[Usenet] ASCII rendition of the ™ appended to phrases that the author feels should be recorded for posterity, perhaps in future editions of this lexicon. Sometimes used ironically as a form of protest against the recent spate of software and algorithm patents and look and feel lawsuits. See also UN*X.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Misc TITLE: /dev/null DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:57 AM ----- BODY: /dev·nuhl/ n.
[from the Unix null device, used as a data sink] A notional
‘black hole’ in any information space being discussed, used, or
referred to. A controversial posting, for example, might end Kudos
to rasputin@kremlin.org, flames to /dev/null
. See
bit bucket.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Misc TITLE: /me DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:56 AM ----- BODY:
[IRC; common] Under most IRC, /me is the pose
command; if you are logged on as Foonly and type /me laughs
,
others watching the channel will see * Joe Foonly
laughs
. This usage has been carried over to mail and news, where
the reader is expected to perform the same expansion in his or her
head.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Misc TITLE: 0 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:55 AM ----- BODY:
Numeric zero, as opposed to the letter ‘O’ (the 15th letter of the English alphabet). In their unmodified forms they look a lot alike, and various kluges invented to make them visually distinct have compounded the confusion. If your zero is center-dotted and letter-O is not, or if letter-O looks almost rectangular but zero looks more like an American football stood on end (or the reverse), you're probably looking at a modern character display (though the dotted zero seems to have originated as an option on IBM 3270 controllers). If your zero is slashed but letter-O is not, you're probably looking at an old-style ASCII graphic set descended from the default typewheel on the venerable ASR-33 Teletype (Scandinavians, for whom Ø is a letter, curse this arrangement). (Interestingly, the slashed zero long predates computers; Florian Cajori's monumental A History of Mathematical Notations notes that it was used in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.) If letter-O has a slash across it and the zero does not, your display is tuned for a very old convention used at IBM and a few other early mainframe makers (Scandinavians curse this arrangement even more, because it means two of their letters collide). Some Burroughs/Unisys equipment displays a zero with a reversed slash. Old CDC computers rendered letter O as an unbroken oval and 0 as an oval broken at upper right and lower left. And yet another convention common on early line printers left zero unornamented but added a tail or hook to the letter-O so that it resembled an inverted Q or cursive capital letter-O (this was endorsed by a draft ANSI standard for how to draw ASCII characters, but the final standard changed the distinguisher to a tick-mark in the upper-left corner). Are we sufficiently confused yet?
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Misc TITLE: 1TBS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
The One True Brace Style
; see
indent style.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Misc TITLE: 2 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:53 AM ----- BODY: infix.
In translation software written by hackers, infix 2 often represents the syllable to with the connotation ‘translate to’: as in dvi2ps (DVI to PostScript), int2string (integer to string), and texi2roff (Texinfo to [nt]roff). Several versions of a joke have floated around the internet in which some idiot programmer fixes the Y2K bug by changing all the Y's in something to K's, as in Januark, Februark, etc.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Misc TITLE: 404 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from the HTTP error file not found on server
]
Extended to humans to convey that the subject has no idea or no clue --
sapience not found. May be used reflexively; Uh, I'm 404ing
means I'm drawing a blank
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Misc TITLE: 404 compliant DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:51 AM ----- BODY: adj.
The status of a website which has been completely removed, usually
by the administrators of the hosting site as a result of net abuse by the
website operators. The term is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the standard
301 compliant
Murkowski Bill disclaimer used by spammers.
See also: spam,
spamvertize.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Misc TITLE: @-party DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:50 AM ----- BODY: /at´par`tee/ n.
[from the @-sign in an Internet address] (alt.: ‘@-sign
party’ /at´si:n par`tee/) A
semi-closed party thrown for hackers at a science-fiction convention (esp.
the annual World Science Fiction Convention or Worldcon
);
one must have a network address to get in, or at
least be in company with someone who does. One of the most reliable
opportunities for hackers to meet face to face with people who might
otherwise be represented by mere phosphor dots on their screens. Compare
boink.
The first recorded @-party was held at the Westercon (a U.S. western regional SF convention) over the July 4th weekend in 1980. It is not clear exactly when the canonical @-party venue shifted to the Worldcon but it had certainly become established by Constellation in 1983. Sadly, the @-party tradition has been in decline since about 1996, mainly because having an @-address no longer functions as an effective lodge pin.
We are informed, however, that rec.skydiving members have maintained a tradition of formation jumps in the shape of an @.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: abbrev DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:49 AM ----- BODY: /@·breev´/, /@·brev´/ n.
Common abbreviation for ‘abbreviation’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: ABEND DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:48 AM ----- BODY: /a´bend/, /@·bend´/ n.
[ABnormal END]
1. Abnormal termination (of software); crash; lossage. Derives from an error message on the IBM 360; used jokingly by hackers but seriously mainly by code grinders. Usually capitalized, but may appear as ‘abend’. Hackers will try to persuade you that ABEND is called abend because it is what system operators do to the machine late on Friday when they want to call it a day, and hence is from the German Abend = ‘Evening’.
2. [alt.callahans] Absent By Enforced Net Deprivation — used in the subject lines of postings warning friends of an imminent loss of Internet access. (This can be because of computer downtime, loss of provider, moving or illness.) Variants of this also appear: ABVND = ‘Absent By Voluntary Net Deprivation’ and ABSEND = ‘Absent By Self-Enforced Net Deprivation’ have been sighted.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: accumulator DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:47 AM ----- BODY: n. obs.
1. Archaic term for a register. On-line use of it as a synonym for register is a fairly reliable indication that the user has been around for quite a while and/or that the architecture under discussion is quite old. The term in full is almost never used of microprocessor registers, for example, though symbolic names for arithmetic registers beginning in ‘A’ derive from historical use of the term accumulator (and not, actually, from ‘arithmetic’). Confusingly, though, an ‘A’ register name prefix may also stand for address, as for example on the Motorola 680x0 family.
2. A register being used for arithmetic or logic (as opposed to
addressing or a loop index), especially one being used to accumulate a sum
or count of many items. This use is in context of a particular routine or
stretch of code. The FOOBAZ routine uses A3 as an
accumulator.
3. One's in-basket (esp. among old-timers who might use sense 1).
You want this reviewed? Sure, just put it in the
accumulator.
(See stack.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: ACK DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:46 AM ----- BODY: /ak/ interj.
1. [common; from the ASCII mnemonic for 0000110] Acknowledge. Used to register one's presence (compare mainstream Yo!). An appropriate response to ping or ENQ.
2. [from the comic strip Bloom County] An
exclamation of surprised disgust, esp. in Ack pffft!
Semi-humorous. Generally this sense is not spelled in caps (ACK) and is
distinguished by a following exclamation point.
3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell them you understand
their point (see NAK). Thus, for example, you might
cut off an overly long explanation with Ack. Ack. Ack. I get it
now
.
4. An affirmative. Think we ought to ditch that damn NT
server for a Linux box?
ACK!
There is also a usage ACK?
(from sense 1) meaning
Are you there?
, often used in email when earlier mail has
produced no reply, or during a lull in talk mode to
see if the person has gone away (the standard humorous response is of
course NAK, i.e., I'm not
here
).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: Acme DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:45 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from Greek akme highest point of
perfection or achievement] The canonical supplier of bizarre, elaborate,
and non-functional gadgetry — where Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson
(two cartoonists who specialized in elaborate contraptions) shop. The name
has been humorously expanded as A (or American) Company Making Everything.
(In fact, Acme was a real brand sold from Sears Roebuck catalogs in the
early 1900s.) Describing some X as an Acme X
either means
This is insanely great
, or, more
likely, This looks insanely great on paper,
but in practice it's really easy to shoot yourself in the foot with
it.
Compare pistol.
This term, specially cherished by American hackers and explained here
for the benefit of our overseas brethren, comes from the Warner Brothers'
series of Road-runner
cartoons. In these cartoons, the
famished Wile E. Coyote was forever attempting to catch up with, trap, and
eat the Road-runner. His attempts usually involved one or more
high-technology Rube Goldberg devices — rocket jetpacks, catapults,
magnetic traps, high-powered slingshots, etc. These were usually delivered
in large wooden crates labeled prominently with the Acme name — which,
probably not by coincidence, was the trade name of the animation rotation
board used by cartoonists since forever. Acme devices invariably
malfunctioned in improbable and violent ways.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: ad-hockery DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:44 AM ----- BODY: /ad·hok'@r·ee/ n.
[Purdue]
1. Gratuitous assumptions made inside certain programs, esp. expert systems, which lead to the appearance of semi-intelligent behavior but are in fact entirely arbitrary. For example, fuzzy-matching of input tokens that might be typing errors against a symbol table can make it look as though a program knows how to spell.
2. Special-case code to cope with some awkward input that would otherwise cause a program to choke, presuming normal inputs are dealt with in some cleaner and more regular way.
Also called ad-hackery, ad-hocity (/ad-hos'@-tee/), ad-crockery. See also ELIZA effect.
This is ad-hockery in action.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 74-08-18)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: address harvester DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:43 AM ----- BODY: n.
A robot that searches web pages and/or filters netnews traffic looking for valid email addresses. Some address harvesters are benign, used only for compiling address directories. Most, unfortunately, are run by miscreants compiling address lists to spam. Address harvesters can be foiled by a teergrube.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: adger DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:42 AM ----- BODY: /aj´r/ vt.
[UCLA mutant of nadger, poss. also from the
middle name of an infamous tenured graduate student]
To make a bonehead move with consequences that could have been foreseen
with even slight mental effort. E.g., He started removing files and
promptly adgered the whole project
. Compare
dumbass attack.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: admin DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:41 AM ----- BODY: /ad·min´/ n.
Short for ‘administrator’; very commonly used in speech or on-line to refer to the systems person in charge on a computer. Common constructions on this include sysadmin and site admin (emphasizing the administrator's role as a site contact for email and news) or newsadmin (focusing specifically on news). Compare postmaster, sysop, system mangler.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: ADVENT DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:40 AM ----- BODY: /ad´vent/ n.
The prototypical computer adventure game, first designed by Will Crowther on the PDP-10 in the mid-1970s as an attempt at computer-refereed fantasy gaming, and expanded into a puzzle-oriented game by Don Woods at Stanford in 1976. (Woods had been one of the authors of INTERCAL.) Now better known as Adventure or Colossal Cave Adventure, but the TOPS-10 operating system permitted only six-letter filenames in uppercase. See also vadding, Zork, and Infocom.
Orange River Chamber You are in a splendid chamber thirty feet high. The walls are frozen rivers of orange stone. An awkward canyon and a good passage exit from east and west sidesof the chamber. A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing. >drop rod Dropped. >take bird You catch the bird in the wicker cage. >take rod Taken. >w At Top of Small Pit At your feet is a small pit breathing traces of white mist. A west passage ends here except for a small crack leading on. Rough stone steps lead down the pit. >down In Hall of Mists You are at one end of a vast hall stretching forward out of sight to the west. There are openings to either side. Nearby, a wide stone staircase leads downward. The hall is filled with wisps of white mist swaying to and fro almost as if alive. A cold wind blows up the staircase. There is a passage at the top of a dome behind you. Rough stone steps lead up the dome.
This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style since expected in
text adventure games, and popularized several tag lines that have become
fixtures of hacker-speak: A huge green fierce snake bars the
way!
I see no X here
(for some noun X). You
are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
You are
in a little maze of twisty passages, all different.
The
‘magic words’ xyzzy and
plugh also derive from this game.
Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the Mammoth & Flint Ridge cave system; it actually has a Colossal Cave and a Bedquilt as in the game, and the Y2 that also turns up is cavers' jargon for a map reference to a secondary entrance.
ADVENT sources are available for FTP at ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/doc/misc/if-archive/games/source/advent.tar.Z. You can also play it as a Java applet. There is a good page of resources at the Colossal Cave Adventure Page.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: adware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
Software which is free to download and use but includes pop-up banner ads somewhere. See also -ware.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: AFAIK DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:38 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet; common] Abbrev. for As Far As I Know
. There
is a variant AFAICT As Far As I Can Tell
; where AFAIK
suggests that the writer knows his knowledge is limited, AFAICT suggests
that he feels his knowledge is as complete as anybody else's buit that the
best available knowledge does not support firm conclusions.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: AFJ DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:37 AM ----- BODY: n.
Written-only abbreviation for April Fool's Joke
.
Elaborate April Fool's hoaxes are a long-established tradition on Usenet
and Internet; see kremvax for an example. In fact,
April Fool's Day is the only seasonal holiday
consistently marked by customary observances on Internet and other hacker
networks.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: AFK DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:36 AM ----- BODY:
[MUD] Abbrev. for Away From Keyboard
. Used to notify
others that you will be momentarily unavailable online. eg. Let's
not go kill that frost giant yet, I need to go AFK to make a phone
call
. Often MUDs will have a command to politely inform others of
your absence when they try to talk with you. The term is not restricted to
MUDs, however, and has become common in many chat situations, from IRC to
Unix talk.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: AI DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:35 AM ----- BODY: /A·I/ n.
Abbreviation for ‘Artificial Intelligence’, so common that the full form is almost never written or spoken among hackers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: AI-complete DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:34 AM ----- BODY: /A·I k@m·pleet'/ adj.
[MIT, Stanford: by analogy with NP-complete (see NP-)] Used to describe problems or subproblems in AI, to indicate that the solution presupposes a solution to the ‘strong AI problem’ (that is, the synthesis of a human-level intelligence). A problem that is AI-complete is, in other words, just too hard.
Examples of AI-complete problems are ‘The Vision Problem’ (building a system that can see as well as a human) and ‘The Natural Language Problem’ (building a system that can understand and speak a natural language as well as a human). These may appear to be modular, but all attempts so far (2002) to solve them have foundered on the amount of context information and ‘intelligence’ they seem to require. See also gedanken.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: airplane rule DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:33 AM ----- BODY: n.
Complexity increases the possibility of failure; a
twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine
airplane.
By analogy, in both software and electronics, the rule
that simplicity increases robustness. It is correspondingly argued that
the right way to build reliable systems is to put all your eggs in one
basket, after making sure that you've built a really
good basket. See also
KISS Principle,
elegant.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: Alderson loop DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:32 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Intel] A special version of an infinite loop
where there is an exit condition available, but inaccessible in the current
implementation of the code. Typically this is created while debugging user
interface code. An example would be when there is a menu stating,
Select 1-3 or 9 to quit
and 9 is not allowed by the function
that takes the selection from the user.
This term received its name from a programmer who had coded a modal message box in MSAccess with no Ok or Cancel buttons, thereby disabling the entire program whenever the box came up. The message box had the proper code for dismissal and even was set up so that when the non-existent Ok button was pressed the proper code would be called.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: aliasing bug DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:31 AM ----- BODY: n.
A class of subtle programming errors that can arise in code that does dynamic allocation, esp. via malloc3 or equivalent. If several pointers address (are aliases for) a given hunk of storage, it may happen that the storage is freed or reallocated (and thus moved) through one alias and then referenced through another, which may lead to subtle (and possibly intermittent) lossage depending on the state and the allocation history of the malloc arena. Avoidable by use of allocation strategies that never alias allocated core, or by use of higher-level languages, such as LISP, which employ a garbage collector (see GC). Also called a stale pointer bug. See also precedence lossage, smash the stack, fandango on core, memory leak, memory smash, overrun screw, spam.
Historical note: Though this term is nowadays associated with C programming, it was already in use in a very similar sense in the Algol-60 and FORTRAN communities in the 1960s.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: Alice and Bob DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:30 AM ----- BODY: n.
The archetypal individuals used as examples in discussions of
cryptographic protocols. Originally, theorists would say something like:
A communicates with someone who claims to be B, So to be sure, A
tests that B knows a secret number K. So A sends to B a random number X. B
then forms Y by encrypting X under key K and sends Y back to A
Because this sort of thing is quite hard to follow, theorists stopped using
the unadorned letters A and B to represent the main players and started
calling them Alice and Bob. So now we say Alice communicates with
someone claiming to be Bob, and to be sure, Alice tests that Bob knows a
secret number K. Alice sends to Bob a random number X. Bob then forms Y by
encrypting X under key K and sends Y back to Alice
. A whole
mythology rapidly grew up around the metasyntactic names; see http://www.conceptlabs.co.uk/alicebob.html.
In Bruce Schneier's definitive introductory text Applied Cryptography (2nd ed., 1996, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-11709-9) he introduced a table of dramatis personae headed by Alice and Bob. Others include Carol (a participant in three- and four-party protocols), Dave (a participant in four-party protocols), Eve (an eavesdropper), Mallory (a malicious active attacker), Trent (a trusted arbitrator), Walter (a warden), Peggy (a prover) and Victor (a verifier). These names for roles are either already standard or, given the wide popularity of the book, may be expected to quickly become so.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: All hardware sucks, all software sucks. DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:29 AM ----- BODY: prov.
[from scary devil monastery] A general recognition of the fallibility of any computer system, ritually intoned as an attempt to quell incipient holy wars. It is a common response to any sort of bigot. When discussing Wintel systems, however, it is often snidely appended with, ‘but some suck more than others.’
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: all your base are belong to us DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:28 AM ----- BODY:
A declaration of victory or superiority. The phrase stems from a
1991 adaptation of Toaplan's Zero Wing
shoot-'em-up arcade
game for the Sega Genesis game console. A brief introduction was added to
the opening screen, and it has what many consider to be the worst
Japanese-to-English translation in video game history. The introduction
shows the bridge of a starship in chaos as a Borg-like figure named CATS
materializes and says, How are you gentlemen!! All your base are
belong to us.
[sic] In 2001, this amusing mistranslation spread
virally through the Internet, bringing with it a slew of JPEGs and a movie
of hacked photographs, each showing a street sign, store front, package
label, etc. hacked to read All your base are belong to us
or
one of the other many supremely dopey lines from the game (such as
Somebody set us up the bomb!!!
or What
happen?
). When these phrases are used properly, the overall effect
is both screamingly funny and somewhat chilling, reminiscent of the B movie
They Live
.
The original has been generalized to All your X are belong to
us
, where X is filled in to connote a sinister takeover of some
sort. Thus, When Joe signed up for his new job at Yoyodyne, he had
to sign a draconian NDA. It basically said: All your code are belong to
us.
Has many of the connotations of Resistance is futile;
you will be assimilated
(see
Borg). Considered silly, and most likely to be used
by the type of person that finds Jeff K.
hilarious.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: alpha geek DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:27 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from animal ethologists' alpha
male] The most technically accomplished or skillful person in
some implied context. Ask Larry, he's the alpha geek
here.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: alpha particles DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:26 AM ----- BODY: n.
See bit rot.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: alt DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:25 AM ----- BODY: /awlt/
1. n. The alt shift key on an IBM PC or clone keyboard; see bucky bits, sense 2 (though typical PC usage does not simply set the 0200 bit).
2. n. The option key on a Macintosh; use of this term usually reveals that the speaker hacked PCs before coming to the Mac (see also feature key, which is sometimes incorrectly called ‘alt’).
3. The alt hierarchy on
Usenet, the tree of newsgroups created by users without a formal vote and
approval procedure. There is a myth, not entirely implausible, that
alt is acronymic for
anarchists, lunatics, and terrorists
; but in fact it is
simply short for alternative
.
4. n.,obs. Rare alternate name for the ASCII ESC character (ASCII 0011011). This use, derives, with the alt key itself, from archaic PDP-10 operating systems, especially ITS.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: alt bit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:24 AM ----- BODY: /awlt bit/ adj.
See meta bit.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: Aluminum Book DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:23 AM ----- BODY: n.
[MIT] Common LISP: The Language, by Guy L.
Steele Jr. (Digital Press, first edition 1984, second edition 1990). Note
that due to a technical screwup some printings of the second edition are
actually of a color the author describes succinctly as yucky
green
. See also book titles.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: ambimouseterous DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:22 AM ----- BODY: /am·b@·mows´ter·us/ or /am·b@·mows´trus/ adj.
[modeled on ambidextrous] Able to use a mouse with either hand.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: Amiga DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:21 AM ----- BODY: n
A series of personal computer models originally sold by Commodore, based on 680x0 processors, custom support chips and an operating system that combined some of the best features of Macintosh and Unix with compatibility with neither.
The Amiga was released just as the personal computing world standardized on IBM-PC clones. This prevented it from gaining serious market share, despite the fact that the first Amigas had a substantial technological lead on the IBM XTs of the time. Instead, it acquired a small but zealous population of enthusiastic hackers who dreamt of one day unseating the clones (see Amiga Persecution Complex). The traits of this culture are both spoofed and illuminated in The BLAZE Humor Viewer. The strength of the Amiga platform seeded a small industry of companies building software and hardware for the platform, especially in graphics and video applications (see video toaster).
Due to spectacular mismanagement, Commodore did hardly any R&D, allowing the competition to close Amiga's technological lead. After Commodore went bankrupt in 1994 the technology passed through several hands, none of whom did much with it. However, the Amiga is still being produced in Europe under license and has a substantial number of fans, which will probably extend the platform's life considerably.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: Amiga Persecution Complex DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:20 AM ----- BODY: n.
The disorder suffered by a particularly egregious variety of bigot, those who believe that the marginality of their preferred machine is the result of some kind of industry-wide conspiracy (for without a conspiracy of some kind, the eminent superiority of their beloved shining jewel of a platform would obviously win over all, market pressures be damned!) Those afflicted are prone to engaging in flame wars and calling for boycotts and mailbombings. Amiga Persecution Complex is by no means limited to Amiga users; NeXT, NeWS, OS/2, Macintosh, LISP, and GNU users are also common victims. Linux users used to display symptoms very frequently before Linux started winning; some still do. See also newbie, troll, holy wars, weenie, Get a life!.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: amp off DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:19 AM ----- BODY: vt.
[Purdue] To run in background. From the Unix shell ‘&’ operator.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: amper DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:18 AM ----- BODY: n.
Common abbreviation for the name of the ampersand (‘&’, ASCII 0100110) character. See ASCII for other synonyms.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: and there was much rejoicing DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:17 AM ----- BODY:
[from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail.]
Acknowledgement of a notable accomplishment. Something long-awaited, widely desired, possibly unexpected but secretly wished-for, with a suggestion that something about the problem (and perhaps the steps necessary to make it go away) was deeply disturbing to hacker sensibilities.
In person, the phrase is almost invariably pronounced with the same
portentious intonation as the movie. The customary in-person (approving)
response is a weak and halfhearted Yaaaay...
,
with one index finger raised like a flag and moved in a small circle.
The reason for this, like most of the Monty Python
oeuvre, cannot easily be explained
outside its original context.
Example: "changelog entry #436: with the foo driver brain damage taken care of, finally obsoleted BROKEN_EVIL_KLUDGE. Removed from source tree. (And there was much rejoicing)."
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: Angband DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:16 AM ----- BODY: n. /ang´band/
Like nethack, moria,
and rogue, one of the large freely distributed
Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide range of
machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's Pits of Angband
(compare elder days, elvish).
Has been described as Moria on steroids
; but, unlike Moria,
many aspects of the game are customizable. This leads many hackers and
would-be hackers into fooling with these instead of doing productive work.
There are many Angband variants, of which the most notorious is probably
the rather whimsical Zangband. In this game, when a key that does not
correspond to a command is pressed, the game will display Type ? for
help
50% of the time. The other 50% of the time, random error
messages including An error has occurred because an error of type 42
has occurred
and Windows 95 uninstalled successfully
will be displayed. Zangband also allows the player to kill Santa Claus
(who has some really good stuff, but also has a lot of friends),
Bull Gates
, and Barney the Dinosaur (but be watchful; Barney
has a nasty case of halitosis). There is an official angband home page at
http://thangorodrim.angband.org/
and a zangband one at http://www.zangband.org/. See also
Random Number God.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: angle brackets DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
Either of the characters < (ASCII 0111100) and > (ASCII 0111110) (ASCII less-than or greater-than signs). Typographers in the Real World use angle brackets which are either taller and slimmer (the ISO lang 〈 and rang 〉 characters), or significantly smaller (single or double guillemets) than the less-than and greater-than signs. See broket, ASCII.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: angry fruit salad DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:14 AM ----- BODY: n.
A bad visual-interface design that uses too many colors. (This term derives, of course, from the bizarre day-glo colors found in canned fruit salad.) Too often one sees similar effects from interface designers using color window systems such as X; there is a tendency to create displays that are flashy and attention-getting but uncomfortable for long-term use.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: annoybot DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:13 AM ----- BODY: /@·noy·bot/ n.
[IRC] See bot.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: annoyware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:12 AM ----- BODY: n.
A type of shareware that frequently disrupts normal program operation to display requests for payment to the author in return for the ability to disable the request messages. (Also called nagware) The requests generally require user action to acknowledge the message before normal operation is resumed and are often tied to the most frequently used features of the software. See also careware, charityware, crippleware, freeware, FRS, guiltware, postcardware, and -ware; compare payware.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: ANSI standard DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:11 AM ----- BODY: /an´see stan´d@rd/
The ANSI standard usage of ANSI standard refers to any practice which is typical or broadly done. It's most appropriately applied to things that everyone does that are not quite regulation. For example: ANSI standard shaking of a laser printer cartridge to get extra life from it, or the ANSI standard word tripling in names of usenet alt groups.
This usage derives from the American National Standards Institute. ANSI, along with the International Organization for Standards (ISO), standardized the C programming language (see K&R, Classic C), and promulgates many other important software standards.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: ANSI standard pizza DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:10 AM ----- BODY: /an´see stan´d@rd peet´z@/
[CMU] Pepperoni and mushroom pizza. Coined allegedly because most pizzas ordered by CMU hackers during some period leading up to mid-1990 were of that flavor. See also rotary debugger; compare ISO standard cup of tea.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: anti-idiotarianism DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:09 AM ----- BODY: n.
[very common] Opposition to idiots of all political stripes. First coined in the blog named Little Green Footballs as part of a post expressing disgust with inane responses to post-9/11 Islamic terrorism. Anti-idiotarian wrath has focused on Islamic terrorists and their sympathizers in the Western political left, but also routinely excoriated right-wing politicians backing repressive ’anti-terror‘ legislation and Christian religious figures who (in the blogosphere's view of the matter) have descended nearly to the level of jihad themselves.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: AOL! DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:08 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet] Common synonym for Me, too!
alluding to the
legendary propensity of America Online users to utter contentless
Me, too!
postings. The number of exclamation points
following varies from zero to five or so. The pseudo-HTML
<AOL>Me, too!</AOL>
is also frequently seen. See also September that never ended.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: app DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:07 AM ----- BODY: /ap/ n.
Short for ‘application program’, as opposed to a systems program. Apps are what systems vendors are forever chasing developers to create for their environments so they can sell more boxes. Hackers tend not to think of the things they themselves run as apps; thus, in hacker parlance the term excludes compilers, program editors, games, and messaging systems, though a user would consider all those to be apps. (Broadly, an app is often a self-contained environment for performing some well-defined task such as ‘word processing’; hackers tend to prefer more general-purpose tools.) See killer app; oppose tool, operating system.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: Archimedes DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:06 AM ----- BODY:
The world's first RISC microcomputer, available only in the British
Commonwealth and europe. Built in 1987 in Great Britain by Acorn Computers,
it was legendary for its use of the ARM-2 microprocessor as a CPU. Many a
novice hacker in the Commonwealth first learnt his or her skills on the
Archimedes, since it was specifically designed for use in schools and
educational institutions. Owners of Archimedes machines are often still
treated with awe and reverence. Familiarly, archi
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: arena DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:05 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common; Unix] The area of memory attached to a process by
brk2
and
sbrk2
and used by
malloc3
as dynamic storage. So named from a malloc: corrupt
arena
message emitted when some early versions detected an
impossible value in the free block list. See
overrun screw, aliasing bug,
memory leak,
memory smash,
smash the stack.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: arg DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:04 AM ----- BODY: /arg/ n.
Abbreviation for ‘argument’ (to a function), used so
often as to have become a new word (like ‘piano’ from
‘pianoforte’). The sine function takes 1 arg, but the
arc-tangent function can take either 1 or 2 args.
Compare
param, parm,
var.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: ARMM DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:03 AM ----- BODY: n.
[acronym, ‘Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation’] A Usenet cancelbot created by Dick Depew of Munroe Falls, Ohio. ARMM was intended to automatically cancel posts from anonymous-posting sites. Unfortunately, the robot's recognizer for anonymous postings triggered on its own automatically-generated control messages! Transformed by this stroke of programming ineptitude into a monster of Frankensteinian proportions, it broke loose on the night of March 30, 1993 and proceeded to spam news.admin.policy with a recursive explosion of over 200 messages.
ARMM's bug produced a recursive cascade of messages each of which mechanically added text to the ID and Subject and some other headers of its parent. This produced a flood of messages in which each header took up several screens and each message ID and subject line got longer and longer and longer.
Reactions varied from amusement to outrage. The pathological
messages crashed at least one mail system, and upset people paying line
charges for their Usenet feeds. One poster described the ARMM debacle as
instant Usenet history
(also establishing the term
despew), and it has since been widely cited as a
cautionary example of the havoc the combination of good intentions and
incompetence can wreak on a network. The Usenet thread on the subject is
archived here. Compare Great Worm;
sorcerer's apprentice mode. See also
software laser,
network meltdown.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: armor-plated DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:02 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. for bulletproof.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: asbestos DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:01 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[common] Used as a modifier to anything intended to protect one from flames; also in other highly flame-suggestive usages. See, for example, asbestos longjohns and asbestos cork award.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: asbestos cork award DATE: 05/15/2003 10:59:00 AM ----- BODY: n.
Once, long ago at MIT, there was a flamer so consistently obnoxious that another hacker designed, had made, and distributed posters announcing that said flamer had been nominated for the asbestos cork award. (Any reader in doubt as to the intended application of the cork should consult the etymology under flame.) Since then, it is agreed that only a select few have risen to the heights of bombast required to earn this dubious dignity — but there is no agreement on which few.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: asbestos longjohns DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:59 AM ----- BODY: n.
Notional garments donned by Usenet posters just before emitting a remark they expect will elicit flamage. This is the most common of the asbestos coinages. Also asbestos underwear, asbestos overcoat, etc.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: ASCII DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:58 AM ----- BODY: /as´kee/ n.
[originally an acronym (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) but now merely conventional] The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers. The standard version uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier codes (including early drafts of ASCII prior to June 1961) used fewer. This change allowed the inclusion of lowercase letters — a major win — but it did not provide for accented letters or any other letterforms not used in English (such as the German sharp-S ß. or the ae-ligature æ which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian). It could be worse, though. It could be much worse. See EBCDIC to understand how. A history of ASCII and its ancestors is at http://www.wps.com/texts/codes/index.html.
Computers are much pickier and less flexible about spelling than humans; thus, hackers need to be very precise when talking about characters, and have developed a considerable amount of verbal shorthand for them. Every character has one or more names — some formal, some concise, some silly. Common jargon names for ASCII characters are collected here. See also individual entries for bang, excl, open, ques, semi, shriek, splat, twiddle, and Yu-Shiang Whole Fish.
This list derives from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII pronunciation
guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII order; character pairs are
sorted in by first member. For each character, common names are given in
rough order of popularity, followed by names that are reported but rarely
seen; official ANSI/CCITT names are surrounded by brokets: <>.
Square brackets mark the particularly silly names introduced by
INTERCAL. The abbreviations l/r
and
o/c
stand for left/right and open/close
respectively. Ordinary parentheticals provide some usage
information.
! | Common: bang ; pling; excl; not; shriek; ball-bat; <exclamation mark>. Rare: factorial; exclam; smash; cuss; boing; yell; wow; hey; wham; eureka; [spark-spot]; soldier, control. |
" | Common: double quote; quote. Rare: literal mark; double-glitch; snakebite; <quotation marks>; <dieresis>; dirk; [rabbit-ears]; double prime. |
# | Common: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp; crunch ; hex; [mesh]. Rare: grid; crosshatch; octothorpe; flash; <square>, pig-pen; tictactoe; scratchmark; thud; thump; splat . |
$ | Common: dollar; <dollar sign>. Rare: currency symbol; buck; cash; string (from BASIC); escape (when used as the echo of ASCII ESC); ding; cache; [big money]. |
% | Common: percent; <percent sign>; mod; grapes. Rare: [double-oh-seven]. |
& | Common: <ampersand>; amp; amper; and, and sign. Rare: address (from C); reference (from C++); andpersand; bitand; background (from sh 1 ); pretzel. [INTERCAL called this ampersand ; what could be sillier?] |
' | Common: single quote; quote; <apostrophe>. Rare: prime; glitch; tick; irk; pop; [spark]; <closing single quotation mark>; <acute accent>. |
( ) | Common: l/r paren; l/r parenthesis; left/right; open/close; paren/thesis; o/c paren; o/c parenthesis; l/r parenthesis; l/r banana. Rare: so/already; lparen/rparen; <opening/closing parenthesis>; o/c round bracket, l/r round bracket, [wax/wane]; parenthisey/unparenthisey; l/r ear. |
* | Common: star; [ splat ]; <asterisk>. Rare: wildcard; gear; dingle; mult; spider; aster; times; twinkle; glob (see glob ); Nathan Hale . |
+ | Common: <plus>; add. Rare: cross; [intersection]. |
, | Common: <comma>. Rare: <cedilla>; [tail]. |
- | Common: dash; <hyphen>; <minus>. Rare: [worm]; option; dak; bithorpe. |
. | Common: dot; point; <period>; <decimal point>. Rare: radix point; full stop; [spot]. |
/ | Common: slash; stroke; <slant>; forward slash. Rare: diagonal; solidus; over; slak; virgule; [slat]. |
: | Common: <colon>. Rare: dots; [two-spot]. |
; | Common: <semicolon>; semi. Rare: weenie; [hybrid], pit-thwong. |
< > | Common: <less/greater than>; bra/ket; l/r angle; l/r angle bracket; l/r broket. Rare: from/{into, towards}; read from/write to; suck/blow; comes-from/gozinta; in/out; crunch/zap (all from UNIX); tic/tac; [angle/right angle]. |
= | Common: <equals>; gets; takes. Rare: quadrathorpe; [half-mesh]. |
? | Common: query; <question mark>; ques . Rare: quiz; whatmark; [what]; wildchar; huh; hook; buttonhook; hunchback. |
@ | Common: at sign; at; strudel. Rare: each; vortex; whorl; [whirlpool]; cyclone; snail; ape; cat; rose; cabbage; <commercial at>. |
V | Rare: [book]. |
[ ] | Common: l/r square bracket; l/r bracket; <opening/closing bracket>; bracket/unbracket. Rare: square/unsquare; [U turn/U turn back]. |
\ | Common: backslash, hack, whack; escape (from C/UNIX); reverse slash; slosh; backslant; backwhack. Rare: bash; <reverse slant>; reversed virgule; [backslat]. |
^ | Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret; <circumflex>. Rare: xor sign, chevron; [shark (or shark-fin)]; to the (‘to the power of’); fang; pointer (in Pascal). |
_ | Common: <underline>; underscore; underbar; under. Rare: score; backarrow; skid; [flatworm]. |
` | Common: backquote; left quote; left single quote; open quote; <grave accent>; grave. Rare: backprime; [backspark]; unapostrophe; birk; blugle; back tick; back glitch; push; <opening single quotation mark>; quasiquote. |
{ } | Common: o/c brace; l/r brace; l/r squiggly; l/r squiggly bracket/brace; l/r curly bracket/brace; <opening/closing brace>. Rare: brace/unbrace; curly/uncurly; leftit/rytit; l/r squirrelly; [embrace/bracelet]. A balanced pair of these may be called curlies . |
| | Common: bar; or; or-bar; v-bar; pipe; vertical bar. Rare: <vertical line>; gozinta; thru; pipesinta (last three from UNIX); [spike]. |
~ | Common: <tilde>; squiggle; twiddle ; not. Rare: approx; wiggle; swung dash; enyay; [sqiggle (sic)]. |
The pronunciation of # as ‘pound’ is
common in the U.S. but a bad idea;
Commonwealth Hackish
has its own, rather more apposite use of ‘pound
sign’ (confusingly, on British keyboards the £ happens to
replace #; thus Britishers sometimes call
# on a U.S.-ASCII keyboard ‘pound’,
compounding the American error). The U.S. usage derives from an
old-fashioned commercial practice of using a # suffix to
tag pound weights on bills of lading. The character is usually pronounced
‘hash’ outside the U.S. There are more culture wars over the
correct pronunciation of this character than any other, which has led to
the ha ha only serious suggestion that it be
pronounced shibboleth
(see Judges 12:6 in an Old Testament or
Tanakh).
The ‘uparrow’ name for circumflex and ‘leftarrow’ name for underline are historical relics from archaic ASCII (the 1963 version), which had these graphics in those character positions rather than the modern punctuation characters.
The ‘swung dash’ or ‘approximation’ sign (∼) is not quite the same as tilde ~ in typeset material, but the ASCII tilde serves for both (compare angle brackets).
Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The
#, $, >, and
& characters, for example, are all pronounced
hex
in different communities because various assemblers use
them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in particular,
# in many assembler-programming cultures,
$ in the 6502 world, > at Texas
Instruments, and & on the BBC Micro, Sinclair, and
some Z80 machines). See also splat.
The inability of ASCII text to correctly represent any of the world's other major languages makes the designers' choice of 7 bits look more and more like a serious misfeature as the use of international networks continues to increase (see software rot). Hardware and software from the U.S. still tends to embody the assumption that ASCII is the universal character set and that characters have 7 bits; this is a major irritant to people who want to use a character set suited to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem by proliferating ‘national’ character sets produce an evolutionary pressure to use a smaller subset common to all those in use.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: ASCII art DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:57 AM ----- BODY: n.
The fine art of drawing diagrams using the ASCII character set (mainly |, -, /, \, and +). Also known as character graphics or ASCII graphics; see also boxology. Here is a serious example: [Examples deleted because MT choked on them. To be fixed - PM]
The next step beyond static tableaux in ASCII art is ASCII animation. There are not many large examples of this; perhaps the best known is the ASCII animation of the original Star Wars movie at http://www.asciimation.co.nz/.
There is a newsgroup, alt.ascii-art, devoted to this genre; however, see also warlording.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: ASCIIbetical order DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:56 AM ----- BODY: /as´kee·be'·t@·kl or´dr/ adj.,n.
Used to indicate that data is sorted in ASCII collated order rather
than alphabetical order. This lexicon is sorted in something close to
ASCIIbetical order, but with case ignored and entries beginning with
non-alphabetic characters moved to the beginning. At my video
store, they used their computer to sort the videos into ASCIIbetical order,
so I couldn't find Crocodile Dundee until I thought
to look before 2001 and 48
Hours!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: astroturfing DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:55 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The use of paid shills to create the impression of a popular movement, through means like letters to newspapers from soi-disant ‘concerned citizens’, paid opinion pieces, and the formation of grass-roots lobbying groups that are actually funded by a PR group (AstroTurf is fake grass; hence the term).
2. What an individual posting to a public forum under an assumed name is said to be doing.
This term became common among hackers after it came to light in early
1998 that Microsoft had attempted to use such tactics to forestall the
U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust action against the company. The
maneuver backfired horribly, angering a number of state attorneys-general
enough to induce them to go public with plans to join the Federal suit. It
also set anybody defending Microsoft on the net for the accusation
You're just astroturfing!
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: atomic DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:54 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[from Gk. atomos, indivisible]
1. Indivisible; cannot be split up. For example, an instruction may
be said to do several things ‘atomically’, i.e., all the things
are done immediately, and there is no chance of the instruction being
half-completed or of another being interspersed. Used esp. to convey that
an operation cannot be screwed up by interrupts. This routine locks
the file and increments the file's semaphore atomically.
2. [primarily techspeak] Guaranteed to complete successfully or not
at all, usu. refers to database transactions. If an error prevents a
partially-performed transaction from proceeding to completion, it must be
backed out
, as the database must not be left in an
inconsistent state.
Computer usage, in either of the above senses, has none of the connotations that ‘atomic’ has in mainstream English (i.e. of particles of matter, nuclear explosions etc.).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: attoparsec DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:53 AM ----- BODY: n.
About an inch. atto- is the standard SI prefix for multiplication by 10-18. A parsec (parallax-second) is 3.26 light-years; an attoparsec is thus 3.26 × 10-18 light years, or about 3.1 cm (thus, 1 attoparsec/microfortnight equals about 1 inch/sec). This unit is reported to be in use (though probably not very seriously) among hackers in the U.K. See micro-.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: Aunt Tillie DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
[linux-kernel mailing list] The archetypal non-technical user, one's
elderly and scatterbrained maiden aunt. Invoked in discussions of
usability for people who are not hackers and geeks; one sees references to
the Aunt Tillie test
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: AUP DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:51 AM ----- BODY: /A·U·P/
Abbreviation, Acceptable Use Policy
. The policy of a
given ISP which sets out what the ISP considers to be (un)acceptable uses
of its Internet resources.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: autobogotiphobia DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:50 AM ----- BODY: /aw´toh·boh·got`@·foh´bee·@/
n. See bogotify.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: autoconfiscate DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:49 AM ----- BODY:
To set up or modify a source-code distribution so that it configures and builds using the GNU project's autoconf/automake/libtools suite. Among open-source hackers, a mere running binary of a program is not considered a full release; what's interesting is a source tree that can be built into binaries using standard tools. Since the mid-1990s, autoconf and friends been the standard way to adapt a distribution for portability so that it can be built on multiple operating systems without change.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: automagically DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:48 AM ----- BODY: /aw·toh·maj´i·klee/ adv.
Automatically, but in a way that, for some reason (typically because
it is too complicated, or too ugly, or perhaps even too trivial), the
speaker doesn't feel like explaining to you. See
magic. The C-INTERCAL compiler generates C,
then automagically invokes
cc1
to produce an executable.
This term is quite old, going back at least to the mid-70s in jargon and probably much earlier. The word ‘automagic’ occurred in advertising (for a shirt-ironing gadget) as far back as the late 1940s.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: avatar DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:47 AM ----- BODY: n. Syn.
[in Hindu mythology, the incarnation of a god]
1. Among people working on virtual reality and cyberspace interfaces, an avatar is an icon or representation of a user in a shared virtual reality. The term is sometimes used on MUDs.
2. [CMU, Tektronix] root, superuser. There are quite a few Unix machines on which the name of the superuser account is ‘avatar’ rather than ‘root’. This quirk was originated by a CMU hacker who found the terms root and superuser unimaginative, and thought ‘avatar’ might better impress people with the responsibility they were accepting.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - A TITLE: awk DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:46 AM ----- BODY: /awk/
1. n. [Unix techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging text data developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (the name derives from their initials). It is characterized by C-like syntax, a declaration-free approach to variable typing and declarations, associative arrays, and field-oriented text processing. See also Perl.
2. n. Editing term for an expression awkward to manipulate through normal regexp facilities (for example, one containing a newline).
3. vt. To process data using awk1.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: B1FF DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:45 AM ----- BODY: /bif/ [Usenet] (alt.: BIFF) n.
The most famous pseudo, and the prototypical newbie. Articles from B1FF feature all uppercase letters sprinkled liberally with bangs, typos, ‘cute’ misspellings (EVRY BUDY LUVS GOOD OLD BIFF CUZ KØ}@oslash;L DOOD AN HE RITES REEL AWESUM THINGZ IN CAPITULL LETTRS LIKE THIS!!!), use (and often misuse) of fragments of talk mode abbreviations, a long sig block (sometimes even a doubled sig), and unbounded naivete. B1FF posts articles using his elder brother's VIC-20. B1FF's location is a mystery, as his articles appear to come from a variety of sites. However, BITNET seems to be the most frequent origin. The theory that B1FF is a denizen of BITNET is supported by B1FF's (unfortunately invalid) electronic mail address: B1FF@BIT.NET.
[1993: Now It Can Be Told! My spies inform me that B1FF was
originally created by Joe Talmadge <jat@cup.hp.com>, also the author
of the infamous and much-plagiarized Flamer's Bible
. The
BIFF filter he wrote was later passed to Richard Sexton, who posted
BIFFisms much more widely. Versions have since been posted for the
amusement of the net at large. See also Jeff K.
—ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: B5 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:44 AM ----- BODY:
[common] Abbreviation for Babylon 5
, a
science-fiction TV series as revered among hackers as was the original Star
Trek.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: back door DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:43 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] A hole in the security of a system deliberately left in place by designers or maintainers. The motivation for such holes is not always sinister; some operating systems, for example, come out of the box with privileged accounts intended for use by field service technicians or the vendor's maintenance programmers. Syn. trap door; may also be called a wormhole. See also iron box, cracker, worm, logic bomb.
Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than anyone expected or planned, and a few have become widely known. Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM admitted the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. In this scheme, the C compiler contained code that would recognize when the login command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him.
Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to use the compiler — so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would recognize when it was compiling a version of itself, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled login the code to allow Thompson entry — and, of course, the code to recognize itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources.
The Turing lecture that reported this truly moby hack was later
published as Reflections on Trusting Trust
,
Communications of the ACM 27, 8 (August 1984),
pp. 761--763 (text available at http://www.acm.org/classics/).
Ken Thompson has since confirmed that this hack was implemented and that
the Trojan Horse code did appear in the login binary of a Unix Support
group machine. Ken says the crocked compiler was never distributed. Your
editor has heard two separate reports that suggest that the crocked login
did make it out of Bell Labs, notably to BBN, and that it enabled at least
one late-night login across the network by someone using the login name
kt
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: backbone cabal DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:42 AM ----- BODY: n.
A group of large-site administrators who pushed through the
Great Renaming and reined in the chaos of
Usenet during most of the 1980s. During most of its
lifetime, the Cabal (as it was sometimes capitalized) steadfastly denied
its own existence; it was almost obligatory for anyone privy to their
secrets to respond There is no Cabal
whenever the existence
or activities of the group were speculated on in public.
The result of this policy was an attractive aura of mystery. Even a decade after the cabal mailing list disbanded in late 1988 following a bitter internal catfight, many people believed (or claimed to believe) that it had not actually disbanded but only gone deeper underground with its power intact.
This belief became a model for various paranoid theories about various Cabals with dark nefarious objectives beginning with taking over the Usenet or Internet. These paranoias were later satirized in ways that took on a life of their own. See Eric Conspiracy for one example.
See NANA for the subsequent history of
the Cabal
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: backbone site DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:41 AM ----- BODY: n.,obs.
Formerly, a key Usenet and email site, one that processes a large amount of third-party traffic, especially if it is the home site of any of the regional coordinators for the Usenet maps. Notable backbone sites as of early 1993, when this sense of the term was beginning to pass out of general use due to wide availability of cheap Internet connections, included uunet and the mail machines at Rutgers University, UC Berkeley, DEC's Western Research Laboratories, Ohio State University, and the University of Texas. Compare leaf site.
[2001 update: This term has passed into history. The UUCP network
world that gave it meaning is gone; everyone is on the Internet now and
network traffic is distributed in very different patterns. Today one might
see references to a backbone router
instead
—ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: backgammon DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:40 AM ----- BODY:
See bignum (sense 3), moby (sense 4), and pseudoprime.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: background DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:39 AM ----- BODY: n.,adj.,vt.
[common] To do a task in
background is to do it whenever
foreground matters are not claiming your undivided
attention, and to background
something means to relegate it to a lower priority. For now, we'll
just print a list of nodes and links; I'm working on the graph-printing
problem in background.
Note that this implies ongoing activity but
at a reduced level or in spare time, in contrast to mainstream ‘back
burner’ (which connotes benign neglect until some future resumption
of activity). Some people prefer to use the term for processing that they
have queued up for their unconscious minds (a tack that one can often
fruitfully take upon encountering an obstacle in creative work). Compare
amp off, slopsucker.
Technically, a task running in background is detached from the terminal where it was started (and often running at a lower priority); oppose foreground. Nowadays this term is primarily associated with Unix, but it appears to have been first used in this sense on OS/360.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: backreference DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:38 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. In a regular expression or pattern match, the text which was matched within grouping parentheses
2. The part of the pattern which refers back to the matched text.
3. By extension, anything which refers back to something which has
been seen or discussed before. When you said ‘she’ just
now, who were you backreferencing?
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: backronym DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:37 AM ----- BODY: n.
[portmanteau of back + acronym] A word interpreted as an acronym that was not originally so intended. This is a special case of what linguists call back formation. Examples are given under recursive acronym (Cygnus), Acme, and mung. Discovering backronyms is a common form of wordplay among hackers. Compare retcon.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: backward combatability DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:36 AM ----- BODY: /bak´w@rd k@m·bat'@·bil'@·tee/ n.
[CMU, Tektronix: from backward
compatibility] A property of hardware or software revisions in
which previous protocols, formats, layouts, etc. are irrevocably discarded
in favor of ‘new and improved’ protocols, formats, and layouts,
leaving the previous ones not merely deprecated but actively defeated.
(Too often, the old and new versions cannot definitively be distinguished,
such that lingering instances of the previous ones yield crashes or other
infelicitous effects, as opposed to a simple version
mismatch
message.) A backwards compatible change, on the other
hand, allows old versions to coexist without crashes or error messages, but
too many major changes incorporating elaborate backwards compatibility
processing can lead to extreme software bloat. See
also flag day.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BAD DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:35 AM ----- BODY: /B·A·D/ adj.
[IBM: acronym, Broken As Designed
] Said of a program
that is bogus because of bad design and misfeatures
rather than because of bugginess. See working as designed.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: Bad and Wrong DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:34 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[Durham, UK] Said of something that is both badly designed and
wrongly executed. This common term is the prototype of, and is used by
contrast with, three less common terms — Bad and Right (a kludge,
something ugly but functional); Good and Wrong (an overblown GUI or other
attractive nuisance); and (rare praise) Good and Right. These terms
entered common use at Durham c.1994 and may have been imported from
elsewhere; they are also in use at Oxford, and the emphatic form
Evil and Bad and Wrong
(abbreviated EBW) is reported from
there. There are standard abbreviations: they start with B&R, a typo
for Bad and Wrong
. Consequently, B&W is actually
Bad and Right
, G&R = Good and Wrong
, and
G&W = Good and Right
. Compare
evil and rude,
Good Thing, Bad Thing.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: Bad Thing DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:33 AM ----- BODY: n.
[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.]
Something that can't possibly result in improvement of the subject. This
term is always capitalized, as in Replacing all of the DSL links
with bicycle couriers would be a Bad Thing
. Oppose
Good Thing. British correspondents confirm that
Bad Thing and Good Thing
(and prob. therefore Right Thing and
Wrong Thing) come from the book referenced in the
etymology, which discusses rulers who were Good Kings but Bad Things.
This has apparently created a mainstream idiom on the British side of the
pond. It is very common among American hackers, but not in mainstream
usage in the U.S. Compare Bad and Wrong.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bag on the side DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:32 AM ----- BODY: n.
[prob. originally related to a colostomy bag] An extension to an
established hack that is supposed to add some functionality to the
original. Usually derogatory, implying that the original was being
overextended and should have been thrown away, and the new product is ugly,
inelegant, or bloated. Also v. phrase,
to hang a bag on the side [of]
. C++? That's just a
bag on the side of C ....
They want me to hang a
bag on the side of the accounting system.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bagbiter DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:31 AM ----- BODY: /bag´bi:t·@r/ n.
1. Something, such as a program or a computer, that fails to work,
or works in a remarkably clumsy manner. This text editor won't let
me make a file with a line longer than 80 characters! What a
bagbiter!
2. A person who has caused you some trouble, inadvertently or otherwise, typically by failing to program the computer properly. Synonyms: loser, cretin, chomper.
3. bite the bag vi. To fail in some manner. The computer
keeps crashing every five minutes.
Yes, the disk controller
is really biting the bag.
The original loading of these terms was almost undoubtedly obscene,
possibly referring to a douche bag or the scrotum (we have reports of
Bite the douche bag!
being used as a taunt at MIT 1970-1976,
and we have another report that Bite the bag!
was in common
use at least as early as 1965), but in their current usage they have become
almost completely sanitized.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bagbiting DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:30 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[MIT; now rare] Having the quality of a
bagbiter. This bagbiting system won't let me
compute the factorial of a negative number.
Compare
losing, cretinous,
bletcherous, barfucious' (under
barfulous) and chomping (under
chomp).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: baggy pantsing DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:29 AM ----- BODY: v.
[Georgia Tech] A baggy pantsing
is used to reprimand
hackers who incautiously leave their terminals unlocked. The affected user
will come back to find a post from them on internal newsgroups discussing
exactly how baggy their pants are, an accepted stand-in for
unattentive user who left their work unprotected in the
clusters
. A properly-done baggy pantsing is highly mocking and
humorous. It is considered bad form to post a baggy pantsing to off-campus
newsgroups or the more technical, serious groups. A particularly nice
baggy pantsing may be claimed
by immediately quoting the
message in full, followed by your sig block; this
has the added benefit of keeping the embarassed victim from being able to
delete the post. Interesting baggy-pantsings have been done involving
adding commands to login scripts to repost the message every time the
unlucky user logs in; Unix boxes on the residential network, when cracked,
oftentimes have their homepages replaced (after being politely backed-up to
another file) with a baggy-pants message; .plan files are also occasionally
targeted. Usage: Prof. Greenlee fell asleep in the Solaris cluster
again; we baggy-pantsed him to git.cc.class.2430.flame.
Compare
derf.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: balloonian variable DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Commodore users; perh. a deliberate phonetic mangling of boolean variable?] Any variable that doesn't actually hold or control state, but must nevertheless be declared, checked, or set. A typical balloonian variable started out as a flag attached to some environment feature that either became obsolete or was planned but never implemented. Compatibility concerns (or politics attached to same) may require that such a flag be treated as though it were live.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bamf DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:27 AM ----- BODY: /bamf/
1. [from X-Men comics; originally bampf
] interj. Notional sound made by a person or object
teleporting in or out of the hearer's vicinity. Often used in
virtual reality (esp. MUD)
electronic fora when a character wishes to make a
dramatic entrance or exit.
2. The sound of magical transformation, used in virtual reality fora like MUDs.
3. In MUD circles, bamf
is also used to refer to the
act by which a MUD server sends a special notification to the MUD client to
switch its connection to another server (I'll set up the old site to
just bamf people over to our new location.
).
4. Used by MUDders on occasion in a more general sense related to
sense 3, to refer to directing someone to another location or resource
(A user was asking about some technobabble so I bamfed them to
&jargonurl;
.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: banana problem DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:26 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from the story of the little girl who said I know how to
spell ‘banana’, but I don't know when to stop
]. Not
knowing where or when to bring a production to a close (compare
fencepost error). One may say there is a banana problem of an algorithm with
poorly defined or incorrect termination conditions, or in discussing the
evolution of a design that may be succumbing to featuritis (see also
creeping elegance,
creeping featuritis).
See item 176 under HAKMEM,
which describes a banana problem in a
Dissociated Press implementation.
Also, see one-banana problem
for a superficially similar but unrelated usage.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bandwidth DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:25 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [common] Used by hackers (in a generalization of its technical
meaning) as the volume of information per unit time that a computer,
person, or transmission medium can handle. Those are amazing
graphics, but I missed some of the detail — not enough bandwidth, I
guess.
Compare low-bandwidth; see also
brainwidth. This generalized usage began to go
mainstream after the Internet population explosion of 1993-1994.
2. Attention span.
3. On Usenet, a measure of network capacity that is often wasted by people complaining about how items posted by others are a waste of bandwidth.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bang DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:24 AM ----- BODY:
1. n. Common spoken name for
! (ASCII 0100001), especially when used in pronouncing a
bang path in spoken hackish. In elder days this was considered a CMUish usage, with MIT and Stanford
hackers preferring excl or
shriek; but the spread of Unix has carried
‘bang’ with it (esp. via the term bang path) and it is now certainly the most common spoken name for
!. Note that it is used exclusively for non-emphatic
written !; one would not say Congratulations
bang
(except possibly for humorous purposes), but if one wanted to
specify the exact characters foo!
one would speak Eff
oh oh bang
. See shriek,
ASCII.
2. interj. An exclamation
signifying roughly I have achieved enlightenment!
, or
The dynamite has cleared out my brain!
Often used to
acknowledge that one has perpetrated a thinko
immediately after one has been called on it.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bang on DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:23 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To stress-test a piece of hardware or software: I banged on
the new version of the simulator all day yesterday and it didn't crash
once. I guess it is ready for release.
The term
pound on is synonymous.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bang path DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:22 AM ----- BODY: n.
[now historical] An old-style UUCP electronic-mail address specifying hops to get from some assumed-reachable location to the addressee, so called because each hop is signified by a bang sign. Thus, for example, the path ...!bigsite!foovax!barbox!me directs people to route their mail to machine bigsite (presumably a well-known location accessible to everybody) and from there through the machine foovax to the account of user me on barbox.
In the bad old days of not so long ago, before autorouting mailers became commonplace, people often published compound bang addresses using the { } convention (see glob) to give paths from several big machines, in the hopes that one's correspondent might be able to get mail to one of them reliably (example: ...!{seismo, ut-sally, ihnp4!rice!beta!gamma!me}). Bang paths of 8 to 10 hops were not uncommon. Late-night dial-up UUCP links would cause week-long transmission times. Bang paths were often selected by both transmission time and reliability, as messages would often get lost. See the network and sitename.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: banner DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:21 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A top-centered graphic on a web page. Esp. used in banner ad.
2. On interactive software, a first screen containing a logo and/or author credits and/or a copyright notice.
3. The title page added to printouts by most print spoolers (see spool). Typically includes user or account ID information in very large character-graphics capitals. Also called a burst page, because it indicates where to burst (tear apart) fanfold paper to separate one user's printout from the next.
4. A similar printout generated (typically on multiple pages of
fan-fold paper) from user-specified text, e.g., by a program such as Unix's
banner({1,6
)}.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: banner ad DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:20 AM ----- BODY: n.
Any of the annoying graphical advertisements that span the tops of way too many Web pages.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: banner site DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:19 AM ----- BODY: n.
[warez d00dz] An FTP site storing pirated files where one must first click on several banners and/or subscribe to various ‘free’ services, usually generating some form of revenues for the site owner, to be able to access the site. More often than not, the username/password painfully obtained by clicking on banners and subscribing to bogus services or mailing lists turns out to be non-working or gives access to a site that always responds busy. See ratio site, leech mode.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bar DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:18 AM ----- BODY: /bar/ n.
1. [very common] The second
metasyntactic variable,
after foo and before
baz. Suppose we have two functions: FOO and
BAR. FOO calls BAR....
2. Often appended to foo to produce foobar.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bare metal DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:17 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [common] New computer hardware, unadorned with such snares and delusions as an operating system, an HLL, or even assembler. Commonly used in the phrase programming on the bare metal, which refers to the arduous work of bit bashing needed to create these basic tools for a new machine. Real bare-metal programming involves things like building boot proms and BIOS chips, implementing basic monitors used to test device drivers, and writing the assemblers that will be used to write the compiler back ends that will give the new machine a real development environment.
2. Programming on the bare metal
is also used to
describe a style of hand-hacking that relies on
bit-level peculiarities of a particular hardware design, esp. tricks for
speed and space optimization that rely on crocks such as overlapping
instructions (or, as in the famous case described in The Story of Mel' (in Appendix A),
interleaving of opcodes on a magnetic drum to minimize fetch delays due to
the device's rotational latency). This sort of thing has become rare as
the relative costs of programming time and machine resources have changed,
but is still found in heavily constrained environments such as industrial
embedded systems. See Real Programmer.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: barf DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:16 AM ----- BODY: /barf/ n.,v.
[common; from mainstream slang meaning ‘vomit’]
1. interj. Term of disgust.
This is the closest hackish equivalent of the Valspeak gag me with a
spoon
. (Like, euwww!) See bletch.
2. vi. To say
Barf!
or emit some similar expression of disgust. I
showed him my latest hack and he barfed
means only that he
complained about it, not that he literally vomited.
3. vi. To fail to work because
of unacceptable input, perhaps with a suitable error message, perhaps not.
Examples: The division operation barfs if you try to divide by
0.
(That is, the division operation checks for an attempt to divide
by zero, and if one is encountered it causes the operation to fail in some
unspecified, but generally obvious, manner.) The text editor barfs
if you try to read in a new file before writing out the old
one.
See choke. In Commonwealth Hackish, barf is generally replaced by ‘puke’ or ‘vom’. barf is sometimes also used as a metasyntactic variable, like foo or bar.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: barfmail DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
Multiple bounce messages accumulating to the level of serious annoyance, or worse. The sort of thing that happens when an inter-network mail gateway goes down or wonky.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: barfulation DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:14 AM ----- BODY: /bar`fyoo·lay´sh@n/ interj.
Variation of barf used around the Stanford
area. An exclamation, expressing disgust. On seeing some particularly bad
code one might exclaim, Barfulation! Who wrote this,
Quux?
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: barfulous DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:13 AM ----- BODY: /bar´fyoo·l@s/ adj.
(alt.: barfucious, /bar-fyoo-sh@s/) Said of something that would make anyone barf, if only for esthetic reasons.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: barn DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:12 AM ----- BODY: n.
[uncommon; prob. from the nuclear military] An unexpectedly large
quantity of something: a unit of measurement. Why is /var/adm
taking up so much space?
The logs have grown to several
barns.
The source of this is clear: when physicists were first
studying nuclear interactions, the probability was thought to be
proportional to the cross-sectional area of the nucleus (this probability
is still called the cross-section). Upon experimenting, they discovered
the interactions were far more probable than expected; the nuclei were
as big as a barn
. The units for cross-sections were
christened Barns, (10-24
cm2) and the book containing cross-sections has
a picture of a barn on the cover.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: barney DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:11 AM ----- BODY: n.
In Commonwealth hackish, barney is to fred (sense #1) as bar is to foo. That is, people who commonly use fred as their first metasyntactic variable will often use barney second. The reference is, of course, to Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble in the Flintstones cartoons.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: baroque DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:10 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[common] Feature-encrusted; complex; gaudy; verging on excessive.
Said of hardware or (esp.) software designs, this has many of the
connotations of elephantine or
monstrosity but is less extreme and not pejorative
in itself. Metafont even has features to introduce random
variations to its letterform output. Now that is
baroque!
See also rococo.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BASIC DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:09 AM ----- BODY: /bay'·sic/ n.
A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's
experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which for many years
was the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra
observed in Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal
Perspective that It is practically impossible to teach
good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC:
as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of
regeneration.
This is another case (like
Pascal) of the cascading
lossage that happens when a language deliberately
designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can
write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10-20 lines) very easily;
writing anything longer (a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits
that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This
wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on
low-end micros in the 1980s. As it is, it probably ruined tens of
thousands of potential wizards.
[1995: Some languages called BASIC
aren't quite this
nasty any more, having acquired Pascal- and C-like procedures and control
structures and shed their line numbers. —ESR]
BASIC stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction
Code
. Earlier versions of this entry claiming this was a later
backronym were incorrect.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: batbelt DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:08 AM ----- BODY: n.
Many hackers routinely hang numerous devices such as pagers, cell-phones, personal organizers, leatherman multitools, pocket knives, flashlights, walkie-talkies, even miniature computers from their belts. When many of these devices are worn at once, the hacker's belt somewhat resembles Batman's utility belt; hence it is referred to as a batbelt.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: batch DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:07 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. Non-interactive. Hackers use this somewhat more loosely than the traditional technical definitions justify; in particular, switches on a normally interactive program that prepare it to receive non-interactive command input are often referred to as batch mode switches. A batch file is a series of instructions written to be handed to an interactive program running in batch mode.
2. Performance of dreary tasks all at one sitting. I finally
sat down in batch mode and wrote out checks for all those bills; I guess
they'll turn the electricity back on next week...
3. batching up: Accumulation
of a number of small tasks that can be lumped together for greater
efficiency. I'm batching up those letters to send sometime
I'm batching up bottles to take to the recycling
center.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-03-17:5-8)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bathtub curve DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:06 AM ----- BODY: n.
Common term for the curve (resembling an end-to-end section of one of those claw-footed antique bathtubs) that describes the expected failure rate of electronics with time: initially high, dropping to near 0 for most of the system's lifetime, then rising again as it ‘tires out’. See also burn-in period, infant mortality.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: Batman factor DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:05 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. An integer number representing the number of items hanging from a batbelt. In most settings, a Batman factor of more than 3 is not acceptable without odd stares and whispering. This encourages the hacker in question to choose items for the batbelt carefully to avoid awkward social situations, usually amongst non-hackers.
2. A somewhat more vaguely defined index of contribution to sense 1.
Devices that are especially obtrusive, such as large, older model cell
phones, Pocket
PC devices and walkie talkies are said to
have a high batman factor. Sleeker devices such as a later-model Palm or
StarTac phone are prized for their low batman factor and lessened
obtrusiveness and weight.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: baud DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:04 AM ----- BODY: /bawd/ n.
[simplified from its technical meaning] n. Bits per second. Hence kilobaud or Kbaud, thousands of bits per second. The technical meaning is level transitions per second; this coincides with bps only for two-level modulation with no framing or stop bits. Most hackers are aware of these nuances but blithely ignore them.
Historical note: baud was originally a unit of telegraph signalling speed, set at one pulse per second. It was proposed at the November, 1926 conference of the Comité Consultatif International Des Communications Télégraphiques as an improvement on the then standard practice of referring to line speeds in terms of words per minute, and named for Jean Maurice Emile Baudot (1845-1903), a French engineer who did a lot of pioneering work in early teleprinters.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: baz DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:03 AM ----- BODY: /baz/ n.
1. [common] The third metasyntactic variable
Suppose we have three functions: FOO, BAR, and BAZ. FOO calls BAR,
which calls BAZ....
(See also
fum)
2. interj. A term of mild annoyance. In this usage the term is often drawn out for 2 or 3 seconds, producing an effect not unlike the bleating of a sheep; /baaaaaaz/.
3. Occasionally appended to foo to produce ‘foobaz’.
Earlier versions of this lexicon derived baz as a Stanford corruption of
bar. However, Pete Samson (compiler of the
TMRC lexicon) reports it was already current when he
joined TMRC in 1958. He says It came from
Pogo. Albert the Alligator, when vexed or outraged,
would shout
Bazz Fazz!
or Rowrbazzle!
The
club layout was said to model the (mythical) New England counties of
Rowrfolk and Bassex (Rowrbazzle mingled with
(Norfolk/Suffolk/Middlesex/Essex).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bazaar DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:02 AM ----- BODY: n.,adj.
In 1997, after meditating on the success of Linux for three years, the Jargon File's own editor ESR wrote an analytical paper on hacker culture and development models titled The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The main argument of the paper was that Brooks's Law is not the whole story; given the right social machinery, debugging can be efficiently parallelized across large numbers of programmers. The title metaphor caught on (see also cathedral), and the style of development typical in the Linux community is now often referred to as the bazaar mode. Its characteristics include releasing code early and often, and actively seeking the largest possible pool of peer reviewers. After 1998, the evident success of this way of doing things became one of the strongest arguments for open source.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bboard DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:01 AM ----- BODY: /bee´bord/ n.
[contraction of ‘bulletin board’]
1. Any electronic bulletin board; esp. used of BBS systems running on personal micros, less frequently of a Usenet newsgroup (in fact, use of this term for a newsgroup generally marks one either as a newbie fresh in from the BBS world or as a real old-timer predating Usenet).
2. At CMU and other colleges with similar facilities, refers to campus-wide electronic bulletin boards.
3. The term physical bboard is sometimes used to refer to an old-fashioned, non-electronic cork-and-thumbtack memo board. At CMU, it refers to a particular one outside the CS Lounge.
In either of senses 1 or 2, the term is usually prefixed by the name
of the intended board (‘the Moonlight Casino bboard’ or
‘market bboard’); however, if the context is clear, the
better-read bboards may be referred to by name alone, as in (at CMU)
Don't post for-sale ads on general
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BBS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:58:00 AM ----- BODY: /B·B·S/ n.
[common; abbreviation, Bulletin Board System
] An
electronic bulletin board system; that is, a message database where people
can log in and leave broadcast messages for others grouped (typically) into
topic groups. The term was especially applied to
the thousands of local BBS systems that operated during the pre-Internet
microcomputer era of roughly 1980 to 1995, typically run by amateurs for
fun out of their homes on MS-DOS boxes with a single modem line each. Fans
of Usenet and Internet or the big commercial timesharing bboards such as
CompuServe and GEnie tended to consider local BBSes the low-rent district
of the hacker culture, but they served a valuable function by knitting
together lots of hackers and users in the personal-micro world who would
otherwise have been unable to exchange code at all. Post-Internet, BBSs
are likely to be local newsgroups on an ISP; efficiency has increased but a
certain flavor has been lost. See also
bboard.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BCPL DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:59 AM ----- BODY: n.
[abbreviation, Basic Combined Programming Language
) A
programming language developed by Martin Richards in Cambridge in 1967. It
is remarkable for its rich syntax, small size of compiler (it can be run in
16k) and extreme portability. It reached break-even point at a very early
stage, and was the language in which the original hello world program was written. It has been ported to so many
different systems that its creator confesses to having lost count. It has
only one data type (a machine word) which can be used as an integer, a
character, a floating point number, a pointer, or almost anything else,
depending on context. BCPL was a precursor of C, which inherited some of
its features.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BDFL DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:58 AM ----- BODY:
[Python; common] Benevolent Dictator For Life. Guido, considered in his role as the project leader of Python. People who are feeling temporarily cheesed off by one of his decisions sometimes leave off the B. The mental image that goes with this, of a cigar-chomping caudillo in gold braid and sunglasses, is extremely funny to anyone who has ever met Guido in person.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: beam DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:57 AM ----- BODY: vt.
[from Star Trek Classic's Beam me up, Scotty!
]
1. To transfer softcopy of a file electronically; most often in combining forms such as beam me a copy or beam that over to his site.
2. Palm Pilot users very commonly use this term for the act of exchanging bits via the infrared links on their machines (this term seems to have originated with the ill-fated Newton Message Pad). Compare blast, snarf, BLT.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: beanie key DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:56 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Mac users] See command key.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: beep DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:55 AM ----- BODY: n.,v.
Syn. feep. This term is techspeak under MS-DOS/Windows and OS/2, and seems to be generally preferred among micro hobbyists.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: Befunge DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
A worthy companion to INTERCAL; a computer language family which escapes the quotidian limitation of linear control flow and embraces program counters flying through multiple dimensions with exotic topologies. The Befunge home page is at http://www.catseye.mb.ca/esoteric/befunge/.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: beige toaster DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:53 AM ----- BODY: n.
[obs.] An original Macintosh in the boxy beige case. See toaster; compare Macintrash, maggotbox.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bells and whistles DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] Features added to a program or system to make it more
flavorful from a hacker's point of view, without
necessarily adding to its utility for its primary function. Distinguished
from chrome, which is intended to attract users.
Now that we've got the basic program working, let's go back and add
some bells and whistles.
No one seems to know what distinguishes a
bell from a whistle. The recognized emphatic form is bells,
whistles, and gongs
.
It used to be thought that this term derived from the toyboxes on
theater organs. However, the and gongs
strongly suggests a
different origin, at sea. Before powered horns, ships routinely used
bells, whistles, and gongs to signal each other over longer distances than
voice can carry.
Sometimes ‘trouble’ is spelled bells and whistles...
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-06-04)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bells whistles and gongs DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:51 AM ----- BODY: n.
A standard elaborated form of bells and whistles; typically said with a pronounced and ironic accent on the ‘gongs’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: benchmark DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:50 AM ----- BODY: n.
[techspeak] An inaccurate measure of computer performance.
In the computer industry, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn
lies, and benchmarks.
Well-known ones include Whetstone, Dhrystone,
Rhealstone (see h), the Gabriel LISP benchmarks, the
SPECmark suite, and LINPACK. See also machoflops,
MIPS, smoke and mirrors.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: Berkeley Quality Software DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:49 AM ----- BODY: adj.
(often abbreviated BQS
) Term used in a pejorative
sense to refer to software that was apparently created by rather spaced-out
hackers late at night to solve some unique problem. It usually has
nonexistent, incomplete, or incorrect documentation, has been tested on at
least two examples, and core dumps when anyone else attempts to use it.
This term was frequently applied to early versions of the
dbx1
debugger. See also Berzerkeley.
Note to British and Commonwealth readers: that's /berk´lee/, not /bark´lee/ as in British Received Pronunciation.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: Berzerkeley DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:48 AM ----- BODY: /b@r·zer´klee/ n.
[from ‘berserk’, via the name of a now-deceased record
label; poss. originated by famed columnist Herb Caen] Humorous distortion
of Berkeley
used esp. to refer to the practices or products
of the BSD Unix hackers. See software bloat, Berkeley Quality Software.
Mainstream use of this term in reference to the cultural and political peculiarities of UC Berkeley as a whole has been reported from as far back as the 1960s.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: beta DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:47 AM ----- BODY: /bay´t@/, /be´t@/ or (Commonwealth) /bee´t@/ n.
1. Mostly working, but still under test; usu. used with
in
: in beta. In the
Real World, hardware or software systems often go
through two stages of release testing: Alpha (in-house) and Beta
(out-house?). Beta releases are generally made to a group of lucky (or
unlucky) trusted customers.
2. Anything that is new and experimental. His girlfriend is
in beta
means that he is still testing for compatibility and
reserving judgment.
3. Flaky; dubious; suspect (since beta software is notoriously buggy).
Historical note: More formally, to beta-test is to test a pre-release (potentially unreliable) version of a piece of software by making it available to selected (or self-selected) customers and users. This term derives from early 1960s terminology for product cycle checkpoints, first used at IBM but later standard throughout the industry. Alpha Test was the unit, module, or component test phase; Beta Test was initial system test. These themselves came from earlier A- and B-tests for hardware. The A-test was a feasibility and manufacturability evaluation done before any commitment to design and development. The B-test was a demonstration that the engineering model functioned as specified. The C-test (corresponding to today's beta) was the B-test performed on early samples of the production design, and the D test was the C test repeated after the model had been in production a while.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BFI DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:46 AM ----- BODY: /B·F·I/ n.
See brute force and ignorance. Also
encountered in the variants BFMI,
brute force and massive ignorance
and
BFBI brute force and bloody
ignorance
. In some parts of the U.S. this abbreviation was probably
reinforced by a company called Browning-Ferris Industries in the
waste-management business; a large BFI logo in white-on-blue could be seen
on the sides of garbage trucks.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BI DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:45 AM ----- BODY:
Common written abbreviation for Breidbart Index.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bible DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:44 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. One of a small number of fundamental source books such as Knuth, K&R, or the Camel Book.
2. The most detailed and authoritative reference for a particular language, operating system, or other complex software system.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BiCapitalization DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:43 AM ----- BODY: n.
The act said to have been performed on trademarks (such as PostScript, NeXT, NeWS, VisiCalc, FrameMaker, TK!solver, EasyWriter) that have been raised above the ruck of common coinage by nonstandard capitalization. Too many marketroid types think this sort of thing is really cute, even the 2,317th time they do it. Compare studlycaps, InterCaps.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: biff DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:42 AM ----- BODY: /bif/ vt.
[now rare] To notify someone of incoming mail. From the BSD utility
biff1,
which was in turn named after a friendly dog who used to chase frisbees in
the halls at UCB while 4.2BSD was in development. There was a legend that
it had a habit of barking whenever the mailman came, but the author of
biff
says this is not true. No relation to
B1FF.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: big iron DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:41 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] Large, expensive, ultra-fast computers. Used generally of number-crunching supercomputers, but can include more conventional big commercial IBMish mainframes. Term of approval; compare heavy metal, oppose dinosaur.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: Big Red Switch DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:40 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] The power switch on a computer, esp. the ‘Emergency
Pull’ switch on an IBM mainframe or the power
switch on an IBM PC where it really is large and red. This !@%$%
bitty box is hung again; time to hit the Big Red
Switch.
Sources at IBM report that, in tune with the company's
passion for TLAs, this is often abbreviated as
BRS (this has also become established
on FidoNet and in the PC clone world). It is
alleged that the emergency pull switch on an IBM 360/91 actually fired a
non-conducting bolt into the main power feed; the BRSes on more recent
mainframes physically drop a block into place so that they can't be pushed
back in. People get fired for pulling them, especially inappropriately
(see also molly-guard). Compare power cycle, three-finger salute; see also
scram switch.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: Big Room DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
(Also Big Blue Room) The
extremely large room with the blue ceiling and intensely bright light
(during the day) or black ceiling with lots of tiny night-lights (during
the night) found outside all computer installations. He can't come
to the phone right now, he's somewhere out in the Big Room.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: big win DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:38 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [common] Major success.
2. [MIT] Serendipity. Yes, those two physicists discovered
high-temperature superconductivity in a batch of ceramic that had been
prepared incorrectly according to their experimental schedule. Small
mistake; big win!
See win big.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: big-endian DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:37 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[common; From Swift's Gulliver's Travels via the famous paper On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace by Danny Cohen, USC/ISI IEN 137, dated April 1, 1980]
1. Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given multi-byte numeric representation, the most significant byte has the lowest address (the word is stored ‘big-end-first’). Most processors, including the IBM 370 family, the PDP-10, the Motorola microprocessor families, and most of the various RISC designs are big-endian. Big-endian byte order is also sometimes called network order. See little-endian, middle-endian, NUXI problem, swab.
2. An Internet address the wrong way round. Most of the world follows the Internet standard and writes email addresses starting with the name of the computer and ending up with the name of the country. In the U.K.: the Joint Academic Networking Team had decided to do it the other way round before the Internet domain standard was established. Most gateway sites have ad-hockery in their mailers to handle this, but can still be confused. In particular, the address me@uk.ac.bris.pys.as could be interpreted in JANET's big-endian way as one in the U.K. (domain uk) or in the standard little-endian way as one in the domain as (American Samoa) on the opposite side of the world.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bignum DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:36 AM ----- BODY: /big´nuhm/ n.
[common; orig. from MIT MacLISP]
1. [techspeak] A multiple-precision computer representation for very large integers.
2. More generally, any very large number. Have you ever
looked at the United States Budget? There's bignums for you!
3. [Stanford] In backgammon, large numbers on the dice especially a roll of double fives or double sixes (compare moby, sense 4). See also El Camino Bignum.
Sense 1 may require some explanation. Most computer languages provide a kind of data called integer, but such computer integers are usually very limited in size; usually they must be smaller than 231 (2,147,483,648) or (on a bitty box) 215 (32,768). If you want to work with numbers larger than that, you have to use floating-point numbers, which are usually accurate to only six or seven decimal places. Computer languages that provide bignums can perform exact calculations on very large numbers, such as 1000! (the factorial of 1000, which is 1000 times 999 times 998 times ... times 2 times 1). For example, this value for 1000! was computed by the MacLISP system using bignums:
40238726007709377354370243392300398571937486421071 46325437999104299385123986290205920442084869694048 00479988610197196058631666872994808558901323829669 94459099742450408707375991882362772718873251977950 59509952761208749754624970436014182780946464962910 56393887437886487337119181045825783647849977012476 63288983595573543251318532395846307555740911426241 74743493475534286465766116677973966688202912073791 43853719588249808126867838374559731746136085379534 52422158659320192809087829730843139284440328123155 86110369768013573042161687476096758713483120254785 89320767169132448426236131412508780208000261683151 02734182797770478463586817016436502415369139828126 48102130927612448963599287051149649754199093422215 66832572080821333186116811553615836546984046708975 60290095053761647584772842188967964624494516076535 34081989013854424879849599533191017233555566021394 50399736280750137837615307127761926849034352625200 01588853514733161170210396817592151090778801939317 81141945452572238655414610628921879602238389714760 88506276862967146674697562911234082439208160153780 88989396451826324367161676217916890977991190375403 12746222899880051954444142820121873617459926429565 81746628302955570299024324153181617210465832036786 90611726015878352075151628422554026517048330422614 39742869330616908979684825901254583271682264580665 26769958652682272807075781391858178889652208164348 34482599326604336766017699961283186078838615027946 59551311565520360939881806121385586003014356945272 24206344631797460594682573103790084024432438465657 24501440282188525247093519062092902313649327349756 55139587205596542287497740114133469627154228458623 77387538230483865688976461927383814900140767310446 64025989949022222176590433990188601856652648506179 97023561938970178600408118897299183110211712298459 01641921068884387121855646124960798722908519296819 37238864261483965738229112312502418664935314397013 74285319266498753372189406942814341185201580141233 44828015051399694290153483077644569099073152433278 28826986460278986432113908350621709500259738986355 42771967428222487575867657523442202075736305694988 25087968928162753848863396909959826280956121450994 87170124451646126037902930912088908694202851064018 21543994571568059418727489980942547421735824010636 77404595741785160829230135358081840096996372524230 56085590370062427124341690900415369010593398383577 79394109700277534720000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bigot DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:35 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] A person who is religiously attached to a particular
computer, language, operating system, editor, or other tool (see
religious issues). Usually found with a specifier;
thus, Cray bigot, ITS bigot, APL
bigot, VMS bigot,
Berkeley bigot. Real bigots can be
distinguished from mere partisans or zealots by the fact that they refuse
to learn alternatives even when the march of time and/or technology is
threatening to obsolete the favored tool. It is truly said You can
tell a bigot, but you can't tell him much.
Compare
weenie,
Amiga Persecution Complex.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bikeshedding DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:34 AM ----- BODY:
[originally BSD, now common] Technical disputes over minor, marginal issues conducted while more serious ones are being overlooked. The implied image is of people arguing over what color to paint the bicycle shed while the house is not finished.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: binary four DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:33 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet] The finger, in the sense of digitus impudicus. This comes from an analogy between binary and the hand, i.e. 1=00001=thumb, 2=00010=index finger, 3=00011=index and thumb, 4=00100. Considered silly. Prob. from humorous derivative of finger, sense 4.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:32 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from the mainstream meaning and Binary digIT
]
1. [techspeak] The unit of information; the amount of information obtained from knowing the answer to a yes-or-no question for which the two outcomes are equally probable.
2. [techspeak] A computational quantity that can take on one of two values, such as true and false or 0 and 1.
3. A mental flag: a reminder that something should be done
eventually. I have a bit set for you.
(I haven't seen you
for a while, and I'm supposed to tell or ask you something.)
4. More generally, a (possibly incorrect) mental state of belief.
I have a bit set that says that you were the last guy to hack on
EMACS.
(Meaning I think you were the last guy to hack on
EMACS, and what I am about to say is predicated on this, so please stop me
if this isn't true.
) I just need one bit from you
is
a polite way of indicating that you intend only a short interruption for a
question that can presumably be answered yes or no.
A bit is said to be set if its value is true or 1, and reset or clear if its value is false or 0. One speaks of setting and clearing bits. To toggle or invert a bit is to change it, either from 0 to 1 or from 1 to 0. See also flag, trit, mode bit.
The term bit first appeared in print in the computer-science sense in a 1948 paper by information theorist Claude Shannon, and was there credited to the early computer scientist John Tukey (who also seems to have coined the term software). Tukey records that bit evolved over a lunch table as a handier alternative to bigit or binit, at a conference in the winter of 1943-44.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bit bashing DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:31 AM ----- BODY: n.
(alt.: bit diddling or
bit twiddling) Term used to describe any of several
kinds of low-level programming characterized by manipulation of
bit, flag,
nybble, and other smaller-than-character-sized
pieces of data; these include low-level device control, encryption
algorithms, checksum and error-correcting codes, hash functions, some
flavors of graphics programming (see bitblt), and
assembler/compiler code generation. May connote either tedium or a real
technical challenge (more usually the former). The command decoding
for the new tape driver looks pretty solid but the bit-bashing for the
control registers still has bugs.
See also
mode bit.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bit bucket DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:30 AM ----- BODY: n.
[very common]
1. The universal data sink (originally, the mythical receptacle used to catch bits when they fall off the end of a register during a shift instruction). Discarded, lost, or destroyed data is said to have gone to the bit bucket. On Unix, often used for /dev/null. Sometimes amplified as the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky.
2. The place where all lost mail and news messages eventually go. The selection is performed according to Finagle's Law; important mail is much more likely to end up in the bit bucket than junk mail, which has an almost 100% probability of getting delivered. Routing to the bit bucket is automatically performed by mail-transfer agents, news systems, and the lower layers of the network.
3. The ideal location for all unwanted mail responses: Flames
about this article to the bit bucket.
Such a request is guaranteed
to overflow one's mailbox with flames.
4. Excuse for all mail that has not been sent. I mailed you
those figures last week; they must have landed in the bit bucket.
Compare black hole.
This term is used purely in jest. It is based on the fanciful notion
that bits are objects that are not destroyed but only misplaced. This
appears to have been a mutation of an earlier term ‘bit box’,
about which the same legend was current; old-time hackers also report that
trainees used to be told that when the CPU stored bits into memory it was
actually pulling them out of the bit box
. See also
chad box.
Another variant of this legend has it that, as a consequence of the
parity preservation law
, the number of 1 bits that go to the
bit bucket must equal the number of 0 bits. Any imbalance results in bits
filling up the bit bucket. A qualified computer technician can empty a
full bit bucket as part of scheduled maintenance.
The source for all these meanings, is, historically, the fact that the chad box on a paper-tape punch was sometimes called a bit bucket.
A literal bit bucket.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-02-14)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bit decay DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:29 AM ----- BODY: n.
See bit rot. People with a physics background tend to prefer this variant for the analogy with particle decay. See also computron, quantum bogodynamics.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bit rot DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] Also bit decay. Hypothetical disease the existence of which has been deduced from the observation that unused programs or features will often stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if ‘nothing has changed’. The theory explains that bits decay as if they were radioactive. As time passes, the contents of a file or the code in a program will become increasingly garbled.
There actually are physical processes that produce such effects (alpha particles generated by trace radionuclides in ceramic chip packages, for example, can change the contents of a computer memory unpredictably, and various kinds of subtle media failures can corrupt files in mass storage), but they are quite rare (and computers are built with error-detecting circuitry to compensate for them). The notion long favored among hackers that cosmic rays are among the causes of such events turns out to be a myth; see the cosmic rays entry for details.
The term software rot is almost synonymous. Software rot is the effect, bit rot the notional cause.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bit twiddling DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:27 AM ----- BODY: n.
[very common]
1. (pejorative) An exercise in tuning (see tune) in which incredible amounts of time and effort go to produce little noticeable improvement, often with the result that the code becomes incomprehensible.
2. Aimless small modification to a program, esp. for some pointless goal.
3. Approx. syn. for bit bashing; esp. used for the act of frobbing the device control register of a peripheral in an attempt to get it back to a known state.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bit-paired keyboard DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:26 AM ----- BODY: n.,obs.
(alt.: bit-shift keyboard) A non-standard keyboard layout that seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several years on early computer equipment. The ASR-33 was a mechanical device (see EOU), so the only way to generate the character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage. The design of the ASR-33 assigned each character key a basic pattern that could be modified by flipping bits if the SHIFT or the CTRL key was pressed. In order to avoid making the thing even more of a kluge than it already was, the design had to group characters that shared the same basic bit pattern on one key.
Looking at the ASCII chart, we find:
high low bits bits 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001 010 ! " # $ % & ' ( ) 011 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
This is why the characters !"#$%&'() appear where they do on a Teletype (thankfully, they didn't use shift-0 for space). The Teletype Model 33 was actually designed before ASCII existed, and was originally intended to use a code that contained these two rows:
low bits high 0000 0010 0100 0110 1000 1010 1100 1110 bits 0001 0011 0101 0111 1001 1011 1101 1111 10 ) ! bel # $ % wru & * ( " : ? _ , . 11 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ' ; / - esc del
The result would have been something closer to a normal keyboard. But as it happened, Teletype had to use a lot of persuasion just to keep ASCII, and the Model 33 keyboard, from looking like this instead:
! " ? $ ' & - ( ) ; : * / , . 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 + ~ < > × |
Teletype's was not the weirdest variant of the QWERTY layout widely seen, by the way; that prize should probably go to one of several (differing) arrangements on IBM's even clunkier 026 and 029 card punches.
When electronic terminals became popular, in the early 1970s, there
was no agreement in the industry over how the keyboards should be laid out.
Some vendors opted to emulate the Teletype keyboard, while others used the
flexibility of electronic circuitry to make their product look like an
office typewriter. Either choice was supported by the ANSI computer
keyboard standard, X4.14-1971, which referred to the alternatives as
logical bit pairing
and typewriter
pairing
. These alternatives became known as bit-paired and typewriter-paired keyboards. To a hacker, the
bit-paired keyboard seemed far more logical — and because most
hackers in those days had never learned to touch-type, there was little
pressure from the pioneering users to adapt keyboards to the typewriter
standard.
The doom of the bit-paired keyboard was the large-scale introduction of the computer terminal into the normal office environment, where out-and-out technophobes were expected to use the equipment. The typewriter-paired standard became universal, X4.14 was superseded by X4.23-1982, bit-paired hardware was quickly junked or relegated to dusty corners, and both terms passed into disuse.
However, in countries without a long history of touch typing, the argument against the bit-paired keyboard layout was weak or nonexistent. As a result, the standard Japanese keyboard, used on PCs, Unix boxen etc. still has all of the !"#$%&'() characters above the numbers in the ASR-33 layout.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bitblt DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:25 AM ----- BODY: /bit´blit/ n.
[from BLT, q.v.:]
1. [common] Any of a family of closely related algorithms for moving and copying rectangles of bits between main and display memory on a bit-mapped device, or between two areas of either main or display memory (the requirement to do the Right Thing in the case of overlapping source and destination rectangles is what makes BitBlt tricky).
2. Synonym for blit or BLT. Both uses are borderline techspeak.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bits DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:24 AM ----- BODY: pl.n.
1. Information. Examples: I need some bits about file
formats.
(I need to know about file formats.
)
Compare core dump, sense 4.
2. Machine-readable representation of a document, specifically as
contrasted with paper: I have only a photocopy of the Jargon File;
does anyone know where I can get the bits?
. See
softcopy,
source of all good bits See also bit.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bitty box DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:23 AM ----- BODY: /bit´ee boks/ n.
1. A computer sufficiently small, primitive, or incapable as to cause a hacker acute claustrophobia at the thought of developing software on or for it. Especially used of small, obsolescent, single-tasking-only personal machines such as the Atari 800, Osborne, Sinclair, VIC-20, TRS-80, or IBM PC.
2. [Pejorative] More generally, the opposite of ‘real computer’ (see Get a real computer!). See also mess-dos, toaster, and toy.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bixie DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:22 AM ----- BODY: /bik´see/ n.
Variant emoticons used BIX (the BIX Information eXchange); the term survived the demise of BIX itself. The most common (smiley) bixie is <@_@>, representing two cartoon eyes and a mouth. These were originally invented in an SF fanzine called APA-L and imported to BIX by one of the earliest users.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: black art DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:21 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] A collection of arcane, unpublished, and (by implication) mostly ad-hoc techniques developed for a particular application or systems area (compare black magic). VLSI design and compiler code optimization were (in their beginnings) considered classic examples of black art; as theory developed they became deep magic, and once standard textbooks had been written, became merely heavy wizardry. The huge proliferation of formal and informal channels for spreading around new computer-related technologies during the last twenty years has made both the term black art and what it describes less common than formerly. See also voodoo programming.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: black hat DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:20 AM ----- BODY:
1. [common among security specialists] A cracker, someone bent on breaking into the system you are protecting. Oppose the less comon white hat for an ally or friendly security specialist; the term gray hat is in occasional use for people with cracker skills operating within the law, e.g. in doing security evaluations. All three terms derive from the dress code of formulaic Westerns, in which bad guys wore black hats and good guys white ones.
2. [spamfighters] ‘Black hat’, ‘white hat’, and ‘gray hat’ are also used to denote the spam-friendliness of ISPs: a black hat ISP harbors spammers and doesn't terminate them; a white hat ISP terminates upon the first LART; and gray hat ISPs terminate only reluctantly and/or slowly. This has led to the concept of a hat check: someone considering a potential business relationship with an ISP or other provider will post a query to a NANA group, asking about the provider's hat color. The term albedo has also been used to describe a provider's spam-friendliness.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: black hole DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:19 AM ----- BODY: n.,vt.
[common] What data (a piece of email or netnews, or a stream of
TCP/IP packets) has fallen into if it disappears mysteriously between its
origin and destination sites (that is, without returning a
bounce message). I think there's a black
hole at foovax!
conveys
suspicion that site foovax has
been dropping a lot of stuff on the floor lately (see
drop on the floor). The implied metaphor of email as interstellar
travel is interesting in itself. Readily verbed as blackhole: That router is blackholing
IDP packets.
Compare bit bucket and see
RBL.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: black magic DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:18 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] A technique that works, though nobody really understands why. More obscure than voodoo programming, which may be done by cookbook. Compare also black art, deep magic, and magic number (sense 2).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: Black Screen of Death DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:17 AM ----- BODY: n.
[prob.: related to the Floating Head of Death in a famous Far Side cartoon.] A failure mode of Microsloth Windows. On an attempt to launch a DOS box, a networked Windows system not uncommonly blanks the screen and locks up the PC so hard that it requires a cold boot to recover. This unhappy phenomenon is known as The Black Screen of Death. See also Blue Screen of Death, which has become rather more common.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blammo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:16 AM ----- BODY: v.
[Oxford Brookes University and alumni, UK] To forcibly remove
someone from any interactive system, especially talker systems. The
operators, who may remain hidden, may blammo
a user who is
misbehaving. Very similar to archaic MIT gun; in fact, the blammo-gun is a notional device used to
blammo
someone. While in actual fact the only incarnation
of the blammo-gun is the command used to forcibly eject a user, operators
speak of different levels of blammo-gun fire; e.g., a blammo-gun to
‘stun’ will temporarily remove someone, but a blammo-gun set to
‘maim’ will stop someone coming back on for a while.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blargh DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:15 AM ----- BODY: /blarg/ n.
[MIT; now common] The opposite of ping, sense 5; an exclamation indicating that one has absorbed or is emitting a quantum of unhappiness. Less common than ping.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blast DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:14 AM ----- BODY:
1. v.,n. Synonym for BLT, used esp. for large data sends over a network or comm line. Opposite of snarf. Usage: uncommon. The variant ‘blat’ has been reported.
2. vt. [HP/Apollo] Synonymous with nuke
(sense 3). Sometimes the message Unable to kill all
processes. Blast them (y/n)?
would appear in the command window
upon logout.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blat DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:13 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Syn. blast, sense 1.
2. See thud.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bletch DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:12 AM ----- BODY: /blech/ interj.
[very common; from Yiddish/German ‘brechen’, to vomit,
poss. via comic-strip exclamation ‘blech’] Term of disgust.
Often used in Ugh, bletch
. Compare
barf.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bletcherous DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:11 AM ----- BODY: /blech'@·r@s/ adj.
Disgusting in design or function; esthetically unappealing. This
word is seldom used of people. This keyboard is
bletcherous!
(Perhaps the keys don't work very well, or are
misplaced.) See losing,
cretinous, bagbiting,
bogus, and random. The term
bletcherous applies to the esthetics of the thing so
described; similarly for cretinous. By contrast,
something that is losing or bagbiting may be failing to meet objective
criteria. See also bogus and
random, which have richer and wider shades of
meaning than any of the above.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blinkenlights DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:10 AM ----- BODY: /blink'@n·li:tz/ n.
[common] Front-panel diagnostic lights on a computer, esp. a dinosaur. Now that dinosaurs are rare, this term usually refers to status lights on a modem, network hub, or the like.
This term derives from the last word of the famous blackletter-Gothic sign in mangled pseudo-German that once graced about half the computer rooms in the English-speaking world. One version ran in its entirety as follows:
ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.
This silliness dates back at least as far as 1959 at Stanford University and had already gone international by the early 1960s, when it was reported at London University's ATLAS computing site. There are several variants of it in circulation, some of which actually do end with the word ‘blinkenlights’.
In an amusing example of turnabout-is-fair-play, German hackers have developed their own versions of the blinkenlights poster in fractured English, one of which is reproduced here:
ATTENTION This room is fullfilled mit special electronische equippment. Fingergrabbing and pressing the cnoeppkes from the computers is allowed for die experts only! So all thelefthandersstay away and do not disturben the brainstorming von here working intelligencies. Otherwise you will be out thrown and kicked anderswhere! Also: please keep still and only watchen astaunished the blinkenlights.
See also geef.
Old-time hackers sometimes get nostalgic for blinkenlights because they were so much more fun to look at than a blank panel. Sadly, very few computers still have them (the three LEDs on a PC keyboard certainly don't count). The obvious reasons (cost of wiring, cost of front-panel cutouts, almost nobody needs or wants to interpret machine-register states on the fly anymore) are only part of the story. Another part of it is that radio-frequency leakage from the lamp wiring was beginning to be a problem as far back as transistor machines. But the most fundamental fact is that there are very few signals slow enough to blink an LED these days! With slow CPUs, you could watch the bus register or instruction counter tick, but at 33/66/150MHz it's all a blur.
Despite this, a couple of relatively recent computer designs of note have featured programmable blinkenlights that were added just because they looked cool. The Connection Machine, a 65,536-processor parallel computer designed in the mid-1980s, was a black cube with one side covered with a grid of red blinkenlights; the sales demo had them evolving life patterns. A few years later the ill-fated BeBox (a personal computer designed to run the BeOS operating system) featured twin rows of blinkenlights on the case front. When Be, Inc. decided to get out of the hardware business in 1996 and instead ported their OS to the PowerPC and later to the Intel architecture, many users suffered severely from the absence of their beloved blinkenlights. Before long an external version of the blinkenlights driven by a PC serial port became available; there is some sort of plot symmetry in the fact that it was assembled by a German.
Finally, a version updated for the Internet has been seen on news.admin.net-abuse.email:
ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS! Das Internet is nicht fuer gefingerclicken und giffengrabben. Ist easy droppenpacket der routers und overloaden der backbone mit der spammen und der me-tooen. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das mausklicken sichtseeren keepen das bandwit-spewin hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das cursorblinken.
This newest version partly reflects reports that the word ‘blinkenlights’ is (in 1999) undergoing something of a revival in usage, but applied to networking equipment. The transmit and receive lights on routers, activity lights on switches and hubs, and other network equipment often blink in visually pleasing and seemingly coordinated ways. Although this is different in some ways from register readings, a tall stack of Cisco equipment or a 19-inch rack of ISDN terminals can provoke a similar feeling of hypnotic awe, especially in a darkened network operations center or server room.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:09 AM ----- BODY: /blit/ vt.
1. [common] To copy a large array of bits from one part of a
computer's memory to another part, particularly when the memory is being
used to determine what is shown on a display screen. The storage
allocator picks through the table and copies the good parts up into high
memory, and then blits it all back down again.
See
bitblt, BLT,
dd, cat,
blast, snarf. More
generally, to perform some operation (such as toggling) on a large array of
bits while moving them.
2. [historical, rare] Sometimes all-capitalized as BLIT: an early experimental bit-mapped terminal
designed by Rob Pike at Bell Labs, later commercialized as the AT&T
5620. (The folk etymology from Bell Labs Intelligent
Terminal
is incorrect. Its creators liked to claim that
Blit
stood for the Bacon, Lettuce, and Interactive
Tomato.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blitter DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:08 AM ----- BODY: /blit´r/ n.
[common] A special-purpose chip or hardware system built to perform blit operations, esp. used for fast implementation of bit-mapped graphics. The Commodore Amiga and a few other micros have these, but since 1990 the trend has been away from them (however, see cycle of reincarnation). Syn. raster blaster.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blivet DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:07 AM ----- BODY: /bliv'@t/ n.
[allegedly from a World War II military term meaning ten
pounds of manure in a five-pound bag
]
1. An intractable problem.
2. A crucial piece of hardware that can't be fixed or replaced if it breaks.
3. A tool that has been hacked over by so many incompetent programmers that it has become an unmaintainable tissue of hacks.
4. An out-of-control but unkillable development effort.
5. An embarrassing bug that pops up during a customer demo.
6. In the subjargon of computer security specialists, a denial-of-service attack performed by hogging limited resources that have no access controls (for example, shared spool space on a multi-user system).
This term has other meanings in other technical cultures; among experimental physicists and hardware engineers of various kinds it seems to mean any random object of unknown purpose (similar to hackish use of frob). It has also been used to describe an amusing trick-the-eye drawing resembling a three-pronged fork that appears to depict a three-dimensional object until one realizes that the parts fit together in an impossible way.
This is a blivet
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bloatware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:06 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] Software that provides minimal functionality while requiring a disproportionate amount of diskspace and memory. Especially used for application and OS upgrades. This term is very common in the Windows/NT world. So is its cause.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BLOB DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:05 AM ----- BODY:
1. n. [acronym: Binary Large OBject] Used by database people to refer to any random large block of bits that needs to be stored in a database, such as a picture or sound file. The essential point about a BLOB is that it's an object that cannot be interpreted within the database itself.
2. v. To
mailbomb someone by sending a BLOB to him/her;
esp. used as a mild threat. If that program crashes again, I'm
going to BLOB the core dump to you.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: block DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:04 AM ----- BODY: v.
[common; from process scheduling terminology in OS theory]
1. vi. To delay or sit idle
while waiting for something. We're blocking until everyone gets
here.
Compare busy-wait.
2. block on vt. To block, waiting for (something).
Lunch is blocked on Phil's arrival.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blog DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:03 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] Short for weblog, an on-line web-zine or diary (usually with facilities for reader comments and discussion threads) made accessible through the World Wide Web. This term is widespread and readily forms derivatives, of which the best known may be blogosphere.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: Bloggs Family DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:02 AM ----- BODY: n.
An imaginary family consisting of Fred and Mary Bloggs and their
children. Used as a standard example in knowledge representation to show
the difference between extensional and intensional objects. For example,
every occurrence of Fred Bloggs
is the same unique person,
whereas occurrences of person
may refer to different people.
Members of the Bloggs family have been known to pop up in bizarre places
such as the old DEC Telephone Directory. Compare
Dr. Fred Mbogo;
J. Random Hacker; Fred Foobar.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blogosphere DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:01 AM ----- BODY:
The totality of all blogs. A culture heavily overlapping with but not coincident with hackerdom; a few of its key coinages (blogrolling, fisking, anti-idiotarianism) are recorded in this lexicon for flavor. Bloggers often divide themselves into warbloggers and techbloggers. The techbloggers write about technology and technology policy, while the warbloggers are more politically focused and tend to be preoccupied with U.S. and world response to the post-9/11 war against terrorism. The overlap with hackerdom is heaviest among the techbloggers, but several of the most prominent warbloggers are also hackers. Bloggers in general tend to be aware of and sympathetic to the hacker culture.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blogrolling DATE: 05/15/2003 10:57:00 AM ----- BODY:
[From the American political term ‘logrolling’, for supporting another's pet bill in the legislature in exchange for reciprocal support,] When you hotlink to other bloggers' blogs (and-or other bloggers' specific blog entries) in your blog, you are blogrolling. This is frequently reciprocal.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blow an EPROM DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:59 AM ----- BODY: /bloh @n ee´prom/ v.
(alt.: blast an EPROM, burn an EPROM) To program a read-only memory, e.g.: for use with an embedded system. This term arose because the programming process for the Programmable Read-Only Memories (PROMs) that preceded present-day Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memories (EPROMs) involved intentionally blowing tiny electrical fuses on the chip. The usage lives on (it's too vivid and expressive to discard) even though the write process on EPROMs is nondestructive.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blow away DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:58 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To remove (files and directories) from permanent storage, generally
by accident. He reformatted the wrong partition and blew away last
night's netnews.
Oppose nuke.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blow out DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:57 AM ----- BODY: vi.
[prob.: from mining and tunneling jargon] Of software, to fail spectacularly; almost as serious as crash and burn. See blow past, blow up, die horribly.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blow past DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:56 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To blow out despite a safeguard. The
server blew past the 5K reserve buffer.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blow up DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:55 AM ----- BODY: vi.
1. [scientific computation] To become unstable. Suggests that the computation is diverging so rapidly that it will soon overflow or at least go nonlinear.
2. Syn. blow out.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BLT DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:54 AM ----- BODY: /B·L·T/, /bl@t/ or (rarely) /belt/ n.,vt.
Synonym for blit. This is the original form
of blit and the ancestor of
bitblt. It referred to any large bit-field copy or
move operation (one resource-intensive memory-shuffling operation done on
pre-paged versions of ITS, WAITS, and TOPS-10 was sardonically referred to
as The Big BLT
). The jargon usage has outlasted the
PDP-10 BLock Transfer instruction from which
BLT derives; nowadays, the assembler mnemonic
BLT almost always means Branch if Less Than
zero
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blue box DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:53 AM ----- BODY:
n.
1. obs. Once upon a time, before all-digital switches made it
possible for the phone companies to move them out of band, one could
actually hear the switching tones used to route long-distance calls. Early
phreakers built devices called blue boxes that could reproduce these tones,
which could be used to commandeer portions of the phone network. (This was
not as hard as it may sound; one early phreak acquired the sobriquet
Captain Crunch
after he proved that he could generate
switching tones with a plastic whistle pulled out of a box of Captain
Crunch cereal!) There were other colors of box with more specialized
phreaking uses; red boxes, black boxes, silver boxes, etc. There were
boxes of other
colors as well, but the blue box was the original and
archetype.
2. n. An IBM machine, especially a large (non-PC) one.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: Blue Glue DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM; obs.] IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture), an incredibly
losing and bletcherous
communications protocol once widely favored at commercial shops that didn't
know any better (like other proprietary networking protocols, it became
obsolete and effectively disappeared after the Internet explosion c.1994).
The official IBM definition is that which binds blue boxes
together.
See fear and loathing. It may not
be irrelevant that Blue Glue is the trade name of a 3M product that is
commonly used to hold down the carpet squares to the removable panel floors
common in dinosaur pens. A correspondent at
U. Minn. reports that the CS department there has about 80 bottles of the
stuff hanging about, so they often refer to any messy work to be done as
using the blue glue.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blue goo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:51 AM ----- BODY: n.
Term for ‘police’ nanobots
intended to prevent gray goo, denature hazardous
waste, destroy pollution, put ozone back into the stratosphere, prevent
halitosis, and promote truth, justice, and the American way, etc. The term
Blue Goo
can be found in Dr. Seuss's Fox In
Socks to refer to a substance much like bubblegum.
‘Would you like to chew blue goo, sir?’. See
nanotechnology.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: Blue Screen of Death DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:50 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] This term is closely related to the older Black Screen of Death but much more common (many non-hackers have picked it up). Due to the extreme fragility and bugginess of Microsoft Windows, misbehaving applications can readily crash the OS (and the OS sometimes crashes itself spontaneously). The Blue Screen of Death, sometimes decorated with hex error codes, is what you get when this happens. (Commonly abbreviated BSOD.) The following entry from the Salon Haiku Contest, seems to have predated popular use of the term:
Windows NT crashed. I am the Blue Screen of Death No one hears your screams.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blue wire DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:49 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] Patch wires (esp. 30 AWG gauge) added to circuit boards at the factory to correct design or fabrication problems. Blue wire is not necessarily blue, the term describes function rather than color. These may be necessary if there hasn't been time to design and qualify another board version. In Great Britain this can be bodge wire, after mainstream slang bodge for a clumsy improvisation or sloppy job of work. Compare purple wire, red wire, yellow wire, pink wire.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: blurgle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:48 AM ----- BODY: /bler´gl/ n.
[UK] Spoken metasyntactic variable, to
indicate some text that is obvious from context, or which is already
known. If several words are to be replaced, blurgle may well be doubled or
tripled. To look for something in several files use ‘grep
string blurgle blurgle’.
In each case, blurgle
blurgle
would be understood to be replaced by the file you wished
to search. Compare mumble, sense 7.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BNF DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:47 AM ----- BODY: /B·N·F/ n.
1. [techspeak] Acronym for Backus Normal Form (later retronymed to Backus-Naur Form because BNF was not in fact a normal form), a metasyntactic notation used to specify the syntax of programming languages, command sets, and the like. Widely used for language descriptions but seldom documented anywhere, so that it must usually be learned by osmosis from other hackers. Consider this BNF for a U.S. postal address:
<postal-address> ::= <name-part> <street-address> <zip-part> <personal-part> ::= <name> | <initial> "." <name-part> ::= <personal-part> <last-name> [<jr-part>] <EOL> | <personal-part> <name-part> <street-address> ::= [<apt>] <house-num> <street-name> <EOL> <zip-part> ::= <town-name> "," <state-code> <ZIP-code> <EOL>
This translates into English as: A postal-address consists of
a name-part, followed by a street-address part, followed by a zip-code
part. A personal-part consists of either a first name or an initial
followed by a dot. A name-part consists of either: a personal-part
followed by a last name followed by an optional jr-part (Jr., Sr., or
dynastic number) and end-of-line, or a personal part followed by a name
part (this rule illustrates the use of recursion in BNFs, covering the case
of people who use multiple first and middle names and/or initials). A
street address consists of an optional apartment specifier, followed by a
street number, followed by a street name. A zip-part consists of a
town-name, followed by a comma, followed by a state code, followed by a
ZIP-code followed by an end-of-line.
Note that many things (such as
the format of a personal-part, apartment specifier, or ZIP-code) are left
unspecified. These are presumed to be obvious from context or detailed
somewhere nearby. See also parse.
2. Any of a number of variants and extensions of BNF proper,
possibly containing some or all of the regexp
wildcards such as *
or +
. In fact the example above isn't the pure form
invented for the Algol-60 report; it uses []
, which was introduced a few years later in IBM's
PL/I definition but is now universally recognized.
3. In science-fiction fandom, a ‘Big-Name Fan’ (someone famous or notorious). Years ago a fan started handing out black-on-green BNF buttons at SF conventions; this confused the hacker contingent terribly.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: boa DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:46 AM ----- BODY: [IBM] n.
Any one of the fat cables that lurk under the floor in a dinosaur pen. Possibly so called because they display a ferocious life of their own when you try to lay them straight and flat after they have been coiled for some time. It is rumored within IBM that channel cables for the 370 are limited to 200 feet because beyond that length the boas get dangerous — and it is worth noting that one of the major cable makers uses the trademark ‘Anaconda’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: board DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:45 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. In-context synonym for bboard; sometimes used even for Usenet newsgroups (but see usage note under bboard, sense 1).
2. An electronic circuit board.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: boat anchor DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:44 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common; from ham radio]
1. Like doorstop but more severe; implies
that the offending hardware is irreversibly dead or useless. That
was a working motherboard once. One lightning strike later, instant boat
anchor!
2. A person who just takes up space.
3. Obsolete but still working hardware, especially when used of an old, bulky, quirky system; originally a term of annoyance, but became more and more affectionate as the hardware became more and more obsolete.
Auctioneers use this term for a large, undesirable object such as a
washing machine; actual boating enthusiasts, however, use mooring
anchor
for frustrating (not actually useless) equipment.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bob DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:43 AM ----- BODY: n.
At Demon Internet, all
tech support personnel are called Bob
. (Female support
personnel have an option on Bobette
). This has nothing to
do with Bob the divine drilling-equipment salesman of the
Church of the SubGenius. Nor is it acronymized from Brother Of
BOFH
, though all parties agree it could have
been. Rather, it was triggered by an unusually large draft of new
tech-support people in 1995. It was observed that there would be much
duplication of names. To ease the confusion, it was decided that all
support techs would henceforth be known as Bob
, and identity
badges were created labelled Bob 1
and Bob 2
.
(No, we never got any further
reports a witness).
The reason for Bob
rather than anything else is due to
a luser calling and asking to speak to
Bob
, despite the fact that no Bob
was
currently working for Tech Support. Since we all know the customer
is always right
, it was decided that there had to be at least one
Bob
on duty at all times, just in case.
This sillyness snowballed inexorably. Shift leaders and managers
began to refer to their groups of bobs
. Whole ranks of
support machines were set up (and still exist in the DNS as of 1999) as
bob1 through bobN. Then came alt.tech-support.recovery, and it was filled
with Demon support personnel. They all referred to themselves, and to
others, as bob
, and after a while it caught on. There is
now a Bob
Code describing the Bob nature.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bodge DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:42 AM ----- BODY:
[Commonwealth hackish] Syn. kludge or
hack (sense 1). I'll bodge this in now and
fix it later
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BOF DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:41 AM ----- BODY: /B·O·F/ or /bof/ n.
1. [common] Abbreviation for the phrase Birds Of a
Feather
(flocking together), an informal discussion group and/or
bull session scheduled on a conference program. It is not clear where or
when this term originated, but it is now associated with the USENIX
conferences for Unix techies and was already established there by 1984. It
was used earlier than that at DECUS conferences and is reported to have
been common at SHARE meetings as far back as the early 1960s.
2. Acronym, Beginning of File
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BOFH DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:40 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] Acronym, Bastard Operator From Hell. A system
administrator with absolutely no tolerance for
lusers. You say you need more filespace?
<massive-global-delete> Seems to me you have plenty left...
Many BOFHs (and others who would be BOFHs if they could get away with it)
hang out in the newsgroup alt.sysadmin.recovery, although there has
also been created a top-level newsgroup hierarchy (bofh.*) of their own.
Several people have written stories about BOFHs. The set usually considered canonical is by Simon Travaglia and may be found at the Bastard Home Page. BOFHs and BOFH wannabes hang out on scary devil monastery and wield LARTs.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bogo-sort DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:39 AM ----- BODY: /boh`goh·sort´/ n.
(var.: stupid-sort) The
archetypical perversely awful algorithm (as opposed to
bubble sort, which is merely the generic bad
algorithm). Bogo-sort is equivalent to repeatedly throwing a deck of cards
in the air, picking them up at random, and then testing whether they are in
order. It serves as a sort of canonical example of awfulness. Looking at
a program and seeing a dumb algorithm, one might say Oh, I see, this
program uses bogo-sort.
Esp. appropriate for algorithms with
factorial or super-exponential running time in the average case and
probabilistically infinite worst-case running time. Compare
bogus, brute force.
A spectacular variant of bogo-sort has been proposed which has the interesting property that, if the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, it can sort an arbitrarily large array in linear time. (In the Many-Worlds model, the result of any quantum action is to split the universe-before into a sheaf of universes-after, one for each possible way the state vector can collapse; in any one of the universes-after the result appears random.) The steps are: 1. Permute the array randomly using a quantum process, 2. If the array is not sorted, destroy the universe (checking that the list is sorted requires O(n) time). Implementation of step 2 is left as an exercise for the reader.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bogometer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:38 AM ----- BODY: /boh·gom'·@t·er/ n.
A notional instrument for measuring bogosity. Compare the Troll-O-Meter and the ‘wankometer’ described in the wank entry; see also bogus.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BogoMIPS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:37 AM ----- BODY: /bo´go·mips/ n.
The number of million times a second a processor can do absolutely nothing. The Linux OS measures BogoMIPS at startup in order to calibrate some soft timing loops that will be used later on; details at the BogoMIPS mini-HOWTO. The name Linus chose, of course, is an ironic comment on the uselessness of all other MIPS figures.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bogon DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:36 AM ----- BODY: /boh´gon/ n.
[very common; by analogy with proton/electron/neutron, but doubtless reinforced after 1980 by the similarity to Douglas Adams's ‘Vogons’; see the Bibliography in Appendix C and note that Arthur Dent actually mispronounces ‘Vogons’ as ‘Bogons’ at one point]
1. The elementary particle of bogosity (see
quantum bogodynamics). For instance, the Ethernet is emitting
bogons again
means that it is broken or acting in an erratic or
bogus fashion.
2. A query packet sent from a TCP/IP domain resolver to a root server, having the reply bit set instead of the query bit.
3. Any bogus or incorrectly formed packet sent on a network.
4. By synecdoche, used to refer to any bogus thing, as in I'd
like to go to lunch with you but I've got to go to the weekly staff
bogon
.
5. A person who is bogus or who says bogus things. This was historically the original usage, but has been overtaken by its derivative senses 1--4. See also bogosity, bogus; compare psyton, fat electrons, magic smoke.
The bogon has become the type case for a whole bestiary of nonce
particle names, including the ‘clutron’ or ‘cluon’
(indivisible particle of cluefulness, obviously the antiparticle of the
bogon) and the futon (elementary particle of
randomness, or sometimes of lameness). These are
not so much live usages in themselves as examples of a live meta-usage:
that is, it has become a standard joke or linguistic maneuver to
explain
otherwise mysterious circumstances by inventing
nonce particle names. And these imply nonce particle theories, with all
their dignity or lack thereof (we might note parenthetically that this is a
generalization from (bogus particle) theories
to
bogus (particle theories)
!). Perhaps such particles are the
modern-day equivalents of trolls and wood-nymphs as standard
starting-points around which to construct explanatory myths. Of course,
playing on an existing word (as in the ‘futon’) yields
additional flavor. Compare magic smoke.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bogon filter DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:35 AM ----- BODY: /boh´gon fil'tr/ n.
Any device, software or hardware, that limits or suppresses the flow
and/or emission of bogons. Engineering hacked a bogon filter
between the Cray and the VAXen, and now we're getting fewer dropped
packets.
See also bogosity,
bogus.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bogon flux DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:34 AM ----- BODY: /boh´gon fluhks/ n.
A measure of a supposed field of bogosity
emitted by a speaker, measured by a bogometer; as a
speaker starts to wander into increasing bogosity a listener might say
Warning, warning, bogon flux is rising
. See
quantum bogodynamics.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bogosity DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:33 AM ----- BODY: /boh·go´s@·tee/ n.
1. [orig. CMU, now very common] The degree to which something is
bogus. Bogosity is measured with a
bogometer; in a seminar, when a speaker says
something bogus, a listener might raise his hand and say My
bogometer just triggered
. More extremely, You just pinned
my bogometer
means you just said or did something so outrageously
bogus that it is off the scale, pinning the bogometer needle at the highest
possible reading (one might also say You just redlined my
bogometer
). The agreed-upon unit of bogosity is the
microLenat.
2. The potential field generated by a bogon flux; see quantum bogodynamics. See also bogon flux, bogon filter, bogus.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bogotify DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:32 AM ----- BODY: /boh·go´t@·fi:/ vt.
To make or become bogus. A program that has been changed so many times as to become completely disorganized has become bogotified. If you tighten a nut too hard and strip the threads on the bolt, the bolt has become bogotified and you had better not use it any more. This coinage led to the notional autobogotiphobia defined as ‘the fear of becoming bogotified’; but is not clear that the latter has ever been ‘live’ jargon rather than a self-conscious joke in jargon about jargon. See also bogosity, bogus.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bogue out DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:31 AM ----- BODY: /bohg owt/ vi.
To become bogus, suddenly and unexpectedly. His talk was
relatively sane until somebody asked him a trick question; then he bogued
out and did nothing but flame afterwards.
See also bogosity,
bogus.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bogus DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:30 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. Non-functional. Your patches are bogus.
2. Useless. OPCON is a bogus program.
3. False. Your arguments are bogus.
4. Incorrect. That algorithm is bogus.
5. Unbelievable. You claim to have solved the halting
problem for Turing Machines? That's totally bogus.
6. Silly. Stop writing those bogus sagas.
Astrology is bogus. So is a bolt that is obviously about to break. So is someone who makes blatantly false claims to have solved a scientific problem. (This word seems to have some, but not all, of the connotations of random — mostly the negative ones.)
It is claimed that bogus was originally used in the hackish sense at Princeton in the late 1960s. It was spread to CMU and Yale by Michael Shamos, a migratory Princeton alumnus. A glossary of bogus words was compiled at Yale when the word was first popularized there about 1975-76. These coinages spread into hackerdom from CMU and MIT. Most of them remained wordplay objects rather than actual vocabulary items or live metaphors. Examples: amboguous (having multiple bogus interpretations); bogotissimo (in a gloriously bogus manner); bogotophile (one who is pathologically fascinated by the bogus); paleobogology (the study of primeval bogosity).
Some bogowords, however, obtained sufficient live currency to be listed elsewhere in this lexicon; see bogometer, bogon, bogotify, and quantum bogodynamics and the related but unlisted Dr. Fred Mbogo.
By the early 1980s ‘bogus’ was also current in something
like hacker usage sense in West Coast teen slang, and it had gone
mainstream by 1985. A correspondent from Cambridge reports, by contrast,
that these uses of bogus grate on
British nerves; in Britain the word means, rather specifically,
‘counterfeit’, as in a bogus 10-pound note
.
According to Merriam-Webster, the word dates back to 1825 and originally
referred to a counterfeiting machine.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: Bohr bug DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:29 AM ----- BODY: /bohr buhg/ n.
[from quantum physics] A repeatable bug; one that manifests reliably under a possibly unknown but well-defined set of conditions. Antonym of heisenbug; see also mandelbug, schroedinbug.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: boink DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:28 AM ----- BODY: /boynk/
1. [Usenet: variously ascribed to the TV series Cheers, Moonlighting, and Soap]v. To have sex with; compare bounce, sense 3. (This is mainstream slang.) In Commonwealth hackish the variant ‘bonk’ is more common.
2. n. After the original Peter Korn ‘Boinkon’ Usenet parties, used for almost any net social gathering, e.g., Miniboink, a small boink held by Nancy Gillett in 1988; Minniboink, a Boinkcon in Minnesota in 1989; Humpdayboinks, Wednesday get-togethers held in the San Francisco Bay Area. Compare @-party.
3. Var of bonk; see bonk/oif.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bomb DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:27 AM ----- BODY:
1. v. General synonym for
crash (sense 1) except that it is not used as a
noun; esp. used of software or OS failures. Don't run Empire with
less than 32K stack, it'll bomb.
2. n.,v. Atari ST and Macintosh equivalents of a Unix panic or Amiga guru meditation, in which icons of little black-powder bombs or mushroom clouds are displayed, indicating that the system has died. On the Mac, this may be accompanied by a decimal (or occasionally hexadecimal) number indicating what went wrong, similar to the Amiga guru meditation number. MS-DOS machines tend to get locked up in this situation.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bondage-and-discipline language DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:26 AM ----- BODY: n.
A language (such as Pascal, Ada, APL, or
Prolog) that, though ostensibly general-purpose, is designed so as to
enforce an author's theory of ‘right programming’ even though
said theory is demonstrably inadequate for systems hacking or even vanilla
general-purpose programming. Often abbreviated ‘B&D’;
thus, one may speak of things having the B&D nature
.
See Pascal; oppose languages of choice.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bonk/oif DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:25 AM ----- BODY: /bonk/, /oyf/ interj.
In the U.S. MUD community, it has become
traditional to express pique or censure by bonking the offending person. Convention holds
that one should acknowledge a bonk by saying oif!
and there
is a myth to the effect that failing to do so upsets the cosmic bonk/oif
balance, causing much trouble in the universe. Some MUDs have implemented
special commands for bonking and oifing. Note: in parts of the
U.K. ‘bonk’ is a sexually loaded slang term; care is advised in
transatlantic conversations (see boink).
Commonwealth hackers report a similar convention involving the
‘fish/bang’ balance. See also talk mode.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: book titles DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:24 AM ----- BODY:
There is a tradition in hackerdom of informally tagging important textbooks and standards documents with the dominant color of their covers or with some other conspicuous feature of the cover. Many of these are described in this lexicon under their own entries. See Aluminum Book, Camel Book, Cinderella Book, daemon book, Dragon Book, Orange Book, Purple Book, Wizard Book, and bible; see also rainbow series. Since about 1993 this tradition has gotten a boost from the popular O'Reilly and Associates line of technical books, which usually feature some kind of exotic animal on the cover and are often called by the name of that animal.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: boot DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:23 AM ----- BODY: v.,n.
[techspeak; from ‘by one's bootstraps’] To load and initialize the operating system on a machine. This usage is no longer jargon (having passed into techspeak) but has given rise to some derivatives that are still jargon.
The derivative reboot implies
that the machine hasn't been down for long, or that the boot is a
bounce (sense 4) intended to clear some state of
wedgitude. This is sometimes used of human thought
processes, as in the following exchange: You've lost me.
OK, reboot. Here's the theory....
This term is also found in the variants cold boot (from power-off condition) and warm boot (with the CPU and all devices already powered up, as after a hardware reset or software crash).
Another variant: soft boot,
reinitialization of only part of a system, under control of other software
still running: If you're running the mess-dos
emulator, control-alt-insert will cause a soft-boot of the emulator, while
leaving the rest of the system running.
Opposed to this there is hard
boot, which connotes hostility towards or frustration with the
machine being booted: I'll have to hard-boot this losing
Sun.
I recommend booting it hard.
One often
hard-boots by performing a power cycle.
Historical note: this term derives from bootstrap loader, a short program that was read in from cards or paper tape, or toggled in from the front panel switches. This program was always very short (great efforts were expended on making it short in order to minimize the labor and chance of error involved in toggling it in), but was just smart enough to read in a slightly more complex program (usually from a card or paper tape reader), to which it handed control; this program in turn was smart enough to read the application or operating system from a magnetic tape drive or disk drive. Thus, in successive steps, the computer ‘pulled itself up by its bootstraps’ to a useful operating state. Nowadays the bootstrap is usually found in ROM or EPROM, and reads the first stage in from a fixed location on the disk, called the ‘boot block’. When this program gains control, it is powerful enough to load the actual OS and hand control over to it.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: Borg DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:22 AM ----- BODY: n.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation the Borg is
a species of cyborg that ruthlessly seeks to incorporate all sentient life
into itself; their slogan is You will be assimilated. Resistance is
futile.
In hacker parlance, the Borg is usually
Microsoft, which is thought to be trying just as
ruthlessly to assimilate all computers and the entire Internet to itself
(there is a widely circulated image of Bill Gates as a Borg). Being forced
to use Windows or NT is often referred to as being Borged
.
Interestingly, the Halloween Documents reveal that
this jargon is live within Microsoft itself. See also
Evil Empire,
Internet Exploiter.
Other companies, notably Intel and UUNet, have also occasionally been
equated to the Borg. In IETF circles, where direct pressure from Microsoft
is not a daily reality, the Borg is sometimes Cisco. This usage
commemorates their tendency to pay any price to hire talent away from their
competitors. In fact, at the Spring 1997 IETF, a large number of ex-Cisco
employees, all former members of Routing Geeks, showed up with t-shirts
printed with Recovering Borg
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: borken DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:21 AM ----- BODY: adj.
(also borked) Common deliberate typo for «broken’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bot DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:20 AM ----- BODY: n
[common on IRC, MUD and among gamers; from robot
]
1. An IRC or MUD user who is actually a program. On IRC, typically the robot provides some useful service. Examples are NickServ, which tries to prevent random users from adopting nicks already claimed by others, and MsgServ, which allows one to send asynchronous messages to be delivered when the recipient signs on. Also common are ‘annoybots’, such as KissServ, which perform no useful function except to send cute messages to other people. Service bots are less common on MUDs; but some others, such as the ‘Julia’ bot active in 1990--91, have been remarkably impressive Turing-test experiments, able to pass as human for as long as ten or fifteen minutes of conversation.
2. An AI-controlled player in a computer game (especially a first-person shooter such as Quake) which, unlike ordinary monsters, operates like a human-controlled player, with access to a player's weapons and abilities. An example can be found at http://www.telefragged.com/thefatal/.
3. Term used, though less commonly, for a web
spider. The file for controlling spider behavior on
your site is officially the Robots Exclusion File
and its
URL is http://<somehost>/robots.txt
)
Note that bots in all senses were ‘robots’ when the terms first appeared in the early 1990s, but the shortened form is now habitual.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bottom feeder DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:19 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. An Internet user that leeches off ISPs — the sort you can never provide good enough services for, always complains about the price, no matter how low it may be, and will bolt off to another service the moment there is even the slimmest price difference. While most bottom feeders infest free or almost free services such as AOL, MSN, and Hotmail, too many flock to whomever happens to be the cheapest regional ISP at the time. Bottom feeders are often the classic problem user, known for unleashing spam, flamage, and other breaches of netiquette.
2. Syn. for slopsucker, derived from the fishermen's and naturalists' term for finny creatures who subsist on the primordial ooze. (This sense is older.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bottom-post DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:18 AM ----- BODY: v.
In a news or mail reply, to put the response to a news or email message after the quoted content from the parent message. This is correct form, and until around 2000 was so universal on the Internet that neither the term ‘bottom-post’ nor its antonym top-post existed. Hackers consider that the best practice is actually to excerpt only the relevent portions of the parent message, then intersperse the poster's response in such a way that each section of response appears directly after the excerpt it applies to. This reduces message bulk, keeps thread content in a logical order, and facilitates reading.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bottom-up implementation DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:17 AM ----- BODY: n.
Hackish opposite of the techspeak term top-down design. It has been received wisdom in most programming cultures that it is best to design from higher levels of abstraction down to lower, specifying sequences of action in increasing detail until you get to actual code. Hackers often find (especially in exploratory designs that cannot be closely specified in advance) that it works best to build things in the opposite order, by writing and testing a clean set of primitive operations and then knitting them together. Naively applied, this leads to hacked-together bottom-up implementations; a more sophisticated response is middle-out implementation, in which scratch code within primitives at the mid-level of the system is gradually replaced with a more polished version of the lowest level at the same time the structure above the midlevel is being built.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bounce DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:16 AM ----- BODY: v.
1. [common; perhaps by analogy to a bouncing check] An electronic mail message that is undeliverable and returns an error notification to the sender is said to bounce. See also bounce message.
2. To engage in sexual intercourse; prob.: from the expression
‘bouncing the mattress’, but influenced by Roo's psychosexually
loaded Try bouncing me, Tigger!
from the
Winnie-the-Pooh books. Compare
boink.
3. To casually reboot a system in order to clear up a transient problem (possibly editing a configuration file in the process, if it is one that is only re-read at boot time). Reported primarily among VMS and Unix users.
4. [VM/CMS programmers] Automatic warm-start
of a machine after an error. I logged on this morning and found it
had bounced 7 times during the night
6. [IBM] To power cycle a peripheral in order to reset it.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bounce message DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] Notification message returned to sender by a site unable to relay email to the intended Internet address recipient or the next link in a bang path (see bounce, sense 1). Reasons might include a nonexistent or misspelled username or a down relay site. Bounce messages can themselves fail, with occasionally ugly results; see sorcerer's apprentice mode and software laser. The terms bounce mail and barfmail are also common.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: boustrophedon DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:14 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from a Greek word for turning like an ox while plowing] An ancient method of writing using alternate left-to-right and right-to-left lines. This term is actually philologists' techspeak and typesetters' jargon. Erudite hackers use it for an optimization performed by some computer typesetting software and moving-head printers. The adverbial form ‘boustrophedonically’ is also found (hackers purely love constructions like this).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: box DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:13 AM ----- BODY: n.
A computer; esp. in the construction foo box where foo
is some functional qualifier, like graphics, or the name of an OS (thus, Unix box, Windows
box, etc.) We preprocess the data on Unix boxes before
handing it up to the mainframe.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: boxed comments DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:12 AM ----- BODY: n.
Comments (explanatory notes attached to program instructions) that occupy several lines by themselves; so called because in assembler and C code they are often surrounded by a box in a style something like this: /************************************************* * * This is a boxed comment in C style * *************************************************/
Common variants of this style omit the asterisks in column 2 or add a matching row of asterisks closing the right side of the box. The sparest variant omits all but the comment delimiters themselves; the ‘box’ is implied. Oppose winged comments.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: boxen DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:11 AM ----- BODY: /bok´sn/ pl.n.
