One of my favorite rap songs is Weird Al's It's All About the Pentiums
. In some ways the exaggerative style of the lyrics have protected the song, and it has aged relatively well, given the subject matter, but even so there are some parts of it that just seem like they could stand to be modernized. Here are a few of my suggestions. (Note that I'm only listing the parts I suggest changes for. The full lyrics, if you don't know them, are available elsewhere.)
original lyric | comments | suggested revision |
---|---|---|
Defraggin' my hard drive for thrills | While defragmentation is not entirely obsolete as such, it seems a lot less relevant now than ten years ago, and indeed there are much geekier things one can do with a filesystem these days than defragment it. Unfortunately, tuning the filesystem parameters for performance doesn't seem to fit the metre here, so I had to go with something older, older even than defragmentation, but something all geeks still do from time to time. | Partition my hard drive for thrills (or stet) |
Installed a T1 line in my house | While residential frame relay is still geeky in general, T1 is no longer the same kind of overkill that it was when the song was written, and many ordinary consumers have that much bandwidth from DSL or even cable modem service. My revised lyric, however, should be good for at least ten years more. | Installed an OC3 at my house |
Upgrade my system at least twice a day | The first line here would have been fine as it stands, except that changing the rhyme makes the next line easier to work with. This latter did not age well and is arguably the worst lyric in the song. (The part about Y2K was laughable within six months after the song's release, and probably should not have been included in the first place.) The line can't even really be upgraded with a modern equivalent, because there isn't one. PnP is a very bad memory for most geeks, with no modern equivalent really, and nobody is very much afraid of 2038, most software having already been upgraded to 64-bit datetime values as I write this. That makes this line a good choice to slip in something that wasn't on most people's radar when the song was written in the nineties. Network security and reliability seems obvious. Social networking and user-created content are another option, but security seems more likely to still be an issue in ten years. Threading and Unicode seem too technical, managed code too likely to be taken for granted in another ten years. | My battery backup is certified green. |
I'm strictly plug-and-play, I ain't afraid of Y2K | My generator's clean. My firewall is lean and mean. | |
You think your Commodore 64 is really neato | No one could have predicted in 1999 that the Commodore 64 would be cool again in 2007, but the retro trend, among teenagers and gamers, has really changed the flavor of meaning this line carries. A small brand substitution should restore the original sentiment. | You think your Packard Bell is really neato |
In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user | Yeah, there is still a lot of 32-bit stuff out there, but the cool CPUs now are all 64-bit, and the days of 32-bit software are numbered. I wouldn't have revised the song for this, and it may even be a little ahead of its time, but since we're making changes, this should be updated too. | In a 64-bit world, you're a 2-bit user |
Wow, look at that. With only six changes (and most of them are very small changes, and two of them scarcely even necessary) a song from 1999 feels current in 2006. Given the subject matter, that's actually fairly amazing. It's hard to find a computer book from 1999 that's worth the paper it's printed on, so these lyrics really have aged quite well.
2 comments:
I still think having your own personal T-1 is up-to-date. I'm surprised, though, that you have no mention of wireless networking.
Having your own personal T1 is still pretty up to date, but it's not the same kind of cartoonishly preposterous overkill that it would have been when the song was written, back when normal people had 36k dialup and people and businesses with relatively high-bandwidth needs had 64k or 128k ISDN. Fiscally T1 might still be fairly preposterous, but in terms of the connectivity and sheer computer-geek drool factor, it's not what it was. It's _better_ than "consumer broadband", yes, particularly if you care about latency and full duplex, but it's not as _overwhelmingly_ better as it used to be, particularly compared to business-grade DSL service.
An OC3, on the other hand, is equivalent in bandwidth to about a hundred T1 lines, so it's clearly overkill for anyone other than an ISP or data center.
Wireless... yeah, it just didn't occur to me. It's something you only need if you really care about being able to sit anywhere in the house and use a laptop, rather than going to where the computer is. Otherwise, wireless networking is very much More Trouble Than It's Worth. But yeah, it's got great buzzword value, so it probably should have been included. Not sure where to put it though.
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