lord high fixer n.
[primarily British, from Gilbert & Sullivan's `lord high executioner'] The person in an organization who knows the most about some aspect of a system. See wizard.
lose vi.
1. [very common] To fail. A program loses when it encounters an exceptional condition or fails to work in the expected manner. 2. To be exceptionally unesthetic or crocky. 3. Of people, to be obnoxious or unusually stupid (as opposed to ignorant). See also deserves to lose. 4. n. Refers to something that is losing, especially in the phrases "That's a lose!" and "What a lose!"
lose lose interj.
A reply to or comment on an undesirable situation. "I accidentally deleted all my files!" "Lose, lose."
loser n.
An unexpectedly bad situation, program, programmer, or person. Someone who habitually loses. (Even winners can lose occasionally.) Someone who knows not and knows not that he knows not. Emphatic forms are `real loser', `total loser', and `complete loser' (but not **`moby loser', which would be a contradiction in terms). See luser.
losing adj.
Said of anything that is or causes a lose or lossage. "The compiler is losing badly when I try to use templates."
loss n.
Something (not a person) that loses; a situation in which something is losing. Emphatic forms include `moby loss', and `total loss', `complete loss'. Common interjections are "What a loss!" and "What a moby loss!" Note that `moby loss' is OK even though **`moby loser' is not used; applied to an abstract noun, moby is simply a magnifier, whereas when applied to a person it implies substance and has positive connotations. Compare lossage.
lossage /los'*j/ n.
[very common] The result of a bug or malfunction. This is a mass or collective noun. "What a loss!" and "What lossage!" are nearly synonymous. The former is slightly more particular to the speaker's present circumstances; the latter implies a continuing lose of which the speaker is currently a victim. Thus (for example) a temporary hardware failure is a loss, but bugs in an important tool (like a compiler) are serious lossage.
lost in the noise adj.
Syn. lost in the underflow. This term is from signal processing, where signals of very small amplitude cannot be separated from low-intensity noise in the system. Though popular among hackers, it is not confined to hackerdom; physicists, engineers, astronomers, and statisticians all use it.
lost in the underflow adj.
Too small to be worth considering; more specifically, small beyond the limits of accuracy or measurement. This is a reference to `floating underflow', a condition that can occur when a floating-point arithmetic processor tries to handle quantities smaller than its limit of magnitude. It is also a pun on `undertow' (a kind of fast, cold current that sometimes runs just offshore and can be dangerous to swimmers). "Well, sure, photon pressure from the stadium lights alters the path of a thrown baseball, but that effect gets lost in the underflow." Compare epsilon, epsilon squared; see also overflow bit.
lots of MIPS but no I/O adj.
Used to describe a person who is technically brilliant but can't seem to communicate with human beings effectively. Technically it describes a machine that has lots of processing power but is bottlenecked on input-output (in 1991, the IBM Rios, a.k.a. RS/6000, was a notorious example).
low-bandwidth adj.
[from communication theory] Used to indicate a talk that, although not content-free, was not terribly informative. "That was a low-bandwidth talk, but what can you expect for an audience of suits!" Compare zero-content, bandwidth, math-out.
LPT /L-P-T/ or /lip'it/ or /lip-it'/ n.
1. Line printer (originally Line Printing Terminal). Rare under Unix, more common among hackers who grew up with ITS, MS-DOS, CP/M and other operating systems that were strongly influenced by early DEC conventions. 2. Local PorT. Used among MS-DOS programmers (and so expanded in the MS-DOS 5 manual). It seems likely this is a backronym.
Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology prov.
"There is always one more bug."
Lumber Cartel n.
A mythical conspiracy accused by spam-spewers of funding anti-spam activism in order to force the direct-mail promotions industry back onto paper. Hackers, predictably, responded by forming a "Lumber Cartel" spoofing this paranoid theory; the web page is http://come.to/the.lumber.cartel. Members often include the tag TINLC ("There Is No Lumber Cartel") in their postings; see TINC, backbone cabal and NANA for explanation.
lunatic fringe n.
