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Comment by qzw | Hacker News Reader

I’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.

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He even mentions hard drive space separately, as something comparable to removable storage:

You could back up your whole hard drive on a floppy diskette

You're the biggest joke on the Internet

I can only conclude that he did understand the distinction between RAM and hard drive space. The song is full of jokes that show a deep understanding of the topic. Indeed I don't find any nits to pick.

Also, taken in context, telling somebody their whole HDD fits in a floppy is entirely consistent with bragging about your entirely unreal 100 gigs of RAM.

Just 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.

> 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.

Calling a hard drive “memory” can also be left over from very old computers which blurred the distinction between transient and permanent/stable memory.

I 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.

You're not wrong, they are a kind of memory. I think more people would understand you if you call RAM memory and HDDs and SDDs storage though.

It goes the other way too, RAM is a type of storage, which is the terminology IBM uses (and I think has used since the 60s or so).

Memory is where you store data

I don’t really care if the unwashed masses understand me.

Do you call them RAM, though?

Never thought about it before, but I guess SSDs are random access, so it would be technically correct to call them RAM, and that’s my favorite kind of correct.

Jumping on the nitpick train: SSDs are less randomly write-access memory because of the requirement to explicitly erase an entire block before you can rewrite it. RAM doesn't have this constraint. It has other constraints, like writing and refreshing rows at a time, but combined with the difference in erase cycles causing wear in flash, you do end up with a significant difference in just how randomly you can access these memories.

SRAM is the only type of memory offering true random access. DRAM can suffer so much on pure random access that completely rewriting your algorithm to have mostly sequential access to 20x more memory still ends up 4x faster (lean miner vs mean miner in [1]).

[1] https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo

Well as long as we are nitpicking: random access does not say anything about the block size - you're not going to be writing individual random bits whith any kind of memory. And random access also does not say that all blocks have the same access time, only that the time does not depend on what you have accessed previously. In conclusion, an array of spinning rust drives is random access memory.

My mother calls the entire computer "hard drive", leftover from old newspapers in the 90'ies.

Yep. Most faculty/staff where I work either call a desktop computer a "hard drive" or a "CPU".

Windows 95/98 labelled HDD space as "Memory" so it's unsurprising that that's common.

That's why I always had to make sure to say "RAM" when I meant memory in the 90s.

>> Windows 95/98 labelled HDD space as "Memory" so it's unsurprising that that's common.

Where did it do that?

> I have been surprised in the past by people I would have described as fairly tech-savvy, who still called hard drive space "memory".

That's not really incorrect, though. RAM is random access memory, as opposed to memory that has other access patterns.

It's less common these days, but among people who learned to use computers in the 80s, you'll still hear some use "memory" to refer to storage that isn't RAM.

He didn’t say “memory” - he said RAM! Why? Because it’s funnier and it rhymes with spam! Plus “hard drive space” is three syllables. It’s a song not a README, sheesh

It’s a SINGME not a README

I like the idea of adding SINGME files to my repos from now on

RAM is just cache for your drive. And these days your drive is just cache for the internet. It’s all memory, one big memory.

Most of the time, my RAM directly caches the internet. (Ie when I watch YouTube or browse the web, stuff doesn't typically go on disk.)

RAM is NOT cache for your drive. It's the active work space where the CPU tracks all the bits and bobs of executing code - state, variables, etc.

Swap space on disk is a cache of RAM, if you want to go down that path - but RAM and disk support entirely different purposes.

Or, swap (and hibernate) are the RAM cache flushing to disk. ;)

| basically 0% chance

lost credibility here

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