First post!
Wait....userfriendly.org flashback....wonder if that is still a thing?
I love disruptive computer jargon. It's so very William Burroughs
Would you mind leveraging a time unit while I ideate my ecosystem? Sorry, I meant to say “Give me a minute while I sort my things out” but I’ve been writing a lot about disruptive technology this week. I must have zoned while dogfooding my hume-code for bugs… er, I mean “got carried away while proofreading my articles for …
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Friday 13th October 2017 11:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Gif.
This reminds me of the story of the naming of the quark.
Murray Gell-Mann who came up with it pronounced it "kwawk".
The origin of the word is in Finnegans Wake where the seagulls cry "Three quarks for Musther Mark" - there being three quarks, of course, in a nucleon.
When it was pointed out to MGM that in Joyce's Dublin accent "Quark" rhymes with "ark" (and of course with Mark) he is said to have denied having ever come across the word in Joyce and having invented it himself de novo. Of course it is impossible to doubt the word of a great physicist who is also an expert in the pronunciation of many languages. And happens, see the fine article, to be American.
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Friday 13th October 2017 16:29 GMT bombastic bob
Re: Gif.
"how can G(raphics) be pronounced as JIF."
it could be worse - they might be pronouncing SQL as "Sequel".
Yeah, it's pronounced Es Queue El for those who didn't know. The other pronunciation, which is _REALLY_ IBM market-speak from the late 80's/early 90's, is like nails on a chalkboard in intelligent or technical conversation. Yes, I'm compelled to stop things and correct the error, and have done so on a few occasions...
And yeah, it's "GUIFF" with a hard 'G'. Soft-G fascists simply can't figure out what the G stands for...
[I'll continue to use PING and JAY-PEGG files anyway - they're better for my needs]
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Friday 13th October 2017 10:04 GMT Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse
Phew!!!
"I appreciate that I might be using some of these IT development expressions incorrectly, and some probably didn’t exist at all until I made them up just now."
Thank Beelzebub for that. I started reading, couldn't understand a thing and had a cold shiver at the thought that I'd turned into a 45 yr old IT dinosaur.
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Friday 13th October 2017 10:10 GMT Fihart
Social ineptitude vs. human frailty
Doubtless the problem is that the sort of people who can cope with writing code are not very good at relating to actual people. Apple, who are generally good making technology accessible, are guilty of some of the worst bits of nonsense I've come across.
iTunes is simply the least intuitive piece of commercial software I've encountered. It seems designed to frustrate any attempt to copy pictures, text or music to Apple devices. I live in an urban area where traffic noise can be so loud that Apple's standard iPhone ringtones are inaudible. Copying custom ringtones to the iPhone was a ridiculous process that doesn''t always seem to work. On Android, it's just drag and drop.
The Guardian complains today that Apple's frequent demands that users supply an Apple ID not only disrupts work but leaves users security vulnerable to spoof sign-in demands.
Recently I tried to help a friend set up a new iPad. At some point we came up against the Apple ID issue. Being non computer literate my friend had probably set up an Apple ID but only had a vague idea whether or what it was. Then, either instead or in addition, the iPad wanted a phone number. At this point I gave up and merely got the iPad working as best I could and advised my friend to take the damn thing back to the Apple shop and get them to set up the rest of it.
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Friday 13th October 2017 16:36 GMT bombastic bob
Re: Hmm.
"and have in the past actually had to distinguish them in speech."
when someone first mentioned "Sequel Server" to me ~1990, I couldn't figure out what it was, where to find it, or who to buy it from. IBM allegedly made it, but no literature on it in the back of PC mag or anything even REMOTELY related. If it had been called "Es Queue El" Server, then I might have been able to find it. But the "Sequel" thing was I.B.M. "Market Speak", in the worst possible way.
And I stop conversations in order to correct the pronunciation of 'Es Queue El'. And it's 'My Es Queue El' no matter WHAT anyone says about it. .Calling it anything else invites me to become a GRAMMAR NAZI.
