Fastest Pi on Earth?

I must say I would be tempted to put the money toward a MacBook!

The new super-slim one does seem to be very nice…but it does depend on what you are planning on using it for really.

Although they pale in comparison to the longevity of RISC OS computers I must say that Macs do seem to last quite well. My wifes MacBook Air is from 2011 which is positively ancient in todays terms…yet still took the update to macOS quite nicely and runs better than ever.

Yeah. I was the last in the family to go Mac. Our daughter is on her second one – after twelve years with the first. Son and wife have both had them a while. I’ve had a Mac Mini now for almost a year, and love it, but I was still using a Windoze Vista laptop until recently. Got this little Medion Windows 10 machine to replace that, dirt cheap (£149 at Aldi). But it’s cheap dirt…

The Vista machine does still work, but only on mains – its battery is completely shot, and it didn’t seem worth replacing that. Useful for Migrainesoft ICE & Sqirlzmorph, nothing else. Need a battery operable laptop for travelling.

Glen:

The difference is that for most things it can update itself without having to do a full restart.

I think that’s something to do with an inability to update a DLL when that DLL is in use by something.

Regarding constant updates…as a Linux user I can safely say “hey we were there first guys!” :—)

I’m really worried that Win10 doesn’t have a “just tell me” option. I absolutely do not update anything (other than anti-virus) on schedule. Ever. I make a mental note of an update (less now, since I’m still using XP!) and then check The Register for a few days to see if anything has “blown up”. Paranoia is easier than an errant update mucking things up.

Why not? There are a zillion different flavours and I’m sure you’ll find one you like…

…and therein lies the problem. I don’t want to wade through a zillion types, I want one that looks and feels like a computer should. Like what? Like XP. Like RISC OS. Like the brown/orange version of Ubuntu. No dummy mode. No special “this is our latest thoughts on UI design”, no pared-down iOS style, just a GUI that looks and feels like a GUI to anybody who has used various types of GUI for a quarter century.

What I will say to anyone trying Linux is if my non tech-savvy mother can use it then I’m sure you can to. She went from typewriter to Windows 3.11 to 95/98 and then on to Linux and hasn’t looked back since (I also get far fewer support callouts now!). She does photo editing, email, word processing, browsing the web, watching videos – all the things that the vast majority of computer users do…

You should give your mother more credit. Mine would probably prefer a typewriter if we had one that works. She keeps her diary and recipes in books written in by pen. She can tell I’m using RISC OS because “it looks old”. I’m not sure she could tell XP from Ubuntu (unless I’m saying “bloody Ubuntu” at it). She can use iOS’s email software. She can use Safari to Google stuff, laugh at Daily Fail headlines, and order books from Amazon. She also knows to switch to Dolphin to look at Amazon France (as Safari has my login details). Watching videos? She can tap on links to watch on the browser (or auto-switch to YouTube). I don’t think she’d know how to find me Chris Rea’s “Road to Hell” if I told her she couldn’t use a browser (and then she’d want to go to Safari because it is Safari, not “browser”). She used to use WordPerfect 5.1 on a PC, and I think that has killed any desire to ever touch a word processor ever again. And as for photo editing, rotate and delete (on iOS) are about the extent of it).
That is what a techno-luddite mother looks like. :-)

which I guess is why […] tablets have a real chance at stealing users away from Microsoft and why Microsoft are panicking and doing weird things to their core product…

Obviously. There is nothing on doramax that interests me, so I just haven’t switched my PC on today. I’m writing this on RISC OS, I referred earlier to the PDFs (on the iPad), and later on if I have the time/inclination I have a film to watch… on my phone. Or I might just see if CrunchyRoll has anything worth trying out. There was one series that was like total non-stop food porn (seriously, it was twenty odd minutes of a girl eating stuff and washing it down with silly amounts of sake!).
Oh look. No PC.

What really annoys me is the smug superiority that many Windows users seem to carry around with them – or maybe I’ve just been unlucky to work with a bunch of twats up to now…?

I’ve met a few unpleasantly smug Linux advocates. So, yeah, I think both sides have people everybody else would rather just said nothing.

The idiot who was accusing me hadn’t wired up the hardware properly. Its one of his specialities.

Well, there you go. Proof of Dunning-Kruger. ;-)

But then maybe if it were all HTML5 then everything would “be in the cloud”.

Question – how many mobile apps have you encountered that just behave like wrappers for the website?

