Raspberry PI

Thewaylander

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17190918

Been excited about this for a while now, and the release is rocking can't get it anywhere as its crashed there sales sites
Gonna keep trying again all day today figers corssed now.

Daz555

All 10,000 have gone apparently. I have registered interest with RS Components as I'd like to pre-order one from the next batch.

Thewaylander

Its not gonna be batch production anymore, The foundation has started production through the suppliers so its supply on demand so hopefull yoru wait shouldn't be so bad :P

isn't RS a business supplier only though? or am i just dribbling?

nicklouse

Thewaylander wrote:

Its not gonna be batch production anymore, The foundation has started production through the suppliers so its supply on demand so hopefull yoru wait shouldn't be so bad :P

isn't RS a business supplier only though? or am i just dribbling?

nope on-line and retail
http://uk.rs-online.com/web/?cm_mmc=UK- ... 3wodtzXCWQ
originally yes trade only.

Thewaylander

now it's out there maybe we can get some real IT teachers

I remeber starting A'level It then when i reliased i knew more than one of my teachers i gave up and swapped to electronics, studying farming milk systems was a joke with minimal coding development.

YeehaaMcgee

Thewaylander wrote:

now it's out there maybe we can get some real IT teachers

I remeber starting A'level It then when i reliased i knew more than one of my teachers i gave up and swapped to electronics, studying farming milk systems was a joke with minimal coding development.

There's something I don't quite understand in the BBC report. How is this meant to help teach children how to code?
The vast majority of British schoolkids have access to a computer of some description already, and Microsoft already offers the express editions of it's awesome visual studio software for free, and provides comprehensive information.
If schools want to ignore Microsoft's offerings, then there's plenty of free and open source solutions already available on Linux. (There's probably free IDEs on Windows too, but seriously, when Visual studio can be freely downloaded, why even bother looking elsewhere?)

So we have kids, we have access to computers, and we have development and compiling software. What does the Raspberry Pi bring to the table that wasn't there before?
We still need knowledgeable teachers and a curriculum that supports kids learning to code.
As it stands, I.T. teachers are considered something of a joke, probably because of the limited scope of "I.T." teaching in schools. What we really need is to change the curriculum and draw in more talented teachers, not a cheap Linux box.

I was kinda lucky in school. For the first half of high school, we had a moron teaching I.T. and we ran rings around him, running Quake servers on his own machine where he couldn't find it and so on. But then he got the boot and we had a great teacher replace him, who insisted on teaching us the fundamentals of programming, even though it wasn't actually part of our "coursework".
Sure, his chosen languages of COBOL, Pascal and FORTRAN were archaic, but they still helped teach useful and important coding principles.

Thewaylander

YeehaaMcgee wrote:

Thewaylander wrote:

now it's out there maybe we can get some real IT teachers

I remeber starting A'level It then when i reliased i knew more than one of my teachers i gave up and swapped to electronics, studying farming milk systems was a joke with minimal coding development.

There's something I don't quite understand in the BBC report. How is this meant to help teach children how to code?
The vast majority of British schoolkids have access to a computer of some description already, and Microsoft already offers the express editions of it's awesome visual studio software for free, and provides comprehensive information.
If schools want to ignore Microsoft's offerings, then there's plenty of free and open source solutions already available on Linux. (There's probably free IDEs on Windows too, but seriously, when Visual studio can be freely downloaded, why even bother looking elsewhere?)

So we have kids, we have access to computers, and we have development and compiling software. What does the Raspberry Pi bring to the table that wasn't there before?
We still need knowledgeable teachers and a curriculum that supports kids learning to code.
As it stands, I.T. teachers are considered something of a joke, probably because of the limited scope of "I.T." teaching in schools. What we really need is to change the curriculum and draw in more talented teachers, not a cheap Linux box.

I was kinda lucky in school. For the first half of high school, we had a moron teaching I.T. and we ran rings around him, running Quake servers on his own machine where he couldn't find it and so on. But then he got the boot and we had a great teacher replace him, who insisted on teaching us the fundamentals of programming, even though it wasn't actually part of our "coursework".
Sure, his chosen languages of COBOL, Pascal and FORTRAN were archaic, but they still helped teach useful and important coding principles.

it's basically cheap all in one box, and the linux distro with it come with programming languages already assecable much like the old BBC/Speccy so you can easily begin to program

i mean go look at the price of visual pascal on a pc? I mean most kids have a console but its there parents Pc, this any kid can buy i mean at £21 thats amazing :)its gives accessability, also think how expesive having enough computes for a school is for development but this? bargain its mostly financially driven, buts its also an accessability factor

YeehaaMcgee

Thewaylander wrote:

YeehaaMcgee wrote:

Thewaylander wrote:

now it's out there maybe we can get some real IT teachers

I remeber starting A'level It then when i reliased i knew more than one of my teachers i gave up and swapped to electronics, studying farming milk systems was a joke with minimal coding development.

