Lots of work to Eben, now as a “evangelist”, we could say ;)

Great talk Eben. (Alway’s loved a good TED talk)
guys also check out Tim Minshall’s talk from the same TEXxGranta event.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvjjYOqXbHI

As someone who is a programmer, everytime I see Eben talk about the reasons to start this project it strikes a chord.

I really hope it works out.

A great talk and of course modestly done but I am very glad as someone who falls into the speccy generation that the emperor’s clothes have been revealed at the state of engineering in this country. What makes me groan in despair is that I thought it was my year that spearheaded the downfall with the move to hyper modularisation and constant evaluation with less and less actual learning that the G.C.S.E’s heralded.

I am a Linux advocate and have been since uni but I am super excited at the idea of a whole new generation who have the freedom to create in a way they have never been able to before.

Hail the rise of the Raspberry Pi, and here’s to a future where we are Raspberry Pi Squared!

The pipeline analogy is spot on, not only for computer science but what I see applicable to UK science, engineering, and industry in general.

Eben, given your ability to see beyond the next financial quarter and publicly point out the pitfalls, have you considered starting a political party with a few like minded people and running in the next general election?

Eben gives good talks. Somehow he reminds me of Douglas Adams talking about old computers :)

Somebody give that man and OBE!!!!

Great talk, and the points are all well made. The concern I have is that a great deal of software jobs are simply being off-shored to India and other lower cost centres, just as electronic assembly has been offshored to China. So whilst the RasPi will encourage children to learn programming will there be a real need for developers/engineers in five/ten years time ? Anyway congratulations on getting the RasPi into production and good luck with the educational developments. Great achievement !

Nice video. But I really laughed myself to pieces by turning the audio transcript on:

Well people have been some haunted involvement for six years-Raspberry Pi has been something I have been involved in for 6 years

uh one adults of darkness but it’s mostly done by the time systems are two-uh one of the jobs of the director of studies

uh…liberals are responsible for engineering-uh…and is also responsible for engineering.
I hope they aren’t art liberals ;)

What a brilliant talk. Love the vision.

Good talk however this is stupid editing. It looks very unprofessional as if it’s been hacked together by some kid (no insults intended). The jumps to different angles could’ve been made smoother as to not appear as if we’re cutting from one thing to another!

Fantastic talk and project. I hope that you will get this information to Sal Khan at the Khan Khan Academy. With his educational abilities and outreach the effect could be dramatic.

While I’m sure it was not your intent you also make a wonderful case for Open Source. Not just because of what it allows us to create today, but the talent we develop for the future.

I’m very appreciative of Eben & the Foundation for taking on this mission. I feel a sense of pride-by-association to know that by buying an R-Pi and by donating to the Foundation I can also play some tiny part.

Back in the 70’s when I was a teenager, I desperately wanted a computer and would have loved the opportunity to learn programming. There were a few occasions when I had short-term access, but it wasn’t really enough. By the time I could, myself, afford one it had passed that “energy barrier” Eben mentions toward closed systems and as a young adult I never crossed that hurdle to dig inside.

Now I’m 50 years old, and this is like having a second chance to exercise that curiosity. The R-Pi screams “tinker with me!” in a way that finished, cased computers never seemed to convey.

Thank you for taking the initiative to pursue this mission and for persevering through everything that’s come up along the way toward making it a reality.

According to RS:
“Due to the unexpected amount of interest for the Raspberry Pi model B boards we are unable to give customers details of where they are in the queue.”

I find it hard to understand the logic of that answer. Regardless of the amount of interest, If there is a queue each person in it must have a number.

I’ve always found the IT industry to be a purple swan which still needs to find its place in this world.

Artists, musicians, natural scientists, translators, etc; these professions all have long-standing traditions and hierarchies which its members understand and follow blindly. These would be stable faculties not influenced by public trends (at least not affecting the interest of becoming those professions), whereas the IT industry is heavily affected by public sales trends.

It’s extremely strange to see the fastest growing and fastest evolving industry (IT) reacting SO slow to a public trend inherent to its success. Eben might as well be the non-monetary business angel that so many companies and future companies have been waiting for.

What a compelling talk. I’m in my 40’s, and grew up hacking zx81 / bbc micros. I now find myself involved in software development for the first time in my life and really appreciate that informal grounding from messing about as a kid. Languages and development environments have changed, but the way of thinking about a problem and in particular ‘getting around’ any perceived limitations is as valid as ever. This is what R-Pi is all about.

Eben and the team have done a great job getting us the tool – it is now the responsibility of my generation to enthuse kids and get them going.

