Passa ai contenuti principali

Geek Speak

Have you ever been at a party with a bunch of "software industry" people and overheard a conversation that included something like this:
"I was sitting in the cube farm checking out the dead tree edition of the Times when some idea hamster comes in to ask for my help on a project. I told him I didn't have enough bandwidth to support him--that he should go find some gray matter to help him out."
Sound like a different language? It is. An entire lexicon of "geek speak" has emerged from the world of hardware and software. But the next time you feel left out at a party full of mouse potatoes, you can show your savvy by speaking the lingo. If you do it well enough, you might even be mistaken for the alpha geek.

Alpha geek: The most knowledgeable, technically proficient person in an office or work group. "Ask Larry, he's the alpha geek around here."

Bandwidth: The ability to juggle or handle an excessive amount of stuff. "I'm really busy and don't have the bandwidth to dedicate to your issue right now."

Cobweb site: A World Wide Web site that hasn't been updated for a long time. A dead Web page.

Cube farm: An office filled with cubicles.

Dead tree edition: The paper version of a publication available in both paper and electronic forms, as in: "The dead tree edition of the San Francisco Chronicle..."

Doorstop: A computer that is no longer considered fast enough or to contain insufficient storage, etc. for use in normal work. All 286's and 386's are doorstops. Most 486's are now doorstops. Soon we'll see Pentium doorstops.

Egosurfing: Scanning the net, databases, print media, or research papers looking for the mention of your name.

Gray matter: Older, experienced business people hired by young entrepreneurial firms looking to appear more reputable and established.

Idea hamsters: People who always seem to have their idea generators running.

Keyboard plaque: The disgusting buildup of dirt and crud found on computer keyboards. "Are there any other terminals I can use? This one has a bad case of keyboard plaque."

Let's take this off-line: Let's talk about this later, after the meeting.

Liveware: Slang for people. Also called wetware or jellyware, as opposed to hardware, software, and firmware.

Mouse potato: The online, wired generation's answer to the couch potato.

Nonlinear Inappropriately intense negative response. "I told him we didn't have any Starbucks' Gazebo Blend and he went totally nonlinear."

Ppen-collar: workers People who work at home or telecommute.

Plug-and-play: A new hire who doesn't need any training. "The new guy, John, is great. He's totally plug-and-play."

Randomize: To divert someone from his or her goal with tertiary tasks or niggling details. "Marketing has totally randomized me by constantly changing their minds about the artwork."

Stress puppy: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.

Total disconnect: An extremely low-bandwidth human interaction. "It was a total disconnect. I spent half an hour explaining how this stuff worked, and he just didn't get it."

Uninstalled: Euphemism for being fired.

published on: mainframe.org

Commenti

Post popolari in questo blog

Little platoons

There's no reference to Hegel in the Tory manifesto, but there is an allusion to one of the founding fathers of conservative thought, Edmund Burke. The "institutional building blocks of the Big Society", the document reads, "[are] the 'little platoons' of civil society". “Little platoons" is a phrase that occurs in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the classic expression of conservative scepticism about large-scale attempts to transform society in the image of abstract ideals. The Tories today use it to refer to the local associations that would go to form a "broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation". The problem is that, for Burke, little platoons weren't groups that you volunteer to join; they were the "social subdivisions" into which you are born - the kind of traditionalism you would have thought Cameron's rebranded "progressive" Conservatives would want to avoid. T

Microsoft Language Portal

Microsoft Language Portal:  a bi-lingual search portal for finding translations of key Microsoft terms and general IT terminology. It is aimed at international users and partners that need to know our terminology for globalization, localization, authoring and general discovery.  It contains approx. 25,000 defined terms, including English definitions, translated in up to 100 languages as well as the software translations for products like Windows, Office, SQL Server and many more.

Football or soccer, which came first?

With the World Cup underway in Brazil, a lot of people are questioning if we should refer to the "global round-ball game" as "soccer" or "football"? This is visible from the queries of the readers that access my blog. The most visited post ever is indeed “ Differenza tra football e soccer ” and since we are in the World Cup craze I think this topic is worth a post. According to a paper published in May by the University of Michigan and written by the sport economist Stefan Szymanski, "soccer" is a not a semantically bizarre American invention but a British import. Soccer comes from "association football" and the term was used in the UK to distinguish it from rugby football. In countries with other forms of football (USA, Australia) soccer became more generic, basically a synonym for 'football' in the international sense, to distinguish it from their domestic game. If the word "soccer" originated in Eng