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M
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M$
Common net abbreviation for Microsoft, everybody's least favorite monopoly.
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macdink
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machinable
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M$
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macdink/mak'dink/ vt.
[from the Apple Macintosh, which is said to encourage such behavior] To make many incremental and unnecessary cosmetic changes to a program or file. Often the subject of the macdinking would be better off without them. "When I left at 11P.M.last night, he was still macdinking the slides for his presentation." See alsofritterware,window shopping.
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machinable
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machoflops
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macdink
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machinableadj.
Machine-readable. Having thesoftcopynature.
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machoflops
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Macintoy
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machinable
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machoflops/mach'oh-flops/ n.
[pun on `megaflops', a coinage for `millions of FLoating-point Operations Per Second'] Refers to artificially inflated performance figures often quoted by computer manufacturers. Real applications are lucky to get half the quoted speed. SeeYour mileage may vary,benchmark.
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Macintoy
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Macintrash
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machoflops
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Macintoy/mak'in-toy/ n.
The Apple Macintosh, considered as atoy. Less pejorative thanMacintrash.
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Macintrash
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macro
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Macintrash/mak'in-trash`/ n.
The Apple Macintosh, as described by a hacker who doesn't appreciate being kept away from thereal computerby the interface. The termmaggotboxhas been reported in regular use in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. CompareMacintoy. See alsobeige toaster,WIMP environment,point-and-drool interface,drool-proof paper,user-friendly.
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macro
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macro-
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macro/mak'roh/ n.
[techspeak] A name (possibly followed by a formalarglist) that is equated to a text or symbolic expression to which it is to be expanded (possibly with the substitution of actual arguments) by a macro expander. This definition can be found in any technical dictionary; what those won't tell you is how the hackish connotations of the term have changed over time.
The term `macro' originated in early assemblers, which encouraged the use of macros as a structuring and information-hiding device. During the early 1970s, macro assemblers became ubiquitous, and sometimes quite as powerful and expensive asHLLs, only to fall from favor as improving compiler technology marginalized assembler programming (seelanguages of choice). Nowadays the term is most often used in connection with the C preprocessor, LISP, or one of several special-purpose languages built around a macro-expansion facility (such as TeX or Unix's [nt]roff suite).
Indeed, the meaning has drifted enough that the collective `macros' is now sometimes used for code in any special-purpose application control language (whether or not the language is actually translated by text expansion), and for macro-like entities such as the `keyboard macros' supported in some text editors (and PC TSR or Macintosh INIT/CDEV keyboard enhancers).
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macro-
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macrology
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macro-pref.
Large. Opposite ofmicro-. In the mainstream and among other technical cultures (for example, medical people) this competes with the prefixmega-, but hackers tend to restrict the latter to quantification.
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macrology
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macrotape
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macrology/mak-rol'*-jee/ n.
1. Set of usually complex or crufty macros, e.g., as part of a large system written inLISP,TECO, or (less commonly) assembler. 2. The art and science involved in comprehending a macrology in sense 1. Sometimes studying the macrology of a system is not unlike archeology, ecology, ortheology, hence the sound-alike construction. See alsoboxology.
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macrotape
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maggotbox
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macrology
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macrotape/mak'roh-tayp/ n.
An industry-standard reel of tape. Originally, as opposed to a DEC microtape; nowadays, as opposed to modern QIC and DDS tapes. Syn.round tape.
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maggotbox
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magic
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maggotbox/mag'*t-boks/ n.
SeeMacintrash. This is even more derogatory.
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magic
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magic cookie
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magic
1. adj. As yet unexplained, or too complicated to explain; compareautomagicallyand (Arthur C.) Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." "TTY echoing is controlled by a large number of magic bits." "This routine magically computes the parity of an 8-bit byte in three instructions." 2. adj. Characteristic of something that works although no one really understands why (this is especially calledblack magic). 3. n. [Stanford] A feature not generally publicized that allows something otherwise impossible, or a feature formerly in that category but now unveiled. 4. n. The ultimate goal of all engineering & development, elegance in the extreme; from the first corollary to Clarke's Third Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced".
