Submitted by “Raspberry Pis started being made a couple of days ago, but I was forbidden to tell you about it until signed contracts and receipts for payment had arrived – it’s been killing me, especially since I’ve had tens of you asking me when manufacturing would start every day for the last few weeks. I am not good at keeping secrets.” No more secrets to keep, Liz! I can’t wait to place my order.
It would be nice if ColorHug, an OPEN SOURCE display color calibration tool, also got some coverage here (and elsewhere).
http://hughski.com/
I don’t know about others, but I for one am grateful you posted this. I recently got a self-calibrating Eizo ColorEdge display for my work, meaning I could finally ditch OSX and Xrite to get a new Linux-only rig for it, but something like this would be good for the monitors back home.
Will be doing some reading on these guys. The “Current Status: Waiting for Stock” over at their Buy link isn’t very reassuring, though, so I might have to e-mail them.
Again, much thanks for sharing.
What kind of work do you do?
check out LinuxOutlaws. They had an interview with the main guy behind the colourhug. You might find it interesitng.
Looking forward to an upcoming review, Mr. Holwerda.
I am glad this project is making progress, but they aren’t hiding the fact that they are very disappointed that they weren’t able to source locally…
“We investigated a number of possible UK manufacturers, but encountered a few problems, some of which made matters impossible.”
“If a factory had sufficient capacity to do the work for us, they were typically quoting very high prices; we’d expected a delta between manufacture pricing between the UK and the Far East, but these build prices not only wiped out all our margin, but actually pushed us into the red.”
“…if we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax. If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those … If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all.”
“So we have had to make the pragmatic decision and look to Taiwan and China for our manufacturing, at least for this first batch.”
Well, this is how the civilized world works. We no longer allow harmful(to the environment) manufacturing so we can take the moral high ground. However, we still want cheap stuff so we push production to 2nd/3rd world countries which don’t have tough pollution laws.
It’s not necessarily about polution laws. It is about EU countries drilling money from companies to the blood level, via various taxes. You know, you have to feed the EU bureaucracy somehow.
I think, he is saying that law is only beneficial for China and other countries. That’s why we are so dependent on far east countries. It is very bad for EU economy and EU country citizens.
I don’t know why people cast about looking for convoluted reasons while missing the obvious one. Open Trade. Money flows downhill. And if workers in one country have less, and are thus willing to work for less money, that’s where the contracts are going to go. And it’s a *good* thing. Denizens of 1st world countries don’t have a $DEITY-given right make lots of money while hard-working 3rd world populations get ignored.
As the world gets smaller, and trade more open, it will become harder and harder for us in the 1st world to maintain our customary arrogance and complacence.
And I, for one, welcome the change.
This post puzzles me. I have a hard time understanding if you advocate increasing the living standards in poorer countries or decreasing them in richer countries.
Edited 2012-01-11 19:51 UTC
In the short term, probably both, to some extent. In the long term… I would expect the total gross world product to increase, increasing the overall average standard of living, world wide. Even then it might be a step down for 1st world citizens.
But it is the *right* way to distribute the *opportunity* for hard working people to excel.
And after a certain point in the Maslow Hierarchy, we tend to start judging our standard of living not by any absolute scale, but by how we compare to the people around us. We adjust. More money doesn’t make us happier over the long term. Moderately less money doesn’t necessarily make us less so.
That said, the middle class in the 1st world countries today live in more relative splendor than European Kings of the middle ages. Progress in techology matters. And a better distribution of opportunity is bound to accelerate that progress.
Though there will no doubt be bumps. Ups and downs which might cause some people to question if it is really the proper course.
-Steve
Edited 2012-01-13 20:04 UTC
sbergman27,
“That said, the middle class in the 1st world countries today live in more relative splendor than European Kings of the middle ages. Progress in techology matters. And a better distribution of opportunity is bound to accelerate that progress.”
Never the less, I think I might enjoy leaving the rat race for a while to live as a european king. Modern consumerism poisons the human spirit.
Watch Peter O’Toole as Henry II and Kathrine Hepburne as Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1968 movie “The Lion In Winter” and get back with me. You might just change your mind. 😉
-Steve
sbergman27,
Hardships were different, they’re different lifestyles. I do believe some people would genuinely prefer older western or colonial lifestyles over today regardless of the “stuff” that wasn’t around then.
One thing that’s bothersome today is that despite absolutely tremendous gains in productivity factors that have come about through modern automation and efficiency, we are hardly seeing any gains flowing to the middle class who are working steadily more (family income did not double over the period that two spouses began working full jobs whereas there used to be one), those gains have been mostly directed into the pockets of a much more wealthy upper class. Combine this with the decreasing social mobility of modern times and we have good reason to question the validity of top-down economic models.
