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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • Along came Creative Labs with their AWE32, a synthesizer card that used wavetable synthesis instead of FM.

    Creative Labs did wavetable synthesis well before the AWE32 — they released the Wave Blaster daughter board for the Sound Blaster 16, two full years before the AWE32 was released.

    (FWIW, I’m not familiar with any motherboards that had FM synthesis built-in in the mid 90’s. By this time, computers were getting fast enough to be able to do software-driven wavetable synthesis, so motherboards just came with a DAC).

    Where the Sound Blaster really shined was that the early models were effectively three cards in one — an Adlib card, a CMS card, and a DAC/ADC card (with models a year or two later also acting as CD-ROM interface cards). Everyone forgets about CMS because Adlib was more popular at the time, but it was capable of stereo FM synthesis, whereas the Adlib was only ever mono.

    (As publisher of The Sound Blaster Digest way back then, I had all of these cards and more. For a few years, Creative sent me virtually everything they made for review. AMA).





  • EV charging doesn’t require you to stand around for 5 minutes holding a handle to fuel up. The charging times are longer, but once plugged in your need to stay anywhere near the vehicle is zero. And plugging in usually takes less than 5s.

    So even if someone came up with a system whereby they expected you to watch an ad before the power would flow, you could always just plug in and walk away. How are they going to know you’re physically there?

    As an EV driver I haven’t been to a gas station since I started driving it, but AFAIK this advertising hasn’t come to Canada — and hopefully it never does.



  • Yaztromo@lemmy.worldtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlHow do we tell him ?
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    7 months ago

    Honestly, I hate these memes. As an old school hacker/programmer who has been doing this for many decades, I can usually just start thinking in code and start dumping out everything I need from my brain through my fingers to the keyboard. I never copy-and-paste code from online for something I’m coding (I don’t count something like copying a script to do a quick shell task of some-sort; for something like Amazon’s directions for installing Corretto I’m not going to type all that out manually; and I don’t really consider that “programming”).

    But as a tech manager (and former University comp.sci instructor), I know this happens more often than I’d prefer. But some of the worst code I’ve had to review has been copy-and-paste jobs where the developer didn’t understand the task correctly and jammed in something they found online as a quick solution. I get that I started in a generation where you had to understand the problem and code the solution from scratch (because the Internet crutch wasn’t what it is today) — but the fact that so many younger developers revel in the fact they copy-and-paste code on the regular makes me sad.










  • Arbitrarily and suddenly destroying all apps built with a certain tech stack…

    Except they aren’t. Sure, PWAs may be slightly more disadvantaged on iOS/iPadOS than they are now, but they haven’t been “destroyed”. And they continue to work exactly as they did with the prior iOS/iPadOS release in all the rest of the world.

    Everyone seems to think Apple is playing some sort of 4D Chess to kill off PWAs — but if Apple wanted to kill off PWAs they could just disable the functionality completely globally tomorrow, and they’d likely face no repercussions for doing so. They don’t even need an excuse to do so.

    I’m not claiming that Apple is acting honourably here; merely that if they actually wanted to kill PWAs it wouldn’t require some sort of Rube Goldberg machine-style planning to do it. There is no conspiracy here.