* Posts by werdsmith

7096 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Feb 2011

The Raspberry Pi 5 is now available ... if you pre-ordered

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They started shipping last Friday 20th and some people had them the next day.

It is 20 years since the last commercial flight of Concorde

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Re: Twice!

Don't want to sound like a twit, but has anyone suggested to the pilot if they could just try turn it off and on again?

I've been on a 787 flight waiting to push back, where there was a problem and a complete power down and restart was the actual solution.

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[USA] Supersonic land overflights were banned,

Supersonic overflights were banned in UK and France too. The flightpath out of LHR was down to the Bristol Channel and then accelerate, people in South Wales or Cornwall might hear a boom.

French Concorde accelerated once it was overhead La Manche.

But yes, the BA service started to Bahrain if I recall. This was subsonic over the continent and supersonic over the med. Air France went to Rio via Dakar.

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Re: Gorgeous aircraft

he didn't think they were any great shakes as an actual flying experience

I flew on one of the Bay of Biscay jolly flights and will never forget it. Apart from reaching Mach 2 and 60,000 feet the take of was amazing.

Yes it was noisy and small, the windows tiny (but an amazing view at cruise).

There was a significant feeling of acceleration and the continued acceleration after take off along with the pitch gave me the feeling the thing was climbing much steeper than it was.

Maybe the Bay of Biscay flights with less fuel and no baggage in the hold made the performance that much more lively, but it was a very different experience to a normal airliner.

Of course, people on scheduled flights getting from A to B in a very short time was what it was about.

Dropbox drops bucks to ditch digs in long-term WFH model

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Re: If I was an investor...

Attracting the best people to come and work is much easier for those willing to use WFH.

And they are much harder to retain for the companies that don’t.

Intel stock stumbles on report Nvidia is building an Arm CPU for PC market

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Re: What's with

Possibly the success of Apple M silicon in performance, power consumption and thermal realms is a motivating force.

An 18 hour battery in a very slim compact unit seems beyond any x86 architecture.

And Apple M runs Windows for ARM very nicely.

More X subscription tiers could spell doom for free access as biz bleeds cash

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Re: I don't think you understand the point of "fediverses"

I found Mastodon a bit awkward in its structure.

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Re: Personally, I don't pay for ads.

Cinema is different because if they advertise a film starts showing at 7PM everybody knows to turn up at 7:25PM to avoid the preamble.

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Re: Personally, I don't pay for ads.

The Sweeney TV cops drove new Fords because that’s what the real flying squad drove. Police didn’t maintain old 50s Jags in the 70s.

Amazon unveils new drone design, plans liftoff of aerial delivery in UK, Italy

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Re: Not viable in UK

It's a service that can only be used by people who choose to opt in and have had a survey of their landing area carried out.

So it won't be attempting to deliver to the 12th floor, flat b, Mandela House, Peckham. But would be fine for Rectory Cottage, Little Shitting, Berkshire.

Unfortunately I probably won't get to enjoy it, I'll have to be content with being under 10 mile final for an international airport.

Raspberry Pi 5: Hot takes and cooler mistakes

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Re: @ "Must admit the fans do worry me."

Yeah that’ll make a difference…..

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Re: @ "Must admit the fans do worry me."

Yes, Jeff Albertson style sarcastic responses, curtness and downright rudeness is the way to treat genuine innocent new entrants to the official RPi forums.

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Re: "...let me count the ways..."

I don't think the Raspberry Pi foundation has ever stated that producing the best SBC on Earth, period, is one of their goals...they've always been straight about building the best they can to a given price point and to keep that price point as low as possible.

I don't think the Raspberry Pi foundation has had anything to do with making SBCs for many years.

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Re: So what was the passive solution?

I've been using Flircs on the 4 and found it to be very effective for my workloads.

The Pi 5 version is already on their website for shipping early December.

Sony, Honda tease EV that aims to be a lounge on wheels

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Re: And a snip at $$$$$$

Not likely to happen to and old MG, they are lucky if they even start.

Microsoft gives unexpected tutorial on how to install Linux

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I tried wsl --install and it installed Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS quite smoothly.

