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Microsoft Announces Windows For Raspberry Pi 2
jones_supa writes Microsoft is expanding their Windows Developer Program for Internet of Things by delivering a version of Windows 10 that runs on the Raspberry Pi 2. This release of Windows 10 will be free for the maker community through the Windows Developer Program for IoT. With an official partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Microsoft is bringing development tools, services and ecosystem to the Raspberry Pi community. More details will be shared in the coming months. You can already join the program and be amongst the first to receive product information and beta software releases.
No thank you. I remember what happened last time you joined a community.
...it's still two months to April Fool's day...
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
I've been running internet-connected Windows desktop for 20 years, and have never gotten a virus. Surf smart, lock your door, and don't click on the damn .scr files.
They say it's free to the maker community, but what if you want to turn your creation into a commercial product? Especially for IoT devices it makes little sense to use an OS not known for its reliability, and encumbered by a non-free license. I see no reason not to use proven and free Linux instead.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
How can Microsoft justify Windows 10 on a less powerful device like Raspberry Pi 2 and not support on the Surface RT?
Seems pretty stupid to me to purposely screw over the people that bought the RT models that are perfectly capable.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Just as soon as everyone recompiles there virus code to run on ARM....
Actually Windows 10 does not suck. While I prefer Linux and OS/X but Windows is not as terrible as it once was. Now Windows Users.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The r-pi has an accelerated desktop now, thank goodness. It was all software on a dumb frame buffer at launch, but those days are far behind us.
Who knows, maybe Wayland support will come soon, we can hope.
a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/preview-the-upcoming-maynard-desktop/">http://www.raspberrypi.org/preview-the-upcoming-maynard-desktop/
How stupid is this?
How stupid? Not at all. The Raspberry Pi is introducing people to Linux incidentally. People who have become accustomed to Linux on Pi are more likely to use it on their main PCs. Microsoft knows that Windows on Pi -- even if its performance is abysmal -- could quickly become the newbies' first choice thanks only to familiarity. The "gateway drug" for Linux defectors is thus protected against. (They did this with netbooks too, remember?)
For the RPi Foundation it makes a lot of sense, as Linux advocacy was never their goal -- they want to get more computing into schools, and one of the chief objections to the RPi is the fact that it doesn't run "industry-standard software"... i.e. Windows. Of course, once schools start realising that the version of Windows can't do everything they expect, they'll conclude that the Raspberry Pi isn't a real computer and stop using it. (They did this with netbooks too, remember?)
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
So you build you IoT based around Windows...just how long do you think it'll stay free?
So you build your next home gadget around Windows...and it's an amazing success...and now you decide to Kickstart it...and Windows is only free to you as a developer...so just how much extra are you going to have to charge to have Windows on the final version?
Malware on IoT...um...not good. I'll leave it to your imagination.
*HOW MUCH* RAM and flash memory space does this behemoth take?
Nah..."Just Say No".
-- Steve
I see a lot of negative comments so far (actually they are all negative). You have a good reason to not want Windows on a Pi? Then don't put Windows on a Pi and you can live in peace and happiness. Personally, I think this is very cool, and although Microsoft may have some hidden agenda to take over the world by releasing a version of Windows 10 for the Pi, I still think this is a positive thing in general. It also further legitimizes the non- X86 / PC / tablet / cellphone niche kind of single board general purpose computer, that obviously a lot of non-mainstream users are very interested in.
Better known as 318230.
Everyone is part of the maker community. They are saying 1 in 5 developers are working on an IoT project and the definition of developer has become so loose that you are probably already a developer. If you aren't comfortable with calling yourself a developer, call yourself an engineer. Anyone can be an engineer too. If you are unsure if you quality, see if any of the following apply to you.
If you answered yes to these questions you are probably already eligible to be part of the illustrious maker community and may well be eligible to be part of whatever the next Web 3.5 community that comes up. The folks at Microsoft look forward to satisfying your development needs, which will likely involve using your Raspberry Pi 2 as a companion in a drawer to your PS/2 to USB adapter, VGA cables, two button laser mice that may or may not work, and other remnants of IT past.