[IBM] Customers who can be relied upon to accept release 1 versions of software. Compare heatseeker.
lurker n.
One of the `silent majority' in a electronic forum; one who posts occasionally or not at all but is known to read the group's postings regularly. This term is not pejorative and indeed is casually used reflexively: "Oh, I'm just lurking." Often used in `the lurkers', the hypothetical audience for the group's flamage-emitting regulars. When a lurker speaks up for the first time, this is called `delurking'.
The creator of the popular science-fiction TV series "Babylon 5" has ties to SF fandom and the hacker culture. In that series, the use of the term `lurker' for a homeless or displaced person is a conscious reference to the jargon term.
luser /loo'zr/ n.
[common] A user; esp. one who is
also a loser. (luser and loser are
pronounced identically.) This word was coined around 1975 at MIT.
Under ITS, when you first walked up to a terminal at MIT and
typed Control-Z to get the computer's attention, it printed out
some status information, including how many people were already
using the computer; it might print "14 users", for example.
Someone thought it would be a great joke to patch the system to
print "14 losers" instead. There ensued a great controversy, as
some of the users didn't particularly want to be called losers to
their faces every time they used the computer. For a while
several hackers struggled covertly, each changing the message
behind the back of the others; any time you logged into the
computer it was even money whether it would say "users" or
"losers". Finally, someone tried the compromise "lusers", and it
stuck. Later one of the ITS machines supported luser
as a request-for-help command. ITS died the death in mid-1990,
except as a museum piece; the usage lives on, however, and the
term `luser' is often seen in program comments and on Usenet.
Compare mundane, muggle.
= M =
- M:
- M$:
- macdink:
- machinable:
- machoflops:
- Macintoy:
- Macintrash:
- macro:
- macro-:
- macrology:
- macrotape:
- maggotbox:
- magic:
- magic cookie:
- magic number:
- magic smoke:
- mail storm:
- mailbomb:
- mailing list:
- main loop:
- mainframe:
- management:
- mandelbug:
- manged:
- mangle:
- mangled name:
- mangler:
- manularity:
- marbles:
- marginal:
- Marginal Hacks:
- marginally:
- marketroid:
- Mars:
- martian:
- massage:
- math-out:
- Matrix:
- maximum Maytag mode:
- meatspace:
- meatware:
- meeces:
- meg:
- mega-:
- megapenny:
- MEGO:
- meltdown network:
- meme:
- meme plague:
- memetics:
- memory farts:
- memory leak:
- memory smash:
- menuitis:
- mess-dos:
- meta:
- meta bit:
- metasyntactic variable:
- MFTL:
- mickey:
- mickey mouse program:
- micro-:
- MicroDroid:
- microfloppies:
- microfortnight:
- microLenat:
- microReid:
- microserf:
- Microsloth Windows:
- Microsoft:
- micros~1:
- middle-endian:
- middle-out implementation:
- milliLampson:
- minifloppies:
- MIPS:
- misbug:
- misfeature:
- Missed'em-five:
- missile address:
- miswart:
- MMF:
- mobo:
- moby:
- mockingbird:
- mod:
- mode:
- mode bit:
- modulo:
- molly-guard:
- Mongolian Hordes technique:
- monkey up:
- monkey scratch:
- monstrosity:
- monty:
- Moof:
- Moore's Law:
- moose call:
- moria:
- MOTAS:
- MOTOS:
- MOTSS:
- mouse ahead:
- mouse around:
- mouse belt:
- mouse droppings:
- mouse elbow:
- mouso:
- MS-DOS:
- mu:
- MUD:
- muddie:
- mudhead:
- muggle:
- multician:
- Multics:
- multitask:
- mumblage:
- mumble:
- munch:
- munching:
- munching squares:
- munchkin:
- mundane:
- mung:
- munge:
- Murphy's Law:
- music:
- mutter:
M pref. (on units) suff. (on numbers)
[SI] See quantifiers.