[very common; by analogy with VAXen] Fanciful plural of box often encountered in the phrase ‘Unix boxen’, used to describe commodity Unix hardware. The connotation is that any two Unix boxen are interchangeable.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: boxology DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:10 AM ----- BODY: /bok·sol'@·jee/ n.
Syn. ASCII art. This term implies a more
restricted domain, that of box-and-arrow drawings. His report has a
lot of boxology in it.
Compare
macrology.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bozotic DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:09 AM ----- BODY: /boh·zoh´tik/ or /boh·zo´tik/ adj.
[from the name of a TV clown even more losing than Ronald McDonald] Resembling or having the quality of a bozo; that is, clownish, ludicrously wrong, unintentionally humorous. Compare wonky, demented. Note that the noun ‘bozo’ occurs in slang, but the mainstream adjectival form would be ‘bozo-like’ or (in New England) ‘bozoish’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: brain dump DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:08 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] The act of telling someone everything one knows about a
particular topic or project. Typically used when someone is going to let a
new party maintain a piece of code. Conceptually analogous to an operating
system core dump in that it saves a lot of useful
state before an exit. You'll have to give me
a brain dump on FOOBAR before you start your new job at HackerCorp.
See core dump (sense 4). At Sun, this is also known
as TOI (transfer of
information).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: brain fart DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:07 AM ----- BODY: n.
The actual result of a braino, as opposed to
the mental glitch that is the braino itself. E.g., typing dir
on a Unix box after a session with DOS.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: brain-damaged DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:06 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. [common; generalization of Honeywell Brain Damage
(HBD), a theoretical disease invented to explain certain utter cretinisms
in Honeywell Multics] adj. Obviously wrong;
cretinous; demented. There
is an implication that the person responsible must have suffered brain
damage, because he should have known better. Calling something
brain-damaged is really bad; it also implies it is unusable, and that its
failure to work is due to poor design rather than some accident.
Only six monocase characters per file name? Now
that's brain-damaged!
2. [esp. in the Mac world] May refer to free demonstration software that has been deliberately crippled in some way so as not to compete with the product it is intended to sell. Syn. crippleware.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: brain-dead DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:05 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[common] Brain-damaged in the extreme. It tends to imply terminal
design failure rather than malfunction or simple stupidity. This
comm program doesn't know how to send a break — how
brain-dead!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: braino DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:04 AM ----- BODY: /bray´no/ n.
Syn. for thinko. See also brain fart.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: brainwidth DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:03 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Great Britain] Analagous to bandwidth but
used strictly for human capacity to process information and especially to
multitask. Writing email is taking up most of my brainwidth right
now, I can't look at that Flash animation.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bread crumbs DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:02 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Debugging statements inserted into a program that emit output or log indicators of the program's state to a file so you can see where it dies or pin down the cause of surprising behavior. The term is probably a reference to the Hansel and Gretel story from the Brothers Grimm or the older French folktale of Thumbelina; in several variants of these, a character leaves a trail of bread crumbs so as not to get lost in the woods.
2. In user-interface design, any feature that allows some tracking of where you've been, like coloring visited links purple rather than blue in Netscape (also called footprinting).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: break DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:01 AM ----- BODY:
1. vt. To cause to be
broken (in any sense). Your latest patch to
the editor broke the paragraph commands.
2. v. (of a program) To stop temporarily, so that it may debugged. The place where it stops is a breakpoint.
3. [techspeak] vi. To send an RS-232 break (two character widths of line high) over a serial comm line.
4. [Unix] vi. To strike whatever key currently causes the tty driver to send SIGINT to the current process. Normally, break (sense 3), delete or control-C does this.
5. break break may be said to interrupt a conversation (this is an example of verb doubling). This usage comes from radio communications, which in turn probably came from landline telegraph/teleprinter usage, as badly abused in the Citizen's Band craze of the early 1980s.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: break-even point DATE: 05/15/2003 10:56:00 AM ----- BODY: n.
In the process of implementing a new computer language, the point at which the language is sufficiently effective that one can implement the language in itself. That is, for a new language called, hypothetically, FOOGOL, one has reached break-even when one can write a demonstration compiler for FOOGOL in FOOGOL, discard the original implementation language, and thereafter use working versions of FOOGOL to develop newer ones. This is an important milestone; see MFTL.
Since this entry was first written, several correspondents have reported that there actually was a compiler for a tiny Algol-like language called Foogol floating around on various VAXen in the early and mid-1980s. A FOOGOL implementation is available at the Retrocomputing Museum http://www.catb.org/retro/.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: breath-of-life packet DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:59 AM ----- BODY: n.
[XEROX PARC] An Ethernet packet that contains bootstrap (see boot) code, periodically sent out from a working computer to infuse the ‘breath of life’ into any computer on the network that has happened to crash. Machines depending on such packets have sufficient hardware or firmware code to wait for (or request) such a packet during the reboot process. See also dickless workstation.
The notional kiss-of-death packet, with a function complementary to that of a breath-of-life packet, is recommended for dealing with hosts that consume too many network resources. Though ‘kiss-of-death packet’ is usually used in jest, there is at least one documented instance of an Internet subnet with limited address-table slots in a gateway machine in which such packets were routinely used to compete for slots, rather like Christmas shoppers competing for scarce parking spaces.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: breedle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:58 AM ----- BODY: n.
See feep.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: Breidbart Index DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:57 AM ----- BODY: /bri:d´bart ind@ks/
A measurement of the severity of spam invented by long-time hacker Seth Breidbart, used for programming cancelbots. The Breidbart Index takes into account the fact that excessive multi-posting EMP is worse than excessive cross-posting ECP. The Breidbart Index is computed as follows: For each article in a spam, take the square-root of the number of newsgroups to which the article is posted. The Breidbart Index is the sum of the square roots of all of the posts in the spam. For example, one article posted to nine newsgroups and again to sixteen would have BI = sqrt(9) + sqrt(16) = 7. It is generally agreed that a spam is cancelable if the Breidbart Index exceeds 20.
The Breidbart Index accumulates over a 45-day window. Ten articles
yesterday and ten articles today and ten articles tomorrow add up to a
30-article spam. Spam fighters will often reset the count if you can
convince them that the spam was accidental and/or you have seen the error
of your ways and won't repeat it. Breidbart Index can accumulate over
multiple authors. For example, the Make Money Fast
pyramid
scheme exceeded a BI of 20 a long time ago, and is now considered
cancel on sight
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bricktext DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:56 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet: common] Text which is carefully composed to be right-justified (and sometimes to have a deliberate gutter at mid-page) without use of extra spaces, just through careful word-length choices. A minor art form. The best examples have something of the quality of imagist poetry.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bring X to its knees DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:55 AM ----- BODY: v.
[common] To present a machine, operating system, piece of software,
or algorithm with a load so extreme or pathological
that it grinds to a halt.: To bring a MicroVAX to its knees, try
twenty users running vi — or four running
EMACS.
Compare
hog.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: brittle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:54 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Said of software that is functional but easily broken by changes in operating environment or configuration, or by any minor tweak to the software itself. Also, any system that responds inappropriately and disastrously to abnormal but expected external stimuli; e.g., a file system that is usually totally scrambled by a power failure is said to be brittle. This term is often used to describe the results of a research effort that were never intended to be robust, but it can be applied to commercial software, which (due to closed-source development) displays the quality far more often than it ought to. Oppose robust.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: broadcast storm DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:53 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] An incorrect packet broadcast on a network that causes most hosts to respond all at once, typically with wrong answers that start the process over again. See network meltdown; compare mail storm.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: broken DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:52 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. Not working according to design (of programs). This is the mainstream sense.
2. Improperly designed, This sense carries a more or less disparaging implication that the designer should have known better, while sense 1 doesn't necessarily assign blame. Which of senses 1 or 2 is intended is conveyed by context and nonverbal cues.
3. Behaving strangely; especially (when used of people) exhibiting extreme depression.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: broken arrow DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:51 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] The error code displayed on line 25 of a 3270 terminal (or a
PC emulating a 3270) for various kinds of protocol violations and
unexpected
error conditions (including connection to a
down computer). On a PC, simulated with
‘->/_’, with the two center characters overstruck.
Note: to appreciate this term fully, it helps to know that
broken arrow
is also military jargon for an accident
involving nuclear weapons....
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: broken-ring network DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:50 AM ----- BODY:
Pejorative hackerism for token-ring network
, an early
and very slow LAN technology from IBM that lost the standards war to
Ethernet. Though token-ring survives in a few niche markets (such as
factory automation) that put a high premium on resistance to electrical
noise, the term is now (2000) primarily historical.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BrokenWindows DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:49 AM ----- BODY: n.
Abusive hackerism for the crufty and elephantine X environment on Sun machines; properly called ‘OpenWindows’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: broket DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:48 AM ----- BODY: /broh´k@t/ or /broh´ket`/ n.
[rare; by analogy with ‘bracket’: a ‘broken bracket’] Either of the characters < and >, when used as paired enclosing delimiters. This word originated as a contraction of the phrase ‘broken bracket’, that is, a bracket that is bent in the middle. (At MIT, and apparently in the Real World as well, these are usually called angle brackets.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: Brooks's Law DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:47 AM ----- BODY: prov.
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it
later
— a result of the fact that the expected advantage from
splitting development work among N
programmers is O(N) (that is, proportional
to N), but the complexity and
communications cost associated with coordinating and then merging their
work is O(N^2) (that is, proportional to
the square of N). The quote is from Fred
Brooks, a manager of IBM's OS/360 project and author of The
Mythical Man-Month (Addison-Wesley, 1975, ISBN 0-201-00650-2),
an excellent early book on software engineering. The myth in question has
been most tersely expressed as Programmer time is fungible
and Brooks established conclusively that it is not. Hackers have never
forgotten his advice (though it's not the whole story; see
bazaar); too often,
management still does. See also
creationism,
second-system effect, optimism.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: brown-paper-bag bug DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:46 AM ----- BODY: n.
A bug in a public software release that is so embarrassing that the author notionally wears a brown paper bag over his head for a while so he won't be recognized on the net. Entered popular usage after the early-1999 release of the first Linux 2.2, which had one. The phrase was used in Linus Torvalds's apology posting.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: browser DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:45 AM ----- BODY: n.
A program specifically designed to help users view and navigate hypertext, on-line documentation, or a database. While this general sense has been present in jargon for a long time, the proliferation of browsers for the World Wide Web after 1992 has made it much more popular and provided a central or default techspeak meaning of the word previously lacking in hacker usage. Nowadays, if someone mentions using a ‘browser’ without qualification, one may assume it is a Web browser.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BRS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:44 AM ----- BODY: /B·R·S/ n.
Syn. Big Red Switch. This abbreviation is fairly common on-line.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: brute force DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:43 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Describes a primitive programming style, one in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing power instead of using his or her own intelligence to simplify the problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive methods suited to small problems directly to large ones. The term can also be used in reference to programming style: brute-force programs are written in a heavyhanded, tedious way, full of repetition and devoid of any elegance or useful abstraction (see also brute force and ignorance).
The canonical example of a brute-force algorithm is associated with the ‘traveling salesman problem’ (TSP), a classical NP-hard problem: Suppose a person is in, say, Boston, and wishes to drive to N other cities. In what order should the cities be visited in order to minimize the distance travelled? The brute-force method is to simply generate all possible routes and compare the distances; while guaranteed to work and simple to implement, this algorithm is clearly very stupid in that it considers even obviously absurd routes (like going from Boston to Houston via San Francisco and New York, in that order). For very small N it works well, but it rapidly becomes absurdly inefficient when N increases (for N = 15, there are already 1,307,674,368,000 possible routes to consider, and for N = 1000 — well, see bignum). Sometimes, unfortunately, there is no better general solution than brute force. See also NP- and rubber-hose cryptanalysis.
A more simple-minded example of brute-force programming is finding the smallest number in a large list by first using an existing program to sort the list in ascending order, and then picking the first number off the front.
Whether brute-force programming should actually be considered stupid or not depends on the context; if the problem is not terribly big, the extra CPU time spent on a brute-force solution may cost less than the programmer time it would take to develop a more ‘intelligent’ algorithm. Additionally, a more intelligent algorithm may imply more long-term complexity cost and bug-chasing than are justified by the speed improvement.
Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix, is reported to have uttered the
epigram When in doubt, use brute force
. He probably
intended this as a ha ha only serious, but the
original Unix kernel's preference for simple, robust, and portable
algorithms over brittle ‘smart’ ones
does seem to have been a significant factor in the success of that OS.
Like so many other tradeoffs in software design, the choice between brute
force and complex, finely-tuned cleverness is often a difficult one that
requires both engineering savvy and delicate esthetic judgment.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: brute force and ignorance DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:42 AM ----- BODY: n.
A popular design technique at many software houses —
brute force coding unrelieved by any knowledge of
how problems have been previously solved in elegant ways. Dogmatic
adherence to design methodologies tends to encourage this sort of thing.
Characteristic of early larval stage programming;
unfortunately, many never outgrow it. Often abbreviated BFI: Gak,
they used a bubble sort! That's strictly from
BFI.
Compare bogosity. A very similar usage
is said to be mainstream in Great Britain.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BSD DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:41 AM ----- BODY: /B·S·D/ n.
[abbreviation for ‘Berkeley Software Distribution’] a family of Unix versions for the DEC VAX and PDP-11 developed by Bill Joy and others at Berzerkeley starting around 1977, incorporating paged virtual memory, TCP/IP networking enhancements, and many other features. The BSD versions (4.1, 4.2, and 4.3) and the commercial versions derived from them (SunOS, ULTRIX, and Mt. Xinu) held the technical lead in the Unix world until AT&T's successful standardization efforts after about 1986; descendants including Free/Open/NetBSD, BSD/OS and MacOS X are still widely popular. Note that BSD versions going back to 2.9 are often referred to by their version numbers alone, without the BSD prefix. See also Unix.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BSOD DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:40 AM ----- BODY: /B·S·O·D/
Very common abbreviation for Blue Screen of Death. Both spoken and written.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BUAF DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
[abbreviation, from alt.fan.warlord] Big Ugly ASCII Font — a special form of ASCII art. Various programs exist for rendering text strings into block, bloob, and pseudo-script fonts in cells between four and six character cells on a side; this is smaller than the letters generated by older banner (sense 2) programs. These are sometimes used to render one's name in a sig block, and are critically referred to as BUAFs. See warlording.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BUAG DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:38 AM ----- BODY: n.
[abbreviation, from alt.fan.warlord] Big Ugly ASCII Graphic. Pejorative term for ugly ASCII art, especially as found in sig blocks. For some reason, mutations of the head of Bart Simpson are particularly common in the least imaginative sig blocks. See warlording.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bubble sort DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:37 AM ----- BODY: n.
Techspeak for a particular 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. (However, it's been shown by repeated experiment that below about 5000 records bubble-sort is OK anyway.) 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bucky bits DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:36 AM ----- BODY: /buh´kee bits/ n.
1. [obs.] The bits produced by the CONTROL and META shift keys on a SAIL keyboard (octal 200 and 400 respectively), resulting in a 9-bit keyboard character set. The MIT AI TV (Knight) keyboards extended this with TOP and separate left and right CONTROL and META keys, resulting in a 12-bit character set; later, LISP Machines added such keys as SUPER, HYPER, and GREEK (see space-cadet keyboard).
2. By extension, bits associated with ‘extra’ shift keys on any keyboard, e.g., the ALT on an IBM PC or command and option keys on a Macintosh.
It has long been rumored that bucky bits were named for Buckminster Fuller during a period when he was consulting at Stanford. Actually, bucky bits were invented by Niklaus Wirth when he was at Stanford in 1964--65; he first suggested the idea of an EDIT key to set the 8th bit of an otherwise 7-bit ASCII character). It seems that, unknown to Wirth, certain Stanford hackers had privately nicknamed him ‘Bucky’ after a prominent portion of his dental anatomy, and this nickname transferred to the bit. Bucky-bit commands were used in a number of editors written at Stanford, including most notably TV-EDIT and NLS.
The term spread to MIT and CMU early and is now in general use. Ironically, Wirth himself remained unaware of its derivation for nearly 30 years, until GLS dug up this history in early 1993! See double bucky, quadruple bucky.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: buffer chuck DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:35 AM ----- BODY: n.
Shorter and ruder syn. for buffer overflow.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: buffer overflow DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:34 AM ----- BODY: n.
What happens when you try to stuff more data into a buffer (holding
area) than it can handle. This problem is commonly exploited by
crackers to get arbitrary commands executed by a
program running with root permissions. This may be due to a mismatch in
the processing rates of the producing and consuming processes (see
overrun and
firehose syndrome), or because the buffer is simply too small to hold
all the data that must accumulate before a piece of it can be processed.
For example, in a text-processing tool that crunches
a line at a time, a short line buffer can result in
lossage as input from a long line overflows the
buffer and trashes data beyond it. Good defensive programming would check
for overflow on each character and stop accepting data when the buffer is
full up. The term is used of and by humans in a metaphorical sense.
What time did I agree to meet you? My buffer must have
overflowed.
Or If I answer that phone my buffer is going to
overflow.
See also spam,
overrun screw.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bug DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:33 AM ----- BODY: n.
An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of
hardware, esp. one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of
feature. Examples: There's a bug in the
editor: it writes things out backwards.
The system crashed
because of a hardware bug.
Fred is a winner, but he has a
few bugs
(i.e., Fred is a good guy, but he has a few personality
problems).
Historical note: Admiral Grace Hopper (an early computing pioneer better known for inventing COBOL) liked to tell a story in which a technician solved a glitch in the Harvard Mark II machine by pulling an actual insect out from between the contacts of one of its relays, and she subsequently promulgated bug in its hackish sense as a joke about the incident (though, as she was careful to admit, she was not there when it happened). For many years the logbook associated with the incident and the actual bug in question (a moth) sat in a display case at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC). The entire story, with a picture of the logbook and the moth taped into it, is recorded in the Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 1981), pp. 285--286.
The text of the log entry (from September 9, 1947), reads 1545
Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being
found
. This wording establishes that the term was already in use
at the time in its current specific sense — and Hopper herself
reports that the term bug was
regularly applied to problems in radar electronics during WWII.
The ‘original bug’
Indeed, the use of bug to mean
an industrial defect was already established in Thomas Edison's time, and a
more specific and rather modern use can be found in an electrical handbook
from 1896 (Hawkin's New Catechism of Electricity,
Theo. Audel & Co.) which says: The term ‘bug’ is
used to a limited extent to designate any fault or trouble in the
connections or working of electric apparatus.
It further notes that
the term is said to have originated in quadruplex telegraphy and
have been transferred to all electric apparatus.
The latter observation may explain a common folk etymology of the
term; that it came from telephone company usage, in which bugs in a
telephone cable
were blamed for noisy lines. Though this
derivation seems to be mistaken, it may well be a distorted memory of a
joke first current among telegraph operators more than
a century ago!
Or perhaps not a joke. Historians of the field inform us that the
term bug
was regularly used in the early days of telegraphy
to refer to a variety of semi-automatic telegraphy keyers that would send a
string of dots if you held them down. In fact, the Vibroplex keyers (which
were among the most common of this type) even had a graphic of a beetle on
them (and still do)! While the ability to send repeated dots automatically
was very useful for professional morse code operators, these were also
significantly trickier to use than the older manual keyers, and it could
take some practice to ensure one didn't introduce extraneous dots into the
code by holding the key down a fraction too long. In the hands of an
inexperienced operator, a Vibroplex bug
on the line could
mean that a lot of garbled Morse would soon be coming your way.
Further, the term bug
has long been used among radio
technicians to describe a device that converts electromagnetic field
variations into acoustic signals. It is used to trace radio interference
and look for dangerous radio emissions. Radio community usage derives from
the roach-like shape of the first versions used by 19th century physicists.
The first versions consisted of a coil of wire (roach body), with the two
wire ends sticking out and bent back to nearly touch forming a spark gap
(roach antennae). The bug is to the radio technician what the stethoscope
is to the stereotypical medical doctor. This sense is almost certainly
ancestral to modern use of bug
for a covert monitoring
device, but may also have contributed to the use of bug
for
the effects of radio interference itself.
Actually, use of bug in the
general sense of a disruptive event goes back to Shakespeare! (Henry VI,
part III - Act V, Scene II: King Edward: So, lie thou there. Die
thou; and die our fear; For Warwick was a bug that fear'd us all.
)
In the first edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary one meaning of
bug is A frightful object; a
walking spectre
; this is traced to ‘bugbear’, a Welsh
term for a variety of mythological monster which (to complete the circle)
has recently been reintroduced into the popular lexicon through fantasy
role-playing games.
In any case, in jargon the word almost never refers to insects. Here
is a plausible conversation that never actually happened: There is a
bug in this ant farm!
What do you mean? I don't see any
ants in it.
That's the bug.
A careful discussion of the etymological issues can be found in a
paper by Fred R. Shapiro, 1987, Entomology of the Computer Bug:
History and Folklore
, American Speech 62(4):376-378.
[There has been a widespread myth that the original bug was moved to the Smithsonian, and an earlier version of this entry so asserted. A correspondent who thought to check discovered that the bug was not there. While investigating this in late 1990, your editor discovered that the NSWC still had the bug, but had unsuccessfully tried to get the Smithsonian to accept it — and that the present curator of their History of American Technology Museum didn't know this and agreed that it would make a worthwhile exhibit. It was moved to the Smithsonian in mid-1991, but due to space and money constraints was not actually exhibited for years afterwards. Thus, the process of investigating the original-computer-bug bug fixed it in an entirely unexpected way, by making the myth true! —ESR]
It helps to remember that this dates from 1973.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-10-31)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bug-compatible DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:32 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[common] Said of a design or revision that has been badly
compromised by a requirement to be compatible with
fossils or misfeatures in
other programs or (esp.) previous releases of itself. MS-DOS 2.0
used \ as a path separator to be bug-compatible with some cretin's choice
of / as an option character in 1.0.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bug-for-bug compatible DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:31 AM ----- BODY: n.
Same as bug-compatible, with the additional implication that much tedious effort went into ensuring that each (known) bug was replicated.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bug-of-the-month club DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:30 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from book-of-the-month club
, a time-honored
mail-order-marketing technique in the U.S.] A mythical club which users of
sendmail8 (the Unix mail daemon)
belong to; this was coined on the Usenet newsgroup comp.security.unix at a
time when sendmail security holes, which allowed outside
crackers access to the system, were being uncovered
at an alarming rate, forcing sysadmins to update very often. Also, more
completely, fatal security bug-of-the-month
club. See also
kernel-of-the-week club.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bulletproof DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:29 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Used of an algorithm or implementation considered extremely robust; lossage-resistant; capable of correctly recovering from any imaginable exception condition — a rare and valued quality. Implies that the programmer has thought of all possible errors, and added code to protect against each one. Thus, in some cases, this can imply code that is too heavyweight, due to excessive paranoia on the part of the programmer. Syn. armor-plated.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bullschildt DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:28 AM ----- BODY: /bul´shilt/ n.
[comp.lang.c on USENET] A confident, but incorrect, statement about
a programming language. This immortalizes a very bad book about
C, Herbert Schildt's C - The Complete
Reference. One reviewer commented The naive errors in
this book would be embarrassing even in a programming assignment turned in
by a computer science college sophomore.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bump DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:27 AM ----- BODY: vt.
Synonym for increment. Has the same meaning as C's ++ operator.
Used esp. of counter variables, pointers, and index dummies in for
, while
, and
do-while
loops.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: burble DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:26 AM ----- BODY: v.
[from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky] Like
flame, but connotes that the source is truly
clueless and ineffectual (mere flamers can be competent). A term of deep
contempt. There's some guy on the phone burbling about how he got a
DISK FULL error and it's all our comm software's fault.
This is
mainstream slang in some parts of England.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: buried treasure DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:25 AM ----- BODY: n.
A surprising piece of code found in some program. While usually not
wrong, it tends to vary from crufty to
bletcherous, and has lain undiscovered only because
it was functionally correct, however horrible it is. Used sarcastically,
because what is found is anything but treasure.
Buried treasure almost always needs to be dug up and removed. I
just found that the scheduler sorts its queue using
bubble sort! Buried treasure!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: burn a CD DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:24 AM ----- BODY: v.
To write a software or document distribution on a CDR. Coined from the fact that a laser is used to inscribe the information by burning small pits in the medium, and from the fact that disk comes out of the drive warm to the touch. Writable CDs can be done on a normal desk-top machine with a suitable drive (so there is no protracted release cycle associated with making them) but each one takes a long time to make, so they are not appropriate for volume production. Writable CDs are suitable for software backups and for short-turnaround-time low-volume software distribution, such as sending a beta release version to a few selected field test sites. Compare cut a tape.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: burn-in period DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:23 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A factory test designed to catch systems with marginal components before they get out the door; the theory is that burn-in will protect customers by outwaiting the steepest part of the bathtub curve (see infant mortality).
2. A period of indeterminate length in which a person using a computer is so intensely involved in his project that he forgets basic needs such as food, drink, sleep, etc. Warning: Excessive burn-in can lead to burn-out. See hack mode, larval stage.
Historical note: the origin of burn-in
(sense 1) is
apparently the practice of setting a new-model airplane's brakes on fire,
then extinguishing the fire, in order to make them hold better. This was
done on the first version of the U.S. spy-plane, the U-2.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: burst page DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:22 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. banner, sense 1.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: busy-wait DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:21 AM ----- BODY: vi.
Used of human behavior, conveys that the subject is busy waiting for
someone or something, intends to move instantly as soon as it shows up, and
thus cannot do anything else at the moment. Can't talk now, I'm
busy-waiting till Bill gets off the phone.
Technically, busy-wait means to wait on an event by spinning through a tight or timed-delay loop that polls for the event on each pass, as opposed to setting up an interrupt handler and continuing execution on another part of the task. In applications this is a wasteful technique, and best avoided on timesharing systems where a busy-waiting program may hog the processor. However, it is often unavoidable in kernel programming. In the Linux world, kernel busy-waits are usually referred to as spinlocks.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: buzz DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:20 AM ----- BODY: vi.
1. Of a program, to run with no indication of progress and perhaps
without guarantee of ever finishing; esp. said of programs thought to be
executing tight loops of code. A program that is buzzing appears to be
catatonic, but never gets out of catatonia, while a
buzzing loop may eventually end of its own accord. The program
buzzes for about 10 seconds trying to sort all the names into
order.
See spin; see also
grovel.
2. [ETA Systems] To test a wire or printed circuit trace for continuity, esp. by applying an AC rather than DC signal. Some wire faults will pass DC tests but fail an AC buzz test.
3. To process an array or list in sequence, doing the same thing to
each element. This loop buzzes through the tz array looking for a
terminator type.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: buzzword-compliant DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:19 AM ----- BODY:
[also buzzword-enabled] Used (disparagingly) of products that seem to have been specified to incorporate all of this month's trendy technologies. Key buzzwords that often show up in buzzword-compliant specifications as of 2001 include ‘XML’, ‘Java’, ‘peer-to-peer’, ‘distributed’, and ‘open’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: BWQ DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:18 AM ----- BODY: /B·W·Q/ n.
[IBM: abbreviation, `Buzz Word Quotient'] The percentage of buzzwords in a speech or documents. Usually roughly proportional to bogosity. See TLA.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: by hand DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:17 AM ----- BODY: adv.
1. [common] Said of an operation (especially a repetitive, trivial,
and/or tedious one) that ought to be performed automatically by the
computer, but which a hacker instead has to step tediously through.
My mailer doesn't have a command to include the text of the message
I'm replying to, so I have to do it by hand.
This does not
necessarily mean the speaker has to retype a copy of the message; it might
refer to, say, dropping into a subshell from the mailer, making a copy of
one's mailbox file, reading that into an editor, locating the top and
bottom of the message in question, deleting the rest of the file, inserting
`>' characters on each line, writing the file, leaving the editor,
returning to the mailer, reading the file in, and later remembering to
delete the file. Compare eyeball search.
2. [common] By extension, writing code which does something in an
explicit or low-level way for which a presupplied library routine ought to
have been available. This cretinous B-tree library doesn't supply a
decent iterator, so I'm having to walk the trees by hand.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: byte DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:16 AM ----- BODY: /bi:t/ n.
[techspeak] A unit of memory or data equal to the amount used to represent one character; on modern architectures this is invariably 8 bits. Some older architectures used byte for quantities of 6, 7, or (especially) 9 bits, and the PDP-10 supported bytes that were actually bitfields of 1 to 36 bits! These usages are now obsolete, killed off by universal adoption of power-of-2 word sizes.
Historical note: The term was coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956 during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer; originally it was described as 1 to 6 bits (typical I/O equipment of the period used 6-bit chunks of information). The move to an 8-bit byte happened in late 1956, and this size was later adopted and promulgated as a standard by the System/360. The word was coined by mutating the word ‘bite’ so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit. See also nybble.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: byte sex DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] The byte sex of hardware is big-endian or little-endian; see those entries.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: bytesexual DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:14 AM ----- BODY: /bi:t`sek´shu·@l/ adj.
[rare] Said of hardware, denotes willingness to compute or pass data in either big-endian or little-endian format (depending, presumably, on a mode bit somewhere). See also NUXI problem.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - B TITLE: Bzzzt! Wrong. DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:13 AM ----- BODY: /bzt rong/ excl.
[common; Usenet/Internet; punctuation varies] From a Robin Williams
routine in the movie Dead Poets Society spoofing
radio or TV quiz programs, such as Truth or
Consequences, where an incorrect answer earns one a blast from
the buzzer and condolences from the interlocutor. A way of expressing
mock-rude disagreement, usually immediately following an included quote
from another poster. The less abbreviated *Bzzzzt*, wrong, but
thank you for playing
is also common; capitalization and emphasis
of the buzzer sound varies.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: C DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:12 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The third letter of the English alphabet.
2. ASCII 1000011.
3. The name of a programming language designed by Dennis Ritchie
during the early 1970s and immediately used to reimplement
Unix; so called because many features derived from
an earlier compiler named ‘B’ in commemoration of
its parent, BCPL. (BCPL was in turn descended from an
earlier Algol-derived language, CPL.) Before Bjarne Stroustrup settled the
question by designing C++, there was a humorous
debate over whether C's successor should be named ‘D’ or
‘P’. C became immensely popular outside Bell Labs after about
1980 and is now the dominant language in systems and microcomputer
applications programming. C is often described, with a mixture of fondness
and disdain varying according to the speaker, as a language that
combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the
readability and maintainability of assembly language
See also
languages of choice, indent style.
The Crunchly on the left sounds a little ANSI.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: C Programmer's Disease DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:11 AM ----- BODY: n.
The tendency of the undisciplined C programmer to set arbitrary but supposedly generous static limits on table sizes (defined, if you're lucky, by constants in header files) rather than taking the trouble to do proper dynamic storage allocation. If an application user later needs to put 68 elements into a table of size 50, the afflicted programmer reasons that he or she can easily reset the table size to 68 (or even as much as 70, to allow for future expansion) and recompile. This gives the programmer the comfortable feeling of having made the effort to satisfy the user's (unreasonable) demands, and often affords the user multiple opportunities to explore the marvelous consequences of fandango on core. In severe cases of the disease, the programmer cannot comprehend why each fix of this kind seems only to further disgruntle the user.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: C&C DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:10 AM ----- BODY:
[common, esp. on news.admin.net-abuse.email] Contraction of
Coffee & Cats
. This frequently occurs as a warning
label on USENET posts that are likely to cause you to
snarf coffee onto your keyboard and startle the cat
off your lap.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: C++ DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:09 AM ----- BODY: /C'·pluhs·pluhs/ n.
Designed by Bjarne Stroustrup of AT&T Bell Labs as a successor
to C. Now one of the
languages of choice, although many hackers still grumble that it is the
successor to either Algol 68 or Ada (depending on
generation), and a prime example of
second-system effect. Almost anything that can be done in any language can
be done in C++, but it requires a language lawyer to
know what is and what is not legal — the design is
almost too large to hold in even hackers' heads. Much
of the cruft results from C++'s attempt to be
backward compatible with C. Stroustrup himself has said in his
retrospective book The Design and Evolution of C++
(p. 207), Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language
struggling to get out.
[Many hackers would now add Yes, and
it's called Java
—ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: calculator DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:08 AM ----- BODY: [Cambridge] n.
Syn. for bitty box.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: Camel Book DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:07 AM ----- BODY: n.
Universally recognized nickname for the book Programming Perl, by Larry Wall and Randal L. Schwartz, O'Reilly and Associates 1991, ISBN 0-937175-64-1 (second edition 1996, ISBN 1-56592-149-6; third edition 2000, 0-596-00027-8, adding as authors Tom Christiansen and Jon Orwant but dropping Randal Schwartz). The definitive reference on Perl.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: camelCase DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:06 AM ----- BODY:
A variable in a programming language is sait to be camelCased when all words but the first are capitalized. This practice contrasts with the C tradition of either running syllables together or marking syllable breaks with underscores; thus, where a C programmer would write thisverylongname or this_very_long_name, the camelCased version would be thisVeryLongName. The common in certain language communities (formerly Pascal; today Java and Visual Basic) and tends to be associated with object-oriented programming.
Compare BiCapitalization; but where that practice is primarily associated with marketing, camelCasing is not aimed at impressing anybody, and hackers consider it respectable.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: camelCasing DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:05 AM ----- BODY:
See PascalCasing.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: can't happen DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:04 AM ----- BODY:
The traditional program comment for code executed under a condition
that should never be true, for example a file size computed as negative.
Often, such a condition being true indicates data corruption or a faulty
algorithm; it is almost always handled by emitting a fatal error message
and terminating or crashing, since there is little else that can be done.
Some case variant of can't happen
is also often the text
emitted if the ‘impossible’ error actually happens! Although
can't happen
events are genuinely infrequent in production
code, programmers wise enough to check for them habitually are often
surprised at how frequently they are triggered during development and how
many headaches checking for them turns out to head off. See also
firewall code (sense 2).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cancelbot DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:03 AM ----- BODY: /kan´sel·bot/
[Usenet: compound, cancel + robot]
1. Mythically, a robocanceller
2. In reality, most cancelbots are manually operated by being fed lists of spam message IDs.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: Cancelmoose[tm] DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:02 AM ----- BODY: /kan´sel·moos/
[Usenet] The archetype and model of all good spam-fighters. Once upon a time, the 'Moose would send out spam-cancels and then post notice anonymously to news.admin.policy, news.admin.misc, and alt.current-events.net-abuse. The 'Moose stepped to the fore on its own initiative, at a time (mid-1994) when spam-cancels were irregular and disorganized, and behaved altogether admirably — fair, even-handed, and quick to respond to comments and criticism, all without self-aggrandizement or martyrdom. Cancelmoose[tm] quickly gained near-unanimous support from the readership of all three above-mentioned groups.
Nobody knows who Cancelmoose[tm] really is, and there aren't even any good rumors. However, the 'Moose now has an e-mail address (moose@cm.org) and a web site (http://www.cm.org/.) By early 1995, others had stepped into the spam-cancel business, and appeared to be comporting themselves well, after the 'Moose's manner. The 'Moose has now gotten out of the business, and is more interested in ending spam (and cancels) entirely.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: candygrammar DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:01 AM ----- BODY: n.
A programming-language grammar that is mostly syntactic sugar; the term is also a play on ‘candygram’. COBOL, Apple's Hypertalk language, and a lot of the so-called ‘4GL’ database languages share this property. The usual intent of such designs is that they be as English-like as possible, on the theory that they will then be easier for unskilled people to program. This intention comes to grief on the reality that syntax isn't what makes programming hard; it's the mental effort and organization required to specify an algorithm precisely that costs. Thus the invariable result is that ‘candygrammar’ languages are just as difficult to program in as terser ones, and far more painful for the experienced hacker.
[The overtones from the old Chevy Chase skit on Saturday Night Live
should not be overlooked. This was a Jaws parody.
Someone lurking outside an apartment door tries all kinds of bogus ways to
get the occupant to open up, while ominous music plays in the background.
The last attempt is a half-hearted Candygram!
When the door
is opened, a shark bursts in and chomps the poor occupant. [There is a
similar gag in Blazing Saddles
—ESR] There is a moral
here for those attracted to candygrammars. Note that, in many circles,
pretty much the same ones who remember Monty Python sketches, all it takes
is the word Candygram!
, suitably timed, to get people
rolling on the floor. — GLS]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: canonical DATE: 05/15/2003 10:55:00 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[very common; historically, ‘according to religious law’] The usual or standard state or manner of something. This word has a somewhat more technical meaning in mathematics. Two formulas such as 9 + x and x + 9 are said to be equivalent because they mean the same thing, but the second one is in canonical form because it is written in the usual way, with the highest power of x first. Usually there are fixed rules you can use to decide whether something is in canonical form. The jargon meaning, a relaxation of the technical meaning, acquired its present loading in computer-science culture largely through its prominence in Alonzo Church's work in computation theory and mathematical logic (see Knights of the Lambda Calculus). Compare vanilla.
Non-technical academics do not use the adjective ‘canonical’ in any of the senses defined above with any regularity; they do however use the nouns canon and canonicity (not **canonicalness or **canonicality). The canon of a given author is the complete body of authentic works by that author (this usage is familiar to Sherlock Holmes fans as well as to literary scholars). ‘The canon’ is the body of works in a given field (e.g., works of literature, or of art, or of music) deemed worthwhile for students to study and for scholars to investigate.
The word ‘canon’ has an interesting history. It derives
ultimately from the Greek kanon (akin to
the English ‘cane’) referring to a reed. Reeds were used for
measurement, and in Latin and later Greek the word ‘canon’
meant a rule or a standard. The establishment of a canon of scriptures
within Christianity was meant to define a standard or a rule for the
religion. The above non-techspeak academic usages stem from this instance
of a defined and accepted body of work. Alongside this usage was the
promulgation of ‘canons’ (‘rules’) for the
government of the Catholic Church. The techspeak usages (according
to religious law
) derive from this use of the Latin
‘canon’.
Hackers invest this term with a playfulness that makes an ironic
contrast with its historical meaning. A true story: One Bob Sjoberg, new
at the MIT AI Lab, expressed some annoyance at the incessant use of jargon.
Over his loud objections, GLS and RMS made a point of using as much of it
as possible in his presence, and eventually it began to sink in. Finally,
in one conversation, he used the word canonical in jargon-like fashion without
thinking. Steele: Aha! We've finally got you talking jargon
too!
Stallman: What did he say?
Steele: Bob
just used ‘canonical’ in the canonical way.
Of course, canonicality depends on context, but it is implicitly defined as the way hackers normally expect things to be. Thus, a hacker may claim with a straight face that ‘according to religious law’ is not the canonical meaning of canonical.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: careware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:59 AM ----- BODY: /keir´weir/ n.
A variety of shareware for which either the author suggests that some payment be made to a nominated charity or a levy directed to charity is included on top of the distribution charge. Syn.: charityware; compare crippleware, sense 2.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cargo cult programming DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:58 AM ----- BODY: n.
A style of (incompetent) programming dominated by ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose. A cargo cult programmer will usually explain the extra code as a way of working around some bug encountered in the past, but usually neither the bug nor the reason the code apparently avoided the bug was ever fully understood (compare shotgun debugging, voodoo programming).
The term ‘cargo cult’ is a reference to aboriginal
religions that grew up in the South Pacific after World War II. The
practices of these cults center on building elaborate mockups of airplanes
and military style landing strips in the hope of bringing the return of the
god-like airplanes that brought such marvelous cargo during the war.
Hackish usage probably derives from Richard Feynman's characterization of
certain practices as cargo cult science
in his book
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (W. W. Norton
& Co, New York 1985, ISBN 0-393-01921-7).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cascade DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:57 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A huge volume of spurious error-message output produced by a compiler with poor error recovery. Too frequently, one trivial syntax error (such as a missing ‘)’ or ‘}’) throws the parser out of synch so that much of the remaining program text is interpreted as garbaged or ill-formed.
2. A chain of Usenet followups, each adding some trivial variation or riposte to the text of the previous one, all of which is reproduced in the new message; an include war in which the object is to create a sort of communal graffito.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: case and paste DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:56 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from ‘cut and paste’]
The addition of a new feature to an existing
system by selecting the code from an existing feature and pasting it in
with minor changes. Common in telephony circles because most operations in
a telephone switch are selected using case
statements. Leads to software bloat.
In some circles of EMACS users this is called ‘programming by Meta-W’, because Meta-W is the EMACS command for copying a block of text to a kill buffer in preparation to pasting it in elsewhere. The term is condescending, implying that the programmer is acting mindlessly rather than thinking carefully about what is required to integrate the code for two similar cases.
At DEC (now HP), this is sometimes called clone-and-hack coding.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: case mod DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:55 AM ----- BODY:
[from ‘case modification’]
1. Originally a kind of hardware hack on a PC intended to support overclocking (e.g. with cutouts for oversized fans, or a freon-based or water-cooling system).
2. Nowadays, similar drastic surgery that's done just to make a machine look nifty. The commonest case mods combine acrylic case windows with LEDs to give the machine an eerie interior glow like a B-movie flying saucer. More advanced forms of case modding involve building machines into weird and unlikely shapes. The effect can be quite artistic, but one of the unwritten rules is that the machine must continue to function as a computer.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: casters-up mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM, prob. fr. slang belly up] Yet another synonym for ‘broken’ or ‘down’. Usually connotes a major failure. A system (hardware or software) which is down may be already being restarted before the failure is noticed, whereas one which is casters up is usually a good excuse to take the rest of the day off (as long as you're not responsible for fixing it).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: casting the runes DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:53 AM ----- BODY: n.
What a guru does when you ask him or her to run a particular program and type at it because it never works for anyone else; esp. used when nobody can ever see what the guru is doing different from what J. Random Luser does. Compare incantation, runes, examining the entrails; also see the AI koan about Tom Knight in Some AI Koans (in Appendix A).
A correspondent from England tells us that one of ICL's most talented systems designers used to be called out occasionally to service machines which the field circus had given up on. Since he knew the design inside out, he could often find faults simply by listening to a quick outline of the symptoms. He used to play on this by going to some site where the field circus had just spent the last two weeks solid trying to find a fault, and spreading a diagram of the system out on a table top. He'd then shake some chicken bones and cast them over the diagram, peer at the bones intently for a minute, and then tell them that a certain module needed replacing. The system would start working again immediately upon the replacement.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cat DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:52 AM ----- BODY: vt.
[from catenate via Unix cat1]
1. [techspeak] To spew an entire file to the screen or some other output sink without pause (syn. blast).
2. By extension, to dump large amounts of data at an unprepared target or with no intention of browsing it carefully. Usage: considered silly. Rare outside Unix sites. See also dd, BLT.
Among Unix fans, cat1 is considered an excellent example of user-interface design, because it delivers the file contents without such verbosity as spacing or headers between the files, and because it does not require the files to consist of lines of text, but works with any sort of data.
Among Unix haters,
cat1
is considered the canonical example of
bad user-interface design, because of its woefully
unobvious name. It is far more often used to blast
a file to standard output than to concatenate two files. The name cat
for the former operation is just as unintuitive
as, say, LISP's cdr.
Of such oppositions are holy wars made.... See also UUOC.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: catatonic DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:51 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Describes a condition of suspended animation in which something is
so wedged or hung that it
makes no response. If you are typing on a terminal and suddenly the
computer doesn't even echo the letters back to the screen as you type, let
alone do what you're asking it to do, then the computer is suffering from
catatonia (possibly because it has crashed). There I was in the
middle of a winning game of nethack and it went
catatonic on me! Aaargh!
Compare
buzz.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cathedral DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:50 AM ----- BODY: n.,adj.
[see bazaar for derivation] The ‘classical’ mode of software engineering long thought to be necessarily implied by Brooks's Law. Features small teams, tight project control, and long release intervals. This term came into use after analysis of the Linux experience suggested there might be something wrong (or at least incomplete) in the classical assumptions.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cd tilde DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:49 AM ----- BODY: /C·D til·d@/ vi.
To go home. From the Unix C-shell and Korn-shell command cd ~
, which takes one to one's $HOME
(cd
with no
arguments happens to do the same thing). By extension, may be used with
other arguments; thus, over an electronic chat link, cd ~coffee
would mean I'm going to the coffee
machine.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: CDA DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:48 AM ----- BODY: /C·D·A/
The Communications Decency Act
, passed as section 502
of a major telecommunications reform bill on February 8th, 1996
(Black Thursday
). The CDA made it a federal crime in the USA
to send a communication which is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy,
or indecent, with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass another
person.
It also threatened with imprisonment anyone who
knowingly
makes accessible to minors any message that
describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary
community standards, sexual or excretory activities or
organs
.
While the CDA was sold as a measure to protect minors from the putative evils of pornography, the repressive political aims of the bill were laid bare by the Hyde amendment, which intended to outlaw discussion of abortion on the Internet.
To say that this direct attack on First Amendment free-speech rights
was not well received on the Internet would be putting it mildly. A
firestorm of protest followed, including a February 29th 1996 mass
demonstration by thousands of netters who turned their
home pages black for 48 hours. Several civil-rights groups and
computing/telecommunications companies mounted a constitutional challenge.
The CDA was demolished by a strongly-worded decision handed down in
8th-circuit Federal court and subsequently affirmed by the U.S. Supreme
Court on 26 June 1997 (White Thursday
). See also
Exon.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cdr DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:47 AM ----- BODY: /ku´dr/ or /kuh´dr/ vt.
[from LISP] To skip past the first item from a list of things
(generalized from the LISP operation on binary tree structures, which
returns a list consisting of all but the first element of its argument).
In the form cdr down, to trace down a
list of elements: Shall we cdr down the agenda?
Usage:
silly. See also loop through.
Historical note: The instruction format of the IBM 704 that hosted the original LISP implementation featured two 15-bit fields called the address and decrement parts. The term cdr was originally Contents of Decrement part of Register. Similarly, car stood for Contents of Address part of Register.
The cdr and car operations have since become bases for formation of compound metaphors in non-LISP contexts. GLS recalls, for example, a programming project in which strings were represented as linked lists; the get-character and skip-character operations were of course called CHAR and CHDR.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: chad DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:46 AM ----- BODY: /chad/ n.
1. [common] The perforated edge strips on printer paper, after they have been separated from the printed portion. Also called selvage, perf, and ripoff.
2. The confetti-like paper bits punched out of cards or paper tape; this has also been called chaff, computer confetti, and keypunch droppings. It's reported that this was very old Army slang (associated with teletypewriters before the computer era), and has been occasionally sighted in directions for punched-card vote tabulators long after it passed out of live use among computer programmers in the late 1970s. This sense of ‘chad’ returned to the mainstream during the finale of the hotly disputed U.S. presidential election in 2000 via stories about the Florida vote recounts. Note however that in the revived mainstream usage chad is not a mass noun and ‘a chad’ is a single piece of the stuff.
There is an urban legend that chad (sense 2) derives from the Chadless
keypunch (named for its inventor), which cut little u-shaped tabs in the
card to make a hole when the tab folded back, rather than punching out a
circle/rectangle; it was clear that if the Chadless keypunch didn't make
them, then the stuff that other keypunches made had to be
‘chad’. However, serious attempts to track down
Chadless
as a personal name or U.S. trademark have failed,
casting doubt on this etymology — and the U.S. Patent Classification
System uses chadless
(small c) as an adjective, suggesting
that chadless
derives from chad
and not the
other way around. There is another legend that the word was originally
acronymic, standing for Card Hole Aggregate Debris
, but this
has all the earmarks of a backronym. It has also
been noted that the word chad
is Scots dialect for gravel,
but nobody has proposed any plausible reason that card chaff should be
thought of as gravel. None of these etymologies is really
plausible.
This is one way to be chadless.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 75-10-04)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: chad box DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:45 AM ----- BODY: n.
A metal box about the size of a lunchbox (or in some models a large wastebasket), for collecting the chad (sense 2) that accumulated in Iron Age card punches. You had to open the covers of the card punch periodically and empty the chad box. The bit bucket was notionally the equivalent device in the CPU enclosure, which was typically across the room in another great gray-and-blue box.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: chain DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:44 AM ----- BODY:
1. vi. [orig. from BASIC's
CHAIN
statement] To hand off execution to a
child or successor without going through the OS
command interpreter that invoked it. The state of the parent program is
lost and there is no returning to it. Though this facility used to be
common on memory-limited micros and is still widely supported for backward
compatibility, the jargon usage is semi-obsolescent; in particular, most
Unix programmers will think of this as an exec.
Oppose the more modern subshell.
2. n. A series of linked data areas within an operating system or application. Chain rattling is the process of repeatedly running through the linked data areas searching for one which is of interest to the executing program. The implication is that there is a very large number of links on the chain.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: chainik DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:43 AM ----- BODY: /chi:´nik/
[Russian, literally teapot
] Almost synonymous with
muggle. Implies both ignorance and a certain amount
of willingness to learn, but does not necessarily imply as little
experience or short exposure time as newbie and is
not as derogatory as luser. Both a novice user and
someone using a system for a long time without any understanding of the
internals can be referred to as chainiks. Very widespread term in Russian
hackish, often used in an English context by Russian-speaking hackers
esp. in Israel (e.g. Our new colleague is a complete
chainik
). FidoNet discussion groups often had a
chainik
subsection for newbies and, well, old chainiks (eg.
su.asm.chainik, ru.linux.chainik, ru.html.chainik). Public projects often
have a chainik mailing list to keep the chainiks off the developers' and
experienced users' discussions. Today, the word is slowly slipping into
mainstream Russian due to the Russian translation of the popular
yellow-black covered foobar for dummies
series, which
(correctly) uses chainik
for dummy
, but its
frequent (though not excessive) use is still characteristic
hacker-speak.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: channel DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:42 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IRC] The basic unit of discussion on IRC.
Once one joins a channel, everything one types is read by others on that
channel. Channels are named with strings that begin with a ‘#’
sign and can have topic descriptions (which are generally irrelevant to the
actual subject of discussion). Some notable channels are #initgame
, #hottub
,
callahans
, and #report
. At times of international crisis, #report
has hundreds of members, some of whom take
turns listening to various news services and typing in summaries of the
news, or in some cases, giving first-hand accounts of the action (e.g.,
Scud missile attacks in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War in 1991).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: channel hopping DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:41 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common; IRC, GEnie] To rapidly switch channels on IRC, or a GEnie chat board, just as a social butterfly might hop from one group to another at a party. This term may derive from the TV watcher's idiom, channel surfing.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: channel op DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:40 AM ----- BODY: /chan´l op/ n.
[IRC] Someone who is endowed with privileges on a particular IRC channel; commonly abbreviated chanop or CHOP or just op (as of 2000 these short forms have almost crowded out the parent usage). These privileges include the right to kick users, to change various status bits, and to make others into CHOPs.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: chanop DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:39 AM ----- BODY: /chan'·op/ n.
[IRC] See channel op.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: char DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:38 AM ----- BODY: /keir/ or /char/; rarely, /kar/ n.
Shorthand for ‘character’. Esp.: used by C programmers, as char is C's typename for character data.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: charityware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:37 AM ----- BODY: /cha´rit·ee·weir`/ n.
Syn. careware.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: chase pointers DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:36 AM ----- BODY:
1. vi. To go through multiple
levels of indirection, as in traversing a linked list or graph structure.
Used esp. by programmers in C, where explicit pointers are a very common
data type. This is techspeak, but it remains jargon when used of human
networks. I'm chasing pointers. Bob said you could tell me who to
talk to about....
See
dangling pointer and snap.
2. [Cambridge] pointer chase or pointer hunt: The process of going through a core dump (sense 1), interactively or on a large piece of paper printed with hex runes, following dynamic data-structures. Used only in a debugging context.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: chawmp DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:35 AM ----- BODY: n.
[University of Florida] 16 or 18 bits (half of a machine word). This term was used by FORTH hackers during the late 1970s/early 1980s; it is said to have been archaic then, and may now be obsolete. It was coined in revolt against the promiscuous use of ‘word’ for anything between 16 and 32 bits; ‘word’ has an additional special meaning for FORTH hacks that made the overloading intolerable. For similar reasons, /gaw´bl/ (spelled ‘gawble’ or possibly ‘gawbul’) was in use as a term for 32 or 48 bits (presumably a full machine word, but our sources are unclear on this). These terms are more easily understood if one thinks of them as faithful phonetic spellings of ‘chomp’ and ‘gobble’ pronounced in a Florida or other Southern U.S. dialect. For general discussion of similar terms, see nybble.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: check DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:34 AM ----- BODY: n.
A hardware-detected error condition, most commonly used to refer to actual hardware failures rather than software-induced traps. E.g., a parity check is the result of a hardware-detected parity error. Recorded here because the word often humorously extended to non-technical problems. For example, the term child check has been used to refer to the problems caused by a small child who is curious to know what happens when s/he presses all the cute buttons on a computer's console (of course, this particular problem could have been prevented with molly-guards).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cheerfully DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:33 AM ----- BODY: adv.
See happily.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: chemist DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:32 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Cambridge] Someone who wastes computer time on number-crunching when you'd far rather the machine were doing something more productive, such as working out anagrams of your name or printing Snoopy calendars or running life patterns. May or may not refer to someone who actually studies chemistry.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: Chernobyl chicken DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:31 AM ----- BODY: n.
See laser chicken.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: Chernobyl packet DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:30 AM ----- BODY: /cher·noh´b@l pak'@t/ n.
A network packet that induces a broadcast storm and/or network meltdown, in memory of the April 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine. The typical scenario involves an IP Ethernet datagram that passes through a gateway with both source and destination Ether and IP address set as the respective broadcast addresses for the subnetworks being gated between. Compare Christmas tree packet.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: chicken head DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:29 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Commodore] The Commodore Business Machines logo, which strongly resembles a poultry part (within Commodore itself the logo was always called chicken lips). Rendered in ASCII as ‘C=’. With the arguable exception of the Amiga, Commodore's machines were notoriously crocky little bitty boxes, albeit people have written multitasking Unix-like operating systems with TCP/IP networking for them. Thus, this usage may owe something to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the basis for the movie Blade Runner; the novel is now sold under that title), in which a ‘chickenhead’ is a mutant with below-average intelligence.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: chickenboner DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
[spamfighters] Derogatory term for a spammer. The image that goes with it is of an overweight redneck with bad teeth living in a trailer, hunched in semi-darkness over his computer and surrounded by rotting chicken bones in half-eaten KFC buckets and empty beer cans. See http://www.spamfaq.net/terminology.shtml#chickenboner for discussion.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: chiclet keyboard DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:27 AM ----- BODY: n.
A keyboard with a small, flat rectangular or lozenge-shaped rubber or plastic keys that look like pieces of chewing gum. (Chiclets is the brand name of a variety of chewing gum that does in fact resemble the keys of chiclet keyboards.) Used esp. to describe the original IBM PCjr keyboard. Vendors unanimously liked these because they were cheap, and a lot of early portable and laptop products got launched using them. Customers rejected the idea with almost equal unanimity, and chiclets are not often seen on anything larger than a digital watch any more.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: Chinese Army technique DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:26 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. Mongolian Hordes technique.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: choad DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:25 AM ----- BODY: /chohd/ n.
Synonym for ‘penis’ used in alt.tasteless and popularized by the denizens
thereof. They say: We think maybe it's from Middle English but
we're all too damned lazy to check the OED.
[I'm not. It
isn't. —ESR] This term is alleged to have been inherited through
1960s underground comics, and to have been recently sighted in the Beavis
and Butthead cartoons. Speakers of the Hindi, Bengali and Gujarati
languages have confirmed that ‘choad’ is in fact an Indian
vernacular word equivalent to ‘fuck’; it is therefore likely to
have entered English slang via the British Raj.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: choke DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:24 AM ----- BODY: v.
[common] To reject input, often ungracefully. NULs make
System V's
lpr1
choke.
I tried building an EMACS
binary to use X, but
cpp1
choked on all those
See
barf, vi.#define
s.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: chomp DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:23 AM ----- BODY: vi.
1. To lose; specifically, to chew on something of which more was bitten off than one can. Probably related to gnashing of teeth.
2. To bite the bag; See bagbiter.
A hand gesture commonly accompanies this. To perform it, hold the
four fingers together and place the thumb against their tips. Now open and
close your hand rapidly to suggest a biting action (much like what Pac-Man
does in the classic video game, though this pantomime seems to predate
that). The gesture alone means ‘chomp chomp’ (see
Verb Doubling in the
Jargon Construction section
of the Prependices). The hand may be pointed at the object of complaint,
and for real emphasis you can use both hands at once. Doing this to a
person is equivalent to saying You chomper!
If you point the
gesture at yourself, it is a humble but humorous admission of some failure.
You might do this if someone told you that a program you had written had
failed in some surprising way and you felt dumb for not having anticipated
it.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: chomper DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:22 AM ----- BODY: n.
Someone or something that is chomping; a loser. See loser, bagbiter, chomp.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: CHOP DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:21 AM ----- BODY: /chop/ n.
[IRC] See channel op.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: Christmas tree DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:20 AM ----- BODY: n.
A kind of RS-232 line tester or breakout box featuring rows of blinking red and green LEDs suggestive of Christmas lights.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: Christmas tree packet DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:19 AM ----- BODY: n.
A packet with every single option set for whatever protocol is in use. See kamikaze packet, Chernobyl packet. (The term doubtless derives from a fanciful image of each little option bit being represented by a different-colored light bulb, all turned on.) Compare Godzillagram.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: chrome DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:18 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from automotive slang via wargaming] Showy features added to
attract users but contributing little or nothing to the power of a system.
The 3D icons in Motif are just chrome, but they certainly are
pretty chrome!
Distinguished from
bells and whistles by the fact that the latter are
usually added to gratify developers' own desires for featurefulness. Often
used as a term of contempt.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: chug DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:17 AM ----- BODY: vi.
To run slowly; to grind or
grovel. The disk is chugging like
crazy.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: Church of the SubGenius DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:16 AM ----- BODY: n.
A mutant offshoot of Discordianism launched
in 1981 as a spoof of fundamentalist Christianity by the
‘Reverend’ Ivan Stang, a brilliant satirist with a gift for
promotion. Popular among hackers as a rich source of bizarre imagery and
references such as Bob
the divine drilling-equipment
salesman, the Benevolent Space Xists, and the Stark Fist of Removal. Much
SubGenius theory is concerned with the acquisition of the mystical
substance or quality of slack. There is a home page
at http://www.subgenius.com/.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: CI$ DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
Hackerism for ‘CIS’, CompuServe Information Service. The dollar sign refers to CompuServe's rather steep line charges. Often used in sig blocks just before a CompuServe address. Syn. Compu$erve.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: Cinderella Book DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:14 AM ----- BODY: n.
[CMU] Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation, by John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman, (Addison-Wesley, 1979). So called because the cover depicts a girl (putatively Cinderella) sitting in front of a Rube Goldberg device and holding a rope coming out of it. On the back cover, the device is in shambles after she has (inevitably) pulled on the rope. See also book titles.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: Classic C DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:13 AM ----- BODY: /klas´ik C/ n.
[a play on ‘Coke Classic’] The C programming language as defined in the first edition of K&R, with some small additions. It is also known as ‘K&R C’. The name came into use while C was being standardized by the ANSI X3J11 committee. Also ‘C Classic’.
An analogous construction is sometimes applied elsewhere: thus, ‘X Classic’, where X = Star Trek (referring to the original TV series) or X = PC (referring to IBM's ISA-bus machines as opposed to the PS/2 series). This construction is especially used of product series in which the newer versions are considered serious losers relative to the older ones.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: clean DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:12 AM ----- BODY:
1. adj. Used of hardware or software designs, implies ‘elegance in the small’, that is, a design or implementation that may not hold any surprises but does things in a way that is reasonably intuitive and relatively easy to comprehend from the outside. The antonym is ‘grungy’ or crufty.
2. v. To remove unneeded or
undesired files in a effort to reduce clutter: I'm cleaning up my
account.
I cleaned up the garbage and now have 100 Meg free
on that partition.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: click of death DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:11 AM ----- BODY: n.
A syndrome of certain Iomega ZIP drives, named for the clicking noise
that is caused by the malady. An affected drive will, after accepting a
disk, will start making a clicking noise and refuse to eject the disk. A
common solution for retrieving the disk is to insert the bent end of a
paper clip into a small hole adjacent to the slot. Clicked
disks are generally unusable after being retrieved from the drive.
The clicking noise is caused by the drive's read/write head bumping against its movement stops when it fails to find track 0 on the disk, causing the head to become misaligned. This can happen when the drive has been subjected to a physical shock, or when the disk is exposed to an electromagnetic field, such as that of the CRT. Another common cause is when a package of disks is armed with an anti-theft strip at a store. When the clerk scans the product to disarm the strip, it can demagnetize the disks, wiping out track 0.
There is evidence that the click of death is a communicable disease;
a clicked
disk can cause the read/write head of a "clean"
drive to become misaligned. Iomega at first denied the existence of the
click of death, but eventually offered to replace free of charge any drives
affected by the condition.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: CLM DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:10 AM ----- BODY: /C·L·M/
[Sun: ‘Career Limiting Move’]
1. n. An action endangering
one's future prospects of getting plum projects and raises, and possibly
one's job: His Halloween costume was a parody of his manager. He
won the prize for ‘best CLM’.
2. adj. Denotes extreme severity of a bug, discovered by a customer
and obviously missed earlier because of poor testing: That's a CLM
bug!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: clobber DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:09 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To overwrite, usually unintentionally: I walked off the end
of the array and clobbered the stack.
Compare
mung, scribble,
trash, and
smash the stack.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: clock DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:08 AM ----- BODY:
n.,v.
1. [techspeak] The master oscillator that steps a CPU or other digital circuit through its paces. This has nothing to do with the time of day, although the software counter that keeps track of the latter may be derived from the former.
2. vt. To run a CPU or other
digital circuit at a particular rate. If you clock it at 1000MHz, it
gets warm.
. See overclock.
3. vt. To force a digital
circuit from one state to the next by applying a single clock
pulse. The data must be stable 10ns before you clock the
latch.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: clocks DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:07 AM ----- BODY: n.
Processor logic cycles, so called because each generally corresponds to one clock pulse in the processor's timing. The relative execution times of instructions on a machine are usually discussed in clocks rather than absolute fractions of a second; one good reason for this is that clock speeds for various models of the machine may increase as technology improves, and it is usually the relative times one is interested in when discussing the instruction set. Compare cycle, jiffy.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: clone DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:06 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. An exact duplicate: Our product is a clone of their
product.
Implies a legal reimplementation from documentation or by
reverse-engineering. Also connotes lower price.
2. A shoddy, spurious copy: Their product is a clone of our
product.
3. A blatant ripoff, most likely violating copyright, patent, or
trade secret protections: Your product is a clone of my
product.
This use implies legal action is pending.
4. [obs] PC clone: a PC-BUS/ISA/EISA/PCI-compatible 80x86-based microcomputer (this use is sometimes spelled klone or PClone). These invariably have much more bang for the buck than the IBM archetypes they resemble. This term fell out of use in the 1990s; the class of machines it describes are now simply PCs or Intel machines.
5. [obs.] In the construction Unix clone: An OS designed to deliver a Unix-lookalike environment without Unix license fees, or with additional ‘mission-critical’ features such as support for real-time programming. Linux and the free BSDs killed off this product category and the term with it.
6. v. To make an exact copy of
something. Let me clone that
might mean I want to
borrow that paper so I can make a photocopy
or Let me get a
copy of that file before you mung it
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: clone-and-hack coding DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:05 AM ----- BODY: n.
[DEC] Syn. case and paste.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: clover key DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:04 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Mac users] See feature key.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: clue-by-four DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:03 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet: portmanteau, clue + two-by-four] The notional stick with
which one whacks an aggressively clueless person. This term derives from a
western American folk saying about training a mule First, you got to
hit him with a two-by-four. That's to get his attention.
The
clue-by-four is a close relative of the LART.
Syn. clue stick. This metaphor is
commonly elaborated; your editor once heard a hacker say I smite you
with the great sword Cluebringer!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: clustergeeking DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:02 AM ----- BODY: /kluh´st@r·gee`king/ n.
[CMU] Spending more time at a computer cluster doing CS homework than most people spend breathing.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: co-lo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:01 AM ----- BODY: /koh´loh`/ n.
[very common; first heard c.1995] Short for ‘co-location’, used of a machine you own that is physically sited on the premises of an ISP in order to take advantage of the ISP's direct access to lots of network bandwidth. Often in the phrases co-lo box or co-lo machines. Co-lo boxes are typically web and FTP servers remote-administered by their owners, who may seldom or never visit the actual site.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: coaster DATE: 05/15/2003 10:54:00 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Unuseable CD produced during failed attempt at writing to
writeable or re-writeable CD media. Certainly related to the coaster-like
shape of a CD, and the relative value of these failures. I made a
lot of coasters before I got a good CD.
2. Useless CDs received in the mail from the likes of AOL, MSN, CI$, Prodigy, ad nauseam.
In the U.K., beermat is often used in these senses.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: coaster toaster DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:59 AM ----- BODY:
A writer for recordable CD-Rs, especially cheap IDE models that tend to produce a high proportion of coasters.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: COBOL DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:58 AM ----- BODY: /koh´bol/ n.
[COmmon Business-Oriented Language] (Synonymous with
evil.) A weak, verbose, and flabby language used by
code grinders to do boring mindless things on
dinosaur mainframes. Hackers believe that all COBOL
programmers are suits or
code grinders, and no self-respecting hacker will ever admit to
having learned the language. Its very name is seldom uttered without
ritual expressions of disgust or horror. One popular one is Edsger W.
Dijkstra's famous observation that The use of COBOL cripples the
mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal
offense.
(from Selected Writings on Computing: A
Personal Perspective) See also
fear and loathing, software rot.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: COBOL fingers DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:57 AM ----- BODY: /koh´bol fing´grz/ n.
Reported from Sweden, a (hypothetical) disease one might get from
coding in COBOL. The language requires code verbose beyond all reason (see
candygrammar); thus it is alleged that programming
too much in COBOL causes one's fingers to wear down to stubs by the endless
typing. I refuse to type in all that source code again; it would
give me COBOL fingers!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cobweb site DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:56 AM ----- BODY: n.
A World Wide Web Site that hasn't been updated so long it has figuratively grown cobwebs.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: code DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:55 AM ----- BODY:
1. n. The stuff that software
writers write, either in source form or after translation by a compiler or
assembler. Often used in opposition to data
, which is the
stuff that code operates on. Among hackers this is a mass noun, as in
How much code does it take to do a bubble sort?
, or The code is loaded at the high end of
RAM.
Among scientific programmers it is sometimes a count noun
equilvalent to program
; thus they may speak of
codes
in the plural. Anyone referring to software as
the software codes
is probably a
newbie or a suit.
2. v. To write code. In this
sense, always refers to source code rather than compiled. I coded
an Emacs clone in two hours!
This verb is a bit of a cultural
marker associated with the Unix and minicomputer traditions (and lately
Linux); people within that culture prefer v. ‘code’ to
v. ‘program’ whereas outside it the reverse is normally
true.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: code grinder DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A suit-wearing minion of the sort hired in legion strength by banks and insurance companies to implement payroll packages in RPG and other such unspeakable horrors. In its native habitat, the code grinder often removes the suit jacket to reveal an underplumage consisting of button-down shirt (starch optional) and a tie. In times of dire stress, the sleeves (if long) may be rolled up and the tie loosened about half an inch. It seldom helps. The code grinder's milieu is about as far from hackerdom as one can get and still touch a computer; the term connotes pity. See Real World, suit.
2. Used of or to a hacker, a really serious slur on the person's creative ability; connotes a design style characterized by primitive technique, rule-boundedness, brute force, and utter lack of imagination.
Contrast hacker, Real Programmer.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: code monkey DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:53 AM ----- BODY: n
1. A person only capable of grinding out code, but unable to perform the higher-primate tasks of software architecture, analysis, and design. Mildly insulting. Often applied to the most junior people on a programming team.
2. Anyone who writes code for a living; a programmer.
3. A self-deprecating way of denying responsibility for a
management decision, or of complaining about having
to live with such decisions. As in Don't ask me why we need to
write a compiler in COBOL, I'm just a code monkey.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: Code of the Geeks DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
see geek code.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: code police DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:51 AM ----- BODY: n.
[by analogy with George Orwell's ‘thought police’] A
mythical team of Gestapo-like storm troopers that might burst into one's
office and arrest one for violating programming style rules. May be used
either seriously, to underline a claim that a particular style violation is
dangerous, or ironically, to suggest that the practice under discussion is
condemned mainly by anal-retentive weenies.
Dike out that goto or the code police will get you!
The
ironic usage is perhaps more common.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: codes DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:50 AM ----- BODY: n.
[scientific computing] Programs. This usage is common in people who
hack supercomputers and heavy-duty number-crunching,
rare to unknown elsewhere (if you say codes
to hackers
outside scientific computing, their first association is likely to be
and cyphers
).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: codewalker DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:49 AM ----- BODY: n.
A program component that traverses other programs for a living.
Compilers have codewalkers in their front ends; so do cross-reference
generators and some database front ends. Other utility programs that try
to do too much with source code may turn into codewalkers. As in
This new
vgrind
feature would
require a codewalker to implement.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: coefficient of X DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:48 AM ----- BODY: n.
Hackish speech makes heavy use of pseudo-mathematical metaphors.
Four particularly important ones involve the terms coefficient, factor, index of
X, and quotient. They are
often loosely applied to things you cannot really be quantitative about,
but there are subtle distinctions among them that convey information about
the way the speaker mentally models whatever he or she is describing.
Foo factor and foo quotient tend to describe something for
which the issue is one of presence or absence. The canonical example is
fudge factor. It's not important how much you're
fudging; the term simply acknowledges that some fudging is needed. You
might talk of liking a movie for its silliness factor. Quotient tends to
imply that the property is a ratio of two opposing factors: I would
have won except for my luck quotient.
This could also be I
would have won except for the luck factor
, but using
quotient emphasizes that it was bad luck overpowering
good luck (or someone else's good luck overpowering your own). Foo index and coefficient of foo both tend to imply that foo
is, if not strictly measurable, at least something that can be larger or
smaller. Thus, you might refer to a paper or person as having a high bogosity index, whereas you would be less
likely to speak of a high bogosity
factor. Foo index
suggests that foo is a condensation of many quantities, as in the mundane
cost-of-living index; coefficient of
foo suggests that foo is a fundamental quantity, as in a
coefficient of friction. The choice between these terms is often one of
personal preference; e.g., some people might feel that bogosity is a
fundamental attribute and thus say coefficient
of bogosity, whereas others might feel it is a combination of
factors and thus say bogosity
index.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cokebottle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:47 AM ----- BODY: /kohk´bot·l/ n.
Any very unusual character, particularly one you can't type because it isn't on your keyboard. MIT people used to complain about the ‘control-meta-cokebottle’ commands at SAIL, and SAIL people complained right back about the ‘escape-escape-cokebottle’ commands at MIT. After the demise of the space-cadet keyboard, cokebottle faded away as serious usage, but was often invoked humorously to describe an (unspecified) weird or non-intuitive keystroke command. It may be due for a second inning, however. The OSF/Motif window manager, mwm1, has a reserved keystroke for switching to the default set of keybindings and behavior. This keystroke is (believe it or not) ‘control-meta-bang’ (see bang). Since the exclamation point looks a lot like an upside down Coke bottle, Motif hackers have begun referring to this keystroke as cokebottle. See also quadruple bucky.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cold boot DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:46 AM ----- BODY: n.
See boot.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: COME FROM DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:45 AM ----- BODY: n.
A semi-mythical language construct dual to the ‘go to’;
COME FROM
<label> would cause the
referenced label to act as a sort of trapdoor, so that if the program ever
reached it control would quietly and automagically
be transferred to the statement following the COME
FROM
. COME FROM
was first
proposed in R. Lawrence Clark's A Linguistic Contribution to
GOTO-less programming, which appeared in a 1973
Datamation issue (and was reprinted in the April
1984 issue of Communications of the ACM). This
parodied the then-raging ‘structured programming’
holy wars (see considered harmful). Mythically, some variants are the assigned COME FROM and the computed COME FROM (parodying some nasty
control constructs in FORTRAN and some extended BASICs). Of course,
multi-tasking (or non-determinism) could be implemented by having more than
one COME FROM
statement coming from the
same label.
In some ways the FORTRAN DO
looks
like a COME FROM
statement. After the
terminating statement number/CONTINUE
is
reached, control continues at the statement following the DO. Some
generous FORTRANs would allow arbitrary statements (other than CONTINUE
) for the statement, leading to examples
like:
DO 10 I=1,LIMIT
C imagine many lines of code here, leaving the
C original DO statement lost in the spaghetti...
WRITE(6,10) I,FROB(I)
10 FORMAT(1X,I5,G10.4)
in which the trapdoor is just after the statement labeled 10. (This
is particularly surprising because the label doesn't appear to have
anything to do with the flow of control at all!) While sufficiently
astonishing to the unsuspecting reader, this form of COME FROM
statement isn't completely general. After
all, control will eventually pass to the following statement. The
implementation of the general form was left to Univac FORTRAN, ca. 1975
(though a roughly similar feature existed on the IBM 7040 ten years
earlier). The statement AT 100
would
perform a COME FROM 100
. It was intended
strictly as a debugging aid, with dire consequences promised to anyone so
deranged as to use it in production code. More horrible things had already
been perpetrated in production languages, however; doubters need only
contemplate the ALTER
verb in
COBOL. COME FROM
was supported under its own name for the first time 15 years later, in
C-INTERCAL (see INTERCAL,
retrocomputing); knowledgeable observers are still
reeling from the shock.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: comm mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:44 AM ----- BODY: /kom mohd/ n.
[ITS: from the feature supporting on-line chat; the first word may be spelled with one or two m's] Syn. for talk mode.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: command key DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:43 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Mac users] Syn. feature key.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: comment out DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:42 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To surround a section of code with comment delimiters or to prefix every line in the section with a comment marker; this prevents it from being compiled or interpreted. Often done when the code is redundant or obsolete, but is being left in the source to make the intent of the active code clearer; also when the code in that section is broken and you want to bypass it in order to debug some other part of the code. Compare condition out, usually the preferred technique in languages (such as C) that make it possible.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: Commonwealth Hackish DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:41 AM ----- BODY: n.
Hacker jargon as spoken in English outside the U.S., esp. in the British Commonwealth. It is reported that Commonwealth speakers are more likely to pronounce truncations like ‘char’ and ‘soc’, etc., as spelled (/char/, /sok/), as opposed to American /keir/ and /sohsh/. Dots in newsgroup names (especially two-component names) tend to be pronounced more often (so soc.wibble is /sok dot wib´l/ rather than /sohsh wib´l/).
Preferred metasyntactic variables include
blurgle, eek
,
ook
, frodo
,
and bilbo
; wibble,
wobble
, and in emergencies wubble
; flob
,
banana
, tom
, dick
, harry
, wombat
,
frog
, fish,
womble and so on and on (see
foo, sense 4). Alternatives to verb doubling
include suffixes -o-rama, frenzy (as in feeding frenzy), and city (examples: barf city!
hack-o-rama!
core dump frenzy!
).
All the generic differences within the anglophone world inevitably show themselves in the associated hackish dialects. The Greek letters beta and zeta are usually pronounced /bee´t@/ and /zee´t@/; meta may also be pronounced /mee´t@/. Various punctuators (and even letters - Z is called ‘zed’, not ‘zee’) are named differently: most crucially, for hackish, where Americans use ‘parens’, ‘brackets’ and `braces' for (), [] and {}, Commonwealth English uses ‘brackets’, ‘square brackets’ and ‘curly brackets’, though ‘parentheses’ may be used for the first; the exclamation mark, ‘!’, is called pling rather than bang and the pound sign, ‘#’, is called hash; furthermore, the term ‘the pound sign’ is understood to mean the £ (of course). Canadian hacker slang, as with mainstream language, mixes American and British usages about evenly.
See also attoparsec, calculator, chemist, console jockey, fish, go-faster stripes, grunge, hakspek, heavy metal, leaky heap, lord high fixer, loose bytes, muddie, nadger, noddy, psychedelicware, raster blaster, RTBM, seggie, spod, sun lounge, terminal junkie, tick-list features, weeble, weasel, YABA, and notes or definitions under Bad Thing, barf, bogus, chase pointers, cosmic rays, crippleware, crunch, dodgy, gonk, hamster, hardwarily, mess-dos, nybble, proglet, root, SEX, tweak, womble, and xyzzy.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: compact DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:40 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Of a design, describes the valuable property that it can all be apprehended at once in one's head. This generally means the thing created from the design can be used with greater facility and fewer errors than an equivalent tool that is not compact. Compactness does not imply triviality or lack of power; for example, C is compact and FORTRAN is not, but C is more powerful than FORTRAN. Designs become non-compact through accreting features and cruft that don't merge cleanly into the overall design scheme (thus, some fans of Classic C maintain that ANSI C is no longer compact).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: compiler jock DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
See jock (sense 2).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: compo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:38 AM ----- BODY: n.
[demoscene] Finnish-originated slang for ‘competition’. Demo compos are held at a demoparty. The usual protocol is that several groups make demos for a compo, they are shown on a big screen, and then the party participants vote for the best one. Prizes (from sponsors and party entrance fees) are given. Standard compo formats include intro compos (4k or 64k demos), music compos, graphics compos, quick demo compos (build a demo within 4 hours for example), etc.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: compress DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:37 AM ----- BODY: vt.
[Unix] When used without a qualifier, generally refers to
crunching of a file using a particular C
implementation of compression by Joseph M. Orost et al.: and widely
circulated via Usenet; use of
crunch itself in this sense is rare among Unix
hackers. Specifically, compress is built around the Lempel-Ziv-Welch
algorithm as described in A Technique for High Performance Data
Compression
, Terry A. Welch, IEEE Computer,
vol. 17, no. 6 (June 1984), pp. 8--19.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: Compu$erve DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:36 AM ----- BODY: n.
See CI$. Synonyms CompuSpend and Compu$pend are also reported.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: computer confetti DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:35 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. chad. [obs.] Though this term was common at one time, this use of punched-card chad is not a good idea, as the pieces are stiff and have sharp corners that could injure the eyes. GLS reports that he once attended a wedding at MIT during which he and a few other guests enthusiastically threw chad instead of rice. The groom later grumbled that he and his bride had spent most of the evening trying to get the stuff out of their hair.
[2001 update: this term has passed out of use for two reasons; (1) the stuff it describes is now quite rare, and (2) the term chad, which was half-forgotten in 1990, has enjoyed a revival. —ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: computron DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:34 AM ----- BODY: /kom´pyoo·tron`/ n.
1. [common] A notional unit of computing power combining instruction
speed and storage capacity, dimensioned roughly in instructions-per-second
times megabytes-of-main-store times megabytes-of-mass-storage. That
machine can't run GNU Emacs, it doesn't have enough computrons!
This usage is usually found in metaphors that treat computing power as a
fungible commodity good, like a crop yield or diesel horsepower. See
bitty box,
Get a real computer!, toy,
crank.
2. A mythical subatomic particle that bears the unit quantity of computation or information, in much the same way that an electron bears one unit of electric charge (see also bogon). An elaborate pseudo-scientific theory of computrons has been developed based on the physical fact that the molecules in a solid object move more rapidly as it is heated. It is argued that an object melts because the molecules have lost their information about where they are supposed to be (that is, they have emitted computrons). This explains why computers get so hot and require air conditioning; they use up computrons. Conversely, it should be possible to cool down an object by placing it in the path of a computron beam. It is believed that this may also explain why machines that work at the factory fail in the computer room: the computrons there have been all used up by the other hardware. (The popularity of this theory probably owes something to the Warlock stories by Larry Niven, the best known being What Good is a Glass Dagger?, in which magic is fueled by an exhaustible natural resource called mana.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: con DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:33 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from SF fandom] A science-fiction convention. Not used of other
sorts of conventions, such as professional meetings. This term, unlike
many others imported from SF-fan slang, is widely recognized even by
hackers who aren't fans. We'd been
corresponding on the net for months, then we met face-to-face at a
con.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: condition out DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:32 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To prevent a section of code from being compiled by surrounding it
with a conditional-compilation directive whose condition is always false.
The canonical examples of these directives are
#if 0
(or #ifdef
notdef
, though some find the latter
bletcherous) and #endif
in C. Compare
comment out.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: condom DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:31 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The protective plastic bag that accompanies 3.5-inch microfloppy diskettes. Rarely, also used of (paper) disk envelopes. Unlike the write protect tab, the condom (when left on) not only impedes the practice of SEX but has also been shown to have a high failure rate as drive mechanisms attempt to access the disk — and can even fatally frustrate insertion.
2. The protective cladding on a light pipe.
3. keyboard condom: A flexible, transparent plastic cover for a keyboard, designed to provide some protection against dust and programming fluid without impeding typing.
4. elephant condom: the plastic shipping bags used inside cardboard boxes to protect hardware in transit.
5. n. obs. A dummy directory /usr/tmp/sh, created to foil the Great Worm by exploiting a portability bug in one of its parts. So named in the title of a comp.risks article by Gene Spafford during the Worm crisis, and again in the text of The Internet Worm Program: An Analysis, Purdue Technical Report CSD-TR-823.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: confuser DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:30 AM ----- BODY: n.
Common soundalike slang for ‘computer’. Usually encountered in compounds such as confuser room, personal confuser, confuser guru. Usage: silly.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: connector conspiracy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:29 AM ----- BODY: n.
[probably came into prominence with the appearance of the KL-10 (one model of the PDP-10), none of whose connectors matched anything else] The tendency of manufacturers (or, by extension, programmers or purveyors of anything) to come up with new products that don't fit together with the old stuff, thereby making you buy either all new stuff or expensive interface devices.
(A closely related phenomenon, with a slightly different intent, is the habit manufacturers have of inventing new screw heads so that only Designated Persons, possessing the magic screwdrivers, can remove covers and make repairs or install options. A good 1990s example is the use of Torx screws for cable-TV set-top boxes. Older Apple Macintoshes took this one step further, requiring not only a long Torx screwdriver but a specialized case-cracking tool to open the box.)
In these latter days of open-systems computing this term has fallen
somewhat into disuse, to be replaced by the observation that
Standards are great! There are so many of them to choose
from!
Compare backward combatability.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cons DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:28 AM ----- BODY: /konz/ or /kons/
[from LISP]
1. vt. To add a new element to a
specified list, esp. at the top. OK, cons picking a replacement
for the console TTY onto the agenda.
2. cons up: vt. To synthesize from smaller pieces: to
cons up an example
.
In LISP itself, cons
is the most
fundamental operation for building structures. It takes any two objects
and returns a dot-pair or
two-branched tree with one object hanging from each branch. Because the
result of a cons is an object, it can be used to build binary trees of any
shape and complexity. Hackers think of it as a sort of universal
constructor, and that is where the jargon meanings spring from.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: considered harmful DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:27 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[very common] Edsger W. Dijkstra's note in the March 1968 Communications of the ACM, Goto Statement Considered Harmful, fired the first salvo in the structured programming wars (text at http://www.acm.org/classics/). As it turns out, the title under which the letter appeared was actually supplied by CACM's editor, Niklaus Wirth. Amusingly, the ACM considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it will (by policy) no longer print an article taking so assertive a position against a coding practice. (Years afterwards, a contrary view was uttered in a CACM letter called, inevitably, ‘Goto considered harmful’ considered harmful''. In the ensuing decades, a large number of both serious papers and parodies have borne titles of the form X considered Y. The structured-programming wars eventually blew over with the realization that both sides were wrong, but use of such titles has remained as a persistent minor in-joke (the ‘considered silly’ found at various places in this lexicon is related).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: console DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:26 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The operator's station of a mainframe. In times past, this was a privileged location that conveyed godlike powers to anyone with fingers on its keys. Under Unix and other modern timesharing OSes, such privileges are guarded by passwords instead, and the console is just the tty the system was booted from. Some of the mystique remains, however, and it is traditional for sysadmins to post urgent messages to all users from the console (on Unix, /dev/console).
2. On microcomputer Unix boxes, the main screen and keyboard (as opposed to character-only terminals talking to a serial port). Typically only the console can do real graphics or run X.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: console jockey DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:25 AM ----- BODY: n.
See terminal junkie.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: content-free DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:24 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[by analogy with techspeak context-free] Used of a message that adds
nothing to the recipient's knowledge. Though this adjective is sometimes
applied to flamage, it more usually connotes
derision for communication styles that exalt form over substance or are
centered on concerns irrelevant to the subject ostensibly at hand. Perhaps
most used with reference to speeches by company presidents and other
professional manipulators. Content-free? Uh... that's
anything printed on glossy paper.
(See also
four-color glossies.) He gave a talk on the implications of
electronic networks for postmodernism and the fin-de-siecle aesthetic. It
was content-free.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: control-C DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:23 AM ----- BODY: vi.
1. Stop whatever you are doing.
From the interrupt
character used on many operating systems to abort a running program.
Considered silly.
2. interj. Among BSD Unix
hackers, the canonical humorous response to Give me a
break!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: control-O DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:22 AM ----- BODY: vi.
Stop talking.
From the character used on some
operating systems to abort output but allow the program to keep on running.
Generally means that you are not interested in hearing anything more from
that person, at least on that topic; a standard response to someone who is
flaming. Considered silly. Compare
control-S.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: control-Q DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:21 AM ----- BODY: vi.
Resume.
From the ASCII DC1 or
XON character (the pronunciation /X-on/ is therefore also used), used to
undo a previous control-S.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: control-S DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:20 AM ----- BODY: vi.
Stop talking for a second.
From the ASCII DC3 or XOFF
character (the pronunciation /X-of/ is therefore also used). Control-S
differs from control-O in that the person is asked
to stop talking (perhaps because you are on the phone) but will be allowed
to continue when you're ready to listen to him — as opposed to
control-O, which has more of the meaning of Shut up.
Considered silly.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: Conway's Law DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:19 AM ----- BODY: prov.
The rule that the organization of the software and the organization
of the software team will be congruent; commonly stated as If you
have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass
compiler
. The original statement was more general,
Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce
designs which are copies of the communication structures of these
organizations.
This first appeared in the April 1968 issue of
Datamation. Compare
SNAFU principle.
The law was named after Melvin Conway, an early proto-hacker who
wrote an assembler for the Burroughs 220 called SAVE. (The name
‘SAVE’ didn't stand for anything; it was just that you lost
fewer card decks and listings because they all had SAVE written on them.)
There is also Tom Cheatham's amendment of Conway's Law: If a group
of N persons implements a COBOL compiler, there will be N-1 passes.
Someone in the group has to be the manager.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cookbook DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:18 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from amateur electronics and radio] A book of small code segments that the reader can use to do various magic things in programs. Cookbooks, slavishly followed, can lead one into voodoo programming, but are useful for hackers trying to monkey up small programs in unknown languages. This function is analogous to the role of phrasebooks in human languages.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cooked mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:17 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Unix, by opposition from raw mode] The normal character-input mode, with interrupts enabled and with erase, kill and other special-character interpretations performed directly by the tty driver. Oppose raw mode, rare mode. This term is techspeak under Unix but jargon elsewhere; other operating systems often have similar mode distinctions, and the raw/rare/cooked way of describing them has spread widely along with the C language and other Unix exports. Most generally, cooked mode may refer to any mode of a system that does extensive preprocessing before presenting data to a program.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cookie DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:16 AM ----- BODY: n.
A handle, transaction ID, or other token of agreement between
cooperating programs. I give him a packet, he gives me back a
cookie.
The claim check you get from a dry-cleaning shop is a
perfect mundane example of a cookie; the only thing it's useful for is to
relate a later transaction to this one (so you get the same clothes back).
Syn. magic cookie; see also
fortune cookie. Now mainstream in the specific sense of web-browser
cookies.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cookie bear DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:15 AM ----- BODY: n. obs.
Original term, pre-Sesame-Street, for what is now universally called
a cookie monster. A correspondent observes In
those days, hackers were actually getting their yucks from...sit
down now...Andy Williams. Yes, that Andy
Williams. Seems he had a rather hip (by the standards of the day) TV
variety show. One of the best parts of the show was the recurring
‘cookie bear’ sketch. In these sketches, a guy in a bear suit
tried all sorts of tricks to get a cookie out of Williams. The sketches
would always end with Williams shrieking (and I don't mean figuratively),
‘No cookies! Not now, not ever...NEVER!!!’ And the bear
would fall down. Great stuff.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cookie file DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:14 AM ----- BODY: n.
A collection of fortune cookies in a format that facilitates retrieval by a fortune program. There are several different cookie files in public distribution, and site admins often assemble their own from various sources including this lexicon.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cookie jar DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:13 AM ----- BODY: n.
An area of memory set aside for storing cookies. Most commonly heard in the Atari ST community; many useful ST programs record their presence by storing a distinctive magic number in the jar. Programs can inquire after the presence or otherwise of other programs by searching the contents of the jar.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cookie monster DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:12 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from the children's TV program Sesame
Street] Any of a family of early (1970s) hacks reported on
TOPS-10, ITS,
Multics, and elsewhere that would lock up either the
victim's terminal (on a timesharing machine) or the
console (on a batch
mainframe), repeatedly demanding I WANT A
COOKIE
. The required responses ranged in complexity from
COOKIE
through HAVE A COOKIE
and upward.
Folklorist Jan Brunvand (see FOAF) has described
these programs as urban legends (implying they probably never existed) but
they existed, all right, in several different versions. See also
wabbit. Interestingly, the term cookie monster appears to be a
retcon; the original term was
cookie bear.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: copious free time DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:11 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Apple; orig. fr. the intro to Tom Lehrer's song It Makes A Fellow Proud To Be A Soldier]
1. [used ironically to indicate the speaker's lack of the quantity
in question] A mythical schedule slot for accomplishing tasks held to be
unlikely or impossible. Sometimes used to indicate that the speaker is
interested in accomplishing the task, but believes that the opportunity
will not arise. I'll implement the automatic layout stuff in my
copious free time.
2. [Archly] Time reserved for bogus or otherwise idiotic tasks, such
as implementation of chrome, or the stroking of
suits. I'll get back to him on that feature
in my copious free time.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: copper DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:10 AM ----- BODY: n.
Conventional electron-carrying network cable with a core conductor of copper — or aluminum! Opposed to light pipe or, say, a short-range microwave link.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: copy protection DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:09 AM ----- BODY: n.
A class of methods for preventing incompetent pirates from stealing software and legitimate customers from using it. Considered silly.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: copybroke DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:08 AM ----- BODY: /kop´ee·brohk/ adj.
1. [play on copyright] Used to describe an instance of a copy-protected program that has been ‘broken’; that is, a copy with the copy-protection scheme disabled. Syn. copywronged.
2. Copy-protected software which is unusable because of some bit-rot or bug that has confused the anti-piracy check. See also copy protection.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: copycenter DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:07 AM ----- BODY: n.
[play on ‘copyright’ and ‘copyleft’]
1. The copyright notice carried by the various flavors of freeware
BSD. According to Kirk McKusick at BSDCon 1999: The way it was
characterized politically, you had copyright, which is what the big
companies use to lock everything up; you had copyleft, which is free
software's way of making sure they can't lock it up; and then Berkeley had
what we called ‘copycenter’, which is ‘take it down to
the copy center and make as many copies as you want’
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: copyleft DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:06 AM ----- BODY: /kop´ee·left/ n.
[play on copyright]
1. The copyright notice (‘General Public License’) carried by GNU EMACS and other Free Software Foundation software, granting reuse and reproduction rights to all comers (but see also General Public Virus).
2. By extension, any copyright notice intended to achieve similar aims.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: copyparty DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:05 AM ----- BODY: n.
[C64/amiga demoscene] A computer party organized so demosceners can meet other in real life, and to facilitate software copying (mostly pirated software). The copyparty has become less common as the Internet makes communication easier. The demoscene has gradually evolved the demoparty to replace it.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: copywronged DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:04 AM ----- BODY: /kop´ee·rongd/ adj.
[play on copyright] Syn. for copybroke.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: core DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:03 AM ----- BODY: n.
Main storage or RAM. Dates from the days of ferrite-core memory; now archaic as techspeak most places outside IBM, but also still used in the Unix community and by old-time hackers or those who would sound like them. Some derived idioms are quite current; in core, for example, means ‘in memory’ (as opposed to ‘on disk’), and both core dump and the core image or core file produced by one are terms in favor. Some varieties of Commonwealth hackish prefer store.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: core cancer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:02 AM ----- BODY: n.
[rare] A process that exhibits a slow but inexorable resource leak — like a cancer, it kills by crowding out productive tissue.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: core dump DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:01 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common Iron Age jargon, preserved by Unix]
1. [techspeak] A copy of the contents of core, produced when a process is aborted by certain kinds of internal error.
2. By extension, used for humans passing out, vomiting, or
registering extreme shock. He dumped core. All over the floor.
What a mess.
He heard about X and dumped
core.
3. Occasionally used for a human rambling on pointlessly at great
length; esp. in apology: Sorry, I dumped core on you
.
4. A recapitulation of knowledge (compare
bits, sense 1). Hence, spewing all one knows about
a topic (syn. brain dump), esp. in a lecture or
answer to an exam question. Short, concise answers are better than
core dumps
(from the instructions to an exam at Columbia). See
core.
A core dump lands our hero in hot water.
(This is the last cartoon in the Crunchly saga.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: core leak DATE: 05/15/2003 10:53:00 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. memory leak.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: Core Wars DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:59 AM ----- BODY: n.
A game between assembler programs in a machine or machine simulator, where the objective is to kill your opponent's program by overwriting it. Popularized in the 1980s by A. K. Dewdney's column in Scientific American magazine, but described in Software Practice And Experience a decade earlier. The game was actually devised and played by Victor Vyssotsky, Robert Morris Sr., and Doug McIlroy in the early 1960s (Dennis Ritchie is sometimes incorrectly cited as a co-author, but was not involved). Their original game was called ‘Darwin’ and ran on a IBM 7090 at Bell Labs. See core. For information on the modern game, do a web search for the ‘rec.games.corewar FAQ’ or surf to the King Of The Hill site.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cosmic rays DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:58 AM ----- BODY: n.
Notionally, the cause of bit rot. However,
this is a semi-independent usage that may be invoked as a humorous way to
handwave away any minor
randomness that doesn't seem worth the bother of
investigating. Hey, Eric — I just got a burst of garbage on
my tube, where did that come from?
Cosmic rays, I guess.
Compare
sunspots, phase of the moon.
The British seem to prefer the usage cosmic
showers; alpha particles
is also heard, because stray alpha particles passing through a memory chip
can cause single-bit errors (this becomes increasingly more likely as
memory sizes and densities increase).
Factual note: Alpha particles cause bit rot, cosmic rays do not (except occasionally in spaceborne computers). Intel could not explain random bit drops in their early chips, and one hypothesis was cosmic rays. So they created the World's Largest Lead Safe, using 25 tons of the stuff, and used two identical boards for testing. One was placed in the safe, one outside. The hypothesis was that if cosmic rays were causing the bit drops, they should see a statistically significant difference between the error rates on the two boards. They did not observe such a difference. Further investigation demonstrated conclusively that the bit drops were due to alpha particle emissions from thorium (and to a much lesser degree uranium) in the encapsulation material. Since it is impossible to eliminate these radioactives (they are uniformly distributed through the earth's crust, with the statistically insignificant exception of uranium lodes) it became obvious that one has to design memories to withstand these hits.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cough and die DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:57 AM ----- BODY: v.
Syn. barf. Connotes that the program is
throwing its hands up by design rather than because of a bug or oversight.
The parser saw a control-A in its input where it was looking for a
printable, so it coughed and died.
Compare
die, die horribly,
scream and die.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: courier DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:56 AM ----- BODY:
[BBS & cracker cultures] A person who distributes newly cracked warez, as opposed to a server who makes them available for download or a leech who merely downloads them. Hackers recognize this term but don't use it themselves, as the act is not part of their culture. See also warez d00dz, cracker, elite.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cow orker DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:55 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet] n. fortuitous typo for co-worker, widely used in Usenet, with perhaps a hint that orking cows is illegal. This term was popularized by Scott Adams (the creator of Dilbert) but already appears in the January 1996 version of the scary devil monastery FAQ, and has been traced back to a 1989 sig block. Compare hing, grilf, filk, newsfroup.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cowboy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Sun, from William Gibson's cyberpunk SF] Synonym for hacker. It is reported that at Sun this word is often said with reverence.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: CP/M DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:53 AM ----- BODY: /C·P·M/ n.
[Control Program/Monitor; later retconned to Control Program for Microcomputers] An early microcomputer OS written by hacker Gary Kildall for 8080- and Z80-based machines, very popular in the late 1970s but virtually wiped out by MS-DOS after the release of the IBM PC in 1981. Legend has it that Kildall's company blew its chance to write the OS for the IBM PC because Kildall decided to spend a day IBM's reps wanted to meet with him enjoying the perfect flying weather in his private plane (another variant has it that Gary's wife was much more interested in packing her suitcases for an upcoming vacation than in clinching a deal with IBM). Many of CP/M's features and conventions strongly resemble those of early DEC operating systems such as TOPS-10, OS/8, RSTS, and RSX-11. See MS-DOS, operating system.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: CPU Wars DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:52 AM ----- BODY: /C·P·U worz/ n.
A 1979 large-format comic by Chas Andres chronicling the attempts of
the brainwashed androids of IPM (Impossible to Program Machines) to conquer
and destroy the peaceful denizens of HEC (Human Engineered Computers).
This rather transparent allegory featured many references to
ADVENT and the immortal line Eat flaming
death, minicomputer mongrels!
(uttered, of course, by an IPM
stormtrooper). The whole shebang is now available on the
Web.
It is alleged that the author subsequently received a letter of appreciation on IBM company stationery from the head of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratories (at that time one of the few islands of true hackerdom in the IBM archipelago). The lower loop of the B in the IBM logo, it is said, had been carefully whited out. See eat flaming death.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: crack DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:51 AM ----- BODY:
[warez d00dz]
1. v. To break into a system (compare cracker).
2. v. Action of removing the copy protection from a commercial program. People who write cracks consider themselves challenged by the copy protection measures. They will often do it as much to show that they are smarter than the developer who designed the copy protection scheme than to actually copy the program.
3. n. A program, instructions or patch used to remove the copy protection of a program or to uncripple features from a demo/time limited program.
4. An exploit.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: crack root DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:50 AM ----- BODY: v.
[very common] To defeat the security system of a Unix machine and gain root privileges thereby; see cracking.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cracker DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:49 AM ----- BODY: n.
One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of hacker (q.v., sense 8). An earlier attempt to establish worm in this sense around 1981--82 on Usenet was largely a failure.
Use of both these neologisms reflects a strong revulsion against the
theft and vandalism perpetrated by cracking rings. The neologism
cracker
in this sense may have been influenced not so much
by the term safe-cracker
as by the non-jargon term
cracker
, which in Middle English meant an obnoxious person
(e.g., What cracker is this same that deafs our ears / With this
abundance of superfluous breath?
— Shakespeare's King John, Act
II, Scene I) and in modern colloquial American English survives as a barely
gentler synonym for white trash
.
While it is expected that any real hacker will have done some playful cracking and knows many of the basic techniques, anyone past larval stage is expected to have outgrown the desire to do so except for immediate, benign, practical reasons (for example, if it's necessary to get around some security in order to get some work done).
Thus, there is far less overlap between hackerdom and crackerdom than the mundane reader misled by sensationalistic journalism might expect. Crackers tend to gather in small, tight-knit, very secretive groups that have little overlap with the huge, open poly-culture this lexicon describes; though crackers often like to describe themselves as hackers, most true hackers consider them a separate and lower form of life. An easy way for outsiders to spot the difference is that crackers use grandiose screen names that conceal their identities. Hackers never do this; they only rarely use noms de guerre at all, and when they do it is for display rather than concealment.
Ethical considerations aside, hackers figure that anyone who can't imagine a more interesting way to play with their computers than breaking into someone else's has to be pretty losing. Some other reasons crackers are looked down on are discussed in the entries on cracking and phreaking. See also samurai, dark-side hacker, and hacker ethic. For a portrait of the typical teenage cracker, see warez d00dz.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cracking DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:48 AM ----- BODY: n.
[very common] The act of breaking into a computer system; what a cracker does. Contrary to widespread myth, this does not usually involve some mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance, but rather persistence and the dogged repetition of a handful of fairly well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the security of target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are incompetent as hackers. This entry used to say 'mediocre', but the spread of rootkit and other automated cracking has depressed the average level of skill among crackers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: crank DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:47 AM ----- BODY: vt.
[from automotive slang] Verb used to describe the performance of a
machine, especially sustained performance. This box cranks (or,
cranks at) about 6 megaflops, with a burst mode of twice that on vectorized
operations.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: crapplet DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:46 AM ----- BODY: n.
[portmanteau, crap + applet] A worthless applet, esp. a Java widget attached to a web page that doesn't work or even crashes your browser. Also spelled ‘craplet’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: CrApTeX DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:45 AM ----- BODY: /krap´tekh/ n.
[University of York, England] Term of abuse used to describe TeX and LaTeX when they don't work (when used by TeXhackers), or all the time (by everyone else). The non-TeX-enthusiasts generally dislike it because it is more verbose than other formatters (e.g. troff) and because (particularly if the standard Computer Modern fonts are used) it generates vast output files. See religious issues, TeX.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: crash DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:44 AM ----- BODY:
1. n. A sudden, usually drastic
failure. Most often said of the system (q.v., sense
1), esp. of magnetic disk drives (the term originally described what
happens when the air gap of a hard disk collapses). Three
lusers lost their files in last night's disk
crash.
A disk crash that involves the read/write heads dropping
onto the surface of the disks and scraping off the oxide may also be
referred to as a head crash, whereas
the term system crash usually, though
not always, implies that the operating system or other software was at
fault.
2. v. To fail suddenly.
Has the system just crashed?
Something crashed the
OS!
See down. Also used transitively to
indicate the cause of the crash (usually a person or a program, or both).
Those idiots playing SPACEWAR crashed the
system.
3. vi. Sometimes said of people hitting the sack after a long hacking run; see gronk out.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: crash and burn DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:43 AM ----- BODY: vi.,n.
A spectacular crash, in the mode of the conclusion of the car-chase scene in the movie Bullitt and many subsequent imitators (compare die horribly). The construction crash-and-burn machine is reported for a computer used exclusively for alpha or beta testing, or reproducing bugs (i.e., not for development). The implication is that it wouldn't be such a disaster if that machine crashed, since only the testers would be inconvenienced.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: crawling horror DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:42 AM ----- BODY: n.
Ancient crufty hardware or software that is kept obstinately alive
by forces beyond the control of the hackers at a site. Like
dusty deck or gonkulator, but
connotes that the thing described is not just an irritation but an active
menace to health and sanity. Mostly we code new stuff in C, but
they pay us to maintain one big FORTRAN II application from
nineteen-sixty-X that's a real crawling horror....
Compare
WOMBAT.
This usage is almost certainly derived from the fiction of
H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft may never have used the exact phrase
crawling horror
in his writings, but one of the fearsome
Elder Gods that he wrote extensively about was Nyarlethotep, who had as an
epithet The Crawling Chaos
. Certainly the extreme, even
melodramatic horror of his characters at the weird monsters they encounter,
even to the point of going insane with fear, is what hackers are referring
to with this phrase when they use it for horribly bad code. Compare
cthulhic.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: CRC handbook DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:41 AM ----- BODY:
Any of the editions of the Chemical Rubber Company
Handbook of Chemistry and Physics; there are other CRC
handbooks, such as the CRC Standard Mathematical Tables and
Formulae, but the
CRC handbook is the chemistry
and physics reference. It is massive tome full of mathematical tables,
physical constants of thousands of alloys and chemical compounds,
dielectric strengths, vapor pressure, resistivity, and the like. Hackers
have remarkably little actual use for these sorts of arcana, but are such
information junkies that a large percentage of them acquire copies anyway
and would feel vaguely bereft if they couldn't look up the magnetic
susceptibility of potassium permanganate at a moment's notice. On hackers'
bookshelves, the CRC handbook is rather likely to keep company with an
unabridged Oxford English Dictionary and a good atlas.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: creationism DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:40 AM ----- BODY: n.
The (false) belief that large, innovative software designs can be completely specified in advance and then painlessly magicked out of the void by the normal efforts of a team of normally talented programmers. In fact, experience has shown repeatedly that good designs arise only from evolutionary, exploratory interaction between one (or at most a small handful of) exceptionally able designer(s) and an active user population — and that the first try at a big new idea is always wrong. Unfortunately, because these truths don't fit the planning models beloved of management, they are generally ignored.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: creep DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:39 AM ----- BODY: v.
To advance, grow, or multiply inexorably. In hackish usage this verb has overtones of menace and silliness, evoking the creeping horrors of low-budget monster movies.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: creeping elegance DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:38 AM ----- BODY: n.
Describes a tendency for parts of a design to become elegant past the point of diminishing return, something which often happens at the expense of the less interesting parts of the design, the schedule, and other things deemed important in the Real World. See also creeping featurism, second-system effect, tense.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: creeping featurism DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:37 AM ----- BODY: /kree´ping fee´chr·izm/ n.
[common]
1. Describes a systematic tendency to load more
chrome and features onto
systems at the expense of whatever elegance they may have possessed when
originally designed. See also feeping creaturism.
You know, the main problem with BSD Unix has
always been creeping featurism.
2. More generally, the tendency for anything complicated to become
even more complicated because people keep saying Gee, it would be
even better if it had this feature too
. (See
feature.) The result is usually a patchwork because
it grew one ad-hoc step at a time, rather than being planned. Planning is
a lot of work, but it's easy to add just one extra little feature to help
someone ... and then another ... and another....
When creeping featurism gets out of hand, it's like a cancer. The GNU
hello program, intended to illustrate GNU
command-line switch and coding conventions, is also a wonderful parody of
creeping featurism; the distribution changelog is particularly funny.
Usually this term is used to describe computer programs, but it could also
be said of the federal government, the IRS 1040 form, and new cars. A
similar phenomenon sometimes afflicts conscious redesigns; see
second-system effect. See also
creeping elegance.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: creeping featuritis DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:36 AM ----- BODY: /kree´ping fee'·chr·i:`t@s/ n.
Variant of creeping featurism, with its own spoonerization: feeping creaturitis. Some people like to reserve this form for the disease as it actually manifests in software or hardware, as opposed to the lurking general tendency in designers' minds. (After all, -ism means ‘condition’ or ‘pursuit of’, whereas -itis usually means ‘inflammation of’.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cretin DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:35 AM ----- BODY: /kret´in/ or /kree´tn/ n.
Congenital loser; an obnoxious person; someone who can't do anything right. It has been observed that many American hackers tend to favor the British pronunciation /kret´in/ over standard American /kree´tn/; it is thought this may be due to the insidious phonetic influence of Monty Python's Flying Circus.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cretinous DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:34 AM ----- BODY: /kret´n·@s/ or /kreet´n·@s/ adj.
Wrong; stupid; non-functional; very poorly designed. Also used pejoratively of people. See dread high-bit disease for an example. Approximate synonyms: bletcherous, bagbiting, losing, brain-damaged.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: crippleware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:33 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [common] Software that has some important functionality deliberately removed, so as to entice potential users to pay for a working version.
2. [Cambridge] Variety of guiltware that exhorts you to donate to some charity (compare careware, nagware).
3. Hardware deliberately crippled, which can be upgraded to a more expensive model by a trivial change (e.g., cutting a jumper).
An excellent example of crippleware (sense 3) is Intel's 486SX chip, which is a standard 486DX chip with the co-processor diked out (in some early versions it was present but disabled). To upgrade, you buy a complete 486DX chip with working co-processor (its identity thinly veiled by a different pinout) and plug it into the board's expansion socket. It then disables the SX, which becomes a fancy power sink. Don't you love Intel?
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: critical mass DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:32 AM ----- BODY: n.
In physics, the minimum amount of fissionable material required to sustain a chain reaction. Of a software product, describes a condition of the software such that fixing one bug introduces one plus epsilon bugs. (This malady has many causes: creeping featurism, ports to too many disparate environments, poor initial design, etc.) When software achieves critical mass, it can never be fixed; it can only be discarded and rewritten.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: crlf DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:31 AM ----- BODY: /ker´l@f/, sometimes /kru´l@f/ or /C·R·L·F/ n.
(often capitalized as ‘CRLF’) A carriage return (CR, ASCII 0001101) followed by a line feed (LF, ASCII 0001010). More loosely, whatever it takes to get you from the end of one line of text to the beginning of the next line. See newline. Under Unix influence this usage has become less common (Unix uses a bare line feed as its ‘CRLF’).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: crock DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:30 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from the American scatologism crock of shit]
1. An awkward feature or programming technique that ought to be made cleaner. For example, using small integers to represent error codes without the program interpreting them to the user (as in, for example, Unix make1, which returns code 139 for a process that dies due to segfault).
2. A technique that works acceptably, but which is quite prone to failure if disturbed in the least. For example, a too-clever programmer might write an assembler which mapped instruction mnemonics to numeric opcodes algorithmically, a trick which depends far too intimately on the particular bit patterns of the opcodes. (For another example of programming with a dependence on actual opcode values, see The Story of Mel' in Appendix A.) Many crocks have a tightly woven, almost completely unmodifiable structure. See kluge, brittle. The adjectives crockish and crocky, and the nouns crockishness and crockitude, are also used.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cross-post DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:29 AM ----- BODY: vi.
[Usenet; very common] To post a single article simultaneously to several newsgroups. Distinguished from posting the article repeatedly, once to each newsgroup, which causes people to see it multiple times (which is very bad form). Gratuitous cross-posting without a Followup-To line directing responses to a single followup group is frowned upon, as it tends to cause followup articles to go to inappropriate newsgroups when people respond to various parts of the original posting.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: crossload DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:28 AM ----- BODY: v.,n.
[proposed, by analogy with upload and download] To move files between machines on a peer-to-peer network of nodes that act as both servers and clients for a distributed file store. Esp. appropriate for anonymized networks like Gnutella and Freenet.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: crudware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:27 AM ----- BODY: /kruhd´weir/ n.
Pejorative term for the hundreds of megabytes of low-quality
freeware circulated by user's groups and BBS systems
in the micro-hobbyist world. Yet another set
of disk catalog utilities for MS-DOS? What
crudware!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cruft DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:26 AM ----- BODY: /kruhft/
[very common; back-formation from crufty]
1. n. An unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under your bed is cruft; the TMRC Dictionary correctly noted that attacking it with a broom only produces more.
2. n. The results of shoddy construction.
3. vt. [from hand cruft, pun on ‘hand craft’] To write assembler code for something normally (and better) done by a compiler (see hand-hacking).
4. n. Excess; superfluous junk; used esp. of redundant or superseded code.
5. [University of Wisconsin] n.
Cruft is to hackers as gaggle is to geese; that is, at UW one properly says
a cruft of hackers
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cruft together DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:25 AM ----- BODY: vt.
(also cruft up) To throw
together something ugly but temporarily workable. Like vt. kluge up, but more
pejorative. There isn't any program now to reverse all the lines of
a file, but I can probably cruft one together in about 10 minutes.
See hack together, hack up,
kluge up, crufty.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cruftsmanship DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:24 AM ----- BODY: /kruhfts´m@n·ship / n.
[from cruft] The antithesis of craftsmanship.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: crufty DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:23 AM ----- BODY: /kruhf´tee/ adj.
[very common; origin unknown; poss. from ‘crusty’ or ‘cruddy’]
1. Poorly built, possibly over-complex. The
canonical example is This is standard old
crufty DEC software
. In fact, one fanciful
theory of the origin of crufty holds
that was originally a mutation of ‘crusty’ applied to DEC
software so old that the ‘s’ characters were tall and skinny,
looking more like ‘f’ characters.
2. Unpleasant, especially to the touch, often with encrusted junk. Like spilled coffee smeared with peanut butter and catsup.
3. Generally unpleasant.
4. (sometimes spelled cruftie)
n. A small crufty object (see
frob); often one that doesn't fit well into the
scheme of things. A LISP property list is a good place to store
crufties (or, collectively, random
cruft).
This term is one of the oldest in the jargon and no one is sure of its etymology, but it is suggestive that there is a Cruft Hall at Harvard University which is part of the old physics building; it's said to have been the physics department's radar lab during WWII. To this day (early 1993) the windows appear to be full of random techno-junk. MIT or Lincoln Labs people may well have coined the term as a knock on the competition.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: crumb DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:22 AM ----- BODY: n.
Two binary digits; a quad. Larger than a bit, smaller than a nybble. Considered silly. Syn. tayste. General discussion of such terms is under nybble.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: crunch DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:21 AM ----- BODY:
1. vi. To process, usually in a
time-consuming or complicated way. Connotes an essentially trivial
operation that is nonetheless painful to perform. The pain may be due to
the triviality's being embedded in a loop from 1 to 1,000,000,000.
FORTRAN programs do mostly
number-crunching.
2. vt. To reduce the size of a file by a complicated scheme that produces bit configurations completely unrelated to the original data, such as by a Huffman code. (The file ends up looking something like a paper document would if somebody crunched the paper into a wad.) Since such compression usually takes more computations than simpler methods such as run-length encoding, the term is doubly appropriate. (This meaning is usually used in the construction file crunch(ing) to distinguish it from number-crunching.) See compress.
3. n. The character #. Used at XEROX and CMU, among other places. See ASCII.
4. vt. To squeeze program source into a minimum-size representation that will still compile or execute. The term came into being specifically for a famous program on the BBC micro that crunched BASIC source in order to make it run more quickly (it was a wholly interpretive BASIC, so the number of characters mattered). Obfuscated C Contest entries are often crunched; see the first example under that entry.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cryppie DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:20 AM ----- BODY: /krip´ee/ n.
A cryptographer. One who hacks or implements cryptographic software or hardware.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cthulhic DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:19 AM ----- BODY: /kthool´hik/ adj.
Having the nature of a Cthulhu, the horrific tentacled green monstrosity from H.P. Lovecraft's seminal horror fiction. Cthulhu sends dreams that drive men mad, feeds on the flesh of screaming victims rent limb from limb, and is served by a cult of degenerates. Hackers think this describes large proprietary systems such as traditional mainframes, installations of SAP and Oracle, or rooms full of Windows servers remarkably well, and the adjective is used casually. Compare Shub-Internet and crawling horror.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: CTSS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:18 AM ----- BODY: /C·T·S·S/ n.
Compatible Time-Sharing System. An early (1963) experiment in the design of interactive timesharing operating systems, ancestral to Multics, Unix, and ITS. The name ITS (Incompatible Time-sharing System) was a hack on CTSS, meant both as a joke and to express some basic differences in philosophy about the way I/O services should be presented to user programs. See timesharing
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cube DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:17 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [short for ‘cubicle’] A module in the open-plan
offices used at many programming shops. I've got the manuals in my
cube.
2. A NeXT machine (which resembles a matte-black cube).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cup holder DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:16 AM ----- BODY: n.
The tray of a CD-ROM drive, or by extension the CD drive itself. So
called because of a common tech support legend about the idiot who called
to complain that the cup holder on his computer broke. A joke program was
once distributed around the net called cupholder.exe
, which
when run simply extended the CD drive tray. The humor of this was of course
lost on people whose drive had a slot or a caddy instead.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cursor dipped in X DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
There are a couple of metaphors in English of the form ‘pen
dipped in X’ (perhaps the most common values of X are
‘acid’, ‘bile’, and ‘vitriol’). These
map over neatly to this hackish usage (the cursor being what moves, leaving
letters behind, when one is composing on-line). Talk about a
nastygram! He must've had his cursor dipped in acid
when he wrote that one!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cuspy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:14 AM ----- BODY: /kuhs´pee/ adj.
[WPI: from the DEC abbreviation CUSP, for ‘Commonly Used System Program’, i.e., a utility program used by many people. Now rare.]
1. (of a program) Well-written.
2. Functionally excellent. A program that performs well and interfaces well to users is cuspy. Oppose rude.
3. [NYU] Said of an attractive woman, especially one regarded as available. Implies a certain curvaceousness.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cut a tape DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:13 AM ----- BODY: vi.
To write a software or document distribution on magnetic tape for shipment. Has nothing to do with physically cutting the medium! Early versions of this lexicon claimed that one never analogously speaks of ‘cutting a disk’, but this has since been reported as live usage. Related slang usages are mainstream business's ‘cut a check’, the recording industry's ‘cut a record’, and the military's ‘cut an order’.
All of these usages reflect physical processes in obsolete recording
and duplication technologies. The first stage in manufacturing an
old-style vinyl record involved cutting grooves in a stamping die with a
precision lathe. More mundanely, the dominant technology for mass
duplication of paper documents in pre-photocopying days involved
cutting a stencil
, punching away portions of the wax overlay
on a silk screen. More directly, paper tape with holes punched in it was
an important early storage medium. See also
burn a CD.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cybercrud DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:12 AM ----- BODY: /si:´ber·kruhd/ n.
1. [coined by Ted Nelson] Obfuscatory tech-talk. Verbiage with a high MEGO factor. The computer equivalent of bureaucratese.
2. Incomprehensible stuff embedded in email. First there were the
Received
headers that show how mail flows through systems,
then MIME (Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions) headers and part
boundaries, and now huge blocks of radix-64 for PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail)
or PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) digital signatures and certificates of
authenticity. This stuff all serves a purpose and good user interfaces
should hide it, but all too often users are forced to wade through
it.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cyberpunk DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:11 AM ----- BODY: /si:´ber·puhnk/ n.,adj.
[orig. by SF writer Bruce Bethke and/or editor Gardner Dozois] A subgenre of SF launched in 1982 by William Gibson's epoch-making novel Neuromancer (though its roots go back through Vernor Vinge's True Names (see the Bibliography in Appendix C) to John Brunner's 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider). Gibson's near-total ignorance of computers and the present-day hacker culture enabled him to speculate about the role of computers and hackers in the future in ways hackers have since found both irritatingly naïve and tremendously stimulating. Gibson's work was widely imitated, in particular by the short-lived but innovative Max Headroom TV series. See cyberspace, ice, jack in, go flatline.
Since 1990 or so, popular culture has included a movement or fashion trend that calls itself ‘cyberpunk’, associated especially with the rave/techno subculture. Hackers have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, self-described cyberpunks too often seem to be shallow trendoids in black leather who have substituted enthusiastic blathering about technology for actually learning and doing it. Attitude is no substitute for competence. On the other hand, at least cyberpunks are excited about the right things and properly respectful of hacking talent in those who have it. The general consensus is to tolerate them politely in hopes that they'll attract people who grow into being true hackers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cyberspace DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:10 AM ----- BODY: /si:´br·spays`/ n.
1. Notional ‘information-space’ loaded with visual cues and navigable with brain-computer interfaces called cyberspace decks; a characteristic prop of cyberpunk SF. Serious efforts to construct virtual reality interfaces modeled explicitly on Gibsonian cyberspace are under way, using more conventional devices such as glove sensors and binocular TV headsets. Few hackers are prepared to deny outright the possibility of a cyberspace someday evolving out of the network (see the network).
2. The Internet or Matrix (sense #2) as a whole, considered as a crude cyberspace (sense 1). Although this usage became widely popular in the mainstream press during 1994 when the Internet exploded into public awareness, it is strongly deprecated among hackers because the Internet does not meet the high, SF-inspired standards they have for true cyberspace technology. Thus, this use of the term usually tags a wannabee or outsider. Oppose meatspace.
3. Occasionally, the metaphoric location of the mind of a person in hack mode. Some hackers report experiencing strong synesthetic imagery when in hack mode; interestingly, independent reports from multiple sources suggest that there are common features to the experience. In particular, the dominant colors of this subjective cyberspace are often gray and silver, and the imagery often involves constellations of marching dots, elaborate shifting patterns of lines and angles, or moire patterns.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cycle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:09 AM ----- BODY:
1. n. The basic unit of
computation. What every hacker wants more of (noted hacker Bill Gosper
described himself as a cycle junkie
). One can describe an
instruction as taking so many clock
cycles. Often the computer can access its memory once on every
clock cycle, and so one speaks also of memory
cycles. These are technical meanings of
cycle. The jargon meaning comes from the
observation that there are only so many cycles per second, and when you are
sharing a computer the cycles get divided up among the users. The more
cycles the computer spends working on your program rather than someone
else's, the faster your program will run. That's why every hacker wants
more cycles: so he can spend less time waiting for the computer to respond.
2. By extension, a notional unit of human
thought power, emphasizing that lots of things compete for the typical
hacker's think time. I refused to get involved with the Rubik's
Cube back when it was big. Knew I'd burn too many cycles on it if I let
myself.
3. vt.
Syn. bounce (sense 4), from the phrase ‘cycle
power’. Cycle the machine again, that serial port's still
hung.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cycle of reincarnation DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:08 AM ----- BODY: n.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cycle server DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:07 AM ----- BODY: n.
A powerful machine that exists primarily for running large compute-, disk-, or memory-intensive jobs (more formally called a compute server). Implies that interactive tasks such as editing are done on other machines on the network, such as workstations.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: cypherpunk DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:06 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from cyberpunk] Someone interested in the uses of encryption via electronic ciphers for enhancing personal privacy and guarding against tyranny by centralized, authoritarian power structures, especially government. There is an active cypherpunks mailing list at cypherpunks-request@toad.com coordinating work on public-key encryption freeware, privacy, and digital cash. See also tentacle.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - C TITLE: C|N>K DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:05 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet] Coffee through Nose to Keyboard; that is, I laughed
so hard I snarfed my coffee onto my
keyboard.
. Common on alt.fan.pratchett and scary devil monastery; recognized elsewhere. The Acronymphomania
FAQ on alt.fan.pratchett
recognizes variants such as T|N>K = ‘Tea through Nose to
Keyboard’ and C|N>S = ‘Coffee through Nose to
Screen’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: daemon DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:04 AM ----- BODY: /day´mn/ or /dee´mn/ n.
[from Maxwell's Demon, later incorrectly retronymed as ‘Disk And Execution MONitor’] A program that is not invoked explicitly, but lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. The idea is that the perpetrator of the condition need not be aware that a daemon is lurking (though often a program will commit an action only because it knows that it will implicitly invoke a daemon). For example, under ITS, writing a file on the LPT spooler's directory would invoke the spooling daemon, which would then print the file. The advantage is that programs wanting (in this example) files printed need neither compete for access to nor understand any idiosyncrasies of the LPT. They simply enter their implicit requests and let the daemon decide what to do with them. Daemons are usually spawned automatically by the system, and may either live forever or be regenerated at intervals.
Daemon and demon are often used interchangeably, but seem to have distinct connotations. The term daemon was introduced to computing by CTSS people (who pronounced it /dee´mon/) and used it to refer to what ITS called a dragon; the prototype was a program called DAEMON that automatically made tape backups of the file system. Although the meaning and the pronunciation have drifted, we think this glossary reflects current (2000) usage.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: daemon book DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:03 AM ----- BODY: n.
The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System, by Samuel J. Leffler, Marshall Kirk McKusick, Michael J. Karels, and John S. Quarterman (Addison-Wesley Publishers, 1989, ISBN 0-201-06196-1); or The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System by Marshall Kirk McKusick, Keith Bostic, Michael J. Karels and John S. Quarterman (Addison-Wesley Longman, 1996, ISBN 0-201-54979-4) Either of the standard reference books on the internals of BSD Unix. So called because the covers have a picture depicting a little demon (a visual play on daemon) in sneakers, holding a pitchfork (referring to one of the characteristic features of Unix, the fork2 system call).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dahmum DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:02 AM ----- BODY: /dah´mum/ n.
[Usenet] The material of which protracted flame wars, especially those about operating systems, is composed. Homeomorphic to spam. The term dahmum is derived from the name of a militant OS/2 advocate, and originated when an extensively cross-posted OS/2-versus-Linux debate was fed through Dissociated Press.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dancing frog DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:01 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Vancouver area] A problem that occurs on a computer that will not reappear while anyone else is watching. From the classic Warner Brothers cartoon One Froggy Evening, featuring a dancing and singing Michigan J. Frog that just croaks when anyone else is around (now the WB network mascot).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dangling pointer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:52:00 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] A reference that doesn't actually lead anywhere (in C and some other languages, a pointer that doesn't actually point at anything valid). Usually this happens because it formerly pointed to something that has moved or disappeared. Used as jargon in a generalization of its techspeak meaning; for example, a local phone number for a person who has since moved to the other coast is a dangling pointer.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dark-side hacker DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:59 AM ----- BODY: n.
A criminal or malicious hacker; a cracker.
From George Lucas's Darth Vader, seduced by the dark side of the
Force
. The implication that hackers form a sort of elite of
technological Jedi Knights is intended. Oppose
samurai.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: Datamation DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:58 AM ----- BODY: /day`t@·may´sh@n/ n.
A magazine that many hackers assume all suits
read. Used to question an unbelieved quote, as in Did you read that
in Datamation?
. It used to publish something
hackishly funny every once in a while, like the original paper on
COME FROM in 1973, and Ed Post's Real
Programmers Don't Use Pascal ten years later, but for a long
time after that it was much more exclusively
suit-oriented and boring. Following a change of
editorship in 1994, Datamation briefly tried for more the technical content
and irreverent humor that marked its early days, but this did not
last.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: DAU DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:57 AM ----- BODY: /dow/ n.
[German FidoNet] German acronym for Dümmster Anzunehmender User (stupidest imaginable user). From the engineering-slang GAU for Grösster Anzunehmender Unfall, worst assumable accident, esp. of a LNG tank farm plant or something with similarly disastrous consequences. In popular German, GAU is used only to refer to worst-case nuclear accidents such as a core meltdown. See cretin, fool, loser and weasel.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: Dave the Resurrector DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:56 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet; also abbreviated DtR] A cancelbot that cancels cancels. Dave the Resurrector originated when some spam-spewers decided to try to impede spam-fighting by wholesale cancellation of anti-spam coordination messages in the news.admin.net-abuse.usenet newsgroup.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: day mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:55 AM ----- BODY: n.
See phase (sense 1). Used of people only.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dd DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:54 AM ----- BODY: /dee·dee/ vt.
[Unix: from IBM JCL] Equivalent to
cat or BLT. Originally the
name of a Unix copy command with special options suitable for
block-oriented devices; it was often used in heavy-handed system
maintenance, as in Let's
. The Unix
dd1
was designed with a weird, distinctly non-Unixy keyword option syntax
reminiscent of IBM System/360 JCL (which had an elaborate DD ‘Dataset
Definition’ specification for I/O devices); though the command filled
a need, the interface design was clearly a prank. The jargon usage is now
very rare outside Unix sites and now nearly obsolete even there, as
dd1
has been deprecated for a long time (though it has
no exact replacement). The term has been displaced by
BLT or simple English ‘copy’.dd
the root
partition onto a tape, then use the boot PROM to load it back on to a new
disk
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: DDT DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:53 AM ----- BODY: /D·D·T/ n.
[from the insecticide para-dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethene]
1. Generic term for a program that assists in debugging other
programs by showing individual machine instructions in a readable symbolic
form and letting the user change them. In this sense the term DDT is now
archaic, having been widely displaced by debugger or names of individual programs like
adb
, sdb
,
dbx
, or gdb
.
2. [ITS] Under MIT's fabled ITS operating system, DDT (running under the alias HACTRN, a six-letterism for ‘Hack Translator’) was also used as the shell or top level command language used to execute other programs.
3. Any one of several specific DDTs (sense 1) supported on early DEC hardware and CP/M. The PDP-10 Reference Handbook (1969) contained a footnote on the first page of the documentation for DDT that illuminates the origin of the term:
Historical footnote: DDT was developed at MIT for the PDP-1
computer in 1961. At that time DDT stood for DEC Debugging
Tape
. Since then, the idea of an on-line debugging program has
propagated throughout the computer industry. DDT programs are now
available for all DEC computers. Since media other than tape are
now frequently used, the more descriptive name Dynamic Debugging
Technique
has been adopted, retaining the DDT abbreviation. Confusion
between DDT-10 and another well known pesticide,
dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane
C14H9Cl5
should be minimal since each attacks a
different, and apparently mutually exclusive, class of bugs.
(The ‘tape’ referred to was, incidentally, not magnetic but paper.) Sadly, this quotation was removed from later editions of the handbook after the suits took over and DEC became much more ‘businesslike’.
The history above is known to many old-time hackers. But there's more: Peter Samson, compiler of the original TMRC lexicon, reports that he named DDT after a similar tool on the TX-0 computer, the direct ancestor of the PDP-1 built at MIT's Lincoln Lab in 1957. The debugger on that ground-breaking machine (the first transistorized computer) rejoiced in the name FLIT (FLexowriter Interrogation Tape).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: de-rezz DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:52 AM ----- BODY: /dee·rez´/
[from ‘de-resolve’ via the movie Tron] (also derez)
1. vi. To disappear or dissolve; the image that goes with it is of an object breaking up into raster lines and static and then dissolving. Occasionally used of a person who seems to have suddenly ‘fuzzed out’ mentally rather than physically. Usage: extremely silly, also rare. This verb was actually invented as fictional hacker jargon, and adopted in a spirit of irony by real hackers years after the fact.
2. vt. The Macintosh resource decompiler. On a Macintosh, many program structures (including the code itself) are managed in small segments of the program file known as resources; Rez and DeRez are a pair of utilities for compiling and decompiling resource files. Thus, decompiling a resource is derezzing. Usage: very common.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dead DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:51 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. Non-functional; down; crashed. Especially used of hardware.
2. At XEROX PARC, software that is working but not undergoing continued development and support.
3. Useless; inaccessible. Antonym: live. Compare dead code.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dead beef attack DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:50 AM ----- BODY: n.
[cypherpunks list, 1996] An attack on a public-key cryptosystem consisting of publishing a key having the same ID as another key (thus making it possible to spoof a user's identity if recipients aren't careful about verifying keys). In PGP and GPG the key ID is the last eight hex digits of (for RSA keys) the product of two primes. The attack was demonstrated by creating a key whose ID was 0xdeadbeef (see DEADBEEF).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dead code DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:49 AM ----- BODY: n.
Routines that can never be accessed because all calls to them have been removed, or code that cannot be reached because it is guarded by a control structure that provably must always transfer control somewhere else. The presence of dead code may reveal either logical errors due to alterations in the program or significant changes in the assumptions and environment of the program (see also software rot); a good compiler should report dead code so a maintainer can think about what it means. (Sometimes it simply means that an extremely defensive programmer has inserted can't happen tests which really can't happen — yet.) Syn. grunge. See also dead, and The Story of Mel'.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dead-tree version DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:48 AM ----- BODY:
[common] A paper version of an on-line document; one printed on dead
trees. In this context, dead trees
always refers to paper.
See also tree-killer.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: DEADBEEF DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:47 AM ----- BODY: /ded·beef/ n.
The hexadecimal word-fill pattern for freshly allocated memory under
a number of IBM environments, including the RS/6000. Some modern debugging
tools deliberately fill freed memory with this value as a way of converting
heisenbugs into Bohr bugs.
As in Your program is DEADBEEF
(meaning gone, aborted,
flushed from memory); if you start from an odd half-word boundary, of
course, you have BEEFDEAD. See also the anecdote under
fool and
dead beef attack.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: deadlock DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:46 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [techspeak] A situation wherein two or more processes are unable to proceed because each is waiting for one of the others to do something. A common example is a program communicating to a server, which may find itself waiting for output from the server before sending anything more to it, while the server is similarly waiting for more input from the controlling program before outputting anything. (It is reported that this particular flavor of deadlock is sometimes called a starvation deadlock, though the term starvation is more properly used for situations where a program can never run simply because it never gets high enough priority. Another common flavor is constipation, in which each process is trying to send stuff to the other but all buffers are full because nobody is reading anything.) See deadly embrace.