It's a shame the first few posts are complaints about virus's or other nonsense. Microsoft has had Windows 8.1 for IoT for a little while now and they have a great growing community of developers and devices that Windows runs on. It's pretty amazing that Windows can run on these devices. Raspberry Pi running Windows 10 with Plex should be a fun experiment if Plex makes a port and it will be exciting to see Visual Studio updated to have the Pi as supported device.
I've been thinking about picking up a Raspberry Pi just to mess around with. Part of the appeal is running a very small, cheap, and open platform that I can tinker with as much as I want. Windows doesn't necessarily fit into that paradigm, and I think that will be true of a lot of other people. I have nothing against windows and have spent most of my career in that space, but I'd also like to spend more time in the Linux world. Why? Just because. That said, adding windows to the options for the RP may prove useful for people who aren't looking to experiment, but want a small utilitarian processor for various tasks and don't want to take the time to get familiar with Linux, etc. Again, it's not like someone has put a gun to your head and told you you had to use Windows on it.
Low power it may be, but with the newer quad core Acorn Risc Machine v7 processor @ 900MHz and a Micro SD Card with a Class 10 speed 128 Gb capacity, it's just like working a normal, but slow, tower PC with a proper keyboard and a proper mouse. As it is designed to teach British school children to write computer software, it will automatically sell Millions of units in it's home market. Just have one micro SD card per operating system!
The purpose of existence is to make money.
I would not want Windows on a Raspberry unless they paid me to install it.
The Raspberry Pi has grown up!
Grown up, come of age... and turning cheap tricks on the corner...
Yikh... I thought you were raised better than that.
Loads of schools have bought and are buying iPads without much of an idea of what they're going to use them for, let alone a coherent educational plan. The end result? Expensive, distracting toys that have little, if any, demonstrable effects on learning outcomes in K-12 education. Then there's stories like this: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01... Developmental psychologists are less than enamoured of shiny, techy internet gadgets in classrooms and children's pockets.
Kind of. I taught at a school that issued MacBooks for lab sections (the loans began and ended with the lab period).
The MacBooks in question were running Windows.
The parent poster had already made the point I was going to make, by the way, that Windows, by and large is a "safer" choice for many, many people.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
The netbook thing was an "Embrace, extend extinguish" kind of deal. It ruined the market.
"You may install and test one copy of the software on your premises."
So that would be Internet of Thing then?
Indeded. RIP R Pi. 2012 - 2015.
No harm in taking a look.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
It's things on the internet.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The RPi2 is completely compatible with RPi, but the RPi 1 is not completely compatible with the RPi2.
Indeed - they only made $5.2 billion in profit in 2013. Looks like roughly the same in 2014. Utterly laughable.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
So will Windows 10 have APIs for stuff such as GPIOs, SPI and I2C, along with pin muxing?
Will everything be possible without having to connect a monitor, keyboard and mouse?
It's backwards compatible, but not necessarily forward compatible. The RPi1 and RPi2 don't use the same instruction set, moving from ARMv6 to ARMv7, and adding the NEON instruction set extensions.
The one thing I wonder about is how many Windows users that are serious enough computer users to try to look outside the box enough to consider an RPi wouldn't already shrug and say "well, why not Linux?"
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for making any tinkering experience as tailorable and accessible as possible, but I'm not sure that Windows on an RPi is the way to bring Windows users over. Most people don't want another device to do a thing unless they already know that the extra thing in question will (per the marketing) do exactly what they want it to do in the first place. So, I presume a Windows user will probably look for ways to do a task using the equipment they already have.
I'm not trying to knock Windows users, mind you. It's the fact that Windows is ubiquitous in the market that might lead a hardcore Windows user to try and find ways to ask "can't my Windows box do that anyway?" instead of trying to DIY a solution that might take more time and effort than they're willing to expend.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
No thank you. I remember what happened last time you joined a community.
OLPC was based on the notion that you could have a school without teachers. Even in the first world, the value of laptops in the grade school classroom remains unproven.
People are getting all excited about this, but they are forgetting that this is *not* going to be a full featured Windows able to run their Office and what not. First of all, it is an ARM architecture, so regular Windows apps won't work unless they have an ARM version (extremely rare). The OS is most likely going to be the cut-down WindowsRT and running on an underpowered hardware - the new Raspberry Pi 2 is still much slower and has less RAM than even the first Microsoft Surface RT, which wasn't exactly known to be a speed demon ...
