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orphaned i-node /or/fend e'nohd/ n. [Unix] 1. [techspeak] A file that retains storage but no longer appears in the directories of a filesystem. 2. By extension, a pejorative for any person no longer serving a useful function within some organization, esp. lion food without subordinates. |
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orthogonal adj. [from mathematics] Mutually independent; well separated; sometimes, irrelevant to. Used in a generalization of its mathematical meaning to describe sets of primitives or capabilities that, like a vector basis in geometry, span the entire 'capability space' of the system and are in some sense non-overlapping or mutually independent. For example, in architectures such as the PDP-11 or VAX where all or nearly all registers can be used interchangeably in any role with respect to any instruction, the register set is said to be orthogonal. Or, in logic, the set of operators not and or is orthogonal, but the set nand, or, and not is not (because any one of these can be expressed in terms of the others). Also used in comments on human discourse: "This may be orthogonal to the discussion, but. " |
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OS /O-S/ 1. [Operating System] n. An abbreviation heavily used in email, occasionally in speech. 2. n. obs. On ITS, an output spy. See "OS and JEDGAR" in Appendix A. |
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OS/2 /O S too/ n. The anointed successor to MS-DOS for Intel 286- and 386-based micros; proof that IBM/Microsoft couldn't get it right the second time, either. Often called 'Half-an-OS'. Mentioning it is usually good for a cheap laugh among hackers the design was so baroque, and the implementation of 1.x so bad, that 3 years after introduction you could still count the major apps shipping for it on the fingers of two hands in unary. The 2.x versions are said to have improved somewhat, and informed hackers now rate them superior to Microsoft Windows (an endorsement which, however, could easily be construed as damning with faint praise). See monstrosity, cretinous, second-system effect. |
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OSU /O-S-U/ n. obs. [TMRC] Acronym for Officially Sanctioned User; a user who is recognized as such by the computer authorities and allowed to use the computer above the objections of the security monitor. |
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OTOH // [USENET] On The Other Hand. |
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out-of-band adj. [from telecommunications and network theory] 1. In software, describes values of a function which are not in its 'natural' range of return values, but are rather signals that some kind of exception has occurred. Many C functions, for example, return a nonnegative integral value, |
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