term% cat index.txt #======= THIS IS THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 4.4.0, 10 MAY 2003 =======#
The Jargon File (version 4.4.0)
________________________________________________________________
Table of Contents
Welcome to the Jargon File
1. Introduction
2. Of Slang, Jargon, and Techspeak
3. Revision History
4. Jargon Construction
Verb Doubling
Soundalike Slang
The -P Convention
Overgeneralization
Spoken inarticulations
Anthropomorphization
Comparatives
5. Hacker Writing Style
6. Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions
7. Hacker Speech Style
8. International Style
9. Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers
10. Pronunciation Guide
11. Other Lexicon Conventions
12. Format for New Entries
13. The Jargon Lexicon
A. Hacker Folklore
The Meaning of `Hack'
TV Typewriters: A Tale of Hackish Ingenuity
A Story About `Magic'
Some AI Koans
Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine
Moon instructs a student
Sussman attains enlightenment
Drescher and the toaster
OS and JEDGAR
The Story of Mel
B. A Portrait of J. Random Hacker
General Appearance
Dress
Reading Habits
Other Interests
Physical Activity and Sports
Education
Things Hackers Detest and Avoid
Food
Politics
Gender and Ethnicity
Religion
Ceremonial Chemicals
Communication Style
Geographical Distribution
Sexual Habits
Personality Characteristics
Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality
Miscellaneous
C. Helping Hacker Culture Grow
D. Bibliography
List of Tables
10.1. Vowels
11.1. Abbreviations
11.2. Origins
Welcome to the Jargon File
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 4.4.0''
or ``The on-line hacker Jargon File, version 4.4.0, 10 May 2003''.)
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 <esr@thyrsus.com>
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 three `authorized' editions so far are
described in the Revision History section; there may be more in the
future.
The Jargon File's online rendition uses an unusually large number of
special characters. This test page lists them so you can check what
your browser does with each one.
glyph description
l greek character lambda
L greek character Lambda
p greek character pi
£ pound sterling
〈 left angle bracket
〉 right angle bracket
æ ae ligature
ß German sharp-s sign
?1 similarity sign
(+) circle-plus
(×) circle-times
× times
{} empty set (used for APL null)
µ micro quantifier sign
-> right arrow
<=> horizontal double arrow
(TM) trademark symbol
® registered-trademark symbol
- minus
± plus-or-minus
Ø slashed-O
@ schwa
Chapter 1. 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 50 years old.
As usual with slang, the special vocabulary of hackers helps hold
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
surreal 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.
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, in the early 1990s it
became 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 since the early 1970s. 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. The `outside' reader's attention is particularly
directed to the Portrait of J. Random Hacker in Appendix B. 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.
Chapter 2. 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 communicate
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.
Chapter 3. 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, FTPed 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 Some 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 <esr@thyrsus.com> maintains the new File with
assistance from Guy L. Steele Jr. <gls@think.com>; 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 Eric.
(Warning: other email addresses and URLs appear in this file but are
not guaranteed to be correct after date of publication. Don't email
us if an attempt to reach someone bounces -- we have no magic way of
checking addresses or looking up people. If a web reference goes
stale, try a Google or Alta Vista search for relevant phrases.
Please try to review a recent copy of the on-line document before
submitting entries; it is available on the Web. It will often contain
new material not recorded in the latest paper snapshot that could
save you some typing. It also includes some submission guidelines not
reproduced here.
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 August 1993 as the second edition
of The New Hacker's Dictionary, again from MIT Press (ISBN
0-262-18154-1).
The 4.0.0 version was published in September 1996 as the third
edition of The New Hacker's Dictionary from MIT Press (ISBN
0-262-68092-0).
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 major revisions:
Version Date Lines Words Characters Entries Comments
2.1.1 Jun 12 1990 5485 42842 278958 790
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.
2.1.5 Nov 28 1990 6028 46946 307510 866
Changes and additions by ESR in response to numerous USENET
submissions and comment from the First Edition co-authors. The
Bibliography (Appendix C) was also appended.
2.2.1 Dec 15 1990 9394 75954 490501 1046
Most of the contents of the 1983 paper edition edited by Guy Steele
was merged in. Many more USENET submissions added, including the
International Style and the material on Commonwealth Hackish.
