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Admin
click-and point? point FIRST!
Admin
Customer in mid-90s didn't know which way up a CD-ROM should be inserted into a drive? Wow, how WFTy. I'm an incredibly un-fun person, as my handle implies.
Admin
TRWTF is that he didn't try to insert the disc vertically.
Admin
But in Robocop 2 he has read the disk by keeping shining side up and actually looking at it ...
Admin
Dunno what you're talking about. It goes in vertically in my machine.
Admin
"But in Robocop 2 he has read the disk by keeping shining side up and actually looking at it ..." which is actually correct.
Admin
If this was a story from 2005, then I could understand the WTF. But in the mid-90s, it's conceivable that a lot of people had never seen a CD before, and really didn't know which way to put it in the tray.
Admin
So now they're using helpdesk stories as "Feature articles". Next time it'll be the one about the user with the retractable coffee holder.
Admin
At least he didn't insert it between two empty 5.25 trays.
Admin
Perhaps we have reached the end of WTF land. Looks at job nope, not here..
Admin
You mean I put it in the cup-holder? who knew?
And there was remote desktop software back then, they just weren't using it/didn't know about it. I certainly was, although it would still only lead you to conclude the disk is faulty.
Not sure what the installer has to do with it either ... VB4 or otherwise, the auto-launch feature being disabled or a PEBKAC user cancelling the install would be a problem with anything, that's only resolved with decent instructions. Perhaps.
2/5 on the yawn index. Must try harder.
Admin
Indeed, because audio CDs totally didn't exist as a medium of music distribution until 1994. Er. Um. No, they had existed like that for at least 12 years before the mid-90s (depending on exactly when you think the "mid-90s" actually begin(1)).
(1) I'd generally tag "early 90s" as 90-93, "mid" as 94-96, and "late" as 97-99.
Admin
Yes, it had. But not everybody had progressed from LPs and cassettes. Almost all people would know what a CD was, and most would have a player, but by no means all. Just as today, most people would have handled an iPAD before, but by no means everybody automatically knows which side the home button should go on.
Admin
CDs look a lot more magically than they are. Pretty much, they are just plastic lids with very very fine precision machining. The reflective foil is just a sticker.
A clever invention made by the great Japanese society, a representative gift from the Emperor to the sleeping giant, in hopes we won't hit them a third time!
In my opinion, we should have dropped a third bomb after the peace treaty on Tokyo just for good measure! Would have saved a lot more lives over the long run!
Don't want bombs? Don't bomb Pearl Harbor!!!!
Admin
Remote desktop kind of requires a network connection. It was the mid-90's. Most people didn't have it at home, and most small businesses didn't have it at work.
I'm an engineer and I didn't get internet (dial-up at that) at home until about 2001. Where my wife worked at the time (small business), they got it in about 2002.
Admin
Shiny Side North or Shiny Side South?
Admin
The title and the image on this article spoil pretty hard what the punchline's going to be.
Admin
You assume there is something worth spoiling.
Admin
North of course, whaddaya think I am, some kinda weirdo?
Admin
Japanese? The CD was invented by Philips, a Dutch company.
Admin
The Unreliable Source claims that CD sales outstripped vinyl around 1988 and cassettes around 1992, so in 1994-1996, most people would at the very least know which way up they went. But anyway, the claim that a lot of people would not know which way up they went is clearly questionable. "Some" people, I'd buy, for small values of "some", but not "a lot".
Well, in raw numbers, maybe, but not fractionwise.
Admin
This one is a bit suspect. I'm pretty sure you'd see an error if you put the CD in the wrong way up, not just an empty drive.
Admin
Ah, customer service. The company position that will teach a junior tech 1) how to think of novel solutions to strange problems and 2) patience. Many of us have so many personal anecdotes to emphasize each point. Even in more recent times (like last year!) I have clients that do not understand why performing Windows Update is important or why you can't just pull the USB memory stick out of the computer without going to the system try and telling the computer to eject the stick first, even after YEARS of explaining.
Admin
My experience is that the drive knows immediately that the CD is upside-down, and won't even spin it up. This is an important distinction, and notably affects double-sided DVDs, where both sides are shiny, but the disk still works only one way up.
Admin
Have you experimented to see this? When you put a single-sided CD/DVD in a CD/DVD drive upside down, the drive spins it up and tries to read the disc header for the info about it. Since it is on the other side of the disc from where the head is reading, the header is not found, so the drive figures there really isn't a CD/DVD in there and says the drive is effectively empty. This will also happen if you stick a DVD in a strictly CD player; the header information does not make sense to the CD player so it says the drive is empty.
Admin
Correct me if wrong, but removing your USB stick while a file transfer is occurring will corrupt your data, however if no transfers are being done then nothing happens. The eject just forces windows to stop any transfers.
Admin
Someone who asks if you put the data side up like a "gramophone" record (heh heh- grandma-phone) probably doesn't own a CD player. Thus, it's likely they wouldn't know how to operate a CD player even if they knew about CDs and had seen them.
Admin
My PC doesn't even have a CD-Rom-drive anymore, so I guess there won't be any more "you put it in the wrong way!"-stories in the future.
With USB sticks (pre 3.0) you at least know that, no matter what, you will try to plug it in the wrong way first time you try. Then you turn it around to find out that, nope, THIS is actually the wrong way, so you turn it around AGAIN and then it suddendly fits.
Admin
For sure, but that doesn't mean that such people were in the majority in the mid-90s.
