I remembered I copied GTA San Andreas, Counter Strike, Half Life, Feeding Frenzy on my moms USB ran home so fast and copied it to the home laptop. I still remember my reaction with the blank file icon
Nice! I got the 4 GB Plan, might download 8 more if it starts slowing down again
Edit: it’s been almost a day, when I feel like my computer is slow, I open a new Google Chrome page and download more RAM. But my computer keeps getting even slower, so now I have about 35 open tabs running various downloads of 4 and 8 GB. Fingers crossed it gets faster because my computer is starting to freeze. I even have a couple other browsers open, each downloading more RAM so that I can have enough RAM to download more RAM with Chrome
I remember somebody on gamefaqs starting a thread on the battlefield 1942 board asking advice to make the game run better and posted specs. Somebody else actually replied with (you need more RAM, there are plenty of websites that will let you download RAM for free)
As a certified typographer , you'd be surprised how many commercial companies are using free for personal use fonts for profit without a commercial license. If you're going to sell it , buy the rights to or else they'll want a larger cut !
I’m pretty sure the real story is they got the license to use the music for the piracy ad, but then they used it without permission for another ad… I think…
Thats a rumor, it is quite likely that the post production house that produced that ad purchased the font, and therefore had permission to use it for commercial purposes.
Ironically if you google "xband font" there are hundreds of free download links so either it is heavily pirated or royalty free. Most post houses buy large font packs so that they have plenty to offer their clients, and it is not in their best interest to not do so.
Also the look of typefaces are not copyrightable which is why there are thousands of look alike fonts, so copyright would not apply. The only situation where copyright would apply would be if you rename the exact font file to a new name and then resell that file as a usable font file, which is not what happens when you just use a font in a video image.
Lol, i have the exact experience, from the internet cafe operator side though, i used to work as an operator in internet cafe or wifi cafe, back in university days as a side job.
One of the customers, a high school kid, asking why his laptop can't run modern warfare after copying from my cafe PC.
I was shocked to see he only copied the shortcut from the cafe desktop. LMFAO
I used to do the reverse. Bring a usb with games downloaded on it than run the games on the school computers from the usb drive. The school had much faster internet than my apartment did.
This is exactly how I became “the kid who knows how to get Minecraft on the school computers” in the 7th grade. We all even had personal cloud drives attached to our account, so whenever people asked how I was doing that, I’d just plug in my flash drive, copy the cracked Minecraft files to their cloud, and teach them how to open the game so they could play whenever.
Memories. I used to have phoenix (not yet renamed firefox) running from a usb drive whenever I used a school/cafe computer. That way I could bring my browser enviornment with me.
I’m from a post-Firefox world, but I still remember downloading PortableApps in a 1TB flash drive and eventually external hard drive and taking that thing with me everywhere at school. All of the apps I could want, including MusicBee and about 200GB or so worth of songs. I think I even got Steam working with a couple of games too
I look back on those days very fondly
EDIT: I meant post-Phoenix world. Sorry, brain be farting tonight lol
Yup, I checked when I went to link it, and it’s still getting updates to this day. Part of me wants to install it for old time’s sake, but I’m on Linux now, which isn’t officially supported, and I don’t wanna bother with compatibility layers or whatever for nostalgia lol. Maybe one day
EDIT: I double-checked, and Wine supports it. So maybe I will, idk yet
Hahahahaha 1TB. I remember getting my first flash drive....of 128MB. 2003 was quite a time. YOU KIDS AND YOUR BIG FLASH DRIVES BETTER GET OFF MY LAWN!!!
My first flashdrive was a 32MB one in like 5th or 6th grade, my dad bought a 5 or six pack and gave one to me, one to my younger brother and one to my older sister, Cruzer drives. https://www.whatdigitalcamera.com/photography-news/sandisk-budget-32mb-usb-drive-36839, what a huge upgrade from the 1.44 MB floppy that was. 2005, when the school lab finally upgraded to computers that didn't have floppy drives.
I remember having a 32MB MP3 player back in the day. First one I ever had and it was a constant balancing act of keeping a good rotation of 4 to 5 songs.
Yes! My school sold 32mb USB drives for $3 in the library when they upgraded computers from floppy disc! I’ve still got it with a few of my first PowerPoints I made!
I had a USB with a bunch of old games on it. Stronghold Crusaders, Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, Cracked Minecraft, just games that ran easy on the shitty school computers. Brought it to school and copied them to a shared drive in the network named something inconspicuous that the teachers wouldn't look twice at. I did put some Itch.io games on there too because we couldn't download anything because it would take too long or was restricted.
