Alternate Paths: Ken and the MS stack

My friend Ken is learning and blogging the Microsoft software stack, check it out.

Torvalds on “throw-away cheap”

Adafruit notices an interesting bit in a BBC interview with Linus Torvalds:

"The recent launch of the Raspberry Pi, running on Linux, has attracted a lot of attention. Are you hopeful it will inspire another generation of programmers who can contribute to the Linux kernel?"

"So I personally come from a “tinkering with computers” background, and yes, as a result I find things like Raspberry Pi to be an important thing: trying to make it possible for a wider group of people to tinker with computers and just playing around.

And making the computers cheap enough that you really can not only afford the hardware at a big scale, but perhaps more important, also “afford failure”.

By that I mean that I suspect a lot of them will go to kids who play with them a bit, but then decide that they just can’t care.

But that’s OK. If it’s cheap enough, you can afford to have a lot of “don’t cares” if then every once in a while you end up triggering even a fairly rare “do care” case.

So I actually think that if you make these kinds of platforms cheap enough – really “throw-away cheap” in a sense – the fact that you can be wasteful can be a good thing, if it means that you will reach a few kids you wouldn’t otherwise have reached."

I thought I'd repeat this here, because it is what this blog's method is about. I recommend "throw-away cheap" computers that are already in your closet or garage, but as I've mentioned, the Raspberry Pi works too.

That said ... a stick-to-it-ness helps. Don't give up too soon.