this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Jessup managed to burn the intact Half-Life CD

What?

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 month ago (8 children)

"Burning" a CD means copying it. Idk why. I used to have someone in my family who would burn movies for everyone so we didn't have to pay to rent or own.

[–] [email protected] 74 points 1 month ago (3 children)

It is sort of surreal to see someone so young they don't know what burning a CD is in an article about a game older than CD burners.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Just a small correction (that makes things worse):

It is sort of surreal to see someone so young they don't know what burning a CD is writing an article about a game older than CD burners.

The person asking the question here is correct, the phrase in the article makes no sense, and it's likely written by someone who heard the lingo "burn" in reference to discs but it's too young to have use it themselves (otherwise they would have said they ripped the intact CD, or they burned copies of it)

Edit: Also I think CD burners came out around the same time (I remember a store that sold copies in my city back in the 90s), although I personally didn't had a disk burner for many years (but also I didn't played Half-life for many years after it came out, so I guess it evens out)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

CD-Rs and CD burners were first available in the early 90's but they were "we'll take the helicopter out to the yacht" expensive. By 1998 they were starting to become normal consumer-grade equipment. I had one as a teenager in the year 2000, along with a Rio CD-MP3 player.

I've still got the computer I had in later high school and college, a Pentium 3 rig that I plan on turning into a sleeper PC for my midlife crisis. It has a DVD-ROM drive and a CD burner. I wonder if they're SATA or some older "we don't do it this way anymore" buses? I remember that machien talking about SCSI during boot-up.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

My drives in the early 2000s were SCSI, the connector was a flat wide grey cable. I remember my first SATA disk as being a great improvement, still had jumpers though.

In any case, the game is not older than CD burners, like I said, I was buying burned CDs before that, and I lived in a small South American city, so they should be very accessible for North American/European folks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

True, I actually misremembered Halflife as being from earlier in the 90s than it really was.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Half-Life is definitely not older than home CD burners. Now if you'll excuse me, there's some damn kids on my lawn again.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Burning is writing a disc. Ripping is extracting data from a disc. Whoever wrote the article used lingo they don't understand.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

That is what I thought, I have burned many discs in my day, and I have never got an ISO from bruning a disc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Yeah I would read "managed to burn the disc" to mean "managed to create a new CD-R copy of the original." "Managed to rip the disc" would mean successfully created an .iso file.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Exactly. I even still have a bunch of blank DVDs and maybe a few blank CDs sitting in storage somewhere. I used to use them to burn Linux ISOs every couple years, but ISOs are now bigger than a DVD, so I now have to hunt down the USB drive each time (I'm always losing those).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I knew it had to do with putting data on a disc. I didn't know the specifics.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Yes, yes we are.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I haven't thought about burning CDs in a long time, man that takes me back. Remember Nero Burning ROM?

I think the etymology of the term is that when you're writing data onto a disk you're shooting a laser onto it to alter the chemistry and change its color, for which "burning" the data into it makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It wasn't the colour, you would burn little bubbles into the disk. The bubbles would deflect a laser and flat parts would not. This would give the 0 or 1 bits.

There were CD- and CD+ versions. I don't know which is which but one would create a divot, and the other would create a bubble. Either way the laser is diverted away from the sensor.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Ah, that's what it was! I always thought it was just a different color for 0 and 1, today I learned! That makes more sense when I think about it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

CD - red laser

BlueRay - blue laser.. shorter wavelength --> more data on same size disk

and inbetween there was DL - dual layer
light scribe - could etch a picture on the top of the cd
and RW - rewriteable CDs

(CD is short for compact disc)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

CDs like laserdiscs before them are read with an infrared laser.

DVDs use a red laser, and Blu-ray does indeed use a blue-violet laser. The smaller wavelengths, plus the ability to do multiple layers, are indeed how they cram more data more densely onto a disc of nearly identical size.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I stand corrected. thx

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

light scribe

I remember having one, but I never actually etched a picture onto the CD, it never seemed worth doing.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What I ment was that bruning a disc is the secondary step to making a copy if a disc, you first need to rip the original disc into an ISO file.

I remember when we got our first CD burner, it was a black and copper colored Philips unit, it was back when you made sure to leave the computer alone when burning a CD because you you didn't want to risk buffer underrun.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

not if you had one of those setups where you can burn right from a source CD to multiple target blanks

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

But the way the sentence is structured is saying that burning happened to the OG disc. Burning is what happens to the copy disc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Did you want the person to detail every step they took?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No, but the verbage is still incorrect for what they were doing. The correct way wouldn't be that much more words, just different words.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Not really. "The information on the original was burned into another new disc"

"I burned the original disc"

Lol this is the dumbest thing ive spent time commenting.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (10 children)

"I burned the original disc" would never mean "I made a copy of the original disc to another CD-R" to anyone that actually knows what burning a disc is.

It would either mean "The original disc is a CD-R that I burned an image to", or "I threw the original disc in a fire".

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (5 children)

It's the difference between "I borrowed some money" and "I loaned someone money". They mean different things, including people occasionally creating awful sentences like "I borrowed him some money" (shudder).

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (12 children)

The least they could do is say that they burned a copy/blank or ripped the original instead of mixing it up and saying that the original was burned. It makes it sound like they were writing to the original.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

When you burn a disc it means using a laser to etch the data as pits and lands in a track on the disc. You're physically changing the disc when you write to it.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

Idk why.

When writing to a CD-R, the laser literally burns a chemical in the disc which causes it to change optical properties, which will cause it to appear to be the same as the pits and lands on a manufactured disc. "Burning a disc" meant to write it. It's not the original that's being burned, it's the new copy. In casual conversation someone might say "I really like this album." "Tell you what I'll burn it for you." short for "I'll burn a copy of it onto a new disc for you."

The line "Jessup managed to burn the intact Half-Life CD", in the context of "thought lost to disc rot", I would extrapolate this to mean that the original old CD was thought to be damaged or destroyed due to age or mishandling, but he was successfully able to copy the data onto a new CD. Handling or using the fragile original my cause the data to be lost, so copying it to a new disc better preserves it.

The word "rip" is usually used to mean take all the data off of a CD and store it elseways. "I ripped the CD to my hard drive." The nuance is, there isn't a new optical disc, the data just exists on a computer's internal storage. Which is probably what they actually did.

The term "burn" survived into the USB thumb drive age to differentiate writing the contents of a .iso file to a thumb drive replacing any file system or data that is currently there from simply storing a copy of the .iso among the existing file system. Often the same software you'd use for CDs would be used to image thumb drives as well so the "BURN!" button would be used to start both processes. Unlike on a CD-R nothing gets permanently altered on a USB drive.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Burning was originally used in the sense that to write to a disc you used the laser to "burn" in your data, at least irrc. It just started to be used interchangeably for copy and write operations. These days I think "rip" makes more sense.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I've literally never heard anyone use "burn" to refer to extracting data. This thread feels like someone trying to gaslight me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Don't worry, I'm old too, and I got you fam.

Burning is creating disks by etching the data onto the metal disc below the plastic layer, and ripping is extracting the data into a digital format, like an ISO, or in the case of music or video discs, usable media files (often includes a transcode because who uses CD/DVD format anyway?).

I've burned dozens if not hundreds of disks in my day, but haven't burned anything for years. I most recently ripped my entire DVD and Bluray collection onto my Jellyfin server so I don't have to deal with those ancient discs that keep getting scratched anymore.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Oh no, it finally happened