FEA
finite element analysisfear and loathing
(Hunter S. Thompson) A state inspired by the prospect of dealing with certain real-world systems and standards that are totally brain-damaged but ubiquitous - Intel 8086s, COBOL, EBCDIC, or any IBM machine except the Rios (also known as the RS/6000). [Jargon File]Last updated: 1994-12-06
fear-driven development
When project management adds more pressure (fires someone or something). A play on test-driven development.
[arnis-l, Dodgy Coder].Last updated: 2014-09-04
feasibility study
Part of the systems develpment life cycle which aims to determine whether it is sensible to develop some system. The most popular model of feasibility study is "TELOS", standing for Technical, Economic, Legal, Operational, Schedule.
Technical Feasibility: does the technology exist to implement the proposed system? Is it a practical proposition? Economic Feasibility: is the system cost-effective? Do benefits outweigh costs? Legal Feasibility: is there any conflict between the proposed system and legal requirements, e.g. the Data Protection Act? Operational Feasibility: are the current work practices and procedures adequate to support the new system? Schedule Feasibility: can the system be developed in time? After the feasibility study, the requirements analysis should be carried out.Last updated: 2006-07-11
feasible
A description of an algorithm that takes polynomial time (that is, for a problem set of size N, the resources required to solve the problem can be expressed as some polynomial involving N).
Problems that are "feasible" are said to be "in P" where P is polynomial time. Problems that are "possible" but not "feasible" are said to be "in NP".Last updated: 2001-04-12
A description of a project or system for which a feasibility study gives a positive answer.
Last updated: 2006-07-11
feature
<jargon>
1. A good property or behaviour (as of a program). Whether it was intended or not is immaterial.
2. An intended property or behaviour (as of a program). Whether it is good or not is immaterial (but if bad, it is also a misfeature). 3. A surprising property or behaviour; in particular, one that is purposely inconsistent because it works better that way - such an inconsistency is therefore a feature and not a bug. This kind of feature is sometimes called a miswart. 4. A property or behaviour that is gratuitous or unnecessary, though perhaps also impressive or cute. For example, one feature of Common LISP's "format" function is the ability to print numbers in two different Roman-numeral formats (see bells, whistles, and gongs). 5. A property or behaviour that was put in to help someone else but that happens to be in your way. 6. A bug that has been documented. To call something a feature sometimes means the author of the program did not consider the particular case, and that the program responded in a way that was unexpected but not strictly incorrect. A standard joke is that a bug can be turned into a feature simply by documenting it (then theoretically no one can complain about it because it's in the manual), or even by simply declaring it to be good. "That's not a bug, that's a feature!" is a common catch-phrase. Apparently there is a Volkswagen Beetle in San Francisco whose license plate reads "FEATURE". See also feetch feetch, creeping featurism, wart, green lightning. The relationship among bugs, features, misfeatures, warts and miswarts might be clarified by the following hypothetical exchange between two hackers on an airliner: A: "This seat doesn't recline." B: "That's not a bug, that's a feature. There is an emergency exit door built around the window behind you, and the route has to be kept clear." A: "Oh. Then it's a misfeature; they should have increased the spacing between rows here." B: "Yes. But if they'd increased spacing in only one section it would have been a wart - they would've had to make nonstandard-length ceiling panels to fit over the displaced seats." A: "A miswart, actually. If they increased spacing throughout they'd lose several rows and a chunk out of the profit margin. So unequal spacing would actually be the Right Thing." B: "Indeed." "Undocumented feature" is a common euphemism for a bug. 7. An attribute or function of a class in Eiffel. [Jargon File]Last updated: 1995-10-22
feature creature
[Possibly from slang "creature feature" for a horror movie] 1. One who loves to add features to designs or programs, perhaps at the expense of coherence, concision or taste. 2. Alternately, a mythical being that induces otherwise rational programmers to perpetrate such crocks. See also feeping creaturism, creeping featurism. [Jargon File]feature creep
creeping featurismfeaturectomy
/fee"ch*r-ek"t*-mee/ The act of removing a feature from a program. Featurectomies come in two flavours, the "righteous" and the "reluctant". Righteous featurectomies are performed because the remover believes the program would be more elegant without the feature, or there is already an equivalent and better way to achieve the same end. (Doing so is not quite the same thing as removing a misfeature.) Reluctant featurectomies are performed to satisfy some external constraint such as code size or execution speed. [Jargon File]Last updated: 1994-10-20
feature key
<hardware>
(Or "flower", "pretzel", "clover", "propeller", "beanie" (from propeller beanie), splat, "command key") The Macintosh modifier key with the four-leaf clover graphic on its keytop.
