May 15, 2003
G
pref.,suff.1. [SI] See quantifiers.
2. The letter G has special significance in the hacker community, largely thanks to the GNU project and the GPL.
Many free software projects have names that
names that begin with G. The GNU project gave many of its projects names
that were acronyms beginning with the word GNU
, such as
GNU C Compiler
(gcc) and GNU Debugger
(gdb),
and this launched a tradition. Just as many Java developers will begin
their projects with J, many free software developers will begin theirs with
G. It is often the case that a program with a G-prefixed name is licensed
under the GNU GPL.
For example, someone may write a free Enterprise Engineering Kludge
package (EEK technology is all the rage in the technical journals) and name
it geek
to imply that it is a GPL'd EEK package.
gang bang
n.The use of large numbers of loosely coupled programmers in an attempt to wedge a great many features into a product in a short time. Though there have been memorable gang bangs (e.g., that over-the-weekend assembler port mentioned in Steven Levy's Hackers), and large numbers of loosely-coupled programmers operating in bazaar mode can do very useful work when they're not on a deadline, most are perpetrated by large companies trying to meet unrealistic deadlines; the inevitable result is enormous buggy masses of code entirely lacking in orthogonality. When market-driven managers make a list of all the features the competition has and assign one programmer to implement each, the probability of maintaining a coherent (or even functional) design goes to epsilon. See also firefighting, Mongolian Hordes technique, Conway's Law.
Gang of Four
n.
(also abbreviated GOF)
[prob. a play on the ‘Gang Of Four’ who briefly ran Communist
China after the death of Mao] Describes either the authors or the book
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented
Software published in 1995 by Addison-Wesley (ISBN
0-201-63361-2). The authors forming the Gang Of Four are Erich Gamma,
Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides. They are also sometimes
referred to as ‘Gamma et. al.’ The authors state at http://www.hillside.net/patterns/DPBook/GOF.html
Why are we ... called this? Who knows. Somehow the name just
stuck.
The term is also used to describe any of the design patterns
that are used in the book, referring to the patterns within it as
‘Gang Of Four Patterns.’
garply
/gar´plee/ n.[Stanford] Another metasyntactic variable (see foo); once popular among SAIL hackers.
gas
[as in ‘gas chamber’]
1. interj. A term of disgust and
hatred, implying that gas should be dispensed in generous quantities,
thereby exterminating the source of irritation. Some loser just
reloaded the system for no reason! Gas!
2. interj. A suggestion that
someone or something ought to be flushed out of mercy. The system's
getting wedged every few minutes. Gas!
3. vt. To
flush (sense 1). You should gas that old
crufty software.
4. [IBM] n. Dead space in nonsequentially organized files that was occupied by data that has since been deleted; the compression operation that removes it is called degassing (by analogy, perhaps, with the use of the same term in vacuum technology).
5. [IBM] n. Empty space on a disk that has been clandestinely allocated against future need.
Gates's Law
The speed of software halves every 18 months.
This
oft-cited law is an ironic comment on the tendency of software bloat to
outpace the every-18-month doubling in hardware capacity per dollar
predicted by Moore's Law. The reference is to Bill
Gates; Microsoft is widely considered among the worst if not the worst of
the perpetrators of bloat.
GC
/G·C/[from LISP terminology; Garbage Collect]
1. vt. To clean up and throw
away useless things. I think I'll GC the top of my desk
today.
2. vt. To recycle, reclaim, or put to another use.
3. n. An instantiation of the garbage collector process.
Garbage collection is computer-science techspeak for a particular class of strategies for dynamically but transparently reallocating computer memory (i.e., without requiring explicit allocation and deallocation by higher-level software). One such strategy involves periodically scanning all the data in memory and determining what is no longer accessible; useless data items are then discarded so that the memory they occupy can be recycled and used for another purpose. Implementations of the LISP language usually use garbage collection.
In jargon, the full phrase is sometimes heard but the
abbrev GC is more frequently used because it is
shorter. Note that there is an ambiguity in usage that has to be resolved
by context: I'm going to garbage-collect my desk
usually
means to clean out the drawers, but it could also mean to throw away or
recycle the desk itself.
GCOS
/jee´kohs/ n.
A quick-and-dirty
clone of System/360 DOS that emerged from GE around
1970; originally called GECOS (the General Electric Comprehensive Operating
System). Later kluged to support primitive timesharing and transaction
processing. After the buyout of GE's computer division by Honeywell, the
name was changed to General Comprehensive Operating System (GCOS). Other
OS groups at Honeywell began referring to it as ‘God's Chosen
Operating System’, allegedly in reaction to the GCOS crowd's
uninformed and snotty attitude about the superiority of their product. All
this might be of zero interest, except for two facts: (1) The GCOS people
won the political war, and this led in the orphaning and eventual death of
Honeywell Multics, and (2) GECOS/GCOS left one
permanent mark on Unix. Some early Unix systems at Bell Labs used GCOS
machines for print spooling and various other services; the field added to
/etc/passwd to carry GCOS ID information was called
the GECOS field and survives today as
the pw_gecos
member used for the user's
full name and other human-ID information. GCOS later played a major role
in keeping Honeywell a dismal also-ran in the mainframe market, and was
itself mostly ditched for Unix in the late 1980s when Honeywell began to
retire its aging big iron designs.
gedanken
/g@·dahn´kn/ adj.Ungrounded; impractical; not well-thought-out; untried; untested.