Microsoft is pushing this as "Internet-of-Things" platform, but I honestly don't see how WindowsRT presents any advantages there over a dedicated OS without the unneeded GUI bloat. And for education? Yes, there will be perhaps Office RT and few Microsoft's apps available, but that's all. What are the kids going to run on this? Visual Studio?
If open was their goal, why did they go with components which require closed source drivers and firmware?
From what I can see, Raspberry Pi's goal was to be this generations BBC Micro, nothing else. Something that is cheap to hack on - Linux was free from a license cost perspective, so that's what got used. The non-open components were cheap from a cost perspective, so thats what got used.
This sure sounds like an April Fool's day joke.
Sure, open is the policy. That must be why they used proprietory hardware mpeg decoding for which you need to buy a separate license.
iPads are just tools. They aren't magic. I've seen some interesting and innovative uses of iPads in education, particularly with kids with special needs. First though you have to have people who know how to use these tools and implement them into an overall educational program. Buying a bunch of anything without a plan makes no sense. This is what's special about the Rpi. They are primarily into teaching and building a community around this educational system. The maker aspect of the Rpi is just a big plus that helps build the community.
Just another data point in Microsoft's slide into being the company of "ME TOO!" When was the last time they actually innovated?
As for running Windows on your IoT device, all I can say is LOL.
Do you have ESP?
There won't be much to do on/with Windows for the Pi 2, the only thing people will be porting to it is the same open source software that's on Linux for the Pi, buy why take all the work to do that and accomplish basically the same thing that's already possible with Linux? Practice for developers I guess, but I don't see what new opportunities having Windows on the Pi will do, it's not like that will bring along the Windows software ecosysytem. It will be the same ecosystem we already have on Linux, except piece by piece and not everything will be there for a while. It will be easier and faster to get up and running with Linux on the Pi. Will Windows even be able to catch up in this niche that's already so well served?
Twinstiq, game news
The extinguishing came at the hands of the iPad and Android tablets though. Microsoft didn't get any piece of that, and in fact lost ground.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Plus, Microsoft forces you to give up all kinds of personal information when you register, as they probably require of you.
It is. It's interesting watching Microsoft thrash around and try to cope with things like this. The Raspberry Pi is the exact antithesis of what Microsoft stands for. Right now Windows Embedded 7 licenses are selling for right around $100 a pop. This entire system costs $35. The margins (if anyone were to try to make an industrial device out of this thing) aren't anywhere near what could make it worth their while, and all because that word "embedded" means something new now.
And yet, they have to try. This gizmo is seriously widening the Linux base, and they gotta do something. You know they're panicked. "You can already join the program and be amongst the first to receive product information and beta software releases." They don't even have a beta available yet, and they're already trying to get market share.
And just imagine how good those tools are going to be when you do get them. They'll be done in a huge hurry because this is a market driven decision. They know they have to get *something* out there super quick because they're losing market share. And the worst part is that they are trying to appeal to the engineer/programmer audience, and we're a pretty discerning audience. It has to be fast because this thing is launching, but it also has to be good because of the audience they are trying to target. And Microsoft is pretty notorious for releasing software when it isn't ready (Vista for example) simply to meet a release date. My guess is that these betas are going to be absolute crap released to make some bean counter's Gantt chart happy, and they'll fall back on the "but it's in beta" excuse when they crash and burn. Microsoft loves having the community do it's QA for them. It'll be a bumpy ride.
And I can't wait to see what bizarre arrangement they try to do when they try to monetize this Windows 10 release for a $35 computer. Because they will. The EULA for this thing is going to be a dadaist work of art.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The extinguishing came at the hands of the iPad and Android tablets though. Microsoft didn't get any piece of that, and in fact lost ground.
No - the death of netbooks was the rapid decline in price in full-featured notebooks. Same as the decline in desktops has been fueled by the rise of DTRs - cheap (and some not-so-cheap) laptops serving as desktop replacements.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Why is this modded 'Funny?' This is still good advice.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
If open was their goal, why did they go with components which require closed source drivers and firmware?
