Only in designated spectrum. And even then you need to register with the FCC and have the device type accepted. Take a look at all devices that transmit anything and note the FCCID string that is on said device. Those fall under the Part 95 licensing.
Remember too that many areas are too far out for even Wireless. And they are not that far from major civilization.
A good friend of mine lives in Tuscola Michigan. This very small town is about 5 miles East of Frankenmuth, MI. The only reliable means of communication he has is the POTS line. I have personally had Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Nextel, and AT&T cell phones on his property. Of those the only one that ever got reliable communication was the Nextel. And that was only in his front yard. For some odd reason it wouldn't connect in his back yard.
Mind you, Frankenmuth, MI is not a huge city here, but it is certainly very well populated so it's not wasteland but it's not metropolis either. This falls true for many areas in Michigan I have been to.
And as for VoIP over satellite, good luck! Propagation delay on a satellite is upwards of a second for network communication. Anything real-time is unusable. This includes any games, etc. That's provided you have one of the newer systems that doesn't REQUIRE a POTS line for the uplink.
Note that anything over 100ms for delay renders the VoIP problematic, if not useless. I am a VoIP engineer for a living. We have to take all of this in to consideration before we even propose a solution to a customer.
Two notes only. Each coil produces one note. At least that is how they were when I saw em a couple of years ago and the setup looks the same.
Sound in real life. Loud. Really freaking loud. These are 7 foot tall units putting out sparks around 7-10 feet controlled. Sound is point source to the coil it is originating from, sorta. The sorta being pretty much the area of the spark itself, so the source is wider than one would think. Highest and lowest dunno, though it had a very good audible range. The sound was a bit harsh due to the nature of how it was being generated and the noise from the bolts themselves.
All in all darned impressive. Very well done and they were very knowledgeable. I had the chance to sit down and chat with them for a little bit before they left and all I can say is "wow".
In this case I would not want to be the recipient of the electric bill. These are not your father's tesla coils. These are fairly low voltage very high current devices. The feed they got from the hotel at Penguicon a few years back was a 220V 50A and I remember them having an ammeter on the line to make sure they didn't exceed the rating and trip the circuit.
They run high current at lower voltage to be able to use solid state switching devices to drive the coil. No rotary spark gap here just a bunch of IGBTs and other fun silicon the size of your fist.
Based on chatting with them when they did Penguicon in Michigan they use a control circuit to turn the coils on and off at a specific rate. This allows them to use the actual lightning breaks per second to generate sound. E.g. 128 breaks per second roughly equals a sound at 128 Hz.
When they were coming out here they asked us to provide 2 note MIDI files for playing. If I remember correctly the computer uses MIDI to drive the control circuitry that is fed optically (to avoid coupling to the coil itself) to the drive electronics in the coil. So not so much pre-programmed as interpreted.
Really neat technology they have put together and darned loud! I wonder if they ever built the other two notes they talked about building at Penguicon. Hearing 4 of those going in harmony would be sweet!
Take a look at the newer VIA VB7001G board. It may be the C7-D processor, but from logicsupply dot com it is $123. Not a hugely cheap board, but quite nicely priced for a mini-ITX board. The only drawback is that some of the cases cost almost more than the M/B itself!
Also the gOS boards are quite nice, though at micro-ATX are harder to fit in to a low power solution... I have two of these, one running my router with a dual Netflex-3 card (yeah I know, older 10/100, but I don't need any faster) and it runs quite well.
I'd be interested to see how this new chip/chipset combo works in say a HTPC and if it does HD content well. None of the current VIA Unichrome chipsets do HD very well.
This sounds like an off the shelf EPIA board. I called Everex to verify, but the technician was unable to provide any information other than the graphics and processor.
That is PURE speculation, and by attempting to prevent the development of BPL, you are actually stalling progress which could eliminate the interference.
Directly on the contrary. Hams have indeed assisted companies to develop BPL solutions that minimize interference, there are just not that many that have invested the time and money to do so. If I remember correctly Motorola has made a solution that eliminates most of the harmful interference.
The issue with BPL is that the interference can not be easily eliminated due to the nature of the powerlines. Phone lines are twisted with ground so as to not be transmitters, the center tap on a coax line is covered by a shielded ground to keep signal in. Power lines are just bare wires out in the open, nothing more than anyone uses as a standard HF dipole.
