:manged: /mahnjd/ /n./ [probably from the French `manger'
or Italian `mangiare', to eat; perhaps influenced by English
`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: /n./ [DEC] A manager. Compare
{management}. Note that {system mangler} is somewhat
different in connotation.
:manularity: /man`yoo-la'ri-tee/ /n./ [prob. fr. techspeak `manual' + `granularity'] 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 inevitably seize the opportunity to build another tool (see {toolsmith}).
:marbles: /pl.n./ [from mainstream "lost all his/her marbles">[ 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}.
:marketroid: /mar'k*-troyd/ /n./ alt. `marketing slime', `marketeer', `marketing droid', `marketdroid'. A member of a company's marketing department, esp. one who promises users that the next version of a product will have features that are not actually scheduled for inclusion, are extremely difficult to implement, and/or are in violation of the laws of physics; and/or one who describes existing features (and misfeatures) in ebullient, buzzword-laden adspeak. Derogatory. Compare {droid}.
:Mars: /n./ A legendary tragic failure, the archetypal Hacker Dream Gone Wrong. Mars was the code name for a family of PDP-10 compatible computers built by Systems Concepts (now, The SC Group): the multi-processor SC-30M, the small uniprocessor SC-25M, and the never-built superprocessor SC-40M. These machines were marvels of engineering design; although not much slower than the unique {Foonly} F-1, they were physically smaller and consumed less power than the much slower DEC KS10 or Foonly F-2, F-3, or F-4 machines. They were also completely compatible with the DEC KL10, and ran all KL10 binaries (including the operating system) with no modifications at about 2—3 times faster than a KL10.