ita ! [link]

I didn't so much mean what it was capable of as much as I meant what tommy was tricking out his with.

Well, I just got it running last night, so not much so far.

I mostly bought it so I could play around with this:

Operating systems development with the Raspberry Pi - Hack a Day

Even though the Raspberry Pi has, from the very beginning, been touted as an educational computer, we’ve seen neither hide nor hare of coursework, lesson plans, or even computer sciencey tutorials using the Raspi. We’re guessing academia works at a much slower pace than the average hardware hacker, but [Alex Chadwick] at Cambridge University has managed to put together an online tutorial on developing an operating system from scratch for the Raspi.

The goal of this tutorial is to throw a budding Raspi tinkerer into the strange and confusing world of registers, hexadecimal, and ARMv6 assembly. After going through the necessary toolchain, [Alex]‘s tutorials cover blinking the ‘OK’ LED on the Raspberry Pi using only assembly.

The OS development guide goes on from there to include drawing graphics on the screen and even accepting input from a USB keyboard.

It’s important to point out what [Alex]‘s tutorial isn’t; even though this series of tutorials goes through manipulating the bare metal of the Raspberry Pi, don’t expect to be porting UNIX to the Raspi after going through these guides. That being said, after completing these tutorials, you’ll be in a fabulous position for building your own homebrew OS on the Raspberry Pi.

The year before me, one of the fundamental CS courses semester-long project was to write an OS. The mere IDEA of doing that boggled me, so I wanted that assignment, but we didn't get it. We had to, instead, design a "chip" (given certain components), and submit the wiring and the microcode that made it possible to write an OS on top of.

Which, by all rights, should boggle me too, but since we did it, it doesn't seem as cool. It was a project of 4 of us, and I was shameless in grabbing the brainiacs (and the hotties--the hottie brainiacs)--it was Andre, Louis who I was flirting with (perffectly fine call--we never went further than flirting, and he was brilliant), and Loreta, who was the smartest person in our year.

I don't remember what tasks the guys got--I wrote the microcode, and Loretta formatted the report in LaTeX. It was generally accepted that she had the hardest job, and yet it was a waste of her brains.

Jesus--I just looked up the others in the team, and two of them are at MS, and one is attached to open source VOIP projects, and I SUCK.

one of the fundamental CS courses semester-long project was to write an OS.

That was my favorite class in college! My group was the only one to get an A.

Sometimes I wish I had majored in CS.

Windows Surface reviews - Boing Boing

Some love it; some say it has potential (needs more apps and what-not).

That was my favorite class in college! My group was the only one to get an A

We got an A too, but it just wasn't as cool as an OS...

Right! I created the microcode, Andre did the CPU, Louis create the assembler code, and poor Loreta...

I looked them all up in LinkedIn, and they're all working for the same place they started working for as soon as they graduated. I moved on from my first job in 3 years. I can't believe 2 of them went straight to Microsoft. I would not have felt prepared. Good lord.

Different paths, different paths.

I read the Giz review, because I have the best sense of their biases (i.e. we don't agree on much), and it looks like it's not something I'd make excuses to buy myself for my birthday to add to my tablet ecosystem.

I am not going anywhere near a barren app market again, so I'll definitely wait to buy until it catches up, rather than buying and waiting. And I'm not as focused as Biddle is on evaluating it as a tablet+, even if that's how it's being sold. I think you should be able to do work without a keyboard--I can do a decent amount of it--I'm toting my ASUS to the ER for the near-infinite (ISTG the meter is broken) battery life and extra ports, not because I'm writing the next great American novel.

I need Office lite apps, and producitivity apps, and cross systems apps-if the app store fills up with things that don't work on my Android and OS X (and to a lesser extent iOS), I'm also less interested, and I think that's the most likely thing to keep me away. I don't know if many people care. But it would be nice if the Android apps I use now develop Windows 8 versions.

Microsoft is offering to handhold app developers: [link]