Following the Egregious pop culture perversion of programming, what is the most outlandishly insane technobabble you have ever heard, either in fiction or real life?
Extra points to those unfortunates whose real life stories beat Hollywood.
Note: feel free to sketch out what would be necessary for such gibberish to actually work.
I work at Best Buy in the computer department. Often times people will miss-pronounce Gigabytes, "Jigabytes." So people often ask me:
"How many jiggs does this one have?"
It takes every fiber in my body to not laugh at them.
When ordering an IBM PC AT with a 20MB HDD in 1985, I asked the salesman about the access times of the HDD. He responded that the access times had been ordered, but the shipment had been delayed...
CSI New York "VB GUI Interface"
“I’ll create a GUI interface using VISUAL BASIC, see if I can track an IP address.”
Salesperson - "The website crashed."
Me - checks site
Me - "It seems like it's up. Is Internet Explorer up?"
Salesperson - "Yeah."
Me - "Try to pull up our website again."
Salesperson - "No, it's not working."
Me - "What's not working?"
Salesperson - "I can't log-in to our e-mail! I don't know what it's called!"
-Actual conversation
May not be on exactly the right track, but I have a PM who knows lots of computer terms... but not what they mean. So he likes to chain a bunch of those together into a request that ends up being gibberish:
"Why don't we inherit that web service from the garbage collector? I don't want to spend any resources managing memory here. That will also let us reuse this code in - insert ASP.NET component name here - later."
I had an aunt ask me, with complete sincerity: "How many Megs does it take to get into the Internet?"
THAT conversation went a little longer than she expected.
I'm not sure if anything can beat Sen. Ted Stevens' "Series of Tubes"
Youtube comment: How much RAM does this program take on a CPU? (inquiring about the size of the program on the hard disk).
An engineer at SGI told me about a customer that called in to complain that "circle mode" on her external CDROM was not working. He said "Tell me more about circle mode". She said, "Well, there's a switch on the back with a line and a circle. It works in line mode, but not in circle mode." The engineer told her "Just leave it in line mode, circle mode hasn't been implemented yet."
Customer: We want RSS for the news on our site.
Me: Ok, cool, we'll do that.
Few days later...
Me: The RSS is done.
Customer: Were can I find it? wait, what exactly IS rss?
Me: Rss is bla bla bla...
Customer: No, we don't need that, we need a newsletter.
:')
My wife used to always talk about "dark side" application programs at her workplace. I always thought it was some suite of "evil" apps (a la Star Wars).
I later found out they were terminal emulation windows. TN3270 FOREVER!!!
The one that irked me the most was in an episode of X-Files (a show that is actually targeted at geeks...).
There is this room that is supposedly the heart of a big computer system or somthing like that where the three tech nerds that helpds with various things are tasked with helping out. They reach under a desk or something pulling out computer in a naked midi-tower chassi and then there is a zoomed in view of how they cut the powercord to a hard drive followed by the line "We've hacked the mainframe".
It's a toss-up between Spore's DRM and Google Chrome's original EULA.
This is actual marketing copy from MSDN
"With BizTalk® Server installed, you arrive at your office in the morning to find that a shipment of door handles that you did not even know you needed is already on your receiving dock ready to be stocked. Not only that, the shipment has already been paid for and your database has been automatically updated."
If anyone has actually worked in manufacturing company and believes that this a realistic scenario feel free to vote me down. Personally, I just giggle like a little girl everytime I read it.
I saw an IT guy tell a user her computer was crashing as her bag was on the power cable and it was stopping the electricity getting though.
I laughed at his joke, but then he just walked away. It appears he wasn't telling a joke!
George W. Bush using the word "Internets." I always get a good laugh from that one.
Digital Fortress by Dan Brown. In retrospect, it seems like a hilarious read, but while I was actually reading it, I was this close to biting my own elbows off. Not at all recommended for angry nitpickers.
Guy walked into Dick Smiths Electronics Shop with a floppy disk and asked staff if they could copy the internet on it for him.
