The New Hacker's Dictionary

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Node:Microsloth Windows, Next:[8718]Microsoft,

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Microsloth Windows /mi:'kroh-sloth` win'dohz/ n.

(Variants combine {Microshift, Macroshaft, Microsuck} with {Windoze, WinDOS}. Hackerism(s) for `Microsoft Windows'. A thirty-two bit extension and graphical shell to a sixteen bit patch to an eight bit operating system originally coded for a four bit microprocessor which was written by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition. Also just called `Windoze', with the implication that you can fall asleep waiting for it to do anything; the latter term is extremely common on Usenet. See [8721]Black Screen of Death and [8722]Blue Screen of Death; compare [8723]X, [8724]sun-stools.

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Node:Microsoft, Next:[8725]micros~1, Previous:[8726]Microsloth

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Microsoft

The new [8728]Evil Empire (the old one was [8729]IBM). The basic complaints are, as formerly with IBM, that (a) their system designs are horrible botches, (b) we can't get [8730]source to fix them, and (c) they throw their weight around a lot. See also [8731]Halloween Documents.

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Node:micros~1, Next:[8732]middle-endian, Previous:[8733]Microsoft,

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micros~1

An abbreviation of the full name [8735]Microsoft resembling the rather [8736]bogus way Windows 9x's VFAT filesystem truncates long file names

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A unit of talking speed, abbreviated mL. Most people run about 200 milliLampsons. The eponymous Butler Lampson (a CS theorist and systems implementor highly regarded among hackers) goes at 1000. A few people speak faster. This unit is sometimes used to compare the (sometimes widely disparate) rates at which people can generate ideas and actually emit them in speech. For example, noted computer architect C. Gordon Bell (designer of the PDP-11) is said, with some awe, to think at about 1200 mL but only talk at about 300; he is frequently reduced to fragments of sentences as his mouth tries to keep up with his speeding brain.

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Node:minifloppies, Next:[8750]MIPS, Previous:[8751]milliLampson,

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minifloppies n.,obs.

5.25-inch floppy disks, as opposed to 3.5-inch or [8753]microfloppies and the long-obsolescent 8-inch variety (if there is ever a smaller size, they will undoubtedly be tagged `nanofloppies'). At one time, this term was a trademark of Shugart Associates for their SA-400 minifloppy drive. Nobody paid any attention. See [8754]stiffy.

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Node:MIPS, Next:[8755]misbug, Previous:[8756]minifloppies, Up:[8757]=

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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 most [8758]benchmark claims, said attitude being one of

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the great cultural divides between hackers and [8759]marketroids (see also [8760]BogoMIPS). The singular is sometimes `1 MIP' even though this is clearly etymologically wrong. See also [8761]KIPS and [8762]GIPS. 2.

Computers, especially large computers, considered abstractly as sources of [8763]computrons. "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 in [8764]DEC's 3100 workstation series. 4. Acronym for `Meaningless Information per Second' (a joke, prob. from sense 1).

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Node:misbug, Next:[8765]misfeature, Previous:[8766]MIPS, Up:[8767]=

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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 a [8768]bug but turns out to be a [8769]feature. Compare [8770]green lightning. See [8771]miswart.

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Node:misfeature, Next:[8772]Missed'em-five, Previous:[8773]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

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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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Node:Missed'em-five, Next:[8775]missile address,

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Missed'em-five n.

Pejorative hackerism for AT&T System V Unix, generally used by [8778]BSD partisans in a bigoted mood. (The synonym `SysVile' is also encountered.) See [8779]software bloat, [8780]Berzerkeley.

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Node:missile address, Next:[8781]miswart,

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missile address n.

See [8784]ICBM address.

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Node:moby, Next:[8801]mockingbird, Previous:[8802]mobo, Up:[8803]=

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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." (See [8804]Appendix A for 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 with [8805]bignum (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

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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 much less than one theoretical `native' moby of [8806]core. 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 incredibly [8807]brain-damaged segmented-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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Node:mockingbird, Next:[8808]mod, Previous:[8809]moby, Up:[8810]= M

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mockingbird n.

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 of [8811]Trojan horse.

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Node:mod, Next:[8812]mode, Previous:[8813]mockingbird, Up:[8814]= M

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mod vt.,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