A phraseology guide to geek speak

07 February 2013 -

Improve your command of IT lingo with our concise blagger’s breakdown of troublesome terminology. Your technical lexicographer: Colin Marrs

EXAMPLE 1

Geek: “Our devices are having handshake problems related to the recognition of communications protocol.”

English: “Sorry – you can’t use your iPhone to access your work files today.”

EXAMPLE 2

Geek: “Our cloud-based data has become corrupted and we are going to miss the recovery time objective and recovery point objective laid out in the information technology service continuity (ITSC) plan.”

English: “We have lost your board presentation and won’t be able to get it back until tomorrow.”

EXAMPLE 3

Geek: “Multiple copies of packets are being sent to the SPAN port, decreasing effective bandwidth capability.”

English: “If you send an email then it might take longer to arrive than normal.”

EXAMPLE 4

Geek: “A Trojan horse has installed itself on a host computer within our network as an anonymiser proxy.”

English: “Our computer system has been hacked, providing a major security threat.”

EXAMPLE 5

Geek: “Combining a clustering with a virtualisation approach can help us integrate our mainframe and distributed infrastructure.” English: “We can reduce hardware and staff costs associated with running our computer systems.”

EXAMPLE 6

Geek: “Efficiencies can be gained by upgrading secure data management for mission-critical online transaction processing applications, query-intensive data warehouses, content management and Web2.0 applications.”

English: “If we spend some money to improve our hardware and software, the company can save money in the long run.”