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PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry PiPyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry PiPosted Mar 21, 2013 5:46 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)In reply to: PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi by jmorris42 Parent article: PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi
parents are also reluctant to let the kids experiment too much with the family computer, it's really easy to mess things up badly (even with a bootable CD)
a 'impulse buy' priced computer that's completely separate doesn't have these issues.
A lot of people got started with programming not by typing programs in from magazines, but from tweaking existing games (i.e. 'cheating')
something along the lines of a Pi is perfect for that, the worst you do is damage the OS badly enough to need to re-write the SD card.
It doesn't have to work the majority of the time, at a million units shipped already, if it only works a fraction of 1% of the time that still gets a lot of new programmers.
And I think it does wonders at changing a computer from something super special that only special people deal with into something that they aren't afraid to experiment with, even if they don't do any programming themselves.
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PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 9:13 UTC (Thu) by ortalo (subscriber, #4654) [Link]
Agreed. For kids, I suppose this can really be their very own inexpensive toy, while an actual PC (even if its "their PC") is more of an expensive tool that we, parents, provide them.
BTW, the hopefully reduced barrier for entry for low income family may be beneficial too...
There is also the issue of simplicity: the Pi is a computer, but it is a simpler one than a modern PCs which is nearer from a supercomputer than it ever was.
I agree that Minecraft idea is brilliant. Btw, Minecraft success itself may be based on the same ground: simplicity, reachability.
As to boys vs. girls, I have no clue yet personnally; but I agree that this is an important question. The most astonishing is that girls seem so uninterested that they do not even bother taking the time to explain why programming apparently is so uninteresting to them...
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 12:19 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
Indeed. It's just a pity that this fine project about computer literacy chose a proprietary platform booting a proprietary OS to implement it. So many other things would have been better. But it is cheap, and it turns out that 'cheap' plus 'good marketing message' is ridiculously successful.
And there are now so many pi hackers that videocore reverse engineering is going on at a reasonable rate. They have a binutils already, I understand. So hopefully what goes around comes around...
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 17:15 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
That really doesn't matter. The BBC B, the ZX81, the C64, all of those were every bit as proprietary. People dug into the guts and figured out how they worked. My only worry is that these days, if people try to publish disassemblies and the like, they'll get sued by the likes of, well, Broadcom...
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 18:39 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] The hardware above the chip level was documented in the manuals for the Acorn machines and I've seen a pretty thorough manual for the Amstrad CPC series that upholds this level of documentation. Most of the ICs were commodity components, and the only notable exceptions in the Acorn machines (and in the Sinclair machines) were the ULAs, for which you did get a block diagram in the former case. Ignoring the physical reverse engineering done on various ULAs, particularly the successful work done on the Spectrum's ULA, it is completely possible to logically reverse engineer these components, and I believe that various emulators actually achieve reasonable accuracy. An interesting test would be to actually try and use such software to drive the hardware and see how compatible the implementation is, although I imagine that you'd need to put work in to do things like refresh the DRAM and other bus signalling that "just happens" in an emulator. Of course, the software in the microcomputers of that era was proprietary and disassembly listings that were actually published in books did lead to legal action. So some things haven't changed at all. (I wrote this stuff up here.)
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 19:28 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] You didn't need to dig very hard on the C64, at least Stateside; the same stores that sold C64s also sold a $19.95 book documenting its internals (including schematics, pinouts, the 6510 instruction set, the memory map, ...)
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 20:30 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
I wasn't comparing with the 1980s, but with other much more open platforms of recent years. Two I've been particularly involved with were the lart and the balloonboard. More recently things like beaglebone (yeah I know, powerPV GPU lets it down). The Pi's lack of freeness wouldn't matter if they didn't go on and on about the openness, which is pretty ironic given that it comes out of Broadcom. There have been plenty of very misleading statements (all that hullabaloo about their free graphics driver for example). If they didn't say that stuff then it wouldn't make me grumpy.
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 17:27 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
so have someone buy a chip and development kit from broadcom, that should give them all the documentation that they need to re-write the binary blob and release the source.
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 21:39 UTC (Thu) by hamjudo (subscriber, #363) [Link] "It doesn't have to work the majority of the time, at a million units shipped already, if it only works a fraction of 1% of the time that still gets a lot of new programmers."In the last 2 months of 2012, I distributed 6 pi's to people I thought I could get interested in programming on them. 2 teenagers are actively using theirs. So I sort of got a whopping 33%. Although, one of them only counts as a conversion to Linux. He was already programming. A 15 year old boy tried to impress my 15 year old daughter with the Mandelbrot sets he generated. A sure sign that he was an excellent candidate for using a Raspberry Pi. Also a sure sign that romance will not come easy. Not counting the ringer, I still got a respectable 20%.
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