Slashdot users are extremely unhappy with the new Slashdot Beta design. The comment section of every single post is devoted to dissatisfaction with the new design.
... ... The thing to keep in mind about community sites devoted to user generated content is that the users generate the content.
One tactic I've heard of in the US is to buy a part to a gun (something small and convenient like a grip or a trigger or something). Then get a nice big lockable gun case and place it and everything else you care about inside.
Here is a video explaining this:
http://deviating.net/firearms/packing/
and a video presentation of the same:
http://vimeo.com/3923535
Which is probably a fair enough comment, given we are not talking about some vast multinational company here.
But compare it to the Kickstarter page:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console
Hackers welcome. Have at it: It's easy to root (and rooting won't void your warranty). Everything opens with standard screws. Hardware hackers can create their own peripherals, and connect via USB or Bluetooth. You want our hardware design? Let us know. We might just give it to you. Surprise us!
After people began calling Al Sutton out over this, he made things even worse by implying that root access was a priviledge and Ouya hadn't promised much of anything (instead attempting to compare the console's openness to that of consoles you can buy at Gamestop).
As for "Open"; Well, a year or so ago the idea of going into a gaming centric store like GameStop or Game, buying a console, taking it home, writing a game on it, and publishing it without spending big money on development kits, licensing, and the like was pretty much non-existant. That's where OUYA is open; It's open to anyone to write games and apps without having to pay dev kit and licensing fees, it's open in that once you have your console you can code for it.
The reason you can still simply get root access is that I've seen people want to tinker beyond what most users would do. OUYA could stick to what was originally put on the Kickstarter page and take away root from non-devkits, but I, for one, would be against that, because I've seen that people do use it constructively and responsibly, and not everyone bricks their device then raises a support ticket to try and get OUYA to fix it.
So yes, I'll stick to calling it "shocking."
PS. A functioning non-OS-dependant recovery mode isn't just important for hackers. It could also be the difference between a faulty official update merely inconveniencing you, or outright bricking your console.
I'm keeping a track of how many requests we get relating custom firmware, and from what I'm seeing the user base is not as interested in custom firmware as you might think, which is echoed by this thread (we've shipped 60,000+ units, and less than 10 people have commented in the last month in this thread about getting access to recovery mode).That doesn't mean that we're shooting the idea down, you need to keep in mind that in terms of priorities this is way down the list as you'd expect from any feature where it's being requested by less than one tenth of one percent of the user-base.
It really floored me to read this a week before Ouya's launch, given the kickstarter page's promises of hackability. Anyone with a reflashable phone (or any pretty much any other Android device whatsoever capable of using custom ROMS) knows that a real recovery mode is absolutely essential, in case the OS/kernel gets borked. Ouya's supposed "recovery mode" relies on an already-bootable OS, so it's useless.
Suggest you just sit there and wait till life gets easier.