[Leica] Re: Mac User and Programmer [extended OT rant]

[Jeff Moore <jbm@jbm.org>]

2002-06-16-13:33:51 Marc James Small:
> Folks who use acronyms are, generally, those unwilling to communicate
> to the public. 

Folks who use acronyms are, in my experience, more often people who
converse routinely with others in their field who share a common base
of knowledge, and who individually and collectively resent the time
which would be wasted on unnecessary communication overhead if they
always spelled out every word of phrases every one of them knows too
well already, and who indeed tend to resent speakers who waste their time
as listeners in that fashion.  It's akin to my instant hatred of
people who walk slowly on a crowded sidewalk, yet are not obviously
infirm;  it's the same phenomenon which dictates that people who stand
stock-still on escalators rather than continuing to walk (especially
if they're on the conventional "passing" side) are a drag on society
and should clearly be killed.

As a technogeek, I knew instantly that an SA (two letters, two
syllables) is a System Administrator (20 characters, 7 syllables);
succinctly transmitted, and there was no doubt which universe of
acronyms was being accessed because of the context provided by the
surrounding text.

Context is indeed important, though: I would not disagree that the
original poster should probably have spelled out the acronym, given
the mixed audience, just as when I've been a member of a staff of
Systems Administrators we would tend to refer to ourselves as SAs
among ourselves, and as Systems Administrators when speaking to the
less adept (managers and small children).

I don't doubt that there exist people who use acronyms to thwart
communication rather than to streamline it;  I merely take issue with
your contention that all acronym users are such.  The experience I recall
with such people has been quite limited, but perhaps that's due to a
sampling bias: as soon as I recognise talkers who aren't actually trying
to communicate, I tend to walk away and do something more interesting.
This may occur in me at such a low level that I've purely ceased to
notice whole flocks of them...

> I suspect that this is the sort of foolishness which
> afflicts Mac users.

I've always associated an entirely different sort of foolishness with
Mac users -- the sort of foolishness which leads to comfort with a
user interface whose designers assumed that the users are too silly
to keep track of their fingers individually, and thus must operate a
mouse as if with a mitten on[1];  the sort of foolishness which leads
to the vendor's having also assumed (perhaps rightly) that users are
too technophobic to deal with as simple a concept as 8, 16 or 24-bit
display devices and must be coddled with such fuzzy vaguenesses as
"thousands of colors" and "millions of colors";  the sort of
foolishness which has led to FTP clients' being known by which cute
animated creature is represented as dragging the files across the
network (do you like the doggie in Fetch, or perhaps the little
bounding kangaroo?)

The thing is, I've seen a new class of Mac user coming down the pike,
and I'm one of them.  With the advent of Mac OS X, technogeeks like me
can now use a mainstream commercial OS (er, need I say "operating
system"?) without deep shame and loathing -- OS X is Unix-flavored
beneath the little pictures, does proper preemptive multitasking[2],
has a comprehensible programming interface and many of the tools
longtime Unix users expect for getting things done.  It's a little
weird, but it has great potential.  So... while I still find Linux the
most comfortable environment for real editing/email/programming
productivity, and it and kin[3] still have a stability edge over X
(I've found Linux kernels to crash less than once every two years or
so, and I've had OS X fall over about eight times in the two months
I've had it), it's a nice luxury to be able to use mainstream
commercial drivers and applications.


[1] The traditional Windows mouse embodies a similar weak-mindedness:
    it supplies only two buttons, even though Unix workstation users
    have long known that the proper number of buttons atop a mouse is
    three, since that is how many fingers lie there when the thumb and
    pinkie are doing grasping duty at the sides.

[2] Too far off topic to be explained in detail in even this rant, and
    besides, I expect that those among us who care what it means already
    know.  I'd be glad to explain if someone asks.

[3] You won't catch me disrespecting the BSDs[2] here.
- --
To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html