I've been recharging the AC system on my vintage daily driver — a late 1960s Mercedes-Benz sedan — with common off the shelf campstove propane for 30 years. Keeps me cool regardless of outside Los Angeles heat. Requires a bit of care while doing a recharge, but it's nothing too crazy. My grandfather ran a dairy farm in Connecticut, he showed me this trick in the 80s. We used propane to keep all the cooling equipment in the milk houses running smooth back then. I'm curious about isobutane now.
This is essentially how my Estonian ID card works. The ID card is inserted into a USB smartcard reader and grants access to identity verification an thus access to services.
But the American public is petrified of systems like that because of the leftovers of frontier settler culture and fear of communism. They're apparently far more comfortable with the similar but worse systems being set up by corporations.
Government is wasteful and could never run an efficient [Industry]. Instead, private companies that can be efficient should run [Industry]. They will be more efficient [and turn the surplus into private profits instead of public savings].
Indeed. Donald Trump is only the visible tip of an iceberg. Below the waterline it's a massive and all encompassing corruption, comprised of an organized multi-national cabal that touches every part of the globe and which has its roots in the world starting well before WWI. The goal of which appears has always been to enrich the people on the inside while sewing chaos. To these figures, war and peril have always been more profitable than making peace.
Um, no. Let's set the record straight. Creative bought Ensoniq in '98 for just shy of $78 million, so by early 2000 the "Ensoniq crap" shipping in OEM boxes was Creative's own product. The AudioPCI ES1370/ES1371 got rebadged as the Sound Blaster PCI64 and PCI128. Creative had already absorbed E-mu Systems in '93, and the EMU8000 on the AWE32/AWE64 was E-mu silicon. Both of these American sampler houses ended up under the Creative Labs roof, so framing Ensoniq as the cheap alternative to Creative in 2000 is totally backwards. Ensoniq was just the volume tier of Creative's own lineup.
You're off on the timeline. AWE32 is '94, AWE64 is '96, both were ISA. By early 2000 those were legacy cards on a dying bus architecture, and the enthusiast ask was a SB Live! with the EMU10K1, or an Aureal Vortex 2 if you cared about A3D and had deep pockets. Specifying an AWE64 in 2000 would have gotten you an obsolete card. Also the term is Windows Sound System, the Microsoft AD1848/CS4231 codec standard, and AudioPCI is not a WSS part. It has its own PCI driver stack with legacy SB emulation bolted on, and it genuinely sucked, ran its wavetable in host CPU and system RAM off the ECW patch sets rather than dedicated hardware, and its DOS Sound Blaster emulation was mediocre compared to a cheap ISA card.
Ensoniq was an amazing engineering powerhouse before the demise. In late 1994 I got an Ensoniq Soundscape, at the time it was the most high-end wavetable card built around their OTTO chip (EPS-16+/ASR10), which I believe was a descendant of the Apple IIGS DOC, and it competed at the time with the Roland SCC-1 and the GUS.
Worth noting that the SID chip in the C64 was also created by the guy who founded Ensoniq, before he went on to found Ensoniq. Good computer audio was invented by Bob Yannes. Ensoniq also made sampling affordable with the Mirage, and built some of the coolest sampling synths of the 80s and 90s (EPS, EPS-16+, ASR-10 were the synths everyone in electronic and industrial music had to have). When a friend in my audio engineering class in college got an ASR-10, it was a moment.
A VST is not similar to what the Live extension can do. I use redux, but it is always a slightly less integrated experience, as the extension, but extensions at the moment are also not fully featured yet. In short, both have a purpose. I also converted some of my tools to both, by either writing actual MIDI data into Ableton, and otherwise, be controlled by the DAW as a VST; I work on Regroove, which is a Protracker and (Octa)MED replayed library, which can convert from and to several other formats and can be used even in a Drumlogue to playback a .mod as a groovebox like use, with looping, etc.
Renoise is great, but there's usually some compromise like using the tracker/vst's built-in sampler instead an integrated instrument (like Ableton's Drum Rack) or another VST (soft synth, etc)
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