2. Also used of deadlock-like interactions between humans, as when two people meet in a narrow corridor, and each tries to be polite by moving aside to let the other pass, but they end up swaying from side to side without making any progress because they always move the same way at the same time.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: deadly embrace DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:45 AM ----- BODY: n.
Same as deadlock, though usually used only when exactly two processes are involved. This is the more popular term in Europe, while deadlock predominates in the United States.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: death code DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:44 AM ----- BODY: n.
A routine whose job is to set everything in the computer —
registers, memory, flags, everything — to zero, including that
portion of memory where it is running; its last act is to stomp on its own store zero
instruction. Death code
isn't very useful, but writing it is an interesting hacking challenge on
architectures where the instruction set makes it possible, such as the
PDP-8 (it has also been done on the DG Nova).
Perhaps the ultimate death code is on the TI 990 series, where all
registers are actually in RAM, and the instruction store immediate
0
has the opcode 0
. The PC will immediately wrap
around core as many times as it can until a user hits HALT. Any empty
memory location is death code. Worse, the manufacturer recommended use of
this instruction in startup code (which would be in ROM and therefore
survive).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: Death Square DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:43 AM ----- BODY: n.
The corporate logo of Novell, the people who acquired USL after AT&T let go of it (Novell eventually sold the Unix group to SCO). Coined by analogy with Death Star, because many people believed Novell was bungling the lead in Unix systems exactly as AT&T did for many years.
[They were right —ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: Death Star DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:42 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from the movie Star Wars]
1. The AT&T corporate logo, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Death Star in the Star Wars movies. This usage was particularly common among partisans of BSD Unix in the 1980s, who tended to regard the AT&T versions as inferior and AT&T as a bad guy. Copies still circulate of a poster printed by Mt. Xinu showing a starscape with a space fighter labeled 4.2 BSD streaking away from a broken AT&T logo wreathed in flames.
2. AT&T's internal magazine, Focus, uses death star to describe an incorrectly done AT&T logo in which the inner circle in the top left is dark instead of light — a frequent result of dark-on-light logo images.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: Death, X of DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:41 AM ----- BODY:
[common] A construction used to imbue the subject with campy menace,
usually with intent to ridicule. The ancestor of this term is a famous
Far Side cartoon from the 1980s in which a balloon
with a fierce face painted on it is passed off as the Floating Head
of Death
. Hackers and SF fans have been using the suffix of
Death
ever since to label things which appear to be vastly
threatening but will actually pop like a balloon if you prick them. Such
constructions are properly spoken in a tone of over-exagerrated
portentiousness: Behold! The Spinning - Pizza - of -
Death!
See
Blue Screen of Death, Ping O' Death,
Spinning Pizza of Death,
click of death. Compare Doom, X of.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: DEC DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:40 AM ----- BODY: /dek/ n.
n. Commonly used abbreviation
for Digital Equipment Corporation, later deprecated by DEC itself in favor
of Digital
and now entirely obsolete following the buyout by
Compaq. Before the killer micro revolution of the
late 1980s, hackerdom was closely symbiotic with DEC's pioneering
timesharing machines. The first of the group of cultures described by this
lexicon nucleated around the PDP-1 (see TMRC).
Subsequently, the PDP-6, PDP-10,
PDP-20, PDP-11 and
VAX were all foci of large and important hackerdoms,
and DEC machines long dominated the ARPANET and Internet machine
population. DEC was the technological leader of the minicomputer era
(roughly 1967 to 1987), but its failure to embrace microcomputers and Unix
early cost it heavily in profits and prestige after
silicon got cheap. Nevertheless, the microprocessor
design tradition owes a major debt to the PDP-11
instruction set, and every one of the major general-purpose microcomputer
OSs so far (CP/M, MS-DOS, Unix, OS/2, Windows NT) was either genetically
descended from a DEC OS, or incubated on DEC hardware, or both.
Accordingly, DEC was for many years still regarded with a certain wry
affection even among many hackers too young to have grown up on DEC
machines.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: DEC Wars DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
A 1983 Usenet posting by Alan Hastings and Steve Tarr spoofing the Star Wars movies in hackish terms. Some years later, ESR (disappointed by Hastings and Tarr's failure to exploit a great premise more thoroughly) posted a 3-times-longer complete rewrite called Unix WARS; the two are often confused.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: decay DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:38 AM ----- BODY: n.,vi
[from nuclear physics] An automatic conversion which is applied to most array-valued expressions in C; they ‘decay into’ pointer-valued expressions pointing to the array's first element. This term is borderline techspeak, but is not used in the official standard for the language.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: deckle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:37 AM ----- BODY: /dek´l/ n.
[from dec- and nybble; the original spelling seems to have been decle] Two nickles; 10 bits. Reported among developers for Mattel's GI 1600 (the Intellivision games processor), a chip with 16-bit-wide RAM but 10-bit-wide ROM. See nybble for other such terms.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: DED DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:36 AM ----- BODY: /D·E·D/ n.
Dark-Emitting Diode (that is, a burned-out LED). Compare
SED, LER,
write-only memory. In the early 1970s both
Signetics and Texas instruments released DED spec sheets as
AFJs (suggested uses included as a power-off
indicator
).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: deep hack mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:35 AM ----- BODY: n.
See hack mode.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: deep magic DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:34 AM ----- BODY: n.
[poss. from C. S. Lewis's Narnia books] An
awesomely arcane technique central to a program or system, esp. one
neither generally published nor available to hackers at large (compare
black art); one that could only have been composed
by a true wizard. Compiler optimization techniques
and many aspects of OS design used to be
deep magic; many techniques in cryptography, signal
processing, graphics, and AI still are. Compare
heavy wizardry. Esp.: found in comments of the form Deep
magic begins here...
. Compare
voodoo programming.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: deep space DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:33 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Describes the notional location of any program that has gone
off the trolley. Esp.: used of programs that just
sit there silently grinding long after either failure or some output is
expected. Uh oh. I should have gotten a prompt ten seconds ago.
The program's in deep space somewhere.
Compare
buzz, catatonic,
hyperspace.
2. The metaphorical location of a human so dazed and/or confused or caught up in some esoteric form of bogosity that he or she no longer responds coherently to normal communication. Compare page out.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: defenestration DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:32 AM ----- BODY: n.
[mythically from a traditional Bohemian assassination method, via SF fandom]
1. Proper karmic retribution for an incorrigible punster.
Oh, ghod, that was awful!
Quick!
Defenestrate him!
2. The act of completely removing Micro$oft Windows from a PC in favor of a better OS (typically Linux).
3. The act of discarding something under the assumption that it will
improve matters. I don't have any disk space left.
Well, why don't you defenestrate that 100 megs worth of old core
dumps?
4. Under a GUI, the act of dragging something out of a window (onto
the screen). Next, defenestrate the MugWump icon.
5. [obs.] The act of exiting a window system in order to get better response time from a full-screen program. This comes from the dictionary meaning of defenestrate, which is to throw something out a window.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: defined as DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:31 AM ----- BODY: adj.
In the role of, usually in an organization-chart sense. Pete
is currently defined as bug prioritizer.
Compare
logical.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: deflicted DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:30 AM ----- BODY:
[portmanteau of defective
and
afflicted
; common among PC repair technicians, and probably
originated among hardware techs outside the hacker community proper] Term
used of hardware that is broken due to poor design or shoddy manufacturing
or (especially) both; less frequently used of software and rarely of
people. This term is normally employed in a tone of weary contempt by
technicians who have seen the specific failure in the trouble report before
and are cynically confident they'll see it again. Ultimately this may
derive from Frank Zappa's 1974 album Apostrophe, on
which the Fur Trapper infamously rubs his deflicted eyes...
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dehose DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:29 AM ----- BODY: /dee·hohz/ vt.
To clear a hosed condition.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: Dejagoo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:28 AM ----- BODY:
[Portmanteau of Dejanews and Google] Google newsgroups. Became common in 2001 after Google acquired Dejanews, and with it the largest on-line archive of Usenet postings.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: deletia DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:27 AM ----- BODY: n. /d@·lee´sha/
[USENET; common] In an email reply, material omitted from the quote
of the original. Usually written rather than spoken; often appears as a
pseudo-tag or ellipsis in the body of the reply, as
[deletia]
or <deletia>
or
<snip>
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: deliminator DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:26 AM ----- BODY: /de·lim'·in·ay·t@r/ n.
[portmanteau, delimiter + eliminate] A string or pattern used to delimit text into fields, but which is itself eliminated from the resulting list of fields. This jargon seems to have originated among Perl hackers in connection with the Perl split() function; however, it has been sighted in live use among Java and even Visual Basic programmers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: delint DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:25 AM ----- BODY: /dee·lint/ v. obs.
To modify code to remove problems detected when linting. Confusingly, this process is also referred to as linting code. This term is no longer in general use because ANSI C compilers typically issue compile-time warnings almost as detailed as lint warnings.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: delta DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:24 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [techspeak] A quantitative change, especially a small or
incremental one (this use is general in physics and engineering). I
just doubled the speed of my program!
What was the delta on
program size?
About 30 percent.
(He doubled the
speed of his program, but increased its size by only 30 percent.)
2. [Unix] A diff, especially a diff stored under the set of version-control tools called SCCS (Source Code Control System) or RCS (Revision Control System).
3. n. A small quantity, but not
as small as epsilon. The jargon usage of
delta and epsilon stems from
the traditional use of these letters in mathematics for very small
numerical quantities, particularly in ‘epsilon-delta’ proofs in
limit theory (as in the differential calculus). The term
delta is often used, once
epsilon has been mentioned, to mean a quantity that
is slightly bigger than epsilon but still very
small. The cost isn't epsilon, but it's delta
means that
the cost isn't totally negligible, but it is nevertheless very small.
Common constructions include within delta of
—, within epsilon of
—: that is, ‘close to’ and ‘even closer
to’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: demented DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:23 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Yet another term of disgust used to describe a malfunctioning program. The connotation in this case is that the program works as designed, but the design is bad. Said, for example, of a program that generates large numbers of meaningless error messages, implying that it is on the brink of imminent collapse. Compare wonky, brain-damaged, bozotic.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: demigod DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:22 AM ----- BODY: n.
A hacker with years of experience, a world-wide reputation, and a major role in the development of at least one design, tool, or game used by or known to more than half of the hacker community. To qualify as a genuine demigod, the person must recognizably identify with the hacker community and have helped shape it. Major demigods include Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (co-inventors of Unix and C), Richard M. Stallman (inventor of EMACS), Larry Wall (inventor of Perl), Linus Torvalds (inventor of Linux), and most recently James Gosling (inventor of Java, NeWS, and GOSMACS) and Guido van Rossum (inventor of Python). In their hearts of hearts, most hackers dream of someday becoming demigods themselves, and more than one major software project has been driven to completion by the author's veiled hopes of apotheosis. See also net.god, true-hacker, ubergeek. Since 1995 or so this term has been gradually displaced by ubergeek.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: demo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:21 AM ----- BODY: /de´moh/
[short for ‘demonstration’]
1. v. To demonstrate a product or prototype. A far more effective way of inducing bugs to manifest than any number of test runs, especially when important people are watching.
2. n. The act of demoing.
I've gotta give a demo of the drool-proof interface; how does it
work again?
3. n. Esp. as demo version, can refer either to an early, barely-functional version of a program which can be used for demonstration purposes as long as the operator uses exactly the right commands and skirts its numerous bugs, deficiencies, and unimplemented portions, or to a special version of a program (frequently with some features crippled) which is distributed at little or no cost to the user for enticement purposes.
4. [demoscene] A sequence of
demoeffects (usually) combined with self-composed
music and hand-drawn (pixelated
) graphics. These days (1997)
usually built to attend a compo. Often called
eurodemos outside Europe, as most of
the demoscene activity seems to have gathered in
northern Europe and especially Scandinavia. See also
intro, dentro.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: demo mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:20 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [Sun] The state of being heads down in order to finish code in time for a demo, usually due yesterday.
2. A mode in which video games sit by themselves running through a portion of the game, also known as attract mode. Some serious apps have a demo mode they use as a screen saver, or may go through a demo mode on startup (for example, the Microsoft Windows opening screen — which lets you impress your neighbors without actually having to put up with Microsloth Windows).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: demoeffect DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:19 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. What among hackers is called a
display hack. Classical effects include plasma
(colorful
mess), keftales
(x*x+y*y
and other similar patterns, usually combined with color-cycling), realtime
fractals, realtime 3d graphics, etc. Historically, demo effects have
cheated as much as possible to gain more speed and more complexity, using
low-precision math and masses of assembler code and building animation
realtime are three common tricks, but use of special hardware to fake
effects is a Good Thing on the demoscene (though
this is becoming less common as platforms like the Amiga fade
away).
2. [Finland] Opposite of dancing frog. The crash that happens when you demonstrate a perfectly good prototype to a client. Plagues most often CS students and small businesses, but there is a well-known case involving Bill Gates demonstrating a brand new version of a major operating system.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: demogroup DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:18 AM ----- BODY: n.
[demoscene] A group of demo (sense 4) composers. Job titles within a group include coders (the ones who write programs), graphicians (the ones who painstakingly pixelate the fine art), musicians (the music composers), sysops, traders/swappers (the ones who do the trading and other PR), and organizers (in larger groups). It is not uncommon for one person to do multiple jobs, but it has been observed that good coders are rarely good composers and vice versa. [How odd. Musical talent seems common among Internet/Unix hackers —ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: demon DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:17 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Often used equivalently to daemon — especially in the Unix world, where the latter spelling and pronunciation is considered mildly archaic.
2. [MIT; now probably obsolete] A portion of a program that is not invoked explicitly, but that lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. See daemon. The distinction is that demons are usually processes within a program, while daemons are usually programs running on an operating system.
Demons in sense 2 are particularly common in AI programs. For example, a knowledge-manipulation program might implement inference rules as demons. Whenever a new piece of knowledge was added, various demons would activate (which demons depends on the particular piece of data) and would create additional pieces of knowledge by applying their respective inference rules to the original piece. These new pieces could in turn activate more demons as the inferences filtered down through chains of logic. Meanwhile, the main program could continue with whatever its primary task was.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: demon dialer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:16 AM ----- BODY: n.
A program which repeatedly calls the same telephone number. Demon dialing may be benign (as when a number of communications programs contend for legitimate access to a BBS line) or malign (that is, used as a prank or denial-of-service attack). This term dates from the blue box days of the 1970s and early 1980s and is now semi-obsolescent among phreakers; see war dialer for its contemporary progeny.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: demoparty DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
[demoscene] Aboveground descendant of the copyparty, with emphasis shifted away from software piracy and towards compos. Smaller demoparties, for 100 persons or less, are held quite often, sometimes even once a month, and usually last for one to two days. On the other end of the scale, huge demo parties are held once a year (and four of these have grown very large and occur annually — Assembly in Finland, The Party in Denmark, The Gathering in Norway, and NAID somewhere in north America). These parties usually last for three to five days, have room for 3000-5000 people, and have a party network with connection to the internet.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: demoscene DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:14 AM ----- BODY: /dem´oh·seen/
[also ‘demo scene’] A culture of multimedia hackers located primarily in Scandinavia and northern Europe. Demoscene folklore recounts that when old-time warez d00dz cracked some piece of software they often added an advertisement in the beginning, usually containing colorful display hacks with greetings to other cracking groups. The demoscene was born among people who decided building these display hacks is more interesting than hacking — or anyway safer. Around 1990 there began to be very serious police pressure on cracking groups, including raids with SWAT teams crashing into bedrooms to confiscate computers. Whether in response to this or for esthetic reasons, crackers of that period began to build self-contained display hacks of considerable elaboration and beauty (within the culture such a hack is called a demo). As more of these demogroups emerged, they started to have compos at copying parties (see copyparty), which later evolved to standalone events (see demoparty). The demoscene has retained some traits from the warez d00dz, including their style of handles and group names and some of their jargon.
Traditionally demos were written in assembly language, with lots of smart tricks, self-modifying code, undocumented op-codes and the like. Some time around 1995, people started coding demos in C, and a couple of years after that, they also started using Java.
Ten years on (in 1998-1999), the demoscene is changing as its original platforms (C64, Amiga, Spectrum, Atari ST, IBM PC under DOS) die out and activity shifts towards Windows, Linux, and the Internet. While deeply underground in the past, demoscene is trying to get into the mainstream as accepted art form, and one symptom of this is the commercialization of bigger demoparties. Older demosceners frown at this, but the majority think it's a good direction. Many demosceners end up working in the computer game industry. Demoscene resource pages are available at http://www.oldskool.org/demos/explained/ and http://www.scene.org/.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dentro DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:13 AM ----- BODY: /den´troh/
[demoscene] Combination of demo (sense 4) and intro. Other name mixings include intmo, dentmo etc. and are used usually when the authors are not quite sure whether the program is a demo or an intro. Special-purpose coinages like wedtro (some member of a group got married), invtro (invitation intro) etc. have also been sighted.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: depeditate DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:12 AM ----- BODY: /dee·ped'@·tayt/ n.
[by (faulty) analogy with decapitate] Humorously, to cut off the feet of. When one is using some computer-aided typesetting tools, careless placement of text blocks within a page or above a rule can result in chopped-off letter descenders. Such letters are said to have been depeditated.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: deprecated DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:11 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Said of a program or feature that is considered obsolescent and in the process of being phased out, usually in favor of a specified replacement. Deprecated features can, unfortunately, linger on for many years. This term appears with distressing frequency in standards documents when the committees writing the documents realize that large amounts of extant (and presumably happily working) code depend on the feature(s) that have passed out of favor. See also dusty deck.
[Usage note: don't confuse this word with ‘depreciated’, or the verb form ‘deprecate’ with ‘depreciate’. They are different words; see any dictionary for discussion.]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: derf DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:10 AM ----- BODY: /derf/
[PLATO]
1. v. The act of exploiting a terminal which someone else has absentmindedly left logged on, to use that person's account, especially to post articles intended to make an ass of the victim you're impersonating. It has been alleged that the term originated as a reversal of the name of the gentleman who most usually left himself vulnerable to it, who also happened to be the head of the department that handled PLATO at the University of Delaware. Compare baggy pantsing.
2. n. The victim of an act of
derfing, sense 1. The most typical posting from a derfed account read
I am a derf.
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: deserves to lose DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:09 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[common] Said of someone who willfully does the
Wrong Thing; humorously, if one uses a feature known to be
marginal. What is meant is that one deserves the
consequences of one's losing actions. Boy,
anyone who tries to use mess-dos deserves to
lose!
(ITS fans used
to say the same thing of Unix; many still do.) See
also screw, chomp,
bagbiter.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: despew DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:08 AM ----- BODY: /d@·spyoo´/ v.
[Usenet] To automatically generate a large amount of garbage to the net, esp. from an automated posting program gone wild. See ARMM.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dickless workstation DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:07 AM ----- BODY: n.
Extremely pejorative hackerism for ‘diskless workstation’, a class of botches including the Sun 3/50 and other machines designed exclusively to network with an expensive central disk server. These combine all the disadvantages of timesharing with all the disadvantages of distributed personal computers; typically, they cannot even boot themselves without help (in the form of some kind of breath-of-life packet) from the server.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dictionary flame DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:06 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet] An attempt to sidetrack a debate away from issues by insisting on meanings for key terms that presuppose a desired conclusion or smuggle in an implicit premise. A common tactic of people who prefer argument over definitions to disputes about reality. Compare spelling flame.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: diddle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:05 AM ----- BODY:
1. vt. To work with or modify in
a not-particularly-serious manner. I diddled a copy of
ADVENT so it didn't double-space all the
time.
Let's diddle this piece of code and see if the problem
goes away.
See tweak and
twiddle.
2. n. The action or result of diddling.
See also tweak, twiddle, frob.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: die DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:04 AM ----- BODY: v.
Syn. crash. Unlike crash, which is used primarily of hardware, this verb is used of both hardware and software. See also go flatline, casters-up mode.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: die horribly DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:03 AM ----- BODY: v.
The software equivalent of crash and burn,
and the preferred emphatic form of die. The
converter choked on an FF in its input and died horribly
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: diff DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:02 AM ----- BODY: /dif/ n.
1. A change listing, especially giving differences between (and
additions to) source code or documents (the term is often used in the
plural diffs). Send me your
diffs for the Jargon File!
Compare vdiff.
2. Specifically, such a listing produced by the diff1 command, esp. when used as specification input to the patch1 utility (which can actually perform the modifications; see patch). This is a common method of distributing patches and source updates in the Unix/C world.
3. v. To compare (whether or not by use of automated tools on machine-readable files); see also vdiff, mod.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dike DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:01 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To remove or disable a portion of something, as a wire from a
computer or a subroutine from a program. A standard slogan is When
in doubt, dike it out
. (The implication is that it is usually more
effective to attack software problems by reducing complexity than by
increasing it.) The word ‘dikes’ is widely used to mean
‘diagonal cutters’, a kind of wire cutter. To ‘dike
something out’ means to use such cutters to remove something. Indeed,
the TMRC Dictionary defined dike as to attack with
dikes
. Among hackers this term has been metaphorically extended to
informational objects such as sections of code.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: Dilbert DATE: 05/15/2003 10:51:00 AM ----- BODY:
n. Name and title character of a comic strip nationally syndicated in the U.S. and enormously popular among hackers. Dilbert is an archetypical engineer-nerd who works at an anonymous high-technology company; the strips present a lacerating satire of insane working conditions and idiotic management practices all too readily recognized by hackers. Adams, who spent nine years in cube 4S700R at Pacific Bell (not DEC as often reported), often remarks that he has never been able to come up with a fictional management blunder that his correspondents didn't quickly either report to have actually happened or top with a similar but even more bizarre incident. In 1996 Adams distilled his insights into the collective psychology of businesses into an even funnier book, The Dilbert Principle (HarperCollins, ISBN 0-887-30787-6). See also pointy-haired, rat dance.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: ding DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:59 AM ----- BODY: n.,vi.
1. Synonym for feep. Usage: rare among hackers, but more common in the Real World.
2. dinged: What happens when
someone in authority gives you a minor bitching about something, esp.
something trivial. I was dinged for having a messy
desk.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dink DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:58 AM ----- BODY: /dink/ adj.
Said of a machine that has the bitty box
nature; a machine too small to be worth bothering with — sometimes
the system you're currently forced to work on. First heard from an MIT
hacker working on a CP/M system with 64K, in reference to any 6502 system,
then from fans of 32-bit architectures about 16-bit machines.
GNUMACS will never work on that dink machine.
Probably
derived from mainstream ‘dinky’, which isn't sufficiently
pejorative. See macdink.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dinosaur DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:57 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Any hardware requiring raised flooring and special power. Used
especially of old minis and mainframes, in contrast with newer
microprocessor-based machines. In a famous quote from the 1998 Unix EXPO,
Bill Joy compared the liquid-cooled mainframe in the massive IBM display
with a grazing dinosaur with a truck outside pumping its bodily
fluids through it
. IBM was not amused. Compare
big iron; see also mainframe.
2. [IBM] A very conservative user; a zipperhead.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dinosaur pen DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:56 AM ----- BODY: n.
A traditional mainframe computer room complete with raised flooring, special power, its own ultra-heavy-duty air conditioning, and a side order of Halon fire extinguishers. See boa.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dinosaurs mating DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:55 AM ----- BODY: n.
Said to occur when yet another big iron merger or buyout occurs; originally reflected a perception by hackers that these signal another stage in the long, slow dying of the mainframe industry. In the mainframe industry's glory days of the 1960s, it was ‘IBM and the Seven Dwarfs’: Burroughs, Control Data, General Electric, Honeywell, NCR, RCA, and Univac. RCA and GE sold out early, and it was ‘IBM and the Bunch’ (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell) for a while. Honeywell was bought out by Bull; Burroughs merged with Univac to form Unisys (in 1984 — this was when the phrase dinosaurs mating was coined); and in 1991 AT&T absorbed NCR (but spat it back out a few years later). Control Data still exists but is no longer in the mainframe business. In similar wave of dinosaur-matings as the PC business began to consolidate after 1995, Digital Equipment was bought by Compaq which was bought by Hewlett-Packard. More such earth-shaking unions of doomed giants seem inevitable.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dirtball DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
[XEROX PARC] A small, perhaps struggling outsider; not in the major
or even the minor leagues. For example, Xerox is not a dirtball
company
.
[Outsiders often observe in the PARC culture an institutional arrogance which usage of this term exemplifies. The brilliance and scope of PARC's contributions to computer science have been such that this superior attitude is not much resented. —ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dirty power DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:53 AM ----- BODY: n.
Electrical mains voltage that is unfriendly to the delicate innards of computers. Spikes, drop-outs, average voltage significantly higher or lower than nominal, or just plain noise can all cause problems of varying subtlety and severity (these are collectively known as power hits).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: disclaimer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet] Statement ritually appended to many Usenet postings (sometimes automatically, by the posting software) reiterating the fact (which should be obvious, but is easily forgotten) that the article reflects its author's opinions and not necessarily those of the organization running the machine through which the article entered the network.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: Discordianism DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:51 AM ----- BODY: /dis·kor´di·@n·ism/ n.
The veneration of Eris, a.k.a. Discordia;
widely popular among hackers. Discordianism was popularized by Robert Shea
and Robert Anton Wilson's novel Illuminatus! as a
sort of self-subverting Dada-Zen for Westerners — it should on no
account be taken seriously but is far more serious than most jokes.
Consider, for example, the Fifth Commandment of the Pentabarf, from
Principia Discordia: A Discordian is
Prohibited of Believing What he Reads.
Discordianism is usually
connected with an elaborate conspiracy theory/joke involving millennia-long
warfare between the anarcho-surrealist partisans of Eris and a malevolent,
authoritarian secret society called the Illuminati. See
Religion in Appendix B,
Church of the SubGenius, and
ha ha only serious.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: disemvowel DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:50 AM ----- BODY: v.
[USENET: play on ‘disembowel’] Less common synonym for splat out.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: disk farm DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:49 AM ----- BODY: n.
A large room or rooms filled with disk drives (esp. washing machines). This term was well established by 1990, and generalized by about ten years later; see farm. It has become less common as disk strange densities reached livels where terabytes of storage can easily be fit in a single rack.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: display hack DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:48 AM ----- BODY: n.
A program with the same approximate purpose as a kaleidoscope: to make pretty pictures. Famous display hacks include munching squares, smoking clover, the BSD Unix rain6 program, worms6 on miscellaneous Unixes, and the X kaleid1 program. Display hacks can also be implemented by creating text files containing numerous escape sequences for interpretation by a video terminal; one notable example displayed, on any VT100, a Christmas tree with twinkling lights and a toy train circling its base. The hack value of a display hack is proportional to the esthetic value of the images times the cleverness of the algorithm divided by the size of the code. Syn. psychedelicware.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dispress DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:47 AM ----- BODY: vt.
[contraction of ‘Dissociated Press’ due to eight-character MS-DOS filenames] To apply the Dissociated Press algorithm to a block of text. The resultant output is also referred to as a 'dispression'.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: Dissociated Press DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:46 AM ----- BODY: n.
[play on ‘Associated Press’; perhaps inspired by a reference in the 1950 Bugs Bunny cartoon What's Up, Doc?] An algorithm for transforming any text into potentially humorous garbage even more efficiently than by passing it through a marketroid. The algorithm starts by printing any N consecutive words (or letters) in the text. Then at every step it searches for any random occurrence in the original text of the last N words (or letters) already printed and then prints the next word or letter. EMACS has a handy command for this. Here is a short example of word-based Dissociated Press applied to an earlier version of this Jargon File:
wart: n. A small, crocky feature that sticks out of an array (C has no checks for this). This is relatively benign and easy to spot if the phrase is bent so as to be not worth paying attention to the medium in question.
Here is a short example of letter-based Dissociated Press applied to the same source:
window sysIWYG: n. A bit was named aften /bee´t@/ prefer to use the other guy's re, especially in every cast a chuckle on neithout getting into useful informash speech makes removing a featuring a move or usage actual abstractionsidered interj. Indeed spectace logic or problem!
A hackish idle pastime is to apply letter-based Dissociated Press to a random body of text and vgrep the output in hopes of finding an interesting new word. (In the preceding example, ‘window sysIWYG’ and ‘informash’ show some promise.) Iterated applications of Dissociated Press usually yield better results. Similar techniques called travesty generators have been employed with considerable satirical effect to the utterances of Usenet flamers; see pseudo.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: distribution DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:45 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A software source tree packaged for distribution; but see kit. Since about 1996 unqualified use of this term often implies ‘Linux distribution’. The short form distro is often used for this sense.
2. A vague term encompassing mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups (but not BBS fora); any topic-oriented message channel with multiple recipients.
3. An information-space domain (usually loosely correlated with geography) to which propagation of a Usenet message is restricted; a much-underutilized feature.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: distro DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:44 AM ----- BODY: n.
Synonym for distribution, sense 1.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: disusered DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:43 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[Usenet] Said of a person whose account on a computer has been
removed, esp. for cause rather than through normal attrition. He
got disusered when they found out he'd been cracking through the school's
Internet access.
The verbal form disuser is live but less common. Both usages
probably derive from the DISUSER account status flag on VMS; setting it
disables the account. Compare star out.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: DMZ DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:42 AM ----- BODY:
[common] Literally, De-Militarized Zone. Figuratively, the portion of a private network that is visible through the network's firewalls (see firewall machine). Coined in the late 1990s as jargon, this term is now borderline techspeak.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: do protocol DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:41 AM ----- BODY: vi.
[from network protocol programming] To perform an interaction with
somebody or something that follows a clearly defined procedure. For
example, Let's do protocol with the check
at a restaurant
means to ask for the check, calculate the tip and everybody's share,
collect money from everybody, generate change as necessary, and pay the
bill. See protocol.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: doc DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:40 AM ----- BODY: /dok/ n.
Common spoken and written shorthand for ‘documentation’. Often used in the plural docs and in the construction doc file (i.e., documentation available on-line).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: documentation DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
The multiple kilograms of macerated, pounded, steamed, bleached, and
pressed trees that accompany most modern software or hardware products (see
also tree-killer). Hackers seldom read paper
documentation and (too) often resist writing it; they prefer theirs to be
terse and on-line. A common comment on this predilection is You
can't grep dead trees
. See
drool-proof paper, verbiage,
treeware.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dodgy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:38 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Syn. with flaky. Preferred outside the U.S.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dogcow DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:37 AM ----- BODY: /dog´kow/ n.
See Moof. The dogcow is a semi-legendary
creature that lurks in the depths of the Macintosh Technical Notes
Hypercard stack V3.1. The full story of the dogcow is told in technical
note #31 (the particular dogcow illustrated is properly named
‘Clarus’). Option-shift-click will cause it to emit a
characteristic Moof!
or !fooM
sound.
Getting to tech note 31 is the hard part; to discover
how to do that, one must needs examine the stack script with a hackerly
eye. Clue: rot13 is involved. A dogcow also
appears if you choose ‘Page Setup...’ with a LaserWriter
selected and click on the ‘Options’ button. It also lurks in
other Mac printer drivers, notably those for the now-discontinued Style
Writers. See http://developer.apple.com/products/techsupport/dogcow/tn31.html.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dogfood DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:36 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Microsoft, Netscape] Interim software used internally for testing.
To eat one's own dogfood
(from which the slang noun derives)
means to use the software one is developing, as part of one's everyday
development environment (the phrase is used outside Microsoft and
Netscape). The practice is normal in the Linux community and elsewhere, but
the term ‘dogfood’ is seldom used as open-source betas tend to
be quite tasty and nourishing. The idea is that developers who are using
their own software will quickly learn what's missing or broken. Dogfood is
typically not even of beta quality.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dogpile DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:35 AM ----- BODY: v.
[Usenet: prob. fr. mainstream puppy pile
] When many
people post unfriendly responses in short order to a single posting, they
are sometimes said to dogpile
or dogpile on
the person to whom they're responding. For example, when a religious
missionary posts a simplistic appeal to alt.atheism, he can expect to be dogpiled.
It has been suggested that this derives from U.S. football slang for a
tackle involving three or more people; among hackers, it seems at least as
likely to derive from an ‘autobiographical’ Bugs Bunny cartoon
in which a gang of attacking canines actually yells Dogpile on the
rabbit!
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dogwash DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:34 AM ----- BODY: /dog´wosh/
[From a quip in the ‘urgency’ field of a very optional
software change request, ca.: 1982. It was something like Urgency:
Wash your dog first
.]
1. n. A project of minimal priority, undertaken as an escape from more serious work.
2. v. To engage in such a project. Many games and much freeware get written this way.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: Don't do that then! DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:33 AM ----- BODY: imp.
[from an old doctor's office joke about a patient with a trivial
complaint] Stock response to a user complaint. When I type
control-S, the whole system comes to a halt for thirty seconds.
Don't do that, then!
(or So don't do that!
).
Compare RTFM.
Here's a classic example of Don't do that then!
from
Neal Stephenson's In The Beginning Was The Command
Line. A friend of his built a network with a load of Macs and
a few high-powered database servers. He found that from time to time the
whole network would lock up for no apparent reason. The problem was
eventually tracked down to MacOS's cooperative multitasking: when a user
held down the mouse button for too long, the network stack wouldn't get a
chance to run...
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dongle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:32 AM ----- BODY: /dong´gl/ n.
1. [now obs.] A security or copy protection device for proprietary software consisting of a serialized EPROM and some drivers in a D-25 connector shell, which must be connected to an I/O port of the computer while the program is run. Programs that use a dongle query the port at startup and at programmed intervals thereafter, and terminate if it does not respond with the dongle's programmed validation code. Thus, users can make as many copies of the program as they want but must pay for each dongle. The first sighting of a dongle was in 1984, associated with a software product called PaperClip. The idea was clever, but it was initially a failure, as users disliked tying up a serial port this way. By 1993, dongles would typically pass data through the port and monitor for magic codes (and combinations of status lines) with minimal if any interference with devices further down the line — this innovation was necessary to allow daisy-chained dongles for multiple pieces of software. These devices have become rare as the industry has moved away from copy-protection schemes in general.
2. By extension, any physical electronic key or transferable ID required for a program to function. Common variations on this theme have used parallel or even joystick ports. See dongle-disk.
3. An adaptor cable mating a special edge-type connector on a PCMCIA or on-board Ethernet card to a standard 8p8c Ethernet jack. This usage seems to have surfaced in 1999 and is now dominant. Laptop owners curse these things because they're notoriously easy to lose and the vendors commonly charge extortionate prices for replacements.
[Note: in early 1992, advertising copy from Rainbow Technologies (a
manufacturer of dongles) included a claim that the word derived from
Don Gall
, allegedly the inventor of the device. The
company's receptionist will cheerfully tell you that the story is a myth
invented for the ad copy. Nevertheless, I expect it to haunt my life as a
lexicographer for at least the next ten years. :-( —ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dongle-disk DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:31 AM ----- BODY: /don´gl disk/ n.
A special floppy disk that is required in order to perform some
task. Some contain special coding that allows an application to identify
it uniquely, others are special code that does
something that normally-resident programs don't or can't. (For example,
AT&T's Unix PC
would only come up in
root mode with a special boot disk.) Also called a key disk. See
dongle.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: Doom, X of DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:30 AM ----- BODY:
[common] A construction similar to ‘Death, X of, but derived rather from the Cracks of Doom in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The connotations are slightly different; a Foo of Death is mainly being held up to ridicule, but one would have to take a Foo of Doom a bit more seriously.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: doorstop DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:29 AM ----- BODY: n.
Used to describe equipment that is non-functional and halfway expected to remain so, especially obsolete equipment kept around for political reasons or ostensibly as a backup. Compare boat anchor.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: DoS attack DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:28 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet,common; note that it's unrelated to DOS as name of an operating system] Abbreviation for Denial-Of-Service attack. This abbreviation is most often used of attempts to shut down newsgroups with floods of spam, or to flood network links with large amounts of traffic, or to flood network links with large amounts of traffic, often by abusing network broadcast addresses. Compare slashdot effect.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dot file DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:27 AM ----- BODY: [Unix] n.
A file that is not visible by default to normal directory-browsing tools (on Unix, files named with a leading dot are, by convention, not normally presented in directory listings). Many programs define one or more dot files in which startup or configuration information may be optionally recorded; a user can customize the program's behavior by creating the appropriate file in the current or home directory. (Therefore, dot files tend to creep — with every nontrivial application program defining at least one, a user's home directory can be filled with scores of dot files, of course without the user's really being aware of it.) See also profile (sense 1), rc file.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: double bucky DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:26 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Using both the CTRL and META keys. The command to burn all
LEDs is double bucky F.
This term originated on the Stanford extended-ASCII keyboard, and was later taken up by users of the space-cadet keyboard at MIT. A typical MIT comment was that the Stanford bucky bits (control and meta shifting keys) were nice, but there weren't enough of them; you could type only 512 different characters on a Stanford keyboard. An obvious way to address this was simply to add more shifting keys, and this was eventually done; but a keyboard with that many shifting keys is hard on touch-typists, who don't like to move their hands away from the home position on the keyboard. It was half-seriously suggested that the extra shifting keys be implemented as pedals; typing on such a keyboard would be very much like playing a full pipe organ. This idea is mentioned in a parody of a very fine song by Jeffrey Moss called Rubber Duckie, which was published in The Sesame Street Songbook (Simon and Schuster 1971, ISBN 0-671-21036-X). These lyrics were written on May 27, 1978, in celebration of the Stanford keyboard:
Double Bucky Double bucky, you're the one! You make my keyboard lots of fun. Double bucky, an additional bit or two: (Vo-vo-de-o!) Control and meta, side by side, Augmented ASCII, nine bits wide! Double bucky! Half a thousand glyphs, plus a few! Oh, I sure wish that I Had a couple of Bits more! Perhaps a Set of pedals to Make the number of Bits four: Double double bucky! Double bucky, left and right OR'd together, outta sight! Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of Double bucky, I'm happy I heard of Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of you! — The Great Quux (with apologies to Jeffrey Moss)
[This, by the way, is an excellent example of computer filk —ESR] See also meta bit, cokebottle, and quadruple bucky.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: doubled sig DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:25 AM ----- BODY: [Usenet] n.
A sig block that has been included twice in a Usenet article or, less commonly, in an electronic mail message. An article or message with a doubled sig can be caused by improperly configured software. More often, however, it reveals the author's lack of experience in electronic communication. See B1FF, pseudo.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: down DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:24 AM ----- BODY:
1. adj. Not operating.
The up escalator is down
is considered a humorous thing to
say (unless of course you were expecting to use it), and The
elevator is down
always means The elevator isn't
working
and never refers to what floor the elevator is on. With
respect to computers, this term has passed into the mainstream; the
extension to other kinds of machine is still confined to techies
(e.g. boiler mechanics may speak of a boiler being down).
2. go down vi. To stop functioning; usually said of the
system. The message from the
console that every hacker hates to hear from the
operator is System going down in 5 minutes
.
3. take down, bring down vt. To deactivate purposely, usually for repair
work or PM. I'm taking the system down to
work on that bug in the tape drive.
Occasionally one hears the word
down by itself used as a verb in this
vt. sense.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: download DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:23 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To transfer data or (esp.) code from a far-away system (especially a larger host system) over a digital communications link to a nearby system (especially a smaller client system. Oppose upload.
Historical use of these terms was at one time associated with transfers from large timesharing machines to PCs or peripherals (download) and vice-versa (upload). The modern usage relative to the speaker (rather than as an indicator of the size and role of the machines) evolved as machine categories lost most of their former functional importance.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: DP DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:22 AM ----- BODY: /D·P/ n.
1. Data Processing. Listed here because, according to hackers, use of the term marks one immediately as a suit. See DPer.
2. Common abbrev for Dissociated Press.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: DPer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:21 AM ----- BODY: /dee·pee·er/ n.
Data Processor. Hackers are absolutely amazed that suits use this term self-referentially. Computers process data, not people! See DP.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: Dr. Fred Mbogo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:20 AM ----- BODY: /@m·boh´goh, dok´tr fred/ n.
[Stanford] The archetypal man you don't want to see about a problem,
esp. an incompetent professional; a shyster. Do you know a good
eye doctor?
Sure, try Mbogo Eye Care and Professional Dry
Cleaning.
The name comes from synergy between
bogus and the original Dr. Mbogo, a witch doctor who
was Gomez Addams' physician on the old Addams Family
TV show. Interestingly enough, it turns out that under the rules for
Swahili noun classes, ‘m-’ is the characteristic prefix of
nouns referring to human beings
. As such,
mbogo
is quite plausible as a Swahili coinage for a person
having the nature of a bogon. Actually,
mbogo
is indeed a Ki-Swahili word referring to the African
Cape Buffalo, syncerus caffer. It is one of
the big five
dangerous African game animals, and many people
with bush experience believe it to be the most dangerous of them. Compare
Bloggs Family and
J. Random Hacker; see also Fred Foobar and
fred.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dragon DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:19 AM ----- BODY: n.
[MIT] A program similar to a daemon, except that it is not invoked at all, but is instead used by the system to perform various secondary tasks. A typical example would be an accounting program, which keeps track of who is logged in, accumulates load-average statistics, etc. Under ITS, many terminals displayed a list of people logged in, where they were, what they were running, etc., along with some random picture (such as a unicorn, Snoopy, or the Enterprise), which was generated by the ‘name dragon’. Usage: rare outside MIT — under Unix and most other OSes this would be called a background demon or daemon. The best-known Unix example of a dragon is cron1. At SAIL, they called this sort of thing a phantom.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: Dragon Book DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:18 AM ----- BODY: n.
The classic text Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools, by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman (Addison-Wesley 1986; ISBN 0-201-10088-6), so called because of the cover design featuring a dragon labeled ‘complexity of compiler design’ and a knight bearing the lance ‘LALR parser generator’ among his other trappings. This one is more specifically known as the ‘Red Dragon Book’ (1986); an earlier edition, sans Sethi and titled Principles Of Compiler Design (Alfred V. Aho and Jeffrey D. Ullman; Addison-Wesley, 1977; ISBN 0-201-00022-9), was the `‘reen Dragon Book’ (1977). (Also New Dragon Book, Old Dragon Book.) The horsed knight and the Green Dragon were warily eying each other at a distance; now the knight is typing (wearing gauntlets!) at a terminal showing a video-game representation of the Red Dragon's head while the rest of the beast extends back in normal space. See also book titles.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: drain DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:17 AM ----- BODY: v.
[IBM] Syn. for flush (sense 2). Has a connotation of finality about it; one speaks of draining a device before taking it offline.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dread high-bit disease DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:16 AM ----- BODY: n.
A condition endemic to some now-obsolete computers and peripherals (including ASR-33 teletypes and PRIME minicomputers) that results in all characters having their high (0x80) bit forced on. This of course makes transporting files to other systems much more difficult, not to mention the problems these machines have talking with true 8-bit devices.
This term was originally used specifically of PRIME (a.k.a. PR1ME) minicomputers. Folklore has it that PRIME adopted the reversed-8-bit convention in order to save 25 cents per serial line per machine; PRIME old-timers, on the other hand, claim they inherited the disease from Honeywell via customer NASA's compatibility requirements and struggled heroically to cure it. Whoever was responsible, this probably qualifies as one of the most cretinous design tradeoffs ever made. See meta bit.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dread questionmark disease DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:15 AM ----- BODY:
n. The result of saving HTML from Microsoft Word or some other program that uses the nonstandard Microsoft variant of Latin-1; the symptom is that various of those nonstandard characters in positions 128-160 show up as questionmarks. The usual culprit is the misnamed ‘smart quotes’ feature in Microsoft Word. For more details (and a program called demoroniser that cleans up the mess) see http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: DRECNET DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:14 AM ----- BODY: /drek´net/ n.
[from Yiddish/German ‘dreck’, meaning filth] Deliberate distortion of DECNET, a networking protocol used in the VMS community. So called because DEC helped write the Ethernet specification and then (either stupidly or as a malignant customer-control tactic) violated that spec in the design of DRECNET in a way that made it incompatible. See also connector conspiracy.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: driver DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:13 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The main loop of an event-processing program; the code that gets commands and dispatches them for execution.
2. [techspeak] In device driver, code designed to handle a particular peripheral device such as a magnetic disk or tape unit.
3. In the TeX world and the computerized typesetting world in general, a program that translates some device-independent or other common format to something a real device can actually understand.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: droid DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:12 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from android, SF terminology
for a humanoid robot of essentially biological (as opposed to
mechanical/electronic) construction] A person (esp. a low-level bureaucrat
or service-business employee) exhibiting most of the following
characteristics: (a) naive trust in the wisdom of the parent organization
or ‘the system’; (b) a blind-faith propensity to believe
obvious nonsense emitted by authority figures (or computers!); (c) a
rule-governed mentality, one unwilling or unable to look beyond the
‘letter of the law’ in exceptional situations; (d) a paralyzing
fear of official reprimand or worse if Procedures are not followed No
Matter What; and (e) no interest in doing anything above or beyond the call
of a very narrowly-interpreted duty, or in particular in fixing that which
is broken; an It's not my job, man
attitude.
Typical droid positions include supermarket checkout assistant and bank clerk; the syndrome is also endemic in low-level government employees. The implication is that the rules and official procedures constitute software that the droid is executing; problems arise when the software has not been properly debugged. The term droid mentality is also used to describe the mindset behind this behavior. Compare suit, marketroid; see -oid.
In England there is equivalent mainstream slang; a
‘jobsworth’ is an obstructive, rule-following bureaucrat, often
of the uniformed or suited variety. Named for the habit of denying a
reasonable request by sucking his teeth and saying Oh no, guv, sorry
I can't help you: that's more than my job's worth
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: drone DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:11 AM ----- BODY: n.
Ignorant sales or customer service personnel in computer or
electronics superstores. Characterized by a lack of even superficial
knowledge about the products they sell, yet possessed of the conviction
that they are more competent than their hacker customers. Usage:
That video board probably sucks, it was recommended by a drone at
Fry's
In the year 2000, their natural habitats include Fry's
Electronics, Best Buy, and CompUSA.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: drool-proof paper DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:10 AM ----- BODY: n.
Documentation that has been obsessively dumbed down, to the point where only a cretin
could bear to read it, is said to have succumbed to the ‘drool-proof
paper syndrome’ or to have been ‘written on drool-proof
paper’. For example, this is an actual quote from Apple's
LaserWriter manual: Do not expose your LaserWriter to open fire or
flame.
The SGI Indy manual included the line [Do not] dangle
the mouse by the cord or throw it at coworkers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: drop on the floor DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:09 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To react to an error condition by silently discarding messages or
other valuable data. The gateway ran out of memory, so it just
started dropping packets on the floor.
Also frequently used of
faulty mail and netnews relay sites that lose messages. See also
black hole,
bit bucket.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: drop-ins DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:08 AM ----- BODY: n.
[prob.: by analogy with drop-outs] Spurious characters appearing on a terminal or console as a result of line noise or a system malfunction of some sort. Esp.: used when these are interspersed with one's own typed input. Compare drop-outs, sense 2.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: drop-outs DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:07 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A variety of power glitch (see glitch); momentary 0 voltage on the electrical mains.
2. Missing characters in typed input due to software malfunction or system saturation (one cause of such behavior under Unix when a bad connection to a modem swamps the processor with spurious character interrupts; see screaming tty).
3. Mental glitches; used as a way of describing those occasions when the mind just seems to shut down for a couple of beats. See glitch, fried.
A really serious case of drop-outs.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-05-21)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: drugged DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:06 AM ----- BODY: adj.
(also on drugs)
1. Conspicuously stupid, heading toward brain-damaged. Often accompanied by a pantomime of toking a joint.
2. Of hardware, very slow relative to normal performance.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: drum DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:05 AM ----- BODY: adj, n.
Ancient techspeak term referring to slow, cylindrical magnetic media
that were once state-of-the-art storage devices. Under some versions of
BSD Unix the disk partition used for swapping is still called
/dev/drum; this has led to considerable humor and not
a few straight-faced but utterly bogus ‘explanations’ getting
foisted on newbies. See also The Story of Mel'
in Appendix
A.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: drunk mouse syndrome DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:04 AM ----- BODY: n.
(also mouse on drugs) A malady exhibited by the mouse pointing device of some computers. The typical symptom is for the mouse cursor on the screen to move in random directions and not in sync with the motion of the actual mouse. Can usually be corrected by unplugging the mouse and plugging it back again. Another recommended fix for optical mice is to rotate your mouse pad 90 degrees.
At Xerox PARC in the 1970s, most people kept a can of copier cleaner (isopropyl alcohol) at their desks. When the steel ball on the mouse had picked up enough cruft to be unreliable, the mouse was doused in cleaner, which restored it for a while. However, this operation left a fine residue that accelerated the accumulation of cruft, so the dousings became more and more frequent. Finally, the mouse was declared ‘alcoholic’ and sent to the clinic to be dried out in a CFC ultrasonic bath.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: DSW DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:03 AM ----- BODY: n.
[alt.(sysadmin|tech-support).recovery; abbrev. for Dick Size War] A contest between two or more people boasting about who has the faster machine, keys on (either physical or cryptographic) keyring, greyer hair, or almost anything. Salvos in a DSW are typically humorous and playful, often self-mocking.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dub dub dub DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:02 AM ----- BODY:
[common] Spoken-only shorthand for the www
(double-u
double-u double-u) in many web host names. Nothing to do with the style of
reggae music called ‘dub’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: Duff's device DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:01 AM ----- BODY: n.
The most dramatic use yet seen of fall through in C, invented by Tom Duff when he was at Lucasfilm. Trying to optimize all the instructions he could out of an inner loop that copied data serially onto an output port, he decided to unroll it. He then realized that the unrolled version could be implemented by interlacing the structures of a switch and a loop: register n = (count + 7) / 8; /* count > 0 assumed */ switch (count % 8) { case 0: do { *to = *from++; case 7: *to = *from++; case 6: *to = *from++; case 5: *to = *from++; case 4: *to = *from++; case 3: *to = *from++; case 2: *to = *from++; case 1: *to = *from++; } while (--n > 0); }
Shocking though it appears to all who encounter it for the first
time, the device is actually perfectly valid, legal C. C's default
fall through in case statements has long been its
most controversial single feature; Duff observed that This code
forms some sort of argument in that debate, but I'm not sure whether it's
for or against.
Duff has discussed the device in detail at http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/duffs-device.html.
Note that the omission of postfix ++
from
*to
was intentional (though confusing).
Duff's device can be used to implement memory copy, but the original aim
was to copy values serially into a magic IO register.
[For maximal obscurity, the outermost pair of braces above could actually be removed — GLS]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dumb terminal DATE: 05/15/2003 10:50:00 AM ----- BODY: n.
A terminal that is one step above a glass tty, having a minimally addressable cursor but no on-screen editing or other features normally supported by a smart terminal. Once upon a time, when glass ttys were common and addressable cursors were something special, what is now called a dumb terminal could pass for a smart terminal.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dumbass attack DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:59 AM ----- BODY: /duhm´as @·tak´/ n.
[Purdue] Notional cause of a novice's mistake made by the
experienced, especially one made while running as
root under Unix, e.g., typing rm -r *
or mkfs
on a
mounted file system. Compare adger.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dumbed down DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:58 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Simplified, with a strong connotation of oversimplified. Often, a marketroid will insist that the interfaces and documentation of software be dumbed down after the designer has burned untold gallons of midnight oil making it smart. This creates friction. See user-friendly.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dump DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:57 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. An undigested and voluminous mass of information about a problem or the state of a system, especially one routed to the slowest available output device (compare core dump), and most especially one consisting of hex or octal runes describing the byte-by-byte state of memory, mass storage, or some file. In elder days, debugging was generally done by groveling over a dump (see grovel); increasing use of high-level languages and interactive debuggers has made such tedium uncommon, and the term dump now has a faintly archaic flavor.
2. A backup. This usage is typical only at large timesharing installations.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dumpster diving DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:56 AM ----- BODY: /dump'·ster di:´·ving/ n.
1. The practice of sifting refuse from an office or technical installation to extract confidential data, especially security-compromising information (‘dumpster’ is an Americanism for what is elsewhere called a skip). Back in AT&T's monopoly days, before paper shredders became common office equipment, phone phreaks (see phreaking) used to organize regular dumpster runs against phone company plants and offices. Discarded and damaged copies of AT&T internal manuals taught them much. The technique is still rumored to be a favorite of crackers operating against careless targets.
2. The practice of raiding the dumpsters behind buildings where producers and/or consumers of high-tech equipment are located, with the expectation (usually justified) of finding discarded but still-valuable equipment to be nursed back to health in some hacker's den. Experienced dumpster-divers not infrequently accumulate basements full of moldering (but still potentially useful) cruft.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dusty deck DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:55 AM ----- BODY: n.
Old software (especially applications) which one is obliged to remain compatible with, or to maintain (DP types call this legacy code, a term hackers consider smarmy and excessively reverent). The term implies that the software in question is a holdover from card-punch days. Used esp. when referring to old scientific and number-crunching software, much of which was written in FORTRAN and very poorly documented but is believed to be too expensive to replace. See fossil; compare crawling horror.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: DWIM DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:54 AM ----- BODY: /dwim/
[acronym, ‘Do What I Mean’]
1. adj. Able to guess, sometimes even correctly, the result intended when bogus input was provided.
2. n. obs. The BBNLISP/INTERLISP function that attempted to accomplish this feat by correcting many of the more common errors. See hairy.
3. Occasionally, an interjection hurled at a balky computer, esp. when one senses one might be tripping over legalisms (see legalese).
4. Of a person, someone whose directions are incomprehensible and vague, but who nevertheless has the expectation that you will solve the problem using the specific method he/she has in mind.
Warren Teitelman originally wrote DWIM to fix his typos and spelling errors, so it was somewhat idiosyncratic to his style, and would often make hash of anyone else's typos if they were stylistically different. Some victims of DWIM thus claimed that the acronym stood for ‘Damn Warren’s Infernal Machine!'.
In one notorious incident, Warren added a DWIM feature to the command
interpreter used at Xerox PARC. One day another hacker there typed
delete *$
to free up some disk space. (The
editor there named backup files by appending $
to the original file name, so he was trying to
delete any backup files left over from old editing sessions.) It happened
that there weren't any editor backup files, so DWIM helpfully reported
*$ not found, assuming you meant 'delete
*'.
It then started to delete all the files on the disk! The
hacker managed to stop it with a Vulcan nerve pinch
after only a half dozen or so files were lost.
The disgruntled victim later said he had been sorely tempted to go to
Warren's office, tie Warren down in his chair in front of his workstation,
and then type delete *$
twice.
DWIM is often suggested in jest as a desired feature for a complex program; it is also occasionally described as the single instruction the ideal computer would have. Back when proofs of program correctness were in vogue, there were also jokes about DWIMC (Do What I Mean, Correctly). A related term, more often seen as a verb, is DTRT (Do The Right Thing); see Right Thing.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - D TITLE: dynner DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:53 AM ----- BODY: /din´r/ n.
32 bits, by analogy with nybble and byte. Usage: rare and extremely silly. See also playte, tayste, crumb. General discussion of such terms is under nybble.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: Easter egg DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from the custom of the Easter Egg hunt observed in the U.S. and many parts of Europe]
1. A message hidden in the object code of a program as a joke, intended to be found by persons disassembling or browsing the code.
2. A message, graphic, or sound effect emitted by a program (or, on
a PC, the BIOS ROM) in response to some undocumented set of commands or
keystrokes, intended as a joke or to display program credits. One
well-known early Easter egg found in a couple of OSes caused them to
respond to the command make love
with
not war?
. Many personal computers have
much more elaborate eggs hidden in ROM, including lists of the developers'
names, political exhortations, snatches of music, and (in one case)
graphics images of the entire development team.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: Easter egging DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:51 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] The act of replacing unrelated components more or less at random in hopes that a malfunction will go away. Hackers consider this the normal operating mode of field circus techs and do not love them for it. See also the jokes under field circus. Compare shotgun debugging.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: eat flaming death DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:50 AM ----- BODY: imp.
A construction popularized among hackers by the infamous
CPU Wars comic; supposedly derived from a famously
turgid line in a WWII-era anti-Nazi propaganda comic that ran Eat
flaming death, non-Aryan mongrels!
or something of the sort
(however, it is also reported that on the Firesign Theatre's 1975 album
In The Next World, You're On Your Own a character
won the right to scream Eat flaming death, fascist media
pigs
in the middle of Oscar night on a game show; this may have
been an influence). Used in humorously overblown expressions of
hostility. Eat flaming death, EBCDIC
users!
IPM tells us to eat flaming death.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: EBCDIC DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:49 AM ----- BODY: /eb´s@·dik/, /eb´see`dik/, or /eb´k@·dik/ n.
[abbreviation, Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code] An alleged character set used on IBM dinosaurs. It exists in at least six mutually incompatible versions, all featuring such delights as non-contiguous letter sequences and the absence of several ASCII punctuation characters fairly important for modern computer languages (exactly which characters are absent varies according to which version of EBCDIC you're looking at). IBM adapted EBCDIC from punched card code in the early 1960s and promulgated it as a customer-control tactic (see connector conspiracy), spurning the already established ASCII standard. Today, IBM claims to be an open-systems company, but IBM's own description of the EBCDIC variants and how to convert between them is still internally classified top-secret, burn-before-reading. Hackers blanch at the very name of EBCDIC and consider it a manifestation of purest evil. See also fear and loathing.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: ECP DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:48 AM ----- BODY: /E·C·P/ n.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: ed DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:47 AM ----- BODY: n.
ed is the standard text editor.
Line taken from the
original Unix manual page on ed, an ancient
line-oriented editor that is by now used only by a few
Real Programmers, and even then only for batch operations. The
original line is sometimes uttered near the beginning of an emacs vs. vi
holy war on Usenet, with the (vain) hope to quench
the discussion before it really takes off. Often followed by a standard
text describing the many virtues of ed (such as the small memory
footprint on a Timex Sinclair, and the consistent
(because nearly non-existent) user interface).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: egg DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:46 AM ----- BODY: n.
The binary code that is the payload for buffer overflow and format string attacks. Typically, an egg written in assembly and designed to enable remote access or escalate privileges from an ordinary user account to administrator level when it hatches. Also known as shellcode.
The name comes from a particular buffer-overflow exploit that was co-written by a cracker named eggplant. The variable name ‘egg’ was used to store the payload. The usage spread from people who saw and analyzed the code.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: egosurf DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:45 AM ----- BODY: vi.
To search the net for your name or links to your web pages. Perhaps connected to long-established SF-fan slang egoscan, to search for one's name in a fanzine.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: eighty-column mind DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:44 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] The sort said to be possessed by persons for whom the transition from punched card to tape was traumatic (nobody has dared tell them about disks yet). It is said that these people, including (according to an old joke) the founder of IBM, will be buried ‘face down, 9-edge first’ (the 9-edge being the bottom of the card). This directive is inscribed on IBM's 1402 and 1622 card readers and is referenced in a famous bit of doggerel called The Last Bug, the climactic lines of which are as follows:
He died at the console Of hunger and thirst. Next day he was buried, Face down, 9-edge first.
The eighty-column mind was thought by most hackers to dominate IBM's customer base and its thinking. This only began to change in the mid-1990s when IBM began to reinvent itself after the triumph of the killer micro. See IBM, fear and loathing, code grinder. A copy of The Last Bug lives on the the GNU site at http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/last.bug.html.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: El Camino Bignum DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:43 AM ----- BODY: /el´ k@·mee´noh big´nuhm/ n.
The road mundanely called El Camino Real, running along San Francisco peninsula. It originally extended all the way down to Mexico City; many portions of the old road are still intact. Navigation on the San Francisco peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real, which defines logical north and south even though it isn't really north-south in many places. El Camino Real runs right past Stanford University and so is familiar to hackers.
The Spanish word ‘real’ (which has two syllables: /ray·ahl´/) means ‘royal’; El Camino Real is ‘the royal road’. In the FORTRAN language, a real quantity is a number typically precise to seven significant digits, and a double precision quantity is a larger floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen significant digits (other languages have similar real types).
When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a long road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on ‘real’, he started calling it ‘El Camino Double Precision’ — but when the hacker was told that the road was hundreds of miles long, he renamed it ‘El Camino Bignum’, and that name has stuck. (See bignum.)
[GLS has since let slip that the unnamed hacker in this story was in fact himself —ESR]
In the early 1990s, the synonym El Camino Virtual was been reported as an alternate at IBM and Amdahl sites in the Valley.
Mathematically literate hackers in the Valley have also been heard
to refer to some major cross-street intersecting El Camino Real as
El Camino Imaginary
. One popular theory is that the
intersection is located near Moffett Field — where they keep all
those complex planes.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: elder days DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:42 AM ----- BODY: n.
The heroic age of hackerdom (roughly, pre-1980); the era of the PDP-10, TECO, ITS, and the ARPANET. This term has been rather consciously adopted from J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings. Compare Iron Age; see also elvish and Great Worm.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: elegant DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:41 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[common; from mathematical usage] Combining simplicity, power, and a certain ineffable grace of design. Higher praise than ‘clever’, ‘winning’, or even cuspy.
The French aviator, adventurer, and author Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry, probably best known for his classic children's book
The Little Prince, was also an aircraft designer.
He gave us perhaps the best definition of engineering elegance when he said
A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is
nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take
away.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: elephantine DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:40 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Used of programs or systems that are both conspicuous hogs (owing perhaps to poor design founded on brute force and ignorance) and exceedingly hairy in source form. An elephantine program may be functional and even friendly, but (as in the old joke about being in bed with an elephant) it's tough to have around all the same (and, like a pachyderm, difficult to maintain). In extreme cases, hackers have been known to make trumpeting sounds or perform expressive proboscatory mime at the mention of the offending program. Usage: semi-humorous. Compare ‘has the elephant nature’ and the somewhat more pejorative monstrosity. See also second-system effect and baroque.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: elevator controller DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
An archetypal dumb embedded-systems application, like
toaster (which superseded it). During one period
(1983--84) in the deliberations of ANSI X3J11 (the C standardization
committee) this was the canonical example of a really stupid,
memory-limited computation environment. You can't require
printf3
to be part of the default runtime library — what if you're targeting
an elevator controller?
Elevator controllers became important
rhetorical weapons on both sides of several
holy wars.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: elite DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:38 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Clueful. Plugged-in. One of the cognoscenti. Also used as a
general positive adjective. This term is not actually native hacker slang;
it is used primarily by crackers and warez d00dz,
for which reason hackers use it only with heavy irony. The term used to
refer to the folks allowed in to the hidden
or
privileged
sections of BBSes in the early 1980s (which,
typically, contained pirated software). Frequently, early boards would only
let you post, or even see, a certain subset of the sections (or
‘boards’) on a BBS. Those who got to the frequently legendary
‘triple super secret’ boards were elite. Misspellings of this
term in warez d00dz style abound; the forms l337 eleet, and 31337 (among others) have been sighted.
A true hacker would be more likely to use ‘wizardly’. Oppose lamer.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: ELIZA effect DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:37 AM ----- BODY: /@·li:´z@ @·fekt´/ n.
[AI community] The tendency of humans to attach associations to terms from prior experience. For example, there is nothing magic about the symbol + that makes it well-suited to indicate addition; it's just that people associate it with addition. Using + or ‘plus’ to mean addition in a computer language is taking advantage of the ELIZA effect.
This term comes from the famous ELIZA program by Joseph Weizenbaum, which simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist by rephrasing many of the patient's statements as questions and posing them to the patient. It worked by simple pattern recognition and substitution of key words into canned phrases. It was so convincing, however, that there are many anecdotes about people becoming very emotionally caught up in dealing with ELIZA. All this was due to people's tendency to attach to words meanings which the computer never put there. The ELIZA effect is a Good Thing when writing a programming language, but it can blind you to serious shortcomings when analyzing an Artificial Intelligence system. Compare ad-hockery; see also AI-complete. Sources for a clone of the original Eliza are available at ftp://ftp.cc.utexas.edu/pub/AI_ATTIC/Programs/Classic/Eliza/Eliza.c.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: elvish DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:36 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The Tengwar of Feanor, a table of letterforms resembling the beautiful Celtic half-uncial hand of the Book of Kells. Invented and described by J. R. R. Tolkien in The Lord of The Rings as an orthography for his fictional ‘elvish’ languages, this system (which is both visually and phonetically elegant) has long fascinated hackers (who tend to be intrigued by artificial languages in general). It is traditional for graphics printers, plotters, window systems, and the like to support a Feanorian typeface as one of their demo items. See also elder days.
2. By extension, any odd or unreadable typeface produced by a graphics device.
3. The typeface mundanely called ‘Böcklin’, an art-Noveau display font.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: EMACS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:35 AM ----- BODY: /ee´maks/ n.
[from Editing MACroS] The ne plus ultra of hacker editors, a
programmable text editor with an entire LISP system inside it. It was
originally written by Richard Stallman in TECO under
ITS at the MIT AI lab; AI Memo 554 described it as
an advanced, self-documenting, customizable, extensible real-time
display editor
. It has since been reimplemented any number of
times, by various hackers, and versions exist that run under most major
operating systems. Perhaps the most widely used version, also written by
Stallman and now called GNU EMACS
or
GNUMACS, runs principally under Unix. (Its close
relative XEmacs is the second most popular version.) It includes
facilities to run compilation subprocesses and send and receive mail or
news; many hackers spend up to 80% of their tube time inside it. Other variants include
GOSMACS, CCA EMACS, UniPress EMACS, Montgomery
EMACS, jove, epsilon, and MicroEMACS. (Though we use the original all-caps
spelling here, it is nowadays very commonly ‘Emacs’.) Some
EMACS versions running under window managers iconify as an overflowing
kitchen sink, perhaps to suggest the one feature the editor does not (yet)
include. Indeed, some hackers find EMACS too
heavyweight and baroque for
their taste, and expand the name as ‘Escape Meta Alt Control
Shift’ to spoof its heavy reliance on keystrokes decorated with
bucky bits. Other spoof expansions include
‘Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping’ (from when that was a
lot of core), ‘Eventually
mallocs
All Computer Storage’, and ‘EMACS Makes A Computer Slow’
(see recursive acronym). See also
vi.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: email DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:34 AM ----- BODY: /ee´mayl/
(also written ‘e-mail’ and ‘E-mail’)
1. n. Electronic mail automatically passed through computer networks and/or via modems over common-carrier lines. Contrast snail-mail, paper-net, voice-net. See network address.
2. vt. To send electronic mail.
Oddly enough, the word emailed
is actually listed in the OED; it means embossed (with a raised
pattern) or perh. arranged in a net or open work
. A use from 1480
is given. The word is probably derived from French émaillé (enameled) and related to
Old French emmailleüre
(network). A French correspondent tells us that in modern French,
‘email’ is a hard enamel obtained by heating special paints in
a furnace; an ‘emailleur’ (no final e) is a craftsman who makes
email (he generally paints some objects (like, say, jewelry) and cooks them
in a furnace).
There are numerous spelling variants of this word. In Internet traffic up to 1995, ‘email’ predominates, ‘e-mail’ runs a not-too-distant second, and ‘E-mail’ and ‘Email’ are a distant third and fourth.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: emoticon DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:33 AM ----- BODY: /ee·moh´ti·kon/ n.
[common] An ASCII glyph used to indicate an emotional state in email or news. Although originally intended mostly as jokes, emoticons (or some other explicit humor indication) are virtually required under certain circumstances in high-volume text-only communication forums such as Usenet; the lack of verbal and visual cues can otherwise cause what were intended to be humorous, sarcastic, ironic, or otherwise non-100%-serious comments to be badly misinterpreted (not always even by newbies), resulting in arguments and flame wars.
Hundreds of emoticons have been proposed, but only a few are in common use. These include:
:-) | ‘smiley face’ (for humor, laughter, friendliness, occasionally sarcasm) |
:-( | ‘frowney face’ (for sadness, anger, or upset) |
;-) | ‘half-smiley’ ( ha ha only serious); also known as semi-smiley or winkey face. |
:-/ | ‘wry face’ |
The invention of the original smiley and frowney emoticons is
generally credited to Scott Fahlman at CMU in 1982. He later wrote:
I wish I had saved the original post, or at least recorded the date
for posterity, but I had no idea that I was starting something that would
soon pollute all the world's communication channels.
In September
2002 the original post was
recovered.
There is a rival claim by one Kevin McKenzie, who seems to have proposed the smiley on the MsgGroup mailing list, April 12 1979. It seems likely these two inventions were independent. Users of the PLATO educational system report using emoticons composed from overlaid dot-matrix graphics in the 1970s.
Note for the newbie: Overuse of the smiley is a mark of loserhood! More than one per paragraph is a fairly sure sign that you've gone over the line.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: EMP DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:32 AM ----- BODY: /E·M·P/
See spam.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: empire DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:31 AM ----- BODY: n.
Any of a family of military simulations derived from a game written
by Peter Langston many years ago. A number of multi-player variants of
varying degrees of sophistication exist, and one single-player version
implemented for both Unix and VMS; the latter is even available as
MS-DOS/Windows freeware. All are notoriously addictive. Of various
commercial derivatives the best known is probably Empire
Deluxe
on PCs and Amigas.
Modern empire is a real-time wargame played over the internet by up to 120 players. Typical games last from 24 hours (blitz) to a couple of months (long term). The amount of sleep you can get while playing is a function of the rate at which updates occur and the number of co-rulers of your country. Empire server software is available for Unix-like machines, and clients for Unix and other platforms. A comprehensive history of the game is available at http://www.empire.cx/infopages/History.html. The Empire resource site is at http://www.empire.cx/.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: engine DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:30 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A piece of hardware that encapsulates some function but can't be used without some kind of front end. Today we have, especially, print engine: the guts of a laser printer.
2. An analogous piece of software; notionally, one that does a lot of noisy crunching, such as a database engine.
The hacker senses of engine are actually close to its original, pre-Industrial-Revolution sense of a skill, clever device, or instrument (the word is cognate to ‘ingenuity’). This sense had not been completely eclipsed by the modern connotation of power-transducing machinery in Charles Babbage's time, which explains why he named the stored-program computer that he designed in 1844 the Analytical Engine.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: English DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:29 AM ----- BODY:
1. n. obs. The source code for a program, which may be in any language, as opposed to the linkable or executable binary produced from it by a compiler. The idea behind the term is that to a real hacker, a program written in his favorite programming language is at least as readable as English. Usage: mostly by old-time hackers, though recognizable in context. Today the preferred shorthand is simply source.
2. The official name of the database language used by the old Pick
Operating System, actually a sort of crufty, brain-damaged SQL with
delusions of grandeur. The name permitted
marketroids to say Yes, and you can program
our computers in English!
to ignorant suits
without quite running afoul of the truth-in-advertising laws.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: enhancement DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
Common marketroid-speak for a bug fix. This abuse of language is a popular and time-tested way to turn incompetence into increased revenue. A hacker being ironic would instead call the fix a feature — or perhaps save some effort by declaring the bug itself to be a feature.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: ENQ DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:27 AM ----- BODY: /enkw/ or /enk/
[from the ASCII mnemonic ENQuire for 0000101] An on-line convention
for querying someone's availability. After opening a
talk mode connection to someone apparently in heavy hack mode, one
might type SYN SYN ENQ?
(the SYNs
representing notional synchronization bytes), and expect a return of
ACK or NAK depending on
whether or not the person felt interruptible. Compare
ping, finger, and the usage
of FOO?
listed under
talk mode.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: EOF DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:26 AM ----- BODY: /E·O·F/ n.
[abbreviation, ‘End Of File’]
1. [techspeak] The out-of-band value returned by C's sequential character-input functions (and their equivalents in other environments) when end of file has been reached. This value is usually -1 under C libraries postdating V6 Unix, but was originally 0. DOS hackers think EOF is ^Z, and a few Amiga hackers think it's ^\.
2. [Unix] The keyboard character (usually control-D, the ASCII EOT (End Of Transmission) character) that is mapped by the terminal driver into an end-of-file condition.
3. Used by extension in non-computer contexts when a human is doing
something that can be modeled as a sequential read and can't go further.
Yeah, I looked for a list of 360 mnemonics to post as a joke, but I
hit EOF pretty fast; all the library had was a JCL
manual.
See also EOL.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: EOL DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:25 AM ----- BODY: /E·O·L/ n.
[End Of Line] Syn. for newline, derived perhaps from the original CDC6600 Pascal. Now rare, but widely recognized and occasionally used for brevity. Used in the example entry under BNF. See also EOF.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: EOU DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:24 AM ----- BODY: /E·O·U/ n.
The mnemonic of a mythical ASCII control character (End Of User) that would make an ASR-33 Teletype explode on receipt. This construction parodies the numerous obscure delimiter and control characters left in ASCII from the days when it was associated more with wire-service teletypes than computers (e.g., FS, GS, RS, US, EM, SUB, ETX, and esp. EOT). It is worth remembering that ASR-33s were big, noisy mechanical beasts with a lot of clattering parts; the notion that one might explode was nowhere near as ridiculous as it might seem to someone sitting in front of a tube or flatscreen today.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: epoch DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:23 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Unix: prob.: from astronomical timekeeping] The time and date corresponding to 0 in an operating system's clock and timestamp values. Under most Unix versions the epoch is 00:00:00 GMT, January 1, 1970; under VMS, it's 00:00:00 of November 17, 1858 (base date of the U.S. Naval Observatory's ephemerides); on a Macintosh, it's the midnight beginning January 1 1904. System time is measured in seconds or ticks past the epoch. Weird problems may ensue when the clock wraps around (see wrap around), which is not necessarily a rare event; on systems counting 10 ticks per second, a signed 32-bit count of ticks is good only for 6.8 years. The 1-tick-per-second clock of Unix is good only until January 18, 2038, assuming at least some software continues to consider it signed and that word lengths don't increase by then. See also wall time. Microsoft Windows, on the other hand, has an epoch problem every 49.7 days — but this is seldom noticed as Windows is almost incapable of staying up continuously for that long.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: epsilon DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:22 AM ----- BODY:
[see delta]
1. n. A small quantity of
anything. The cost is epsilon.
2. adj. Very small, negligible;
less than marginal. We can get this feature
for epsilon cost.
3. within epsilon of: close
enough to be indistinguishable for all practical purposes, even closer than
being within delta of. That's
not what I asked for, but it's within epsilon of what I wanted.
Alternatively, it may mean not close enough, but very little is required to
get it there: My program is within epsilon of
working.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: epsilon squared DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:21 AM ----- BODY: n.
A quantity even smaller than epsilon, as small in comparison to epsilon as epsilon is to something normal; completely negligible. If you buy a supercomputer for a million dollars, the cost of the thousand-dollar terminal to go with it is epsilon, and the cost of the ten-dollar cable to connect them is epsilon squared. Compare lost in the underflow, lost in the noise.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: era DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:20 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. epoch. Webster's Unabridged makes these words almost synonymous, but era more often connotes a span of time rather than a point in time, whereas the reverse is true for epoch. The epoch usage is recommended.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: Eric Conspiracy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:19 AM ----- BODY: n.
A shadowy group of mustachioed hackers named Eric first pinpointed as a sinister conspiracy by an infamous talk.bizarre posting ca. 1987; this was doubtless influenced by the numerous ‘Eric’ jokes in the Monty Python oeuvre. There do indeed seem to be considerably more mustachioed Erics in hackerdom than the frequency of these three traits can account for unless they are correlated in some arcane way. Well-known examples include Eric Allman (he of the ‘Allman style’ described under indent style) and Erik Fair (co-author of NNTP); your editor has heard from more than a hundred others by email, and the organization line ‘Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories’ now emanates regularly from more than one site. See the Eric Conspiracy Web Page at http://www.catb.org/~esr/ecsl/ for full details.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: Eris DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:18 AM ----- BODY: /e´ris/ n.
The Greek goddess of Chaos, Discord, Confusion, and Things You Know Not Of; her name was latinized to Discordia and she was worshiped by that name in Rome. Not a very friendly deity in the Classical original, she was reinvented as a more benign personification of creative anarchy starting in 1959 by the adherents of Discordianism and has since been a semi-serious subject of veneration in several ‘fringe’ cultures, including hackerdom. See Discordianism, Church of the SubGenius.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: erotics DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:17 AM ----- BODY: /ee·ro´tiks/ n.
[Helsinki University of Technology, Finland] n. English-language university slang for electronics. Often used by hackers in Helsinki, maybe because good electronics excites them and makes them warm.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: error 33 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:16 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [XEROX PARC] Predicating one research effort upon the success of another.
2. Allowing your own research effort to be placed on the critical path of some other project (be it a research effort or not).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: eurodemo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:15 AM ----- BODY: /yoor´o·dem`·o/
a demo, sense 4
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: evil DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:14 AM ----- BODY: adj.
As used by hackers, implies that some system, program, person, or
institution is sufficiently maldesigned as to be not worth the bother of
dealing with. Unlike the adjectives in the
cretinous/losing/brain-damaged
series, evil does not imply
incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of goals or design criteria
fatally incompatible with the speaker's. This usage is more an esthetic
and engineering judgment than a moral one in the mainstream sense.
We thought about adding a Blue Glue interface
but decided it was too evil to deal with.
TECO is neat, but it can be pretty evil if
you're prone to typos.
Often pronounced with the first syllable
lengthened, as /eeee'vil/.
Compare evil and rude.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: evil and rude DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:13 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Both evil and rude, but with the additional connotation that the rudeness was due to malice rather than incompetence. Thus, for example: Microsoft's Windows NT is evil because it's a competent implementation of a bad design; it's rude because it's gratuitously incompatible with Unix in places where compatibility would have been as easy and effective to do; but it's evil and rude because the incompatibilities are apparently there not to fix design bugs in Unix but rather to lock hapless customers and developers into the Microsoft way. Hackish evil and rude is close to the mainstream sense of ‘evil’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: Evil Empire DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:12 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from Ronald Reagan's famous characterization of the communist Soviet Union] Formerly IBM, now Microsoft. Functionally, the company most hackers love to hate at any given time. Hackers like to see themselves as romantic rebels against the Evil Empire, and frequently adopt this role to the point of ascribing rather more power and malice to the Empire than it actually has. See also Borg and search for ‘Evil Empire’ pages on the Web.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: exa- DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:11 AM ----- BODY: /ek´s@/ pref.
[SI] See quantifiers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: examining the entrails DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:10 AM ----- BODY: n.
The process of grovelling through a core dump or hex image in an attempt to discover the bug that brought a program or system down. The reference is to divination from the entrails of a sacrificed animal. Compare runes, incantation, black art.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: EXCH DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:09 AM ----- BODY: /eks´ch@/ or /eksch/ vt.
To exchange two things, each for the other; to swap places. If you
point to two people sitting down and say Exch!
, you are
asking them to trade places. EXCH, meaning EXCHange, was originally the
name of a PDP-10 instruction that exchanged the contents of a register and
a memory location. Many newer hackers are probably thinking instead of the
PostScript exchange operator (which is usually
written in lowercase).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: excl DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:08 AM ----- BODY: /eks´kl/ n.
Abbreviation for ‘exclamation point’. See bang, shriek, ASCII.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: EXE DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:07 AM ----- BODY: /eks´ee/ or /eek´see/ or /E·X·E/ n.
An executable binary file. Some operating systems (notably MS-DOS, VMS, and TWENEX) use the extension .EXE to mark such files. This usage is also occasionally found among Unix programmers even though Unix executables don't have any required suffix.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: exec DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:06 AM ----- BODY: /eg·zek´/ or /eks´ek/ vt., n.
1. [Unix: from execute] Synonym for chain, derives from the exec2 call.
2. [from executive] obs. The command interpreter for an OS (see shell); term esp. used around mainframes, and prob.: derived from UNIVAC's archaic EXEC 2 and EXEC 8 operating systems.
3. At IBM and VM/CMS shops, the equivalent of a shell command file (among VM/CMS users).
The mainstream ‘exec’ as an abbreviation for (human) executive is not used. To a hacker, an ‘exec’ is always a program, never a person.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: exercise, left as an DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:05 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[from technical books] Used to complete a proof when one doesn't
mind a handwave, or to avoid one entirely. The
complete phrase is: The proof [or ‘the rest’] is left as
an exercise for the reader.
This comment has
occasionally been attached to unsolved research problems by authors
possessed of either an evil sense of humor or a vast faith in the
capabilities of their audiences.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: Exon DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:04 AM ----- BODY: /eks´on/ excl.
A generic obscenity that quickly entered wide use on the Internet and Usenet after the passage of the Communications Decency Act. From the last name of Senator James Exon (Democrat-Nebraska), primary author of the CDA. This usage outlasted the CDA itself, which was quashed a little over a year later by one of the most acerbic pro-free-speech opinions ever uttered by the Supreme Court. The campaign against it was led by an alliance of hackers and civil libertarians, and was the first effective political mobilization of the hacker culture. Use of Exon's name as an expletive outlived the CDA controversy itself.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: Exploder DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:03 AM ----- BODY: n.
Used within Microsoft to refer to the Windows Explorer, the web-interface component of Windows 95 and WinNT 4. Our spies report that most of the heavy guns at MS came from a Unix background and use command line utilities; even they are scornful of the over-gingerbreaded WIMP environments that they have been called upon to create.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: exploit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:02 AM ----- BODY: n.
[originally cracker slang]
1. A vulnerability in software that can be used for breaking security or otherwise attacking an Internet host over the network. The Ping O' Death is a famous exploit.
2. More grammatically, a program that exploits an exploit in sense 1.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: external memory DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:01 AM ----- BODY: n.
A memo pad, palmtop computer, or written notes. Hold on
while I write that to external memory
. The analogy is with store
or DRAM versus nonvolatile disk storage on computers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: eye candy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:49:00 AM ----- BODY: /i:´ kand`ee/ n.
[from mainstream slang ear candy
] A display of some
sort that's presented to lusers to keep them
distracted while the program performs necessary background tasks.
Give 'em some eye candy while the back-end
slurps that BLOB into
core.
Reported as mainstream usage among players of graphics-heavy
computer games. We're also told this term is mainstream slang for soft
pornography, but that sense does not appear to be live among
hackers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - E TITLE: eyeball search DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:59 AM ----- BODY: n.,v.
To look for something in a mass of code or data with one's own native optical sensors, as opposed to using some sort of pattern matching software like grep or any other automated search tool. Also called a vgrep; compare vdiff.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: face time DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:58 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] Time spent interacting with somebody face-to-face (as
opposed to via electronic links). Oh, yeah, I spent some face time
with him at the last Usenix.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: factor DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:57 AM ----- BODY: n.
See coefficient of X.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fairings DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:56 AM ----- BODY: n. /fer´ingz/
[FreeBSD; orig. a typo for fairness] A term thrown out in discussion
whenever a completely and transparently nonsensical argument in one's
favor(?) seems called for, e,g. at the end of a really long thread for
which the outcome is no longer even cared about since everyone is now so
sick of it; or in rebuttal to another nonsensical argument (Change
the loader to look for /kernel.pl? What about fairings?
)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fall over DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:55 AM ----- BODY: vi.
[IBM] Yet another synonym for crash or lose. ‘Fall over hard’ equates to crash and burn.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fall through DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:54 AM ----- BODY: v.
(n. fallthrough, var.: fall-through)
1. To exit a loop by exhaustion, i.e., by having fulfilled its exit condition rather than via a break or exception condition that exits from the middle of it. This usage appears to be really old, dating from the 1940s and 1950s.
2. To fail a test that would have passed control to a subroutine or some other distant portion of code.
3. In C, ‘fall-through’ occurs when the flow of
execution in a switch statement reaches a case
label other than by jumping there from the
switch header, passing a point where one would normally expect to find a
break
. A trivial example:
switch (color) { case GREEN: do_green(); break; case PINK: do_pink(); /* FALL THROUGH */ case RED: do_red(); break; default: do_blue(); break; }
The variant spelling /* FALL THRU */ is also common.
The effect of the above code is to
do_green
when color is GREEN
,
do_red
when color is RED
,
do_blue
on any other color other than PINK
, and
(and this is the important part)
do_pink
and then
do_red
when color is PINK
. Fall-through is
considered harmful by some, though there are
contexts (such as the coding of state machines) in which it is natural; it
is generally considered good practice to include a comment highlighting the
fall-through where one would normally expect a break. See also
Duff's device.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fan DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:53 AM ----- BODY: n.
Without qualification, indicates a fan of science fiction,
especially one who goes to cons and tends to hang
out with other fans. Many hackers are fans, so this term has been imported
from fannish slang; however, unlike much fannish slang it is recognized by
most non-fannish hackers. Among SF fans the plural is correctly fen, but this usage is not automatic to
hackers. Laura reads the stuff occasionally but isn't really a
fan.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fandango on core DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Unix/C hackers, from the Iberian dance] In C, a wild pointer that runs out of bounds, causing a core dump, or corrupts the malloc3 arena in such a way as to cause mysterious failures later on, is sometimes said to have ‘done a fandango on core’. On low-end personal machines without an MMU (or Windows boxes, which have an MMU but use it incompetently), this can corrupt the OS itself, causing massive lossage. Other frenetic dances, such as the cha-cha or the watusi, may be substituted. See aliasing bug, precedence lossage, smash the stack, memory leak, memory smash, overrun screw, core.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: FAQ DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:51 AM ----- BODY: /F·A·Q/ or /fak/ n.
[Usenet]
1. A Frequently Asked Question.
2. A compendium of accumulated lore, posted periodically to high-volume newsgroups in an attempt to forestall such questions. Some people prefer the term ‘FAQ list’ or ‘FAQL’ /fa´kl/, reserving ‘FAQ’ for sense 1.
This lexicon itself serves as a good example of a collection of one
kind of lore, although it is far too big for a regular FAQ posting.
Examples: What is the proper type of NULL?
and What's
that funny name for the # character?
are both
Frequently Asked Questions. Several FAQs refer readers to the Jargon
File.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: FAQ list DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:50 AM ----- BODY: /F·A·Q list/ or /fak list/ n.
[common; Usenet] Syn FAQ, sense 2.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: FAQL DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:49 AM ----- BODY: /fa´kl/ n.
Syn. FAQ list.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: faradize DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:48 AM ----- BODY: /far'@·di:z/ v.
[US Geological Survey] To start any hyper-addictive process or trend, or to continue adding current to such a trend. Telling one user about a new octo-tetris game you compiled would be a faradizing act — in two weeks you might find your entire department playing the faradic game.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: farkled DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:47 AM ----- BODY: /far´kld/ adj.
[DeVry Institute of Technology, Atlanta] Syn. hosed. Poss. owes something to Yiddish farblondjet and/or the ‘Farkle Family’ skits on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, a popular comedy show of the late 1960s.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: farm DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:46 AM ----- BODY: n.
A group of machines, especially a large group of near-identical
machines running load-balancing software, dedicated to a single task.
Historically the term server farm,
used especially for a group of web servers, seems to have been coined by
analogy with earlier disk farm in the early 1990s;
generalization began with render farm
for a group of machines dedicated to rendering computer animations (this
term appears to have been popularized by publicity about the pioneering
Linux render farm
used to produce the movie
Titanic). By 2001 other combinations such as
compile farm
and compute farm
were
increasingly common, and arguably borderline techspeak. More jargon uses
seem likely to arise (and be absorbed into techspeak over time) as new uses
are discovered for networked machine clusters. Compare
link farm.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fascist DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:45 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. [common] Said of a computer system with excessive or annoying security barriers, usage limits, or access policies. The implication is that said policies are preventing hackers from getting interesting work done. The variant fascistic seems to have been preferred at MIT, poss. by analogy with touristic (see tourist or under the influence of German/Yiddish faschistisch).
2. In the design of languages and other software tools, the fascist alternative is the most restrictive and structured way of capturing a particular function; the implication is that this may be desirable in order to simplify the implementation or provide tighter error checking. Compare bondage-and-discipline language, although that term is global rather than local.
Fascist security strikes again.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-05-28)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fat electrons DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:44 AM ----- BODY: n.
Old-time hacker David Cargill's theory on the causation of computer glitches. Your typical electric utility draws its line current out of the big generators with a pair of coil taps located near the top of the dynamo. When the normal tap brushes get dirty, they take them off line to clean them up, and use special auxiliary taps on the bottom of the coil. Now, this is a problem, because when they do that they get not ordinary or ‘thin’ electrons, but the fat'n'sloppy electrons that are heavier and so settle to the bottom of the generator. These flow down ordinary wires just fine, but when they have to turn a sharp corner (as in an integrated-circuit via), they're apt to get stuck. This is what causes computer glitches. [Fascinating. Obviously, fat electrons must gain mass by bogon absorption —ESR] Compare bogon, magic smoke.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fat pipe DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:43 AM ----- BODY:
A high-bandwidth connection to the Internet. When the term gained currency in the mid-1990s, a T-1 (at 1.5 Mbits/second) was considered a fat pipe, but the standard has risen. Now it suggests multiple T3s.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fat-finger DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:42 AM ----- BODY: vt.
1. To introduce a typo while editing in such a way that the
resulting manglification of a configuration file does something useless,
damaging, or wildly unexpected. NSI fat-fingered their DNS zone file
and took half the net down again.
2. More generally, any typo that produces dramatically bad results.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: faulty DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:41 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Non-functional; buggy. Same denotation as bletcherous, losing, q.v., but the connotation is much milder.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fear and loathing DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:40 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from Hunter S. Thompson] A state inspired by the prospect of
dealing with certain real-world systems and standards that are totally
brain-damaged but ubiquitous — Intel 8086s, or
COBOL, or EBCDIC, or any
IBM machine bigger than a workstation. Ack!
They want PCs to be able to talk to the AI machine. Fear and loathing
time!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: feature DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [common] A good property or behavior (as of a program). Whether it was intended or not is immaterial.
2. [common] An intended property or behavior (as of a program). Whether it is good or not is immaterial (but if bad, it is also a misfeature).
3. A surprising property or behavior; in particular, one that is purposely inconsistent because it works better that way — such an inconsistency is therefore a feature and not a bug. This kind of feature is sometimes called a miswart; see that entry for a classic example.
4. A property or behavior that is gratuitous or unnecessary, though
perhaps also impressive or cute. For example, one feature of Common LISP's
format
function is the ability to print
numbers in two different Roman-numeral formats (see
bells whistles and gongs).
5. A property or behavior that was put in to help someone else but that happens to be in your way.
6. [common] A bug that has been documented. To call something a
feature sometimes means the author of the program did not consider the
particular case, and that the program responded in a way that was
unexpected but not strictly incorrect. A standard joke is that a bug can
be turned into a feature simply by documenting it
(then theoretically no one can complain about it because it's in the
manual), or even by simply declaring it to be good. That's not a
bug, that's a feature!
is a common catchphrase. See also
feetch feetch,
creeping featurism, wart,
green lightning.
The relationship among bugs, features, misfeatures, warts, and miswarts might be clarified by the following hypothetical exchange between two hackers on an airliner:
A: This seat doesn't recline.
B: That's not a bug, that's a feature. There is an emergency
exit door built around the window behind you, and the route has to be kept
clear.
A: Oh. Then it's a misfeature; they should have increased the
spacing between rows here.
B: Yes. But if they'd increased spacing in only one section
it would have been a wart — they would've had to make
nonstandard-length ceiling panels to fit over the displaced
seats.
A: A miswart, actually. If they increased spacing throughout
they'd lose several rows and a chunk out of the profit margin. So unequal
spacing would actually be the Right Thing.
B: Indeed.
Undocumented feature is a
common, allegedly humorous euphemism for a bug.
There's a related joke that is sometimes referred to as the
one-question geek test
. You say to someone I saw a
Volkswagen Beetle today with a vanity license plate that read
FEATURE
. If he/she laughs, he/she is a
geek.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: feature creature DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:38 AM ----- BODY: n.
[poss. fr. slang ‘creature feature’ for a horror movie]
1. One who loves to add features to designs or programs, perhaps at the expense of coherence, concision, or taste.
2. Alternately, a mythical being that induces otherwise rational programmers to perpetrate such crocks. See also feeping creaturism, creeping featurism.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: feature creep DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:37 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] The result of creeping featurism, as
in Emacs has a bad case of feature creep
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: feature key DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:36 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] The Macintosh key with the cloverleaf graphic on its keytop; sometimes referred to as flower, pretzel, clover, propeller, beanie (an apparent reference to the major feature of a propeller beanie), splat, open-apple or (officially, in Mac documentation) the command key. In French, the term papillon (butterfly) has been reported. The proliferation of terms for this creature may illustrate one subtle peril of iconic interfaces.
Many people have been mystified by the cloverleaf-like symbol that
appears on the feature key. Its oldest name is ‘cross of St.
Hannes’, but it occurs in pre-Christian Viking art as a decorative
motif. Throughout Scandinavia today the road agencies use it to mark sites
of historical interest. Apple picked up the symbol from an early Mac
developer who happened to be Swedish. Apple documentation gives the
translation interesting feature
!
There is some dispute as to the proper (Swedish) name of this symbol. It technically stands for the word sevärdhet (thing worth seeing); many of these are old churches. Some Swedes report as an idiom for the sign the word kyrka, cognate to English ‘church’ and pronounced (roughly) /chur´ka/ in modern Swedish. Others say this is nonsense. Other idioms reported for the sign are runa (rune) or runsten /roon´stn/ (runestone), derived from the fact that many of the interesting features are Viking rune-stones. The term fornminne /foorn´min'@/ (relic of antiquity, ancient monument) is also reported, especially among those who think that the Mac itself is a relic of antiquity.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: feature shock DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:35 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from Alvin Toffler's book title Future Shock] A user's (or programmer's!) confusion when confronted with a package that has too many features and poor introductory material.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: featurectomy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:34 AM ----- BODY: /fee`ch@r·ek´t@·mee/ n.
The act of removing a feature from a program. Featurectomies come in two flavors, the righteous and the reluctant. Righteous featurectomies are performed because the remover believes the program would be more elegant without the feature, or there is already an equivalent and better way to achieve the same end. (Doing so is not quite the same thing as removing a misfeature.) Reluctant featurectomies are performed to satisfy some external constraint such as code size or execution speed.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: feep DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:33 AM ----- BODY: /feep/
1. n. The soft electronic ‘bell’ sound of a display terminal (except for a VT-52); a beep (in fact, the microcomputer world seems to prefer beep).
2. vi. To cause the display to make a feep sound. ASR-33s (the original TTYs) do not feep; they have mechanical bells that ring. Alternate forms: beep, ‘bleep’, or just about anything suitably onomatopoeic. (Jeff MacNelly, in his comic strip Shoe, uses the word ‘eep’ for sounds made by computer terminals and video games; this is perhaps the closest written approximation yet.) The term ‘breedle’ was sometimes heard at SAIL, where the terminal bleepers are not particularly soft (they sound more like the musical equivalent of a raspberry or Bronx cheer; for a close approximation, imagine the sound of a Star Trek communicator's beep lasting for five seconds). The ‘feeper’ on a VT-52 has been compared to the sound of a '52 Chevy stripping its gears. See also ding.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: feeper DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:32 AM ----- BODY: /fee´pr/ n.
The device in a terminal or workstation (usually a loudspeaker of some kind) that makes the feep sound.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: feeping creature DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:31 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from feeping creaturism] An unnecessary feature; a bit of chrome that, in the speaker's judgment, is the camel's nose for a whole horde of new features.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: feeping creaturism DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:30 AM ----- BODY: /fee´ping kree`ch@r·izm/ n.
A deliberate spoonerism for creeping featurism, meant to imply that the system or program in question has become a misshapen creature of hacks. This term isn't really well defined, but it sounds so neat that most hackers have said or heard it. It is probably reinforced by an image of terminals prowling about in the dark making their customary noises.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: feetch feetch DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:29 AM ----- BODY: /feech feech/ interj.
If someone tells you about some new improvement to a program, you
might respond: Feetch, feetch!
The meaning of this depends
critically on vocal inflection. With enthusiasm, it means something like
Boy, that's great! What a great hack!
Grudgingly or with
obvious doubt, it means I don't know; it sounds like just one more
unnecessary and complicated thing
. With a tone of resignation, it
means, Well, I'd rather keep it simple, but I suppose it has to be
done
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fence DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:28 AM ----- BODY:
n.
1. A sequence of one or more distinguished (out-of-band) characters (or other data items), used to delimit a piece of data intended to be treated as a unit (the computer-science literature calls this a sentinel). The NUL (ASCII 0000000) character that terminates strings in C is a fence. Hex FF is also (though slightly less frequently) used this way. See zigamorph.
2. An extra data value inserted in an array or other data structure in order to allow some normal test on the array's contents also to function as a termination test. For example, a highly optimized routine for finding a value in an array might artificially place a copy of the value to be searched for after the last slot of the array, thus allowing the main search loop to search for the value without having to check at each pass whether the end of the array had been reached.
3. [among users of optimizing compilers] Any technique, usually
exploiting knowledge about the compiler, that blocks certain optimizations.
Used when explicit mechanisms are not available or are overkill. Typically
a hack: I call a dummy procedure there to force a flush of the
optimizer's register-coloring info
can be expressed by the shorter
That's a fence procedure
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fencepost error DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:27 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [common] A problem with the discrete equivalent of a boundary
condition, often exhibited in programs by iterative loops. From the
following problem: If you build a fence 100 feet long with posts 10
feet apart, how many posts do you need?
(Either 9 or 11 is a better
answer than the obvious 10.) For example, suppose you have a long list or
array of items, and want to process items
m through
n; how many items are there? The obvious
answer is n - m, but that is off by one;
the right answer is n - m + 1. A program
that used the ‘obvious’ formula would have a fencepost error in
it. See also zeroth and
off-by-one error, and note that not all off-by-one errors are fencepost
errors. The game of Musical Chairs involves a catastrophic off-by-one
error where N people try to sit in
N - 1 chairs, but it's not a fencepost
error. Fencepost errors come from counting things rather than the spaces
between them, or vice versa, or by neglecting to consider whether one
should count one or both ends of a row.
2. [rare] An error induced by unexpected regularities in input values, which can (for instance) completely thwart a theoretically efficient binary tree or hash table implementation. (The error here involves the difference between expected and worst case behaviors of an algorithm.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fiber-seeking backhoe DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:26 AM ----- BODY:
[common among backbone ISP personnel] Any of a genus of large, disruptive machines which routinely cut critical backbone links, creating Internet outages and packet over air problems.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: FidoNet DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:25 AM ----- BODY: n.
A worldwide hobbyist network of personal computers which exchanges mail, discussion groups, and files. Founded in 1984 and originally consisting only of IBM PCs and compatibles, FidoNet now includes such diverse machines as Apple ][s, Ataris, Amigas, and Unix systems. For years FidoNet actually grew faster than Usenet, but the advent of cheap Internet access probably means its days are numbered. In mid-2001 Fidonet has approximately 15K nodes, down from 38K in 1996 — and most of those are probably single-user machines rather than the thriving BBSes of yore.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: field circus DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:24 AM ----- BODY: n.
[a derogatory pun on ‘field service’] The field service organization of any hardware manufacturer, but originally DEC. There is an entire genre of jokes about field circus engineers:
Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer with a flat tire? A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat. Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer who is out of gas? A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat. Q: How can you tell it's your field circus engineer? A: The spare is flat, too.
[See Easter egging for additional insight on these jokes.]
There is also the ‘Field Circus Cheer’ (from the old plan file for DEC on MIT-AI):
Maynard! Maynard! Don't mess with us! We're mean and we're tough! If you get us confused We'll screw up your stuff.
(DEC's service HQ, still extant under the HP regime, is located in Maynard, Massachusetts.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: field servoid DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:23 AM ----- BODY: /fee´ld ser´voyd/ n.
[play on ‘android’] Representative of a field service organization (see field circus). This has many of the implications of droid.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: file signature DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:22 AM ----- BODY: n.
A magic number, sense 3.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: filk DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:21 AM ----- BODY: /filk/ n.,v.
[from SF fandom, where a typo for ‘folk’ was adopted as a new word] Originally, a popular or folk song with lyrics revised or completely new lyrics and/or music, intended for humorous effect when read, and/or to be sung late at night at SF conventions. More recently (especially since the late 1980s), filk has come to include a great deal of originally-composed music on SFnal or fantasy themes and a range of moods wider than simple parody or humor. Worthy of mention here because there is a flourishing subgenre of filks called computer filks, written by hackers and often containing rather sophisticated technical humor. See double bucky for an example. Compare grilf, hing, pr0n, and newsfroup.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: film at 11 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:20 AM ----- BODY:
[MIT: in parody of TV newscasters]
1. Used in conversation to announce ordinary events, with a
sarcastic implication that these events are earth-shattering.
ITS crashes; film at 11.
Bug
found in scheduler; film at 11.
2. Also widely used outside MIT to indicate that additional
information will be available at some future time,
without the implication of anything particularly
ordinary about the referenced event. For example, The mail file
server died this morning; we found garbage all over the root directory.
Film at 11.
would indicate that a major failure had occurred but
that the people working on it have no additional information about it as
yet; use of the phrase in this way suggests gently that the problem is
liable to be fixed more quickly if the people doing the fixing can spend
time doing the fixing rather than responding to questions, the answers to
which will appear on the normal 11:00 news
, if people will
just be patient.
The variant MPEGs at 11
has recently been cited (MPEG
is a digital-video format.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: filter DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:19 AM ----- BODY: n.
[very common; orig. Unix] A program that processes an input data stream into an output data stream in some well-defined way, and does no I/O to anywhere else except possibly on error conditions; one designed to be used as a stage in a pipeline (see plumbing). Compare sponge.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: Finagle's Law DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:18 AM ----- BODY: n.
The generalized or ‘folk’ version of
Murphy's Law, fully named Finagle's Law of Dynamic
Negatives
and usually rendered Anything that can go wrong,
will
. May have been first published by Francis P. Chisholm in his
1963 essay The Chisholm Effect, later reprinted in
the classic anthology A Stress Analysis Of A Strapless Evening
Gown: And Other Essays For A Scientific Eye (Robert Baker ed,
Prentice-Hall, ISBN 0-13-852608-7).
The label ‘Finagle's Law’ was popularized by SF author
Larry Niven in several stories depicting a frontier culture of asteroid
miners; this ‘Belter’ culture professed a religion and/or
running joke involving the worship of the dread god Finagle and his mad
prophet Murphy. Some technical and scientific cultures (e.g.,
paleontologists) know it under the name Sod's
Law; this usage may be more common in Great Britain. One
variant favored among hackers is The perversity of the Universe
tends towards a maximum
; Niven specifically referred to this as
O'Toole's Corollary of Finagle's Law. See also
Hanlon's Razor.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fine DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:17 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[WPI] Good, but not good enough to be cuspy. The word fine is used elsewhere, of course, but without the implicit comparison to the higher level implied by cuspy.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: finger DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:16 AM ----- BODY:
[WAITS, via BSD Unix]
1. n. A program that displays information about a particular user or all users logged on the system, or a remote system. Typically shows full name, last login time, idle time, terminal line, and terminal location (where applicable). May also display a plan file left by the user (see also Hacking X for Y).
2. vt. To apply finger to a username.
3. vt. By extension, to check a
human's current state by any means. Foodp?
T!
OK, finger Lisa and see if she's idle.
4. Any picture (composed of ASCII characters) depicting ‘the finger’, see See figure 1. Originally a humorous component of one's plan file to deter the curious fingerer (sense 2), it has entered the arsenal of some flamers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: finger trouble DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
Mistyping, typos, or generalized keyboard incompetence (this is
surprisingly common among hackers, given the amount of time they spend at
keyboards). I keep putting colons at the end of statements instead
of semicolons
, Finger trouble again, eh?
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: finger-pointing syndrome DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:14 AM ----- BODY: n.
All-too-frequent result of bugs, esp. in new or experimental configurations. The hardware vendor points a finger at the software. The software vendor points a finger at the hardware. All the poor users get is the finger.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: finn DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:13 AM ----- BODY: v.
[IRC] To pull rank on somebody based on the amount of time one has
spent on IRC. The term derives from the fact that
IRC was originally written in Finland in 1987. There may be some influence
from the ‘Finn’ character in William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk
novel Count Zero, who at one point says to another
(much younger) character I have a pair of shoes older than you are,
so shut up!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: firebottle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:12 AM ----- BODY: n.obs.
A large, primitive, power-hungry active electrical device, similar in function to a FET but constructed out of glass, metal, and vacuum. Characterized by high cost, low density, low reliability, high-temperature operation, and high power dissipation. Sometimes mistakenly called a tube in the U.S. or a valve in England; another hackish term is glassfet.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: firefighting DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:11 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. What sysadmins have to do to correct sudden operational problems.
An opposite of hacking. Been hacking your new newsreader?
No, a power glitch hosed the network and I spent the whole afternoon
fighting fires.
2. The act of throwing lots of manpower and late nights at a project, esp. to get it out before deadline. See also gang bang, Mongolian Hordes technique; however, the term firefighting connotes that the effort is going into chasing bugs rather than adding features.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: firehose syndrome DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:10 AM ----- BODY: n.
In mainstream folklore it is observed that trying to drink from a firehose can be a good way to rip your lips off. On computer networks, the absence or failure of flow control mechanisms can lead to situations in which the sending system sprays a massive flood of packets at an unfortunate receiving system, more than it can handle. Compare overrun, buffer overflow.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: firewall code DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:09 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The code you put in a system (say, a telephone switch) to make sure that the users can't do any damage. Since users always want to be able to do everything but never want to suffer for any mistakes, the construction of a firewall is a question not only of defensive coding but also of interface presentation, so that users don't even get curious about those corners of a system where they can burn themselves.
2. Any sanity check inserted to catch a can't happen error. Wise programmers often change code to fix a bug twice: once to fix the bug, and once to insert a firewall which would have arrested the bug before it did quite as much damage.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: firewall machine DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:08 AM ----- BODY: n.
A dedicated gateway machine with special security precautions on it, used to service outside network connections and dial-in lines. The idea is to protect a cluster of more loosely administered machines hidden behind it from crackers. The typical firewall is an inexpensive micro-based Unix box kept clean of critical data, with a bunch of modems and public network ports on it but just one carefully watched connection back to the rest of the cluster. The special precautions may include threat monitoring, callback, and even a complete iron box keyable to particular incoming IDs or activity patterns. Syn. flytrap, Venus flytrap. See also wild side.
[When first coined in the mid-1980s this term was pure jargon. Now (1999) it is techspeak, and has been retained only as an example of uptake —ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fireworks mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:07 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The mode a machine is sometimes said to be in when it is performing a crash and burn operation.
2. There is (or was) a more specific meaning of this term in the Amiga community. The word fireworks described the effects of a particularly serious crash which prevented the video pointer(s) from getting reset at the start of the vertical blank. This caused the DAC to scroll through the entire contents of CHIP (video or video+CPU) memory. Since each bit plane would scroll separately this was quite a spectacular effect.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: firmware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:06 AM ----- BODY: /ferm´weir/ n.
Embedded software contained in EPROM or flash memory. It isn't quite hardware, but at least doesn't have to be loaded from a disk like regular software. Hacker usage differs from straight techspeak in that hackers don't normally apply it to stuff that you can't possibly get at, such as the program that runs a pocket calculator. Instead, it implies that the firmware could be changed, even if doing so would mean opening a box and plugging in a new chip. A computer's BIOS is the classic example, although nowadays there is firmware in disk controllers, modems, video cards and even CD-ROM drives.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fish DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:05 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Adelaide University, Australia]
1. Another metasyntactic variable. See foo. Derived originally from the Monty Python skit in the middle of The Meaning of Life entitled Find the Fish.
2. A pun for microfiche. A microfiche file cabinet may be referred to as a fish tank.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: FISH queue DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:04 AM ----- BODY: n.
[acronym, by analogy with FIFO (First In, First Out)] ‘First In, Still Here’. A joking way of pointing out that processing of a particular sequence of events or requests has stopped dead. Also FISH mode and FISHnet; the latter may be applied to any network that is running really slowly or exhibiting extreme flakiness.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fisking DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:03 AM ----- BODY: n.
[blogosphere; very common] A point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or (especially) news story. A really stylish fisking is witty, logical, sarcastic and ruthlessly factual; flaming or handwaving is considered poor form. Named after Robert Fisk, a British journalist who was a frequent (and deserving) early target of such treatment. See also MiSTing, anti-idiotarianism
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: FITNR DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:02 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[Thinking Machines, Inc.] Fixed In The Next Release. A written-only notation attached to bug reports. Often wishful thinking.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fix DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:01 AM ----- BODY: n.,v.
What one does when a problem has been reported too many times to be ignored.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: FIXME DATE: 05/15/2003 10:48:00 AM ----- BODY: imp.
[common] A standard tag often put in C comments near a piece of code
that needs work. The point of doing so is that a grep
or a similar pattern-matching tool can find all
such places quickly.
/* FIXME: note this is common in GNU code. */
Compare XXX.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flag DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:59 AM ----- BODY: n.
[very common] A variable or quantity that can take on one of two
values; a bit, particularly one that is used to indicate one of two
outcomes or is used to control which of two things is to be done.
This flag controls whether to clear the screen before printing the
message.
The program status word contains several flag
bits.
Used of humans analogously to bit.
See also hidden flag,
mode bit.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flag day DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:58 AM ----- BODY: n.
A software change that is neither forward- nor
backward-compatible, and which is costly to make and costly
to reverse. Can we install that without causing a
flag day for all users?
This term has nothing to do
with the use of the word flag to mean
a variable that has two values. It came into use when a
change was made to the definition of the ASCII character set
during the development of Multics.
The change was scheduled for Flag Day (a U.S. holiday),
June 14, 1966.
The change altered the Multics definition of ASCII from the short-lived 1965 version of the ASCII code to the 1967 version (in draft at the time); this moved code points for braces, vertical bar, and circumflex. See also backward combatability. The Great Renaming was a flag day.
[Most of the changes were made to files stored on CTSS, the system used to support Multics development before it became self-hosting.]
[As it happens, the first installation of a commercially-produced computer, a Univac I, took place on Flag Day of 1951 —ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flaky DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:57 AM ----- BODY: adj.
(var sp. flakey) Subject to frequent lossage. This use is of course related to the common slang use of the word to describe a person as eccentric, crazy, or just unreliable. A system that is flaky is working, sort of — enough that you are tempted to try to use it — but fails frequently enough that the odds in favor of finishing what you start are low. Commonwealth hackish prefers dodgy or wonky.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flamage DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:56 AM ----- BODY: /flay'm@j/ n.
[very common] Flaming verbiage, esp. high-noise, low-signal postings to Usenet or other electronic fora. Often in the phrase the usual flamage. Flaming is the act itself; flamage the content; a flame is a single flaming message. See flame, also dahmum.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flame DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:55 AM ----- BODY:
[at MIT, orig. from the phrase flaming asshole]
1. vi. To post an email message intended to insult and provoke.
2. vi. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude.
3. vt. Either of senses 1 or 2, directed with hostility at a particular person or people.
4. n. An instance of flaming.
When a discussion degenerates into useless controversy, one might tell the
participants Now you're just flaming
or Stop all that
flamage!
to try to get them to cool down (so to speak).
The term may have been independently invented at several different places. It has been reported from MIT, Carleton College and RPI (among many other places) from as far back as 1969, and from the University of Virginia in the early 1960s.
It is possible that the hackish sense of ‘flame’ is much
older than that. The poet Chaucer was also what passed for a wizard hacker
in his time; he wrote a treatise on the astrolabe, the most advanced
computing device of the day. In Chaucer's Troilus and
Cressida, Cressida laments her inability to grasp the proof of
a particular mathematical theorem; her uncle Pandarus then observes that
it's called the fleminge of wrecches.
This phrase seems to
have been intended in context as that which puts the wretches to
flight
but was probably just as ambiguous in Middle English as
the flaming of wretches
would be today. One suspects that
Chaucer would feel right at home on Usenet.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flame bait DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] A posting intended to trigger a flame war, or one that invites flames in reply. See also troll.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flame on DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:53 AM ----- BODY: vi.,interj.
1. To begin to flame. The punning reference to Marvel Comics's Human Torch is no longer widely recognized.
2. To continue to flame. See rave, burble.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flame war DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] (var.: flamewar) An acrimonious dispute, especially when conducted on a public electronic forum such as Usenet.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flamer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:51 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] One who habitually flames. Said esp. of obnoxious Usenet personalities.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flap DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:50 AM ----- BODY: vt.
1. [obs.] To unload a DECtape (so it goes flap, flap, flap...). Old-time hackers at MIT tell of the days when the disk was device 0 and DEC microtapes were 1, 2,... and attempting to flap device 0 would instead start a motor banging inside a cabinet near the disk.
2. By extension, to unload any magnetic tape. Modern cartridge tapes no longer actually flap, but the usage has remained. (The term could well be re-applied to DEC's TK50 cartridge tape drive, a spectacularly misengineered contraption which makes a loud flapping sound, almost like an old reel-type lawnmower, in one of its many tape-eating failure modes.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flarp DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:49 AM ----- BODY: /flarp/ n.
[Rutgers University] Yet another metasyntactic variable (see foo). Among those who use it, it is associated with a legend that any program not containing the word flarp somewhere will not work. The legend is discreetly silent on the reliability of programs which do contain the magic word.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flash crowd DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:48 AM ----- BODY:
Larry Niven's 1973 SF short story Flash Crowd predicted that one consequence of cheap teleportation would be huge crowds materializing almost instantly at the sites of interesting news stories. Twenty years later the term passed into common use on the Internet to describe exponential spikes in website or server usage when one passes a certain threshold of popular interest (what this does to the server may also be called slashdot effect). It has been pointed out that the effect was anticipated years earlier in Alfred Bester's 1956 The Stars My Destination.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flat DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:47 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. [common] Lacking any complex internal structure. That
bitty box has only a flat filesystem, not a
hierarchical one.
The verb form is flatten.
2. Said of a memory architecture (like that of the VAX or 680x0) that is one big linear address space (typically with each possible value of a processor register corresponding to a unique core address), as opposed to a segmented architecture (like that of the 80x86) in which addresses are composed from a base-register/offset pair (segmented designs are generally considered cretinous).
Note that sense 1 (at least with respect to filesystems) is usually used pejoratively, while sense 2 is a Good Thing.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flat-ASCII DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:46 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[common] Said of a text file that contains only 7-bit ASCII characters and uses only ASCII-standard control characters (that is, has no embedded codes specific to a particular text formatter markup language, or output device, and no meta-characters). Syn. plain-ASCII. Compare flat-file.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flat-file DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:45 AM ----- BODY: adj.
A flattened representation of some database or tree or network structure as a single file from which the structure could implicitly be rebuilt, esp. one in flat-ASCII form. See also sharchive.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flatten DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:44 AM ----- BODY: vt.
[common] To remove structural information, esp. to filter something
with an implicit tree structure into a simple sequence of leaves; also
tends to imply mapping to flat-ASCII. This
code flattens an expression with parentheses into an equivalent
canonical form.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flavor DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:43 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [common] Variety, type, kind. DDT commands come in two
flavors.
These lights come in two flavors, big red ones and
small green ones.
Linux is a flavor of Unix
See
vanilla.
2. The attribute that causes something to be
flavorful. Usually used in the phrase yields
additional flavor
. This convention yields additional flavor
by allowing one to print text either right-side-up or upside-down.
See vanilla. This usage was certainly reinforced by
the terminology of quantum chromodynamics, in which quarks (the
constituents of, e.g., protons) come in six flavors (up, down, strange,
charm, top, bottom) and three colors (red, blue, green) — however,
hackish use of flavor at MIT predated
QCD.
3. The term for class (in the object-oriented sense) in the LISP Machine Flavors system. Though the Flavors design has been superseded (notably by the Common LISP CLOS facility), the term flavor is still used as a general synonym for class by some LISP hackers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flavorful DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:42 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Full of flavor (sense 2); esthetically pleasing. See random and losing for antonyms. See also the entries for taste and elegant.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flippy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:41 AM ----- BODY: /flip´ee/ n.
A single-sided floppy disk altered for double-sided use by addition of a second write-notch, so called because it must be flipped over for the second side to be accessible. No longer common.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flood DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:40 AM ----- BODY: v.
[common]
1. To overwhelm a network channel with mechanically-generated traffic; especially used of IP, TCP/IP, UDP, or ICMP denial-of-service attacks.
2. To dump large amounts of text onto an IRC channel. This is especially rude when the text is uninteresting and the other users are trying to carry on a serious conversation. Also used in a similar sense on Usenet.
3. [Usenet] To post an unusually large number or volume of files on a related topic.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flowchart DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
[techspeak] An archaic form of visual control-flow specification employing arrows and speech balloons of various shapes. Hackers never use flowcharts, consider them extremely silly, and associate them with COBOL programmers, code grinders, and other lower forms of life. This attitude follows from the observations that flowcharts (at least from a hacker's point of view) are no easier to read than code, are less precise, and tend to fall out of sync with the code (so that they either obfuscate it rather than explaining it, or require extra maintenance effort that doesn't improve the code).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flower key DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:38 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Mac users] See feature key.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flush DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:37 AM ----- BODY: v.
1. [common] To delete something, usually superfluous, or to abort an
operation. All that nonsense has been flushed.
2. [Unix/C] To force buffered I/O to disk, as with an fflush3 call. This is not an abort or deletion as in sense 1, but a demand for early completion!
3. To leave at the end of a day's work (as opposed to leaving for a
meal). I'm going to flush now.
Time to
flush.
4. To exclude someone from an activity, or to ignore a person.
‘Flush’ was standard ITS terminology for aborting an output operation; one spoke of the text that would have been printed, but was not, as having been flushed. It is speculated that this term arose from a vivid image of flushing unwanted characters by hosing down the internal output buffer, washing the characters away before they could be printed. The Unix/C usage, on the other hand, was propagated by the fflush3 call in C's standard I/O library (though it is reported to have been in use among BLISS programmers at DEC and on Honeywell and IBM machines as far back as 1965). Unix/C hackers found the ITS usage confusing, and vice versa.
Crunchly gets flushed.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-05-01)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flypage DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:36 AM ----- BODY: /fli:´payj/ n.
(alt.: fly page) A banner, sense 1.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: Flyspeck 3 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:35 AM ----- BODY: n.
Standard name for any font that is so tiny as to be unreadable (by analogy with names like Helvetica 10 for 10-point Helvetica). Legal boilerplate is usually printed in Flyspeck 3.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: flytrap DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:34 AM ----- BODY: n.
[rare] See firewall machine.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: FM DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:33 AM ----- BODY: /F·M/ n.
1. [common] Not ‘Frequency
Modulation’ but rather an abbreviation for ‘Fucking
Manual’, the back-formation from RTFM. Used to
refer to the manual itself in the RTFM. Have
you seen the Networking FM lately?
2. Abbreviation for Fucking Magic
, used in the sense
of black magic.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fnord DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:32 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from the Illuminatus Trilogy]
1. A word used in email and news postings to tag utterances as
surrealist mind-play or humor, esp. in connection with
Discordianism and elaborate conspiracy theories.
I heard that David Koresh is sharing an apartment in Argentina with
Hitler. (Fnord.)
Where can I fnord get the Principia
Discordia from?
2. A metasyntactic variable, commonly used by hackers with ties to Discordianism or the Church of the SubGenius.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: FOAF DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:31 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet; common] Acronym for ‘Friend Of A Friend’. The source of an unverified, possibly untrue story. This term was not originated by hackers (it is used in Jan Brunvand's books on urban folklore), but is much better recognized on Usenet and elsewhere than in mainstream English.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: FOD DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:30 AM ----- BODY: /fod/ v.
[Abbreviation for ‘Finger of Death’, originally a
spell-name from fantasy gaming] To terminate with extreme prejudice and
with no regard for other people. From MUDs where
the wizard command ‘FOD <player>’ results in the
immediate and total death of <player>, usually as punishment for
obnoxious behavior. This usage migrated to other circumstances, such as
I'm going to fod the process that is burning all the
cycles.
In aviation, FOD means Foreign Object Damage, e.g., what happens when a jet engine sucks up a rock on the runway or a bird in flight. Finger of Death is a distressingly apt description of what this generally does to the engine.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fold case DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:29 AM ----- BODY: v.
See smash case. This term tends to be used more by people who don't mind that their tools smash case. It also connotes that case is ignored but case distinctions in data processed by the tool in question aren't destroyed.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: followup DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] On Usenet, a posting generated in response to another posting (as opposed to a reply, which goes by email rather than being broadcast). Followups include the ID of the parent message in their headers; smart news-readers can use this information to present Usenet news in ‘conversation’ sequence rather than order-of-arrival. See thread.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fontology DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:27 AM ----- BODY: n.
[XEROX PARC] The body of knowledge dealing with the construction and use of new fonts (e.g., for window systems and typesetting software). It has been said that fontology recapitulates file-ogeny.
[Unfortunately, this reference to the embryological dictum that
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny
is not merely a joke. On
the Macintosh, for example, System 7 has to go through contortions to
compensate for an earlier design error that created a whole different set
of abstractions for fonts parallel to ‘files’ and
‘folders’ —ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: foo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:26 AM ----- BODY: /foo/
1. interj. Term of disgust.
2. [very common] Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything, esp. programs and files (esp. scratch files).
3. First on the standard list of metasyntactic variables used in syntax examples. See also bar, baz, qux, quux, garply, waldo, fred, plugh, xyzzy, thud.
When ‘foo’ is used in connection with ‘bar’ it has generally traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym FUBAR (‘Fucked Up Beyond All Repair’ or ‘Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition’), later modified to foobar. Early versions of the Jargon File interpreted this change as a post-war bowdlerization, but it it now seems more likely that FUBAR was itself a derivative of ‘foo’ perhaps influenced by German furchtbar (terrible) — ‘foobar’ may actually have been the original form.
For, it seems, the word ‘foo’ itself had an immediate
prewar history in comic strips and cartoons. The earliest documented uses
were in the Smokey Stover comic strip published from
about 1930 to about 1952. Bill Holman, the author of the strip, filled it
with odd jokes and personal contrivances, including other nonsense phrases
such as Notary Sojac
and 1506 nix nix
. The
word foo
frequently appeared on license plates of cars, in
nonsense sayings in the background of some frames (such as He who
foos last foos best
or Many smoke but foo men chew
),
and Holman had Smokey say Where there's foo, there's
fire
.
According to the
Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion Holman claimed to have found the
word foo
on the bottom of a Chinese figurine. This is
plausible; Chinese statuettes often have apotropaic inscriptions, and this
one was almost certainly the Mandarin Chinese word
fu (sometimes transliterated
foo), which can mean
happiness
or prosperity
when spoken with the
rising tone (the lion-dog guardians flanking the steps of many Chinese
restaurants are properly called fu dogs
). English speakers'
reception of Holman's ‘foo’ nonsense word was undoubtedly
influenced by Yiddish ‘feh’ and English ‘fooey’ and
‘fool’.
Holman's strip featured a firetruck called the Foomobile that rode on
two wheels. The comic strip was tremendously popular in the late 1930s,
and legend has it that a manufacturer in Indiana even produced an operable
version of Holman's Foomobile. According to the Encyclopedia of American
Comics, ‘Foo’ fever swept the U.S., finding its way into
popular songs and generating over 500 ‘Foo Clubs.’ The fad left
‘foo’ references embedded in popular culture (including a
couple of appearances in Warner Brothers cartoons of 1938-39; notably in
Robert Clampett's Daffy Doc
of 1938, in which a very early
version of Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying SILENCE IS
FOO!
) When the fad faded, the origin of foo
was
forgotten.
One place foo
is known to have remained live is in the
U.S. military during the WWII years. In 1944-45, the term ‘foo
fighters’ was in use by radar operators for the kind of mysterious or
spurious trace that would later be called a UFO (the older term resurfaced
in popular American usage in 1995 via the name of one of the better
grunge-rock bands). Because informants connected the term directly to the
Smokey Stover strip, the folk etymology that connects it to French
feu
(fire) can be gently dismissed.
The U.S. and British militaries frequently swapped slang terms during
the war (see kluge and kludge
for another important example) Period sources reported that
‘FOO’ became a semi-legendary subject of WWII British-army
graffiti more or less equivalent to the American Kilroy. Where British
troops went, the graffito FOO was here
or something similar
showed up. Several slang dictionaries aver that FOO probably came from
Forward Observation Officer, but this (like the contemporaneous
FUBAR
) was probably a backronym .
Forty years later, Paul Dickson's excellent book Words
(Dell, 1982, ISBN 0-440-52260-7) traced Foo
to an
unspecified British naval magazine in 1946, quoting as follows:
Mr. Foo is a mysterious Second World War product, gifted with bitter
omniscience and sarcasm.
Earlier versions of this entry suggested the possibility that hacker usage actually sprang from FOO, Lampoons and Parody, the title of a comic book first issued in September 1958, a joint project of Charles and Robert Crumb. Though Robert Crumb (then in his mid-teens) later became one of the most important and influential artists in underground comics, this venture was hardly a success; indeed, the brothers later burned most of the existing copies in disgust. The title FOO was featured in large letters on the front cover. However, very few copies of this comic actually circulated, and students of Crumb's oeuvre have established that this title was a reference to the earlier Smokey Stover comics. The Crumbs may also have been influenced by a short-lived Canadian parody magazine named ‘Foo’ published in 1951-52.
An old-time member reports that in the 1959 Dictionary of the TMRC Language, compiled at TMRC, there was an entry that went something like this:
FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase FOO MANE PADME
HUM.
Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning.
(For more about the legendary foo counters, see TMRC.) This definition used Bill Holman's nonsense word, then only two decades old and demonstrably still live in popular culture and slang, to a ha ha only serious analogy with esoteric Tibetan Buddhism. Today's hackers would find it difficult to resist elaborating a joke like that, and it is not likely 1959's were any less susceptible. Almost the entire staff of what later became the MIT AI Lab was involved with TMRC, and the word spread from there.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: foobar DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:25 AM ----- BODY: n.
[very common] Another widely used
metasyntactic variable; see foo for etymology.
Probably originally propagated through DECsystem manuals by Digital
Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1960s and early
1970s; confirmed sightings there go back to 1972. Hackers do
not generally use this to mean
FUBAR in either the slang or jargon sense. See also
Fred Foobar. In RFC1639, FOOBAR
was
made an abbreviation for FTP Operation Over Big Address
Records
, but this was an obvious backronym.
It has been plausibly suggested that foobar
spread among
early computer engineers partly because of FUBAR and partly because
foo bar
parses in electronics techspeak as an inverted foo
signal; if a digital signal is active low (so a negative or zero-voltage
condition represents a "1") then a horizontal bar is commonly placed over
the signal label.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fool DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:24 AM ----- BODY: n.
As used by hackers, specifically describes a person who habitually reasons from obviously or demonstrably incorrect premises and cannot be persuaded by evidence to do otherwise; it is not generally used in its other senses, i.e., to describe a person with a native incapacity to reason correctly, or a clown. Indeed, in hackish experience many fools are capable of reasoning all too effectively in executing their errors. See also cretin, loser, fool file.
The Algol 68-R compiler used to initialize its storage to the character string "F00LF00LF00LF00L..." because as a pointer or as a floating point number it caused a crash, and as an integer or a character string it was very recognizable in a dump. Sadly, one day a very senior professor at Nottingham University wrote a program that called him a fool. He proceeded to demonstrate the correctness of this assertion by lobbying the university (not quite successfully) to forbid the use of Algol on its computers. See also DEADBEEF.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fool file DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:23 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet] A notional repository of all the most dramatically and
abysmally stupid utterances ever. An entire subgenre of
sig blocks consists of the header From the fool
file:
followed by some quote the poster wishes to represent as an
immortal gem of dimwittery; for this usage to be really effective, the
quote has to be so obviously wrong as to be laughable. More than one
Usenetter has achieved an unwanted notoriety by being quoted in this
way.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: Foonly DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:22 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The PDP-10 successor that was to have been
built by the Super Foonly project at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory along with a new operating system. (The name itself came from
FOO NLI, an error message emitted by a PDP-10 assembler at SAIL meaning
FOO is Not a Legal Identifier
. The intention was to
leapfrog from the old DEC timesharing system SAIL
was then running to a new generation, bypassing TENEX which at that time
was the ARPANET standard. ARPA funding for both the Super Foonly and the
new operating system was cut in 1974. Most of the design team went to DEC
and contributed greatly to the design of the PDP-10 model KL10.
2. The name of the company formed by Dave Poole, one of the principal Super Foonly designers, and one of hackerdom's more colorful personalities. Many people remember the parrot which sat on Poole's shoulder and was a regular companion.
3. Any of the machines built by Poole's company. The first was the
F-1 (a.k.a. Super Foonly), which was the computational engine used to
create the graphics in the movie TRON. The F-1 was
the fastest PDP-10 ever built, but only one was ever made. The effort
drained Foonly of its financial resources, and the company turned towards
building smaller, slower, and much less expensive machines. Unfortunately,
these ran not the popular TOPS-20 but a TENEX
variant called Foonex; this seriously limited their market. Also, the
machines shipped were actually wire-wrapped engineering prototypes
requiring individual attention from more than usually competent site
personnel, and thus had significant reliability problems. Poole's
legendary temper and unwillingness to suffer fools gladly did not help
matters. By the time DEC's Jupiter Project
followon to the
PDP-10 was cancelled in 1983, Foonly's proposal to build another F-1 was
eclipsed by the Mars, and the company never quite
recovered. See the Mars entry for the continuation
and moral of this story.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: footprint DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:21 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The floor or desk area taken up by a piece of hardware.
2. [IBM] The audit trail (if any) left by a crashed program (often in plural, footprints). See also toeprint.
3. RAM footprint: The minimum amount of RAM which an OS or other program takes; this figure gives one an idea of how much will be left for other applications. How actively this RAM is used is another matter entirely. Recent tendencies to featuritis and software bloat can expand the RAM footprint of an OS to the point of making it nearly unusable in practice. [This problem is, thankfully, limited to operating systems so stupid that they don't do virtual memory -- ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: for free DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:20 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[common] Said of a capability of a programming language or hardware
that is available by its design without needing cleverness to implement:
In APL, we get the matrix operations for free.
And
owing to the way revisions are stored in this system, you get revision
trees for free.
The term usually refers to a serendipitous feature
of doing things a certain way (compare big win), but
it may refer to an intentional but secondary feature.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: for the rest of us DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:19 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[from the Mac slogan The computer for the rest of us
]
1. Used to describe a spiffy product whose affordability shames other comparable products, or (more often) used sarcastically to describe spiffy but very overpriced products.
2. Describes a program with a limited interface, deliberately
limited capabilities, non-orthogonality, inability to compose primitives,
or any other limitation designed to not ‘confuse’ a naive user.
This places an upper bound on how far that user can go before the program
begins to get in the way of the task instead of helping accomplish it.
Used in reference to Macintosh software which doesn't provide obvious
capabilities because it is thought that the poor lusers might not be able
to handle them. Becomes ‘the rest of
them’ when used in third-party reference; thus,
Yes, it is an attractive program, but it's designed for The Rest Of
Them
means a program that superficially looks neat but has no depth
beyond the surface flash. See also WIMP environment, Macintrash,
point-and-drool interface,
user-friendly.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: for values of DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:18 AM ----- BODY:
[MIT] A common rhetorical maneuver at MIT is to use any of the
canonical random numbers as placeholders for
variables. The max function takes 42 arguments, for arbitrary
values of 42.:
There are 69 ways to leave your lover, for 69
= 50.
