True, just about nowhere now, since even your average PC comes with at least mediocre digital nonlinear editing capabilities... However, S-VHS/was/ popular in cable stations and small video production studios for A-B editing since you could make 2-3 generations of copies before the signal degraded below "TV quality" but it wasn't as expensive as 3/4". And that's where it was marketed.
But that's the point. There's always a niche market for incremental improvements in media, you just can't expect everyone to jump on the $1000 bandwagon.
If it was just a higher quality but still on tape, it wouldn't have caught on as well as it did, I don't think.
Which is why I'm the only person I've ever met who was recording TV shows off cable with an S-VHS VCR and used a Hi-8 camcorder for home videos when I was a kid. For regular consumers, the current standard (VHS and 8mm or VHS-C) was good enough, and the other formats didn't offer anything but a little better clarity for a much higher price. In our case, our family had that equipment because we ran a small video production business, and it was stuff we'd replaced in the studio with even higher quality gear.
There's always a market for more-of-the-same-just-higher-quality technology, somewhere, but it's foolish to expect consumers to make the upgrade on each step of the way.
So far, a third of our gamecube games have been damaged beyond repair, and the number of my DVDs and PC CDs getting scratched up is increasing. The CDs are worst of all, because if you get a single scratch on the label side of the disc, you can kiss the data goodbye. True, a caddy wouldn't have saved the two they left on the floor and snapped in half with a chair earlier this summer, but it could have mitigated most of the damage that's been done.
Oh, and they've had a DS for a month and already lost the Super Mario cartridge. There's no telling where that tiny thing has gone.
Just give us the data cartridges from the original Star Trek. Small formfactor, but big enough it's not too easily lost, and won't matter if the case is scratched or cracked. They had the right idea.:)
Or the 7-0's we use in the open hearts. I think we even have 12-0 suture in stock for eye cases.
Which means the most difficult things on the count to (1) make sure you've kept up to date, and (2) find when you come up short - those pesky needles that are probably on the floor, but since some brilliant manager installed black-and-white speckled rubber flooring you'll never find the thing - won't be any easier to count with RFID.
Not that you could even see one on an x-ray for an incorrect count, either. I have one MD brush that off, saying "something that small won't hurt anything." Great, just great.
Re:Don't Bother With The 360 Version
on
Prey Review
·
· Score: 1
No, I think he was saying that for the cost of a 360 and the $300 lame PC (since most people are gonna have a PC at home too), you could instead buy an $800 PC that was first of all a better PC, and second, better at games than the 360. And that either option was still $200 cheaper than the PS3.
As an added benefit, the IS folks don't have to come out to my OR quite so much, since I can take care of a lot of stuff myself. Too bad they won't give me admin access.;) (20+ years computer experience, and my previous career was tech support. Anyway.)
One item that I didn't see mentioned in this discussion is the factor of "time" when a patient in on the table.
True. Although, as we advance our surgical procedures to include more minimally-invasive operations (laparoscopic, microscopic, limited incision, etc) we actually increase patients' surgical times to reduce their recovery times. The benefits of the reduced tissue trauma and having the patient go straight home rather than to an inpatient unit for several days outweighs the downsides of longer surgical times. (It also costs the hospital less. The ever powerful dollar.)
In fact, perhaps the biggest "time" constraints we face is not the surgical time itself. First is our turnaround time - the time between the end of one case, and being ready for the next. A full instrument count on a large case could take 5-10 minutes - thus we don't count instruments except on open abdominal/chest cases. We face extreme pressure - to the point of being written up and disciplined - to make our turnaround times quick.
Second is the staff's time during a case. Counts aren't as simple as 'count at the beginning, count at the end' because very rarely can we anticipate exactly what will be needed in advance. We're always opening up new packages of gauze, new suture, new hemoclips, even opening up new single-wrapped instruments or entire instrument trays. It's very easy to forget to document one of those sutures on the count - or, even, write it down twice - and wind up with an incorrect count even when everything is actually there. Or to have a correct count when something is left inside. This is the human aspect of error that this RFID system could help with the most - you don't have to remember to do anything special to be able to check at the end of the case.
But I still think we could do just as much good to find ways to reduce the stress, time constraints, and complacency of OR staff, so that we all are doing our jobs right. It would relieve many other problems in the OR as well - don't even get me started on surgical site verification...
