I don't know about the Daily Mail other than its repute here, but in this case they really did nothing but regurgitate a paragraph from the conference report, and add a few words of fairly relevant if snide commentary:
While the Movement works vigorously to promote international humanitarian law (IHL) worldwide, there is also an audience of approximately 600 million gamers who may be virtually violating IHL. Exactly how video games influence individuals is a hotly debated topic, but for the first time, Movement partners discussed our role and responsibility to take action against violations of IHL in video games. In a side event, participants were asked: âoewhat should we do, and what is the most effective method?â While National Societies shared their experiences and opinions, there is clearly no simple answer. There is, however, an overall consensus and motivation to take action. ====
They recently messed up the stylesheet and the HTML that goes with it, so now slashdot no longer works in a textmode browser; I'd guess it's all the same problem, some poorly-tested twiddling in the back end somewhere.
If we get sensible, honest answers like we get over at the MSDN forums, it should work. If not... well, no need to reiterate.
BTW would you *please* give us a user-controlled option to turn off/.'s styles entirely? I can't do it in the browser except on a page-by-page basis, and I can't read/. otherwise. (The stylesheet is messed up again so/. doesn't work at all anymore in a browser that doesn't know stylesheets in the first place.)
Considering that the staffers actually write the text of most bills, and considering what a lot of crap has come down the legislative pike in recent years... Serves 'em right.
My observation of poorly cured rubber is that motion doesn't do a thing to preserve it one way or the other; however once it starts breaking down ANY motion will make it crumble.
I have a few old rubber bungees holding things down outside... the last of the old good ones are about 15 years old. Occasionally one breaks but they don't get brittle. The oldest of the new ones... well, there's none left after about 6 months.
And if they can't make shoes that don't rot, the "publicity" serves 'em right.;D
BTW I was looking at your Dead Shoes page. Looks to me like cheap unvulcanized Chinese rubber. Same problem with lots of Chinese rubber products, notably rubber bungee cords. A little time in the sun and they're suddenly friable, which is typical for unvulcanized rubber. (Makes a person wonder about your tires, eh?)
The vast majority of generics come out of the same plants and even from the same batches as the namebrand products. (I've found batch numbers on antibiotics which confirmed it.) It's about like whether you've got a Plymouth or a Dodge -- the car may be identical, but the difference is in the trappings and price.
The trouble is, if the mfgr's name isn't given, you have no way of knowing *which* "generic" product you've received. So two patients get what's labeled "generic" but if one is actually Synthroid and the other is Levoxyl, you can see the problem.
As to the occasional screams about "3 million pills recalled!" to put it in perspective, that's only a one-day supply (for the U.S. alone) of commonly-prescribed drugs. And after reading about the rather complex process required to get a a few micrograms evenly distributed in the pill medium, IMO it's a wonder there aren't more recalls.
I take T4 too and so does my mom. Synthroid doesn't work for her, tho Levoxyl does. Theoretically identical, but not so in practice. -- Costco's generic is actually Unithroid (Lannett). I don't know if there's a general requirement to put the actual mfgr on the label, but Costco does.
Reformulating to use microcrystalline cellulose as the major binder seems to be a common factor in "brands that suddenly stop working for a bunch of users", or where they abruptly develop side effects.
Some people have a genetic variant that reduces conversion efficiency (http://jcem.endojournals.org/content/93/3/910.full.pdf)...and it's still an uphill battle to get T3 prescribed even when it's clearly needed. One of T4's degradation products in storage is T3... so a little instability is not entirely a bad thing.;) (I have to add some ancient stuff to the Unithroid, otherwise I get side effects. Hmmm...)
I don't usually think much of about.com but in this case it's run by a patient advocate with a science degree. http://thyroid.about.com/ Some fruitbattery but a great deal of sound info as well.
