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