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yet?" 2. Said sarcastically of a program that is perceived to have little more than a flashy interface going for it. Which meaning should be drawn depends delicately on tone of voice and context. This word was common mainstream slang during the 1940s, in a sense close to 1. |
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spike v. To defeat a selection mechanism by introducing a (sometimes temporary) device that forces a specific result. The word is used in several industries; telephone engineers refer to spiking a relay by inserting a pin to hold the relay in either the closed or open state, and railroaders refer to spiking a track switch so that it cannot be moved. In programming environments it normally refers to a temporary change, usually for testing purposes (as opposed to a permanent change, which would be called hardwired). |
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spin vi. Equivalent to buzz. More common among C and Unix programmers. |
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spl /S-P-L/ [abbrev, from Set Priority Level] The way traditional Unix kernels implement mutual exclusion by running code at high interrupt levels. Used in jargon to describe the act of tuning in or tuning out ordinary communication. Classically, spl levels run from 1 to 7; "Fred's at spl 6 today" would mean that he is very hard to interrupt. "Wait till I finish this; I'll spl down then." See also interrupts locked out. |
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splash screen n. [Mac users] Syn. banner, sense 3. |
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splat n. 1. Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for the asterisk ('*') character (ASCII 0101010). This may derive from the 'squashedbug' appearance of the asterisk on many early line printers. 2. [MIT] Name used by some people for the '#' character (ASCII 0100011). 3. [Rochester Institute of Technology] The feature key on a Mac (same as alt, sense 2). 4. obs. Name used by some people for the Stanford/ITS extended ASCII  , the 'circle-x' character. This character is also called blobby and frob, among other names; it is sometimes used by mathematicians as a notation for 'tensor product'. 5. obs. Name for the semi-mythical Stanford extended ASCII  , the 'circle-plus' character. See also ASCII. |
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spod n. [UK] A lower form of life found on talker systems and MUDs. The spod has few friends in RL and uses talkers instead, finding communication easier and preferable over the net. He has all the negative traits of the computer geek without having any interest in computers per se. Lacking any knowledge of or interest in how networks work, and considering his access a God-given right, he is a major irritant to sysadmins, clogging up |
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