After reading probably a couple hundred research articles on the T4/T3 controversy, I've concluded that NEJM and JCEM are still open to research that goes against prevailing practice... but JAMA not so. When one paper concluded "patients claimed to feel better on this regime, but we don't believe patients know how they feel", JAMA lost all credibility with me.:(
Either I neglected to save it (happens when you wind up with 15 windows open at once) or just can't find it... (went thru a bunch of PDFs and it's not there either)... I *think* I got there from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2902299/ which is basically the same topic. This one happens to be specific to levothyroxin; behaviour of other drugs probably varies, and should be looked at individually.
I have a login at WP but it usually refuses to let me save changes.:(
Generics don't necessarily equate (nor do branded versions), and both for that reason and physician inertia, the prescription market tends to be slow to shift. Here's an example:
As to why they don't equate -- even when the active ingredient is identical, the various binders and excipients can greatly differ, and that can mean that some patients only do well on a specific brand. This can be particularly critical with drugs that are prescribed in very low doses (micrograms) or that tend to degrade very rapidly.
I was just reading a study on that the other day (can't find it again offhand but it was in NEJM) -- for one commonly-prescribed drug, results were radically different depending on the binder -- from 18% to 90%. This can result in nominally-identical drugs not being bioequivalent (and the FDA has a rating system for bioequivalence).
[BTW as it turned out, the cheap old-fashioned sugar-based binders performed best.]
When you really look at WinME, it's clear it's not a backport of XPHome, but rather should have been called Win98 3rd Edition. It's really just Win98SE with the DOS memory drivers disabled (and they won't run even if you apply the DOS boot patch), and a really buggy early beta of System Restore added. And almost any utility for Win98 will work on WinME, but it does not support XP-specific apps.
I think the notion to remove the DOS boot was their attempt to unify WinME with the DOSless Win2K, which was already out.
The only thing WinME really improved was driver support; it's is probably the smartest of all WinVersions at identifying the drivers it needs, or making do with a close-enough. (My old WinME setup makes do with some Win95 drivers, which it picked for itself from a CD full -- and it works fine.)
As to XPHome, my understanding was that it is XPPro with some of the guts ripped out, notably chunks of the networking -- and in the process they evidently broke stuff.
Right, at least Win2K's launch tour was about a year before WinME's (tho I don't recall the exact release dates). M$ used to have big events in Los Angeles, which I attended.
I found Win2K would run nicely on about half the machine that Win98 required to be good. And Win2K would run, if not lively, on *way* less hardware than it required to install... one day I hooked up the wrong HD to my way-old RAM test rig, a 486DX4-100 which at the time I'd stuck a whopping 8mb of RAM in.... and instead of the DOS boot I was expecting, here came Win2K. Took 5 minutes to load but after that it ran well enough to use in a pinch, if somewhat sluggish. I was astonished.
As I recall per what others said (I never ran W2K as an everyday OS) the main problem was lack of sound support for DOS games of the era, but otherwise they worked. And eventually there was a 3rd party fix for stuff that wanted direct access to the sound card (VDMsound or whatever it was called).
The way I heard it at the time, when M$ decided to move on to XP, they literally abandoned WinME development -- at the time WinME was only half-baked, but they shipped it anyway. That didn't exactly do them any favours in the marketplace; they'd have been better off to just let WinME die. If they needed a market filler, as you say it would have made more sense to boost Win2K as their current consumer OS (and call it Win2001 or something like that).
TinyXP sounds like a wonderful idea for old machines, minimal dual boots, running in a VM... now if only I could find a copy that wasn't behind some signup-wall.:( -- I've put WinXP Pro on some low-RAM machines (96mb) and it runs decent, if not slick (unlike XPHome which is ugly even on 256mb), but I see a lot of 64mb boxes yet, so...
Right, I hadn't heard of QtWeb, but... [goes to look]...they've certainly put more userland thought into it than some browsers I could name and often swear at. [downloads] Since it runs on Win2K it should be good with KernelEx... [starts standalone version]...starts slowly but seems to run just fine. Tried it on a known problem site (gis.mt.gov, newly misconfuglied) and it mostly worked, tho with many complaints about "this script appears to have a problem". (I told them so...) Is there a way to turn that off, or better yet change the timeout for bad scripts before it complains about 'em? Will have to move the JS/Images on-off control to somewhere I can get at it with one click, but otherwise it almost manages to achieve PrefBar (the one add-on I use with the Moz family, otherwise I can't stand 'em). Thanks, this looks like a good find!
