There was a program call “Nero burning ROM”. A pun I understood much later
Well fuck me, that’s a name I haven’t heard for close to 20 years and it didn’t twig until just now.
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.
Emperor Nero is rumored to have cause the great fire of Rome in 64 AD that burned over 2/3rds of the city
Did he cause the fire, or did a fire happen while he was the leader and he completely ignored it?
ok I never thought I would need this info about CD burning but this is genuinely a cool revelation about my childhood
I still have a copy of Nero Express on a DVD in my bookcase.
Not that I use it very much - if I ever need to burn an iso Ill use xfburn or brasero or something like that, as I run Linux now. It’s more if I need to burn data onto disk’s to get it off an older PC.
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.
Quck note on that, many smart devices have trouble with wifi if the 2,4 ghz and 5 ghz have the same name. Rename the one of the two and it mostly works.
I work in IT, at my second full-time job at a small financial firm in Manhattan I would get at least 2-4 tickets a day that said “my computer doesn’t work, please take a look” and 90% of the time it was one of two issues:
-
The tower was off but the monitors were on
-
The tower was on but the monitors were off
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Occasionally it was the Display Port to HDMI dongle became dislodged or bent which stopped the PC from POSTing (of course I didn’t blame them for this one)
These people were in their 40s and didn’t know how to press a fucking power button even though they had been using the same computer for years. Some would even say “I know the monitors are on because I see the yellow lights on it, but when I move the mouse nothing happens!”. After about a month of this I would just say “Hi”, press the power button, and then walk away shaking my head. This was in like 2016.
My dad was an electrician by trade and he would always tell me a story about how he was working at a nuclear power plant that was being built in the early 90s and the engineers didn’t know how to turn on the PCs they worked on every day and he would have to show them.
Not PC related, but I was a service technician for a company that sold ice cream machines and I had this one call that I’ll never forget… This woman has a store built for her, we just came come to train her on how to use the machines (the important bit for this being a switch: day mode and night mode.) When you leave for the day you switch to night mode and when you come back you set it to day mode so it freezes. She calls us saying all the ice cream is too soft and almost liquid. She never switched from night to day… Like it’s one step. Only one step. You come in and flip the switch from night to day lol
I felt terrible about having to charge her for it but I had no control over that.
I’m glad to hear you say ‘regardless of age’ as it really isn’t a generation thing. I’ve met people younger than myself and I’ve had to help them navigate some basic computer stuff. it doesn’t make it easier when they get very frustrated and transfer all their anger of computers at me like I alone have created computers everywhere to annoy everyone. “WHY ARE THESE LIKE THIS.??”
It feels like we just got past teaching the population that gender doesn’t matter when it comes to using computers and it’s like we have to go through all of it again to teach the population age doesn’t matter either.
You will find people of your own generation who really hate technology. they exist everywhere and you really see it when you’re in a support role. Maybe you didn’t meet them today but it doesn’t mean they aren’t out there bugging the heck out of someone else right now what with refusing to read some super basic error message or not remembering their own password.
Back in the early 2010s I was helping a girl at my University’s computer lab that I worked at that didn’t know how to print from Microsoft Office. Granted it was like a year or so after they hid everything behind that stupid button in the upper right hand corner, but still…
Hell, i run Linux on everything and I hate technology, there are just so many helpful guides and everything is so easy to fix, until it isn’t…
So funny story I recently remembed a situation in my early years of running Ubuntu 8.04(I miss the old gnome days), I spent MONTHS trying to get an ir remote to do various things on the computer(play/pause vlc, run apt-get, whatever random shit I thought of at the time) only for the whole thing to never pan out, the recent realization that I had tried to do such a useless thing(it was a laptop) and spent too many night frustrated in tears made me laugh.
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.
tag-based file management in iOS.
Could you clarify what this means? I’ve never used an iPhone, so I’m not familiar with how they handle files.
Do they not use folders?
It sounds similar to what google does where it uses a tag for categorizing instead of physical movement of a file into a folder system. Handy for exclusive use if everything exists for one purpose on the one os that uses it. An absolute pain in the ass when you need to conveniently back stuff up or require compatibility.
file management up until very recently was very basic and even now is very limited. there is no access to any files that apps use besides downloads from Chrome and whatnot.
there isn’t really a downloads folder per se, only a downloads section. besides that, files can be tagged to help find them and folders are just something deemed unnecessary. everything is just saved into a “space”. there is no implication that there is a root directory of sorts, only a space where files are and you let the phone search for it.
when you save pictures from a website, there is an option to save as image, but in the photo gallery, there is an option to save it into the files app, implying that files and photos are different things. you can’t access photos from the files app, you HAVE to access them from the photos app. this one really frustrates me.