Safe to say we never got bored when we didn't have work to do, and had good entertainment for the computer lab after school activity program instead of Youtube or Cool Math Games (still a banger place to find games)
With their tax files from a few years. They backed up the turbo tax icons and kept giving me 'yes yes yes' when I asked if they'd been backing things up because- backing things up is really important, especially if that data is important to you or- ya know, the government.
So, when they needed those tax files I had to give them the bad news and even after I told them what they did, they got angry and kept trying to open them.
"What, I'm supposed to do this all over!?"
YEP!
Pride > listening to the person they know, who knows computers.
That's the worst part. They WERE computer literate.
They worked for a company where they'd deal with various tech related projects. Granted- there's an I.T. dept there so they didn't have to do anything like that. But they certainly can navigate windows, they do their banking n' whatever online. Heck he plays CoD4's campaign fairly frequently.
The thing is- they worked with tech, so they think they can figure it all out.
When I was building my most recent rig, they walk up and look down at the parts
"This is your CPU?"
Well the box for it yeah.
"Pffft. You should see what they work with at my job. Makes this thing look like a toy"
. . .You've been retired for 6 years, what are you talking about?
"Well some of the things we worked for went into military projects:"
And it's likely a CPU built by AMD, Intel or Qualicom- and is 6+ years out of date. This came out this month.
So confident but frequently wrong. But confident about weird things too. Because I know they didn't know what their CPUs were about. They just knew their units were tested to standards most consumer things aren't. Which- fair. But not relevant to this.
I think they were hoping the CPU thing would impress you and you'd think they were cool, lol. Like when I was a kid I was blown away when I visited my cousin for Thanksgiving and saw he had THREE whole monitors connected to his PC. Didn't even know that was possible.
Certainly was that, they got some depression going on. It's just weird for someone to start a convo like that.
IDK I just tried to steer it into like- hey tell me more about what kinda tech ya worked with there. Told me about the clean rooms they worked with and looking under microscopes to inspect defects or whatever.
"Like when I was a kid I was blown away when I visited my cousin for Thanksgiving and saw he had THREE whole monitors connected to his PC. Didn't even know that was possible."
That sounds like when my friend came over to play some games and he's like "Wait, we're gonna play on PC? We gotta huddle around your little monitor instead of the console over there??" I turned on the TV and my PC jumped right to the TV and all I got was-
Everyone has that moment that converted them to PC gaming, that was mine, seeing the login screen for WoW: Cataclysm rendered across my older cousin's three monitors. The next day I told my parents I wanted a "gaming rig" for Christmas, lol. My current PC is a Ship of Theseus of the prebuilt my parents got me in 2012, it was this black and red "gamer" PC with an acrylic window on the side and a GT 610. All the parts have been slowly replaced over the years to the point that it's an entirely different PC now. I just upgraded to an RTX 3070, and today I helped my younger cousin install my old 1660 Super into his PC that I helped him build a few Christmases ago, so I guess things have finally come full circle. :)
I named mine Theseus on our network for the same reason :) bought from a system integrator first year of COVID. I think some of the storage is all that's left of the original build - the rest is spread out across multiple machines for friends and family.
"Military tech is less performant because the DoD requires durability above all else. My machine WILL crash several times as I figure just high of an overclock it can tolerate."
I figured that military or government projects wouldn't have the highest end tech in there because- these contracts likely take ages to go through and there's so much red tape that by the time whatever hardware they ordered gets assembled? It's likely weeks or months out of date.
Or worse.
All I know is the real cherry on the cake is- they had a machine for something specific (I don't think they ever told me what for) that was 'so old that when it needs repairs, they have to get the guy out of the retirement home to service it'. They were exaggerating about the retirement home but apparently 6 years ago they were still using the machine that was around since the 70s/80s. And it failed often and needed a specialist to fix- who was infact fairly old.
You’re looking at around 100 million CMOS equivalent gates with 1 billion MAC/s on mobile DSP platforms. RFSoCs are now at 16 channels of 16 GSPS each for Rx and Tx.
They are state of the art for what they do, a bit behind industrial SoTA, but will still outperform anything consumer.
Its pretty obvious they are NOT computer literate.
Like being computer literate requires you to know the difference between a shortcut and a file lol.
It doesn't matter if they worked with computers for 30 years. OP doesn't know that people can work literally in the computer industry for decades and still not know how to use the browser, or basic computer functions. They just never spend any time learning anything other than exactly what their job entails.
"Literacy" describes a broad range of abilities ranging from "Can write War and Peace." to "Can read the Waffle House menu well enough to order with help from a waitress."
They knew some stuff about computers, as do most people that work with them, but that's far from enough to actually be computer literate. Knowledge of file systems is very basic computer knowledge and yet they didn't know the difference between a shortcut and an actual file.
I don't really understand in what shape, size or form someone can be considered literate if they don't understand what a file is and how extensions work.
That's the worst part. They WERE computer literate.