Admin
Nor does mine, unless you mean "generic shiny-biscuit drive", which would include my Blu-Ray writer.
Admin
The only reason this is necessary is that the drive is not configured as removable. (Removable drive caching is write-through, while fixed disk caching is write-back, and the "eject drive" thing forces the system to flush "dirty" sectors to the drive.)
Write-back caching "looks" faster, but delays the actual write-back, so for certain "common" tasks it will feel much slower, especially if you forget to do the "eject".
So in a way, these people are right. The copy has finished, so there is no reason(1) for the eject to be necessary.
(1) Apart from some nerdly gibberish about cash and money laundering that has nothing to do with the cat video I saved on the USB drive.
Admin
I'd think that the WTF was the "little icon that was lying". Oh well...
Admin
I remember the US sending a "nano" wire to Japan as proof our tech was better. They drilled holes in it and sent it back!
All big tech starts there. They are crazy.
Also I think they invented the 3-1/2" Floppy to fit inside the pocket of a dress shirt!
Admin
https://gaijinlife.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/seal-of-the-emperor.jpg
Admin
https://www.snopes.com/business/genius/wire.asp
Admin
Admin
Hey I never lie! That's what so great about me!
A Psycotropic Theory of Everything for the Spontaneous Generation of the Big Bang actually works! Just ask an anthropologist! They know. They just keep getting Ike Turner'ed by a closet full of Hitler clones!
Not only does it work, but if we are going to do something cool, like this: https://www.braininitiative.nih.gov/?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1
You need it!
Smarter people than me are working on the "logistics" of such things. Meanwhile, I'm going sit back, do MY work, and maybe, oh I don't know, every once awhile chase around a coed???
Admin
https://twitter.com/fun_stevehawkin/status/966359640517857281
Admin
VB 4. Back before IntelliSense.
Admin
@spaceman wrote: CDs look a lot more magically than they are. Pretty much, they are just plastic lids with very very fine precision machining. The reflective foil is just a sticker.
no, the shinyness is an integral part of the way they work, a laser beam reflects off it and the different distances between the pit and surface is measured using destructive interference: http://www.hk-phy.org/articles/cdrom/cdrom_e.html
Admin
Yes, but most people think they are magic, like cut from a prism. When you see what they really are, it's just more cheap plastic from Asia!
Admin
Fermi, we look farther and farther into space, no intelligence. Likely not even bacteria. What's up with that?
Admin
Fast-forward to 2016(ish) when companies (Microsoft) with bloated software (Windows 10) assume that everyone has fast Internet and unlimited bandwidth. Next time send my the DVD please.
And while I'm ranting, just because you download updates, that does not make the operating system "as a service". Maybe the updates are a service, but the OS is still loaded onto and running on my workstation. And I'd like to keep it that way.
Admin
Pre USB3.1 devices exist in a state of quantum superposition. They will, usually, remain in a state where they cannot be plugged in until you actually look at the plug thus making an observation and invoking the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principal corollary which locks the plug into one of it's quantum states. The USB plug will remain in this quantum state as long as it is plugged in, and for an indeterminate time after being removed. USB Type A plugs have 2 possible quantum states, whereas USB Type B plugs have 4 possible quantum states.
Admin
It doesn't help that if you look at ads showing a CD-ROM drive, there's a CD in it that is shiny side up. To a lot of people, that is supposed to be the way the CD is in the tray.
Even ads for CD players show the audio CD with the data side up.
Of course, this was to hide whatever label was on the CD, but to a lot of people, it certain looks like it should go in that way, because all the pictures you see of CD-ROM drives and CD players show discs going in that way.
Admin
More like, everything is a CD-ROM, whether it's shiney or not. Just depends on your required bandwidth and signal integrity.
Does the extra electron come from the light emitter, the graphene, or the your very own eye itself, due to the high number of packets needed to be transversed for such an observation at a high resolution of the photon?
Do waves really exist? Recent experiments studying the photon suggest it's just particles. That's it. No special sauce. And you really can't tell if they are spontaneously generated, or they are just bouncing around so fast you can never really "catch" them.
Does any of it really matter, matter enough for gatekeepers of science to keep throwing humanity down into the abyss?
From our anthropological standpoint, does it really matter? I just don't want to die!
I don't want to proseltyze biblical anthropology. I don't want to tilt the scales of the great debate one way or another. I don't want to be famous from this stuff. I just want to make sure one of the evil murderers from Mindhunter doesn't think what I thought of before anyone else! It's a burden and I have kids to think of!
You should not read biblical scripture to understand or judge or even redeem. You should read it with a Fabian strategy in mind. How can this be unleashed! Maybe it's been unleashed already!!!
Admin
Um, mid-90's customer portal? You mean not enough customers had dialup let alone knew how to download from the vendor's FTP server.
And yeah, some people didn't know the coffee-cup holder had other purposes.
Admin
The outfit I was working for in the mid-90s had remote access, via dial-up. The main computer at each site had a cash drawer attached, and a Travan TR-1 tape drive. So my boss, while remote-controlling a computer, got the staff member at the remote location to bend down to listen to the tape drive (this was pretty plausible, as you could actually diagnose some tape drive faults this way), and then hit the key for "open the cash drawer". Bam. Whacked the guy on the other side of the continent in the head with the cash drawer.
Admin
Dear mod,
If you're going to change my comments significantly, please don't introduce spelling errors. It makes both of us look stupid.
Best,
No fun
Admin
Ah those good old days when I asked a client to send me a copy of a certain floppy and received a photocopy... guess my instructions were not clear enough.