The New Hacker's Dictionary
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micro).
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management n.
1. Corporate power elites distinguished primarily by their distance from actual productive work and their chronic failure to manage (see also [8454]suit). Spoken derisively, as in "Management decided 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 the [8455]Bibliography in Appendix C).
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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 a [8459]Bohr bug, rather than a [8460]heisenbug. See also [8461]schroedinbug.
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manged /mahnjd/ n.
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[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." Compare [8465]mung.
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mangle vt.
1. Used similarly to [8469]mung or [8470]scribble, but more violent in its connotations; something that is mangled has been irreversibly and totally trashed. 2. To produce the [8471]mangled name corresponding to a C++ declaration.
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mangled name n.
A name, appearing in a C++ object file, that is a coded representation of the object declaration as it appears in the source. Mangled names are used because C++ allows multiple objects to have the same name, as long as they are distinguishable in some other way, such as by having different parameter types. Thus, the internal name must have that additional information embedded in it, using the limited character set allowed by most linkers. For instance, one popular compiler encodes the standard library function declaration "memchr(const void*,int,unsigned int)" as "@memchr$qpxviui".
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Node:mangler, Next:[8475]manularity, Previous:[8476]mangled name, Up:[8477]= M =
mangler n.
[DEC] A manager. Compare [8478]management. Note that [8479]system mangler is somewhat different in connotation.
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Node:manularity, Next:[8480]marbles, Previous:[8481]mangler,
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manularity /man`yoo-la'ri-tee/ n.
[prob. fr. techspeak `manual' + `granularity'] A notional measure of the manual labor required for some task, particularly one of the sort that automation is supposed to eliminate. "Composing English on paper has much higher manularity than using a text editor, especially in the revising stage." Hackers tend to consider manularity a symptom of primitive methods; in fact, a true hacker confronted with an apparent requirement to do a computing task [8483]by hand will inevitably seize the opportunity to build another tool (see [8484]toolsmith).
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marbles pl.n.
[from mainstream "lost all his/her marbles"] The minimum needed to build your way further up some hierarchy of tools or abstractions. After a bad system crash, you need to determine if the machine has enough marbles to come up on its own, or enough marbles to allow a rebuild from backups, or if you need to rebuild from scratch. "This compiler doesn't even have
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enough marbles to compile [8488]hello world."
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marginal adj.
[common] 1. [techspeak] An extremely small change. "A marginal increase in [8492]core can decrease [8493]GC time drastically." In everyday terms, this means that it is a lot easier to clean off your desk if you have a spare place to put some of the junk while you sort through it. 2. Of little merit. "This proposed new feature seems rather marginal to me." 3. Of extremely small probability of [8494]winning. "The power supply was rather marginal anyway; no wonder it fried."
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Marginal Hacks n.
Margaret Jacks Hall, a building into which the Stanford AI Lab was moved near the beginning of the 1980s (from the [8498]D. C. Power Lab).
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Node:marginally, Next:[8499]marketroid, Previous:[8500]Marginal Hacks,
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marginally adv.
Slightly. "The ravs here are only marginally better than at Small Eating Place." See [8502]epsilon.
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Node:marketroid, Next:[8503]Mars, Previous:[8504]marginally,
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marketroid /mar'k*-troyd/ n.
alt. `marketing slime', `marketeer', `marketing droid', `marketdroid'. A member of a company's marketing department, esp. one who promises users that the next version of a product will have features that are not actually scheduled for inclusion, are extremely difficult to implement, and/or are in violation of the laws of physics; and/or one who describes existing features (and misfeatures) in ebullient, buzzword-laden adspeak. Derogatory. Compare [8506]droid.
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Mars n.
A legendary tragic failure, the archetypal Hacker Dream Gone Wrong. Mars was the code name for a family of PDP-10 compatible computers built by Systems Concepts (now, The SC Group): the multi-processor SC-30M, the small uniprocessor SC-25M, and the never-built superprocessor SC-40M. These machines were marvels of engineering design; although not much slower than the unique [8510]Foonly F-1, they were physically smaller and consumed less power than the much slower [8511]DEC KS10 or Foonly F-2, F-3, or F-4 machines. They were also completely compatible with the DEC KL10, and ran all KL10 binaries (including the operating system) with no modifications at about 2-3 times faster than a KL10.