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Friday 13th October 2017 10:23 GMT Rameses Niblick the Third Kerplunk Kerplunk Whoops Where's My Thribble?
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Saturday 14th October 2017 08:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Hmm.
@Rameses Niblick etc (lovely moniker, btw!) - no. Squirrels are called squiggles, because when they move fast they run in a squiggly kinda way, squiggle, squiggle, squiggle.... (says my inner 7-year old)
SQL is pronounced sequel by folk who are trying to get the job done and haven't got all day to worry about what some twonk thinks about how it should be pronounced.
GIF is pronounced with a g-sound identical to that in the word graphics, because that's where the g in it comes from. See previous reference to not caring about twonks with too much time on their hands.
I'm loving the change from being a helldesker to being a hort (note that T on the end!) which is what horticultural students are called - I no longer GIF a fsck how folk pronounce SQL. It's fun leveraging the synchronicties of object-oriented living! And who'da thunk my left boot makes a decent de-bugging tool? Hort's kinda like open source, too, as the answer to a lot of things seems to be to fork it!
Icon because I'm enjoying a nice glass of the college's very own sweet cider. First time I've really enjoyed using the products created where I work!
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Friday 13th October 2017 14:35 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: "all Americans sound like Woody from Toy Story"
Or Woody from Woodpecker...
Hmmm.. Cider[1]...
[1] For those not fortunate to live in the UK, Woodpecker Cider was a fixture of my youth. Not use whether it still exists.. But there are plenty of really, really good ciders around so I've not missed it.
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Friday 13th October 2017 17:43 GMT Geoffrey W
Re: "all Americans sound like Woody from Toy Story"
As someone fortunate to have lived the first half of his life in the UK before escaping to somewhere even worse I was most disappointed to find that in the USA cider is just apple juice! They don't even make it with a dead rat in the barrel!
Conversely, Americans visiting the UK and seeing the vast range of ciders on offer are in for a surprise.
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Friday 13th October 2017 18:26 GMT John Gamble
Re: "all Americans sound like Woody from Toy Story"
Yeah, you're a victim of language shift (a native French speaker here was similarly surprised). Although apple cider (U.S. version) in no way can be confused with apple juice, if you want the alcoholic variety, you ask for "hard cider".
Woodpecker was widely available (well, when hard cider was just taking off again1 here) a couple of decades ago, but the Big BrewCos have been doing what they do best -- dumping flavored water-alcohol mixtures on the market -- so finding actual hard ciders that taste of apple takes a bit of research.
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1. Some sales idiots tried marketing it to bars as "cider beer", which then became the term the wait staff used with customers. That usage got slammed pretty hard by customers who actually knew what the stuff was.
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Friday 13th October 2017 16:33 GMT Tikimon
""I don’t know whether what you think you’re writing is supposed to mean" - Was this intended to mean something?"
Maybe? It's not inconceivable that it's a play on "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means" from The Princess Bride. (which you must see if you haven't yet)
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Friday 13th October 2017 10:26 GMT Doctor Syntax
"Being able to make up new jargon whenever you like is one of the finest unique features of the English language."
My distant memory of a year of Science German in the 6th form says that not only can German do this but it can do it with twice as many letters and probably more with a bit of effort.
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Friday 13th October 2017 11:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
"My distant memory of a year of Science German in the 6th form says that not only can German do this "
Wasserstoffionenkonzentrationbestimmunggeraet. (pH meter)
But in the same language a mobile phone is a handy. Presumably using one is a hand job.
The French, of course, had a proper committee to organise technical terms (I don't know if they still do, but I was once sat at a dinner with a member of said committee). Hence caméscope, logiciel and so on. But also navigateur being a browser (wonder why) while the similar job function of pilote is actually a driver.