Not only this, but components that are not available in quantities of less than tens of thousands of units. The last attempt to make a genuine Raspberry Pi clone collapsed when they ran out of their "sample" batch of Broadcom SoCs and Broadcom refused to sell to them in the sort of quantities that they could have hoped to sell.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
But that's neither a rational or logical objection. It's a biased objection born of ignorance.
I agree, but we have to function in the world we live in, and selling to the ignorant is easier than educating the whole world.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
My PI 1 is nice as a mini server. I have with apache/mysql etc running good for collecting data from PLC. However, I have never been happy with the GUI's on offer. Maybe Windows will offer a semi-decent GUI as opposed to the half-baked Linux GUIs that are capable of running on a PI.
What do you mean anti-freedom? Unless you know c/c++ programming you can't really do much with the Linux Distros either. You are stuck with whatever ubuntu, mint, fedora, opensuse, arch gives you. Open Source is for and by geeks and they are always hostile towards the average joe. Rather pay $$$ for the backward software compatibility, stability, and the A+ software availability then mess around with the buggy linux.
I suspect "free for the maker community" translates as "free for personal use but if you use this in a product you are going to have to pay". How much you have to pay will probablly depend on the details of the product.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
You're doing it wrong. I never had any perfomance issues when I used to use Atom netbooks. You need to tweak the OS a bit to get usable performance. Oh and Windows 8 is alot faster than 7, so it's better to install that and add classic start to get the start menu back as well as disable the completely unneccesary visual affects. Windows XP perforrms good on netbooks, probably better than anything else, but due to security issues that is no longer an option. Not everyone can affor modern hardware, especially in poorer countries, but people want to be able to run a modern OS. The best option to get the balance is to have sofware that is efficient and cant take advantage of different hardware types.
My wife is a teacher and she uses an "interactive board" and it really helps. She can prepare stuff in advance (do that with a chalkboard) move stuff around the board (do that with a chalkboard) show Wikipedia, youtube, anything in just an alt-tab (do that with a chalkboard). When she brings a student to the board do do something, she can them replay it (...)
Well, you get the point. An interactive board is much more than a chalkboard on steroids.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
What the hell are you talking about?
The first Atom was very adequate, performance over that of a Pentium III 1GHz was useful (and still is), netbooks were a success because they were real computers (with XP or real linux) as long as you had one with a hard drive, not 4GB flash.
Also not sure what a 3rd gen Celeron is, but a Celeron 1.3GHz based on Pentium III Tualatin has a Passmark of 288 not 5000.
Ever heard of the Khan academy ? It's entirely the opposite of a remediation tool. You're probably a teacher that feels your job is threathened by tools like the Khan academy. We must strive for excellence in education for kids of all economical and cultural levels, otherwise China and South Korea will take over the world (they don't kid about education).
It's the internet w/ more than just computing devices (laptops/phones/tablets). You can now have cars, home security systems, and a whole genre of non computing electronic devices on the internet of things.
They may have little mindshare in one segment - namely phones. That doesn't imply that they have little mindshare in other segments - namely PCs. Regardless of how popular smartphones & tablets may be, corporate environments still need PCs/laptops, and there, neither Apple nor Google have taken over. So since Microsoft owns that, they are fixing their Windows 8.x issues, as well as looking at expanding beyond that market.
And what component was it that you modified to make javascript process faster and .NET framework patches install faster? You're wrong.
It's the internet w/ more than just computing devices (laptops/phones/tablets). You can now have cars, home security systems, and a whole genre of non computing electronic devices on the internet of things.
And what do each of those things have inside them that connects to the Internet? That's right, a computer.
The decline in price of full laptops, combined with the increasing price of netbooks (more powerful hardware because windows needed it)...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The "extinguish" part came about when people realized that netbooks were essentially useless unless for any sort of work, and would have happened soon whether MS got involved in the market or not.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
so will it come with a free copy of visual studio hosted on ARM - or does it need to be programmed in powershell, python or java (or .bat I suppose !). Or do we need to cross-compile from a windows x86 machine ?
Nullius in verba
Up to now, the platform was just too... open!
It was actually pretty good until the most recent build where they replaced the fusion start menu with the metro based shrunken start screen abomination.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Oh shit you are right!