Just remember, with this much RFI coming out of the power lines, what does this do to military HF signals. Yes, the military does indeed still use HF. What does this do to commercial AM and FM stations, much less over the air TV. Remember, most of the cable companies do not pipe out the local channels all the way from the transmitting station, they use your standard high gain arial at the head end.
Why are hams so eager to place the burden on the power companies? There is probably a great reason, but what I've heard is essentially "We were here first" or as you did "there is an incredibly small niche that is insignificant, but I can spin it to appear important". That won't fly.
Because as a Part 15 _*UNLICENSED*_ user of the spectrum, they are required by FCC law to _*ACCEPT*_ interference by Part 97 _*LICENSED*_ users of the spectrum.
It is not a matter that we Hams are whining, it is the fact that we have spent money and time to have the FCC grant us a license to use the spectrum that we are licensed to use.
If someone nearby is transmitting on your favorite AM or FM radio station, are you going to sit there and say "Well, I just have to take it." Or are you going to call #1 the radio station whom paid a good sum of money to get the spectrum they have and #2 call the FCC.
I know I would be doing both #1 and #2.
I am a licensed Amateur Radio Operator by the FCC. If someone is causing harmful interference of my licensed transmission then I will do whatever is necessary to stop it. This is not a matter of whining, this is a matter of law.
Mark - KC8ZUC
Re:Is it cost effective to become a mini-Vonage?
on
Build Your Own PBX
·
· Score: 2, Informative
FYI: T1 can handle calls on all 24 channels without extra digital info, Caller ID, ANI/DNIS, etc.
You are referring to a PRI (Primary Rate ISDN) that uses 23 channels for voice and 1 for call setup/teardown. This provides all modern phone convieniences.
Re:Interesting, but the real question is...
on
FreeBSD 4.9 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Are you using that as a workstation? Then ya gotta have sound.. AC97 is widely known, must be a configuration issue.
Not all chipsets are known... I have the KT133 chipset on my AMD box here at home and the AC'97 works beautifully. A buddy of mine has the exact next revision of the chipset the KT266 which uses a different AC'97 chip... And is not supported. It all depends. If you dig into the sound support (I have, I tried to hack my buddies machine to work properly but failed) you will see that even though all the AC'97 chips are touted to be equal they all have their own qwirks...
OS/390 is MVS, it was renamed to stress the S/390 platform. It is simply a newer version. Just as z/OS is a new version of OS/390, specifically tailored to the z/900 platform.
Almost every comment I have read here has been yelling at the open group for making their software open. I've been using Motif apps for years now and even bought a copy ($200 for Linux libc4) about 5 years ago. Motif has a history of being extremely high priced and totally commercial.
We should be applauding the Open Group's decision to make Motif available FREE to the open source OS's.
I've seen complaints about interoperability, read the FAQ, this is the exact same source that is used for the commercial versions of Motif! So the Motif libraries that exist under CDE for Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX, as well as the Motif libraries in IRIX will now and for the first time work seamlessly with the OpenMotif libraries under xBSD and Linux!
I applaud OSI for their release! We should encourage this activity! I wish MORE companies would do this! So evreyone should quit their griping and celebrate, now that one of the most commercialized X11 based toolkits is now available to the general public FREE on any open source system!
Also highly recommended is Tenchi Muyo. The original OVA series is hilarious, and available as a box set. It's what I cut my anime teeth on, and I've loved it ever since!
Well the happy hacking keyboard has a convertor for PS/2 KB to Sun computer... I wonder if it would work backwards... I have a few Sun Type 4 keyboards I'd love to use...
I couldn't agree more. But the average price for a Mac (at least in this area) is 1500-2000$US. The average price for an entry level PC is 600-1000$US. at almost twice the price, that is enough to dissuade most consumers. Especially the clueless.
I couldn't agree more, which is why I said in a few years... heck even as small as a year, who knows... Especially with the pace that Linux is going and the corporate funding that it is recieving.
But remember, you set them up. They probably could not have set themselves up. (note this is not a flame -- my parents don't even try to understand what I do...)
The two things linux is lacking right now is install and a good unified desktop. both are being addressed, and IMHO coming along quite nicely...
I work for a small telecommunications/internet company in south eastern Michigan. Most of our low end servers (DNS, Web, Mail, ftp) are all Linux. From my experience at work and at home, this is the perfect place for a linux server.
The place where linux is not ready for use right now is in fact the desktop. The few users that we do have that use linux are quite versed in the system and know their way around. On the contrary the average windows user is quite clueless. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of knowledgable users, but not the ones I deal with.