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Friday 13th October 2017 12:13 GMT cklammer
I just wrote at work:
"Oracledatenbankclientinstallationdateisystemspeicherumfang".
And the term "handy" for a mobile as it used in Germany was coined by the Saxons: when the Berlin Wall fell, most of them saw a mobile for the first time which they recognized as phone but were missing the phone cable.
So they asked: "Häm die kein Schnur?"
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Friday 13th October 2017 13:03 GMT I ain't Spartacus
cklammer,
When you said the term handy was coined by the Saxons - you created a very strange mental picture in my head. I didn't think the people of the Saxony, my brain supplied the mental image of Saxons. Since I've visited Sutton Hoo, that was a bloke in really impressive armour with a bloody big war axe on a 6 foot shaft and a nice sword. Complete with shield and a boat full of shiny things to take to the afterlife.
I don't remember the section of the museum dedicated to his Nokia 3310 - but I imagine that's just because the government hushed it up. Being a 3310 they were able to turn it on, and it still had 2 bars of battery left, which is how they could look up his contacts and find out he was called Redwulf.
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Saturday 14th October 2017 09:21 GMT allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
"The French, of course, had a proper committee to organise technical terms [...]"
Fun fact: so does the Vatican.
There is a Latin term for all the modern stuff around us. Poke around a bit, it's fun. Plus, you find a lot of fancy words for mundane stuff that you can use in presentations, reports, job descriptions, job titles on business cards... And as Latin is an officially recognized language in the EU, at least there no one can fault you for using it.
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Friday 13th October 2017 14:38 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
not only can German do this but it can do it with twice as many letters
German is an agglutinative language - it contructs words by gluing lots of smaller words together (like Forth - except, unlike Forth, you are expected to see and say all the parts).
English kind of does that too (there is, after all, a sort-of-Germanic language buried under all the layers of languages that we've stolen from elsewhere). Hence - database is a base that contains data. We tend to stop after a certain number of syllables, but German seems to prefer long words.
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Friday 13th October 2017 16:10 GMT Ken Hagan
"We tend to stop after a certain number of syllables, but German seems to prefer long words."
I'm not sure that we do (stop). We tend to write the resulting mess as separate words but that's a cosmetic detail. The big exception here is when we are glueing Latin or Greek roots together, in which case we join them up, presumably because the parts aren't recognisable words on their own.
Either way, in the spoken language the stream of sounds is much the same. I imagine that in the mind of a listener these compounds are just as separable (or not) in either language.
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Friday 13th October 2017 10:52 GMT Unicornpiss
British revenge
I can't really disagree with anything you're saying here. Possibly the only worse documentation is that which comes poorly translated from India. But all I can say in us Yanks' defense is that you Brits created ITIL, apparently as a punishment and loathing for all IT workers everywhere.
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Friday 13th October 2017 11:07 GMT FuzzyWuzzys
Re: British revenge
"But all I can say in us Yanks' defense is that you Brits"
No, no, no!
Don't start a sentence with "But".
Don't use "us" when you should have used "we".
Oh, an please spell "defence" correctly.
"All I can say in defence of we Yanks is that the Brits must have created ITIL..."
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Friday 13th October 2017 15:17 GMT cbigglesworth
Re: British revenge
Actually, "But all I can say in us Yanks' defense is that you Brits" is clunky but correct, and "All I can say in defence of we Yanks is..." is incorrect. What the OP should have said is, "But all I can say in our defense" for better flow, but grammatically his use of "us" is correct.
Grammar rules found here: http://snarkygrammarguide.blogspot.com/2012/09/object-of-preposition-all-of-us.html
For me, the easy way to tell is to remove the noun from the prepositional phrase and see how it reads.
Ex: He has no trust in us scientists.
Correct (with "scientists" removed): He has no trust in us.
Incorrect (replace with "we" and also with "scientists" removed): He has no trust in we.
So if the sentence sounds correct with the noun removed, you have the correct pronoun.
