For some it was effective.

This isn't reflecting the OP case though.

After beos failed, I played/developed with QNX until they pulled the rug. I was on it full time on my main dev machine. I loved it.

When they closed it I got severely burned to the point that I will not touch a any closed development platform. I see from the license they didn't change a bit.

Not that it matters anymore.. they're largely irrelevant today except for whatever existing markets they already have. It would be fooling to choose QNX today: we now have good alternatives, and all of them with open licenses.

In the end I exported the document to libreoffice, and got something way more usable in a few hours just by editing the styles than whatever I was able to do in days of fiddling with html+browser.

iBooks on apple might get a pass as it doesn't need to paginate, but truth be told it seems that epub/ebooks and ereaders in general are being targeted at novels and romance, where form factor, typesetting and formatting doesn't matter that much.

I have access to ebooks through my local library and there's no way I would use, let alone buy, any technical ebook.

Not to mention, I've seen a steady average decline in the quality of printed media in general over the last ~15 years. A lot less attention is put in the typesetting and layout. Even the print quality itself is lower, which I think is due to the smaller and cheaper print runs being done now also for more popular titles.

Heck, I work on embedded, and having a dual-stack system is just a PITA to deal with. If v6 would have been fully retro-compatible this wouldn't have been something to think about, but you can't drop v4 and there's no future in sight where v6 will be the only choice (we'll have dual-stack for a looooong time), so we just push the problem up the chain.

There are plenty of systems being developed _now_ which are still v4 only as a result.

That being said the rm3 is usable without backlight indoors if the place is decently lit (for example, in most offices), but requires some backlight otherwise. The rm2 is usable also in poorly lit conditions.

I'd really like some comments there. There's a lot that goes into writing and drawing, and all the online reviews I've seen seem just to praise it.

I used most digital writing devices starting from wacom tables (first intuos series), to laptops with foldable screens and currently using the rm2/rm3.

I agree that nothing still has the precision of a real pen or pencil. I can lazily fill and shade even with a micron fineliner when I want, and simply can't replicate the same precision with anything else I tried. I could buy a lifetime supply of the best pens and paper with the cost of the rm3.

Writing is mostly fine, but when drawing I notice immediately the precision just isn't there. But still, at least on the rm (both 2 and pro), the digitizer is well calibrated, and the feel is good, the pen is actually like a pen and not the sucky abomination what wacom like to call "pens" or the tiny unusable styluses of the samsung "note" or lenovo yoga series. The show distance between tip and display is very good, and even though it seems ridicolous, the slighltly shorter one on the rm3 makes a difference. The rm2 is still requires a bit too much pressure for my taste (I have a light touch being used to mechanical pencils, fineliners and tech drawing); the rm3 seems slightly improved.

I can still tell instantly that lines are occasionally wobbly due to the digitizer's grid and pen position.

That being said I got the rm2 at some point, and it's the first e-notebook I actually stuck with because it's effectively "endless paper" and has reached the "good enough" feeling for me. I used to have tons of sheets of paper with notes, now I have somewhat less ;).

In the rm pro the colors are still what I consider to be pretty muted. I had a laugh of what "red" looks like then I tried it. I don't care too much about it, for the purpose it's a great addition, but it's also darker than the rm2, which instead turned out to bother me a lot.

I can use the rm2 everywhere, but the rm3 is only saved, in my eyes, by some amount of backlight, which brings it closer, but still not exacly equal to the rm2. And by the way the rm2 is also, by far, not "white". If I consider rm2 to be some shade of ivory, the rm3 is downright gray.

Grayscale rendering on the rm2 display is also better. I do notice the dithering on the rm pro, and there's some color fringing in the ghosting.

I tried for a long time to get around it, but now when I hit a website like this just close the tab and don't bother anymore.

Technically static, but absolutely of the worst kind in my opinion.

I blocked PH with ublacklist a long time ago for looking like SEO promotion/garbage and looking too much like those "VS/comparison/best 5 apps" websites with next to zero content. These pop out faster than what I can filter by hand.

After checking it out again and knowing it is not purely-generated content, I _STILL_ don't see the value proposition if I stumbled on such a result.

About 5 years ago I was often pulling up the cache to see if the indexed/cached page actually contained the search terms I was looking up, suspecting the site was serving a different page compared to what I was redirected to.

The number of websites doing this to game SEO was (and I suspect still is) substantial, despite google saying they're penalizing this behavior.

Outlets serving full articles to google then presenting you an unreadable mess, often downgraded through JS, is one of the most egregious, and google doesn't seem to care anyway.

This was before I gave up completely on google giving me pages containing the terms I was looking for.

I don't understand why all vendors are actively trying to kill S3 sleep. It doesn't make any sense.

I do expect them to do a pull-rug on the free license at some point, like fusion did, especially now that they've been bought by PTC. If they do, the commercial license is too expensive IMHO compared to other offerings for what they offer.

I had the option to use the educational license at some point, but we couldn't get to renew it (ironically, we got a dirt-cheap Creo license afterwards).

Just to keep things in mind it can go anyday from free to too-expensive.

I had a few complex designs in fusion360 I essentially lost at some points due to the price hikes. I decided to endure the pain in freecad. It's getting better.

I tried it for a while, and while I generally liked it, also got stumped by the artificial limitation of STEP import/export, which made it a non-starter even for hobby projects. This is, IMHO, the dumbest thing they could do in terms of licensing.

Most of his contributions to the topology fixes got merged back into freecad now, but his enhancements to UI/behavior aren't (yet), and they make a night and day compared to ondsel too.

I didn't find any significant limitation to RealThunder's assembly3.

In any case, while far from most commercial offerings, FreeCAD is progressing and the future looks bright. I've stopped using f360/onshape in the last years for my hobby designs. Once you know the specific limitations of freecad+occt (something you learn in each cad program) and how to work them around effectively, it's already pretty powerful.

I've seen healthcare management software evolution due to my partner working with it. As in the worst management story, it's pitched to a boss that doesn't need or want to use it, offered to generally the lowest bidder, and then immediately outsourced in parts that rarely work well together taking years to develop.

The UI and workflows are designed by people that will never use it and are just plainly bad. The software/UI takes years to stabilize and reach feature parity to the same level it was before. During that time, it's pretty common to see staff having to use both systems and perform double data entry.

You're not learning to improve anything here. You're substituting a [shitty] tool with another one which does _exactly_ the same.

Sadly in IT this is pretty common. There's nothing special about healthcare.

They all tend to lag behind over time, until the fork is eventually too old and it's either abandoned, useful changes I was relying on are dropped, or becomes just too old compared to upstream to be fully compatible (and thus just annoying to use).

Just the burden to upkeep the upstream changes, in either firefox or chrome forks, seems to be significant enough that I'm quite pessimistic on the lifespan of these projects.

You might just as well do your own thing, and don't pretend to be a mainstream browser replacement altogether.