On the RFID account

I’m always on the lookout for linguistic niceties and abominations, and this summary is too wonderful not to pass along. I can’t find a way to link directly to the 24 Jun entry at Beyond the Beyond, an RFID (etc.)-watch blog, so I’m reproducing the text here, with bits of emphasis added:

Web Semantics Watch VIII: RFID Jargon
Posted: 24 Jun 2006 04:44:44 -0600
Next-generation RFID tools expand the market

This InfoWorld article by James R. Borck is well worth a read for the techie contingent in RFID middle-management, but I find it chiefly remarkable for the startling beauty of its jargon. The RFID biz has plenty of rough patches ahead on its road to commercial ubitopia, but its geeks are shedding the initial hype and ballyhoo and generating a kind of poetry.

A few choice semantic nuggets from the article (and I grant Mr. Borck every credit here):

“newfound event stream”
“a flood of streaming data at high burst rates”
“an events management subengine winnows nuance from noise” (((Gosh-wow! This formulation isn’t just Flarf poetry, it *describes the very nature* of Flarf poetry.)))
“minimize the barrage before it hits the corporate network”
“a consortium of standards bodies and supply-chain interests”
“abstracts the internal machinations of relational databases”
“Time-based and delta change criteria”
“post-mortem latency”
“details on location, state, causality, and time reference”
“applications can rake supercharged events across complex rule sets”
“Stream Processing Engine”
“latencies too great to withstand the real-time surge”
“in-memory pattern matching and native temporal services”
“inevitable glitches, collisions, and partial reads”
“application sophistication will rise”
“insight into tomorrow’s highly distributed, real-time networks”
“delivers excellent distributed fail-over”
“an excellent next-step advance into building smart readers”
“support for the range of legacy and modern devices”
“a variety of interrogator interfaces”
(((And last but not least, these gnomic words of wisdom)))
“If you’re planning to deploy RFID today, prepare to face device compatibility issues, buggy software and firmware, global numbering standards that still need to be ironed out, and security threats in need of redress.”

1 thought on “On the RFID account

  1. Blacksheep

    “delivers excellent distributed fail-over”
    Well, shoot. I think we ALL had days like that…

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