New language in business computing

 

Just to keep me sane during my IT training (vSphere 7: VCP-DCP Official Cert Guide, 4th Edition), here's some emerging linguistic usage that I thought was worth recording:

Enable or disable Network I/O Control, which if enabled will prioritize network traffic.

Prioritize not in the sense of "assign a high priority" but "assign priorities" (as opposed to treating all network traffic the same). 

Terms that become familiar in the authoritarian world of data processing, where no-one turns a hair when we talk about "the principle of least privilege",  are prone to take up a second career in the processing of the human population. "Security" and "health" are obvious current examples. Likewise "prioritization" has a great future, replacing the unacceptable term "discrimination". . .

Pop-up charts are useful for maximizing the available real estate for a chart

I think it means letting the chart fill up the whole screen . . .

Changes to the logging level are persisted in the vCenter Server configuration file /etc/vmware-vpx/vpxd.cfg

You are responsible for keeping track of the password. It is not persisted anywhere in vSphere.

persisted = rendered persistent (e.g. by being written into the config file)

Gap's stylish winter range is perfect for gifting this Christmas.  

An advertising break.

"Gifting" already exists in standard English, as e.g. the hapless team that "gifts" their opponents a goal-scoring opportunity. In this game-playing context, "gifting" is pejorative, it implies a stupid mistake. 

Here it's being deployed to mean something else, something like "the activity of choosing gifts" (and selecting and paying for them). It's what we used to call Christmas shopping.

The word "giving" has long seemed not quite right for this activity. For at its archaic heart it ought to mean giving something that belongs to us to someone else: for instance, a ring or a tool or a horse. It's what the thee Kings did, but it's not what the much-stimulated hive behaviour of a capitalist Christmas has ever implied.

"Gifting" abstracts from the physical foot-slogging and bag-lugging of Christmas shopping. It has an enhanced sense that much of the "gifting" at Christmas will now be done remotely: we'll never, even momentarily, possess the "gifts" that we've organized and paid for. 

I'm not yet a firm enough divester to act on what I sense, that "gifting" remains much the same stupid mistake as that weak back-pass in the penalty area. 

For example, if you set a vSAN Primary level of failures to tolerate to 1, then the HA admission control policy must reserve enough resource that is equal to 1 host. If you set the vSAN Primary level of failures to tolerate to 2, then the HA admission control policy must reserve enough resource that is equal to 2 ESXi hosts.

enough resource that is equal : The linguistic confusion reflects the self-contradiction in other VMware documentation, which says that implied reservation in vSAN must not be lower than implied reservation in HA, but also says that if HA reserves less, failover is unpredictable. The resources we're referring to aren't the same: vSAN is about disk capacity and HA is about compute/memory, but both can be crudely expressed as provision for a given number of host failures within the cluster.  My course authors hedge their bets (and have probably ended up getting it the wrong way round), while strongly hinting that the only safe choice is to make the vSAN and HA values equal (or equivalent).  

Each ESXi host has a vSAN storage provider, but only one is active. Storage providers on other ESXi hosts are in standby. If an ESXi host with an active storage provider fails, a storage provider from another host actives.

Actives = "becomes active" (the words used in vSphere 6.7 documentation), but avoiding the connotation of passivity in "becomes". Apparently the authors want us to imagine the storage provider as the agent of its own destiny. But that isn't the case. It's the vSAN component of vCenter that will make a storage provider active. So why is it important to promote an imaginary picture of community and personal agency?