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on "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In", a popular comedy show of the late 1960s. |
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farming n. [Adelaide University, Australia] What the heads of a disk drive are said to do when they plow little furrows in the magnetic media. Associated with a crash. Typically used as follows: "Oh no, the machine has just crashed; I hope the hard drive hasn't gone farming again." |
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fascist adj. 1. Said of a computer system with excessive or annoying security barriers, usage limits, or access policies. The implication is that said policies are preventing hackers from getting interesting work done. The variant fascistic seems to have been preferred at MIT, poss. by analogy with touristic (see tourist). 2. In the design of languages and other software tools, the fascist alternative is the most restrictive and structured way of capturing a particular function; the implication is that this may be desirable in order to simplify the implementation or provide tighter error checking. Compare bondage-and-discipline language, although that term is global rather than local. |
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fat electrons n. Old-time hacker David Cargill's theory on the causation of computer glitches. Your typical electric utility draws its line current out of the big generators with a pair of coil taps located near the top of the dynamo. When the normal tap brushes get dirty, they take them off line to clean them up, and use special auxiliary taps on the bottom of the coil. Now, this is a problem, because when they do that they get not ordinary or 'thin' electrons, but the fat'n'sloppy electrons that are heavier and so settle to the bottom of the generator. These flow down ordinary wires just fine, but when they have to turn a sharp corner (as in an integrated-circuit via), they're apt to get stuck. This is what causes computer glitches. [Fascinating. Obviously, fat electrons must gain mass by bogon absorption ESR] Compare bogon, magic smoke. |
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faulty adj. Non-functiona; buggy. Same denotation as bletcherous, losing, q.v., but the connotation is much milder. |
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fd leak /F-D leek/ n. A kind of programming bug analogous to a core leak, in which a program fails to close file descriptors ('fd's) after file operations are completed, and thus eventually runs out of them. See leak. |
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fear and loathing n. [from Hunter S. Thompson] A state inspired by the prospect of dealing with certain real-world systems and standards that are totally brain-damaged but ubiquitous Intel 8086s, or COBOL, or |
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