Yep, I can't argue with your statement and no company is going to manufacture such a board if doing so makes them a loss.

But a £25 overall cost still puts in the "loose change" pricing bracket - plus they could have put it in a cheap but pretty plastic case with a nice logo on it and made a good margin by charging double the price.

As a fellow Linux user, I must say that you are missing the point entirely.

The whole concept of the Raspberry Pi is not to be the smallest, fastest or most powerful, it is simply designed to be extremely cheap to buy but with enough processing power to make it a reasonably good programming platform, especially for kids and students.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK charity, it has been set up to further IT skills in schools, and the reason it was introduced and sold the way it was a few months ago was specifically to get the units out to those people who are keen on doing interesting things with them, and to feed back what they've done into the Foundation to get the schoolkids even more interested in programming on one.

Your comments about it being "nothing special" would be entirely valid were it being sold for profit and you were comparing specifications to similar items - but that is not the case.

Incidentally, I have no personal connection with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, but I support any efforts done altruistically, especially in IT education where it might get kids learning proper skills that they can build careers on and make a living from.

Wow! I think those same people need to go get some interesting stuff to fill all that spare time they clearly have.

...my Google Android phone gets the importance of standard connectors.

Ultimately it's the same type of religious hatred you are demonstrating that changes the world, not religion itself.

I don't follow an organised religion but I'm still an honest, law-abiding citizen that has respect for those around me. If some of those around me need organised religion to get themselves to the same point, I don't see a problem with that, whatever works.

The problem I have with 4X games is that the best games are those with human opponents, and the number of people prepared to sit and patiently play turn-based strategy games seems to get fewer and fewer by the day...

I always find that playing against the AI, I tend to fall into the same strategy of play that always lets me win in the end - in my case, it tends to be a strategy of getting as technologically advanced as possible whilst not expanding too much and keeping all my opponents friendly until I can roll out my tank divisions and bombers against their archers and catapults...

I can never play the evil conquering warmonger in 4X games, just as I've never been able to play the evil murderous bastard in either Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas...

Yeah, thanks, you're right and I should have read the article more carefully.

But even so, isn't this just indicative of 4X computer strategy games in general anyway?

When you play games of this type that start with 8 or so players, then you usually end up with about half of them being wiped out in the early to mid-stages of the game because the successful players have been the quickest and fastest to follow a specific strategy - whether it's fast expansion and strength through numbers or being the most technologically advanced.

If you are at a situation where there are only 3 players left in a game then it's because there's a stalemate situation happening whereby no one player is big enough or bad enough to take out one of the other players. By the year 3991 AD, presumably every surviving player will have got to the end of the tech tree, so there's no advantage there; and by virtue of there being three surviving players, they must each occupy considerable land mass each.

You can play a game of chess in 30 minutes or it could take you 6 months to play the game if you made one move a day and played someone via email. But that doesn't mean that the moves are any different in either game.

Therefore I don't see the relevance of playing Civilization II over 10 years here, apart from it being a notable but geeky thing to do.

I've not played Civ in a long time but from what I recall the number of physical game turns are fixed and apart from a couple of the variants ("Test Of Time" springs to mind), the game starts in 4000BC and ends at around 2000AD - so how long it takes you to play that fixed number of turns seems largely irrelevant.

Sure, if the guy had reported that he'd replayed the same game over and over again using different strategies and it *ALWAYS* finished up with the three civilizations at constant war in a nuclear wasteland, then that might be worthy of mention.

But otherwise I must be missing something here or it's just a slow Slashdot news day...

Linux might have more freedom, but for most people they won't have much of a use for it, and so it doesn't provide enough of a compelling argument to use instead of something established, well-known and with a wealth of support like Windows or OS X.

I think the most compelling argument you can give is that using free software downloaded from a trusted source does a helluva lot to stop the threat of viruses.

I use both XP and Linux, go back 5 years or so and I used to run all manner of hooky software on XP with the associated virus problems that result. Now I just run free software or, in the case of some Windows killer apps I use, just buy and register them properly.

Yes, that meant running OpenOffice/LibreOffice on my home machines (because I didn't want to fork out for several MS Office licenses) and not having full compatibility with MS Office, but I've not seen a virus on XP in over 5 years now.