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Friday 13th October 2017 11:50 GMT Flocke Kroes
Re: Acronyms
The gym I used to go to had "How does it feel in my arms" playing every half hour. It started with arms, then the chorus had the line twice with a little delay so the s of one arms came right after the ar of the other. By the end of the song the lyrics become completely blatant but apparently no-one else heard them the way I did.
I leave you with my favorite jarjon acronym: People Can't Memorise Computer Industry Acronyms.
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Friday 13th October 2017 12:40 GMT Flocke Kroes
For further confusion ...
The consonants for the name of god transliterate to YHVH, but the wrong vowel points were added to avoid saying the name out loud by accident. Jehovah's witnesses use those wrong vowel points (and get the first consonant wrong). If we start calling them Yahweh's Auditors will the get the message?
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Friday 13th October 2017 13:36 GMT BeakUpBottom
Vowels are for wimps
Could try Polish, where they obviously decided they'd used enough vowels in the name and went with putting little dots and slashes on consonants to tell you how many wasps to put in your mouth before attempting the word. They are quite proud of how hard their language is, even for them!
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Friday 13th October 2017 14:50 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
The letter "ayin" is a silent letter which changes the way a word is pronounced
If you want to see some freaky stuff, try learning one of the Celtic languages where they do mutation - so in Gaidhlig, a word that starts with an m (like 'mor' - big) has, under certain circumstances, an 'h' put after it. This, as one might expect, changes the sound. So "very big" (gle mhor) is pronounced as "gle vor".
There are reasonable simple rules about how this happems (starting letter == b,f,m,p and mumble mumble[1]) but it catches out the beginner.
And don't get me started on balanced thick and thin vowels. No really, don't - I can't remember the rules[1]..
I'm sure that Welsh, Cornish and Breton have similar-but-different mutation rules (so Cymru becomes Gymru etc etc) but I know even less about that branch of Celtic languages.
[1] It was 20 years ago that we learnt a bit of Scots Gaidhlig and my brain has had to process a lot of alcohol^W stuff since then.
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Saturday 14th October 2017 13:39 GMT Martin an gof
I'm sure that Welsh, Cornish and Breton have similar-but-different mutation rules (so Cymru becomes Gymru etc etc) but I know even less about that branch of Celtic languages.
The oft-quoted thing about mutations is that they are beneficial to the spoken language; they help the flow, and may well be one of the reasons non (Celtic) speakers consider these languages, particularly it seems Welsh, as more poetic or tuneful.
As a Welsh-speaker, the one thing I would say is that when spoken, people rarely bother too much about whether you have got the mutation exactly correct (other than a few cases where it grates). It's written Welsh where they get all het-up about it.
Welsh, particularly spoken Welsh, is almost obsessive about removing letters, phonemes or even whole syllables. If you were to write Welsh as she is spoken the apostrophe on your keyboard would wear out very quickly. Na, 's dim ishe mwy, 'dw i 'di ca'l llon' bol'
As regards vowels, the thing that English monoglots fail to recognise is that while we call "AEIOU" vowels, even English actually uses other letters in a very vowel-like way. Take "Y" as an example. The simple English words "by" or "cyst" or "dry" or "fly" or many, many others contain no vowels, except that "y" is used as a vowel. Welsh, of course, acknowledges that fact and adds "W" and "Y" to the list of vowels.
Some English friends of mine were startled on moving to live in Wales by an apparent lack of vowels in placenames - take Ynysybwl ("Uh-nis-uh-bull"), just north of Pontypridd as an example, and note the number of nearby places with a limited number of English vowels in their names.
M.
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Friday 13th October 2017 11:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
Dabsy clearly isn't keeping up
The chances of your code lasting COBOL like 30 years or more are nearly gone. You are lucky if the platform you are writing on will last more than 3 or 4 years.
Refer to Apple deprecation of 32bit for example, M$ are nearly as bad as examples.
