Wired News: Do You Speak Tech?

Those of us not afraid to call ourselves geeks have long been proud of our command of “geek-speak”. We knew the difference between ROM and RAM. We understood why a 32 bit application wouldn’t run on a 16 bit system.

But these days the acronyms are flying fast and furious. It almost seems like every new process, app or piece of hardware requires several new acronyms to be invented. It’s getting nearly impossible to keep up with it all, as Wired magazine notes.

“The technology industry never had it easy explaining technical concepts in plain language, but some at Hanover’s CeBIT technology fair don’t even seem to be trying.

‘SAN extension over MAN/WAN’ is on offer as well as ‘knowledge automation infrastructure’ with ‘authentic cross-linguistic capability.’ That is all about computer networking and how companies store and access information.

‘Public safety organizations’ — police and fire brigades — might benefit from a mobile information and communication system called MiKoBOS with an XBRL Tool Suite.

And if in doubt, there’s always ‘high-quality antialiasing with arbitrary oversampling for optimal resolution,’ which relates to 3-D graphics.

Even straightforward products, like televisions, pose questions. Is a PDP display the same as a plasma TV? And what exactly is plasma, anyway? More cutting-edge technology such as internet phones — voice over internet protocol, or VOIP in the industry dialect — is generally followed by a string of acronyms.

The problem is hardly new. A standard for extension cards for laptops, commonly called PCMCIA, was spoofed as ‘people can’t memorize computer industry acronyms’ when it launched. It actually stands for ‘personal computer memory card international association.’

It is a real problem for consumers, however, who have to make sure that their new DVD player — next to plain-vanilla DVDs — supports DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM, CD, MP3 and JPEG. If a player is missing one of those, a disc might simply not play. To top if off, one of two new, mutually incompatible formats will be built into players within the next year — Blu-ray and HD-DVD.”