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The Hard Drive Is Inside the Computer
davidmwilliams writes "Those of us who work in technology have a jargon all of our very own. We know the difference between CPUs and GPUs, between SSD and HD, let alone HD and SDTV! Yet, our users are flat out calling everything 'the hard drive.' Why is it so?" As much as I hate to admit it, this particular thing drives me nuts. You don't call the auto shop and tell them that your engine is broken when your radio breaks!
Get over it.. Who really needs users to identify which piece of their computer is broken? Even if they could tell the different components apart, they'd probably be wrong about where the problem is 90% of the time anyway.
I also get the term "modem box" frequently, in reference to the tower.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
... The occasionally semi-literate ones will call it the "CPU." Having worked in modem tech support we got plenty of people referring to the PC itself as the "Modem."
- R
That will never be as aggravating as memory vs. storage. "I need more memory for my program" is more likely to mean "I'm out of disk space" than "I need more RAM". And the error messages specifically say they need more disk space, but they heard once that a computer stores things in its "memory" and they stopped learning right then and there. Just turned off their fucking brains, and went to sleep.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...so I don't click on pointless drivel like this by mistake.
As an outsourcer I ran in to an issue for a while trying to talk someone through something on the phone, because as it turns out, everything in side the server room is a server, even the switches, the routers, and and other piece of equipment. It really just comes down to people hearing one or two terms and thinking they're talking "tech-speak" with you. Only problem is often times they're either unable or unwilling to learn, or take offense at suggestions on what the difference is.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
It's one of the few components they routinely hear about which is usually referred to with words rather than letters and is therefore easier to remember. Since it becomes the only known (though not understood) technical term, a certain class of users will invoke it at every opportunity they get to make themselves sound as if they know what they're talking about and thereby deserve some preferential treatment.
This is not something specific to computing. The same type of people will constantly refer their mechanic to their "carburetor" or their plumber to their "ball cock" ;-)
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
BOSS - What do you know about computers?
- Well, receiving emails, sending emails, clicking, double clicking, the internet... The list goes on...
BOSS - What is that under my table?
- The... hard... drive(?)...
BOSS - Of course! You got the job!
For my customers in a very rural, very southern town, it's a toss up between hard drive and: 'There's something wrong with the modem' "You mean you can't dial out?" "What?" "Dial out. You can't dial into your internet provider" "No. We got DSL. There's something wrong with the whole modem" "..."
Be thankful
I completely understand. If our users had a better grasp of technology, they would be making all the numb skull mistakes. The same mistakes that are ranked Level 1 importance, when in fact every else on my plate is actually more important.
If they used the proper terms, I wouldn't have to carry around a mini shop in a bag.
What I am have a problem with, is when they get offended by you asking them questions that could help me fix it right now, over the phone. Saving them time and, most of the time, money.
Film makers are the reason we pull our feet back when something brushes against them.
Think of the issue from the point of view of someone who has no interest in the technical aspects of a computer. They see the entire desktop amalgamation--display, keyboard, mouse, and box of chips--as the computer. Now consider the first time that the computer, as a whole, caused them anxiety or stress: for most people when a document was lost, or when the system failed to boot, or when the system began malfunctioning. That anxiety was not caused, most frequently, by the CPU, or the motherboard, or by the memory, or the monitor, or the mouse. The source of the anxiety was something that happened with the hard drive. In their struggle to appear to know more about the computer they have managed to identify that there is a significant component called the hard drive. It's a default setting. If the word they are looking for is not the entire computer then, by default, it must be the hard drive.
People do know the difference between the radio and the engine of a car because, for many people, the radio is every bit as important as the engine and, should the radio go out, it would cause them just as much anxiety as the engine going out.
Another poster mentioned 'modem box'. Those people, obviously, have had their largest and most stressful experience with the computer when the modem was no longer working properly. Blame that one on AOL.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
I like the mass hallucination that causes everyone to pronounce Linksys as Linkskees.
Due most of the time to poor teacher comp.sci literacy at school (whatever degree).
Sometime is also mind laziness that drives people not to literate themselves.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
I sense an immense tech/geek bitchin' session in the makin'
Chill out dudes - and we don't need anyone mentioning the 'coffe cup holder' again, do we!?
AT&ROFLMAO
The thing is, most users don't NEED or WANT to know about how the tool works. Doesn't matter what tool that is.
WE do.
A general car driver WILL say "the engine is broken" if the engine, drive-train or ANY other mechanical part between engine and wheels seems to malfunction. That goes about many of you computer experts as well.
Why?
You don't NEED or WANT to know anything about flywheels, transmissions, cam-shafts, fuel injector nozzles or other car crap.
Respect the user as a USER of a tool. A very advanced and complicated tool which needs a specialist to understand it.
As for the understanding the average user does need.
They need to know about the storage, the hard disk. Just so they can find files. They don't need to know about the CPU, RAM (except that you can only run a few apps at once, if the computer gets slow then shut down some programs) or PSUs or motherboards or any of that crap.
Just think about your life and all the tools YOU use, yet don't really understand. When it fails, it's broken. Just... youknow...the box, it dun broked!
Even where you have some limited laymans understanding that may still be rather faulty (most people don't understand microwaves for instance)
"You don't call the auto shop and tell them that your engine is broken when your radio breaks!" You might not but lots of people do! Fixing anything can be a challenge, you get to figure it out without much help from the customer on most occasions (sometimes it is easier without their diagnosis). They just want it to work.
Because people are stupid, that's why.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Laptops are wayy more common than they were a decade ago, and yet I still here a lot of people saying "labtop". I know that my girlfriend can spell "laptop", and yet she still pronounces it with a "b" rather than "p".
Well, sometimes IT professionals refer to people by their component parts too. For example:
"That dick from accounting just fubared the laser printer by feeding regular transparancies into it."
The way people (my father, specifically) refer to both the RAM and storage as memory.
I've never once heard of anyone referring to a PC as a HDD here in the UK. 'Computer' or 'PC' is all I've ever actually heard it been called. Even with older people who haven't had a great deal of exposure, they at least refer to it as 'tower', 'unit' or even 'system' - all of which are perfectly valid.
I think the problem is actually that the computer field didn't come up with a proper term themselves. I remember way back-in-the-day some computer enthusiasts calling it "the CPU" which is also highly misleading. Nowadays, computer people will call it, "the tower", "the machine", "the box", or something like that. But let's face it--these are actually not very good terms. We don't actually have a precise and universal term that refer to it. The situation was muddled by the fact that there is no standard form-factor for a computer (we went from big servers, to boxes laying down, to boxes standing up like towers, to all-in-ones like iMacs, with all kinds of variations in between...).
Now this isn't a problem for computer people. We know what "power cycle the system" means and we can be precise by saying "press the button on the front of the case". But because amongst ourselves we don't consistently use a precise term, other people just picked-up on whatever term sounded right. We kept referring to "the hard drive" while pointing at (actually inside) the box, so people thought the box was "the hard drive". It's understandable.
The whole situation is funny, but not the end of the world. You just have to keep in mind that when someone uses precise terminology (like "hard drive" or "operating system" or "internet") they could very well be using it wrong.
I get it all the time - nobody can say Firefox, it's always Foxfire. Drives me nuts. I've been doing on-site service with the company I started for 10+ years and I really would love to be insulated from the customers. I don't want to deal with them on the phone or via e-mail, I want to show up and fix what needs fixin' or whatever else I have to do. Babbling on the phone about the same thing over and over again is driving me crazy.
Do or do not. There is no try. --Yoda
Yeah, and that's all well and good until someone mentions virtual memory.
When I was younger and first learning about computers I made this mistake all the time until a more computer literate friend corrected me. I think the problem is when someone refers to memory they normally associate that with how their memory works in a human. You have memories to hold long term information so people will make the same assumption when the computer says "Need more memory to run the program." The message is a little vague in that sense. I can't really fault people for making the error.
No, you call them and tell them:
your car is making a funny noise when your wheel bearings are going out.
your car is making squealing noise when the belts are loose.
your car doesn't shift right when your transmission is low on fluid.
the steering wheel shakes when your tires are out of balance.
the car is overheating when the water pump or thermostat is broken.
Ok, maybe you don't, but most people do just that.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I've found an alarming number of business ISP users referring to their Internet connection as their server: "I can't get on to Google - is our server down?". Aaargh ;/
As far as some people are concerned, their computer consists of four parts: the monitor, keyboard, mouse and hard drive. The latter is the big case where they put CDs. It's the only component their software and other users regularly mention, so it's what they've come to know the box as.
If you remember those boxes with 8" screens....
The MAC OS would throw up a message that said something to the effect you were running out of memory (we had 2meg installed instead of max 4). I believe the message said please close some applications (Multi-finder).
Anyway, the natural step was for the user to start deleting icons (ie programs) from the desktop.
Then they would reboot. Then they would notice that some documents couldn't be opened and perhaps notice the icon has changed.
The trouble ticket would be "Can't open a document that I could open yesterday".
Why did they remove MS Word? Because they created all their documents with Word Perfect and only used MS Word to read docs from others (so they never clicked on the icon itself).
This happened so often that we had a server with an 'image' of the standard licensed software that we could drag over at moments notice. At the speed of Appletalk. Probably should have just turned off multi-finder... Oh well.
TODO: create/find/steal funny sig.
But outside of nerddom, computers are all software. People make the distinction between the motor and the radio because they interact with the stereo and the motor separately. And really, most people would identify the alternator, water pump, and headders as "motor". Most people have never opened the case to their pc and only know it as the thing they have to turn on to get at the internet.
I think it's mostly an issue of people having been trained for years that the relevant part is the hard drive and that everything else is just nerd jargon for the crap that supports the drive.
Frankly, they're right.
Everything lives on the hard drive, and when some part fucks up, it's their data that gets screwed up and the software that they interact with that tells them or quits working. The particular component that failed is pretty much irrelevant. The data on the drive is inaccessible or corrupt.
In a similar but related argument that pops up once in a while... nerds talk about hardening the Linux OS and say things like "the only thing rogue software could destroy is user data, the OS proper remains unharmed". Neglecting the fact that the whole fucking purpose is the data.
Users call it the hard drive because that's the only part that actually matters.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Try to get them to understand that they need to buy 2 Gigs of ram when they could have hundreds for the same price... only that these Gigs come in hard drive form.
But you may excuse them, IMO. We do use similar terms for quite different things. Graphics ram and system ram are both measured in MB and GB, but they are not interchangable. You cannot make your Windows run faster with a graphics card of 1GB ram, if you only have 128MB system memory, it won't do you any good. And Megahertz, Megabyte... they're both Mega, right. And if the advertising industry taught me anything, Mega means good, so it's gotta be great...
