You get a percentage of the price which is subsidised.
Solar 12%
Then you say:
Sans subsidies it takes decades to pay back the capital costs of a solar installation
But those two don't match up. If 12% of the price is subsidised, then without the subsidy it would cost 14% more. If the break even point is 10 years with the subsidy, then it would be 11.4 years without. For a small-scale home installation, the break even point is closer to seven years without subsidy, for a larger plant it can be anywhere from 2-5 years. Without the subsidy it would be a few months longer, not decades, unless the subsidies are closer to 80% of the price, not the 12% that you claim...
You're assuming that all of the money is going into production. A lot of it is going to R&D. Irrespective of what happens to the investors, the results of that R&D will remain. The same thing happened with the dot-com bubble - lots of companies went bust, but we still got a lot of new technology developed while they were spending money like water.
US solar companies are going out of business? I only know of two, and both are building new factories because they managed to sell the entire production run in their current factories for the next year already.
Re:C is just a rip off of BCPL
on
Dennis Ritchie Day
·
· Score: 3, Informative
BCPL only had one data type. Everything in it was a word. It didn't have arrays or structures, just arithmetic on words (which could then be treated as pointer to other words). Try writing C with no data types other than uintptr_t, intptr_t and uintptr_t* - no arrays, no structs, no chars - and see how far you get.
You talk as if the only options are an 8-bit computer from the '80s or a modern Flash game. There is a reason why the Raspberry Pi isn't using a 6502 - technology has moved on. Why not show them something like Squeak eToys? It lets them produce things of the same complexity as a modern Flash game and also teaches them modern object-oriented programming.
Same version? Try same printer drivers! Yes, the default printer can change the layout of a word document and cause text to flow differently on different machines. This is only a problem if you are doing the layout at the wrong phase in document creation. There's nothing wrong with exchanging word processor files between people collaborating on a document, but you should always export to PDF or similar for the final version, when you have tweaked the layout and care about the final presentation.
It's been a while since I used Microsoft Office, but I remember even back in Word For Windows 2.0 you could control the space before, space after, and indent of paragraphs, and have special rules for the first paragraph in that style. StarOffice 4.0, the first version of what eventually became OpenOffice that I used, had the same feature.
XP was the next release of Windows NT after Windows 2000, and it required more RAM and a faster processor to achieve the same level of performance. This and the activation requirements were why I never bought XP and stuck with 2000 until I stopped using Windows altogether. I upgraded from NT4 to 2000, and it also required roughly double the amount of RAM and a faster CPU, but the benefits of having Direct3D and plug-and-play working properly - meaning I could get rid of 9x entirely - were worth it.
Hardware support for open source operating systems tends to be best with 2-3 year old hardware. It's been around long enough for people to have got around to reverse engineering and writing drivers for it, it's cheap enough that kernel developers can pick one up to play with, and it's still fast enough that people still care about testing it.
That's just marketing. If you're going to get the computer into schools where it can be used for interesting things, then you have to show that it can also be used for things that the head teacher and the governors understand...
I don't think that's true. I learned to program - in school - on a BBC Model B when I was 7. At the time, I could play shiny VGA graphics games at home, and even things like the NES (although based on the same CPU) were far ahead of the BBC in terms of graphics and sound. We laughed a lot at how primitive the BBC seemed.
But that red triangle? It wasn't cool because it was a red triangle. It was cool because I made a red triangle. The existence of better systems didn't take away the feeling of achievement any more than the existence of Leonardo Da Vinci or William Shakespeare didn't take away the experience of producing a painting or writing a story (the fact that I sucked at painting did, but that's unrelated).
I wrote games on the BBC, and on other computers of a similar level while at school. They weren't good, but they were games that I thought of and that I created. The same was true with meccano and lego. Toy shops were full of toys that were better than things that I could make with a construction set, but that didn't make the construction sets less fun, because I could make things that weren't in the shops, and were things I had thought of.
Children, at the age when we were introduced to the BBC, have a lot of imagination. The most fun toys were the ones we made ourselves. It didn't matter that they weren't as shiny or polished as the ones our parents bought us, it mattered because they were really ours. And, according to a report that was linked to here a few months ago, that isn't something children grow out of: adults value things that they made more than things that they bought too.
