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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).
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.
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 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.
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.
"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!
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
here was the response:
I'm mean, christ! does basic knowledge equate to sexiness? hopefully!!!!
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
I think you've got an epistemological problem with your teleology there, son.
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
Yeah well did you get the memo about the new TSP reports?
I went to battle MC Escher but drew a blank
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
Why are the customer support representatives at gateway and dell laughing so loudly?
Little Brother, watching the watchers
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?
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.
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....
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....
>Tech Support: What version of Windows are you running OpenBSD on?
Yes.
Like Lance Armstrong?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
12:00
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
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
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.
What language is this? I can't find it on Babelfish...
My amber CRT and Hercules clone are still running quite happily on my home server, though the monitor is turned off, most of the time. That system's getting retired sometime in the next few months, so the display stuff will become available. Plus down in the basement I have the rest (most of, I'll need another 3.5" floppy.) of the old equipment you need, so I'll be happy to assemble it for you, and meet your $3000 price.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
A writer of lyrical rhythms
Encountered a creative schism
When those who spoke terse
Demanded his verse
Lose its sesquipedalianisms.
Why are you so fixated on cheese? I think we got ourselves a French sympathizer! Send him to the work camp!
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
I still haven't exactly figured out what .net really is.
My rights don't need management.
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 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.
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
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...
Load up the slashdot homepage in another browser tab. Now go over the homepage word by word.
Not fair! The front page currently has a story about .Net, and I don't think anyone knows exactly what the hell MS means at this point.
49 20 68 61 76 65 20 74 6F 6F 20 6D 75 63 68 20 66 72 65 65 20 74 69 6D 65 2E
Thank God I found a local mechanic who was honest enough to make sure I had these pivotal items installed. I can't believe the DOT doesn't require them!
Seriously. Every consumer should take the time to become as educated as I have.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
What are the other third? Sendmail administrators?
What a weird question.
-Dave
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!
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 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.
Please read player piano.
fo' shizzle my nizzle
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.