WhatIs

/stä-pij/

n. Extreme lossage that renders something (usually something vital) completely unusable.

"The recent system stoppage was caused by a fried transformer."

/stōn āj/

n., adj. 1. In computer folklore, an ill-defined period from ENIAC (ca. 1943) to the mid-1950s; the great age of electromechanical dinosaurs. Sometimes used for the entire period up to 1960-61 (see Iron Age); however, it is funnier and more descriptive to characterize the latter period in terms of a 'Bronze Age' era of transistor-logic, pre-ferrite-core machines with drum or CRT mass storage (as opposed to just mercury delay lines and/or relays).

/stämp ȯn/

vt. To inadvertently overwrite something important, usually automatically.

"All the work I did this weekend got stomped on last night by the nightly server script."

Compare scribble, mangle, trash, scrog, roach.

/stər frīd ran-dəm/

alt. 'stir-fried mumble' n. Term used for the best dish of many of those hackers who can cook. Consists of random fresh veggies and meat wokked with random spices. Tasty and economical.

See random, great-wall, ravs, laser chicken, oriental food; see also mumble.

/sti-fē/

[University of Lowell, Massachusetts.]

n. 3.5-inch microfloppies, so called because their jackets are more firm than those of the 5.25-inch and the 8-inch floppy. Elsewhere this might be called a firmy.

/stēm-pau(-ə)r'd/

adj. Old-fashioned or underpowered; archaic. This term does not have a strong negative loading and may even be used semi-affectionately for something that clanks and wheezes a lot but hangs in there doing the job.

/stāt/

n. 1. Condition, situation.
"What's the state of your latest hack?"
"It's winning away."
"The system tried to read and write the disk simultaneously and got into a totally wedged state."

The standard question "What's your state?" means "What are you doing?" or "What are you about to do?"

/stāl pȯin-tər bəg/

n. Synonym for aliasing bug used esp. among microcomputer hackers.

/stak pyük/

n. Some processor architectures are said to puke their guts onto the stack to save their internal state during exception processing. The Motorola 68020, for example, regurgitates up to 92 bytes on a bus fault. On a pipelined machine, this can take a while.

/stak/

n. A person's stack is the set of things he or she has to do in the future. One speaks of the next project to be attacked as having risen to the top of the stack.

"I'm afraid I've got real work to do, so this'll have to be pushed way down on my stack."

"I haven't done it yet because every time I pop my stack something new gets pushed."