Slashdot Mirror
Public Confused by Tech Lingo
the_helper_monkey writes "The BBC has an article about how tech jargon confuses the public. It's based on a survey done by AMD asking the definitions of words such as megahertz, MP3, and Bluetooth. " I was recently reminded of how big a deal this is while trying to help my tech novice brother select a computer. If you don't know what a gigabyte is, it's hard to know how large of a hard drive you need.
j00 d0n7 u|\|d3r574|\|d m3 1337 5p34|????
... I do love the jargon of tech.
But seriously, back when I was on phone tech support, half of the battle was describing things without using tech jargon. The other half of the battle was having patience. Thank goodness I am not doing that any more
KARMA TAG! You're it.
- all you need to know is bigger is better, right women?
In other news:
:P
Terms such as 'baffled', 'flummoxed', and 'jargon' consfuse the general public.
Techs are confused by general public's Lingo.
Sorry, if you're going to write a story about people being confused by big words, please don't use big words to describe how people don't understand big words. Your target audience is then people who can't understand big words. Don't you know we have to dumb down everything for the uneducated people coming out of our schools?
Oh, wait, where is that contradicting report that says the people coming out of our schools are more tech savvy than ever. But they aren't getting educated gaddammmmit.
On a side note, techs don't understand techno-babble either:
"The jig is up!"
no...
"The *gig* is up."
"1.21 Jiggawatts???"
no...
"1.21 Gigawatts????"
So exactly how do we all keep screwing up by saying "Gig" instead of "Jig" when we probably heard it right most of our lives?
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Just tell them to go here: The Jargon File.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
tell me about it. I've done phone tech support and personal desktop support. The hardest thing is just explaining it to them.
I never thought about it, but we must sound really funny to non-technically inclined people. "Yea, I picked up the Athlon 1800 XP, you know the one point five three three gig, and the dude was selling pc2100 for like 50 a stick of 512 so I figured what the hell, cause Galaxies was running choppy with my old 133 stuff and the 64 meg GeForce two I had."
That must sound as bad as Star Trek dialogue to most people.
Through basic generational education...
Maybe some of the currently active generations don't know what a byte or a megahertz is, but more of each successive generation does know. When, as is likely, computer education will be a solid subject part of the primary school curriculum, this problem will vanish on its own.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
"the_helper_monkey writes..."
Yea, but only with the help of 999 of his closest friends and some typewriters.
I remember on tv (think it was jay leno) where a woman was asked what is a "megahertz" and answered something like "a big hurt, mega hurt". I cracked my balls laughing on that one.
This information isn't exactly difficult to find. If you're planning on investing $.5-2K, it seems like a few hours research at the local library would be in order.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Put it into terms that they can understand.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
I really think that when buying a computer they should give a little standard definition of common computer terms. therefore they may get something close to what they want.
Name any field (Computers, Engineering, Finance, Medicine, Skateboarding) and if you are not involved, you will get blown away by terminology.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
I submit that people would be much less confused if AMD would spec its processors in terms of megawatts instead. After all, we already know they are excellent space heaters. ;)
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Tons of stuff confuses the public, and if organizations like the RIAA can control the definition of terms (MP3 = piracy), than they could help disuade people from pirating (or sharing if that's your angle) music.
--------
Free your mind.
That they're not /-r4d k00l l33t h4x0r5?
It's very analogous to the introduction of the vernacular Mass. When Masses were said in Latin, with the priest facing away from the people, it was a much more mysterious, deep experience. Now that English is used for Mass, the people, without the benefit of years in a seminary, have all become amatuer theologians, thinking that birth control, homosexuality and ecumenalism are all okay, instead of being the one way tickets to eternan Damnation that the Holy See has repeatedly declared them to be.
So, I think we need more computer jargon, computer cases only openable by licensed tech, and a return to Latin Mass.
A. Rightmann
I've experienced this problem with lusers before too. At first I was very frustrated, spending hours explaning the logical history underlying the acronames "cd" and "ls" and how they are actually newmonic. After a while, though, I realized that this jargon was actually working for us, not against us. If someone is too stupid to learn and understand some basic terminology, I don't want them dumbing down Linux anyway. It's like Mensa--you have to have a certain amount of brains to get in the door, which makes for a more pleasant experience among the intelligentcia.
"Only slightly more than half correctly identified the definition of megahertz - a measurement of how many times a part of the processor, called the clock, ticks every millionth of a second."
:)
A couple of hours ago this read "- a measurement of the processing power of the computer."
I wonder why they changed it?
If the survey they gave those 1500 people is the same as the one on their web site, then that's really pathetic news.
Multiple choice, 3 answers for each, with one being an obviously stupid answer.
And only 3% got the entire thing (7 questions) correct.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Just tell them to go here: The Jargon File.
The truth is probably that the blame for this is squarely on the head of Microsoft for trying to make the PC ubiquitous, like a toaster, when it's really an extremely complicated technology which the common man should not even try to understand, let alone use to it's full potential. But now that the Genie is out of the bottle, so to speak, it's too late to shove her back in and we (the professional IT community) are left to deal with the aftermath of Microsoft's behaviour.
They (MS) got rich by marketing stuff to people with no business using it and we get the shaft.
All the best,
--Bob
"Memory" means how big the hard drive is.
He calls floppies "tapes".
To him the monitor is the computer.
He calls the tower the hard drive.
And he claims that I'm confusing.
Best Windows Freeware
Studies conducted by some large corporation found that the sky is blue, shit is brown (and sometimes green), and that the average accelleration due to gravity on earth is approximately 9.81m/sec/sec.
Join Tor today!
Hate to be a dick, but, unless you're in your 50s, you really ought to know what most of these words mean by now. It's kind of scary that people my age don't know these things.
On second thought, let them get outsourced to India.
After a year or two, they will beg for domestic support again.
Bad news for the tech industry, perhaps, but good news for the porn industry, as computer terminology like RAM, hard drive, floppy, and the like are having a stimulative effect and increasing the sales of some gadgets.
Tech jargon contains all kinds of english words, which are often used as is, or transformed to look like native words. This is a real problem with non-techie, non-english-speakers.
For example, something like this (in French), generally makes me look like an alien:
"J'ai downloadé un file manager dans le directory des tools, mais il était buggé, et il a crashé le drive".
Gud what a bunch of dumbfucks.
look at laptop adverts. I want a 1600x1200 screen, now now many pixels is SVGA, XGA, SXGA,WXGA SWXGA? 1.2 MegaPixels? just tell me what the frigging resolution is!!!
Techs are Techs, were created to get by the tech stuff and if possible stay in the basement NOT speaking to users in case they confuse them.
Users are users, and, to copy the BOFH, the day a luser will have access to my Server Room, he'll have to do it over my dead body.
For the rest, they NEVER understood Gigabit, they NEVER understood DHCP and it's all for the better.
Next, they will tell me Users are confused by rocket science and everybody will get Ahhhh !!!
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I pointed out on the .NET thread that our company, prior to my arrivial here, paid waaay too much for a website recently because of a misunderstanding in terminology.
One of the owners wanted the website to have a domain name that ended in ".net" because he felt that ".com" was associated with the US, and he didn't want to be associated with them (this company is an offshore company).
That in itself is kind of funny, but then when the company he hired to do the programming was asking him what type of server he wanted it on and what language. He had no clue, but told them that he wanted the ".net" on it.
They thought he wanted ".NET" and started it up.
At some point the misunderstanding was seen on their side, but they just ran with it, seeing that he was pretty clueless and then overbilled us.
Fantastic.
He isn't totally clueless, he does know a tiny little bit - but that makes it worse.
He just throws around buzzwords and it is a bit embarrassing/hilarious.
His current thing is that he wants a PDA that plays MP3s, and that has a phone jack directly into it that will let him dial-up and check his e-mail, but also record conversations, but it can't be a Handspring product "because those are crap, and did you see that Palm is buying them out" as he told me.
He was asking me the other day which he should try to get, "64K or 128K" in his MP3 player. I acted like he wrote "M" for megs and left it at that.
He makes my days much longer than they need to be - otherwise, I would be doing more programming and less trying to get crap done for him.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Have you taken the Geek Purity Test lately?
http://www.armory.com/tests/geek.html
Its a bit out of date. Anyone know if there's been an update?
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
Next we will find that most people do not understand history or how their political system is really run!
WTF?
I had the hardest time trying to explain the difference between memory as in RAM versus disk space to my mom when she looked for a computer.
Then there are all these people that want computers to be as easy to understand and use as a toaster or something. They completely forget the vast numbers of machines and ledgers that the computer in the office for example replaces.
How the hell is something that acts likes a typewriter, a ledger, interoffice communication device and research library (google and the 'Net) supposed to be as easy to use as a single use appliance? Answer it is never going to be that easy. That is not to say that things cannot get a hell of a lot better.
The tech jargon is out there for the geeks among us fixated on the system stats. The regular user sees bigger numbers and ends up buying what all his friends have anyway. Looked deep into sports car numbers lately? Half of that crap is meaningless to me torque to dumbnut ratios for sports suspension and makes it more responsive but has the downside of... You get the picture.
Wow jargon is confusing. I needed a study to tell me this?
ACK
From the article: Most people are confused and flummoxed by the jargon used to describe new technology, says a survey.
Well, I know the definition of mp3, and html, and bluetooth, and DVR, and hertz, megahertz, gigahertz [...] and I scored 100% on this test, but what does "flummoxed" mean?!
Next on Slashdot: Nerds confused by media lingo!
Okay, here it is:
a : to make indistinct : BLUR b : to mix indiscriminately : JUMBLE c : to fail to differentiate from an often similar or related other
It's the same as 'confuse'.
"Please bring your computer in so we can look at it."
....
"The whole thing?"
"No, just the main tower."
"Oh, you mean the hard drive?"
Sometimes I can understand that not everyone is this interested in computers, and wouldn't know all th terms.
OTOH, I'm not a bit interested in cars, but I know what an alternator is.
... this post would get +1 Ironic.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
here was the response:
I'm mean, christ! does basic knowledge equate to sexiness? hopefully!!!!
I work for a Canadian Graphics Board company (bet you can't guess which one... hint it's not Matrox)and you'd be surprised how many people call tech support cause they can't get their new 500$ AGP card to fit in their 500$ computer which only has PCI slots
The biggest problem I have with novices is explaining what a "file" is. Simple things like directories are a difficult concept to grasp if you have no experience with computers.
Storage and memory are another big issue. There's a lot of confusion out there regarding the difference between fast temporary storage (memory) and slower long term storage (hard drive space) what what they're both used for.
It's maddening sometimes trying to communicate with someone who has very little computer know-how.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Reminds me of that ol' tech support "joke": Customer: "The coffee tray is broken." Techie: "The coffee tray?" After 10 mins of negotiations, it was revealed that the guy used the CD-ROM to put his coffee mug on. BTW, I only scored 6/7, lost the DVR question :(
--
We apologise for the inconvenience
Tech speak is confusing in it has its own vocabulary, but even if people could understand the vocabulary, there is still the daunting task of understanding the technology. For example, somebody might know that a megahertz is used to determine processor clock speed, but they might not understand that clock speed is not really a good measure of computing power even for the same company. A Pentium 4 1.3GHz will outperform a Celeron 1.3 GHz.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Don't you know that the tower is the MODEM, not the hard drive, for starters.
The monitor is the thing you hold the paper up to for scanning, and that thing label "CD-ROM" is for holding your coffee!
The last two are cliche, but I heard both waaaaaaay too much back when I was a parts jockey for Best Buy (thankfully faaaaar in my past).
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
How many people know what 'horsepower' really is? Doesn't stop them from buying cars.
... and not spend so much time praising the specs. Leave the specs there for the informed consumer, but don't expect that someone like my mom will really know what the heck to make of a computer with more gigahertz, but a slower front-side-bus.
Tech lingo (from any industry/profession) goes above the head of most people. It just means that maybe companies need to spend time explaining what the benefits of a device are
I've seen some digital camera makers try to sort out the megapixel confusion by explaining what the size picture you can print (with acceptable quality) will be. That helps to make it accessible to people who don't know a pixel from a hole in the ground. "With this camera, I can do 8x10 pictures, with that one, I can do 5x7 pics." I'd want to know all the specs, but for most people, they just need to know if it does what they want it to do, they don't care what happens behind the scenes to get there.
English-speaking americans have difficulty understanding Japanese.
philcrissman.com.
It's based on smalltalk with some algol thrown in. I bet the public doesn't understand your precious c++ and perl either.
that also was a classic... To the point some PC makers decided to change the text so it reads "press Enter key", because much too many ppl was calling asking where the hell the "any" key was...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
When my old manager used to talk about "leveraging the synergies inherit in a business relationship", all i ever heard was "blah blah blah more work for you blah blah blah."
... that he think "blah blah blah boy that sounds expensive blah blah blah."
It's only fair that when I talk about SMP architectures, S-ATA, Terabytes, 64-bit, distributed model computing, TCP, UDP, server farms, load balancers, and quad-port ethernet adapters
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte
This is always a good thing for social engineering. Take, for example, this conversation, taken from real life, (not a movie called "Hackers").
*phone rings and gaurd picks up*
Gaurd: Security, Norm speaking.
Dade: Norman? This is Jimmy Tanner speaking. Norm, do you know anything about computers?
Gaurd: Uhhhh... Uhhhhhh..
Dade: Well, Norm, my B.L.T. drive just went A.W.O.L. and I have a big project due for mr. Kawasaki, and if I don't get it in he's going to commit Harry Karry on me.
Gaurd: Uhhhhhhhh...*mumbles*
Dade: Well, you know these Japanese management types. Norm could you read me the numbers off the modem?
Gaurd: uhhhhh....
Dade: It's a little boxy thing with switches.
Gaurd: *reads numbers*
See? Tech jargon is supposed to be confusing so hackers can take over TV stations with hapless security gaurds.
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
Is this really news? That when "average" people don't understand something, it's just an ID10T error?
When people refuse to RTFM, clearly the PEBKAC.
Face it, some technology is just too complex to be sufficiently dumbed down for the NASCAR and country music loving set.
... I will be EXTREMELY distressed.
t m
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3054782.s
"The findings are bad news for the industry, as it suggests that the baffling terms are putting people off buying the latest gadget."
Doesn't sound like very bad news to me. Marketting is the last leg of the journy for a product lifecycle (well, not counting support). If all gadget firms have to do is change their vocabulary to sell more stuff, I'd say they're in decent shape.
In the realm of computers, even the bottom of the barel is more than enough for most people these days, so an uninformed buyer won't even be hurt much by not knowing what Ghz and Gigabytes are. Those of us who do know will continue to look for tech specs on the sidepanel. Who cares if they take specs off the product name (AMD has already headed in this direction with their meaningless numerical designations for the athlon XP line).
SPAM
I'm involved in teaching people who have little experience with computers and networks how to use them. They don't know a lot of the terminology. The problem is, they don't care to know it. They, like many in management, want to throw money at a problem and hope it goes away. The result that I see is that this gets them a lot of incompatible proprietary "solutions" that don't do what they want, though they're out a lot of money for it.
I don't know what the solution is. They refuse education, instead preferring someone simply telling them something will work and being frustrated later.
funny munging
Bluetooth, MP3, RAM, cache, FIFO .. they mean very specific things, and are well suited for having their own names.
Now, if you want a thrill ride of superfluous jargon, take a gander at the business "self help" section of your local book store.
Or google for something called "Six Sigma."
Business jargoneers have a nasty tendency to rename common ideas, wrap them in market speak to create buzzwords, and resell them to the helpless souls who seem to collect in middle managment.
And is this really a problem? I know folks who are just now getting a cell phone - and they are 26-27 years old. I don't personally see how they ever lived without one, but I rely on mine for business, and I'm ususally so busy it is the ONLY way to find me. Same with a computer. I NEED to know what GHz, MHz, Bluetooth, WIFI, etc, etc etc is. I WORK in the industry. Does the average joe REALLY need a clue or even need most of this technology in their lives? Does it really even make their lives "easier?" You know what "they" say - "ignorance is bliss."
quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Juvenal
It's about time people started to acknowledge this issue. While all fields (medicine, physics, philosophy...) have their own specialized jargons, as technology becomes more and more a part of every normal person's life, techspeak is going to prove a significant impediment to widespread computer literacy.
A big part of the problem is that words in computer lingo often refer to lower level concepts that normal users don't (and shouldn't have to) know about or understand. It should be possible to discuss the size of a file or disk without understanding what bits and bytes are, and to be able to discuss relative speeds of computers without understanding the role of a clock signal in a CPU (or even what "CPU" stands for).
An effort should be made to replace these confusing terms with familiar ones that normal people can easily understand through analogy. For example, why not refer to memory "sizes" using mass units? A gram could be defined as equal to a megabyte, making people much less likely to answer the question "how fast is your computer?" with "20 gigabytes," since they will intuitively understand that "20 kilos" cannot be a measurement of speed. Likewise, processor speed could be measured in miles per hour, bandwidth in kilograms per second, &c..
A side benefit is that this would allow Europeans and Americans to use their traditional units, which are easily converted between.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
British people wouldn't know how much a Library of Congress is, so how would they ever understand our explanations of how much a gigabyte is?
In promulgating your esoteric cogitations and articulating your superficial, psychological and sentimental observation. Beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your extemporaneous decantations, unpremeditated explanations have voracious veracity without any rodomontade and thrasonical bombard. Sedulously, avoid all poly-syllabic profundity, pussilanimous vacuity, pestiferous profanity and similar transgressions.
I don't see what the big deal is. While I understand computers quite well I didn't have a clue as to what I wanted in a TV, a surround sound system, and the like. So I did "research". I browsed around the internet, asked people I knew in the know, and after a bit of reasearch found exactly the best bang for my buck. There are plenty of resources online and even at your local library to understand "things". Go use them.
If you don't know what a gigabyte is, it's hard to know how large of a hard drive you need.
And if you never listen to what you're told or bother to think about it, it's hard to know what a gigabyte is. I know there's plenty of people who haven't heard, but I just know a lot of people who like to revel in their ignorance. When someone explains something, they grin and say, "Well, that's just too complicated for me." Then they want someone else to work it out for them.
In a land where everyone's proud of not being able to set their VCR clocks (in other words, proud of being too lazy to read simple instructions, or too scatterbrained to follow simple instructions), shouldn't warning bells go off whenever we elect such self-admitted technophobes to Congress and hear them assert, "We've got to get tough on computer crime!"?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Hell, even I wouldnt have defined megahertz that way. If you try and get the general public to understand computers literally, good luck. You need to simply educate them relationally. Tell them that the higher the number of MegaHertz, the more responcive the computer will be - it will act faster. If you're feeling brave, tell the its a measure of how many calculations the computer can do in a certain time period. Even that much might confuse them.
You cant teach people literals when it comes to computers. The average person doesnt need to know, nor care to know that USB is the Universal Serial Bus, which supports up to 128 devices with a maximum cable length of 5 meters. They just need to know that USB is a different way to plug things into your computer.
.
anything? It's not like Bluetooth is explained in it.
I certainly don't trust a people who call botulism "steak and kidney pie!"
Could you dumb it down a little. I just don't understand all this technical jargon.
Please stop, you sound retarded.
Public Confused By Tech Lingo
In other news, the sky is blue, what goes up must come down, and SCO is full of it.
The coolest voice ever.
That won't necessarily help you, because companies can't agree on what a gigabyte is. If you take the word at face value, it should be one billion bytes. However, most geeks know that it's 1,073,741,824 bytes (2^30), or 1024MB. And companies use both interpretations when advertising their product. And then there are the instruction manuals which claim that 1GB = 1000MB, which just makes things worse.
