The New Hacker's Dictionary

marginal // adj.

[common]

1. [techspeak] An extremely small change. "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 little merit. "This proposed new feature seems rather marginal to me."

3. Of extremely small probability of winning. "The power supply was rather marginal anyway; no wonder it fried."

Marginal Hacks // 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).

marginally // adv.

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

marketroid /mar'k*-troyd/ n.

alt. 'marketing slime', 'marketeer', 'marketing droid', 'marketdroid'. 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.

Mars // 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. They were also completely compatible with the DEC KL10, and ran all KL10 binaries (including the operating system) with no modifications at about 2-3 times faster than a KL10.