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line-noise

  • noun Corruption by the communications medium of either your input or your output as it is passed between your computer and the host. Normally, new characters are added in a vaguely random fashion, which renders input unparsable and output unreadable. In spectacular cases, you may find that the line-noise is meaningful to the parser or to your monitor: in the former case, this will mean your persona does things it wasn't instructed to do (or things it was instructed to do, but several times more than it was so instructed); in the latter, your screen will start printing polychrome graphics interspersed with ASCII characters you didn't even know existed. Naturally, the likelihood of line-noise occurring is directly proportional to the importance that it doesn't. Really severe line-noise can cause carrier loss. See BT (not that this will make any difference...).

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23rd September 1999: line_noise.htm