You know you're an SF reader

[ksmith]

...when you read a post in another newsgroup entitled "jump drive help" and you wonder if they need assistance figuring out the physics for their spacecraft.

Comments

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't have thought that only because I've spent my entire professional adult life in positions where computers were enabling infrastructure. Therefore to me a "jump drive" is one of those things that gets plugged into a computer, rather than a not-yet-implemented interstellar craft... (though, I still remember and treasure the response to a comment I made in the back of a room at a space combat-related workship by Fred Bond, an IEEE fellow and one of the parents of satellite communications. The speaker, one in a series proposing various "technology initiatives," was talking about what I considered the stupidest one of lot, a technology initiative for a trans-cis-lunar communications system: I observed to Fred that the communications lag from the speed of light would be unacceptable, and Fred's response was, "What we need is a technology initiative for a speed of light accelerator.").

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I call "jump drives" either "flash drives" or "thumb drives". To me, "jump" brings to mind wormholes networks and all sorts of handwavium technology.

"What we need is a technology initiative for a speed of light accelerator.

Would that be an ansible?

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

Nope--ansibles are fictional devices which communicate faster than light, Dr Bond was proposing an initiative to increase the speed that light propagates. That way, there would be less propagation relaying data to a "repeater" far far away and forwarding the data from there to its destination.

(If you read Bob Shaw's Slow Light stories in which there was a type of glass which light took months/years to get to the other side of the glass in, that glass was making light travel very slowly through it, effectively make lightspeed slow far far down. A speed of light accelerator would get sunlight to e.g. Earth faster than 9 minutes after leaving the surface of Sol, and signals from spacecraft out around Jupiter to Earth faster than hours, but not necessarily instantaneously.

[windrose.livejournal.com]

I would have thought the same thing. *g*

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

that's exactly what i thought!

[juliabk.livejournal.com]

Jump drive is for interstellar travel. Flash drive is for computer data. I'm not sure where the 'jump' came from for flash drives, I know we've never used it here, though I've heard the odd student use it.

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

"flash" refers to a specific type of microcircuitry used for storing data, and it's not the only type of storage used in the plug-in/pull out USB drives, there are some drives that use tiny hard drives. "jump" refers, rather whimsically, to the face that one plugs the drive into a USB port, gets the data load, pulls in out, and plugs it into the USB port of a different computer, jumping between or among machines.

[juliabk.livejournal.com]

Yes, you're quite right. But just like "coke" (at least down here) refers to any kind of carbonated soda/pop/soft drink, "flash" has come to mean, for a lot of folks, those little hard drives you carry in your pockets and stick in USB ports.

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

But, but, but... the "thumb drives," the "pen drives" (I actually have one that's part of a pen barrel, alas, the pen part no longer works properly, but the memory part does), etc., are mostly flash (to get more technical, I think they use EEPROM -- Extended Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory--yeah, probably that goes beyond most people's interest level, the "flash" IIRC involves UV light or some such for what used to be known as "bulk erasing"). The miniaturized hard drives (a business invented and started by IBM and then sold off to I think Hitachi...) are somewhat bulkier, they don't fit into pens, or on keychains or lanyards, and are larger than e.g. "thumb"-sized.

There are terminology issues... and the last I heard, Coca-Cola and Pepsi still sent out people to defend their trademarks and legally enforce them, lest they lose them out to publicsloppyspiek the way Bayer lost Aspirin as a trademark.

[juliabk.livejournal.com]

Yes. Doesn't change the fact that people still call them flash drives. They're just little flash drives.

And Coke is up a creek if they think they're ever going to get people to stop calling all soft drinks 'cokes'. :-) It covers a fairly huge region.

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

Depends on whether someone gets hauled into court to be made an example of... Coke doesn't have to do it to everyone, just randomly selected establishment owners (ASCAP/BMI does the same thing about music, it will e.g. send someone into an area who will pick three restaurants/bars to go into and check for licensing for music they're playing. If they haven't paid the fees, it can get extremely expensive for them. One fellow sued saying that his establishment was in effect being singled out for abuse because the other same type of establishments nearby didn't get investigated and sued. He lost the legal battle on the subject, along with losing the case about not having the license for playing music under ASCAP/BMI protection.

======

Possibly the worst example of me being overly geek was the day I was at a supermarket checkout stand seeing a Woman's Day or Family Circle with one of the cover articles noted as "Seven Ways to Do Windows." Guess what I initially thought....

"Oh, look, they're telling their readers about the Windows Operating System." Er, no, it dawned on me after a minute or so, "Duh, they're talking about see-through glass installations in houses and things like curtains, blind, shades, etc.!"

[juliabk.livejournal.com]

I'm talking about private citizens. Coke can *try* to sue me for calling "Dr. Pepper" a Coke, but I doubt there's a court in the land that would A. take the case, B. not end up laughing Coke out of said court.

[retrobabble.livejournal.com]

Hah! Yes, I went there too.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Totally with you. I can't call them jump drives, either, and once had a five-minute explanation with a computer tech friend, as I tried to convey "That little portable drive thingy about the size of my thumb that plugs into a USB port. You know--everyone has them!" She couldn't get her head around either the term "flash drive" or "thumb drive," and I would never call them "jump drives."

You would never guess I own three of the things.

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

So what do you call them?

============

Regarding tech naming silliness... one friend of mine indicated that she almost lost it regarding ROFLMAO reactions when she heard someone use the term "gigaflops." That shows a certain divide--to anyone back in the days when dealing with that as a technical term, of 10**9 Floating point Operations Per Second (FLOPS), it didn't occur to someone thinking of it as Floating point Operations Per Seconds would be thinking in terms of English and regard the term with appall.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

I call them "portable drive thingy about the size of my thumb." No, I don't like it one bit. Sometimes I call it a "thumb drive" but about 50% of my friends are programmers/tech support/similar occupations, and some of them object to that.

Geeks of the world, I hereby order you to standardize your frigging nomenclature to something that makes sense.

Like "gigaflops." That makes sense. I find "gigaflops" charming.