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Quite so! And whereas the Arduino has flash and ram measured in a handful of kb the Raspberry Pi has half a gig of ram onboard and supports SD cards which run at less than a dollar per gig, and runs linux of course. If you want to run Python or Erlang or host a local Postresql server on your tiny little embedded system you can do so easily with Raspberry Pi. The sorts of projects that are going to come out of this thing are going to be incredible.

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They're also cheap enough to make distributed computing more immediately viable in those projects. A few of these chained up could probably do quite a variety of complicated tasks. I'd bet you could make stuff like self-driving cars a lot cheaper and efficient on the computing side.

That's an interesting point. With a $35 computer of those capabilities it's definitely a lot more doable to just develop out each hardware component to have a computer attached to it. You can run MongoDB or Couch or well as Node.js and have a services oriented architecture with high-level APIs between all your hardware components.

Exactly. Each device is potentially a self-contained unit of a whole, and things tend to get a damn sight more efficient if each is exclusively host to a specific tool, with the environment exclusively designed to match that specific tool. I do wonder just how efficient a cluster of Pis running a typical, but refactored for Pis, LAMP stack would be in comparison to a typical LAMP setup on a comparable server.

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