Hey now that was an accident! They created a taskforce to prevent that from happening again, ignored all their recommendations and then laid them all off.
Flash as an animation tool vs Flash as a web development tool are two very different discussions. There's overlap and they're related but still separate.
Flash was very interesting as an animation tool because it was at its core a vector drawing animation tool. All the scripting components were icing on the cake allowing automation of things that's incredibly tedious in traditional animation.
The fast vector animations made Flash very useful for web distribution. That's all well and good. But as it became the go-to for interactive websites the structure of Flash was antithetical to the web. Deep links became meaningless and content became locked behind Flash. Adobe was also a terrible steward of Flash and only put effort into Flash for Windows. Every other platform was an also-ran for them and the Flash experience was terrible.
The security of Flash was a bad joke on top of it all.
As an animation tool and delivery vector for interactive content beyond the abilities of browsers of the era it was useful. As the front end of the web it was an awful mess.
I set up an isolated network on my LAN with its own WAP to play with my old devices that don't support WPA. I don't leave it on all the time and the network segmentation limits any blast damage. Works well since I have so much old crap with early WiFi.
Including but not limited to dual gigabit Ethernet (on a PCIe bus), NVMe slots, and a capable power supply is included in the box.
I lucked out having bought a few N95 mini PCs a few years ago. They were even cheaper then with 16GB of RAM out of the box. To me they're vastly superior to the various RPis I replaced.
I sold off my Pi 4s and never bothered with the 5s. I kept my mix of older Pis for projects that need GPIO and of those my Pi Zeros are the ones that really get used.
Online services most assuredly billed by the minute. He'll, AOL had a huge marketing campaign offering "free" minutes for new customers. You might also have charges from the phone company but those were independent of the online service charges. It wasn't until the late 90s the major online services went to flat rate "unlimited" plans.
> Online services most assuredly billed by the minute. He'll, AOL had a huge marketing campaign offering "free" minutes for new customers. You might also have charges from the phone company but those were independent of the online service charges.
AOL was offering free minutes because it was an ISP, not because it was an online service. (It was also an online service. Most of that service was indeed free; some of it billed by the minute, but that was separate from the rate you paid for connecting to the internet.)
For me and most people I knew at the time, VHS didn't have a noticeable quality loss over broadcast unless you were watching LP/EP recordings.
Many TVs people already had in the 80s didn't have RCA connections so VCRs were connected via twin lead to F connector adapters. They had the same noise as the antenna or cable input. So your commercial tapes usually looked about as good as broadcast. If you actually read the instructions with your VCR to set the timing correctly recorded broadcasts in SP mode also tended to look pretty good.
In absolute terms the VHS video was worse than the original broadcast but on the TVs we had it was hard to notice.
This definitely changed through the 90s. Larger and brighter tubes made the deficiencies of VHS more noticeable. Moving to cable TV from antenna was also very noticeable and made VHS quality more apparent.
If you happened to see a LaserDisc video as a comparison to VHS then the quality difference was stark. As much as VHS and DVD by the late 90s and early 00s. However I think that direct comparison was out of reach for most people.
While DDR3 is cheaper it's still tripled or quadrupled in price over the past two years. I just bought a pair or sticks for an old Mac Pro and it was 4x what i paid just a few years ago.
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