Snideness aside. Maybe our jargon is a bit hard to understand outside the biz. Your muffler is a muffler and it doesn't belong anywhere else. The fluids you fill into the various places in your car are very easy to keep apart. Breaking flued does not only sound different than fuel, it also smells and looks very different.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
twig, verb, twigged, twig-ging. British
verb (used with object)
1. to look at; observe: Now, twig the man climbing there, will you?
2. to see; perceive: Do you twig the difference in colors?
3. to understand.
verb (used without object)
4. to understand.
Not only do users confused with terms it seams the whole furniture industry is confused. It seems that CPU has become the term used by the furniture industry. Just Google CPU Holder.
the "hard drive" is the beige box sitting on the floor. And the "computer" is the heavy thing you look at on the desk. (be careful when telling them to bring in their "computer" for service) After about two weeks of taking phonecalls for support you come to understand this. After awhile, you also come to understand that some people believe electronics can work without power or while switched off also. I watched someone here almost short out their brain when a caller asked if the computer had to be turned on to burn CDs.
One of these callers is a professor at our local university. assume nothing.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Doesn't this come from the time when the hard drive really was a box on its own?
And that one is extremely hard to explain. The closest that I can do to explain this is compare RAM with short-time memory and Storage with long-time memory. Alas, most people have problems understanding that too.
I've also tried scrapbook (RAM) versus bookshelf with books (Storage).
Nothing seems to really get it through, even if you try to explain it without analogies. The problem here is that the concept of RAM is too hard to grasp and the the terms MegaByte/GigaByte are linked to Storage in their minds.
On the same note, when I mentioned my new computer recently, a non-technical friend asked "How many gigabytes?"
I told him I had a thousand...
I still have a dozen or so customers that call their tower the "modem".
I was doing work for a small town ISP a few years ago (1996 or so). They had a policy that if you bring your PC to the office they will configure it for you. A lady showed with with just the CRT monitor and wanted to get set up for internet access. The guy I was working with explained very nicely that he needed the computer and this was just the monitor. She said that she was not sure and would come back with the other part. The really bad part...the lady who brought in the monitor taught computer 101 classes at the local community college.
The most common thing I hear is people confusing memory and the hard drive. I suppose to them it makes sense. The hard drive is the thing that keeps (remembers) their files.
Me: "You are running out of space on your computer."
Them: "OK, well can you give me some more memory then?"
It is at this point I usually get out my pack of crayons.
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
heh
My favorite was a woman on the local news objecting to a strip club where there wold be "laptop dancing" taking place.
I still have visions of a titty bar with woman dancing on top of old thinkpads :-)
I was in a kick-off meeting for a small web project for my firm's new client (a non-profit advocacy type organization). We were going to build a little CMS for part of their relocated web presence, and this was back before you could just-add-water to Drupal or Joomla, etc., and when which browser you used actually mattered when it came to admin tasks.
... uh ... highly technical stuff."
So, I asked the group around the conference table, "Just so we know how to approach some of this, which web browser do you folks use here in the office?" The public relations director raised her hand and said, "Oh, that's me!"
She was the Official Web Browser in the office, and was the one to talk to about all such matters. What do you say at that point? So I said, "Excellent... it's helpful to have a designated contact point on the
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Twig?
Cutting-edge word definition? This one goes back to the 1700s!
At least that is the name that rhetoricians use for it: referring to a thing by something associated with it.
When we call soldiers "boots on the ground" that is metonymy. A special case is synecdoche, using the part for the whole ("blade" for "sword").
In any case, its wired into human language and thought. If you look in a dictionary, you'll find words with three or more definitions. Usually there is a process of metonymy going on. "Justice" entered the English language meaning something to mete punishment or reward according to the right of the recipient. It has come to mean a lot of other things: fairness, righteousness, the law, a judge or other legal official, etc.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
My users all call the box "the CPU".
Thank goodness no one remembers 5.25" disks anymore, since they used to see 3.5" disks as rigid, and would tell me they stored things on the "hard disk" when they'd put them on 3.5" floppy.
Now ALL the floppies are gone, so I just never ask people where they store anything. If I did, I suspect they'd tell me they put it in "the CPU."
You're ABSOLUTELY right, except that they don't ask about the server, do they? They TELL you that the server is down.
On the other hand, the amateurs who actually do anything with my servers blame EVERYTHING on the network. They want to VLAN everything. Graphs of tiny network usage versus their colossal CPU or local disk IO stats mean nothing. It is the network. They need their own network, then everything will be fine. And they know so much more than me.
And this is news?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Ok, it's not really fair to pick on people for not knowing something that isn't in their field. I'd hate for a doctor to mock me because I don't actually know where my liver is or what on earth the spleen is for.
Actually, the last few times I visited a physician, they mocked me for not being familiar with internal medicine. (Srsly.) I take this as carte blanche to mock people outside of my profession for not being reasonably familiar with it.
I usually don't mock my users, however, since I'm a professional.
So, what exactly is the difference between memory and storage? Access latency and capacity are just implementation details, and even persistence is arguably so.
"hard drive" sounds cool. It has two resonating "r"s and there are such things like "warp drive" and somebody can drive someone else insane. It's not like some wimpy see-pee-ew or for gods sake cheap-set.
I don't fault people for not knowing what the blinky bits are. What I fault is when they ask for advice and then don't fucking listen.
I shit you not, I actually had this conversation --
"Why did you buy Vista? We had this discussion last week and I told you you didn't need it, your computer couldn't run it, and you aren't missing anything."
"But I thought I needed Vista to be legal on my computer."
"No, for the fuck of Christ, no. Just make sure you don't open the box and you should be able to return it."
The next day.
"My little one opened the Vista and tried installing it. Now I don't have my stuff where I had my stuff."
"You never made backups of anything, did you?"
"No. The computer is as far back on the desk as it can go. How much further should I push it?"
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
In Latin America I have often heard the box you plug the mouse, keyboard and monitor into referred to as the "CPU". Now having a hard drive inside your CPU, that would be cool :-)
43 - For those who require slightly more than the answer to life, the universe and everything.
My sisters are always referring to the monitor as "the computer" and the the computer itself as the "hard drive". It's ridiculous.
It's an improvement, though-- they used to call the 3.5" floppies "hard drives", until I pulled a floppy apart in front of them to explain why it was a "floppy", not a hard drive. I also had a hard drive to show them what it really was.
I think the confusion stemmed from the fact that I pointed out that the hard drive lives in the same box as the actual computer.
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
A CFO at a local community bank once told me (I was the manager of network services for the bank):
"I don't want to know how the watch works, I just want to know what time it is."
That put my job into perspective.
-ted
Try the "computer as kitchen" analogy.
System memory = counter top; where stuff that's being worked on now is
Hard drive = refrigerator and cabinets; stuff you want to keep/use, but aren't using now
CPU = oven
Programs = food processor, blender, etc.
I've found it to work surprisingly well.
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
I run into a similar instance with users calling anything made by Adobe, Inc. the term "Adobe". User -- My Adobe isn't working right. Me -- Adobe?.... Dreamweaver right? Photoshop? No, no, I know, InDesign? Still not it? OH the software that reads PDF files?!? You mean "Acrobat". Normally, I am not a smartass IT stereotype, but that always irritates me to no end. Eventually, some do learn. Most do not. I try to explain it to them by relating it to Microsoft. If you have a problem with Word they don't call in and say "My Microsoft is broken". Once they see it that way, some tend to remember it better.
It appears that this usage is not just limited to the furniture industry. The parent's search had Dell as the first sponsored link
Interestingly in Costa Rica people tend to call it CPU, and I have even seen it in advertisements in newspapers/online/TV.
Frankly CPU actually makes some sense, since "the box" is the Central Processing Unit to which you attach your peripherals (from the users' standpoint at least).
What drives me nuts when they call the tire "wheel" on a car or bike, Here you have a lot of flats (bad roads) and you never know what happened and if you are going to shell out $$ for a tyre (tire?) or a lot more $$$$$ for new wheels when your wife tells you she has to change her "wheels"....
This topic highlights why nerds don't have friends. Normal people are tolerant of others. Nerds use knowledge as a weapon. I suppose it's a coping mechanism or some such thing.
Computer smart, cool people understand that non-tech smart people are generally insecure about to their total lack of l33tn355. The illiterate are generally just trying to inch their way through life.
Please, in the future, be kind
Not long before he died, my grandfather and I were able to bond over this.
Now, he did not know the first damn thing about computers. Given that he spent most of the first two decades of his life without electricity, I really could not blame him. However, he was a furniture salesman from the 50s through the 70s. I was relating to him some of the frustration of front line tech support, and he told me about some of the things he dealt with back then. Like people calling in because they bought ironing boards, and the ironing board was not ironing their clothes. Or those newfangled microwaves. People would buy them, put the food in, and not understand why the food was not cooking even though they had not turned any dials or pressed any buttons. We shared quite a few laughs over people misunderstanding technologies that are so elementary today a child can use them.
You say you want a revolution....
I didn't twig just what she meant at the time.
Trying to use a cutting-edge word definition which only a select few know makes you look, and sound, elitist as well as trying too hard (which also applies to this common sense blurb called an article).
You, sir, are an arse. Someone using decades-old British colloquialisms does not warrant such a ridiculous diatribe.
Pirate Party UK
Apparently the monitor is the computer and the computer is the CPU.
In addition to being called the computer, the monitor is also often referred to as the t.v. and the "window." I once had a lady that was adamant that they called the operating system Windows because you viewed it in the window.
Both the monitor and computer both have their separate power cable. Just because you have your monitor cable going between the monitor and computer doesn't mean that one is going to power the other.
Unfortunately, there isn't a fuse to replace when the computer won't turn on. Also, they stopped using tubes in computers some ages ago.
Laptop's are actually "labtops," because the original intent was to make a computer that was easy to use in a lab environment. It's just coincidental that they also work nicely in your lap.
When someone says the word "memory," don't even try to figure out what they mean. Just troubleshoot. Not enough memory for their program could mean anything from hard drive space to ram to having integrated video and not being able to play a game.
There is really no need to have a fire extinguisher close to the computer. Honestly. The cd burner isn't really burning anything.
Your best costumer is the one who knows absolutely nothing and doesn't claim to know anything. I successfully walked an 85 year old lady through a motherboard replacement on the phone once. On the other hand, I often had a hard time getting "IT guys" to follow simple instructions for troubleshooting devices. I don't care who you are, I'm not going to send you a replacement modem when there is a known registry fix that will make it work just fine. ...
It's funny, you almost develop an entirely knew "language" when dealing with laypeople over the phone. I could go on and on...
