All kinds of self-published stuff, lots of which later became commercial. You will have heard of some of it, for sure. Darude - Sandstorm? That was from there. DragonForce were big in the power metal category. The band that became Linkin Park came from there. And then hundreds of thousands of indie artists (including an earlier me).
The RIAA's action there destroyed vast amounts of music, pretty much the equivalent of if someone just aggressively deleted Bandcamp and Soundcloud put together and everything on it because they were upset they didn't control it all. I will never forgive them for that.
Another random band I was listening to because of MP3.com was Lazlo Bane which is best known because one of their songs "Superman" (which was on MP3.com) became the Scrubs TV show theme song.
MP3.com also had a bunch of very early meme bands such as The Laziest Men on Mars with songs based on "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" and "The Terrible Secret of Space" which were viral and hard to escape in certain friend groups.
Because most of the music was free to download and a lot of it was pretty viral, I'd maybe add a Spotify if it was Legal Napster analogy to the Bandcamp and Soundcloud put together analogy.
Basically all of my friends use it. I insist. I trust it; I don't trust WhatsApp (not because WA's crypto is weak, just because I don't trust who runs it now).
I mean, that brute-forceability was a reason for the newer v3 addresses; the v2 ones just weren't long enough.
(As told to me by Alec, they bruteforced the first bit, but found a very coincidentally attractive one for a backronym among the candidates and chose that.)
You didn't even need Caetla. You could do that straight-up with the original ROMs for some of the cartridge series (FCD), and X-Link from DOS (or, if you were prepared to get involved with a bit of spicy linux 2.3, bitbang the parallel port yourself from the /dev/ interface for it at the time, the protocol was really simple). You get a live memory monitor you can watch (made it really easy to make cheat codes or look inside stuff for fun), and you can write and debug anything you want - in many ways it was nicer than the official Psy-Q kit Sony adopted, I thought.
Except to be fair, I didn't have a C toolchain, but R3000 assembly language is really nice when you get used to the delay slot.
i guess you'd discover that protocol by playing with a yaroze/caetla/etc with some of of device listening in between and recording the words?
never really got into using the parallel port as a cheap dio until building science rigs years later... (and some fun experiments with using it to do cheap adc when in college)
They're all actually AI powered, generally some form of real-time RNN trained on identifying and isolating voice content from background noise or music.
rnnoise2 is an open-source model that does very well. There also are things like Waves Clarity VX, the Nvidia Broadcast (Audio Effects SDK) too, as well as plenty of other solutions like Supertone Clear, Krisp, etc etc etc.
Does that mean youtube is AI generating your voice to "add it back" after silencing that part of the video? Does it ever generate different words to what you actually said?
My memory there is a bit fuzzy, but saying there was no official Mozilla web browser feels misleading. The Mozilla Suite (which I used for a while even in the 'milestone' versions) contained a fully functional web browser, Navigator - it was just really heavy and cumbersome because it also had the mail client Communicator and the other stuff like the IRC client and it was very new, very raw, rough-edges software built on this new XPCOM stuff. Very 'kitchen sink', inspired by the Netscape 'SeaMonkey' suite (SeaMonkey I believe lives on under that name). It wasn't based on the OG Netscape source code very much at all - while an attempt was made to develop that, it was so bad it was basically thrown in the bin and rewritten from scratch - which is where Gecko comes from.
K-Meleon and so forth was an attempt to take the core Gecko components out of the Mozilla Suite and just have a small simple browser built in it. Having seen that and a few others which had the same kind of idea but were native, Phoenix, which became Firebird, which became Firefox, was... kind of a grassroots disruptive community effort to try the same sort of minimum-viable-product browser thing in XPCOM as a cross-platform experiment, which rapidly gained adoption when people started realising how much faster and better it was to build it that way from the ground up instead. It certainly didn't feel like it was "AOL Time Warner" sponsored. If anything, it felt kind of chaotic. Nobody did a detailed name search because it was an experimental side project.
That worked so well, Thunderbird the email client was forked off too (during the Firebird era), and if I recall Sunbird (the calendar part)?
This is a relatively accurate recollection. Each of the components of Seamonkey (which was the successor to Netscape, containing Navigator, Communicator, and others as you mentioned) was eventually rolled into a separate standalone project, some of which were part of the overall Mozilla Project and some which were done by the community outside of Mozilla. The IRC client even got spun out as ChatZilla as a standalone piece of software, as did the webpage editor/publisher (analogous to MS Front Page).
> it was just really heavy and cumbersome because it also had the mail client Communicator and the other stuff like the IRC client and it was very new, very raw, rough-edges software built on this new XPCOM stuff
The suite - Seamonkey - was/is heavy if all you used was the browser. If you compare it to running Firefox and Thunderbird together it actually was quite a bit leaner which is why I ran it for several years on lower-spec hardware.
Yeah, this matches my recollection of that time period as well. I definitely used the browser here and there when it was still Phoenix. My memory even says that Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox was something of a skunkworks project inside Mozilla, and it wasn't until several releases were made that Mozilla decided to go all-in on it and abandon their other browser. But those are nearly 25 year old memories so maybe they're incorrect.
If they were restricting controllers from the start, that would be one thing, and controller exclusivity is something every console manufacturer right back to Atari has always thought about from the very beginning - mostly for cash-grab reasons, but also, much later on, with this very excuse. It's why the original XBox's USB controllers were a different shape.
But to me this feels like a clear-cut case of interoperability, unilaterally and unconditionally removed after the fact of the sale of both millions of consoles and controllers (both first-party and not). Are they sure they want to do that? Now?
This also reminds me very much of Sony's removal of OtherOS in the PS3, and I draw the analogy with what happened to the console's security afterwards very much in mind.
Yeep. That is not entirely unsurprising (it’s such a common flaw in basic section/chunk formats that they obviously didn’t research about even the possibility of security flaws, or consider there to be any threat model at all — it was designed to be used internally in games for game assets, perhaps). Still a little disappointing to see they were indeed that lackadaisical. I don’t expect change, they’re very set in their ways.
There is a superior, free, open-source alternative called Inochi2D — https://inochi2d.com/ — developed primarily by Luna the Foxgirl, and used by all of nullptr::live, including Asahi Lina (of Asahi Linux fame). It really should see more love because it’s superior in almost every way.
That was Digital Research’s GEM, which Atari had licenced for the GUI of TOS (they threw it together quite quickly). There was a whole thing about GEM and inspiration from Xerox PARC and Apple; that’s largely the reason why the Atari version was the only version that really made it to any kind of brief success.
It was the only way to use a couple of very early DTP packages (Timeworks being the one I remember).
Of course, by then it was after GEM 2 and had been neutered by the lawsuit which forced it to abandon the desktop metaphor for 2 permanently tiled windows
The RIAA's action there destroyed vast amounts of music, pretty much the equivalent of if someone just aggressively deleted Bandcamp and Soundcloud put together and everything on it because they were upset they didn't control it all. I will never forgive them for that.