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Windows on Raspberry Pi will have even less app support than Windows Phone or Windows RT.
Plenty of Linux apps available that will run just find on the Raspberry Pi with a recompile or the right build options passed to configure.
What interactive board does she use? Pros / cons?
Stephen D. Williams
Lots of embedded projects are done on Raspberry Pi. If Windows does not run on the Pi, the company who decides to do a Pi based project will decide to develop under Linux. If Windows is available on the Pi and they have Windows developers available, they might decide to do the project with Windows. Also, its less expensive to hire Windows developers than Linux developers right now. Microsoft likes selling embedded windows because its a great way for them to sell lots of Windows licenses.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
The RPI2 has 1GB of ram, and this isn't going to be running explorer, it's basically Windows CE 10.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
even if its performance is abysmal
Why would its performance be abysmal? The Raspberry Pi 2 has 1GB of RAM, the base memory footprint for Windows 8 is ~280mb which is about 60% of what Windows 7 uses, not sure what Windows 10 uses but I'm assuming it's going to be much the same. More to the point one of the biggest memory hogs from a lowend perspective is often the graphics driver, and Pi 2 doesn't have a heavyweight GPU so that shouldn't be a problem.
Because Eben Upton and most of the Raspberry Pi Foundation are Broadcom employees. The primary goal was to build something educational and to build it cheaply enough to be affordable around the world. Since they could work on acquiring the parts from inside the company, Broadcom made sense as a vendor to support their goal. They got cheaper parts, some level of code-openening from Broadcom, and manufacturing in Britain. Openness was a secondary goal, and only because it supported the primary goal of education.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
We're doing this to undercut any interest in competing OS's, not because we actually care about it. When we've undercut things enough, we'll dump any support entirely...
Ruined the market for whom?
From what I can see, Raspberry Pi's goal was to be this generations BBC Micro, nothing else. Something that is cheap to hack on
You're evidently not *that* familiar with the BBC Micro then. It may have been a great computer in many respects (particularly the Model B), but it was never, *ever* "cheap". Quite the opposite, it always had a reputation as an expensive machine that was mainly owned by schools and kids with well-off Mummies and Daddies.
The ZX81 cost £70 (or £50 in kit form) when launched in 1981. Multiply that by around 3.5 times for today's prices.
The cheaper Model A cost £235 when it came out a few months later, but went up almost immediately to £299. And that still only had 16K- not enough to even use the more demanding graphics modes- and lacked a lot of the Model B's ports. The 32K Model B (which far outsold the Model A and is the one everyone remembers) jumped from £335 to £399, and that was its regular price for most of its life. And remember that *didn't* include the disk drives and nice RGB monitor that every school seemed to have. (Even at a conservative guess I'd assume those came close to doubling the price, if not completely rushing past it (no, monitors and disk drives were *not* cheap). Even £650 at today's prices is over £2000!
So, no. The Raspberry Pi may have the educational aims of the BBC, but the "hackability" and cheapness is more akin to the Sinclair machines (ZX80, ZX81, ZX Spectrum) that most people could afford for all their limitations. And even *those* are expensive if you compare their price in real terms to what you can get a Raspberry Pi for these days!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I've been running internet-connected Windows desktop for 20 years, and have never gotten a virus. Surf smart, lock your door, and don't click on the damn .scr files.
When you say lock your door, I'm presuming you mean behind a firewall or router?
The only time I've been infected was during a Win98 install. I ended up connecting it directly to the internet instead of using my router (I don't recall why; that was a long time ago.) After my first set of updates had applied (ie: rebooted from), I discovered that it was already infected. The most interesting part was it was compromised in under 25 minutes.
Since then, a router has been my best and first line of defense. After that, the rest of stuff is avoiding most of the social engineering that's trying to get you to click them.