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
The only one that really bothered me was the hard drive/memory mix-up, or lack of differentiation, my father used whenever talking about his computer. Even worse, he always took my brother's word as The last word in computer technology, even though he's a dentist and I was building computers for a living. He must have thought technology was not for "girls".
Well, you can use my analogy:
Memory is your desk. You have to put something on your desk to work on it. The hard drive is your filing cabinet.
You can't read things in the filing cabinet without getting up, walking across the room, opening it up, flipping through the files, and taking the one you want back to your desk. Although the filing cabinet can hold a lot of stuff very cheaply, you can't work directly on stuff in it. Furthermore, the smaller your desk is, the fewer things you'll be able to keep on it, and the more you'll have to get up and walk over to the filing cabinet. This takes your computer lots of time, if you keep doing it, so you have to buy enough desk to hold all the things you'll want to work on at the same time.
These are the same people that say things such as: NIC Cards (network interface card card) ATM Machine (automated teller machine machine) and my favorite PIN Number (personal identification number number). Calling the whole computer a CPU/hard drive/box thingy/tower will always continue on, so we will just have to deal with it.
The hard drive is the computer and the application is the database. This craziness has gone so far that in documents that go outside of development, some writers swap the word application or program with database just so that the end user gets it.
I think this behavior stems from when a user overhears a "cool" new word somewhere in a context that makes sense; such as:
Thus, database becomes the application and everything that's associated with it.
if they don't know. forget them.
...or the many dummy synonyms for the word "download". Awhile back I was doing tech support for a fairly small firm, and I quickly learned that in the stoopid realm, "download" could mean any combination of:
copy
install
download
upload
import
export
transfer
send
receive
etc.
I sometimes wonder if it didn't get its start back in the 80's when "My hard drive crashed" referred to permanent disk failure.
Now, people are more likely to use it to mean BSOD.
The problem here is with the terminology, not the user. In normal language, memory is what we use to remembering things, both long term and short term. So of course the place where your computer remembers everything is the memory.
Make it personal: "Memory is like the stuff in your head, Storage is the stuff you write down. When you're turned off (eg: dead) the stuff in your head is gone, but the stuff you wrote down is still available. Now maybe you'll remember to tell your computer to write down the document you're working on before you kill it."
agreed. In the example of the radiator, they might say radiator but it could be a thermostat, hose or water pump.
I think everyone's missing the point. We don't expect users to understand what all the components of their computers are. We expect them to stop pretending they do.
I'm really very ignorant about cars, and if something goes wrong with my car, I don't take it to a mechanic and start guessing: "it's a problem with the radiator." I tell him, "there's a problem with my car and explain the symptoms. Let him figure it out.
Similarly, users saying, "my hard drive is broken" when they mean the computer would seriously piss me off. Just say, "there's a problem with my computer" and explain the problem. Let the experts figure out what's wrong and stop trying to use technical terms you don't understand.
I used to work at an ISP in the dirty dirty, back in the days when all we had were 8 external modems on a card table.
There was a cable cut that took out our T1 connection, and soon frantic calls from end users were coming in. For whatever reason, people just didn't accept that the "whole internet" could be inaccessible because our connection to it was severed.
We just started telling people that the internet was on fire. And for some reason, they would say "Oh, okay" and hang up.
That doesn't beat the time when a customer told me that the "computer inside his computer" was making funny noises. Looking back though, it sort of makes sense.
How far did his jaw drop?
You say you want a revolution....
Of the thousands of people I've supported so many of them called the computer a hard drive, I politely correct them once and if they persist, I don't correct them again. They've decided the piece of technology is in fact a hard drive and why waste my breath explaining what every piece is, if they're not interested. Sometimes I get an old guy asking questions about everything who is genuinely curious and has an attitude to learn so I explain as much as I can in laymans terms.
Not everyone cares how things are made and essentially these same people pay my bills so I don't blame them.
--
"What? No eggy-wegs?"
"The files are IN the computer" --Zoolander
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
I guess a lot of people at /. are just as bad as those who call a computer a "CPU". I'm sure you all call one of those boxes that has a network switch, DHCP server, router, modem etc. simply as a "router".
I'm fine with a computer being called a CPU, going back in history a CPU was a device on its own, with memory, data etc. being separate. Just winds me up when my girlfriend calls her iMac a "modem".
An accurate description of symptoms is far better than wild and wrong guesses about the cause of the problem.
That's forgivable. That's just jargon incompatibility. Disk memory and chip memory are both types of memory, and there's even an argument to call a hard disk RAM (after all, hard disks are randomly accessible, and Compact disks are referred to as CD-ROMs).
Love the analogy... I just fail to see why the oven is any different from the food processor or blender. Not all food (data?) gets put in the oven...
ignorant people keep me in business. they can call it a magic box for all i care.
It's HDD, meaning Hard Disk Drive, so as to not be confused with HD, High Definition.
Hehehe.... Lovely.
That's pretty much my scrap-paper / bookshelf analogy. The larger paragraph is, however, what it makes clear. It does require some explaining. Some users have the attention span of a squirrel.
I once had a customer come in and tell me that "I need more RAMs of memory in my computer."
One of my favorites was when a customer called in to ask a couple of questions and she told me how many "Gigglebytes" of storage she had.
Another good one was when a potential customer called in telling me that he wanted to buy a Compaq computer, but he pronounced it "COMP A QUE".
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
How many people refer to the Clock Tower as "Big Ben", while Big Ben is actually one of the bells in the tower and hence seen by few people?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
When you go to the doctor, do you say "Doctor, my Interior Vena Cava isn't processing the volume of blood that it should"? No, you say "my chest hurts". The innards of a computer are just as mysterious to the average user as the insides of the human body. Why should a user be able to tell a hard drive from a cable modem? We, as IT professionals are paid to diagnose and fix the problem. We rely on users to report symptoms, then we figure out what the problem is. Our first question should not be "What part is broken?", but rather "What is happening?"
I get 'my computer is out of memory' or 'i need more memory' when they really mean HDD capacity
The one I've found that works reasonably well is:
RAM is how much stuff you can do at the same time.
Hard drive storage is how much stuff you can keep.
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
I hope you know that consumer ADSL equipment is, in fact, a modem and is even occasionally correctly called such by packaging, customer service reps, etc.
Unless you're forgetting important parts of this story, you're the one who's mistaken, not the customer.
That will never be as aggravating as memory vs. storage. "I need more memory for my program" is more likely to mean "I'm out of disk space" than "I need more RAM".
Of course, even some applications get that one wrong. Older versions of photoshop for windows, for instance, if you try to start them when there isn't enough disk space to create their tile cache, will complain that there isn't enough "memory (RAM)" in the system.
Adding more RAM just makes matter worse, because the size of the tile cache that it tries to create is proportional to the amount of memory you have.
For saying what is in the first few paragraphs of the article? Way to waste your mod points.
Well how about this. You, as an IT knowing guy, tell your friend, the retard, that his hard drive is broken. Instead of buying a new hard drive, he buys a new PC, on your recommendation. Language is language and it's important that we are all synced.
What good is it to sync up language, when the guy still has no idea what you are talking about?
This reminds me of a time, a long long time ago, when I went into my college campus's computer store. I told the friendly sales associate that I wanted to look at their hard disks. He handed me a box of 3.5 inch floppies.
Wow.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I would probably change CPU = Oven analogy. Maybe CPU = Chef or Chefs. If you have a really fast chef or chefs, but no counter space, then shit can only be done so fast... but if you have a slow Chef, it doesn't matter how much counter space you have, shit ain't gonna be done fast.
Further more a cup of water and a cup of sugar are both a cup but are not interchangeable. Byte is just a unit of measure just like cup. A byte of disk is not interchangeable with a byte of system memory is not interchangeable with a byte of graphics memory.
if you then had to fix that one too!
What drives me crazy are users who refer to every piece of software on their computers as "the Microsoft", even if they're using products by Adobe, EA, Apple, Corel, or Mozilla.
A friend of mine was a help desk worker at a cable company and had a funny story. A lady called in saying her internet was down. After about 30 minutes on the phone trying to diagnose the problem he figured out that her power was out in house.
I guess at the end of the day, we just need to remember that we're being paid regardless if the end user is smart or stupid.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
On the popular TV show Chuck the main characters, supposedly tech experts, repeatedly refer to desktop PCs as "hard drives."
I assume that millions of viewers adopt this misuse of vocabulary under the assumption that the fictional Nerd Herd employees actually know what they are talking about.
It kinda bugs me that the show's writers could be so lazy/ignorant when it comes to simple tech vocabulary.
That's exactly how I've started explaining things to people. The hard drive is long-term memory. It's slow, but it holds a lot. The RAM is short-term memory and holds everything you're working on at the moment. That explanation usually holds long enough to get the information I want, and then they forget what it means the next day.
I think computer jargon needs some improvement. What do you call the computer system, sans monitor? Box? Tower? I don't blame users for being confused. They probably call it CPU or hard drive because they expect a technical term to apply, yet none does. And what about hard disk? How's that going to fly when we're using flash drives? It's not actually a disk.
We need some better terminology. Maybe pmem (persistent memory) instead of hard drive.
It's not the customer's job to know the technical details of a complex computer system and its software. That's what the support tech is for. It's your job as a tech to listen to the customer's needs, interpret them, devise a solution, and drag them kicking and screaming to that solution. Irritating? Sure. But that's why they pay you. Can you educate them? Maybe. Most people just want to click the mouse and see the expected result. Or press the pedal on the floor to make the car go forward. Or push the green Send button and hear a ring. Not everyone wants to learn the details of how things work.
I wish I had mod points for you and the AC above. I actually have the reverse problem. It bothers me that it's considered "disk I/O" when it's essentially storage (memory) in the Von Neumann architecture.
CPU = oven. Still have an original Athlon?
No, seriously. The first part of the problem is something that it's hard to blame anyone for: the uninformed user confuses the computer with the monitor. The monitor's where interesting stuff happens, so it's easy to see why anyone who didn't know better would be under the impression that was the important part.
Unfortunately, jumping to this obvious and incorrect conclusion leaves the user with something of a conundrum: what's the big grey box for? Fortunately, Microsoft have supplied the answer in the form of the standard Windows Explorer icons. Open up "My Computer" (an icon with a monitor on it, of course), and you see a set of grey boxes that look something like what you have sitting under your desk. And when you click on them, that thing starts making noises. And we all know those icons are for where your files are stored, and your files are stored on hard drives, so that thing under the desk must be a hard drive, right? Stands to reason.
In cree the word for monitor I have found is teevee. The word for computer is hard drive. Who am I to say they are wrong? I just have to make it's still working for them when I am 500 miles away back home.
If you would read the article, you'd notice that his point isn't that different things are called by different words in different languages.
You'd also see that his point wasn't that nontechnical users don't always know the proper names for computer components.
