pkorzeniewski> Why there're so many abbrevations?
pkorzeniewski> Why there're so many abbrevations? Is there a technical reason for it or is it just a convention among pilots? It's a [frustrating] convention among pilot data services. METARs, TAFs, FDs, etc are all coded. Many of these systems date back 30+ years, when telecom equipment and data transmission was much more limited and expensive. After a short while, it's relatively transparent to decode the abbreviated weather and other items that we use a lot. And of course, anyone who is remotely fluent in English can decode the minimal abbreviations in the quoted text. It's also somewhat easier to scan certain reports (TAFs and Winds Aloft forecasts) as the abbreviations tend to keep the data in a visually scannable almost tabular form, so you can easily see when conditions are becoming more/less favorable. If it were free/cheap to update all the systems that generate and all the systems that process, interpret, archive, and/or retransmit that data, there's no reason to keep the abbreviation culture. It's far from free, so inertia will keep it the way it is for a long time. PS: I don't know why that comment is dead. It seems a perfectly reasonable question and your account isn't banned...
Posted by sokoloff on May 8, 2015, 11:56 AM
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Raise real-world problems, find people facing the same issue, and discuss solutions.6,500 issues0 comments
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Yeah PC was a horrible platform before Win2k, but there was a beautiful short time period when we had alternatives like Amiga, Atari, NeX...
Living in a 200+ year old house, I've seen a lot of this first-hand through both planned and unplanned renovations and repairs.
Is anything with the pebble time able to capture heart rate for historical data analysis?
Datastar has evolved into a suite of tools [1].
> real issue is that MSG is basically a public utility.
Everything good is a slippery slope: every step in the right direction is bad if you overshoot.
Status Update - May 2026
I think what you wrote makes sense, and you missed one critical aspect : shared access to excessively expensive capitalized facilities an...
pkorzeniewski> Why there're so many abbrevations?
pkorzeniewski> Why there're so many abbrevations? Is there a technical reason for it or is it just a convention among pilots? It's a [frustrating] convention among pilot data services. METARs, TAFs, FDs, etc are all coded. Many of these systems date back 30+ years, when telecom equipment and data transmission was much more limited and expensive. After a short while, it's relatively transparent to decode the abbreviated weather and other items that we use a lot. And of course, anyone who is remotely fluent in English can decode the minimal abbreviations in the quoted text. It's also somewhat easier to scan certain reports (TAFs and Winds Aloft forecasts) as the abbreviations tend to keep the data in a visually scannable almost tabular form, so you can easily see when conditions are becoming more/less favorable. If it were free/cheap to update all the systems that generate and all the systems that process, interpret, archive, and/or retransmit that data, there's no reason to keep the abbreviation culture. It's far from free, so inertia will keep it the way it is for a long time. PS: I don't know why that comment is dead. It seems a perfectly reasonable question and your account isn't banned...
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