That's irrelevant. The limitarion is the teacher, not the whiteboard. I had a degree in Computer Science long before I moved into teaching, and I barely scratched the surface of what's possible with interactive whiteboards when I was teaching English....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Excellence != Khan Academy. Khan Academy == Acceptable mediocrity.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Yeuch. KA is riddled with errors and omissions. The idea of a "mastery curriculum" was not dreamt up by Sal Khan, and KA barely attempts to measure mastery anyway. It's a bunch of videos -- nothing more.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
They were not useless -- I'd been waiting almost a decade for netbooks. The problem was bloatware -- MS apps had expanded to fill the vacuum of a much bigger computer... but why? I would love to see computing becoming more efficient, rather than algorithms abhoring a vacuum.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
You're just a filthy commie... no, wait, that's 16k too much... filthy speccy...! ;-)
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Unless you want people to believe "computer=Windows", in which case NOT having Windows is stupid.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I said "if", not "though". Microsoft's goal will be to mark the territory, one way or the other.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I said "if", not "though".
I know, either way the question of "why" is just as relevant.
They were not useless
They were cheap, underpowered with low resolution screens and poor quality trackpads making them a race to the bottom competing only on price. They were only useful for the sorts of things that are easier on a tablet, everything else is better on an ultrabook which is why the market has expelled them.
The problem was bloatware -- MS apps had expanded to fill the vacuum of a much bigger computer... but why? I would love to see computing becoming more efficient, rather than algorithms abhoring a vacuum.
Citation? Windows has been reducing its hunger for system resources and on Linux you can use reduced-functionality shells on and less graphically intense window managers to remove the need to load the high-capability graphics drivers that take up a lot of memory.
I'm not sure what "MS apps" you're referring to that have "expanded" or what you mean by that. For example say you open a built-in application like Wordpad, on Windows 7 it uses about 20mb of RAM, open Wordpad on Windows 8.1 and it uses just over 9MB of RAM. Then there's the base install of Windows 8 which brings the memory footprint from 7's ~400MB down to ~280MB of RAM.
I checked screenshots and the builds doesn't look that much different to me. The tiles was in the older builds too.
Alright. But Celeron N2820 is 22nm Atom, not Haswell.
Celeron was based on Pentium II , two gens of Pentium III, three gens of Pentium 4, two gens of Core 2 Duo and then three gens of i3/i7 (not the first gen of i7 I believe, so not counted)
I happen to think the performance is adequate but well : instead of bitching about the very low power stuff, why not ignore it? stay on desktop where the Haswell Celeron (G1840) is fucking incredibly fast.
They were cheap, underpowered with low resolution screens and poor quality trackpads making them a race to the bottom competing only on price. They were only useful for the sorts of things that are easier on a tablet, everything else is better on an ultrabook which is why the market has expelled them.
I liked writing blog posts and student worksheets on the train. I wanted to code lightweight programs in Python and Javascript. I didn't need a heavy, full-sized laptop for that, but I certainly needed a keyboard. It happily played back the audio and video files I needed in class, and connected perfectly happily to any standard projector. That the market for netbooks is smaller than the market for tablets, I understand; however, the niche I was in was well-served by the eeePC, and in trying to embrace and extend customer appeal, they extinguished the netbook. That said, a reflashed Chromebook is an acceptable alternative.
Citation? Windows has been reducing its hunger for system resources
Windows has been reducing its hunger for system resources recently. Five years ago, when netbooks were the "next big thing", Windows XP's life was extended because they couldn't get Windows 7 squeezed into the specs of the netbooks at the time. Microsoft is shrinking the Windows footprint now because of the convergence of mobile and desktop, but that wasn't on the cards back then.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
But pointing those out or contributing to correcting them would not be in your interest.
It's not about whether it's in my interest to correct them or not, it is about whether it's in my interest to watch the videos in the first place or not. I have no reason to watch the ones that I have the knowledge to correct, and I have no desire to watch ones that I can't determine the veracity of. Khan Academy's quality may have improved in the last couple of years, but the initial quality was poor enough to lose my interest completely.
It's a bunch of videos -- nothing more.
And that demonstrates irrefutably that you are just acting defensively and in doing so trying to spread FUD.
No it doesn't. It demonstrates that I am oversimplifying. Yes, there are questions and online code editors/checkers. Yes it assesses your knowledge and skips the odd video to personalise the learning track a little, but that's a poor approximation of adaptive learning at best. Yes it has a handful of teacher tools to allow you to integrate it into your own curriculum, but again, this is kind of lip-service as it is not really any more flexible than most offline materials -- and perhaps less so, because it's much easier to alter photocopiable spreadsheets than a web video.
