{"id":98595,"date":"2018-04-25T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-25T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=98595"},"modified":"2019-03-13T00:46:24","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T07:46:24","slug":"20180425-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20180425-00\/?p=98595","title":{"rendered":"Microspeak: Tented"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s a citation for the Microspeak term <i>tented<\/i> from <a HREF=\"https:\/\/careers.microsoft.com\/jobdetails.aspx?jid=325644\">an old Microsoft job listing<\/a> that is no longer available, maybe because the <a HREF=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/\">req<\/a> has been filled. <\/p>\n<blockquote CLASS=\"q\"><p>You and your team will decide how the Office clients and services measure their success in performance sensitive areas like latency, memory\/disk footprint, and battery life not only for the devices of today but also on the evolving ecosystem of hardware including new, <i>tented<\/i> devices that Microsoft is building.  <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>What is a &#8220;tented device&#8221;? <\/p>\n<p>No it&#8217;s not <a HREF=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/gadgets\/2012\/11\/a-good-ultrabook-a-bad-tablet-the-lenovo-ideapad-yoga-13-review\/\">a two-in-one laptop in the tent configuration<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s also not <a HREF=\"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/the_power_of_software\/2008\/09\/19\/intense-computing-or-in-tents-computing\/\">a data center in a tent<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>The term started in Windows 8. The hardware team was developing some new hardware devices. One was a tablet that would run Windows on an ARM processor. (That device would eventually be marketed under the name <a HREF=\"https:\/\/www.engadget.com\/2012\/10\/16\/microsoft-surface-behind-the-scenes\/\"><i>Surface RT<\/i><\/a>.) Another was a tablet that would run Windows on a desktop-class processor. (That device was marketed under the name <i>Surface Pro<\/i>.) <\/p>\n<p>These were top secret projects, with access very tightly controlled. They were so top secret that you weren&#8217;t even allowed to say the product code names in the presence of people who weren&#8217;t cleared for access, because the mere act of saying a code name discloses the fact that the project <i>exists at all<\/i>. The code phrase for saying that somebody has been cleared for access to the top secret projects was <i>in the tent<\/i>. If you wanted to know whether it was okay to discuss the top secret projects with Alice, you would ask whether Alice was <i>in the tent<\/i>. <\/p>\n<p>This phrase <i>in the tent<\/i> had some catchiness to it, so people started applying it to any case where there was a top secret project. And since all cool words get verbed eventually, the term <i>in the tent<\/i> led to the verb <i>tented<\/i>. <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;Is Alice tented for project X?&#8221; =     &#8220;Has Alice been granted access to information about project X?&#8221;     which basically boils down to     &#8220;Is it okay to discuss project X with Alice?&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;This relates to a tented project.&#8221; =     &#8220;This related to a project for which access to any information     is tightly restricted.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;This is a feature for a tented device.&#8221; =     &#8220;This is a feature for a device for which access to any information     is tightly restricted.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Few projects rise to this level of secrecy, but in case you have one, there&#8217;s a Microspeak term to describe it. <\/p>\n<p><b>Bonus chatter<\/b>: Some years later, I learned that the concept of being &#8220;in the tent&#8221; is recursive: There are <a HREF=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Turtles_all_the_way_down\">tents inside tents<\/a>! Even though you are tented for some project X, there may be a part of that project that is double-top-secret, and you need to be tented for that part of the project to know about it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No peeking into the tent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[105,26],"class_list":["post-98595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-microspeak","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>No peeking into the tent.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}