The Usenet Physics FAQ has some background information on the theory behind this question. It's 14 years old but still worth reading. One interesting bit:

Yeah, simply having access to knowledge isn't very helpful for knowing what questions to ask.

A two hour commute one way? If you're spending four hours a day commuting you're living in the wrong place.

Which is not a problem we should dismiss out of hand. The exact same problem killed Atari (and the American video game market with it) back in the 80s. When the NES was introduced, Nintendo had some pretty strict quality/quantity control to prevent that from happening again, as well as its own magazine to inform gamers about what was available. Perhaps aggregate reviews on the internet will fulfill the same function today.

I do not complain about other people's personal projects. But when you start asking for money, there's some responsibility that goes along with that. Part of it is being honest with others and yourself about who you are and how you operate. Part of it is responding to criticism. You can't expect the benefit of the doubt when you're selling something, especially when you barely understand your own project. You can't expect us to be trusting when we find out that nobody is working with you except the outside companies you're paying to do the design and prototyping. If your response to criticism of your credentials and your business model is to act persecuted and accuse others of bullying, how are you going to make it in the business world?

You want to make a funky SBC? Great! You had some working boards fabbed? Congrats! I am sincerely happy for you. You want to share the joy of your project with others? Go for it! (Maybe bring some technical people along, though.)

You want other people's money? Come back when you're actually shipping product.

Excuse me? You're the one who keeps bringing your pointless stories about meaningless "progress" on your pie in the sky project to Slashdot. Last time you were asking for ten million dollars for a hopeless SoC project that you yourself knew nothing about. Now you're back here, what, trolling for pre-orders and funding? What kind of con artist are you?

And let's be clear, this isn't even really *your* project. You're throwing money at companies in China to get them to do the work for you, and you can't even answer their questions. You're nothing but a sales guy with a vague idea and a big ego. Come back when you're selling in volume, until then please quit wasting our time.

The Raspberry Pi people made a toy for educational purposes. If you read the About page, you will see two key differences:

1. The Raspberry Pi people have extensive hardware experience, with key figures actually working in the industry. They do their own technical work. They can answer questions about their design. They are selling through reputable distributors. lkcl, on the other hand, is a front-man with no hardware background. He is apparently the sole advocate in the world for a China-based for-profit operation.

2. Raspberry Pi's ultimate goal is to make a small single-board computer to help kids learn programming. lkcl's goals are large and varied, but mostly involve upending industries he knows nothing about, and probably getting rich in the process.

No, it's much sillier than that. This is the latest in a long-running series of Slashvertisements by the submitter, lkcl. They chronicle his journey towards creating an "industry standard" for swappable processors for tablets based on the PCMCIA form factor. Nobody asked for this, nobody wants it, and lkcl has next to no experience with hardware development, but he's convinced it's going to change the world! To help the world along, he's working on-- actually, it looks like various Chinese companies are doing all the work. Anyway, lkcl is the funding conduit for an example card based on an existing ARM SoC. Today's story is about getting the first samples of the "2nd revision" of this card. Future samples are approved for sale as a standalone product because "they boot", which obviously qualifies them to ship.

In our last episode, lkcl digressed from his main project to announce a funding drive for a totally unrealistic project to build a free software-friendly SoC with a custom CPU in six months without doing any "design" work. Except for speeding up the processor, adding a bunch of peripherals, and implementing it on a cutting-edge semiconductor process. And then getting to market by Christmas. Just a small side project, right?

lkcl is pretty prolific on his own stories, so I'm sure his dozens of comment responses will answer all of your questions.

Previous episodes:
Live Interview: Luke Leighton of Rhombus Tech Dec 11, 2012: Live interview that nobody saw. There doesn't seem to be a transcript.

Rhombus Tech A10 EOMA-68 CPU Card Schematics Completed Sept 7, 2012: PCB schematics (for the first revision -- prototype?) completed.

PCMCIA Computer Project Aims Even Higher (and Cheaper) Than Raspberry Pi Dec 17, 2011: Project announced? This is as far back as the Rhombus Tech news page goes.

AviSynth is a scripting language/library that can do those things, but it's more useful as glue logic than a standalone editor. You really need to see what you're working on when editing video. Even simple effects can involve some manual tweaking to figure out what looks good, and having a real-time random access preview in a non-linear editor is ideal. Seeing audio waveforms is also helpful -- maybe you want to synchronize a video effect with the audio, for instance. I'm currently adding RiffTrax commentary tracks to movie audio/video to make custom Blu-rays, which is a lot easier if I can see how the waveforms line up at the synch points.

You also have the question of how to handle (or rather, avoid) re-encoding. Does each tool output a huge raw temporary file? Do you use pipes to go from stdout->stdin through a mile-long command line? Do you have to run the tools in video-chronological order? How do you synchronize the audio with the video?

That was the first mission in Call of Duty: Black Ops. You play a special forces team sent in with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The goal of the mission is to kill Castro, but you only end up killing a body double. (It's based on a real historical event, so they couldn't actually have him get killed.)

They have artillery lined up by the border. Within the first few hours of a war, they can devastate Seoul and probably other South Korean cities, killing millions. I think they also have rocket artillery that could hit Tokyo. North Korea would lose the war pretty quickly, but the civilian cost would be *very* high.

Come on, a gamer wouldn't do that kind of research unless they were playing MMOs, or *maybe* a hardcore RPG. If he played shooters he would have just accused the other killers of hacking and tried to build an aimbot in retaliation.

(I am a bad person.)