Some of them are, some of them aren't. There have been multiple reports of the recently Chinese manufactured Pi's having questionable soldering and reliability problems. See here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=22473 and http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=24571

Judging from their forums, there's a significant number of people who think removing the Ethernet controller/USB hub chip is going to solve or at least substantially reduce the Raspberry Pi's problems with USB. It won't. Unfortunately, but predictably it doesn't look like the Foundation have done anything to correct this misconception. Isochronous transfers which audio interfaces, webcams etc. rely upon won't be affected much, if at all by this change, i.e. they will still be utterly broken. If you get one of these types of devices working at all with your Pi you should consider yourself lucky.

The quote refers to something that was eventually done, so what else could have been meant other than "completely open access to the hardware" was ultimately achieved? Especially considering that this article wasn't the last time someone connected with the Raspberry Pi Foundation has made this sort of misleading claim, see http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2221

What makes you think I care? Whether or not the Raspberry Pi is open isn't something that particularly interests me. But claiming it is when it clearly isn't is concerning.

The quote was not taken out of context. The fact remains that nobody outside of Broadcom has "competely open access" to the Raspberry Pi's hardware from a software point of view.

They certainly have done. From http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/09/raspberry-pi-insider-exclusive-sellout-to-sell-out/

"Because our remit is education in the broadest sense, we wanted – needed – to provide completely open access to the hardware."

Actually, they've sold something like a million Raspberry Pi's now, vastly more than they'd originally aimed for.

When I hear the term "developer board" I think of a board suitable for doing development work on, i.e. something reliable, not a board that is undergoing development, i.e. a prototype, which is what the Raspberry Pi actually feels like. It was certainly not meant to be this way though, the Raspberry Pi went through a prior beta phase which was meant to iron out the last remaining bugs before the final version of the board was created for mass production. Clearly they failed to achieve this goal.

These are the two most common excuses you hear from the Raspberry Pi apologists.

I haven't watched Doctor Who in a while. The reason why? Too much bad melodrama. Melodrama is tricky to get right, do it well and you end up with something comparable in quality to "The English Patient", do it badly and it can result in something unwatchable. More coherent storylines spread over more episodes would be good too.

We'll know by March next year. With the amount of money they've raised via Kickstarter and the big names in support it would be a absolute travesty if the Ouya turns out to be vapour. I'm confident it won't be. I wish they did status updates more frequently though.

Console-wise I'm considerably more interested in the Ouya. I think the Wii U will be completely forgotten once the next Xbox and Playstation are out. I doubt I will purchase any of them, although I think the Ouya could turn out to be very useful for non-gaming related stuff. Hopefully it will be something like a Raspberry Pi done right as I'm somewhat fed up with all of the Pi's problems. As for gaming, PC gaming has never looked better to me.

This was modded as a troll? I don't think so.

I submitted that. No, the problems with the USB drivers have not been fixed but software modifications subsequent to that post have improved the situation slightly for all Raspberry Pi's. Also, the revision 2 boards can supply more current to USB devices which means more of them will work when plugged in directly to the Pi. Unfortunately USB will most likely never work well on the Raspberry Pi due to the sheer difficulty of fixing the vendor-supplied drivers for the Synopsys USB controller which remain very buggy. I doubt the Raspberry Pi Foundation will ever acknowledge this.

I may be a twat, but if so I'm a twat who's in the right, whereas you sound like just another Raspberry Pi apologist who didn't even have the courage to post non-anonymously. There appears to be a few people like you who've responded to this story, then again it might be just you.

I wholeheartedly agree.