Magic Quadrant: An impartial and highly accurate graphical representation of the relative rankings of vendor technology at a given point in time, which is utterly unrelated to the amount of goods and services that any given IT vendor might have purchased from the Gartner Group.
Mobilepsy: This is the medical term for the frantic red-faced fit that someone goes into when their mobile phone starts ringing during an important meeting or while they are listening to a public presentation. Luckily mobilepsy is curable. Mild sufferers can be taught where the off button on their mobile phone is. With chronic sufferers, the only solution is a full mobilectomy.
MP3: A scheme for the compression of audio signals, using perceptual audio coding, psychoacoustic compression and a modified discrete cosine transform in order to enable efficient Internet music theft.
Multiplexer: Someone who goes to cinemas that have multiple screens… Wait, wasn’t there a word like this that had something to do with modems or was I dreaming? If there was a multiplexer, what was a plexer? It was a long time ago, damn it. Anyway who cares, nowadays, it’s about cinemas…
Normalisation (Normal Forms): Refers to a satanic ritual carried out by database designers. A group of them assemble, draw a pentangle on the floor, light candles and sacrifice a goat. They then invoke the five demons of Thoth, or the “five normal forms” as they are sometimes called. At the end of the ritual a database design manifests from the netherworld. The full details of how this is done is a closely guarded secret, understood only by a few database masters and revealed only to initiates. I daren’t say more.