‘Gedanken’ is a German word for ‘thought’. A thought experiment is one you carry out in your head. In physics, the term gedanken experiment is used to refer to an experiment that is impractical to carry out, but useful to consider because it can be reasoned about theoretically. (A classic gedanken experiment of relativity theory involves thinking about a man in an elevator accelerating through space.) Gedanken experiments are very useful in physics, but must be used with care. It's too easy to idealize away some important aspect of the real world in constructing the ‘apparatus’.
Among hackers, accordingly, the word has a pejorative connotation. It is typically used of a project, especially one in artificial intelligence research, that is written up in grand detail (typically as a Ph.D. thesis) without ever being implemented to any great extent. Such a project is usually perpetrated by people who aren't very good hackers or find programming distasteful or are just in a hurry. A gedanken thesis is usually marked by an obvious lack of intuition about what is programmable and what is not, and about what does and does not constitute a clear specification of an algorithm. See also AI-complete, DWIM.
geek
n.A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance. Geeks usually have a strong case of neophilia. Most geeks are adept with computers and treat hacker as a term of respect, but not all are hackers themselves — and some who are in fact hackers normally call themselves geeks anyway, because they (quite properly) regard ‘hacker’ as a label that should be bestowed by others rather than self-assumed.
One
description accurately if a little breathlessly enumerates
gamers, ravers, science fiction fans, punks, perverts, programmers,
nerds, subgenii, and trekkies. These are people who did not go to their
high school proms, and many would be offended by the suggestion that they
should have even wanted to.
Originally, a geek was a carnival performer who bit the heads off chickens. (In early 20th-century Scotland a ‘geek’ was an immature coley, a type of fish.) Before about 1990 usage of this term was rather negative. Earlier versions of this lexicon defined a computer geek as one who eats (computer) bugs for a living — an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater. This is often still the way geeks are regarded by non-geeks, but as the mainstream culture becomes more dependent on technology and technical skill mainstream attitudes have tended to shift towards grudging respect. Correspondingly, there are now ‘geek pride’ festivals (the implied reference to ‘gay pride’ is not accidental).
See also propeller head, clustergeeking, geek out, wannabee, terminal junkie, spod, weenie, geek code, alpha geek.
geek code
n.
(also Code of the Geeks
). A set of codes commonly
used in sig blocks to broadcast the interests,
skills, and aspirations of the poster. Features a G at the left margin
followed by numerous letter codes, often suffixed with plusses or minuses.
Because many net users are involved in computer science, the most common
prefix is ‘GCS’. To see a copy of the current code, browse
http://www.geekcode.com/.
Here is a sample geek code (that of Robert Hayden, the code's inventor)
from that page:
geek out
vi.
To temporarily enter techno-nerd mode while in a non-hackish
context, for example at parties held near computer equipment. Especially
used when you need to do or say something highly technical and don't have
time to explain: Pardon me while I geek out for a moment.
See geek; see also
propeller head.
geekasm
Originally from a quote on the PBS show Scientific
American Frontiers (week of May 21st 2002) by MIT professor
Alex Slocum: When they build a machine, if they do the calculations
right, the machine works and you get this intense ... uhh ... just like a
geekasm, from knowing that what you created in your mind and on the
computer is actually doing what you told it to do
. Unsurprisingly,
this usage went live on the Web almost instantly. Every hacker knows this
feeling. Compare earlier progasm.
gender mender
n.[common] A cable connector shell with either two male or two female connectors on it, used to correct the mismatches that result when some loser didn't understand the RS232C specification and the distinction between DTE and DCE. Used esp. for RS-232C parts in either the original D-25 or the IBM PC's bogus D-9 format. Also called gender bender, gender blender, sex changer, and even homosexual adapter; however, there appears to be some confusion as to whether a male homosexual adapter has pins on both sides (is doubly male) or sockets on both sides (connects two males).
General Public Virus
n.
Pejorative name for some versions of the GNU
project copyleft or General Public License (GPL),
which requires that any tools or apps incorporating
copylefted code must be source-distributed on the same anti-proprietary
terms as GNU stuff. Thus it is alleged that the copyleft
‘infects’ software generated with GNU tools, which may in turn
infect other software that reuses any of its code. The Free Software
Foundation's official position is that copyright law limits the scope of
the GPL to programs textually incorporating significant amounts of
GNU code
, and that the ‘infection’ is not passed on to
third parties unless actual GNU source is transmitted. Nevertheless,
widespread suspicion that the copyleft language is
‘boobytrapped’ has caused many developers to avoid using GNU
tools and the GPL. Changes in the language of the version 2.0 GPL did not
eliminate this problem.
generate
vt.
To produce something according to an algorithm or program or set of
rules, or as a (possibly unintended) side effect of the execution of an
algorithm or program. The opposite of parse. This
term retains its mechanistic connotations (though often humorously) when
used of human behavior. The guy is rational most of the time, but
mention nuclear energy around him and he'll generate
infinite flamage.
Genius From Mars Technique
n.[TMRC] A visionary quality which enables one to ignore the standard approach and come up with a totally unexpected new algorithm. An attack on a problem from an offbeat angle that no one has ever thought of before, but that in retrospect makes total sense. Compare grok, zen.
gensym
/jen´sim/[from MacLISP for generated symbol]
1. v. To invent a new name for something temporary, in such a way that the name is almost certainly not in conflict with one already in use.
2. n. The resulting name. The canonical form of a gensym is ‘Gnnnn’ where nnnn represents a number; any LISP hacker would recognize G0093 (for example) as a gensym.
