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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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I think the main point is all the other (technical) brags are quite quaintly outdated (T1 lines are glacial by todays standard, while interestingly the lines about how quickly hardware becomes obsolete have become less accurate over time), on the other hand 100GB of RAM is still quite extreme.

I don't know how extreme I'd consider it; 64GB of RAM is relatively common and 128GB is just one step up from that.

I'd say it differently: 64Gb ram is easily purchasable and 128 isn't much harder - just $$$.

But to my knowledge not many purchase it. As the article says, the defaults for new items on the main vendors are still 8 or 16. I suspect most could be happy with 32GB for the next 3 years but that isn't a default.

64 Gb is a high-end desktop these days. But most desktops aren't high-end, and most PCs these days aren't desktops.

IIRC the point about T1 lines are their availability + uptime + bandwidth guarantees, but yea they're not so hot anymore from the ubiquity of other high performance networking alternatives.

This was an active topic of debate back in the days when people still relied on modems. T1 gives you 1.544 mpbs "bandwidth" but the fact that it's "guaranteed" bandwidth means it should be fast enough for anything you'd need to do as an individual user. If you had your own private T1 line all to yourself, the latency should feel the same as being on the same local LAN as whatever service you're trying to access. Even a 56k modem still had a small but noticeable latency, especially if you're doing command-line where you expect echo-back on each character you type.

People don't really understand the speed vs. bandwidth debate, but they do know the psychological difference when latency is low enough to be unnoticeable.

> 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).

> 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.

> RAM is actually an implementation detail that all of the in-machine memory shares

Nope. A pagefile is random-access memory backed by your sequential-access hard drive (or, hey, maybe your random-access SSD) instead of your "RAM".

I mean... My computer has a device called RAM that communicates with the north bridge by a protocol where sequential readings have lower latency than random ones. It also has a device called disk (or sometimes drive), that has nothing shaped like a disk (and is never loaded), and communicates with the north bridge by a protocol where sequential readings have lower latency than random ones.

At the CPU side, there is an in-package device that communicates with the memory controller by a protocol where sequential readings have lower latency than random ones. It communicates with an in-die device, that finally communicates with the CPU with a protocol that provides random access. That last one is obviously not called "RAM".

> I'm guessing I was wrong in thinking the lines could be cause-and-effect

This is the root cause of why everyone is arguing with you. For some reason, TFA quotes the defrag line and the RAM line as if they are somehow paired, which you've also latched onto, but it makes no sense to consider them as a pair. Many lines in this song are to be interpreted as their own complete thought. And if we really want to pair up consecutive lines, wouldn't we use lines that rhyme to do so?

...

Nine to five, chillin' at Hewlett Packard? // Workin' at a desk with a dumb little placard?

Yeah, payin' the bills with my mad programming skills // Defraggin' my hard drive for thrills

I got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM // I never feed trolls and I don't read spam

Installed a T1 line in my house // Always at my PC, double-clickin' on my mizouse

...

Yeah, that's fair.

As I said before, this is not one of my favorite Weird Al songs (many of which I could sing along with word-for-word from memory). I was never crazy about the song, so I am not surprised that I didn't know the surrounding context (which the original article left out). Still, I don't think you can exclude the possibility of a cause-and-effect relationship spanning the middle of two rhyming lines (perhaps particularly, in rap music), but after seeing and hearing the lines in context, I don't think that was Al's intention here.

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