3 ms·

What a bunch of naysayers... The Pi isn't the most modern board out there. It isn't the most powerful one or the smallest. It isn't the most open one... But, w

by CrLf 14y ago

What a bunch of naysayers... The Pi isn't the most modern board out there. It isn't the most powerful one or the smallest. It isn't the most open one... But, who cares? The Pi is readily available from a number of distributors in a number of countries. It is cheap enough. It runs a plain linux distribution that can be easily installed on a plain SD card by anyone with half a brain. It has (documented) GPIO pins. It serves its purpose just fine. People are curious about it (even if they are attracted by the media-center red herring), they buy it and they learn something. Many of these people never used Linux, some never programmed anything. Maybe they just mess with it for a while and then put it away. In the end, it's a net gain. BTW, for those of you touting supposedly "better" alternatives. Why haven't these alternatives taken off? And also, why hasn't Beta totally killed VHS... it was so much better...

makomk 14y ago
The thing is, it was months between the Foundation launching the Pi and its basic, advertised functionality becoming even close to reliable. Originally, your SD card had to be carefully picked due to firmware bugs that made it incompatible with most of the newer cards on the market, ditto for your USB keyboard and mouse because it was incompatible with many of those too, and the network fell over all the time as well. In fact, despite the Pi Foundation trying to blame the problems on power-hungry keyboards and people using the wrong power supplies and everything except the Pi itself, an outsider eventually figured out that the USB hardware and driver couldn't reliably talk to any low-speed USB devices like keyboards and mice. Communicating with anything the Pi Foundation didn't explicitly advertise, like webcams or Arduinos, was even more broken.
- CrLf 14y ago
  Regardless of that (which I haven't experienced, at the very least because I only got a Pi when they started selling the Rev 2), any platform has its issues at first. The important part is that they recognize them and fix them. People can choose not to buy if the outstanding issues are important to them, but they seem to have chosen to buy en-masse instead... Unless you are referring to those issues being, in part, from the non-open nature of some parts of the Pi. If that's so, I only have to point to every other platform where there's a ROM with non-open firmware. Being that on the Pi all firmware is loaded on startup, and on other platforms the firmware is there and all that the OS can do is work around it's bugs...

by CrLf 14y ago

makomk 14y ago

The thing is, it was months between the Foundation launching the Pi and its basic, advertised functionality becoming even close to reliable. Originally, your SD card had to be carefully picked due to firmware bugs that made it incompatible with most of the newer cards on the market, ditto for your USB keyboard and mouse because it was incompatible with many of those too, and the network fell over all the time as well. In fact, despite the Pi Foundation trying to blame the problems on power-hungry keyboards and people using the wrong power supplies and everything except the Pi itself, an outsider eventually figured out that the USB hardware and driver couldn't reliably talk to any low-speed USB devices like keyboards and mice. Communicating with anything the Pi Foundation didn't explicitly advertise, like webcams or Arduinos, was even more broken.

CrLf 14y ago
Regardless of that (which I haven't experienced, at the very least because I only got a Pi when they started selling the Rev 2), any platform has its issues at first. The important part is that they recognize them and fix them. People can choose not to buy if the outstanding issues are important to them, but they seem to have chosen to buy en-masse instead... Unless you are referring to those issues being, in part, from the non-open nature of some parts of the Pi. If that's so, I only have to point to every other platform where there's a ROM with non-open firmware. Being that on the Pi all firmware is loaded on startup, and on other platforms the firmware is there and all that the OS can do is work around it's bugs...