The only rule was was to use ALL of the 700mb. I paid for that 800k, you bet your ass I’m gonna use it.
I remember trying different combinations of songs on my mixtapes to make sure I got full value.
I still do this when copying files to hard drives for backup/archival. Personally like to call it digital tetris.
There was a program call “Nero burning ROM”. A pun I understood much later
Ah fuck, I remember Nero, and I know why it is called Nero (because Nero and the burning of rome), but I never connect the ROM to ROME.
The logo was literally the colosseum on fire…
Oh I know about that, just the connection of Rom and Rome.
Ah, ok. Makes even more sense knowing that Nero is a German company, and the city is literally spelled Rom in German.
Exact same sentiment. Mind blown
Well fuck me, that’s a name I haven’t heard for close to 20 years and it didn’t twig until just now.
CD’s? HA! When I was young we copied music with hammer and chisel on a stone disc. And that WAS the actual music!
I like that this would technically be possible using the same principal as vinyl records. I want a record made of stone. That would be dope.
you had a tiny needle and a little hammer, and you would look through a jeweler’s loupe to see where to carve in the 1s and the 0s. It was a golden age.
It was a nuisance, with a high failure rate. Recording to tape was kind of fun. Optical not as much.
I thought the failure rate only went up a lot if you burned at very high speeds? I seem to remember having problems with burning an OS to a DVD too fast.
Depends on your drive and the media. Modern drives in good shape with any media will have like a 90%+ success rate. I don’t think my MacBook has ever had a failed burn that wasn’t because the disc was pre scratched. But older drives, and older media were sometimes a lot less reliable.
Sometimes modern stuff sucks too. The drive in my desktop will fail to burn a CD 100% of the time if I burn it at high speeds, but only because it’s shit and the disk falls of the spindle.
But I’ve got some ancient drives that still burn reliably at their highest speed. Mid 2000s was probably peak of CD and DVD burning reliability, and that’s why I use machines from then to do all my burning,
Was it high? It’s anecdotal, but I feel like I burned hundreds to thousands and had very few failures.
Yea, I’m with you. But I also made sure I bought good media.
I don’t know how film is developed and nobody ever made fun of me for not knowing.
You weren’t taught this in high school?
…no?
I know how film is developed now due to curious YouTubers who love connecting technology, but I didn’t before then.
Haha, i think I watched the same video but got lost pretty quickly
I did, but only because I took an elective film development class.
Yikes, I’m old too.
We didn’t do any actual film development, but we were taught about the process and the chemistry involved in chemistry class.
I developed film by hand in elementary school but it’s only because I had an elected position that included taking school photos. A staff member taught me how to do it and kept all of the supplies stocked.
You make it sound like all older people knew. I work in IT and most users, regardless of age, do not know anything about computers. They don’t know how to navigate file systems, they don’t know where they saved anything, they don’t even know what the recycle bin is sometimes.
I once had a user plug a power strip into itself and then didn’t understand why there was no power.
Hell, they don’t even know how to read. I lost track of how many times I had this conversation:
“There’s an error message on my screen.”
“What does it say?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s an error message on my screen.”
“What does it say?”
“I don’t know.”
This was painful to read. I’m a developer and have colleagues who can’t read. “It failed! It says that I need to clear all changes before I can branch, how can I fix this?” “Well clear the changes and then branch”. It’s just learnes helplessness, people want to sit back and let someone else do the thinking.
I work in IT, and nothing against you, but a bunch of devs do write horrible, useless error messages. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an error message that just says “an error has occurred” and you’re left to figure out what error.
For example, I have a smart air purifier that absolutely refuses to connect to my WiFi for some reason. You have to do the stupid ad-hoc/direct connection from your phone’s app to the device, then the device connects to WiFi. I follow all the steps on the app, it fails and then just says " an error has occurred, please try again.", it worked fine on my parents WiFi though!
I have a Canon printer that is WiFi enabled (also has USB) and it’s the same thing. I tried using their damn app on Android, OS X, Linux, and Windows and it would just be like “An error has occurred”.
I work in IT, and nothing against you, but a bunch of devs do write horrible, useless error messages. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an error message that just says “an error has occurred” and you’re left to figure out what error.
If the error message is that stupid, I’m 100% with you. I suspect that’s the result of a direct instruction to developers to dumb down the messages to avoid creating distress in users, which is idiotic.
However, final users in a corporate environment should be taught that if they get a message with a lot of information, and they don’t understand that information, it’s not for them, and they need to leave it alone or take precise notes of what the message says, so somebody from IT who does understand it can act on it. But most users act like the error message is radioactive or they’re participating in a competition of who can dismiss the message faster: when support asks about the error, they say hey don’t know because they have dismissed it.
Almost every finished product I’ve seen has a generic error message like that which makes it extremely frustrating when you’re technical and actually want to attempt to fix the problem. I had the same issue with a WiFi connected Canon printer. As a dev myself, I know how difficult it can be to write a useful error message for every edge case, but it’s not that difficult to be a bit helpful lol
Regarding users hatred of error messages: when I worked in my University’s computer lab about 15 years ago a student complained that she couldn’t download a file. I went with her to see what the issue was and had her show me what she was doing. She’d attempt to download the file, quickly dismiss a pop-up, and then angrily say “see?! It’s not working!!”. I told her to do it again, but not dismiss the pop-up so quickly so I could see what it said. Of course, it was asking for permission to save the file to the HDD and she kept clicking “no” 🤦♂️
I told her to do it again, but not dismiss the pop-up so quickly so I could see what it said.
I shit you not, I’ve had a user do worse.
