#======= THIS IS THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 4.0.0, 24 JUL 1996 =======#
This is the Jargon File, a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang
illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor.
This document (the Jargon File) is in the public domain, to be freely
used, shared, and modified. There are (by intention) no legal
restraints on what you can do with it, but there are traditions about
its proper use to which many hackers are quite strongly attached.
Please extend the courtesy of proper citation when you quote the File,
ideally with a version number, as it will change and grow over time.
(Examples of appropriate citation form: "Jargon File 4.0.0" or "The
on-line hacker Jargon File, version 4.0.0, 24 JUL 1996".)
The Jargon File is a common heritage of the hacker culture. Over the
years a number of individuals have volunteered considerable time to
maintaining the File and been recognized by the net at large as
editors of it. Editorial responsibilities include: to collate
contributions and suggestions from others; to seek out corroborating
information; to cross-reference related entries; to keep the file in a
consistent format; and to announce and distribute updated versions
periodically. Current volunteer editors include:
Eric Raymond
[email protected]
Although there is no requirement that you do so, it is considered good
form to check with an editor before quoting the File in a published
work or commercial product. We may have additional information that
would be helpful to you and can assist you in framing your quote to
reflect not only the letter of the File but its spirit as well.
All contributions and suggestions about this file sent to a volunteer
editor are gratefully received and will be regarded, unless otherwise
labelled, as freely given donations for possible use as part of this
public-domain file.
From time to time a snapshot of this file has been polished, edited,
and formatted for commercial publication with the cooperation of the
volunteer editors and the hacker community at large. If you wish to
have a bound paper copy of this file, you may find it convenient to
purchase one of these. They often contain additional material not
found in on-line versions. The two `authorized' editions so far are
described in the Revision History section; there may be more in the
future.
:Introduction:
**************
This document is a collection of slang terms used by various
subcultures of computer hackers. Though some technical material is
included for background and flavor, it is not a technical dictionary;
what we describe here is the language hackers use among themselves for
fun, social communication, and technical debate.
The `hacker culture' is actually a loosely networked collection of
subcultures that is nevertheless conscious of some important shared
experiences, shared roots, and shared values. It has its own myths,
heroes, villains, folk epics, in-jokes, taboos, and dreams. Because
hackers as a group are particularly creative people who define
themselves partly by rejection of `normal' values and working habits,
it has unusually rich and conscious traditions for an intentional
culture less than 40 years old.
As usual with slang, the special vocabulary of hackers helps hold
their culture together -- it helps hackers recognize each other's
places in the community and expresses shared values and experiences.
Also as usual, *not* knowing the slang (or using it inappropriately)
defines one as an outsider, a mundane, or (worst of all in hackish
vocabulary) possibly even a {suit}. All human cultures use slang in
this threefold way -- as a tool of communication, and of inclusion,
and of exclusion.
Among hackers, though, slang has a subtler aspect, paralleled perhaps
in the slang of jazz musicians and some kinds of fine artists but hard
to detect in most technical or scientific cultures; parts of it are
code for shared states of *consciousness*. There is a whole range of
altered states and problem-solving mental stances basic to high-level
hacking which don't fit into conventional linguistic reality any
better than a Coltrane solo or one of Maurits Escher's `trompe l'oeil'
compositions (Escher is a favorite of hackers), and hacker slang
encodes these subtleties in many unobvious ways. As a simple example,
take the distinction between a {kluge} and an {elegant} solution, and
the differing connotations attached to each. The distinction is not
only of engineering significance; it reaches right back into the
nature of the generative processes in program design and asserts
something important about two different kinds of relationship between
the hacker and the hack. Hacker slang is unusually rich in
implications of this kind, of overtones and undertones that illuminate
the hackish psyche.
But there is more. Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay and are very
conscious and inventive in their use of language. These traits seem
to be common in young children, but the conformity-enforcing machine
we are pleased to call an educational system bludgeons them out of
most of us before adolescence. Thus, linguistic invention in most
subcultures of the modern West is a halting and largely unconscious
process. Hackers, by contrast, regard slang formation and use as a
game to be played for conscious pleasure. Their inventions thus
display an almost unique combination of the neotenous enjoyment of
language-play with the discrimination of educated and powerful
intelligence. Further, the electronic media which knit them together
are fluid, `hot' connections, well adapted to both the dissemination
of new slang and the ruthless culling of weak and superannuated
specimens. The results of this process give us perhaps a uniquely
intense and accelerated view of linguistic evolution in action.
Hacker slang also challenges some common linguistic and
anthropological assumptions. For example, it has recently become
fashionable to speak of `low-context' versus `high-context'
communication, and to classify cultures by the preferred context level
of their languages and art forms. It is usually claimed that
low-context communication (characterized by precision, clarity, and
completeness of self-contained utterances) is typical in cultures
which value logic, objectivity, individualism, and competition; by
contrast, high-context communication (elliptical, emotive,
nuance-filled, multi-modal, heavily coded) is associated with cultures
which value subjectivity, consensus, cooperation, and tradition. What
then are we to make of hackerdom, which is themed around extremely
low-context interaction with computers and exhibits primarily
"low-context" values, but cultivates an almost absurdly high-context
slang style?
The intensity and consciousness of hackish invention make a
compilation of hacker slang a particularly effective window into the
surrounding culture -- and, in fact, this one is the latest version of
an evolving compilation called the `Jargon File', maintained by
hackers themselves for over 15 years. This one (like its ancestors)
is primarily a lexicon, but also includes topic entries which collect
background or sidelight information on hacker culture that would be
awkward to try to subsume under individual slang definitions.
Though the format is that of a reference volume, it is intended that
the material be enjoyable to browse. Even a complete outsider should
find at least a chuckle on nearly every page, and much that is
amusingly thought-provoking. But it is also true that hackers use
humorous wordplay to make strong, sometimes combative statements about
what they feel. Some of these entries reflect the views of opposing
sides in disputes that have been genuinely passionate; this is
deliberate. We have not tried to moderate or pretty up these
disputes; rather we have attempted to ensure that *everyone's* sacred
cows get gored, impartially. Compromise is not particularly a hackish
virtue, but the honest presentation of divergent viewpoints is.
The reader with minimal computer background who finds some references
incomprehensibly technical can safely ignore them. We have not felt
it either necessary or desirable to eliminate all such; they, too,
contribute flavor, and one of this document's major intended audiences
--- fledgling hackers already partway inside the culture -- will benefit
from them.
A selection of longer items of hacker folklore and humor is included
in Appendix A, {Hacker Folklore}. The `outside' reader's attention is
particularly directed to Appendix B, {A Portrait of J. Random Hacker}.
Appendix C, the {Bibliography}, lists some non-technical works which
have either influenced or described the hacker culture.
Because hackerdom is an intentional culture (one each individual must
choose by action to join), one should not be surprised that the line
between description and influence can become more than a little
blurred. Earlier versions of the Jargon File have played a central
role in spreading hacker language and the culture that goes with it to
successively larger populations, and we hope and expect that this one
will do likewise.
:Of Slang, Jargon, and Techspeak:
=================================
Linguists usually refer to informal language as `slang' and reserve
the term `jargon' for the technical vocabularies of various
occupations. However, the ancestor of this collection was called the
`Jargon File', and hacker slang is traditionally `the jargon'. When
talking about the jargon there is therefore no convenient way to
distinguish it from what a *linguist* would call hackers' jargon
--- the formal vocabulary they learn from textbooks, technical papers,
and manuals.
To make a confused situation worse, the line between hacker slang and
the vocabulary of technical programming and computer science is fuzzy,
and shifts over time. Further, this vocabulary is shared with a wider
technical culture of programmers, many of whom are not hackers and do
not speak or recognize hackish slang.
Accordingly, this lexicon will try to be as precise as the facts of
usage permit about the distinctions among three categories:
* `slang': informal language from mainstream English or
non-technical subcultures (bikers, rock fans, surfers, etc).
* `jargon': without qualifier, denotes informal `slangy' language
peculiar to or predominantly found among hackers -- the subject
of this lexicon.
* `techspeak': the formal technical vocabulary of programming,
computer science, electronics, and other fields connected to
hacking.
This terminology will be consistently used throughout the remainder of
this lexicon.
The jargon/techspeak distinction is the delicate one. A lot of
techspeak originated as jargon, and there is a steady continuing
uptake of jargon into techspeak. On the other hand, a lot of jargon
arises from overgeneralization of techspeak terms (there is more about
this in the {Jargon Construction} section below).
In general, we have considered techspeak any term that communicates
primarily by a denotation well established in textbooks, technical
dictionaries, or standards documents.
A few obviously techspeak terms (names of operating systems,
languages, or documents) are listed when they are tied to hacker
folklore that isn't covered in formal sources, or sometimes to convey
critical historical background necessary to understand other entries
to which they are cross-referenced. Some other techspeak senses of
jargon words are listed in order to make the jargon senses clear;
where the text does not specify that a straight technical sense is
under discussion, these are marked with `[techspeak]' as an etymology.
Some entries have a primary sense marked this way, with subsequent
jargon meanings explained in terms of it.
We have also tried to indicate (where known) the apparent origins of
terms. The results are probably the least reliable information in the
lexicon, for several reasons. For one thing, it is well known that
many hackish usages have been independently reinvented multiple times,
even among the more obscure and intricate neologisms. It often seems
that the generative processes underlying hackish jargon formation have
an internal logic so powerful as to create substantial parallelism
across separate cultures and even in different languages! For
another, the networks tend to propagate innovations so quickly that
`first use' is often impossible to pin down. And, finally, compendia
like this one alter what they observe by implicitly stamping cultural
approval on terms and widening their use.
Despite these problems, the organized collection of jargon-related
oral history for the new compilations has enabled us to put to rest
quite a number of folk etymologies, place credit where credit is due,
and illuminate the early history of many important hackerisms such as
{kluge}, {cruft}, and {foo}. We believe specialist lexicographers
will find many of the historical notes more than casually instructive.
:Revision History:
==================
The original Jargon File was a collection of hacker jargon from
technical cultures including the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI lab
(SAIL), and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities
including Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), Carnegie-Mellon University
(CMU), and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI).
The Jargon File (hereafter referred to as `jargon-1' or `the File')
was begun by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975. From this time until
the plug was finally pulled on the SAIL computer in 1991, the File was
named AIWORD.RF[UP,DOC] there. Some terms in it date back
considerably earlier ({frob} and some senses of {moby}, for instance,
go back to the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT and are believed to
date at least back to the early 1960s). The revisions of jargon-1
were all unnumbered and may be collectively considered `Version 1'.
In 1976, Mark Crispin, having seen an announcement about the File on
the SAIL computer, {FTP}ed a copy of the File to MIT. He noticed that
it was hardly restricted to `AI words' and so stored the file on his
directory as AI:MRC;SAIL JARGON.
The file was quickly renamed JARGON > (the `>' caused versioning under
ITS) as a flurry of enhancements were made by Mark Crispin and Guy L.
Steele Jr. Unfortunately, amidst all this activity, nobody thought of
correcting the term `jargon' to `slang' until the compendium had
already become widely known as the Jargon File.
Raphael Finkel dropped out of active participation shortly thereafter
and Don Woods became the SAIL contact for the File (which was
subsequently kept in duplicate at SAIL and MIT, with periodic
resynchronizations).
The File expanded by fits and starts until about 1983; Richard
Stallman was prominent among the contributors, adding many MIT and
ITS-related coinages.
In Spring 1981, a hacker named Charles Spurgeon got a large chunk of
the File published in Stewart Brand's "CoEvolution Quarterly" (issue
29, pages 26--35) with illustrations by Phil Wadler and Guy Steele
(including a couple of the Crunchly cartoons). This appears to have
been the File's first paper publication.
A late version of jargon-1, expanded with commentary for the mass
market, was edited by Guy Steele into a book published in 1983 as "The
Hacker's Dictionary" (Harper & Row CN 1082, ISBN 0-06-091082-8). The
other jargon-1 editors (Raphael Finkel, Don Woods, and Mark Crispin)
contributed to this revision, as did Richard M. Stallman and Geoff
Goodfellow. This book (now out of print) is hereafter referred to as
`Steele-1983' and those six as the Steele-1983 coauthors.
Shortly after the publication of Steele-1983, the File effectively
stopped growing and changing. Originally, this was due to a desire to
freeze the file temporarily to facilitate the production of
Steele-1983, but external conditions caused the `temporary' freeze to
become permanent.
The AI Lab culture had been hit hard in the late 1970s by funding cuts
and the resulting administrative decision to use vendor-supported
hardware and software instead of homebrew whenever possible. At MIT,
most AI work had turned to dedicated LISP Machines. At the same time,
the commercialization of AI technology lured some of the AI Lab's best
and brightest away to startups along the Route 128 strip in
Massachusetts and out West in Silicon Valley. The startups built LISP
machines for MIT; the central MIT-AI computer became a {TWENEX} system
rather than a host for the AI hackers' beloved {ITS}.
The Stanford AI Lab had effectively ceased to exist by 1980, although
the SAIL computer continued as a Computer Science Department resource
until 1991. Stanford became a major {TWENEX} site, at one point
operating more than a dozen TOPS-20 systems; but by the mid-1980s most
of the interesting software work was being done on the emerging BSD
Unix standard.
In April 1983, the PDP-10-centered cultures that had nourished the
File were dealt a death-blow by the cancellation of the Jupiter
project at Digital Equipment Corporation. The File's compilers,
already dispersed, moved on to other things. Steele-1983 was partly a
monument to what its authors thought was a dying tradition; no one
involved realized at the time just how wide its influence was to be.
By the mid-1980s the File's content was dated, but the legend that had
grown up around it never quite died out. The book, and softcopies
obtained off the ARPANET, circulated even in cultures far removed from
MIT and Stanford; the content exerted a strong and continuing
influence on hacker language and humor. Even as the advent of the
microcomputer and other trends fueled a tremendous expansion of
hackerdom, the File (and related materials such as the {AI Koans} in
Appendix A) came to be seen as a sort of sacred epic, a hacker-culture
Matter of Britain chronicling the heroic exploits of the Knights of
the Lab. The pace of change in hackerdom at large accelerated
tremendously -- but the Jargon File, having passed from living
document to icon, remained essentially untouched for seven years.
This revision contains nearly the entire text of a late version of
jargon-1 (a few obsolete PDP-10-related entries were dropped after
careful consultation with the editors of Steele-1983). It merges in
about 80% of the Steele-1983 text, omitting some framing material and
a very few entries introduced in Steele-1983 that are now also
obsolete.
This new version casts a wider net than the old Jargon File; its aim
is to cover not just AI or PDP-10 hacker culture but all the technical
computing cultures wherein the true hacker-nature is manifested. More
than half of the entries now derive from {Usenet} and represent jargon
now current in the C and Unix communities, but special efforts have
been made to collect jargon from other cultures including IBM PC
programmers, Amiga fans, Mac enthusiasts, and even the IBM mainframe
world.
Eric S. Raymond <
[email protected]> maintains the new File with
assistance from Guy L. Steele Jr. <
[email protected]>; these are the
persons primarily reflected in the File's editorial `we', though we
take pleasure in acknowledging the special contribution of the other
coauthors of Steele-1983. Please email all additions, corrections,
and correspondence relating to the Jargon File to
[email protected].
(Warning: other email addresses appear in this file *but are not
guaranteed to be correct* later than the revision date on the first
line. *Don't* email us if an attempt to reach your idol bounces
--- we have no magic way of checking addresses or looking up people.)
The 2.9.6 version became the main text of "The New Hacker's
Dictionary", by Eric Raymond (ed.), MIT Press 1991, ISBN
0-262-68069-6.
The 3.0.0 version was published in September 1993 as the second
edition of "The New Hacker's Dictionary", again from MIT Press (ISBN
0-262-18154-1).
If you want the book, you should be able to find it at any of the
major bookstore chains. Failing that, you can order by mail from
The MIT Press
55 Hayward Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
or order by phone at (800)-356-0343 or (617)-625-8481.
The maintainers are committed to updating the on-line version of the
Jargon File through and beyond paper publication, and will continue to
make it available to archives and public-access sites as a trust of
the hacker community.
Here is a chronology of the high points in the recent on-line
revisions:
Version 2.1.1, Jun 12 1990: the Jargon File comes alive again after a
seven-year hiatus. Reorganization and massive additions were by Eric
S. Raymond, approved by Guy Steele. Many items of UNIX, C, USENET,
and microcomputer-based jargon were added at that time.
Version 2.9.6, Aug 16 1991: corresponds to reproduction copy for book.
This version had 18952 lines, 148629 words, 975551 characters, and
1702 entries.
Version 2.9.8, Jan 01 1992: first public release since the book,
including over fifty new entries and numerous corrections/additions to
old ones. Packaged with version 1.1 of vh(1) hypertext reader. This
version had 19509 lines, 153108 words, 1006023 characters, and 1760
entries.
Version 2.9.9, Apr 01 1992: folded in XEROX PARC lexicon. This
version had 20298 lines, 159651 words, 1048909 characters, and 1821
entries.
Version 2.9.10, Jul 01 1992: lots of new historical material. This
version had 21349 lines, 168330 words, 1106991 characters, and 1891
entries.
Version 2.9.11, Jan 01 1993: lots of new historical material. This
version had 21725 lines, 171169 words, 1125880 characters, and 1922
entries.
Version 2.9.12, May 10 1993: a few new entries & changes, marginal
MUD/IRC slang and some borderline techspeak removed, all in
preparation for 2nd Edition of TNHD. This version had 22238 lines,
175114 words, 1152467 characters, and 1946 entries.
Version 3.0.0, Jul 27 1993: manuscript freeze for 2nd edition of TNHD.
This version had 22548 lines, 177520 words, 1169372 characters, and
1961 entries.
Version 3.1.0, Oct 15 1994: interim release to test WWW conversion.
This version had 23197 lines, 181001 words, 1193818 characters, and
1990 entries.
Version 3.2.0, Mar 15 1995: Spring 1995 update. This version had
23822 lines, 185961 words, 1226358 characters, and 2031 entries.
Version 3.3.0, Jan 20 1996: Winter 1996 update. This version had
24055 lines, 187957 words, 1239604 characters, and 2045 entries.
Version 3.3.1, Jan 25 1996: Copy-corrected improvement on 3.3.0
shipped to MIT Press as a step towards TNHD III. This version had
24147 lines, 188728 words, 1244554 characters, and 2050 entries.
Version 3.3.2, Mar 20 1996: A number of new entries pursuant on 3.3.2.
This version had 24442 lines, 190867 words, 1262468 characters, and
2061 entries.
Version 3.3.3, Mar 25 1996: Cleanup before TNHD III manuscript freeze.
This version had 24584 lines, 191932 words, 1269996 characters, and
2064 entries.
Version 4.0.0, Jul 25 1996: The actual TNHD III version after
copy-edit. This version had 24801 lines, 193697 words, 1281402
characters, and 2067 entries.
Version numbering: Version numbers should be read as
major.minor.revision. Major version 1 is reserved for the `old' (ITS)
Jargon File, jargon-1. Major version 2 encompasses revisions by ESR
(Eric S. Raymond) with assistance from GLS (Guy L. Steele, Jr.)
leading up to and including the second paper edition. From now on,
major version number N.00 will probably correspond to the Nth paper
edition. Usually later versions will either completely supersede or
incorporate earlier versions, so there is generally no point in
keeping old versions around.
Our thanks to the coauthors of Steele-1983 for oversight and
assistance, and to the hundreds of Usenetters (too many to name here)
who contributed entries and encouragement. More thanks go to several
of the old-timers on the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers, who
contributed much useful commentary and many corrections and valuable
historical perspective: Joseph M. Newcomer <
[email protected]>,
Bernie Cosell <
[email protected]>, Earl Boebert <
[email protected]>, and
Joe Morris <
[email protected]>.
We were fortunate enough to have the aid of some accomplished
linguists. David Stampe <
[email protected]> and Charles Hoequist
<
[email protected]> contributed valuable criticism; Joe Keane
<
[email protected]> helped us improve the pronunciation guides.
A few bits of this text quote previous works. We are indebted to
Brian A. LaMacchia <
[email protected]> for obtaining permission
for us to use material from the "TMRC Dictionary"; also, Don Libes
<
[email protected]> contributed some appropriate material from his
excellent book "Life With UNIX". We thank Per Lindberg
<
[email protected]>, author of the remarkable Swedish-language 'zine
"Hackerbladet", for bringing "FOO!" comics to our attention and
smuggling one of the IBM hacker underground's own baby jargon files
out to us. Thanks also to Maarten Litmaath for generously allowing
the inclusion of the ASCII pronunciation guide he formerly maintained.
And our gratitude to Marc Weiser of XEROX PARC
<
[email protected]> for securing us permission to quote from
PARC's own jargon lexicon and shipping us a copy.
It is a particular pleasure to acknowledge the major contributions of
Mark Brader <
[email protected]> and Steve Summit <
[email protected]> to the File
and Dictionary; they have read and reread many drafts, checked facts,
caught typos, submitted an amazing number of thoughtful comments, and
done yeoman service in catching typos and minor usage bobbles. Their
rare combination of enthusiasm, persistence, wide-ranging technical
knowledge, and precisionism in matters of language has been of
invaluable help. Indeed, the sustained volume and quality of
Mr. Brader's input over several years and several different editions
has only allowed him to escape co-editor credit by the slimmest of
margins.
Finally, George V. Reilly <
[email protected]> helped with TeX
arcana and painstakingly proofread some 2.7 and 2.8 versions, and Eric
Tiedemann <
[email protected]> contributed sage advice throughout on
rhetoric, amphigory, and philosophunculism.
:How Jargon Works:
******************
:Jargon Construction:
=====================
There are some standard methods of jargonification that became
established quite early (i.e., before 1970), spreading from such
sources as the Tech Model Railroad Club, the PDP-1 SPACEWAR hackers,
and John McCarthy's original crew of LISPers. These include verb
doubling, soundalike slang, the `-P' convention, overgeneralization,
spoken inarticulations, and anthropomorphization. Each is discussed
below. We also cover the standard comparatives for design quality.
Of these six, verb doubling, overgeneralization, anthropomorphization,
and (especially) spoken inarticulations have become quite general; but
soundalike slang is still largely confined to MIT and other large
universities, and the `-P' convention is found only where LISPers
flourish.
:Verb Doubling:
---------------
A standard construction in English is to double a verb and use it as
an exclamation, such as "Bang, bang!" or "Quack, quack!". Most of
these are names for noises. Hackers also double verbs as a concise,
sometimes sarcastic comment on what the implied subject does. Also, a
doubled verb is often used to terminate a conversation, in the process
remarking on the current state of affairs or what the speaker intends
to do next. Typical examples involve {win}, {lose}, {hack}, {flame},
{barf}, {chomp}:
"The disk heads just crashed." "Lose, lose."
"Mostly he talked about his latest crock. Flame, flame."
"Boy, what a bagbiter! Chomp, chomp!"
Some verb-doubled constructions have special meanings not immediately
obvious from the verb. These have their own listings in the lexicon.
The {Usenet} culture has one *tripling* convention unrelated to this;
the names of `joke' topic groups often have a tripled last element.
The first and paradigmatic example was alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork
(a "Muppet Show" reference); other infamous examples have included:
alt.french.captain.borg.borg.borg
alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die
comp.unix.internals.system.calls.brk.brk.brk
sci.physics.edward.teller.boom.boom.boom
alt.sadistic.dentists.drill.drill.drill
:Soundalike slang:
------------------
Hackers will often make rhymes or puns in order to convert an ordinary
word or phrase into something more interesting. It is considered
particularly {flavorful} if the phrase is bent so as to include some
other jargon word; thus the computer hobbyist magazine "Dr. Dobb's
Journal" is almost always referred to among hackers as `Dr. Frob's
Journal' or simply `Dr. Frob's'. Terms of this kind that have been in
fairly wide use include names for newspapers:
Boston Herald => Horrid (or Harried)
Boston Globe => Boston Glob
Houston (or San Francisco) Chronicle
=> the Crocknicle (or the Comical)
New York Times => New York Slime
However, terms like these are often made up on the spur of the moment.
Standard examples include:
Data General => Dirty Genitals
IBM 360 => IBM Three-Sickly
Government Property -- Do Not Duplicate (on keys)
=> Government Duplicity -- Do Not Propagate
for historical reasons => for hysterical raisins
Margaret Jacks Hall (the CS building at Stanford)
=> Marginal Hacks Hall
This is not really similar to the Cockney rhyming slang it has been
compared to in the past, because Cockney substitutions are opaque
whereas hacker punning jargon is intentionally transparent.
:The `-P' convention:
---------------------
Turning a word into a question by appending the syllable `P'; from the
LISP convention of appending the letter `P' to denote a predicate (a
boolean-valued function). The question should expect a yes/no answer,
though it needn't. (See {T} and {NIL}.)
At dinnertime:
Q: "Foodp?"
A: "Yeah, I'm pretty hungry." or "T!"
At any time:
Q: "State-of-the-world-P?"
A: (Straight) "I'm about to go home."
A: (Humorous) "Yes, the world has a state."
On the phone to Florida:
Q: "State-p Florida?"
A: "Been reading JARGON.TXT again, eh?"
[One of the best of these is a {Gosperism}. Once, when we were at a
Chinese restaurant, Bill Gosper wanted to know whether someone would
like to share with him a two-person-sized bowl of soup. His inquiry
was: "Split-p soup?" -- GLS]
:Overgeneralization:
--------------------
A very conspicuous feature of jargon is the frequency with which
techspeak items such as names of program tools, command language
primitives, and even assembler opcodes are applied to contexts outside
of computing wherever hackers find amusing analogies to them. Thus
(to cite one of the best-known examples) Unix hackers often {grep} for
things rather than searching for them. Many of the lexicon entries
are generalizations of exactly this kind.
Hackers enjoy overgeneralization on the grammatical level as well.
Many hackers love to take various words and add the wrong endings to
them to make nouns and verbs, often by extending a standard rule to
nonuniform cases (or vice versa). For example, because
porous => porosity
generous => generosity
hackers happily generalize:
mysterious => mysteriosity
ferrous => ferrosity
obvious => obviosity
dubious => dubiosity
Another class of common construction uses the suffix `-itude' to
abstract a quality from just about any adjective or noun. This usage
arises especially in cases where mainstream English would perform the
same abstraction through `-iness' or `-ingness'. Thus:
win => winnitude (a common exclamation)
loss => lossitude
cruft => cruftitude
lame => lameitude
Some hackers cheerfully reverse this transformation; they argue, for
example, that the horizontal degree lines on a globe ought to be
called `lats' -- after all, they're measuring latitude!
Also, note that all nouns can be verbed. E.g.: "All nouns can be
verbed", "I'll mouse it up", "Hang on while I clipboard it over", "I'm
grepping the files". English as a whole is already heading in this
direction (towards pure-positional grammar like Chinese); hackers are
simply a bit ahead of the curve.
However, hackers avoid the unimaginative verb-making techniques
characteristic of marketroids, bean-counters, and the Pentagon; a
hacker would never, for example, `productize', `prioritize', or
`securitize' things. Hackers have a strong aversion to bureaucratic
bafflegab and regard those who use it with contempt.
Similarly, all verbs can be nouned. This is only a slight
overgeneralization in modern English; in hackish, however, it is good
form to mark them in some standard nonstandard way. Thus:
win => winnitude, winnage
disgust => disgustitude
hack => hackification
Further, note the prevalence of certain kinds of nonstandard plural
forms. Some of these go back quite a ways; the TMRC Dictionary
includes an entry which implies that the plural of `mouse' is
{meeces}, and notes that the defined plural of `caboose' is `cabeese'.
This latter has apparently been standard (or at least a standard joke)
among railfans (railroad enthusiasts) for many years.
On a similarly Anglo-Saxon note, almost anything ending in `x' may
form plurals in `-xen' (see {VAXen} and {boxen} in the main text).
Even words ending in phonetic /k/ alone are sometimes treated this
way; e.g., `soxen' for a bunch of socks. Other funny plurals are
`frobbotzim' for the plural of `frobbozz' (see {frobnitz}) and
`Unices' and `Twenices' (rather than `Unixes' and `Twenexes'; see
{Unix}, {TWENEX} in main text). But note that `Unixen' and `Twenexen'
are never used; it has been suggested that this is because `-ix' and
`-ex' are Latin singular endings that attract a Latinate plural.
Finally, it has been suggested to general approval that the plural of
`mongoose' ought to be `polygoose'.
The pattern here, as with other hackish grammatical quirks, is
generalization of an inflectional rule that in English is either an
import or a fossil (such as the Hebrew plural ending `-im', or the
Anglo-Saxon plural suffix `-en') to cases where it isn't normally
considered to apply.
This is not `poor grammar', as hackers are generally quite well aware
of what they are doing when they distort the language. It is
grammatical creativity, a form of playfulness. It is done not to
impress but to amuse, and never at the expense of clarity.
:Spoken inarticulations:
------------------------
Words such as `mumble', `sigh', and `groan' are spoken in places where
their referent might more naturally be used. It has been suggested
that this usage derives from the impossibility of representing such
noises on a comm link or in electronic mail (interestingly, the same
sorts of constructions have been showing up with increasing frequency
in comic strips). Another expression sometimes heard is "Complain!",
meaning "I have a complaint!"
:Anthropomorphization:
----------------------
Semantically, one rich source of jargon constructions is the hackish
tendency to anthropomorphize hardware and software. This isn't done
in a naive way; hackers don't personalize their stuff in the sense of
feeling empathy with it, nor do they mystically believe that the
things they work on every day are `alive'. What *is* common is to
hear hardware or software talked about as though it has homunculi
talking to each other inside it, with intentions and desires. Thus,
one hears "The protocol handler got confused", or that programs "are
trying" to do things, or one may say of a routine that "its goal in
life is to X". One even hears explanations like "... and its poor
little brain couldn't understand X, and it died." Sometimes modelling
things this way actually seems to make them easier to understand,
perhaps because it's instinctively natural to think of anything with a
really complex behavioral repertoire as `like a person' rather than
`like a thing'.
:Comparatives:
--------------
Finally, note that many words in hacker jargon have to be understood
as members of sets of comparatives. This is especially true of the
adjectives and nouns used to describe the beauty and functional
quality of code. Here is an approximately correct spectrum:
monstrosity brain-damage screw bug lose misfeature
crock kluge hack win feature elegance perfection
The last is spoken of as a mythical absolute, approximated but never
actually attained. Another similar scale is used for describing the
reliability of software:
broken flaky dodgy fragile brittle
solid robust bulletproof armor-plated
Note, however, that `dodgy' is primarily Commonwealth Hackish (it is
rare in the U.S.) and may change places with `flaky' for some
speakers.
Coinages for describing {lossage} seem to call forth the very finest
in hackish linguistic inventiveness; it has been truly said that
hackers have even more words for equipment failures than Yiddish has
for obnoxious people.
:Hacker Writing Style:
======================
We've already seen that hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing
grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more general fondness for
form-versus-content language jokes that shows up particularly in
hackish writing. One correspondent reports that he consistently
misspells `wrong' as `worng'. Others have been known to criticize
glitches in Jargon File drafts by observing (in the mode of Douglas
Hofstadter) "This sentence no verb", or "Too repetetetive", or "Bad
speling", or "Incorrectspa cing." Similarly, intentional spoonerisms
are often made of phrases relating to confusion or things that are
confusing; `dain bramage' for `brain damage' is perhaps the most
common (similarly, a hacker would be likely to write "Excuse me, I'm
cixelsyd today", rather than "I'm dyslexic today"). This sort of
thing is quite common and is enjoyed by all concerned.
Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses,
much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if "Jim is going" is a
phrase, and so are "Bill runs" and "Spock groks", then hackers
generally prefer to write: "Jim is going", "Bill runs", and "Spock
groks". This is incorrect according to standard American usage (which
would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the
string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to
mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them.
Given the sorts of examples that can come up in discussions of
programming, American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading.
When communicating command lines or small pieces of code, extra
characters can be a real pain in the neck.
Consider, for example, a sentence in a {vi} tutorial that looks like
this:
Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd".
Standard usage would make this
Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd."
but that would be very bad -- because the reader would be prone to
type the string d-d-dot, and it happens that in `vi(1)' dot
repeats the last command accepted. The net result would be to delete
*two* lines!
The Jargon File follows hackish usage throughout.
Interestingly, a similar style is now preferred practice in Great
Britain, though the older style (which became established for
typographical reasons having to do with the aesthetics of comma and
quotes in typeset text) is still accepted there. "Hart's Rules" and
the "Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors" call the hacker-like
style `new' or `logical' quoting.
Another hacker habit is a tendency to distinguish between `scare'
quotes and `speech' quotes; that is, to use British-style single
quotes for marking and reserve American-style double quotes for actual
reports of speech or text included from elsewhere. Interestingly,
some authorities describe this as correct general usage, but
mainstream American English has gone to using double-quotes
indiscriminately enough that hacker usage appears marked [and, in
fact, I thought this was a personal quirk of mine until I checked with
Usenet --ESR]. One further permutation that is definitely
*not* standard is a hackish tendency to do marking quotes by
using apostrophes (single quotes) in pairs; that is, 'like this'.
This is modelled on string and character literal syntax in some
programming languages (reinforced by the fact that many character-only
terminals display the apostrophe in typewriter style, as a vertical
single quote).
One quirk that shows up frequently in the {email} style of Unix
hackers in particular is a tendency for some things that are normally
all-lowercase (including usernames and the names of commands and C
routines) to remain uncapitalized even when they occur at the
beginning of sentences. It is clear that, for many hackers, the case
of such identifiers becomes a part of their internal representation
(the `spelling') and cannot be overridden without mental effort (an
appropriate reflex because Unix and C both distinguish cases and
confusing them can lead to {lossage}). A way of escaping this dilemma
is simply to avoid using these constructions at the beginning of
sentences.
There seems to be a meta-rule behind these nonstandard hackerisms to
the effect that precision of expression is more important than
conformance to traditional rules; where the latter create ambiguity or
lose information they can be discarded without a second thought. It
is notable in this respect that other hackish inventions (for example,
in vocabulary) also tend to carry very precise shades of meaning even
when constructed to appear slangy and loose. In fact, to a hacker,
the contrast between `loose' form and `tight' content in jargon is a
substantial part of its humor!
Hackers have also developed a number of punctuation and emphasis
conventions adapted to single-font all-ASCII communications links, and
these are occasionally carried over into written documents even when
normal means of font changes, underlining, and the like are available.
One of these is that TEXT IN ALL CAPS IS INTERPRETED AS `LOUD', and
this becomes such an ingrained synesthetic reflex that a person who
goes to caps-lock while in {talk mode} may be asked to "stop shouting,
please, you're hurting my ears!".
Also, it is common to use bracketing with unusual characters to
signify emphasis. The asterisk is most common, as in "What the
*hell*?" even though this interferes with the common use of the
asterisk suffix as a footnote mark. The underscore is also common,
suggesting underlining (this is particularly common with book titles;
for example, "It is often alleged that Joe Haldeman wrote
_The_Forever_War_ as a rebuttal to Robert Heinlein's earlier novel of
the future military, _Starship_Troopers_."). Other forms exemplified
by "=hell=", "\hell/", or "/hell/" are occasionally seen (it's claimed
that in the last example the first slash pushes the letters over to
the right to make them italic, and the second keeps them from falling
over). Finally, words may also be emphasized L I K E T H I S, or by a
series of carets (^) under them on the next line of the text.
There is a semantic difference between *emphasis like this* (which
emphasizes the phrase as a whole), and *emphasis* *like* *this* (which
suggests the writer speaking very slowly and distinctly, as if to a
very young child or a mentally impaired person). Bracketing a word
with the `*' character may also indicate that the writer wishes
readers to consider that an action is taking place or that a sound is
being made. Examples: *bang*, *hic*, *ring*, *grin*, *kick*, *stomp*,
*mumble*.
One might also see the above sound effects as <bang>, <hic>, <ring>,
<grin>, <kick>, <stomp>, <mumble>. This use of angle brackets to mark
their contents originally derives from conventions used in {BNF}, but
since about 1993 it has been reinforced by the HTML markup used on the
World Wide Web.
Angle-bracket enclosure is also used to indicate that a term stands
for some {random} member of a larger class (this is straight from
{BNF}). Examples like the following are common:
So this <ethnic> walks into a bar one day...
There is also an accepted convention for `writing under erasure'; the
text
Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman,
he's visiting from corporate HQ.
reads roughly as "Be nice to this fool, er, gentleman...". This comes
from the fact that the digraph ^H is often used as a print
representation for a backspace. It parallels (and may have been
influenced by) the ironic use of `slashouts' in science-fiction
fanzines.
A related habit uses editor commands to signify corrections to
previous text. This custom is fading as more mailers get good editing
capabilities, but one occasionally still sees things like this:
I've seen that term used on alt.foobar often.
Send it to Erik for the File.
Oops...s/Erik/Eric/.
The s/Erik/Eric/ says "change Erik to Eric in the preceding". This
syntax is borrowed from the Unix editing tools `ed' and `sed', but is
widely recognized by non-Unix hackers as well.
In a formula, `*' signifies multiplication but two asterisks in a row
are a shorthand for exponentiation (this derives from FORTRAN). Thus,
one might write 2 ** 8 = 256.
Another notation for exponentiation one sees more frequently uses the
caret (^, ASCII 1011110); one might write instead `2^8 = 256'. This
goes all the way back to Algol-60, which used the archaic ASCII
`up-arrow' that later became the caret; this was picked up by Kemeny
and Kurtz's original BASIC, which in turn influenced the design of the
`bc(1)' and `dc(1)' Unix tools, which have probably done most to
reinforce the convention on Usenet. The notation is mildly confusing
to C programmers, because `^' means bitwise exclusive-or in C.
Despite this, it was favored 3:1 over ** in a late-1990 snapshot of
Usenet. It is used consistently in this lexicon.
In on-line exchanges, hackers tend to use decimal forms or improper
fractions (`3.5' or `7/2') rather than `typewriter style' mixed
fractions (`3-1/2'). The major motive here is probably that the
former are more readable in a monospaced font, together with a desire
to avoid the risk that the latter might be read as `three minus
one-half'. The decimal form is definitely preferred for fractions
with a terminating decimal representation; there may be some cultural
influence here from the high status of scientific notation.
Another on-line convention, used especially for very large or very
small numbers, is taken from C (which derived it from FORTRAN). This
is a form of `scientific notation' using `e' to replace `*10^'; for
example, one year is about 3e7 seconds long.
The tilde (~) is commonly used in a quantifying sense of
`approximately'; that is, `~50' means `about fifty'.
On Usenet and in the {MUD} world, common C boolean, logical, and
relational operators such as `|', `&', `||', `&&', `!', `==', `!=',
`>', `<', `>=', and `=<' are often combined with English. The Pascal
not-equals, `<>', is also recognized, and occasionally one sees `/='
for not-equals (from Ada, Common Lisp, and Fortran 90). The use of
prefix `!' as a loose synonym for `not-' or `no-' is particularly
common; thus, `!clue' is read `no-clue' or `clueless'.
A related practice borrows syntax from preferred programming languages
to express ideas in a natural-language text. For example, one might
see the following:
In <
[email protected]> J. R. Hacker wrote:
>I recently had occasion to field-test the Snafu
>Systems 2300E adaptive gonkulator. The price was
>right, and the racing stripe on the case looked
>kind of neat, but its performance left something
>to be desired.
Yeah, I tried one out too.
#ifdef FLAME
Hasn't anyone told those idiots that you can't get
decent bogon suppression with AFJ filters at today's
net volumes?
#endif /* FLAME */
I guess they figured the price premium for true
frame-based semantic analysis was too high.
Unfortunately, it's also the only workable approach.
I wouldn't recommend purchase of this product unless
you're on a *very* tight budget.
#include <disclaimer.h>
--
== Frank Foonly (Fubarco Systems)
In the above, the `#ifdef'/`#endif' pair is a conditional compilation
syntax from C; here, it implies that the text between (which is a
{flame}) should be evaluated only if you have turned on (or defined
on) the switch FLAME. The `#include' at the end is C for "include
standard disclaimer here"; the `standard disclaimer' is understood to
read, roughly, "These are my personal opinions and not to be construed
as the official position of my employer."
The top section in the example, with > at the left margin, is an
example of an inclusion convention we'll discuss below.
More recently, following on the huge popularity of the World Wide Web,
pseudo-HTML markup has become popular for similar purposes:
<flame>
Your father was a hamster and your mother smelt of elderberries!
</flame>
You'll even see this with an HTML-style modifier:
<flame intensity="100%">
You seem well-suited for a career in government.
</flame>
Hackers also mix letters and numbers more freely than in mainstream
usage. In particular, it is good hackish style to write a digit
sequence where you intend the reader to understand the text string
that names that number in English. So, hackers prefer to write
`1970s' rather than `nineteen-seventies' or `1970's' (the latter looks
like a possessive).
It should also be noted that hackers exhibit much less reluctance to
use multiply nested parentheses than is normal in English. Part of
this is almost certainly due to influence from LISP (which uses deeply
nested parentheses (like this (see?)) in its syntax a lot), but it has
also been suggested that a more basic hacker trait of enjoying playing
with complexity and pushing systems to their limits is in operation.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that many studies of on-line
communication have shown that electronic links have a de-inhibiting
effect on people. Deprived of the body-language cues through which
emotional state is expressed, people tend to forget everything about
other parties except what is presented over that ASCII link. This has
both good and bad effects. A good one is that it encourages honesty
and tends to break down hierarchical authority relationships; a bad
one is that it may encourage depersonalization and gratuitous
rudeness. Perhaps in response to this, experienced netters often
display a sort of conscious formal politesse in their writing that has
passed out of fashion in other spoken and written media (for example,
the phrase "Well said, sir!" is not uncommon).
Many introverted hackers who are next to inarticulate in person
communicate with considerable fluency over the net, perhaps precisely
because they can forget on an unconscious level that they are dealing
with people and thus don't feel stressed and anxious as they would
face to face.
Though it is considered gauche to publicly criticize posters for poor
spelling or grammar, the network places a premium on literacy and
clarity of expression. It may well be that future historians of
literature will see in it a revival of the great tradition of personal
letters as art.
:Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions:
========================================
One area where conventions for on-line writing are still in some flux
is the marking of included material from earlier messages -- what
would be called `block quotations' in ordinary English. From the
usual typographic convention employed for these (smaller font at an
extra indent), there derived a practice of included text being
indented by one ASCII TAB (0001001) character, which under Unix and
many other environments gives the appearance of an 8-space indent.
Early mail and netnews readers had no facility for including messages
this way, so people had to paste in copy manually. BSD `Mail(1)' was
the first message agent to support inclusion, and early Usenetters
emulated its style. But the TAB character tended to push included
text too far to the right (especially in multiply nested inclusions),
leading to ugly wraparounds. After a brief period of confusion
(during which an inclusion leader consisting of three or four spaces
became established in EMACS and a few mailers), the use of leading `>'
or `> ' became standard, perhaps owing to its use in `ed(1)' to
display tabs (alternatively, it may derive from the `>' that some
early Unix mailers used to quote lines starting with "From" in text,
so they wouldn't look like the beginnings of new message headers).
Inclusions within inclusions keep their `>' leaders, so the `nesting
level' of a quotation is visually apparent.
The practice of including text from the parent article when posting a
followup helped solve what had been a major nuisance on Usenet: the
fact that articles do not arrive at different sites in the same order.
Careless posters used to post articles that would begin with, or even
consist entirely of, "No, that's wrong" or "I agree" or the like.
It was hard to see who was responding to what. Consequently, around
1984, new news-posting software evolved a facility to automatically
include the text of a previous article, marked with "> " or whatever
the poster chose. The poster was expected to delete all but the
relevant lines. The result has been that, now, careless posters post
articles containing the *entire* text of a preceding article,
*followed* only by "No, that's wrong" or "I agree".
Many people feel that this cure is worse than the original disease,
and there soon appeared newsreader software designed to let the reader
skip over included text if desired. Today, some posting software
rejects articles containing too high a proportion of lines beginning
with `>' -- but this too has led to undesirable workarounds, such as
the deliberate inclusion of zero-content filler lines which aren't
quoted and thus pull the message below the rejection threshold.
Because the default mailers supplied with Unix and other operating
systems haven't evolved as quickly as human usage, the older
conventions using a leading TAB or three or four spaces are still
alive; however, >-inclusion is now clearly the prevalent form in both
netnews and mail.
Inclusion practice is still evolving, and disputes over the `correct'
inclusion style occasionally lead to {holy wars}.
Most netters view an inclusion as a promise that comment on it will
immediately follow. The preferred, conversational style looks like
this,
> relevant excerpt 1
response to excerpt
> relevant excerpt 2
response to excerpt
> relevant excerpt 3
response to excerpt
or for short messages like this:
> entire message
response to message
Thanks to poor design of some PC-based mail agents, one will
occasionally see the entire quoted message *after* the response, like
this
response to message
> entire message
but this practice is strongly deprecated.
Though `>' remains the standard inclusion leader, `|' is
occasionally used for extended quotations where original variations in
indentation are being retained (one mailer even combines these and
uses `|>'). One also sees different styles of quoting a number
of authors in the same message: one (deprecated because it loses
information) uses a leader of `> ' for everyone, another (the
most common) is `> > > > ', `> > > ', etc. (or
`>>>> ', `>>>', etc., depending on line length and
nesting depth) reflecting the original order of messages, and yet
another is to use a different citation leader for each author, say
`> ', `: ', `| ', `} '
(preserving nesting so that the inclusion order of messages is still
apparent, or tagging the inclusions with authors' names). Yet
*another* style is to use each poster's initials (or login name)
as a citation leader for that poster.