Yes. The hardships were different. No access to proper medical care, even for Kings. Backbreaking labor that was so pervasive that people sometimes didn’t even remember to complain about it.
In more recent times… meh, we can do a hell of a lot more with the money we have. Just go to Walmart and look around. In the old days (not the medieval ones; I’m not *that* old) I certainly never saw people carting out 32 inch TVs (One for upstairs, one for downstairs) in one shopping cart, because they were on sale, and paying with their bank cards.
You’ve got to have have attained a certain level of comfort to do that, though. But today, only the “Attention Walmart Shoppers” level is necessary.
Much of the rest of the world does not enjoy such luxury.
I’d continue. But my Lion In Winter download just ding’d to inform me that it was completed.
Edited 2012-01-13 23:35 UTC
Well, I never said pre-modern living was easy, but it can still hold appeal.
Speaking strictly of modern times, especially the last generation or two, the standard of living is actually regressing. I see it all around me. Children doing worse than their parents while having to shoulder crippling unprecedented expenses. Home ownership is going down, dept is going up. The cost of raising a child is way up. The majority of new workers have no employer sponsored retirement plans. Etc. Middle class family income has failed to keep up with all this inflation.
All this while GDP has increased by a factor of 6 in the past 30 years. This is not due to population growth, so in theory, we could either work 1/6th as hard as our parents to maintain the same standard of living, or we could get compensated 6 times as well for the same amount of work. Neither of these is happening for the middle class, and it doesn’t take long to find where the difference is going.
http://www.businessinsider.com/15-charts-about-wealth-and-inequalit…
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/top-5-facts-america-ric…
I’m not trying to be alarmist, but the long term statistics truly are alarming. We desperately need to re-evaluate the top-to-bottom economic models that we so widely cherish.
Edited 2012-01-14 06:42 UTC
What you are seeing is a steady decrease in the ability of the US to compete effectively in the world market. You’re looking in the wrong places for a solution. A change in economic model is not going to fix the complacent attitudes of adults and the poor performance of our high school students compared to the rest to the world.
The US’s 15 year olds rank 32nd in science, 30th in math, and 17th in reading, according to the 2009 OECD results:
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/31/28/46660259.pdf
That out of about 65 countries participating. The US is outclassed in education by such countries as Estonia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Latvia, and many more. Some that you may not even have heard of. The #1 city in the world in all 3 tested areas? Shanghai, China.
And year by year, the US rankings are *getting worse*.
You can’t expect the standard of living to be rising in a (currently) 1st world country when 3rd world kids regularly run circles around their kids in education.
And you’re not going fix that with a change in economic model. In fact, I’m not sure it can be fixed at all. History is full of examples of nations rising to great power, becoming fat, complacent, and sassy, and declining due to the resulting internal rot. It’s a very common pattern. And our grand United States appear to be right on schedule. All the indications are clearly there when viewed in an objective manner.
In short, it appears to me that the sad state of affairs is not due to some inferior economic model or external influence, but is a direct a result of a problem with the people of the United States, ourselves.
-Steve
Edited 2012-01-14 21:22 UTC
sbergman27,
“And year by year, the US rankings are *getting worse*.”
This is true, however I think the causality is circular rather than strictly one way. The schools here are broke. They’re raising taxes on a shrinking middle class and cutting back days. When schools shut down, the remaining ones become ridiculously overpopulated. So it may be true that US education has gone down – that may be both a cause and effect of worsening economic conditions.
However, many degreed graduates don’t even have professional jobs waiting for them. I could vouch for that personally, so there’s definitely more than an education problem.
“You can’t expect the standard of living to be rising in a (currently) 1st world country when 3rd world kids regularly run circles around their kids in education.”
So competing on a global market is killing the middle class? Sounds plausible to me. I think US workers deserve some defense though, when career veterans are being laid off in favor of outsourcing abroad, it’s probably motivated by cost savings rather than a skills gap.
Regardless of this, you might still say the cold hard truth is that we’re uncompetitive in the US. And maybe that’s true, however that might be because of the fat cats on top who take enormous piles of wealth out of company operations. Our companies used to invest in training and even university classes for employees, they would sponsor childhood education, invest in better facilities, better products, etc. Today’s companies have stopped all these beneficiary activities in order to raise profits to unprecedented levels. And my have their profits skyrocketed. Now they feel entitled to keep those profits at any cost to society. So maybe society should be considering alternatives.