No, I'm not moralising for or against software piracy, I can only confirm what I myself have experienced since not using pirated software.

If it's any consolation, I have been having all sorts of similar graphics problems recently with NVIDIA GT440 cards on all three similar Linux PCs I have at home.

Since about the 170.x commercial NVIDIA drivers (about a year ago), I had problems with artifacts, Gnome/X crashing on logout and, more recently, X not even starting at all. The Open Source Nouveau drivers worked okay but since I also play games, they just didn't have good enough performance in comparison to the commercial drivers.

As it happens, I tend to upgrade graphics cards about every 18 months (I don't play the latest games so buy mid-range graphics cards) and have just swapped out all the NVIDIA cards for AMD/ATI 6xxx HD ones and they work much nicer with AMD's Catalyst drivers.

Unfortunately, it's just one of the things with Linux as long as there are closed source graphics drivers. I spent a long time trying to get to the bottom of the NVIDIA card problem and did have them working stably with old pre-170.x driver versions but then had all sorts of problems moving to the later versions of X-Windows. So I gave up in the end and changed the hardware.

Tell me something...

Why is Richard Stallman's religious fervour around free software any less extreme than Apple's religious fervour over their commercial-software based walled garden approach?

I'm not saying you're an Apple fanboi and whilst I myself use and work with Linux and free software, even I believe Stallman's views are somewhat extreme, and that harmony exists somewhere along the line that joins Stallman to Apple - namely that there's a place for both free and commercial software.

It's very easy to sit back and sneer at the man but the fact is that someone of his software programming talents could have chosen to make himself very rich had he chosen the commercial software path, whereupon the loss of his laptop would have probably been not so much of a biggie to him.

Even if you don't agree with someone's ideals (and, again, I don't agree with all of what Stallman says), sometimes the humane and adult thing to do is just to keep your mouth shut and perhaps demonstrate at least a little sympathy.

Thank you for the health tips.

Neither of us have any problem with walking 2 miles unless traffic getting into London has delayed us to the point where you have 15 minutes to get to the venue before the band comes on.

So don't be a smart-ass!

Thanks (to all the replies) for the advice.

Being a "carrot chomper in the Shires" I rarely go up to the "Big Smoke" so use the Underground rarely - but will remember it for the future.

Fortunately most of the bands I like usually tour across the country and whilst Southampton is equal distance from me as London is, I tend to try to go there for gigs first - lower (if not free) parking, much easier to get in and out of, and at least two of the venues there serve good British ale at pub prices! :-)

Not to mention the fact that NVIDIA have now dropped all support for ION chipsets in those laptops...

That's not my experience, I'm afraid.

I had 3 similar AMD64 multi-core PCs, all of them with NVIDIA GT440 cards in them, and for over a month now I've been trying to get them to work with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers that are up in the v295.x range - I cannot get any of them to start an X-session at all, and since about v173 of the drivers, there's been a problem that when they did work, if you logged out of the X-Session, you'd get a black screen with a few white dots and dashes in the top left corner with a total machine hang.

Incidentally, I dropped an ATI card in one of the machines, jiggled about with the kernel a bit, dropped in the proprietary ATI drivers and an accelerated Gnome desktop fired up fine. (Nope, I'm not an ATI fanboy by any means, there are BIG issues with their drivers on Linux and always have been.)

I have managed to get accelerated desktops working on the NVIDIA machines using the open source "nouveau" drivers but they, of course, are still reasonably early in development and give nowhere near the framerates of the proprietary NVIDIA drivers under normal circumstances.

The worse thing about it is that I used to own an NVIDIA GT-250 card that worked flawlessly under Linux but sold and replaced it with one of the GT-440 cards. I have since discovered on a forum (though not sure of the truth of this) that the only real difference between the GT440 and GT250 is that the former supports DirectX 11 whereas the latter does not, which is of course irrelevant to Linux.

Incidentally, if anyone can recommend me a reasonably good NVIDIA card for up to $100 (I don't need bleeding edge cards, if it can run Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas then that's fine for me) that also works well under Linux, I'd be grateful. I've lost touch with graphics cards specs over the past few years and when you check out reviews and comments on the Interweb, there's always a lot of conflicting information given.