Saturday, August 29, 2009

TLA to FLA and beyond

This week I discovered a few new TLA’s (Three Letter Acronyms). These are ACL, PCL and MCL. Unfortunately I also discovered that when used with terms like ‘ruptured’ and ‘torn’ it is not a good prognosis for a knee. Still I’ll get over it, get fixed up, get fit and once again start to play my beloved football (soccer to some of you).

You might recall that I wrote a blog some time ago about airport codes and the potential to eventually run out of codes. See link below.

Today. I am amused. Very amused. This must be the analytical in me.

Consider this.
We were all familiar with BBC, ITV, CNN, MGM, WWE or WWF. The techoids among us are familiar with terms like XLS, DOC, PPT for our office documents or RAM, DVD or CDR as components of our PC or media centers.

Has anyone else noticed that there appears to be a trend to using FLA’s (Four Letter Acronyms) these days. Have we ran out of these or is the world moving into IT mode and creating a naming standard 2.0.

Many of you have heard of terms like HDMI, HTML, XSLT, PCML and J2EE. Some may have heard of SaaS and HaaS. A few may have been using WDSc. What is it with the little letters? Are we witnessing the birth of the second naming standard. Our kids are certainly into these with text language LMAO, PMSL and WUU2. You can look these up yourself.

With this in mind we should be covered for FLA’s for quite some time. If we exclude numbers we have 26x26x26x26 combinations available. A staggering 456976 configurations from which to choose from. That should keep us going for a while but with patenting and copyright on the increase these might run out sooner than we think.

Then we will be heading towards Five Letter Acronyms. Or FLA’s.

“Hmmmm. Isn’t that TLA for FLA already taken?” I hear you say. We might have to skip to SLA or (Six Letter Acronyms) or is that Service Level Agreements.

Interesting times ahead I guess. I am quite fond of the Five letter Acronyms though, especially BURMA :-)
Thanks for reading.
Lee.

2 comments:

  1. I've long known a useful SLA in the form of 'PEBKAC'. Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. Just the other day I learnt a similar but far more stealthy variation on that theme.

    Next time you're asked to go and sort out that stupid user's problems, just utter the cheery phrase "Oh, sure! That'll be a PICNIC." Problem In Chair. Not In Computer.

    ReplyDelete
  2. How come I can't read your comments, but have to post one instead?

    ReplyDelete

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