I think the extremity of the situation is finally causing ordinary people to recognize how the elite are holding back the middle class and the US as a whole. Hell, even billionaire Warren Buffet thinks so.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-r…
“History is full of examples of nations rising to great power, becoming fat, complacent, and sassy, and declining due to the resulting internal rot.”
“…but is a direct a result of a problem with the people of the United States, ourselves.”
Having the US fall is a good kick in the pants to motivate real changes, however some people are far more responsible for the internal rot than others, even though in the end it won’t make much difference who was responsible.
Edited 2012-01-15 06:11 UTC
“The schools here are broke.”
When people recognize that we have a problem regarding education, they immediately look to blame our educational system. Understandable. But I don’t buy it.
We are *swimming* in virtually cost free opportunity for both continuing education for adults, and for the education of kids whose schools might have faltered on them.
I’m 48, and further my continuing education every day, using the resources provided at ocw.mit.edu, which is MIT’s site for making their teaching materials, often including lecture videos, available to the public free of charge.
Also Yale’s excellent line of courses. Standford’s. Boston University’s. And many lesser known Universities, like the University of Missouri, Kansas City, which has an excellent course on college algebra, which I have found very helpful as an adjunct to the Calculus refresher I’m taking. (I’ve always needed more drill on factoring polynomials and simplifying expressions. It’s so important to being able to finish up after you’ve done the actual Calculus part.)
MIT has 3 particularly good physics courses available, lectured by Walter Lewin. Yale and Berkeley have complementary Chem 1A and Organic Chemistry courses up.
I’m just highlighting the one’s I’m currently availing myself of. Almost any topic you might want to educate yourself upon is available. And increasingly, the courses are *not* dependent upon expensive text books, but are designed to use the custom materials provided by the institution: Lectures. Focused, pertinent PDF handouts. Problem sets. Past exams, with solutions provided either together or separately.
It’s all there. Any motivated person could acquire an impressive education even if their local public school burned down and nobody bothered to rebuild it.
The *only* way not to have a proper education, these days, is to not *want* one. And that goes for adults as well as kids. Adults who bemoan the sad state of education without addressing their own continuing education are the height of irony. Ignorance among the children is an impending problem. Ignorance among adults is an acute problem.
I think that the most important thing I have learned is just how much I have forgotten. Hence my decision to lay off cosmology (which is both fascinating and numinous) and review the basics. And work on my math, which I was somehow able to kind of “wing” when I was studying Mech E back in college, rather than really understanding it.
The resources which anyone with an Internet connection has available today are an unimaginably valuable gift.
I realize that I took one line of your post and made a whole long post of my own in response. Apologies. But it is a topic which has weighed upon my mind a great deal, lately.
-Steve
Edited 2012-01-15 06:57 UTC
sbergman27,
“We are *swimming* in virtually cost free opportunity for both continuing education for adults, and for the education of kids whose schools might have faltered on them.”
This makes me wonder if you’ve seen the data, it’s so bloody expensive as to be completely unfordable (we pay for it through debt).
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/education/03college.html
“I’m just highlighting the one’s I’m currently availing myself of. Almost any topic you might want to educate yourself upon is available.”
Something that might interest you too, my university charged half price to students in classes without counting towards a diploma. That may be an option.
“It’s all there. Any motivated person could acquire an impressive education even if their local public school burned down and nobody bothered to rebuild it.”
Fields like CS can certainly be learned at home. If you can find employers who will hire you without an accredited degree, then go for it.
“I think that the most important thing I have learned is just how much I have forgotten.”
This is so true.
“I realize that I took one line of your post and made a whole post of my own in response. Apologies. But it is a topic which has weighed upon my mind a great deal, lately.”
Haha, not a problem. I think we understand each other, even though we’re sitting at different vantage points. It’s true online courses are a viable option.
Aside: I highly respect the cool with which you conduct yourself (particularly in that other thread). Now that’s a gift!
Thanks for the discussion!
Edited 2012-01-15 08:25 UTC
I think we need to make a distinction between “education” and “degree”.
I haven’t paid a penny for my continuing education the last few years. Though I really do need to start donating something to the Universities’ projects which have so benefited me. A *degree* is expensive. An *education* needn’t cost anything but the monthly cost of an Internet connection. Even a modem or shared connection will do, along with some motivation and patience. The lectures are generally both streaming and downloadable.
You get most everything that the students paying to attend the course get. Except for office hours consultations, and the academic credit, itself. Many of the Universities even provide study group forums, which facilitate the interaction between students’ minds which can be of such value.
Degrees are nice. I have one, from 24 years ago. Although last I looked, the diploma is still at the bottom of my sock drawer. (Never did get around to having it framed.) But an education is *far* more important than a degree. A degree is something you get for utilitarian purposes. Like a waffle iron, in a way. The value of an education transcends such mundane considerations. If you do the degree right, it does come with an education. But the two are still distinct.
If I had to choose between either the diploma or my access to all of these wonderful educational resources we have today, I’d give up the diploma in a minute. (Most of that knowledge is outdated anyway.)
I would particularly recommend MIT’s “Scholar” series of courses. With those, MIT is really taking the next step to turn something that started out rather “catch as catch can” into a more formal curriculum, with a suggested process, and all the customized materials, very clearly laid out.
-Steve
Edited 2012-01-15 17:20 UTC
sbergman27,
“I think we need to make a distinction between ‘education’ and ‘degree'”
Of course I know the difference. When I said that CS skills could be learned at home – I did mean it literally. If one is able to get a decent job that doesn’t require a degree and/or several years experience in the industry, then that’s great.
Back on the topic of youth education though, which is what you cited as dropping, I don’t think on-line materials make a good substitute for grade school. Lack of funding will impede their education even with the availability of on-line materials.
off topic
Sbergman27, just realized you are back. I have missed your insightful comments.
Hey Boldie,
It was kind of an accident. I was testing a system-wide adblock+ configuration and remembered that OSNews is a good place to test such things. That was a few days ago. I’d forgotten how addictive this place is. 😉
-Steve
That’s probably hardly “after some point”, probably ~always.
Edited 2012-01-17 23:59 UTC
I understood, that UK work has similar price as “Far East” price. The difference is tax for single part and for whole device. You have to pay more for assembling device because tax for getting all parts from abroad is higher than for getting whole device. So I’m asking, where is that “free trade”?
I doubt human labor has that much to do with it. I think its more about the fact that the manufacturing process is extremely toxic for the environment. There are a lot of nasty chemicals used in fabbing and electronics manufacturing. Theoretically, those high taxes go to offset the damage done to the environment by providing money for things like reforestation and spill cleanups. Hence, completed device are not taxed. I could be wrong, I am not a UK citizen. But it is a reasonable explanation and one of the things that pushed manufacturing out of the US.
As for countries like China, I have little sympathy. While behind us, they at least have the benefit of our experience. There is no reason other than government control that they aren’t a first world nation.
Ahh…when citizens from rich countries write in favor of free trade thinking that they are doing citizens from poor countries a favor (and with such moral conviction)…now we know that colonialism has come full circle 😉
You are aware of course that countless millions of people in “third world” countries are against so-called free trade? You do also realize that the money that flows downhill comes from the uphill in the first place, correct? I think most people who are against unfettered free trade are in favor of other nations generating their own wealth rather than letting it roll down a hill into their neighbor’s backyard.
At any rate, the way that the blog post described UK law made it clear–if their interpretation and delivery are correct–that UK tax law is decidedly anti-free trade. They are effectively subsidizing importation, which is a totally valid economic policy decision for certain things but certainly not if you’re trying to promote free trade or if you’re trying to generate manufacturing jobs.
earksiinni,
“At any rate, the way that the blog post described UK law made it clear–if their interpretation and delivery are correct–that UK tax law is decidedly anti-free trade. They are effectively subsidizing importation, which is a totally valid economic policy decision for certain things but certainly not if you’re trying to promote free trade or if you’re trying to generate manufacturing jobs.”
Unfortunately the geniuses who promote these economic policies (in the US as well) are on corporate payroll and have an agenda. They do not consider or care that a prolonged loss of manufacturing jobs leads not only to economic turmoil, but also creates technological dependencies on the countries which actually do the manufacturing. State of the art factories are not built locally, jobs are not being created locally. Money may be flowing to shareholders, but it isn’t flowing to local employees who drive the local economy. The loss of local investment hurts not only the first line employees, but also has a recursive effect on the whole economy. When corporations offshore jobs in the name of profits for them, the public often end up paying for it.
I don’t know what the situation is in the UK, but in the context of France I would be tempted to sigh “well, as long as employees don’t start to care about who they vote for…”
At the start of the Industrial Revolution ordinary people in the “Third World” were often wealthier than the European factory workers who were making the trinkets.
Reading their blog post, it feels really strange. So they claimed 25 and 35 pounds price, before checking out, how actually expensive the production run in UK is going to be? It seems like an excuse, and the plan to produce at the far east from the very beginning.
Perhaps it was a simple oversight, and that their calculation was something like parts + manufacture + overheads = £25. This price seemed to attract a lot of attention in the public eye, and maybe it would’ve been bad publicity to keep upping it as the details were ironed out, and the extent of taxation was realised.