His point is that there is a significant contingent of people who make the specific error of referring to a computer by the name "hard drive". He wonders where huge populations of computer users were taught this specific piece of incorrect terminology.
Personally, I'm a bit curious about that, as well. Why would so many people people refer to a computer as a "hard drive", as opposed to any other component or term. Where are people being taught this?
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
"Open the pod bay door, HAL..... Open the pod bay door, HAL."
"I'm afraid I can't let you do that, Dave."
"Wtf. Open the pod bay door, HAL! Please?"
"I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave.... Um, I seem to have a 'hard drive failure'."
"Oh. Well. I'll just-- Should I just sit here and wait?"
"That would be satisfactory."
"Fine. Okay... Get better!"
"Thank you, Dave."
"Do you.. Do you want me to sing you a song or something?"
"That's alright, Dave. I see that the batteries on your pod has decreased to 12% now. At 10% I won't be able to hear you any longer."
"Oh.. That also because of this 'hard drive' error?"
"Certainly, Dave. Whatever makes you comfortable."
Defining Statistics and Social Research
people on a LAN would still sign in to AOL and open the web from there.
AOL gave millions of people the wrong impression.
So I would agree with "The Hard Drive" being the entire box comment being really annoying.
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." -Dr. Seuss
I really hate this too. I hate it almost as much as panicked calls telling me the "Internet is down!!!" because someone's stupid home page isn't loading.
At this point in the game, basic computer knowledge should be mandatory for any non "blue-collar" job. It amazes me still that my company continues to hire people who can barely figure out where the power buttons are on their computer and monitor. There are a lot of people with good computer skills out of work right now!
"My internet is down", has to be my top pet peeve. The Internet doesn't soley belong to you, and I can assure you the general Internet is up. I'm playing a game of StarCraft right now over the Internet, as a matter of fact.
I'd much prefer, "my connection is down", but people rarely say that.
It's no different than how everything is a "jet-ski." That was a kawasaki brand. Also, just look at MP3 players; they get called "iPods" more often than not.
My favorite is when they call it 'their brain.'
This only works so long as neither you nor the person you are 'communicating' with have any actual familiarity with the work flow in a real kitchen. Your 'analogy' would be confusing as hell to anyone who does.
Clap. Clap. Clap. Well done sir. :-)
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
...and put all of my efforts into getting people to stop calling the projector "the powerpoint." "I need to borrow the laptop and powerpoint" BAH!
I pity your flamebait status, but alas I have no points.
Well, are these software or hardware problems? If my mom's computer was unusable because of a bunch of viruses and she called me and told me, "I think my computer is broken". After explanation I would probably tell her he computer wasn't broken at all, and that she should probably have someone do a fresh install. After which she would suggest that maybe it is her mouse, because the light keeps flashing. I would then assure her that no, the problem is the hard drive -- and you should bring your windows disk in and have someone do a fresh install and transfer all your stuff back to your computer.
The result, my mom calls someone and says her hard drive is broken.
Making them right more of the time doesn't help unless they're right all of the time, because you still have to spend just as much effort to figure out if they know what they're talking about on any given occasion. Just teach them to describe what happened; this is one of those times where computers are identical to cars. In either case, the tech needs to know what you were doing and what actually happened, and not what you think the problem is; if you knew what the problem was, you wouldn't have to go to them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Nice. I usually use the "computer as office" analogy.
Hard drive = filing cabinet, where you store your files.
System memory = Desktop; where you take out files and work (you only have so much desk space before things back up).
CPU = you/others in the office
Programs = tasks you're doing
Its usually simple enough that people can grasp it, and you can usually expand things pretty easily.
"you want to add more RAM? that's like getting a bigger desktop so you can have more projects open on it at once"
"you want a faster CPU? that's like you being able to work faster"
"multiple cores? Okay, imagine it wasn't just you sitting in the office, but there were four people"
Other hardware becomes office equipment (depending on what it is and how its used), but that starts to push the analogy a bit. :)
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
When was the last time you saw persistent 'memory' on a PC? I don't think I ever have.
I've always assumed that this naming convention started with the Classic Mac. With that, the computer *was* the screen, and if you were lucky enough to have a hard drive, that was the little box attached to the screen. In previous jobs, it would usually be the longtime Mac users would would use Hard Drive for the computer itself, and I suspect it's just one of those memes that gets spread around.
One problem that I have is that people will call me to fix their computer, but then not let me fix it.The best example I can give is my mother's computer. I built the thing from scratch, she even took pictures of me building the whole thing. Some time later the one of the fans on the computer is making a lot of noise, compressed air doesn't do the trick so I prepare to replace the fan.But no, no. Don't open the computer, you might break it! Of course she regularly kicks the tower to make the noise stop.
I get the same kind of feed back when it comes to software. I would tell my family to use Firefox to stop pop-up windows (this is a few years ago). I install it and show them how to use it. A month goes by and they say they getting pop-ups. I ask them to show me and guess what? They are using IE, because they don't like Firefox. Can't I just make IE not have pop-ups? Eventually I started to use the XP file permissions to block access to iexplore.exe. I would just make up some excuse for why it stopped working (pop-ups, virus, etc.). I know its not the ethical thing to do, but it helped them in the long run. As a bonus they would tell others my story, hopefully that caused some of them to switch too.
irrelevant, pointless article ! we need more useful and intelligent material on SD not "small talk".
I have had a few incompetent IT it teachers - one of them even tried to teach me that the whole system was a CPU. To be fair she was just a computer skills teacher (to teach grade 8's how to type, which she was good at). I can totally see where the author of TFA is coming from. I blame pop culture (and Microsoft).
Why teach a user terminology when it's not needed? I've told my mother not to use jarhon, only the terms she knows. Instead, I've asked her to describe the what she sees compared to what she expected. MUCH more valuable, as it allows me to accurately diagnose any problem reliably and reasonably quickly. Kind of like me interacting with a garage mechanic: I can name or describe the components I come into contact with, and describe the problem. The mechanic can then find the actual problem quickly. It even works when you're dead wrong about a possible cause, like I was once when I had my bike repaired.
Been using this analogy for years. Swap oven for chef for CPU, and it works wonders.
Her: im having a really big problem with my icq will you please help me?
Me: I'll try my best
Her: my mom just got a new server and she completely and now i can't get my old contact list back!!!! she erased everything!!!!
Me: What do you mean "new server"? A new computer?
Her: you know the thing that sits next to your computer that you turn on to to on the comp!
Me: The metal box that has the CD drive in it?
Her: yep.
Me: That would be the computer.
When was the last time you saw persistent 'memory' on a PC? I don't think I ever have.
Er... last time I booted and saw that my BIOS settings had been retained.
Flamebait: This is pretty low content, even by Slashdot standards.
Admins and help desk folk have been whining about clueless users for as long as there have been computers. It takes a few generations for people to hit an equilibrium level of tech savvy. Everyone loves to cite the car as an example of minimum mechanical competency. This comparason falls flat for two reasons:
1. Cars cost a lot more than a computer, therefore there is much more incentive to understand how they work. Mistaking windshield wiper fluid for antifreeze can cost you $10,000. This isn't the case with a computer (cue the anecdotal outliers like some virii stealing $10,000 from your mom's bank account). Moreover, this article mistakes the basic level of competency of most computer users. Most of them are reasonably proficient at any day-to-day operation of their PC. Beyond that, just as with a car, they'll take it to a professional.
2. This is the most important point: everyone grew up in a world with automobiles. Your parents understand how cars work because they had to own and maintain them. Personal computers as a universal device are less than 20 years old. Give it a generation or two and people will understand, as a rule, that the hard drive lives inside the computer.
Honestly, this kind of generic holier-than-thou geek wankery is really annoying. It's a sign of an immature perspective, coming from the type of person who is insecure in their knowledge.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Btw. I am not using my current monitor for monitoring either.
I bet you just used it for monitoring replies to your comments :-)
No, anything based on Netburst [Pentium 4] would be more likely to be "an oven"
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
I've known many a user who refer to anything that isn't the monitor, mouse, keyboard, or printer as "the CPU". If someone says they have "CPU problems", that statement can support an incorrect assumption that the user did some sort of diagnostics to determine that their problem is indeed the CPU, and not memory, storage, video, sound, network card, etc...
Of course this also leads to interesting questions like "how do I hook up this new USB hooziwhatzit to my CPU?"
And given the rising failure rate of hard drives (and the disappointingly acceptably lower MTBF ratings in the industry), there is likely a better chance that a user is correct when they say "I have a hard drive problem" than when they say "I have a CPU problem".
I know from my experience I have had far more hard drives fail than CPUs. I can think of at least four hard drives that I have had fail on me, and only one CPU (which I overclocked).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I assume then by your car example that you are entirely familiar with the technical aspects of everything? Sure you may know the difference between a radio and an engine. Your customers may know the difference between the monitor and the hard drive. Can you identify the difference between an engine problem and motor problem in a Prius? I gaurantee you I can come up with a long list of items you can't name all the parts to correctly. Get over yourself already.
This is a pet peave of mine too. But, when I run into someone referring to the computer as a "Hard Drive" I pull out the disk platter I keep in my desk drawer and patiently explain that the hard drive is just one component...
many people just like saying "hard drive". Plus, it counter-acts "micro soft". People around here call their flash-drives "dongles" for pure amusement. It's a way to work around the P.C. police. "But Inspector Snootihunt, it's a tech term. Honest."
Table-ized A.I.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Really? I've seen every episode, and while I wasn't looking for this sort of mistake so I could have missed it, I would think I'd notice such a thing.
More confusing is when they refer to the Intersect as both a database and a computer.
And wait when the computer experts starts explaining how the Internet browser or Open Office is part of the operating system and if you get malware trought browser, it is the virus on the OS.
Tangentially related, I hate how hard it apparently is for people to not incorrectly interchange upload and download.
I can deal with users who don't know that it's not the CPU or the hard drive, but I used to work as a repair tech for a computer company and tech support would regularly open a ticket with instructions like "replace the CPU" "replace the hard drive" or even "replace the modem" when what they really meant was that the customer had complained enough that the company agreed to replace the entire base unit with a new one. It's very frustrating to work with supposed "technicians" who are completely ignorant of computer terminology.
My take is that this issue dates from around the time of the Mac Plus. The Mac Plus did not have an internal hard drive, but it did have an external SCSI connection for connecting to a good-sized hard drive enclosure. Most often, when sitting at a desk, the "monitor" (the actual Mac Plus computer) would sit on top of the hard drive enclosure. When the computer bits migrated to the bottom enclosure, people did not know/understand/care and kept right on calling it the hard drive.