I have only used iOS in the days where the iPhone 6S was relavant and never went back, so do correct me if anything I said was wrong.
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!”
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.
Flashbacks to a few months ago when Adobe Reader pushed out an update that changed how the menu looks and I had an employee freaking out telling me he was “trying to do my PDFs, and it won’t let me”… All because the menu didn’t say “file” anymore, it was just 3 horizontal lines (and still in the exact same spot…). It took me like 10 minutes to understand what the hell he was trying to tell me his problem was, as he points to an open PDF document and tells me the computer won’t let him “do his PDFs”…
I know it’s fun to complain/rant about users, but to most people, computers are just a tool. You and I would probably agree that a good tradesman learns his tools intimately, but that’s because our jobs are mechanically focused, so it’s a requirement. People who work jobs like accountant can maybe be bothered to learn one application well and that’s really due to a lack of training or education, you can’t expect people to learn secondary skills unless they’re led. I’ve been able to train the worst of users into people that can troubleshoot their own issues, though there are always users that say “idk, you’re the one who needs to fix it” because in their minds we’re impeding their progress. But most of the time users don’t want to call helpdesk either if they can avoid it.
It’s always a good idea to practice your soft skills with difficult customers and be compassionate because they don’t go away the more you climb the ladder, you just have to deal with them less frequently. Something that someone once told me many 10+ years ago when I was starting my career was that were it not for the users/customers, we wouldn’t have a job to complain about.
Yep. I definitely agree that if users knew everything, there’s basically no need for the admin team. Most of us would be unemployed.
I’m not trying to say they are a burden, it is simply confounding that someone who works on computers every day for work, who needs to get into network drives and open everything from word to excel to PDF, and so much more, doesn’t even have the ability to competently navigate the file system using Explorer.
The only thing that I cannot abide is the willfully ignorant crowd, who will refuse to listen at every turn.
We have an error message in our software. Basically telling the user that the device they’re connecting to isn’t there.
Over time, I can see all the additions that the developer has been told to make. Check the USB cable, check the power cable, make sure the device itself hasn’t got an error message on it, to restart it, etc.
Not one of these additions has reduced the number of support calls, because nobody reads anything. And in fact adding more lines to the message probably makes it even less likely they will do so.
Look at all these rich people in the comments with their car stereos that could play CD-RW. Some of us were lucky to have one that would play CD-R 80% of the time, and it was completely brand agnostic.
MP3 cds blew my mind and that’s what made me understand the difference between analog and digital in regard to files and music.
How can there be 100 songs on some cds and only 12 on others? Well that’s why.
I got a Sony CDP once that wouldn’t play burned CDs. Not sure if it was a hardware issue with that one CDP, or if it affected the model itself. I returned it and got a different one and it works with burned CDs. To this day it’s a mystery
Sony did a lot to develop drm for disc’s. I bet not playing burned disc’s was an intentional design decision.
I had one of these bad boys for work, its a Sony.
It could play mp3 CDRW discs. It was an amazing device.
To be fair, CD/DVD burning peaked and declined extremely quickly in comparison to most other media technology. We went from nobody having a CD burner to most people ditching DVDs for blu ray and/or streaming in what, 15 years?
Burning cd’s for ripped movies/pirated games was mostly obsoleted by super cheap & huge hard drives, in combination with piracy mainly transitioning to downloads over the internet idue to increased bandwidth and removed caps (instead of physical sharing of medi). Price per byte for HDD storage decreased 1000x between 1995-2008. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage?time=1995..latest
Burning for cd audio/MP3 was obsoleted in favor of MP3 players/ipod and later the smartphone.
Funny anecdote; my friend’s mother referred to the cd burner as “the cd crusher” in the late 90’s, I guess it’s easy to mix up the terms if one is oblivious to the fact that the information is burned into the disc by a laser.
Burning for cd audio/MP3 was obsoleted in favor of MP3 players/ipod and later the smartphone.