There's something I don't quite understand in the BBC report. How is this meant to help teach children how to code?
The vast majority of British schoolkids have access to a computer of some description already, and Microsoft already offers the express editions of it's awesome visual studio software for free, and provides comprehensive information.
If schools want to ignore Microsoft's offerings, then there's plenty of free and open source solutions already available on Linux. (There's probably free IDEs on Windows too, but seriously, when Visual studio can be freely downloaded, why even bother looking elsewhere?)

So we have kids, we have access to computers, and we have development and compiling software. What does the Raspberry Pi bring to the table that wasn't there before?
We still need knowledgeable teachers and a curriculum that supports kids learning to code.
As it stands, I.T. teachers are considered something of a joke, probably because of the limited scope of "I.T." teaching in schools. What we really need is to change the curriculum and draw in more talented teachers, not a cheap Linux box.

I was kinda lucky in school. For the first half of high school, we had a moron teaching I.T. and we ran rings around him, running Quake servers on his own machine where he couldn't find it and so on. But then he got the boot and we had a great teacher replace him, who insisted on teaching us the fundamentals of programming, even though it wasn't actually part of our "coursework".
Sure, his chosen languages of COBOL, Pascal and FORTRAN were archaic, but they still helped teach useful and important coding principles.

it's basically cheap all in one box, and the linux distro with it come with programming languages already assecable much like the old BBC/Speccy so you can easily begin to program

i mean go look at the price of visual pascal on a pc? I mean most kids have a console but its there parents Pc, this any kid can buy i mean at £21 thats amazing :)its gives accessability, also think how expesive having enough computes for a school is for development but this? bargain its mostly financially driven, buts its also an accessability factor

But why bother with visual Pascal, when Visual studio is free, and supports c++, as well as MS's C#, Visual Basic etc etc.
Kids already have access to the computers and the programming tools. It's the teachers that are lacking.

Thewaylander

Thing is they don't alot of homes do not even really have a pc now, there expensive they have consoles and so on, And a full blown Pc is beyond the house holds ability to purchase.

Plus its partially marketing its there to encourage them, as a devloper platform which means the sharing community will be huge, and sharing is the easiest well to learn trust me the whole package holds together

bompington

Thewaylander wrote:

Thing is they don't alot of homes do not even really have a pc now, there expensive they have consoles and so on, And a full blown Pc is beyond the house holds ability to purchase.

Plus its partially marketing its there to encourage them, as a devloper platform which means the sharing community will be huge, and sharing is the easiest well to learn trust me the whole package holds together

The proportion of UK households without a PC is around 20%, true, but how many of these are going to rush out and buy a Pi? Oh, and a KSM to go with it, which will bump the price up a bit.

That reservation aside, I really hope it catches on - the way that the whole IT industry is becoming a branch of the fashion and entertainment industries is a bit of a disappointment to say the least: we are encouraged to look down on all the sad geeks while cooing over the products that they make possible - except that "they" is more and more going to mean "cleverer, harder-working people abroad" unless the decline in IT is reversed. So if the Pi (I'm sure all proper geeks will want to call it the π, just 'cos we can) can go some way to making it cool to be a geek, or at least to actually create something on a computer rather being a passive consumer*, then great.




*Personal bugbear: I want to replace my laptop soon, but believe it or not, you simply cannot buy a laptop anywhere with a screen with as high a resolution as the one I bought 9 years ago - 1920X1200. Why? because the manufacturers assume that everyone just wants to watch movies on them, so they all come with 1920X1080 to match the 16:9 ratio movies come in.
So Moore's law says that the processor on a new laptop should be about 64 times more powerful, but the screen has 10% less pixels :-(

YeehaaMcgee

bompington wrote:

*Personal bugbear: I want to replace my laptop soon, but believe it or not, you simply cannot buy a laptop anywhere with a screen with as high a resolution as the one I bought 9 years ago - 1920X1200. Why? because the manufacturers assume that everyone just wants to watch movies on them, so they all come with 1920X1080 to match the 16:9 ratio movies come in.

Ugh, I know. Same thing with desktop monitors. At least we can still find them though, if we look hard enough and spend enough, but I suspect you might be straight out of luck on the laptop front.

