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.
Honestly, did you really think you could get rid of my marathon programming threads that easily? And myspace? Eewwww. Podcasts, on the other hand...
New features
But in all seriousness, our transformation into an Apple fanbois wet dream was due to our latest feature, the site themes feature thing, from which you can select from a selection of different themes with which to alter the site more to your liking. So far we've got the standard TIB and AcornArcade themes, as well as the Apple one, and a simple RISC OS one. More themes will be arriving as soon as we can get the sword away from Rich and chain him back down behind his keyboard.
There's also a new script we're playing with to allow RSS updates of forum posts. Either using a regular RSS reader, or setting up an RSS "account" in Thunderbird (etc.) pointing here: https://acornarcade.com/forums/rss-rss20.php ...you'll be able to see when new messages have been written. It's like that list down the side of the main site, but even more divorced from the forum itself! You can change the rss20 bit to rss09, rss10 or atom03 for other flavours of feed.
Hello, and welcome to the new new look iConbar. Since we're all Mac users now (even Rich!), we thought it was about time that we ditched RISC OS properly and changed the focus of the site to cover all things Apple. No more will I be posting marathon threads in the Playpen about games that no-one is interested in and that I'll never complete, for I've found a new hobby of making podcasts, directing fan films on YouTube, and chatting on my myspace. And no, you're not invited. It's strictly Mac users only.
Scottish companies Nallatech and Alpha Data have revealed "Maxwell", an FGPA-based supercomputer that is 10 times more energy efficient and up to 300 times faster than traditional equivalents. By reprogramming the FPGA chips at runtime, the machine is able to perform some calculations much more efficiently than a traditional computer, in a way somewhat reminiscent of the ill-fated Omega from MicroDigital. The design also requires less space and cooling than traditional supercomputers. Although the technology behind the machine is sound, there are still some implementation issues to resolve, such as determining the best way of programming the FPGAs for a given problem.
It's reported that other companies are also looking at using FPGAs in large numbers to produce similar supercomputers.
Hey, we're not one of those sites that just posts YouTube videos, honest. We also post Google Video too.
So, if you've not seen it before, you have to watch this Windows/386 promo video. It may be your usual nonsense at the start... but wait until it gets to seven minutes in. I CAN'T STAND THE CONFUSION IN MY MIND.