The problem is that the terms are just plain wrong. Yes, I know as well as the next person that 1KB = 1024 bytes, but really "kilo-" means 1000. You can debate this all you like, and talk about the "binary prefixes" where kilo = 2^10, and mega = 2^20, but sorry, the Greeks were here long before the geeks, so they get to decide :-)
Of course, I'm not naive enough to think that these broken terms will change, however if you want to blame someone for the public's confusion about units of data capacity, go blame the lazy geek who decided "enh, 1024 is close enough to 1000, I'll just use kilo- for the prefix."
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
The tech world is not the only world where people get lost with the lingo, however...ever walked into a mechanic's place after getting your car looked at and been overwhelmed by car terms? Or how about going to the doctor's office and wondering if they're speaking English?
One important point to remember is not everyone is as clued in to the wonderful world of technology as we are...so if someone is confused by the terminology, don't be an arrogant ubergeek. Just explain it in terms they understand...remember, anaolgies are your friend!
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
You're standing with a group of other people, discussing Company X's latest product. One of the people talking throws out an acronym that you've never heard before. You have absolutely no idea what this acronym may mean, as it was mentioned while the person was discussing a framework/language/methodology/technology that you've never heard of before.
Do you:
Honestly, are any of us geeks ever willing to admit that we don't inherently recognize and grok every single term that is thrown our way? Isn't that part of being a geek?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
... but how will you know that I'm not saying something like:
No kingdom need come,
My will be done,
On Earth, and to Hell with Heaven!
Of course the public is confused by tech-specific lingo. It's for the same reason I get confused if I try to figure out where the Axle Seal is on my Miata, or what the hell SEC rule 17 CFR Part 270 means. Every major industry has its own lingo that has developed to make intra-industry communication as clear and precise as possible. They're labels, and we strive to make them as specialized as possible.
The problem comes when Tech companies (e.g. IBM) attempt to use these labels to communicate with non-industry people. That we have these labels is not a problem (it is, in fact, a good thing). That we persist in using them with 'outsiders' is.
In the end, it may be better to tell someone they can put 1000 hours of music on an iPod (which Apple has done) than "5 Gb of MP3s encoded at 128kbit." It sure is less precise -- what happens if you use 196kbit? Does it support Ogg? But hey, the vast majority of people who Apple is targeting to purchase iPods not only don't care, they wouldn't understand these differences.
I'm not arguing for a dumbing down of all tech communications -- when I buy a RAID card, I want to know what RAID levels it can support -- but some products are naturally designed for outsiders and some are naturally designed for insiders. When in doubt, include both types of lingo (how would that work? I have no clue -- "3.2Ghz CPU with an 800 MHz FSB. / This processor is wicked fast and needs a really modern motherboard -- ask your kid for help!")
I think the best attempt at making this a null issue has been the "Good, Better, Best" campaign of companies like Monster Cable (makes uber cabling for upper consumer level to oxygen free braided ultra pure copper speaker wire for audiophiles)... They rate their own products in a tiered system. Some stores (Circuit city, for example) does this between brands in store as well.
;)) uninformed consumers come to those called expert consumers in the marketing world. Their friend the mechanic or the car buff (reads all the mags, knows their shit), or us, the slashdot readers and techies for their computer purchase needs.
The public will never sit down to learn all of the jargon of the year when it comes to technology no matter it's importance to purchase decisions. Like people who don't have a workable concept of what exactally a horsepower is and how many they need (hey, one horse can carry a person right? so if my car holds 5 people and some luggage 6 HP should do it
All in all, I don't think people not knowing anything about the technical aspects of what they are purchasing keeps them from doing so. I would chalk it up to the slow economy right now. Companies need to improve the purchase process and not shy away from technologicaly advanced language.
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
There are differences in procesor speeds; there needs to be named a unit of measure to discuss it. Ditto for hard drives sizes, and most other measurables.
Similarly, technologies need to be named too. DVRs exist; how would you tell your friends you got one if it didn't have a name? Its much easier to explain a definition once than to use the expanded definition each time. ("I just got a box that records TV shows, and I just programmed my box that records TV shows to record all my favorites, and its way better than your box that records TV shows" - substitute in DVR or a brand name like TiVo, and you have a much better sentence (note: pronouns would also work, but thats not the point))
But all these words are confusing. How about just picking one word for all units of measure and even technologies. I suggest "dot" in honor of /., and it has the advantages of being short, easily abbreviated as ., and it rolls off the tongue.
For example: I just got a new dot player that stores 120 dots of music, which means I can listen to music for 20 straight dots!
The jargon problem isn't limited to the tech industry. It's a fundamental characteristic of language among populations. Insofar as the world is not one gigantic community, we speak differently and use some of the same words to mean different things. Insofar as you follow this, jargon may be argued to be essentially no more than slang... with purpose.
Wow, I didn't think we could get a less insightful article than the "Gamers aren't (always) Geeks", and then this comes along. Everyday people confused by computer terminology? Shocking!
Think of other consumer goods, however, and you'll see the same thing. Can most people differentiate between the various input/output and resolution options available on modern TV's? Do they have any idea what a VTEC engine is on their new Honda? I didn't think so...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Yeah well did you get the memo about the new TSP reports?
I went to battle MC Escher but drew a blank
Had to post a quote from a Six Sigma page:
"Adams Associates using six sigma plus specializes in synergistic combination of strategic planning, leadership and total quality management (tqm) so clients achieve more goals more often. Six sigma plus is a planned use of strategy, total quality management (tqm) and leadership development. It is the plus in six sigma plus that cause people to align for goal accomplishment. This is a major difference between six sigma plus and a statistical approach or a teaching of total quality management (tqm) tools. The plus is often the catalyst that allows all other concepts to be a success."
Taken from http://www.adamssixsigma.com/
This, a survey from a company who can't even coherently label the speed of their mainstream processors...
The slow acceptance of new technology among the average consumer might as well be related to the general slump in the global economy. People are obviously less prone to buying high tech gadgets when the amount of disposable income shrinks...
OTOH, technical specs shouldn't really matter to Joe Average anyway, even if we geeks like to believe that.
English is found to be confusing among non-english speakers.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
The quality of the BBC's "technology" reporting leaves a lot to be desired. They refer to computer viruses as bugs and only the other day ran a top-of-page headline exclusively revealing that Microsoft Word stores document history information in .DOC files.
Stick Men
If your wife thinks her car has a carburetor then:
Your wife is really old. Why are you married to an 80 year old? Is she rich? Does she have a sister?
or...
Your wife's car is really old. Buy the poor woman a new car, for Chrissakes!
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Lets face it - the general public doesn't really need to know it all. Take cars for example: we've been making them for a lot longer than computers, but do people really know what the terms mean? When I tell my mother that her van has a 3.6L V6 engine with fuel injection, does she know what that means? Absolutely not. Does she still drive her van? Yes.
:) If the average person can't handle the big terms, then the average person shouldnt be dealing with them.
Computers are the same way. Of course they are confusing to the average person. Thats why there are companies like Dell, HP-Compaq, etc that make it simple.
Say, starting tomorrow, we started buying processors not by gigahertz, but by "fast","faster","really fast","really faster"...who would really know how fast it is anyway?
I think we're doing just fine
Which is if you don't understand the lingo anything on the shelf will probably meet your needs, now pick the one you like the look of and which fits into your budget? Really for a first PC to do email, write some letters, or surfing the web anything you can find in a retail establishment will fullfill your needs. By the time you need a more powerfull PC you will probably know most of the lingo or be able to find the info if you don't.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Let's just go back to caves and sticks. Then the stupid people would just die!
Get over it. I went to college, got my degree, paid back my loans. Now I'm not going to make it easy for anyone else. So go take your megafloppy and stick it in your gigathingy and go back to the cave you came out of.
I guess they should have paid attention in school or maybe should have gone to school.
-PissedAsHe11.
People that know me, know pretty much that "he's into computers and stuff."
In fact, my current position to me is rather insulting. I have gotten rather good at some pretty cool things - genetic algorithms, neural networks, Markov martricies, Bayesian analysis, and distributed computing. The math of the El Farol problem, the heat distribution through a medium, etc. I am starting up a company that uses all of these as a means to an end of servicing investors in the financial markets.
What is insulting? Well, I do all of that on my own. My job is to do IT stuff. I'm basically a glorified plumber. I go up and twist things, or install things, or bump things. I push things, pull them, and tell people that the issue is resolved.
I mean no offense to the IT people, but to be the IT manager of a small network takes far less skill, knowledge, and education than it does to do any of the previous things I mentioned.
So anyway, people hear that I know about computers and they assume I'm an IT person and then they start asking me about computers. Probably like what happens with doctors, except that I had far less schooling and can't ask women to take their clothes off to solve problems.
So if someone comes up to me and asks me about some random computer issues and then I'm noticing they are tossing about buzzwords incorrectly, or saying them wrong, or is generally clueless - then I just try and quickly shut them up and point them in the general direction of the nearest Mac dealer.
Hell, Mac's ad campaign is currently "Too dumb to use anything else? Try a Mac!"
While this personally is offensive to me, I too like the shiny cases and pretty colors, so with that and then the idito proof approach, I think they are exactly where the clueless should be shunted at the end of the day.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Back in the 80's it was great, but now its obsolete.
The unofficial
You get the idea. Non techies should not need to know all the jargon, just a few basic concepts and names. The same goes for User Interfaces in operating systems :-)
I thought smoking fags gave you cancer? :)
People bringing their machines in to be worked on are constantly confusing their box with with whatever piece of hardware is inside that's giving them trouble. Example: A lady calls up and is having internet problems, we walk her through a few routine troubleshooting steps, and determine she needs has a blownout modem. We advise her to bring in her machine, then she asks, in an unintelligible manner, "so i just bring my modium and tv?"..at that point i usually reply, "no ma'am, bring just the big thing that the tv plugs into."...GAH!!!...I'm tired of people not taking the time to familiarize themselves with their PCs. I certainly don't expect customers to be A+ certified, most of these people show NO effort to learn the right names for what they have. I sure as hell don't refer to my car tires as "those big burnt bagels".
What's the big deal, anyway? Every field of endevor has its own terms that are used (almost) exclusively within that realm. The automotive industry has its own language. Aviation has a language. Farming has a language. Textiles has a language.
:) Ask the guy on the street what a "pitot tube" is, and why is it important (even better, ask him to spell it!).
I didn't know what calender and anvil rolls were until I worked at Kimberly-Clark. I couldn't have told you the difference between SBL and SMS materials. Didn't know what a forming wire was, or what a motor drive was used for.
Before I learned to fly I didn't know the difference between a Class-B or Class-C airspace, but I did know that "stalling" had nothing to do with the propulsion units
Working as a microwave circuit designer, I get to deal with another completely different set of words that nobody outside the field understands.
What it all comes down to is that since the Renniassance, it has become impossible for somebody to know everything that is knowable. People don't (can't!) put in the time and effort required to be well-versed in every aspect of modern existance.
Most people, when faced with a household problem or emergency, call an expert: a plumber, a roofer, an exterminator, an electrician or perhaps a carpenter. Each field of expertise has its own phraseology that compactly convey the thoughts of the speaker. Yes, it becomes cryptic to the uninitiated, but over the centuries people have decided that the expressive power of obscure words is better than the alternative: a torrent of verbal effluent that takes a day to pronounce and still doesn't quite capture what the speaker intended.
how could that be?
Customer: My computer's broken, can you do anything about it?
Me: Sure, just bring it in and we'll take care of it.
Customer: Do you want just the CPU?
Me: Hi. I just installed OpenBSD on an old box, and I'm having trouble getting it to DHCP for an IP address.
Tech Support: I'm not sure what you mean by DHCP, but we have it set up so that your computer will automatically get an IP address
Me (rolling with it): Ok, but I'm still not getting an IP address
Tech Support: What version of Windows are you running OpenBSD on
Me (rather annoyed): OpenBSD is a form of Unix
Tech Support (sounding annoyed): Fine then sir, what version of Windows are you running unix on?
Me: Can you switch me to someone else?
luckily, the next person was helpful (all we had to do was reset my modem), but it goes to show that there are people in the tech industry that don't know a lot of the jargon outside of Microsoft-speek.
Ignorance will never be banned, unfortunately.
"Only slightly more than half correctly identified the definition of megahertz - a measurement of how many times a part of the processor, called the clock, ticks every millionth of a second." Megahertz doesn't only apply to microprocessor control clocks, it merely means 1 million cycles per second. This could be used to describe atoms, radio, or anything else that cycles really quickly.
idito proof
brilliant. go me.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
The PDF of the survey can be found here.
From Page 4
"Because of objectives and
subject, paper surveys sent
by mail were used to avoid
built-in sample bias from
internet-based study"
From Page 6
Age mix
- 35% Age 55+
- 20% Age 45 to 54
- 21% Age 35 to 44
- 24% Age 34 and under
Gender blend
- 38% Male, 62% Female
It looks like the ended up with a bias in the sample anyway. 55% over 55 years old, 62% female... I think it was already understood that technology confuses them.
He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.
you: this drive is 80 gig, I recommend it, should be well enough
..but how many libraries of congress is that?
;) OK lets ask the salesmen over there
someone: whats a gig? i dunno?
you: oh, it can hold about 10 DVD movies?
someone:
you: erm, I dont (want) know..
someone: and I thought you where the expert
Oh good, more super-kewl names like "Opteron 200" and "Opteron 800" and "RADEON 9000" and
"RADEON 9100" and "RADEON 9200" and "RADEON 9300" and "RADEON 9400" and "RADEON 9500"
and "RADEON 9600" and "RADEON 9700" and "RADEON 9800" and "RADEON All-in-Wonder 9800 Pro" and...
Jeez, gimme a break already.
The number one thing that seems to confuse non-techies is memory versus hard drive space. They are both measured in megabytes/gigabytes, they are both used to store programs and information, and they are both inside the big black/beige box that they seem to think is the "CPU".
I don't know that it's truly necessary to know what every term means. Non-techies may not know the definition of megahertz, but they probably understand that more is better. I don't know how horsepower is measured on my car engine, but I know more horsepower means a more powerful car.
And who cares how many people know what bluetooth means? If it's important to you, you will know what it means and you will look for it. If it's not, you will gloss over it.
I'm just a little concerned that this type of study will lead to the further dumbing-down of marketing material for tech products. Nothing annoys me more than product literature that talks endlessly about reducing costs, enhancing performance, saving money, simplifying your life, etc., without ever telling you what the product actually is.
Sometimes i help some friends in the buy of a new computer .. and many of them (word and excel only users) don't even know the diference between memory (ram) and Hard Drive, they think it's the same thing "I want a computer with lot's of memory so i can keep all my project documents and photos stored in it" .. they say.
.. 1 CD can hold aprox (i'm not doing the math here) 420 floppies and the 40 Gb HD you just bought can hold aprox 60 of those Cds .. and a total of 25200 floppies , how about that for storing all of your word documents ;D. I do this because the majority of people are more tied to the use of floppies, even newbies, to carry their work from one place to another
For the HD size problem (after all the memory and HD explanation, teletubby based psicology) i tend to use a comparative to floppies or cds, like
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
How about superchargers, turbochargers, wankle engines, two-stroke, overhead cam, titanium valves, fuel injection, independent suspension, transaxle, ignition advance, TDC, brake calipers, blah blah blah how many car buyers understand or care about this stuff?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Yeah but I'm not going to get ripped off at a restaurant and end up paying $850 for a curry because I don't know how to cook. However, one can end up paying way too much for a computer that is complete overkill by listening to the damned salesman, which is all the uneducated public has to go on. Same applies to car mechanics.
As such, getting some minimal education about how a computer works is a good idea, just like it's a good idea to learn a bit about cars so you at least have an idea of when the mechanic is lying out his ass.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
eschew obfuscation
It has been my experience that the public is confused by words - anything more complicated than "push here" is going to be trouble.
I design fairly complicated equipement to be used by (supposedly) trained radio technicians. I recently sent out a replacement file to a specific customer to see if we had a problem he had reported fixed.
Mind you, this customer was working to integrate our equipment into an automated test station - one would expect this person to have at least a cluon or two.
In the instructions for the replacement file, I stated most clearly:
Step 1: update the unit to the latest firmware.
Step 2: after you have done the update, apply the attached replacement file.
Pretty simple, huh? Guess what: the customer did NOT do the update first, and wedged the equipment.
Now, had this been a true production update, I would have added check code to verify that the patch would not apply unless the firmware version matched, then I would have spent the hours validating that the check code actually would catch version mismatches, then released the patch. During all those hours I would NOT have been getting the other features ready.
But this was one customer, and one that should have been more technically adept than most. So I felt that spending thirty seconds explaining the process would be a better use of my time than spending the hours to make it idiot-proof - after all, I was not dealing with an idiot, was I?
The general public runs at just over the level of a caveman (no offense intended OOG if you are still listening...) - anything more complicated than "push here" will elude them (and given that I have seen footage of bank robbers foiled by a "PULL" rather than "PUSH" door, I have my doubts about that) It would seem the average person's reaction to any printed matter is "WORDS! WHY DID IT HAVE TO BE WORDS! OHH, MY HEAD'S ABOUT TO EXPLODE!"
Granted, much of the terminology used in selling computers to the lay public is too complicated for them to understand, but trust me - trying to dumb it down won't work, unless you can determine how to describe a computer in grunts and pointing.
www.eFax.com are spammers
i swear it's a myth, but i'm bitten by it all the time!
bit rot: n. [common] Also bit decay. Hypothetical disease the existence of which has been deduced from the observation that unused programs or features will often stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if `nothing has changed'. The theory explains that bits decay as if they were radioactive. As time passes, the contents of a file or the code in a program will become increasingly garbled.
I just took the test. I think some of the questions are intentionally misleading and/or phrased poorly, eg "What is a DPI?" and the answer for "What is Dot Pitch?" Oh well, it's their test; they can sabotage it however they want.
Here are the questions:
Question 1: Which of the following is a definition of Megahertz?
Choose one of the following answers:
A data transfer technology that uses fiber optic cable to carry information
A unit of measurement equal to 1 million electrical cycles per second, commonly used to compare the clock speeds of microprocessors
A computer's random access memory equal to 1 million bytes
Question 2: Which of the following is a definition of Short Messaging Service (SMS)?
Choose one of the following answers:
A messaging service that points out when an e-mail message was not delivered
The ability to send and receive text messages (words and or numbers) to and from cellular telephones
Service where the computer is installed, instead of having to bring the computer into a shop or ship the computer back to the manufacturer for repairs
Question 3: Which of the following is a definition of WAP?
Choose one of the following answers:
A global standard for developing applications over wireless communication networks
A company that provides wireless telecommunications services
Transmission of voice or other sound by means of electrical signals sent over wires or radio waves
Question 4: Which of the following is a definition of megapixel?
Choose one of the following answers:
A crime committed using a computer or data stored on a computer
A presentation graphics program that enables you to produce attractive presentations
A term used in reference to the resolution of a graphics device such as a scanner, digital camera or monitor
Question 5: What is a Digital Video Recorder or DVR?
Choose one of the following answers:
The same as a VCR/Video Cassette Recorder
A box that records and plays television programs
A box that makes DVDs
Question 6: What is an MP3?
Choose one of the following answers:
An audio compression technology that is part of the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 specifications
A kind of magnetic tape originally designed for audio format now also used in computers to back up data
A box that allows you to watch television programs without commercials
Question 7: What is a DPI?
Choose one of the following answers:
A measure of the resolution of printers, scanners and monitors
A video production made with a desktop computer and home video equipment
A file that has been corrupted by a virus, or computer failure
Question 8: What does it mean to download?
