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Comment by wowczarek

3 days ago

There's an obscure Polish film from 2002, "Haker" (Hacker), obscure for many reasons and not in a good way; it's absolute drivel, not even accidentally funny in a MST3K, B movie kind of way - it's just really, really bad.

In this gem there is a conversation about hacking into some system, and a character asks another a completely nonsensical semi jargon question, which goes like this: "Did you try Emacs via Sendmail?". I shit you not.

This expression firmly cemented itself into Polish tech speak as a way to refer to or call out someone having absolutely no idea what they are taking about.

That expression reminds me of another old meme in Russian: "How does one patch KDE2 under FreeBSD?"

A common US equivalent comes from a Dilbert strip where the boss wants him to investigate databases, with the suggestion that “mauve has more RAM”.