[Popularised by Eugene Brooks] A microprocessor-based
machine that infringes on mini, mainframe, or supercomputer
performance turf. Often heard in "No one will survive the
attack of the killer micros!", the battle cry of the
downsizers. Used especially of RISC architectures.
The popularity of the phrase "attack of the killer micros" is
doubtless reinforced by the movie title "Attack Of The Killer
Tomatoes" (one of the canonical examples of
so-bad-it's-wonderful among hackers). This has even more
flavour now that killer micros have gone on the offensive not
just individually (in workstations) but in hordes (within
massively parallel computers).
A recipe for inducing hardware damage on a machine via
insertion of invalid values (see poke) into a
memory-mapped control register; used especially of various
fairly well-known tricks on bitty boxes without hardware
memory management (such as the IBM PC and Commodore PET)
that can overload analog electronics in the monitor.
[Usenet] Per-user file(s) used by some Usenet reading
programs (originally Larry Wall's rn) to discard summarily
(without presenting for reading) articles matching some
particularly uninteresting (or unwanted) patterns of subject,
author, or other header lines. Thus to add a person (or
subject) to one's kill file is to arrange for that person to
be ignored by one's newsreader in future. By extension, it
may be used for a decision to ignore the person or subject in
other media. See also plonk.
