I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
There’s some truth to that. The computers I was first exposed to costs thousands of dollars and all you got was a text console with a prompt. You had to figure out how to make the magic box so something meaningful.
Now a Raspberry Pi computer with 1000x more compute power, memory plus network connectivity costs $6. The equivalent of the computers I originally learned to program on is now basically a disposable commodity.
I recently experienced this while building an upgrade for my 3D printer. The upgrade kit included a touchscreen. I found out later that the touchscreen was effectively its own separate computer with more than 10x more resources than the actual computer inside the 3D printer that was doing the most important calculations.
The compute and memory resource constraints were basically nonexistent factors in the design of the printer and the upgrade kit. Merely, a simpler computer was easier to design for and characterize, so the printer itself had a very simple computer, and for the UX, a “beefy” computer was much easier to program. It’s bizarre seeing how little the amount of computer resources mattered. It might as well have been free.
I really wish those 6$ raspies were easily accessible though.
Your point still stands, it wasn’t easy getting a tower in the olden days either.
Orangepi was the alternative for a while. There are lots of “knockoffs” that are even cheaper these days. RPi decided they wanted to focus on business customers first and have kind of strayed from their mission in exchange for (likely) perpetuity and subsidizing the hobbyists and poor people they are supposed to care about.
LTT did a good video on alternatives 4 months ago. That’s a while in this market though, so I’d definitely shop around.
I just bought a few at adafruit. I didn’t realize they were in short supply now.