Technical terms that irritate you when misused on the internet

[cschraer]

I'm a computer scientist and it just irritates me when people on the internet misuse certain terms. The main one that I see is when talking about network speeds.

Just so everyone knows, KB means Kilobytes which is 8 times bigger than a Kb(Kilobit). I see the bytes and bits get mixed up all the time. Including in the latest Escapist article about internet speeds. Does anyone else have terms that really annoy them when they are misused?

 

[TheIronRuler]

I'm a computer scientist and it just irritates me when people on the internet misuse certain terms. The main one that I see is when talking about network speeds.

Just so everyone knows, KB means Kilobytes which is 8 times bigger than a Kb(Kilobit). I see the bytes and bits get mixed up all the time. Including in the latest Escapist article about internet speeds. Does anyone else have terms that really annoy them when they are misused?

Learning how to speak in Binary had taught me that difference, I shall never forget.
Nothing comes to mind at the moment, but I'll hop in and Edit something when I think of something noteworthy.

 

[ChildishLegacy]

Theory - the scientific explanation of how a phenomena works or how we understand it (this obviously isn't a text book definition, I'm just shortening it). E.g. the theory of gravity explains the laws of gravity and how it works, it doesn't mean you can choose to believe it or not.
You cant say things are "ONLY A THEORY", any scientific field has theories, and the majority of them are accepted as facts.

Communism and Socialism are misused a lot. Soviet Russia was neither of these (it called itself these but was pulled off so poorly it was pretty much right wing) yet people seem to want to think it is.

European as a blanket term for non american too, France is as different from Britain as the USA is, just because we're in the same continent/group doesn't mean we have more in common.

 

[WaysideMaze]

I did not know the difference between the 2, thankyou for enlightening me (no sarcasm there, I genuinely didn't know).

OT nothing comes to mind right now, aside from spelling mistakes, but those aren't really technical now are they.

 

[Xanadu84]

My degree is in Psychology. When someone uses the word, "Prove" in reference to something in the social sciences,I want to punch them in the face. Not exactly a technical term, but in Psychology, most technical terms that get used in a non-technical sense are still accurate, just less refined.

 

[Sparcrypt]

Sysadmin with a computer science degree here.

I left uni about 5 years ago and have been doing the job since - once you're in the real world dealing with real people you give up on being annoyed they don't know anything/get it mixed up. Otherwise you're going to end up killing everyone...

 

[Draconalis]

'Ironic' is a good one to fall back on.

Edit:

Though I suppose it's not a "Technical" term.

 

[woodwalker]

Temper and heat treat. I swear, on just about any show on tv (yeah, its not the internet, but it happens here too) if they are talking about hardening steel, they say that it is tempering. You heat treat to the max hardness, THEN you temper the steel so that it looses some of its hardness but is no longer as brittle. I saw this on a show on discovery on time, but it was even worse. They said that in order to get the maximum hardness from a steel, the sword-smith was annealing the steel. Annealing is what you do to get soften the steel BEFORE you heat treat!

So, to recap, you anneal, then heat treat, then draw a temper.

 

[Aitur]

I had TMobile call me and the guy offered me an 8 megabyte mobile internet service, I couldn't help but laugh.

The only thing I can think of which gets misused, usually by the media, is hackers and hacking - last time I checked a DDOS attack wasn't the same as hacking.

 

[Agayek]

Theory - the scientific explanation of how a phenomena works or how we understand it (this obviously isn't a text book definition, I'm just shortening it). E.g. the theory of gravity explains the laws of gravity and how it works, it doesn't mean you can choose to believe it or not.
You cant say things are "ONLY A THEORY", any scientific field has theories, and the majority of them are accepted as facts.

Communism and Socialism are misused a lot. Soviet Russia was neither of these (it called itself these but was pulled off so poorly it was pretty much right wing) yet people seem to want to think it is.

European as a blanket term for non american too, France is as different from Britain as the USA is, just because we're in the same continent/group doesn't mean we have more in common.

Technically, a theory isn't a fact. It's an explanation for a phenomena that is supported by evidence, but cannot be proven to be true. Essentially, it's something that's most likely true, but we lack the capacity or knowledge to prove it is true in all cases.

One of the best examples is the theory of gravity. We know how gravity behaves, and we have a collection of hypotheses supported by experiments that form the theory, but we have not unequivocally proven any of them. We lack the knowledge and/or technology to prove the fundamental cause of it.

PS - You're correct colloquially, but a real scientific theory is different from a hard fact.

PPS - France and Britain are more similar than many disparate parts of the USA. From our perspective, you guys really are more or less the same. If you don't believe me, spend some time in London and Paris, then cross the pond and do the same thing in San Francisco and Alabama. The difference between the US cities is a lot more jarring than the European cities.

 

[manythings]

Theory - the scientific explanation of how a phenomena works or how we understand it (this obviously isn't a text book definition, I'm just shortening it). E.g. the theory of gravity explains the laws of gravity and how it works, it doesn't mean you can choose to believe it or not.
You cant say things are "ONLY A THEORY", any scientific field has theories, and the majority of them are accepted as facts.

I don't think you do understand the term theory. It means that a Hypothesis was posited, tested in controlled conditions, the information catalogued and a paper produced detailng the entire process and performed by several other scientists several times and accepted. Once all that data is processed it can then classified as a Theory.

