Today I feel like an abbreviated rant. About ambiguity for the sake of brevity.
What do SMS, SMP and TSO have in common? They're all ambiguous mainframe TLA's!
What's a TLA? Why a Three-Letter Acronym of course! That is, unless you wish to point out that it's not an acronym if it doesn't form a word, in which case it's a Three-Letter Abbreviation. In other words, even TLA itself has a somewhat ambiguous meaning.
Then there are ETLA's - Extended TLA's, or Four-Letter Acronyms/Abbreviations.
I blame JFK, LBJ and the lot of them for the initial steps down this path. But whether or not it's really their faults, the fact is that we've discovered a real affinity for these brief referents (heck, even my parents chose my initials - RWH - before choosing my first and middle names).
So, what's the problem? Ambiguity.
Take SMS, for example - System-Managed Storage on the mainframe, Short Message Service on your cell phone.
Or SMP - aka SMP/E on the mainframe, the primary way we install and maintain software. In the distributed world, it stands for Symmetric Multi-Processing. To make it even weirder, I recently heard Parallel Sysplexes being referred to as SMP environments... referring to the second of these meanings!
Even CA isn't immune to this - we have an internal Technical Sales Organization which is called TSO. I've recommended we call the mainframe portion of it "TSO/E".
So, what are we going to do about it? IDK (LOL) I guess I'm just going to rant and then put up with it... RU2?