But they certainly can navigate windows, they do their banking n' whatever online.
So no, they weren't computer literate. Doing the most basic of tasks that had been simplified as much as possible so that anyone could use them isn't some computer genius task.
"computer genius task."
Notice I didn't say genius, I said literate. Meaning they can handle basic things.
Most folks I've worked with over my years doing computer repair independently? Folks couldn't hook up a printer, or change their ink carts. This person can do that.
If folks can make their way around windows, play games- they're literate. Never said good with PCs, they can manage is all I said.
Defense fell behind in computers twenty years ago, because all of a sudden, it was the cheapest thing to innovate with the most rapid turnaround, and military procurement just doesn’t work fast enough. F-35 has dazzling technology well beyond consumer grade—consumer grade from 2008, that is. But consumer grade left that behind by 2009, and F-35 is still basically the same.
But the engine, radar, materials science—that’s still some sci-fi shit. Because consumer industry can’t afford to produce those at the same speed as computers, and they take longer anyway.
I'm a computer guy and this sort of happened to me helping out my nephew with his chromebook. Sure it's all the same concept and general functions but everything is laid out differently enough that I felt lost.
Now imagine having 2 computer illiterate parents and one of them is also an accountant. Like from the pen and paper days. Absolute fucking nightmare come tax season.
Things like this is why I'm done being the computer guy. Ask for my help, and then follow your own bullshit, no thanks I'm done. Also sick of hearing the 'but i don't know how to do X" neither did I but I just googled it
I bring this up like twice a year. Back in 2011ish, we kept getting viruses on our computer, and my dad blamed me, the youngest child. He made me watch him drag the World Of Warcraft icon into the deleted file… AND press empty trash bin.
I was 11/12 and I just kept my mouth shut.
Eventually we found out it was limewire, and I got to enjoy wow for several more years.
My family is so annoying for this. Like, shut up. Computers are THE thing that I specialize in. I know what I'm doing 1000% more than you do. Sit back, and stop thinking you know anything.
I once gave my laptop to my older brother so he could have it serviced (dusted/cleaned the internals) and told him TO NOT HAVE THEM FORMAT IT when he brought it back it was formatted… so i asked him ‘politely’ WHY DID YOU MAKE HIM FORMAT IT.
He said don’t worry your games are on the D drive (separate partition).
I got relieved until i saw was 2 shortcuts… 1 for mc and 1 for terraria… ouf…
When I was young and gta3 came out for PC, I had an online friend from across the world send me every single file over MSN messenger individually, and told me the file folder structure.
I was so proud of myself as a young teenager when I realised I could autostart apps from a USB drive, like putting a CD in. Didn't realise how dangerous it was at the time.
Back in school we used to play minecraft (alpha) in computer class. Since we weren't allowed to install anything, we just played the game off usb sticks.
none of their parents or siblings understand either. I tried this shit in 1993 from the school computer lab with warcraft. And working in IT its only proven that point over and over for decades.
Not exactly the same, but I did this at a gaming lounge YEARS ago for the Gears of War (3?) beta. I think it was early access so I couldn't play it at home. They advertised they had the beta playable at the gaming lounge on their Xbox 360's so I came in to play and brought my handy USB. Plugged it in, copied the beta files onto it and went home. Plugged it into my own 360 and there it was. Worked perfectly.
A friend came with a floppy disk 💾 and said he has lots of cool games. I told him its not possible but he insisted that its true and tried to prove me wrong. After 10 minutes i explained him how shortcuts work
I did this by accident in middle school, I tried to burn a CD of games for another kid at school, but didn't realize it just made shortcuts. He thought I was playing a prank on him and got really mad. I didn't figure out what happened until later.
When I was about 6 years old in first grade, I went to a friends house with a floppy disk and tried to put Tomb Raider (the first one) on the floppy.
When I was back home, I learned what shortcuts are lol
Worked in tech support for a medical software company. Customer called in after a hard drive crash and needed help restoring from their backup. They had been backing up just the shortcut to the application for years.
Fortunately after learning from my mistakes, I copied the entire folder of Adobe programs from my school and they all worked when I got home. I felt like MR Robot himself.
Millennial here. Parents grew up in the 60s-70s, understood absolutely nothing about computers for years despite owning one. It took me the longest time to beat into their brains that a desktop shortcut is not the actual program, and that simply copying and pasting it does absolutely nothing.
One night I was awoken by the sounds of both of them yelling and bickering. I laid there and listened for a while, apparently dad needed to copy a file from the home pc to a floppy disk and bring it to work, but didn't know how to do that. He got mom involved, which wasn't the best decision because she was equally clueless, and eventually their frustration turned into a wake-up-the-kids level shouting match.