TBH though, a UNIX admin in a robe would make quite a facsimile of a druid though, with the beard, unintelligible use of language etc. :)
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Friday 13th October 2017 12:02 GMT Nigel Cro
Thank you all...
...for brightening up my day.
Working for an American company we are forever solutioneering and acclimating. Only the other day I was asked to 'socialize the risk so we can drive corrective action'. Five minutes ago I was asked to 'circle back round and stay close to this'
Two countries divided by a common language indeed!
By the way, it is now, has always been and will be forever, GIF (like Gold or Golf or Good).
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Friday 13th October 2017 12:22 GMT amanfromMars 1
Real High Virtual Roller Stakes Poker Play ....... for Phantom Ghost Hosters.
Does El Reg host and field Red Team Players? Would it like to? ..... https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2017/10/11/el_reg_meets_the_lords_to_puncture_the_aipocalypse/#c_3314427
Well, well, well, Dabbsie, you certainly answered that loud and clear. Do you have Future Steps to Follow with NEUKlearer HyperRadioProActive IT Deeply into the Very Best of the Best Available Dark Luscious Quantum Communicator Webs/Networks/AIMagic Circles?
Dare Care Share Win Win Orders from/for Special AIR Service Members/Honoured Veterans/Master Pilots ....... Revealing Grand AIMaster Plans?
:-) cc Sir Michael Fallon KCB MP, UKGBNI Secretary of State for Defence ...... RSVPVIP
Let's see if there are any Switched On Virtual Hornets in the Queen's Nest to Stir and Steer into Future Action at the MOD/GCHQ, Alastair, with both Recently Uncovered and Fully Discovered and Recovered Assets with Quite Quiet AIMagical Abilities in Quantum Communication Facilities Hosting and Presenting Only the Very Best of the Best Available Dark Luscious Quantum Communicator Webs/Networks/AIMagic Circles.
When IT is such, and Finely Built, Who Follows What to Lead and Create the Future with these New Fangled, Quantum Entangling Tools for Virtual Reality Production with AIMentored and AVMonitored Directors in Absolute Command with/of Remote Alien Controls. ..... and they are tricky enough to learn how to handle to be perfectly safe and secure against compromise and/or penetration and unwarranted alteration or misappropriation of code.
cc Andrew Orlowski, Executive Editor, El Reg
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Saturday 14th October 2017 01:05 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Real High Virtual Roller Stakes Poker Play ....... for Phantom Ghost Hosters.
"I don't think aManFromMars' programmer will let you have the code. He has gone from total gibberish through marketing then management bollocks to almost coherent in a matter of a few years"
Yes, the A.I is evolving at an ever increasing rate. I wonder if Mr Orlowski is in contact with it's creator, it could a be a whole chapter in his new book. Or maybe AMFM is Mr Orlowski's creation and that's what the whole book will be about?
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Saturday 14th October 2017 15:28 GMT amanfromMars 1
Victor of/Victim in LOVE ...... amfM Gone Phishing for a Vanguard Crash of Flash Players
Yes, the A.I is evolving at an ever increasing rate. I wonder if Mr Orlowski is in contact with it's creator,........John Brown (no body)
Exploratory contact is made, John Brown (no body), for answers to questions y'all may be seeking and which are being leaked everywhere via WWWorldWide Webs Manufacturing Heavenly AINetworks.
And I'd like to bet an absolute fortune, very very few would know and be able to survive well handling that Perfect Munition and its Almighty Ammunitions.
When IT is such, and Finely Built, Who Follows What to Lead and Create the Future with these New Fangled, Quantum Entangling Tools for Virtual Reality Production with AIMentored and AVMonitored Directors in Absolute Command with/of Remote Alien Controls. ..... and they are tricky enough to learn how to handle to be perfectly safe and secure against compromise and/or penetration and unwarranted alteration or misappropriation of code.
cc Andrew Orlowski, Executive Editor, El Reg .... https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/3/2017/10/13/i_love_disruptive_computer_jargon_its_so_very_william_burroughs/#c_3316398
Do you think that is a tad ...... Moving Mountains to Mohammad and/or a biting and baiting of hands that feed IT?