2.3.1 Jan 03 1991 10728 85070 558261 1138
The great format change -- case is no longer smashed in lexicon keys
and cross-references. A very few entries from jargon-1 which were
basically straight techspeak were deleted; this enabled the rest of
Appendix B (created in 2.1.1) to be merged back into main text and
the appendix replaced with the Portrait of J. Random Hacker. More
USENET submissions were added.
2.4.1 Jan 14 1991 12362 97819 642899 1239
The Story of Mel and many more USENET submissions merged in. More
material on hackish writing habits added. Numerous typo fixes.
2.6.1 Feb 12 1991 15011 118277 774942 1484
Second great format change; no more <> around headwords or
references. Merged in results of serious copy-editing passes by Guy
Steele, Mark Brader. Still more entries added.
2.7.1 Mar 01 1991 16087 126885 831872 1533
New section on slang/jargon/techspeak added. Results of Guy's second
edit pass merged in.
2.8.1 Mar 22 1991 17154 135647 888333 1602
Material from the TMRC Dictionary and MRC's editing pass merged in.
2.9.6 Aug 16 1991 18952 148629 975551 1702
Corresponds to reproduction copy for book.
2.9.8 Jan 01 1992 19509 153108 1006023 1760
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.
2.9.9 Apr 01 1992 20298 159651 1048909 1821
Folded in XEROX PARC lexicon.
2.9.10 Jul 01 1992 21349 168330 1106991 1891
lots of new historical material.
2.9.11 Jan 01 1993 21725 171169 1125880 1922
Lots of new historical material.
2.9.12 May 10 1993 22238 175114 1152467 1946
A few new entries & changes, marginal MUD/IRC slang and some
borderline techspeak removed, all in preparation for 2nd Edition of
TNHD.
3.0.0 Jul 27 1993 22548 177520 1169372 1961
Manuscript freeze for 2nd edition of TNHD.
3.1.0 Oct 15 1994 23197 181001 1193818 1990
Interim release to test WWW conversion.
3.2.0 Mar 15 1995 23822 185961 1226358 2031
Spring 1995 update.
3.3.0 Jan 20 1996 24055 187957 1239604 2045
Winter 1996 update.
3.3.1 Jan 25 1996 24147 188728 1244554 2050
Copy-corrected improvement on 3.3.0 shipped to MIT Press as a step
towards TNHD III.
4.0.0 Jul 25 1996 24801 193697 1281402 2067
The actual TNHD III version after copy-edit
4.1.0 8 Apr 1999 25777 206825 1359992 2217
The Jargon File rides again after three years.
4.2.0 31 Jan 2000 26598 214639 1412243 2267
Fix processing of URLs.
4.3.0 30 Apr 2001 27805 224978 1480215 2319
Special edition in honor of the first implementation of RFC 1149.
Also cleaned up a number of obsolete entries.
4.4.0 10 May 2003 32004 230012 1707139 2290
XML-Docbook format conversion. Serious pruning of old slang, nearly
100 entries failed the Google test and were removed.
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 <jn11+@andrew.cmu.edu>,
Bernie Cosell <cosell@bbn.com>, Earl Boebert <boebert@SCTC.com>, and
Joe Morris <jcmorris@mwunix.mitre.org>.
We were fortunate enough to have the aid of some accomplished
linguists. David Stampe <stampe@hawaii.edu> and Charles Hoequist
<hoequist@bnr.ca> contributed valuable criticism; Joe Keane
<jgk@osc.osc.com> helped us improve the pronunciation guides.
A few bits of this text quote previous works. We are indebted to
Brian A. LaMacchia <bal@zurich.ai.mit.edu> for obtaining permission
for us to use material from the TMRC Dictionary; also, Don Libes
<libes@cme.nist.gov> contributed some appropriate material from his
excellent book Life With UNIX. We thank Per Lindberg <per@front.se>,
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 <Marc_Weiser.PARC@xerox.com> 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 and Steve Summit <scs@eskimo.com> 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 a decade and several different editions has only
allowed him to escape co-editor credit by the slimmest of margins.
Finally, George V. Reilly <georgere@microsoft.com> helped with TeX
arcana and painstakingly proofread some 2.7 and 2.8 versions, and
Eric Tiedemann <est@thyrsus.com> contributed sage advice throughout
on rhetoric, amphigory, and philosophunculism.
