I don't know that I'd say they are loyal. With the 60% failure rate everyone should have abandoned them. That's an amazing failure rate.

I believe what keeps people onboard is that they already had this major investment in games. It isn't as if they could take those games to another platform and play them. If you own an Xbox 360 and it fails you buy another because your games are worthless without one.

With the potentiality of having the new version of the Xbox not play used games I would think that any loyalty factor would begin to go down. And, with the Kinect watching you (for the benefit of advertisers) I would conclude that as well.

Why is he still in office? He should have been driven out of town.

The article title should read "Richard Branson plans".

I have read the article that you reference. It is not a problem unless you overload the chain and even then it isn't because of the USB chip it's because of the CPU.

I don't agree. The product has been out for a good long time. They've had long periods where we couldn't get any. Then they opened up to mass purchases leaving those that couldn't get any before still out in the cold. It is rare that you'll actually find a Pi for sale in the US. When they are they are gone just as fast as they showed up.

It also has an RCA video out built into the board. You can also get an HDMI to VGA adapter.

My buddy is always trying to build the cheapest most flexible and powerful car computer he can. This would seem to be a good solution for him. Even if it is just a project always in the works he could learn a lot. I'm thinking about doing something similar just to work the project. That just got me wondering whether I could run that off my truck's stereo USB ports.

An old android cell phone isn't a general purpose device. Thus it has limits that the Pi was designed to eliminate. Please don't buy a Pi because that means there's one more available for the rest of us.

I also bought several SD cards to swap out but only during the test phase to determine which distro was right for me. I chose against and speak out against openelec primarily due to their bullshit security policy which prohibits installation of other programs while at the same time activating the root account. It also won't recognize my drobobox that I have connected to it. Technically it sees it but reports that it is a huge huge device and then fails to mount the volume. The Raspbmc distro sees my drobobox and works properly with it, though the raspbmc guys made it so that you can't update the files as a regular user even though the shares are set up to allow that. You have to open a file manager window as root to do it (as root on a workstation accessing the shares).

Your way of doing things has brought yet another slew of ideas about how this little device can be used. A low cost print server is a neat idea as I have 4 printers set up near one another that all could be run off that device thus allowing me to turn off one or more computers.

At this point I have a Drobobox, an external USB CD/DVD writer and my mouse connected to one powered 5v 2.6a hub. I have a G15 keyboard and the hub connected to the USB ports on the Pi.

I've had it a bit more complex in that I had taken a PC case fan and spliced it to a USB cable and had that plugged into the hub as well. On top of that I had an ATI RF USB adapter plugged into either the keyboard or the hub. All of this without any adverse or abnormal behavior. I do have my Pi overclocked and the voltage upped (which likely has nothing to do with the power supplied to the USB ports, but likely does impact the ability of the CPU to provide a realtime response).

In my case I rarely am in front of the keyboard or using the mouse as I use XBMC and hence use the remote control software on my Android devices. I also SSH in most of the time to do various tasks such as install new software, compile programs, etc. Amazingly while compiling programs and playing a HD video on the TV the Pi didn't balk once.

The USB port is not broken. It works fine with everything that I have thrown at it. If anything it is the amount of power available to the devices that you plug in. This is common on all PCs.

The device itself is the killer app.

A Pi running a web server from his home needs no justification or consideration of reduction of ongoing external charges. He's removed the $140.00 totally except maybe the dollar or two a year he pays in electricity to run it.

In other words he's fine running the Pi and he need not consider these other services albeit cheaper ones for what he's set up is perfectly fine.

I generally don't reply to my own posts, but I had a couple followup points. DVD support was added to XBMC nightly builds in mid November, 2012. That means you need only the libdvdcss2 library installed to play back commercial DVDs. I also tested to see if I could just hook up an external USB DVD drive and whether it would detect it. It does.

As I was closing my browser tabs to end my day something caught my eye in regards to the "not all USB devices are supported on the Pi". In reality that is an extremely misleading statement. The Pi uses the same kernels as regular Linux so technically it will support every device that regular Linux distros support. That includes just about every USB device on the planet.