When DEC cancelled the Jupiter project in 1983, Systems Concepts should have made a bundle selling their machine into shops with a lot of software
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investment in PDP-10s, and in fact their spring 1984 announcement generated a great deal of excitement in the PDP-10 world. TOPS-10 was running on the Mars by the summer of 1984, and TOPS-20 by early fall. Unfortunately, the hackers running Systems Concepts were much better at designing machines than at mass producing or selling them; the company allowed itself to be sidetracked by a bout of perfectionism into continually improving the design, and lost credibility as delivery dates continued to slip. They also overpriced the product ridiculously; they believed they were competing with the KL10 and VAX 8600 and failed to reckon with the likes of Sun Microsystems and other hungry startups building workstations with power comparable to the KL10 at a fraction of the price. By the time SC shipped the first SC-30M to Stanford in late 1985, most customers had already made the traumatic decision to abandon the PDP-10, usually for VMS or Unix boxes. Most of the Mars computers built ended up being purchased by CompuServe.
This tale and the related saga of [8512]Foonly hold a lesson for hackers: if you want to play in the [8513]Real World, you need to learn Real World moves.
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martian n.
A packet sent on a TCP/IP network with a source address of the test loopback interface [127.0.0.1]. This means that it will come back labeled with a source address that is clearly not of this earth. "The domain server is getting lots of packets from Mars. Does that gateway have a martian filter?" Compare [8517]Christmas tree packet, [8518]Godzillagram.
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massage vt.
[common] Vague term used to describe `smooth' transformations of a data set into a different form, esp. transformations that do not lose information. Connotes less pain than [8522]munch or [8523]crunch. "He wrote a program that massages X bitmap files into GIF format." Compare [8524]slurp.
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math-out n.
[poss. from `white-out' (the blizzard variety)] A paper or presentation so encrusted with mathematical or other formal notation as to be incomprehensible. This may be a device for concealing the fact that it is actually [8528]content-free. See also [8529]numbers, [8530]social science number.
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Matrix n.
[FidoNet] 1. What the Opus BBS software and sysops call [8534]FidoNet. 2. Fanciful term for a [8535]cyberspace expected to emerge from current networking experiments (see [8536]the network). The name of the rather good 1999 [8537]cypherpunk movie "The Matrix" played on this sense, which however had been established for years before. 3. The totality of
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present-day computer networks (popularized in this sense by John Quarterman; rare outside academic literature).
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maximum Maytag mode n.
What a [8541]washing machine or, by extension, any disk drive is in when it's being used so heavily that it's shaking like an old Maytag with an unbalanced load. If prolonged for any length of time, can lead to disks becoming [8542]walking drives. In 1999 it's been some years since hard disks were large enough to do this, but the same phenomenon has recently been reported with 24X CD-ROM drives.
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meatspace /meet'spays/ n.
The physical world, where the meat lives - as opposed to [8546]cyberspace. Hackers are actually more willing to use this term than `cyberspace', because it's not speculative - we already have a running meatspace implementation (the universe). Compare [8547]RL.
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meatware n.
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Synonym for [8551]wetware. Less common.
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meeces /mees'*z/ n.
[TMRC] Occasional furry visitors who are not [8555]urchins. [That is, mice. This may no longer be in live use; it clearly derives from the refrain of the early-1960s cartoon character Mr. Jinx: "I hate meeces to pieces!" -- ESR]
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meg /meg/ n.
See [8559]quantifiers.
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mega- /me'g*/ pref.
[SI] See [8563]quantifiers.
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megapenny /meg'*-pen`ee/ n.
$10,000 (1 cent * 10^6). Used semi-humorously as a unit in comparing computer cost and performance figures.
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MEGO /me'goh/ or /mee'goh/
[`My Eyes Glaze Over', often `Mine Eyes Glazeth (sic) Over', attributed to the futurologist Herman Kahn] Also `MEGO factor'. 1. n. A [8570]handwave intended to confuse the listener and hopefully induce agreement because the listener does not want to admit to not understanding what is going on. MEGO is usually directed at senior management by engineers and contains a high proportion of [8571]TLAs. 2. excl. An appropriate response to MEGO tactics. 3. Among non-hackers, often refers not to behavior that causes the eyes to glaze, but to the eye-glazing reaction itself, which may be triggered by the mere threat of technical detail as effectively as by an actual excess of it.
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meltdown, network n.
See [8575]network meltdown.
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