Bookmark this page

Blinklist
Blogmarks
Furl
Simpy

drop-outs

Rating

drop-outs n.

1. A variety of power glitch (see glitch); momentary 0 voltage on the electrical mains.

2. Missing characters in typed input due to software malfunction or system saturation (one cause of such behavior under Unix when a bad connection to a modem swamps the processor with spurious character interrupts; see screaming tty).

3. Mental glitches; used as a way of describing those occasions when the mind just seems to shut down for a couple of beats. See glitch, fried.

A really serious case of drop-outs.

(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-05-21. The previous one is 73-05-19.)

The Jargon File

Cartoons

The crunchly saga

The infamous Crunchly cartoons by The Great Quux are woven into the lexicon, each next to an appropriate entry. To read them in the sequence in which they were written, chase pointers from here using the ‘next cartoon’ information in the captions.