I bought my IBM ThinkPad R31 for £100 on eBay back around 2005. For £200, I can get a dual-core 64-bit laptop. Looking at eBay right now, there are quite a few laptops going for under £50 with 1-2GHz single-core CPUs. Not very many at the cheap end because the effort of packaging and posting them is more than you get for selling it. If you look in local computer shops, you can get second hand laptops very cheaply. They also appear on things like Freecycle pretty regularly - people can't sell them, but they'll give them away if you collect. If you're happy with something like a 1GHz Pentium M, you can pick up a second hand laptop for next to nothing - often just the cost of getting yourself to someone else's house and getting yourself and the laptop back home.
Did you just get your first computer or something? This machine is intended as the spiritual successor of the BBC Models A and B, which had 16KB and 32KB respectively. It is intended to fulfil the same purpose. Yet, apparently, you can't do in 256MB of RAM today what we could in 32KB of RAM in 1981? OpenOffice and FireFox, ignoring the fact that they both run quite happily in 512MB of RAM - I can run them both, simultaneously, on my Efika with an 800MHz ARM CPU and 512MB of RAM - are totally irrelevant for the task of teaching children how a computer works.
Oh, and LiveCDs need a lot of RAM because they need to create a big writable overlay filesystem in RAM, so that's a stupid thing to bring up, independent of the other stupidity in your post.
The project's been covered on Slashdot, what, four times now? And people still don't understand what the target market is!
This is not aimed at the third world (although I am involved with a project in Tanzania that's considering using them if we can get a FreeBSD port), it's aimed at UK schools. When I went to school, we had BBC Model B computers and a couple of BBC Masters. The A and B nomenclature of the Raspberry Pi is directly inherited from the original BBC micros, because they are intended to fill exactly the same niche: teaching kids how to make computers do what they want. Modern computing in schools has drifted too far towards teaching kids to do what the computer wants.
When you turned on the BBC, you were in a programming environment. Actually a fairly powerful one: a dialect of BASIC that supported structured programming, direct memory manipulation via PEEK and POKE, and a built-in assembler (i.e. everything you needed to write a JIT compiler, although I never did).
You also had a range of I/O capabilities, including analogue input and digital input and output that could be read or written to trivially, just by reading or writing the relevant memory address. These machines had just enough abstraction that they weren't totally intimidating, but it was thin enough that you could push (POKE?) through it and see exactly how things were working. That was what made it a good teaching machine.
The original BBC Model B cost about £300, in 1981s money. Accounting for inflation, you can give every child in the class one of these to play with for the price of buying the BBC B for the classroom back in 1981.
I've not used an aurdino, but how easy is it to write a simple web application that is lets users control that GPIO pin from any machine on the network? Because that's pretty trivial with the Raspberry PI...
It's intended to teach computing, not to teach media consumption using a computer. Like the BBC Micro that inspired it, it's intended to have a reasonable range of I/O capabilities for controlling electronics projects and a decent programming environment. Everything else is a bonus.
When the BBC Micro started to be replaced by Archimedes machines and later IBM PCs in schools, the focus on computer education shifted away from how it works and how you can control it to using off-the-shelf packages. I was right at the tail end of that transition, and my lecturers noticed a fairly abrupt jump in the programming abilities of people who were taught with the BBC to those a few years later who were taught with PCs.
We live in a society where basic programming is as important as basic penmanship was a century ago. Most people won't become programmers, but they will need to be able to use various domain-specific languages, even if just to write office macros. Yet, during this transition, our school system has moved away from teaching programming to young children - the time when they are most receptive to it - and taught them how to use specific software packages, rather than how to understand the underlying logic behind them.
You might want to read the news. You'll discover that joking is less of a defence than you might think it is. Apparently the police don't have much of a sense of humour...
He said violent criminals. Most of the people in prison in the USA are non-violent people who are guilty of taking different narcotics from the ruling classes.
Is that really a new and exciting feature? My last three phones since about 2003 have supported syncing via bluetooth. Just put them near my computer and contacts and calendars are sync'd. The only advantage of doing it via the Internet is that it uses more battery power...
Nothing damaging!?! They were wearing red ties! Red is the colour of communists! Their passengers might have caught communism as a result of being exposed to employees wearing red ties! Think of the lawsuits!
Slashdot Mirror
You get a percentage of the price which is subsidised.
