Date: Mon, 13 OCT 1997 17:26:04 +0100 (BST) From: Dave Walker Subject: Acorn Developer News 13/10/97: I'm Back, Acorn World CD, Replay 3, ... To: isvquery@acorn.com Hi folks... Acorn Developer News 13/10/97 I'm Back -------- I arrived back in the UK on October 4th, following a fortnight-long 4000-mile tour through much of Western Europe and a reasonable amount of the East (taking in parts of France, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia (overtaking mile-long convoys of APCs and HMMWVs...), Hungary, Italy (just for a lunch break while doing southern Austria) and Switzerland; rest assured that *much* fun was had. If you ever want to do something *completely* mad for a fortnight, a mini-Grand Tour such as this can be heartily recommended. Meantime, apologies for not firing off a missive earlier, but 800-something emails and assorted Acorn World-related stuff awaiting my return and otherwise falling on my head at short notice has managed to keep me diverted since. Still, hopefully the information in this missive will make up for the wait... Acorn World CD -------------- One of the things we'll be doing at Acorn World this year is giving away beta versions of various items of software to attendees who sign the relevant waivers. Obviously it makes sense to make this software available to the developer community as soon as possible (like most definitely before the public get their hands on it), so the following items of software will be appearing on the developer site over the course of this week: Acorn WWW browser Likely to be available Wednesday / Thursday Java New version (which should pass Sun's validation suite) likely to be available tomorrow/Wednesday Replay 3 Available *NOW*: http://www.art.acorn.co.uk/SALES/DEVELOPERS/resource/updates/replay052.arc and http://www.art.acorn.co.uk/SALES/DEVELOPERS/resource/updates/replayfront.arc Director 4 / Shockwave Player only. Likely to be the version of the player previously shipped on the Developer Conference CD. In addition, improved versions of items such as the RISC OS 3.1 Internet 5 stack and universal boot structure are likely to appear at some indeterminate time. All uploads will be heralded by a brief email missive. Replay 3 -------- I know that many of you have been asking for this for *ages* (and indeed it's been held up for about 18 months for assorted reasons), but it's now here in very beta form. Caveat emptor: what's currently on the site may bear little or no resemblance to whatever may emerge in the end as a licensable entity, but I'll push people as hard as I can to try to enable those of you who desperately need to license Replay 3 to be able to license this version if your tests prove it to be stable enough for your needs. Hopefully more documentation will be forthcoming soon. A word from Sales and Marketing... ---------------------------------- > Dear Developer, > SORRY IF THIS DOES NOT INCLUDE YOU. ONLY READ IF EXHIBITING AT ACORN WORLD > 97 > With Acorn World just a few weeks ahead now, I would be very grateful > if it would be possible for you to e-mail jcooke@acorn.com giving > details of any competitions, new releases or promotions specifically > connected with Acorn World 97. > We will add the data to our Acorn World website and to the show guide > editorial where possible. > I would also like to take this opportunity to ask all exhibitors for their > URLs in order that I can arrange links from the Acorn World 97 website. Any > exhibitor without a dedicated URL can take advantage of the free page offer > that we have arranged in association with Argo Interactive; please contact > Jcooke for details. > I look forward to hearing from you shortly. > -- > Robert Bond, Sales & Marketing Assistant > Acorn Computers Ltd Tel: +44 (0) 1223 725282 > Acorn House, 645 Newmarket Road Fax: +44 (0) 1223 725435 > Cambridge, CB5 8PB, United Kingdom WWW: http://www.acorn.com/ Year 2000: Clarification ------------------------ (Apologies for the somewhat stilted grammar, but the following document needs to be approved by our Legal dept... I'll drop the text somewhere on the site for reference too.) Acorn has chosen to produce a statement of year 2000 conformity based upon the definition DISC PD2000-1 produced by the British Standards Institute; the BSI definition is reproduced below by kind permission of its authors, the BSI DISC office. At the time of writing our conformity statement has yet to be ratified by our legal department and is thus not legally binding, however it can be considered technically accurate and can thus be usefully disseminated to developers. If all goes according to schedule, a legally ratified and binding document will be available by the time of Acorn World 97. DISC PD2000-1 A Definition of Year 2000 Conformity Requirements A DEFINITION OF YEAR 2000 CONFORMITY REQUIREMENTS THE DEFINITION Year 2000 conformity shall mean that neither performance nor functionality is affected by dates prior to, during and after the year 2000. In particular: Rule 1. No value for current date will cause any interruption in operation. Rule 2. Date-based functionality must behave consistently for dates prior to, during and after year 2000. Rule 3. In all interfaces and data storage, the century in any date must be specified either explicitly or by unambiguous algorithms or inferencing rules. Rule 4. Year 2000 must be recognised as a leap year. AMPLIFICATION OF THE DEFINITION AND RULES General Explanation Problems can arise from some means of representing dates in computer equipment and products and from date-logic embedded in purchased goods or services, as the year 2000 approaches and during and after that year. As a result, equipment or products, including embedded control logic, may fail completely, malfunction or cause data to be corrupted. To avoid such problems, organisations must check, and modify if necessary, internally produced equipment and products and similarly check externally supplied equipment and products with their suppliers. The purpose of this document is to allow such checks to be made on a basis of common understanding. Where checks are made with external suppliers, care should be taken to distinguish between claims of conformity and the ability to demonstrate conformity. Rule 1. 