- MISFEATURE
- n. A feature which eventually screws someone, possibly
because it is not adequate for a new situation which has evolved.
It is not the same as a bug because fixing it involves a gross
philosophical change to the structure of the system involved.
Often a former feature becomes a misfeature because a tradeoff was
made whose parameters subsequently changed (possibly only in the
judgment of the implementors). "Well, yeah, it's kind of a
misfeature that file names are limited to six characters, but we're
stuck with it for now."
- MOBY
- [seems to have been in use among model railroad fans years ago.
Entered the world of AI with the Fabritek 256K moby memory of
MIT-AI. Derived from Melville's "Moby Dick" (some say from "Moby
Pickle").]1. adj. Large, immense, or complex. "A moby frob."
2.
n. The maximum address space of a machine, hence
3. n. 256K words,
the size of a PDP-10 moby. (The maximum address space means the
maximum normally addressable space, as opposed to the amount of
physical memory a machine can have. Thus the MIT PDP-10s each have
two mobies, usually referred to as the "low moby" (0-777777) and
"high moby" (1000000-1777777), or as "moby 0" and "moby 1". MIT-AI
has four mobies of address space: moby 2 is the PDP-6 memory, and
moby 3 the PDP-11 interface.) In this sense "moby" is often used
as a generic unit of either address space (18. bits' worth) or of
memory (about a megabyte, or 9/8 megabyte (if one accounts for
difference between 32.- and 36.-bit words), or 5/4 megacharacters).
4.A title of address (never of third-person reference), usually
used to show admiration, respect, and/or friendliness to a
competent hacker. "So, moby Knight, how's the CONS machine doing?"
5. adj. In backgammon, doubles on the dice, as in "moby sixes",
"moby ones", etc.
MOBY FOO, MOBY WIN, MOBY LOSS: standard emphatic forms.
FOBY MOO: a spoonerism due to Greenblatt.
- MODE
- n. A general state, usually used with an adjective describing the
state. "No time to hack; I'm in thesis mode." Usage: in its
jargon sense, MODE is most often said of people, though it is
sometimes applied to programs and inanimate objects. "If you're on
a TTY, E will switch to non-display mode." In particular, see DAY
MODE, NIGHT MODE, and YOYO MODE; also COM MODE, TALK MODE, and
GABRIEL MODE.
- MODULO
- prep. Except for. From mathematical terminology: one can
consider saying that 4=22 "except for the 9's" (4=22 mod 9).
"Well, LISP seems to work okay now, modulo that GC bug."
|
Delicious
Digg
reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon