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MIPS
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misbug
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minifloppies
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= M =
MIPS/mips/ n.
[abbreviation] 1. A measure of computing speed; formally, `Million Instructions Per Second' (that's 10^6 per second, not 2^(20)!); often rendered by hackers as `Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed' or in other unflattering ways, such as `Meaningless Information Provided by Salesmen'. This joke expresses an attitude nearly universal among hackers about the value of mostbenchmarkclaims, said attitude being one of the great cultural divides between hackers andmarketroids (see alsoBogoMIPS). The singular is sometimes `1 MIP' even though this is clearly etymologically wrong. See alsoKIPSandGIPS. 2. Computers, especially large computers, considered abstractly as sources ofcomputrons. "This is just a workstation; the heavy MIPS are hidden in the basement." 3. The corporate name of a particular RISC-chip company; among other things, they designed the processor chips used inDEC's 3100 workstation series. 4. Acronym for `Meaningless Information per Second' (a joke, prob. from sense 1).
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misbug
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misfeature
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MIPS
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misbug/mis-buhg/ n.
[MIT; rare (like its referent)] An unintended property of a program that turns out to be useful; something that should have been abugbut turns out to be afeature. Comparegreen lightning. Seemiswart.
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misfeature
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Missed'em-five
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misbug
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misfeature/mis-fee'chr/ or /mis'fee`chr/ n.
[common] A feature that eventually causes lossage, possibly because it is not adequate for a new situation that has evolved. Since it results from a deliberate and properly implemented feature, a misfeature is not a bug. Nor is it a simple unforeseen side effect; the term implies that the feature in question was carefully planned, but its long-term consequences were not accurately or adequately predicted (which is quite different from not having thought ahead at all). A misfeature can be a particularly stubborn problem to resolve, because fixing it usually involves a substantial philosophical change to the structure of the system involved.
Many misfeatures (especially in user-interface design) arise because the designers/implementors mistake their personal tastes for laws of nature. Often a former feature becomes a misfeature because trade-offs were made whose parameters subsequently change (possibly only in the judgment of the implementors). "Well, yeah, it is kind of a misfeature that file names are limited to six characters, but the original implementors wanted to save directory space and we're stuck with it for now."
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Missed'em-five
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missile address
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misfeature
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Missed'em-fiven.
Pejorative hackerism for AT&T System V Unix, generally used byBSDpartisans in a bigoted mood. (The synonym `SysVile' is also encountered.) Seesoftware bloat,Berzerkeley.
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missile address
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miswart
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Missed'em-five
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= M =
missile addressn.
SeeICBM address.
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miswart
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MMF
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missile address
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miswart/mis-wort/ n.
[fromwartby analogy withmisbug] Afeaturethat superficially appears to be awartbut has been determined to be theRight Thing. For example, in some versions of theEMACStext editor, the `transpose characters' command exchanges the character under the cursor with the one before it on the screen,exceptwhen the cursor is at the end of a line, in which case the two characters before the cursor are exchanged. While this behavior is perhaps surprising, and certainly inconsistent, it has been found through extensive experimentation to be what most users want. This feature is a miswart.
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MMF
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mobo
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miswart
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MMF//
[Usenet; common] Abbreviation: "Make Money Fast". Refers to any kind of scheme which promises participants large profits with little or no risk or effort. Typically, it is a some kind of multi-level marketing operation which involves recruiting more members, or an illegal pyramid scam. The term is also used to refer to any kind of spam which promotes this. For more information, see the Make Money Fast Myth Page.
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mobo
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moby
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MMF
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mobo/moh'bo/
Written and (rarely) spoken contraction of "motherboard"
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moby
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mockingbird
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mobo
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moby/moh'bee/
[MIT: seems to have been in use among model railroad fans years ago. Derived from Melville's "Moby Dick" (some say from `Moby Pickle'). Now common.] 1. adj. Large, immense, complex, impressive. "A Saturn V rocket is a truly moby frob." "Some MIT undergrads pulled off a moby hack at the Harvard-Yale game." (SeeAppendix Afor discussion.) 2. n. obs. The maximum address space of a machine (see below). For a 680[234]0 or VAX or most modern 32-bit architectures, it is 4,294,967,296 8-bit bytes (4 gigabytes). 3. A title of address (never of third-person reference), usually used to show admiration, respect, and/or friendliness to a competent hacker. "Greetings, moby Dave. How's that address-book thing for the Mac going?" 4. adj. In backgammon, doubles on the dice, as in `moby sixes', `moby ones', etc. Compare this withbignum(sense 3): double sixes are both bignums and moby sixes, but moby ones are not bignums (the use of `moby' to describe double ones is sarcastic). Standard emphatic forms: `Moby foo', `moby win', `moby loss'. `Foby moo': a spoonerism due to Richard Greenblatt. 5. The largest available unit of something which is available in discrete increments. Thus, ordering a "moby Coke" at the local fast-food joint is not just a request for a large Coke, it's an explicit request for the largest size they sell.