As curious as the Raspberry Pi is (god damn I want one, but I don't know why), I really don't see these claims of them pushing forward a generation of programmers bearing any fruit.
I live in an area with one of the lowest average household incomes in the UK, and still, everyone seems to have a laptop. The UK is not a third world country.

Although, that does raise an interesting point. Maybe in third world or developing countries, the Pi will actually be used for such goals.
But, with consumers in this country replacing their laptops and computers at a frankly alarming rate, wouldn't it be prudent to use those old machines to distribute to schools in poorer areas or developing nations, to teach them how to use and program computers, instead of throwing them in a landfill?

El Zomba

The proportion of UK households without a PC is around 20%, true, but how many of these are going to rush out and buy a Pi? Oh, and a KSM to go with it, which will bump the price up a bit.

The whole 'cheap computer for the kids' is nothing but marketing gumph, to be honest. As you point out, if a household can't afford a 'proper' PC, then how is going to be able to afford the nice HD telly to plug the Pi into, etc.

Also, just out of interest, where did the '20% of households don't have a PC' bit come from? I'd guess that while there might be a ring of truth to it, the 20% is more likely to be the elderly rather than young families.

Nah, the Raspberry Pi's niche will be found once people realise that for a little over £20 and the cost of an external Hard Drive, you can get yourself a nice little media server. That's probably why I would buy one.

Thewaylander

El Zomba wrote:

The proportion of UK households without a PC is around 20%, true, but how many of these are going to rush out and buy a Pi? Oh, and a KSM to go with it, which will bump the price up a bit.

The whole 'cheap computer for the kids' is nothing but marketing gumph, to be honest. As you point out, if a household can't afford a 'proper' PC, then how is going to be able to afford the nice HD telly to plug the Pi into, etc.

Also, just out of interest, where did the '20% of households don't have a PC' bit come from? I'd guess that while there might be a ring of truth to it, the 20% is more likely to be the elderly rather than young families.

Nah, the Raspberry Pi's niche will be found once people realise that for a little over £20 and the cost of an external Hard Drive, you can get yourself a nice little media server. That's probably why I would buy one.

HD telly? its not only HDMI output if you look jeese

I honestly think your wrong with it being nich especially if you go read up on the demand currently, ts already huge, and is getting badned around alot for the new curriculum for IT

Thewaylander

I think what i will have going for it Yee is a very strong open source development community which is a struggling community on the PC,

Alot more sharing and development will make it an exceleent teaching tool.

cooldad

I quite fancy one just for fun - cheap enough. Add an old monitor - probably free, cheap mouse and keyboard and you could surf BR for £25.


Which frankly is more than it's worth.

Thewaylander

bompington wrote:

Thewaylander wrote:

Thing is they don't alot of homes do not even really have a pc now, there expensive they have consoles and so on, And a full blown Pc is beyond the house holds ability to purchase.

Plus its partially marketing its there to encourage them, as a devloper platform which means the sharing community will be huge, and sharing is the easiest well to learn trust me the whole package holds together

The proportion of UK households without a PC is around 20%, true, but how many of these are going to rush out and buy a Pi? Oh, and a KSM to go with it, which will bump the price up a bit.

That reservation aside, I really hope it catches on - the way that the whole IT industry is becoming a branch of the fashion and entertainment industries is a bit of a disappointment to say the least: we are encouraged to look down on all the sad geeks while cooing over the products that they make possible - except that "they" is more and more going to mean "cleverer, harder-working people abroad" unless the decline in IT is reversed. So if the Pi (I'm sure all proper geeks will want to call it the π, just 'cos we can) can go some way to making it cool to be a geek, or at least to actually create something on a computer rather being a passive consumer*, then great.




*Personal bugbear: I want to replace my laptop soon, but believe it or not, you simply cannot buy a laptop anywhere with a screen with as high a resolution as the one I bought 9 years ago - 1920X1200. Why? because the manufacturers assume that everyone just wants to watch movies on them, so they all come with 1920X1080 to match the 16:9 ratio movies come in.
So Moore's law says that the processor on a new laptop should be about 64 times more powerful, but the screen has 10% less pixels :-(

Hmm interested to know how many of those people have apples,

This is not a dig of apple's now so take it as its meant, the reason apple are lvoed by there users are they work, and thats largely due to most of the development being done b apple, or heavily checked in by them if you see what i mean, this makes a supperbly stable set up. Bt its a complete pain in the bum to develop on, and the development community is really limited(no support).

I think the great idea behind this is a cheap accessable devloper community, people who will make alot of mistakes and talk on forums about solutions and so on, this is how some of the best software developers progress!

