Is that an iomega drive in the background!?
Yes, indeed. Likely a parallel-port version unless that machine has a SCSI card.
Canyon.mid
121–130 of 214 posts
Re: Canyon.mid
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is more commentary on the nature of personality and taste than of computers. It’s human nature to think of familiar things from our youth as the height of achievement. That was the time of the best music, the best movies, the best culture, the best sports, the best everything. No matter if you were born in 1950 or 1990.
To be fair, the quality of software has dramatically dropped, apps now take 10 seconds to load, memory usage is maxed, games crash and people needed to reinstall their OS so frequently that Microsoft literally added a "reset PC" option.. You can argue that software does much more than before, sure I agree but no one asked for so much bloat and features in every day apps. My note taking app doesn't need AI.
I don’t know what period your referencing but software quality wasn’t exactly amazing back in the day. It did mandate a higher degree of validation before release due to the distribution nature (physical media as opposed to a download) but even then some remarkably dumb bugs made it out the door
Re: Canyon.mid
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Asceticism doesn't generate revenue. That's why striving capital needs a population that consumes more, and fat in technologies is not an exception. Software in the '90s was mostly driven by altruism, software in '20s starts with an A-round.
What's an A round?
The first funding round for a startup. "Series A", "Series B", etc.
(… although there are sometimes "seed" rounds that precede a series A, or even pre-seed rounds … like everything else, it's complicated & messy. But hopefully you see the metaphor the parent was trying to paint.)
Re: Canyon.mid
#124Personally I prefer onestop.mid :)
Re: Canyon.mid
#125Why did we kill all that beautiful minimalism? Computers had enough gaming, entertainment and productivity back then. But the definition of "enough" kept changing. Like a carrot tied to stick attached to an animal.
Modern technology has made it a lot easier to build video games or entertainment (music, movies, etc) affordably and in a reasonable amount of time. The diversity of entertainment out there for you to experience cheaply is incredible compared to the 90s or 00s, even if we lost some stuff like Flash along the way.
Nearly 19000 games were released on Steam in 2024. A lot of the most interesting stuff that came out simply wouldn't have existed 10 or 20 years ago. I think it's great that those things can exist now and potentially find an audience.
Re: Canyon.mid
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is more commentary on the nature of personality and taste than of computers. It’s human nature to think of familiar things from our youth as the height of achievement. That was the time of the best music, the best movies, the best culture, the best sports, the best everything. No matter if you were born in 1950 or 1990.
To be fair, the quality of software has dramatically dropped, apps now take 10 seconds to load, memory usage is maxed, games crash and people needed to reinstall their OS so frequently that Microsoft literally added a "reset PC" option.. You can argue that software does much more than before, sure I agree but no one asked for so much bloat and features in every day apps. My note taking app doesn't need AI.
> To be fair, the quality of software has dramatically dropped, apps now take 10 seconds to load, memory usage is maxed, games crash and people needed to reinstall their OS so frequently that Microsoft literally added a "reset PC" option..
Are you talking about the 90s or now? Because those were all at least as true then as now. Everything took forever. You needed more RAM every month. Everything crashed constantly. I had to reinstall Win98SE so many fucking times that I can still type F73WT-WHD3J-CD4VR-2GWKD-T38YD from memory.
The amount of suck in commercial software is constant. Companies always prioritize adding the shiny-looking features that sell software to rubes over improving things like memory use, response time, and general quality of life until the quality of life is actually bad enough to drive customers to another vendor, so it's perpetually bad enough to keep the average customer right on the edge of "oh fuck this, I'm switching to something else."
Re: Canyon.mid
#127Why did we kill all that beautiful minimalism? Computers had enough gaming, entertainment and productivity back then. But the definition of "enough" kept changing. Like a carrot tied to stick attached to an animal.
It's funny how you want minimalism yet another commenter commented about an experimental OS needing to have a modern UI to be relevant. Just can't win.
Re: Canyon.mid
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
The PC speaker could only play square waves, and had only one voice. There is no "correct" sound for a MIDI file as it's just note and tempo data. But many people probably associate them with the OPL2 synthesizer chip on AdLib and early SoundBlaster cards. [1] Now that we have high fidelity digital sound output on even the cheapest computers/devices, at least 44 kHz, at least two channels, and at least 16 bits per sa…
There is no "correct" sound for a MIDI file In the case of canyon.mid there is because it was composed for a specific midi instrument with a particular set of timbres. Or to put it another way, it’s music and therefore complicated.
I can play the guitar parts on a banjo but it ain't going to sound right.
Re: Canyon.mid
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apps take 10 seconds to load? Which apps, on what system? My whole machine reboots in less than 10 seconds. I haven’t seen a blue screen of death in a decade. I haven’t had significant data loss from a failed drive or a corrupt machine in.. I can’t remember. Even DaVinci Resolve is ready to run in a few short seconds. This is all on a machine I bought 6-8 years ago. I reboot my phone and watch and laptop when I think…
Gimp. On any system.
On my personal 2017-vintage i5-7200U, GIMP opens in under 5 seconds. On the computer I had for my last job, a 2023-ish i7, about 30 seconds. The problem was the shitheap of corporate security software that bogged down the zillion file access operations during application startup, not the app itself.
Re: Canyon.mid
#130Why did we kill all that beautiful minimalism? Computers had enough gaming, entertainment and productivity back then. But the definition of "enough" kept changing. Like a carrot tied to stick attached to an animal.
This is more commentary on the nature of personality and taste than of computers. It’s human nature to think of familiar things from our youth as the height of achievement. That was the time of the best music, the best movies, the best culture, the best sports, the best everything. No matter if you were born in 1950 or 1990.
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