:lose lose: interj. A reply to or comment on an undesirable situation. "I accidentally deleted all my files!" "Lose, lose."
:loser: n. An unexpectedly bad situation, program, programmer, or person. Someone who habitually loses. (Even winners can lose occasionally.) Someone who knows not and knows not that he knows not. Emphatic forms are `real loser', `total loser', and `complete loser' (but not *`moby loser', which would be a contradiction in terms). See {luser}.
:losing: adj. Said of anything that is or causes a {lose} or {lossage}.
:loss: n. Something (not a person) that loses; a situation in which
something is losing. Emphatic forms include `moby loss', and
`total loss', `complete loss'. Common interjections are
"What a loss!" and "What a moby loss!" Note that `moby loss'
is OK even though *`moby loser' is not used; applied to an abstract
noun, moby is simply a magnifier, whereas when applied to a person
it implies substance and has positive connotations. Compare
{lossage}.
:lossage: /los'*j/ n. The result of a bug or malfunction. This
is a mass or collective noun. "What a loss!" and "What
lossage!" are nearly synonymous. The former is slightly more
particular to the speaker's present circumstances; the latter
implies a continuing {lose} of which the speaker is currently a
victim. Thus (for example) a temporary hardware failure is a loss,
but bugs in an important tool (like a compiler) are serious
lossage.
:lost in the noise: adj. Syn. {lost in the underflow}. This term is from signal processing, where signals of very small amplitude cannot be separated from low-intensity noise in the system. Though popular among hackers, it is not confined to hackerdom; physicists, engineers, astronomers, and statisticians all use it.
:lost in the underflow: adj. Too small to be worth considering; more specifically, small beyond the limits of accuracy or measurement. This is a reference to `floating underflow', a condition that can occur when a floating-point arithmetic processor tries to handle quantities smaller than its limit of magnitude. It is also a pun on `undertow' (a kind of fast, cold current that sometimes runs just offshore and can be dangerous to swimmers). "Well, sure, photon pressure from the stadium lights alters the path of a thrown baseball, but that effect gets lost in the underflow." See also {overflow bit}.
:lots of MIPS but no I/O: adj. Used to describe a person who is technically brilliant but can't seem to communicate with human beings effectively. Technically it describes a machine that has lots of processing power but is bottlenecked on input-output (in 1991, the IBM Rios, a.k.a. RS/6000, is a notorious recent example).
:low-bandwidth: [from communication theory] adj. Used to indicate a
talk that, although not {content-free}, was not terribly
informative. "That was a low-bandwidth talk, but what can you
expect for an audience of {suit}s!" Compare {zero-content},
{bandwidth}, {math-out}.
:LPT: /L-P-T/ or /lip'it/ or /lip-it'/ [MIT, via DEC] n. Line
printer, of course. Rare under UNIX, commoner in hackers with
MS-DOS or CP/M background. The printer device is called
`LPT:' on those systems that, like ITS, were strongly
influenced by early DEC conventions.