A few site updates

although Arachsys doesn’t seem to have an HTTPS

They’re late with the https, and perhaps more worryingly they’re also late filing the company accounts (unless, perhaps, they both recently got taken down with flu or covid?).

they’re also late filing the company accounts

Confirmation Statement, not accounts; the accounts are due in the autumn. Also a legal requirement, of course.

Presumably there’s someone about, as this site appears to now be back to the correct SSL certificate.

Blue/Green (Turquoise?) is most pleasing to the eye and brain from entirely natural reasons (sky, forest, water) but is there for brand recognition’s sake any legal prohibition to use the classic Acorn acorn instead of a daft cogwheel which in truth should miss several teeth due to excessive lack of Device/Standard support? Plus the acorn is.. green. Nice.

The default “recent posts” feed for the forum now excludes Aldershot and Tests.

A belated “thank you” for this — the forum has just become significantly more usable again.

resumably there’s someone about, as this site appears to now be back to the correct SSL certificate.

ROOL and Arachsys are totally separate companies that have no involvement whatsoever in anything to do with accounts, filings, or any other legal or financial matters. Nobody at ROOL is involved with running Arachsys (or vice versa) as far as I know.

any legal prohibition to use the classic Acorn acorn

Yes. That belongs to Acorn. RISC OS Open Limited is not Acorn Computers Limited. We have (via an expensive, multi-year, convoluted and indirect chain) the rights to RISC OS, but not any other of Acorn’s property beyond historic artefacts present in the code base itself.

I also note that Acorn Computers Limited ceased to exist in January 1999, so the idea that it’s got brand recognition over the likes of Tematic (with the Iyonix), RISC OS Ltd, RISC OS Developments, R-Comp, RISC OS Open Ltd etc. etc. (apologies to the many other important companies I’ve missed!) who’ve been active in the quarter of a century that’s passed by since then, doesn’t really follow.

This post reminded me I keep meaning to ask, is it just me that doesn’t stay logged in for more than a few hours, or is it just the nature of these forums?

This post reminded me I keep meaning to ask, is it just me that doesn’t stay logged in for more than a few hours, or is it just the nature of these forums?

Security and stability auto-restart at about 3am UK time daily with intentional log-out forced. If I ever get the rebuild done, I might extend the persistence time.

Oh no, it’s far more frequent than that. Sometimes I come back and it says “session expired”, other times i’m just logged out.

But based on your “once a day”, i suspect it’s my end somewhere then, as in it persists until firefox decides it’s had enough.

@James: Is it that your router drops the line frequently and gets assigned a new IP address, that you might not otherwise have noticed?

I log on once a day every day on ARMX6 using NetSurf. It has never that I have noticed dropped me out.
One thing that is odd though is the users online statistic that appears on the front page. There is rarely more than me and ocasionaly one other listed. This is a bit surprising if people are in the habit of logging on and not logging out.

One thing that is odd though is the users online statistic that appears on the front page. There is rarely more than me and ocasionaly one other listed. This is a bit surprising if people are in the habit of logging on and not logging out.

I think that is showing you “recent forum activity by logged-in users” rather than displaying all users who happen to be logged-in.

If I’m doing a wiki editing session, I will be logged-in for a significant amount of time but my name won’t appear on that list as “online”. Conversely, if I log-out after posting a forum message, the page will continue to show me as “online” for a few minutes after I have logged out.

Oh, it’s always done it to me, even when i’ve been on a static IP.

It’s entirely possible it’s my choice of privacy settings or something.

It never happens to me while browsing the forums but I usually browse a little bit around afterwards and then I noticed I am not logged in anymore. Like today: Forum, Bounties, Bounties → More information, Download, Download → stable release criteria and I was logged out.

I think that is showing you “recent forum activity by logged-in users” rather than displaying all users who happen to be logged-in.

Right now at the bottom of the main forum page it shows users online as Clive Semmens and John Rickman. Clive does not appear in the recent posts, so who knows?

Right now at the bottom of the main forum page it shows users online as Clive Semmens and John Rickman.

Now it is just me.

