2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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glitch
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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/glich/ [very common; from German glitschig slippery, via Yiddish glitshen ,
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to slide or skid] 1. n. A sudden interruption in electric service, sanity,
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continuity, or program function. Sometimes recoverable. An interruption in
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electric service is specifically called a power glitch (also power hit ), of
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grave concern because it usually crashes all the computers. In jargon,
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though, a hacker who got to the middle of a sentence and then forgot how he
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or she intended to complete it might say, Sorry, I just glitched. 2. vi. To
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commit a glitch. See gritch. 3. vt. [Stanford] To scroll a display screen,
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esp. several lines at a time. WAITS terminals used to do this in order to
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avoid continuous scrolling, which is distracting to the eye. 4. obs. Same as
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magic cookie , sense 2. All these uses of glitch derive from the specific
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technical meaning the term has in the electronic hardware world, where it is
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now techspeak. A glitch can occur when the inputs of a circuit change, and
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the outputs change to some random value for some very brief time before they
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settle down to the correct value. If another circuit inspects the output at
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just the wrong time, reading the random value, the results can be very wrong
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and very hard to debug (a glitch is one of many causes of electronic
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heisenbug s). Coping with a hydraulic glitch. (The next cartoon in the
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Crunchly saga is 73-07-24. The previous one is 73-05-28.
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