Found the "Urgent Order Information" in the inbox - mine is due 26 March. I called Farnell this morning and they said they are yet to receive any RPis in stock (in EU), so all their orders were pre-orders, and if they get them faster, they will be shipped faster.
I did. By buying the Raspberry Pi stickers. They said they were overpriced (thus they considered those money to be a donation). I say they were fair-priced. And they sent me 6 instead of the 3 i ordered. I don't expect any favours for this. I'm sad i didn't "donate" more as they are now out of stickers and i don't think they will sell them again (each were indivdualy cut and packaged by the members of the foundation)
Managed to order mine from Farnell this morning. Took almost a whole hour of refreshes & timeouts considering that i already had an account on their site. RS Online did not accepted any orders, they only have a "register for updates" page.
The DDoS of the Farnell & RS-Online servers caused by the announcement was massive (and still is for Farnell).
Here, the endpoint boxes they install in apartment buildings use power from the hallway lighting. Which is paid by the owners of the appartments. And not by them = savings. And after everyone is converted, the cooper trunks can be dug out and sold for scrap as the prices of cooper have skyrocketed. And if you no longer have a cooper line to the CO, you can no longer call on that anti-monopoly laws which allowed you to get a different ADSL provider on those lines.
I have seen the insides of the "pizza boxes" they house their endpoint FTTH equipment into. Not a single battery in sight. I specifically checked for this.
1) Yes, i know. I worked for that telco. 2) The endpoint VoIP equipment is not carrier-grade. It's lower-bidder, lowest-bandwidth grade. Huawei if you're lucky. I have a VoIP phone line from their competitor - all calls sound like on a GSM phone or worse. 3) In order to call the Power company to report a blackout, you have to dial their "short" number. Free on a fixed line, extra cost per minute from a mobile phone. And if your mobile phone is low on battery, good luck navigating their voice prompts and waiting on the line. Here the phone lines are usually buried. And never fail.
In some magical land, all endpoints have battery backup. In Romania, for example, they don't - a backup battery must be replaced every 3 years or so - which can become expensive. I refused to allow the local telco to install FTTH in my apartment building as all the cooper landlines (powered by the large battery pack + diesel generator at the CO) would have been replaced by VoIP over that fibre. Lousy audio quality, no battery backup, end-point equipment usually locks up during brown-outs. I'm ok with slower ADSL that works 24/7.
Way to go, Telestra ! They still have some smart people in charge.
According to the foundation, the largest available PoP RAM chip of the required physical size manufactured at the time is 512Mb, it costs way more than twice of the price of the 256Mb one and is not yet available in the required volumes. You'll have to wait for Rev.C & D boards...
Anyone remembers the "CherryPal Africa" $99 laptops ? I preordered two. And almost 3 months after the date they were supposed to be shipping i got the money back by filling a complaint with my bank. Some of the people who preordered used Western Union or simmilar money transfer services and they never got their money back OR the laptop.
Be carefull if preordering vapourware from unknown companies.
They did - Samsung will open a new factory in Texas for producing the A? CPUs. Too bad that they will be shipped to China for final assembly as there are no suitable factories in US:)
They failed at: reliability, uptime and ease of use Real life example: - Today i just missed a rescheduled meeting because my BlackBerry failed to ring the alarm (usually happens after too many days with no reboot); - Had about 4 half-day to full-day outages in the last month; - BES server upgrade caused ~15% of the Blackberry users in my department to lose access for around 3 days and then they had to reformat their devices to be able to receive mail again.
If you are able to solder by yourself BGA package-on-package components, congratulations. Over 99.9% of the potential buyers are not, so it will only come pre-assembled. You DO have to reach for the soldering iron if you want to use the GPIO,SPI,I2C & UART pins to connect a 1.27mm pitch header to the board.
Composite or HDMI monitor. Unfortunatelly Raspberry Pi does not have VGA output - the Broadcom SoC used it's a "mobile phone" version and it has only HDMI, Composite & DSI outputs (for direct LCD flat-panel connection) The SoCs with VGA output were unfortunatelly too expensive.
To sum up the post on the official site: - Small UK companies were offering faster assembly & low prices but a very low volume (hundreds per week) - Big UK companies were either not interested for runs under 100k or offered outrageously high quotes and demanded a huge wait time. Adding the component customs tax to this... it's cheaper in China as the end product (computer board) has 0 customs tax according to EU laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Found the "Urgent Order Information" in the inbox - mine is due 26 March. I called Farnell this morning and they said they are yet to receive any RPis in stock (in EU), so all their orders were pre-orders, and if they get them faster, they will be shipped faster.
I did.
By buying the Raspberry Pi stickers. They said they were overpriced (thus they considered those money to be a donation). I say they were fair-priced. And they sent me 6 instead of the 3 i ordered.
I don't expect any favours for this.
