It's Pi day: Care to stuff a brand new Raspberry one in your wallet? It is Pi day (assuming you live in a country that insists on writing dates in the frankly barking mad MM/DD format) and after a quiet two years, the Raspberry Pi Foundation have pushed out a new version of the tiny computer. In news guaranteed to bring joy to hobbyists and nerds the world over, the $35 Model 3 B+ now features …
I use one as a Plex client into my TV (it used to run Kodi, but it works better as a Plex client), one as a Squeezebox server, and one as a simple backup handler running a nightly rsync. OK, the third (which is the oldest RPi) is probably barely necessary, but it works every night without fail - why would I change it?
I've built a couple of test-bench "bed of nails" devices for a customer using RPi model 2B's from a couple of years ago [with the older BCM CPU on them]. Also have a model 1B and another model 2B that I'm playing around with at the moment [writing necessary kernel drivers for FreeBSD].
I saw that after I bought my Pi 2's (and the ones for the customer devices) the CPU on the RPi 2B v1.2 was updated to a 64-bit device, though from what I have read it also runs the older 32-bit code, which is good, because I do _NOT_ want to be forced into a version of Raspbian that uses systemd... [and so I should be able to continue using FreeBSD and the older Raspbian on it]. Haven't tried Devuan's RPi code yet (Raspuan?).
I'll still have to try the 32-bit OS's on the RPi 3 though. anybody done that? As far as I can tell it should work.
Why not?
Doesn't everyone need a computer whose "...Gigabit Ethernet..." really runs at only 300 MHz?
Kudos to the Raspberry Pi organization for their being able to to foist this package of not-so-subtle prevarication and dissembling off on the majority of the 'Tech-Journalist' and RPi-fanbois world.
Heaps of scorn to The Register for its brain-dead acceptance, and lack of correction, of this load of crap from the RPi organization.
That was the first thing I checked for, and again, why I haven't bought one.
I realise gigabit ethernet is power hungry when you're working at this scale, but proper GigE would make this far more appealing to me, in terms of picking a few up to play with containerization stuff, HA methodologies, etc (rather than messing with bulky old PCs).
I may still pick one up, but it's not a 'zero thought' purchase - again.
I'll probably get downvoted, it's still not quite a 'no brainer' purchase for me.
Steven R
Just things I'm thinking about off the top of my head. There are other uses for it, obviously (it'd make a fine broker for Proxmox/Ceph management I suppose).
I'd not turn one down at all (and I might actually have accidentally just blagged myself a free one from a colleague for sorting some stuff out for them last night) but I just keep wondering when they're going to have SATA and proper GigE.
You're not wrong, mind - GigE isn't essential, but when you don't have it, it's really noticable when you're shuffling images around etc. I think I just want to rationalise a RetroPi setup to myself that I could (reasonably) justify for works testing ;-)
Steven R
Edit: While I toddle off to do some work, can anyone remind me why there's no true ethernet/sata/etc - is it a lack of a built in PCIe bus, etc? Genuinely curious, so if you're all going to downvote me, you can at least educate me at the same time, eh? :-)
James, cool - so I guess we're waiting for the current smartphone gen of SOCs (which have that sort of connectivity on board, or at least the capability for it) to mature and get cheapy cheap and well understood before a RaspPI would come with that sort of gear?
(hypothetically, of course).
Steven "I asked for those downvotes" R
@James Hughes
I'm sure that this is obvious to everyone else but isn't to me: just how hard is it to have a new SoC? I presume that you take a standard broadcom chip and 'just' have to do the layout to wire it up to the outputs with various output chips? Or do you actually go in at the silicon level on the SoC and tailor it before chip manufacture so that the raspberry pi has a unique cpu iteration that isn't used anywhere else?
Some answers to questions above:
New SoC: I reckon about three years work. We need to ensure its robust, performant, certified with a solid SW base that works on day of release.
H265. Not purely in HW, that would require new HW blocks, but we are reusing some H264 blocks, plus NEON to get HEVC 1080p30 working for the majority of the use cases.
"New SoC: I reckon about three years work. We need to ensure its robust, performant, certified with a solid SW base that works on day of release."
Ooh, from the horses mouth, it sounds like. And yeah, I reckoned it would entail more than just BGAing a new CPU in place and hanging some peripherals off it in the same form factor.
As a result of all this chatter, I've been looking at RasPis and their competitors quite a lot lately. And the more I look at it, the more a RasPi does seem to fit the bill well for the other stuff I'd like to use it for. It certainly seems to have a more mature ecosystem, although the Asus one looks pretty close when you trade the performance off against it...
IE, a simple setup for Docker testing (I'm fairly new to it) because that's A Thing you can do on them these days. HA broker for my little two box proxmox cluster (I don't want to sully my desktop machine with such things) and the like.
Hmm...
Steven "Turning to the dark side" R
Another good thing to note is that the new SoC can supposedly decode H265 streams in hardware. For someone like me that uses a Pi as a media centre, this is a welcome addition!
Yes, but I'm out of HDMI ports on my TV (only has 2), and the rPi3 didn't want to work with a HDMI-VGA adapter (so I could use the VGA-In on my TV) Can't see this one cooperating any better. So as a media center I still need a different board.
Just things I'm thinking about off the top of my head. There are other uses for it, obviously (it'd make a fine broker for Proxmox/Ceph management I suppose).
Yes, I had thought rPi units would make an interesting Ceph cluster, using each as an OSD host for one or two drives. Major downfalls being only one ethernet (no separate management interface) and the HDD/OSD being attached over USB. Might not be fast, but would be darned cheap.
Do you really need Gb to "play" with containers. I'd of thought the lack of grunt in the CPU would slow it down enough to worry abut throughput.
That was my initial thought - if you're going to be shunting huge amounts of data around very quickly, you still need something at the end to be able to work with that data, so you become bound by the capacity of the device to process data.
>IMO for GbE to make proper sense they would need to add a proper SATA port.
Or USB3. I replaced the Pi I used for a file server with an Odroid XU4. Yes, it's twice the price but more than twice as good in this respect. I get full Gigabit bandwidth from a USB HDD. SATA wouldn't have made a difference here.
I expect for most people the lack of bandwidth isn't a huge issue but it all depends on your application.
I use one Pi in anger; a Pi3 running OSMC and it's good enough for that task.
Don't forget their insistence in using 12Hour clocks on transport along with AM/PM...Yes, I fell for it once and arrived 12hours early for my flight from Boston to St Louis.
