178 karma · joined November 8, 2014
We weren't blessed with such weaponry in the UK. About all we got was 12 gauge shotgun cartridges and anything we made ourselves. The latter included ANFO so we made up for it through chemistry. This was 25 years ago; doing this now would get you chucked in prison in 2 seconds flat.
I found this out as a child by accident and set fire to the desk in my bedroom...
To be fair that desk caught fire quite a few times.
My first post (perhaps this was a grave mistake), I gave a concise rundown of all of the problems that I had during the process of provisioning the thing and explained my dissatisfaction. I was not rude or condescending. In fact I asked for suggestions and offered improvement advice. Perhaps advice (from someone who's being working in the embedded systems sector for 20 years isn't real advice?). If I'd bought a MacBook Pro and it had the same functional problems, I'd say the same things about it. If I bought a vacuum cleaner that didn't work, I'd say the same things about it.
One of the problems was that the thing wouldn't output on composite at all (we didn't have a device handy that took HDMI in) and that I complained about the fact you have to poke keys in the dark to configure video (no video output) when you don't know if the hub or keyboard is working properly. Then that started the whole process of hoop jumping to get Linux running on it. Perhaps you remember me now?
I had about 4 replies to my comment, two of which were backing up my claims and one which was actually helpful.
Then the next thing I know, I went to reply to the post by someone trying to be helpful to say thanks and bang, no account. That's poor moderation and trying to hide dissatisfaction and criticism which is not acceptable. That's entirey your problem as a moderator.
Well lack of use in their case is that they don't have the time to do the hoop jumping when it's pretty easy to fire up a python interpreter from an MSI package on a windows machine to get the same results. I thoroughly approve of this; the first experience of proper computer science education shouldn't be hoop jumping and trying to work out how to get the thing working. Much like the BBC Micro, it should be plug it in, turn it on and open the User Guide.
90% of people fall at the first hurdle and you made it a very high one.
In absolutely no way would I recommend it to them.
Now I'm going to take a stab: The Picademy thing sounds much like the old school "big vendor" sales approach. Come see our products and you'll buy and market them for us. Sorry but no banana. I can't recommend the Raspberry Pi in any way and would not enable any promotion of them.
Even in swype mode.
As said elsewhere (see entire thread) it was most likely a duff one.
My problem is with the community and the support and the quality, none of which are suitable for the target market.
If you can't hot plug a USB device, forget it.
Power supply was a Thurlby PL330 linear bench PSU (£350 worth) so I'm sure that bit was fine.
I'd rather pay £10 more for something that works. To be honest a lot of no brand Chinese Ali Express dev kit I've bought is more reliable so I'm not sure what they're doing wrong.
They didn't like those facts.
Give them 28 days, then pastebin it and stick on reddit.
But now you can't do a thing because they know who you are and will sue you so forget about it and stop using their products.
I bought a Pi model B for my daughter. Nothing but terrible unreliability. Booting problems as you state, power problems with the USB ports, random hangs and crashes and problems getting half of the devices recommended to work.
I kind of expected that for the money but the thing that really pissed me off was when I raised these issues constructively on their forum, I was met with nothing but vicious denial and had my post deleted and account closed within an hour. Possibly the worst bit was the insinuation that I was clearly an idiot and this was all my fault. I'm technically literate (I'm quite handy with anything from an oscilloscope to GDB) but I can't imagine this doing well in the hands of teachers I.e. one of the target markets.
She now uses an old ThinkPad X61 and finds it a million times more useful and with all the extra bits required on the Pi to get it to work, considerably better value for money.
Not impressed. When your policy is to silence critics the product should be distrusted.
As for the initial design brief to produce a useful educational computer, I think it fails entirely based on the sheer amount of friction between opening the box and writing your first program. I was brought up on a diet of BBC Micros and Acorn machines and despite the brand association, the Pi is nowhere near the mark. Her school even bought 20 Pis that are wheeled out for open evenings and otherwise never used as well in favour of bog standard PCs running python.