Finding Technical Definitions
Overwhelmed with “geek speak”? Google can help you find the answers.
Specialized vocabularies remain, for the most part, fairly static—words don’t suddenly change their meaning all that often. Not so with technical and computer-related jargon. It seems like every 12 seconds someone comes up with a new buzzword or term relating to computers or the Internet, and then 12 minutes later it becomes obsolete or means something completely different—often more than one thing at a time. Maybe it’s not that bad. It just feels that way.
Google can help you in two ways; by helping you look up words and by helping you figure out what words you don’t know that you need to know.
Technology Terminology
You’ve just got out of the conference room and so many new words were slung at you your head is buzzing. The problem at this point is that you don’t know if you’ve been hearing slang, hardware/software specific terminology, or general terminology. How do you determine which is which?
As with any new vocabulary, you’re going to have to use contextual clues. In what part of the conversation was the term used? Was it used most often in relation to something? Did only one person use the term? It might just be slang [Hack #4]. Is it written down anywhere? Try to get all the information about it that you can. If there is no information about it available—your boss stuck her head in your cubicle and said, “We’re thinking of spending $20 million on a project using X. What do you ...
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