They also write dumb computer systems that output values such as 12:00am and 12:00pm. There is no such time as 12:00am or 12:00pm and when (ab)used it's then a fun game of trying to guess if 12:00am or 12:00pm is midday or midnight.
"am" is before the meridian. "pm" is after the meridian". Midday is the meridian therefore 12:00 midday cannot be recorded as being either before (12:00am) or after (12:00pm) itself. Midnight is exactly the same amount of time before the meridian as it is after the meridian therefore it makes no more sense to try to write 12:00am or 12:00pm meaning midnight either.
For example, "Tuesday 12:00am": is this "Tuesday 00:00", "Tuesday 12:00 (midday)" or even "Wednesday 00:00" (effectively "Tuesday 24:00" even though 24:00 isn't valid). Midnight Tuesday doesn't make much more sense either as it's contextual if you consider this the very start of Tuesday or a sliver of time past the very end of Tuesday.
The same logic works for +0 and -0 which I still see on occasions... although Microsoft did eventually fix this in the windows calculator.
""am" is before the meridian. "pm" is after the meridian"."
It doesn't matter what the letters technically stand for, it's a simple naming convention that is well established and easily understood - 12AM is midnight, 12PM is midday. Also, 2400 is perfectly valid and often used in place of 0000. While there are plenty of arguments about ordering of dates and the like, I'm not aware of any alternative conventions for the above; people complaining about them being silly or hard to understand just need to make the tiny effort to learn something most of us had grasped before we left primary school.
Ok for those who lived in a country which use the crazy system.
Not to mention feet, inches, etc... so called imperial measurements.
Why should the rest of the world learn some crazy system just to satisfy the inhabitants of one country, most of whom never leave it???
Wouldn't it be easier for the inhabitants of that country to learn how the rest of the world does things and deal with it!!!
@Lisa
Not to mention feet, inches, etc... so called imperial measurements.
Whilst metric is easier to use in calculations, computers etc, there is a lot going for the imperial system in terms of reflecting natural and everyday needs. Generally you can express most everyday measurements with a smallish number and appropriate unit.
So weight of flour in a recipe is 8oz, not 228g - or even 225 or 250g (which encourages an understanding of precision - 'about 8oz' is fine, what is 'about 225g'? 223? or 220? or 200?) Weight of people though, is in stone, like 12s 6lbs not 78.9kg (or, god forbid, 174lb) - much easier to get a feel of what the numbers are. Is 245lb a normal weight a person or morbid obesity? (USians,don't answer that)
People are 5'10" tall not some silly number of cm.
A pint is a good quantity of beer, a demi-litre isn't enough, a litre is excessive (and usually all froth if you're in Munich)
And the world would be a better place if some barking mad people weren't under the impression that a pint contains 16 fl oz. For heavens sake, 16 oz is a pound, 20 fl. oz. is a pint
"People are 5'10" tall not some silly number of cm."
But there are those who would say two meters is easier to visualize than six feet or so.
As for dates, the format usually comes from how people speak it. Americans are used to "March (the) 14th, 2018", so you have 03/14/2018. Many other countries go "14th of March, 2018" or similar (like Catorce de Marzo), so guess what floats your boat. I do find the YYYY-MM-DD format (with optional HHMMSS) useful for natural sorting (and I always use hyphens to avoid restricted characters). Since I grew up a Navy brat, I'm comfortable with 24-hour times, but I know that's not universal.
PS. For those unfamiliar, Z(ulu) time is military parlance for GMT/UTC while J(uliet) simply designates local time.
oh Charles 9 you forgot about the time zone letter notation - where J would indicate Z+10 hours.
Which puts the nearest bit of the US at V and very sensibly does not allow for the barking mad concept of time zones on half hours; or the equally barking mad concept of DST - 12:00z mid day at Greenwich; so to try and claim 12:00 BST is mid day is demonstrably delusional I know it is hard to prove in the grey cloudy days that make up UK weather; but occasionally the sun shines on the centre of the known universe and it is then easy to show that the sun is overhead in Greenwich at 12:00Z not at 12:00A
"Weight of people though, is in stone, like 12s 6lbs not 78.9kg (or, god forbid, 174lb) - much easier to get a feel of what the numbers are. Is 245lb a normal weight a person or morbid obesity? (USians,don't answer that)"
A 'stone' has to be one of the more obscure and useless measures I have come across, and it comes in multiple sizes, as well.
Grams, kilograms, and tonnes are enormously more useful and easier to apply to various situations.
I really like the fact that 1 cubic metre = 1,000 litres = 1,000 kg (water) = 1 tonne - it's surprising how often working density / mass / volume calculations in your head can be useful.
@Pen-y-gors - I can't decide whether you deserve an upvote or downvote...
For recipes, think significant figures, "about 220g" is 2 s.f., so from 210g - 230g, or specify the error margin: 228 ±15g. Changing units depending on whether you are working on "natural", "human" needs or calculations is a bit crazy,
"My lounge is 10' x 15', how many floor tiles will I need?"
"Uh, can you re-measure in metric?"
But then you redeem yourself with a pint of beer, 20 fl. oz.
Getting back to time, another advantage of YYYY-MM-DD is that there is no confusion over which format is being used (now someone is going to tell me there is a country using YYYY-DD-MM, to mess things up).
""My lounge is 10' x 15', how many floor tiles will I need?""
Fired tiles are nominal*** sizes anyway. The size is variable due to the shrinkage in the kiln. I am not sure if the nominal size also includes an allowance for a reasonable grouting gap - which is itself usually variable.
Obviously that matters more for small mosaic tiles than for 18 inch ones. Then again the big ones will probably be cut at the room edges - so the off-cut may save a tile elsewhere. Always best to include a decent number for wastage and as spares for repairs.
***"nominal" means the stated size - not the actual measured size of something. Like a resistor would be a nominal marked value like 4k7 - with an indicated percentage tolerance either way.
"Not to mention feet, inches, etc... so called imperial measurements."
Imperial measures in most of the world, but different non-metric 'US' measures in the country that is the biggest obstacle to sensible universal measurement.
US versions of fluid ounces, cups, pints, quarts, and gallons are all different from Imperial measures.
Then again, there are at least a dozen different definitions of 'ton', several of which are not even measures of weight or mass. At least with a tonne (aka metric ton, aka 1000 kg) you know what you are measuring and how big it is. Even worse, in some cases imperial convention uses different tons for different materials, but you don't know whether everyone between you and the original measurement knows that... or whether one or more of them have helpfully converted. Similar issues arise with ounces, and pounds. At least the pounds are probably units of weight or mass. Relatively few people know that a hundredweight comes in two different sizes, only one of which is 100 pounds.
