|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Naziism or various forms of millennarian Christianity have exhibited plague-like cycles of exponential growth followed by collapses to small reservoir populations. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
memetics /me-met'iks/ n. [from meme] The study of memes. As of early 1996, this is still an extremely informal and speculative endeavor, though the first steps towards at least statistical rigor have been made by H. Keith Henson and others. Memetics is a popular topic for speculation among hackers, who like to see themselves as the architects of the new information ecologies in which memes live and replicate. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
memory farts n. The flatulent sounds that some DOS box BIOSes (most notably AMI's) make when checking memory on bootup. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
memory leak n. An error in a program's dynamic-store allocation logic that causes it to fail to reclaim discarded memory, leading to eventual collapse due to memory exhaustion. Also (esp. at CMU) called core leak. These problems were severe on older machines with small, fixed-size address spaces, and special "leak detection" tools were commonly written to root them out. With the advent of virtual memory, it is unfortunately easier to be sloppy about wasting a bit of memory (although when you run out of memory on a VM machine, it means you've got a real leak!). See aliasing bug, fandango on core, smash the stack, precedence lossage, overrun screw, leaky heap, leak. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
memory smash n. [XEROX PARC] Writing through a pointer that doesn't point to what you think it does. This occasionally reduces your machine to a rubble of bits. Note that this is subtly different from (and more general than) related terms such as a memory leak or fandango on core because it doesn't imply an allocation error or overrun condition. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
menuitis /men`yoo- 'tis/ n. Notional disease suffered by software with an obsessively simple-minded menu interface and no escape. Hackers find this intensely irritating and much prefer the flexibility of command-line or language-style interfaces, especially those customizable via macros or a special-purpose language in which one can encode useful hacks. See user-obsequious, drool-proof paper, WIMP environment, for the rest of us. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
mess-dos /mes-dos/ n. Derisory term for MS-DOS. Often followed by the ritual banishing "Just say No1" See MS-DOS. Most hackers (even many MS-DOS hackers) loathe MS-DOS for its single-tasking nature, its limits on application size, its nasty primitive interface, and its ties to IBMness (see fear |
|
|
|
|
|