Windoze 8

[Mr Momo]

The same kind of curiosity that drives cats to put their paws into beehives?

Genuine question though, I'm interested to know why someone would spend hours of their time installing Windows 8. Seen it running myself, had a quick play... thought that it was a backward-step in almost every regard but hey, that's JMO...

Good question - so here's my "logic" :

- Like to think I'm an early adopter for Windows - recently observed more originality in the iPhone and Android systems, so I'm being temped away from my PC (iPad3 or a Galaxy Tablet). I only really use xl/word/outlook and sometime ppt at home). I wanted to see if W8 contained anything novel or more of the same in a prettier package.

Wasn't going to put W8CP on this PC, so got an old box out of the loft and hooked it up. As the first attempt to load W8CP failed, so I got carried away and let it update most applications (my OCD took over) - just took ages (hasn't been powered up for a year). That took 3 of the 6 hrs (ok - so I was exageratting for effect ). But once eventually ready to load, it stalled a couple of times. On the 3rd attempt, it made it all the way through to the final stage, only to tell me it it wasn't possible to load. This took 3 hrs and kept my attention enough that I wasn't doing much else.

So, I don't know what W8CP looks or feels like (just some crappy MS videos) and feel like leaving this machine on W7 and getting and iPad3.

So, I completely understand your question, especially about "nothing new here - move along..." and am considering wholesale move to Apple (testing myself out that I really want to chuck everything away).

[ironside]

How many SEers are waiting for a Raspberry Pi, and what projects do you have in mind?

Mine's coming at the end of April, I haven't a clue what I'll do with it yet either

[robin]

If you're going to run Linux on your Pi then you don't need a Pi ... you can run on any one of hundreds of available single board computers with a video output. In fact you'll find progress much quicker on something like a mini-ITX board with good driver support - mostly because you can build code without cross compilers and/or you can run the tool chain on the target as it has a hard disk and reasonable CPU performance.

If you're going to run on bare metal (which is more in the spirit of the BBC micro that they're wanting to emulate) then it's a tough platform to program for as no doubt the graphics acceleration (video decoding and 2D/3D engine) will be proprietary to Broadcom (just guessing - no facts to hand) and there will be no documentation for any of it.

That said they might make a bare-metal graphics driver available that does have a documented interface even if the actual source code to it is not available, in which case you might be able to program against it without Linux and X11 and this would then be similar to BBC Micro territory (where innovative programming was required to get good graphics performance, but all the hardware was documented). For example, if there is a functional OpenGLES/OpenVG driver you could write games in that - Elliot and his pal recently wrote pong that way - clearly not a challenging game but very educational none-the-less.

If you're not going to do graphics programming your choice of target board widens significantly and I wouldn't start with a Pi for various reasons (I like the Pi and they guys behind it, BTW, and I'm thrilled that they've gotten this much interest).

Put another way, embedded systems are much more hassle than proper machines and only make any sense if you have a specific task in mind AND you've worked out that the embedded system has all of the I/O capabilities you need and those capabilities are properly documented/accessible to you.

The holy grail of low power (read: fanless) media processing for a wide range of media types is still hard to achieve. The Pi's an old chip (relatively ancient ARM11 vs modern Cortex-A8/A9) so don't expect blistering performance from it unless you're able to optimize your code.

My guess is most Pi's will run the demo and then sit in a drawer ... feel free to send any unwanted Pi's to me where I will keep them fed and watered.

Cheers,
Robin

[BiggestNizzy]

Waiting on RS and CPC getting back to me. to be honest I was probably going to stick XBMC on it and run it to a touch screen.

[robin]

Have you confirmed that is actually possible?

[Corranga]

Have you confirmed that is actually possible?

Reckon there is a demo of one running XBMC, but there is no Pi compatible release of XBMC yet.

For me, I'll look at one in 6-12 months once the initial bugs have been ironed out, and see what can and can't be done on them.
Not too interested in them from a dev perspective, i'd look at something more games focussed if I was going that way (have already played with playstation (sort of) ps2, GBA and DS in the past, then there is also PSP or (sort of) via XNA on pc.

Raspberry Pi (or indeed any similar..) I'd quite like one as an emulation box possibly case modded into an old dreamcast controller or something..

[graeme]

I'm lacking amazing ideas so I'll probably do a Pi-based smart-home project (home automation, IP cameras, energy monitoring, temp/lighting control, weather station in the garden, etc). It has loads of GPIO, so I'll just swamp it with sensors and gather lots of data I'll never use. Or I might end up upgrading my race data-logger project which is quickly outgrowing the Arduino boards...

[BiggestNizzy]

Have you confirmed that is actually possible?

Don't see why not I have heard that it can run off HD video (I will only be using it for sound) I don't see any reason why it wouldn't and if not it gives me something to work towards.

[_ali]

BeagleBone (http://beagleboard.org/bone) is another option for that sort of project

[Kelvin]

Home automation is my most likely use for it since I use my Win7 PC for that currently or XBMC (the demo looked pretty slick). I just like the idea of the Raspi for some reason. Maybe I'm more easily led by marketing than I realise. If it ends up in a drawer I'll post it up to you Robin.

[Sanjøy]

Firing up Win8 tonight.

While we are geeking out I just had a wee moment reading about the ioDrive Octal. I shwinged out when I saw The Woz talking about this last year.