Entries Open For First Ever 24-Hour Raspberry Pi Hackathon 74
concertina226 writes "Called the Raspberry Pi 'hack day', the competition will pit 100 entrants against one another in a number of categories using only the board, Internet access, soldering irons and as much coding as they think appropriate. Participants will have 24-hours to complete projects, at the end of which winners will be awarded from a variety of prizes including camcorders, Android tablets and the geek must-have, the Hubsan H107 Quadcopter."
Who wrote that article? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is TechWorld for real or is it someone's blog?
"The best overall winner will also be given a tour of Sony’s Welsh in which the Raspberry Pi is manufactured"
Proof-reader sick today?
Actually, I'm not usually so grumpy but that full-page interstitial ad I had to dismiss before I got to the 7-paragraph ultra-lightweight "story" kind of ticked me off.
Re:Why is Slashdot to Hostile to Raspberry Pi? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't speak for myself but it's the jerking around that I don't appreciate. This will be done this time, no wait, it'll be done that time. We have Android for you, oh but we're not going to release it and we won't explain why. Guess what? People who ordered two days later than you got twice as much RAM, which we clearly knew about for quite some time because these things don't happen overnight, but rather than discount the obsolete part we'll just ignore the whole situation. So much for Openness of the process, there is none. Also, claiming the entire driver stack is free from end to end when it isn't. (I have previously posted about being glad they opened up the driver stubs but that still doesn't make it the complete driver source. And no I'm not interested in hearing about how nobody else opens their blob either, because this is about the claim to a fully-open driver.) And let us not even get into the drastically incompetent shipping nightmares. What I learned from this is to avoid both RS and Farnell like the plagues they are because they are not competent to put something in a box and send it to a customer. Hell, Farnell will even defraud you about backstock and shipping, at least they did me.
We're a cynical bunch, and R-Pi has done nothing to change that. Indeed, it has only served to further cement the high value of cynicism. If I were smarter, I would have waited to buy an R-Pi. Early adopters get screwed around (if not actually screwed) and I forgot that to my detriment.
My next ARM computer will probably be a pogoplug. And hey, they have GPIO too :p
Re:Why is Slashdot to Hostile to Raspberry Pi? (Score:5, Insightful)
Farnell seem perfectly competent to me,
I ordered mine from Farnell in August hoping it would arrive in time for the mid-winter hacking season and it arrived on my doorstep the very next day. This in Ireland, a place most Amazon and UK Ebay sellers won't ship to because of the random and untrackable variations in its postal system, no post codes and addresses such as "O'Leary's Farm, County Donegal."
IMHO the reason many Slashdotters are hostile to the Pi is that many Slashdotters are based in the US, a country that hasn't been high on the Pi's priority list. Keep in mind that while the Raspberry Pi is great for us grown-up hackers, it was intended primarily for school kids in the UK. So get to the back of the queue/line or build your own.