Solar 12%
Then you say:
Sans subsidies it takes decades to pay back the capital costs of a solar installation
But those two don't match up. If 12% of the price is subsidised, then without the subsidy it would cost 14% more. If the break even point is 10 years with the subsidy, then it would be 11.4 years without. For a small-scale home installation, the break even point is closer to seven years without subsidy, for a larger plant it can be anywhere from 2-5 years. Without the subsidy it would be a few months longer, not decades, unless the subsidies are closer to 80% of the price, not the 12% that you claim...
You're assuming that all of the money is going into production. A lot of it is going to R&D. Irrespective of what happens to the investors, the results of that R&D will remain. The same thing happened with the dot-com bubble - lots of companies went bust, but we still got a lot of new technology developed while they were spending money like water.
US solar companies are going out of business? I only know of two, and both are building new factories because they managed to sell the entire production run in their current factories for the next year already.
BCPL only had one data type. Everything in it was a word. It didn't have arrays or structures, just arithmetic on words (which could then be treated as pointer to other words). Try writing C with no data types other than uintptr_t, intptr_t and uintptr_t* - no arrays, no structs, no chars - and see how far you get.
So the entire point of your post is to say that, as someone totally outside of the target market for the device, you are not interested in it?
You talk as if the only options are an 8-bit computer from the '80s or a modern Flash game. There is a reason why the Raspberry Pi isn't using a 6502 - technology has moved on. Why not show them something like Squeak eToys? It lets them produce things of the same complexity as a modern Flash game and also teaches them modern object-oriented programming.
Same version? Try same printer drivers! Yes, the default printer can change the layout of a word document and cause text to flow differently on different machines. This is only a problem if you are doing the layout at the wrong phase in document creation. There's nothing wrong with exchanging word processor files between people collaborating on a document, but you should always export to PDF or similar for the final version, when you have tweaked the layout and care about the final presentation.
It's been a while since I used Microsoft Office, but I remember even back in Word For Windows 2.0 you could control the space before, space after, and indent of paragraphs, and have special rules for the first paragraph in that style. StarOffice 4.0, the first version of what eventually became OpenOffice that I used, had the same feature.
XP was the next release of Windows NT after Windows 2000, and it required more RAM and a faster processor to achieve the same level of performance. This and the activation requirements were why I never bought XP and stuck with 2000 until I stopped using Windows altogether. I upgraded from NT4 to 2000, and it also required roughly double the amount of RAM and a faster CPU, but the benefits of having Direct3D and plug-and-play working properly - meaning I could get rid of 9x entirely - were worth it.
Hardware support for open source operating systems tends to be best with 2-3 year old hardware. It's been around long enough for people to have got around to reverse engineering and writing drivers for it, it's cheap enough that kernel developers can pick one up to play with, and it's still fast enough that people still care about testing it.
That's just marketing. If you're going to get the computer into schools where it can be used for interesting things, then you have to show that it can also be used for things that the head teacher and the governors understand...
I don't think that's true. I learned to program - in school - on a BBC Model B when I was 7. At the time, I could play shiny VGA graphics games at home, and even things like the NES (although based on the same CPU) were far ahead of the BBC in terms of graphics and sound. We laughed a lot at how primitive the BBC seemed.
But that red triangle? It wasn't cool because it was a red triangle. It was cool because I made a red triangle. The existence of better systems didn't take away the feeling of achievement any more than the existence of Leonardo Da Vinci or William Shakespeare didn't take away the experience of producing a painting or writing a story (the fact that I sucked at painting did, but that's unrelated).
I wrote games on the BBC, and on other computers of a similar level while at school. They weren't good, but they were games that I thought of and that I created. The same was true with meccano and lego. Toy shops were full of toys that were better than things that I could make with a construction set, but that didn't make the construction sets less fun, because I could make things that weren't in the shops, and were things I had thought of.
Children, at the age when we were introduced to the BBC, have a lot of imagination. The most fun toys were the ones we made ourselves. It didn't matter that they weren't as shiny or polished as the ones our parents bought us, it mattered because they were really ours. And, according to a report that was linked to here a few months ago, that isn't something children grow out of: adults value things that they made more than things that they bought too.
I bought my IBM ThinkPad R31 for £100 on eBay back around 2005. For £200, I can get a dual-core 64-bit laptop. Looking at eBay right now, there are quite a few laptops going for under £50 with 1-2GHz single-core CPUs. Not very many at the cheap end because the effort of packaging and posting them is more than you get for selling it. If you look in local computer shops, you can get second hand laptops very cheaply. They also appear on things like Freecycle pretty regularly - people can't sell them, but they'll give them away if you collect. If you're happy with something like a 1GHz Pentium M, you can pick up a second hand laptop for next to nothing - often just the cost of getting yourself to someone else's house and getting yourself and the laptop back home.