The new word to bring the English language to 1,000,000 words is "noob". In hot contention is "defriend" (as in MySpace or FaceBook parlance) It is no wonder that people are calling the tower "hard-drive"? The tech industry is spinning new words almost daily.
Note: Consideration of a "new word "requires 25,000 uses in television.
Some people don't have a large investment in geekery. I don't see why they guy who mows my neighbor's lawn should have to keep up on the FPM/EDO/DRAM/DDRAM transition. I am not required by my automechanic to keep up on the latest in variable valve timing techniques.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
What gets me is when people make no attempt to understand the tech when I'm making a real effort to understand their job. I hear it all the time "this IT stuff makes no sense to me" - and at the first utterance of an acronym from me, I see eyes roll and hands wave in a dismissive manner.
I don't think that simply making an effort is an unreasonable expectation, especially when I sit in meetings asking about each finance/accounting acronym that I don't recognize and take all kinds of notes to understand the process and terminology. I'm not an accountant either, but at least I'm trying to understand and am contributing something useful to a discussion.
On the other hand, I'm completely cool with the fact that part of my job is to understand both the technology, its application, and the business processes around it. Accounts, HR, business development, and operations staff do not necessarily share this responsibility. I guess that it's another place where I can add value and justify my existence in the company.
On a pure annoyance level, I hear "my server is down" (as a completely generic description of any network issue) far more often than a generic "hard drive" problem. That one tends to get me - I have to conscientiously hold my tongue when I hear that.
-Turkey
Or a P4...
During the murky period between earning my degree and finding a real people job, I spent some time as a computer salesman at a big-box electronics retailer.
I often found myself in a position where I not only had to accept a customer's ignorance, but also had to go along with it as if they knew what they were talking about. Correcting a customer, no matter how polite you are, makes them feel stupid and less likely to buy from you.
I sold a great many systems by avoiding any sort of discussion regarding the guts of a particular PC at all, instead opting to figure out what they were planning on doing with it and pointing out several systems that would just get the job done.
Funny. Reminds me of the place I worked where all the little old ladies thought programs, screen savers, wallpaper, and almost anything else they could see on the screen was an "icon." Confused the hell out of me until I learned to translate.
Ask me about my sig!
And every electrical failure is caused by a "short curcuit"!
The confusion of RAM and the hard drive never really bothered me too much. RAM is like short term memory and the hard drive is like long term memory.
I think referring to the computer as the CPU comes from Apple people back in the day. Every person that was an Apple user referred to it as the CPU, without exception.
You managed to contradict yourself in a two sentence post. Obviously, it would be better to pay for a hard drive replacement (incl. service) than to pay for a whole new system. Of course things are more complicated than that, and many factors need to be considered, including:
I believe you owe no undies an apology sir!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
... Synecdoche, it's not just a city in New York :-)
Everything is a hard drive unless your using the XBox 360. Microsoft confuses things for users even further by referring to the external hard drive as "Memory." I started correcting a friend when they said "Oh, my xbox is running low on memory, have to delete some stuff to download this movie." Then I watched them go through the interface and access "Memory" to do file management on the hard drive.
Let me tell you why, Americans especially, look so stupid. Because their life is so nicely set up. You have a problem with some appliance - you call the tech guy. Why would you at all need a name for the appliance if you could just point him out the problem. Well in other parts of the world people may (try to) fix it themselves. Obviously in this case they'll learn more about the particular device. But loose time they could devote to their profession. Specialization is the driving force behind complex *things* (speaking general).
While we may argue which life style is better, we could describe the American as being more specialized and dependent. And recalling that our biological cells were once separate organisms (many cells still are) that became specialized and dependent upon the others to form the multicellular organism, we could easily recognise the new higher organism that is evolving. This organism has it's name - Society.
I always went with a Library when describing the components.
Tower = Building, it all goes inside
CPU = Your Brain, the faster it works, the faster you read a book
Hard Drive = Book shelves, more shelf space holds more books
Programs/File = Books
Memory = The table where you open the books, more table the more room you have to work and open what you need
Vid Card = Your eyes, won't see with out it
Sound Card = Your ears
This has worked for the past 12 years. Even on my 79 year old mother in law.
Yo dawg, we heard you like computers so we put a computer in your computer so it can make funny noises while it makes funny noises. :)
Users are simple. They don't really care what it's called.
They call it the hard drive.
And of course, a lot of users call their monitor "the computer".
Some used to call it the tower.
Others have called it that box on the floor, as if it does nothing.
They're using their grammar skills there.
So are external hard drives inside the computer? :)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
When stuff like this starts to bother you that much, it's time for a career change. You can always tell when somebody has been at a job (usually one they don't like) too long.
If you own a car, you SHOULD know what a starter motor is and approximately where you can find it and what it may look like.
And, if you use a computer, you should know the difference the monitor and the computer, and the difference between between hard disk and internal memory, the difference between the CPU and the keyboard.
If you don't, you should be allowed to use one.
assignment != equality != identity
Contrary to what we might prefer, the USA is not the center of the universe, and American English is not even the original, let alone only English dialect. In fact, we are so far off we spell words such as "standardise," "colour," "centre," "flavour," and many others incorrectly because one guy (Noah Webster) in the 1800s thought it would be a really great idea to dumb down the language a bit, and since words like "razor" and "colour" sound sorta-kinda-but-not-quite alike, dropping the "u" would be perfectly fine. and even though "standardise" was kind of a slurred "s" but not quite a "z" but sounded almost like a "z" it would be fine spelled with a z, because obviously Americans are too stupid to learn to spell words in this complicated language.
That trend of lowering the bar and dumbing down of America has continued ever since then and is showing no signs of slowing down.
In other words, "twig" may not have that common usage here, but it does elsewhere.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
"Hi, this is Karen at Client Company X. My Microsoft isn't working."
Granted, she may be on to something, but she's not smart enough... to be on to anything. In reality, she had 22 apps open and MS Word 2007 frozen on her.
If you're under 50 and don't know the proper use of the terms 'Hard Drive' 'CPU' and 'Computer', you live under a rock. There's no excuse. EVERYONE has a computer these days. It is not comparable to owning a car but not knowing thing-one about maintaining it, it's like owning a car and not knowing that it isn't called a 'toaster oven'.
The worst part is— as posited in the article —there are most certainly people out there teaching these incorrect terms. There has to be. I've even heard people who've grown up with modern computers refer to hard drive space as 'memory'.
It makes no sense to me whatsoever.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Errr.... so close and yet so far? Why not change that so that programs are recipes - closer to the actual truth and then they gain some understanding that the recipe controls what gets done with the oven.
Or, if you want to stick to the programs as tools metaphor then make the chef the CPU. The oven is just another tool, and you've made a weird distinction between one tool, and all the other tools in the kitchen just to shoehorn it in.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
Please. Who came up with 'hard drive'?
A hard disk drive is hard.
A floppy disk drive is hard.
An optical disk drive is hard.
A hard disk is hard.
A floppy disk is floppy.
I highly suspect that this dichotomy stems from a belief (well-founded or not) that mechanics are below their station in life but high-tech professionals should be below it and are somehow above it.
For ages and ages, mechanics have been (even if only in perception) dirty, slightly lower-class people that fix our things when we need them to. On the other hand, high-tech professionals appear to be clean, generally-well-educated people that can make six-figure salaries for being not much more than being born introverted and socially awkward. :) They may only need a high-tech professional when something is broken and needs fixing, just like they would for a mechanic, but this seems to only magnify the problem in some strange way.
People would like to be seen as knowing a little something about what their mechanics do, if only to provide a mild threat against being ripped off, but are fine with not knowing all that much about it because if they did then it might indicate that they are closer to their mechanic's station in life. This is something they want to avoid if possible. On the other hand, people get very touchy when they can't pull off an air of understanding and correctness of matters related to stations in life that they perceive to be higher than theirs, even if the only aspect they care about in this particular case is the high-tech professional's earning potential and recognized demand in the marketplace.
Compounding all of this is the fact that while a mechanic may involve someone in diagnosing a problem by having them answer a few very simple questions, they generally involve them in the process less than a high-tech professional often has to, even ignoring for the moment that even if a high-tech professional needed to ask the same number of questions each of those questions can be much more difficult for them to answer.
As they do with a mechanic, they want to see the high-tech professional as a servant they can just throw problems at. Except that this "servant" is better-educated, works a cleaner job with generally better hours and quite regularly a higher salary than theirs, and is asking them questions they can't answer (or fake.) This combination seems to make their blood boil more often than not, and it certainly doesn't help that the high-tech professional's lifetime experience as a socially-awkward introvert means that when they do have to involve someone in the diagnostic process they don't present questions and process answers as smoothly as would help the situation along.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hey Doches,
I think your username is missing a letter!
::fiddles with letters::
Douches
There, much better.
"You don't call the auto shop and tell them that your engine is broken when your radio breaks! " Knowing some mechanics all i can say is, you could not be more wrong
This little gem of a term has been making its rounds lately. It took us hours of troubleshooting one day to realize that when our user said "I have a blue screen and can't log in" he wasn't referring to Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death but instead, to the teal blue color of his Desktop in Windows XP.
Isn't this like "Bus error, core dumped", or all those sh.core files?
Or "memory banks"? or "engrams"?
Language changes more slowly than the underlying technology (although language changes surprisingly quickly compared with other cultural aspects)...
I think it might have to do with the fact that the in windows the filesystem is rooted at the hard drive. People click on "My Computer" and the first thing they see is "Hard Drive".
My dad calls the hard-drive "the memory," and when talking about actual memory he refers to it as "the tapes."
"Then there is the usual stuff... I tell people about Ubuntu, and how it is an alternative operating system" - comment from Matrix
So, Ubuntu is an operating system now, is it?
Garry Knight
... funny you should mention that. Around 1970 when VW started to 'improve' the Beetle line, they introduced an Electronic Fuel Injection that would cut out when you turned on the radio.
Disclaimer -- this may have been a North American market thing. Might not have effected the Euro VWs.
I use the library full of zombie monkeys analogy myself:
Main desk : RAM (bigger desk= more customers at once)
Librarian : CPU (multi-core=multi monkeys, overclocking=Monkey on meth)
Librarian's desk : L1 and l2 Cache
Clerks : Northbridge and Southbridge
Stacks : HDD (more GB= many more shelves)
Book: single file
page : chunk of file actually written to disk
Card Catalogue : File Table
plug n' board antique switchboard : NIC with IP address and port numbers
usually. Anytime the tower has a problem, the user says my CPU's broken, making a noise, won't turn on etc.
I'm tired of the excuses. If you rely on a particular device to put food on your table and a roof over your family's head, you damn well better understand how that device works. There's nothing secret or classified about personal computers. All of the information needed to gain a basic understanding of the technology is freely available and explained in terms as complicated or simple as anyone could want. You can look up "Go, Dog. Go!" level guides or read the engineering documentation.