Trouble is many people don’t bother testing on other platforms,

It’s a good thing that GUIs generally hide the nuts and bolts from the user. It irritates me when ported (command line) software carries around baggage from the original platform that doesn’t hold true on the platform of the port. Some that come to mind are the ‘-’ vs ‘—’ distinction in command line options; the need to have or want or check file extensions; sticking configuration in dot-prefixed files in odd places instead of using the Choices protocol; and – worst of all – expecting some sort of horribly bastardised file specifier that uses ‘/’ as a path separator, can’t cope with <Something$Dir> prefixes, and may or may not cope with filesystem descriptors – potentially leading to messes like SDFS::$/What/The/F.ext.

DavidS:

I had an Android tablet for about two months (was a freebee), could not do anything of use with the system, and ended up throwing it out (parted it out for the few usable parts).

Shame. Android out of the box is a bit rubbish, but as long as your processor is ~1.2GHz or more and you have a decent amount of RAM…

• Install Firefox and UBlock Origin. Instantly the web gets a LOT faster.
• Adobe Reader isn’t that bad. Sucks less than the PC version. Possibly because it does less. It’s like… shock horror… a reader for PDF files!
• ES File Explorer is a nice way to manage files and also download stuff.
• MX Player, my video player of choice. There’s also a version of VLC available.
• Orange Radio gives easy access to radio streams. Surprisingly for an Orange app, it isn’t that crashy. Easier to use than some others that are only interested in shoving adverts in your face.
• Google Translate for the fun of translating stuff into your own language, with varying degrees of abject failure. Well, okay, to be fair I did use it to entirely translate the instructions of an microwave egg cooker (written in Japanese).
• TrackID, for when you hear a nice song when you’re out, and want to know what it is so you can go home and rip it from YouTube…
• VNC Viewer so you can keep an eye on your PC if it is left doing stuff.
• VX Connectbot if you need telnet. Because it might not cope with ANSI fonts, but it does manage the colours, which is more than every single free telnet/terminal app I’ve ever seen on iOS…and most of the paid-for ones too.
• YouTube Downloader, because you can watch videos without Google tracking you (the Preview option) and if you like what you see, a range of handy download options. It’ll even mux the 480p audio and video streams into a complete mp4 file. And it does a much better and quicker job than YouTubeDownloaderHD on Windows.

Android does have its uses. You just need to understand that it is mostly a device for consumption, not for creation.

The FOSS movement and zealots seem to have missed the point of Open Source free software.

I don’t think the “movement” has, as there are several OSI approved “open source” licences. However, yes, the vocal zealots seem to prefer an extremely restricted definition of what open means. Okay, yes, they want to ensure that open stays open, but on the other hand, it is a peculiarly narrow and controlling sort of open.

stuff specificaly for RISC OS tends to be good, while the FOSS stuff tends to lean toward bloat,

As was pointed out earlier, “open source” is open source. There is no difference. Maybe, one could say, the programmers that write stuff for RISC OS write better programs? I’m not sure I’d necessarily agree – I reckon you can find good and bad programs for every system on earth; lest you forget that Apache, sendmail, and some other stuff are pretty much the heart of most web servers. It sure as hell isn’t Microsoft’s IIS!

I do not know why every FOSS programmer seems to want to do things the hardest way, explain nothing,

RISC OS was riddled with software that had no instructions whatsoever. One of the reasons I tend to write instructions that reads like a mini novel is because of an extreme dislike of “what does this even do?”. Thankfully the majority of that rubbish didn’t survive the 32 bit transition. However, I do feel obliged to point out that on my system I have a package called OpenVector. It’s nice. It’s like Draw the way it should have been in the RiscPC era. It has no instructions. At least it supports interactive help and seems to have Windows-like tooltips, so I can sort of fudge my way around. But I bet there’s a load of things it can do that I have not discovered, and may never…

and produce the most convoluted UI they can dream up.

Many supposedly smart people think that the idea of a “desktop” on the screen is old fashioned and needs to be replaced. The problem is, it is a metaphor that works and nobody has any real idea of what to replace it with. Thus, a lot of developers flailing in the dark unable to see really obvious mistakes such as applying a UI that works on a tablet to a desktop machine. Although, granted, you can buy small laptops these days where you can pull off the keyboard part and use it as a tablet, so the boundary is indeed blurring.
Which is about zero use if you have a clunky box and a 21" monitor…

The authors use long command line swithces that are not easy to remember, and often do not make any since for what they do.

