I think you're still kind of missing the point of the hardware, however. From their about page:
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity (Registration Number 1129409) which exists to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing.
We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world.
Oh, I do get that. And, there's the other side of it too that simply making any kind of computer with some utility for such a shockingly low price will get them press coverage. I was completely jazzed about netbooks when they were announced for $99, but when they finally came out for $199, I ended up waiting and buying one around the $350 price point, and I am very happy with it. This feels like a similar evolution, except they appear to have more or less promoted the true release price point... we'll see if another batch of $25 units is even worth producing after this one, I suspect the majority of customers will want at least an ethernet port (although, following the commonly quoted logic, you could add a cheap ethernet port via the USB hub that you'll need to add to the one USB port $25 "solution"... I still prefer integrated solutions with well known driver configurations to having my own special combination of problems.)
Wow, why does this post have so many comments when it hasn't even been moderated? Oh wait, it's the first comment (ignoring the -1 Golden Girls lyrics [wonderful show, by the way] posted by an AC just above you). Never mind. Move along.
Seriously though, can something be done about the prevalence of posting in the first comment with a score >= 2? It buries high quality posts at the bottom, unmoderated and largely unseen. Would randomly reordering the top-level comments be so terrible?
It has always been thus... (and, thus, the glee of Frist posters) If I see a story that's 8 hours old or more, I rarely bother posting to it because nobody replies. I suppose you might convince the code monkeys for/. to give you a browsing option that shows something like the highest rated first, but if they pushed that to everybody, it would completely change the dynamic of how discussions evolve on/.
If I see a story that is "topheavy" like this one and I don't like what's at the top, I generally load all comments and start reading from the bottom up.
Nothing as "safe" as securities backed by the U.S. government. There may come a day when the U.S. government cannot pay its debts, but likely long before that day comes, the dollars they would be paid off in would be worthless too...
Personally, I have more faith in the U.S. government than, say, Apple, or WalMart.
Really? I'm not sure the rest of the world agrees with you lately.:P
The market is a funny thing, differential changes in opinion/confidence make dramatic swings in "value," and I guess T-Bills have their share of up and down - but, even if T-Bills grow slower than Apple and WalMart, they are less volatile, even lately. If I had to pick an investment vehicle for $10K that I _need_ to be worth at least $11K ten years from now, I'd still pick T-Bills. The broad market offers better growth, but less safety - or at least it has since the 1930s - and past performance is no guarantee blah blah blah.
All valid points, and thanks for the shopping list I may well use it, but, on the other hand, I can also acknowledge the validity of the lazy point of view that each of those mix and match parts has the potential to be a giant time sink and/or waste of money and effort. Especially when playing with wireless tech, things don't always work as well as they might in your particular installation. If a system of wireless components is pre-tested and demonstrated to work... there's value in that.
The form factor (and power factor) are both extremely attractive - I'm currently using Asus eee nettops for the purpose, and they're good, but the Pi, with a little more juice, could be better.
I still have a problem with the notion of people who don't have internet access "needing" a computer. If you don't have mains power, then, odds are, you don't have internet access either.
I made good use of computers before there was a useful internet, but I was in a distinct minority. The "general population" didn't care much about computers until the late '90s, even if they were forced to use them for work, and I can respect their disregard of the technology, it didn't to anything relevant for them, until it got connected.
Now, I can see how just about anybody, anywhere on the planet, can benefit from computer+internet access, as a library / teaching tool. Raspberry Pi seems to be catering to that distinct minority who can benefit from computer without internet access, and more power to them, but I feel like that minority is around 1 to 2 percent of the general population, and most people in the developed world who are in that minority will already have computer equipment stacked fairly high in the house (I know I spent my life savings of $700 for a 4MHz 8-bit machine with 16K of RAM).
Of course it is, but in my case the state ended up subsidizing tuition costs to bring them down to state levels - some bizarre program that ended a year or two after I graduated.
In other words: You have a good life because somebody else suffered, don't turn your back now.
