

Raspberry Pi Foundation launches the Raspberry Pi Store - Ecio78
http://store.raspberrypi.com/

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ChuckMcM
It is interesting to see the resistance to selling stuff "on Linux" here. When
the Apple II came out "kids" made games and software for it, and sold it in
plastic baggies with a floppy disk and a photocopied "manual". Those of us in
the community thought this was a great idea, not because we bought everything
that came out, but the notion that you could spend your time working on this
awesomely cool stuff and if other folks liked it enough what you were
producing they would buy copies from you. Heck you could even make a living on
writing software for people.

That made a lot of things you take for granted today possible. And it made
total sense, here was someone spending their time writing code to do something
that you wouldn't have to spend your time doing. You could write it yourself
or you could leverage their effort by buying a copy of their stuff. That
infused money into the field which gave people the freedom to invest their
time into building amazing things.

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Newky
The donations system is great, but I would have preferred to see a push for a
community built up around free and open source software.

The idea of a young person beginning to code and polishing their application
and uploading and getting some money in donations. I'm more likely to donate
to a great attempt at a project by a young person than I am to buy software on
Linux. Raspberry Pi Store could have been the communities push to loads of
great community driven open source projects.

~~~
mtgx
Yeah, it seems like a lost opportunity in regards to that, as I too thought
Raspberry Pi will generally help accelerate the growth of open source
software.

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chopsueyar
Too bad the store is running on a Raspberry Pi.

~~~
clicks
I'm sorry, but I've gotta ask: Was that supposed to be a joke about R-pi sites
often being unable to handle heavy traffic -- or is the store actually running
on R-pi's?

~~~
astrodust
You'd think by now that they'd come to understand that the demand for this
product is completely off the charts and would have built a site that'd scale
accordingly.

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heymishy
I believe its just a app store rather than a hardware store.. They already
have a merch store (<http://www.raspberrypi.com/>) and links to their
suppliers.

As far as I know they don't want to sell direct through their only store..

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vasco
Cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Astore...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Astore.raspberrypi.com)

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davidcollantes
They are selling everything else, but Raspberry Pi. At least that is what I
saw. Has anyone seen the little machine at their store?

~~~
jpdevereaux
Sad, I came to the store hoping that there'd finally be a dependable US
distributor of the devices themselves.

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dutchbrit
Will be buying a MPEG-2 license key this week - I'm currently only getting a
"It works!" message on their store, but when I visited it yetserday, I
couldn't find what payment methods they accepted before filling out the whole
checkout process. Anyone know (I didn't finish the checkout process)?

\-- EDIT --

Looks like I was confused with their other store. This indeed just looks like
an App Store :)

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e1ven
Alternate Link - <http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2768>

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elbac
But does it actually sell the Raspberry Pi??

~~~
program
No. It's sold only at Element14, RS Components and Allied Electronics.

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frontsideair
Looks down: <http://isup.me/store.raspberrypi.com>

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yarrel
Remember, kids, sharing is bad.

~~~
sbuk
How passive aggressive. I thought that open source wasn't necessarily free as
in beer? Also, here we are on a site that basically promotes and fosters
_exactly_ this kind entrepreneurial endeavour and we have the entitled masses
complaining that they might have to pay for something.

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muyuu
I'd much rather do without the IndieCity client to be honest.

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drzaiusapelord
On a tangential note, are they ever going to update this thing with a faster
SoC? Its been a year since the design was finalized. I just saw an android dev
board that blows this thing away for not much more. Not sure what the allure
here is at this point. What's the Pi's roadmap, if any?

~~~
hermanhermitage
Blows it away?

16 way vector integer processor - giving ~4 Gigaops of integer compute
performance (see
[https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv/wiki/VideoCor...](https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv/wiki/VideoCore-
IV-Kernels-under-Linux) for how to access it from user land).

24 Gigaflops via the QPU (from the 3d shader pipe) - which we have people
beavering away on to open up soon.

Yes the ARM is weak on this one, but don't underestimate the power of the
functional blocks and the open source and reverse engineering community.

Edit: see
[https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv/wiki/VideoCor...](https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv/wiki/VideoCore-
IV-Programmers-Manual) for more info, or check the root wiki page. Volunteers
wanted - all shapes - all sizes - all capabilities (join the mailing list, or
come visit us on IRC).

~~~
nitrogen
In your efforts to RE the GPU, have you uncovered any hope of getting faster
I/O? I'd love to use all that GPU power, but the applications I have in mind
require I/O to match (at the very least, solid 150 mbits/s USB2.0 and
25mbits/s Ethernet).

~~~
hermanhermitage
The only options I can think of for fast IO would be exploiting the MIPI CSI
and DSI interfaces. I think you can get 2 Gbps input on CSI and same on DSI
for output. You'd need some fairly specialist interface chips.

What would be nice in a future SoC would be say 1 Gbps Ethernet or USB3 right
into the core of the beast. The current USB situation is rather disappointing
- I would imagine the team would be avoiding the current IP in a hurry on
future devices.

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obilgic
Its good to know that it works.

