Fastest Pi on Earth?

I came across this on Ars Technica UK yesterday.

Look at the last image or, if you’re on NetSurf, the bottom image (shame about the black legend bar).

Ha! Would you get into a supersonic car with an MS computer controlling the telemetry?

I hope the driver has Ctrl-Alt-Del mapped to a button on his steering wheel…

Its nice to see the Pi being used but a shame that there is no mention of it in the text – its made out that MS have developed a custom piece of hardware but all they have done is bolted together existing stuff.

Why do I feel wary about Azure…is it just my personal prejudice…?

And don’t get me started on clouds. I think some of the most infuriatingly stupid conversations/statements I’ve heard recently all involved something being “in the cloud”. Almost as bad as having a meeting and when an off-topic discussion arises someone would pipe up “lets take this offline” (meaning talk about it later…but all I wanted to do was take them offline).

People use it as a byword for data just floating around and as a way of passing responsibility for personal/company security. Its not “in a cloud” it is in a data center. Who knows where that data center might be (probably one copy just outside the M25 and another copy in Asia somewhere). Importantly, who owns that data center? Who owns that serer rack? Why have they built it and for what purpose?

I fear its only a matter of time before some scandalously corrupt practices come to light…then again since the companies affected are all Internet technology companies perhaps we’ll never know?

OK so I’ve had too much coffee this morning and am in a rather vexatious mood.

Apologies to the original topic – its impressive that a Pi can be used in such a way, proving yet again that its not just for hobbyists!

Now we just need to get RISC OS running on that car….

I hope the driver has Ctrl-Alt-Del mapped to a button on his steering wheel…

You may jest but in a recent TV program about Chris Hoy driving the LeMans 24Hr race, one of his fellow drivers was told over the radio to turn his computer off and back on again whilst in a race and driving at speed! I wonder what OS they were using.

The title of this thread is correct but the fastest ever Pi will be the two on the ISS 27,600 km/h

The title of this thread is correct but the fastest ever Pi will be the two on the ISS 27,600 km/h

Yes, I was careful about the wording Chris.

I’m not sure how many of you watched The IT Crowd when it was on UK television but if you did, then you know exactly what our office looks like.

My colleague and I have remarkably similar personalities to the two main protagonists as well…although my hair isn’t quite as fluffy…

But anyway – if someone comes in for support the first thing we ask is “have you tried turning it off and on again?” :—)

Can we send a Pi to the Moon or Mars yet? Maybe it would do a better job of controlling the parachute/retro-thrusters?

Ha! Would you get into a supersonic car with an MS computer controlling the telemetry?

Take your pick:

Brings new meaning to the concept of a Blue Screen of Death!

Or…

Telemetry? Well, we know MS are good at collecting that!

Its nice to see the Pi being used but a shame that there is no mention of it in the text – its made out that MS have developed a custom piece of hardware but all they have done is bolted together existing stuff.

Indeed – even the caption for the picture just says “The guts of the Azure IoT device”. :(

As an aside, I wonder what direction the car went in? It’ll be a straight course, but if it was West then technically it’ll be the slowest Pi on Earth. :p

Indeed – even the caption for the picture just says “The guts of the Azure IoT device”. :(

So basically, MS can’t make an IoT device without putting UK technology into an American¹ plastic box.

¹ It would be even more humiliating if the plastic box was non-US

Plastic box? I bet it comes from China, Indonesia or Malaysia. Unless it’s a prototype costing $1,845.

Steve – what Clive said. The box came from Taiwan. Or somewhere in that ballpark.

And don’t get me started on clouds.

Ditto. We only need clouds because even now, in 2016, devices still have difficulty talking to each other. In some cases (Apple) it is the manufacturer (Apple) being s****y to those of us who choose to use different (non-Apple) devices. In other cases, it is just broken or partially implemented support. One of my computers can only Bluetooth files one way. One of the others prompts me to confirm for every single file. The box I’m using right now doesn’t have BT at all, but thankfully the MTP support is only broken insofar as it is in Italian (!) so I can just plug the phone in to transfer files.

