Raspberry Pi and America, was Re: ST-506/412 to IDE/ATA/SCSI/? adaptor

I don't talk much on here because most of the time I am in awe of most of you guys fixing things and sharing knowledge at levels I don't have the tools or the talent to aspire to, and hays off it's awesome. Fact is though, this thread is starting to have echoes of that guy at HP that said he could only see a market for 5 computers at most. I have a Raspberry Pi and run it 24/7 as an emulated VAX 3900 using SimH. It does a damn good job of it too. Here's the rub on Raspberry Pi as I see it: 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). This means you get what you pay for on Raspberry Pi and those systems are exposed for the overpriced hunks of junk they really are. You get a board for your 35 bucks. You can do what you like with it. No frills, no BS. There's even some good community support that's free as in beer. It's real. It's not some imaginary vapourware project that'll never see the light of day. Availability can be sketchy but that'll improve as demand normalises. It runs free software. No Windows license, no Microsoft guff. It's accessible (not everywhere, but it is) - it has GPIO which is open and usable and useful, USB, ethernet etc. Sure, you need a few extras. Most of them are cheap and available. Oh and guess what. Buy a fancy BeagleBoard or an Atom ITX board, something that costs anything from 2x to 6x as much and you... STILL need all the extras. To use a horrid management phrase, it's the Total Cost of Ownership where the impact is. Sure it takes some time fooling about, but that's part of the fun. This is a platform for goofing about with, not running JP Morgan's Oracle stack. Stop being so down on it. It's a great idea and will go far because the sheer variety of stuff you can use it for and the price of it means it's going to be something people don't fear buying because of loss of investment. The hardware itself isn't gonna set the world on fire (at 2W it barely gets warm enough to start one) but that's not the point. The Broadcom SoC is a run-of-the-mill cellphone chip. It isn't fast, the SD card I/O is pretty slow (4-5MB/s which is little more than a DEC RA92 disk) and the power to the USB ports isn't sufficient but you can work around them or just live with it. It cost 35 bucks for pete's sake. 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. -- Mark Benson http://markbenson.org/blog http://twitter.com/MDBenson