parent message n.
What a followup follows up.
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parity errors pl.n.
Little lapses of attention or (in more severe cases)
consciousness, usually brought on by having spent all night and
most of the next day hacking. "I need to go home and crash; I'm
starting to get a lot of parity errors." Derives from a
relatively common but nearly always correctable transient error
in memory hardware. It predates RAM; in fact, this term is
reported to have already have been in use in its jargoin sense
back in the 1960s when magnetic cores ruled. Parity errors can
also afflict mass storage and serial communication lines; this is
more serious because not always correctable.
Node:Parkinson's Law of
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Parkinson's Law of Data prov.
"Data expands to fill the space available for storage"; buying
more memory encourages the use of more memory-intensive
techniques. It has been observed since the mid-1980s that the
memory usage of evolving systems tends to double roughly once
every 18 months. Fortunately, memory density available for
constant dollars also tends to about double once every 18 months
(see Moore's Law);
unfortunately, the laws of physics guarantee that the latter
cannot continue indefinitely.
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parm /parm/ n.
Further-compressed form of param.
This term is an IBMism, and written use is almost unknown outside
IBM shops; spoken /parm/ is more widely distributed, but the
synonym arg is favored among hackers.
Compare arg, var.