@scottalanmiller said:

Once upon a time (pre 1997, I think) MS SQL Server and Sybase were the same product. They split at some point. For a long time, MS SQL Server was just Sybase repackaged. To the best of my knowledge, Sybase has not had a product called "SQL Server" for decades. They make things like ASE now.

Shows you when the last time I messed around with that Same company I worked for switched from Sybase, flat files, and some other weird stuff inherited from some acquisitions to Oracle, I guess for a desire to spend even more money on licenses

I'd also like to add to Post 27 that for the most part almost all of the discussions I've had offline about Unix and Linux have been with Europeans, or Americans at conventions like Defcon, Blackhat, and HOPE, and that could also be a major influence on what I've heard as well, not having heard etsee at all prior to that. Additionally in the corporate world, I always heard "e-t-c". Even at large, nation unnamed ISP I worked there were many Unix machines, later replaced mostly by Linux, and in conversations I had with the various sysadmins, they either said "e-t-c" or one person specifically did say "et cetera."

So, perhaps there's a large gap between the European communities, hacker communities, and other corporate communities like with IBM. I'm still curious about any mention of pronunciation or non-abbreviated meaning any old manuals, especially standard setting/referencing ones may have if you know of any, but they're old manuals, and I haven't met many people aside from me that cares to read obsolete material.

@scottalanmiller said:

You can tell the pure Microsoft folks because they are often unaware that the relational database world is older and and far, far larger than just MS SQL Server.

Our conversation at Spiceworks on this issue actually began because I had mentioned an IT guy had told me that "Anyone who pronounces MySQL as anything other than My Sequel shows they don't really know anything about Sequel." And he tried to be a condescending smart ass, ironically he didn't even know basic SQL syntax, so I'm not sure what he was on about.

I only say "SQL Server" in the context of Microsoft if that's a part of the discussion, otherwise I do clarify MSSQL or Microsoft SQL Server. I do see people say "SQL Server" as if it's a definable product like Windows, when there are many, many servers which allow SQL. And really Sybase also calls theirs that too, IIRC, I may be wrong about that, it's been nearly 15 years.

@scottalanmiller Well, whatever happens, I'm just glad I'm not one of those gauche people who says "My SEQUEL", curiously I've even heard big-time MySQL people say this, it just sounds weird though.

@scottalanmiller said:

What drives me really crazy is when people are sloppy with SQL. Unlike /etc which has no defining body with authoritative pronunciation decision making power to determine what it must be, SQL, in all cases, does have a current, existing body that determines how it is pronounced in every instance. This is because the pronunciation is determined by the vendors who make the product. There is no ambiguity. Yet, for a series of products where there is no grey area, few things are pronounced more loosely!! In many cases these are commercial product or company names, not subject to personal interpretation.

SQL the language is pronounced "ess cue ell" and is owned and defined by IBM and several standards bodies. The pronunciation guide was built into the spec to make sure no one mistook the intent since SQL replaced the earlier SEQUEL language which, quite obviously, was pronounced "sequel."

MS SQL Server is also pronounced "sequel server" and is owned and defined by Microsoft. This is the only major vendor pronouncing it in this fashion.

MySQL is pronounced "my ess cue ell" and is owned and defined by Oracle.

PostgreSQL is pronounced "Post gress cue ell" and is owned and defined by PostgreSQL itself.

I remember talking to you about this at Spiceworks meeting and I did research (by that I mean looked it up for once) after we spoke and I saw you were right. I try to say "Sequel" for everything except the name "MySQL" but I sometimes fall back into saying "S-Q-L" for the language, but far less often than I used to. I always said "Sequel" for SQL Server and T-SQL, etc. My main confusion was calling SQL used for MySQL "S-Q-L" as well, not just in the name.

Edit: I'm now confused, are you saying the language is or is not "Sequel" since it replaced "SEQUEL"?

@scottalanmiller Based on what? Even manuals as far back as 1984, which I linked, point out it is short for et cetera. If it wasn't short for et cetera, what would it possibly be short for?

/usr is user, I sort of feel like you're being sarcastic now, because /usr was the original location for home directories, like /usr/dmr for Dennis Ritchie. I don't know of early attestments at all that these are anything except abbreviations, the acronyms come much later, seemingly the late 90s and early 2000s is when they were made popular.

If there are attestments that /usr means anything other than user, and /etc means anything other than et cetera prior to 1984, I'd love to see them, and that isn't sarcasm, but it's as far back as I was able to find, granted I didn't look too hard.

I do know people have been saying etsee for a long time, I even said I've heard of people saying it for years, I've never witnessed this myself though at all.

