Comments on: Words to live by

Words to live by

drezdn — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:09:53 -0800

By: cardoso

cardoso — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:14:47 -0800

If my computer will start to play rap music if I do, I'll never copy a single pr0n jpeg in my life.

By: wumpus

wumpus — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:17:13 -0800

this video is great for about the first 1 1/2 minutes, then it gets tired for the next 5 -- i got excited about 7 minutes into it, but only because my pop-tarts finished cooking - then there's a 1/2 hour of crap, and finally, by the time you're 80, you just want to die.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:21:19 -0800

Wow, it just goes on and on and on.

By: ZachsMind

ZachsMind — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:24:48 -0800

I wouldn't say the first ninety seconds were 'great' but I did manage to stick with it for about two and a half minutes before I'd had enough. I liked the commercial with Snoop Dog and the Orbits gum lady better. I think Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth would be less painful to watch than the rest of that video. Good find tho. Thanks for posting it. =)

By: Kronoss

Kronoss — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:32:59 -0800

God damn, homie My mind is playing tricks on me. I swear to God that I saw this video when it came out, but I can't remember were. What is this from? Thanks for driving me nuts, drezdn. (seriously, though this is cool).

By: cellphone

cellphone — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:34:12 -0800

is that Arsenio Hall?

By: CCBC

CCBC — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:34:43 -0800

The funny part is that, in 1992, when you bought a program the first thing you were supposed to do was copy it, so you would have backup disks. I never understood why.

By: Tryptophan-5ht

Tryptophan-5ht — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:36:31 -0800

janet hunter is hot

By: CrunchyFrog

CrunchyFrog — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:43:29 -0800

CCBC: Back in the days before every home computer had hard drives, all programs had to run off of floppy discs. This meant that if you used the original, you ran the risk of losing everything if something went wrong. (Yes, I did occasionally mess up a backup disc, and was happy to be able to go back to the originals.) That's how it was back in the 80's when I started using computers. By the time we got to the 90's, home computers came standard with hard drives, and computer programs in general installed themselves on hard drives. So your "everyday use" copy was on the hard drive itself, and the original discs were stored safely in the original box.

By: p3on

p3on — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:43:46 -0800

The rapper is now an attorney.

By: Mikey-San

Mikey-San — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:56:49 -0800

CCBC: Back in the days before every home computer had hard drives, all programs had to run off of floppy discs. This meant that if you used the original, you ran the risk of losing everything if something went wrong. (Yes, I did occasionally mess up a backup disc, and was happy to be able to go back to the originals.) And even when machines started shipping with internal permanent storage, you still had to deal with the fact that floppies were notoriously prone to damage. Sneeze hard enough and every disk within arm's reach would suddenly become unreadable. I hosed a copy of Marathon once in a freak sneezing accident.

By: nyxxxx

nyxxxx — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:58:25 -0800

I was wondering who the rapper was. I thought it was KRS-One for a minute.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:17:16 -0800

is that Arsenio Hall? Well he dosn't look or sound anything like Arsenio...

By: furtive

furtive — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:18:44 -0800

Not to sound snootty, but this video has been mentioned on MeFi at least a dozen times, be it in comments or perhaps FPP.

By: chudmonkey

chudmonkey — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:19:30 -0800

The video clearly worked. The software industry still exists.

By: OverlappingElvis

OverlappingElvis — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:24:52 -0800

Please tell me that Neverwinter Nights wasn't actually in development for that long...

By: taosbat

taosbat — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:36:17 -0800

Floppies? Does anyone still use floppies?

By: cardoso

cardoso — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:50:12 -0800

I had a graphic card with a single 5 1/4 drivers disk. But it was damaged. I couldn't COPY it but if I tried the install hitting the RETRY a brazilion times, it worked. I used to protect that disk with my life, because, remember, there was NO Internet, BBSs were not really great depositories of files and the nearest representative was 10.000 miles away. Now I don't even bother to open the CD with drivers of things I install. Better download a brand new version from whatever it's hosted.

By: pwb503

pwb503 — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:54:31 -0800

I cannot believe this is isn't a double. Alas, for those who are interested in this, you should check out these posters that I was selling on eBay a while back that I got from the SPA when I was in high school. If anyone wants one, I still have a few.

