Benanov

I'm just imagining the amount of damage some determined people can do to the Cricut ecosystem because the serial numbers are guessable...

Custom Video Card firmware has been around a long time. It was possible to convert PC video cards to Mac use by flashing them. When I was faffing around with PPC64 Macs (I mean hey I got it for free) I picked up an ATI card on ebay that had been flashed.

I had sleep issues. It was the lowest-end G5. I ended up recycling it.

It's stupid from a practical perspective but the energy required to build up the uterine lining and tear it down on a (basically-)monthly basis is much lower than its upkeep

Schism Tracker is based off Impulse Tracker, and as such it isn't a ProTracker successor per se as the user interface is different.

It's absolutely a tracker, and absolutely part of the demoscene and quite a capable piece of software - but if you have the muscle memory for ProTracker (or FastTracker 2, as I do) keyboard shortcuts, it is not the same.

MilkyTracker does have an option for FT2-style shortcuts.

Honestly by 1995/1996 or so yeah you could find SoundBlaster cards everywhere and anywhere...but if you wanted a GUS you were basically having to plunk down a lot of cash.

Maybe SoundBlaster being short was a little earlier? I didn't have a PC before 1995, so...

By early 2000 you were seeing a lot of Ensoniq and other sort of "Windows Sound Source" crap in most consumer-grade PCs and if you wanted an AWE32 or AWE64 you had to specify you wanted a good sound card.

As someone who was in the demoscene: FastTracker II was more of a successor to ProTracker on the Amiga than it was a successor to ScreamTracker 3. I say this because I used it for years; if you go by user interface and keyboard shortcuts the heritage is very visible.

That isn't to say that FT2 didn't build upon what ST3 (ScreamTracker 3) did; FT2 loaded ST3 files and played them just fine, as long as they were sample-based and not OPL3 (basically no one used the OPL3 functionality in #trax); and a lot of the concepts were brought along as well; per-channel panning (not the hard LRRL of the Paula) and an option for a Linear frequency table (instead of using the Amiga's). I think ST3 had ADSR envelopes; FT2 definitely does.

There were other trackers about like MultiTracker, which got some use - it had a fairly interesting per-track compression (not just pattern compression) that was transparent to the user. It was the original format for Kenny Chou's (CC Catch) soundtrack to One Must Fall 2097 (which is public domain; if anyone can send me FALL1.MTM {"Powerplant"} I'd love you for days; I only have that one after I converted it to XM and it lost all the panning information, as FT2 does not store per-channel panning information; only per-instrument and per-sample; you can't just set a channel pan and have it persist)

No one was really using .MTM in 1995 onward tho.

ImpulseTracker was a 'proper' successor to ScreamTracker 3, down to how the interfaces looked and the keyboard shortcuts. Both are DOS Terminal / "ANSI" looking. ncurses was a thing back then but this was DOS; but they weren't using it. IT is still around and has been open-sourced and I think SchismTracker is the current flag-bearer fork - unsure.

FT2 vs IT was a hot topic in #trax in the late 90's; most of the cool kids used Impulse but I stuck to FT2.

ModPlug Tracker was the first really successful Windows tracker, it is and was FLOSS, and it's still around, and was a pretty capable tracker in its day if you didn't mind light mode. I think a lot of the more 'modern' module output plugins for GStreamer et al are based off of ModPlug code, but again I can't prove it (there was also the MikMod library/players; and CubicPlayer, etc. Tons of libraries)

MilkyTracker is the spiritual successor to FT2 (down to the keyboard shortcuts!) and runs on pretty much anything modern these days. I got it to run on the OLPC XO-1, which was plenty capable because modules were being mixed on a 486 or so at 33MHz, and the XO-1's Geode was running at 433MHz, which is a good 10x faster. However my biggest problem with tracking on the XO-1 was all the times I'd get interrupted when people would ask me about the computer I was working on...

iirc FT2 also had a "Disney Sound Source" parallel port option but never used it. It did have MIDI output.

FT2 did have a really shitty PC speaker output option, because almost all of them are shitty, and a really good one didn't happen until 8088mph came out. It was capable enough to annoy people around you, but it was also capable enough that a friend and I made some 4/6-channel XM files that used basically square wave samples that sounded decent enough. They're on modarchive, look for Comp Sci Chip Tech, you'll find them.

Soft skills, mostly - you just find things that you're weak on (since you know enough to know where you suck) and just work on those.

...usually because they have a fork of the codebase, and it's not vanilla base OpenWRT.

Last time I opted out at the (edit: TSA) scan, a number of people behind me followed suit.

I enjoyed that. I will remember to opt out again.

Can't skip ahead to sections of their content you want to view and instead are forced to watch it in sequence.

Either that or can't skip ads, ala legal dvd playback

My thirteen year old PC is holding up fine. I've replaced the disk (condition of me getting it; it was a disused Windows machine), installed Ubuntu, Debian, then Kubuntu, and upgraded the video card, but beyond that...basically as it shipped from Dell. The last BIOS update was 2013.

You'd have to use this version (not sure if they back-licensed old versions) but MIT would mean you wouldn't have to agree to that draconian licensing.

AIUI (I don't have any of this hardware) SteamOS is really meant for the Steam Deck; while there's "basic support" for the ROG Ally, it's not their focus. Bazzite seems to be quite happy to support everything, and AIUI it's frighteningly close to SteamOS (the same customizations, etc.)

It's not "we have SteamOS at home" - it's more like RedHat vs CentOS

As we know or a quick STFW will educate - the "airplane with red dots" refers to the idea that the planes that came back had damage indicated on them with red dots and so the initial idea was that the designers of the planes needed to armor those spots...

When it was really the case that the spots that weren't damaged were the ones that actually needed to be armored, because the planes that took damage there didn't come back.

In this case, the data that survived a selection process ("I just recommended this book that dovetails nicely") is the only data considered, when really all of the data needs to be considered.

I'm seeing this as "you're reading the data wrong" or more accurately "you're barking up the wrong tree"