I went to interview for a position at DoubleClick. They deal with Flash Advertising. The interviewer wanted me to know that from time to time you get odd requests. He showed me one: " ... And we would like the the widget to feel Ajaxy." ( referring to the way modern web apps are visually designed these days )
Even worse I had a 'peer' at my work who whats a big phoney. I have no idea how he was able to last so long. Just imagine a programming position where someone who didn't know how to program could hold his job!
Some of the gems this person said were: (in response to adjusting game play) "You know, I've just got to change up the classes."
"Man, I love this Boolean Package, it makes so much sense." (in reference to the boolean object)
"I don't get it, this book says the AS2 code would work in AS3" (after copying and pasting as2 code into as3 and trying to compile... the equivalent of copying C++ into C#.net or Javascript into JDE and compiling)
I once worked on a computer for a guy at his house - while describing a problem he was having copying files, he indicated I should go to "the red zone" to see what he was talking about - in this case, "the red zone" was his desktop, where his wallpaper was the old Win9x "redbricks" image scaled to the size of the desktop (and thus very pixelated). It took a great deal of willpower not to let a chuckle escape...
On craigslist today
On behalf of our client, XXXX Recruiting is searching for intermediate C++/Pearl Developers
you are strong in C++ with good exposure to Pearl or PHP programming.
There's a Star Trek: Voyager episode where Kim's trying to create a replacement holographic doctor, but the immense size of the medical database is overloading it. The solution?
"Computer, install a recursive algorithm!"
Problem solved.
At a previous job when we were demoing some 3rd party software, the lead technical guy from the other company kept ensuring us that their software was of the highest quality and they didn't use any "if" statements. I guess if statements are bad for performance.
Why do an alarming number of computer illiterates refer to a PC tower as "the hard drive"? I always answer "Where did all the other bits go?" Blank look follows.
From the "Good Times Virus" hoax email:
If the program is not stopped, the computer's processor will be placed in an nth-complexity infinite binary loop - which can severely damage the processor if left running that way too long.
"nth-complexity infinite binary loop" makes me laugh every time.
It's funny that this just came up since we've been talking about this at the office. Another guy here said his next e-mail was going to contain most of these terms:
The most baffling IT terms, part II
Here was my stab at it:
"I just wanted to let everyone know what happened with our unexpected e-mail downtime. We run a virtualized, rack mounted server farm that runs in the cloud and is hosted by a third party company. Outlook points to this via an IDN. Their WEP key was changed as part of their normal security procedures via a 3G VPN connection, which caused the ASCII bytes normally sent through to be incorrectly encrypted. This generated gigs of logs files which eventually crashed their server. They had to back up these log files onto a blue-ray drive before being able to reset and restart their servers and reset their internal IP addresses. This problem has been addressed and fixed so that it will not occur in the future."
Saw a b-grade sci-fi movie on well sci-fi channel.. a skinny dude (obviously referred to as a hacker) whistles into a cell phone and retorts "here long distance is free on this. .forever"
We're way off technobabble here, but the responses seem to have devolved into general computer cluelessness humor...
My dad was having trouble with his PC and decided to take it into a shop for "tune-up" (he's far away, so I can't perform any laying on of hands). I gleaned from his questions that he was getting ready to take the monitor, but I gently guided him back to taking the tower!
RRS
Many years ago, in high school, my friend babbling me about his programming skills:
-- You know.. I'm quite competent at Regedit!?
I think I have most of these beat. If you want to talk crazy nonsense, I worked at a computer store when I was a teenager.
For some reason, there was this fad where everyone called the desktop, the "modem." We have all heard the "harddrive" phrase or of course "cpu" but here they always, several, several different people, uses the word "modem."
Well, for one customer, this was even more difficult to remember, so she referred to her computer as "the Imodium (as in the diarrhea medicine).
This isn't exactly computer babble, but stupid enough for the spirit of the thing.
My father in law works with the studios.
He had a project with Fox (I think) and told them he would need...
"Four Lifts With Outriggers.
A few days later, the lifts show up, but no outriggers.
He calls up and asks "Hey, where are the outriggers for these lifts?"
