Talk:Little's law
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the corresponding article on h2g2 (by u129960) is mine. I have the relevant rights. Martin
Is there somthing usefull to retrieve from this article: JDC Little? Looxix 20:42 May 5, 2003 (UTC)
I removed the weird purple box as it looked inconsistent with other pages and I didn't want to start a precedent where everyone starts adding odd HTML to pages in order to produce features that don't add anything to the article. Angela 02:13, Sep 22, 2003 (UTC) (in an anti-html mood).
What is an "OAP" (referred to in this entry)?
OAP stands for Old Age Pensioner Tango
After seeing the query written into this article (not just on the talk page) I searched on Google and found that in Britain the term is frequently used to refer to old people. Not just pensioners, even if that's the etymology. What I saw on Google did not suggest what the letters stand for, and I remained ignorant until I saw Tango's answer above. OAP is regional dialect, not standard English. Michael Hardy 23:27, 8 Oct 2003 (UTC)
All "old people" in england are pensioners, because everyone over 60/65 is entitled to a state pension (some will correct me if i'm wrong), so it the meaning is the same whatever way you look at it. OAP is used across England (and the rest of the UK to the best of my knowledge), so doesn't that make it standard english? (standard english being that which is spoken in england, or so i thought). -- Tango
- No -- over the last few centuries English has become international. Many regional variations exist and England, like all other places where English is spoken, has usages that are only local (in some cases used throughout all of Britain and Ireland but not elsewhere, for example, and in some cases used only in the southern part of one county or the like) or ephemeral. England has imported lots of usages from France that have replaced more traditional English usages that remain standard in America ("6 September" instead of the traditional "September 6th", and lots of others) so that current American usage and Samuel Johnson's 18th-century usage may coincide where 21st-century British usage has been Frenchified or otherwise changed (e.g., the British no longer often use "gotten" as the past participle of "got"; Americans still do). I would say it would have to be more international and less ephemeral than "OAP" before I would call it "standard English". Michael Hardy 22:16, 11 Oct 2003 (UTC)
The claim about the counter and Little's law not applying in the previous version of this article was simply untrue. There is no requirement for arrivals to be independent in Little's Theorem. I have added a section which formalises things a bit and puts in the requirements for Little's Theorem to hold. I have removed incorrect claims about independent arrivals. --Richard Clegg 15:59, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)