For documents, I can use Google Docs as most devices can access it. For pictures… would you believe I email them to myself (via a private server) as it’s often the quickest way I can get them from here to there? Remind me – what year is this?

No. I won’t use Google Drive for personal pictures. I don’t trust Google not to keep copies of “deleted” information, and I don’t trust them not to scan it for metrics (faces, recognisable objects/words, etc).

I think some of the most infuriatingly stupid conversations/statements I’ve heard recently all involved something being “in the cloud”.

Well, people, sometimes the Internet just “goes down” (not so long ago, Orange pooped out here for an entire weekend).

What’s your backup plan if everything is “in the cloud” and the cloud isn’t there?
What’s your backup plan if some fat fingered admin wipes the data “by accident”?
What’s your backup plan if it turns out that the “cloud” translates to “America” and you’ve been sending private data of Europeans to the cloud America without their explicit consent?
What’s your backup plan if your cloud provider realises that you depend on this functionality, therefore you can pay 50% more?
What’s your backup plan if Russian state sponsored hackers the NSA compromise your data and, oops, some of it gets leaked…to your competitors? (Think it won’t happen? Talk to Airbus.)

Five easy peasy questions that should be put in front of anybody extolling the virtues of The Cloud.

Sure, it is convenient. But it involves one willingly handing over what might be mission critical and commercially important information and services to a third party. A third party that doesn’t really care about your business, just that you pay.

At least if you run your own services, you ought to have a backup schedule, somebody to once in a while verify that the backups actually work, and if it all goes tits-in-the-air then your IT guys will concentrate purely on recovering your services. Security is your responsibility, as is access control.

As opposed to: can you easily collect all of your data to make backups when it is in the cloud, or it is a PITA? Does the provider maintain backups or is it a paid extra? Does anybody ever test those backups? If the service goes down, is the provider going to work hard to restore you, or a competitor that pays more? As for security? Well, if it’s hosted on the other side of the Atlantic, strike one. If it is hosted anywhere else by a company with American presence, strike two (re. DoJ vs Microsoft Ireland).

Almost as bad as having a meeting and when an off-topic discussion arises someone would pipe up “lets take this offline”

What a twat. Who actually speaks like that, asides from contestants on The Apprentice?

Importantly, who owns that data center? Who owns that serer rack? Why have they built it and for what purpose?

Not you. Not you. Kerching. In that order.

I fear its only a matter of time before some scandalously corrupt practices come to light…

WTF? Don’t you read The Register? Don’t you know the name Edward Snowden? Haven’t you been following the US Department of Justice’s attempts to strongarm Microsoft and bypass treaties with other sovereign nations?

The problem is, the world is split into four:

25% wear tinfoil on their heads. In the future, they’ll turn out as “crazy dude was right all along”.

25% try to avoid the whole thing and only use it for information of minimal importance as it’s easier than the alternatives. I’d put myself in this group as I’m not quite old and jaded enough to make a tinfoil hat.

25% either don’t understand or don’t care so will make use of the services when they look useful. The company I work for makes heavy duty use of Skype…

25% are busy posting every intimate detail of their pitiful lives to a world where only equally pitiful people are watching. These people don’t think the ‘e’ is The Internet, they think Facebook is, and that ought to be really worrying.

Why is it that we can have cloud integration on all sorts of devices, yet it is so very very hard to get these devices to just talk to each other? Without The Mothership in between. I believe this is actually by design. The Mothership wants to be in between, so it can keep an eye on what you are up to. Our legal process, and indeed our minds, simply cannot readily grasp the complex ethical questions of the wholesale widespread snooping that is taking place these days. Somewhere along the way, we stopped buying products and we became the product.

Who actually speaks like that, asides from contestants on The Apprentice?

