back to article 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 …

  1. wolfetone Silver badge
    Joke

    Fantastic!

    My drawer at home could do with another Raspberry Pi.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Coffee/keyboard

      Re: Fantastic!

      Comment of the year right there.

      1. 404

        Re: Fantastic!

        Doesn't mean they're wrong either... Was just thinking the same thing... Have 5 or 6 of them laying around.

        1. Martin
          Happy

          Re: Fantastic!

          I've done quite well - I have four of them, and three are actually being used...

    2. Francis Boyle Silver badge

      Don't leave your Pi in a drawer

      Install Boinc and donate some cycles.

    3. skalamanga

      Re: Fantastic!

      I have one set up as a pihole and another as a deluge/flexget client, any more useful setups? I have three more doing nothing...

      1. Martin
        Thumb Up

        Re: Fantastic!

        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?

      2. bombastic bob Silver badge
        Devil

        Re: Fantastic!

        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.

    4. nautica Silver badge
      Holmes

      Re: Fantastic!

      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.

  2. IrishFella

    I think Gigabit networking is only available over USB2

    1. Korev Silver badge

      Yep. Their blog claims 315Mb/s which is still thrice the speed of the previous model.

      1. Steven Raith

        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

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          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.

          1. Steven Raith

            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? :-)

            1. James Hughes 1

              No fast path in to the SoC. Getting PCIe, USB3 or similar would require a new SoC on a new process, which is more than a B to B+ upgrade.

              We have pretty much reach the limit of this SoC on this process. Anything past this point is likely to have a new SoC.

              1. Steven Raith

                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

              2. ZSn

                @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?

                1. James Hughes 1

                  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.

                  1. Steven Raith

                    "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

                    1. Steven Raith

                      Fuck it I've bought one.

                      A gaming based set so that if I find it's not ideal for my needs, I can still play Stuntrace FX and Starwing on it.

                      Steven "hypocrite" R

            2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

              s it a lack of a built in PCIe bus

              Yes, you want something like a Banana Pi for a faster bus. Surprised to see a chip update at all considering how little Broadcom cares about the chips.

              1. Dave K

                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!

                1. jelabarre59

                  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.

                  1. Daniel 18

                    You might want to check the state of drivers for USB to VGA adapters. As of about four years ago it seemed to be mixed, but I didn't do much research.

            3. jelabarre59

              OSDpi

              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.

          2. Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese Silver badge

            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.

        2. Gordan

          "but proper GigE would make this far more appealing to me"

          Why? It's not like you'll get that much I/O to/from the micro-SD card or a USB attached disk.

          IMO for GbE to make proper sense they would need to add a proper SATA port.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            >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.

            1. Gordan

              If you are looking for something that is specifically in the Pi form factor, Asus Tinkerboard is much more advanced. The only downside of the Tinkerboard is that it's SoC is 32-bit, but that's hardly an issue on a board with less than 4GB of RAM.

            2. rsole

              Not necessarily

              Gb ethernet makes sense from a cable point of view because you don't need a crossover cable.

              1. Old Used Programmer

                Re: Not necessarily

                The Pi Ethernet autosenses. You've *never* needed a crossover cable with a Pi.

  3. Korev Silver badge
    Pint

    Dates

    "assuming you live in a country that insists on writing dates in the frankly barking mad MM/DD format"

    A pint for the author -->

    1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: Dates

      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.

      1. Nick Ryan Silver badge

        Re: Dates

        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.

        1. Cuddles

          Re: Dates

          ""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.

          1. TRT Silver badge

            Re: Dates

            12pm is midnight because it comes after 11pm.

            I have written my human readable time translation subroutines to return Noon and Midnight instead of any faffing around with ams and pms.

          2. LisaJK

            Re: Dates

            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!!!

            1. Pen-y-gors

              Re: Dates

              @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

              1. Charles 9

                Re: Dates

                "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.

                1. peter_dtm
                  Happy

                  Re: Dates

                  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

              2. Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese Silver badge

                @Pen-y-gors Re: Dates

                A very well put together post - please have a guinea from me for your troubles

              3. dajames
                Headmaster

                Re: Dates

                So weight of flour in a recipe is 8oz, not 228g - or even 225 or 250g ...

                No, indeed ... it's nearer 227g. (226.796, it says here.)