They reply: "What!? You said without riggers! Can't your crew rig them?
I can't believe nobody mention this yet, but in the movie Swordfish when the hacker is asked how he managed to break into the DoD network in only 1 minute he answers:
I dropped a logic bomb through the trapdoor.
There was a great one in 24 where they knew something had happened to a character because "she hasn't updated her cron jobs, she's meant to do that every 15 minutes but she missed the last one!" It's like they ALMOST knew what they were talking about.
In real life, my high school computer teacher told me that a multi-sync monitor was one that tipped forwards / backwards as well as swivelling. When I went to buy a PC I caused the shopdude to look at me very strangely when I said "so is this monitor multi-sync? [fx: swivel, tilt] Oh yes, good."
[Edit:] Oh, and I can't believe I forgot - I received a call from a recruitment agency trying to get me to interview a guy whose key skills included "He's very experienced in the tee-see-pip programming language".
So, the guy of hackers-through-electrical-network fame once proposed a fantastic method to protect his intranet from hackers: the bastion host had to be a IRIX machine. After the bastion host, another computer with Linux was present. This linux computer was followed by a HP/UX machine, the HP/UX followed by a FreeBSD.
His idea is that a hacker, in order to access his intranet, had to be competent in all the operating systems at once to be able to crack all of them, meaning that he would be trapped in this deceiving tarpit of informatic despair. He called it "multilayered firewall".
I mean, not that is a bad idea, but I think that it's enough nonsense for many other reasons.
My wife's sister:
Somoebody I do not remember:
I personally like Swordfish for the visual representation (three big cubes) of a hacker putting together a virus. Particularly the point where they turned nice colours and glowed to let him know it was working.
P.S. I would love to be able to code like this. IDE writers, if you're watching, please take note...
I saw this one in a bollywood movie. Our hero was busy romancing with his gf until his friend informs him about upcoming college exams. So, he decides to get examination papers by hacking into his college network. This is how he goes about it:
Enters Lab. Opens up a command prompt window. Types - Hack System
And that's it!!...A window pops up- System Hacked
He gets access to all papers and returns to his gf for a romantic song :)
Nice!! :D
(Give him +1 for at least opening up the command prompt instead of doing it in notepad) :D
I was once informed that a computer had 5 IEs of speed and then asked how to get more IEs.
It's not the worst, but it's still painful.
Pretty manager lady's technical advise to an HTML guy: "We should use ASCII coding to protect the e-mails."
In a computer shop, circa 1997:
Me: Do you have internal ZIP drives?
Salesman: Yes, here it is (shows me a ZIP plus drive, which had two ports, parallel and SCSI)
Me: This is an external drive.
Salesman: Well, this one is external and internal at the same time.
Me: Eeeh... thanks...
I called my ISP tech support for an unreliable connection. I'd run some pretty intensive tests and discovered serious packet loss.
Me: The connection is dropping packets
Tech: What else is it dropping?
I just gave up after that.
We must imagineer the system’s REVPAR model with our non-rational uniform B-spline to reticulate a grid mesh that correlates availability with rates in a multi-dimensional revenue cube so that the business consistently synergizes it EBITDA.
The Vice President of my division, many jobs back, would somehow get a list of buzzwords in his head that were always backwards. We'd print up bingo cards before meetings, which made pep talks by this guy much easier to endure.
"We're only limited by the size of the widthband" was my personal favorite, followed by "our transformation to a high-baud organization" and "Lotus Notes is the future."
NOT computer related: I heard a salesman telling some customer who asked about oversampling on a DVD player that it was the number of times it read the data to make sure it got it right.
Nice.
Preparing for an integration project:
Me - "Ok, so we should talk to your partner to know more about their web services"
Customer - "Sure, you know, they have a whole X and ML department. This will be easy"
Stargate Atlantis
They're communicating with some Aliens which want to send some data. Dr. Weir: "Download it to a non-networked, firewalled computer!"
Check out this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLYR0iJnjAM
Our hero does performs an impossible security hack..using Windows media player! :-)
"Global impact paradigm shift" as spoken by my former, retarded, CEO.