Tag Archives: strategy

2016 logo

Arca Noae at Warpstock Europe 2016

Arca Noae principals David Azarewicz and Lewis Rosenthal will be on hand at this year’s Warpstock Europe event to discuss some of the great offerings from Arca Noae, including latest driver development and the upcoming Blue Lion release.

Expect more details in the coming days, and be sure to visit the event page for general information and the Arca Noae store to register and purchase your tickets.

Blue Lion, by Arca Noae

Presentation: Blue Lion – A First Peek

We’ve added a new item to our Presentations, Whitepapers, & Case Studies page.

Blue Lion – A First Peek was a presentation given by Lewis Rosenthal via Skype to the Dutch OS/2 Users Group (eCS-gg), Saturday, January 9. The discussion focuses on Blue Lion’s new Preboot environment, including screenshots of current alpha builds, and references some planned features of the new installation media and maintenance environment. The presentation is provided as a PDF.

Still running mature software? Arca Noae can help

There was some news made recently when Orly Airport in Paris, France suffered some apparent downtime of its Windows 3.1-based DECOR system which provides Runway Visual Range (RVR) information to pilots. Tech news media was abuzz with ridicule for any enterprise still running what it termed as such “antiquated” systems (referring to both DECOR and Windows 3.1, and in several instances, referring to Windows XP and “UNIX” as similarly antiquated (see here, here, and here for examples).

Unfortunately, what many of these news outlets don’t understand is that after all of the years in service, it simply may not make economic sense to replace a working system simply because there’s a new OS or application version available (likely with new and unknown flaws and potential pitfalls). Perhaps a newer version of a critical application did away with what is to that customer a must-have feature, or perhaps the application has been orphaned altogether, and nothing else currently available seems to be able to do as efficient a job as what is already in place.

Arca Noae understands the value of these systems. OS/2 still provides “a better DOS than DOS and a better [16-bit] Windows than Windows” due to its preemptive multitasking capabilities and crash protection, so multiple Windows 3.1 and/or DOS sessions may be started and run independently of one another, where a critical application is less likely to be brought down simply because some other application crashed in a different session.

If you have a need to run mature applications on OS/2, Windows 3.1, or DOS, Arca Noae can help extend the life of your investment in those platforms and those applications. Our OS/2 & eCS Drivers and Software package subscription – available now – can assist in running OS/2 or eComStation on newer hardware. Our upcoming OS/2 release, codenamed Blue Lion, is being designed to provide an installable solution to deploy new systems with an updated OS/2, fully capable of handling those mature DOS and Windows 3.1 applications, as well as native OS/2 applications and ported Linux applications on modern hardware or in a virtualized environment.

Perhaps you need expertise in handling such a transition or in maintaining your mature infrastructure. Arca Noae’s experienced engineers and consultants can provide those services, as well, practically anywhere in the world. Need us? Contact us.

Arca Noae at Warpstock Europe 2015

Our own David Azarewicz and Lewis Rosenthal will be presenting at this year’s Warpstock Europe, in Munch, Germany, June 6-7. This will be a rare opportunity to hear from two of the Company’s principals about what Arca Noae is presently doing, and what is planned for the future.

You may find out more about their discussion topics on the Warpstock Europe 2015 Presentations page.

In addition, Steven Levine will be presenting via Skype. You may find out more about Steven’s planned discussion on the above Presentation page, as well.

Howard Winter joins Arca Noae in Customer Relations

Arca Noae is pleased to announce that we have engaged Howard Winter in our Customer Relations department. Howard will be responsible for answering your pre-sales and order fulfilment inquiries via email and telephone.

Howard brings his years of experience with sales and marketing along with his OS/2 expertise to Arca Noae, enhancing the capability of the Company to handle customer (and potential customer) concerns.

Effective immediately, Customer Relations and pre-sales telephone numbers are:

US: +1 571 758 5218
UK: +44 1727 238802

Expect to see more of Howard online, too.

Arca Noae: a new name, but with familiar faces

Arca Noae has been active for about half a year; our online store opened mid-November, and our popular drivers and software subscription has seen several updates. We’ve made numerous news postings, as well as personal appearances at Warpstock. We’ve even added a FAQ page and a roadmap to our site. Still, some people seem to be confused as to why Arca Noae was created, who works for Arca Noae, and what Arca Noae’s long term goals are.

