WhatIs

/dā mōd/

n. See phase (sense 1). Used of people only.

/day't*-may'sh*n/

n. A magazine that many hackers assume all suits read. Used to question an unbelieved quote, as in "Did you read that in Datamation?" It used to publish something hackishly funny every once in a while, like the original paper on COME FROM in 1973, but it has since become much more exclusively suit-oriented and boring.

/daŋ-gəliŋ pȯin-tər/

n. A reference that doesn't actually lead anywhere (in C and some other languages, a pointer that doesn't actually point at anything valid). Usually this is because it formerly pointed to something that has moved or disappeared. Used as jargon in a generalization of its techspeak meaning; for example, a local phone number for a person who has since moved to the other coast is a dangling pointer.

/day'mn/ or /dee'mn/

[ from the mythological meaning, later rationalized as the acronym Disk And Execution MONitor ]

n. A program that is not invoked explicitly, but lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. The idea is that the perpetrator of the condition need not be aware that a daemon is lurking (though often a program will commit an action only because it knows that it will implicitly invoke a daemon).

/dē sē pau̇(-ə)r lab/

n. The former site of SAIL. Hackers thought this was very funny because the obvious connection to electrical engineering was nonexistent -- the lab was named for a Donald C. Power.

Compare Marginal Hacks.

/sī-kəl sər-vər/

n. A powerful machine that exists primarily for running large batch jobs. Implies that interactive tasks such as editing are done on other machines on the network, such as workstations.

/sī-kəl əv rē-in-kär-ˈnā-shən/

[coined by Ivan Sutherland ca. 1970]

n. Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again.

/sī-kəl drau̇t/

n. A scarcity of cycles. It may be due to a cycle crunch, but it could also occur because part of the computer is temporarily not working, leaving fewer cycles to go around.

"The high moby is down, so we're running with only half the usual amount of memory. There will be a cycle drought until it's fixed."

/sī-kəl krənch/

n. A situation where the number of people trying to use the computer simultaneously has reached the point where no one can get enough cycles because they are spread too thin and the system has probably begun to thrash. This is an inevitable result of Parkinson's Law applied to timesharing. Usually the only solution is to buy more computer.

/sī-kəl/

1. n. The basic unit of computation. What every hacker wants more of (noted hacker Bill Gosper describes himself as a "cycle junkie"). One can describe an instruction as taking so many 'clock cycles'. Often the computer can access its memory once on every clock cycle, and so one speaks also of 'memory cycles'. These are technical meanings of cycle. The jargon meaning comes from the observation that there are only so many cycles per second, and when you are sharing a computer the cycles get divided up among the users.