I could never get Media Player Classic to run. Last time I tried, IIRC it just sat there staring at me and wouldn't do anything. [scratching head]
One of the arguments I have with linux when I take a notion to try current distros, is that a lot of 'em won't speak to those older video cards that the world is still full of. Grrr... if you're not a gamer, which most users aren't, those old vidcards are just fine.
There seem to be several Underdogs revival sites, and per Wiki one is working with GOG, which might help preserve and distribute some of those oldies. I never really got into any games but DOOM, but I don't like to see information lost, of whatever sort.
On that note, and and nominally to topic, I still drag around a well-aged copy of WordPerfect 5.1, as well as collect WP stuff.:) There's a piece of digital misfortune... I wish WP5.1's source would be released, but... one of Corel's programmers told me Novell had lost some of WPCorp's source code.:(
Those Conners were not only slow, if one sat unused for a few months it would forget how to boot, and occasionally would forget all your data too. Saw it all across their products.
I had it happen exactly the other way around.... installed Win95 (OSR2) and RedHat6 on the same box, dual boot. That Win95 install had exactly ONE abend in 7 years of hard labour, and that was at the hands of Mozilla 1.0 which tried to do something illegal to the network. But RH6 fell over regularly, and was eventually evicted after it forgot its own password.
I don't say this is good... I've been hoping to find a linux I could love ever since I first tried it back in 1998. Unfortunately it doesn't love me.:(
Heh heh, I know that one... I stopped keeping track of the zoo of new hardware and software a few years back, it was changing too fast to be worth my time since I don't build PCs for clients anymore... And it's so much easier to maintain the old stuff, besides around here that's mostly what I see. While back someone donated a bunch of Socket7/W95 machines to our user grope and I got 'em all running again and gave 'em to random passersby (except for one that was especially nice that I kept.:) Perfectly good for the minimal uses most people put a computer to, which around here means write a letter and check email on dialup.
Yeah, I remember those old ISA controllers and their unlabeled jumper hells, or worse yet, the MFM controllers that would only speak to certain families of HD and not a one of 'em labeled. I still have a couple working systems around here with not only MFM but one with Herc monochrome. Sometimes I've thought I'd like to have Herc in a 2nd monitor, cuz it's so much easier on the aging glare-sensitive eyes.
Oh, browsers. I have K-Meleon 1.5.3 installed (that's two years old) -- any huge leaps of functionality since then? I don't use it much because in some ways it's a little clunky. Anyway I didn't do anything special to install it.
[goes off, looks up this VCRedist] Apparently the IE5.0 installer updated all these same files. (I have an old Win2K-developer edition that unlike other IEs, didn't make W98 leak resources, and fixed the leaks from IE4.)
Been hoping the Konqueror for Windows project would get off the ground... it seems to have kept the greatest legacy from the extremely efficient and fast Netscape 3 (which I am using this instant, I can't do/. without it)... I see it's gotten a little further than it was when last I looked. http://windows.kde.org/
Wonder if Konq will play nice with KernelEx? Which I must say is the best Win98 utility I've installed yet.:D
Any box I build has a DOS boot, I can't live without it!
Yeah, you could kill a sheep with the one I have, it's pretty heavy. I recall Compaq KBs being heavy too... I see the company is still around, http://www.nmbtc.com/
I prefer quiet and light-touch keyboards myself, my best for typing at speed and fewer mistakes.
I wouldn't have expected FF3.6 usage to be that high, but thanks, that's exactly the info I needed (I'm trying to browbeat a gov't agency into supporting something beyond the latest-and-greatest).
Yeah, "other" is always a real useful category, ha! I wonder if SeaMonkey (which I prefer) comes in as SM or as FF-ancient or as "other" ??
