DefederateLemmyMl

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 …

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)

Yeah and Flatpaks also exist.

Flatpaks are probably the best generic solution for using an LTS release like Debian Stable on a desktop system. You get the best of both worlds: up to date desktop packages and a stable base.

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.

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.

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.

At a stretch, I guess you could say that a battery that’s going bad doesn’t make a sound.

But yes, electric motors are way more reliable than internal combustion engines and objectively superior. You would never use an ICE over an EE for any application where you have a reliable supply of electricity.

you just need to get in the habit of plugging in like you would your phone

Yeah but not everyone lives in suburbia with ample plug-in options available to them. Where I live the street-side charging spots are usually occupied, and the parking spot that I rent has no charging.

For journey’s long enough for it to be more than a single charge you really should be stopping for more than a few seconds anyway as you need recharging.

True to some extent, I have to check my travel logs but I do feel like stopping for an hour every 300km or so is longer and much more often than I would normally stop on long road trips. My (diesel) car has a range of well over 1000km so often I stop for only 15 minutes for a coffee and to stretch my legs, or just for a restroom stop and a driver swap. We usually plan just one big stop (1h) for dinner. Most destinations I’ve been to I could reach without refueling at all.

There’s also the issue of contention for charging spots. On gas stations near the big highways towards popular destinations you often already have to queue to get gas. This will become worse when EVs become common place and people occupy a charging spot for an hour instead of a fuel pump for 30 seconds to top up.

Little anecdote: every year around the holiday season, there are several company wide e-mails from EV driving co-workers requesting to swap cars (with a co-worker who has a CE car) to go on holiday. So I think the practical experience may not be as rosy as you paint it.

only this time they’ve got a decade of research behind them and maybe they get the bomb first

Maybe that’s why we’re living in the universe where this didn’t happen, because in the universe where it did, we wouldn’t exist (many worlds/anthropic principle interpretation)

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.

You don’t even have to NAT the fuck out of your network. NAT is usually only needed in one place: where your internal network meets the outside world, and it provides a clean separation between the two as well, which I like.

For most internal networks there really are no advantages to moving to IPv6 other than bragging rights.

The more I think about it, the more I find IPv6 a huge overly complicated mistake. For the issue they wanted to solve, worldwide public IP shortage, they could have just added an octet to IPv4 to multiply the number of available addresses with 256 and called it a day. Not every square cm of the planet needs a public IP.

If human skin was sometimes completely patterned

If?

Gingers would like to have a word with you.

It’s when you have to set static routes and such.

For example I have a couple of locations tied together with a Wireguard site-to-site VPN, each with several subnets. I had to write wg config files and set static routes with hardcoded subnets and IP addresses. Writing the wg config files and getting it working was already a bit daunting with IPv4, because I was also wrapping my head around wireguard concepts at the same time. It would have been so much worse to debug with IPv6 unreadable subnet names.

Network ACLs and firewall rules are another thing where you have to work with raw IPv6 addresses. For example: let’s say you have a Samba share or proxy server that you only want to be accessible from one specific subnet, you have to use IPv6 addresses. You can’t solve that with DNS names.

Anyway my point is: the idea that you can simply avoid IPv6’s complexity by using DNS names is just wrong.

You do need to know it when you’re working with subnets and routing tables.

Unless you have anything but a flat network structure with everything in one subnet, working with IPV6 is a giant PITA.

It’s a documentary.

Removed by mod

• Red Hat Linux 5.1 - 7.x
• Slackware 7.0 - 12.0
• Ubuntu 6.10 - 9.10
• Slackware 13.37 - 14.1
• Mint 16 - 17
• Arch

Yeah god forbid people have some interesting discussion on this platform, right?

The post doesn’t answer the questions, it’s why I asked.

It says:

All running on a krun microVM with FEX and full TSO support 💪

I was not expecting Party Animals to run! That’s a DX11 game, running with the classic WineD3D on our OpenGL 4.6 driver!

Now I know some of these words, but it does not answer my question.