This term entered hackerdom with the Fabritek 256K memory added to the MIT AI PDP-6 machine, which was considered unimaginably huge when it was installed in the 1960s (at a time when a more typical memory size for a timesharing system was 72 kilobytes). Thus, a moby is classically 256K 36-bit words, the size of a PDP-6 or PDP-10 moby. Back when address registers were narrow the term was more generally useful, because when a computer had virtual memory mapping, it might actually have more physical memory attached to it than any one program could access directly. One could then say "This computer has 6 mobies" meaning that the ratio of physical memory to address space is 6, without having to say specifically how much memory there actually is. That in turn implied that the computer could timeshare six `full-sized' programs without having to swap programs between memory and disk.
Nowadays the low cost of processor logic means that address spaces are usually larger than the most physical memory you can cram onto a machine, so most systems have muchlessthan one theoretical `native' moby ofcore. Also, more modern memory-management techniques (esp. paging) make the `moby count' less significant. However, there is one series of widely-used chips for which the term could stand to be revived -- the Intel 8088 and 80286 with their incrediblybrain-damagedsegmented-memory designs. On these, a `moby' would be the 1-megabyte address span of a segment/offset pair (by coincidence, a PDP-10 moby was exactly 1 megabyte of 9-bit bytes).
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mockingbird
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mod
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moby
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mockingbirdn.
Software that intercepts communications (especially login transactions) between users and hosts and provides system-like responses to the users while saving their responses (especially account IDs and passwords). A special case ofTrojan horse.
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mod
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mode
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mockingbird
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modvt.,n.
[very common] 1. Short for `modify' or `modification'. Very commonly used -- in fact the full terms are considered markers that one is being formal. The plural `mods' is used esp. with reference to bug fixes or minor design changes in hardware or software, most esp. with respect topatchsets or adiff. 2. Short formodulobut usedonlyfor its techspeak sense.
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mode
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mode bit
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mod
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moden.
[common] A general state, usually used with an adjective describing the state. Use of the word `mode' rather than `state' implies that the state is extended over time, and probably also that some activity characteristic of that state is being carried out. "No time to hack; I'm in thesis mode." In its jargon sense, `mode' is most often attributed to people, though it is sometimes applied to programs and inanimate objects. In particular, seehack mode,day mode,night mode,demo mode,fireworks mode, andyoyo mode; alsotalk mode.
One also often hears the verbs `enable' and `disable' used in connection with jargon modes. Thus, for example, a sillier way of saying "I'm going to crash" is "I'm going to enable crash mode now". One might also hear a request to "disable flame mode, please".
In a usage much closer to techspeak, a mode is a special state that certain user interfaces must pass into in order to perform certain functions. For example, in order to insert characters into a document in the Unix editorvi, one must type the "i" key, which invokes the "Insert" command. The effect of this command is to put vi into "insert mode", in which typing the "i" key has a quite different effect (to wit, it inserts an "i" into the document). One must then hit another special key, "ESC", in order to leave "insert mode". Nowadays, modeful interfaces are generally consideredlosingbut survive in quite a few widely used tools built in less enlightened times.
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mode bit
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modulo
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mode
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mode bitn.
[common] Aflag, usually in hardware, that selects between two (usually quite different) modes of operation. The connotations are different fromflagbit in that mode bits are mainly written during a boot or set-up phase, are seldom explicitly read, and seldom change over the lifetime of an ordinary program. The classic example was the EBCDIC-vs.-ASCII bit (#12) of the Program Status Word of the IBM 360.
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modulo
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molly-guard
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mode bit
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modulo/mod'yu-loh/ prep.
Except for. An overgeneralization of mathematical terminology; one can consider saying that 4 equals 22 except for the 9s (4 = 22 mod 9). "Well, LISP seems to work okay now, modulo thatGCbug." "I feel fine today modulo a slight headache."