                1. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

                  Re: Dates

                  Wrong! 8oz is clearly 236.588ml. Or is that 248.828gm - we are talking about troy ounces, right?

                2. Anonymous Coward
                  Anonymous Coward

                  Re: Dates

                  "So weight of flour in a recipe is 8oz, not 228g - or even 225 or 250g ..."

                  Why on earth would I want to measure the dry ingredients in ounces when I am measuring the liquids in milliliters?

                  Weird.

              4. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Dates

                "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.

              5. Allan George Dyer
                Pint

                Re: Dates

                @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).

                1. Anonymous Coward
                  Anonymous Coward

                  Re: Dates

                  ""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.

            2. Daniel 18

              Re: Dates

              "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.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Dates

                "[...] 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).

              2. jelabarre59

                Re: Dates

                Then again, there are at least a dozen different definitions of 'ton', several of which are not even measures of weight or mass

                But what is the official definition of a "fuck-ton"?

                1. Nick Ryan Silver badge

                  Re: Dates

                  But what is the official definition of a "fuck-ton"?

                  I believe that it is approximately 11 fuck-loads. I have yet to receive a clarification as to whether or not a fuck-lot is the same as a fuck-load, I suspect not.

          3. jfm

            Re: Dates

            NATO did (and presumably still does) have a different convention. Things didn't happen at midnight, they happened at 2359 (or less commonly, at 0001).

            1. TRT Silver badge

              Re: Dates

              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.

              1. Charles 9

                Re: Dates

                "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).

                1. Anonymous Coward
                  Anonymous Coward

                  Re: Dates

                  That's the reason they are offically 12 Noon and 12 Midnight, i.e. 12 Noon is neither a.m nor p.m

                  1. Old Used Programmer

                    Re: Dates

                    I have been known to write "12M", and "AM" could be construed as "Anti-Meridian".

              2. katrinab Silver badge

                Re: Dates

                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.

                1. TRT Silver badge

                  Re: Dates

                  "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.

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Off by one

              "Things didn't happen at midnight, they happened at 2359 (or less commonly, at 0001"

              So nothing ever happened at 2400 or 0000 then? Or is NATO's day one minute shorter than the SI version?

          4. H in The Hague

            Re: Dates

            "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.

            1. Daniel 18

              Re: Dates

              "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.

          5. Dave559 Silver badge

            Re: ""am" is before the meridian. "pm" is after the meridian"."

            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? ;-)

            1. TRT Silver badge

              Re: The meridian is, by definition, when the sun is directly overhead.

              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?

            2. Daniel 18

              Re: ""am" is before the meridian. "pm" is after the meridian"."

              "The meridian is, by definition, only an exact instant in time, when the sun is directly overhead."

              The tight relationship of the meridian to local time was broken as soon as standard time, with time zones, was adopted.

          6. Nick Ryan Silver badge

            Re: Dates

            @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...

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Dates

          "12:00am and 12:00pm."

          to be fair, the meridian is *exactly* 12:00. By the time the photons from the clock display hit your eyes, it is after the meridian by some nanoseconds, making it "PM"

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Dates

        "Yes, I fell for it once and arrived 12hours early for my flight from Boston to St Louis."

        So, just about early enough to make it through the TSA security checkpoint, then?

        1. 404

          Re: Dates

          Who the fuck is/are 'they' in this context? How about naming them so we know whose ass to kick?

    2. Tweetiepooh

      Re: Dates

      I can never see why people want to use MM/DD, well actually maybe I can depending on how you say dates. Do you say "March the 14th" or "14th of March"?

      BTW, Growing up in South Africa in the 70's we were taught to write dates 'YYYY Month DD'.

      1. AMBxx Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: Dates

        MM/DD make much more sense than DD/MM (painful for a Brit to say). It has the most significant digits at the left. We don't do time as mm:hh do we?

        Putting the year after the day is the barking mad bit, should be YY/MM/DD or YYYY/MM/DD if you're being pedantic.

        1. Lee D Silver badge

          Re: Dates

          YYYY-MM-DD is a fabulous, sensible format. It means that alphabetical sorting actually sorts chronologically too. If you don't file your emails like that, you're barking.

          But MM-DD-YYYY is ludicrous and nonsensical. It doesn't matter "how you say it".

          1. wyatt
            Happy

            Re: Dates

            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..

          2. Robert Sneddon

            Re: Dates

            "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.