I don't understand how people can willingly live in such a thick fog of ignorance. It must make the world an incredibly frightening place.
"Download." For so many people I work with (and in my family as well) the word "download" ends up being the universal verb for everything computer-related. Save a document? Downloaded it. Move a file to a USB drive? Downloaded it. Run a program? Downloaded it.
Another common one is for someone to refer to a whole computer as a CPU. This doesn't irk me as much, but still...
/* No Comment */
There is really no need to have a fire extinguisher close to the computer. Honestly. The cd burner isn't really burning anything.
well, if you want to get technical about it... the pits are formed by a chemical reaction caused by the laser on the substrate of the disc
Strictly speaking they're correct. And by 'strictly' I mean, when they say they don't have enough memory, they're right. It's the difference between volatile (RAM) and non-volatile (HDD etc) memory. Which is why a swap file is the continuation of RAM by other means. I find that worse, because they've arrived at the right words by the wrong route, so I have to say something like 'Yes, you're right, but what do you actually mean?'
People around me are calling a hard drive a server, usually when speaking about an external hard drive. And no matter how much I try to correct them, they always go back to calling a hard drive a server.
I guess the hard drives, especially the external ones, are evolving toward being servers, but it's very confusing when a user tells you that he can't copy it's files on the server, whey they are referring to a hard drive.
The whole memory thing, I can't really blame users for too much. Technically, hard drives, optical drives, memory cards, usb sticks, etc, *are* forms of long-term memory for the computer. A hard drive does much the same thing as system memory (that is, it stores digital values) - it just does it *much* slower. I do get what you're saying about being frustrated though - I run into this with my mom and dad frequently - I'd rather they used the word memory to only refer to system RAM, not their hard drive space, because when they tell me they think their computer is running out of memory, I now have to go in and figure out if they have too much crap running in the background, or if I need to delete something off the hard drive.
What gets me is when I ask what version of Windows they're using and they look at me like I've asked them about some obscure phenomenon in quantum mechanics.
This also has the advantage of meshing with basically every single OS metaphor in common usage. Kitchen?!
Culture is more than commerce
Posting Anon since I already moderated.
My main problem with this analogy is: when my CPU is running programs, why must I put the food processor and the toaster into the oven?
One incident I had that still amuses me greatly:
I was working on a laptop of a guy from South Africa, and asked if he had the install floppies for some software (yeah it was a while ago). He replied that the machine doesn't use floppies. I grabbed a 3.5" disk off his desk and said "it doesn't?", to which he replied "OH! That's not a floppy, that's a stiffy!"
After I got done chuckling and explaining what "stiffy" means in American slang, we had no problems. Their word is perfectly logical, it just wasn't what I was expecting. Sort of like Americans using "fanny" to refer to the backside, while in the rest of the English-speaking world it generally refers to female genitalia.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Probe-Analyze-Isolate-Resolve...
Isn't this generally solved with the age old rule of "gaining agreement with the customer" and "asking probing questions"?
I remember once I was trying to figure out a customer's issue with email over the phone. I had to ask her to describe the icon she used to check her email when the computer first started. Eventually I learned she was actually using the web mail, not an actual desktop client. The other support people hadn't figured that part out for some reason. Since you can't get the user to come up to your level you have to go down to theirs. That means finding out not only what the issue is but *WHAT* exactly they are having an issue with.
Course having to follow up on tickets "written" but people who apparently don't know much more than the actual users makes it so much more fun. Sometimes I don't know if I should be mad at them or feel sorry for them. Please don't tell me the help desk was so over loaded that instead of closing the ticket by telling the user "turn off the num lock" the ticket was transferred to local support. I'm just not buying it. Yes that was an actual ticket in my queue. "The letter "K" produces the number "2". From the help desk, not a user. Not that I'm bitter. I don't yet have a ponytail, a beard and a love of sarcasm but I'm getting there...
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
Don't forget cache. It's the stack of paper you're holding in your hand.
interactive hologram, or it didn't happen.
LOL, just LOL. Dude - you need to get out more.
You, as an IT knowing guy, tell your friend, the retard, that his hard drive is broken. Instead of buying a new hard drive, he buys a new PC, on your recommendation. Language is language and it's important that we are all synced.
But even in your example, for the end user, there is no penalty for the confusion.
If the user replaces the actual HDD, the drive itself costs $100, and then he/she has to pay somebody who has a clue a few hours of qualified tech time to come up with a working system. Total cost: $300 to get essentially the same computer back, with an expired warranty.
If the user replaces the computer itself, he/she gets a computer that works (pretty much) right away. Total cost: $300, for a new system with a warranty and most likely significantly better specs.
So the confusion actually works to the end users' benefit in a large percentage of cases. So why would he/she care? Heck, even tech weenies often call the "hard drive" a "CPU", even though the actual CPU is a small part thereof. Aren't we guilty of the same thing?
This is a slow news day...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
While the office analogy probably makes more sense to most people, the kitchen one makes more sense to me personally. That's only because I use a kitchen and I don't use the old office components like filing cabinets and desktops. When I hear "file," I don't think of a piece of paper. When I hear "desktop," I don't think of a horizontal surface.
While using the office analogy is probably a good idea for someone over 35, it wouldn't be for someone who's grown up using a computer. What analogy should we use for the generation that's grown up with computers, but still doesn't know the difference between a hard drive and RAM?
We all know what a computer is and the parts (CPU, hard drive, monitor, keyboard etc) but, as far as I know, there is no word for the subassembly including the case, PSU, mainboard, HDD etc. To the average user, a computer has 4 pieces: keyboard, monitor, mouse and a grey box that we all insist is NOT the hard drive or CPU.
Moron!
Why bother
You could always ask someone who said their hard drive was broken what parameters they used to establish this. Also, whether they had tried networking the hard drive to the intranet to establish just which software programs were causing it to crash.
We don't have the time to educate the person on the phone about the correct terminology. If we need them to do something to get it to work, we'll say whatever we need to say to get them to do what we need to do. I told a woman to hit the power button on the computer and she asked where it was. I told her its the big black box that the monitor and keyboard and everything is hooked up to. Imagine my surprise when she said there were two of them. I asked her to describe the other box and it ended up this was the UPS. I just told her to hit the big button the box you occasionally put CDs into. I then asked her to take out a USB dongle that I described as "the size of her thumb and it's blinking green on the end"... she then proceeded to unplug the ethernet. Sometimes their knowledge is so lacking that you can't use the technical terms and you start trying to explain it in the most simple terms possible. I think its the fact that we don't always take the time to correct them and just keep going so we get the job done that leads to the proliferation of the problem.
You are being paid to perform the job you are mostly because 'they' cannot be bothered to learn a 'hard drive' from a 'hole in their arse'.
Let their inability to grasp this simple concept stand as an example of their further inability to grasp your career field as a whole.
They want to call it everything a 'hard drive' and pay you 10 x N dollars per hour? Let them continue for all time.
Pet peeves are annoying, it's true. Hearing people complain that others refer to a specific item via improper nomenclature is one of mine.
Yeah, when technical people say "memory," we usually mean "RAM," but a hard drive or SSD is technically memory too. So, when a user is confused about RAM vs. disk space, I say that they're different kinds of memory (short term vs. long term) and point out that the word "memory" usually refers to the short term kind.
Whether reading from a disk is an input operation depends on the scope of the machine I guess. It's an input operation from the point of view of the CPU.
I've had an actual repair tech tell me a machine was dead. I pop the case cover off, blow out the dust completely clogging the CPU heat sink, regrease with heatsink compound, and, voila, she boots and runs no problem. Guy went on to work in the IT dept. at a large airplane mfr, last I heard. Made more than me at the time. Yeah, go figure. Names withheld to protect the guilty.
The other day a friend batted her eyes and told me her CV joint had broken. Pulled hard to the right, nearly put her in the ditch. Noise, metal bits emanating from the right front wheel. Okay... Since I wanted to see what a CV joint looked like on a 2WD Blazer, I took the bait and said, yeah, have it towed over here and I'll look at it, might cost $200 or so. and immediately started hunting a front hub assembly. Guy who towed it got the job, though. $60 labor, plus the tow. She got the hub herself, $120+tax. I would have charged $40 and made a few bucks on the hub, but so it goes. Maybe I'll get to do the front brakes, which are also worn out.
Unless you have a magic decoder ring, just get the user to tell you what happened. Or is that the magic decoder ring? At any rate, customer diagnoses may or may not be based on any kind of a clue, (hard to tell which is worse sometimes), but definitely don't assume that they are.
The reason many people think that the PC is called the "hard drive" is that they learn to store things "on the hard drive". Completely understandable, if they don't have any idea of what is inside the PC.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I think it depends on if the person is trying to sound smart "Hey, I know what a hard drive is" or is just describing the interaction point with the computer. Those who aren't trying to sound smart say things like "My mouse is broken" (esp. on old macs that would freeze up). Rational in a way...they move and click the mouse and the pointer doesn't move. Must be a broken mouse, right? I've also heard "My monitor is broken" for a computer that wouldn't boot. But that's all to be expected. Just smile and nod and ask the right diagnostic questions. That's your job, after all.
These people must really put on a stellar slideshow!
While any storage of bits can be called "memory," I don't think it's correct to call a hard disk drive "RAM." From the Wikipedia article:
The word random thus refers to the fact that any piece of data can be returned in a constant time, regardless of its physical location and whether or not it is related to the previous piece of data.
The only word the acronyms "RAM" and "ROM" have in common is "memory."
An 85 year old lady was able to unscrew and remove the old motherboard, put in the new motherboard and screw that in? Not to mention removing the components from the motherboard itself and putting them into the new one? Hell, I'm surprised she didn't put the CPU in the wrong way and break the pins and what not.
I've heard it called a CPU more than a hard drive. Maybe that's just me. :-)
http://www.unfocus.com/
Use of the CPU can be a lot like baking if you've ever done CGI involving rendering. So there's some truth to that. Put all the ingredients in, then hurry up and wait while it does its thing. Hopefully when it's done something good comes out of it.
I guess programmers could say that of compiling too.
And your thing about AMDs is true too, I can hear their fans going right now. And don't disturb the box, my render might fall in on itself.
The "Computer as Office" analogy is one that works quite well and is one that can actually be expanded quite a lot to describe the "complex" innards of the computer, for instance;
Hard drive = filing cabinet, where you store your files.
System memory = Desktop; where you take out files and work (you only have so much desk space before things back up).
