WhatIs

/märj-nəl/

adj. 1. Extremely small.

"A marginal increase in core can decrease GC time drastically."

In everyday terms, this means that it is a lot easier to clean off your desk if you have a spare place to put some of the junk while you sort through it.

2. Of extremely small merit.

"This proposed new feature seems rather marginal to me."

3. Of extremely small probability of winning.

/mär-bəls/

[from mainstream "lost all his/her marbles"]

pl.n. The minimum needed to build your way further up some hierarchy of tools or abstractions. After a bad system crash, you need to determine if the machine has enough marbles to come up on its own, or enough marbles to allow a rebuild from backups, or if you need to rebuild from scratch.

"This compiler doesn't even have enough marbles to compile 'Hello World'."

/mang'go/

[orig. in-house jargon at Symbolics]

n. A manager.

Compare mangler.

See also devo and doco.

/maŋ-gəl/

vt. Used similarly to mung or scribble, but more violent in its connotations; something that is mangled has been irreversibly and totally trashed.

/monjd/

[probably from the French manger or Italian mangiare, to eat; perhaps influenced by English n. mange, mangy]

adj. Refers to anything that is mangled or damaged, usually beyond repair.

"The disk was manged after the electrical storm."

Compare mung.

/mon'del-buhg/

[from the Mandelbrot set]

n. A bug whose underlying causes are so complex and obscure as to make its behavior appear chaotic or even non-deterministic. This term implies that the speaker thinks it is a Bohr bug, rather than a heisenbug.

/ma-nij-mənt

n. 

1. Corporate power elites distinguished primarily by their distance from actual productive work and their chronic failure to manage (see also suit). Spoken derisively, as in

   "*Management* decided that ...".

2. Mythically, a vast bureaucracy responsible for all the world's minor irritations. Hackers' satirical public notices are often signed The Mgt; this derives from the Illuminatus novels (see the Bibliography).

/mān-ˌfrām/

n. This term originally referred to the cabinet containing the central processor unit or 'main frame' of a room-filling Stone Age batch machine. After the emergence of smaller 'minicomputer' designs in the early 1970s, the traditional big iron machines were described as 'mainframe computers' and eventually just as mainframes.

/mān lüp/

n. Software tools are often written to perform some actions repeatedly on whatever input is handed to them, terminating when there is no more input or they are explicitly told to go away. In such programs, the loop that gets and processes input is called the 'main loop'.

See also driver.

/mā-liŋ list/

n. (often shortened in context to 'list') 1. An email address that is an alias (or macro, though that word is never used in this connection) for many other email addresses. Some mailing lists are simple 'reflectors', redirecting mail sent to them to the list of recipients. Others are filtered by humans or programs of varying degrees of sophistication; lists filtered by humans are said to be 'moderated'.

2. The people who receive your email when you send it to such an address.