            1. Jamie Jones Silver badge
              Happy

              Re: Dates

              "Until you run into the Year 9999 problem."

              That's already been addressed! :-)

              https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2550

              1. Eddy Ito

                Re: Dates

                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.

                1. Charles 9

                  Re: Dates

                  "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.

                  1. Old Used Programmer

                    Re: Dates

                    Well...also, the Roman year began in March.

                  2. Daniel 18

                    Re: Dates

                    "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...

                2. dajames
                  Headmaster

                  Re: Dates

                  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.

                  No, because 30th June is only 181/365 (or 182/366 in a leap year) days into the year. The actual mid-point is around 2nd July.

            2. ArrZarr Silver badge
              Joke

              Re: Dates

              @Robert Sneddon

              Unless you're feeling particularly longevic, I expect that the year 9999 is as much Someone Else's Problem as the year 10^200.

            3. Allonymous Coward
              Devil

              Re: Dates

              voiding all warranties and support contracts

              Oracle will still find some way to come after you...

            4. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Dates

              the y10k-problem?

              well we managed the y2k just 2 decades ago

              maybe we should focus on the year 2048 next?

              We switch from 2^10 to 2^11!

              Think about it :-)

              1. Excellentsword (Written by Reg staff)

                Re: Re: Dates

                Why are you arbitrarily pressing return mid-sentence?

                1. TRT Silver badge

                  Re: Dates

                  @Pen-y-gors

                  The good thing about decimal Pi day in Wales is that you can ask people "What's recurring?"

            5. mstreet

              Re: Dates

              re."Until you run into the Year 9999 problem"

              Ah, the great Y10K disaster to be...after living through the Y2K over-hype, I can hardly wait to see what the media of the day will come up with.

              Of wait, I'll be dead by then... maybe.....

          3. /dev/null

            Re: Dates

            In fact, YYYY-MM-DD is so fabulous and sensible, it's enshrined in an ISO standard - ISO 8601 to be precise.

            1. TRT Silver badge

              Re: Midnight cowboy

              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!

            2. PaulR79

              Re: Dates

              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).

              1. Mike Moyle

                Re: Dates

                "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!

          4. Havin_it

            Re: Dates

            If your email platform requires your input in order to sort by date, I'd find a better one.

        2. Bob Dunlop

          Re: Dates

          > We don't do time as mm:hh do we?

          Well my mum taught me to say things like "five and twenty to nine".

          1. LisaJK

            Re: Dates

            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....

            1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

              Re: Dates

              " Four and twenty blackbirds"

              To be fair, "twenty four blackbirds" would ruin the scansion.

            2. Glenturret Single Malt

              Re: Dates

              Re "meet up": see the article by Oliver Kamm (The Pedant) in the Times of last Saturday (10th March).

          2. Ken Hagan Gold badge

            Re: Dates

            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.

        3. Charlie Clark Silver badge

          Re: Dates

          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.

          1. dajames

            Re: Dates

            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.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Dates

              "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.

          2. Mike Moyle

            Re: Dates

            "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.

            1. peter_dtm

              Re: Dates

              @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

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Dates

                "12 VII 2018 or 2018 12 VII or VII 2018 12 It is ALWAYS un-ambiguous; "

                In handwritten form 2018 VII with minimal spacing could be either 2018 V 11 or 2018 VI 1 - unless you assume people will never use a pure stroke for 1.

              2. Mike Moyle

                Re: Dates

                @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

        4. katrinab Silver badge

          Re: Dates

          2018-03-14 makes sense, yes, however 3/14/2018 does not.

        5. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Dates

          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?

        6. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Dates

          We don't do time as mm:hh do we?

          *cough* quarter to nine, half past eight, etc

          For digital readouts, our left-to-right reading takes precedence, though

        7. Old Used Programmer

          Re: Dates

          "We don't do time as mm:hh do we?"

          Crontab does.

        8. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Dates

          The mistake you are making is to ignore context.

          It's likely I know what the year and probably month (probably current) are, the interesting part is the day.

          Not as true with hours and minutes.

      2. Ross 12

        Re: Dates

        YYYY Month DD at least has some logic to it, as each part is of decreasing significance.

        I can only assume that MM/DD comes from accounting and paper file storage

        1. DropBear
          WTF?

          Re: Dates

          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...