Miles is another one, of course. Ignoring older versions of the measure, there is no easy way to know if the person giving you a city to city distance is using statute miles or nautical miles, unless they explicitly tell you which it is. Ditto aircraft speed.
The US is stuck half way through conversion, with the consumer facing side still in the dark ages. Case in point - you can go into any US hardware store and buy 'quarter inch' glass, but that hasn't actually been made for decades. The factories produce 6mm glass, which is sold as quarter inch glass. Just finish the job, already!
As a bonus, they occasionally lose a spacecraft, or someone's airliner runs out of fuel (Gimli glider) because the archaic measurements are still allowed to mess up the world by inciting confusion. I'm just glad Air Canada tends to have quite competent pilots, or they would have lost a planeload of people somewhere near Gimli.
"[...] there is no easy way to know if the person giving you a city to city distance is using statute miles or nautical miles, [....]"
The Swedish "mil" is 10km (6 imperial miles). Or rather that is the "new mile" from 1889 - the old one was slightly longer.
There are also "kyndemil" – the distance a torch will last, approx 16 km (9.9 mi) and "skogsmil" - the distance between rests in the woods, approx. 5 km (3.1 mi).
OK, who is down voting me for saying 12pm is midnight? Everyone known that 12 hours past meridian is midnight (+ or - daylight savings).
12 hours POST MERIDIAN. Meridian is MID DAY, when the sun is directly overhead.
12 hours ANTE MERIDIAN is 12 hours BEFORE midday, so it HAS to be midnight.
And when you DO start thinking about daylight savings, the fact that the solar meridian changes by an hour or two or a half in some places...
Oh I give up. Time is an illusion. 6 pints please, the world's about to end.
"12 hours POST MERIDIAN. Meridian is MID DAY, when the sun is directly overhead.
12 hours ANTE MERIDIAN is 12 hours BEFORE midday, so it HAS to be midnight."
Except ANTE means BEFORE while POST means AFTER. One problem. Midnight is BOTH 12 hours BEFORE AND 12 hours AFTER noon. Meaning 12AM and 12PM should really be identical, much as 0000 and 2400 are in military time (they DO use 2400 hours when referring to events that started before midnight but end right on it).
The day starts at midnight, therefore it is before noon, and written as 12 am. The day ends one plank-time unit before the following midnight.
12 pm covers a period of time of either 1 second, 1 minute, etc, depending on your level of accuracy, that starts at noon, therefore it is mostly after noon.
"This" and "next" is very relative terminology. You see for me, talking in a future tense about an event and using THIS or just saying the name of the day means it is the next occurrence of that day.
"I'll be going to match on Saturday", means "whatever day we are on, the next occurrence of Saturday is when I will be going to football". You cannot be referring to the Saturday that's in the past, even if it is in the same week as you are. Whenever your definition of the week starting is; for me, I've shifted mine to run Sunday-Sunday because that's the definition that a S.O.'s works uses to determine shifts and holiday weeks.
"Are you going to the match this Saturday?" means the same as just "Saturday".
Now, if you are going to use the word NEXT when you already have two acceptable ways of specifying the date as THIS COMING Saturday... three acceptable ways... then you must be referring to the Saturday AFTER the 1st future Saturday on the Calendar.
If you are using a past tense, of course, then you can't use next at all. You simply don't say "Did you see the game next Saturday?" Unless of course you have a private box and it's blue with a flashing light on the top.
"Also, 2400 is perfectly valid and often used in place of 0000."
Hmm, not too keen on that. According to the gospel (well, Ellis' British Railway Engineering Encyclopaedia):
Midnight: since 00:00 is ambiguous (is it later today, early tomorrow, or was it first thing?) railway practice avoids it and uses 23:59 or 00:001 instead, as required. For all practical puposes the intervening two minutes do not exist.
"Midnight: since 00:00 is ambiguous (is it later today, early tomorrow, or was it first thing?) railway practice avoids it and uses 23:59 or 00:001 instead, as required. For all practical puposes the intervening two minutes do not exist"
Given rounding conventions, it's only an intervening minute - the semi-open interval starting at 2359.5 and less than 0000.5.
The meridian is, by definition, only an exact instant in time, when the sun is directly overhead. Therefore, the time that your clock displays, even the tiniest fraction of a second after the meridian, is indisputably post meridian, “pm”. Therefore, 12:00 pm (and, correspondingly, 12:00 am) works for me.
For all we know, perhaps for the barest fraction of a second digital clocks do display just 12:00 (with no suffix) just before then also displaying “pm” or “am”, has anyone ever checked? ;-)
I'll try to remember that next time I'm standing exactly on the Greenwich Meridian in winter.
am and pm have lost their very specific meaning and now are understood as "in the early hours of the morning or the morning" and "in the afternoon, evening, night-time, I wonder if I should go to bed yet? Do you remember when the screen used to go to a white dot and whistle at you?"
It still doesn't help in the 12am/12pm issue. We don't have a 0am... what would that mean?
@Cuddles: It doesn't matter what the letters technically stand for, it's a simple naming convention that is well established and easily understood - 12AM is midnight, 12PM is midday.
It does matter because there is no "simple naming convention that is well established and easily understood". Actually, that is a lie: there is and it's called the 24 hour clock and it is was created for almost exactly this reason.
In context it is usually possible to figure out whether 12am or 12pm are referring to midday or midnight (whichever one), however your arguments about the "naming convention" are just wrong, there isn't one. 12pm is arguably as much midday as it is midnight. After all, 12pm is at the end of the rest of the pm times (11:59pm => tick => 12:00pm) therefore it is obviously midnight isn't it? Except that you're claiming that it isn't...
I use to use this in the military when writing a DTG (Date Time Group). It was also very useful as part of a file naming convention, made looking for files a bit easier.
<YYYMMDD><HHMM><TIMEZONE(Z)> today being 201803141156Z. We also used JFT which was the Julian Filing Time, helped to organise the paperwork we were told..
"YYYY-MM-DD is a fabulous, sensible format."
Until you run into the Year 9999 problem. The only solution really is to count in femtoseconds out to about 10^200 years, the time when the last proton decays and the Universe expires, voiding all warranties and support contracts. After that it's Someone Else's Problem.
"Until you run into the Year 9999 problem."
That's already been addressed! :-)
There seems to be some discord in this thread so I propose we change Pi day to Confusion 14th. Of course perhaps we should simply use base 32 in which case pi=818 which means using either August 18th or every other June 8th. Then again a full circle is 2*Pi so if that represents a full year or orbit around the sun then Pi would be June 30th no matter how you write it. Of course the date is pretty much arbitrary no matter how you slice it. I mean it isn't like September, October, November, and December are the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months. So yeah, happy 01V23E.
Edit: Perhaps that should have been happy MFRC depending on how literally you want to keep the date.
"I mean it isn't like September, October, November, and December are the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months."
Recall they WERE once, as IIRC the names came from the Roman calendar. Blame Julius Caesar for not getting the names straight when he was trying to correct for the tropical year.
"Recall they WERE once, as IIRC the names came from the Roman calendar. Blame Julius Caesar for not getting the names straight when he was trying to correct for the tropical year."
I think it was really more about getting his own month. Then Augustus had to keep up with the Caesar...
Oh yes, I hadn't thought of that. 12 hours before is the same as 12 hours after. There must be a difference though? What about when it's combined with a date?
12 hours before midday on this given date... the date part applies to the meridian, surely?
So does 12pm on 12th October mean midnight as 12th October becomes 13th October, midnight as 11th October becomes 12th October, or midday on 12th October? And what about 12am on 12th October? There's no official definition of that, is there? I mean, there will be implementations of translations, but it's not mentioned in RFC3339 - they only use the word 'noon' once in the whole document!
00:00 12th October is unambiguously equivalent to 24:00 on 11th October.
If you can't use zeroes, the whole thing goes to pot!
"I always thought it funny that Americans use MM/DD except for "4th July" when they celebrate Independence Day....... by using the format we use here (UK)."
We actually use them both interchangeably; either "the fourth of July" or "July fourth". Note that all words as above are used in the former case and no interstitial "the" needed in the latter; "4th July" or "July the 4th" just tend to sound wrong on so many levels!
I assume that comes from the Germanic roots of English, where the tens are put after the units when counting from 13 to 99. Four and twenty blackbirds... etc.
Then there comes the continental vs British confusion on the meaning of half hour, e.g. half ten in England is half past 10. Halb zehn in German means half past nine!!!
I assume some Americanisms came from the German immigrants. Like waiting 'on' something that is not a table. To meet up; up where??? etc....
For pure numbers, Germans would say "three hundred five and sixty". Since nearly all languages pre-date widespread numeracy among the speaking population, it is quite surprising that middle-endian madness is not more widespread.
But if we return to the specific issue of dates, any software that I write now uses yyyy-mm-dd and I've to hear any evidence that any non-programmer has noticed. ISTM that actually honouring the OS's locale settings for time and date formatting might actually be best regarded as a bug.
MM/DD make much more sense than DD/MM
In which context? In any technical context they are both bad because they're ambiguous (as are year abbreviations YY) and this is the big problem with Americans using the abbreviation in technical contexts and why we have an ISO standard (of course, not without its own problems). Outside of a technical context then you might as well write out the month name or three letter abbreviation. MAR-14 or 14/MAR or whetever.
Outside of a technical context then you might as well write out the month name or three letter abbreviation. MAR-14 or 14/MAR or whetever.
In the English-speaking world that works, yes.
What you and I call "January" is "gennaio" in Italy, and "enero" in Spain (note that month names are not capitalized in either language), so it's not a general solution.
"What you and I call "January" is "gennaio" in Italy, and "enero" in Spain [...]"
I have a bit of code that analyses web page postings' text for dates and times. At the last count there were about 20 different analysis functions - each of which had several variants on a particular theme.
It also tries to recognise month names - and their common abbreviations - in about twenty languages. It tries to avoid red herrings with words like "may" in the narrative part of the text. It limits the languages to English plus the native language(s) of the performer in order to narrow the choices on their pages.
It also recognises days of the week by name - and their common abbreviations - in the different languages. These are used to generate a year when it is not explicit.
The day of week name is also used to try to differentiate mm/dd and dd/mm when they are both less than 13. It still ends up flagging ambiguities when it turns out that the two dates - within scope - fall on the same day of the week. You can't apply a "which country" filter - as a European may list USA tour dates in US format.
Times are equally tricky - especially when something like "8:45 uhr" sometimes can be morning or evening. Then there is the "7h" type of notation for 19:00.
It all seemed so simple when I started - and then the variations started to crawl out of the woodwork. Some people manage to use several different variants in different postings.
The tricky ones are when the dated entries omit the year. You may then be expected to assume that there is a chronological order that will span year ends. The order of course can be latest first or earliest first.
One person published their list of performance dates in the random order they received the bookings - without any year indicator. They also didn't remove old entries.
"In which context? In any technical context they are both bad because they're ambiguous (as are year abbreviations YY) and this is the big problem with Americans using the abbreviation in technical contexts and why we have an ISO standard (of course, not without its own problems). Outside of a technical context then you might as well write out the month name or three letter abbreviation. MAR-14 or 14/MAR or whetever."
Back when I worked a tech pubs job where I had to co-ordinate our materials with our branches in the UK and Australia, I got in the habit of denoting the month in Roman numerals. Still do it to this day for most purposes. I'm mostly out of that field these days, so I don't know if it's still done but it used to be quite common in scientific publications.
@mike moyle
That very sensible convention was invented by WHO (the drs; as inb World Health Organisation; not The Dr.)
The concept was simple
Month - Roman
Day - one or two digits
Year - always 4 digits
12 VII 2018 or 2018 12 VII or VII 2018 12
It is ALWAYS un-ambiguous; never understood why it didn’t catch on
@peter_dtm
"That very sensible convention was invented by WHO (the drs; as inb World Health Organisation; not The Dr.)"
The WHO may have standardized on the practice and format, but the practice itself predates them.
A 1928 letter from Marc Chagall, albeit with a slightly different format:
https://books.google.com/books?id=WXI6K9vPLfkC&pg=PA347&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false
It's to do with the salience/relevance of the information: on average the month is the same for, well, half a month (yeah stats!) - so the more salient information is the more variable day - so that gets mentioned first.
Also by ordering the information by variability, it allows us to easily drop the irrelevant or assumed known backdrop info without having to re-order ourselves.
It's Wednesday 14th March 2018
It's Wednesday 14th March
It's Wednesday 14th
It's Wednesday
It's When?