El Zomba

Thewaylander wrote:

HD telly? its not only HDMI output if you look jeese

I honestly think your wrong with it being nich especially if you go read up on the demand currently, ts already huge, and is getting badned around alot for the new curriculum for IT

Just had a look at spec on Wikipedia, saw that it has composite video. I stand corrected. That said, anyone who uses a PC plugged into a telly with composite video will have to learn to live with eye-strain after a while.

As far as demand goes, I know that it's sold out, but it still seems like too much of a curio to me. It's a great idea and a great marketing ploy (it reminds me of the old 'it'll help me with my homework' arguement so many of us used to get our hands on a computer when we were younger), but without some form of casing, are they going to last that long in the hands of schoolchildren? Are they the property of the school, handed back and forth between yeargroups like French textbooks? Who gets the Raspberry Pi with a boabie drawn on it in tippex? Once the inital novelty has worn off, will they be robust enough to endure children, or will they break and not get replaced due to costs?

YeehaaMcgee

Thewaylander wrote:

I think what i will have going for it Yee is a very strong open source development community which is a struggling community on the PC,

Alot more sharing and development will make it an exceleent teaching tool.

Right, so what it's got going for it, in essence, it Linux?
And Linux runs on any Pc, and people already have PCs?

Right, I'm still not with you on this.
There's far more developers on windows than any other platform, quite possibly several orders of magnitude more. And you think that the way to push programming is to get kids into Linux? When the vast majority already have the tools necessary to start programming?
I'm still adamant that the education (and possibly enthusiasm) is what's lacking, not the hardware. You've still yet to give me a compelling reason to believe that the Pi will suddenly "enable" a load of programmers.

It reeks of the typical Linux attitude that Linux is somehow a more "real" OS than anything else.

I honestly think your wrong with it being nich especially if you go read up on the demand currently, ts already huge, and is getting badned around alot for the new curriculum for IT

Well, there wasn't much supply to meet the demand, was there? I think the initial run was 10,000 units, if I'm not mistaken.
As for schools switching to Pi to teach programming, I honestly think that is a truly misguided idea, but hey, it's getting a little buzz in the press right now so it must be good eh?

Thewaylander

YeehaaMcgee wrote:

Thewaylander wrote:

I think what i will have going for it Yee is a very strong open source development community which is a struggling community on the PC,

Alot more sharing and development will make it an exceleent teaching tool.

Right, so what it's got going for it, in essence, it Linux?
And Linux runs on any Pc, and people already have PCs?

Right, I'm still not with you on this.
There's far more developers on windows than any other platform, quite possibly several orders of magnitude more. And you think that the way to push programming is to get kids into Linux? When the vast majority already have the tools necessary to start programming?
I'm still adamant that the education (and possibly enthusiasm) is what's lacking, not the hardware. You've still yet to give me a compelling reason to believe that the Pi will suddenly "enable" a load of programmers.

It reeks of the typical Linux attitude that Linux is somehow a more "real" OS than anything else.

here it is ready....


£21



bargain

YeehaaMcgee

Thewaylander wrote:

here it is ready....


£21



bargain

But people by and large already have computers, and access to free programming tools, at ZERO cost. Yet they're not learning to program.

Thewaylander

El Zomba wrote:

Thewaylander wrote:

HD telly? its not only HDMI output if you look jeese

I honestly think your wrong with it being nich especially if you go read up on the demand currently, ts already huge, and is getting badned around alot for the new curriculum for IT

Just had a look at spec on Wikipedia, saw that it has composite video. I stand corrected. That said, anyone who uses a PC plugged into a telly with composite video will have to learn to live with eye-strain after a while.

As far as demand goes, I know that it's sold out, but it still seems like too much of a curio to me. It's a great idea and a great marketing ploy (it reminds me of the old 'it'll help me with my homework' arguement so many of us used to get our hands on a computer when we were younger), but without some form of casing, are they going to last that long in the hands of schoolchildren? Are they the property of the school, handed back and forth between yeargroups like French textbooks? Who gets the Raspberry Pi with a boabie drawn on it in tippex? Once the inital novelty has worn off, will they be robust enough to endure children, or will they break and not get replaced due to costs?

its a non profit organisation actaully

Also in a few months there will be a cased version, available for the same price. It's just been them trying to get it ready for production in a decent time scale.

YeehaaMcgee

Thewaylander wrote:

its a non profit organisation actaully

What's that got to do with anything?
Also, why bring Apple into this earlier?

valheru

I'm not sure what is the point of encouraging people to programme, when the UK is hell bent on exporting it all to India. This is not a good career choice to be encouraging.