This is especially likely when the speaker has uttered a
random number and realizes that it was not recognized as such, but even
‘non-random’ numbers are occasionally used in this fashion. A
related joke is that π equals 3 —
for small values of π and large values
of 3.
Historical note: at MIT this usage has traditionally been traced to the programming language MAD (Michigan Algorithm Decoder), an Algol-58-like language that was the most common choice among mainstream (non-hacker) users at MIT in the mid-60s. It inherited from Algol-58 a control structure FOR VALUES OF X = 3, 7, 99 DO ... that would repeat the indicated instructions for each value in the list (unlike the usual FOR that only works for arithmetic sequences of values). MAD is long extinct, but similar for-constructs still flourish (e.g., in Unix's shell languages).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fora DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:17 AM ----- BODY: pl.n.
Plural of forum.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: foreground DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:16 AM ----- BODY: vt.
[Unix; common] To bring a task to the top of one's
stack for immediate processing, and hackers often
use it in this sense for non-computer tasks. If your presentation is
due next week, I guess I'd better foreground writing up the design
document.
Technically, on a timesharing system, a task executing in foreground is one able to accept input from and return output to the user; oppose background. Nowadays this term is primarily associated with Unix, but it appears first to have been used in this sense on OS/360. Normally, there is only one foreground task per terminal (or terminal window); having multiple processes simultaneously reading the keyboard is a good way to lose.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fork DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:15 AM ----- BODY:
In the open-source community, a fork is what occurs when two (or more) versions of a software package's source code are being developed in parallel which once shared a common code base, and these multiple versions of the source code have irreconcilable differences between them. This should not be confused with a development branch, which may later be folded back into the original source code base. Nor should it be confused with what happens when a new distribution of Linux or some other distribution is created, because that largely assembles pieces than can and will be used in other distributions without conflict.
Forking is uncommon; in fact, it is so uncommon that individual instances loom large in hacker folklore. Notable in this class were the Emacs/XEmacs fork, the GCC/EGCS fork (later healed by a merger) and the forks among the FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD operating systems.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fork bomb DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:14 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Unix] A particular species of wabbit that
can be written in one line of C (main()
{for(;;)fork();
}) or shell ($0 & $0
&
) on any Unix system, or occasionally created by an
egregious coding bug. A fork bomb process ‘explodes’ by
recursively spawning copies of itself (using the Unix system call
fork2).
Eventually it eats all the process table entries and effectively wedges the
system. Fortunately, fork bombs are relatively easy to spot and kill, so
creating one deliberately seldom accomplishes more than to bring the just
wrath of the gods down upon the perpetrator. Also called a fork bunny. See also
logic bomb.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: forked DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:13 AM ----- BODY: adj.,vi.
1. [common after 1997, esp. in the Linux community] An open-source software project is said to have forked or be forked when the project group fissions into two or more parts pursuing separate lines of development (or, less commonly, when a third party unconnected to the project group begins its own line of development). Forking is considered a Bad Thing — not merely because it implies a lot of wasted effort in the future, but because forks tend to be accompanied by a great deal of strife and acrimony between the successor groups over issues of legitimacy, succession, and design direction. There is serious social pressure against forking. As a result, major forks (such as the Gnu-Emacs/XEmacs split, the fissionings of the 386BSD group into three daughter projects, and the short-lived GCC/EGCS split) are rare enough that they are remembered individually in hacker folklore.
2. [Unix; uncommon; prob.: influenced by a mainstream expletive] Terminally slow, or dead. Originated when one system was slowed to a snail's pace by an inadvertent fork bomb.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: Fortrash DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:12 AM ----- BODY: /for´trash/ n.
Hackerism for the FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) language, referring to its primitive design, gross and irregular syntax, limited control constructs, and slippery, exception-filled semantics.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fortune cookie DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:11 AM ----- BODY: n.
[WAITS, via Unix; common] A random quote, item of trivia, joke, or maxim printed to the user's tty at login time or (less commonly) at logout time. Items from this lexicon have often been used as fortune cookies. See cookie file.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: forum DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:10 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet, GEnie, CI$; pl. fora or forums] Any discussion group accessible through a dial-in BBS, a mailing list, or a newsgroup (see the network). A forum functions much like a bulletin board; users submit postings for all to read and discussion ensues. Contrast real-time chat via talk mode or point-to-point personal email.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fossil DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:09 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. In software, a misfeature that becomes understandable only in historical context, as a remnant of times past retained so as not to break compatibility. Example: the retention of octal as default base for string escapes in C, in spite of the better match of hexadecimal to ASCII and modern byte-addressable architectures. See dusty deck.
2. More restrictively, a feature with past but no present utility. Example: the force-all-caps (LCASE) bits in the V7 and BSD Unix tty driver, designed for use with monocase terminals. (In a perversion of the usual backward-compatibility goal, this functionality has actually been expanded and renamed in some later USG Unix releases as the IUCLC and OLCUC bits.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: four-color glossies DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:08 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Literature created by marketroids that
allegedly contains technical specs but which is in fact as superficial as
possible without being totally content-free.
Forget the four-color glossies, give me the tech ref
manuals.
Often applied as an indication of superficiality even when
the material is printed on ordinary paper in black and white.
Four-color-glossy manuals are never useful for solving
a problem.
2. [rare] Applied by extension to manual pages that don't contain enough information to diagnose why the program doesn't produce the expected or desired output.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: frag DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:07 AM ----- BODY: n.,v.
[from Vietnam-era U.S. military slang via the games Doom and Quake]
1. To kill another player's avatar in a
multiuser game. I hold the office Quake record with 40
frags.
2. To completely ruin something. Forget that power supply,
the lightning strike fragged it.
See also
gib.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fragile DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:06 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Syn brittle.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: Frankenputer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:05 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A mostly-working computer thrown together from the spare parts of several machines out of which the magic smoke had been let. Most shops have a closet full of nonworking machines. When a new machine is needed immediately (for testing, for example) and there is no time (or budget) to requisition a new box, someone (often an intern) is tasked with building a Frankenputer.
2. Also used in referring to a machine that once was a name-brand
computer, but has been upgraded long beyond its useful life, to the point
at which the nameplate violates truth-in-advertising laws (e.g., a Pentium
III-class machine inexplicably living in a case marked Gateway
486/66
).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fred DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:04 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The personal name most frequently used as a metasyntactic variable (see foo). Allegedly popular because it's easy for a non-touch-typist to type on a standard QWERTY keyboard. In Great Britain, ‘fred’, ‘jim’ and ‘sheila’ are common metasyntactic variables because their uppercase versions were official names given to the 3 memory areas that held I/O status registers on the lovingly-remembered BBC Microcomputer! (It is reported that SHEILA was poked the most often.) Unlike J. Random Hacker or J. Random Loser, the name ‘fred’ has no positive or negative loading (but see Dr. Fred Mbogo). See also barney.
2. An acronym for ‘Flipping Ridiculous Electronic Device’; other F-verbs may be substituted for ‘flipping’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: Fred Foobar DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:03 AM ----- BODY: n.
J. Random Hacker's cousin. Any typical human
being, more or less synonymous with ‘someone’ except that Fred
Foobar can be backreferenced by name later on.
So Fred Foobar will enter his phone number into the database, and
it'll be archived with the others. Months later, when Fred
searches...
See also Bloggs Family and
Dr. Fred Mbogo
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: frednet DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:02 AM ----- BODY: /fred´net/ n.
Used to refer to some random and uncommon
protocol encountered on a network. We're implementing bridging in
our router to solve the frednet problem.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: free software DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:01 AM ----- BODY: n.
As defined by Richard M. Stallman and used by the Free Software movement, this means software that gives users enough freedom to be used by the free software community. Specifically, users must be free to modify the software for their private use, and free to redistribute it either with or without modifications, either commercially or noncommercially, either gratis or charging a distribution fee. Free software has existed since the dawn of computing; Free Software as a movement began in 1984 with the GNU Project.
RMS observes that the English word free
can refer
either to liberty (where it means the same as the Spanish or French
libre
) or to price (where it means the same as the Spanish
gratis
or French gratuit
). RMS and other
people associated with the FSF like to explain the word free
in free software
by saying Free as in speech, not as
in beer.
See also open source. Hard-core proponents of
the term free software
sometimes reject this newer term,
claiming that the style of argument associated with it ignores or downplays
the moral imperative at the heart of free software.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: freeware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:47:00 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] Freely-redistributable software, often written by enthusiasts and distributed by users' groups, or via electronic mail, local bulletin boards, Usenet, or other electronic media. As the culture of the Internet has displaced the older BBS world, this term has lost ground to both open source and free software; it has increasingly tended to be restricted to software distributed in binary rather than source-code form. At one time, freeware was a trademark of Andrew Fluegelman, the author of the well-known MS-DOS comm program PC-TALK III. It wasn't enforced after his mysterious disappearance and presumed death in 1984. See shareware, FRS.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: freeze DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:59 AM ----- BODY: v.
To lock an evolving software distribution or document against
changes so it can be released with some hope of stability. Carries the
strong implication that the item in question will ‘unfreeze’ at
some future date. OK, fix that bug and we'll freeze for
release.
There are more specific constructions on this term. A
feature freeze, for example, locks
out modifications intended to introduce new features but still allows
bugfixes and completion of existing features; a code freeze connotes no more changes at all.
At Sun Microsystems and elsewhere, one may also hear references to
code slush — that is, an
almost-but-not-quite frozen state.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fried DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:58 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. [common] Non-working due to hardware failure; burnt out. Especially used of hardware brought down by a power glitch (see glitch), drop-outs, a short, or some other electrical event. (Sometimes this literally happens to electronic circuits! In particular, resistors can burn out and transformers can melt down, emitting noxious smoke — see friode, SED and LER. However, this term is also used metaphorically.) Compare frotzed.
2. [common] Of people, exhausted. Said particularly of those who
continue to work in such a state. Often used as an explanation or excuse.
Yeah, I know that fix destroyed the file system, but I was fried
when I put it in.
Esp.: common in conjunction with brain: My brain is fried today, I'm very
short on sleep.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: frink DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:57 AM ----- BODY: /frink/ v.
The unknown ur-verb, fill in your own meaning. Found esp. on the Usenet newsgroup alt.fan.lemurs, where it is said that the lemurs know what ‘frink’ means, but they aren't telling. Compare gorets.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: friode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:56 AM ----- BODY: /fri:´ohd/ n.
[TMRC] A reversible (that is, fused or blown) diode. Compare fried; see also SED, LER.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fritterware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:55 AM ----- BODY: n.
An excess of capability that serves no productive end. The canonical example is font-diddling software on the Mac (see macdink); the term describes anything that eats huge amounts of time for quite marginal gains in function but seduces people into using it anyway. See also window shopping.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: frob DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:54 AM ----- BODY: /frob/
1. n. [MIT; very common] The
TMRC definition was FROB = a protruding arm
or trunnion
; by metaphoric extension, a frob is any random small thing; an object that
you can comfortably hold in one hand; something you can frob (sense 2).
See frobnitz.
2. vt. Abbreviated form of frobnicate.
3. [from the MUD world] A command on some MUDs that changes a player's experience level (this can be used to make wizards); also, to request wizard privileges on the ‘professional courtesy’ grounds that one is a wizard elsewhere. The command is actually ‘frobnicate’ but is universally abbreviated to the shorter form.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: frobnicate DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:53 AM ----- BODY: /frob´ni·kayt/ vt.
[Poss. derived from frobnitz, and usually
abbreviated to frob, but frobnicate is recognized as the official full
form.:] To manipulate or adjust, to tweak. One frequently frobs bits or
other 2-state devices. Thus: Please frob the light switch
(that is, flip it), but also Stop frobbing that clasp; you'll break
it
. One also sees the construction to
frob a frob. See tweak and
twiddle.
Usage: frob, twiddle, and tweak sometimes connote points along a continuum. ‘Frob’ connotes aimless manipulation; twiddle connotes gross manipulation, often a coarse search for a proper setting; tweak connotes fine-tuning. If someone is turning a knob on an oscilloscope, then if he's carefully adjusting it, he is probably tweaking it; if he is just turning it but looking at the screen, he is probably twiddling it; but if he's just doing it because turning a knob is fun, he's frobbing it. The variant frobnosticate has been recently reported.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: frobnitz DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:52 AM ----- BODY: /frob´nits/, pl. frobnitzem /frob´nit·zm/ or frobni /frob'ni:/ n.
[TMRC] An unspecified physical object, a widget. Also refers to electronic black boxes. This rare form is usually abbreviated to frotz, or more commonly to frob. Also used are frobnule (/frob´n[y]ool/) and frobule (/frob´yool/). Starting perhaps in 1979, frobozz /fr@-boz´/ (plural: frobbotzim /fr@-bot´zm/) has also become very popular, largely through its exposure as a name via Zork. These variants can also be applied to nonphysical objects, such as data structures. For related amusement, see the Encyclopedia Frobozzica.
Pete Samson, compiler of the original TMRC
lexicon, adds, Under the TMRC [railroad] layout were many storage
boxes, managed (in 1958) by David R. Sawyer. Several had fanciful
designations written on them, such as ‘Frobnitz Coil Oil’.
Perhaps DRS intended Frobnitz to be a proper name, but the name was quickly
taken for the thing
. This was almost certainly the origin of the
term.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: frog DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:51 AM ----- BODY: alt.: phrog
1. interj. Term of disgust (we seem to have a lot of them).
2. Used as a name for just about anything. See foo.
3. n. Of things, a crock.
4. n. Of people, somewhere in between a turkey and a toad.
5. froggy: adj. Similar to bagbiting,
but milder. This froggy program is taking forever to
run!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: frogging DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:50 AM ----- BODY: [University of Waterloo] v.
1. Partial corruption of a text file or input stream by some bug or consistent glitch, as opposed to random events like line noise or media failures. Might occur, for example, if one bit of each incoming character on a tty were stuck, so that some characters were correct and others were not. See dread high-bit disease.
2. By extension, accidental display of text in a mode where the output device emits special symbols or mnemonics rather than conventional ASCII. This often happens, for example, when using a terminal or comm program on a device like an IBM PC with a special ‘high-half’ character set and with the bit-parity assumption wrong. A hacker sufficiently familiar with ASCII bit patterns might be able to read the display anyway.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: front end DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:49 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. An intermediary computer that does set-up and filtering for another (usually more powerful but less friendly) machine (a back end).
2. What you're talking to when you have a conversation with someone
who is making replies without paying attention. Look at the dancing
elephants!
Uh-huh.
Do you know what I just
said?
Sorry, you were talking to the front end.
3. Software that provides an interface to another program ‘behind’ it, which may not be as user-friendly. Probably from analogy with hardware front-ends (see sense 1) that interfaced with mainframes.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: frotz DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:48 AM ----- BODY: /frots/
1. n. See frobnitz.
2. mumble frotz: An interjection of mildest disgust. The word ‘frotzen’ is live in this sense in some eastern German dialects; the safe bet is that it came to hackers via Yiddish.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: frotzed DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:47 AM ----- BODY: /frotst/ adj.
To be down because of hardware problems. Compare fried. A machine that is merely frotzed may be fixable without replacing parts, but a fried machine is more seriously damaged.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: frowney DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:46 AM ----- BODY: n.
(alt.: frowney face) See emoticon.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: FRS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:45 AM ----- BODY: n.,obs.
[obs.] Abbreviation for Freely Redistributable
Software
which entered general use on the Internet in 1995 after
years of low-level confusion over what exactly to call software written to
be passed around and shared (contending terms including
freeware, shareware, and
sourceware were never universally
felt to be satisfactory for various subtle reasons). The first formal
conference on freely redistributable software was held in Cambridge,
Massachussetts, in February 1996 (sponsored by the Free Software
Foundation). The conference organizers used the FRS abbreviation heavily in
its calls for papers and other literature during 1995. The term was in
steady though not common use until 1998 and the invention of
open source, after which it became swiftly
obsolete.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fry DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:44 AM ----- BODY:
1. vi. To fail. Said especially of smoke-producing hardware failures. More generally, to become non-working. Usage: never said of software, only of hardware and humans. See fried, magic smoke.
2. vt. To cause to fail; to roach, toast, or hose a piece of hardware. Never used of software or humans, but compare fried.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fscking DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:43 AM ----- BODY: /fus'·king/ or /eff'·seek·ing/ adj.
[Usenet; very common] Fucking, in the expletive sense (it refers to
the Unix filesystem-repair command
fsck8,
of which it can be said that if you have to use it at all you are having a
bad day). Originated on scary devil monastery and
the bofh.net newsgroups, but
became much more widespread following the passage of
CDA. Also occasionally seen in the variant
What the fsck?
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: FSF DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:42 AM ----- BODY: /F·S·F/ abbrev.
Common abbreviation (both spoken and written) for the name of the Free Software Foundation, a nonprofit educational association formed to support the GNU project.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Misc TITLE: -fu DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:41 AM ----- BODY:
[common; generalized from kung-fu]
Combining form denoting expert practice of a skill. That's going to
take some serious code-fu.
First sighted in connection with the
GIMP's remote-scripting facility, script-fu, in 1998.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: FUBAR DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:40 AM ----- BODY: n.
The Failed UniBus Address Register in a VAX. A good example of how jargon can occasionally be snuck past the suits; see foobar, and foo for a fuller etymology.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fuck me harder DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:39 AM ----- BODY: excl.
Sometimes uttered in response to egregious misbehavior, esp. in
software, and esp. of misbehaviors which seem unfairly persistent (as
though designed in by the imp of the perverse). Often theatrically
elaborated: Aiighhh! Fuck me with a piledriver and 16 feet of
curare-tipped wrought-iron fence and no
lubricants!
The phrase is sometimes heard abbreviated
FMH in polite company.
[This entry is an extreme example of the hackish habit of coining elaborate and evocative terms for lossage. Here we see a quite self-conscious parody of mainstream expletives that has become a running gag in part of the hacker culture; it illustrates the hackish tendency to turn any situation, even one of extreme frustration, into an intellectual game (the point being, in this case, to creatively produce a long-winded description of the most anatomically absurd mental image possible — the short forms implicitly allude to all the ridiculous long forms ever spoken). Scatological language is actually relatively uncommon among hackers, and there was some controversy over whether this entry ought to be included at all. As it reflects a live usage recognizably peculiar to the hacker culture, we feel it is in the hackish spirit of truthfulness and opposition to all forms of censorship to record it here. —ESR & GLS]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: FUD DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:38 AM ----- BODY: /fuhd/ n.
Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company:
FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people
instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering
[Amdahl] products.
The idea, of course, was to persuade them to go
with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This implicit
coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would
happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the
future of competitors' equipment or software. See
IBM. After 1990 the term FUD was associated
increasingly frequently with Microsoft, and has
become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a
competitive weapon.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: FUD wars DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:37 AM ----- BODY: /fuhd worz/ n.
1, [from FUD] Historically, political posturing engaged in by hardware and software vendors ostensibly committed to standardization but actually willing to fragment the market to protect their own shares. The Unix International vs.: OSF conflict about Unix standards was one outstanding example; Microsoft vs. Netscape vs. W3C about HTML standards is another.
2. Since about 2000 the FUD wars have a different character; the battle over open standards has been partly replaced and partly subsumed by the argument between closed- and open source proponents. Nowadays, accordingly, the term is most likely to be used of anti-open-source propaganda emitted by Microsoft. Compare astroturfing.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fudge DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:36 AM ----- BODY:
1. vt. To perform in an
incomplete but marginally acceptable way, particularly with respect to the
writing of a program. I didn't feel like going through that pain
and suffering, so I fudged it — I'll fix it later.
2. n. The resulting code.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fudge factor DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:35 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] A value or parameter that is varied in an ad hoc way to produce the desired result. The terms tolerance and slop are also used, though these usually indicate a one-sided leeway, such as a buffer that is made larger than necessary because one isn't sure exactly how large it needs to be, and it is better to waste a little space than to lose completely for not having enough. A fudge factor, on the other hand, can often be tweaked in more than one direction. A good example is the fuzz typically allowed in floating-point calculations: two numbers being compared for equality must be allowed to differ by a small amount; if that amount is too small, a computation may never terminate, while if it is too large, results will be needlessly inaccurate. Fudge factors are frequently adjusted incorrectly by programmers who don't fully understand their import. See also coefficient of X.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fuel up DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:34 AM ----- BODY: vi.
To eat or drink hurriedly in order to get back to hacking.
Food-p?
Yeah, let's fuel up.
Time for
a great-wall!
See also
oriental food.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: Full Monty DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:33 AM ----- BODY: n.
See monty, sense 2.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: fum DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:32 AM ----- BODY: n.
[XEROX PARC] At PARC, often the third of the standard metasyntactic variables (after foo and bar). Competes with baz, which is more common outside PARC.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: functino DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:31 AM ----- BODY: n.
[uncommon, U.K.; originally a serendipitous typo in 1994] A pointer to a function in C and C++. By association with sub-atomic particles such as the neutrino, it accurately conveys an impression of smallness (one pointer is four bytes on most systems) and speed (hackers can and do use arrays of functinos to replace a switch() statement).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: funky DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:30 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Said of something that functions, but in a slightly strange, klugey
way. It does the job and would be difficult to change, so its obvious
non-optimality is left alone. Often used to describe interfaces. The more
bugs something has that nobody has bothered to fix because workarounds are
easier, the funkier it is. TECO and UUCP are funky.
The Intel i860's exception handling is extraordinarily funky. Most
standards acquire funkiness as they age. The new mailer is
installed, but is still somewhat funky; if it bounces your mail for no
reason, try resubmitting it.
This UART is pretty funky. The
data ready line is active-high in interrupt mode and active-low in DMA
mode.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: funny money DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:29 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Notional ‘dollar’ units of computing time and/or storage handed to students at the beginning of a computer course; also called play money or purple money (in implicit opposition to real or green money). In New Zealand and Germany the odd usage paper money has been recorded; in Germany, the particularly amusing synonym transfer ruble commemorates the funny money used for trade between COMECON countries back when the Soviet Bloc still existed. When your funny money ran out, your account froze and you needed to go to a professor to get more. Fortunately, the plunging cost of timesharing cycles has made this less common. The amounts allocated were almost invariably too small, even for the non-hackers who wanted to slide by with minimum work. In extreme cases, the practice led to small-scale black markets in bootlegged computer accounts.
2. By extension, phantom money or quantity tickets of any kind used as a resource-allocation hack within a system. Antonym: real money.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - F TITLE: furrfu DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:28 AM ----- BODY: excl.
[Usenet; written, only rarely spoken] Written-only equivalent of
Sheesh!
; it is, in fact, sheesh
modified by
rot13. Evolved in mid-1992 as a response to notably
silly postings repeating urban myths on the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban, after some posters
complained that Sheesh!
as a response to
newbies was being overused. See also
FOAF.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: G DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:27 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gang bang DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:26 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: Gang of Four DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:25 AM ----- BODY: 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.’
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: garbage collect DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:24 AM ----- BODY: vi.
(also garbage collection, n.) See GC.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: garply DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:23 AM ----- BODY: /gar´plee/ n.
[Stanford] Another metasyntactic variable (see foo); once popular among SAIL hackers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gas DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:22 AM ----- BODY:
[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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: Gates's Law DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:21 AM ----- BODY:
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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gawble DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:20 AM ----- BODY: /gaw´bl/ n.
See chawmp.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: GC DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:19 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: GCOS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:18 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: GECOS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:17 AM ----- BODY: /jee´kohs/ n.
See GCOS.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gedanken DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:16 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: geef DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:15 AM ----- BODY: v.
[ostensibly from ‘gefingerpoken’] vt. Syn. mung. See also blinkenlights.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: geek DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:14 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: geek code DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:13 AM ----- BODY: 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:
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.1 GED/J d-- s:++>: a- C++(++++)$ ULUO++ P+>+++ L++ !E---- W+(---) N+++ o+ K+++ w+(---) O- M+$>++ V-- PS++(+++)>$ PE++(+)>$ Y++ PGP++ t- 5+++ X++ R+++>$ tv+ b+ DI+++ D+++ G+++++>$ e++$>++++ h r-- y+** ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
The geek code originated in 1993; it was inspired (according to the
inventor) by previous bear
, smurf
and
twink
style-and-sexual-preference codes from lesbian and gay
newsgroups. It has in turn spawned imitators; there
is now even a Saturn geek code
for owners of the Saturn car.
See also geek.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: geek out DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:12 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: geekasm DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:11 AM ----- BODY:
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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gen DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:10 AM ----- BODY: /jen/ n.,v.
Short for generate, used frequently in both spoken and written contexts.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gender mender DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:09 AM ----- BODY: 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).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: General Public Virus DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:08 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: generate DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:07 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: Genius From Mars Technique DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:06 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gensym DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:05 AM ----- BODY: /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).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: Get a life! DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:04 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: Get a real computer! DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:03 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: GandhiCon DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:02 AM ----- BODY:
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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gib DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:01 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: GIFs at 11 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:46:00 AM ----- BODY:
[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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gig DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:59 AM ----- BODY: /jig/ or /gig/ n.
[SI] See quantifiers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: giga- DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:58 AM ----- BODY: /ji´ga/ or /gi´ga/ pref.
[SI] See quantifiers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: GIGO DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:57 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gilley DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:56 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gillion DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:55 AM ----- BODY: /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’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: ginger DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
See saga.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: GIPS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:53 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: glark DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:52 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: glass DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:51 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] Synonym for silicon.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: glass tty DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:50 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: glassfet DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:49 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: glitch DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:48 AM ----- BODY: /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)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: glob DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:47 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: glork DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:46 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: glue DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:45 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gnarly DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:44 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: GNU DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:43 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gnubie DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:42 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: GNUMACS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:41 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: go flatline DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:40 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: go gold DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:39 AM ----- BODY: v.
[common] See golden.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: go root DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:38 AM ----- BODY: 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
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: go-faster stripes DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:37 AM ----- BODY: n.
[UK] Syn. chrome. Mainstream in some parts of UK.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: GoAT DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:36 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet] Abbreviation: Go Away, Troll
. See
troll.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: goat file DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:35 AM ----- BODY:
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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gobble DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:34 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: Godwin's Law DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:33 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: Godzillagram DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:32 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: golden DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:31 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: golf-ball printer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:30 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gonk DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:29 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gonkulator DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:28 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gonzo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:27 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: Good Thing DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:26 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: google DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:25 AM ----- BODY: v.
[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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: google juice DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:24 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gopher DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:23 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gopher hole DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:22 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gorets DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:21 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gorilla arm DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:20 AM ----- BODY: 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?
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gorp DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:19 AM ----- BODY: /gorp/ n.
[CMU: perhaps from the canonical hiker's food, Good Old Raisins and Peanuts] Another metasyntactic variable, like foo and bar.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: GOSMACS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:18 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gotcha DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:17 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: GPL DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:16 AM ----- BODY: /G·P·L/ n.
Abbreviation for ‘General Public License’ in widespread use; see copyleft, General Public Virus. Often mis-expanded as ‘GNU Public License’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: GPV DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:15 AM ----- BODY: /G·P·V/ n.
Abbrev. for General Public Virus in widespread use.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gray goo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:14 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gray hat DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:13 AM ----- BODY:
See black hat.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: Great Internet Explosion DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:12 AM ----- BODY:
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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: Great Renaming DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:11 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: Great Runes DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:10 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: Great Worm DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:09 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: great-wall DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:08 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: green bytes DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:07 AM ----- BODY: 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).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: green card DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:06 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: green lightning DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:05 AM ----- BODY: 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).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: green machine DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:04 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: Green's Theorem DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:03 AM ----- BODY: 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]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: greenbar DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:02 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: grep DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:01 AM ----- BODY: /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]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gribble DATE: 05/15/2003 10:45:00 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: grilf DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:59 AM ----- BODY: 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]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: grind DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:58 AM ----- BODY: 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!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: grind crank DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:57 AM ----- BODY: 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/.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gritch DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:56 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: grok DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:55 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gronk DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:54 AM ----- BODY: /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
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gronk out DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:53 AM ----- BODY: vi.
To cease functioning. Of people, to go home and go to sleep.
I guess I'll gronk out now; see you all tomorrow.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gronked DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:52 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: grovel DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:51 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: grue DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:50 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: grunge DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:49 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gubbish DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:48 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: Guido DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:47 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: guiltware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:46 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gumby DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:45 AM ----- BODY: /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.
)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gunch DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:44 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gunpowder chicken DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:43 AM ----- BODY: n.
Same as laser chicken.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: guru DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:42 AM ----- BODY: 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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: guru meditation DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:41 AM ----- BODY: 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).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - G TITLE: gweep DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:40 AM ----- BODY: /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.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: h DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:39 AM ----- BODY:
[from SF fandom] A method of ‘marking’ common words,
i.e., calling attention to the fact that they are being used in a
nonstandard, ironic, or humorous way. Originated in the fannish
catchphrase Bheer is the One True Ghod!
from decades ago.
H-infix marking of ‘Ghod’ and other words spread into the 1960s
counterculture via underground comix, and into early hackerdom either from
the counterculture or from SF fandom (the three overlapped heavily at the
time). More recently, the h infix has become an expected feature of
benchmark names (Dhrystone, Rhealstone, etc.); this is probably patterning
on the original Whetstone (the name of a laboratory) but influenced by the
fannish/counterculture h infix.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: ha ha only serious DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:38 AM ----- BODY:
[from SF fandom, orig. as mutation of HHOK, ‘Ha Ha Only Kidding’] A phrase (often seen abbreviated as HHOS) that aptly captures the flavor of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to parodies, absurdities, and ironic jokes that are both intended and perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or truths that are constructed on in-joke and self-parody. This lexicon contains many examples of ha-ha-only-serious in both form and content. Indeed, the entirety of hacker culture is often perceived as ha-ha-only-serious by hackers themselves; to take it either too lightly or too seriously marks a person as an outsider, a wannabee, or in larval stage. For further enlightenment on this subject, consult any Zen master. See also hacker humor, and koan.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hack DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:37 AM ----- BODY:
[very common]
1. n. Originally, a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well.
2. n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed.
3. vt. To bear emotionally or
physically. I can't hack this heat!
4. vt. To work on something
(typically a program). In an immediate sense: What are you
doing?
I'm hacking TECO.
In a general
(time-extended) sense: What do you do around here?
I
hack TECO.
More generally, I hack foo
is roughly equivalent to
foo is my major interest (or
project)
. I hack solid-state physics.
See
Hacking X for Y.
5. vt. To pull a prank on. See sense 2 and hacker (sense 5).
6. vi. To interact with a
computer in a playful and exploratory rather than goal-directed way.
Whatcha up to?
Oh, just hacking.
7. n. Short for hacker.
8. See nethack. 9. [MIT] v. To explore the basements, roof ledges, and steam tunnels of a large, institutional building, to the dismay of Physical Plant workers and (since this is usually performed at educational institutions) the Campus Police. This activity has been found to be eerily similar to playing adventure games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Zork. See also vadding.
Constructions on this term abound. They include happy hacking (a farewell), how's hacking? (a friendly greeting among hackers) and hack, hack (a fairly content-free but friendly comment, often used as a temporary farewell). For more on this totipotent term see The Meaning of Hack. See also neat hack, real hack.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hack attack DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:36 AM ----- BODY: n.
[poss. by analogy with ‘Big Mac Attack’ from ads for the McDonald's fast-food chain; the variant big hack attack is reported] Nearly synonymous with hacking run, though the latter more strongly implies an all-nighter.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hack mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:35 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. What one is in when hacking, of course.
2. More specifically, a Zen-like state of total focus on The Problem that may be achieved when one is hacking (this is why every good hacker is part mystic). Ability to enter such concentration at will correlates strongly with wizardliness; it is one of the most important skills learned during larval stage. Sometimes amplified as deep hack mode.
Being yanked out of hack mode (see priority interrupt) may be experienced as a physical shock, and the sensation of being in hack mode is more than a little habituating. The intensity of this experience is probably by itself sufficient explanation for the existence of hackers, and explains why many resist being promoted out of positions where they can code. See also cyberspace (sense 3).
Some aspects of hacker etiquette will appear quite odd to an observer unaware of the high value placed on hack mode. For example, if someone appears at your door, it is perfectly okay to hold up a hand (without turning one's eyes away from the screen) to avoid being interrupted. One may read, type, and interact with the computer for quite some time before further acknowledging the other's presence (of course, he or she is reciprocally free to leave without a word). The understanding is that you might be in hack mode with a lot of delicate state (sense 2) in your head, and you dare not swap that context out until you have reached a good point to pause. See also juggling eggs.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hack on DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:34 AM ----- BODY: vt.
[very common] To hack; implies that the subject is some pre-existing hunk of code that one is evolving, as opposed to something one might hack up.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hack together DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:33 AM ----- BODY: vt.
[common] To throw something together so it will work. Unlike kluge together or cruft together, this does not necessarily have negative connotations.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hack up DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:32 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To hack, but generally implies that the result is a hack in sense 1 (a quick hack). Contrast this with hack on. To hack up on implies a quick-and-dirty modification to an existing system. Contrast hacked up; compare kluge up, monkey up, cruft together.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hack value DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:31 AM ----- BODY: n.
Often adduced as the reason or motivation for expending effort
toward a seemingly useless goal, the point being that the accomplished goal
is a hack. For example, MacLISP had features for reading and printing
Roman numerals, which were installed purely for hack value. See
display hack for one method of computing hack value,
but this cannot really be explained, only experienced. As Louis Armstrong
once said when asked to explain jazz: Man, if you gotta ask you'll
never know.
(Feminists please note Fats Waller's explanation of
rhythm: Lady, if you got to ask, you ain't got it.
)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hacked off DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:30 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[analogous to ‘pissed off’] Said of system administrators who have become annoyed, upset, or touchy owing to suspicions that their sites have been or are going to be victimized by crackers, or used for inappropriate, technically illegal, or even overtly criminal activities. For example, having unreadable files in your home directory called ‘worm’, ‘lockpick’, or ‘goroot’ would probably be an effective (as well as impressively obvious and stupid) way to get your sysadmin hacked off at you.
It has been pointed out that there is precedent for this usage in
U.S. Navy slang, in which officers under discipline are sometimes said to
be in hack
and one may speak of hacking off the
C.O.
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hacked up DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:29 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Sufficiently patched, kluged, and tweaked that the surgical scars are beginning to crowd out normal tissue (compare critical mass). Not all programs that are hacked become hacked up; if modifications are done with some eye to coherence and continued maintainability, the software may emerge better for the experience. Contrast hack up.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hacker DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
[originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe]
1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.
2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.
3. A person capable of appreciating hack value.
4. A person who is good at programming quickly.
5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in ‘a Unix hacker’. (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.)
6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example.
7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence password hacker, network hacker. The correct term for this sense is cracker.
The term ‘hacker’ also tends to connote membership in the global community defined by the net (see the network. For discussion of some of the basics of this culture, see the How To Become A Hacker FAQ. It also implies that the person described is seen to subscribe to some version of the hacker ethic (see hacker ethic).
It is better to be described as a hacker by others than to describe oneself that way. Hackers consider themselves something of an elite (a meritocracy based on ability), though one to which new members are gladly welcome. There is thus a certain ego satisfaction to be had in identifying yourself as a hacker (but if you claim to be one and are not, you'll quickly be labeled bogus). See also geek, wannabee.
This term seems to have been first adopted as a badge in the 1960s by the hacker culture surrounding TMRC and the MIT AI Lab. We have a report that it was used in a sense close to this entry's by teenage radio hams and electronics tinkerers in the mid-1950s.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hacker ethic DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:27 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing open-source code and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible.
2. The belief that system-cracking for fun and exploration is ethically OK as long as the cracker commits no theft, vandalism, or breach of confidentiality.
Both of these normative ethical principles are widely, but by no means universally, accepted among hackers. Most hackers subscribe to the hacker ethic in sense 1, and many act on it by writing and giving away open-source software. A few go further and assert that all information should be free and any proprietary control of it is bad; this is the philosophy behind the GNU project.
Sense 2 is more controversial: some people consider the act of cracking itself to be unethical, like breaking and entering. But the belief that ‘ethical’ cracking excludes destruction at least moderates the behavior of people who see themselves as ‘benign’ crackers (see also samurai, gray hat). On this view, it may be one of the highest forms of hackerly courtesy to (a) break into a system, and then (b) explain to the sysop, preferably by email from a superuser account, exactly how it was done and how the hole can be plugged — acting as an unpaid (and unsolicited) tiger team.
The most reliable manifestation of either version of the hacker ethic is that almost all hackers are actively willing to share technical tricks, software, and (where possible) computing resources with other hackers. Huge cooperative networks such as Usenet, FidoNet and the Internet itself can function without central control because of this trait; they both rely on and reinforce a sense of community that may be hackerdom's most valuable intangible asset.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hacker humor DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:26 AM ----- BODY:
A distinctive style of shared intellectual humor found among hackers, having the following marked characteristics:
1. Fascination with form-vs.-content jokes, paradoxes, and humor
having to do with confusion of metalevels (see
meta). One way to make a hacker laugh: hold a red
index card in front of him/her with GREEN
written on it, or
vice-versa (note, however, that this is funny only the first time).
2. Elaborate deadpan parodies of large intellectual constructs, such as specifications (see write-only memory), standards documents, language descriptions (see INTERCAL), and even entire scientific theories (see quantum bogodynamics, computron).
3. Jokes that involve screwily precise reasoning from bizarre, ludicrous, or just grossly counter-intuitive premises.
4. Fascination with puns and wordplay.
5. A fondness for apparently mindless humor with subversive currents of intelligence in it — for example, old Warner Brothers and Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, the Marx brothers, the early B-52s, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. Humor that combines this trait with elements of high camp and slapstick is especially favored.
6. References to the symbol-object antinomies and associated ideas in Zen Buddhism and (less often) Taoism. See has the X nature, Discordianism, zen, ha ha only serious, koan.
See also filk, retrocomputing, and the Portrait of J. Random Hacker in Appendix B. If you have an itchy feeling that all six of these traits are really aspects of one thing that is incredibly difficult to talk about exactly, you are (a) correct and (b) responding like a hacker. These traits are also recognizable (though in a less marked form) throughout science-fiction fandom.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: Hackers (the movie) DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:25 AM ----- BODY: n.
A notable bomb from 1995. Should have been titled Crackers, because cracking is what the movie was about. It's understandable that they didn't however; titles redolent of snack food are probably a tough sell in Hollywood.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hacking run DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:24 AM ----- BODY: n.
[analogy with ‘bombing run’ or ‘speed run’] A hack session extended long outside normal working times, especially one longer than 12 hours. May cause you to change phase the hard way (see phase).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: Hacking X for Y DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:23 AM ----- BODY: n.
[ITS] Ritual phrasing of part of the information which ITS made
publicly available about each user. This information (the INQUIR record)
was a sort of form in which the user could fill out various fields. On
display, two of these fields were always combined into a project
description of the form Hacking X for Y
(e.g.,
Hacking perceptrons for Minsky
). This form of description
became traditional and has since been carried over to other systems with
more general facilities for self-advertisement (such as Unix
plan files).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: Hackintosh DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:22 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. An Apple Lisa that has been hacked into emulating a Macintosh (also called a ‘Mac XL’).
2. A Macintosh assembled from parts theoretically belonging to different models in the line.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hackish DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:21 AM ----- BODY: /hak´ish/ adj.
(also hackishness n.)
1. Said of something that is or involves a hack.
2. Of or pertaining to hackers or the hacker subculture. See also true-hacker.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hackishness DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:20 AM ----- BODY: n.
The quality of being or involving a hack. This term is considered mildly silly. Syn. hackitude.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hackitude DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:19 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. hackishness; this word is considered sillier.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hair DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:18 AM ----- BODY: n.
[back-formation from hairy] The complications
that make something hairy. Decoding TECO
commands requires a certain amount of hair.
Often seen in the
phrase infinite hair, which connotes
extreme complexity. Also in hairiferous (tending to promote hair growth):
GNUMACS elisp encourages lusers to write complex editing
modes.
Yeah, it's pretty hairiferous all right.
(or
just: Hair squared!
)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hairball DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:17 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [Fidonet] A large batch of messages that a store-and-forward
network is failing to forward when it should. Often used in the phrase
Fido coughed up a hairball today
, meaning that the stuck
messages have just come unstuck, producing a flood of mail where there had
previously been drought.
2. An unmanageably huge mass of source code. JWZ thought the
Mozilla effort bogged down because the code was a huge hairball.
3. Any large amount of garbage coming out suddenly. Sendmail
is coughing up a hairball, so expect some slowness accessing the
Internet.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hairy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:16 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. Annoyingly complicated. DWIM is
incredibly hairy.
2. Incomprehensible. DWIM is
incredibly hairy.
3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative, rare, expert, and/or
incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in context: He knows this
hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to worry about.
See also
hirsute.
There is a theorem in simplicial homology theory which states that
any continuous tangent field on a 2-sphere is null at least in a point.
Mathematically literate hackers tend to associate the term
‘hairy’ with the informal version of this theorem; You
can't comb a hairy ball smooth.
(Previous versions of this entry
associating the above informal statement with the Brouwer fixed-point
theorem were incorrect.)
The adjective ‘long-haired’ is well-attested to have been in slang use among scientists and engineers during the early 1950s; it was equivalent to modern hairy senses 1 and 2, and was very likely ancestral to the hackish use. In fact the noun ‘long-hair’ was at the time used to describe a person satisfying sense 3. Both senses probably passed out of use when long hair was adopted as a signature trait by the 1960s counterculture, leaving hackish hairy as a sort of stunted mutant relic.
In British mainstream use, hairy
means
dangerous
, and consequently, in British programming terms,
hairy
may be used to denote complicated and/or
incomprehensible code, but only if that complexity or incomprehesiveness is
also considered dangerous.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: HAKMEM DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:15 AM ----- BODY: /hak´mem/ n.
MIT AI Memo 239 (February 1972). A legendary collection of neat
mathematical and programming hacks contributed by many people at MIT and
elsewhere. (The title of the memo really is HAKMEM
, which
is a 6-letterism for ‘hacks memo’.) Some of them are very
useful techniques, powerful theorems, or interesting unsolved problems, but
most fall into the category of mathematical and computer trivia. Here is a
sampling of the entries (with authors), slightly paraphrased:
Item 41 (Gene Salamin): There are exactly 23,000 prime numbers less than 218.
Item 46 (Rich Schroeppel): The most probable suit distribution in bridge hands is 4-4-3-2, as compared to 4-3-3-3, which is the most evenly distributed. This is because the world likes to have unequal numbers: a thermodynamic effect saying things will not be in the state of lowest energy, but in the state of lowest disordered energy.
Item 81 (Rich Schroeppel): Count the magic squares of order 5 (that is, all the 5-by-5 arrangements of the numbers from 1 to 25 such that all rows, columns, and diagonals add up to the same number). There are about 320 million, not counting those that differ only by rotation and reflection.
Item 154 (Bill Gosper): The myth that any given programming language is machine independent is easily exploded by computing the sum of powers of 2. If the result loops with period = 1 with sign +, you are on a sign-magnitude machine. If the result loops with period = 1 at -1, you are on a twos-complement machine. If the result loops with period greater than 1, including the beginning, you are on a ones-complement machine. If the result loops with period greater than 1, not including the beginning, your machine isn't binary — the pattern should tell you the base. If you run out of memory, you are on a string or bignum system. If arithmetic overflow is a fatal error, some fascist pig with a read-only mind is trying to enforce machine independence. But the very ability to trap overflow is machine dependent. By this strategy, consider the universe, or, more precisely, algebra: Let X = the sum of many powers of 2 = ...111111 (base 2). Now add X to itself: X + X = ...111110. Thus, 2X = X - 1, so X = -1. Therefore algebra is run on a machine (the universe) that is two's-complement.
Item 174 (Bill Gosper and Stuart Nelson): 21963283741 is the only number such that if you represent it on the PDP-10 as both an integer and a floating-point number, the bit patterns of the two representations are identical.
Item 176 (Gosper): The banana phenomenon
was
encountered when processing a character string by taking the last 3 letters
typed out, searching for a random occurrence of that sequence in the text,
taking the letter following that occurrence, typing it out, and iterating.
This ensures that every 4-letter string output occurs in the original. The
program typed BANANANANANANANA.... We note an ambiguity in the
phrase, the Nth occurrence
of.
In one sense, there are five 00's in 0000000000; in another,
there are nine. The editing program TECO finds five. Thus it finds only
the first ANA in BANANA, and is thus obligated to type N next. By Murphy's
Law, there is but one NAN, thus forcing A, and thus a loop. An option to
find overlapped instances would be useful, although it would require
backing up N − 1 characters before
seeking the next N-character
string.
Note: This last item refers to a Dissociated Press implementation. See also banana problem.
HAKMEM also contains some rather more complicated mathematical and technical items, but these examples show some of its fun flavor.
An HTML transcription of the entire document is available at http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/hakmem.html.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hakspek DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:14 AM ----- BODY: /hak´speek/ n.
A shorthand method of spelling found on many British academic
bulletin boards and talker systems. Syllables and
whole words in a sentence are replaced by single ASCII characters the names
of which are phonetically similar or equivalent, while multiple letters are
usually dropped. Hence, ‘for’ becomes ‘4’;
‘two’, ‘too’, and ‘to’ become
‘2’; ‘ck’ becomes ‘k’. Before I
see you tomorrow
becomes b4 i c u 2moro
. First
appeared in London about 1986, and was probably caused by the slowness of
available talker systems, which operated on archaic machines with outdated
operating systems and no standard methods of communication.
Hakspek almost disappeared after the great bandwidth explosion of the early 1990s, as fast Internet links wiped out the old-style talker systems. However, it has enjoyed a revival in another medium — the Short Message Service (SMS) associated with GSM cellphones. SMS sends are limited to a maximum of 160 characters, and typing on a cellphone keypad is difficult and slow anyway. There are now even published paper dictionaries for SMS users to help them do hakspek-to-English and vice-versa.
See also talk mode.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: Halloween Documents DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:13 AM ----- BODY: n.
A pair of Microsoft internal strategy memoranda leaked to ESR in
late 1998 that confirmed everybody's paranoia about the current
Evil Empire. These documents praised
the technical excellence of Linux and outlined a
counterstrategy of attempting to lock in customers by
de-commoditizing
Internet protocols and services. They were
extensively cited on the Internet and in the press and proved so
embarrassing that Microsoft PR barely said a word in public for six months
afterwards.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: ham DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:12 AM ----- BODY:
The opposite of spam, sense 3; that is, incoming mail that the user actually wants to see.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hammer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:11 AM ----- BODY: vt.
Commonwealth hackish syn. for bang on.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hamster DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:10 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [Fairchild] A particularly slick little piece of code that does one thing well; a small, self-contained hack. The image is of a hamster happily spinning its exercise wheel.
2. A tailless mouse; that is, one with an infrared link to a receiver on the machine, as opposed to the conventional cable.
3. [UK] Any item of hardware made by Amstrad, a company famous for its cheap plastic PC-almost-compatibles.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: HAND DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:09 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet: very common] Abbreviation: Have A Nice Day. Typically used to close a Usenet posting, but also used to informally close emails; often preceded by HTH.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hand cruft DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:08 AM ----- BODY: vt.
[pun on ‘hand craft’] See cruft, sense 3.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hand-hacking DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:07 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [rare] The practice of translating hot spots from an HLL into hand-tuned assembler, as opposed to trying to coerce the compiler into generating better code. Both the term and the practice are becoming uncommon. See tune, by hand; syn. with v. cruft.
2. [common] More generally, manual construction or patching of data sets that would normally be generated by a translation utility and interpreted by another program, and aren't really designed to be read or modified by humans.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hand-roll DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:06 AM ----- BODY: v.
[from obs. mainstream slang hand-rolled in opposition to ready-made, referring to cigarettes] To perform
a normally automated software installation or configuration process
by hand; implies that the normal process failed due
to bugs in the configurator or was defeated by something exceptional in the
local environment. The worst thing about being a gateway between
four different nets is having to hand-roll a new sendmail configuration
every time any of them upgrades.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: handle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:05 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [from CB slang] An electronic pseudonym; a nom de guerre intended to conceal the user's true identity. Network and BBS handles function as the same sort of simultaneous concealment and display one finds on Citizen's Band radio, from which the term was adopted. Use of grandiose handles is characteristic of warez d00dz, crackers, weenies, spods, and other lower forms of network life; true hackers travel on their own reputations rather than invented legendry. Compare nick, screen name.
2. A magic cookie, often in the form of a numeric index into some array somewhere, through which you can manipulate an object like a file or window. The form file handle is especially common.
3. [Mac] A pointer to a pointer to dynamically-allocated memory; the extra level of indirection allows on-the-fly memory compaction (to cut down on fragmentation) or aging out of unused resources, with minimal impact on the (possibly multiple) parts of the larger program containing references to the allocated memory. Compare snap (to snap a handle would defeat its purpose); see also aliasing bug, dangling pointer.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: handshaking DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:04 AM ----- BODY: n.
[very common] Hardware or software activity designed to start or
keep two machines or programs in synchronization as they
do protocol. Often applied to human activity; thus, a hacker
might watch two people in conversation nodding their heads to indicate that
they have heard each others' points and say Oh, they're
handshaking!
. See also protocol.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: handwave DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:03 AM ----- BODY: /hand´wayv/
[poss. from gestures characteristic of stage magicians]
1. v. To gloss over a complex point; to distract a listener; to support a (possibly actually valid) point with blatantly faulty logic.
2. n. The act of handwaving.
Boy, what a handwave!
If someone starts a sentence with Clearly...
or
Obviously...
or It is self-evident
that...
, it is a good bet he is about to handwave
(alternatively, use of these constructions in a sarcastic tone before a
paraphrase of someone else's argument suggests that it is a handwave). The
theory behind this term is that if you wave your hands at the right moment,
the listener may be sufficiently distracted to not notice that what you
have said is bogus. Failing that, if a listener
does object, you might try to dismiss the objection with a wave of your
hand.
The use of this word is often accompanied by gestures: both hands up, palms forward, swinging the hands in a vertical plane pivoting at the elbows and/or shoulders (depending on the magnitude of the handwave); alternatively, holding the forearms in one position while rotating the hands at the wrist to make them flutter. In context, the gestures alone can suffice as a remark; if a speaker makes an outrageously unsupported assumption, you might simply wave your hands in this way, as an accusation, far more eloquent than words could express, that his logic is faulty.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hang DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:02 AM ----- BODY: v.
1. [very common] To wait for an event that will never occur.
The system is hanging because it can't read from the crashed
drive
. See wedged,
hung.
2. To wait for some event to occur; to hang around until something
happens. The program displays a menu and then hangs until you type
a character.
Compare block.
3. To attach a peripheral device, esp. in the construction
‘hang off’: We're going to hang another tape drive off
the file server.
Implies a device attached with cables, rather than
something that is strictly inside the machine's chassis.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: Hanlon's Razor DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:01 AM ----- BODY: prov.
A corollary of Finagle's Law, similar to
Occam's Razor, that reads Never attribute to malice that which can
be adequately explained by stupidity.
Quoted here because it seems
to be a particular favorite of hackers, often showing up in
sig blocks, fortune cookie files and the
login banners of BBS systems and commercial networks. This probably
reflects the hacker's daily experience of environments created by
well-intentioned but short-sighted people. Compare
Sturgeon's Law, Ninety-Ninety Rule.
At http://www.statusq.org/2001/11/26.html
it is claimed that Hanlon's Razor was coined by one Robert J. Hanlon of
Scranton, PA. However, a curiously similar remark (You have
attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from
stupidity.
) appears in Logic of Empire, a
classic 1941 SF story by Robert A. Heinlein, who calls the error it
indicates the ‘devil theory’ of sociology. Similar epigrams
have been attributed to William James and (on dubious evidence) Napoleon
Bonaparte.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: happily DATE: 05/15/2003 10:44:00 AM ----- BODY: adv.
Of software, used to emphasize that a program is unaware of some
important fact about its environment, either because it has been fooled
into believing a lie, or because it doesn't care. The sense of
‘happy’ here is not that of elation, but rather that of
blissful ignorance. The program continues to run, happily unaware
that its output is going to /dev/null.
Also used to suggest that a
program or device would really rather be doing something destructive, and
is being given an opportunity to do so. If you enter an O here
instead of a zero, the program will happily erase all your data.
Nevertheless, use of this term implies a basically benign attitude towards
the program: It didn't mean any harm, it was just eager to do its job. We'd
like to be angry at it but we shouldn't, we should try to understand it
instead. The adjective cheerfully
is often used in exactly
the same way.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hard boot DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:59 AM ----- BODY: n.
See boot.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hardcoded DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:58 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. [common] Said of data inserted directly into a program, where it cannot be easily modified, as opposed to data in some profile, resource (see de-rezz sense 2), or environment variable that a user or hacker can easily modify.
2. In C, this is esp. applied to use of a literal instead of a
#define
macro (see
magic number).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hardwarily DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:57 AM ----- BODY: /hard·weir'@·lee/ adv.
In a way pertaining to hardware. The system is hardwarily
unreliable.
The adjective ‘hardwary’ is
not traditionally used, though it has recently been
reported from the U.K. See softwarily.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hardwired DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:56 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. In software, syn. for hardcoded.
2. By extension, anything that is not modifiable, especially in the sense of customizable to one's particular needs or tastes.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: has the X nature DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:55 AM ----- BODY:
[seems to derive from Zen Buddhist koans of the form Does an
X have the Buddha-nature?
] adj.
Common hacker construction for ‘is an X’, used for humorous
emphasis. Anyone who can't even use a program with on-screen help
embedded in it truly has the loser nature!
See also the X that can be Y is not the true X. See
also mu.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hash bucket DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
A notional receptacle, a set of which might be used to apportion
data items for sorting or lookup purposes. When you look up a name in the
phone book (for example), you typically hash it by extracting its first
letter; the hash buckets are the alphabetically ordered letter sections.
This term is used as techspeak with respect to code that uses actual hash
functions; in jargon, it is used for human associative memory as well.
Thus, two things ‘in the same hash bucket’ are more difficult
to discriminate, and may be confused. If you hash English words
only by length, you get too many common grammar words in the first couple
of hash buckets.
Compare hash collision.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hash collision DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:53 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from the techspeak] (var.: hash
clash) When used of people, signifies a confusion in associative
memory or imagination, especially a persistent one (see
thinko). True story: One of us [ESR] was once on
the phone with a friend about to move out to Berkeley. When asked what he
expected Berkeley to be like, the friend replied: Well, I have this
mental picture of naked women throwing Molotov cocktails, but I think
that's just a collision in my hash tables.
Compare
hash bucket.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hat DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
Common (spoken) name for the circumflex (‘^’, ASCII 1011110) character. See ASCII for other synonyms.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: HCF DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:51 AM ----- BODY: /H·C·F/ n.
Mnemonic for ‘Halt and Catch Fire’, any of several undocumented and semi-mythical machine instructions with destructive side-effects, supposedly included for test purposes on several well-known architectures going as far back as the IBM 360. The MC6800 microprocessor was the first for which an HCF opcode became widely known. This instruction caused the processor to toggle a subset of the bus lines as rapidly as it could; in some configurations this could actually cause lines to burn up. Compare killer poke.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: heads down DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:50 AM ----- BODY: [Sun] adj.
Concentrating, usually so heavily and for so long that everything outside the focus area is missed. See also hack mode and larval stage, although this mode is hardly confined to fledgling hackers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: heartbeat DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:49 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The signal emitted by a Level 2 Ethernet transceiver at the end of every packet to show that the collision-detection circuit is still connected.
2. A periodic synchronization signal used by software or hardware, such as a bus clock or a periodic interrupt.
3. The ‘natural’ oscillation frequency of a computer's clock crystal, before frequency division down to the machine's clock rate.
4. A signal emitted at regular intervals by software to demonstrate that it is still alive. Sometimes hardware is designed to reboot the machine if it stops hearing a heartbeat. See also breath-of-life packet.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: heatseeker DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:48 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] A customer who can be relied upon to buy, without fail, the latest version of an existing product (not quite the same as a member of the lunatic fringe). A 1993 example of a heatseeker was someone who, owning a 286 PC and Windows 3.0, went out and bought Windows 3.1 (which offers no worthwhile benefits unless you have a 386). If all customers were heatseekers, vast amounts of money could be made by just fixing some of the bugs in each release (n) and selling it to them as release (n+1). Microsoft in fact seems to have mastered this technique.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: heavy metal DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:47 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Cambridge] Syn. big iron.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: heavy wizardry DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:46 AM ----- BODY: n.
Code or designs that trade on a particularly intimate knowledge or
experience of a particular operating system or language or complex
application interface. Distinguished from
deep magic, which trades more on arcane
theoretical knowledge. Writing device drivers is
heavy wizardry; so is interfacing to X (sense 2)
without a toolkit. Esp.: found in source-code comments of the form
Heavy wizardry begins here
. Compare
voodoo programming.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: heavyweight DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:45 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[common] High-overhead; baroque; code-intensive; featureful, but costly. Esp. used of communication protocols, language designs, and any sort of implementation in which maximum generality and/or ease of implementation has been pushed at the expense of mundane considerations such as speed, memory utilization, and startup time. EMACS is a heavyweight editor; X is an extremely heavyweight window system. This term isn't pejorative, but one hacker's heavyweight is another's elephantine and a third's monstrosity. Oppose lightweight. Usage: now borders on techspeak, especially in the compound heavyweight process.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: Hed Rat DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:44 AM ----- BODY:
Unflattering spoonerism of Red Hat, a popular Linux distribution. Compare Macintrash. sun-stools, HP-SUX, Slowlaris.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: heisenbug DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:43 AM ----- BODY: /hi:´zen·buhg/ n.
[from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics] A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it. (This usage is not even particularly fanciful; the use of a debugger sometimes alters a program's operating environment significantly enough that buggy code, such as that which relies on the values of uninitialized memory, behaves quite differently.) Antonym of Bohr bug; see also mandelbug, schroedinbug. In C, nine out of ten heisenbugs result from uninitialized auto variables, fandango on core phenomena (esp. lossage related to corruption of the malloc arena) or errors that smash the stack.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hell desk DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:42 AM ----- BODY:
Common mispronunciation of ‘help desk’, especially among people who have to answer phones at one.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hello sailor! DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:41 AM ----- BODY: interj.
Occasional West Coast equivalent of
hello world; seems to have originated at SAIL, later associated with
the game Zork (which also included hello,
aviator
and hello, implementor
). Originally from
the traditional hooker's greeting to a swabbie fresh off the boat, of
course. The standard response is Nothing happens here.
; of
all the Zork/Dungeon games, only in Infocom's Zork 3 is Hello,
Sailor
actually useful (excluding the unique situation where
_knowing_ this fact is important in Dungeon...).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hello world DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:40 AM ----- BODY: interj.
1. The canonical minimal test message in the C/Unix universe.
2. Any of the minimal programs that emit this message (a
representative sample in various languages can be found at http://www.latech.edu/~acm/helloworld/).
Traditionally, the first program a C coder is supposed to write in a new
environment is one that just prints hello, world
to standard
output (and indeed it is the first example program in K&R). Environments that generate
an unreasonably large executable for this trivial test or which require a
hairy compiler-linker invocation to generate it are
considered to lose (see X).
3. Greeting uttered by a hacker making an entrance or requesting
information from anyone present. Hello, world! Is the LAN back up
yet?
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hello, wall! DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:39 AM ----- BODY: excl.
See wall.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hex DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:38 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Short for hexadecimal, base 16.
2. A 6-pack of anything (compare quad, sense 2). Neither usage has anything to do with magic or black art, though the pun is appreciated and occasionally used by hackers. True story: As a joke, some hackers once offered some surplus ICs for sale to be worn as protective amulets against hostile magic. The chips were, of course, hex inverters.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hexadecimal DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:37 AM ----- BODY: n.
Base 16. Coined in the early 1950s to replace earlier sexadecimal, which was too racy and amusing for stuffy IBM, and later adopted by the rest of the industry.
Actually, neither term is etymologically pure. If we take binary to be paradigmatic, the most
etymologically correct term for base 10, for example, is
‘denary’, which comes from ‘deni’ (ten at a time,
ten each), a Latin distributive
number; the corresponding term for base-16 would be something like
‘sendenary’. Decimal
comes from the combining
root of decem, Latin for 10. If wish
to create a truly analogous word for base 16, we should start with
sedecim, Latin for 16. Ergo,
sedecimal is the word that would have
been created by a Latin scholar. The ‘sexa-’ prefix is Latin
but incorrect in this context, and
‘hexa-’ is Greek. The word octal is similarly incorrect; a correct form
would be ‘octaval’ (to go with decimal), or
‘octonary’ (to go with binary). If anyone ever implements a
base-3 computer, computer scientists will be faced with the unprecedented
dilemma of a choice between two correct forms; both
ternary and trinary have a claim to this throne.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hexit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:36 AM ----- BODY: /hek´sit/ n.
A hexadecimal digit (0-9, and A-F or a-f). Used by people who claim that there are only ten digits, dammit; sixteen-fingered human beings are rather rare, despite what some keyboard designs might seem to imply (see space-cadet keyboard).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: HHOK DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:35 AM ----- BODY:
See ha ha only serious.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: HHOS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:34 AM ----- BODY:
See ha ha only serious.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hidden flag DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:33 AM ----- BODY: n.
[scientific computation] An extra option added to a routine without changing the calling sequence. For example, instead of adding an explicit input variable to instruct a routine to give extra diagnostic output, the programmer might just add a test for some otherwise meaningless feature of the existing inputs, such as a negative mass. The use of hidden flags can make a program very hard to debug and understand, but is all too common wherever programs are hacked on in a hurry.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: high bit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:32 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from high-order bit]
1. The most significant bit in a byte.
2. [common] By extension, the most significant part of something
other than a data byte: Spare me the whole
saga, just give me the high bit.
See also
meta bit,
dread high-bit disease, and compare the mainstream
slang bottom line.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: high moby DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:31 AM ----- BODY: /hi:´ mohb´ee/ n.
The high half of a 512K PDP-10's physical address space; the other half was of course the low moby. This usage has been generalized in a way that has outlasted the PDP-10; for example, at the 1990 Washington D.C. Area Science Fiction Conclave (Disclave), when a miscommunication resulted in two separate wakes being held in commemoration of the shutdown of MIT's last ITS machines, the one on the upper floor was dubbed the ‘high moby’ and the other the ‘low moby’. All parties involved grokked this instantly. See moby.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: highly DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:30 AM ----- BODY: adv.
[scientific computation] The preferred modifier for overstating an understatement. As in: highly nonoptimal, the worst possible way to do something; highly nontrivial, either impossible or requiring a major research project; highly nonlinear, completely erratic and unpredictable; highly nontechnical, drivel written for lusers, oversimplified to the point of being misleading or incorrect (compare drool-proof paper). In other computing cultures, postfixing of in the extreme might be preferred.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hing DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:29 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IRC] Fortuitous typo for ‘hint’, now in wide intentional use among players of initgame. Compare newsfroup, filk.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hired gun DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
A contract programmer, as opposed to a full-time staff member. All the connotations of this term suggested by innumerable spaghetti Westerns are intentional.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hirsute DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:27 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Occasionally used humorously as a synonym for hairy.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: HLL DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:26 AM ----- BODY: /H·L·L/ n.
[High-Level Language (as opposed to assembler)] Found primarily in email and news rather than speech. Rarely, the variants ‘VHLL’ and ‘MLL’ are found. VHLL stands for ‘Very-High-Level Language’ and is used to describe a bondage-and-discipline language that the speaker happens to like; Prolog and Backus's FP are often called VHLLs. ‘MLL’ stands for ‘Medium-Level Language’ and is sometimes used half-jokingly to describe C, alluding to its ‘structured-assembler’ image. See also languages of choice.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hoarding DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:25 AM ----- BODY: n.
See software hoarding.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hog DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:24 AM ----- BODY: n.,vt.
1. Favored term to describe programs or hardware that seem to eat
far more than their share of a system's resources, esp. those which
noticeably degrade interactive response. Not used of
programs that are simply extremely large or complex or that are merely
painfully slow themselves. More often than not encountered in qualified
forms, e.g., memory hog, core hog, hog the
processor, hog the disk.
A controller that never gives up the I/O bus gets killed after the
bus-hog timer expires.
2. Also said of people who use more than their fair share of resources (particularly disk, where it seems that 10% of the people use 90% of the disk, no matter how big the disk is or how many people use it). Of course, once disk hogs fill up one filesystem, they typically find some other new one to infect, claiming to the sysadmin that they have an important new project to complete.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hole DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:23 AM ----- BODY: n.
A region in an otherwise flat entity which is not actually present. For example, some Unix filesystems can store large files with holes so that unused regions of the file are never actually stored on disk. (In techspeak, these are referred to as ‘sparse’ files.) As another example, the region of memory in IBM PCs reserved for memory-mapped I/O devices which may not actually be present is called ‘the I/O hole’, since memory-management systems must skip over this area when filling user requests for memory.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hollised DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:22 AM ----- BODY: /hol´ist/ adj.
[Usenet: sci.space] To be hollised is to have been ordered by one's employer not to post any even remotely job-related material to Usenet (or, by extension, to other Internet media). The original and most notorious case of this involved one Ken Hollis, a Lockheed employee and space-program enthusiast who posted publicly available material on access to Space Shuttle launches to sci.space. He was gagged under threat of being fired in 1994 at the behest of NASA public-relations officers. The result was, of course, a huge publicity black eye for NASA. Nevertheless several other NASA contractor employees were subsequently hollised for similar activities. Use of this term carries the strong connotation that the persons doing the gagging are bureaucratic idiots blinded to their own best interests by territorial reflexes.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: holy penguin pee DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:21 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Linux] Notional substance said to be sprinkled by Linus onto other people's contributions. With this ritual, he blesses them, officially making them part of the kernel. First used in November 1998 just after Linus had handed the maintenance of the stable kernel over to Alan Cox.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: holy wars DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:20 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from Usenet, but may predate it; common] n. flame wars over religious issues. The paper by Danny Cohen that popularized the terms big-endian and little-endian in connection with the LSB-first/MSB-first controversy was entitled On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace.
Great holy wars of the past have included ITS vs.: Unix, Unix vs.: VMS, BSD Unix vs.: System V, C vs.: Pascal, C vs.: FORTRAN, etc. In the year 2000, popular favorites of the day are KDE vs, GNOME, vim vs. elvis, Linux vs. [Free|Net|Open]BSD. Hardy perennials include EMACS vs.: vi, my personal computer vs.: everyone else's personal computer, ad nauseam. The characteristic that distinguishes holy wars from normal technical disputes is that in a holy war most of the participants spend their time trying to pass off personal value choices and cultural attachments as objective technical evaluations. This happens precisely because in a true holy war, the actual substantive differences between the sides are relatively minor. See also theology.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: home box DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:19 AM ----- BODY: n.
A hacker's personal machine, especially one he or she owns.
Yeah? Well, my home box runs a full 4.4 BSD,
so there!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: home machine DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:18 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Syn. home box.
2. The machine that receives your email. These senses might be distinct, for example, for a hacker who owns one computer at home, but reads email at work.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: home page DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:17 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. One's personal billboard on the World Wide Web. The term ‘home page’ is perhaps a bit misleading because home directories and physical homes in RL are private, but home pages are designed to be very public.
2. By extension, a WWW repository for information and links related to a project or organization. Compare home box.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: honey pot DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:16 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A box designed to attract crackers so that they can be observed in action. It is usually well isolated from the rest of the network, but has extensive logging (usually network layer, on a different machine). Different from an iron box in that its purpose is to attract, not merely observe. Sometimes, it is also a defensive network security tactic — you set up an easy-to-crack box so that your real servers don't get messed with. The concept was presented in Cheswick & Bellovin's book Firewalls and Internet Security.
2. A mail server that acts as an open relay when a single message is attempted to send through it, but discards or diverts for examination messages that are detected to be part of a spam run.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hook DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
A software or hardware feature included in order to simplify later additions or changes by a user. For example, a simple program that prints numbers might always print them in base 10, but a more flexible version would let a variable determine what base to use; setting the variable to 5 would make the program print numbers in base 5. The variable is a simple hook. An even more flexible program might examine the variable and treat a value of 16 or less as the base to use, but treat any other number as the address of a user-supplied routine for printing a number. This is a hairy but powerful hook; one can then write a routine to print numbers as Roman numerals, say, or as Hebrew characters, and plug it into the program through the hook. Often the difference between a good program and a superb one is that the latter has useful hooks in judiciously chosen places. Both may do the original job about equally well, but the one with the hooks is much more flexible for future expansion of capabilities (EMACS, for example, is all hooks). The term user exit is synonymous but much more formal and less hackish.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hop DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:14 AM ----- BODY:
1. n. [common] One file transmission in a series required to get a file from point A to point B on a store-and-forward network. On such networks (including the old UUCP network and and FidoNet), an important inter-machine metric is the number of hops in the shortest path between them, which can be more significant than their geographical separation. See bang path.
2. v. [rare] To log in to a
remote machine, esp. via rlogin or telnet. I'll hop over to foovax
to FTP that.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: horked DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:13 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Broken. Confused. Trashed. Now common; seems to be post-1995. There is an entertaining web page of related definitions, few of which seem to be in live use but many of which would be in the recognition vocabulary of anyone familiar with the adjective.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hose DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:12 AM ----- BODY:
1. vt. [common] To make
non-functional or greatly degraded in performance. That big
ray-tracing program really hoses the system.
See
hosed.
2. n. A narrow channel through which data flows under pressure. Generally denotes data paths that represent performance bottlenecks.
3. n. Cabling, especially thick Ethernet cable. This is sometimes called bit hose or hosery (play on ‘hosiery’) or ‘etherhose’. See also washing machine.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hosed DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:11 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Same as down. Used primarily by Unix hackers. Humorous: also implies a condition thought to be relatively easy to reverse. Probably derived from the Canadian slang ‘hoser’ popularized by the Bob and Doug Mackenzie skits on SCTV, but this usage predated SCTV by years in hackerdom (it was certainly already live at CMU in the 1970s). See hose. It is also widely used of people in the mainstream sense of ‘in an extremely unfortunate situation’.
Once upon a time, a Cray that had been experiencing periodic difficulties crashed, and it was announced to have been hosed. It was discovered that the crash was due to the disconnection of some coolant hoses. The problem was corrected, and users were then assured that everything was OK because the system had been rehosed. See also dehose.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hot chat DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:10 AM ----- BODY: n.
Sexually explicit one-on-one chat. See teledildonics.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hot spot DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:09 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [primarily used by C/Unix programmers, but spreading] It is received wisdom that in most programs, less than 10% of the code eats 90% of the execution time; if one were to graph instruction visits versus code addresses, one would typically see a few huge spikes amidst a lot of low-level noise. Such spikes are called hot spots and are good candidates for heavy optimization or hand-hacking. The term is especially used of tight loops and recursions in the code's central algorithm, as opposed to (say) initial set-up costs or large but infrequent I/O operations. See tune, hand-hacking.
2. The active location of a cursor on a bit-map display. Put
the mouse's hot spot on the ‘ON’ widget and click the left
button.
3. A screen region that is sensitive to mouse gestures, which trigger some action. World Wide Web pages now provide the canonical examples; WWW browsers present hypertext links as hot spots which, when clicked on, point the browser at another document (these are specifically called hotlinks).
4. In a massively parallel computer with shared memory, the one location that all 10,000 processors are trying to read or write at once (perhaps because they are all doing a busy-wait on the same lock).
5. More generally, any place in a hardware design that turns into a performance bottleneck due to resource contention.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hotlink DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:08 AM ----- BODY: /hot´link/ n.
A hot spot on a World Wide Web page; an area, which, when clicked or selected, chases a URL. Also spelled ‘hot link’. Use of this term focuses on the link's role as an immediate part of your display, as opposed to the timeless sense of logical connection suggested by web pointer. Your screen shows hotlinks but your document has web pointers, not (in normal usage) the other way around.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: house wizard DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:07 AM ----- BODY: n.
[prob.: from ad-agency tradetalk, ‘house freak’] A hacker occupying a technical-specialist, R&D, or systems position at a commercial shop. A really effective house wizard can have influence out of all proportion to his/her ostensible rank and still not have to wear a suit. Used esp. of Unix wizards. The term house guru is equivalent.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: HP-SUX DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:06 AM ----- BODY: /H·P suhks/ n.
Unflattering hackerism for HP-UX, Hewlett-Packard's Unix port, which
features some truly unique bogosities in the filesystem internals and
elsewhere (these occasionally create portability problems). HP-UX is often
referred to as ‘hockey-pux’ inside HP, and one respondent
claims that the proper pronunciation is /H·P
ukkkhhhh/ as though one were about to spit. Another such
alternate spelling and pronunciation is H-PUX
/H-puhks/. Hackers at HP/Apollo (the
former Apollo Computers which was swallowed by HP in 1989) have been heard
to complain that Mr. Packard should have pushed to have his name first, if
for no other reason than the greater eloquence of the resulting acronym.
See sun-stools,
Slowlaris.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: HTH DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:05 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet: very common] Abbreviation: Hope This Helps (e.g. following a response to a technical question). Often used just before HAND. See also YHBT.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: huff DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:04 AM ----- BODY: v.
To compress data using a Huffman code. Various programs that use such methods have been called ‘HUFF’ or some variant thereof. Oppose puff. Compare crunch, compress.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hung DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:03 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[from ‘hung up’; common] Equivalent to wedged, but more common at Unix/C sites. Not generally used of people. Syn. with locked up, wedged; compare hosed. See also hang. A hung state is distinguished from crashed or down, where the program or system is also unusable but because it is not running rather than because it is waiting for something. However, the recovery from both situations is often the same. It is also distinguished from the similar but more drastic state wedged — hung software can be woken up with easy things like interrupt keys, but wedged will need a kill -9 or even reboot.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hungry puppy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:02 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. slopsucker.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hungus DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:01 AM ----- BODY: /huhng´g@s/ adj.
[perhaps related to slang ‘humongous’] Large, unwieldy,
usually unmanageable. TCP is a hungus piece of code.
This is a hungus set of modifications.
The
Infocom text adventure game Beyond
Zork included two monsters called hunguses.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hyperspace DATE: 05/15/2003 10:43:00 AM ----- BODY: /hi:´per·spays/ n.
A memory location that is far away from where
the program counter should be pointing, especially a place that is
inaccessible because it is not even mapped in by the virtual-memory system.
Another core dump — looks like the program jumped off to
hyperspace somehow.
(Compare
jump off into never-never land.) This usage is from the SF notion of a spaceship jumping
into hyperspace, that is, taking a
shortcut through higher-dimensional space — in other words, bypassing
this universe. The variant east
hyperspace is recorded among CMU and Bliss hackers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - H TITLE: hysterical reasons DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:59 AM ----- BODY: n.
(also hysterical raisins) A
variant on the stock phrase for historical reasons
,
indicating specifically that something must be done in some stupid way for
backwards compatibility, and moreover that the feature it must be
compatible with was the result of a bad design in the first place.
All IBM PC video adapters have to support MDA text mode for
hysterical reasons.
Compare
bug-for-bug compatible.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: I didn't change anything! DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:58 AM ----- BODY: interj.
An aggrieved cry often heard as bugs manifest during a regression
test. The canonical reply to this assertion is
Then it works just the same as it did before, doesn't it?
See also one-line fix. This is also heard from
applications programmers trying to blame an obvious applications problem on
an unrelated systems software change, for example a divide-by-0 fault after
terminals were added to a network. Usually, their statement is found to be
false. Upon close questioning, they will admit some major restructuring of
the program that shouldn't have broken anything, in their opinion, but
which actually hosed the code completely.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: I see no X here. DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:57 AM ----- BODY:
Hackers (and the interactive computer games they write)
traditionally favor this slightly marked usage over other possible
equivalents such as There's no X here!
or X is
missing.
or Where's the X?
. This goes back to the
original PDP-10 ADVENT, which would respond in this
wise if you asked it to do something involving an object not present at
your location in the game.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: IANAL DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:56 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet] Abbreviation, I Am Not A Lawyer
. Usually
precedes legal advice.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: IBM DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:55 AM ----- BODY: /I·B·M/
Once upon a time, the computer company most hackers loved to hate; today, the one they are most puzzled to find themselves liking.
From hackerdom's beginnings in the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, IBM was regarded with active loathing. Common expansions of the corporate name included: Inferior But Marketable; It's Better Manually; Insidious Black Magic; It's Been Malfunctioning; Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a near-infinite number of even less complimentary expansions (see also fear and loathing). What galled hackers about most IBM machines above the PC level wasn't so much that they were underpowered and overpriced (though that counted against them), but that the designs were incredibly archaic, crufty, and elephantine ... and you couldn't fix them — source code was locked up tight, and programming tools were expensive, hard to find, and bletcherous to use once you had found them.
We didn't know how good we had it back then. In the 1980s IBM had its own troubles with Microsoft and lost its strategic way, receding from the hacker community's view. Then, in the 1990s, Microsoft became more noxious and omnipresent than IBM had ever been.
In the late 1990s IBM re-invented itself as a services company, began to release open-source software through its AlphaWorks group, and began shipping Linux systems and building ties to the Linux community. To the astonishment of all parties, IBM emerged as a staunch friend of the hacker community and open source development.
This lexicon includes a number of entries attributed to ‘IBM’; these derive from some rampantly unofficial jargon lists circulated within IBM's formerly beleaguered hacker underground.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: ICBM address DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
(Also missile address) The form used to register a site with the Usenet mapping project, back before the day of pervasive Internet, included a blank for longitude and latitude, preferably to seconds-of-arc accuracy. This was actually used for generating geographically-correct maps of Usenet links on a plotter; however, it became traditional to refer to this as one's ICBM address or missile address, and some people include it in their sig block with that name. (A real missile address would include target elevation.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: ice DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:53 AM ----- BODY: n.
[coined by Usenetter Tom Maddox, popularized by William Gibson's cyberpunk SF novels: a contrived acronym for ‘Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics’] Security software (in Gibson's novels, software that responds to intrusion by attempting to immobilize or even literally kill the intruder). Hence, icebreaker: a program designed for cracking security on a system.
Neither term is in serious use yet as of late 2002, but many hackers
find the metaphor attractive, and each may develop a denotation in the
future. In the meantime, the speculative usage could be confused with
‘ICE’, an acronym for in-circuit
emulator
.
In ironic reference to the speculative usage, however, some hackers and computer scientists formed ICE (International Cryptographic Experiment) in 1994. ICE is a consortium to promote uniform international access to strong cryptography.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: ID10T error DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:52 AM ----- BODY: /I·D·ten·T er'@r/
Synonym for PEBKAC, e.g. The user is
being an idiot
. Tech-support people passing a problem report to
someone higher up the food chain (and presumably better equipped to deal
with idiots) may ask the user to convey that there seems to be an I-D-ten-T
error. Users never twig.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: idempotent DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:51 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[from mathematical techspeak] Acting as if used only once, even if used multiple times. This term is often used with respect to C header files, which contain common definitions and declarations to be included by several source files. If a header file is ever included twice during the same compilation (perhaps due to nested #include files), compilation errors can result unless the header file has protected itself against multiple inclusion; a header file so protected is said to be idempotent. The term can also be used to describe an initialization subroutine that is arranged to perform some critical action exactly once, even if the routine is called several times.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: IDP DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:50 AM ----- BODY: /I·D·P/ v.,n.
[Usenet] Abbreviation for Internet Death Penalty. Common (probably now more so than the full form), and frequently verbed. Compare UDP.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: If you want X, you know where to find it. DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:49 AM ----- BODY:
There is a legend that Dennis Ritchie, inventor of
C, once responded to demands for features resembling
those of what at the time was a much more popular language by observing
If you want PL/I, you know where to find it.
Ever since,
this has been hackish standard form for fending off requests to alter a new
design to mimic some older (and, by implication, inferior and
baroque) one. The case X =
Pascal manifests semi-regularly on Usenet's
comp.lang.c newsgroup. Indeed,
the case X = X has been reported in discussions of graphics software (see
X).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: ifdef out DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:48 AM ----- BODY: /if´def owt/ v.
Syn. for condition out, specific to C.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: IIRC DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:47 AM ----- BODY:
Common abbreviation for If I Recall Correctly
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: ill-behaved DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:46 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. [numerical analysis] Said of an algorithm or computational method that tends to blow up because of accumulated roundoff error or poor convergence properties.
2. [obs.] Software that bypasses the defined OS interfaces to do things (like screen, keyboard, and disk I/O) itself, often in a way that depends on the hardware of the machine it is running on or which is nonportable or incompatible with other pieces of software. In the MS-DOS world, there was a folk theorem (nearly true) to the effect that (owing to gross inadequacies and performance penalties in the OS interface) all interesting applications were ill-behaved. See also bare metal. Oppose well-behaved. See also mess-dos.
3. In modern usage, a program is called ill-behaved if it uses interfaces to the OS or other programs that are private, undocumented, or grossly non-portable. Another way to be ill-behaved is to use headers or files that are theoretically private to another application.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: IMHO DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:45 AM ----- BODY: abbrev.
[from SF fandom via Usenet; abbreviation for ‘In My Humble
Opinion’] IMHO, mixed-case C names should be avoided, as
mistyping something in the wrong case can cause hard-to-detect errors
— and they look too Pascalish anyhow.
Also seen in variant
forms such as IMNSHO (In My Not-So-Humble Opinion) and IMAO (In My Arrogant
Opinion).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted! DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:44 AM ----- BODY: prov.
[Usenet] Since Usenet first got off the
ground in 1980--81, it has grown exponentially, approximately doubling in
size every year. On the other hand, most people feel the
signal-to-noise ratio of Usenet has dropped
steadily. These trends led, as far back as mid-1983, to predictions of the
imminent collapse (or death) of the net. Ten years and numerous doublings
later, enough of these gloomy prognostications have been confounded that
the phrase Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!
has become a
running joke, hauled out any time someone grumbles about the
S/N ratio or the huge and steadily increasing volume, or the
possible loss of a key node or link, or the potential for lawsuits when
ignoramuses post copyrighted material, etc., etc., etc.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: in the extreme DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:43 AM ----- BODY: adj.
A preferred superlative suffix for many hackish terms. See, for example, obscure in the extreme under obscure, and compare highly.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: incantation DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:42 AM ----- BODY: n.
Any particularly arbitrary or obscure command that one must mutter
at a system to attain a desired result. Not used of passwords or other
explicit security features. Especially used of tricks that are so poorly
documented that they must be learned from a wizard.
This compiler normally locates initialized data in the data segment,
but if you mutter the right incantation they will be
forced into text space.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: include DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:41 AM ----- BODY: vt.
[Usenet]
1. To duplicate a portion (or whole) of another's message (typically with attribution to the source) in a reply or followup, for clarifying the context of one's response. See the discussion of inclusion styles under Hacker Writing Style.
2. [from C] #include
<disclaimer.h>
has appeared in
sig blocks to refer to a notional standard disclaimer
file.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: include war DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:40 AM ----- BODY: n.
Excessive multi-leveled inclusion within a discussion thread, a practice that tends to annoy readers. In a forum with high-traffic newsgroups, such as Usenet, this can lead to flames and the urge to start a kill file.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: indent style DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
[C, C++, and Java programmers] The rules one uses to indent code in
a readable fashion. There are four major C indent styles, described below;
all have the aim of making it easier for the reader to visually track the
scope of control constructs. They have been inherited by C++ and Java,
which have C-like syntaxes. The significant variable is the placement of
{ and } with respect to the
statement(s) they enclose and to the guard or controlling statement
(if
, else
,
for
, while
,
or do
) on the block, if any.
K&R style — Named after Kernighan & Ritchie, because the examples in K&R are formatted this way. Also called kernel style because the Unix kernel is written in it, and the ‘One True Brace Style’ (abbrev. 1TBS) by its partisans. In C code, the body is typically indented by eight spaces (or one tab) per level, as shown here. Four spaces are occasionally seen in C, but in C++ and Java four tends to be the rule rather than the exception.
if (<cond>) { <body> }
Allman style — Named for Eric Allman, a Berkeley hacker who wrote a lot of the BSD utilities in it (it is sometimes called BSD style). Resembles normal indent style in Pascal and Algol. It is the only style other than K&R in widespread use among Java programmers. Basic indent per level shown here is eight spaces, but four (or sometimes three) spaces are generally preferred by C++ and Java programmers.
if (<cond>) { <body> }
Whitesmiths style — popularized by the examples that came with Whitesmiths C, an early commercial C compiler. Basic indent per level shown here is eight spaces, but four spaces are occasionally seen.
if (<cond>) { <body> }
GNU style — Used
throughout GNU EMACS and the Free Software Foundation code, and just about
nowhere else. Indents are always four spaces per level, with {
and }
halfway
between the outer and inner indent levels.
if (<cond>) { <body> }
Surveys have shown the Allman and Whitesmiths styles to be the most
common, with about equal mind shares. K&R/1TBS used to be nearly
universal, but is now much less common in C (the opening brace tends to get
lost against the right paren of the guard part in an if
or while
, which
is a Bad Thing). Defenders of 1TBS argue that any
putative gain in readability is less important than their style's relative
economy with vertical space, which enables one to see more code on one's
screen at once. The Java Language Specification legislates not only the
capitalization of identifiers, but where nouns, adjectives, and verbs
should be in method, class, interface, and variable names (section
6.8). While the specification stops short of also standardizing on a
bracing style, all source code originating from Sun Laboratories uses the
K&R style. This has set a precedent for Java programmers, which most
follow.
Doubtless these issues will continue to be the subject of holy wars.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: Indent-o-Meter DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:38 AM ----- BODY:
[] A fiendishly clever ASCII display hack that became a brief fad in 1993-1994; it used combinations of tabs and spaces to produce an analog indicator of the amount of indentation an included portion of a reply had undergone. The full story is at http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/indent.html.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: index of X DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:37 AM ----- BODY: n.
See coefficient of X.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: infant mortality DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:36 AM ----- BODY: n.
It is common lore among hackers (and in the electronics industry at large; this term is possibly techspeak by now) that the chances of sudden hardware failure drop off exponentially with a machine's time since first use (that is, until the relatively distant time at which enough mechanical wear in I/O devices and thermal-cycling stress in components has accumulated for the machine to start going senile). Up to half of all chip and wire failures happen within a new system's first few weeks; such failures are often referred to as infant mortality problems (or, occasionally, as sudden infant death syndrome). See bathtub curve, burn-in period.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: infinite DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:35 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[common] Consisting of a large number of objects; extreme. Used
very loosely as in: This program produces infinite garbage.
He is an infinite loser.
The word most likely to follow
infinite, though, is
hair. (It has been pointed out that fractals are an
excellent example of infinite hair.) These uses are abuses of the word's
mathematical meaning. The term semi-infinite, denoting an immoderately large
amount of some resource, is also heard. This compiler is taking a
semi-infinite amount of time to optimize my program.
See also
semi.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: infinite loop DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:34 AM ----- BODY: n.
One that never terminates (that is, the machine
spins or buzzes forever and
goes catatonic). There is a standard joke that has
been made about each generation's exemplar of the ultra-fast machine:
The Cray-3 is so fast it can execute an infinite loop in under 2
seconds!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: Infinite-Monkey Theorem DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:33 AM ----- BODY: n.
If you put an infinite number of
monkeys at typewriters, eventually one will bash out the script for
Hamlet.
(One may also hypothesize a small number of monkeys and a
very long period of time.) This theorem asserts nothing about the
intelligence of the one random monkey that
eventually comes up with the script (and note that the mob will also type
out all the possible incorrect versions of Hamlet).
It may be referred to semi-seriously when justifying a brute force method; the implication is that, with enough resources
thrown at it, any technical challenge becomes a one-banana problem. This argument gets more respect since
Linux justified the bazaar
mode of development.
Other hackers maintain that the Infinite-Monkey Theorem cannot be true — otherwise Usenet would have reproduced the entire canon of great literature by now.
In mid-2003, researchers at Plymouth Univesity in England actually
put a working computer in a cage with six crested macaques. The monkeys
proceeded to bash the machine with a rock, urinate on it, and type the
letter S a lot (later, the letters A, J, L, and M also crept in). The
results were published in a limited-edition book, Notes Towards
The Complete Works of Shakespeare. A researcher reported:
They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when
they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention
there.
Scattered field reports that there are AOL users this
competent have been greeted with well-deserved skepticism.
This theorem has been traced to the mathematiciamn Émile Borel in 1913, and was first popularized by the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington. It became part of the idiom of techies via the classic SF short story Inflexible Logic by Russell Maloney, and many younger hackers know it through a reference in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Some other references have been collected on the Web. On 1 April 2000 the usage acquired its own Internet standard, RFC2795 (Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: infinity DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:32 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The largest value that can be represented in a particular type of variable (register, memory location, data type, whatever).
2. minus infinity: The smallest such value, not necessarily or even usually the simple negation of plus infinity. In N-bit twos-complement arithmetic, infinity is 2N-1 - 1 but minus infinity is - (2N-1), not -(2N-1 - 1). Note also that this is different from time T equals minus infinity, which is closer to a mathematician's usage of infinity.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: inflate DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:31 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To decompress or puff a file. Rare among Internet hackers, used primarily by MS-DOS/Windows types.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: Infocom DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:30 AM ----- BODY: n.
A now-legendary games company, active from 1979 to 1989, that
commercialized the MDL parser technology used for
Zork to produce a line of text adventure games that
remain favorites among hackers. Infocom's games were intelligent, funny,
witty, erudite, irreverent, challenging, satirical, and most thoroughly
hackish in spirit. The physical game packages from Infocom are now prized
collector's items. After being acquired by Activision in 1989 they did a
few more modern
(e.g. graphics-intensive) games which were
less successful than reissues of their classics.
The software, thankfully, is still extant; Infocom games were written in a kind of P-code (called, actually, z-code) and distributed with a P-code interpreter core, and not only open-source emulators for that interpreter but an actual compiler as well have been written to permit the P-code to be run on platforms the games never originally graced. In fact, new games written in this P-code are still being written. There is a home page at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/, and it is even possible to play these games in your browser if it is Java-capable.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: initgame DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:29 AM ----- BODY: /in·it´gaym/ n.
[IRC] An IRC version of the trivia game
Botticelli
, in which one user changes his
nick to the initials of a famous person or other
named entity, and the others on the channel ask yes or no questions, with
the one to guess the person getting to be it
next. As a
courtesy, the one picking the initials starts by providing a 4-letter hint
of the form sex, nationality, life-status, reality-status. For example,
MAAR means Male, American, Alive, Real
(as opposed to
fictional
). Initgame can be surprisingly addictive. See
also hing.
[1996 update: a recognizable version of the initgame has become a staple of some radio talk shows in the U.S. We had it first! -- ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: insanely great DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:28 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[Mac community, from Steve Jobs; also BSD Unix people via Bill Joy] Something so incredibly elegant that it is imaginable only to someone possessing the most puissant of hacker-natures.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: installfest DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:27 AM ----- BODY:
[Linux community since c.1998] Common portmanteau word for
installation festival
; Linux user groups frequently run
these. Computer users are invited to bring their machines to have Linux
installed on their machines. The idea is to get them painlessly over the
biggest hump in migrating to Linux, which is initially installing and
configuring it for the user's machine.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: INTERCAL DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:26 AM ----- BODY: /in´t@r·kal/ n.
[said by the authors to stand for Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym] A computer language designed by Don Woods and James Lyons in 1972. INTERCAL is purposely different from all other computer languages in all ways but one; it is purely a written language, being totally unspeakable. An excerpt from the INTERCAL Reference Manual will make the style of the language clear:
It is a well-known and oft-demonstrated fact that a person whose work is incomprehensible is held in high esteem. For example, if one were to state that the simplest way to store a value of 65536 in a 32-bit INTERCAL variable is:
DO :1 <- #0$#256
any sensible programmer would say that that was absurd. Since this is indeed the simplest method, the programmer would be made to look foolish in front of his boss, who would of course have happened to turn up, as bosses are wont to do. The effect would be no less devastating for the programmer having been correct.
INTERCAL has many other peculiar features designed to make it even more unspeakable. The Woods-Lyons implementation was actually used by many (well, at least several) people at Princeton. The language has been recently reimplemented as C-INTERCAL and is consequently enjoying an unprecedented level of unpopularity; there is even an alt.lang.intercal newsgroup devoted to the study and ... appreciation of the language on Usenet.
Inevitably, INTERCAL has a home page on the Web: http://www.catb.org/~esr/intercal/. An extended version, implemented in (what else?) Perl and adding object-oriented features, is rumored to exist. See also Befunge.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: InterCaps DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:25 AM ----- BODY:
[Great Britain] Synonym for BiCapitalization.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: interesting DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:24 AM ----- BODY: adj.
In hacker parlance, this word has strong connotations of
‘annoying’, or ‘difficult’, or both. Hackers
relish a challenge, and enjoy wringing all the irony possible out of the
ancient Chinese curse May you live in interesting times
.
Oppose trivial,
uninteresting.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: Internet DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:23 AM ----- BODY: n.
The mother of all networks. First incarnated beginning in 1969 as
the ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defense research testbed. Though it has
been widely believed that the goal was to develop a network architecture
for military command-and-control that could survive disruptions up to and
including nuclear war, this is a myth; in fact, ARPANET was conceived from
the start as a way to get most economical use out of then-scarce
large-computer resources. Robert Herzfeld, who was director of ARPA at
the time, has been at some pains to debunk the
survive-a-nuclear-war
myth, but it seems unkillable.
As originally imagined, ARPANET's major use would have been to support what is now called remote login and more sophisticated forms of distributed computing, but the infant technology of electronic mail quickly grew to dominate actual usage. Universities, research labs and defense contractors early discovered the Internet's potential as a medium of communication between humans and linked up in steadily increasing numbers, connecting together a quirky mix of academics, techies, hippies, SF fans, hackers, and anarchists. The roots of this lexicon lie in those early years.
Over the next quarter-century the Internet evolved in many ways. The
typical machine/OS combination moved from DEC
PDP-10s and PDP-20s, running
TOPS-10 and TOPS-20, to
PDP-11s and VAXen and Suns running
Unix, and in the 1990s to Unix on Intel
microcomputers. The Internet's protocols grew more capable, most notably
in the move from NCP/IP to TCP/IP in 1982 and the
implementation of Domain Name Service in 1983. It was around this time
that people began referring to the collection of interconnected networks
with ARPANET at its core as the Internet
.
The ARPANET had a fairly strict set of participation guidelines -- connected institutions had to be involved with a DOD-related research project. By the mid-80s, many of the organizations clamoring to join didn't fit this profile. In 1986, the National Science Foundation built NSFnet to open up access to its five regional supercomputing centers; NSFnet became the backbone of the Internet, replacing the original ARPANET pipes (which were formally shut down in 1990). Between 1990 and late 1994 the pieces of NSFnet were sold to major telecommunications companies until the Internet backbone had gone completely commercial.
That year, 1994, was also the year the mainstream culture discovered the Internet. Once again, the killer app was not the anticipated one — rather, what caught the public imagination was the hypertext and multimedia features of the World Wide Web. Subsequently the Internet has seen off its only serious challenger (the OSI protocol stack favored by European telecoms monopolies) and is in the process of absorbing into itself many of the proprietary networks built during the second wave of wide-area networking after 1980. By 1996 it had become a commonplace even in mainstream media to predict that a globally-extended Internet would become the key unifying communications technology of the next century. See also the network.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: Internet Death Penalty DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:22 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet] (often abbreviated IDP) The ultimate sanction against spam-emitting sites — complete shunning at the router level of all mail and packets, as well as Usenet messages, from the offending domain(s). Compare Usenet Death Penalty, with which it is sometimes confused.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: Internet Exploder DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:21 AM ----- BODY:
[very common] Pejorative hackerism for Microsoft's Internet
Explorer
web browser (also Internet
Exploiter
). Compare HP-SUX,
Macintrash, sun-stools,
Slowlaris.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: Internet Exploiter DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:20 AM ----- BODY: n.
Another common name-of-insult for Internet Explorer, Microsoft's overweight Web Browser; more hostile than Internet Exploder. Reflects widespread hostility to Microsoft and a sense that it is seeking to hijack, monopolize, and corrupt the Internet. Compare Exploder and the less pejorative Netscrape.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: interrupt DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:19 AM ----- BODY:
1. [techspeak] n. On a computer,
an event that interrupts normal processing and temporarily diverts
flow-of-control through an interrupt handler
routine. See
also trap.
2. interj. A request for
attention from a hacker. Often explicitly spoken. Interrupt
— have you seen Joe recently?
See
priority interrupt.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: interrupts locked out DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:18 AM ----- BODY: adj.
When someone is ignoring you. In a restaurant, after several
fruitless attempts to get the waitress's attention, a hacker might well
observe She must have interrupts locked out
. The synonym
interrupts disabled is also common.
Variations abound; to have one's interrupt mask bit set
and
interrupts masked out
are also heard. See also
spl.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: intertwingled DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:17 AM ----- BODY:
adj. [Invented by Theodor Holm
Nelson, prob. a blend of mingled
and
intertwined
.] Connected together in a complex way;
specifically, composed of one another's components.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: intro DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:16 AM ----- BODY: n.
[demoscene] Introductory screen of some production.
2. A short demo, usually showing just one or two screens.
3. Small, usually 64k, 40k or 4k demo. Sizes are generally dictated by compo rules. See also dentro, demo.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: IRC DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:15 AM ----- BODY: /I·R·C/ n.
[Internet Relay Chat] A worldwide party line
network
that allows one to converse with others in real time. IRC is structured as
a network of Internet servers, each of which accepts connections from
client programs, one per user. The IRC community and the
Usenet and MUD communities
overlap to some extent, including both hackers and regular folks who have
discovered the wonders of computer networks. Some Usenet jargon has been
adopted on IRC, as have some conventions such as
emoticons. There is also a vigorous native jargon,
represented in this lexicon by entries marked ‘[IRC]’. See
also talk mode.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: iron DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:14 AM ----- BODY: n.
Hardware, especially older and larger hardware of mainframe class with big metal cabinets housing relatively low-density electronics (but the term is also used of modern supercomputers). Often in the phrase big iron. Oppose silicon. See also dinosaur.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: Iron Age DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:13 AM ----- BODY: n.
In the history of computing, 1961-1971 — the formative era of commercial mainframe technology, when ferrite-core dinosaurs ruled the earth. The Iron Age began, ironically enough, with the delivery of the first minicomputer (the PDP-1) and ended with the introduction of the first commercial microprocessor (the Intel 4004) in 1971. See also Stone Age; compare elder days.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: iron box DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:12 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Unix/Internet] A special environment set up to trap a cracker logging in over remote connections long enough to be traced. May include a modified shell restricting the cracker's movements in unobvious ways, and ‘bait’ files designed to keep him interested and logged on. See also back door, firewall machine, Venus flytrap, and Clifford Stoll's account in The Cuckoo's Egg of how he made and used one (see the Bibliography in Appendix C). Compare padded cell, honey pot.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: ironmonger DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:11 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] A hardware specialist (derogatory). Compare sandbender, polygon pusher.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: ISO standard cup of tea DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:10 AM ----- BODY: n.
[South Africa] A cup of tea with milk and one teaspoon of sugar, where the milk is poured into the cup before the tea. Variations are ISO 0, with no sugar; ISO 2, with two spoons of sugar; and so on.
This may derive from the NATO standard
cup of coffee
and tea (milk and two sugars), military slang going back to the late 1950s
and parodying NATO's relentless bureaucratic drive to standardize parts
across European and U.S. militaries.
Like many ISO standards, this one has a faintly alien ring in North America, where hackers generally shun the decadent British practice of adulterating perfectly good tea with dairy products and prefer instead to add a wedge of lemon, if anything. If one were feeling extremely silly, one might hypothesize an analogous ANSI standard cup of tea and wind up with a political situation distressingly similar to several that arise in much more serious technical contexts. (Milk and lemon don't mix very well.)
[2000 update: There is now, in fact, an ISO standard 3103: ‘Method for preparation of a liquor of tea for use in sensory tests.’, alleged to be equivalent to British Standard BS6008: How to make a standard cup of tea. —ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: ISP DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:09 AM ----- BODY: /I·S·P/
Common abbreviation for Internet Service Provider, a kind of company that barely existed before 1993. ISPs sell Internet access to the mass market. While the big nationwide commercial BBSs with Internet access (like America Online, CompuServe, GEnie, Netcom, etc.) are technically ISPs, the term is usually reserved for local or regional small providers (often run by hackers turned entrepreneurs) who resell Internet access cheaply without themselves being information providers or selling advertising. Compare NSP.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: ITS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:08 AM ----- BODY: /I·T·S/ n.
1. Incompatible Time-sharing System, an influential though highly idiosyncratic operating system written for PDP-6s and PDP-10s at MIT and long used at the MIT AI Lab. Much AI-hacker jargon derives from ITS folklore, and to have been ‘an ITS hacker’ qualifies one instantly as an old-timer of the most venerable sort. ITS pioneered many important innovations, including transparent file sharing between machines and terminal-independent I/O. After about 1982, most actual work was shifted to newer machines, with the remaining ITS boxes run essentially as a hobby and service to the hacker community. The shutdown of the lab's last ITS machine in May 1990 marked the end of an era and sent old-time hackers into mourning nationwide (see high moby). There is an ITS home page.
2. A mythical image of operating-system perfection worshiped by a bizarre, fervent retro-cult of old-time hackers and ex-users (see troglodyte, sense 2). ITS worshipers manage somehow to continue believing that an OS maintained by assembly-language hand-hacking that supported only monocase 6-character filenames in one directory per account remains superior to today's state of commercial art (their venom against Unix is particularly intense). See also holy wars, Weenix.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: IWBNI DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:07 AM ----- BODY:
Abbreviation for ‘It Would Be Nice If’. Compare WIBNI.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - I TITLE: IYFEG DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:06 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet] Abbreviation for ‘Insert Your Favorite Ethnic Group’. Used as a meta-name when telling ethnic jokes on the net to avoid offending anyone. See JEDR.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - J TITLE: J. Random DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:05 AM ----- BODY: /J rand´m/ n.
[common; generalized from J. Random Hacker]
Arbitrary; ordinary; any one; any old. ‘J. Random’ is often
prefixed to a noun to make a name out of it. It means roughly some particular or any specific one. Would you let
J. Random Loser marry your daughter?
The most common uses are
‘J. Random Hacker’, ‘J. Random Loser’, and
‘J. Random Nerd’ (Should J. Random Loser be allowed to
kill other peoples' processes?
), but it can be used simply as an
elaborate version of random in any sense.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - J TITLE: J. Random Hacker DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:04 AM ----- BODY: /J rand´m hak´r/ n.
[very common] A mythical figure like the Unknown Soldier; the archetypal hacker nerd. This term is one of the oldest in the jargon, apparently going back to MIT in the 1960s. See random, Suzie COBOL. This may originally have been inspired by ‘J. Fred Muggs’, a show-biz chimpanzee whose name was a household word back in the early days of TMRC, and was probably influenced by ‘J. Presper Eckert’ (one of the co-inventors of the electronic computer). See also Fred Foobar.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - J TITLE: jack in DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:03 AM ----- BODY: v.
To log on to a machine or connect to a network or
BBS, esp. for purposes of entering a
virtual reality simulation such as a
MUD or IRC (leaving is
jacking out
). This term derives from
cyberpunk SF, in which it was used for the act of
plugging an electrode set into neural sockets in order to interface the
brain directly to a virtual reality. It is primarily used by MUD and IRC
fans and younger hackers on BBS systems.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - J TITLE: jaggies DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:02 AM ----- BODY: /jag´eez/ n.
The ‘stairstep’ effect observable when an edge (esp. a linear edge of very shallow or steep slope) is rendered on a pixel device (as opposed to a vector display).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - J TITLE: Java DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:01 AM ----- BODY:
An object-oriented language originally developed at Sun by James
Gosling (and known by the name Oak
) with the intention of
being the successor to C++ (the project was however
originally sold to Sun as an embedded language for use in set-top boxes).
After the great Internet explosion of 1993-1994, Java was hacked into a
byte-interpreted language and became the focus of a relentless hype
campaign by Sun, which touted it as the new language of choice for
distributed applications.
Java is indeed a stronger and cleaner design than C++ and has been embraced by many in the hacker community — but it has been a considerable source of frustration to many others, for reasons ranging from uneven support on different Web browser platforms, performance issues, and some notorious deficiencies in some of the standard toolkits (AWT in particular). Microsoft's determined attempts to corrupt the language (which it rightly sees as a threat to its OS monopoly) have not helped. As of 2002, these issues are still in the process of being resolved.
Despite many attractive features and a good design, it is difficult to find people willing to praise Java who have tried to implement a complex, real-world system with it (but to be fair it is early days yet, and no other language has ever been forced to spend its childhood under the limelight the way Java has). On the other hand, Java has already been a big win in academic circles, where it has taken the place of Pascal as the preferred tool for teaching the basics of good programming to the next generation of hackers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - J TITLE: JCL DATE: 05/15/2003 10:42:00 AM ----- BODY: /J·C·L/ n.
1. IBM's supremely rude Job Control Language.
JCL is the script language used to control the execution of programs in
IBM's batch systems. JCL has a very fascist syntax,
and some versions will, for example, barf if two
spaces appear where it expects one. Most programmers confronted with JCL
simply copy a working file (or card deck), changing the file names.
Someone who actually understands and generates unique JCL is regarded with
the mixed respect one gives to someone who memorizes the phone book. It is
reported that hackers at IBM itself sometimes sing Who's the breeder
of the crud that mangles you and me? I-B-M, J-C-L, M-o-u-s-e
to
the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club theme to express
their opinion of the beast.
2. A comparative for any very rude software
that a hacker is expected to use. That's as bad as JCL.
As
with COBOL, JCL is often used as an archetype of
ugliness even by those who haven't experienced it. See also
IBM,
fear and loathing.
A (poorly documented, naturally) shell simulating JCL syntax is available at the Retrocomputing Museum http://www.catb.org/retro/.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - J TITLE: JEDR DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:59 AM ----- BODY: n.
Synonymous with IYFEG. At one time, people in the Usenet newsgroup rec.humor.funny tended to use ‘JEDR’ instead of IYFEG or ‘<ethnic>’; this stemmed from a public attempt to suppress the group once made by a loser with initials JEDR after he was offended by an ethnic joke posted there. (The practice was retconned by expanding these initials as ‘Joke Ethnic/Denomination/Race’.) After much sound and fury JEDR faded away; this term appears to be doing likewise. JEDR's only permanent effect on the net.culture was to discredit ‘sensitivity’ arguments for censorship so thoroughly that more recent attempts to raise them have met with immediate and near-universal rejection.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - J TITLE: Jeff K. DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:58 AM ----- BODY:
The spiritual successor to B1FF and the
archetype of script kiddies. Jeff K. is a
sixteen-year-old suburbanite who fancies himself a l33t
haX0r
, although his knowledge of computers seems to be limited to
the procedure for getting Quake up and running. His Web page http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/
features a number of hopelessly naive articles, essays, and rants, all
filled with the kind of misspellings, studlycaps,
and number-for-letter substitutions endemic to the script kiddie and
warez d00dz communities. Jeff's offerings, among
other things, include hardware advice (such as AMD VERSIS
PENTIUM
and HOW TO OVARCLOAK YOUR COMPUTAR
), his own
Quake clan (Clan 40 OUNSCE), and his own comic strip (Wacky Fun Computar
Comic Jokes).
Like B1FF, Jeff K. is (fortunately) a hoax. Jeff K. was created by
internet game journalist Richard Lowtax
Kyanka, whose web
site Something Awful (http://www.somethingawful.com) highlights
unintentionally humorous news items and Web sites, as a parody of the kind
of teenage luser who infests Quake servers, chat
rooms, and other places where computer enthusiasts congregate. He is
well-recognized in the PC game community and his influence has spread to
hacker fora like Slashdot as well.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - J TITLE: jello DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:57 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet: by analogy with spam] A message that is both excessively cross-posted and too frequently posted, as opposed to spam (which is merely too frequently posted) or velveeta (which is merely excessively cross-posted). This term is widely recognized but not commonly used; most people refer to both kinds of abuse or their combination as spam.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - J TITLE: Jeopardy-style quoting DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:56 AM ----- BODY:
See top-post.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - J TITLE: jibble DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:55 AM ----- BODY:
[UK] Unspecified stuff. An unspecified action. A deliberately blank word; compare gorets. A deliberate experiment in tracking the spread of a near-meaningless word. See http://www.jibble.org/jibblemeaning.php.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - J TITLE: jiffy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The duration of one tick of the system clock on your computer
(see tick). Often one AC cycle time (1/60 second in
the U.S. and Canada, 1/50 most other places), but more recently 1/100 sec
has become common. The swapper runs every 6 jiffies
means
that the virtual memory management routine is executed once for every 6
ticks of the clock, or about ten times a second.
2. Confusingly, the term is sometimes also used for a 1-millisecond wall time interval.
3. Even more confusingly, physicists semi-jokingly use ‘jiffy’ to mean the time required for light to travel one foot in a vacuum, which turns out to be close to one nanosecond. Other physicists use the term for the quantum-nechanical lower bound on meaningful time lengths,
4. Indeterminate time from a few seconds to forever. I'll do
it in a jiffy
means certainly not now and possibly never. This is
a bit contrary to the more widespread use of the word. Oppose
nano. See also
Real Soon Now.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - J TITLE: job security DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:53 AM ----- BODY: n.
When some piece of code is written in a particularly
obscure fashion, and no good reason (such as time or
space optimization) can be discovered, it is often said that the programmer
was attempting to increase his job security (i.e., by making himself
indispensable for maintenance). This sour joke seldom has to be said in
full; if two hackers are looking over some code together and one points at
a section and says job security
, the other one may just
nod.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - J TITLE: jock DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A programmer who is characterized by large and somewhat brute-force programs. See brute force.
2. When modified by another noun, describes a specialist in some particular computing area. The compounds compiler jock and systems jock seem to be the best-established examples.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - J TITLE: joe code DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:51 AM ----- BODY: /joh´ kohd`/ n.
1. Code that is overly tense and
unmaintainable. Perl may be a handy program,
but if you look at the source, it's complete joe code.
2. Badly written, possibly buggy code.
Correspondents wishing to remain anonymous have fingered a particular Joe at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and observed that usage has drifted slightly; the original sobriquet ‘Joe code’ was intended in sense 1.
1994 update: This term has now generalized to ‘<name>
code’, used to designate code with distinct characteristics traceable
to its author. This section doesn't check for a NULL return from
malloc()! Oh. No wonder! It's Ed code!
. Used most often with a
programmer who has left the shop and thus is a convenient scapegoat for
anything that is wrong with the project.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - J TITLE: juggling eggs DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:50 AM ----- BODY: vi.
Keeping a lot of state in your head while
modifying a program. Don't bother me now, I'm juggling
eggs
, means that an interrupt is likely to result in the program's
being scrambled. In the classic 1975 first-contact SF novel The
Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, an alien
describes a very difficult task by saying We juggle priceless eggs
in variable gravity.
It is possible that this was intended as
tribute to a less colorful use of the same image in Robert Heinlein's
influential 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange
Land. See also hack mode and
on the gripping hand.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - J TITLE: juice DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:49 AM ----- BODY: n.
The weight of a given node in some sort of graph (like a web of
trust or a relevance-weighted search query). This appears to have been
generalized from google juice, but may derive from
black urban slang for power or a respect. Example: I
signed your key, but I really don't have the juice to be
authoritative.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - J TITLE: jump off into never-never land DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:48 AM ----- BODY: v.
[from J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan] An unexpected jump in a program that produces catastrophic or just plain weird results. Compare hyperspace.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - J TITLE: jupiter DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:47 AM ----- BODY: vt.
[IRC] To kill an IRC bot or user and then take its place by adopting its nick so that it cannot reconnect. Named after a particular IRC user who did this to NickServ, the robot in charge of preventing people from inadvertently using a nick claimed by another user. Now commonly shortened to jupe.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: K DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:46 AM ----- BODY: /K/ n.
[from kilo-] A kilobyte. Used both as a spoken word and a written suffix (like meg and gig for megabyte and gigabyte). See quantifiers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: K&R DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:45 AM ----- BODY: [Kernighan and Ritchie] n.
Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie's book The C Programming Language, esp. the classic and influential first edition (Prentice-Hall 1978; ISBN 0-13-110163-3). Syn. Old Testament. See also New Testament.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: k- DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:44 AM ----- BODY: pref.
[rare; poss fr. kilo- prefix] Extremely. Rare among hackers, but quite common among crackers and warez d00dz in compounds such as k-kool /K´kool´/, k-rad /K´rad´/, and k-awesome /K´aw`sm/. Also used to intensify negatives; thus, k-evil, k-lame, k-screwed, and k-annoying. Overuse of this prefix, or use in more formal or technical contexts, is considered an indicator of lamer status.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: kahuna DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:43 AM ----- BODY: /k@·hoo´n@/ n.
[IBM: from the Hawaiian title for a shaman] Synonym for wizard, guru.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: kamikaze packet DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:42 AM ----- BODY: n.
The ‘official’ jargon for what is more commonly called a Christmas tree packet. RFC-1025, TCP and IP Bake Off says:
10 points for correctly being able to process a Kamikaze
packet
(AKA nastygram, christmas tree packet, lamp test segment, et al.). That is,
correctly handle a segment with the maximum combination of features at once
(e.g., a SYN URG PUSH FIN segment with options and data).
See also Chernobyl packet.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: kangaroo code DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:41 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. spaghetti code.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: ken DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:40 AM ----- BODY: /ken/ n.
1. [Unix] Ken Thompson, principal inventor of Unix. In the early
days he used to hand-cut distribution tapes, often with a note that read
Love, ken
. Old-timers still use his first name (sometimes
uncapitalized, because it's a login name and mail address) in third-person
reference; it is widely understood (on Usenet, in particular) that without
a last name ‘Ken’ refers only to Ken Thompson. Similarly,
‘Dennis’ without last name means Dennis Ritchie (and he is
often known as dmr). See also
demigod, Unix.
2. A flaming user. This was originated by the Software Support group at Symbolics because the two greatest flamers in the user community were both named Ken.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: kernel-of-the-week club DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:39 AM ----- BODY:
The fictional society that BSD bigots claim Linux users belong to, alluding to the release-early-release-often style preferred by the kernel maintainers. See bazaar. This was almost certainly inspired by the earlier bug-of-the-month club.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: kgbvax DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:38 AM ----- BODY: /K·G·B´vaks/ n.
See kremvax.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: KIBO DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:37 AM ----- BODY: /ki:´boh/
1. [acronym] Knowledge In, Bullshit Out. A summary of what happens whenever valid data is passed through an organization (or person) that deliberately or accidentally disregards or ignores its significance. Consider, for example, what an advertising campaign can do with a product's actual specifications. Compare GIGO; see also SNAFU principle.
2. James Parry <kibo@world.std.com>, a Usenetter infamous for various surrealist net.pranks and an uncanny, machine-assisted knack for joining any thread in which his nom de guerre is mentioned. He has a website at http://www.kibo.com/.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: kiboze DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:36 AM ----- BODY: v.
[Usenet] To grep the Usenet news for a string, especially with the intention of posting a follow-up. This activity was popularised by Kibo (see KIBO, sense 2).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: kibozo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:35 AM ----- BODY: /ki:·boh´zoh/ n.
[Usenet] One who kibozes but is not Kibo (see KIBO, sense 2).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: kick DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:34 AM ----- BODY: v.
1. [IRC] To cause somebody to be removed from a IRC channel, an option only available to channel ops. This is an extreme measure, often used to combat extreme flamage or flooding, but sometimes used at the CHOP's whim.
2. To reboot a machine or kill a running process. The
server's down, let me go kick it.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: kill file DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:33 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet; very common] (alt.: KILL file) Per-user file(s) used by some Usenet reading programs (originally Larry Wall's rn1) to discard summarily (without presenting for reading) articles matching some particularly uninteresting (or unwanted) patterns of subject, author, or other header lines. Thus to add a person (or subject) to one's kill file is to arrange for that person to be ignored by one's newsreader in future. By extension, it may be used for a decision to ignore the person or subject in other media. See also plonk.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: killer app DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:32 AM ----- BODY:
The application that actually makes a sustaining market for a
promising but under-utilized technology. First used in the mid-1980s to
describe Lotus 1-2-3 once it became evident that demand for that product
had been the major driver of the early business market for IBM PCs. The
term was then retrospectively applied to VisiCalc, which had played a
similar role in the success of the Apple II. After 1994 it became
commonplace to describe the World Wide Web as the Internet's killer app.
One of the standard questions asked about each new personal-computer
technology as it emerges has become what's the killer
app?
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: killer micro DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:31 AM ----- BODY: n.
[popularized by Eugene Brooks c.1990] A microprocessor-based machine
that infringes on mini, mainframe, or supercomputer performance turf.
Often heard in No one will survive the attack of the killer
micros!
, the battle cry of the downsizers.
The popularity of the phrase ‘attack of the killer micros’ is doubtless reinforced by the title of the movie Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes (one of the canonical examples of so-bad-it's-wonderful among hackers). This has even more flavor now that killer micros have gone on the offensive not just individually (in workstations) but in hordes (within massively parallel computers).
[2002 update: Eugene Brooks was right. Since this term first entered the Jargon File in 1990, the minicomputer has effectively vanished, the mainframe sector is in deep and apparently terminal decline, and even the supercomputer business has contracted into a smaller niche. It's networked killer micros as far as the eye can see. —ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: killer poke DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:30 AM ----- BODY: n.
A recipe for inducing hardware damage on a machine via insertion of invalid values (see poke) into a memory-mapped control register; used esp. of various fairly well-known tricks on bitty boxes without hardware memory management (such as the IBM PC and Commodore PET) that can overload and trash analog electronics in the monitor. See also HCF.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: kilo- DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:29 AM ----- BODY: pref.
[SI] See quantifiers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: kilogoogle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
The standard unit of measurement for Web search hits: a thousand
Google matches. There are about a kilogoogle and a half sites with
that band's name on it.
Compare google juice.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: KIPS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:27 AM ----- BODY: /kips/ n.
[abbreviation, by analogy with MIPS using K] Thousands (not 1024s) of Instructions Per Second. Usage: rare.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: KISS Principle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:26 AM ----- BODY: /kis´ prin´si·pl/ n.
Keep It Simple, Stupid
. A maxim often invoked when
discussing design to fend off creeping featurism and
control development complexity. Possibly related to the
marketroid maxim on sales presentations, Keep
It Short and Simple
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: kit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:25 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet; poss.: fr.: DEC slang for a full software distribution, as opposed to a patch or upgrade] A source software distribution that has been packaged in such a way that it can (theoretically) be unpacked and installed according to a series of steps using only standard Unix tools, and entirely documented by some reasonable chain of references from the top-level README file. The more general term distribution may imply that special tools or more stringent conditions on the host environment are required.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: KLB DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:24 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common among Perl hackers] Known Lazy Bastard. Used to describe somebody who perpetually asks questions which are easily answered by referring to the reference material or manual.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: klone DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:23 AM ----- BODY: /klohn/ n.
See clone, sense 4.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: kludge DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:22 AM ----- BODY:
1. /kluhj/ n. Incorrect (though regrettably common) spelling of kluge (US). These two words have been confused in American usage since the early 1960s, and widely confounded in Great Britain since the end of World War II.
2. [TMRC] A crock that works. (A long-ago
Datamation article by Jackson Granholme similarly
said: An ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a
distressing whole.
)
3. v. To use a kludge to get
around a problem. I've kludged around it for now, but I'll fix it
up properly later.
This word appears to have derived from Scots kludge or kludgie for a common toilet, via British military slang. It apparently became confused with U.S. kluge during or after World War II; some Britons from that era use both words in definably different ways, but kluge is now uncommon in Great Britain. ‘Kludge’ in Commonwealth hackish differs in meaning from ‘kluge’ in that it lacks the positive senses; a kludge is something no Commonwealth hacker wants to be associated too closely with. Also, ‘kludge’ is more widely known in British mainstream slang than ‘kluge’ is in the U.S.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: kluge DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:21 AM ----- BODY: /klooj/
[from the German ‘klug’, clever; poss. related to Polish & Russian ‘klucz’ (a key, a hint, a main point)]
1. n. A Rube Goldberg (or Heath Robinson) device, whether in hardware or software.
2. n. A clever programming trick intended to solve a particular nasty case in an expedient, if not clear, manner. Often used to repair bugs. Often involves ad-hockery and verges on being a crock.
3. n. Something that works for the wrong reason.
4. vt. To insert a kluge into a
program. I've kluged this routine to get around that weird bug, but
there's probably a better way.
5. [WPI] n. A feature that is implemented in a rude manner.
Nowadays this term is often encountered in the variant spelling ‘kludge’. Reports from old farts are consistent that ‘kluge’ was the original spelling, reported around computers as far back as the mid-1950s and, at that time, used exclusively of hardware kluges. In 1947, the New York Folklore Quarterly reported a classic shaggy-dog story ‘Murgatroyd the Kluge Maker’ then current in the Armed Forces, in which a ‘kluge’ was a complex and puzzling artifact with a trivial function. Other sources report that ‘kluge’ was common Navy slang in the WWII era for any piece of electronics that worked well on shore but consistently failed at sea.
However, there is reason to believe this slang use may be a decade
older. Several respondents have connected it to the brand name of a device
called a Kluge paper feeder
, an adjunct to mechanical
printing presses. Legend has it that the Kluge feeder was designed before
small, cheap electric motors and control electronics; it relied on a
fiendishly complex assortment of cams, belts, and linkages to both power
and synchronize all its operations from one motive driveshaft. It was
accordingly temperamental, subject to frequent breakdowns, and devilishly
difficult to repair — but oh, so clever! People who tell this story
also aver that ‘Kluge’ was the name of a design
engineer.
There is in fact a Brandtjen & Kluge Inc., an old family business that manufactures printing equipment — interestingly, their name is pronounced /kloo´gee/! Henry Brandtjen, president of the firm, told me (ESR, 1994) that his company was co-founded by his father and an engineer named Kluge /kloo´gee/, who built and co-designed the original Kluge automatic feeder in 1919. Mr. Brandtjen claims, however, that this was a simple device (with only four cams); he says he has no idea how the myth of its complexity took hold. Other correspondents differ with Mr. Brandtjen's history of the device and his allegation that it was a simple rather than complex one, but agree that the Kluge automatic feeder was the most likely source of the folklore.
TMRC and the MIT hacker culture of the early '60s seems to have developed in a milieu that remembered and still used some WWII military slang (see also foobar). It seems likely that ‘kluge’ came to MIT via alumni of the many military electronics projects that had been located in Cambridge (many in MIT's venerable Building 20, in which TMRC is also located) during the war.
The variant ‘kludge’ was apparently popularized by the Datamation article mentioned under kludge; it was titled How to Design a Kludge (February 1962, pp. 30, 31). This spelling was probably imported from Great Britain, where kludge has an independent history (though this fact was largely unknown to hackers on either side of the Atlantic before a mid-1993 debate in the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers over the First and Second Edition versions of this entry; everybody used to think kludge was just a mutation of kluge). It now appears that the British, having forgotten the etymology of their own ‘kludge’ when ‘kluge’ crossed the Atlantic, repaid the U.S. by lobbing the ‘kludge’ orthography in the other direction and confusing their American cousins' spelling!
The result of this history is a tangle. Many younger U.S. hackers pronounce the word as /klooj/ but spell it, incorrectly for its meaning and pronunciation, as ‘kludge’. (Phonetically, consider huge, refuge, centrifuge, and deluge as opposed to sludge, judge, budge, and fudge. Whatever its failings in other areas, English spelling is perfectly consistent about this distinction.) British hackers mostly learned /kluhj/ orally, use it in a restricted negative sense and are at least consistent. European hackers have mostly learned the word from written American sources and tend to pronounce it /kluhj/ but use the wider American meaning!
Some observers consider this mess appropriate in view of the word's meaning.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: kluge around DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:20 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To avoid a bug or difficult condition by inserting a kluge. Compare workaround.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: kluge up DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:19 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To lash together a quick hack to perform a task; this is milder than
cruft together and has some of the connotations of
hack up (note, however, that the construction
kluge on corresponding to
hack on is never used). I've kluged up this
routine to dump the buffer contents to a safe place.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: Knights of the Lambda Calculus DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:18 AM ----- BODY: n.
A semi-mythical organization of wizardly LISP and Scheme hackers. The name refers to a mathematical formalism invented by Alonzo Church, with which LISP is intimately connected. There is no enrollment list and the criteria for induction are unclear, but one well-known LISPer has been known to give out buttons and, in general, the members know who they are....
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: knobs DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:17 AM ----- BODY: pl.n.
Configurable options, even in software and even those you can't
adjust in real time. Anything you can twiddle is a
knob. Has this PNG viewer got an alpha knob?
Software may
be described as having knobs and switches
or occasionally
knobs and lights
. See also nerd knob
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: Knuth DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:16 AM ----- BODY: /ka·nooth´/ n.
[Donald E. Knuth's The Art of Computer
Programming] Mythically, the reference that answers all
questions about data structures or algorithms. A safe answer when you do
not know: I think you can find that in Knuth.
Contrast
the literature. See also
bible. There is a Donald Knuth home page at http://Sunburn.Stanford.EDU/~knuth/.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: koan DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:15 AM ----- BODY: /koh´an/ n.
A Zen teaching riddle. Classically, koans are attractive paradoxes to be meditated on; their purpose is to help one to enlightenment by temporarily jamming normal cognitive processing so that something more interesting can happen (this practice is associated with Rinzai Zen Buddhism). Defined here because hackers are very fond of the koan form and compose their own koans for humorous and/or enlightening effect. See Some AI Koans, has the X nature, hacker humor.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: kook DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:14 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet; originally and more formally, net.kook] Term used to describe a regular poster who continually posts messages with no apparent grounding in reality. Different from a troll, which implies a sort of sly wink on the part of a poster who knows better, kooks really believe what they write, to the extent that they believe anything.
The kook trademark is paranoia and grandiosity. Kooks will often build up elaborate imaginary support structures, fake corporations and the like, and continue to act as if those things are real even after their falsity has been documented in public.
While they may appear harmless, and are usually filtered out by the other regular participants in a newsgroup of mailing list, they can still cause problems because the necessity for these measures is not immediately apparent to newcomers; there are several instances on record, for example, of journalists writing stories with quotes from kooks who caught them unaware.
An entertaining web page chronicling the activities of many notable kooks can be found at http://www.crank.net/usenet.html.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: Kool-Aid DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:13 AM ----- BODY:
[from a kid's sugar-enriched drink in fruity flavors] When someone who should know better succumbs to marketing influences and actually begins to believe the propaganda being dished out by a vendor, they are said to have drunk the Kool-Aid. Usually the decortication process is slow and almost unnoticeable until one day the victim emerges as a True Believer and begins spreading the faith himself. The term originates in the suicide of 914 followers of Jim Jones's People's Temple cult in Guyana in 1978. What they actually drank was cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid, a cheap knockoff, rather than Kool-Aid itself. There is a FAQ on this topic.
This has live variants. When a suit is blithering on about their
latest technology and how it will save the world, that's ‘pouring
Kool-Aid’. When the suit does not violate the laws of physics,
doesn't make impossible claims, and in fact says something reasonable and
believable, that's pouring good Kool-Aid, usually used in the sentence
He pours good Kool-Aid, doesn't he?
This connotes that the
speaker might be about to drink same.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: kremvax DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:12 AM ----- BODY: /krem·vaks/ n.
[from the then-large number of Usenet VAXen with names of the form foovax] Originally, a fictitious Usenet site at the Kremlin, announced on April 1, 1984 in a posting ostensibly originated there by Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The posting was actually forged by Piet Beertema as an April Fool's joke. Other fictitious sites mentioned in the hoax were moskvax and kgbvax. This was probably the funniest of the many April Fool's forgeries perpetrated on Usenet (which has negligible security against them), because the notion that Usenet might ever penetrate the Iron Curtain seemed so totally absurd at the time.
In fact, it was only six years later that the first genuine site in Moscow, demos.su, joined Usenet. Some readers needed convincing that the postings from it weren't just another prank. Vadim Antonov, senior programmer at Demos and the major poster from there up to mid-1991, was quite aware of all this, referred to it frequently in his own postings, and at one point twitted some credulous readers by blandly asserting that he was a hoax!
Eventually he even arranged to have the domain's gateway site named kremvax, thus neatly turning fiction into fact and demonstrating that the hackish sense of humor transcends cultural barriers. [Mr. Antonov also contributed the Russian-language material for this lexicon. —ESR]
In an even more ironic historical footnote, kremvax became an electronic center of the anti-communist resistance during the bungled hard-line coup of August 1991. During those three days the Soviet UUCP network centered on kremvax became the only trustworthy news source for many places within the USSR. Though the sysops were concentrating on internal communications, cross-border postings included immediate transliterations of Boris Yeltsin's decrees condemning the coup and eyewitness reports of the demonstrations in Moscow's streets. In those hours, years of speculation that totalitarianism would prove unable to maintain its grip on politically-loaded information in the age of computer networking were proved devastatingly accurate — and the original kremvax joke became a reality as Yeltsin and the new Russian revolutionaries of glasnost and perestroika made kremvax one of the timeliest means of their outreach to the West.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - K TITLE: kyrka DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:11 AM ----- BODY: /chur´ka/ n.
[Swedish] See feature key.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lag DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:10 AM ----- BODY: n.
[MUD, IRC; very common] When used without qualification this is
synonymous with netlag. Curiously, people will
often complain I'm really lagged
when in fact it is their
server or network connection that is lagging.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lamer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:09 AM ----- BODY: n.
[originally among Amiga fans]
1. Synonym for luser, not used much by hackers but common among warez d00dz, crackers, and phreakers. A person who downloads much, but who never uploads. (Also known as leecher). Oppose elite. Has the same connotations of self-conscious elitism that use of luser does among hackers.
2. Someone who tries to crack a BBS.
3. Someone who annoys the sysop or other BBS users — for instance, by posting lots of silly messages, uploading virus-ridden software, frequently dropping carrier, etc.
Crackers also use it to refer to cracker wannabees. In phreak culture, a lamer is one who scams codes off others rather than doing cracks or really understanding the fundamental concepts. In warez d00dz culture, where the ability to wave around cracked commercial software within days of (or before) release to the commercial market is much esteemed, the lamer might try to upload garbage or shareware or something incredibly old (old in this context is read as a few years to anything older than 3 days). ‘Lamer’ is also much used in the IRC world in a similar sense to the above.
This term seems to have originated in the Commodore-64 scene in the
mid 1980s. It was popularized among Amiga crackers of the mid-1980s by
‘Lamer Exterminator’, the most famous and feared Amiga virus
ever, which gradually corrupted non-write-protected floppy disks with bad
sectors. The bad sectors, when looked at, were overwritten with repetitions
of the string LAMER!
