Raspberry Pi

[Euler]

I'm quite interested in this and they have officially launched today.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17192823

I come the generation of ZX81 and Spectrum bedroom coders and I think a simple device like this that everybody can play with should be interesting and it will probably produce unexpected results. I know naff all about Linux however so I'll have to start revising.

[LeTiss 4pm]

Interesting stuff

I had a Commodore 64 as a kid, I was obsessed with it. I loved the fact that with a knowledge of BASIC, you could produce your own programs

[xitian]

Arduino is a similar concept and has been around for years already and has a big following.
http://www.arduino.cc/

It's more expensive though, and perhaps not quite as accessible (although it's also marketed at the non-computer scientist). They do have lots of cool input sensors and controls though.

Here's stuff which people have done with it in the past:
http://arduino.cc/playground/Projects/ArduinoUsers

It'll be exciting to see what people come up with on the Raspberry Pi if it builds as much interest.

[Euler]

I saw a book on this in Maplin and wondered what it was, it looks interesting. Have you use this?

[PeterLe]

Interesting stuff

I had a Commodore 64 as a kid, I was obsessed with it. I loved the fact that with a knowledge of BASIC, you could produce your own programs

You're nearly as old as me!
I took my youngest to the Museum of science and industry in Manchester they had the ZX81/Commodore 64 and BBC micro in there..made me feel old!

[xitian]

Haven't actually used it myself. I've been meaning to have a play, but haven't come up with any good ideas of what to create, and I think I need to goal to motivate me.

[74.5]

When I left University many moons ago and went into a commercial IT environment, I realised how different university and Commercial IT was and how ill-disciplined I was. This was long before the ZX81 et al. At university, we thought that were writing efficient code and that we had analysed the problem to the nth. degree until I worked in a commercial IT environment. I then realised how little I knew and how ill-disciplined I really was when it came to IT. Back in those days, we had a 32K mainframe – which was big for its day. The operating system required 8K. That left only 24K of available memory. If you couldn’t write a program that ran in 24K or less, it wouldn’t load and you couldn’t run it. Virtual memory was a thing of the future. If you were short of memory, you even had to resort to swapping over the contents of two fields without using a third field. Back in those, disks were small and expensive. The disk drives were astronomic al in cost. You couldn’t just store oodles of data for naff all like you can today. Computers were very slow. They spent the whole of the day running production systems. The only time we could test our programs was over night. If a test failed because a full stop was in the wrong place, that was life. You now had to wait until the following night to test again. That’s why we spent all day manually checking everything.
Today, memory is cheap, disks are cheap and computers run at frightening speeds. Are systems developed any faster today than they were in my day? No. Is the quality of the software any better these days? No, in fact, it’s worse. Did we make mistakes when we analysed, designed and coded a system? Yup. However, when one of our errors bit us on the bum, it was usually because of something really obscure. Something that we just couldn’t ever contemplate happening. Today, software is released with such basic errors, it beggars belief. There was an Alarm Clock problem with iphones at the start of this year if memory serves. Doesn’t anyone test things these days?
Basically, when I started out in IT, we were disciplined. We checked, double checked and triple checked everything. Little was left to chance. We had to be like that. We had no choice. Today, there is a choice.
It doesn’t end there. I’ve talked to a lot of people about backing/laying/trading horse racing systems. All too often, when I ask: Why does your system work? What is the logic that supports it? All I seem to get is ‘Who cares, if it works, it works.’ When you ask them how much testing they did before they went live with their system, invariably the answer is, ‘I tested it out on a couple of hundred selections’. If you ask them what the chi-squared value of their system is, I invariably get the answer: ‘What is chi-squared?. Little wonder then that so many people lose so much money.

Enough of my ranting and back to the topic - The Raspberry Pi.......

One thing that is happening is that,in IT,we are placing layer upon layer of code over the top of the basic code which operates our hardware (PC's etc.).Therefore,we are so far removed from the basic code that most people don't understand how it works any more.In fact, most kids these days don't even know that it exists.They just use it through layer upon layer of code.If they want a system or an app,they simply buy and download it.I'm glad therefore that the Raspberry Pi has hit the market.My only misgiving with this piece of kit is that it will allow the kids of today to generate some code.How efficient and robust that code will be remains to be seen.
74.5

[herbie]

they have sold out ... no left after 24 hrs....now there's an investment

[nicrag9]

When my neice was being home educated at about 13 or 14, the inspector came round and she was being taught to write web pages, the actual html code, not a wysiwyg editor. The inspector had never seen this underlying code. When she was still in school they were being taught welding and brazing, the school did not have enough goggles to go round and the teacher could not braze proplerly, she came home, got my brother to teach her to braze properly, and then next lesson she, at the age of about 10, taught the teacher to braze properly. No wonder kids today do not learn how to do things.I may well have to get one of these raspberry pi things, looks like a lot of fun, for people like me anyway.

Nic

[Euler]

My Raspberry Pi arrived today!