8 ms·
Of course, the other plausible explanation is that (at least at the time) Weird Al didn't know the difference between RAM and hard drive space (especially likel
by nocman 4y ago
Of course, the other plausible explanation is that (at least at the time) Weird Al didn't know the difference between RAM and hard drive space (especially likely, because he's talking about defragging a hard drive). In fact, I'd be surprised if that wasn't what he meant. I will, however, leave room for him knowing the difference, but intentionally being absurd (it is Weird Al, after all).
That problem (referring to things that are not conventional fast, volatile random access memory as RAM) seems to have only gotten worse in the last twenty years - exacerbated, I believe by the increased use of flash technology (SSDs, etc - which have, admittedly blurred the lines some).
It also doesn't help that smart phone and tablet manufacturers/advertisers have long insisted on referring to the device's long-term storage (also flash tech) as "memory". I doubt that will ever stop bugging me, but I've learned to live with it, albeit curmudgeonly.
Whippersnappers! :-D
- function_seven 4y agoSee also "Wi-Fi" meaning any Internet access now. Or "screen saver" meaning the desktop wallpaper.
- treeman79 4y agoInternet is down! Umm no it’s fine. Shows me Facebook not working. Umm that’s just Facebook down. So the internet is down! After a few rounds sure. The entire Internet is down. I’m going to go play an online game.
- netsharc 4y agoA pet peeve I've had to grow out of is the missing word "connection" when people say "The Internet is down".
- fijiaarone 4y agoSo you don’t believe in technological solipsism?
- planede 4y agoThe web server is down! - Sales guy
- Handytinge 4y agoI think you mean "the website is down!" https://youtu.be/uRGljemfwUE https://youtu.be/uRGljemfwUE
- hosteur 4y agoHuh? I have never encountered those.
- xen2xen1 4y agoMy children complain the wifi is down when their ethernet cable is broken. They say that AFTER THEY TELL ME IT'S BROKEN. This is not just a meme, they should know better, and are very unhappy on WiFi, but still tend to call all internet Wi-Fi.
- sp332 4y agoThere was an incident years ago with a library offering wired Ethernet for laptops, and the sign said "wired wifi connection". I'm not sure it's really that common.
- naniwaduni 4y agowifi but the wi stands for wired
- drdec 4y agoAnd what does the "fi" stand for?
- krallja 4y agoThe same thing it stands for in "WiFi."
- whatshisface 4y agoWIres For Information
- nocman 4y agoFrom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi > The name Wi-Fi, commercially used at least as early as August 1999, was coined by the brand-consulting firm Interbrand. The Wi-Fi Alliance had hired Interbrand to create a name that was "a little catchier than 'IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence'." > The Wi-Fi Alliance used the advertising slogan "The Standard for Wireless Fidelity" for a short time after the brand name was created, and the Wi-Fi Alliance was also called the "Wireless Fidelity Alliance Inc" in some publications. Elsewhere I've seen that it was chosen because of its similarity to HiFi - which is short for "High Fidelity" (regarding audio equipment): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fidelity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fidelity > High fidelity (often shortened to Hi-Fi or HiFi) is the high-quality reproduction of sound. It is important to audiophiles and home audio enthusiasts. Ideally, high-fidelity equipment has inaudible noise and distortion, and a flat (neutral, uncolored) frequency response within the human hearing range. However, there seems to be a lot of debate as to whether the 'Fi' in WiFi was ever fully accepted to mean "Fidelity". So pretty much it seems marketing people liked the way "WiFi" sounded, so they used it.
- HankB99 4y agoThe CPU is that box that the monitor and keyboard connect to. :-/
- 13of40 4y agoI could be wrong, but I think back in the day the computer monitor was the whole system for debugging and viewing the state of a running computer (which is why the debugger on an Apple II is called a monitor, for example) but now we just use it to mean the physical screen.
- Eleison23 4y agoI'm not sure about that. CRT monitor were a relatively late addition to terminal devices. Traditional terminals were hardcopy printers; they printed the output you received onto paper.
- YurgenJurgensen 4y agoJust three days ago, professional streamer Hakos Baelz made this exact mistake. ...and then had to be told that the cable you plug into the back of a landline telephone isn't just a power connector. Sadly, I doubt we'll ever know how she thought telephones actually worked.
- Cyberdog 4y agoI think she was playing up most of her zoomerisms during that stream to play off Vesper's boomer character. I think. But who knows.
- vincent-manis 4y ago20mA current loop?
- dreamcompiler 4y agoIt's really not the users' fault. Most civilians understand that computers have to have some way to "remember" their files, but the fact that computers also need memory that "forgets" if the power goes off makes no sense to them. It shouldn't make sense to us either; it's a ridiculous kludge resulting from the fact that we've never figured out how to make memory fast, dense, cheap, and nonvolatile at the same time. Actually Intel did figure it out with Optane. Then they killed it because computer designers couldn't figure out how to build computers without the multilevel memory kludge. IMHO this is the single dumbest thing that happened in computer science in the last ten years.
- mwcampbell 4y agoMy understanding is that the problems with Optane were a lot more complicated than that. @bcantrill and others talked about this on an episode of their Oxide and Friends Twitter space a few weeks ago. A written summary would be nice.
- dreamcompiler 4y agoThanks for the tip. I learned a lot listening to this [0]. My takeway: Optane was good technology that was killed by Intel's thoroughly wrong-headed marketing. It's cheaper than DRAM but more expensive than flash. And much faster than flash, so it makes the fastest SSDs. But those SSDs are too expensive for everybody except niche server farms who need the fastest possible storage. And that's not a big enough market to get the kinks worked out of a new physics technology and achieve economies of scale. Intel thought they knew how to fix that: They sold Optane DIMMs to replace RAM. But they also refused to talk about how it worked, be truthful about the fact that it probably had a limited number of write cycles, or describe even one killer use case. So nobody wanted to trust it with mission-critical data. Worst of all, Intel only made DIMMs for Intel processors that had the controller on the CPU die. ARM? AMD? RISC-V? No Optane DIMMs for you. This was the dealbreaker that made every designer say "Thanks Intel but I'm good with DRAM." As they said on the podcast, Intel wanted Optane to be both proprietary and ubiquitous, and those two things almost never go together. (Well obviously they do. See Apple for example. But the hosts were discussing fundamental enabling technology, not integrated systems.) [0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rip-optane/id1625932222?i=1000576421907 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rip-optane/id162593222...
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> I will, however, leave room for him knowing the difference, but intentionally being absurd (it is Weird Al, after all). This isn't even intentional absurdity. The theme of the song is bragging. Here are some other lyrics. I'm down with Bill Gates I call him "Money" for short I phone him up at home and I make him do my tech support Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great, if you could use a nice heavy paperweight Installed a T1 line in my house Upgrade my system at least twice a day The line about having 100 gigabytes of RAM is completely in keeping with every other part of the song. There's no more reason to think Weird Al might not have known what RAM was than there is reason to believe he didn't know that having Bill Gates do your tech support was unrealistic, or that PCs are rarely upgraded more than once a day.
- nocman 4y ago> There's no more reason to think Weird Al might not have known what RAM was than there is reason to believe he didn't know that having Bill Gates do your tech support was unrealistic I understand why you might argue that, but I've been surprised in the past by people who were fairly-well-versed on computers (no pun intended), but still called hard drive space "memory". I should go listen to that section of the song again (like I said elsewhere, it isn't one of my favorites of his). By intentional absurdity, I meant that I could see Al intending this to be a case of bragging in an absurd way "Defraggin' my hard drive for thrills, I got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM". But now that I noticed the "I" in the middle there (I had missed it before), I'm guessing I was wrong in thinking the lines could be cause-and-effect (which would be the source of the absurdity).
- marcosdumay 4y ago> but still called hard drive space "memory". Well, it is secondary memory. Besides, absolutely, it is memory. It's just not the main memory in a relative context about your computer. In fact, "storage" and "memory" mean about the same thing. And since it's not technically the main or primary memory of our computers anymore, and RAM is actually an implementation detail that all of the in-machine memory shares, I'm not sure I have a good pedantic name for it.
- bdowling 4y agoThe rest of the lyrics make it clear that Weird Al knows exactly what he's talking about. https://genius.com/Weird-al-yankovic-its-all-about-the-pentiums-lyrics https://genius.com/Weird-al-yankovic-its-all-about-the-penti...
- heresie-dabord 4y agoIn this particular song, His Weirdness offers a few timeless observations: > Upgrade my system at least twice a day > What kinda chip you got in there, a Dorito? > You say you've had your desktop for over a week? > Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique!
- fortran77 4y agoWeird Al has an engineering degree from Cal Poly
- nocman 4y agoTo be specific, he has an architecture degree from Cal Poly.
- sterlind 4y agoyeah, the Usenet reference had to have been obscure even back then. and beta-testing OSes back then would been.. what? Windows Neptune and Copeland?
- samplatt 4y agoEh; Debian has been around since '93. I'm sure there were dozens of non-mainstream OS's fighting for nerds' attention by 1999.
- icedchai 4y agoToday, Usenet is obscure. Late 90's was right around when Usenet was at its peak. ISPs back then advertised newsgroups as a feature: "we have a full newsfeed", that sort of thing. I worked at one that built a server with a whopping 9 gigabyte hard drive just for the NNTP feed! That was pretty cutting edge back in 1995.