I could be wrong, but I perceive that many/most comments on this blog are currently from us oldies – I really hope that very soon the comments will be filled with enthusiastic kids doing innovative things. That will be a true measure of success.

You weren’t becoming less ambitious, you were becoming more focused. That’s a good thing – without focus a small team can easily dissipate their energies on irrelevant goals.

Excellent talk Eben,
Its so simple, its clear to me that a lot of thought has gone into the ideas behind the R-PI foundation.
Boils down to the old: “Give a man a fish… vs. Teach a man to fish…” doesn’t it.
Just the fact that you are in a position to warn the western world about this unforeseen side effect of consumerism may be enough to avoid a tech dependability disaster.
Its analogous to our dependency on oil; will we be dependent on China, India etc for our (technological) future, or will we be able to take the future into our own hands and shape it the way we want it to be?
Is Raspberry Pi poised to become the pivotal instrument to safeguard our tech future? I’m staying tuned to find out!

Enjoyed the presentation and passed it on to people who havent heard of it yet.
Needless to say, my engineer friends answered me back and were THRILLED at the initiative. Emails full of exclamation points and colourful swear words. Not about the hardware but about the goals of the project. The motives really struck a chord with them.

——————–

Eben mentions having wanted the BBC badge but it couldnt work out..

any more details? Im curious as to the reason why it didnt go through.
trademarks or lack of interest?

Also while not british, I do have a general idea of the importance of the BBC Micro
and was curious as to what would it have given you more?
Name recognition is nice for the british audience but I think the R-Pi has done very well so far across the world with people who dont have the history of the BBC Micro in their childhood.
Would it have had other advatanges in other ways besides visibility?

he always dresses like an engineer, doenst he? ;-)
outsource the merchandising stuff and get the Pi stickers (!), shirts and coffee mugs flowing. most of us can make our own online but im sure many would be happy to pimp the Pi and add some money to the coffers. (dont forget to add the website on the merch)

What an inspiring speech. I remember begging my dad to buy me a ZX Spectrum back in the day (£130 was a lot of money to us in the mid-80s). He could barely afford it, but he was smart enough to recognise the educational potential, and knew that this was the future.

Before the first year of Speccy bashing was out I’d already left BASIC behind and was messing round with things like Forth and assembler (Rodnay Zaks’s “Programming the Z80” was my constant companion).

It would be great if another generation of kids could get as passionate about programming as we were – especially (speaking now as a dad) if we only have to shell out £30 this time around!

I really liked the TED talk. It totally did not occur to me that what I had as a kid (the BBC Micro and the Commodore 64) is totally absent from today’s home.

I am grateful that I have a technical background to pass onto my kids though.

Just how do you tech programing to a 4 year old (and I am not joking!)?

“not enough twenty-something-year-olds” can largely be explained by the industry sending most of the entry-level jobs offshore, rather than staffing them domestically in the United States, or even in Europe. I follow Broadcom’s postings on LinkedIn, and rarely do I see entry-level positions (for twenty-something-year-olds) posted for California, but no shortage of positions in India.

Raspberry Pi is a great idea, but when I graduated in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science back in 2002, most of my graduating class was unemployed due to the tech downturn. Very few of us managed to actually get into the industry when there was somewhat of a recovery. Many of my classmates remain unemployed even a decade later, as our resume submissions, to firms like Broadcom, are largely ignored.

Adamın ismi çok sakıncalı.

Eben,

Have you thought of offering your services to test web sites for scalability as an extra way of pulling in funds for the Foundation? :)

Having been a computer science academic in South Africa (back there now) and in Australia, where we had very similar issues with a drop in able undergrads, and number of students wanting to do CS, I wonder to what extent the same issues drive these things worldwide, or whether a trend in one place drives expectations in other countries.

I do know that at University of Queensland, my engineering colleagues found that their expectation that the average engineering undergrad would have had hobbies that included knowing which end of a soldering iron is hot was no longer true, and they had to introduce basic training in hands-on skills. The UK was possibly unique in the high penetration of cheap “toy” computers that invited programming, but I think there are other factors at play (literally) including the rise of web surfing and social networks, that take kids away from constructive play and turn them into consumers. I saw figures somewhere showing that the rise in the UK of web surfing and computer gaming correlated with a general drop in academic scores, so something is very wrong.

Whatever the real issue, RasPi is a great innovation and I will be pursuing ideas like forming computer clubs in low-income communities. It could have the same role as Meccano (but cheaper) in getting kids geared early to thinking about engineering and how stuff works.

Eben makes several references in the video above (1m01s, 6m22s, 11m11s) to my TEDxGranta talk which I had just finished moments earlier. To help to understand what he’s referring to, why not pop over and watch my talk too?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gSAkUOElsg