For me it's "fourteenth of March" what sounds incredibly backwards, you don't write the year as "8102" so why the hell would you invert the date... Not to mention "2018-03-14" as a string or filename sorts naturally in the correct order without needing to get interpreted as a date, whereas none of the other notations do. And if I can see only a fraction of a date, "2018" is what I want to see, not "14". So how about going easy on slinging "barking mad" stuff around particularly as it points the completely wrong way around...
YYYY-MM-DD is Largest -> Smallest
DD/MM/YYYY is Smallest -> Largest
HH:mm:ss is Largest -> Smallest
These all follow conventions in the order.
MM/DD/YYYY is Middle -> Small -> Large
All conventions are gone; cats and dogs are living together and there is mass hysteria.
It wouldn't be so bad if the formats were mutually exclusive but some American dates work with some rest of the damn world dates and vice versa which causes no end of problems.
It wouldn't be so bad if the formats were mutually exclusive but some American dates work with some rest of the damn world dates and vice versa which causes no end of problems.
Excel oh how I hate thee. It's half aware that countries outside the US exist, but only aware enough to screw up dates even more. If it said, "no, everything's MM/DD/YYY" then at least you'd know where you stand, but the "let me guess the date format only I'm not telling you I'm doing that" thing is useless.
Anything, and by that I mean everything that has a date field in it when I'm writing a text import function for Excel is imported as text then converted afterwards as Microsoft refuse to fix their inbuilt function, it's been the same since at least Office '97 that I know of.
Also shows that Office has ever been a complete re-write as there's big chunks of code they're obviously re-using.
Please file your grievances with an American congressman and ask them to change it. Also, try your fortune and ask them to switch our measurements to metric. Good luck!
Yes, it's inconvenient that all humans can't have adopted the same conventions over the course of history. Why don't those numbskulls just fall in line?
And while we're ranting+griping, how come those pesky Chinese fellers have to do LAST NAME, FIRST NAME. So inconvenient. And by the way, you shouldn't have just agreed with me. You should have immediately visited the LDAP RFC and corrected me that I was imprecise with my stupid human terminology and should have said surname, givenname.
Because we tend to be involved at the day of the month level in our daily lives. Typically the wall calendar has one page per month. Next Saturday is 10 days away. So the numeral at the start will quite likely tell us what we want to know as the rest can be assumed. So 14 is the most significant part which is why we get it at the beginning.
There you are -- Mystery solved!
I would have thought that DD MMM YYYY was decreasing significance, as you are most likely to want to know the day followed by the month and finally the year. say someone said the Date, then they can usually assume the month and year, and if they append the month they can usually assume the year.
Thankfully the Norman French influence on English didn't land us with "quatre-vingt
I think it was the Celtic influence in French, as Welsh still uses vingtesimal notation - deugain (2 twenties), trigain (3 20s) etc, but it goes a wonderful step further - 15 is pymtheg, (5-10), 16 is un ar bymtheg (1 on 5-10), 17 is 2 on 5-10 and, most glorious of all, 18 is deunaw = 2x9, 19 is 4 on 5-10 (pedwar ar bymtheg) and so 99 can be pedwar ar bymtheg a phedwar hugain (4 on 5-10 and 4 twenties) or sometimes just cant namyn un (100 less 1)
Scots Gaelic also uses 20-base, and Breton manages a variation on the welsh 18=2x9, they use triwec'h, literally 3x6
Wonderful languages.
"...So is 22nd of July 'Pi Approximation Day' in DD/MM countries then?"
I will be making a pie (Key Lime) for my family to celebrate today. I don't expect to get them to join me in singing a few rounds (which are, of course, the traditional music for Pi Day, similar to carols for Christmas).
https://projectpluto.com/temp/pi_rounds.pdf
My wife and daughter do not, in general, really get into the holiday spirit; Pi Day is more part of their nerdly husband/father's cultural heritage. But they'll eat the pie.
But a couple of years ago, my wife made some quite tasty quiches for 22/7. A quiche is, of course, "approximately" a pie.
The dashes fix an ambiguity problem. 12031102? Nov 2, 1203 or Dec 3, 1102 or March 12, 1102. It's very, very rare to find YYYY-DD-MM. So if you're interpreting human generated dates, the dashes pretty much force YYYY-MM-DD. And YYYY-M-D is easily interpreted as a bonus.
As others have noted, file names really, really want to be in numeric, YYYY-MM-DD order. Take note when you supply your users the file name when they download from you!
That's a pretty huge can of worms to open.
The varied interpretation of these and related colloquial chronological phrases has damn near resulted in divorce proceedings with Mrs Igor.
Speaking as a physicist, I contend that "THIS Tuesday" is the Tuesday of THIS week and may be in the past or in the future. From this, it logically follows that "NEXT Tuesday" MUST be in the NEXT week.
Of course there also has to be further agreement on the first day of the week when talking about this Sunday.
Calling Dr Streetmentioner...
@TRT
Tuesday week...
Good point - although most(?) people would probably take that as a week after the forthcoming Tuesday - although what about last Tuesday week?
Welsh has an interesting approach to similar problems. English has "yesterday, today, tomorrow" as single words. Welsh has single words for today-2 days (echdoe), today-1 day (ddoe), today (heddiw), tomorrow (yfory), today+2 days(trenydd) and today+3 days (tradwy), and as a bonus 'the following day (tranoeth)'(not just tomorrow) and 'the night before last (echnos)'.
And curiously, the Welsh word for 'week' (wythnos) translates as eight-night.
English is so long-winded sometimes...
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Long ago on an American Manufactured Mainframe far away:
01 YANKEE-DATE.
05 MM PIC XX.
05 DD PIC XX.
05 YY PIC XX. **
*
*
*
01 UK-DATE.
05 DD PIC XX.
05 MM PIC XX.
05 YY PIC XX.
some stuff goes in here
ACCEPT YANKEE-DATE FROM TODAY.
MOVE CORRESPONDING YANKEE-DATE TO UK-DATE.
and get on with life
** yes, yes I know about y2k but the system date only came in that way in 1980 in ANSII Cobol and anyway if you think y2k issues only encompassed this thing you are deluded. A raft of issues revolved around report headings that only had mm/dd (or was it dd/mm? No way to tell) and *that* problem was a language agnostic, equal opportunity rat's nest.
To wade nto this swamp at a rather late time, you are all wrong. The only correct answer (a few seconds ago) is : 1521080123
Running Linux, that is all the Pi understands (Time Since Unix - 1st Jan 1970 00:00).
