On 06/26/2012 01:23 PM, Liam Proven 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,
As am I. People are talking about it like it's the first small form
factor Linux machine.
but I think
the extreme cheapness is what is driving people.
That must be it. See below.
This might be harder
to understand in America, where even in bad times, you guys typically
have lots more disposable income than we do -
I'm afraid this hasn't been true for a while. Of my "top ten"
in-person friends, seven are unemployed, five have been unemployed for
more than two years, and eight have lost their homes. And they are all
educated professionals; most are engineers.
I'm not trying to start an argument, but I must assert that the
typical "everyone in America is rich" image that many people outside of
America seem to believe (NOT saying you said that, but it's along the
same lines) has never been true...but the American propaganda machine is
perfectly happy to propagate that rumor. Our roads and bridges are
crumbling, our homes are owned by banks and rotting/falling down due to
unoccupancy, adults are living with their parents (I understand this is
acceptable in other societies, especially in South America...we are very
different, it means "loser" here), the homeless population is
overrunning the public parks and soup kitchens...it really is quite a mess.
Thanks, Wall Street...and my stupid fellow Americans for living beyond
their means and shopping at WalMart, so our money goes straight to
China, never to return.
(again, I know YOU didn't say this, Liam, and you have been here so
you know more than most...but I get SO SICK AND TIRED of people in other
countries going on and on about how every American is somehow born with
a silver spoon in his/her mouth, we're all so spoiled, etc etc...it is a
lie...they have no idea of what things are really like here)
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, this is true. It has never happened at this price point. I have
a slightly more powerful machine that I paid, I think, $80 for two years
ago. (no silver spoon here, that was a big stretch!) The only real
difference about the Raspberry Pi is that it's very, very inexpensive.
Still, that's not what people SAY about it. They go on and on about
how unbelievably awesome it is...So small, power sipper, graphics
capability, networking, real OS, blah blah blah. For the things people
actually SAY about it, it is far from unique!
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.
True, but any old PC that one can pick up for free on trash day meets
all these requirements, and is even cheaper. Just larger and more
power-hungry.
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.
The board I have is similar to a Beagleboard (it's a "Hawk Board").
More expensive, yes. I guess that really is the difference...but as
above, that's not what everyone talks about when they rant and rave
about the Raspberry Pi. It seems to have gotten some sort of bizarre
cult status almost overnight, and I think that's just weird.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA