1. [US Geological Survey] A
program with a ludicrously complex user interface written to
perform extremely trivial tasks. An example would be a
menu-driven, button clicking, pulldown, pop-up windows program for
listing directories. The original monty was an infamous
weather-reporting program, Monty the Amazing Weather Man, written
at the USGS. Monty had a widget-packed X-window interface with
over 200 buttons; and all monty actually did was FTP
files off the network. 2. [Great Britain; commonly capitalized as
`Monty' or as `the Full Monty'] 16 megabytes of memory, when
fitted to an IBM-PC or compatible. A standard PC-compatible using
the AT- or ISA-bus with a normal BIOS cannot access more than 16
megabytes of RAM. Generally used of a PC, Unix workstation,
etc. to mean `fully populated with' memory, disk-space or some
other desirable resource. This usage may be related to a TV
commercial for Del Monte fruit juice, in which one of the
characters insisted on "the full Del Monte"; but see the World
Wide Words article
"The Full Monty" for discussion of the rather complex etymol
may lie behind this. Compare American moby.
brute force adj.
Describes a primitive programming style
one in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing
power instead of using his or her own intelligence to simplify the
problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive
methods suited to small problems directly to large ones....
