How Did I Get All This Stuff?

By -
I'm running verify disk on my Mac right now, and I see my hard drive has 183,231 folders, and over 700,000 files. Now I used to now my way around a UNIX volume to the extent I could say what almost every directory (folder) was for, but no one but no one can keep track of 183,231 folders.

Comments

  1. Bob Murphy2:49 PM

    Not entirely relevant, but I've been meaning to ask you computer gurus: How can I be that when I'm, say, copying a folder from my hard drive to a zip drive, that the files remaining etc. can keep changing? I.e. I can understand if the Time Remaining is off, because the computer improperly estimates how long it will take to move x files over. But how can the computer be mistaken about how many files it still needs to copy over?!

    If it matters, I am running Windows XP. And please don't just tell me, "Get a Mac." Fine, if that's part of your answer, but please explain specifically how my Windows XP can be so dumb.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bob Murphy2:50 PM

    Just to clarify, the progress bar will be moving along, filling in the empty bar, but then it will zoom back the other way. And the files remaining will be winding down to zero, but then will jump back up to 200.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Wabulon4:35 PM

    I dunno, Bob. Aside from the trivial answer--"Dumb programmers"--all I can think of is:

    a) It sometimes revises the total upon looking at a file, e.g., an archive.

    b) It bases the "files remaining" on some summary information gathered from directories which turns out to be out of date.

    c) Others have access to your files and are modifying your inventory during the copying.

    d) God.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Murray Tyson5:50 PM

    Just so I can keep comfortable track in my head, I try to limit files on my computer to 103,074.

    ReplyDelete
  5. gcallah2:03 PM

    I suspect Wabulon's a) and b).

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights

By -
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more

Against their will / we were taxing against their will / we were young and we were strong and we were taxing against their will

By -
Never one to allow a mistake to go uncompounded by a glaring error, Bob Murphy digs in deeper . He claims that "Taking money from people against their will is not akin to getting on the treadmill; it is akin to killing people against their will." Bob has introduced a largely irrelevant criterion here with his "against their will." Let us start with killing. (No, no, not killing Bob : we still love him despite his obstinacy.) The justice of a killing does not depend at all on whether the "victim" wants to be killed. If I shoot someone who is attempting to set off a nuclear weapon in Times Square, the fact that I killed him "against his will" does not make my killing immoral. And if a friend who is in despair asks me to shoot him in the head, the fact that he wants me to kill him would not make my action moral. Similarly, in taking money from people, the crucial question is whether you are taking it justly or unjustly, not whether they wan...
Read more