All systems are back online as of 5:00am EDT, following a blackout which began at approximately 2:25pm EDT, yesterday.
Power, fiber optic broadband, and even wireless communications were impacted by yesterday’s passing of Isaias, rendering even the best of contingency plans inadequate. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
We often get asked,”so what’s next for ArcaOS?” “Where can we see you guys?” “What have you done with XYZ?” We realize our original roadmap page fell short, and the more work we did, the harder it became to keep updating that page — especially when it was all-in-one.
So, we decided to do something about that. We’ve split our roadmaps into different targeted areas, namely, General, ArcaOS, Drivers, Software, and Advocacy & Events. We’ll do our best to keep these pages updated with our latest plans and releases.
2019 is starting off as a great year for Arca Noae, and there is a lot of great stuff on the horizon. ArcaOS 5.0.4 is in beta, which will include a number of great updates including Samba 4.9 and a handy updater feature which should update even an early 5.0 release to the latest code in a matter of a few minutes. USB 3 is also on the way very soon, now.
Watch for more updates to our software and to our roadmaps as we move further into this year.
If you’ve been waiting for us to get ahead of our server load issues, you shall be greatly rewarded. We have taken steps to address the issue, and traffic seems to be flowing more consistently.
Thank you for your patience, and for all of you who have already ordered and downloaded your personalized ArcaOS ISOs, thank you for your business!
It’s happened again… We’ve been slashdotted…
It all started when James Sanders wrote this piece in Tech Republic, which among other bits of Blue Lion news, correctly reported the official product name of Blue Lion as ArcaOS 5.0.
As was to be expected, this news took on a life of its own, and pretty soon, we were slashdotted.
Try a quick web search for “ArcaOS 5.0” and you’ll see what we mean…
Some of the comments which follow these articles can be quite humorous. Many people have fond memories of OS/2 (2.0? 3?), but have never had an opportunity to run it on modern hardware or even on a gigabit LAN, nor have they had the experience of running modern software on the platform, such as Firefox 38.8.0 ESR or Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2. (Both of these current applications have been ported and made possible on the OS/2 platform by our good friends and strategic partners, bww bitwise works, GmbH. You may find more great stuff from bitwise in our store.) For those of you who do take the time to post and respond in these venues, our heartfelt thanks for updating some of the users who seem a little out of step.
Of course, there are some great comments by well-respected people in the tech arena, like Brian Proffit and Brian J Dooley (thanks, guys).
Whatever your preferred language, enjoy the read, and be sure to add your own comments, including your more recent experience with OS/2 and the difference modern drivers and software make.
If you are a resident of the European Union and a customer of ours, chances are you have been watching (or at least are aware of) the situation regarding data transfer policy between the EU and the US.
On October 6, 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union (the “CJEU”) invalidated the European Commission’s Decision on the EU-US Safe Harbor arrangement, determining that the Commission’s finding that Safe Harbor was adequate was, in fact, inadequate. More on this decision may be found here.
On February 2, the US and the EU reached an agreement in principle to construct a framework to replace Safe Harbor and to reconcile differences between the laws of both governments. That framework has been named the EU-US Privacy Shield. In response to the agreement, the US Department of Commerce released a fact sheet, which we are making available as a pdf, here.
As the new framework promises to have farther reaching implications for how personally identifiable data is handled by third parties, we have contacted both of our current payment processors (Stripe and PayPal) for their comments. While we are still awaiting comment from PayPal, Stripe has responded that they, too, are monitoring the situation, but have not yet made any changes to their policies or procedures, pending more concrete guidance.
We want you to know that we take the privacy concerns of our customers very seriously, and we will continue to monitor this and any other legislation which may have an impact on doing business with us, whether you are located within the US or anywhere in the world. We believe that our current privacy policy remains in accord with the spirit of the new EU-US Privacy Shield as we anticipate it, but we will keep you apprised of the situation and will make adjustments as necessary.
More information and commentary on the EU-US Privacy Shield may be found on these sites:
Digital Media, Technology & Privacy Alert >> Agreement on EU-U.S. Privacy Shield to Replace Safe Harbor Faces Hurdles, Kibel, Gary A, Partner (Digital Media, Technology & Privacy), Davis & Gilbert, LLP, February 4, 2016.
Article 29 Working Party Reacts to the U.S.-EU Privacy Shield Agreement, Tielemans, Jetty and Steinhardt, Ezra (Data Privacy and Cybersecurity group), Covington & Burling LLP, February 2, 2016.
We understand that not everyone is enamoured of processing payments through PayPal’s gateway, for a variety of reasons, whether they be security concerns or other bad customer service experiences.
We feel strongly that how you pay us should never become an obstacle to transacting business with us. We remain committed to providing our customers with the broadest possible range of payment solutions to get the business end of things out of the way as quickly, easily, and painlessly as possible.
We know that for some of you, the wait has been long. Today, we are pleased to announce that Arca Noae has established a relationship with Stripe to handle our credit card processing for all major credit and debit cards, internationally.
Based in San Francisco, California, USA, Stripe’s investors include Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Elon Musk. Read more about Stripe on their press page.
N.B.: As always, if you have any difficulties with your shopping or payment experience, please contact us immediately, either via our convenient web form or direct email (sales AT arcanoae DOT com).
We have updated our roadmap to reflect some recent changes in project status, namely the beginning of the beta testing phase of our graphical package management tool, our participation in some very exciting USB development, and our initial investigation of support for some SATA RAID and SAS controllers.
Also of note are some upcoming changes to our store checkout which will soon allow for credit card processing through Authorize.net, a recognized world leader in payment processing. We know that this will be a welcome option for those who prefer not to transact business through PayPal. We anticipate this capability early next year.
Our online store has been open for exactly one month today. The response has been overwhelming, and customer feedback has been of immense help. We continue to work hard to address some lingering issues with server performance and website compatibility across browsers and platforms, and appreciate the valuable input from all reporters.
It may not be apparent if you haven’t yet ordered, but upon completing your order, all of your downloadable products will be accessible from your account page. Just click the Account link on the main menu, log in (if you haven’t already), and your recent orders will be listed on your account page.
Clicking either the order number or the View button will open the details of the order, including handy links to download your software.
As we continue to add content and products to the Arca Noae site and online store, we thought it might be handy to have a way to search that content from Firefox or SeaMonkey (or any other browser which is OpenSearch-compatible).
To add it to your browser, simply follow this link to the Mycroft Project, click the Arca Noae link, and allow the search provider to be added to your browser.
Our mission at Arca Noae is to do what we can to ensure the longest term of usefulness of the OS/2 platform, for both individuals and enterprises. Part of that mission is addressed by updates to existing drivers and applications, part by adding new functionality to those softwares, and part by adding new drivers and/or applications entirely.
What we’d like to know is: What do you need to be able to stay on OS/2?
Other platforms (both closed and open source) tend to follow their own path. A large software developer in the state of Washington in the US decided a couple of years ago that the entire desktop interface was somehow no longer useful, and needed to be scrapped in favor of something completely different, taking a one-size-fits-all approach across desktops and mobiles. Linux has had desktop wars waging for decades between Gnome and KDE, and once Unity appeared, it seemed to draw almost universal scorn from both camps (and somehow, the steering groups of various distros tend to make unilateral decisions insofar as which desktops to include by default in their distros).
Arca Noae is different in that our direction should always be guided by the needs of the community. As we have pledged to reinvest as much of our earnings as possible into further development, we need to regularly solicit input from you, so that we may be assured we are heading in the right direction.
So please drop us a note on our contact page and let us know what you need. We’re listening, we care, and we’re not going away anytime soon.