I dunno, it's a tiny little goonbox with crapass specs. That's crippled in my book.
Well, that's in the eye of the beholder, and in the end it depends on what you are going to use it for. I'm sure it would have enough horsepower for you to troll amiga.org with it, for example.
Right. However, I think there are better solutions. Ignorant parents suck. Especially since most parents suck at computers and screw them up (and then blame the kid who barely uses it)
I'm glad you are able to make legitimate points and back them up with hard data. I see that in your eyes both parents and children are stupid and ignorant, but in real life the situation is a bit more complex. Naturally, you don't want your 12 year old child to experiment freely with your computer. If he has his own computer, you probably don't want him to mess about too much with that either, because in the end you'll have to fix it if things **** up.
Please, lets drop the condescending HURHUR you dunno nothin' crap. It's getting none of us anywhere.
If someone's talking out of his ass, making invalid assumptions about everything, I'll point it out. It's hard to approach you in any way that' not condescending because most everything you say makes you look like an angry 15 year old.
I use linux daily (Zenwalk and Fedora). I've even got a frigging Minix install still. Mono blows. The good form of C# is all the M$ related nonsense.
Frankly, it's beyond me why anyone would like to do C#/.NET stuff in Linux, but maybe you could point out what particularly blows about Mono. It's not a 100% implementation of .NET, but it's no less than C# for you.
Plus this *is* all Linux stuff. Linux is not really user friendly, especially to kids who generally have short attention spans and are impatient.
Totally distribution dependent. Tried Android? It's not like Fedora is black magic either.
I was under the impression these things came with goofy little dumbed down Linux OS's that aren't exactly full of all the features you'd want, out of box. I don't expect a little kid to be savvy enough to start adding things he needs/wants to one of these. Nor do I expect most staff at a school. I drew this conclusion from reading the wikipedia entry AND the RPi wiki. It sounds like they've got Linux going on it, but it isn't full-blown. As expected from some crap running off an SD card.
Before you start talking about full blown/not full blown, you need to set the definitions straight. The distribution for the RPi is full blown in the sense that you can compile and run software freely as you would any other distribution. It's NOT full blown in the sense that... well, in that you'll never acknowledge that it is, no matter what anyone says.
Oh, and on one hand you are whining about how Linux isn't user friendly, and on the other hand you are whining about the distribution being "dumbed down." Make up your mind. If you can't follow your own train of thought, maybe you should continue trolling some other day. Your arguments so far have been based on ambiguations, misunderstandings, fallacious conclusions and outright lies.
But, what you are saying then is, these can run the same full blown Fedora install that I have installed right here? With all the fixins?
Get a big enough SD card and make a big enough swap file; I'm sure you could. The RPi distribution probably has a subset of the software you get out of the box with the official desktop PC distribution, but it is Fedora nonetheless.
and still, it's a fairly low powered machine. I sure hope the thing is snappy. I remember putting Fedora on a 1ghz 256mb machine, and even with XFCE, the thing was pretty damn sluggish.
We'll have to wait and see, I guess. Personally, I don't use desktop environments at all, and simple/friendly WMs like Openbox run happily without.
Everyone is approaching this from a seasoned developer standpoint. Try putting yourself in a clueless little kids shoes. These aren't the PROGRAMMING YOUR COMPUTER IN BASIC days where a happy little computer cartoon on the cover tells you all about how to PEEK and POKE and make pacman in a weekend.
This is a cluster****. It's modern computing.
Generally speaking, 12 year olds are quick learners when given the right motivation. I understand that you don't think highly of children at all, but 12 year olds are close to the peak of being able to pick up new skills. Even if 90% won't have any use of it, the $35 price makes it more worth a shot than ever before.
