WhatIs

/d[y]oop kill'r/

[FidoNet]

n. Software that is supposed to detect and delete duplicates of a message that may have reached the FidoNet system via different routes.

/dəmp/

n. 1. An undigested and voluminous mass of information about a problem or the state of a system, especially one routed to the slowest available output device (compare core dump), and most especially one consisting of hex or octal runes describing the byte-by-byte state of memory, mass storage, or some file.

/dəm'd dau̇n/

adj. Simplified, with a strong connotation of *over*simplified. Often, a marketroid will insist that the interfaces and documentation of software be dumbed down after the designer has burned untold gallons of midnight oil making it smart. This creates friction.

See user-friendly.

/duhm'as *-tak'/

[Purdue]

n. Notional cause of a novice's mistake made by the experienced, especially one made while running as root under UNIX, e.g., typing rm -r * or mkfs on a mounted file system.

Compare adger.

/drəŋk mau̇s sin-ˌdrōm/

n. A malady exhibited by the mouse pointing device of some computers. The typical symptom is for the mouse cursor on the screen to move in random directions and not in sync with the motion of the actual mouse. Can usually be corrected by unplugging the mouse and plugging it back again. Another recommended fix for optical mice is to rotate your mouse pad 90 degrees.

/drəgd/

adj. (also 'on drugs')

1. Conspicuously stupid, heading toward brain-damaged. Often accompanied by a pantomime of toking a joint.

2. Of hardware, very slow relative to normal performance.

/dräp ins/

[prob. by analogy with drop-outs]

n. Spurious characters appearing on a terminal or console as a result of line noise or a system malfunction of some sort. Esp. used when these are interspersed with one's own typed input.

Compare drop-outs.

/dräp au̇ts/

n. 1. A variety of 'power glitch' (see glitch); momentary 0 voltage on the electrical mains.

2. Missing characters in typed input due to software malfunction or system saturation (this can happen under UNIX when a bad connection to a modem swamps the processor with spurious character interrupts).

3. Mental glitches; used as a way of describing those occasions when the mind just seems to shut down for a couple of beats.

See glitch, fried.

/dräp ȯn t͟hə flȯr/

vt. To react to an error condition by silently discarding messages or other valuable data.

"The gateway ran out of memory, so it just started dropping packets on the floor."

Also frequently used of faulty mail and netnews relay sites that lose messages.

See also black hole, bit bucket.

/drül-prüf pā-pər/

n. Documentation that has been obsessively dumbed down, to the point where only a cretin could bear to read it, is said to have succumbed to the 'drool-proof paper syndrome' or to have been 'written on drool-proof paper'.

For example, this is an actual quote from Apple's LaserWriter manual:

"Do not expose your LaserWriter to open fire or flame."