Occasionally one sees a `# ' leader used for quotations from
authoritative sources such as standards documents; the intended
allusion is to the root prompt (the special Unix command prompt issued
when one is running as the privileged super-user).
:Hacker Speech Style:
=====================
Hackish speech generally features extremely precise diction, careful
word choice, a relatively large working vocabulary, and relatively
little use of contractions or street slang. Dry humor, irony, puns,
and a mildly flippant attitude are highly valued -- but an underlying
seriousness and intelligence are essential. One should use just
enough jargon to communicate precisely and identify oneself as a
member of the culture; overuse of jargon or a breathless, excessively
gung-ho attitude is considered tacky and the mark of a loser.
This speech style is a variety of the precisionist English normally
spoken by scientists, design engineers, and academics in technical
fields. In contrast with the methods of jargon construction, it is
fairly constant throughout hackerdom.
It has been observed that many hackers are confused by negative
questions -- or, at least, that the people to whom they are talking
are often confused by the sense of their answers. The problem is that
they have done so much programming that distinguishes between
if (going) ...
and
if (!going) ...
that when they parse the question "Aren't you going?" it seems to be
asking the opposite question from "Are you going?", and so merits an
answer in the opposite sense. This confuses English-speaking
non-hackers because they were taught to answer as though the negative
part weren't there. In some other languages (including Russian,
Chinese, and Japanese) the hackish interpretation is standard and the
problem wouldn't arise. Hackers often find themselves wishing for a
word like French `si' or German `doch' with which one could
unambiguously answer `yes' to a negative question.
For similar reasons, English-speaking hackers almost never use double
negatives, even if they live in a region where colloquial usage allows
them. The thought of uttering something that logically ought to be an
affirmative knowing it will be misparsed as a negative tends to
disturb them.
In a related vein, hackers sometimes make a game of answering
questions containing logical connectives with a strictly literal
rather than colloquial interpretation. A non-hacker who is indelicate
enough to ask a question like "So, are you working on finding that bug
*now* or leaving it until later?" is likely to get the perfectly
correct answer "Yes!" (that is, "Yes, I'm doing it either now or
later, and you didn't ask which!").
:International Style:
=====================
Although the Jargon File remains primarily a lexicon of hacker usage
in American English, we have made some effort to get input from
abroad. Though the hacker-speak of other languages often uses
translations of jargon from English (often as transmitted to them by
earlier Jargon File versions!), the local variations are interesting,
and knowledge of them may be of some use to travelling hackers.
There are some references herein to `Commonwealth hackish'. These are
intended to describe some variations in hacker usage as reported in
the English spoken in Great Britain and the Commonwealth (Canada,
Australia, India, etc. -- though Canada is heavily influenced by
American usage). There is also an entry on {{Commonwealth Hackish}}
reporting some general phonetic and vocabulary differences from
U.S. hackish.
Hackers in Western Europe and (especially) Scandinavia report that
they often use a mixture of English and their native languages for
technical conversation. Occasionally they develop idioms in their
English usage that are influenced by their native-language styles.
Some of these are reported here.
On the other hand, English often gives rise to grammatical and
vocabulary mutations in the native language. For example, Italian
hackers often use the nonexistent verbs `scrollare' (to scroll) and
`deletare' (to delete) rather than native Italian `scorrere' and
`cancellare'. Similarly, the English verb `to hack' has been seen
conjugated in Swedish. European hackers report that this happens
partly because the English terms make finer distinctions than are
available in their native vocabularies, and partly because deliberate
language-crossing makes for amusing wordplay.
A few notes on hackish usages in Russian have been added where they
are parallel with English idioms and thus comprehensible to
English-speakers.
:Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers:
===============================
From the late 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local,
MS-DOS-based bulletin boards has been developing separately from
Internet hackerdom. The BBS culture has, as its seamy underside, a
stratum of `pirate boards' inhabited by {cracker}s, phone phreaks, and
{warez d00dz}. These people (mostly teenagers running PC-clones from
their bedrooms) have developed their own characteristic jargon,
heavily influenced by skateboard lingo and underground-rock slang.
Though crackers often call themselves `hackers', they aren't (they
typically have neither significant programming ability, nor Internet
expertise, nor experience with UNIX or other true multi-user systems).
Their vocabulary has little overlap with hackerdom's. Nevertheless,
this lexicon covers much of it so the reader will be able to
understand what goes by on bulletin-board systems.
Here is a brief guide to cracker and {warez d00dz} usage:
* Misspell frequently. The substitutions
phone => fone
freak => phreak
are obligatory.
* Always substitute `z's for `s's. (i.e. "codes" -> "codez").
* Type random emphasis characters after a post line (i.e. "Hey
Dudes!#!$#$!#!$").
* Use the emphatic `k' prefix ("k-kool", "k-rad", "k-awesome")
frequently.
* Abbreviate compulsively ("I got lotsa warez w/ docs").
* Substitute `0' for `o' ("r0dent", "l0zer").
* TYPE ALL IN CAPS LOCK, SO IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE YELLING ALL THE
TIME.
These traits are similar to those of {B1FF}, who originated as a
parody of naive BBS users. For further discussion of the pirate-board
subculture, see {lamer}, {elite}, {leech}, {poser}, {cracker}, and
especially {warez d00dz}.
:How to Use the Lexicon:
************************
:Pronunciation Guide:
=====================
Pronunciation keys are provided in the jargon listings for all entries
that are neither dictionary words pronounced as in standard English
nor obvious compounds thereof. Slashes bracket phonetic
pronunciations, which are to be interpreted using the following
conventions:
1. Syllables are hyphen-separated, except that an accent or
back-accent follows each accented syllable (the back-accent marks
a secondary accent in some words of four or more syllables). If
no accent is given, the word is pronounced with equal
accentuation on all syllables (this is common for abbreviations).
2. Consonants are pronounced as in American English. The letter `g'
is always hard (as in "got" rather than "giant"); `ch' is soft
("church" rather than "chemist"). The letter `j' is the sound
that occurs twice in "judge". The letter `s' is always as in
"pass", never a z sound. The digraph `kh' is the guttural of
"loch" or "l'chaim". The digraph 'gh' is the aspirated g+h of
"bughouse" or "ragheap" (rare in English).
3. Uppercase letters are pronounced as their English letter names;
thus (for example) /H-L-L/ is equivalent to /aych el el/. /Z/
may be pronounced /zee/ or /zed/ depending on your local dialect.
4. Vowels are represented as follows:
/a/
back, that
/ah/
father, palm (see note)
/ar/
far, mark
/aw/
flaw, caught
/ay/
bake, rain
/e/
less, men
/ee/
easy, ski
/eir/
their, software
/i/
trip, hit
/i:/
life, sky
/o/
block, stock (see note)
/oh/
flow, sew
/oo/
loot, through
/or/
more, door
/ow/
out, how
/oy/
boy, coin
/uh/
but, some
/u/
put, foot
/y/
yet, young
/yoo/
few, chew
/[y]oo/
/oo/ with optional fronting as in `news' (/nooz/ or
/nyooz/)
The glyph /*/ is used for the `schwa' sound of unstressed or occluded
vowels (the one that is often written with an upside-down `e'). The
schwa vowel is omitted in syllables containing vocalic r, l, m or n;
that is, `kitten' and `color' would be rendered /kit'n/ and /kuhl'r/,
not /kit'*n/ and /kuhl'*r/.
Note that the above table reflects mainly distinctions found in
standard American English (that is, the neutral dialect spoken by TV
network announcers and typical of educated speech in the Upper
Midwest, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul and Philadelphia). However, we
separate /o/ from /ah/, which tend to merge in standard American.
This may help readers accustomed to accents resembling British
Received Pronunciation.
The intent of this scheme is to permit as many readers as possible to
map the pronunciations into their local dialect by ignoring some
subset of the distinctions we make. Speakers of British RP, for
example, can smash terminal /r/ and all unstressed vowels. Speakers
of many varieties of southern American will automatically map /o/ to
/aw/; and so forth. (Standard American makes a good reference dialect
for this purpose because it has crisp consonents and more vowel
distinctions than other major dialects, and tends to retain
distinctions between unstressed vowels. It also happens to be what
your editor speaks.)
Entries with a pronunciation of `//' are written-only usages. (No,
Unix weenies, this does *not* mean `pronounce like previous
pronunciation'!)
:Other Lexicon Conventions:
===========================
Entries are sorted in case-blind ASCII collation order (rather than
the letter-by-letter order ignoring interword spacing common in
mainstream dictionaries), except that all entries beginning with
nonalphabetic characters are sorted after Z. The case-blindness is a
feature, not a bug.
The beginning of each entry is marked by a colon (`:') at the left
margin. This convention helps out tools like hypertext browsers that
benefit from knowing where entry boundaries are, but aren't as
context-sensitive as humans.
In pure ASCII renderings of the Jargon File, you will see {} used to
bracket words which themselves have entries in the File. This isn't
done all the time for every such word, but it is done everywhere that
a reminder seems useful that the term has a jargon meaning and one
might wish to refer to its entry.
In this all-ASCII version, headwords for topic entries are
distinguished from those for ordinary entries by being followed by
"::" rather than ":"; similarly, references are surrounded by "{{" and
"}}" rather than "{" and "}".
Defining instances of terms and phrases appear in `slanted type'. A
defining instance is one which occurs near to or as part of an
explanation of it.
Prefixed ** is used as linguists do; to mark examples of incorrect
usage.
We follow the `logical' quoting convention described in the Writing
Style section above. In addition, we reserve double quotes for actual
excerpts of text or (sometimes invented) speech. Scare quotes (which
mark a word being used in a nonstandard way), and philosopher's quotes
(which turn an utterance into the string of letters or words that name
it) are both rendered with single quotes.
References such as `malloc(3)' and `patch(1)' are to Unix facilities
(some of which, such as `patch(1)', are actually freeware distributed
over Usenet). The Unix manuals use `foo(n)' to refer to item foo in
section (n) of the manual, where n=1 is utilities, n=2 is system
calls, n=3 is C library routines, n=6 is games, and n=8 (where
present) is system administration utilities. Sections 4, 5, and 7 of
the manuals have changed roles frequently and in any case are not
referred to in any of the entries.
Various abbreviations used frequently in the lexicon are summarized
here:
abbrev.
abbreviation
adj.
adjective
adv.
adverb
alt.
alternate
cav.
caveat
conj.
conjunction
esp.
especially
excl.
exclamation
imp.
imperative
interj.
interjection
n.
noun
obs.
obsolete
pl.
plural
poss.
possibly
pref.
prefix
prob.
probably
prov.
proverbial
quant.
quantifier
suff.
suffix
syn.
synonym (or synonymous with)
v.
verb (may be transitive or intransitive)
var.
variant
vi.
intransitive verb
vt.
transitive verb
Where alternate spellings or pronunciations are given, alt. separates
two possibilities with nearly equal distribution, while var. prefixes
one that is markedly less common than the primary.
Where a term can be attributed to a particular subculture or is known
to have originated there, we have tried to so indicate. Here is a
list of abbreviations used in etymologies:
Amateur Packet Radio
A technical culture of ham-radio sites using AX.25 and TCP/IP for
wide-area networking and BBS systems.
Berkeley
University of California at Berkeley
BBN
Bolt, Beranek & Newman
Cambridge
the university in England (*not* the city in Massachusetts where
MIT happens to be located!)
CMU
Carnegie-Mellon University
Commodore
Commodore Business Machines
DEC
The Digital Equipment Corporation
Fairchild
The Fairchild Instruments Palo Alto development group
FidoNet
See the {FidoNet} entry
IBM
International Business Machines
MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology; esp. the legendary MIT AI
Lab culture of roughly 1971 to 1983 and its feeder groups,
including the Tech Model Railroad Club
NRL
Naval Research Laboratories
NYU
New York University
OED
The Oxford English Dictionary
Purdue
Purdue University
SAIL
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (at Stanford
University)
SI
From Syst`eme International, the name for the standard
conventions of metric nomenclature used in the sciences
Stanford
Stanford University
Sun
Sun Microsystems
TMRC
Some MITisms go back as far as the Tech Model Railroad Club
(TMRC) at MIT c. 1960. Material marked TMRC is from "An Abridged
Dictionary of the TMRC Language", originally compiled by Pete
Samson in 1959
UCLA
University of California at Los Angeles
UK
the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland)
Usenet
See the {Usenet} entry
WPI
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, site of a very active community
of PDP-10 hackers during the 1970s
WWW
The World-Wide-Web.
XEROX PARC
XEROX's Palo Alto Research Center, site of much pioneering
research in user interface design and networking
Yale
Yale University
Some other etymology abbreviations such as {Unix} and {PDP-10} refer
to technical cultures surrounding specific operating systems,
processors, or other environments. The fact that a term is labelled
with any one of these abbreviations does not necessarily mean its use
is confined to that culture. In particular, many terms labelled `MIT'
and `Stanford' are in quite general use. We have tried to give some
indication of the distribution of speakers in the usage notes;
however, a number of factors mentioned in the introduction conspire to
make these indications less definite than might be desirable.
A few new definitions attached to entries are marked [proposed].
These are usually generalizations suggested by editors or Usenet
respondents in the process of commenting on previous definitions of
those entries. These are *not* represented as established jargon.
:Format For New Entries:
========================
You can mail submissions for the Jargon File to
jargon@@snark.thyrsus.com.
All contributions and suggestions about the Jargon File will be
considered donations to be placed in the public domain as part of this
File, and may be used in subsequent paper editions. Submissions may
be edited for accuracy, clarity and concision.
Try to conform to the format already being used in the ASCII on-line version
--- head-words separated from text by a colon (double colon for topic
entries), cross-references in curly brackets (doubled for topic
entries), pronunciations in slashes, etymologies in square brackets,
single-space after definition numbers and word classes, etc. Stick to
the standard ASCII character set (7-bit printable, no high-half
characters or [nt]roff/TeX/Scribe escapes), as one of the versions
generated from the master file is an info document that has to be
viewable on a character tty.
We are looking to expand the File's range of technical specialties
covered. There are doubtless rich veins of jargon yet untapped in the
scientific computing, graphics, and networking hacker communities;
also in numerical analysis, computer architectures and VLSI design,
language design, and many other related fields. Send us your jargon!
We are *not* interested in straight technical terms explained by
textbooks or technical dictionaries unless an entry illuminates
`underground' meanings or aspects not covered by official histories.
We are also not interested in `joke' entries -- there is a lot of
humor in the file but it must flow naturally out of the explanations
of what hackers do and how they think.
It is OK to submit items of jargon you have originated if they have
spread to the point of being used by people who are not personally
acquainted with you. We prefer items to be attested by independent
submission from two different sites.
An HTML version of the File is available at
http://www.ccil.org/jargon. Please send us URLs for materials related
to the entries, so we can enrich the File's link structure.
The Jargon File will be regularly maintained and made available for
browsing on the World Wide Web, and will include a version number.
Read it, pass it around, contribute -- this is *your* monument!
The Jargon Lexicon
******************
= A =
=====
:abbrev: /*-breev'/, /*-brev'/ /n./ Common abbreviation for
`abbreviation'.
:ABEND: /a'bend/, /*-bend'/ /n./ [ABnormal END] Abnormal
termination (of software); {crash}; {lossage}. Derives from
an error message on the IBM 360; used jokingly by hackers but
seriously mainly by {code grinder}s. 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'.
:accumulator: /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}.)
:ACK: /ak/ /interj./ 1. [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".
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}
(sense 2), i.e., "I'm not here").
:Acme: /n./ The canonical supplier of bizarre, elaborate, and
non-functional gadgetry -- where Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson
shop. 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 "Roadrunner" cartoons. In these
cartoons, the famished Wile E. Coyote was forever attempting to
catch up with, trap, and eat the Roadrunner. 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 cardboard
boxes, labeled prominently with the Acme name. These devices
invariably malfunctioned in violent and improbable ways.
:acolyte: /n. obs./ [TMRC] An {OSU} privileged enough to
submit data and programs to a member of the {priesthood}.
:ad-hockery: /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}.
:Ada:: /n./ A {{Pascal}}-descended language that has been made
mandatory for Department of Defense software projects by the
Pentagon. Hackers are nearly unanimous in observing that,
technically, it is precisely what one might expect given that kind
of endorsement by fiat; designed by committee, crockish, difficult
to use, and overall a disastrous, multi-billion-dollar boondoggle
(one common description is "The PL/I of the 1980s"). Hackers
find Ada's exception-handling and inter-process communication
features particularly hilarious. Ada Lovelace (the daughter of
Lord Byron who became the world's first programmer while
cooperating with Charles Babbage on the design of his mechanical
computing engines in the mid-1800s) would almost certainly blanch
at the use to which her name has latterly been put; the kindest
thing that has been said about it is that there is probably a good
small language screaming to get out from inside its vast,
{elephantine} bulk.
:adger: /aj'r/ /vt./ [UCLA mutant of {nadger}, poss. 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}.
:admin: /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}.
:ADVENT: /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. Now better known as Adventure, but the {{TOPS-10}}
operating system permitted only six-letter filenames. See also
{vadding}, {Zork}, and {Infocom}.
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.
:AFAIK: // /n./ [Usenet] Abbrev. for "As Far As I Know".
:AFJ: // /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.
:AI: /A-I/ /n./ Abbreviation for `Artificial Intelligence',
so common that the full form is almost never written or spoken
among hackers.
:AI-complete: /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 (1996) to solve them have
foundered on the amount of context information and `intelligence'
they seem to require. See also {gedanken}.
:AI koans: /A-I koh'anz/ /pl.n./ A series of pastiches of Zen
teaching riddles created by Danny Hillis at the MIT AI Lab around
various major figures of the Lab's culture (several are included
under {AI Koans} in Appendix A). See also {ha ha
only serious}, {mu}, and {{hacker humor}}.
:AIDS: /aydz/ /n./ Short for A* Infected Disk Syndrome (`A*'
is a {glob} pattern that matches, but is not limited to, Apple
or Amiga), this condition is quite often the result of practicing
unsafe {SEX}. See {virus}, {worm}, {Trojan horse},
{virgin}.
:AIDX: /ayd'k*z/ /n./ Derogatory term for IBM's perverted
version of Unix, AIX, especially for the AIX 3.? used in the IBM
RS/6000 series (some hackers think it is funnier just to pronounce
"AIX" as "aches"). A victim of the dreaded "hybridism"
disease, this attempt to combine the two main currents of the Unix
stream ({BSD} and {USG Unix}) became a {monstrosity} to
haunt system administrators' dreams. For example, if new accounts
are created while many users are logged on, the load average jumps
quickly over 20 due to silly implementation of the user databases.
For a quite similar disease, compare {HP-SUX}. Also, compare
{Macintrash}, {Nominal Semidestructor}, {Open DeathTrap},
{ScumOS}, {sun-stools}.
:airplane rule: /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}.
:aliasing bug: /n./ A class of subtle programming errors that
can arise in code that does dynamic allocation, esp. via
`malloc(3)' or equivalent. If several pointers address
(`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.
:all-elbows: /adj./ [MS-DOS] Of a TSR
(terminate-and-stay-resident) IBM PC program, such as the N
pop-up calendar and calculator utilities that circulate on {BBS}
systems: unsociable. Used to describe a program that rudely steals
the resources that it needs without considering that other TSRs may
also be resident. One particularly common form of rudeness is
lock-up due to programs fighting over the keyboard interrupt. See
{rude}, also {mess-dos}.
:alpha particles: /n./ See {bit rot}.
:alt: /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 `clover'
or `Command' key on a Macintosh; use of this term usually reveals
that the speaker hacked PCs before coming to the Mac (see also
{feature key}). Some Mac hackers, confusingly, reserve `alt'
for the Option key (and it is so labeled on some Mac II keyboards).
3. /n.,obs/. [PDP-10; often capitalized to ALT] Alternate name for
the ASCII ESC character (ASCII 0011011), after the keycap labeling
on some older terminals; also `altmode' (/awlt'mohd/). This
character was almost never pronounced `escape' on an ITS system,
in {TECO}, or under TOPS-10 -- always alt, as in "Type alt alt
to end a TECO command" or "alt-U onto the system" (for "log
onto the [ITS] system"). This usage probably arose because alt is
more convenient to say than `escape', especially when followed by
another alt or a character (or another alt *and* a character,
for that matter). 4. 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".
:alt bit: /awlt bit/ [from alternate] /adj./ See {meta
bit}.
:altmode: /n./ Syn. {alt} sense 3.
:Aluminum Book: /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}}.
:amoeba: /n./ Humorous term for the Commodore Amiga personal
computer.
:amp off: /vt./ [Purdue] To run in {background}. From the
Unix shell `&' operator.
:amper: /n./ Common abbreviation for the name of the ampersand
(`&', ASCII 0100110) character. See {{ASCII}} for other synonyms.
:angle brackets: /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 `Bra' and
`Ket' characters), or significantly smaller (single or double
guillemets) than the less-than and greater-than signs.
See {broket}, {{ASCII}}.
:angry fruit salad: /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.
:annoybot: /*-noy-bot/ /n./ [IRC] See {robot}.
:ANSI: /an'see/ 1. /n./ [techspeak] 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. 2. /n./ [techspeak] A terminal may be said to
be
`ANSI' if it meets the ANSI X.364 standard for terminal control.
Unfortunately, this standard was both over-complicated and too
permissive. It has been retired and replaced by the ECMA-48
standard, which shares both flaws. 3. /n./ [BBS jargon] The set of
screen-painting codes that most MS-DOS and Amiga computers accept.
This comes from the ANSI.SYS device driver that must be loaded on
an MS-DOS computer to view such codes. Unfortunately, neither DOS
ANSI nor the BBS ANSIs derived from it exactly match the ANSI X.364
terminal standard. For example, the ESC-[1m code turns on the bold
highlight on large machines, but in IBM PC/MS-DOS ANSI, it turns on
`intense' (bright) colors. Also, in BBS-land, the term `ANSI' is
often used to imply that a particular computer uses or can emulate
the IBM high-half character set from MS-DOS. Particular use
depends on context. Occasionally, the vanilla ASCII character set
is used with the color codes, but on BBSs, ANSI and `IBM
characters' tend to go together.
:AOS: 1. /aws/ (East Coast), /ay'os/ (West Coast) /vt. obs./
To increase the amount of something. "AOS the campfire."
[based on a PDP-10 increment instruction] Usage:
considered silly, and now obsolete. Now largely supplanted by
{bump}. See {SOS}. 2. /n./ A {{Multics}}-derived OS
supported at one time by Data General. This was pronounced
/A-O-S/ or /A-os/. A spoof of the standard AOS system
administrator's manual ("How to Load and Generate your AOS
System") was created, issued a part number, and circulated as
photocopy folklore; it was called "How to Goad and Levitate
your CHAOS System". 3. /n./ Algebraic Operating System, in
reference
to those calculators which use infix instead of postfix (reverse
Polish) notation. 4. A {BSD}-like operating system for the IBM
RT.
Historical note: AOS in sense 1 was the name of a {PDP-10}
instruction that took any memory location in the computer and added
1 to it; AOS meant `Add One and do not Skip'. Why, you may ask,
does the `S' stand for `do not Skip' rather than for `Skip'? Ah,
here was a beloved piece of PDP-10 folklore. There were eight such
instructions: AOSE added 1 and then skipped the next instruction
if the result was Equal to zero; AOSG added 1 and then skipped if
the result was Greater than 0; AOSN added 1 and then skipped
if the result was Not 0; AOSA added 1 and then skipped Always;
and so on. Just plain AOS didn't say when to skip, so it never
skipped.
For similar reasons, AOJ meant `Add One and do not Jump'. Even
more bizarre, SKIP meant `do not SKIP'! If you wanted to skip the
next instruction, you had to say `SKIPA'. Likewise, JUMP meant
`do not JUMP'; the unconditional form was JUMPA. However, hackers
never did this. By some quirk of the 10's design, the {JRST}
(Jump and ReSTore flag with no flag specified) was actually faster
and so was invariably used. Such were the perverse mysteries of
assembler programming.
:app: /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}.
:arena: [Unix] /n./ The area of memory attached to a process by
`brk(2)' and `sbrk(2)' and used by `malloc(3)' 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}.
:arg: /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}.
:ARMM: /n./ [acronym, `Automated Retroactive Minimal
Moderation'] A Usenet robot 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 31, 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. Compare {Great Worm, the};
{sorcerer's apprentice mode}. See also {software laser},
{network meltdown}.
:armor-plated: /n./ Syn. for {bulletproof}.
:asbestos: /adj./ Used as a modifier to anything intended to
protect one from {flame}s; also in other highly
{flame}-suggestive usages. See, for example, {asbestos
longjohns} and {asbestos cork award}.
:asbestos cork award: /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.
:asbestos longjohns: /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.
:ASCII:: /as'kee/ /n./ [acronym: American Standard Code for
Information Interchange] The predominant character set encoding of
present-day computers. The modern version uses 7 bits for each
character, whereas most earlier codes (including an early version
of ASCII) 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
or the ae-ligature
which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian). It could be worse,
though. It could be much worse. See {{EBCDIC}} to understand how.
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; shriek; <exclamation mark>. Rare:
factorial; exclam; smash; cuss; boing; yell; wow; hey; wham;
eureka; [spark-spot]; soldier.
"
Common: double quote; quote. Rare: literal mark; double-glitch;
<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>; amper; and. Rare: address (from C);
reference (from C++); andpersand; bitand; background (from
`sh(1)'); pretzel; amp. [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); [angle/right angle].
=
Common: <equals>; gets; takes. Rare: quadrathorpe; [half-mesh].
?
Common: query; <question mark>; {ques}. Rare: 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; escape (from C/UNIX); reverse slash; slosh;
backslant; backwhack. Rare: bash; <reverse slant>; reversed
virgule; [backslat].
^
Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret; <circumflex>. Rare:
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].
|
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 pound graphic
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 a Christian Bible).
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 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.
:ASCII art: /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:
o----)||(--+--|<----+ +---------o + D O
L )||( | | | C U
A I )||( +-->|-+ | +-\/\/-+--o - T
C N )||( | | | | P
E )||( +-->|-+--)---+--)|--+-o U
)||( | | | GND T
o----)||(--+--|<----+----------+
A power supply consisting of a full wave rectifier circuit
feeding a capacitor input filter circuit
And here are some very silly examples:
|\/\/\/| ____/| ___ |\_/| ___
| | \ o.O| ACK! / \_ |` '| _/ \
| | =(_)= THPHTH! / \/ \/ \
| (o)(o) U / \
C _) (__) \/\/\/\ _____ /\/\/\/
| ,___| (oo) \/ \/
| / \/-------\ U (__)
/____\ || | \ /---V `v'- oo )
/ \ ||---W|| * * |--| || |`. |_/\
//-o-\\
____---=======---____
====___\ /.. ..\ /___==== Klingons rule OK!
// ---\__O__/--- \\
\_\ /_/
There is an important subgenre of ASCII art that puns on the
standard character names in the fashion of a rebus.
+--------------------------------------------------------+
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^ B ^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |
+--------------------------------------------------------+
" A Bee in the Carrot Patch "
Within humorous ASCII art, there is for some reason an entire
flourishing subgenre of pictures of silly cows. Four of these are
reproduced in the silly examples above, here are three more:
(__) (__) (__)
(\/) ($$) (**)
/-------\/ /-------\/ /-------\/
/ | 666 || / |=====|| / | ||
* ||----|| * ||----|| * ||----||
~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
Satanic cow This cow is a Yuppie Cow in love
Finally, here's a magnificent example of ASCII art depicting an
Edwardian train station in Dunedin, New Zealand:
.-.
/___\
|___|
|]_[|
/ I \
JL/ | \JL
.-. i () | () i .-.
|_| .^. /_\ LJ=======LJ /_\ .^. |_|
._/___\._./___\_._._._._.L_J_/.-. .-.\_L_J._._._._._/___\._./___\._._._
., |-,-| ., L_J |_| [I] |_| L_J ., |-,-| ., .,
JL |-O-| JL L_J%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%L_J JL |-O-| JL JL
IIIIII_HH_'-'-'_HH_IIIIII|_|=======H=======|_|IIIIII_HH_'-'-'_HH_IIIIII_HH_
-------[]-------[]-------[_]----\.=I=./----[_]-------[]-------[]--------[]-
_/\_ ||\\_I_//|| _/\_ [_] []_/_L_J_\_[] [_] _/\_ ||\\_I_//|| _/\_ ||\
|__| ||=/_|_\=|| |__|_|_| _L_L_J_J_ |_|_|__| ||=/_|_\=|| |__| ||-
|__| |||__|__||| |__[___]__--__===__--__[___]__| |||__|__||| |__| |||
IIIIIII[_]IIIII[_]IIIIIL___J__II__|_|__II__L___JIIIII[_]IIIII[_]IIIIIIII[_]
\_I_/ [_]\_I_/[_] \_I_[_]\II/[]\_\I/_/[]\II/[_]\_I_/ [_]\_I_/[_] \_I_/ [_]
./ \.L_J/ \L_J./ L_JI I[]/ \[]I IL_J \.L_J/ \L_J./ \.L_J
| |L_J| |L_J| L_J| |[]| |[]| |L_J |L_J| |L_J| |L_J
|_____JL_JL___JL_JL____|-|| |[]| |[]| ||-|_____JL_JL___JL_JL_____JL_J
There is a newsgroup, alt.ascii.art, devoted to this
genre; however, see also {warlording}.
:ASCIIbetical order: /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 end.
:atomic: /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.).
:attoparsec: /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-}.
:autobogotiphobia: /aw'toh-boh-got`*-foh'bee-*/ /n./ See
{bogotify}.
:automagically: /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
`cc(1)' to produce an executable."
This term is quite old, going back at least to the mid-70s and
probably much earlier. The word `automagic' occurred in
advertising
(for a shirt-ironing gadget) as far back as the late 1940s.
:avatar: /n./ Syn. 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 {MUD}s. 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 disliked the term
`superuser', and was propagated through an ex-CMU hacker at
Tektronix.
:awk: /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 `awk(1)'.
= B =
=====
:back door: /n./ 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 talk that suggested this truly moby hack was 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'.
:backbone cabal: /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. The cabal {mailing list}
disbanded in late 1988 after a bitter internal catfight.
:backbone site: /n./ 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 {rib site}, {leaf site}.
[1996 update: This term is seldom heard any more. The UUCP network
world that gave it meaning has nearly disappeared; everyone is on
the Internet now and network traffic is distributed in very
different patterns. --ESR]
:backgammon:: See {bignum} (sense 3), {moby} (sense 4),
and {pseudoprime}.
:background: /n.,adj.,vt./ 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.
:backspace and overstrike: /interj./ Whoa! Back up. Used to
suggest that someone just said or did something wrong. Common
among APL programmers.
:backward combatability: /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}.
:BAD: /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}.
:Bad Thing: /n./ [from the 1930 Sellar & Yeatman parody "1066
And All That"] Something that can't possibly result in
improvement of the subject. This term is always capitalized, as in
"Replacing all of the 9600-baud modems 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.
:bag on the side: /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."
:bagbiter: /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 the scrotum, but in their current usage they
have become almost completely sanitized.
ITS's `lexiphage' program was the first and to date only known
example of a program *intended* to be a bagbiter.
:bagbiting: /adj./ 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}).
:balloonian variable: /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}.
:bamf: /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
http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon.html.")
:banana label: /n./ The labels often used on the sides of
{macrotape} reels, so called because they are shaped roughly
like blunt-ended bananas. This term, like macrotapes themselves,
is still current but visibly headed for obsolescence.
:banana problem: /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.
:bandwidth: /n./ 1. 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}. 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.
:bang: 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.
:bang on: /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.
:bang path: /n./ 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 in 1981. 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 {{Internet address}},
{network, the}, and {sitename}.
:banner: /n./ 1. 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. 2. 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})'. 3. On interactive software,
a first screen containing a logo and/or author credits and/or a
copyright notice.
:bar: /bar/ /n./ 1. 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}.
:bare metal: /n./ 1. 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, a Real Programmer} (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 less common 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, and
in the code of hackers who just can't let go of that low-level
control. See {Real Programmer}.
In the world of personal computing, bare metal programming
(especially in sense 1 but sometimes also in sense 2) is often
considered a {Good Thing}, or at least a necessary evil
(because these machines have often been sufficiently slow and
poorly designed to make it necessary; see {ill-behaved}).
There, the term usually refers to bypassing the BIOS or OS
interface and writing the application to directly access device
registers and machine addresses. "To get 19.2 kilobaud on the
serial port, you need to get down to the bare metal." People who
can do this sort of thing well are held in high regard.
:barf: /barf/ /n.,v./ [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}, {gag}. In Commonwealth
Hackish, `barf' is generally replaced by `puke' or `vom'.
{barf} is sometimes also used as a {metasyntactic variable},
like {foo} or {bar}.
:barfmail: /n./ Multiple {bounce message}s 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.
:barfulation: /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?"
:barfulous: /bar'fyoo-l*s/ /adj./ (alt. `barfucious',
/bar-fyoo-sh*s/) Said of something that would make anyone
barf, if only for esthetic reasons.
:barney: /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.
:baroque: /adj./ 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}.
:BASIC: /bay'-sic/ /n./ [acronym: Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic
Instruction Code] A programming language, originally designed for
Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s,
which has since become 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. As it is, it ruins thousands of potential wizards a
year.
[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]
:batch: /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."
:bathtub curve: /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}.
:baud: /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 International Telegraph Conference of 1927, and named after
J.M.E. Baudot (1845--1903), the French engineer who constructed
the first successful teleprinter.
:baud barf: /bawd barf/ /n./ The garbage one gets on the
monitor when using a modem connection with some protocol setting
(esp. line speed) incorrect, or when someone picks up a voice
extension on the same line, or when really bad line noise disrupts
the connection. Baud barf is not completely {random}, by the
way; hackers with a lot of serial-line experience can usually tell
whether the device at the other end is expecting a higher or lower
speed than the terminal is set to. *Really* experienced ones
can identify particular speeds.
:baz: /baz/ /n./ 1. 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)."
:bboard: /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".
:BBS: /B-B-S/ /n./ [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 group}s. Thousands of local BBS systems
are in operation throughout the U.S., 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 tend to consider
local BBSes the low-rent district of the hacker culture, but they
serve a valuable function by knitting together lots of hackers and
users in the personal-micro world who would otherwise be unable to
exchange code at all. See also {bboard}.
:beam: /vt./ [from Star Trek Classic's "Beam me up, Scotty!"]
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'. Compare {blast}, {snarf}, {BLT}.
:beanie key: /n./ [Mac users] See {command key}.
:beep: /n.,v./ Syn. {feep}. This term is techspeak under
MS-DOS and OS/2, and seems to be generally preferred among micro
hobbyists.
:beige toaster: /n./ A Macintosh. See {toaster}; compare
{Macintrash}, {maggotbox}.
:bells and whistles: /n./ [by analogy with the toyboxes on theater
organs] 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.
:bells, whistles, and gongs: /n./ A standard elaborated form of
{bells and whistles}; typically said with a pronounced and
ironic accent on the `gongs'.
:benchmark: [techspeak] /n./ 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 (see {gabriel}), the SPECmark suite, and LINPACK.
See also {machoflops}, {MIPS}, {smoke and mirrors}.
:Berkeley Quality Software: /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 `dbx(1)'
debugger. See also {Berzerkeley}.
Note to British and Commonwealth readers: that's /berk'lee/, not
/bark'lee/ as in British Received Pronunciation.
:berklix: /berk'liks/ /n.,adj./ [contraction of `Berkeley
Unix'] See {BSD}. Not used at Berkeley itself. May be more
common among {suit}s attempting to sound like cognoscenti than
among hackers, who usually just say `BSD'.
:Berzerkeley: /b*r-zer'klee/ /n./ [from `berserk', via the
name of a now-deceased record label] Humorous distortion of
`Berkeley' used esp. to refer to the practices or products of the
{BSD} Unix hackers. See {software bloat},
{Missed'em-five}, {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.
:beta: /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}, systems (hardware or software)
software 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.
:BFI: /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'.
:bible: /n./ 1. One of a small number of fundamental source
books such as {Knuth} and {K&R}. 2. The most detailed and
authoritative reference for a particular language, operating
system, or other complex software system.
:BiCapitalization: /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}.
:B1FF: /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
HE"S A K00L 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:
[email protected].
[1993: Now It Can Be Told! My spies inform me that B1FF was
originally created by Joe Talmadge <
[email protected]>, 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. --ESR]
:biff: /bif/ /vt./ To notify someone of incoming mail. From
the BSD utility `biff(1)', which was in turn named after a
friendly golden Labrador 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}.
:Big Gray Wall: /n./ What faces a {VMS} user searching for
documentation. A full VMS kit comes on a pallet, the documentation
taking up around 15 feet of shelf space before the addition of
layered products such as compilers, databases, multivendor
networking, and programming tools. Recent (since VMS version 5)
DEC documentation comes with gray binders; under VMS version 4 the
binders were orange (`big orange wall'), and under version 3 they
were blue. See {VMS}. Often contracted to `Gray Wall'.
:big iron: /n./ Large, expensive, ultra-fast computers. Used
generally of {number-crunching} supercomputers such as Crays,
but can include more conventional big commercial IBMish mainframes.
Term of approval; compare {heavy metal}, oppose {dinosaur}.
:Big Red Switch: /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 {TLA}s, 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}, {120 reset}; see also {scram switch}.
:Big Room, the: /n./ 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."
:big win: /n./ 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}.
:big-endian: /adj./ [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
current in late 1995, 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 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
[email protected] 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.
:bignum: /big'nuhm/ /n./ [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 than 2^(31) (2,147,483,648) or (on a
{bitty box}) 2^(15) (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
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000000000000000000.
:bigot: /n./ 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}.
:bit: /n./ [from the mainstream meaning and `Binary digIT']
1. [techspeak] The unit of information; the amount of information
obtained by asking 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 1949, and seems to have been coined by early computer
scientist John Tukey. Tukey records that it evolved over a lunch
table as a handier alternative to `bigit' or `binit'.
:bit bang: /n./ Transmission of data on a serial line, when
accomplished by rapidly tweaking a single output bit, in software,
at the appropriate times. The technique is a simple loop with
eight OUT and SHIFT instruction pairs for each byte. Input is more
interesting. And full duplex (doing input and output at the same
time) is one way to separate the real hackers from the
{wannabee}s.
Bit bang was used on certain early models of Prime computers,
presumably when UARTs were too expensive, and on archaic Z80 micros
with a Zilog PIO but no SIO. In an interesting instance of the
{cycle of reincarnation}, this technique returned to use in the
early 1990s on some RISC architectures because it consumes such
an infinitesimal part of the processor that it actually makes sense
not to have a UART. Compare {cycle of reincarnation}.
:bit bashing: /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 {bit bang},
{mode bit}.
:bit bucket: /n./ 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.
:bit decay: /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}.
:bit rot: /n./ 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.
:bit twiddling: /n./ 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.
:bit-paired keyboard: /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 more of a Rube Goldberg 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). This 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. 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,
`bit-paired' hardware was quickly junked or relegated to dusty
corners, and both terms passed into disuse.
:bitblt: /bit'blit/ /n./ [from {BLT}, q.v.] 1. 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.
:BITNET: /bit'net/ /n./ [acronym: Because It's Time NETwork]
Everybody's least favorite piece of the network (see {network,
the}). The BITNET hosts are a collection of IBM dinosaurs and
VAXen (the latter with lobotomized comm hardware) that communicate
using 80-character {{EBCDIC}} card images (see {eighty-column
mind}); thus, they tend to mangle the headers and text of
third-party traffic from the rest of the ASCII/{RFC}-822 world
with annoying regularity. BITNET was also notorious as the
apparent home of {B1FF}.
:bits: /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}.
:bitty box: /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}.
:bixie: /bik'see/ /n./ Variant {emoticon}s used on BIX
(the Byte Information eXchange). The {smiley} bixie is <@_@>,
apparently intending to represent two cartoon eyes and a mouth. A
few others have been reported.
:black art: /n./ 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}.
:black hole: /n./ What a piece of email or netnews 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.
Compare {bit bucket}.
:black magic: /n./ 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).
:Black Screen of Death: 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.
:Black Thursday: n. February 8th, 1996 -- the day of the
signing into law of the {CDA}, so called by analogy with the
catastrophic "Black Friday" in 1929 that began the Great
Depression.
:blammo: /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 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.
:blargh: /blarg/ /n./ [MIT] The opposite of {ping}, sense
5; an exclamation indicating that one has absorbed or is emitting a
quantum of unhappiness. Less common than {ping}.
:blast: 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.
:blat: /n./ 1. Syn. {blast}, sense 1. 2. See {thud}.
:bletch: /blech/ /interj./ [from Yiddish/German `brechen', to
vomit, poss. via comic-strip exclamation `blech'] Term
of disgust. Often used in "Ugh, bletch". Compare {barf}.
:bletcherous: /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.
:blink: /vi.,n./ To use a navigator or off-line message reader
to minimize time spent on-line to a commercial network service.
As of late 1994, this term was said to be in wide use in the UK,
but is rare or unknown in the US.
:blinkenlights: /blink'*n-li:tz/ /n./ Front-panel diagnostic
lights on a computer, esp. a {dinosaur}. 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 the "lefthanders" stay 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.
:blit: /blit/ /vt./ 1. 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. 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.)
:blitter: /blit'r/ /n./ 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 sine 1990 the trend is away from
them (however, see {cycle of reincarnation}). Syn. {raster
blaster}.
:blivet: /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.
:BLOB: 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."
:block: /v./ [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."
:block transfer computations: /n./ [from the television series
"Dr. Who"] Computations so fiendishly subtle and complex that
they could not be performed by machines. Used to refer to any task
that should be expressible as an algorithm in theory, but isn't.
(The Z80's LDIR instruction, "Computed Block Transfer with
increment", may also be relevant)
:Bloggs Family, the: /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 DEC
Telephone Directory. Compare {Mbogo, Dr. Fred}.
:blow an EPROM: /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.
:blow away: /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}.
:blow out: /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}.
:blow past: /vt./ To {blow out} despite a safeguard. "The
server blew past the 5K reserve buffer."
:blow up: /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}.
:BLT: /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'.
:Blue Book: /n./ 1. Informal name for one of the three standard
references on the page-layout and graphics-control language
{{PostScript}} ("PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook",
Adobe Systems, Addison-Wesley 1985, QA76.73.P67P68, ISBN
0-201-10179-3); the other three official guides are known as the
{Green Book}, the {Red Book}, and the {White Book} (sense
2). 2. Informal name for one of the three standard references on
Smalltalk: "Smalltalk-80: The Language and its
Implementation", David Robson, Addison-Wesley 1983, QA76.8.S635G64,
ISBN 0-201-11371-63 (this book also has green and red siblings).
3. Any of the 1988 standards issued by the CCITT's ninth plenary
assembly. These include, among other things, the X.400 email spec
and the Group 1 through 4 fax standards. See also {{book
titles}}.
:blue box: /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 {phreaker}s 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. 2. /n./ An {IBM} machine, especially a large (non-PC)
one.
:Blue Glue: /n./ [IBM] IBM's SNA (Systems Network
Architecture), an incredibly {losing} and {bletcherous}
communications protocol widely favored at commercial shops that
don't know any better. 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 pen}s. 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'.
:blue goo: /n./ Term for `police' {nanobot}s 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}}.
:blue wire: /n./ [IBM] Patch wires added to circuit boards at
the factory to correct design or fabrication problems. These may
be necessary if there hasn't been time to design and qualify
another board version. Compare {purple wire}, {red wire},
{yellow wire}.
:blurgle: /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.
:BNF: /B-N-F/ /n./ 1. [techspeak] Acronym for `Backus-Naur
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 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.
:boa: [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'.
:board: /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.
:boat anchor: /n./ 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 S100-bus hobbyist system; originally a term of
annoyance, but became more and more affectionate as the hardware
became more and more obsolete.
:bodysurf code: /n./ A program or segment of code written
quickly in the heat of inspiration without the benefit of formal
design or deep thought. Like its namesake sport, the result is
too often a wipeout that leaves the programmer eating sand.
:BOF: /B-O-F/ or /bof/ /n./ 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.
:BOFH: // /n./ Acronym, Bastard Operator From Hell. A system
administrator with absolutely no tolerance for {luser}s. "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,
http://prime-mover.cc.waikato.ac.nz/Bastard.html.
:bogo-sort: /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." Compare
{bogus}, {brute force}, {Lasherism}.
:bogometer: /boh-gom'-*t-er/ /n./ A notional instrument for
measuring {bogosity}. Compare the `wankometer' described in
the {wank} entry; see also {bogus}.
:bogon: /boh'gon/ /n./ [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}.
:bogon filter: /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}.
:bogon flux: /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}.
:bogosity: /boh-go's*-tee/ /n./ 1. The degree to which
something is {bogus}. At CMU, 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}.
:bogotify: /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}.
:bogue out: /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}.
:bogus: /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 (see
{autobogotiphobia} under {bogotify}). The word spread into
hackerdom from CMU and MIT. By the early 1980s it was also
current in something like the hackish 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".
:Bohr bug: /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}.
:boink: /boynk/ [Usenet: variously ascribed to the TV
series "Cheers" "Moonlighting", and "Soap"]
1. /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}.
:bomb: 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} (sense 2), 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.
:bondage-and-discipline language: /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}.
:bonk/oif: /bonk/, /oyf/ /interj./ In the {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. See also {talk mode}.
:book titles:: 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}, {Blue Book},
{Camel Book}, {Cinderella Book}, {Devil Book}, {Dragon
Book}, {Green Book}, {Orange Book}, {Pink-Shirt Book},
{Purple Book}, {Red Book}, {Silver Book}, {White Book},
{Wizard Book}, {Yellow Book}, and {bible}; see also
{rainbow series}. Since about 1983 this tradition has gotten a
boost from the popular O'Reilly Associates line of technical books,
which usually feature some kind of exotic animal on the
cover.
