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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
...so I don't click on pointless drivel like this by mistake.
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!!!
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
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)
And if I hear the phrase "now, I am computer illiterate..." one more fucking time....
The best therapy for that one though, is to mentally change illiterate to ignorant.
Trust me, those people are fine. It's the ones who pretend to know what they're talking about, that cause the headaches.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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.
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.
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.
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.
IIRC it was more like
"I could go on" ... double clicking... the mouse... mice ... the thing under the table"
"Clicking
"The hard drive!"
"Correct".
The fun (or not so fun, IMO) part of our profession is that you can BS anyone into believing anything, as long as you stay ahead just an inch. Sadly, this also means that imposters can easily become your boss if they can pull off a better show than you, despite not knowing anything about Komputars.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Twig?
Cutting-edge word definition? This one goes back to the 1700s!
So, what exactly is the difference between memory and storage? Access latency and capacity are just implementation details, and even persistence is arguably so.
Describing the symptoms over declaring the problem.
Whenever I hear a "X is broken", I'll ask them to step back and ask them to tell me why they think that.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
I pity your flamebait status, but alas I have no points.
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.