If you want to buy a chair, order a chair from a company that claims to sell chairs, and receive a case of rotten tomatoes because the company decided to start calling cases of rotten totamoes "chairs", you'd be justifyably pissed off. Why? Because the word "chair" already means something. It's been taken. It's unavailable, like an occupied parking space, and you can't park anything else in it without breaking something. Makes sense, right?
So why is it that people who come up with computer terms often seem incapable of wrapping their heads around this relatively simple concept? Appropriation of existing terms is making the tech industry even more confusing than it already is:
There's Microsoft's ASP (Active Server Pages), and while there are certain philosophical similarities between it and the dangerous snake it shares a name with, the two weren't confused. Then a bunch of jackasses at USinternetworking decided that they were going to revolutionize the hosting industry by thoughtlessly calling their business model "Application Service Provider" and referring to it as "ASP". When you say ASP now, nobody knows what the hell you're talking about because you can run ASP at and buy ASP services from your ASP. Thanks, guys.
The authors of Quark, an audio player for unix, apparently didn't know or care about QuarkXPress (commonly referred to as "Quark"), the industry standard layout program for print. I don't know how long QuarkXPress has been in existence, but it was around well before I started using it over 11 years ago.
There was the Firebird debacle, where the people at the Mozilla project knowingly stole and are still using the name of a pre-existing database.
The acronym CSS was already taken for Cascading Style Sheets when the same geniuses who brought you region codes borrowed it for Content Scrambling System, the encryption method used in DVDs.
The Audio Engineering Society has a fairly decent claim on the AES acronym as it's been around for over 115 years. It co-developed a digital audio standard called AES/EBU with the European Broadcasting Union, which is commonly referred to as "AES". Naturally, the US government saw no problem with hijacking the initials for the Advanced Encryption Standard.
Hey, programmers: what does select() do? Ha ha ha! That's funny! Why? Because there are at least 4 standard API functions called select() that all do different things: in C on unix, it waits for a file descriptor to change; in Perl, it returns the current filehandle or sets the default filehandle for output; in SQL, it gets data from a table; in C on PalmOS, it does something with the serial port.
There are plenty of other duplications out there. Please, stop the freakin' madness!
Google and Webopedia are your friends. Is it really too much trouble to spend 3 minutes on research before pouring gasoline on the fire?
Request for business people in the tech sector: don't use a computer term unless you know what it means. For example, don't say "I'll ping you later" unless you actually plan to send me an ICMP packet.