WhatIs

/seg-mənt/

vi. To experience a segmentation fault. Confusingly, this is often pronounced more like the noun 'segment' than like mainstream v. segment; this is because it is actually a noun shorthand that has been verbed.

/se-jē/

[UNIX]

n. Shorthand for segmentation fault reported from Britain.

/segfȯlt/

n.,vi. Syn. segment, seggie.

/S-E-D/

[TMRC, from Light-Emitting Diode]

n. Smoke-emitting diode. A friode that lost the war.

See LER.

/si-kyu̇r-ə-tē thrü äb-skyu̇r-ə-tē/

n. A name applied by hackers to most OS vendors' favorite way of coping with security holes -- namely, ignoring them and not documenting them and trusting that nobody will find out about them and that people who do find out about them won't exploit them. This never works for long and occasionally sets the world up for debacles like the RTM worm of 1988, but once the brief moments of panic created by such events subside most vendors are all too willing to turn over and go back to sleep.

/se-kən-der-ē da-mij/

n. When a fatal error occurs (esp. a segfault) the immediate cause may be that a pointer has been trashed due to a previous fandango on core.

However, this fandango may have been due to an *earlier* fandango, so no amount of analysis will reveal (directly) how the damage occurred. "The data structure was clobbered, but it was secondary damage."

/se-kənd si-stəm i-fekt/

n. (sometimes, more euphoniously, second-system syndrome) When one is designing the successor to a relatively small, elegant, and successful system, there is a tendency to become grandiose in one's success and design an elephantine feature-laden monstrosity. The term was first used by Fred Brooks in his classic The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (Addison-Wesley, 1975; ISBN 0-201-00650-2).

/sərch ən(d) di-strȯi mōd/

n. Hackerism for the search-and-replace facility in an editor, so called because an incautiously chosen match pattern can cause infinite damage.

/seks-sē/, /sis'sē/ or /skə'sē/

[Small Computer System Interface]

n. A bus-independent standard for system-level interfacing between a computer and intelligent devices. Typically annotated in literature with sexy (/sek'see/), sissy (/sis'ee/), and scuzzy (/skuh'zee/) as pronunciation guides -- the last being the overwhelmingly predominant form, much to the dismay of the designers and their marketing people. One can usually assume that a person who pronounces it /S-C-S-I/ is clueless.

/skrä-zəl/

vt. Used when a self-modifying code segment runs incorrectly and corrupts the running program or vital data.

"The damn compiler scrozzled itself again!"