I'm aware of that, since it's my job to do it. The part I see as a fantastic fantasy is the computerized system with an LCD on the wall keeping a running inventory of what's in the field. Rather like the Mass Gen's OR of the Future.
every item that can be counted IS counted.
I work with a surgeon who, when doing a laparoscopic case that might turn into an open case, asks new scrubs, "Did you count everything?"
Upon the tech saying yes, he'll start rattling off from a list he's made of things on the sterile field that aren't counted even when we do a full instrument count (he says it's more than 50 items long). Things like blue towels, the irrigation bowl, syringes, laparoscopic trocars, labels, the skin stapler, the little FRED jar (anti-fog solution), the disposable marker...
I'm an RN in an OR myself. My cynicism is from experience.
What is cheaper?
Well, you'd think. The hospital budgets for lawsuits in advance, though, and our OR budget is already strained even before they shelled out several tens of thousands last week for two broken neuro microscopes.
Another part of the cost equation is the additional cost of RFID-embedded sponges and other disposables, which is a recurring cost beyond the wands and initial tagging of instruments. We already have an obscene amount of money going into the trashcan each case as it is.
More to the point, though, we already have systems - very cheap ones - to make surgical counts easier and safer. Someone mentioned the "shoe hanger" hanging counting bag for sorting out and visualizing sponges, of which our OR has exactly one, and is usually hidden in a storage room rather than used. Standards dictate at least two closing counts - three or more for abdominal cases - and yet most techs and nurses where I work just do one. And as a result we have people with retained sponges on operations where the RN wrote down "counts correct."
We already have systems for preventing medication errors on the surgical field - it's called a sterile marker and stickers. They come in every core supply pack we open. And we have techs who come in to relieve for lunch and find the last tech left a bunch of unlabeled syringes with clear liquid in them, a timebomb just waiting to go off.
I'm all for technology that will take some of the human error (whether caused by negligence, ignorance, complacency, or stress) out of the equation. For that matter, that wireless tracking system you point out would be great for inventory management, I'd love to have it. Our hospital already has two hospital-wide wireless networks - one for doctors' laptops, and one for the hospital's laptops on carts for nursing staff.
But anything with a bulletin point of "saves money" is gonna be implented well before an RFID surgical tracking system pitched explicitly on patient safety.
Actually, inventory and billing are probably the best reasons for RFID in the OR. At least, the best way to pitch it and get it into the OR. Some hospitals have adopted barcoding for this, but RFID makes it even simpler. And believe me, simpler is better when it comes to my fellow well-educated but technologically-incompetent OR nurses.
Then, add in the additional uses for patient safety, and you've got a winner all-around. But hospitals aren't going to go for something this elaborate and expensive for patient safety alone.
Like someone can go "32. 33. 34. Ok, that's 368 gauze pads, 72 sponges, and 34 wads of gauze strips. That's everything."
Well, that's what we do. Our open-heart cases routinely go over 100 suture needles, and our neuro cases have dozens of 1/2"x1/2" cotton sponges. We section off sponges in groups of five or ten, keep needles organized on a numbered magnet, and always have the tech and nurse count them *together* to help prevent mistakes.
And, we count them at least twice - once before closing and once after. At least that's what we're supposed to do - complacency and stress about time leads many of my coworkers to skip the final count, and I know at least one retained sponge case that resulted from this.
Make it so the surgeons can go "Is that everything?" [...]
They already take an x-ray if they have an emergency case and don't have time for a preoperative count, or the post-surgical counts are wrong. It'd probably be cheaper to roll each patient under a flouroscope on the way to the recovery room and glance at the screen to make sure you're good, than put wands in each room and RFIDs into all reusable and disposable instruments, sponges, needles (some of which are very tiny), blades, and other accessories, and hope one of them hasn't gone defective and stopped working during the case.
I'm still not convinced that this technology will do much for us above what we already have, in any form that an ordinary hospital will accept the cost of.
okay to leave a foreign object lying on top of an organ or tissue in the first place?
You mean like a clamp to stop bleeding, or a retractor to hold things in place, or sponges (cotton gauze) to keep tissue moist so it stays healthy? No, wouldn't want to use those during surgery, nope.
There are many reasons why sponges and instruments are placed *inside* an open surgical wound. And during, say, an abdominal procedure, it's easy for something that's gone inside to get covered and hidden by other organs. And the white cotton sponges obviously turn red when they're soaked with blood, which rather looks like everything else that's soaked with blood in the wound already.