Parodies playing on these senses of the term abound; some have made their way into serious documentation, as when a MAGIC directive was described in the Control Card Reference for GCOS c.1978. For more about hackish `magic', seeAppendix A. Compareblack magic,wizardly,deep magic,heavy wizardry.
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magic cookie
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magic number
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magic
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magic cookien.
[Unix; common] 1. Something passed between routines or programs that enables the receiver to perform some operation; a capability ticket or opaque identifier. Especially used of small data objects that contain data encoded in a strange or intrinsically machine-dependent way. E.g., on non-Unix OSes with a non-byte-stream model of files, the result offtell(3)may be a magic cookie rather than a byte offset; it can be passed tofseek(3), but not operated on in any meaningful way. The phrase `it hands you a magic cookie' means it returns a result whose contents are not defined but which can be passed back to the same or some other program later. 2. An in-band code for changing graphic rendition (e.g., inverse video or underlining) or performing other control functions (see alsocookie). Some older terminals would leave a blank on the screen corresponding to mode-change magic cookies; this was also called aglitch(or occasionally a `turd'; comparemouse droppings). See alsocookie.
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magic number
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magic numbern.
[Unix/C; common] 1. In source code, some non-obvious constant
whose value is significant to the operation of a program and that
is inserted inconspicuously in-line (hardcoded), rather than expanded in by a
symbol set by a commented#define. Magic numbers in
this sense are bad style. 2. A number that encodes critical
information used in an algorithm in some opaque way. The classic
examples of these are the numbers used in hash or CRC functions,
or the coefficients in a linear congruential generator for
pseudo-random numbers. This sense actually predates and was
ancestral to the more commonsense 1. 3. Special data located at
the beginning of a binary data file to indicate its type to a
utility. Under Unix, the system and various applications programs
(especially the linker) distinguish between types of executable
file by looking for a magic number. Once upon a time, these magic
numbers were PDP-11 branch instructions that skipped over header
data to the start of executable code; 0407, for example, was
octal for `branch 16 bytes relative'. Many other kinds of files
now have magic numbers somewhere; some magic numbers are, in
fact, strings, like the!
Themagic number, on the other hand, is 7+/-2. See "The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information" by George Miller, in the "Psychological Review" 63:81-97 (1956). This classic paper established the number of distinct items (such as numeric digits) that humans can hold in short-term memory. Among other things, this strongly influenced the interface design of the phone system.
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magic smoke
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magic smoken.
A substance trapped inside IC packages that enables them to function (also called `blue smoke'; this is similar to the archaic `phlogiston' hypothesis about combustion). Its existence is demonstrated by what happens when a chip burns up -- the magic smoke gets let out, so it doesn't work any more. Seesmoke test,let the smoke out.
Usenetter Jay Maynard tells the following story: "Once, while hacking on a dedicated Z80 system, I was testing code by blowing EPROMs and plugging them in the system, then seeing what happened. One time, I plugged one in backwards. I only discovered thatafterI realized that Intel didn't put power-on lights under the quartz windows on the tops of their EPROMs -- the die was glowing white-hot. Amazingly, the EPROM worked fine after I erased it, filled it full of zeros, then erased it again. For all I know, it's still in service. Of course, this is because the magic smoke didn't get let out." Compare the original phrasing ofMurphy's Law.
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mail storm
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mail stormn.
[frombroadcast storm, influenced by `maelstrom'] What often happens when a machine with an Internet connection and active users re-connects after extended downtime -- a flood of incoming mail that brings the machine to its knees. See alsohairball.
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mailbomb
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mailbomb
(alsomail bomb) [Usenet] 1. v. To send, or urge others to send, massive amounts ofemailto a single system or person, esp. with intent to crash orspamthe recipient's system. Sometimes done in retaliation for a perceived serious offense. Mailbombing is itself widely regarded as a serious offense -- it can disrupt email traffic or other facilities for innocent users on the victim's system, and in extreme cases, even at upstream sites. 2. n. An automatic procedure with a similar effect. 3. n. The mail sent. Compareletterbomb,nastygram,BLOB(sense 2),list-bomb.