I've often thought of it as the "I've got mine, now you f-off" mentality, with the implied "and I paid my dues to get it" in there, but somehow in my life, the people I know who have the most seem to have paid the least dues.
hang around maybe models C and D will do just that, for now A and B seem perfectly reasonable. besides dump javabloat and a machine with 256 megs does decent around the web anyway... I do it every day
I have an iPad (not a wallet vote on my part, actually "won" it in a drawing I didn't even know I had entered), and I must say that it sucks not having flash work, especially for things that the kids use like spellingcity.com. I also have a PS3 and will not go into depth about the ways that web browsing sucks on it, even under (the now verboten) Linux. I have also used a PandaBoard as a "desktop" for a little while, I assume the Raspberry Pi will "feel" very similar - amazingly good, for what it is, but still lacking.
I totally intend to order a model B, and maybe get a few more of them if it works out as a replacement for any of my existing machines around the house.
The $35 version only has wired ethernet, and I suppose I should have been specific that I would like at least 512MB of RAM, preferably 2GB, especially when coping with a 700MHz ARM 11 as a processor. I guess I just want a "decent" web browsing capability instead of one that will always feel lame when compared to a normal desktop.
So WiFi, 2GB RAM, how about built-in monitor and keyboard? And of course a trackpad and some spare USB ports on the side. It should have a built in OS, and a long-life battery as part of it too.
If only someone made such a device.
And, you forgot, sold it for $25... I think you can actually get those on eBay, 3 year old notebooks are going cheap.
How many people that need a $25 computer will be worried...
How many people that "need" a $25 computer will be able to afford a monitor and keyboard, or electricity to drive it all?
Filling the "wants" of the people who can actually afford it is what marketing is about, otherwise you've got a noble product that nobody buys (i.e. a big waste of time and effort.)
I think the Pi will fill enough "wants" to not be a waste of time, I also think if they push just a little bit up-market, they can get a much larger volume, which should help with the production costs of the entire product line. The foundation appears to know what they are doing and don't need my 2 cents (or, rather, pence), but that's what/. is good for: spouting off opinions for no particular reason.
Funny, at my current job they knew I had never programmed for Nios, ATMega or PIC before they hired me, and I have done projects in all 3 in the last year. The four companies before that all basically asked me what I thought was the best solution to their problem and we went with that.
I have not one, but two Asus eee nettop machines in the house, sometimes they feel brutal to work with, but never brutally powerful, more like brutal in an obtuse, Neanderthal way. They are impressively small, quiet and power efficient, and the two of them together cost less than the bottom of the line "mini" fruity option.
Yes, but you can plug in a wifi dongle onto the usb port and boom: wifi!
Can't do anything about the memory, but the thing isn't meant to replace our computers for web browsing. These have a much less general use.
I had an 8-bit machine with a cassette drive, I well remember "less general use" machines, I also know that 95%+ of what my kids do on computers, for school or fun, runs through the web browser.
I suppose if I provided them with lame hardware that is incapable of web browsing, they might be more inclined to learn to program it, but more likely they'll just seek out some other way to get on the web and ignore the lame toy.
Um, what. Do you really expect for the price of an Arduino?
I understand (at some levels) the concept of trying to create a computer for less than the cost of a textbook, but I'd much rather pay $45 and get WiFi, or even $55 and get WiFi and Bluetooth (or, gasp, even $75 and get a plastic case and power supply in the deal.) My vision for this thing is to hang it on the back of the living room TV and use it as a computer in the living room... I currently use an eee nettop for this, but something even smaller and less power consuming would be more attractive.
And, speaking to the foundation's goals, it would be a likely solution for my kids to have computers in their bedrooms, especially if it could be done without wires.
The $35 version only has wired ethernet, and I suppose I should have been specific that I would like at least 512MB of RAM, preferably 2GB, especially when coping with a 700MHz ARM 11 as a processor. I guess I just want a "decent" web browsing capability instead of one that will always feel lame when compared to a normal desktop.
Concur with parent, cheap works, whatever I have used in the past (half a dozen varieties, at least) has always "just worked" apparently it's not too hard to do.