3. A freshly generated data structure with a gensymmed name. Gensymmed names are useful for storing or uniquely identifying crufties (see cruft).
Get a life!
imp.
Hacker-standard way of suggesting that the person to whom it is
directed has succumbed to terminal geekdom (see
geek). Often heard on
Usenet, esp. as a way of suggesting that the target
is taking some obscure issue of theology too
seriously. This exhortation was popularized by William Shatner on a 1987
Saturday Night Live episode in a speech that ended
Get a life!
, but it can be traced back
at least to ‘Valley Girl’ slang in 1983. It was certainly in
wide use among hackers for years before achieving mainstream currency via
the sitcom Get A Life in 1990.
Get a real computer!
imp.Typical hacker response to news that somebody is having trouble getting work done on a system that (a) is single-tasking, (b) has no hard disk, or (c) has an address space smaller than 16 megabytes. This is as of early 1996; note that the threshold for ‘real computer’ rises with time. See bitty box and toy.
GandhiCon
There is a quote from Mohandas Gandhi, describing the stages of establishment resistence to a winning strategy of nonviolent activism, that partisans of open source and especially Linux have embraced as almost an explanatory framework for the behaviors they observe while trying to get corporations and other large institutions to take new ways of doing things seriously:
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
In hacker usage this quote has miscegenated with the U.S military's DefCon terminology describing ‘defense conditions’ or degrees of war alert. At GhandiCon One, you're being ignored. At GhandiCon Two, opponents are laughing at you and dismissing the idea that you could ever be a threat. At GhandiCon Three, they're fighting you on the merits and/or attempting to discredit you. At GhandiCon Four, you're winning and they are arguing to save face or stave off complete collapse of their position.
gib
/jib/
1. vi. To destroy utterly. Like
frag, but much more violent and final.
There's no trace left. You definitely gibbed that
bug
.
2. n. Remnants after total obliteration.
Originated first by id software in the game Quake. It's short for
giblets (thus pronounced jib
), and referred to the bloody
remains of slain opponents. Eventually the word was verbed, and leaked
into general usage afterward.
GIFs at 11
[Fidonet] Fidonet alternative to film at 11, especially in echoes (Fidonet topic areas) where uuencoded GIFs are permitted. Other formats, especially JPEG and MPEG, may be referenced instead.
GIGO
/gi:´goh/ [acronym]
1. ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’ — usually said in
response to lusers who complain that a program
didn't do the right thing
when given imperfect input or
otherwise mistreated in some way. Also commonly used to describe failures
in human decision making due to faulty, incomplete, or imprecise data.
2. Garbage In, Gospel Out: this more recent expansion is a sardonic comment on the tendency human beings have to put excessive trust in ‘computerized’ data.
gilley
n.
[Usenet] The unit of analogical bogosity.
According to its originator, the standard for one gilley was the act
of bogotoficiously comparing the shutting down of 1000 machines for a day
with the killing of one person
. The milligilley has been found to
suffice for most normal conversational exchanges.
gillion
/gil´y@n/ or /jil´y@n/ n.[formed from giga- by analogy with mega/million and tera/trillion] 10^9. Same as an American billion or a British milliard. How one pronounces this depends on whether one speaks giga- with a hard or soft ‘g’.
GIPS
/gips/ or /jips/ n.[analogy with MIPS] Giga-Instructions per Second (also possibly ‘Gillions of Instructions per Second’; see gillion). In 1991, this is used of only a handful of highly parallel machines, but this is expected to change. Compare KIPS.
glark
/glark/ vt.
To figure something out from context. The System III manuals
are pretty poor, but you can generally glark the meaning from
context.
Interestingly, the word was originally
‘glork’; the context was This gubblick contains many
nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp can be glorked
[sic] from context
(David Moser, quoted by Douglas Hofstadter in
his Metamagical Themas column in the January 1981
Scientific American). It is conjectured that hacker
usage mutated the verb to ‘glark’ because
glork was already an established jargon term (some
hackers do report using the original term). Compare
grok, zen.
glass tty
/glas T·T·Y/ or /glas ti´tee/ n.[obs.] A terminal that has a display screen but which, because of hardware or software limitations, behaves like a teletype or some other printing terminal, thereby combining the disadvantages of both: like a printing terminal, it can't do fancy display hacks, and like a display terminal, it doesn't produce hard copy. An example is the early ‘dumb’ version of Lear-Siegler ADM 3 (without cursor control). See tube, tty; compare dumb terminal. See TV Typewriters (Appendix A) for an interesting true story about a glass tty.
glassfet
/glas´fet/ n.[by analogy with MOSFET, the acronym for Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor] Syn. firebottle, a humorous way to refer to a vacuum tube.
glitch
/glich/[very common; from German ‘glitschig’ slippery, via Yiddish ‘glitshen’, to slide or skid]
1. n. A sudden interruption in
electric service, sanity, continuity, or program function. Sometimes
recoverable. An interruption in electric service is specifically called a
power glitch (also
power hit), of grave concern because it usually crashes all the
computers. In jargon, though, a hacker who got to the middle of a sentence
and then forgot how he or she intended to complete it might say,
Sorry, I just glitched
.
2. vi. To commit a glitch. See gritch.
3. vt. [Stanford] To scroll a display screen, esp. several lines at a time. WAITS terminals used to do this in order to avoid continuous scrolling, which is distracting to the eye.
4. obs. Same as magic cookie, sense 2.
