adj. Of a TSR (terminate-and-stay-resident) IBM PC program, such as the N pop-up calendar and calculator utilities that circulate on BBS systems: unsociable. Used to describe a program that rudely steals the resources that it needs without considering that other TSRs may also be resident. One particularly common form of rudeness is lock-up due to programs fighting over the keyboard interrupt.
n. A class of subtle programming errors that can arise in code that does dynamic allocation, esp. via 'malloc(3)' or equivalent. If more than one pointer addresses ('aliases for') a given hunk of storage, it may happen that the storage is freed through one alias and then referenced through another, which may lead to subtle (and possibly intermittent) lossage depending on the state and the allocation history of the malloc arena. Avoidable by use of allocation strategies that never alias allocated core.
n. "Complexity increases the possibility of failure; a twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane." By analogy, in both software and electronics, the rule that simplicity increases robustness (see also KISS Principle). It is correspondingly argued that the right way to build reliable systems is to put all your eggs in one basket, after making sure that you've built a really *good* basket.
n. Short for A* Infected Disk Syndrome ('A*' is a glob pattern that matches, but is not limited to, Apple), this condition is quite often the result of practicing unsafe SEX.
[ MIT, Stanford: by analogy with 'NP-complete' (see NP) ]
adj. Used to describe problems or subproblems in AI, to indicate that the solution presupposes a solution to the 'strong AI problem' (that is, the synthesis of a human-level intelligence).
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a widely-used symmetric encryption algorithm that has become the de facto standard for securing sensitive data. It is a symmetric key algorithm, which means that the same key is used for both encryption and decryption processes.
