I kind of think that they've missed "their own" point with it.

Their official line is that it's a educational board that is going to go into schools and recreate the times when kids could learn to do more than just use word or surf the internet, they have people like David Braben "evangelising" it saying it could help develop the next set of "Elite" (the game) programmers.

I know times have moved on significantly, but the appeal of computers like the BBC (and its peers) were that they were essentially very basic, you had total control over the hardware and the entire system was documented.

What they've managed to achieve here is a board that runs linux with a CPU that is heavily protected by NDA's and therefore has plenty of "binary only" bits.

I like it for what is it, a cheap board that runs linux and has HDMI.

I don't like it for what it isn't, an educational tool to teach the fundamentals of computing. If they wanted to do that, they should have just recreated the BBC model B and then give this generation of "computer users" a real taste of how computers really work.

I grew up in that era, typing in programs from computer magazines and learning many skills that are sorely missed from todays generation of comp. si graduates, certainly in the UK where you pretty much guarantee that a comp. sic graduate won't be able to program). It's because of doing such low level stuff early on that I just love doing embedded stuff, because it uses all those skills that I picked up way back - and it's probably the reason that I dislike for doing "PC" software gets worse!

Let's face it, most of these will get snapped up by geeks and won't be landing in your local school. Do "IT" teachers even have the skill to do anything with these? I think not.