28 Jun
2012
28 Jun
'12
7:24 a.m.
It's cheap, magnitudes cheaper than any of that
POC Dell or Acer
stuff you buy for GBP 299 which has *most* of the same drawbacks (no
docs, no schematics, etc).
Most - all? - of the people complaining about lack of documentation for
the Pi _aren't_ buying Dell or Acer or whatever. I know I certainly am
not. (I have some such machines. I paid nothing for them beyond my
time-&-trouble to get them home from wherever they were being junked.)
To use a horrid management phrase, it's the Total
Cost of Ownership
where the impact is.
For some people. People who discuss TCO usually ignore non-monetary
costs. I play with computers because I enjoy it. If I don't enjoy
playing with machine XYZ, there is, quite literally, no point, even if
its TCO is zero - and effective inability to dig into the guts of the
machine impairs my enjoyment. For some here - tony comes to mind as a
likely candidate - it may actually push a machine's worth negative.
For me it doesn't, or I wouldn't have those peecees, even though they
cost me $0; some of my playing with computers uses them purely as
abstract computron sources, and the peecees work very well for that.
This is a platform for goofing about with, not running
JP Morgan's
Oracle stack.
Is it documented even enough for that? Or does hardware documentation
mean reverse-engineering existing Linux code? (I actually don't know;
what little I've heard of the Pi hasn't gone into enough detail to tell
whether running my own code on it is feasible or whether someone who
wants to talk to the hardware has to reverse-engineer existing source
(or, worse, binary) drivers.)
Stop being so down on it. [...]
So cut em some slack, they are trying to do something rare and
enlightened in an industry that increasingly is more interested in
turning us into cloud-based service-locked-in drones.
As much as I agree with your basic message - or at least what I think
it is - I do see a risk, a risk that the Pi will tend to produce yet
more people who are used to computers being undocumented hardware
blobs. It's admittedly better than your typical peecee, in that the
latter applies that to software as well as hardware, but "it's better
than this other thing" is not inconsistent with "it could be so much
better than it is".
There's also an important implicit note (which, to be fair, lots of
other people forget/miss too): (almost?) everyone's remarks should be
taken with an implicit "in my opinion" and/or "for my purposes"
qualifier. That ?300 Dell you mentioned, for example, is not worth
even 10 quid to me - but that's very much a personal statement.
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