On Tue, September 16, 2014 12:03 pm, Warren Young wrote: > On 9/15/2014 16:54, Paul Heinlein wrote: >> On Mon, 15 Sep 2014, Valeri Galtsev wrote: >> >> 1. a throw-away line meant as a joke, > > I didn't take it as a joke so much as a comment that where he works, > high-end hardware is available for the asking. SLC is the most > expensive sort of SSD; if it's so readily available that he can joke > about using them for paving tiles, he's pooh-poohing my observation that > adding an SSD to a ZFS pool to accelerate it isn't free. Where he > works, it effectively *is* free. > > Where *I* work, a freed-up second-hand 40 GB first-generation SSD is a > welcome boon. > >> Who gets to say that USB is >> an acceptable acronym while SLC is not? If you know, how does one become >> that person? > > Prescriptivist lexicographers are popinjays that try to tell you what > the legal words are. > > The descriptivists are the real lexicographers, because they merely try > to figure out which words are actually being used in a widespread > fashion and try to document the meaning(s) of those words. They > understand how language actually works. > > SLC is perfectly cromulent to a descriptivist. It's in wide use in a > large community, and a large fraction of that community agrees on its > meaning. I would comment here even though you answered someone's else argument - put much better than I can do. (after all I'm not linguist in any language, not even in my native one ;-) My take on it is it is your decision to be understood by me or not. If I'm anxious to decipher what is not obvious I will look it up. I often do (lying of course: I do it only occasionally). And I can easily find out that SLC stands for Salt Lake City (and quite a few other things). But, of course, if I didn't spare enough effort I may not deserve to understand discussions above some technical (or abbreviational ;-) level. As they will say in volleyball: the ball is on other side. Valeri > > Keep in mind that there are only about 17,000 three-letter acronyms. > Most will have conflicts. > > Yes, most. XQZ is yet unused according to http://www.acronymfinder.com/ > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++