Can I really be the first?


That's too catchy, and logical, a phrase for it not to show up, in some permutation, somewhere on the web. Almost along the lines of having a thousand monkeys banging away on typewriters eventually writing a sonnet of Shakespeare, somebody, somewhere in cyberspace, must have thought of writing a phrase like that before.

And somebody did. I tried searching for a number of different phrases similar to "a hard drive abhors a vacuum", and when I got to "disk space abhors a vacuum" I more or less hit the jackpot - one hit. The phrase shows up on a tutorial for partitioning drives on computers running Linux:
A good rule of thumb is to provide enough space to grow in /tmp, /usr, /opt, and the partitions specific to your needs. This means that you'll usually want to make these partitions 2-5 times as large as you think you'll need (really, disk space abhors a vacuum).
A couple of additional pages tell us that "servers abhor a vacuum", or that "computers abhor a vacuum" (which is a very different thought), but other than that Linux page, it seems to be a rather original phrase.



Go to: Me and Moore's Law.