Re: Pi Forums

"I think element14 owes a lot to RasPi and its Foundation".

As a very rare contributer I also think the RasPi and it´s Foundation owes a lot to Element 14 and the excellent after sales service.  Over the last 14 months I have purchased three Raspberry Pi. a self assembly Gertboard Kit, a PiFace Digital and most recently a BBB.  Every time Element 14 have done what they said they would do with very propmpt replies to any questions.  In particular Rachel has been very efficient and helpful.

Colin Gearon.

Colin Gearon wrote:

 

I also think the RasPi and it´s Foundation owes a lot to Element 14

Very true.  E14/Farnell hasn't really put a foot wrong throughout the whole Pi saga, not significantly.

Their site collapsed during launch for a few days, but that was caused by RPF's entirely ridiculous concept of opening the floodgates to pre-orders at a single instant of time and requiring customers to compete.  This is not just the power of hindsight.  Every web service on the planet with the exception of Google and Facebook is likely to collapse when 100k+ people hit it within a few seconds, and subsequent recovery is prevented because of the retries.  I blame the collapse squarely on RPF's faulty planning.  The fact that  RS collapsed at the same time offers proof of that.  At worst, Farnell and RS were guilty of not telling RPF that such an approach was not feasible given their server capabilities, although competition between them may have prevented either party saying "We can't do that".  It was obvious though.  Even RPF's forum sysadmin could have told them that.  It was even checkable in advance with a load test script.

Once Pi became available, my only significant criticisms of E14/Farnell are that the export site provides substandard Farnell service (compared to Farnell UK), and that they haven't been fast enough at putting Pi on a regular product footing now that it is ex-stock.  This still hasn't happened, and that's a fault because substandard service should never be considered "business as usual" for Farnell.  Also, they could have volunteered a bit more information when people were asking for it, but none of these things are epic disasters.

So on the whole, almost full marks.

And in case anyone suspects that this is just being nice to our hosts here, I think we've made our feelings quite plain and unambiguous when we've criticised the dreadful handling of knode discussions for BBB, so we don't hesitate to highlight things that are are broken when they are.  This problem is still present, but the fault was acknowledged rapidly and an update is in progress for end of Q3 so we live with it, unhappily but patiently.

Well done E14 on Pi.

Sorry, but I'm not impressed with any of it. The R-Pi and its peripherals might be capable of wonders, but without some fairly basic documentation accompanying each item they're of little use. The forums might be of value to those who already know something about modern systems and software, but I have wasted hours trying to find solutions to quite basic problems. (" .. fire-hose ... pointing the wrong way.")

At times I feel like giving up altogether, but I was asked to help write a course for Year 8 and Year 9 pupils based on the R-Pi, so I'll persevere.

I seem to recall that coder27 has pointed out on many occasions that the stated goals of providing a supported educational release never materialized.  I haven't been following it, but with the early part of my career being in academia and knowing the importance of engineering education, I do share your pain.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

I seem to recall that coder27 has pointed out on many occasions that the stated goals of providing a supported educational release never materialized.  I haven't been following it, but with the early part of my career being in academia and knowing the importance of engineering education, I do share your pain.

Personally, I would say the educational release "has yet to materialize", or to quote Robert Service "a promise made is a debt unpaid".  Converting the herd of cats that is FLOSS into robust software that's easy to use by the masses is really hard.  You can make things easier to use by limiting their capabilities (Android), but then you'll have people screaming for features that aren't supported.  From what I've read, NOOBS is going in the right direction.

About a year ago the strategy was to let the developer community come up with educational stuff, but of course with FLOSS people will work on what's interesting for them and not work towards anything cohesive unless you have a foul-mouthed benevolent dictator.  So we have various packages that run on RasPi and some address various educational applications, but at this time it does require educators to climb a steep learning curve to deploy them.

As I understand it, RasPi was inspired by Eben's disappointment with the amount of programming knowledge shown by candidates for jobs at Broadcom nowadays compared to the 1980s.  Well, a lot of people have learned a lot of lore to get their RasPis to do useful things, so RasPi's been pretty successful towards that goal.  I don't know how much of that lore is programming -- a lot of it is system admin skills, but unfortunately you do need a lot of those skills nowadays.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

I seem to recall that coder27 has pointed out on many occasions that the stated goals of providing a supported educational release never materialized.

It looks like this could end up being it http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4247

I thought it was just me, but there seem to be a fair few people pointing out problems in the comments.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

I seem to recall that coder27 has pointed out on many occasions that the stated goals of providing a supported educational release never materialized.

It looks like this could end up being it http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4247

I thought it was just me, but there seem to be a fair few people pointing out problems in the comments.