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mailing list
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mailing listn.
(often shortened in context to `list') 1. Anemailaddress that is an alias (ormacro, though that word is never used in this connection) for many other email addresses. Some mailing lists are simple `reflectors', redirecting mail sent to them to the list of recipients. Others are filtered by humans or programs of varying degrees of sophistication; lists filtered by humans are said to be `moderated'. 2. The people who receive your email when you send it to such an address.
Mailing lists are one of the primary forms of hacker interaction, along withUsenet. They predate Usenet, having originated with the first UUCP and ARPANET connections. They are often used for private information-sharing on topics that would be too specialized for or inappropriate to public Usenet groups. Though some of these maintain almost purely technical content (such as the Internet Engineering Task Force mailing list), others (like the `sf-lovers' list maintained for many years by Saul Jaffe) are recreational, and many are purely social. Perhaps the most infamous of the social lists was the eccentricbandykindistribution; its latter-day progeny,lectroidsandtanstaafl, still include a number of the oddest and most interesting people in hackerdom.
Mailing lists are easy to create and (unlike Usenet) don't tie up a significant amount of machine resources (until they get very large, at which point they can become interesting torture tests for mail software). Thus, they are often created temporarily by working groups, the members of which can then collaborate on a project without ever needing to meet face-to-face. Much of the material in this lexicon was criticized and polished on just such a mailing list (called `jargon-friends'), which included all the co-authors of Steele-1983.
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main loop
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main loopn.
The top-level control flow construct in an input- or event-driven program, the one which receives and acts or dispatches on the program's input. See alsodriver.
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mainframe
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mainframen.
Term originally referring to the cabinet containing the central processor unit or `main frame' of a room-fillingStone Agebatch machine. After the emergence of smaller `minicomputer' designs in the early 1970s, the traditionalbig ironmachines were described as `mainframe computers' and eventually just as mainframes. The term carries the connotation of a machine designed for batch rather than interactive use, though possibly with an interactive timesharing operating system retrofitted onto it; it is especially used of machines built by IBM, Unisys, and the other greatdinosaurs surviving from computing'sStone Age.
It has been common wisdom among hackers since the late 1980s that the mainframe architectural tradition is essentially dead (outside of the tiny market fornumber-crunchingsupercomputers (seecray)), having been swamped by the recent huge advances in IC technology and low-cost personal computing. The wave of failures, takeovers, and mergers among traditional mainframe makers in the early 1990s bore this out. The biggest mainframer of all, IBM, was compelled to re-invent itself as a huge systems-consulting house. (Seedinosaurs matingandkiller micro).
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management
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managementn.
1. Corporate power elites distinguished primarily by their distance from actual productive work and their chronic failure to manage (see alsosuit). Spoken derisively, as in "Managementdecided that...". 2. Mythically, a vast bureaucracy responsible for all the world's minor irritations. Hackers' satirical public notices are often signed `The Mgt'; this derives from the "Illuminatus" novels (see theBibliographyin Appendix C).
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mandelbug
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mandelbug/man'del-buhg/ n.
[from the Mandelbrot set] A bug whose underlying causes are so complex and obscure as to make its behavior appear chaotic or even non-deterministic. This term implies that the speaker thinks it is aBohr bug, rather than aheisenbug. See alsoschroedinbug.
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manged
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mangle
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manged/mahnjd/ n.
[probably from the French `manger' or Italian `mangiare', to eat; perhaps influenced by English `mange', `mangy'] adj. Refers to anything that is mangled or damaged, usually beyond repair. "The disk was manged after the electrical storm." Comparemung.
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mangle
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mangled name
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manged
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manglevt.
1. Used similarly tomungorscribble, but more violent in its connotations; something that is mangled has been irreversibly and totally trashed. 2. To produce themangled namecorresponding to a C++ declaration.