Maybe in a few years it might be a viable solution. Recently the desktop has taken a drastic improvement with KDE and Gnome. And the installs are getting easier every day. (RedHat is a breeze today compared to Slackware back in '95 when I started with Linux).
Linux is rapidly becoming a contender in the low to mid end of the server market, and is being embraced by corporations. This is a definate improvement from where it was even a year ago. So we should be rejoycing at the good press, not criticizing it for being too brief... Considering that all of the IT department and most of the upper level management reading the Berst alert here where I work, I'm sure that others in management are reading this. It is far from the FUD that is par for the course in management literature about Linux, and for that I congratulate Berst for his observations!
I have seen a few comments about how evil NAT is. I wholelly agree. But it has it's benefits.
Being able to have any number of IP's that are needed to complete one's network without having to go through the hassle of paying for an IP space is the one at the top of my list for one... Though:
For ease of use I would recommend FreeBSD, it has a better suite for NAT (no flames yet plaese... read the rest.) And my statistics for the box actually say that FreeBSD is faster for doing the networking. (non professional... just watching the D/L rates.)
For functionality I would highly recommend Linux, as it has a much better plug in system for the Masq modules.
I have used both. And had much success with both. But the one thing I will HIGHLY recommend for both operating system platforms is socks5. Most applications are somewhat aware of it, and those that are not can be made aware with some library tricks. I use ICQ and AIM on a windows box behind my firewall with little to no problems at all. The only problem that I see is that sometimes incoming messages are a little slow (have yet to figure that one out, but I'm sure it's a configuration error).
The only other thing that may cause problems is if you are using dynamic dialup. Secure web sites sometimes complain about an invalid reverse name lookup.
I have been happily using a NAT based firewall for about 2 years now both Linux and FreeBSD. I prefer FreeBSD for the networking speed, but that is wholelly my personal opinion.
It is amazing the similarity of many of these posts. I know myself for one went through much of the ridicule and puishment (physical and emotional) that most geeks get in grade school and high school.
There are warning signs, yes. But when one is trained to keep emotion in at all costs so you are not called a "crybaby" often times there are no warning signs. I for one know that had I not had local Bulliten boards (BBS's) I probably would have suffered the same fate. I look back at some of my entries in my diary and quite simply it frightens me.
Most of my friends suffered the same fate as I did. Of the group, I am the only one to be graduating college. This is not a slam against anyone, it is just a simple fact. 3 of my friends actually spent time in mental hospitals because the stress was just too much for them to cope with and they snapped.
Mind you, this was before there was Doom or any of the modern first person shoot-em-ups. The violence was all caused by classmates and teachers. Yes, teachers. There was one teacher in my grade school that would regularly reduce students to tears in front of the class if they forgot a pen or pencil. Yes, a pen or pencil. This same teacher reduced a few _*PARENTS*_ to tears as well. What good is this when she teaches 5th grade. I know it was none the better for me, seeing as though I had to go through counseling because she belittled me so much.
The story rings true year after year. I just wish there was some way that there could be an end to the ridecule and abuse. I know I would have had a better learning experience than I did.
And to anyone that is curious, I am a graduating senior at the University of Michigan - Dearborn. In CIS:CS (computer science). Being a computer geek I am actually respected by classmates and teachers alike. It is definatly a different atmosphere entirely than grade and high school.
Kudos to Jon for a wholelly impressive article, and kudos to the readers of slashdot for keeping the flaming/crap posts down. It's a nice thing to see a civil debate!
Mark Szlaga aka: Computer Geek (and damn proud of it)
The only question that I have is why haven't the vendors provided any support for the old games. I for one would be more than happy to actually purchase a copy of the game in rom form so that I can enjoy it on my PC. The problem is that none of the companies are seeing this. I mean heck... they can make more money off the old games that are no longer supported. Especially if the platform is hard to find anymore (I'm a pretty big fan of the old Atari 2600 and ColecoVision).
I know some of you want to flame me because it's not "free", but nothing in this world is truely free. Even pirated ROMs. I wouldn't want any kind of support. Just the ROM so that I can have a legal copy and can enjoy it for years to come, even when the old hardware has died. Which in my case the 2600 did indeed die on me...
Just my $.02 or however much the cartridge manufacturers want for the ROMs when licensed...
Slashdot Mirror
Only in designated spectrum. And even then you need to register with the FCC and have the device type accepted. Take a look at all devices that transmit anything and note the FCCID string that is on said device. Those fall under the Part 95 licensing.
