The New Hacker's Dictionary2. Computers, especially large computers, considered abstractly as sources of computrons. "This is just a workstation; the heavy MIPS are hidden in the basement." 3. The corporate name of a particular RISC-chip company; among other things, they designed the processor chips used in DEC's 3100 workstation series. 4. Acronym for 'Meaningless Information per Second' (a joke, prob. from sense 1). misbug /mis-buhg/ n. [MIT; rare (like its referent)] An unintended property of a program that turns out to be useful; something that should have been a bug but turns out to be a feature. Compare green lightning. See miswart. misfeature /mis-fee'chr/ or /mis'fee'chr/ n. [common] A feature that eventually causes lossage, possibly because it is not adequate for a new situation that has evolved. Since it results from a deliberate and properly implemented feature, a misfeature is not a bug. Nor is it a simple unforeseen side effect; the term implies that the feature in question was carefully planned, but its long-term consequences were not accurately or adequately predicted (which is quite different from not having thought ahead at all). A misfeature can be a particularly stubborn problem to resolve, because fixing it usually involves a substantial philosophical change to the structure of the system involved. Many misfeatures (especially in user-interface design) arise because the designers/implementors mistake their personal tastes for laws of nature. Often a former feature becomes a misfeature because trade-offs were made whose parameters subsequently change (possibly only in the judgment of the implementors). "Well, yeah, it is kind of a misfeature that file names are limited to six characters, but the original implementors wanted to save directory space and we're stuck with it for now." Missed'em-five // n. Pejorative hackerism for AT&T System V Unix, generally used by BSD partisans in a bigoted mood. (The synonym 'SysVile' is also encountered.) See software bloat, Berzerkeley. missile address // n. See ICBM address. |