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square tape
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squirrelcide
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spungle
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square tapen.
Mainframe magnetic tape cartridges for use with IBM 3480 or compatible tape drives; or QIC tapes used on workstations and micros. The term comes from the square (actually rectangular) shape of the cartridges; contrastround tape.
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squirrelcide
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stack
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square tape
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= S =
squirrelciden.
[common on Usenet'scomp.risksnewsgroup.] (alt. `squirrelicide') What all too frequently happens when a squirrel decides to exercise its species's unfortunate penchant for shorting out power lines with their little furry bodies. Result: one dead squirrel, one down computer installation. In this situation, the computer system is said to have been squirrelcided.
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stack
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stack puke
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squirrelcide
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stackn.
The set of things a person has to do in the future. One speaks of the next project to be attacked as having risen to the top of the stack. "I'm afraid I've got real work to do, so this'll have to be pushed way down on my stack." "I haven't done it yet because every time I pop my stack something new gets pushed." If you are interrupted several times in the middle of a conversation, "My stack overflowed" means "I forget what we were talking about." The implication is that more items were pushed onto the stack than could be remembered, so the least recent items were lost. The usual physical example of a stack is to be found in a cafeteria: a pile of plates or trays sitting on a spring in a well, so that when you put one on the top they all sink down, and when you take one off the top the rest spring up a bit. See alsopushandpop.
At MIT,PDLused to be a more common synonym forstackin all these contexts, and this may still be true. Everywhere elsestackseems to be the preferred term.Knuth("The Art of Computer Programming", second edition, vol. 1, p. 236) says:
Many people who realized the importance of stacks and queues independently have given other names to these structures: stacks have been called push-down lists, reversion storages, cellars, nesting stores, piles, last-in-first-out ("LIFO") lists, and even yo-yo lists!
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stack puke
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stale pointer bug
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stack
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stack puken.
Some processor architectures are said to `puke their guts onto the stack' to save their internal state during exception processing. The Motorola 68020, for example, regurgitates up to 92 bytes on a bus fault. On a pipelined machine, this can take a while.
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stale pointer bug
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star out
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stack puke
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stale pointer bugn.
Synonym foraliasing bugused esp. among microcomputer hackers.
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star out
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state
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stale pointer bug
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star outv.
[University of York, England] To replace a user's encrypted password in /etc/passwd with a single asterisk. Under Unix this is not a legal encryption of any password; hence the user is not permitted to log in. In general, accounts like adm, news, and daemon are permanently "starred out"; occasionally a real user might have the this inflicted upon him/her as a punishment, e.g. "Graham was starred out for playing Omega in working hours". Also occasionally known as The Order Of The Gold Star in this context. "Don't do that, or you'll be awarded the Order of the Gold Star..." Comparedisusered.
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state
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stealth manager
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star out
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staten.
1. Condition, situation. "What's the state of your latest hack?" "It's winning away." "The system tried to read and write the disk simultaneously and got into a totallywedgedstate." The standard question "What's your state?" means "What are you doing?" or "What are you about to do?" Typical answers are "about to gronk out", or "hungry". Another standard question is "What's the state of the world?", meaning "What's new?" or "What's going on?". The more terse and humorous way of asking these questions would be "State-p?". Another way of phrasing the first question under sense 1 would be "state-p latest hack?". 2. Information being maintained in non-permanent memory (electronic or human).
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stealth manager
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steam-powered
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state
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stealth managern.
[Corporate DP] A manager that appears out of nowhere, promises undeliverable software to unknown end users, and vanishes before the programming staff realizes what has happened. Seesmoke and mirrors.
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steam-powered
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STFW
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stealth manager
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steam-poweredadj.
Old-fashioned or underpowered; archaic. This term does not have a strong negative loading and may even be used semi-affectionately for something that clanks and wheezes a lot but hangs in there doing the job.
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STFW
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stiffy
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steam-powered
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STFWimp. /S-T-F-W/
[Usenet] Commmon abbreviation for "Search The Fucking Web", a suggestion that what you're asking for is a query better handled by a search engine than a human being. Usage is common and exactly parallel to both senses ofRTFM.
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stiffy
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stir-fried random
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STFW
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stiffyn.
3.5-inchmicrofloppies, so called because their jackets are more rigid than those of the 5.25-inch and the (now totally obsolete) 8-inch floppy. Elsewhere this might be called a `firmy'. For some odd reason, several sources have taken the trouble to inform us that this term is widespread in South Africa.
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stir-fried random
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stomp on
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stiffy
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stir-fried randomn.
(alt. `stir-fried mumble') Term used for the best dish of many of those hackers who can cook. Consists of random fresh veggies and meat wokked with random spices. Tasty and economical. Seerandom,great-wall,ravs,laser chicken,oriental food; see alsomumble.
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stomp on
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Stone Age
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stir-fried random
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stomp onvt.
To inadvertently overwrite something important, usually automatically. "All the work I did this weekend got stomped on last night by the nightly server script." Comparescribble,mangle,trash,scrog,roach.