Remember too that many areas are too far out for even Wireless. And they are not that far from major civilization.
A good friend of mine lives in Tuscola Michigan. This very small town is about 5 miles East of Frankenmuth, MI. The only reliable means of communication he has is the POTS line. I have personally had Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Nextel, and AT&T cell phones on his property. Of those the only one that ever got reliable communication was the Nextel. And that was only in his front yard. For some odd reason it wouldn't connect in his back yard.
Mind you, Frankenmuth, MI is not a huge city here, but it is certainly very well populated so it's not wasteland but it's not metropolis either. This falls true for many areas in Michigan I have been to.
And as for VoIP over satellite, good luck! Propagation delay on a satellite is upwards of a second for network communication. Anything real-time is unusable. This includes any games, etc. That's provided you have one of the newer systems that doesn't REQUIRE a POTS line for the uplink.
Note that anything over 100ms for delay renders the VoIP problematic, if not useless. I am a VoIP engineer for a living. We have to take all of this in to consideration before we even propose a solution to a customer.
Two notes only. Each coil produces one note. At least that is how they were when I saw em a couple of years ago and the setup looks the same.
Sound in real life. Loud. Really freaking loud. These are 7 foot tall units putting out sparks around 7-10 feet controlled. Sound is point source to the coil it is originating from, sorta. The sorta being pretty much the area of the spark itself, so the source is wider than one would think. Highest and lowest dunno, though it had a very good audible range. The sound was a bit harsh due to the nature of how it was being generated and the noise from the bolts themselves.
All in all darned impressive. Very well done and they were very knowledgeable. I had the chance to sit down and chat with them for a little bit before they left and all I can say is "wow".
In this case I would not want to be the recipient of the electric bill. These are not your father's tesla coils. These are fairly low voltage very high current devices. The feed they got from the hotel at Penguicon a few years back was a 220V 50A and I remember them having an ammeter on the line to make sure they didn't exceed the rating and trip the circuit.
They run high current at lower voltage to be able to use solid state switching devices to drive the coil. No rotary spark gap here just a bunch of IGBTs and other fun silicon the size of your fist.
Based on chatting with them when they did Penguicon in Michigan they use a control circuit to turn the coils on and off at a specific rate. This allows them to use the actual lightning breaks per second to generate sound. E.g. 128 breaks per second roughly equals a sound at 128 Hz.
When they were coming out here they asked us to provide 2 note MIDI files for playing. If I remember correctly the computer uses MIDI to drive the control circuitry that is fed optically (to avoid coupling to the coil itself) to the drive electronics in the coil. So not so much pre-programmed as interpreted.
Really neat technology they have put together and darned loud! I wonder if they ever built the other two notes they talked about building at Penguicon. Hearing 4 of those going in harmony would be sweet!
Take a look at the newer VIA VB7001G board. It may be the C7-D processor, but from logicsupply dot com it is $123. Not a hugely cheap board, but quite nicely priced for a mini-ITX board. The only drawback is that some of the cases cost almost more than the M/B itself!
Also the gOS boards are quite nice, though at micro-ATX are harder to fit in to a low power solution... I have two of these, one running my router with a dual Netflex-3 card (yeah I know, older 10/100, but I don't need any faster) and it runs quite well.
I'd be interested to see how this new chip/chipset combo works in say a HTPC and if it does HD content well. None of the current VIA Unichrome chipsets do HD very well.
Mark
Unichrome Pro chipset.
This sounds like an off the shelf EPIA board. I called Everex to verify, but the technician was unable to provide any information other than the graphics and processor.
That is PURE speculation, and by attempting to prevent the development of BPL, you are actually stalling progress which could eliminate the interference.
Directly on the contrary. Hams have indeed assisted companies to develop BPL solutions that minimize interference, there are just not that many that have invested the time and money to do so. If I remember correctly Motorola has made a solution that eliminates most of the harmful interference.
The issue with BPL is that the interference can not be easily eliminated due to the nature of the powerlines. Phone lines are twisted with ground so as to not be transmitters, the center tap on a coax line is covered by a shielded ground to keep signal in. Power lines are just bare wires out in the open, nothing more than anyone uses as a standard HF dipole.
Just remember, with this much RFI coming out of the power lines, what does this do to military HF signals. Yes, the military does indeed still use HF. What does this do to commercial AM and FM stations, much less over the air TV. Remember, most of the cable companies do not pipe out the local channels all the way from the transmitting station, they use your standard high gain arial at the head end.
