Re: Slightly off topic: FUD ??
Hi,
>>"G" == G Crimp <ye416@freenet.victoria.bc.ca> writes:
G> Anyway, my question for the list is, "does anyone know what FUD
G> is". I have recently seen this acronym floating around in
G> relation to how big companies like micromush are going to combat
G> against the growing threat posed by open source. These references
G> are always saying stuff like normal FUD tactics won't work.
FUD: /fuhd/ /n./ Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to
found his own company: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt
that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers
who might be considering [Amdahl] products." The idea, of course,
was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with
competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally
accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people
who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of
competitors' equipment or software. See {IBM}.
IBM: /I-B-M/ Inferior But Marketable; It's Better
Manually; Insidious Black Magic; It's Been Malfunctioning;
Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a near-{infinite} number of even
less complimentary expansions, including `International Business
Machines'. See {TLA}. These abbreviations illustrate the
considerable antipathy most hackers have long felt toward the
`industry leader' (see {fear and loathing}).
What galls hackers about most IBM machines above the PC level isn't
so much that they are underpowered and overpriced (though that does
count against them), but that the designs are incredibly archaic,
{crufty}, and {elephantine} ... and you can't *fix* them
-- source code is locked up tight, and programming tools are
expensive, hard to find, and bletcherous to use once you've found
them. With the release of the Unix-based RIOS family this may have
begun to change -- but then, we thought that when the PC-RT came
out, too.
In the spirit of universal peace and brotherhood, this lexicon now
includes a number of entries attributed to `IBM'; these derive from
some rampantly unofficial jargon lists circulated within IBM's own
beleaguered hacker underground.
TLA: /T-L-A/ /n./ [Three-Letter Acronym] 1. Self-describing
abbreviation for a species with which computing terminology is
infested. 2. Any confusing acronym. Examples include MCA, FTP,
SNA, CPU, MMU, SCCS, DMU, FPU, NNTP, TLA. People who like this
looser usage argue that not all TLAs have three letters, just as
not all four-letter words have four letters. One also hears of
`ETLA' (Extended Three-Letter Acronym, pronounced /ee tee el
ay/) being used to describe four-letter acronyms. The term
`SFLA' (Stupid Four-Letter Acronym) has also been reported. See
also {YABA}.
The self-effacing phrase "TDM TLA" (Too Damn Many...) is
often used to bemoan the plethora of TLAs in use. In 1989, a
random of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin
"What do you think will be the biggest problem in computing in
the 90s?" Paul's straight-faced response: "There are only
17,000 three-letter acronyms." (To be exact, there are 26^3
= 17,576.)
--
"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the Legislature is
in session." Lysander Spooner
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@acm.org> <http://www.datasync.com/%7Esrivasta/>
Key C7261095 fingerprint = CB D9 F4 12 68 07 E4 05 CC 2D 27 12 1D F5 E8 6E
Reply to: