@ ianlee74 - So true, so true :’(
@ godefroi why do you think Microsoft move this to China?
Raspberry Pi has sold over 2 million units (they recently announced that the two millionth Pi shipped between October 24 and October 31), very good for Raspberry Pi, no doubt, but anyone else making money on Raspberry Pi devices, hence same problem as everyone else, step two. Perhaps given RaspberryPi is a charity organization and their objective was to create a cheap platform to introduce programming to students, that perhaps there isn’t an objective to take it beyond that, in which case its all good for them as they achieved some of their final objective.
On average how many Raspberry Pi’s would the average Pi owner have and how many are students and how many were programmers before they got their Pi’s?
I must admit I find it impossible to work with schools as for example one local high school I found a company that was willing to buy a number of Gadgeteer kits for their Robotics Club, but were turned down because the company wasn’t the ‘corporate partner’ of the high school (and their official corporate partner wasn’t even slightly interested in helping their Robotic Club, even though they are a multi-national engineering firm). If people really wanted to help students learn programming etc, then they would help tear down some of these stupid barriers that exist between businesses and education. I could equip every junior and high school computer lab in our city with newer hardware and they could be using free development environments (Visual Studio, Eclipse , etc), over the next couple of months, but I can’t because school boards have become impossible to work with, and so the onus now is on students to buy their own platforms and tools (enter RaspberryPi), how stupid is that? Even when I offer to hook up Research Groups with assisting Disable Students, I can’t, its madding so to preserve what sanity I had left, I gave up.
Now I’m a roll as I’m thinking about this a bit. What does a kid need to learn programming? RaspberryPi is $35 (approx.) but you can’t program that, you need accessories etc so how much does it really cost to start cutting code on one?
Now in my city if you go down to our computer recycler and volunteer a total of 24 hours of work and you walk out of there with a free computer or laptop. That’s 24 hours of someone teaching you how to rip down and rebuild a computer, pretty good education on its own. Reality is a kid could get a really good system and software for learning programming for the price of a RaspberryPi and its required accessories.
@ Duke Nukem - I’m sure I don’t know why it was moved. If you’d like me to speculate, you should know that my wife says I’m a pessimist. That being said, I think it’s because Microsoft sees no value in putting any more resources into NETMF, and some inexpensive, low-maintenance team in China is the perfect place for it to be in case something interesting ever happens with it.
Now, like I said before, if the question is, “what happens now”, the answer is, “nothing at all changes”, except maybe now someday GHI will move to 4.3 because NETMF is no longer a moving target.
As a thought game, I posted a thread: https://www.ghielectronics.com/community/forum/topic?id=14444&page=1#msg146638 On what you’d do if you forked the PK and could change anything you wanted.