Retained instruments isn't a symptom of HMOs or careless surgeons, it's a symptom of complacent OR staff.
This sounds like a fantastic idea, but it's likely it'd never be anything but fantasy.
My hospital just got around to putting computers in the operating rooms, and it'll be another couple years before we're acutally using them for charting and get rid of all the dead trees.
Something this flashy (read: expensive) for a (supposedly) rare occurance isn't gonna fly in today's hospital. Actually, I don't see anywhere but grant-funded specialty hospitals using RFID for counts. Now, I can see RFIDs in instruments being used to streamline the cleaning/processing/sterilization process - take a basin full of instruments, wave them one by one under the wand, and sort them into the proper sets. That could hold some promise and might get the process of getting it into the OR started.
Actually, two checks is the current standard for surgical counts - a first one before you close, and a final count after you close. It's better to find out before you close, but as he said, you might loose something during closing too.
The two issues I'd see with doing it *before* closing are:
1) all the other instruments are still near the patient, so the wand would need to have a pretty narrow field of reception, and
2) if it needs to be that close, the receiver itself will need to be a sterile instrument. Which means it must be more rugged, and therefore more costly.
Right now, if a surgical count isn't correct and the surgeon's looked and doesn't see it anywhere, but we have to suspect something was left inside, you finish closing the wound and have an portable xray done in the room. If they see something, they'll re-open and find it. Actually, the only reason they don't send the patient on and do the xray in the recovery unit later (since most the time missing things are on the floor, not in the patient), is if they find it when they're still inside the operating room, it doesn't count against them as an adverse event.
The few MySpace pages I've seen (being RL friends who said "come see my new page!!! isn't it cool?!?") choose font colors and background images such that I can't read their pages without highlighting the text, block by block.
I'm afraid to say, I haven't had any urge to go back.
Yeah. Funny thing is, in nursing school, they drilled into us to always remove all the air out of an IV line. In the OR where I work now, the anesthesiologists handle the IV lines, and they don't care a bit aoout air bubbles in the lines. Most say that the air is dissolved in the large veins before it gets anywhere important. (Whether or not there's anything to back up that statement, or if it's just something they believe because it's convenient, I dunno. Some of the docs are very strict about evidence-based practice and standard of care, though.)
Arterial lines and central lines are a different matter, and everyone is pretty picky about keeping air out of those.
Considering they originally planned to convert Enterprise into a full Orbiter after they built and flew Columbia, but then scrapped the idea because it was too expensive - and they also passed up the idea when they built Endeavor from scratch after Challenger was lost - I figure it's probably still cheaper today to "start over" than refit Enterprise.
Buran had no engines for a start, it was strictly a payload for Energia.
Funny little irony: while the atmospheric test vehicle for the Orbiter project (Enterprise) had no engines, the Russian atmospheric test vehicle had four jet engines to allow self-powered takeoffs.
BTW the reason that the Braun wasn't manned we because they didn't have a working life support system installed yet.
But one of uses for Buran was to provide both manned and unmanned flights. It was actually fulfilling one of it's target roles, even without life support or cockpit instrumentation.
I found this other article even more interesting - 1974, issue 311, "In Praise of Hydrogen." It talks about how easily the School of Automotive Studies converted a traditional internal combustion engine to hydrogen, and how with only one major area of research (storage of hydrogen) we should expect our dependance on gasoline to be quickly and easily eliminated.
Talk about vaporware (pun not intended, though also funny).
First computer I used was my grandparents' Apple IIe, in 1984 or so.
But my family's first computer was an Amiga 2000, in 1988. Oh, the weekends spent toying with Deluxe Paint or creating horrendous melodies in DMCS. Taking over the world in Empire, and trying to get a higher score than my sister in Mousetrap. Being introduced to the CLI, programming in BASIC, and helping upgrade our computers through the years...
For a few years I had an Amiga 1000 as my own computer, though I eventually inherited the old (upgraded) A2k and used it as my primary computer until '97. That's when I went to eollege, and had to choose - buy an '060 upgrade and a graphics card for the dead-end Amiga, or get with the program and buy a Pentium. I chose the Pentium, and have regretted it ever since. I would have missed a few great games, but I also would have missed countless days, weeks, months of frustration.
Slashdot Mirror
True, just about nowhere now, since even your average PC comes with at least mediocre digital nonlinear editing capabilities... However, S-VHS /was/ popular in cable stations and small video production studios for A-B editing since you could make 2-3 generations of copies before the signal degraded below "TV quality" but it wasn't as expensive as 3/4". And that's where it was marketed.