The feature key is the Mac's equivalent of a control key (and so labelled on some Mac II keyboards). The proliferation of terms for this creature may illustrate one subtle peril of iconic interfaces. Macs also have an "Option" modifier key, equivalent to Alt. The cloverleaf-like symbol's oldest name is "cross of St. Hannes", but it occurs in pre-Christian Viking art as a decorative motif. In Scandinavia it marks sites of historical interest. An early Macintosh developer who happened to be Swedish introduced it to Apple. Apple documentation gives the translation "interesting feature". The symbol has a Unicode character called "PLACE OF INTEREST SIGN" (U+2318), previously known as "command key". The Swedish name of this symbol stands for the word "sev"ardhet" (interesting feature), many of which are old churches. Some Swedes report as an idiom for it the word "kyrka", cognate to English "church" and Scots-dialect "kirk" but pronounced /shir'k*/ in modern Swedish. Others say this is nonsense. http://fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2318/index.htm. [Jargon File]Last updated: 2005-09-15
feature shock
<jargon>
(From Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock") A user's confusion when confronted with a package that has too many features and poor introductory material.
[Jargon File]Last updated: 2005-09-15
FEC
Forward Error CorrectionFED
field emission displayFederal Geographic Data Committee
(FGDC) ftp://fgdc.er.usgs.gov/gdc/html/fgdc.html. [Summary?]Last updated: 1995-03-06
Federal Information Exchange
(FIX) One of the connection points between the American governmental internets and the Internet.
Last updated: 2001-05-14
Federal Information Processing Standards
<standard>
(FIPS) United States Government technical standards published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). NIST develops FIPS when there are compelling Federal government requirements such as for security and interoperability but no acceptable industry standards or solutions.
Computer-related products bought by the US Government must conform to FIPS.Last updated: 2003-06-04
Federal Networking Council
(FNC) The coordinating group of representatives from federal agencies involved in the development and use of federal networking, especially those networks using TCP/IP and the Internet. Current members include representatives from DOD, DOE, DARPA, NSF, NASA, and HHS.Last updated: 1994-11-17
federation
<security>
The establishment of some or all of business agreements, cryptographic trust and user identifiers or attributes across security and policy domains to enable more seamless business interaction.
As web services promise to enable integration between business partners through loose coupling at the application and messaging layer, federation does so at the identity management layer, insulating each domain from the details of the others' authentication and authorization. Key to this loose coupling at the identity management layer are standardized mechanisms and formats for the communication of identity information between the domains. SAML is one such standard.Last updated: 2011-05-12
Federation Against Software Theft Limited
(FAST) A non-profitmaking organisation, formed in 1984 by the software industry with the aim of eradicating software theft in the UK. FAST was the world's first anti-piracy organisation to work to protect the intellectual property rights of software publishers. Initially concentrating on lobbying parliament to revise Copyright law, FAST also prosecutes organisations and individuals for software theft on behalf of its members and publicises the legal penalties and security risks.