Ah, but ffmpeg is not a simple piece of software. Let’s just say I hand you an MKV with H.264 in it and I want you to display the English subtitles (the first one) with the Japanese audio (the second track). It was mis-muxed so you will need to tell the demuxer to build an index before playing the file. Oh, and the video is saved anamorphic, so you will need to stretch it to 16:9 aspect.
With the right sorts of clever incantations, you can do it directly from the command line. Fair enough, such things are not common – but you can if you need to.
For just playing a generic simple thing, I’d have thought just tossing the filename would have sufficed…

FWIW, I’m describing a real video file. I play it using SMPlayer as I try to avoid complicated command line stuff if possible. It is enough of a PITA to mux together video and subtitles into an MKV file (with MKVToolNix).

then the programs seem to have UI’s that require RTFM just to figgure out how to get it to start (over stated, though you know the idea)

;-) I remember the days when typing ‘x’ would likely crash your computer. Trying to configure the video was a black art, and the reason I pretty much ignored Linux until this decade is because I never managed to get slackware (the distro I got on a CD) to start up x on my older Presario. It just didn’t want to know about my video hardware. And, really, what’s the point of an OS that can’t manage to get a UI up in even basic VGA mode? My god, even Windows managed that much.
The slackware book might have told me how, but I didn’t feel too inclined to wade through the waffle as the first chapter started by telling you how to build your own kernel. As opposed to, oh, let’s go out on a limb and try “how do I use this thing?”!
Back then, Linux really wasn’t prime time. It’s a different story these days.

The worste of it is that FOSS authors are using 100’s of libraries to get everything done,

That’s quite common these days. Everything is an interacting pile of frameworks.

often times for things that would take way less work for them to do without the libraries.

Way less work in processor terms, but way more work in programmer terms.

Let me give you an example. There is a file on my website. I want it. Not only that, but I want it to be fetched, saved someplace, and a result code returned so I know it works and that it didn’t go and 404 on me.
But, wait, I’ve not finished yet. The file might be redirected. I expect this to be sensibly handled.
And the final thing? Please be nice to the tin foil hats and fetch it using HTTPS. Thanks.

I can probably find one call in something like Android or a framework in Linux that is capable of doing all of that.
Can you point me to a SWI or, hell, a command line program even, that can do that for RISC OS? I could write one for HTTP in a few evenings if I had to, but all bets are off when it comes to SSL.

Sometimes all those libraries are useful. They let people get stuff done without worrying about the nuts and bolts over and over and over.

I have a house phone, I may even answer it if I know the phone number on te caller ID.

Ditto.

I do not have voice mail, I do not have an answering machine.

I have both, sort of. It’s a service provided by the telco. It’s free, so…

I have always used the Radio to talk to whome I need to when not home,

What, like CB or something? In the UK and in France (probably Germany too), regulations are pretty damn tight regarding radio transmissions. The reason I never got into amateur radio was partly the cost, and partly because a morse test was mandatory and I was hopeless at learning it.
So I did CB for a while, and sidelined with a nighttime station playing old records (like 78s and stuff I could pick up dirt cheap) on 107.5 on the FM dial. ;-)

I have been using RISC OS before HTTP was added to the internet,

I’ve been using RISC OS since before Windows.
[not strictly true, but you’d be hard pushed to find somebody who has ever actually used Windows 1.0, 2.0, or 2.1; most people (old enough to remember) associate the birth of Windows with Windows 3.xx]

I have never understood the way that programs for other systems tend to be mega packages where a single application attempts to provide the functionality that belongs to a number of small applications.

It depends upon where you draw the line. In a horrible pun, consider !Trace and !Draw. Would it not be feasible for a package that dealt with vector graphics to have an “import” mode where it could try to generate a vector image from a bitmap image?
Some might say, yes, that could be useful. Others would say “bloat!”.
In the end, it is probably marketing that thinks they can sell it as a “pro-quality feature” (or whatever rubbish they come up with).

Done such that working with a document acrossed multiple applications is more effecient than attempting to use one of these MegaApps on other systems.

Yes, it is amazing how abysmal such a thing is on Windows. There was “OLE”, but that was restricted to certain things in certain ways in certain apps. Certainly no uniform sort of drag and drop exists, not in the RISC OS sense.
Just in case the forum eats this post, I have dropped a copy of the text into Zap. Granted, it is simpler in Windows (^A^C here, ^V there), but the point still stands that stuff can be pushed all over the place using drag’n’drop. I wonder if people from other platforms truly appreciate how prevalent this is in RISC OS?

Though I am sure that someone somewhere is working on a solution for RISC OS, so it is temperary situatioon.

