End of my frustation

I guess in time all will even out.  I'm willing to drop my frustration even though I was online a 12:45 am (Canada - EDT) and didn't get through.  There were a lot of people online at that time.  The problem is the implemented sales solution didn't work.  One earlier poster said that they were taking pre-orders 2-days before...who was?  No one was supposed to know until 6:00 GMT on 29 feb that RS and Farnell were the distributors. 

So at 1am I was on the RPi shop and the main site. RPi shop was gone and main page was down.  By the time the .org site was up on static HTML it was around 1:12. I followed both links to buy.  Problem is the main RS and Farnell sites are setup to cater to the UK.  In both cases there are NO direct links to US or Canadian partners. Eventually I found that Newark handles US and Canada.  The RS partner in Canada still doesn't have any RPi info.

I'm still a little pissed that I essentially on a "black Friday" type event, I had to walk around the back of the store and crawl through a window while UK residents walked through a wide open front door and got the first 10 bluray players for steal.

The implemented process was faulty and no one at all can say that if you weren't on at 6:00 GMT then you're just a sore loser. Many people were on at that time. I would assume that even if I new every step in advance and got on the main pages at the right time, that all the extra steps that a Canadian would have to go through would have meant that all 10k would have been gone by the time I would have gotten to the order page.

I guess I'll go back to sulking until 10 may, when supposedly my RPi will begin its long journey to my door.

a) My understanding is that the different international branches of Farnell had different portions of the total batch allocated to them. In this sense, the UK customers could complain because the UK batch went out first, and international customers were able to preorder for hours after that. Whatever the case, this was not the responsibility of the foundation.

b) I understand your frustration. I live in Greece and had to wake up before 8:00, visit many different sites (Including the Farnell UK, Farnell France, Newark, before finally landing on the Farnell-Export site (which is for customers from countries where there are no local distributors). I spent around two and a half hours in the process. If the Farnell people had been kind and smart enough to provide the foundation with a list of specific URLs for the order pages appropriate for each country, the addresses would have been posted in the raspberrypi.org page, many people would have been spared lots of time. There would have been less traffic at the sites, which means the first batch would have sold out much earlier - probably within minutes. But then again, the same number of people would have been served.

USvER wrote:

 

Some citations:

 

 

"You will be able to buy a Raspberry Pi from the end of February, from this website."

"We have no plans for preorders."

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/633

 

This is taken out of context. "We are adequately funded and will not take preorders", was indeed a frequent statement. But, it was a reference to the practice of taking preorders and possibly a down payment), for a product that is not yet produced. Taking preorders for a product that has been produced and is on its way is a totally different thing. And, if you want to be a pedant, you 'll then have to admit that the foundation didn't take any preorders - Farnell did.

USvER wrote:

 

"The good news is that this finally means we have a date for the first batch: the boards will be finished on February 20. Eben and I may be going to China to make sure that the boards can be brought up properly for that date if necessary. We’ll be airfreighting them to the UK immediately, so you should be able to buy them before the end of the month."

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/615

Did you notice the verb "should"? this verb is used to express probability, not certainty.

USvER wrote:

 

Some citations:

 

"Althrugh we are still waiting units to arrive from China you can start buying Raspberry Pi today."

What exactly is your issue with this? the use of "buying" instead of "preordering"? Yes, not an 100% accurate choice of verb, but the meaning is 100% clear if you read the entire sentence.

USvER wrote:

 

So... trickery... in the very last moment...

No trickery. Just a change of plans, which has been necessary as the release time approached and it became evident that the demand would be too high for the foundation to handle on its own. As far as I know, the foundation has not signed a contract with you. If they have, and went on to breach the terms of the contract, then by all means go on and sue them.

PS: Why wuld someone grownup go to the personal with kid(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem)

First of all, if you think you have been the victim of an ad hominem attack, this just means that you don't know the meanng of "ad hominem". People have been commenting on your behaviour.

So raspi is not for kids??? Ok... another discrimination...

Yes, Pis are targetted mainly at kids, but kids have no credit cards and are generally not allowed to conduct online transactions. So it is for grown ups to buy them and give them to their kids.

I would be obliged if you would keep your posts on element14 and out of my

inbox, that lengthy reply was not required by me.

To this day (March 6) I have yet to receive the e-mail with the announcement...

This is what worked for me:

To turn off e-mail notifications, edit your profile by clicking on your name at the top of the screen (assuming you are logged in).  Then go to "manage e-mail notifications" and turn off notification of all discussions.  You also need to "edit preferences" and then select the "Email Notification Preferences" so that the default is no longer to get e-mail notification of discussions.

I have yet to get an email announcement either.

I am entirely sympathetic to the OPs frustration, and share some of it. I wasn't following twitter, RSS etc, because I had registered on the RPi site in good faith that I would be given a chance to be one of the first to order.

This could have all been solved so easily if RPi had posted an announcement and sent an e-mail to everybody in the queue and EXPLICITLY said that they were having to walk away from their previous statements about ordering only from them if you had pre-registered. If that staement had told people that the best way to be at the front of the queue was instead to subscribe to RSS, follow twitter feeds, visit the site daily, then everybody would have been back on the same level playing field.

As it happens, I don't think I was anywhere near the front of the queue (if they had over 100K emails to send) as I only recently registered. But I do resent the fact that other people may have managed to jump ahead of me who weren't registered at all.