Well I could name names from my place of work¹ but then I could just pluralise your preceding three word sentence.
I prefer “later, no-one here speaks geek”

¹ “Name names” is a figure of speech, because disciplinary hearings are pretty naff.

And don’t get me started on clouds.

Don’t get me started either! About three years ago, one of the managers at work heard all the “cloud” buzz and demanded that we look into it. Despite having our own data centre. Here we are, three years later, still doing things the same old way (although some people are using services like OneNote).

Almost as bad as having a meeting and when an off-topic discussion arises someone would pipe up “lets take this offline”.

Gah, my boss says that! Once I dared to say “we are offline” and I got a bit of a glare back.

I’d put myself in this group as I’m not quite old and jaded enough to make a tinfoil hat.

Well, the whole “tinfoil hat” thing is a conspiracy anyway; foil amplifies the signals!

Why is it that we can have cloud integration on all sorts of devices, yet it is so very very hard to get these devices to just talk to each other?

IPv6 fans will say that it’s a workaround for NAT, and that v6 will fix the problems since every device will be publicly addressable. I’m not so sure myself (and I’m not sure that my printer¹ should be publicly-addressable in the first place!)

¹ Not that I even own a networkable printer…

Not that I even own a networkable printer…

Only requires that it be connected to a print server. Connected to a Windows PeeCee running the LP print services service built in to XP and beyond that’s sorted. OK, you probably don’t have a printer.

I had began to wonder if I was alone in seeing the obvious.

As you will no doubt see from subsequent comments, you aren’t! Rick mentioned El Reg in reply to Glen – but perhaps you should give it a look too; particularly the comment threads on articles that mention ‘the cloud’.

Rest assured, you we are not alone!

Well, the whole “tinfoil hat” thing is a conspiracy anyway; foil amplifies the signals!

Citation needed. I’ve invested a lot of money in my tin foil hats, and I need to be sure if that investment was sound! ;)

El Reg? You can start here – so if like me, you couldn’t get ROOL yesterday, this is why. And there I was swearing at Orange when it turns out to be something much more dramatic… ;-)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/21/dyn_dns_ddos_explained/

WTF? Don’t you read The Register? Don’t you know the name Edward Snowden? Haven’t you been following the US Department of Justice’s attempts to strongarm Microsoft and bypass treaties with other sovereign nations?

No I don’t. Yes I have. No I haven’t.

I did read an interesting article about Microsofts practices in Romania though…but can’t remember where that was…

Generally I see the world slightly differently:

• 99% of the world doesn’t care about open software and other such freedoms
• Of that 99% the rich people only care about getting the latest fashion (be that a tweed suit, car or phone)
• The poor people generally only care about where they are going to get their next meal, or how they’re going to feed & house their family
• Of the 1% who do care, only a small amount actually voice their feelings. They do this on the web in places where most of the 99% never look.
• 1% of 7.4 billion people is still a lot of people (so no, we are not alone).
• 76.34% of all statistics are made up on the spot

I generally fall into the 1% but am starting to come to the conclusion that perhaps I shouldn’t care – as in there are more important things to care about (such as keeping my family in a house). This is why I can live with the fact that I generally work for companies producing closed software and generally work on closed software to produce it! (the last 8 months have been great because I’ve actually been able to work on Linux…but then the company is pretty much bankrupt…so what does that tell you?)

I spent a long time agonising over which phone I should use, should I have a google account or an apple account? Should I try to get some other phone? I even tried to get a Jolla phone but that never took off. In the end someone gave me a Samsung so I set up a google account. So google have my data. I don’t particularly like this but realistically have no choice – I have to be able to be contacted (for various personal and professional reasons) so I have to have a phone. Whichever manufacturers phone I choose, they’re going to be collecting data on me, so its not so much “a rock and a hard place” as “a rock, another rock, another rock….”