I’ve done the same exact scenario as you with one difference. I told her the same thing you did. And then. She closed the message again. While I was pointing at it, and asking her to read it out loud.
I.
Pointed. At the screen. And said read this out loud.
She moved her mouse to my finger.
And closed the message.
I.
Can’t.
Hahaha for some people it’s just a habit I guess.
Or for some, like my mom, it’s learned helplessness. She always misplaces her phone and keys (not because of dementia or something like that, just lack of attention) so my brother bought her one the Bluetooth tracking tags (air tags, but for Android). Since I work in tech, I’m always the one to set everything up. She said “Set it up for me, I don’t wanna know how to use it…” as if it required zero user input after I had set it up 🤦♂️ I just looked at her and said "… if you lose you keys and need to track them down, how do you expect to find them?!”
She said “Set it up for me, I don’t wanna know how to use it…”
The only proper answer to this is Then I won’t do it. We’re done. Don’t ask me again.
“There’s an error message on my screen.”
“What does it say?”
“I don’t know.”
“I just clicked it off. But I need this to work, I’m late on my project. Can’t you just fix it without asking me all this technical stuff?”
You’re in the same boat I am. I’m doing IT support and one user couldn’t navigate their file system to save their life. They almost exclusively used “file open” dialogs to get to their files. They seemed to have zero understanding that using word’s open file dialog to open a PDF file with Adobe, was strange.
It broke my brain for a minute watching it all unfold. So much so that I didn’t even try to correct their methods. I was just like, “okay”, and moved on.
It’s not like the person was new, or a temp worker or anything. They were middle aged, and had used that exact system for years in this manner, and saw nothing wrong with how they did things… Look, if it gets the job done, okay, and that’s probably the main reason I shut up about it, but the way they were doing it was so backwards and slow… They definitely were not stupid, they at least had some level of university and they were working in a legal field. They just did not “get” that there’s a much better way to accomplish the tasks they were doing and had no interest in figuring it out more than they already had.
Definitely one of the more painful moments of my career, but certainly not the only demonstration of how people are willfully ignorant when it comes to computers and technology.
I hate hearing “I don’t know computers” or “I’m not very good with technology” … You use it every day. There’s some fundamental that you should have picked up by now. Being “bad” with technology is not an excuse. An infant is bad at walking, then they learn and figure it out, which is more than I can say about you Janice.
They don’t know how to navigate file systems
that’s a thing we see with gen z especially nowadays, because of the advent of tag-based file management in iOS.
To be fair, there has been people unable to navigate file systems at all times.
Well, my computer knowledge extends back to some form of MS-DOS when I was 4 years old. Back then, you either knew how to operate a command line interface or you didn’t know how to actually use a computer to do anything on your own.
Now the entire world uses computers for almost every single job. And yet, we live in a time where people are not proficient with the tools they are using to live and work.
If your mechanic said, “I’m not much of a wrench person” you’d take your car elsewhere.
If your typical office worker said, “I’m not much of a computer person” , 90% of their colleagues would nod, grin, and say “I know right! Computers are so dumb! So hard to use!”
I used CloneCD. It had an icon of a sheep. Because Dolly.
The household tower when I was young had 2 CD drives. The actual computer wasn’t much, but boy, do I remember all the burning my mom had me do for her peoples
I wanna get a DVD/CD Rom drive in my PC, not because I need one because honestly it feels weird not having one
I have an external one around here somewhere. I’ve used it maybe once or twice, but I just like having it.
Do you even know how to format a 3.5” floppy?
Yeah I’m not gonna lie this is me. I’ve burned iso’s to CDs before but I really not get it. The cds I had could only be burned once and then got write protected and I didn’t know how to undo to. I’m just gonna stick with my flash drives
They’re not “write-protected”, they’re literally a write-once medium. The name “burner” isn’t a metaphore, that’s actually what they do.
Tbf there are absolutely rewritable CDs and DVDs:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-RW
Though compatibility with regular players was a bit of a crapshoot.
That’s true. CD-RW “burners”, to keep accurate phrasing would’ve been well described as “melters”. They melted the medium, and erasing it was just melting it back.
I still miss them, so convienent in the mid 2000s era cars that could play CDs loaded with decent quality MP3s.
But I remember you could only do it X times before you’d actually be able to corrupt your data. Never had that happen, but it always felt a bit scary.
To be fair, practically every medium from tape to HDD to SSD has a limit. But CD-RW was a lot more vulnerable to data loss in my memory.
Oh haha, I didn’t know that
CD-R vs CD-RW.
Don’t worry, even in Gen Alpha there are some people who know how to burn CDs (in theory), but probably never did, as it is not so widespread now.
I never learned to burn CD’s cause I had a friend whose dad burned them for us. Not sure if that makes anyone feel old or not.
When I was a kid I had two radios.
One with a cassette player in it that had a mic built in for recording. I found it in the trash.
The other was a small FM/AM alarm clock that was dangerously hot at all times and had a noise as it was an analog clock with the little cards that flipped and the such. My opa gave it to me when he said it got too hot for his liking.
It was not long before I had figured out that if I played the radio really loud on the clock, the cassette mic would record the songs onto whatever tape you had. Be it blank, or with tape over the security gaps on the top, any tape will do.
Hardest part was the timing to start and stop the tape. And making sure you were in as close to total silence as possible as the mic picked everything up.
Even if the hot buzz of the alarm clock motor fighting to flip into the next set of minutes would make it on the tape, the recording/welfare piracy continued. It was the sneezing/siblings walking in/parents making ugly sounds that were the worst as you’d have to stop the tape, rewind to the part of the tape you were using, and wait for the radio station to play the song again, so you might be able to try and tape it again.
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