Comment by sciurus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sciurus | Hacker News Reader

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I think the great advantage the Raspberry Pi has over the Mk802 and other Allwinner A10 based devices right now is the community resources.

Let's say I wanted to install Debian on the Raspberry Pi. I can go to http://www.raspbian.org/ and find a healthy project and well-organized documentation. What if I wanted to install it on the MK802? After a lot of googling and skimming results, I'd probably end up at http://linux-sunxi.org/Debian if I wanted to build the bootloader, kernel, and root filesystem myself or http://forum.doozan.com/list.php?6 if I trusted somebody else's work. The experience is very different.

This is why I'm hoping http://www.indiegogo.com/pengpod succeeds. I think what they plan to do is exactly what the A10 platform needs to succeeed with hobbyists-

    Maintain a community forum and wiki
    Provide source for everything we create and share it on Github.
    Provide a package repository for the PengPods.
    Provide prebuilt images, with updates as available.
    Provide tools, scripts and guides as we go.

Community resources? The Raspberry Pi has almost zero hardware documentation, a closed black box controlled by a massive binary blob and an absolutely despotic PR disaster named Liz Upton who actively insults and derides developers and others in the RPi community.

Here's a fun excerpt from http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2221 :

Liz: ... keep trying to rustle up some outrage if it gives you a kick; I’d recommend finding something else to do soon, though. We don’t want you developing an ulcer.

Developer: Am I allowed to be outraged by the fact that it’s not really open, since I see no mention of actual documentation for the hardware? Or by this: http://www.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/ ? Can I get outraged by that?

Liz: Well you /could/, but you wouldn’t half look silly.

Nice going, Liz. That's right, anyone who actually wants to make full utilization of the hardware they paid for is 'silly' and we're only rustling up outrage for 'kicks' when you post a press release announcing how open source you really aren't.

Here, have a nine page thread of people complaining they were banned under weak, insane excuses like 'concern trolling' because they dared to mention things like 'your supplier isn't sending me anything' and 'My SD card gets corrupted when I unplug the device sometimes': https://www.element14.com/community/thread/20081

It's got massive hype since it's a $35 Beagleboard, but otherwise it's bringing nothing new to the table that hasn't been done by others and increasingly done better by other devices.

The remainder of the situation seems to be a collection of people more interested in their awards, hype and press releases than their actual users and developers on their forums. Frankly, there's quite a few ARM SoC boards out there with GPIO pins and all the bells and whistles of the Pi, many of them have even beefier hardware. None of them have this horrible baggage and all of them will run the same software for the most part.

So that's great that many people are going to target this device, but it's hardly an 'exclusive port' to the RPi. The real bet to back is Linux on ARM.

Personally, this board gets me much more hot than the RPi and prices are only going to come down on similar future boards: http://www.arndaleboard.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Don't want to speak on behalf of the R-Pi foundation, but you're taking things out of context. This whole thread was disgusting, I wanted to puke reading such douchy comments - from both sides. Example:

Developer: Remember who you are talking to here, and i am currently talking to the developer of the freedreno driver, and the guy REing the tegra, and we are all shaking our heads in disgust over the brashness of this announcement.

Liz: > Remember who you are talking to here Seriously?

Developer: Definitely... Google me.

Yes, R-Pi folks should have clarified that while opening the userland code was definitely a good move (which was the topic of the blog post btw), the videocore blob was still closed - and probably will never be open-sourced.

And while this is fine for most people, some folks will still be frustrated - and they can always vote with their time and money. It'd be much more effective than writing self-aggrandizing comments, regardless their individual achievements.

Let's face it, it's a design trade-off, not the foundation's choice. You know, Broadcom-trade secrets-yadda yadda. May change one day, but I wouldn't bet on it.

HN, as usual, had way more civilized comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4692401

We're still talking about a woman who posted the following piece to the foundation's frontpage for lulz: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1901

Yes, the guy was out there -- but does waving chat logs like this around for people to gawk at really belong on the front page of a supposedly educational foundation's website? It sure did get linked around, so it's certainly advertising... but by no means is it educational and it's still very much the general antagonistic and lulzy behavior I've come to expect from these people and how they choose to run their community and maintain their web presence.

