Accountancy
A pernicious personality disorder. An individual that suffers from this condition is referred to as an accountant. Etymologically, “actuary” has the same root as the word “accountant” and its meaning is related. An actuary is an individual who suffers from chronic accountancy.
Agent
An agent is an “informer” program sent out into the network to inform on other programs. This sounds sinister – and it is. There are probably a host of clandestine agents running on your PC right now. According to conspiracy theorists, the CIA, KGB, Al Qaeda and all organisations bent on world domination deploy software agents. Some are double agents. They’re really working for the Al Qaeda even though the CIA planted them. Some viruses are actually agents pretending to be viruses. Some trojan horses are actually moles. Other viruses are assassins sent out to destroy enemy agents. The reason that computers need to get more powerful each year is so that they have the capacity to run the millions of agents that are out there on the internet and living in your computer right now.
Archiving
A way of deleting data by writing it to magnetic tapes, which will, if ever tested, prove to be unreadable.
Artificial Intelligence
The doomed attempt to make computers behave like HAL in 2001, A Space Oddessy.
Athiest
Someone who doesn’t believe in spell checkers.
Audit Trail
Audit trails excite accountants, but not system designers. Accountants are obsessed with knowing exactly how money moves around in accounting systems, so that no mistakes are made and fraud becomes traceable. The audit trail tracks what happens. Systems designers hate audit trails because they are not cool and innovative. The best way to stop hackers and fraudsters is to design a system that is so convoluted that nobody is quite sure how it works.
Autoformat
A word processor command that orders the word processing software to irretrievably trash the current document in a way that cannot be reversed by the “Undo” command. It has no other function.
In Norwegian (the langage), we sometimes define (our translation of) Artificial Intelligence as a contrievance by the (as translated from our language) artificial intelligentsia. I don’t know the ethymology, maybe even this stems from Englsih.