On the flipside, if I were designing a project, I'd lean toward Flash over EEPROM, or, what I have done a few times, a RAM over PROM solution (bootstrap in the ROM, but load the dev code to RAM for testing, when the code matures, drop it into the ROM (one-time programmable chips are usually 1/10th the cost of a "windowed" part, or less) and leave the hook in to be able to load new test code up into RAM for further development.
I'm 45ish and I suffer from tl;dr pretty badly too.. I _can_ read a novel, or at least I used to read them before I had kids... the thing that puts me off of a screen full of text is when it's some idiot's rant instead of an actual decent piece of writing, you know, like Hunter S. Thompson used to put out, I could read several pages of Thompson without getting bored...
Occupy is going to be interesting, they've shown they can flash-mob, and they're starting to show some signs of staying power... if they can just manage to create a coherent message and drive the point home, they might actually do something, something that my generation has pretty much failed to.
I thought the promise of Republican politics was smaller government and less taxes
You need to learn to distinguish between politicians' advertisements and what they're actually selling.
I know the difference, and I don't vote based on what they promise, but there's rarely a "good" choice out there who has any chance of winning.
I always vote on the least bad one. We could improve the average, if everyone would do that.
Who knows, maybe candidates with good values and principles would start running, if we signaled that we're willing to elect them.
That's what I try to do, too, except for judges - who the hell knows anything about judges? and, still, there, if there's a female in the race I vote for the female judge, because, in my limited experience, female judges have consistently out-performed male judges in terms of thoroughness, fairness, and staying awake on the bench. It also is my little dig at myself, thinking that if I do something so arbitrary when I vote, what does the majority of the voting public do?
By the way, love your handle. I was The Black Falcon, back in the mid to late '80s... just recently the damn writers of "Flyboys" decided to create a fictitious villain pilot with the same name, glad I haven't used it in years.
The "free" company blackberry killed my Abacus, that and the fact that I had to charge the Abacus nightly. I did use palm pilots for several years, developed a couple of apps for them and even a plug-in module for the Visor, I still used the palm desktop software until a couple of years ago as a catch-all for addresses, passwords and the like. Developing for palm felt like I was a significant "first mover" in an exciting space, I've never been inspired to jump into the iOS app store and beg for the privilege of being one in a crowd of millions....
I bought a few bonds once (well, actually, Nielsen NetRatings bought them for me, but since I quit putting up with their snooper software more than seven years ago, I feel free to disclose that now...) and, returning to the point, I cashed them in some years later - the U.S. government paid that particular debt to me off, with interest. The fact that they paid me off by borrowing more money in what appears to be a ponzi scheme does not, by itself, make it unsustainable. It is conceivable that a return of fiscal responsibility will happen someday, if we manage to stay out of significant military adventures for a few decades, I believe it will.
If we don't, our credit will be measured against that of the rest of the world, as long as they are as screwed up as we are, it will all work out in the end.
When they can arbitrarily raise oil from $40 to $100 a barrel whenever they feel like it, I don't think it really matters....
I have always had a little soft spot of pride in the U.S. leadership that we're trading essentially worthless money for oil, while leaving our natural reserves relatively untapped (sure, we got the easy stuff, but there's lots left that hasn't been exploited yet.) And what to they do with their dollars, give them back to us for things like F-16s and Coco Chanel clothes... of course, I oversimplify, but on the whole, I'd say it's a good trade, and when _it_ hits the fan in a few decades, we still have our domestic oil reserves and they, quite simply, do not.
I don't think I've ever believed a rating higher than T-Bills, back to the previous statement, if the T-Bills are failing, anything else paid in dollars is equally screwed.
I don't think the cell phone risk is large, hell, I sit at my desk with a 1W transmitter 2' over my head for hours at a time, but it amuses me that after a lifetime of talking about it, nobody can quantify the risk.
Yes, and I have one, but I'm too damn cheap to pay for 3G and Skype points, and too damn lazy to figure out how to configure my bluetool earpiece to work with it. Also, iOS apps don't really fill my needs as well as Windows or even Linux would.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're still kind of missing the point of the hardware, however. From their about page:
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity (Registration Number 1129409) which exists to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing.
