Raspberry Pi

[tufty]

The missing piece is course work rather than hardware or software.

Yeah. That said, though (and I don't know if this is still the case), sharing a "workstation" (or, as was the case in my day, either one of the 4 PETs or the TTY connected via acoustic coupler to the local tech college's "minicomputer") is a pain in the arse - if you can equip a class of kids with "their" computer (even if it's only for "doing their homework" :) for 15 quid a head, that's a massive fucking win. Hell, you could equip an entire school of 1000 kids for less than the cost of a classroom full of PCs. Assuming local authority provisioning costs don't blow the price up to 150 quid a piece, that is. No licensing costs, little to no virus risk if there's no network connection, and so on.

I like the sound of it.

[sdetoni]

Whereas in the 8-bit days you had to issue at least one BASIC command before you could download porn or go on facebook or do anything else that wasn't programming.

load "*",8,1

[tufty]

Well, yeah. The textual, rote-learned equivalent of double-clicking an icon, and one which teaches the user approximately the same amount about how the computer works as double-clicking an icon does. It's just meaningless syntax that doesn't express any concept in particular. When we have mind-controlled machines, we will probably hark back to the "golden days" when you had to physically *touch* the computer...

[Stone]

The number of people I see doubleclicking web links tells me we haven't even got that sorted yet

Stone

[Firefox]

*** bump ***

Alpha boards are in production:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=28

They're going to have a Model A and a Model B.

Model A: 128MB of RAM. ($25)
Model B: 256MB of RAM + Ethernet. ($30 - $35)

[gravy]

Seeing Model A and Model B made do a big

[merman]

And in three years time they announce the upgraded Master, flog off the company to a rival electronics firm and sink into obscurity...

[Firefox]

Alpha boards have been delivered and actually work.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=78

[Ratsoap]

First off, someone is gonna have to write Repton for it, so the kids have some means of skiving off properly.

[toxibunny]

Original Xbox quality graphics, apparently! O.o

[Muttley]

They have another video up of Quake 3 running on the Alpha:

[Firefox]

Quick clip of the Pi playing a 1080p video:



http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=152

[disciple]

Oooh interesting.

[tufty]

With they'd get their collective fingers out and release the damn thing. I have money burning a hole in my pocket.

[Gorecki]

I have money burning a hole in my pocket.

The great thing about this is that I don't have any money and yet I can still afford to buy one (probably two, maybe three).

I'm really quite excited about these. The biggest problem I have with my computer at the moment (a lowly G4 mac mini) isn't that it's not powerful enough to do what I want it to do. It's that it's not powerful enough to do several things at the same time. And conversely, uses far too much power to justify having it on for mundane tasks.

Being able to farm processes off to a bunch of cheap, low power computers dedicated to only doing one task (downloading, media server, media player) ensures that I can have that task available all day without having to worry about whether or not one will affect another.

Plus, I'm finally going to be able to play with Linux which is something I've always wanted to do.