WhatIs

/mak'in-toy/

n. The Apple Macintosh, considered as a toy. Less pejorative than Macintrash.

/mach'oh-flops/

[pun on megaflops, a coinage for millions of FLoating-point Operations Per Second]

n. Refers to artificially inflated performance figures often quoted by computer manufacturers. Real applications are lucky to get half the quoted speed.

See Your mileage may vary, benchmark.

/mə-ˈshē-nā-bəl/

adj. Machine-readable. Having the softcopy nature.

/makdiŋk/

[from the Apple Macintosh, which is said to encourage such behavior]

vt. To make many incremental and unnecessary cosmetic changes to a program or file. Often the subject of the macdinking would be better off without them.

"When I left at 11 P.M. last night, he was still macdinking the slides for his presentation."

See also fritterware.

/em/

[SI]

pref. (on units) suff. (on numbers)

See quantifiers.

/lü-zər/

n. A user; esp. one who is also a loser. (luser and loser are pronounced identically.) This word was coined around 1975 at MIT. Under ITS, when you first walked up to a terminal at MIT and typed Control-Z to get the computer's attention, it printed out some status information, including how many people were already using the computer; it might print "14 users", for example.

/lər-kər/

n. One of the 'silent majority' in a electronic forum; one who posts occasionally or not at all but is known to read the group's postings regularly. This term is not pejorative and indeed is casually used reflexively:

"Oh, I'm just lurking."

Often used in 'the lurkers', the hypothetical audience for the group's flamage-emitting regulars.

/lü-nə-ˌtik frinj/

[IBM]

n. Customers who can be relied upon to accept release 1 versions of software.

/L-P-T/ or /lip'it/ or /lip-it'/

[MIT, via DEC]

n. Line printer, of course. Rare under UNIX, commoner in hackers with MS-DOS or CP/M background. The printer device is called LPT: on those systems that, like ITS, were strongly influenced by early DEC conventions.

/lō-band-width/

[from communication theory]

adj. Used to indicate a talk that, although not content-free, was not terribly informative.

"That was a low-bandwidth talk, but what can you expect for an audience of suits!"

Compare zero-content, bandwidth, math-out.