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people who had no idea of then-current technology or the storage, signal-processing, or speech recognition needs of such a project. On the basis of mass-storage costs alone it would have been cheaper to hire 50 high-school students and just let them listen in. Speech-recognition technology can't do this job even now (1996), and almost certainly won't in this millennium, either. The peak of silliness came with a letter to an alternative paper in New Haven, Connecticut, laying out the factoids of this Big Brotherly affair. The letter writer then revealed his actual agenda by offering at an amazing low price, just this once, we take VISA and MasterCard a scrambler guaranteed to daunt the Trunk Trawler and presumably allowing the would-be Baader-Meinhof gangs of the world to get on with their business. |
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NSP /N-S-P/ n. Common abbreviation for 'Network Service Provider', one of the big national or regional companies that maintains a portion of the Internet backbone and resells connectivity to ISPs. In 1996, major NSPs include ANS, MCI, UUNET, and Sprint. An Internet wholesaler. |
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nude adj. Said of machines delivered without an operating system (compare bare metal). "We ordered 50 systems, but they all arrived nude, so we had to spend a an extra weekend with the installation tapes." This usage is a recent innovation reflecting the fact that most PC clones are now delivered with DOS or Microsoft Windows pre-installed at the factory. Other kinds of hardware are still normally delivered without OS, so this term is particular to PC support groups. |
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nuke /n[y]ook/ vt. 1. To intentionally delete the entire contents of a given directory or storage volume. "On Unix, rm -r /usr will nuke everything in the sur filesystem." Never used for accidental deletion. Oppose blow away. 2. Syn. for dike, applied to smaller things such as files, features, or code sections. Often used to express a final verdict. "What do you want me to do with that 80-meg wallpaper file?" ''Nuke it." 3. Used of processes as well as files; nuke is a frequent verbal alias for kill -9 on Unix. 4. On IBM PCs, a bug that results in fandango on core can trash the operating system, including the FAT (the in-core copy of the disk block chaining information). This can utterly scramble attached disks, which are then said to have been nuked. This term is also used of analogous lossages on Macintoshes and other micros without memory protection. |
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number-crunching n. Computations of a numerical nature, esp. those that make extensive use of floating-point numbers. The only thing Fortrash is good for. This term is in widespread informal use outside hackerdom and |
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