Raspberry Pi now with 512MB RAM

And they've now suspended orders due to the high demand.

I'm only an interested observer.

This could also be of interest to you: http://simplehomenet.com/solutions.asp?page_id=HomAidPi It uses a Pi too!

Also could be of use: http://www.zigbee.org/

There was an old Perl based project called Mr. House ( http://misterhouse.sourceforge.net/ ), though it hasn't seen activity in a few years. It tried to be vendor-neutral and (apparently) had voice controls, too, which sounded cool.

I never had the money to set up the hardware, though, so I have no idea about it's actual abilities...

https://github.com/dandroid88/webmote I have been working on this for fun in my spare time. Probably not the best fit for what you are doing as my primary focus (so far) has been controlling IR-controlled devices via a web interface. It is still a bit of a hack but it works well for controlling my TV, stereo, xbmc, x10 lights from anything with a browser. I have been hosting it on a raspi and it is pretty fun to play with (turning off my fiance's 'say yes to the dress' from the bathroom). Good luck with your project.

Are the menus still slow with the new overclocking firmware?

Farnell (element14) have generally been very good with fulfilment of orders, RS not so much. Got my e14 in 5 weeks (ordered at release), RS one never came after months so cancelled it.

Well I guess I might as well just order a new 512 with element14 (I wish I knew about those guys).

Mine didn't ship at all with RS Components (+4 months waiting) then I complain on twitter to @RSComponents, 3 hours later I get an email from RS saying that my order just shipped... This is last SATURDAY! - so no 512 version :(

A couple hours later I get a reply from RS to my tweet saying: "Our records show that yours shipped LAST FRIDAY".

And now I still have to wait 21 more days until it arrives. Maybe if I order right now from element14, it may arrive earlier?!

Garbage collected systems typically implement allocation with a simple pointer bump. This is possible because values are moved in memory by the garbage collector, updating references automatically. You can then compact all the empty space when collecting garbage, making allocation easy.

This is obviously faster than malloc which is what people compare with when they say allocation is faster with a garbage collector. Collecting the garbage, i.e. de-allocation, can be more expensive though, since it might require scanning large parts of the heap.

Since games generally use region based allocators , the performance gain is probably very small there. If you make lots of calls to malloc, then the gain would be larger.

For example, an advanced garbage collector can group the remaining allocations together, reducing the fragmentation and potentially increasing cache hits.

To add another point: For programs which only run for a certain time (not servers) the freeing can be delayed until the end and then skipped.

I think this is largely a myth perpetuated by benchmarks that were faster GC'd than with some system-default badly-tuned malloc. There are gains to be made by copying, generational collectors, and it's impossible to generalize to all workloads, but a basic tenet of optimization is, so they say, that being faster is doing less work. Garbage collectors do a lot of extra work checking the heap, and thrash the cache while they're doing it. Batching a bunch of allocs/frees isn't an advantage exclusive to GC, since any allocator could be easily extended to do the same.

And yes games especially are finely tuned to their allocation patterns. Generational collectors somewhat emulate the kinds of region allocation games do. I know I've read war stories about fighting the GC in for example C# XNA games to avoid random stuttering when collection kicks in. For games you'd want some kind of incremental background collector, but these are kind of like "sufficiently smart" compilers. They work until they hit the case where they have to fall back to stop-the-world collection.

Unless your memory patterns are horribly irregular to the point that they fragment your heap (completely avoided in e.g. console games) and you need to compact memory heavily, non-GC code will just do less work than any type of GC.

Sorry, I shouldn't be awake at this hour (See AWS thread). However the number of upvotes I immediately got seems to indicate my subtly suggested solution was quite clear to others.

I'd say more blunt and to the point. Also, it doesn't help now, but in future it certainly will.

Don't make plans around pre-release or limited hardware.

Yes. But instead of letting people buy them for the asking price, and pocketing the difference on ebay, RPi Foundation should pocket the difference themselves.

Of course, they don't do this because they want to keep everything simple, and might even get reputational damage out of an auction. Also last time I talked to the guys (HN London), they were constrained by the founders time more than anything else. So they wanted to keep running the foundation as simple as possible.

As for the money: They could always donate to Doctors Without Borders or something like that.

Indeed. Maplin are like an Argos these days, except the service is worse than Argos and you have to wait longer to be served, and they have less in stock, and the staff run away when you ask them anything.

Looking at their £69 offer - it does look pretty good actually. If they deliver, I'll be very surprised and would consider forgiving them for a while :)

Tandy - £1 for 5 resistors!! How could they possibly have failed?

You might have better luck at a local college. A friend learned welding at community college (after earning a four year university degree)