Ashtead's Journal: What's up with the naming of ships?

I see the paper has a headline "MS Explorer sank i natt" (which is the title in Norwegian, "MS explorer sank during the night" would be this title in English). MS Explorer is a cruise ship that ran into iceberge, but unlike the more famous Titanic, everyone on board had been rescued and are safe now that the ship has sunk.

But to me with my IT leanings, names like "Server" and "MS Explorer" have other connotations than ships. Servers, ships or otherwise, at least agree on crashing as a common failure mode, but the MS Explorer, well, "sinking" isn't the most likely failure mode there -- "Blue screen" (as opposed to the big blue sea (as opposed to C)) just appears a lot more plausible.

Thus leading to the initial question, what is up with the naming of the ships. Will we see some ship named Excel or maybe Fortran crash or sink or something, next?

hah!

[tuxette]

Yeah, with a name like that, you're bound for disaster...

How are things going otherwise? Life is good?

Re:

[jawtheshark]

I still don't know what MS means? Marine Ship? But the MS Explorer name is funny ;-)

That said, a Blue Screen of Death is always part of a kernel failure. MS Explorer is a userspace program and as such, can't be cause of a BSoD

Relevant Link for today [schneier.com]

Re:

[nizo]

HMS = Her (His?) Majesty's Ship? Like the HMS Bounty for example.

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[Ashtead]

The MS simply means "Motor Ship", while for example SS is "Steam Ship". I found this list of ship prefixes [wikipedia.org] that also includes all sorts of national prefixes. MS, SS, and a number of others are internationally recognized.

So there might seem to be a slight bias towards a certain large corporation in Redmond, just from their shared abbreviations. It does open the door for puns however, same as with BSA which could be Birmingham Small Arms Company, Boy Scouts of America, or Business Software Alliance, all d

Re:

[Ashtead]

There's that Magic 8-ball, with its "Outlook not so good" message that comes to mind...

Life is kinda busy these days, I have guests in the house and they require some attention; then there was a large bug hunt last week (by now successful, the bug has been found and fixed), and then a couple of our customers started hollering because nothing was happening as far as they could see, so it's back to keeping them satisfied -- but at least I had time to look at slashdot again for a brief while this morning.

J

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[tuxette]

It's snowing (sort of) so I'm happy... also glad I don't have to take the train anywhere, though it would have made a nice excuse to stay in bed a few extra hours ;-)