.NET Gadgeteer — Microsoft's Arduino Killer? 241
mikejuk writes ".NET Gadgeteer is a new open source platform, from Microsoft Research, based on the use of the .NET Micro Framework. It brings with it lots of hardware modules that are backed by object oriented software. You simply buy the modules you need — switches, GPS, WiFi etc — that you need and plug them together. The software, based on C#, is also open source, and comes with classes that let you use the modules without having to go 'low level.' Is this a competitor for the Arduino?"
Not a chance. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The likeliest adopters are commercial users (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't love Microsoft, but kudos to them for branching out creatively in an effort to shore up their sagging fortunes.
Microsoft just announced record Q4 earnings a few weeks ago of over $17B. How, by any stretch of the phrase, are their fortunes "sagging"? I wish my own personal fortunes were sagging as badly.
Re:little pricey (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeh, it's an "arduino killer", why else would it have been made?
Stop playing fucking semantics to ignore the truth of the situation.
It's an overpriced "arduino killer" for people who've drunk the .net koolaid.
http://www.ghielectronics.com/catalog/category/265/ [ghielectronics.com]
$3 for the cheapest ribbon cable, something you can pick up from a decent part store for 50c. Rip off.
Re:Wow! Awesome idea!! (Score:3, Interesting)
TL;DR: "You kids get off my lawn"
May apologies, but you are on the wrong side of history. In the 50's, there were "old guard" programmers who wanted to program in octal instead of assembly so they could really understand what the computer was doing. In the 60's, the "old guard" fought COBOL and FORTRAN in favor of assembly so "they could understand what the computer was doing". In then 70's, they fought virtual memory because "only with real memory could you understand what the computer was doing". In the 80's, they fought SQL and wanted to keep COBOL so "they could understand what the computer was really doing". In the 90's they fought GUIs because "only with a command line could you really understand what the computer was doing". And in the last decade, they fought bytecode and interpreted languages because "only with a compiled language can you really understand what the computer is doing".
This is not to say that every proposed new language and concept is good -- they aren't. There was an research computer where the compiler was in hardware (yes, individual gates and thing to parse your source code), along with the entire OS. There have been visual languages by the dozen; almost all were losers.
But, overall, history isn't on your side. The higher level languages and abstractions actual make people more productive programmers. Both Java and .NET have been accepted as "good" by an enormous number of working programmers and their hard-nosed managers; they are here to stay.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nope (Score:5, Interesting)
The type of person who is a rabid irrational open source zealot and would cut their nose off to spite their face is the same type who will avoid anything with a Microsoft logo.
FTFY.
There's plenty of people out there who are a bit more rational than that though, and just use what they like, and avoid what they don't. The plethora of open source software available on Windows should make that clear enough- clearly if people are developing FOSS for Windows, then not everyone that cares about open source is avoiding everything with a Microsoft logo, clearly some recognise that FOSS and proprietary can actually work together. Obviously you've never heard of XBMC or the FOSS Kinect projects etc. either.
In fact frankly, most people I come across who have this hate Microsoft for everything, forever attitude, aren't even FOSS developers, they're just FOSS fanboys, groupies, whatever you want to call them. They don't actually help the FOSS community really, they just unfairly make it look like it's full of retards because they're the mouthy gobshites making it look bad, whilst the hard working, talented developers slave away creating a decent product, whatever the underlying platform.
Besides, even if you genuinely believe that a single company can kill FOSS, then there's a lot bigger threats than Microsoft nowadays, MS is pretty much done as a threat to FOSS, I'd be more worried about the growing influence of Apple's extremely more closed and restrictive platform model, or the push by equally many other firms for everything to be run from the cloud, where you can use it, but can't fiddle with it.