2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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SEX
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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/seks/ [Sun Users' Group elsewhere] n. 1. Software EXchange. A technique
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invented by the blue-green algae hundreds of millions of years ago to speed
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up their evolution, which had been terribly slow up until then. Today, SEX
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parties are popular among hackers and others (of course, these are no longer
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limited to exchanges of genetic software). In general, SEX parties are a
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Good Thing , but unprotected SEX can propagate a virus. See also pubic
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directory. 2. The rather Freudian mnemonic often used for Sign EXtend, a
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machine instruction found in the PDP-11 and many other architectures. The
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RCA 1802 chip used in the early Elf and SuperElf personal computers had a
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SEt X register SEX instruction, but this seems to have had little folkloric
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impact. The Data General instruction set also had SEX. DEC 's engineers
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nearly got a PDP-11 assembler that used the SEX mnemonic out the door at one
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time, but (for once) marketing wasn't asleep and forced a change. That
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wasn't the last time this happened, either. The author of The Intel 8086
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Primer , who was one of the original designers of the 8086, noted that there
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was originally a SEX instruction on that processor, too. He says that Intel
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management got cold feet and decreed that it be changed, and thus the
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instruction was renamed CBW and CWD (depending on what was being extended).
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Amusingly, the Intel 8048 (the microcontroller used in IBM PC keyboards) is
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also missing straight SEX but has logical-or and logical-and instructions
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ORL and ANL. The Motorola 6809, used in the Radio Shack Color Computer and
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in U.K.'s Dragon 32 personal computer, actually had an official SEX
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instruction; the 6502 in the Apple II with which it competed did not.
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British hackers thought this made perfect mythic sense; after all, it was
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commonly observed, you could (on some theoretical level) have sex with a
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dragon, but you can't have sex with an apple.
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