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Silver Book n. Jensen and Wirth's infamous Pascal User Manual and Report, so called because of the silver cover of the widely distributed Springer-Verlag second edition of 1978 (ISBN 0-387-90144-2). See book titles, Pascal. |
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since time T equals minus infinity adv. A long time ago; for as long as anyone can remember; at the time that some particular frob was first designed. Usually the word 'time' is omitted. See also time T; contrast epoch. |
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sitename /s t'naym/ n. [Unix/Internet] The unique electronic name of a computer system, used to identify it in UUCP mail, Usenet, or other forms of electronic information interchange. The folklore interest of sitenames stems from the creativity and humor they often display. Interpreting a sitename is not unlike interpreting a vanity license plate; one has to mentally unpack it, allowing for mono-case and length restrictions and the lack of whitespace. Hacker tradition deprecates dull, institutional-sounding names in favor of punchy, humorous, and clever coinages (except that it is considered appropriate for the official public gateway machine of an organization to bear the organization's name or acronym). Mythological references, cartoon characters, animal names, and allusions to SF or fantasy literature are probably the most popular sources for sitenames (in roughly descending order). The obligatory comment when discussing these is Harris's Lament: "All the good ones are taken!" See also network address. |
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slab [Apple] 1. n. A continuous horizontal line of pixels, all with the same color. 2. vi. To paint a slab on an output device. Apple's QuickDraw, like most other professional-level graphics systems, renders polygons and lines not with Bresenham's algorithm, but by calculating 'slab points' for each scan line on the screen in succession, and then slabbing in the actual image pixels. |
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slack n. 1. Space allocated to a disk file but not actually used to store useful information. The techspeak equivalent is 'internal fragmentation'. Antonym: hole. 2. In the theology of the Church of the SubGenius, a mystical substance or quality that is the prerequisite of all human happiness. |
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Since Unix files are stored compactly, except for the unavoidable wastage in the last block or fragment, it might be said that "Unix has no slack". See ha ha only serious. |
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