It's about time some of these security-by-rote rituals were challenged and changed or abolished. They may appear to be making things more secure, but sometimes the actual effect is the opposite, like insisting on ridiculous password policies. For the topic being discussed, I've had to reduce the strength of a friends wi-fi password as it was almost impossible to enter a long complex string correctly on a variety of devices, some with horrible UIs, when you couldn't even see if what you were entering was correct. In this case making visibility an option seems best.

And with everyone falling over themselves to expose their privates on facebook and youtube, they're 80% of the way there with that goal too.

Tape, bitch!
Now clear off my lawn.

SunView. Beat the pants off OpenWindows for simplicity.

Or else.

The media creators will still have their toys, but this is all about the media consumers. Big money hates that every joe can create content and IP without them getting a cut, so they're pushing for a (licenced) media delivery only internet and killing the tools end users have for being creative.

This whole fiasco is going to be revealed as a huge practical joke.... isn't it? please say it is. Please?

And when those tools are no longer installed?

The ones associated with the ethernet socket, perhaps?

The ones on the SD card holder look worse actually.

As for the keyboard problem, its entirely possible that your USB PSU isn't as capable of putting out the 1A @ 5v it claims on the plate

That was my first thought, so I switched it for a proper lab PSU. it was pulling 400-500mA on boot. One keyboard that does work fine is a Logitech G11 that has more blue lights than a chavs motor, so it really does look more like a protocol problem than an electrical one.

Well mine arrived yesterday. First impressions:

Build quality is a bit iffy - the SD / HDMI and power connectors won't last 5 minutes with frequent swapping and some of the solder joints look to have been "reworked".

Connected keyboard/mouse and HDMI monitor put the Fedora image on an SD card and powered her up.... Kernel panic :( Futzed around for a while and finally found that it didn't like the keyboard I was using (generic cheepie).

Connected the network and removed the keyboard and mouse. Eventually booted to a login prompt on the display. SSH in and all looked good.

Decided to try Debian. That had the same problem with the keyboard as Fedora. Found another keyboard (ancient Fujitsu Siemens one) that it didn't object to and got into the GUI. Biggest problem here was the resolution was some strange one (1896x788 or something) which looked awful on a 1920x1080 screen, but at least I was able to fire up the browser and "surf the web".

Back to Fedora... Tried to get into the GUI again with the working keyboard but startx crashed the first time and just came up with a blank screen the second.

Reflashed the image and had an awful row with the password settings. By luck I'd set a local timeserver when I'd first logged in by SSH (no, I don't give extarnal access to every device on the network so the default timeservers weren't accessible). This meant the passwords were set with a valid date. Second time around the "firstboot" script ran, setting up users but without the time being set, so the passwords were flagged as expired and had to be changed on every login - very annoying.

Finally got into the Fedora GUI but it was slooooooow.

Overall, yes it works. Some effort is needed on the default images if it's to be used by the great unwashed. Need to play with the GPIO as that's where my interest is...

Exactly. As long as you're a content consumer. The internet becomes another cable TV channel for the masses. Good luck if you want to be a content provider - better go make a facebook page or upload to youtube.

...if the big boys have their way.

The one killer bonus for them is that it nixes the second hand market at a stroke (and puts "rental" into their control). We've got three shelves of Xbox360 games here - most were bought second hand from Blockbuster/amazon/ebay at a fraction of the new price. Of course they will assume all current second-hand sales will instantly become full-price purchases, and be disappointed when they don't.

Also noticed that MS are starting to punt what could be considered "full" games via their online marketplace, at a comparable cost to shop prices for a new game. Testing the water...