I very much doubt it. Access to the GPU is usually via a binary blob (not open) which is spoken to by dozens of libraries. The end result? AKB48 bouncing around the screen.
While on RISC OS, a regular Pi can just about manage a 320×240 DivX in single-tasking mode, as doing it all in pure software is a hell of a lot harder than pushing the difficult bits to the GPU.

DavidF:

No. The result is LESS bugs.

No, the result is likely about the same number of bugs. The likes of Heartbleed should have brought home the reality that the “thousand eyes” utopia is only valid if there are indeed a thousand eyes looking over the code. There aren’t.

And, for what it is worth, I have actually found Ubuntu to be, well, buggy. Putting menus in windows (instead of along the top) doesn’t work. It can’t make a sound on my PC’s speaker (only via headphones). And Brasero is crap. And that’s the second time I tried it. The first time? I got it to kernel panic. Just by asking it to collect some information on itself and show me the results in a browser.
This isn’t some ancient version, either. It’s one with Unity, so fairly modern.

Oh, and there’s something weird with setting up the partitions during installation, where it says it won’t do something then goes and does it anyway, but I don’t recall as I only installed it twice (once alongside an old XP, and then later as I decided just to toast XP on that drive and use it all for Linux).

Try to make some calculation under it, and you’ll see that Linux is MUCH faster (it uses all cores, uses VFP, has better use of resources, better filesystem, etc.).

Indeed. This is something I used to point out when comparing my RiscPC with Windows. Because RISC OS is likeweight, the UI on a 40MHz processor is a lot more fluid than x86 clocking ten times faster. However it’s a different story when you come to stuff that needs grunt behind it. An ARM7 more or less can’t play MP3s, for instance.
And for everybody who has unpacked the RISC OS source archive, you’ll know how long that takes. What did I clock 7zip doing it at? Something in the order of twenty seconds? :-)
However, for RISC OS I am writing this in NetSurf. I write software in Zap. I write documents in OvationPro. Writing, writing. This means that most of the time the machine is just burning cycles waiting for me to do something. It’s a good thing the machine is incapable of frustration, as I reckon it probably burns though an easy million instructions between every keypress (no matter how fast I type, it is like a whale compared to a mosquito).

We use RISC OS because we want too.

Yup.
That’s about it.

It’s a good thing that GUIs generally hide the nuts and bolts from the user.

Sometimes.
However, there are times where it’s an invitation for the user to demonstrate how dopey they can be.
e.g There is a simple batch file added to a PC that sits in the same directory as an XML file. open a command prompt change to the directory and run the batch file, if it fails you see the error.
Alternately your user GUI navigates to a browsed view of the batch file and clicks away and any error flickers in the briefly displayed command window and is gone.

Fine with an average user. Not so fine when the “user” is actually one of the desktop support guys.¹ The first time it’s a revelation of the lack of knowledge of the command line, the second and third are less so. The third or fourth year of repetition is where the irritation has worn off again.

And for everybody who has unpacked the RISC OS source archive, you’ll know how long that takes. What did I clock 7zip doing it at? Something in the order of twenty seconds? :-)

I wonder if the recent changes Jeffrey has made have affected the speeds of those processes?

¹ Out of interest are anally inserted cattle prods triggered by mouse use of a batch file considered legal training tools/methods?

I dispise the waste that is CB, as it is useless and gives radio a bad name.

What’s your definition of CB? I know some people that use it aren’t the sharpest crayon in the cupboard, but it is pretty indispensible under certain circumstances.
I’ve spent the last week in tiny increments re-fitting the UHF CB in my car. I had to replace the cable and connector, put a new hole and grommet in the firewall, and fit a bracket for the roof along with the soldering etc. For some reason it’s still a little hard of hearing but it transmits fine.
Where I live mobile coverage is patchy at best, and it pays to have a CB radio especially where vehicles are concerned. Highway on 40 and caravans on 18. Plus there’s irrigation equipment etc. which operates via the telemetry channels.
It’s also the only option keeping track of people in other vehicles when travelling as a group. When someone doesn’t have their radio it can be a nightmare. Trust me. Not a fun day.

You may not like it, but I’ve been wanting to get my radio license so I can run a higher gain setup. I hate talking much, especially when it is being broadcast. But it’s a safety thing, and I certainly don’t have the budget for a satphone.

So what am I missing that makes Linux better for large amounts of calculation/processing than RISC OS?

In theory probably nothing. In practicality probably because of the CPUs that can run Linux.