But you mention AIX, so I'm curious now if that has something to do with it at well. We're all saying Unix and even talking about Linux, but I'm starting to wonder if the overall community also has influence on this as well. I'm surprised you've never heard "et cetera" before, even 20 years ago I remember explicitly hearing that, because early on I said "e-t-c", and this was in the Linux community at the time, later on I got heavily involved in FreeBSD and also Sun, but admittedly I didn't have voice discussions about Sun that much, mostly electronic so I can't say with any confidence how people in that community said much of anything.

@MrWright4hire said:

On one hand I think it's beautiful how @tonyshowoff is passionate about his era, but disappointed that someone of his intelligence isn't excepting that fact that each generation customize life the way they see fit for comfort with words, beliefs and music. We should appreciate our own eras as well as share the beauty of it. However, we shouldn't discourage the new generation how to customize their era just because it's not what we are use to. Hence, having the strength to keep up with life.

I really hope this doesn't come across as condescending, trust me that's not my intent, but we are talking about the pronunciation of an abbreviation when spoken still, aren't we? I don't think it's that big of a deal, I was exploring the issue, and I even said that it seems as though "etsee" may become even more popular, but I didn't say or even mean to imply that if someone says that they know less, can do less, etc. I just find it really unusual and it wasn't meant to be pronounced that way. Additionally on the issue, if you read "I like cats, dogs, etc" you wouldn't say aloud "I like cat, dogs, etsee." That's neither here nor there, it's simply not that big of a deal, it's just really unusual.

And here's where I agree with @Carnival-Boy it's important to have standards, and this is an example of a newly popular thing hurting quality of work (time-wise), because I didn't understand at first what the other guy was saying when he told me "etsee" until he described it.

I've noticed this same issue with "intranet" which has morphed to mean "internal web site" rather than essentially a LAN, and that one I think is pretty annoying actually, more so than etsee, because it's not an issue of mispronouncing (as far as I'm concerned) it's an issue of completely changing the meaning of an established term in order to describe something else which already has one. It creates potential confusion and monstrous overlap with words like "internet" and "web site." This, however, has basically become main stream so I am not suggesting a crusade to stop it, but what I do, personally is, when someone uses it properly on other forums I'm on, I praise them for doing so, even if they're not even the OP.

However, if someone uses it incorrectly, I don't bring it up unless I'm speaking directly to them about something else. Is this insane? Probably, but my view is if amateur IT people can, at a whim, completely redefine what things mean based on god-only-knows-what, then it could be a thing where we need to create an Urban Dictionary for IT terms and go on consensus what people are talking about when they're trying to get a quote for a job or trying to define a project. See why this is important?

Normal people saying something incorrectly is nothing we can control (see hacker, hacking) or even try to, but within our realm, we need to at least try to stick to established standards.

@Dashrender Wow, "platform independent," is he describing SQL as an actual piece of software not a language/mark up? And the rest he says is just... I don't even...

Because you can have SQL front ends to many different types of databases, some non-RDBMS also have SQL front ends.

He's an expert in being ignorant as hell.

@Dashrender said:

I wanted to start by telling this guy that he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.

That's all you need to say in my opinion. Of course you can lay it all politely if you want

Anyway so he doesn't know what DB they use at all, but knows it's not SQL? How does he know?

@coliver said:

Don't get me started, I helped grade a few English papers while I was working in a high school, I know my writing here isn't that great but I do have a fairly strong understanding of the English language. To emphasize a point the kids were using emoji at the end of specific sentences. At least they used the right ones.

I guess now in literature you can show, not tell

@Dashrender What EHR do you use, out of curiosity?

And jeeze, ActiveX, can we please shoot that horse already and move to real web based apps instead of dangerous things that only work on crappy browsers that came out of time machines?

You're right though, (X)HTML is how the web works, ActiveX is basically a browser plugin, I don't consider it a part of the web, just something that people who use the web, use if they're really unlucky.

@coliver I was mostly using that as a rant against young people, you know how is typical of older people. Like "those damn vidya games." It is unusual to me, but I'm not bent out of shape about it, I just wanted to explore the history of it and how the popularity does seem to be fairly new. The first time I heard it was in 2010, I think, and at first I had no idea what the guy was talking about, and I had use Unix and been apart of both BSD and Linux communities since the mid 90s, a bit earlier in a few cases, but never had once heard anyone say "etsee."

