It is interesting to see the resistance to selling stuff "on Linux" here. When the Apple II came out "kids" made games and software for it, and sold it in plastic baggies with a floppy disk and a photocopied "manual". Those of us in the community thought this was a great idea, not because we bought everything that came out, but the notion that you could spend your time working on this awesomely cool stuff and if other folks liked it enough what you were producing they would buy copies from you. Heck you could even make a living on writing software for people.
That made a lot of things you take for granted today possible. And it made total sense, here was someone spending their time writing code to do something that you wouldn't have to spend your time doing. You could write it yourself or you could leverage their effort by buying a copy of their stuff. That infused money into the field which gave people the freedom to invest their time into building amazing things.
The donations system is great, but I would have preferred to see a push for a community built up around free and open source software.
The idea of a young person beginning to code and polishing their application and uploading and getting some money in donations. I'm more likely to donate to a great attempt at a project by a young person than I am to buy software on Linux. Raspberry Pi Store could have been the communities push to loads of great community driven open source projects.
Yeah, it seems like a lost opportunity in regards to that, as I too thought Raspberry Pi will generally help accelerate the growth of open source software.
I'm sorry, but I've gotta ask: Was that supposed to be a joke about R-pi sites often being unable to handle heavy traffic -- or is the store actually running on R-pi's?
You'd think by now that they'd come to understand that the demand for this product is completely off the charts and would have built a site that'd scale accordingly.
I believe its just a app store rather than a hardware store.. They already have a merch store (http://www.raspberrypi.com/) and links to their suppliers.
As far as I know they don't want to sell direct through their only store..
Will be buying a MPEG-2 license key this week - I'm currently only getting a "It works!" message on their store, but when I visited it yetserday, I couldn't find what payment methods they accepted before filling out the whole checkout process. Anyone know (I didn't finish the checkout process)?
-- EDIT --
Looks like I was confused with their other store. This indeed just looks like an App Store :)
How passive aggressive. I thought that open source wasn't necessarily free as in beer? Also, here we are on a site that basically promotes and fosters exactly this kind entrepreneurial endeavour and we have the entitled masses complaining that they might have to pay for something.
On a tangential note, are they ever going to update this thing with a faster SoC? Its been a year since the design was finalized. I just saw an android dev board that blows this thing away for not much more. Not sure what the allure here is at this point. What's the Pi's roadmap, if any?
In your efforts to RE the GPU, have you uncovered any hope of getting faster I/O? I'd love to use all that GPU power, but the applications I have in mind require I/O to match (at the very least, solid 150 mbits/s USB2.0 and 25mbits/s Ethernet).
The only options I can think of for fast IO would be exploiting the MIPI CSI and DSI interfaces. I think you can get 2 Gbps input on CSI and same on DSI for output. You'd need some fairly specialist interface chips.
What would be nice in a future SoC would be say 1 Gbps Ethernet or USB3 right into the core of the beast. The current USB situation is rather disappointing - I would imagine the team would be avoiding the current IP in a hurry on future devices.
I've seen a number of comments like yours, mostly on Slashdot, and they always end with the the same "for not much more". But never "for the same price or less". The RPi foundation is focusing on price first, and to cram as much into that budget as possible. Which is exactly why these things are flying off the shelves as fast as they can make them -- you don't see the same demand for the "not much more" boards.
Oh I don't know, they have the best marketing/word of mouth.
Yes, the price is excellent, but like all things in tech, it should be advancing. When is the newer SoC coming out for this, if ever? Its a tempting device but currently a bit too slow for what I'd like to do with it. The newer SoC's are out there and perform well. Heck, that ARM11 chip on there has a 2004 release date!
For reference, they were taking pre-orders in Aug of 2011 and its going to be 2013 in two weeks. So, I don't think its unreasonable to ask if they're going to replace that long in the tooth broadcom SoC soon.
Also I question the utility of being bottom basement. The ODROID-U is $69.99 retail. Is $34 more worth it for tons more performance? I'd say yes, but to each his own.
To me $35 is far more 'disposable' than $70. This is why I bought a Raspberry pi a few days ago. I have no real need for it but I can imagine some (likely permanently hooked up to my TV).
At $35, if the device is never used for more than a few minutes to tinker with, it is OK by me which would not be true if the device was $70 (and twice as fast).
From what I've read, the device is capable of doing full 1080p which alone is a huge feat and opens up a lot of possibilities. One of my earliest PCs was a Pentium 2 at 400Mhz with a video card that I doubt could even do 720p video and cost $1600. The Pi is running at 700Mhz and does full 1080p so I don't feel the need for anything faster for what I need at this time.
Agreed. $35 is impulse-buy territory and $70 is "let me think about it" territory. I'm leaning towards the ODROID now for a fancy little HTPC. Figure an extra $35 bucks won't hurt me, but slow performance drives me crazy.
They're targeting education. The whole point is being able to get all the kids the same computer so that dev tools can be standardized and you can worry about learning something useful, rather than learning about driver incomptabilities.
This argument comes off as "how dare someone make a product that doesn't match what I think would be cool to have".
That made a lot of things you take for granted today possible. And it made total sense, here was someone spending their time writing code to do something that you wouldn't have to spend your time doing. You could write it yourself or you could leverage their effort by buying a copy of their stuff. That infused money into the field which gave people the freedom to invest their time into building amazing things.