512MB deliberate deception?

> They have explained that this was done because they were afraid that their sales would dry up because many potential customers would prefer not to buy the 256MB version if a 512MB version [...]

Commonly know as "The Osborne Effect" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect).

The bump up to 512MB was certainly expected by myself--- the 256 MiB part would be EoL eventually, and even before then, the cost of the 512 part would match on production price.

I think it was the Android porting announcement that blew the cover on the impending memory upgrade-- there was no way a 256MB RPi could demo Android like it did, and when they wouldn't give out much details of the porting effort, it certainly suggested that they had 512 MB hardware, even if hand-spun engineering test boards.

The reference to the "Osborne effect" in this case is another piece of BS and excuse from RPF for poor planning and execution.

It can certainly apply if the distributors had a substantial volume of units in stock, which as far as we know is not the case, also if they had an important number of 256MB memory chips they don't go to scrap since are planned to be used for the model A.

So I agree that instead of providing BS or misinformation it could be acceptable if from the get go they say "our policy is not to announce blah blah."

It was almost like large flashing neon sign that the 512MB was coming when they started talking and showing some promising screens of Android 4.0.

One thing I don't understand is why the Rev 2.0 schematics have not been released yet ? Afraid that we may find something wrong again ?

Still too much focus on hype and self promotion, poor execution and lack of transparency, which creates a shadow on any technical progress.

My .02

You may not like our reasoning, but the proof is in the pudding.

The readers on the RPi.org site were taken by surprise with 512MB,

and the readers here were not.  The reason they were not is that the

engineers here took note of the Samsung and Hynix announcements

that 512MB were in mass production, Google's published Android

memory requirements, and the RPF Android pre-announcement.

The readers on the RPi.org site were taken by surprise because they

put faith in the RPF's strenuous denials, despite the fact that the RPF

is known for being more concerned about the so-called Osborne effect

than they are about their credibility.  The readers there also apparently

put faith in the repeated claims that 256MB is plenty for education and

education is the primary purpose of the device, a claim that has little

credence among the readers here.

You're argument makes sense at first then you just loose it.  Fair enough that you were not taken by surprise about the 512 because you took note of the 512 going into mass production.  But it's just not logical to make the android jump, that's the point at which you take a non RPF "team" of people and try to slap it to RPF's agenda.    And it still seems more likely that they care about NDAs than Osborne effect (though I'll grant you that I've at least seen that mentioned).  If Android was the main push for 512, why not make a big deal about it with the 512 announcement?  Why not mention stuff like "this will really open the way for Android" or even give a sly off hand statement that would suggest that?  If all they care about the Osborne effect then alluding to an upcoming android system would only be beneficial to sales.  You're just taking random logic, slapping it together, and applying your own agenda. 

What's more is their front pages are peppered with stories of them going to schools, spending time personally teaching kids at maker faires, and from time to time a post about how the education release is going.  Yet you call that little credence?  There is far more evidence for their education efforts than your android connection yet you're skeptical of blatant facts?  I hate to take a defensive stance for the RPF as it makes it look like I'm trying to say their perfect, but come on guys, lets take a nuetral position here and examine the facts without bias!  It's one thing to take that data and make a supposition to see if it will be proven whenever Android is anounced, but you've already issued a ruling without getting all the facts.  I'm sure when the android announcement comes out you'll ignore everything they say (they're liars anyway, right?) and say it just proves you all right. That's not science.  That's politics.

Speaking personally, I'm not suggesting that Android was the motivation for the move to 512M  - that is a bit of a jump, even for a sceptic like me!

I am however a bit cheesed off for the following reason:

There is at least one Broadcom engineer working on the Android port when in the short term I feel that there are issues with basic functionality that need to be sorted (and can't realistically be tackled in a timely manner by enthusiastic amateurs within "The Community").

Perhaps someone has decided that Android is an effective way to further milk the cash cow. It's also (just) possible that someone would rather have a more familiar operating system on their low cost educational computer than "wobbly old command line Linux".

It's also true that the Fondation have been very good at denying (often via a forum moderator who happens to be a Broadcom employee)  the possibility of certain changes right up until the time that those changes are released to the wild. That's entirely their business of course, but it reeks of corporate spin and makes me wonder whether the only motivation is just profit and that "The Community" (which the Foundation relied upon to provide it with a working OS) can go swivel.

