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that spec in the design of DRECNET in a way that made it incompatible. See also connector conspiracy. |
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driver n. 1. The main loop of an even-processing program; the code that gets commands and dispatches them for execution. 2. [techspeak] In device driver, code designed to handle a particular peripheral device such as a magnetic disk or tape unit. 3. In the TEX world and the computerized typesetting world in general, a program that translates some device-independent or other common format to something a real device can actually understand. |
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droid n. [from android, SF terminology for a humanoid robot of essentially biological (as opposed to mechanical/electronic) construction] A person (esp. a low-level bureaucrat or service-business employee) exhibiting most of the following characteristics: (a) naive trust in the wisdom of the parent organization or 'the system'; (b) a blind-faith propensity to believe obvious nonsense emitted by authority figures (or computers!); (c) a rule-governed mentality, one unwilling or unable to look beyond the 'letter of the law' in exceptional situations; (d) a paralyzing fear of official reprimand or worse if Procedures are not followed No Matter What; and (e) no interest in doing anything above or beyond the call of a very narrowly-interpreted duty, or in particular in fixing that which is broken; an "It's not my job, man" attitude. |
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Typical droid positions include supermarket checkout assistant and bank clerk; the syndrome is also endemic in low-level government employees. The implication is that the rules and official procedures constitute software that the droid is executing; problems arise when the software has not been properly debugged. The term droid mentality is also used to describe the mindset behind this behavior. Compare suit, marketroid; see -oid. |
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drool-proof paper n. Documentation that has been obsessively dumbed down, to the point where only a cretin could bear to read it, is said to have succumbed to the 'drool-proof paper syndrome' or to have been 'written on drool-proof paper'. For example, this is an actual quote from Apple's LaserWriter manual: "Do not expose your LaserWriter to open fire or flame." |
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drop on the floor vt. To react to an error condition by silently discarding messages or other valuable data. "The gateway ran out of memory, so it just started dropping packets on the floor." Also frequently used of faulty mail and netnews relay sites that lose messages. See also black hole, bit bucket. |
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