Any idea offhand what browsers will run on W98 with KernelEx, that I might not have tried? FF3.6 and Opera 11.50 (current as of July 2011) both run, but I understand SM 2.x and Chrome will not, something about what they do with video prevents it.:(
Ah yes, you're right, it was the Shiva dialer, albeit under another name (and I got it with my Earthlink packet). I couldn't think what the heck it was called. Worked dandy, never gave me a bit of trouble. (I finally retired that WFWG machine in 2001, after 7 years of hard labor. It had never crashed, not once.)
I never used NT4 myself, tho I unfondly remember encountering webservers running the damned thing. Seems they were either hacked or had progressive slowdown problems. The Los Angeles county assessor office used to be on one... I found that if it was being really slow, if I made and interrupted browser requests several times very quickly, it would crash... and then would be fine at 8am next morning, when apparently someone arrived at the office and rebooted it. Then it would be good for 3 or 4 days, then slow down again....
Some Packard Smells were lucky and had good hardware in 'em; some had crap. I've seen 'em both ways. (We get all kinds of junk donated to the user grope, and I'm the hardware dude.) My understanding is that PB bought whatever surplus was cheapest and that's why no two runs of PB machines were alike. OTOH one of the toughest and best keyboards I've ever had is labeled PB (I'd like to know who really made it).
The trick with WinME was to 1) apply 98Lite in default mode, and 2) disable System Restore. After I did that to my WinME test install, it went from "unable to even crash properly" (it took 20 minutes of thrashing around to finally reach the point where it could be shut down) to 2 solid years of almost continuous uptime without a single crash, despite being used to test all manner of software (not usually a good thing for stability). However, it didn't do anything for WinME's dreadful resource management -- resource heap gets low with just 3 apps running. They sure as hell busted something in that dept.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about the Daily Mail other than its repute here, but in this case they really did nothing but regurgitate a paragraph from the conference report, and add a few words of fairly relevant if snide commentary:
http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/red-cross-crescent-movement/31st-international-conference/31-international-conference-daily-bulletin-2011-12-01.htm
====
Video games and IHL: how should the Movement take action?
While the Movement works vigorously to promote international humanitarian law (IHL) worldwide, there is also an audience of approximately 600 million gamers who may be virtually violating IHL. Exactly how video games influence individuals is a hotly debated topic, but for the first time, Movement partners discussed our role and responsibility to take action against violations of IHL in video games. In a side event, participants were asked: âoewhat should we do, and what is the most effective method?â While National Societies shared their experiences and opinions, there is clearly no simple answer. There is, however, an overall consensus and motivation to take action.
====
They recently messed up the stylesheet and the HTML that goes with it, so now slashdot no longer works in a textmode browser; I'd guess it's all the same problem, some poorly-tested twiddling in the back end somewhere.
If we get sensible, honest answers like we get over at the MSDN forums, it should work. If not... well, no need to reiterate.
BTW would you *please* give us a user-controlled option to turn off /.'s styles entirely? I can't do it in the browser except on a page-by-page basis, and I can't read /. otherwise. (The stylesheet is messed up again so /. doesn't work at all anymore in a browser that doesn't know stylesheets in the first place.)
Considering that the staffers actually write the text of most bills, and considering what a lot of crap has come down the legislative pike in recent years... Serves 'em right.
My observation of poorly cured rubber is that motion doesn't do a thing to preserve it one way or the other; however once it starts breaking down ANY motion will make it crumble.
I have a few old rubber bungees holding things down outside... the last of the old good ones are about 15 years old. Occasionally one breaks but they don't get brittle. The oldest of the new ones ... well, there's none left after about 6 months.
And if they can't make shoes that don't rot, the "publicity" serves 'em right. ;D
BTW I was looking at your Dead Shoes page. Looks to me like cheap unvulcanized Chinese rubber. Same problem with lots of Chinese rubber products, notably rubber bungee cords. A little time in the sun and they're suddenly friable, which is typical for unvulcanized rubber. (Makes a person wonder about your tires, eh?)
