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Comment by nocman | Hacker News Reader

> 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).

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> 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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