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The preferred emphatic form is decidedly nontrivial. See trivial, uninteresting, interesting. |
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not ready for prime time adj. Usable, but only just so; not very robust; for internal use only. Said of a program or device. Often connotes that the thing will be made more solid Real Soon Now. This term comes from the ensemble name of the original cast of "Saturday Night Live", the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players". It has extra flavor for hackers because of the special (though now semi-obsolescent) meaning of prime time. Compare beta. |
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notwork /not'werk/ n. A network, when it is acting flaky or is down. Compare nyetwork. Said at IBM to have originally referred to a particular period of flakiness on IBM's VNET corporate network ca. 1988; but there are independent reports of the term from elsewhere. |
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NP- /N-P/ pref. Extremely. Used to modify adjectives describing a level or quality of difficulty; the connotation is often 'more so than it should be' This is generalized from the computer-science terms 'NP-hard' and 'NP-complete'; NP-complete problems all seem to be very hard, but so far no one has found a good a priori reason that they should be. NP is the set of Nondeterministic-Polynomial algoirthms, those that can be completed by a nondeterministic Turing machine in an amount of time that is a polynomial function of the size of the input; a solution for one NP-complete problem would solve all the others. "Coding a BitBlt implementation to perform correctly in every case is NP-annoying." |
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nroff /N'rof/ n. [Unix, from "new roff" (see troff)] A companion program to the Unix typesetter troff, accepting identical input but preparing output for terminals and line printers. |
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NSA line eater n. The National Security Agency trawling program sometimes assumed to be reading the net for the U.S. Government's spooks. Most hackers describe it as a mythical beast, but some believe it actually exists, more aren't sure, and many believe in acting as though it exists just in case. Some netters put loaded phrases like 'KGB', 'Uzi', 'nuclear materials', 'Palestine', 'cocaine', and 'assassination' in their sig blocks in a (probably futile) attempt to confuse and overload the creature. The GNU version of EMACS actually has a command that randomly inserts a bunch of insidious anarcho-verbiage into your edited text. |
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There is a mainstream variant of this myth involving a 'Trunk Line Monitor', which supposedly used speech recognition to extract words from telephone trunks. This one was making the rounds in the late 1970s, spread by |
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