Choose one of the following answers:
To connect a computer to the Internet
To save a file on your computer from a remote computer
To send a computer file to someone else
Question 9: What is Dot Pitch?
Choose one of the following answers:
A special type of television
A method for determining how sharp a displayed image can be
A company that provides individuals and companies access to the Internet
Question 10: What is a Web browser?
Choose one of the following answers:
A person who likes to look at the Internet
A software program that allows you to view sites on the World Wide Web
A computer that stores World Wide Web files
Question 11: What is Bluetooth?
Choose one of the following answers:
A product that can save many photographs in a small space
A way to connect products to each other without using wires
A program that searches the Internet for the lowest price available
If you don't know what a gigabyte is
And as we all know - a gigabyte is how much it takes to store....... oh wait..
That's the thing - what can be done with 100 kb is a relative matter. File formats are always changing, applications bloat, video can be compressed. Answering quetions like "how much hard drive space do I need" is a question with many, many contributing factors. Perhaps with MP3s as music and mpeg and video 'standards' we are getting closer to a common language - since most everyone (in a first world nation =P ) is familiar with AV recordings.
...and let's remember that with PHP and MySQL I can write 1MB of dynamic interface code (+ graphics) that can interface 1GB of ecological/nuclear/etc data. Perhaps there is some kind of categorization of information efficiency, or usage?
-shpoffo
This one confuses the fsck out of people. People don't understand the difference between memory and hard disk space. They think that memory is what your computer uses to store stuff.
They do, however, understand what multi-tasking is. I know this is uber-general, but more memory = better multitasking.
So, in my convoluted round-about way of saying things - PCs should be sold on tangible benefit and not on numbered features.
EG:
100 GIG Storage Space (enough to store 19043829043820 documents/mp3s)
512 MB RAM (enough to run 3 applications simultaneiously)
or something.
The link to the quiz is:
t ml
http://www2.amd.com/us-en/gcab/lt/exam/1,,,00.h
TPS.
It's to the advantage of marketers that the public is so ignorant about computers. It makes it easier to sell unrealistic expectations as well as worthless products. It also helps marketers differentiate between otherwise similar products.
I kid you not, a computer store I shop at was selling battery backups for home computers that touted "Internet ready" in a bold red and gold splash on the box. Huh???
I thought it might have meant that the modem line ran through the UPS to catch any surges through the phone line, but it didn't *have* any RJ-11 jacks to accomodate this speculation. I came to the conclusion that it was completely useless marketing spiel designed to play on the "Internet" buzzword.
I strongly believe that computer awareness is the next "literacy" of this millenium - as essential as reading, writing and basic arithmetic. But the only way to accomplish that (on a nationwide level) is to *require* incorporating computer literacy into the curriculum of all schools and make sure all schools have the basic tools to teach it, ie. computers.
(steps of soapbox)
blue
I've come to the conclusion that for the general public it doesn't matter what the metrics used to indicate performance actually mean, but that there is a metric and that bigger means better.
As an example consider a car. The most common metric given for a car that is "pseudo-related" to performance is the size of the engine. Regardless of what the performance of the engine is actually like, the perception is that a larger engine will mean the car goes faster, whilst a smaller engine will result in better fuel economy. It doesn't matter whether this is actually true or not, but that that is what people think, and that is what makes the car sell.
The survey can be found here
Question 1: Which of the following is a definition of Megahertz?
a. A data transfer technology that uses fiber optic cable to carry information
b. A unit of measurement equal to 1 million electrical cycles per second, commonly used to compare the clock speeds of microprocessors
c. A computer's random access memory equal to 1 million bytes
Question 2: Which of the following is a definition of Short Messaging Service (SMS)?
a. A messaging service that points out when an e-mail message was not delivered
b. The ability to send and receive text messages (words and or numbers) to and from cellular telephones
c. Service where the computer is installed, instead of having to bring the computer into a shop or ship the computer back to the manufacturer for repairs
Question 3: Which of the following is a definition of WAP?
a. A global standard for developing applications over wireless communication networks
b. A company that provides wireless telecommunications services
c. Transmission of voice or other sound by means of electrical signals sent over wires or radio waves
Question 4: Which of the following is a definition of megapixel?
a. A crime committed using a computer or data stored on a computer
b. A presentation graphics program that enables you to produce attractive presentations
c. A term used in reference to the resolution of a graphics device such as a scanner, digital camera or monitor
Question 5: What is a Digital Video Recorder or DVR?
a. The same as a VCR/Video Cassette Recorder
b. A box that records and plays television programs
c. A box that makes DVDs
Question 6: What is an MP3?
a. An audio compression technology that is part of the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 specifications
b. A kind of magnetic tape originally designed for audio format now also used in computers to back up data
c. A box that allows you to watch television programs without commercials
Question 7: What is a DPI?
a. A measure of the resolution of printers, scanners and monitors
b. A video production made with a desktop computer and home video equipment
c. A file that has been corrupted by a virus, or computer failure
Question 8: What does it mean to download?
a. To connect a computer to the Internet
b. To save a file on your computer from a remote computer
c. To send a computer file to someone else
Question 9: What is Dot Pitch?
a. A special type of television
b. A method for determining how sharp a displayed image can be
c. A company that provides individuals and companies access to the Internet
Question 10: What is a Web browser?
a. A person who likes to look at the Internet
b. A software program that allows you to view sites on the World Wide Web
c. A computer that stores World Wide Web files
Question 11: What is Bluetooth?
a. A product that can save many photographs in a small space
b. A way to connect products to each other without using wires
c. A program that searches the Internet for the lowest price available
Question 12: How much do you agree or disagree with the following statements? (Choices are "Strongly Agree", "Neutral", and "Strongly Disagree")
a. Technology words are made up just to sound interesting
b. Consumer electronics are more complicated than they need to be
c. Most product instruction manuals are not helpful
d. I wish to have things work and not spend time setting them up
e. I will try out a new technology even before I am sure I will really need it
Question 13: Have you used any of these products in the last three months? (Choose Yes or No)
a. Television
b. Digital Camera
c. Microwave Oven
d. Cell Phone
e. Videogame System
f. Internet Service
g. Home Computer
h. Digital Video Recorder (DVR)
i. DVD Player
j. Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)
I like to think I can usually explain computers in lay terms, but I've never been able to convey easily the concept of "memory". People come to me and say "I don't have enough RAM to store my pictures" or "do I have enough memory to run xyz?" and are refering to disk space. Other times, they speak of their 20 Gigs of memory, and don't understand why "xyz runs so slow" on their 200Mhz with 32 megs of ram.
Any ideas on how to explain this one without getting funny looks =)
games like Planetside (most recent one I've purchased) saying things like 'Required Ram 256mhz' on the back.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
The bottom line should say 55% over 45 years old, not 55 years old.
He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.
XP : full form eXPee - fermented urine; sewage. .Net : Used to catch .Fish; also undefined, nebulous technology.
NT : Not Trustworthy - for MS, that is.
MicroSoft: A microscopic, kind-hearted organisation.
DRM: Digital Restrictions Managaement
TCPA: Treacherous Computing Platform Alliance
SCO : short for SCOurge; root of all evil.
XML : eXtremely Munged Language.
GNU : Great New Unix
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
The general public is clueless when it comes to automobiles, medicine, home repairs, nutrition...
Why should computers be any different?
It's almost impossible to keep up with every new technology or acronym. Especially when you're working and have your head in one or two particular technologies.
I wouldn't gotten everything on that test. DVR for example. Before reading the article I had no idea what this meant. However if someone asked me how a Tivo worked, I'd explain that it's basicly a feature rich device that stores video on a disk. As opposed to an old fashioned VCR. So am I out of touch because I don't know an acronym?
Not everyone can know everything.
Huh?
It should be no suprise then that Linux hasn't experienced more widespread adoption. It's full of it's own jargon that is *not* intuitive no matter how often linux advocates claim it is.
It's all a conspiracy by large computer manufacturers to be able to dazzle and impress you with large numbers and obscure illogical alien like acronyms in order to sell you more products that will aid you and your family throughout the technological world of today, and tomorrow!
It's backed by HP, Compaq, SCO, MS and aliens that are in league with the US Government so that they can obtain their resolve of using human beings as batteries for their new amusement park located on the inside of our moon.
It's lucky I have my tinfoil hat and my rubber boots.
The BBC generally displays a reasonable command of the English language, unlike the Americans who can't even spell English words, let alone pronounce them. You presumably speak American, which is not the same language. I suppose you'll be trying to correct the French in their pronunciation of the French language next (sorry, the Freedom language).
lorry = van, truck.
lift = elevator
How can you take a country seriously? Fanny pack? How's it hanging? Let's just not go down the road of picking specific idiomatic phrases, as there are too many examples on both sides of the pond.
That is all.
I think that the problem is an interesting reflection on the state of technology, and "technologists" themselves. For example, the test includes Megahertz, megapixel, download, web browser and Bluetooth--all good examples (IMO) of naming. "Bluetooth" may be debatable, but it's a distinct name for a distinct technology, and people who use technology should be aware of its capabilities. "Web browser" is another good name; unfortunately, Hollywood's and tech-illiterate journalists' insistence on "surfing the 'net" means that a good name is unknown by the public.
On the dark side of the naming spectrum, the tech industry has given us some gems such as SMS, DVR, MP3 and dot pitch (all from the quiz). SMS and DVR are good examples of trying to pick a generic name that didn't step on any copyright holders' toes, but didn't adequately describe the product either. But perhaps the public is too picky. They learned about VHS, so why can't they learn about DVR.
Dot pitch is a terrible misnomer but its roots are firmly entrenched in the display industry. Perhaps a better term would be "pixel density" or "image clarity," but then it's hard to associate a name like that with a value that gets better as it gets lower.
MP3 is understandable: no one is going to get a friendly, trademarkable name from a group of geeks writing cutting-edge software. But the trademark issue itself it one of the culprits. How many nice names could we have for computer components if the most descriptive words weren't already trademarked?
And finally, it's easy to point out to Houston that we have a problem. It's harder to realize what the problem's origins were and to appreciate the evolution of the computer industry in just fifty years. And it's most difficult to propose a workable solution and carry it through.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Besides, the Linux kernal guys have better things to do than run sed scripts to change all these jargony terms.
Yes but unfortunately humans are a derived class and have the same methods.
Shit! My BLT drive just want AWOL!
True Story:
I went into a radio shack, to have some amusement at the dumbassitude of their staff. I told them I needed a flux capacitor in order to repair the wavetable floating-point unit on my network card....
They spent 20 minutes with their heads in catalogs.... Not only didn't they know they names of things; they never watched Back to the Future either....
PS: That was a joke
i.e., they're not selling enough. and the media (doing its job of fronting for business) finds that important enough to write about.
The sentence Only slightly more than half correctly identified the definition of megahertz - a measurement of how many times a part of the processor, called the clock, ticks every millionth of a second. was not in the story when first posted on the BBC website.
When it was first posted the journalist had made the school boy error of stating that megahertz was a measurement of the processing power of a computer...Doh!
I always thought that this was measured in MIPS etc. and depended on many things including the word length, instruction set etc., etc.
When I started reading slashdot some years ago after 'graduating' from C|Net, I had to look quite a few things up before I understood the conversations. People kept talking about something called Mozilla which I eventually realised was a web browser ;-) (This was back in the Milestone 0.7 days.) I eventually realised that an OS and the GUI were separate things and Linux wasn't simply that desktop I saw when I booted Corel Linux one time. And at that point, I could already take a computer apart, put it together again, set up networks and such.
Now here is an exercise for you: Load up the slashdot homepage in another browser tab. Now go over the homepage word by word. Would your mother understand each of these words? Or your boss? What percentage of sentences would your mother not understand?
Sometimes I forget that it takes an immense amount of time and reading each week even for people like you and me to keep up with everything on this front. The general public ... well ... it doesn't have a chance.
If we don't tell people what all this techno-stuff is then they might think it is magic and start to hoist us geeks on thier shoulders as if we were Priests. We could get people to workship the talking magical box and we would tell them what to do. Hmmm.... this might have some potential.
If not, go to a website selling a new car. Lots of jibber jabber about power telescoping steering columns, intermitent windshield wipers, ABS, Limited Slip, 5.7 Liter V8, Sequential Fuel Injection, F55 Magnetic Selective Ride Control, Fully independent suspension with transverse springs, front P245/45ZR-17, rear P275/40ZR-18, 18 gallon tank, 6.5 quarts oil, 11.5 quarts antifreeze, 16.1:1 steering ratio, 2.66 turns lock-to-lock, 39.4 foot turning diameter curb-to-curb, 22.6 sq inch gross lining on brakes (front), engine with 5655 cc, 375 pound-feet of torque at 4400 RPM manual, 6000 RPM redline, 10.1:1 compression ratio, a firing order of 1-8-7-2-6-5-4-3, head gasket thickness of 1.33mm, Bore x Stroke = 3.9 x 3.62 in, 19mpg city.
Now, I don't have a clue what some of that stuff means. Other stuff I can understand, but I don't know why or if that particular configuration is any better or worse than another.
When I buy a car, I don't care about most of those specs. I consider overall price (inital cost, financing, maintainance, and operating costs), reliability, functionality, and reputation. I know it's highly unlikely I'll ever do more than change the oil or replace a cheap (and easy to get to) part like an air filter or the power window motor. I won't use MotorHead magazine as a reference to help me buy a car... I'll use something much closer to Consumer Reports.
All of this is A-OK. My ignorance won't prevent me from making a pretty good choice in my purchase of an automobile. Why would it stop others in their purchase of an MP3 player, flat screen monitor, or printer/scanner/fax/copier machine?
Bonus points to whomever can figure out what car I (arbitrarily) chose...
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Asking a bunch of technology-aware, most likely above average on the educational scale, daily-computer using "geeks" why no one understands our jargon, is like the guy who always yells at me for not doing my own taxes. I'm not freaking interested in my own taxes, and it's not worth my personal time, but it's worth about $75 for my accountant-friend to do 'em for me. Why doesn't everyone understand all the physics jargon?!?!? It governs our every movement....
/.
Well, some people are cut out for different things. A fellow graduate student in the English department can talk circles around me about certain authors, but we study different things and we understand each other's spoutings to a very small extent. It's not a crime to not know these things, so quit the "Ignorance won't ever be illegal" garbage. You can't know everything. Some people are cut out of the mold differently.
This conversation would be infinitly more interesting if you brought in a bunch of English scholars to debate all the techno-geek denizens of
It's only when we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything...
I do find your "shaft" metaphor a disgusting, homosexualist shaded concept, please desist from such perverted thoughts.
A. Rightmann
...how large a hard drive you need, you probably don't need one.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
you see?
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
people are just as confused with -any- profession specific jargon
legal jargon
auto jargon
tech jargon
aerospace jargon
military jargon
photography jargon
math jargon
c'mon people - if you aren't in a particular field, the lingo is alien to you until you've had exposure to it. and if you never hear it used in -context- of course you're going to be lost.
the consumer only ever gets the high level marketing bulletpoint, and we all know how useful that is. so who's surprised by this?
what we have in the tech circle though, is marketing educating the public in a vacuum, as geeks are more reclusive than, say, auto mechanics. so the -only- think people know, is what the marketroids tell them. and as marketroids don't know anything either - it's pure fabrication.
education is difficult and expensive compared to marketing. obviously they're not going to bother with that.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Even more of a reason that the Wintel world is not in the consumer's best interest.
If they don't RTFM, how can they know what RTFM stands for?!
I understand that tech jargon confuses people, but is there really anything that we can do about it? People in the field need names for things that are easy to use and distinguish. For instance, we could call a motherboard "Big peice of silicon with that everything attaches to" but "motherboard" is much easier to spit out. Besides, if a person really cared to get "in the know" then all it takes is about 5 minutes on google or webopedia.
From my POV, I am running on 360GB of attached and network storage, and I couldn't work without it. Mainly for videos, but even then, 30 minutes takes up approximately 233MB, and in OGM/Vorbis goodness at that.
/me returns to scripting
The main problem from techno-illeracy is those who walk into BestBuy asking for a computer to so X an Y and Z, and walk out with a Vaio or something, without ever realizing that the actual software is what does that. Hence why tech support is saturated with how-do-I's.
On the other hand, I still admit I have to call Tech Support, but in cases where the MFG screwed something up and it takes a 4-entry registry fix to correct... or I figure I paid for the warranty, might as well use it : ) [Me to CSR: "What's the 'any' key?"]
I see a large market for PC Topic Assistance.. walking techno-illiterates though tasks over Remote Assistance for $2.00 a session. [Note the lack of any mention of *nix users, as they probably wouldn't need it].
Hell, I get confused sometimes. For instance, I'm still not sure what a CowboyNeal is.
You are truly ignorant if that is your conception of all religions. (mind you, he's not making a good case for the Catholic Church by suggesting that people should be kept in the dark as in the middle ages...)
Does that have to do with MONITORS? Oh my god. Back in the day (before the "Dot bust"), the "Dot pitch" was something done in an elevator to separate me from my money... or over the phone from a broker...
Gotta love tech words...
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
http://homepage.mac.com/deadtroll2/deadtroll.com/s tream1.html
668: Neighbour of the Beast
"I'm just a caveman. Your world frightens and confuses me" - unfrozen caveman lawyer
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
Oh well, I was looking at the PDF survey myself... and I liked to consider myself as "computer litterate" and all that... but... ahem... ... need I go on?... Hmm, needless to say, I'm still confused that DPI stands for, LOL. You do know what "LOL" means, no? :)
What in the blazes is "DPI"?
That was my reaction on pages 4 and 5 of the "survey". Needless to say, I "googled" in an instant... here's what my first searches returned *sigh*...
1. Disabled Peoples International
2. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
...
5. DPI - Digital Printing & Imaging Association6.
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
>> A better idea would be to educate those who need to understand the vocabulary wouldn't it?
With respect, this is more than just a very bad idea. This is why real people think techs and geeks are arrogant dweebs who live on another planet.
The vocabulary is important to people inside the industry because it (usually) allows them to communicate quickly and precisely about matters that are important to them. These matters are not important to the rest of the world.
The vocabulary is not important to the people who consume what techs and geeks build. They have their own vocabulary. Since almost everyone in the world is neither a tech nor a geek, it might be wise for techs and geeks to start speaking something other than gibberish to the people who ensure their incomes.
For example, I'm sure that an entirely different vocabulary has grown up around automotive engineering during the last century. Do people who buy and drive cars need to learn that vocabulary in order to use an automobile? No. They know what is important to them, and if an auto maker fails to deliver that, regardless of what words are used to name or describe it, they'll sell few cars.
Ditto for tech stuff. People need to know "How many movies will fit on this drive?", not listen impatiently as someone explains what gigabyte means. Or, "If plug this wireless thing into my PC in the den, can I carry my laptop into the backyard and get on the Internet?", rather than listening to someone drone one about protocols. (The almost certain result of that one-sided converstation will be the real person's conclusion that the tech is unwilling to speak in understandable terms. Not unable, but unwilling.)
A much more serious example of a failure to communicate on the part of a specialized minority can be the medical profession. Doctors and caregivers put their patients' lives and health at risk if they don't communicate in a way that the patient understands.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
With stunts like the USB 2.0 (High speed or full speed?), it's no wonder the general public is confused. I've been working with computers for over 15 years, and crap like that still confuses me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Like who really cares? It's not like complaining on here is gonna change it. Shut up and get back to work people!
The same arguments were made against educating the peasant class. "Serfs don't need to read to bring in the crops."
Technology evolves, society evolves.
Conversely, the "Lightswitch Theory" of general knowledge is best illustrated by C.M. Kornbluth's _The Marching Morons_.