We have (via an expensive, multi-year, convoluted and indirect chain) the rights to RISC OS

If you say multi-year, you don’t mean indefinite, I presume.
So at one point the rights will end? Or…

Edit: How do I quote? smilyface.
Edit2: Worked like magic. Jolly thanks!

Use bq. preceding the quoted text.

It was the process to obtain those rights that was multi-year, not that the rights will expire.

via an expensive, multi-year, convoluted and indirect chain

Legalese. Why do something simple and obvious when a two hundred page document with clauses and subclauses galore will suffice instead?

So at one point the rights will end?

Given that the code has been released as open source, I’d not waste time worrying about such possibilities. It’s the nature of open source that you can obtain your copy today with the licence that applies to it, and whatever happens tomorrow isn’t retrospective to the copy that you have.

But, as Stuart says:

not that the rights will expire.

Again, it’s open source, so…. just not going to happen.

but not any other of Acorn’s property

It’s a bit of a shame, but then if you look at the stuff that is floating around (part of the Econet file server, 65Host (but an oldish one), the kernel and part of the filing system of RISC OS 2…), I think the horrible truth is that most of the old stuff isn’t hidden away in a vault somewhere, but is instead languishing on an old floppy disc (that nobody remembers having, or indeed is buried under a bunch of Amigas in a landfill that got redeveloped as “quality housing” (cough, Port Solent, cough) that will disintegrate the moment anybody tries to read it.
Like those old lost BBC recordings, stuff has just been lost because nobody saw value in keeping it safe.

nobody saw value in keeping it safe

We did see great value in keeping it safe. It was all in the Acorn Drawing Office. It just went to shit when Acorn went down the tubes, and so will mostly have gone in a skip to landfill, to join the unsold myriad copies of UCSD P-System.

John, please could you use bq. for quoting bits of other messages, and not bc. which is there for posting source code? bq. will wrap to fit the window width (which is quite useful for those of us reading on phones), while bc. will not because you don’t want lines of code wrapping.

This is a quote

and

REM This is some source code!

John, please could you use bq.

qed

If you say multi-year, you don’t mean indefinite, I presume.

I only meant that it took literally years to get it arranged. I’m not a lawyer so no, Rick M:

Legalese.

…it was not. But what I think you are saying (and we are in agreement on) is that even if it was, dismissing it would not work unless we had a few hundred thousand pounds, possibly a 7 figure sum, to get lawyers back into all this from the ground up. It’s absolutely not worth it. Just a picture. An icon. You can find it online in seconds if you want the nostalgia hit.

ROOL doesn’t need to own everything!

ROOL doesn’t need to own everything!

And certainly not spending time and money chasing a logo that effectively ceased to have meaning back in 1998.

You can find it online in seconds if you want the nostalgia hit.

Uhh…. 😂 You know, most of us can probably just glance over to the other side of the room if we need a nostalgia hit with the authentic Acorn logo experience.

For another nostalgia hit – the Charismatic Voice just looked at Come On Eileen. That was 1982. A year I remember. Got smacked in the face by a high speed cricket ball. Mom took me to see ET at the cinema after utterly destroying the school headmaster for writing off a head trauma as “sit there alone and be quiet for a while” (she took me straight to A&E when she was called about an hour later). There was some inconvenience with an insignificant little island down the south side of the planet, and the Mary Rose sort of saw the light of day (are they still spraying it with water mist?).

Now ask me what I had for dinner three nights ago…

The fact that Computer Concepts hasn’t done anything RISC OS-related in around 25 years after releasing !ArtWorks and !Impression(Publisher) is pretty symptomatic of the general state of affairs after Acorn Ltd. was killed. Everybody except those with rose-colored glasses superglued over their eyes know that the current RISC OS user base is a tiny fraction of what was when Acorn Ltd existed. And CC is hardly alone in having ditched anything Acorn-related to new software or significant updates. Which is very sad since RISC OS (3.7 which I used) was the most productive OS I’ve ever worked with. With no new “killer” apps the OS goes from being retro to becoming obsolete unless something sensible happens like going 64-bit, multi-core, multi-cpu with a new SDK and full support of legacy 26/32-bit applications. Become 21st century for real.