The Forked IT Dictionary - Part S, T
(Reborn from an old blog post)
Server Farm: A server farm is a green and pleasant place where innocent young servers gambol across the hillsides under blue skies in springtime. You may think that, but nothing could be further from the truth. The poor innocent servers are herded into glass rooms, blasted with electricity and made to run applications process emails and display web pages until their useful life is over, when (some people believe) they ascend to the cloud.
OK it may be cruel, but you know what, if we didn’t have applications, those servers would never be born.
Software Patch: The updating of executable code within an application, so that old familiar software defects are replaced by exciting new defects.
Software Pirate: Someone who has a PC at work and also one at home.
Special Characters: These are characters that never appear on keyboards for the obvious reason that they have no useful function. Some of these characters purport to derive from dead languages and scripts, while others are clearly jokes played on PC users by developers at Microsoft.
SQL: SQL stands for Structured Query Language. This is a special database oriented language which was designed to stop people from retrieving data they want from a database. It stands as the most successful programmer job preservation strategy that the IT industry has yet pulled. One can only gasp at the creative intelligence of Ted Codd.
Sequel: To further confuse ordinary mortals, database programmers often pronounce SQL as “sequel”. This also allows them to have invent philosophical database aphorisms such as “all relational databases are SQL but some are more SQL than others”.
Standard: A common well-defined and generally agreed approach to providing a capability that software vendors strictly adhere to in their marketing literature.
Structured Programming: In the dark ages before millennials existed “structured programming” was a cruel and unusual way of torturing programmers by making them adopt standard naming conventions and write code in a predefined manner. This was the cause of the great programmers revolt of the late 20th century when vast numbers of programmers left the industry to form rock groups while, at the same time, a small cadre of revolutionary programmers, working in secret, invented Java and XML, thus destroying structured programming forever.
Steering Committee: A group of individuals assembled to carry out an activity that is best carried out by an individual, such as, for example, “steering”.
Syncpoint: The point where the Titanic meets the iceberg.
Terminal Emulation: Playing possum.
Trigger: The origin of this term is archaic. Originally it referred to the handle of an instance of a mode of transport used by an early television cowboy, who was sponsored by the NRA. Nowadays it refers to a dangerous feature of a database, the effect of which is unpredictable.
This Page Intentionally Left Blank (TPILB): This definition intentionally left unwritten.