:boot: /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.
:bottom feeder: /n./ Syn. for {slopsucker}, derived from the
fishermen's and naturalists' term for finny creatures who subsist
on the primordial ooze.
:bottom-up implementation: /n./ Hackish opposite of the
techspeak term `top-down design'. It is now 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.
:bounce: /v./ 1. [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. [Stanford] To play volleyball. The
now-demolished {D. C. Power Lab} building used by the Stanford
AI Lab in the 1970s had a volleyball court on the front lawn. From
5 P.M. to 7 P.M. was the scheduled maintenance time for the
computer, so every afternoon at 5 would come over the intercom the
cry: "Now hear this: bounce, bounce!", followed by Brian McCune
loudly bouncing a volleyball on the floor outside the offices of
known volleyballers. 3. 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}. 4. To casually
reboot a system in order to clear up a transient problem. Reported
primarily among {VMS} users. 5. [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.
:bounce message: /n./ [Unix] 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.
:boustrophedon: /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).
:box: /n./ 1. 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', `MS-DOS
box', etc.) "We preprocess the data on Unix boxes before handing
it up to the mainframe." 2. [IBM] Without qualification but
within an SNA-using site, this refers specifically to an IBM
front-end processor or FEP /F-E-P/. An FEP is a small computer
necessary to enable an IBM {mainframe} to communicate beyond the
limits of the {dinosaur pen}. Typically used in expressions
like the cry that goes up when an SNA network goes down: "Looks
like the {box} has fallen over." (See {fall over}.) See also
{IBM}, {fear and loathing}, {fepped out}, {Blue Glue}.
:boxed comments: /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}.
:boxen: /bok'sn/ /pl.n./ [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.
:boxology: /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}.
:bozotic: /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'.
:BQS: /B-Q-S/ /adj./ Syn. {Berkeley Quality Software}.
:brain dump: /n./ 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).
:brain fart: /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.
:brain-damaged: /adj./ 1. [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 commercial product it is intended
to sell. Syn. {crippleware}.
:brain-dead: /adj./ 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!"
:braino: /bray'no/ /n./ Syn. for {thinko}. See also
{brain fart}.
:branch to Fishkill: /n./ [IBM: from the location of one of the
corporation's facilities] Any unexpected jump in a program that
produces catastrophic or just plain weird results. See {jump
off into never-never land}, {hyperspace}.
:bread crumbs: /n./ 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; in several
variants, a character leaves a trail of bread crumbs so as not to
get lost in the woods.
:break: 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 a few years ago.
:break-even point: /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.ccil.org/retro.
:breath-of-life packet: /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.
:breedle: /n./ See {feep}.
:bring X to its knees: /v./ 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}.
:brittle: /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 commercially
developed software, which displays the quality far more often than
it ought to. Oppose {robust}.
:broadcast storm: /n./ 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}.
:brochureware: /n./ Planned but non-existent product like
{vaporware}, but with the added implication that marketing is
actively selling and promoting it (they've printed brochures).
Brochureware is often deployed as a strategic weapon; the idea is
to con customers into not committing to an existing product of the
competition's. It is a safe bet that when a brochureware product
finally becomes real, it will be more expensive than and inferior
to the alternatives that had been available for years.
:broken: /adj./ 1. Not working properly (of programs).
2. Behaving strangely; especially (when used of people) exhibiting
extreme depression.
:broken arrow: /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....
:BrokenWindows: /n./ Abusive hackerism for the {crufty} and
{elephantine} {X} environment on Sun machines; properly
called `OpenWindows'.
:broket: /broh'k*t/ or /broh'ket`/ /n./ [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}.)
:Brooks's Law: /prov./ "Adding manpower to a late software
project makes it later" -- a result of the fact that the expected
advantage from splitting 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; too often, {management} still does. See
also {creationism}, {second-system effect}, {optimism}.
:browser: /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 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.
:BRS: /B-R-S/ /n./ Syn. {Big Red Switch}. This
abbreviation is fairly common on-line.
:brute force: /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-}.
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.
:brute force and ignorance: /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}.
:BSD: /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 1980, 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, and are still widely popular. Note that
BSD versions going back to 2.9 are often referred to by their
version numbers, without the BSD prefix. See {4.2}, {{Unix}},
{USG Unix}.
:BUAF: // /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
`BUAF's. See {warlording}.
:BUAG: // /n./ [abbreviation, from alt.fan.warlord] Big
Ugly ASCII Graphic. Pejorative term for ugly {ASCII art},
especially as found in {sig block}s. For some reason, mutations
of the head of Bart Simpson are particularly common in the least
imaginative {sig block}s. See {warlording}.
:bubble sort: /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. 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.
:bucky bits: /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}.
:buffer chuck: /n./ Shorter and ruder syn. for {buffer
overflow}.
:buffer overflow: /n./ What happens when you try to stuff more
data into a buffer (holding area) than it can handle. 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 {crunch}es 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}.
:bug: /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.
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! 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.
Actually, use of `bug' in the general sense of a disruptive event
goes back to Shakespeare! 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 has not yet been exhibited. Thus, the
process of investigating the original-computer-bug bug fixed it in
an entirely unexpected way, by making the myth true! --ESR]
:bug-compatible: /adj./ Said of a design or revision that has
been badly compromised by a requirement to be compatible with
{fossil}s or {misfeature}s 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."
:bug-for-bug compatible: /n./ Same as {bug-compatible}, with
the additional implication that much tedious effort went into
ensuring that each (known) bug was replicated.
:bug-of-the-month club: /n./ [from "book-of-the-month
club", a time-honored mail-order-marketing technique in the U.S.]
A mythical club which users of `sendmail(1)' (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 {cracker}s 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'.
:buglix: /buhg'liks/ /n./ Pejorative term referring to
{DEC}'s ULTRIX operating system in its earlier *severely*
buggy versions. Still used to describe ULTRIX, but without nearly
so much venom. Compare {AIDX}, {HP-SUX}, {Nominal
Semidestructor}, {Telerat}, {sun-stools}.
:bulletproof: /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. Syn. {armor-plated}.
:bum: 1. /vt./ To make highly efficient, either in time or
space, often at the expense of clarity. "I managed to bum three
more instructions out of that code." "I spent half the night
bumming the interrupt code." In 1996, this term and the practice
it
describes are semi-obsolete. In {elder days}, John McCarthy
(inventor of {LISP}) used to compare some efficiency-obsessed
hackers among his students to "ski bums"; thus, optimization
became "program bumming", and eventually just "bumming". 2. To
squeeze out excess; to remove something in order to improve
whatever it was removed from (without changing function; this
distinguishes the process from a {featurectomy}). 3. /n./ A small
change to an algorithm, program, or hardware device to make it more
efficient. "This hardware bum makes the jump instruction
faster." Usage: now uncommon, largely superseded by /v./ {tune}
(and /n./ {tweak}, {hack}), though none of these exactly
capture sense 2. All these uses are rare in Commonwealth hackish,
because in the parent dialects of English `bum' is a rude synonym
for `buttocks'.
:bump: /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.
:burble: /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.
:buried treasure: /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!"
:burn-in period: /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.
:burst page: /n./ Syn. {banner}, sense 1.
:busy-wait: /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
{spin}ning 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. This
is a wasteful technique, best avoided on time-sharing systems where
a busy-waiting program may {hog} the processor.
:buzz: /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 by applying an AC rather than DC signal. Some
wire faults will pass DC tests but fail a 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."
:BWQ: /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}.
:by hand: /adv./ 1. 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. 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."
:byte:: /bi:t/ /n./ [techspeak] A unit of memory or data equal to
the amount used to represent one character; on modern architectures
this is usually 8 bits, but may be 9 on 36-bit machines. Some
older architectures used `byte' for quantities of 6 or 7 bits, and
the PDP-10 supported `bytes' that were actually bitfields of
1 to 36 bits! These usages are now obsolete, and even 9-bit bytes
have become rare in the general trend toward 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}.
:bytesexual: /bi:t`sek'shu-*l/ /adj./ 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}.
:bzzzt, wrong: /bzt rong/ /excl./ [Usenet/Internet] 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.
= C =
=====
:C: /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. See also {languages of
choice}, {indent style}.
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".
:C Programmer's Disease: /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.
:C++: /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]
:calculator: [Cambridge] /n./ Syn. for {bitty box}.
:Camel Book: /n./ Universally recognized nickname for the book
"Programming Perl", by Larry Wall and Randal L. Schwartz,
O'Reilly Associates 1991, ISBN 0-937175-64-1. The definitive
reference on {Perl}.
:can: /vt./ To abort a job on a time-sharing system. Used
esp. when the person doing the deed is an operator, as in
"canned from the {{console}}". Frequently used in an imperative
sense, as in "Can that print job, the LPT just popped a
sprocket!" Synonymous with {gun}. It is said that the ASCII
character with mnemonic CAN (0011000) was used as a kill-job
character on some early OSes. Alternatively, this term may derive
from mainstream slang `canned' for being laid off or fired.
:can't happen: 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).
:candygrammar: /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 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]
:canonical: /adj./ [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'.
:card walloper: /n./ An EDP programmer who grinds out batch
programs that do stupid things like print people's paychecks.
Compare {code grinder}. See also {{punched card}},
{eighty-column mind}.
:careware: /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.
:cargo cult programming: /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).
:cascade: /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.
:case and paste: /n./ [from `cut and paste'] 1. 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, this is sometimes called `clone-and-hack' coding.
:casters-up mode: /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).
:casting the runes: /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 "{AI Koans}"
(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.
:cat: [from `catenate' via {{Unix}} `cat(1)'] /vt./
1. [techspeak] To spew an entire file to the screen or some other
output sink without pause. 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, `cat(1)' 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, `cat(1)' 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....
:catatonic: /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}.
:cd tilde: /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."
:CDA: /C-D-A/ The "Communications Decency Act" of 1996,
passed on {Black Thursday} as section 502 of a major
telecommunications reform bill. 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 threatens 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
mass demonstration by thousands of netters who turned their
{home page}s black for 48 hours. Several civil-rights groups
and computing/telecommunications companies sought an immediate
injunction to block enforcement of the CDA pending a constitutional
challenge. This injunction was granted on the likelihood that
plaintiffs would prevail on the merits of the case. At time of
writing (Spring 1996), the fate of the CDA, and its effect on the
Internet, is still unknown. See also {Exon}.
To join the fight against the CDA (if it's still law) and other
forms of Internet censorship, visit the Center for Democracy and
Technology Home Page at
http://www.cdt.org.
:cdr: /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.
:chad: /chad/ /n./ 1. The perforated edge strips on printer
paper, after they have been separated from the printed portion.
Also called {selvage} and {perf}. 2. obs. The confetti-like
paper bits punched out of cards or paper tape; this has also been
called `chaff', `computer confetti', and `keypunch
droppings'. This use may now be mainstream; it has been reported
seen (1993) in directions for a card-based voting machine in
California.
Historical note: One correspondent believes `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'. There is a
legend that the word was originally acronymic, standing for
"Card Hole Aggregate Debris", but this has all the earmarks of
a bogus folk etymology.
:chad box: /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.
:chain: 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.
:channel: /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', 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).
:channel hopping: /n./ [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'.
:channel op: /chan'l op/ /n./ [IRC] Someone who is endowed
with privileges on a particular {IRC} channel; commonly
abbreviated `chanop' or `CHOP'. These privileges include the
right to {kick} users, to change various status bits, and to
make others into CHOPs.
:chanop: /chan'-op/ /n./ [IRC] See {channel op}.
:char: /keir/ or /char/; rarely, /kar/ /n./ Shorthand for
`character'. Esp. used by C programmers, as `char' is C's
typename for character data.
:charityware: /cha'rit-ee-weir`/ /n./ Syn. {careware}.
:chase pointers: 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.
:chawmp: /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}.
:check: /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-guard}s).
:chemist: /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.
:Chernobyl chicken: /n./ See {laser chicken}.
:Chernobyl packet: /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}.
:chicken head: /n./ [Commodore] The Commodore Business
Machines logo, which strongly resembles a poultry part. Rendered
in ASCII as `C='. With the arguable exception of the Amiga (see
{amoeba}), Commodore's machines are notoriously crocky little
{bitty box}es (see also {PETSCII}). 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.
:chiclet keyboard: /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.
:chine nual: /sheen'yu-*l/ /n. obs./ [MIT] The LISP Machine
Manual, so called because the title was wrapped around the cover so
only those letters showed on the front.
:Chinese Army technique: /n./ Syn. {Mongolian Hordes
technique}.
:choad: /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.
:choke: /v./ 1. To reject input, often ungracefully. "NULs
make System V's `lpr(1)' choke." "I tried building an
{EMACS} binary to use {X}, but `cpp(1)' choked on all
those `#define's." See {barf}, {gag}, {vi}.
2. [MIT] More generally, to fail at any endeavor, but with some
flair or bravado; the popular definition is "to snatch defeat from
the jaws of victory."
:chomp: /vi./ To {lose}; specifically, to chew on something
of which more was bitten off than one can. Probably related to
gnashing of teeth. 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.
:chomper: /n./ Someone or something that is chomping; a loser.
See {loser}, {bagbiter}, {chomp}.
:CHOP: /chop/ /n./ [IRC] See {channel op}.
:Christmas tree: /n./ A kind of RS-232 line tester or breakout
box featuring rows of blinking red and green LEDs suggestive of
Christmas lights.
:Christmas tree packet: /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.)
:chrome: /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.
:chug: /vi./ To run slowly; to {grind} or {grovel}.
"The disk is chugging like crazy."
:Church of the SubGenius: /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}.
:Cinderella Book: [CMU] /n./ "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}}.
:CI$: // /n./ Hackerism for `CIS', CompuServe Information
Service. The dollar sign refers to CompuServe's rather steep line
charges. Often used in {sig block}s just before a CompuServe
address. Syn. {Compu$erve}.
:Classic C: /klas'ik C/ [a play on `Coke Classic'] /n./ 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.
:clean: 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."
:CLM: /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!"
:clobber: /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}.
:clocks: /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}.
:clone: /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. `PC clone:' a PC-BUS/ISA or EISA-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. 5. 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. 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".
:clone-and-hack coding: /n./ [DEC] Syn. {case and paste}.
:clover key: /n./ [Mac users] See {feature key}.
:clustergeeking: /kluh'st*r-gee`king/ /n./ [CMU] Spending
more time at a computer cluster doing CS homework than most people
spend breathing.
:COBOL: /koh'bol/ /n./ [COmmon Business-Oriented Language]
(Synonymous with {evil}.) A weak, verbose, and flabby language
used by {card walloper}s to do boring mindless things on
{dinosaur} mainframes. Hackers believe that all COBOL
programmers are {suit}s or {code grinder}s, 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}.
:COBOL fingers: /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!"
:code grinder: /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. Compare {card walloper}; contrast {hacker},
{Real Programmer}.
:Code of the Geeks: /n./ see {geek code}.
:code police: /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 {weenie}s. "Dike out that goto or the code
police will get you!" The ironic usage is perhaps more common.
:codes: /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").
:codewalker: /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."
:coefficient of X: /n./ Hackish speech makes heavy use of
pseudo-mathematical metaphors. Four particularly important
ones involve the terms `coefficient', `factor', `index', 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'.
:cokebottle: /kohk'bot-l/ /n./ Any very unusual character,
particularly one you can't type because it 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 `{altmode}-altmode-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, `mwm(1)', 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}.
:cold boot: /n./ See {boot}.
:COME FROM: /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.
:comm mode: /kom mohd/ /n./ [ITS: from the feature supporting
on-line chat; the term may spelled with one or two m's] Syn. for
{talk mode}.
:command key: /n./ [Mac users] Syn. {feature key}.
:comment out: /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.
:Commonwealth Hackish:: /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/). The prefix {meta} may be pronounced
/mee't*/; similarly, Greek letter beta is usually /bee't*/,
zeta is usually /zee't*/, and so forth. Preferred
{metasyntactic variable}s include {blurgle}, `eek',
`ook', `frodo', and `bilbo'; {wibble},
`wobble', and in emergencies `wubble'; `flob',
`banana', `tom', `dick', `harry',
`wombat', `frog', {fish}, 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!"). Finally, note
that the American terms `parens', `brackets', and `braces' for (),
[], and {} are uncommon; Commonwealth hackish prefers
`brackets', `square brackets', and `curly brackets'. Also, the
use of `pling' for {bang} is common outside the United States.
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}, {plingnet}, {raster
blaster}, {RTBM}, {seggie}, {spod}, {sun lounge},
{terminal junkie}, {tick-list features}, {weeble},
{weasel}, {YABA}, and notes or definitions under {Bad
Thing}, {barf}, {bogus}, {bum}, {chase pointers},
{cosmic rays}, {crippleware}, {crunch}, {dodgy},
{gonk}, {hamster}, {hardwarily}, {mess-dos},
{nybble}, {proglet}, {root}, {SEX}, {tweak}, and
{xyzzy}.
:compact: /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 {feature}s 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).
:compiler jock: /n./ See {jock} (sense 2).
:compress: [Unix] /vt./ When used without a qualifier,
generally refers to {crunch}ing of a file using a particular C
implementation of compression by James A. Woods 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.
:Compu$erve: /n./ See {CI$}. Synonyms CompuSpend and
Compu$pend are also reported.
:computer confetti: /n./ Syn. {chad}. Though this term is
common, 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.
:computer geek: /n./ 1. One who eats (computer) bugs for a
living. One who fulfills all the dreariest negative stereotypes
about hackers: an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with
all the personality of a cheese grater. Cannot be used by
outsiders without implied insult to all hackers; compare
black-on-black vs. white-on-black usage of `nigger'. A computer
geek may be either a fundamentally clueless individual or a
proto-hacker in {larval stage}. Also called `turbo nerd',
`turbo geek'. See also {propeller head}, {clustergeeking},
{geek out}, {wannabee}, {terminal junkie}, {spod},
{weenie}. 2. Some self-described computer geeks use this term
in a positive sense and protest sense 1 (this seems to have
been a post-1990 development). For one such argument, see
http://samsara.circus.com/~omni/geek.html.
:computron: /kom'pyoo-tron`/ /n./ 1. 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.
(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'.)
:con: [from SF fandom] /n./ A science-fiction convention. Not
used of other sorts of conventions, such as professional meetings.
This term, unlike many others of SF-fan slang, is widely recognized
even by hackers who aren't {fan}s. "We'd been corresponding on
the net for months, then we met face-to-face at a con."
:condition out: /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}.
:condom: /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. See {Great Worm, the}.
:confuser: /n./ Common soundalike slang for `computer'.
Usually encountered in compounds such as `confuser room',
`personal confuser', `confuser guru'. Usage: silly.
:connector conspiracy: /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. The KL-10 Massbus connector was
actually *patented* by {DEC}, which reputedly refused to
license the design and thus effectively locked third parties out of
competition for the lucrative Massbus peripherals market. This
policy is a source of never-ending frustration for the diehards who
maintain older PDP-10 or VAX systems. Their CPUs work fine, but
they are stuck with dying, obsolescent disk and tape drives with
low capacity and high power requirements.
(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 hex wrench 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}.
:cons: /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.
:considered harmful: /adj./ 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).
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. 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).
:console:: /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}. See also {CTY}.
:console jockey: /n./ See {terminal junkie}.
:content-free: /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."
:control-C: /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!"
:control-O: /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}.
:control-Q: /vi./ "Resume." From the ASCII DC1 or {XON}
character (the pronunciation /X-on/ is therefore also used), used
to undo a previous {control-S}.
:control-S: /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.
:Conway's Law: /prov./ The rule that the organization of the
software and the organization of the software team will be
congruent; originally stated as "If you have four groups working
on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler".
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."
:cookbook: /n./ [from amateur electronics and radio] A book of small
code segments that the reader can use to do various {magic}
things in programs. One current example is the
"{{PostScript}} Language Tutorial and Cookbook" by Adobe
Systems, Inc (Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-10179-3), also known as
the {Blue Book} which has recipes for things like wrapping text
around arbitrary curves and making 3D fonts. 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.
:cooked mode: /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.
:cookie: /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). Compare {magic cookie};
see also {fortune cookie}.
:cookie bear: /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."
:cookie file: /n./ A collection of {fortune cookie}s 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.
:cookie jar: /n./ An area of memory set aside for storing
{cookie}s. 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.
:cookie monster: /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 time-sharing
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}.
:copious free time: /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 {suit}s. "I'll get back to him
on that feature in my copious free time."
:copper: /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.
:copy protection: /n./ A class of methods for preventing
incompetent pirates from stealing software and legitimate customers
from using it. Considered silly.
:copybroke: /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}.
:copyleft: /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.
:copywronged: /kop'ee-rongd/ /adj./ [play on `copyright']
Syn. for {copybroke}.
:core: /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}.
:core cancer: /n./ A process that exhibits a slow but
inexorable resource {leak} -- like a cancer, it kills by
crowding out productive `tissue'.
:core dump: /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}.
:core leak: /n./ Syn. {memory leak}.
:Core Wars: /n./ A game between `assembler' programs in a
simulated machine, where the objective is to kill your opponent's
program by overwriting it. Popularized by A. K. Dewdney's column
in "Scientific American" magazine, this was actually devised
by Victor Vyssotsky, Robert Morris Sr., and Dennis Ritchie in the
early 1960s (their original game was called `Darwin' and ran on a
PDP-1 at Bell Labs). See {core}.
:corge: /korj/ /n./ [originally, the name of a cat] Yet
another {metasyntactic variable}, invented by Mike Gallaher and
propagated by the {GOSMACS} documentation. See {grault}.
:cosmic rays: /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.
:cough and die: /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}.
:cowboy: /n./ [Sun, from William Gibson's {cyberpunk} SF]
Synonym for {hacker}. It is reported that at Sun this word is
often said with reverence.
:CP/M:: /C-P-M/ /n./ [Control Program/Monitor; later
{retcon}ned 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. 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}.
:CPU Wars: /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). 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 (then, as now, 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}.
:crack root: /v./ To defeat the security system of a Unix
machine and gain {root} privileges thereby; see {cracking}.
:cracker: /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. 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.
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}.
:cracking: /n./ 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 only
mediocre hackers.
:crank: /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."
:CrApTeX: /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}}.
:crash: 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 {luser}s 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}.
:crash and burn: /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}). Sun-3
monitors losing the flyback transformer and lightning strikes on
VAX-11/780 backplanes are notable crash and burn generators. 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.
:crawling horror: /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}.
:cray: /kray/ /n./ 1. (properly, capitalized) One of the line
of supercomputers designed by Cray Research. 2. Any supercomputer
at all. 3. The {canonical} {number-crunching} machine.
The term is actually the lowercased last name of Seymour Cray, a
noted computer architect and co-founder of the company. Numerous
vivid legends surround him, some true and some admittedly invented
by Cray Research brass to shape their corporate culture and image.
:cray instability: /n./ 1. A shortcoming of a program or
algorithm that manifests itself only when a large problem is being
run on a powerful machine (see {cray}). Generally more subtle
than bugs that can be detected in smaller problems running on a
workstation or mini. 2. More specifically, a shortcoming of
algorithms which are well behaved when run on gentle floating point
hardware (such as IEEE-standard or DEC) but which break down badly
when exposed to a Cray's unique `rounding' rules.
:crayola: /kray-oh'l*/ /n./ A super-mini or -micro computer
that provides some reasonable percentage of supercomputer
performance for an unreasonably low price. Might also be a
{killer micro}.
:crayola books: /n./ The {rainbow series} of National
Computer Security Center (NCSC) computer security standards (see
{Orange Book}). Usage: humorous and/or disparaging.
:crayon: /n./ 1. Someone who works on Cray supercomputers.
More specifically, it implies a programmer, probably of the CDC
ilk, probably male, and almost certainly wearing a tie
(irrespective of gender). Systems types who have a Unix background
tend not to be described as crayons. 2. A {computron} (sense 2)
that participates only in {number-crunching}. 3. A unit of
computational power equal to that of a single Cray-1. There is a
standard joke about this usage that derives from an old Crayola
crayon promotional gimmick: When you buy 64 crayons you get a free
sharpener.
:creationism: /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.
:creep: /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.
:creeping elegance: /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}.
:creeping featurism: /kree'ping fee'chr-izm/ /n./
1. Describes a systematic tendency to load more {chrome} and
{feature}s 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. 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}.
:creeping featuritis: /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'.)
:cretin: /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.
:cretinous: /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}.
:crippleware: /n./ 1. 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 dyked
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?
:critical mass: /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.
:crlf: /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}, {terpri}.
Under {{Unix}} influence this usage has become less common (Unix
uses a bare line feed as its `CRLF').
:crock: /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 `make(1)', 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, a Real Programmer} 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.
:cross-post: [Usenet] /vi./ 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 only one part of the original posting.
:crudware: /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!"
:cruft: /kruhft/ [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".
:cruft together: /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}.
:cruftsmanship: /kruhfts'm*n-ship / /n./ [from {cruft}]
The antithesis of craftsmanship.
:crufty: /kruhf'tee/ /adj./ [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.
:crumb: /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}.
:crunch: 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.
:cruncha cruncha cruncha: /kruhn'ch* kruhn'ch* kruhn'ch*/ /interj./
An encouragement sometimes muttered to a machine
bogged down in a serious {grovel}. Also describes a notional
sound made by groveling hardware. See {wugga wugga}, {grind}
(sense 3).
:cryppie: /krip'ee/ /n./ A cryptographer. One who hacks or
implements cryptographic software or hardware.
:CTSS: /C-T-S-S/ /n./ Compatible Time-Sharing System. An
early (1963) experiment in the design of interactive time-sharing
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.
:CTY: /sit'ee/ or /C-T-Y/ /n./ [MIT] The terminal
physically associated with a computer's system {{console}}. The
term is a contraction of `Console {tty}', that is, `Console
TeleTYpe'. This {{ITS}}- and {{TOPS-10}}-associated term has
become less common, as most Unix hackers simply refer to the CTY as
`the console'.
:cube: /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).
:cubing: /vi./ [parallel with `tubing'] 1. Hacking on an IPSC
(Intel Personal SuperComputer) hypercube. "Louella's gone cubing
*again*!!" 2. Hacking Rubik's Cube or related puzzles,
either physically or mathematically. 3. An indescribable form of
self-torture (see sense 1 or 2).
:cursor dipped in X: /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!"
:cuspy: /kuhs'pee/ /adj./ [WPI: from the {DEC}
abbreviation CUSP, for `Commonly Used System Program', i.e., a
utility program used by many people] 1. (of a program)
Well-written. 2. Functionally excellent. A program that performs
well and interfaces well to users is cuspy. See {rude}.
3. [NYU] Said of an attractive woman, especially one regarded as
available. Implies a certain curvaceousness.
:cut a tape: /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.
:cybercrud: /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 hex for PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail) or PGP (Pretty Good
Privacy) digital signatures and certificates of authenticity. This
stuff all services a purpose and good user interfaces should hide
it, but all too often users are forced to wade through it.
:cyberpunk: /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 na"ive 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.
:cyberspace: /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 {network, the}). 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.
3. Occasionally, the metaphoric location of the mind of a person in
{hack mode}. Some hackers report experiencing strong eidetic
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.
:cycle: 1. /n./ The basic unit of computation. What every
hacker wants more of (noted hacker Bill Gosper describes 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), {120 reset};
from the phrase `cycle power'. "Cycle the machine again, that
serial port's still hung."
:cycle crunch: /n./ A situation wherein the number of people
trying to use a computer simultaneously has reached the point where
no one can get enough cycles because they are spread too thin and
the system has probably begun to {thrash}. This scenario is an
inevitable result of Parkinson's Law applied to timesharing.
Usually the only solution is to buy more computer. Happily, this
has rapidly become easier since the mid-1980s, so much so that the
very term `cycle crunch' now has a faintly archaic flavor; most
hackers now use workstations or personal computers as opposed to
traditional timesharing systems.
:cycle drought: /n./ A scarcity of cycles. It may be due to a
{cycle crunch}, but it could also occur because part of the
computer is temporarily not working, leaving fewer cycles to go
around. "The {high moby} is {down}, so we're running with
only half the usual amount of memory. There will be a cycle
drought until it's fixed."
:cycle of reincarnation: /n./ [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},
{bit bang}.
:cycle server: /n./ A powerful machine that exists primarily
for running large compute-, disk-, or memory-intensive jobs.
Implies that interactive tasks such as editing are done on other
machines on the network, such as workstations.
:cypherpunk: /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
[email protected]
coordinating work on public-key encryption freeware, privacy, and
digital cash. See also {tentacle}.
= D =
=====
:D. C. Power Lab: /n./ The former site of {{SAIL}}. Hackers
thought this was very funny because the obvious connection to
electrical engineering was nonexistent -- the lab was named for a
Donald C. Power. Compare {Marginal Hacks}.
:daemon: /day'mn/ or /dee'mn/ /n./ [from the mythological
meaning, later rationalized as the acronym `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}. Although the
meaning and the pronunciation have drifted, we think this glossary
reflects current (1996) usage.
:daemon book: /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) -- the standard reference
book on the internals of {BSD} Unix. So called because the
cover has a picture depicting a little devil (a visual play on
{daemon}) in sneakers, holding a pitchfork (referring to one of
the characteristic features of Unix, the `fork(2)' system
call). Also known as the {Devil Book}.
:dahmum: /dah'mum/ /n./ [Usenet] The material of which
protracted {flame war}s, 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 crossposted
OS/2-versus-{Linux} debate was fed through {Dissociated
Press}.
:dangling pointer: /n./ 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. Compare {dead link}.
:dark-side hacker: /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}.
:Datamation: /day`t*-may'sh*n/ /n./ A magazine that many
hackers assume all {suit}s read. Used to question an unbelieved
quote, as in "Did you read that in `Datamation?'" (But see
below; this slur may be dated by the time you read this.) 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 is trying for more of the technical content and
irreverent humor that marked its early days.
Datamation now has a WWW page at
http://www.datamation.com
worth visiting for its selection of computer humor, including
"Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" and the `Bastard Operator
From Hell' stories by Simon Travaglia (see {BOFH}).
:DAU: /dow/ [German FidoNet] /n./ German acronym for
D"ummster Anzunehmender User (stupidest imaginable user).
From the engineering-slang GAU for Gr"osster 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 acidents
such as a core meltdown. See {cretin}, {fool}, {loser} and
{weasel}.
:day mode: /n./ See {phase} (sense 1). Used of people only.
:dd: /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
`dd' the root partition onto a tape, then use the boot PROM to
load it back on to a new disk". The Unix `dd(1)' 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 `dd(1)' has been {deprecated} for a
long time (though it has no exact replacement). The term has been
displaced by {BLT} or simple English `copy'.
:DDT: /D-D-T/ /n./ 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. The DEC 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 (C14-H9-Cl5) 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 {suit}s 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).
:de-rezz: /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.
:dead: /adj./ 1. Non-functional; {down}; {crash}ed.
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}.
:dead code: /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, a Real Programmer}.
:dead link: /n./ [WWW] A World-Wide-Web URL that no longer
points to the information it was written to reach. Usually this
happens because the document has been moved or deleted. Lots of
dead links make a WWW page frustrating and useless and are the #1
sign of poor page maintainance. Compare {dangling pointer}.
:DEADBEEF: /ded-beef/ /n./ The hexadecimal word-fill pattern
for freshly allocated memory (decimal -21524111) 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 {heisenbug}s into {Bohr bug}s. 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}.
:deadlock: /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.
:deadly embrace: /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.
:death code: /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).
:Death Square: /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.
:Death Star: /n./ [from the movie "Star Wars"] 1. The
AT&T corporate logo, which appears on computers sold by AT&T and
bears an uncanny resemblance to the Death Star in the movie. This
usage is particularly common among partisans of {BSD} Unix, who
tend 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.
:DEC:: /dek/ /n./ Commonly used abbreviation for Digital
Equipment Corporation, now deprecated by DEC itself in favor of
"Digital". 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 heavy 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 is still regarded with a
certain wry affection even among many hackers too young to have
grown up on DEC machines. The contrast with {IBM} is
instructive.
[1996 update: DEC has gradually been reclaiming some of its old
reputation among techies in the last five years. The success of
the Alpha, an innovatively-designed and very high-performance
{killer micro}, has helped a lot. So has DEC's newfound
receptiveness to Unix and open systems in general. --ESR]
:dec: /dek/ /v./ Verbal (and only rarely written) shorthand
for decrement, i.e. `decrease by one'. Especially used by
assembly programmers, as many assembly languages have a `dec'
mnemonic. Antonym: {inc}.
:DEC Wars: /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.
:decay: /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.
:DEChead: /dek'hed/ /n./ 1. A {DEC} {field servoid}.
Not flattering. 2. [from `deadhead'] A Grateful Dead fan working
at DEC.
:deckle: /dek'l/ /n./ [from dec- and {nybble}; the original
spelling seems to have been `decle'] Two {nickle}s; 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.
:DED: /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 {AFJ}s (suggested uses included "as a power-off
indicator").
:deep hack mode: /n./ See {hack mode}.
:deep magic: /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}.
:deep space: /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}.
:defenestration: /n./ [from the traditional Czechoslovakian
method of assassinating prime ministers, via SF fandom] 1. Proper
karmic retribution for an incorrigible punster. "Oh, ghod, that
was *awful*!" "Quick! Defenestrate him!" 2. 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. 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. [proposed] The requirement to support a command-line interface.
"It has to run on a VT100." "Curses! I've been
defenestrated!"
:defined as: /adj./ In the role of, usually in an
organization-chart sense. "Pete is currently defined as bug
prioritizer." Compare {logical}.
:dehose: /dee-hohz/ /vt./ To clear a {hosed} condition.
:delint: /dee-lint/ /v. obs./ To modify code to remove
problems detected when {lint}ing. 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.
:delta: /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'.
:demented: /adj./ Yet another term of disgust used to describe
a 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}, {bozotic}.
:demigod: /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}), Linus Torvalds (inventor of Linux), and
most recently James Gosling (inventor of Java). 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}.
:demo: /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.
:demo mode: /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 {app}s 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}).
:demon: /n./ 1. [MIT] 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. 2. [outside MIT]
Often used equivalently to {daemon} -- especially in the
{{Unix}} world, where the latter spelling and pronunciation is
considered mildly archaic.
Demons in sense 1 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.
:demon dialer: /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 {phreaker}s;
see {war dialer} for its contemporary progeny.
:depeditate: /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.
:deprecated: /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}.
:derf: /derf/ /v.,n./ [PLATO] 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.
:deserves to lose: /adj./ 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}.
:desk check: /n.,v./ To {grovel} over hardcopy of source
code, mentally simulating the control flow; a method of catching
bugs. No longer common practice in this age of on-screen editing,
fast compiles, and sophisticated debuggers -- though some maintain
stoutly that it ought to be. Compare {eyeball search},
{vdiff}, {vgrep}.
:despew: /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}.
:Devil Book: /n./ See {daemon book}, the term preferred by
its authors.
:dickless workstation: /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 time-sharing 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.
:dictionary flame: /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}.
:diddle: 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}.
:die: /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}.
:die horribly: /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".
:diff: /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 `diff(1)' command, esp. when
used as specification input to the `patch(1)' 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}.
:digit: /n./ An employee of Digital Equipment Corporation. See
also {VAX}, {VMS}, {PDP-10}, {{TOPS-10}}, {DEChead},
{double DECkers}, {field circus}.
:dike: /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 among mechanics and engineers to mean `diagonal
cutters', esp. the heavy-duty metal-cutting version, but may also
refer to a kind of wire-cutters used by electronics techs. 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.
:Dilbert: /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 {rat dance}.
:ding: /n.,vi./ 1. Synonym for {feep}. Usage: rare among
hackers, but commoner 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."
:dink: /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}.
:dinosaur: /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 1988 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}.
:dinosaur pen: /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}.
:dinosaurs mating: /n./ Said to occur when yet another {big
iron} merger or buyout occurs; reflects a perception by hackers
that these signal another stage in the long, slow dying of the
{mainframe} industry. In its glory days of the 1960s, it was
`IBM and the Seven Dwarves': 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. More such earth-shaking unions of doomed
giants seem inevitable.
:dirtball: /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]
:dirty power: /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 hit}s).
:disclaimer: /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.
:Discordianism: /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}.
:disk farm: /n./ (also {laundromat}) A large room or rooms
filled with disk drives (esp. {washing machine}s).
:display hack: /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
`rain(6)' program, `worms(6)' on miscellaneous Unixes,
and the {X} `kaleid(1)' program. Display hacks can also be
implemented without programming 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}.
:Dissociated Press: /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}.
:distribution: /n./ 1. A software source tree packaged for
distribution; but see {kit}. 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.
:disusered: /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}.
:do protocol: /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}.
:doc: /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).
:documentation:: /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}.
:dodgy: /adj./ Syn. with {flaky}. Preferred outside the
U.S.
:dogcow: /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.
:dogpile: /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.
:dogwash: /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.
:domainist: /doh-mayn'ist/ /adj./ 1. [USENET, by pointed
analogy with "sexist", "racist", etc.] Someone who judges
people by the domain of their email addresses; esp. someone who
dismisses anyone who posts from a public internet provider. "What
do you expect from an article posted from aol.com?" 2. Said of an
{{Internet address}} (as opposed to a {bang path}) because the
part to the right of the `@' specifies a nested series of
`domains'; for example,
[email protected] specifies
the machine called snark in the subdomain called thyrsus
within the top-level domain called com. See also
{big-endian}, sense 2.
The meaning of this term has drifted. At one time sense 2 was
primary. In elder days it was also used of a site, mailer, or
routing program which knew how to handle domainist addresses; or of
a person (esp. a site admin) who preferred domain addressing,
supported a domainist mailer, or proselytized for domainist
addressing and disdained {bang path}s. These senses are now
(1996) obsolete, as effectively all sites have converted.
:Don't do that, then!: /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}.
:dongle: /dong'gl/ /n./ 1. A security or {copy protection}
device for commercial microcomputer programs 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 idea was clever, but it was initially a
failure, as users disliked tying up a serial port this way. Almost
all dongles on the market today (1993) will 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. The devices are still not
widely used, 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}.
[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]
:dongle-disk: /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}.
:donuts: /n. obs./ A collective noun for any set of memory bits.
This usage is extremely archaic and may no longer be live jargon;
it dates from the days of ferrite-{core} memories in which each
bit was implemented by a doughnut-shaped magnetic flip-flop.
:doorstop: /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. "When we get another Wyse-50 in here, that ADM 3
will turn into a doorstop." Compare {boat anchor}.
:dot file: [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}.
:double bucky: /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}.
:double DECkers: /n./ Used to describe married couples in which
both partners work for Digital Equipment Corporation.
:doubled sig: [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}.
:down: 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. See {crash}; oppose {up}.
:download: /vt./ To transfer data or (esp.) code from a
larger `host' system (esp. a {mainframe}) over a digital
comm link to a smaller `client' system, esp. a microcomputer
or specialized peripheral. Oppose {upload}.
However, note that ground-to-space communications has its own usage
rule for this term. Space-to-earth transmission is always `down'
and the reverse `up' regardless of the relative size of the
computers involved. So far the in-space machines have invariably
been smaller; thus the upload/download distinction has been
reversed from its usual sense.
:DP: /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}.
:DPB: /d*-pib'/ /vt./ [from the PDP-10 instruction set] To
plop something down in the middle. Usage: silly. "DPB yourself
into that couch there." The connotation would be that the couch
is full except for one slot just big enough for one last person to
sit in. DPB means `DePosit Byte', and was the name of a PDP-10
instruction that inserts some bits into the middle of some other
bits. Hackish usage has been kept alive by the Common LISP
function of the same name.
:DPer: /dee-pee-er/ /n./ Data Processor. Hackers are
absolutely amazed that {suit}s use this term self-referentially.
*Computers* process data, not people! See {DP}.
:dragon: /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
`cron(1)'. At SAIL, they called this sort of thing a
`phantom'.
:Dragon Book: /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 `Green 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}}.
:drain: /v./ [IBM] Syn. for {flush} (sense 2). Has a
connotation of finality about it; one speaks of draining a device
before taking it offline.
:dread high-bit disease: /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}.
:DRECNET: /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}.
:driver: /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.
:droid: /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}.
:drool-proof paper: /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."
:drop on the floor: /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}.
:drop-ins: /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.
:drop-outs: /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}.
:drugged: /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.
:drum: adj, /n./ Ancient techspeak term referring to slow,
cylindrical magnetic media that were once state-of-the-art storage
devices. Under 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 {newbie}s. See also "{The Story of Mel, a
Real Programmer}" in Appendix A.
:drunk mouse syndrome: /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.
:Duff's device: /n./ The most dramatic use yet seen of {fall
through} in C, invented by Tom Duff when he was at Lucasfilm.
Trying to {bum} 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."
[For maximal obscurity, the outermost pair of braces above could be
actually be removed -- GLS]
:dumb terminal: /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.
:dumbass attack: /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}.
:dumbed down: /adj./ Simplified, with a strong connotation of
*over*simplified. 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}.
:dump: /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.
:dumpster diving: /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}.
:dup killer: /d[y]oop kill'r/ /n./ [FidoNet] Software that is
supposed to detect and delete duplicates of a message that may have
reached the FidoNet system via different routes.
:dup loop: /d[y]oop loop/ (also `dupe loop') /n./ [FidoNet]
An infinite stream of duplicated, near-identical messages on a
FidoNet {echo}, the only difference being unique or mangled
identification information applied by a faulty or incorrectly
configured system or network gateway, thus rendering {dup
killer}s ineffective. If such a duplicate message eventually
reaches a system through which it has already passed (with the
original identification information), all systems passed on the way
back to that system are said to be involved in a {dup loop}.
:dusty deck: /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}.
:DWIM: /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}).
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}.
:dynner: /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}.
= E =
=====
:earthquake: /n./ [IBM] The ultimate real-world shock test for
computer hardware. Hackish sources at IBM deny the rumor that the
Bay Area quake of 1989 was initiated by the company to test
quality-assurance procedures at its California plants.
:Easter egg: /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.
:Easter egging: /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}.
:eat flaming death: /imp./ A construction popularized among
hackers by the infamous {CPU Wars} comic; supposedly derive 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 the Firesign
Theater's 1975 album "In The Next World, You're On Your Own"
included the phrase "Eat flaming death, fascist media pigs"; this
may have been an influence). Used in humorously overblown
expressions of hostility. "Eat flaming death, {{EBCDIC}} users!"
:EBCDIC:: /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 {dinosaur}s. 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}.
:echo: [FidoNet] /n./ A {topic group} on {FidoNet}'s
echomail system. Compare {newsgroup}.
:eighty-column mind: /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 is thought by most hackers to dominate IBM's
customer base and its thinking. See {IBM}, {fear and
loathing}, {card walloper}.
:El Camino Bignum: /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}.)
In recent years, the synonym `El Camino Virtual' has been
reported as an alternate at IBM and Amdahl sites in the Valley.
[GLS has since let slip that the unnamed hacker in this story was
in fact he --ESR]
:elder days: /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,
the}.
:elegant: /adj./ [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-Exup'ery, 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."
:elephantine: /adj./ Used of programs or systems that are both
conspicuous {hog}s (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}.
:elevator controller: /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 `printf(3)' 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}.
:elite: /adj./ Clueful. Plugged-in. One of the cognoscenti.
Also used as a general positive adjective. This term is not
actually hacker slang in the strict sense; it is used primarily by
crackers and {warez d00dz}. Cracker usage is probably related to
a 19200cps modem called the `Courier Elite' that was widely popular
on pirate boards before the V.32bis standard. A true hacker would
be more likely to use `wizardly'. Oppose {lamer}.
:ELIZA effect: /*-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}.
:elvish: /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
`B"ocklin', an art-decoish display font.
:EMACS: /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.
It includes facilities to run compilation subprocesses and send and
receive mail; 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.
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',
`Eventually `malloc()'s All Computer Storage', and `EMACS
Makes A Computer Slow' (see {{recursive acronym}}). See
also {vi}.
:email: /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 `'emaill'e' (enameled) and related to Old
French `emmaille"ure' (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.
:emoticon: /ee-moh'ti-kon/ /n./ 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
{newbie}s), resulting in arguments and {flame war}s.
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'
(These may become more comprehensible if you tilt your head
sideways, to the left.)
The first two listed are by far the most frequently encountered.
Hyphenless forms of them are common on CompuServe, GEnie, and BIX;
see also {bixie}. On {Usenet}, `smiley' is often used as a
generic term synonymous with {emoticon}, as well as specifically
for the happy-face emoticon.
It appears that the emoticon was invented by one Scott Fahlman on
the CMU {bboard} systems around 1980. 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." [GLS
confirms that he remembers this original posting].
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.
:empire: /n./ Any of a family of military simulations derived
from a game written by Peter Langston many years ago. Five or six
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 freeware. All are
notoriously addictive.
:engine: /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 hackish 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'.
:English: 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. 2. The official
name of the database language used by the Pick Operating System,
actually a sort of crufty, brain-damaged SQL with delusions of
grandeur. The name permits {marketroid}s to say "Yes, and you
can program our computers in English!" to ignorant {suit}s
without quite running afoul of the truth-in-advertising laws.
:enhancement: /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.
:ENQ: /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}.
:EOF: /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 -1 under C libraries postdating V6 Unix, but was
originally 0. 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}.
:EOL: /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}.
:EOU: /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.
:epoch: /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 {tick}s 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}.
:epsilon: [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."
:epsilon squared: /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}.
:era, the: /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.
:Eric Conspiracy: /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 about fifteen 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.ccil.org/~esr/ecsl.html for full details.
:Eris: /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}.
:erotics: /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.
