Meaning of memory hole | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up; nowhere, oblivion.
2. A fragment of physical address space which does not map to main memory.
3. Synonym of memory leak (“any of several faults in the memory allocation logic of a computer or program whereby parts of memory become hidden or unusable”).
   rare

Equivalents

Examples

“As relations between the West and Russia grew worse, the party began to discard its patriotic draperies; everything that had been said during the war years was now quietly dropped into the memory hole.”

“President [Richard] Nixon didn't even blush when he claimed that the raise in the debt limit was "in the interest of responsible management." If it were already 1984, all of Nixon's old speeches about the government squandering our money could be shoved into the "memory hole."”

“[T]he innermost circle of the Stalinist limbo was occupied by the Damned. The Damned were by no means exponents of an alien ideology. On the contrary, they were numbered among the true believers—they were Communists. But despite superhuman efforts to obey the all-wise party, they nevertheless fell by the wayside and were swept into the memory hole.”

“After a few more years [Leon] Trotsky's name disappeared down the "memory hole," and the Red Army became a fully professional force in which certain selected values and traditions of the old army were resurrected and even made the object of a veritable cult.”

“Jiang Zemin has almost managed to make the event disappear down an Orwellian memory hole. Even in Western countries, sub-editors have taken to calling it the ‘Tiananmen crackdown’, rather than ‘massacre’, making it seem as insignificant as the endless stories about routine ‘crackdowns’ on smuggling, prostitution, counterfeit goods, VAT forms or corruption, which provide the stuff of daily reporting here in China.”

“The painstaking work of scientists, the reasoned deliberations of the President's Science Advisory Committee, and the bipartisan American agreement to ban DDT have been flushed down the memory hole, along with the well-documented and easily found (but extremely inconvenient) fact that the most important reason that DDT failed to eliminate malaria was because insects evolved.”

“A memory hole provides performance improvement by reserving certain parts of memory for use by ISA cards. […] The memory hole is usually disabled because there are few ISA cards today that need to be mapped. If you have an ISA card that refuses to function properly in a PC with more than 16MB of RAM, you should enable the memory hole.”

“We won't touch high ISA memory (the so-called memory hole in the 14 MB to 16 MB physical address range), because that kind of I/O memory is extremely rare nowadays and is not supported by the majority of modern motherboards or by the kernel.”

“The use of new and delete, along with the scope related creation and deletion of objects, provide safer and more consistent management of the available memory pool. […] It also resolves common problems with passing incorrect pointers to free, or obtaining memory using malloc and then forgetting to free it (causing a memory hole). This typically occurs when a subroutine allocates some memory via malloc, and during some processing a premature return taken that does not free the allocated memory.”

“When Lighttpd finishes, it calls mod_helloworld_free to release the memory held by plugin_data. Beware that not freeing the plugin_data creates a memory hole.”

CEFR level