Forums | MacLife

There is no real world metaphor that matches exactly, but you can say it's equivalent to keeping a file cabinet of papers, and a list of which paper is where in the cabinet. When you want to get rid of a paper, instead of looking though and throwing the paper itself away, you simply take it off the list. Then when you need to put another paper in that spot, that's when you remove the original one.

sounds kind of silly, but it may get through to some people.

Thanks. I tried (sort of) both the paper and the cabinet things. Met with blank stares, as the cabinet thing wasn't sinking in at all and the eraser "actually makes things disappear". Even referring to the old detective trick of rubbing a pencil over what had been written to highlight the indentation of the deleted word didn't work.
The garbage incinerator thing is good, but as it turns stuff to ash you cannot retrieve the original, which is part of the problem.

Try starting from the basics. Give them a book like "computers for dummies" of how the computer works" (although with the latter, the author recommends switching from Mac, so he should read "Macs for dummies).

trade wrote:

..are you teaching a computer class to toddlers?..seriously!

It's not hard to believe.
My sisters don't know the difference between how a floppy and a CD works.
Snd that's just the beginning.

Wow, you'll have to dumb it down even more! 

Just as there are people who cannot dance, who cannot sing, or who cannot drive on highways, there are people who cannot understand how computers work. Sometimes you just have to give up and go on to the next topic.

<--approaching 25 years of helping folks with various computers.

why is it important that they know this?

just tell them that if they delete stuff it's gone for good and get on with your day.

Jonski wrote:

CMYK anyone? Anyone??

Why does it need to be CMYK? It looks GREAT on my screen!

Here's one. Note: it's all about the piece of paper.

You start with an empty bookshelf (blank hard drive). You put a new book (new file) on a shelf and write down its title on a piece of paper (catalog). You continue to write down the titles of each book you put on the shelf (adding files to the drive).

As you read the books, you cross out their titles from the paper (deleting the files), yet those books remain on the shelf.

As you add more books to the bookshelf, you write down the new titles on the piece of paper; as you read the books, you cross the titles out. However, books continue filling the shelves.

This piece of paper represents a computer's disk catalog. Those titles that have been crossed out are just like "deleted files." While they'e been "eliminated" from the list, they still exist on the bookshelf. In other words, the files aren't really deleted. They're just not readable on that piece of paper.

Note that this "trashed" data won't exist forever. At some point, the drive will run out of free data sectors. Let's continue the analogy...

When you run out of shelf space, you remove those books that have already been read and replace them with new books, but still, on that piece of paper, you'd only be writing down the titles of the new books, while ignoring those that have been crossed out. This piece of paper is telling you what's available on that bookshelf to read.

On a hard drive, when you run out of "blank" data sectors (free space on the bookshelf), new data will overwrite the old data that has been "deleted" by the user. But this all happens in the background. The catalog will only show you those files that have not been deleted.

Bottom line, as you create and delete files, you're merely changing the info in the catalog.

To take this a bit further...

Suppose you wanted to initialize a hard drive, so that it'd be "empty." Well, if we go back to our bookshelf and paper analogy, an equivalent action would be to throw away the piece of paper and start with a brand new, blank piece of paper. As you may have surmised, the books are still on the shelf, as are the files on the hard drive. Yup they're there for the most part--you just can't see 'em. Data recovery tools can often access these files that are thought to be gone. It's like losing that piece of paper, but still being able to retrieve the books from the shelves.

Some utilities allow you to "securely" delete files, or to "zero" a hard drive. What this process entails is not only changing the catalog (or paper) information, but actually overwriting the data with garbage, or "zero" data. This is akin to removing the books from bookshelf outright.

That was fun to write. I may have overdone this to the point of being convoluted and hard to follow, but...whatever. I should get to bed now.

trade wrote:

..are you teaching a computer class to toddlers?..seriously!

ironically young kids can usually pick up tech theories a lot faster than middle aged +
(assuming neither had any tech experience)

Last edited by mrreet2001 (2007-05-16 9:56 am)

maxintosh wrote:

I actually explained this concept to my mom yesterday (a completely illiterate technophobe) and she picked it up quite quickly. The people you're teaching this to are dumber than kwanza

You sure she wasn't just witty?