{"id":104,"date":"2010-11-13T16:34:20","date_gmt":"2010-11-13T23:34:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/evanjenkins.net\/?p=104"},"modified":"2010-11-15T09:24:27","modified_gmt":"2010-11-15T16:24:27","slug":"the-non-geeks-guide-to-geek-speak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/evanjenkins.net\/?p=104","title":{"rendered":"The non geek&#8217;s guide to geek speak"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Lately I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>I have been  collecting a few uncommon or borrowed computer phrases that I come across day to day. Let&#8217;s call this post a guide to help non geeks understand geeks when they speak. <!--more--><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<li><strong>easter egg<\/strong> not \u00a0the 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\u00a0act\u00a0of\u00a0rebellion\u00a0by a\u00a0software\u00a0developer (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,\u00a0just\u00a0the right times and then something wonderful (or awful) will happen in the program.<\/li>\n<li><strong>virus<\/strong> 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)<\/li>\n<li><strong>cookie<\/strong> is not something you eat; it&#8217;s something your browser eats<\/li>\n<li><strong>port<\/strong> is not a place where ships pull in, it&#8217;s a software abstraction of a physical interface<\/li>\n<li><strong>spool<\/strong> is not something you wrap thread around, it&#8217;s a temporary buffer for printer output<\/li>\n<li><strong>thread<\/strong> is not used in \u00a0sewing, it&#8217;s a separate independent path of program execution<\/li>\n<li><strong>execute<\/strong> does not mean the intentional violent act of killing, rather it&#8217;s the act of running a program<\/li>\n<li><strong>kill<\/strong><em> <\/em>when you want to abort the execution of a program, then you <em>kill<\/em> it<\/li>\n<li><strong>cloud<\/strong> the cloud is an emerging concept whereby large companies run software\u00a0applications\u00a0for smaller companies on\u00a0gigantic\u00a0arrays of super fast servers. That way if the software crashes, or doesn&#8217;t work right then the smaller\u00a0company\u00a0can blame the cloud company. It&#8217;s a really big mistake to say &#8220;Which cloud?&#8221;, or &#8220;It looks sunny to me.&#8221; when geeks speak of clouds.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Hackers<\/strong> Here is real tricky one. Years ago, before Robert Redford became old, like I&#8217;m talking 1992 here, he starred in a flick called <em>Sneakers.<\/em> A sneaker is not a hacker, I know but the film captures the basic problem: hacker, good or evil? In\u00a0<em>Sneakers<\/em>, Robert Redford is the loveable, affable, smart, ethical and devious computer wundermind. His\u00a0character\u00a0gains notoriety\u00a0by getting arrested for breaking into government computers when he was a young 20 something. That&#8217;s it right there. So a hacker is someone we admire, he&#8217;s handsome, kind and caring. He&#8217;s&#8230;Robert Redford. And he&#8217;s also a convicted felon. This central paradox crops up all the time and it&#8217;s very\u00a0difficult\u00a0to discern, hacker, good or evil?\n<ul>\n<li>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 \u00a0the term &#8216;cracker&#8217; was invented, it really means a black hat hacker. Then some people wanted\u00a0everyone to call black hat hackers &#8216;crackers&#8217; to avoid confusion. But\u00a0nobody\u00a0knows what a\u00a0cracker\u00a0is, 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\u00a0particularly\u00a0bad code (nothing I wrote of course), I call it a <em>hack<\/em>. And everyone seems to know what I mean.<\/li>\n<li>Here, I&#8217;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&#8217;t want working in your IT group. I mean, how many people put <em>great hacker<\/em> on their resume?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Streisand Effect<\/strong> this is a good one; and there&#8217;s a lesson here for everyone. You can not remove something from the internet by publicly asking &#8211; or worse <em>demanding<\/em> that it be removed. That kind thing is like throwing gasoline on a fire &#8211; the opposite to the power of ten will happen. As Barbara Streisand\u00b9 and untold others have found out, the new fame is anonymity.<\/li>\n<li><strong>bit rot<\/strong> here is something that everyone who has some family photos burned onto a CD should be conscious of &#8212; the degradation of data on the physical medium. CDs and DVDs do not last forever.<\/li>\n<li><strong>bit rot<\/strong> (alternative def.)\u00a0 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\u00a0phenomenon\u00a0the &#8220;&#8230;spontaneous degradation of a software program over time.&#8221;\u00b2\u00a0While this description is\u00a0facetious, yes, it is aptly put. Geeks live in\u00a0constant\u00a0fear of bit rot. Everyone suffers from it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span><strong>References<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Streisand_effect\">The Streisand Effect<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bit_rot\">Wikipedia definition for bit rot <\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lately I&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-terminology","tag-technical-humor"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/evanjenkins.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/evanjenkins.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/evanjenkins.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evanjenkins.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evanjenkins.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":55,"href":"https:\/\/evanjenkins.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":187,"href":"https:\/\/evanjenkins.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions\/187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/evanjenkins.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evanjenkins.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evanjenkins.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}