Raspberry PI

[commodorejohn]

Some people have even said that children aren't that interested in programming and for a reason, they aren't bothered with what's underneath or inside a machine they just want to use it and play. Time will tell...

That's a bit of a sweeping assumption - programming is taught so little and so poorly below BA-level college classes that it's difficult to say whether kids actually aren't interested or simply have never had a latent interest properly fed. It's like saying kids aren't interested in reading when all you've got is a shelf full of accounting manuals.

[commodorejohn]

You left off the .01 final cost of the phone but regardless, "Ho hum," because there are plenty of people walking around with devices more powerful than this in their pockets.

Cheap doesn't make it awesome.

No, but cheap makes it accessible, and that's entirely the stated point of the project. Tablets and smartphones are designed for media cattle to click through movies and Facebook, not to allow kids to learn programming. For that purpose your average tablet is about as useful as an Etch-A-Sketch, and quite a bit pricier.

[commodorejohn]

The Daddy is partially right, for sure on the marketing.  I know this is a community used to dropping three figures on something as banal as a network card or a USB card, but I'll throw 35 bucks at all sorts of things way before I'll throw a hundred.  I'll take risk with a 35 dollar thing that I wouldn't for 125.  I don't think it will be a great XBMC platform, but I DO think it will be a great platform for a low power controller for homebrew projects.

I agree. My "serious consideration" range is somewhere around $50-60, so the Pi falls well within the range of "eh, why not" while the Efika (in either form) is something I'd want to budget for.

Use-wise, I've been toying with the idea of hobby OS development for a while, so I think (now that they've begun seriously releasing development information) that this might be a good platform to experiment with that on...

[commodorejohn]

It's about as real as the 8088s and 286s I was learning QBasic programming on back in high school while the rest of the world had moved on to Pentiums and more powerful programming languages.  Might as well give them what the real world is using.

Feh.

If you can't do it on 700MHz and 256MB of RAM, it isn't worth doing.

[commodorejohn]

If they have an HDMI capable display and no personal computer, their family needs to rethink priorities and get them into technology instead of HD television.

It's DVI via HDMI, you can hook it to basically any LCD made in the past seven years with a $5 adapter. I find DVI monitors in piles at the recycle center, for God's sake, it's not like you're required to shell out for a wall TV.

if you can't do it in assembly, it isn't worth doing.

I would point out that there's nothing you can't do in assembler.

now , really, its 2012.  This kind of thinking is just stupid.  Stop being stupid and get with the times.

I think not. The best thing that could happen to software right now is a new generation of programmers who learned on a machine with 1/8 to 1/4 the power of base-level desktop systems. It's like all the demoscene coders who went on to be game programmers - those skills at doing lots with little stay with you the rest of your life.

[commodorejohn]

and John, what you're saying is we should force kids to learn assembly.  I agree.

Except, we'd have like 3 successful students out of 200.

I never said any such thing. I just said that people who bag on assembly language would do well to remember that ultimately every single toolchain and library for every single high-level language is only a tool to write assembler for people who can't or won't do it themselves.

[commodorejohn]

Trying to teach programming to kids is a waste of time. The geek kids don't need incompetent teachers to show them the ropes and the non geek kids don't give a damn and won't get anything out of it any way. The raspberry pi doesn't change anything, and kids aren't hurting for computers anyway, they're surrounded by them.

Programming itself isn't all that particularly useful of a skill for the vast majority of people and society isn't suffering from a lack of computer programmers. The raspberry pi is a cool toy for geeks but I think it's usefulness in an educational setting for k-12 is massively overblown.

Bull. Programming is a great skill to have whether or not you use it on a daily basis or in a professional context; it's an excellent key to a real understanding of computers and how they work, and the more ubiquitous computers become in every aspect of life, the more useful that understanding will be.

