WhatIs

/mȯrz lȯ/

prov. The observation that the logic density of silicon integrated circuits has closely followed the curve (bits per square inch) = 2(n - 1962); that is, the amount of information storable in one square inch of silicon has roughly doubled yearly every year since the technology was invented.

See also Parkinson's Law of Data.

/müf/

[MAC users]

/män-ˈsträ-sə-tē/

1. n. A ridiculously elephantine program or system, esp. one that is buggy or only marginally functional.

2. The quality of being monstrous (see Overgeneralization in the discussion of jargonification).

See also baroque.

/məŋ-kē, skrach/

n. See scratch monkey.

/məŋ-kē əp/

vt. To hack together hardware for a particular task, especially a one-shot job. Connotes an extremely crufty and consciously temporary solution.

Compare hack up, kluge up, cruft together.

/män-ˈgōl-yən hȯrds tek-ˈnēk/

n. Development by gang bang (poss. from the Sixties counterculture expression 'Mongolian clusterfuck' for a public orgy). Implies that large numbers of inexperienced programmers are being put on a job better performed by a few skilled ones. Also called 'Chinese Army technique'; see also Brooks' Law.

/mä-lē-gärd/

[University of Illinois]

n. A shield to prevent tripping of some Big Red Switch by clumsy or ignorant hands. Originally used of some plexiglass covers improvised for the BRS on an IBM 4341 after a programmer's toddler daughter (named Molly) frobbed it twice in one day. Later generalized to covers over stop/reset switches on disk drives and networking equipment.

/mä-jə-lō/

prep. Except for. From mathematical terminology; one can consider saying that 4 = 22 except for the 9s (4 = 22 mod 9).

"Well, LISP seems to work okay now, modulo that GC bug."

"I feel fine today modulo a slight headache."

/mä-jə-lər ek-spə-nen(t)-shē-ā-shən/

raising an integer to the power of another integer, modulo some integer. For integers a, n, and m, am mod n.

For example, 53 mod 100 = 25.

Modular exponentiation can be done fairly quickly with a sequence of bit shifts and adds, and special purpose chips have been designed.

See also discrete logarithm problem.

/mōd bit/

n. A flag, usually in hardware, that selects between two (usually quite different) modes of operation. The connotations are different from flag bit in that mode bits are mainly written during a boot or set-up phase, are seldom explicitly read, and seldom change over the lifetime of an ordinary program. The classic example was the EBCDIC-vs.-ASCII bit (#12) of the Program Status Word of the IBM 360. Another was the bit on a PDP-12 that controlled whether it ran the PDP-8 or the LINC instruction set.