Chapter 4. Jargon Construction
Table of Contents
Verb Doubling
Soundalike Slang
The -P Convention
Overgeneralization
Spoken inarticulations
Anthropomorphization
Comparatives
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
These two traditions fuse in the newsgroup
alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb, devoted to humor based on
deliberately confounding parts of speech. Several observers have
noted that the contents of this group is excellently representative
of the peculiarities of hacker humor.
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
* Wall Street Journal -> Wall Street Urinal
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
* Microsoft -> Microsloth
* Internet Explorer -> Internet Exploiter
* FrontPage -> AffrontPage
* VB.NET -> VB Nyet
* FrontPage -> AffrontPage
* Lotus Notes -> Lotus Bloats
* Microsoft Outlook -> Microsoft Outhouse
* Linux -> Linsux
* FreeBSD -> FreeLSD
* C# -> C Flat
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?"
[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 and 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.
The suffix "-full" can also be applied in generalized and fanciful
ways, as in "As soon as you have more than one cachefull of data, the
system starts thrashing," or "As soon as I have more than one
headfull of ideas, I start writing it all down." A common use is
"screenfull", meaning the amount of text that will fit on one screen,
usually in text mode where you have no choice as to character size.
Another common form is "bufferfull".
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 the
Hebrew-style `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 `Twenexen' was never used,
and `Unixen' was not sighted in the wild until the year 2000, thirty
years after it might logically have come into use; it has been
suggested that this is because `-ix' and `-ex' are Latin singular
endings that attract a Latinate plural. Among Perl hackers it is
reported that `comma' and `semicolon' pluralize as `commata' and
`semicola' respectively. 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, MUDs,
and IRC channels (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. English purists
and academic computer scientists frequently look down on others for
anthropomorphizing hardware and software, considering this sort of
behavior to be characteristic of naive misunderstanding. But most
hackers anthropomorphize freely, frequently describing program
behavior in terms of wants and desires.
Thus it is common 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". Or: "You can't run those two cards on the
same bus; they fight over interrupt 9."
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'.
At first glance, to anyone who understands how these programs
actually work, this seems like an absurdity. As hackers are among the
people who know best how these phenomena work, it seems odd that they
would use language that seems to ascribe consciousness to them. The
mind-set behind this tendency thus demands examination.
The key to understanding this kind of usage is that it 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'. To the contrary: hackers
who anthropomorphize are expressing not a vitalistic view of program
behavior but a mechanistic view of human behavior.
Almost all hackers subscribe to the mechanistic, materialistic
ontology of science (this is in practice true even of most of the
minority with contrary religious theories). In this view, people are
biological machines -- consciousness is an interesting and valuable
epiphenomenon, but mind is implemented in machinery which is not
fundamentally different in information-processing capacity from
computers.
Hackers tend to take this a step further and argue that the
difference between a substrate of CHON atoms and water and a
substrate of silicon and metal is a relatively unimportant one; what
matters, what makes a thing `alive', is information and richness of
pattern. This is animism from the flip side; it implies that humans
and computers and dolphins and rocks are all machines exhibiting a
continuum of modes of `consciousness' according to their
information-processing capacity.
Because hackers accept that a human machine can have intentions, it
is therefore easy for them to ascribe consciousness and intention to
other complex patterned systems such as computers. If consciousness
is mechanical, it is neither more or less absurd to say that "The
program wants to go into an infinite loop" than it is to say that "I
want to go eat some chocolate" -- and even defensible to say that
"The stone, once dropped, wants to move towards the center of the
earth".
This viewpoint has respectable company in academic philosophy. Daniel
Dennett organizes explanations of behavior using three stances: the
"physical stance" (thing-to-be-explained as a physical object), the
"design stance" (thing-to-be-explained as an artifact), and the
"intentional stance" (thing-to-be-explained as an agent with desires
and intentions). Which stances are appropriate is a matter not of
abstract truth but of utility. Hackers typically view simple programs
from the design stance, but more complex ones are often modelled
using the intentional stance.
It has also been argued that the anthropomorphization of software and
hardware reflects a blurring of the boundary between the programmer
and his artifacts -- the human qualities belong to the programmer and
the code merely expresses these qualities as his/her proxy. On this
view, a hacker saying a piece of code `got confused' is really saying
that he (or she) was confused about exactly what he wanted the
computer to do, the code naturally incorporated this confusion, and
the code expressed the programmer's confusion when executed by
crashing or otherwise misbehaving.