A lot of things are "Only a Theory" since there can be seperate explanations for phenomena which can fit the same information. Also accepting facts makes for shitty Scientists.

OT: The Exception that Proves the Rule. It means the exact opposite of what people think it does.

Firstly it's The exception that proofs the rule. It was originally a scientific phrase used when an accepted fact was contradicted by new reliable information. This new information was the exception that showed the rule was wrong not that you could ignore it as a thing that crops up.

 

[Inkidu]

I'm a computer scientist and it just irritates me when people on the internet misuse certain terms. The main one that I see is when talking about network speeds.

Just so everyone knows, KB means Kilobytes which is 8 times bigger than a Kb(Kilobit). I see the bytes and bits get mixed up all the time. Including in the latest Escapist article about internet speeds. Does anyone else have terms that really annoy them when they are misused?

Well, seeing as that's not really a misuse of a term, it's a misuse of an abbreviation for a jargonistic term I think I can relate when people are, "Doin' it wrong."

 

[Agayek]

Sysadmin with a computer science degree here.

I left uni about 5 years ago and have been doing the job since - once you're in the real world dealing with real people you give up on being annoyed they don't know anything/get it mixed up. Otherwise you're going to end up killing everyone...

This is so very, very true. I got out of school with my CS degree 2 years ago and got a job writing apps for Android phones. That's all well and good, but part of my job is to train other people in how to do the same.

There are some people who just astound me that they've been able to keep their job. One of my earliest students was a guy who claimed to be a 30 year programmer but couldn't understand how/why to declare a variable or the basic concept of a class. It astounds me how many completely incompetent idiots are out there.

 

[Sonicron]

I sat through a lot of classes on linguistics over the past four years, and now one of my biggest pet peeves is when someone misuses the term 'acronym'.

An acronym is an abbreviation which can be pronounced as a regular word using standard reading rules; examples of this would be PETA, NASA, NATO, RADAR etc. However, an abbreviation for which this is not possible (i.e. a consonant cluster) and which has to be pronounced as a string of individual letters (e.g. PPC - particle projector cannon) is called an 'initialism'.

And before someone tries proving me wrong citing some bullshit definition pulled from the internet, let me back up my claim:

"[Abbreviations] can be pronounced either by naming each individual letter (so-called initialisms, as in USA [...] or by applying regular reading rules (e.g. NATO [...]). In the latter case the abbreviation is called an acronym."

Source: Plag, I. Word-Formation in English. Cambridge University Press. New York: 2003, p. 127.

 

[JoJo]

It's not really a technical term but I get annoyed at the misuse of the term "Mary Sue" when sometimes people apply it to a character they simply don't like or find annoying rather than specifically to an idealised character who has no meaningful flaws etc

 

[the.gill123]

I hate it when people say fibreglass as a blanket term for all FRP.

 

[Actual]

Terrorism.

Hacking is not terrorism, it's not even a little scary. Our governments and media have started using terrorism to describe any activity which they don't like and want to be able to ignore civil rights laws in order to prosecute.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Terrorism.

Hacking is not terrorism, it's not even a little scary. Our governments and media have started using terrorism to describe any activity which they don't like and want to be able to ignore civil rights laws in order to prosecute.

You are right, hacking is not terrorism in and of itself. However considering that the root word in 'terrorism' is 'terror' and when groups like lulzsec go around stealing people's personal information and shit, that's pretty damn terrifying and I wouldn't stop short of calling them terrorists.

 

[Actual]

Terrorism.

Hacking is not terrorism, it's not even a little scary. Our governments and media have started using terrorism to describe any activity which they don't like and want to be able to ignore civil rights laws in order to prosecute.

You are right, hacking is not terrorism in and of itself. However considering that the root word in 'terrorism' is 'terror' and when groups like lulzsec go around stealing people's personal information and shit, that's pretty damn terrifying and I wouldn't stop short of calling them terrorists.

I dunno, I'm terrified of nuclear war and spiders, not having to cancel my credit cards and make insurance claims. Just can't work up any fear of hackers. Especially ones like lulzsec who just want to have a laugh at everyone's expense, yeah it's malicious, but it's not dangerous.

 

[Anarchemitis]

The word "gentleman" originally meant something recognisable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone "a gentleman" you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not "a gentleman" you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there now is in saying that James is a fool and a PhD. But then there came people who said- so rightly, so charitably, so spiritually, so sensitively, so anything but usefully- "Ah, but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John?"
They meant well. To be honourable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse still, it is not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a
man "a gentleman" in this new, 'refined sense', becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is "a gentleman" becomes simply a way of insulting him. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker's attitude to that object. (A "nice" meal only means a meal the speaker likes.)
A gentleman, once it has been spiritualised and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. As a result, gentleman is now a useless word. We had lots of terms of approval already, so it was not needed for that use; on the other hand if anyone (say, in a historical work) wants to use it in its old sense, he cannot do so without explanations. It has been spoiled for that purpose.
Now if once we allow people to start spiritualising and refining, or as they might say "deepening," the sense of the word Christian, it too will speedily become a useless word. [There is most definitively more to being a Christian than the behavior.]

C.S. Lewis is far more competent in language that probably most of us would ever hope to be.