All these uses of glitch derive from the specific technical meaning the term has in the electronic hardware world, where it is now techspeak. A glitch can occur when the inputs of a circuit change, and the outputs change to some random value for some very brief time before they settle down to the correct value. If another circuit inspects the output at just the wrong time, reading the random value, the results can be very wrong and very hard to debug (a glitch is one of many causes of electronic heisenbugs).
Coping with a hydraulic glitch.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-07-24)
glob
/glob/, not /glohb/ v.,n.[Unix; common] To expand special characters in a wildcarded name, or the act of so doing (the action is also called globbing). The Unix conventions for filename wildcarding have become sufficiently pervasive that many hackers use some of them in written English, especially in email or news on technical topics. Those commonly encountered include the following:
* | wildcard for any string (see also UN*X) |
? | wildcard for any single character (generally read this way only at the beginning or in the middle of a word) |
[] | delimits a wildcard matching any of the enclosed characters |
{} | alternation of comma-separated alternatives; thus, ‘foo{baz,qux}’ would be read as ‘foobaz’ or ‘fooqux’ |
Some examples: He said his name was [KC]arl
(expresses
ambiguity). I don't read talk.politics.*
(any of the
talk.politics subgroups on Usenet). Other examples
are given under the entry for X. Note that glob
patterns are similar, but not identical, to those used in
regexps.
Historical note: The jargon usage derives from glob
, the name of a subprogram that expanded
wildcards in archaic pre-Bourne versions of the Unix shell.
glork
/glork/1. interj. Term of mild surprise, usually tinged with outrage, as when one attempts to save the results of two hours of editing and finds that the system has just crashed.
2. Used as a name for just about anything. See foo.
3. vt. Similar to
glitch, but usually used reflexively. My
program just glorked itself.
4. Syn. for glark, which see.
glue
n.Generic term for any interface logic or protocol that connects two component blocks. For example, Blue Glue is IBM's SNA protocol, and hardware designers call anything used to connect large VLSI's or circuit blocks glue logic.
gnarly
/nar´lee/ adj.
Both obscure and hairy
(sense 1). Yow! — the tuned assembler
implementation of BitBlt is really gnarly!
From a similar but less
specific usage in surfer slang.
GNU
/gnoo/, not /noo/
1. [acronym: ‘GNU’s Not Unix!', see recursive acronym] A Unix-workalike development effort of the Free
Software Foundation headed by Richard Stallman. GNU EMACS and the GNU C
compiler, two tools designed for this project, have become very popular in
hackerdom and elsewhere. The GNU project was designed partly to
proselytize for RMS's position that information is community property and
all software source should be shared. One of its slogans is Help
stamp out software hoarding!
Though this remains controversial
(because it implicitly denies any right of designers to own, assign, and
sell the results of their labors), many hackers who disagree with RMS have
nevertheless cooperated to produce large amounts of high-quality software
for free redistribution under the Free Software Foundation's imprimatur.
The GNU project has a web page at http://www.gnu.org/. See
EMACS, copyleft,
General Public Virus, Linux.
2. Noted Unix hacker John Gilmore gnu@toad.com}, founder of Usenet's anarchic alt.* hierarchy.
gnubie
/noo´bee/ n.Written-only variant of newbie in common use on IRC channels, which implies specifically someone who is new to the Linux/open-source/free-software world.
GNUMACS
/gnoo´maks/ n.[contraction of ‘GNU EMACS’] Often-heard abbreviated name for the GNU project's flagship tool, EMACS. StallMACS, referring to Richard Stallman, is less common but also heard. Used esp. in contrast with GOSMACS and X Emacs.
go flatline
v.[from cyberpunk SF, refers to flattening of EEG traces upon brain-death] (also adjectival flatlined).
1. To die, terminate, or fail, esp. irreversibly. In hacker parlance, this is used of machines only, human death being considered somewhat too serious a matter to employ jargon-jokes about.
2. To go completely quiescent; said of machines undergoing
controlled shutdown. You can suffer file damage if you shut down
Unix but power off before the system has gone flatline.
3. Of a video tube, to fail by losing vertical scan, so all one sees is a bright horizontal line bisecting the screen.
go root
vi.
[Unix; common] To temporarily enter root mode
in order to perform a privileged operation. This use is deprecated in
Australia, where v. ‘root’
is a synonym for fuck
.
goat file
A sacrificial file used to test a computer virus, i.e. a dummy executable that carries a sample of the virus, isolated so it can be atudied. Not common among hackers, since the Unix systems most use basically don't get viruses.
gobble
vt.
1. To consume, usu.: used with ‘up’. The output
spy gobbles characters out of a tty output
buffer.
2. To obtain, usu.: used with ‘down’. I guess
I'll gobble down a copy of the documentation tomorrow.
See also
snarf.
Godwin's Law
prov.
[Usenet] As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability
of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
There is
a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and
whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in
progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an
upper bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also a
widely- recognized codicil that any intentional
triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects
will be unsuccessful. Godwin himself has discussed
the subject.
Godzillagram
/god·zil'@·gram/ n.[from Japan's national hero]
1. A network packet that in theory is a broadcast to every machine in the universe. The typical case is an IP datagram whose destination IP address is [255.255.255.255]. Fortunately, few gateways are foolish enough to attempt to implement this case!
2. A network packet of maximum size. An IP Godzillagram has 65,535 octets. Compare super source quench, Christmas tree packet, martian.
golden
adj.
