Provide a quick, creative biography in 140 characters or less.
More bioThe New High-Tech Dictionary 2.0
Fully compatible: Same old features.
Upwardly compatible: Lots of new Bugs.
New and Improved: Totally incompatible.
Beta: Software that isn't quite ready. As in "beta late than never."
Alpha: Software so bad that the beta testers won't even install it.
Release date: The date the product manager was hoping to go on vacation.
Open Architecture: We didn't finish half of what's in the spec.
User friendly: Lots of gratuitous bitmaps.
Windows XP: Extreme Patience required.
Linux: Technically superior operating system favored by cult leaders everywhere.
Teamwork: Quake deathmatch mode.
Visionary: A CEO who has not yet bankrupted a company.
Chief Technology Officer: In charge of the PowerPoint slide show.
Focus group: Buying drinks for analysts.
Market research: Buying drinks for customers.
Industry insiders: Disgruntled employee after a few too many drinks.
Short term planning: Meeting payroll.
Long term planning: Meeting payroll twice in a row.
Press leak: Your company CEO speaking to analysts.
Memory leak: What your company CEO remembers telling the analyst.
Minimum System requirements: The oldest PC you could find in the company's store room.
Ada, Pascal, Perl: Popular names for programmers' children.
Snobol, Rexx, Python, Fortran: Popular names for programmer's pets.
Trade secret: We lost the source code.
Encryption: What documentation writers do to features.
Industry analyst: Someone who brags about writing reviews of software he's never used.
Mission critical: Multiplayer Quake.
Fault tolerant: Failing to kill your boss when playing multi-player Quake.
Strategic partnership: Two second-rate companies that can't afford to merge.
Press release: What marketing thought was being built. Often used as the specification for version 2.0.
Whitepaper: Creative fiction by the marketing team.
Technical reference: An alphabetical listing of functions the programmer commented.
On-line help: Calling the psychic hotline for technical support.
SDK: A development system without documentation for people with too much time on their hands.
API: Applications Programming Interface. Any function library with more than 200 entry points all of which sound the same.
DirectX: An API for turning a $2000 Pentium machine into a $250 game console.
Comdex: One hundred and fifty thousand geeks trying to get an outside phone line to the Internet.
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