But that's the point. There's always a niche market for incremental improvements in media, you just can't expect everyone to jump on the $1000 bandwagon.
If it was just a higher quality but still on tape, it wouldn't have caught on as well as it did, I don't think.
Which is why I'm the only person I've ever met who was recording TV shows off cable with an S-VHS VCR and used a Hi-8 camcorder for home videos when I was a kid. For regular consumers, the current standard (VHS and 8mm or VHS-C) was good enough, and the other formats didn't offer anything but a little better clarity for a much higher price. In our case, our family had that equipment because we ran a small video production business, and it was stuff we'd replaced in the studio with even higher quality gear.
There's always a market for more-of-the-same-just-higher-quality technology, somewhere, but it's foolish to expect consumers to make the upgrade on each step of the way.
Or prepend "either" like they did earlier in the sentance, "either as checked or cabin baggage..."
In my case, I have kids.
:)
So far, a third of our gamecube games have been damaged beyond repair, and the number of my DVDs and PC CDs getting scratched up is increasing. The CDs are worst of all, because if you get a single scratch on the label side of the disc, you can kiss the data goodbye. True, a caddy wouldn't have saved the two they left on the floor and snapped in half with a chair earlier this summer, but it could have mitigated most of the damage that's been done.
Oh, and they've had a DS for a month and already lost the Super Mario cartridge. There's no telling where that tiny thing has gone.
Just give us the data cartridges from the original Star Trek. Small formfactor, but big enough it's not too easily lost, and won't matter if the case is scratched or cracked. They had the right idea.
Or the 7-0's we use in the open hearts. I think we even have 12-0 suture in stock for eye cases.
Which means the most difficult things on the count to (1) make sure you've kept up to date, and (2) find when you come up short - those pesky needles that are probably on the floor, but since some brilliant manager installed black-and-white speckled rubber flooring you'll never find the thing - won't be any easier to count with RFID.
Not that you could even see one on an x-ray for an incorrect count, either. I have one MD brush that off, saying "something that small won't hurt anything." Great, just great.
No, I think he was saying that for the cost of a 360 and the $300 lame PC (since most people are gonna have a PC at home too), you could instead buy an $800 PC that was first of all a better PC, and second, better at games than the 360. And that either option was still $200 cheaper than the PS3.
At least that was my interpretation.
As an added benefit, the IS folks don't have to come out to my OR quite so much, since I can take care of a lot of stuff myself. Too bad they won't give me admin access. ;) (20+ years computer experience, and my previous career was tech support. Anyway.)
One item that I didn't see mentioned in this discussion is the factor of "time" when a patient in on the table.
True. Although, as we advance our surgical procedures to include more minimally-invasive operations (laparoscopic, microscopic, limited incision, etc) we actually increase patients' surgical times to reduce their recovery times. The benefits of the reduced tissue trauma and having the patient go straight home rather than to an inpatient unit for several days outweighs the downsides of longer surgical times. (It also costs the hospital less. The ever powerful dollar.)
In fact, perhaps the biggest "time" constraints we face is not the surgical time itself. First is our turnaround time - the time between the end of one case, and being ready for the next. A full instrument count on a large case could take 5-10 minutes - thus we don't count instruments except on open abdominal/chest cases. We face extreme pressure - to the point of being written up and disciplined - to make our turnaround times quick.
Second is the staff's time during a case. Counts aren't as simple as 'count at the beginning, count at the end' because very rarely can we anticipate exactly what will be needed in advance. We're always opening up new packages of gauze, new suture, new hemoclips, even opening up new single-wrapped instruments or entire instrument trays. It's very easy to forget to document one of those sutures on the count - or, even, write it down twice - and wind up with an incorrect count even when everything is actually there. Or to have a correct count when something is left inside. This is the human aspect of error that this RFID system could help with the most - you don't have to remember to do anything special to be able to check at the end of the case.
But I still think we could do just as much good to find ways to reduce the stress, time constraints, and complacency of OR staff, so that we all are doing our jobs right. It would relieve many other problems in the OR as well - don't even get me started on surgical site verification...
I'm aware of that, since it's my job to do it. The part I see as a fantastic fantasy is the computerized system with an LCD on the wall keeping a running inventory of what's in the field. Rather like the Mass Gen's OR of the Future.
every item that can be counted IS counted.