:error 33: [XEROX PARC] /n./ 1. 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).
:evil: /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}.
:evil and rude: /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'.
:exa-: /ek's*/ /pref./ [SI] See {{quantifiers}}.
:examining the entrails: /n./ The process of {grovel}ling
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 sacrified animal. Compare
{runes}, {incantation}, {black art}, {desk check}.
:EXCH: /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).
:excl: /eks'kl/ /n./ Abbreviation for `exclamation point'.
See {bang}, {shriek}, {{ASCII}}.
:EXE: /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.
:exec: /eg-zek'/ or /eks'ek/ vt., /n./ 1. [Unix: from
`execute'] Synonym for {chain}, derives from the
`exec(2)' 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 a always a program,
never a person.
:exercise, left as an: /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.
:Exon: /eks'on/ /excl./ A generic obscenity that quickly
entered wide use on the Internet and Usenet after {Black
Thursday}. From the last name of Senator James Exon
(Democrat-Nevada), primary author of the {CDA}.
:external memory: /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.
:eye candy: /i:' kand`ee/ /n./ [from mainstream slang
"ear candy"] A display of some sort that's presented to {luser}s
to keep them distracted while the program performs necessary
background tasks. "Give 'em some eye candy while the back-end
{slurp}s that {BLOB} into core."
:eyeball search: /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}, {desk check}.
= F =
=====
:face time: /n./ 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."
:factor: /n./ See {coefficient of X}.
:fall over: /vi./ [IBM] Yet another synonym for {crash} or
{lose}. `Fall over hard' equates to {crash and burn}.
:fall through: /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}.
:fan: /n./ Without qualification, indicates a fan of science
fiction, especially one who goes to {con}s 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."
:fandango on core: /n./ [Unix/C hackers, from the Mexican
dance] In C, a wild pointer that runs out of bounds, causing a
{core dump}, or corrupts the `malloc(3)' {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, this can corrupt the OS itself, causing massive
lossage. Other frenetic dances such as the rhumba, cha-cha, or
watusi, may be substituted. See {aliasing bug}, {precedence
lossage}, {smash the stack}, {memory leak}, {memory
smash}, {overrun screw}, {core}.
:FAQ: /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
this file.
:FAQ list: /F-A-Q list/ or /fak list/ /n./ [Usenet] Syn
{FAQ}, sense 2.
:FAQL: /fa'kl/ /n./ Syn. {FAQ list}.
:faradize: /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.
:farkled: /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.
:farming: /n./ [Adelaide University, Australia] What the heads
of a disk drive are said to do when they plow little furrows in the
magnetic media. Associated with a {crash}. Typically used as
follows: "Oh no, the machine has just crashed; I hope the hard
drive hasn't gone {farming} again."
:fascist: /adj./ 1. 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}). 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.
:fat electrons: /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}.
:faulty: /adj./ Non-functional; buggy. Same denotation as
{bletcherous}, {losing}, q.v., but the connotation is much
milder.
:fd leak: /F-D leek/ /n./ A kind of programming bug analogous
to a {core leak}, in which a program fails to close file
descriptors (`fd's) after file operations are completed, and
thus eventually runs out of them. See {leak}.
:fear and loathing: /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 except the Rios (a.k.a. the RS/6000). "Ack! They want
PCs to be able to talk to the AI machine. Fear and loathing
time!"
:feature: /n./ 1. A good property or behavior (as of a
program). Whether it was intended or not is immaterial. 2. 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. 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 (see {computer
geek}, sense #2).
:feature creature: /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}.
:feature key: /n./ 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},
or the `command key'. The Mac's equivalent of an {alt} key.
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 `sev"ardhet'
(interesting feature); many of these are old churches. Some Swedes
report as an idiom for it the word `kyrka', cognate to English
`church' and Scots-dialect `kirk' but pronounced /shir'k*/ in
modern Swedish. Others say this is nonsense. Another idiom
reported for the sign is `runsten' /roon'stn/, derived from
the fact that many of the interesting features are Viking
rune-stones.
:feature shock: /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.
:featurectomy: /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.
:feep: /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}.
:feeper: /fee'pr/ /n./ The device in a terminal or
workstation (usually a loudspeaker of some kind) that makes the
{feep} sound.
:feeping creature: /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.
:feeping creaturism: /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.
:feetch feetch: /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".
:fence: /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".
:fencepost error: /n./ 1. 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.)
:fepped out: /fept owt/ /adj./ The Symbolics 3600 LISP
Machine has a Front-End Processor called a `FEP' (compare sense 2
of {box}). When the main processor gets {wedged}, the FEP
takes control of the keyboard and screen. Such a machine is said
to have `fepped out' or `dropped into the fep'.
:FidoNet: /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. FidoNet has grown rapidly
and in early 1996 has approximately 38000 nodes.
:field circus: /n./ [a derogatory pun on `field service'] The
field service organization of any hardware manufacturer, but
especially DEC. There is an entire genre of jokes about DEC field
circus engineers:
Q: How can you recognize a DEC 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 DEC field circus engineer
who is out of gas?
A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.
[See {Easter egging} for additional insight on these jokes.]
There is also the `Field Circus Cheer' (from the {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 is located in Maynard, Massachusetts.)
:field servoid: [play on `android'] /fee'ld ser'voyd/ /n./
Representative of a field service organization (see {field
circus}). This has many of the implications of {droid}.
:Fight-o-net: /n./ [FidoNet] Deliberate distortion of {FidoNet},
often applied after a flurry of {flamage} in a particular
{echo}, especially the SYSOP echo or Fidonews (see {'Snooze}).
:File Attach: [FidoNet] 1. /n./ A file sent along with a mail
message from one BBS to another. 2. /vt./ Sending someone a file
by
using the File Attach option in a BBS mailer.
:File Request: [FidoNet] 1. /n./ The {FidoNet} equivalent of
{FTP}, in which one BBS system automatically dials another and
{snarf}s one or more files. Often abbreviated `FReq'; files
are often announced as being "available for FReq" in the same way
that files are announced as being "available for/by anonymous
FTP" on the Internet. 2. /vt./ The act of getting a copy of a file
by using the File Request option of the BBS mailer.
:file signature: /n./ A {magic number}, sense 3.
:filk: /filk/ /n.,v./ [from SF fandom, where a typo for
`folk' was adopted as a new word] A popular or folk song with
lyrics revised or completely new lyrics, intended for humorous
effect when read, and/or to be sung late at night at SF
conventions. There is a flourishing subgenre of these called
`computer filks', written by hackers and often containing rather
sophisticated technical humor. See {double bucky} for an
example. Compare {grilf}, {hing} and {newsfroup}.
:film at 11: [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.
:filter: /n./ [orig. {{Unix}}, now also in {{MS-DOS}}] 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}.
:Finagle's Law: /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". One variant favored among hackers is "The perversity of
the Universe tends towards a maximum" (but see also {Hanlon's
Razor}). 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.
:fine: /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}.
:finger: [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'. Originally a humorous component of one's plan file
to deter the curious fingerer (sense 2), it has entered the arsenal
of some {flamer}s.
:finger trouble: /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?".
:finger-pointing syndrome: /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.
:finn: /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!"
:firebottle: /n./ 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}.
:firefighting: /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.
:firehose syndrome: /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}.
:firewall code: /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.
:firewall machine: /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
{cracker}s. 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}.
[When first coined in the mid-1980s this term was pure jargon. Now
(1996) it is borderline techspeak, and may have to be dropped from
this lexicon before very long --ESR]
:fireworks mode: /n./ The mode a machine is sometimes said to
be in when it is performing a {crash and burn} operation.
:firmy: /fer'mee/ /n./ Syn. {stiffy} (a 3.5-inch floppy
disk).
:fish: /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'.
:FISH queue: /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.
:FITNR: // /adj./ [Thinking Machines, Inc.] Fixed In The
Often Next Release. A written-only notation attached to bug
reports.
wishful thinking.
:fix: /n.,v./ What one does when a problem has been reported
too many times to be ignored.
:FIXME: /imp./ 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}.
:flag: /n./ 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}.
:flag day: /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 massive change was made to the {{Multics}} timesharing
system to convert from the old ASCII code to the new one; this was
scheduled for Flag Day (a U.S. holiday), June 14, 1966. See also
{backward combatability}.
:flaky: /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}.
:flamage: /flay'm*j/ /n./ 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}.
:flame: 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.
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.
:flame bait: /n./ A posting intended to trigger a {flame
war}, or one that invites flames in reply. See also {troll}.
:flame on: 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}.
:flame war: /n./ (var. `flamewar') An acrimonious dispute,
especially when conducted on a public electronic forum such as
{Usenet}.
:flamer: /n./ One who habitually {flame}s. Said esp. of
obnoxious {Usenet} personalities.
:flap: /vt./ 1. 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 {microtape}s 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. See also {macrotape}. 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.)
:flarp: /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.
:flat: /adj./ 1. 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}.
:flat-ASCII: /adj./ 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}.
:flat-file: /adj./ A {flatten}ed 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}.
:flatten: /vt./ 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."
:flavor: /n./ 1. Variety, type, kind. "DDT commands come in
two flavors." "These lights come in two flavors, big red ones
and small green ones." 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.
:flavorful: /adj./ Full of {flavor} (sense 2); esthetically
pleasing. See {random} and {losing} for antonyms. See also
the entries for {taste} and {elegant}.
:flippy: /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.
:flood: /v./ [IRC] 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.
:flowchart:: /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, {card walloper}s, 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).
See also {pdl}, sense 3.
:flower key: /n./ [Mac users] See {feature key}.
:flush: /v./ 1. 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
`fflush(3)' 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 `fflush(3)' 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 find the ITS usage confusing, and vice versa.
:flypage: /fli:'payj/ /n./ (alt. `fly page') A {banner},
sense 1.
:Flyspeck 3: /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.
:flytrap: /n./ See {firewall machine}.
:FM: /F-M/ /n./ 1. *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}.
:fnord: /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}.
:FOAF: // /n./ [Usenet] 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.
:FOD: /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
{MUD}s 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." Compare {gun}.
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.
:fold case: /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.
:followup: /n./ 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}.
:fontology: /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]
:foo: /foo/ 1. /interj./ Term of disgust. 2. 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 variable}s used in syntax examples. See also
{bar}, {baz}, {qux}, {quux}, {corge}, {grault},
{garply}, {waldo}, {fred}, {plugh}, {xyzzy},
{thud}.
The etymology of hackish `foo' is obscure. When used in
connection with `bar' it is generally traced to the WWII-era Army
slang acronym FUBAR (`Fucked Up Beyond All Repair'), later
bowdlerized to {foobar}. (See also {FUBAR}.)
However, the use of the word `foo' itself has more complicated
antecedents, including a long history in comic strips and cartoons.
The old "Smokey Stover" comic strips by Bill Holman often
included the word `FOO', in particular on license plates of cars;
allegedly, `FOO' and `BAR' also occurred in Walt Kelly's
"Pogo" strips. In the 1938 cartoon "The Daffy Doc", a very
early version of Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying "SILENCE IS
FOO!"; oddly, this seems to refer to some approving or positive
affirmative use of foo. It has been suggested that this might be
related to the Chinese word `fu' (sometimes transliterated
`foo'), which can mean "happiness" when spoken with the proper
tone (the lion-dog guardians flanking the steps of many Chinese
restaurants are properly called "fu dogs").
Paul Dickson's excellent book "Words" (Dell, 1982, ISBN
0-440-52260-7) traces "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."
Other sources confirm that `FOO' was 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. In this
connection, the later American military slang `foo fighters' is
interesting; at least as far back as the 1950s, radar operators
used it 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).
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.
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}. Almost
the entire staff of what later became the MIT AI Lab was involved
with TMRC, and probably picked the word up there.
Very probably, hackish `foo' had no single origin and derives
through all these channels from Yiddish `feh' and/or English
`fooey'.
:foobar: /n./ Another common {metasyntactic variable}; see
{foo}. Hackers do *not* generally use this to mean
{FUBAR} in either the slang or jargon sense.
:fool: /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}.
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}.
:fool file, the: /n./ [Usenet] A notional repository of all the
most dramatically and abysmally stupid utterances ever. An entire
subgenre of {sig block}s 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.
:Foonly: /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
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 of the Jupiter
project cancellation 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.
:footprint: /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 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]
:for free: /adj./ 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.
:for the rest of us: /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}.
:for values of: [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 pi equals 3 -- for small values
of pi 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).
:fora: /pl.n./ Plural of {forum}.
:foreground: /vt./ [Unix] 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 time-sharing 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}.
:fork bomb: /n./ [Unix] A particular species of {wabbit}
that can be written in one line of C (`main()
{for(;;)fork();}') or shell (`$0 & $0 &') on any Unix system,
or occasionally created by an egregious coding bug. A fork bomb
process `explodes' by recursively spawning copies of itself
(using the Unix system call `fork(2)'). Eventually it eats
all the process table entries and effectively wedges the system.
Fortunately, fork bombs are relatively easy to spot and kill, so
creating one deliberately seldom accomplishes more than to bring
the just wrath of the gods down upon the perpetrator. See also
{logic bomb}.
:forked: /adj./ [Unix; prob. influenced by a mainstream
expletive] Terminally slow, or dead. Originated when one system
was slowed to a snail's pace by an inadvertent {fork bomb}.
:Fortrash: /for'trash/ /n./ Hackerism for the FORTRAN
(FORmula TRANslator) language, referring to its primitive design,
gross and irregular syntax, limited control constructs, and
slippery, exception-filled semantics.
:fortune cookie: /n./ [WAITS, via Unix] A random quote, item of
trivia, joke, or maxim printed to the user's tty at login time or
(less commonly) at logout time. Items from this lexicon have often
been used as fortune cookies. See {cookie file}.
:forum: /n./ [Usenet, GEnie, CI$; pl. `fora' or `forums']
Any discussion group accessible through a dial-in {BBS}, a
{mailing list}, or a {newsgroup} (see {network, the}). A
forum functions much like a bulletin board; users submit
{posting}s for all to read and discussion ensues. Contrast
real-time chat via {talk mode} or point-to-point personal
{email}.
:fossil: /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.) 3. The FOSSIL
(Fido/Opus/Seadog Standard Interface Level) driver specification
for serial-port access to replace the {brain-dead} routines in
the IBM PC ROMs. Fossils are used by most MS-DOS {BBS} software
in preference to the `supported' ROM routines, which do not support
interrupt-driven operation or setting speeds above 9600; the use of
a semistandard FOSSIL library is preferable to the {bare metal}
serial port programming otherwise required. Since the FOSSIL
specification allows additional functionality to be hooked in,
drivers that use the {hook} but do not provide serial-port
access themselves are named with a modifier, as in `video
fossil'.
:four-color glossies: /n./ 1. Literature created by
{marketroid}s 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.
:fragile: /adj./ Syn {brittle}.
:fred: /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. Unlike {J. Random Hacker} or `J. Random
Loser', this name has no positive or negative loading (but see
{Mbogo, Dr. Fred}). See also {barney}. 2. An acronym for
`Flipping Ridiculous Electronic Device'; other F-verbs may be
substituted for `flipping'.
:frednet: /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."
:freeware: /n./ Free software, often written by enthusiasts and
distributed by users' groups, or via electronic mail, local
bulletin boards, {Usenet}, or other electronic media. 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}.
:freeze: /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.
:fried: /adj./ 1. 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. 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."
:frink: /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}.
:friode: /fri:'ohd/ /n./ [TMRC] A reversible (that is, fused
or blown) diode. Compare {fried}; see also {SED}, {LER}.
:fritterware: /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}.
:frob: /frob/ 1. /n./ [MIT] 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.
:frobnicate: /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.
:frobnitz: /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.
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.
:frog: 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!"
:frogging: [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 {terminak} for a historical example and compare
{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.
:front end: /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." See also {fepped out}. 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.
:frotz: /frots/ 1. /n./ See {frobnitz}. 2. `mumble
frotz': An interjection of mildest disgust.
:frotzed: /frotst/ /adj./ {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.
:frowney: /n./ (alt. `frowney face') See {emoticon}.
:FRS: // /n./ 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; this was probably critical in helping establish the
term.
:fry: 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}.
:FSF: /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.
:FTP: /F-T-P/, *not* /fit'ip/ 1. [techspeak] /n./ The
File Transfer Protocol for transmitting files between systems on
the Internet. 2. /vt./ To {beam} a file using the File Transfer
Protocol. 3. Sometimes used as a generic even for file transfers
not using {FTP}. "Lemme get a copy of "Wuthering
Heights" ftp'd from uunet."
:FUBAR: /n./ The Failed UniBus Address Register in a VAX. A
good example of how jargon can occasionally be snuck past the
{suit}s; see {foobar}, and {foo} for a fuller etymology.
:fuck me harder: /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]
:FUD: /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}.
:FUD wars: /fuhd worz/ /n./ [from {FUD}] 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 is but one outstanding example.
:fudge: 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.
:fudge factor: /n./ 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}.
:fuel up: /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}}.
:Full Monty, the: /n./ See {monty}, sense 2.
:fum: /n./ [XEROX PARC] At PARC, often the third of the
standard {metasyntactic variable}s (after {foo} and
{bar}). Competes with {baz}, which is more common outside
PARC.
:funky: /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."
:funny money: /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'
commemmorates 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'.
:furrfu: // /excl./ [Usenet] 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 {newbie}s was being overused. See
also {FOAF}.
:fuzzball: /n./ [TCP/IP hackers] A DEC LSI-11 running a
particular suite of homebrewed software written by Dave Mills and
assorted co-conspirators, used in the early 1980s for Internet
protocol testbedding and experimentation. These were used as
NSFnet backbone sites in its early 56KB-line days; a few were still
active on the Internet as late as mid-1993, doing odd jobs such as
network time service.
= G =
=====
:G: /pref.,suff./ [SI] See {{quantifiers}}.
:g-file: /n./ [Commodore BBS culture] Any file that is written
with the intention of being read by a human rather than a machine,
such as the Jargon File, documentation, humor files, hacker lore,
and technical materials.
This term survives from the nearly forgotten Commodore 64
underground and BBS community. In the early 80s, C-Net had emerged
as the most popular C64 BBS software for systems which encouraged
messaging (as opposed to file transfer). There were three main
options for files: Program files (p-files), which served the same
function as `doors' in today's systems, UD files (the user
upload/download section), and g-files. Anything that was meant to
be read was included in g-files.
:gabriel: /gay'bree-*l/ /n./ [for Dick Gabriel, SAIL LISP
hacker and volleyball fanatic] An unnecessary (in the opinion of
the opponent) stalling tactic, e.g., tying one's shoelaces or
combing one's hair repeatedly, asking the time, etc. Also used to
refer to the perpetrator of such tactics. Also, `pulling a
Gabriel', `Gabriel mode'.
:gag: /vi./ Equivalent to {choke}, but connotes more
disgust. "Hey, this is FORTRAN code. No wonder the C compiler
gagged." See also {barf}.
:gang bang: /n./ The use of large numbers of loosely coupled
programmers in an attempt to wedge a great many features into a
product in a short time. Though there have been memorable gang
bangs (e.g., that over-the-weekend assembler port mentioned in
Steven Levy's "Hackers"), most are perpetrated by large
companies trying to meet deadlines; the inevitable result is
enormous buggy masses of code entirely lacking in
{orthogonal}ity. 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 infinitesimal. See also {firefighting},
{Mongolian Hordes technique}, {Conway's Law}.
:garbage collect: /vi./ (also `garbage collection', n.) See
{GC}.
:garply: /gar'plee/ /n./ [Stanford] Another metasyntactic
variable (see {foo}); once popular among SAIL hackers.
:gas: [as in `gas chamber'] 1. /interj./ A term of disgust
and hatred, implying that gas should be dispensed in generous
quantities, thereby exterminating the source of irritation. "Some
loser just reloaded the system for no reason! Gas!" 2. /interj./
A
suggestion that someone or something ought to be flushed out of
mercy. "The system's getting {wedged} every few minutes.
Gas!" 3. /vt./ To {flush} (sense 1). "You should gas that old
crufty software." 4. [IBM] /n./ Dead space in nonsequentially
organized files that was occupied by data that has since been
deleted; the compression operation that removes it is called
`degassing' (by analogy, perhaps, with the use of the same term
in vacuum technology). 5. [IBM] /n./ Empty space on a disk that
has
been clandestinely allocated against future need.
:gaseous: /adj./ Deserving of being {gas}sed. Disseminated
by Geoff Goodfellow while at SRI; became particularly popular after
the Moscone-Milk killings in San Francisco, when it was learned
that the defendant Dan White (a politician who had supported
Proposition 7) would get the gas chamber under Proposition 7 if
convicted of first-degree murder (he was eventually convicted of
manslaughter).
:gawble: /gaw'bl/ /n./ See {chawmp}.
:GC: /G-C/ [from LISP terminology; `Garbage Collect']
1. /vt./ To clean up and throw away useless things. "I think I'll
GC the top of my desk today." When said of files, this is
equivalent to {GFR}. 2. /vt./ To recycle, reclaim, or put to
another use. 3. /n./ An instantiation of the garbage collector
process.
`Garbage collection' is computer-science techspeak for a
particular class of strategies for dynamically but transparently
reallocating computer memory (i.e., without requiring explicit
allocation and deallocation by higher-level software). One such
strategy involves periodically scanning all the data in memory and
determining what is no longer accessible; useless data items are
then discarded so that the memory they occupy can be recycled and
used for another purpose. Implementations of the LISP language
usually use garbage collection.
In jargon, the full phrase is sometimes heard but the {abbrev}
GC is more frequently used because it is shorter. Note that there
is an ambiguity in usage that has to be resolved by context: "I'm
going to garbage-collect my desk" usually means to clean out the
drawers, but it could also mean to throw away or recycle the desk
itself.
:GCOS:: /jee'kohs/ /n./ A {quick-and-dirty} {clone} of
System/360 DOS that emerged from GE around 1970; originally called
GECOS (the General Electric Comprehensive Operating System). Later
kluged to support primitive timesharing and transaction processing.
After the buyout of GE's computer division by Honeywell, the name
was changed to General Comprehensive Operating System (GCOS).
Other OS groups at Honeywell began referring to it as `God's Chosen
Operating System', allegedly in reaction to the GCOS crowd's
uninformed and snotty attitude about the superiority of their
product. All this might be of zero interest, except for two facts:
(1) The GCOS people won the political war, and this led in the
orphaning and eventual death of Honeywell {{Multics}}, and (2)
GECOS/GCOS left one permanent mark on Unix. Some early Unix
systems at Bell Labs used GCOS machines for print spooling and
various other services; the field added to `/etc/passwd' to
carry GCOS ID information was called the `GECOS field' and
survives today as the `pw_gecos' member used for the user's
full name and other human-ID information. GCOS later played a
major role in keeping Honeywell a dismal also-ran in the mainframe
market, and was itself ditched for Unix in the late 1980s when
Honeywell retired its aging {big iron} designs.
:GECOS:: /jee'kohs/ /n./ See {{GCOS}}.
:gedanken: /g*-dahn'kn/ /adj./ Ungrounded; impractical; not
well-thought-out; untried; untested.
`Gedanken' is a German word for `thought'. A thought
experiment is one you carry out in your head. In physics, the term
`gedanken experiment' is used to refer to an experiment that is
impractical to carry out, but useful to consider because it can
be reasoned about theoretically. (A classic gedanken experiment of
relativity theory involves thinking about a man in an elevator
accelerating through space.) Gedanken experiments are very useful
in physics, but must be used with care. It's too easy to idealize
away some important aspect of the real world in constructing the
`apparatus'.
Among hackers, accordingly, the word has a pejorative connotation.
It is typically used of a project, especially one in artificial
intelligence research, that is written up in grand detail
(typically as a Ph.D. thesis) without ever being implemented to
any great extent. Such a project is usually perpetrated by people
who aren't very good hackers or find programming distasteful or are
just in a hurry. A `gedanken thesis' is usually marked by an
obvious lack of intuition about what is programmable and what is
not, and about what does and does not constitute a clear
specification of an algorithm. See also {AI-complete},
{DWIM}.
:geef: /v./ [ostensibly from `gefingerpoken']
/vt./ Syn. {mung}. See also {blinkenlights}.
:geek code: /n./ (also "Code of the Geeks"). A set of
codes commonly used in {sig block}s 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://krypton.mankato.msus.edu/~hayden/geek.html. Here is a
sample geek code (that or 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
{newsgroup}s. It has in turn spawned imitators; there is now
even a "Saturn geek code" for owners of the Saturn car. See also
{computer geek}.
:geek out: /vi./ To temporarily enter techno-nerd mode while in
a non-hackish context, for example at parties held near computer
equipment. Especially used when you need to do or say something
highly technical and don't have time to explain: "Pardon me while
I geek out for a moment." See {computer geek}; see also
{propeller head}.
:gen: /jen/ /n.,v./ Short for {generate}, used frequently
in both spoken and written contexts.
:gender mender: /n./ A cable connector shell with either two
male or two female connectors on it, used to correct the mismatches
that result when some {loser} didn't understand the RS232C
specification and the distinction between DTE and DCE. Used
esp. for RS-232C parts in either the original D-25 or the IBM
PC's bogus D-9 format. Also called `gender bender', `gender
blender', `sex changer', and even `homosexual adapter;'
however, there appears to be some confusion as to whether a `male
homosexual adapter' has pins on both sides (is doubly male) or
sockets on both sides (connects two males).
:General Public Virus: /n./ Pejorative name for some versions
of the {GNU} project {copyleft} or General Public License
(GPL), which requires that any tools or {app}s incorporating
copylefted code must be source-distributed on the same
counter-commercial 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 as of January 1991 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 (as in, for example, use of the Bison
parser skeleton). Nevertheless, widespread suspicion that the
{copyleft} language is `boobytrapped' has caused many
developers to avoid using GNU tools and the GPL. Recent (July
1991) changes in the language of the version 2.00 license may
eliminate this problem.
:generate: /vt./ To produce something according to an algorithm
or program or set of rules, or as a (possibly unintended) side
effect of the execution of an algorithm or program. The opposite
of {parse}. This term retains its mechanistic connotations
(though often humorously) when used of human behavior. "The guy
is rational most of the time, but mention nuclear energy around him
and he'll generate {infinite} flamage."
:Genius From Mars Technique: /n./ [TMRC] A visionary quality
which enables one to ignore the standard approach and come up with
a totally unexpected new algorithm. An attack on a problem from an
offbeat angle that no one has ever thought of before, but that in
retrospect makes total sense. Compare {grok}, {zen}.
:gensym: /jen'sim/ [from MacLISP for `generated symbol']
1. /v./ To invent a new name for something temporary, in such a way
that the name is almost certainly not in conflict with one already
in use. 2. /n./ The resulting name. The canonical form of a
gensym
is `Gnnnn' where nnnn represents a number; any LISP hacker would
recognize G0093 (for example) as a gensym. 3. A freshly generated
data structure with a gensymmed name. Gensymmed names are useful
for storing or uniquely identifying crufties (see {cruft}).
:Get a life!: /imp./ Hacker-standard way of suggesting that the
person to whom it is directed has succumbed to terminal geekdom
(see {computer 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 "Saturday Night Live" episode in a
speech that ended "Get a *life*!", but some respondents
believe it to have been in use before then. It was certainly in
wide use among hackers for at least five years before achieving
mainstream currency in early 1992.
:Get a real computer!: /imp./ Typical hacker response to news
that somebody is having trouble getting work done on a system that
(a) is single-tasking, (b) has no hard disk, or (c) has an address
space smaller than 16 megabytes. This is as of early 1996; note
that the threshold for `real computer' rises with time. See
{bitty box} and {toy}.
:GFR: /G-F-R/ /vt./ [ITS: from `Grim File Reaper', an ITS and
LISP Machine utility] To remove a file or files according to some
program-automated or semi-automatic manual procedure, especially
one designed to reclaim mass storage space or reduce name-space
clutter (the original GFR actually moved files to tape). Often
generalized to pieces of data below file level. "I used to have
his phone number, but I guess I {GFR}ed it." See also
{prowler}, {reaper}. Compare {GC}, which discards only
provably worthless stuff.
:GIFs at 11: [Fidonet] Fidonet alternative to {film at
11}, especially in echoes (Fidonet topic areas) where uuencoded
GIFs are permitted. Other formats, especially JPEG and MPEG,
may be referenced instead.
:gig: /jig/ or /gig/ /n./ [SI] See {{quantifiers}}.
:giga-: /ji'ga/ or /gi'ga/ /pref./ [SI] See
{{quantifiers}}.
:GIGO: /gi:'goh/ [acronym] 1. `Garbage In, Garbage Out' ---
usually said in response to {luser}s who complain that a program
didn't "do the right thing" when given imperfect input or
otherwise mistreated in some way. Also commonly used to describe
failures in human decision making due to faulty, incomplete, or
imprecise data. 2. `Garbage In, Gospel Out': this more recent
expansion is a sardonic comment on the tendency human beings have
to put excessive trust in `computerized' data.
:gilley: /n./ [Usenet] The unit of analogical bogosity.
According to its originator, the standard for one gilley was "the
act of bogotoficiously comparing the shutting down of 1000 machines
for a day with the killing of one person". The milligilley has
been found to suffice for most normal conversational exchanges.
:gillion: /gil'y*n/ or /jil'y*n/ /n./ [formed from
{giga-} by analogy with mega/million and tera/trillion]
10^9. Same as an American billion or a British `milliard'.
How one pronounces this depends on whether one speaks {giga-}
with a hard or soft `g'.
:GIPS: /gips/ or /jips/ /n./ [analogy with {MIPS}]
Giga-Instructions per Second (also possibly `Gillions of
Instructions per Second'; see {gillion}). In 1991, this is used
of only a handful of highly parallel machines, but this is expected
to change. Compare {KIPS}.
:glark: /glark/ /vt./ To figure something out from context.
"The System III manuals are pretty poor, but you can generally
glark the meaning from context." Interestingly, the word was
originally `glork'; the context was "This gubblick contains many
nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp can be
glorked [sic] from context" (David Moser, quoted by Douglas
Hofstadter in his "Metamagical Themas" column in the January
1981 "Scientific American"). It is conjectured that hackish
usage mutated the verb to `glark' because {glork} was already
an established jargon term. Compare {grok}, {zen}.
:glass: /n./ [IBM] Synonym for {silicon}.
:glass tty: /glas T-T-Y/ or /glas ti'tee/ /n./ 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},
{smart terminal}. See "{TV Typewriters}" (Appendix
A) for an interesting true story about a glass tty.
:glassfet: /glas'fet/ /n./ [by analogy with MOSFET, the
acronym for `Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor']
Syn. {firebottle}, a humorous way to refer to a vacuum tube.
:glitch: /glich/ [from German `glitschig' to slip, 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 {heisenbug}s).
:glob: /glob/, *not* /glohb/ /v.,n./ [Unix] 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 {regexp}s.
Historical note: The jargon usage derives from `glob', the
name of a subprogram that expanded wildcards in archaic pre-Bourne
versions of the Unix shell.
:glork: /glork/ 1. /interj./ Term of mild surprise, usually
tinged with outrage, as when one attempts to save the results of
two hours of editing and finds that the system has just crashed.
2. Used as a name for just about anything. See {foo}.
3. /vt./ Similar to {glitch}, but usually used reflexively. "My
program just glorked itself." See also {glark}.
:glue: /n./ Generic term for any interface logic or protocol
that connects two component blocks. For example, {Blue Glue} is
IBM's SNA protocol, and hardware designers call anything used to
connect large VLSI's or circuit blocks `glue logic'.
:gnarly: /nar'lee/ /adj./ Both {obscure} and {hairy}
(sense 1). "{Yow!} -- the tuned assembler implementation of
BitBlt is really gnarly!" From a similar but less specific usage
in surfer slang.
:GNU: /gnoo/, *not* /noo/ 1. [acronym: `GNU's Not
Unix!', see {{recursive acronym}}] A Unix-workalike development
effort of the Free Software Foundation headed by Richard Stallman
<
[email protected]>. 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.
See {EMACS}, {copyleft}, {General Public Virus},
{Linux}. 2. Noted Unix hacker John Gilmore <
[email protected]>,
founder of Usenet's anarchic alt.* hierarchy.
:GNUMACS: /gnoo'maks/ /n./ [contraction of `GNU EMACS']
Often-heard abbreviated name for the {GNU} project's flagship
tool, {EMACS}. Used esp. in contrast with {GOSMACS}.
:go flatline: /v./ [from cyberpunk SF, refers to flattening of
EEG traces upon brain-death] (also adjectival `flatlined'). 1. To
{die}, terminate, or fail, esp. irreversibly. In hacker
parlance, this is used of machines only, human death being
considered somewhat too serious a matter to employ jargon-jokes
about. 2. To go completely quiescent; said of machines undergoing
controlled shutdown. "You can suffer file damage if you shut down
Unix but power off before the system has gone flatline." 3. Of a
video tube, to fail by losing vertical scan, so all one sees is a
bright horizontal line bisecting the screen.
:go root: /vi./ [Unix] To temporarily enter {root mode} in
order to perform a privileged operation. This use is deprecated in
Australia, where /v./ `root' refers to animal sex.
:go-faster stripes: /n./ [UK] Syn. {chrome}. Mainstream in
some parts of UK.
:gobble: /vt./ 1. To consume, usu. used with `up'. "The
output spy gobbles characters out of a {tty} output buffer."
2. To obtain, usu. used with `down'. "I guess I'll gobble down
a copy of the documentation tomorrow." See also {snarf}.
:Godwin's Law: /prov./ [Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows
longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler
approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once
this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis
has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's
Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on
thread length in those groups.
:Godzillagram: /god-zil'*-gram/ /n./ [from Japan's national
hero] 1. A network packet that in theory is a broadcast to every
machine in the universe. The typical case is an IP datagram whose
destination IP address is [255.255.255.255]. Fortunately, few
gateways are foolish enough to attempt to implement this case!
2. A network packet of maximum size. An IP Godzillagram has 65,536
octets. Compare {super source quench}.
:golden: /adj./ [prob. from folklore's `golden egg'] When
used to describe a magnetic medium (e.g., `golden disk',
`golden tape'), describes one containing a tested, up-to-spec,
ready-to-ship software version. Compare {platinum-iridium}.
:golf-ball printer: /n. obs./ The IBM 2741, a slow but
letter-quality printing device and terminal based on the IBM
Selectric typewriter. The `golf ball' was a little spherical
frob bearing reversed embossed images of 88 different characters
arranged on four parallels of latitude; one could change the font
by swapping in a different golf ball. The print element spun and
jerked alarmingly in action and when in motion was sometimes
described as an `infuriated golf ball'. This was the technology
that enabled APL to use a non-EBCDIC, non-ASCII, and in fact
completely non-standard character set. This put it 10 years ahead
of its time -- where it stayed, firmly rooted, for the next 20,
until character displays gave way to programmable bit-mapped
devices with the flexibility to support other character sets.
:gonk: /gonk/ /vi.,n./ 1. 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 mir" (You're pulling
my leg). See also {gonkulator}. 2. [British] To grab some
sleep at an odd time; compare {gronk out}.
:gonkulator: /gon'kyoo-lay-tr/ /n./ [from the old
"Hogan's Heroes" TV series] A pretentious piece of equipment
that actually serves no useful purpose. Usually used to describe
one's least favorite piece of computer hardware. See {gonk}.
:gonzo: /gon'zoh/ /adj./ [from Hunter S. Thompson]
Overwhelming; outrageous; over the top; very large, esp. used of
collections of source code, source files, or individual functions.
Has some of the connotations of {moby} and {hairy}, but
without the implication of obscurity or complexity.
:Good Thing: /n.,adj./ Often capitalized; always pronounced as
if capitalized. 1. Self-evidently wonderful to anyone in a
position to notice: "The Trailblazer's 19.2Kbaud PEP mode with
on-the-fly Lempel-Ziv compression is a Good Thing for sites
relaying netnews." 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}.
:gopher: /n./ A type of Internet service first floated around
1991 and now (1994) being obsolesced 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", dialectical "go fer"),
one whose job is to run and fetch things. Finally, observe that
gophers (aka woodchucks) dig long tunnels, and the idea of
tunneling through the net to find information was a defining
metaphor for the developers. Probably all three things were true,
but with the first two coming first and the gopher-tunnel metaphor
serendipitously adding flavor and impetus to the project as it
developed out of its concept stage.
:gopher hole: /n./ 1. Any access to a {gopher}. 2. [Amateur
Packet Radio] The terrestrial analog of a {wormhole} (sense
2), from which this term was coined. A gopher hole links two
amateur packet relays through some non-ham radio medium.
:gorets: /gor'ets/ /n./ The unknown ur-noun, fill in your own
meaning. Found esp. on the Usenet newsgroup alt.gorets, which
seems to be a running contest to redefine the word by implication
in the funniest and most peculiar way, with the understanding that
no definition is ever final. [A correspondent from the Former
Soviet Union informs me that `gorets' is Russian for `mountain
dweller' --ESR] Compare {frink}.
:gorilla arm: /n./ The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens
as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the
early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those {spiffy}
touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to
hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions.
After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore,
cramped, and oversized -- the operator looks like a gorilla while
using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards. This is now
considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers;
"Remember the gorilla arm!" is shorthand for "How is this going
to fly in *real* use?".
:gorp: /gorp/ /n./ [CMU: perhaps from the canonical hiker's
food, Good Old Raisins and Peanuts] Another {metasyntactic
variable}, like {foo} and {bar}.
:GOSMACS: /goz'maks/ /n./ [contraction of `Gosling EMACS']
The first {EMACS}-in-C implementation, predating but now largely
eclipsed by {GNUMACS}. Originally freeware; a commercial
version is now modestly popular as `UniPress EMACS'. The author,
James Gosling, went on to invent {NeWS} and the programming
language Java; the latter earned him {demigod} status.
:Gosperism: /gos'p*r-izm/ /n./ A hack, invention, or saying
due to arch-hacker R. William (Bill) Gosper. This notion merits
its own term because there are so many of them. Many of the
entries in {HAKMEM} are Gosperisms; see also {life}.
:gotcha: /n./ A {misfeature} of a system, especially a
programming language or environment, that tends to breed bugs or
mistakes because it both enticingly easy to invoke and completely
unexpected and/or unreasonable in its outcome. For example, a
classic gotcha in {C} is the fact that `if (a=b) {code;}'
is syntactically valid and sometimes even correct. It puts the
value of `b' into `a' and then executes `code' if
`a' is non-zero. What the programmer probably meant was
`if (a==b) {code;}', which executes `code' if `a'
and `b' are equal.
:GPL: /G-P-L/ /n./ Abbreviation for `General Public
License' in widespread use; see {copyleft}, {General Public
Virus}.
:GPV: /G-P-V/ /n./ Abbrev. for {General Public Virus} in
widespread use.
:grault: /grawlt/ /n./ Yet another {metasyntactic
variable}, invented by Mike Gallaher and propagated by the
{GOSMACS} documentation. See {corge}.
:gray goo: /n./ A hypothetical substance composed of
{sagan}s of sub-micron-sized self-replicating robots programmed
to make copies of themselves out of whatever is available. The
image that goes with the term is one of the entire biosphere of
Earth being eventually converted to robot goo. This is the
simplest of the {{nanotechnology}} disaster scenarios, easily
refuted by arguments from energy requirements and elemental
abundances. Compare {blue goo}.
:Great Renaming: /n./ The {flag day} in 1985 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."
:Great Runes: /n./ Uppercase-only text or display messages.
Some archaic operating systems still emit these. See also
{runes}, {smash case}, {fold case}.
Decades ago, back in the days when it was the sole supplier of
long-distance hardcopy transmittal devices, the Teletype
Corporation was faced with a major design choice. To shorten code
lengths and cut complexity in the printing mechanism, it had been
decided that teletypes would use a monocase font, either ALL UPPER
or all lower. The Question Of The Day was therefore, which one to
choose. A study was conducted on readability under various
conditions of bad ribbon, worn print hammers, etc. Lowercase won;
it is less dense and has more distinctive letterforms, and is thus
much easier to read both under ideal conditions and when the
letters are mangled or partly obscured. The results were filtered
up through {management}. The chairman of Teletype killed the
proposal because it failed one incredibly important criterion:
"It would be impossible to spell the name of the Deity
correctly."
In this way (or so, at least, hacker folklore has it) superstition
triumphed over utility. Teletypes were the major input devices on
most early computers, and terminal manufacturers looking for
corners to cut naturally followed suit until well into the 1970s.
Thus, that one bad call stuck us with Great Runes for thirty years.
:Great Worm, the: /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
hack was a sort of devastating watershed event in hackish history;
certainly it did more to make non-hackers nervous about the
Internet than anything before or since.
:great-wall: /vi.,n./ [from SF fandom] A mass expedition to an
oriental restaurant, esp. one where food is served family-style
and shared. There is a common heuristic about the amount of food
to order, expressed as "Get N - 1 entrees"; the value of
N, which is the number of people in the group, can be
inferred from context (see {N}). See {{oriental food}},
{ravs}, {stir-fried random}.
:Green Book: /n./ 1. One of the three standard {{PostScript}}
references: "PostScript Language Program Design", bylined
`Adobe Systems' (Addison-Wesley, 1988; QA76.73.P67P66 ISBN
0-201-14396-8); see also {Red Book}, {Blue Book}, and the
{White Book} (sense 2). 2. Informal name for one of the three
standard references on SmallTalk: "Smalltalk-80: Bits of
History, Words of Advice", by Glenn Krasner (Addison-Wesley, 1983;
QA76.8.S635S58; ISBN 0-201-11669-3) (this, too, is associated with
blue and red books). 3. The "X/Open Compatibility Guide",
which defines an international standard {{Unix}} environment that
is a proper superset of POSIX/SVID; also includes descriptions of a
standard utility toolkit, systems administrations features, and the
like. This grimoire is taken with particular seriousness in
Europe. See {Purple Book}. 4. The IEEE 1003.1 POSIX Operating
Systems Interface standard has been dubbed "The Ugly Green Book".
5. Any of the 1992 standards issued by the CCITT's tenth plenary
assembly. These include, among other things, the X.400 email
standard and the Group 1 through 4 fax standards. See also
{{book titles}}.
:green bytes: /n./ (also `green words') 1. Meta-information
embedded in a file, such as the length of the file or its name; as
opposed to keeping such information in a separate description file
or record. The term comes from an IBM user's group meeting
(ca. 1962) at which these two approaches were being debated and the
diagram of the file on the blackboard had the `green bytes' drawn
in green. 2. By extension, the non-data bits in any
self-describing format. "A GIF file contains, among other things,
green bytes describing the packing method for the image." Compare
{out-of-band}, {zigamorph}, {fence} (sense 1).
:green card: /n./ [after the "IBM System/360 Reference
Data" card] A summary of an assembly language, even if the color is
not green. 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." Some green cards
are actually booklets.
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.
:green lightning: /n./ [IBM] 1. Apparently random flashing
streaks on the face of 3278-9 terminals while a new symbol set is
being downloaded. This hardware bug was left deliberately unfixed,
as some genius within IBM suggested it would let the user know that
`something is happening'. That, it certainly does. Later
microprocessor-driven IBM color graphics displays were actually
*programmed* to produce green lightning! 2. [proposed] Any
bug perverted into an alleged feature by adroit rationalization or
marketing. "Motorola calls the CISC cruft in the 88000
architecture `compatibility logic', but I call it green
lightning". See also {feature} (sense 6).
:green machine: /n./ A computer or peripheral device that has
been designed and built to military specifications for field
equipment (that is, to withstand mechanical shock, extremes of
temperature and humidity, and so forth). Comes from the olive-drab
`uniform' paint used for military equipment.
:Green's Theorem: /prov./ [TMRC] For any story, in any group of
people there will be at least one person who has not heard the
story. A refinement of the theorem states that there will be
*exactly* one person (if there were more than one, it wouldn't
be as bad to re-tell the story). [The name of this theorem is a
play on a fundamental theorem in calculus. --ESR]
:grep: /grep/ /vi./ [from the qed/ed editor idiom g/re/p,
where re stands for a regular expression, to Globally search
for the Regular Expression and Print the lines containing matches
to it, via {{Unix}} `grep(1)'] 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}.
:grilf: // /n./ Girlfriend. Like {newsfroup} and
{filk}, a typo reincarnated as a new word. Seems to have
originated sometime in 1992 on {Usenet}. [A friend tells me
there was a Lloyd Biggle SF novel "Watchers Of The Dark", in
which alien species after species goes insane and begins to chant
"Grilf! Grilf!". A human detective eventually determines that
the word means "Liar!" I hope this has nothing to do with the
popularity of the Usenet term. --ESR]
:grind: /vt./ 1. [MIT and Berkeley] 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 {{nroff}}, {{troff}}, {{TeX}}, or Scribe
source. 3. To run seemingly interminably, esp. (but not
necessarily) if performing some tedious and inherently useless
task. Similar to {crunch} or {grovel}. Grinding has a
connotation of using a lot of CPU time, but it is possible to grind
a disk, network, etc. See also {hog}. 4. To make the whole
system slow. "Troff really grinds a PDP-11." 5. `grind grind'
/excl./ Roughly, "Isn't the machine slow today!"
:grind crank: /n./ A mythical accessory to a terminal. A
crank on the side of a monitor, which when operated makes a zizzing
noise and causes the computer to run faster. Usually one does not
refer to a grind crank out loud, but merely makes the appropriate
gesture and noise. See {grind} and {wugga wugga}.
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.
:gripenet: /n./ [IBM] A wry (and thoroughly unofficial) name
for IBM's internal VNET system, deriving from its common use by
IBMers to voice pointed criticism of IBM management that would be
taboo in more formal channels.
