dumb

adj 1: slow to learn or understand; lacking intellectual acuity;

"so dense he never understands anything I say to him";

"never met anyone quite so dim"; "although dull at

classical learning, at mathematics he was uncommonly

quick"- Thackeray; "dumb officials make some really

dumb decisions"; "he was either normally stupid or

being deliberately obtuse"; "worked with the slow

students" [syn: {dense}, {dim}, {dull}, {obtuse}, {slow}]

2: unable to speak temporarily; "struck dumb"; "speechless with

shock" [syn: {speechless}]

3: lacking the power of human speech; "dumb animals"

4: unable to speak because of hereditary deafness [syn: {mute},

{silent}]

dump

1. An undigested and voluminous mass of

information about a problem or the state of a system,

especially one routed to the slowest available output device

(compare {core dump}), and most especially one consisting of

{hexadecimal} or {octal} {runes} describing the byte-by-byte

state of memory, mass storage, or some file. In {elder days},

debugging was generally done by "groveling over" a dump (see

{grovel}); increasing use of high-level languages and

interactive debuggers has made such tedium uncommon, and the

term "dump" now has a faintly archaic flavour.

2. A {backup}. This usage is typical only at large

{time-sharing} installations.

{Unix manual page}: dump(1).

[{Jargon File}]

(1994-12-01)