News Raspberry Pi goes on sale - briefly

Raspberry Pi opened the floodgates to customers this morning, only to see stock exhausted within an hour.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/02/29/raspberry-pi-goes-on-sale/1

 

Good to see it's launch as such a success. Lots of press coverage. Although a lot of the media seems to be saying it has WiFi when it doesn't

 

Why did it launch at such an antisocial hour, and without any notification to those on the mailing list?

 

In case you are so desperate that the temptation arises, please do not try to buy a Raspberry Pi from anywhere else - especially ebay. The only legitimate sources for a Raspberry Pi are RS and Farnell. Anyone else is either a fraudster or a ripoff merchant: either they're selling something they don't have and will never send to you, or they're selling on a board that they have ordered and not yet received at an inflated price.

That said, I'm not quite as desperate to get one; now that they're no longer limited to production runs of 10,000 units at a time, it should be far easier to meet demand. For what it's worth, the foundation were reporting that Farnell had sold out by 0627 - only 27 minutes after launch...

I've been up since 0540 this morning to follow this launch and I feel knackered; I have no idea what the Raspberry Pi team must be going through, but I think it's safe to say that they've all earned a pint (or twelve) when they finally finish for the day!

 

There are over 100,000 people on the mailing list, so there were major problems getting the emails out; you aren't alone in not receiving the email. But the email didn't say anything more than the announcement on the website anyway.

The reason for the antisocial hour is presumably so that everyone interested has a good chance of getting one no matter what time zone they're in. If it launched at 1000GMT, that'd be between 0300 and 0500 for the US.

 

Looks like it's going to be a bit hit! Was up before 6AM along with a lot of other people, but alas, it wasn't meant to be.

 

Today wasn't really the time to go and order some connectors from Farnell, was it...

What the hell are you actually supposed to do with a Raspberry Pi, anyway? I've yet to see that there's actually any software for it.

F*&#$ing linux-powered, penguin-poking, Farnell-offlining piece of (#$!...

Mutter, grumble.

 

Power cable, ethernet cable and HDMi cable

Then you install RaspBMC and watch movies on your 1080p capable mini computer.

 

The Debian root filesystem has already been uploaded - last week - and a Fedora distro is expected imminently. Both distros already have a large library of ARM software available - particularly Debian.

What are you supposed to do with it? Well, what are you supposed to do with any other computer?

 

Probably not, but this isn't a profit making company - it's a charitable foundation. Besides, even if no-one else in the world would have done this, that doesn't mean that they shouldn't hold themselves to higher standards.

 

Exactly, you're supposed to do whatever you want to do with the Pi.

The only difference between it and any other desktop is it's tiny and cheap, so it lends itself to tinkering, coding and modding.

 

Windows 8 Preview today too ? Windows on arm will it work anyone ?

 

I tried to get one at 8AM this morning from Farnell (through work) and they are out of stock until late April now.
Luckily I have started looking at other products, so they might have missed a few customers already.

Badly organized, badly distributed

 

Damn it! Why do I have to go to school?

 

Wow! A killer application and no mistake! Where else can I get a computer that has, crikey, a filesystem? Sign me up!

 

You conveniently forgot to also quote the part of my post that mentions that there's already a large amount of ARM applications already available through Debian - which actually takes more effort than just clicking the "Quote" button and quoting the whole post.

If you're not interested then move right along - there's no need to be an ass about it.

 

I think you are completely missing the point of this system.

 

What I'm trying to do here is highlight the dismaying tendency of linux people to get all wound up and excited over the utterly trivial.

Not that a filesystem is a trivial bit of software engineering, but it isn't an application. Nobody buys a PC so they can use its filesystem.

I ask again: what can this thing actually do?