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slap on the side n. (also called a sidecar, or abbreviated SOTS.) A type of external expansion hardware marketed by computer manufacturers (e.g., Commodore for the Amiga 500/1000 series and IBM for the hideous failure called 'PCjr'). Various SOTS boxes provided necessities such as memory, hard drive controllers, and conventional expansion slots. |
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slash n. Common name for the slant ('/', ASCII 0101111) character. See ASCII for other synonyms. |
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sleep vi. 1. [techspeak] To relinquish a claim (of a process on a multitasking system) for service; to indicate to the scheduler that a process may be deactivated until some given event occurs or a specified time delay elapses. 2. In jargon, used very similarly to v. block; also in sleep on, syn. with block on. Often used to indicate that the speaker has relinquished a demand for resources until some (possibly unspecified) external event: "They can't get the fix I've been asking for into the next release, so I'm going to sleep on it until the release, then start hassling them again." |
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slim n. A small, derivative change (e.g., to code). |
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slop n. 1. A one-sided fudge factor, that is, an allowance for error but in only one of two directions. For example, if you need a piece of wire 10 feet long and have to guess when you cut it, you make very sure to cut it too long, by a large amount if necessary, rather than too short by even a little bit, because you can always cut off the slop but you can't paste it back on again. When discrete quantities are involved, slop is often introduced to avoid the possibility of being on the losing side of a fencepost error. 2. The percentage of 'extra' code generated by a compiler over the size of equivalent assembler code produced by hand-hacking; i.e., the space (or maybe time) you lose because you didn't do it yourself. This number is often used as a measure of the goodness of a compiler; slop below 5% is very good, and 10% is usually acceptable. With modern compiler technology, esp. on RISC machines, the compiler's slop may actually be negative; that is, humans may be unable to generate code as good. This is one of the reasons assembler programming is no longer common. |
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slopsucker /slop'suhk-r/ n. A lowest-priority task that waits around until everything else has 'had its fill' of machine resources. Only when the machine would otherwise be idle is the task allowed to 'suck up the slop'. Also called a hungry puppy or bottom feeder. One common variety of slopsucker hunts for large prime numbers. Compare background. |
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