26 Jun
2012
26 Jun
'12
10:23 a.m.
On 26 June 2012 17:49, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
?About the Raspberry Pi in particular...I'm having a very hard time
getting excited about it. ?It's a neat board, to be sure, but it's only
the twentieth or thirtieth design just like it (and nobody got this
excited about its predecessors), and you can't actually GET one without
spending months on end on a waiting list.
I am a bit surprised by the sheer level of hype myself, but I think
the extreme cheapness is what is driving people. This might be harder
to understand in America, where even in bad times, you guys typically
have lots more disposable income than we do - and many things are much
cheaper. Now, granted, I haven't been to the States in a decade, but
in the late '90s/early noughties, a pair of brand-name jeans was a
third to a half the price in the US. No-brand sneakers were a tenth of
the price over there. Your petrol is about a on fifth to one quarter
of the price of ours or even less. Computer hardware prices are
converted from $ to ? by changing the sign, so computers and software
tend to cost around a quarter to a third more over there than there.
And so on.
The idea of a complete functioning RISC computer, all of whose
software is free, for ?30 including tax, is proving very enticing to
people here. It's not very powerful, but then, it also doesn't take
much power, so people are using them for media servers, digital
signage, monitoring and control.
Yes, an electronics hobbyist could do much of this with an Arduino,
but that needs a quite high level of skill and knowledge. More than I
have, for instance. On an R?, it's a Linux machine with a graphical
desktop; you can just write something in Perl or Python or a shell
script or even BASIC and have it work. No need to learn new languages
or anything.
For many people, over here, devices costing ?150, such as a
Beagleboard, are too expensive to buy for curiosity or as a toy. An R?
is the price of a good meal with a beer; that is disposable income for
a lot of people, whereas a Beagleboard or a Pandaboard is the cost of
a cheap weekend family vacation.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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