Public Confused by Tech Lingo 1041
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.
Even worse in non English-speaking countries (Score:2, Interesting)
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".
reminds me of the other thread (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
AGP vs. PCI (Score:3, Interesting)
Bad news? I think not. (Score:2, Interesting)
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).
Too complex, or just necessary? (Score:2, Interesting)
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
they could at least get the terms right (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:And the thing about the "ANY" key ? (Score:3, Interesting)
The hardest part was to explain why alt, ctrl, meta, esc, shift and caps lock are not exactly just "any" keys.
Re:It will sort itself out (Score:5, Interesting)
This isn't helped by .. (Score:3, Interesting)
games like Planetside (most recent one I've purchased) saying things like 'Required Ram 256mhz' on the back.
Re:So what? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's not just the general public.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm surprised they didn't just tell you that only Windows/Mac computers are supported (once somebody finally figured out that OpenBSD isn't a Windows program).
I usually tell them I'm running Windows and to just gimmie the numbers even though I'm not. :-)
Mike.
Re:In other news (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, I stare at a LCD screen, whether laptop, cellphone, PDA, television (in public places) every five minutes. We need tech jargon to live.
Re:My father-in-law (Score:1, Interesting)
I have books from the dawn of the microcomputing age illustrating this usage.
Chassis is an acceptable substitute, I guess, but "Tower" seems a little too specific to me.
Re:Be Judicious (Score:5, Interesting)
Tell me about it... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I don't buy it (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think that's the case at all. Remember, Apple was the company that brought the computer to the mainstream. Others followed, Commodore, Atari, etc. IBM brought the PC to the business world. M$, rode the wave much later. M$ commoditized everything via Windoze and later Office. This thing's been going on longer than M$ can take credit. It's just shifted, that's all.
M$s' crimes have a lot more to do with other things than bringing the common Joe into the fray, all of which are well documented and don't need to be brought up once again.
However, like American cars, we still don't get it like the Japanese do. They are the tech masters in not only production, but assimilation. Even the old folks are ooh'd and ahh'd buy the latest little gadget.
The average U.S. mom and pop computer users wanna do only a few things:
- send/receive email
- im
- maybe buy something at amazon (all hail the patent!)
- maybe print out some pix via email
That's it. In my experience, they care about very little else. So, my moms p2-350 still suits her just fine.
I was in a store with a friend who wanted a PC and the guys was telling us 'oh yah, you want a 80-gig drive, 256megs of ram, and a 2ghz cpu at a minimum'. I was like, 'For what?! To run a gene sequence server outta your house or something?' He didn't know what gene sequencing was.
Excuse me for being from the 8-bit old school days, but what the hell is the average mom and pop or 'un-educated' computer user need the above for email, im, amazon (all hail the patent!), and photos?
Exactly..
Trademarks == Jargon? (Score:2, Interesting)
Since when is "Bluetooth" jargon? That's a registered trademark. Is "Dell" jargon? How 'bout "Slashdot"?
Re:Yes they do (Score:5, Interesting)
Whenever you are trying to help a newbie over the phone or via email or IM, the biggest obstacle seems to be accurately communicating where they are, what they see, and where to go. Given that GUIs are built upon metaphors to the real world, this terminology should be the easiest to learn but often that is not the case.
How many of the comical tech support stories that have become ingrained in the mythology of the information age revolve around difficulties describing visual interfaces?
"Mail Call" for geeks (Score:2, Interesting)
Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
Just being nitpicky.
--grendel drago
It's not that hard. (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Yes they do (Score:2, Interesting)
One piece of good advice a teacher once gave me was this.
If an idea can't be simplified so that you can explain it with a simple drawing on a paper napkin, it's probably too complex and not worth explaining.
"Correct" Pronunciation (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
Isn't this what benchmarks were supposed to be for (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why Techs Are Dweebs From Another Planet (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yes they do (Score:4, Interesting)
But the interesting thing is, most people think that "horsepower" and "torque" are the same thing. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people talk about horsepower as being the same as speed off the line.