[prob.: from folklore's ‘golden egg’] When used to
describe a magnetic medium (e.g., golden
disk, golden tape),
describes one containing a tested, up-to-spec, ready-to-ship software
version. Compare platinum-iridium. One may also
go gold
, which is the act of releasing a golden version.
The gold color of many CDROMs is a coincidence; this term was well
established a decade before CDROM distribution become common in the
mid-1990s.
golf-ball printer
n. obs.The IBM 2741, a slow but letter-quality printing device and terminal based on the IBM Selectric typewriter. The golf ball was a little spherical frob bearing reversed embossed images of 88 different characters arranged on four parallels of latitude; one could change the font by swapping in a different golf ball. The print element spun and jerked alarmingly in action and when in motion was sometimes described as an infuriated golf ball. This was the technology that enabled APL to use a non-EBCDIC, non-ASCII, and in fact completely non-standard character set. This put it 10 years ahead of its time — where it stayed, firmly rooted, for the next 20, until character displays gave way to programmable bit-mapped devices with the flexibility to support other character sets.
gonk
/gonk/ vi.,n.
1. [prob. back-formed from gonkulator.] To
prevaricate or to embellish the truth beyond any reasonable recognition.
In German the term is (mythically) gonken; in Spanish the verb becomes gonkar. You're gonking me. That story
you just told me is a bunch of gonk.
In German, for example,
Du gonkst mich
(You're pulling my leg). See also
gonkulator.
2. [British] To grab some sleep at an odd time; compare gronk out.
gonkulator
/gon´kyoo·lay·tr/ n.[common; from the 1960s Hogan's Heroes TV series] A pretentious piece of equipment that actually serves no useful purpose. Usually used to describe one's least favorite piece of computer hardware. See gonk.
gonzo
/gon´zoh/ adj.[from Hunter S. Thompson]
1. With total commitment, total concentration, and a mad sort of panache. (Thompson's original sense.)
2. More loosely: Overwhelming; outrageous; over the top; very large, esp. used of collections of source code, source files, or individual functions. Has some of the connotations of moby and hairy, but without the implication of obscurity or complexity.
Good Thing
n.,adj.[very common; always pronounced as if capitalized. Orig. fr. the 1930 Sellar & Yeatman parody of British history 1066 And All That, but well-established among hackers in the U.S. as well.]
1. Self-evidently wonderful to anyone in a position to notice:
A language that manages dynamic memory automatically for you is a
Good Thing.
2. Something that can't possibly have any ill side-effects and may
save considerable grief later: Removing the self-modifying code from
that shared library would be a Good Thing.
3. When said of software tools or libraries, as in YACC is a
Good Thing
, specifically connotes that the thing has drastically
reduced a programmer's work load. Oppose
Bad Thing.
[common] To search the Web using the Google search engine, http://www.google.com. Google is highly esteemed among hackers for its significance ranking system, which is so uncannily effective that many hackers consider it to have rendered other search engines effectively irrelevant. The name ‘google’ has additional flavor for hackers because most know that it was copied from a mathematical term for ten to the 100th power, famously first uttered as ‘googol’ by a mathematician's nine-year-old nephew.
google juice
n.
A hypothetical substance which attracts the index bots of
Google.com. In common usage, a web page or web site with high placement in
the results of a particular search on Google or frequent placement in the
results of a various searches is said to have a lot of google
juice
or good google juice
. Also used to compare
web pages or web sites, for example CrackMonkey has more google
juice than KPMG
. See also juice,
kilogoogle.
gopher
n.[obs.] A type of Internet service first floated around 1991 and obsolesced around 1995 by the World Wide Web. Gopher presents a menuing interface to a tree or graph of links; the links can be to documents, runnable programs, or other gopher menus arbitrarily far across the net.
Some claim that the gopher software, which was originally developed
at the University of Minnesota, was named after the Minnesota Gophers (a
sports team). Others claim the word derives from American slang gofer (from go for
, dialectal
go fer
), one whose job is to run and fetch things. Finally,
observe that gophers dig long tunnels, and the idea of tunneling through
the net to find information was a defining metaphor for the developers.
Probably all three things were true, but with the first two coming first
and the gopher-tunnel metaphor serendipitously adding flavor and impetus to
the project as it developed out of its concept stage.
gopher hole
n.1. Any access to a gopher.
2. [Amateur Packet Radio] The terrestrial analog of a wormhole (sense 2), from which this term was coined. A gopher hole links two amateur packet relays through some non-ham radio medium.
gorets
/gor´ets/ n.The unknown ur-noun, fill in your own meaning. Found esp. on the Usenet newsgroup alt.gorets, which seems to be a running contest to redefine the word by implication in the funniest and most peculiar way, with the understanding that no definition is ever final. [A correspondent from the former Soviet Union informs me that gorets is Russian for ‘mountain dweller’. Another from France informs me that goret is archaic French for a young pig —ESR] Compare frink.
gorilla arm
n.
The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input
technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the
designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems
failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of
their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections,
the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized — the operator
looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen and feels like one
afterwards. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to
human-factors designers; Remember the gorilla arm!
is
shorthand for How is this going to fly in real
use?
.
gorp
/gorp/ n.[CMU: perhaps from the canonical hiker's food, Good Old Raisins and Peanuts] Another metasyntactic variable, like foo and bar.
