A tech conversation…

Published on Monday, February 26th, 2007

When you’re a consultant, you once in a while get to overhear (alright, I’m constantly eavesdropping) some interesting conversations that amuses you. Today’s one: a technical one.

Scenario: a woman is about to place an order on a computer and a guy comes by to give her advice:

But make sure not to order from that place, since they can only offer you 1 GB RAM memory per default.

1 GB?! But that sucks! I’ve seen ads in the paper for PCs with a 100 GB!

Ehhh… Uncomfortable silence
That’s hard drive size. I’m talking about memory here.

Oh…

Posted in Fun, Technology | 5 comments

5 comments

  • Jeroen Mulder
    February 26th, 2007 at 15:14

    Among the people I know who barely know anything about computers, it’s not rare to mix up ‘memory’ and ‘hard drive’. To them, the hard drive is a memory. The actual component we usually call memory is completely irrelevant to the way they experience and understand a computer.

    It’s complicated stuff, k ;-)

  • Rado
    February 26th, 2007 at 15:42

    Technically, the hard drive is non-volatile memory. Of course it’s not made up of transistors but hey… it’s memory.

  • Love
    February 26th, 2007 at 16:03

    What’s the point here? That she mixed up RAM and harddrive capacity?

  • Chris
    February 26th, 2007 at 17:19

    Hmm… I know this uncomfortable feeling… It usually comes if my boss says something technical. It’s like in Dilbert. ;-)

  • Robert Nyman - author
    February 27th, 2007 at 8:39

    Rado,

    Well, yeah… But let’s not go there right now. :-)

    Love,

    Yes, that’s the point. With people working with IT, i think it’s fair to expect them to make the distinction. If, for no other reason, out of the context that it’s a vast difference between 1 GB and 100 GB.

    Chris,

    Yes, Dilbert seems to be more of a documentary. :-)

Share your thoughts:

HTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> . If you want to display code examples, please remember to write &lt; for < and &gt; for >.

Comment preview

Top results