So generally I just use the phone (when required to by society), the Windows computer (when required to by others), the macOS computer (when required to by others) and whatever else may be collecting data about me and shrug my shoulders and move on to other things in life. Very occasionally I get to use my own laptop which is a recycled one from 2004 and runs OpenBSD beautifully, or even more rarely I get to play around with a Pi and RISC OS. I cherish these moments as moments of privacy and solitary contemplation as much as actually using these devices to do something productive.

Sometimes the “old me” gets through and I have a rant about things (sometimes on fora, sometimes to my brother who is the only like-minded person I have ever met face-to-face!).

Right! That was cathartic – thanks for reading!

I’m off to check out The Register now…

99% of the world doesn’t care about open software and other such freedoms

99% of people doesn’t KNOW about.
When I inform people of differences between Office and LibreOffice, they tend to move fast to LO.

Sadly I haven’t had such a great success rate – generally I get scorn poured on me for being a “weird Linux user”

Since I started working “in the field” of computing (my previous career involved doing unspeakable things to atoms in a lab) I have worked for one company who flatly refused to allow me to have anything using Linux (so I did all my work in MinGW). They were “proud to be a Microsoft company” which I always found quite amusing. Another company who allowed me to develop on a Linux machine (partly because I just brought one in from home and did it and partly because nobody knew how to program embedded Linux), however, whenever anything went wrong it was generally my fault and generally because I wasn’t using Windows. My boss insisted that I write everything using Microsoft Word but he was a twat so I refused and then resigned shortly after that. Next came to a company that allowed me to install a Debian server and actually bought me a Linux laptop for development work (I went with a Dell XPS but really should have gone for a ThinkPenguin machine…) but again if I faced any kind of problem with the code it was dismissed as “yeah but your using Linux” implying that using Windows would somehow make it all better (never mind the fact that the code is embedded C running on an ARM microprocessor!).

Now I’m on to another company which develops software exclusively for Windows and seems to use Microsoft products almost entirely. Got a mortgage though so not a great amount of choice!

I think in all that time the only person who has listened to me about Linux was a PhD student who was doing some complex calculations for a new neutron detector and eventually tried Linux. The next day he came in to work as was incredibly excited because “Linux is amazingly fast!” – possibly because his computer had just magically recovered half of the RAM that Windows was hogging for no good reason…

Linux is a different thing. People tend to be pragmatic. That’s why they choose Windows (it’s in the box, so why changing?).
The same way they use Android for mobile (Open Source)… and LO for productivity, when they know it exists :)

Yup. I don’t use Linux because I don’t have the patience to get to grips with it, but getting LibreOffice to work – originally on Windows, now on MacOS – was no trouble at all.

I also use The GIMP in preference to Photoshop – I used to use Photoshop Elements, which came bundled with a camera I had (until it died), but I much prefer The GIMP now.

But Linux? I’d need a guru at my elbow, and I don’t have one handy most of the time. He’s left home.

I’d need a guru at my elbow

PDF guru

VirtualBox nicely on a decent Mac.

Less prevaricating, that man!

But what for, David? I’m quite happy with my Mac, with the Pi alongside. !Draw, !StrongEd & various homespun apps on the Pi; Firefox, LibreOffice, XnView, Filezilla, Atom & The GIMP on the Mac…what else do I want?

But what for, David?

I am quite happy with my Macs also, but I do like to see what else is out there. Following the demise of a Windows laptop, this iMac now has Windows 10 installed. It’s all good fun.

I have a Windoze 10 laptop. I don’t use it much. In fact at the moment the only thing I use it for is Microsoft ICE, but the fact that it’s a laptop means that I’ll use it for Firefox and LibreOffice when I need a computer on the road. If I haven’t decided to get a MacBook first.

I do like to see what else is out there.

I’m not honestly bothered what’s out there. Computers are a tool to me, nothing more. Windoze 10 is bloody annoying – in particular, its insistence on spending ages updating itself at inconvenient times, whether you like it or not.