Did you just get your first computer or something? This machine is intended as the spiritual successor of the BBC Models A and B, which had 16KB and 32KB respectively. It is intended to fulfil the same purpose. Yet, apparently, you can't do in 256MB of RAM today what we could in 32KB of RAM in 1981? OpenOffice and FireFox, ignoring the fact that they both run quite happily in 512MB of RAM - I can run them both, simultaneously, on my Efika with an 800MHz ARM CPU and 512MB of RAM - are totally irrelevant for the task of teaching children how a computer works.
Oh, and LiveCDs need a lot of RAM because they need to create a big writable overlay filesystem in RAM, so that's a stupid thing to bring up, independent of the other stupidity in your post.
The project's been covered on Slashdot, what, four times now? And people still don't understand what the target market is!
This is not aimed at the third world (although I am involved with a project in Tanzania that's considering using them if we can get a FreeBSD port), it's aimed at UK schools. When I went to school, we had BBC Model B computers and a couple of BBC Masters. The A and B nomenclature of the Raspberry Pi is directly inherited from the original BBC micros, because they are intended to fill exactly the same niche: teaching kids how to make computers do what they want. Modern computing in schools has drifted too far towards teaching kids to do what the computer wants.
When you turned on the BBC, you were in a programming environment. Actually a fairly powerful one: a dialect of BASIC that supported structured programming, direct memory manipulation via PEEK and POKE, and a built-in assembler (i.e. everything you needed to write a JIT compiler, although I never did).
You also had a range of I/O capabilities, including analogue input and digital input and output that could be read or written to trivially, just by reading or writing the relevant memory address. These machines had just enough abstraction that they weren't totally intimidating, but it was thin enough that you could push (POKE?) through it and see exactly how things were working. That was what made it a good teaching machine.
The original BBC Model B cost about £300, in 1981s money. Accounting for inflation, you can give every child in the class one of these to play with for the price of buying the BBC B for the classroom back in 1981.
I've not used an aurdino, but how easy is it to write a simple web application that is lets users control that GPIO pin from any machine on the network? Because that's pretty trivial with the Raspberry PI...
It's intended to teach computing, not to teach media consumption using a computer. Like the BBC Micro that inspired it, it's intended to have a reasonable range of I/O capabilities for controlling electronics projects and a decent programming environment. Everything else is a bonus.
When the BBC Micro started to be replaced by Archimedes machines and later IBM PCs in schools, the focus on computer education shifted away from how it works and how you can control it to using off-the-shelf packages. I was right at the tail end of that transition, and my lecturers noticed a fairly abrupt jump in the programming abilities of people who were taught with the BBC to those a few years later who were taught with PCs.
We live in a society where basic programming is as important as basic penmanship was a century ago. Most people won't become programmers, but they will need to be able to use various domain-specific languages, even if just to write office macros. Yet, during this transition, our school system has moved away from teaching programming to young children - the time when they are most receptive to it - and taught them how to use specific software packages, rather than how to understand the underlying logic behind them.
You might want to read the news. You'll discover that joking is less of a defence than you might think it is. Apparently the police don't have much of a sense of humour...
My history is a little bit rusty, but I'm pretty sure Hitler didn't have killer flying drones. Except maybe in the Wolfenstein series...
He said violent criminals. Most of the people in prison in the USA are non-violent people who are guilty of taking different narcotics from the ruling classes.
The US is extremely disorderly and has vast numbers of violent criminals compared to most modern nations. The police didn't create them.
Nope, your every-man-for-himself social and economic policies did that.
Is that really a new and exciting feature? My last three phones since about 2003 have supported syncing via bluetooth. Just put them near my computer and contacts and calendars are sync'd. The only advantage of doing it via the Internet is that it uses more battery power...
Nothing damaging!?! They were wearing red ties! Red is the colour of communists! Their passengers might have caught communism as a result of being exposed to employees wearing red ties! Think of the lawsuits!
Yet the abbreviation tech is strangely present in the URL of this story, posted as it was on tech.slashdot.org, not politics.slashdot.org.
Android users signed up to be spied on by Google, not some random third party!