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: LAN party DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:08 AM ----- BODY: /lan par´tee/
An event to which several users bring their boxes and hook them up to a common LAN (Local Area Network), often for the purpose of playing multiplayer computer games, especially action games such as Quake or Unreal Tournament. This is also a good venue for people to show-off their fancy new hardware. Such events can get pretty large, several hundred people attend the annual QuakeCon in Texas. The theoretical rationale behind LAN parties is that playing over the Internet often introduces too much lag in the playing experience — but just as important is the special quality of trash-talking each other across the room while playing, and the instinctive social ritual of consuming vast amounts of food and drink together.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: language lawyer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:07 AM ----- BODY: n.
A person, usually an experienced or senior software engineer, who is
intimately familiar with many or most of the numerous restrictions and
features (both useful and esoteric) applicable to one or more computer
programming languages. A language lawyer is distinguished by the ability
to show you the five sentences scattered through a 200-plus-page manual
that together imply the answer to your question if only you had
thought to look there
. Compare wizard,
legal, legalese.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: languages of choice DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:06 AM ----- BODY: n.
C, Perl, Python, Java and LISP — the dominant languages in open-source development. This list has changed over time, but slowly. Java bumped C++ off of it, and Python appears to be recruiting people who would otherwise gravitate to LISP (which used to be much more important than it is now). Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in small but influential communities.
The Real Programmers who loved FORTRAN and assembler have pretty much all retired or died since 1990. Assembler is generally no longer considered interesting or appropriate for anything but HLL implementation, glue, and a few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systems programs. FORTRAN occupies a shrinking niche in scientific programming.
Most hackers tend to frown on languages like Pascal and Ada, which don't give them the near-total freedom considered necessary for hacking (see bondage-and-discipline language), and to regard everything even remotely connected with COBOL or other traditional DP languages as a total and unmitigated loss.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: LART DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:05 AM ----- BODY:
Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool.
1. n. In the collective mythos of scary devil monastery, this is an essential item in the toolkit of every BOFH. The LART classic is a 2x4 or other large billet of wood usable as a club, to be applied upside the head of spammers and other people who cause sysadmins more grief than just naturally goes with the job. Perennial debates rage on alt.sysadmin.recovery over what constitutes the truly effective LART; knobkerries, automatic weapons, flamethrowers, and tactical nukes all have their partisans. Compare clue-by-four.
2. v. To use a LART. Some would
add in malice
, but some sysadmins do prefer to gently lart
their users as a first (and sometimes final) warning.
3. interj. Calling for one's LART, much as a surgeon might call
Scalpel!
.
4. interj. [rare] Used in flames as a
rebuke. LART! LART! LART!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: larval stage DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:04 AM ----- BODY: n.
Describes a period of monomaniacal concentration on coding apparently passed through by all fledgling hackers. Common symptoms include the perpetration of more than one 36-hour hacking run in a given week; neglect of all other activities including usual basics like food, sleep, and personal hygiene; and a chronic case of advanced bleary-eye. Can last from 6 months to 2 years, the apparent median being around 18 months. A few so afflicted never resume a more ‘normal’ life, but the ordeal seems to be necessary to produce really wizardly (as opposed to merely competent) programmers. See also wannabee. A less protracted and intense version of larval stage (typically lasting about a month) may recur when one is learning a new OS or programming language.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lase DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:03 AM ----- BODY: /layz/ vt.
To print a given document via a laser printer. OK, let's
lase that sucker and see if all those graphics-macro calls did the right
things.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: laser chicken DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:02 AM ----- BODY: n.
Kung Pao Chicken, a standard Chinese dish containing chicken, peanuts, and hot red peppers in a spicy pepper-oil sauce. Many hackers call it laser chicken for two reasons: It can zap you just like a laser, and the sauce has a red color reminiscent of some laser beams. The dish has also been called gunpowder chicken.
In a variation on this theme, it is reported that some Australian hackers have redesignated the common dish ‘lemon chicken’ as Chernobyl Chicken. The name is derived from the color of the sauce, which is considered bright enough to glow in the dark (as, mythically, do some of the inhabitants of Chernobyl).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: leaf site DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:01 AM ----- BODY: n.
[obs.] Before pervasive TCP/IP, this term was used of a machine that merely originated and read Usenet news or mail, and did not relay any third-party traffic. It was often uttered in a critical tone; when the ratio of leaf sites to backbone, rib, and other relay sites got too high, the network tended to develop bottlenecks. Compare backbone site. Now that traffic patterns depend more on the distribution of routers than of host machines this term has largely fallen out of use.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: leak DATE: 05/15/2003 10:41:00 AM ----- BODY: n.
With qualifier, one of a class of resource-management bugs that occur when resources are not freed properly after operations on them are finished, so they effectively disappear (leak out). This leads to eventual exhaustion as new allocation requests come in. memory leak has its own entry; one might also refer, to, say, a window handle leak in a window system.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: leaky heap DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:59 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Cambridge] An arena with a memory leak.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: leapfrog attack DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:58 AM ----- BODY: n.
Use of userid and password information obtained illicitly from one host (e.g., downloading a file of account IDs and passwords, tapping TELNET, etc.) to compromise another host. Also, the act of TELNETting through one or more hosts in order to confuse a trace (a standard cracker procedure).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: leech DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:57 AM ----- BODY:
1. n. (Also leecher.) Among BBS types, crackers and warez d00dz, one who consumes knowledge without generating new software, cracks, or techniques. BBS culture specifically defines a leech as someone who downloads files with few or no uploads in return, and who does not contribute to the message section. Cracker culture extends this definition to someone (a lamer, usually) who constantly presses informed sources for information and/or assistance, but has nothing to contribute. See troughie.
2. v. [common, Toronto area]
v. To download a file across any kind of internet link. Hop on IRC
later so I can leech some MP3s from you.
Used to describe
activities ranging from FTP, to IRC DCC-send, to ICQ file requests, to
Napster searches (but never to downloading email with file attachments; the
implication is that the download is the result of a browse or search of
some sort of file server). Seems to be a holdover from the early 1990s
when Toronto had a very active BBS and warez scene. Synonymous with
snarf (sense 2), and contrast
snarf (sense 4).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: leech mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:56 AM ----- BODY: n.
[warez d00dz] Leech mode
or leech
access
or (simply leech
as in You get
leech
) is the access mode on a FTP site where one can download as
many files as one wants, without having to upload. Leech mode is often
promised on banner sites, but rarely obtained. See
ratio site, banner site.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: legal DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:55 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Loosely used to mean ‘in accordance with all the relevant
rules’, esp. in connection with some set of constraints defined by
software. The older =+ alternate for += is no longer legal syntax
in ANSI C.
This parser processes each line of legal input
the moment it sees the trailing linefeed.
Hackers often model their
work as a sort of game played with the environment in which the objective
is to maneuver through the thicket of ‘natural laws’ to achieve
a desired objective. Their use of legal is flavored as much by this game-playing
sense as by the more conventional one having to do with courts and lawyers.
Compare language lawyer,
legalese.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: legalese DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
Dense, pedantic verbiage in a language description, product specification, or interface standard; text that seems designed to obfuscate and requires a language lawyer to parse it. Though hackers are not afraid of high information density and complexity in language (indeed, they rather enjoy both), they share a deep and abiding loathing for legalese; they associate it with deception, suits, and situations in which hackers generally get the short end of the stick.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lenna DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:53 AM ----- BODY:
The Internet's first poster girl, a standard test load used in the image processing community. The image was originally cropped from the November 1972 issue of Playboy Magazine, which anglicized the model's name with a double n. It has interesting properties — complex feathers, shadows, smooth (but not flat) surfaces — that are pertinent in demonstrating various processing algorithms for image compression, filtering, dithering, texture mapping, image recognition, and so on. After a quarter century of remaining completely unaware that she had become an icon, a gray-haired but still winsome Lenna finally met her fans at a computer graphics conference in 1997. There is a fan page at www.lenna.org, with more details. Compare Utah teapot and Stanford Bunny
Miss Lena Sjööblom
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: LER DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:52 AM ----- BODY: /L·E·R/
n.
1. [TMRC, from ‘Light-Emitting Diode’] A light-emitting resistor (that is, one in the process of burning up). Ohm's law was broken. See also SED.
2. An incandescent light bulb (the filament emits light because it's resistively heated).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: LERP DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:51 AM ----- BODY: /lerp/ vi.,n.
Quasi-acronym for Linear Interpolation, used as a verb or noun for
the operation. Bresenham's algorithm lerps incrementally between the
two endpoints of the line.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: let the smoke out DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:50 AM ----- BODY: v.
To fry hardware (see fried). See magic smoke for a discussion of the underlying mythology.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: letterbomb DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:49 AM ----- BODY:
1. n. A piece of email containing live data intended to do nefarious things to the recipient's machine or terminal. It used to be possible, for example, to send letterbombs that would lock up some specific kinds of terminals when they are viewed, so thoroughly that the user must cycle power (see cycle, sense 3) to unwedge them. Under Unix, a letterbomb can also try to get part of its contents interpreted as a shell command to the mailer. The results of this could range from silly to tragic; fortunately it has been some years since any of the standard Unix/Internet mail software was vulnerable to such an attack (though, as the Melissa virus attack demonstrated in early 1999, Microsoft systems can have serious problems). See also Trojan horse; compare nastygram.
2. Loosely, a mailbomb.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lexer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:48 AM ----- BODY: /lek´sr/ n.
Common hacker shorthand for lexical
analyzer, the input-tokenizing stage in the parser for a
language (the part that breaks it into word-like pieces). Some C
lexers get confused by the old-style compound ops like
=-
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: life DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:47 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton Conway and first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner (Scientific American, October 1970); the game's popularity had to wait a few years for computers on which it could reasonably be played, as it's no fun to simulate the cells by hand. Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with it, and hackers at various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented life in TECO!). When a hacker mentions ‘life’, he is much more likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal, or the human state of existence.
2. The opposite of Usenet. As in
Get a life!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: Life is hard DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:46 AM ----- BODY: prov.
[XEROX PARC] This phrase has two possible interpretations: (1)
While your suggestion may have some merit, I will behave as though I
hadn't heard it.
(2) While your suggestion has obvious
merit, equally obvious circumstances prevent it from being seriously
considered.
The charm of the phrase lies precisely in this subtle
but important ambiguity.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: light pipe DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:45 AM ----- BODY: n.
Fiber optic cable. Oppose copper.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lightweight DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:44 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Opposite of heavyweight; usually found in combining forms such as lightweight process.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: like kicking dead whales down the beach DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:43 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Describes a slow, difficult, and disgusting process. First
popularized by a famous quote about the difficulty of getting work done
under one of IBM's mainframe OSes. Well, you
could write a C compiler in COBOL, but it would be
like kicking dead whales down the beach.
See also
fear and loathing.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: like nailing jelly to a tree DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:42 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Used to describe a task thought to be impossible, esp. one in which
the difficulty arises from poor specification or inherent slipperiness in
the problem domain. Trying to display the ‘prettiest’
arrangement of nodes and arcs that diagrams a given graph is like nailing
jelly to a tree, because nobody's sure what ‘prettiest’ means
algorithmically.
Hacker use of this term may recall mainstream slang originated early
in the 20th century by President Theodore Roosevelt. There is a legend
that, weary of inconclusive talks with Colombia over the right to dig a
canal through its then-province Panama, he remarked, Negotiating
with those pirates is like trying to nail currant jelly to the
wall.
Roosevelt's government subsequently encouraged the
anti-Colombian insurgency that created the nation of Panama.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: line 666 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:41 AM ----- BODY:
[from Christian eschatological myth] n. The notional line of source at which a program
fails for obscure reasons, implying either that
somebody is out to get it (when you are the
programmer), or that it richly deserves to be so gotten (when you are not).
It works when I trace through it, but seems to crash on line 666
when I run it.
What happens is that whenever a large batch
comes through, mmdf dies on the Line of the Beast. Probably some twit
hardcoded a buffer size.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: line eater, the DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:40 AM ----- BODY: n. obs.
1. [Usenet] A bug in some now-obsolete versions of the netnews software that used to eat up to BUFSIZ bytes of the article text. The bug was triggered by having the text of the article start with a space or tab. This bug was quickly personified as a mythical creature called the line eater, and postings often included a dummy line of line eater food. Ironically, line eater ‘food’ not beginning with a space or tab wasn't actually eaten, since the bug was avoided; but if there was a space or tab before it, then the line eater would eat the food and the beginning of the text it was supposed to be protecting. The practice of sacrificing to the line eater continued for some time after the bug had been nailed to the wall, and is still humorously referred to. The bug itself was still occasionally reported to be lurking in some mail-to-netnews gateways as late as 1991.
2. See NSA line eater.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: line noise DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [techspeak] Spurious characters due to electrical noise in a communications link, especially an RS-232 serial connection. Line noise may be induced by poor connections, interference or crosstalk from other circuits, electrical storms, cosmic rays, or (notionally) birds crapping on the phone wires.
2. Any chunk of data in a file or elsewhere that looks like the results of line noise in sense 1.
3. Text that is theoretically a readable text or program source but
employs syntax so bizarre that it looks like line noise in senses 1 or 2.
Yes, there are languages this ugly. The canonical example is
TECO; it is often claimed that TECO's input
syntax is indistinguishable from line noise.
Other
non-WYSIWYG editors, such as Multics qed
and Unix ed
, in
the hands of a real hacker, also qualify easily, as do deliberately
obfuscated languages such as INTERCAL.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: linearithmic DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:38 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Of an algorithm, having running time that is O(N log N). Coined as a portmanteau of ‘linear’ and ‘logarithmic’ in Algorithms In C by Robert Sedgewick (Addison-Wesley 1990, ISBN 0-201-51425-7).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: link farm DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:37 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Unix] A directory tree that contains many links to files in a
master directory tree of files. Link farms save space when one is
maintaining several nearly identical copies of the same source tree —
for example, when the only difference is architecture-dependent object
files. Let's freeze the source and then rebuild the FROBOZZ-3 and
FROBOZZ-4 link farms.
Link farms may also be used to get around
restrictions on the number of -I
(include-file directory) arguments on older C preprocessors. However, they
can also get completely out of hand, becoming the filesystem equivalent of
spaghetti code. See also
farm.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: link rot DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:36 AM ----- BODY: n.
The natural decay of web links as the sites they're connected to change or die. Compare bit rot.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: link-dead DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:35 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[MUD] The state a player is in when they kill their connection to a MUD without leaving it properly. The player is then commonly left as a statue in the game, and is only removed after a certain period of time (an hour on most MUDs). Used on IRC as well, although it is inappropriate in that context. Compare netdead.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lint DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:34 AM ----- BODY:
[from Unix's lint1, named for the bits of fluff it supposedly picks from programs]
1. vt. To examine a program closely for style, language usage, and portability problems, esp. if in C, esp. if via use of automated analysis tools, most esp. if the Unix utility lint1 is used. This term used to be restricted to use of lint1 itself, but (judging by references on Usenet) it has become a shorthand for any exhaustive review process at some non-Unix shops, even in languages other than C. Also as v. delint.
2. n. Excess verbiage in a
document, as in This draft has too much lint
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: Lintel DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:33 AM ----- BODY: n.
The emerging Linux/Intel alliance. This term began to be used in early 1999 after it became clear that the Wintel alliance was under increasing strain and Intel started taking stakes in Linux companies.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: Linus DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:32 AM ----- BODY: /leen´us/ or /lin´us/, not /li:´nus/
Linus Torvalds, the author of Linux. Nobody in the hacker culture has been as readily recognized by first name alone since ken.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: Linux DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:31 AM ----- BODY: /lee´nuhks/ or /li´nuks/, not /li:´nuhks/ n.
The free Unix workalike created by Linus Torvalds and friends starting about 1991. The pronunciation /li´nuhks/ is preferred because the name ‘Linus’ has an /ee/ sound in Swedish (Linus's family is part of Finland's 6% ethnic-Swedish minority) and Linus considers English short /i/ to be closer to /ee/ than English long /i:/. This may be the most remarkable hacker project in history — an entire clone of Unix for 386, 486 and Pentium micros, distributed for free with sources over the net (ports to Alpha and Sparc and many other machines are also in use).
Linux is what GNU aimed to be, and it relies on the GNU toolset. But the Free Software Foundation didn't produce the kernel to go with that toolset until 1999, which was too late. Other, similar efforts like FreeBSD and NetBSD have been technically successful but never caught fire the way Linux has; as this is written in 2002, Linux has effectively swallowed all proprietary Unixes except Solaris and is seriously challenging Microsoft. It has already captured 37% of the Internet-server market and over 25% of general business servers.
An earlier version of this entry opined The secret of Linux's
success seems to be that Linus worked much harder early on to keep the
development process open and recruit other hackers, creating a snowball
effect.
Truer than we knew. See
bazaar.
(Some people object that the name ‘Linux’ should be used to refer only to the kernel, not the entire operating system. This claim is a proxy for an underlying territorial dispute; people who insist on the term GNU/Linux want the FSF to get most of the credit for Linux because RMS and friends wrote many of its user-level tools. Neither this theory nor the term GNU/Linux has gained more than minority acceptance).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lion food DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:30 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] Middle management or HQ staff (or, by extension,
administrative drones in general). From an old joke about two lions who,
escaping from the zoo, split up to increase their chances but agree to meet
after 2 months. When they finally meet, one is skinny and the other
overweight. The thin one says: How did you manage? I ate a human
just once and they turned out a small army to chase me — guns, nets,
it was terrible. Since then I've been reduced to eating mice, insects,
even grass.
The fat one replies: Well,
I hid near an IBM office and ate a manager a day. And
nobody even noticed!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: Lions Book DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:29 AM ----- BODY: n.
Source Code and Commentary on Unix level 6, by John Lions. The two parts of this book contained (1) the entire source listing of the Unix Version 6 kernel, and (2) a commentary on the source discussing the algorithms. These were circulated internally at the University of New South Wales beginning 1976--77, and were, for years after, the only detailed kernel documentation available to anyone outside Bell Labs. Because Western Electric wished to maintain trade secret status on the kernel, the Lions Book was only supposed to be distributed to affiliates of source licensees. In spite of this, it soon spread by samizdat to a good many of the early Unix hackers.
[1996 update: The Lions book lives again! It was put back in print as ISBN 1-57398-013-7 from Peer-To-Peer Communications, with forewords by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. In a neat bit of reflexivity, the page before the contents quotes this entry.]
[1998 update: John Lions's death was an occasion of general mourning in the hacker community.]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: LISP DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from ‘LISt Processing language’, but mythically from ‘Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses’] AI's mother tongue, a language based on the ideas of (a) variable-length lists and trees as fundamental data types, and (b) the interpretation of code as data and vice-versa. Invented by John McCarthy at MIT in the late 1950s, it is actually older than any other HLL still in use except FORTRAN. Accordingly, it has undergone considerable adaptive radiation over the years; modern variants are quite different in detail from the original LISP 1.5. The dominant HLL among hackers until the early 1980s, LISP has since shared the throne with C. Its partisans claim it is the only language that is truly beautiful. See languages of choice.
All LISP functions and programs are expressions that return values;
this, together with the high memory utilization of LISPs, gave rise to Alan
Perlis's famous quip (itself a take on an Oscar Wilde quote) that
LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of
nothing
.
One significant application for LISP has been as a proof by example that most newer languages, such as COBOL and Ada, are full of unnecessary crocks. When the Right Thing has already been done once, there is no justification for bogosity in newer languages.
We've got your numbers....
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: list-bomb DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:27 AM ----- BODY: v.
To mailbomb someone by forging messages causing the victim to become a subscriber to many mailing lists. This is a self-defeating tactic; it merely forces mailing list servers to require confirmation by return message for every subscription.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lithium lick DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:26 AM ----- BODY: n.
[NeXT] Steve Jobs. Employees who have gotten too much attention
from their esteemed founder are said to have ‘lithium lick’
when they begin to show signs of Jobsian fervor and repeat the most recent
catch phrases in normal conversation — for example, It just
works, right out of the box!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: little-endian DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:25 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given 16- or 32-bit word, bytes at lower addresses have lower significance (the word is stored ‘little-end-first’). The PDP-11 and VAX families of computers and Intel microprocessors and a lot of communications and networking hardware are little-endian. See big-endian, middle-endian, NUXI problem. The term is sometimes used to describe the ordering of units other than bytes; most often, bits within a byte.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: live DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:24 AM ----- BODY: /li:v/ adj.,adv.
[common] Opposite of ‘test’. Refers to actual
real-world data or a program working with it. For example, the response to
I think the record deleter is finished
might be Is it
live yet?
or Have you tried it out on live data?
This usage usually carries the connotation that live data is more fragile
and must not be corrupted, or bad things will happen. So a more
appropriate response might be: Well, make sure it works perfectly
before we throw live data at it.
The implication here is that
record deletion is something pretty significant, and a haywire
record-deleter running amok live would probably cause great harm.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: live data DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:23 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Data that is written to be interpreted and takes over program flow when triggered by some un-obvious operation, such as viewing it. One use of such hacks is to break security. For example, some smart terminals have commands that allow one to download strings to program keys; this can be used to write live data that, when listed to the terminal, infects it with a security-breaking virus that is triggered the next time a hapless user strikes that key. For another, there are some well-known bugs in vi that allow certain texts to send arbitrary commands back to the machine when they are simply viewed.
2. In C code, data that includes pointers to function hooks (executable code).
3. An object, such as a trampoline, that is constructed on the fly by a program and intended to be executed as code.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: Live Free Or Die! DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:22 AM ----- BODY: imp.
1. The state motto of New Hampshire, which appears on that state's automobile license plates.
2. A slogan associated with Unix in the romantic days when Unix
aficionados saw themselves as a tiny, beleaguered underground tilting
against the windmills of industry. The free
referred
specifically to freedom from the fascist design
philosophies and crufty misfeatures common on competing operating systems.
Armando Stettner, one of the early Unix developers, used to give out fake
license plates bearing this motto under a large Unix, all in New Hampshire
colors of green and white. These are now valued collector's items. In
1994 DEC put an inferior imitation of these in
circulation with a red corporate logo added. Compaq (half of which was
once DEC) continued the practice.
Armando Stettner's original Unix license plate.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: livelock DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:21 AM ----- BODY: /li:v´lok/ n.
A situation in which some critical stage of a task is unable to finish because its clients perpetually create more work for it to do after they have been serviced but before it can clear its queue. Differs from deadlock in that the process is not blocked or waiting for anything, but has a virtually infinite amount of work to do and can never catch up.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: liveware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:20 AM ----- BODY: /li:v´weir/ n.
1. Synonym for wetware. Less common.
2. [Cambridge] Vermin. Waiter, there's some liveware in my
salad...
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lobotomy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:19 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. What a hacker subjected to formal management training is said to have undergone. At IBM and elsewhere this term is used by both hackers and low-level management; the latter doubtless intend it as a joke.
2. The act of removing the processor from a microcomputer in order to replace or upgrade it. Some very cheap clone systems are sold in lobotomized form — everything but the brain.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: locals, the DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:18 AM ----- BODY: pl.n.
The users on one's local network (as opposed, say, to people one
reaches via public Internet connections). The marked thing about this
usage is how little it has to do with real-space distance. I have to
do some tweaking on this mail utility before releasing it to the
locals.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: locked and loaded DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:17 AM ----- BODY: adj.,obs.
[from military slang for an M-16 rifle with magazine inserted and prepared for firing] Said of a removable disk volume properly prepared for use — that is, locked into the drive and with the heads loaded. Ironically, because their heads are ‘loaded’ whenever the power is up, this description is never used of Winchester drives (which are named after a rifle).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: locked up DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:16 AM ----- BODY: adj.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: logic bomb DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
Code surreptitiously inserted into an application or OS that causes it to perform some destructive or security-compromising activity whenever specified conditions are met. Compare back door.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: logical DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:14 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[from the technical term logical device, wherein a physical device is referred to by an arbitrary ‘logical’ name] Having the role of. If a person (say, Les Earnest at SAIL) who had long held a certain post left and were replaced, the replacement would for a while be known as the logical Les Earnest. (This does not imply any judgment on the replacement.) Compare virtual.
At Stanford, ‘logical’ compass directions denote a coordinate system relative to El Camino Real, in which ‘logical north’ is always toward San Francisco and ‘logical south’ is always toward San Jose--in spite of the fact that El Camino Real runs physical north/south near San Francisco, physical east/west near San Jose, and along a curve everywhere in between. (The best rule of thumb here is that, by definition, El Camino Real always runs logical north-south.)
In giving directions, one might say: To get to Rincon Tarasco
restaurant, get onto El Camino Bignum going logical
north.
Using the word ‘logical’ helps to prevent the
recipient from worrying about that the fact that the sun is setting almost
directly in front of him. The concept is reinforced by North American
highways which are almost, but not quite, consistently labeled with logical
rather than physical directions. A similar situation exists at MIT: Route
128 (famous for the electronics industry that grew up along it) wraps
roughly 3 quarters around Boston at a radius of 10 miles, terminating near
the coastline at each end. It would be most precise to describe the two
directions along this highway as ‘clockwise’ and
‘counterclockwise’, but the road signs all say
north
and south
, respectively. A hacker
might describe these directions as logical
north and logical south,
to indicate that they are conventional directions not corresponding to the
usual denotation for those words.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: loop through DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:13 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To process each element of a list of things. Hold on, I've
got to loop through my paper mail.
Derives from the
computer-language notion of an iterative loop; compare cdr down (under cdr),
which is less common among C and Unix programmers. ITS hackers used to say
IRP over after an obscure pseudo-op
in the MIDAS PDP-10 assembler (the same IRP op can nowadays be found in
Microsoft's assembler).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: loose bytes DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:12 AM ----- BODY: n.
Commonwealth hackish term for the padding bytes or shims many compilers insert between members of a record or structure to cope with alignment requirements imposed by the machine architecture.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lord high fixer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:11 AM ----- BODY: n.
[primarily British, from Gilbert & Sullivan's ‘lord high executioner’] The person in an organization who knows the most about some aspect of a system. See wizard.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lose DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:10 AM ----- BODY: vi.
1. [very common] To fail. A program loses when it encounters an exceptional condition or fails to work in the expected manner.
2. To be exceptionally unesthetic or crocky.
3. Of people, to be obnoxious or unusually stupid (as opposed to ignorant). See also deserves to lose.
4. n. Refers to something that
is losing, especially in the phrases That's a
lose!
and What a lose!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lose lose DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:09 AM ----- BODY: interj.
A reply to or comment on an undesirable situation. I
accidentally deleted all my files!
Lose,
lose.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: loser DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:08 AM ----- BODY: n.
An unexpectedly bad situation, program, programmer, or person. Someone who habitually loses. (Even winners can lose occasionally.) Someone who knows not and knows not that he knows not. Emphatic forms are real loser, total loser, and complete loser (but not **moby loser, which would be a contradiction in terms). See luser.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: losing DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:07 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Said of anything that is or causes a lose or
lossage. The compiler is losing badly when I
try to use templates.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: loss DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:06 AM ----- BODY: n.
Something (not a person) that loses; a situation in which something
is losing. Emphatic forms include moby
loss, and total loss,
complete loss. Common interjections
are What a loss!
and What a moby loss!
Note
that moby loss is OK even though
**moby loser is not used; applied to
an abstract noun, moby is simply a magnifier, whereas when applied to a
person it implies substance and has positive connotations. Compare
lossage.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lossage DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:05 AM ----- BODY: /los'@j/ n.
[very common] The result of a bug or malfunction. This is a mass or
collective noun. What a loss!
and What
lossage!
are nearly synonymous. The former is slightly more
particular to the speaker's present circumstances; the latter implies a
continuing lose of which the speaker is currently a
victim. Thus (for example) a temporary hardware failure is a loss, but
bugs in an important tool (like a compiler) are serious lossage.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lossy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:04 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[Usenet]
1. Said of people, this indicates a poor memory, usually short-term.
This usage is analogical to the same term applied to data compression and
analysis. He's very lossy.
means that you can't rely on him
to accurately remember recent experiences or conversations, or requests.
Not to be confused with a ‘loser’, which is a person who is in
a continual state of lossiness, as in sense 2 (see below).
2. Said of an attitude or a situation, this indicates a general
downturn in emotions, lack of success in attempted endeavors, etc. Eg,
I'm having a lossy day today.
means that the speaker has
‘lost’ or is ‘losing’ in all of their activities,
and that this is causing some increase in negative emotions.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lost in the noise DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:03 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Syn. lost in the underflow. This term is from signal processing, where signals of very small amplitude cannot be separated from low-intensity noise in the system. Though popular among hackers, it is not confined to hackerdom; physicists, engineers, astronomers, and statisticians all use it.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lost in the underflow DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:02 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Too small to be worth considering; more specifically, small beyond
the limits of accuracy or measurement. This is a reference to floating underflow, a condition that can occur
when a floating-point arithmetic processor tries to handle quantities
smaller than its limit of magnitude. It is also a pun on
‘undertow’ (a kind of fast, cold current that sometimes runs
just offshore and can be dangerous to swimmers). Well, sure, photon
pressure from the stadium lights alters the path of a thrown baseball, but
that effect gets lost in the underflow.
Compare
epsilon, epsilon squared; see
also overflow bit.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lots of MIPS but no I/O DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:01 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Used to describe a person who is technically brilliant but can't seem to communicate with human beings effectively. Technically it describes a machine that has lots of processing power but is bottlenecked on input-output (in 1991, the IBM Rios, a.k.a. RS/6000, was a notorious example).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: low-bandwidth DATE: 05/15/2003 10:40:00 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[from communication theory] Used to indicate a talk that, although
not content-free, was not terribly informative.
That was a low-bandwidth talk, but what can you expect for an
audience of suits!
Compare
zero-content, bandwidth,
math-out.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:59 AM ----- BODY: prov.
There is always one more
bug.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: Lumber Cartel DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:58 AM ----- BODY: n.
A mythical conspiracy accused by spam-spewers
of funding anti-spam activism in order to force the direct-mail promotions
industry back onto paper. Hackers, predictably, responded by forming a
Lumber Cartel
spoofing this paranoid theory; the web page is
http://come.to/the.lumber.cartel/. Members
often include the tag TINLC (There Is No Lumber Cartel
) in
their postings; see TINC,
backbone cabal and NANA for explanation.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lunatic fringe DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:57 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] Customers who can be relied upon to accept release 1 versions of software. Compare heatseeker.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: lurker DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:56 AM ----- BODY: n.
One of the ‘silent majority’ in an electronic forum; one
who posts occasionally or not at all but is known to read the group's
postings regularly. This term is not pejorative and indeed is casually
used reflexively: Oh, I'm just lurking.
Often used in
the lurkers, the hypothetical
audience for the group's flamage-emitting regulars.
When a lurker speaks up for the first time, this is called delurking.
The creator of the popular science-fiction TV series Babylon 5 has ties to SF fandom and the hacker culture. In that series, the use of the term ‘lurker’ for a homeless or displaced person is a conscious reference to the jargon term.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - L TITLE: luser DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:55 AM ----- BODY: /loo´zr/ n.
[common] A user; esp. one who is also a
loser. (luser and
loser are pronounced identically.) This word was
coined around 1975 at MIT. Under ITS, when you first walked up to a
terminal at MIT and typed Control-Z to get the computer's attention, it
printed out some status information, including how many people were already
using the computer; it might print 14 users
, for example.
Someone thought it would be a great joke to patch the system to print
14 losers
instead. There ensued a great controversy, as
some of the users didn't particularly want to be called losers to their
faces every time they used the computer. For a while several hackers
struggled covertly, each changing the message behind the back of the
others; any time you logged into the computer it was even money whether it
would say users
or losers
. Finally, someone
tried the compromise lusers
, and it stuck. Later one of the
ITS machines supported luser
as a
request-for-help command. ITS died the death in mid-1990, except as a
museum piece; the usage lives on, however, and the term luser is often seen in program comments and on
Usenet. Compare mundane,
muggle, newbie,
chainik.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: M DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:54 AM ----- BODY: pref. (on units) suff. (on numbers)
[SI] See quantifiers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: M$ DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:53 AM ----- BODY:
Common net abbreviation for Microsoft, everybody's least favorite monopoly.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: macdink DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:52 AM ----- BODY: /mak´dink/ vt.
[from the Apple Macintosh, which is said to encourage such behavior]
To make many incremental and unnecessary cosmetic changes to a program or
file. Often the subject of the macdinking would be better off without
them. When I left at 11PM last night, he was still macdinking the
slides for his presentation.
See also
fritterware,
window shopping.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: machoflops DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:51 AM ----- BODY: /mach´oh·flops/ n.
[pun on megaflops, a coinage for ‘millions of FLoating-point Operations Per Second’] Refers to artificially inflated performance figures often quoted by computer manufacturers. Real applications are lucky to get half the quoted speed. See Your mileage may vary, benchmark.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: Macintoy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:50 AM ----- BODY: /mak´in·toy/ n.
The Apple Macintosh, considered as a toy. Less pejorative than Macintrash.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: Macintrash DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:49 AM ----- BODY: /mak´in·trash`/ n.
The Apple Macintosh, as described by a hacker who doesn't appreciate being kept away from the real computer by the interface. The term maggotbox has been reported in regular use in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. Compare Macintoy. See also beige toaster, WIMP environment, point-and-drool interface, drool-proof paper, user-friendly.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: macro DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:48 AM ----- BODY: /mak´roh/ n.
[techspeak] A name (possibly followed by a formal arg list) that is equated to a text or symbolic expression to which it is to be expanded (possibly with the substitution of actual arguments) by a macro expander. This definition can be found in any technical dictionary; what those won't tell you is how the hackish connotations of the term have changed over time.
The term macro originated in early assemblers, which encouraged the use of macros as a structuring and information-hiding device. During the early 1970s, macro assemblers became ubiquitous, and sometimes quite as powerful and expensive as HLLs, only to fall from favor as improving compiler technology marginalized assembler programming (see languages of choice). Nowadays the term is most often used in connection with the C preprocessor, LISP, or one of several special-purpose languages built around a macro-expansion facility (such as TeX or Unix's [nt]roff suite).
Indeed, the meaning has drifted enough that the collective macros is now sometimes used for code in any special-purpose application control language (whether or not the language is actually translated by text expansion), and for macro-like entities such as the keyboard macros supported in some text editors (and PC TSR or Macintosh INIT/CDEV keyboard enhancers).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: macro- DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:47 AM ----- BODY: pref.
Large. Opposite of micro-. In the mainstream and among other technical cultures (for example, medical people) this competes with the prefix mega-, but hackers tend to restrict the latter to quantification.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: macrology DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:46 AM ----- BODY: /mak·rol'@·jee/ n.
1. Set of usually complex or crufty macros, e.g., as part of a large system written in LISP, TECO, or (less commonly) assembler.
2. The art and science involved in comprehending a macrology in sense 1. Sometimes studying the macrology of a system is not unlike archeology, ecology, or theology, hence the sound-alike construction. See also boxology.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: maggotbox DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:45 AM ----- BODY: /mag'@t·boks/ n.
See Macintrash. This is even more derogatory.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: magic DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:44 AM ----- BODY:
1. adj. As yet unexplained, or
too complicated to explain; compare automagically
and (Arthur C.) Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic.
TTY echoing is
controlled by a large number of magic bits.
This routine
magically computes the parity of an 8-bit byte in three
instructions.
2. adj. Characteristic of something that works although no one really understands why (this is especially called black magic).
3. n. [Stanford] A feature not generally publicized that allows something otherwise impossible, or a feature formerly in that category but now unveiled.
4. n. The ultimate goal of all
engineering & development, elegance in the extreme; from the first
corollary to Clarke's Third Law: Any technology distinguishable from
magic is insufficiently advanced
.
Parodies playing on these senses of the term abound; some have made their way into serious documentation, as when a MAGIC directive was described in the Control Card Reference for GCOS c.1978. For more about hackish ‘magic’, see Appendix A. Compare black magic, wizardly, deep magic, heavy wizardry.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: magic cookie DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:43 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Unix; common]
1. Something passed between routines or programs that enables the receiver to perform some operation; a capability ticket or opaque identifier. Especially used of small data objects that contain data encoded in a strange or intrinsically machine-dependent way. E.g., on non-Unix OSes with a non-byte-stream model of files, the result of ftell3 may be a magic cookie rather than a byte offset; it can be passed to fseek3, but not operated on in any meaningful way. The phrase it hands you a magic cookie means it returns a result whose contents are not defined but which can be passed back to the same or some other program later.
2. An in-band code for changing graphic rendition (e.g., inverse video or underlining) or performing other control functions (see also cookie). Some older terminals would leave a blank on the screen corresponding to mode-change magic cookies; this was also called a glitch (or occasionally a turd; compare mouse droppings). See also cookie.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: magic number DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:42 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Unix/C; common]
1. In source code, some non-obvious constant whose value is
significant to the operation of a program and that is inserted
inconspicuously in-line (hardcoded), rather than
expanded in by a symbol set by a commented #define
. Magic numbers in this sense are bad style.
2. A number that encodes critical information used in an algorithm in some opaque way. The classic examples of these are the numbers used in hash or CRC functions, or the coefficients in a linear congruential generator for pseudo-random numbers. This sense actually predates and was ancestral to the more common sense
3. Special data located at the beginning of a binary data file to indicate its type to a utility. Under Unix, the system and various applications programs (especially the linker) distinguish between types of executable file by looking for a magic number. Once upon a time, these magic numbers were PDP-11 branch instructions that skipped over header data to the start of executable code; 0407, for example, was octal for ‘branch 16 bytes relative’. Many other kinds of files now have magic numbers somewhere; some magic numbers are, in fact, strings, like the !<arch> at the beginning of a Unix archive file or the %! leading PostScript files. Nowadays only a wizard knows the spells to create magic numbers. How do you choose a fresh magic number of your own? Simple — you pick one at random. See? It's magic!
4. An input that leads to a computational boundary condition, where algorithm behavior becomes discontinuous. Numeric overflows (particularly with signed data types) and run-time errors (divide by zero, stack overflows) are indications of magic numbers. The Y2K scare was probably the most notorious magic number non-incident.
The magic number, on the other hand, is 7±2. See The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information by George Miller, in the Psychological Review 63:81-97 (1956). This classic paper established the number of distinct items (such as numeric digits) that humans can hold in short-term memory. Among other things, this strongly influenced the interface design of the phone system.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: magic smoke DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:41 AM ----- BODY: n.
A substance trapped inside IC packages that enables them to function (also called blue smoke; this is similar to the archaic phlogiston hypothesis about combustion). Its existence is demonstrated by what happens when a chip burns up — the magic smoke gets let out, so it doesn't work any more. See smoke test, let the smoke out.
Usenetter Jay Maynard tells the following story: Once, while
hacking on a dedicated Z80 system, I was testing code by blowing EPROMs and
plugging them in the system, then seeing what happened. One time, I
plugged one in backwards. I only discovered that
after I realized that Intel didn't put power-on lights
under the quartz windows on the tops of their EPROMs — the die was
glowing white-hot. Amazingly, the EPROM worked fine after I erased it,
filled it full of zeros, then erased it again. For all I know, it's still
in service. Of course, this is because the magic smoke didn't get let
out.
Compare the original phrasing of
Murphy's Law.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mail storm DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:40 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from broadcast storm, influenced by maelstrom] What often happens when a machine with an Internet connection and active users re-connects after extended downtime — a flood of incoming mail that brings the machine to its knees. See also hairball.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mailbomb DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:39 AM ----- BODY:
(also mail bomb) [Usenet]
1. v. To send, or urge others to send, massive amounts of email to a single system or person, esp. with intent to crash or spam the recipient's system. Sometimes done in retaliation for a perceived serious offense. Mailbombing is itself widely regarded as a serious offense — it can disrupt email traffic or other facilities for innocent users on the victim's system, and in extreme cases, even at upstream sites.
2. n. An automatic procedure with a similar effect.
3. n. The mail sent. Compare letterbomb, nastygram, BLOB (sense 2), list-bomb.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mailing list DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:38 AM ----- BODY: n.
(often shortened in context to list)
1. An email address that is an alias (or macro, though that word is never used in this connection) for many other email addresses. Some mailing lists are simple reflectors, redirecting mail sent to them to the list of recipients. Others are filtered by humans or programs of varying degrees of sophistication; lists filtered by humans are said to be moderated.
2. The people who receive your email when you send it to such an address.
Mailing lists are one of the primary forms of hacker interaction, along with Usenet. They predate Usenet, having originated with the first UUCP and ARPANET connections. They are often used for private information-sharing on topics that would be too specialized for or inappropriate to public Usenet groups. Though some of these maintain almost purely technical content (such as the Internet Engineering Task Force mailing list), others (like the ‘sf-lovers’ list maintained for many years by Saul Jaffe) are recreational, and many are purely social. Perhaps the most infamous of the social lists was the eccentric bandykin distribution; its latter-day progeny, lectroids and tanstaafl, still include a number of the oddest and most interesting people in hackerdom.
Mailing lists are easy to create and (unlike Usenet) don't tie up a significant amount of machine resources (until they get very large, at which point they can become interesting torture tests for mail software). Thus, they are often created temporarily by working groups, the members of which can then collaborate on a project without ever needing to meet face-to-face. Much of the material in this lexicon was criticized and polished on just such a mailing list (called ‘jargon-friends’), which included all the co-authors of Steele-1983.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: main loop DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:37 AM ----- BODY: n.
The top-level control flow construct in an input- or event-driven program, the one which receives and acts or dispatches on the program's input. See also driver.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mainframe DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:36 AM ----- BODY: n.
Term originally referring to the cabinet containing the central processor unit or ‘main frame’ of a room-filling Stone Age batch machine. After the emergence of smaller minicomputer designs in the early 1970s, the traditional big iron machines were described as ‘mainframe computers’ and eventually just as mainframes. The term carries the connotation of a machine designed for batch rather than interactive use, though possibly with an interactive timesharing operating system retrofitted onto it; it is especially used of machines built by IBM, Unisys, and the other great dinosaurs surviving from computing's Stone Age.
It has been common wisdom among hackers since the late 1980s that the mainframe architectural tradition is essentially dead (outside of the tiny market for number-crunching supercomputers having been swamped by the recent huge advances in IC technology and low-cost personal computing. The wave of failures, takeovers, and mergers among traditional mainframe makers in the early 1990s bore this out. The biggest mainframer of all, IBM, was compelled to re-invent itself as a huge systems-consulting house. (See dinosaurs mating and killer micro).
However, in yet another instance of the cycle of reincarnation, the port of Linux to the IBM S/390 architecture in 1999 — assisted by IBM — produced a resurgence of interest in mainframe computing as a way of providing huge quantities of easily maintainable, reliable virtual Linux servers, saving IBM's mainframe division from almost certain extinction.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mainsleaze DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:35 AM ----- BODY: n.
[spam fighters] A big-time spammer, with their own fat pipe, their own mailservers, and a pink contract. Almost impossible to get shut down.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: man page DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:34 AM ----- BODY: n.
A page from the Unix Programmer's Manual,
documenting one of Unix's many commands, system calls,
library subroutines, device driver interfaces, file formats,
games, macro packages, or maintenance utilities.
By extension, the term man page
may be used to refer to
documentation of any kind, under any system, though it is most likely to be
confined to short on-line references.
As mentioned in , there is a
standard syntax for referring to man page entries: the phrase
foo(n)
refers to the page for foo
in chapter
n of the manual, where chapter 1 is user commands, chapter 2 is system
calls, etc.
The man page format is beloved, or berated, for having the same sort of pithy utility as the rest of Unix. Man pages tend to be written as very compact, concise descriptions which are complete but not forgiving of the lazy or careless reader. Their stylized format does a good job of summarizing the essentials: invocation syntax, options, basic functionality. While such a concise reference is perfect for the do-one-thing-and-do-it-well tools which are favored by the Unix philosophy, it admittedly breaks down when applied to a command which is itself a major subsystem.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: management DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:33 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Corporate power elites distinguished primarily by their distance
from actual productive work and their chronic failure to manage (see also
suit). Spoken derisively, as in
Management decided that ...
.
2. Mythically, a vast bureaucracy responsible for all the world's minor irritations. Hackers' satirical public notices are often signed ‘The Mgt’; this derives from the Illuminatus novels (see the Bibliography in Appendix C).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mandelbug DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:32 AM ----- BODY: /man´del·buhg/ n.
[from the Mandelbrot set] A bug whose underlying causes are so complex and obscure as to make its behavior appear chaotic or even non-deterministic. This term implies that the speaker thinks it is a Bohr bug, rather than a heisenbug. See also schroedinbug.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: manged DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:31 AM ----- BODY: /mahnjd/ n.
[probably from the French ‘manger’ or Italian
‘mangiare’, to eat; perhaps influenced by English
‘mange’, ‘mangy’] adj. Refers to anything that is mangled or
damaged, usually beyond repair. The disk was manged after the
electrical storm.
Compare mung.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mangle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:30 AM ----- BODY: vt.
1. Used similarly to mung or scribble, but more violent in its connotations; something that is mangled has been irreversibly and totally trashed.
2. To produce the mangled name corresponding to a C++ declaration.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mangled name DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:29 AM ----- BODY: n.
A name, appearing in a C++ object file, that is a coded
representation of the object declaration as it appears in the
source. Mangled names are used because C++ allows multiple objects to have
the same name, as long as they are distinguishable in some other way, such
as by having different parameter types. Thus, the internal name must have
that additional information embedded in it, using the limited character set
allowed by most linkers. For instance, one popular compiler encodes the
standard library function declaration memchr(const
void*,int,unsigned int)
as @memchr$qpxviui
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mangler DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
[DEC] A manager. Compare management. Note that system mangler is somewhat different in connotation.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: manularity DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:27 AM ----- BODY: /man`yoo·la´ri·tee/ n.
[prob. fr. techspeak manual +
granularity] A notional measure of
the manual labor required for some task, particularly one of the sort that
automation is supposed to eliminate. Composing English on paper has
much higher manularity than using a text editor, especially in the revising
stage.
Hackers tend to consider manularity a symptom of primitive
methods; in fact, a true hacker confronted with an apparent requirement to
do a computing task by hand will inevitably seize
the opportunity to build another tool (see
toolsmith).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: marching ants DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:26 AM ----- BODY:
The animated dotted-line marquee that indicates a rectangle or item select in Adobe Photoshop, the GIMP, and other similar image-editing programs.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: marbles DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:25 AM ----- BODY: pl.n.
[from mainstream lost all his/her marbles
] The
minimum needed to build your way further up some hierarchy of tools or
abstractions. After a bad system crash, you need to determine if the
machine has enough marbles to come up on its own, or enough marbles to
allow a rebuild from backups, or if you need to rebuild from scratch.
This compiler doesn't even have enough marbles to compile
hello world.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: marginal DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:24 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[common]
1. [techspeak] An extremely small change. A marginal
increase in core can decrease
GC time drastically.
In everyday terms, this
means that it is a lot easier to clean off your desk if you have a spare
place to put some of the junk while you sort through it.
2. Of little merit. This proposed new feature seems rather
marginal to me.
3. Of extremely small probability of winning.
The power supply was rather marginal anyway; no wonder it
fried.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: marginally DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:23 AM ----- BODY: adv.
Slightly. The ravs here are only marginally better than at
Small Eating Place.
See epsilon.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: marketroid DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:22 AM ----- BODY: /mar´k@·troyd/ n.
alt.: marketing slime, marketeer, marketing droid, marketdroid. A member of a company's marketing department, esp. one who promises users that the next version of a product will have features that are not actually scheduled for inclusion, are extremely difficult to implement, and/or are in violation of the laws of physics; and/or one who describes existing features (and misfeatures) in ebullient, buzzword-laden adspeak. Derogatory. Compare droid.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: Mars DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:21 AM ----- BODY: n.
A legendary tragic failure, the archetypal Hacker Dream Gone Wrong. Mars was the code name for a family of PDP-10-compatible computers built by Systems Concepts (now, The SC Group): the multi-processor SC-30M, the small uniprocessor SC-25, and the never-built superprocessor SC-40. These machines were marvels of engineering design; although not much slower than the unique Foonly F-1, they were physically smaller and consumed less power than the much slower DEC KS10 or Foonly F-2, F-3, or F-4 machines. They were also completely compatible with the DEC KL10, and ran all KL10 binaries (including the operating system) with no modifications at about 2--3 times faster than a KL10.
When DEC cancelled the Jupiter project in 1983 (their followup to the PDP-10), Systems Concepts should have made a bundle selling their machine into shops with a lot of software investment in PDP-10s, and in fact their spring 1984 announcement generated a great deal of excitement in the PDP-10 world. TOPS-10 was running on the Mars by the summer of 1984, and TOPS-20 by early fall. Unfortunately, the hackers running Systems Concepts were much better at designing machines than at mass producing or selling them; the company allowed itself to be sidetracked by a bout of perfectionism into continually improving the design, and lost credibility as delivery dates continued to slip. They also overpriced the product ridiculously; they believed they were competing with the KL10 and VAX 8600 and failed to reckon with the likes of Sun Microsystems and other hungry startups building workstations with power comparable to the KL10 at a fraction of the price. By the time SC shipped the first SC-30M to Stanford in late 1985, most customers had already made the traumatic decision to abandon the PDP-10, usually for VMS or Unix boxes. Most of the Mars computers built ended up being purchased by CompuServe.
This tale and the related saga of Foonly hold a lesson for hackers: if you want to play in the Real World, you need to learn Real World moves.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: martian DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:20 AM ----- BODY: n.
A packet sent on a TCP/IP network with a source address of the test
loopback interface [127.0.0.1]. This means that it will come back labeled
with a source address that is clearly not of this earth. The domain
server is getting lots of packets from Mars. Does that gateway have a
martian filter?
Compare
Christmas tree packet, Godzillagram.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: massage DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:19 AM ----- BODY: vt.
[common] Vague term used to describe ‘smooth’
transformations of a data set into a different form, esp. transformations
that do not lose information. Connotes less pain than
munch or crunch. He
wrote a program that massages X bitmap files into GIF format.
Compare slurp.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: math-out DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:18 AM ----- BODY: n.
[poss. from ‘white-out’ (the blizzard variety)] A paper or presentation so encrusted with mathematical or other formal notation as to be incomprehensible. This may be a device for concealing the fact that it is actually content-free. See also numbers, social science number.
A math-out approach to history.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-05-19)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: Matrix DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:17 AM ----- BODY: n.
[FidoNet]
1. What the Opus BBS software and sysops call FidoNet.
2. Fanciful term for a cyberspace expected to emerge from current networking experiments (see the network). The name of the rather good 1999 cypherpunk movie The Matrix played on this sense, which however had been established for years before.
3. The totality of present-day computer networks (popularized in this sense by John Quarterman; rare outside academic literature).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: maximum Maytag mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:16 AM ----- BODY: n.
What a washing machine or, by extension, any disk drive is in when it's being used so heavily that it's shaking like an old Maytag with an unbalanced load. If prolonged for any length of time, can lead to disks becoming walking drives. In 1999 it's been some years since hard disks were large enough to do this, but the same phenomenon has recently been reported with 24X CD-ROM drives.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: McQuary limit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:15 AM ----- BODY:
[from the name of the founder of alt.fan.warlord; see warlording.] 4 lines of at most 80 characters each, sometimes still cited on Usenet as the maximum acceptable size of a sig block. Before the great bandwidth explosion of the early 1990s, long sigs actually cost people running Usenet servers significant amounts of money. Nowadays social pressure against long sigs is intended to avoid waste of human attention rather than machine bandwidth. Accordingly, the McQuary limit should be considered a rule of thumb rather than a hard limit; it's best to avoid sigs that are large, repetitive, and distracting. See also warlording.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: meatspace DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:14 AM ----- BODY: /meet´spays/ n.
The physical world, where the meat lives — as opposed to cyberspace. Hackers are actually more willing to use this term than ‘cyberspace’, because it's not speculative — we already have a running meatspace implementation (the universe). Compare RL.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: meatware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:13 AM ----- BODY: n.
Synonym for wetware. Less common.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: meeces DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:12 AM ----- BODY: /mees'@z/ n.
[TMRC] Occasional furry visitors who are not
urchins. [That is, mice. This may no longer be in
live use; it clearly derives from the refrain of the early-1960s cartoon
character Mr. Jinks: I hate meeces to
pieces!
— ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: meg DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:11 AM ----- BODY: /meg/ n.
See quantifiers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mega- DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:10 AM ----- BODY: /me´g@/ pref.
[SI] See quantifiers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: megapenny DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:09 AM ----- BODY: /meg'@·pen`ee/ n.
$10,000 (1 cent * 106). Used semi-humorously as a unit in comparing computer cost and performance figures.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: MEGO DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:08 AM ----- BODY: /me´goh/ or /mee´goh/
[My Eyes Glaze Over
, often Mine Eyes Glazeth
(sic) Over
, attributed to the futurologist Herman Kahn] Also
MEGO factor.
1. n. A handwave intended to confuse the listener and hopefully induce agreement because the listener does not want to admit to not understanding what is going on. MEGO is usually directed at senior management by engineers and contains a high proportion of TLAs.
2. excl. An appropriate response to MEGO tactics.
3. Among non-hackers, often refers not to behavior that causes the eyes to glaze, but to the eye-glazing reaction itself, which may be triggered by the mere threat of excessive technical detail as effectively as by an actual excess of it.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: meltdown, network DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:07 AM ----- BODY: n.
See network meltdown.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: meme DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:06 AM ----- BODY: /meem/ n.
[coined by analogy with ‘gene’, by Richard Dawkins] An idea considered as a replicator, esp. with the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do. Used esp. in the phrase meme complex denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organized belief system, such as a religion. This lexicon is an (epidemiological) vector of the ‘hacker subculture’ meme complex; each entry might be considered a meme. However, meme is often misused to mean meme complex. Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has superseded biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Hackers find this idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: meme plague DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:05 AM ----- BODY: n.
The spread of a successful but pernicious meme, esp. one that parasitizes the victims into giving their all to propagate it. Astrology, BASIC, and the other guy's religion are often considered to be examples. This usage is given point by the historical fact that ‘joiner’ ideologies like Naziism or various forms of millennarian Christianity have exhibited plague-like cycles of exponential growth followed by collapses to small reservoir populations.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: memetics DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:04 AM ----- BODY: /me·met´iks/ n.
[from meme] The study of memes. As of early 1999, this is still an extremely informal and speculative endeavor, though the first steps towards at least statistical rigor have been made by H. Keith Henson and others. Memetics is a popular topic for speculation among hackers, who like to see themselves as the architects of the new information ecologies in which memes live and replicate.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: memory farts DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:03 AM ----- BODY: n.
The flatulent sounds that some DOS box BIOSes (most notably AMI's) make when checking memory on bootup.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: memory leak DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:02 AM ----- BODY: n.
An error in a program's dynamic-store allocation logic that causes
it to fail to reclaim discarded memory, leading to eventual collapse due to
memory exhaustion. Also (esp. at CMU) called
core leak. These problems were severe on older machines with small,
fixed-size address spaces, and special leak detection
tools
were commonly written to root them out. With the advent of virtual memory,
it is unfortunately easier to be sloppy about wasting a bit of memory
(although when you run out of memory on a VM machine, it means you've got a
real leak!). See aliasing bug,
fandango on core,
smash the stack, precedence lossage,
overrun screw, leaky heap,
leak.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: memory smash DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:01 AM ----- BODY: n.
[XEROX PARC] Writing through a pointer that doesn't point to what you think it does. This occasionally reduces your memory to a rubble of bits. Note that this is subtly different from (and more general than) related terms such as a memory leak or fandango on core because it doesn't imply an allocation error or overrun condition.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: menuitis DATE: 05/15/2003 10:39:00 AM ----- BODY: /men`yoo·i:´tis/ n.
Notional disease suffered by software with an obsessively simple-minded menu interface and no escape. Hackers find this intensely irritating and much prefer the flexibility of command-line or language-style interfaces, especially those customizable via macros or a special-purpose language in which one can encode useful hacks. See user-obsequious, drool-proof paper, WIMP environment, for the rest of us.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mess-dos DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:59 AM ----- BODY: /mes·dos/ n.
[semi-obsolescent now that DOS is] Derisory term for MS-DOS. Often
followed by the ritual banishing Just say No!
See
MS-DOS. Most hackers (even many MS-DOS hackers)
loathed MS-DOS for its single-tasking nature, its limits on application
size, its nasty primitive interface, and its ties to IBMness and
Microsoftness (see fear and loathing). Also
mess-loss, messy-dos, mess-dog, mess-dross, mush-dos, and various combinations thereof. In
Ireland and the U.K. it is even sometimes called ‘Domestos’
after a brand of toilet cleanser.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: meta DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:58 AM ----- BODY: /me´t@/ or /may´t@/ or (Commonwealth) /mee´t@/ adj.,pref.
[from analytic philosophy] One level of description up. A metasyntactic variable is a variable in notation used to describe syntax, and meta-language is language used to describe language. This is difficult to explain briefly, but much hacker humor turns on deliberate confusion between meta-levels. See hacker humor.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: meta bit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:57 AM ----- BODY: n.
The top bit of an 8-bit character, which is on in character values 128--255. Also called high bit, alt bit. Some terminals and consoles (see space-cadet keyboard) have a META shift key. Others (including, mirabile dictu, keyboards on IBM PC-class machines) have an ALT key. See also bucky bits.
Historical note: although in modern usage shaped by a universe of 8-bit bytes the meta bit is invariably hex 80 (octal 0200), things were different on earlier machines with 36-bit words and 9-bit bytes. The MIT and Stanford keyboards (see space-cadet keyboard) generated hex 100 (octal 400) from their meta keys.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: metasyntactic variable DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:56 AM ----- BODY: n.
A name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is under discussion, or any random member of a class of things under discussion. The word foo is the canonical example. To avoid confusion, hackers never (well, hardly ever) use ‘foo’ or other words like it as permanent names for anything. In filenames, a common convention is that any filename beginning with a metasyntactic-variable name is a scratch file that may be deleted at any time.
Metasyntactic variables are so called because (1) they are variables
in the metalanguage used to talk about programs etc; (2) they are variables
whose values are often variables (as in usages like the value of
f(foo,bar) is the sum of foo and bar
). However, it has been
plausibly suggested that the real reason for the term metasyntactic
variable
is that it sounds good. To some extent, the list of one's
preferred metasyntactic variables is a cultural signature. They occur both
in series (used for related groups of variables or objects) and as
singletons. Here are a few common signatures:
foo, bar, baz, quux, quuux, quuuux...: | MIT/Stanford usage, now found everywhere (thanks largely to early versions of this lexicon!). At MIT (but not at Stanford), baz dropped out of use for a while in the 1970s and '80s. A common recent mutation of this sequence inserts quxbefore quux. |
bazola, ztesch: | Stanford (from mid-'70s on). |
foo, bar, thud, grunt: | This series was popular at CMU. Other CMU-associated variables include gorp. |
foo, bar, bletch: | Waterloo University. We are informed that the CS club at
Waterloo formerly had a sign on its door reading
Ye Olde Foo Bar and Grill; this led to an attempt to establish grillas the third metasyntactic variable, but it never caught on. |
foo, bar, fum: | This series is reported to be common at XEROX PARC. |
fred, jim, sheila, barney: | See the entry for fred. These tend to be Britishisms. |
flarp: | Popular at Rutgers University and among GOSMACS hackers. |
zxc, spqr, wombat: | Cambridge University (England). |
shme | Berkeley, GeoWorks, Ingres. Pronounced /shme/ with a short /e/. |
foo, bar, baz, bongo | Yale, late 1970s. |
spam, eggs | Python programmers. |
snork | Brown University, early 1970s. |
foo, bar, zot | Helsinki University of Technology, Finland. |
blarg, wibble | New Zealand. |
toto, titi, tata, tutu | France. |
pippo, pluto, paperino | Italy. Pippo /pee´po/ and Paperino /pa·per·ee'·no/ are the Italian names for Goofy and Donald Duck. |
aap, noot, mies | The Netherlands. These are the first words a child used to learn to spell on a Dutch spelling board. |
oogle, foogle, boogle; zork, gork, bork | These two series (which may be continued with other initial consonents) are reportedly common in England, and said to go back to Lewis Carroll. |
Of all these, only foo and bar are universal (and baz nearly so). The compounds foobar and foobaz also enjoy very wide currency. Some jargon terms are also used as metasyntactic names; barf and mumble, for example. See also Commonwealth Hackish for discussion of numerous metasyntactic variables found in Great Britain and the Commonwealth.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: MFTL DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:55 AM ----- BODY: /M·F·T·L/
[abbreviation: ‘My Favorite Toy Language’]
1. adj. Describes a talk on a
programming language design that is heavy on the syntax (with lots of BNF),
sometimes even talks about semantics (e.g., type systems), but rarely, if
ever, has any content (see content-free). More
broadly applied to talks — even when the topic is not a programming
language — in which the subject matter is gone into in unnecessary
and meticulous detail at the sacrifice of any conceptual content.
Well, it was a typical MFTL talk
.
2. n. Describes a language about
which the developers are passionate (often to the point of proselytic zeal)
but no one else cares about. Applied to the language by those outside the
originating group. He cornered me about type resolution in his
MFTL.
The first great goal in the mind of the designer of an MFTL is
usually to write a compiler for it, then bootstrap the design away from
contamination by lesser languages by writing a compiler for it in itself.
Thus, the standard put-down question at an MFTL talk is Has it been
used for anything besides its own compiler?
On the other hand, a
(compiled) language that cannot even be used to write its own compiler is
beneath contempt. (The qualification has become necessary because of the
increasing popularity of interpreted languages like
Perl and Python.) See
break-even point. (On a related note, Doug McIlroy
once proposed a test of the generality and utility of a language and the
operating system under which it is compiled: Is the output of a
FORTRAN program acceptable as input to the FORTRAN compiler?
In
other words, can you write programs that write programs? (See
toolsmith.) Alarming numbers of (language, OS)
pairs fail this test, particularly when the language is FORTRAN;
aficionados are quick to point out that Unix (even
using FORTRAN) passes it handily. That the test could ever be failed is
only surprising to those who have had the good fortune to have worked only
under modern systems which lack OS-supported and -imposed file
types
.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mickey DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
The resolution unit of mouse movement. It has been suggested that the disney will become a benchmark unit for animation graphics performance.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mickey mouse program DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:53 AM ----- BODY: n.
North American equivalent of a noddy (that
is, trivial) program. Doesn't necessarily have the belittling connotations
of mainstream slang Oh, that's just mickey mouse stuff!
;
sometimes trivial programs can be very useful.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: micro- DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:52 AM ----- BODY: pref.
1. Very small; this is the root of its use as a quantifier prefix.
2. A quantifier prefix, calling for multiplication by 10-6 (see quantifiers). Neither of these uses is peculiar to hackers, but hackers tend to fling them both around rather more freely than is countenanced in standard English. It is recorded, for example, that one CS professor used to characterize the standard length of his lectures as a microcentury — that is, about 52.6 minutes (see also attoparsec, nanoacre, and especially microfortnight).
3. Personal or human-scale — that is, capable of being maintained or comprehended or manipulated by one human being. This sense is generalized from microcomputer, and is esp. used in contrast with macro- (the corresponding Greek prefix meaning ‘large’).
4. Local as opposed to global (or macro-). Thus a hacker might say that buying a smaller car to reduce pollution only solves a microproblem; the macroproblem of getting to work might be better solved by using mass transit, moving to within walking distance, or (best of all) telecommuting.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: MicroDroid DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:51 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet] A Microsoft employee, esp. one who posts to various operating-system advocacy newsgroups. MicroDroids post follow-ups to any messages critical of Microsoft's operating systems, and often end up sounding like visiting fundamentalist missionaries. See also astroturfing; compare microserf.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: microfortnight DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:50 AM ----- BODY: n.
1/1000000 of the fundamental unit of time in the Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight system of measurement; 1.2096 sec. (A furlong is 1/8th of a mile; a firkin is 9 imperial gallons; the mass unit of the system is taken to be a firkin of water). The VMS operating system has a lot of tuning parameters that you can set with the SYSGEN utility, and one of these is TIMEPROMPTWAIT, the time the system will wait for an operator to set the correct date and time at boot if it realizes that the current value is bogus. This time is specified in microfortnights!
Multiple uses of the millifortnight (about 20 minutes) and nanofortnight have also been reported.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: microLenat DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:49 AM ----- BODY: /mi:`·kroh·len'·@t/ n.
The unit of bogosity. Abbreviated µL
or mL in ASCII Consensus is that this is the largest unit practical for
everyday use. The microLenat, originally invented by David Jefferson, was
promulgated as an attack against noted computer scientist Doug Lenat by a
tenured graduate student at CMU. Doug had failed
the student on an important exam because the student gave only AI is
bogus
as his answer to the questions. The slur is generally
considered unmerited, but it has become a running gag nevertheless. Some
of Doug's friends argue that of course a microLenat is
bogus, since it is only one millionth of a Lenat. Others have suggested
that the unit should be redesignated after the grad student, as the
microReid.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: microReid DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:48 AM ----- BODY: /mi:´kroh·reed/ n.
See microLenat.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: microserf DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:47 AM ----- BODY: /mi:´kro·s@rf/
[popularized, though not originated, by Douglas Coupland's book Microserfs] A programmer at Microsoft, especially a low-level coder with little chance of fame or fortune. Compare MicroDroid.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: Microsloth Windows DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:46 AM ----- BODY: /mi:´kroh·sloth` win´dohz/ n.
(Variants combine {Microshift, Macroshaft, Microsuck} with {Windoze, WinDOS}. Hackerism(s) for ‘Microsoft Windows’. A thirty-two bit extension and graphical shell to a sixteen-bit patch to an eight-bit operating system originally coded for a four-bit microprocessor which was written by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition. Also just called Windoze, with the implication that you can fall asleep waiting for it to do anything; the latter term is extremely common on Usenet. See Black Screen of Death and Blue Screen of Death; compare X, sun-stools.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: Microsoft DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:45 AM ----- BODY:
The new Evil Empire (the old one was IBM). The basic complaints are, as formerly with IBM, that (a) their system designs are horrible botches, (b) we can't get source to fix them, and (c) they throw their weight around a lot. See also Halloween Documents.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: micros~1 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:44 AM ----- BODY:
An abbreviation of the full name Microsoft resembling the rather bogus way Windows 9x's VFAT filesystem truncates long file names to fit in the MS-DOS 8+3 scheme (the real filename is stored elsewhere). If other files start with the same prefix, they'll be called micros~2 and so on, causing lots of problems with backups and other routine system-administration problems. During the US Antitrust trial against Microsoft the names Micros~1 and Micros~2 were suggested for the two companies that would exist after a break-up.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: middle-endian DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:43 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Not big-endian or little-endian. Used of perverse byte orders such as 3-4-1-2 or 2-1-4-3, occasionally found in the packed-decimal formats of minicomputer manufacturers who shall remain nameless. See NUXI problem. Non-US hackers use this term to describe the American mm/dd/yy style of writing dates (Europeans write little-endian dd/mm/yy, and Japanese use big-endian yy/mm/dd for Western dates).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: middle-out implementation DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:42 AM ----- BODY:
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: milliLampson DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:41 AM ----- BODY: /mil'@·lamp`sn/ n.
A unit of talking speed, abbreviated mL. Most people run about 200 milliLampsons. The eponymous Butler Lampson (a CS theorist and systems implementor highly regarded among hackers) goes at 1000. A few people speak faster. This unit is sometimes used to compare the (sometimes widely disparate) rates at which people can generate ideas and actually emit them in speech. For example, noted computer architect C. Gordon Bell (designer of the PDP-11) is said, with some awe, to think at about 1200 mL but only talk at about 300; he is frequently reduced to fragments of sentences as his mouth tries to keep up with his speeding brain.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: minor detail DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:40 AM ----- BODY:
Often used in an ironic sense about brokenness or problems that
while apparently major, are in principle solvable. It works — the
fact that it crashes the system right after is a minor detail.
Compare SMOP.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: MIPS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:39 AM ----- BODY: /mips/ n.
[abbreviation]
1. A measure of computing speed; formally, ‘Million Instructions Per Second’ (that's 106 per second, not 220!); often rendered by hackers as ‘Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed’ or in other unflattering ways, such as ‘Meaningless Information Provided by Salesmen’. This joke expresses an attitude nearly universal among hackers about the value of most benchmark claims, said attitude being one of the great cultural divides between hackers and marketroids (see also BogoMIPS). The singular is sometimes ‘1 MIP’ even though this is clearly etymologically wrong. See also KIPS and GIPS.
2. Computers, especially large computers, considered abstractly as
sources of computrons. This is just a
workstation; the heavy MIPS are hidden in the basement.
3. The corporate name of a particular RISC-chip company, later acquired by SGI.
4. Acronym for ‘Meaningless Information per Second’ (a joke, prob.: from sense 1).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: misbug DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:38 AM ----- BODY: /mis·buhg/ n.
[MIT; rare (like its referent)] An unintended property of a program that turns out to be useful; something that should have been a bug but turns out to be a feature. Compare green lightning. See miswart.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: misfeature DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:37 AM ----- BODY: /mis·fee´chr/ or /mis´fee`chr/ n.
[common] A feature that eventually causes lossage, possibly because it is not adequate for a new situation that has evolved. Since it results from a deliberate and properly implemented feature, a misfeature is not a bug. Nor is it a simple unforeseen side effect; the term implies that the feature in question was carefully planned, but its long-term consequences were not accurately or adequately predicted (which is quite different from not having thought ahead at all). A misfeature can be a particularly stubborn problem to resolve, because fixing it usually involves a substantial philosophical change to the structure of the system involved.
Many misfeatures (especially in user-interface design) arise because
the designers/implementors mistake their personal tastes for laws of
nature. Often a former feature becomes a misfeature because trade-offs
were made whose parameters subsequently change (possibly only in the
judgment of the implementors). Well, yeah, it is kind of a
misfeature that file names are limited to six characters, but the original
implementors wanted to save directory space and we're stuck with it for
now.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: missile address DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:36 AM ----- BODY: n.
See ICBM address.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: MiSTing DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:35 AM ----- BODY:
[blogosphere] A variant of fisking patterned on the protocol of Mystery Science Theater 3000, In a MiSTing, the satire is spoken through characters purporting to be the MST3K robots or other suitably bizarre characters, such as the Roman emperors Augustus and Caligula.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: miswart DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:34 AM ----- BODY: /mis·wort/ n.
[from wart by analogy with misbug] A feature that superficially appears to be a wart but has been determined to be the Right Thing. For example, in some versions of the EMACS text editor, the ‘transpose characters’ command exchanges the character under the cursor with the one before it on the screen, except when the cursor is at the end of a line, in which case the two characters before the cursor are exchanged. While this behavior is perhaps surprising, and certainly inconsistent, it has been found through extensive experimentation to be what most users want. This feature is a miswart.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: MMF DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:33 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet; common] Abbreviation: Make Money Fast
.
Refers to any kind of scheme which promises participants large profits with
little or no risk or effort. Typically, it is a some kind of multi-level
marketing operation which involves recruiting more members, or an illegal
pyramid scam. The term is also used to refer to any kind of spam which
promotes this. For more information, see the Make Money Fast Myth
Page.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mobo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:32 AM ----- BODY: /moh´bo/
Written and (rarely) spoken contraction of
motherboard
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: moby DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:31 AM ----- BODY: /moh´bee/
[MIT: seems to have been in use among model railroad fans years ago. Derived from Melville's Moby Dick (some say from ‘Moby Pickle’). Now common.]
1. adj. Large, immense, complex,
impressive. A Saturn V rocket is a truly moby frob.
Some MIT undergrads pulled off a moby hack at the Harvard-Yale
game.
(See Appendix A for
discussion.)
2. n. obs. The maximum address space of a machine (see below). For a 680[234]0 or VAX or most modern 32-bit architectures, it is 4,294,967,296 8-bit bytes (4 gigabytes).
3. A title of address (never of third-person reference), usually
used to show admiration, respect, and/or friendliness to a competent
hacker. Greetings, moby Dave. How's that address-book thing for
the Mac going?
4. adj. In backgammon, doubles on the dice, as in moby sixes, moby ones, etc. Compare this with bignum (sense 3): double sixes are both bignums and moby sixes, but moby ones are not bignums (the use of moby to describe double ones is sarcastic). Standard emphatic forms: Moby foo, moby win, moby loss. Foby moo: a spoonerism due to Richard Greenblatt.
5. The largest available unit of something which is available in
discrete increments. Thus, ordering a moby Coke
at the
local fast-food joint is not just a request for a large Coke, it's an
explicit request for the largest size they sell.
This term entered hackerdom with the Fabritek 256K memory added to
the MIT AI PDP-6 machine, which was considered unimaginably huge when it
was installed in the 1960s (at a time when a more typical memory size for a
timesharing system was 72 kilobytes). Thus, a moby is classically 256K
36-bit words, the size of a PDP-6 or PDP-10 moby. Back when address
registers were narrow the term was more generally useful, because when a
computer had virtual memory mapping, it might actually have more physical
memory attached to it than any one program could access directly. One
could then say This computer has 6 mobies
meaning that the
ratio of physical memory to address space is 6, without having to say
specifically how much memory there actually is. That in turn implied that
the computer could timeshare six ‘full-sized’ programs without
having to swap programs between memory and disk.
Nowadays the low cost of processor logic means that address spaces are usually larger than the most physical memory you can cram onto a machine, so most systems have much less than one theoretical ‘native’ moby of core. Also, more modern memory-management techniques (esp. paging) make the ‘moby count’ less significant. However, there is one series of widely-used chips for which the term could stand to be revived — the Intel 8088 and 80286 with their incredibly brain-damaged segmented-memory designs. On these, a moby would be the 1-megabyte address span of a segment/offset pair (by coincidence, a PDP-10 moby was exactly 1 megabyte of 9-bit bytes).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mockingbird DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:30 AM ----- BODY: n.
Software that intercepts communications (especially login transactions) between users and hosts and provides system-like responses to the users while saving their responses (especially account IDs and passwords). A special case of Trojan horse.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mod DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:29 AM ----- BODY: vt.,n.
[very common]
1. Short for ‘modify’ or ‘modification’. Very commonly used — in fact the full terms are considered markers that one is being formal. The plural ‘mods’ is used esp. with reference to bug fixes or minor design changes in hardware or software, most esp. with respect to patch sets or a diff. See also case mod.
2. Short for modulo but used only for its techspeak sense.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] A general state, usually used with an adjective describing
the state. Use of the word ‘mode’ rather than
‘state’ implies that the state is extended over time, and
probably also that some activity characteristic of that state is being
carried out. No time to hack; I'm in thesis mode.
In its
jargon sense, ‘mode’ is most often attributed to people, though
it is sometimes applied to programs and inanimate objects. In particular,
see hack mode, day mode,
night mode, demo mode,
fireworks mode, and
yoyo mode; also talk mode.
One also often hears the verbs enable and disable used in connection with jargon modes.
Thus, for example, a sillier way of saying I'm going to
crash
is I'm going to enable crash mode now
. One
might also hear a request to disable flame mode,
please
.
In a usage much closer to techspeak, a mode is a special state that
certain user interfaces must pass into in order to perform certain
functions. For example, in order to insert characters into a document in
the Unix editor vi
, one must type the
i
key, which invokes the Insert
command. The
effect of this command is to put vi into insert mode
, in
which typing the i
key has a quite different effect (to wit,
it inserts an i
into the document). One must then hit
another special key, ESC
, in order to leave insert
mode
. Nowadays, modeful interfaces are generally considered
losing but survive in quite a few widely used tools
built in less enlightened times.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mode bit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:27 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] A flag, usually in hardware, that selects between two (usually quite different) modes of operation. The connotations are different from flag bit in that mode bits are mainly written during a boot or set-up phase, are seldom explicitly read, and seldom change over the lifetime of an ordinary program. The classic example was the EBCDIC-vs.-ASCII bit (#12) of the Program Status Word of the IBM 360.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: modulo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:26 AM ----- BODY: /mod´yu·loh/ prep.
Except for. An overgeneralization of mathematical terminology; one
can consider saying that 4 equals 22 except for the 9s (4 =
22 mod 9). Well, LISP seems to work okay now,
modulo that GC bug.
I feel fine today
modulo a slight headache.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mojibake DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:25 AM ----- BODY: n. /mo´jee·ba·ke/
Japanese for ghost characters
, the garbage that comes
out when one tries to display international character sets through software
not configured for them. There is a page on the topic at http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/mojibake/.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: molly-guard DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:24 AM ----- BODY: /mol´ee·gard/ n.
[University of Illinois] A shield to prevent tripping of some
Big Red Switch by clumsy or ignorant hands.
Originally used of the plexiglass covers improvised for the BRS on an IBM
4341 after a programmer's toddler daughter (named Molly) frobbed it twice
in one day. Later generalized to covers over stop/reset switches on disk
drives and networking equipment. In hardware catalogues, you'll see the
much less interesting description guarded button
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: Mongolian Hordes technique DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:23 AM ----- BODY: n.
[poss. from the Sixties counterculture expression Mongolian clusterfuck for a public orgy] Development by gang bang. Implies that large numbers of inexperienced programmers are being put on a job better performed by a few skilled ones (but see bazaar). Also called Chinese Army technique; see also Brooks's Law.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: monkey up DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:22 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To hack together hardware for a particular task, especially a one-shot job. Connotes an extremely crufty and consciously temporary solution. Compare hack up, kluge up, cruft together.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: monkey, scratch DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:21 AM ----- BODY: n.
See scratch monkey.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: monstrosity DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:20 AM ----- BODY:
1. n. A ridiculously elephantine program or system, esp. one that is buggy or only marginally functional.
2. adj. The quality of being monstrous (see in the discussion of jargonification). See also baroque.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: monty DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:19 AM ----- BODY: /mon´tee/ n.
1. [US Geological Survey] A program with a ludicrously complex user interface written to perform extremely trivial tasks. An example would be a menu-driven, button clicking, pulldown, pop-up windows program for listing directories. The original monty was an infamous weather-reporting program, Monty the Amazing Weather Man, written at the USGS. Monty had a widget-packed X-window interface with over 200 buttons; and all monty actually did was files off the network.
2. [Great Britain; commonly capitalized as Monty or as the Full
Monty] 16 megabytes of memory, when fitted to an IBM-PC or
compatible. A standard PC-compatible using the AT- or ISA-bus with a
normal BIOS cannot access more than 16 megabytes of RAM. Generally used of
a PC, Unix workstation, etc. to mean fully
populated with memory, disk-space or some other desirable
resource. See the World Wide Words article The Full
Monty
for discussion of the rather complex etymology that
may lie behind this phrase. Compare American
moby.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: Moof DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:18 AM ----- BODY: /moof/
[Macintosh users]
1. n. The call of a semi-legendary creature, properly called the dogcow. (Some previous versions of this entry claimed, incorrectly, that Moof was the name of the creature.)
2. adj. Used to flag software
that's a hack, something untested and on the edge. On one Apple CD-ROM,
certain folders such as Tools & Apps (Moof!)
and
Development Platforms (Moof!)
, are so marked to indicate
that they contain software not fully tested or sanctioned by the powers
that be. When you open these folders you cross the boundary into
hackerland.
3. v. On the Microsoft Network,
the term ‘moof’ has gained popularity as a verb meaning
‘to be suddenly disconnected by the system’. One might say
I got moofed
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: Moore's Law DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:17 AM ----- BODY: /morz law/ prov.
Any one of several similar folk theorems that fit computing capacity or cost to a 2t exponential curve, with doubling time close to a year. The most common fits component density to such a curve (previous versions of this entry gave that form). Another variant asserts that the dollar cost of constant computing power decreases on the same curve. The original Moore's Law, first uttered in 1965 by semiconductor engineer Gordon Moore (who co-founded Intel four years later), spoke of the number of components on the lowest-cost silicon integrated circuits — but Moore's own formulation varied somewhat over the years, and reconstructing the meaning of the terminology he used in the original turns out to be fraught with difficulties. Further variants were spawned by Intel's PR department and various journalists.
It has been shown that none of the variants of Moore's Law actually fit the data very well (the price curves within DRAM generations perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of computing technology. See also Parkinson's Law of Data and Gates's Law.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: moria DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:16 AM ----- BODY: /mor´ee·@/ n.
Like nethack and rogue, one of the large PD Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's Mines of Moria; compare elder days, elvish. The game is extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for hacking. See also nethack, rogue, Angband.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: MOTAS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:15 AM ----- BODY: /moh·tahz/ n.
[Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after MOTOS and MOTSS] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also SO.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: MOTOS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:14 AM ----- BODY: /moh·tohs/ n.
[acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See MOTAS, MOTSS, SO. Less common than MOTSS or MOTAS, which has largely displaced it.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: MOTSS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:13 AM ----- BODY: /mots/ or /M·O·T·S·S/ n.
[from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex, esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See MOTOS and MOTAS, which derive from it. See also SO.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mouse ahead DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:12 AM ----- BODY: vi.
Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it can help make a WIMP environment much more usable, assuming the users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mouse belt DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:11 AM ----- BODY: n.
See rat belt.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mouse droppings DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:10 AM ----- BODY: n.
[MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mouse elbow DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:09 AM ----- BODY: n.
A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of a WIMP environment. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mouse pusher DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:08 AM ----- BODY:
[common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or appreciating the full glory of the command line.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mouso DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:07 AM ----- BODY: /mow´soh/ n.
[by analogy with ‘typo’] An error in mouse usage resulting in an inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare thinko, braino.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: MS-DOS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:06 AM ----- BODY: /M·S·dos/ n.
[MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A clone of
CP/M for the 8088 crufted together in 6 weeks by
hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle Computer Products, who called the original
QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) and is said to have regretted it
ever since. Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for
IBM on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including vaguely
Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O redirection,
and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and subsequent versions; as
a result, there are two or more incompatible versions of many system calls,
and MS-DOS programmers can never agree on basic things like what character
to use as an option switch or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting
appalling mess is now the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known
simply as DOS, which annoys people familiar with other similarly
abbreviated operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it
was attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
further annoys those who know what the term
operating system does (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set
of relatively simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS
like dose
, as in I don't work on dose, man!
,
or to compare it to a dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide
circulation among hackers exhorts: MS-DOS: Just say No!
).
See mess-dos.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mu DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:05 AM ----- BODY: /moo/
The correct answer to the classic trick question Have you
stopped beating your wife yet?
. Assuming that you have no wife or
you have never beaten your wife, the answer yes
is wrong
because it implies that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but
no
is worse because it suggests that you have one and are
still beating her. According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter
the correct answer is usually mu
, a Japanese word alleged to
mean Your question cannot be answered because it depends on
incorrect assumptions
. Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical
inadequacies in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with
enthusiasm. The word ‘mu’ is actually from Chinese, meaning
‘nothing’; it is used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In
Chinese it can also mean have not
(as in I have not
done it
), or lack of
, which may or may not be a
definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers of Japanese do not
recognize the Discordian question-denying use, which almost certainly
derives from overgeneralization of the answer in the following well-known
Rinzai Zen koan:
A monk asked Joshu, Does a dog have the Buddha nature?
Joshu
retorted, Mu!
See also has the X nature, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the Bibliography in Appendix C.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: MUD DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:04 AM ----- BODY: /muhd/ n.
[acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]
1. A class of virtual reality experiments accessible via the Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have multiple ‘locations’ like an adventure game, and may include combat, traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability for characters to build more structure onto the database that represents the existing world.
2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.
Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that game
still exist today and are sometimes generically called
BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated,
unfortunately, by earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was
trademarked to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the
motto: You haven't lived 'til you've
died on MUD!
); however, this is false —
Richard Bartle explicitly placed ‘MUD’ in the public domain in
1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark claims
on some maps and posters, which were released and created the myth.
Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD). Many of these had associated bulletin-board systems for social interaction. Because these had an image as ‘research’ they often survived administrative hostility to BBSs in general. This, together with the fact that Usenet feeds were often spotty and difficult to get in the U.K., made the MUDs major foci of hackish social interaction there.
AberMUD and other variants crossed the Atlantic around 1988 and quickly gained popularity in the U.S.; they became nuclei for large hacker communities with only loose ties to traditional hackerdom (some observers see parallels with the growth of Usenet in the early 1980s). The second wave of MUDs (TinyMUD and variants) tended to emphasize social interaction, puzzles, and cooperative world-building as opposed to combat and competition (in writing, these social MUDs are sometimes referred to as ‘MU*’, with ‘MUD’ implicitly reserved for the more game-oriented ones). By 1991, over 50% of MUD sites were of a third major variety, LPMUD, which synthesizes the combat/puzzle aspects of AberMUD and older systems with the extensibility of TinyMud. In 1996 the cutting edge of the technology is Pavel Curtis's MOO, even more extensible using a built-in object-oriented language. The trend toward greater programmability and flexibility will doubtless continue.
The state of the art in MUD design is still moving very rapidly, with new simulation designs appearing (seemingly) every month. Around 1991 there was an unsuccessful movement to deprecate the term MUD itself, as newer designs exhibit an exploding variety of names corresponding to the different simulation styles being explored. It survived. See also bonk/oif, FOD, link-dead, mudhead, talk mode.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: muddie DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:03 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. mudhead. More common in Great Britain,
possibly because system administrators there like to mutter bloody
muddies
when annoyed at the species.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mudhead DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:02 AM ----- BODY: n.
Commonly used to refer to a MUD player who eats, sleeps, and breathes MUD. Mudheads have been known to fail their degrees, drop out, etc., with the consolation, however, that they made wizard level. When encountered in person, on a MUD, or in a chat system, all a mudhead will talk about is three topics: the tactic, character, or wizard that is supposedly always unfairly stopping him/her from becoming a wizard or beating a favorite MUD; why the specific game he/she has experience with is so much better than any other; and the MUD he or she is writing or going to write because his/her design ideas are so much better than in any existing MUD. See also wannabee.
To the anthropologically literate, this term may recall the Zuni/Hopi
legend of the mudheads or koyemshi, mythical
half-formed children of an unnatural union. Figures representing them act
as clowns in Zuni sacred ceremonies. Others may recall the ‘High
School Madness’ sequence from the Firesign Theatre album
Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers, in which
there is a character named Mudhead
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: muggle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:01 AM ----- BODY:
[from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, 1998] A non-wizard. Not as disparaging as luser; implies vague pity rather than contempt. In the universe of Rowling's enormously (and deservedly) popular children's series, muggles and wizards inhabit the same modern world, but each group is ignorant of the commonplaces of the others' existence — most muggles are unaware that wizards exist, and wizards (used to magical ways of doing everything) are perplexed and fascinated by muggle artifacts.
In retrospect it seems completely inevitable that hackers would adopt this metaphor, and in hacker usage it readily forms compounds such as muggle-friendly. Compare luser, mundane, chainik, newbie.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: Multics DATE: 05/15/2003 10:38:00 AM ----- BODY: /muhl´tiks/ n.
[from MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service
]
An early timesharing operating system co-designed
by a consortium including MIT, GE, and Bell Laboratories as a successor to
CTSS. The design was first presented in 1965,
planned for operation in 1967, first operational in 1969, and took several
more years to achieve respectable performance and stability.
Multics was very innovative for its time — among other things, it provided a hierarchical file system with access control on individual files and introduced the idea of treating all devices uniformly as special files. It was also the first OS to run on a symmetric multiprocessor, and the only general-purpose system to be awarded a B2 security rating by the NSA (see Orange Book).
Bell Labs left the development effort in 1969 after judging that second-system effect had bloated Multics to the point of practical unusability. Honeywell commercialized Multics in 1972 after buying out GE's computer group, but it was never very successful: at its peak in the 1980s, there were between 75 and 100 Multics sites, each a multi-million dollar mainframe.
One of the former Multics developers from Bell Labs was Ken Thompson,
and Unix deliberately carried through and extended
many of Multics' design ideas; indeed, Thompson described the very name
‘Unix’ as a weak pun on Multics
. For this and
other reasons, aspects of the Multics design remain a topic of occasional
debate among hackers. See also brain-damaged and
GCOS.
MIT ended its development association with Multics in 1977. Honeywell sold its computer business to Bull in the mid 80s, and development on Multics was stopped in 1988. Four Multics sites were known to be still in use as late as 1998, but the last one (a Canadian military site) was decommissioned in November 2000. There is a Multics page at http://www.stratus.com/pub/vos/multics/tvv/multics.html.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: multitask DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:59 AM ----- BODY: n.
Often used of humans in the same meaning it has for computers, to describe a person doing several things at once (but see thrash). The term multiplex, from communications technology (meaning to handle more than one channel at the same time), is used similarly.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mumblage DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:58 AM ----- BODY: /muhm´bl@j/ n.
The topic of one's mumbling (see mumble).
All that mumblage
is used like all that stuff
when it is not quite clear how the subject of discussion works, or like
all that crap
when ‘mumble’ is being used as an
implicit replacement for pejoratives.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mumble DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:57 AM ----- BODY: interj.
1. Said when the correct response is too complicated to enunciate,
or the speaker has not thought it out. Often prefaces a longer answer, or
indicates a general reluctance to get into a long discussion. Don't
you think that we could improve LISP performance by using a hybrid
reference-count transaction garbage collector, if the cache is big enough
and there are some extra cache bits for the microcode to use?
Well, mumble ... I'll have to think about it.
2. [MIT] Expression of not-quite-articulated agreement, often used
as an informal vote of consensus in a meeting: So, shall we dike out
the COBOL emulation?
Mumble!
3. Sometimes used as an expression of disagreement (distinguished
from sense 2 by tone of voice and other cues). I think we should
buy a VAXVAX.
Mumble!
Common variant: mumble
frotz (see frotz; interestingly, one does
not say ‘mumble frobnitz’ even though ‘frotz’ is
short for ‘frobnitz’).
4. Yet another metasyntactic variable, like foo.
5. When used as a question (Mumble?
) means I
didn't understand you
.
6. Sometimes used in ‘public’ contexts on-line as a
placefiller for things one is barred from giving details about. For
example, a poster with pre-released hardware in his machine might say
Yup, my machine now has an extra 16M of memory, thanks to the card
I'm testing for Mumbleco.
7. A conversational wild card used to designate something one doesn't want to bother spelling out, but which can be glarked from context. Compare blurgle.
8. [XEROX PARC] A colloquialism used to suggest that further discussion would be fruitless.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: munch DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:56 AM ----- BODY: vt.
[often confused with mung, q.v.] To transform information in a serial fashion, often requiring large amounts of computation. To trace down a data structure. Related to crunch and nearly synonymous with grovel, but connotes less pain.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: munching DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:55 AM ----- BODY: n.
Exploration of security holes of someone else's computer for thrills, notoriety, or to annoy the system manager. Compare cracker. See also hacked off.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: munching squares DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
A display hack dating back to the PDP-1 (ca. 1962, reportedly discovered by Jackson Wright), which employs a trivial computation (repeatedly plotting the graph Y = X XOR T for successive values of T — see HAKMEM items 146--148) to produce an impressive display of moving and growing squares that devour the screen. The initial value of T is treated as a parameter, which, when well-chosen, can produce amazing effects. Some of these, later (re)discovered on the LISP machine, have been christened munching triangles (try AND for XOR and toggling points instead of plotting them), munching w's, and munching mazes. More generally, suppose a graphics program produces an impressive and ever-changing display of some basic form, foo, on a display terminal, and does it using a relatively simple program; then the program (or the resulting display) is likely to be referred to as munching foos. [This is a good example of the use of the word foo as a metasyntactic variable.]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: munchkin DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:53 AM ----- BODY: /muhnch´kin/ n.
[from the squeaky-voiced little people in L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz] A teenage-or-younger micro enthusiast hacking BASIC or something else equally constricted. A term of mild derision — munchkins are annoying but some grow up to be hackers after passing through a larval stage. The term urchin is also used. See also wannabee, bitty box.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mundane DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from SF fandom]
1. A person who is not in science fiction fandom.
2. A person who is not in the computer industry. In this sense,
most often an adjectival modifier as in in my mundane
life....
See also Real World,
muggle.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mung DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:51 AM ----- BODY: /muhng/ vt.
[in 1960 at MIT, Mash Until No Good
; sometime after
that the derivation from the recursive acronym
Mung Until No Good
became standard; but see
munge]
1. To make changes to a file, esp. large-scale and irrevocable changes. See BLT.
2. To destroy, usually accidentally, occasionally maliciously. The system only mungs things maliciously; this is a consequence of Finagle's Law. See scribble, mangle, trash, nuke. Reports from Usenet suggest that the pronunciation /muhnj/ is now usual in speech, but the spelling ‘mung’ is still common in program comments (compare the widespread confusion over the proper spelling of kluge).
3. In the wake of the spam epidemics of the 1990s, mung is now commonly used to describe the act of modifying an email address in a sig block in a way that human beings can readily reverse but that will fool an address harvester. Example: johnNOSPAMsmith@isp.net.
4. The kind of beans the sprouts of which are used in Chinese food. (That's their real name! Mung beans! Really!)
Like many early hacker terms, this one seems to have originated at TMRC; it was already in use there in 1958. Peter Samson (compiler of the original TMRC lexicon) thinks it may originally have been onomatopoeic for the sound of a relay spring (contact) being twanged. However, it is known that during the World Wars, ‘mung’ was U.S.: army slang for the ersatz creamed chipped beef better known as ‘SOS’, and it seems quite likely that the word in fact goes back to Scots-dialect munge.
Charles Mackay's 1874 book Lost Beauties of the English
Language defined mung
as follows:
Preterite of ming, to ming or mingle; when the substantive meaning
of mingled food of bread, potatoes, etc. thrown to poultry. In America,
mung news
is a common expression applied to false news, but
probably having its derivation from mingled (or mung) news, in which the
true and the false are so mixed up together that it is impossible to
distinguish one from another.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: munge DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:50 AM ----- BODY: /muhnj/ vt.
1. [derogatory] To imperfectly transform information.
2. A comprehensive rewrite of a routine, data structure or the whole program.
3. To modify data in some way the speaker doesn't need to go into right now or cannot describe succinctly (compare mumble).
4. To add spamblock to an email address.
This term is often confused with mung, which
probably was derived from it. However, it also appears the word munge was in common use in Scotland in the
1940s, and in Yorkshire in the 1950s, as a verb, meaning to munch up into a
masticated mess, and as a noun, meaning the result of munging something up
(the parallel with the
kluge/kludge pair is
amusing). The OED reports munge
as an archaic verb meaning
to wipe (a person's nose)
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: Murphy's Law DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:49 AM ----- BODY: prov.
The correct, original Murphy's Law reads:
If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways
can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it.
This is a
principle of defensive design, cited here because it is usually given in
mutant forms less descriptive of the challenges of design for
lusers. For example, you don't make a two-pin plug
symmetrical and then label it THIS WAY UP
; if it matters
which way it is plugged in, then you make the design asymmetrical (see also
the anecdote under magic smoke).
Edward A. Murphy, Jr. was one of McDonnell-Douglas's quality-control
engineers on the rocket-sled experiments that were done by the U.S. Air
Force in 1949 to test human acceleration tolerances (USAF project MX981).
One experiment involved a set of 16 accelerometers mounted to different
parts of the subject's body. There were two ways each sensor could be
glued to its mount, and somebody methodically installed all 16 in a
replacement set the wrong way around. Murphy then made the original form
of his pronouncement, which the test subject (Major John Paul Stapp)
mis-quoted (apparently in the more general form Whatever can go
wrong, will go wrong)
at a news conference a
few days later.
Within months ‘Murphy's Law’ had spread to various
technical cultures connected to aerospace engineering. Before too many
years had gone by variants had passed into the popular imagination,
changing as they went. Most of these are variants on Anything that
can go wrong, will
; this is more correctly referred to as
Finagle's Law. The memetic drift apparent in these
mutants clearly demonstrates Murphy's Law acting on itself!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: music DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:48 AM ----- BODY: n.
A common extracurricular interest of hackers (compare science-fiction fandom, oriental food; see also filk). Hackish folklore has long claimed that musical and programming abilities are closely related, and there has been at least one large-scale statistical study that supports this. Hackers, as a rule, like music and often develop musical appreciation in unusual and interesting directions. Folk music is very big in hacker circles; so is electronic music, and the sort of elaborate instrumental jazz/rock that used to be called ‘progressive’ and isn't recorded much any more. The hacker's musical range tends to be wide; many can listen with equal appreciation to (say) Talking Heads, Yes, Gentle Giant, Pat Metheny, Scott Joplin, Tangerine Dream, Dream Theater, King Sunny Ade, The Pretenders, Screaming Trees, or the Brandenburg Concerti. It is also apparently true that hackerdom includes a much higher concentration of talented amateur musicians than one would expect from a similar-sized control group of mundane types.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - M TITLE: mutter DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:47 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To quietly enter a command not meant for the ears, eyes, or fingers
of ordinary mortals. Often used in mutter an
incantation
. See also
wizard.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: N DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:46 AM ----- BODY: /N/ quant.
1. A large and indeterminate number of objects: There were
N bugs in that crock!
Also used in
its original sense of a variable name: This crock has
N bugs, as
N goes to infinity.
(The true
number of bugs is always at least N + 1;
see Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology.)
2. A variable whose value is inherited from the current context.
For example, when a meal is being ordered at a restaurant,
N may be understood to mean however many
people there are at the table. From the remark We'd like to order
N wonton soups and a family dinner for
N - 1
you can deduce that one
person at the table wants to eat only soup, even though you don't know how
many people there are (see great-wall).
3. Nth: adj. The ordinal counterpart of N, senses 1 and 2.
4. Now for the Nth and last
time...
In the specific context
Nth-year grad student
,
N is generally assumed to be at least 4,
and is usually 5 or more (see
tenured graduate student). See also random numbers,
two-to-the-N.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nadger DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:45 AM ----- BODY: /nad´jr/ v.
[UK, from rude slang noun nadgers for testicles; compare American &
British bollixed] Of software or
hardware (not people), to twiddle some object in a hidden manner, generally
so that it conforms better to some format. For instance, string printing
routines on 8-bit processors often take the string text from the
instruction stream, thus a print call looks like jsr
print:"Hello world"
. The print routine has to nadger the saved instruction pointer so that
the processor doesn't try to execute the text as instructions when the
subroutine returns. See adger.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nagware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:44 AM ----- BODY: /nag´weir/ n.
[Usenet] The variety of shareware that displays a large screen at the beginning or end reminding you to register, typically requiring some sort of keystroke to continue so that you can't use the software in batch mode. Compare annoyware, crippleware.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nailed to the wall DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:43 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[like a trophy] Said of a bug finally eliminated after protracted, and even heroic, effort.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nailing jelly DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:42 AM ----- BODY: vi.
See like nailing jelly to a tree.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: naive DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:41 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. Untutored in the perversities of some particular program or system; one who still tries to do things in an intuitive way, rather than the right way (in really good designs these coincide, but most designs aren't ‘really good’ in the appropriate sense). This trait is completely unrelated to general maturity or competence, or even competence at any other specific program. It is a sad commentary on the primitive state of computing that the natural opposite of this term is often claimed to be experienced user but is really more like cynical user.
2. Said of an algorithm that doesn't take advantage of some superior
but advanced technique, e.g., the bubble sort. It
may imply naivete on the part of the programmer, although there are
situations where a naive algorithm is preferred, because it is more
important to keep the code comprehensible than to go for maximum
performance. I know the linear search is naive, but in this case the
list typically only has half a dozen items.
Compare
brute force.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: naive user DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:40 AM ----- BODY: n.
A luser. Tends to imply someone who is ignorant mainly owing to inexperience. When this is applied to someone who has experience, there is a definite implication of stupidity.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: NAK DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:39 AM ----- BODY: /nak/ interj.
[from the ASCII mnemonic for 0010101]
1. On-line joke answer to ACK?: I'm
not here.
2. On-line answer to a request for chat: I'm not
available.
3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell them you don't understand their point or that they have suddenly stopped making sense. See ACK, sense
3. And then, after we recode the project in
COBOL....
Nak, Nak, Nak! I thought I heard you say
COBOL!
4. A negative answer. OK if I boot the server?
NAK!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: NANA DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:38 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet] The newsgroups news.admin.net-abuse.*, devoted to fighting spam and network abuse. Each individual newsgroup is often referred to by adding a letter to NANA. For example, NANAU would refer to news.admin.net-abuse.usenet.
When spam began to be a serious problem around 1995, and a loose
network of anti-spammers formed to combat it, spammers immediately accused
them of being the backbone cabal, or the Cabal
reborn. Though this was not true, spam-fighters ironically accepted the
label and the tag line There is No Cabal
reappeared (later,
and now commonly, abbreviated to TINC
). Nowadays the
Cabal
is generally understood to refer to the NANA regulars.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nano DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:37 AM ----- BODY: /nan´oh/ n.
[CMU: from nanosecond] A brief
period of time. Be with you in a nano
means you really will
be free shortly, i.e., implies what mainstream people mean by in a
jiffy
(whereas the hackish use of ‘jiffy’ is quite
different — see jiffy).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nano- DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:36 AM ----- BODY: pref.
[SI: the next quantifier below micro-;
meaning ×
10-9] Smaller than
micro-, and used in the same rather loose and
connotative way. Thus, one has nanotechnology
(coined by hacker K. Eric Drexler) by analogy with microtechnology; and a few machine
architectures have a nanocode level
below microcode. Tom Duff at Bell
Labs has also pointed out that Pi seconds is a nanocentury
.
See also quantifiers, pico-,
nanoacre, nanobot,
nanocomputer,
nanofortnight.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nanoacre DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:35 AM ----- BODY: /nan´oh·ay`kr/ n.
A unit (about 2 mm square) of real estate on a VLSI chip. The term gets its giggle value from the fact that VLSI nanoacres have costs in the same range as real acres once one figures in design and fabrication-setup costs.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nanobot DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:34 AM ----- BODY: /nan´oh·bot/ n.
A robot of microscopic proportions, presumably built by means of nanotechnology. As yet, only used informally (and speculatively!). Also called a nanoagent.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nanocomputer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:33 AM ----- BODY: /nan´oh·k@m·pyoo´tr/ n.
A computer with molecular-sized switching elements. Designs for mechanical nanocomputers which use single-molecule sliding rods for their logic have been proposed. The controller for a nanobot would be a nanocomputer.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nanofortnight DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:32 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Adelaide University] 1 fortnight × 10-9, or about 1.2 msec. This unit was used largely by students doing undergraduate practicals. See microfortnight, attoparsec, and micro-.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nanotechnology DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:31 AM ----- BODY: /nan'·oh·tek·no`l@·jee/ n.
A hypothetical fabrication technology in which objects are designed and built with the individual specification and placement of each separate atom. The first unequivocal nanofabrication experiments took place in 1990, for example with the deposition of individual xenon atoms on a nickel substrate to spell the logo of a certain very large computer company. Nanotechnology has been a hot topic in the hacker subculture ever since the term was coined by K. Eric Drexler in his book Engines of Creation (Anchor/Doubleday, ISBN 0-385-19973-2), where he predicted that nanotechnology could give rise to replicating assemblers, permitting an exponential growth of productivity and personal wealth (there's an authorized transcription at http://www.foresight.org/EOC/index.html). See also blue goo, gray goo, nanobot.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: narg DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:30 AM ----- BODY:
[Cambridge] Short for Not A Real Gentleman
, i.e. one
who excessively talks shop out of hours.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nasal demons DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:29 AM ----- BODY: n.
Recognized shorthand on the Usenet group comp.std.c for any unexpected behavior of a C
compiler on encountering an undefined construct. During a discussion on
that group in early 1992, a regular remarked When the compiler
encounters [a given undefined construct] it is legal for it to make demons
fly out of your nose
(the implication is that the compiler may
choose any arbitrarily bizarre way to interpret the code without violating
the ANSI C standard). Someone else followed up with a reference to
nasal demons
, which quickly became established. The
original post is web-accessible at http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&selm=10195%40ksr.com.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nastygram DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:28 AM ----- BODY: /nas´tee·gram/ n.
1. A protocol packet or item of email (the latter is also called a letterbomb) that takes advantage of misfeatures or security holes on the target system to do untoward things.
2. Disapproving mail, esp. from a net.god, pursuant to a violation of netiquette or a complaint about failure to correct some mail- or news-transmission problem. Compare shitogram, mailbomb.
3. A status report from an unhappy, and probably picky, customer.
What'd Corporate say in today's nastygram?
4. [deprecated] An error reply by mail from a daemon; in particular, a bounce message.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: Nathan Hale DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:27 AM ----- BODY: n.
An asterisk (see also splat,
ASCII). Oh, you want an etymology? Notionally,
from I regret that I have only one asterisk for my country!
,
a misquote of the famous remark uttered by Nathan Hale just before he was
hanged. Hale was a (failed) spy for the rebels in the American War of
Independence.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nature DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:26 AM ----- BODY: n.
See has the X nature.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: neat hack DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:25 AM ----- BODY: n.
[very common]
1. A clever technique.
2. A brilliant practical joke, where neatness is correlated with cleverness, harmlessness, and surprise value. Example: the Caltech Rose Bowl card display switch (see Appendix A for discussion). See also hack.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: neats vs. scruffies DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:24 AM ----- BODY: n.
The label used to refer to one of the continuing holy wars in AI research. This conflict tangles together two separate issues. One is the relationship between human reasoning and AI; ‘neats’ tend to try to build systems that ‘reason’ in some way identifiably similar to the way humans report themselves as doing, while ‘scruffies’ profess not to care whether an algorithm resembles human reasoning in the least as long as it works. More importantly, neats tend to believe that logic is king, while scruffies favor looser, more ad-hoc methods driven by empirical knowledge. To a neat, scruffy methods appear promiscuous, successful only by accident, and not productive of insights about how intelligence actually works; to a scruffy, neat methods appear to be hung up on formalism and irrelevant to the hard-to-capture ‘common sense’ of living intelligences.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: neep-neep DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:23 AM ----- BODY: /neep neep/ n.
[onomatopoeic, widely spread through SF fandom but reported to have
originated at Caltech in the 1970s] One who is fascinated by computers.
Less specific than hacker, as it need not imply more
skill than is required to play games on a PC. The derived noun neeping applies specifically to the long
conversations about computers that tend to develop in the corners at most
SF-convention parties (the term neepery is also in wide use). Fandom has a
related proverb to the effect that Hacking is a conversational black
hole!
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: neophilia DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:22 AM ----- BODY: /nee`oh·fil'·ee·@/ n.
The trait of being excited and pleased by novelty. Common among most hackers, SF fans, and members of several other connected leading-edge subcultures, including the pro-technology ‘Whole Earth’ wing of the ecology movement, space activists, many members of Mensa, and the Discordian/neo-pagan underground (see geek). All these groups overlap heavily and (where evidence is available) seem to share characteristic hacker tropisms for science fiction, music, and oriental food. The opposite tendency is neophobia.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nerd DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:21 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [mainstream slang] Pejorative applied to anyone with an above-average IQ and few gifts at small talk and ordinary social rituals.
2. [jargon] Term of praise applied (in conscious ironic reference to sense 1) to someone who knows what's really important and interesting and doesn't care to be distracted by trivial chatter and silly status games. Compare geek.
The word itself appears to derive from the lines And then,
just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a
Preep and a Proo, / A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!
in the
Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo (1950). (The
spellings ‘nurd’ and ‘gnurd’ also used to be current
at MIT, where ‘nurd’ is reported from as far back as 1957.) How
it developed its mainstream meaning is unclear, but sense 1 seems to have
entered mass culture in the early 1970s (there are reports that in the
mid-1960s it meant roughly annoying misfit
without the
connotation of intelligence.
An IEEE Spectrum article (4/95, page 16) once derived ‘nerd’ in its variant form ‘knurd’ from the word ‘drunk’ backwards, but this bears all the hallmarks of a bogus folk etymology. Apparently this etymology was folklore at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute around 1979.
Hackers developed sense 2 in self-defense perhaps ten years later,
and some actually wear Nerd Pride
buttons, only half as a
joke. At MIT one can find not only buttons but (what else?) pocket
protectors bearing the slogan and the MIT seal.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nerd knob DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:20 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Cisco] A command in a complex piece of software which is more likely to be used by an extremely experienced user to tweak a setting of one sort or another - a setting which the average user may not even know exists. Nerd knobs tend to be toggles, turning on or off a particular, specific, narrowly defined behavior. Special case of knobs.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: net.- DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:19 AM ----- BODY: /net dot/ pref.
[Usenet] Prefix used to describe people and events related to
Usenet. From the time before the Great Renaming,
when most non-local newsgroups had names beginning net.
.
Includes net.gods, net.goddesses (various charismatic net.women
with circles of on-line admirers), net.lurkers (see
lurker), net.person, net.parties (a synonym for
boink, sense 2), and many similar constructs. See
also net.police.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: net.god DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:18 AM ----- BODY: /net god/ n.
Accolade referring to anyone who satisfies some combination of the following conditions: has been visible on Usenet for more than 5 years, ran one of the original backbone sites, moderated an important newsgroup, wrote news software, or knows Gene, Mark, Rick, Mel, Henry, Chuq, and Greg personally. See demigod. Net.goddesses such as Rissa or the Slime Sisters have (so far) been distinguished more by personality than by authority.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: net.personality DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:17 AM ----- BODY: /net per`sn·al'·@·tee/ n.
Someone who has made a name for him or herself on Usenet, through either longevity or attention-getting posts, but doesn't meet the other requirements of net.godhood.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: net.police DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:16 AM ----- BODY: /net·p@·lees'/ n.
(var.: net.cops) Those Usenet readers who feel it is their responsibility to pounce on and flame any posting which they regard as offensive or in violation of their understanding of netiquette. Generally used sarcastically or pejoratively. Also spelled ‘net police’. See also net.-, code police.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: netburp DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IRC] When netlag gets really bad, and delays between servers exceed a certain threshold, the IRC network effectively becomes partitioned for a period of time, and large numbers of people seem to be signing off at the same time and then signing back on again when things get better. An instance of this is called a netburp (or, sometimes, netsplit).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: netdead DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:14 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IRC] The state of someone who signs off IRC,
perhaps during a netburp, and doesn't sign back on
until later. In the interim, he is dead to the net
.
Compare link-dead.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nethack DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:13 AM ----- BODY: /net´hak/ n.
[Unix] A dungeon game similar to rogue but more elaborate, distributed in C source over Usenet and very popular at Unix sites and on PC-class machines (nethack is probably the most widely distributed of the freeware dungeon games). The earliest versions, written by Jay Fenlason and later considerably enhanced by Andries Brouwer, were simply called ‘hack’. The name changed when maintenance was taken over by a group of hackers originally organized by Mike Stephenson. There is now an official site at http://www.nethack.org/. See also moria, rogue, Angband.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: netiquette DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:12 AM ----- BODY: /net´ee·ket/ or /net´i·ket/ n.
[Coined by Chuq von Rospach c.1983] [portmanteau, network + etiquette] The conventions of politeness recognized on Usenet, such as avoidance of cross-posting to inappropriate groups and refraining from commercial pluggery outside the biz groups.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: netlag DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:11 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IRC, MUD] A condition that occurs when the delays in the
IRC network or on a MUD
become severe enough that servers briefly lose and then reestablish
contact, causing messages to be delivered in bursts, often with delays of
up to a minute. (Note that this term has nothing to do with mainstream
jet lag
, a condition which hackers tend not to be much
bothered by.) Often shortened to just ‘lag’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: netnews DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:10 AM ----- BODY: /net´n[y]ooz/ n.
1. The software that makes Usenet run.
2. The content of Usenet. I read netnews right after my mail
most mornings.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: Netscrape DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:09 AM ----- BODY: n.
[sometimes elaborated to Netscrape Fornicator, also Nutscrape] Standard name-of-insult for Netscape Navigator/Communicator, Netscape's overweight Web browser. Compare Internet Exploiter.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: netsplit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:08 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. netburp.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: netter DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:07 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Loosely, anyone with a network address.
2. More specifically, a Usenet regular. Most
often found in the plural. If you post that in
a technical group, you're going to be flamed by angry netters for the rest
of time!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: network address DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:06 AM ----- BODY: n.
(also net address) As used by hackers, means an address on ‘the’ network (see the network; this used to include bang path addresses but now always implies an Internet address). Net addresses are often used in email text as a more concise substitute for personal names; indeed, hackers may come to know each other quite well by network names without ever learning each others' ‘legal’ monikers. Display of a network address (e.g. on business cards) used to function as an important hacker identification signal, like lodge pins among Masons or tie-dyed T-shirts among Grateful Dead fans. In the day of pervasive Internet this is less true, but you can still be fairly sure that anyone with a network address handwritten on his or her convention badge is a hacker.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: network meltdown DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:05 AM ----- BODY: n.
A state of complete network overload; the network equivalent of thrashing. This may be induced by a Chernobyl packet. See also broadcast storm, kamikaze packet.
Network meltdown is often a result of network designs that are optimized for a steady state of moderate load and don't cope well with the very jagged, bursty usage patterns of the real world. One amusing instance of this is triggered by the popular and very bloody shoot-'em-up game Doom on the PC. When used in multiplayer mode over a network, the game uses broadcast packets to inform other machines when bullets are fired. This causes problems with weapons like the chain gun which fire rapidly — it can blast the network into a meltdown state just as easily as it shreds opposing monsters.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: New Jersey DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:04 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[primarily Stanford/Silicon Valley] Brain-damaged or of poor
design. This refers to the allegedly wretched quality of such software as
C, C++, and Unix (which originated at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New
Jersey). This compiler bites the bag, but what can you expect from
a compiler designed in New Jersey?
Compare
Berkeley Quality Software. See also
Unix conspiracy.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: New Testament DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:03 AM ----- BODY: n.
[C programmers] The second edition of K&R's The C Programming Language (Prentice-Hall, 1988; ISBN 0-13-110362-8), describing ANSI Standard C. See K&R; this version is also called «K&R2’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: newbie DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:02 AM ----- BODY: /n[y]oo´bee/ n.
[very common; orig. from British public-school and military slang
variant of ‘new boy’] A Usenet neophyte. This term surfaced in
the newsgroup talk.bizarre but is now in wide use (the
combination clueless newbie
is especially common). Criteria
for being considered a newbie vary wildly; a person can be called a newbie
in one newsgroup while remaining a respected regular in another. The label
newbie is sometimes applied as a
serious insult to a person who has been around Usenet for a long time but
who carefully hides all evidence of having a clue. See
B1FF; see also gnubie.
Compare chainik,
luser.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: newgroup wars DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:01 AM ----- BODY: /n[y]oo´groop worz/ n.
[Usenet] The salvos of dueling newgroup
and rmgroup
messages sometimes exchanged by persons on opposite sides of a dispute over
whether a newsgroup should be created net-wide, or
(even more frequently) whether an obsolete one should be removed. These
usually settle out within a week or two as it becomes clear whether the
group has a natural constituency (usually, it doesn't). At times,
especially in the completely anarchic alt hierarchy, the names of newsgroups
themselves become a form of comment or humor; e.g., the group alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork which
originated as a birthday joke for a Muppets fan, or any number of
specialized abuse groups named after particularly notorious
flamers, e.g., alt.weemba.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: newline DATE: 05/15/2003 10:37:00 AM ----- BODY: /n[y]oo´li:n/ n.
1. [techspeak, primarily Unix] The ASCII LF character (0001010), used under Unix as a text line terminator. Though the term newline appears in ASCII standards, it never caught on in the general computing world before Unix.
2. More generally, any magic character, character sequence, or operation (like Pascal's writeln procedure) required to terminate a text record or separate lines. See crlf.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: NeWS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:59 AM ----- BODY: /nee´wis/, /n[y]oo´is/ or /n[y]ooz/ n.
[acronym; the Network Window System
] The road not
taken in window systems, an elegant PostScript-based
environment that would almost certainly have won the standards war with
X if it hadn't been
proprietary to Sun Microsystems. There is a lesson
here that too many software vendors haven't yet heeded. Many hackers
insist on the two-syllable pronunciations above as a way of distinguishing
NeWS from Usenet news (the netnews software).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: newsfroup DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:58 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet] Silly synonym for newsgroup, originally a typo but now in regular use on Usenet's talk.bizarre, and other lunatic-fringe groups. Compare hing, grilf, pr0n and filk.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: newsgroup DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:57 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet] One of Usenet's huge collection of topic groups or fora. Usenet groups can be unmoderated (anyone can post) or moderated (submissions are automatically directed to a moderator, who edits or filters and then posts the results). Some newsgroups have parallel mailing lists for Internet people with no netnews access, with postings to the group automatically propagated to the list and vice versa. Some moderated groups (especially those which are actually gatewayed Internet mailing lists) are distributed as digests, with groups of postings periodically collected into a single large posting with an index.
Among the best-known are comp.lang.c (the C-language forum), comp.arch (on computer architectures), comp.unix.wizards (for Unix wizards), rec.arts.sf.written and siblings (for science-fiction fans), and talk.politics.misc (miscellaneous political discussions and flamage).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nick DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:56 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IRC; very common] Short for nickname. On IRC, every user must pick a nick, which is sometimes the same as the user's real name or login name, but is often more fanciful. Compare handle, screen name.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nickle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:55 AM ----- BODY: /ni´kl/ n.
[from ‘nickel’, common name for the U.S. 5-cent coin] A nybble + 1; 5 bits. Reported among developers for Mattel's GI 1600 (the Intellivision games processor), a chip with 16-bit-wide RAM but 10-bit-wide ROM. See also deckle, and nybble for names of other bit units.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: night mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
See phase (of people).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: Nightmare File System DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:53 AM ----- BODY: n.
Pejorative hackerism for Sun's Network File System (NFS). In any nontrivial network of Suns where there is a lot of NFS cross-mounting, when one Sun goes down, the others often freeze up. Some machine tries to access the down one, and (getting no response) repeats indefinitely. This causes it to appear dead to some messages (what is actually happening is that it is locked up in what should have been a brief excursion to a higher spl level). Then another machine tries to reach either the down machine or the pseudo-down machine, and itself becomes pseudo-down. The first machine to discover the down one is now trying both to access the down one and to respond to the pseudo-down one, so it is even harder to reach. This situation snowballs very quickly, and soon the entire network of machines is frozen — worst of all, the user can't even abort the file access that started the problem! Many of NFS's problems are excused by partisans as being an inevitable result of its statelessness, which is held to be a great feature (critics, of course, call it a great misfeature). (ITS partisans are apt to cite this as proof of Unix's alleged bogosity; ITS had a working NFS-like shared file system with none of these problems in the early 1970s.) See also broadcast storm.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: NIL DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:52 AM ----- BODY: /nil/
No. Used in reply to a question, particularly one asked using the ‘-P’ convention. Most hackers assume this derives simply from LISP terminology for ‘false’ (see also T), but NIL as a negative reply was well-established among radio hams decades before the advent of LISP. The historical connection between early hackerdom and the ham radio world was strong enough that this may have been an influence.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: Ninety-Ninety Rule DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:51 AM ----- BODY: n.
The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the
development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90%
of the development time.
Attributed to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs,
and popularized by Jon Bentley's September 1985 Bumper-Sticker
Computer Science column in Communications of the
ACM. It was there called the Rule of
Credibility
, a name which seems not to have stuck. Other maxims in
the same vein include the law attributed to the early British computer
scientist Douglas Hartree: The time from now until the completion of
the project tends to become constant.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nipple mouse DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:50 AM ----- BODY: n.
Var. clit mouse, clitoris Common term for the pointing device used on IBM ThinkPads and a few other laptop computers. The device, which sits between the ‘g’ and ‘h’ keys on the keyboard, indeed resembles a rubber nipple intended to be tweaked by a forefinger. Many hackers consider these superior to the glide pads found on most laptops, which are harder to control precisely.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: NMI DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:49 AM ----- BODY: /N·M·I/ n.
Non-Maskable Interrupt. An IRQ 7 on the PDP-11 or 680[01234]0; the NMI line on an 80[1234]86. In contrast with a priority interrupt (which might be ignored, although that is unlikely), an NMI is never ignored. Except, that is, on clone boxes, where NMI is often ignored on the motherboard because flaky hardware can generate many spurious ones.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: no-op DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:48 AM ----- BODY: /noh´op/ n.,v.
alt.: NOP /nop/ [no operation]
1. A machine instruction that does nothing (sometimes used in assembler-level programming as filler for data or patch areas, or to overwrite code to be removed in binaries).
2. A person who contributes nothing to a project, or has nothing
going on upstairs, or both. As in He's a no-op.
3. Any operation or sequence of operations with no effect, such as
circling the block without finding a parking space, or putting money into a
vending machine and having it fall immediately into the coin-return box, or
asking someone for help and being told to go away. Oh, well, that
was a no-op.
Hot-and-sour soup (see
great-wall) that is insufficiently either is
no-op soup; so is wonton soup if
everybody else is having hot-and-sour.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: noddy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:47 AM ----- BODY: /nod´ee/ adj.
[UK: from the children's books]
1. Small and un-useful, but demonstrating a point. Noddy programs
are often written by people learning a new language or system. The
archetypal noddy program is hello world. Noddy code
may be used to demonstrate a feature or bug of a compiler. May be used of
real hardware or software to imply that it isn't worth using. This
editor's a bit noddy.
2. A program that is more or less instant to produce. In this use,
the term does not necessarily connote uselessness, but describes a
hack sufficiently trivial that it can be written and
debugged while carrying on (and during the space of) a normal conversation.
I'll just throw together a noddy awk script
to dump all the first fields.
In North America this might be called
a mickey mouse program. See
toy program.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: non-optimal solution DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:46 AM ----- BODY: n.
(also sub-optimal solution) An astoundingly stupid way to do something. This term is generally used in deadpan sarcasm, as its impact is greatest when the person speaking looks completely serious. Compare stunning. See also Bad Thing.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nonlinear DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:45 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[scientific computation]
1. Behaving in an erratic and unpredictable fashion; unstable. When used to describe the behavior of a machine or program, it suggests that said machine or program is being forced to run far outside of design specifications. This behavior may be induced by unreasonable inputs, or may be triggered when a more mundane bug sends the computation far off from its expected course.
2. When describing the behavior of a person, suggests a tantrum or a
flame. When you talk to Bob, don't mention
the drug problem or he'll go nonlinear for hours.
In this context,
go nonlinear connotes ‘blow up
out of proportion’ (proportion connotes linearity).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nontrivial DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:44 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Requiring real thought or significant computing power. Often used
as an understated way of saying that a problem is quite difficult or
impractical, or even entirely unsolvable (Proving P=NP is
nontrivial
). The preferred emphatic form is decidedly nontrivial. See
trivial, uninteresting,
interesting.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: not entirely unlike X DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:43 AM ----- BODY:
Used ironically of things which are in fact almost entirely unlike
X, except for one feature which the speaker clearly regards as
insignificant. That is not entirely unlike cool...at least
it's small.
Comes directly from the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy
scene in which the food synthesizer on the starship Heart of
Gold dispenses something almost, but not quite, entirely
unlike tea
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: not ready for prime time DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:42 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Usable, but only just so; not very robust; for internal use only.
Said of a program or device. Often connotes that the thing will be made
more solid Real Soon Now. This term comes from the
ensemble name of the original cast of Saturday Night
Live, the Not Ready for Prime Time Players
. It
has extra flavor for hackers because of the special (though now
semi-obsolescent) meaning of prime time. Compare
beta.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: notwork DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:41 AM ----- BODY: /not´werk/ n.
A network, when it is acting flaky or is down. Compare nyetwork. Said at IBM to have originally referred to a particular period of flakiness on IBM's VNET corporate network ca. 1988; but there are independent reports of the term from elsewhere.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: NP- DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:40 AM ----- BODY: /N·P/ pref.
Extremely. Used to modify adjectives describing a level or quality
of difficulty; the connotation is often ‘more so than it should
be’. This is generalized from the computer-science terms NP-hard and NP-complete; NP-complete problems all seem to
be very hard, but so far no one has found a proof that they are. NP is the
set of Nondeterministic-Polynomial problems, those that can be completed
by a nondeterministic Turing machine in an amount of time that is a
polynomial function of the size of the input; a solution for one
NP-complete problem would solve all the others. Coding a BitBlt
implementation to perform correctly in every case is
NP-annoying.
Note, however, that strictly speaking this usage is misleading; there are plenty of easy problems in class NP. NP-complete problems are hard not because they are in class NP, but because they are the hardest problems in class NP.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: NSA line eater DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
The National Security Agency trawling program sometimes assumed to be reading the net for the U.S. Government's spooks. Most hackers used to think it was mythical but believed in acting as though existed just in case. Since the mid-1990s it has gradually become known that the NSA actually does this, quite illegally, through its Echelon program.
The standard countermeasure is to put loaded phrases like ‘KGB’, ‘Uzi’, ‘nuclear materials’, ‘Palestine’, ‘cocaine’, and ‘assassination’ in their sig blocks in a (probably futile) attempt to confuse and overload the creature. The GNU version of EMACS actually has a command that randomly inserts a bunch of insidious anarcho-verbiage into your edited text.
As far back as the 1970s there was a mainstream variant of this myth involving a ‘Trunk Line Monitor’, which supposedly used speech recognition to extract words from telephone trunks. This is much harder than noticing keywords in email, and most of the people who originally propagated it had no idea of then-current technology or the storage, signal-processing, or speech recognition needs of such a project. On the basis of mass-storage costs alone it would have been cheaper to hire 50 high-school students and just let them listen in.
Twenty years and several orders of technological magnitude later, however, there are clear indications that the NSA has actually deployed such filtering (again, very much against U.S. law). In 2000, the FBI wants to get into this act with its ‘Carnivore’ surveillance system.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: NSP DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:38 AM ----- BODY: /N·S·P/ n.
Common abbreviation for ‘Network Service Provider’, one of the big national or regional companies that maintains a portion of the Internet backbone and resells connectivity to ISPs. In 1996, major NSPs include ANS, MCI, UUNET, and Sprint. An Internet wholesaler.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nude DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:37 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Said of machines delivered without an operating system (compare
bare metal). We ordered 50 systems, but they
all arrived nude, so we had to spend an extra weekend with the installation
disks.
This usage is a recent innovation reflecting the fact that
most IBM-PC clones are now delivered with an operating system pre-installed
at the factory. Other kinds of hardware are still normally delivered
without OS, so this term is particular to PC support groups.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nugry DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:36 AM ----- BODY: /n[y]oo´gree/
[Usenet, ‘newbie’ + ‘-gry’] n. A newbie who posts a
FAQ in the rec.puzzles newsgroup, especially if it
is a variant of the notorious trick question: Think of words ending
in ‘gry’. Angry and hungry are two of them. There are three
words in the English language. What is the third word?
In the
newsgroup, the canonical answer is of course ‘nugry’
itself. Plural is nusgry /n[y]oos´gree/.
2. adj. Having the qualities of a nugry.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nuke DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:35 AM ----- BODY: /n[y]ook/ vt.
[common]
1. To intentionally delete the entire contents of a given directory
or storage volume. On Unix,
Never
used for accidental deletion; contrast blow away.
rm -r
/usr
will nuke everything in the usr filesystem.
2. Syn. for dike, applied to smaller things
such as files, features, or code sections. Often used to express a final
verdict. What do you want me to do with that 80-meg session
file?
Nuke it.
3. Used of processes as well as files; nuke is a frequent verbal
alias for kill -9
on Unix.
4. On IBM PCs, a bug that results in fandango on core can trash the operating system, including the FAT (the in-core copy of the disk block chaining information). This can utterly scramble attached disks, which are then said to have been nuked. This term is also used of analogous lossages on Macintoshes and other micros without memory protection.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: number-crunching DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:34 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] Computations of a numerical nature, esp. those that make extensive use of floating-point numbers. The only thing Fortrash is good for. This term is in widespread informal use outside hackerdom and even in mainstream slang, but has additional hackish connotations: namely, that the computations are mindless and involve massive use of brute force. This is not always evil, esp. if it involves ray tracing or fractals or some other use that makes pretty pictures, esp. if such pictures can be used as screen backgrounds. See also crunch.
Hydrodynamic number-crunching.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 74-12-29)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: numbers DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:33 AM ----- BODY: n.
[scientific computation] Output of a computation that may not be significant results but at least indicate that the program is running. May be used to placate management, grant sponsors, etc. Making numbers means running a program because output — any output, not necessarily meaningful output — is needed as a demonstration of progress. See pretty pictures, math-out, social science number.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: NUXI problem DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:32 AM ----- BODY: /nuk´see pro´bl@m/ n.
Refers to the problem of transferring data between machines with
differing byte-order. The string UNIX
might look like
NUXI
on a machine with a different byte sex (e.g., when transferring data from a
little-endian to a
big-endian, or vice-versa). See also
middle-endian, swab, and
bytesexual.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nybble DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:31 AM ----- BODY: /nib´l/ (alt.: nibble) n.
[from v. nibble by analogy with ‘bite’
→ ‘byte’] Four bits; one hex digit;
a half-byte. Though ‘byte’ is now techspeak, this useful
relative is still jargon. Compare byte; see also
bit. The more mundane spelling nibble
is also commonly used. Apparently the ‘nybble’ spelling is
uncommon in Commonwealth Hackish, as British orthography would suggest the
pronunciation /ni:´bl/.
Following ‘bit’, ‘byte’ and ‘nybble’ there have been quite a few analogical attempts to construct unambiguous terms for bit blocks of other sizes. All of these are strictly jargon, not techspeak, and not very common jargon at that (most hackers would recognize them in context but not use them spontaneously). We collect them here for reference together with the ambiguous techspeak terms ‘word’, ‘half-word’, ‘double word’, and ‘quad’ or quad word; some (indicated) have substantial information separate entries.
2 bits: | crumb, quad, quarter, tayste, tydbit, morsel |
4 bits: | nybble |
5 bits: | nickle |
10 bits: | deckle |
16 bits: | playte, chawmp (on a 32-bit machine), word (on a 16-bit machine), half-word (on a 32-bit machine). |
18 bits: | chawmp (on a 36-bit machine), half-word (on a 36-bit machine) |
32 bits: | dynner, gawble (on a 32-bit machine), word (on a 32-bit machine), longword (on a 16-bit machine). |
36 bits: | word (on a 36-bit machine) |
48 bits: | gawble (under circumstances that remain obscure) |
64 bits: | double word (on a 32-bit machine) quad (on a 16-bit machine) |
128 bits: | quad (on a 32-bit machine) |
The fundamental motivation for most of these jargon terms (aside from the normal hackerly enjoyment of punning wordplay) is the extreme ambiguity of the term word and its derivatives.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - N TITLE: nyetwork DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:30 AM ----- BODY: /nyet´werk/ n.
[from Russian ‘nyet’ = no] A network, when it is acting flaky or is down. Compare notwork.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: Ob- DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:29 AM ----- BODY: /ob/ pref.
Obligatory. A piece of netiquette acknowledging that the author has been straying from the newsgroup's charter topic. For example, if a posting in alt.sex is a response to a part of someone else's posting that has nothing particularly to do with sex, the author may append ‘ObSex’ (or ‘Obsex’) and toss off a question or vignette about some unusual erotic act. It is considered a sign of great winnitude when one's Obs are more interesting than other people's whole postings.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: Obfuscated C Contest DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
(in full, the ‘International Obfuscated C Code Contest’, or IOCCC) An annual contest run since 1984 over Usenet by Landon Curt Noll and friends. The overall winner is whoever produces the most unreadable, creative, and bizarre (but working) C program; various other prizes are awarded at the judges' whim. C's terse syntax and macro-preprocessor facilities give contestants a lot of maneuvering room. The winning programs often manage to be simultaneously (a) funny, (b) breathtaking works of art, and (c) horrible examples of how not to code in C.
This relatively short and sweet entry might help convey the flavor of obfuscated C: /* * HELLO WORLD program * by Jack Applin and Robert Heckendorn, 1985 * (Note: depends on being able to modify elements of argv[], * which is not guaranteed by ANSI and often not possible.) */ main(v,c)char**c;{for(v[c++]="Hello, world!\n)"; (!!c)[*c]&&(v--||--c&&execlp(*c,*c,c[!!c]+!!c,!c)); **c=!c)write(!!*c,*c,!!**c);}
Here's another good one: /* * Program to compute an approximation of pi * by Brian Westley, 1988 * (requires pcc macro concatenation; try gcc -traditional-cpp) */ #define _ -F<00||--F-OO--; int F=00,OO=00; main(){F_OO();printf("%1.3f\n",4.*-F/OO/OO);}F_OO() { _-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_ }
Note that this program works by computing its own area. For more digits, write a bigger program. See also hello world.
The IOCCC has an official home page at http://www.ioccc.org/.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: obi-wan error DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:27 AM ----- BODY: /oh´bee·won` er'@r/ n.
[RPI, from off-by-one and the Obi-Wan Kenobi character in Star Wars] A loop of some sort in which the index is off by
1. Common when the index should have started from 0 but instead started from
2. A kind of off-by-one error. See also zeroth.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: Objectionable-C DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:26 AM ----- BODY: n.
Hackish take on Objective-C
, the name of an
object-oriented dialect of C in competition with the better-known C++ (it
is used to write native applications on the NeXT machine). Objectionable-C
uses a Smalltalk-like syntax, but lacks the flexibility of Smalltalk method
calls, and (like many such efforts) comes frustratingly close to attaining
the Right Thing without actually doing so.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: obscure DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:25 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Used in an exaggeration of its normal meaning, to imply total
incomprehensibility. The reason for that last crash is
obscure.
The
find1
command's syntax is obscure!
The phrase moderately obscure implies that something could
be figured out but probably isn't worth the trouble. The construction
obscure in the extreme is the
preferred emphatic form.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: octal forty DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:24 AM ----- BODY: /ok´tl for´tee/ n.
Hackish way of saying I'm drawing a blank.
Octal 40
is the ASCII space character, 0100000; by an odd
coincidence, hex 40 (01000000) is the
EBCDIC space character. See
wall.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: off the trolley DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:23 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Describes the behavior of a program that malfunctions and goes catatonic, but doesn't actually crash or abort. See glitch, bug, deep space, wedged.
This term is much older than computing, and is (uncommon) slang elsewhere. A trolley is the small wheel that trolls, or runs against, the heavy wire that carries the current to run a streetcar. It's at the end of the long pole (the trolley pole) that reaches from the roof of the streetcar to the overhead line. When the trolley stops making contact with the wire (from passing through a switch, going over bumpy track, or whatever), the streetcar comes to a halt, (usually) without crashing. The streetcar is then said to be off the trolley, or off the wire. Later on, trolley came to mean the streetcar itself. Since streetcars became common in the 1890s, the term is more than 100 years old. Nowadays, trolleys are only seen on historic streetcars, since modern streetcars use pantographs to contact the wire.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: off-by-one error DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:22 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] Exceedingly common error induced in many ways, such as by
starting at 0 when you should have started at 1 or vice-versa, or by
writing < N
instead of <= N
or vice-versa. Also applied to giving
something to the person next to the one who should have gotten it. Often
confounded with fencepost error, which is properly a
particular subtype of it.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: offline DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:21 AM ----- BODY: adv.
Not now or not here. Let's take this discussion
offline.
Specifically used on Usenet to
suggest that a discussion be moved off a public newsgroup to email.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: ogg DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:20 AM ----- BODY: /og/ v.
[CMU]
1. In the multi-player space combat game Netrek, to execute kamikaze
attacks against enemy ships which are carrying armies or occupying
strategic positions. Named during a game in which one of the players
repeatedly used the tactic while playing Orion ship G, showing up in the
player list as Og
. This trick has been roundly denounced by
those who would return to the good old days when the tactic of dogfighting
was dominant, but as Sun Tzu wrote, What is of supreme importance in
war is to attack the enemy's strategy, not his tactics.
However,
the traditional answer to the newbie question What does ogg
mean?
is just Pick up some armies and I'll show you.
2. In other games, to forcefully attack an opponent with the expectation that the resources expended will be renewed faster than the opponent will be able to regain his previous advantage. Taken more seriously as a tactic since it has gained a simple name.
3. To do anything forcefully, possibly without consideration of the
drain on future resources. I guess I'd better go ogg the problem
set that's due tomorrow.
Whoops! I looked down at the map
for a sec and almost ogged that oncoming car.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Misc TITLE: -oid DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:19 AM ----- BODY: suff.
[from Greek suffix -oid = in the image of]
1. Used as in mainstream slang English to indicate a poor imitation,
a counterfeit, or some otherwise slightly bogus resemblance. Hackers will
happily use it with all sorts of non-Greco/Latin stem words that wouldn't
keep company with it in mainstream English. For example, He's a
nerdoid
means that he superficially resembles a nerd but can't make
the grade; a modemoid might be a
300-baud box (Real Modems run at 28.8 or up); a computeroid might be any
bitty box. The word keyboid
could be used to describe a chiclet keyboard, but
would have to be written; spoken, it would confuse the listener as to the
speaker's city of origin.
2. More specifically, an indicator for ‘resembling an android’ which in the past has been confined to science-fiction fans and hackers. It too has recently (in 1991) started to go mainstream (most notably in the term ‘trendoid’ for victims of terminal hipness). This is probably traceable to the popularization of the term droid in Star Wars and its sequels. (See also windoid.)
Coinages in both forms have been common in science fiction for at least fifty years, and hackers (who are often SF fans) have probably been making ‘-oid’ jargon for almost that long [though GLS and I can personally confirm only that they were already common in the mid-1970s —ESR].
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: old fart DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:18 AM ----- BODY: n.
Tribal elder. A title self-assumed with remarkable frequency by (esp.) Usenetters who have been programming for more than about 25 years; often appears in sig blocks attached to Jargon File contributions of great archeological significance. This is a term of insult in the second or third person but one of pride in first person.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: Old Testament DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:17 AM ----- BODY: n.
[C programmers] The first edition of K&R, the sacred text describing Classic C.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: on the gripping hand DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:16 AM ----- BODY:
In the progression that starts On the one hand...
and
continues On the other hand...
mainstream English may add
on the third hand...
even though most people don't have
three hands. Among hackers, it is just as likely to be on the
gripping hand
. This metaphor supplied the title of Larry Niven
& Jerry Pournelle's 1993 SF novel The Gripping Hand
which involved a species of hostile aliens with three arms (the same
species, in fact, referenced in juggling eggs). As
with TANSTAAFL and con, this
usage became one of the naturalized imports from SF fandom frequently
observed among hackers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: one-banana problem DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
At mainframe shops, where the computers have operators for routine
administrivia, the programmers and hardware people tend to look down on the
operators and claim that a trained monkey could do their job. It is
frequently observed that the incentives that would be offered said monkeys
can be used as a scale to describe the difficulty of a task. A one-banana
problem is simple; hence, It's only a one-banana job at the most;
what's taking them so long?
At IBM, folklore divides the world into
one-, two-, and three-banana problems. Other cultures have different
hierarchies and may divide them more finely; at ICL, for example, five
grapes (a bunch) equals a banana. Their upper limit for the in-house
sysapes is said to be two bananas and three grapes
(another source claims it's three bananas and one grape, but observes
However, this is subject to local variations, cosmic rays and
ISO
). At a complication level any higher than that, one asks the
manufacturers to send someone around to check things.
See also Infinite-Monkey Theorem.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: one-line fix DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:14 AM ----- BODY: n.
Used (often sarcastically) of a change to a program that is thought to be trivial or insignificant right up to the moment it crashes the system. Usually ‘cured’ by another one-line fix. See also I didn't change anything!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: one-liner wars DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:13 AM ----- BODY: n.
A game popular among hackers who code in the language APL (see write-only language and line noise). The objective is to see who can code the most interesting and/or useful routine in one line of operators chosen from APL's exceedingly hairy primitive set. A similar amusement was practiced among TECO hackers and is now popular among Perl aficionados.
Ken Iverson, the inventor of APL, has been credited with a one-liner that, given a number N, produces a list of the prime numbers from 1 to N inclusive. It looks like this: (2=0+.=T∅.|T)/T←ιN
Here's a Perl program that prints primes: perl -wle '(1 x $_) !~ /^(11+)\1+$/ && print while ++ $_'
In the Perl world this game is sometimes called Perl Golf because the player with the fewest (key)strokes wins.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: ooblick DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:12 AM ----- BODY: /oo´blik/ n.
[from the Dr. Seuss title Bartholomew and the Oobleck; the spelling ‘oobleck’ is still current in the mainstream] A bizarre semi-liquid sludge made from cornstarch and water. Enjoyed among hackers who make batches during playtime at parties for its amusing and extremely non-Newtonian behavior; it pours and splatters, but resists rapid motion like a solid and will even crack when hit by a hammer. Often found near lasers.
Here is a field-tested ooblick recipe contributed by GLS:
1 cup cornstarch
1 cup baking soda
3/4 cup water
N drops of food coloring
This recipe isn't quite as non-Newtonian as a pure cornstarch ooblick, but has an appropriately slimy feel.
Some, however, insist that the notion of an ooblick recipe is far too mechanical, and that it is best to add the water in small increments so that the various mixed states the cornstarch goes through as it becomes ooblick can be grokked in fullness by many hands. For optional ingredients of this experience, see the Ceremonial Chemicals section of Appendix B.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: OP DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:11 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet; common] Abbreviation for original poster
, the
originator of a particular thread.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: op DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:10 AM ----- BODY: /op/ n.
1. In England and Ireland, common verbal abbreviation for ‘operator’, as in system operator. Less common in the U.S., where sysop seems to be preferred.
2. [IRC] Someone who is endowed with privileges on IRC, not limited to a particular channel. These are generally people who are in charge of the IRC server at their particular site. Sometimes used interchangeably with CHOP. Compare sysop.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: open DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:09 AM ----- BODY: n.
Abbreviation for ‘open (or left) parenthesis’ —
used when necessary to eliminate oral ambiguity. To read aloud the LISP
form (DEFUN FOO (X) (PLUS X 1)) one might say: Open defun foo, open
eks close, open, plus eks one, close close.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: open source DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:08 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common; also adj. open-source] Term coined in March 1998
following the Mozilla release to describe software distributed in source
under licenses guaranteeing anybody rights to freely use, modify, and
redistribute, the code. The intent was to be able to sell the hackers'
ways of doing software to industry and the mainstream by avoiding the
negative connotations (to suits) of the term
free software
. For discussion of the
follow-on tactics and their consequences, see the Open Source Initiative
site.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: open switch DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:07 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM: prob.: from railroading] An unresolved question, issue, or problem.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: operating system DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:06 AM ----- BODY: n.
[techspeak] (Often abbreviated ‘OS’) The foundation software of a machine; that which schedules tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the user between applications. The facilities an operating system provides and its general design philosophy exert an extremely strong influence on programming style and on the technical cultures that grow up around its host machines. Hacker folklore has been shaped primarily by the Unix, ITS, TOPS-10, TOPS-20/TWENEX, WAITS, CP/M, MS-DOS, and Multics operating systems (most importantly by ITS and Unix). See also timesharing.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: operator headspace DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:05 AM ----- BODY:
[common] More fully, operator headspace error
. Synonym
for pilot error — a dumb move, especially one
pulled by someone who ought to know better. Often used reflexively.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: optical diff DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:04 AM ----- BODY: n.
See vdiff.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: optical grep DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:03 AM ----- BODY: n.
See vgrep.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: optimism DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:02 AM ----- BODY: n.
What a programmer is full of after fixing the last bug and before discovering the next last bug. Fred Brooks's book The Mythical Man-Month (See Brooks's Law) contains the following paragraph that describes this extremely well:
All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially
attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the
hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus
on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers
are younger, and the young are always optimists. But however the selection
process works, the result is indisputable: This time it will surely
run,
or I just found the last bug.
.
See also Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: Oracle, the DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:01 AM ----- BODY:
The all-knowing, all-wise Internet Oracle rec.humor.oracle, or one of the foreign
language derivatives of same. Newbies frequently confuse the Oracle with
Oracle, a database vendor. As a result, the unmoderated rec.humor.oracle.d is frequently cross-posted
to by the clueless, looking for advice on SQL. As more than one person has
said in similar situations, Don't people bother to look at the
newsgroup description line anymore?
(To which the standard response
is, Did people ever read it in the first place?
)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: Orange Book DATE: 05/15/2003 10:36:00 AM ----- BODY: n.
The U.S. Government's (now obsolete) standards document Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, DOD standard 5200.28-STD, December, 1985 which characterize secure computing architectures and defines levels A1 (most secure) through D (least). Modern Unixes are roughly C2. See also book titles.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: oriental food DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:59 AM ----- BODY: n.
Hackers display an intense tropism towards oriental cuisine, especially Chinese, and especially of the spicier varieties such as Szechuan and Hunan. This phenomenon (which has also been observed in subcultures that overlap heavily with hackerdom, most notably science-fiction fandom) has never been satisfactorily explained, but is sufficiently intense that one can assume the target of a hackish dinner expedition to be the best local Chinese place and be right at least three times out of four. See also ravs, great-wall, stir-fried random, laser chicken, Yu-Shiang Whole Fish. Thai, Indian, Korean, Burmese, and Vietnamese cuisines are also quite popular.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: orphan DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:58 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Unix] A process whose parent has died; one inherited by init1. Compare zombie.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: orphaned i-node DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:57 AM ----- BODY: /or´f@nd i:´nohd/ n.
[Unix]
1. [techspeak] A file that retains storage but no longer appears in the directories of a filesystem.
2. By extension, a pejorative for any person no longer serving a useful function within some organization, esp. lion food without subordinates.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: orthogonal DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:56 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[from mathematics] Mutually independent; well separated; sometimes,
irrelevant to. Used in a generalization of its mathematical meaning to
describe sets of primitives or capabilities that, like a vector basis in
geometry, span the entire ‘capability space’ of the system and
are in some sense non-overlapping or mutually independent. For example, in
architectures such as the PDP-11 or
VAX where all or nearly all registers can be used
interchangeably in any role with respect to any instruction, the register
set is said to be orthogonal. Or, in logic, the set of operators not and or is orthogonal, but the set nand, or,
and not is not (because any one of
these can be expressed in terms of the others). Also used in comments on
human discourse: This may be orthogonal to the discussion,
but....
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: OS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:55 AM ----- BODY: /O·S/
1. [Operating System] n. An abbreviation heavily used in email, occasionally in speech.
2. n. obs. On ITS, an output spy. See OS and JEDGAR in Appendix A.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: OS/2 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:54 AM ----- BODY: /O S too/ n.
The anointed successor to MS-DOS for Intel 286- and 386-based micros; proof that IBM/Microsoft couldn't get it right the second time, either. Often called ‘Half-an-OS’. Mentioning it is usually good for a cheap laugh among hackers — the design was so baroque, and the implementation of 1.x so bad, that three years after introduction you could still count the major apps shipping for it on the fingers of two hands — in unary. The 2.x versions were said to have improved somewhat, and informed hackers rated them superior to Microsoft Windows (an endorsement which, however, could easily be construed as damning with faint praise). In the mid-1990s IBM put OS/2 on life support, refraining from killing it outright purely for internal political reasons; by 1999 the success of Linux had effectively ended any possibility of a renaissance. See monstrosity, cretinous, second-system effect.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: OSS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:53 AM ----- BODY:
Written-only acronym for Open Source Software
(see
open source). This is a rather ugly
TLA, and the principals in the open-source movement
don't use it, but it has (perhaps inevitably) spread through the trade
press like kudzu.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: OT DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:52 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet: common] Abbreviation for off-topic
. This is
used to respond to a question that is inappropriate for the newsgroup that
the questioner posted to. Often used in an HTML-style modifier or with
adverbs. See also TAN.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: OTOH DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:51 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet; very common] On The Other Hand.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: out-of-band DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:50 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[from telecommunications and network theory]
1. In software, describes values of a function which are not in its ‘natural’ range of return values, but are rather signals that some kind of exception has occurred. Many C functions, for example, return a nonnegative integral value, but indicate failure with an out-of-band return value of −1. Compare hidden flag, green bytes, fence.
2. Also sometimes used to describe what communications people call shift characters, such as the ESC that leads control sequences for many terminals, or the level shift indicators in the old 5-bit Baudot codes.
3. In personal communication, using methods other than email, such as telephones or snail-mail.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: overclock DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:49 AM ----- BODY: /oh´vr·klok´/ vt.
To operate a CPU or other digital logic device at a rate higher than
it was designed for, under the assumption that the manufacturer put some
slop into the specification to account for
manufacturing tolerances. Overclocking something can result in intermittent
crashes, and can even burn things out, since power
dissipation is directly proportional to clock
frequency. People who make a hobby of this are sometimes called
overclockers
; they are thrilled that they can run their
CPU a few percent faster, even though they can only tell the difference by
running a benchmark program. See also
case mod.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: overflow bit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:48 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [techspeak] A flag on some processors indicating an attempt to calculate a result too large for a register to hold.
2. More generally, an indication of any kind of capacity overload
condition. Well, the Ada description was
baroque all right, but I could hack it OK until they
got to the exception handling ... that set my overflow bit.
3. The hypothetical bit that will be set if a hacker doesn't get to
make a trip to the Room of Porcelain Fixtures: I'd better process an
internal interrupt before the overflow bit gets set.
Crunchly and the overflow bit.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-07-29)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: overrun DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:47 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [techspeak] Term for a frequent consequence of data arriving faster than it can be consumed, esp. in serial line communications. For example, at 9600 baud there is almost exactly one character per millisecond, so if a silo can hold only two characters and the machine takes longer than 2 msec to get to service the interrupt, at least one character will be lost.
2. Also applied to non-serial-I/O communications. I forgot
to pay my electric bill due to mail overrun.
Sorry, I got
four phone calls in 3 minutes last night and lost your message to
overrun.
When thrashing at tasks, the next
person to make a request might be told Overrun!
Compare
firehose syndrome.
3. More loosely, may refer to a buffer overflow not necessarily related to processing time (as in overrun screw).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: overrun screw DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:46 AM ----- BODY: n.
[C programming] A variety of fandango on core produced by scribbling past the end of an array (C implementations typically have no checks for this error). This is relatively benign and easy to spot if the array is static; if it is auto, the result may be to smash the stack — often resulting in heisenbugs of the most diabolical subtlety. The term overrun screw is used esp. of scribbles beyond the end of arrays allocated with malloc3; this typically trashes the allocation header for the next block in the arena, producing massive lossage within malloc and often a core dump on the next operation to use stdio3 or malloc3 itself. See spam, overrun; see also memory leak, memory smash, aliasing bug, precedence lossage, fandango on core, secondary damage.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - O TITLE: owned DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:45 AM ----- BODY:
1. [cracker slang; often written 0wned
] Your condition
when your machine has been cracked by a root exploit, and the attacker can
do anything with it. This sense is occasionally used by hackers.
2. [gamers, IRC, crackers] To be dominated, controlled, mastered.
For example, if you make a statement completely and utterly false, and
someone else corrects it in a way that humiliates or removes you, you are
said to have been owned
by that person. When referring to
games, I own0r UT GOTYE
means that one has mastered Unreal
Tournament, Game of the Year Edition to such a level that even the hardest
AI characters are mere lunchmeat, and that no ordinary mortal player would
even receive a point in competition. There are several spelling variants:
0wned, 0wn0r3d, even pwn0r3d. Hackers do not use this sense.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: P.O.D. DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:44 AM ----- BODY: /P·O·D/
[rare; sometimes ‘POD’ without the periods] Acronym for ‘Piece Of Data’ or ‘Plain Old Data’ (as opposed to a code section, or a section containing mixed code and data). The latter expansion was in use by the C++ standards committee, for which it indicated a struct or class which only contains data (as in C), distinguished from one which has a constructor and member functions. There are things which you can do with a P.O.D. which you can't with a more general class.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: packet over air DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:43 AM ----- BODY:
[common among backbone ISPs] The protocol notionally being used by
Internet data attempting to traverse a physical gap or break in the
network, such as might be caused by a
fiber-seeking backhoe. I see why you're dropping packets. You seem to
have a packet over air problem.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: padded cell DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:42 AM ----- BODY: n.
Where you put lusers so they can't hurt anything. A program that limits a luser to a carefully restricted subset of the capabilities of the host system (for example, the rsh1 utility on USG Unix). Note that this is different from an iron box because it is overt and not aimed at enforcing security so much as protecting others (and the luser) from the consequences of the luser's boundless naivete (see naive). Also padded cell environment.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: page in DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:41 AM ----- BODY: v.
[MIT]
1. To become aware of one's surroundings again after having paged
out (see page out). Usually confined to the
sarcastic comment: Eric pages in,
film at 11!
2. Syn. swap in; see swap.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: page out DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:40 AM ----- BODY: vi.
[MIT]
1. To become unaware of one's surroundings temporarily, due to
daydreaming or preoccupation. Can you repeat that? I paged out for
a minute.
See page in. Compare
glitch, thinko.
2. Syn. swap out; see swap.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pain in the net DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
A flamer.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: paper-net DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:38 AM ----- BODY: n.
Hackish way of referring to the postal service, analogizing it to a
very slow, low-reliability network. Usenet
sig blocks sometimes include a Paper-Net:
header
just before the sender's postal address; common variants of this are
Papernet
and P-Net
. Note that the standard
netiquette guidelines discourage this practice as a
waste of bandwidth, since netters are quite unlikely to casually use postal
addresses. Compare voice-net,
snail-mail.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: param DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:37 AM ----- BODY: /p@·ram´/ n.
[common] Shorthand for parameter. See also parm; compare arg, var.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: PARC DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:36 AM ----- BODY: n.
See XEROX PARC.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: parent message DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:35 AM ----- BODY: n.
What a followup follows up.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: parity errors DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:34 AM ----- BODY: pl.n.
Little lapses of attention or (in more severe cases) consciousness,
usually brought on by having spent all night and most of the next day
hacking. I need to go home and crash; I'm starting to get a lot of
parity errors.
Derives from a relatively common but nearly always
correctable transient error in memory hardware. It predates RAM; in fact,
this term is reported to have already have been in use in its jargon sense
back in the 1960s when magnetic cores ruled. Parity errors can also
afflict mass storage and serial communication lines; this is more serious
because not always correctable.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: Parkinson's Law of Data DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:33 AM ----- BODY: prov.
Data expands to fill the space available for storage
;
buying more memory encourages the use of more memory-intensive techniques.
(The original 1958 Parkinson's Law described the structural tendency of
bureaucracies to make work for themselves.) It has been observed since the
mid-1980s that the memory usage of evolving systems tends to double roughly
once every 18 months. Fortunately, memory density available for constant
dollars also tends to about double once every 18 months (see
Moore's Law); unfortunately, the laws of physics
guarantee that the latter cannot continue indefinitely.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: parm DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:32 AM ----- BODY: /parm/ n.
Further-compressed form of param. This term is an IBMism, and written use is almost unknown outside IBM shops; spoken /parm/ is more widely distributed, but the synonym arg is favored among hackers. Compare arg, var.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: parse DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:31 AM ----- BODY: [from linguistic terminology] vt.
1. To determine the syntactic structure of a sentence or other
utterance (close to the standard English meaning). That was the one
I saw you.
I can't parse that.
2. More generally, to understand or comprehend. It's very
simple; you just kretch the glims and then aos the zotz.
I
can't parse that.
3. Of fish, to have to remove the bones yourself. I object
to parsing fish
, means I don't want to get a whole fish, but
a sliced one is okay
. A parsed
fish has been deboned. There is some controversy over whether
unparsed should mean
‘bony’, or also mean ‘deboned’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: Pascal DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:30 AM ----- BODY: n.
An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967--68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact, became the ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and Ada (see also bondage-and-discipline language). The hackish point of view on Pascal was probably best summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K&R fame) entitled Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language, which was turned down by the technical journals but circulated widely via photocopies. It was eventually published in Comparing and Assessing Programming Languages, edited by Alan Feuer and Narain Gehani (Prentice-Hall, 1984). Part of his discussion is worth repeating here, because its criticisms are still apposite to Pascal itself after many years of improvement and could also stand as an indictment of many other bondage-and-discipline languages. (The entire essay is available at http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html.) At the end of a summary of the case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote:
9. There is no escape
This last point is perhaps the most important. The language is
inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape its
limitations. There are no casts to disable the type-checking when necessary.
There is no way to replace the defective run-time environment with a sensible
one, unless one controls the compiler that defines the standard
procedures
. The language is closed.
People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look like whatever language they really want. Extensions for separate compilation, FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types, internal static variables, initialization, octal numbers, bit operators, etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but destroy its portability to others.
I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond its original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy language, suitable for teaching but not for real programming.
Pascal has since been entirely displaced (mainly by C) from the niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems programming, and from its role as a teaching language by Java.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: PascalCasing DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:29 AM ----- BODY:
The practice of marking all word boundaries in long identifiers (such as ThisIsASampleVariable) (including the first letter of the identifier) with uppercase. Constrasts with camelCasing, in which the first character of the identifier is left in lowercase (thisIsASampleVariable), and with the traditional C style of short all-lower-case names with internal word breaks marked by an underscore (sample_var).
Where these terms are used, they usually go with advice to use PascalCasing for public interfaces and camelCasing for private ones. They may have originated at Microsoft, but are in more general use in ECMA standards, among Java programmers, and elsewhere.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pastie DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:28 AM ----- BODY: /pay´stee/ n.
An adhesive-backed label designed to be attached to a key on a keyboard to indicate some non-standard character which can be accessed through that key. Pasties are likely to be used in APL environments, where almost every key is associated with a special character. A pastie on the R key, for example, might remind the user that it is used to generate the ρ character. The term properly refers to nipple-concealing devices formerly worn by strippers in concession to indecent-exposure laws; compare tits on a keyboard.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: patch DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:27 AM ----- BODY:
1. n. A temporary addition to a piece of code, usually as a quick-and-dirty remedy to an existing bug or misfeature. A patch may or may not work, and may or may not eventually be incorporated permanently into the program. Distinguished from a diff or mod by the fact that a patch is generated by more primitive means than the rest of the program; the classical examples are instructions modified by using the front panel switches, and changes made directly to the binary executable of a program originally written in an HLL. Compare one-line fix.
2. vt. To insert a patch into a piece of code.
3. [in the Unix world] n. A diff (sense 2).
4. A set of modifications to binaries to be applied by a patching
program. IBM operating systems often receive updates to the operating
system in the form of absolute hexadecimal patches. If you have modified
your OS, you have to disassemble these back to the source. The patches
might later be corrected by other patches on top of them (patches were said
to grow scar tissue
). The result was often a convoluted
patch space and headaches galore.
5. [Unix] the patch1 program, written by Larry Wall, which automatically applies a patch (sense 3) to a set of source code.
There is a classic story of a tiger team penetrating a secure military computer that illustrates the danger inherent in binary patches (or, indeed, any patches that you can't — or don't — inspect and examine before installing). They couldn't find any trap doors or any way to penetrate security of IBM's OS, so they made a site visit to an IBM office (remember, these were official military types who were purportedly on official business), swiped some IBM stationery, and created a fake patch. The patch was actually the trapdoor they needed. The patch was distributed at about the right time for an IBM patch, had official stationery and all accompanying documentation, and was dutifully installed. The installation manager very shortly thereafter learned something about proper procedures.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: patch pumpkin DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:26 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Perl hackers] A notional token passed around among the members of a project. Possession of the patch pumpkin means one has the exclusive authority to make changes on the project's master source tree. The implicit assumption is that pumpkin holder status is temporary and rotates periodically among senior project members.
This term comes from the Perl development community, but has been sighted elsewhere. It derives from a stuffed-toy pumpkin that was passed around at a development shop years ago as the access control for a shared backup-tape drive.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: patch space DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:25 AM ----- BODY: n.
An unused block of bits left in a binary so that it can later be modified by insertion of machine-language instructions there (typically, the patch space is modified to contain new code, and the superseded code is patched to contain a jump or call to the patch space). The near-universal use of compilers and interpreters has made this term rare; it is now primarily historical outside IBM shops. See patch (sense 4), zap (sense 4), hook.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: path DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:24 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A bang path or explicitly routed Internet address; a node-by-node specification of a link between two machines. Though these are now obsolete as a form of addressing, they still show up in diagnostics and trace headers occasionally (e.g. in NNTP headers).
2. [Unix] A filename, fully specified relative to the root directory (as opposed to relative to the current directory; the latter is sometimes called a relative path). This is also called a pathname.
3. [Unix and MS-DOS/Windows] The search
path, an environment variable specifying the directories in
which the shell (COMMAND.COM, under MS-DOS) should
look for commands. Other, similar constructs abound under Unix (for
example, the C preprocessor has a search
path it uses in looking for #include
files).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pathological DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:23 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. [scientific computation] Used of a data set that is grossly atypical of normal expected input, esp. one that exposes a weakness or bug in whatever algorithm one is using. An algorithm that can be broken by pathological inputs may still be useful if such inputs are very unlikely to occur in practice.
2. When used of test input, implies that it was purposefully engineered as a worst case. The implication in both senses is that the data is spectacularly ill-conditioned or that someone had to explicitly set out to break the algorithm in order to come up with such a crazy example.
3. Also said of an unlikely collection of circumstances. If
the network is down and comes up halfway through the execution of that
command by root, the system may just crash.
Yes, but that's
a pathological case.
Often used to dismiss the case from
discussion, with the implication that the consequences are acceptable,
since they will happen so infrequently (if at all) that it doesn't seem
worth going to the extra trouble to handle that case (see sense 1).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: payware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:22 AM ----- BODY: /pay´weir/ n.
Commercial software. Oppose shareware or freeware.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: PBD DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:21 AM ----- BODY: /P·B·D/ n.
[abbrev. of ‘Programmer Brain Damage’] Applied to bug reports revealing places where the program was obviously broken by an incompetent or short-sighted programmer. Compare UBD; see also brain-damaged.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: PD DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:20 AM ----- BODY: /P·D/ adj.
[common] Abbreviation for ‘public domain’, applied to software distributed over Usenet and from Internet archive sites. Much of this software is not in fact public domain in the legal sense but travels under various copyrights granting reproduction and use rights to anyone who can snarf a copy. See copyleft.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: PDP-10 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:19 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Programmed Data Processor model 10] The machine that made timesharing real. It looms large in hacker folklore because of its adoption in the mid-1970s by many university computing facilities and research labs, including the MIT AI Lab, Stanford, and CMU. Some aspects of the instruction set (most notably the bit-field instructions) are still considered unsurpassed. The 10 was eventually eclipsed by the VAX machines (descendants of the PDP-11) when DEC recognized that the 10 and VAX product lines were competing with each other and decided to concentrate its software development effort on the more profitable VAX. The machine was finally dropped from DEC's line in 1983, following the failure of the Jupiter Project at DEC to build a viable new model. (Some attempts by other companies to market clones came to nothing; see Foonly and Mars.) This event spelled the doom of ITS and the technical cultures that had spawned the original Jargon File, but by mid-1991 it had become something of a badge of honorable old-timerhood among hackers to have cut one's teeth on a PDP-10. See TOPS-10, ITS, BLT, DDT, EXCH, HAKMEM, pop, push. See also http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: PDP-11 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:18 AM ----- BODY:
Possibly the single most successful minicomputer design in history, a favorite of hackers for many years, and the first major Unix machine, The first PDP-11s (the 11/15 and 11/20) shipped in 1970 from DEC; the last (11/93 and 11/94) in 1990. Along the way, the 11 gave birth to the VAX, strongly influenced the design of microprocessors such as the Motorola 6800 and Intel 386, and left a permanent imprint on the C language (which has an odd preference for octal embedded in its syntax because of the way PDP-11 machine instructions were formatted). There is a history site.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: PDP-20 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:17 AM ----- BODY: n.
The most famous computer that never was. PDP-10 computers running the TOPS-10 operating system were labeled ‘DECsystem-10’ as a way of differentiating them from the PDP-11. Later on, those systems running TOPS-20 were labeled ‘DECSYSTEM-20’ (the block capitals being the result of a lawsuit brought against DEC by Singer, which once made a computer called ‘system-10’), but contrary to popular lore there was never a ‘PDP-20’; the only difference between a 10 and a 20 was the operating system and the color of the paint. Most (but not all) machines sold to run TOPS-10 were painted ‘Basil Blue’, whereas most TOPS-20 machines were painted ‘Chinese Red’ (often mistakenly called orange).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: PEBKAC DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:16 AM ----- BODY: /peb´kak/
[Abbrev., Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair
]
Used by support people, particularly at call centers and help desks. Not
used with the public. Denotes pilot error as the cause of the crash,
especially stupid errors that even a luser could
figure out. Very derogatory. Usage: Did you ever figure out why that
guy couldn't print?
Yeah, he kept cancelling the operation
before it could finish. PEBKAC
. See also ID10T. Compare pilot error, UBD.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: peek DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:15 AM ----- BODY: n.,vt.
(and poke) The commands in most microcomputer BASICs for directly accessing memory contents at an absolute address; often extended to mean the corresponding constructs in any HLL (peek reads memory, poke modifies it). Much hacking on small, non-MMU micros used to consist of peeking around memory, more or less at random, to find the location where the system keeps interesting stuff. Long (and variably accurate) lists of such addresses for various computers circulated. The results of pokes at these addresses may be highly useful, mildly amusing, useless but neat, or (most likely) total lossage (see killer poke).
Since a real operating system provides useful,
higher-level services for the tasks commonly performed with peeks and pokes
on micros, and real languages tend not to encourage low-level memory
groveling, a question like How do I do a peek in C?
is
diagnostic of the newbie. (Of course, OS kernels
often have to do exactly this; a real kernel hacker would unhesitatingly,
if unportably, assign an absolute address to a pointer variable and
indirect through it.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pencil and paper DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:14 AM ----- BODY: n.
An archaic information storage and transmission device that works by depositing smears of graphite on bleached wood pulp. More recent developments in paper-based technology include improved ‘write-once’ update devices which use tiny rolling heads similar to mouse balls to deposit colored pigment. All these devices require an operator skilled at so-called ‘handwriting’ technique. These technologies are ubiquitous outside hackerdom, but nearly forgotten inside it. Most hackers had terrible handwriting to begin with, and years of keyboarding tend to have encouraged it to degrade further. Perhaps for this reason, hackers deprecate pencil-and-paper technology and often resist using it in any but the most trivial contexts.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: Pentagram Pro DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:13 AM ----- BODY: n.
A humorous corruption of Pentium Pro
, with a Satanic
reference, implying that the chip is inherently
evil. Often used with 666 MHz
; there
is a T-shirt. See Pentium
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: Pentium DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:12 AM ----- BODY: n.
The name given to Intel's P5 chip, the successor to the 80486. The
name was chosen because of difficulties Intel had in trademarking a
number. It suggests the number five (implying 586) while (according to
Intel) conveying a meaning of strength like titanium
. Among
hackers, the plural is frequently ‘pentia’. See also
Pentagram Pro.
Intel did not stick to this convention when naming its P6 processor
the Pentium Pro; many believe this is due to difficulties in selling a chip
with hex
or sex
in its name. Successor chips
have been called Pentium II,
Pentium III, and Pentium IV.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: peon DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:11 AM ----- BODY: n.
A person with no special (root or
wheel) privileges on a computer system. I
can't create an account on foovax for you; I'm only a
peon there.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: percent-S DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:10 AM ----- BODY: /per·sent´ es´/ n.
[From the code in C's
printf3
library function used to insert an arbitrary string argument] An
unspecified person or object. I was just talking to some percent-s
in administration.
Compare random.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: perf DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:09 AM ----- BODY: /perf/ n.
Syn. chad (sense 1). The term perfory /per´f@-ree/ is also heard. The term perf may also refer to the perforations themselves, rather than the chad they produce when torn (philatelists use it this way).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: perfect programmer syndrome DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:08 AM ----- BODY: n.
Arrogance; the egotistical conviction that one is above normal human
error. Most frequently found among programmers of some native ability but
relatively little experience (especially new graduates; their perceptions
may be distorted by a history of excellent performance at solving
toy problems). Of course my program is
correct, there is no need to test it.
Yes, I can see there
may be a problem here, but I'll never type
rm -r /
while in
root mode.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: Perl DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:07 AM ----- BODY: /perl/ n.
[Practical Extraction and Report Language, a.k.a. Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister] An interpreted language developed by Larry Wall, author of patch1 and rn1). Superficially resembles awk, but is much hairier, including many facilities reminiscent of sed1 and shells and a comprehensive Unix system-call interface. Unix sysadmins, who are almost always incorrigible hackers, generally consider it one of the languages of choice, and it is by far the most widely used tool for making ‘live’ web pages via CGI. Perl has been described, in a parody of a famous remark about lex1, as the Swiss-Army chainsaw of Unix programming. Though Perl is very useful, it would be a stretch to describe it as pretty or elegant; people who like clean, spare design generally prefer Python. See also Camel Book, TMTOWTDI.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: person of no account DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:06 AM ----- BODY: n.
[University of California at Santa Cruz] Used when referring to a
person with no network address, frequently to
forestall confusion. Most often as part of an introduction: This is
Bill, a person of no account, but he used to be bill@random.com
.
Compare return from the dead.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pessimal DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:05 AM ----- BODY: /pes´im·l/ adj.
[Latin-based antonym for optimal] Maximally bad. This is a
pessimal situation.
Also pessimize vt. To make as bad as possible. These words are
the obvious Latin-based antonyms for optimal and optimize, but for some reason they do not
appear in most English dictionaries, although ‘pessimize’ is
listed in the OED.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pessimizing compiler DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:04 AM ----- BODY: /pes'@·mi:z`ing k@m·pi:l´r/ n.
[antonym of techspeak ‘optimizing compiler’] A compiler that produces object code that is worse than the straightforward or obvious hand translation. The implication is that the compiler is actually trying to optimize the program, but through excessive cleverness is doing the opposite. A few pessimizing compilers have been written on purpose, however, as pranks or burlesques.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: peta- DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:03 AM ----- BODY: /pe´t@/ pref
[SI] See quantifiers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pffft DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:02 AM ----- BODY: interj.
[IRC] A metamorphic expletive which can be used to convey emotion, particularly shock or surprise, disgust or anger. The amplitude of the reaction can be measured by counting intermediary fs. For example:
<jrandom> someone stole my hotdog <fred> pffft <frodo> Cthulhu stole my hotdog <joe> pffffffffffffft!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: PFY DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:01 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet; common, originally from the BOFH mythos] Abbreviation for Pimply-Faced Youth. A BOFH in training, esp. one apprenticed to an elder BOFH aged in evil.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: phage DATE: 05/15/2003 10:35:00 AM ----- BODY: n.
A program that modifies other programs or databases in unauthorized ways; esp. one that propagates a virus or Trojan horse. See also worm, mockingbird. The analogy, of course, is with phage viruses in biology.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: phase DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:59 AM ----- BODY:
1. n. The offset of one's
waking-sleeping schedule with respect to the standard 24-hour cycle; a
useful concept among people who often work at night and/or according to no
fixed schedule. It is not uncommon to change one's phase by as much as 6
hours per day on a regular basis. What's your phase?
I've been getting in about 8PM lately, but I'm going to
wrap around to the day schedule by Friday.
A
person who is roughly 12 hours out of phase is sometimes said to be in
night mode. (The term day mode is also (but less frequently) used,
meaning you're working 9 to 5 (or, more likely, 10 to 6).) The act of
altering one's cycle is called changing
phase; phase shifting has
also been recently reported from Caltech.
2. change phase the hard way: To stay awake for a very long time in order to get into a different phase.
3. change phase the easy way: To stay asleep, etc. However, some claim that either staying awake longer or sleeping longer is easy, and that it is shortening your day or night that is really hard (see wrap around). The ‘jet lag’ that afflicts travelers who cross many time-zone boundaries may be attributed to two distinct causes: the strain of travel per se, and the strain of changing phase. Hackers who suddenly find that they must change phase drastically in a short period of time, particularly the hard way, experience something very like jet lag without traveling.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: phase of the moon DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:58 AM ----- BODY: n.
Used humorously as a random parameter on which something is said to
depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that
reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to
determine. This feature depends on having the channel open in
mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the
moon.
See also heisenbug.
True story: Once upon a time there was a program bug that really did depend on the phase of the moon. There was a little subroutine that had traditionally been used in various programs at MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon's true phase. GLS incorporated this routine into a LISP program that, when it wrote out a file, would print a timestamp line almost 80 characters long. Very occasionally the first line of the message would be too long and would overflow onto the next line, and when the file was later read back in the program would barf. The length of the first line depended on both the precise date and time and the length of the phase specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the bug literally depended on the phase of the moon!
The first paper edition of the Jargon File (Steele-1983) included an example of one of the timestamp lines that exhibited this bug, but the typesetter ‘corrected’ it. This has since been described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug.
However, beware of assumptions. A few years ago, engineers of CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) were baffled by some errors in experiments conducted with the LEP particle accelerator. As the formidable amount of data generated by such devices is heavily processed by computers before being seen by humans, many people suggested the software was somehow sensitive to the phase of the moon. A few desperate engineers discovered the truth; the error turned out to be the result of a tiny change in the geometry of the 27km circumference ring, physically caused by the deformation of the Earth by the passage of the Moon! This story has entered physics folklore as a Newtonian vengeance on particle physics and as an example of the relevance of the simplest and oldest physical laws to the most modern science.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: phase-wrapping DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:57 AM ----- BODY: n.
[MIT] Syn. wrap around, sense 2.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: PHB DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:56 AM ----- BODY: /P·H·B/
[Usenet; common; rarely spoken] Abbreviation, Pointy-Haired
Boss
. From the Dilbert character, the
archetypal halfwitted middle-management type. See
also pointy-haired.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: phreaker DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:55 AM ----- BODY: /freek´r/ n.
One who engages in phreaking. See also blue box.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: phreaking DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:54 AM ----- BODY: /freek´ing/ n.
[from ‘phone phreak’]
1. The art and science of cracking the phone network (so as, for example, to make free long-distance calls).
2. By extension, security-cracking in any other context (especially, but not exclusively, on communications networks) (see cracking).
At one time phreaking was a semi-respectable activity among hackers; there was a gentleman's agreement that phreaking as an intellectual game and a form of exploration was OK, but serious theft of services was taboo. There was significant crossover between the hacker community and the hard-core phone phreaks who ran semi-underground networks of their own through such media as the legendary TAP Newsletter. This ethos began to break down in the mid-1980s as wider dissemination of the techniques put them in the hands of less responsible phreaks. Around the same time, changes in the phone network made old-style technical ingenuity less effective as a way of hacking it, so phreaking came to depend more on overtly criminal acts such as stealing phone-card numbers. The crimes and punishments of gangs like the ‘414 group’ turned that game very ugly. A few old-time hackers still phreak casually just to keep their hand in, but most these days have hardly even heard of ‘blue boxes’ or any of the other paraphernalia of the great phreaks of yore.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pico- DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:53 AM ----- BODY: pref.
[SI: a quantifier meaning × 10-12] Smaller than nano-; used in the same rather loose connotative way as nano- and micro-. This usage is not yet common in the way nano- and micro- are, but should be instantly recognizable to any hacker. See also quantifiers, micro-.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pig-tail DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:52 AM ----- BODY:
[radio hams] A short piece of cable with two connectors on each end for converting between one connector type and another. Common pig-tails are 9-to-25-pin serial-port converters and cables to connect PCMCIA network cards to an RJ-45 network cable.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pilot error DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:51 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Sun: from aviation] A user's misconfiguration or misuse of a piece
of software, producing apparently buglike results (compare
UBD). Joe Luser reported a bug in sendmail
that causes it to generate bogus headers.
That's not a bug,
that's pilot error. His
Compare PEBKAC,
UBD, ID10T.sendmail.cf
is
hosed.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: ping DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:50 AM ----- BODY:
[from the submariners' term for a sonar pulse]
1. n. Slang term for a small network message (ICMP ECHO) sent by a computer to check for the presence and alertness of another. The Unix command ping8 can be used to do this manually (note that ping8's author denies the widespread folk etymology that the name was ever intended as an acronym for ‘Packet INternet Groper’). Occasionally used as a phone greeting. See ACK, also ENQ.
2. vt. To verify the presence of.
3. vt. To get the attention of.
4. vt. To send a message to all
members of a mailing list requesting an
ACK (in order to verify that everybody's addresses
are reachable). We haven't heard much of anything from Geoff, but
he did respond with an ACK both times I pinged jargon-friends.
5. n. A quantum packet of
happiness. People who are very happy tend to exude pings; furthermore, one
can intentionally create pings and aim them at a needy party (e.g., a
depressed person). This sense of ping may appear as an exclamation;
Ping!
(I'm happy; I am emitting a quantum of happiness; I
have been struck by a quantum of happiness). The form
pingfulness
, which is used to describe people who exude
pings, also occurs. (In the standard abuse of language,
pingfulness
can also be used as an exclamation, in which
case it's a much stronger exclamation than just ping
!).
Oppose blargh.
The funniest use of ‘ping’ to date was
described in January 1991 by Steve Hayman on the Usenet group
comp.sys.next. He was trying to
isolate a faulty cable segment on a TCP/IP Ethernet hooked up to a NeXT
machine, and got tired of having to run back to his console after each cabling
tweak to see if the ping packets were getting through. So he used the
sound-recording feature on the NeXT, then wrote a script that repeatedly
invoked
ping8,
listened for an echo, and played back the recording on each returned packet.
Result? A program that caused the machine to repeat, over and over,
Ping ... ping ... ping ...
as long as the
network was up. He turned the volume to maximum, ferreted through the
building with one ear cocked, and found a faulty tee connector in no
time.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: Ping O' Death DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:49 AM ----- BODY: n.
A notorious exploit that (when first discovered) could be easily used to crash a wide variety of machines by overrunning size limits in their TCP/IP stacks. First revealed in late 1996. The open-source Unix community patched its systems to remove the vulnerability within days or weeks, the closed-source OS vendors generally took months. While the difference in response times repeated a pattern familiar from other security incidents, the accompanying glare of Web-fueled publicity proved unusually embarrassing to the OS vendors and so passed into history and myth. The term is now used to refer to any nudge delivered by network wizards over the network that causes bad things to happen on the system being nudged. For the full story on the original exploit, see http://www.insecure.org/sploits/ping-o-death.html. Compare kamikaze packet and 'Chernobyl packet.'
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: ping storm DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:48 AM ----- BODY: n.
A form of DoS attack consisting of a flood of ping requests (normally used to check network conditions) designed to disrupt the normal activity of a system. This act is sometimes called ping lashing or ping flood. Compare mail storm, broadcast storm.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pink contract DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:47 AM ----- BODY:
[spamfighters: from the color of the tinned meat] A contract from an Internet service provider to a spammer exempting the spammer from the usual terms of service prohibiting spamming. Usually pink contracts come about because ISPs can charge the spammer a great deal more than they would a normal client.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pink wire DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:46 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from the pink PTFE wire used in military equipment] As blue wire, but used in military applications.
2. vi. To add a pink wire to a board.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pipe DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:45 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] Idiomatically, one's connection to the Internet; in
context, the expansion bit pipe
is understood. A fat
pipe
is a line with T1 or higher capacity. A person with a 28.8
modem might be heard to complain I need a bigger
pipe
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pistol DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:44 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] A tool that makes it all too easy for you to shoot yourself in
the foot. Unix
rm *
makes such a
nice pistol!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pixel sort DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:43 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Commodore users] Any compression routine which irretrievably loses valuable data in the process of crunching it. Disparagingly used for ‘lossy’ methods such as JPEG. The theory, of course, is that these methods are only used on photographic images in which minor loss-of-data is not visible to the human eye. The term pixel sort implies distrust of this theory. Compare bogo-sort.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pizza box DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:42 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Sun] The largish thin box housing the electronics in (especially Sun) desktop workstations, so named because of its size and shape and the dimpled pattern that looks like air holes.
Two-meg single-platter removable disk packs used to be called pizzas, and the huge drive they were stuck into was referred to as a pizza oven. It's an index of progress that in the old days just the disk was pizza-sized, while now the entire computer is.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: plaid screen DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:41 AM ----- BODY: n.
[XEROX PARC] A ‘special effect’ that occurs when certain
kinds of memory smashes overwrite the control blocks
or image memory of a bit-mapped display. The term salt and
pepper
may refer to a different pattern of similar origin. Though
the term as coined at PARC refers to the result of an error, some of the
X demos induce plaid-screen effects deliberately as
a display hack.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: plain-ASCII DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:40 AM ----- BODY: /playn·as´kee/
Syn. flat-ASCII.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: Plan 9 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
In the late 1980s, researchers at Bell Labs (especially Rob Pike of
Kernighan & Pike fame) got bored with the limitations of UNIX and
decided to reimplement the entire system. The result was called Plan 9 in
the Bell Labs tradition of selecting names that make marketeers
wince.
The developers also wished to pay homage to the famous film,
Plan 9 From Outer Space
, considered by some to be the worst
movie ever made. The source is available for download under
almost-open-source terms. The developers and a small fan base hang out at
comp.os.plan9, where one can
occasionally hear If you want UNIX, you know where to find
it
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: plan file DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:38 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Unix] On systems that support finger, the .plan file in a user's home directory is displayed when the user is fingered. This feature was originally intended to be used to keep potential fingerers apprised of one's location and near-future plans, but has been turned almost universally to humorous and self-expressive purposes (like a sig block). See also Hacking X for Y.
A recent innovation in plan files has been the introduction of
scrolling plan files
which are one-dimensional animations
made using only the printable ASCII character set, carriage return and line
feed, avoiding terminal specific escape sequences, since the
finger command will (for security reasons; see
letterbomb) not pass the escape character.
Scrolling .plan files have become art forms in miniature, and some sites have started competitions to find who can create the longest running, funniest, and most original animations. Various animation characters include:
Centipede: | mmmmme |
Lorry/Truck: | oo-oP |
Andalusian Video Snail: | _@/ |
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: platinum-iridium DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:37 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Standard, against which all others of the same category are
measured. Usage: silly. The notion is that one of whatever it is has
actually been cast in platinum-iridium alloy and placed in the vault beside
the Standard Kilogram at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures
near Paris. (From 1889 to 1960, the meter was defined to be the distance
between two scratches in a platinum-iridium bar kept in that same vault
— this replaced an earlier definition as
10-7 times the
distance between the North Pole and the Equator along a meridian through
Paris; unfortunately, this had been based on an inexact value of the
circumference of the Earth. From 1960 to 1984 it was defined to be
1650763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red line of krypton-86 propagating in
a vacuum. It is now defined as the length of the path traveled by light in
a vacuum in the time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second. The kilogram
is now the only unit of measure officially defined in terms of a unique
artifact.) This garbage-collection algorithm has been tested
against the platinum-iridium cons cell in Paris.
Compare
golden.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: playpen DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:36 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] A room where programmers work. Compare salt mines.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: playte DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:35 AM ----- BODY: /playt/
16 bits, by analogy with nybble and byte. Usage: rare and extremely silly. See also dynner and crumb. General discussion of such terms is under nybble.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: plokta DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:34 AM ----- BODY: /plok´t@/ v.
[acronym: Press Lots Of Keys To Abort] To press random keys in an attempt to get some response from the system. One might plokta when the abort procedure for a program is not known, or when trying to figure out if the system is just sluggish or really hung. Plokta can also be used while trying to figure out any unknown key sequence for a particular operation. Someone going into plokta mode usually places both hands flat on the keyboard and mashes them down, hoping for some useful response.
A slightly more directed form of plokta can often be seen in mail messages or Usenet articles from new users — the text might end with
^X^C q quit :q ^C end x exit ZZ ^D ? help
as the user vainly tries to find the right exit sequence, with the incorrect tries piling up at the end of the message....
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: plonk DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:33 AM ----- BODY: excl.,vt.
[Usenet: possibly influenced by British slang ‘plonk’
for cheap booze, or ‘plonker’ for someone behaving stupidly
(latter is lit. equivalent to Yiddish
schmuck)] The sound a
newbie makes as he falls to the bottom of a
kill file. While it originated in the
newsgroup talk.bizarre, this term (usually written
*plonk*
) is now (1994) widespread on Usenet as a form of
public ridicule.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: plug-and-pray DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:32 AM ----- BODY: adj.,vi.
Parody of the techspeak term plug-and-play, describing a PC peripheral card which is claimed to have no need for hardware configuration via jumpers or DIP switches, and which should work as soon as it is inserted in the PC. Unfortunately, even the PCI bus is all too often not up to pulling this off reliably, and people who have to do installation or troubleshoot PCs soon find themselves longing for the jumpers and switches.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: plugh DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:31 AM ----- BODY: /ploogh/ v.
[from the ADVENT game] See xyzzy.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: plumbing DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:30 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Unix] Term used for shell code, so called
because of the prevalence of pipelines that feed the output of one program
to the input of another. Under Unix, user utilities can often be
implemented or at least prototyped by a suitable collection of pipelines
and temp-file grinding encapsulated in a shell script; this is much less
effort than writing C every time, and the capability is considered one of
Unix's major winning features. A few other OSs such as IBM's VM/CMS
support similar facilities. Esp.: used in the construction hairy plumbing (see
hairy). You can kluge together a basic
spell-checker out of
sort1,
comm1,
and
tr1
with a little plumbing.
See also tee.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: PM DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:29 AM ----- BODY: /P·M/
1. v. (from preventive maintenance) To bring down a machine for inspection or test purposes. See provocative maintenance; see also scratch monkey.
2. n. Abbrev. for ‘Presentation Manager’, an elephantine OS/2 graphical user interface.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: point-and-drool interface DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
Parody of the techspeak term point-and-click interface, describing a windows, icons, and mouse-based interface such as is found on the Macintosh. The implication, of course, is that such an interface is only suitable for idiots. See for the rest of us, WIMP environment, Macintrash, drool-proof paper. Also point-and-grunt interface.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pointy hat DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:27 AM ----- BODY: n.
See wizard hat. This synonym specifically refers to the wizards of Unseen University in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series of humorous fantasies; these books are extremely popular among hackers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pointy-haired DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:26 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[after the character in the Dilbert comic
strip] Describes the extreme form of the property that separates
suits and marketroids from
hackers. Compare brain-dead;
demented; see PHB. Always
applied to people, never to ideas. The plural form is often used as a
noun. The pointy-haireds ordered me to use Windows NT, but I set up
a Linux server with Samba instead.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: poke DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:25 AM ----- BODY: n.,vt.
See peek.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: poll DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:24 AM ----- BODY: v.,n.
1. [techspeak] The action of checking the status of an input line, sensor, or memory location to see if a particular external event has been registered.
2. To repeatedly call or check with someone: I keep polling
him, but he's not answering his phone; he must be swapped out.
3. To ask. Lunch? I poll for a takeout order
daily.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: polygon pusher DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:23 AM ----- BODY: n.
A chip designer who spends most of his or her time at the physical layout level (which requires drawing lots of multi-colored polygons). Also rectangle slinger.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: POM DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:22 AM ----- BODY: /P·O·M/ n.
Common abbreviation for phase of the moon. Usage: usually in the phrase POM-dependent, which means flaky.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: ponytail DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:21 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A hairstyle in which long hair is held back so as to hang down like a pony's tail.
2. A descriptive term for a man having a ponytail hairstyle, or such character traits as might be associated with having a ponytail, eg: effeminacy, narcissism, undue concern with fashion etc.
3. A general term used by hackers for 'creatives': advertising copywriters, graphic designers, video compositors, users characterised by a preference for the Macintosh, recreational drug use, and better sex lives than programmers.
4. A derogatory term for web designers and other persons peripherally associated with IT projects, devoid of programming skills and dismissed as being concerned with visual presentation to the exclusion of actual technical reality.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pop DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:20 AM ----- BODY: /pop/
[from the operation that removes the top of a stack, and the fact that procedure return addresses are usually saved on the stack] (also capitalized ‘POP’)
1. vt. To remove something from a stack. If a person says he/she has popped something from his stack, that means he/she has finally finished working on it and can now remove it from the list of things hanging overhead.
2. When a discussion gets to a level of detail so deep that the main
point of the discussion is being lost, someone will shout
Pop!
, meaning Get back up to a higher level!
The shout is frequently accompanied by an upthrust arm with a finger
pointing to the ceiling.
3. [all-caps, as ‘POP’] Point of Presence, a bank of dial-in lines allowing customers to make (local) calls into an ISP. This is borderline techspeak.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: poser DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:19 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from French poseur] A
wannabee; not hacker slang, but used among crackers,
phreaks and warez d00dz. Not as negative as
lamer or leech. Probably
derives from a similar usage among punk-rockers and metalheads, putting
down those who talk the talk but don't walk the walk
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: post DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:18 AM ----- BODY: v.
To send a message to a mailing list or
newsgroup. Distinguished in context from mail; one might ask, for example: Are
you going to post the patch or mail it to known users?
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: postcardware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:17 AM ----- BODY: n.
A kind of shareware that borders on freeware, in that the author requests only that satisfied users send a postcard of their home town or something. (This practice, silly as it might seem, serves to remind users that they are otherwise getting something for nothing, and may also be psychologically related to real estate ‘sales’ in which $1 changes hands just to keep the transaction from being a gift.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: Postel's Prescription DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:16 AM ----- BODY:
[proposed] Several of the key Internet RFCs, especially 1122 and 791 contain a piece of advice due to Jon Postel, which is most often stated as:
Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you
send.
That is, a well-engineered implementation of any of the Internet protocols should be willing to deal with marginal and imperfectly-formed inputs, but should not assume that the program on the other end (that is, the program dealing with the well-engineered implementation's output) will be anything other than rigid and inflexible, and perhaps even incomplete or downright buggy.
This property is valuable because a network of programs adhering to it will be much more robust in the presence of any uncertainties in the protocol specifications, or any individual implementor's failure to understand those specifications perfectly. Though the policy does tend to accommodate broken implementations it is held to more important to get the communication flowing than to immediately (but terminally) diagnose the broken implementations at the expense of the people trying to use them.
The principle is a well-known one in the design of programs
that handle Internet wire protocols, especially network
relays and servers, and it is regularly applied by extension
in any situation where two or more separately-implemented
pieces of software are supposed to interoperate even though the
various implementors have never talked to each other and have
absolutely nothing whatsoever in common other than having
all read the same protocol specification. The principle travels
under several different names, including the Internet credo
,
the IETF maxim
, the Internet Engineering
Principle
, and
the liberal/conservative rule
; the [proposed] term
Postel' Prescription
is a tribute to its inventor, the first
RFC editor
and (until his untimely death) probably the single most respected
individual in the Internet engineering community.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: posting DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
Noun corresp. to v.: post (but note that post can be nouned). Distinguished from a ‘letter’ or ordinary email message by the fact that it is broadcast rather than point-to-point. It is not clear whether messages sent to a small mailing list are postings or email; perhaps the best dividing line is that if you don't know the names of all the potential recipients, it is a posting.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: postmaster DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:14 AM ----- BODY: n.
The email contact and maintenance person at a site connected to the network. Often, but not always, the same as the admin. The Internet standard for electronic mail (RFC-822) requires each machine to have a ‘postmaster’ address; usually it is aliased to this person.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: PostScript DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:13 AM ----- BODY: n.
A page description language, based on work originally done by John Gaffney at Evans and Sutherland in 1976, evolving through ‘JaM’ (‘John and Martin’, Martin Newell) at XEROX PARC, and finally implemented in its current form by John Warnock et al. after he and Chuck Geschke founded Adobe Systems Incorporated in 1982. PostScript gets its leverage by using a full programming language, rather than a series of low-level escape sequences, to describe an image to be printed on a laser printer or other output device (in this it parallels EMACS, which exploited a similar insight about editing tasks). It is also noteworthy for implementing on-the fly rasterization, from Bezier curve descriptions, of high-quality fonts at low (e.g. 300 dpi) resolution (it was formerly believed that hand-tuned bitmap fonts were required for this task). Hackers consider PostScript to be among the most elegant hacks of all time, and the combination of technical merits and widespread availability has made PostScript the language of choice for graphical output.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pound on DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:12 AM ----- BODY: vt.
Syn. bang on.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: power cycle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:11 AM ----- BODY: vt.
(also, cycle power or just cycle) To power off a machine and then power it on immediately, with the intention of clearing some kind of hung or gronked state. See also Big Red Switch. Compare Vulcan nerve pinch, bounce (sense 4), and boot, and see the Some AI Koans (in Appendix A) about Tom Knight and the novice.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: power hit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:10 AM ----- BODY: n.
A spike or drop-out in the electricity supplying your machine; a power glitch. These can cause crashes and even permanent damage to your machine(s).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pr0n DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:09 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet, IRC] Pornography. Originally this referred only to
Internet porn but since then it has expanded to refer to just about any
kind. The term comes from the warez kiddies
tendency to replace letters with numbers. At some point on IRC someone
mistyped, swapping the middle two characters, and the name stuck. It then
propagated over into mainstream hacker usage. New versions of the Mozilla
web browser internally refer to the image library as
libpr0n
. Compare filk,
grilf, hing and
newsfroup.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: precedence lossage DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:08 AM ----- BODY: /pre´s@·dens los'@j/ n.
[C programmers] Coding error in an expression due to unexpected
grouping of arithmetic or logical operators by the compiler. Used esp. of
certain common coding errors in C due to the nonintuitively low precedence
levels of &
, |
, ^
, <<
, and >>
(for this reason, experienced C programmers
deliberately forget the language's baroque
precedence hierarchy and parenthesize defensively). Can always be avoided
by suitable use of parentheses. LISP fans enjoy
pointing out that this can't happen in their favorite
language, which eschews precedence entirely, requiring one to use explicit
parentheses everywhere. See aliasing bug,
memory leak, memory smash,
smash the stack,
fandango on core, overrun screw.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pred DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:07 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet; orig. fr. the Island MUD via Oxford University] Abbreviation
for predictable
, used to signify or preempt responses that
are extremely predictable but have to be filled in for the sake of form
(the phrase is bracketed by <pred>...</pred>). X-Pred headers
in mail or news serve the same end. Figuring out the connection between
the X-Pred tagline and the thread is part of the entertainment. For
example, it is said that any thread about taxation must contain a reference
to Raquel Welch, if only to stop other people from mentioning her. This is
allegedly due to a Monty Python sketch where a character declares that he
would tax Raquel Welch, and he has a feeling she would tax him.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: prepend DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:06 AM ----- BODY: /pree`pend´/ vt.
[by analogy with ‘append’] To prefix. As with
‘append’ (but not ‘prefix’ or ‘suffix’
as a verb), the direct object is always the thing being added and not the
original word (or character string, or whatever). If you prepend a
semicolon to the line, the translation routine will pass it through
unaltered.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: prestidigitization DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:05 AM ----- BODY: /pres`t@·di`j@·ti:·zay´sh@n/ n.
1. The act of putting something into digital notation via sleight of hand.
2. Data entry through legerdemain.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pretty pictures DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:04 AM ----- BODY: n.
[scientific computation] The next step up from numbers. Interesting graphical output from a program that may not have any sensible relationship to the system the program is intended to model. Good for showing to management.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: prettyprint DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:03 AM ----- BODY: /prit´ee·print/ v.
(alt.: pretty-print)
1. To generate ‘pretty’ human-readable output from a hairy internal representation; esp. used for the process of grinding (sense 1) program code, and most esp. for LISP code.
2. To format in some particularly slick and nontrivial way.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pretzel key DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:02 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Mac users] See feature key.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: priesthood DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:01 AM ----- BODY: n.
[TMRC; obs.] The select group of system managers responsible for the operation and maintenance of a batch computer system. On these computers, a user never had direct access to a computer, but had to submit his/her data and programs to a priest for execution. Results were returned days or even weeks later.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: prime time DATE: 05/15/2003 10:34:00 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from TV programming] Normal high-usage hours on a system or network. Back in the days of big timesharing machines ‘prime time’ was when lots of people were competing for limited cycles, usually the day shift. Avoidance of prime time was traditionally given as a major reason for night mode hacking. The term fell into disuse during the early PC era, but has been revived to refer to times of day or evening at which the Internet tends to be heavily loaded, making Web access slow. The hackish tendency to late-night hacking runs has changed not a bit.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: print DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:59 AM ----- BODY: v.
To output, even if to a screen. If a hacker says that a program
printed a message
, he means this; if he refers to printing a
file, he probably means it in the conventional sense of writing to a
hardcopy device (compounds like ‘print job’ and
‘printout’, on the other hand, always refer to the
latter). This very common term is likely a holdover from the days when
printing terminals were the norm, perpetuated by programming language
constructs like C's
printf3.
See senses 1 and 2 of tty.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: printing discussion DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:58 AM ----- BODY: n.
[XEROX PARC] A protracted, low-level, time-consuming, generally pointless discussion of something only peripherally interesting to all.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: priority interrupt DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:57 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from the hardware term] Describes any stimulus compelling enough to yank one right out of hack mode. Classically used to describe being dragged away by an SO for immediate sex, but may also refer to more mundane interruptions such as a fire alarm going off in the near vicinity. Also called an NMI (non-maskable interrupt), especially in PC-land.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: profile DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:56 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A control file for a program, esp. a text file automatically read from each user's home directory and intended to be easily modified by the user in order to customize the program's behavior. Used to avoid hardcoded choices (see also dot file, rc file).
2. [techspeak] A report on the amounts of time spent in each routine of a program, used to find and tune away the hot spots in it. This sense is often verbed. Some profiling modes report units other than time (such as call counts) and/or report at granularities other than per-routine, but the idea is similar. 3.[techspeak] A subset of a standard used for a particular purpose. This sense confuses hackers who wander into the weird world of ISO standards no end!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: progasm DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:55 AM ----- BODY: /proh´gaz·m/ n.
[University of Wisconsin] The euphoria experienced upon the completion of a program or other computer-related project. For example, the rush you get when you finally run the code you've been hacking for the past week and it works first time. (The quality of the experience is directly proportional to the complexity of the code and inversely proportional to the amount of debugging it took to get the code working.) Compare geekasm.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: proggy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Any computer program that is considered a full application.
2. Any computer program that is made up of or otherwise contains proglets.
3. Any computer program that is large enough to be normally distributed as an RPM or tarball.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: proglet DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:53 AM ----- BODY: /prog´let/ n.
[UK] A short extempore program written to meet an immediate, transient need. Often written in BASIC, rarely more than a dozen lines long, and containing no subroutines. The largest amount of code that can be written off the top of one's head, that does not need any editing, and that runs correctly the first time (this amount varies significantly according to one's skill and the language one is using). Compare toy program, noddy, one-liner wars.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: program DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A magic spell cast over a computer allowing it to turn one's input into error messages.
2. An exercise in experimental epistemology.
3. A form of art, ostensibly intended for the instruction of computers, which is nevertheless almost inevitably a failure if other programmers can't understand it.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: Programmer's Cheer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:51 AM ----- BODY:
Shift to the left! Shift to the right! Pop up, push down!
Byte! Byte! Byte!
A joke so old it has hair on it.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: programming DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:50 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The art of debugging a blank sheet of paper (or, in these days of
on-line editing, the art of debugging an empty file). Bloody
instructions which, being taught, return to plague their inventor
(Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7)
2. A pastime similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward.
3. The most fun you can have with your clothes on.
4. The least fun you can have with your clothes off.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: programming fluid DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:49 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Coffee.
2. Cola.
3. Any caffeinacious stimulant. Many hackers consider these essential for those all-night hacking runs. See wirewater.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: propeller head DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:48 AM ----- BODY: n.
Used by hackers, this is syn. with geek. Non-hackers sometimes use it to describe all techies. Prob. derives from SF fandom's tradition (originally invented by old-time fan Ray Faraday Nelson) of propeller beanies as fannish insignia (though nobody actually wears them except as a joke).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: propeller key DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:47 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Mac users] See feature key.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: proprietary DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:46 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. In marketroid-speak, superior; implies a product imbued with exclusive magic by the unmatched brilliance of the company's own hardware or software designers.
2. In the language of hackers and users, inferior; implies a product
not conforming to open-systems standards, and thus one that puts the
customer at the mercy of a vendor able to gouge freely on service and
upgrade charges after the initial sale has locked the customer in. Often
used in the phrase proprietary crap
.
3. Synonym for closed-source, e.g. software issued in binary without source and under a restrictive license.
Since the coining of the term open source, many hackers have made a conscious effort to distinguish between proprietary and commercial software. It is possible for software to be commercial (that is, intended to make a profit for the producers) without being proprietary. The reverse is also possible, for example in binary-only freeware.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: protocol DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:45 AM ----- BODY: n.
As used by hackers, this never refers to niceties about the proper form for addressing letters to the Papal Nuncio or the order in which one should use the forks in a Russian-style place setting; hackers don't care about such things. It is used instead to describe any set of rules that allow different machines or pieces of software to coordinate with each other without ambiguity. So, for example, it does include niceties about the proper form for addressing packets on a network or the order in which one should use the forks in the Dining Philosophers Problem. It implies that there is some common message format and an accepted set of primitives or commands that all parties involved understand, and that transactions among them follow predictable logical sequences. See also handshaking, do protocol.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: provocative maintenance DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:44 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common ironic mutation of preventive maintenance] Actions performed upon a machine at regularly scheduled intervals to ensure that the system remains in a usable state. So called because it is all too often performed by a field servoid who doesn't know what he is doing; such ‘maintenance’ often induces problems, or otherwise results in the machine's remaining in an unusable state for an indeterminate amount of time. See also scratch monkey.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: prowler DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:43 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Unix] A daemon that is run periodically
(typically once a week) to seek out and erase core
files, truncate administrative logfiles, nuke lost+found
directories, and otherwise clean up the
cruft that tends to pile up in the corners of a file
system. See also reaper,
skulker.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pseudo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:42 AM ----- BODY: /soo´doh/ n.
[Usenet: truncation of ‘pseudonym’]
1. An electronic-mail or Usenet persona adopted by a human for amusement value or as a means of avoiding negative repercussions of one's net.behavior; a ‘nom de Usenet’, often associated with forged postings designed to conceal message origins. Perhaps the best-known and funniest hoax of this type is B1FF. See also tentacle.
2. Notionally, a flamage-generating AI program simulating a Usenet user. Many flamers have been accused of actually being such entities, despite the fact that no AI program of the required sophistication yet exists. However, in 1989 there was a famous series of forged postings that used a phrase-frequency-based travesty generator to simulate the styles of several well-known flamers; it was based on large samples of their back postings (compare Dissociated Press). A significant number of people were fooled by the forgeries, and the debate over their authenticity was settled only when the perpetrator came forward to publicly admit the hoax.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pseudoprime DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:41 AM ----- BODY: n.
A backgammon prime (six consecutive occupied points) with one point
missing. This term is an esoteric pun derived from number theory: a number
that passes a certain kind of primality test
may be called a
pseudoprime (all primes pass any such
test, but so do some composite numbers), and any number that passes several
is, in some sense, almost certainly prime. The hacker backgammon usage
stems from the idea that a pseudoprime is almost as good as a prime: it
will do the same job unless you are unlucky.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pseudosuit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:40 AM ----- BODY: /soo´doh·s[y]oot`/ n.
A suit wannabee; a hacker who has decided that he wants to be in management or administration and begins wearing ties, sport coats, and (shudder!) suits voluntarily. It's his funeral. See also lobotomy.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: psychedelicware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:39 AM ----- BODY: /si:`k@·del'·ik·weir/ n.
[UK] Syn. display hack. See also smoking clover.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: psyton DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:38 AM ----- BODY: /si:´ton/ n.
[TMRC] The elementary particle carrying the sinister force. The probability of a process losing is proportional to the number of psytons falling on it. Psytons are generated by observers, which is why demos are more likely to fail when lots of people are watching. [This term appears to have been largely superseded by bogon; see also quantum bogodynamics. —ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pubic directory DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:37 AM ----- BODY: /pyoob´ik d@·rek´t@·ree/) n.
[NYU] (also pube directory
/pyoob'
d@·rek´t@·ree/) The pub (public) directory on a machine that allows
FTP access. So called because it is the default
location for SEX (sense 1). I'll have the
source in the pube directory by Friday.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: puff DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:36 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To decompress data that has been crunched by Huffman coding. At least one widely distributed Huffman decoder program was actually named ‘PUFF’, but these days it is usually packaged with the encoder. Oppose huff, see inflate.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pumpkin holder DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:35 AM ----- BODY: n.
See patch pumpkin.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: pumpking DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:34 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. for pumpkin holder; see patch pumpkin.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: punched card DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:33 AM ----- BODY: n.obs.
[techspeak] (alt.: punch card) The signature medium of computing's Stone Age, now obsolescent. The punched card actually predated computers considerably, originating in 1801 as a control device for mechanical looms. The version patented by Hollerith and used with mechanical tabulating machines in the 1890 U.S. Census was a piece of cardboard about 90 mm by 215 mm. There is a widespread myth that it was designed to fit in the currency trays used for that era's larger dollar bills, but recent investigations have falsified this.
IBM (which originated as a tabulating-machine manufacturer) married the punched card to computers, encoding binary information as patterns of small rectangular holes; one character per column, 80 columns per card. Other coding schemes, sizes of card, and hole shapes were tried at various times.
The 80-column width of most character terminals is a legacy of the IBM punched card; so is the size of the quick-reference cards distributed with many varieties of computers even today. See chad, chad box, eighty-column mind, green card, dusty deck, code grinder.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: punt DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:32 AM ----- BODY: v.
[from the punch line of an old joke referring to American football:
Drop back 15 yards and punt!
]
1. To give up, typically without any intention of retrying.
Let's punt the movie tonight.
I was going to hack all
night to get this feature in, but I decided to punt
may mean that
you've decided not to stay up all night, and may also mean you're not ever
even going to put in the feature.
2. More specifically, to give up on figuring out what the Right Thing is and resort to an inefficient hack.
3. A design decision to defer solving a problem, typically because
one cannot define what is desirable sufficiently well to frame an
algorithmic solution. No way to know what the right form to dump
the graph in is — we'll punt that for now.
4. To hand a tricky implementation problem off to some other section
of the design. It's too hard to get the compiler to do that; let's
punt to the runtime system.
5. To knock someone off an Internet or chat connection; a punter thus, is a person or program that does this.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: Purple Book DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:31 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The System V Interface Definition. The covers of the first editions were an amazingly nauseating shade of off-lavender.
2. Syn. Wizard Book. Donald Lewine's POSIX Programmer's Guide (O'Reilly, 1991, ISBN 0-937175-73-0). See also book titles.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: purple wire DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:30 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] Wire installed by Field Engineers to work around problems discovered during testing or debugging. These are called ‘purple wires’ even when (as is frequently the case) their actual physical color is yellow.... Compare blue wire, yellow wire, and red wire.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: push DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:29 AM ----- BODY:
[from the operation that puts the current information on a stack, and the fact that procedure return addresses are saved on a stack] (Also PUSH /push/ or PUSHJ /push´J/, the latter based on the PDP-10 procedure call instruction.)
1. To put something onto a stack. If one says that something has been pushed onto one's stack, it means that the Damoclean list of things hanging over ones's head has grown longer and heavier yet. This may also imply that one will deal with it before other pending items; otherwise one might say that the thing was ‘added to my queue’.
2. vi. To enter upon a digression, to save the current discussion for later. Antonym of pop; see also stack.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - P TITLE: Python DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:28 AM ----- BODY: /pi:´thon/
In the words of its author, the other scripting
language
(other than Perl, that is).
Python's design is notably clean, elegant, and well thought through; it
tends to attract the sort of programmers who find Perl grubby and exiguous.
Some people revolt at its use of whitespace to define logical structure by
indentation, objecting that this harks back to the horrible old fixed-field
languages of the 1960s. Python's relationship with Perl is rather like the
BSD community's relationship to
Linux — it's the smaller party in a (usually
friendly) rivalry, but the average quality of its developers is generally
conceded to be rather higher than in the larger community it competes with.
There's a Python resource page at http://www.python.org. See also
Guido, BDFL.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Q TITLE: quad DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:27 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Two bits; syn. for quarter, crumb, tayste.
2. A four-pack of anything (compare hex, sense 2).
3. The rectangle or box glyph used in the APL language for various arcane purposes mostly related to I/O. Former Ivy-Leaguers and Oxford types are said to associate it with nostalgic memories of dear old University.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Q TITLE: quadruple bucky DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:26 AM ----- BODY: n. obs.
1. On an MIT space-cadet keyboard, use of all four of the shifting keys (control, meta, hyper, and super) while typing a character key.
2. On a Stanford or MIT keyboard in raw mode, use of four shift keys while typing a fifth character, where the four shift keys are the control and meta keys on both sides of the keyboard. This was very difficult to do! One accepted technique was to press the left-control and left-meta keys with your left hand, the right-control and right-meta keys with your right hand, and the fifth key with your nose.
Quadruple-bucky combinations were very seldom used in practice,
because when one invented a new command one usually assigned it to some
character that was easier to type. If you want to imply that a program has
ridiculously many commands or features, you can say something like:
Oh, the command that makes it spin the tapes while whistling
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is quadruple-bucky-cokebottle.
See
double bucky, bucky bits,
cokebottle.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Q TITLE: quantifiers DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:25 AM ----- BODY:
In techspeak and jargon, the standard metric prefixes used in the SI (Système International) conventions for scientific measurement have dual uses. With units of time or things that come in powers of 10, such as money, they retain their usual meanings of multiplication by powers of 1000 = 10^3. But when used with bytes or other things that naturally come in powers of 2, they usually denote multiplication by powers of 1024 = 210.
Here are the SI magnifying prefixes, along with the corresponding binary interpretations in common use:
prefix decimal binary kilo- 1000^1 1024^1 = 2^10 = 1,024 mega- 1000^2 1024^2 = 2^20 = 1,048,576 giga- 1000^3 1024^3 = 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 tera- 1000^4 1024^4 = 2^40 = 1,099,511,627,776 peta- 1000^5 1024^5 = 2^50 = 1,125,899,906,842,624 exa- 1000^6 1024^6 = 2^60 = 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 zetta- 1000^7 1024^7 = 2^70 = 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 yotta- 1000^8 1024^8 = 2^80 = 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176
Here are the SI fractional prefixes:
prefix decimal jargon usage milli- 1000^-1 (seldom used in jargon) micro- 1000^-2 small or human-scale (see micro-) nano- 1000^-3 even smaller (see nano-) pico- 1000^-4 even smaller yet (see pico-) femto- 1000^-5 (not used in jargon—yet) atto- 1000^-6 (not used in jargon—yet) zepto- 1000^-7 (not used in jargon—yet) yocto- 1000^-8 (not used in jargon—yet)
The prefixes zetta-, yotta-, zepto-, and yocto- have been included in these tables purely for completeness and giggle value; they were adopted in 1990 by the 19th Conference Generale des Poids et Mesures. The binary peta- and exa- loadings, though well established, are not in jargon use either — yet. The prefix milli-, denoting multiplication by 1/1000, has always been rare in jargon (there is, however, a standard joke about the millihelen — notionally, the amount of beauty required to launch one ship). See the entries on micro-, pico-, and nano- for more information on connotative jargon use of these terms. ‘Femto’ and ‘atto’ (which, interestingly, derive not from Greek but from Danish) have not yet acquired jargon loadings, though it is easy to predict what those will be once computing technology enters the required realms of magnitude (however, see attoparsec).
There are, of course, some standard unit prefixes for powers of 10. In the following table, the ‘prefix’ column is the international standard prefix for the appropriate power of ten; the ‘binary’ column lists jargon abbreviations and words for the corresponding power of 2. The B-suffixed forms are commonly used for byte quantities; the words ‘meg’ and ‘gig’ are nouns that may (but do not always) pluralize with ‘s’.
prefix decimal binary pronunciation} kilo- k K, KB, kay mega- M M, MB, meg meg giga- G G, GB, gig gig,jig
Confusingly, hackers often use K or M as though they were suffix or
numeric multipliers rather than a prefix; thus 2K dollars
,
2M of disk space
. This is also true (though less commonly)
of G.
Note that the formal SI metric prefix for 1000 is ‘k’; some use this strictly, reserving ‘K’ for multiplication by 1024 (KB is thus ‘kilobytes’).
K, M, and G used alone refer to quantities of bytes; thus, 64G is 64 gigabytes and ‘a K’ is a kilobyte (compare mainstream use of ‘a G’ as short for ‘a grand’, that is, $1000). Whether one pronounces ‘gig’ with hard or soft ‘g’ depends on what one thinks the proper pronunciation of ‘giga-’ is.
Confusing 1000 and 1024 (or other powers of 2 and 10 close in magnitude) — for example, describing a memory in units of 500K or 524K instead of 512K — is a sure sign of the marketroid. One example of this: it is common to refer to the capacity of 3.5" floppies as ‘1.44 MB’ In fact, this is a completely bogus number. The correct size is 1440 KB, that is, 1440 * 1024 = 1474560 bytes. So the ‘mega’ in ‘1.44 MB’ is compounded of two ‘kilos’, one of which is 1024 and the other of which is 1000. The correct number of megabytes would of course be 1440 / 1024 = 1.40625. Alas, this fine point is probably lost on the world forever. [1993 update: hacker Morgan Burke has proposed, to general approval on Usenet, the following additional prefixes:
groucho | 10-30 |
harpo | 10-27 |
harpi | 1027 |
grouchi | 1030 |
We observe that this would leave the prefixes zeppo-, gummo-, and chico- available for future expansion. Sadly, there is little immediate prospect that Mr. Burke's eminently sensible proposal will be ratified.]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Q TITLE: quantum bogodynamics DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:24 AM ----- BODY: /kwon´tm boh`goh·di:·nam´iks/ n.
A theory that characterizes the universe in terms of bogon sources (such as politicians, used-car salesmen, TV evangelists, and suits in general), bogon sinks (such as taxpayers and computers), and bogosity potential fields. Bogon absorption, of course, causes human beings to behave mindlessly and machines to fail (and may also cause both to emit secondary bogons); however, the precise mechanics of the bogon-computron interaction are not yet understood and remain to be elucidated. Quantum bogodynamics is most often invoked to explain the sharp increase in hardware and software failures in the presence of suits; the latter emit bogons, which the former absorb. See bogon, computron, suit, psyton.
Here is a representative QBD theory: The bogon is a boson (integral spin, +1 or -1), and has zero rest mass. In this respect it is very much like a photon. However, it has a much greater momentum, thus explaining its destructive effect on computer electronics and human nervous systems. The corollary to this is that bogons also have tremendous inertia, and therefore a bogon beam is deflected only with great difficulty. When the bogon encounters its antiparticle, the cluon, they mutually annihilate each other, releasing magic smoke. Furthermore 1 Lenat = 1 mole (6.022E23) of bogons (see microLenat).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Q TITLE: quarter DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:23 AM ----- BODY: n.
Two bits. This in turn comes from the ‘pieces of eight’ famed in pirate movies — Spanish silver crowns that could be broken into eight pie-slice-shaped ‘bits’ to make change. Early in American history the Spanish coin was considered equal to a dollar, so each of these ‘bits’ was considered worth 12.5 cents. Syn. tayste, crumb, quad. Usage: rare. General discussion of such terms is under nybble.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Q TITLE: ques DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:22 AM ----- BODY: /kwes/
1. n. The question mark character (?, ASCII 0111111).
2. interj. What? Also
frequently verb-doubled as Ques ques?
See
wall.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Q TITLE: quick-and-dirty DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:21 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[common] Describes a crock put together under
time or user pressure. Used esp. when you want to convey that you think
the fast way might lead to trouble further down the road. I can
have a quick-and-dirty fix in place tonight, but I'll have to rewrite the
whole module to solve the underlying design problem.
See also
kluge.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Q TITLE: quine DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:20 AM ----- BODY: /kwi:n/ n.
[from the name of the logician Willard van Orman Quine, via Douglas Hofstadter] A program that generates a copy of its own source text as its complete output. Devising the shortest possible quine in some given programming language is a common hackish amusement. (We ignore some variants of BASIC in which a program consisting of a single empty string literal reproduces itself trivially.) Here is one classic quine: ((lambda (x) (list x (list (quote quote) x))) (quote (lambda (x) (list x (list (quote quote) x)))))
This one works in LISP or Scheme. It's relatively easy to write quines in other languages such as Postscript which readily handle programs as data; much harder (and thus more challenging!) in languages like C which do not. Here is a classic C quine for ASCII machines: char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main() {printf(f,34,f,34,10);}%c"; main(){printf(f,34,f,34,10);}
For excruciatingly exact quinishness, remove the interior line breaks. Here is another elegant quine in ANSI C: #define q(k)main(){return!puts(#k"\nq("#k")");} q(#define q(k)main(){return!puts(#k"\nq("#k")");})
Some infamous Obfuscated C Contest entries have been quines that reproduced in exotic ways. There is an amusing Quine Home Page.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Q TITLE: Quirk objection DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:19 AM ----- BODY: interj.
[Named for Captain Gym Z. Quirk, the first to raise it.]
Objection! Assumes organ not in evidence!
Used in
news.admin.net-abuse.email to
point out that a comment assumes the presence of something whose existence
has not been proven, such as a spammer's brain or gonads. This is not used
to refer to things that are definitely proven not to
exist, such as a spammer's ethics. It's applicable to enough postings
there that a poster wishing to raise the objection often need merely say
ObQuirk!
, an instance of the Ob-
convention.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Q TITLE: quote chapter and verse DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:18 AM ----- BODY: v.
[by analogy with the mainstream phrase] To cite a relevant excerpt
from an appropriate bible. I don't care if
See also
legalese, language lawyer,
RTFS (sense 2).rn
gets it wrong; ‘Followup-To:
poster’ is explicitly permitted by RFC-1036.
I'll quote chapter and verse if you don't believe me.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Q TITLE: quotient DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:17 AM ----- BODY: n.
See coefficient of X.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Q TITLE: quux DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:16 AM ----- BODY: /kwuhks/ n.
[Mythically, from the Latin semi-deponent verb quuxo, quuxare, quuxandum iri; noun form variously ‘quux’ (plural ‘quuces’, anglicized to ‘quuxes’) and ‘quuxu’ (genitive plural is ‘quuxuum’, for four u-letters out of seven in all, using up all the ‘u’ letters in Scrabble).]
1. Originally, a metasyntactic variable like foo and foobar. Invented by Guy Steele for precisely this purpose when he was young and naive and not yet interacting with the real computing community. Many people invent such words; this one seems simply to have been lucky enough to have spread a little. In an eloquent display of poetic justice, it has returned to the originator in the form of a nickname.
2. interj. See foo; however, denotes very little disgust, and is uttered mostly for the sake of the sound of it.
3. Guy Steele in his persona as ‘The Great Quux’, which is somewhat infamous for light verse and for the ‘Crunchly’ cartoons.
4. In some circles, used as a punning opposite of
‘crux’. Ah, that's the quux of the matter!
implies that the point is not crucial (compare
tip of the ice-cube).
5. quuxy: adj. Of or pertaining to a quux.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Q TITLE: qux DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:15 AM ----- BODY: /kwuhks/
The fourth of the standard metasyntactic variable, after baz and before the quu(u...)x series. See foo, bar, baz, quux. This appears to be a recent mutation from quux, and many versions (especially older versions) of the standard series just run foo, bar, baz, quux, ....
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Q TITLE: QWERTY DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:14 AM ----- BODY: /kwer´tee/ adj.
[from the keycaps at the upper left] Pertaining to a standard English-language typewriter keyboard (sometimes called the Sholes keyboard after its inventor), as opposed to Dvorak or non-US-ASCII layouts or a space-cadet keyboard or APL keyboard.
Historical note: The QWERTY layout is a fine example of a fossil. It is sometimes said that it was designed to slow down the typist, but this is wrong; it was designed to allow faster typing — under a constraint now long obsolete. In early typewriters, fast typing using nearby type-bars jammed the mechanism. So Sholes fiddled the layout to separate the letters of many common digraphs (he did a far from perfect job, though; ‘th’, ‘tr’, ‘ed’, and ‘er’, for example, each use two nearby keys). Also, putting the letters of ‘typewriter’ on one line allowed it to be typed with particular speed and accuracy for demos. The jamming problem was essentially solved soon afterward by a suitable use of springs, but the keyboard layout lives on.
The QWERTY keyboard has also spawned some unhelpful economic myths about how technical standards get and stay established; see http://www.reasonmag.com/9606/Fe.QWERTY.html.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rabbit job DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:13 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Cambridge] A batch job that does little, if any, real work, but creates one or more copies of itself, breeding like rabbits. Compare wabbit, fork bomb.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rain dance DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:12 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Any ceremonial action taken to correct a hardware problem, with
the expectation that nothing will be accomplished. This especially applies
to reseating printed circuit boards, reconnecting cables, etc. I
can't boot up the machine. We'll have to wait for Greg to do his rain
dance.
2. Any arcane sequence of actions performed with computers or software in order to achieve some goal; the term is usually restricted to rituals that include both an incantation or two and physical activity or motion. Compare magic, voodoo programming, black art, cargo cult programming, wave a dead chicken; see also casting the runes.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rainbow series DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:11 AM ----- BODY: n.
Any of several series of technical manuals distinguished by cover
color. The original rainbow series was the NCSC security manuals (see
Orange Book).
These are now available via the web.
the term has also been commonly applied to the PostScript reference set.
Which books are meant by the
rainbow series
unqualified is thus dependent on one's local
technical culture.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: random DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:10 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. Unpredictable (closest to mathematical definition); weird.
The system's been behaving pretty randomly.
2. Assorted; undistinguished. Who was at the
conference?
Just a bunch of random business
types.
3. (pejorative) Frivolous; unproductive; undirected. He's
just a random loser.
4. Incoherent or inelegant; poorly chosen; not well organized.
The program has a random set of misfeatures.
That's a
random name for that function.
Well, all the names were
chosen pretty randomly.
5. In no particular order, though deterministic. The I/O
channels are in a pool, and when a file is opened one is chosen
randomly.
6. Arbitrary. It generates a random name for the scratch
file.
7. Gratuitously wrong, i.e., poorly done and for no good apparent reason. For example, a program that handles file name defaulting in a particularly useless way, or an assembler routine that could easily have been coded using only three registers, but redundantly uses seven for values with non-overlapping lifetimes, so that no one else can invoke it without first saving four extra registers. What randomness!
8. n. A random hacker; used particularly of high-school students who soak up computer time and generally get in the way.
9. n. Anyone who is not a hacker
(or, sometimes, anyone not known to the hacker speaking); the noun form of
sense 2. I went to the talk, but the audience was full of randoms
asking bogus questions
.
10. n. (occasional MIT usage) One who lives at Random Hall. See also J. Random, some random X.
11. [UK] Conversationally, a non sequitur or something similarly
out-of-the-blue. As in: Stop being so random!
This sense
equates to ‘hatstand’, taken from the Viz comic character
Roger Irrelevant - He's completely Hatstand.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: Random Number God DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:09 AM ----- BODY:
[rec.games.roguelike.angband; often abbreviated ‘RNG’]
The malign force which lurks behind the random number generator in
Angband (and by extension elsewhere). A dark god
that demands sacrifices and toys with its victims. I just found a
really great item; I suppose the RNG is about to punish me...
Apparently, Angband's random number generator occasionally gets locked in a
repetition, so you get something with a 3% chance happening 8 times in a
row. Improbable, but far too common to be pure chance. Compare
Shub-Internet.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: random numbers DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:08 AM ----- BODY: n.
When one wishes to specify a large but random number of things, and the context is inappropriate for N, certain numbers are preferred by hacker tradition (that is, easily recognized as placeholders). These include the following:
17 |
Long described at MIT as ‘the least random number’; see also
23. This may be Discordian in origin, or it may be related to some in-jokes
about 17 and |
23 |
Sacred number of Eris, Goddess of Discord (along with 17 and 5). |
37 |
The most random two-digit number is 37, When groups of people are polled
to pick a |
42 |
The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and
Everything ( |
69 |
From the sexual act. This one was favored in MIT's ITS culture. |
105 |
69 hex = 105 decimal, and 69 decimal = 105 octal. |
666 |
In Christian mythology, the Number of the Beast. |
For further enlightenment, study the Principia Discordia, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Joy of Sex, and the Christian Bible (Revelation 13:18). See also Discordianism or consult your pineal gland. See also for values of.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: randomness DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:07 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. An inexplicable misfeature; gratuitous inelegance.
2. A hack or crock
that depends on a complex combination of coincidences (or, possibly, the
combination upon which the crock depends for its accidental failure to
malfunction). This hack can output characters 40--57 by putting the
character in the four-bit accumulator field of an XCT and then extracting
six bits — the low 2 bits of the XCT opcode are the right
thing.
What randomness!
3. Of people, synonymous with flakiness. The connotation is that the person
so described is behaving weirdly, incompetently, or inappropriately for
reasons which are (a) too tiresome to bother inquiring into, (b) are
probably as inscrutable as quantum phenomena anyway, and (c) are likely to
pass with time. Maybe he has a real complaint, or maybe it's just
randomness. See if he calls back.
Despite the negative connotations of most jargon uses of this term have, it is worth noting that randomness can actually be a valuable resource, very useful for applications in cryptography and elsewhere. Computers are so thoroughly deterministic that they have a hard time generating high-quality randomness, so hackers have sometimes felt the need to built special-purpose contraptions for this purpose alone. One well-known website offers random bits generated by radioactive decay. Another derives random bits from images of Lava Lite lamps. (Hackers invariably find the latter hilarious. If you have to ask why, you'll never get it.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rape DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:06 AM ----- BODY: vt.
1. To screw someone or something, violently;
in particular, to destroy a program or information irrecoverably. Often
used in describing file-system damage. So-and-so was running a
program that did absolute disk I/O and ended up raping the master
directory.
2. To strip a piece of hardware for parts.
3. [CMU/Pitt] To mass-copy files from an anonymous ftp site.
Last night I raped Simtel's dskutl directory.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rare mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:05 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[Unix] CBREAK mode (character-by-character with interrupts enabled).
Distinguished from raw mode and
cooked mode; the phrase a sort of half-cooked (rare?)
mode
is used in the V7/BSD manuals to describe the mode. Usage:
rare.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: raster blaster DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:04 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Cambridge] Specialized hardware for bitblt operations (a blitter). Allegedly inspired by ‘Rasta Blasta’, British slang for the sort of portable stereo Americans call a ‘boom box’ or ‘ghetto blaster’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: raster burn DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:03 AM ----- BODY: n.
Eyestrain brought on by too many hours of looking at low-res, poorly tuned, or glare-ridden monitors, esp. graphics monitors. See terminal illness.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rasterbation DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:02 AM ----- BODY: n.
[portmanteau: raster + masturbation] The gratuitous use of computer-generated images and effects in movies and graphic art which would have been better without them. Especially employed as a term of abuse by Photoshop/GIMP users and graphic artists.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rat belt DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:01 AM ----- BODY: n.
A cable tie, esp. the sawtoothed, self-locking plastic kind that you can remove only by cutting (as opposed to a random twist of wire or a twist tie or one of those humongous metal clip frobs). Small cable ties are mouse belts.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rat dance DATE: 05/15/2003 10:33:00 AM ----- BODY: n.
[From the Dilbert comic strip of November 14, 1995] A hacking run that produces results which, while superficially coherent, have little or nothing to do with its original objectives. There are strong connotations that the coding process and the objectives themselves were pretty random. (In the original comic strip, the Ratbert is invited to dance on Dilbert's keyboard in order to produce bugs for him to fix, and authors a Web browser instead.) Compare Infinite-Monkey Theorem.
This term seems to have become widely recognized quite rapidly after the original strip, a fact which testifies to Dilbert's huge popularity among hackers. All too many find the perverse incentives and Kafkaesque atmosphere of Dilbert's mythical workplace reflective of their own experiences.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rathole DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:59 AM ----- BODY:
[from the English idiom down a rathole
for a waste of
money or time] A technical subject that is known to be able to absorb
infinite amounts of discussion time without more than an infinitesimal
probability of arrival at a conclusion or consensus. That's a
rathole
(or just Rathole!
) is considered a
pre-emptive bid to change the subject. The difference between ratholes and
religious issues is that a holy war cannot be
pre-empted in this way. Canonical examples are XML namespaces and
open-source licensing.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: ratio site DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:58 AM ----- BODY:
[warez d00dz] An FTP site storing pirated files where one must first upload something before being able to download. There is a ratio, based on bytes or files count, between the uploads and download. For instance, on a 2:1 site, to download a 4 Mb file, one must first upload at least 2 Mb of files. The hotter the contents of the server are, the smaller the ratio is. More often than not, the server refuses uploads because its disk is full, making it useless for downloading — or the connection magically breaks after one has uploaded a large amount of files, just before the downloading phase begins. See also banner site, leech mode.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rave DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:57 AM ----- BODY: vi.
[WPI]
1. To persist in discussing a specific subject.
2. To speak authoritatively on a subject about which one knows very little.
3. To complain to a person who is not in a position to correct the difficulty.
4. To purposely annoy another person verbally.
5. To evangelize. See flame.
6. Also used to describe a less negative form of blather, such as friendly bullshitting. ‘Rave’ differs slightly from flame in that rave implies that it is the persistence or obliviousness of the person speaking that is annoying, while flame implies somewhat more strongly that the tone or content is offensive as well.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rave on! DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:56 AM ----- BODY: imp.
Sarcastic invitation to continue a rave, often by someone who wishes the raver would get a clue but realizes this is unlikely.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: ravs DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:55 AM ----- BODY: /ravz/, also Chinese ravs n.
[primarily MIT/Boston usage] Jiao-zi (steamed or boiled) or Guo-tie
(pan-fried). A Chinese appetizer, known variously in the plural as
dumplings, pot stickers (the literal translation of guo-tie), and (around
Boston) ‘Peking Ravioli’. The term rav is short for ‘ravioli’, and
among hackers always means the Chinese kind rather than the Italian kind.
Both consist of a filling in a pasta shell, but the Chinese kind includes
no cheese, uses a thinner pasta, has a pork-vegetable filling (good ones
include Chinese chives), and is cooked differently, either by steaming or
frying. A rav or dumpling can be cooked any way, but a potsticker is
always the pan-fried kind (so called because it sticks to the frying pot
and has to be scraped off). Let's get hot-and-sour soup and three
orders of ravs.
See also oriental food.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: raw mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
A mode that allows a program to transfer bits directly to or from an I/O device (or, under bogus operating systems that make a distinction, a disk file) without any processing, abstraction, or interpretation by the operating system. Compare rare mode, cooked mode. This is techspeak under Unix, jargon elsewhere.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: RBL DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:53 AM ----- BODY: /R·B·L/
Abbreviation: Realtime Blackhole List
. A service that
allows people to blacklist sites for emitting spam,
and makes the blacklist available in real time to electronic-mail transport
programs that know how to use RBL so they can filter out mail from those
sites. Drastic (and controversial) but effective. There is an RBL home page.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rc file DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:52 AM ----- BODY: /R·C fi:l/ n.
[Unix: from runcom files on the CTSS system 1962-63, via the startup script /etc/rc] Script file containing startup instructions for an application program (or an entire operating system), usually a text file containing commands of the sort that might have been invoked manually once the system was running but are to be executed automatically each time the system starts up. See also dot file, profile (sense 1).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: RE DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:51 AM ----- BODY: /R·E/ n.
Common spoken and written shorthand for regexp.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: read-only user DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:50 AM ----- BODY: n.
Describes a luser who uses computers almost exclusively for reading Usenet, bulletin boards, and/or email, rather than writing code or purveying useful information. See twink, terminal junkie, lurker.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: README file DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:49 AM ----- BODY: n.
Hacker's-eye introduction traditionally included in the top-level
directory of a Unix source distribution, containing a pointer to more
detailed documentation, credits, miscellaneous revision history, notes,
etc. In the Mac and PC worlds, software is not usually distributed in
source form, and the README is more likely to contain user-oriented
material like last-minute documentation changes, error workarounds, and
restrictions. When asked, hackers invariably relate the README convention
to the famous scene in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures In
Wonderland in which Alice confronts magic munchies labeled
Eat Me
and Drink Me
.
The file may be named README, or READ.ME, or rarely ReadMe or readme.txt or some other variant. The all-upper-case spellings, however, are universal among Unix programmers. By ancient tradition, real source files have all-lowercase names and all-uppercase is reserved for metadata, comments, and grafitti. This is functional; because 'A' sorts before 'a' in ASCII, the README will appear in directory listings before any source file.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: real DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:48 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Not simulated. Often used as a specific antonym to virtual in any of its jargon senses.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: real estate DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:47 AM ----- BODY: n.
May be used for any critical resource measured in units of area. Most frequently used of chip real estate, the area available for logic on the surface of an integrated circuit (see also nanoacre). May also be used of floor space in a dinosaur pen, or even space on a crowded desktop (whether physical or electronic).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: real hack DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:46 AM ----- BODY: n.
A crock. This is sometimes used affectionately; see hack.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: real operating system DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:45 AM ----- BODY: n.
The sort the speaker is used to. People from the BSDophilic
academic community are likely to issue comments like System V? Why
don't you use a real operating system?
, people
from the commercial/industrial Unix sector are known to complain
BSD? Why don't you use a real operating
system?
, and people from IBM object Unix? Why don't you use
a real operating system?
Only
MS-DOS is universally considered unreal. See
holy wars, religious issues,
proprietary,
Get a real computer!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: Real Programmer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:44 AM ----- BODY: n.
[indirectly, from the book Real Men Don't Eat
Quiche] A particular sub-variety of hacker: one possessed of a
flippant attitude toward complexity that is arrogant even when justified by
experience. The archetypal Real
Programmer likes to program on the bare metal and is very good at same, remembers the binary opcodes
for every machine he has ever programmed, thinks that HLLs are sissy, and
uses a debugger to edit his code because full-screen editors are for wimps.
Real Programmers aren't satisfied with code that hasn't been tuned into a
state of tenseness just short of rupture. Real
Programmers never use comments or write documentation: If it was
hard to write
, says the Real Programmer, it should be hard
to understand.
Real Programmers can make machines do things that
were never in their spec sheets; in fact, they are seldom really happy
unless doing so. A Real Programmer's code can awe with its fiendish
brilliance, even as its crockishness appalls. Real Programmers live on
junk food and coffee, hang line-printer art on their walls, and terrify the
crap out of other programmers — because someday, somebody else might
have to try to understand their code in order to change it. Their
successors generally consider it a Good Thing that
there aren't many Real Programmers around any more. For a famous (and
somewhat more positive) portrait of a Real Programmer, see The Story of Mel' in Appendix A. The term
itself was popularized by a letter to the editor in the July 1983
Datamation titled Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal
by Ed Post, still circulating on Usenet and Internet in on-line
form.
Typing Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal into a web search engine should turn up a copy.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: Real Soon Now DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:43 AM ----- BODY: adv.
[orig. from SF's fanzine community, popularized by Jerry Pournelle's column in BYTE]
1. Supposed to be available (or fixed, or cheap, or whatever) real soon now according to somebody, but the speaker is quite skeptical.
2. When one's gods, fates, or other time commitments permit one to get to it (in other words, don't hold your breath). Often abbreviated RSN. Compare copious free time.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: real time DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:42 AM ----- BODY:
1. [techspeak] adj. Describes an application which requires a program to respond to stimuli within some small upper limit of response time (typically milli- or microseconds). Process control at a chemical plant is the canonical example. Such applications often require special operating systems (because everything else must take a back seat to response time) and speed-tuned hardware.
2. adv. In jargon, refers to
doing something while people are watching or waiting. I asked her
how to find the calling procedure's program counter on the stack and she
came up with an algorithm in real time.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: real user DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:41 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A commercial user. One who is paying real money for his computer usage.
2. A non-hacker. Someone using the system for an explicit purpose
(a research project, a course, etc.) other than pure exploration. See
user. Hackers who are also students may also be
real users. I need this fixed so I can do a problem set. I'm not
complaining out of randomness, but as a real user.
See also
luser.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: Real World DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:40 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Those institutions at which ‘programming’ may be used in the same sentence as ‘FORTRAN’, ‘COBOL’, ‘RPG’, ‘IBM’, ‘DBASE’, etc. Places where programs do such commercially necessary but intellectually uninspiring things as generating payroll checks and invoices.
2. The location of non-programmers and activities not related to programming.
3. A bizarre dimension in which the standard dress is shirt and tie and in which a person's working hours are defined as 9 to 5 (see code grinder).
4. Anywhere outside a university. Poor fellow, he's left MIT
and gone into the Real World.
Used pejoratively by those not in
residence there. In conversation, talking of someone who has entered the
Real World is not unlike speaking of a deceased person. It is also
noteworthy that on the campus of Cambridge University in England, there is
a gaily-painted lamp-post which bears the label ‘REALITY
CHECKPOINT’. It marks the boundary between university and the Real
World; check your notions of reality before passing. This joke is funnier
because the Cambridge ‘campus’ is actually coextensive with the
center of Cambridge town. See also fear and loathing, mundane, and
uninteresting.
()
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: reality check DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The simplest kind of test of software or hardware; doing the equivalent of asking it what 2 + 2 is and seeing if you get 4. The software equivalent of a smoke test.
2. The act of letting a real user try out prototype software. Compare sanity check.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: reality-distortion field DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:38 AM ----- BODY: n.
An expression used to describe the persuasive ability of managers like Steve Jobs (the term originated at Apple in the 1980s to describe his peculiar charisma). Those close to these managers become passionately committed to possibly insane projects, without regard to the practicality of their implementation or competitive forces in the marketplace.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: reaper DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:37 AM ----- BODY: n.
A prowler that removes files. A file removed in this way is said to have been reaped.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: recompile the world DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:36 AM ----- BODY:
The surprisingly large amount of work that needs to be done as the
result of any small but globally visible program change. The
world
may mean the entirety of some huge program, or may in theory
refer to every program of a certain class in the entire known universe. For
instance, Add one #define to stdio.h, and you have to recompile the
world.
This means that any minor change to the standard-I/O header
file theoretically mandates recompiling every C program in existence, even
if only to verify that the change didn't screw something else up. In
practice, you may not actually have to recompile the world, but the
implication is that some human cleverness is required to figure out what
parts can be safely left out.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rectangle slinger DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:35 AM ----- BODY: n.
See polygon pusher.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: recursion DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:34 AM ----- BODY: n.
See recursion. See also tail recursion.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: recursive acronym DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:33 AM ----- BODY: n.
A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose
acronyms/abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other
acronyms/abbreviations. The original of the breed may have been TINT
(TINT Is Not TECO
). The classic examples were two MIT
editors called EINE (EINE Is Not EMACS
) and ZWEI
(ZWEI Was EINE Initially
). More recently, there is a Scheme
compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and
GNU (q.v., sense 1) stands for GNU's Not
Unix!
— and a company with the name Cygnus, which expands to
Cygnus, Your GNU Support
(though Cygnus people say this is a
backronym). See also mung,
EMACS.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: red wire DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:32 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] Patch wires installed by programmers who have no business mucking with the hardware. It is said that the only thing more dangerous than a hardware guy with a code patch is a softy with a soldering iron.... Compare blue wire, yellow wire, purple wire.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: regexp DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:31 AM ----- BODY: /reg´eksp/ n.
[Unix] (alt.: regex or reg-ex)
1. Common written and spoken abbreviation for regular expression, one of the wildcard
patterns used, e.g., by Unix utilities such as
grep1,
sed1,
and
awk1.
These use conventions similar to but more elaborate than those described
under glob. For purposes of this lexicon, it is
sufficient to note that regexps also allow complemented character sets
using ^; thus, one can specify ‘any non-alphabetic
character’ with [^A-Za-z]
.
2. Name of a well-known PD regexp-handling package in portable C, written by revered Usenetter Henry Spencer.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: register dancing DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:30 AM ----- BODY: n.
Many older processor architectures suffer from a serious shortage of general-purpose registers. This is especially a problem for compiler-writers, because their generated code needs places to store temporaries for things like intermediate values in expression evaluation. Some designs with this problem, like the Intel 80x86, do have a handful of special-purpose registers that can be pressed into service, providing suitable care is taken to avoid unpleasant side effects on the state of the processor: while the special-purpose register is being used to hold an intermediate value, a delicate minuet is required in which the previous value of the register is saved and then restored just before the official function (and value) of the special-purpose register is again needed.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rehi DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:29 AM ----- BODY:
[IRC, MUD] Hello again.
Very commonly used to greet
people upon returning to an IRC channel after
channel hopping.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: reincarnation, cycle of DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: reinvent the wheel DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:27 AM ----- BODY: v.
To design or implement a tool equivalent to an existing one or part of one, with the implication that doing so is silly or a waste of time. This is often a valid criticism. On the other hand, automobiles don't use wooden rollers, and some kinds of wheel have to be reinvented many times before you get them right. On the third hand, people reinventing the wheel do tend to come up with the moral equivalent of a trapezoid with an offset axle.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: relay rape DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:26 AM ----- BODY: n.
The hijacking of a third party's unsecured mail server to deliver spam.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: religion of CHI DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:25 AM ----- BODY: /ki:/ n.
[Case Western Reserve University] Yet another hackish parody
religion (see also Church of the SubGenius,
Discordianism). In the mid-70s, the canonical
Introduction to Programming
courses at CWRU were taught in
Algol, and student exercises were punched on cards and run on a Univac 1108
system using a homebrew operating system named CHI. The religion had no
doctrines and but one ritual: whenever the worshiper noted that a digital
clock read 11:08, he or she would recite the phrase It is 11:08;
ABS, ALPHABETIC, ARCSIN, ARCCOS, ARCTAN.
The last five words were
the first five functions in the appropriate chapter of the Algol manual;
note the special pronunciations /obz/ and /ark´sin/ rather than the more common
/ahbz/ and /ark´si:n/. Using an alarm clock to warn
of 11:08's arrival was considered harmful.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: religious issues DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:24 AM ----- BODY: n.
Questions which seemingly cannot be raised without touching off
holy wars, such as What is the best operating
system (or editor, language, architecture, shell, mail reader, news
reader)?
, What about that Heinlein guy, eh?
,
What should we add to the new Jargon File?
See
holy wars; see also theology,
bigot, and compare
rathole.
This term is a prime example of ha ha only serious. People actually develop the most amazing and religiously intense attachments to their tools, even when the tools are intangible. The most constructive thing one can do when one stumbles into the crossfire is mumble Get a life! and leave — unless, of course, one's own unassailably rational and obviously correct choices are being slammed.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: replicator DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:23 AM ----- BODY: n.
Any construct that acts to produce copies of itself; this could be a living organism, an idea (see meme), a program (see quine, worm, wabbit, fork bomb, and virus), a pattern in a cellular automaton (see life, sense 1), or (speculatively) a robot or nanobot. It is even claimed by some that Unix and C are the symbiotic halves of an extremely successful replicator; see Unix conspiracy.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: reply DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:22 AM ----- BODY: n.
See followup.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: restriction DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:21 AM ----- BODY: n.
A bug or design error that limits a program's capabilities, and which is sufficiently egregious that nobody can quite work up enough nerve to describe it as a feature. Often used (esp. by marketroid types) to make it sound as though some crippling bogosity had been intended by the designers all along, or was forced upon them by arcane technical constraints of a nature no mere user could possibly comprehend (these claims are almost invariably false).
Old-time hacker Joseph M. Newcomer advises that whenever choosing a quantifiable but arbitrary restriction, you should make it either a power of 2 or a power of 2 minus 1. If you impose a limit of 107 items in a list, everyone will know it is a random number — on the other hand, a limit of 15 or 16 suggests some deep reason (involving 0- or 1-based indexing in binary) and you will get less flamage for it. Limits which are round numbers in base 10 are always especially suspect.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: retcon DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:20 AM ----- BODY: /ret´kon/
[short for ‘retroactive continuity’, from the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.comics]
1. n. The common situation in pulp fiction (esp. comics or soap operas) where a new story ‘reveals’ things about events in previous stories, usually leaving the ‘facts’ the same (thus preserving continuity) while completely changing their interpretation. For example, revealing that a whole season of Dallas was a dream was a retcon.
2. vt. To write such a story
about a character or fictitious object. Byrne has retconned
Superman's cape so that it is no longer unbreakable.
Marvelman's old adventures were retconned into synthetic
dreams.
Swamp Thing was retconned from a transformed person
into a sentient vegetable.
[This term is included because it is a good example of hackish linguistic innovation in a field completely unrelated to computers. The word retcon will probably spread through comics fandom and lose its association with hackerdom within a couple of years; for the record, it started here. —ESR]
[1993 update: some comics fans on the net now claim that retcon was independently in use in comics fandom before rec.arts.comics, and have citations from around 1981. In lexicography, nothing is ever simple. —ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: RETI DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:19 AM ----- BODY: v.
Syn. RTI
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: retrocomputing DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:18 AM ----- BODY: /ret'·roh·k@m·pyoo´ting/ n.
Refers to emulations of way-behind-the-state-of-the-art hardware or software, or implementations of never-was-state-of-the-art; esp. if such implementations are elaborate practical jokes and/or parodies, written mostly for hack value, of more ‘serious’ designs. Perhaps the most widely distributed retrocomputing utility was the pnch6 or bcd6 program on V7 and other early Unix versions, which would accept up to 80 characters of text argument and display the corresponding pattern in punched card code. Other well-known retrocomputing hacks have included the programming language INTERCAL, a JCL-emulating shell for Unix, the card-punch-emulating editor named 029, and various elaborate PDP-11 hardware emulators and RT-11 OS emulators written just to keep an old, sourceless Zork binary running.
A tasty selection of retrocomputing programs are made available at the Retrocomputing Museum, http://www.catb.org/retro/.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: return from the dead DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:17 AM ----- BODY: v.
To regain access to the net after a long absence. Compare person of no account.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: RFC DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:16 AM ----- BODY: /R·F·C/ n.
[Request For Comment] One of a long-established series of numbered Internet informational documents and standards widely followed by commercial software and freeware in the Internet and Unix communities. Perhaps the single most influential one has been RFC-822 (the Internet mail-format standard). The RFCs are unusual in that they are floated by technical experts acting on their own initiative and reviewed by the Internet at large, rather than formally promulgated through an institution such as ANSI. For this reason, they remain known as RFCs even once adopted as standards.
The RFC tradition of pragmatic, experience-driven, after-the-fact
standard writing done by individuals or small working groups has important
advantages over the more formal, committee-driven process typical of ANSI
or ISO. Emblematic of some of these advantages is the existence of a
flourishing tradition of ‘joke’ RFCs; usually at least one a
year is published, usually on April 1st. Well-known joke RFCs have
included 527 (ARPAWOCKY
, R. Merryman, UCSD; 22 June 1973),
748 (Telnet Randomly-Lose Option
, Mark R. Crispin; 1 April
1978), and 1149 (A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on
Avian Carriers
, D. Waitzman, BBN STC; 1 April 1990). The first was
a Lewis Carroll pastiche; the second a parody of the TCP-IP documentation
style, and the third a deadpan skewering of standards-document legalese,
describing protocols for transmitting Internet data packets by carrier
pigeon (since actually implemented; see Appendix A). See also
Infinite-Monkey Theorem.
The RFCs are most remarkable for how well they work — they frequently manage to have neither the ambiguities that are usually rife in informal specifications, nor the committee-perpetrated misfeatures that often haunt formal standards, and they define a network that has grown to truly worldwide proportions.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: RFE DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:15 AM ----- BODY: /R·F·E/ n.
1. [techspeak] Request For Enhancement (compare RFC).
2. [from ‘Radio Free Europe’, Bellcore and Sun] Radio Free Ethernet, a system (originated by Peter Langston) for broadcasting audio among Sun SPARCstations over the ethernet.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: Right Thing DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:14 AM ----- BODY: n.
That which is compellingly the correct or
appropriate thing to use, do, say, etc. Often capitalized, always
emphasized in speech as though capitalized. Use of this term often implies
that in fact reasonable people may disagree. What's the right thing
for LISP to do when it sees
mod a
0? Should it return
Oppose
Wrong Thing.a
, or give a divide-by-0 error?
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rip DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:13 AM ----- BODY: v.
1. To extract the digital representation of a piece of music from an
audio CD. Software that does this is often called a CD
ripper
.
2. [Amiga hackers] To extract sound or graphics from a program that they have been compiled/assembled into, or which generates them at run-time. In the case of older Amiga games this entails searching through memory shortly after a reboot. This sense has been in use for many years and probably gave rise to the (now more common) sense 1.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: ripoff DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:12 AM ----- BODY: n.
Synonym for chad, sense 1.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: RL DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:11 AM ----- BODY: n.
[MUD community] Real Life. Firiss laughs in RL
means
that Firiss's player is laughing. Compare
meatspace; oppose VR.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: roach DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:10 AM ----- BODY: vt.
[Bell Labs] To destroy, esp. of a data structure. Hardware gets toasted or fried, software gets roached. Probably derived from '70s and '80s drug slang; marijuana smokers used ‘roach’ to refer to the unsmokable remnant of a joint, and to ‘roach’ a joint was therefore to destroy it.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: robocanceller DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:09 AM ----- BODY: /roh·boh·kan´sel·@r/
A program that monitors Usenet feeds, attempting to detect and eliminate spam by sending appropriate cancel messages. Robocancellers may use the Breidbart Index as a trigger. Programming them is not a game for amateurs; see ARMM. See also Dave the Resurrector.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: robot DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:08 AM ----- BODY: n.
See bot.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: robust DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:07 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Said of a system that has demonstrated an ability to recover gracefully from the whole range of exceptional inputs and situations in a given environment. One step below bulletproof. Carries the additional connotation of elegance in addition to just careful attention to detail. Compare smart, oppose brittle.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rococo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:06 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Terminally baroque. Used to imply that a
program has become so encrusted with the software equivalent of gold leaf
and curlicues that they have completely swamped the underlying design.
Called after the later and more extreme forms of Baroque architecture and
decoration prevalent during the mid-1700s in Europe. Alan Perlis said:
Every program eventually becomes rococo, and then rubble.
Compare critical mass.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rogue DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:05 AM ----- BODY:
1. [Unix] n. A Dungeons-and-Dragons-like game using character graphics, written under BSD Unix and subsequently ported to other Unix systems. The original BSD curses3 screen-handling package was hacked together by Ken Arnold primarily to support games, and the development of rogue6 popularized its use; it has since become one of Unix's most important and heavily used application libraries. Nethack, Omega, Larn, Angband, and an entire subgenre of computer dungeon games (all known as ‘roguelikes’) all took off from the inspiration provided by rogue6; the popular Windows game Diablo, though graphics-intensive, has very similar play logic. See also nethack, moria, Angband.
2. [Usenet] adj. An
ISP which permits net abuse (usually in the form of
spamming) by its customers, or which itself engages
in such activities. Rogue ISPs are sometimes subject to
IDPs or UDPs. Sometimes
deliberately misspelled as rouge
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: room-temperature IQ DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:04 AM ----- BODY: quant.
[IBM] 80 or below (nominal room temperature is 72 degrees
Fahrenheit, 22 degrees Celsius). Used in describing the expected
intelligence range of the luser. Well, but
how's this interface going to play with the room-temperature IQ
crowd?
See drool-proof paper. This is a
much more insulting phrase in countries that use Celsius
thermometers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: root DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:03 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [Unix] The superuser account (with user name ‘root’) that ignores permission bits, user number 0 on a Unix system. The term avatar is also used.
2. The top node of the system directory structure; historically the home directory of the root user, but probably named after the root of an (inverted) tree.
3. By extension, the privileged system-maintenance login on any OS. See root mode, go root, see also wheel.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: root mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:02 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. with wizard mode or wheel mode. Like these, it is often generalized to describe privileged states in systems other than OSes.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rootkit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:01 AM ----- BODY: /root´kit/ n.
[very common] A kit for getting root; an automated cracking tool. What script kiddies use. The existence of rootkits means that large-scale attacks on insecure computers can be done by people with no technical skills other than the ability to follow directions. Rootkits designed to crack Microsoft operating systems and webservers are especially common, because their software is so porous and easy to crack.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rot13 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:32:00 AM ----- BODY: /rot ther´teen/ n.,v.
[Usenet: from ‘rotate alphabet 13 places’] The simple
Caesar-cypher encryption that replaces each English letter with the one 13
places forward or back along the alphabet, so that The butler did
it!
becomes Gur ohgyre qvq vg!
Most Usenet news
reading and posting programs include a rot13 feature. It is used to
enclose the text in a sealed wrapper that the reader must choose to open
— e.g., for posting things that might offend some readers, or
spoilers. A major advantage of rot13 over
rot(N) for other N is that it is
self-inverse, so the same code can be used for encoding and decoding. See
also spoiler space, which has partly displaced rot13
since non-Unix-based newsreaders became common.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rotary debugger DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:59 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Commodore] Essential equipment for those late-night or early-morning debugging sessions. Mainly used as sustenance for the hacker. Comes in many decorator colors, such as Sausage, Pepperoni, and Garbage. See ANSI standard pizza.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: RSN DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:58 AM ----- BODY: /R·S·N/ adj.
See Real Soon Now.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: RTBM DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:57 AM ----- BODY: /R·T·B·M/ imp.
[Unix] Commonwealth Hackish variant of RTFM;
expands to ‘Read The Bloody Manual’. RTBM is often the entire
text of the first reply to a question from a newbie;
the second would escalate to
RTFM
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: RTFAQ DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:56 AM ----- BODY: /R·T·F·A·Q/ imp.
[Usenet: primarily written, by analogy with RTFM] Abbrev. for ‘Read the FAQ!’, an exhortation that the person addressed ought to read the newsgroup's FAQ list before posting questions.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: RTFB DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:55 AM ----- BODY: /R·T·F·B/ imp.
[Unix] Abbreviation for ‘Read The Fucking Binary’. Used
when neither documentation nor source for the problem at hand exists, and
the only thing to do is use some debugger or monitor and directly analyze
the assembler or even the machine code. No source for the buggy
port driver? Aaargh! I hate proprietary operating
systems. Time to RTFB.
Of the various RTF? forms, ‘RTFB’ is the least pejorative against anyone asking a question for which RTFB is the answer; the anger here is directed at the absence of both source and adequate documentation.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: RTFM DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:54 AM ----- BODY: /R·T·F·M/ imp.
[Unix] Abbreviation for ‘Read The Fucking Manual’.
1. Used by gurus to brush off questions they consider trivial or annoying. Compare Don't do that then!.
2. Used when reporting a problem to indicate that you aren't just
asking out of randomness. No, I can't figure
out how to interface Unix to my toaster, and yes, I have RTFM.
Unlike sense 1, this use is considered polite. See also
FM, RTFAQ,
RTFB, RTFS,
STFW, RTM, all of which
mutated from RTFM, and compare UTSL.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: RTFS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:53 AM ----- BODY: /R·T·F·S/
[Unix]
1. imp. Abbreviation for ‘Read The Fucking Source’. Variant form of RTFM, used when the problem at hand is not necessarily obvious and not answerable from the manuals — or the manuals are not yet written and maybe never will be. For even trickier situations, see RTFB. Unlike RTFM, the anger inherent in RTFS is not usually directed at the person asking the question, but rather at the people who failed to provide adequate documentation.
2. imp. ‘Read The Fucking Standard’; this oath can only be used when the problem area (e.g., a language or operating system interface) has actually been codified in a ratified standards document. The existence of these standards documents (and the technically inappropriate but politically mandated compromises that they inevitably contain, and the impenetrable legalese in which they are invariably written, and the unbelievably tedious bureaucratic process by which they are produced) can be unnerving to hackers, who are used to a certain amount of ambiguity in the specifications of the systems they use. (Hackers feel that such ambiguities are acceptable as long as the Right Thing to do is obvious to any thinking observer; sadly, this casual attitude towards specifications becomes unworkable when a system becomes popular in the Real World.) Since a hacker is likely to feel that a standards document is both unnecessary and technically deficient, the deprecation inherent in this term may be directed as much against the standard as against the person who ought to read it.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: RTI DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:52 AM ----- BODY: /R·T·I/ interj.
The mnemonic for the ‘return from interrupt’ instruction
on many computers including the 6502 and 6800. The variant RETI is found among Z80 hackers. Equivalent to
Now, where was I?
or used to end a conversational
digression. See pop.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: RTM DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:51 AM ----- BODY: /R·T·M/
1. [Usenet: abbreviation for ‘Read The Manual’] Politer variant of RTFM.
2. Robert Tappan Morris, perpetrator of the great Internet worm of 1988 (see Great Worm); villain to many, naive hacker gone wrong to a few. Morris claimed that the worm that brought the Internet to its knees was a benign experiment that got out of control as the result of a coding error. After the storm of negative publicity that followed this blunder, Morris's username on ITS was hacked from RTM to RTFM.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: RTS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:50 AM ----- BODY: /R·T·S/ imp.
Abbreviation for ‘Read The Screen’. Mainly used by hackers in the microcomputer world. Refers to what one would like to tell the suit one is forced to explain an extremely simple application to. Particularly appropriate when the suit failed to notice the ‘Press any key to continue’ prompt, and wishes to know ‘why won't it do anything’. Also seen as ‘RTFS’ in especially deserving cases.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rubber-hose cryptanalysis DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:49 AM ----- BODY: n.
[sci.crypt newsgroup] The technique of breaking a code or cipher by
finding someone who has the key and applying a rubber hose vigorously and
repeatedly to the soles of that luckless person's feet until the key is
discovered. Shorthand for any method of coercion: the originator of the
term drily noted that it can take a surprisingly short time and is
quite computationally inexpensive
relative to other cryptanalysis
methods. Compare social engineering,
brute force.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rude DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:48 AM ----- BODY: [WPI] adj.
1. (of a program) Badly written.
2. Functionally poor, e.g., a program that is very difficult to use because of gratuitously poor (random?) design decisions. Oppose cuspy.
3. Anything that manipulates a shared resource without regard for its other users in such a way as to cause a (non-fatal) problem. Examples: programs that change tty modes without resetting them on exit, or windowing programs that keep forcing themselves to the top of the window stack.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: runes DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:47 AM ----- BODY: pl.n.
1. Anything that requires heavy wizardry or black art to parse: core dumps, JCL commands, APL, or code in a language you haven't a clue how to read. Not quite as bad as line noise, but close. Compare casting the runes, Great Runes.
2. Special display characters (for example, the high-half graphics on an IBM PC).
3. [borderline techspeak] 16-bit characters from the Unicode multilingual character set.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: runic DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:46 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Syn. obscure. VMS fans sometimes refer to
Unix as ‘Runix’; Unix fans return the compliment by expanding
VMS to ‘Very Messy Syntax’ or ‘Vachement Mauvais
Système’ (French idiom, Hugely Bad
System
).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rusty iron DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:45 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. tired iron. It has been claimed that this is the inevitable fate of water MIPS.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - R TITLE: rusty wire DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:44 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Amateur Packet Radio] Any very noisy network medium, in which the
packets are subject to frequent corruption. Most prevalent in reference to
wireless links subject to all the vagaries of RF noise and marginal
propagation conditions. Yes, but how good is your whizbang new
protocol on really rusty wire?
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: S/N ratio DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:43 AM ----- BODY: n.
(also s/n ratio, s:n ratio). Syn. signal-to-noise ratio. Often abbreviated SNR.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sacred DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:42 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Reserved for the exclusive use of something (an extension of the
standard meaning). Often means that anyone may look at the sacred object,
but clobbering it will screw whatever it is sacred to. The comment
Register 7 is sacred to the interrupt handler
appearing in a
program would be interpreted by a hacker to mean that if any
other part of the program changes the contents of
register 7, dire consequences are likely to ensue.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: saga DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:41 AM ----- BODY: n.
[WPI] A cuspy but bogus raving story about N random broken people.
Here is a classic example of the saga form, as told by Guy L. Steele:
Jon L. White (login name JONL) and I (GLS) were office mates at MIT for many years. One April, we both flew from Boston to California for a week on research business, to consult face-to-face with some people at Stanford, particularly our mutual friend Richard P. Gabriel (RPG).
RPG picked us up at the San Francisco airport and drove us back to
Palo Alto (going logical south on route 101,
parallel to El Camino Bignum). Palo Alto is
adjacent to Stanford University and about 40 miles south of San Francisco.
We ate at The Good Earth, a ‘health food’ restaurant, very
popular, the sort whose milkshakes all contain honey and protein powder.
JONL ordered such a shake — the waitress claimed the flavor of the
day was lalaberry
. I still have no idea what that might be,
but it became a running joke. It was the color of raspberry, and JONL said
it tasted rather bitter. I ate a better tostada there than I have ever had
in a Mexican restaurant.
After this we went to the local Uncle Gaylord's Old Fashioned Ice
Cream Parlor. They make ice cream fresh daily, in a variety of intriguing
flavors. It's a chain, and they have a slogan: If you don't live
near an Uncle Gaylord's — MOVE!
Also, Uncle Gaylord (a real
person) wages a constant battle to force big-name ice cream makers to print
their ingredients on the package (like air and plastic and other
non-natural garbage). JONL and I had first discovered Uncle Gaylord's the
previous August, when we had flown to a computer-science conference in
Berkeley, California, the first time either of us had been on the West
Coast. When not in the conference sessions, we had spent our time
wandering the length of Telegraph Avenue, which (like Harvard Square in
Cambridge) was lined with picturesque street vendors and interesting little
shops. On that street we discovered Uncle Gaylord's Berkeley store. The
ice cream there was very good. During that August visit JONL went
absolutely bananas (so to speak) over one particular flavor, ginger
honey.
Therefore, after eating at The Good Earth — indeed, after every
lunch and dinner and before bed during our April visit — a trip to
Uncle Gaylord's (the one in Palo Alto) was mandatory. We had arrived on a
Wednesday, and by Thursday evening we had been there at least four times.
Each time, JONL would get ginger honey ice cream, and proclaim to all
bystanders that Ginger was the spice that drove the Europeans mad!
That's why they sought a route to the East! They used it to preserve their
otherwise off-taste meat.
After the third or fourth repetition RPG
and I were getting a little tired of this spiel, and began to paraphrase
him: Wow! Ginger! The spice that makes rotten meat taste
good!
Say! Why don't we find some dog that's been run over
and sat in the sun for a week and put some ginger on
it for dinner?!
Right! With a lalaberry shake!
And
so on. This failed to faze JONL; he took it in good humor, as long as we
kept returning to Uncle Gaylord's. He loves ginger honey ice cream.
Now RPG and his then-wife KBT (Kathy Tracy) were putting us up
(putting up with us?) in their home for our visit, so to thank them JONL
and I took them out to a nice French restaurant of their choosing. I
unadventurously chose the filet mignon, and KBT had je
ne sais quoi du jour, but RPG and JONL had lapin (rabbit). (Waitress: Oui, we have fresh rabbit, fresh today.
RPG:
Well, JONL, I guess we won't need any
ginger!
)
We finished the meal late, about 11PM, which is 2AM Boston time, so JONL and I were rather droopy. But it wasn't yet midnight. Off to Uncle Gaylord's!
Now the French restaurant was in Redwood City, north of Palo Alto. In leaving Redwood City, we somehow got onto route 101 going north instead of south. JONL and I wouldn't have known the difference had RPG not mentioned it. We still knew very little of the local geography. I did figure out, however, that we were headed in the direction of Berkeley, and half-jokingly suggested that we continue north and go to Uncle Gaylord's in Berkeley.