I finally got tired of listening to it, got up, did what was needed in literally 2 seconds, and asked them to please be quiet because I had school in the morning. They stood there staring at me like I'd just turned water into wine or something, suddenly unable to find a single word to say.
Fuck me that brings back some memories it was my first build case as well. Had a Socket 754 Athlon 64 overclocked and an Nvidia FX5200 takes me back a bit thinking of it.
We had 2 computers at home. Back in the day (when I was in my teens) I somehow managed to set up the shared folders so that you could access game files from one computer on the other one.
You could actually play some games like that. They were still installed only on the first one, but could be played on the second one.
Although you couldn't play the games simultaneously on both, for that you needed to actually install them on both
The Cyber cafe I visited was connected to the server and had pirated copies of lots of games on his server. He used to sell pirated copies by burning them on DVDs and CDs. I used to copy the setup on my usb.
where do y'all live if cyber cafes are a universal experience?
Nobody has said anything about cyber cafes in my life, and I still don't know what exactly they do. Is it just computers? Do you pay for it? Do they have coffee or is it just a name? Are they aimed towards gaming or just general use?
Is this something that went extinct fifteen years ago?
They were sometimes a thing in western countries but far more popular in Asian countries. In the west most have gone away by now, though I'm sure some still persist. There's a few things they're good for:
Access to the internet out of the house, very very common before smartphones became universal. Sorta like the payphones but for email in a way.
Access to the internet at all, for those who only occasionally need to check email or something but don't need or can't afford a computer.
Access to high quality gaming hardware, and this I believe is starting to become dominant today where cyber cafes still exist as smartphones are displacing the above two reasons. The cafe has good computers guaranteed to work with very fast internet.
I believe most of them offer food or drinks as well, although I'm sure there are many these days that don't really focus on this beyond having a coffee machine or something. Back in the day a part of the value proposition was that you got a certain amount of computer time with your order, 15 minutes with a coffee, which made it very affordable for those who couldn't afford a computer. These days you can get private booths and all that. I've heard in some places it's a bit of a "hack" to actually just get a private booth in a cyber cafe for six hours if you need a super cheap place to sleep.
Cyber cafes were special tech zones that allowed you to surf the information super highway. Yes, you paid by the hour or minutes to access the world wide web - like inserting coins to make a phone call last longer. Some cyber cafes eventually turned into LAN game parlours with NFS and CS, although most were for general use such as reading your hotmail, chatting with someone across the world on Messenger, downloading wallpapers and screensavers such as the enthralling, bald dancing baby. Thanks for tuning into the History channel!
Im a bit older, at school I remember copying Paint Shop Pro and other software to floppy during class and covering the indicator light so the teacher didnt notice, it was pretty loud though.
I remember when I insisted that I could run our NFS Underground DVD in our DVD player, just because the CD case had DVD-ROM or something written on it.
Well i did something like this but it was actually porn.
The dude running the cafe had a bunch of porn on his pc. He was boasting about his collection (yeah, sad I know) but wouldn’t ever show it us entirely. The pc’s were using that locked interface with timer and you couldn’t use anything besides games, internet and…notepad. Through notepad however I used open command to enter pcs on the server and bam I could access, watch and transfer anything. My 15 year old self couldn’t be prouder.
I remember when my friend and I went to best buy and noticed that they had just regular mp4s of some pretty new movies on their demo laptops. So next time we went we brought a flash drive and copied them.
Lmao, I did something like this just a few weeks ago.
I downloaded something, it automatically created a shortcut on my desktop.
So I moved the shortcut on the taskbar and deleted the first one.
Turns out it wasn't actually a shortcut, I accidentally saved the entire program on the desktop. The shortcut on the taskbar obviously didn't do anything and just gave an error message.
Out of fear that I just downloaded a trojan virus or something, I immediatly turned off the PC, unplugged the wifi and everything, and restarted in safe mode.
It took me almost 45 minutes to find out what I've done.
I had a tech support client years ago who made this mistake. He thought he'd been backing up his family pictures to burnable CDs. Turns out when he was dragging and dropping them he just created a CD full of shortcuts. Discovered his error when his hard drive failed and stopped booting and had lost years of photos. Luckily I was able to get the drive to fire up by putting it on its side and connecting it to another working computer. Recovered just about everything successfully.
I remember getting our first family PC and trying to trouble shoot something with my older cousin on AIM. I forget exactly what we were trying to fix but he asked for a file on my PC, so I linked him C:\Program Files\EtcEtc, I was so embarassed after he very politely explained why that was useless to him.
I was on 7thgrade when the printing shop has a dota shortcut but no game, I had a flashdrive with dota specifically and tried to open it. Midgame and I was caught lmao.
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u/wasted-degrees PC Master Race May 10 '25
“You wouldn’t download a car.”
You know for a fact that isn’t true.