Note that by displacing from "I got confused" to "It got confused",
the programmer is not avoiding responsibility, but rather getting
some analytical distance in order to be able to consider the bug
dispassionately.
It has also been suggested that anthropomorphizing complex systems is
actually an expression of humility, a way of acknowleging that simple
rules we do understand (or that we invented) can lead to emergent
behavioral complexities that we don't completely understand.
All three explanations accurately model hacker psychology, and should
be considered complementary rather than competing.
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.
Chapter 5. 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. This returns British English to the style
many other languages (including Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan,
and German) have been using all along.
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). On FidoNet, you might see #bright# and ^dark^ text,
which was actually interpreted by some reader software. 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...", with irony
emphasized. The digraph ^H is often used as a print representation
for a backspace, and was actually very visible on old-style printing
terminals. As the text was being composed the characters would be
echoed and printed immediately, and when a correction was made the
backspace keystrokes would be echoed with the string `^H'. Of course,
the final composed text would have no trace of the backspace
characters (or the original erroneous text).
Accidental writing under erasure occurs when using the Unix talk
program to chat interactively to another user. On a PC-style keyboard
most users instinctively press the backspace key to delete mistakes,
but this may not achieve the desired effect, and merely displays a ^H
symbol. The user typically presses backspace a few times before their
brain realises the problem - especially likely if the user is a
touch-typist -- and since each character is transmitted as soon as it
is typed, Freudian slips and other inadvertent admissions are
(barring network delays) clearly visible for the other user to see.
Deliberate use of ^H for writing under erasure 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 faded in email as more mailers got good
editing capabilities, only to take on new life on IRCs and other
line-based chat systems.
charlie: I've seen that term used on alt.foobar often.
lisa: Send it to Erik for the File.
lisa: 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, and is
also used in Ada). 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. (TeX math mode also uses ^ for
exponention.) 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 (that is, 3 × 10 7) 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 <jrh578689@thudpucker.com> 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 mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!
</flame>
You'll even see this with an HTML-style attribute modifier:
<flame intensity="100%">
You seem well-suited for a career in government.
</flame>
Another recent (late 1990s) construction now common on Usenet seems
to be borrowed from Unix shell syntax or Perl. It consists of using a
dollar sign before an uppercased form of a word or acronym to suggest
any random member of the class indicated by the word. Thus: `$PHB'
means "any random member of the class `Pointy-Haired Boss'".
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.
Chapter 6. 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.
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 (notably Microsoft
Outlook and Outlook Express), 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).
Chapter 7. 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 may seem to
be asking the opposite question from "Are you going?", and so to
merit 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', German `doch', or Dutch `jawel' -- a word with
which one could unambiguously answer `yes' to a negative question.
(See also mu)
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!").
Chapter 8. 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. In German, many Unix terms in English are
casually declined as if they were German verbs -- thus:
mount/mounten/gemountet; grep/grepen/gegrept; fork/forken/geforkt;
core dump/core-dumpen, gecoredumpt. And Spanish-speaking hackers use
`linkear' (to link), `debugear' (to debug), and `lockear' (to lock).
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.
Chapter 9. Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers
From the early 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local,
MS-DOS-based bulletin boards developed separately from Internet
hackerdom. The BBS culture has, as its seamy underside, a stratum of
`pirate boards' inhabited by crackers, phone phreaks, and warez
d00dz. These people (mostly teenagers running IBM-PC clones from
their bedrooms) have developed their own characteristic jargon,
heavily influenced by skateboard lingo and underground-rock slang.
While BBS technology essentially died out after the Great Internet
Explosion, the cracker culture moved to IRC and other Internet-based
network channels and maintained a semi-underground existence.
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, and
hackers regard them with varying degrees of contempt. But ten years
on the brightest crackers tend to become hackers, and sometimes to
recall their origins by using cracker slang in a marked and heavily
ironic way.
This lexicon covers much of cracker slang (which is often called
"leet-speak") so the reader will be able to understand both what
leaks out of the cracker underground and the occasional ironic use by
hackers.
Here is a brief guide to cracker and warez d00dz usage:
* Misspell frequently. The substitutions phone -> fone and freak ->
phreak are obligatory.
