Sound typically (*) didn’t require “drivers” or any TSR though. The game had to do all the hardware control itself.
It was usually enough to set a BLASTER variable to point it at the correct IRQ, DMA and memory address, and perhaps run a program at boot to initialize the card and set volume levels, but no TSR eating up memory.
(*) Some exceptions are later soundcards of the Win 9x era that did crappy emulation of a real Soundblaster via a TSR in DOS.
Ah the sweet sounds of a simpler, worryfree time …
The point is that your example use case of “YouTube 4k videos” doesn’t need a browser full of bloated js garbage.
Just don’t compain that YouTube doesn’t play 4K videos anymore.
strange, mpv handles it just fine
I remember when I got my first computer with 1GB of RAM, where my previous computer had 64MB, later upgraded to 192MB. And there were only like 3 or 4 years in between them.
It was like: holy shit, now I can put all the things in RAM. I will never run out.
most PCs by that time had built-in MIDI synthesizers
Built-in? You had AdLib cards for FM synthesis, but they were never built-in and most PCs didn’t even have them. Adlib cards used the Yamaha OPL2 or OPL3 chip.
Along came Creative Labs with their AWE32, a synthesizer card that used wavetable synthesis instead of FM
You are skipping a very important part here: cards that could output digital audio. The early Soundblaster cards were pioneers here (SB 1.0, SB 2.0, SB Pro, SB16). The SB16 for example was waaaaay more popular than the AWE32 ever was, even if it still used OPL3 based FM synth for music. It’s the reason why most soundcards in the 90s were “Soundblaster compatible”.
Digital audio meant that you could have recorded digital sound effects in games. So when you fired the shotgun in Doom to kill demons, it would play actual sound effects of shotgun blasts and demon grunts instead of bleeps or something synthesized and it was awesome. This was the gamechanger that made soundcards popular, not wavetable.
The wavetable cards I feel were more of a sideshow. They were interesting, and a nice upgrade, especially if you composed music. They never really took off though and they soon became obsolete as games switched from MIDI based audio to digital audio, for example Quake 1 already had its music on audio tracks on CD-ROM, making wavetable synthesis irrelevant.
BTW, I also feel like you are selling FM synthesis short. The OPL chips kinda sucked for plain MIDI, especially with the Windows drivers, and they were never good at reproducing instrument sounds but if you knew how to program them and treated the chip as its own instrument rather than a tool to emulate real world instruments, they were capable of producing beautiful electronic music with a very typical sound signature. You should check out some of the adlib trackers, like AdTrack2 for some examples. Many games also had beautiful FM synthesized soundtracks, and I often preferred it over the AWE32 wavetable version (e.g. Doom, Descent, Dune)
Pro tip: set a 40 minute timer on your phone as soon as you put the beer in the freezer.
How can air get heat saturated? i followed you thus far but its not like humidity, you can always add more heat
When the temperature of the air and temperature of the object you want to cool reach an equilibrium, no heat gets transfered anymore.
who is going to use a VPN (an internet privacy tool) from Google?
Exactly. That would be like using a web browser made by Google so they have direct access to your internet browsing history. Ridiculous!
Slashdot still exists, but it was mostly popular in the late 90s to mid 2000s.
I mean, he was still reading Slashdot, so I guess “yes”
I run a pihole as well, but it is a very rudimentary tool compared to browser based adblockers like uBlock origin. It can only block DNS queries, and can’t for example block ads if they are served from the same domain as the main site (i.e. youtube) or block specific elements on a page or block a specific script from running.
Ah, so you’re wanting to transport tons and tons of batteries back to a centralized facility to be inspected and have testing done?
No, that’s just something new you invented to shoot down the idea.
Batteries can have a tamperproof seal so that customers can’t easily mess with it, just like you normally don’t mess with the electricity, gas or water meter in your home. QC and charging can be done on site where you swap, and can mostly be automated. The only thing that needs to be transported back and forth regularly are defective and replacement batteries. Just like gas stations at the end of the day or week need to order replenishment for the fuel they’ve dispensed.
We already do this kind of swapping with other stuff as well: from crates with empty beer bottles and office water cooler bottles to refilling propane and butane bottles.
It’s not a gov problem, it’s a logistics issue.
The lack of government oversight that you brought up, and which this was in reply to, is literally a government issue. Regulation and inspection works fine in most of the civilized world, the fact that it doesn’t in Backwater USA is no argument.
Fossil fuel distribution already is a huge logistics issue, we have to dig it up in the middle east, transport it in oil tankers, refine it at some central locations, then distribute it again with tanker trucks to millions of gas stations so that finally you can put it in your car and use it to drive somewhere, but somehow we have been making that work for over a century.
Quality control on batteries that go out to customers, and make the stations legally liable.
For example: I once pumped petrol in my diesel car due to human error by the gas station’s supply company (they put petrol in the diesel tanks). They found out about the error as I was filling up and stopped me halfway, so luckily I had no engine damage, but they had to pay for the tow and to get my tank emptied.
how many states with counties have no inspections
Sounds more like a “your government is shit” problem than a “this scheme can’t work” problem.
Battery swapping sounds great, until you put it into a real world scenario.
Government regulation and standardization is the answer.
You know, like fossil fuels also are. For example fuelpumps have to be legally calibrated so that they measure accurately, and there are a myriad of quality standards and ratings regarding what 98 octane or 95 octane or diesel fuel or whatever can contain.
I’d say the problem with Linux is not so much with beginner users, it’s easy enough to setup a basic desktop with a web browser and some tools, but with intermediate users who know enough to be dangerous on Windows and think that makes them “advanced”, who then can’t apply their clickety clackety ways of figuring things out on Linux.
I feel like that’s more a boomer thing.
If human skin was sometimes completely patterned
If?
Gingers would like to have a word with you.
Just disconnect your network cable, press this magic key combination and type this undocumented command: “MSBLAOIGKSDF /ACZSF”
Actually lot less than the browser. Under 300MB, I just checked, and that’s mostly just the network buffer which is 150MB by default.