simple: dell computers do not come without CD drives sir! You must pay us TO TAKE THEM OUT.
>-- Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc?-ra-cy) ? a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.
Just pull the power cable?
By that point they'd completely lost the plot and systematically destroying their empire. Paying extra for no CD drive is very easy to imagine. :/
The point is that the early model Bs and the model A have very little memory. This and the low-end CPU make IDEs run *very* slow. It has nothing to do with the availability of software.
Again the point is to realize what the RPi is good at and what it is not so good at.
--
(\__/) M.
(='.'=) If a man stands in a forest and no woman is around
(")_(") is he still wrong?
In
degrees.
Or a sad reflection of the devaluation of the degree in recent times. Have those lab assistants got a degree related to the lab they are working in or in Flower Arranging from what would have been a Poly or College but now calls itself The University Of ?
-- Cheers Dave.
A degree in climate science from the university of the Matto Grosso , available on ebay for $3.99
-- Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc?-ra-cy) ? a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.
I used to run a Linux GUI on a 166MHz PC with 32MB RAM and 4MB graphics quite happily, for internet/office/development work, I don't see why the RPi's 700MHz and 256MB should struggle unless you insist on using software that's intended to run on a modern PC.
I like the RPi, but I'm sceptical about it getting much use in schools.
With the BBC Micro, and the others around at the time, kids and teachers had to learn to deal with the command line, as there wasn't an alternative. Now there is a massive alternative called Windows, and most people don't see the point of using ahything without a GUI.
Having supported computers in primary schools for some years, I've seen a move away from teaching ICT to "embedded ICT", meaning that the emphasis is on using ICT in work on other subjects. Essentially that translates to using Word, Excel and Powerpoint to present information. That's a useful skill for anyone looking for employment of course. Unfortunately there is very little else done.
Some schools are using Control Station, with or without the hardware. (It is a process control simulator using flow chart elements, and very child-friendly.)
One of the schools is using Scratch - or rather a parent is running out-of-hours sessions with it.
Other that that, just Office.
One school was very short of money when setting up the new computers, so I put open Office on instead of Office. The kids were fine with it, but the teachers struggled, because it had a slightly different user interface. Six months later that found the money for Office.
I did find a couple of teachers who were brave enough to learn from the kids. Most couldn't admit in front of the kids that there was something they didn't know. I found a useful tactic when something new was added to the system was to teach it to a class, with the teacher watching (and learning) without appearing to show ignorance.
25-minute lesson slots don't allow for anything that requires setting up.Finally there is the cost. The schools already have computers. The vast majority of the monitors are VGA, so you can't just drop a pi in in place of the desktop. Adding a converter puts £20 on the cost, so pi, power unit, SD card and adapter comes to around £70 to £80. Why spend that, when you can run things like Python on Windows? The real advantage comes with controlling hardware - but that's another cost.
-- Alan Adams, from Northamptonshire alan@adamshome.org.uk http://www.nckc.org.uk/
But that's just what happens: I d'lded Raspi, and (from a blog) I was recommended to run "aptitude update" - it filled my SD card, and messed it up to non-boot (no room for tmp?).
-- It's a money /life balance.
That's the issue - it's actually very hard to get software that's not designed to run on a modern PC - modern software has kept pace with modern hardware, so the "office" application is rather large - as is the email client and so on. Trying to get that software we used to use on those old, slow PCs (and my first Linux box was a DX4/66) is almost impossible.
But with care, it's very usable if you select the right software. e.g. I'm finding that xfce4 is better than lxde for a GUI environment. The Chromium browser is usable, but you must remember to not open many tabs, etc.
I've not tried libreoffice, but others have - I use LaTeX and it works better than it did when I first used it on a Sun3 with 4MB of RAM well over 20 years ago...
But if you want to run alpine for email, (which I still do), trn for usenet, vi/nano/emacs to edit and use gcc for development then it's a nice little platform.... Although I find the latency to the SD card to be higher than those old PCs - I suspect the Pi's SD card IO driver and SD card operations themselves have a higher "startup" time cost and hence latency.
Gordon
That is the point I was trying to make.
-- I think I am an Elephant, Behind another Elephant Behind /another/ Elephant who isn't really there.... A.A. Milne
The minimum card size is 2GB, which will fill up very soon if you are not careful. The recommended card size is 4GB or more and you need to use the "expand file system" option on the initial config screen to use it (there are other ways, but that is easiest).
aptitude update is very unlikely to fill up anything as it just downloads the latest software index files. aptitude upgrade will use up space (in /var/cache/apt/archives/, not /tmp).