And whoever designed the Java Date classes deserves a GregorianCalendar inserted where Sun didn't shine.
assuming you live in a country that insists on writing dates in the frankly barking mad MM/DD format
Nothing wrong with it if you're using it for sorting purposes. Just make sure you're using the year formatted as YY/MM/DD or YYYY/MM/DD (OK, usually if I'm doing a sortable list I'll forego the slash).
I'll wait this time, the last model was incredibly unreliable.
The problem with the previous model was:
Тhe team expects that this limit is unlikely to be reached by the majority of users.
I did some extensive experimentation with the previous variant. There was no way to keep it from overheating using passive cooling if the loadavg was > 50%. Pi does not give you proper access to the cpu freq subsystem as on other Arm and most Intel/AMD CPUs. It only has medium or large :) If you are in the large territory, even with one of the stock heatsinks, it will barf sooner or later. You either need a HUGE heatsink or the f-word (fan). Downclocking does not help unless you downclock it all the way to 600 which defeats the purpose of havinga 1200MHz CPU in the first place.
It will be interesting to see if this one is an improvement, but based on my experience with the previous one it has to thermal throttle under 800.
I've had pretty much every model with no problems apart from the last one. I think it's overheating, but I'm not sure. It just freezes. That's with aftermarket heatsinks too. I don't want to put a fan on it because it's in the bedroom ( and the fact I'd have to spend money on a new case, which might not fix the problem ).
Same software as on my (perfectly reliable) Pi2 in another room.
... has a Pi Zero W running a 5" touchscreen and RetroPi as a sort of homebrew Nintendo Switch, but with ZX Spectrum games, etc. The whole setup runs happily from a power/charge controller and 1200mAh LiPo battery (or mains charger).
His Pi2B used to throttle due to heat, and occasionally would crash, but he just added some inexpensive alloy heat sinks to the top ICs and a copper heat spreader plate to the bottom one and it's steady away now.
He added heatsinks to the Pi Zero as well, based on his experience with the 2B (and the charge controller, since it runs hot when on mains power) - I guess the same thing would work with the new 3B+?
Be interesting to know why you think the previous model (9M sold) is unreliable,
100% reproducible fail for the compute heavy apps which it was tested with multiple Pi3Bs:
1. Running it as a time capsule - nfs mini-server exporting an attached 500G USB drive set-up for encrypted lvm. Fails ~ 10-20G transferred, classic symptoms of thermal failure. Going unreliable then random failure of running software, then hang or reboot.
2. Running it as a motion camera controller - 5 cameras, 1-4 H264 network and one USB. The moment the load is above >50% thermal runaway and thermal death.
Adding heatsinks delays the inevitable, but does not prevent it. Downclocking to any frequency above 600 only makes things worse because it spends more time at the higher frequency and heats up more. The threshold is ~ 50% at higher freq based on frequency stats. The moment you get into that territory you are a goner if you have something running on all cores - f.e. 4 motion threads. Same goes for making all cores busy with nfs+crypto+io.
The only thing the old Pi3B was excellent at was working at ridiculously low ambient. I had it running at -27C without any issues. +35C ambient was a definite belly up though.
RPI.. so much potential.. so little time to actually do something with it!
I'm using my current RPI3 as a Kodi box as I get very tired with trying to battle with Plex on any other format... the built in 'Smart' TV version is slow and terrbile, Chromecast and Fire Stick versions just hitch and judder during playback... but the RPI handles it like a champ. Now I want to build a little media centre box around it with LED displays...buttons... other..things...
Curse working 40 hour weeks.. never have enough time for the fun things! And now I need to buy another RPI... no idea what for yet but...
If it's just for Audio, why are you bothering going down the Plex route? Stick Logitech Media Server on there (used to Slim Devices Squeezeserver) and on any spare Pis, run PiCorePlayer which means you can have your own cheap, opensource synchronised music system without having to touch Sonos or other expensive crap.
"If it's just for Audio, why are you bothering going down the Plex route? "
Because I have another Plex server for video on a more capable platform, and it makes it easier to change interface. TBH, my audio playback devices are a handful of cheap old recycled iPod touches hung on the wall in various rooms, running 8Player as DLNA clients.
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I use a pi3 for my kodi box...
I never bothered connecting a hard drive, I use a old desktop PC as a NAS and use that to hold all my media. I never have any problems streaming to the the pi even at 1080p across a wired network. and use the onboard wifi as a wireless access point, so the 5ghz is welcome...
Not sure you can get the critial bit any more, but I have a CM3L mounted in a WD SATA Adapter connected to a 60GB SSD. The CM3L has the OTP bit set to boot directly from the SSD, no SD card involved at all. It could be done with a Pi2Bv1.2 or Pi3B by setting the OTP bit to permit booting over USB, or (given what's been posted on the RPF Forums) by a Pi3B+ right out of the box. Yuo'll just need a USB to SATA cable to connect them together..
I use a 2-slot USB HDD enclosure hooked up to an RPI-3 to feed the two RPIs running Kodi on my TVs via Samba/NFS. Works like a charm. I also use Deluged on it to download torrents directly to the HDDs. Public domain media only, of course.
[note: I fried the video chip on an RPI-3 when I incorrectly fitted a fan and shorted something. It still works fine as a headless box though, which is why its my little black box o'bits]
Might use this to get one of the previous 3s which will inevitably end up on ebay to upgrade the RPi-2 Kodi box upstairs.
Anon, obvs.
I use a RPI3 running Open Media Vault for storing all my media
Open Media Vault does a great job of abstracting disk and file paths so that if you do need to swap disks, the operation should be painless.
I have 2 2TB disks attached. One acting as a back - backups managed through OMV.
OMV has a simple web interface which handles the bulk of the management tasks.
For actually playing the media I use cheap android TV boxes re-flashed to use openelec (another kodi distribution). They are all set up to use a shared library which is stored in a mySQL database on the OMV server. What this means is that I can watch half a film in the living room then seemlessly resume watching in the bedroom.
I found the RPI3 to be unreliable when playing HD sources.
OS/8! Luxury. We had to load up via an ASR33:-
Rim Loader
(Low Speed)
7756/ 6032
7757/ 6031
7760/ 5357
7761/ 6036
7762/ 7106
7763/ 7006
7764/ 7510
7765/ 5357
7766/ 7006
7767/ 6031
7770/ 5367
7771/ 6034
7772/ 7420
7773/ 3776
7774/ 3376
7775/ 5356
Phil.
p.s. Apologies for the extra blank lines - not sure where they came from.
