h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Introducing the Raspberry Pi - A13735596
Author: Bernadette Lynn_ Home Educator - U15459

Raspberry Pi University Project.


The other Entries in the Project are:

A13720385 Introducing the Raspberry Pi - Hardware

A13413584 Introducing the Raspberry Pi - Peripherals You'll Need

A13335932 Introducing the Raspberry Pi - Software

A9143796 Introducing the Raspberry Pi - Getting Started

I did that wrong, I'm not the author. The author is Tufty - U566116
Sorry.

There are a couple of statements in hardware part that need to be changed.

Hard Disk Drives are not read by lasers. They are magnetic devices.
ARM is not owned by Broadcom, it is an independent PLC.

Cheers. Interesting entry.

Very interesting.

I thought in the software Entry the second paragraph where you start talking about Linux starts a bit strange. It needs a better first sentence.

It doesn't say ARM is owned by Broadcom, it says part of the company became ARM Holdings, which is an independent PLC, and the rest was bought by Broadcom.

As far as I can tell that's accurate.

It says;

>>Acorn closed in 1998, but the licence for the ARM processor was sold off as 'ARM Holdings', and the rest of the company was eventually purchased by Broadcom.>>

Maybe it is right, but ARM PLC still exists, and that seems to be more important than this snapshot history. Am I being too pedantic?

For the HDD - sorry, I must have been sleep-writing when I wrote 'laser' Bernadette had kindly suggested:

A lot of computers still make use of a Hard Disk Drive (HDD). A stack of discs called platters are coated in a thin layer of magnetic material, mounted on a spindle and spun at speeds of up to 15,000rpm. Each platter is divided into millions of tiny regions, each of which is a magnetic dipole which represents either a 1 or a 0 depending on its orientation. Read-and-write heads mounted over each disc can detect (and change) the orientation of each dipole.

As for ARM:

Acorn closed in 1998, but the licence for the ARM processor was sold off as 'ARM Holdings', which still exists today as ARM PLC. The rest of the company was eventually purchased by Broadcom.

And for the Linux bit:

Every computer needs some form of operating system (OS) to direct its hardware, provide a user interface and allow software to be run. As it is open-source, making it free to use, Linux would seem the ideal OS for the job:

Thanks

I've put those changes in.

Thanks

I've had a suggestion F4779111?thread=8291489 to remove the .exe from ./fredsprogram.exe in the Linux Language section.

That's done, too.

This has been in Peer Review more than a week, so we can now move it on to the next stage. Has anybody got any more comments before I do that?

We'll a picture to go with this project before it can be published. Tufty, have you any suitable photos?

Actually, before that, I have a couple of comments myself:

A13335932

"bleeding edge" -- any particular reason why you've used the ironic term "bleeding edge" rather than the straightforward "leading edge"?

"save for those that were impossible to solve" - I think this would be clearer as:
"save for those that were impossible for any computer to solve"

There are a couple of other tiny typos, but I'll sort those out in the final polishing.

To be honest I'm not fussed about bleeding edges provided the meaning is clear.

"save for those that were impossible to solve"
- I do mean this literally - impossible to solve not just by any computer, but by anyone, anywhere. In order for a language to be Turing-complete, it must allow a universal computing engine to solve any mathematical problem that can be conceived and solved, be it by any computer or by pen and paper. I don't know of a problem that is soluble by hand but not by computer. (Of course, we cannot necessarily know whether a problem is soluble, as the computer must run the program in order to determine if it has an end... but that's a problem for mathematics as a whole, not just computers.)

Thanks for your comments

How about saying "save for those that are mathematically impossible to solve", then. As it stands, it sounds a bit like "it is able to solve any problem except for the ones it can't solve".

Ah, yes, that's a good idea.

Sorry, I've been off sick for a while, but I did make that change.

I may have asked this already, but are there any pictures to go with this set of entries? We like to have at least one picture on each new entry on the Front Page. We could get away with one picture for the whole project, but would obviously accommodate lots of pictures if you have them.

I haven't taken any pictures yet as I don't have a Raspberry Pi board yet! The first batches should really go to developers (hardware and software), so I'm waiting until there's clearly a good supply before I order. I'll happily provide some pictures of one, plus wires/peripherals, once I have one.

[message for Bernadette - I saw you mention in another thread somewhere, that you weren't able to access the Noesis sub-eds forum - I have asked for the required permissions to be put in place and hopefully you will be able to get access there later tonight. Sorry you've been sick, and hope you are better now]