Why are hams so eager to place the burden on the power companies? There is probably a great reason, but what I've heard is essentially "We were here first" or as you did "there is an incredibly small niche that is insignificant, but I can spin it to appear important". That won't fly.
Because as a Part 15 _*UNLICENSED*_ user of the spectrum, they are required by FCC law to _*ACCEPT*_ interference by Part 97 _*LICENSED*_ users of the spectrum.
It is not a matter that we Hams are whining, it is the fact that we have spent money and time to have the FCC grant us a license to use the spectrum that we are licensed to use.
If someone nearby is transmitting on your favorite AM or FM radio station, are you going to sit there and say "Well, I just have to take it." Or are you going to call #1 the radio station whom paid a good sum of money to get the spectrum they have and #2 call the FCC.
I know I would be doing both #1 and #2.
I am a licensed Amateur Radio Operator by the FCC. If someone is causing harmful interference of my licensed transmission then I will do whatever is necessary to stop it. This is not a matter of whining, this is a matter of law.
Mark - KC8ZUC
FYI: T1 can handle calls on all 24 channels without extra digital info, Caller ID, ANI/DNIS, etc.
You are referring to a PRI (Primary Rate ISDN) that uses 23 channels for voice and 1 for call setup/teardown. This provides all modern phone convieniences.
Why, yes. Yes it does.
See: /usr/ports/emulators/linux-base
or: FreeBSD Hypertext Man Pages: linux
Are you using that as a workstation? Then ya gotta have sound.. AC97 is widely known, must be a configuration issue.
Not all chipsets are known... I have the KT133 chipset on my AMD box here at home and the AC'97 works beautifully. A buddy of mine has the exact next revision of the chipset the KT266 which uses a different AC'97 chip... And is not supported. It all depends. If you dig into the sound support (I have, I tried to hack my buddies machine to work properly but failed) you will see that even though all the AC'97 chips are touted to be equal they all have their own qwirks...
OS/390 is MVS, it was renamed to stress the S/390 platform. It is simply a newer version. Just as z/OS is a new version of OS/390, specifically tailored to the z/900 platform.
Mark
No, That was Cyrix. Once they saw the P-###+ series failing, they moved to the PR### for Pentium Rating.
I just melted a PR200 about 60 days ago, so I have
the chip to prove my point.
Almost every comment I have read here has been yelling at the open group for making their software open. I've been using Motif apps for years now and even bought a copy ($200 for Linux libc4) about 5 years ago. Motif has a history of being extremely high priced and totally commercial.
We should be applauding the Open Group's decision to make Motif available FREE to the open source OS's.
I've seen complaints about interoperability, read the FAQ, this is the exact same source that is used for the commercial versions of Motif! So the Motif libraries that exist under CDE for Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX, as well as the Motif libraries in IRIX will now and for the first time work seamlessly with the OpenMotif libraries under xBSD and Linux!
I applaud OSI for their release! We should encourage this activity! I wish MORE companies would do this! So evreyone should quit their griping and celebrate, now that one of the most commercialized X11 based toolkits is now available to the general public FREE on any open source system!
Also highly recommended is Tenchi Muyo. The original OVA series is hilarious, and available as a box set. It's what I cut my anime teeth on, and I've loved it ever since!
Well the happy hacking keyboard has a convertor for PS/2 KB to Sun computer... I wonder if it would work backwards... I have a few Sun Type 4 keyboards I'd love to use...
Mark
I couldn't agree more. But the average price for a Mac (at least in this area) is 1500-2000$US. The average price for an entry level PC is 600-1000$US. at almost twice the price, that is enough to dissuade most consumers. Especially the clueless.
Mark
I couldn't agree more, which is why I said in a few years... heck even as small as a year, who knows... Especially with the pace that Linux is going and the corporate funding that it is recieving.
But remember, you set them up. They probably could not have set themselves up. (note this is not a flame -- my parents don't even try to understand what I do...)
The two things linux is lacking right now is install and a good unified desktop. both are being addressed, and IMHO coming along quite nicely...
Mark
I work for a small telecommunications/internet company in south eastern Michigan. Most of our low end servers (DNS, Web, Mail, ftp) are all Linux. From my experience at work and at home, this is the perfect place for a linux server.