We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world.
Oh, I do get that. And, there's the other side of it too that simply making any kind of computer with some utility for such a shockingly low price will get them press coverage. I was completely jazzed about netbooks when they were announced for $99, but when they finally came out for $199, I ended up waiting and buying one around the $350 price point, and I am very happy with it. This feels like a similar evolution, except they appear to have more or less promoted the true release price point... we'll see if another batch of $25 units is even worth producing after this one, I suspect the majority of customers will want at least an ethernet port (although, following the commonly quoted logic, you could add a cheap ethernet port via the USB hub that you'll need to add to the one USB port $25 "solution"... I still prefer integrated solutions with well known driver configurations to having my own special combination of problems.)
Wow, why does this post have so many comments when it hasn't even been moderated? Oh wait, it's the first comment (ignoring the -1 Golden Girls lyrics [wonderful show, by the way] posted by an AC just above you). Never mind. Move along.
Seriously though, can something be done about the prevalence of posting in the first comment with a score >= 2? It buries high quality posts at the bottom, unmoderated and largely unseen. Would randomly reordering the top-level comments be so terrible?
It has always been thus... (and, thus, the glee of Frist posters) If I see a story that's 8 hours old or more, I rarely bother posting to it because nobody replies. I suppose you might convince the code monkeys for /. to give you a browsing option that shows something like the highest rated first, but if they pushed that to everybody, it would completely change the dynamic of how discussions evolve on /.
If I see a story that is "topheavy" like this one and I don't like what's at the top, I generally load all comments and start reading from the bottom up.
Nothing as "safe" as securities backed by the U.S. government. There may come a day when the U.S. government cannot pay its debts, but likely long before that day comes, the dollars they would be paid off in would be worthless too...
Personally, I have more faith in the U.S. government than, say, Apple, or WalMart.
Really? I'm not sure the rest of the world agrees with you lately. :P
The market is a funny thing, differential changes in opinion/confidence make dramatic swings in "value," and I guess T-Bills have their share of up and down - but, even if T-Bills grow slower than Apple and WalMart, they are less volatile, even lately. If I had to pick an investment vehicle for $10K that I _need_ to be worth at least $11K ten years from now, I'd still pick T-Bills. The broad market offers better growth, but less safety - or at least it has since the 1930s - and past performance is no guarantee blah blah blah.
All valid points, and thanks for the shopping list I may well use it, but, on the other hand, I can also acknowledge the validity of the lazy point of view that each of those mix and match parts has the potential to be a giant time sink and/or waste of money and effort. Especially when playing with wireless tech, things don't always work as well as they might in your particular installation. If a system of wireless components is pre-tested and demonstrated to work... there's value in that.
The form factor (and power factor) are both extremely attractive - I'm currently using Asus eee nettops for the purpose, and they're good, but the Pi, with a little more juice, could be better.
I still have a problem with the notion of people who don't have internet access "needing" a computer. If you don't have mains power, then, odds are, you don't have internet access either.
I made good use of computers before there was a useful internet, but I was in a distinct minority. The "general population" didn't care much about computers until the late '90s, even if they were forced to use them for work, and I can respect their disregard of the technology, it didn't to anything relevant for them, until it got connected.
Now, I can see how just about anybody, anywhere on the planet, can benefit from computer+internet access, as a library / teaching tool. Raspberry Pi seems to be catering to that distinct minority who can benefit from computer without internet access, and more power to them, but I feel like that minority is around 1 to 2 percent of the general population, and most people in the developed world who are in that minority will already have computer equipment stacked fairly high in the house (I know I spent my life savings of $700 for a 4MHz 8-bit machine with 16K of RAM).
10K in 1984-5? That's a private university.
Of course it is, but in my case the state ended up subsidizing tuition costs to bring them down to state levels - some bizarre program that ended a year or two after I graduated.
In other words: You have a good life because somebody else suffered, don't turn your back now.
