What are they talking about???

[Kevin D. Kinsey, DaleCo, S.P.]

Andrew Predoehl wrote:

>Hello!  I'm reading with some interest the tempest that's a-blowin' on -chat,
>and as a newbie, I just got here and I'm wondering what the heck these people
>are talking about.  A few questions (not -questions questions, just newbie
>questions):  What's bikeshedding, or a bikeshed disagreement?  What's the heck
>are GEOM and SMP?  What's a WIKI?  Anybody know a dictionary of these acronyms
>that I read all the time?  I can figure out 90% of them but some of them (like
>PITA*) leave me mystified...
>
>Andrew
>
>* e.g., from freebsd-mobile vol. 42 #1 msg 3, 5 Jan 2004.
>
>  
>
PITA isn't too hard.  If your American, anyway ...
it starts out "Pain in the..."

I'd recommend that you cruise Eric S. Raymond
"Jargon File" for some of the lingo.  Great stuff,
and since you're interacting with hacker culture,
it's a "must read."  I wouldn't read it all at once,
though, 'cause it's addictive...maybe bookmark
it in your browser. ;)

GEOM and SMP are technologies that are being
implemented (more or less) in FreeBSD at the
current time.  GEOM is about disks/filesystems,
but I don't know much about it.  SMP is "symmetric
multi-processing", IIRC. 

A WIKI is some acronym for a community-type/
cooperative web site, I think.  Best try Google for that.

As for a bikeshed disagreement, I believe that's
also in the ESR I recommended to you.  Basically,
though, it's something like this...In any group of
people, if you say you're going to build a great
big skyscraper (or $foo), people will just sit and
(therefore) silently give assent to your project, because
they no nothing about skyscraper ($foo) building and
assume that you do, hence they leave you alone, let you
work, and generally keep their opinions to themselves.

Conversely, everyone thinks that they know how
to build a bikeshed......

Kevin Kinsey