The vast majority of generics come out of the same plants and even from the same batches as the namebrand products. (I've found batch numbers on antibiotics which confirmed it.) It's about like whether you've got a Plymouth or a Dodge -- the car may be identical, but the difference is in the trappings and price.
The trouble is, if the mfgr's name isn't given, you have no way of knowing *which* "generic" product you've received. So two patients get what's labeled "generic" but if one is actually Synthroid and the other is Levoxyl, you can see the problem.
As to the occasional screams about "3 million pills recalled!" to put it in perspective, that's only a one-day supply (for the U.S. alone) of commonly-prescribed drugs. And after reading about the rather complex process required to get a a few micrograms evenly distributed in the pill medium, IMO it's a wonder there aren't more recalls.
I take T4 too and so does my mom. Synthroid doesn't work for her, tho Levoxyl does. Theoretically identical, but not so in practice. -- Costco's generic is actually Unithroid (Lannett). I don't know if there's a general requirement to put the actual mfgr on the label, but Costco does.
Reformulating to use microcrystalline cellulose as the major binder seems to be a common factor in "brands that suddenly stop working for a bunch of users", or where they abruptly develop side effects.
Some people have a genetic variant that reduces conversion efficiency (http://jcem.endojournals.org/content/93/3/910.full.pdf) ...and it's still an uphill battle to get T3 prescribed even when it's clearly needed. One of T4's degradation products in storage is T3... so a little instability is not entirely a bad thing. ;) (I have to add some ancient stuff to the Unithroid, otherwise I get side effects. Hmmm...)
I don't usually think much of about.com but in this case it's run by a patient advocate with a science degree. http://thyroid.about.com/
Some fruitbattery but a great deal of sound info as well.
After reading probably a couple hundred research articles on the T4/T3 controversy, I've concluded that NEJM and JCEM are still open to research that goes against prevailing practice... but JAMA not so. When one paper concluded "patients claimed to feel better on this regime, but we don't believe patients know how they feel", JAMA lost all credibility with me. :(
Either I neglected to save it (happens when you wind up with 15 windows open at once) or just can't find it... (went thru a bunch of PDFs and it's not there either)... I *think* I got there from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2902299/ which is basically the same topic. This one happens to be specific to levothyroxin; behaviour of other drugs probably varies, and should be looked at individually.
I have a login at WP but it usually refuses to let me save changes. :(
They may also outcompete on patient satisfaction.
Generics don't necessarily equate (nor do branded versions), and both for that reason and physician inertia, the prescription market tends to be slow to shift. Here's an example:
http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=3106
As to why they don't equate -- even when the active ingredient is identical, the various binders and excipients can greatly differ, and that can mean that some patients only do well on a specific brand. This can be particularly critical with drugs that are prescribed in very low doses (micrograms) or that tend to degrade very rapidly.
I was just reading a study on that the other day (can't find it again offhand but it was in NEJM) -- for one commonly-prescribed drug, results were radically different depending on the binder -- from 18% to 90%. This can result in nominally-identical drugs not being bioequivalent (and the FDA has a rating system for bioequivalence).
[BTW as it turned out, the cheap old-fashioned sugar-based binders performed best.]
The way I heard it, that one plant was 7% of total HD capacity, tho it might be 25% of WD's capacity.
When you really look at WinME, it's clear it's not a backport of XPHome, but rather should have been called Win98 3rd Edition. It's really just Win98SE with the DOS memory drivers disabled (and they won't run even if you apply the DOS boot patch), and a really buggy early beta of System Restore added. And almost any utility for Win98 will work on WinME, but it does not support XP-specific apps.
I think the notion to remove the DOS boot was their attempt to unify WinME with the DOSless Win2K, which was already out.
The only thing WinME really improved was driver support; it's is probably the smartest of all WinVersions at identifying the drivers it needs, or making do with a close-enough. (My old WinME setup makes do with some Win95 drivers, which it picked for itself from a CD full -- and it works fine.)
As to XPHome, my understanding was that it is XPPro with some of the guts ripped out, notably chunks of the networking -- and in the process they evidently broke stuff.