"But it's all for charity!".

True - and a noble cause it is too. But does the end always justify the means? And what of the progress of this effort? TBH a casual visitor to Planet Pi could be forgiven for not realising that it was a charity venture at all.

So come on Foundation - get the damn thing working properly, be a little more honest  / upfront and stop playing the "concern troll" card every time someone asks an awkward question. You're not some faceless multinational. Or are you?

Jonathan Garrish wrote:

 

Speaking personally, I'm not suggesting that Android was the motivation for the move to 512M  - that is a bit of a jump, even for a sceptic like me!

 

I am however a bit cheesed off for the following reason:

 

There is at least one Broadcom engineer working on the Android port when in the short term I feel that there are issues with basic functionality that need to be sorted (and can't realistically be tackled in a timely manner by enthusiastic amateurs within "The Community").

 

Perhaps someone has decided that Android is an effective way to further milk the cash cow. It's also (just) possible that someone would rather have a more familiar operating system on their low cost educational computer than "wobbly old command line Linux".

 

It's also true that the Fondation have been very good at denying (often via a forum moderator who happens to be a Broadcom employee)  the possibility of certain changes right up until the time that those changes are released to the wild. That's entirely their business of course, but it reeks of corporate spin and makes me wonder whether the only motivation is just profit and that "The Community" (which the Foundation relied upon to provide it with a working OS) can go swivel.

 

"But it's all for charity!".

 

True - and a noble cause it is too. But does the end always justify the means? And what of the progress of this effort? TBH a casual visitor to Planet Pi could be forgiven for not realising that it was a charity venture at all.

 

So come on Foundation - get the damn thing working properly, be a little more honest  / upfront and stop playing the "concern troll" card every time someone asks an awkward question. You're not some faceless multinational. Or are you?

Making a lot of assumptions there.  Let me make some that actually make sense. My assumption is that there are a hell of a lot of Broadcom people working on Android - not just the one. Not on the Raspberry PI, but on their other chips with the VIdeocore GPU.  Why? Because where woudl you put effort nowadays? iOS? No, Apple have that sown up. Windows 8? Hmm, possbile I suppose but unlikely. ALthough the Videocore is used in the Nokia Smartphone range using Symbian. So, lets assume the Android effort on Rasspberry Pi is a side effect of other Broadcom work. Not a huge job porting to Raspberry Pi since the GPU is the difficult bit. Why its taken so long? Dunno, assuming they are busy on other things.

As for people wanting Android, and it increasing the market - well, people seem to want it for some reason, and it would increase the market. If that was a prime driver, why haven't they already done it? Dpoesnt seem much urgency to get Android out, so they presuambly arn;t that worried about it. I woudlnt be either - not relevent to theiur core aims.

You've assumed the moderators know what the Foundations plans are. Why would they. They are just moderators and unlikely to have knowledge of any plans. Same with Broadcom employees - why would they know what a completely different company is up to? I woudlnt even want my employees to know what my companies future plans were, never mind employees of another company!

What woudl you like them to be more honest about - their future plans? Why should they tell you? Or anyone? The road to profits is littered with companies who released too much information. ANd despite being a charity, they still need profits to run. Someone has to be paid to fix bugs that turn up, because in the end, real bug fixing need real software engineers and they need paying. Volunteering only goes so far. It's why Linux software lacks in documentation, and it takes years to fix boring bugs whilst new features spring up like rampant roos.

Why they aren't in a rush to release android. Simple, because sales are still going good.

Very likely people are porting android on newer chips in the broadcom factory, but the chip used in the Pi is not exactly new technology.

So if they intended to use it for android platforms, you would expect they already had a port for it. (I know, it's speculation)

They don't need to tell us anything, but they shouldn't be mad if we start speculating due to that.

I agree upon the fact they have some issues to clear up for their educational purpose like the usb, hardware accelerated x and some others.

I don't mind if they bring out android. I just can't figure out how their todo priority system works, unless I turn the noble educational goal into a fog screen.

That's how I feel about it, and I know you feel differently. It's not politics, it's religion. I hope within a year I will be able to tell I was wrong, but at the moment you will need much better arguments to convince me.

