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GIGO

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GIGO /gi:´goh/ [acronym]

1. ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’ — usually said in response to lusers who complain that a program didn't “do the right thing” when given imperfect input or otherwise mistreated in some way. Also commonly used to describe failures in human decision making due to faulty, incomplete, or imprecise data.

2. Garbage In, Gospel Out: this more recent expansion is a sardonic comment on the tendency human beings have to put excessive trust in ‘computerized’ data.

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.