Hi Steve, list,

Steve Litt writes:

> On Thu, 23 May 2019 12:15:06 -0700
> Rick Moen <rick@???> wrote:
>
>> Quoting Bruce Ferrell (bferrell@???):
>>
>> > I could be wrong, but based on the context of his question:
>> >
>> > AMI = Amazon Machine Image
>>
>> I know Josef, and, yes, that's exactly what he meant. Amazon EC2 and
>> all that.
>>
>> (Asterisk Management Interface, really? {snort})
>
> On the other hand, before we make little in-groups based on knowledge
> of ambiguous acronyms, consider what I do. If I introduce any acronym
> that isn't public knowledge to every Linux user (DHCP, NIS, NFS), on
> first use in the email I associate the spelled out version with the
> acronym. 5 seconds more typing, and everything's clear.

ACK.

# That's the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII,
# see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII) for acknowledge. Numerical
# value is 6 in all of octal, decimal and hexadecimal ;-)

> Of course I
> *do* lose that "knowledgeable expert" status I could have gained by
> whipping out an unknown acronym.

On more than one occasion I've found that some acronym "flashers" are
just wildly flapping arms and waving hands in thin air trying to make an
impresssion rather than "knowledgeable experts". Anyone serious about
trying to get something across to an audience whose knowledge level is
not known a priori would spell it out first time around (with the
acronym in parentheses) *or* provide a link to a (wikipedia?) page
explaining the thing.
As per above.

Hope this helps,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
 GnuPG key: F84A2DD9/B3C0 2F47 EA19 64F4 9F13  F43E B8A4 A88A F84A 2DD9
 Support Free Software                        https://my.fsf.org/donate
 Join the Free Software Foundation              https://my.fsf.org/join