At the end of the day, the RPi only feels 'educational' flavored for marketing for me. It may not for you, that's cool too. People are going to do educational things with the RPi, but they're going to do it in spite of how the RPi Foundation are running things since now the meme of this board being 'educational' has been cemented.

... Though given they're already talking about on their own blog[1] how the board may not be around in a few years, I suspect we'll have another 'educational' board (with a new Broadcom chip, natch) to purchase for cheap. It'll be just as revolutionary as the others on the market at the time, I'm sure.

[1]: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2519

> does waving chat logs like this around for people to gawk at really belong on the front page of a supposedly educational foundation's website?

It's a post on "the blog" which for 24 hours or so (if post timestamps are to be believed), was the first thing anyone looking at the website saw.

And yes, since they are a non-profit, and some idiot is wasting their time trying to weasel out a $35 gift from them, I don't see a problem with shaming to prevent recurrence.

The rpi foundation IS a non-profit. As someone with some experience in hardware design and in entrepreneurship, I see EVERYTHING they've done is along those lines. Your snark and disbelief of that is completely unwarranted, and speaks volume about you, rather than about the rpi foundation. They have some ideals and principals, but are extremely pragmatic, and if that bothers you (as it seems to do), you are welcome to ignore them.

They're STILL on track, as far as I know, to produce a $25 board that's useful for education. If you think they are chasing profits, please explain how that is possible. Their $35 model is STILL significantly cheaper than any comparable commercial offering (I found one vendor in Singapore offering an MK802 for $46, the rest are >$50; cubieboard is $50 but not yet available; RPi is available from multiple vendors including for-profit ones for $35-$40).

If they tried to make more profit, they would have priced it higher - demand definitely supports a higher priced point. And by NOT chasing profits, they've actually brought down the prices from anyone else.

Well, the title says it all: a prankster tries to extort $35 from a non-profit. Word of advice for others that might be thinking about doing the same: don't. Or prepare to be shamed publicly.

While I also felt strange to see such a Michael Arrington-move on the homepage, it was impossible to not laugh about the idiotic effort of this guy trying to convince them to get a freebie. And what a persistent prankster he was. Towards the end it became more obvious that probably he was just a kid, having fun and practicing his social engineering skills.

Anyway, shame on him, for wasting people's time. Try picking one of the big guys next time, that have deep pockets and vast call centers (and lawyers) to deal with idiots. And btw, TI, Microchip, Renesas, all have trial programs for hobbyists, no social engineering required.

Again, I don't want to speak on behalf of R-Pi or Liz, but I don't think she's doing this just for lulz, at all. It's really a pain to manage social communities, especially tech ones. 1% of the users cause 90% of your nightmares, so you need to have a bit of humor (even if it's dark humor; it's a British foundation after all).

Hmmmm... That's a bit shady, especially charging for MPEG-2 support and other codecs. Not quite sure what they're getting at there.

It's pretty simple. The RPi is an advertising campaign for Broadcom's VideoCore IV processor, which is part of why the RPi is so cheap. Broadcom is uncomfortable with the reality that software is eating hardware, so they've decided to artificially bolster the value of their hardware by selling it back to you incrementally with their own buggy software. Until they lose interest in maintaining it, of course.

> Not quite sure what they're getting at there.

It's not like they have a choice. Since MPEG-2 is covered by patents (which are underwritten by customs, police and eventually armies), they cannot really provide an MPEG-2 capable product without permission from the patent owners.

And those patent owners demand $2/chip or so; So RPi, instead of passing it on to all users, whether they need it or not, pass it through only to those who are interested. It's >5% of the cost for the Model B, and >8% of the cost of the Model A. I'm sure if they included it as part of the base, there would be people outraged that they did as well.

