nickle /ni'kl/ n.
[from `nickel', common name for the U.S. 5-cent coin] A nybble + 1; 5 bits. Reported among
developers for Mattel's GI 1600 (the Intellivision games
processor), a chip with 16-bit-wide RAM but 10-bit-wide ROM. See
also deckle, and nybble for names of other bit units.
Node:night mode, Next:Nightmare File System,
Previous:nickle, Up:= N =
night mode n.
See phase (of people).
Node:Nightmare File
System, Next:NIL, Previous:night mode, Up:= N =
Nightmare File System n.
Pejorative hackerism for Sun's Network File System (NFS). In
any nontrivial network of Suns where there is a lot of NFS
cross-mounting, when one Sun goes down, the others often freeze
up. Some machine tries to access the down one, and (getting no
response) repeats indefinitely. This causes it to appear dead to
some messages (what is actually happening is that it is locked up
in what should have been a brief excursion to a higher spl level). Then another machine tries to
reach either the down machine or the pseudo-down machine, and
itself becomes pseudo-down. The first machine to discover the
down one is now trying both to access the down one and to respond
to the pseudo-down one, so it is even harder to reach. This
situation snowballs very quickly, and soon the entire network of
machines is frozen -- worst of all, the user can't even abort the
file access that started the problem! Many of NFS's problems are
excused by partisans as being an inevitable result of its
statelessness, which is held to be a great feature (critics, of
course, call it a great misfeature). (ITS partisans are apt to cite
this as proof of Unix's alleged bogosity; ITS had a working
NFS-like shared file system with none of these problems in the
early 1970s.) See also broadcast
storm.
Node:NIL, Next:Ninety-Ninety Rule, Previous:Nightmare File
System, Up:= N =