GOSMACS
/goz´maks/ n.[contraction of ‘Gosling EMACS’] The first EMACS-in-C implementation, predating but now largely eclipsed by GNUMACS. Originally freeware; a commercial version was modestly popular as ‘UniPress EMACS’ during the 1980s. The author, James Gosling, went on to invent NeWS and the programming language Java; the latter earned him demigod status.
gotcha
n.
A misfeature of a system, especially a
programming language or environment, that tends to breed bugs or mistakes
because it is both enticingly easy to invoke and completely unexpected
and/or unreasonable in its outcome. For example, a classic gotcha in
C is the fact that if (a=b)
{code;
} is syntactically valid and sometimes even correct. It
puts the value of b
into a
and then executes code
if a
is
non-zero. What the programmer probably meant was if
(a==b) {code;
}, which executes code
if a
and
b
are equal.
GPL
/G·P·L/ n.Abbreviation for ‘General Public License’ in widespread use; see copyleft, General Public Virus. Often mis-expanded as ‘GNU Public License’.
gray goo
n.A hypothetical substance composed of sagans of sub-micron-sized self-replicating robots programmed to make copies of themselves out of whatever is available. The image that goes with the term is one of the entire biosphere of Earth being eventually converted to robot goo. This is the simplest of the nanotechnology disaster scenarios, easily refuted by arguments from energy requirements and elemental abundances. Compare blue goo.
Great Internet Explosion
The mainstreaming of the Internet in 1993-1994. Used normally in time comparatives; before the Great Internet Explosion and after it were very different worlds from a hacker's point of view. Before it, Internet access was expensive and available only to an elite few through universities, research laboratories, and well-heeled corporations; after it, everybody's mother had access.
Great Renaming
n.
The flag day in 1987 on which all of the
non-local groups on the Usenet had their names
changed from the net.- format to the current multiple-hierarchies scheme.
Used esp. in discussing the history of newsgroup names. The oldest
sources group is comp.sources.misc; before the Great Renaming,
it was net.sources.
There
is a Great
Renaming FAQ on the Web.
Great Runes
n.Uppercase-only text or display messages. Some archaic operating systems still emit these. See also runes, smash case, fold case.
There is a widespread legend (repeated by earlier versions of this entry, though tagged as folklore) that the uppercase-only support of various old character codes and I/O equipment was chosen by a religious person in a position of power at the Teletype Company because supporting both upper and lower cases was too expensive and supporting lower case only would have made it impossible to spell ‘God’ correctly. Not true; the upper-case interpretation of teleprinter codes was well established by 1870, long before Teletype was even founded.
Great Worm
n.
The 1988 Internet worm perpetrated by
RTM. This is a play on Tolkien (compare
elvish, elder days). In the
fantasy history of his Middle Earth books, there were dragons powerful
enough to lay waste to entire regions; two of these (Scatha and Glaurung)
were known as the Great Worms
. This usage expresses the
connotation that the RTM crack was a sort of devastating watershed event in
hacker history; certainly it did more to make non-hackers nervous about the
Internet than anything before or since.
great-wall
vi.,n.
[from SF fandom] A mass expedition to an oriental restaurant, esp.
one where food is served family-style and shared. There is a common
heuristic about the amount of food to order, expressed as Get
N - 1 entrees
; the value of
N, which is the number of people in the
group, can be inferred from context (see N). See
oriental food, ravs,
stir-fried random.
green bytes
n.(also green words)
1. Meta-information embedded in a file, such as the length of the file or its name; as opposed to keeping such information in a separate description file or record. The term comes from an IBM user's group meeting (ca. 1962) at which these two approaches were being debated and the diagram of the file on the blackboard had the green bytes drawn in green.
2. By extension, the non-data bits in any self-describing format.
A GIF file contains, among other things, green bytes describing the
packing method for the image.
Compare
out-of-band, zigamorph,
fence (sense 1).
green card
n.
[after the IBM System/360 Reference Data
card] A summary of an assembly language, even if the color is not green and
not a card. Less frequently used now because of the decrease in the use of
assembly language. I'll go get my green card so I can check the
addressing mode for that instruction.
The original green card became a yellow card when the System/370 was
introduced, and later a yellow booklet. An anecdote from IBM refers to a
scene that took place in a programmers' terminal room at Yorktown in 1978.
A luser overheard one of the programmers ask another
Do you have a green card?
The other grunted and passed the
first a thick yellow booklet. At this point the luser turned a delicate
shade of olive and rapidly left the room, never to return.
In fall 2000 it was reported from Electronic Data Systems that the green card for 370 machines has been a blue-green booklet since 1989.
green lightning
n.[IBM]
1. Apparently random flashing streaks on the face of 3278-9 terminals while a new symbol set is being downloaded. This hardware bug was left deliberately unfixed, as some genius within IBM suggested it would let the user know that ‘something is happening’. That, it certainly does. Later microprocessor-driven IBM color graphics displays were actually programmed to produce green lightning!
2. [proposed] Any bug perverted into an alleged feature by adroit
rationalization or marketing. Motorola calls the CISC cruft in the
88000 architecture ‘compatibility logic’, but I call it green
lightning
. See also feature (sense
6).
green machine
n.A computer or peripheral device that has been designed and built to military specifications for field equipment (that is, to withstand mechanical shock, extremes of temperature and humidity, and so forth). Comes from the olive-drab ‘uniform’ paint used for military equipment.