And while it doesn't change the meaning of what they're talking about, it does create needless ambiguity for an abbreviation which already has had a pronunciation since the High Middle Ages. Like I said, "sighs-op", people who use "sighs-op" often get defensive like "etsee" people, just as you did, and yeah the typical response is "I don't care." Well, that's obvious, if you did, you'd change it, so that's moot and just serves as a "nyanya I don't care" more than anything constructive, not that I'm any more constructive.

If you prefer etsee, that's fine, keep using it, but "et cetera", depending on how you say it is only 1 or 2 more syllables in length and isn't as ambiguous, though I guess in time that may change since it seems to be getting more popular.

I have heard "e-t-c" a lot though, which is one syllable longer than "etsee," but actually I think I've heard more people say "e-t-c" than even "et cetera" and I have noticed it's heavily used among non-UK Europeans, though I've heard a lot of Americans and English say "e-t-c" too.

I am the same person that really dislikes that we are moving toward text speech and emoji in high school English papers.... This one doesn't really bother me.

What? Are you serious? You're pulling my chain here, right? Emoji? In some universe I can understand text to speech, but emoji?

What about all those damn young people now saying "etsee" for "etc" instead of "et cetera" or the more typical European "e-t-c"?

I'm not the only person that's reporting hearing a brash, 20-something, Ubuntu sportsman saying "etsee" and not knowing what the hell he's talking about at first. I've only heard it in the last 5 years or so from really young people who use things like Ubuntu.

What's even more irritating about it is how I now see these same people claim "etsee" is the "old school" pronunciation or that "all North Americans say etsee", talk about historical revisionism.

I've only heard, vaguely, of reports of much older school than me people saying "etsee" though I've never once actually heard this. Also a lot of date-based searching, it seems that "etsee" is very rarely mentioned before about 2009, and almost never prior to 2004, though it does come up.

Plus old school manuals (Chapter 2.3 talks about how they're abbreviations meant to be extended in pronunciation, and 2.6 mentions etc specifically) disagree. Unfortunately even older school manuals such as The UNIX Time-Sharing System don't mention /etc at all.

And things like "extended tool chest" is just idiotic, it's not extended, it's not for tools (though historically it did have a few programs in it, such as init, Fortran compiler, and a few other things, but that's long in the past, usually), it's for config, and the "editable text configuration", well text and editable is redundant, especially because "config" on Unix tends to imply this anyway.

"etc" as "etsee" really is no different than when people were sometimes saying "sighs-op" for "sysop" in the BBS days.

They're abbreviations, not acronyms.

@Dashrender There's also the "unschooling" types, which at face value, a lot of the unschooling things are interesting, but more often than not, in action seems to be a way just to avoid having to ever teach anything. The idea that "my child will learn to read/maths/whatever when s/he is ready and is interested to learn" doesn't seem quite logical, especially for potentially learning disabled students.

@Dashrender From what I've seen that's more of an amateur / pro-amateur belief, sort of like how all through the 90s it was widely believed movies and such could only be made on Macs, when most studios were actually using SGI, this is still a common belief today and may actually be closer to true than it ever was. I do know that some films such as Shrek 3 were made on Linux and FOSS. I'm no expert on this, and absolutely could be wrong, but it seems as though the higher professionals use things like Motion, PowerAnimator, Maya, and whatever else. I think Adobe's gained a mythos about how far they can actually take you, though certainly, I'm sure, there are places in big studios which use Adobe software, it's just not as dominate as they'd want you to believe.

@g.jacobse Yeah, I could never get through those New York winters without Canned Heat:

Youtube Video

@g.jacobse Milk and Bread being the sole most important things one needs if cold weather is approaching. It strikes me as strange, because it seems as though firewood or propane, or something would be more useful. Also, there is a sort of implication that cold weather, most of the US can stand easily, will lead to bread and milk shortages, though based on the photo and discussion so far, it seems the only shortages which exist, if any, are only there because of this belief.

This whole thing is a culture shock to me

Today's To Do List:

• Get my leprosy treated
• Commence DDoS attack against ThanksAJ.com

BTW, nice post, pretty informative, I bet especially to those new to AWS.

So, those of you who are way into PHP may or may not know that the recent push for scalar type hinting (being able to define int, string, bool, etc not just arrays), something which exists in languages like C#, has taken a major blow. I was originally going to write up a post here about it but I thought it was too much whining for this site, so I detailed it here:

http://tonyshowoff.com/articles/php-scalar-type-hinting-takes-a-massive-blow/

I honestly do think this is a major blow to PHP and I'm seriously wondering if I should switch to Go or just node.js. If no RFC is submitted for scalar typing in PHP 7, I'm probably going to switch languages.