Khan Academy got big not because of good pedagogy, but because of its price. It was created for free by a guy who didn't know a lot about teaching. He made the videos in an ad hoc manner that was quick and easy for him. Cheap production values for free materials. Sadly, the whole online learning sector has gone this way, and ploughed lots of money into making materials with cheap production values (see Coursera, edX etc). It's maddening. Why are all these screencasts and slidecasts touted as "the future of technology" when they're really just a professor-and-chalkboard lecture in a different medium? When I was a child, the UK's Open University had materials like that -- you'd see them on TV in the early morning writing equations on the board -- but they abandoned that and started using the medium of video in its own terms, borrowing more and more techniques from TV to convey information efficiently and effectively. Yes, that takes time, and it takes money. No, Sal couldn't have done that on his own. But the world has fetishised the lo-fi aesthetic, and no-one's willing to step away from it when the money's there to do something better. It's practically ludditism.
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The tile space is twice as large, can't be reduced, and the app section is not the folder based start menu that we've been using for 20 years, instead it's a shrunken version of the start screen from 8.1 which means things are organized alphabetically instead of into user controllable folders.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It is alphabetically organized, but it still have folders actually (I have it running in a VM).
Khan academy is by no means 100% done. They don't have thousands of professionals. AFAIK all videos are done by Sal himself. But it's good enough it has been adopted as primary teaching materials for some USA School districts.
It's not a bunch of videos. This statement of yours just shows you have no interest in even trying to learn about it, you just make up your own FUD to try to prevent others from learning about it.
You are sooooo wrong, it's not even worth trying to detail how wrong you are.
You just made a generic Khan academy is crap generalization without a single fact to make your point.
By no means Khan academy is 100% ready.
Watching a 10 minute video about Khan academy will show you the exercise generator, with the integrated teacher tools that allow teachers to analyze which students have learned the subject perfectly (and could be assigned to help others), those who need some help (which could come from the ace students), and the students that are struggling with the topic and need teacher direct help.
I liked writing blog posts and student worksheets on the train. I wanted to code lightweight programs in Python and Javascript. I didn't need a heavy, full-sized laptop for that, but I certainly needed a keyboard. It happily played back the audio and video files I needed in class, and connected perfectly happily to any standard projector.
Now all of that is done on tablets and if you need a keyboard then just attach a bluetooth keyboard cover.
That the market for netbooks is smaller than the market for tablets, I understand; however, the niche I was in was well-served by the eeePC, and in trying to embrace and extend customer appeal, they extinguished the netbook.
Nobody extinguished the netbook. In fact netbooks still exist and are still being sold, it's just that nobody wants them, instead they opt for a much more capable ultrabook or their needs are better served by a tablet.
Windows has been reducing its hunger for system resources recently. Five years ago, when netbooks were the "next big thing", Windows XP's life was extended because they couldn't get Windows 7 squeezed into the specs of the netbooks at the time.
Yes which is why netbooks of the time ran Windows XP - an operating system from 2001 that ran on much less powerful hardware than netbooks - and they ran it fine. Many of those netbooks also ran Linux except relatively nobody in the target market really wanted to run Linux.
Im afraid there is really no merit to your argument that Windows 7 killed the netbook, in fact the netbook isn't even dead, there are plenty of netbooks still on the market and even quite a lot of them that run Android.
Last time I looked, none of the tools on KA were unique or innovative. They were all just implementations of standard tools that have been available for years in various forms. Khan Academy's success derives from the media hype, not the technology.
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Yep. The proper response is "the OSs that have run up to now on the RPi ARE the industry standard, as well as the applications that work on them. Windows and Windows applications on lightweight devices have never been "the industry standard". It is unlikely that the majority of future lightweight and/or IoT devices will be running Windows or Windows applications, so it makes no sense to educate students using those, even if they function as claimed.
I find it hard to imagine windows 7 running well in 400MB of ram, In practice taskmanager has shown booting to the desktop taking around 1GB A Windows 7 desktop is pretty much unusable with 1GB of ram 1.5GB at least lets you boot up and run office or a web browser.
previous experience with XP has found it sluggish with 512 MB but reasonable with 756MB 2000 is very zippy on 512MB and great in a VM. Some of the linux desktops are pretty bad in a VM especially unity but xubuntu is quite usable.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
I find it hard to imagine windows 7 running well in 400MB of ram
All I said was there is significant a reduction in the amount of base memory used by the operating system.
