Google cooks web dev teaching tool for Raspberry Pi Google has jumped aboard the Raspberry Pi badwagon, releasing an operating system called “Coder” designed to get kids into web development. Operating system might be flattering Coder a bit, as it offers a constrained environment dedicated to web development and based on Node.JS, which itself is an implementation of Google's V8 …
"Coder is a second signal that the Pi may be a little more confronting than its makers intended. ®"
Or more worryingly, for Google, something that does not immediately leak privacy.
Can't have a generation growing up without using Google for everything, can we?
Using this icon, but would like to use AC instead although not anonymous >>===>
Just for my own benefit, can you explain what you mean by
"Coder is a second signal that the Pi may be a little more confronting than its makers intended. ®"
and
"It may also show that in formulating that mission the Pi Foundation over-estimated the skills of its intended audience, a theory we advance given installing Apache or any other web server in in Raspbian is only a “sudo apt-get install [package name]” away."
Because I don't see what you are getting at.
Unfortunately the Pi still does not hit the mark, it's too sluggish when compared to everything else around. No kid wants to sit down to a machine that has a thudding lag every time an icon is clicked.
Introducing one reworking of an OS after another is just polishing a turd. The interface should have been the place to start, not an add-on (cf. One Laptop Per Child).
Google's motivation for doing this - like several other of their current touchy-feely projects - is because the public is turning against them.
What has happened to all these Pis that have been sold? My guess is that half of them are on techy Dads' desks waiting to be made into that project that will never happen.
Meanwhile, the kids are doing Scratch or Python just fine on some other machine in the house.
Two words for you: try Scratch.
One of the whole reasons for Pi is that it should do Scratch and do it well. Compare this to a second-hand machine like you will find in practically any house and it looks poor. I can buy a £100 (or less) laptop from Amazon which will do it better and doesn't need all the peripheral hardware (case, monitor, keyboard, mouse, USB hub, wireless dongle, power supplies, cables).
And the USPs of Pi also look increasingly weak when compared to any programmable phablet.
My Pi Laptop based on a Motorola Lapdock cost less than £100 including all the parts you have listed. It runs better than booting into Windows on my old Eee 901 and the battery life can be measured in hours instead of minutes. It all depends on what you want your Laptop to do but I am very happy with my PiTop.
Scratch is currently having quite a lot of money thrown at it to improve speed. Unfortunately the underlying code is somewhat inefficiently coded, and needs work.
But as a whole, Scratch does work OK even now.
The USP of Pi? It's $35 new, plus $20-30 of bits gets it going (apart form screen). As for second hand PC's, they are fine. But somewhat lacking in warrantee, or GPIO, or often HDMI out etc, and use a huge amount of power in comparison. And not so many about in the less well off parts of the world.
Horses for courses.
I wish I had a turd that I had sold nearly 2 million of, polishable or not. Have a quick google/bing/whatever to get an idea of what its being used for.
It's perfectly fine for a multitude of different tasks. The latest Rasbian is actually pretty decent speed wise, certainly good enough for teaching purposes, and Scratch is undergoing constant speed ups to improve it's performance (already pretty good). But as you say, if you have another machine that's faster, you can indeed use it. Oh, that's *IF* you have another machine...
As for Google motivation - bollocks. Coder is a 20% project - you know, the Google projects people do in the 20% of time they are given for their own ideas.
Work was being done this weekend to get Haiku to run on ARM and, therefore, on the Raspberry Pi. Be interesting to see how responsive it is if we ever get the port finished.
But you're missing the point: the Pi is about making fully functional computers as cheap as possible so that they can be used for hobby or educational projects. Whether this means kids pick it up because of scratch or their dads make home automation or media servers with them is less important.
"Coder is a second signal that the Pi may be a little more confronting than its makers intended."
Getting RaspBMC running off the NOOBS setup was worryingly simple. Frankly after the trauma of building a boot card for the Beagle, I didn't actually expect to unzip stuff to a fresh SD and have it work.
It did. I was impressed. It also coped with an HDMI to VGA dongle. Really, it couldn't have been simpler.
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