For a short while, you could get CD players that also played MP3s burned onto a CD-R. You could put a ton of MP3s on one CD-R. I had lots of BBC radio dramas on them. All lost now, sadly. And there doesn’t seem to be anyone archiving them anymore despite daily dramas.
I recently purchased an old Toyota from 2009, which had the TOTL audio system including an MP3 compatible cd player and Bluetooth (voice/phone-only). I ended up using the cd tray as a slot for a phone holder, and use a Bluetooth LDAC dongle connected to the AUX input. But I’m gonna burn an old school MP3 cd and leave it in the glove box for a rainy day :)
Don’t forget USB sticks and file storage services like DropBox.
CD burning was mostly dead by the mid-to-late naughties. Streaming came later.
Not really, I still had plenty of people who used CDs up until 2010 at least.
There’s going to be some variance depending on how a person tends to listen to their music. I think the decline of CDs correlates pretty well with digital options being available, and people making the switch. There’s always going to be people at the head of the pack using the new thing and people that want to save costs by keeping what they’ve got. The accessory market affects that too, there was overlap when people would have portable digital music players, but still use optical disks for their home stereo and vehicles. But as manufacturers came out with solutions like iPod docks or Bluetooth streaming the digital devices were able to push out the physical media.
USB flash drives took way longer to catch on than most people remember, thanks to how ubiquitous they are now. It took ages for them to become large enough to be worth a damn, for the plurality of computers to be compatible enough to support them, and for them to become affordable enough for anyone other than nerds or businessmen with an expense account to care. And then USB 2.0 just would not gain widespread adoption for what felt like about a century, so even what was available was inevitably agonizingly slow even if it had any kind of capacity.
There was a solid chunk of time between about 1997 and 2006 when a CD-R was not only monumentally cheaper than flash media but was also much more likely to work in any random computer or other device you stuck it into. Prior to about 2003 you couldn’t realistically even buy a flash drive that held as much data as a humble CD-R in the first place. In 2004 a 256 megabyte USB flash drive would run you $50 and operate at piddling USB 1.1 speed, but a 700 megabyte CD-R was 20 cents. That helped the CD-R and certainly the DVD+/-R formats to hang on well past their supposed sell-by date.
(And I just checked, since I was morbidly curious. A Verbatim CD-R still costs about 21 cents per disc at Microcenter. Yes, you can still buy them.)
A later large portion of the application for writable CD’s was, I’m sure you’ll remember, good old fashioned wholesome piracy. At 20 cents each it was cheap and easy to run off a copied CD full of whatever to give to your friends and not expect to get it back. So even after flash drives became affordable, they were never never affordable enough for most people to do that.
The time between CD burners being uncommon nerd shit, and the iPod becoming ubiquitous, was a single digit number of years. I had a fairly early CD mp3 player (it could play red book audio discs and data discs with mp3s on them) plus I had a CD player in my truck, so I actually did burn a few discs in my day, but a lot of people went straight from buying albums on disc or tape to dragging and dropping files onto a hard drive or flash based mp3 player.
The IPod killed CDs i think is pretty established
There were other attempts, like the Diamond Rio
But because of iTunes, the ipod made actually getting songs onto your device as easy as clicking a button and apple got into bed with the recording industry so they didnt get shut down hard like everyone else that came before them and you didnt have to be labelled a dirty pirate.
mp3s were quite disruptive and contentious ahh Napster
What mp3 player had any success compared to the ipod?!
In 1998, the first portable solid-state digital audio player MPMan, developed by SaeHan Information Systems, which is headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, was released and the Rio PMP300 was sold afterward in 1998, despite legal suppression efforts by the RIAA.
There really werent any clear mp3 players standouts available to the public because of letigious RIAA
But there were many portable cd players that could play mp3 discs when the ipod came out.
Sonys minidisc player was cool, but an absolute flop from success standpoint, we wanted reusable media, burning cds was often a frustrating process.
Ill say it again the RIAA was absolutely (litigiously) against any device they couldnt get their fingers into and apple was happy to work out a deal with them with itunes. The next best thing was napster from a user standpoint(though scourexchange was better imo but lasted about a minute)
Cds were the main way artists released music because rhe RIAA didnt support mp3 anywhere they didnt have to, it took years for people to really switch over to itunes, but they did and streaming took over from there eventually
Not sure why im getting downvotes, but please correct anything you disagree with
“Lasers”
