Re: [Lingo] Terminology help

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull.stephen.fw@example.com>]

Claus Aranha writes:
 > Adding 2 cents:
 > 
 > We recently hired a company to design a website for an event in the
 > university.

Ouch.[1]

 > They used "モバイル" and "PC" to identify/separate the two versions
 > of the design.

I was going to suggest "パソコン" and I think there's a slight
advantage because many Japanese have a taste for "balance" in naming
(at least in personal names).  I suppose you could argue that "PC" = 
"ピーシー", though.

I don't think anybody who doesn't work in David's company will
understand "fixed seating" (but maybe that's just me).  I agree that
services can be distinguished as "wired" and "wireless", but that has
rather different connotations to me than PC and mobile, it's more a
ops-side expression.  Real people just don't use wired connections
with their notebooks any more, but in a UI context notebooks need to
be classed with fixed seating, I think.

I wonder if the distinction is more touch operation than size?  (Ie,
an A4 tablet with no keyboard or mouse is "mobile", while a mousy
notebook with keyboard A5 screen would be "PC"?)  OTOH, obviously the
supermarket self-checkout cash register is anything but mobile....

Regarding "traditional computer, you know what I mean," well, "You're
gonna have to pry my OS/360 JCL manual and associated hardware from my
cold dead fingers."  Now, that's what I call traditional computing! :-)


Footnotes: 
[1]  I hope it's not any of the companies that did the main website,
TWINS, FAIR, and especially not KDB and the recent offsite "workplace
stress test" (the latter "especially not" class have or had serious
security issues that I personally stumbled into, but refused to
exploit because I just don't exploit just because it's possible; the
former three just suck on accessibility, I18N, and navigability --
nothing that anybody really cares about, right?)  Can you tell that
the university has been wasting my time with triply-redundant
paperwork again?  Nah, nobody would think *that*, right?