Raspberry Pi, Smart Highways Win World's Biggest Design Prize

An anonymous reader writes "Last night the €500,000 INDEX: Award was awarded to five designs that can improve life for millions of people around the world. The winners include high-tech highways that light up at night, the $25 Raspberry Pi computer, a simple piece of paper that can cut food waste by extending the life of fresh produce by 2-4 weeks, and a plan for adapting to climate change."

Re:Cut food waste or...?

[jellomizer]

Refrigeration doesn't do much with produce. Other than keeping it cold.
I usually keep my fruit un-refrigerated. It tastes better and lasts just as long.

Re:How can the Pi win this award when there are...

[jmhobrien]

From the above list:
ODROID - $90
CubieBoard - $90
MK908 - $65
RPi - $30

How dare people vote with their dollars.

Fresh Paper

[Anonymous Coward]

Consumer Reports covered Fresh Paper a few months back, and from their testing, determined an air-tight container performed better.

https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2013/06/claim-check-fenugreen-freshpaper/index.htm [consumerreports.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDR20j0aTUY [youtube.com]

Re:How can the Pi win this award when there are...

[ebenupton]

A couple of points to bear in mind:

- You can now buy a Model B Pi bundled with a fast 8GB SD card for $40 from both our primary distributors.
- Most other cheap boards use the Cortex A8 core, which is rather a primitive implementation of the ARMv7 ISA. In particular, while it's great at memcpy() and reasonable at integer operations, it has rather poor floating point performance; for a floating-point performance comparison of ARM11+VFP, Cortex A8 and the (more modern and capable) Cortex A9, see:

https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/5/topics/466?page=7 [riscosopen.org]

In other news, the FreshPaper guys are amazing. Definitely the stars of the show here in Copenhagen.

Re:How can the Pi win this award when there are...

[The-Ixian]

FTFA

1. The ability to provide kids with a tool that can help them understand computer coding and the ability to distribute computer power widely for very little money: In our globalized world, many of us are illiterates to a language, which increasingly characterizes our world and our choices. That language is computer encoding and this illiteracy means that few of us are actually able to understand, let alone write the programs that – everyday – decide what we buy online, who we are friends with on Facebook, and what answers we are offered when we are Googling. Raspberry Pi is a part of the solution of this serious illiteracy.
2. The low price of Raspberry Pi ensures that creativity and play can be added to children and young people’s use of computers and programming. Raspberry Pi is awarded as a market leader with a very open approach to sharing, which actively encourages other companies to clone what they’re doing

I think it has as much, or more, to do with the culture surrounding the Raspberry Pi foundation as it does with the price point.
 
This is good work these people are doing and it is about making a difference (hence the whole point of the award).