Iyonix, Drobe and Slashdot - RISC OS News, Software and Information

Iyonix, Drobe and Slashdot

Published: 8th Dec 2002, 16:26:28GMT Source: drobe.co.uk
By Chris Williams

Page 1 of 1

More Iyonix news. Avert eyes now if you're tired of it. Give us a 'hell yeah' if you read Slashdot.

Just in case you were desperate for more, we've got another round up of recent Iyonix news.

And The Winner Is
John Myers of Cleveland is the lucky winner of the Iyonix in Castle's competition. In usenet, he states "I never win anything. In fact, the best I have done is win a tenner on the lottery...". He also graciously states "If anybody who lives nearby wants to see the machine when it arrives, drop me an email and I'll see if it can't be arranged."

John also tells us he's been a regular Drobe reader since its inception, and he would like to thank Jack Lillingstn and Castle. We hope John enjoys his new machine when it arrives.

Drobe Slashdotted
Don't worry, we've got plenty of bandwidth, although it's going to skew this month's stats. Anyway, the Iyonix has appeared on the geek news site Slashdot which you can read in this article submitted by Ian Chamberlain.

You know it

Of course, we think this is great coverage for RISC OS in general, given the huge audience that Slashdot has. Having said that, we knew that the result of its appearance on this website was probably a foregone conclusion, with the usual crazy comments and predictable trolling, despite valiant efforts from RISC OS users such as Simon Wilson and others. Certainly the responses are a great read, but don't take them too seriously. I've taken a few liberties with some of the comments made, and have the results of "Iyonix according to slashdot" below:

Iyonix has PCI-X
Iyonix was designed to be a server
The motherboard should be available for $500
The primary purpose of the machine is for PDA manufacturers using XScale
Use of an XScale only reduces the overall power consumption by a 1/4 compared to a PC (despite the lack of heatsinks on the motherboard)
Iyonix has hardware floating point

You get the idea. Enjoy.

OSNews coverage
OSNews, the large news portal for general operating system news and issues, has linked to drobe.co.uk (again) in their brief coverage of RISC OS 5 and the Iyonix. The OSNews quotes the Iyonix as being "extremely important" to RISC OS users.

Amiga.org
As if that weren't enough, Iyonix has also been mentioned in amiga.org's Alternative Operating Systems forum in this thread. Not too much to see here, although our impression seems to be they're a little bitter. Not that RISC OS users haven't had their share of bitterness of course. And no, Intel haven't bought ARM.

Peter, we-know-what-we're-doing department, drobe.co.uk

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ksattic 8/12/02 7:16PM	Cool, I made Drobe news! Quite a lot of the /. responses were positive but there were the obligatory troll and flamebait posts. I think the "best" serious comment was: "Why not get one of these PC-compatible motherboards instead and then you can run Windows apps". D'oh. -- Simon Wilson, Boulder, Colorado
diomus 8/12/02 7:29PM	That's quite funny. As some wise person once told me, you can't tell someone about RISC OS. You have to let them see it for themselves. Chris, drobe.co.uk
senduran 8/12/02 8:13PM	Or point them to http://www.sendu.co.uk/computers/UIepisode1.php -- Sendu Bala,
JGZimmerle 8/12/02 11:57PM	Or point them to [Link: productsdb.riscos.com] -- Julian G. F. Zimmerle
senduran 9/12/02 9:01AM	Amazing. What's it doing hidden there? Both that and the 'what is RISC OS' page should be given promenant links on the www.riscos.com front page! -- Sendu Bala,
mfrissen 9/12/02 11:57AM	great, isn't it.. I just hope all the attention will not demise, and after the initial hype everything gets quiet again.. btw, I just noticed that ROS5 uses the cogwheel logo.. now, that was supposed to be ROS Ltd only, right? and Pace delivered ROS5, right? duh? me confused.
jess 9/12/02 1:47PM	Perhaps common sense prevailed? -- Jess
mrchocky 9/12/02 1:49PM	Common sense would reveal that Castle Delivered RO5, not Pace, and that the Cog was intended for all future versions of RISC OS.
DiehardDuck 10/12/02 1:49PM	Drobe keep nicking news off my threads on csa.*!!! I want compensation That SAE to castle cost me a round trip of 54p + an envelope
mrchocky 10/12/02 4:17PM	To solve the problem, send Drobe the news in the first place
John Myers 10/12/02 5:32PM	Of course I could have told you Russ and saved you the fifty four pence, but I didn't. you should of course, have used a used envelope. ;-P John Myers,
DiehardDuck 10/12/02 9:20PM	Ah, so it's you I need to sue John. You'll be hearing from my lawyers. Compensation for costs: 54pence. Compensation by unneccessary stress caused by writing enevelope: 1 Iyonix
ksattic 10/12/02 9:58PM	Drobe nicking your news off csa.: priceless. (I would have added "For everything else, there's TIB" to stay in line with the Mastercard ads, but this is a Drobe messageboard!) -- Simon Wilson, Boulder, Colorado*
John Myers 11/12/02 12:29AM	Russ, Pah! (anyway it hasn't arrived yet ( John Myers,
danielbarron 11/12/02 12:41AM	is swinging from the lights. Weeeeee. Where's my Iyonix I ordered? Yeah ok, its been only 2 working days since I ordered.... Does anyone know what actually happens when you run a 26-bit app written in c or assembler on an Iyonix? Does it bomb the whole machine, give a nasty abort message or a nice friendly "this is not 32-bit compatible"? I know it does this (the latter) for modules already.
diomus 11/12/02 3:26AM	I would imagine the 26 bit code would meddle with the upper bits of the PC and force the processor to jump to a wild address, raising an abort. Or try an interpret the upper bits of the PC to be flags and go wrong. So in short, you'd get a fairly abrupt abort. Chris, drobe.co.uk
mrchocky 11/12/02 4:06PM	RISC OS 5 gives a suitable error message if the 32-bit flag in the header is not set. At least, for modules - for apps, it doesn't yet. An abort message would obviously be unfriendly.
danielbarron 12/12/02 10:31PM	Now my Iyonix has arrived..... Some apps give an 'this app is not 32-bit compatible' error and some just abort. Not wanting to put anyone off but it is a little bit flakey. I've already made mine crash completely just using !Configure having done nothing else. Also there are various other odd things like the keyboard keeps on stopping working. However, the speed is fantastic. Scrolling huge complex Ovation Pro documents is so incredibly fast for example.