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Raspberry Pi Forum 512MB deliberate deception?
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512MB deliberate deception?

e14 Contributor
e14 Contributor over 13 years ago

The RPF has made lots of predictions that turned out to be way off,

but perhaps they were just being overoptimistic.   They have told stories

that I don't think most people believe now, about needing to resolder 10K

ethernet jacks, but perhaps they were just mistaken.  But now we

have a more clearcut case:

 

On October 15, Liz wrote:
"This has, as you've probably guessed by now, been in the works for months. (In fact, the day we visited the factory last month, all the Pis being made there were 512MB ones already - we had to be very careful which photos we used from the visit.) "

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=19963&start=75

 

However, On September 5, 2012 at 3:59PM when Ozy asked:

"are there any plans for GPU, CPU, or RAM updates in the pipeline? "

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1929

 

JamesH at 4:00PM answered:

"Not at present."

 

and Liz confirmed at 4:00PM

"Not at the moment, no."

 

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 was in the pipeline. 

And of course, they are not required to look out for their customers' interests

or to divulge confidential information on future products.  But the standard

solution to that for any organization that values its reputation for honesty

is to say simply "we have a policy of not commenting on unannounced products."

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  • e14 Contributor
    e14 Contributor over 13 years ago in reply to e14 Contributor

    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?

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  • morgaine
    morgaine over 13 years ago in reply to e14 Contributor

    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.

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  • e14 Contributor
    e14 Contributor over 13 years ago in reply to e14 Contributor

    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.

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  • e14 Contributor
    e14 Contributor over 13 years ago in reply to e14 Contributor

    "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/

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  • e14 Contributor
    e14 Contributor over 13 years ago in reply to e14 Contributor

    It's obvious that the magic isn't in the shim they just open sourced.

    So the answer Liz gave was....wrong. I think we can all agree upon that.

    It's off topic in this thread about 512MB deliberate deception? Do we all agree upon that 2?

    If so, we are making progress. I think I am going to take a bath...

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  • e14 Contributor
    e14 Contributor over 13 years ago in reply to e14 Contributor

    ha ha, yes I can agree to those statements (mostly) I only talked about it because cherry picking a phrase is one of my pet peeves... which might be a little hightened right now due to it being presidental debate time here in America.

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