El Zomba

valheru wrote:

I'm not sure what is the point of encouraging people to programme, when the UK is hell bent on exporting it all to India. This is not a good career choice to be encouraging.

Export the Pi out to India too. Job done.

Thewaylander wrote:

its a non profit organisation actaully

Also in a few months there will be a cased version, available for the same price. It's just been them trying to get it ready for production in a decent time scale.

I was thinking about the cost to schools, not the manufacturer. Even with cases, my point about the tippex boabie still applies (probably moreso).

Thewaylander

valheru wrote:

I'm not sure what is the point of encouraging people to programme, when the UK is hell bent on exporting it all to India. This is not a good career choice to be encouraging.

Actually its a great time,

The whole ARM arcitecture is british in design and some of the great developers are in ireland for instance google so its not awful at all :S the problem is we just have a spot of no one with the relevant skillls,

Apple was brought into it by me just to point the ease of development on some platforms compared to others that make up the quoted figure.

I think it will allow schools to have alot of useable hardware for kids to work on, I was lucky at the school i was in that it had a lot of IT from funding won, but not all schools have this and it does provide a cheap cheap way of getting an programming lab set up

Yee most development packages i can find cost a fortune, what free one's are about with a decent amount of community support for the begginer?(this actually a real question as i'm trying to get back in to programming but it's been a loooong time).

But at the end of it, it's all opinion we will see what happens over the next year or so, i personally am very excited. so hopefull some other excited geeks come in and have a gossip too

valheru

El Zomba wrote:

Export the Pi out to India too. Job done.

Lol!

valheru

Thewaylander wrote:

valheru wrote:

I'm not sure what is the point of encouraging people to programme, when the UK is hell bent on exporting it all to India. This is not a good career choice to be encouraging.

Actually its a great time,

The whole ARM arcitecture is british in design and some of the great developers are in ireland for instance google so its not awful at all :S the problem is we just have a spot of no one with the relevant skillls,

Apple was brought into it by me just to point the ease of development on some platforms compared to others that make up the quoted figure.

I think it will allow schools to have alot of useable hardware for kids to work on, I was lucky at the school i was in that it had a lot of IT from funding won, but not all schools have this and it does provide a cheap cheap way of getting an programming lab set up

Yee most development packages i can find cost a fortune, what free one's are about with a decent amount of community support for the begginer?(this actually a real question as i'm trying to get back in to programming but it's been a loooong time).

But at the end of it, it's all opinion we will see what happens over the next year or so, i personally am very excited. so hopefull some other excited geeks come in and have a gossip too

Wow - if you think objective-c gives ease of development you must be stuck in 80s

valheru

oops - thats what you were saying!!

El Zomba

Thewaylander wrote:

Yee most development packages i can find cost a fortune, what free one's are about with a decent amount of community support for the begginer?(this actually a real question as i'm trying to get back in to programming but it's been a loooong time).

What are you looking to learn? I'm learning a lot of LAMP-related stuff for work, and am getting by with Notepad++, WAMP and Tizag. Always looking to branch out though, so I'd be interested in finding out what else is available for free too.

YeehaaMcgee

Thewaylander wrote:

Yee most development packages i can find cost a fortune, what free one's are about with a decent amount of community support for the begginer?(this actually a real question as i'm trying to get back in to programming but it's been a loooong time).

Visual studio express.
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/e ... ns/express
The visual studio IDE doesn't have to compile to windows runtimes, so you can use it in any way you wish.
MS has invested craploads in getting new programmers, programming. And most of it is available completely free of charge. Check out
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/bb188199

Or if you want to get started in game development,
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/aa937791

If Linux is your bag, search for IDE in any repository, there's certainly no shortage of free and open source tools for linux based developers either. But personally, I reckon Visual Studio is the top of the tree. It is to programming, what photoshop is to image editing. And Visual studio express is like Photoshop Elements. If you get what I mean.

addivllangirb

El Zomba wrote:

Thewaylander wrote:

Yee most development packages i can find cost a fortune, what free one's are about with a decent amount of community support for the begginer?(this actually a real question as i'm trying to get back in to programming but it's been a loooong time).

What are you looking to learn? I'm learning a lot of LAMP-related stuff for work, and am getting by with Notepad++, WAMP and Tizag. Always looking to branch out though, so I'd be interested in finding out what else is available for free too.

Full Visual Studio 2010 is free if you look in the correct place (From Microsoft and Fully Legit) - I'll find a link in a second...