I'm sad i didn't "donate" more as they are now out of stickers and i don't think they will sell them again (each were indivdualy cut and packaged by the members of the foundation)
Managed to order mine from Farnell this morning. Took almost a whole hour of refreshes & timeouts considering that i already had an account on their site. RS Online did not accepted any orders, they only have a "register for updates" page.
The DDoS of the Farnell & RS-Online servers caused by the announcement was massive (and still is for Farnell).
Here, the endpoint boxes they install in apartment buildings use power from the hallway lighting. Which is paid by the owners of the appartments. And not by them = savings. And after everyone is converted, the cooper trunks can be dug out and sold for scrap as the prices of cooper have skyrocketed. And if you no longer have a cooper line to the CO, you can no longer call on that anti-monopoly laws which allowed you to get a different ADSL provider on those lines.
Don't underestimate my UPS :-)
I have seen the insides of the "pizza boxes" they house their endpoint FTTH equipment into. Not a single battery in sight. I specifically checked for this.
1) Yes, i know. I worked for that telco.
2) The endpoint VoIP equipment is not carrier-grade. It's lower-bidder, lowest-bandwidth grade. Huawei if you're lucky. I have a VoIP phone line from their competitor - all calls sound like on a GSM phone or worse.
3) In order to call the Power company to report a blackout, you have to dial their "short" number. Free on a fixed line, extra cost per minute from a mobile phone. And if your mobile phone is low on battery, good luck navigating their voice prompts and waiting on the line. Here the phone lines are usually buried. And never fail.
Mod Gradparent Up !
In some magical land, all endpoints have battery backup. In Romania, for example, they don't - a backup battery must be replaced every 3 years or so - which can become expensive. I refused to allow the local telco to install FTTH in my apartment building as all the cooper landlines (powered by the large battery pack + diesel generator at the CO) would have been replaced by VoIP over that fibre. Lousy audio quality, no battery backup, end-point equipment usually locks up during brown-outs. I'm ok with slower ADSL that works 24/7.
Way to go, Telestra ! They still have some smart people in charge.
Yep - the official name for a [Beowulf] cluster of Raspberries is a Bramble.
Not yet - http://robobees.seas.harvard.edu/research/body
Or some of the other pages on that site :)
According to the foundation, the largest available PoP RAM chip of the required physical size manufactured at the time is 512Mb, it costs way more than twice of the price of the 256Mb one and is not yet available in the required volumes. ...
You'll have to wait for Rev.C & D boards
> Wife reception becomes even worse if you "do not hold it right"
Learn to hold yor wife right and she'll be more receptive :)
This "preorder" business sounds fishy.
Anyone remembers the "CherryPal Africa" $99 laptops ? I preordered two. And almost 3 months after the date they were supposed to be shipping i got the money back by filling a complaint with my bank. Some of the people who preordered used Western Union or simmilar money transfer services and they never got their money back OR the laptop.
Be carefull if preordering vapourware from unknown companies.
They already did this - it's called Mac OS X Server and it does exactly that and more.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum
They did - Samsung will open a new factory in Texas for producing the A? CPUs. Too bad that they will be shipped to China for final assembly as there are no suitable factories in US :)
Question is - how much money did they won from that one ruling in favor ?
They failed at: reliability, uptime and ease of use
Real life example:
- Today i just missed a rescheduled meeting because my BlackBerry failed to ring the alarm (usually happens after too many days with no reboot);
- Had about 4 half-day to full-day outages in the last month;
- BES server upgrade caused ~15% of the Blackberry users in my department to lose access for around 3 days and then they had to reformat their devices to be able to receive mail again.
Oblig. Penny Arcade:
http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/04/13
Looks like Systems of Hull is not a scam, just the result of a badly uninformed enthusiast.
See his reply on the Raspberry Pi forum:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum/general-discussion/order-placed-very-excited/page-3
Post 52, by Andy Lamb
Flash or non-flash, the slashdot videos are not viewable from behind corporate firewalls allowing only ports 80 & 443 :(
Won't work - The Raspberry Pi USB ports are host-only.
But you can have one on a switch (with Rev.B)
If you are able to solder by yourself BGA package-on-package components, congratulations. Over 99.9% of the potential buyers are not, so it will only come pre-assembled.
You DO have to reach for the soldering iron if you want to use the GPIO,SPI,I2C & UART pins to connect a 1.27mm pitch header to the board.
Composite or HDMI monitor.
Unfortunatelly Raspberry Pi does not have VGA output - the Broadcom SoC used it's a "mobile phone" version and it has only HDMI, Composite & DSI outputs (for direct LCD flat-panel connection)
The SoCs with VGA output were unfortunatelly too expensive.
To sum up the post on the official site: ... it's cheaper in China as the end product (computer board) has 0 customs tax according to EU laws.
- Small UK companies were offering faster assembly & low prices but a very low volume (hundreds per week)
- Big UK companies were either not interested for runs under 100k or offered outrageously high quotes and demanded a huge wait time.
Adding the component customs tax to this