Green's Theorem
prov.[TMRC] For any story, in any group of people there will be at least one person who has not heard the story. A refinement of the theorem states that there will be exactly one person (if there were more than one, it wouldn't be as bad to re-tell the story). [The name of this theorem is a play on a fundamental theorem in calculus. —ESR]
greenbar
n.A style of fanfolded continuous-feed paper with alternating green and white bars on it, especially used in old-style line printers. This slang almost certainly dates way back to mainframe days.
grep
/grep/ vi.
[from the qed/ed editor idiom g/re/p,
where re stands for a regular expression, to
Globally search for the Regular Expression and Print the lines containing
matches to it, via Unix
grep1]
To rapidly scan a file or set of files looking for a particular string or
pattern (when browsing through a large set of files, one may speak of
grepping around). By extension, to
look for something by pattern. Grep the bulletin board for the
system backup schedule, would you?
See also
vgrep.
[It has been alleged that the source is from the title of a paper
A General Regular Expression Parser
, but dmr confirms the
g/re/p etymology --ESR]
gribble
n.Random binary data rendered as unreadable text. Noise characters in a data stream are displayed as gribble. Dumping a binary file to the screen is an excellent source of gribble, and (if the bell/speaker is active) headaches.
grilf
n.
Girlfriend. Like newsfroup and
filk, a typo reincarnated as a new word. Seems to
have originated sometime in 1992 on Usenet. [A
friend tells me there was a Lloyd Biggle SF novel Watchers Of
The Dark, in which alien species after species goes insane and
begins to chant Grilf! Grilf!
. A human detective
eventually determines that the word means Liar!
I hope this
has nothing to do with the popularity of the Usenet
term. —ESR]
grind
vt.1. [MIT and Berkeley; now rare] To prettify hardcopy of code, especially LISP code, by reindenting lines, printing keywords and comments in distinct fonts (if available), etc. This usage was associated with the MacLISP community and is now rare; prettyprint was and is the generic term for such operations.
2. [Unix] To generate the formatted version of a document from the troff, TeX, or Scribe source.
3. [common] To run seemingly interminably, esp. (but not necessarily) if performing some tedious and inherently useless task. Similar to crunch or grovel. Grinding has a connotation of using a lot of CPU time, but it is possible to grind a disk, network, etc. See also hog.
4. To make the whole system slow. Troff really grinds a
PDP-11.
5. grind grind excl. Roughly, Isn't the machine slow
today!
grind crank
n.A mythical accessory to a terminal. A crank on the side of a monitor, which when operated makes a zizzing noise and causes the computer to run faster. Usually one does not refer to a grind crank out loud, but merely makes the appropriate gesture and noise. See grind.
Historical note: At least one real machine actually had a grind crank — the R1, a research machine built toward the end of the days of the great vacuum tube computers, in 1959. R1 (also known as ‘The Rice Institute Computer’ (TRIC) and later as ‘The Rice University Computer’ (TRUC)) had a single-step/free-run switch for use when debugging programs. Since single-stepping through a large program was rather tedious, there was also a crank with a cam and gear arrangement that repeatedly pushed the single-step button. This allowed one to ‘crank’ through a lot of code, then slow down to single-step for a bit when you got near the code of interest, poke at some registers using the console typewriter, and then keep on cranking. See http://www.cs.rice.edu/History/R1/.
gritch
/grich/[MIT]
1. n. A complaint (often caused by a glitch).
2. vi. To complain. Often
verb-doubled: Gritch gritch
.
3. A synonym for glitch (as verb or noun).
Interestingly, this word seems to have a separate history from
glitch, with which it is often confused. Back in
the early 1960s, when ‘glitch’ was strictly a hardware-tech's
term of art, the Burton House dorm at M.I.T. maintained a Gritch
Book
, a blank volume, into which the residents hand-wrote
complaints, suggestions, and witticisms. Previous years' volumes of this
tradition were maintained, dating back to antiquity. The word
gritch
was described as a portmanteau of
gripe
and bitch
. Thus, sense 3 above is at
least historically incorrect.
grok
/grok/, var.: /grohk/ vt.[common; from the novel Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein, where it is a Martian word meaning literally ‘to drink’ and metaphorically ‘to be one with’] The emphatic form is grok in fullness.
1. To understand. Connotes intimate and exhaustive knowledge. When
you claim to ‘grok’ some knowledge or technique, you are
asserting that you have not merely learned it in a detached instrumental
way but that it has become part of you, part of your identity. For
example, to say that you know
LISP is
simply to assert that you can code in it if necessary — but to say
you grok
LISP is to claim that you have deeply entered the
world-view and spirit of the language, with the implication that it has
transformed your view of programming. Contrast zen,
which is similar supernal understanding experienced as a single brief
flash. See also glark.
2. Used of programs, may connote merely sufficient understanding.
Almost all C compilers grok the
void
type these days.
gronk
/gronk/ vt.[popularized by Johnny Hart's comic strip B.C.: but the word apparently predates that]
1. To clear the state of a wedged device and restart it. More severe than ‘to frob’ (sense 2).
2. [TMRC] To cut, sever, smash, or similarly disable.
3. The sound made by many 3.5-inch diskette drives. In particular,
the microfloppies on a Commodore Amiga go grink,
gronk
.
gronk out
vi.
To cease functioning. Of people, to go home and go to sleep.
I guess I'll gronk out now; see you all tomorrow.
gronked
adj.
1. Broken. The teletype scanner was gronked, so we took the
system down.
2. Of people, the condition of feeling very tired or (less commonly)
sick. I've been chasing that bug for 17 hours now and I am
thoroughly gronked!
