Is it, though? Consider:
“Your computer stores information on a hard drive. You can transfer information onto your hard drive by either copying it from a compact disc, or downloading it from the internet.”
<User goes home, tries to download something from the internet, get “insufficient disk space” error>
“But I’m not using a disk! I’m downloading from the internet onto my hard drive!”
Bonus points if he’s got an SSD, so there’s literally no disk involved at all.
My first tech support job was with UPS which, for moderate-sized shippers supplied them the computer and label printer. It was a PC running Win 3.11 with the shipping client in the startup file. My first day I had a shipping clerk with the complaint that the screen is showing just C:\ “and a blinky line.”
I tried for fifteen minutes to get her to cycle the power to the computer. She’d shut off the monitor so I got her to trace the cable on the monitor that led to the flat box, which she did, then push down the big red switch on the right side. “There is no big red switch.”
I had her trace the power cord to the power strip (which we also supplied). “There is no power strip.” To where it’s plugged into the wall then. “I can’t find that. I don’t know why you’re getting frustrated, I’ve been to college.” I came this close telling her to get her money back. Not wanting to spend more time trying to get her to type a run command (What’s a backslash?) I sent a tech out to restart the computer.
The rest of the time I was doing support I referred to that as my frog call, as in, “Eat a frog first thing in the morning…”
Unrelated anecdote: I’m chatting right now with an IT guy remotely diagnosing a problem with my work PC.
Him: Are your fans going crazy right now?
Me: Yes, I’m very popular.
xxx
<user>What are pounds? Like weight or money? And why would I put shit in a bag?</user>
SAP messages always have the possibility to click on them for further detail. Some of SAP’s own are wrong (“inspection data not found” and it actually means “check your stocks”, stuff like that), some helpfully repeat the original message exactly (oh, very enlightening). If you’re adding messages (such as in a bespoke screen), you can put some content in that detail window. Can.
I once told a SAP programmer “I realize you probably don’t like being hugged*, plus it would be awkward and stuff, but right now I want to hug you flat.” “:dubious:why?” “You’re the first programmer I’ve known who actually bothers put some detail into the ‘additional info’ window. Thank you.” “Oh. Yeah, it’s less work than having everybody ask ‘what does this mean’. You’re welcome.”
In the early days of my army tech course some years ago, an instructor gave us a piece of advice that has stayed with me. He described an officer coming to us with a radio and announcing, in total, “The fucking fucker’s fucked.” The message was clear; we were going to be dealing with non-technical people, who only knew that some temperamental gizmo was getting in the way of them getting their job done. They wouldn’t care what the problem was, lacked the vocabulary to describe it anyway, and it wouldn’t help to try to make this a small teachable moment by telling them technical details that may be fascinating to us but were of complete irrelevance to them.
Heh, 15 years ago I posted this on a thread about a brain chip being developed about the limits of memory:
Yep, customers will not get it about memory space, and it is more scary that the Simpsons are now in their 30th season!
[Brain explodes]
I teach Adobe software, often to beginners. There are users (many of them “my age”, 50-death) who as soon as there’s a problem, well, it’s a computer, so they freeze up.
If their car or toaster had a problem they’d at least think “Huh, wonder what’s wrong?” If their TV or thermostat gave them an error message, they’d read it. But, it’s a scary computer… and it’s so far beyond their understanding that it never occurs to them that they might understand something about it.
I’ve done that “Do it again, AND READ THE MESSAGE.” So many times… sigh.
Always seemed weird to me that they didn’t develop the ability to auto split, especially since FAT32 is still used on SD cards below a certain size (and that size is not 4GB) and nearly all USB thumb drives.
My best guess is Microsoft was trying to make people use NTFS, and when that didn’t work, exFAT. The 4GB limitation is the main reason most people would care about the filesystem format.
A similar error is quite common on Android, not allowing you to install more programs even though you have plenty of space. It seems to be how the device chokes on file corruption. Also, there seems to be some file that has to exist in a particular partition that lists installed apps, and that can become too big: it’s like the Windows 3.1 “resources exhausted” problem that they wisely removed in Windows 95.
Of course, Explorer (at least up through Windows 7) would just hang the CPU if it hit corrupted file data while copying, and you wouldn’t even be able to actually terminate the task (due to some weirdness of tasks not ending while doing disk I/O). It should have always just failed on that one file and continued, listing it as an error later.
I missed the implication of the quotation marks and was popping in here to ask “What the heck does What does ‘Insufficient Disk Space’ mean mean?” Because.
FAT32 was introduced with Windows 95, which can’t read or write to NTFS (nor can Win98 or ME). At the time the 4 gig max was much bigger than the 500meg to 1 gig HD sizes that home computers typically had. (I got my first DOS only PC in about 1993. It had a 100 meg HD, which was close to overkill at the time.) So it (the 4 gig filesize limit) was for all intents and purposes no limit at all. NTFS existed, but has more overhead, so it was normally only used for servers that required the additional security.
It’s a typo for “Insufficient Desk Space.” It means your desk is cluttered up with so much crap, you can’t do any work on it.
I had a similar reaction in 1991 when I installed 350MB hard drive on my new computer with the 80386 processor. Yup. I can’t see running out of room on this puppy for the rest of my life…
Wow, that was an expensive drive back then. I think our computer has 120 or 160 MB of storage. If I wanted to play a new game I had to uninstall the previous one first.
I think that people are just spoiled with a lot of storage in all of their devices. I haven’t seen a low disk space/low storage message in years. I just did a bit of cleanup on my laptop when I noticed that my downloads folder was over 20 GB.
One of my favorites from my tech support days, back in the early 90s when office PCs were still kinda newish. One of the ladies working at the front desk called me because there was a document she was working on before she left the night before, couldn’t open it in the morning, and was certain that the computer had deleted it.
I calmly explained to her that the computer wouldn’t just delete her file, it had to be there somewhere, and started asking questions.
Me: What was the file called?
She: I don’t remember.
Me: What directory did you save it in?
She: I don’t know.
Me:. :smack:
I found it after poking around on her PC for a couple minutes, but jeez, a clue next time would be helpful!
My first hard drive was five megabytes, and I was glad to have it.
My first hard drive was cassette tape - I even sprang for memorex!