* Always substitute `z's for `s's. (i.e. "codes" -> "codez"). The
substitution of `z' for `s' has evolved so that a `z' is now
systematically put at the end of words to denote an illegal or
cracking connection. Examples : Appz, passwordz, passez, utilz,
MP3z, distroz, pornz, sitez, gamez, crackz, serialz, downloadz,
FTPz, etc.
* 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").
* TYPE ALL IN CAPS LOCK, SO IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE YELLING ALL THE
TIME.
The following letter substitutions are common:
a -> 4
e -> 3
f -> ph
i -> 1 or |
l -> | or 1
m -> |\/|
n -> |\|
o -> 0
s -> 5
t -> 7 or +
Thus, "elite" comes out "31337" and "all your base are belong to us"
becomes "4ll y0ur b4s3 4r3 b3l0ng t0 us", Other less common
substitutions include:
b -> 8
c -> ( or k or |< or /<
d -> <|
g -> 6 or 9
h -> |-|
k -> |< or /<
p -> |2
u -> |_|
v -> / or \/
w -> // or \/\/
x -> ><
y -> '/
The word "cool" is spelled "kewl" and normally used ironically; when
crackers really want to praise something they use the prefix "uber"
(from German) which comes out "ub3r" or even "|_|83r"
These traits are similar to those of B1FF, who originated as a parody
of naive BBS users; also of his latter-day equivalent Jeff K..
Occasionally, this sort of distortion may be used as heavy sarcasm or
ironically by a real hacker, as in:
> I got X Windows running under Linux!
d00d! u R an 31337 hax0r
The words "hax0r" for "hacker" and "sux0r" for "sucks" are the most
common references; more generally, to mark a term as cracker-speak
one may add "0r" or "xor". Examples:
"The nightly build is sux0r today."
"Gotta go reboot those b0x0rz."
"Man, I really ought to fix0r my .fetchmailrc."
"Yeah, well he's a 'leet VMS operat0r now, so he's too good for u
s."
The only practice resembling this in native hacker usage is the
substitution of a dollar sign of `s' in names of products or service
felt to be excessively expensive, e.g. Compu$erve, Micro$oft.
For further discussion of the pirate-board subculture, see lamer,
elite, leech, poser, cracker, and especially warez d00dz, banner
site, ratio site, leech mode.
Chapter 10. 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:
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).
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).
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.
Vowels are represented as follows:
Table 10.1. Vowels
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 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 consonants 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'!)
Chapter 11. 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 before A, except that leading
dash is ignored. The case-blindness is a feature, not a bug.
Prefix ** 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 open source
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:
Table 11.1. Abbreviations
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:
Table 11.2. Origins
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 (now HP).
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 Systéme International, the name for the standard
abbreviations 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
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.
Chapter 12. Format for New Entries
We welcome new jargon, and corrections to or amplifications of
existing entries. You can improve your submission's chances of being
included by adding background information on user population and
years of currency. References to actual usage via URLs and/or Google
pointers are particularly welcomed.
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.
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.
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!
Chapter 13. The Jargon Lexicon
Table of Contents
[crunchly-1.png]
The Crunchly saga begins here.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-05-18.)
The infamous Crunchly cartoons by The Great Quux are woven into the
lexicon, each next to an appropriate entry. To read them in the
sequence in which they were written, chase pointers from here using
the `next cartoon' information in the captions. A few don't have next
pointers; these are vignettes from the 1973 Crunchland tableau spread
that inaugurated the strip.
0
(TM) : //
[Usenet] ASCII rendition of the (TM) 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.
/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 rasputin@kremlin.org, flames to /dev/null". See
bit bucket.
/me : //
[IRC; common] Under most IRC, /me is the "pose" command; if
you are logged on as Foonly and type "/me laughs", others
watching the channel will see "* Joe Foonly laughs". This
usage has been carried over to mail and news, where the reader
is expected to perform the same expansion in his or her head.
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 Ø is a letter, curse this arrangement). (Interestingly,
the slashed zero long predates computers; Florian Cajori's
monumental A History of Mathematical Notations notes that it
was used in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.) If letter-O
has a slash across it and the zero does not, your display is
tuned for a very old convention used at IBM and a few other
early mainframe makers (Scandinavians curse this arrangement
even more, because it means two of their letters collide).
