:mandelbug: /mon'del-buhg/ [from the Mandelbrot set] n. A bug
whose underlying causes are so complex and obscure as to make its
behavior appear chaotic or even non-deterministic. This term
implies that the speaker thinks it is a {Bohr bug}, rather than a
{heisenbug}. See also {schroedinbug}.
:manged: /monjd/ [probably from the French `manger' or Italian
`mangiare', to eat; perhaps influenced by English n. `mange',
`mangy'] adj. Refers to anything that is mangled or damaged,
usually beyond repair. "The disk was manged after the electrical
storm." Compare {mung}.
:mangle: vt. Used similarly to {mung} or {scribble}, but more violent
in its connotations; something that is mangled has been
irreversibly and totally trashed.
:mangler: [DEC] n. A manager. Compare {mango}; see also
{management}. Note that {system mangler} is somewhat different
in connotation.
:mango: /mang'go/ [orig. in-house jargon at Symbolics] n. A manager.
Compare {mangler}. See also {devo} and {doco}.
:manularity: [prob. fr. techspeak `granularity' + `manual'] n. A notional measure of the manual labor required for some task, particularly one of the sort that automation is supposed to eliminate. "Composing English on paper has much higher manularity than using a text editor, especially in the revising stage." Hackers tend to consider manularity a symptom of primitive methods; in fact, a true hacker confronted with an apparent requirement to do a computing task {by hand} will usually consider it motivation enough to build another tool.
:marbles: [from mainstream "lost all his/her marbles">[ pl.n. The minimum needed to build your way further up some hierarchy of tools or abstractions. After a bad system crash, you need to determine if the machine has enough marbles to come up on its own, or enough marbles to allow a rebuild from backups, or if you need to rebuild from scratch. "This compiler doesn't even have enough marbles to compile {hello, world}."
:marginal: adj. 1. Extremely small. "A marginal increase in {core} can decrease {GC} time drastically." In everyday terms, this means that it is a lot easier to clean off your desk if you have a spare place to put some of the junk while you sort through it. 2. Of extremely small merit. "This proposed new feature seems rather marginal to me." 3. Of extremely small probability of {win}ning. "The power supply was rather marginal anyway; no wonder it fried."
:Marginal Hacks: n. Margaret Jacks Hall, a building into which the
Stanford AI Lab was moved near the beginning of the 1980s (from the
{D. C. Power Lab}).
:marginally: adv. Slightly. "The ravs here are only marginally better than at Small Eating Place." See {epsilon}.