By: papakwanz

papakwanz — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 23:03:13 -0800

What the fuck? That was so goddamn long. Did they actually expect people to sit through that whole thing? I mean, there's a certain level of amusement in doing so today, but back in 1992... were schools showing this to students or something?

By: knave

knave — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 23:20:19 -0800

Adooooooooooooooobe.

By: chococat

chococat — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 23:48:15 -0800

Queen Latifah played crappy video games off a floppy?

By: dabitch

dabitch — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 00:15:44 -0800

but back in 1992... were schools showing this to students or something? ...Or something! I know it so well, like Kronoss I must have seen it when it came out but I can't for the life of me remember where I saw it. I was in college in the states -92, maybe they did show it in class or something? I doubt this dreck ever ran on TV.

By: pax digita

pax digita — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 03:02:49 -0800

Metafilter: by the time you're 80, you just want to die

By: sunshinesky

sunshinesky — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 04:18:09 -0800

Man, my brother had this posted in his blog a good five years ago... meh

By: elpapacito

elpapacito — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 05:39:31 -0800

I feel an urge to copy whatever, right here right now

By: greycap

greycap — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 06:09:43 -0800

The games industry seems to have a bizarre relationship with rap - exhibit 2.

By: unsupervised

unsupervised — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 06:25:55 -0800

If you were somehow able to make it to the credits, you'd know that this was, in part, a PIXAR production.

By: drezdn

drezdn — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 08:08:43 -0800

I was forced to watch it when I was in High School, sometime between 93 and 97, granted I had copies of Spectra VR and had got called out of class once because they thought I accidentally encrypted a hard drive.

By: uncleozzy

uncleozzy — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 08:39:17 -0800

The "don't copy that floppy" slogan is familiar, although I don't think I've ever seen this video. In 1992, it would never have occurred to me not to copy that floppy. I can probably count on one hand the number of original floppy disks I saw in those days. Everything my friends and I had was at least a third generation copy. Then CD-ROMs came along and made it impossible, for a time, to pirate many games. The CD talkie of Sam & Max Hit the Road was pretty great, though.

By: quonsar

quonsar — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 08:41:01 -0800

I can't for the life of me remember where I saw it. metafilter, most likely. i think that's where i first saw it. years ago.

By: WhipSmart

WhipSmart — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 09:13:32 -0800

at the end when the choice is given to copy or cancel, I would have hit copy just for making me sit thru that crap... for the record, I didn't actually sit thru it all... I just skipped to the end... I just wanted to see if their heads exploded or something...

By: reklaw

reklaw — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 10:59:05 -0800

If we're linking to 'Don't Copy That Floppy', is it alright if I link to zombo.com? I mean, look at the length of the Wikipedia entry for Don't Copy That Floppy -- it's hardly obscure, is it? I thought everyone had seen it by now, surely. I must say, though, that I very much enjoyed Wikipedia's plot synopsis, complete with spoiler warning, so thanks for making me look for that.

By: interrobang

interrobang — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 11:39:14 -0800

I'd never seen this before, so thanks, drezdn.

By: Afroblanco

Afroblanco — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 11:41:20 -0800

I wonder if that guy still has a career.

By: phrontist

phrontist — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 11:54:57 -0800

Have you guys heard about this all your base video? It's really cool! You see, there was this really bad translation of a video game called zero wing... Seriously, has this never been on MeFi before?

By: tristeza

tristeza — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 12:04:03 -0800

FLAG IT AND MOVE ON, HATERS.

By: odinsdream

odinsdream — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 13:01:18 -0800

Jesus christ, that was long. It really irks me to see the "Creativity will DIE!!!" theory thrown around so wantonly, though. This seems to be the heart of a lot of these pro-eternal-copyright positions, and yet has it ever, in the history of mankind, been shown to be true? Quite the contrary, actually. When the technology to publish and reproduce creative works was made more accessible to the public, either from a decreased cost of entry, or simply from invention, the amount and quality of creative works consistently increased.

