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S/N ratio // n. (also s/n ratio, s:n ratio). Syn. signal-to-noise ratio. Often abbreviated SNR. |
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sacred adj. Reserved for the exclusive use of something (an extension of the standard meaning). Often means that anyone may look at the sacred object, but clobbering it will screw whatever it is sacred to. The comment "Register 7 is sacred to the interrupt handler" appearing in a program would be interpreted by a hacker to mean that if any other part of the program changes the contents of register 7, dire consequences are likely to ensue. |
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saga n. [WPI] A cuspy but bogus raving story about N random broken people. |
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Here is a classic example of the saga form, as told by Guy L. Steele: |
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Jon L. White (login name JONL) and I (GLS) were office mates at MIT for many years. One April, we both flew from Boston to California for a week on research business, to consult face-to-face with some people at Stanford, particularly our mutual friend Richard P. Gabriel (RPG; see gabriel). |
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RPG picked us up at the San Francisco airport and drove us back to Palo Alto (going logical south on route 101, parallel to El Camino Bignum). Palo Alto is adjacent to Stanford University and about 40 miles south of San Francisco. We ate at The Good Earth, a 'health food' restaurant, very popular, the sort whose milkshakes all contain honey and protein powder. JONL ordered such a shake the waitress claimed the flavor of the day was "lalaberry". I still have no idea what that might be, but it became a running joke. It was the color of raspberry, and JONL said it tasted rather bitter. I ate a better tostada there than I have ever had in a Mexican restaurant. |
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After this we went to the local Uncle Gaylord's Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor. They make ice cream fresh daily, in a variety of intriguing flavors. It's a chain, and they have a slogan: "If you don't live near an Uncle Gaylord's MOVE!" Also, Uncle Gaylord (a real person) wages a constant battle to force big-name ice cream makers to print their ingredients on the package (like air and plastic and other non-natural garbage). JONL and I had first discovered Uncle Gaylord's the previous August, when we had flown to a computer-science conference in Berkeley, California, the first time |
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