Elon Musk's ambitions for Starship soar high while reality waits on launchpad

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$ years

I'm wondering what Solar System phase Musk is basing his 4 years on. Mars oppositions are every 26 or so months. Next is early 2027 so a bit over 3 years. Then there is another 2029, which is actually a bit closer. None of the upcoming ones are as close as the 2020 opposition.

Lenovo to offer Android PCs, starting with an all-in-one that can pack a Core i9

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I've lately discovered FreeBSD and what a breath of fresh air, simplified with optimal consistent tools. I wish I'd discovered it long ago and now my days of speccing linux for servers is coming to an end.

linux over the years seems to have morphed into what it stood against. I find it and its culture getting very tiresome. Windows as a sever OS on its own really does seem a bit wrong. But in an Enterprise the admin and management is very developed.

On the desktop I use mulitple major OSes. Windows as the boot on one, linux as the boot os on another. Linux as a guest OS on the Windows. Mac OS on an M2 with linux and Windows ARM as guest OSes. They all have their place. None of them are rubbish on the desktop because they are, after all, just a host for applications and applications is where the productivity happens on desktops.

Make-me-root 'Looney Tunables' security hole on Linux needs your attention

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Dynamic linking always seems so messy and untidy.

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Re: re: a buffer overflow vulnerability in the GNU C Library

Back in the 8 bit days, Assembler was a doddle.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

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3B+ doesn't have 8GB RAM.

There are jumpers on the 5 that are labelled 1, 2, 4 and 8GB. Wait until the 1 and 2 GB versions appear before you compare the price to a 3B+.

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And only $5 less.

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Re: Old cores

Broadcom are still doing the SoC.

The Raspberry Pi developed silicon is a support chip.

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I think the lower RAM versions that will be more comparable to the 3B+ are in the pipeline for less money.

The 5 has the ability to control what it powers, so you can shutdown unused subsystems and it's more efficient than the 4 for a given workload.

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Re: Same Footprint

That's what they are now.

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Re: fanless minis

Now you are suggesting apricot jam. Those paperback sized fanless things are not as cheap, nor have the kind of ecosystem that Pi does. Just not even close to being a useful suggestion.

werdsmith Silver badge

I really don't understand this comment that comes up all the time.

It's like I go to the shop for orange marmalade and someone suggests peanut butter as an alternative.

If I want to be part of the Pi movement, there is really no point in buying a second hand x86 with a PSU 10 times bigger than the Pi and a power consumption to match plus a noisy fan.

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Re: Lost the plot

It’s an ARM ecosystem. Of course they are not going to break their line of compatibility for feeble RISC V cores.

If they do a RISC V then I expect it will be a separate parallel line, but Pi V development has been several years and £15 million so I doubt they have the capacity yet.

Their customer base are generally not interested in windows but many are. Fortunately most are mature enough to be tolerant of other interests.

UTM: An Apple hypervisor with some unique extra abilities

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Re: Found UTM Rather useful on a recent macbook.

I would like to have seen this a week or so back. I've just wiped off subby Parallels and installed VMWare. I might still give this a spin, I like the fact it's an easier to use wrapper on QEMU.

California governor vetoes bill requiring human drivers in robo trucks

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Re: Now that you mention it

Thumbs down, without explanation of why that could not physically function in that manner?

I never use the thumbs down or thumbs up things, but it's plain to see you are receiving thumbs down because you are writing shit like you are 11 years old and appearing to be a twat.

werdsmith Silver badge

If you sprayed peanut butter, or any sticky substance over the front glass of any human driven vehicle, you will disrupt the human sensors and the car will come to a stop until somebody cleans it off.

Same for self driving vehicles.

NASA's Mars Sample Return mission is in danger of never launching

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Re: HS2 - "people can't not know this"

The fast trains on the London to Birmingham route tie up more blocks than a slow freight train does.

Original London to Birmingham bypassed Northampton because the landowners didn't want it. Was it the Spencers? Maybe they were canal people. Dunno, but they soon came back to get their branch line built.

Anyway, original L&B 112 miles raised £2.5 million pounds to build it. It actually ended up costing £6.5 million to complete. So when people gasp in shock at inflated costs, they are acting.

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Re: HS2

The purpose of HS2 is not widely understood and the project has failed to do a decent job of describing its purpose. Consequently you get all the ill informed pub talk like "all that money to save 20 minutes".

