Jargon File: Difference between revisions

* [[Ice Cream Koan]]

* [[Ha Ha Only Serious]]: Defined by the file.

* [[Ice Cream Koan]]: Several such sayings, in which reference to the phrase "ice cream koan" was [[Trope Namer|coined]], originated at MIT in the 1970s and found their way into the Jargon File. One example:

{{quote|A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly: "You can not fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong."

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked. }}

:{{spoiler|It helps if you wait five or more seconds.}} (It also plays on the absurdity that understanding alone is enough to make the exact same behavior work.)

* [[Names Given to Computers]]: The real-life [[Cthulhu Mythos|Shub-Internet]] was named after a joke in the Jargon File and operated as a server in the Pentagon for a number of years. Obviously a very silly type-6, relating to the Internet's origins as a US Defense Department project.

* [[Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup]]: The file contains an entry which states that "Adding manpower to a late project makes it later", with mathematical justification; dividing a task among N people gets the work done in ''O''(N) time, but actually coordinating that work and getting it merged back into a completed project takes ''O''(N^2) because of duplication, intercommunication problems (two people on a project have one line of communication (A<->B); four people have six), and general laziness (if there's a hundred people on a task, there will be a few who think they don't need to pull their weight).

* [[Words Do Not Make the Magic]]: See the [[Ice Cream Koan]] quoted above.

[[Category:Non-Fiction Literature]]

[[Category:Jargon File]]