I'm just glad the industry settled on the term PC instead of "IBM Compatible" or "MS-DOS based computer". It's funny how long the IBM Compatible term lasted despite its inaccuracy.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
"Voracious veracity?"
"Pestiferous profanity?"
My aural sense has never been assailed with such hyperbole!
some of us know how to conjugate english verbs, too. it's "led" if i'm not mistaken
i sell illegal drugs
Here is a quiz! How many of these nautical terms can you recognize:
- Stanchion (n.)
- Halyard (n.)
- Pintle (n.)
- Gudgeon (n.)
- Traveller (n.)
- Shroud (n.)
- Transom (n.)
- Gybe (v.)
- Batten (n.)
- Rode (n.)
- Companionway (n.)
- Lazarette (n.)
The list goes on and on! If you want to feel overwhelmed, try to go on a boat with a bunch of experienced sailors. They will say something like "put a bowline on the bow line" and you end up with a dumb look on your face.I imagine that's how many people feel when some of us start spouting technobabble. You say "gigabyte", and some people think "what's a gigawiggle?"
Perhaps there is a business opportunity for someone to publish a decent pocketbook dictionary of tech terms and sell it to people entering computer stores. Next time you need to know what the sales drone means by "AGP", you at least have the book! At the very least, it might create some computer-store comedy.
Insert witty, contrived comment here.
12:00
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
I like how Apple does their iPod advertising. They say how many *songs* you can have on it. That makes it easy for people to understand what the iPod can hold. (Yeah, I know how you sample your music will change that number, but that's irrelevant to my point.) Instead of focusing on the nuts and bolts of the tech, Apple focuses on the end result.
For example, if people want to push Linux onto the consumer desktop then this type of word of mouth advertising will be crucial. Consumers done care which technology is *best* technically (subjective many times), but how it is better for them from a practical standpoint. 'Generally virus proof/free (as in cost)/can install on all of your computers (no activation)/etc.' versus 'can scale up to 8-processors via SMP' or some such.
"All the darkness in the world can not quench the light of one small candle."
Quick related story:
Back when I had dialup, I switched to a cheaper provider. I was having problems, though - for the life of me I couldn't connect to my non-isp SMTP server.
So I call them up. I get a pseudo-techie (the kind with lists of ANDIFs and no practical computer knowledge. He starts in on asking me What operating system I'm running and all that. Figuring that saying OS X would be a problem I waid, "Look, that really doesn't matter. All I need to know is if you guys block off port 25." He insisted that he needed to know what operating system I was running to answer that question. Silly techie person. :)
Triv
Try explaining to someone that running out of storage doesn't mean they need more memory or that moving from dialup to DSL isn't going to make their programs run faster. I still know people who think the case is the hard drive or the "big thingy" is the modem and the monitor is the "computer." >
Considering both the survey group and the results, I think people did quite well here. 75% of the people surveyed got 8 +/- 2 terms correct out of 11, btw, whereas random guessing would yield an average score of less than 4. Only 14% of the people in the survey actually got a 4 or below.
/.'ers would. Although you have to "choose the best answer"; some of the choices are a bit misleading or slightly incomplete in their definitions. However, most of them are completely obvious if you have any idea of what the term actually means.
I know because I took the survey yesterday to check it out. Yep. got all 11 right, as I bet most
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Everyone needs to know a minimal set of vocabulary to purchase and oeprate anything. Sure a person does not need to know what horsepower is to drive a car. But do they need to know whata Gigabyte is to operate a computer? The answer is no. Sure they should know what it is if they are BUYING a computer..just as a consumer should know what horsepower is when buying an automobile. The problem isn't that the vocabulary is too difficult, it's that people are too lazy to learn it.
Well, that's just excellent news, nothing "gloomy" about this. The results of this survey mean that manufacturers can easily increase (somewhat) their sales by taking out complicated words out of their ads and slightly changing their marketing approach.
But is it actually necessary that people understand tech terms? Many secretaries called the file-manager "blue screen" or "blue panel" (because Norton Commander and its many descendants, like Volkov, FAR, Midnight Commander, Windows Commander, etc. are blue by default). That didn't prevent them from using them, although cause some C:\-deleting accidents (what do you mean there wasn't a second copy on another side of the screen?).
Some people understand the jargon, some don't. So what?
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
This shouldn't be surprising. All the tech words business people know is what they hear on CNBC.
So when you're at a conference, with a lot of business people, start regaling them about how you were optimizing your system by defragging your kernel! Then just wait for them to nod in agreement.
Wow do I ever sound smart!
My own particular disfavorites are "big-endian" and "little-endian", mainly because I can never remember which is which. Now, you can't really talk about byte and bit orders without using jargon, but at least you can use descriptive jargon. The really sad thing is that most people who use these terms seem to be unaware that they started out as a joke!
For Bonjela, I think, although as always, I had the TV muted to cut out the worst of the psychotronic radiation. Anyway, the theme of the ad appeared to be that Bonjela can be used to cure mouth ulcers, and that it does so by by killing the tiny spikey demon person that lives inside them and causes you pain.
So we've known about bacteria since the seventeenth century, but we still believe - in a very real and fiduciarily binding sense - that Joe Lowest Common Denominator is more comfortable believing that mouth pain is caused by little demons. Specifically little spiney ones who dropped out of spiny demon mime school.
And you wonder why AMD gave up on trying to explain why MHz don't matter? I'm surprised they don't market their chips based on multiples of Imp Power.
Buy The New Efreet Chip! Now With the Power of Ten Genies, All Doing Your Bidding!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
"Apart from the fact that you're running Windows, your computer keeps crashing because you don't have enough memory."
"But I deleted a bunch of programs today, and that didn't help."
"No, that's disk space; you'll never in your life use up the 120 gig the salesman told you that you needed. I'm talking about memory... how much room the computer has to do its thinking."
"Huh?"
I was in Houston several weeks ago visiting my mother, and her computer was sluggish due to the fact that she got it secondhand from a niece who had a bunch of [Windows] programs set to start up automatically and download the latest screen saver images from the web. Mom, not being connected, only saw the computer spend all its resources attempting a download it couldn't get to. So they brought in a homeless friend - I'm not kidding - who authoritatively decreed that the problem was there were too many "cookies", and deleting the cookies would fix the problem. She then proceeded to delete half the files out of C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM, apparently at random. I told my mother not to let this woman near her computer again, and I'm sure they think it's just because of my big ego that I don't like someone else doing my job.
What language is this? I can't find it on Babelfish...
And so the BBC defines...
MP3: a digital audio file
"digital"? "Audio file"? Is that like an audiophile?
Bluetooth: a short-range technology which uses radio waves instead of wires
How short? What are "radio waves"? I suspect most people have no idea how a radio works, yet they still use them.
And so the crux...
It showed that many people are delaying buying products such as digital cameras because it is all seen as too complex and difficult to understand.
Instead nearly two-third said they "wish to have things work and not spend time setting up."
4 letters. RTFM. No, really. This is the kind of lazy, counter-productive public attitude that we're now supposed to expect? That people hand over their cash and get the latest whatever instantly, out of the box. Hell, they won't even want to have to plug them in soon.
Seriously. There's a difference between innaccessible products, and not using something because it doesn't respond instantaneously to thought patterns. Just as I read man pages because I *want* to know how to use *nix, so you shouldn't *expect* to just know how to use something you've never used before, and that's why you read the manual.
Perhaps the problem is that there are so many new terminologies emerging every day. Hell, that confuses me sometimes. So, do people not learn how to drive, just because there are all these controls new to them? "Clutch?" "Steering wheel? Is that like the spare wheel?" No. You use it, you get used to it. And most importantly, you spend time learning what's called what.
The problem is that everybody wants the technology to progress, but not the understanding that goes with it, nor the way in which they use it. It's going to be a hell of a lot more complex if we have to resort to calling different things by the same name. Imagine the confusion caused by the simple statement, "It's a song player." What saddens me is the kind of attitude that says you've learnt all you're ever going to know by the time you reach some semblance of adulthood. It's progress. It's always happened. It always will. Stop whinging.
Better than the jargon file for techno words (as opposed to techno-cultural words) is whatis.
Just missed getting a job w/ those folks, darn the luck.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Move along, nothing to see here.
I bet a similar survey asking people what cylinder, piston, carborator, camshaft, calliper, etc. would yield the same results. But TONS of people buy cars. They learn the terms they need to understand.
Some things are simple:
Cylinders ~= power (acceleration, towing)
Megahertz ~= power (operations per second)
Others are not:
How many MP3 things fit in here?
- That depends on the number of megabytes...
How many camping supplies can I fit in here?
- How big are your camping supplies?
Since when is "Bluetooth" jargon? That's a registered trademark. Is "Dell" jargon? How 'bout "Slashdot"?
Seriously. Product complexity doesn't prevent people from buying cars, why should it be a problem for people buying computers? 200 HP, 250 lb/ft of torque, cross-section body frame, aluminum engine block, etc.
Of all people buying cars today, how many do you think understand what's in those technical sheets? I mean, come on.
The thing with cars is the feedback. Visual styling shows what the car is all about (sports coupe, SUV, minivan, interior trim) and a quick test drive shows you how it feels.
Computers give some feedback, but not as much as a car. As for visual, there are too many variations on the dull mini-tower case, which may help in the general confusion. Different models from the same manufacturers that look the same give no visual clues as to which one is better at doing what.
I always wondered why gaming machines didn't have those big hood air intakes like muscle cars do. Alienware attempted a step in the right direction, but it failed because the result is just too weird. Then again, there are people buying Honda Elements...
As far as I can tell, Apple does fine in their line ups. Every Apple user knows which computer is good for what tasks and which ones are faster or more complete. And they look different from most other computers in the market.
Or maybe people just need cars a lot more than they need computers.
Bottom line: We're ALL idiots and if we wish to communicate with the idiot next to us, we must shift gears and use that idiot's idiom.
Is it fascism yet?
I'm definitely not a techie, and even I understand (most) of the definitions given at whatis.com. More helpful may be the "advanced" search, where you can turn off the hits for webpages and news articles (so you only get the encyclopedia-ish hits).
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein
Have you thought about entering the competition to find the sexiest geek alive?
Have you ever seen/heard anything funnier than this on the BBC news?
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
I'm confused by 10 dollar words.
flummox
tr.v. Informal flummoxed, flummoxing, flummoxes
-To confuse; perplex.
A writer of lyrical rhythms
Encountered a creative schism
When those who spoke terse
Demanded his verse
Lose its sesquipedalianisms.
Substituting qualitative comparison for a quantitative one doesn't work, because it ends up stretched to the extremes and degenerate into zero-information marketing speak. Even cameras with the same number of megapixels give substantially different image quality. The reasons are different color matrices, image compression, optics, readout, sharpening, etc.
About your picture size: you either define "acceptable quality" in terms of DPI, or don't get any meaningless comparison at all.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
those are all things that just about anyone should know about computers :)
How about they ask questions like what the Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor does.
Only two things are infinite, the universe, and human stupidity,
and I'm not sure about the former.
... we should just go back to using simple and descriptive units like "this is equal to so-and-so many Libraries of Congress" and "so-and-so many of these suckers when put all on top of each other, go right up to the surface of the moon".
So you're smarter than a teenage retail clerk and appearantly don't have anything better to do than remind them of that fact. Wow. Just wow. Did it ever occur to you than people like you might be part of the problem?
In all seriousness, it's only the really stupid people who would have patience for that kind of job, dealing with that kind of bullshit.
The truth is probably that the blame for this is squarely on the head of Microsoft for trying to make the PC ubiquitous, like a toaster, when it's really an extremely complicated technology which the common man should not even try to understand, let alone use to it's full potential.
By your logic, most people should ride on buses or taxis, rather than try to operate their own cars, which are themselves extremely complicated pieces of machinery that most people can't undestand.
Otherwise, the roads would be full of idiots who can't drive. Wait a minute...
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
People are just plain lazy. Thank you public education and TV. The adverage person doesn't need a technical understanding of horsepower to know that the higher the horsepower rating the faster the car goes. Most people don't know the math and physics envolved and most don't need to. The same thing applies to tech terms. I find many people that confuse megabyte and megahertz. Most people can tell you the basic difference between a transmition and a engine yet most people can't tell the difference between memory and hard drive space. This ISN'T rocket science it just NEW.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
There was a slightly more questioning article on the Register about this a while back. Basically, the phrasing of the questions in the survey was a little suspect.
As this was commisioned by AMD, the fact that it finds that people don't know what a megahertz is is convenient, as it provides more 'evidence' for their use of processor ratings rather than clock speed.
(This post was typed on an Athlon-1800XP, before the AMD fan boys attack me)
The sky is blue, the sun lights the earth. More news at 11:00!
Reminds me of the old trick used to test the type of salesdroid who's working with you -- ask them if the thing they're trying to sell you has "LRF support".
OUch. New word
And this one's only available to paying members of Dictionary.com...
Have to wait till I'm home and can grab my Oxford.
Yeah, but my mother was pure virtual.
Maybe there should be a show on a major station that is like "Mail Call" but for geek questions. I know there are shows on TechTV like this, but I think if TLC or Discovery channel had one, it would reach more of the average Joe.
Here a Sig There a Sig Everywhere a Sig Sig...
I know I'm not the only person that fields calls from desperate relatives and family friends looking to recover their lost Word document. There is absolutely a gap in knowledge that is only widened with the introduction of more lingo.
#1 on my list of annoyances is how people CONSTANTLY mix up "memory" with "hard disk space".
"I can't save this file, I think I need more memory."
"Won't a bigger hard disk speed everything up?"
I don't know about "up in arms," perhaps I missed that one. Although one could certainly make a case that computer education in schools, say, is pretty important. Rare is the decent job today that doesn't require computer literacy as a minimum.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Games!
Sure, mum and dad (or mom and pop) often aren't interested in games, but the kids soon will be. My brother was once happy with his Playstation or whatever it is he had, but once the family PC was upgraded he effectively binned it in favour of PC games, which generally provide a richer gaming experience. (I guess)
My family has a PC similar to that you described the salesman selling. I'm still using a PII-350. :)
If consumers have problems with megabytes, why not market an MP3 player as holding for instance an hour of music. Somewhere on the back or side of the packaging, it could have more detailed specs that list it as having 64mb.
Then their software can default to a bitrate of 128 (but could be changed by more technically inclined users) and convert any MP3s you drag into it to that bitrate.
Maybe there's already players that work like that. Mine doesn't but it's also kind of old and cheap.
Only slightly more than half correctly identified the definition of megahertz - a measurement of frequency which can be used to measure how many times a part of the processor, called the clock, ticks every millionth of a second. - From article
If you define it like this of course people won't understand it! If one of the options was "the measure of the speed of a computers CPU" I bet results would have been very different. If you tell someone that a computer is 800Mhz they might understand but might not be able to define the term, just as if you tell someone your car is 500HP they might understand that is powerful, but would not be able to define horsepower as a physics professor would.
Visualize the world of wine
People in tech marketing keep telling us that consumers "just want things to work" and don't want to have to be bothered by jargon or technical details when making buying decisions. I think this is a bad idea.
The problem is that once they figure that consumers will buy without specs, manufacturers stop putting them on the box, or making them available on the Web site, and so on. That way they can cut corners or do proprietary things without anyone ever knowing. It soon becomes damn hard to see what standards a particular device supports, and thus what decision to make when buying it.
Think about car buying:
Car salesman: This is our latest! Isn't she beautiful?
Customer: How many horsepower? Displacement? Is it turbocharged?
Car salesman: She's got the most power in her class. Drives really nice.
Customer: Do you have any specs?
Car salesman: It doesn't matter, all power is not created equal. Just test-drive her and you'll realize, she's got the most power in her class.
Customer: Anti-lock breaks? Air bags?
Car salesman: I think so, but it doesn't matter, she handles so well you'll never need them anyway.
Customer: But are they there?
Car salesman: If the Toyota model has them, I'm sure she does as well. We're generally a step ahead of Toyota in these things.
Customer: How many cylinders? Four? Five? Six? Eight?
Car salesman: Um, the engine is perfectly sized for the car's body. And as I said, most power in her class. Don't worry about it, just give it a test drive.
Customer: How about the interior? From here it's hard to tell. Can I feel it?
Car salesman: (opening door) Actually, I think it's leather.
Customer: No, it's obviously not leather, I can tell just by feeling it. What kind of vinyl is it, though?
Car salesman: Well, whatever it is, I'm sure it's the best. She's a beautiful car and anything less just wouldn't suit her. Ready to take a test drive?
I admit that there are one or two car buyers these days who are satisfied with such a conversation, but (at least where I'm from) nearly everyone goes to independent sources of information before buying a car -- auto guides, the World Wide Web, etc. -- to get answers to these questions.
It's all part of being an informed consumer in a world in which business would prefer to screw you hard for all you're worth, given a chance. Naturally most consumers these days aren't comfortable with tech jargon, but in another generation, everyone will be fine with it; it will be a part of life. TV is just getting to that point... the older generation still has no idea about such things, but current adults can hook up coax cable, auto-scan for channels, run picture-in-picture, know what a "projection" TV is versus a tube, know that they want stero rather than mono, and so on.
I would prefer to see laws that require detailed, scientific specs to be printed on boxes and to be available from salesmen and manufacturers upon request. If some people want to ignore them, fine, let them, but at least then there is some measure of protection for people who are willing to try to get a reasonable deal in this world of ours. Why instead are we hell-bent on hiding all relevant information from the consumer, so that companies can sell you a "milk farm" for a few million, then deliver a small aging female goat to your doorstep?
I mean, half of the computer boxes and shop salesmen out there are already useless, providing misinformation to uneducated computer users and no viable information at all information to ededucated ones. Making this problem worse or hiding it altogether beneath a glowing sheen of ignorance may make a few of the more lazy consumers happier, but is that ethically okay if they're getting screwed the entire time by inferior products?
I'm sure some Slashdot braniac will say hey, if the consumer is happy being taken, then let them be taken! Fine. Is it okay to lynch someone and steal their wallet, if I can get them to be in favor of it? I'm sure a few shots of Brandy here and there and I can make quite a few bob...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
When my old manager used to talk about "leveraging the synergies inherit in a business relationship", all i ever heard was "blah blah blah more work for you blah blah blah."
So, you DID understand properly!
The main difference between computer tech talk and other tech talk is that computers became part of the common daily life of people before they became truly commoditized (verbing nouns is always fun). When cars first came out, only hobbyists/rich had them and knowing tech set them apart as a club. Once they became cheap enough to become somewhat common (I'm thinking 50's), only the hobbyists really knew what the details meant, most people knew they sounded good. Nowadays even terms like 'overhead cam' are fading, as the public knows that all things considered, a car is a car. What are obvious it's factors: seating, color, looks, convenience. About the only tech most people would still would care about is mileage.
Relative to that, personal-use computers are a young technology. But their usefulness and relative cheapness have spread them through the masses unlike virtually anything before them.* Thus, they are still growing and changing, and the details matter, but they are being used more and more by people who only care about the overall package. A problem that arises is that manufacturers can't easily advertise their usability features since they come from software, so they advertise the internal details. Not to start a war, but the differences between Apple and other ads reflect this. Apple has moved to trying to advertise what the computer will do for you. Other manufacturers have featured their tech lists. They are starting to switch over, like in the Dell commercials with interns, but instead of saying 'Let's you record CDs!' they still say 'Has 52X CD burner!'. Since the only thing that seperates most computers is the internal technology they won't lose it all, but hopefully they will start leaving out more and more.
I don't think it's a bad thing per se. Yes, repeatedly telling my mother 'You don't have 40 GB of RAM!' gets tiring, but I try to keep in mind that what really matters is what she gets out of it, not what she thinks she knows about how it works.
