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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jul 2005
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night: Good point. I would distinguish between mouse and drive as follows: Mouse is ok because the gadget looks like a mouse. Drive, however, is a poor choice for something with no moving parts
By 2024 any word at all. misspelled or not, will have come to mean anything the writer wishes it to
At present: A drive drive drive drive is the flight of a ball in a baseball game, the outcome of which results in an automobile trip by the all-time home-run champion to a venue in which culturally-acquired concern for the proliferation of a keychain semiconductor memory is sponsored through the profits of a lumber mill whose continued existence depends upon the legalization of dredging a shallow river intended to convey logs downstream for further processing
dalehileman
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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A floppy drive was so called because floppy disks were inserted and written to or read from. From the point of view of the user it was a method of storing information for later retrieval. In a hard drive the disks were mounted within the unit. It was still a method of storing information for retrieval later. The original optical drives were used to retrieve information that had been stored on a CD, and later a DVD and also later used to store data on a CD or DVD. A thumb drive (or what ever you do or don't want to call it) is a method of storing information for retrieval later. The fact that nothing is driven is irrelevant; from the point of view of the user it does everything that the previous versions of drives did. You might as well complain about Newsweek being called a magazine because it isn't a building and there are no physical objects stored in it. The defense rests.
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journeyman
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journeyman
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Doesn't the CD or DVD drive spin the medium? Also, HDD's?
I exist! I am a pedant! I have a foreboding signature!
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Quote:
Doesn't the CD or DVD drive spin the medium? Also, HDD's?
Yup, so does the floppy drive. That's what bothers dale about the use of the term drive to refer to thumb drives. My point is that the spinning of media is invisible to the ultimate arbiter of language usage and therefore irrelevant to the definition of a drive.
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addict
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addict
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We've also had "RAM disks" and "RAM drives" of various kinds for 30 years or so. For example, a built-in one on a piece of hardware that holds the boot operating system, or enough operating system for the device to find the network and boot from there. And, even today, if you boot from a Windows rescue diskette, it holds more than a diskette's worth of the command line utilities and decompresses them to a RAM drive with its own drive letter. Wikipedia on Ram Drive
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jul 2005
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I endorse the coinage of a new word to describe a new gadget. "Thumb" is good in "thumb drive" because it's about the size of your thumb and because you write on your thumbnail. Hoever, I would have called it "thumbmory" or "flashrom" or something like that
Although I understand that "flash" comes from "FutureSplash," I like it too because it imparts the idea of quick learning, or in some cases the instant display of an entire page
dalehileman
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I understand that "flash" comes from "FutureSplash,"See this article for the non-Dalian etymology. Also per subjectline.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Joined: Jul 2003
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Quote:
I understand that "flash" comes from "FutureSplash,"
See this article for the non-Dalian etymology.
"non-Dalian" - now there's a useful coinage, one that can really get a workout on these boards.
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Joined: Aug 2005
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2005
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Ta, max. As a born-again prescriptivist, it occurs to me that I should've written "non-Dalean" as what I did write could be mistaken for "non-Dali-an". OTOH, I'll go with the sentiment rather than the flow of the mo'. Besides it saved me G(64) keystrokes. BTW, what is the macro for that?
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jul 2003
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Quote:
Ta, max. As a born-again prescriptivist, it occurs to me that I should've written "non-Dalean" as what I did write could be mistaken for "non-Dali-an".
"Mistaken" for non-Dali-an? Here was I thinking that there was definitely an element of Salvador's surrealism in some of dale's posts anyway. 
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