Positive Path

Lately I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to listen to geeks have a conversation. It must be maddening, I mean when you think about it, because they live in a world of deep introspection, and the language is all their own. Although words and phrases are used that sound familiar, the meaning is all distorted.

I have been collecting a few uncommon or borrowed computer phrases that I come across day to day. Let’s call this post a guide to help non geeks understand geeks when they speak.

• easter egg not  the beautiful colourful painted egg of which you have fond memories, hidden in your living room on easter morning. No, an easter egg is this strange act of rebellion by a software developer (or development team) that is hidden in software code. The user presses some obscure sequence of keys or clicks the mouse in just the right places, just the right times and then something wonderful (or awful) will happen in the program.
• virus does not make you sick; rather it makes your computer sick and all you get is this sinking feeling that you forgot to back up those photos to CD from the last vacation (see bit rot below)
• cookie is not something you eat; it’s something your browser eats
• port is not a place where ships pull in, it’s a software abstraction of a physical interface
• spool is not something you wrap thread around, it’s a temporary buffer for printer output
• thread is not used in  sewing, it’s a separate independent path of program execution
• execute does not mean the intentional violent act of killing, rather it’s the act of running a program
• kill when you want to abort the execution of a program, then you kill it
• cloud the cloud is an emerging concept whereby large companies run software applications for smaller companies on gigantic arrays of super fast servers. That way if the software crashes, or doesn’t work right then the smaller company can blame the cloud company. It’s a really big mistake to say “Which cloud?”, or “It looks sunny to me.” when geeks speak of clouds.
• Hackers Here is real tricky one. Years ago, before Robert Redford became old, like I’m talking 1992 here, he starred in a flick called Sneakers. A sneaker is not a hacker, I know but the film captures the basic problem: hacker, good or evil? In Sneakers, Robert Redford is the loveable, affable, smart, ethical and devious computer wundermind. His character gains notoriety by getting arrested for breaking into government computers when he was a young 20 something. That’s it right there. So a hacker is someone we admire, he’s handsome, kind and caring. He’s…Robert Redford. And he’s also a convicted felon. This central paradox crops up all the time and it’s very difficult to discern, hacker, good or evil?
  • There are white hat hackers, these are the good guys who hack on systems for a fee to expose security holes. Contrast this with back hat hackers who hack on systems to make money through fraud and other means. So white hat hackers became offended by getting mixed up with black hat hackers, and  the term ‘cracker’ was invented, it really means a black hat hacker. Then some people wanted everyone to call black hat hackers ‘crackers’ to avoid confusion. But nobody knows what a cracker is, so now just about everyone assumes that any hacker is bad. Which is right back where the whole concept started. I write computer code for a living, and when I speak of some particularly bad code (nothing I wrote of course), I call it a hack. And everyone seems to know what I mean.
  • Here, I’m going to throw out my definition for hacker. A hacker is someone that accomplished something with computers that meant he knows a lot about technology, spent many long nights working on something, and is probably someone you don’t want working in your IT group. I mean, how many people put great hacker on their resume?
• Streisand Effect this is a good one; and there’s a lesson here for everyone. You can not remove something from the internet by publicly asking – or worse demanding that it be removed. That kind thing is like throwing gasoline on a fire – the opposite to the power of ten will happen. As Barbara Streisand¹ and untold others have found out, the new fame is anonymity.
• bit rot here is something that everyone who has some family photos burned onto a CD should be conscious of — the degradation of data on the physical medium. CDs and DVDs do not last forever.
• bit rot (alternative def.)  is the reason why your Windows 98 Copy of Norton Anti Virus is completely useless. Bit rot is the reason you have to constantly update your Adobe PDF reader even though you swore you just updated it last month. Wikipedia calls this phenomenon the “…spontaneous degradation of a software program over time.”² While this description is facetious, yes, it is aptly put. Geeks live in constant fear of bit rot. Everyone suffers from it.

References

1. The Streisand Effect
2. Wikipedia definition for bit rot

Tags: technical humor

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 13th, 2010 at 4:34 pm and is filed under computer terminology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.