1.1 This rule is sometimes known as general integrity. 1.2 If this requirement is satisfied, roll-over between all significant time demarcations (e.g. days, months, years, centuries) will be performed correctly. 1.3 Current date means today's date as known to the equipment or product. Rule 2. 2.1 This rule is sometimes known as date integrity. 2.2 This rule means that all equipment and products must calculate, manipulate and represent dates correctly for the purposes for which they were intended. 2.3 The meaning of functionality includes both processes and the results of those processes. 2.4 If desired, a reference point for date values and calculations may be added by organisations; e.g. as defined by the Gregorian calendar. 2.5 No equipment or product shall use particular date values for special meanings; e.g. "99" to signify "no end value" or "end of file" or "00" to mean "not applicable" or "beginning of file". Rule 3. 3.1 This rule is sometimes known as explicit/implicit century. 3.2 It covers two general approaches: (a) explicit representation of the year in dates: e.g. by using four digits or by including a century indicator. In this case, a reference may be inserted (e.g. 4-digit years as allowed by ISO standard 8601:1988) and it may be necessary to allow for exceptions where domain-specific standards [e.g. standards relating to Electronic Data Interchange, Automatic Teller Machines or Bankers Automated Clearing Services] should have precedence. (b) the use of inferencing rules: e.g. two digit years with a greater value than 50 imply 19xx, those with a value equal to or less than 50 imply 20xx. Rules for century inferencing as a whole must apply to all contexts in which the date is used, although different inferencing rules may apply to different data sets. General Notes For Rules 1 and 2 in particular, organisations may wish to specify allowable ranges for values of current date and dates to be manipulated. The ranges may relate to one or more of the feasible life-span of equipment or products or the span of dates required to be represented by the organisation's business processes. Tests for specifically critical dates may also be added (e.g. for leap years, end of year, etc). Organisations may wish to append additional material in support of local requirements. Where the term century is used, clear distinction should be made between the "value" denoting the century (e.g. 20th) and its representation in dates (e.g. 19xx); similarly, 21st and 20xx. This definition of Year 2000 conformity has been produced with the permission of the authors, the British Standards Institution. It was produced by the BSI committee BDD/1/-/3 in response to demand from UK industry, commerce and the public sector. Acorn Statement of Year 2000 Conformity --------------------------------------- Introduction ------------ This document describes the degree of conformity of the Acorn components listed in Schedule 1 to the BSI document DISC PD2000-1, "A Definition of Year 2000 Conformity Requirements". It is intended to be read in conjunction with said BSI document. Rule 1 Compliance ----------------- The components listed in Schedule 1 are conformant to the General Integrity rules 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 provided that: * The "current date" is defined as today's date in the Gregorian calendar and no other calendar. * "Today's date" falls in the range detailed in the Rule 2 Compliance note below. Rule 2 Compliance ----------------- The components listed in Schedule 1 are conformant to the Date Integrity rules 2.1 through 2.5 inclusive subject to the following limitations: The baseline reference point for date compliance is the date of adoption of the Gregorian calendar or Gregorian January 1st 1900 AD, whichever is the later. In the case of localisation to other territories which adopted the Gregorian calendar on a date other than the date of the UK adoption of the Gregorian calendar, the baseline reference point for date correctness should be taken as the Gregorian date in that locale on which the Gregorian calendar was last adopted (this takes into account those territories which adopted the Gregorian calendar, renounced it, and then later re-adopted it). For the systems described in Schedule 1 only the UK territory is officially supported, although unofficial alternative territory definitions exist. In reference to the General Notes section of the BSI document, we declare a date ceiling relating to the projected feasible lifespan of the equipment. Dates will cease to be represented correctly in the Gregorian year 2248 AD, hence the chosen declared ceiling for correct date representation is Gregorian December 31st, 2247 AD. In Rule 2.2, calculation, manipulation and representation of dates is only guaranteed conformant for Gregorian dates in the range above (subject to the Additional Notes below). In Rule 2.3, only the ROM-based OS software and system hardware detailed in Schedule 1 is guaranteed to represent process results in a compliant manner (subject to the Additional Notes below). Rule 3 Compliance ----------------- The components listed in Schedule 1 are conformant to the Explicit / Implicit Century rules 3.1 and 3.2 subject to the Additional Notes below. All components listed in Schedule 1 store the year in a 4-digit format. Similarly, files written to filing systems which intrinsically support a four year-digit file datestamping system (such as Acorn ADFS) and for which suitable interfacing software (such as RISC OS FileCore) exists will have their datestamp recorded with a four-digit year component. It is possible to specify years in two-digit form when passing arguments to the system calls SWI "Territory_ConvertTimeStringToOrdinals" (with reason codes 2 and 3) and SWI "OS_Word",15 (with reason codes 15 and 24, which specify that the operation to be performed is a write to CMOS); in the case of these specific calls, dates supplied as arguments and which contain a two-digit year field are treated as follows: 0