Despite the best intentions, limited resources and (despite what some people who have no experience with actually producing and selling hardware think) spectacular success - there will always be people who think they can do better. To those people I say: I'm here to cheer for you when you actually do. Until then, I will join Eben in ignoring you (or even Liz in mocking you silly)

Why shouldn't the people tha want to use the MPEG-2 patents pay the license fees? I don't play MPEG-2 on any of my RPis and am fine not paying them for those those that want to use that format.

Except that totally overlooks the fact there are parts of the world where they could implement their own MPEG-2 decoder legally as they do not have software patents. Instead, because of this blob system without documentation they're forced to pay for it. How is this in any way not contrary to goals of education?

"Perfect" will be great. Here in 2012 we don't have good performing GPUs with open documentation available for integration. This is what we can have now.

It sucks a bit. I don't see it changing anytime soon. That's most of the reason I supported Parallela. That promises to be open, it probably won't be as much power as a nice GPU, but I want to compute with that hardware, and more problems will fit better. Plus I won't get trapped in some flawed API that has weird black boxes bugs and unpredictable performance issues.

They still can, no one is stopping them! All they have to do is compile ffmpeg in software only mode. It would be dog slow, but it's what you are after.

They are optimizing for the British education market, not for some ideal libertarian education market in Somalia that can ignore patents.

And licensing agreements are a bitch. It might be against Broadcom's license with MPEG-LA to give enough info about implementing MPEG-2 regardless of jurisdiction.

> All they have to do is compile ffmpeg in software only mode.

Let them eat cake!

Given that I (and everyone I've spoken to) thought that one of the main goals for the Raspberry Pi was to provide an open platform for childrens education and development (right or wrong, this is how it was marketed to me and quite a few others that I know personally) it makes me feel a bit like I've been had. If it's not an open platform why are we supporting it? What's the difference between this and insert a n other board? Cheapness? I can get that with an MSP430. Linux? I can get that elsewhere in a more open capacity.

Having met one of the key RPi developers, I think the issue of "open design" was a trade-off. They could get a high performance SoC with "closed BLOBs" at a cheap price, and still achieve the the educational goals of the board.

What part of their educational goals involve publicly antagonizing their users? The behavior of their PR and their forum moderators does not resemble any open academic environment I've ever seen. It does, however, resemble Tumblr.

The educational goal of actually getting a usable product out? Your snide remarks about them being a PR stunt for broadcom do not change the facts that they are working with very little resources, and have actually delivered on what they have promised (and then some), with a delay that's comparable to many for-profit vendors.

And further - you may dislike Liz' handling of things. SO DON'T BE THEIR USER!. Linus Torvalds is about a hundred times worse to his users and fellow developers on public mailing lists. And you know what? He's gotten more and better stuff done thanks to that, compared to any polite project manager I've ever known.

Liz/RPiFoundation (and Linus) may antagonize people here and there - but I suspect that thanks to how they handle things, I think the gain (in users that can afford or find the product useful) to pain (antagonized user/developer) is well above 1,000:1 (perhaps even 100,000:1) which makes it totally justified - in fact, the preferred course of action.

edit: better wording.

In my opinion, it looks exactly like the academic environment.

I don't see many pictures on the Raspberry Pi Foundations pages - which Tumblr seems to be 99% made out of.

"Linux on ARM" has already been won by Android. That's why many ARM SoCs comes with closed Android drivers.

That argument makes no sense.

ARM chips come with closed source android drivers because those bring money. That's that. If you think GNU/Linux "victory" would be about making money, you'd be sorely mistaking (or else, you can go the ubuntu way and beg for donations, include proprietary apps, track users, and wonder where you failed)

Who said anything about money? GNU/Linux is about freedom. In most of these new devices you can't run GNU/Linux without a lot of work, because there are no driver, leaving you with no freedom.

I agree with this. Raspberry Pi has a community momentum. Looking at every aspect of its hardware, it might not be the best, but it has the momentum to overcome it.

The Allwinner A10 is being outpaced by its competition for the same price. It's too weak and anyone watching this space knows how far to bet on Allwinner for anything.

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