First and formost, lets keep things civil. Everybody is entitled to an opinion and more than welcome to express it. There's no need to get snippy. Now, I trust that no more will need to be said along these lines.
iosif wrote (Thursday 02 September 2004 10:12 pm): > 1. it's pronounced something like F.S.-check, as in, "there's an F S > check meeting tonight, and man it has a cool name". as for lacking > vowels, a lot of abbreviations and organizations do fine without: > BBB, PBK, PKP, and even student senate with the dreaded SS. Well, from everything I've seen/heard most people do actually say it fsssk. Sure, it stands for the File System Checker, but why say something long like "FS-Check" when fsssk is so much faster. Also, most, if not all, of the examples you give are spelled out when said, eg. Bee Bee Bee, Pee Bee Kay, &c. Eff Ess Cee Kay just don't have a good ring to it, or so it seems to me. > 2. FSCK is a great name and i was never much into the in-joke. it > gets points because it's an actual command, and a fairly serious one > when failed. Yes, it is an actual command, so people who have experience with UNIX like operating systems will know what it means. But what about the beginner who's only used KDE/GNOME? Or the prospective user who hasn't a clue about the low level stuff like that? So, it's not "inside" as in "about 10 people," but it is in terms of the whole population. > 3. one can't claim that the name is terrible because it lacks a > vowel while simultaneously lamenting that people will interpret a > consonant 'S' as some other vowel. pick one or the other. See my notes above. Fsssk doesn't have any vowels in it, really. The Ss are just a soft sound seperating the beginning of the word from the hard stop of the K. > as for it > potentially being misconstrued as profanity, well, we're all big kids > now and i don't think the world will end. i'll put my name up next > to it any day of any week with a campus size of 10 or 10,000. The way I see this issue has to do with the image that we, as a group, portray. If I, as person knowing a lot about this knowledge domain, saw a group called FSCK, I would have a reaction along the lines of, "Funny, but fairly juvenile." And personally, thats not an image I want associated with myself or a group I'm involved in. > 4. abbreviations don't go on resumes, because it's lazy and not > everyone knows every shortening. that's why we, as big kids now, put > down things like Association of Computing Machinery and Free Software > Club in Kirksville (or if you're into brevity, Free Software Club). This is a valid point, though I fail to see what being a "big kid" has to do with it... However, consider this scenario: You're in an interview, talking about your school experience. FSCK is brought up. You go off talking about it, and accidently refer to it as "FSCK." Yes, a silly slipup, but given that this would be how you had thought of it for the past four or so years, understandable. The interviewer says, "Excuse me!" You don't get the job. In short, even if you don't put it on your resume, it may very well come up in any number of ways. And if it comes up, you're again faced with the trouble of explaining what the fsck "FSCK" is. So, in short, we could more than likely make it work as Free Software Club in/of Kirksville (FSCK) but there should be serious discussion of it. -- Peter Snoblin - http://entropicaccess.net/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- To get off this list, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with Subject: unsubscribe -----------------------------------------------------------------
