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An acronym by any other name

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 27 Jan 2005 11:25 GMT

The industry is facing a new crisis, one that cuts to the core of the innovation engine that drives us all. Forget about Moore's Law faltering at the edge of physics, put aside all worries about complexity defeating our security and management needs. The abyss into which we stare is deeper than either. We are running out of acronyms.

For years, engineers and marketing types alike rapaciously mined the English language. At first, the pickings were plentiful. Your display is composed of single bits of information that make up the picture elements? Call them pixels. Randomly accessible memory? RAM. The language of information technology glistened with newly cut jewels: modems, IO, VDU, hex, DMA, CPU -- some might be less than beautiful, but all filled a need, were quick to say and brooked no ambiguity. It was all so easy.

Too easy. As the seams close to the surface were worked out, finding new ways to describe new ideas became harder and the results less satisfactory. Where once the simple LAN did full service for your local area network, now the 802.11a/b/g high speed DSS/FSS wireless LAN has to be coupled to the incomprehensible Wi-Fi -- wireless fidelity, whatever that means. That in turn mutates to WiMax which some marketeer would probably say means Wireless to the Max, if you let them. Some people have given up altogether: Zigbee might be a fine name for a children's cartoon character, but it has no cognitive connection whatsoever with the 802.15.4 low-power personal area networking standard Might as well call your next CPU Spongebob Squarepantium. At least Pentium sounded like a real word.

Yet those who continue to try and stick to the rules do no better. Ultrawideband wireless takes the standard inflection to UWB, which is fair enough -- were it not for the fact it has five syllables, enough for the second line of a haiku and one more than the word it seeks to replace. There is a move afoot to call the technology uweeba, but that has gained no ground, probably because any word with 'wee' in the middle has overtones of childishness and tweeness. Or take the well-meaning folks behind OpenOffice.org. That's easy enough to say but looks as ugly as a bullfrog in print: you can't call it Open Office because that's not its name, and attempts to render it as OOo resemble a hieroglyph for a grazing cow.

There is even the suspicion that some may be using this global shortage for their own ends. Take the Microsoft trusted computing initiative called Palladium. That was a splendid name. Not only is it a tarnish-resistant metal, but in classical times it was the name for a sacred object that safeguarded a city or state. Yet as controversy mounted, Palladium was ditched in favour of the Next Generation Secure Computing Base -- NGSCB. Try saying that, remembering what it stands for or understanding what it means -- and watch it drift off the radar like a stealth bomber.