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)

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)

You need to turn on ambient occlusion. That should fix it.

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.

Hmm, on one of the KDE plasma updates, my wallpaper did change to their infamous teletubby wallpaper. Mind you, I was still using the default wallpaper at that time, and this was their new default wallpaper, so that’s probably why.

Removed by mod

At least they were kind enough to start top down, instead of bottom up.

There is a big correlation between homelessness and mental illness, personality disorder, addiction or a combination thereof. So yeah, excuse me if I don’t want to deal with the paranoid schizophrenic hobo who’s high on god knows what.

I can’t speak for the US here, but in most civilized countries there is actually help available for homeless people and enough social systems to ensure that well adjusted people don’t end up homeless in the first place. With the homeless that we do have, the difficulty usually lies in reaching them, getting them to accept the help that is available and having them durably make the necessary changes to their life to escape homelessness.

Accepting some of their anti-social behaviors is actually enabling it, and not helping them at all.

This doesn’t even have anything to do with homeless people. Homeless people don’t sleep on a window sill.

I personally know a few places in my city where people have resorted to putting spikes on their window sills like that. It has everything to do with anti-social people who think someone else’s window sill is a perfectly good place to sit around all night, make noise, drink alcohol, do drugs, leave their garbage, damage the property, …

The spikes are put there out of desperation when talking to people and talking to the police hasn’t helped.

This is not anti-homeless. This is anti-idiots sitting on the window sill of the house you live in, making it a gathering place and a nuisance of themselves. A window sill is not a bench in the park.

~# tar -h
tar: You must specify one of the '-Acdtrux', '--delete' or '--test-label' options
Try 'tar --help' or 'tar --usage' for more information.
***********************************************
WARNING: Self destruct sequence initiated
***********************************************

Yes, the terse Unix version, which needs to be supported for compatibility, and the more readable GNU long option

Depends. Is it GNU tar, BSD tar or some old school Unix tar?

Double hyphen “long options” are a typical GNU thing.

Tech hipsters be like: you had me at container!

I mean… Young people don’t know things yet… Isn’t that normal?

Depends on the context I guess. If this is a professional IT context in which the 25yo is expected to be proficient enough on a Linux system to edit a text file, not knowing that vim exists is kinda sad.

No it does not. Unless it tasted like shit to begin with.

Otherwise a second PiHole set as the secondary DNS in DHCP would keep things online.

No, that just creates time outs and delays when either of them is offline.

The proper way is to have a standby pihole that takes over the IP address of the main pihole when it goes down. It’s quite easy to achieve this with keepalived.

Mental note: have to migrate my gitea instance over to forgejo.