          1. TRT Silver badge

            Re: Dates

            I'm sure they only did that because of the civil war.

            Anyway, as for barking mad... they do set a president.

          2. ArrZarr Silver badge
            Facepalm

            Re: Dates

            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.

            1. Dan 55 Silver badge
              Devil

              Re: Dates

              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.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Dates

                Even worse is when Excel decides that "1/4" isn't January 4th or April 1st. No, it decides that 1/4 is the fractional representation of 0.25.

              2. Siberian Hamster

                Re: Dates

                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.

            2. JohnJacob
              WTF?

              Re: Dates

              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.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Dates

                "[...] surname [...]"

                No longer PC as it is patriarchal - literally the name of the man who sired you. Nowadays it tends to be called "family name".

                Generally in England people ask for "first name - last name" or vice versa.

            3. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Dates

              Decreasing order of immediate conscious relevance to the human reader? A human with a job and bills and family to care for as opposed to a geek steeped in IT?

              Just a perspective?

              1. TRT Silver badge

                Re: Decreasing order of immediate conscious relevance

                ... so the most immediate unit of consciously relevant time would be the pint?

          3. Uncle Slacky Silver badge
            Stop

            Re: Dates

            > "fourteenth of March" what sounds incredibly backwards

            How about "Fourth of July" then?

            1. Allan George Dyer

              Re: Dates

              > > "fourteenth of March" what sounds incredibly backwards

              > How about "Fourth of July" then?

              Is that near the Firth of Fourth?

          4. Peter Prof Fox

            14 then March makes very good sense

            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!

        2. rsole

          Re: Dates

          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.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Dates

            "I would have thought that DD MMM YYYY was decreasing significance"

            Conflating or switching definitions of a word is at best an error.

    3. Andus McCoatover
      Windows

      Re: Dates

      Yeah, let's infuriate the "Barking Mad" country dwellers by specifying the time as MM/SS/HH.

      Makes as much sense - middle/smallest/largest rule.

    4. Anonymous Blowhard

      Re: Dates

      So is 22nd of July "Pi Approximation Day" in DD/MM countries then?

      Edit: turns out it is!

      1. Richard Tobin

        Re: Dates

        22/7 is actually closer to pi than 3.14 is.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Dates

          "Four and twenty blackbirds."

          Thankfully the Norman French influence on English didn't land us with "quatre-vingt" and "quatre-vingt-dix" - respectively "four-twenty" = 80 and "four-twenty-ten" = 90.

          1. Named coward

            Re: Dates

            "Thankfully the Norman French influence on English didn't land us with "quatre-vingt" and "quatre-vingt-dix" - respectively "four-twenty" = 80 and "four-twenty-ten" = 90."

            "4 score and 7 years ago..."

            1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

              Re: Dates

              Don't forget the biblical three-score and ten.

          2. Tristram Shandy

            Re: Dates

            However in Belgian French they have "septante", "huitante" and "nonante", a much more sensible naming system.

          3. Pen-y-gors

            Re: Dates

            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.

          4. Diogenes

            Re: Dates

            -deleted - others beat me too it - should have scrolled first - sigh

      2. Bill Gray

        Re: Dates

        "...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.

      3. J. R. Hartley

        Re: Dates

        22/7 at least makes sense.

      4. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: Dates

        3.142 is less approximate than 3.14

    5. Kane

      Re: Dates

      You are all barking mad, the only date format that is acceptable is YYYYMMDD, no funny hyphens, no slashes, none of that stuff.

      1. TRT Silver badge

        Re: Dates

        You can't collapse the 0s, though.

        1. hplasm
          Coat

          Re: Dates

          "You can't collapse the 0s, though."

          Ah, yes you can... 0000/01/10 becomes ___/_1/1_

          1. IanRS

            Re: Dates with collapsed zeros

            Not ::1/10 ?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Dates

        yes this!

        and it got iso(8601) credit as well

        so now it is 20180314T153911Z

        We could understand it worldwide,

        it's UTC and

        we could do easy our math with

      3. FelixReg

        Re: Dates

        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!

    6. Pen-y-gors
      Headmaster

      Re: Dates

      To be honest, when I'm writing stuff, I still prefer to use inst. ult. and prox. Surely it's much clearer to refer to 'our meeting on the 9th inst.' than all those confusing numbers?