By: odinsdream

odinsdream — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 13:01:26 -0800

Also, queen latifa?

By: loquacious

loquacious — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 13:22:37 -0800

Floppies? Does anyone still use floppies? *looks at dusty uniboot/ghost/system utility disk sticking out of 3.5" drive* Why yes, yes they do. Granted, I haven't actually bought any floppies in ages, nor have I even seen them for sale. But in an odd reversal of fortunes I find myself taping over the write-protect notches of old, old OEM driver and software discs to resuse 'em for data. The one in the drive right now was driver disk 2/4 for HP DeskJet 710C for Windows 95 or 3.1x. Somewhere I have a factory sealed baggie complete with dessicant pack containing either Windows 3.1 or 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups) that I'm saving - just for the discs.

By: blacklite

blacklite — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 13:23:01 -0800

Good catch, p3on! Fixed. I know so much more about MC Double Def DP than I ever really needed to.

By: blacklite

blacklite — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 13:34:38 -0800

Now that I'm done with that, though: I'm a programmer. I understand that people want to get paid for what they do; open source is great in theory but it can't pay your bills until you're Linus Torvalds and you get hired just to be Linus Torvalds. It's by necessity a spare-time thing for all but a handful of developers. But I download copies of games. Or, at least, I have, not so much recently. This has been because I was a very poor student, who wanted entertainment and the newest software but had virtually zero means with which to do so. And I didn't feel bad about it. What can you do? I wanted to be able to use this giant humming paperweight for something other than metafilter and word documents. I buy games, too. There are games I've bought the day of release. Precisely because I've played previous games by the same developers, for free, or I've seen similar games by different developers, for free. Now that I am in the "real world" and have an actual income, I'll be buying games a lot. If every game I'd played cost me $50 on the spot, not only would I not be buying games, I'd probably be in an entirely different line of work. As a society, we can't really sanction copying, because it invalidates the entire model of paying for creative efforts and turns it into "donate, please, if you like", and suddenly everyone's in the same boat as PBS -- which might work in some theoretical utopia, but I am pretty sure it wouldn't work that well here. Realistically, it seems the only way copying can function the way it's always been functioning for me is if we just keep doing what we're doing, and realise that's how it's going to have to be, and quit worrying about it. Anyway, regardless of all that, I think this is the best rap ever.

By: 6am

6am — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 14:17:57 -0800

gotta agree with odinsdream. Games not being available commerically would surely increase the amount of people making games. Necessity is the mother of invention.

By: Skwirl

Skwirl — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 14:24:49 -0800

So much of being a computer geek is exploration and never being satisfied with the same stimulus over and over again. Come to think of it, the holy grail for me as a young geek was that I'd find a DOS compiler of any language at a garage sale or Goodwill and I really never did graduate beyond QBasic as my day-to-day programming environment until college and I'm absolutely positive that my skills today suffer because of it. How many budding designers can afford Photoshop. Yes, there's the GIMP, but it's not industry standard, now is it? Games are part of that motivation-driven learning process, too. Don't ever tell me that the SPA, RIAA and MPAA have the creative teams' best interests in mind. How does the original author benefit when copyright extends 70 years past their own death? Yeah. I'm sure it was widows and widowers and grieving children who lobbied congress to push that extension. I know, we've had this discussion a bazillion times. Lemme add one more thing, though. Artificial scarcity ticks me off. Economic forces drive all prices to equal the cost of production. This is a natural economic law. They can fight it as much as they like, but it's about as hopeless as the anti-sex fight or the oft-cited war on drugs. Regardless of whether or not they're on the morally correct side, they'll never win. They'll just make people's lives miserable in the meanwhile. For instance, by suing P2P grandmas and whatnot.

By: stilgar

stilgar — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 19:43:53 -0800

sweet merciful jesus....

By: Bryan Behrenshausen

Bryan Behrenshausen — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 07:24:01 -0800

Next I'd like a "Say It, Don't Spray It" anti-graffiti campaign.

By: kdar

kdar — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 19:56:42 -0800

I saw that the first time in grade school. Then a second time in my computer ethics class. Then a third time when my non-geek friends found it. This thing just won't die!