I work with a surgeon who, when doing a laparoscopic case that might turn into an open case, asks new scrubs, "Did you count everything?"
Upon the tech saying yes, he'll start rattling off from a list he's made of things on the sterile field that aren't counted even when we do a full instrument count (he says it's more than 50 items long). Things like blue towels, the irrigation bowl, syringes, laparoscopic trocars, labels, the skin stapler, the little FRED jar (anti-fog solution), the disposable marker...
I'm an RN in an OR myself. My cynicism is from experience.
What is cheaper?
Well, you'd think. The hospital budgets for lawsuits in advance, though, and our OR budget is already strained even before they shelled out several tens of thousands last week for two broken neuro microscopes.
Another part of the cost equation is the additional cost of RFID-embedded sponges and other disposables, which is a recurring cost beyond the wands and initial tagging of instruments. We already have an obscene amount of money going into the trashcan each case as it is.
More to the point, though, we already have systems - very cheap ones - to make surgical counts easier and safer. Someone mentioned the "shoe hanger" hanging counting bag for sorting out and visualizing sponges, of which our OR has exactly one, and is usually hidden in a storage room rather than used. Standards dictate at least two closing counts - three or more for abdominal cases - and yet most techs and nurses where I work just do one. And as a result we have people with retained sponges on operations where the RN wrote down "counts correct."
We already have systems for preventing medication errors on the surgical field - it's called a sterile marker and stickers. They come in every core supply pack we open. And we have techs who come in to relieve for lunch and find the last tech left a bunch of unlabeled syringes with clear liquid in them, a timebomb just waiting to go off.
I'm all for technology that will take some of the human error (whether caused by negligence, ignorance, complacency, or stress) out of the equation. For that matter, that wireless tracking system you point out would be great for inventory management, I'd love to have it. Our hospital already has two hospital-wide wireless networks - one for doctors' laptops, and one for the hospital's laptops on carts for nursing staff.
But anything with a bulletin point of "saves money" is gonna be implented well before an RFID surgical tracking system pitched explicitly on patient safety.
Now that's the way it's supposed to be done.
Wish I worked there, wherever that is.
Actually, inventory and billing are probably the best reasons for RFID in the OR. At least, the best way to pitch it and get it into the OR. Some hospitals have adopted barcoding for this, but RFID makes it even simpler. And believe me, simpler is better when it comes to my fellow well-educated but technologically-incompetent OR nurses.
Then, add in the additional uses for patient safety, and you've got a winner all-around. But hospitals aren't going to go for something this elaborate and expensive for patient safety alone.
Like someone can go "32. 33. 34. Ok, that's 368 gauze pads, 72 sponges, and 34 wads of gauze strips. That's everything."
Well, that's what we do. Our open-heart cases routinely go over 100 suture needles, and our neuro cases have dozens of 1/2"x1/2" cotton sponges. We section off sponges in groups of five or ten, keep needles organized on a numbered magnet, and always have the tech and nurse count them *together* to help prevent mistakes.
And, we count them at least twice - once before closing and once after. At least that's what we're supposed to do - complacency and stress about time leads many of my coworkers to skip the final count, and I know at least one retained sponge case that resulted from this.
Make it so the surgeons can go "Is that everything?" [...]
They already take an x-ray if they have an emergency case and don't have time for a preoperative count, or the post-surgical counts are wrong. It'd probably be cheaper to roll each patient under a flouroscope on the way to the recovery room and glance at the screen to make sure you're good, than put wands in each room and RFIDs into all reusable and disposable instruments, sponges, needles (some of which are very tiny), blades, and other accessories, and hope one of them hasn't gone defective and stopped working during the case.
I'm still not convinced that this technology will do much for us above what we already have, in any form that an ordinary hospital will accept the cost of.
okay to leave a foreign object lying on top of an organ or tissue in the first place?
You mean like a clamp to stop bleeding, or a retractor to hold things in place, or sponges (cotton gauze) to keep tissue moist so it stays healthy? No, wouldn't want to use those during surgery, nope.
There are many reasons why sponges and instruments are placed *inside* an open surgical wound. And during, say, an abdominal procedure, it's easy for something that's gone inside to get covered and hidden by other organs. And the white cotton sponges obviously turn red when they're soaked with blood, which rather looks like everything else that's soaked with blood in the wound already.
Retained instruments isn't a symptom of HMOs or careless surgeons, it's a symptom of complacent OR staff.
