Raspberry Pi announcement on Wed 29th Feb at 6am GMT
raspberrypi.orgI'm really looking forward to these shipping. The combination of high-quality graphics and networking will make it easy to build lightweight graphic displays and integrations with other physical devices. I'm thinking an HDMI dongle for making displays like Panic built ( http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/ ) but self-contained and configured from the cloud.
2/29 is a good date. 3/14 would have been much more in tune with the Raspberry Pi name.
That would be pretty damn cool.
If it weren't for the army of geeks with internet pitchforks :-)
Does anyone know how they are planning to sell off the first batch?
If they do anything besides some manner of dutch auction they will be leaving a lot of money on the table for enterprising folks to pick up by reselling them on eBay.
Between the one-per-person limit for the first batch and moving to rolling production fairly quickly, the eBay inflation factor should be cut to a minimum.
The first batch of 10000 Model B's will be sold on a first-come-first-served basis.
The website is going to buckle under the pressure unfortunately :(
Really looking forward to getting my hands on one though, although I doubt I'll be quick enough to snap one up from the first batch
They did also put out a call for mirrors recently for their OS image download. Possibly part of that effort went to distributing load for the shopping cart app. http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/683
Plans are in place to make the website and announcement, etc accessible under load.
Curious - if the announcement is going to be "the store is now open" why don't they just say now "the store will be open on Wednesday at 6am?"
There are multiple replies to tweets asking this same question, all of which cite "arcane contract requirements" as to blame for the secrecy.
They very likely have contract stipulations with suppliers / distributors / fulfillment service preventing Raspberry from committing to product availability at certain datetime, before said suppliers are indeed ready to go.
From the Raspi Twitter "not allowed to say (arcane contractual stuff)"