A project that gets priced up with a certain figure that people feel would be acceptable to get it past all the politics then in reality turns out to be several times more.... well that's new.... I'm certain that when people sign off on these giant projects they already know the cost is a ridiculous work of fiction because all costs always have magnified historically, people can't not know this.

US military F-35 readiness problems highlighted in aptly timed report

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Re: Too many cooks spoil the broth

Pub talk debates about military hardware capabilities are hilarious.

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Re: Optional Extras Not Included.......

US operates a global hegemony, it requires the rest of the planet to act in the interests on the US at all times and needs a very large stick to ensure this happens.

The iPhone 15 has a Goldilocks issue: Too big or too small. Maybe a case will make it just right

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Re: Phones are lovely but they'd be much better without cameras

Do the Japanese HW people not just suggest using Cascable or any of the other various solutions to this problem that already exist?

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Re: Phones are lovely but they'd be much better without cameras

The compact camera itself is a compromised camera. Not much better than a good phone camera, nowhere near as good as a full frame or ever a 2/3.

DSLRs are going extinct very quickly now. The full frame mirrorless shows there is no need for flappy mirrors.

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Re: Phones are lovely but they'd be much better without cameras

I have a nice mirrorless camera thing but I'm not inclined to take it everywhere. It's an encumbrance most of the time, won't go in a pocket, swings about on a strap.

For all the time readiness the phone has been a godsend.

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Re: Recovering fanboy here.

I will wait about 4 years and then consider a used one. I have an iPhone XS and I expect it to be still be my main phone in 2027.

Unless 4G is switched off.

That's gas: CO2 found on Europa surface may hint at some possible sign of life

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Next year JUICE and then CLIPPER will hopefully launch on schedule and so at the end of the decade the real exciting stuff will start to happen.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

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Re: Moving House

The thing about CDs is, you pay for them once on their storage media. You don't keep paying for them forever.

I own on CD probably about 98% of the music I'll ever want to listen to. I paid for it already, I don't want to have to pay for it again. Much of it came on very cheap used CDs.

It's all ripped and available wherever I need it.

I realise my way is not making more money for the artist and even more money for the music corporates.

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BMW always offered the heated seats as a choice of a £350 one time forever payment rather than monthly, so this would have been exactly the same as choosing it from the options list. I guess very few took the monthly choice. Three years would have been a one time payment of £250, so £7 added to the monthly PCP payment which was probably at least £600 per month. Taking the £350 option would add about a tenner. I'm not sure if people are concerned about the odd £100 or £3 per month when speccing up a new BMW for £40k or more.

I guess it's just the idea of the never never. I actively avoid subscription, ongoing monthly wherever I can because I don't like the idea of my money being spent before I earn it. But it will be seen as normal for youngsters.

Airbus takes its long, thin, plane on a ten-day test campaign

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Re: "leaving airlines to decide if they want to cram passengers in"

NYC is an excellent place if you like big cities with a buzz about them. I used to go for weekends, loved it.

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Re: in a 3-3 economy class configuration.

It's almost as if no-one's noticed the average size of a human these days

Oh the people configuring cabin layouts know exactly how to keep people just uncomfortable enough to persuade them that paying for business class becomes more acceptable.

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Re: in a 3-3 economy class configuration.

I did this frequently on some NorthWest Airlines flights back from Boston to London years ago. DC-10 in those days. Loads of people do it.

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Re: in a 3-3 economy class configuration.

I think Ryanair brought back assigned seating because it makes it easier to split people 50/50 between the two sets of stairs.

Ryanair brought back assigned seating so they could separate families and people who were travelling together, they could then charge them money to choose seats.

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

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Because they believe that the hundreds of thousands of dollars they cost in aggregated time is worth it.

Connect to the meeting, put it in the background, get on with some real work.

Lightning struck: Apple switches to USB-C for iPhone 15 lineup

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Re: More discarded cables

The most common problem with lightning is lint-in-the-hole. I don't know if USB-C has that problem.

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I will be very interested in buying an iPhone 15 for myself.......in about 4 to 5 years time.

Those people upgrading to 13/14/15 now would probably be interested in 5G.

Microsoft's Surface Duo phone hangs up, drops out of support

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Re: A Pity

Palm Pre / WebOS was also quite useful.

And the Meego stuff that developed into Sailfish - which is still holding its own in its small niche is very good.