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On Mon, 16 Jan 2012, tom wrote:
On 16/01/12 08:29, Kai Hendry wrote:No - its not just a toy - its a small compact computer. As such you can do just about anything with it.Aren't folks getting a little _too_ excited by Rasberry PI? I must say it's getting a absurd amount of coverage from BBC et al. It's a toy, an education device. The specs are super low, yet people ask me if repeatedly if Webconverger will be ported to it. You can't hope to browse in a modern manner on 256megs of RAM I'm sorry to say. It's not even great for driving a Webcam. http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum/general-discussion/raspberry-pi-as-autonomous-surveillance-system#p9283256 M Ram was quite common on a lot of usable low end android devices.It might not run badly written bloatware but the CPU is around 1000 times more powerful than the old DEC machine I used to use with 20 other engineers and 130 secretaries on 1 meg of ram. And its got a gpu too....
The other side if this is that we're now dealing with 1000 times more information than we used to deal with 30 years ago - even though we don't think we are...
e.g. putting a character on a screen - that used to be one byte down a 9600 baud wire... Now it's a high resolution bit-mapped "graphic" on a screen that uses more memory just for the display than your old DEC machine had in total. No-longer is a 80x25 character display acceptble either - it has to be multi-colour, transparent in places, proportionally spaced, WYSIWYG, full of eye-candy. That soaks up resources too.
If only we could go back to the old days... But I'm not sure they really were 'good' though...
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq