[Marketing] Christian Science Monitor article about Raspberry Pi - and alternative gadgets

[Ron Feigenblatt]

Hello,

On 7/12/11, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
>http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Responsible-Tech/2011/0712/Raspberry-Pi-Rise-of-the-25-computer
> descriptions and discussions of the Raspberry Pi are here:
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2011-May/003273.html
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2011-May/013141.html

The Pi has a Wikipedia article at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi which links to a
14-minute-audio interview in June of its foundation trustee Eben
Upton, accessed from
http://foundationlibraries.blogspot.com/2011/06/cfl-podcast-eben-upton-raspberry-pi.html

In it, Upton explains that the original intention of the project was
to encourage children in the First World to learn computer
programming. This makes no sense to me, given how widespread PC
ownership is in this part of the world. Moreover, at public
expenditures of crudely $10,000 per schoolchild per year, there is no
lack of public education money to buy off-the-shelf PCs for such
schoolkids - if there exists the WILL to do so and the BELIEF that it
is comparatively cost-effective. Those are different problems.

If you want more First World kids to get into programming, for
whatever reason, you should make such activity appealing in the face
of so many wonderful alternate uses of time which attract these kids -
lots of which, ironically, are enabled by dirt-cheap IT. You can give
kids a child-friendly IDE for a virtual machine of some description,
which runs on the PCs (not to mention other digital toys) they ALREADY
have, and which lets them build things which give them satisfaction -
perhaps video games of their own design. In fact, a BBC podcast about
the Pi mentioned use of just such a tool running on Microsoft's XBox.

Apropos of this, let me mention that the other year I suggested that
rather than send out "expensive" flash drives loaded with Sugar, one
should use cheap Live CDs. Now that most homes in the US (and many
other places) have PCs and broadband connections, free cloud storage
(e.g. re-purposed Gmail, if nothing else) would provide any needed
long-term writable memory, which could be keyed by using the unique
hardware signature of the PC running Sugar. Live CDs also have the
advantage over flash drives that sharing between friends is easy - CD
burners are common and blank optical disks only cost pennies.

Aside: I think the biggest problem with any old-fashioned AOL-style
"mailbombing" is that I hope by now most people are too careful about
security to boot their PC off ANYTHING free and unsolicited they
receive in the mail! That's not to say that CDs don't have a place -
only that they have a much better chance of being used if the consumer
can request one by going to a Web site which is linked from other,
already-trusted online sources. Or if he gets it by hand from a local
institution or
person equally well respected and trusted.

Anyway, getting back to the Raspberry Pi - Upton explained that when
the project was exposed to the world, the e-mail feedback they got
revealed two unanticipated avenues of application.

One avenue was something of which I immediately thought about upon
hearing of the project - use in embedded and hobbyist activities.
Think Stamp computer on steroids!

The other avenue was something of interest to many reading this Sugar
("OLPC Juice") mailing list: Re-purposing the very many television
sets in the on-grid portion of the developing world as video
computers.

I hope you guys remember this is practically a RERUN of the early
reaction which the "Wintel" folks had to the OLPC, as explained here:
http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/30/gates-proposes-cellphones-as-alternative-to-olpc/
wherein is cited "the idea of a specially designed smartphone that
could be connected to a TV and keyboard, turning it into a
full-fledged computer" on the premise that "Everyone is going to have
a cellphone." (I think Microsoft later called this their Phone Plus
project.)

In fact, the Raspberry Pi uses a mobile phone chipset. And as if to
cement the parallelism with the Wintel reaction, Upton mentioned that
they are yet looking at the possibility of adding networking to the
Pi.

By the way, Upton praises the OLPC as being as a good a job as one
might do within its form factor, with its attendant advantages and
disadvantages.

To enable use of virtually any TV made within the last two decades,
Upton says they want to add a RCA composite output to the Pi. This
brings to mind an idea I had about a decade ago, when I learned how
cheap the Chinese might make a DVD player and how popular the
forerunner VCD player already was (8 million VCD players sold in 1997)
there.

I saw the low-cost DVD player as a potential low-cost e-book
appliance. Even within the straight-jacket of the DVD format, one
could use a single DVD to publish 9801 (99 titles x 99 chapters each)
snapshots of pages with e.g. about 40x25=1000 Roman characters each,
i.e. the contents of about ten books of text. And with minor tweaks to
the DVD standard and electronics, one could have imagined using a
4.7GB DVD to publish the text of roughly five thousand books - a
decent village library. (The extant standard already included an
optional, limited-use specification
called "DVD Text"; see http://www.dvdforum.org/VideoTextDataUsage.pdf )

"Cinema & Home Entertainment in China" by Nielsen NRG, dated January
2007, http://www.goldmedia.com/uploads/media/Studieninformation_Cinema_Home_Enteratinment_China.pdf
(page 62, embodied as PDF page 7) graphed DVD penetration of TV
households as already 15% in China and 42% in urban China by 2005,
with the former fraction projected to reach 36% by 2010.

Nowadays, even low-cost (sub-$100) digital media players are routinely
bundling in e-book functionality. But an optical disk is still a very
much cheaper way to store data than flash media.

Also on the horizon is the "Sakshat", India's ambitious tablet answer
to the OLPC. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakshat .) New Delhi
Television [NDTV]'s Gadget Guru (see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RF_qEuIl8E ) examined this  7" Android
tablet, demoed a year ago now, then promised at a cost of 1500 Rupees
(US$ 35ish) each in lots of one million units.

Today, OLPC India mentions it briefly in passing. (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_India .) After a false start,
manufacturing was rebid in January 2011. A report now suggests that
production is imminent - but at increased cost - at 2200 Rupees (US$
50ish) each. See
http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Sakshat_Tablet_To_Launch_This_Month/551-115360-615.html

For comparison, Amazon currently advertises an unrelated product, the
VIA8650 EPad, a 7-inch Android 2.2 tablet, for $80 + $8SH (See
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0050CSHCG/ .)

Ron F