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Friday 13th October 2017 12:44 GMT Potemkine!
Talking about jargon...
The president for France's Schools Programs Council resigned a few week ago. That guy, in charge of designing what would be taught to kids had some brilliant ideas.
Among those, don't say "swimming pools" but "deep standardized aquatic environment". Kids shouldn't learn to write but should "mastering the graphomotor gesture and progressively automate the standard lettering". And don't call a pen a pen, but a "scripting tool.". Practicing Kayak ? No, practicing "an activity of moving a floating support on a fluid". Also, Badminton sounds much more spectacular when labeled as a "dual debate activity mediated by a shuttlecock"...
350 years after its creation, Les Précieuses Ridicules is a satire still relevant.
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Friday 13th October 2017 13:05 GMT asickness231
"Instead of something British and bland such as “Repeat the previous three steps and click OK”, it’ll say something like “The user will be behooved to reitify the aforementioned functionation in advance of affirmerating the mode of acceptancy”."
I mean have you ever tried writing this stuff? You have to make it interesting or you'd blow your brains out.
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Friday 13th October 2017 13:32 GMT BeakUpBottom
Strapping on An Awesome Serpent
I don't know how he got through all those William Burroughs and Naked Lunch references without using Steely Dan the Third in his punch-line somehow.
Better that than something to do with "the musty aroma of penetrated rectums deliciously flavoured the air" as an alternative to DRV_IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAT_OR_EQUAL_TO, because it pretty much means the same thing even if there's no acronym in it.
Yes, I did read the book recently, I'm not sure how many years the various images it conjures up take to fade!
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Friday 13th October 2017 15:43 GMT Jeffrey Nonken
The correct pronunciation of ".GIF" is just as controversial as the pronunciation of "Linux". I don't think your friend gets to claim unequivocally how it's pronounced.
For the former, I personally consider that an acronym derives from the words it's abbreviating. All else being equal, then, I pronounce it with a hard "g". Also, it's the only way the joke "beware geeks bearing .GIFs" works.
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Friday 13th October 2017 15:53 GMT Jeffrey Nonken
As for my funny accent... If we ever meet, watch out. I'm gonna take YerAHRS and... buy it and you a pint at the nearest pub. We can sit for a while and poke fun at each others' cultures. And our own. I promise I won't be bringing my six-gun, they annoyingly don't like us to be armed on international flights for some reason.
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Friday 13th October 2017 17:49 GMT BeakUpBottom
Re: Thank you for resisting the temptation
Personally I started using it to annoy Canadians who throw a massive strop about being called American, and then an even bigger one when you point out they are, in fact, just as American as you USAians.
Although I suspect it doesn't really have the desired effect. I could say Yank, but there was some confusing explanation I got as to how that doesn't work either.
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Sunday 15th October 2017 14:18 GMT amanfromMars 1
Re: What, me worry? When Heaven is Available. Are you Mad? I Kid U Not
And now are y'all Registered as being Privy to the Facility Running Below* ...... with Augmented Virtual Reality Applications for Future Beta-Testing of Superior Prime Quality Product/Earthly Alien Productions ...... AI Based Programs with Quantum Communication Channels Guaranteeing Security Needs and Feeds.
And the newest versions of Fortran, Herby, .... Enabled to Handle Delivery and Drivering of Virtual Reality ProgramMING ........ with Ab Fab Fabless NEUKlearer HyperRadioProActive IT AIMentoring and AIMonitoring for Future Leading Developments, Default Provided ..... thus to avoid and/or mitigate any Hellish* Problems.
Should El Reg Engage and lead with the Learning of Secret Sacred Practices in the Future that do Almighty Lead, Every Day?
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
