SpaceCadet

SpaceCadet , 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

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)

SpaceCadet , 1 day ago

Ah the sweet sounds of a simpler, worryfree time ...

SpaceCadet , 1 day ago

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.

SpaceCadet , 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

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.

SpaceCadet , 1 day ago

Just don’t compain that YouTube doesn’t play 4K videos anymore.

strange, mpv handles it just fine

SpaceCadet , 1 day ago

The point is that your example use case of "YouTube 4k videos" doesn't need a browser full of bloated js garbage.

SpaceCadet , 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

Actually lot less than the browser. Under 300MB, I just checked, and that's mostly just the network buffer which is 150MB by default.

SpaceCadet , 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

There was a guy named Jesus that was crucified by the romans and all that. There is proof of that

There isn't actually. The proof is basically: it's embarassing that their cult leader got painfully crucified, so the early Christians and writers of the new testament wouldn't have made that shit up.

Personally I find it rather unconvincing.

SpaceCadet , 2 days ago

if it’s good enough for the majority of historians

It isn't. Historians would love to have independent evidence of the existence and crucifixion of Jesus, but there isn't... so most historians refrain from taking a position one way or the other. The ones that do have to make do with what little objective information they have, and the best they can come up with is: well because of this embarassing thing, it's more likely that he did exist and was crucified than that he didn't, because why would they make that up?

That's rather weak evidence, and far from "proof".

Not sure why you’d need more

Well for one because the more prominent people who have studied this have a vested interest in wanting it to be true. For example, John P. Meier, who posited this criterion of embarassment that I outlined in my previous comment, isn't really a historian but a catholic priest, professor of theology (not history) and a writer of books on the subject.

SpaceCadet , 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

There are basically four positions you can take about this:

1. Jesus existed and was crucified
2. We can't know, because there is no conclusive evidence, but I think (1) is more likely
3. We can't know, because there is no conclusive evidence, but I think (4) is more likely
4. Jesus is a myth

I am on (2), as are most historians, and you put yourself on (1).

SpaceCadet , 4 days ago

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!

SpaceCadet , 6 days ago

I mean, he was still reading Slashdot, so I guess "yes"

SpaceCadet , 6 days ago

Slashdot still exists, but it was mostly popular in the late 90s to mid 2000s.

SpaceCadet , 7 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

IPv6 = second system effect. It's way too complicated for what was needed and this complexity hinders its adoption. We don't need 100 ip addresses for every atom on the earth's surface and we never will.

They should have just added an octet to IPv4 and be done with it.

SpaceCadet , 7 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

you are wasting 24 bits of a 64-bit register

You're not "wasting" them if you just don't need the extra bits, Are you wasting a 32-bit integer if your program only ever counts up to 1000000?

Even so when you do start to need them, you can gradually make the other bits available in the form of more octets. Like you can just define it as a.b.c.d.e = 0.a.b.c.d.e = 0.0.a.b.c.d.e = 0.0.0.a.b.c.d.e

Recall that IPv6 came out just a year before the Nintendo 64

If you're worried about wasting registers it makes even less sense to switch from a 32-bit addressing space to a 128-bit one in one go.

Anyway, your explanation is a perfect example of "second system effect" at work. You get all caught up in the mistakes of the first system, in casu the lack of addressing bits, and then you go all out to correct those mistakes for your second system, giving it all the bits humanity could ever need before the heat death of the universe, while ignoring the real world implications of your choices. And now you are surprised that nobody wants to use your 128-bit abomination.

SpaceCadet , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

We are talking about addresses, not counters. An inherently hierarchical one at that. If you don’t use the bits you are actually wasting them.

Bullshit.

I have a 64-bit computer, it can address up to 18.4 exabytes, but my computer only has 32GB, so I will never use the vast majority that address space. Am I "wasting" it?

All the 128 bits are used in IPv6. ;)

Yes they are all "used" but you don't need them. We are not using 2^128 ip addresses in the world. In your own terminology: you are using 4 registers for a 2 register problem. That is much more wasteful in terms of hardware than using 40 bits to represent an ip address and wasting 24 bits.