FAST Corporate Services Limited runs the FAST Standard for Software Compliance (FSSC-1:2004). This was developed in collaboration with the British Standards Institution as an independent standard of excellence in software compliance. In 1995 FAST proposed to merge with the Business Software Alliance created by Microsoft and which has a world-wide influence. However, the talks fell through and in 1996, Novell and Adobe Systems, Inc. defected to BSA. FAST Home. E-mail: <[email protected]>. Address: York House, 18 York Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire SL6 1SF. Telephone: +44 (1628) 622 121Last updated: 2005-12-27
Fedora
An open source project, sponsored by Red Hat, Inc., and potentially feeding into their products.
Fedora Home.Last updated: 2005-12-27
feed
<data>
1. data feed.
2. Rich Site Summary.feedback
Part of a system output presented at its input. Feedback may be unintended. When used as a design feature, the output is usually transformed by passive components which attenuate it in some manner; the result is then presented at the system input.
Feedback is positive or negative, depending on the sign with which a positive change in the original input reappears after transformation. Negative feedback was invented by Black to stabilise vacuum tube amplifiers. The behaviour becomes largely a function of the feedback transformation and only minimally a function of factors such as transistor gain which are imperfectly known. Positive feedback can lead to instability; it finds wide application in the construction of oscillators. Feedback can be used to control a system, as in feedback control.Last updated: 1996-01-02
feedback control
A control system which monitors its effect on the system it is controlling and modifies its output accordingly. For example, a thermostat has two inputs: the desired temperature and the current temperature (the latter is the feedback). The output of the thermostat changes so as to try to equalise the two inputs.
Computer disk drives use feedback control to position the read/write heads accurately on a recording track. Complex systems such as the human body contain many feedback systems that interact with each other; the homeostasis mechanisms that control body temperature and acidity are good examples.Last updated: 1996-01-02
feed-forward
A multi-layer perceptron network in which the outputs from all neurons (see McCulloch-Pitts) go to following but not preceding layers, so there are no feedback loops.Feel
(Free and Eventually Eulisp) An initial implementation of an EuLisp interpreter by Pete Broadbery <[email protected]>. Version 0.75 features an integrated object system, modules, parallelism, interfaces to PVM library, TCP/IP sockets, futures, Linda and CSP. Portable to most Unix systems. Can use shared memory and threads if available. ftp://ftp.bath.ac.uk/pub/eulisp/.Last updated: 1992-09-14
feep
/feep/ 1. The soft electronic "bell" sound of a display terminal (except for a VT-52); a beep (in fact, the microcomputer world seems to prefer beep). 2. To cause the display to make a feep sound. ASR-33s (the original TTYs) do not feep; they have mechanical bells that ring. Alternate forms: beep, "bleep", or just about anything suitably onomatopoeic. (Jeff MacNelly, in his comic strip "Shoe", uses the word "eep" for sounds made by computer terminals and video games; this is perhaps the closest written approximation yet.) The term "breedle" was sometimes heard at SAIL, where the terminal bleepers are not particularly soft (they sound more like the musical equivalent of a raspberry or Bronx cheer; for a close approximation, imagine the sound of a Star Trek communicator's beep lasting for five seconds). The "feeper" on a VT-52 has been compared to the sound of a '52 Chevy stripping its gears. See also ding. [Jargon File]feeper
/fee'pr/ The device in a terminal or workstation (usually a loudspeaker of some kind) that makes the feep sound.feeping creature
[feeping creaturism] An unnecessary feature; a bit of chrome that, in the speaker's judgment, is the camel's nose for a whole horde of new features. [Jargon File]feeping creaturism
/fee'ping kree"ch*r-izm/ A deliberate spoonerism for creeping featurism, meant to imply that the system or program in question has become a misshapen creature of hacks. This term isn"t really well defined, but it sounds so neat that most hackers have said or heard it. It is probably reinforced by an image of terminals prowling about in the dark making their customary noises.FEL
Function Equation Language. Programs are sets of definitions. Sequences are lists stored in consecutive memory. "FEL Programmer's Guide", R. M. Keller, AMPS TR 7, U Utah, March 1982.femto-
prefixfence
