Except that engineers are supposed to use precise, unambiguous language. I blame the computer guys for knowing jack of signal processing / communications theory and misusing the technical terms due to plain ignorance. It wouldn't be so bad if the ignorant fools in question weren't so arrogant...
I agree with that arrogant part. I think also though, it does get annoying when people know full well what you are talking about, but then interject with some clarification or correction or disambiguation that really wasn't necessary.
The problem is that sort of interjection ruins the conversation and interrupts the communication of ideas that are bigger than the individual words that comprise them.
It also gets annoying when people discuss things and in the end discover they are talking about different things, you know. When a networks guy talks about bandwidth, he might refer to bit rate or channel capacity, but for an RF engineer, bandwidth is measured in Hertz. Interrupting the commnunication of ideas is bad, but communicating imprecise ideas is close to useless.
So the onus is on you to make yourself clear in spite of the ambiguity (a simple way would be to mention a unit early in the conversation). Really, the terminology isn't going to change no matter how much noise you make, so it would be worthwhile to save yourself the effort.
I blame the computer guys for knowing jack of signal processing / communications theory and misusing the technical terms due to plain ignorance.
It's revenge!
But seriously, we also do it a lot to ourselves. There seems to be a programmer mindset -- experiencing our ability to figure things out using deduction and documentation, we get conditioned to think we can quickly get a working handle on anything. As a result, engineers and scientists of all sorts are constantly annoyed at computer guys posting stupid things. (But at least we can unite in our exasperation at journalists.)
We programmers live, "There's nothing more dangerous than a little knowledge." Often we live with the consequences. (In the late 90's I despaired at the dilution of the language around Object Orientation. Things have gotten better since then, somehow.)