SpaceCadet , 8 days ago

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.

SpaceCadet , 13 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

At 17:00 everyone’s got a beer on their desk and by 18:00 the doors are locked and the lights are out. One Thursday a month the table is used for beer pong after work and we play card games like Exploding Kittens.

I'd rather go home at 17:00 and do all those things with my real friends, or you know, spend some quality time with my partner.

SpaceCadet , 17 days ago

If human skin was sometimes completely patterned

If?

Gingers would like to have a word with you.

SpaceCadet , 17 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

If you use shred instead of rm to delete a file, the contents should be unrecoverable for all practical intents and purposes.

I don't believe shred can work recursively on a directory structure, like rm, so you'll have to cobble something together with the find command I guess.

SpaceCadet , 19 days ago

They're just going to do a classical boil-the-frog operation:

• Step 1: Make it opt-in and present it as the new cool thing.
• Step 2: Make it opt-out, and if the users opts out, show a scary warning about how the cool thing won't work anymore.
• Step 3: Silently opt-in, and hide the opt-out option deeply in a settings menu.
• Step 4: Silently opt-in, remove opt-out, but it still works with a registry hack. Microsoft apologists will still thinks it's cool because "just use this simple registry hack bro".
• Step 5: Remove opt-out alltogether, and silently opt-in everyone who had previously opted out.
• Step 6: Enjoy their boiled frog!

SpaceCadet , 19 days ago

But emoji's are not derived from the Simpsons. They're derived from the yellow smiley face ideogram that originated in the 1960s, it was designed by the artist Harvey Ball.

It's yellow, not because it's supposed to represent whiteness, but because the company colors of the State Mutual Life Assurance Company it was designed for were yellow and black, and because it feels sunny, bright and positive. It's an anthropomorphized representation of the Sun, and does not represent a human with a specific skin color.

Image

SpaceCadet , 18 days ago

It's not even about which view is right or neutral. On .world posts and comments critical of the US aren't mass censored like .ml does with posts critical of China, Russia or the former USSR.

SpaceCadet , 19 days ago

I think the problem is not so much that "communities don't exist", but that they are far less popular and active than the lemmy.ml ones, and when presented with a choice new users will typically choose the community that is more active and has the most subs. You can't simply solve that by creating another community on another instance. A concerted effort would be needed to get people to move and to get them to pick the alternative community over the lemmy.ml one. Raising awareness and defederation by bigger instances (like lemmy.world) would help immensely.

For me the big ones are !linux and !programmerhumor btw, which do exist elsewhere but the alternatives are stale.

SpaceCadet , 21 days ago

I believe some guy got banned from all .ml communities for posting things .ml didnt like about tianamin square.

That was me, yes.

SpaceCadet , 20 days ago

You can still see that your comment has been removed, but you can't see the biased mass removals of content, like mass purging all China critical comments from a post, unless you're quick enough to screenshot the modlog.

SpaceCadet OP , 21 days ago

Yeah, but for example !linux is the only reasonably active community on Linux, and one of the communities I frequent the most.

SpaceCadet OP , 21 days ago

Living in the bubble of "CCP did nothing wrong (and we will ban you from all your favorite communities if you dare to disagree)" isn't exactly a great alternative.

SpaceCadet , 1 month ago

Why not your current computer? No time like the present...

SpaceCadet , 1 month ago

It's not just about trusting Microsoft, but about control over the technology. Users will never have real control over AI technology, it's too valuable and the inner workings are anxiously being kept under wraps by the big techbro companies. It also runs on their computers for the most part, so of course we can't trust what's being done with it, regardless of whether Microsoft has been a good boy or a bad boy recently.

SpaceCadet , 1 month ago

Use Xorg with the proprietary driver instead of Wayland for the time being. Much less issues. You can always switch to Wayland later when either Nvidia support matures, or when your next computer has an AMD GPU.

Or get a cheap ass AMD GPU, like an RX6400, plop it in as a second GPU and run on that in Linux. Perfectly serviceable for plain desktop stuff.

Or run on integrated graphics, if you have it. Again, perfectly serviceable for plain desktop stuff.

Problems have solutions :)

SpaceCadet , 1 month ago

Yeah but you said you wanted a dual-boot machine for your next computer, with Windows only for gaming. What I meant is: why not get a head start and make your current computer that dual-boot machine?

SpaceCadet , 1 month ago

Don't you control your dhcp server?

SpaceCadet , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

True that. Hadn't thought of that as it's not my typical VPN use case.

I'm not sure what a VPN provider could do about that though, they don't control the operating system's networking stack. If the user or an outside process that the user decides to trust (i.e. a dhcp server) adds its own network routes, the OS will follow it and route traffic outside of the tunnel.

The defenses I see against it are:

• Run the VPN and everything that needs to go through the VPN in a virtualized, non-bridged environment so it's unaffected by the routing table.
• Put a NAT-ing device in between your computer and the network you want to use
• Modify the DHCP client so that option 121 is rejected

Edit: thinking about it some more, on Linux at least the VPN client could add some iptables rules that block traffic going through any other interface than the tunnel device (i.e. if it's not through tun0 or wg0, drop it). Network routes can't bypass iptables rules, so that should work. It will have the side effect that the VPN connection will appear not to work if someone is using the option 121 trick though, but at least you would know something funny was happening.

SpaceCadet , 1 month ago

It was a bit rocky coming over from Plasma 5, but settled in nicely now.

SpaceCadet , 1 month ago

Oh and don’t forget to take backups of your /home. Thats good practice for every desktop environment.

The config files of the major desktop environments have become a mess though. Plasma absolutely shits files all over ~/.config and /.local/share where they sit mingled together with the config files of all your other applications and most of it is thoroughly undocumented. I've been in the situation where I wanted to restore a previous state of my Plasma desktop from my backups or just start with a clean default desktop and there is just no straightforward way to do that, short of nuking all your configurations.

Doing a quick find query in my current home directory, there are 57 directories and 79 config files that have either plasma or kde in the name, and that doesn't even include all the /.config/* files belonging to plasma or kde components that don't have it in their name explicitly (e.g. dolphinrc, katerc, kwinrc, powerdevilrc, bluedevilglobalrc , ...)

It was much simpler in the old days when you just had something like a ~/.fvwmrc file that was easy to backup and restore, even early kde used to store everything together in a ~/.kde directory.

SpaceCadet , 1 month ago

apt purge nano is one of the first things I do on a new Debian installation. Much easier to remember than having to use update-alternatives, select-editor and the $EDITOR variable to convince the likes of vigr,vipw, visudo,crontab -e,... that I really want to use vim as my primary editor.

SpaceCadet , 2 months ago

I'm having a pretty good time now with the AMD RX7900XT. The early days were a bit rough in terms of the driver, but it sorted itself out.

SpaceCadet , 4 months ago

It was a company almost from the start. In the mid 90s Tatu Ylonen created ssh v1 and released it as freeware, then shortly afterwards apparently he regretted it and created ssh v2, made it proprietary and commercialized it with his company.

In the late 90s some OpenBSD guys then forked the unencumbered ssh v1 source to create OpenSSH and implemented ssh v2 with it and their ssh version eventually gained traction and became dominant.

SpaceCadet , 4 months ago

Tatu was also a bit of a d*ck about the thing. There were some GPL violations when he made the licensing more restrictive, and at one point he accused the OpenSSH project of violating his trademark, even though his original license permitted the use of the ssh name.

SpaceCadet , 9 months ago

Any money that goes to nuclear could be going to renewables, which would get us there more quickly.

That's a false dilemma. Nuclear and renewables provide different things, so they shouldn't be compared directly in an "either or" comparison, and certainly not on cost. Nuclear power provides a stable baseline, so you don't have to rely on coal/gas/diesel powered generators. Renewables cheaply but opportunistically provide power from natural sources that may not always be available but that can augment the baseline. The share of renewable energy in the mix is something engineers should figure out, not "the market".

Also, monetary cost shouldn't be the only concern. Some renewables have a societal cost too, for example in the amount of land that they occupy per kWh generated, or visual polution. I wouldn't want to live within the shadow flicker of a windmill for example.