1. A sequence of one or more distinguished (out-of-band) characters (or other data items), used to delimit a piece of data intended to be treated as a unit (the computer-science literature calls this a "sentinel"). The NUL (ASCII 0000000) character that terminates strings in C is a fence. Hex FF is also (though slightly less frequently) used this way. See zigamorph. 2. An extra data value inserted in an array or other data structure in order to allow some normal test on the array's contents also to function as a termination test. For example, a highly optimised routine for finding a value in an array might artificially place a copy of the value to be searched for after the last slot of the array, thus allowing the main search loop to search for the value without having to check at each pass whether the end of the array had been reached. 3. [among users of optimising compilers] Any technique, usually exploiting knowledge about the compiler, that blocks certain optimisations. Used when explicit mechanisms are not available or are overkill. Typically a hack: "I call a dummy procedure there to force a flush of the optimiser's register-colouring info" can be expressed by the shorter "That's a fence procedure". [Jargon File]Last updated: 1999-01-08
fencepost error
1. (Rarely "lamp-post error") A problem with the discrete equivalent of a boundary condition, often exhibited in programs by iterative loops. From the following problem: "If you build a fence 100 feet long with posts 10 feet apart, how many posts do you need?" (Either 9 or 11 is a better answer than the obvious 10). For example, suppose you have a long list or array of items, and want to process items m through n; how many items are there? The obvious answer is n - m, but that is off by one; the right answer is n - m + 1. The "obvious" formula exhibits a fencepost error. See also zeroth and note that not all off-by-one errors are fencepost errors. The game of Musical Chairs involves a catastrophic off-by-one error where N people try to sit in N - 1 chairs, but it's not a fencepost error. Fencepost errors come from counting things rather than the spaces between them, or vice versa, or by neglecting to consider whether one should count one or both ends of a row. 2. (Rare) An error induced by unexpected regularities in input values, which can (for instance) completely thwart a theoretically efficient binary tree or hash coding implementation. The error here involves the difference between expected and worst case behaviours of an algorithm. [Jargon File]Last updated: 1994-12-01
fepped out
<jargon>
/fept owt/ The Symbolics 3600 LISP Machine has a Front-End Processor (FEP). When the main processor gets wedged, the FEP takes control of the keyboard and screen. Such a machine is said to have "fepped out" or "dropped into the fep".
[Jargon File]Last updated: 1994-12-01
FEPROM
Flash Erasable Programmable Read-Only MemoryFermat prime
A prime number of the form 2^2^n + 1. Any prime number of the form 2^n+1 must be a Fermat prime. Fermat conjectured in a letter to someone or other that all numbers 2^2^n+1 are prime, having noticed that this is true for n=0,1,2,3,4.
Euler proved that 641 is a factor of 2^2^5+1. Of course nowadays we would just ask a computer, but at the time it was an impressive achievement (and his proof is very elegant). No further Fermat primes are known; several have been factorised, and several more have been proved composite without finding explicit factorisations. Gauss proved that a regular N-sided polygon can be constructed with ruler and compasses if and only if N is a power of 2 times a product of distinct Fermat primes.Last updated: 1995-04-10
Fermat's Last Post
<humour>
A post to a bug tracker, mailing list or forum in which the author claims to have found a simple fix or workaround for a bug, but never says what it is and never shows up again to explain it (even after others have been puzzling over the bug for years).
[Dodgy Coder].Last updated: 2012-02-19
Ferranti F100-L
A processor, with 16-bit addressing, registers and data paths and a 1-bit serial ALU. The F100-L could only access 32K of memory (one address bit was used for indirection). It was designed by a British company for the British Military.
The unique feature of the F100-L was that it had a complete control bus available for a coprocessor. Any instruction the F100-L couldn't decode was sent directly to the coprocessor for processing. Applications for coprocessors at the time were limited, but the design is still used in modern processors, such as the National Semiconductor 32000 series. The disk operating system was written by Alec Cawley.Last updated: 2007-05-19
ferrite core memory
<storage>
(Or "core") An early form of non-volatile storage built (by hand) from tiny rings of magnetisable material threaded onto very fine wire to form large (e.g. 13"x13" or more) rectangluar arrays. Each core stored one bit of data. These were sandwiched between printed circuit boards(?). Sets of wires ran horizontally and vertically and where a vertical and horizontal wire crossed, a core had both wires threaded through it.