:gritch: /grich/ [MIT] 1. /n./ A complaint (often caused by a
{glitch}). 2. /vi./ To complain. Often verb-doubled: "Gritch
gritch". 3. A synonym for {glitch} (as verb or noun).
Interestingly, this word seems to have a separate history from
{glitch}, with which it is often confused. Back in the early
1960s, when `glitch' was strictly a hardware-tech's term of art,
the Burton House dorm at M.I.T. maintained a "Gritch Book", a
blank volume, into which the residents hand-wrote complaints,
suggestions, and witticisms. Previous years' volumes of this
tradition were maintained, dating back to antiquity. The word
"gritch" was described as a portmanteau of "gripe" and
"bitch". Thus, sense 3 above is at least historically incorrect.
:grok: /grok/, var. /grohk/ /vt./ [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, usually in a global sense. Connotes
intimate and exhaustive knowledge. Contrast {zen}, which is
similar supernal understanding experienced as a single brief flash.
See also {glark}. 2. Used of programs, may connote merely
sufficient understanding. "Almost all C compilers grok the
`void' type these days."
:gronk: /gronk/ /vt./ [popularized by Johnny Hart's comic
strip "B.C." but the word apparently predates that] 1. To
clear the state of a wedged device and restart it. More severe
than `to {frob}' (sense 2). 2. [TMRC] To cut, sever, smash,
or similarly disable. 3. The sound made by many 3.5-inch diskette
drives. In particular, the microfloppies on a Commodore Amiga go
"grink, gronk".
:gronk out: /vi./ To cease functioning. Of people, to go home
and go to sleep. "I guess I'll gronk out now; see you all
tomorrow."
:gronked: /adj./ 1. Broken. "The teletype scanner was
gronked, so we took the system down." 2. Of people, the condition
of feeling very tired or (less commonly) sick. "I've been chasing
that bug for 17 hours now and I am thoroughly gronked!" Compare
{broken}, which means about the same as {gronk} used of
hardware, but connotes depression or mental/emotional problems in
people.
:grovel: /vi./ 1. To work interminably and without apparent
progress. Often used transitively with `over' or `through'.
"The file scavenger has been groveling through the /usr
directories for 10 minutes now." Compare {grind} and
{crunch}. Emphatic form: `grovel obscenely'. 2. To examine
minutely or in complete detail. "The compiler grovels over the
entire source program before beginning to translate it." "I
grovelled through all the documentation, but I still couldn't find
the command I wanted."
:grunge: /gruhnj/ /n./ 1. That which is grungy, or that which
makes it so. 2. [Cambridge] Code which is inaccessible due to
changes in other parts of the program. The preferred term in North
America is {dead code}.
:gubbish: /guhb'*sh/ /n./ [a portmanteau of `garbage' and
`rubbish'; may have originated with SF author Philip K. Dick]
Garbage; crap; nonsense. "What is all this gubbish?" The
opposite portmanteau `rubbage' is also reported; in fact, it was
British slang during the 19th century and appears in Dickens.
:guiltware: /gilt'weir/ /n./ 1. A piece of {freeware}
decorated with a message telling one how long and hard the author
worked on it and intimating that one is a no-good freeloader if one
does not immediately send the poor suffering martyr gobs of money.
2. A piece of {shareware} that works.
:gumby: /guhm'bee/ /n./ [from a class of Monty Python
characters, poss. with some influence from the 1960s claymation
character] 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.")
:gun: /vt./ [ITS: from the `:GUN' command] To forcibly
terminate a program or job (computer, not career). "Some idiot
left a background process running soaking up half the cycles, so I
gunned it." Usage: now rare. Compare {can}, {blammo}.
:gunch: /guhnch/ /vt./ [TMRC] To push, prod, or poke at a
device that has almost (but not quite) produced the desired result.
Implies a threat to {mung}.
:gurfle: /ger'fl/ /interj./ An expression of shocked
disbelief. "He said we have to recode this thing in FORTRAN by
next week. Gurfle!" Compare {weeble}.
:guru: /n./ [Unix] An expert. Implies not only {wizard}
skill but also a history of being a knowledge resource for others.
Less often, used (with a qualifier) for other experts on other
systems, as in `VMS guru'. See {source of all good bits}.
:guru meditation: /n./ Amiga equivalent of `panic' in Unix
(sometimes just called a `guru' or `guru event'). When the
system crashes, a cryptic message of the form "GURU MEDITATION
#XXXXXXXX.YYYYYYYY" may appear, indicating what the problem was.
An Amiga guru can figure things out from the numbers. Sometimes a
{guru} event must be followed by a {Vulcan nerve pinch}.
This term is (no surprise) an in-joke from the earliest days of the
Amiga. There used to be 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 in AmigaOS 2.04 (actually in
2.00, a buggy post-2.0 release on the A3000 only).
:gweep: /gweep/ [WPI] 1. /v./ To {hack}, usually at night.
At WPI, from 1975 onwards, one who gweeped could often be found at
the College Computing Center punching cards or crashing the
{PDP-10} or, later, the DEC-20. A correspondent who was there at
the time opines that the term was originally onomatopoetic,
describing the keyclick sound of the Datapoint terminals long
connected to the PDP-10. The term has survived the demise of those
technologies, however, and was still alive in late 1991. "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."
= H =
=====
:h: [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.
:ha ha only serious: [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 {AI koans}.
:hack: 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}.
:hack attack: /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.
:hack mode: /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 2).
Some aspects of hackish 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}.
:hack on: /vt./ 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}.
:hack together: /vt./ To throw something together so it will
work. Unlike `kluge together' or {cruft together}, this does
not necessarily have negative connotations.
:hack up: /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}.
:hack value: /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.")
:hacked off: /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.".
:hacked up: /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}.
:hacker: /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 {network, the} and
{Internet address}). 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 {wannabee}.
:hacker ethic: /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 free software 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 free 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}). 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 Internet (see {Internet address})
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.
:hacker humor:: 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}, {AI koans}.
See also {filk}, {retrocomputing}, and {A Portrait of J.
Random Hacker} in Appendix B. If you have an itchy feeling that
all 6 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}}.
:hacking run: /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}).
:Hacking X for Y: /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 file}s).
:Hackintosh: /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.
:hackish: /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}.
:hackishness: /n./ The quality of being or involving a hack.
This term is considered mildly silly. Syn. {hackitude}.
:hackitude: /n./ Syn. {hackishness}; this word is considered
sillier.
:hair: /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!")
:hairball: /n./ [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.
:hairy: /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}.
A well-known result in topology called the Brouwer Fixed-Point
Theorem states that any continuous transformation of a surface into
itself has at least one fixed 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."
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.
:HAKMEM: /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 2^(18).
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 document is available at
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/hb/hbaker/hakmem/hakmem.html.
:hakspek: /hak'speek/ /n./ A shorthand method of spelling
found on many British academic bulletin boards and {talker
system}s. 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. Has become rarer since. See also
{talk mode}.
:hammer: /vt./ Commonwealth hackish syn. for {bang on}.
:hamster: /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.
:hand cruft: /vt./ [pun on `hand craft'] See {cruft}, sense
3.
:hand-hacking: /n./ 1. The practice of translating {hot
spot}s 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},
{bum}, {by hand}; syn. with /v./ {cruft}. 2. 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.
:hand-roll: /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."
:handle: /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}, {cracker}s, {weenie}s,
{spod}s, and other lower forms of network life; true hackers
travel on their own reputations rather than invented legendry.
Compare {nick}. 2. [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}.
:handshaking: /n./ 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}.
:handwave: [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.
:hang: /v./ 1. 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.
:Hanlon's Razor: /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." The
derivation of the Hanlon eponym is not definitely known, but a very
similar remark ("You have attributed conditions to villainy that
simply result from stupidity.") appears in "Logic of Empire",
a 1941 story by Robert A. Heinlein, who calls it the `devil theory'
of sociology. Heinlein's popularity in the hacker culture makes
plausible the supposition that `Hanlon' is derived from `Heinlein'
by phonetic corruption. A similar epigram has been attributed to
William James, but Heinlein more probably got the idea from Alfred
Korzybski and other practitioners of General Semantics. Quoted
here because it seems to be a particular favorite of hackers, often
showing up in {sig block}s, {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}.
:happily: /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."
:haque: /hak/ /n./ [Usenet] Variant spelling of {hack},
used only for the noun form and connoting an {elegant}
hack. that is a {hack} in sense 2.
:hard boot: /n./ See {boot}.
:hardcoded: /adj./ 1. 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}).
:hardwarily: /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}.
:hardwired: /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.
:has the X nature: [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}.
:hash bucket: /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}.
:hash collision: /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}.
:hat: /n./ Common (spoken) name for the circumflex (`^', ASCII
1011110) character. See {ASCII} for other synonyms.
:HCF: /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.
:heads down: [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.
:heartbeat: /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}.
:heatseeker: /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 is someone who, owning a 286 PC and Windows
3.0, goes out and buys 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 the
bugs in each release (n) and selling it to them as release (n+1).
:heavy metal: /n./ [Cambridge] Syn. {big iron}.
:heavy wizardry: /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}.
:heavyweight: /adj./ 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'.
:heisenbug: /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}.
:Helen Keller mode: /n./ 1. State of a hardware or software
system that is deaf, dumb, and blind, i.e., accepting no input and
generating no output, usually due to an infinite loop or some other
excursion into {deep space}. (Unfair to the real Helen Keller,
whose success at learning speech was triumphant.) See also {go
flatline}, {catatonic}. 2. On IBM PCs under DOS, refers to a
specific failure mode in which a screen saver has kicked in over an
{ill-behaved} application which bypasses the very interrupts the
screen saver watches for activity. Your choices are to try to get
from the program's current state through a successful save-and-exit
without being able to see what you're doing, or to re-boot the
machine. This isn't (strictly speaking) a crash.
:hello, sailor!: /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.
:hello, wall!: /excl./ See {wall}.
:hello, world: /interj./ 1. The canonical minimal test message
in the C/Unix universe. 2. Any of the minimal programs that emit
this message. 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 {VAX} back up yet?"
:hex: /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.
:hexadecimal:: /n./ Base 16. Coined in the early 1960s 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' is from an ordinal number; the
corresponding prefix for 6 would imply something like
`sextidecimal'. 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.
:hexit: /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}).
:HHOK: See {ha ha only serious}.
:HHOS: See {ha ha only serious}.
:hidden flag: /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.
:high bit: /n./ [from `high-order bit'] 1. The most
significant bit in a byte. 2. 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},
{hobbit}, {dread high-bit disease}, and compare the
mainstream slang `bottom line'.
:high moby: /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 {grok}ked this instantly. See {moby}.
:highly: /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 {luser}s, 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.
:hing: // /n./ [IRC] Fortuitous typo for `hint', now in
wide intentional use among players of {initgame}. Compare
{newsfroup}, {filk}.
:hired gun: /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.
:hirsute: /adj./ Occasionally used humorously as a synonym for
{hairy}.
:HLL: /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}.
:hoarding: /n./ See {software hoarding}.
:hobbit: /n./ 1. The High Order BIT of a byte; same as the
{meta bit} or {high bit}. 2. The non-ITS name of
[email protected] (*Hobbit*), master of lasers.
:hog: /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 (see {pig,
run like a}). 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.
:hole: /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.
:hollised: /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.
:holy wars: /n./ [from {Usenet}, but may predate it]
/n./ {flame war}s 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".
Other perennial Holy Wars have included {EMACS} vs. {vi},
my personal computer vs. everyone else's personal computer,
{{ITS}} vs. {{Unix}}, {{Unix}} vs. {VMS}, {BSD} Unix
vs. {USG Unix}, {C} vs. {{Pascal}}, {C} vs.
FORTRAN, etc., 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. See also {theology}.
:home box: /n./ A hacker's personal machine, especially one he
or she owns. "Yeah? Well, *my* home box runs a full 4.2
BSD, so there!"
:home machine: /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.
:home page: /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}.
:hook: /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.
:hop: 1. /n./ 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 {UUCPNET} 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./ To log in
to a remote machine, esp. via rlogin or telnet. "I'll hop over to
foovax to FTP that."
:hose: 1. /vt./ 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}.
:hosed: /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}.
:hot chat: /n./ Sexually explicit one-on-one chat. See
{teledildonics}.
:hot spot: /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}, {bum}, {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 {hotlink}s). 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.
:hotlink: /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.
:house wizard: /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.
:HP-SUX: /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. Compare {AIDX}, {buglix}. See also
{Nominal Semidestructor}, {Telerat}, {Open DeathTrap},
{ScumOS}, {sun-stools}.
:huff: /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}.
:humma: // /excl./ A filler word used on various `chat'
and `talk' programs when you had nothing to say but felt that it
was important to say something. The word apparently originated (at
least with this definition) on the MECC Timeshare System (MTS, a
now-defunct educational time-sharing system running in Minnesota
during the 1970s and the early 1980s) but was later sighted on
early Unix systems. Compare the U.K's {wibble}.
:hung: /adj./ [from `hung up'] 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 {crash}ed 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.
:hungry puppy: /n./ Syn. {slopsucker}.
:hungus: /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."
:hyperspace: /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.
:hysterical reasons: /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}.
= I =
=====
:I didn't change anything!: /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.
:I see no X here.: 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.
:IBM: /I-B-M/ 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, including `International Business
Machines'. See {TLA}. These abbreviations illustrate the
considerable antipathy most hackers have long felt toward the
`industry leader' (see {fear and loathing}).
What galls hackers about most IBM machines above the PC level isn't
so much that they are underpowered and overpriced (though that does
count against them), but that the designs are incredibly archaic,
{crufty}, and {elephantine} ... and you can't *fix* them
-- source code is locked up tight, and programming tools are
expensive, hard to find, and bletcherous to use once you've found
them. With the release of the Unix-based RIOS family this may have
begun to change -- but then, we thought that when the PC-RT came
out, too.
In the spirit of universal peace and brotherhood, this lexicon now
includes a number of entries attributed to `IBM'; these derive from
some rampantly unofficial jargon lists circulated within IBM's own
beleaguered hacker underground.
:IBM discount: /n./ A price increase. Outside IBM, this
derives from the common perception that IBM products are generally
overpriced (see {clone}); inside, it is said to spring from a
belief that large numbers of IBM employees living in an area cause
prices to rise.
:ICBM address: /n./ (Also `missile address') The form used to
register a site with the Usenet mapping project includes a blank
for longitude and latitude, preferably to seconds-of-arc accuracy.
This is actually used for generating geographically-correct maps of
Usenet links on a plotter; however, it has become traditional to
refer to this as one's `ICBM address' or `missile address', and
many people include it in their {sig block} with that name. (A
real missile address would include target altitude.)
:ice: /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 early 1996, 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. ICE has a home page
at
http://www.tis.com/crypto/ice.html.
:idempotent: /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.
:If you want X, you know where to find it.: 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}).
:ifdef out: /if'def owt/ /v./ Syn. for {condition out},
specific to {C}.
:ill-behaved: /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. 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 IBM PC/MS-DOS world, there is a folk theorem (nearly true)
to the effect that (owing to gross inadequacies and performance
penalties in the OS interface) all interesting applications are
ill-behaved. See also {bare metal}. Oppose {well-behaved},
compare {PC-ism}. See {mess-dos}.
:IMHO: // /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).
:Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!: /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.
:in the extreme: /adj./ A preferred superlative suffix for many
hackish terms. See, for example, `obscure in the extreme' under
{obscure}, and compare {highly}.
:inc: /ink/ /v./ Verbal (and only rarely written) shorthand
for increment, i.e. `increase by one'. Especially used by
assembly programmers, as many assembly languages have an `inc'
mnemonic. Antonym: {dec}.
:incantation: /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."
:include: /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 block}s to refer to a notional `standard
{disclaimer} file'.
:include war: /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 {flame}s and the urge to start a {kill file}.
:indent style: /n./ [C 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. 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. The basic indent
shown here is eight spaces (or one tab) per level; four spaces are
occasionally seen, but are much less common.
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. Basic indent per level shown here is eight spaces, but four
spaces are just as common (esp. in C++ code).
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 (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. Doubtless these
issues will continue to be the subject of {holy wars}.
:index: /n./ See {coefficient of X}.
:infant mortality: /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}.
:infinite: /adj./ 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}.
:infinite loop: /n./ One that never terminates (that is, the
machine {spin}s or {buzz}es 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!"
:Infinite-Monkey Theorem: /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 theorem 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".
:infinity: /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
2^(N-1) - 1 but minus infinity is -
(2^(N-1)), not -(2^(N-1) - 1). Note also that this
is different from "time T equals minus infinity", which is
closer to a mathematician's usage of infinity.
:inflate: /vt./ To decompress or {puff} a file. Rare among
Internet hackers, used primarily by MS-DOS/Windows types.
:Infocom: /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. The software,
thankfully, is still extant; Infocom games were written in a kind
of P-code and distributed with a P-code interpreter core, and
freeware emulators for that interpreter have been written to permit
the P-code to be run on platforms the games never originally
graced.
:initgame: /in-it'gaym/ /n./ [IRC] An {IRC} version of the
venerable trivia game "20 questions", 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]
:insanely great: /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.
:INTERCAL: /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.
An INTERCAL implementation is available at the Retrocomputing
Museum,
http://www.ccil.org/retro.
:interesting: /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}.
:Internet:: /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.
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-10}s and {PDP-20}s, running {TOPS-10} and
{TOPS-20}, to PDP-11s and VAXes 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. With TCP/IP and DNS in place. 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. As of
early 1996, the Internet has seen off its only serious challenger
(the OSI protocol stack favored by European telecom monopolies) and
is in the process of absorbing into itself many of of the
proprietary networks built during the second wave of wide-area
networking after 1980. It is now a commonplace even in mainstream
media to predict that a globally-extended Internet will become the
key unifying communications technology of the next century. See
also {network, the} and {Internet address}.
:Internet address:: /n./ 1. [techspeak] An absolute network
address of the form
[email protected], where foo is a user name, bar
is a {sitename}, and baz is a `domain' name, possibly
including periods itself. Contrast with {bang path}; see also
{network, the} and {network address}. All Internet machines
and most UUCP sites can now resolve these addresses, thanks to a
large amount of behind-the-scenes magic and {PD} software
written since 1980 or so. See also {bang path}, {domainist}.
2. More loosely, any network address reachable through Internet;
this includes {bang path} addresses and some internal corporate
and government networks.
Reading Internet addresses is something of an art. Here are the
four most important top-level functional Internet domains followed
by a selection of geographical domains:
com
commercial organizations
edu
educational institutions
gov
U.S. government civilian sites
mil
U.S. military sites
Note that most of the sites in the com and edu domains are in
the U.S. or Canada.
us
sites in the U.S. outside the functional domains
su
sites in the ex-Soviet Union (see {kremvax}).
uk
sites in the United Kingdom
Within the us domain, there are subdomains for the fifty
states, each generally with a name identical to the state's postal
abbreviation. Within the uk domain, there is an ac subdomain for
academic sites and a co domain for commercial ones. Other
top-level domains may be divided up in similar ways.
:interrupt: 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}. 3. Under MS-DOS, nearly
synonymous with `system call', because the OS and BIOS routines
are both called using the INT instruction (see {{interrupt list,
the}}) and because programmers so often have to bypass the OS
(going
directly to a BIOS interrupt) to get reasonable
performance.
:interrupt list, the:: /n./ [MS-DOS] The list of all known
software interrupt calls (both documented and undocumented) for IBM
PCs and compatibles, maintained and made available for free
redistribution by Ralf Brown <
[email protected]>. As of late
1992, it had grown to approximately two megabytes in length.
:interrupts locked out: /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}.
:IRC: /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
{emoticon}s. There is also a vigorous native jargon,
represented in this lexicon by entries marked `[IRC]'. See also
{talk mode}.
:iron: /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}.
:Iron Age: /n./ In the history of computing, 1961--1971 -- the
formative era of commercial {mainframe} technology, when
ferrite-core {dinosaur}s 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}.
:iron box: /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}.
:ironmonger: /n./ [IBM] A hardware specialist (derogatory).
Compare {sandbender}, {polygon pusher}.
:ISP: /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}.
:ITS:: /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}). The Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden is
maintaining one `live' ITS site at its computer museum (right
next to the only TOPS-10 system still on the Internet), so ITS is
still alleged to hold the record for OS in longest continuous use
(however, {{WAITS}} is a credible rival for this palm). 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}.
:IWBNI: // Abbreviation for `It Would Be Nice If'. Compare
{WIBNI}.
:IYFEG: // [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}.
= J =
=====
:J. Random: /J rand'm/ /n./ [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 {gun} down other
people?"), but it can be used simply as an elaborate version of
{random} in any sense.
:J. Random Hacker: /J rand'm hak'r/ /n./ [MIT] A mythical
figure like the Unknown Soldier; the archetypal hacker nerd. 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).
:jack in: /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.
:jaggies: /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).
:JCL: /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.ccil.org/retro.
:JEDR: // /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 {retcon}ned by the 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.
:JFCL: /jif'kl/, /jaf'kl/, /j*-fi'kl/ vt., obs. (alt.
`jfcl') To cancel or annul something. "Why don't you jfcl that
out?" The fastest do-nothing instruction on older models of the
PDP-10 happened to be JFCL, which stands for "Jump if Flag set and
then CLear the flag"; this does something useful, but is a very
fast no-operation if no flag is specified. Geoff Goodfellow, one
of the Steele-1983 co-authors, had JFCL on the license plate of his
BMW for years. Usage: rare except among old-time PDP-10 hackers.
:jiffy: /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. 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*. 3. 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}.
:job security: /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.
:jock: /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.
:joe code: /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.
:jolix: /joh'liks/ /n.,adj./ 386BSD, the freeware port of
the BSD Net/2 release to the Intel i386 architecture by Bill Jolitz
and friends. Used to differentiate from BSDI's port based on the
same source tape, which used to be called BSD/386 and is now
BSD/OS. See {BSD}.
:JR[LN]: /J-R-L/, /J-R-N/ /n./ The names JRL and JRN were
sometimes used as example names when discussing a kind of user ID
used under {{TOPS-10}} and {WAITS}; they were understood to be
the initials of (fictitious) programmers named `J. Random Loser'
and `J. Random Nerd' (see {J. Random}). For example, if one
said "To log in, type log one comma jay are en" (that is, "log
1,JRN"), the listener would have understood that he should use his
own computer ID in place of `JRN'.
:JRST: /jerst/ /v. obs./ [based on the PDP-10 jump
instruction] To suddenly change subjects, with no intention of
returning to the previous topic. Usage: rather rare except among
PDP-10 diehards, and considered silly. See also {AOS}.
:juggling eggs: /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 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." See also {hack mode}.
:jump off into never-never land: /v./ [from J. M. Barrie's
"Peter Pan"] Same as {branch to Fishkill}, but more common
in technical cultures associated with non-IBM computers that use
the term `jump' rather than `branch'. Compare
{hyperspace}.
:jupiter: /vt./ [IRC] To kill an {IRC} {robot} 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.
= K =
=====
:K: /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}}.
:K&R: [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
0-113-110163-3). Syn. {White Book}, {Old Testament}. See
also {New Testament}.
:k-: /pref./ Extremely. Not commonly used 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.
:kahuna: /k*-hoo'n*/ /n./ [IBM: from the Hawaiian title for a
shaman] Synonym for {wizard}, {guru}.
:kamikaze packet: /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}.
:kangaroo code: /n./ Syn. {spaghetti code}.
:ken: /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.
:kgbvax: /K-G-B'vaks/ /n./ See {kremvax}.
:KIBO: /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 <
[email protected]>, 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.
:kiboze: /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).
:kibozo: /ki:-boh'zoh/ /n./ [Usenet] One who
{kiboze}s but is not Kibo (see {KIBO}, sense 2).
:kick: /v./ [IRC] To cause somebody to be removed from a
{IRC} channel, an option only available to {CHOP}s. This is
an extreme measure, often used to combat extreme {flamage} or
{flood}ing, but sometimes used at the chop's whim. Compare
{gun}.
:kill file: /n./ [Usenet] (alt. `KILL file') Per-user
file(s) used by some {Usenet} reading programs (originally Larry
Wall's `rn(1)') 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}.
:killer app: The application that actually makes a mass
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 restrospectively
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?"
:killer micro: /n./ [popularized by Eugene Brooks] 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. Used esp. of RISC architectures.
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).
[1996 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 (with IBM but a shadow of its former self), and
even the supercomputer business has contracted into a smaller
niche. It's networked killer micros as far as the eye can see.
--ESR]
:killer poke: /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 box}es 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}.
:kilo-: /pref./ [SI] See {{quantifiers}}.
:KIPS: /kips/ /n./ [abbreviation, by analogy with {MIPS}
using {K}] Thousands (*not* 1024s) of Instructions Per
Second. Usage: rare.
:KISS Principle: /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".
:kit: /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.
:klone: /klohn/ /n./ See {clone}, sense 4.
:kludge: 1. /klooj/ /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.
:kluge: /klooj/ [from the German `klug', clever; poss.
related to Polish `klucza', a trick or hook] 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 fart}s 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.
{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 above; 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.
:kluge around: /vt./ To avoid a bug or difficult condition by
inserting a {kluge}. Compare {workaround}.
:kluge up: /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."
:Knights of the Lambda Calculus: /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....
:Knuth: /knooth'/ /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
{literature, the}. See also {bible}. There is a Donald
Knuth home page at
http://www-cs-faculty.Stanford.EDU/~knuth.
:kremvax: /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.
:kyrka: /shir'k*/ /n./ [Swedish] See {feature key}.
= L =
=====
:lace card: /n. obs./ A {{punched card}} with all holes
punched (also called a `whoopee card' or `ventilator card').
Card readers tended to jam when they got to one of these, as the
resulting card had too little structural strength to avoid buckling
inside the mechanism. Card punches could also jam trying to
produce these things owing to power-supply problems. When some
practical joker fed a lace card through the reader, you needed to
clear the jam with a `card knife' -- which you used on the joker
first.
:lamer: /n./ [prob. originated in skateboarder slang] Synonym
for {luser}, not used much by hackers but common among {warez
d00dz}, crackers, and {phreaker}s. Oppose {elite}. Has the
same connotations of self-conscious elitism that use of {luser}
does among hackers.
Crackers also use it to refer to cracker {wannabee}s. 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).
:language lawyer: /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}.
:languages of choice: /n./ {C}, {C++}, {LISP}, and
{Perl}. Nearly every hacker knows one of C or LISP, and most
good ones are fluent in both. C++, despite some serious drawbacks,
is generally preferred to other object-oriented languages (though
in
1996 it looks as though Java may soon displace it in the affections
of hackers, if not everywhere). Since around 1990 Perl has rapidly
been gaining favor, especially as a tool for systems-administration
utilities and rapid prototyping. Smalltalk and Prolog are also
popular in small but influential communities.
There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with
FORTRAN, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They
often prefer to be known as {Real Programmer}s, and other
hackers consider them a bit odd (see "{The Story of Mel,
a Real Programmer}" in Appendix A). 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 {card walloper} languages as a total and
unmitigated {loss}.
:larval stage: /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.
:lase: /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."
:laser chicken: /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.
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).
:Lasherism: /n./ [Harvard] A program that solves a standard
problem (such as the Eight Queens puzzle or implementing the
{life} algorithm) in a deliberately nonstandard way.
Distinguished from a {crock} or {kluge} by the fact that the
programmer did it on purpose as a mental exercise. Such
constructions are quite popular in exercises such as the
{Obfuscated C Contest}, and occasionally in {retrocomputing}.
Lew Lasher was a student at Harvard around 1980 who became
notorious for such behavior.
:laundromat: /n./ Syn. {disk farm}; see {washing
machine}.
:LDB: /l*'d*b/ /vt./ [from the PDP-10 instruction set] To
extract from the middle. "LDB me a slice of cake, please." This
usage has been kept alive by Common LISP's function of the same
name. Considered silly. See also {DPB}.
:leaf site: /n./ A machine that merely originates and reads
Usenet news or mail, and does not relay any third-party traffic.
Often uttered in a critical tone; when the ratio of leaf sites to
backbone, rib, and other relay sites gets too high, the network
tends to develop bottlenecks. Compare {backbone site}, {rib
site}.
:leak: /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} and {fd leak}
have their own entries; one might also refer, to, say, a `window
handle leak' in a window system.
:leaky heap: /n./ [Cambridge] An {arena} with a {memory
leak}.
:leapfrog attack: /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).
:leech: /n./ 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.
:legal: /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}.
:legalese: /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, {suit}s, and situations in
which hackers generally get the short end of the stick.
:LER: /L-E-R/ /n./ [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}.
:LERP: /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."
:let the smoke out: /v./ To fry hardware (see {fried}). See
{magic smoke} for a discussion of the underlying mythology.
:letterbomb: 1. /n./ A piece of {email} containing {live
data} intended to do nefarious things to the recipient's machine or
terminal. It is possible, for example, to send letterbombs that
will 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. See also
{Trojan horse}; compare {nastygram}. 2. Loosely, a
{mailbomb}.
:lexer: /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 `=-'."
:lexiphage: /lek'si-fayj`/ /n./ A notorious word {chomper}
on ITS. See {bagbiter}. This program would draw on a selected
victim's bitmapped terminal the words "THE BAG" in ornate
letters, followed a pair of jaws biting pieces of it off.
:life: /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}!; see {Gosperism}). 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!}"
:Life is hard: /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.
:light pipe: /n./ Fiber optic cable. Oppose {copper}.
:lightweight: /adj./ Opposite of {heavyweight}; usually
found in combining forms such as `lightweight process'.
:like kicking dead whales down the beach: /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}.
:like nailing jelly to a tree: /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.
:line 666: [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."
:line eater, the: /n. obs./ [Usenet] 1. 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}.
:line noise: /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}.
:line starve: [MIT] 1. /vi./ To feed paper through a printer
the wrong way by one line (most printers can't do this). On a
display terminal, to move the cursor up to the previous line of the
screen. "To print `X squared', you just output `X', line starve,
`2', line feed." (The line starve causes the `2' to appear on the
line above the `X', and the line feed gets back to the original
line.) 2. /n./ A character (or character sequence) that causes a
terminal to perform this action. ASCII 0011010, also called SUB or
control-Z, was one common line-starve character in the days before
microcomputers and the X3.64 terminal standard. Unlike `line
feed', `line starve' is *not* standard {{ASCII}}
terminology. Even among hackers it is considered a bit silly.
3. [proposed] A sequence such as \c (used in System V echo, as well
as {{nroff}} and {{troff}}) that suppresses a {newline} or
other character(s) that would normally be emitted.
:linearithmic: /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).
:link farm: /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}.
:link-dead: /adj./ [MUD] Said of a {MUD} character who has
frozen in place because of a dropped Internet connection.
:lint: [from Unix's `lint(1)', 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 `lint(1)' is used.
This term used to be restricted to use of `lint(1)' itself,
but (judging by references on Usenet) it has become a shorthand for
{desk check} 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".
:Linux:: /lee'nuhks/ or /li'nuks/, *not* /li:'nuhks/
/n./ The free Unix workalike created by Linus Torvalds and
friends starting about 1990 (the pronunciation /lee'nuhks/ is
preferred because the name `Linus' has an /ee/ sound in Swedish).
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-based
machines are underway). This is what {GNU} aimed to be, but the
Free Software Foundation has not (as of early 1996) produced the
kernel to go with its Unix toolset (which Linux uses). Other,
similar efforts like FreeBSD and NetBSD have been much less
successful. 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.
:lion food: /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!"
:Lions Book: /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 will finally see legal
public print as ISBN 1-57398-013-7 from Peer-To-Peer
Communications, with a forward by Dennis Ritchie.]
:LISP: /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 now shares the throne
with {C}. 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 {crock}s. When the {Right Thing} has already
been done once, there is no justification for {bogosity} in newer
languages.
:list-bomb: /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.
:literature, the: /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.
:lithium lick: /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!"
:little-endian: /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.
:live: /li:v/ /adj.,adv./ 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.
:live data: /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 {hook}s
(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.
:Live Free Or Die!: /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 commercial 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. Recently (1994) an inferior imitation of these
has been put in circulation with a red corporate logo added.
:livelock: /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.
:liveware: /li:v'weir/ /n./ 1. Synonym for {wetware}.
Less common. 2. [Cambridge] Vermin. "Waiter, there's some
liveware in my salad..."
:lobotomy: /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.
:locals, the: /pl.n./ The users on one's local network (as
opposed, say, to people one reaches via public Internet or UUCP
connects). 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."
:locked and loaded: /adj./ [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).
:locked up: /adj./ Syn. for {hung}, {wedged}.
:logic bomb: /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}.
:logical: /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 in which `logical north' is toward San Francisco,
`logical west' is toward the ocean, etc., even though logical
north varies between physical (true) north near San Francisco and
physical west near San Jose. (The best rule of thumb here is that,
by definition, El Camino Real always runs logical north-and-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 has grown up along it) is a 3-quarters circle
surrounding 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. (If you went logical south along the
entire length of route 128, you would start out going northwest,
curve around to the south, and finish headed due east, passing
along one infamous stretch of pavement that is simultaneously route
128 south and Interstate 93 north, and is signed as such!)
:loop through: /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).
:loose bytes: /n./ Commonwealth hackish term for the padding
bytes or {shim}s many compilers insert between members of a
record or structure to cope with alignment requirements imposed by
the machine architecture.
:lord high fixer: /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}.
:lose: [MIT] /vi./ 1. 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!"
:lose lose: /interj./ A reply to or comment on an undesirable
situation. "I accidentally deleted all my files!" "Lose,
lose."
:loser: /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}.
:losing: /adj./ Said of anything that is or causes a {lose}
or {lossage}.
:loss: /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}.
:lossage: /los'*j/ /n./ 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.
:lost in the noise: /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.
:lost in the underflow: /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}.
:lots of MIPS but no I/O: /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, is a notorious recent example).
:low-bandwidth: /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 {suit}s!" Compare
{zero-content}, {bandwidth}, {math-out}.
:LPT: /L-P-T/ or /lip'it/ or /lip-it'/ /n./ Line printer,
of course. Rare under Unix, more common among hackers who grew up
with ITS, MS-DOS, CP/M and other operating systems that were
strongly influenced by early DEC conventions.
:Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology: /prov./ "There is
*always* one more bug."
:lunatic fringe: /n./ [IBM] Customers who can be relied upon to
accept release 1 versions of software.
:lurker: /n./ One of the `silent majority' in a 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'.
:luser: /loo'zr/ /n./ 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.
= M =
=====
:M: /pref./ (on units) suff. (on numbers) [SI] See
{{quantifiers}}.
:macdink: /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 11 P.M. last night, he was still macdinking the
slides for his presentation." See also {fritterware},
{window shopping}.
:machinable: /adj./ Machine-readable. Having the {softcopy}
nature.
:machoflops: /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}.
:Macintoy: /mak'in-toy/ /n./ The Apple Macintosh, considered
as a {toy}. Less pejorative than {Macintrash}.
:Macintrash: /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}.
:macro: /mak'roh/ [techspeak] /n./ 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 {HLL}s, 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).
:macro-: /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.
:macrology: /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}.
:macrotape: /mak'roh-tayp/ /n./ An industry-standard reel of
tape, as opposed to a {microtape}. See also {round tape}.
:maggotbox: /mag'*t-boks/ /n./ See {Macintrash}. This is
even more derogatory.
:magic: /adj./ 1. 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. Characteristic of something
that works although no one really understands why (this is
especially called {black magic}). 3. [Stanford] A feature not
generally publicized that allows something otherwise impossible, or
a feature formerly in that category but now unveiled. Compare
{black magic}, {wizardly}, {deep magic}, {heavy
wizardry}.
For more about hackish `magic', see {A Story About `Magic'}
in Appendix A.
:magic cookie: /n./ [Unix] 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 `ftell(3)' may
be a magic cookie rather than a byte offset; it can be passed to
`fseek(3)', 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}.
:magic number: /n./ [Unix/C] 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 commonsense
1. 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!
*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.
:magic smoke: /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}.
:mail storm: /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}.
:mailbomb: (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}.
:mailing list: /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.
:main loop: /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}.
:mainframe: /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 {dinosaur}s 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 (see
{cray})), having been swamped by the recent huge advances in IC
technology and low-cost personal computing. As of 1993, corporate
America is just beginning to figure this out -- the wave of
failures, takeovers, and mergers among traditional mainframe makers
have certainly provided sufficient omens (see {dinosaurs
mating} and {killer micro}).
:management: /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).
:mandelbug: /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}.
:manged: /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}.
:mangle: /vt./ Used similarly to {mung} or {scribble},
but more violent in its connotations; something that is mangled has
been irreversibly and totally trashed.
:mangler: /n./ [DEC] A manager. Compare
{management}. Note that {system mangler} is somewhat
different in connotation.
:manularity: /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}).
:marbles: /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}."
:marginal: /adj./ 1. Extremely small. "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 extremely small merit. "This proposed new
feature seems rather marginal to me." 3. Of extremely small
probability of {win}ning. "The power supply was rather
marginal anyway; no wonder it fried."
:Marginal Hacks: /n./ Margaret Jacks Hall, a building into
which the Stanford AI Lab was moved near the beginning of the 1980s
(from the {D. C. Power Lab}).
:marginally: /adv./ Slightly. "The ravs here are only
marginally better than at Small Eating Place." See {epsilon}.
:marketroid: /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}.
:Mars: /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-25M, and the
never-built superprocessor SC-40M. 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, 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.
:martian: /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?"
:massage: /vt./ 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}.
:math-out: /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}.
:Matrix: /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
{network, the}). 3. The totality of present-day computer
networks.
:maximum Maytag mode: /n./ What a {washing machine} or, by
extension, any hard disk 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}.
:Mbogo, Dr. Fred: /*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. Compare {Bloggs
Family, the}, see also {fred}.
:meatware: /n./ Synonym for {wetware}. Less common.
:meeces: /mees'*z/ /n./ [TMRC] Occasional furry visitors who
are not {urchin}s. [That is, mice. This may no longer be in
live use; it clearly derives from the refrain of the early-1960s
cartoon character Mr. Jinx: "I hate meeces to *pieces*!" ---
ESR]
:meg: /meg/ /n./ See {{quantifiers}}.
:mega-: /me'g*/ /pref./ [SI] See {{quantifiers}}.
:megapenny: /meg'*-pen`ee/ /n./ $10,000 (1 cent *
10^6). Used semi-humorously as a unit in comparing computer
cost and performance figures.
:MEGO: /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 {TLA}s. 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
technical detail as effectively as by an actual excess of it.
:meltdown, network: /n./ See {network meltdown}.
:meme: /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.
:meme plague: /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.
:memetics: /me-met'iks/ /n./ [from {meme}] The study of
memes. As of early 1996, 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.
:memory farts: /n./ The flatulent sounds that some DOS box
BIOSes (most notably AMI's) make when checking memory on bootup.
:memory leak: /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}.
:memory smash: /n./ [XEROX PARC] Writing through a pointer that
doesn't point to what you think it does. This occasionally reduces
your machine 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.
:menuitis: /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}.
:mess-dos: /mes-dos/ /n./ Derisory term for MS-DOS. Often
followed by the ritual banishing "Just say No!" See
{{MS-DOS}}. Most hackers (even many MS-DOS hackers) loathe
MS-DOS for its single-tasking nature, its limits on application
size, its nasty primitive interface, and its ties to IBMness (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.
:meta: /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}}.
:meta bit: /n./ The top bit of an 8-bit character, which is on
in character values 128--255. Also called {high bit}, {alt
bit}, or {hobbit}. 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.
:metasyntactic variable: /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.
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
{qux} before {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}, fum:
This series is reported to be common at XEROX PARC.
{fred}, {barney}:
See the entry for {fred}. These tend to be Britishisms.
{corge}, {grault}, {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/.
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.
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.
:MFTL: /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 language that cannot even be used to write
its own compiler is beneath contempt. 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".)
:mickey: /n./ The resolution unit of mouse movement. It has
been suggested that the `disney' will become a benchmark unit for
animation graphics performance.
:mickey mouse program: /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.
:micro-: /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.
:MicroDroid: /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 Mormon
missionaries.
:microfloppies: /n./ 3.5-inch floppies, as opposed to 5.25-inch
{vanilla} or mini-floppies and the now-obsolete 8-inch variety.
This term may be headed for obsolescence as 5.25-inchers pass out
of use, only to be revived if anybody floats a sub-3-inch floppy
standard. See {stiffy}, {minifloppies}.
:microfortnight: /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 1/4th of a barrel; 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.
:microLenat: /mi:`-kroh-len'-*t/ /n./ The unit of
{bogosity}, written uL; the 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 for giving 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.
:microReid: /mi:'kroh-reed/ /n./ See {microLenat}.
:Microsloth Windows: /mi:'kroh-sloth` win'dohz/ /n./
Hackerism for `Microsoft Windows', a windowing system for the
IBM-PC which is so limited by bug-for-bug compatibility with
{mess-dos} that it is agonizingly slow on anything less than a
fast 486. 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};
compare {X}, {sun-stools}.
:microtape: /mi:'kroh-tayp/ /n./ Occasionally used to mean a
DECtape, as opposed to a {macrotape}. A DECtape is a small
reel, about 4 inches in diameter, of magnetic tape about an inch
wide. Unlike those for today's {macrotape}s, microtape drivers
allowed random access to the data, and therefore could be used to
support file systems and even for swapping (this was generally done
purely for {hack value}, as they were far too slow for practical
use). In their heyday they were used in pretty much the same ways
one would now use a floppy disk: as a small, portable way to save
and transport files and programs. Apparently the term
`microtape' was actually the official term used within DEC for
these tapes until someone coined the word `DECtape', which, of
course, sounded sexier to the {marketroid}s; another version of
the story holds that someone discovered a conflict with another
company's `microtape' trademark.
:middle-endian: /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 dd/mm/yy).
:milliLampson: /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.
:minifloppies: /n./ 5.25-inch {vanilla} floppy disks, as
opposed to 3.5-inch or {microfloppies} and the now-obsolescent
8-inch variety. At one time, this term was a trademark of Shugart
Associates for their SA-400 minifloppy drive. Nobody paid any
attention. See {stiffy}.
:MIPS: /mips/ /n./ [abbreviation] 1. A measure of computing
speed; formally, `Million Instructions Per Second' (that's
10^6 per second, not 2^(20)!); often rendered by
hackers as `Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed' or in
other unflattering ways. This joke expresses a nearly universal
attitude about the value of most {benchmark} claims, said
attitude being one of the great cultural divides between hackers
and {marketroid}s. 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 {computron}s. "This is
just a workstation; the heavy MIPS are hidden in the basement."
3. The corporate name of a particular RISC-chip company; among
other things, they designed the processor chips used in DEC's 3100
workstation series. 4. Acronym for `Meaningless Information per
Second' (a joke, prob. from sense 1).
:misbug: /mis-buhg/ /n./ [MIT] 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}. Usage: rare.
Compare {green lightning}. See {miswart}.
:misfeature: /mis-fee'chr/ or /mis'fee`chr/ /n./ 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."
:Missed'em-five: /n./ Pejorative hackerism for AT&T System V
Unix, generally used by {BSD} partisans in a bigoted mood. (The
synonym `SysVile' is also encountered.) See {software bloat},
{Berzerkeley}.
:missile address: /n./ See {ICBM address}.
:miswart: /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.
:moby: /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').] 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 "{The Meaning of `Hack'}").
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).
:mockingbird: /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}.
:mod: /vt.,n./ 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}. 2. Short for {modulo} but used *only* for
its techspeak sense.
:mode: /n./ 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.
:mode bit: /n./ 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. Another was the bit on a
PDP-12 that controlled whether it ran the PDP-8 or the LINC
instruction set.
:modulo: /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."
:molly-guard: /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.
:Mongolian Hordes technique: /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. Also called `Chinese Army technique'; see
also {Brooks's Law}.
:monkey up: /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}.
:monkey, scratch: /n./ See {scratch monkey}.
:monstrosity: 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 `Overgeneralization'
in
the discussion of jargonification). See also {baroque}.
:monty: /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 {FTP} 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. This usage is possibly derived from a TV commercial for
Del Monte fruit juice, in which one of the characters insisted on
"the full Del Monte". Compare American {moby}.
:Moof: /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".
:Moore's Law: /morz law/ /prov./ The observation that the
logic density of silicon integrated circuits has closely followed
the curve (bits per square inch) = 2^((t - 1962)) where
t is time in years; that is, the amount of information storable on
a given amount of silicon has roughly doubled every year since the
technology was invented. This relation, first uttered in 1964 by
semiconductor engineer Gordon Moore (who co-founded Intel four
years later) held until the late 1970s, at which point the doubling
period slowed to 18 months. It remained at that value through time
of writing (late 1995). See also {Parkinson's Law of Data}.
:moose call: /n./ See {whalesong}.
:moria: /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.
:MOTAS: /moh-tahz/ /n./ [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate
Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A potential or (less often)
actual sex partner. See also {SO}.
:MOTOS: /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 have largely displaced
it.
:MOTSS: /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}.
:mouse ahead: /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.
:mouse around: /vi./ To explore public portions of a large
system, esp. a network such as Internet via {FTP} or
{TELNET}, looking for interesting stuff to {snarf}.
:mouse belt: /n./ See {rat belt}.
:mouse droppings: /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.
:mouse elbow: /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.
:mouso: /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}.
:MS-DOS:: /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 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}, {ill-behaved}.
:mu: /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, but native speakers do not
recognize the Discordian question-denying use. It almost certainly
derives from overgeneralization of the answer in the following
well-known Rinzei Zen teaching riddle:
A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
retorted, "Mu!"
See also {has the X nature}, {AI Koans}, and Douglas
Hofstadter's "G"odel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid"
(pointer in the {Bibliography} in Appendix C.
:MUD: /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. 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}.
