Techno Musings

So I’m just in the middle of reading a presentation by one of the larger IT vendors and I’m finally sick of this term so I’m going to rant for a minute. The “this term” is “transparent to…” You hear it all the time, transparent to the application or transparent to the storage, or transparent to the network. Okay let’s understand the definition of transparent firstly from Wikipedia.

Comparisons of 1. opacity, 2. translucency, and 3. transparency; behind each panel is a star

In the field of optics, transparency (also called pellucidity or diaphaneity) is the physical property of allowing light to pass through a material; translucency (also called translucence or translucidity) only allows light to pass through diffusely. The opposite property is opacity. Transparent materials are clear, while translucent ones cannot be seen through clearly. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent)

Well to me this would imply that if something is transparent you can see through it, correct? Following that line of thinking then what people are actually saying with the usage of “transparent to…” is that the thing on the other side of “to” can see through clearly without interference to the underlying operations. However, this is not what people mean. What they mean is that the thing on the other side of “to” is not aware and in fact does not see clearly or at all what is going on “under the covers.” To me this implies that what IT professionals really should be saying is: “opaque to…” Further if we wanted to talk about something that has some but not all of the visibility into what is going on “under the covers” then we should be talking about “translucent to…” I realize that IT professionals aren’t going to run to my line of thinking and I’m okay withthat. However, I do feel like I need to be on the record so to speak on this point as it bothers me. So now that I have brought up this point I can let it go, I hope. Further I hope that this gets those of you that read my blog to think about the terms we use in our arcane IT language a little bit more.

P.S. I also have a problem when people say NIC Card. No it is not a Network Interface Card Card — again what you are really saying — it is a Network Interface Card, or NIC.