Compare broken, which
means about the same as gronk used of hardware, but
connotes depression or mental/emotional problems in people.
grovel
vi.
1. To work interminably and without apparent progress. Often used
transitively with ‘over’ or ‘through’. The
file scavenger has been groveling through the /usr directories for 10
minutes now.
Compare grind and
crunch. Emphatic form: grovel obscenely.
2. To examine minutely or in complete detail. The compiler
grovels over the entire source program before beginning to translate
it.
I grovelled through all the documentation, but I still
couldn't find the command I wanted.
grue
n.
[from archaic English verb for shudder, as with fear] The grue was originated
in the game Zork (Dave Lebling took the name from
Jack Vance's Dying Earth fantasies) and used in
several other Infocom games as a hint that you
should perhaps look for a lamp, torch or some type of light source.
Wandering into a dark area would cause the game to prompt you, It is
very dark. If you continue you are likely to be eaten by a grue.
If you failed to locate a light source within the next couple of moves this
would indeed be the case.
The grue, according to scholars of the Great Underground Empire, is a
sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite
diet is either adventurers or enchanters, but its insatiable appetite is
tempered by its extreme fear of light. No grues have ever been seen by the
light of day, and only a few have been observed in their underground
lairs. Of those who have seen grues, few have survived their fearsome jaws
to tell the tale. Grues have sickly glowing fur, fish-mouthed faces, sharp
claws and fangs, and an uncontrollable tendency to slaver and gurgle. They
are certainly the most evil-tempered of all creatures; to say they are
touchy is a dangerous understatement. Sour as a grue
is a
common expression, even among grues themselves.
All this folklore is widely known among hackers.
grunge
/gruhnj/ n.1. That which is grungy, or that which makes it so.
2. [Cambridge] Code which is inaccessible due to changes in other parts of the program. The preferred term in North America is dead code.
gubbish
/guhb'@sh/ n.
[a portmanteau of ‘garbage’ and ‘rubbish’;
may have originated with SF author Philip K. Dick] Garbage; crap; nonsense.
What is all this gubbish?
The opposite portmanteau
‘rubbage’ is also reported; in fact, it was British slang
during the 19th century and appears in Dickens.
Guido
/gwee´do/ or /khwee´do/
Without qualification, Guido van Rossum (author of
Python). Note that Guido answers to English
/gwee´do/ but in Dutch it's
/khwee´do/. Mythically,
Guido's most important attribute besides Python itself is Guido's time
machine, a device he is reputed to possess because of the unnerving
frequency with which user requests for new features have been met with the
response I just implemented that last night...
. See
BDFL.
guiltware
/gilt´weir/ n.1. A piece of freeware decorated with a message telling one how long and hard the author worked on it and intimating that one is a no-good freeloader if one does not immediately send the poor suffering martyr gobs of money.
2. A piece of shareware that works.
gumby
/guhm´bee/ n.[from a class of Monty Python characters, poss. with some influence from the 1960s claymation character]
1. An act of minor but conspicuous stupidity, often in gumby maneuver or pull a gumby.
2. [NRL] n. A bureaucrat, or other technical incompetent who impedes the progress of real work.
3. adj. Relating to things
typically associated with people in sense 2. (e.g. Ran would be
writing code, but Richard gave him gumby work that's due on Friday
,
or, Dammit! Travel screwed up my plane tickets. I have to go out
on gumby patrol.
)
gunch
/guhnch/ vt.[TMRC] To push, prod, or poke at a device that has almost (but not quite) produced the desired result. Implies a threat to mung.
guru
n.[Unix] An expert. Implies not only wizard skill but also a history of being a knowledge resource for others. Less often, used (with a qualifier) for other experts on other systems, as in VMS guru. See source of all good bits.
guru meditation
n.
Amiga equivalent of panic in
Unix (sometimes just called a guru or
guru event). When the system
crashes, a cryptic message of the form GURU MEDITATION
#XXXXXXXX.YYYYYYYY
may appear, indicating what the problem was. An
Amiga guru can figure things out from the numbers. Sometimes a
guru event must be followed by a
Vulcan nerve pinch.
This term is (no surprise) an in-joke from the earliest days of the Amiga. An earlier product of the Amiga corporation was a device called a ‘Joyboard’ which was basically a plastic board built onto a joystick-like device; it was sold with a skiing game cartridge for the Atari game machine. It is said that whenever the prototype OS crashed, the system programmer responsible would calm down by concentrating on a solution while sitting cross-legged on a Joyboard trying to keep the board in balance. This position resembled that of a meditating guru. Sadly, the joke was removed fairly early on (but there's a well-known patch to restore it in more recent versions).
gweep
/gweep/[WPI]
1. v. To
hack, usually at night. At WPI, from 1975 onwards,
one who gweeped could often be found at the College Computing Center
punching cards or crashing the PDP-10 or, later, the
DEC-20. A correspondent who was there at the time opines that the term was
originally onomatopoetic, describing the keyclick sound of the Datapoint
terminals long connected to the PDP-10; others allege that
‘gweep’ was the sound of the Datapoint's bell (compare
feep). The term has survived the demise of those
technologies, however, and was still alive in early 1999. I'm going
to go gweep for a while. See you in the morning.
I gweep
from 8 PM till 3 AM during the week.
2. n. One who habitually gweeps
in sense 1; a hacker. He's a hard-core
gweep, mumbles code in his sleep.
Around 1979 this was considered
derogatory and not used in self-reference; it has since been proudly
claimed in much the same way as geek.