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Stone Age
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stone knives and bearskins
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stomp on
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Stone Agen.,adj.
1. In computer folklore, an ill-defined period from ENIAC (ca. 1943) to the mid-1950s; the great age of electromechanicaldinosaurs. Sometimes used for the entire period up to 1960-61 (seeIron Age); however, it is funnier and more descriptive to characterize the latter period in terms of a `Bronze Age' era of transistor-logic, pre-ferrite-coremachines with drum or CRT mass storage (as opposed to just mercury delay lines and/or relays). See alsoIron Age. 2. More generally, a pejorative for any crufty, ancient piece of hardware or software technology. Note that this is used even by people who were there for theStone Age(sense 1).
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stone knives and bearskins
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stoppage
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Stone Age
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stone knives and bearskinsn.
[from the Star Trek Classic episode "The City on the Edge of Forever"] A term traditionally used to describe (and deprecate) computing environments that are grotesquely primitive in light of what is known about good ways to design things. As in "Don't get too used to the facilities here. Once you leave SAIL it's stone knives and bearskins as far as the eye can see". Comparesteam-powered.
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stoppage
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store
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stone knives and bearskins
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stoppage/sto'p*j/ n.
Extremelossagethat renders something (usually something vital) completely unusable. "The recent system stoppage was caused by afriedtransformer."
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store
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strided
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stoppage
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storen.
[prob. from techspeak `main store'] In some varieties of Commonwealth hackish, the preferred synonym forcore. Thus, `bringing a program into store' means not that one is returning shrink-wrapped software but that a program is beingswapped in.
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strided
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stroke
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store
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strided/stri:'d*d/ adj.
[scientific computing] Said of a sequence of memory reads and writes to addresses, each of which is separated from the last by a constant interval called the `stride length'. These can be a worst-case access pattern for the standard memory-caching schemes when the stride length is a multiple of the cache line size. Strided references are often generated by loops through an array, and (if your data is large enough that access-time is significant) it can be worthwhile to tune for better locality by inverting double loops or by partially unrolling the outer loop of a loop nest. This usage is borderline techspeak; the related term `memory stride' is definitely techspeak.
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stroke
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strudel
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strided
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stroken.
Common name for the slant (`/', ASCII 0101111) character. SeeASCIIfor other synonyms.
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strudel
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stubroutine
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stroke
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strudeln.
Common (spoken) name for the at-sign (`@', ASCII 1000000) character. SeeASCIIfor other synonyms.
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stubroutine
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studly
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strudel
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stubroutine/stuhb'roo-teen/ n.
[contraction of `stub subroutine'] Tiny, often vacuous placeholder for a subroutine that is to be written or fleshed out later.
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studly
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studlycaps
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stubroutine
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studlyadj.
Impressive; powerful. Said of code and designs which exhibit both complexity and a virtuoso flair. Has connotations similar tohairybut is more positive in tone. Often in the emphatic `most studly' or as noun-form `studliness'. "Smail 3.0's configuration parser is most studly."
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studlycaps
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stunning
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studly
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studlycaps/stuhd'lee-kaps/ n.
A hackish form of silliness similar toBiCapitalizationfor trademarks, but applied randomly and to arbitrary text rather than to trademarks. ThE oRigiN and SigNificaNce of thIs pRacTicE iS oBscuRe.
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stunning
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stupid-sort
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studlycaps
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stunningadj.
Mind-bogglingly stupid. Usually used in sarcasm. "You want to codewhatin ADA? That's a...stunning idea!"
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stupid-sort
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Stupids
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stunning
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stupid-sortn.
Syn.bogo-sort.
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Stupids
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Sturgeon's Law
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stupid-sort
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Stupidsn.
Term used bysamuraifor thesuits who employ them; succinctly expresses an attitude at least as common, though usually better disguised, among other subcultures of hackers. There may be intended reference here to an SF story originally published in 1952 but much anthologized since, Mark Clifton's "Star, Bright". In it, a super-genius child classifies humans into a very few `Brights' like herself, a huge majority of `Stupids', and a minority of `Tweens', the merely ordinary geniuses.
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Sturgeon's Law
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sucking mud
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Stupids
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Sturgeon's Lawprov.
"Ninety percent of everything is crap". Derived from a quote by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who once said, "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud." Oddly, when Sturgeon's Law is cited, the final word is almost invariably changed to `crap'. CompareHanlon's Razor,Ninety-Ninety Rule. Though this maxim originated in SF fandom, most hackers recognize it and are all too aware of its truth.
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sucking mud
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sufficiently small
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Sturgeon's Law
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sucking mudadj.
[Applied Data Research] (also `pumping mud') Crashed orwedged. Usually said of a machine that provides some service to a network, such as a file server. This Dallas regionalism derives from the East Texas oilfield lament, "Shut 'er down, Ma, she's a-suckin' mud". Often used as a query. "We are going to reconfigure the network, are you ready to suck mud?"
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sufficiently small
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suit
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sucking mud
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sufficiently smalladj.
Syn.suitably small.