RPG said Fine!
and we drove on for a while and talked.
I was drowsy, and JONL actually dropped off to sleep for 5 minutes. When
he awoke, RPG said, Gee, JONL, you must have slept all the way over
the bridge!
, referring to the one spanning San Francisco Bay. Just
then we came to a sign that said University Avenue
. I
mumbled something about working our way over to Telegraph Avenue; RPG said
Right!
and maneuvered some more. Eventually we pulled up in
front of an Uncle Gaylord's.
Now, I hadn't really been paying attention because I was so sleepy, and I didn't really understand what was happening until RPG let me in on it a few moments later, but I was just alert enough to notice that we had somehow come to the Palo Alto Uncle Gaylord's after all.
JONL noticed the resemblance to the Palo Alto store, but hadn't
caught on. (The place is lit with red and yellow lights at night, and
looks much different from the way it does in daylight.) He said,
This isn't the Uncle Gaylord's I went to in Berkeley! It looked
like a barn! But this place looks just like the one
back in Palo Alto!
RPG deadpanned, Well, this is the one I
always come to when I'm in Berkeley. They've got two in San Francisco,
too. Remember, they're a chain.
JONL accepted this bit of wisdom. And he was not totally ignorant — he knew perfectly well that University Avenue was in Berkeley, not far from Telegraph Avenue. What he didn't know was that there is a completely different University Avenue in Palo Alto.
JONL went up to the counter and asked for ginger honey. The guy at the counter asked whether JONL would like to taste it first, evidently their standard procedure with that flavor, as not too many people like it.
JONL said, I'm sure I like it. Just give me a cone.
The guy behind the counter insisted that JONL try just a taste first.
Some people think it tastes like soap.
JONL insisted,
Look, I love ginger. I eat Chinese food. I
eat raw ginger roots. I already went through this hassle with the guy back
in Palo Alto. I know I like that
flavor!
At the words back in Palo Alto
the guy behind the
counter got a very strange look on his face, but said nothing. KBT caught
his eye and winked. Through my stupor I still hadn't quite grasped what
was going on, and thought RPG was rolling on the floor laughing and
clutching his stomach just because JONL had launched into his spiel
(makes rotten meat a dish for princes
) for the forty-third
time. At this point, RPG clued me in fully.
RPG, KBT, and I retreated to a table, trying to stifle our chuckles. JONL remained at the counter, talking about ice cream with the guy b.t.c., comparing Uncle Gaylord's to other ice cream shops and generally having a good old time.
At length the g.b.t.c.: said, How's the ginger honey?
JONL said, Fine! I wonder what exactly is in it?
Now Uncle
Gaylord publishes all his recipes and even teaches classes on how to make
his ice cream at home. So the g.b.t.c.: got out the recipe, and he and
JONL pored over it for a while. But the g.b.t.c.: could contain his
curiosity no longer, and asked again, You really like that stuff,
huh?
JONL said, Yeah, I've been eating it constantly back in
Palo Alto for the past two days. In fact, I think this batch is about as
good as the cones I got back in Palo Alto!
G.b.t.c.: looked him straight in the eye and said, You're
in Palo Alto!
JONL turned slowly around, and saw the three of us collapse in a fit
of giggles. He clapped a hand to his forehead and exclaimed, I've
been hacked!
[My spies on the West Coast inform me that there is a close relative of the raspberry found out there called an ‘ollalieberry’ —ESR]
[Ironic footnote: the meme about ginger vs. rotting meat is an urban legend. It's not borne out by an examination of medieval recipes or period purchase records for spices, and appears full-blown in the works of Samuel Pegge, a gourmand and notorious flake case who originated numerous food myths. The truth seems to be that ginger was used to cover not rot but the extreme salt taste of meat packed in brine, which was the best method available before refrigeration. —ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sagan DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:40 AM ----- BODY: /say´gn/ n.
[from Carl Sagan's TV series Cosmos; think
billions and billions
] A large quantity of anything.
There's a sagan different ways to tweak EMACS.
The
U.S. Government spends sagans on bombs and welfare — hard to say
which is more destructive.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: SAIL DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:39 AM ----- BODY: /sayl/, not /S·A·I·L/ n.
1. The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. An important site in the early development of LISP; with the MIT AI Lab, BBN, CMU, XEROX PARC, and the Unix community, one of the major wellsprings of technical innovation and hacker-culture traditions (see the WAITS entry for details). The SAIL machines were shut down in late May 1990, scant weeks after the MIT AI Lab's ITS cluster was officially decommissioned.
2. The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language used at SAIL (sense 1). It was an Algol-60 derivative with a coroutining facility and some new data types intended for building search trees and association lists.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: salescritter DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:38 AM ----- BODY: /sayls´kri`tr/ n.
Pejorative hackerism for a computer salesperson. Hackers tell the following joke:
Q. What's the difference between a used-car dealer and a computer salesman? A. The used-car dealer knows he's lying. [Some versions add: ...and probably knows how to drive.]
This reflects the widespread hacker belief that salescritters are self-selected for stupidity (after all, if they had brains and the inclination to use them, they'd be in programming). The terms salesthing and salesdroid are also common. Compare marketroid, suit, droid.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: salt DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:37 AM ----- BODY: n.
A tiny bit of near-random data inserted where too much regularity
would be undesirable; a data frob (sense 1). For
example, the Unix crypt3 man page mentions that the salt string is
used to perturb the DES algorithm in one of 4096 different
ways.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: salt mines DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:36 AM ----- BODY: n.
Dense quarters housing large numbers of programmers working long hours on grungy projects, with some hope of seeing the end of the tunnel in N years. Noted for their absence of sunshine. Compare playpen, sandbox.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: salt substrate DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:35 AM ----- BODY: n.
[MIT] Collective noun used to refer to potato chips, pretzels, saltines, or any other form of snack food designed primarily as a carrier for sodium chloride. Also sodium substrate. From the technical term chip substrate, used to refer to the silicon on the top of which the active parts of integrated circuits are deposited.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: same-day service DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:34 AM ----- BODY: n.
Ironic term used to describe long response time, particularly with respect to MS-DOS and Windows system calls (which ought to require only a tiny fraction of a second to execute). Such response time is a major incentive for programmers to write programs that are not well-behaved.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: samizdat DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:33 AM ----- BODY: /sahm·iz·daht/ n.
[Russian, literally self publishing
] The process of
disseminating documentation via underground channels. Originally referred
to underground duplication and distribution of banned books in the Soviet
Union; now refers by obvious extension to any less-than-official
promulgation of textual material, esp. rare, obsolete, or
never-formally-published computer documentation. Samizdat is obviously
much easier when one has access to high-bandwidth networks and high-quality
laser printers. Note that samizdat is properly used only with respect to
documents which contain needed information (see also
hacker ethic) but which are for some reason otherwise unavailable, but
not in the context of documents which are available
through normal channels, for which unauthorized duplication would be
unethical copyright violation. See Lions Book for a
historical example.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: samurai DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:32 AM ----- BODY: n.
A hacker who hires out for legal cracking jobs, snooping for
factions in corporate political fights, lawyers pursuing privacy-rights and
First Amendment cases, and other parties with legitimate reasons to need an
electronic locksmith. In 1991, mainstream media reported the existence of
a loose-knit culture of samurai that meets electronically on BBS systems,
mostly bright teenagers with personal micros; they have modeled themselves
explicitly on the historical samurai of Japan and on the net
cowboys
of William Gibson's cyberpunk
novels. Those interviewed claim to adhere to a rigid ethic of loyalty to
their employers and to disdain the vandalism and theft practiced by
criminal crackers as beneath them and contrary to the hacker ethic; some
quote Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings, a
classic of historical samurai doctrine, in support of these principles.
See also sneaker, Stupids,
social engineering, cracker,
hacker ethic, and
dark-side hacker.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sandbender DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:31 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] A person involved with silicon lithography and the physical design of chips. Compare ironmonger, polygon pusher.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sandbox DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:30 AM ----- BODY: n.
(also ‘sandbox, the’)
1. Common term for the R&D department at many software and computer companies (where hackers in commercial environments are likely to be found). Half-derisive, but reflects the truth that research is a form of creative play. Compare playpen.
2. Syn. link farm.
3. A controlled environment within which potentially dangerous programs are run. Used esp. in reference to Java implementations.
4. A checked-out copy of a source tree, on which one may safely perform builds without interfereing with others.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sanity check DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:29 AM ----- BODY: n.
[very common]
1. The act of checking a piece of code (or anything else, e.g., a Usenet posting) for completely stupid mistakes. Implies that the check is to make sure the author was sane when it was written; e.g., if a piece of scientific software relied on a particular formula and was giving unexpected results, one might first look at the nesting of parentheses or the coding of the formula, as a sanity check, before looking at the more complex I/O or data structure manipulation routines, much less the algorithm itself. Compare reality check.
2. A run-time test, either validating input or ensuring that the program hasn't screwed up internally (producing an inconsistent value or state).
3. Conversationally, saying sanity check
means you
are requesting a check of your assumptions. Wait a minute, sanity
check, are we talking about the same Kevin here?
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: Saturday-night special DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from police slang for a cheap handgun] A quick-and-dirty program or feature kluged together during off hours, under a deadline, and in response to pressure from a salescritter. Such hacks are dangerously unreliable, but all too often sneak into a production release after insufficient review.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: say DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:27 AM ----- BODY: vt.
1. To type to a terminal. To list a directory verbosely, you
have to say
Tends to imply a
newline-terminated command (a
‘sentence’).
ls -l
.
2. A computer may also be said to ‘say’ things to you, even if it doesn't have a speech synthesizer, by displaying them on a terminal in response to your commands. Hackers find it odd that this usage confuses mundanes.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: scag DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:26 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To destroy the data on a disk, either by corrupting the filesystem
or by causing media damage. That last power hit scagged the system
disk.
Compare scrog,
roach.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: scanno DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:25 AM ----- BODY: /skan´oh/ n.
An error in a document caused by a scanner glitch, analogous to a typo or thinko.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: scary devil monastery DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:24 AM ----- BODY: n.
Anagram frequently used to refer to the newsgroup alt.sysadmin.recovery, which is populated with characters that rather justify the reference.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: schroedinbug DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:23 AM ----- BODY: /shroh´din·buhg/ n.
[MIT: from the Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment in quantum physics] A design or implementation bug in a program that doesn't manifest until someone reading source or using the program in an unusual way notices that it never should have worked, at which point the program promptly stops working for everybody until fixed. Though (like bit rot) this sounds impossible, it happens; some programs have harbored latent schroedinbugs for years. Compare heisenbug, Bohr bug, mandelbug.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: science-fiction fandom DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:22 AM ----- BODY: n.
Another voluntary subculture having a very heavy overlap with hackerdom; most hackers read SF and/or fantasy fiction avidly, and many go to ‘cons’ (SF conventions) or are involved in fandom-connected activities such as the Society for Creative Anachronism. Some hacker jargon originated in SF fandom; see defenestration, great-wall, cyberpunk, h, ha ha only serious, IMHO, mundane, neep-neep, Real Soon Now. Additionally, the jargon terms cowboy, cyberspace, de-rezz, go flatline, ice, phage, virus, wetware, wirehead, and worm originated in SF stories.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: SCNR DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:21 AM ----- BODY: abbrev
[common] Sorry, Could Not Resist. Normally used to semi-apologize for an obvious wisecrack.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: scram switch DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:20 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from the nuclear power industry] An emergency-power-off switch (see Big Red Switch), esp. one positioned to be easily hit by evacuating personnel. In general, this is not something you frob lightly; these often initiate expensive events (such as Halon dumps) and are installed in a dinosaur pen for use in case of electrical fire or in case some luckless field servoid should put 120 volts across himself while Easter egging. (See also molly-guard, TMRC.)
Scram
was in origin a backronym for Safety Cut
Rope Axe Man
coined by Enrico Fermi himself. The story goes that
in the earliest nuclear power experiments the engineers recognized the
possibility that the reactor wouldn't behave exactly as predicted by their
mathematical models. Accordingly, they made sure that they had mechanisms
in place that would rapidly drop the control rods back into the reactor.
One mechanism took the form of ‘scram technicians’. These
individuals stood next to the ropes or cables that raised and lowered the
control rods. Equipped with axes or cable-cutters, these technicians stood
ready for the (literal) ‘scram’ command. If necessary, they
would cut the cables, and gravity would expeditiously return the control
rods to the reactor, thereby averting yet another kind of core dump.
Modern reactor control rods are held in place with claw-like devices, held closed by current. SCRAM switches are circuit breakers that immediately open the circuit to the rod arms, resulting in the rapid insertion and subsequent bottoming of the control rods.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: scratch DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:19 AM ----- BODY:
1. [from scratchpad] adj. Describes a data structure or recording medium attached to a machine for testing or temporary-use purposes; one that can be scribbled on without loss. Usually in the combining forms scratch memory, scratch register, scratch disk, scratch tape, scratch volume. See also scratch monkey.
2. [primarily IBM, also Commodore] vt. To delete (as in a file).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: scratch monkey DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:18 AM ----- BODY: n.
As in Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a
scratch monkey
, a proverb used to advise
caution when dealing with irreplaceable data or devices. Used to refer to
any scratch volume hooked to a computer during any risky operation as a
replacement for some precious resource or data that might otherwise get
trashed.
This term preserves the memory of Mabel, the Swimming Wonder Monkey, star of a biological research program at the University of Toronto. Mabel was not (so the legend goes) your ordinary monkey; the university had spent years teaching her how to swim, breathing through a regulator, in order to study the effects of different gas mixtures on her physiology. Mabel suffered an untimely demise one day when a DEC field circus engineer troubleshooting a crash on the program's VAX inadvertently interfered with some custom hardware that was wired to Mabel.
It is reported that, after calming down an understandably irate
customer sufficiently to ascertain the facts of the matter, a DEC
troubleshooter called up the field circus manager
responsible and asked him sweetly, Can you swim?
Not all the
consequences to humans were so amusing; the sysop of the machine in
question was nearly thrown in jail at the behest of certain clueless
droids at the local ‘humane’ society.
The moral is clear: When in doubt, always mount a scratch monkey. [The
actual incident occured in 1979 or 1980. There is a version of this story,
complete with reported dialogue between one of the project people and DEC
field service, that has been circulating on Internet since 1986. It is
hilarious and mythic, but gets some facts wrong. For example, it reports
the machine as a PDP-11 and alleges that Mabel's demise occurred when DEC
PMed the machine. Earlier versions of this entry
were based on that story; this one has been corrected from an interview
with the hapless sysop. —ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: scream and die DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:17 AM ----- BODY: v.
Syn. cough and die, but connotes that an error message was printed or displayed before the program crashed.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: screaming tty DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:16 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Unix] A terminal line which spews an infinite number of random
characters at the operating system. This can happen if the terminal is
either disconnected or connected to a powered-off terminal but still
enabled for login; misconfiguration, misimplementation, or simple bad luck
can start such a terminal screaming. A screaming tty or two can seriously
degrade the performance of a vanilla Unix system; the arriving
characters
are treated as userid/password pairs and tested
as such. The Unix password encryption algorithm is designed to be
computationally intensive in order to foil brute-force crack attacks, so
although none of the logins succeeds; the overhead of rejecting them all
can be substantial.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: screen DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Atari ST demoscene] One demoeffect or one screenful of them. Probably comes from old Sierra-style adventures or shoot-em-ups where one travels from one place to another one screenful at a time.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: screen name DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:14 AM ----- BODY: n.
A handle sense
1. This term has been common among users of IRC, MUDs, and commercial on-line services since the mid-1990s. Hackers recognize the term but don't generally use it.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: screen scraping DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:13 AM ----- BODY: v.
The act of capturing data from a system or program by snooping the contents of some display that is not actually intended for data transport or inspection by programs. Around 1980 this term referred to tricks like reading the display memory of a smart terminal through its auxiliary port. Nowadays it often refers to parsing the HTML in generated web pages with programs designed to mine out particular patterns of content. In either guise screen-scraping is an ugly, ad-hoc, last-resort technique that is very likely to break on even minor changes to the format of the data being snooped.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: screw DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:12 AM ----- BODY: n.
[MIT] A lose, usually in software. Especially used for user-visible misbehavior caused by a bug or misfeature. This use has become quite widespread outside MIT.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: screwage DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:11 AM ----- BODY: /skroo'@j/ n.
Like lossage but connotes that the failure is due to a designed-in misfeature rather than a simple inadequacy or a mere bug.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: scribble DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:10 AM ----- BODY: n.
To modify a data structure in a random and unintentionally
destructive way. Bletch! Somebody's disk-compactor program went
berserk and scribbled on the i-node table.
It was working
fine until one of the allocation routines scribbled on low core.
Synonymous with trash; compare
mung, which conveys a bit more intention, and
mangle, which is more violent and final.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: script kiddies DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:09 AM ----- BODY: pl.n.
1. [very common] The lowest form of cracker; script kiddies do mischief with scripts and rootkits written by others, often without understanding the exploit they are using. Used of people with limited technical expertise using easy-to-operate, pre-configured, and/or automated tools to conduct disruptive activities against networked systems. Since most of these tools are fairly well-known by the security community, the adverse impact of such actions is usually minimal.
2. People who cannot program, but who create tacky HTML pages by
copying JavaScript routines from other tacky HTML pages. More generally, a
script kiddie writes (or more likely cuts and pastes) code without either
having or desiring to have a mental model of what the code does; someone
who thinks of code as magical incantations and asks only what do I
need to type to make this happen?
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: scrog DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:08 AM ----- BODY: /skrog/ vt.
[Bell Labs] To damage, trash, or corrupt a data structure.
The list header got scrogged.
Also reported as skrog, and ascribed to the comic strip
The Wizard of Id. Compare
scag; possibly the two are related. Equivalent to
scribble or mangle.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: scrool DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:07 AM ----- BODY: /skrool/ n.
[from the pioneering Roundtable chat system in Houston ca.: 1984; prob.: originated as a typo for ‘scroll’] The log of old messages, available for later perusal or to help one get back in synch with the conversation. It was originally called the scrool monster, because an early version of the roundtable software had a bug where it would dump all 8K of scrool on a user's terminal.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: scrozzle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:06 AM ----- BODY: /skroz´l/ vt.
Used when a self-modifying code segment runs incorrectly and
corrupts the running program or vital data. The damn compiler
scrozzled itself again!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: scruffies DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:05 AM ----- BODY: n.
See neats vs. scruffies.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: SCSI DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:04 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Small Computer System Interface] A bus-independent standard for system-level interfacing between a computer and intelligent devices. Typically annotated in literature with ‘sexy’ (/sek´see/), ‘sissy’ (/sis´ee/), and ‘scuzzy’ (/skuh´zee/) as pronunciation guides — the last being the overwhelmingly predominant form, much to the dismay of the designers and their marketing people. One can usually assume that a person who pronounces it /S-C-S-I/ is clueless.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: SCSI voodoo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:03 AM ----- BODY: /skuz´ee voo´doo/
[common among Mac users] SCSI interface hardware is notoriously fickle of temperament. Often, the SCSI bus will fail to work unless the cable order of devices is re-arranged, SCSI termination is added or removed (sometimes double-termination or no termination will fix the problem), or particular devices are given particular SCSI IDs. The skills needed to trick the naturally skittish demons of SCSI into working are collectively known as SCSI voodoo. Compare magic, deep magic, heavy wizardry, rain dance, cargo cult programming, wave a dead chicken, voodoo programming.
While ordinary mortals frequently experience near-terminal frustration when attempting to configure SCSI device chains, it is said that a true master of this arcane art can (through rituals involving chicken blood, ground rhino horn, hairs of a virgin, eye of newt, etc.) hook up your personal computer with three scanners, a Zip drive, an IDE hard drive, a home weather station, a Smith-Corona typewriter, and the neighbor's garage door.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: search-and-destroy mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:02 AM ----- BODY: n.
Hackerism for a noninteractive search-and-replace facility in an editor, so called because an incautiously chosen match pattern can cause infinite damage.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: second-system effect DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:01 AM ----- BODY: n.
(sometimes, more euphoniously, second-system syndrome) When one is designing the successor to a relatively small, elegant, and successful system, there is a tendency to become grandiose in one's success and design an elephantine feature-laden monstrosity. The term was first used by Fred Brooks in his classic The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (Addison-Wesley, 1975; ISBN 0-201-00650-2). It described the jump from a set of nice, simple operating systems on the IBM 70xx series to OS/360 on the 360 series. A similar effect can also happen in an evolving system; see Brooks's Law, creeping elegance, creeping featurism. See also Multics, OS/2, X, software bloat.
This version of the jargon lexicon has been described (with altogether too much truth for comfort) as an example of second-system effect run amok on jargon-1....
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: secondary damage DATE: 05/15/2003 10:31:00 AM ----- BODY: n.
When a fatal error occurs (esp. a segfault)
the immediate cause may be that a pointer has been trashed due to a
previous fandango on core. However, this fandango
may have been due to an earlier fandango, so no amount
of analysis will reveal (directly) how the damage occurred. The
data structure was clobbered, but it was secondary damage.
By
extension, the corruption resulting from N cascaded
fandangoes on core is ‘Nth-level damage’.
There is at least one case on record in which 17 hours of
grovelling with adb
actually dug up the underlying bug behind an instance of seventh-level
damage! The hacker who accomplished this near-superhuman feat was
presented with an award by his fellows.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: security through obscurity DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:59 AM ----- BODY:
(alt.: security by obscurity)
A term applied by hackers to most OS vendors' favorite way of coping with
security holes — namely, ignoring them, documenting neither any known
holes nor the underlying security algorithms, trusting that nobody will
find out about them and that people who do find out about them won't
exploit them. This strategy
never works for long and
occasionally sets the world up for debacles like the
RTM worm of 1988 (see
Great Worm), but once the brief moments of panic created by such
events subside most vendors are all too willing to turn over and go back to
sleep. After all, actually fixing the bugs would siphon off the resources
needed to implement the next user-interface frill on marketing's wish list
— and besides, if they started fixing security bugs customers might
begin to expect it and imagine that their warranties
of merchantability gave them some sort of right to a
system with fewer holes in it than a shotgunned Swiss cheese, and
then where would we be?
Historical note: There are conflicting stories about the origin of this term. It has been claimed that it was first used in the Usenet newsgroup comp.sys.apollo during a campaign to get HP/Apollo to fix security problems in its Unix-clone Aegis/DomainOS (they didn't change a thing). ITS fans, on the other hand, say it was coined years earlier in opposition to the incredibly paranoid Multics people down the hall, for whom security was everything. In the ITS culture it referred to (1) the fact that by the time a tourist figured out how to make trouble he'd generally gotten over the urge to make it, because he felt part of the community; and (2) (self-mockingly) the poor coverage of the documentation and obscurity of many commands. One instance of deliberate security through obscurity is recorded; the command to allow patching the running ITS system (escape escape control-R) echoed as $$^D. If you actually typed alt alt ^D, that set a flag that would prevent patching the system even if you later got it right.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: SED DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:58 AM ----- BODY: /S·E·D/ n.
[TMRC, from ‘Light-Emitting Diode’] Smoke-emitting diode. A friode that lost the war. See also LER. [Not to be confused with sed1, the Unix stream editor. —ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: See figure 1 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:57 AM ----- BODY:
Metaphorically, Get stuffed.
From the title of a
famous parody that can easily be found with a web search on this phrase;
figure 1, in fact, depicts the digitus impudicus.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: segfault DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:56 AM ----- BODY: n.,vi.
Syn. segment, segmentation fault.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: seggie DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:55 AM ----- BODY: /seg´ee/ n.
[Unix] Shorthand for segmentation fault reported from Britain.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: segment DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:54 AM ----- BODY: /seg´ment/ vi.
To experience a segmentation fault. Confusingly, this is often pronounced more like the noun ‘segment’ than like mainstream v. segment; this is because it is actually a noun shorthand that has been verbed.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: segmentation fault DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:53 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Unix]
1. [techspeak] An error in which a running program attempts to access memory not allocated to it and core dumps with a segmentation violation error. This is often caused by improper usage of pointers in the source code, dereferencing a null pointer, or (in C) inadvertently using a non-pointer variable as a pointer. The classic example is:
int i; scanf ("%d", i); /* should have used &i */
2. To lose a train of thought or a line of reasoning. Also uttered as an exclamation at the point of befuddlement.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: segv DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:52 AM ----- BODY: /seg´vee/ n.,vi.
Yet another synonym for segmentation fault (actually, in this case, ‘segmentation violation’).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: self-reference DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:51 AM ----- BODY: n.
See self-reference.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: selvage DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:50 AM ----- BODY: /sel´v@j/ n.
[from sewing and weaving] See chad (sense 1).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: semi DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:49 AM ----- BODY: /se´mee/ or /se´mi:/
1. n. Abbreviation for
‘semicolon’, when speaking. Commands to
grind are prefixed by semi-semi-star
means
that the prefix is ;;*, not 1/4 of a star.
2. A prefix used with words such as ‘immediately’ as a
qualifier. When is the system coming up?
Semi-immediately.
(That is, maybe not for an hour.)
We did consider that possibility semi-seriously.
See also
infinite.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: semi-automated DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:48 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[US Geological Survey] A procedure that has yet to be completely
automated; it still requires a smidge of clueful human interaction.
Semi-automated programs usually come with written-out operator instructions
that are worth their weight in gold — without them, very nasty things can
happen. At USGS semi-automated programs are often referred to as
semi-automated weapons
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: semi-infinite DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:47 AM ----- BODY: n.
See infinite.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: senior bit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:46 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM; rare] Syn. meta bit.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: September that never ended DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:45 AM ----- BODY:
All time since September 1993. One of the seasonal rhythms of the Usenet used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who, lacking any sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves. This coincided with people starting college, getting their first internet accounts, and plunging in without bothering to learn what was acceptable. These relatively small drafts of newbies could be assimilated within a few months. But in September 1993, AOL users became able to post to Usenet, nearly overwhelming the old-timers' capacity to acculturate them; to those who nostalgically recall the period before, this triggered an inexorable decline in the quality of discussions on newsgroups. Syn. eternal September. See also AOL!.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: server DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:44 AM ----- BODY: n.
A kind of daemon that performs a service for the requester and which often runs on a computer other than the one on which the requestor/client runs. A particularly common term on the Internet, which is rife with web servers, name servers, domain servers, ‘news servers’, finger servers, and the like.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: SEX DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:43 AM ----- BODY: /seks/
[Sun Users' Group & elsewhere] n.
1. Software EXchange. A technique invented by the blue-green algae hundreds of millions of years ago to speed up their evolution, which had been terribly slow up until then. Today, SEX parties are popular among hackers and others (of course, these are no longer limited to exchanges of genetic software). In general, SEX parties are a Good Thing, but unprotected SEX can propagate a virus. See also pubic directory.
2. The rather Freudian mnemonic often used for Sign EXtend, a
machine instruction found in the PDP-11 and many
other architectures. The RCA 1802 chip used in the early Elf and SuperElf
personal computers had a ‘SEt X register’ SEX instruction, but
this seems to have had little folkloric impact. The Data General
instruction set also had SEX
.
DEC's engineers nearly got a
PDP-11 assembler that used the SEX
mnemonic out the door at one time, but (for
once) marketing wasn't asleep and forced a change. That wasn't the last
time this happened, either. The author of The Intel 8086
Primer, who was one of the original designers of the 8086,
noted that there was originally a SEX
instruction on that processor, too. He says that Intel management got cold
feet and decreed that it be changed, and thus the instruction was renamed
CBW
and CWD
(depending on what was being extended). Amusingly, the Intel 8048 (the
microcontroller used in IBM PC keyboards) is also missing straight SEX
but has logical-or and logical-and instructions
ORL
and ANL
.
The Motorola 6809, used in the Radio Shack Color Computer and in
U.K.'s ‘Dragon 32’ personal computer, actually had an official
SEX
instruction; the 6502 in the Apple II
with which it competed did not. British hackers thought this made perfect
mythic sense; after all, it was commonly observed, you could (on some
theoretical level) have sex with a dragon, but you can't have sex with an
apple.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sex changer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:42 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. gender mender.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: shambolic link DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:41 AM ----- BODY: /sham·bol´ik link/ n.
A Unix symbolic link, particularly when it confuses you, points to nothing at all, or results in your ending up in some completely unexpected part of the filesystem....
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: shar file DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:40 AM ----- BODY: /shar´ fi:l/ n.
Syn. sharchive.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sharchive DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:39 AM ----- BODY: /shar´ki:v/ n.
[Unix and Usenet; from /bin/sh archive] A flattened representation of a set of one or more files, with the unique property that it can be unflattened (the original files restored) by feeding it through a standard Unix shell; thus, a sharchive can be distributed to anyone running Unix, and no special unpacking software is required. Sharchives are also intriguing in that they are typically created by shell scripts; the script that produces sharchives is thus a script which produces self-unpacking scripts, which may themselves contain scripts. Sharchives are also commonly referred to as ‘shar files’ after the name of the most common program for generating them.
The downsides of sharchives are that they are an ideal venue for Trojan horse attacks and that, for recipients not running Unix, no simple un-sharchiving program is possible; sharchives can and do make use of arbitrarily-powerful shell features. For these reasons, this technique has largely fallen out of use since the mid-1990s.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: Share and enjoy! DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:38 AM ----- BODY: imp.
1. Commonly found at the end of software release announcements and README files, this phrase indicates allegiance to the hacker ethic of free information sharing (see hacker ethic, sense 1).
2. The motto of the complaints division of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation (the ultimate gaggle of incompetent suits) in Douglas Adams's Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The irony of using this as a cultural recognition signal appeals to hackers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: shareware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:37 AM ----- BODY: /sheir´weir/ n.
A kind of freeware for which the author requests some payment, usually in the accompanying documentation files or in an announcement made by the software itself. Such payment may or may not buy additional support or functionality. See also careware, charityware, crippleware, FRS, guiltware, postcardware, and -ware; compare payware.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sharing violation DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:36 AM ----- BODY:
[From a file error common to several OSes] A
response to receiving information, typically of an excessively personal
nature, that you were probably happier not knowing. You know those
little noises that Pat makes in bed?
Whoa! Sharing
violation!
In contrast to the original file error, which indicated
that you were not being given data that you
did want.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: shebang DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:35 AM ----- BODY: /sh@·bang/ n.
The character sequence #!
that frequently begins
executable shell scripts under Unix. Probably derived from shell
bang
under the influence of American slang the whole
shebang
(everything, the works).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: shelfware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:34 AM ----- BODY: /shelf´weir/ n.
Software purchased on a whim (by an individual user) or in accordance with policy (by a corporation or government agency), but not actually required for any particular use. Therefore, it often ends up on some shelf.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: shell DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:33 AM ----- BODY: n.
[orig. Multics techspeak, widely propagated via Unix]
1. [techspeak] The command interpreter used to pass commands to an operating system; so called because it is the part of the operating system that interfaces with the outside world.
2. More generally, any interface program that mediates access to a special resource or server for convenience, efficiency, or security reasons; for this meaning, the usage is usually a shell around whatever. This sort of program is also called a wrapper.
3. A skeleton program, created by hand or by another program (like, say, a parser generator), which provides the necessary incantations to set up some task and the control flow to drive it (the term driver is sometimes used synonymously). The user is meant to fill in whatever code is needed to get real work done. This usage is common in the AI and Microsoft Windows worlds, and confuses Unix hackers.
Historical note: Apparently, the original Multics shell (sense 1) was so called because it was a shell (sense 3); it ran user programs not by starting up separate processes, but by dynamically linking the programs into its own code, calling them as subroutines, and then dynamically de-linking them on return. The VMS command interpreter still does something very like this.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: shell out DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:32 AM ----- BODY: vi.
[Unix] To spawn an interactive subshell from
within a program (e.g., a mailer or editor). Bang foo runs foo in a
subshell, while bang alone shells out.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: shift left (or right) logical DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:31 AM ----- BODY:
[from any of various machines' instruction sets]
1. vi. To move oneself to the left (right). To move out of the way.
2. imper. Get out of my seat! You can shift to that empty
one to the left (right).
Often used without the logical, or as left
shift instead of shift
left. Sometimes heard as LSH /lish/, from the
PDP-10 instruction set. See
Programmer's Cheer.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: shim DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:30 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A small piece of data inserted in order to achieve a desired memory alignment or other addressing property. For example, the PDP-11 Unix linker, in split I&D (instructions and data) mode, inserts a two-byte shim at location 0 in data space so that no data object will have an address of 0 (and be confused with the C null pointer). See also loose bytes.
2. A type of small transparent image inserted into HTML documents by certain WYSIWYG HTML editors, used to set the spacing of elements meant to have a fixed positioning within a TABLE or DIVision. Hackers who work on the HTML code of such pages afterwards invariably curse these for their crocky dependence on the particular spacing of original image file, the editor that generated them, and the version of the browser used to view them. Worse, they are a poorly designed kludge which the advent of Cascading Style Sheets makes wholly unnecessary; Any fool can plainly see that use of borders, layers and positioned elements is the Right Thing (or would be if adequate support for CSS were more common).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: shitogram DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:29 AM ----- BODY: /shit´oh·gram/ n.
A really nasty piece of email. Compare nastygram, flame.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: shotgun debugging DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
The software equivalent of Easter egging; the making of relatively undirected changes to software in the hope that a bug will be perturbed out of existence. This almost never works, and usually introduces more bugs.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: shovelware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:27 AM ----- BODY: /shuh´v@l·weir`/ n.
1. Extra software dumped onto a CD-ROM or tape to fill up the remaining space on the medium after the software distribution it's intended to carry, but not integrated with the distribution.
2. A slipshod compilation of software dumped onto a CD-ROM without much care for organization or even usability.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: showstopper DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:26 AM ----- BODY: n.
A hardware or (especially) software bug that makes an implementation effectively unusable; one that absolutely has to be fixed before development can go on. Opposite in connotation from its original theatrical use, which refers to something stunningly good.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: shriek DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:25 AM ----- BODY: n.
See excl. Occasional CMU usage, also in common use among APL fans and mathematicians, especially category theorists.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: Shub-Internet DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:24 AM ----- BODY: /shuhb´ in´t@r·net/ n.
[MUD: from H. P. Lovecraft's evil fictional deity Shub-Niggurath,
the Black Goat with a Thousand Young] The harsh personification of the
Internet: Beast of a Thousand Processes, Eater of Characters, Avatar of
Line Noise, and Imp of Call Waiting; the hideous multi-tendriled entity
formed of all the manifold connections of the net. A sect of MUDders
worships Shub-Internet, sacrificing objects and praying for good
connections. To no avail — its purpose is malign and evil, and it is
the cause of all network slowdown. Often heard as in Freela casts a
tac nuke at Shub-Internet for slowing her down.
(A forged response
often follows along the lines of: Shub-Internet gulps down the tac
nuke and burps happily.
) Also cursed by users of the Web,
FTP and telnet when the network lags. The dread
name of Shub-Internet is seldom spoken aloud, as it is said that repeating
it three times will cause the being to wake, deep within its lair beneath
the Pentagon. Compare Random Number God.
[January 1996: It develops that one of the computer administrators in the basement of the Pentagon read this entry and fell over laughing. As a result, you too can now poke Shub-Internet by pinging shub-internet.ims.disa.mil. Compare kremvax. —ESR]
[April 1999: shub-internet.ims.disa.mil is no more, alas. But Shub-Internet lives, and even has a home page. —ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: SIG DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:23 AM ----- BODY: /sig/ n.
(also common as a prefix in combining forms) A Special Interest Group, in one of several technical areas, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery; well-known ones include SIGPLAN (the Special Interest Group on Programming Languages), SIGARCH (the Special Interest Group for Computer Architecture) and SIGGRAPH (the Special Interest Group for Computer Graphics). Hackers, not surprisingly, like to overextend this naming convention to less formal associations like SIGBEER (at ACM conferences) and SIGFOOD (at University of Illinois).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sig block DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:22 AM ----- BODY: /sig blok/ n.
[Internet and Usenet; often written ‘.sig’ there] Short for ‘signature’, used specifically to refer to the electronic signature block that most Unix mail- and news-posting software will automagically append to outgoing mail and news. The composition of one's sig can be quite an art form, including an ASCII logo, one's choice of witty sayings (see sig quote, fool file), or even source code for small programs about which the author wishes to make a statement; but many consider large sigs a waste of bandwidth, and it has been observed that the size of one's sig block is usually inversely proportional to one's longevity and level of prestige on the net. See also doubled sig, McQuary limit.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sig quote DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:21 AM ----- BODY: /sig kwoht/ n.
[Usenet] A maxim, quote, proverb, joke, or slogan embedded in one's
sig block and intended to convey something of one's
philosophical stance, pet peeves, or sense of humor. Calm down,
it's only ones and zeroes.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sig virus DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:20 AM ----- BODY: n.
A parasitic meme embedded in a sig block. There was a meme plague or fad
for these on Usenet in late 1991. Most were equivalents of I am a
.sig virus. Please reproduce me in your .sig block.
. Of course,
the .sig virus's memetic hook is the giggle value of going along with the
gag; this, however, was a self-limiting phenomenon as more and more people
picked up on the idea. There were creative variants on it; some people
stuck ‘sig virus antibody’ texts in their sigs, and there was
at least one instance of a sig virus eater.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sigmonster DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:19 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common] A beast that randomly chooses one of a selection of
signatures for appending to mail and news messages. The creature is most
often mentioned directly when it has been in particularly good form and
selected a signature appropriate to the topic being discussed; the
construction P.S.: good sigmonster, have a cookie
is not
uncommon. While the are sigmonster programs floating around on the net,
most hackers who keep one use a silly little Perl or Python script that
they threw together in the middle of the night under the influence of far
too much caffeine.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: signal-to-noise ratio DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:18 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from analog electronics] Used by hackers in a generalization of its technical meaning. ‘Signal’ refers to useful information conveyed by some communications medium, and ‘noise’ to anything else on that medium. Hence a low ratio implies that it is not worth paying attention to the medium in question. Figures for such metaphorical ratios are never given. The term is most often applied to Usenet newsgroups during flame wars. Compare bandwidth. See also coefficient of X, lost in the noise.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: silicon DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:17 AM ----- BODY: n.
Hardware, esp. ICs or microprocessor-based computer systems (compare iron). Contrasted with software. See also sandbender.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: silly walk DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:16 AM ----- BODY: vi.
[from Monty Python's Flying Circus]
1. A ridiculous procedure required to accomplish a task. Like
grovel, but more random and
humorous. I had to silly-walk through half the /usr directories to
find the maps file.
2. Syn. fandango on core.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: silo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
The FIFO input-character buffer in an RS-232 line card. So called from DEC terminology used on DH and DZ line cards for the VAX and PDP-11, presumably because it was a storage space for fungible stuff that went in at the top and came out at the bottom.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: since time T equals minus infinity DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:14 AM ----- BODY: adv.
A long time ago; for as long as anyone can remember; at the time that some particular frob was first designed. Usually the word ‘time’ is omitted. See also time T; contrast epoch.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sitename DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:13 AM ----- BODY: /si:t´naym/ n.
[Unix/Internet] The unique electronic name of a computer system,
used to identify it in email, Usenet, or other forms of electronic
information interchange. The folklore interest of sitenames stems from the
creativity and humor they often display. Interpreting a sitename is not
unlike interpreting a vanity license plate; one has to mentally unpack it,
allowing for mono-case and length restrictions and the lack of whitespace.
Hacker tradition deprecates dull, institutional-sounding names in favor of
punchy, humorous, and clever coinages (except that it is considered
appropriate for the official public gateway machine of an organization to
bear the organization's name or acronym). Mythological references, cartoon
characters, animal names, and allusions to SF or fantasy literature are
probably the most popular sources for sitenames (in roughly descending
order). The obligatory comment when discussing these is Harris's Lament:
All the good ones are taken!
See also
network address.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: skrog DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:12 AM ----- BODY: v.
Syn. scrog.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: skulker DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:11 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. prowler.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: slab DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:10 AM ----- BODY: [Apple]
1. n. A continuous horizontal line of pixels, all with the same color.
2. vi. To paint a slab on an output device. Apple's QuickDraw, like most other professional-level graphics systems, renders polygons and lines not with Bresenham's algorithm, but by calculating slab points for each scan line on the screen in succession, and then slabbing in the actual image pixels.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: slack DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:09 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Space allocated to a disk file but not actually used to store useful information. The techspeak equivalent is ‘internal fragmentation’. Antonym: hole.
2. In the theology of the Church of the SubGenius, a mystical substance or quality that is the prerequisite of all human happiness.
Since Unix files are stored compactly, except for the unavoidable
wastage in the last block or fragment, it might be said that Unix
has no slack
. See
ha ha only serious.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: slash DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:08 AM ----- BODY: n.
Common name for the slant (‘/’, ASCII 0101111) character. See ASCII for other synonyms.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: slashdot effect DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:07 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Also spelled /. effect
; what is said to have
happened when a website becoming virtually unreachable because too many
people are hitting it after the site was mentioned in an interesting
article on the popular Slashdot
news service. The term is quite widely used by /. readers, including
variants like That site has been slashdotted again!
2. In a perhaps inevitable generation, the term is being used to describe any similar effect from being listed on a popular site. This would better be described as a flash crowd. Differs from a DoS attack in being unintentional.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sleep DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:06 AM ----- BODY: vi.
1. [techspeak] To relinquish a claim (of a process on a multitasking system) for service; to indicate to the scheduler that a process may be deactivated until some given event occurs or a specified time delay elapses.
2. In jargon, used very similarly to v. block; also in
sleep on, syn.: with block on. Often used to indicate that the
speaker has relinquished a demand for resources until some (possibly
unspecified) external event: They can't get the fix I've been asking
for into the next release, so I'm going to sleep on it until the release,
then start hassling them again.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: slim DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:05 AM ----- BODY: n.
A small, derivative change (e.g., to code).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: slop DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:04 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A one-sided fudge factor, that is, an allowance for error but in only one of two directions. For example, if you need a piece of wire 10 feet long and have to guess when you cut it, you make very sure to cut it too long, by a large amount if necessary, rather than too short by even a little bit, because you can always cut off the slop but you can't paste it back on again. When discrete quantities are involved, slop is often introduced to avoid the possibility of being on the losing side of a fencepost error.
2. The percentage of ‘extra’ code generated by a compiler over the size of equivalent assembler code produced by hand-hacking; i.e., the space (or maybe time) you lose because you didn't do it yourself. This number is often used as a measure of the goodness of a compiler; slop below 5% is very good, and 10% is usually acceptable. With modern compiler technology, esp. on RISC machines, the compiler's slop may actually be negative; that is, humans may be unable to generate code as good. This is one of the reasons assembler programming is no longer common.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: slopsucker DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:03 AM ----- BODY: /slop´suhk·r/ n.
A lowest-priority task that waits around until everything else has ‘had its fill’ of machine resources. Only when the machine would otherwise be idle is the task allowed to `‘suck up the slop’. Also called a hungry puppy or bottom feeder. One common variety of slopsucker hunts for large prime numbers. Compare background.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: Slowlaris DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:02 AM ----- BODY: /slo'·lahr·is/ n.
[Usenet; poss. from the variety of prosimian called a slow
loris
. The variant ‘Slowlartus’ is also common, related
to LART] Common hackish term for Solaris, Sun's
System VR4 version of Unix that came out of the standardization wars of the
early 1990s. So named because especially on older hardware, responsiveness
was much less crisp than under the preceding SunOS. Early releases of
Solaris (that is, Solaris 2, as some marketroids at
Sun retroactively rechristened SunOS as Solaris 1) were quite buggy, and
Sun was forced by customer demand to support SunOS for quite some
time. Newer versions are acknowledged to be among the best commercial Unix
variants in 1998, but still lose single-processor benchmarks to Sparc
Linux. Compare HP-SUX,
sun-stools.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: slurp DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:01 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To read a large data file entirely into core
before working on it. This may be contrasted with the strategy of reading
a small piece at a time, processing it, and then reading the next piece.
This program slurps in a 1K-by-1K matrix and does an FFT.
See also sponge.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: slurp the robot DATE: 05/15/2003 10:30:00 AM ----- BODY:
See STR.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: smart DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:59 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Said of a program that does the Right Thing in a wide variety of complicated circumstances. There is a difference between calling a program smart and calling it intelligent; in particular, there do not exist any intelligent programs (yet — see AI-complete). Compare robust (smart programs can be brittle).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: smart terminal DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:58 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A terminal that has enough computing capability to render graphics or to offload some kind of front-end processing from the computer it talks to. The development of workstations and personal computers has made this term and the product it describes semi-obsolescent, but one may still hear variants of the phrase act like a smart terminal used to describe the behavior of workstations or PCs with respect to programs that execute almost entirely out of a remote server's storage, using local devices as displays.
2. obs. Any terminal with an addressable cursor; the opposite of a glass tty. Today, a terminal with merely an addressable cursor, but with none of the more-powerful features mentioned in sense 1, is called a dumb terminal.
There is a classic quote from Rob Pike (inventor of the
blit terminal): A smart terminal is not a
smartass terminal, but rather a terminal you can
educate.
This illustrates a common design problem: The attempt to
make peripherals (or anything else) intelligent sometimes results in
finicky, rigid ‘special features’ that become just so much dead
weight if you try to use the device in any way the designer didn't
anticipate. Flexibility and programmability, on the other hand, are
really smart. Compare
hook.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: smash case DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:57 AM ----- BODY: vi.
To lose or obliterate the uppercase/lowercase distinction in text
input. MS-DOS will automatically smash case in the names of all the
files you create.
Compare fold case.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: smash the stack DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:56 AM ----- BODY: n.
[C programming] To corrupt the execution stack by writing past the end of a local array or other data structure. Code that smashes the stack can cause a return from the routine to jump to a random address, resulting in some of the most insidious data-dependent bugs known to mankind. Variants include trash the stack, scribble the stack, mangle the stack; the term **mung the stack is not used, as this is never done intentionally. See spam; see also aliasing bug, fandango on core, memory leak, memory smash, precedence lossage, overrun screw.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: smiley DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:55 AM ----- BODY: n.
See emoticon.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: smoke DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:54 AM ----- BODY: vi.
1. To crash or blow up, usually
spectacularly. The new version smoked, just like the last
one.
Used for both hardware (where it often describes an actual
physical event), and software (where it's merely colorful).
2. [from automotive slang] To be conspicuously fast. That
processor really smokes.
Compare
magic smoke.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: smoke and mirrors DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:53 AM ----- BODY: n.
Marketing deceptions. The term is mainstream in this general sense.
Among hackers it's strongly associated with bogus demos and crocked
benchmarks (see also MIPS,
machoflops). They claim their new box cranks
50 MIPS for under $5000, but didn't specify the instruction mix —
sounds like smoke and mirrors to me.
The phrase, popularized by
newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin c.1975, has been said to derive from
carnie slang for magic acts and ‘freak show’ displays that
depend on trompe l'oeil effects, but also
calls to mind the fierce Aztec god Tezcatlipoca (lit. Smoking
Mirror
) for whom the hearts of huge numbers of human sacrificial
victims were regularly cut out. Upon hearing about a rigged demo or yet
another round of fantasy-based marketing promises, hackers often feel
analogously disheartened. See also stealth manager.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: smoke test DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A rudimentary form of testing applied to electronic equipment following repair or reconfiguration, in which power is applied and the tester checks for sparks, smoke, or other dramatic signs of fundamental failure. See magic smoke.
2. By extension, the first run of a piece of software after construction or a critical change. See and compare reality check.
There is an interesting semi-parallel to this term among typographers and printers: When new typefaces are being punch-cut by hand, a smoke test (hold the letter in candle smoke, then press it onto paper) is used to check out new dies.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: smoking clover DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:51 AM ----- BODY: n.
[ITS] A display hack originally due to Bill Gosper. Many convergent lines are drawn on a color monitor in such a way that every pixel struck has its color incremented. The lines all have one endpoint in the middle of the screen; the other endpoints are spaced one pixel apart around the perimeter of a large square. The color map is then repeatedly rotated. This results in a striking, rainbow-hued, shimmering four-leaf clover. Gosper joked about keeping it hidden from the FDA (the U.S.'s Food and Drug Administration) lest its hallucinogenic properties cause it to be banned.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: smoot DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:50 AM ----- BODY: /smoot/ n.
[MIT] A unit of length equal five feet seven inches. The length of the Harvard Bridge in Boston is famously 364.4 smoots plus an ear (the ear is allegedly the width of the earhole in the side of the football helmet the victim was wearing when he was rolled over the bridge). This legend began with a fraternity prank in 1958 during which the body length of Oliver Smoot (class of '62) was actually used to measure out that distance. It is commemorated by smoot marks that MIT students repaint every few years; the tradition even survived the demolition and rebuilding of the bridge in the late 1980s. The Boston police have been known to use smoot markers to indicate accident locations on the bridge. Apparently Smoot's experience as a unit of measurement led to a life-long career; he eventually became Chairman of the Board of the American National Standards Institute.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: SMOP DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:49 AM ----- BODY: /S·M·O·P/ n.
[Simple (or Small) Matter of Programming]
1. A piece of code, not yet written, whose anticipated length is
significantly greater than its complexity. Used to refer to a program that
could obviously be written, but is not worth the trouble. Also used
ironically to imply that a difficult problem can be easily solved because a
program can be written to do it; the irony is that it is very clear that
writing such a program will be a great deal of work. It's easy to
enhance a FORTRAN compiler to compile COBOL as well; it's just a
SMOP.
2. Often used ironically by the intended victim when a suggestion for a program is made which seems easy to the suggester, but is obviously (to the victim) a lot of work. Compare minor detail.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: smurf DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:48 AM ----- BODY: /smerf/ n.
1. [from the soc.motss newsgroup on Usenet, after some obnoxiously gooey cartoon characters] A newsgroup regular with a habitual style that is irreverent, silly, and cute. Like many other hackish terms for people, this one may be praise or insult depending on who uses it. In general, being referred to as a smurf is probably not going to make your day unless you've previously adopted the label yourself in a spirit of irony. Compare old fart.
2. [techspeak] A ping packet with a forged source address sent to some other network's broadcast address. All the machines on the destination network will send a ping response to the forged source address (the victim). This both overloads the victim's network and hides the location of the attacker.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: SNAFU principle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:47 AM ----- BODY: /sna´foo prin´si·pl/ n.
[from a WWII Army acronym for ‘Situation Normal, All
Fucked Up’] True communication is possible only between
equals, because inferiors are more consistently rewarded for telling their
superiors pleasant lies than for telling the truth.:
— a
central tenet of Discordianism, often invoked by
hackers to explain why authoritarian hierarchies screw up so reliably and
systematically. The effect of the SNAFU principle is a progressive
disconnection of decision-makers from reality. This lightly adapted
version of a fable dating back to the early 1960s illustrates the
phenomenon perfectly:
In the beginning was the plan, and then the specification; And the plan was without form, and the specification was void. And darkness was on the faces of the implementors thereof; And they spake unto their leader, saying:It is a crock of shit, and smells as of a sewer.And the leader took pity on them, and spoke to the project leader:It is a crock of excrement, and none may abide the odor thereof.And the project leader spake unto his section head, saying:It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, such that none may abide it.The section head then hurried to his department manager, and informed him thus:It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength.The department manager carried these words to his general manager, and spoke unto him saying:It containeth that which aideth the growth of plants, and it is very strong.And so it was that the general manager rejoiced and delivered the good news unto the Vice President.It promoteth growth, and it is very powerful.The Vice President rushed to the President's side, and joyously exclaimed:This powerful new software product will promote the growth of the company!And the President looked upon the product, and saw that it was very good.
After the subsequent and inevitable disaster, the
suits protect themselves by saying I was
misinformed!
, and the implementors are demoted or fired. Compare
Conway's Law.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: snail DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:46 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To snail-mail something. Snail me a
copy of those graphics, will you?
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: snail-mail DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:45 AM ----- BODY: n.
Paper mail, as opposed to electronic. Sometimes written as the single word ‘SnailMail’. One's postal address is, correspondingly, a snail address. Derives from earlier coinage ‘USnail’ (from ‘U.S. Mail’), for which there have even been parody posters and stamps made. Also (less commonly) called P-mail, from ‘paper mail’ or ‘physical mail’. Oppose email.
(Note: Actual garden snails progress at about 10 meters per hour,
which is about 25-50 times slower than the U.K.'s Royal Mail; comparable
measurements for other countries have not yet been made. More biologically
apt terms might be sloth-mail
at 250 m/hr or
tortoise-mail
at 270 m/hr. See http://www.newscientist.com/lastword/answers/789communication.jsp?tp=communication
for details.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: snap DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:44 AM ----- BODY: v.
To replace a pointer to a pointer with a direct pointer; to replace an old address with the forwarding address found there. If you telephone the main number for an institution and ask for a particular person by name, the operator may tell you that person's extension before connecting you, in the hopes that you will snap your pointer and dial direct next time. The underlying metaphor may be that of a rubber band stretched through a number of intermediate points; if you remove all the thumbtacks in the middle, it snaps into a straight line from first to last. See chase pointers.
Often, the behavior of a trampoline is to perform an error check once and then snap the pointer that invoked it so as henceforth to bypass the trampoline (and its one-shot error check). In this context one also speaks of snapping links. For example, in a LISP implementation, a function interface trampoline might check to make sure that the caller is passing the correct number of arguments; if it is, and if the caller and the callee are both compiled, then snapping the link allows that particular path to use a direct procedure-call instruction with no further overhead.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: snarf DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:43 AM ----- BODY: /snarf/ vt.
1. To grab, esp. to grab a large document or file for the purpose of using it with or without the author's permission. See also BLT.
2. [in the Unix community] To fetch a file or set of files across a
network. See also blast. This term was mainstream
in the late 1960s, meaning ‘to eat piggishly’. It may still
have this connotation in context. He's in the snarfing phase of
hacking — FTPing megs of stuff a day.
3. To acquire, with little concern for legal forms or politesse (but not quite by stealing). They
were giving away samples, so I snarfed a bunch of them.
4. Syn. for slurp. This program
starts by snarfing the entire database into core, then....
5. [GEnie] To spray food or
programming fluids due to laughing at the wrong moment. I was
drinking coffee, and when I read your post I snarfed all over my
desk.
If I keep reading this topic, I think I'll have to
snarf-proof my computer with a keyboard
condom.
[This sense appears to be widespread
among mundane teenagers —ESR] The sound of snarfing is
splork!.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: snarf & barf DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:42 AM ----- BODY: /snarf´n·barf`/ n.
Under a WIMP environment, the act of grabbing a region of text and then stuffing the contents of that region into another region (or the same one) to avoid retyping a command line. In the late 1960s, this was a mainstream expression for an ‘eat now, regret it later’ cheap-restaurant expedition.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: snarf down DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:41 AM ----- BODY: v.
To snarf, with the connotation of absorbing,
processing, or understanding. I'll snarf down the latest version of
the nethack user's guide — it's been a while
since I played last and I don't know what's changed
recently.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: snark DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:40 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Lewis Carroll, via the Michigan Terminal System]
1. A system failure. When a user's process bombed, the operator
would get the message Help, Help, Snark in MTS!
2. More generally, any kind of unexplained or threatening event on a computer (especially if it might be a boojum). Often used to refer to an event or a log file entry that might indicate an attempted security violation.
3. UUCP name of snark.thyrsus.com, home site of the Jargon File versions from 2.*.* on (i.e., this lexicon).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sneaker DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
An individual hired to break into places in order to test their security; analogous to tiger team. Compare samurai.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sneakernet DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:38 AM ----- BODY: /snee´ker·net/ n.
Term used (generally with ironic intent) for transfer of electronic
information by physically carrying tape, disks, or some other media from
one machine to another. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a
station wagon filled with magtape, or a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Also called ‘Tennis-Net’, ‘Armpit-Net’,
‘Floppy-Net’ or ‘Shoenet’; in the 1990s,
‘Nike network’ after a well-known sneaker brand.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sniff DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:37 AM ----- BODY: v.,n.
1. To watch IP packets traversing a local network. Most often in the phrase packet sniffer, a program for doing same. 2. Synonym for poll.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: SO DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:36 AM ----- BODY: /S·O/ n.
1. (also S.O.) Abbrev. for Significant Other, almost invariably written abbreviated and pronounced /S·O/ by hackers. Used to refer to one's primary relationship, esp. a live-in to whom one is not married. See MOTAS, MOTOS, MOTSS.
2. [techspeak] The Shift Out control character in ASCII (Control-N, 0001110).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: social engineering DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:35 AM ----- BODY: n.
Term used among crackers and samurai for cracking techniques that rely on weaknesses in wetware rather than software; the aim is to trick people into revealing passwords or other information that compromises a target system's security. Classic scams include phoning up a mark who has the required information and posing as a field service tech or a fellow employee with an urgent access problem. See also the tiger team story in the patch entry, and rubber-hose cryptanalysis.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: social science number DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:34 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] A statistic that is content-free, or nearly so. A measure derived via methods of questionable validity from data of a dubious and vague nature. Predictively, having a social science number in hand is seldom much better than nothing, and can be considerably worse. As a rule, management loves them. See also numbers, math-out, pretty pictures.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sock puppet DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:33 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet: from the act of placing a sock over your hand and talking to it and pretending it's talking back] In Usenet parlance, a pseudo through which the puppeteer posts follow-ups to their own original message to give the appearance that a number of people support the views held in the original message.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sodium substrate DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:32 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn salt substrate.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: soft boot DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:31 AM ----- BODY: n.
See boot.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: softcopy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:30 AM ----- BODY: /soft´kop·ee/ n.
[by analogy with hardcopy] A machine-readable form of corresponding hardcopy. See bits.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: software bloat DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:29 AM ----- BODY: n.
The results of second-system effect or creeping featuritis. Commonly cited examples include ls1, X, BSD, and OS/2.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: software hoarding DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
Pejorative term employed by members and adherents of the GNU project to describe the act of holding software proprietary, keeping it under trade secret or license terms which prohibit free redistribution and modification. Used primarily in Free Software Foundation propaganda. For a summary of related issues, see GNU and free software.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: software laser DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:27 AM ----- BODY: n.
An optical laser works by bouncing photons back and forth between two mirrors, one totally reflective and one partially reflective. If the lasing material (usually a crystal) has the right properties, photons scattering off the atoms in the crystal will excite cascades of more photons, all in lockstep. Eventually the beam will escape through the partially-reflective mirror. One kind of sorcerer's apprentice mode involving bounce messages can produce closely analogous results, with a cascade of messages escaping to flood nearby systems. By mid-1993 there had been at least two publicized incidents of this kind.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: software rot DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:26 AM ----- BODY: n.
Term used to describe the tendency of software that has not been used in a while to lose; such failure may be semi-humorously ascribed to bit rot. More commonly, software rot strikes when a program's assumptions become out of date. If the design was insufficiently robust, this may cause it to fail in mysterious ways. Syn. code rot. See also link rot.
For example, owing to endemic shortsightedness in the design of COBOL programs, a good number of them succumbed to software rot when their 2-digit year counters underwent wrap around at the beginning of the year 2000. Actually, related lossages often afflict centenarians who have to deal with computer software designed by unimaginative clods. One such incident became the focus of a minor public flap in 1990, when a gentleman born in 1889 applied for a driver's license renewal in Raleigh, North Carolina. The new system refused to issue the card, probably because with 2-digit years the ages 101 and 1 cannot be distinguished.
Historical note: Software rot in an even funnier sense than the
mythical one was a real problem on early research computers (e.g., the R1;
see grind crank). If a program that depended on a
peculiar instruction hadn't been run in quite a while, the user might
discover that the opcodes no longer did the same things they once did.
(Hey, so-and-so needs an instruction to do such-and-such. We can
snarf this opcode, right? No one uses it.
)
Another classic example of this sprang from the time an MIT hacker found a
simple way to double the speed of the unconditional jump instruction on a
PDP-6, so he patched the hardware. Unfortunately, this broke some fragile
timing software in a music-playing program, throwing its output out of
tune. This was fixed by adding a defensive initialization routine to
compare the speed of a timing loop with the real-time clock; in other
words, it figured out how fast the PDP-6 was that day, and corrected
appropriately.
Compare bit rot.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: softwarily DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:25 AM ----- BODY: /soft·weir´i·lee/ adv.
In a way pertaining to software. The system is softwarily
unreliable.
The adjective **‘softwary’ is
not used. See
hardwarily.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: softy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:24 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] Hardware hackers' term for a software expert who is largely ignorant of the mysteries of hardware.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: some random X DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:23 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Used to indicate a member of class X, with the implication that Xs
are interchangeable. I think some random cracker tripped over the
guest timeout last night.
See also
J. Random.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sorcerer's apprentice mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:22 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from Goethe's Der Zauberlehrling via Paul Dukas's L'apprenti sorcier in the film Fantasia.] A bug in a protocol where, under some circumstances, the receipt of a message causes multiple messages to be sent, each of which, when received, triggers the same bug. Used esp. of such behavior caused by bounce message loops in email software. Compare broadcast storm, network meltdown, software laser, ARMM.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: source DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:21 AM ----- BODY: n.
[very common] In reference to software, source is invariably shorthand for
‘source code’, the preferred human-readable and
human-modifiable form of the program. This is as opposed to object code,
the derived binary executable form of a program. This shorthand readily
takes derivative forms; one may speak of the sources of a
system
or of having source
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: source of all good bits DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:20 AM ----- BODY: n.
A person from whom (or a place from which) useful information may be obtained. If you need to know about a program, a guru might be the source of all good bits. The title is often applied to a particularly competent secretary.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: space-cadet keyboard DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:19 AM ----- BODY: n.
A now-legendary device used on MIT LISP machines, which inspired several still-current jargon terms and influenced the design of EMACS. It was equipped with no fewer than seven shift keys: four keys for bucky bits (‘control’, ‘meta’, ‘hyper’, and ‘super’) and three regular shift keys, called ‘shift’, ‘top’, and ‘front’. Many keys had three symbols on them: a letter and a symbol on the top, and a Greek letter on the front. For example, the ‘L’ key had an ‘L’ and a two-way arrow on the top, and the Greek letter lambda on the front. By pressing this key with the right hand while playing an appropriate ‘chord’ with the left hand on the shift keys, you could get the following results:
L | lowercase l |
shift-L | uppercase L |
front-L | λ |
front-shift-L | Λ |
top-L | ⇔ (front and shift are ignored) |
And of course each of these might also be typed with any combination of the control, meta, hyper, and super keys. On this keyboard, you could type over 8000 different characters! This allowed the user to type very complicated mathematical text, and also to have thousands of single-character commands at his disposal. The keyboard of the Symbolics Lisp machine was a simplified version, lacking Top and Front keys, that could only send about 2000 characters.
Many hackers were actually willing to memorize the command meanings of that many characters if it reduced typing time (this attitude obviously shaped the interface of EMACS). Other hackers, however, thought having that many bucky bits was overkill, and objected that such a keyboard can require three or four hands to operate. See bucky bits, cokebottle, double bucky, meta bit, quadruple bucky.
Simplified Symbolics version of the space-cadet keyboard
(Some relatively bad photographs of the earlier, more elaborate version are available on the Web.).
Note: early versions of this entry incorrectly identified the space-cadet keyboard with the Knight keyboard. Though both were designed by Tom Knight, the latter term was properly applied only to a keyboard used for ITS on the PDP-10 and modeled on the Stanford keyboard (as described under bucky bits). The true space-cadet keyboard evolved from the first Knight keyboard.
An early space-cadet keyboard
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-05-20)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spaceship operator DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:18 AM ----- BODY: n.
The glyph <=>, so-called apparently because in the low-resolution constant-width font used on many terminals it vaguely resembles a flying saucer. Perl uses this to denote the signum-of-difference operation.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: SPACEWAR DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:17 AM ----- BODY: n.
A space-combat simulation game, inspired by E. E. Doc
Smith's Lensman books, in which two spaceships duel
around a central sun, shooting torpedoes at each other and jumping through
hyperspace. This game was first implemented on the PDP-1 at MIT in 1962.
In 1968-69, a descendant of the game motivated Ken Thompson to build, in
his spare time on a scavenged PDP-7, the operating system that became
Unix. Less than nine years after that, SPACEWAR was
commercialized as one of the first video games; descendants are still
feeping in video arcades everywhere.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spaghetti code DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:16 AM ----- BODY: n.
Code with a complex and tangled control structure, esp. one using many GOTOs, exceptions, or other ‘unstructured’ branching constructs. Pejorative. The synonym kangaroo code has been reported, doubtless because such code has so many jumps in it.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spaghetti inheritance DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
[encountered among users of object-oriented languages that use inheritance, such as Smalltalk] A convoluted class-subclass graph, often resulting from carelessly deriving subclasses from other classes just for the sake of reusing their code. Coined in a (successful) attempt to discourage such practice, through guilt-by-association with spaghetti code.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spam DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:14 AM ----- BODY: vt.,vi.,n.
[from Monty Python's Flying Circus]
1. To crash a program by overrunning a fixed-size buffer with excessively large input data. See also buffer overflow, overrun screw, smash the stack.
2. To cause a newsgroup to be flooded with irrelevant or
inappropriate messages. You can spam a newsgroup with as little as one
well- (or ill-) planned message (e.g. asking What do you think of
abortion?
on soc.women).
This is often done with cross-posting (e.g. any
message which is cross-posted to alt.rush-limbaugh and alt.politics.homosexuality will almost
inevitably spam both groups). This overlaps with
troll behavior; the latter more specific term has
become more common.
3. To send many identical or nearly-identical messages separately to a large number of Usenet newsgroups. This is more specifically called ECP, Excessive Cross-Posting. This is one sure way to infuriate nearly everyone on the Net. See also velveeta and jello.
4. To bombard a newsgroup with multiple copies of a message. This is more specifically called EMP, Excessive Multi-Posting.
5. To mass-mail unrequested identical or nearly-identical email messages, particularly those containing advertising. Especially used when the mail addresses have been culled from network traffic or databases without the consent of the recipients. Synonyms include UCE, UBE. As a noun, ‘spam’ refers to the messages so sent.
6. Any large, annoying, quantity of output. For instance, someone
on IRC who walks away from their screen and comes back to find 200 lines of
text might say Oh no, spam
.
The later definitions have become much more prevalent as the Internet
has opened up to non-techies, and to most people senses 3 4 and 5 are now
primary. All three behaviors are considered abuse of the net, and are
almost universally grounds for termination of the originator's email
account or network connection. In these senses the term ‘spam’
has gone mainstream, though without its original sense or folkloric freight
— there is apparently a widespread myth among
lusers that spamming
is what happens
when you dump cans of Spam into a revolving fan. Hormel, the makers of
Spam, have published a surprisingly enlightened position statement on the
Internet usage.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spam bait DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:13 AM ----- BODY: n.
Email addresses included in, or comprising the entirety of, a Usenet message so that spammers mining a newsgroup with an address harvester will collect them. These addresses can be people who have offended or annoyed the poster, or who are included so that a spammer will spam an official, thereby causing himself trouble. One particularly effective form of spam bait is the address of a teergrube.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spamblock DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:12 AM ----- BODY: /spam´blok/ n.
[poss. by analogy to sunblock] Text inserted in an email address to render it invalid and thus useless to spammers. For example, the address jrandom@hacker.org might be transformed to jrandom@NOSPAM.hacker.org. Adding spamblock to an address is often referred to as munging it (see munge)-. This evasion tactic depends on the fact that most spammers collect names with some sort of address harvester on volumes too high to de-mung by hand, but individual humans reading an email message can readily spot and remove a spamblock in the From address.
Note: This is not actually a very effective tactic, and may already be passing out of use in early 1999 after about two years of life. In both mail and news, it's essentially impossible to keep a smart address harvester from mining out the addresses in the message header and trace lines. Therefore the only people who can be protected are third parties mentioned by email address in the message — not a common enough case to interest spammers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spamhaus DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:11 AM ----- BODY: spam´hows n.
Pejorative term for an internet service provider that permits or even encourages spam mailings from its systems. The plural is spamhausen. There is a web page devoted to tracking spamhausen.
The most notorious of the spamhausen was Sanford Wallace's Cyber Promotions Inc., shut down by a lawsuit on 16 October 1997. The anniversary of the shutdown is celebrated on Usenet as Spam Freedom Day, but lesser imitators of the Spamford still infest various murky corners of the net. Since prosecution of spammers became routine under the junk-fax laws and statues specifically targeting spam, spamhausen have declined in relative importance; today, hit-and-run attacks by spammers using relay rape and throwaway accounts on reputable ISPs seem to account for most of the flow.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spamvertize DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:10 AM ----- BODY: v.
To advertise using spam. Pejorative.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spangle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:09 AM ----- BODY: n.
[UK] The singular of bells and whistles. See also spungle.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spawn DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:08 AM ----- BODY: n.,vi.
1. [techspeak] In Unix parlance, to create a child process from within a process. Technically this is a ‘fork’; the term ‘spawn’ is a bit more general and is used for threads (lightweight processes) as well as traditional heavyweight processes.
2. In gaming, meant to indicate where (spawn-point) and when a player comes to life (or re-spawns) after being killed. Opposite of frag.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: special-case DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:07 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To write unique code to handle input to or situations arising in a program that are somehow distinguished from normal processing. This would be used for processing of mode switches or interrupt characters in an interactive interface (as opposed, say, to text entry or normal commands), or for processing of hidden flags in the input of a batch program or filter.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: speed of light DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:06 AM ----- BODY:
The absolutely fastest a particular algorithm or application could be
implemented, given a set of constraints that are assumed to be
unchangeable. For example, This would take 60 microseconds without
any processing whatsoever, so that's the speed of light.
However,
as one brilliant hacker once commented: Remember that the speed of
light only is constant if you can't redesign the universe.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: speedometer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:05 AM ----- BODY: n.
A pattern of lights displayed on a linear set of LEDs (today) or nixie tubes (yesterday, on ancient mainframes). The pattern is shifted left every N times the operating system goes through its main loop. A swiftly moving pattern indicates that the system is mostly idle; the speedometer slows down as the system becomes overloaded. The speedometer on Sun Microsystems hardware bounces back and forth like the eyes on one of the Cylons from the wretched Battlestar Galactica TV series.
Historical note: One computer, the GE 600 (later Honeywell 6000) actually had an analog speedometer on the front panel, calibrated in instructions executed per second.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spell DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:04 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. incantation.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spelling flame DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:03 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet] A posting ostentatiously correcting a previous article's spelling as a way of casting scorn on the point the article was trying to make, instead of actually responding to that point (compare dictionary flame). Of course, people who are more than usually slovenly spellers are prone to think any correction is a spelling flame. It's an amusing comment on human nature that spelling flames themselves often contain spelling errors.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spider DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:02 AM ----- BODY:
The Web-walking part of a search engine that collects pages for indexing in the search engine's database. Also called a bot. The best-known spider is Scooter, the web-walker for the Alta Vista search engine.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spider food DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:01 AM ----- BODY: n.
Keywords embedded (usually invisibly) into a web page to attract search engines (spiders). The intended result of including spider food in one's web page is to insure that the page appears high on the list of matching entries to a search engine query. There are right and wrong ways to do this; the right way is a discreet ‘meta keywords’ tag, the wrong way is to embed many repeats of a keyword in comments (and many search engines now detect and ignore the latter).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spiffy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:29:00 AM ----- BODY: /spi´fee/ adj.
1. Said of programs having a pretty, clever, or exceptionally
well-designed interface. Have you seen the spiffy
X version of empire
yet?
2. Said sarcastically of a program that is perceived to have little more than a flashy interface going for it. Which meaning should be drawn depends delicately on tone of voice and context. This word was common mainstream slang during the 1940s, in a sense close to 1.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spike DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:59 AM ----- BODY: v.
1. To defeat a selection mechanism by introducing a (sometimes temporary) device that forces a specific result. The word is used in several industries; telephone engineers refer to spiking a relay by inserting a pin to hold the relay in either the closed or open state, and railroaders refer to spiking a track switch so that it cannot be moved. In programming environments it normally refers to a temporary change, usually for testing purposes (as opposed to a permanent change, which would be called hardwired).
2. [borderline techspeak] A visible peak in an otherwise rather
constant graph (e.g. a sudden surge in line voltage, an unexpected short
high
on a logical line in a circuit). Hackers frequently use
this for a sudden short increase in some quantity such as system load or
network traffic.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spin DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:58 AM ----- BODY: vi.
Equivalent to buzz. More common among C and Unix programmers. See the discussion of ‘spinlock’ under busy-wait.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: Spinning Pizza of Death DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:57 AM ----- BODY: n.
[OS X; common] The quartered-circle busy indicator on Mac OS X versions before 10.2, after which it was replaced by a sort of rainbow pinwheel thingy. It was analogous to the Microsoft Windows hourglass, but OS X 10.0's legendary slowness under the Aqua toolkit made this term rather more evocative. See Death, X of.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spl DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:56 AM ----- BODY: /S·P·L/
[abbrev, from Set Priority Level] The way traditional Unix kernels
implement mutual exclusion by running code at high interrupt levels. Used
in jargon to describe the act of tuning in or tuning out ordinary
communication. Classically, spl levels run from 1 to 7; Fred's at
spl 6 today
would mean that he is very hard to interrupt.
Wait till I finish this; I'll spl down then.
See also
interrupts locked out.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: splash screen DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:55 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Mac users] Syn. banner, sense 3.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: splat DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for the asterisk (*) character (ASCII 0101010). This may derive from the ‘squashed-bug’ appearance of the asterisk on many early line printers.
2. [MIT] Name used by some people for the # character (ASCII 0100011).
3. The feature key on a Mac (same as alt, sense 2).
4. obs. Name used by some people for the Stanford/ITS extended ASCII ⊗ character. This character is also called blobby and frob, among other names; it is sometimes used by mathematicians as a notation for tensor product.
5. obs. Name for the semi-mythical Stanford extended ASCII ⊕ character. See also ASCII.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: splat out DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:53 AM ----- BODY: v.
[Usenet; syn. disemvowel] To partially obscure a potentially provocative word by substituting splat characters for some of its letters (usually, but not always, the vowels). The purpose is not to make the word unrecognizable but to make it a mention rather than a use, so that no flamewar ensues. Words often splatted out include N*z* (see Godwin's Law), k*bo* (see KIBO, sense 2), *v*l*t**n (anywhere fundamentalists might be lurking), *b*rt**n, and g*n c*ntr*l. Compare UN*X.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: splork! DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:52 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet; common] The sound of coffee (or other beverage) hitting the monitor and/or keyboard after being forced out of the mouth via the nose. It usually follows an unexpectedly funny thing in a Usenet post. Compare snarf.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spod DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:51 AM ----- BODY: n.
[UK]
1. A lower form of life found on
talker systems and MUDs. The spod has few
friends in RL and uses talkers instead, finding
communication easier and preferable over the net. He has all the negative
traits of the computer geek without having any interest in computers per
se. Lacking any knowledge of or interest in how networks work, and
considering his access a God-given right, he is a major irritant to
sysadmins, clogging up lines in order to reach new MUDs, following
passed-on instructions on how to sneak his way onto Internet (Wow!
It's in America!
) and complaining when he is not allowed to use
busy routes. A true spod will start any conversation with Are you
male or female?
(and follow it up with Got any good
numbers/IDs/passwords?
) and will not talk to someone physically
present in the same terminal room until they log onto the same machine that
he is using and enter talk mode. Compare newbie,
tourist, weenie,
twink, terminal junkie,
warez d00dz.
2. A backronym for Sole Purpose,
Obtain a Degree
; according to some self-described spods, this term
is used by indifferent students to condemn their harder-working
fellows. Compare the defiant adoption of the term
geek in the mid-1990s by people who would previously
have been stigmatized by it. Spods in the positive sense are talker users
who've accumulated a large amount of spod time, that is, they spend a lot
of time logged in to that talker (for example, my spod time on Uberworld as
of this moment is 131 days, 15 hours and 20 minutes). Spods are generally
highly knowledgeable about talkers and SGXStalker coding, as well as
computers and the internet in general.
3. [Glasgow University] An otherwise competent hacker who spends way too much time on talker systems.
4. [obs.] An ordinary person; a random. This is the meaning with which the term was coined, but the inventor informs us he has himself accepted sense 1.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spoiler DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:50 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet]
1. A remark which reveals important plot elements from books or movies, thus denying the reader (of the article) the proper suspense when reading the book or watching the movie.
2. Any remark which telegraphs the solution of a problem or puzzle, thus denying the reader the pleasure of working out the correct answer (see also interesting). Either sense readily forms compounds like total spoiler, quasi-spoiler and even pseudo-spoiler.
By convention, articles which are spoilers in either sense should contain the word ‘spoiler’ in the Subject: line, or guarantee via various tricks that the answer appears only after several screens-full of warning, or conceal the sensitive information via rot13, spoiler space or some combination of these techniques.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spoiler space DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:49 AM ----- BODY:
[also spoiler spoo or spoiler protection] A screenful of blank or spacer lines deliberately inserted in a message following a spoiler warning, so the actual spoiler can't be seen without hitting a key. Formfeeds used to be used for this, but are now rare because so many people read news through Web interfaces on which they have no good interpretation.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sponge DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:48 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Unix] A special case of a filter that reads its entire input before writing any output; the canonical example is a sort utility. Unlike most filters, a sponge can conveniently overwrite the input file with the output data stream. If a file system has versioning (as ITS did and VMS does now) the sponge/filter distinction loses its usefulness, because directing filter output would just write a new version. See also slurp.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spoof DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:47 AM ----- BODY: vi.
To capture, alter, and retransmit a communication stream in a way that misleads the recipient. As used by hackers, refers especially to altering TCP/IP packet source addresses or other packet-header data in order to masquerade as a trusted machine. This term has become very widespread and is borderline techspeak. Interestingly, it was already in use in its modern sense more than a century ago among Victorian teklegraphers; it shows up in Kipling.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spool DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:46 AM ----- BODY: vi.
[from early IBM ‘Simultaneous Peripheral Operation On-Line’, but is widely thought to be a backronym] To send files to some device or program (a spooler) that queues them up and does something useful with them later. Without qualification, the spooler is the print spooler controlling output of jobs to a printer; but the term has been used in connection with other peripherals (especially plotters and graphics devices) and occasionally even for input devices. See also demon.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spool file DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:45 AM ----- BODY: n.
Any file to which data is spooled to await the next stage of processing. Especially used in circumstances where spooling the data copes with a mismatch between speeds in two devices or pieces of software. For example, when you send mail under Unix, it's typically copied to a spool file to await a transport demon's attentions. This is borderline techspeak.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sporgery DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:44 AM ----- BODY:
[portmanteau of ‘spam’ or ‘spew’ and ‘forgery’. Massive floods of forged articles intended to disrupt a newsgroup. Typically these have reasonable-looking headers but complete gibberish for content, making the legitimate articles too difficult to find. This tactic has been most notoriously used by the Church of Scientology to disrupt discussion on the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology, but is unfortunately not by any means confined to that group.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sport death DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:43 AM ----- BODY: n.
[MIT] The masochistic extreme of hacking, where the body and mind are pushed until their limits are reached, and the body is barely able to support the mind. Then, once your extremes are reached, you push as far beyond that point as you can, far beyond normal notions of all-nighters and caffeine diets.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spungle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:42 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Durham, UK; portmanteau, spangle + bungle] A spangle of no actual usefulness. Example: Roger the Bent Paperclip in Microsoft Word '98. A spungle's only virtue is that it looks pretty, unless you find creeping featurism ugly.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: spyware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:41 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Software which, when installed by a user insufficiently enlightened to avoid it, enables third parties to snoop the user's hard drive or monitor their network transactions. Though the term seems to have entered use in the late 1990s, it achieved real popularity as applied to Microsoft Windows XP. Some back door features in XP permit Microsoft to (for example) covertly scan your disk directories for the names of files it might deem to be warez.
2. Systems for spying on email and web traffic, such as the FBI's Carnivore.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: squirrelcide DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:40 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common on Usenet's comp.risks newsgroup.] (alt.: squirrelicide) What all too frequently happens when a squirrel decides to exercise its species's unfortunate penchant for shorting out power lines with their little furry bodies. Result: one dead squirrel, one down computer installation. In this situation, the computer system is said to have been squirrelcided.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: stack DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
The set of things a person has to do in the future. One speaks of
the next project to be attacked as having risen to the top of the stack.
I'm afraid I've got real work to do, so this'll have to be pushed
way down on my stack.
I haven't done it yet because every
time I pop my stack something new gets pushed.
If you are
interrupted several times in the middle of a conversation, My stack
overflowed
means I forget what we were talking
about.
The implication is that more items were pushed onto the
stack than could be remembered, so the least recent items were lost. The
usual physical example of a stack is to be found in a cafeteria: a pile of
plates or trays sitting on a spring in a well, so that when you put one on
the top they all sink down, and when you take one off the top the rest
spring up a bit. See also push and
pop.
(The Art of Computer Programming, second edition, vol. 1, p. 236) says:
Many people who realized the
importance of stacks and queues independently have given other names to
these structures: stacks have been called push-down lists, reversion
storages, cellars, nesting stores, piles, last-in-first-out
(LIFO
) lists, and even yo-yo lists!
The term stack
was originally coined by Edsger
Dijkstra, who was quite proud of it.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: stack puke DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:38 AM ----- BODY: n.
Some processor architectures are said to ‘puke their guts onto the stack’ to save their internal state during exception processing. The Motorola 68020, for example, regurgitates up to 92 bytes on a bus fault. On a pipelined machine, this can take a while.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: stale pointer bug DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:37 AM ----- BODY: n.
Synonym for aliasing bug used esp. among microcomputer hackers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: Stanford Bunny DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:36 AM ----- BODY:
The successor of the Utah Teapot. The model is of a chocolate Easter bunny consisting of about 5000 polygons. It is small by 2002 standards, but is more illustrative than the teapot of of techniques such as surface radiance (e.g. radiosity) and self-reflection. There is a history page. Compare lenna.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: star out DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:35 AM ----- BODY: v.
[University of York, England] To replace a user's encrypted password
in /etc/passwd with a single asterisk. Under Unix this is not a legal
encryption of any password; hence the user is not permitted to log in. In
general, accounts like adm, news, and daemon are permanently starred
out
; occasionally a real user might have this inflicted upon
him/her as a punishment, e.g. Graham was starred out for playing
Omega in working hours
. Also occasionally known as The Order Of The
Gold Star in this context. Don't do that, or you'll be awarded the
Order of the Gold Star...
Compare
disusered.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: state DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:34 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Condition, situation. What's the state of your latest
hack?
It's winning away.
The system tried to
read and write the disk simultaneously and got into a totally
wedged state.
The standard question
What's your state?
means What are you doing?
or What are you about to do?
Typical answers are
about to gronk out
, or hungry
. Another
standard question is What's the state of the world?
, meaning
What's new?
or What's going on?
. The more
terse and humorous way of asking these questions would be
State-p?
. Another way of phrasing the first question under
sense 1 would be state-p latest hack?
.
2. Information being maintained in non-permanent memory (electronic or human).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: stealth manager DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:33 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Corporate DP] A manager that appears out of nowhere, promises undeliverable software to unknown end users, and vanishes before the programming staff realizes what has happened. See smoke and mirrors.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: steam-powered DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:32 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Old-fashioned or underpowered; archaic. This term does not have a strong negative loading and may even be used semi-affectionately for something that clanks and wheezes a lot but hangs in there doing the job.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: steved DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:31 AM ----- BODY: adj.,v. /steevd/
[Apple employees and users] Terminated, said of a development project. Originated after Steven P. Jobs returned to Apple as acting CEO in 1997. Jobs immediated axed several development projects, including OpenDoc and Newton that had been launched by John Sculley, the man who had ousted Jobs in the mid 1980s. Now any project shut down at Apple and often at any large firm connected with Apple may be said to have gotten steved. It is usually spelled lowercase despite the origin. It is almost always past-tense and used quasi-adjectivally.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: STFW DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:30 AM ----- BODY: imp. /S·T·F·W/
[Usenet] Common abbreviation for Search The Fucking
Web
, a suggestion that what you're asking for is a query better
handled by a search engine than a human being. Usage is common and exactly
parallel to both senses of RTFM.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: stir-fried random DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:29 AM ----- BODY: n.
(alt.: stir-fried mumble) Term used for the best dish of many of those hackers who can cook. Consists of random fresh veggies and meat wokked with random spices. Tasty and economical. See random, great-wall, ravs, laser chicken, oriental food; see also mumble.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: stomp on DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:28 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To inadvertently overwrite something important, usually
automatically. All the work I did this weekend got stomped on last
night by the nightly server script.
Compare
scribble, mangle,
trash, scrog,
roach.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: Stone Age DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:27 AM ----- BODY: n.,adj.
1. In computer folklore, an ill-defined period from ENIAC (ca. 1943) to the mid-1950s; the great age of electromechanical dinosaurs. Sometimes used for the entire period up to 1960--61 (see Iron Age); however, it is funnier and more descriptive to characterize the latter period in terms of a ‘Bronze Age’ era of transistor-logic, pre-ferrite-core machines with drum or CRT mass storage (as opposed to just mercury delay lines and/or relays). See also Iron Age.
How things weren't in the Stone Age.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-07-18)
2. More generally, a pejorative for any crufty, ancient piece of hardware or software technology. Note that this is used even by people who were there for the Stone Age (sense 1).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: stone knives and bearskins DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:26 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from the Star Trek Classic episode The City on the Edge
of Forever] A term traditionally used to describe (and
deprecate) computing environments that are grotesquely primitive in light
of what is known about good ways to design things. As in Don't get
too used to the facilities here. Once you leave SAIL it's stone knives and
bearskins as far as the eye can see
. Compare
steam-powered.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: stoppage DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:25 AM ----- BODY: /sto´p@j/ n.
Extreme lossage that renders something
(usually something vital) completely unusable. The recent system
stoppage was caused by a fried
transformer.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: store DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:24 AM ----- BODY: n.
[prob.: from techspeak main store] In some varieties of Commonwealth hackish, the preferred synonym for core. Thus, bringing a program into store means not that one is returning shrink-wrapped software but that a program is being swapped in.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: STR DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:23 AM ----- BODY:
Spot the reference. Used in
scary devil monastery to mark the witticism one just uttered as a quote
from some work of art or literature, the more obscure the better. Those who
know where the reference comes from reply in the form You are
$CHARACTER, and you owe me $ITEM
, where $CHARACTER is a character
from the story being referenced and $ITEM is something associated with that
character. This acronym is never actually expanded to its proper meaning in
the newsgroup; posters instead use obscure expansions, the most common
being slurp the robot
, leading to comments like I
pulled my hair out, but couldn't figure out which robot you're
slurping
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: strided DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:22 AM ----- BODY: /stri:´d@d/ adj.
[scientific computing] Said of a sequence of memory reads and writes to addresses, each of which is separated from the last by a constant interval called the stride length. These can be a worst-case access pattern for the standard memory-caching schemes when the stride length is a multiple of the cache line size. Strided references are often generated by loops through an array, and (if your data is large enough that access-time is significant) it can be worthwhile to tune for better locality by inverting double loops or by partially unrolling the outer loop of a loop nest. This usage is borderline techspeak; the related term memory stride is definitely techspeak.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: stroke DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:21 AM ----- BODY: n.
Common name for the slant (‘/’, ASCII 0101111) character. See ASCII for other synonyms.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: strudel DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:20 AM ----- BODY: n.
Common (spoken) name for the at-sign (‘@’, ASCII 1000000) character. See ASCII for other synonyms.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: stubroutine DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:19 AM ----- BODY: /stuhb´roo·teen/ n.
[contraction of stub subroutine] Tiny, often vacuous placeholder for a subroutine that is to be written or fleshed out later.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: studly DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:18 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Impressive; powerful. Said of code and designs which exhibit both
complexity and a virtuoso flair. Has connotations similar to
hairy but is more positive in tone. Often in the
emphatic most studly or as noun-form
studliness. Smail 3.0's
configuration parser is most studly.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: studlycaps DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:17 AM ----- BODY: /stuhd´lee·kaps/ n.
A hackish form of silliness similar to BiCapitalization for trademarks, but applied randomly and to arbitrary text rather than to trademarks. ThE oRigiN and SigNificaNce of thIs pRacTicE iS oBscuRe.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: stunning DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:16 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Mind-bogglingly stupid. Usually used in sarcasm. You want
to code what in Ada? That's a ... stunning
idea!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: stupid-sort DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. bogo-sort.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: Stupids DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:14 AM ----- BODY: n.
Term used by samurai for the suits who employ them; succinctly expresses an attitude at least as common, though usually better disguised, among other subcultures of hackers. There may be intended reference here to an SF story originally published in 1952 but much anthologized since, Mark Clifton's Star, Bright. In it, a super-genius child classifies humans into a very few ‘Brights’ like herself, a huge majority of ‘Stupids’, and a minority of ‘Tweens’, the merely ordinary geniuses.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: Sturgeon's Law DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:13 AM ----- BODY: prov.
Ninety percent of everything is crud
. Derived from a
quote by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who once said,
Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of
everything is crud.
Sturgeon himself called this Sturgeon's
Revelation
, and it first appeared in the March 1958 issue of
Venture Science Fiction; he gave Sturgeon's Law as
Nothing is always absolutely so.
Oddly, when Sturgeon's
Revelation is cited, the final word is almost invariably changed to
‘crap’. Compare Hanlon's Razor,
Ninety-Ninety Rule. Though this maxim originated in
SF fandom, most hackers recognize it and are all too aware of its
truth.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sucking mud DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:12 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[Applied Data Research] (also pumping
mud) Crashed or wedged. Usually said of
a machine that provides some service to a network, such as a file server.
This Dallas regionalism derives from the East Texas oilfield lament,
Shut 'er down, Ma, she's a-suckin' mud
. Often used as a
query. We are going to reconfigure the network, are you ready to
suck mud?
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sufficiently small DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:11 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Syn. suitably small.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: suit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:10 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Ugly and uncomfortable ‘business clothing’ often worn by non-hackers. Invariably worn with a ‘tie’, a strangulation device that partially cuts off the blood supply to the brain. It is thought that this explains much about the behavior of suit-wearers. Compare droid.
2. A person who habitually wears suits, as distinct from a techie or hacker. See pointy-haired, burble, management, Stupids, SNAFU principle, PHB, and brain-damaged.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: suitable win DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:09 AM ----- BODY: n.
See win.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: suitably small DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:08 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[perverted from mathematical jargon] An expression used ironically
to characterize unquantifiable behavior that differs from expected or
required behavior. For example, suppose a newly created program came up
with a correct full-screen display, and one publicly exclaimed: It
works!
Then, if the program dumped core on the first mouse click,
one might add: Well, for suitably small values of
‘works’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: Sun DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:07 AM ----- BODY: n.
Sun Microsystems. Hackers remember that the name was originally an acronym, Stanford University Network. Sun started out around 1980 with some hardware hackers (mainly) from Stanford talking to some software hackers (mainly) from UC Berkeley; Sun's original technology concept married a clever board design based on the Motorola 68000 to BSD Unix. Sun went on to lead the workstation industry through the 1980s, and for years afterwards remained an engineering-driven company and a good place for hackers to work. Though Sun drifted away from its techie origins after 1990 and has since made some strategic moves that disappointed and annoyed many hackers (especially by maintaining proprietary control of Java and rejecting Linux), it's still considered within the family in much the same way DEC was in the 1970s and early 1980s.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sun lounge DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:06 AM ----- BODY: n.
[UK] The room where all the Sun workstations live. The humor in this term comes from the fact that it's also in mainstream use to describe a solarium, and all those Sun workstations clustered together give off an amazing amount of heat.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sun-stools DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:05 AM ----- BODY: n.
Unflattering hackerism for SunTools, a pre-X windowing environment notorious in its day for size, slowness, and misfeatures. X, however, is larger and (some claim) slower; see second-system effect.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sunspots DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:04 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Notional cause of an odd error. Why did the program
suddenly turn the screen blue?
Sunspots, I guess.
2. Also the cause of bit rot — from the myth that sunspots will increase cosmic rays, which can flip single bits in memory. See also phase of the moon.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: super source quench DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:03 AM ----- BODY: n.
A special packet designed to shut up an Internet host. The Internet
Protocol (IP) has a control message called Source Quench that asks a host
to transmit more slowly on a particular connection to avoid congestion. It
also has a Redirect control message intended to instruct a host to send
certain packets to a different local router. A super source
quench
is actually a redirect control packet, forged to look like
it came from a local router, that instructs a host to send all packets to
its own local loopback address. This will effectively tie many Internet
hosts up in knots. Compare Godzillagram,
breath-of-life packet.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: superloser DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:02 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Unix] A superuser with no clue — someone with root privileges on a Unix system and no idea what he/she is doing, the moral equivalent of a three-year-old with an unsafetied Uzi. Anyone who thinks this is an uncommon situation reckons without the territorial urges of management.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: superprogrammer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:01 AM ----- BODY: n.
A prolific programmer; one who can code exceedingly well and quickly. Not all hackers are superprogrammers, but many are. (Productivity can vary from one programmer to another by three orders of magnitude. For example, one programmer might be able to write an average of 3 lines of working code in one day, while another, with the proper tools, might be able to write 3,000. This range is astonishing; it is matched in very few other areas of human endeavor.) The term superprogrammer is more commonly used within such places as IBM than in the hacker community. It tends to stress naive measures of productivity and to underweight creativity, ingenuity, and getting the job done — and to sidestep the question of whether the 3,000 lines of code do more or less useful work than three lines that do the Right Thing. Hackers tend to prefer the terms hacker and wizard.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: superuser DATE: 05/15/2003 10:28:00 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Unix] Syn. root, avatar. This usage has spread to non-Unix environments; the superuser is any account with all wheel bits on. A more specific term than wheel.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: support DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:59 AM ----- BODY: n.
After-sale handholding; something many software vendors promise but few deliver. To hackers, most support people are useless — because by the time a hacker calls support he or she will usually know the software and the relevant manuals better than the support people (sadly, this is not a joke or exaggeration). A hacker's idea of ‘support’ is a têete-à-têete with the software's designer.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: surf DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:58 AM ----- BODY: v.
[from the ‘surf’ idiom for rapidly flipping TV channels] To traverse the Internet in search of interesting stuff, used esp. if one is doing so with a World Wide Web browser. It is also common to speak of surfing in to a particular resource.
Hackers adopted this term early, but many have stopped using it since
it went completely mainstream around 1995. The passive, couch-potato
connotations that go with TV channel surfing were never pleasant, and
hearing non-hackers wax enthusiastic about surfing the net
tends to make hackers feel a bit as though their home is being overrun by
ignorami.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: Suzie COBOL DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:57 AM ----- BODY: /soo´zee koh´bol/
1. [IBM: prob.: from Frank Zappa's ‘Suzy Creamcheese’] n. A coder straight out of training school who knows everything except the value of comments in plain English. Also (fashionable among personkind wishing to avoid accusations of sexism) ‘Sammy Cobol’ or (in some non-IBM circles) ‘Cobol Charlie’.
2. [proposed] Meta-name for any code grinder, analogous to J. Random Hacker.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: swab DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:56 AM ----- BODY: /swob/
[From the mnemonic for the PDP-11 ‘SWAp
Byte’ instruction, as immortalized in the
dd1
option conv=swab
(see
dd)]
1. vt. To solve the NUXI problem by swapping bytes in a file
2. n. The program in V7 Unix used to perform this action, or anything functionally equivalent to it. See also big-endian, little-endian, middle-endian, bytesexual.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: swap DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:55 AM ----- BODY: vt.
1. [techspeak] To move information from a fast-access memory to a slow-access memory (swap out), or vice versa (swap in). Often refers specifically to the use of disks as virtual memory. As pieces of data or program are needed, they are swapped into core for processing; when they are no longer needed they may be swapped out again.
2. The jargon use of these terms analogizes people's short-term
memories with core. Cramming for an exam might be spoken of as swapping
in. If you temporarily forget someone's name, but then remember it, your
excuse is that it was swapped out. To keep
something swapped in means to keep it fresh in your memory:
I reread the TECO manual every few months to keep it swapped
in.
If someone interrupts you just as you got a good idea, you
might say Wait a moment while I swap this out
, implying that
a piece of paper is your extra-somatic memory and that if you don't swap
the idea out by writing it down it will get overwritten and lost as you
talk. Compare page in,
page out.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: swap space DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
Storage space, especially temporary storage space used during a move
or reconfiguration. I'm just using that corner of the machine room
for swap space.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: swapped in DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:53 AM ----- BODY: n.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: swapped out DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: Swiss-Army chainsaw DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:51 AM ----- BODY:
In early Unix days, a well-known technical paper analogized the
lexical analyzer generator lex1 to a Swiss-army knife; this was a comment
on the remarkable variety of more general uses discovered for a program
originally designed as a special-purpose code generator for writing
compilers. Two decades later, well-known hacker Henry Spencer described
the Perl scripting language as a Swiss-Army
chainsaw
, intending to convey his evaluation of the language as
exceedingly powerful but ugly and noisy and prone to belch noxious fumes.
This had two results: (1) Perl fans adopted the epithet as a badge of
pride, and (2) it entered more general usage to describe software that is
highly versatile but distressingly inelegant.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: swizzle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:50 AM ----- BODY: v.
To convert external names, array indices, or references within a data structure into address pointers when the data structure is brought into main memory from external storage (also called pointer swizzling); this may be done for speed in chasing references or to simplify code (e.g., by turning lots of name lookups into pointer dereferences). The converse operation is sometimes termed unswizzling. See also snap.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sync DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:49 AM ----- BODY: /sink/ n., vi.
(var.: synch)
1. To synchronize, to bring into synchronization.
2. [techspeak] To force all pending I/O to the disk; see flush, sense 2.
3. More generally, to force a number of competing processes or agents to a state that would be ‘safe’ if the system were to crash; thus, to checkpoint (in the database-theory sense).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: syntactic salt DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:48 AM ----- BODY: n.
The opposite of syntactic sugar, a feature
designed to make it harder to write bad code. Specifically, syntactic salt
is a hoop the programmer must jump through just to prove that he knows
what's going on, rather than to express a program action. Some programmers
consider required type declarations to be syntactic salt. A requirement to
write end if
, end
while
, end do
, etc.: to terminate
the last block controlled by a control construct (as opposed to just
end
) would definitely be syntactic salt.
Syntactic salt is like the real thing in that it tends to raise hackers'
blood pressures in an unhealthy way. Compare
candygrammar.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: syntactic sugar DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:47 AM ----- BODY: n.
[coined by Peter Landin] Features added to a language or other
formalism to make it ‘sweeter’ for humans, but which do not
affect the expressiveness of the formalism (compare
chrome). Used esp. when there is an obvious and
trivial translation of the ‘sugar’ feature into other
constructs already present in the notation. C's a[i]
notation is syntactic sugar for
*a +
i. Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the
semicolon.
— Alan Perlis.
The variants syntactic saccharin and syntactic syrup are also recorded. These denote something even more gratuitous, in that syntactic sugar serves a purpose (making something more acceptable to humans), but syntactic saccharin or syrup serve no purpose at all. Compare candygrammar, syntactic salt.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sys-frog DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:46 AM ----- BODY: /sis´frog/ n.
[the PLATO system] Playful variant of sysprog, which is in turn short for ‘systems programmer’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sysadmin DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:45 AM ----- BODY: /sis´ad·min/ n.
Common contraction of ‘system admin’; see admin.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sysape DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:44 AM ----- BODY: /sys´ayp/ n.
A rather derogatory term for a computer operator; a play on sysop common at sites that use the banana hierarchy of problem complexity (see one-banana problem).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: sysop DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:43 AM ----- BODY: /sis´op/ n.
[esp. in the BBS world] The operator (and usually the owner) of a bulletin-board system. A common neophyte mistake on FidoNet is to address a message to sysop in an international FodoNet board, thus sending it to hundreds of sysops around the world.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: system DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:42 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The supervisor program or OS on a computer.
2. The entire computer system, including input/output devices, the supervisor program or OS, and possibly other software.
3. Any large-scale program.
4. Any method or algorithm.
5. System hacker: one who hacks the system (in senses 1 and 2 only; for sense 3 one mentions the particular program: e.g., LISP hacker)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: system mangler DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:41 AM ----- BODY: n.
Humorous synonym for ‘system manager’, poss. from the fact that one major IBM OS had a root account called SYSMANGR. Refers specifically to a systems programmer in charge of administration, software maintenance, and updates at some site. Unlike admin, this term emphasizes the technical end of the skills involved.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - S TITLE: systems jock DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:40 AM ----- BODY: n.
See jock, sense 2.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: T DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:39 AM ----- BODY: /T/
1. [from LISP terminology for ‘true’] Yes. Used in reply to a question (particularly one asked using The -P convention). In LISP, the constant T means ‘true’, among other things. Some Lisp hackers use ‘T’ and ‘NIL’ instead of ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ almost reflexively. This sometimes causes misunderstandings. When a waiter or flight attendant asks whether a hacker wants coffee, he may absently respond ‘T’, meaning that he wants coffee; but of course he will be brought a cup of tea instead. Fortunately, most hackers (particularly those who frequent Chinese restaurants) like tea at least as well as coffee — so it is not that big a problem.
2. See time T (also since time T equals minus infinity).
3. [techspeak] In transaction-processing circles, an abbreviation for the noun ‘transaction’.
4. [Purdue] Alternate spelling of tee.
5. A dialect of LISP developed at
Yale. (There is an intended allusion to NIL, New Implementation of
Lisp
, another dialect of Lisp developed for the
VAX)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tail recursion DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:38 AM ----- BODY: n.
If you aren't sick of it already, see tail recursion.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: talk mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:37 AM ----- BODY: n.
A feature supported by Unix and some other OSes that allows two or more logged-in users to set up a real-time on-line conversation. It combines the immediacy of talking with all the precision (and verbosity) that written language entails. It is difficult to communicate inflection, though conventions have arisen for some of these (see the section on writing style in the Prependices for details).
Talk mode has a special set of jargon words, used to save typing, which are not used orally. Some of these are identical to (and probably derived from) Morse-code jargon used by ham-radio amateurs since the 1920s.
AFAIAC | as far as I am concerned |
AFAIK | as far as I know |
BCNU | be seeing you |
BTW | by the way |
BYE? | are you ready to unlink? (this is the standard way to end a
talk-mode conversation; the other person types
BYE
to confirm, or else continues the conversation) |
CUL | see you later |
ENQ? | are you busy? (expects ACK
or NAK in return) |
FOO? | are you there? (often used on unexpected links, meaning also
Sorry if I butted in &ellipsis;(linker) or What's up?(linkee)) |
FWIW | for what it's worth |
FYI | for your information |
FYA | for your amusement |
GA | go ahead (used when two people have tried to type simultaneously; this cedes the right to type to the other) |
GRMBL | grumble (expresses disquiet or disagreement) |
HELLOP | hello? (an instance of the ‘-P’ convention) |
IIRC | if I recall correctly |
JAM | just a minute (equivalent to
SEC....
) |
MIN | same as JAM |
NIL | no (see NIL) |
NP | no problem |
O | over to you |
OO | over and out |
/ | another form of over to you(from x/y as x over y) |
\ | lambda (used in discussing LISPy things) |
OBTW | oh, by the way |
OTOH | on the other hand |
R U THERE? | are you there? |
SEC | wait a second (sometimes written
SEC...
) |
SYN | Are you busy? (expects ACK, SYN|ACK, or RST in return; this is modeled on the TCP/IP handshake sequence) |
T | yes (see the main entry for T) |
TNX | thanks |
TNX 1.0E6 | thanks a million (humorous) |
TNXE6 | another form of thanks a million |
TTBOMK | to the best of my knowledge |
WRT | with regard to, or with respect to. |
WTF | the universal interrogative particle; WTF knows what it means? |
WTH | what the hell? |
<double newline> | When the typing party has finished, he/she types two newlines to signal that he/she is done; this leaves a blank line between 'speeches' in the conversation, making it easier to reread the preceding text. |
YHTBT | You Had To Be There. Used of a situation which loses significant meaning in the telling, usually because it's difficult to convey tone and timing. |
<name>: | When three or more terminals are linked, it is conventional for each typist to prepend his/her login name or handle and a colon (or a hyphen) to each line to indicate who is typing (some conferencing facilities do this automatically). The login name is often shortened to a unique prefix (possibly a single letter) during a very long conversation. |
/\/\/\ | A giggle or chuckle. On a MUD, this usually means 'earthquake fault'. |
<g> | grin |
<gd&r> | grinning, ducking, and running |
BBL | be back later |
BRB | be right back |
HHOJ | ha ha only joking |
HHOK | ha ha only kidding |
HHOS | ha ha only serious |
IMHO | in my humble opinion (see IMHO) |
LOL | laughing out loud |
NHOH | Never Heard of Him/Her (often used in initgame) |
ROTF | rolling on the floor |
ROTFL | rolling on the floor laughing |
AFK | away from keyboard |
b4 | before |
CU l8tr | see you later |
MORF | male or female? |
TTFN | ta-ta for now |
TTYL | talk to you later |
OIC | oh, I see |
rehi | hello again |
Most of these are not used at universities or in the Unix world, though ROTF and TTFN have gained some currency there and IMHO is common; conversely, most of the people who know these are unfamiliar with FOO?, BCNU, HELLOP, NIL, and T.
The MUD community uses a mixture of Usenet/Internet emoticons, a few of the more natural of the old-style talk-mode abbrevs, and some of the ‘social’ list above; specifically, MUD respondents report use of BBL, BRB, LOL, b4, BTW, WTF, TTFN, and WTH. The use of rehi is also common; in fact, mudders are fond of re- compounds and will frequently rehug or rebonk (see bonk/oif) people. The word re by itself is taken as ‘regreet’. In general, though, MUDders express a preference for typing things out in full rather than using abbreviations; this may be due to the relative youth of the MUD cultures, which tend to include many touch typists and to assume high-speed links. The following uses specific to MUDs are reported:
CU l8er | see you later (mutant of CU l8tr ) |
FOAD | fuck off and die (use of this is generally OTT) |
OTT | over the top (excessive, uncalled for) |
ppl | abbrev for people |
THX | thanks (mutant of TNX ; clearly this comes in batches of 1138 (the
Lucasian K)). |
UOK? | are you OK? |
Some B1FFisms (notably the variant spelling
d00d
) appear to be passing into wider use
among some subgroups of MUDders.
One final note on talk mode style: neophytes, when in talk mode,
often seem to think they must produce letter-perfect prose because they are
typing rather than speaking. This is not the best approach. It can be
very frustrating to wait while your partner pauses to think of a word, or
repeatedly makes the same spelling error and backs up to fix it. It is
usually best just to leave typographical errors behind and plunge forward,
unless severe confusion may result; in that case it is often fastest just
to type xxx
and start over from before the mistake.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: talker system DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:36 AM ----- BODY: n.
British hackerism for software that enables real-time chat or talk mode.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: TAN DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:35 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[Usenet, particularly rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan] Abbrev. of
‘tangent’, as in off on a tangent
, and synonym
for OT. A number of hacker-humor synonyms are used
for TAN in some newsgroups. Instances such as BEIGE, OFF-WHITE,
BROWNISH-GRAY, and LIGHT BROWN have been observed. It is generally
understood on newsgroups with this convention that any color descriptor is
a TAN synonym if (a) used as the first word(s) of the topic of a Usenet
post, (b) written in ALL CAPS, and (c) followed immediately by a
colon. Usage: OFF-WHITE: 2000 Presidential candidates
on an
SF newsgroup.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tanked DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:34 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Same as down, used primarily by Unix hackers. See also hosed. Popularized as a synonym for ‘drunk’ by Steve Dallas in the late lamented Bloom County comic strip.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: TANSTAAFL DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:33 AM ----- BODY: /tan´stah·fl/
[acronym, from Robert Heinlein's classic SF novel The
Moon is a Harsh Mistress.] There Ain't No Such Thing As
A Free Lunch
, often invoked when someone is balking at the prospect
of using an unpleasantly heavyweight technique, or
at the poor quality of some piece of software, or at the
signal-to-noise ratio of unmoderated Usenet
newsgroups. What? Don't tell me I have to implement a database
back end to get my address book program to work!
Well,
TANSTAAFL you know.
This phrase owes some of its popularity to the
high concentration of science-fiction fans and political libertarians in
hackerdom (see Appendix B for
discussion).
Outside hacker circles the variant TINSTAAFL (There is No Such
Thing...
) is apparently more common, and can be traced back to 1952
in the writings of ethicist Alvin Hansen. TANSTAAFL may well have arisen
from it by mutation.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tape monkey DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:32 AM ----- BODY: n.
A junior system administrator, one who might plausibly be assigned
to do physical swapping of tapes and subsequent storage. When a backup
needs to be restored, one might holler Tape monkey!
(Compare
one-banana problem) Also used to dismiss jobs not
worthy of a highly trained sysadmin's ineffable talents: Cable up
her PC? You must be joking — I'm no tape monkey.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tar and feather DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:31 AM ----- BODY: vi.
[from Unix tar1] To create a transportable archive from a group of files by first sticking them together with tar1 (the Tape ARchiver) and then compressing the result (see compress). The latter action is dubbed feathering partly for euphony and (if only for contrived effect) by analogy to what you do with an airplane propeller to decrease wind resistance, or with an oar to reduce water resistance; smaller files, after all, slip through comm links more easily. Compare the more common tarball. Earlier, the phrase referred to a punishment in which the victims had tar being poured upon them and then, whilst the tar was still sticky, having a pillow full of feathers - or other material — thrown at them. See http://www.nwta.com/Spy/spring99/tar.html.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tarball DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:30 AM ----- BODY: n.
[very common; prob. based on the tar baby
in the
Uncle Remus folk tales] An archive, created with the Unix tar1 utility,
containing myriad related files. Here, I'll just ftp you a tarball
of the whole project.
Tarballs have been the standard way to ship
around source-code distributions since the mid-1980s; in retrospect it
seems odd that this term did not enter common usage until the late
1990s.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tardegy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:29 AM ----- BODY: tar´djee n.
[deliberate mangling of tragedy] An incident in which someone who clearly deserves to be selected out of the gene pool on grounds of extreme stupidity meets with a messy end. Coined on the Darwin list, which is dedicated to chronicling such incidents; but almost all hackers would instantly recognize the intention of the term and laugh.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: taste DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:28 AM ----- BODY: [primarily MIT] n.
1. The quality in a program that tends to be inversely proportional
to the number of features, hacks, and kluges programmed into it. Also
tasty, tasteful, tastefulness. This feature comes in
N tasty flavors.
Although
tasty and flavorful are essentially synonyms, taste and flavor are
not. Taste refers to sound judgment on the part of the creator; a program
or feature can exhibit taste but cannot
have taste. On the other hand, a feature can have
flavor. Also, flavor has the
additional meaning of ‘kind’ or ‘variety’ not
shared by taste. The marked sense of
flavor is more popular than taste, though both are widely used. See also
elegant.
2. Alt. sp. of tayste.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tayste DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:27 AM ----- BODY: /tayst/
n. Two bits; also as taste. Syn. crumb, quarter. See nybble.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: TCB DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:26 AM ----- BODY: /T·C·B/ n.
[IBM] 1. Trouble Came Back. An intermittent or difficult-to-reproduce problem that has failed to respond to neglect or shotgun debugging. Compare heisenbug. Not to be confused with:
2. Trusted Computing Base, an ‘official’ jargon term from the Orange Book.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: TCP/IP DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:25 AM ----- BODY: /T´C·P I´P/ n.
1. [Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol] The wide-area-networking protocol that makes the Internet work, and the only one most hackers can speak the name of without laughing or retching. Unlike such allegedly ‘standard’ competitors such as X.25, DECnet, and the ISO 7-layer stack, TCP/IP evolved primarily by actually being used, rather than being handed down from on high by a vendor or a heavily-politicized standards committee. Consequently, it (a) works, (b) actually promotes cheap cross-platform connectivity, and (c) annoys the hell out of corporate and governmental empire-builders everywhere. Hackers value all three of these properties. See creationism.
2. [Amateur Packet Radio] Formerly expanded as The Crap Phil
Is Pushing
. The reference is to Phil Karn, KA9Q, and the context
was an ongoing technical/political war between the majority of sites still
running AX.25 and the TCP/IP relays. TCP/IP won.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: TECO DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:24 AM ----- BODY: /tee´koh/ n.,v. obs.
1. [originally an acronym for ‘[paper] Tape Editor and COrrector’; later, ‘Text Editor and COrrector’] n. A text editor developed at MIT and modified by just about everybody. With all the dialects included, TECO may have been the most prolific editor in use before EMACS, to which it was directly ancestral. Noted for its powerful programming-language-like features and its unspeakably hairy syntax. It is literally the case that every string of characters is a valid TECO program (though probably not a useful one); one common game used to be mentally working out what the TECO commands corresponding to human names did.
2. vt. Originally, to edit using the TECO editor in one of its infinite variations (see below).
3. vt.,obs. To edit even when TECO is not the editor being used! This usage is rare and now primarily historical.
As an example of TECO's obscurity, here is a TECO program that takes a list of names such as:
Loser, J. Random Quux, The Great Dick, Moby
sorts them alphabetically according to surname, and then puts the surname last, removing the comma, to produce the following:
Moby Dick J. Random Loser The Great Quux
The program is
[1 J^P$L$$ J <.-Z; .,(S,$ -D .)FX1 @F^B $K :L I $ G1 L>$$
(where ^B means ‘Control-B’ (ASCII 0000010) and $ is actually an alt or escape (ASCII 0011011) character).
In fact, this very program was used to produce the second, sorted
list from the first list. The first hack at it had a
bug: GLS (the author) had accidentally omitted the
@
in front of F^B
, which as anyone can see is clearly the
Wrong Thing. It worked fine the second time. There
is no space to describe all the features of TECO, but it may be of interest
that ^P
means ‘sort’ and
J<.-Z; ... L>
is an idiomatic
series of commands for ‘do once for every line’.
In mid-1991, TECO is pretty much one with the dust of history, having been replaced in the affections of hackerdom by EMACS. Descendants of an early (and somewhat lobotomized) version adopted by DEC can still be found lurking on VMS and a couple of crufty PDP-11 operating systems, however, and ports of the more advanced MIT versions remain the focus of some antiquarian interest. See also retrocomputing, write-only language.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tee DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:23 AM ----- BODY: n.,vt.
[Purdue] A carbon copy of an electronic transmission. Oh,
you're sending him the bits to that? Slap on a tee
for me.
From the Unix command
tee1,
itself named after a pipe fitting (see plumbing).
Can also mean ‘save one for me’, as in Tee a slice for
me!
Also spelled ‘T’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: teergrube DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:22 AM ----- BODY: /teer´groob·@/ n.
[German for tar pit] A trap set to punish spammers who use an address harvester; a mail server deliberately set up to be really, really slow. To activate it, scatter addresses that look like users on the teergrube's host in places where the address harvester will be trolling (one popular way is to embed the fake address in a Usenet sig block next to a human-readable warning not to send mail to it). The address harvester will dutifully collect the address. When the spammer tries to mailbomb it, his mailer will get stuck.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: teledildonics DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:21 AM ----- BODY: /tel`@·dil·do'·niks/ n.
Sex in a computer simulated virtual reality, esp. computer-mediated
sexual interaction between the VR presences of two
humans. This practice is not yet possible except in the rather limited
form of erotic conversation on MUDs and the like.
The term, however, is widely recognized in the VR community as a
ha ha only serious projection of things to come.
When we can sustain a multi-sensory surround good enough for
teledildonics, then we'll know we're getting
somewhere.
See also hot chat.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: ten-finger interface DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:20 AM ----- BODY: n.
The interface between two networks that cannot be directly connected for security reasons; refers to the practice of placing two terminals side by side and having an operator read from one and type into the other.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tense DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:19 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Of programs, very clever and efficient. A tense piece of code often
got that way because it was highly tuned, but sometimes it was just based
on a great idea. A comment in a clever routine by Mike Kazar, once a
grad-student hacker at CMU: This routine is so tense it will bring
tears to your eyes.
A tense programmer is one who produces tense
code.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tentacle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:18 AM ----- BODY: n.
A covert pseudo, sense 1. An artificial identity created in cyberspace for nefarious and deceptive purposes. The implication is that a single person may have multiple tentacles. This term was originally floated in some paranoid ravings on the cypherpunks list (see cypherpunk), and adopted in a spirit of irony by other, saner members. It has since shown up, used seriously, in the documentation for some remailer software, and is now (1994) widely recognized on the net.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tenured graduate student DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:17 AM ----- BODY: n.
One who has been in graduate school for 10 years (the usual maximum is 5 or 6): a ‘ten-yeared’ student (get it?). Actually, this term may be used of any grad student beginning in his seventh year. Students don't really get tenure, of course, the way professors do, but a tenth-year graduate student has probably been around the university longer than any untenured professor.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tera- DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:16 AM ----- BODY: /te´r@/ pref.
[SI] See quantifiers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: teraflop club DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:15 AM ----- BODY: /te´r@·flop kluhb/ n.
[FLOP = Floating Point Operation] A mythical association of people who consume outrageous amounts of computer time in order to produce a few simple pictures of glass balls with intricate ray-tracing techniques. Caltech professor James Kajiya is said to have been the founder. Compare Knights of the Lambda Calculus.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: terminak DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:14 AM ----- BODY: /ter´mi·nak`/ n.
[Caltech, ca. 1979] Any malfunctioning computer terminal. A common
failure mode of Lear-Siegler ADM 3a terminals caused the ‘L’
key to produce the ‘K’ code instead; complaints about this
tended to look like Terminak #3 has a bad keyboard. Pkease
fix.
Compare dread high-bit disease,
frogging; see also
sun-stools, HP-SUX,
Slowlaris.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: terminal brain death DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:13 AM ----- BODY: n.
The extreme form of terminal illness (sense 1). What someone who has obviously been hacking continuously for far too long is said to be suffering from.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: terminal illness DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:12 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Syn. raster burn.
2. The ‘burn-in’ condition your CRT tends to get if you don't have a screen saver.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: terminal junkie DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:11 AM ----- BODY: n.
[UK] A wannabee or early larval stage hacker who spends most of his or her time wandering the directory tree and writing noddy programs just to get a fix of computer time. Variants include terminal jockey, console junkie, and console jockey. The term console jockey seems to imply more expertise than the other three (possibly because of the exalted status of the console relative to an ordinary terminal). See also twink, read-only user. Appropriately, this term was used in the works of William S. Burroughs to describe a heroin addict with an unlimited supply.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: test DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:10 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Real users bashing on a prototype long enough to get thoroughly acquainted with it, with careful monitoring and followup of the results.
2. Some bored random user trying a couple of the simpler features with a developer looking over his or her shoulder, ready to pounce on mistakes.
Judging by the quality of most software, the second definition is far more prevalent. See also demo.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: TeX DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:09 AM ----- BODY: /tekh/ n.
An extremely powerful macro-based text formatter written by Donald E. Knuth, very popular in the computer-science community (it is good enough to have displaced Unix troff, the other favored formatter, even at many Unix installations). TeX fans insist on the correct (guttural) pronunciation, and the correct spelling (all caps, squished together, with the E depressed below the baseline; the mixed-case ‘TeX’ is considered an acceptable kluge on ASCII-only devices). Fans like to proliferate names from the word ‘TeX’ — such as TeXnician (TeX user), TeXhacker (TeX programmer), TeXmaster (competent TeX programmer), TeXhax, and TeXnique. See also CrApTeX.
Knuth began TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining quality of the typesetting in volumes I--III of his monumental Art of Computer Programming (see Knuth, also bible). In a manifestation of the typical hackish urge to solve the problem at hand once and for all, he began to design his own typesetting language. He thought he would finish it on his sabbatical in 1978; he was wrong by only about 8 years. The language was finally frozen around 1985, but volume IV of The Art of Computer Programming is not expected to appear until 2007. The impact and influence of TeX's design has been such that nobody minds this very much. Many grand hackish projects have started as a bit of toolsmithing on the way to something else; Knuth's diversion was simply on a grander scale than most.
TeX has also been a noteworthy example of free, shared, but high-quality software. Knuth offers a monetary award to anyone who found and reported bugs dating from before the 1989 code freeze; as the years wore on and the few remaining bugs were fixed (and new ones even harder to find), the bribe went up. Though well-written, TeX is so large (and so full of cutting edge technique) that it is said to have unearthed at least one bug in every Pascal system it has been compiled with.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: text DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:08 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [techspeak] Executable code, esp. a pure code portion shared between multiple instances of a program running in a multitasking OS. Compare English.
2. Textual material in the mainstream sense; data in ordinary
ASCII or EBCDIC
representation (see flat-ASCII). Those are
text files; you can review them using the editor.
These two contradictory senses confuse hackers, too.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: thanks in advance DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:07 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet] Conventional net.politeness ending a posted request for information or assistance. Sometimes written ‘advTHANKSance’ or ‘aTdHvAaNnKcSe’ or abbreviated ‘TIA’. See net.-, netiquette.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: That's not a bug, that's a feature! DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:06 AM ----- BODY:
The canonical first parry in a debate about a purported bug. The complainant, if unconvinced, is likely to retort that the bug is then at best a misfeature. See also feature.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: the literature DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:05 AM ----- BODY: n.
Computer-science journals and other publications, vaguely gestured
at to answer a question that the speaker believes is
trivial. Thus, one might answer an annoying
question by saying It's in the literature.
Oppose
Knuth, which has no connotation of
triviality.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: the network DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:04 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Historically, the union of all the major noncommercial, academic, and hacker-oriented networks, such as Internet, the pre-1990 ARPANET, NSFnet, BITNET, and the virtual UUCP and Usenet ‘networks’, plus the corporate in-house networks and commercial timesharing services (such as CompuServe, GEnie and AOL) that gateway to them. A site is generally considered on the network if it can be reached through some combination of Internet-style (@-sign) and UUCP (bang-path) addresses. See Internet, bang path, network address.
2. Following the mass-culture discovery of the Internet in 1994 and
subsequent proliferation of cheap TCP/IP connections, the
network
is increasingly synonymous with the Internet itself (as it
was before the second wave of wide-area computer networking began around
1980).
3. A fictional conspiracy of libertarian hacker-subversives and anti-authoritarian monkeywrenchers described in Robert Anton Wilson's novel Schrödinger's Cat, to which many hackers have subsequently decided they belong (this is an example of ha ha only serious).
In sense 1, the network is
often abbreviated to the net.
Are you on the net?
is a frequent question when hackers
first meet face to face, and See you on the net!
is a
frequent goodbye.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: the X that can be Y is not the true X DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:03 AM ----- BODY:
Yet another instance of hackerdom's peculiar attraction to mystical
references — a common humorous way of making exclusive statements
about a class of things. The template is from the Tao te
Ching: The Tao which can be spoken of is not the true
Tao.
The implication is often that the X is a mystery accessible
only to the enlightened. See the trampoline entry
for an example, and compare has the X nature.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: theology DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:02 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Ironically or humorously used to refer to religious issues.
2. Technical fine points of an abstruse nature, esp. those where the resolution is of theoretical interest but is relatively marginal with respect to actual use of a design or system. Used esp. around software issues with a heavy AI or language-design component, such as the smart-data vs. smart-programs dispute in AI.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: theory DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:01 AM ----- BODY: n.
The consensus, idea, plan, story, or set of rules that is currently
being used to inform a behavior. This usage is a generalization and
(deliberate) abuse of the technical meaning. What's the theory on
fixing this TECO loss?
What's the theory on dinner
tonight?
(Chinatown, I guess.
) What's the
current theory on letting lusers on during the day?
The
theory behind this change is to fix the following well-known
screw....
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: thinko DATE: 05/15/2003 10:27:00 AM ----- BODY: /thing´koh/ n.
[by analogy with ‘typo’] A momentary, correctable glitch in mental processing, especially one involving recall of information learned by rote; a bubble in the stream of consciousness. Syn. braino; see also brain fart. Compare mouso.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: This can't happen DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:59 AM ----- BODY:
Less clipped variant of can't happen.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: This time, for sure! DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:58 AM ----- BODY: excl.
Ritual affirmation frequently uttered during protracted debugging
sessions involving numerous small obstacles (e.g., attempts to bring up a
UUCP connection). For the proper effect, this must be uttered in a fruity
imitation of Bullwinkle J. Moose. Also heard: Hey, Rocky! Watch me
pull a rabbit out of my hat!
The canonical
response is, of course, But that trick never
works!
See hacker humor.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: thrash DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:57 AM ----- BODY: vi.
To move wildly or violently, without accomplishing anything useful. Paging or swapping systems that are overloaded waste most of their time moving data into and out of core (rather than performing useful computation) and are therefore said to thrash. Someone who keeps changing his mind (esp. about what to work on next) is said to be thrashing. A person frantically trying to execute too many tasks at once (and not spending enough time on any single task) may also be described as thrashing. Compare multitask.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: thread DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:56 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet, GEnie, CompuServe] Common abbreviation of topic thread, a more or less continuous chain of postings on a single topic. To follow a thread is to read a series of Usenet postings sharing a common subject or (more correctly) which are connected by Reference headers. The better newsreaders can present news in thread order automatically. Not to be confused with the techspeak sense of ‘thread’, e.g. a lightweight process.
Interestingly, this is far from a neologism. The OED says:
That which connects the successive points in anything, esp. a
narrative, train of thought, or the like; the sequence of events or ideas
continuing throughout the whole course of anything;
Citations are
given going back to 1642!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: three-finger salute DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:55 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. Vulcan nerve pinch.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: throwaway account DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. An inexpensive Internet account purchased on a legitimate ISP for the sole purpose of spewing spam.
2. An inexpensive Internet account obtained for the sole purpose of doing something which requires a valid email address but being able to ignore spam since the user will not look at the account again.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: thud DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:53 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Yet another metasyntactic variable (see foo). It is reported that at CMU from the mid-1970s the canonical series of these was ‘foo’, ‘bar’, ‘thud’, ‘blat’.
2. Rare term for the hash character, ‘#’ (ASCII 0100011). See ASCII for other synonyms.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: thumb DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
The slider on a window-system scrollbar. So called because moving it allows you to browse through the contents of a text window in a way analogous to thumbing through a book.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: thundering herd problem DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:51 AM ----- BODY:
Scheduler thrashing. This can happen under Unix when you have a number of processes that are waiting on a single event. When that event (a connection to the web server, say) happens, every process which could possibly handle the event is awakened. In the end, only one of those processes will actually be able to do the work, but, in the meantime, all the others wake up and contend for CPU time before being put back to sleep. Thus the system thrashes briefly while a herd of processes thunders through. If this starts to happen many times per second, the performance impact can be significant.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: thunk DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:50 AM ----- BODY: /thuhnk/ n.
1. [obs.]A piece of coding which provides an
address:
, according to P. Z. Ingerman, who invented thunks in 1961
as a way of binding actual parameters to their formal definitions in
Algol-60 procedure calls. If a procedure is called with an expression in
the place of a formal parameter, the compiler generates a thunk which
computes the expression and leaves the address of the result in some
standard location.
2. Later generalized into: an expression, frozen together with its environment, for later evaluation if and when needed (similar to what in techspeak is called a closure). The process of unfreezing these thunks is called forcing.
3. A stubroutine, in an overlay programming environment, that loads and jumps to the correct overlay. Compare trampoline.
4. Microsoft and IBM have both defined, in their Intel-based
systems, a 16-bit environment
(with bletcherous segment
registers and 64K address limits) and a 32-bit environment
(with flat addressing and semi-real memory management). The two
environments can both be running on the same computer and OS (thanks to
what is called, in the Microsoft world, WOW which stands for Windows On
Windows). MS and IBM have both decided that the process of getting from 16-
to 32-bit and vice versa is called a thunk
; for Windows 95,
there is even a tool THUNK.EXE called a thunk compiler
.
5. A person or activity scheduled in a thunklike manner. It
occurred to me the other day that I am rather accurately modeled by a thunk
— I frequently need to be forced to completion.:
—
paraphrased from a plan file.
Historical note: There are a couple of onomatopoeic myths circulating
about the origin of this term. The most common is that it is the sound
made by data hitting the stack; another holds that the sound is that of the
data hitting an accumulator. Yet another suggests that it is the sound of
the expression being unfrozen at argument-evaluation time. In fact,
according to the inventors, it was coined after they realized (in the wee
hours after hours of discussion) that the type of an argument in Algol-60
could be figured out in advance with a little compile-time thought,
simplifying the evaluation machinery. In other words, it had
‘already been thought of’; thus it was christened a thunk, which is the past tense of
‘think’ at two in the morning
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tick DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:49 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A jiffy (sense 1).
2. In simulations, the discrete unit of time that passes between iterations of the simulation mechanism. In AI applications, this amount of time is often left unspecified, since the only constraint of interest is the ordering of events. This sort of AI simulation is often pejoratively referred to as tick-tick-tick simulation, especially when the issue of simultaneity of events with long, independent chains of causes is handwaved.
3. In the FORTH language, a single quote character.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tick-list features DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:48 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Acorn Computers] Features in software or hardware that customers insist on but never use (calculators in desktop TSRs and that sort of thing). The American equivalent would be checklist features, but this jargon sense of the phrase has not been reported.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tickle a bug DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:47 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To cause a normally hidden bug to manifest itself through some known
series of inputs or operations. You can tickle the bug in the
Paradise VGA card's highlight handling by trying to set bright yellow
reverse video.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tiger team DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:46 AM ----- BODY: n.
[U.S. military jargon]
1. Originally, a team (of sneakers) whose
purpose is to penetrate security, and thus test security measures. These
people are paid professionals who do hacker-type tricks, e.g., leave
cardboard signs saying bomb
in critical defense
installations, hand-lettered notes saying Your codebooks have been
stolen
(they usually haven't been) inside safes, etc. After a
successful penetration, some high-ranking security type shows up the next
morning for a ‘security review’ and finds the sign, note, etc.,
and all hell breaks loose. Serious successes of tiger teams sometimes lead
to early retirement for base commanders and security officers (see the
patch entry for an example).
2. Recently, and more generally, any official inspection team or special firefighting group called in to look at a problem.
A subset of tiger teams are professional crackers, testing the security of military computer installations by attempting remote attacks via networks or supposedly ‘secure’ comm channels. Some of their escapades, if declassified, would probably rank among the greatest hacks of all times. The term has been adopted in commercial computer-security circles in this more specific sense.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: time bomb DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:45 AM ----- BODY: n.
A subspecies of logic bomb that is triggered by reaching some preset time, either once or periodically. There are numerous legends about time bombs set up by programmers in their employers' machines, to go off if the programmer is fired or laid off and is not present to perform the appropriate suppressing action periodically.
Interestingly, the only such incident for which we have been pointed to documentary evidence took place in the Soviet Union in 1986! A disgruntled programmer at the Volga Automobile Plant (where the Fiat clones called Ladas were manufactured) planted a time bomb which, a week after he'd left on vacation, stopped the entire main assembly line for a day. The case attracted lots of attention in the Soviet Union because it was the first cracking case to make it to court there. The perpetrator got a suspended sentence of 3 years in jail and was barred from future work as a programmer.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: time sink DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:44 AM ----- BODY: n.
[poss.: by analogy with heat sink or current sink] A project that consumes unbounded amounts of time.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: time T DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:43 AM ----- BODY: /ti:m T/ n.
1. An unspecified but usually well-understood time, often used in
conjunction with a later time T+1.