:muddie: /n./ Syn. {mudhead}. More common in Great Britain,
possibly because system administrators there like to mutter
"bloody muddies" when annoyed at the species.
:mudhead: /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 Theater album
"Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers", in which there
is a character named "Mudhead".
:multician: /muhl-ti'shn/ /n./ [coined at Honeywell,
ca. 1970] Competent user of {{Multics}}. Perhaps oddly, no one
has ever promoted the analogous `Unician'.
:Multics:: /muhl'tiks/ /n./ [from "MULTiplexed Information
and Computing Service"] An early (late 1960s) timesharing
operating system co-designed by a consortium including MIT, GE, and
Bell Laboratories. Multics was very innovative for its time ---
among other things, it introduced the idea of treating all devices
uniformly as special files. All the members but GE eventually
pulled out after determining that {second-system effect} had
bloated Multics to the point of practical unusability (the
`lean' predecessor in question was {CTSS}). Honeywell
commercialized Multics after buying out GE's computer group, but it
was never very successful (among other things, on some versions one
was commonly required to enter a password to log out). One of the
developers left in the lurch by the project's breakup was Ken
Thompson, a circumstance which led directly to the birth of
{{Unix}}. For this and other reasons, aspects of the Multics
design remain a topic of occasional debate among hackers. See also
{brain-damaged} and {GCOS}.
:multitask: /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.
:mumblage: /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.
:mumble: /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 {VAX}." "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 {glark}ed from
context. Compare {blurgle}. 8. [XEROX PARC] A colloquialism
used to suggest that further discussion would be fruitless.
:munch: /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.
:munching: /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}.
:munching squares: /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}.]
:munchkin: /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}.
:mundane: /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}.
:mung: /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. 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}.
:munge: /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}).
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).
:Murphy's Law: /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 {luser}s. 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 the 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 the wrong
way around. Murphy then made the original form of his
pronouncement, which the test subject (Major John Paul Stapp)
quoted 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 correctly referred to as
{Finagle's Law}. The memetic drift apparent in these mutants
clearly demonstrates Murphy's Law acting on itself!
:music:: /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.
:mutter: /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}.
= N =
=====
:N: /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. "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}.
:nadger: /nad'jr/ /v./ [UK] 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.
Apparently this word originated on a now-legendary 1950s radio
comedy program called "The Goon Show". The Goon Show usage
of "nadger" was definitely in the sense of "jinxed"
"clobbered" "fouled up". The American mutation {adger}
seems to have preserved more of the original flavor.
:nagware: /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
{crippleware}.
:nailed to the wall: /adj./ [like a trophy] Said of a bug
finally eliminated after protracted, and even heroic, effort.
:nailing jelly: /vi./ See {like nailing jelly to a tree}.
:naive: /adj./ 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'.
:naive user: /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.
:NAK: /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!"
:nano: /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}).
:nano-: /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}.
:nanoacre: /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.
:nanobot: /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'.
:nanocomputer: /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.
:nanofortnight: /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-}.
:nanotechnology:: /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. See also {blue goo}, {gray
goo}, {nanobot}.
:nasal demons: /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.
:nastygram: /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}.
:Nathan Hale: /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.
:nature: /n./ See {has the X nature}.
:neat hack: /n./ 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 "{The Meaning of `Hack'}",
Appendix A). See also {hack}.
:neats vs. scruffies: /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.
:neep-neep: /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
boot 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!".
:neophilia: /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. 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'.
:nerd: /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 the two senses of
{computer 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.) 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 earmarks of a bogus folk etymology.
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.
:net.-: /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.god}s, `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}.
:net.god: /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.
:net.personality: /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.god}hood.
:net.police: /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}.
:NetBOLLIX: /n./ [from bollix: to bungle] {IBM}'s NetBIOS, an
extremely {brain-damaged} network protocol that, like {Blue
Glue}, is used at commercial shops that don't know any better.
:netburp: /n./ [IRC] When {netlag} gets really bad, and
delays between servers exceed a certain threshhold, 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}).
:netdead: /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".
:nethack: /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; the
current contact address (as of early 1996) is
[email protected].
:netiquette: /net'ee-ket/ or /net'i-ket/ /n./ [portmanteau
from "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.
:netlag: /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.)
:netnews: /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."
:netrock: /net'rok/ /n./ [IBM] A {flame}; used esp. on
VNET, IBM's internal corporate network.
:netsplit: /n./ Syn. {netburp}.
:netter: /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!"
:network address: /n./ (also `net address') As used by
hackers, means an address on `the' network (see {network,
the}; this used to include {bang path} addresses but now almost
always implies an {{Internet address}}).
Display of a network address is essential if one wants to be to be
taken seriously by hackers; in particular, persons or organizations
that claim to understand, work with, sell to, or recruit from among
hackers but *don't* display net addresses are quietly presumed
to be clueless poseurs and mentally flushed (see {flush}, sense
4). Hackers often put their net addresses on their business cards
and wear them prominently in contexts where they expect to meet
other hackers face-to-face (see also {{science-fiction fandom}}).
This is mostly functional, but is also a signal that one identifies
with hackerdom (like lodge pins among Masons or tie-dyed T-shirts
among Grateful Dead fans). 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. See also
{sitename}, {domainist}.
[1996 update: the lodge-pin function of the network address has
been gradually eroding in the last two years as Internet and World
Wide Web usage have become common outside hackerdom. -- ESR]
:network meltdown: /n./ A state of complete network overload;
the network equivalent of {thrash}ing. 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 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.
:network, the: /n./ 1. 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 time-sharing 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},
{{Internet address}}, {network address}. 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).
2. A fictional conspiracy of libertarian hacker-subversives and
anti-authoritarian monkeywrenchers described in Robert Anton
Wilson's novel "Schr"odinger's Cat", to which many hackers
have subsequently decided they belong (this is an example of {ha
ha only serious}).
In sense 1, `network' is often abbreviated to `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.
:New Jersey: /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}.
:New Testament: /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'.
:newbie: /n[y]oo'bee/ /n./ [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. 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}.
:newgroup wars: /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 spinoff of alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork from
alt.tv.muppets in early 1990, or any number of specialized
abuse groups named after particularly notorious {flamer}s, e.g.,
alt.weemba.
:newline: /n[y]oo'li:n/ /n./ 1. [techspeak, primarily Unix]
The ASCII LF character (0001010), used under {{Unix}} as a text
line terminator. A Bell-Labs-ism rather than a Berkeleyism;
interestingly (and unusually for Unix jargon), it is said to have
originally been an IBM usage. (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}, {terpri}.
:NeWS: /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 {news} (the {netnews} software).
:news: /n./ See {netnews}.
:newsfroup: // /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},
and {filk}.
:newsgroup: /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 list}s 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}).
:nick: /n./ [IRC] 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}.
:nickle: /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.
:night mode: /n./ See {phase} (of people).
:Nightmare File System: /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}.
:NIL: /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.
:Ninety-Ninety Rule: /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.
:NMI: /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.
:no-op: /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). See also {JFCL}.
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.
:noddy: /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}.
:node: /n./ 1. [Internet, UUCP] A host machine on the network.
2. [MS-DOS BBSes] A dial-in line on a BBS. Thus an MS-DOS {sysop}
might say that his BBS has 4 nodes even though it has a single
machine and no Internet link, confusing an Internet hacker no end.
:NOMEX underwear: /noh'meks uhn'-der-weir/ /n./ [Usenet] Syn.
{asbestos longjohns}, used mostly in auto-related mailing lists
and newsgroups. NOMEX underwear is an actual product available on
the racing equipment market, used as a fire resistance measure and
required in some racing series.
:Nominal Semidestructor: /n./ Soundalike slang for `National
Semiconductor', found among other places in the Networking/2
networking sources. During the late 1970s to mid-1980s this
company marketed a series of microprocessors including the NS16000
and NS32000 and several variants. At one point early in the great
microprocessor race, the specs on these chips made them look like
serious competition for the rising Intel 80x86 and Motorola 680x0
series. Unfortunately, the actual parts were notoriously flaky and
never implemented the full instruction set promised in their
literature, apparently because the company couldn't get any of the
mask steppings to work as designed. They eventually sank without
trace, joining the Zilog Z8000 and a few even more obscure
also-rans in the graveyard of forgotten microprocessors. Compare
{HP-SUX}, {AIDX}, {buglix}, {Macintrash}, {Telerat},
{Open DeathTrap}, {ScumOS}, {sun-stools}.
:non-optimal solution: /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}.
:nonlinear: /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).
:nontrivial: /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}.
:not ready for prime time: /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}.
:notwork: /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.
:NP-: /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 good a priori reason that they should be. NP is
the set of Nondeterministic-Polynomial algorithms, 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."
:nroff:: /N'rof/ /n./ [Unix, from "new roff" (see
{{troff}})] A companion program to the Unix typesetter {{troff}},
accepting identical input but preparing output for terminals and
line printers.
:NSA line eater: /n./ The National Security Agency trawling
program sometimes assumed to be reading the net for the
U.S. Government's spooks. Most hackers describe it as a mythical
beast, but some believe it actually exists, more aren't sure, and
many believe in acting as though it exists just in case. Some
netters put loaded phrases like `KGB', `Uzi', `nuclear
materials', `Palestine', `cocaine', and `assassination' in
their {sig block}s 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.
There is a mainstream variant of this myth involving a `Trunk Line
Monitor', which supposedly used speech recognition to extract words
from telephone trunks. This one was making the rounds in the
late 1970s, spread by people who 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. Speech-recognition technology can't do this
job even now (1996), and almost certainly won't in this millennium,
either. The peak of silliness came with a letter to an alternative
paper in New Haven, Connecticut, laying out the factoids of this
Big Brotherly affair. The letter writer then revealed his actual
agenda by offering -- at an amazing low price, just this once, we
take VISA and MasterCard -- a scrambler guaranteed to daunt the
Trunk Trawler and presumably allowing the would-be Baader-Meinhof
gangs of the world to get on with their business.
:NSP: /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 {ISP}s. In 1996, major NSPs include ANS, MCI,
UUNET, and Sprint. An Internet wholesaler.
:nude: /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 a an extra weekend with
the installation tapes." This usage is a recent innovation
reflecting the fact that most PC clones are now delivered with DOS
or Microsoft Windows pre-installed at the factory. Other kinds of
hardware are still normally delivered without OS, so this term is
particular to PC support groups.
:nuke: /n[y]ook/ /vt./ 1. To intentionally delete the entire
contents of a given directory or storage volume. "On Unix,
`rm -r /usr' will nuke everything in the usr filesystem."
Never used for accidental deletion. Oppose {blow away}.
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 {wallpaper} 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.
:number-crunching: /n./ 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 {wallpaper}.
See also {crunch}.
:numbers: /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}.
:NUXI problem: /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}.
:nybble: /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}, Apparently the `nybble' spelling is
uncommon in Commonwealth Hackish, as British orthography suggests
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' and `quadwords'; some (indicated) have
substantial information separate entries.
2 bits:
{crumb}, {quad}, {quarter}, tayste
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:
word (on a 36-bit machine)
48 bits:
{gawble} (under circumstances that remain obscure)
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.
:nyetwork: /nyet'werk/ /n./ [from Russian `nyet' = no] A
network, when it is acting {flaky} or is {down}. Compare
{notwork}.
= O =
=====
:Ob-: /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.
:Obfuscated C Contest: /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
*/
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
*/
#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 IOCC has an official home page at
http://reality.sgi.com/csp/ioccc.
:obi-wan error: /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
1. A kind of {off-by-one error}. See also {zeroth}.
:Objectionable-C: /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.
:obscure: /adj./ Used in an exaggeration of its normal meaning,
to imply total incomprehensibility. "The reason for that last
crash is obscure." "The `find(1)' 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.
:octal forty: /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}.
:off the trolley: /adj./ Describes the behavior of a program
that malfunctions and goes catatonic, but doesn't actually
{crash} or abort. See {glitch}, {bug}, {deep space}.
:off-by-one error: /n./ 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.
:offline: /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.
:ogg: /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." 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."
:old fart: /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
block}s 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.
:Old Testament: /n./ [C programmers] The first edition of
{K&R}, the sacred text describing {Classic C}.
:one-banana problem: /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
{sysape}s 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}.
:one-line fix: /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!}
:one-liner wars: /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 o.| T) / T <- iN
where `o' is the APL null character, the assignment arrow is a
single character, and `i' represents the APL iota.
:ooblick: /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.
:op: /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}.
:open: /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."
:Open DeathTrap: /n./ Abusive hackerism for the Santa Cruz
Operation's `Open DeskTop' product, a Motif-based graphical
interface over their Unix. The funniest part is that this was
coined by SCO's own developers.... Compare {AIDX},
{Macintrash} {Nominal Semidestructor}, {ScumOS},
{sun-stools}, {HP-SUX}.
:open switch: /n./ [IBM: prob. from railroading] An
unresolved question, issue, or problem.
:operating system:: /n./ [techspeak] (Often abbreviated `OS')
The foundation software of a machine, of course; 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).
:optical diff: /n./ See {vdiff}.
:optical grep: /n./ See {vgrep}.
:optimism: /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}.
:Orange Book: /n./ The U.S. Government's 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). Stock Unixes are roughly C1, and can be upgraded to about
C2 without excessive pain. See also {{crayola books}}, {{book
titles}}.
:oriental food:: /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, and Vietnamese cuisines are also quite popular.
:orphan: /n./ [Unix] A process whose parent has died; one
inherited by `init(1)'. Compare {zombie}.
:orphaned i-node: /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.
:orthogonal: /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...."
:OS: /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.
:OS/2: /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 3 years after introduction you could still count the
major {app}s shipping for it on the fingers of two hands -- in
unary. The 2.x versions are said to have improved somewhat, and
informed hackers now rate them superior to Microsoft Windows (an
endorsement which, however, could easily be construed as damning
with faint praise). See {monstrosity}, {cretinous},
{second-system effect}.
:OSU: /O-S-U/ /n. obs./ [TMRC] Acronym for Officially
Sanctioned User; a user who is recognized as such by the computer
authorities and allowed to use the computer above the objections of
the security monitor.
:OTOH: // [USENET] On The Other Hand.
:out-of-band: /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}.
:overflow bit: /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".
:overflow pdl: /n./ [MIT] The place where you put things when
your {pdl} is full. If you don't have one and too many things
get pushed, you forget something. The overflow pdl for a person's
memory might be a memo pad. This usage inspired the following
doggerel:
Hey, diddle, diddle
The overflow pdl
To get a little more stack;
If that's not enough
Then you lose it all,
And have to pop all the way back.
--The Great Quux
The term {pdl} seems to be primarily an MITism; outside MIT this
term is replaced by `overflow {stack}'.
:overrun: /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 {thrash}ing 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}).
:overrun screw: /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 {heisenbug}s of the most diabolical subtlety. The term
`overrun screw' is used esp. of scribbles beyond the end of
arrays allocated with `malloc(3)'; 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 `stdio(3)' or `malloc(3)' itself. See
{spam}, {overrun}; see also {memory leak}, {memory
smash}, {aliasing bug}, {precedence lossage}, {fandango on
core}, {secondary damage}.
= P =
=====
:P-mail: /n./ Physical mail, as opposed to {email}.
Synonymous with {snail-mail}, but much less common.
:P.O.D.: /P-O-D/ Acronym for `Piece Of Data' (as opposed
to a code section). Usage: pedantic and rare. See also {pod}.
:padded cell: /n./ Where you put {luser}s 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
`rsh(1)' 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'.
:page in: /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}.
:page out: /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}.
:pain in the net: /n./ A {flamer}.
:Pangloss parity: /n./ [from Dr. Pangloss, the eternal optimist
in Voltaire's "Candide"] In corporate DP shops, a common
condition of severe but equally shared {lossage} resulting from
the theory that as long as everyone in the organization has the
exactly the *same* model of obsolete computer, everything will
be fine.
:paper-net: /n./ Hackish way of referring to the postal
service, analogizing it to a very slow, low-reliability network.
Usenet {sig block}s 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}, {P-mail}.
:param: /p*-ram'/ /n./ Shorthand for `parameter'. See
also {parm}; compare {arg}, {var}.
:PARC: /n./ See {XEROX PARC}.
:parent message: /n./ What a {followup} follows up.
:parity errors: /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 RAM hardware. Parity errors can also afflict mass storage and
serial communication lines; this is more serious because not always
correctable.
:Parkinson's Law of Data: /prov./ "Data expands to fill the
space available for storage"; buying more memory encourages the
use of more memory-intensive techniques. It has been observed over
the last 10 years 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 double about
once every 12 months (see {Moore's Law}); unfortunately, the
laws of physics guarantee that the latter cannot continue
indefinitely.
:parm: /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}.
:parse: [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'.
:Pascal:: /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 ten years of
improvement and could also stand as an indictment of many other
bondage-and-discipline languages. 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 almost entirely displaced (by {C}) from the
niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems
programming, but retains some popularity as a hobbyist language in
the MS-DOS and Macintosh worlds.
:pastie: /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
rho character. The term properly refers to
nipple-concealing devices formerly worn by strippers in concession
to indecent-exposure laws; compare {tits on a keyboard}.
:patch: 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
`patch(1)' 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 door}s 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.
:patch space: /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 widening use of HLLs has
made this term rare; it is now primarily historical outside IBM
shops. See {patch} (sense 4), {zap} (sense 4), {hook}.
:path: /n./ 1. A {bang path} or explicitly routed
{{Internet address}}; a node-by-node specification of a link
between two machines. 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]
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).
:pathological: /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).
:payware: /pay'weir/ /n./ Commercial software. Oppose
{shareware} or {freeware}.
:PBD: /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}.
:PC-ism: /P-C-izm/ /n./ A piece of code or coding technique
that takes advantage of the unprotected single-tasking environment
in IBM PCs and the like, e.g., by busy-waiting on a hardware
register, direct diddling of screen memory, or using hard timing
loops. Compare {ill-behaved}, {vaxism}, {unixism}. Also,
`PC-ware' n., a program full of PC-isms on a machine with a more
capable operating system. Pejorative.
:PD: /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}.
:PDL: /P-D-L/, /pid'l/, /p*d'l/ or /puhd'l/
1. /n./ `Program Design Language'. Any of a large class of formal
and profoundly useless pseudo-languages in which {management}
forces one to design programs. Too often, management expects PDL
descriptions to be maintained in parallel with the code, imposing
massive overhead to little or no benefit. See also {{flowchart}}.
2. /v./ To design using a program design language. "I've been
pdling so long my eyes won't focus beyond 2 feet." 3. /n./ `Page
Description Language'. Refers to any language which is used to
control a graphics device, usually a laserprinter. The most common
example is, of course, Adobe's {{PostScript}} language, but there
are many others, such as Xerox InterPress, etc.
:pdl: /pid'l/ or /puhd'l/ /n./ [abbreviation for `Push Down
List'] 1. In ITS days, the preferred MITism for {stack}. See
{overflow pdl}. 2. Dave Lebling, one of the co-authors of
{Zork}; (his {network address} on the ITS machines was at one
time pdl@dms). 3. Rarely, any sense of {PDL}, as these are not
invariably capitalized.
:PDP-10: /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}},
{AOS}, {BLT}, {DDT}, {DPB}, {EXCH}, {HAKMEM},
{JFCL}, {LDB}, {pop}, {push}.
:PDP-20: /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).
:peek: /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 consists of `peek'ing
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 circulate (see
{{interrupt list, the}}). The results of `poke's 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 C hacker would unhesitatingly, if
unportably, assign an absolute address to a pointer variable and
indirect through it.)
:pencil and paper: /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.
:peon: /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."
:percent-S: /per-sent' es'/ /n./ [From the code in C's
`printf(3)' 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}.
:perf: /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).
:perfect programmer syndrome: /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 problem}s). "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}."
:Perl: /perl/ /n./ [Practical Extraction and Report Language,
a.k.a. Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister] An interpreted
language developed by Larry Wall (<
[email protected]>, author
of `patch(1)' and `rn(1)') and distributed over Usenet.
Superficially resembles {awk}, but is much hairier, including
many facilities reminiscent of `sed(1)' and shells and a
comprehensive Unix system-call interface. Unix sysadmins, who are
almost always incorrigible hackers, increasingly consider it one of
the {languages of choice}. Perl has been described, in a parody
of a famous remark about `lex(1)', as the "Swiss-Army
chainsaw" of Unix programming. See also {Camel Book}.
:person of no account: /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
[email protected]". Compare {return from the
dead}.
:pessimal: /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.
:pessimizing compiler: /pes'*-mi:z`ing k*m-pi:l'r/ /n./ A
compiler that produces object [antonym of `optimizing compiler']
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.
:peta-: /pe't*/ pref [SI] See {{quantifiers}}.
:PETSCII: /pet'skee/ /n. obs./ [abbreviation of PET ASCII] The
variation (many would say perversion) of the {{ASCII}} character
set used by the Commodore Business Machines PET series of personal
computers and the later Commodore C64, C16, and C128 machines. The
PETSCII set used left-arrow and up-arrow (as in old-style ASCII)
instead of underscore and caret, placed the unshifted alphabet at
positions 65--90, put the shifted alphabet at positions 193--218,
and added graphics characters.
:phage: /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.
:phase: 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 8 P.M. 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.
:phase of the moon: /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 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.
:phase-wrapping: /n./ [MIT] Syn. {wrap around}, sense 2.
:phreaker: /freek'r/ /n./ One who engages in
{phreaking}.
:phreaking: /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.
:pico-: /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-}.
:pig, run like a: /v./ To run very slowly on given hardware,
said of software. Distinct from {hog}.
:pilot error: /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
`sendmail.cf' is hosed."
:ping: [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 `ping(8)' can be used to do this manually (note
that `ping(8)''s author denies the widespread folk etymology
that the name was ever intended as acronym `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 `ping(8)', 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.
:Pink-Shirt Book: "The Peter Norton Programmer's Guide
to the IBM PC". The original cover featured a picture of Peter
Norton with a silly smirk on his face, wearing a pink shirt.
Perhaps in recognition of this usage, the current edition has a
different picture of Norton wearing a pink shirt. See also
{{book titles}}.
:PIP: /pip/ vt.,obs. [Peripheral Interchange Program] To
copy; from the program PIP on CP/M, RSX-11, RSTS/E, TOPS-10, and
OS/8 (derived from a utility on the PDP-6) that was used for file
copying (and in OS/8 and RT-11 for just about every other file
operation you might want to do). It is said that when the program
was originated, during the development of the PDP-6 in 1963, it was
called ATLATL (`Anything, Lord, to Anything, Lord'; this played on
the Nahuatl word `atlatl' for a spear-thrower, with connotations
of utility and primitivity that were no doubt quite intentional).
See also {BLT}, {dd}, {cat}.
:pistol: /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!"
:pixel sort: /n./ [Commodore users] Any compression routine
which irretrievably loses valuable data in the process of
{crunch}ing 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}.
:pizza box: /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.
:pizza, ANSI standard: /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
{tea, ISO standard cup of}.
:plaid screen: /n./ [XEROX PARC] A `special effect' that
occurs when certain kinds of {memory smash}es 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}.
:plain-ASCII: /playn-as'kee/ Syn. {flat-ASCII}.
:plan file: /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:
_@/
and a compiler (ASP) is available on Usenet for producing them.
See also {twirling baton}.
:platinum-iridium: /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}.
:playpen: /n./ [IBM] A room where programmers work. Compare {salt
mines}.
:playte: /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}.
:plingnet: /pling'net/ /n./ Syn. {UUCPNET}. Also see
{{Commonwealth Hackish}}, which uses `pling' for {bang} (as
in {bang path}).
:plokta: /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....
:plonk: /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.
:plugh: /ploogh/ /v./ [from the {ADVENT} game] See
{xyzzy}.
:plumbing: /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 `sort(1)', `comm(1)', and `tr(1)' with a
little plumbing." See also {tee}.
:PM: /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.
:pnambic: /p*-nam'bik/ [Acronym from the scene in the film
version of "The Wizard of Oz" in which the true nature of the
wizard is first discovered: "Pay no attention to the man behind
the curtain."] 1. A stage of development of a process or function
that, owing to incomplete implementation or to the complexity of
the system, requires human interaction to simulate or replace some
or all of the actions, inputs, or outputs of the process or
function. 2. Of or pertaining to a process or function whose
apparent operations are wholly or partially falsified.
3. Requiring {prestidigitization}.
The ultimate pnambic product was "Dan Bricklin's Demo", a program
which supported flashy user-interface design prototyping. There is
a related maxim among hackers: "Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo." See
{magic}, sense 1, for illumination of this point.
:pod: /n./ [allegedly from abbreviation POD for `Prince Of
Darkness'] A Diablo 630 (or, latterly, any letter-quality impact
printer). From the DEC-10 PODTYPE program used to feed formatted
text to it. Not to be confused with {P.O.D.}.
:point-and-drool interface: /n./ Parody of the techspeak term
`point-and-shoot 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'.
:poke: /n.,vt./ See {peek}.
:poll: /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."
:polygon pusher: /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'.
:POM: /P-O-M/ /n./ Common abbreviation for {phase of the
moon}. Usage: usually in the phrase `POM-dependent', which means
{flaky}.
:pop: /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} or {pdl}. 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.
:POPJ: /pop'J/ /n.,v./ [from a {PDP-10}
return-from-subroutine instruction] To return from a digression.
By verb doubling, "Popj, popj" means roughly "Now let's see,
where were we?" See {RTI}.
:poser: /n./ 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".
:post: /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?"
:postcardware: /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.)
:posting: /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.
:postmaster: /n./ The email contact and maintenance person at a
site connected to the Internet or UUCPNET. 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.
:PostScript:: /n./ A Page Description Language ({PDL}),
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.
:pound on: /vt./ Syn. {bang on}.
:power cycle: /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 {gronk}ed state.
Syn. {120 reset}; see also {Big Red Switch}. Compare
{Vulcan nerve pinch}, {bounce} (sense 4), and {boot}, and
see the "{AI Koans}" (in Appendix A) about Tom Knight
and the novice.
:power hit: /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).
:PPN: /P-P-N/, /pip'n/ /n. obs./ [from `Project-Programmer
Number'] A user-ID under {{TOPS-10}} and its various mutant
progeny at SAIL, BBN, CompuServe, and elsewhere. Old-time hackers
from the PDP-10 era sometimes use this to refer to user IDs on
other systems as well.
:precedence lossage: /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}.
:prepend: /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."
:prestidigitization: /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.
:pretty pictures: /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}.
:prettyprint: /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
{grind}ing (sense 1) program code, and most esp. for LISP code.
2. To format in some particularly slick and nontrivial way.
:pretzel key: /n./ [Mac users] See {feature key}.
:priesthood: /n. obs./ [TMRC] The select group of system
managers responsible for the operation and maintenance of a batch
operated 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. See {acolyte}.
:prime time: /n./ [from TV programming] Normal high-usage hours
on a timesharing system; the day shift. Avoidance of prime time
was traditionally given as a major reason for {night mode}
hacking. The rise of the personal workstation has rendered this
term, along with timesharing itself, almost obsolete. The hackish
tendency to late-night {hacking run}s has changed not a bit.
:printing discussion: /n./ [XEROX PARC] A protracted,
low-level, time-consuming, generally pointless discussion of
something only peripherally interesting to all.
:priority interrupt: /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.
:profile: /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 spot}s 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!
:progasm: /proh'gaz-m/ /n./ [University of Wisconsin] The
euphoria experienced upon the completion of a program or other
computer-related project.
:proglet: /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}.
:program: /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.
:Programmer's Cheer: "Shift to the left! Shift to the
right! Pop up, push down! Byte! Byte! Byte!" A joke so old it
has hair on it.
:programming: /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 (although clothes are not mandatory).
:programming fluid: /n./ 1. Coffee. 2. Cola. 3. Any
caffeinacious stimulant. Many hackers consider these essential for
those all-night hacking runs. See {wirewater}.
:propeller head: /n./ Used by hackers, this is syn. with
{computer 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).
:propeller key: /n./ [Mac users] See {feature key}.
:proprietary: /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.
:protocol: /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}.
:provocative maintenance: /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 *un*usable state for
an indeterminate amount of time. See also {scratch monkey}.
:prowler: /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 {GFR}, {reaper},
{skulker}.
:pseudo: /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.
:pseudoprime: /n./ A backgammon prime (six consecutive occupied
points) with one point missing. This term is an esoteric pun
derived from a mathematical method that, rather than determining
precisely whether a number is prime (has no divisors), uses a
statistical technique to decide whether the number is `probably'
prime. A number that passes this test was, before about 1985,
called a `pseudoprime' (the terminology used by number theorists
has since changed slightly; pre-1985 pseudoprimes are now
`probable primes' and `pseudoprime' has a more restricted meaning
in modular arithmetic). The hacker backgammon usage stemmed from
the idea that a pseudoprime is almost as good as a prime: it does
the job of a prime until proven otherwise, and that probably won't
happen.
:pseudosuit: /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}.
:psychedelicware: /si:`k*-del'-ik-weir/ /n./ [UK] Syn.
{display hack}. See also {smoking clover}.
:psyton: /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]
:pubic directory: /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."
:puff: /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}.
:punched card:: n.obs. [techspeak] (alt. `punch card') The
signature medium of computing's {Stone Age}, now obsolescent
outside of some IBM shops. 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}, {lace card}, {card walloper}.
:punt: /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."
:Purple Book: /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}}.
:purple wire: /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}.
:push: [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} or {pdl}. 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}, {pdl}.
= Q =
=====
:quad: /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.
:quadruple bucky: /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}.
:quantifiers:: In techspeak and jargon, the standard metric
prefixes used in the SI (Syst`eme 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 = 2^(10).
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 suffix 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" {microfloppies} 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
10^(27)
grouchi
10^(30)
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.]
:quantum bogodynamics: /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
{suit}s 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}.
:quarter: /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}.
:ques: /kwes/ 1. /n./ The question mark character (`?',
ASCII 0111111). 2. /interj./ What? Also frequently verb-doubled
as
"Ques ques?" See {wall}.
:quick-and-dirty: /adj./ 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}.
:quine: /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. 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. Some infamous {Obfuscated C Contest} entries have been
quines that reproduced in exotic ways.
:quote chapter and verse: /v./ [by analogy with the mainstream
phrase] To cite a relevant excerpt from an appropriate {bible}.
"I don't care if `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." See also {legalese},
{language lawyer}, {RTFS} (sense 2).
:quotient: /n./ See {coefficient of X}.
:quux: /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.
:qux: /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}, ....
:QWERTY: /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 foreign-language 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 {demo}s. The jamming problem was
essentially solved soon afterward by a suitable use of springs, but
the keyboard layout lives on.
= R =
=====
:rabbit job: /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}.
:rain dance: /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}.
:rainbow series: /n./ Any of several series of technical
manuals distinguished by cover color. The original rainbow series
was the NCSC security manuals (see {Orange Book}, {crayola
books}); the term has also been commonly applied to the PostScript
reference set (see {Red Book}, {Green Book}, {Blue Book},
{White Book}). Which books are meant by "`the' rainbow
series" unqualified is thus dependent on one's local technical
culture.
:random: /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}.
:random numbers:: /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 23.
23
Sacred number of Eris, Goddess of Discord (along with 17 and
5).
42
The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe,
and Everything. (Note that this answer is completely
fortuitous. `:-)')
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
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}.
:randomness: /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."
:rape: /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."
:rare mode: /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.
:raster blaster: /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'.
:raster burn: /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}.
:rat belt: /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'.
:rat dance: /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.
:rave: /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.
:rave on!: /imp./ Sarcastic invitation to continue a {rave},
often by someone who wishes the raver would get a clue but realizes
this is unlikely.
:ravs: /ravz/, also `Chinese ravs' /n./ 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 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}}.
:raw mode: /n./ A mode that allows a program to transfer bits
directly to or from an I/O device (or, under {bogus} 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.
:rc file: /R-C fi:l/ /n./ [Unix: from `runcom files' on
the {CTSS} system ca.1955, 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).
:RE: /R-E/ /n./ Common spoken and written shorthand for
{regexp}.
:read-only user: /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}.
:README file: /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. (The file may be named
README, or READ.ME, or rarely ReadMe or readme.txt or some other
variant.) 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".
:real: /adj./ Not simulated. Often used as a specific antonym
to {virtual} in any of its jargon senses.
:real estate: /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).
:real hack: /n./ A {crock}. This is sometimes used
affectionately; see {hack}.
:real operating system: /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!}
:Real Programmer: /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 {bum}med into a state of {tense}ness 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, a Real Programmer}" in Appendix A.
The term itself was popularized by a 1983 Datamation article
"Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" by Ed Post, still
circulating on Usenet and Internet in on-line form.
You can browse "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" from the
Datamation home page
http://www.datamation.com.
:Real Soon Now: /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}.
:real time: 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 classic 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."
:real user: /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}.
:Real World: /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}.
:reality check: /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}.
:reaper: /n./ A {prowler} that {GFR}s files. A file
removed in this way is said to have been `reaped'.
:rectangle slinger: /n./ See {polygon pusher}.
:recursion: /n./ See {recursion}. See also {tail
recursion}.
:recursive acronym:: /n./ A hackish (and especially MIT)
tradition is to choose acronyms/abbreviations that refer humorously
to themselves or to other acronyms/abbreviations. 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". See also {mung}, {EMACS}.
:Red Book: /n./ 1. Informal name for one of the three standard
references on {{PostScript}} ("PostScript Language Reference
Manual", Adobe Systems (Addison-Wesley, 1985; QA76.73.P67P67; ISBN
0-201-10174-2, or the 1990 second edition ISBN 0-201-18127-4); the
others are known as the {Green Book}, the {Blue Book}, and
the {White Book} (sense 2). 2. Informal name for one of the 3
standard references on Smalltalk ("Smalltalk-80: The
Interactive Programming Environment" by Adele Goldberg
(Addison-Wesley, 1984; QA76.8.S635G638; ISBN 0-201-11372-4); this
too is associated with blue and green books). 3. Any of the 1984
standards issued by the CCITT eighth plenary assembly. These
include, among other things, the X.400 email spec and the Group 1
through 4 fax standards. 4. The new version of the {Green Book}
(sense 4) -- IEEE 1003.1-1990, a.k.a ISO 9945-1 -- is (because of
the color and the fact that it is printed on A4 paper) known in the
USA as "the Ugly Red Book That Won't Fit On The Shelf" and in
Europe as "the Ugly Red Book That's A Sensible Size". 5. The NSA
"Trusted Network Interpretation" companion to the {Orange
Book}. See also {{book titles}}.
:red wire: /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}.
:regexp: /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 `grep(1)', `sed(1)', and `awk(1)'.
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 <
[email protected]>.
:register dancing: /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.
:reincarnation, cycle of: /n./ See {cycle of reincarnation}.
:reinvent the wheel: /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.
:religion of CHI: /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 worshipper 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}.
:religious issues: /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}.
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.
:replicator: /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}.
:reply: /n./ See {followup}.
:restriction: /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.
:retcon: /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."
"Darth Vader was retconned into Luke Skywalker's father in
"The Empire Strikes Back".
[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.
In lexicography, nothing is ever simple. --ESR]
:RETI: /v./ Syn. {RTI}
:retrocomputing: /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
`pnch(6)' or `bcd(6)' 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.ccil.org/retro.
:return from the dead: /v./ To regain access to the net after a
long absence. Compare {person of no account}.
:RFC: /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.
The RFCs are most remarkable for how well they work -- they 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.
:RFE: /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.
:rib site: /n./ [by analogy with {backbone site}] A machine
that has an on-demand high-speed link to a {backbone site} and
serves as a regional distribution point for lots of third-party
traffic in email and Usenet news. Compare {leaf site},
{backbone site}.
:rice box: /n./ [from ham radio slang] Any Asian-made commodity
computer, esp. an 80x86-based machine built to IBM PC-compatible
ISA or EISA-bus standards.
:Right Thing: /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 `a', or give a divide-by-0
error?" Oppose {Wrong Thing}.
:RL: // /n./ [MUD community] Real Life. "Firiss laughs in
RL" means that Firiss's player is laughing. Oppose {VR}.
:roach: /vt./ [Bell Labs] To destroy, esp. of a data
structure. Hardware gets {toast}ed or {fried}, software gets
roached.
:robot: /n./ [IRC, MUD] 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 {nick}s 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 robots are
less common on MUDs; but some others, such as the `Julia' robot
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.
:robust: /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}.
:rococo: /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}.
:rogue: /n./ [Unix] A Dungeons-and-Dragons-like game using character
graphics, written under BSD Unix and subsequently ported to other
Unix systems. The original BSD `curses(3)' screen-handling
package was hacked together by Ken Arnold to support
`rogue(6)' and has since become one of Unix's most important
and heavily used application libraries. Nethack, Omega, Larn, and
an entire subgenre of computer dungeon games all took off from the
inspiration provided by `rogue(6)'. See also {nethack}.
:room-temperature IQ: /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.
:root: /n./ [Unix] 1. 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}.
:root mode: /n./ Syn. with {wizard mode} or `wheel mode'.
Like these, it is often generalized to describe privileged states
in systems other than OSes.
:rot13: /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 {spoiler}s. 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.
:rotary debugger: /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 {pizza, ANSI standard}.
:round tape: /n./ Industry-standard 1/2-inch magnetic tape (7-
or 9-track) on traditional circular reels. See {macrotape},
oppose {square tape}.
:RSN: /R-S-N/ /adj./ See {Real Soon Now}.
:RTBM: /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".
:RTFAQ: /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.
:RTFB: /R-T-F-B/ /imp./ [Unix] Acronym 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.
:RTFM: /R-T-F-M/ /imp./ [Unix] Acronym for `Read The Fucking
Manual'. 1. Used by {guru}s 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}, {RTM}, all of which mutated
from RTFM, and compare {UTSL}.
:RTFS: /R-T-F-S/ [Unix] 1. /imp./ Acronym 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.
:RTI: /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 former Z80 hackers
(almost nobody programs these things in assembler anymore).
Equivalent to "Now, where was I?" or used to end a
conversational digression. See {pop}; see also {POPJ}.
:RTM: /R-T-M/ [Usenet: abbreviation for `Read The Manual']
1. Politer variant of {RTFM}. 2. Robert T. Morris,
perpetrator of the great Internet worm of 1988 (see {Great Worm,
the}); 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}.
:RTS: /R-T-S/ /imp./ Acronym 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.
:rude: [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. Compare
{all-elbows}.
:runes: /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.
:runic: /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 Syst`eme' (French
idiom, "Hugely Bad System").
:rusty iron: /n./ Syn. {tired iron}. It has been claimed
that this is the inevitable fate of {water MIPS}.
:rusty memory: /n./ Mass-storage that uses iron-oxide-based
magnetic media (esp. tape and the pre-Winchester removable disk
packs used in {washing machine}s). Compare {donuts}.
:rusty wire: /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?".
= S =
=====
:S/N ratio: // /n./ (also `s/n ratio', `s:n ratio').
Syn. {signal-to-noise ratio}. Often abbreviated `SNR'.
:sacred: /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.
:saga: /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; see {gabriel}).
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 11 P.M., which is 2 A.M 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: it appears that the {meme} about ginger vs.
rotting meat may be 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. --ESR]
:sagan: /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."
:SAIL:: /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.
:salescritter: /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}.
:salt: /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 crypt(3) man page mentions that "the salt
string is used to perturb the DES algorithm in one of 4096
different ways."
:salt mines: /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}.
:salt substrate: /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.
:same-day service: /n./ Ironic term used to describe long
response time, particularly with respect to {{MS-DOS}} 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}. See also
{PC-ism}.
:samizdat: /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.
:samurai: /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}.
:sandbender: /n./ [IBM] A person involved with silicon lithography and
the physical design of chips. Compare {ironmonger}, {polygon
pusher}.
:sandbox: /n./ 1. (also `sandbox, the') 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}.
:sanity check: /n./ 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).
:Saturday-night special: /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.
:say: /vt./ 1. To type to a terminal. "To list a directory
verbosely, you have to say `ls -l'." Tends to imply a
{newline}-terminated command (a `sentence'). 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
{mundane}s.
:scag: /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}.
:scanno: /skan'oh/ /n./ An error in a document caused by a
scanner glitch, analogous to a typo or {thinko}.
:schroedinbug: /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}.
:science-fiction fandom:: /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.
:scram switch: /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}.)
:scratch: 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 {scribble}d 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] /vt./ To delete (as in a file).
:scratch monkey: /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 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 {droid}s 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 {PM}ed 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]
:scream and die: /v./ Syn. {cough and die}, but connotes
that an error message was printed or displayed before the program
crashed.
:screaming tty: /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.
:screw: /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.
:screwage: /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.
:scribble: /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.
:scrog: /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}.
:scrool: /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.
:scrozzle: /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!"
:scruffies: /n./ See {neats vs. scruffies}.
:SCSI: /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.
:ScumOS: /skuhm'os/ or /skuhm'O-S/ /n./ Unflattering
hackerism for SunOS, the BSD Unix variant supported on Sun
Microsystems's Unix workstations (see also {sun-stools}), and
compare {AIDX}, {Macintrash}, {Nominal Semidestructor},
{Open DeathTrap}, {HP-SUX}. Despite what this term might
suggest, Sun was founded by hackers and still enjoys excellent
relations with hackerdom; usage is more often in exasperation than
outright loathing.
:search-and-destroy mode: /n./ Hackerism for a noninteractive
search-and-replace facility in an editor, so called because an
incautiously chosen match pattern can cause {infinite} damage.
:second-system effect: /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....
:secondary damage: /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 {grovel}ling 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.
:security through obscurity: (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, the}), 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 in 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
({altmode} altmode 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.
:SED: /S-E-D/ /n./ [TMRC, from `Light-Emitting Diode']
Smoke-emitting diode. A {friode} that lost the war. See also
{LER}.
:segfault: /n.,vi./ Syn. {segment}, {segmentation fault}.
:seggie: /seg'ee/ /n./ [Unix] Shorthand for
{segmentation fault} reported from Britain.
:segment: /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.
:segmentation fault: /n./ [Unix] 1. An error in which a running
program attempts to access memory not allocated to it and {core
dump}s with a segmentation violation error. 2. To lose a train of
thought or a line of reasoning. Also uttered as an exclamation at
the point of befuddlement.
:segv: /seg'vee/ /n.,vi./ Yet another synonym for
{segmentation fault} (actually, in this case, `segmentation
violation').
:self-reference: /n./ See {self-reference}.
:selvage: /sel'v*j/ /n./ [from sewing and weaving] See
{chad} (sense 1).
:semi: /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}.
:semi-infinite: /n./ See {infinite}.
:senior bit: /n./ [IBM] Syn. {meta bit}.
:server: /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 server 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.
:SEX: /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.
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 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.
:sex changer: /n./ Syn. {gender mender}.
:shambolic link: /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....
:shar file: /shar' fi:l/ /n./ Syn. {sharchive}.
:sharchive: /shar'ki:v/ /n./ [Unix and Usenet; from /bin/sh
archive] A {flatten}ed 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. (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.)
Sharchives are also commonly referred to as `shar files' after the
name of the most common program for generating them.
:Share and enjoy!: /imp./ 1. Commonly found at the end of
software release announcements and {README file}s, this phrase
indicates allegiance to the hacker ethic of free information
sharing (see {hacker ethic}, sense 1). 2. The motto of the
Sirius Cybernetics Corporation (the ultimate gaggle of incompetent
{suit}s) in Douglas Adams's "Hitch Hiker's Guide to the
Galaxy". The irony of using this as a cultural recognition signal
appeals to freeware hackers.
:shareware: /sheir'weir/ /n./ A kind of {freeware} (sense
1) 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}.
:shelfware: /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.
:shell: [orig. {{Multics}} /n./ 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 {incantation}s 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.
:shell out: /n./ [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."
:shift left (or right) logical: [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 that (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}.
:shim: /n./ 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}.
:shitogram: /shit'oh-gram/ /n./ A *really* nasty piece
of email. Compare {nastygram}, {flame}.
:short card: /n./ A half-length IBM XT expansion card or
adapter that will fit in one of the two short slots located towards
the right rear of a standard chassis (tucked behind the floppy disk
drives). See also {tall card}.
:shotgun debugging: /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.
:shovelware: /shuh'v*l-weir`/ /n./ 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.
:showstopper: /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*.
:shriek: /n./ See {excl}. Occasional CMU usage, also in
common use among APL fans and mathematicians, especially category
theorists.
:Shub-Internet: /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 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 system slows down. 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.
[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
{ping}ing shub-internet.ims.disa.mil. See also
{kremvax}. -- ESR]
:sidecar: /n./ 1. Syn. {slap on the side}. Esp. used of
add-ons for the late and unlamented IBM PCjr. 2. The IBM PC
compatibility box that could be bolted onto the side of an Amiga.
Designed and produced by Commodore, it broke all of the company's
own design rules. If it worked with any other peripherals, it was
by {magic}. 3. More generally, any of various devices designed
to be connected to the expansion slot on the left side of the Amiga
500 (and later, 600 & 1200), which included a hard drive
controller, a hard drive, and additional memory.
:SIG: /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).
:sig block: /sig blok/ /n./ [Unix; 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 or one's choice of witty sayings (see {sig quote},
{fool file, the}); 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}.
:sig quote: /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."
:sig virus: /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.
:signal-to-noise ratio: [from analog electronics] /n./ 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 war}s. Compare {bandwidth}. See also {coefficient
of X}, {lost in the noise}.
:silicon: /n./ Hardware, esp. ICs or microprocessor-based
computer systems (compare {iron}). Contrasted with software.
See also {sandbender}.
:silly walk: /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}.
:silo: /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.
