Spare Cycles?
Can someone explain to me what spare cycles are? This morning I overheard a conversation asking whether someone had spare cycles. So I did a quick search. All that was returned were links about spare bicycles and spare CPU cycles. Last time I checked, I was neither. But I should stop whining, especially since, as a strategic member of the corporate unit, my resources should be utilized to leverage spare cycles towards target deliverables for the near term, going forward.
2 partners have spoken to this:
I think "CPU cycles" is the ticket. For anyone who doesn't know, CPU cycles are a measure of processor time used executing the various instructions that make up a program. If the computer is sitting there doing nothing, then it is idle and cycles are wasted.
Since when does everyone want to be a dork? I never thought that being a programmer would get you chicks, but the way these people misuse high-tech language, I'm starting to wonder if I missed a whole half-hour of Swingers.
It seems like there's a lot of high-tech language being misused in business speak. Another one I've heard used as a synonym for "spare cycles" is "bandwidth", which in the real definition has no relationship at all.
My favourite is "ping", as in: "Give me your coordinates and I'll ping you with an update when we've realized the current milestone." If only they knew that ping doesn't transmit information, it just tells you if an internet host is responding to connections.
When will the other command line network programs get the special attention they deserve?
traceroute, netstat, route, ifconfig, arp, hostname, nslookup, dig.
I shudder to think of the day that they discover the command line text processing programs. Imagine these people saying: grep, sed, awk, uniq...
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