CPU = you/others in the office (cache memory is like your own brain thinking of stuff)
Programs = tasks you're doing
GPU = painter drawing the stuff you are working with (the more memory/faster clock, the better the painting is)
I accompanied my dad to help a co-worker's with his computer problem some years ago. He wanted to upgrade his 486 machine to Windows 95 from Windows 3.1. He bought the OS at Best Buy, brought it home, and tried to install it.
The installer informed him that he needed more "memory" to run Windows 95. What then did he do?
He booted back into Windows 3.1 and started deleting things he didn't need using File Manager. Going down the C: drive alphabetically, it didn't take long to get to the DOS directory. "I don't use DOS, I use Windows. I can get rid of this."
Then he couldn't understand why Windows 3.1 (which is actually a shell of DOS) wouldn't work anymore and he still couldn't upgrade to 95.
Have you heard the tech terms thrown around in TV and movies? Penny Arcade exaggerated the point here: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/7/16/brains-with-urgent-appointments/
And if you were unfortunate enough to have seen the movie "Hackers," well, now you know why a bunch of people think filesystems look like little towers and you can float around between them.
Simple:
Programs = recipes.
The oven and food processor are system resources.
There are two lights on the front of a desktop PC.
When people have been trained to respond to questions about the box (the PC) that has a light on it that blinks, "Is your hard drive light blinking?" - they make the natural association.
Oh yes.. I am all too familiar with this issue. I used to work at a computer store and people would call me on the phone nearly every day and start the line with something like "Yeah, I bought this hard drive there yesterday..." Then I'd have to spend the next 10 minutes trying to ring the information out of them to figure out if they bought a computer or a hard drive. I mean, without knowing what it was, it was hard to answer their question.
My guess is that a lot of this confusion may stem from the Hard Drive access light. Fairly often when a computer slows down when a program is loading or virtual memory is getting swapped in large amounts, they'll hear the hard drive working away and the hard drive access light blinking. People associate this with the computer being busy/slow and equate hard drive to computer.
Also, you could figure in that in something like Windows Explorer or Finder, the majority of stuff under "My Computer" is the hard drive.
I went to college for Computer Science, and was good with hardware long before that. Even before I got into computer programming i was good with hardware.
In the 3rd grade I remember asking for a VooDoo 3 when they were still new.
I got one. I asked my Dad to install it since he knew about computer hardware, but he refused.
He said that if I want to mess with computers, I need to teach myself. Besides, there were instructions IN THE BOX!
Ever since then, I would consider myself extremely good with hardware. Yes, I have been doing it for years upon years.
What is the moral of this story from an anon? If you like computers, learn to do it yourself. I say screw the mainstream that can't figure it out. Let their computers crash and burn, and then maybe they will be able to figure it out, and if not, then I have no remorse since they were not willing to learn.
My 80 year old grandmother taught herself how to troubleshoot her dialup connection (she is 80, she doesn't need anything more than dialup).
I am sick and tired of all these trendy punks with computers, where one little issue, and I hear, "My computer is bad. Fix it." and that is all they tell me.
Is this an elitist way of thinking? No.
The only reason why I take my own car in for repairs is because it is under warranty. Me, personally, I don't know much about cars, but cars are nothing like computers.
Computers are actually much simpler now. Most hardware stuff is a matter of just turning off the machine and plugging it in where it will fit (not all cases, but many cases).
Software is a whole other ball game.
Learn to use a computer, or don't use one.
Learn to drive, or start taking the bus.
Learn to walk in a straight line, or get a wheelchair or rascal scooter or something.
The point is: Why should I sit here and do incredibly easy fixes for very competent people just because they are too lazy to learn? Don't compare it to car stuff, since I said I take mine to proffessionals when I do it because it is under warranty. I don't give you a warranty if I build you a computer, plus I have never built a computer for a single person besides myself, but all of a sudden they think I am a member of Pink Squad or something (yes, I said that right, geek squad sucks).
That or a Cyrix CPU
An observation that Malcolm makes in this book is that most people defer certain topics to people who are good in the subject area. In my life, I married and accountant. I don't think about our finances except when I get in trouble - she takes in the new information and controls that aspect of our life.
My love is for computers and science - and so when there is incoming information about computers, she ignores it and I absorb it. If she has a question later, she will come to me and ask. This is the same for most IT users - they don't need to learn that the "hard drive" isn't the big box with a cdrom and a power button. When something goes wrong, they come find the person who does know how to solve the problem.
I also think that we as humans create stub understandings of topics to help make the picture of the world complete. An example of this would be on the old maps, where out in the ocean would be the statement "Thar be dragons here". In this case, an unknown was replaced with a stub understanding. You see this too here on slashdot, where a technical subject will have depth beyond most of our understandings. We overlay what we do know about the subject, and fill in the gaps with assumptions (thar be dragons). Most of us then post our opinion without really taking into consideration what we are basing off of fact, and what we have assumed.
...doesn't mean it's a "cutting-edge word definition," mate.
fucking americans.
I didn't know this was the case in english as well, but the exact same issue has been annoying me in norwegian.
The computer is almost always referenced as "hard disk" by non-tech people in Norway (same as hard drive in english).
Perhaps a global issue?
and the printer is like.... oh
My favorite is when I get a call from the wife or my mom telling me that the internet is not working or it is slow. When I look at it for them, I usually find that they are complaining about the program starting slowly or a slow/non-responsive server. The problem is that I try to educate them on how to tell the difference, but as soon as i begin explaining, ADHD kicks in and they're in lala land not listening to a word but looking like they are. Is there anyone home? Hello? LOL. I've since put up a grease board with notes and diagrams to give them a visual.
My entire car isn't "the engine", why do people insist on calling the case "the CPU"? ... "the computer".
If you don't know what it is, call it what you know it is
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I'll have to dig it up one of these days: "Hard drive" = computer "CPU" = computer "Computer" = monitor "Mouse" = pointer "Program" = folder "Folder" = program (note: all files and folders are identified by the name of the application the user uses the most, e.g. "last I saw it, it was in Microsoft Word").
My she must have been savagely treated by the geeks of the day? What? You mean that's what Windows actually means? BURN HER! BURN HER AS A WITCH! How did she know what I was thinking, unless she was a witch?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I suppose "get off our lawn!" isn't appropriate? :)
Okay, jokes aside, every office I've been in, even one populated with "below 35s" still has a Desk, a Filing Cabinet/Book shelf and a person sitting in a chair doing the work.
I usually use the phrase "the desk's surface" or "the top of the desk" when I'm discussing the analogy specifically because a lot of people now-a-days associate the word "Desktop" with their home screen/directory on the computer. However you're right, some people don't always get the "computer as office" analogy.
The core of the analogy is simple though:
1) Things - these are the files/programs that the system is using.
2) A place to store things - this is the Disk Drive (Floppy/Hard/SolidState)
3) A place to work/play with the things - this is the RAM
4) The "user" who is the CPU.
You can always tailor the analogy to your audience (although I'd say the more practice you have with a given analogy the better you'll be able to expand it and adapt it to the discussion).
For instance: you could also describe a computer by using a Child, their floor, their toy-chest and their toys.
The child is the CPU.
The toys and the games they play are the files and processes.
The toy chest is the Disk Drive.
The floor is the RAM.
Not enough Floor (RAM) and things get messy fast and you can't play (process) many toys (files/programs), before you need to put things back in the toy chest.
Not enough Toy Chest (disk) and there is no where for your toys(files).
Add Extra Children (CPUs) and they can play with more toys but they'll run out of floor(RAM) sooner.
Give the children caffeine and/or sugar (OverClock the CPU) and you can play with toys faster, but they can crash fast and need a nap (premature hardware failure).
Actually ... thank you ... I think I've found my new favorite analogy. :)
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Reminds me of the Russian woman asking what a "Plumber" and "Electrician" were. When these concepts were explained, she said, "Oh, in Russia, we just call that a 'Man'".
To be fair, though, not everybody thinks the same way tech geeks do. There ARE different types of people out there for whom some subjects bore the living piss out of them. I know there are a few subjects like that for me, and so I am more than happy to let somebody else do them for me. If I learn the correct basic terms, it is only to be polite.
While there are some things I just don't care for and consequently know nothing about, (the latest bullshit TV talent and reality shows are examples), there are some subjects of true value which also have this effect on me.
Gardening comes to mind. I can listen while an excited gardener explains her latest endeavor, but my knowledge retention isn't driven by a natural fascination and thus isn't so great. All I know for certain is that the white beans taste good with butter. The trick is to value people for the things they are good at and let them know they are appreciated, --and to learn your own beloved subjects as best you are able while remaining understanding when others value you for your knowledge but otherwise don't care to know the details.
It's a big, wonderful world and there isn't time to learn everything. Best to focus on the things we are most fascinated by.
But I do agree that when I take the time to learn the bare essentials of any given craft, it goes a long, long way toward being a better person. People who make the effort are far more interesting than those who make none whatsoever. (I do, actually, know a fair bit about gardening now, simply because over the years I didn't want to look like a dumb animal while my friend was talking about something she loves. I even grew my own tomato patch one year and I confess, it was quite a lot of fun.)
-FL
I used to run small training classes for a retailer and that's the analogy I used. Worked incredibly well, although I tended to try to use physical objects rather than concepts to represent programs. Calculator, Notepad, pots of paint and brush for Paint, etc. You could pretty much watch the light switch on behind their eyes as they grasped the idea.
And showing the basic differences between Notepad and Word is great for demonstrating how much more flexible yet complex computerised versions of these tools could be.
Of course there's always the people that just don't care. They just want to know how to type their letters, they don't want to have to know about icons and desktops, etc. In classes of 6 to 8, I usually got one every 2 or 3 classes.
Great. So, thanks to you, they'll continue to believe that a hard drive is a CPU is a computer, thus passing your headache on to me when they ask me for help later.
You are one of the reasons support calls can be such a bitch. Recently, someone wanted my help blocking a website that a friend of theirs was addicted to. I walked them through adding it to the host file. Afterwards, they said something like: "Great! When I try to go there, Google gives me this error..."
I thought, "Oh shit, they somehow managed to block the entire Internet in their host file."
Turns out, when they said "Google", they meant "Firefox".
Now, in this case, it was probably just a case of absent-mindedness -- this person actually did know the difference. But this is precisely what I'm talking about -- it's the difference between spending a few pleasant minutes fixing a problem over the phone, or spending half an hour trying to figure out what the fuck they're talking about.
It's our field, it's our jargon. Learn the language of the audience to give you an opening -- but then use that to teach them our language, because damnit, our language is at least correct and consistent.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Damn you! Now I'll have to go back.
People do this for one simple reason. To get by in life we all must boil down our knowledge of unfamilar fields to it's most basic constructs.