      1. TRT Silver badge

        Re: Dates

        Don't get me started on what constitutes "next Tuesday" or "Tuesday week" or "Tuesday fortnight"...

        1. I said the red button Igor!

          Re: Dates

          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...

        2. Pen-y-gors

          Re: Dates

          @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...

    7. This post has been deleted by its author

    8. Stevie

      Re: Dates

      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.

    9. SVV

      Re: Dates

      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.

    10. jelabarre59

      Re: Dates

      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).

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'll wait this time, the last model was incredibly unreliable.

    Actually no 4k. I don't think there's any point upgrading for me.

    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      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.

      1. James Hughes 1

        Admittedly I am biased, but I have never had any reliability issues with the Pi3B. Be interesting to know why you think the previous model (9M sold) is unreliable, since we don't get many returns.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          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.

        2. MrT

          #1 son...

          ... 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+?

        3. Voland's right hand Silver badge

          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.

      2. Dan 55 Silver badge

        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.

        Buy a FIRC case.

        1. Dan 55 Silver badge

          Can't tell if I was downvoted because of the typo (it should be FLIRC) or downvoted because it didn't work for some people. Seems to work okay for me.

          1. werdsmith Silver badge

            I never get overheat problems, but that may be because I don't waste money on cases or enclosures.

            Some of the testing people do though, is like putting a car in neutral gear and placing a brick on the accelerator.

  5. Kaltern

    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...

    1. wolfetone Silver badge

      Have you considered using an SSD drive in conjunction with the RPI? I'm like you, I want to build a media centre to hold films and music on there but it's too big to fit on an SD Card.

      1. Flywheel

        I bought an Odroid XU4 for that as it had a USB 3 cconnector.

        1. TRT Silver badge

          Plex server...

          2 x 64GB flash drives. Holds a surprising amount of audio.

          1. Andrew Jones 2

            Re: Plex server...

            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.

            1. TRT Silver badge

              Re: Plex server...

              "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.

      2. DropBear

        Re: SSD - it (may or) may not matter much for streaming media off the Pi, but I for one would prefer a proper SATA interface for any kind of storage-oriented SBC instead of a hub-attached USB (that coincidentally also handles the network traffic)...

        1. This post has been deleted by its author

          1. TRT Silver badge

            SATA?

            Wouldn't SATA/SAS be better?

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Buy a small file server and wire it up with Ethernet. I've got one in another room and it works perfectly well, using Emby on top of Kodi to keep the multiple Pi media databases in sync.

      4. oldcoder

        I use NFS to a disk server for that.

        A single 32GB SDcard is then enough.

      5. pɹɐʍoɔ snoɯʎuouɐ
        Pirate

        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...

      6. Kaltern

        Oddly enough, I have hardly any media on my own system, it's all out there... in the cloud... Means I don't need to use anything more than a 16Gb SD card... which might have enough room for a few games perhaps....

        (BTW El REG Ed's... Where's my silver badge? :P )

      7. Old Used Programmer

        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..

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      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.

    3. AceRimmer

      Rpi for Media Storage

      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.

    4. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      I'm using my current RPI3 as a Kodi box

      Which it's great at even though it has a problem with audio dropping out when starting playback.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        There's a kodi plugin which will allow you to jump back a certain number of seconds when you resume playing a video. I use it set to 5 to work around that problem and now I'm always disappointed when I'm watching netflix and I don't get the past few seconds of video/audio when I resume.

  6. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
    Happy

    Lovely bits of kit.

    Got my PiDP-8i system working the other day, blinking lights and front panel included!

    Enjoying writing some Fortran Code again on OS/8 (The OS for the DEC PDP-8)

    1. PhilBuk

      Re: Lovely bits of kit.

      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.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Lovely bits of kit.

        " Apologies for the extra blank lines - not sure where they came from."

        The posting mechanism always puts a blank line when you use a return. IIRC it also reduces contiguous intended blank lines down to just one.

  7. Flywheel

    I hope the Bluetooth works better on this one

    The Pi (in my opinion) has a history of sucking badly in the Bluetooth department - I've ordered a 3B+ and will be more than a little upset if it still sucks as hard...

    1. James Hughes 1

      Re: I hope the Bluetooth works better on this one

      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.

