WhatIs

/mī-krō-fȯrt-nīt/

n. About 1.2 sec. The VMS operating system has a lot of tuning parameters that you can set with the SYSGEN utility, and one of these is TIMEPROMPTWAIT, the time the system will wait for an operator to set the correct date and time at boot if it realizes that the current value is bogus. This time is specified in microfortnights!

Multiple uses of the millifortnight (about 20 minutes) and nanofortnight have also been reported.

/mī-krō-flä-pēs/

n. 3.5-inch floppies, as opposed to 5.25-inch vanilla or mini-floppies and the now-obsolete 8-inch variety. This term may be headed for obsolescence as 5.25-inchers pass out of use, only to be revived if anybody floats a sub-3-inch floppy standard.

See stiffy, minifloppies.

/mī-krō-/

pref. 

/mi-kē mīs prō-gram/

n. North American equivalent of a noddy (that is, trivial) program. Doesn't necessarily have the belittling connotations of mainstream slang

"Oh, that's just mickey mouse stuff!"; sometimes trivial programs can be very useful.

/mi-kē/

n. The resolution unit of mouse movement. It has been suggested that the disney will become a benchmark unit for animation graphics performance.

/M-F-T-L/

[acronym: 'My Favorite Toy Language']

1. adj. Describes a talk on a programming language design that is heavy on the syntax (with lots of BNF), sometimes even talks about semantics (e.g., type systems), but rarely, if ever, has any content (see content-free). More broadly applied to talks --- even when the topic is not a programming language -- in which the subject matter is gone into in unnecessary and meticulous detail at the sacrifice of any conceptual content.

"Well, it was a typical MFTL talk".

/me-tə bit/

n. The top bit of an 8-bit character, which is on in character values 128--255. Also called high bit, alt bit, or hobbit. Some terminals and consoles (see space-cadet keyboard) have a META shift key. Others (including, *mirabile dictu*, keyboards on IBM PC-class machines) have an ALT key.

See also bucky bits.

/me-tə/ or /mē-tə/

[from analytic philosophy]

adj.,pref. One level of description up. A meta-syntactic variable is a variable in notation used to describe syntax, and meta-language is language used to describe language. This is difficult to explain briefly, but much hacker humor turns on deliberate confusion between meta-levels.

See Humor, Hacker.

/mes-däs/

n. Derisory term for MS-DOS. Often followed by the ritual banishing "Just say No!"

See MS-DOS.

/men-yü-ī-təs/

n. Notional disease suffered by software with an obsessively simple-minded menu interface and no escape. Hackers find this intensely irritating and much prefer the flexibility of command-line or language-style interfaces, especially those customizable via macros or a special-purpose language in which one can encode useful hacks.