Why do you think there would be a difference in calculation speed between Linux and RISC OS using the same HW?

I take it you missed the part in my post where I was actually comparing the “feels faster” RiscPC to a “feels slower” PC. I wasn’t comparing like with like.
However, you have pretty much answered your own question. No, RISC OS does not support multiple cores. Doing it yourself does not count – that’s not RISC OS.

As such the only big difference I can see is that RISC OS is less likely to inturupt your code

That’s very true, there’s a lot less running in the background of RISC OS than a Linux machine. But, still… n cores versus one core. Only really works if ‘n’ = 1.

Not to mention that there is a lot less overhead in calling the WIMP than there is in calling a toolkit that calls XLib or XCB that in turn calls X.

I think this depends upon what the program is trying to do. I would imagine a lot of calculation heavy programs probably don’t increase their GUI behaviour by much. In fact, they might prefer to pop up an hourglass and deal with the UI less. Which means library vs SWI speed – unlikely to be a big factor.

unless you need a compositing window manager for some weard reason, though that is rare even on Linux

xfwm supports it. MacOS does it. Windows (Vista and later) does it… It isn’t so weird, given it allows not only lots of eye candy (Windows Aero), but also finally a semi-sensible behaviour for zombie tasks that won’t redraw their windows.

In theory probably nothing. In practicality probably because of the CPUs that can run Linux.

And the fact that all of this is only true for pure optimised ASM.
When you’ll go to C, GCC is more modern and optimised than DDE.
When you’ll need to use files, ADFS will be far behind EXT4.
When you’ll need graphic acceleration, RISC OS will be simply nowhere.
Etc.

We do the best with little workforce and not so good tools.
They do better with more people and much better tools and libs.

But tools is not a product.
Wimp is light, GNOME is bloat. True.
Graphics in Linux framebuffer will be faster than graphics on RISC OS. True too.

It isn’t so weird

But it limits (memory limit) the maximum number of Windows.

Not a good thing for RISC OS. With some Basic operations (Sprite to PNG) I can drag files between 3 to 4 tools (Paint to remove transparency, ChangeFSI to go to square more, Paint to put transparency again, tool to convert to PNG – Of course, a better tool will make all in one operation).

Under Windows, I have only two application launched at one time: Firefox, LibreOffice.
Under RISC OS, I have many windows and applications opened. Different strategy.

DavidS: I’m in Australia. Generally nuisance CB users are frowned upon. The real offenders are tracked down by the authorities.
I’m one of the statistically insignificant people living in rural Australia. I could rant for ages about inequality, infrastructure etc. but I won’t. CB radio is necessary for communications where the infrastructure is lacking.
I really miss AM. It was phased out a decade or so. It had way better range, especially in non line of sight circumstances. But everybody is on UHF now. I’ve got an old Electrophone 40 channel in my vehicle, and a handheld I have programmed as an 80ch UHF CB. Depending on where I have to go, our vehicles can have anything up to a large list of things on board.
It’s not uncommon for me to travel with a full tool kit, spare hoses, fuel, water, soap, toilet paper, compressor, jack, at least one GPS blah blah. It pays to be safe because getting stuck can be A Bad Thing.

The rest of the discussion. MIPS is MIPS. Only slightly related but I discovered I can really upset the OS pummeling GPIO with short delays in between reads / writes using a TaskWindow. Sometimes it would hang up for a second plus. So I guess calculation speed also is governed by what it is doing and whether it can cause issues with the host OS.

I am KD0TPC

You’re the Wichita lineman and I claim my $5. :-)

I was GM7CTF – long since lapsed.

Do not know what you are talking about

Rick is making reference to a UK press phenomenon described in this article and concatenating it with a well-known song title from the late Jimmy Webb first recorded by Glen Campbell (1968).

He has thoughtfully changed the currency from sterling to US dollars to internationalise his quip to have it more widely appreciated.

The format is widely recognised in the UK, and Jim Webb songs are also very popular.

QV any references to cake and rain!

concatenating it with a well-known song title

Because Wichita is where KD0TPC is supposed to be based. ;-)

Amazing what you learn reading this forum !

I understood the reference to claiming five pounds as I’m a Private Eye reader. However I was not aware of Lobby Lud (or his mates). Nor was I aware that the back catalogue of Private Eye covers are on the ’net back to the sixties :-)

Live and learn…

Ralph

Because Wichita is where KD0TPC is supposed to be based. ;-)

Rick – I under-estimate you constantly!

Saluté!