>>Are you sure this "media" thing was already in practice back then when we still used floppies?
>
>Yes, Even 5" floppies. That very example was said by this guy who I thereafter despised :-) (never fond of him before). Why he couldn't say "Your disk is faulty" I don't know.

The other reason you may dislike this guy is that he's probably not too good at his job, but wants to sound as an expert, so he never uses simple terms? Mind you, expressing an expert opinion in simple terms isn't easy, you do need an expert for that :).

Somewhere in the Foundation series Asimov envisioned a semantic analyzer, a gadget which would pull out the substance out of any document. As an example of its use, he put it to task to translate a trade treaty between two planets, and it ground twenty pages down to two sentences: "You're screwed. We win.". (I may have exaggerated this a bit :). I sometimes get a wish to do this manually, to go through government statements or news and translate them into plain languages. Not just to replace every "evasive action" into "retreat", "development programme" as "usury", but to really get the substance to light.