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social science number n. [IBM] A statistic that is content-free, or nearly so. A measure derived via methods of questionable validity from data of a dubious and vague nature. Predictively, having a social science number in hand is seldom much better than nothing, and can be considerably worse. As a rule, management loves them. See also numbers, math-out, pretty pictures. |
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sodium substrate n. Syn salt substrate. |
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softcopy /soft'kop-ee/ n. [by analogy with 'hardcopy'] A machine-readable form of corresponding hardcopy. See bits, machinable. |
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software bloat n. The results of second-system effect or creeping featuritis. Commonly cited examples include ls(1), X, BSD, Missed'em-five, and OS/2. |
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software hoarding n. Pejorative term employed by members and adherents of the GNU project to describe the act of holding software proprietary, keeping it under trade secret or license terms which prohibit free redistribution and modification. Used primarily in Free Software Foundation propaganda. For a summary of related issues, see GNU. |
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software laser n. An optical laser works by bouncing photons back and forth between two mirrors, one totally reflective and one partially reflective. If the lasing material (usually a crystal) has the right properties, photons scattering off the atoms in the crystal will excite cascades of more photons, all in lockstep. Eventually the beam will escape through the partially-reflective mirror. One kind of sorcerer's apprentice mode involving bounce messages can produce closely analogous results, with a cascade of messages escaping to flood nearby systems. By mid-1993 there had been at least two publicized incidents of this kind. |
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software rot n. Term used to describe the tendency of software that has not been used in a while to lose; such failure may be semi-humorously ascribed to bit rot. More commonly, software rot strikes when a program's assumptions become out of date. If the design was insufficiently robust, this may cause it to fail in mysterious ways. |
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For example, owing to endemic shortsightedness in the design of COBOL programs, most will succumb to software rot when their 2-digit year counters wrap around at the beginning of the year 2000. Actually, |
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