Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2004 11:59:41 -0800 From: Johnson David <DavidJohnson@Siemens.com> To: Andrew Predoehl <apredoehl@go.mailsvc.com>, freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Subject: Re: What are they talking about??? Message-ID: <200401081159.41767.DavidJohnson@Siemens.com> In-Reply-To: <005601c3d61e$fcad88e0$0100007f@kafu.east.kz> References: <005601c3d61e$fcad88e0$0100007f@kafu.east.kz>
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On Thursday 08 January 2004 09:05 am, Andrew Predoehl wrote: > Hello! I'm reading with some interest the tempest that's a-blowin' > on -chat, and as a newbie, I just got here and I'm wondering what the > heck these people are talking about. A few questions (not -questions > questions, just newbie questions): What's bikeshedding, or a > bikeshed disagreement? What's the heck are GEOM and SMP? What's a > WIKI? Anybody know a dictionary of these acronyms that I read all > the time? I can figure out 90% of them but some of them (like PITA*) > leave me mystified... Ha! Bikeshedding is discussed in the FreeBSD FAQ. As far as I know (AFAIK), this term is only used regularly in the BSD communities. In essence, it refers to a Bikeshed Construction Committee, where people who know nothing about building bikesheds argue over what color the bikeshed should be. They're not doing this to be destructive or argumentative, but they are keenly interested in bikesheds, but not knowing anything about it, fallback to discussions of colors. A good example would be a hypothetical group set up to create a GUI installer for FreeBSD. The group ends up imploding over arguments on Qt versus GTK+ versus FOX versus Tk, or shell versus perl versus python versus ruby. SMP is "symmetric multiprocessing", or systems with multiple CPUs. GEOM has something to do with a filesystem infrastructure. More info at the FreeBSD site. WIKI is a type of web site where users can edit the content. PITA means "pain in the ass", as in "these acronyms are a PITA!" David
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