It was DOS that only provided 640 KB. The game needed more memory than DOS could provide, thus Origin had to write their own memory manager.
Yes, you’re correct. I do recall that even with Voodoo you could still only access a small amount of RAM (1mb or so?) and I spent ages trying to come up with a boot floppy and set of drivers I could run on my Windows 95 machine while still having enough left to launch the game.
It was annoying, especially considering how damn good and ahead of its time that game was. Ultima VII walked so that Skyrim could fly.
I just did some research.
It seems the things (“Stage II Vapor Recovery Dispensing Nozzles” in the argot) were required mostly in dense urban / suburban areas, plus statewide in certain especially pollution-conscious states like CA. Gasoline vehicles since 2000 are required to have onboard vapor recovery systems that eliminate the Federal requirement for the nozzles. Various states are now in the process of rewriting their regs to eliminate the state-level requirements.
So, like smog pumps, analog cell phones, and 5-cent beer, these nozzles are soon to be history for most (all?) of the country. This being about government, “soon” might be a decade or two, but it’s coming.
Computer monitors (and laptop screens). I still haven’t seen any way to adjust the contrast (other than full contrast mode). Everything is washed out and hard to read.
There’s also the web design fad for gray text on a white background. It makes things hard to read and isn’t the point of a web page is for people to read it?
Have you had your eyes checked recently? I don’t think that’s a common complaint.
I did have trouble seeing in “dark places” in video games until i bought a new monitor with better dynamic range. But most web pages are pretty legible.
In Windows, settings-display-brightness?
In addition to pretty crappy speakers, my new computer monitor has the power button on the back. And not along the back edge so you could reach up from under but 1/3rd up the back’s right side.
I have had my eyes checked and their fine. It’s certainly not an uncommon complaint – the Internet is filled with them.
And why don’t monitors have that control? Should I be able to decide what level of contrast works for me?
My ViewSonic monitor has contrast and brightness controls.
In Mac, at least in my old version, system preferences-accessibility-display. Why not just in system preferences-display, I do not know.
The monitor itself also has a setting, one of the buttons on the right front of the monitor. Where, as an example of not great design, I occasionally hit the power button by accident when reaching for something to the right of the computer, and then have to turn the screen back on again.
I wish mine were on the back; or maybe we could please both of us? on the front, but in the middle of the top bar? I often reach to the right or left of the monitor for something, but very rarely over the top.
My monitors let me adjust brightness and contrast.
I’ve been much happier with “dark” images since i upgraded from “the cheapest thing with lots of pixels” to monitors that are highly rated for image. Brightness is easy, you need to play with the menu to find contrast and saturation. But you can play with those. (And i don’t need to, unlike on my cheap monitor.) The one in front of me, that i like a lot, is the Asus pa278qv.
I’ve two Samsung monitors. Two different places. One works great.
The other though doesn’t go to ‘sleep’ it turns completely off. But only once in a while. Sometimes it goes to sleep. It’s strange.
Ok. Maybe a setting. But the ‘switch’ is a 4 way toggle button in the back. You push it in too, so It may be 8 way.
It’s a gamble to be able to turn the thing back on. I often get frustrated and just boot my system. Not really a problem since I always save, and use it mostly to remote into other computers, so nothing is affected there.
I’ve two remote systems at different locations that I remote into work on, which in turn I remote into other systems. It’s a little crazy, but works real well.
It’s not really worth researching, happens maybe once a day but kind of ticks me off.
GIVE ME AN ON/OFF button, thanks.
Not quite the same thing, but: I’ve owned numerous pairs of cheap bluetooth earbuds (the sort where the right and left bud are connected via a wire, not the “true wireless” ones where step one is pairing, and step two is instantly losing one of them).
In all of them, the charging port and control buttons are one one of the two earbuds. Two main issues:
- When the battery dies, you CANNOT still use the non-port earbud while charging with the other.
- Using any of the control buttons involves jamming the thing into the ear canal by the force of the button press.
I splurged on a pair of Samsung Galaxy Buds Live - the ones that look like kidney beans. They’re quite comfy, and produce decent sound, but there’s no way to make them stay put if I even walk around - I have to be prepared to catch one as it falls out. There’s no way to add on a tether of any sort, either. Like someone else noted, this is what happens when “pretty” trumps “functional”. By contrast, my husband and I each own a pair of AirPods. Similar issue with them and the potential to fall out of my ears, but because of their stalk design, we can attach ear hooks or simply a tether. Problem solved.
My CPAP machine has an integral water tank for humidification. It’s impossible to pull it out if you have limited hand strength. And the damn tank is too small. Adding a centimeter or two to the width of the tank would take up very little additional table space and make it possible to sleep more than 8 hours without waking up a burning aroma.
We got a batch of Dell monitors with a push button for power on the back. Also on the back. a button/joystick thing for the menu. If anyone turned anything off around here, hilarity and cursing would ensue.
I think that might actually have been good design. They were making more money on the pouches than on the high-tech press itself (the classic printer-and-toner business model), and anyone who was buying the packets to squeeze by hand was still paying nearly a dollar an ounce for preserved fruit.
It’s been at least 15 years since I turned a monitor off except to move it from one desk to another. And in that case I turned it off a moment before unplugging it which would have had the same effect.
Any reasonably modern monitor goes into a nil-power consumption sleep mode when the computer does. They could leave the power button off completely for all I care.
My Acer monitor is annoyingly darker than my HP laptop’s monitor, no matter how I adjust the brightness and contrast.
Second that. If I go out of town, I’ll turn off the computer and usually unplug it but will leave the monitor on.
I have one monitor on my desk that i attach to whatever PC I’m using, and they talk to it using a couple of different cables. When i want to switch between HDMI and another one, sometimes the computer gets confused, and doesn’t. The easiest way to fix that is to turn it off and turn it in again. (I can also manually switch the input, but it’s easier to just turn it off, turn it on, and let it find the input that’s sending it data.)
I also sometimes turn it off at night, if I’m leaving the computer running.
So i like having an accessible on-off switch. But it’s not about power consumption.
OK, that’s a valid reason for wanting to power-cycle the monitor. In some cases, it may be easier to pull the power cord out of the monitor or the wall than to push the power button.