Has the point that this machine is meant as a ubiquitous children's "learn to program" environment escaped everybody? It may offer cool alternative uses, but that's not its raison d'être. It's supposed to something kids can muck about with without screwing up the family computer so that there will be the same pool of kids to draw from going forward as there were with the BBC Micro (or the Timex/Sinclair machines) in play. Scratch is the killer app for the platform, not Flash or even a web browser.
I agree. A lot of the points in this review are simply irrelevant. They're talking about support for HDMI and other features not being available in default Debian distributions, the abililty to render Quake 3 (seriously), and other ridiculous comments.
If you're a hacker/tinkerer/kid learning, the default distribution isn't likely all you'll be using anyway. And if you're buying the Raspberry Pi to try to get a cheap gaming system, you've completely missed the point.
+1, Really not sure why these reviewers are going on about its rendering capabilities, its quite adequate for learning python or C++ on and totally overkill for any embedded projects (Think Arduino on steroids).
Once some optimisation work is done I think people will be amazed by what it can do.
I can picture myself starting a Raspberry Pithon hacking club. :)
Also: I want to write a port/clone of Elite, in Python, that runs on the Raspberry Pi. A tribute to Braben. On the other hand, I would not be surprised if he's already done something like that himself, as a "test" of the system.
