WhatIs

/mētwer/

n. Synonym for wetware. Less common.

/*m-boh'goh, dok'tr fred/

[Stanford]

n. The archetypal man you don't want to see about a problem, esp. an incompetent professional; a shyster.

"Do you know a good eye doctor?"

"Sure, try Mbogo Eye Care and Professional Dry Cleaning."

The name comes from synergy between bogus and the original Dr. Mbogo, a witch doctor who was Gomez Addams' physician on the old "Addams Family" TV show.

See also fred.

/math-au̇t/

[poss. from 'white-out' (the blizzard variety)]

n. A paper or presentation so encrusted with mathematical or other formal notation as to be incomprehensible. This may be a device for concealing the fact that it is actually content-free.

See also numbers, social science number.

/mə-ˈsäzh/

vt. Vague term used to describe 'smooth' transformations of a data set into a different form, esp. transformations that do not lose information. Connotes less pain than munch or crunch.

"He wrote a program that massages X bitmap files into GIF format."

Compare slurp.

/mär-shən/

n. A packet sent on a TCP/IP network with a source address of the test loopback interface [127.0.0.1]. This means that it will come back at you labeled with a source address that is clearly not of this earth.

"The domain server is getting lots of packets from Mars. Does that gateway have a martian filter?"

/märz/

n. A legendary tragic failure, the archetypal Hacker Dream Gone Wrong. Mars was the code name for a family of PDP-10 compatible computers built by Systems Concepts (now, The SC Group); the multi-processor SC-30M, the small uniprocessor SC-25M, and the never-built superprocessor SC-40M. These machines were marvels of engineering design; although not much slower than the unique Foonly F-1, they were physically smaller and consumed less power than the much slower DEC KS10 or Foonly F-2, F-3, or F-4 machines.

/mar'k*-troyd/

alt. marketing slime, marketing droid, marketeer 

n. A member of a company's marketing department, esp. one who promises users that the next version of a product will have features that are not actually scheduled for inclusion, are extremely difficult to implement, and/or are in violation of the laws of physics; and/or one who describes existing features (and misfeatures) in ebullient, buzzword-laden adspeak. Derogatory.

Compare droid.

/märj-nə-lē/

adv. Slightly.

"The ravs here are only marginally better than at Small Eating Place."

See epsilon.

/märj-nəl haks/

n. Margaret Jacks Hall, a building into which the Stanford AI Lab was moved near the beginning of the 1980s (from the D. C. Power Lab).