Unofficial A9home mailing list opened

By Chris Williams. Published: 17th May 2006, 22:11:10 | Permalink | Printable

Daylight poured on new product

An unofficial mailing list was created this week for A9home owners to discuss their new computers. Users had hoped to chat amongst themselves about any problems and issues with the ARM9-powered computer, and to swap ideas and hints'n'tips. Vince Hudd decided to create the mailing list from his new website, and has invited all users to join in - the archives of the forum are open for all to browse through.

During the beta testing phase of the A9home, users were asked not to discuss their problems and bug reports openly, although this requirement was lifted after the product went on general sale on Saturday.

Vince said: "The unofficial mailing list has been created as a mutual support and discussion mailing list for users of the A9Home computer, from Advantage 6 and CJE Micros, as well as for those people who are interested in the machine."

The ground rules for the list include keeping on-topic, being polite and keeping messages to 10K or less. Topics discussed so far include the unwillingness for the A9home to preserve a copy of the 'CMOS configuration settings' when the unit is switched off or rebooted. Although the hardware has suitable non-volatile memory built in, and we're told the operating system can support it, the issue is quite a tricky one for AdvantageSix to solve due to the hardware abstraction involved. The CMOS settings store information that is critical during boot up and a mis-configuration could result in a dead system.

• Some owners have run into problems with the 32bit AIF checking on the 32bit RISC OS Adjust running on the A9home. Although most software works, or the checking can be temporarily disabled by users, some products have run aground - including Photodesk, sold now by CJE Micros. A patch handed out for the software doesn't solve the problem of it attempting to load a newer CallASWI module which reportedly isn't correctly marked as being 32bit compatible. Fiddling with the !Run file to disable the check will trigger the graphics package's anti-tamper copy protection system.

Update at 07:09 18/5/2006
And as if by magic, an official mailing list has been setup by AdvantageSix.

Links

A9home mailing list Unofficial software compatibility website

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Discussion

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>An unofficial mailing list was created this week for >A9home owners to discuss their new computers.

The mailing list I have been invited to join looks pretty official to me. It is hosted in-house and is signed "The A9 Team"

JohnR on 17/5/06 11:53PM
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Office A9home list is now available to A9home owners

sa110 on 18/5/06 6:22AM
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"Daylight poured on new product"

And just as quickly, the blinds are drawn again given that there is now an official list. I'll leave the unofficial list open, but I suspect that the few posts we've seen will pretty much be 'it'.

I'm pleased to see (ref JohnR's comment) that the official list is hosted in-house; the reliance on free list providers is a current pet hate of mine, and part of why I set up the riscository.com domain. The (spur of the moment) intention being to offer a free mailing list facility specifically to RISC OS users/organisations/companies, but in this case provided by someone 'RISC OS friendly' (ie me). The cost of the domain and hosting is, essentially, funded by advertising - in that I've taken it out of my advertising budget. :-)

I'll formally launch the domain and offer free list facilities in due course, mainly, once I've done a basic website and decided how to allow people to set up lists. The latter will probably be manual on my part, because I'll want to 'approve' any lists as the idea is for them to be RISC OS related - automating it will enable any Fred, Jim or Shiela to set up a mailing list for any old purpose.

I have done a logo, though, so that's good. ([link])

VinceH on 18/5/06 9:24AM
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Why are all these sort of things mailing lists? I know someone who set up a message board a while back, and added an NNTP interface to it. Usenet seems to be a more suitable medium than email for such things.

SimonC on 18/5/06 10:37AM
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<QUOTE>"During the beta testing phase of the A9home, users were asked not to discuss their problems and bug reports openly, although this requirement was lifted after the product went on general sale on Saturday"</QUOTE>

I an not aware that this restriction has been lifted - relevant wording is "you may move from the beta programme as soon as retail machines are available and your A9home will then be upgraded to the retail version upon repayment of the beta programme discount .. warranty period then commences"

CKH2 on 18/5/06 11:09AM
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To SimonC: Theoretically you're right, but ...

What's wrong with the email based solution. It's dead simple to use for the user and most email clients offer some filerting to sort the mail from the mailinglist out to some folder, or the user can simply set up a separate email address for that. Furthermore most users have signed on to the odd mailinglist alerady so this new one behaves pretty much like the other ones.

What I absolutely do not like is the forum type solution where you have to go to some website which might be fine if you're looking at one or two only, but not at a dozen.

And with an NNTP interface there is the problem that that usually is more complicated to set up - for the message board which thus needs to run the NNTP server and for the user who has to configure the additional NNTP server etc. And opposed to the mail based solution what's the advantage (assuming you set the filter to put the mails for that list in a separate folder)?

hzn on 18/5/06 11:27AM
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CKH2:

I'm pretty sure the A9homes being sold on general release now aren't covered by any beta agreement, and people can speak about their new kit as you'd expect. And if you're still under the thumb of the beta agreement from before hand then that's something you need to sort out with Ad6, and it's also why I just don't do NDAs anymore. If someone's bought a general release A9home but it carries an NDA element, then do let me know.

diomus on 18/5/06 12:15PM
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I suppose on RISC OS it doesn't matter as much. My experience from other areas is that people are slightly less likely to make a complete mess of quoting and heading a Usenet article as they are an email. I think the other reason was that the message board in question didn't want to insist on people signing up to it, it didn't have to know what address to send anythign to.