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molly-guard
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Mongolian Hordes technique
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modulo
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molly-guard/mol'ee-gard/ n.
[University of Illinois] A shield to prevent tripping of someBig Red Switchby clumsy or ignorant hands. Originally used of the plexiglass covers improvised for the BRS on an IBM 4341 after a programmer's toddler daughter (named Molly) frobbed it twice in one day. Later generalized to covers over stop/reset switches on disk drives and networking equipment. In hardware catalogues, you'll see the much less interesting description "guarded button".
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Mongolian Hordes technique
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monkey up
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molly-guard
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Mongolian Hordes techniquen.
[poss. from the Sixties counterculture expression `Mongolian clusterfuck' for a public orgy] Development bygang bang. Implies that large numbers of inexperienced programmers are being put on a job better performed by a few skilled ones (but seebazaar). Also called `Chinese Army technique'; see alsoBrooks's Law.
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monkey up
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monkey scratch
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Mongolian Hordes technique
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monkey upvt.
To hack together hardware for a particular task, especially a one-shot job. Connotes an extremelycruftyand consciously temporary solution. Comparehack up,kluge up,cruft together.
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monkey scratch
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monstrosity
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monkey up
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monkey, scratchn.
Seescratch monkey.
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monstrosity
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monty
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monstrosity
1. n. A ridiculouslyelephantineprogram or system, esp. one that is buggy or only marginally functional. 2. adj. The quality of being monstrous (see `Overgeneralization' in the discussion of jargonification). See alsobaroque.
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monty
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Moof
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monty/mon'tee/ n.
1. [US Geological Survey] A program with a ludicrously complex user interface written to perform extremely trivial tasks. An example would be a menu-driven, button clicking, pulldown, pop-up windows program for listing directories. The original monty was an infamous weather-reporting program, Monty the Amazing Weather Man, written at the USGS. Monty had a widget-packed X-window interface with over 200 buttons; and all monty actuallydidwasFTPfiles off the network. 2. [Great Britain; commonly capitalized as `Monty' or as `the Full Monty'] 16 megabytes of memory, when fitted to an IBM-PC or compatible. A standard PC-compatible using the AT- or ISA-bus with a normal BIOS cannot access more than 16 megabytes of RAM. Generally used of a PC, Unix workstation, etc. to mean `fully populated with' memory, disk-space or some other desirable resource. This usage may be related to a TV commercial for Del Monte fruit juice, in which one of the characters insisted on "the full Del Monte"; but see the World Wide Words article"The Full Monty"for discussion of the rather complex etymology that may lie behind this. Compare Americanmoby.
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Moof
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Moore's Law
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monty
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Moof/moof/
[Macintosh users] 1. n. The call of a semi-legendary creature, properly called thedogcow. (Some previous versions of this entry claimed, incorrectly, that Moof was the name of thecreature.) 2. adj. Used to flag software that's a hack, something untested and on the edge. On one Apple CD-ROM, certain folders such as "Tools & Apps (Moof!)" and "Development Platforms (Moof!)", are so marked to indicate that they contain software not fully tested or sanctioned by the powers that be. When you open these folders you cross the boundary into hackerland. 3. v. On the Microsoft Network, the term `moof' has gained popularity as a verb meaning `to be suddenly disconnected by the system'. One might say "I got moofed".
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Moore's Law
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moose call
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Moof
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Moore's Law/morz law/ prov.
The observation that the logic density of silicon integrated circuits has closely followed the curve (bits per square inch) = 2^(t - 1962) where t is time in years; that is, the amount of information storable on a given amount of silicon has roughly doubled every year since the technology was invented. This relation, first uttered in 1964 by semiconductor engineer Gordon Moore (who co-founded Intel four years later) held until the late 1970s, at which point the doubling period slowed to 18 months. The doubling period remained at that value through time of writing (late 1999). Moore's Law is apparently self-fulfilling. The implication is that somebody, somewhere is going to be able to build a better chip than you if you rest on your laurels, so you'd better start pushing hard on the problem. See alsoParkinson's Law of DataandGates's Law.
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moose call
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moria
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Moore's Law
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moose calln.
Seewhalesong.
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moria
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MOTAS
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moose call
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moria/mor'ee-*/ n.
Likenethackandrogue, one of the large PD Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's Mines of Moria; compareelder days,elvish. The game is extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for hacking. See alsonethack,rogue,Angband.