We'll meet on campus at time T or
at Louie's at time T+1
means, in
the context of going out for dinner: We can meet on campus and go to
Louie's, or we can meet at Louie's itself a bit later.
(Louie's was
a Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto that was a favorite with hackers.) Had
the number 30 been used instead of the number 1, it would have implied that
the travel time from campus to Louie's is 30 minutes; whatever time
T is (and that hasn't been decided on
yet), you can meet half an hour later at Louie's than you could on campus
and end up eating at the same time. See also
since time T equals minus infinity.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: times-or-divided-by DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:42 AM ----- BODY: quant.
[by analogy with ‘plus-or-minus’] Term occasionally used when describing the uncertainty associated with a scheduling estimate, for either humorous or brutally honest effect. For a software project, the scheduling uncertainty factor is usually at least 2.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: timesharing DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:41 AM ----- BODY:
[now primarily historical] Timesharing is the technique of scheduling a computer's time so that they are shared across multiple tasks and multiple users, with each user having the illusion that his or her computation is going on continuously. John McCarthy, the inventor of LISP, first imagined this technique in the late 1950s. The first timesharing operating systems, BBN's "Little Hospital" and CTSS, were deplayed in 1962-63. The early hacker culture of the 1960s and 1970s grew up around the first generation of relatively cheap timesharing computers, notably the DEC 10, 11, and VAX lines. But these were only cheap in a relative sense; though quite a bit less powerful than today's personal computers, they had to be shared by dozens or even hundreds of people each. The early hacker comunities nucleated around places where it was relatively easy to get access to a timesharing account.
Nowadays, communications bandwidth is usually the most important constraint on what you can do with your computer. Not so back then; timesharing machines were often loaded to capacity, and it was not uncommon for everyone's work to grind to a halt while the machine scheduler thrashed, trying to figure out what to do next. Early hacker slang was replete with terms like cycle crunch and cycle drought for describing the consequences of too few instructions-per-second spread among too many users. As GLS has noted, this sort of problem influenced the tendency of many hackers to work odd schedules.
One reason this is worth noting here is to make the point that the earliest hacker communities were physical, not distributed via networks; they consisted of hackers who shared a machine and therefore had to deal with many of the same problems with respect to it. A system crash could idle dozens of eager programmers, all sitting in the same terminal room and with little to do but talk with each other until normal operation resumed.
Timesharing moved from being the luxury of a few large universities runing semi-experimental operating systems to being more generally available about 1975-76. Hackers in search of more cycles and more control over their programming environment began to migrate off timesharing machines and onto what are now called workstations around 1983. It took another ten years, the development of powerful 32-bit personal micros, the Great Internet Explosion before the migration was complete. It is no coincidence that the last stages of this migration coincided with the development of the first open-source operating systems.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: TINC DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:40 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet] Abbreviation: There Is No Cabal
. See
backbone cabal and NANA, but
note that this abbreviation did not enter use until long after the
dispersal of the backbone cabal.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: Tinkerbell program DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Great Britain] A monitoring program used to scan incoming network calls and generate alerts when calls are received from particular sites, or when logins are attempted using certain IDs. Named after ‘Project Tinkerbell’, an experimental phone-tapping program developed by British Telecom in the early 1980s.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: TINLC DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:38 AM ----- BODY:
Abbreviation: There Is No Lumber Cartel
. See
Lumber Cartel. TINLC is a takeoff on
TINC.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tip of the ice-cube DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:37 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] The visible part of something small and insignificant. Used as an ironic comment in situations where ‘tip of the iceberg’ might be appropriate if the subject were at all important.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tired iron DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:36 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] Hardware that is perfectly functional but far enough behind the state of the art to have been superseded by new products, presumably with sufficient improvement in bang-per-buck that the old stuff is starting to look a bit like a dinosaur.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tits on a keyboard DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:35 AM ----- BODY: n.
Small bumps on certain keycaps to keep touch-typists registered. Usually on the 5 of a numeric keypad, and on the F and J of a QWERTY keyboard; but older Macs (like pre-PC electric typewriters) had them on the D and K keys (this changed in 1999).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: TLA DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:34 AM ----- BODY: /T·L·A/ n.
[Three-Letter Acronym]
1. Self-describing abbreviation for a species with which computing terminology is infested.
2. Any confusing acronym. Examples include MCA, FTP, SNA, CPU, MMU, SCCS, DMU, FPU, NNTP, TLA. People who like this looser usage argue that not all TLAs have three letters, just as not all four-letter words have four letters. One also hears of ‘ETLA’ (Extended Three-Letter Acronym, pronounced /ee tee el ay/) being used to describe four-letter acronyms; the terms ‘SFLA’ (Stupid Four-Letter Acronym), ‘LFLA’ (Longer Four Letter Acronym), and VLFLA (Very Long Five Letter Acronym) have also been reported. See also YABA.
The self-effacing phrase TDM TLA
(Too Damn
Many...) is often used to bemoan the plethora of TLAs in use. In
1989, a random of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin
What do you think will be the biggest problem in computing in the
90s?
Paul's straight-faced response: There are only 17,000
three-letter acronyms.
(To be exact, there are 26^3
= 17,576.) There is probably some karmic justice in the
fact that Paul Boutin subsequently became a journalist.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: TMRC DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:33 AM ----- BODY: /tmerk´/ n.
The Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, one of the wellsprings of hacker culture. The 1959 Dictionary of the TMRC Language compiled by Peter Samson included several terms that became basics of the hackish vocabulary (see esp. foo, mung, and frob).
By 1962, TMRC's legendary layout was already a marvel of complexity and has grown in the years since. All the features described here were still present when the old layout was decommissioned in 1998 just before the demolition of MIT Building 20, and will almost certainly be retained when the old layout is rebuilt (expected in 2003). The control system alone featured about 1200 relays. There were scram switches located at numerous places around the room that could be thwacked if something undesirable was about to occur, such as a train going full-bore at an obstruction. Another feature of the system was a digital clock on the dispatch board, which was itself something of a wonder in those bygone days before cheap LEDs and seven-segment displays. When someone hit a scram switch the clock stopped and the display was replaced with the word ‘FOO’; at TMRC the scram switches are therefore called foo switches.
Steven Levy, in his book Hackers (see the Bibliography in Appendix C), gives a stimulating account of those early years. TMRC's Signals and Power Committee included many of the early PDP-1 hackers and the people who later became the core of the MIT AI Lab staff. Thirty years later that connection is still very much alive, and this lexicon accordingly includes a number of entries from a recent revision of the TMRC dictionary.
TMRC has a web page at http://tmrc-www.mit.edu/. The TMRC Dictionary is available there, at http://tmrc-www.mit.edu/dictionary.html.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: TMRCie DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:32 AM ----- BODY: /tmerk´ee/, n.
[MIT] A denizen of TMRC.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: TMTOWTDI DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:31 AM ----- BODY: /tim·toh'·dee/ abbrev.
There's More Than One Way To Do It. This abbreviation of the official motto of Perl is frequently used on newsgroups and mailing lists related to that language.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: to a first approximation DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:30 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. [techspeak] When one is doing certain numerical computations, an approximate solution may be computed by any of several heuristic methods, then refined to a final value. By using the starting point of a first approximation of the answer, one can write an algorithm that converges more quickly to the correct result.
2. In jargon, a preface to any comment that indicates that the
comment is only approximately true. The remark To a first
approximation, I feel good
might indicate that deeper questioning
would reveal that not all is perfect (e.g., a nagging cough still remains
after an illness).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: to a zeroth approximation DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:29 AM ----- BODY:
[from to a first approximation] A really sloppy approximation; a wild guess. Compare social science number.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: toad DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:28 AM ----- BODY: vt. [MUD]
1. Notionally, to change a MUD player into a toad.
2. To permanently and totally exile a player from the MUD. A very serious action, which can only be done by a MUD wizard; often involves a lot of debate among the other characters first. See also frog, FOD.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: toast DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:27 AM ----- BODY:
1. n.Any completely inoperable
system or component, esp. one that has just crashed and burned: Uh,
oh ... I think the serial board is toast.
(This sense went
mainstream around 1993.)
2. vt. To cause a system to
crash accidentally, especially in a manner that requires manual rebooting.
Rick just toasted the firewall machine
again.
Compare fried.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: toaster DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:26 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. The archetypal really stupid application for an embedded
microprocessor controller; often used in comments that imply that a scheme
is inappropriate technology (but see
elevator controller). DWIM for an
assembler? That'd be as silly as running Unix on your toaster!
2. A very, very dumb computer. You could run this program on
any dumb toaster.
See bitty box,
Get a real computer!, toy,
beige toaster.
3. A Macintosh, esp. a Mac in the original unitary case. Some hold that this is implied by sense 2.
4. A peripheral device. I bought my box without toasters,
but since then I've added two boards and a second disk drive.
5. A specialized computer used as an appliance. See web toaster, video toaster.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: toeprint DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:25 AM ----- BODY: n.
A footprint of especially small size.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: TOFU DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:24 AM ----- BODY:
Text Over, Fullquote Under; see top-post.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: toggle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:23 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To change a bit from whatever state it is in to the other state; to change from 1 to 0 or from 0 to
1. This comes from ‘toggle switches’, such as standard light switches, though the word toggle actually refers to the mechanism that keeps the switch in the position to which it is flipped rather than to the fact that the switch has two positions. There are four things you can do to a bit: set it (force it to be 1), clear (or zero) it, leave it alone, or toggle it. (Mathematically, one would say that there are four distinct boolean-valued functions of one boolean argument, but saying that is much less fun than talking about toggling bits.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tool DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:22 AM ----- BODY:
1. n.A program used primarily to create, manipulate, modify, or analyze other programs, such as a compiler or an editor or a cross-referencing program. Oppose app, operating system; see also toolchain.
2. [Unix] An application program with a simple, ‘transparent’ (typically text-stream) interface designed specifically to be used in programmed combination with other tools (see filter, plumbing).
3. [MIT: general to students there] vi. To work; to study (connotes tedium). The
TMRC Dictionary defined this as to set one's brain to the
grindstone
. See hack.
4. n. [MIT] A student who studies too much and hacks too little. (MIT's student humor magazine rejoices in the name Tool and Die.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: toolchain DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:21 AM ----- BODY:
A collection of tools used to develop for a particular hardware target, or to work with a particular data format (thus ‘the Crusoe development toolchain’, or the ‘DocBook toolchain’). Often used in the context of building software on one system which will be installed or run on some other device; in that case the chain of tools usually consists of such items as a particular version of a compiler, libraries, special headers, etc. May also be used of text-formatting, page layout, or multimedia tools which render from some markup to a variety of production formats. Differs from ‘toolkit’ in that the former implies a collection of semi-independent tools with complementary functions, while ‘toolchain’ implies that each of the parts is a serial stage in a rather tightly bound pipeline. Seems to have become current in early 1999 and 2000; now common.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: toolsmith DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:20 AM ----- BODY: n.
The software equivalent of a tool-and-die specialist; one who
specializes in making the tools with which other
programmers create applications. Many hackers consider this more fun than
applications per se; to understand why, see
uninteresting. Jon Bentley, in the
Bumper-Sticker Computer Science
chapter of his book
More Programming Pearls, quotes Dick Sites from
DEC as saying I'd rather write programs to
write programs than write programs
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: toor DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:19 AM ----- BODY: n.
The Bourne-Again Super-user. An alternate account with UID of 0, created on Unix machines where the root user has an inconvenient choice of shell. Compare avatar.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: top-post DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:18 AM ----- BODY: n. v.
[common] To put the newly-added portion of an email or Usenet response before the quoted part, as opposed to the more logical sequence of quoted portion first with original following. The problem with this practice is neatly summed up by the following FAQ entry:
A: No. Q: Should I include quotations after my reply?
This term is generally used pejoratively with the implication that the offending person is a newbie, a Microsoft addict (Microsoft mail tools produce a similar format by default), or simply a common-and-garden-variety idiot.
One major problem with top-posting is that people who do it all too
frequently quote the entire parent message rather than
trimming it down to those portions relevent to their reply — this makes
threads bulky and unnecessarily difficult to read and arouses the righteous
ire of experienced Internet residents (this style is called
TOFU
for text over, fullquote under
, or
sometimes jeopardy-style quoting
). Another problem is that
top-posters often word their replies on the assumption that you just read
the previous message, even though their perversity has put it further down
the page than you have yet read. Oppose
bottom-post.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: topic drift DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:17 AM ----- BODY: n.
Term used on GEnie, Usenet and other electronic fora to describe the tendency of a thread to drift away from the original subject of discussion (and thus, from the Subject header of the originating message), or the results of that tendency. The header in each post can be changed to keep current with the posts, but usually isn't due to forgetfulness or laziness. A single post may often result in several posts each responding to a different point in the original. Some subthreads will actually be in response to some off-the-cuff side comment, possibly degenerating into a flame war, or just as often evolving into a separate discussion. Hence, discussions aren't really so much threads as they are trees. Except that they don't really have leaves, or multiple branching roots; usually some lines of discussion will just sort of die off after everyone gets tired of them. This could take anywhere from hours to weeks, or even longer.
The term ‘topic drift’ is often used in gentle reminders
that the discussion has strayed off any useful track. I think we
started with a question about Niven's last book, but we've ended up
discussing the sexual habits of the common marmoset. Now
that's topic drift!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: topic group DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:16 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. forum.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: TOPS-10 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:15 AM ----- BODY: /tops·ten/ n.
DEC's proprietary OS for the fabled PDP-10 machines, long a favorite of hackers but now long extinct. A fountain of hacker folklore; see Appendix A. See also ITS, TOPS-20, TWENEX, VMS, operating system. TOPS-10 was sometimes called BOTS-10 (from ‘bottoms-ten’) as a comment on the inappropriateness of describing it as the top of anything.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: TOPS-20 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:14 AM ----- BODY: /tops·twen´tee/ n.
See TWENEX.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: TOS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:13 AM ----- BODY: vt.
[from the acronym for ‘Terms Of Service’ playing on the
verb toss
]
1. The act of terminating an Internet access account because the owner breached the terms of service (e.g. by spamming).
2. To successfully complain to the ISP for that reason so that they then close the account.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tourist DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:12 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [ITS] A guest on the system, especially one who generally logs in over a network from a remote location for comm mode, email, games, and other trivial purposes. One step below luser. ITS hackers often used to spell this turist, perhaps by some sort of tenuous analogy with luser (this usage may also have expressed the ITS culture's penchant for six-letterisms, and/or been some sort of tribute to Alan Turing). Compare twink, lurker, read-only user.
2. [IRC] An IRC user who goes from channel to channel without saying anything; see channel hopping.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tourist information DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:11 AM ----- BODY: n.
Information in an on-line display that is not immediately useful,
but contributes to a viewer's gestalt of what's going on with the software
or hardware behind it. Whether a given piece of info falls in this
category depends partly on what the user is looking for at any given time.
The ‘bytes free’ information at the bottom of an MS-DOS or
Windows dir
display is tourist information;
so (most of the time) is the TIME information in a Unix
ps1
display.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: touristic DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:10 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Having the quality of a tourist. Often used as a pejorative, as in ‘losing touristic scum’. Often spelled ‘turistic’ or ‘turistik’, so that phrase might be more properly rendered ‘lusing turistic scum’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: toy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:09 AM ----- BODY: n.
A computer system; always used with qualifiers.
1. nice toy: One that supports the speaker's hacking style adequately.
2. just a toy: A machine that yields insufficient computrons for the speaker's preferred uses. This is not condemnatory, as is bitty box; toys can at least be fun. It is also strongly conditioned by one's expectations; Cray XMP users sometimes consider the Cray-1 a toy, and certainly all RISC boxes and mainframes are toys by their standards. See also Get a real computer!.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: toy language DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:08 AM ----- BODY: n.
A language useful for instructional purposes or as a proof-of-concept for some aspect of computer-science theory, but inadequate for general-purpose programming. Bad Things can result when a toy language is promoted as a general purpose solution for programming (see bondage-and-discipline language); the classic example is Pascal. Several moderately well-known formalisms for conceptual tasks such as programming Turing machines also qualify as toy languages in a less negative sense. See also MFTL.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: toy problem DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:07 AM ----- BODY: n.
[AI] A deliberately oversimplified case of a challenging problem used to investigate, prototype, or test algorithms for a real problem. Sometimes used pejoratively. See also gedanken, toy program.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: toy program DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:06 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. One that can be readily comprehended; hence, a trivial program (compare noddy).
2. One for which the effort of initial coding dominates the costs through its life cycle. See also noddy.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: trampoline DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:05 AM ----- BODY: n.
An incredibly hairy technique, found in some HLL and program-overlay implementations (e.g., on the Macintosh), that involves on-the-fly generation of small executable (and, likely as not, self-modifying) code objects to do indirection between code sections. Under BSD and possibly in other Unixes, trampoline code is used to transfer control from the kernel back to user mode when a signal (which has had a handler installed) is sent to a process. These pieces of live data are called trampolines. Trampolines are notoriously difficult to understand in action; in fact, it is said by those who use this term that the trampoline that doesn't bend your brain is not the true trampoline. See also snap.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: trap DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:04 AM ----- BODY:
1. n. A program interrupt, usually an interrupt caused by some exceptional situation in the user program. In most cases, the OS performs some action, then returns control to the program.
2. vi. To cause a trap.
These instructions trap to the monitor.
Also used
transitively to indicate the cause of the trap. The monitor traps
all input/output instructions.
This term is associated with assembler programming (interrupt or exception is more common among HLL programmers) and appears to be fading into history among programmers as the role of assembler continues to shrink. However, it is still important to computer architects and systems hackers (see system, sense 1), who use it to distinguish deterministically repeatable exceptions from timing-dependent ones (such as I/O interrupts).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: trap door DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:03 AM ----- BODY: n.
(alt.: trapdoor)
1. Syn. back door — a Bad Thing.
2. [techspeak] A trap-door function is one which is easy to compute but very difficult to compute the inverse of. Such functions are Good Things with important applications in cryptography, specifically in the construction of public-key cryptosystems.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: trash DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:02 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To destroy the contents of (said of a data structure). The most common of the family of near-synonyms including mung, mangle, scribble, and roach.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: trawl DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:01 AM ----- BODY: v.
To sift through large volumes of data (e.g., Usenet postings, FTP archives, or the Jargon File) looking for something of interest.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tree-killer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:26:00 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Sun]
1. A printer.
2. A person who wastes paper. This epithet should be interpreted in a broad sense; ‘wasting paper’ includes the production of spiffy but content-free documents. Thus, most suits are tree-killers.
It is likely that both senses derive their flavor from the epithet ‘tree-killer’ applied by Treebeard the Ent to the Orcs in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. See also elvish, elder days, and especially dead-tree version.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: treeware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:59 AM ----- BODY: /tree´weir/ n.
Printouts, books, and other information media made from pulped dead trees. Compare tree-killer, see documentation.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: trit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:58 AM ----- BODY: /trit/ n.
[by analogy with bit] One base-3 digit; the amount of information conveyed by a selection among one of three equally likely outcomes (see also bit). Trits arise, for example, in the context of a flag that should actually be able to assume three values — such as yes, no, or unknown. Trits are sometimes jokingly called 3-state bits. A trit may be semi-seriously referred to as a bit and a half, although it is linearly equivalent to 1.5849625 bits (that is, log_{2$(3)} bits).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: trivial DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:57 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. Too simple to bother detailing.
2. Not worth the speaker's time.
3. Complex, but solvable by methods so well known that anyone not utterly cretinous would have thought of them already.
4. Any problem one has already solved (some claim that hackish
trivial usually evaluates to
I've seen it before
). Hackers' notions of triviality may be
quite at variance with those of non-hackers. See
nontrivial,
uninteresting.
The physicist Richard Feynman, who had the hacker nature to an
amazing degree (see his essay Los Alamos From Below
in
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!), defined
trivial theorem as one that
has already been proved
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: troff DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:56 AM ----- BODY: /T´rof/ or /trof/ n.
[Unix] The gray eminence of Unix text processing; a formatting and
phototypesetting program, written originally in PDP-11 assembler and then
in barely-structured early C by the late Joseph Ossanna, modeled after the
earlier ROFF which was in turn modeled after the
Multics and CTSS program
RUNOFF by Jerome Saltzer (that name came from the
expression to run off a copy
). A companion program,
nroff, formats output for terminals and line
printers.
In 1979, Brian Kernighan modified troff so that it could drive
phototypesetters other than the Graphic Systems CAT. His paper describing
that work (A Typesetter-independent troff,
AT&T CSTR
#97) explains troff's durability. After discussing the program's
obvious deficiencies — a rebarbative input syntax, mysterious
and undocumented properties in some areas, and a voracious appetite for
computer resources
and noting the ugliness and extreme hairiness of
the code and internals, Kernighan concludes:
None of these remarks should be taken as denigrating Ossanna's accomplishment with TROFF. It has proven a remarkably robust tool, taking unbelievable abuse from a variety of preprocessors and being forced into uses that were never conceived of in the original design, all with considerable grace under fire.
The success of TeX and desktop publishing
systems have reduced troff
's relative
importance, but this tribute perfectly captures the strengths that secured
troff
a place in hacker folklore; indeed,
it could be taken more generally as an indication of those qualities of
good programs that, in the long run, hackers most admire.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: troglodyte DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:55 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Commodore]
1. A hacker who never leaves his cubicle. The term gnoll (from Dungeons & Dragons) is also reported.
2. A curmudgeon attached to an obsolescent computing environment. The combination ITS troglodyte was flung around some during the Usenet and email wringle-wrangle attending the 2.x.x revision of the Jargon File; at least one of the people it was intended to describe adopted it with pride.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: troglodyte mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Rice University] Programming with the lights turned off, sunglasses on, and the terminal inverted (black on white) because you've been up for so many days straight that your eyes hurt (see raster burn). Loud music blaring from a stereo stacked in the corner is optional but recommended. See larval stage, hack mode.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: Trojan horse DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:53 AM ----- BODY: n.
[coined by MIT-hacker-turned-NSA-spook Dan Edwards] A malicious security-breaking program that is disguised as something benign, such as a directory lister, archiver, game, or (in one notorious 1990 case on the Mac) a program to find and destroy viruses! See back door, virus, worm, phage, mockingbird.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: troll DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:52 AM ----- BODY:
1. v.,n. [From the Usenet group
alt.folklore.urban] To utter a
posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable
responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives
from the phrase trolling for newbies
which in turn comes from mainstream trolling
, a style of
fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite.
The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and
flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do,
while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact
a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on
it. See also YHBT.
2. n. An individual who
chronically trolls in sense 1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames
or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no
other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are
recognizable by the fact that they have no real interest in learning about
the topic at hand - they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly
creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics,
and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in,
Oh, ignore him, he's just a troll.
Compare
kook.
3. n. [Berkeley] Computer lab monitor. A popular campus job for CS students. Duties include helping newbies and ensuring that lab policies are followed. Probably so-called because it involves lurking in dark cavelike corners.
Some people claim that the troll (sense 1) is properly a narrower category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial. See also Troll-O-Meter.
The use of ‘troll’ in any of these senses is a live
metaphor that readily produces elaborations and combining forms. For
example, one not infrequently sees the warning Do not feed the
troll
as part of a followup to troll postings.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: Troll-O-Meter DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:51 AM ----- BODY: n.
Common Usenet jargon for a notional instrument used to measure the
provocation level of a Usenet troll. Come on,
everyone! If the above doesn't set off the Troll-O-Meter, we're going to
have to get him to run around with a big blinking sign saying ‘I am a
troll, I’m only in it for the controversy and flames', and shooting
random gobs of Jell-O(tm) at us before the point is proven.
Mentions of the Troll-O-Meter are often accompanied by an ASCII picture of
an arrow pointing at a numeric scale. Compare
bogometer,
Indent-o-Meter.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tron DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:50 AM ----- BODY: v.
[NRL, CMU; prob. fr. the movie Tron] To
become inaccessible except via email or
talk1,
especially when one is normally available via telephone or in person.
Frequently used in the past tense, as in: Ran seems to have tronned
on us this week
or Gee, Ran, glad you were able to un-tron
yourself
. One may also speak of tron
mode; compare spod.
Note that many dialects of BASIC have a TRON/TROFF command pair that enables/disables line number tracing; this has no obvious relationship to the slang usage.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: troughie DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:49 AM ----- BODY: /traw´fee/ n.
[British BBS scene] Synonym for leech, sense 1. The implied metaphor is that of a pig at a trough.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: true-hacker DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:48 AM ----- BODY: n.
[analogy with ‘trufan’ from SF fandom] One who
exemplifies the primary values of hacker culture, esp. competence and
helpfulness to other hackers. A high compliment. He spent 6 hours
helping me bring up UUCP and netnews on my FOOBAR 4000 last week —
manifestly the act of a true-hacker.
Compare
demigod, oppose
munchkin.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tty DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:47 AM ----- BODY: /T·T·Y/, /tit´ee/ n.
The latter pronunciation was primarily ITS, but some Unix people say it this way as well; this pronunciation is not considered to have sexual undertones.
1. A terminal of the teletype variety, characterized by a noisy mechanical printer, a very limited character set, and poor print quality. Usage: antiquated (like the TTYs themselves). See also bit-paired keyboard.
2. [especially Unix] Any terminal at all; sometimes used to refer to the particular terminal controlling a given job.
3. [Unix] Any serial port, whether or not the device connected to it is a terminal; so called because under Unix such devices have names of the form tty*. Ambiguity between senses 2 and 3 is common but seldom bothersome.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tube DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:46 AM ----- BODY:
1. n. A CRT terminal. Never used in the mainstream sense of TV; real hackers don't watch TV, except for Looney Toons, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Trek Classic, the Simpsons, Babylon 5, and the occasional cheesy old swashbuckler movie.
2. [IBM] To send a copy of something to someone else's terminal.
Tube me that note?
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tube time DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:45 AM ----- BODY: n.
Time spent at a terminal or console. More inclusive than hacking
time; commonly used in discussions of what parts of one's environment one
uses most heavily. I find I'm spending too much of my tube time
reading mail since I started this revision.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tunafish DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:44 AM ----- BODY: n.
In hackish lore, refers to the mutated punchline of an age-old joke
to be found at the bottom of the manual pages of
tunefs8
in the original BSD 4.2 distribution. The joke was
removed in later releases once commercial sites started using 4.2, but
apparently restored on the 4.4BSD tape and in {Net,Free,Open}BSD. Tunefs
relates to the tuning of file-system
parameters for optimum performance, and at the bottom of a few pages of
wizardly inscriptions was a ‘BUGS’ section consisting of the
line You can tune a file system, but you can't tunafish
.
Variants of this can be seen in other BSD versions, though it has been
excised from some versions by humorless management
droids. The [nt]roff source for SunOS 4.1.1
contains a comment apparently designed to prevent this: Take this
out and a Unix Demon will dog your steps from now until the
time_t
's wrap around.
[It has since been pointed out that indeed you can tunafish. Usually at a canning factory... —ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tune DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:43 AM ----- BODY: vt.
[from automotive or musical usage] To optimize a program or system
for a particular environment, esp. by adjusting numerical parameters
designed as hooks for tuning, e.g., by changing
#define
lines in C. One may tune for time (fastest execution), tune for space (least memory use), or tune for configuration (most efficient use of
hardware). See hot spot,
hand-hacking.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: turbo nerd DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:42 AM ----- BODY: n.
See geek.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: Turing tar-pit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:41 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A place where anything is possible but nothing of interest is practical. Alan Turing helped lay the foundations of computer science by showing that all machines and languages capable of expressing a certain very primitive set of operations are logically equivalent in the kinds of computations they can carry out, and in principle have capabilities that differ only in speed from those of the most powerful and elegantly designed computers. However, no machine or language exactly matching Turing's primitive set has ever been built (other than possibly as a classroom exercise), because it would be horribly slow and far too painful to use. A Turing tar-pit is any computer language or other tool that shares this property. That is, it's theoretically universal — but in practice, the harder you struggle to get any real work done, the deeper its inadequacies suck you in. Compare bondage-and-discipline language.
2. The perennial holy wars over whether
language A or B is the most powerful
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: turist DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:40 AM ----- BODY: /too´rist/ n.
Var. sp. of tourist, q.v. Also in adjectival form, ‘turistic’. Poss. influenced by luser and ‘Turing’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: Tux DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:39 AM ----- BODY:
Tux the Penguin is the official emblem of Linux, This eventuated after a logo contest in 1996, during which Linus Torvalds endorsed the idea of a penguin logo in a couple of famously funny postings. Linus explained that he was once bitten by a killer penguin in Australia and has felt a special affinity for the species ever since. (Linus has since admitted that he was also thinking of Feathers McGraw, the evil-genius penguin jewel thief who appeared in a Wallace & Grommit feature cartoon, The Wrong Trousers.)
Larry Ewing designed the official Tux logo. It has proved a wise choice, amenable to hundreds of recognizable variations used as emblems of Linux-related projects, products, and user groups. In fact, Tux has spawned an entire mythology, of which the Gospel According to Tux and the mock-epic poem Tuxowolf are among the best-known examples.
There is a ‘real’ Tux — a black-footed penguin resident at the Bristol Zoo. Several friends of Linux bought a zoo sponsorship for Linus as a birthday present in 1996.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: tweak DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:38 AM ----- BODY: vt.
1. To change slightly, usually in reference to a value. Also used synonymously with twiddle. If a program is almost correct, rather than figure out the precise problem you might just keep tweaking it until it works. See frobnicate and fudge factor; also see shotgun debugging.
2. To tune a program; preferred usage in the U.K.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: TWENEX DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:37 AM ----- BODY: /twe´neks/ n.
The TOPS-20 operating system by DEC —
the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10 — preferred by most PDP-10
hackers over TOPS-10 (that is, by those who were not
ITS or WAITS partisans).
TOPS-20 began in 1969 as Bolt, Beranek & Newman's TENEX operating
system using special paging hardware. By the early 1970s, almost all of
the systems on the ARPANET ran TENEX. DEC purchased the rights to TENEX
from BBN and began work to make it their own. The first in-house code name
for the operating system was VIROS (VIRtual memory Operating System); when
customers started asking questions, the name was changed to SNARK so DEC
could truthfully deny that there was any project called VIROS. When the
name SNARK became known, the name was briefly reversed to become KRANS;
this was quickly abandoned when someone objected that krans meant ‘funeral wreath’ in
Swedish (though some Swedish speakers have since said it means simply
‘wreath’; this part of the story may be apocryphal).
Ultimately DEC picked TOPS-20 as the name of the operating system, and it
was as TOPS-20 that it was marketed. The hacker community, mindful of its
origins, quickly dubbed it TWENEX (a contraction of ‘twenty
TENEX’), even though by this point very little of the original TENEX
code remained (analogously to the differences between AT&T V6 Unix and
BSD). DEC people cringed when they heard TWENEX
, but the
term caught on nevertheless (the written abbreviation ‘20x’ was
also used). TWENEX was successful and very popular; in fact, there was a
period in the early 1980s when it commanded as fervent a culture of
partisans as Unix or ITS — but DEC's decision to scrap all the
internal rivals to the VAX architecture and its
relatively stodgy VMS OS killed the DEC-20 and put a sad end to TWENEX's
brief day in the sun. DEC attempted to convince TOPS-20 users to convert
to VMS, but instead, by the late 1980s, most of the
TOPS-20 hackers had migrated to Unix. There is a TOPS-20 home page.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: twiddle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:36 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Tilde (ASCII 1111110, ~). Also called squiggle, sqiggle (sic — pronounced /skig´l/), and twaddle, but twiddle is the most common term.
2. A small and insignificant change to a program. Usually fixes one bug and generates several new ones (see also shotgun debugging).
3. vt. To change something in a small way. Bits, for example, are often twiddled. Twiddling a switch or knobs implies much less sense of purpose than toggling or tweaking it; see frobnicate. To speak of twiddling a bit connotes aimlessness, and at best doesn't specify what you're doing to the bit; ‘toggling a bit’ has a more specific meaning (see bit twiddling, toggle). 4. Uncommon name for the twirling baton prompt.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: twilight zone DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:35 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IRC] Notionally, the area of cyberspace where
IRC operators live. An op is
said to have a connection to the twilight zone
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: twink DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:34 AM ----- BODY: /twink/ n.
1. [Berkeley] A clue-repellant user; the next step beyond a clueless one.
2. [UCSC] A read-only user. Also reported on the Usenet group soc.motss; may derive from gay slang for a cute young thing with nothing upstairs (compare mainstream ‘chick’).
3. On MU* systems that specialize in role-playing, refers to behavior of a (usually inexperienced) player that either ignores rules or social convention, or disrupts the natural flow of a scene to show off super powers.
We are informed that in Indian country, the term twink generally refers to blondes into generic ‘Native American spirituality’. Signs include Indian jewelry with MADE IN THAILAND stamped on it, crystals, Clairol black hair, wearing swimsuits to powwows, Cherokee princess grandmas, a love of Dances with Wolves, and a fear of AIM and the NCAI. The twink nature is everywhere.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: twirling baton DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:33 AM ----- BODY: n.
[PLATO] The overstrike sequence -/|\-/|\- which produces an animated twirling baton. If you output it with a single backspace between characters, the baton spins in place. If you output the sequence BS SP between characters, the baton spins from left to right. If you output BS SP BS BS between characters, the baton spins from right to left. This is also occasionally called a twiddle prompt.
The twirling baton was a popular component of animated signature
files on the pioneering PLATO educational timesharing system. The archie
Internet service is perhaps the best-known
baton program today; it uses the twirling baton as an idler indicating that
the program is working on a query. The twirling baton is also used as a
boot progress indicator on several BSD variants of Unix; if it stops,
you're probably going to have a long and trying day.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: two pi DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:32 AM ----- BODY: quant.
The number of years it takes to finish one's thesis. Occurs in
stories in the following form: He started on his thesis; 2 pi years
later...
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - T TITLE: two-to-the-N DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:31 AM ----- BODY: quant.
An amount much larger than N but smaller than
infinity. I have
2-to-the-N things to do before I can go
out for lunch
means you probably won't show up.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: u- DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:30 AM ----- BODY: pref.
Written shorthand for micro-; techspeak when
applied to metric units, jargon when used otherwise. Derived from the
Greek letter µ the first letter of micro
(and which
letter looks a lot like the English letter u
).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: UBD DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:29 AM ----- BODY: /U·B·D/ n.
[abbreviation for ‘User Brain Damage’] An abbreviation used to close out trouble reports obviously due to utter cluelessness on the user's part. Compare pilot error, PEBKAC, ID10T; oppose PBD; see also brain-damaged.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: UBE DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
[abbrev., Unsolicited Bulk Email] A widespread, more formal term for email spam. Compare UCE. The UBE term recognizes that spam is uttered by nonprofit and advocacy groups whose motives are not commercial.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: ubergeek DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:27 AM ----- BODY: n. /oo´ber·geek/
[common; often spelled with initial ü; from German über + geek] Almost synonymous with demigod; used as a compliment of someone regarded as a paragon of geek achievement and virtue. Has partially replaced earlier demigod.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: UCE DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:26 AM ----- BODY: n.
[abbrev., Unsolicited Commercial Email] A widespread, more formal term for email spam. Compare UBE, which may be superseding it.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: UDP DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:25 AM ----- BODY: /U·D·P/ v.,n.
[Usenet] Abbreviation for Usenet Death Penalty. Common (probably now more so than the full form), and frequently verbed. Compare IDP.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: UN*X DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:24 AM ----- BODY: n.
Used to refer to the Unix operating system (a trademark of AT&T, then of Novell, then of Unix Systems Laboratories, then of the Open Group; the source code parted company with it after Novell and was owned by SCO, which was acquired by Caldera) in writing, but avoiding the need for the ugly ™ typography (see also (TM)). Also used to refer to any or all varieties of Unixoid operating systems. Ironically, lawyers now say that the requirement for the trademark postfix has no legal force, but the asterisk usage is entrenched anyhow. It has been suggested that there may be a psychological connection to practice in certain religions (especially Judaism) in which the name of the deity is never written out in full, e.g., ‘YHWH’ or ‘G--d’ is used. See also glob and splat out.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: undefined external reference DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:23 AM ----- BODY: excl.
[Unix] A message from Unix's linker. Used in speech to flag loose ends or dangling references in an argument or discussion.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: under the hood DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:22 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[hot-rodder talk]
1. Used to introduce the underlying implementation of a product
(hardware, software, or idea). Implies that the implementation is not
intuitively obvious from the appearance, but the speaker is about to enable
the listener to grok it. Let's now look
under the hood to see how ....
2. Can also imply that the implementation is much simpler than the
appearance would indicate: Under the hood, we are just fork/execing
the shell.
3. Inside a chassis, as in Under the hood, this baby has a
40MHz 68030!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: undocumented feature DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:21 AM ----- BODY: n.
See feature.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: uninteresting DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:20 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. Said of a problem that, although nontrivial, can be solved simply by throwing sufficient resources at it.
2. Also said of problems for which a solution would neither advance the state of the art nor be fun to design and code.
Hackers regard uninteresting problems as intolerable wastes of time, to be solved (if at all) by lesser mortals. Real hackers (see toolsmith) generalize uninteresting problems enough to make them interesting and solve them — thus solving the original problem as a special case (and, it must be admitted, occasionally turning a molehill into a mountain, or a mountain into a tectonic plate). See WOMBAT, SMOP; compare toy problem, oppose interesting.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: Unix DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:19 AM ----- BODY: /yoo´niks/ n.
[In the authors' words, A weak pun on Multics
; very
early on it was UNICS
] (also UNIX
) An
interactive timesharing system invented in 1969 by Ken Thompson after Bell
Labs left the Multics project, originally so he could play games on his
scavenged PDP-7. Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of C, is considered a
co-author of the system. The turning point in Unix's history came when it
was reimplemented almost entirely in C during 1972—1974, making it
the first source-portable OS. Unix subsequently underwent mutations and
expansions at the hands of many different people, resulting in a uniquely
flexible and developer-friendly environment. By 1991, Unix had become the
most widely used multiuser general-purpose operating system in the world
— and since 1996 the variant called Linux has
been at the cutting edge of the open source
movement. Many people consider the success of Unix the most important
victory yet of hackerdom over industry opposition (but see Unix weenie and Unix conspiracy for an
opposing point of view). See Version 7,
BSD, Linux.
Archetypal hackers ken (left) and dmr (right).
Some people are confused over whether this word is appropriately
‘UNIX’ or ‘Unix’; both forms are common, and used
interchangeably. Dennis Ritchie says that the ‘UNIX’ spelling
originally happened in CACM's 1974 paper The UNIX Time-Sharing
System because we had a new typesetter and
troff had just been invented and we were intoxicated
by being able to produce small caps.
Later, dmr tried to get the
spelling changed to ‘Unix’ in a couple of Bell Labs papers, on
the grounds that the word is not acronymic. He failed, and eventually (his
words) wimped out
on the issue. So, while the trademark
today is ‘UNIX’, both capitalizations are grounded in ancient
usage; the Jargon File uses ‘Unix’ in deference to dmr's
wishes.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: Unix brain damage DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:18 AM ----- BODY: n.
Something that has to be done to break a network program (typically a mailer) on a non-Unix system so that it will interoperate with Unix systems. The hack may qualify as Unix brain damage if the program conforms to published standards and the Unix program in question does not. Unix brain damage happens because it is much easier for other (minority) systems to change their ways to match non-conforming behavior than it is to change all the hundreds of thousands of Unix systems out there.
An example of Unix brain damage is a kluge in a mail server to recognize bare line feed (the Unix newline) as an equivalent form to the Internet standard newline, which is a carriage return followed by a line feed. Such things can make even a hardened jock weep.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: Unix conspiracy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:17 AM ----- BODY: n.
[ITS] According to a conspiracy theory long popular among ITS and TOPS-20 fans, Unix's growth is the result of a plot, hatched during the 1970s at Bell Labs, whose intent was to hobble AT&T's competitors by making them dependent upon a system whose future evolution was to be under AT&T's control. This would be accomplished by disseminating an operating system that is apparently inexpensive and easily portable, but also relatively unreliable and insecure (so as to require continuing upgrades from AT&T). This theory was lent a substantial impetus in 1984 by the paper referenced in the back door entry.
In this view, Unix was designed to be one of the first computer
viruses (see virus) — but a virus spread to
computers indirectly by people and market forces, rather than directly
through disks and networks. Adherents of this ‘Unix virus’
theory like to cite the fact that the well-known quotation Unix is
snake oil
was uttered by DEC president
Kenneth Olsen shortly before DEC began actively promoting its own family of
Unix workstations. (Olsen now claims to have been misquoted.)
If there was ever such a conspiracy, it got thoroughly out of the plotters' control after 1990. AT&T sold its Unix operation to Novell around the same time Linux and other free-Unix distributions were beginning to make noise.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: Unix weenie DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:16 AM ----- BODY: n.
[ITS]
1. A derogatory play on ‘Unix wizard’, common among
hackers who use Unix by necessity but would prefer alternatives. The
implication is that although the person in question may consider mastery of
Unix arcana to be a wizardly skill, the only real skill involved is the
ability to tolerate (and the bad taste to wallow in) the incoherence and
needless complexity that is alleged to infest many Unix programs.
This shell script tries to parse its arguments in 69 bletcherous
ways. It must have been written by a real Unix weenie.
2. A derogatory term for anyone who engages in uncritical praise of
Unix. Often appearing in the context stupid Unix weenie
.
See Weenix, Unix conspiracy.
See also weenie.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: unixism DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
A piece of code or a coding technique that depends on the protected multi-tasking environment with relatively low process-spawn overhead that exists on virtual-memory Unix systems. Common unixisms include: gratuitous use of fork2; the assumption that certain undocumented but well-known features of Unix libraries such as stdio3 are supported elsewhere; reliance on obscure side-effects of system calls (use of sleep2 with a 0 argument to clue the scheduler that you're willing to give up your time-slice, for example); the assumption that freshly allocated memory is zeroed; and the assumption that fragmentation problems won't arise from never freeing memory. Compare vaxocentrism; see also New Jersey.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: unswizzle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:14 AM ----- BODY: v.
See swizzle.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: unwind the stack DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:13 AM ----- BODY: vi.
1. [techspeak] During the execution of a procedural language, one is
said to unwind the stack from a
called procedure up to a caller when one discards the stack frame and any
number of frames above it, popping back up to the level of the given
caller. In C this is done with longjmp
/setjmp
, in
LISP or C++ with throw/catch
. See also
smash the stack.
2. People can unwind the stack as well, by quickly dealing with a
bunch of problems: Oh heck, let's do lunch. Just a second while I
unwind my stack.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: unwind-protect DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:12 AM ----- BODY: n.
[MIT: from the name of a LISP operator] A task you must remember to
perform before you leave a place or finish a project. I have an
unwind-protect to call my advisor.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: up DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:11 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. Working, in order. The down escalator is up.
Oppose down.
2. bring up: vt. To create a working version and start it.
They brought up a down system.
3. come up vi. To become ready for production use.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: upload DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:10 AM ----- BODY: /uhp´lohd/ v.
1. [techspeak] To transfer programs or data over a digital communications link from a system near you (especially a smaller or peripheral client system) to one further away from you (especially a larger or central host system). A transfer in the other direction is, of course, called a download
2. [speculatively] To move the essential patterns and algorithms that make up one's mind from one's brain into a computer. Those who are convinced that such patterns and algorithms capture the complete essence of the self view this prospect with pleasant anticipation.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: upstream DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:09 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[common] Towards the original author(s) or maintainer(s) of a project. Used in connection with software that is distributed both in its original source form and in derived, adapted versions through a distribution (like the Debian version of Linux or one of the BSD ports) that has component maintainers for each of their parts. When a component maintainer receives a bug report or patch, he may choose to retain the patch as a porting tweak to the distribution's derivative of the project, or to pass it upstream to the project's maintainer. The antonym downstream is rare.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: upthread DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:08 AM ----- BODY: adv.
Earlier in the discussion (see thread), i.e.,
‘above’. As Joe pointed out upthread,
...
See also followup.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: uptime DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:07 AM ----- BODY: n.
Technically, a machine's time since last reboot; jargonically, how
long a hacker has gone without sleep. What's your uptime?
Oh, about 28 hours so far, but I think I can probably do another
12.
This is, of course, a reference to the uptime command and the
pride with which most Unix types note how long their computers go without
reboots. Uptime is a testament to the stability of the OS and the stamina
of the hacker.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: urchin DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:06 AM ----- BODY: n.
See munchkin.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: URL DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:05 AM ----- BODY: /U·R·L/ or /erl/ n.
Uniform Resource Locator, an address widget that identifies a document or resource on the World Wide Web. This entry is here primarily to record the fact that the term is commonly pronounced both /erl/, and /U-R-L/ (the latter predominates in more formal contexts).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: Usenet DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:04 AM ----- BODY: /yoos´net/ or /yooz´net/ n.
[from ‘Users' Network’; the original spelling was USENET, but the mixed-case form is now widely preferred] A distributed bboard (bulletin board) system supported mainly by Unix machines. Originally implemented in 1979--1980 by Steve Bellovin, Jim Ellis, Tom Truscott, and Steve Daniel at Duke University, it has swiftly grown to become international in scope and is now probably the largest decentralized information utility in existence. As of late 2002, it hosts over 100,000 newsgroups and an unguessably huge volume of new technical articles, news, discussion, chatter, and flamage every day (and that leaves out the graphics...).
By the year the Internet hit the mainstream (1994) the original UUCP
transport for Usenet was fading out of use — almost all Usenet
connections were over Internet links. A lot of newbies and journalists
began to refer to Internet newsgroups
as though Usenet was
and always had been just another Internet service. This ignorance greatly
annoys experienced Usenetters.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: Usenet Death Penalty DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:03 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet] A sanction against sites that habitually spew Usenet spam. This can be either passive or active. A passive UDP refers to the dropping of all postings by a particular domain so as to inhibit propagation. An active UDP refers to third-party cancellation of all postings by the UDPed domain. A partial UDP is one which applies only to certain newsgroups or hierarchies in Usenet. Compare Internet Death Penalty, with which this term is sometimes confused.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: user DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:02 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Someone doing ‘real work’ with the computer, using it as a means rather than an end. Someone who pays to use a computer. See real user.
2. A programmer who will believe anything you tell him. One who asks silly questions. [GLS observes: This is slightly unfair. It is true that users ask questions (of necessity). Sometimes they are thoughtful or deep. Very often they are annoying or downright stupid, apparently because the user failed to think for two seconds or look in the documentation before bothering the maintainer.] See luser.
3. Someone who uses a program from the outside, however skillfully, without getting into the internals of the program. One who reports bugs instead of just going ahead and fixing them.
The general theory behind this term is that there are two classes of people who work with a program: there are implementors (hackers) and lusers. The users are looked down on by hackers to some extent because they don't understand the full ramifications of the system in all its glory. (The few users who do are known as real winners.) The term is a relative one: a skilled hacker may be a user with respect to some program he himself does not hack. A LISP hacker might be one who maintains LISP or one who uses LISP (but with the skill of a hacker). A LISP user is one who uses LISP, whether skillfully or not. Thus there is some overlap between the two terms; the subtle distinctions must be resolved by context.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: user-friendly DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:01 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Programmer-hostile. Generally used by hackers in a critical tone, to describe systems that hold the user's hand so obsessively that they make it painful for the more experienced and knowledgeable to get any work done. See menuitis, drool-proof paper, Macintrash, user-obsequious.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: user-obsequious DATE: 05/15/2003 10:25:00 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Emphatic form of user-friendly. Connotes a
system so verbose, inflexible, and determinedly simple-minded that it is
nearly unusable. Design a system any fool can use and only a fool
will want to use it.
See WIMP environment,
Macintrash.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: userland DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:59 AM ----- BODY: n.
Anywhere outside the kernel. That code belongs in
userland.
This term has been in common use among Unix kernel
hackers since at least 1985, and may have have originated in that
community. The earliest sighting was reported from the usenet group
net.unix-wizards.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: Utah teapot, the DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:58 AM ----- BODY:
This object is historically one of the first complex 3D models to be rendered in computer graphics. It consisted of about 110 vertices, and was generated by Martin Newell in 1974 using hand-drawn Bezier curves, based on a real teapot that he and his wife had bought. This model served as a basis for comparing various 3D rendering methodologies for lighting, textures, bump-mapping, etc. By the standards of 2002, the model is trivial to render and thus is often not suited to demonstrate the complexity of modern research. Despite this, the tea pot still appears, now and then, in recent papers. More on the teapot's history lives at The History Of The Teapot. Compare lenna, Stanford Bunny
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: UTSL DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:57 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Unix] On-line acronym for ‘Use the Source, Luke’ (a pun
on Obi-Wan Kenobi's Use the Force, Luke!
in Star
Wars) — analogous to RTFS (sense
1), but more polite. This is a common way of suggesting that someone would
be better off reading the source code that supports whatever feature is
causing confusion, rather than making yet another futile pass through the
manuals, or broadcasting questions on Usenet that haven't attracted
wizards to answer them.
Once upon a time in elder days, everyone running Unix had source. After 1978, AT&T's policy tightened up, so this objurgation was in theory appropriately directed only at associates of some outfit with a Unix source license. In practice, bootlegs of Unix source code (made precisely for reference purposes) were so ubiquitous that one could utter it at almost anyone on the network without concern.
Nowadays, free Unix clones have become widely enough distributed that anyone can read source legally. The most widely distributed is certainly Linux, with variants of the NET/2 and 4.4BSD distributions running second. Cheap commercial Unixes with source such as BSD/OS are accelerating this trend.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - U TITLE: UUOC DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:56 AM ----- BODY:
[from the comp.unix.shell group on Usenet] Stands for Useless Use of cat; the
reference is to the Unix command
cat1,
not the feline animal. As received wisdom on comp.unix.shell observes,
The purpose of cat is to concatenate (or ‘catenate’)
files. If it's only one file, concatenating it with nothing at all is a
waste of time, and costs you a process.
Nevertheless one sees
people doing
cat file | some_command and its args ...
instead of the equivalent and cheaper
<file some_command and its args ...
or (equivalently and more classically)
some_command and its args ... <file
Since 1995, occasional awards for UUOC have been given out, usually by Perl luminary Randal L. Schwartz. There is a web page devoted to this and other similar awards.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: V7 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:55 AM ----- BODY: /V´sev´en/ n.
See Version 7.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: vadding DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:54 AM ----- BODY: /vad´ing/ n.
[from VAD, a permutation of ADV (i.e., ADVENT), used to avoid a particular admin's continual search-and-destroy sweeps for the game] A leisure-time activity of certain hackers involving the covert exploration of the ‘secret’ parts of large buildings — basements, roofs, freight elevators, maintenance crawlways, steam tunnels, and the like. A few go so far as to learn locksmithing in order to synthesize vadding keys. The verb is to vad (compare phreaking; see also hack, sense 9). This term dates from the late 1970s, before which such activity was simply called ‘hacking’; the older usage is still prevalent at MIT.
The most extreme and dangerous form of vadding is elevator rodeo, a.k.a. elevator surfing, a sport played by wrasslin' down a thousand-pound elevator car with a 3-foot piece of string, and then exploiting this mastery in various stimulating ways (such as elevator hopping, shaft exploration, rat-racing, and the ever-popular drop experiments). Kids, don't try this at home!
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: vanilla DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:53 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[from the default flavor of ice cream in the U.S.] Ordinary
flavor, standard. When used of food, very often
does not mean that the food is flavored with vanilla extract! For example,
vanilla wonton soup means ordinary
wonton soup, as opposed to hot-and-sour wonton soup. Applied to hardware
and software, as in Vanilla Version 7 Unix can't run on a vanilla
11/34.
Also used to orthogonalize chip nomenclature; for instance,
a 74V00 means what TI calls a 7400, as distinct from a 74LS00, etc. This
word differs from canonical in that the latter means
‘default’, whereas vanilla simply means ‘ordinary’.
For example, when hackers go on a great-wall,
hot-and-sour soup is the canonical soup to get
(because that is what most of them usually order) even though it isn't the
vanilla (wonton) soup.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: vanity domain DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
[common; from ‘vanity plate’ as in car license plate] An Internet domain, particularly in the .com or .org top-level domains, apparently created for no reason other than boosting the creator's ego.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: vannevar DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:51 AM ----- BODY: /van'@·var/ n.
A bogus technological prediction or a foredoomed engineering concept, esp. one that fails by implicitly assuming that technologies develop linearly, incrementally, and in isolation from one another when in fact the learning curve tends to be highly nonlinear, revolutions are common, and competition is the rule. The prototype was Vannevar Bush's prediction of ‘electronic brains’ the size of the Empire State Building with a Niagara-Falls-equivalent cooling system for their tubes and relays, a prediction made at a time when the semiconductor effect had already been demonstrated. Other famous vannevars have included magnetic-bubble memory, LISP machines, videotex, and a paper from the late 1970s that computed a purported ultimate limit on areal density for ICs that was in fact less than the routine densities of 5 years later.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: vaporware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:50 AM ----- BODY: /vay´pr·weir/ n.
Products announced far in advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: var DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:49 AM ----- BODY: /veir/ or /var/ n.
Short for variable. Compare arg, param.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: vaston DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:48 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Durham, UK] The unit of ‘load average’. A measure of how much work a computer is doing. A meter displaying this as a function of time is known as a vastometer. First used during a computing practical in December 1996.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: VAX DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:47 AM ----- BODY: /vaks/ n.
1. [from Virtual Address eXtension] The most successful minicomputer design in industry history, possibly excepting its immediate ancestor, the PDP-11. Between its release in 1978 and its eclipse by killer micros after about 1986, the VAX was probably the hacker's favorite machine of them all, esp. after the 1982 release of 4.2 BSD Unix (see BSD). Especially noted for its large, assembler-programmer-friendly instruction set — an asset that became a liability after the RISC revolution.
It is worth noting that the standard plural of VAX was ‘vaxen’ and that VAX system operators were sometimes referred to as ‘vaxherds’
2. A major brand of vacuum cleaner in Britain. Cited here because
its sales pitch, Nothing sucks like a VAX!
became a sort of
battle-cry of RISC partisans. It is even sometimes claimed that DEC
actually entered a cross-licensing deal with the vacuum-Vax people that
allowed them to market VAX computers in the U.K. in return for not
challenging the vacuum cleaner trademark in the U.S.
A rival brand actually pioneered the slogan: its original form was
Nothing sucks like Electrolux
. It has apparently become a
classic example (used in advertising textbooks) of the perils of not
knowing the local idiom. But in 1996, the press manager of Electrolux AB,
while confirming that the company used this slogan in the late 1960s, also
tells us that their marketing people were fully aware of the possible
double entendre and intended it to gain attention.
And gain attention it did — the VAX-vacuum-cleaner people thought the slogan a sufficiently good idea to copy it. Several British hackers report that VAX's promotions used it in 1986--1987, and we have one report from a New Zealander that the infamous slogan surfaced there in TV ads for the product in 1992.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: VAXen DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:46 AM ----- BODY: /vak´sn/ n.
[from ‘oxen’, perhaps influenced by ‘vixen’]
(alt.: vaxen) The plural canonically
used among hackers for the DEC VAX computers.
Our installation has four PDP-10s and twenty vaxen.
See
boxen.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: vaxocentrism DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:45 AM ----- BODY: /vak`soh·sen´trizm/ n.
[analogy with ‘ethnocentrism’] A notional disease said to afflict C programmers who persist in coding according to certain assumptions that are valid (esp. under Unix) on VAXen but false elsewhere. Among these are:
The assumption that dereferencing a null pointer is safe because it is all bits 0, and location 0 is readable and 0. Problem: this may instead cause an illegal-address trap on non-VAXen, and even on VAXen under OSes other than BSD Unix. Usually this is an implicit assumption of sloppy code (forgetting to check the pointer before using it), rather than deliberate exploitation of a misfeature.
The assumption that characters are signed.
The assumption that a pointer to any one type can freely be cast into a pointer to any other type. A stronger form of this is the assumption that all pointers are the same size and format, which means you don't have to worry about getting the casts or types correct in calls. Problem: this fails on word-oriented machines or others with multiple pointer formats.
The assumption that the parameters of a routine are stored in memory, on a stack, contiguously, and in strictly ascending or descending order. Problem: this fails on many RISC architectures.
The assumption that pointer and integer types are the same size, and that pointers can be stuffed into integer variables (and vice-versa) and drawn back out without being truncated or mangled. Problem: this fails on segmented architectures or word-oriented machines with funny pointer formats.
The assumption that a data type of any size may begin at any byte address in memory (for example, that you can freely construct and dereference a pointer to a word- or greater-sized object at an odd char address). Problem: this fails on many (esp. RISC) architectures better optimized for HLL execution speed, and can cause an illegal address fault or bus error.
The (related) assumption that there is no padding at the end of types and that in an array you can thus step right from the last byte of a previous component to the first byte of the next one. This is not only machine- but compiler-dependent.
The assumption that memory address space is globally flat and that the array
reference foo[-1]
is necessarily valid.
Problem: this fails at 0, or other places on segment-addressed machines like
Intel chips (yes, segmentation is universally considered a
brain-damaged way to design machines (see
moby), but that is a separate issue).
The assumption that objects can be arbitrarily large with no special considerations. Problem: this fails on segmented architectures and under non-virtual-addressing environments.
The assumption that the stack can be as large as memory. Problem: this fails on segmented architectures or almost anything else without virtual addressing and a paged stack.
The assumption that bits and addressable units within an object are ordered in the same way and that this order is a constant of nature. Problem: this fails on big-endian machines.
The assumption that it is meaningful to compare pointers to different objects not located within the same array, or to objects of different types. Problem: the former fails on segmented architectures, the latter on word-oriented machines or others with multiple pointer formats.
The assumption that an int is 32 bits, or (nearly equivalently)
the assumption that sizeof(int) ==
sizeof(long)
. Problem: this fails on PDP-11s, 286-based systems and
even on 386 and 68000 systems under some compilers (and on 64-bit systems like
the Alpha, of course).
The assumption that argv[]
is
writable. Problem: this fails in many embedded-systems C environments and even
under a few flavors of Unix.
Note that a programmer can validly be accused of vaxocentrism even if he or she has never seen a VAX. Some of these assumptions (esp. 2--5) were valid on the PDP-11, the original C machine, and became endemic years before the VAX. The terms vaxocentricity and all-the-world's-a-VAX syndrome have been used synonymously.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: vdiff DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:44 AM ----- BODY: /vee´dif/ v.,n.
Visual diff. The operation of finding differences between two files by eyeball search. The term optical diff has also been reported, and is sometimes more specifically used for the act of superimposing two nearly identical printouts on one another and holding them up to a light to spot differences. Though this method is poor for detecting omissions in the ‘rear’ file, it can also be used with printouts of graphics, a claim few if any diff programs can make. See diff.
An interesting variant of the vdiff technique usable by anyone who has sufficient control over the parallax of their eyeballs (e.g. those who can easily view random-dot stereograms), is to hold up two paper printouts and go cross-eyed to superimpose them. This invokes deep, fast, built-in image comparison wetware (the same machinery responsible for depth perception) and differences stand out almost immediately. This technique is good for finding edits in graphical images, or for comparing an image with a compressed version to spot artifacts.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: veeblefester DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:43 AM ----- BODY: /vee´b@l·fes`tr/ n.
[from the Born Loser comix via Commodore; prob.: originally from Mad Magazine's ‘Veeblefetzer’ parodies beginning in #15, 1954] Any obnoxious person engaged in the (alleged) professions of marketing or management. Antonym of hacker. Compare suit, marketroid.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: velveeta DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:42 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Usenet: by analogy with spam. The trade name Velveeta is attached in the U.S. to a particularly nasty processed-cheese spread.] Also knows as ECP; a message that is excessively cross-posted, as opposed to spam which is too frequently posted. This term is widely recognized but not commonly used; most people refer to both kinds of abuse as spam. Compare jello.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: Venus flytrap DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:41 AM ----- BODY: n.
[after the insect-eating plant] See firewall machine.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: verbage DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:40 AM ----- BODY: /ver´b@j/ n.
A deliberate misspelling and mispronunciation of verbiage that assimilates it to the word ‘garbage’. Compare content-free. More pejorative than ‘verbiage’.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: verbiage DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
When the context involves a software or hardware system, this refers to documentation. This term borrows the connotations of mainstream ‘verbiage’ to suggest that the documentation is of marginal utility and that the motives behind its production have little to do with the ostensible subject.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: Version 7 DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:38 AM ----- BODY: /vee´ se´vn/ n.
The first widely distributed version of Unix,
released unsupported by Bell Labs in 1978. The term is used adjectivally
to describe Unix features and programs that date from that release, and are
thus guaranteed to be present and portable in all Unix versions (this was
the standard gauge of portability before the POSIX and IEEE 1003
standards). Note that this usage does not derive from
the release being the seventh version of
Unix
; research Unix
at Bell Labs has traditionally been numbered according to the edition of
the associated documentation. Indeed, only the widely-distributed Sixth
and Seventh Editions are widely known as V[67]; the OS that might today be
known as ‘V10’ is instead known in full as Tenth Edition
Research Unix
or just Tenth Edition
for short. For
this reason, V7
is often read by cognoscenti as
Seventh Edition
. See BSD,
Unix. Some old-timers impatient with
commercialization and kernel bloat still maintain that V7 was the Last True
Unix.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: vgrep DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:37 AM ----- BODY: /vee´grep/ v.,n.
Visual grep. The operation of finding patterns in a file optically rather than digitally (also called an optical grep). See grep; compare vdiff.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: vi DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:36 AM ----- BODY: /V·I/, not /vi:/ and never /siks/ n.
[from ‘Visual Interface’] A screen editor crufted together by Bill Joy for an early BSD release. Became the de facto standard Unix editor and a nearly undisputed hacker favorite outside of MIT until the rise of EMACS after about 1984. Tends to frustrate new users no end, as it will neither take commands while expecting input text nor vice versa, and the default setup on older versions provides no indication of which mode the editor is in (years ago, a correspondent reported that he has often heard the editor's name pronounced /vi:l/; there is now a vi clone named vile). Nevertheless vi (and variants such as vim and elvis) is still widely used (about half the respondents in a 1991 Usenet poll preferred it), and even EMACS fans often resort to it as a mail editor and for small editing jobs (mainly because it starts up faster than the bulkier versions of EMACS). See holy wars.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: video toaster DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:35 AM ----- BODY: n.
Historically, an Amiga fitted with a particular line of special video effects hardware from NewTek — long a popular platform at special-effects and video production houses. More generally, any computer system designed specifically for video production and manipulation. Compare web toaster and see toaster.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: videotex DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:34 AM ----- BODY: n. obs.
An electronic service offering people the privilege of paying to read the weather on their television screens instead of having somebody read it to them for free while they brush their teeth. The idea bombed everywhere it wasn't government-subsidized, because by the time videotex was practical the installed base of personal computers could hook up to timesharing services and do the things for which videotex might have been worthwhile better and cheaper. Videotex planners badly overestimated both the appeal of getting information from a computer and the cost of local intelligence at the user's end. Like the gorilla arm effect, this has been a cautionary tale to hackers ever since. See also vannevar.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: virgin DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:33 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Unused; pristine; in a known initial state. Let's bring up a
virgin system and see if it crashes again.
(Esp.: useful after
contracting a virus through
SEX.) Also, by extension, buffers and the like
within a program that have not yet been used.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: virtual DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:32 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[via the technical term virtual memory, prob.: from the term virtual image in optics]
1. Common alternative to logical; often used to refer to the artificial objects (like addressable virtual memory larger than physical memory) simulated by a computer system as a convenient way to manage access to shared resources.
2. Simulated; performing the functions of something that isn't really there. An imaginative child's doll may be a virtual playmate. Oppose real.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: virtual beer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:31 AM ----- BODY: n.
Praise or thanks. Used universally in the Linux community. Originally this term signified cash, after a famous incident in which some Britishers who wanted to buy Linus a beer sent him money to Finland to do so.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: virtual Friday DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:30 AM ----- BODY: n.
(also logical Friday) The last day before an extended weekend, if that day is not a ‘real’ Friday. For example, the U.S. holiday Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday. The next day is often also a holiday or taken as an extra day off, in which case Wednesday of that week is a virtual Friday (and Thursday is a virtual Saturday, as is Friday). There are also virtual Mondays that are actually Tuesdays, after the three-day weekends associated with many national holidays in the U.S.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: virtual reality DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:29 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Computer simulations that use 3-D graphics and devices such as the Dataglove to allow the user to interact with the simulation. See cyberspace.
2. A form of network interaction incorporating aspects of role-playing games, interactive theater, improvisational comedy, and ‘true confessions’ magazines. In a virtual reality forum (such as Usenet's alt.callahans newsgroup or the MUD experiments on Internet), interaction between the participants is written like a shared novel complete with scenery, foreground characters that may be personae utterly unlike the people who write them, and common background characters manipulable by all parties. The one iron law is that you may not write irreversible changes to a character without the consent of the person who ‘owns’ it. Otherwise anything goes. See bamf, cyberspace, teledildonics.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: virtual shredder DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
The jargonic equivalent of the bit bucket at shops using IBM's VM/CMS operating system. VM/CMS officially supports a whole bestiary of virtual card readers, virtual printers, and other phantom devices; these are used to supply some of the same capabilities Unix gets from pipes and I/O redirection.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: virus DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:27 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from the obvious analogy with biological viruses, via SF] A cracker program that searches out other programs and ‘infects’ them by embedding a copy of itself in them, so that they become Trojan horses. When these programs are executed, the embedded virus is executed too, thus propagating the ‘infection’. This normally happens invisibly to the user. Unlike a worm, a virus cannot infect other computers without assistance. It is propagated by vectors such as humans trading programs with their friends (see SEX). The virus may do nothing but propagate itself and then allow the program to run normally. Usually, however, after propagating silently for a while, it starts doing things like writing cute messages on the terminal or playing strange tricks with the display (some viruses include nice display hacks). Many nasty viruses, written by particularly perversely minded crackers, do irreversible damage, like nuking all the user's files.
In the 1990s, viruses became a serious problem, especially among Windows users; the lack of security on these machines enables viruses to spread easily, even infecting the operating system (Unix machines, by contrast, are immune to such attacks). The production of special anti-virus software has become an industry, and a number of exaggerated media reports have caused outbreaks of near hysteria among users; many lusers tend to blame everything that doesn't work as they had expected on virus attacks. Accordingly, this sense of virus has passed not only into techspeak but into also popular usage (where it is often incorrectly used to denote a worm or even a Trojan horse). See phage; compare back door; see also Unix conspiracy.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: visionary DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:26 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. One who hacks vision, in the sense of an Artificial Intelligence researcher working on the problem of getting computers to ‘see’ things using TV cameras. (There isn't any problem in sending information from a TV camera to a computer. The problem is, how can the computer be programmed to make use of the camera information? See SMOP, AI-complete.)
2. [IBM] One who reads the outside literature. At IBM, apparently, such a penchant is viewed with awe and wonder.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: VMS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:25 AM ----- BODY: /V·M·S/ n.
DEC's proprietary operating system for its VAX minicomputer; one of the seven or so environments that loom largest in hacker folklore. Many Unix fans generously concede that VMS would probably be the hacker's favorite commercial OS if Unix didn't exist; though true, this makes VMS fans furious. One major hacker gripe with VMS concerns its slowness — thus the following limerick:
There once was a system called VMS Of cycles by no means abstemious. It's chock-full of hacks And runs on a VAX And makes my poor stomach all squeamious. — The Great Quux
See also VAX, TOPS-10, TOPS-20, Unix, runic.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: voice DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:24 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To phone someone, as opposed to emailing them or connecting in
talk mode. I'm busy now; I'll voice you
later.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: voice-net DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:23 AM ----- BODY: n.
Hackish way of referring to the telephone system, analogizing it to
a digital network. Usenet sig blocks not uncommonly
include the sender's phone next to a Voice:
or
Voice-Net:
header; common variants of this are
Voicenet
and V-Net
. Compare
paper-net, snail-mail.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: voodoo programming DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:22 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from George Bush's voodoo economics
]
1. The use by guess or cookbook of an obscure or hairy system, feature, or algorithm that one does not truly understand. The implication is that the technique may not work, and if it doesn't, one will never know why. Almost synonymous with black magic, except that black magic typically isn't documented and nobody understands it. Compare magic, deep magic, heavy wizardry, rain dance, cargo cult programming, wave a dead chicken, SCSI voodoo.
2. Things programmers do that they know shouldn't work but they try anyway, and which sometimes actually work, such as recompiling everything.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: VR DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:21 AM ----- BODY: [MUD] n.
On-line abbrev for virtual reality, as opposed to RL.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: Vulcan nerve pinch DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:20 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from the old Star Trek TV series via Commodore Amiga hackers] The keyboard combination that forces a soft-boot or jump to ROM monitor (on machines that support such a feature). On Amigas this is <Ctrl>-<Left-Amiga>-<Right-Amiga>; on PC clones this is Ctrl-Alt-Del; on Suns, L1-A; on Macintoshes, it is <Cmd>-<Power switch> or <Cmd>-<Ctrl>-<Power>! On IRIX, <Left-Ctrl><Left-Shift><F12><Keypad-Slash>, which kills and restarts the X server, is sometimes called a vulcan nerve pinch. Also called three-finger salute and Vulcan death grip. At shops with a lot of Microsoft Windows machines, this is often called the Microsoft Maneuver because of the distressing frequency with which Microsoft's unreliable software requires it. Compare quadruple bucky.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - V TITLE: vulture capitalist DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:19 AM ----- BODY: n.
Pejorative hackerism for ‘venture capitalist’, deriving from the common practice of pushing contracts that deprive inventors of control over their own innovations and most of the money they ought to have made from them.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: w00t DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:18 AM ----- BODY:
An interjection similar to Yay!
, as in: w00t!!!
I just got a raise!
Often used for small victories the speaker dies
not expect to be of special interest to anyone else. Some claim this is a
bastardization of root
, the highest level of access to a
system (particularly UNIX), originated by script kiddies as a 133tspeak
equivalent of root
, and said as an exclamation upon gaining
root access. Others claim it originated in the Everquest multiplayer game
as an abbreviation of wonderful loot
. Still other claim it
on originated on IRC as the Ewok victory cheer
] Adj.
w00table has the sense of
cool
or nifty
. This is one of the few
leet-speak coinages to have crossed over into non-ironic use among
hackers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wabbit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:17 AM ----- BODY: /wab´it/ n.
[almost certainly from Elmer Fudd's immortal line You
wascawwy wabbit!
]
1. A legendary early hack reported on a System/360 at RPI and elsewhere around 1978; this may have descended (if only by inspiration) from a hack called RABBITS reported from 1969 on a Burroughs 5500 at the University of Washington Computer Center. The program would make two copies of itself every time it was run, eventually crashing the system.
2. By extension, any hack that includes infinite self-replication but is not a virus or worm. See fork bomb and rabbit job, see also cookie monster.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: WAITS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:16 AM ----- BODY: /wayts/ n.
The mutant cousin of TOPS-10 used on a handful of systems at SAIL up to 1990. There was never an ‘official’ expansion of WAITS (the name itself having been arrived at by a rather sideways process), but it was frequently glossed as ‘West-coast Alternative to ITS’. Though WAITS was less visible than ITS, there was frequent exchange of people and ideas between the two communities, and innovations pioneered at WAITS exerted enormous indirect influence. The early screen modes of EMACS, for example, were directly inspired by WAITS's ‘E’ editor — one of a family of editors that were the first to do ‘real-time editing’, in which the editing commands were invisible and where one typed text at the point of insertion/overwriting. The modern style of multi-region windowing is said to have originated there, and WAITS alumni at XEROX PARC and elsewhere played major roles in the developments that led to the XEROX Star, the Macintosh, and the Sun workstations. Also invented there were bucky bits — thus, the ALT key on every IBM PC is a WAITS legacy. One WAITS feature very notable in pre-Web days was a news-wire interface that allowed WAITS hackers to read, store, and filter AP and UPI dispatches from their terminals; the system also featured a still-unusual level of support for what is now called multimedia computing, allowing analog audio and video signals to be switched to programming terminals.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: waldo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:15 AM ----- BODY: /wol´doh/ n.
[From Robert A. Heinlein's story Waldo]
1. A mechanical agent, such as a gripper arm, controlled by a human limb. When these were developed for the nuclear industry in the mid-1940s they were named after the invention described by Heinlein in the story, which he wrote in 1942. Now known by the more generic term telefactoring, this technology is of intense interest to NASA for tasks like space station maintenance.
2. At Harvard (particularly by Tom Cheatham and students), this is used instead of foobar as a metasyntactic variable and general nonsense word. See foo, bar, foobar, quux.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: walk DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:14 AM ----- BODY: n.,vt.
Traversal of a data structure, especially an array or linked-list data structure in core. See also codewalker, silly walk, clobber.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: walk off the end of DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:13 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To run past the end of an array, list, or medium after stepping through it — a good way to land in trouble. Often the result of an off-by-one error. Compare clobber, roach, smash the stack.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: walking drives DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:12 AM ----- BODY: n.
An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky washing machines. Those old dinosaur parts carried terrific angular momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn bearings and stick-slip interactions with the floor could cause them to ‘walk’ across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a couple of millimeters at a time. There is a legend about a drive that walked over to the only door to the computer room and jammed it shut; the staff had to cut a hole in the wall in order to get at it! Walking could also be induced by certain patterns of drive access (a fast seek across the whole width of the disk, followed by a slow seek in the other direction). Some bands of old-time hackers figured out how to induce disk-accessing patterns that would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive races.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wall DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:11 AM ----- BODY: interj.
[WPI]
1. An indication of confusion, usually spoken with a quizzical tone:
Wall??
2. A request for further explication. Compare octal forty.
3. [Unix, from ‘write all’] v. To send a message to everyone currently logged in, esp. with the wall8 utility.
It is said that sense 1 came from the idiom ‘like talking to a
blank wall’. It was originally used in situations where, after you
had carefully answered a question, the questioner stared at you blankly,
clearly having understood nothing that was explained. You would then throw
out a Hello, wall?
to elicit some sort of response from the
questioner. Later, confused questioners began voicing Wall?
themselves.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wall follower DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:10 AM ----- BODY: n.
A person or algorithm that compensates for lack of sophistication or native stupidity by efficiently following some simple procedure shown to have been effective in the past. Used of an algorithm, this is not necessarily pejorative; it recalls ‘Harvey Wallbanger’, the winning robot in an early AI contest (named, of course, after the cocktail). Harvey successfully solved mazes by keeping a ‘finger’ on one wall and running till it came out the other end. This was inelegant, but it was mathematically guaranteed to work on simply-connected mazes — and, in fact, Harvey outperformed more sophisticated robots that tried to ‘learn’ each maze by building an internal representation of it. Used of humans, the term is pejorative and implies an uncreative, bureaucratic, by-the-book mentality. See also code grinder; compare droid.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wall time DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:09 AM ----- BODY: n.
(also wall clock time)
1. ‘Real world’ time (what the clock on the wall shows), as opposed to the system clock's idea of time.
2. The real running time of a program, as opposed to the number of ticks required to execute it (on a timesharing system these always differ, as no one program gets all the ticks, and on multiprocessor systems with good thread support one may get more processor time than real time).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wall wart DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:08 AM ----- BODY: n.
A small power-supply brick with integral male plug, designed to plug directly into a wall outlet; called a ‘wart’ because when installed on a power strip it tends to block up at least one more socket than it uses. These are frequently associated with modems and other small electronic devices which would become unacceptably bulky or hot if they had power supplies on board (there are other reasons as well having to do with the cost of UL certification).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wallhack DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:07 AM ----- BODY:
A form of game cheat especially associated with first-person shooters like Quake, in which the walls in the simulated maze or dungeon are rendered transparent to the cheater. This gives the cheater normally hidden information about the whereabouts of other players. Beyond gaming, a wallhack is the paradigm case of a whole class of security problems that stem from the fact that a server cannot trust client software, and server authors must assume that all computation farmed out to a client is exposed to and can be interfered with by the user.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wango DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:06 AM ----- BODY: /wang´goh/ n.
Random bit-level grovelling going on in a
system during some unspecified operation. Often used in combination with
mumble. For example: You start with the
‘.o’ file, run it through this postprocessor that does
mumble-wango — and it comes out a snazzy object-oriented
executable.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wank DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:05 AM ----- BODY: /wangk/ n.,v.,adj.
[Columbia University: prob.: by mutation from Commonwealth slang
v. wank, to masturbate] Used much as
hack is elsewhere, as a noun denoting a clever
technique or person or the result of such cleverness. May describe
(negatively) the act of hacking for hacking's sake (Quit wanking,
let's go get supper!
) or (more positively) a
wizard. Adj. wanky describes something particularly clever
(a person, program, or algorithm). Conversations can also get wanky when
there are too many wanks involved. This excess wankiness is signalled by
an overload of the wankometer
(compare bogometer). When the wankometer overloads,
the conversation's subject must be changed, or all non-wanks will leave.
Compare neep-neeping (under
neep-neep). Usage: U.S. only. In Britain and the
Commonwealth this word is extremely rude and is best
avoided unless one intends to give offense. Adjectival wanky is less offensive and simply means
‘stupid’ or ‘broken’ (this is mainstream in Great
Britain).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wannabee DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:04 AM ----- BODY: /won'@·bee/ n.
(also, more plausibly, spelled wannabe) [from a term recently used to describe Madonna fans who dress, talk, and act like their idol; prob.: originally from biker slang] A would-be hacker. The connotations of this term differ sharply depending on the age and exposure of the subject. Used of a person who is in or might be entering larval stage, it is semi-approving; such wannabees can be annoying but most hackers remember that they, too, were once such creatures. When used of any professional programmer, CS academic, writer, or suit, it is derogatory, implying that said person is trying to cuddle up to the hacker mystique but doesn't, fundamentally, have a prayer of understanding what it is all about. Overuse of terms from this lexicon is often an indication of the wannabee nature. Compare newbie.
Historical note: The wannabee phenomenon has a slightly different flavor now (1993) than it did ten or fifteen years ago. When the people who are now hackerdom's tribal elders were in larval stage, the process of becoming a hacker was largely unconscious and unaffected by models known in popular culture — communities formed spontaneously around people who, as individuals, felt irresistibly drawn to do hackerly things, and what wannabees experienced was a fairly pure, skill-focused desire to become similarly wizardly. Those days of innocence are gone forever; society's adaptation to the advent of the microcomputer after 1980 included the elevation of the hacker as a new kind of folk hero, and the result is that some people semi-consciously set out to be hackers and borrow hackish prestige by fitting the popular image of hackers. Fortunately, to do this really well, one has to actually become a wizard. Nevertheless, old-time hackers tend to share a poorly articulated disquiet about the change; among other things, it gives them mixed feelings about the effects of public compendia of lore like this one.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: war dialer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:03 AM ----- BODY: n.
A cracking tool, a program that calls a given list or range of phone numbers and records those which answer with handshake tones (and so might be entry points to computer or telecommunications systems). Some of these programs have become quite sophisticated, and can now detect modem, fax, or PBX tones and log each one separately. The war dialer is one of the most important tools in the phreaker's kit. These programs evolved from early demon dialers.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: war-driving DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:02 AM ----- BODY:
[play on war dialer; also as single word wardriving] Driving around looking for unsecured wireless Internet access points to connect to. More at the War Driving home page. Compare war-chalking.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: war-chalking DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:01 AM ----- BODY:
[play on war-driving; the first syllable has
since been reinterpreted as an acronym for wireless access
revolution
] The practice of using chalk marks similar to hobo signs
to indicate the nearby presence of a wireless Internet access point, a boon
to strolling hackers with laptops. The concept was first floated in early
2002 and was instantly seized upon with cries of glee by hackers all over
the portions of the world urbanized enough to have sidewalks and access
points. The process rather recalls the explosive spread of heraldry in the
medieval Europe of the 1120s. There is a site that explains the symbology;.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Misc TITLE: -ware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:24:00 AM ----- BODY: suff.
[from ‘software’] Commonly used to form jargon terms for classes of software. For examples, see annoyware, careware, crippleware, crudware, freeware, fritterware, guiltware, liveware, meatware, payware, psychedelicware, shareware, shelfware, vaporware, wetware, spyware, adware.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: warez DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:59 AM ----- BODY: /weirz/ n.
Widely used in cracker subcultures to denote cracked version of commercial software, that is versions from which copy-protection has been stripped. Hackers recognize this term but don't use it themselves. See warez d00dz, courier, leech, elite.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: warez d00dz DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:58 AM ----- BODY: /weirz doodz/ n.
A substantial subculture of crackers refer to themselves as warez d00dz; there is evidently some connection with B1FF here. As ‘Ozone Pilot’, one former warez d00d, wrote:
Warez d00dz get illegal copies of copyrighted software. If
it has copy protection on it, they break the protection so
the software can be copied. Then they distribute it around
the world via several gateways. Warez d00dz form badass
group names like RAZOR and the like. They put up boards
that distribute the latest ware, or pirate program. The
whole point of the Warez sub-culture is to get the pirate
program released and distributed before any other group. I
know, I know. But don't ask, and it won't hurt as much.
This is how they prove their poweress [sic]. It gives them
the right to say, I released King's Quest IVXIX before you
so obviously my testicles are larger.
Again don't ask...
The studly thing to do if one is a warez d00d, it appears, is emit 0-day warez, that is copies of commercial software copied and cracked on the same day as its retail release. Warez d00ds also hoard software in a big way, collecting untold megabytes of arcade-style games, pornographic JPGs, and applications they'll never use onto their hard disks. As Ozone Pilot acutely observes:
[BELONG] is the only word you will need
to know. Warez d00dz want to belong. They have been shunned by everyone,
and thus turn to cyberspace for acceptance. That is why they always start
groups like TGW, FLT, USA and the like. Structure makes them happy. [...]
Warez d00dz will never have a handle like Pink Daisy
because
warez d00dz are insecure. Only someone who is very secure with a good dose
of self-esteem can stand up to the cries of fag and girlie-man. More
likely you will find warez d00dz with handles like: Doctor Death, Deranged
Lunatic, Hellraiser, Mad Prince, Dreamdevil, The Unknown, Renegade Chemist,
Terminator, and Twin Turbo. They like to sound badass when they can hide
behind their terminals. More likely, if you were given a sample of 100
people, the person whose handle is Hellraiser is the last person you'd
associate with the name.
The contrast with Internet hackers is stark and instructive. See cracker, wannabee, handle, elite, courier, leech; compare weenie, spod.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: warez kiddies DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:57 AM ----- BODY: n.
Even more derogatory way of referring to warez d00dz; refers to the fact that most warez d00dz are around the age of puberty. Compare script kiddies.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: warlording DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:56 AM ----- BODY: v.
[from the Usenet group alt.fan.warlord] The act of excoriating a bloated, ugly, or derivative sig block. Common grounds for warlording include the presence of a signature rendered in a BUAF, over-used or cliched sig quotes, ugly ASCII art, or simply excessive size. The original ‘Warlord’ was a B1FF-like newbie c.1991 who featured in his sig a particularly large and obnoxious ASCII graphic resembling the sword of Conan the Barbarian in the 1981 John Milius movie; the group name alt.fan.warlord was sarcasm, and the characteristic mode of warlording is devastatingly sarcastic praise. See also McQuary limit.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: warm boot DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:55 AM ----- BODY: n.
See boot.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wart DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:54 AM ----- BODY: n.
A small, crocky feature that sticks out of an otherwise clean design. Something conspicuous for localized ugliness, especially a special-case exception to a general rule. For example, in some versions of csh1, single quotes literalize every character inside them except !. In ANSI C, the ?? syntax used for obtaining ASCII characters in a foreign environment is a wart. See also miswart.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: washing machine DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:53 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Old-style 14-inch hard disks in floor-standing cabinets. So called because of the size of the cabinet and the ‘top-loading’ access to the media packs — and, of course, they were always set on ‘spin cycle’. The washing-machine idiom transcends language barriers; it is even used in Russian hacker jargon. See also walking drives. The thick channel cables connecting these were called bit hoses (see hose, sense 3).
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-03-17:2)
2. [CMU] A machine used exclusively for washing software. CMU has clusters of these.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: washing software DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
The process of recompiling a software distribution (used more often when the recompilation is occuring from scratch) to pick up and merge together all of the various changes that have been made to the source.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: water MIPS DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:51 AM ----- BODY: n.
(see MIPS, sense 2) Large, water-cooled machines of either today's ECL-supercomputer flavor or yesterday's traditional mainframe type.
A really unusual kind of water MIPS.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 74-12-25)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wave a dead chicken DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:50 AM ----- BODY: v.
To perform a ritual in the direction of crashed software or hardware
that one believes to be futile but is nevertheless necessary so that others
are satisfied that an appropriate degree of effort has been expended.
I'll wave a dead chicken over the source code, but I really think
we've run into an OS bug.
Compare
voodoo programming, rain dance; see also
casting the runes.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: weasel DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:49 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Cambridge] A naive user, one who deliberately or accidentally does things that are stupid or ill-advised. Roughly synonymous with loser.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: web pointer DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:48 AM ----- BODY: n.
A World Wide Web URL. See also hotlink, which has slightly different connotations.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: web ring DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:47 AM ----- BODY: n.
Two or more web sites connected by prominent links between sites sharing a common interest or theme. Usually such cliques have the topology of a ring, in order to make it easy for visitors to navigate through all of them.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: web toaster DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:46 AM ----- BODY: n.
A small specialized computer, shipped with no monitor or keyboard or any other external peripherals, pre-configured to be controlled through an Ethernet port and function as a WWW server. Products of this kind (for example the Cobalt Qube) are often about the size of a toaster. See toaster; compare video toaster.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: webify DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:45 AM ----- BODY: n.
To put a piece of (possibly already existing) material on the WWW.
Frequently used for papers (Why don't you webify all your
publications?
) or for demos (They webified their 6.866 final
project
). This term seems to have been (rather logically)
independently invented multiple times in the early 1990s.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: webmaster DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:44 AM ----- BODY: n.
[WWW: from postmaster] The person at a site providing World Wide Web information who is responsible for maintaining the public pages and keeping the Web server running and properly configured.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wedged DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:43 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. To be stuck, incapable of proceeding without help. This is different from having crashed. If the system has crashed, it has become totally non-functioning. If the system is wedged, it is trying to do something but cannot make progress; it may be capable of doing a few things, but not be fully operational. For example, a process may become wedged if it deadlocks with another (but not all instances of wedging are deadlocks). See also gronk, locked up, hosed, hung (wedged is more severe than hung).
2. Often refers to humans suffering misconceptions. He's
totally wedged — he's convinced that he can levitate through
meditation.
3. [Unix] Specifically used to describe the state of a TTY left in a losing state by abort of a screen-oriented program or one that has messed with the line discipline in some obscure way.
There is some dispute over the origin of this term. It is usually thought to derive from a common description of recto-cranial inversion; however, it may actually have originated with older ‘hot-press’ printing technology in which physical type elements were locked into type frames with wedges driven in by mallets. Once this had been done, no changes in the typesetting for that page could be made.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wedgie DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:42 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Fairchild] A bug. Prob. related to wedged.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wedgitude DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:41 AM ----- BODY: /wedj´i·t[y]ood/ n.
The quality or state of being wedged.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: weeble DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:40 AM ----- BODY: /weeb´l/ interj.
[Cambridge] Used to denote frustration, usually at amazing
stupidity. I stuck the disk in upside down.
Weeble....
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: weeds DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:39 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Refers to development projects or algorithms that have no
possible relevance or practical application. Comes from ‘off in the
weeds’. Used in phrases like lexical analysis for microcode
is serious weeds....
2. At CDC/ETA before its demise, the phrase go off in the weeds was equivalent mainstream hackerdom's jump off into never-never land.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: weenie DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:38 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [on BBSes] Any of a species of luser resembling a less amusing version of B1FF that infests many BBS systems. The typical weenie is a teenage boy with poor social skills travelling under a grandiose handle derived from fantasy or heavy-metal rock lyrics. Among sysops, the weenie problem refers to the marginally literate and profanity-laden flamage weenies tend to spew all over a newly-discovered BBS. Compare spod, geek, terminal junkie, warez d00dz.
2. [among hackers] When used with a qualifier (for example, as in Unix weenie, VMS weenie, IBM weenie) this can be either an insult or a term of praise, depending on context, tone of voice, and whether or not it is applied by a person who considers him or herself to be the same sort of weenie. Implies that the weenie has put a major investment of time, effort, and concentration into the area indicated; whether this is good or bad depends on the hearer's judgment of how the speaker feels about that area. See also bigot.
3. The semicolon character, ; (ASCII 0111011).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: Weenix DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:37 AM ----- BODY: /wee´niks/ n.
1. [ITS] A derogatory term for Unix, derived
from Unix weenie. According to one noted ex-ITSer,
it is the operating system preferred by Unix Weenies: typified by
poor modularity, poor reliability, hard file deletion, no file version
numbers, case sensitivity everywhere, and users who believe that these are
all advantages
. (Some ITS fans behave as though they believe Unix
stole a future that rightfully belonged to them. See
ITS, sense 2.)
2. [Brown University] A Unix-like OS developed for tutorial purposes at Brown University. See http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs167/weenix.html. Named independently of the ITS usage.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: well-behaved DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:36 AM ----- BODY: adj.
1. Software that does its job quietly and without counterintuitive effects. Esp.: said of software having an interface spec sufficiently simple and well-defined that it can be used as a tool by other software. See cat.
2. Said of an algorithm that doesn't crash or blow up, even when given pathological input. Implies that the stability of the algorithm is intrinsic, which makes this somewhat different from bulletproof.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: well-connected DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:35 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Said of a computer installation, asserts that it has reliable email links with the network and/or that it relays a large fraction of available Usenet newsgroups. Well-known can be almost synonymous, but also implies that the site's name is familiar to many (due perhaps to an archive service or active Usenet users).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wetware DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:34 AM ----- BODY: /wet´weir/ n.
[prob.: from the novels of Rudy Rucker]
1. The human nervous system, as opposed to computer hardware or
software. Wetware has 7 plus or minus 2 temporary
registers.
2. Human beings (programmers, operators, administrators) attached to a computer system, as opposed to the system's hardware or software. See liveware, meatware.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: whack DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:33 AM ----- BODY: v.
According to arch-hacker James Gosling (designer of
NeWS, GOSMACS and Java), to
...modify a program with no idea whatsoever how it works.
(See whacker.) It is actually possible to do this
in nontrivial circumstances if the change is small and well-defined and you
are very good at glarking things from context. As a
trivial example, it is relatively easy to change all stderr
writes to stdout
writes in a piece of C filter code which
remains otherwise mysterious.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: whack-a-mole DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:32 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from the carnival game which involves quickly and repeatedly hitting the heads of mechanical moles with a mallet as they pop up from their holes.]
1. The practice of repeatedly causing spammers' throwaway accounts and drop boxes to be terminated.
2. After sense 1 became established in the mid-1990s the term passed into more generalized use, and now is commonly found in such combinations as whack-a-mole windows; the obnoxious pop-up advertisement windows spawned in flocks when you surf to sites like Angelfire or Lycos.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: whacker DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:31 AM ----- BODY: n.
[University of Maryland: from hacker]
1. A person, similar to a hacker, who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities. Whereas a hacker tends to produce great hacks, a whacker only ends up whacking the system or program in question. Whackers are often quite egotistical and eager to claim wizard status, regardless of the views of their peers.
2. A person who is good at programming quickly, though rather poorly and ineptly.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: whales DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:30 AM ----- BODY: n.
See like kicking dead whales down the beach.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: What's a spline? DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:29 AM ----- BODY:
[XEROX PARC] This phrase expands to: You have just used a
term that I've heard for a year and a half, and I feel I should know, but
don't. My curiosity has finally overcome my guilt.
The PARC
lexicon adds Moral: don't hesitate to ask questions, even if they
seem obvious.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wheel DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:28 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from slang ‘big wheel’ for a powerful person] A person
who has an active wheel bit. We need to find
a wheel to unwedge the hung tape drives.
(See
wedged, sense 1.) The traditional name of security
group zero in BSD (to which the major
system-internal users like root belong) is
‘wheel’. Some vendors have expanded on this usage, modifying
Unix so that only members of group ‘wheel’ can
go root.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wheel bit DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:27 AM ----- BODY: n.
A privilege bit that allows the possessor to perform some restricted operation on a timesharing system, such as read or write any file on the system regardless of protections, change or look at any address in the running monitor, crash or reload the system, and kill or create jobs and user accounts. The term was invented on the TENEX operating system, and carried over to TOPS-20, XEROX-IFS, and others. The state of being in a privileged logon is sometimes called wheel mode. This term entered the Unix culture from TWENEX in the mid-1980s and has been gaining popularity there (esp. at university sites). See also root.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wheel of reincarnation DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:26 AM ----- BODY:
[coined in a paper by T.H. Myer and I.E. Sutherland On the Design of Display Processors, Comm. ACM, Vol. 11, no. 6, June 1968)] Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again.
Several iterations of this cycle have been observed in graphics-processor design, and at least one or two in communications and floating-point processors. Also known as the Wheel of Life, the Wheel of Samsara, and other variations of the basic Hindu/Buddhist theological idea. See also blitter.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wheel wars DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:25 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Stanford University] A period in larval stage during which student hackers hassle each other by attempting to log each other out of the system, delete each other's files, and otherwise wreak havoc, usually at the expense of the lesser users.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: white hat DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:24 AM ----- BODY:
See black hat.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: whitelist DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:23 AM ----- BODY: n.
The opposite of a blacklist. That is, instead of being an explicit list of people who are banned, it's an explicit list of people who are to be admitted. Hackers use this especially of lists of email addresses that are explicitly enabled to get past strict anti-spam filters.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: whizzy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:22 AM ----- BODY: adj.
(alt.: wizzy) [Sun] Describes a cuspy program; one that is feature-rich and well presented.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: Whorfian mind-lock DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:21 AM ----- BODY:
[from the Lojban-language list] Software designs are often restricted in unavoidable ways by the capacities of the operating system or hardware they have to work with. Sometimes they are restricted in avoidable ways by mental habits a developer has picked up from a particular language or environment (perhaps a now-obsolete one) and never discarded. When a design develops complications that are the result of a mental habit that is no longer adaptive, the developer has succumbed to Whorfian mind-lock. The design itself has been ‘whorfed’.
For example, some Unix designs are whorfed by the assumption that directory searches are linear and expensive for large directories; therefore directories must be kept small. Another common way to succumb to Whorfian mind-lock is to do serial processing with a small working set rather than slurping an entire file or data structure into memory; the hidden assumption here is that not much core is available and virtual memory works poorly if at all. Detecting Whorfian mind-lock is important, because it tends to introduce unnecessary complexity and bugs.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wibble DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:20 AM ----- BODY:
[UK, perh. originally from the first Roger Irrelevant strip in VIZ comics, spread via Your Sinclair magazine in the 1980s and early 1990s]
1. n.,v. Commonly used to
describe chatter, content-free remarks or other essentially meaningless
contributions to threads in newsgroups. Oh, rspence is wibbling
again
.
2. [UK IRC] An explicit on-line no-op.
3. One of the preferred
metasyntactic variables in the UK, forming a series with wobble
, wubble
, and
flob
(attributed to the hilarious
historical comedy Blackadder).
4. A pronunciation of the letters www
, as seen in
URLs; i.e., www.foo.com may be pronounced
wibble dot foo dot com
(compare
dub dub dub).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: WIBNI DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:19 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Bell Labs: Wouldn't It Be Nice If] What most requirements documents and specifications consist entirely of. Compare IWBNI.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: widget DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:18 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A meta-thing. Used to stand for a real object in didactic
examples (especially database tutorials). Legend has it that the original
widgets were holders for buggy whips. But suppose the parts list
for a widget has 52 entries....
2. [poss.: evoking ‘window gadget’] A user interface object in X graphical user interfaces.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wiggles DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:17 AM ----- BODY: n.
[scientific computation] In solving partial differential equations by finite difference and similar methods, wiggles are sawtooth (up-down-up-down) oscillations at the shortest wavelength representable on the grid. If an algorithm is unstable, this is often the most unstable waveform, so it grows to dominate the solution. Alternatively, stable (though inaccurate) wiggles can be generated near a discontinuity by a Gibbs phenomenon.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wild side DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:16 AM ----- BODY:
The public or uncontrolled side of a firewall machine.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: WIMP environment DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
[acronym: ‘Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing device (or Pull-down menu)’] A graphical-user-interface environment such as X or the Macintosh interface, esp. as described by a hacker who prefers command-line interfaces for their superior flexibility and extensibility. However, it is also used without negative connotations; one must pay attention to voice tone and other signals to interpret correctly. See menuitis, user-obsequious.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: win DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:14 AM ----- BODY:
[MIT; now common everywhere]
1. vi. To succeed. A program wins if no unexpected conditions arise, or (especially) if it is sufficiently robust to take exceptions in stride.
2. n. Success, or a specific
instance thereof. A pleasing outcome. So it turned out I could use
a lexer generator instead of hand-coding my own
pattern recognizer. What a win!
Emphatic forms: moby win, super
win, hyper-win (often used
interjectively as a reply). For some reason suitable win is also common at MIT, usually in
reference to a satisfactory solution to a problem. Oppose
lose; see also big win, which
isn't quite just an intensification of win.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: win big DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:13 AM ----- BODY: vi.
To experience serendipity. I went shopping and won big;
there was a 2-for-1 sale.
See
big win.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: win win DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:12 AM ----- BODY: excl.
Expresses pleasure at a win.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: Winchester DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:11 AM ----- BODY: n.
Informal generic term for sealed-enclosure magnetic-disk drives in which the read-write head planes over the disk surface on an air cushion. There is a legend that the name arose because the original 1973 engineering prototype for what later became the IBM 3340 featured two 30-megabyte volumes; 30--30 became ‘Winchester’ when somebody noticed the similarity to the common term for a famous Winchester rifle (in the latter, the first 30 referred to caliber and the second to the grain weight of the charge). (It is sometimes incorrectly claimed that Winchester was the laboratory in which the technology was developed.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: windoid DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:10 AM ----- BODY: n.
In the Macintosh world, a style of window with much less adornment (smaller or missing title bar, zoom box, etc.) than a standard window.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: window shopping DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:09 AM ----- BODY: n.
[US Geological Survey] Among users of
WIMP environments like X or the Macintosh,
extended experimentation with new window colors, fonts, and icon shapes.
This activity can take up hours of what might otherwise have been
productive working time. I spent the afternoon window shopping
until I found the coolest shade of green for my active window borders
— now they perfectly match my medium slate blue background.
Serious window shoppers will spend their days with bitmap editors, creating
new and different icons and background patterns for all to see. Also:
window dressing, the act of applying
new fonts, colors, etc. See fritterware, compare
macdink.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: Windowsitis DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:08 AM ----- BODY:
1. As a disease of people: the tendency of inexperienced (or Windows-experienced) Web developers have to use backslashes in URLs, rather than the correct forward slashes.
2. As a disease of programs: to be a rigid, clunky, bug-prone monstrosity, all glossy surface with a hollow interior.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: Windoze DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:07 AM ----- BODY: /win´dohz/ n.
See Microsloth Windows. (Also Losedoze.)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: winged comments DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:06 AM ----- BODY: n.
Comments set on the same line as code, as opposed to boxed comments. In C, for example:
d = sqrt(x*x + y*y); /* distance from origin */
Generally these refer only to the action(s) taken on that line.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 75-10-04)
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: winkey DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:05 AM ----- BODY: n.
(alt.: winkey face) See emoticon.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: winnage DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:04 AM ----- BODY: /win'@j/ n.
The situation when a lossage is corrected, or when something is winning.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: winner DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:03 AM ----- BODY:
1. n. An unexpectedly good situation, program, programmer, or person.
2. real winner: Often
sarcastic, but also used as high praise (see also the note under
user). He's a real winner — never
reports a bug till he can duplicate it and send in an
example.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: winnitude DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:02 AM ----- BODY: /win'@·t[y]ood/ n.
The quality of winning (as opposed to
winnage, which is the result of winning).
Guess what? They tweaked the microcode and now the LISP interpreter
runs twice as fast as it used to.
That's really great! Boy,
what winnitude!
Yup. I'll probably get a half-hour's winnage
on the next run of my program.
Perhaps curiously, the obvious
antonym ‘lossitude’ is rare.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: Wintel DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:01 AM ----- BODY: n.
Microsoft Windows plus Intel — the tacit alliance that dominated desktop computing in the 1990s. After 1999 it began to brwak up under pressure from Linux; see Lintel.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: Wintendo DATE: 05/15/2003 10:23:00 AM ----- BODY: /win·ten´doh/ n.
[Play on Nintendo
] A PC running the Windows operating
system kept primarily for the purpose of viewing multimedia and playing
games. The implication is that the speaker uses a Linux or *BSD box for
everything else.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wired DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:59 AM ----- BODY: n.
See hardwired.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wirehead DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:58 AM ----- BODY: /wi:r´hed/ n.
[prob.: from SF slang for an electrical-brain-stimulation addict]
1. A hardware hacker, especially one who concentrates on communications hardware.
2. An expert in local-area networks. A wirehead can be a network software wizard too, but will always have the ability to deal with network hardware, down to the smallest component. Wireheads are known for their ability to lash up an Ethernet terminator from spare resistors, for example.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wirewater DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:57 AM ----- BODY: n.
Syn. programming fluid. This melds the mainstream slang adjective ‘wired’ (stimulated, up, hyperactive) with ‘firewater’; however, it refers to caffeinacious rather than alcoholic beverages.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wish list DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:56 AM ----- BODY: n.
A list of desired features or bug fixes that probably won't get done
for a long time, usually because the person responsible for the code is too
busy or can't think of a clean way to do it. OK, I'll add automatic
filename completion to the wish list for the new interface.
Compare
tick-list features.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: within delta of DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:55 AM ----- BODY: adj.
See delta.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: within epsilon of DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:54 AM ----- BODY: adj.
See epsilon.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wizard DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:53 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. Transitively, a person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works (that is, who groks it); esp. someone who can find and fix bugs quickly in an emergency. Someone is a hacker if he or she has general hacking ability, but is a wizard with respect to something only if he or she has specific detailed knowledge of that thing. A good hacker could become a wizard for something given the time to study it.
2. The term ‘wizard’ is also used intransitively of someone who has extremely high-level hacking or problem-solving ability.
3. A person who is permitted to do things forbidden to ordinary people; one who has wheel privileges on a system.
4. A Unix expert, esp. a Unix systems programmer. This usage is well enough established that ‘Unix Wizard’ is a recognized job title at some corporations and to most headhunters.
See guru, lord high fixer. See also deep magic, heavy wizardry, incantation, magic, mutter, rain dance, voodoo programming, wave a dead chicken.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: Wizard Book DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Hal Abelson, Jerry Sussman and Julie Sussman; MIT Press, 1984, 1996; ISBN 0-262-01153-0), an excellent computer science text used in introductory courses at MIT. So called because of the wizard on the jacket. One of the bibles of the LISP/Scheme world. Also, less commonly, known as the Purple Book. Now available on the http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wizard hat DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:51 AM ----- BODY: n.
[also, after Terry Pratchett, pointy
hat] Notional headgear worn by whoever is the
wizard in a particular context. The implication is
that it's a transferable role. Talk to Alice, she's wearing the
TCP/IP wizard hat while Bob is on vacation.
This metaphor is
sufficiently live that one may actually see hackers miming the act of
putting on, taking off, or transferring a phantom hat. See also
pointy hat, compare
patch pumpkin.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wizard mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:50 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from rogue] A special access mode of a program or system, usually passworded, that permits some users godlike privileges. Generally not used for operating systems themselves (root mode or wheel mode would be used instead). This term is often used with respect to games that have editable state.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wizardly DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:49 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Pertaining to wizards. A wizardly feature is one that only a wizard could understand or use properly.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wok-on-the-wall DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:48 AM ----- BODY: n.
A small microwave dish antenna used for cross-campus private network circuits, from the obvious resemblance between a microwave dish and the Chinese culinary utensil.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: womb box DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:47 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [TMRC] Storage space for equipment.
2. [proposed] A variety of hard-shell equipment case with heavy interior padding and/or shaped carrier cutouts in a foam-rubber matrix; mundanely called a flight case. Used for delicate test equipment, electronics, and musical instruments.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: WOMBAT DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:46 AM ----- BODY: /wom´bat/ adj.
[acronym: Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time] Applied to problems which are both profoundly uninteresting in themselves and unlikely to benefit anyone interesting even if solved. Often used in fanciful constructions such as wrestling with a wombat. See also crawling horror, SMOP. Also note the rather different usage as a metasyntactic variable in Commonwealth Hackish.
Users of the PDP-11 database program
DATATRIEVE adopted the wombat as their notional mascot; the program's help
file responded to HELP WOMBAT
with factual information about
Real World wombats.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: womble DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:45 AM ----- BODY: n.
[Unisys UK: from British puppet-show characters] A user who has great difficulty in communicating their requirements and/or in using the resulting software. Extreme case of luser. An especially senior or high-ranking womble is referred to as Great-Uncle Bulgaria. Compare Aunt Tillie.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wonky DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:44 AM ----- BODY: /wong´kee/ adj.
[from Australian slang] Yet another approximate synonym for
broken. Specifically connotes a malfunction that
produces behavior seen as crazy, humorous, or amusingly perverse.
That was the day the printer's font logic went wonky and everybody's
listings came out in Tengwar.
Also in wonked out. See funky,
demented, bozotic.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: workaround DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:43 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. A temporary kluge used to bypass, mask, or
otherwise avoid a bug or
misfeature in some system. Theoretically,
workarounds are always replaced by fixes; in
practice, customers often find themselves living with workarounds for long
periods of time. The code died on NUL characters in the input, so I
fixed it to interpret them as spaces.
That's not a fix,
that's a workaround!
2. A procedure to be employed by the user in order to do what some
currently non-working feature should do. Hypothetical example:
Using META-F7 crashes the 4.43 build of
Weemax, but as a workaround you can type CTRL-R, then SHIFT-F5, and delete
the remaining cruft by hand.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: working as designed DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:42 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[IBM]
1. In conformance to a wrong or inappropriate specification; useful, but misdesigned.
2. Frequently used as a sardonic comment on a program's utility.
3. Unfortunately also used as a bogus reason for not accepting a criticism or suggestion. At IBM, this sense is used in official documents! See BAD.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: worm DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:41 AM ----- BODY: n.
[from tapeworm in John Brunner's novel The Shockwave Rider, via XEROX PARC] A program that propagates itself over a network, reproducing itself as it goes. Compare virus. Nowadays the term has negative connotations, as it is assumed that only crackers write worms. Perhaps the best-known example was Robert T. Morris's Great Worm of 1988, a ‘benign’ one that got out of control and hogged hundreds of Suns and VAXen across the U.S. See also cracker, RTM, Trojan horse, ice.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wormhole DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:40 AM ----- BODY: /werm´hohl/ n.
[from the wormhole singularities hypothesized in some versions of General Relativity theory]
1. [n.,obs.] A location in a monitor which contains the address of a routine, with the specific intent of making it easy to substitute a different routine. This term is now obsolescent; modern operating systems use clusters of wormholes extensively (for modularization of I/O handling in particular, as in the Unix device-driver organization) but the preferred techspeak for these clusters is ‘device tables’, ‘jump tables’ or ‘capability tables’.
2. [Amateur Packet Radio] A network path using a commercial satellite link to join two or more amateur VHF networks. So called because traffic routed through a wormhole leaves and re-enters the amateur network over great distances with usually little clue in the message routing header as to how it got from one relay to the other. Compare gopher hole (sense 2).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wound around the axle DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:39 AM ----- BODY: adj.
In an infinite loop. Often used by older computer types.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wrap around DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:38 AM ----- BODY: vi.
(also n. wraparound and v. shorthand wrap)
1. [techspeak] The action of a counter that starts over at zero or at minus infinity (see infinity) after its maximum value has been reached, and continues incrementing, either because it is programmed to do so or because of an overflow (as when a car's odometer starts over at 0).
2. To change phase gradually and continuously by maintaining a steady wake-sleep cycle somewhat longer than 24 hours, e.g., living six long (28-hour) days in a week (or, equivalently, sleeping at the rate of 10 microhertz). This sense is also called phase-wrapping.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: write-only code DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:37 AM ----- BODY: n.
[a play on read-only memory] Code so arcane, complex, or ill-structured that it cannot be modified or even comprehended by anyone but its author, and possibly not even by him/her. A Bad Thing.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: write-only language DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:36 AM ----- BODY: n.
A language with syntax (or semantics) sufficiently dense and bizarre that any routine of significant size is automatically write-only code. A sobriquet applied occasionally to C and often to APL, though INTERCAL and TECO certainly deserve it more. See also Befunge.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: write-only memory DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:35 AM ----- BODY: n.
The obvious antonym to read-only
memory. Out of frustration with the long and seemingly useless
chain of approvals required of component specifications, during which no
actual checking seemed to occur, an engineer at Signetics once created a
specification for a write-only memory and included it with a bunch of other
specifications to be approved. This inclusion came to the attention of
Signetics management only when regular customers
started calling and asking for pricing information. Signetics published a
corrected edition of the data book and requested the return of the
‘erroneous’ ones. Later, in 1972, Signetics bought a
double-page spread in Electronics magazine's April
issue and used the spec as an April Fools' Day joke. Instead of the more
conventional characteristic curves, the 25120 fully encoded, 9046 x
N, Random Access, write-only-memory
data sheet included diagrams of
bit capacity vs.: Temp.
, Iff vs. Vff
,
Number of pins remaining vs.: number of socket insertions
,
and AQL vs.: selling price
. The 25120 required a 6.3 VAC
VFF supply, a +10V VCC, and VDD of 0V,
±2%.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: Wrong Thing DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:34 AM ----- BODY: n.
A design, action, or decision that is clearly incorrect or
inappropriate. Often capitalized; always emphasized in speech as if
capitalized. The opposite of the Right Thing; more
generally, anything that is not the Right Thing. In cases where ‘the
good is the enemy of the best’, the merely good — although good
— is nevertheless the Wrong Thing. In C, the default is for
module-level declarations to be visible everywhere, rather than just within
the module. This is clearly the Wrong Thing.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wugga wugga DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:33 AM ----- BODY: /wuh´g@ wuh´g@/ n.
Imaginary sound that a computer program makes as it labors with a tedious or difficult task.grind (sense 4).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: wumpus DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:32 AM ----- BODY: /wuhm´p@s/ n.
The central monster (and, in many versions, the name) of a famous family of very early computer games called Hunt The Wumpus. The original was invented in 1970 (several years before ADVENT) by Gregory Yob. The wumpus lived somewhere in a cave with the topology of an dodecahedron's edge/vertex graph (later versions supported other topologies, including an icosahedron and Möbius strip). The player started somewhere at random in the cave with five ‘crooked arrows’; these could be shot through up to three connected rooms, and would kill the wumpus on a hit (later versions introduced the wounded wumpus, which got very angry). Unfortunately for players, the movement necessary to map the maze was made hazardous not merely by the wumpus (which would eat you if you stepped on him) but also by bottomless pits and colonies of super bats that would pick you up and drop you at a random location (later versions added ‘anaerobic termites’ that ate arrows, bat migrations, and earthquakes that randomly changed pit locations).
This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like the even older Star Trek games). In this respect, as in the dungeon-like setting and its terse, amusing messages, it prefigured ADVENT and Zork and was directly ancestral to the latter (Zork acknowledged this heritage by including a super-bat colony). A C emulation of the original Basic game is available at the Retrocomputing Museum, http://www.catb.org/retro/.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: WYSIAYG DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:31 AM ----- BODY: /wiz´ee·ayg/ adj.
Describes a user interface under which What You See Is
All You Get
; an unhappy variant of
WYSIWYG. Visual,
‘point-and-shoot’-style interfaces tend to have easy initial
learning curves, but also to lack depth; they often frustrate advanced
users who would be better served by a command-style interface. When this
happens, the frustrated user has a WYSIAYG problem. This term is most
often used of editors, word processors, and document formatting programs.
WYSIWYG ‘desktop publishing’ programs, for example, are a clear
win for creating small documents with lots of fonts and graphics in them,
especially things like newsletters and presentation slides. When
typesetting book-length manuscripts, on the other hand, scale changes the
nature of the task; one quickly runs into WYSIAYG limitations, and the
increased power and flexibility of a command-driven formatter like
TeX or Unix's troff becomes
not just desirable but a necessity. Compare
YAFIYGI.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - W TITLE: WYSIWYG DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:30 AM ----- BODY: /wiz´ee·wig/ or /wiss´ee·wig/ adj.
[Traced to Flip Wilson's Geraldine
character c.1970]
Describes a user interface under which What You See Is What You
Get
, as opposed to one that uses more-or-less obscure commands that
do not result in immediate visual feedback. True WYSIWYG in environments
supporting multiple fonts or graphics is a rarely-attained ideal; there are
variants of this term to express real-world manifestations including
WYSIAWYG (What You See Is Almost What You Get) and
WYSIMOLWYG (What You See Is More or Less What You Get). All these can be
mildly derogatory, as they are often used to refer to dumbed-down
user-friendly interfaces targeted at
non-programmers; a hacker has no fear of obscure commands (compare
WYSIAYG). On the other hand,
EMACS was one of the very first WYSIWYG editors,
replacing (actually, at first overlaying) the extremely obscure,
command-based TECO. See also
WIMP environment. [Oddly enough, WYSIWYG made it into the 1986
supplement to the OED, in lower case yet. —ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - X TITLE: X DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:29 AM ----- BODY: /X/ n.
1. Used in various speech and writing contexts (also in lowercase) in roughly its algebraic sense of ‘unknown within a set defined by context’ (compare N). Thus, the abbreviation 680x0 stands for 68000, 68010, 68020, 68030, or 68040, and 80x86 stands for 80186, 80286, 80386, 80486, 80586 or 80686 (note that a Unix hacker might write these as 680[0-6]0 and 80[1-6]86 or 680?0 and 80?86 respectively; see glob).
2. [after the name of an earlier window system called ‘W’] An over-sized, over-featured, over-engineered and incredibly over-complicated window system developed at MIT and widely used on Unix systems.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - X TITLE: XEROX PARC DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:28 AM ----- BODY: /zee´roks park´/ n.
The famed Palo Alto Research Center. For more than a decade, from the early 1970s into the mid-1980s, PARC yielded an astonishing volume of groundbreaking hardware and software innovations. The modern mice, windows, and icons style of software interface was invented there. So was the laser printer and the local-area network; and PARC's series of D machines anticipated the powerful personal computers of the 1980s by a decade. Sadly, the prophets at PARC were without honor in their own company, so much so that it became a standard joke to describe PARC as a place that specialized in developing brilliant ideas for everyone else.
The stunning shortsightedness and obtusity of XEROX's top-level suits has been well anatomized in Fumbling The Future: How XEROX Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander (William Morrow & Co., 1988, ISBN 0-688-09511-9).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - X TITLE: XOFF DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:27 AM ----- BODY: /X·of/ n.
Syn. control-S.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - X TITLE: XON DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:26 AM ----- BODY: /X·on/ n.
Syn. control-Q.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - X TITLE: xor DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:25 AM ----- BODY: /X´or/, /kzor/ conj.
Exclusive or. ‘A xor B’ means ‘A or B, but not
both’. I want to get cherry pie xor a banana split.
This derives from the technical use of the term as a function on
truth-values that is true if exactly one of its two arguments is
true.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - X TITLE: xref DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:24 AM ----- BODY: /X´ref/ v.,n.
Hackish standard abbreviation for cross-reference.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - X TITLE: XXX DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:23 AM ----- BODY: /X·X·X/ n.
A marker that attention is needed. Commonly used in program comments to indicate areas that are kluged up or need to be. Some hackers liken ‘XXX’ to the notional heavy-porn movie rating. Compare FIXME.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - X TITLE: xyzzy DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:22 AM ----- BODY: /X·Y·Z·Z·Y/, /X·Y·ziz´ee/, /ziz´ee/, or /ik·ziz´ee/ adj.
[from the ADVENT game] The canonical
‘magic word’. This comes from ADVENT,
in which the idea is to explore an underground cave with many rooms and to
collect the treasures you find there. If you type xyzzy at the appropriate time, you can move
instantly between two otherwise distant points. If, therefore, you
encounter some bit of magic, you might remark on
this quite succinctly by saying simply Xyzzy!
Ordinarily you can't look at someone else's screen if he has
protected it, but if you type quadruple-bucky-clear the system will let you
do it anyway.
Xyzzy!
It's traditional for xyzzy to
be an Easter egg in games with text
interfaces.
Xyzzy has actually been implemented as an undocumented no-op command
on several OSes; in Data General's AOS/VS, for example, it would typically
respond Nothing happens
, just as
ADVENT did if the magic was invoked at the wrong
spot or before a player had performed the action that enabled the word. In
more recent 32-bit versions, by the way, AOS/VS responds Twice as
much happens
.
Early versions of the popular ‘minesweeper’ game under Microsoft Windows had a cheat mode triggered by the command ‘xyzzy<enter><right-shift>’ that turns the top-left pixel of the screen different colors depending on whether or not the cursor is over a bomb. This feature temporarily disappeared in Windows 98, but reappeared in Windows 2000.
The following passage from The Wonderful Wizard of
Oz by L. Frank Baum, suggesting a possible pre-ADVENT origin,
has recently come to light: Ziz-zy, zuz-zy, zik!
said
Dorothy, who was now standing on both feet. This ended the saying of the
charm, and they heard a great chattering and flapping of wings, as the band
of Winged Monkeys flew up to them.
The text can be viewed at Project Gutenberg.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Y TITLE: YA- DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:21 AM ----- BODY: abbrev.
[Yet Another] In hackish acronyms this almost invariably expands to Yet Another, following the precedent set by Unix yacc1 (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler). See YABA.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Y TITLE: YABA DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:20 AM ----- BODY: /ya´b@/ n.
[Cambridge] Yet Another Bloody Acronym. Whenever some program is
being named, someone invariably suggests that it be given a name that is
acronymic. The response from those with a trace of originality is to
remark ironically that the proposed name would then be
‘YABA-compatible’. Also used in response to questions like
What is WYSIWYG?
See also TLA.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Y TITLE: YAFIYGI DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:19 AM ----- BODY: /yaf´ee·y@·gee/ adj.
[coined in response to WYSIWYG] Describes the command-oriented
ed/vi/nroff/TeX style of word processing or other user interface, the
opposite of WYSIWYG. Stands for You asked
for it, you got it
, because what you actually asked for is often
not apparent until long after it is too late to do anything about it. Used
to denote perversity (Real Programmers use YAFIYGI
tools...and like it!
) or, less often, a
necessary tradeoff (Only a YAFIYGI tool can have full programmable
flexibility in its interface.
).
This precise sense of You asked for it, you got it
seems to have first appeared in Ed Post's classic parody Real
Programmers don't use Pascal (see
Real Programmers); the acronym is a more recent invention.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Y TITLE: yak shaving DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:18 AM ----- BODY:
[MIT AI Lab, after 2000: orig. probably from a Ren & Stimpy episode.] Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you're working on.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Y TITLE: YAUN DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:17 AM ----- BODY: /yawn/ n.
[Acronym for ‘Yet Another Unix Nerd’] Reported from the San Diego Computer Society (predominantly a microcomputer users' group) as a good-natured punning insult aimed at Unix zealots.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Y TITLE: yellow card DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:16 AM ----- BODY: n.
See green card.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Y TITLE: yellow wire DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:15 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] Repair wires used when connectors (especially ribbon connectors) got broken due to some schlemiel pinching them, or to reconnect cut traces after the FE mistakenly cut one. Compare blue wire, purple wire, red wire.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Y TITLE: Yet Another DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:14 AM ----- BODY: adj.
[From Unix's yacc1, ‘Yet Another Compiler-Compiler’, a LALR parser generator]
1. Of your own work: A humorous allusion often used in titles to acknowledge that the topic is not original, though the content is. As in ‘Yet Another AI Group’ or ‘Yet Another Simulated Annealing Algorithm’.
2. Of others' work: Describes something of which there are already far too many. See also YA-, YABA, YAUN.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Y TITLE: YHBT DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:13 AM ----- BODY:
[Usenet: very common] Abbreviation: You Have Been Trolled (see
troll, sense 1). Especially used in YHBT.
YHL. HAND.
, which is widely understood to expand to You
Have Been Trolled. You Have Lost. Have A Nice Day
. You are quite
likely to see this if you respond incautiously to a flame-provoking post
that was obviously floated as sucker bait.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Y TITLE: YKYBHTLW DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:12 AM ----- BODY: abbrev.
Abbreviation of ‘You know you've been hacking too long when...’, which became established on the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers during extended discussion of the indicated entry in the Jargon File.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Y TITLE: YMMV DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:11 AM ----- BODY: cav.
Abbreviation for Your mileage may vary common on Usenet.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Y TITLE: You are not expected to understand this DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:10 AM ----- BODY: cav.
[Unix] The canonical comment describing something magic or too complicated to bother explaining properly. From an infamous comment in the context-switching code of the V6 Unix kernel. Dennis Ritchie has explained this in detail.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Y TITLE: You know you've been hacking too long when DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:09 AM ----- BODY:
The set-up line for a genre of one-liners told by hackers about themselves. These include the following:
not only do you check your email more often than your paper mail, but you remember your network address faster than your postal one.
your SO kisses you on the neck and the first thing
you think is Uh, oh,
priority interrupt.
you go to balance your checkbook and discover that you're doing it in octal.
your computers have a higher street value than your car.
in your universe, ‘round numbers’ are powers of 2, not 10.
more than once, you have woken up recalling a dream in some programming language.
you see the word Oxford
and mentally trip over
the fact that ‘r’ is not a hex digit.
you realize you have never seen half of your best friends.
A list of these can be found by searching for this phrase on the web.
[An early version of this entry said All but one of these have
been reliably reported as hacker traits (some of them quite often). Even
hackers may have trouble spotting the ringer.
The ringer was
balancing one's checkbook in octal, which I made up out of whole cloth.
Although more respondents picked that one out as fiction than any of the
others, I also received multiple independent reports of its actually
happening, most famously to Grace Hopper while she was working with BINAC
in 1949. —ESR]
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Y TITLE: Your mileage may vary DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:08 AM ----- BODY: cav.
[from the standard disclaimer attached to EPA mileage ratings by American car manufacturers]
1. A ritual warning often found in Unix freeware distributions.
Translates roughly as Hey, I tried to write this portably, but who
knows what'll happen on your system?
2. More generally, a qualifier attached to advice. I find
that sending flowers works well, but your mileage may vary.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Y TITLE: Yow! DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:07 AM ----- BODY: /yow/ interj.
[from Zippy the Pinhead
comix] A favored hacker
expression of humorous surprise or emphasis. Yow! Check out what
happens when you twiddle the foo option on this display
hack!
.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Y TITLE: yoyo mode DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:06 AM ----- BODY: n.
The state in which the system is said to be when it rapidly alternates several times between being up and being down. Interestingly (and perhaps not by coincidence), many hardware vendors give out free yoyos at Usenix exhibits.
Sun Microsystems gave out logoized yoyos at SIGPLAN '88. Tourists staying at one of Atlanta's most respectable hotels were subsequently treated to the sight of 200 of the country's top computer scientists testing yo-yo algorithms in the lobby.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Y TITLE: Yu-Shiang Whole Fish DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:05 AM ----- BODY: /yoo·shyang hohl fish/ n. obs.
The character gamma (extended SAIL ASCII 0001001), which with a loop in its tail looks like a little fish swimming down the page. The term is actually the name of a Chinese dish in which a fish is cooked whole (not parsed) and covered with Yu-Shiang (or Yu-Hsiang) sauce. Usage: primarily by people on the MIT LISP Machine, which could display this character on the screen. Tends to elicit incredulity from people who hear about it second-hand.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Z TITLE: zap DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:04 AM ----- BODY:
1. n. Spiciness.
2. vt. To make food spicy.
3. vt. To make someone ‘suffer’ by making his food spicy. (Most hackers love spicy food. Hot-and-sour soup is considered wimpy unless it makes you wipe your nose for the rest of the meal.) See zapped.
4. vt. To modify, usually to
correct; esp. used when the action is performed with a debugger or binary
patching tool. Also implies surgical precision. Zap the debug
level to 6 and run it again.
In the IBM mainframe world, binary
patches are applied to programs or to the OS with a program called
‘superzap’, whose file name is ‘IMASPZAP’ (possibly
contrived from I M A SuPerZAP).
5. vt. To erase or reset.
6. To fry a chip with static electricity.
Uh oh — I think that lightning strike may have zapped the disk
controller.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Z TITLE: zapped DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:03 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Spicy. This term is used to distinguish between food that is hot (in temperature) and food that is spicy-hot. For example, the Chinese appetizer Bon Bon Chicken is a kind of chicken salad that is cold but zapped; by contrast, vanilla wonton soup is hot but not zapped. See also oriental food, laser chicken. See zap, senses 1 and 2.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Z TITLE: Zawinski's Law DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:02 AM ----- BODY:
Every program attempts to expand until it can read
mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which
can.
Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the Law of
Software Envelopment
) to express his belief that all truly useful
programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and application
platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a side effect of that). It
is commonly cited, though with widely varying degrees of accuracy.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Z TITLE: zbeba DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:01 AM ----- BODY: n.
[USENET] The word ‘moron’ in rot13. Used to describe newbies who are behaving with especial cluelessness.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Z TITLE: zen DATE: 05/15/2003 10:22:00 AM ----- BODY: vt.
To figure out something by meditation or by a sudden flash of
enlightenment. Originally applied to bugs, but occasionally applied to
problems of life in general. How'd you figure out the buffer
allocation problem?
Oh, I zenned it.
Contrast
grok, which connotes a time-extended version of
zenning a system. Compare hack mode. See also
guru.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Z TITLE: zero DATE: 05/15/2003 10:21:59 AM ----- BODY: vt.
1. To set to 0. Usually said of small pieces of data, such as bits or words (esp. in the construction zero out).
2. To erase; to discard all data from. Said of disks and directories, where ‘zeroing’ need not involve actually writing zeroes throughout the area being zeroed. One may speak of something being logically zeroed rather than being physically zeroed. See scribble.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Z TITLE: zero-content DATE: 05/15/2003 10:21:58 AM ----- BODY: adj.
Syn. content-free.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Z TITLE: Zero-One-Infinity Rule DATE: 05/15/2003 10:21:57 AM ----- BODY: prov.
Allow none of foo, one of
foo, or any number of
foo.
A rule of thumb for software design,
which instructs one to not place random limits on
the number of instances of a given entity (such as: windows in a window
system, letters in an OS's filenames, etc.). Specifically, one should
either disallow the entity entirely, allow exactly one instance (an
exception
), or allow as many as the user wants —
address space and memory permitting.
The logic behind this rule is that there are often situations where it makes clear sense to allow one of something instead of none. However, if one decides to go further and allow N (for N > 1), then why not N+1? And if N+1, then why not N+2, and so on? Once above 1, there's no excuse not to allow any N; hence, infinity.
Many hackers recall in this connection Isaac Asimov's SF novel The Gods Themselves in which a character announces that the number 2 is impossible — if you're going to believe in more than one universe, you might as well believe in an infinite number of them.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Z TITLE: zeroth DATE: 05/15/2003 10:21:56 AM ----- BODY: /zee´rohth/ adj.
First. Among software designers, comes from C's and LISP's 0-based indexing of arrays. Hardware people also tend to start counting at 0 instead of 1; this is natural since, e.g., the 256 states of 8 bits correspond to the binary numbers 0, 1, ..., 255 and the digital devices known as counters count in this way.
Hackers and computer scientists often like to call the first chapter of a publication ‘Chapter 0’, especially if it is of an introductory nature (one of the classic instances was in the First Edition of K&R). In recent years this trait has also been observed among many pure mathematicians (who have an independent tradition of numbering from 0). Zero-based numbering tends to reduce fencepost errors, though it cannot eliminate them entirely.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Z TITLE: zigamorph DATE: 05/15/2003 10:21:55 AM ----- BODY: /zig'@·morf/ n.
1. Hex FF (11111111) when used as a delimiter or fence character. Usage: primarily at IBM shops.
2. [proposed] n. The Unicode non-character U+FFFF (1111111111111111), a character code which is not assigned to any character, and so is usable as end-of-string. (Unicode is a 16-bit character code intended to cover all of the world's writing systems, including Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese, hiragana, katakana, Devanagari, Thai, Laotian and many other scripts — support for elvish is planned for a future release).
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Z TITLE: zip DATE: 05/15/2003 10:21:54 AM ----- BODY: vt.
[primarily MS-DOS/Windows] To create a compressed archive from a
group of files using PKWare's PKZIP or a compatible archiver. Its use is
spreading now that portable implementations of the algorithm have been
written. Commonly used as follows: I'll zip it up and send it to
you.
See tar and feather.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Z TITLE: zipperhead DATE: 05/15/2003 10:21:53 AM ----- BODY: n.
[IBM] A person with a closed mind.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Z TITLE: zombie DATE: 05/15/2003 10:21:52 AM ----- BODY: n.
1. [Unix] A process that has died but has not yet relinquished its process table slot (because the parent process hasn't executed a wait2 for it yet). These can be seen in ps1 listings occasionally. Compare orphan.
2. A machine, especially someone's home box, that has been cracked and is being used as part of a second-stage attack by miscreants trying to mask their home IP address. Especially used of machines being exploited in large gangs for a mechanized denial-of-service attack like Tribe Flood Network; the image that goes with this is of a veritable army of zombies mindlessly doing the bidding of a necromancer.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Z TITLE: zorch DATE: 05/15/2003 10:21:51 AM ----- BODY: /zorch/
1. [TMRC] v. To attack with an inverse heat sink.
2. [TMRC] v. To travel, with v approaching c [that is, with velocity approaching lightspeed —ESR].
3. [MIT] v. To propel something
very quickly. The new comm software is very fast; it really zorches
files through the network.
4. [MIT] n. Influence. Brownie
points. Good karma. The intangible and fuzzy currency in which favors are
measured. I'd rather not ask him for that just yet; I think I've
used up my quota of zorch with him for the week.
5. [MIT] n. Energy, drive, or
ability. I think I'll punt that change for
now; I've been up for 30 hours and I've run out of zorch.
6. [MIT] v. To flunk an exam or course.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Z TITLE: Zork DATE: 05/15/2003 10:21:50 AM ----- BODY: /zork/ n.
The second of the great early experiments in computer fantasy
gaming; see ADVENT. Originally written on MIT-DM
during 1977-1979, later distributed with BSD Unix (as a patched, sourceless
RT-11 FORTRAN binary; see retrocomputing) and
commercialized as ‘The Zork Trilogy’ by
Infocom. The FORTRAN source was later rewritten for
portability and released to Usenet under the name Dungeon
.
Both FORTRAN Dungeon
and translated C versions are available
at many FTP sites; the commercial Zork trilogy is available at http://www.ifarchive.org/. See
also grue. You can play Zork via a Java
Applet.
-------- AUTHOR: Jargon File CATEGORY: Lexicon - Z TITLE: zorkmid DATE: 05/15/2003 10:21:49 AM ----- BODY: /zork´mid/ n.
The canonical unit of currency in hacker-written games. This originated in Zork but has spread to nethack and is referred to in several other games.
--------