* One counter example of quick pervasiveness of new technology might be the telephone, or later devices based on it, but these never had a real tech-talk associated with them. Sure, marketers tried to introduce one with cordless phones (900Mhz! 2.4 Ghz! Digital, not cellular!), but most people just want a phone with decent features and decent pricing that works, regardless of how. This is probably true of computers as well; there are just few places that would admit 'Well, yes you can check your email and the web with that model' without adding 'but this one is 1.643 times faster with two times the memory for only $350 more!'
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
Surely you mean, why the fuck would you assume that DHCP would even bother support OpenBSD on your cable company... ? :-)
No, that didn't make any sense either...
If a cable company uses DHCP, a protocol that doesn't care what operating system the client or server is actually running, then why should they "support" any operating system more than any other with respect to it?
But when it describes the process used to determine that, it says
The article implies that only 3% of the people surveyed understand MP3 or Bluetooth. What really happened is that only 3% got a perfect score. It never says what percentage got the MP3 question right. Depending on the complexity of the question, I'd expect a majority of people to have at least some idea of what an MP3 is. I hypothesize that most people would be able to tell you that an MP3 is a popular type of music file and possibly even that it is the most popular type of file on programs like Napster and KaZaA.
On the other hand, if the people surveyed were required to know that MP3 is a "codec" that stands for "MPEG Level-3", and it works by compressing the ranges of frequencies that are difficult for the human ear to hear...
Well, it's not exactly news that most people don't know that.
I wish that my inferiority complex were as good as yours.
-RenderHead
Remember to tell the nontechie to reverse the polarity, it always works in Star Trek...
"Oh, I see, your P4 chipset's not going to work with this PC133. We're going to have to get you some DDR, which will have the benefit of detecting tachyons and reversing the starboard shield antimatter polarity nutation."
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
He was asking me about various technologies, and it went like:
Finally, he threw one at me that I didn't even recognize. I asked him what it was, and he said"Dunno. I made it up. I just wanted to make sure you weren't snowing us."
At that point, I knew I was doing pretty well.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Whoever I ask about the definition of a bit (as in 1/8th of a byte) gets confused and starts mumbling... Here, can you follow up with a good definition? Don't use a book...
I wonder, if there will be follow-ups and how will they be rated :-)
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Did anyone notice this little line?
"More than 1,500 people in the US, UK, China and Japan took part in the survey"
With a population of well over 6 Billion, I wouldn't call a survey of less than 400 people per country in 4 countries "people". How was it distributed across the countries (i.e. were 6-700 in China)? Where were the surveys taken? With a selection of only 0.000025% of the worldwide population, I wouldn't even call 100% of the people being mystified odd.
I'll grant you that mayhaps they were conducting these surveys at your BestBuys, computer shows, and the like, but with so little background data, and so small a survey, I wouldn't put too much stock in their findings.
--- What
Instead nearly two-third said they "wish to have things work and not spend time setting up."
So people are saying they want Apple products?
Since I mostly burn 350MB (half-CD) TV eps, I'm familiar with 1GB being very close to 1.5 (700MB) CDs. (It's 26MB too small.)
Just being nitpicky.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The only difference is that Ballmer has a little more hair than him, and Gates is slightly more evil than him.
Oh, and the other difference is that people who inhabited a white building with he word "Justice" emblazoned on it somewhere could actually STOP Lex Luthor's evil schemes.
"Ultimately, it's about power. Microsoft's only crime was that it brought computing to the "common man", bypassing the high priests of tech. Those people hate MS for undermining them. They'd like nothing more than for the "common man" to worship them. Instead, the average employee just wonders where the geek who's supposed to be replacing the printer cartridge is."
For all the lambasting those "high priests" get. They do deserve "early adopter" recognization. Also as others have pointed out. If they was to hate anyone? It's not MS but IBM, for making the computer ubicquitous. I know everyone wants to make this whole issue about MS, but history shows that there were big influences from the other parts of the computing industry (you know the parts that MS lovers conviently forget). Also if we're going to lambast "high priest", when was the last time you chewed out your doctor, auto mechanic, airline pilot? We all know they want the "common man" to worship them. Who are they suppose to be bad to, because people self-medicate, fix their own cars, and fly their own planes? Gosh darn it! They want to be elite too.
BTW To everyone. You too can be a high priest, only six easy lessons from SQL*kitten's school of appliances, and hands on dentistry. Hey! We all know the only thing seperating "common" from "high" is ego. That and a couple thousand dollars.
BTWII If your at work? Go downstairs and shake hands with the "high priests" in your MIS department. And don't forget to give an expensive geeky present on "all geeks day" (which is just after secretaries day, but before garbage man's day), in which you recognize the underappreciated, shat upon, abused flagarently, but essential people who help make your entire technical day (what's that you say? You don't have anything technological?) possible.
I explain computers to non-techies with a kitchen analogy.
Your counter space and your cupboard space are both measured in square feet, but you can't use them the same way. To do actual work, and have more things in progress and going at the same time, you need counter space. To tuck away all the tools you need, you need cupboard space. If you don't have enough counter space, you have to wash up your bowls and things and put them away, so that you can bring out other ones. Obviously, swapping to storage space slows the whole process, so it's good to have counter space. Cupboard space is good too, but for different reasons.
As recipes get more elaborate, you need more counter space to work in, and more cupboard space for all the extra cooking implements required.
And faster processors? That's like hiring more chefs, that magically don't bump into each other while they run around cooking.
Analogies help non-techies immensely, if you can find the right ones. Bypassing the jargon helps in the short-term, but in the long run people need an understanding of the basics, at least. For example, Apple markets the iPod as "1000 songs in your pocket" or whatever. You don't need to know how much a MB is, or how many MB a song is, or what format it's saved as. For non-techies, the iPod's drive is "1000 song size", and that's enough. But if the format changes, it's more useful to know how to do the math so you know how many songs will fit on it now. And if they happen to remember that GB == gigabyte == ~1000 MB == billion bytes, that's a bonus.
Constitutionally Correct
I think hard disk manufacturing companies also seem to have trouble with hard disk size lingo...they don't seem to understand that a gigabyte should be 1024 megabytes (1048576 Kbytes, 1073741824 bytes), so now we get cheated out of literally GIGABYTES worth of data storage with the new, bigger hard drives coming out. For example, my 60 GB hard disk is 3 GB short of its advertised size. As far as having a real problem with understanding computing lingo goes , I think hard disk manufacturing companies take first prize.
you see new Celerons that were based on 0.13 micron Tualatin core had 256 KB of L2 cache, while older Celerons only had 128 KB. 1.3 P4 is an old Willamette core and only has 256 KB of cache instead of 512 K on newer Northwoods. Celeron 1.3 will greatly outperform Pentium 4 1.3 (if there ever was such a thing, the first might have been 1.4) in everything except some multimedia stuff or something that P4 is optimized for.
There. I feel better now.
mod parent up
If they had "a music file on your computer" as a definition for "MP3" and "how fast your computer is" as a definition for "megaherz" then I bet many more people would have understood. Most people learn things in real language and not tech-ease. You might know what HTML stood for but does it matter? do you know what it does?
I'm not trying to make people mad; I'm trying to make people think!
I wonder how frequently we forget we know this stuff. What are we in? One percentage of the population? I called in to Matt Drudge's radio show one night and discussed the RIAA, and the MPAA and how they were getting in with state governments and their DMCA's and MP3's and TiVo's... After I got off the phone, I listened to it again and wondered what percentage of his audience must have understood... My mother and sister just sort of looked at me funny. "Huh?"
I had a sucky sig.
I still haven't exactly figured out what .net really is.
My rights don't need management.
Let's get rid of all confusing field specific terms.
Brake rotor, piston, spark plug, cadalydic converter, distributor cap...
Defendant, prosecution, jury...
Computer terms are used to describe the items. I'm sure this same problem existed when people first started to learn how cars work. They're not confusing terms, they're new terms. You don't learn them, you'll be confused.
...and that's all there is to it.
"The problem is that not only do people not feel the need to educate themselves, they wear their computer ignorance with pride. Even when you try to show them how to fix a common problem they'll give you the "don't tell me how, just fix it" all while constantly mentioning how they "know nothing about these computers".
The sheer number of people in the corporate world who seem to refuse to learn about their tools is astounding."
Not really. I wonder if all this "pride" in ignorance is because of: One a backlash to the failures of the scientific/technical community? (notice the potrayal of scientists as "mad").
Two as a reaction to the flood of information that our society has generated as a part of it's "revolutions"? People want to feel they're in control of themselves and their immediate environment.
During the holiday weekend, I got to sit and talk with my Grandmother. She's been using PCs since 1992, so I think of her as an expert. But she still believes she's a novice. Half of the problem is how one sees one's self.
... ringer. :-) He hung up. I had no way of reporting his rude unprofessional behavior. Let this be a warning. Get their name first. Even if they give a fake name, they always seem to give the same fake name.
Even though she's been using PCs for a long time, she's still unaware of the jargon, but there are a couple things that entriege her. For instance, the concept of Machine Language. To a geek, this is a basic concept. To her, the idea that machines now have their very own language would be science fiction in her day, and it is fascinating.
So, I have a problem when I try to explain what I do for a living. I'm a Java programmer. "Ok, what's that?" I usually leave out the word "java" for obvious reasons - it's confusing. Ok, so I'm a programmer. Again, "Ok, what's that?" "Well, I write instructions for a computer to follow." Not, "Well, I code up objects and methods that the compiler translates into bytecode that the virtual machines uses to translate into native machine language."
Still, after that it's not like I can't talk to her about what I do. But usually I have to resort to analogy, which I hate because it's always a sloppy analogy.
Lately, I've been working on a web version of our company's customer relationship management suite. I always start from the beginning with explaining what a customer relationship manager (CRM) is. "It's a list of customers and information about them." Instead of, "It's a database of profiles with relational ties to multiple tables."
Sometimes she'd ask, "How does it work?" I'm not sure what she's really asking, so I say, half jokingly, "Very well, thank you." Usually that kind of question really means, "Can you show me a demo?"
I almost feel like a JVM myself sometimes, but at least I can talk to her.
Kind of on the reverse end for me, once I had a call in for Sprint's technical department because my Web enabled phone stopped accessing web sites. The front line support couldn't figure it out, so they told me to wait for the technical people to call me back.
They called back early Saturday to my land line. I was half asleep, and they guy sounded like he was on speed. He told me to try a bunch of things, all the time talking about the "deck" and "cards" of the wireless web. I knew all about them, but why was he throwing out the jargon? "The card you see is on the ROM, so we need to get you back to your home deck." Then he'd say, "Did you change the home deck to something else?" He had me check this and that, all to no avail. Still no web access.
Finally, he had me drill into the service screens using some codes I wanted to write down, but couldn't because I was still too sleepy. After all that, he realizes that the web service had been turned off. That's an accounting issue, not technical. I let him have it. I told him that Sprint should have figured this out before running me through the
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Firewire -- IEEE-1394
Airport Extreme -- IEEE 802.11g
Bluetooth -- Full duplex radio in the 2.4 GHz spectrum
(add your own)
There's little things in most computers and apps that do a fairly good job of masking the tech behind them. It wasn't long ago that you had to type http:// into a browser window. Now most will assume that and go get the page.
Hardware still has a way to go. RAM, VRAM, and hard drives are all fairly basic things that will frequently flunk the "Mom test". Maybe it's time for some 'unit' of memory and storage than help to explain what these do for the computer in a more colloquial terms.
You know what?
I remember the best Tech Support question I ever got. The woman called about the internet service she had just bought from the phone company. She complained she couldn't get it to work and then asked, "Exactly how close does the phone need to be to the computer?"
I'll grant you that I implement the interface (it's required by several calling methods), but I just return;. Thus, I am not implementing the Sheep interface in the same way as everybody else.
Wait a second, the interface method is called "void doNothing( )".
Doh!
Jouster
I don't think the problem is really that people don't know what terms mean, but that everyone seems to think they matter at a basic level.
At work I watched a new course being taught last week (second level word processing... including such joys as creating folders), and in this incredibly entry level course, there's a section on hardware... including asking people to say what the hard disc is.
Except it doesn't matter what the hard disc is, beyond "you save files on it"... they weren't even really saving to the hard disc, but to one of the hard discs server in the room next door.
And don't even get me started on the technical inaccuracies in the course. I could have slapped the person who was running (and wrote) the course, when she said "this is the hard disc". She was pointing at the case of the computer... if you want to show them a hard disc, say so - I have a small stack of them in the server room.
I read this on Ars Technica 2 DAYS ago.
That's because we don't put up things like they should be. I think "libraries of congress" and "Voxwagon beetle" are more suitable terms... hey dude.. this HDD can store 0.69865 libraries of congress and that computer goes 1.79 times faster than your Civic :-P
- mritunjai
I hate buzzwords. Using buzzwords is almost as bad as being politically correct. At least tech jargon means something, even if some people don't know what.
that so many people are so ignorant.
I went to repair a PC once at a church about 18 years ago. The lady that used the computer to type letters for the pastor was bumfuzzled because "my TV won't give me a picture after I turned the brain on!"
She called the monitor the "TV" and the CPU was the "brain". It was an old IBM XT.
Turns out that she had turned the brightness down on the monitor because this was *way* before the days (IBM DOS 2.10) of screensavers.
My dad still can't grasp the difference between RAM and hard disk storage after 10 years of me trying to explain it to him.
MOST people call the CASE (the cabinet) the "hard drive"
They know mouse, monitor, keyboard, CD. That's about it.
I find it easier to explain the problem of filling the hard disk up like this.
Your hard drive is like your refridgerator. You can only put so much beer in it before it gets to full to close the door. Once it gets filled up you have to take some beer (files) out to put more in.
It's sad that most people can tell you how many times some football player farted in 1996 or the names of all the movies that some little twit starred in or name all the Brittney Spears songs but they can't put oil in a car or lawn mower, don't know the difference between the CPU and the hard drive, etc...
If it doesn't involve sports, alcohol, or tv/movie stars they are baffled.
I'm afraid there is little hope for mankind, ignorance truly is bliss...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If everyone pronounces it 'giga' (ie with a hard g), then the correct pronunciation is 'giga', not 'jiga'. It's not someone's name, so the 'correct' pronunciation is how people who are familiar with the term say it.
In fact, the prefix giga- is from Greek 'gigas'. The Greek gamma is always the hard 'g' sound; there is no sound in Greek that is at all like 'j'. In names like John, 'i' is substituted ('Ioannos' or something).
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Of course, what he *really* wanted to call it was Freax, which would have opened an entirely different can of worms...:)
Then one could have used the name of the OS to also refer to enthusiastic users of the OS.
"Linux freaks" would become, simply, "Freax".
You left out "shoes with laces".
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The major difference is how the technology was first marketed.
Toasters
Put bread in slots. Push lever. Wait.
They have not changed much.
TV
Initially, it was turn volume knob from OFF to desired volume. Turn other knob to change channels.
Wait a generation for everyone to understand. Add cable, so we need more input because there are too many channels to fit on the knob. Add VCRs, which people still cannot understand. Add a DVD player. Add surround sound speakers. Then add a remote control for each device. Then add universal remotes so that you destroy the cable settings when trying to change the channel. But most people can eventually learn how to treat their systems as if they had one control for volume and one for choosing channels, and that is all they need.
Phone
Initially, lift handset, tell operator who you are calling, wait until connected.
Then, lift handset, dial a number, wait until connected.
Then came answering machines, caller id, voicemail, conferencing. Many business people cannot transfer a call. But most phones are still usable with the "lift handset, dial number, talk" instructions.
Car
They initially had controls for "move faster", "move slower", and "turn". Then they added the clutch to change gears, but that was too complicated for most people so the automatic transmission was invented. Now a "gear" needs to be chosen, but most people only use Park, Drive, and Reverse. How many drivers understand the 1 and 2 settings? They have learned to turn on the headlights and wipers, but rarely remember to use turn signals. And please get off the road before adjusting your radio.
Computers
Home computers started with kits: put the boards together and hook it to your TV with this device, then type these commands, type in a program and this command to run it.
Then came the closed box: Atari, Commodore: attach these cables to this box and your TV, and plug in this cartridge.
Then we had dedicated computers with their own monitors, but programs needed to be run from floppies, so put in the floppy and run this command.
It is not much simpler today. Plug these power cables into your computer and monitor. Attach the monitor cable. Attach the keyboard, mouse, and speakers to the color-coded connectors hidden on the back. To run a program, put in the CD, or click on this icon.
Computers are one of the few technologies to be marketed before the controls were understandable by the general public. They ARE getting simpler. The best today is the wireless laptop (and a wireless router installed by the cable company): plug in power, click icons. (And laptop pointer controls are still not very user-friendly.) No wires, no extra devices. But that is not yet inexpensive enough to be common.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
About your .sig ("Ach! Mein Lieben!"): it's incorrect. That means, "Argh! My love!" You want, "Ach! Mein Leben!" which means, "Argh! My life!"
Carry on.
Virg
The average consumer only needs a general idea of what most technical terms mean. For example, they need to be able to understand that 200 megahertz is twice as fast as 100 megahertz. It works in other fields; how many people who use "horsepower" to describe an engine know that it translates to 550 foot-pounds of work per second?
As for getting people to buy the latest gadget, the right answer is not to have the technical folk stop speaking in jargon, but to have marketing explain new technologies in terms the public understands.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Excuse me??
If you don't know what the salesman is talking about, your gonna get SCREWED!
Thats for cars too!
You don't buy a V8 if you want a car thats cheap to drive! You research which kind of car you want, and you buy it, same for computers.
The lingo is part of the package, you don't buy an IA64, if a Celeron will do what you need.
Its analagous to a Sport utility to a import compact, (Sport utility, one of those big things, right?)
Sorry, but a bit of knowlege on the part of the buyer goes a long way.
A "full" install of diablo 2 is 1.5gigs, that's with the videos, etc. But it's not enough for a full install of baldurs gate 2, which if I remember correctly, is 2.4gigs, which is kind of weird, because I think you could do something like a 5 meg install of baldur's gate 1.
And you know that "I don't give a shit" attitude makes me lots of money.
So Joe Consumer please don't believe all that talk about having to understand tech this or that. I need a new Lexus this christmas.
...terms and information from all fields. People are, in general, remarkably ignorant about the technology around them and our scientific knowledge.
One induhvidual I recall kept insisting to me that the difference between a cold and influenza was that one was a virus and one was a "bacteria" [sic].
Avoid an unusual and unfamiliar word just as you would a reef.
It is always best to remember your ABC's as well: Accuracy, Brevity, and Clarity. Part of clarity, as you said, is considering your audience.
I seem to remember way way back in the days of old, you would go look at computers, and most major manufacturers would have benchmark scores with various applications. You'd then pick the machine with the highest score in the applications you used most often that you could afford. Or you'd go pick up a couple of PC magazines and read a review or two. What happened to that?
Oh yeah, people started paying off reviewers and cheating on the benchmarks.
Then again, assuming that benchmarks did get back into a realistic picture, what would we use for the test applications these days? Browser page loads? I mean what does the average user who doesn't understand the terminology run on their machine?
1. IE or Netscape.
2. AOL's crap or similar from another "value" ISP like MSN.
3. A media player of some kind for audio or video or dvds.
4. An IM client of some kind.
5. Games, most likely a year or more out of date games like starcraft, diablo2, and counterstrike.
6. Some form of word processor maybe. I doubt 90% of the people who get bundled office suites ever use spreadsheets or presentations.
7. Maybe some basic photo stuff that came with a camera or scanner.
8. Financial software for taxes maybe?
Now, pick one on the list that requires more than a 1ghz machine, which is arguably the slowest machine you could reasonably expect to find. Even the games they're likely to run don't require anything within 2 generations of the latest hardware, usually it's hardcore gamers playing the new stuff that drives most of the faster system sales these days, at least for home users. But most of them learn the jargon after awhile.
