However there IS very clear evidence that it was emulated by the display of a bug known to only exist in versions of MAME until very recently, involving the display order of the girders when a stage begins.

In fact, this situation is what brought the bug to the attention of MAMEdev; it's been subsequently fixed.

Yeah. I had one of their last XP laptops and it needed a compatibility shim to even boot into XP correctly because the BIOS was actually incompatible. They then announced they'd only be releasing updates for a small number of those machine lines to be able to run Vista, and the one I had was not one of them; you'd forever get a bluescreen on boot saying that the BIOS was nonstandard and incompatible.

That turned me off the brand real fast.

Those two machines are special purpose boxes with migrated older XP licenses. One does streaming video output from Flash Media Encoder, which still seems to work a bit better in 32-bit XP right now. If the situation ever changes enough to justify such a change, I'll gladly move it up to a 64-bit W7 build.

The other is a dedicated JDownloader/Ventrilo/Skype/VoIP box (running an ancient P4) to allow communications and downloads to keep going while other machines are rebooting, under maintenance, or whatever.

That second machine could be migrated to W7, sure, or maybe even Linux, but I've got a perfectly servicable license for XP and the machine barely touches the internet outside of those specific apps.

Really, the risk ends up being pretty minimal after you factor in the firewall and very limited port forwarding.

Eventually they'll probably get migrated up, but I think the comm box will end up getting a total hardware change along with a new OS. That's a long ways away, though. No need to upgrade those two yet.

I can answer that. I used Firefox for years, but the memory leaks got worse and worse and the browser got slower and slower. Chrome was at least 500% faster right from the start, and as soon as extensions became available most of my Firefox extensions were ported. There's even a decent port of AdBlock-- the only major extension I miss is NoScript. I still have Firefox on here for the occasional site where I'd prefer to use NoScript, but I can certainly say there's still a major speed and RAM consumption difference.

Oh, and I'm 34, in case you were wondering.

Shit, I wouldn't even call a Cryix a 486. Like you said, higher end 386s tore those things to shreds. A guy I knew back in highschool had one, and it had a notorious chipset defect that caused it to semi-randomly scramble floppy writes under certain conditions.

Already exists. iPhone Justin.TV client can broadcast over 3G or wifi straight to the net.

Simply isn't going to happen until someone writes a development environment on par with Flash's, which doesn't seem to be happening any time soon. Chicken and egg problem. There's no interest in moving off Flash until the tools are there and nobody wants to write tools until there's interest in them.

You can set up mailing list addresses that you can assign to one or more people.

Nine fives? I think they just work nine TO five!

Had some early chipset driver issues in XP way back in the day (a six month period of major problems between Detonator drivers and Via's 4-in-1 chipset drivers) but in recent years (XP, Vista, and Win7) I've only had problems from the rare occasional "driver went very very wrong" crash or dying hardware crash.

BSODs don't show up nearly as much as they did back in the 9X days, that's for sure.

Did you put in a bug report on this, or at least check to see if one existed? If it's really a problem (and it sure looks like one) then there are mechanisms in place to tell the devs "Hey! I need this fixed!"

Note I never assured you that they'll LISTEN. That's a completely different angle, but you really can't complain unless there's at least a bug report on file.

I'll agree with you there. I was a CoCo user for most of my formative childhood, and I was sad to see the line die off. Great keyboard. I still have some mental adjustments when I switch between it and a PC, though. Shift-2 being " and the oddball shift-@ pause function.

I don't necessarily agree here. It's not the verification, it's the "Okay, what facts do we have?" question.

At least in my case, someone told me the guy had died and my first reaction was to google it and see HOW he had died. I'd think that's more likely than the suspicion of a hoax.

At least for USB drives, it looks like the successor will be exFAT (or call it FAT64 since that essentially IS what it is.)