:Silver Book: /n./ Jensen and Wirth's infamous "Pascal
User Manual and Report", so called because of the silver cover of
the widely distributed Springer-Verlag second edition of 1978 (ISBN
0-387-90144-2). See {{book titles}}, {Pascal}.
:since time T equals minus infinity: /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}.
:sitename: /si:t'naym/ /n./ [Unix/Internet] The unique
electronic name of a computer system, used to identify it in UUCP
mail, 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}.
:skrog: /v./ Syn. {scrog}.
:skulker: /n./ Syn. {prowler}.
:slab: [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.
:slack: /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}.
:slap on the side: /n./ (also called a {sidecar}, or
abbreviated `SOTS'.) A type of external expansion hardware
marketed by computer manufacturers (e.g., Commodore for the Amiga
500/1000 series and IBM for the hideous failure called `PCjr').
Various SOTS boxes provided necessities such as memory, hard drive
controllers, and conventional expansion slots.
:slash: /n./ Common name for the slant (`/', ASCII 0101111)
character. See {ASCII} for other synonyms.
:sleep: /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."
:slim: /n./ A small, derivative change (e.g., to code).
:slop: /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.
:slopsucker: /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}.
:slurp: /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}.
:smart: /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}).
:smart terminal: /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 smart*ass* 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}.
:smash case: /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}.
:smash the stack: /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}.
:smiley: /n./ See {emoticon}.
:smoke: /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}.
:smoke and mirrors: /n./ Marketing deceptions. The term is
mainstream in this general sense. Among hackers it's strongly
associated with bogus demos and crocked {benchmark}s (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}.
:smoke test: /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.
:smoking clover: /n./ [ITS] A {display hack} originally due
to Bill Gosper. Many convergent lines are drawn on a color monitor
in {AOS} mode (so 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.
:SMOP: /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 an 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.
:smurf: /smerf/ /n./ [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}.
:SNAFU principle: /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 {suit}s
protect themselves by saying "I was misinformed!", and the
implementors are demoted or fired.
:snail: /vt./ To {snail-mail} something. "Snail me a copy
of those graphics, will you?"
:snail-mail: /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}.
:snap: /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.
:snarf: /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 -- {FTP}ing
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 fluid}s 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]
:snarf & barf: /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.
:snarf down: /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."
:snark: /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. See {snivitz}. 3. UUCP name of
snark.thyrsus.com, home site of the Jargon File versions from
2.*.* on (i.e., this lexicon).
:sneaker: /n./ An individual hired to break into places in
order to test their security; analogous to {tiger team}.
Compare {samurai}.
:sneakernet: /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'.
:sniff: /v.,n./ Synonym for {poll}.
:snivitz: /sniv'itz/ /n./ A hiccup in hardware or software; a
small, transient problem of unknown origin (less serious than a
{snark}). Compare {glitch}.
:SO: /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).
:social engineering: /n./ Term used among {cracker}s 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.
:social science number: /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}.
:sodium substrate: /n./ Syn {salt substrate}.
:soft boot: /n./ See {boot}.
:softcopy: /soft'kop-ee/ /n./ [by analogy with `hardcopy']
A machine-readable form of corresponding hardcopy. See {bits},
{machinable}.
:software bloat: /n./ The results of {second-system effect}
or {creeping featuritis}. Commonly cited examples include
`ls(1)', {X}, {BSD}, {Missed'em-five}, and {OS/2}.
:software hoarding: /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}.
:software laser: /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 message}s 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.
:software rot: /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.
For example, owing to endemic shortsightedness in the design of
COBOL programs, most will succumb to software rot when their
2-digit year counters {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}.
:softwarily: /soft-weir'i-lee/ /adv./ In a way pertaining to
software. "The system is softwarily unreliable." The adjective
**`softwary' is *not* used. See {hardwarily}.
:softy: /n./ [IBM] Hardware hackers' term for a software expert who
is largely ignorant of the mysteries of hardware.
:some random X: /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}.
:sorcerer's apprentice mode: /n./ [from Goethe's "Der
Zauberlehrling" via Paul Dukas's "L'apprenti sorcier" 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}.
:SOS: /S-O-S/ /n. obs./ 1. An infamously {losing} text
editor. Once, back in the 1960s, when a text editor was needed for
the PDP-6, a hacker crufted together a {quick-and-dirty}
`stopgap editor' to be used until a better one was written.
Unfortunately, the old one was never really discarded when new ones
(in particular, {TECO}) came along. SOS is a descendant (`Son
of Stopgap') of that editor, and many PDP-10 users gained the
dubious pleasure of its acquaintance. Since then other programs
similar in style to SOS have been written, notably the early font
editor BILOS /bye'lohs/, the Brother-In-Law Of Stopgap (the
alternate expansion `Bastard Issue, Loins of Stopgap' has been
proposed). 2. /sos/ /vt./ To decrease; inverse of {AOS}, from
the PDP-10 instruction set.
:source of all good bits: /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.
:space-cadet keyboard: /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 like
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
lowercase lambda
front-shift-L
uppercase lambda
top-L
two-way arrow (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. 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}.
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.
:spaceship operator: /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.
:SPACEWAR: /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 1960--61. SPACEWAR aficionados
formed the core of the early hacker culture at MIT. Nine years
later, 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 {feep}ing in video arcades everywhere.
:spaghetti code: /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.
:spaghetti inheritance: /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}.
:spam: /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-post}ing
(e.g. any message which is crossposted to alt.rush-limbaugh
and alt.politics.homosexuality will almost inevitably spam
both groups). 3. To send many identical or nearly-identical
messages separately to a large number of Usenet newsgroups. This
is one sure way to infuriate nearly everyone on the Net.
The second and third definitions have become much more prevalent as
the Internet has opened up to non-techies, and to many Usenetters
sense 3 is now (1995) primary. In this sense the term has
apparantly begun to go mainstream, though without its original
sense or folkloric freight -- there is apparently a widespread
belief among {luser}s that "spamming" is what happens when you
dump cans of Spam into a revolving fan.
:special-case: /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 flag}s in the input of a batch program or
{filter}.
:speedometer: /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.
:spell: /n./ Syn. {incantation}.
:spelling flame: /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.
:spiffy: /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.
:spike: /v./ 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}).
:spin: /vi./ Equivalent to {buzz}. More common among C and
Unix programmers.
:spl: /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}.
:splash screen: /n./ [Mac users] Syn. {banner}, sense 3.
:splat: /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. [Rochester Institute of
Technology] The {feature key} on a Mac (same as {alt}, sense
2). 4. obs. Name used by some people for the Stanford/ITS extended
ASCII
circle-x
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
circle-plus
character. See also {{ASCII}}.
:spod: /n./ [UK] A lower form of life found on {talker
system}s and {MUD}s. 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}.
:spoiler: /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}, or some combination of these techniques.
:sponge: /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}.
:spool: /vi./ [from early IBM `Simultaneous Peripheral
Operation On-Line', but this acronym is widely thought to have been
contrived for effect] 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}.
:spool file: /n./ Any file to which data is {spool}ed 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.
:square tape: /n./ Mainframe magnetic tape cartridges for use
with IBM 3480 or compatible tape drives; or QIC tapes used on
workstations and micros. The term comes from the square (actually
rectangular) shape of the cartridges; contrast {round tape}.
:squirrelcide: /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.
:stack: /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}.
At MIT, {pdl} used to be a more common synonym for {stack} in
all these contexts, and this may still be true. Everywhere else
{stack} seems to be the preferred term. {Knuth}
("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!
:stack puke: /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.
:stale pointer bug: /n./ Synonym for {aliasing bug} used
esp. among microcomputer hackers.
:star out: /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 the 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}.
:state: /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).
:stealth manager: /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}.
:steam-powered: /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.
:stiffy: /n./ [University of Lowell, Massachusetts.] 3.5-inch
{microfloppies}, so called because their jackets are more rigid
than those of the 5.25-inch and the (now totally obsolete) 8-inch
floppy. Elsewhere this might be called a `firmy'.
:stir-fried random: /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}.
:stomp on: /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}.
:Stone Age: /n.,adj./ 1. In computer folklore, an ill-defined
period from ENIAC (ca. 1943) to the mid-1950s; the great age of
electromechanical {dinosaur}s. 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}. 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).
:stone knives and bearskins: /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}.
:stoppage: /sto'p*j/ /n./ Extreme {lossage} that renders
something (usually something vital) completely unusable. "The
recent system stoppage was caused by a {fried}
transformer."
:store: /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 {swap}ped in.
:strided: /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.
:stroke: /n./ Common name for the slant (`/', ASCII 0101111)
character. See {ASCII} for other synonyms.
:strudel: /n./ Common (spoken) name for the at-sign (`@',
ASCII 1000000) character. See {ASCII} for other synonyms.
:stubroutine: /stuhb'roo-teen/ /n./ [contraction of `stub
subroutine'] Tiny, often vacuous placeholder for a subroutine that
is to be written or fleshed out later.
:studly: /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."
:studlycaps: /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.
:stunning: /adj./ Mind-bogglingly stupid. Usually used in
sarcasm. "You want to code *what* in ADA? That's a ...
stunning idea!"
:stupid-sort: /n./ Syn. {bogo-sort}.
:Stupids: /n./ Term used by {samurai} for the {suit}s 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.
:Sturgeon's Law: /prov./ "Ninety percent of everything is
crap". 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." Oddly, when Sturgeon's
Law 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.
:sucking mud: [Applied Data Research] /adj./ (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?"
:sufficiently small: /adj./ Syn. {suitably small}.
:suit: /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
{loser}, {burble}, {management}, {Stupids}, {SNAFU
principle}, and {brain-damaged}. English, by the way, is
relatively kind; our Moscow correspondent informs us that the
corresponding idiom in Russian hacker jargon is `sovok', lit. a
tool for grabbing garbage.
:suitable win: /n./ See {win}.
:suitably small: /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'."
Compare the characterization of pi under {{random
numbers}}.
:sun lounge: /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.
:sun-stools: /n./ Unflattering hackerism for SunTools, a pre-X
windowing environment notorious in its day for size, slowness, and
misfeatures. {X}, however, is larger and slower; see
{second-system effect}.
:sunspots: /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}.
:super source quench: /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}.
:superloser: /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}.
:superprogrammer: /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}.
:superuser: /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}.
:support: /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
t^ete-`a-t^ete with the software's designer.
:surf: /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.
:Suzie COBOL: /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}.
:swab: /swob/ [From the mnemonic for the PDP-11 `SWAp Byte'
instruction, as immortalized in the `dd(1)' 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}.
:swap: /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}.
:swap space: /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."
:swapped in: /n./ See {swap}. See also {page in}.
:swapped out: /n./ See {swap}. See also {page out}.
:swizzle: /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}.
:sync: /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).
:syntactic salt: /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}.
:syntactic sugar: /n./ [coined by Peter Landin] Features added
to a language or other formalism to make it `sweeter' for
humans, features 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}.
:sys-frog: /sis'frog/ /n./ [the PLATO system] Playful variant
of `sysprog', which is in turn short for `systems programmer'.
:sysadmin: /sis'ad-min/ /n./ Common contraction of `system
admin'; see {admin}.
:sysape: /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}).
:sysop: /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 {echo}, thus sending it to
hundreds of sysops around the world.
:system: /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')
:systems jock: /n./ See {jock}, sense 2.
:system mangler: /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.
:SysVile: /sis-vi:l'/ /n./ See {Missed'em-five}.
= T =
=====
:T: /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})
:tail recursion: /n./ If you aren't sick of it already, see
{tail recursion}.
:talk mode: /n./ A feature supported by Unix, ITS, 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.
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 ..." (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})
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...')
T
yes (see the main entry for {T})
TNX
thanks
TNX 1.0E6
thanks a million (humorous)
TNXE6
another form of "thanks a million"
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.
<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'.
Most of the above sub-jargon is used at both Stanford and MIT.
Several of these expressions are also common in {email}, esp.
FYI, FYA, BTW, BCNU, WTF, and CUL. A few other abbreviations have
been reported from commercial networks, such as GEnie and
CompuServe, where on-line `live' chat including more than two
people is common and usually involves a more `social' context,
notably the following:
<g>
grin
<gr&d>
grinning, running, and ducking
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 {B1FF}isms (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.
See also {hakspek}, {emoticon}.
:talker system: /n./ British hackerism for software that
enables real-time chat or {talk mode}.
:tall card: /n./ A PC/AT-size expansion card (these can be
larger than IBM PC or XT cards because the AT case is bigger). See
also {short card}. When IBM introduced the PS/2 model 30 (its
last gasp at supporting the ISA) they made the case lower and many
industry-standard tall cards wouldn't fit; this was felt to be a
reincarnation of the {connector conspiracy}, done with less
style.
:tanked: /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.
:TANSTAAFL: /tan'stah-fl/ [acronym, from Robert Heinlein's
classic "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 free 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 {A Portrait of J. Random
Hacker} in Appendix B).
:tar and feather: /vi./ [from Unix `tar(1)'] To create a
transportable archive from a group of files by first sticking them
together with `tar(1)' (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.
:taste: [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}.
:tayste: /tayst/ /n./ Two bits; also as {taste}.
Syn. {crumb}, {quarter}. See {nybble}.
:TCB: /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}.
:TCP/IP: /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]
Sometimes expanded as "The Crap Phil Is Pushing". The reference
is to Phil Karn, KA9Q, and the context is an ongoing
technical/political war between the majority of sites still running
AX.25 and a growing minority of TCP/IP relays.
:tea, ISO standard cup of: /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.
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.
:TechRef: /tek'ref/ /n./ [MS-DOS] The original "IBM PC
Technical Reference Manual", including the BIOS listing and
complete schematics for the PC. The only PC documentation in the
original-issue package that was considered serious by real
hackers.
:TECO: /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}.
:tee: /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 `tee(1)',
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'.
:teledildonics: /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 {MUD}s 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}.
:Telerat: /tel'*-rat/ /n. obs./ Unflattering hackerism for
`Teleray', a now-extinct line of extremely losing terminals.
Compare {AIDX}, {Macintrash} {Nominal Semidestructor},
{Open DeathTrap}, {ScumOS}, {sun-stools}, {HP-SUX}.
:TELNET: /tel'net/ /vt./ (also commonly lowercased as
`telnet') To communicate with another Internet host using the
TELNET ({RFC} 854) protocol (usually using a program of the same
name). TOPS-10 people used the word IMPCOM, since that was the
program name for them. Sometimes abbreviated to TN /T-N/. "I
usually TN over to SAIL just to read the AP News."
:ten-finger interface: /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.
:tense: /adj./ Of programs, very clever and efficient. A tense
piece of code often got that way because it was highly {bum}med,
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.
:tentacle: /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.
:tenured graduate student: /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.
:tera-: /te'r*/ /pref./ [SI] See {{quantifiers}}.
:teraflop club: /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}.
:terminak: /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 {AIDX}, {Nominal
Semidestructor}, {Open DeathTrap}, {ScumOS}, {sun-stools},
{Telerat}, {HP-SUX}.
:terminal brain death: /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.
:terminal illness: /n./ 1. Syn. {raster burn}. 2. The
`burn-in' condition your CRT tends to get if you don't have a
screen saver.
:terminal junkie: /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}.
:terpri: /ter'pree/ /vi./ [from LISP 1.5 (and later,
MacLISP)] To output a {newline}. Now rare as jargon, though
still used as techspeak in Common LISP. It is a contraction of
`TERminate PRInt line', named for the fact that, on some early OSes
and hardware, no characters would be printed until a complete line
was formed, so this operation terminated the line and emitted the
output.
:test: /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}.
:TeX:: /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 2002.
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 {toolsmith}ing 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 used to offer monetary awards to
people who found and reported bugs in it; 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.
:text: /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.
:thanks in advance: [Usenet] Conventional net.politeness
ending a posted request for information or assistance. Sometimes
written `advTHANKSance' or `aTdHvAaNnKcSe' or abbreviated `TIA'.
See {net.-}, {netiquette}.
:That's not a bug, that's a feature!: 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}.
:the X that can be Y is not the true X: 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}.
:theology: /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.
:theory: /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...."
:thinko: /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}.
:This can't happen: Less clipped variant of {can't
happen}.
:This time, for sure!: /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}}.
:thrash: /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}.
:thread: /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.
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!
:three-finger salute: /n./ Syn. {Vulcan nerve pinch}.
:thud: /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.
:thumb: /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.
:thunk: /thuhnk/ /n./ 1. "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. People and activities 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".
:tick: /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 {handwave}d. 3. In the FORTH
language, a single quote character.
:tick-list features: /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.
:tickle a bug: /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."
:tiger team: /n./ [U.S. military jargon] 1. Originally, a team
(of {sneaker}s) 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 {cracker}s, 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.
:time bomb: /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.
:time sink: /n./ [poss. by analogy with `heat sink' or
`current sink'] A project that consumes unbounded amounts of
time.
:time T: /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}.
:times-or-divided-by: /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.
:Tinkerbell program: /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.
:tip of the ice-cube: /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.
:tired iron: /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}.
:tits on a keyboard: /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 the Mac, perverse as usual, has them on the `D' and
`K' keys).
:TLA: /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 term
`SFLA' (Stupid Four-Letter Acronym) has 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.)
:TMRC: /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 thirty years since; all the features
described here are still present). The control system alone
featured about 1200 relays. There were {scram switch}es 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 Power and Signals group included most 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.
:TMRCie: /tmerk'ee/, /n./ [MIT] A denizen of {TMRC}.
:to a first approximation: /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).
:to a zeroth approximation: [from `to a first
approximation'] A *really* sloppy approximation; a wild
guess. Compare {social science number}.
:toad: /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}.
:toast: 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." 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}.
:toaster: /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. the Classic Mac. 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."
:toeprint: /n./ A {footprint} of especially small size.
:toggle: /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.)
:tool: 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}. 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".)
:toolsmith: /n./ The software equivalent of a tool-and-die
specialist; one who specializes in making the {tool}s 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".
:topic drift: /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. 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!"
:topic group: /n./ Syn. {forum}.
:TOPS-10:: /tops-ten/ /n./ DEC's proprietary OS for the
fabled {PDP-10} machines, long a favorite of hackers but now
effectively 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.
:TOPS-20:: /tops-twen'tee/ /n./ See {{TWENEX}}.
:tourist: /n./ [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}. Hackers often spell this {turist}, perhaps by
some sort of tenuous analogy with {luser} (this also expresses
the ITS culture's penchant for six-letterisms). Compare
{twink}, {read-only user}.
:tourist information: /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 `dir' display is
tourist information; so (most of the time) is the TIME information
in a Unix `ps(1)' display.
:touristic: /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'.
:toy: /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
{computron}s 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!}.
:toy language: /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 Thing}s 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}.
:toy problem: /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}.
:toy program: /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}.
:trampoline: /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. 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}.
:trap: 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).
:trap door: /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 Thing}s with important
applications in cryptography, specifically in the construction of
public-key cryptosystems.
:trash: /vt./ To destroy the contents of (said of a data
structure). The most common of the family of near-synonyms
including {mung}, {mangle}, and {scribble}.
:trawl: /v./ To sift through large volumes of data (e.g.,
Usenet postings, FTP archives, or the Jargon File) looking for
something of interest.
:tree-killer: /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 {suit}s are
tree-killers. The negative loading of this term may reflect 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}).
:treeware: /tree'weir/ /n./ Printouts, books, and other
information media made from pulped dead trees. Compare
{tree-killer}, see {documentation}.
:trit: /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,
log2(3)
bits).
:trivial: /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".
:troff:: /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 Multics' 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.
:troglodyte: /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.
:troglodyte mode: /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}.
:Trojan horse: /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}.
:troll: /v.,n./ [From the Usenet group
alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on {Usenet}
designed to attract predictable responses or {flame}s. Derives
from the phrase "trolling for {newbie}s" 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.
Some people claim that the troll is properly a narrower category
than {flame bait}, that a troll is categorized by containing
some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial.
:tron: /v./ [NRL, CMU; prob. fr. the movie "Tron"] To
become inaccessible except via email or `talk(1)', 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}.
:true-hacker: /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}.
:tty: /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.
:tube: 1. /n./ A CRT terminal. Never used in the mainstream
sense of TV; real hackers don't watch TV, except for Loony Toons,
Rocky & Bullwinkle, Trek Classic, the Simpsons, and the occasional
cheesy old swashbuckler movie. 2. [IBM] To send a copy of
something to someone else's terminal. "Tube me that
note?"
:tube time: /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."
:tunafish: /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 `tunefs(8)' in the original {BSD} 4.2
distribution. The joke was removed in later releases once
commercial sites started using 4.2. 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 {droid}s. 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]
:tune: /vt./ [from automotive or musical usage] To optimize a
program or system for a particular environment, esp. by adjusting
numerical parameters designed as {hook}s 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
{bum}, {hot spot}, {hand-hacking}.
:turbo nerd: /n./ See {computer geek}.
:Turing tar-pit: /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".
:turist: /too'rist/ /n./ Var. sp. of {tourist}, q.v. Also
in adjectival form, `turistic'. Poss. influenced by {luser}
and `Turing'.
:tweak: /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} or {bum} a program; preferred usage in the U.K.
:tweeter: /n./ [University of Waterloo] Syn. {perf},
{chad} (sense 1). This term (like {woofer}) has been in use
at Waterloo since 1972 but is elsewhere unknown. In audio jargon,
the word refers to the treble speaker(s) on a hi-fi.
:TWENEX:: /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.
:twiddle: /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 knob 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}).
:twilight zone: /n./ [IRC] Notionally, the area of
cyberspace where {IRC} operators live. An {op} is said to
have a "connection to the twilight zone".
:twink: /twink/ /n./ [UCSC] Equivalent to {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').
:twirling baton: /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.
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.
:two pi: /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..."
:two-to-the-N: /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.
:twonkie: /twon'kee/ /n./ The software equivalent of a
Twinkie (a variety of sugar-loaded junk food, or (in gay slang with
a small t) the male equivalent of `chick'); a useless
`feature' added to look sexy and placate a {marketroid}
(compare {Saturday-night special}). The term may also be
related to "The Twonky", title menace of a classic SF short
story by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore), first
published in the September 1942 "Astounding Science Fiction"
and subsequently much anthologized.
= U =
=====
:u-: /pref./ Written shorthand for {micro-}; techspeak when
applied to metric units, jargon when used otherwise. Derived from
the Greek letter "mu", the first letter of "micro" (and which
letter looks a lot like the English letter "u").
:UBD: /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};
oppose {PBD}; see also {brain-damaged}.
:UN*X: /n./ Used to refer to the Unix operating system (a
trademark of AT&T) in writing, but avoiding the need for the ugly
{(TM)} typography.
Also used to refer to any or all varieties of Unixoid operating
systems. Ironically, lawyers now say that the requirement for the
TM-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}.
:undefined external reference: /excl./ [Unix] A message from
Unix's linker. Used in speech to flag loose ends or dangling
references in an argument or discussion.
:under the hood: /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!"
:undocumented feature: /n./ See {feature}.
:uninteresting: /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}.
:Unix:: /yoo'niks/ /n./ [In the authors' words, "A weak pun
on Multics"; very early on it was `UNICS'] (also `UNIX') An
interactive time-sharing 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. Many people consider this 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}, {USG Unix}, {Linux}.
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.
:Unix brain damage: /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.
:Unix conspiracy: /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. --ESR]
:Unix weenie: /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}.
:unixism: /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 {unixism}s include: gratuitous use of
`fork(2)'; the assumption that certain undocumented but
well-known features of Unix libraries such as `stdio(3)' are
supported elsewhere; reliance on {obscure} side-effects of
system calls (use of `sleep(2)' 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 `free()'ing memory. Compare {vaxocentrism}; see also
{New Jersey}.
:unswizzle: /v./ See {swizzle}.
:unwind the stack: /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 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."
:unwind-protect: /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."
:up: /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.
:upload: /uhp'lohd/ /v./ 1. [techspeak] To transfer programs
or data over a digital communications link from a smaller or
peripheral `client' system to a larger or central `host' one.
A transfer in the other direction is, of course, called a
{download} (but see the note about ground-to-space comm under
that entry). 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.
:upthread: /adv./ Earlier in the discussion (see {thread}),
i.e., `above'. "As Joe pointed out upthread, ..." See
also {followup}.
:urchin: /n./ See {munchkin}.
:URL: /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).
:Usenet: /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 early 1996,
it hosts over 10,000 {newsgroup}s and an average of over 500
megabytes (the equivalent of several thousand paper pages) of new
technical articles, news, discussion, chatter, and {flamage}
every day.
By the year the Internet hit the mainstream (1994) the original
UUCP transport for Usenet was fading out of use (see {UUCPNET})
-- 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.
:user: /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 {luser}s. 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.
:user-friendly: /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}.
:user-obsequious: /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}.
:USG Unix: /U-S-G yoo'niks/ /n./ Refers to AT&T Unix
commercial versions after {Version 7}, especially System III and
System V releases 1, 2, and 3. So called because during most of
the lifespan of those versions AT&T's support crew was called the
`Unix Support Group'. See {BSD}, {{Unix}}.
:UTSL: // /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
{wizard}s 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.
:UUCPNET: /n. obs./ The store-and-forward network consisting of all
the world's connected Unix machines (and others running some clone
of the UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) software). Any machine reachable
only via a {bang path} is on UUCPNET. This term has been
rendered obsolescent by the spread of cheap Internet connections in
the 1990s; the few remaining UUCP links are essentially slow
channels to the Internet rather than an autonomous network. See
{network address}.
= V =
=====
:V7: /V'sev'en/ /n./ See {Version 7}.
:vadding: /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!
See also {hobbit} (sense 2).
:vanilla: /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.
:vannevar: /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.
:vaporware: /vay'pr-weir/ /n./ Products announced far in
advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place).
See also {brochureware}.
:var: /veir/ or /var/ /n./ Short for `variable'.
Compare {arg}, {param}.
:VAX: /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 micro}s 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}). Esp.
noted for its large, assembler-programmer-friendly instruction set
-- an asset that became a liability after the RISC revolution.
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.
:VAXectomy: /vak-sek't*-mee/ /n./ [by analogy with
`vasectomy'] A VAX removal. DEC's Microvaxen, especially, are
much slower than newer RISC-based workstations such as the SPARC.
Thus, if one knows one has a replacement coming, VAX removal can be
cause for celebration.
:VAXen: /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}.
:vaxherd: /vaks'herd/ /n. obs./ [from `oxherd'] A VAX
operator. The image is reinforced because VAXen actually did tend
to come in herds, technically known as `clusters'.
:vaxism: /vak'sizm/ /n./ A piece of code that exhibits
{vaxocentrism} in critical areas. Compare {PC-ism},
{unixism}.
:vaxocentrism: /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:
1. 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.
2. The assumption that characters are signed.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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).
9. The assumption that objects can be arbitrarily large with no
special considerations. Problem: this fails on segmented
architectures and under non-virtual-addressing environments.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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.
:vdiff: /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}.
:veeblefester: /vee'b*l-fes`tr/ /n./ [from the "Born
Loser" comix via Commodore; prob. originally from "Mad"
Magazine's `Veeblefeetzer' parodies ca. 1960] Any obnoxious person
engaged in the (alleged) professions of marketing or management.
Antonym of {hacker}. Compare {suit}, {marketroid}.
:ventilator card: /n./ Syn. {lace card}.
:Venus flytrap: /n./ [after the insect-eating plant] See
{firewall machine}.
:verbage: /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'.
:verbiage: /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.
:Version 7: alt. V7 /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}, {USG Unix},
{{Unix}}. Some old-timers impatient with commercialization and
kernel bloat still maintain that V7 was the Last True Unix.
:vgrep: /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}.
:vi: /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 provides no indication of which mode the editor is in (one
correspondent accordingly reports that he has often heard the
editor's name pronounced /vi:l/). Nevertheless it 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}.
:videotex: /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}.
:virgin: /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.
:virtual: /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}.
:virtual Friday: /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.
:virtual reality: /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}.
:virtual shredder: /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.
:virus: /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 horse}s. 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 hack}s). Many nasty viruses, written by
particularly perversely minded {cracker}s, do irreversible
damage, like nuking all the user's files.
In the 1990s, viruses have become a serious problem, especially
among IBM PC and Macintosh users (the lack of security on these
machines enables viruses to spread easily, even infecting the
operating system). 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
{luser}s 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}.
:visionary: /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.
:VMS: /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}.
:voice: /vt./ To phone someone, as opposed to emailing them or
connecting in {talk mode}. "I'm busy now; I'll voice you
later."
:voice-net: /n./ Hackish way of referring to the telephone
system, analogizing it to a digital network. Usenet {sig
block}s 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}.
:voodoo programming: /n./ [from George Bush's "voodoo
economics"] 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}.
:VR: // [MUD] /n./ On-line abbrev for {virtual reality},
as opposed to {RL}.
:Vulcan nerve pinch: /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 many micros this is Ctrl-Alt-Del; on Suns,
L1-A; on some Macintoshes, it is <Cmd>-<Power switch>! Also called
{three-finger salute}. Compare {quadruple bucky}.
:vulture capitalist: /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.
= W =
=====
:wabbit: /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}.
:WAITS:: /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 notable WAITS feature seldom duplicated elsewhere 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.
:waldo: /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}.
:walk: /n.,vt./ Traversal of a data structure, especially an
array or linked-list data structure in {core}. See also
{codewalker}, {silly walk}, {clobber}.
:walk off the end of: /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}.
:walking drives: /n./ An occasional failure mode of
magnetic-disk drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky
{washing machine}s. 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.
:wall: /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 wall(8) 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.
:wall follower: /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}.
:wall time: /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 {tick}s 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).
:wallpaper: /n./ 1. A file containing a listing (e.g., assembly
listing) or a transcript, esp. a file containing a transcript of
all or part of a login session. (The idea was that the paper for
such listings was essentially good only for wallpaper, as evidenced
at Stanford, where it was used to cover windows.) Now rare, esp.
since other systems have developed other terms for it (e.g., PHOTO
on TWENEX). However, the Unix world doesn't have an equivalent
term, so perhaps {wallpaper} will take hold there. The term
probably originated on ITS, where the commands to begin and end
transcript files were `:WALBEG' and `:WALEND', with
default file `WALL PAPER' (the space was a path delimiter).
2. The background pattern used on graphical workstations (this is
techspeak under the `Windows' graphical user interface to
MS-DOS). 3. `wallpaper file' /n./ The file that contains the
wallpaper information before it is actually printed on paper.
(Even if you don't intend ever to produce a real paper copy of the
file, it is still called a wallpaper file.)
:wango: /wang'goh/ /n./ Random bit-level {grovel}ling
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."
:wank: /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.
:wannabee: /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.
:war dialer: /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 dialer}s.
:warez: /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}.
:warez d00dz: /weirz doodz/ /n./ A substantial subculture of
{cracker}s 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 GIFs, 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}; compare
{weenie}, {spod}.
:warlording: /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
quote}s, 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.
:warm boot: /n./ See {boot}.
:wart: /n./ A small, {crock}y {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 `csh(1)',
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}.
:washing machine: /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). 2. [CMU] A machine used exclusively for
{washing software}. CMU has clusters of these.
:washing software: /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.
:water MIPS: /n./ (see {MIPS}, sense 2) Large, water-cooled
machines of either today's ECL-supercomputer flavor or yesterday's
traditional {mainframe} type.
:wave a dead chicken: /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}.
:weasel: /n./ [Cambridge] A naive user, one who deliberately or
accidentally does things that are stupid or ill-advised. Roughly
synonymous with {loser}.
:web pointer: /n./ A World Wide Web {URL}. See also
{hotlink}, which has slightly different connotations.
:webmaster: /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.
:wedged: /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 {deadlock}s with
another (but not all instances of wedging are deadlocks). See also
{gronk}, {locked up}, {hosed}. 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.
:wedgie: /n./ [Fairchild] A bug. Prob. related to {wedged}.
:wedgitude: /wedj'i-t[y]ood/ /n./ The quality or state of
being {wedged}.
:weeble: /weeb'l/ /interj./ [Cambridge] Used to denote
frustration, usually at amazing stupidity. "I stuck the disk in
upside down." "Weeble...." Compare {gurfle}.
:weeds: /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 to IBM's
{branch to Fishkill} and mainstream hackerdom's {jump off
into never-never land}.
:weenie: /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}, {computer 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).
:Weenix: /wee'niks/ /n./ [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.)
:well-behaved: /adj./ 1. [primarily {{MS-DOS}}] Said of
software conforming to system interface guidelines and standards.
Well-behaved software uses the operating system to do chores such
as keyboard input, allocating memory and drawing graphics. Oppose
{ill-behaved}. 2. 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}.
:well-connected: /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).
:wetware: /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}.
:whack: /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 {glark}ing
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.
:whacker: /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.
:whales: /n./ See {like kicking dead whales down the beach}.
:whalesong: /n./ The peculiar clicking and whooshing sounds
made by a PEP modem such as the Telebit Trailblazer as it tries to
synchronize with another PEP modem for their special high-speed
mode. This sound isn't anything like the normal two-tone handshake
between conventional V-series modems and is instantly recognizable
to anyone who has heard it more than once. It sounds, in fact,
very much like whale songs. This noise is also called "the moose
call" or "moose tones".
:What's a spline?: [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."
:wheel: /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}.
:wheel bit: /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}.
:wheel wars: /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.
:White Book: /n./ 1. Syn. {K&R}. 2. Adobe's fourth book in
the PostScript series, describing the previously-secret format of
Type 1 fonts; "Adobe Type 1 Font Format, version 1.1",
(Addison-Wesley, 1990, ISBN 0-201-57044-0). See also {Red Book},
{Green Book}, {Blue Book}.
:whizzy: /adj./ (alt. `wizzy') [Sun] Describes a {cuspy}
program; one that is feature-rich and well presented.
:wibble: [UK] 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".
Compare {humma}. 2. One of the preferred {metasyntactic
variable}s in the UK, forming a series with `wobble',
`wubble', and `flob' (attributed to the hilarious
historical comedy "Blackadder").
:WIBNI: // /n./ [Bell Labs: Wouldn't It Be Nice If] What most
requirements documents and specifications consist entirely of.
Compare {IWBNI}.
:widget: /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.
:wiggles: /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.
:WIMP environment: /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}.
:win: [MIT] 1. /vi./ To succeed. A program wins if no
unexpected conditions arise, or (especially) if it 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'.
:win big: /vi./ To experience serendipity. "I went shopping
and won big; there was a 2-for-1 sale." See {big win}.
:win win: /excl./ Expresses pleasure at a {win}.
:Winchester:: /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). Others claim, however, that Winchester was simply the
laboratory in which the technology was developed.
:windoid: /n./ In the Macintosh world, a style of window with
much less adornment (smaller or missing title bar, zoom box, etc,
etc) than a standard window.
:window shopping: /n./ [US Geological Survey] Among users of
{WIMP environment}s 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}.
:Windoze: /win'dohz/ /n./ See {Microsloth Windows}.
:winged comments: /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.
:winkey: /n./ (alt. `winkey face') See {emoticon}.
:winnage: /win'*j/ /n./ The situation when a lossage is
corrected, or when something is winning.
:winner: 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."
:winnitude: /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.
:wired: /n./ See {hardwired}.
:wirehead: /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.
:wirewater: /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.
:wish list: /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}.
:within delta of: /adj./ See {delta}.
:within epsilon of: /adj./ See {epsilon}.
:wizard: /n./ 1. A person who knows how a complex piece of
software or hardware works (that is, who {grok}s 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. A person who
is permitted to do things forbidden to ordinary people; one who has
{wheel} privileges on a system. 3. 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}.
:Wizard Book: /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 {bible}s of the
LISP/Scheme world. Also, less commonly, known as the {Purple
Book}.
:wizard mode: /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.
:wizardly: /adj./ Pertaining to wizards. A wizardly
{feature} is one that only a wizard could understand or use
properly.
:wok-on-the-wall: /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.
:womb box: /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.
:WOMBAT: /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.
:wonky: /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}.
:woofer: /n./ [University of Waterloo] Some varieties of wide
paper for printers have a perforation 8.5 inches from the left
margin that allows the excess on the right-hand side to be torn off
when the print format is 80 columns or less wide. The right-hand
excess may be called `woofer'. This term (like {tweeter}) has
been in use at Waterloo since 1972, but is elsewhere unknown. In
audio jargon, the word refers to the bass speaker(s) on a hi-fi.
:workaround: /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
{fix}es; 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 {crash}es 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."
:working as designed: /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}.
:worm: /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 {cracker}s write worms. Perhaps the
best-known example was Robert T. Morris's `Internet 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}, and {Great Worm, the}.
:wormhole: /werm'hohl/ /n./ [from the `wormhole'
singularities hypothesized in some versions of General Relativity
theory] 1. 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).
:wound around the axle: /adj./ In an infinite loop. Often used
by older computer types.
:wrap around: /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}.
:write-only code: /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}.
:write-only language: /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.
:write-only memory: /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,
around 1974, 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%.
:Wrong Thing: /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."
:wugga wugga: /wuh'g* wuh'g*/ /n./ Imaginary sound that a
computer program makes as it labors with a tedious or difficult
task. Compare {cruncha cruncha cruncha}, {grind} (sense 4).
:wumpus: /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", dating back at least to 1972 (several
years before {ADVENT}) on the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System.
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 M"obius 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).
Today, a port is distributed with SunOS and as freeware for the
Mac. A C emulation of the original Basic game is available at the
Retrocomputing Museum,
http://www.ccil.org/retro.
:WYSIAYG: /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}.
:WYSIWYG: /wiz'ee-wig/ /adj./ 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 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 has already made it into the
OED, in lower case yet. --ESR]
= X =
=====
:X: /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 or 80486 (note that a Unix
hacker might write these as 680[0-4]0 and 80[1-4]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.
:XEROX PARC: /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
{suit}s 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).
:XOFF: /X-of/ /n./ Syn. {control-S}.
:XON: /X-on/ /n./ Syn. {control-Q}.
:xor: /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.
:xref: /X'ref/ /v.,n./ Hackish standard abbreviation for
`cross-reference'.
:XXX: /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}.
:xyzzy: /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!"
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".
The popular `minesweeper' game under Microsoft Windows has 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.
= Y =
=====
:YA-: /abbrev./ [Yet Another] In hackish acronyms this almost
invariably expands to {Yet Another}, following the precedent set
by Unix `yacc(1)' (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler). See
{YABA}.
:YABA: /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}.
:YAFIYGI: /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 Programmer}s); the
acronym is a more recent invention.
:YAUN: /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.
:Yellow Book: /n./
The print version of this Jargon
File; "The New Hacker's Dictionary" from MIT Press; The book
includes essentially all the material the File, plus a Foreword by
Guy L. Steele Jr. and a Preface by Eric S. Raymond. Most
importantly, the book version is nicely typeset and includes almost
all of the infamous Crunchly cartoons by the Great Quux, each
attached to an appropriate entry. The first edition (1991, ISBN
0-262-68069-6) corresponded to the Jargon File version 2.9.6. The
second edition (1993, ISBN 0-262-68079-3) corresponded to the
Jargon
File 3.0.0. The third (1996, ISBN 0-262-68092-0) will correspond
to 4.0.0.
:yellow wire: /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}.
:Yet Another: /adj./ [From Unix's `yacc(1)', `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}.
:YKYBHTLW: // /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.
:YMMV: // /cav./ Abbreviation for {Your mileage
may vary} common on Usenet.
:You are not expected to understand this: [Unix] /cav./ 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.
:You know you've been hacking too long when...: 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 realize you have never seen half of your best friends.
[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]
:Your mileage may vary: /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."
:Yow!: /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!" Compare {gurfle}.
:yoyo mode: /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.
:Yu-Shiang Whole Fish: /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 {parse}d) 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.
= Z =
=====
:zap: 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."
:zapped: /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.
:zen: /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}.
:zero: /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}.
:zero-content: /adj./ Syn. {content-free}.
:Zero-One-Infinity Rule: /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.
:zeroth: /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 error}s, though it cannot eliminate them
entirely.
:zigamorph: /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 (a subset
of ISO 10646) is a 16-bit character code intended to cover all of
the world's writing systems, including Roman, Greek, Cyrillic,
Chinese, hiragana, katakana, Devanagari, Ethiopic, Thai, Laotian
and many other languages (support for {elvish} is planned for a
future release).
:zip: /vt./ [primarily MS-DOS] 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}.
:zipperhead: /n./ [IBM] A person with a closed mind.
:zombie: /n./ [Unix] A process that has died but has not yet
relinquished its process table slot (because the parent process
hasn't executed a `wait(2)' for it yet). These can be seen in
`ps(1)' listings occasionally. Compare {orphan}.
:zorch: /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.
:Zork: /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.
:zorkmid: /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.
= [^A-Za-z] =
=============
:<bobbit>: /n./ [Usenet: alt.folklore.urban and
elsewhere] Commonly used as a placeholder for omitted text in a
followup message (not copying the whole parent message is
considered good form). Refers, of course, to the celebrated
mutilation of John Bobbitt.
:4.2: /for' poynt too'/ /n./ Without a prefix, this almost
invariably refers to {BSD} Unix release 4.2. Note that it is an
indication of cluelessness to say "version 4.2", and "release
4.2" is rare; the number stands on its own, or is used in the more
explicit forms 4.2BSD or (less commonly) BSD 4.2. Similar remarks
apply to "4.3", "4.4" and to earlier, less-widespread releases
4.1 and 2.9.
:'Snooze: /snooz/ [FidoNet] /n./ Fidonews, the weekly
official on-line newsletter of FidoNet. As the editorial policy of
Fidonews is "anything that arrives, we print", there are often
large articles completely unrelated to FidoNet, which in turn tend
to elicit {flamage} in subsequent issues.
:(TM): // [Usenet] ASCII rendition of the
trademark-superscript symbol
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}.
:-oid: /suff./ [from `android'] 1. Used as in mainstream
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 9600 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].
:-ware: /suff./ [from `software'] Commonly used to form
jargon terms for classes of software. For examples, see
{careware}, {crippleware}, {crudware}, {freeware},
{fritterware}, {guiltware}, {liveware}, {meatware},
{payware}, {psychedelicware}, {shareware}, {shelfware},
{vaporware}, {wetware}.
:/dev/null: /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
[email protected], flames to
/dev/null". See {bit bucket}.
:0: 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 Slashed-O is a letter,
curse this arrangement). 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. 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?
:1TBS: // /n./ The "One True Brace Style"; see {indent
style}.
:120 reset: /wuhn-twen'tee ree'set/ /n./ [from 120 volts,
U.S. wall voltage] To cycle power on a machine in order to reset or
unjam it. Compare {Big Red Switch}, {power cycle}.
:2: /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).
:@-party: /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 California
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.
:@Begin: // See {\begin}.
:\begin: // [from the LaTeX command] With \end, used
humorously in writing to indicate a context or to remark on the
surrounded text. For example:
\begin{flame}
Predicate logic is the only good programming
language. Anyone who would use anything else
is an idiot. Also, all computers should be
tredecimal instead of binary.
\end{flame}
The Scribe users at CMU and elsewhere used to use @Begin/@End in
an identical way (LaTeX was built to resemble Scribe). On Usenet,
this construct would more frequently be rendered as `<FLAME
ON>' and `<FLAME OFF>', or `#ifdef FLAME' and `#endif FLAME''.
:(Lexicon Entries End Here):
:Hacker Folklore:
*****************
This appendix contains several legends and fables that illuminate the
meaning of various entries in the lexicon.
:The Meaning of `Hack':
=======================
"The word {hack} doesn't really have 69 different meanings", according
to MIT hacker Phil Agre. "In fact, {hack} has only one meaning, an
extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which
connotation is implied by a given use of the word depends in similarly
profound ways on the context. Similar remarks apply to a couple of
other hacker words, most notably {random}."
Hacking might be characterized as `an appropriate application of
ingenuity'. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or
a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness
that went into it.
An important secondary meaning of {hack} is `a creative practical
joke'. This kind of hack is easier to explain to non-hackers than the
programming kind. Of course, some hacks have both natures; see the
lexicon entries for {pseudo} and {kgbvax}. But here are some examples
of pure practical jokes that illustrate the hacking spirit:
In 1961, students from Caltech (California Institute of
Technology, in Pasadena) hacked the Rose Bowl football game. One
student posed as a reporter and `interviewed' the director of the
University of Washington card stunts (such stunts involve people
in the stands who hold up colored cards to make pictures). The
reporter learned exactly how the stunts were operated, and also
that the director would be out to dinner later.
While the director was eating, the students (who called
themselves the `Fiendish Fourteen') picked a lock and stole a
blank direction sheet for the card stunts. They then had a
printer run off 2300 copies of the blank. The next day they
picked the lock again and stole the master plans for the stunts
-- large sheets of graph paper colored in with the stunt
pictures. Using these as a guide, they made new instructions for
three of the stunts on the duplicated blanks. Finally, they
broke in once more, replacing the stolen master plans and
substituting the stack of diddled instruction sheets for the
original set.
The result was that three of the pictures were totally different.
Instead of `WASHINGTON', the word ``CALTECH' was flashed. Another
stunt showed the word `HUSKIES', the Washington nickname, but
spelled it backwards. And what was supposed to have been a picture of
a husky instead showed a beaver. (Both Caltech and MIT use the beaver
--- nature's engineer -- as a mascot.)
After the game, the Washington faculty athletic representative
said: "Some thought it ingenious; others were indignant." The
Washington student body president remarked: "No hard feelings,
but at the time it was unbelievable. We were amazed."
This is now considered a classic hack, particularly because revising
the direction sheets constituted a form of programming.
Here is another classic hack:
On November 20, 1982, MIT hacked the Harvard-Yale football game.
Just after Harvard's second touchdown against Yale, in the first
quarter, a small black ball popped up out of the ground at the
40-yard line, and grew bigger, and bigger, and bigger. The
letters `MIT' appeared all over the ball. As the players and
officials stood around gawking, the ball grew to six feet in
diameter and then burst with a bang and a cloud of white smoke.