I've often thought of it as the "I've got mine, now you f-off" mentality, with the implied "and I paid my dues to get it" in there, but somehow in my life, the people I know who have the most seem to have paid the least dues.
hang around maybe models C and D will do just that, for now A and B seem perfectly reasonable. besides dump javabloat and a machine with 256 megs does decent around the web anyway ... I do it every day
I have an iPad (not a wallet vote on my part, actually "won" it in a drawing I didn't even know I had entered), and I must say that it sucks not having flash work, especially for things that the kids use like spellingcity.com. I also have a PS3 and will not go into depth about the ways that web browsing sucks on it, even under (the now verboten) Linux. I have also used a PandaBoard as a "desktop" for a little while, I assume the Raspberry Pi will "feel" very similar - amazingly good, for what it is, but still lacking.
I totally intend to order a model B, and maybe get a few more of them if it works out as a replacement for any of my existing machines around the house.
The $35 version only has wired ethernet, and I suppose I should have been specific that I would like at least 512MB of RAM, preferably 2GB, especially when coping with a 700MHz ARM 11 as a processor. I guess I just want a "decent" web browsing capability instead of one that will always feel lame when compared to a normal desktop.
So WiFi, 2GB RAM, how about built-in monitor and keyboard? And of course a trackpad and some spare USB ports on the side. It should have a built in OS, and a long-life battery as part of it too.
If only someone made such a device.
And, you forgot, sold it for $25... I think you can actually get those on eBay, 3 year old notebooks are going cheap.
How many people that need a $25 computer will be worried...
How many people that "need" a $25 computer will be able to afford a monitor and keyboard, or electricity to drive it all?
Filling the "wants" of the people who can actually afford it is what marketing is about, otherwise you've got a noble product that nobody buys (i.e. a big waste of time and effort.)
I think the Pi will fill enough "wants" to not be a waste of time, I also think if they push just a little bit up-market, they can get a much larger volume, which should help with the production costs of the entire product line. The foundation appears to know what they are doing and don't need my 2 cents (or, rather, pence), but that's what /. is good for: spouting off opinions for no particular reason.
Funny, at my current job they knew I had never programmed for Nios, ATMega or PIC before they hired me, and I have done projects in all 3 in the last year. The four companies before that all basically asked me what I thought was the best solution to their problem and we went with that.
but the x86s of the world are brutally powerful.
I have not one, but two Asus eee nettop machines in the house, sometimes they feel brutal to work with, but never brutally powerful, more like brutal in an obtuse, Neanderthal way. They are impressively small, quiet and power efficient, and the two of them together cost less than the bottom of the line "mini" fruity option.
Yes, but you can plug in a wifi dongle onto the usb port and boom: wifi!
Can't do anything about the memory, but the thing isn't meant to replace our computers for web browsing. These have a much less general use.
I had an 8-bit machine with a cassette drive, I well remember "less general use" machines, I also know that 95%+ of what my kids do on computers, for school or fun, runs through the web browser.
I suppose if I provided them with lame hardware that is incapable of web browsing, they might be more inclined to learn to program it, but more likely they'll just seek out some other way to get on the web and ignore the lame toy.
Um, what. Do you really expect for the price of an Arduino?
I understand (at some levels) the concept of trying to create a computer for less than the cost of a textbook, but I'd much rather pay $45 and get WiFi, or even $55 and get WiFi and Bluetooth (or, gasp, even $75 and get a plastic case and power supply in the deal.) My vision for this thing is to hang it on the back of the living room TV and use it as a computer in the living room... I currently use an eee nettop for this, but something even smaller and less power consuming would be more attractive.
And, speaking to the foundation's goals, it would be a likely solution for my kids to have computers in their bedrooms, especially if it could be done without wires.
The $35 version only has wired ethernet, and I suppose I should have been specific that I would like at least 512MB of RAM, preferably 2GB, especially when coping with a 700MHz ARM 11 as a processor. I guess I just want a "decent" web browsing capability instead of one that will always feel lame when compared to a normal desktop.
The $25 pi is cool and all, but I'd find it much more interesting with WiFi and a bit more RAM.
Concur with parent, cheap works, whatever I have used in the past (half a dozen varieties, at least) has always "just worked" apparently it's not too hard to do.
