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unflattering ways. This joke expresses a nearly universal attitude about the value of most benchmark claims, said attitude being one of the great cultural divides between hackers and marketroids. The singular is sometimes '1 MIP' even though this is clearly etymologically wrong. See also KIPS and GIPS. 2. Computers, especially large computers, considered abstractly as sources of 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 DEC's 3100 workstation series. 4. Acronym for 'Meaningless Information per Second' (a joke, probably from sense 1). |
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misbug /mis-buhg/ n. [MIT] An unintended property of a program that turns out to be useful; something that should have been a bug but turns out to be a feature. Usage: rare. Compare green lightning. See miswart. |
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misfeature /mis-fee'chr/ or /mis'fee`chr/ n. 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 to resolve, because fixing it usually involves a substantial philosophical change to the structure of the system involved. |
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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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Missed'em-five n. Pejorative hackerism for AT&T System V Unix, generally used by BSD partisans in a bigoted mood. (The synonym 'SysVile' is also encountered.) See software bloat, Berzerkeley. |
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missile address n. See ICBM address. |
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miswart /mis-wort/ n. [from wart by analogy with misbug] A feature that superficially appears to be a wart but has been determined to be the Right Thing. For example, in some versions of the EMACS text editor, the 'transpose characters' command exchanges the character under the cursor |
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