So when AMD says "People aren't buying fast computers because they don't understand the terms!" I think the real problem is that people aren't buying fast computers because they don't need them. Anything they buy will do whatever they do as fast as they need so they'll be happy with whatever a salesman has been paid to talk them into buying. They never know they're getting a bad deal because there's no way for them to tell, even after they get it home and use it for a year! The only way they can know is if someone who knows all the terminology comes and looks at it and says "What did you pay for this?" and tells them it's crap.
Let's face it, the majority of applications are no longer intensive enough to drive faster hardware sales. Only a few niche apps like the latest games, heavy duty image and video editing, and software development need a system faster than even the most pathetic mainstream commercial offering in stores now. And the people who run those apps already know what they're talking about when they go shopping.
The home PC market is dying. Start buying PDA and cellphone stocks now. What? Mom'll never use a PDA? Like she won't ever use a computer? Or a VCR? Wait till the PDAs cross this "sufficiency threshold" of being able to run the apps listed above, and relegate PCs to a role of "home server" to centrally store videos you don't feel like watching this week and such. "Hmm, now I can take my entire machine with me anywhere and just dock it into a small box with a keyboard under an LCD, even at work or my friend's house, and still have all my stuff, and it works just like my old PC did." It happens, it's just like OSs giving way to browsers, and command lines giving way to GUIs and ICs to microprocessors, transistors to ICs, and vaccuum tubes to transistors. It seems like it actually starts to happen just about every 10 years on the 5th year, give or take a few.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
Although these analogies are good, they do miss a critical point. Computers and computer related technology is not nearly as slow as the automotive or industry or medical sciences. Sure, new automobile and medical technology are being developed constantly. But not nearly as fast as the tech sector. One only hears about the tweaking of current automotive technology in a sales pitch. Do you see advertisements of Brand-A car having a new fusion powered engine, or that Brand-B offers flight capabilities? Does the automotive industry consider 3 year old vehicles obsolete? So the basic problem with the tech vocabulary is that it is far to dynamic, thus it doesn't make much sense to compare cars or medicine to computers in that sense. Until computer technology possibly gets to a slower development pace more comparable to automobile technology, consumers are going to be bombarded with new terms to deal with, or not take part in the said technology at all.
You forgot:
PCMCIA - People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
Now that English is used for Mass...
It would just figure. Some guy starts a flamewar by comparing MCSE with Vatican II and everyone misses the most important point - Martin Luther beat Vatican II to Mass in the vernacular by about 400 years.
Sorry to nit, but I didn't spend five years as a Lutheran kid at a Catholic school just to let that one pass.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
C'mon! You're justifying the stupidity of the average person. I understand your point, but you've taken it to an extreme. Are we supposed to kill ourselves catering to an ignorant public as they empty their drool cups? I guess it will be like "Logan's Run". It will be easier to zap them because they don't know what a "laser" is.
Getting back to the discussion... They don't need to know what Mhz is, in terms of CPU cycles, but they should know that it determines the speed of the core part of a computer. All they really need to know is that bigger is better. Using the auto analogy, most people don't know the true definition of horsepower, but they know that bigger is better.
If you want to jump in the AMD camp, you can argue that Mhz is the wrong measure. Nice try, but Intel isn't going to educate the public on why a 2Ghz P4 is no faster than a 1.5Ghz PIII. Using the auto analogy, people very rarely talk about torque, even though it is just as important as horsepower in determining an engine's power.
Considering the popularity of MP3, I don't see what could be done to make it better. Sure, not everyone knows the details, but most should know that it is a music file. Should we call it "Em Pee Three"? Would that make it better?
Sheesh!
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
and in other posts.
A. Rightmann
By the time I finish waving my arms around in the air to signify where the ethernet connections run and mimicking the motions of placing a cd in a drive or signing on using a keyboard the users have begun to back away. Long before I actually begin describing the shape of the machine to which I am referring by using quick hand-edge slicing motions through the air in front of me they have moved into another row or far enough down the hall that I can just walk away.
Funny, they never ask me to clarify my use of jargon.
It's the same thing with cars. Repair can cost you if you don't know what's what. I don't know the terms for a car but I'm very tempted to learn them. I have a friend who was told by a repairmen that he needed a new whatchahoozits (I don't know the terms), but he knew that his car is one that can't have a whatchahoozits. The repair shop was pretty much ready to do his bidding at that point.
So yeah, don't know what people are talking about and get fucked.
The other thing with cars is that they've been around longer than computers and have become part of life. People learn to drive cars. It takes a while to do so.
I know that people are confused by terms such as,MP3. That why I always refer to them as the much more understandable Moving Picture Experts Group level 3 audio" files...
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
Dammit, my last job had those! "Temporary Part Shortage"
WRONG! You do need to understand the terminology, at least enough to use it. If I am buying a car, it would be good to know what MPG and Horsepower are, maybe what the difference is between all-while drive and four-wheel drive - otherwise, how will I know what I'm buying? ABS? Airbags? More terms... But it's ok to make people understand those terms, right?
So what's wrong with a gigabyte? Or megahertz? Why sholdn't people know what those mean? I don't care if someone knows exactly how big a gigabyte is...but they better know that it's a measure of storage.
Arrogance has nothing to do with it. People simply NEED to be informed.
yrs,
Ephemeriis
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
What do you recommend we use? If people are confused by tech terms, what units should we use? "This will hold up to 40,000 Word documents?" The number of MP3s? This might help some people, but frankly, it's about as accurate as measuring the area of a closet based on "Things it can hold" -- if you have Word documents of things like Shakespeare's complete works, you're going to fit way fewer Word documents on a computer than if you had 1-page letters to friends. Bytes make sense, and they're the true limit. There's no limit that you can fit, say, the 40,000 Word documents -- it's when you run out of bytes that you have a problem. I guess what I don't understand is what you'd have us use instead. A lot of stores now have things that will say, for example, you can store up to 24 hours of video on hard drive X, or 30,000 MP3s. But throwing away the 'real' terms entirely will cause havoc, as people don't understand why they could only fit 5,000 MP3s, each an hour-long speech, onto their hard drive that was supposed to hold 30,000. We need to help them to understand -- not ramble about how a byte is 8 bits, but rather something more like "Well, the average MP3 is about 5 megabytes -- five million bytes. This hard drive will hold up to 80 gigabytes -- eighty billion bytes..." You give the example of the medical profession, and how few people actually understand many of the terms. My doctor does what I recommend people do with computers -- he'll use a medical term, but then explain what it means. If he told me "You have a condition where you have to watch what you eat or you'll die," and then I tried to explain this to another doctor, he wouldn't really know what I was talking about. But if he told me (fortunately, this is just an example) "You have type 2 diabetes. This means..." and gave me a (concise and easy-to-understand) example, I'd know the term, _and_ understand what it meant. My doctor's always done this, and it gives me great confidence in his abilities, and is frankly kind of neat to learn about things, rather than having overly simplistic terms used. The key isn't to stop using tech terms, the key is to explain them in a way that makes sense to ordinary people.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
maybe a good idea would be a video-faq, aimed at sales people (bottom line enough).
I remember that TV serie about the human body as an example... that could be nice and spare us some very big headaches and deception moments.
justathought.
The same people who would complain that they don't understand the terminology for making a purchase are the same one's with VCRs blinking 00:00. No matter how simple things are, there will always be people who convince themselves it's too hard and too complicated to learn.
The problem with your analogy to cars is that you know what features you want -- automatic/standard, A/C, power seats, etc. Essentially the Best Buy/Walmart/other chain buying experience, where you just ask a sales rep which models have the options you want.
Now go buy a Kenworth tractor, and see how well your knowledge helps. Those things are heavily customized for the type of load and travel the owner is planning to use it for, much as non-consumer computers have all the details about component providers included in their specs.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It depends on whether you're talking about Bluetooth or 802.11. They are both "wireless things" but one of them will almost certainly not allow you to get onto the Internet from your back yard. We need accurate terminology in order to have meaningful discussions about technological products. Dismissing new names for new technology as "jargon" is naive.
> Schools are buying more computers, and kids are using them more, but they aren't learning about computers.
I don't agree with this. If the kids are using computers more, then they're learning about the machine by interfacing with it. Learning by doing works well for many skills, so why do you think it's not so for computers?
> Public schools use computers to try to get kids to learn in other subjects. They often have math programs, encyclopedias, and typing teachers. The most common uses of computers in public schools are typing reports in word, printing, and of course web browsing and instant messenger.
Where is your point? These are all valid uses for a computer.
> Every school, starting in elementary or middle school, should have required computer classes. Everyone who graduates public high school in the united states should have knowledge in the following topics. (list follows)
With the exception of typing skills, which I consider as important as penmanship, I don't agree with a single one of your points. Everybody does not need to know these things to use a computer, any more than they need to understand internal combustion to drive a car. Binary math? What use would that be to a fisherman, or a car salesman, or a doctor? Parts and assembly of a modern computer change too quickly to force everyone to learn it (if I learned that in high school and never actually did it, my knowledge would have been completely obsolete fifteen years ago). Knowledge of electronics is useless to most of the population, and basic UNIX skills would be as limiting as choosing any other particular operating system.
> Schools have computers, and they use them to teach everything, except about computers.
Inaccurate. My school used computers to teach everything including computers.
> You buy paint and brushes to teach about art, and novels to teach about literature, why buy computers to teach something besides computers?
Well, because you can use a computer to teach about stuff besides computers. We read books to learn about art, not just learning about books. I agree that a computer is a powerful teaching tool, but I see no reason to limit its teaching use to computers themselves.
> I think in the world today this is really a necessity to teach these skills to everybody.
Then you need to broaden your horizons a bit. While everyone should be given instruction in basic computer skills, your idea of what that term encompasses is badly overbroad. Not every driver wants or needs to be a mechanic. Nobody needs to understand electronics to use a VCR, nor radiology to use a microwave oven. And, not every computer user needs to be a computer technician.
Virg
So what's wrong with a gigabyte? Or megahertz?
Bluetooth and DVR, can totally understand. Gigabyte, I can forgive some for not knowing what specifically a byte is, but Megahertz? Come on! Were these people never exposed to a high school physics class?
moto411.com
In other news, a poll shows fewer than 5% of the public knows what "Dual Overhead Cam" means. Or could correctly define horsepower other than "what engines are measured in." Neither could they tell you what fuel injection was, what a transmission did or where it was situated in their car.
This news stunned advertisers that have been using these terms to sell cars for the past hundred years. Ford motor company has recently launched a campaign to educate the public as a result of these figures. Experts remain skeptical about the effectiveness of such a campaign, citing the fact that this is 100 year old technology, and saying "if the public doesn't get it now, they never will."
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
With respect, this is more than just a very bad idea. This is why real people think techs and geeks are arrogant dweebs who live on another planet.
And at the same time, the reason we geeks consider the masses as unbelievably stupid sheep.
These words don't have an arbitrary basis (beyond the arguement that all words reflect a set of arbitrary choices several thousand years ago)... Basic engineering terms with SI units to quantify them. Really, only "byte" counts as a truly "unique" word people need to understand. Everything else simply describes, in terms existing quite happily outside computer tech, physical aspects of the component. (Okay, "mouse" seems like a new word (or use thereof), but people don't have much trouble with that one).
While techies can certainly make an effort to explain their use of words that get a blank stare, the mindless masses still deserve much of the scorn we heap upon them. For example, memory vs HDD space - Really NOT a tough distinction, at least at a high-level. One stays around after you shut off the machine. Simple as that. Yet people can't remember even that much. Even worse, now that we tend to measure both in gigabytes (oooh, those nasty SI units Americans in particular seem to hate, as I learned many years ago in a college intro-bio class). Of course, confusing them on the basis of using the same units to measure them strikes me as equally sensible to confusing my penis and my monitor because I could measure both in inches.
Do people who buy and drive cars need to learn that vocabulary in order to use an automobile?
Yes. Try to drive a car without knowing what an "accelerator", "brake", or possibly a "clutch" does? Without knowing how many "gallons" or "liters" of fuel the car holds, and how far I can drive on that? Without knowing what a "defroster" does and the farly standard symbol that will appear on the button for it? Same issue. If people want to use computers, they need to learn the basic parts and the units of measure for those parts.
Ditto for tech stuff. People need to know "How many movies will fit on this drive?", not listen impatiently as someone explains what gigabyte means
Yes, people want answers phrased like that, but simply can't have them without a better understanding of the question. What codec? what bitrate? How long of a movie? Any "quick" answer makes a lot of possibly unsafe assumptions. Similar to your automobile analogy, someone might "know" that 10 gallons of fuel in a typical car should take them (at least) 200 miles over the deathly-hot desert to the next town - Oops, forgot to mention they drive an '82 Dodge Dart, getting 12 miles to the gallon. "They gonna die" for wanting a "simple" answer without any contextual understanding.
These matters are not important to the rest of the world.
No excuse exists for willful ignorance. If a term confuses me, I look it up. If I need to really grasp it, for example to properly use something I spend several hours each day using, I research related conceptual territory until I grasp the ideas behind the word. I don't only do this for computer terms, but for medical terms, automotive terms, knitting terms, audio terms, whatever. "Jargon" only provides an excuse for not knowing a word the first time someone hears it.
THAT makes me a geek, and explains why we deride the sheeple so venemously - Because most people will not even look up a word they don't know, prefering to stay ignorant. Unforgiveable, and those of us who do take the initiative to better ourselves most certainly should not accomodate those too lazy to do likewise. They want to stay ignorant? Fine, they can serve my fries (until we completely automate the fast-food industry) and I'll spare them the jargon.
The world moves on, with us or without us.
people are perfectly capable of getting their heads around 'technical lingo'. Is it truly more complicated to understand that computer processor speed is measured in megahertz (or sometimes gigahertz) than it is to understand that car engine capacities are measured in litres (or sometimes CCs)? I don't think so. And it's no harder for people to appreciate that while more CCs generally == more power, other factors (weight, powertrain, aerodynamics, gearbox) have an ultimate effect on the performance of a car. So I don't think most people will have problems getting their head around the fact that more megahertz == good, but that other factors can affect how powerful a computer is.
That said, my eyes glaze over when motorheads start talking about torque and power ratings and valve timings. Similarly, I think plenty of non techies are perfectly entitled to glaze over when they hear people talking about frontside bus speeds, memory latency, and second level cache speeds.
But there's no excuse for taking a kind of 'oo, I don't know anything about these computer thingummies, how many megahertz per second does that hard drive get?' attitude - that should be as worthy of derision as someone saying 'how many horsepower per hour can I get in the trunk of this car?'
It's NOT that hard, and it's as important a set of cultural knowledge for survival in the modern world.
If there's one field whose jargon seriously needs sorting out, it's personal finance. Now there's a profession that loves its acronyms and obscure vocabulary....
The line, "He's an asshole!" in Back to the Future III always makes me squirm. I'm not offended by the anatomical reference -- I use it myself -- but it seems out of place in a movie you might go to see with your grandparents.
One problem you see in a lot of technical documentation is imprecise use of jargon. But that doesn't mean using some "correct" definition of a word. It just means using the word in a way your expected audience is likely to understand.
An article posted on boltEngine.org reports that very few of those in the general public could sucessfully describe what ignition timing was. SHOCKING!
Washing Machine
Two knobs with bizarre pictograms, numbers and letters at apparently random intervals.
Car Heater
Two sliders, one labelled "HOT - BLOW - LO" and the other labelled "HIGH - DEFROST - (picture of a fan).
VCR
Worst interface ever.
Cigarette
Now there's an interface. That stupid New York law should be rescinded on interface elegance alone.
What are the other third? Sendmail administrators?
What a weird question.
-Dave
Your comment is a perfect example of what the article describes. Reread it, and see if you can find a single non-tech person who could comprehend that spew of jargon. Yikes. So, you can construct a decent quality machine for US$600, but can Joe Sixpack?
Virg
i don't always understand doctors when they are speaking medical jargon. but people don't talk about dumbing down medical speak. we need to take into account that tech speak is relatively new. it used to be that people knew LESS about the medical field, LESS about cars, LESS about science. but instead of changing the name of gravity to "downForce TX" people just kind of used to it. yes, we call coronary infarctions heart attacks, but you still have numbers i don't understand for blood pressure, heart rate, cholesterol. who here ACTUALLY knows what cholesterol REALLY is? "sir, i don't mean to alarm you, but your blood plaque is in the red zone. not just red, but the little indicator light is FLASHING."
Please stop stalking me, bro.
BTW, "Endian" actually has nothing to do with computers. In Gulliver's Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift satirized ideological/religious war by mentioning a conflict between two groups who differed on the correct way to crack an egg: the big end, or the little end? The Jargon File credits Danny Cohen with introducing this metaphor to the net, in an attempt to calm down an ongoing flame war over address schemes. In any case, almost nobody who uses these terms seems to have heard of Swift or Cohen!
Your retail consumer essentially wants everthing for nothing. They want a solution to their technically complex (and, often, revoltingly stupid) needs that is cheap, reliable, flexible, and doesn't require any thought or care on their part. They also require the salesperson to be humble when giving it to them.
I remember the glory days of Radio Shack. The world has moved on. Nostalgia is not wisdom, and an additional iteration or variant of 'what's wrong with kids these days' is neither helpful nor witty.
I guess my biggest real bitch is the self-congratulatory wankfests that these sorts of stories always start here.
Being my mind doesn't work very well, does this mean that the soccer mom driving the canary yellow H2 monstrosity has an Altix 3000 in her den?
Next time I see an H2 with a 120lb woman driving, I'm following her home.
-phish
It's about time people started to acknowledge this issue. While all fields (medicine, physics, philosophy...) have their own specialized jargons, as automobiles become more and more a part of every normal person's life, techspeak is going to prove a significant impediment to widespread automobile literacy.
A big part of the problem is that words in automobile lingo often refer to lower level concepts that normal users don't (and shouldn't have to) know about or understand. It should be possible to discuss the fuel efficiency of a car or truck without understanding how many gallons the gas tank holds or what engine capacity is, and to be able to discuss relative acceleration speeds of cars without understanding the role of torque and RPM in determining horsepower (or even what "RPM" stands for).
-----
In short, any field can sound confusing if you don't understand the basics behind it. (I used Google for a bunch of that above, and it probably shows...)
But it's not a matter of more slick marketing, since that's what got us into this mess in the first place. ("Megahertz, megahertz, megahertz!!") it's having people realize that some work is going to be required if you want to make the most of a technology.
How can you know whether or not you want to use a faster shutter speed and a wider f-stop to create a "freeze-frame" image with a clear subject and muddy background, as opposed to a small f-stop and a long shutter speed to capture motion and depth-of-field (or even understand why those might be important) if you don't learn the terminology?
Jay (=
No, you see management jargon is just using big words to camoflage your incompetence.
It took a study to figure this out...
"Car - common interface taught and tested by law. Big wheel, stick, bunch of pedals. Even so, a lot of people take a long time to learn to drive."
Some people would argue that some people STILL don't manage to master this device. Just look at all the bad drivers out there.
Exactly.
I'm a tech geek and I can speak technobable, alphabet soup like the best of them. I know what I do and do what I know.
Why should our industry dumb down to handle the people that don't want to take the time to learn it.
I've never gone to medical school and as such I shouldn't and don't understand a word of medical jargon. Should the medical profession be dumbed down as well?
Some people thing Dr's are arrogant as well..
Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
You're absolutely right. Instead of saying "megahertz," we should say "three billion individual operations every second." Instead of "MP3 file," we should say "pirated Metallica songs." Instead of "Bluetooth," we should say "magic." Finally, "PVR" should be replaced "illegal content theft enabler."
:: end sarcasm ::
Wow, I'm understanding this technology...er, I mean, "nifty stuff I can spend money on"... already.
Beneath a certain critical threshold, I have to stop blaming the experts, and start blaming the masses who refuse to make any effort to educate themselves about the devices.
As far as the medical profession goes, sure there are many doctors who think that using thick jargon makes them sound smart--and therefore trustworthy. It's a bad strategy. But if someone doesn't know what basic medical terms like "pancreas," "antibody," "virus," and "cell" mean, there's not a whole lot a doctor can do to communicate with them. At that point, it's the patient who is putting his/her own life at risk.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
20oz or 40oz
six packs
left and right hands
I meant to say "gigahertz." I really did.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Technological jargon, like all other jargon, has two purposes:
1) To allow for more efficient communication on a particular topic
2) To make the group that understands the jargon feel special and keep them apart from others
We must acknowledge both of these in any serious discussion. Significantly, I think there is some jargon that has a needless amount of 2) in it. Why say 810.11 (or whatever, I always forget the right number) when all you mean is wireless (of course, the more precise term can be useful when comparing wireless protocols but not really when you are only pointing out that you have a wireless card). Simlarly, phrases like DVR are likely to confuse people and it really isn't that essential to save one second from saying the full words.
On the other hand, there are many instances when 1) actually is important. There is no simple subsitute for Megapixel. You can say kinda good and really crisp but if you are going to invest in a digital camera it is a very good idea to learn about the most basic measurements of resolution.
Tor
ya know, i've never heard it that way before...and to think, some hold that reading slashdot is a waste of time... :>
ed
For instance even amongst the highly technically oriented few people understand what the hell is going on...
...etc...
The graphics geeks going on about the page-flipping the voxel buffer...
The crypto guys flapping away about the size of the secret exponents chosens such that a meet-in-the-middle attack would be slower than the general discrete log algorithm...
Database wizards frustrated with the limitations of the native java odbc API having to dig down deep into the bowels of ole-db to see if the base recordset can actually start doing transactions in oracle without blowing up the servlet...
Network jockeys putting the packet to the pocket to the socket to the port...in just enough time to see the header abort...
And we wonder why the general public has no idea what the hell is going on?
I'd like the apple green Imac....
Hrm, I think the red one's faster.
Ok, Cherry Red it is then.
-=sig=-
Physicians, of which I am one, MUST be able to explain things in layman's terms. When it comes down to it, health care decisions are made by the patient, so it is incumbent upon us to educate them to the best of our ability. Doctor comes from the Latin word Docere, which means "to teach"... and so teach we must.
One of the most common complaints among patients is that their doctor doesn't talk to them, or doesn't explain things to them. Personally, I like patients who are educated about their own health and disease process... it makes my job infinitely easier. It's much simpler to have a risks-and-benefits discussion with someone who knows what you're talking about, compared to someone for whom you must break everything down.
I NEVER talk to a patient about alleles, or cytochrome p-450 induction, or receptor up-regulation... they'd think I was some kind of space alien. When patients are upset, or feel they've been mistreated or talked-down-to, they sue... even if your medical care was totally above-board.
I try to make everyone happy, and am mostly successful, but in Emergency Services, I'm often shackled by time constraints. That said, if I have to cut short an explanation to attend to a critical patient, I ensure the patient knows why I'm being pulled away... most people are quite understanding when they know the circumstances.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
rather than size terms: the confusion between memory and long-term storage. In my experience with my technical support customers (i.e. the family), nobody outside the industry really understands the difference between RAM and disk space.
So -- yes, it is a corvette. Or, more precisely, some specs from some newfangled 2003 corvette or two (C5 and maybe something similar). There were a few different models, and I wasn't careful about which I wrote down because...
* the point was to list specs, not to sort them, and
* as stated, I don't know what most of that means.
It seems I've made both points fairly well. Some folks find the information useful enough to determine which kind (and in some cases, which model) of car that is. Others know what most of that means, but not enough to know the car. Still, others know it relates to cars, but not quite how.
I've made my ignorance clear... I don't know enough about cars to list the horsepower. I didn't "go out of my way to confuse" because I'm not able to arrange the data in a more confusing manner than just barfing it from the spec sheets. I just listed some specs and some acronyms associated with a particular car or two.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
I work in the tech support industry. The biggest problem is not the users that don't know what you are talking about (I've gotten very good at analogies) but when the "network/computer" admin calls in and can't do simple troubleshooting like reboot their router/computer, check cables to see if they are plugged in, see if there is dial tone on the phone line, give a correct error message... etc. Or they have no idea when you ask them some simple question concerning the computer/network like
Me: Are you using static IP's or are you setup to use DHCP?
The "admin": Uhm, what do you mean?
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
Umm, all of the ones riddled with misspellings and/or grammatical mistakes?
One of the key skills that people should have is the ability to describe something that they understand very well to someone who knows nothing about it. This is not a trivial task, I know. But being able to put complex, tech things into common language is something very valuable. Sure, among those "in the know" you use acronyms, slang, and technical terms, but you should have the ability to condense it and convey a reasonable synopsis to someone who knows nothing about that topic.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
> Now there's an interface. That stupid New York law should be rescinded on interface elegance alone.
What, you got something against the nipple? It's the only "instinctive" UI ever invented!
only soooo many times you can use "thingy" before SOMEONE needs to be edjucated.
... can be found here: http://www2.amd.com/us-en/gcab/lt/exam/1,,,00.html
Heh, my apologies if this has been posted already. Didn't have time to read every single last post today. :P
Julie Moult is an idiot.
in the hopes of making linux more user friendly, we will shortly be releasing the "iLin" linux distribution. we've done a little renaming of commands that are confusing to some users:
'ls' is now "ListTheFilesInThisFolder" (note that the term 'directory' has been deprecated in favor of the more friendly 'folder').
'cd' is "ChangeFolder"
'cp' is "CopyFiles"
'mv' is "PutFilesInADifferentFolder" (we felt that the name "Move" was not immediately obvious).
'rm' is "Recycle"
'cat' is "MakeScreenScrollReallyFast"
'mkfs' is "PremanentlyDeleteAllMyFiles"
'vi' is now "pico"
'emacs' is now "KOffice"
'netscape' is now "Internet"
also, a few other changes that you might notice:
your password is alway "password" and can not be changed, your hostname is "MyComputer", and the 'root' account is no longer available.
Very well said!
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
theres been a lot of talk here about how using long words doesnt make you intelligent, and how using vernacular or short words or whatever might make you sound dumb, and a lot of other opinions.
heres mine.
to communicate effectively in general, you need to be able to vary your vocabulary depending on the audience. for example, when i write a research paper for a college class, i try to use fairly high vocabulary.
when im talking on instant messages, i say 'sup ho.' and other such pithy and offensive constructions.
when im playing everquest things like 'dont pull yet i gotta med.' and '34m' and 'DING!'
so basically, if the public at large wants to talk about computers, they need to learn the lingo. if they dont, fuckem. they should take the trouble to learn the lingo, just like the rest of us do for whatever we need to communicate about.
Neat!
That's the influence of those goddamned ISA and PCI Win"Modems" for ya.
15 years ago, the glass thing on your desktop was the "computer", and the big metal and plastic thing beneath it was the "hard drive". (Because that's where your WordPerfect files got saved if you didn't use the floppy. Even had a little light that flashed when you did it.)
Today, the most complicated bit of setup for a home user is to "plug your phone line into the modem" (which, for a nontechnical user, is a port on the motherboard, or an ISA or PCI slot with a phone jack - but never an external modem hooked up through a serial port!).
Why, the big plastic and metal box must be the modem! Heck, if you turn the modem's speaker on, the big plastic box even makes dial tones and beep beep noises. It has to be the modem! :)
Just like Febuary and nucular.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with showing alternate pronunciations, but there's also usually an established, preferred pronunciation.
My personal experience of working in a technical field for the government, or any large corporation for that matter, is that technical jargon pervades all my work. That is why we are given communications departments. If I need to dumb it down a hair I let them deal with it. I think Homer Simpson said it best:
Dr. Hibbert: Homer, I'm afraid you'll have to undergo a coronary bypass operation.
Homer: Say it in English, Doc.
Dr. Hibbert: You're going to need open-heart surgery.
Homer: Spare me your medical mumbo-jumbo.
Dr. Hibbert: We're going to cut you open and tinker with your ticker.
Homer: Could you dumb it down a shade?
For example, I'm sure that an entirely different vocabulary has grown up around automotive engineering during the last century. Do people who buy and drive cars need to learn that vocabulary in order to use an automobile? No. They know what is important to them, and if an auto maker fails to deliver that, regardless of what words are used to name or describe it, they'll sell few cars.
I love it when people use the computer/car analogy because it is easy to debunk. It is flawed. Many other computer/X analogies fail on the same logic.
Computers are not cars. Cars are meant to do one thing and do it well: drive you around town. Computers are meant to do many things, balance your checkbook, control missile trajectories, play games, etc.
The reason I bring this up is because in your argument you state that there are two camps (users and techonologists) and that they require different vocabularies. For cars that's well and good, but I'm not sure, given that computers are not cars that the same applies to computers. People need to know a little (and sometimes a lot) more about how computers work than they do about cars.
There are ways for complicated technology to benefit the masses without their comprehension. The Lord of the Rings movies can appeal to 60 year olds who read the books in their teens. They don't need to know how Massive or mocap or compositing works to watch the movie; they don't even need to know what a computer is. They just need to buy a ticket and look at the screen, then they'll think "Yup, that's the battle of the Pelennor Fields. Hey, there's Gollum. Wow, Bag End looks just like I imagined it. Gandalf and Bilbo are just the right height."
On the other hand, lacking tech knowledge can be dangerous. When you go to the dentist's office you won't use any of the instruments there, but if you're getting a filling you'd better know the differennt pros and cons of a silver-mercury amalgam vs a white composite.
So I guess tech knowledge is most important when it comes to safety or work. But don't expect most people to learn new technology for recreatiion. It's too much like work.
Good ol' Bill must pronounce it Mee-crow-soft. /.ers pronouncing it Mickeysoft, Microsloth, etc.
Not unlike most
If I drew a caricature of you, would it look something like the comic book shop guy on the Simpsons?
OK, sorry, that was uncalled for, but Geezus.
There are maybe some good points in there - but I'm not going to strain my eyes reading it without paragraphing. Something about Word documents, and diabetes, and gigabytes, or something...
Get your own free personal location tracker
P eople
C ant
M emorize
C omputer
I ndustry
A cronyms
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
- Chaos Marketing
and my fave title of all timeShop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Please read player piano.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
By educating them, you are HELPING them.
When you are trying to help a company with a tech solution, you probably try to educate them, so that they can pick the appropriate hardware/software for what they are doing.
By the same token, I try to educate my patients so that they can make appropriate decisions about their own healthcare. They are the ones who bear the ultimate consequences of any medical decision... I'd rather they make an informed decision. Now, some people will say "you decide for me, doc." and that's fine... but I still educate them as thoroughly as possible about risks and benefits.
That's what informed consent is really all about... education.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Now, if you want a thrill ride of superfluous jargon, take a gander at the business "self help" section of your local book store.
Or google for something called "Six Sigma."
"Six Sigma" is jargon from another field, statistics. It refers to deviations from target value which are so extreme that they occur less than one in a billion times by chance.
If you think that's superfluous jargon, you've just had the same experience your mom has when you talk computers.
If you could find out the MHz of the CPU you just bought my AMD keeps saying it is a 1700+ but it is hard to tell what that equalls in MHz, still a fine rig when matched with an original nForce mobo... Drop the ratings screed AMD it will be ok...
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
I believe most arrogant dweebs are still here on planet earth - anxiously awaiting a viable alternative. Soon everyone will lament that the arrogant dweebs really are on another planet as computers all over the earth go unrepaired, and grandmother's DELL goes unsupported.
This is exactly why I think it's good that Apple makes up their own names for stuff like 802.11b (Airport). Even if 'Airport' doesn't instantly ring a bell, it is easier to remember than... uuh... wait... ...802.11b.
Listened to a parlimentary(british) debate on iraq a few days ago, A british defence analyst was being questioned. and he talked with great distain of the american use of the description 'network-centric' comunications, as in Network - a group of linked distributed objects and Centric - something with a center, anyone notice a slight incompatability between these two definitions?
Sassy!
You know I have heard a couple of mosts about the "masses" need to learn or the "masses" are too lazy.
I think the problem is that technology is moving so fast and these terms are coming at them so quickly that they feel overwhelmed. Tech terms are white noise to the masses. And it will only get worse. We don't see this because we are constantly surrounded by it, constantly keeping pace with technology (i think that's the defn of a slashdot reader).
I agree with the solution of being like doctors (suggested from a parent post). Explain succinctly and simply what information you are trying to convey in terms that the "average" person would understand.
I only mod up parents of "mod parent up" posts...
The first step is convincing everyone that 1 + 1 = 10 after that explaining the rest of the jargon is simple.
I'll certainly realign my business paradigm with a successful restructuring based on these essential processes, in order to ... uhh ... make more money?
Heh. Good stuff.
Nah, I'm not "justifying the stupidity" of the average person.
First, having acquired some expertise in one speciality or another is not a sign of intelligence. So, I reject your assertion that people who don't understand techspeak are stupud. Neither of us probably know much about how plant and harvest a successful crop of wheat. Does that make us stupid.
No, the problem is that too many techs don't have the patience, willingness or skills to explain what they're talking about to ordinary folks. So, if a tech has the arrogance to condemn other people as being stupid because they choose not to be an expert in his speciality, well...tht's the tech's problem.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Apple does a good job all around in this respect, with terms like "Airport" instead of 80211.x, "FireWire" instead of IEEE394, etc. Their software works the same way--use the spiffy GUI and don't worry about the jargon. What's nice is that you can easily get under the hood, and use the command line if you so choose.
Beats me what you might try, except to go for shorter paragraphs.
I'm not arguing that you need to be overly simplistic, or dumb it down, just explain things using a vocabulary that others can understand. Jargon is just shorthand; it encompasses a range of knowledge into one word or phrase. Dropping the jargon doesn't mean dumbing down, it just means taking the long way around, using a vocabulary that is familiar to your audience.
After all, that's how we all need to learn something the first time you're exposed to it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Eschew obfuscation.
"Defenestration" is to throw out of a window; what's a word for throwing 'Windows' out of something?
I didn't there's anything amiss with knowing what a gigabyte is. I just said you ought not to need to know to buy or use a computer. Will knowing make you a smarter consumer? Sure.
And I really do think it is arrogant for someone with speciaoized knowledge to expect others to share that knowledge, especially if he lacks the patience to explain himself.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
fo' shizzle my nizzle
I stopped reading your rant when I got to " mindless masses", since that epitomizes the kind of unjustified arrogance that motivated my original post.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
someone found out that I can work on computers, they asked if I could look at their computer, as they werent recieving messages anymore...
their answering machine was broke...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Sedulously, avoid all poly-syllabic profundity, pussilanimous vacuity, pestiferous profanity and similar transgressions.
Heheheheheheheheh... He said "pussy."
"It's a very tangled subsystem." --Windows kernel guru
It isn't dumbing down. It is simply explaining what the jargon means. How'd you learn it in the fist place?
If somone can't explain what a gigabyte is, maybe they don't really know.
I gotta tell you, I've hired, fired and worked with a lot of techs, and every time one of them told a roomful of the MBA's who were paying his or her salary that "It's complicated. You wouldn't understand; just trust me on this one", they came off my list of people interested in getting things done.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Let me translate:
4. Profit!
nosig today
>> ...if someone doesn't know what basic medical terms like "pancreas," "antibody," "virus," and "cell" mean, there's not a whole lot a doctor can do to communicate with them
Of course there is. The doctor can take the time to explain what "pancreas," "antibody," "virus," and "cell" mean. If he doesn't he risks putting his patient's health at risk, which is his problem.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Great, maybe my old 20Mb harddrive is worth something after all.
Forget it! Go learn Latin, like us well-educated intelligent people do! :P
Morieris, sicuti pater tuus!
Do people need to know the jargon used in Ford and GM's engineering and design shops before they can drive? No.
Do people need to know the jargon used on the job by techs and geeks in order to use a computer? No.
If techs and geeks deliberately keep their jargon unnecesarily obscure, does the rest of the world have reason to be annoyed and to think they're simply building job security? Yes.
Does the ability to toss around jargon imply real knowledge. No.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Please read player piano.
I've read it. I rather like Vonnegut, and have read most of his novels (though only a handful of his short stories).
However...
Despite his anti-elitism and apparent fear of uncontrolled technology, we do live in a world controlled largely by machines, like it or not. People can choose to ignore that if it makes them feel better, but that doesn't eliminate the need to understand those machines if they want to understand the world around them.
Ok, you are right. Calling them stupid is unfair.
I still contend that if they are going to purchase a computer and want to make a good choice, they must educate themselves.
Extending the auto analogy, if you go to buy a car and the sales-creep convinces you that you need the Corvette because it is faster, then it is up to you to refute his claims and understand that faster isn't necessarily better or useful (how often do you really make use of that speed?).
This is akin to Intel convincing the public that they must upgrade to the latest super-duper-herz computer to surf the web. An educated consumer will understand that his/her 1.5Ghz system is sufficient and that they do not need to get the 3Ghz system.
I guess my point is, if you wish to remain ignorant on a subject, then you are at the mercy of the marketeers who dumb things down to improve sales.
Perhaps we are going in different tangents. Another post put it best - the general public is lazy.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
No excuse exists for willful ignorance. If a term confuses me, I look it up.
I strongly agree with everything you've said here. I switched from pharmacology to computer science, and in both professions, again and again I came accross this idea that we had to dumb things down to a level many ten year olds would have been insulted by. And the sad thing is that people depend on this so much. I was working in a pharmacy for a while, and quite often I'd see people refer to their drugs by color. "Yes Sir, what exactly are you using to keep yourself from dying? GREEN PILLS!!!". When many people refuse to go so far as to even learn the name of the thing that's keeping them alive, I have little hope for most people learning anything they're not forced to.
Everything will be taken away from you.
I stopped reading your rant when I got to "mindless masses", since that epitomizes the kind of unjustified arrogance that motivated my original post
I like your use of the word "unjustified".
Why, you may ask?
Because it refers to EXACTLY what you refused to read. You stopped before reading my JUSTIFICATION for that "arrogance" Thus, you can maintain your personal delusion that such a stance has no justification.
Cute.
We can't just hide from that which we don't like. Even if you disagree with me, knowing my reasons for my attitude can only help you. "Know thy enemy..." and all. For example, I don't like "Corporate America", but you can bet the farm that I don't stick my head in the sand and pretend that strange pain in my netherregion doesn't exist. Instead, I study their methods and motivations, and do my damnedest to use their own blind passions against them.
Knowledge does equal power. Learn or remain powerless, but either way, others will learn, and quite rightly will gain power over those who choose not to.
Sky is blue!
XML must mean to some "Xtra Medium Large", ne?
have the good sense to let you alone.
I bought a Integra GS-R back in '93 before the ricer phenomenon became big. People tried to race me. So I went with a BMW 330, and guess what, the rice boys don't even look over.
The BMW actually has torque.
Its a sweet sweet car to drive. Don't let any G35 owner tell you otherwise.
With the example of gigabytes - what else can you say? Just saying that one drive is bigger than another might encourage a customer to get the larger one, but it doesn't tell them which one they need. For that matter, if they don't know how to measure file sizes, they probablhy won't be able to personaly decide what size of drive is needed anyway. Adding another unit is unlikly to help, since no older measurments can really be applied and a new one would just introduce another term.
