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showstopper
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shriek
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shovelware
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= S =
showstoppern.
A hardware or (especially) software bug that makes an implementation effectively unusable; one that absolutely has to be fixed before development can go on. Opposite in connotation from its original theatrical use, which refers to something stunninglygood.
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shriek
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Shub-Internet
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showstopper
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shriekn.
Seeexcl. Occasional CMU usage, also in common use among APL fans and mathematicians, especially category theorists.
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Shub-Internet
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sidecar
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shriek
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= S =
Shub-Internet/shuhb' in't*r-net/ n.
[MUD: from H. P. Lovecraft's evil fictional deity Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat with a Thousand Young] The harsh personification of the Internet: Beast of a Thousand Processes, Eater of Characters, Avatar of Line Noise, and Imp of Call Waiting; the hideous multi-tendriled entity formed of all the manifold connections of the net. A sect of MUDders worships Shub-Internet, sacrificing objects and praying for good connections. To no avail -- its purpose is malign and evil, and is the cause of all network slowdown. Often heard as in "Freela casts a tac nuke at Shub-Internet for slowing her down." (A forged response often follows along the lines of: "Shub-Internet gulps down the tac nuke and burps happily.") Also cursed by users of the Web,FTPandTELNETwhen the system slows down. The dread name of Shub-Internet is seldom spoken aloud, as it is said that repeating it three times will cause the being to wake, deep within its lair beneath the Pentagon. CompareRandom Number God.
[January 1996: It develops that one of the computer administrators in the basement of the Pentagon read this entry and fell over laughing. As a result, you too can now poke Shub-Internet bypingingshub-internet.ims.disa.mil. See alsokremvax. - ESR]
[April 1999: shub-internet.ims.disa.mil is no more, alas. But Shub-Internet lives o^$#$*^ - ESR]
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sidecar
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SIG
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Shub-Internet
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sidecarn.
1. Syn.slap on the side. Esp. used of add-ons for the late and unlamented IBM PCjr. 2. The IBM PC compatibility box that could be bolted onto the side of an Amiga. Designed and produced by Commodore, it broke all of the company's own design rules. If it worked with any other peripherals, it was bymagic. 3. More generally, any of various devices designed to be connected to the expansion slot on the left side of the Amiga 500 (and later, 600 & 1200), which included a hard drive controller, a hard drive, and additional memory.
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SIG
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sig block
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sidecar
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SIG/sig/ n.
(also common as a prefix in combining forms) A Special Interest Group, in one of several technical areas, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery; well-known ones include SIGPLAN (the Special Interest Group on Programming Languages), SIGARCH (the Special Interest Group for Computer Architecture) and SIGGRAPH (the Special Interest Group for Computer Graphics). Hackers, not surprisingly, like to overextend this naming convention to less formal associations like SIGBEER (at ACM conferences) and SIGFOOD (at University of Illinois).
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sig block
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sig quote
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SIG
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sig block/sig blok/ n.
[Unix; often written `.sig' there] Short for `signature', used specifically to refer to the electronic signature block that most Unix mail- and news-posting software willautomagicallyappend to outgoing mail and news. The composition of one's sig can be quite an art form, including an ASCII logo or one's choice of witty sayings (seesig quote,fool file); but many consider large sigs a waste ofbandwidth, and it has been observed that the size of one's sig block is usually inversely proportional to one's longevity and level of prestige on the net. See alsodoubled sig.
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sig quote
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sig virus
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sig block
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sig quote/sig kwoht/ n.
[Usenet] A maxim, quote, proverb, joke, or slogan embedded in one'ssig blockand intended to convey something of one's philosophical stance, pet peeves, or sense of humor. "Calm down, it's only ones and zeroes."
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sig virus
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signal-to-noise ratio
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sig quote
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sig virusn.
A parasiticmemeembedded in asig block. There was ameme plagueor fad for these on Usenet in late 1991. Most were equivalents of "I am a .sig virus. Please reproduce me in your .sig block.". Of course, the .sig virus's memetic hook is the giggle value of going along with the gag; this, however, was a self-limiting phenomenon as more and more people picked up on the idea. There were creative variants on it; some people stuck `sig virus antibody' texts in their sigs, and there was at least one instance of a sig virus eater.
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signal-to-noise ratio
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silicon
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sig virus
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signal-to-noise ratio[from analog electronics] n.
Used by hackers in a generalization of its technical meaning. `Signal' refers to useful information conveyed by some communications medium, and `noise' to anything else on that medium. Hence a low ratio implies that it is not worth paying attention to the medium in question. Figures for such metaphorical ratios are never given. The term is most often applied toUsenetnewsgroups duringflame wars. Comparebandwidth. See alsocoefficient of X,lost in the noise.
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silicon
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silly walk
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signal-to-noise ratio
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siliconn.
Hardware, esp. ICs or microprocessor-based computer systems (compareiron). Contrasted with software. See alsosandbender.
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silly walk
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silo
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silicon
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silly walkvi.
[from Monty Python's Flying Circus] 1. A ridiculous procedure required to accomplish a task. Likegrovel, but morerandomand humorous. "I had to silly-walk through half the /usr directories to find the maps file." 2. Syn.fandango on core.
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silo
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Silver Book
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silly walk
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silon.
The FIFO input-character buffer in an RS-232 line card. So called fromDECterminology used on DH and DZ line cards for the VAX and PDP-11, presumably because it was a storage space for fungible stuff that went in at the top and came out at the bottom.
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Silver Book
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since time T equals minus infinity
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silo
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Silver Bookn.
Jensen and Wirth's infamous "Pascal User Manual and Report", so called because of the silver cover of the widely distributed Springer-Verlag second edition of 1978 (ISBN 0-387-90144-2). Seebook titles,Pascal.
