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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered, is it French? "Je m'alloc du memory"

Rather a tradition to call a malloc by the initials of the implementer: Jason Evans malloc (jemalloc), Poul-Henning Kamp malloc (phkmalloc), Doug Lea (dlmalloc).

P.S. I also wondered whether systemd had any cultural reference to Système D aka Système Débrouillard, but Pottering does not seem to engage in word play on other occasions, so probably not.

damn i always thought it was a french thing, this is blowing my mind

"Yes, it is written systemd, not system D or System D, or even SystemD. And it isn't system d either. Why? Because it's a system daemon, and under Unix/Linux those are in lower case, and get suffixed with a lower case d."

Source: https://brand.systemd.io/

I love how autocorrect thinks I mean to type systems, not systemd. I mean they are one key away on qwerty and systemd is definitely not a word.

you were right, check siblings of your comment.

It does

> Systemd was launched in April 2010; it adopts various ideas from previous init systems and combines them with a uniform configuration and administration interface. Systemd operates as a background service (daemon) and controls important system configuration tasks including hardware initialisation and the starting of server processes. The developers thought that its name is suitably reminiscent of the French term "système D", an expression that relates to "thinking on your feet" and describes high-speed technical problem-solving abilities such as those displayed by TV action hero MacGyver.

https://web.archive.org/web/20121014173559/http://www.h-onli...

Fun grammatical fact that I only learned after years of speaking French: when borrowing words from other languages, you usually (not always) take the gender of the equivalent word in French, so technically it would be “de la memory” :)

That's the rule the old geezers at the Academy insist on. But then you have idiotic situations where everyone is using "le" for e.g. the COVID virus, while Academicians cry about the D meaning "Disease", which is feminine, making it "la COVID" in their book. As for all languages, the most important rule is that usage prevails. And that's something we in France still have a hard time integrating into public discourse.

An interesting case is "WiFi", short for "wireless fidelity". "Fidélité sans fil" in French should be feminine, but every technical person says "le WiFi" (masculine) while many (most?) non-technical people intuitively say "la WiFi" (feminine).

If you keep your access point secure and in good working order, or if you can flash any firmware into OpenWRT... make sure to publicly credit your excellent "Wi-fu"

Better keep the wifi working, or your waifu could get angry.

WiFi is not an acronym for "wireless fidelity"; the developers likely just thought it sounded cool. The term is probably just a play on the words from the audio term "high fidelity". The phrase "Wireless Fidelity" is meaningless.

The more you know!

Wiki on wifi:

> It is disputed whether the name Wi-Fi is short-form for 'Wireless Fidelity',[34] although the Wi-Fi Alliance did use the advertising slogan "The Standard for Wireless Fidelity" for a short time after the brand name was created,[31][35] referenced "the Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) logo" in a white paper[33] and the Wi-Fi Alliance was also called the "Wireless Fidelity Alliance Inc." in some publications.[36] IEEE, a separate but related organization, has stated "WiFi is a short name for Wireless Fidelity" on their website.[37][38] The name Wi-Fi was partly chosen because it sounds similar to Hi-Fi, which consumers take to mean high fidelity or high quality. Interbrand hoped consumers would find the name catchy, and that they would assume this wireless protocol has high fidelity because of its name.[39]

So it’s not really safe to say it’s not meant to mean wireless fidelity, in fact it sounds pretty likely.

Thanks, now my brain will forever read it like that. I'm not even a little bit French.

Memory je Srbia

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