Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdknsk | Hacker News Reader

I have a question. Why did a moderator lowercase OpenPOWER? It makes a difference.

To the mod:

POWER is not a typo, and it is not a emphasis, this is the trademark from IBM, the thing is really named POWER in all caps.

IMHO, that doesn't mean it's not shouting. At some point, gratuitous typography runs the risk of people refusing to respect it. For example, that company that seems to expect people to spell its name with a trailing exclamation point.

I have a bit more sympathy for IBM since they weren't exactly going for viral adoption and (seriously) their products have a long tradition of being lowercase-challenged.

>"The name is an acronym for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_POWER_Instruction_Set_Archi...

Right, not contrived at all.

It will be interesting to see if the New York Times refers to it as "I.B.M.'s P.O.W.E.R. technology."

A.F.A.I.K., N.Y.T.'s quaint style guide advises periods for initialisms (which are pronounced letter-by-letter) but no periods for acronyms (which are pronounced like words).

We also write Patriot Act not PATRIOT Act.

May I suggest: "Patriot" Act

Shouldn't we call out particularly egregious bits of language engineering when we see them?

"IMHO, that doesn't mean it's not shouting. "

So why did you write IBM, instead of Ibm? Or ARM, instead of Arm?

Because I find meaningless three letter acronyms much more palatable than five letter contrived ones.

The contrivedness of an acronym increases exponentially with its length.

EDIT: OK, I give in. I had too much fun hanging out with the password cracking guys at the awesome Passwords 13 conference last week.

Have you been anywhere near technology for the past 20 years? POWER has been its name forever.

Indeed. It was exactly 20 years ago, almost to the day, that I quit working for that IBM reseller in RTP, NC and took a career detour into lesser things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com