In mathematical terms, technical proficiency is orthogonal to managerial proficiency.

They *could* produce the firmware and updates forever, but how are they going to pay the salaries of the people and infrastructure to deliver it? Yes, they could build it into the price, but if they built in 'everlasting support' into the original purchase price, it would be too expensive for you to buy in the first place. It's not only up to the SonicWalls of the world, but also the chipmakers (and every other supplier up the line).

The folks that front the money (so you don't have to fork out the purchase price 2 years ahead of time) want some return on their investment. If technology was static, the 'perfect' product could be made, it would be flawless the first time out and never need replacing. But technology isn't static, and there is no such thing as infinite patience.

This is an anecdote- it has no statistical basis. Repeat it many, many times under controlled conditions, and then you can extrapolate with a good probability as to if it is BS or not.

I take issue with the 'doesn't support huge numbers of older PICs' Microchip has something on the order of 600-700 different PICs in production (and which rarely if ever get obsoleted) - looking through the latest MPLAB 8, I see a few rfPICs and some PIC18s that are not supported by ICD3. But if the part you're using isn't supported, that can be a huge issue.

I've seen quite a few issues with the boost circuit, they haven't traced back to an issue with the ICD3 itself- they were due to the resistor on the MCLR pin being too low, and dragging down VPP. The datasheets pretty universally (now) specify 10K on the MCLR pull up. The boost circuit on the ICD3 is more controllable, but not as strong as the one on the ICD2. With some of the newer parts, the ICD2 can very easily over-voltage MCLR.

Breakpoints and other debugging features are a matter of hardware- it adds silicon, and therefore cost. Some PICs come with embedded debugging hardware (in every part), some have special debug parts ($25-$50 US)- compared to the development parts of yesteryear, these are super-cheap.

The ICD2 is a *really* old design- it is now obsolete, unfortunately, there are lots out there. The ICD3 is a far more robust platform, from the drivers on up.

What products have Intellectual Ventures developed and brought to market?

The Raspberry Pi will not replace a regular Windows machine- but I find it hard to think of any easier way to have something that also allows the user to have the freedom to poke around, modify files, even destroy the filesystem, and the system can be restored in a few minutes. SD cards are cheap enough that part of the lab setup costs could include a huge number of cards that each user could take their setup with them in their pocket.

An Android powered stick is a great choice for someone who already knows Linux, but the learning curve is way too steep for an educational environment. The Android stick doesn't have anywhere near the install base (throwing in Android phones/tablets is a red herring) or the documentation in a hacker sense- how many well supported Allwinner A10 Android distributions can you just write to a SD card with virtually any windows machine with a SD card reader? I'm not saying RPi is perfect, just that it would be a good alternative in an educational environment- far, far easier to re-write a SD card than to do even a Live-CD based install.

I was thinking about this- in the long term, you really want to encourage people to play around with things rather than run a static collection of applications. If people want to just browse the net and search, Raspberry Pi is a poor choice, but for learning about programming- the Raspberry Pi is great because if things get messed up, just flash a card with the reference image- system is re-imaged. Cards are cheap enough that you could hand them out to people and they would end up keeping their entire setup with them.

If I'm at a counter and the person behind the counter is just reading things off a screen to me, what's the point? If the person adds nothing to the transaction, what I really should be talking to them about is what they are going to do after their job is eliminated.

Yep, gigabit to the home would be cool, and I would score massive geek points, but in terms of an individual user, what use would it be? A big pipe makes a lot of sense when you're aggregating traffic from a bunch of different sites, but a normal residential customer (torrents aside) is going to be pulling most of their bandwidth from a small number of sites at any one time. Of course, this is for the near term, and I would expect that we are a pretty long way from putting a 2 way gigabit connection to use.

On the other hand, I expect that TWC already has plenty of experience in delivering one way multi-gigabit bandwidth- digital television.

Since SD cards are the standard storage medium for the Raspberry Pi, what about a speed comparison for that?

On all parts I've seen, if the datasheet says 100K PE cycles minimum, is at the maximum rated temperature for the part. The physics of flash works out that the worst case is when hot. Without a temperature bound, the number of PE cycles is meaningless.

I'm not sure what you're saying is badly wrong- 40C is pretty cool for most laptops. If your drives are 31-34C, you have *very* good cooling available. a temperature sensor on the front of the hard drive (if the ambient air is coming from the front) only tells you the lowest possible temperature the rest of the drive could be. On most servers I've seen in data centers, internal temperatures in the 30's would be an indication of a very light load.

The temperature dependence is a very strong factor that does seem to be missing from the analysis- to add to what the AC parent said, my experience is that the minimum number of erase cycles is when the device is at maximum temperature, take it down to room temperature, and the typical number of erase cycles goes up by an order of magnitude. Most computers have an internal temperature of over 40C when run in a normal environment,

Your drive will fail, SSD or HD. You must be prepared for that.