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What is your least favourite acronym? (lemmy.nz)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

563 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Mine is OOO for Out Of Office. I always misread it in my head like a ghost and it takes me a few seconds to process. It also doesn't translate to speech—you have to say the whole thing.

Interested to see if others have similar acronyms they beef with.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Do you remember before we had usb devices, our laptops had credit-card-sized PCMCIA slots?

I love that word. What's it mean? People can't memorise computer industry acronyms. ;-)

[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago

Oh wow! I knew about TWAIN (technology without an interesting name), but that takes the cake!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Sorry to ruin the fun but it stands for "Personal Computer Memory Card International Association"

There is a joke around the name, as you said, though :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Computer_Memory_Card_International_Association

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Nothing ruined :) I knew that, and wanted to share the fun version first. Thanks for providing the true version, of course.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Another real acronym with a funny story (maybe only to old geeks like me) is STONITH.

Back when "high availability" meant two servers with shared storage and a "heartbeat" network connection, if one of the servers failed, the second one would notice there was no more heartbeat from the first and pick up the traffic so users would never know.

However, if the servers lost the network connection, there'd be no way to tell if the other server was still running and if both continued accessing the shared storage, they could corrupt the application data. So each server could take over if it noticed the other wasn't available by executing STONITH (Shoot The Other Node In The Head) basically sending a power down signal to the PDU, making sure the other node couldn't corrupt data.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

That is amazing! Thank you for this!

My dad is from the punch card era and he had stories like this. But that one is new to me!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Installing linux drivers / modules for PCMCIA wifi cards :(

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

That’s the neat part, you don’t

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Happily it started being known as PC-CARD.