SimonC on 18/5/06 12:25PM
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CKH2>I'd not consider a machine that is still *beta* (that is not having been updated to the release version) as a completely accurate guide to what may or may not be wrong with the hardware/OS of the *release version*.

Therefore any comments you'd make might have less relevance than comments from users who are using the release hardware, assuming of course the NDA business is "cancelled" when the machine was released and you're free to comment.

As a general query is the non-volatile RAM in the A9Home actually a CMOS (Battery backed) or NVRAM of the flash variety ?

AMS on 18/5/06 1:06PM
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In reply to Diomus:

I bought a retail A9home from CJE at wakefield. I did not have to sing an NDA.

chriswhy on 18/5/06 2:01PM
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chriswhy:

"I bought a retail A9home from CJE at wakefield. I did not have to *sing* an NDA."

It is very uncommon to expect buyers to *sing* an NDA and such a requirement would probably have deterred quite a few people. Ad6 apparently forgot to have music scores ready anyway - the question is whether they would have had different versions for base and tenor singers (not to mention female voices). Besides, Alan (Liquid Silicon) was probably too busy to be able to accompany each A9Home buyer on his MIDI keyboard.

wuerthne on 18/5/06 3:02PM
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I hate mailing lists! Why not just have the discussions on c.s.a.hardware? It's what it is there for. All these mailing lists for every bit of hardware and software are killing the newsgroups and segmenting the users. There is no longer anywhere to discuss the pros and cons of software, or find out about useful features of packages you don't have, because all the users are tucked away in their own little mailing list. Plus mailing lists have a similar effect to spam - filling up your mailbox with hundreds of irrelevant mails that obscure your "real" mail. Yes, once downloaded it can be filtered, but I like to be able to access my mailbox from webmail, pda, or even mobile phone. This would be impractical if I actually signed up for the lists for all the software I own. All assuming Smartgroups is working of course :-)

helpful on 18/5/06 3:06PM
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helpful: your arguments really dont add up there. Membership of a few relevant, tightly targeted and moderated mailing lists, is preferable to the plowing through the vast quantity of ranting, off topic rambling and general noise on the newsgroups. Especially as they are frequented by a few individuals whos only remaining connection with RISC OS is to get on the wick of those who still use it.

Your problem is easily solved by routing all mailing list traffic through a different POP3 mail box. If your ISP doesn't offer this facilty, theres plenty of free accounts you can create, then then collect from them seperately.

druck on 18/5/06 3:22PM
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In addition to druck in reply to helpful: I absolutely agree with druck - with mailinglists you can subscribe to the ones you're interested. Would all that be in c.s.a.hardware then for me probably at least 50% if not much more would be useless since it is about hardware I don't have and need. Or use the filtering option of your mail client - if it does not offer that you might want to get a better one.

hzn on 18/5/06 3:28PM
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wuerthne(r):

Hehe :-D

liquid on 18/5/06 3:39PM
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druck: A few mailing lists? I'd need to be on at least a dozen just to cover the things that could be on csa.apps instead. And that's just the ones I know about - another problem with mailing lists is that there's no central list of what's available. One of the reason's the newsgroups are full of "off topic rambling" is because all the relevant stuff is on some mailing list somewhere! Mailing lists are fine for low volume announcements, like the DiscKnight one (Is that still going? I lost track after it moved servers, yet another problem with them!), but a pain for general discussions among more than half a dozen people. hzn: You haven't read my message properly - I do filter the mail, but that's no use when I'm not using my mail client to read it! Of course, web forums are far worse ;-)

helpful on 18/5/06 7:43PM
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Helpful:

Paul V was at one point trying to create a list of all the available mailing lists. Like all manually maintained lists, if it hasn't already, it will probably eventually fall out of date through lack of maintenance, though... <searches> [link]

The two premier RISC OS email clients, Messenger Pro and Pluto, are both able to handle mailing lists in such a way as to make them 'feel' like newsgroups from the users' POV. Granted, that doesn't help when viewing your email by other means (such as webmail) - but as Druck said, using a different POP3 mailbox for all mailing list traffic solves that easily enough.

VinceH on 18/5/06 8:32PM
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wuerthne:

"It is very uncommon to expect buyers to *sing* an NDA"

NDA or not, you'll find users singing your praises, Martin ;-)

Stewy on 19/5/06 1:42PM
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"the question is whether they would have had different versions for base and tenor singers"

surely 'bass' is what you mean? The idea of singing an NDA is a great one!

CKH2 on 19/5/06 2:46PM
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Solution to singing a NDA:

modify speak.

;-)

ROHC on 19/5/06 5:03PM
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