For more details on Arca Noae’s history and mission, please see our updated About page.

 

The UEFI Forum

Arca Noae joins the UEFI Forum as an Adopting Member

For immediate release:

Leesburg, Virginia, USA

Arca Noae, LLC, a Delaware-based Limited Liability Company, is pleased to announce their membership in the UEFI Forum.

The UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) specification defines a new model for the interface between personal-computer operating systems and platform firmware. The interface consists of data tables that contain platform-related information, plus boot and runtime service calls that are available to the operating system and its loader. Together, these provide a standard environment for booting an operating system and running pre-boot applications. Essentially, this layer provides a replacement for the traditional BIOS, and is the future of small computing architecture.

The UEFI Forum is a clearinghouse for all current, related documents pertaining to UEFI, the UEFI specification, and its adoption by manufacturers and software developers.

In addition, the UEFI Forum performs a similar function for ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface). Arca Noae develops and maintains the current ACPI implementation for the OS/2 and eComStation platform.

Arca Noae is committed to running OS/2 on current hardware. UEFI, like ACPI, is a continuation of the trend to move more functions from the BIOS to the operating system. Arca Noae is looking into how this new technology can be supported under OS/2 in the future.

End of press release.

Arca Noae and Serenity Systems International

For immediate release:

Leesburg, Virginia, USA

Arca Noae, LLC, a Delware-based Limited Liability Company, is pleased to announce the acquisition of the remaining assets of Serenity Systems International, including its domain name. The site is now hosted on the same servers hosting arcanoae.com, the Company history on the About page has been updated, and the links on the main page have also been modified to be more relevant.

We are happy to continue Serenity Systems’ tradition of providing value to OS/2 and eComStation users, whether they be individuals or businesses, and we look forward to welcoming Serenity Systems’ customers to our subscription services.

End of press release.

Current happenings

While our blog posts have been infrequent, our developers, beta testing, and translation teams have been quite busy the past few weeks. Here are some highlights of what’s been going on behind the scenes at Area Noae:

  • USB: Work is continuing on various USB problems, including the “hub-attached devices” issue.
  • Graphical update utility (YUMIE): We have been through several more test versions in the past few weeks, and with the help from our friends working on YUM and Python (more on this, below), we are getting closer to a release date, with much of our planned functionality for version 1.0 in place.
  • Graphical update utility (YUMIE): National Language Support is planned for English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Hungarian, Polish, Finnish, Korean, and Japanese, and translators for these languages are engaged and working. We are also hopeful for more languages, such as Russian, Chinese, and Swedish, and continue to seek willing translators.
  • Outside projects: Arca Noae continues to support the efforts of our strategic partner, bww bitwise works, GmbH, and their excellent work on Firefox and OpenOffice, as well as the ever-growing list of ported applications and tools available from the Netlabs repositories. Our work has intersected theirs regarding the YUMIE project (see above), and they have been extremely responsive to our reports and update requests, enabling us to move forward without delay.
  • Arca Noae web services: Thanks to the tireless efforts of Paul Smedley and Steven Levine, our web platform grows more stable and robust. We have implemented a number of recent updates to the Apache web server software, including current OpenSSL technology to safeguard our subscribers’ data while communicating with us over the web.
  • Arca Noae in the news: Look for an upcoming announcement about some new strategies for the Company, and an association with a familiar name.

If you haven’t purchased a subscription for the Arca Noae drivers and software package, now is the time.

New store items: bww bitwise works GmbH sponsoring and InJoy Firewall

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of InJoy Firewall, the premier firewall and VPN solution for OS/2, eComStation, Windows, and Linux in our online store. All three licensing options (Personal, Professional, and Enterprise) are available, in all user counts.

In addition, sponsoring bww bitwise works GmbH has never been easier. bww bitwise works is responsible for the ongoing work on the Firefox port for OS/2, Qt, Java, and so many more bits and pieces which make it possible for others to build great software for the platform. 100% of the net proceeds of your sponsoring go to funding this important work.

bww bitwise works GmbH is an Arca Noae strategic partner.