• (nodebb)

    I for one am not going to recommend Best Buy's website…

  • Ulysses (unregistered)

    The spam one seems to be fake/humor. It's youhaveunsubscribed.com.

  • Carl Witthoft (google)

    something's missing in the comments so far...

    This is the frist post to say "frist," even though this is not the frist post.

    OK, now things are back to normal

  • For Great Justice (unregistered) in reply to Carl Witthoft

    Oh, I thought you were missing comments 'in moderation'.

  • Friendly_Reminder (unregistered)

    WebEx was smart enough to include a comments field. You can easily put in your answers to questions 1 and 2 there.

  • BernieTheBernie (unregistered)

    A file of 1 byte occupies at minimum 1 kilobyte of space on the disc. That is, freeing up 6.66 GB on disc by deleting files totalling 7.0 MB is not such impossible. But just tell me: why do you store some 7 million files containing one byte each only? Do you try to confuse Locky?

  • (nodebb) in reply to Ulysses
    The spam one seems to be fake/humor. It's youhaveunsubscribed.com.
    
    

    Also seems to be one of those "you can never unsubscribe" subscriptions.

  • dave (unregistered)

    i'm guessing the best buy scale is a bell-curve where 5 or 6 mean "extremely likely"

  • Sole Purpose of Visit (unregistered) in reply to For Great Justice

    And while we're on that subject, what's wrong with "in excess?" Far more suitable for this site.

    And screw those Delphi 0.01 guys, anyhow.

  • A "non-E" mouse (unregistered)

    I was the one who posted that unsubscribe image. It does look fishy, which I think adds to the WTFness. One of my coworkers recently left the company I am working for and I took over his mailbox. To my delight, he had subscribed to 100s of newsletters and assorted junk. I've been steadily reducing the flow since then. This was from some or other newsletter that had the standard "why do you want to unsubscribe" spiel before redirecting me to this site.

    I'm not sure if the site owners registered this domain (since the whois data is obfuscated) or if it is some service that their web host/mass mail service uses to unsubscribe, but the site works even if you visit it without a reference or a referrer.

  • (nodebb)

    The Gerber Dime doesn't have any Apple-specific screwdrivers.

  • fa (unregistered)

    I like that the Best Buy question qualifies it with "If asked". Normally I hate being asked if I would recommend something(X). They're asking me to evaluate the product of the probabilities (assuming they're independent) that I get in a situation where it would be natural to recommend X, and the probability that I would choose X over other equivalents, or nothing. Normally they get a max. of about 7/10, unless it's something I talk about a lot with friends or colleagues.

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to BernieTheBernie

    Good work on figuring that out. They're temporary files, so it's quite possible that most of them are only a few bytes in size (the number of temporary files I've seen that contain only a single number, or are empty altogether, is ridiculous). Also I believe the minimum occupied space per file is usually 4KB these days, not 1KB - depending on how the disk is formatted it might even be 8KB. So while this is an unlikely set of circumstances, it's possible that they're all legitimate temporary files.

    But now I must ask why the one field gives the actual size and the other field gives the size on disk.

  • (nodebb) in reply to anonymous

    Well, 7 megabytes' worth of files taking up 6.6 gigabytes' worth of disk space. If the file is really small (say, smaller than 600 bytes or so), the amount of disk space it occupies may even be zero - when the file itself is stored in the space that otherwise would have been used to store the record of its location.

  • Jeremy Hannon (google) in reply to Watson

    It really depends on the file system, which you can't tell from the picture. If this is a FAT32 drive or similar, then storing the small files in the allocation tables themselves is not possible and each file takes up a minimum of one cluster, which can vary in size. If there is a lot of files less than the minimum, it can add up very quickly and show results like that. NTFS does store very small files together in the Master File Table, and does not have that type of problem. So, Watson, you would be correct for an NTFS or similarly formatted drive, but not for a FAT style format.

  • Friendly_Reminder (unregistered) in reply to A "non-E" mouse

    Ah yes, those nice colleagues, who signed up to numerous news letters that all went straight to the spam folder after a while. Had to deal with one of those a while back, too. One news letter was particularly hard to unsubscribe from. It all seemed simple, they just wanted a mail stating "unsubscribe" sent back to them. So I did that. They sent another news letter, I replied "unsubscribe". They sent another news letter, I sent "unsubscribe". After that, ANOTHER news letter came and I replied "I already sent 'unsubscribe' three times. How many times do I have to repeat that before I am actually unsubscribed?" after that, the news letters stopped. So I guess the answer is: "4 times".

  • Peter da Silva (google)

    I can beat that.

    I had a Windows tablet with only 16GB total storage (and nominally something like 5GB available when brand new) inform me that I could free up several terabytes by deleting Windows Update files.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Jeremy Hannon

    Although, C:\ is pretty likely to be NTFS. My memory suggests that Windows XP was the last version of Windows to support FAT32 C:\ drives.

  • siciac (unregistered) in reply to BernieTheBernie

    It really depends on the file system, which you can't tell from the picture.

    It depends on how the dialog figures out the space freed. It might not check with the filesystem and simply assume each file takes up a minimum of a cluster.

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