I suppose to avoid patent infringement we shouldn't use DRM on our P2P networks. How will we all manage :o)

wups - my bad - I read Spit's post as saying all machines had the same spec and your post appeared to be agreeing with that. I now sit corrected (I would stand corrected but it makes typing tricky) Of course my memory sugests that most games (not all but most) only appeared on one family of machines although there were always copycats about that were similar. I remember a friend introducing me to (I think) frontier on his amiga which I gather (thanks google) was also writen by David Braben - he left me with it for a few mins and whenhe came back I had worked out how to game the trading system allowing me to build up a substantial bank balance and buy the top of the range ship and equipment (no hacking involved - just manipulating the market). it made the game rather pointless as we could fly around wiping out everything in sight. Please excuse my mad rambling - something to do with nostalgia or old age creeping up on me :o)

Spit (23158) and BasilBrush (643681) seem to have forgotten the fact that there were many different personal computers available at this time so while it is true that the BBC model A could be upgraded to the standard of the model B there were also the apples, dragons, sinclairs, comodores, ataris etc (and many more) which in some cases had the same CPU and Memory but were still completely incompatible with the Acorn/BBC. Personaly I was exclusively an Acorn/BBC owner from early '81 with a kit built atom until about '95 when my work ment I needed to get into the grind of PC compatibility (I still have the Atom, BBC and Archimedes 310 though - all heavily upgraded) but it doesn't stop me appreciating some of the other tech out there at the time.

They have a great advantage over employees at other companies (at least from my experience of doing contract work in a range of businesses). If they don't know something you can be damn sure they know how to Google it.

Ah, but you were renting - jittles specified buying

Fair point but the beauty of using a microcontroler is that you can reconfigure the system to specific needs without having to redesign the hardware every time. This is pretty much what microprocessors were intended for until various people thought "Hey I can make a general purpose machine out of these"

*cough* guantanamo *cough*

Well it's 40 years to late to be Lunacy

When I was at school (many years ago) we made something similar in woodwork class using a marble as the ballbearing.

As far as I've seen this is learnt by doing an MBA or other managemant zombie courses - more to the point for me is why do you learn to make a powerpoint slide?

Think Geek agrees.

meh - 640 light years ought to be enough for anyone

For the Horde!

No, you've worked in support too long when you read that as "Customers make great targets"

Perhaps they are counting on Schools to buy 30 copies per class - still cheeper than providing each kid with a computer.