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Engineer gadgets

Spot the odd one out – Pi, Apple Pie, @Raspberry_Pi

I get high on RaspberryPiMost people will not have heard about it before today when it hit the headlines. It is also hitting the shops – two of them. It is the way of the future in the here and now. It is affordable and will one day, in one form or another, inevitably permeate into every household on the planet. It is educational, sensational, it’s the RaspberryPi.

Most of you will know by now that the RaspberryPi is a low cost very low cost computer that has been developed to encourage kids to learn to write computer code. The level of interest in the device has been so great that the two outlets chosen to stock the device, Farnell and RS Components, have this morning seen their websites crash due to high levels of traffic 1. A botnet generated DDOS attack could not have done any better. In internet terms it’s the same as the huge round the block queues that unexplainably form outside Apple stores just before a new product launch.

I leave the minutiae of RaspberryPi  to the thousands of others no doubt crafting blog posts at this very moment without a hope of any reasonable Google ranking.

It is however worth discussing the intent behind the project and that is to boost the desire to learn computer science amongst yooves.

If you were to ask me to recommend a career direction for a teenager wondering where to take his or her life then computer science would probably be at the top. There are two reasons for this.

Firstly every single company in the world without exception will at some stage need some kind of software development. This could be a simple website or it could be a huge ecommerce platform with multiple facets. Start-ups these days cannot happen without a technologist on board. Every one of them has to be low or zero touch and highly scalable or they will not be able to compete. Coders are essential and will command earning power.

Secondly we live in an exciting fast moving world with lots of exciting and interesting opportunities. If you can write code you can be a player. Those that can’t write code will have to buddy up with someone who can. Microsoft, Facebook et al all had coders as founders.

Computer scientists are not only critical to the future of a nation but will also have the best time!

Coincidentally I am off to meet the Computing Profs at the University of Lincoln tomorrow morning. They seem to be churning out a lot of coders. There is already a vibrant community of Lincoln Uni graduates that have stuck around and are already starting to have a commercial effect on the city. Great things are to come.

Oh and by the way if you haven’t already guessed the apple pie is the only edible one although you could argue that Pi is the only one with no mention of fruit. You can decide on your own odd one out.

1 They should talk to me & I’d tell them about the platform we built for the world record attempt.

PS Of course as a coder you may consign yourself to a life spent in darkened rooms hunched over a keyboard but it will be exciting and you will be able to afford the best kit whilst the others will be forced to conduct ordinary lives with 2.3 kids and a Ford Mondeo.  Do they still make Ford Mondeos? 🙂

PPS btw it is a little known fact that in 2003 2004 Russia was the world’s biggest producer of Raspberries with 28% of total output! Not a lot of people know that.

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

4 replies on “Spot the odd one out – Pi, Apple Pie, @Raspberry_Pi”

I wasted a few minutes this morning trying to buy a Raspberry Pi without much luck! Maybe I should write a “5 Alternatives to the Raspberry Pi” blog post 🙂 The BeagleBoard, PandaBoard, Fignition, DuinoMite and something else…

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