Most projects will have a target price to aim for during the development of the product. Quite often that price shifts – on this occasion they managed to stick to it.
So I don’t see the problem
What a joke! 3/4 of that blog post is political. An apology for sourcing products from the most competitive manufacturers on the planet. The people behind this project must be living in the stone age or something.
Their point was that they wanted to use domestic producers who could do the job, but the UK tax structure makes them too expensive for large production runs. So you’d rather they just pretend that Asians are magic?
And you must be not so good at reading comprehension. The complaint is about the fact that even if the local manufacturers could make the devise for less (which I doubt but that’s not the point), it would still be more expensive because of taxation!
And if you don’t appreciate their desire to go with local manufacturers… well, I really don’t know what to tell you without offending you. BTW, my opening line should not be read as an offense – it’s just an observation.
I’ll definitely be picking one of these up. I plan to use it as a video and content streamer for the projector. Hook it up to the hdmi and then stream videos from a shared drive over the network. Not that I can’t do that off the iPhone right now, but this’ll be a fun project to play around with.
Hi, I’m really not too familiar with the prospects of this project, but it looks incredibly interesting. Does anyone know if it would be possible to hook up a USB HD and turn it into music collection / organizer to hook up to a home theater system? I honestly can’t stand my PS3 for the job, and I haven’t used actual music CD’s in any kind of system in a long time!
I’m mostly asking because of wondering whether the 256MB Ram would be able to handle one of the arm distros and a decent collection of music.
It will handle your music without a problem. Even the 128MB version (Model A) will suffice. The question is how you intend to control it. You can hook it to a display with a keyboard and a mouse but then why would it better than your regular desktop? Maybe you can use some music player which is controlled via Web interface. Then you’ll need it to be networked – either get the Model B with the Ethernet port or hook a USB Wi-Fi adapter. Or use some USB IR receiver for remote control. Then it will be a matter of software again. And without a display it will be a bit hard to select the song you want.
I intend to use one as an Internet radio. With a USB Wi-Fi adapter to connect to the network. And it will stream a fixed station all the time. So I just turn on/off the speakers. And I can log in remotely to change the station. Geeky!
if you have ethernet you could use mpd.
Like your idea!
For me, I’m looking to use it with one of those small wireless keyboards that I can tuck away neatly in a drawer in the coffee table. Ethernet isn’t important to me (I haven’t used ethernet to connect any of my devices in a little over 2 years), but the RAM is. I don’t own a regular desktop, just a laptop I use for school, and I’m looking for something dedicated and distraction free, and wanting to make a single entertainment center that doesn’t require hooking or unhooking anything up when I want to change what I’d like to do 🙂 Mostly just something simple for listening to music, and MAYBE be able to purchase music from Amazon.
You could use an LCD display with a couple of buttons, it’d be fairly easy to make a USB device in order to control a piece of software. I’m sure someone already has. Maybe even with some sort of remote (A la Apple’s wonderful remote for the iMac).
Put in a decent amplifier, and a speaker, you could have a really nice appliance (clock? with aux in? FM (UKW)?)
Of course a nice small USB wifi for streaming, you could even have an on screen display for an HDTV.
Ahh… if only Haiku had an ARM…
[q]You could use an LCD display with a couple of buttons, it’d be fairly easy to make a USB device in order to control a piece of software. I’m sure someone already has. Maybe even with some sort of remote (A la Apple’s wonderful remote for the iMac).[/QUOTE]
There’s plenty of different ways of doing what he wants. A simple LCD can be connected via the DSI, you can attach various kinds of buttons and levers via the I2C or serial interface and so on. Just takes a bit of reading. You could even hook up a touchscreen to it as long as it doesn’t use some proprietary connector.
Using the I2C or serial interface for buttons would leave the USB port free for use with WIFI, infrared, bluetooth or something similar.
I’m doing this exactly since many years! I have an old Sony Vaio PCG C1XD (Pentium 2 400MHz, 64MB RAM) with an uptime of almost 3 years. In the morning it goes of out sleep and stream a specific radio station over wifi. I put it to sleep when done.
I tried using X on it, but gosh it’s slow. I can barely browse using Opera. So I removed that all. Virtual consoles are just fine for controlling this. alsamixer in one, and vlc in the other. I agree the “hard” part is the software: how to control it efficiently… But I’m quite impress of what that little machine can still do!
It isn’t a straight announcement.
On the other hand, it needs to be said and repeated over and over again until the politicians take notice.
I’m a fervent advocate of simplifying the English language. Getting rid of all those silly and complicated rules about the formation of plurals, etc. But this one gives me pause for thought. Perhaps we *should* have a special rule for avoiding this sort of thing. Or maybe not…