[HN Gopher] Eierlegende Wollmilchsau (2011)
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Eierlegende Wollmilchsau (2011)
Author : Tomte
Score : 66 points
Date : 2022-10-07 18:42 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (germanyinusa.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (germanyinusa.com)
| microtherion wrote:
| Occasionally this is also encountered as an acronym. Some
| colleagues of mine christened an ASIC whose requirements kept
| growing EWOMIS: http://asic.ethz.ch/1991/Ewomis.html
|
| And I suspect it's not a coincidence that there is a German
| company named EWOMIS as well: http://ewomis.com
| m4lvin wrote:
| Is "sow" really a word for pig? Or did they just want something
| that sounds like the German "Sau"?
|
| Also, when print-scan-copy-all-in-one devices were a new thing, I
| liked to call them Eierlegende Wollmilchsau. Any other devices
| that come to mind?
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| It's quite a cromulent word for a female pig.
| lqet wrote:
| A sow is a female pig. It has exactly the same meaning as "Sau"
| in German, and even sounds the same. "Pig" is "Schwein" in
| German.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig
| netsharc wrote:
| And Schwein is probably where the word swine comes from.
| kuramitropolis wrote:
| Is "pork"? There's a layer of English that has decidedly
| Germanic origins; see also "legal doublets".
| fifticon wrote:
| porc is french, generally english meat animals turn french
| when you kill them to eat them - no joke.
| wolfi1 wrote:
| we were told in class that the meat is called what the
| nobility called it and the nobility spoke french
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| There's some awesome pictures of this beast around if you do an
| image search. I wonder what AI art prompts would dream up?
|
| It's a common insult in engineering to mean "feature creep". As
| software, for me it's those web "Portals" (filled with images of
| grinning beautiful people holding laptops) that universities or
| giant organisations build to pull together everything, HR,
| payroll, phone-book, marketing, the CEO's blog... all into one
| unholy dysfunctional tangle that prevents you from finding
| anything (and expose the org to much higher cyber-risk).
|
| Closer to home, isn't that just what the "smartphone" is? A
| single point of omnifunctional convergence that, if it dies,
| leaves you cold and hungry? I'd rather have a whole farmyard of
| squawking and squealing any day.
| [deleted]
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Eierlegende Wollmilchsau
|
| Funny,when I first read this, I thought they had found a new
| nickname for their government.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Nah, the eierlegende Wollmilchsau is good for everything, but
| unattainable. Our government is good for nothing, but we can't
| get rid of it. So ... it's the exact opposite.
| treffer wrote:
| That would,imply outcomes on all dimensions....
| amelius wrote:
| A new name for the 10x developer.
| rurban wrote:
| Not at all. It was originally referring to C++ ("Sorry, cannot
| say no"), then to the design by committee of Perl6, now renamed
| to Raku, the Japanese translation of "Eierlegende
| Wollmilchsau". https://imgur.io/xtddi16
| lizmat wrote:
| Please Reini, stop being funny like this. It does not become
| you.
|
| To everybody else: if you would like to see what the Raku
| Programming Language is about, check out an introduction
| https://raku.guide , or check out the weekly blog
| https://rakudoweekly.blog
| throw827474737 wrote:
| Not at all.
| amelius wrote:
| > The Eierlegende Wollmilchsau is a single tool or a person
| that attempts to do the work of many, like a jack of all
| trades or the literal egg-laying wool-milk-sow. Needless to
| say, finding such a versatile tool or person is almost as
| hard as finding the mythical creature.
|
| You say this description doesn't come close?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| It doesn't really carry the mainly negative meaning of the
| word. E.g. trying to do too many things, but everything is
| half-assed.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| "Eierlegende Wollmilchsau" doesn't really have the positive
| connotation of an "unachievable ideal", but instead that it is a
| dumb idea in the first place trying to cram too many features
| into a product.
| lytefm wrote:
| Fun fact: A Scrum poker set that's commonly used in Germany
| uses it as an image corresponding to "infinity" in terms of
| story points or hours.
|
| It also has a question mark with a train station on it, since
| "I just understand only train station" means "I have no clue
| what you're talking about".
| mywaifuismeta wrote:
| This. I wonder how this site can get it so wrong and I hope
| this wrong interpretation doesn't spread. As a native German
| speaker, "Eierlegende Wollmilchsau" has a clear negative
| connotation, not a positive one, and means feature bloat.
| seedie wrote:
| I don't see the negative connotation in "Eierlegende
| Wollmilchsau". It's more a "It has so many features and is
| the nonplusultra so it just can't be real"
|
| Maybe it is understood differently depending on the part of
| germany you're from.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I suspect the divide is more between product managers and
| developers ;)
| FabHK wrote:
| "This site" is the blog of the German Embassy in Washington.
| They know what the word means, even if they might have given
| insufficient emphasis to the negative connotation.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Meanwhile perhaps they don't realize what "wet dream" means
| in English.
| wolfi1 wrote:
| I guess they do. After all, in German it's the same
| phrase
| sdrothrock wrote:
| The first thing that came to mind was The Homer:
| https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer
| Tomte wrote:
| That's probably more of a Fliewatuut: https://en.m.wikipedia.
| org/wiki/Robbi,_Tobbi_und_das_Fliewat...
| atoav wrote:
| Well it has a certain kind of utopian ring to it. But my guess
| (as a German native speaker) would be that if you were to ask
| ten Germans whether the word was meant positive, negative or
| neutral, the needle would not swing as _decisively_ into
| negative direction as some here claim.
|
| It is very typical for example to read: "Die Eierlegende
| Wollmilchsau!" as the title line of a clearly _positive_ review
| of some sort of technological product sold online. I have
| _never_ once seen it used in a negative way in such a review,
| even though it certainly has the aforementioned "wet dream"
| aspect to it.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| To expand on that, I'd say it's a thing that does everything
| and depending on context, that's a good thing because the
| compromises and the intended use work out (e.g. Swiss army
| knives) or a bad thing because they result in a product that
| sucks at everything (e.g. Jira).
| zeitlupe wrote:
| To me this also misses the point. An eierlegende Wollmilchsau
| in my book represents a non-existent solution to every single
| problem in a context (or at least too many problems) at the
| same time. The whole point is that there is no such animal, and
| this should indirectly indicate that the author thinks this
| sought solution does not exist - not that it just has not been
| found yet but that such a solution is impossible, maybe even
| absurd.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Eclipse Installer lists a product with the same name; it installs
| a "kitchen sink" version of the IDE, mostly as an academic
| exercise to demonstrate the installer's capabilities and see how
| well components come along: https://www.eclipse.org/lists/cross-
| project-issues-dev/msg12...
| EleanorKonik wrote:
| Sounds a bit like the Shmoo, of Shmoocon fame.
|
| > Are you familiar with The Shmoo, Mr. Fisher? Comic strip I
| liked as a boy. The Shmoo was a loveable creature, really. Laid
| eggs, gave milk... ...and died of sheer ecstasy when looked at
| with hunger. The Shmoo loved to be eaten. It could taste like any
| food you desire. Shmoo hide cut thin made fine leather. Even
| Shmoo whiskers made excellent toothpicks.
|
| > In essence, The Shmoo supplied all of the world's wants. I only
| bring up the case of The Shmoo because of its relevance to you
| and the reason you were brought here.
|
| (via Lucky Number Slevin, which is a vastly underrated movie IMO)
| FabHK wrote:
| BTW, this came up on Daring Fireball recently regarding Elon
| Musk's "X" app...
|
| https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/10/07/eierlegende-wol...
| teddyh wrote:
| So essentially a Shmoo.
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