- bena 4y agoThose lines are separate lines of separate couplets. The lines around it are "Paying the bills with my mad programming skills Defragging my hard drive for thrills Got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM I never feed trolls and I don't read spam" They're not really related to each other besides being right next to each other. The lines rhyme with other lines. Which, if you were trying to link ideas lyrically, is where you'd do it, on the rhyme. But, the entire song is just a litany of various brags centered around technology. It is, like most of Al's work, pretty clever and knowledgeable. Not only of the source material, but of the subject presented.
- nocman 4y agoYeah, I guess it depends on whether you interpret them as separate. It is possible to think of it in a cause-and-effect way "Defragging my hard drive for thrills got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM". Which, honestly, I could see Al saying that as a purposefully absurd statement (because the first could not cause the second, but people brag like that all of the time). I will admit that, although it seems like it should be (given my profession), this is not one of my favorite Weird Al songs --and I've been a fan for decades. So while I have heard it many times, I can't remember the last time I listened to it.
- bena 4y agoThere's really only one interpretation. There's a definite pause between the lines as well. This isn't really a matter of perspective. The only way I can concede that it's possible to read those lines in your way is not particularly flattering to you.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y agoI still tell people that I'm double clickin' on my mizouse.
- qzw 4y agoI’m going to have to stan for Weird Al here and say that there’s basically 0% chance that he didn’t know the difference between RAM and hard drive space. He’s actually quite meticulous in his songwriting and pays a lot of attention to details. And with a mostly (white and) nerdy (ba-dum-tssshhh!) audience he knows he’d never hear the end of it if he screws up. Must be quite the motivator to get things right.
- nocman 4y agoJust to be clear, I did not in any way mean this as disparaging toward Weird Al. I've been a fan of his music for decades. But as I said elsewhere in this thread, I have been surprised in the past by people I would have described as fairly tech-savvy, who still called hard drive space "memory". However, if the two phrases are related (as opposed to just being adjacent in the song), at this point I'd guess Al does probably know the difference, and the relationship is intended to be intentionally over-the-top absurd bragging.
- nicoburns 4y ago> who still called hard drive space "memory" I mean, “memory” in the computer sense is by analogy t memory in the brain sense, which is used for both short and long term storage (and I’d argue more commonly for long term storage). It therefore doesn’t seem unreasonable to me for people to call a computers long term storage it’s “memory”. The function of a hard drive is to remember things.
- bombcar 4y agoCalling a hard drive “memory” can also be left over from very old computers which blurred the distinction between transient and permanent/stable memory.
- 9991 4y agoI consider myself pretty tech savvy and call hard drives memory. HDDs exist in the middle of a memory hierarchy stretching from registers to cloud storage.
- faluzure 4y agoAnother plausible explanation is that `100 Gigabytes of RAM` is more catchy than `100 Megabytes of RAM`
- krallja 4y ago"A thousand megabytes of RAM" has the same meter, and sounds more like an absurd brag than "A hundred gigabytes" even though it's smaller
- Brian_K_White 4y agoI don't think I've ever heard anyone confuse ram and mass storage by saying "ram". All I think I've ever seen is anyone who says "ram" knows what ram is, and people who are fuzzy on it call it all "memory".
- nocman 4y agoYeah, I think that's mostly true. However, I'm sure I have heard a few people use RAM when they meant hard drive space. Though, in fairness, those were probably friends/relatives who used computers but didn't know a lot about how they actually work.
- TakeBlaster16 4y agoI'm 100% sure he knew what he was talking about. That line wouldn't have fit the song if he threw out a reasonable-sounding number for the 90s. > Defragging my hard drive occasionally, when I start to notice drops in i/o performance > I got me 32 megabytes of RAM No thank you.
- int_19h 4y agoConversely, when it comes to mobile devices, RAM is still used in its original meaning, but somehow internal Flash storage became "ROM".
- RunawayGalaxy 4y ago> especially likely, because he's talking about *defragging a hard drive* Can someone explain why this is incorrect? I thought a hard drive is typically what one would defrag
- vlovich123 4y agoThe thing people are discussing is the 100GiB of RAM line. You wouldn’t typically defrag RAM (although that was a thing back then) and 100GiB is more indicative of HD space and not RAM. So the question is whether the two lines are related and did Weird Al say that defragging his disk freed up 100GiB of RAM (an impossible amount at the time) or 100 GiB of storage and got RAM and disk confused.
- seba_dos1 4y ago> and 100GiB is more indicative of HD space and not RAM That's exactly what clearly points to it being about RAM. > So the question is whether the two lines are related There's no reason to think that they're related.
- wodenokoto 4y agoWhat should he have had been talking about defragging? I don’t remember ever defragging anything but my hard drive.
- vanderZwan 4y agoOr the fact that he's "doing it for thrills" implies he doesn't need to because he has mounted his entire file system as a RAM disk.
- ChrisRR 4y agoI think the poster is overthinking it. It was probably just that a gigabyte sounds big, 100 sounds big. Therefore, 100 gigs
- seba_dos1 4y ago> the other plausible explanation It's not really plausible in the context of those lyrics.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]