1990 RRC Auto with an excess of wooden trim. Rather than a nice easy 'gently prise front and rear with scewdriver' bit of plastic trim on top of the gear selector there is a highly polished and undoubtedly irreplaceable bit of polished wood. Gentle persausion with a screwdriver has produced nothing but frightening cracking sounds. I want the trim off so that I can - get at the selector linkage to trace the slack, clean some horrible gloop off the indicator thingy, replace a dead bulb and tidy the bit of covering fabric/plastic that has come unstuck from the edge of the trim unit that the selector is surrounded by.
Of course I could just smash it to a thousand splinters but . . .
Not any more, with no !Prophet development (i.e. adding multi-user support) it can't be done (that's accounts/stock control folks, and very good it is too for a single user, far better than PC stuff, but we need to employ someone who is going to need access to the data concurrently). I'm sort of doing something to add such support, but frankly with almost all development being about porting yet another browser etc from Linux rather than native development of useful, if not over-glamourous apps like accounts or even a Dymo printer driver, I've lost heart and taken up O Gauge model railways instead. No one there tells me which locomotives I need to build without understanding what I do ;-) The open-sourcing of Risc OS, while a Good Thing, is just going to be another distraction from doing what *needs* to be done - they are already squabbling about desktop icons, without realising that icons are pointless if no one uses them!
As you probably know from the C.S.A.* groups, the self-appointed Keepers Of The Knowledge have their own agenda and are stuffing the platform by not living in the real world regading what needs to be done keep it from just being an interesting plaything - which is shame, as it's far more productive than the PC's (got 3 now! Hateful things....)
Plus I've got a brand new A9 that's never earned a penny sitting under my desk........... a total waste of £650.00. That makes me very cross.
It's very depressing really - if The Keepers of The Knowledge put as much effort into doing things that users need as they doing trying to score easoteric points about English grammar from each other in the news groups, things could be so very different.
Risc OS RIP, I'm affraid. It's headstone will have a Naull pointer on it! (In joke there folks, or at least it would be if it weren't so sad.)
OK, that's understandable, otherwise you'd end up having to be tech support on an unsupported product, which isn't where you want your career to go I'll bet!
Hey that's open source for you, they seem to spend more time bickering and forking code and competing with each other than organising themselves to get the task done. It does mean that there's a reasonable amount of competition, sadly much of it means that you've got 5 choices of half-finished applications. When I've tried suggesting things to open-source app developers, they tend to tell me to send code or shut up, which of course means that the apps tend towards those that are suitable for programmers and not really very good for anyone else.
As an ex amateur photographer I suggested some changes to Gimp to make it a suitable contender to Photoshop, but got told to code it or get lost, Gimp still can't even handle the most basic photo editing operation, setting levels, anywhere near as well as photoshop. It's fine for creating web pages and flashy font effects though.
Business at least has a common goal, to make a product that people want and to sell it for money, OS apps tend to be written by enthusiasts and are often not suitable for anyone else.
Yes I used to drop in from time to time, having been a regular poster in the past. Most of the people who used to get things written have left the scene with just a few of the old guard left, John Kortink being the only one who springs to mind immediately.
I've still got an old Risc PC upstairs somewhere, together with a clutch of A3000s (my first Risc OS box) and a few Axxx machines.
For my accounting purposes I now use a package on linux called Quasar from Linux Canada IIRC, which is pretty good and a mix of open source and commercial. It's more suited to you than it is to me, handling cash sales, stores and inventory levels. I don't use windows for anything serious as it's blown up on me too often, I used to be a legend for having trouble with windows despite knowing more about it than most admin staff I've met, simple installs accepting all the defaults go wrong for me even if I take the exact same actions as others who have no trouble, I'm jinxed and happy to be ;-)
I don't mind supporting it - I'd be delighted to champion it, but it just doesn't exist!
A very conscise summary!
Agreed 100% - without business apps, the machines don't get seen in offices, and if they ain't in offices then they 'aint no good. It might not be true, but that's the real world market for you, whatever the Keepers may see in their ivory towers ;-) To try to get back on topic a bit, I have my personal view of what a Land Rover should be, and I suppose it would be nice if I could just concentrate on that rather than the fiddly bit's I'm not personaly interested in. However, the real world dictates that I must support all, like it or not. So to be an enthusiast, I have to support things I don't like for the good of the whole - it's a bummer, but that's life. You'll notice I'm absoluetly did *not* mention Freelanders.;-)
Indeed. And it's noticable how many disappeared after the Keepers got their claws into them for daring to hold differing opinions (usually valid, if not popular ones).
Oooh! I'll have a look at Quasar - it must be the only one I've missed (I've spent 2 years trying to find something as good as !Prophet, and I really don't like the look of Vista - specifically the small print! ("I hearby agree to MickySoft knobbling my machine if they don't like the look of what I'm running" - slightly paraphrased, but not a lot, nothing is defined in the licence).
Heh, I'll bet you're going to love the transit-engined Defenders (if I've got that right), at least if the engine lives up to hype they'll generate lots of spares sales.
There was a chap called Moray McKenzie who I used to hang about with in my days in Reading, last I heard (ages ago) he was working for Risc OS Ltd as a programmer, I think he posted a few times to CSA but that was after I left. I lost contact so don't know what he's up to any more.
OK, but I'll warn you now, Quasar isn't a pretty app and tends to force you to do things its way, however in hindsight most of the time my way wouldn't have worked, as a longer term business man than I am, you'll probably see much more sense in the way it works than I did when first trying it out.
I'm surprised companies use it with the capability of it knocking your servers on the head if the servers decide they're not legal, even if you've got valid licenses. Upgrading machines is apparently a real headache too, I sidestep the whole issue by avoiding mickeysoft. Apple appear to be about as bad and OSX is a resource hog as well as an unco-ordinated mess, despite what mac advocates say.
A blank record would be fine - I just want to know if it supports stock locations - the blurb implies it does - and spare fields for web site info. You be amazed how many PC packages that purport to do stock control don't have stock locations, which is something I can't figure out - all your stock on the system but you can't find it!
Thanks for all that - I'll download it tonight and have a play - from the sound of it it works something like !Prophet, i.e intended for non-accountant type users who just want to bang things in and forget it.
It even does imports! Just got to figure out what XML is..... ;-)
Going even more off-topic.... what's the best (read easiest, idiot proof) Linux to install, and can I do it without having to reformat the disc, by that I mean create a partition or whatever without starting from scratch). I've only ever played with ARM Linux and ended up hopelessly confused.... Any pointers appreciated.
I don't really use such installations as I don't dual-boot anything, and use a distribution called Gentoo, which is the most tweakable but most laborious installation of all. I tried Ubuntu as it has lots of good write-ups and it was very easy, even easier than Windows XP. A dolt I know set it up dual-booting on a windows box in a very short time, so if he can do it, just about anyone should be able to! I'd always recommend that full backups are made of the other OS of course, as you can't be sure it won't toast everything.
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