stomp on vt.
To inadvertently overwrite something important, usually
automatically. "All the work I did this weekend got stomped on
last night by the nightly server script." Compare scribble, mangle, trash,
scrog, roach.
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Stone Age n.,adj.
1. In computer folklore, an ill-defined period from ENIAC (ca.
1943) to the mid-1950s; the great age of electromechanical dinosaurs. Sometimes used for the entire
period up to 1960-61 (see Iron
Age); however, it is funnier and more descriptive to
characterize the latter period in terms of a `Bronze Age' era of
transistor-logic, pre-ferrite-core
machines with drum or CRT mass storage (as opposed to just
mercury delay lines and/or relays). See also Iron Age. 2. More generally, a pejorative
for any crufty, ancient piece of hardware or software technology.
Note that this is used even by people who were there for the
Stone Age (sense 1).
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stone knives and bearskins n.
[from the Star Trek Classic episode "The City on the Edge of
Forever"] A term traditionally used to describe (and deprecate)
computing environments that are grotesquely primitive in light of
what is known about good ways to design things. As in "Don't get
too used to the facilities here. Once you leave SAIL it's stone
knives and bearskins as far as the eye can see". Compare steam-powered.
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stoppage /sto'p*j/ n.
Extreme lossage that renders
something (usually something vital) completely unusable. "The
recent system stoppage was caused by a fried transformer."
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store n.
[prob. from techspeak `main store'] In some varieties of
Commonwealth hackish, the preferred synonym for core. Thus, `bringing a program into store' means
not that one is returning shrink-wrapped software but that a
program is being swapped in.
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strided /stri:'d*d/ adj.
[scientific computing] Said of a sequence of memory reads and
writes to addresses, each of which is separated from the last by
a constant interval called the `stride length'. These can be a
worst-case access pattern for the standard memory-caching schemes
when the stride length is a multiple of the cache line size.
Strided references are often generated by loops through an array,
and (if your data is large enough that access-time is
significant) it can be worthwhile to tune for better locality by
inverting double loops or by partially unrolling the outer loop
of a loop nest. This usage is borderline techspeak; the related
term `memory stride' is definitely techspeak.
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stroke n.
Common name for the slant (`/', ASCII 0101111) character. See
ASCII for other synonyms.
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strudel n.
Common (spoken) name for the at-sign (`@', ASCII 1000000)
character. See ASCII for other
synonyms.
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stubroutine /stuhb'roo-teen/ n.
[contraction of `stub subroutine'] Tiny, often vacuous
placeholder for a subroutine that is to be written or fleshed out
later.