The article seems to imply that MP3s should be called something like 'digital audio files', but if you want to distinguish between formats you get stuck with the name MP3. Maybe end users shouldn't have to worry about format anyway, but either you cut all audio files down to one format, killing possible improvments, or you have to let people get used to the fact that there are multiple formats.
I'm sure in somecases jargon could be simplified, but I think much of it is unavoidable.
Last time I looked, DOHC stood for 'Double Overhead Cam', so I'm not surprised that people aren't aware of a 'Dual' version. Not sure how long Ford have been making DOHC engines, but ALfa-Romeo had one in 1927.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Why read more when arrogance is always unjustified?
I don't believe that "the masses" exist, and I certainly don't believe that people are "mindless". What you term "the masses" (in just a shopworn elitist way of setting yourself apart) is really just a bunch of people just like you.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Try to explain to a non-techie what linux is. I tried that once and it didn't work to well.
With respect, may I suggest that communication is a two-way street.
You really cannot compare tech (or car) salespeople and medical practitioner, unless you think the customer or the boss is always right.
Different people have opinions on what jargons need to be explained to what people. Like should a stock investor know what is EBITDA? Should an employee know what is EBITDA? Should a financial advisor use the term EBITDA? Should a stock broker use the term EBITDA?
Respect is also two-way, between management and technical staff.
There's a lot of people who do this in the tech industry too. An even better example is on tv and in movies. How many times have you heard someone in a TV show try to explain something technical -- and to most people, it sounds that way -- and just think to yourself that it makes absolutely no sense?
Of course, being aSpeak before you think
They're asking BRITS, for Christ's sake. Luddite land of fairies and elves, where people are very likely to say "ee, by gum, ah kin do that fasteh w'pen an papeh!"
You only have to look at how "Doctor Who" depicts robots and computers to realise how devoid of reality those folks are.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
It is standard practice in the English language to use "their" instead of "his" or "her", and "one" instead of "he" or "she". In fact, not only is this standard, doing this is considered *more* correct. You are not supposed to write "he" or "she" unless you are referring to a man or woman. If you are referring to a general person, an individual, etc., they are sexless and should not have a "he" or "she" attached (See how I just did that myself--I said "they" instead of "he/she"?)
To avoid saying "he/she", you are supposed to say "one" or "they".
By the way, even if you are talking about a profession like programmer, which is mostly male, you should still not use "he" when referring to a programmer. You should still refer to a person of that professional title in a way that avoids having to say "he/she"; and, when you can't avoid it, use "they."
Cover your eyes and click this link!
It's not just the tech industry that has jargon. My sister (who wouldn't know a MHz from a Mb) has just finished her PhD thesis. Does anyone know what this means, for example:
Engaging with current debates on national identity, environmentalism, and the legacies of
colonisation, this thesis considers non-indigenous belonging in contemporary Australia
and its discursive representation as insufficient, illegitimate, and in urgent need of
resolution. Apocalyptic overtones adhere to discussions of an unsettled and anxietyridden
non-indigenous culture in which a 'crisis' of belonging for a non-indigenous
majority is seen as an historical inheritance weakening, or indeed dissolving, any kind of
national cohesion.
I think tech jargon is mild compared with this..
Why read more when arrogance is always unjustified?
;-)
What an arrogant statement.
Sorry, I don't mean that as sharply as it sounds. But your insistance that your belief holds true while mine does not... Well, I'd like to know how you consider that not a form of arrogance in itself.
However, I do have a better point to make than a meaningless "gotcha"...
What you term "the masses" (in just a shopworn elitist way of setting yourself apart) is really just a bunch of people just like you.
Truly, I used to believe that myself. I would say to myself, whenever something seemed very "wrong" about another person's (or rather, most people's) behavior, that they thought more-or-less the same way that I do and I only needed to find the motivation for their behavior to make sense.
But at some point, I came to the conclusion that no, "they" do not think like I do. They simply do not think, period. Most people simple lack any curiosity about their world, beyond what gets them fed, sheltered, and laid. Not that I mean that to apply to everyone - I know quite a few people who appear to actually "think", and tend to associate with such people preferentially. But the majority? No. Not by a long shot.
Most people have no sense of wonder at the world (past childhood, when I believe some people could still make it to "conscious being" in later life if we didn't have such an "effective" public school system). They don't look at the sky and wonder why it appears blue. They don't plug something in and wonder why it takes three prongs, when two (or one, actually, assuming an object not completely insulated from its surroundings) would suffice. They don't wonder what a "byte" means in relation to "that new way to distract myself I downloaded off Kazaa". They don't wonder how a shiny 12cm disc translates into the sensory experience of Beethoven's 5th (or even how Beethoven's 5th translates into a sensory experience at all). They don't wonder why ethanol makes you drunk but the very very similar methanol molecule kills you. They don't wonder why chenille yarn feels so soft and why lens paper feels rough. They don't wonder why Advil makes aches and pains go away. They don't wonder. Period.
And THAT I assert as my justification for calling them mindless. Not that they don't contain quite a lot of information, but rather, they don't want to contain any information beyond that necessary to keep breathing. Anything more than that people resent and attack out of fear. No one thanks the geek who builds a solar still to allow a dozen people trapped on a desert island to survive - They consider him a threat, since he knows how to keep them alive and they do not.
Rather than "mindless", I suggest "not quite conscious". The idea that people sleepwalk through their lives. Content to live to work to eat to live to work and so on until death.
And I did believe otherwise, once upon a time. You can only disprove a hypothesis so many times, though, before you need to declare it inductively false. Not arrogance, but a rational progression of ideas.
Do people who buy and drive cars need to learn that vocabulary in order to use an automobile? No.
:)
If this is truely your opinion, I fear for the safety of those that ride with you.
"Use" of an automobile doesn't simply mean driving. Proper "use" of a vehicle includes: changing your oil every 1000-3000 miles (depending on age of the vehicle, type of oil, etc), keeping fuels topped off, flushing your fluids every year, keeping tire presure at the proper level (depending on tire type/load), fueling your vehicle (with the proper octane... specifics not really that important), making sure your lights, turn signals, etc. all work, and on and on. If you're not doing those things, you aren't using your automobile properly. Your car will eventually stop working.
As far as a mechanic communicating those things to you, I personally like to know what they're doing to my car, so that I can assess whether the mechanic is ripping me off. That requires a basic understanding of the language they use, since most mechanics I know are roughly as articulate as your less intelligent computer geeks; that is, they aren't.
On a related topic, I was at a restraunt the other day and overheard several elderly people talking: 2 men and a woman. They were probably in their late 50s or 60s. Of all things, they were talking about computers. Their conversation ranged from the history of computers - back to mainframes and punch cards - to how DVD/optical disc technology is now evolving to use blue light so as to get a tigher focused beam. Very encouraging to hear elderly folks converse about such things - you'd think they read slashdot or something.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Unlike with 'jiga,' a substantial portion of the population (geez, I hope it's the majority), pronounces February and nuclear in the preferred manner.
If essentially all the population, including nuclear scientists, pronounced it 'nucular', then that would be the established pronunciation.
You wouldn't try to argue that the "established" pronunciation of 'knight' is as it's written, even though it once was pronounced that way.
My point about the Greek is that in the case of 'giga', you cannot even defend your position based on the original pronunciation.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
how hard it is not to laugh in someone's face when they tell you that they need to buy "Some more RAMS of memory for my computer", or when they tell you that "My son says that I need at least 8 Gigglebytes of memory"
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
But audiophiles are inbred retards who have too much fucking money and don't want to buy Porsches like any decent rich kid. They care about the size of their audiovisual wang much more than their actual audio quality. If you say "double-blind listening test", their heads explode.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"shifter," or a "signal lever,"
Well, I am guessing that those are what I think of "the stick phallus I use to select from the menu of Pee, Dee, and aRr" and "blinking lights control thingie that sticks out of the steering wheel and also has buttons for window cleaning". Do I have to give up my car now?;)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
No surprise there. Most of it is just marketing bullshit. But even the techies out there resort to purple prose. The fact that the software world is dominated by programs that focus more on bigger and more fashionable user interfaces than the function the software performs makes it difficult for newbies to understand the design basics of modern 32+ computers "from the ground up", and so the jargon that's used is more misleading than anything. Children, who have lots of free time to fiddle with a computer and little patience for the simplistic manuals that come with them, have an advantage over adults, even though adults may have the advantage in their capability for abstract thought. But the more abstract the word or phrase is, the more theory people need to be familiar with in order to appreciate the meaning of that word or phrase. The uninitiated will simply see a computer as being "magic".
Why say 810.11...
Because you and I can get together and say "hey, you got one of them wireless thingies? Cool, me too! Let's swap pr0n!", and totally fail to be able to do so as you have an 802.11g card and I have an Bluetooth card. They're both "wireless", but different standards for different purposes.
Now who's fault is that? Ours, not the manufacturer's, not the slashdot crowd's.
You know they call 'em fingers but I've never seen 'em fing. Oh, there they go.
AMD isn't much better giving chips names like "2200 XP" when 2200 has nothing to do with its clock rating
Talk to any non-techie - they're being confused themselves by AMD's unique clock rating/model numbering system for their CPUs. I know someone that bought a 2.4 chip, onyl to be informed later it's actually 2G.
The author says the PUBLIC is confused? He writes:
"Only slightly more than half correctly identified the definition of megahertz - a measurement of frequency which can be used to measure how many times a part of the processor, called the clock, ticks every millionth of a second."
That would mean my old PII would be somewhere in the neighborhood of... 333,000,000,000,000 cycles per second! 333THz!! And to think I almost got rid of it!
AMD? Oh, they're the ones that have the confusing processor model numbers. Anyone know what clock speed an XP 2400 is? Good, I knew you /.ers would know! Now, go stand outside Walmart, and ask people that question. No, the general pc buying public does not know that "2400" is not say, 2.4 GHZ as has been the method of rating processors up to now.
/., everybody loves AMD (price,price, etc.) Don't we?
the buying public also seems to have embraced the company's listing numeric ratings instead of clock speeds as a simple method of denoting actual performance. (Found this little statement on the Internet just now).
Of course they do! "They" are buying "Down to a Price". Imagine: "Hey Honey, I'm Home!, and I have a new computer with a "2400" processor!, For Hundred's Less than Intel! What a Steal.
And to validate the numbering system, just look at the Opteron numbering system: (Just put "AMD processor numbers" in google, and see what I mean.)
PS: This post will get deleted by
This should make us glad. I was showing my grandmother how to use her computer. I told her to 'click on the menu'. She didn't know what I meant by 'click' or 'menu'. As long as there are people like that, there is job security for me.
every stain tells a story
The Medical profession is even worse.
...otomy, what he means is that he's coming after you with a very sharp knife to hack off some appendage or other.
Just remember that next time you go to the doctor and he burbles on using words ending with the syllable
Run away as fast as your little legs will carry you!
I agree wholeheartedly. This whole issue sounds more like a marketing issue than a technical one. Marketing needs to find a better way to describe these things.
I just can't wait to see computer adverisements showing how many Libraries of Congress will fit on the hard drive, or how many football fields tall the system case stands, or how many cars worth it weighs.
{ - Generic Guy - }
Most people couldn't tell you the differences between varieties of wines; even people who can taste the differences without any trouble. That doesn't stop people from buying wine. And it doesn't stop people who've never learned French, but who love wine, from picking up a fair amount of French wine jargon.
One of the reasons for the complaint is that a lot of people want computing appliances. And there are a lot more who don't really, but believe they do. Another reason is that tech, by definition, is rapidly changing. We add new jargon for new things. I have no idea what the latest bus technology for consumer computer products will be called 10 years from now. Nobody has a name for it yet. But I'll need to know that name 10 years from now.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Honestly, the should know they are taking a computer literacy quiz, and realize that A and C have nothing to do with computers! Some of the others were understandable, such as the HTML q, I would be surprises if anyone that doesn't know HTML knows what it stands for.
An infamous pirate? I pity da foo who guesses that!
Well, you are obviously delusional, and so are the poor sods who modded up this sad post.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
There's a world of difference between the examples you cite and the expertise required to engineer a car. Do you really think that knowing how to change the oil and keep the tires inflated qualifies you to design a new engine, or a transmission, or a suspension system? One level of knowledge is the equivalent of knowing how to "drive" a computer. The other level of knowledge is comparable to the level of expertise many /. posters want us to believe they have. And a lot of those folks seem to think that everyone else is "stupid" because they lack that specialized expertise. Smells like arrogance to me.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
XML : eXtremely Munged Language.
"Munged" probably qualifies as hacker jargon LOL.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
It sounds like you still don't quite get what a hertz is. ;)
My dad, who used to teach science, really hated the word, because it does obfuscate. Some self-important board somewhere decreed that it had to be used (it's the name of a scientist who worked with it) instead of the much more clear term which had been used previously with exactly the same meaning. That term would be 'cycles per second' abbreviated cps or simply cycles. He was teaching when the transition was made and it was a subject that really got him worked up, because the change in vocabulary really has no effect except to make it harder to understand. He still say 'kilocycles' instead of 'kilohertz' and so forth. It is actually much easier to understand that way.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
One of my favorite acronyms comes from an IBM mainframe manual.
FAMD - Forced Air Movement Device
leave it to IBM to come up with a four-letter acronym for a three-letter word.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I would have heard, "leveraging the violence inherent in the system." Then I would have complained about being repressed.
Is it really important for the public to know exactly what a Gigabyte is or a MegaByte. Or for that matter GigaHertz or MegaHertz etc...
I think basicly the community should only need to know that when a Byte is at the end of something such as Mega Giga or Kilo that its a term of storge. I feel that they may need to know that Mega is larger than kilo and Giga is larger than kilo etc. I dont think its important to get into the fine detail of stuff, such as what these things are made up of on the board.
Another example, Hertz... when they hear or see that, they know it has something to do with speed. Speed related. And that the bigger the better, normaly.
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
I read the article and was imediatly inspired. Sorry for any spelling or grammatical errors. Here's the link: http://www.geocities.com/rachelisapsycho/market.ht ml
When I have to explain the concept of phones to people at work (the local evil*mart), I hold no hope of ever explaining computers to them.
On a related topic, I was at a restraunt the other day and overheard several elderly people talking: 2 men and a woman. They were probably in their late 50s or 60s. Of all things, they were talking about computers. Their conversation ranged from the history of computers - back to mainframes and punch cards - to how DVD/optical disc technology is now evolving to use blue light so as to get a tigher focused beam. Very encouraging to hear elderly folks converse about such things - you'd think they read slashdot or something. :)
Glad you added the smiley. My dad, who I call a "first generation geek", is one of those so-called "elderly" folks. He's a COBOL guru, reads slashdot, keeps up with all the spiffy new technology, and enjoys his retirement, in between oh-so-urgent, we-must-have-you-nobody-else-will-do jobs that the government calls him in for.
Proud of him? you bet I am.
I was playing with punchcards as a 3 year old - colouring them in with crayon.
morf - second generation geek
-- Why should I question authority?!
Now, I was following astronomy and space since 1989, when Voyager 2 reached Neptune, on National Geographic and other sci mags, so I already had a fair idea about the concepts being taught in class. Like you, I somehow had this innate urge to be an eager beaver, and, actually stood up in the class and pointed out that the textbook's data was 30 years old, and that Jupiter had, in fact, sixteen moons. (Nat Geo, August 1990; ol' Jupe seems to have amassed more moons recently).
Been 11 years now, the same lady taught my younger siblings and has developed a friendship with my mom that's continued even after I graduated from school, but I don't think I can ever forgive her for snubbing me for "confusing" the class with "new ideas".
More than mere navel gazing.
Yeah... I forgot to check "HTML Formatted" :(
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Let's try again, but set it to "Plain Text" rather than HTML. :)
What do you recommend we use? If people are confused by tech terms, what units should we use? "This will hold up to 40,000 Word documents?" The number of MP3s? This might help some people, but frankly, it's about as accurate as measuring the area of a closet based on "Things it can hold" -- if you have Word documents of things like Shakespeare's complete works, you're going to fit way fewer Word documents on a computer than if you had 1-page letters to friends. Bytes make sense, and they're the true limit. There's no limit that you can fit, say, the 40,000 Word documents -- it's when you run out of bytes that you have a problem. I guess what I don't understand is what you'd have us use instead.
A lot of stores now have things that will say, for example, you can store up to 24 hours of video on hard drive X, or 30,000 MP3s. But throwing away the 'real' terms entirely will cause havoc, as people don't understand why they could only fit 5,000 MP3s, each an hour-long speech, onto their hard drive that was supposed to hold 30,000. We need to help them to understand -- not ramble about how a byte is 8 bits, but rather something more like "Well, the average MP3 is about 5 megabytes -- five million bytes. This hard drive will hold up to 80 gigabytes -- eighty billion bytes..." You give the example of the medical profession, and how few people actually understand many of the terms.
My doctor does what I recommend people do with computers -- he'll use a medical term, but then explain what it means. If he told me "You have a condition where you have to watch what you eat or you'll die," and then I tried to explain this to another doctor, he wouldn't really know what I was talking about. But if he told me (fortunately, this is just an example) "You have type 2 diabetes. This means..." and gave me a (concise and easy-to-understand) example, I'd know the term, _and_ understand what it meant. My doctor's always done this, and it gives me great confidence in his abilities, and is frankly kind of neat to learn about things, rather than having overly simplistic terms used.
The key isn't to stop using tech terms, the key is to explain them in a way that makes sense to ordinary people.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
"THAT makes me a geek, and explains why we deride the sheeple so venemously - Because most people will not even look up a word they don't know, prefering to stay ignorant. Unforgiveable, and those of us who do take the initiative to better ourselves most certainly should not accomodate those too lazy to do likewise. They want to stay ignorant? Fine, they can serve my fries (until we completely automate the fast-food industry) and I'll spare them the jargon."
The arrogance! For many people computers and their use are still a mystery to be feared. People need to understand what this thing is and how it works and using jargon is hardly helpful. Taking the time to teach someone what it is all about is more likely to calm their fears and reservations than standing there in all your geekdom looking down on them for now knowing something.
We have three children - one is a total geek who is totally into computers, one is beginning to embrace all the computer has to offer, and the third uses the computer mainly as a word processor for school and is not interested in much beyond that. The geek thinks the non-computer user is an idiot and by thier saying so has made the non-user less likely to even try and learn anything about computers.
I have learned alot from the time I have spent on my computer - how things work etc. but I refuse to use too much tech jargon when talking to my spouse who is also a non-tech non-computer person.
Tone down the jargon - teach a little with some patience and understanding always remembering you were a newbie once and more people may be willing to learn.
yduzitmatter
All I need to know is if you guys block off port 25
Of course you realize that the instant the phone tech support dood can answer that question is the day he goes off to get a Real Job that pays more than McMoney.
Frankly, if I got a phone support tech that was able to immediately answer rapid fire questions that run deep into the intracacies of networking, then I'd think two things:
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I disagree. There are more sheep than humans in New Zealand.
People can use computers without learning the jargon though. Much of the jargon is confusing anyway. Why are floppy disks hard? If floppy disks are hard, then what's a "hard disk?" Why do we call "ROM" and "RAM" different things? Isn't ROM also "random access?" Shouldn't ROM be called "RAROM?" Maybe RAM should be "RARWM"? In 10 years, when we have tiny little disks 1/10 the size of a CD, what will we call them? CD's already stand for "Compact Disc" - how can we go even smaller than that? "Super-compact-discs?"
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
From dictionary.reference.com:
Just in case anyone was wondering what sesquipedalianism was.... *grin*