We've had problems with the supplier of the BT chip updating their firmware at any sort of reasonable rate. This is a newer chip with newer firmware, although same supplier, so we hope there are some improvements.
BT is just a PITA in general I find.
EDIT to add: BT/Wifi coexistence is the culprit I suspect. A good idea in principle, a PITA in practice.
I wanted remote keyboards to go with Kodi (better than faffing with on-screen keyboards) and ended up buying a couple of compacts which paired with their own USB devices rather than BT. At first it seemed a bit pointless to tie up a USB connector. Having read these comments it seems they were were the better option than pure bluetooth.
Last year we needed to plonk an NTP server somewhere until we got out new time infrastructure in. Somewhat jokingly boss of boss suggested an RasPi. I thought about it and realised that it wasn't such a silly idea. So we purchased two (always have a backup!), threw on CentOS 7 (so they fit in with everything else) and aside from a USB dongle on one of them playing silly they worked fine for several months.
Once they were decommed from that use I took one home, threw on RiPTC and now use it as a VMware Horizon thin client to connect to work.
It was my first one.
Decided to try and turn my life around, go back to college to do my HND (still need to deal with all that stuff) then progress onto getting a BSc, then in time... emigrate.
I thought buying this would give me a chance to hone my skills that have gone rusty over the last decade or so by learning and playing around with Python, SQL, JavaScript/Nodes, Java, *nix, etc.
I thought buying this would give me a chance to hone my skills that have gone rusty over the last decade or so by learning and playing around with Python, SQL, JavaScript/Nodes, Java, *nix, etc.
Exactly what they were meant for. This is excellent.
I'm doing something with Python now, need to understand uWSGI, Django, Flask etc enough to evaluate. Spin up a Pi and hack away.
I got one of the first ones. The low resources are just fine for a small web server. It's been chugging away for a couple of years now with a little onion site that's actually getting quite a bit of traffic. Text versions of historical texts, in case anyone was wondering about onion Pi.
I'm working on a new way to digitize video tapes. Essentially I'm trying to get the raw signal from the video heads and then process it later. Gigabit Ethernet, even if it's just connected to USB2 could give more than 30 Megasameples per second which should be good enough for most consumer formats.
The Pi would then interface with an FPGA with some extra RAM essentially used as a FIFO.
Well it's actually rather expensive. We are talking about perhaps 5 Euros per board, which is far to expensive for something only few people need.
What makes it expensive is that it needs galvanic isolation. So it's about the same number of parts you have in a fixed voltage power supply, you only need beefier components as you're dealing with lower voltages and therefore higher currents.
Well I've got a mixed estate of 8 Pis
1) is a motion sensitive camera overlooking the back of the house, a temp. sensor reporting to pi2 and an in-house web-server
2) is a file server, iplayer server, runs a daemon that controls 4 remote wireless mains sockets and records temp. measurements from around the house.
3) Has daemon controlling external house-lights via a Power MOSFET, has a temp. sensor reporting to pi2.
4) Motion sensitive camera and PIR sensor.
5) Motion sensitive camera, has a temp. sensor reporting to pi2
6) Controls via Pi2 a heater in otherwise unheated utility room, has a temp. sensor reporting to pi2.
7) has 2 temp. sensors reporting to pi2.
8) testbed - at mo' has a Schmitt trigger light sensor tracking dawn-dusk
Very simple jobs which could be combined into a smaller number but would mean swathes of wiring around the house.
Combining the capabilities can be usefull. Just tracked over the last few weeks an area of loft that had an intruder that sounded
too loud to be a mouse. So PIR detector switched on light and motion cameras spotted a mouse and a few days later noted its demise.
> Well I've got a mixed estate of 8 Pis
Quite a few here too. Main RPi3 runs off a 2TB disk, serves NFS, runs a USB weather station, email (postfix, dovecot) for three domains, Nextcloud with numerous apps against postgresql (fewer resource demands than MySQL) and various other thngs previously run by an x86 server. The big thing to get over was the deep seated uncertainty about the USB disk, but actually it's been trouble free.
Another one (Pi Zero) is plugged into the telly and runs OSMC, getting the data from the main server via NFS. Control is via Kore on various tablets, phones around the house.
Another (Model B) is fitted with a Hifiberry device and is plugged into the old and wonderful sounding hifi amp directly. This one mainly runs mpd, and a web based control interface, but also does some cron jobs for the network. Also run minidlna for local streaming to tablets etc.
And another is in a data centre Somewhere In Europe running as a fallback MX, a few lowish traffic web sites, a Nextcloud instance used to share data with friends, family and other collaborators.
Another one runs in the house of a friend, who needed a nextcloud instance to get him round a short term difficulty, but the Pi turned out to be so useful a much wider range of local services are now run.
The new Pi just ordered will replace the "main server". That leaves me with an original Pi, ordered in the first wave, a Pi ZeroW, and a spare Pi3 and a Model 2, all of which are used at one stage or another to play.
The most astonishing thing about the Pi to one who does not use them in their originally intended way, for education, is that they are as capable as they are. When one runs out of grunt or otherwise hits the inevitable limitations of the nature of the device and its price point, the creativity required to get things working well is a reminder of the most satisfying times in IT. When I find myself wishing for more RAM, or disk connections, or whatever, I remind myself that we in technology are probably too conditioned to expect bigger or faster, and that very often, being disappointed when an ideal is unattainable gets in the way of what is actually achievable. Or as Miranda says, "such fun."
get back on to some Pi work. I've got a model 2 currently sitting under a model railway. It's connected to servos via a dedicated board for points control (its main use at the moment), has inputs from track detectors and a small push-button controller and can drive locos from code via a USB DCC controller. It all works and I've written the relevant Python control software, I just need to put all the programming together to get fully automated running.
I'll get my coat, mine's the anorak!
"Sadly, the module will need a tiny fan to keep things cool."
Oh no, not worth it vs. the previous completely passive model. This needs to be industrial stuff. I use it as a home automation POC ...
Also, for those worried with bluetooth, don't be. It never works correctly, any time I tried to use it ...
"Also, for those worried with bluetooth, don't be. It never works correctly, any time I tried to use it ..."
Last Halloween - with minutes to go before visitors. The SFX external Bluetooth speaker suddenly wouldn't connect reliably to the PC - through the thickness of a double-glazed window. Next year it will be a wired connection snaking out of the garage.