      1. Flywheel

        Re: I hope the Bluetooth works better on this one

        Re: Edit.. Yes, I've certainly found that to be the case, and the number of discarded Bluetooth items is testament to the problem. Maybe I'll have better luck with this one...

      2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: I hope the Bluetooth works better on this one

        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.

    2. Mike 125

      >> a history of sucking badly in the Bluetooth department

      EVERYTHING BT has that history, and future. BT is a piece of sh't.

      Pi - great stuff. Less emphasis on grunt please - we have Intels for that, and look where it got them.

      1. wolfetone Silver badge

        Re: >> a history of sucking badly in the Bluetooth department

        "BT is a piece of sh't."

        Are you still on about Bluetooh or have you moved on to British Telecom?

    3. Tom 7

      Re: I hope the Bluetooth works better on this one

      Bluetooth has a history of sucking badly in the Bluetooth department.

      1. Aitor 1

        Re: I hope the Bluetooth works better on this one

        And then it has interference even from USB3...

  8. Jay 2

    Handy little things

    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.

  9. Anonymous Noel Coward
    Headmaster

    Rats...

    ...and I bought the previous model less than a month ago.

    Oh well.

    Having a fun time trying to code an IRC bot in Python using SQLite.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Rats...

      "...and I bought the previous model less than a month ago."

      Less than a month ago? I bought one less than a fortnight ago. Another Kodi box.

      1. Anonymous Noel Coward

        Re: Rats...

        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.

        1. werdsmith Silver badge

          Re: Rats...

          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.

      2. JoshOvki

        Re: Rats...

        I had one in my "shopping basket" on Sunday but never go around to buying it. I am glad I forgot to click the purchase button! Just ordered a new one to play with Mycroft

  10. Ole Juul

    first one still chugging 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.

    1. Tom 7

      Re: first one still chugging away

      I've got a first one with RiscOs on it to remind how things could be.

      A bit of work with https://github.com/BVLC/caffe/tree/opencl and I think it could come to life for a lot of things!

  11. Christian Berger

    I have a project for it

    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.

  12. TRT Silver badge

    I use them...

    for all kinds of things. The PoE is something I've been waiting for, but disappointed it's an add-on rather than fully on-board. Maybe next time, eh?

    1. James Hughes 1

      Re: I use them...

      Just too expensive to put on every board, hence the add on board. Image making 5M devices a years, with $0.50 more hardware on that only 10k people use. You've just wasted a shitload of cash on something no-one uses.

    2. Christian Berger

      Re: I use them...

      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.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I use them...

        I wonder if it possible to make/buy a PoE > rj45 + power adapter for these use cases?

        1. TRT Silver badge

          Re: I use them...

          Mmm... incorporated into the socket itself, perhaps, then? Quick soldering iron job to replace the socketry, or a plug in like a cap? Would it be that bulky?

          1. werdsmith Silver badge

            Re: I use them...

            Various aftermarket PoE solutions have always been available for Raspberry Pi.

            1. Edwin

              Re: I use them...

              Indeed. I use one to power the pi that runs my unifi server. Doesn't need a fan though - doesn't even get noticeably warm (unlike the 8/60W Ubiquiti switch that powers it...)

  13. Chemist

    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.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      > 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."

  14. Christian Berger

    Have they fixed the serial port issue?

    The Raspberry PI3 essentially had only its "mini-UART" on the header, which had its clock derived from the CPU core and therefore was rather unusable.

  15. Isitari
    Happy

    Pihole all the way

    If you've got your old Pi (or the new one) chuck Pihole on it. Amazing DNS based ad-blocking before it even hits the computer, it even works on my original model B. :)

    1. Charles 9

      Re: Pihole all the way

      Problem is we really need transparent IP-based blocking for those nasties that keep their own DNS directories. Would also be nice if it could grok IPv6 as well.

  16. GlenP Silver badge
    Coat

    I really must...

    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!

  17. regadpellagru

    Fan ???? Oh no !

    "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 ...

    1. dajames

      Re: Fan ???? Oh no !

      "Sadly, the module will need a tiny fan to keep things cool."

      Oh no, not worth it vs. the previous completely passive model.

      Relax. As I understand it, the fan is needed on the optional POE board, not on the Pi 3B+ itself.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Fan ???? Oh no !

      "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.

  18. Wisteela
    Happy

    Excellent news

    It's a good job I'd not yet upgraded from my RPi 2. I say 'Yay!'.