Right, at least Win2K's launch tour was about a year before WinME's (tho I don't recall the exact release dates). M$ used to have big events in Los Angeles, which I attended.
I found Win2K would run nicely on about half the machine that Win98 required to be good. And Win2K would run, if not lively, on *way* less hardware than it required to install... one day I hooked up the wrong HD to my way-old RAM test rig, a 486DX4-100 which at the time I'd stuck a whopping 8mb of RAM in.... and instead of the DOS boot I was expecting, here came Win2K. Took 5 minutes to load but after that it ran well enough to use in a pinch, if somewhat sluggish. I was astonished.
As I recall per what others said (I never ran W2K as an everyday OS) the main problem was lack of sound support for DOS games of the era, but otherwise they worked. And eventually there was a 3rd party fix for stuff that wanted direct access to the sound card (VDMsound or whatever it was called).
The way I heard it at the time, when M$ decided to move on to XP, they literally abandoned WinME development -- at the time WinME was only half-baked, but they shipped it anyway. That didn't exactly do them any favours in the marketplace; they'd have been better off to just let WinME die. If they needed a market filler, as you say it would have made more sense to boost Win2K as their current consumer OS (and call it Win2001 or something like that).
TinyXP sounds like a wonderful idea for old machines, minimal dual boots, running in a VM... now if only I could find a copy that wasn't behind some signup-wall. :( -- I've put WinXP Pro on some low-RAM machines (96mb) and it runs decent, if not slick (unlike XPHome which is ugly even on 256mb), but I see a lot of 64mb boxes yet, so...
Right, I hadn't heard of QtWeb, but... [goes to look] ...they've certainly put more userland thought into it than some browsers I could name and often swear at. [downloads] Since it runs on Win2K it should be good with KernelEx... [starts standalone version] ...starts slowly but seems to run just fine. Tried it on a known problem site (gis.mt.gov, newly misconfuglied) and it mostly worked, tho with many complaints about "this script appears to have a problem". (I told them so...) Is there a way to turn that off, or better yet change the timeout for bad scripts before it complains about 'em? Will have to move the JS/Images on-off control to somewhere I can get at it with one click, but otherwise it almost manages to achieve PrefBar (the one add-on I use with the Moz family, otherwise I can't stand 'em). Thanks, this looks like a good find!
I could never get Media Player Classic to run. Last time I tried, IIRC it just sat there staring at me and wouldn't do anything. [scratching head]
One of the arguments I have with linux when I take a notion to try current distros, is that a lot of 'em won't speak to those older video cards that the world is still full of. Grrr... if you're not a gamer, which most users aren't, those old vidcards are just fine.
There seem to be several Underdogs revival sites, and per Wiki one is working with GOG, which might help preserve and distribute some of those oldies. I never really got into any games but DOOM, but I don't like to see information lost, of whatever sort.
On that note, and and nominally to topic, I still drag around a well-aged copy of WordPerfect 5.1, as well as collect WP stuff. :) There's a piece of digital misfortune... I wish WP5.1's source would be released, but... one of Corel's programmers told me Novell had lost some of WPCorp's source code. :(
Those Conners were not only slow, if one sat unused for a few months it would forget how to boot, and occasionally would forget all your data too. Saw it all across their products.
I had it happen exactly the other way around.... installed Win95 (OSR2) and RedHat6 on the same box, dual boot. That Win95 install had exactly ONE abend in 7 years of hard labour, and that was at the hands of Mozilla 1.0 which tried to do something illegal to the network. But RH6 fell over regularly, and was eventually evicted after it forgot its own password.
I don't say this is good... I've been hoping to find a linux I could love ever since I first tried it back in 1998. Unfortunately it doesn't love me. :(
Heh heh, I know that one... I stopped keeping track of the zoo of new hardware and software a few years back, it was changing too fast to be worth my time since I don't build PCs for clients anymore... And it's so much easier to maintain the old stuff, besides around here that's mostly what I see. While back someone donated a bunch of Socket7/W95 machines to our user grope and I got 'em all running again and gave 'em to random passersby (except for one that was especially nice that I kept. :) Perfectly good for the minimal uses most people put a computer to, which around here means write a letter and check email on dialup.
