251: CD Tray Fight

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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CD Tray Fight
This is silly, of course. The enemy will be born in the network.
Title text: This is silly, of course. The enemy will be born in the network.

Explanation

This comic refers to the behavior of a tray loading optical disc drive of a desktop computer. When the tray is opened and the user is reaching for the disc, a process or task on the computer can, at that exact inopportune time, request that the disc drive close its tray. Alternatively, accidentally bumping the open tray may engage the auto-close feature, resulting in the same scenario.

This results in a sort of "tug of war" between the user who is trying to remove the disc and the CD drive trying to retract.

With a reasonable amount of force by the user, most drives will detect the resistance and give up trying to close as a safety feature, ejecting the disc again.

A Robot War is a recurring theme in science fiction where humans develop robots that become self aware and start a war against humanity. A well known example of this theme is found in the Terminator franchise where, as the title text suggests, a military computer network (Skynet) becomes self aware and starts a world war to kill all humans. This event is also parodied in 1046: Skynet.

Transcript

[Cueball is standing, holding a CD tray which is half-in his computer. There are other CDs on the floor.]
Cueball: Hey. Hey! Stop retracting my CD!
I feel uncomfortable when my computer physically struggles with me. Sure, I can overpower it now, but it feels like a few short steps from here to the robot war.


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Discussion

This may be a reference to a bug in certain old versions of FUSE that causes the CD tray to load almost immediately after being ejected. 162.72.40.137 13:18, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

Incomplete because there is a missing Terminator reference or something???--Dgbrt (talk) 21:46, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

Reference to Skynet? I don't know enough about Terminator to be sure. 173.245.52.211 20:15, 10 December 2013 (UTC)


The opposite of this kept happening to me, when I tried to burn Ubuntu to a disc Windows kept opening the disc drive whenever I clicked on Burn, then informed me that the disc drive was open. 141.101.98.246 19:12, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Also, it must be noted that this may damage the device. 108.162.212.199 23:05, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

I do the reverse with dollar bills in vending machines. Greyson (talk) 14:27, 20 December 2013 (UTC) Added the title text so maybe this will stop it from being flagged as incomplete 173.245.52.219 15:13, 20 December 2013 (UTC)