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developed based on the physical fact that the molecules in a solid object move more rapidly as it is heated. It is argued that an object melts because the molecules have lost their information about where they are supposed to be (that is, they have emitted computrons). This explains why computers get so hot and require air conditioning; they use up computrons. Conversely, it should be possible to cool down an object by placing it in the path of a computron beam. It is believed that this may also explain why machines that work at the factory fail in the computer room: the computrons there have been all used up by the other hardware. (This theory probably owes something to the "Warlock" stories by Larry Niven, the best known being "What Good is a Glass Dagger?", in which magic is fueled by an exhaustible natural resource called 'mana'.) |
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con [from SF fandom] n. A science-fiction convention. Not used of other sorts of conventions, such as professional meetings. This term, unlike many others of SF-fan slang, is widely recognized even by hackers who aren't fans. "We'd been corresponding on the net for months, then we met face-to-face at a con." |
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condition out vt. To prevent a section of code from being compiled by surrounding it with a conditional-compilation directive whose condition is always false. The canonical examples of these directives are #if 0 (or #ifdef notdef, though some find the latter bletcherous) and #endif in C. Compare comment out. |
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condom n. 1. The protective plastic bag that accompanies 3.5-inch microfloppy diskettes. Rarely, also used of (paper) disk envelopes. Unlike the write protect tab, the condom (when left on) not only impedes the practice of SEX but has also been shown to have a high failure rate as drive mechanisms attempt to access the disk and can even fatally frustrate insertion. 2. The protective cladding on a light pipe. 3. keyboard condom: A flexible, transparent plastic cover for a keyboard, designed to provide some protection against dust and programming fluid without impeding typing. 4. elephant condom: the plastic shipping bags used inside cardboard boxes to protect hardware in transit. 5. n. obs. A dummy directory /usr/tmp/sh, created to foil the Great Worm by exploiting a portability bug in one of its parts. So named in the title of a comp.risks article by Gene Spafford during the Worm crisis, and again in the text of The Internet Worm Program: An Analysis, Purdue Technical Report CSD-TR-823. See Great Worm, the. |
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