The "Boston Globe" later reported: "If you want to know the
truth, MIT won The Game."
The prank had taken weeks of careful planning by members of MIT's
Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. The device consisted of a
weather balloon, a hydraulic ram powered by Freon gas to lift it
out of the ground, and a vacuum-cleaner motor to inflate it.
They made eight separate expeditions to Harvard Stadium between 1
and 5 A.M., locating an unused 110-volt circuit in the stadium
and running buried wires from the stadium circuit to the 40-yard
line, where they buried the balloon device. When the time came
to activate the device, two fraternity members had merely to flip
a circuit breaker and push a plug into an outlet.
This stunt had all the earmarks of a perfect hack: surprise,
publicity, the ingenious use of technology, safety, and
harmlessness. The use of manual control allowed the prank to be
timed so as not to disrupt the game (it was set off between
plays, so the outcome of the game would not be unduly affected).
The perpetrators had even thoughtfully attached a note to the
balloon explaining that the device was not dangerous and
contained no explosives.
Harvard president Derek Bok commented: "They have an awful lot of
clever people down there at MIT, and they did it again."
President Paul E. Gray of MIT said: "There is absolutely no truth
to the rumor that I had anything to do with it, but I wish there
were."
The hacks above are verifiable history; they can be proved to have
happened. Many other classic-hack stories from MIT and elsewhere,
though retold as history, have the characteristics of what Jan
Brunvand has called `urban folklore' (see {FOAF}). Perhaps the best
known of these is the legend of the infamous trolley-car hack, an
alleged incident in which engineering students are said to have welded
a trolley car to its tracks with thermite. Numerous versions of this
have been recorded from the 1940s to the present, most set at MIT but
at least one very detailed version set at CMU.
Brian Leibowitz has researched MIT hacks both real and mythical
extensively; the interested reader is referred to his delightful
pictorial compendium "The Journal of the Institute for Hacks,
Tomfoolery, and Pranks" (MIT Museum, 1990; ISBN 0-917027-03-5). The
Institute has a World Wide Web page at
http://fishwrap.mit.edu/Hacks/Gallery.html.
Finally, here is a story about one of the classic computer hacks.
Back in the mid-1970s, several of the system support staff at
Motorola discovered a relatively simple way to crack system
security on the Xerox CP-V timesharing system. Through a simple
programming strategy, it was possible for a user program to trick
the system into running a portion of the program in `master mode'
(supervisor state), in which memory protection does not apply.
The program could then poke a large value into its `privilege
level' byte (normally write-protected) and could then proceed to
bypass all levels of security within the file-management system,
patch the system monitor, and do numerous other interesting
things. In short, the barn door was wide open.
Motorola quite properly reported this problem to Xerox via an
official `level 1 SIDR' (a bug report with an intended urgency of
`needs to be fixed yesterday'). Because the text of each SIDR
was entered into a database that could be viewed by quite a
number of people, Motorola followed the approved procedure: they
simply reported the problem as `Security SIDR', and attached all
of the necessary documentation, ways-to-reproduce, etc.
The CP-V people at Xerox sat on their thumbs; they either didn't
realize the severity of the problem, or didn't assign the
necessary operating-system-staff resources to develop and
distribute an official patch.
Months passed. The Motorola guys pestered their Xerox
field-support rep, to no avail. Finally they decided to take
direct action, to demonstrate to Xerox management just how easily
the system could be cracked and just how thoroughly the security
safeguards could be subverted.
They dug around in the operating-system listings and devised a
thoroughly devilish set of patches. These patches were then
incorporated into a pair of programs called `Robin Hood' and
`Friar Tuck'. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck were designed to run as
`ghost jobs' (daemons, in Unix terminology); they would use the
existing loophole to subvert system security, install the
necessary patches, and then keep an eye on one another's statuses
in order to keep the system operator (in effect, the superuser)
from aborting them.
One fine day, the system operator on the main CP-V software
development system in El Segundo was surprised by a number of
unusual phenomena. These included the following:
* Tape drives would rewind and dismount their tapes in the
middle of a job.
* Disk drives would seek back and forth so rapidly that they
would attempt to walk across the floor (see {walking
drives}).
* The card-punch output device would occasionally start up of
itself and punch a {lace card}. These would usually jam in
the punch.
* The console would print snide and insulting messages from
Robin Hood to Friar Tuck, or vice versa.
* The Xerox card reader had two output stackers; it could be
instructed to stack into A, stack into B, or stack into A
(unless a card was unreadable, in which case the bad card
was placed into stacker B). One of the patches installed by
the ghosts added some code to the card-reader
driver... after reading a card, it would flip over to the
opposite stacker. As a result, card decks would divide
themselves in half when they were read, leaving the operator
to recollate them manually.
Naturally, the operator called in the operating-system
developers. They found the bandit ghost jobs running, and
{gun}ned them... and were once again surprised. When Robin Hood
was gunned, the following sequence of events took place:
!X id1
id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack! Pray save me!
id1: Off (aborted)
id2: Fear not, friend Robin! I shall rout the Sheriff
of Nottingham's men!
id1: Thank you, my good fellow!
Each ghost-job would detect the fact that the other had been
killed, and would start a new copy of the recently slain program
within a few milliseconds. The only way to kill both ghosts was
to kill them simultaneously (very difficult) or to deliberately
crash the system.
Finally, the system programmers did the latter -- only to find
that the bandits appeared once again when the system rebooted!
It turned out that these two programs had patched the boot-time
OS image (the kernel file, in Unix terms) and had added
themselves to the list of programs that were to be started at
boot time (this is similar to the way MS-DOS viruses propagate).
The Robin Hood and Friar Tuck ghosts were finally eradicated when
the system staff rebooted the system from a clean boot-tape and
reinstalled the monitor. Not long thereafter, Xerox released a
patch for this problem.
It is alleged that Xerox filed a complaint with Motorola's
management about the merry-prankster actions of the two employees
in question. It is not recorded that any serious disciplinary
action was taken against either of them.
:TV Typewriters: A Tale of Hackish Ingenuity
============================================
Here is a true story about a glass tty: One day an MIT hacker was in a
motorcycle accident and broke his leg. He had to stay in the hospital
quite a while, and got restless because he couldn't {hack}. Two of
his friends therefore took a terminal and a modem for it to the
hospital, so that he could use the computer by telephone from his
hospital bed.
Now this happened some years before the spread of home computers, and
computer terminals were not a familiar sight to the average person.
When the two friends got to the hospital, a guard stopped them and
asked what they were carrying. They explained that they wanted to
take a computer terminal to their friend who was a patient.
The guard got out his list of things that patients were permitted to
have in their rooms: TV, radio, electric razor, typewriter, tape
player, ... no computer terminals. Computer terminals weren't on the
list, so the guard wouldn't let it in. Rules are rules, you know.
(This guard was clearly a {droid}.)
Fair enough, said the two friends, and they left again. They were
frustrated, of course, because they knew that the terminal was as
harmless as a TV or anything else on the list... which gave them an
idea.
The next day they returned, and the same thing happened: a guard
stopped them and asked what they were carrying. They said: "This is a
TV typewriter!" The guard was skeptical, so they plugged it in and
demonstrated it. "See? You just type on the keyboard and what you
type shows up on the TV screen." Now the guard didn't stop to think
about how utterly useless a typewriter would be that didn't produce
any paper copies of what you typed; but this was clearly a TV
typewriter, no doubt about it. So he checked his list: "A TV is all
right, a typewriter is all right ... okay, take it on in!"
[Historical note: Many years ago, "Popular Electronics" published
solder-it-yourself plans for a TV typewriter. Despite the essential
uselessness of the device, it was an enormously popular project.
Steve Ciarcia, the man behind "Byte" magazine's "Circuit Cellar"
feature, resurrected this ghost in one of his books of the early
1980s. He ascribed its popularity (no doubt correctly) to the feeling
of power the builder could achieve by being able to decide himself
what would be shown on the TV. --ESR]
[Antihistorical note: On September 23rd, 1992, the L.A. Times ran the
following bit of filler:
Solomon Waters of Altadena, a 6-year-old first-grader, came home
from his first day of school and excitedly told his mother how he
had written on "a machine that looks like a computer -- but
without the TV screen." She asked him if it could have been a
"typewriter." "Yeah! Yeah!" he said. "That's what it was
called."
I have since investigated this matter and determined that many of
today's teenagers have never seen a slide rule, either.... -- ESR]
:A Story About `Magic':
=======================
Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that
housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to
the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by
one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).
You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what
it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled
in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil
on the metal switch body were the words `magic' and `more magic'. The
switch was in the `more magic' position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the
switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had
only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear
into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of
electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires
connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no
wire on its other side.
It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke.
Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped
it. The computer instantly crashed.
Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but
nevertheless restored the switch to the `more magic' position before
reviving the computer.
A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I
recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a
supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I
was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him
the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire
connected to it, still in the `more magic' position. We scrutinized
the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of
the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a
ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was
it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that
couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.
The computer promptly crashed.
This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who
was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either.
He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters
and {dike}d it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine
ever since.
We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a
theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and
flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset
the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But
we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch
was {magic}.
I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I
usually keep it set on `more magic'.
1994: Another explanation of this story has since been offered. Note
that the switch body was metal. Suppose that the non-connected side
of the switch was connected to the switch body (usually the body is
connected to a separate earth lug, but there are exceptions). The
body is connected to the computer case, which is, presumably,
grounded. Now the circuit ground within the machine isn't necessarily
at the same potential as the case ground, so flipping the switch
connected the circuit ground to the case ground, causing a voltage
drop/jump which reset the machine. This was probably discovered by
someone who found out the hard way that there was a potential
difference between the two, and who then wired in the switch as a
joke.
:AI Koans:
==========
These are some of the funniest examples of a genre of jokes told at
the MIT AI Lab about various noted hackers. The original koans were
composed by Danny Hillis. In reading these, it is at least useful to
know that Minsky, Sussman, and Drescher are AI researchers of note,
that Tom Knight was one of the Lisp machine's principal designers, and
that David Moon wrote much of Lisp Machine Lisp.
* * *
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the
power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You
cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of
what is going wrong."
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
* * *
One day a student came to Moon and said: "I understand how to make
a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the
pointers to each cons."
Moon patiently told the student the following story:
"One day a student came to Moon and said: `I understand how to
make a better garbage collector...
[Ed. note: Pure reference-count garbage collectors have problems with
circular structures that point to themselves.]
* * *
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he
sat hacking at the PDP-6.
"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe"
Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play",
Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
* * *
A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was eating
his morning meal.
"I would like to give you this personality test", said the
outsider, "because I want you to be happy."
Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it into the
toaster, saying: "I wish the toaster to be happy, too."
:OS and JEDGAR:
===============
This story says a lot about the ITS ethos.
On the ITS system there was a program that allowed you to see what was
being printed on someone else's terminal. It spied on the other guy's
output by examining the insides of the monitor system. The output spy
program was called OS. Throughout the rest of the computer science
(and at IBM too) OS means `operating system', but among old-time ITS
hackers it almost always meant `output spy'.
OS could work because ITS purposely had very little in the way of
`protection' that prevented one user from trespassing on another's
areas. Fair is fair, however. There was another program that would
automatically notify you if anyone started to spy on your output. It
worked in exactly the same way, by looking at the insides of the
operating system to see if anyone else was looking at the insides that
had to do with your output. This `counterspy' program was called
JEDGAR (a six-letterism pronounced as two syllables: /jed'gr/), in
honor of the former head of the FBI.
But there's more. JEDGAR would ask the user for `license to kill'.
If the user said yes, then JEDGAR would actually {gun} the job of the
{luser} who was spying. Unfortunately, people found that this made
life too violent, especially when tourists learned about it. One of
the systems hackers solved the problem by replacing JEDGAR with
another program that only pretended to do its job. It took a long
time to do this, because every copy of JEDGAR had to be patched. To
this day no one knows how many people never figured out that JEDGAR
had been defanged.
Interestingly, there is still a security module named JEDGAR alive as
of late 1994 -- in the Unisys MCP for large systems. It is unknown to
us whether the name is tribute or independent invention.
:The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer:
=====================================
This was posted to Usenet by its author, Ed Nather (utastro!nather),
on May 21, 1983.
A recent article devoted to the *macho* side of programming
made the bald and unvarnished statement:
Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.
Maybe they do now,
in this decadent era of
Lite beer, hand calculators, and "user-friendly" software
but back in the Good Old Days,
when the term "software" sounded funny
and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,
Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language.
Machine Code.
Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
Directly.
Lest a whole new generation of programmers
grow up in ignorance of this glorious past,
I feel duty-bound to describe,
as best I can through the generation gap,
how a Real Programmer wrote code.
I'll call him Mel,
because that was his name.
I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp.,
a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company.
The firm manufactured the LGP-30,
a small, cheap (by the standards of the day)
drum-memory computer,
and had just started to manufacture
the RPC-4000, a much-improved,
bigger, better, faster -- drum-memory computer.
Cores cost too much,
and weren't here to stay, anyway.
(That's why you haven't heard of the company,
or the computer.)
I had been hired to write a FORTRAN compiler
for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders.
Mel didn't approve of compilers.
"If a program can't rewrite its own code",
he asked, "what good is it?"
Mel had written,
in hexadecimal,
the most popular computer program the company owned.
It ran on the LGP-30
and played blackjack with potential customers
at computer shows.
Its effect was always dramatic.
The LGP-30 booth was packed at every show,
and the IBM salesmen stood around
talking to each other.
Whether or not this actually sold computers
was a question we never discussed.
Mel's job was to re-write
the blackjack program for the RPC-4000.
(Port? What does that mean?)
The new computer had a one-plus-one
addressing scheme,
in which each machine instruction,
in addition to the operation code
and the address of the needed operand,
had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum,
the next instruction was located.
In modern parlance,
every single instruction was followed by a GO TO!
Put *that* in Pascal's pipe and smoke it.
Mel loved the RPC-4000
because he could optimize his code:
that is, locate instructions on the drum
so that just as one finished its job,
the next would be just arriving at the "read head"
and available for immediate execution.
There was a program to do that job,
an "optimizing assembler",
but Mel refused to use it.
"You never know where it's going to put things",
he explained, "so you'd have to use separate constants".
It was a long time before I understood that remark.
Since Mel knew the numerical value
of every operation code,
and assigned his own drum addresses,
every instruction he wrote could also be considered
a numerical constant.
He could pick up an earlier "add" instruction, say,
and multiply by it,
if it had the right numeric value.
His code was not easy for someone else to modify.
I compared Mel's hand-optimized programs
with the same code massaged by the optimizing assembler program,
and Mel's always ran faster.
That was because the "top-down" method of program design
hadn't been invented yet,
and Mel wouldn't have used it anyway.
He wrote the innermost parts of his program loops first,
so they would get first choice
of the optimum address locations on the drum.
The optimizing assembler wasn't smart enough to do it that way.
Mel never wrote time-delay loops, either,
even when the balky Flexowriter
required a delay between output characters to work right.
He just located instructions on the drum
so each successive one was just *past* the read head
when it was needed;
the drum had to execute another complete revolution
to find the next instruction.
He coined an unforgettable term for this procedure.
Although "optimum" is an absolute term,
like "unique", it became common verbal practice
to make it relative:
"not quite optimum" or "less optimum"
or "not very optimum".
Mel called the maximum time-delay locations
the "most pessimum".
After he finished the blackjack program
and got it to run
("Even the initializer is optimized",
he said proudly),
he got a Change Request from the sales department.
The program used an elegant (optimized)
random number generator
to shuffle the "cards" and deal from the "deck",
and some of the salesmen felt it was too fair,
since sometimes the customers lost.
They wanted Mel to modify the program
so, at the setting of a sense switch on the console,
they could change the odds and let the customer win.
Mel balked.
He felt this was patently dishonest,
which it was,
and that it impinged on his personal integrity as a programmer,
which it did,
so he refused to do it.
The Head Salesman talked to Mel,
as did the Big Boss and, at the boss's urging,
a few Fellow Programmers.
Mel finally gave in and wrote the code,
but he got the test backwards,
and, when the sense switch was turned on,
the program would cheat, winning every time.
Mel was delighted with this,
claiming his subconscious was uncontrollably ethical,
and adamantly refused to fix it.
After Mel had left the company for greener pa$ture$,
the Big Boss asked me to look at the code
and see if I could find the test and reverse it.
Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed to look.
Tracking Mel's code was a real adventure.
I have often felt that programming is an art form,
whose real value can only be appreciated
by another versed in the same arcane art;
there are lovely gems and brilliant coups
hidden from human view and admiration, sometimes forever,
by the very nature of the process.
You can learn a lot about an individual
just by reading through his code,
even in hexadecimal.
Mel was, I think, an unsung genius.
Perhaps my greatest shock came
when I found an innocent loop that had no test in it.
No test. *None*.
Common sense said it had to be a closed loop,
where the program would circle, forever, endlessly.
Program control passed right through it, however,
and safely out the other side.
It took me two weeks to figure it out.
The RPC-4000 computer had a really modern facility
called an index register.
It allowed the programmer to write a program loop
that used an indexed instruction inside;
each time through,
the number in the index register
was added to the address of that instruction,
so it would refer
to the next datum in a series.
He had only to increment the index register
each time through.
Mel never used it.
Instead, he would pull the instruction into a machine register,
add one to its address,
and store it back.
He would then execute the modified instruction
right from the register.
The loop was written so this additional execution time
was taken into account ---
just as this instruction finished,
the next one was right under the drum's read head,
ready to go.
But the loop had no test in it.
The vital clue came when I noticed
the index register bit,
the bit that lay between the address
and the operation code in the instruction word,
was turned on ---
yet Mel never used the index register,
leaving it zero all the time.
When the light went on it nearly blinded me.
He had located the data he was working on
near the top of memory ---
the largest locations the instructions could address ---
so, after the last datum was handled,
incrementing the instruction address
would make it overflow.
The carry would add one to the
operation code, changing it to the next one in the instruction set:
a jump instruction.
Sure enough, the next program instruction was
in address location zero,
and the program went happily on its way.
I haven't kept in touch with Mel,
so I don't know if he ever gave in to the flood of
change that has washed over programming techniques
since those long-gone days.
I like to think he didn't.
In any event,
I was impressed enough that I quit looking for the
offending test,
telling the Big Boss I couldn't find it.
He didn't seem surprised.
When I left the company,
the blackjack program would still cheat
if you turned on the right sense switch,
and I think that's how it should be.
I didn't feel comfortable
hacking up the code of a Real Programmer.
This is one of hackerdom's great heroic epics, free verse or no. In a
few spare images it captures more about the esthetics and psychology
of hacking than all the scholarly volumes on the subject put together.
For an opposing point of view, see the entry for {Real Programmer}.
[1992 postscript -- the author writes: "The original submission to the
net was not in free verse, nor any approximation to it -- it was
straight prose style, in non-justified paragraphs. In bouncing around
the net it apparently got modified into the `free verse' form now
popular. In other words, it got hacked on the net. That seems
appropriate, somehow." The author adds that he likes the `free-verse'
version better...]
:A Portrait of J. Random Hacker:
********************************
This profile reflects detailed comments on an earlier `trial balloon'
version from about a hundred Usenet respondents. Where comparatives
are used, the implicit `other' is a randomly selected segment of the
non-hacker population of the same size as hackerdom.
An important point: Except in some relatively minor respects such as
slang vocabulary, hackers don't get to be the way they are by
imitating each other. Rather, it seems to be the case that the
combination of personality traits that makes a hacker so conditions
one's outlook on life that one tends to end up being like other
hackers whether one wants to or not (much as bizarrely detailed
similarities in behavior and preferences are found in genetic twins
raised separately).
:General Appearance:
====================
Intelligent. Scruffy. Intense. Abstracted. Surprisingly for a
sedentary profession, more hackers run to skinny than fat; both
extremes are more common than elsewhere. Tans are rare.
:Dress:
=======
Casual, vaguely post-hippie; T-shirts, jeans, running shoes,
Birkenstocks (or bare feet). Long hair, beards, and moustaches are
common. High incidence of tie-dye and intellectual or humorous
`slogan' T-shirts (only rarely computer related; that would be too
obvious).
A substantial minority prefers `outdoorsy' clothing -- hiking boots
("in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the machine room",
as one famous parody put it), khakis, lumberjack or chamois shirts,
and the like.
Very few actually fit the "National Lampoon" Nerd stereotype, though
it lingers on at MIT and may have been more common before 1975. At
least since the late Seventies backpacks have been more common than
briefcases, and the hacker `look' has been more whole-earth than
whole-polyester.
Hackers dress for comfort, function, and minimal maintenance hassles
rather than for appearance (some, perhaps unfortunately, take this to
extremes and neglect personal hygiene). They have a very low
tolerance of suits and other `business' attire; in fact, it is not
uncommon for hackers to quit a job rather than conform to a dress
code.
Female hackers almost never wear visible makeup, and many use none at
all.
:Reading Habits:
================
Omnivorous, but usually includes lots of science and science fiction.
The typical hacker household might subscribe to "Analog", "Scientific
American", "Whole-Earth Review", and "Smithsonian" (most hackers
ignore "Wired" and other self-consciously `cyberpunk' magazines,
considering them {wannabee} fodder). Hackers often have a reading
range that astonishes liberal arts people but tend not to talk about
it as much. Many hackers spend as much of their spare time reading as
the average American burns up watching TV, and often keep shelves and
shelves of well-thumbed books in their homes.
:Other Interests:
=================
Some hobbies are widely shared and recognized as going with the
culture: science fiction, music, medievalism (in the active form
practiced by the Society for Creative Anachronism and similar
organizations), chess, go, backgammon, wargames, and intellectual
games of all kinds. (Role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons
used to be extremely popular among hackers but they lost a bit of
their luster as they moved into the mainstream and became heavily
commercialized. More recently, "Magic: The Gathering" has been widely
popular among hackers.) Logic puzzles. Ham radio. Other interests
that seem to correlate less strongly but positively with hackerdom
include linguistics and theater teching.
:Physical Activity and Sports:
==============================
Many (perhaps even most) hackers don't follow or do sports at all and
are determinedly anti-physical. Among those who do, interest in
spectator sports is low to non-existent; sports are something one
*does*, not something one watches on TV.
Further, hackers avoid most team sports like the plague. Volleyball
was long a notable exception, perhaps because it's non-contact and
relatively friendly; Ultimate Frisbee has become quite popular for
similar reasons. Hacker sports are almost always primarily
self-competitive ones involving concentration, stamina, and micromotor
skills: martial arts, bicycling, auto racing, kite flying, hiking,
rock climbing, aviation, target-shooting, sailing, caving, juggling,
skiing, skating (ice and roller). Hackers' delight in techno-toys
also tends to draw them towards hobbies with nifty complicated
equipment that they can tinker with.
:Education:
===========
Nearly all hackers past their teens are either college-degreed or
self-educated to an equivalent level. The self-taught hacker is often
considered (at least by other hackers) to be better-motivated, and may
be more respected, than his school-shaped counterpart. Academic areas
from which people often gravitate into hackerdom include (besides the
obvious computer science and electrical engineering) physics,
mathematics, linguistics, and philosophy.
:Things Hackers Detest and Avoid:
=================================
IBM mainframes. Smurfs, Ewoks, and other forms of offensive cuteness.
Bureaucracies. Stupid people. Easy listening music. Television
(except for cartoons, movies, and "Star Trek" classic). Business
suits. Dishonesty. Incompetence. Boredom. COBOL. BASIC.
Character-based menu interfaces.
:Food:
======
Ethnic. Spicy. Oriental, esp. Chinese and most esp. Szechuan, Hunan,
and Mandarin (hackers consider Cantonese vaguely d'eclass'e). Hackers
prefer the exotic; for example, the Japanese-food fans among them will
eat with gusto such delicacies as fugu (poisonous pufferfish) and
whale. Thai food has experienced flurries of popularity. Where
available, high-quality Jewish delicatessen food is much esteemed. A
visible minority of Southwestern and Pacific Coast hackers prefers
Mexican.
For those all-night hacks, pizza and microwaved burritos are big.
Interestingly, though the mainstream culture has tended to think of
hackers as incorrigible junk-food junkies, many have at least mildly
health-foodist attitudes and are fairly discriminating about what they
eat. This may be generational; anecdotal evidence suggests that the
stereotype was more on the mark before the early 1980s.
:Politics:
==========
Vaguely liberal-moderate, except for the strong libertarian contingent
which rejects conventional left-right politics entirely. The only
safe generalization is that hackers tend to be rather
anti-authoritarian; thus, both conventional conservatism and `hard'
leftism are rare. Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers
to either (a) be aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or
idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them
day-to-day.
:Gender and Ethnicity:
======================
Hackerdom is still predominantly male. However, the percentage of
women is clearly higher than the low-single-digit range typical for
technical professions, and female hackers are generally respected and
dealt with as equals.
In the U.S., hackerdom is predominantly Caucasian with strong
minorities of Jews (East Coast) and Orientals (West Coast). The
Jewish contingent has exerted a particularly pervasive cultural
influence (see {Food}, above, and note that several common jargon
terms are obviously mutated Yiddish).
The ethnic distribution of hackers is understood by them to be a
function of which ethnic groups tend to seek and value education.
Racial and ethnic prejudice is notably uncommon and tends to be met
with freezing contempt.
When asked, hackers often ascribe their culture's gender- and
color-blindness to a positive effect of text-only network channels,
and this is doubtless a powerful influence. Also, the ties many
hackers have to AI research and SF literature may have helped them to
develop an idea of personhood that is inclusive rather than exclusive
--- after all, if one's imagination readily grants full human rights
to future AI programs, robots, dolphins, and extraterrestrial aliens,
mere color and gender can't seem very important any more.
:Religion:
==========
Agnostic. Atheist. Non-observant Jewish. Neo-pagan. Very commonly,
three or more of these are combined in the same person. Conventional
faith-holding Christianity is rare though not unknown.
Even hackers who identify with a religious affiliation tend to be
relaxed about it, hostile to organized religion in general and all
forms of religious bigotry in particular. Many enjoy `parody'
religions such as Discordianism and the Church of the SubGenius.
Also, many hackers are influenced to varying degrees by Zen Buddhism
or (less commonly) Taoism, and blend them easily with their `native'
religions.
There is a definite strain of mystical, almost Gnostic sensibility
that shows up even among those hackers not actively involved with
neo-paganism, Discordianism, or Zen. Hacker folklore that pays homage
to `wizards' and speaks of incantations and demons has too much
psychological truthfulness about it to be entirely a joke.
:Ceremonial Chemicals:
======================
Most hackers don't smoke tobacco, and use alcohol in moderation if at
all (though there is a visible contingent of exotic-beer fanciers, and
a few hackers are serious oenophiles). Limited use of non-addictive
psychedelic drugs, such as cannabis, LSD, psilocybin, and nitrous
oxide, etc., used to be relatively common and is still regarded with
more tolerance than in the mainstream culture. Use of `downers' and
opiates, on the other hand, appears to be particularly rare; hackers
seem in general to dislike drugs that make them stupid. On the third
hand, many hackers regularly wire up on caffeine and/or sugar for
all-night hacking runs.
:Communication Style:
=====================
See the discussions of speech and writing styles near the beginning of
this File. Though hackers often have poor person-to-person
communication skills, they are as a rule quite sensitive to nuances of
language and very precise in their use of it. They are often better
at writing than at speaking.
:Geographical Distribution:
===========================
In the United States, hackerdom revolves on a Bay Area-to-Boston axis;
about half of the hard core seems to live within a hundred miles of
Cambridge (Massachusetts) or Berkeley (California), although there are
significant contingents in Los Angeles, in the Pacific Northwest, and
around Washington DC. Hackers tend to cluster around large cities,
especially `university towns' such as the Raleigh-Durham area in North
Carolina or Princeton, New Jersey (this may simply reflect the fact
that many are students or ex-students living near their alma maters).
:Sexual Habits:
===============
Hackerdom easily tolerates a much wider range of sexual and lifestyle
variation than the mainstream culture. It includes a relatively large
gay and bisexual contingent. Hackers are somewhat more likely to live
in polygynous or polyandrous relationships, practice open marriage, or
live in communes or group houses. In this, as in general appearance,
hackerdom semi-consciously maintains `counterculture' values.
:Personality Characteristics:
=============================
The most obvious common `personality' characteristics of hackers are
high intelligence, consuming curiosity, and facility with intellectual
abstractions. Also, most hackers are `neophiles', stimulated by and
appreciative of novelty (especially intellectual novelty). Most are
also relatively individualistic and anti-conformist.
Although high general intelligence is common among hackers, it is not
the sine qua non one might expect. Another trait is probably even
more important: the ability to mentally absorb, retain, and reference
large amounts of `meaningless' detail, trusting to later experience to
give it context and meaning. A person of merely average analytical
intelligence who has this trait can become an effective hacker, but a
creative genius who lacks it will swiftly find himself outdistanced by
people who routinely upload the contents of thick reference manuals
into their brains. [During the production of the first book version
of this document, for example, I learned most of the rather complex
typesetting language TeX over about four working days, mainly by
inhaling Knuth's 477-page manual. My editor's flabbergasted reaction
to this genuinely surprised me, because years of associating with
hackers have conditioned me to consider such performances routine and
to be expected. --ESR]
Contrary to stereotype, hackers are *not* usually intellectually
narrow; they tend to be interested in any subject that can provide
mental stimulation, and can often discourse knowledgeably and even
interestingly on any number of obscure subjects -- if you can get them
to talk at all, as opposed to, say, going back to their hacking.
It is noticeable (and contrary to many outsiders' expectations) that
the better a hacker is at hacking, the more likely he or she is to
have outside interests at which he or she is more than merely
competent.
Hackers are `control freaks' in a way that has nothing to do with the
usual coercive or authoritarian connotations of the term. In the same
way that children delight in making model trains go forward and back
by moving a switch, hackers love making complicated things like
computers do nifty stuff for them. But it has to be *their* nifty
stuff. They don't like tedium, nondeterminism, or most of the fussy,
boring, ill-defined little tasks that go with maintaining a normal
existence. Accordingly, they tend to be careful and orderly in their
intellectual lives and chaotic elsewhere. Their code will be
beautiful, even if their desks are buried in 3 feet of crap.
Hackers are generally only very weakly motivated by conventional
rewards such as social approval or money. They tend to be attracted
by challenges and excited by interesting toys, and to judge the
interest of work or other activities in terms of the challenges
offered and the toys they get to play with.
In terms of Myers-Briggs and equivalent psychometric systems,
hackerdom appears to concentrate the relatively rare INTJ and INTP
types; that is, introverted, intuitive, and thinker types (as opposed
to the extroverted-sensate personalities that predominate in the
mainstream culture). ENT[JP] types are also concentrated among
hackers but are in a minority.
:Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality:
======================================
Hackers have relatively little ability to identify emotionally with
other people. This may be because hackers generally aren't much like
`other people'. Unsurprisingly, hackers also tend towards
self-absorption, intellectual arrogance, and impatience with people
and tasks perceived to be wasting their time.
As cynical as hackers sometimes wax about the amount of idiocy in the
world, they tend by reflex to assume that everyone is as rational,
`cool', and imaginative as they consider themselves. This bias often
contributes to weakness in communication skills. Hackers tend to be
especially poor at confrontation and negotiation.
Because of their passionate embrace of (what they consider to be) the
{Right Thing}, hackers can be unfortunately intolerant and bigoted on
technical issues, in marked contrast to their general spirit of
camaraderie and tolerance of alternative viewpoints otherwise.
Old-time {{ITS}} partisans look down on the ever-growing hordes of
{{Unix}} hackers; Unix aficionados despise {VMS} and {{MS-DOS}}; and
hackers who are used to conventional command-line user interfaces
loudly loathe mouse-and-menu based systems such as the Macintosh.
Hackers who don't indulge in {Usenet} consider it a huge waste of time
and {bandwidth}; fans of old adventure games such as {ADVENT} and
{Zork} consider {MUD}s to be glorified chat systems devoid of
atmosphere or interesting puzzles; hackers who are willing to devote
endless hours to Usenet or MUDs consider {IRC} to be a *real* waste of
time; IRCies think MUDs might be okay if there weren't all those silly
puzzles in the way. And, of course, there are the perennial {holy
wars} -- {EMACS} vs. {vi}, {big-endian} vs. {little-endian}, RISC
vs. CISC, etc., etc., etc. As in society at large, the intensity and
duration of these debates is usually inversely proportional to the
number of objective, factual arguments available to buttress any
position.
As a result of all the above traits, many hackers have difficulty
maintaining stable relationships. At worst, they can produce the
classic {computer geek}: withdrawn, relationally incompetent, sexually
frustrated, and desperately unhappy when not submerged in his or her
craft. Fortunately, this extreme is far less common than mainstream
folklore paints it -- but almost all hackers will recognize something
of themselves in the unflattering paragraphs above.
Hackers are often monumentally disorganized and sloppy about dealing
with the physical world. Bills don't get paid on time, clutter piles
up to incredible heights in homes and offices, and minor maintenance
tasks get deferred indefinitely.
1994-95's fad behavioral disease was a syndrome called Attention
Deficit Disorder, supposedly characterized by (among other things) a
combination of short attention span with an ability to `hyperfocus'
imaginatively on interesting tasks. There are grounds for questioning
whether ADD actually exists, and if it does whether it is really a
`disease' rather than an extreme of a normal genetic variation like
having freckles or being able to taste DPT; but it is certainly true
that many hacker traits coincide with major indicators for ADD, and
probably true that ADD boosters would find a far higher rate of
clinical ADD among hackers than the supposedly mainstream-normal 10%.
The sort of person who routinely uses phrases like `incompletely
socialized' usually thinks hackers are. Hackers regard such people
with contempt when they notice them at all.
:Miscellaneous:
===============
Hackers are more likely to have cats than dogs (in fact, it is widely
grokked that cats have the hacker nature). Many drive incredibly
decrepit heaps and forget to wash them; richer ones drive spiffy
Porsches and RX-7s and then forget to have them washed. Almost all
hackers have terribly bad handwriting, and often fall into the habit
of block-printing everything like junior draftsmen.
:Helping Hacker Culture Grow:
*****************************
If you enjoyed the Jargon File, please help the culture that created
it grow and flourish. Here are several ways you can help:
* If you are a writer or journalist, don't say or write
{hacker} when you mean {cracker}. If you work with writers or
journalists, educate them on this issue and push them to do the right
thing. If you catch a newspaper or magazine abusing the work `hacker',
write them and straigten them out (this appendix includes a model
letter).
* If you're a techie or computer hobbyist, get involved with
one of the free Unixes. Toss out that lame Microsoft OS, or confine
it to one disk partition and put Linux or FreeBSD or NetBSD on the
other one. And the next time your friend or boss is thinking about
some commercial software `solution' that costs more than it's worth,
be ready to blow the competition away with free software running over
a free Unix.
* Contribute to organizations like the Free Software
Foundation that promote the production of high-quality free software.
You can reach the Free Software Foundation at
[email protected], by
phone at +1-617-542-5942, or by snail-mail at 59 Temple Place, Suite
330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA.
* Support the League for Programming Freedom, which opposes
over-broad software patents that constantly threaten to blow up in
hackers' faces, preventing them from developing innovative software
for tomorrow's needs. You can reach the League for Programming
Freedom at
[email protected]. by phone at +1 617 621 7084, or by
snail-mail at 1 Kendall Square #143, P.O.Box 9171, Cambridge,
Massachusetts 02139 USA.
* If you do nothing else, please help fight government
attempts to seize political control of Internet content and restrict
strong cryptography. As TNHD III went to press, the so-called
`Communications Decency Act' had just been declared "unconstitutional
on its face" by a Federal court, but the government is expected to
appeal. If it's still law when you read this, please join the effort
by the Citizens' Internet Empowerment Coalition lawsuit to have the
CDA quashed or repealed. Surf to the Center for Democracy and
technology's home page at
http://www.cdt.org to see what you can do to
help fight censorship of the net.
Here's the text of a letter RMS wrote to the Wall Street Journal to
complain about their policy of using "hacker" only in a pejorative
sense. We hear that most major newspapers have the same policy. If
you'd like to help change this situation, send your favorite newspaper
the same letter -- or, better yet, write your own letter.
Dear Editor:
This letter is not meant for publication, although you can
publish it if you wish. It is meant specifically for you, the
editor, not the public.
I am a hacker. That is to say, I enjoy playing with computers --
working with, learning about, and writing clever computer
programs. I am not a cracker; I don't make a practice of
breaking computer security.
There's nothing shameful about the hacking I do. But when I tell
people I am a hacker, people think I'm admitting something
naughty -- because newspapers such as yours misuse the word
"hacker", giving the impression that it means "security breaker"
and nothing else. You are giving hackers a bad name.
The saddest thing is that this problem is perpetuated
deliberately. Your reporters know the difference between
"hacker" and "security breaker". They know how to make the
distinction, but you don't let them! You insist on using
"hacker" pejoratively. When reporters try to use another word,
you change it. When reporters try to explain the other meanings,
you cut it.
Of course, you have a reason. You say that readers have become
used to your insulting usage of "hacker", so that you cannot
change it now. Well, you can't undo past mistakes today; but
that is no excuse to repeat them tomorrow.
If I were what you call a "hacker", at this point I would
threaten to crack your computer and crash it. But I am a hacker,
not a cracker. I don't do that kind of thing! I have enough
computers to play with at home and at work; I don't need yours.
Besides, it's not my way to respond to insults with violence. My
response is this letter.
You owe hackers an apology; but more than that, you owe us
ordinary respect.
Sincerely, etc.
:Bibliography:
**************
Here are some other books you can read to help you understand the
hacker mindset.
:G"odel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid:
Douglas Hofstadter
Basic Books, 1979
ISBN 0-394-74502-7
This book reads like an intellectual Grand Tour of hacker
preoccupations. Music, mathematical logic, programming, speculations
on the nature of intelligence, biology, and Zen are woven into a
brilliant tapestry themed on the concept of encoded self-reference.
The perfect left-brain companion to "Illuminatus".
:Illuminatus!:
I. "The Eye in the Pyramid"
II. "The Golden Apple"
III. "Leviathan".
Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
Dell, 1988
ISBN 0-440-53981-1
This work of alleged fiction is an incredible berserko-surrealist
rollercoaster of world-girdling conspiracies, intelligent dolphins,
the fall of Atlantis, who really killed JFK, sex, drugs, rock'n'roll,
and the Cosmic Giggle Factor. First published in three volumes, but
there is now a one-volume trade paperback, carried by most chain
bookstores under SF. The perfect right-brain companion to
Hofstadter's "G"odel, Escher, Bach". See {Eris}, {Discordianism},
{random numbers}, {Church of the SubGenius}.
:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
Douglas Adams
Pocket Books, 1981
ISBN 0-671-46149-4
This `Monty Python in Space' spoof of SF genre traditions has been
popular among hackers ever since the original British radio show.
Read it if only to learn about Vogons (see {bogon}) and the
significance of the number 42 (see {random numbers}) -- and why the
winningest chess program of 1990 was called `Deep Thought'.
:The Tao of Programming:
James Geoffrey
Infobooks, 1987
ISBN 0-931137-07-1
This gentle, funny spoof of the "Tao Te Ching" contains much that is
illuminating about the hacker way of thought. "When you have learned
to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you
to leave."
:Hackers:
Steven Levy
Anchor/Doubleday 1984
ISBN 0-385-19195-2
Levy's book is at its best in describing the early MIT hackers at the
Model Railroad Club and the early days of the microcomputer
revolution. He never understood Unix or the networks, though, and his
enshrinement of Richard Stallman as "the last true hacker" turns out
(thankfully) to have been quite misleading. Numerous minor factual
errors also mar the text; for example, Levy's claim that the original
Jargon File derived from the TMRC Dictionary (the File originated at
Stanford and was brought to MIT in 1976; the co-authors of the first
edition had never seen the dictionary in question). There are also
numerous misspellings in the book that inflame the passions of
old-timers; as Dan Murphy, the author of TECO, once said: "You would
have thought he'd take the trouble to spell the name of a winning
editor right." Nevertheless, this remains a useful and stimulating
book that captures the feel of several important hackish subcultures.
:The Computer Contradictionary:
Stan Kelly-Bootle
MIT Press, 1995
ISBN 0-262-61112-0
This pastiche of Ambrose Bierce's famous work is similar in format to
the Jargon File (and quotes several entries from TNHD-2) but somewhat
different in tone and intent. It is more satirical and less
anthropological, and is largely a product of the author's literate and
quirky imagination. For example, it defines `computer science' as "a
study akin to numerology and astrology, but lacking the precision of
the former and the success of the latter" and `implementation' as "The
fruitless struggle by the talented and underpaid to fulfill promises
made by the rich and ignorant"; `flowchart' becomes "to obfuscate a
problem with esoteric cartoons". Revised and expanded from "The
Devil's DP Dictionary", McGraw-Hill 1981, ISBN 0-07-034022-6.
:The Devouring Fungus: Tales from the Computer Age:
Karla Jennings
Norton, 1990
ISBN 0-393-30732-8
The author of this pioneering compendium knits together a great deal
of computer- and hacker-related folklore with good writing and a few
well-chosen cartoons. She has a keen eye for the human aspects of the
lore and is very good at illuminating the psychology and evolution of
hackerdom. Unfortunately, a number of small errors and awkwardnesses
suggest that she didn't have the final manuscript checked over by a
native speaker; the glossary in the back is particularly embarrassing,
and at least one classic tale (the Magic Switch story, retold here
under {A Story About `Magic'} in Appendix A is given in incomplete and
badly mangled form. Nevertheless, this book is a win overall and can
be enjoyed by hacker and non-hacker alike.
:The Soul of a New Machine:
Tracy Kidder
Little, Brown, 1981
(paperback: Avon, 1982
ISBN 0-380-59931-7)
This book (a 1982 Pulitzer Prize winner) documents the adventure of
the design of a new Data General computer, the MV-8000 Eagle. It is
an amazingly well-done portrait of the hacker mindset -- although
largely the hardware hacker -- done by a complete outsider. It is a
bit thin in spots, but with enough technical information to be
entertaining to the serious hacker while providing non-technical
people a view of what day-to-day life can be like -- the fun, the
excitement, the disasters. During one period, when the microcode and
logic were glitching at the nanosecond level, one of the overworked
engineers departed the company, leaving behind a note on his terminal
as his letter of resignation: "I am going to a commune in Vermont and
will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."
:Life with UNIX: a Guide for Everyone:
Don Libes and Sandy Ressler
Prentice-Hall, 1989
ISBN 0-13-536657-7
The authors of this book set out to tell you all the things about Unix
that tutorials and technical books won't. The result is gossipy,
funny, opinionated, downright weird in spots, and invaluable. Along
the way they expose you to enough of Unix's history, folklore and
humor to qualify as a first-class source for these things. Because so
much of today's hackerdom is involved with Unix, this in turn
illuminates many of its in-jokes and preoccupations.
:True Names ... and Other Dangers:
Vernor Vinge
Baen Books, 1987
ISBN 0-671-65363-6
Hacker demigod Richard Stallman used to say that the title story of
this book "expresses the spirit of hacking best". Until the subject
of the next entry came out, it was hard to even nominate another
contender. The other stories in this collection are also fine work by
an author who has since won multiple Hugos and is one of today's very
best practitioners of hard SF.
:Snow Crash:
Neal Stephenson
Bantam, 1992
ISBN 0-553-56261-4
Stephenson's epic, comic cyberpunk novel is deeply knowing about the
hacker psychology and its foibles in a way no other author of fiction
has ever even approached. His imagination, his grasp of the relevant
technical details, and his ability to communicate the excitement of
hacking and its results are astonishing, delightful, and (so far)
unsurpassed.
:Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier:
Katie Hafner & John Markoff
Simon & Schuster 1991
ISBN 0-671-68322-5
This book gathers narratives about the careers of three notorious
crackers into a clear-eyed but sympathetic portrait of hackerdom's
dark side. The principals are Kevin Mitnick, "Pengo" and "Hagbard" of
the Chaos Computer Club, and Robert T. Morris (see {RTM}, sense 2) .
Markoff and Hafner focus as much on their psychologies and motivations
as on the details of their exploits, but don't slight the latter. The
result is a balanced and fascinating account, particularly useful when
read immediately before or after Cliff Stoll's {The Cuckoo's Egg}. It
is especially instructive to compare RTM, a true hacker who blundered,
with the sociopathic phone-freak Mitnick and the alienated,
drug-addled crackers who made the Chaos Club notorious. The gulf
between {wizard} and {wannabee} has seldom been made more obvious.
:Technobabble:
John Barry
MIT Press 1991
ISBN 0-262-02333-4
Barry's book takes a critical and humorous look at the `technobabble'
of acronyms, neologisms, hyperbole, and metaphor spawned by the
computer industry. Though he discusses some of the same mechanisms of
jargon formation that occur in hackish, most of what he chronicles is
actually suit-speak -- the obfuscatory language of press releases,
marketroids, and Silicon Valley CEOs rather than the playful jargon of
hackers (most of whom wouldn't be caught dead uttering the kind of
pompous, passive-voiced word salad he deplores).
:The Cuckoo's Egg:
Clifford Stoll
Doubleday 1989
ISBN 0-385-24946-2
Clifford Stoll's absorbing tale of how he tracked Markus Hess and the
Chaos Club cracking ring nicely illustrates the difference between
`hacker' and `cracker'. Stoll's portrait of himself, his lady Martha,
and his friends at Berkeley and on the Internet paints a marvelously
vivid picture of how hackers and the people around them like to live
and how they think.
#===================== THE JARGON FILE ENDS HERE ====================#
