platinum-iridium adj. Standard, against which all others of the same category are measured. Usage: silly. The notion is that one of whatever it is has actually been cast in platinum-iridium alloy and placed in the vault beside the Standard Kilogram at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris. (From 1889 to 1960, the meter was defined to be the distance between two scratches in a platinum-iridium bar kept in that same vault this replaced an earlier definition as 10-7 times the distance between the North Pole and the Equator along a meridian through Paris; unfortunately, this had been based on an inexact value of the circumference of the Earth. From 1960 to 1984 it was defined to be 1650763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red line of krypton-86 propagating in a vacuum. It is now defined as the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in the time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second. The kilogram is now the only unit of measure officially defined in terms of a unique artifact.) "This garbage-collection algorithm has been tested against the platinum-iridium cons cell in Paris." Compare golden.
playpen n. [IBM] A room where programmers work. Compare salt mines.
playte /playt/ 16 bits, by analogy with nybble and byte. Usage: rare and extremely silly. See also dynner and crumb. General discussion of such terms is under nybble.
plingnet /pling'net/ n. Syn. UUCPNET. Also see Commonwealth Hackish, which uses 'pling' for bang (as in bang path).
plokta /plok't/ v. [acronym: Press Lots Of Keys To Abort] To press random keys in an attempt to get some response from the system. One might plokta when the abort procedure for a program is not known, or when trying to figure out if the system is just sluggish or really hung. Plokta can also be used while trying to figure out any unknown key sequence for a particular operation. Someone going into plokta mode usually places both hands flat on the keyboard and mashes them down, hoping for some useful response.
A slightly more directed form of plokta can often be seen in mail messages or Usenet articles from new users the text might end with
/ v. [acronym: Press Lots Of Keys To Abort] To press random keys in an attempt to get some response from the system. One might plokta when the abort procedure for a program is not known, or when trying to figure out if the system is just sluggish or really hung. Plokta can also be used while trying to figure out any unknown key sequence for a particular operation. Someone going into plokta mode usually places both hands flat on the keyboard and mashes them down, hoping for some useful response.