None of this has anything to do with the CPU speed, or amount of RAM on the system.
I know school education is free, but that doesn't cover everything: trips to theatres, etc. generally expect a contribution from the student. I don't see why the same sort of thing shouldn't apply to students taking stuff home. The schooling is still free: its just that losing or damaging school equipment wouldn't be.
Don't want to contribute? Then you don't get to go on the trip/to take stuff home/whatever.
-- martin@ | Martin Gregorie gregorie. | Essex, UK org |
Humpf! WINE is pretty much a joke thanks to its almost total lack of regression testing. The result is that programs that used to run under it suddenly stop working after upgrading to a later version. I used to rate it "useful", but over the last year that has dropped to "waste of disk space".
The Wine forums are full of tales about 'regressions': what they mean is that some clown made a change which was committed after very minimal testing and surprise! it broke stuff. If its to be useful, Wine needs a full suite of regression test tools that can fully exercise every system call it implements and for versions not to be released until they can pass a complete set of regression tests without any errors being signalled. Yes, I know this means that no patches should be accepted without the accompanying regression test modules, test data and expected results but so what? Thats how reliable software gets developed.
-- martin@ | Martin Gregorie gregorie. | Essex, UK org |
They can be made to, yes, but it's beyond what many schools have support resources for, and they're often tied into a managment suite that's Windows-only from the likes of RM.
A Pi is self-contained, simple, and cheap.
On 19 Jun 2013 07:33:01 GMT, "Peter Heitzer" declaimed the following:
Based on my latest machine -- because that isn't an option
I recall my earlier Dell buys where practically every component except the tower chassis was optional: pick a processor speed, pick from two or three graphics cards, pick from two or three or no optical drive, etc.
On my latest machine -- I had the choice of how much memory, and maybe a choice of hard drive capacity. Blu-Ray player, DVD/CD burner was default. A BD burner was an /additional/ drive option.
Dell used to separate the order system by personal, SOHO, and commercial (large orders). The large order systems tended to be a year or two behind in technology, but came in sturdier chassis.
Heh... I'm pretty sure no one would want my older machine -- it's over
8years old: WinXP sp3, a mere 400GB drive 1.5Mbps SATA, 2GB Ram, 3.4GHz P4-HT... DVD/CD burn capability, and 3.5" floppy (the system /that/ replaced had a ZIP drive!) Used to have a pair of 1TB drives added, but I moved them over to the new machine (which now has a total of 4TB internal, a 2TB external, AND a 4TB external for back-up-only... shocking... I remember the summer my college mainframe received a pair of 300MB "washing machines"! )Nice thing -- I was still able to get Win7Pro on the new one.
--
Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN
wlfraed@ix.netcom.com HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/
On Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:46:11 +0100, Alan Adams declaimed the following:
And even that may fade if one considers:
--
Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN
wlfraed@ix.netcom.com HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/
How good is the latest Wine at handling USB stuff? There's a lot of Windows-only hardware (no Linux drivers) which would become useful if it could be driven by Wine.
Off the top of my head it would appear that there ought to be a standard way to handle USB access from just about any computer. (But what do I know).
-- Windmill, TiltNot@Nonetel.com Use t m i l l J.R.R. Tolkien:- @ O n e t e l . c o m All that is gold does not glister / Not all who wander are lost
It depends /a lot/ on your SD card. Some (apparently all Class 10 cards) are utterly terrible at 4KB random writes (10KB/s) while others are much much better (MB/s). Try and find an SD with as many IOPS as possible - often this information is difficult to find. 500+ 4KB random write IOPS is good, some class 10 cards can have something in single figures.
Theo
You could argue that the Rpi might tend at least to make people more aware of the bloat which has afflicted standard PCs so that they would try a little harder to avoid it.
Especially now that silicon has run out of steam, speed-wise, while GaAs no longer seems to be a possible replacement.
Of course some govt. agency might have very quietly taken up where Cray left off; I'm not certain if such an event would become common knowledge.
-- Windmill, TiltNot@Nonetel.com Use t m i l l J.R.R. Tolkien:- @ O n e t e l . c o m All that is gold does not glister / Not all who wander are lost
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