[commodorejohn]

I saw more interesting stuff in BASIC from Mr. Wizzard on TV and Compute! magazines. In the 6th grade we had to do some LOGO stuff and the teacher didn't like messing with the computers so she just took us out on the playground and made every kid a turtle and had us walk the programs out in the sand. Don't even need a computer for that kind of stuff. Anybody who ever played a board game or knitted a scarf has done more logic than what a school child will ever see in a classroom. Kids will learn more about logic in a math class than they'll ever get in a few stupid programming tricks lessons in computer lab.

That's a problem of bad curricula and bad tools, though, not a problem with the concept. I don't know how the Pi effort is going to work out, curriculum-wise, but I will say that while Python isn't my language of choice, it's certainly not LOGO or '80s ROM BASIC.

[commodorejohn]

Buhh, "expected to ship April 3..." Oh well, as long as it gets here...

[commodorejohn]

Very good question. They've got a custom Fedora spin for it which I'd bet they've been tweaking, I haven't looked at it though. Honestly I'm much more interested in running Haiku or RISC OS or something on it than another Linux distro...

[commodorejohn]

Problems *will* arise however, if you want something close to what could be called a full, usable desktop environment, there is no magic way of circumventing missing HW resources.

Well, there's always writing tighter code, but the Linux folks don't really seem to be interested in that anymore...

WinXP in fisherprice mode

:lol: I've always called it "Windows for Toddlers," since it's got bright colors and no sharp corners...good to see someone agrees First thing I turn off on every new XP install...

[commodorejohn]

640K ought to be enough for anybody!

Indeed it ought!

[commodorejohn]

Did you guys ever figure anything to do with these things? I just ordered a 512meg Chip RAM version...

So far I really just want to try RiscOS...

Mine got kind of shuffled aside as I got my PDP-11 pretty much right afterward...been meaning to get back to it. I still need to try Raspbian and see if that's better performing than the unoptimized Linux builds, and I have wanted to give RiscOS a shot, too...

[commodorejohn]

I can't have something like a PDP-11, it takes too much power and probably produces a bunch of heat than my AC would then have to cool... PI is more my budget.

I don't know for sure; I've asked some of the minicomputer fanatics over on the Vintage Computer Forums about power draw before, and they weren't sure of anything conclusive. Later models at least are probably better (and the PDP-11 was always a mid-range sort of machine anyway, compared to the PDP-10 - which had power supplies so inefficient that CompuServe, which used a bunch of them, had to design a replacement!)

In any case, mine is not one of the classic fridge-sized minicomputer models; it's a microcomputer version (or at least inasmuch as you can say that a tower case the size of a small radiator is "micro.") The power supply's only 320W; I'm pretty sure my P4 gaming rig uses more than that. Budget's still an issue, though, since DEC gear of any kind is prey for collectors and service agencies trying to maintain ancient field installations alike; mine was a very lucky score at the recycle center, which only wanted scrap value for it - followed by an extremely lucky score of a bunch of upgrade parts from another machine that they were obligated to scrap but let me pull the boards from.

I kinda would like a full-fledged minicomputer with a proper lights-and-switches front panel, but as I have neither the space nor the budget, my MicroPDP-11'll do just fine for now

[commodorejohn]

PDP-1 anyone?

Oh, I wish. Got to see one of the last remaining units in existence when I visited the Computer History Museum, but sadly I didn't get to see a demo. Maybe when I go back to California this Christmas...

I don't suppose you would leave the PDP running 24/7, then then again, that's probably what its designed for...

It is, but then that's in an industrial or business environment where your power budget is already high. For me, it's no skin off my nose, as my utilities are included in the rent But I don't anyway, as the fans are quite loud and it's a small apartment; I only left it on overnight the once (when I was imaging the hard drive - over the serial port, joy,) and that was plenty. Though it doesn't actually seem to run hot, anyway, not sure why it needs to move that much air...

I remember when I was a teenager and the school was trying to get rid of some sort of big mainframe thing with tape drives... I tried to convince my dad to bring it home with his truck as it would not fit in my mustang-II. He said no way, so I must not have  convincing enough. I guess that was my one shot of having a mainframe.

Aw, bummer...