In practice taskmanager has shown booting to the desktop taking around 1GB A Windows 7 desktop is pretty much unusable with 1GB of ram 1.5GB at least lets you boot up and run office or a web browser.
A lot of it depends on the device drivers you have loaded. Once you're loading high performance graphics drivers, shell extensions, accelerated DWM, etc... of course it adds up. There are various tools that help you to strip out the unnecessary things of a Windows install too. Anyway that's beside the point, from Vista, to 7 to 8 there has been a marked reduction in memory usage.
Schools basically give away old windows machines. Now that they remove hard drives they're almost totally worthless. I think they bring more as scrap.
Your attitude is understandable, but not excusable. Whenever somebody feels threatened by change, insofar as their inability to adapt to it is concerned, they will react with baseless accusations and attempts to spread FUD as a method of defending themselves which is precisely what you are doing. Many of these tools exist to supplement existing curriculum, not replace it, however that doesn't stop the incumbents from feeling threatened by the change if they are not progressive.
When you assume, you make an ass of U and the adaptive learning systems programmer you are talking to. I'm not frightened of change, I'm trying to create it. If I'm worried about any threat, it's the threat of a flood of acceptably mediocre offerings creating a popular view that educational technology is a little freebie that has a few nice effects, thus undermining research into truly revolutionary (but far more expensive) systems. KA throughout it's history has been based on screencasts, and everything added on since has been aimed at leveraging the screencasts. It has all been taken from existing standard edtech practice -- nothing they have done as been cutting edge.
The end result is basically a semi-automated update of what was known as "resource-based learning" back when my father was the one railing against it, and because KA doesn't have as much teacher involvement it's better than previous resource-based approaches, but in the end it still shares many of its limitations in terms of flexibility -- all the assumptions that went into the curriculum design and resultant ordering constraints remain. Which is why this is overly optimistic:
Many of these tools exist to supplement existing curriculum, not replace it,
A tool can supplement an existing curriculum, but materials always end up supplanting it. With teaching materials, it is rarely a question of all-or-nothing, but the middle ground between all and nothing is best described as a poorly coordinated mess. You need to have a profound understanding of the rationale behind the material before you can adapt it without losing the benefits, and if you step off the resource's expected learning path, suddenly you've got to adapt every other resource to meet your new path.
For example, if your language resources start with the present tense, animals and food, and you want to start with the past tense (maybe because you want to tell lots of stories in class, and the past is the typical narrative tense in the language), all your resources will be loaded with vocabulary it expects the kids to know before the lesson starts, so you can't use any of them. You only truly get flexibility when the materials are made by the teacher or to the teacher's specifications -- KA doesn't attempt to do that. That's why I don't like Khan Academy.
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You are completely right. I still use my EEEpc. Though more often I use my Chromebook which has more modern specs and a better for factor (not reflashed though. For advanced features, remoting works well for my needs).
The sibling post of mine notes that you can effectively get a netbook by having a tablet and adding a keyboard. Sorry, I like my keyboard pre-attached. I do have a tablet but it has mostly fallen to being used as a remote control for mythtv and for my daughter to track her yu-gi-oh games. My chromebook is in constant use when I'm not at my main desktop.
I don't believe he said that Windows 7 killed the notebook, merely that Microsoft's efforts to take a slice of the pie were damaging to the market
How? They used Windows XP, people wanted that and bought netbooks but when tablets came out people preferred those, that is all that happened. Anybody could buy a netbook over a tablet but virtually nobody wants that.
XP had more demanding specs which was adopted pushed the netbooks out of their value point (they failed to be competitive with low-end laptops).
Tablets vs netbooks is yet to be decided. Tablet sales are flattening and Chromebooks are still out there.
XP had more demanding specs which was adopted pushed the netbooks out of their value point (they failed to be competitive with low-end laptops).
No it didn't, even the first Asus eeePC was later released with Windows XP. Even at that $200 price point there are still netbooks available, even new ones with Windows.