Horrific bandwidth, far less than USB 2.0 so not worth bothering with.
The Broadcom SoC has very few "high bandwidth" interfaces - the camera interface, LVDS, HDMI, SD/MMC and USB.
They'd need to switch over to a different SoC that has PCIe or SATA as well for SATA to be worthwhile.
There are quite a few sub $50 single board computers that have that, albeit much harder to buy.
I Still have my very first Pi that was on the original first production run.... it still works, it has a USB hard drive connected to it and I use for my bitcoin and litecoin wallets....
I also have a row of them hooked up to ASIC cards mining away at litecoins... with another pi running security over it all....
I also have another running a radius server to keep the wifi secure (disabled on the rpi's running the cryptocurrency stuff)
Well there’s the problem(s) straight away
www.loca.gov
goverment ! USAian gov at that.
The Radio people sorted this out back in the early part of the 20th centuary !
Day starts at 00:00:00 and ends at 23:59:59
Binary - two digits - 0 to 1 NOT 2; octal 0 to 7 NOT 8; deneray 10 digits 0 to 9 NOT 0 to 10; hex - well you should get thge point by now. How on earth can you have hour 24 a 24 hour system ?
Monday 23:59:58 tic Monday 23:59:59 tic TUESDAY 00:00:00 tic Tuesday 00:00:01...
There is no such time as 24:00 (or 24:00:00)
ANY attempt to go to 24:00:00 is patently barking mad
@James Hughes 1
Can I just float this idea & see what the rest of the commentards make of it.
The existing Pi layout sprouts connectors in all sorts of directions which is fine for a bench-top gadget.
Trying to incorporate this in some sort of integrated device, say the PiTop or the NextCloud box the arrangement is really sub-optimal. In the PiTop, for instance, the need to get an internal connection for the keyboard plugged into the Pi means that the board is set far back into the case making the connectors awkward to access from the outside and the keyboard lead blocks the headphone socket.
Can I suggest an alternative layout for system builders?
HDMI, headphones, network and at least two USB sockets all line up on one edge which could then be made accessible to the outside of the box.
At least one USB would be on another edge for internal user - keyboard and/or storage.
The power connector would also be internal on the assumption that such a device would have its own internal powere (e.g. Pi batteries) or some sort of internal power distribution so that storage doesn't have to draw from the board.
The Swedes have a nice abbreviation t.o.m (Till Och Med) - literally "to and with".
When talking about an expiry date of a period you write "t.o.m date. Which means "up to and including".
In English there is often confusion when people state "to" an end date. It can be taken as either it expires at the end of that day - or at the end of the day before.
What?
>1.4Ghz quad core Raspberry Pi - £35
>1.4Ghz dual core Mac Mini - £479
>Whilst the Mac Mini does come with a 500MB hard drive, you can pick one of those up for under £25
The raspberry pi has a 1.4 GHZ arm processor. The mac mini has a 1.4 GHZ intel one. The mac's is faster. A lot faster. Also, the hard drive is 500 gb, not mb. Big difference there.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Although I agree with you that the oranges in question are old and unappetizing, after all the mac mini has a processor from 2014 in it, that doesn't make your comparison correct or even usable.
I think the comparison operates on the structure that apples and oranges are similar enough that you can compare them in a broad sense, but doing so on specifics is focusing on the wrong thing. Therefore:
"This yellow apple is not as crunchy as that red one, so I like it less." is fine.
"This orange from California is sweeter than that one from Florida, so I like it more." is fine.
"I tried the apples at the supermarket, but they seem old so I ate oranges." is fine.
"This apple had a thinner skin than that orange, so I like it more." is missing the point because oranges have rinds and apples don't (well functionally they don't). Meanwhile, using a general comparison such as "Oranges have thick rinds and apples don't, so I prefer apples." is fine.
Thus, comparisons like "Raspberry pi boards are cheaper and easier to modify than mac minis", "The cost of the raspberry pi is commensurate with its components, but the mac mini is hideously overpriced", and "The raspberry pi has a GPIO interface, but the mac mini does not" are all completely valid comparisons. Statements like "Both of the machines have 1.4ghz processors, but the mac mini is more expensive" are missing the point because the processors are different and so the comparison can't be used to correctly differentiate between the two.
...another one I'll want to buy in the hope I start to use it and then still never use it.
I have the last model, I bought 2. One too hook up to the TV and do stuff with and one to stick on a touch screen. I briefly used the one on the TV and haven't touched it since. The one to go on the touch screen, I still haven't even opened the touch screen.
The other older model I also used briefly and never went further.
I'm a lazy shit.
I have three RaspPi boards of various iterations, but I won't buy (or use) any more of them until they get rid of that ancient USB2 interface and install at least one USB3 port! I don't care if it requires a price increase, but I need speed to the "outside world" (such as USB thumb drives and high-speed external hard drives).
You can't just float things like 'you'll have to wait for Pi4' without giving us more details, that's just cruel.
Is the Pi4 under development? How far are we away from some sort of announcement regarding it's capabilities & price? When might we see this available to buy?
BTW, the Pi team are doing great work, currently have a 2B and a 3B, will probably get a 3B+ in next couple of weeks.
Why do they *need* it exactly?
You might need it for the use-case you've got in mind (I'm guessing you want a dirt-cheap file server or some such) but I'm willing to bet the majority of folk don't need a whole lot more than basic peripherals.
AFAIK there is no SBC with USB3.0 and gigabit ethernet, much less one for $35. Sure, USB3 would be nice. I'd hardly call it essential though. You might not care about a price increase, but the price is and always has been the big leveller of the RPi and makes it so readily available to practically anyone. I'll live without it.
AFAIK there is no SBC with USB3.0 and gigabit ethernet, much less one for $35.
No ... but you can get the Gigabyte GA-E3800N for around £40, and that has USB3.1 and gigabit ethernet (and a couple of SATA ports, RS-232 and Parallel, etc). That has an AMD APU and isn't fanless ... and you'd need to add a RAM DIMM or two ...
It's not quite Pi-small, or Pi-cheap, or Pi-quiet ... but it's not a world away.
I would settle for USB with Multi-TT. I'm using one Pi in a rather unorthodox location and have 17 USB devices connected externally (including the hubs). No-one should have to go through what I did to get that working.
"I'm using one Pi in a rather unorthodox location and have 17 USB devices connected externally (including the hubs). No-one should have to go through what I did to get that working."
Hove you considered that you might need more than one computer (that's more than one at the same time) to do all that properly?
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