The place where linux is not ready for use right now is in fact the desktop. The few users that we do have that use linux are quite versed in the system and know their way around. On the contrary the average windows user is quite clueless. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of knowledgable users, but not the ones I deal with.
Maybe in a few years it might be a viable solution. Recently the desktop has taken a drastic improvement with KDE and Gnome. And the installs are getting easier every day. (RedHat is a breeze today compared to Slackware back in '95 when I started with Linux).
Linux is rapidly becoming a contender in the low to mid end of the server market, and is being embraced by corporations. This is a definate improvement from where it was even a year ago. So we should be rejoycing at the good press, not criticizing it for being too brief... Considering that all of the IT department and most of the upper level management reading the Berst alert here where I work, I'm sure that others in management are reading this. It is far from the FUD that is par for the course in management literature about Linux, and for that I congratulate Berst for his observations!
Mark
Network Administrator
I have seen a few comments about how evil NAT is. I wholelly agree. But it has it's benefits.
Being able to have any number of IP's that are needed to complete one's network without having to go through the hassle of paying for an IP space is the one at the top of my list for one... Though:
For ease of use I would recommend FreeBSD, it has a better suite for NAT (no flames yet plaese... read the rest.) And my statistics for the box actually say that FreeBSD is faster for doing the networking. (non professional... just watching the D/L rates.)
For functionality I would highly recommend Linux, as it has a much better plug in system for the Masq modules.
I have used both. And had much success with both. But the one thing I will HIGHLY recommend for both operating system platforms is socks5. Most applications are somewhat aware of it, and those that are not can be made aware with some library tricks. I use ICQ and AIM on a windows box behind my firewall with little to no problems at all. The only problem that I see is that sometimes incoming messages are a little slow (have yet to figure that one out, but I'm sure it's a configuration error).
The only other thing that may cause problems is if you are using dynamic dialup. Secure web sites sometimes complain about an invalid reverse name lookup.
I have been happily using a NAT based firewall for about 2 years now both Linux and FreeBSD. I prefer FreeBSD for the networking speed, but that is wholelly my personal opinion.
It is amazing the similarity of many of these posts. I know myself for one went through much of the ridicule and puishment (physical and emotional) that most geeks get in grade school and high school.
There are warning signs, yes. But when one is trained to keep emotion in at all costs so you are not called a "crybaby" often times there are no warning signs. I for one know that had I not had local Bulliten boards (BBS's) I probably would have suffered the same fate. I look back at some of my entries in my diary and quite simply it frightens me.
Most of my friends suffered the same fate as I did. Of the group, I am the only one to be graduating college. This is not a slam against anyone, it is just a simple fact. 3 of my friends actually spent time in mental hospitals because the stress was just too much for them to cope with and they snapped.
Mind you, this was before there was Doom or any of the modern first person shoot-em-ups. The violence was all caused by classmates and teachers. Yes, teachers. There was one teacher in my grade school that would regularly reduce students to tears in front of the class if they forgot a pen or pencil. Yes, a pen or pencil. This same teacher reduced a few _*PARENTS*_ to tears as well. What good is this when she teaches 5th grade. I know it was none the better for me, seeing as though I had to go through counseling because she belittled me so much.
The story rings true year after year. I just wish there was some way that there could be an end to the ridecule and abuse. I know I would have had a better learning experience than I did.
And to anyone that is curious, I am a graduating senior at the University of Michigan - Dearborn. In CIS:CS (computer science). Being a computer geek I am actually respected by classmates and teachers alike. It is definatly a different atmosphere entirely than grade and high school.
Kudos to Jon for a wholelly impressive article, and kudos to the readers of slashdot for keeping the flaming/crap posts down. It's a nice thing to see a civil debate!
Mark Szlaga
aka: Computer Geek
(and damn proud of it)
The only question that I have is why haven't the vendors provided any support for the old games. I for one would be more than happy to actually purchase a copy of the game in rom form so that I can enjoy it on my PC. The problem is that none of the companies are seeing this. I mean heck... they can make more money off the old games that are no longer supported. Especially if the platform is hard to find anymore (I'm a pretty big fan of the old Atari 2600 and ColecoVision).
I know some of you want to flame me because it's not "free", but nothing in this world is truely free. Even pirated ROMs. I wouldn't want any kind of support. Just the ROM so that I can have a legal copy and can enjoy it for years to come, even when the old hardware has died. Which in my case the 2600 did indeed die on me...
Just my $.02 or however much the cartridge manufacturers want for the ROMs when licensed...
Mark