Question

Please use this topic for comments regarding giving credit to others for their ideas.

Rule of Thumb

When in doubt, give credit!! What are your thoughts on this. What are your thoughts on this? Do exceptions exist to this rule?

Answer 1

A rule of thumb is an casual precept that is intended to provide basic steering as an alternative than special path.

Folks once used the phrase rule of thumb in reference to a tough bodily dimension, but the time period has evolved to use to any sort of largely applicable and imprecise rule. It's not anticipated that a rule of thumb will normally provide the right answer.

For illustration, see under three principles of thumb for coping with web problems:

1. For those who get a message pronouncing the domain identify server (DNS) are not able to to find your web page and you are certain you will have typed it in effectively or clicked on a legitimate link, are attempting it again -- twice. Commonly packets do not get the place they are supposed to.

2. When you get a 404 error (web page now not observed) message, the web page could also be quickly lacking given that of some predicament at the goal site. Try it again later or ship an e-mail informing the webmaster of the drawback and asking them to restore the web page.

Three. Be aware that regularly a web page you may have visited just lately could also be coming out of your cache or the cache on a proxy server within your corporation. To get the "contemporary" variation of the page, click on reload in the menu.

Ideas of thumb commonly yield fine practices. For illustration, in intrusion detection, a rule of thumb is that documents and profiles should have distinctive identifiers, insofar as possible. That rule of thumb yields the first-rate apply of including full route names for documents and following a consumer identification scheme that binds a user id to the approach on which it resides.

The origin of the phrase rule of thumb is reasonably contentious. Many declare that the common "rule of thumb" was laws that at one time made it authorized for a person to beat his wife, despite the fact that now not with any enforce thicker than his thumb. References to any such regulation exist; nevertheless, no documentation of the specific regulation has ever been placed.

The reference to a difficult dimension for carpentry and agricultural functions is a more doubtless source of the phrase. The earliest documented use is on this feel is in J. Durham's Heaven upon Earth (1685): "Many profest [professed] Christians are prefer to foolish builders, who build by means of bet, and by means of rule of thumb."