A single core could be selected and magnetised by passing sufficient current through its horizontal and vertical wires. A core would retain its magnetisation until it was re-magnetised. The two possible polarities of magnetisation were used to represent the binary values zero and one. A third "sense" wire, passed through the core and, if the magnetisation of the core was changed, a small pulse would be induced in the sense wire which could be detected and used to deduce the core's original state. Some core memory was immersed in a bath of heated oil to improve its performance. Core memory was rendered obsolete by semiconductor memory. For example, the 1970s-era NCR 499 had two boards, each with 16 kilobytes of core memory.Last updated: 1996-03-04
Ferroelectric RAM
Ferroelectric Random Access MemoryFerroelectric Random Access Memory
<storage>
(FRAM) A type of non-volatile read/write random access semiconductor memory. FRAM combines the advantages of SRAM - writing is roughly as fast as reading, and EPROM - non-volatility and in-circuit programmability. Current (Feb 1997) disadvantages are high cost and low density, but that may change in the future. Density is currently at most 32KB on a chip, compared with 512KB for SRAM, 1MB for EPROM and 8MB for DRAM.
A ferroelectric memory cell consists of a ferroelectric capacitor and a MOS transistor. Its construction is similar to the storage cell of a DRAM. The difference is in the dielectric properties of the material between the capacitor's electrodes. This material has a high dielectric constant and can be polarized by an electric field. The polarisation remains until it gets reversed by an opposite electrical field. This makes the memory non-volatile. Note that ferroelectric material, despite its name, does not necessarily contain iron. The most well-known ferroelectric substance is BaTiO3, which does not contain iron. Data is read by applying an electric field to the capacitor. If this switches the cell into the opposite state (flipping over the electrical dipoles in the ferroelectric material) then more charge is moved than if the cell was not flipped. This can be detected and amplified by sense amplifiers. Reading destroys the contents of a cell which must therefore be written back after a read. This is similar to the precharge operation in DRAM, though it only needs to be done after a read rather than periodically as with DRAM refresh. In fact it is most like the operation of ferrite core memory. FRAM has similar applications to EEPROM, but can be written much faster. The simplicity of the memory cell promises high density devices which can compete with DRAM. RAMTRON is the company behind FRAM.Last updated: 1997-02-17
Fetch
A Macintosh program by Jim Matthews <[email protected]> for transferring files using File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Fetch requires a Mac 512KE, System 4.1, and either KSP 1.03 or MacTCP. Fetch is Copyright 1992, Trustees of Dartmouth College. ftp://ftp.Dartmouth.edu/pub/mac/Fetch_2.1.2.sit.hqx. ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/computing/systems/mac/info-mac/comm/tcp.Last updated: 1994-11-30
fetch-execute cycle
The sequence of actions that a central processing unit performs to execute each machine code instruction in a program.
At the beginning of each cycle the CPU presents the value of the program counter on the address bus. The CPU then fetches the instruction from main memory (possibly via a cache and/or a pipeline) via the data bus into the instruction register. From the instruction register, the data forming the instruction is decoded and passed to the control unit which sends a sequence of control signals to the relevant function units of the CPU to perform the actions required by the instruction such as reading values from registers, passing them to the ALU to add them together and writing the result back to a register. The program counter is then incremented to address the next instruction and the cycle is repeated. The fetch-execute cycle was first proposed by John von Neumann.Last updated: 1998-06-25
Feynman, Richard P.
Richard P. FeynmanNearby terms:
FDT ♦ fdx ♦ FEA ♦ fear and loathing ♦ fear-driven development ♦ feasibility study
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