This sounds like a fantastic idea, but it's likely it'd never be anything but fantasy.
My hospital just got around to putting computers in the operating rooms, and it'll be another couple years before we're acutally using them for charting and get rid of all the dead trees.
Something this flashy (read: expensive) for a (supposedly) rare occurance isn't gonna fly in today's hospital. Actually, I don't see anywhere but grant-funded specialty hospitals using RFID for counts. Now, I can see RFIDs in instruments being used to streamline the cleaning/processing/sterilization process - take a basin full of instruments, wave them one by one under the wand, and sort them into the proper sets. That could hold some promise and might get the process of getting it into the OR started.
Actually, two checks is the current standard for surgical counts - a first one before you close, and a final count after you close. It's better to find out before you close, but as he said, you might loose something during closing too.
The two issues I'd see with doing it *before* closing are:
1) all the other instruments are still near the patient, so the wand would need to have a pretty narrow field of reception, and
2) if it needs to be that close, the receiver itself will need to be a sterile instrument. Which means it must be more rugged, and therefore more costly.
Right now, if a surgical count isn't correct and the surgeon's looked and doesn't see it anywhere, but we have to suspect something was left inside, you finish closing the wound and have an portable xray done in the room. If they see something, they'll re-open and find it. Actually, the only reason they don't send the patient on and do the xray in the recovery unit later (since most the time missing things are on the floor, not in the patient), is if they find it when they're still inside the operating room, it doesn't count against them as an adverse event.
It could be Neilsen ratings. http://netratings.com/mktg.jsp?section=ps_nv
The few MySpace pages I've seen (being RL friends who said "come see my new page!!! isn't it cool?!?") choose font colors and background images such that I can't read their pages without highlighting the text, block by block.
I'm afraid to say, I haven't had any urge to go back.
Yeah. Funny thing is, in nursing school, they drilled into us to always remove all the air out of an IV line. In the OR where I work now, the anesthesiologists handle the IV lines, and they don't care a bit aoout air bubbles in the lines. Most say that the air is dissolved in the large veins before it gets anywhere important. (Whether or not there's anything to back up that statement, or if it's just something they believe because it's convenient, I dunno. Some of the docs are very strict about evidence-based practice and standard of care, though.)
Arterial lines and central lines are a different matter, and everyone is pretty picky about keeping air out of those.
As an RN, I do that to make sure I am giving an accurate amount of medication.
Considering they originally planned to convert Enterprise into a full Orbiter after they built and flew Columbia, but then scrapped the idea because it was too expensive - and they also passed up the idea when they built Endeavor from scratch after Challenger was lost - I figure it's probably still cheaper today to "start over" than refit Enterprise.
Buran had no engines for a start, it was strictly a payload for Energia.
Funny little irony: while the atmospheric test vehicle for the Orbiter project (Enterprise) had no engines, the Russian atmospheric test vehicle had four jet engines to allow self-powered takeoffs.
BTW the reason that the Braun wasn't manned we because they didn't have a working life support system installed yet.
But one of uses for Buran was to provide both manned and unmanned flights. It was actually fulfilling one of it's target roles, even without life support or cockpit instrumentation.
I found this other article even more interesting - 1974, issue 311, "In Praise of Hydrogen." It talks about how easily the School of Automotive Studies converted a traditional internal combustion engine to hydrogen, and how with only one major area of research (storage of hydrogen) we should expect our dependance on gasoline to be quickly and easily eliminated.
Talk about vaporware (pun not intended, though also funny).
First computer I used was my grandparents' Apple IIe, in 1984 or so.
But my family's first computer was an Amiga 2000, in 1988. Oh, the weekends spent toying with Deluxe Paint or creating horrendous melodies in DMCS. Taking over the world in Empire, and trying to get a higher score than my sister in Mousetrap. Being introduced to the CLI, programming in BASIC, and helping upgrade our computers through the years...
For a few years I had an Amiga 1000 as my own computer, though I eventually inherited the old (upgraded) A2k and used it as my primary computer until '97. That's when I went to eollege, and had to choose - buy an '060 upgrade and a graphics card for the dead-end Amiga, or get with the program and buy a Pentium. I chose the Pentium, and have regretted it ever since. I would have missed a few great games, but I also would have missed countless days, weeks, months of frustration.
The public satellites are the ones that we know that we know, and these are the ones we know we don't know.
What about the ones that we don't know that we don't know?