August 19, 2008, 12:17 PM — I cut my technological teeth in a more innocent age. Back then, a "floppy" disk meant what it said. Back then, slides were printed on acetates. You know stuff that you could slide.
Back then, printers had roller teeth that grabbed the perforated paper and hauled your content out into the world amid much noise and clamour. We were simple folk back then, but we were happy.
Part of the simplicity of the old days was that acronyms actually meant something. I don't mean that they could be spelled out and understood as a series of words. That goes without saying. What I mean is that if I told you that X was a DR-DOS disk, you could infer useful information about it. The same was true for many other acronyms of the day : MNP level 3, Centronics interface, EGA and so on.
One short acronym or phrase you could communicate a whole lot of useful information. Today we seem to be surrounded with a new class of acronym and a new class of phrase. The modern beasts seem to me to carry a lot less information than used to be the case. Take video and audio standards for example. I am currently knee deep in problems creating, processing and sharing audio and video. I am not short of "standard" acronyms that are supposed to be helping me. They don't seem to mean much.
For example, my JVC camcorder can record to an SD card. Great. Lets start there. I can go get an SD card...unfortunately apart from variations in capacity - which I understand (I think) - there seems to be variants on what it is to be an SD card. SDHC or plain SD? They look the same, smell the same...but are different...somehow.
I forge on. I shoot some video, recording into the SD card and move the card to my trusty Lenovo X61 running Ubuntu. It has a reader for SD (or is that SDHC?) cards. I plug it in. The card pops up. Happy days! Hmm ... the videos appear as .MOD files. I have never heard of .MOD. I click it. Magic happens, the video works! What?
I look at the properties. It appears to be an MPEG-2 file. Maybe all is well after all? MPEG is a standard right? Is a .MOD same as a .VOB? I have heard of those. Are they both MPEG-2 thingies? Dunno...
Using an SD card reader, my daughter loads the video up on her Macbook Air. She clicks on it. Bang! Error message. Some more digging, we have here an MPEG but we don't have the right codec or something. Hmmmm. Is the MPEG acronym really telling me anything of use I wonder? Frustration descends like a black cloud all around me. Life is too short.
I get flashbacks. Flashbacks of similar grief last month with some screencams. Screencams that were all (apparently) created by the same screencam-ing software. All in AVI format. I clicked one. It worked. I sat on my laurels. When the time came (at a trade show, with a customer looming over me) to show video 6 - also in AVI - I clicked it. Bang. Error message. No such codec buddy!
Does the "AVI" acronym really mean anything useful? How did we get into this mess? Am I missing something? Audio/video is not my primary field of experience but gosh, it sure looks to me as if things could be a whole lot simpler than they are.
A good place to start would be some acronyms that actually mean something.