@ Billy: The BCM2835 is old, so it makes little sense for Broadcom to spend any resources fiddling about with an Android port for it, but they were back in August and the mood from one of the threads over there is that they are continuing to do so (albeit half - heartedly). Why bother at all unless it's for a customer? Anyway, I'm repeating myself (again!).

Regarding moderators: in case you haven't noticed there's a pretty strong Broadcom contingent over there (eben, jamesh, dom and gert to name four). Of course, knowing what's going on and being able to say anything are two entirely different concepts, but there's a difference between a polite "can't comment" or "I don't know" and a sulky denial + locked thread  Given recent history one could take a sulky denial of the existence of "x" to mean that "x" is just around the corner.

I agree absolutely that proper bugfixing (or feature implementation) takes proper engineers with the proper documentation and that's one of my bugbears about this project. It may have been brought into existence by a charitable foundation, but it's turned into a bells and whistles commercial venture and so the onus on getting stuff (USB, hardware acceleration, the godawful onboard sound, etc) working should be on the vendor. It's simply not ok to cry "community fix required!" any more.

Jim,

  You say you didn't see any talk about Android at the 512MB launch, not even

"a sly offhand statement".   Well yes, the RPF didn't mention it, but element14 did:

http://www.element14.com/community/thread/19691?start=93&tstart=0

and some news reports even included Android in the headline:

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/15/10/2012/54774/raspberry-pi-gets-more-memory-for-android-4.0.htm

Maybe element14 wasn't supposed to mention it.  I notice they no longer

mention it in their 512MB documentation.

So are we really supposed to draw inferences about priorities

from a downplayed story?

You say "let's take a neutral position here".

Have you heard the saying "once burned, twice shy"?

Or, "fool me once, shame on you,

fool me twice, shame on me,

fool me thrice ..."

How many times do you need to be fooled before

you no longer take a neutral position?

Yesterday, with the announcement of the "open source drivers",

Luc Verhaegen asked if the magic was all in the videocore blob,

and the user code being opened up was just a message passing shim.

Liz answered "No."

Eben aswered "Yes".

Are we really supposed to take a neutral position as to who is

telling us the straight story?

As has been said before, a more flourishing case of mushroom management would be hard to imagine.

I think the reason why engineers tend to see right through it is that the science which underlies engineering teaches us to make up our own minds through observation, never to argue from authority but from solid premises, and to use well structured logic in our reasoning rather than the disconnected debating forms common outside of science and engineering.

It's a fairly direct consequence of this that we ignore celebrity entirely during analysis, and celebrity that dishes out contradictory statements even more so.

Wait a tic, I've seen several comments from users here complaining that people got all hyped up before the launch because third party media kept making a big deal out of the post on the RPF site talking about XBMC.  So that in the end people purchased it for something it wasn't really supporting yet and made it a big issue for legit developers to get a hold of what was clearly an early revision, in need of major error testing, board.

Now you want to take some 3rd party people who are making a big deal our of Android and try to make that equate to the RPF making a big push for android?  That just doesn't add up.

Also you need to re-read the posts you just referenced about Liz and Eben's response.  You cherry picked their answer to two different questions of Luc's (who was being a bit too hopped up on his own self importance in my opinion, but maybe there was some translation lost without hearing his inflection).

The question Liz answered was "isn't all the magic in the videocore blob?" (to which she answered no)

The question Eben answered was when Luc (incorrectly) stated that the shim which was just released "prevented nothing" (i.e. it's a piece of junk that doesn't actually open anything up) to which Eben replied "that many of our userland functions are message passing shims." Now I say Luc incorrectly stated what's been opened up wouldn't enable anyone to fix anything because several program developers have already stated in the forum, that's not the case as they see things that they could have changed to fix an error they were having with their program.  Of course the issues were already fixed by "broadcom" (Dom?) by the time it was released, but they (specifically "toad king") can confirm exactly where the error was occurring and where he could have fixed it himself based off what was just released.

"Hobson, do you know what I'm going to do"? "No I don't". "I'm going to take a bath". "Oh, shall I alert the media"? -- Dudley Moore and Sir John Geilgud from the movie Arthur

s/I'm going to take a bath/I'm going to open source a shim/

"Hobson, do you know what I'm going to do"? "No I don't". "I'm going to take a bath". "Oh, shall I alert the media"? -- Dudley Moore and Sir John Geilgud from the movie Arthur

s/I'm going to take a bath/I'm going to open source a shim/