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since time T equals minus infinity
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sitename
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Silver Book
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since time T equals minus infinityadv.
A long time ago; for as long as anyone can remember; at the time that some particular frob was first designed. Usually the word `time' is omitted. See alsotime T; contrastepoch.
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sitename
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skrog
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since time T equals minus infinity
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sitename/si:t'naym/ n.
[Unix/Internet] The unique electronic name of a computer system, used to identify it in UUCP mail, Usenet, or other forms of electronic information interchange. The folklore interest of sitenames stems from the creativity and humor they often display. Interpreting a sitename is not unlike interpreting a vanity license plate; one has to mentally unpack it, allowing for mono-case and length restrictions and the lack of whitespace. Hacker tradition deprecates dull, institutional-sounding names in favor of punchy, humorous, and clever coinages (except that it is considered appropriate for the official public gateway machine of an organization to bear the organization's name or acronym). Mythological references, cartoon characters, animal names, and allusions to SF or fantasy literature are probably the most popular sources for sitenames (in roughly descending order). The obligatory comment when discussing these is Harris's Lament: "All the good ones are taken!" See alsonetwork address.
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skrog
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skulker
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sitename
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skrogv.
Syn.scrog.
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skulker
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slab
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skrog
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skulkern.
Syn.prowler.
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slab
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slack
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skulker
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slab[Apple]
1. n. A continuous horizontal line of pixels, all with the same color. 2. vi. To paint a slab on an output device. Apple's QuickDraw, like most other professional-level graphics systems, renders polygons and lines not with Bresenham's algorithm, but by calculating `slab points' for each scan line on the screen in succession, and then slabbing in the actual image pixels.
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slack
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slap on the side
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slab
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slackn.
1. Space allocated to a disk file but not actually used to store useful information. The techspeak equivalent is `internal fragmentation'. Antonym:hole. 2. In the theology of theChurch of the SubGenius, a mystical substance or quality that is the prerequisite of all human happiness.
Since Unix files are stored compactly, except for the unavoidable wastage in the last block or fragment, it might be said that "Unix has no slack". Seeha ha only serious.
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slap on the side
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slash
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slack
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slap on the siden.
(also called asidecar, or abbreviated `SOTS'.) A type of external expansion hardware marketed by computer manufacturers (e.g., Commodore for the Amiga 500/1000 series and IBM for the hideous failure called `PCjr'). Various SOTS boxes provided necessities such as memory, hard drive controllers, and conventional expansion slots.
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slash
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slashdot effect
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slap on the side
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slashn.
Common name for the slant (`/', ASCII 0101111) character. SeeASCIIfor other synonyms.
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slashdot effect
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sleep
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slash
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slashdot effectn.
1. Also spelled "/. effect"; what is said to have happened when a website being virtually unreachable because too many people are hitting it after the site was mentioned in an interesting article on the popular Slashdot news service. The term is quite widely used by /. readers, including variants like "That site has been slashdotted again!" 2. In a perhaps inevitable generation, the term is being used to describe any similar effect from being listed on a popular site. This would better be described as aflash crowd.
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sleep
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slim
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slashdot effect
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sleepvi.
1. [techspeak] To relinquish a claim (of a process on a multitasking system) for service; to indicate to the scheduler that a process may be deactivated until some given event occurs or a specified time delay elapses. 2. In jargon, used very similarly to v.block; also in `sleep on', syn. with `block on'. Often used to indicate that the speaker has relinquished a demand for resources until some (possibly unspecified) external event: "They can't get the fix I've been asking for into the next release, so I'm going to sleep on it until the release, then start hassling them again."
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slim
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slop
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sleep
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slimn.
A small, derivative change (e.g., to code).
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slop
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slopsucker
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slim
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slopn.
1. A one-sidedfudge factor, that is, an allowance for error but in only one of two directions. For example, if you need a piece of wire 10 feet long and have to guess when you cut it, you make very sure to cut it too long, by a large amount if necessary, rather than too short by even a little bit, because you can always cut off the slop but you can't paste it back on again. When discrete quantities are involved, slop is often introduced to avoid the possibility of being on the losing side of afencepost error. 2. The percentage of `extra' code generated by a compiler over the size of equivalent assembler code produced byhand-hacking; i.e., the space (or maybe time) you lose because you didn't do it yourself. This number is often used as a measure of the goodness of a compiler; slop below 5% is very good, and 10% is usually acceptable. With modern compiler technology, esp. on RISC machines, the compiler's slop may actually benegative; that is, humans may be unable to generate code as good. This is one of the reasons assembler programming is no longer common.
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slopsucker
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Slowlaris
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slop
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slopsucker/slop'suhk-r/ n.
A lowest-priority task that waits around until everything else has `had its fill' of machine resources. Only when the machine would otherwise be idle is the task allowed to `suck up the slop'. Also called a `hungry puppy' or `bottom feeder'. One common variety of slopsucker hunts for large prime numbers. Comparebackground.
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Slowlaris
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slurp
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slopsucker
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Slowlaris/slo'-lahr-is/ n.
[Usenet; poss. from the variety of prosimian called a "slow loris". The variant `Slowlartus' is also common, related toLART] Common hackish term for Solaris, Sun's System VR4 version of UNIX that came out of the standardization wars of the early 1990s. So named because especially on older hardware, responsiveness was much less crisp than under the preceding SunOS. Early releases of Solaris (that is, Solaris 2, as somemarketroids at Sun retroactively rechristened SunOS as Solaris 1) were quite buggy, and Sun was forced by customer demand to support SunOS for quite some time. Newer versions are acknowledged to be among the best commercial UNIX variants in 1998, but still lose single-processor benchmarks to SparcLinux. CompareAIDX,HP-SUX,Nominal Semidestructor,Telerat,sun-stools.