bubble memory
A storage device built using materials such as gadolinium gallium garnet which are can be magnetised easily in only one direction. A film of these materials can be created so that it is magnetisable in an up-down direction. The magnetic fields tend to join together, some with the north pole facing up, some with the south. When a veritcal magnetic field is imposed on this, the areas in opposite alignment to the field shrink to circles, or 'bubbles'. A bubble can be formed by reversing the field in a small spot, and can be destroyed by increasing the field. Bubble memory is a kind of non-volatile storage but EEPROM, Flash Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory and ferroelectric technologies, which are also non-volatile, are faster. ["Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present", V 4.0.0, John Bayko <bayko@hercules.cs.uregina.ca>, Appendix C]Last updated: 1995-02-03
bubble sort
A sorting technique in which pairs of adjacent values in the list to be sorted are compared and interchanged if they are out of order; thus, list entries "bubble upward" in the list until they bump into one with a lower sort value. Because it is not very good relative to other methods and is the one typically stumbled on by naive and untutored programmers, hackers consider it the canonical example of a naive algorithm. The canonical example of a really *bad* algorithm is bogo-sort. A bubble sort might be used out of ignorance, but any use of bogo-sort could issue only from brain damage or willful perversity. [Jargon File]Nearby terms:
BTW ♦ BUAF ♦ BUAG ♦ bubble memory ♦ bubble sort ♦ bucky bits ♦ buffer ♦ buffered write-through
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