May 15, 2003

state

n.

1. Condition, situation. What's the state of your latest hack? It's winning away. The system tried to read and write the disk simultaneously and got into a totally wedged state. The standard question What's your state? means What are you doing? or What are you about to do? Typical answers are about to gronk out, or hungry. Another standard question is What's the state of the world?, meaning What's new? or What's going on?. The more terse and humorous way of asking these questions would be State-p?. Another way of phrasing the first question under sense 1 would be state-p latest hack?.

2. Information being maintained in non-permanent memory (electronic or human).

Posted by Jargon File at May 15, 2003 10:28 AM

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