What the article went off about was that the ports on the Pi don't provide enough power to run some devices straight up. This is not an uncommon situation for any computer, desktop or laptop. Often the USB ports provide insufficient power to power on an external laptop HDD, and obviously an external USB CD/DVD. Some manufacturers of these external devices (primarily laptop based external HDDs) provided a split cable that allowed you to plug into two laptop USB ports and in some cases two PC USB ports to get enough power to drive the external device.

In the case of a full sized external HDD those normally come with their own power adapter. In the case of virtually ALL USB CD/DVD drives they come with their own power brick. This has been the case going way back; probably even a decade back.

The article that was referenced also indicated that it would be likely be necessary to have a powered USB hub for this situation. That could be considered blatantly wrong or in the least extremely misleading, or whomever wrote it doesn't understand hubs and why you would use them. Most powered USB hubs provides barely an additional 5v of power. That means you would run into the same kind of problem with it that you are experiencing with the Pi (not having enough power to drive all the devices you might want to attach to the hub). Because the external drives (CD/DVD and HDD) generally provide their own power brick it isn't commonly necessary to consider a powered hub for those reasons. You may still need one for different reasons but you will almost never use one to power an external HDD/CD/DVD USB drive.

Actually "quite well" is an understatement. It plays videos impressively. The system menus are laggy because there's no X and thus no 2d accelerated desktop components, because technically there is no desktop. Distros like raspbmc and openelec don't use X. It's not even installed. Hence it doesn't consume RAM nor require configuration.

If you want a full desktop you can get the distro recommended by the raspberrypi.org that implements a desktop and allows you to run GUI apps. Even without a desktop you can still ssh into your Pi and do updates, monitor temperature, update the packages (and install new or remove old ones) from your desktop/laptop computer without having to get up and to type away at the Pi's keyboard.

If you overclock the system this performance improves. It doesn't void the warranty if you don't exceed their OC limits. Even so, it's only $35.00, so if you blow one buy another. My Pi is overclocked in all categories, which isn't hard to do nor hard to determine issues with overclocking. Adjust up or down as you see it is stable or unstable. If it helps to run this off a USB HDD rather than a flash drive (which are known to be slow to write) then do so. For simplicity sake I don't run from an external USB HDD. I do have my Drobobox attached with 4 drives installed in it, and I have samba set up so any computer can access those files from shares created on the Pi. I've played 3 videos on different computers, via these shares, including one of them on the Pi (and music on another computer) at the same time with little to no lag on the Pi.

You can also use XBMC remotes such as yatse (which is far better than the remote from the XBMC devs). You'll not notice the screen lag and it won't annoy you because you aren't interacting with the screen. XBMC can be configured to enable the web server allowing access your Pi's XBMC via your web browser (to start and stop and queue up content). With remote control software (for Android) like yatse and the XBMC dev's remote you can even browse the web (or, if you have a favorite podcast player, browse your available podcasts (either stored locally or directly from the web)), and then tell your android device to play on an external player. Doing so directs the URL to your Pi's XBMC. In otherwords you could be watching a video podcast on your Android device and with a tap tell it to begin playing that same podcast on your Pi's XBMC.

The Pi also has a distribution that is targeted to run Asterisk. Currently I have a mini itx mobo running an asterisk server. For me, it would be nice to have asterisk installed and configured with my current Pi.

There are few if any media boxes that provide DVD support. The ATV, many Google TV boxes, the ROKU, the WD media box, the Boxee Box, and the various other dual core and quad core Pi copycats don't have DVD support. Nearly no tablet (Android, iOS, nor Win8) support DVD drives yet play media well. With the Pi you can at least plug in an external DVD drive and with the right software, such as libdvdcss2, you can play back DVD content, that is, if the distro you chose hasn't removed support (which would be very short sighted). Support for any given device that is supported in Linux is also supported on EVERY Pi, IF, the distro chose to LEAVE those features in rather than remove them in an effort to shave off some memory demands. Even so, this doesn't preclude someone else from adding it back, BECAUSE Linux is Open Source, hence so are the distributions for the Pi.

There's really no comparing the ATV product to the Pi.