Yeah, I remember those old ISA controllers and their unlabeled jumper hells, or worse yet, the MFM controllers that would only speak to certain families of HD and not a one of 'em labeled. I still have a couple working systems around here with not only MFM but one with Herc monochrome. Sometimes I've thought I'd like to have Herc in a 2nd monitor, cuz it's so much easier on the aging glare-sensitive eyes.
Oh, browsers. I have K-Meleon 1.5.3 installed (that's two years old) -- any huge leaps of functionality since then? I don't use it much because in some ways it's a little clunky. Anyway I didn't do anything special to install it.
[goes off, looks up this VCRedist] Apparently the IE5.0 installer updated all these same files. (I have an old Win2K-developer edition that unlike other IEs, didn't make W98 leak resources, and fixed the leaks from IE4.)
Been hoping the Konqueror for Windows project would get off the ground... it seems to have kept the greatest legacy from the extremely efficient and fast Netscape 3 (which I am using this instant, I can't do /. without it)... I see it's gotten a little further than it was when last I looked. http://windows.kde.org/
Wonder if Konq will play nice with KernelEx? Which I must say is the best Win98 utility I've installed yet. :D
Any box I build has a DOS boot, I can't live without it!
Yeah, you could kill a sheep with the one I have, it's pretty heavy. I recall Compaq KBs being heavy too... I see the company is still around, http://www.nmbtc.com/
I prefer quiet and light-touch keyboards myself, my best for typing at speed and fewer mistakes.
I wouldn't have expected FF3.6 usage to be that high, but thanks, that's exactly the info I needed (I'm trying to browbeat a gov't agency into supporting something beyond the latest-and-greatest).
Yeah, "other" is always a real useful category, ha! I wonder if SeaMonkey (which I prefer) comes in as SM or as FF-ancient or as "other" ??
Any idea offhand what browsers will run on W98 with KernelEx, that I might not have tried? FF3.6 and Opera 11.50 (current as of July 2011) both run, but I understand SM 2.x and Chrome will not, something about what they do with video prevents it. :(
Well then, *you* explain why some boxes didn't crash after 49 days, with unpatched Win9x.
Especially rushed software that has to hit the market while it's hot, like games.
Demolition derby came to mind when I thought about how the people who buy cheapassed hardware usually treat it!
Ah yes, you're right, it was the Shiva dialer, albeit under another name (and I got it with my Earthlink packet). I couldn't think what the heck it was called. Worked dandy, never gave me a bit of trouble. (I finally retired that WFWG machine in 2001, after 7 years of hard labor. It had never crashed, not once.)
I never used NT4 myself, tho I unfondly remember encountering webservers running the damned thing. Seems they were either hacked or had progressive slowdown problems. The Los Angeles county assessor office used to be on one... I found that if it was being really slow, if I made and interrupted browser requests several times very quickly, it would crash... and then would be fine at 8am next morning, when apparently someone arrived at the office and rebooted it. Then it would be good for 3 or 4 days, then slow down again....
Some Packard Smells were lucky and had good hardware in 'em; some had crap. I've seen 'em both ways. (We get all kinds of junk donated to the user grope, and I'm the hardware dude.) My understanding is that PB bought whatever surplus was cheapest and that's why no two runs of PB machines were alike. OTOH one of the toughest and best keyboards I've ever had is labeled PB (I'd like to know who really made it).
The trick with WinME was to 1) apply 98Lite in default mode, and 2) disable System Restore. After I did that to my WinME test install, it went from "unable to even crash properly" (it took 20 minutes of thrashing around to finally reach the point where it could be shut down) to 2 solid years of almost continuous uptime without a single crash, despite being used to test all manner of software (not usually a good thing for stability). However, it didn't do anything for WinME's dreadful resource management -- resource heap gets low with just 3 apps running. They sure as hell busted something in that dept.