Let's put this another way:
There's a new kit car announced. It has a 100cc engine and a small frame attached to four wheels. This "car" gets 100mpg and costs $500. It has no seats, no steering wheel, no roof, no doors, no airbags, no windshield, etc.
Is it fair to compare this "car" in terms of fuel economy and price to a brand new Corolla or F150?
If someone starts going on about "It's a fraction of the cost and gets 4x the economy! That's the real story here!" Wouldn't you think they were a little nuts?
No I'd think they're freaking geniuses.
You screwed up the standard
Right, so what I described is NOT a Harley or a Vespa, correct? You would have to add more thing to it, correct? It would also have to meet certain safety requirement which further drive up it's cost and drive down it's fuel economy. And you can see that I didn't compare it to a Harley or Vespa. I compared it to the standard 4 door family car and the standard truck. Are you saying that a Vespa really replace the standard car for a family of 4?
Are there businesses currently using iPhone 4Ss as embedded video display devices? Good dog I hope not. If so, I agree that they would save a ton of money by installing Raspberry Pi's. But they should be using AppleTVs in that case instead, which is a better comparison. How much is it to add on wifi, ir receiver / remote, and 8gb of flash to the Raspberry Pi? The cost is about the same and while the Raspberry Pi has a better GPU, the AppleTV has a much better CPU.
For the record I think the Raspberry Pi is an amazing piece of technology, but saying that it beats the iPhone 4S in performance and cost when it cannot do ANYTHING out of the box without buying additional parts (it's runs XBMC, great! Are LCD displays free with purchase of the Pi?) is very misguided statement.
I could find a dozen GPUs that put the iPhone 4S to shame and are cheaper
You are missing the point. Can you find a dozen that are part of a fully functional computer that costs $25?
Are you saying that the Raspberry Pi is as fully functional as an iPhone 4S? If not, then you're completely missing my point.
Let's put this another way:
There's a new kit car announced. It has a 100cc engine and a small frame attached to four wheels. This "car" gets 100mpg and costs $500. It has no seats, no steering wheel, no roof, no doors, no airbags, no windshield, etc.
Is it fair to compare this "car" in terms of fuel economy and price to a brand new Corolla or F150?
If someone starts going on about "It's a fraction of the cost and gets 4x the economy! That's the real story here!" Wouldn't you think they were a little nuts?
If 'Misery' can auto-magically detect trolling why not just auto-ban or auto-suspend and give an explanation?
The user will know that the account is dead and just create another one. If you can string them along for a while and they think that the site is broken maybe they'll just leave instead.
"Ada is PL/I trying to be Smalltalk. -- Codoso diBlini