WhatIs

/sāl/ not /S-A-I-L/

n. 1. Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. An important site in the early development of LISP; with the MIT AI Lab, BBN, CMU, and the UNIX community, one of the major wellsprings of technical innovation and hacker-culture traditions (see the WAITS entry for details). The SAIL machines were officially shut down in late May 1990, scant weeks after the MIT AI Lab's ITS cluster was officially decommissioned.

/sā-gən/

[from Carl Sagan's TV series Cosmos; think "billions and billions"]

n. A large quantity of anything.

"There's a sagan different ways to tweak EMACS."

"The U.S. Government spends sagans on bombs and welfare -- hard to say which is more destructive."

/sä-gə/

[WPI]

n. A cuspy but bogus raving story about N random broken people.

Here is a classic example of the saga form, as told by Guy L. Steele:

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).

/sā-krəd/

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.

/es-en rā-shē-ō/

n. (also s/n ratio, s:n ratio). Syn. signal-to-noise ratio. Often abbreviated SNR.

/rə-stē mem-rē/

n. Mass-storage that uses iron-oxide-based magnetic media (esp. tape and the pre-Winchester removable disk packs used in washing machines).

Compare donuts.

/rə-stē ī(-ə)rn/

n. Syn. tired iron. It has been claimed that this is the inevitable fate of water MIPS.

/rü-nik/

adj. Syn. obscure. VMS fans sometimes refer to UNIX as Runix; UNIX fans return the compliment by expanding VMS to Very Messy Syntax or Vachement Mauvais Système (French; lit. "Cowlike Bad System", idiomatically "Bitchy Bad System").

/rünz/

pl. n. 1. Anything that requires heavy wizardry or black art to parse: core dumps, JCL commands, APL, or code in a language you haven't a clue how to read.

Compare casting the runes, Great Runes.

2. Special display characters (for example, the high-half graphics on an IBM PC).

/rüd/

[WPI]

adj. 1. (of a program) Badly written.

2. Functionally poor, e.g., a program that is very difficult to use because of gratuitously poor (random?) design decisions.

See cuspy.