Brain fart: no format option on a pen drive pop-up menu?

[Tim]

On Sat, 2011-08-27 at 12:02 -0300, Fernando Cassia wrote: 
> Twisting the discussion to what words should mean is a futile exercise.

Pot, kettle black.

> Formatting a flash drive means what the gnome page says.

Formatting a drive only means what formatting a drive *actually* does,
not what people *think* it might mean.

It's a fundamental issue that people using computers continue to fail to
grasp.  Computers do what they do, they're not a magic box that does
what you think it does, while also doing what someone else (differently)
thinks it does.

> Let's do a poll on any street about what formatting a removable drive
> means, in common usage of the expression.

You can do a street poll on all sorts of subjects, and what you'll find
is that there's an awful lot of fools out there, believing in utter
nonsense.  A lot of people have scant idea how their computer works, and
what things do.  *Those* people are not the ones to pay attention to
when trying to understand the computer.  You are one of those people.

You should be thankful that there are nitpickers correcting the mistakes
that people make, and think, otherwise Linux would be the complete
shambles that Windows is.

The one discussing what you think the word format should mean is you.
Others are discussing what it actually means.  

There's a huge difference, and until you grasp the facts, you're going
keep getting told that you've got it wrong.  The facts won't change just
because you don't, or won't, understand them.

Regardless of what you, and a few others, *erroneously* believe.  It's
childlishly simple to get back files that disappeared thanks to
formatting a drive.  You're only highlighting your own ignorance to
argue otherwise.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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