It comes down to the fact that metrics are used to sell, even when they're not a "pure" representation of what the buyer is looking for. Just like you can have gearing on a car that's contrary to the performance patterns you're looking for, you can have a high GHz CPU with a lousy memory or I/O bandwidth. The metric looks good, but the product may not be. Otherwise all the Corvette drivers would be buying 500 horsepower tilling tractors, since they've got the horsepower per dollar advantage.
People buy cars and computers for what they think they'll use them for. Someone looking for simple transportation doesn't care about horsepower. Someone looking to impress their friends will get a high horsepower car. Someone who wants performance will look into torque curves , unsprung weight, gear ratios, and, yes, horsepower.
Similarly, people buying a computer so they can "have that internet thing" shouldn't really care much about CPU speed. Developers might care more about performance, and check disk size, memory, etc. Gamers will want to know that they can tweak CPU Input voltage, and will want to know how many cycles they lose for a secondary cache miss, etc.
Apparently, this is "news" to the BBC. (Score:5, Interesting)
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."
Re:It will sort itself out (Score:5, Interesting)
Elementary and middle school teachers seem to *always* be clueless, and not just about computers. You seem pretty sharp, like the exception that proves the rule, so don't think I'm targeting you here. I'm saying, in general they seem to be on the dumb side (at least mine were). One, Mr. Gilbert, once failed me for using the word "alas"! He screamed at me, "A sixth grader does NOT use the word ALAS!!!" I had to spend a half hour explaining it to the principal, for cryin' out loud. Ridiculous.
The state of "education" doesn't matter, though. My kids are going to learn the way I did: my father used to bring me physics and science books that he got cheaply at work. I did the schoolwork I had to, to get through elementary and middle school, and I learned everything important on my own, by reading. I understood electromagnetism, geology, biology... All before I was in high school. I didn't need a teacher to tell me about it. Luckily, in high school I had some good teachers, and I learned a lot more.
The thing to do is make sure you spend time with your kids, teaching them what you want them to know -- personally. Don't depend on some stranger to show them the light. Remember, "if you want it done right, do it yourself"...
Re:Yes they do (Score:3, Interesting)
s/people/riceboys/g
(Yeah, I suppose the general public doesn't know any better either, but riceboys tend to be the most obnoxiously ignorant of it. That they pretend they know anything about performance only makes things worse. They'll never get decent torque from their dinky 4-bangers, so they just gloss over it and hope to distract you with their obnoxious fart-can exhaust tips into thinking that they have something worth writing home about.)
Re:Yes they do (Score:3, Interesting)
It's like the law in that respect; every citizen is supposed to know it: ignorance is not an excuse.
Somehow, you want to punish the knowledgable for the fact that the ignorant don't bother to educate themselves. Now this only works if you pay for someone to help you, as you would a lawyer or a helpdesk; then, and only then, do you have a right to demand explanantion.
As for what you're talking about, you're talking about interdiciplinary communication. which is a whole different beast again.
That's about different engineers with different sets of jargon having to communicate, not about one set of people without a jargon who need to know about something that lies within the domain of a group which does have a jargon...and somehow the mechanical engineer is always the one who has to learn the other jargon, never the electrical engineer or the chemical engineer having to learn the mech. eng.'s jargon. As a mechanical engineer, that pisses me off. I do it, but that doesn't mean it's fair.
Re:Be Judicious (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not. You can't substitute actions for things or ideas. If asked for a pencil, I can't hand a person "to write." I can't argue that Heigel makes great strides in the field of "think." The word "bombard" therefore is either used wrong contextually, or it's just silly.
"Bombast" is a noun which is graphically and phonetically similar to "bombard," so it's easy to mix the two up. In the context of that sentence, "bombast" is beautiful, since it means "long-winded rhetoric." Like this post i'm penning now, but unlike the one I penned before it. That was succinct, though it was kind of bitchy. Je me excuse.
Therefore, the correction stands. And I'll thank you not to correct my correction incorrectly.