My dad doesn't like his Mac. He doesn't understand it. He doesn't want to understand it. He knows how to use a slide rule and understands non-Euclidean geometry, so it's not that he can't do math or can't grasp concepts. He just resents the terminology. He doesn't like the word "server," and all the other made-up, insider-y sounding terms that computer people toss around all the time. He tries to learn about it by reading books sometimes, but as soon as he sees a word like "hypertext," he gets disgusted and shuts the book.
I share some of this novelty anxiety and terminology fatigue, but I want to make myself a more useful and employable member of society. Also, I really love the internet and truly envy people who can create their own little worlds online, and so I genuinely want to overcome this temperamental limitation. A prerequisite for transcending this is a capacity to recognize when I have reached my daily limit of new concepts and unfamiliar terms. In addition, it's equally important for me to acknowledge when some term just plain annoys me.
I just experienced this annoyance upon reading the following sentence, "The Java applet runs in a generic Java runtime environment supplied by the browser...." You might guess that it was the word "applet" that got on my nerves, but I'm actually okay with that. Once I realized that it has nothing to do with Apple computers, and that instead it refers to a sort of mini "app" that you download and then kind of unpack and run on your computer, I was fine. What made my eyes roll was the phrase "generic runtime environment." It's actually the word "runtime" that annoyed me, because I'll bet it has nothing to do with time, and also because I don't care for the way the words "run" and "time" are sissily smooshed together. I'm pretty sure that the guy who thought that up was and probably still is pretty satisfied with himself because of it (and I am sure it's a "he"). I also feel resentful of and kind of excluded by the use of the word "environment." The people who are in the "in" group know darn well that the rest of us find it unsettling and confusing, because we were basically in agreement about what that word meant before they appropriated it. How can "environment" be linked back to "time" in any way other than a most annoying, clubby, cutesy kind of way?
I may have reached my threshold for the time being and should do some laundry or something.
"Runtime" is what you get when you do the fifty yard dash in an "environment' that involves grass and sun and bugs.
Blech.
posted by Lisa #
12:31 PM |
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Trying to figure out databases. I am confused. Okay there's the client, say, a library patron trying to find a book from their own personal computer. The patron's computer is the client. They go online to the library's web site and navigate to the library's online catalog, which has some boxes to enter the title and author, call number, etc. The patron types in the title: The Road Less Traveled. The library's server does something. What? It turns it into a query or something. The library's database management system processes the words the patron types in and turns it into a query that looks like what (I don't know). The query goes to the database which is located where? On some server computer somewhere. I guess the database will have a record that has Title, Author, Call Number, What libraries in the system own the title, and then of those, which ones have one available. It might also have other details like other formats the title is in like CD, audiotape, etc., whether it is on some special status, like it can only be checked out for two weeks or something. The database doesn't "do" anything, does it? It just sits there with the data, right? And it's the Database Management System that sorts it, and then the web server puts it into a readable format and renders it into a sort of temporary web page that it sends over the internet back to the patron.
posted by Lisa #
11:56 AM |
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