On the flipside, if I were designing a project, I'd lean toward Flash over EEPROM, or, what I have done a few times, a RAM over PROM solution (bootstrap in the ROM, but load the dev code to RAM for testing, when the code matures, drop it into the ROM (one-time programmable chips are usually 1/10th the cost of a "windowed" part, or less) and leave the hook in to be able to load new test code up into RAM for further development.
I'm 45ish and I suffer from tl;dr pretty badly too.. I _can_ read a novel, or at least I used to read them before I had kids... the thing that puts me off of a screen full of text is when it's some idiot's rant instead of an actual decent piece of writing, you know, like Hunter S. Thompson used to put out, I could read several pages of Thompson without getting bored...
Occupy is going to be interesting, they've shown they can flash-mob, and they're starting to show some signs of staying power... if they can just manage to create a coherent message and drive the point home, they might actually do something, something that my generation has pretty much failed to.
I thought the promise of Republican politics was smaller government and less taxes
You need to learn to distinguish between politicians' advertisements and what they're actually selling.
I know the difference, and I don't vote based on what they promise, but there's rarely a "good" choice out there who has any chance of winning.
I always vote on the least bad one. We could improve the average, if everyone would do that.
Who knows, maybe candidates with good values and principles would start running, if we signaled that we're willing to elect them.
That's what I try to do, too, except for judges - who the hell knows anything about judges? and, still, there, if there's a female in the race I vote for the female judge, because, in my limited experience, female judges have consistently out-performed male judges in terms of thoroughness, fairness, and staying awake on the bench. It also is my little dig at myself, thinking that if I do something so arbitrary when I vote, what does the majority of the voting public do?
By the way, love your handle. I was The Black Falcon, back in the mid to late '80s... just recently the damn writers of "Flyboys" decided to create a fictitious villain pilot with the same name, glad I haven't used it in years.
The "free" company blackberry killed my Abacus, that and the fact that I had to charge the Abacus nightly. I did use palm pilots for several years, developed a couple of apps for them and even a plug-in module for the Visor, I still used the palm desktop software until a couple of years ago as a catch-all for addresses, passwords and the like. Developing for palm felt like I was a significant "first mover" in an exciting space, I've never been inspired to jump into the iOS app store and beg for the privilege of being one in a crowd of millions....
I bought a few bonds once (well, actually, Nielsen NetRatings bought them for me, but since I quit putting up with their snooper software more than seven years ago, I feel free to disclose that now...) and, returning to the point, I cashed them in some years later - the U.S. government paid that particular debt to me off, with interest. The fact that they paid me off by borrowing more money in what appears to be a ponzi scheme does not, by itself, make it unsustainable. It is conceivable that a return of fiscal responsibility will happen someday, if we manage to stay out of significant military adventures for a few decades, I believe it will.
If we don't, our credit will be measured against that of the rest of the world, as long as they are as screwed up as we are, it will all work out in the end.
When they can arbitrarily raise oil from $40 to $100 a barrel whenever they feel like it, I don't think it really matters....
I have always had a little soft spot of pride in the U.S. leadership that we're trading essentially worthless money for oil, while leaving our natural reserves relatively untapped (sure, we got the easy stuff, but there's lots left that hasn't been exploited yet.) And what to they do with their dollars, give them back to us for things like F-16s and Coco Chanel clothes... of course, I oversimplify, but on the whole, I'd say it's a good trade, and when _it_ hits the fan in a few decades, we still have our domestic oil reserves and they, quite simply, do not.
putting their money into something higher rated.
I don't think I've ever believed a rating higher than T-Bills, back to the previous statement, if the T-Bills are failing, anything else paid in dollars is equally screwed.
I don't think the cell phone risk is large, hell, I sit at my desk with a 1W transmitter 2' over my head for hours at a time, but it amuses me that after a lifetime of talking about it, nobody can quantify the risk.
Yes, and I have one, but I'm too damn cheap to pay for 3G and Skype points, and too damn lazy to figure out how to configure my bluetool earpiece to work with it. Also, iOS apps don't really fill my needs as well as Windows or even Linux would.