  19. Peter Mount
    Meh

    SATA on a pi is possible

    I know people keep on saying they want sata but sata has been around for some time now in various forms, even Western Digital make one.

    For about £20 there's multiple ones out there that plug into the GPIO - just don't know what the band width would be like.

    1. Richard 12 Silver badge

      Re: SATA on a pi is possible

      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.

  20. pɹɐʍoɔ snoɯʎuouɐ
    Thumb Up

    gotta love the Pi...

    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)

  21. dnicholas

    Only on el Reg can the comments section about a piece of hardware be filled with date/time format debate

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ISO 8601

    For pedants, you'll be pleased to know that ISO 8601 (sec 4.2.3) defines midnight at the start of a time period as 0000hrs and at the end of that period as 2400hrs.

    http://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/iso-tc154-wg5_n0038_iso_wd_8601-1_2016-02-16.pdf

    1. peter_dtm
      Mushroom

      Re: ISO 8601

      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

      1. Charles 9

        Re: ISO 8601

        No, it doesn't end at 23:59:59. One, what if you have a LITERAL last-second event that occurs between 23:59:59 and 00:00:00?

        Two, what about leap seconds? Then you have to account for the occasional 61st second (23:59:60), and then have last-second events on top of that.

  23. eJ2095

    Must have missed it

    There is no "Will it run Crysis"........

  24. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    @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.

    1. Old Used Programmer

      Design a carrier with the connector layout you want and use a CM3/CM3L/CM3-16.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    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.

    1. Havin_it

      Really? If anyone utters or interprets "to $date" as excluding $date, I judge them an utter ocean-going See You Next Tuesday.

      And don't get me started on people who say "next Tuesday" when they mean THIS Tuesday (Tuesday of THIS week). Nurse, make it a large one please....

  26. Wyrdness

    Pi vs Mac Mini

    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 too.

    Apple really does need to up their offerings, and I say this as an Mac user.

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: Pi vs Mac Mini

      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.

      1. Wyrdness

        Re: Pi vs Mac Mini

        Oops, accidentally typed MB instead of GB. I'm very aware that the Mac's CPU is faster, but it's still massively overpriced for what it is. I can't imagine that Apple is paying very much for those i5-4260U CPUs.

      2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge
        Headmaster

        Re: Pi vs Mac Mini

        "You're comparing apples to oranges."

        No, he's comparing Apples to Raspberries.

        1. skalamanga

          Re: Pi vs Mac Mini

          I never understood the apples to oranges comparison. As far as i'm concerned, two fruit are relatively similar.

          I prefer to compare apples to corduroy, or the density of the atmosphere at sea level to oranges or somthing...

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: Pi vs Mac Mini

            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.

  27. steviebuk Silver badge

    Oh no...

    ...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.

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ARM

    After the whole Meltdown and AMD "thing" is the Raspberry now the most secure device in the house?

    1. Richard 12 Silver badge

      Re: ARM

      Got any MIPs?

  29. sisk

    Ok. I have just one question.

    Which of the projects on my todo list is going to end up with a RasPi 3B+ at its core?

  30. kkanalz

    All Pi's need USB3!

    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).

    1. James Hughes 1

      Re: All Pi's need USB3!

      Getting rid of the USB2.0 requires a new SoC...this is NOT a cheap thing to do. You'll have to wait for Pi4 for a big change in SoC.

      1. ukaudiophile

        Re: All Pi's need USB3!

        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.

      2. werdsmith Silver badge

        Re: All Pi's need USB3!

        "You'll have to wait for Pi4 for a big change in SoC."

        That's almost confirming it James, the roadmap has become less speculative now, thanks.

    2. DasWezel
      Thumb Down

      Re: All Pi's need USB3!

      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.

      1. dajames

        Re: All Pi's need USB3!

        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.

        1. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

          Re: All Pi's need USB3!

          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.

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: All Pi's need USB3!

            "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?

  31. jms222

    Remember it's a SoC for set-top boxes

    and do not even bother saying "if only it had something other" until you read the subject above again and consider the costs or whatever it was.

  32. Daniel 18

    The next upgrade?

    I would think that the most generally useful upgrade in a subsequent Pi would be more RAM.

  33. skalamanga

    We've been through this! Approximate pi day is 22/7, i'm not accepting pi with only three significant figures!

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