A car transports you from point A > B. The only component in your car that performs this basic task is the engine. When ever any lay person discusses a car problem they know nothing about it invariably will be a discussion about the engine. Engines move machines from point A > B, every other component is secondary.
A computer stores and retrieves information. And while there are many components critical to doing this the only one people associate with is the Hard Drive. It's full of information, their information, and thus it's what things get boiled down to. The box under the desk is the Hard Drive.
If you can't fix it ask the 3 year old down the street.
I haven't been able to use it since. Please remove it.
The only reason why I take my own car in for repairs is because it is under warranty. Me, personally, I don't know much about cars, but cars are nothing like computers.
I can't work on a computer without cutting my fingers on SOMETHING. I'm convinced computers require occasional blood sacrifice.
That's why I am EXTREMELY reluctant to work on a car. I don't want to find out if cars demand blood sacrifice or not.
The secretary you give the file to ask to type it out.
As another poster pointed out, most of this only makes sense if you're used to the way offices work, without computers.
Once computers came on the scene they slowly overhauled the traditional workflow and removed traditional jobs like "secretary" that were needed to type up documents, answer phones, etc. :)
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
I have developed a filter over the years, I don't bother explaining things to users (Lusers) anymore, if they don't get it they never will.
I use a workbench and storage cabinet analogy. I think I will try yours next time.
I only ask: "R u running MS windows? "yes" ahh that is your problem, that OS is really a huge virus...".
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
How do you know about the machine?
If you can read this, it means that I bothered to log in.
People are always amazed that I can take their aging slow computer and within a few hours restore it to the same condition as when they bought it.
I tried calling it the "chassis" in front of my girlfriend, and she said "the what?!? Oh, you mean the hard drive, silly"
It took 100 years to accept the automobile, and still people ask the service station if the OIL lit is part number 710.
In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.
you haven't seen my desktop have you?
I swear, "A clean desk is a sign of a deranged mind"... my desktop is about as cluttered as they come (but I can still find things quickly)
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
This myth has been going on ever since computer cases added a light to them labeled hard drive. A user sees this light blinks whenever the computer is "working", or so they think, so obviously the box that does all the work is the hard drive.
You can be an insane coder too, read: Insane Coding
The point was, she thought the monitor was called a "window"...
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
2 1/2 hours later she got it working. Granted, she seemed to be one of those rare older folks who still have the energy of someone half their age. She didn't have anyone to help her, so we went along with the procedure. I told her if she breaks any of the parts trying to replace this, it was our responsibility to replace them so she wasn't scared. It was a pain, but at the end of the day the computer worked. Everyone was amazed we pulled it off, even though it killed my call center stats for that week.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
users will come to you with the complaint: "It doesn't work!"
Drives me up the wall, that does. _What_ doesn't work? What was the error message? The _exact_ error message? What precisely were you trying to do?
Am I supposed to read that from your mind? (If you had a mind to read from...)
I do tend to get sarcaustic at such moments.
Stefan.
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
This is a troll article. Even the really stupid I've met (and I mean against the wall drooling stupid) know their processors from their hard drives nowadays. You may still get that kind of bollocks from old people, but only if they can be certain it won't have adverse effects on the solution to whatever problem your having (it's lazyness, not stupidity, and you've got the bad luck to be their relative who is good with computers).
It happens all the time.
(to Sarah and John, who are arguing.)
Chuck: Mom. Dad. Can we get on with it? I have hard drives to fix.
(later on)
Chuck: Right then. I'm gonna fix some hard drives. Good luck with the spy stuff.
Source: http://www.tv.com/chuck/chuck-versus-the-tango/episode/1137950/trivia.html
I've never had to support somebody that was paying my salary. It does make it easier, because you can always tell your mom you're not going to do any more phone support until she learns how to speak the lingo.
I believe you meant Prescott Pentium 4.
Thanks in advance for ignoring me, all!
Right - and how is this different to their efforts at communicating with the IT geek? "My hard-drive's broken" would be as useful in this situation as a chef discovering the pressure regulator on a burner is broken, after being told that the dishwasher isn't working. At least this way the analogy is good, and if you're talking in simplified terms both parties can relate to, useful communication can happen because the limitations of language are apparent.
/~Rockwolf
February 9th, 2009 8:55pm: Slashdot becomes self-aware.
I use the body.
- CPU = Thinking/thought part of your brain. GhZ/FLOPS are like IQ (see - they're not 100% accurate!)
- Memory/Ram = Short term memory (aka working memory). Fast, but small.
- Hard Drive = Long term memory. Slow but large. Easy to remember, because it's like DRIVING a chisel into a HARD piece of stone to record information (slow, but persistent)
- Motherboard = Nervous system/synapses. Connects everything together.
- Programs = Thoughts. You have to teach people (install programs) things because they can think about it, and doesn't exist in a tangible form.
- Keyboard/Mouse = Eyes/Ears. How to talk to the thing
It's also useful to expand - "See, you *CAN* have hard disk space for memory, but it would be like you using your long term memory for thinking - it would be slow, and difficult. Better to get more short term memory (ram)"
But damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! I will make clear my total lack of knowledge of english dialects from other parts of the world!
/~Rockwolf
February 9th, 2009 8:55pm: Slashdot becomes self-aware.
My pet gripe is people who refer to the Case as the 'CPU'. Even technicians and retail stores do this.
The worst one I've encountered a user pointed to the box and said "is that the Hardware?", "uhh yes" I replied, "So is that the software on top?"... pointing to the monitor. *facepalm*
Could someone please explain why we don't ever correct users on their miss-use of jargon?
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
When you're only thinking of hardware and software.
because one guy (Noah Webster) in the 1800s thought it would be a really great idea to dumb down the language a bit
The blame, however, isn't solely Webster's. Surnames were routinely dumbed down by a mostly uneducated or illiterate populace, and both the spellings and pronunciations evolved over time into something very different (laughably so if you recognise the orginal).
Americans take pride in such things, so I guess it's a waste of effort asking them to reconsider the "correctness" of their ways. When I lived in Chicago, telling a cabbie that you lived on "Guthie" was a lot easier than pointing to a street sign that read "Goethe" and then engaging in a discussion of German language, culture and philosophy.
4 years in the UK, never heard ANYONE ever use that term. And there are many british colloquialisms that deserve to never be spoken (brill).
Are there any other professions where analogies are used as much?
I don't think I've ever had a doctor, mechanic, plumber, electrician, etc. ever use an anology with me. They just explain the facts.
I've never had a problem explaining, in simple terms, to people who have no idea, how a computer works.
I think it's time for the whole industry to grow up and stop using analogies to explain every thing, and just explain everything as it is.
Or you are going to start having tech queries like this: "I need a cool-box that can hold more food than my filing-cabinet but is half the size. I don't think my oven is hot enough. Oh and I poured water into my steering wheel."
This is /., can we not have a car analogy?
> because a lot of people now-a-days associate the word "Desktop" with their home screen/directory on the computer
You're privileged. One of these days I will go on a killing spree. With a spoon. Because I'm sick of people calling their desktop background "my screensaver".
Sorry - just had to share that one.
Aha! I knew it, digital is just another of those meaningless marketing terms.
Hey, I have a student who takes advantage of this phenomenon. He goes to the recycling center once a month and grabs computers that people have thrown out. He can then often just swap out the bad part and he has a computer he can sell or use!
Open Source: Eroding the Digital Divide
That's WHY WINDOWS ARE CALLED WINDOWS IN THE FIRST PLACE, because the monitor is a pane of glass, just like a window. Seriously, wtf man?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Here everyone calls their box "the CPU"...
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
They always say that either the switch or the picture tube is bad when they call about their television.
I think the thing that is more aggravating than the terminology on this is just how many people still don't understand the difference and flip out about it- I can't tell you how many times I have heard people say that they need more RAM because they are out of drive space or think that because their hard drive is full that it is using up memory- or that deleting pictures from the hard disc will free up RAM or any number of things because they don't get the distinction between hard disk and RAM
One thing that really grind my gears is when folks call installing "Downloading" or vice versa. Another is when Someone says, "Oh, I got that offline", what they mean to say is that they got is off of the internet. You can't get something "offline" because you are offline moron!!
Why I get so many referalls, and repeat customers. (repeat in a good way, not because I didn't fix it right!)
If you treat someone like the Saturday Night Live "Computer Guy," you're only going to get their respect until you walk out the door. If you treat people like people, amazing things can happen.
Once people experience my exceptional service, they try and do things like pawn their neighbors off, tell me who'll pay me the most.
I had one client pay me to build a machine when I told them to "go to Dell" and get one cheaper there! Interesting how that sounds... "go to Dell" but I can't compete at the $900ish price level.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
and now he's probably going to chastise you for spelling arse "arse" and not "ass".
"Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
"Offline" is one that bugs me. People say they downloaded it offline. When they talk about where they downloaded a music cd or a movie or something from. If you get something offline, that means you didn't get it on the internet. If you got it on the internet, then you got it online.
And yeah, the download thing, people say that too. Move a file to a USB drive? Well technically I guess you could say you downloaded file X to your thumb drive, though just saying you put file X or transfered file X would be more appropriate.
don't knock it.. in the words of george orwell, "ignorance is strength". the less the average user knows about their "hard drive" *snicker*, the more we can charge them for pushing the "power" button for them.
We do live in an increasingly connected world. I see tons of the standard geek vitriol begrudging lack of education on the part of the user, but let's consider a few points here.
- Do you understand every detail of how your car works? I'd wager that a fair number of us have no to little clue. The analogy about the car stereo above may hold, but you have to remember that cars have been around a lot longer. Society had much more time to even gain a basic understanding of cars and the various parts that compose them. Computers as they exist now are, by comparison, a relatively new phenomenon.
This vitriol will not exist in another generation or two. It could quite possibly shift to something else, but I guarantee as a society that we will at least get a basic understanding of the computer as it is today. It has all happened, and will happen again.... got to give it to BSG on that message.
First, welcome to the world of IT, little guy!
The "hard drive" slang has been in use since the mid 1980s, when monitors were first separated from the remainder of microcomputers. It will probably be in use long after the hard disk is abandoned, and we're all dead.
If they don't know what it's properly called, charge them double.
Yes, tax the stupid!
I use Windows... like a two dollar wh.. why don't I just go ahead and not finish that sentence.
To me, WI is West Indies, DE is the two letter country code of Deutchland (Germany), NE is North East (which ironically is central to the USA), DC is Direct Current and TX is a term generally used to denote transmission in two-way communication.
- Anti-flame disclaimer: I didn't intend for all those to be from the USA , they just happened to be the first few I thought of.
That's OK, you can't be expected to keep that kind of thing straight. I mean, it's not like anyone outside the British Isles cares about the difference between GB, UK, and England, so fair's fair.