Tech-centric news site The Register have an article up that gives a brief overview of Acorn, the BeagleBoard, and the fact that RISC OS runs on it. Not exactly new news to the average RISC OS user, but the article is still worth a look just for to see the comments from old hands such as Eddie Edwards, Heyrick, and Hugo Tyson, and some extra trivia tidbits linked to by commenter jlocke.
 
Now, who wants to be the first to enlighten Peter Gathercole that adding (working) pre-emptive multitasking to RISC OS is in no way "trivial"?
 

There's an interesting article up here with Steve Furber, one of the designers of the BBC Micro and ARM processor. It's been linked to from Slashdot, which is where we came across it.
 
There's some background in there on the development of the original ARM designs, as well as the StrongARM and the current SpiNNaker project, an attempt to come up with a more biologically based style of computation.
 
All fascinating stuff, and especially so at the moment with the explosion of ARM-based computers out there.
 

The RISC OS user base has always been a bit schizophrenic. Even in the 90s - the period when the OS had its greatest mainstream success - RISC OS users were a diverse bunch. Most OSes had a clearly defined stereotypical user: Windows was for business-types, Macs for design gurus, Amigas/STs for gamers and Linux/UNIX for developers and academics. RISC OS never had a clear rationale. Many users came from the education sector, others from the scientific community, and a few were home computing enthusiasts.
 

This was going to be a pretty dry fluff piece about the gaming events going on in my home city, something I'd pop in to between renewing my travel pass and getting some new shoelaces.  Then something slightly surreal happened to me.
 
I've just spent around an hour in the company of one of the men partly responsible for getting me into computers in the first place.  And I didn't recognise him.
 

There has been much discussion in the forum about Micro Men, a short film written by Tony Saint that was shown on BBC4 last week. The film is based on real events, and tells of the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair and Acorn Computers in the 1980s.
 
Chris Williams of drobe.co.uk has written an excellent a review of the film, and interviewed the film's producer, Andrea Cornwell, to find out more about the show.
 
Link: Micro Men (on iPlayer, available until 21st October 2009)
 

Acorn World - now there's a name from the past. The final show was cancelled in 1998 when Acorn closed its workstations division - now it's back thanks to Dave Moore and the Retro Reunited team. The show, held over the weekend at the Cedar Court Hotel in Huddersfield, offered a range of vintage games consoles and bizarre Acorn hardware hacks. The Acorn scene was mostly 8-bit oriented although there was some RISC OS coverage too.
 

The 2009 Wakefield Show takes place today.

• Stuart Tyrrell Developments' have unveiled their VPod graphics accelerator. For £149, the podule card for the Risc PC range of computers features hardware acceleration and high resolutions such as 1680x1050 in 16 million colours.
• NetSurf 2.0 has been released and is available for download on the NetSurf website.
• RISC OS Open has been demonstrated running on a A7000 computer.

Link: Wakefield Show news (via Twitter)

 

Reader Mike sent in these pictures of something he found while out walking his ferret. Yes, we have readers with ferrets. Although the concept of a reader with a ferret confuses us, luckily we don't have to use our brains for this update because Mike was kind enough to send in some words to accompany the pictures.
 
Standard disclaimer: As most of you have probably noticed, this was our April Fool's piece for this year. If you liked our UK:Resistance theme used for the fool then you'll be glad to hear it's been added to the theme selector available from your account control panel. Of course in the end the joke was on us, because UK:R changed their website design from traditional red and black to their new colourful layout a couple of months ago. Oh well!
 
Click the owly pic above to see the article in its intended guise.