Perhaps it’s only come across my radar screen[sup]1[/sup] because I am in a non-profit environment, but what’s with this “ping” business?
“I’ve pinged him but I haven’t heard back.”
“Could you ping him and just let him know about this decision?”
I know what they mean so I can’t pull off the “Do what with the who now?” but I feel myself being pulled under. I’ve even almost adopt some of these phrases just because the shorthand is easy. :eek:
Where did it come from?
[sup]1[/sup]The phrase that “ping” supplanted as the latest
It’s a computing term. Basically every operating system comes with a “ping” program. All it does is send a short “Are you there?” message to another computer and waits for it to reply. So you can use ping to see if a computer is alive and on a network.
Apparently the name came from sonar operators, who called a sonar pulse a “ping”.
I work in IT with Unix and Linux systems. If I hear someone use “ping” this way, I assume it comes from the Unix/Linux command of the same name, which is mostly used to see if a particular machine is up and can be accessed from the machine you’re using.
I thought the phrase originally derived from the submarine service, where sailors would send out a sonar signal to ‘ping’ their target. Sort of like playing ‘gotcha’ with your fellow subs or other marine vessels while out on wargame maneuvers, or to annoy russian subs during the cold war.
Oh, jeez. I know what ping really means, and guessed what they meant by it. I’d have trouble not rolling my eyes at their blatant geekiness if they used the term ping that way with a straight face.
My wife’s employer has a company-wide IM system, and she and her co-workers use “ping” to mean, “send an IM to see if the person is at work/available to talk/IM/whatever.” I don’t think I’ve heard anyone use it outside of that context.
For anyone who played counterstrike back in the day, ping is a noun, not a verb. (I only played at my friends house, cause he was rich and had the computers and internet, so forgive me if I don’t remember entirely correct.) See, you could perform a ping command to the server that was hosting the game, and it wouldn’t just tell you if you were connected, but also how long it took to reply back. That number (I think it was measured in hundredths of a second) was your ping.
“How come you didn’t shoot that guy?”
“I couldn’t even see him! My ping’s freaking 150 over here!”
It almost used to be civilized… now it’s just “LAG!!LOLOLOL11!!!”
Jeeeeeez, it sounds like 1993 in here-- brilliant. When you could alter your profile to give a clever lyric from Psychic TV or something if someone dared ‘finger’ your account ,and you pinged your pal at Harvey Mudd to see whether you could ‘talk’ them. So much cheaper than the phone. S
Hey, Mac terminal still knows ping. . . and finger! And talk! Yay!
So “ping” went corporate? How. . . geeky.