WhatIs

/sa-tər-dā nīt spe-shəl/

[from police slang for a cheap handgun]

n. A program or feature kluged together during off hours, under a deadline, and in response to pressure from a salescritter. Such hacks are dangerously unreliable, but all too often sneak into a production release after insufficient review.

/sa-nə-tē chek/

n. 1. The act of checking a piece of code (or anything else, e.g., a USENET posting) for completely stupid mistakes. Implies that the check is to make sure the author was sane when it was written; e.g., if a piece of scientific software relied on a particular formula and was giving unexpected results, one might first look at the nesting of parentheses or the coding of the formula, as a sanity check, before looking at the more complex I/O or data structure manipulation routines, much less the algorithm itself.

/san(d)-bäks/

n. (or 'sandbox, the') Common term for the R&D department at many software and computer companies (where hackers in commercial environments are likely to be found). Half-derisive, but reflects the truth that research is a form of creative play.

Compare playpen.

/sand ben-dər/

[IBM]

n. A person involved with silicon lithography and the physical design of chips.

Compare ironmonger, polygon pusher.

/sām dā sər-vəs/

n. Ironic term used to describe long response time, particularly with respect to MS-DOS system calls (which ought to require only a tiny fraction of a second to execute). Such response time is a major incentive for programmers to write programs that are not well-behaved.

See also PC-ism.

/sȯlt səb-strāt/

[MIT]

n. Collective noun used to refer to potato chips, pretzels, saltines, or any other form of snack food designed primarily as a carrier for sodium chloride. From the technical term chip substrate, used to refer to the silicon on the top of which the active parts of integrated circuits are deposited.

/sȯlt mīnz/

n. Dense quarters housing large numbers of programmers working long hours on grungy projects, with some hope of seeing the end of the tunnel in N years. Noted for their absence of sunshine.

Compare playpen, sandbox.

/salz-mən/

v. To flood a mailing list or newsgroup with huge amounts of useless, trivial or redundant information. 

From the name of a hacker who has frequently done this on some widely distributed mailing lists.

/sālz-kri-tər /

n. Pejorative hackerism for a computer salesperson. Hackers tell the following joke:

Q. What's the difference between a used-car dealer and a computer salesman?
A. The used-car dealer knows he's lying.

This reflects the widespread hacker belief that salescritters are self-selected for stupidity (after all, if they had brains and the inclination to use them, they'd be in programming). The terms 'salesthing' and 'salesdroid' are also common.

/sāl/ not /S-A-I-L/

n. 1. Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. An important site in the early development of LISP; with the MIT AI Lab, BBN, CMU, and the UNIX community, one of the major wellsprings of technical innovation and hacker-culture traditions (see the WAITS entry for details). The SAIL machines were officially shut down in late May 1990, scant weeks after the MIT AI Lab's ITS cluster was officially decommissioned.