Some Burroughs/Unisys equipment displays a zero with a
reversed slash. Old CDC computers rendered letter O as an
unbroken oval and 0 as an oval broken at upper right and lower
left. And yet another convention common on early line printers
left zero unornamented but added a tail or hook to the
letter-O so that it resembled an inverted Q or cursive capital
letter-O (this was endorsed by a draft ANSI standard for how
to draw ASCII characters, but the final standard changed the
distinguisher to a tick-mark in the upper-left corner). Are we
sufficiently confused yet?
1TBS : // , n.
The "One True Brace Style"; see indent style.
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). Several versions
of a joke have floated around the internet in which some idiot
programmer fixes the Y2K bug by changing all the Y's in
something to K's, as in Januark, Februark, etc.
404 : // , n.
[from the HTTP error "file not found on server"] Extended to
humans to convey that the subject has no idea or no clue --
sapience not found. May be used reflexively; "Uh, I'm 404ing"
means "I'm drawing a blank".
404 compliant : adj.
The status of a website which has been completely removed,
usually by the administrators of the hosting site as a result
of net abuse by the website operators. The term is a
tongue-in-cheek reference to the standard "301 compliant"
Murkowski Bill disclaimer used by spammers. See also: spam,
spamvertize.
@-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 U.S.
western regional SF convention) over the July 4th weekend in
1980. It is not clear exactly when the canonical @-party venue
shifted to the Worldcon but it had certainly become
established by Constellation in 1983. Sadly, the @-party
tradition has been in decline since about 1996, mainly because
having an @-address no longer functions as an effective lodge
pin.
We are informed, however, that rec.skydiving members have
maintained a tradition of formation jumps in the shape of an
@.
A
abbrev : /@-breev'/ , /@-brev'/ , n.
Common abbreviation for `abbreviation'.
ABEND : /a'bend/ , /@-bend'/ , n.
[ABnormal END]
1. Abnormal termination (of software); crash; lossage. Derives
from an error message on the IBM 360; used jokingly by hackers
but seriously mainly by code grinders. Usually capitalized,
but may appear as `abend'. Hackers will try to persuade you
that ABEND is called abend because it is what system operators
do to the machine late on Friday when they want to call it a
day, and hence is from the German `Abend' = `Evening'.
2. [alt.callahans] Absent By Enforced Net Deprivation -- used
in the subject lines of postings warning friends of an
imminent loss of Internet access. (This can be because of
computer downtime, loss of provider, moving or illness.)
Variants of this also appear: ABVND = `Absent By Voluntary Net
Deprivation' and ABSEND = `Absent By Self-Enforced Net
Deprivation' have been sighted.
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. [common; from the ASCII mnemonic for 0000110] Acknowledge.
Used to register one's presence (compare mainstream Yo!). An
appropriate response to ping or ENQ.
2. [from the comic strip Bloom County] An exclamation of
surprised disgust, esp. in "Ack pffft!" Semi-humorous.
Generally this sense is not spelled in caps (ACK) and is
distinguished by a following exclamation point.
3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell them you
understand their point (see NAK). Thus, for example, you might
cut off an overly long explanation with "Ack. Ack. Ack. I get
it now".
4. An affirmative. "Think we ought to ditch that damn NT
server for a Linux box?" "ACK!"
There is also a usage "ACK?" (from sense 1) meaning "Are you
there?", often used in email when earlier mail has produced no
reply, or during a lull in talk mode to see if the person has
gone away (the standard humorous response is of course NAK,
i.e., "I'm not here").
Acme : n.
[from Greek akme highest point of perfection or achievement]
The canonical supplier of bizarre, elaborate, and
non-functional gadgetry -- where Rube Goldberg and Heath
Robinson (two cartoonists who specialized in elaborate
contraptions) shop. The name has been humorously expanded as A
(or American) Company Making Everything. (In fact, Acme was a
real brand sold from Sears Roebuck catalogs in the early
1900s.) Describing some X as an "Acme X" either means "This is
insanely great", or, more likely, "This looks insanely great
on paper, but in practice it's really easy to shoot yourself
in the foot with it." Compare pistol.
This term, specially cherished by American hackers and
explained here for the benefit of our overseas brethren, comes
from the Warner Brothers' series of "Road-runner" cartoons. In
these cartoons, the famished Wile E. Coyote was forever
attempting to catch up with, trap, and eat the Road-runner.
His attempts usually involved one or more high-technology Rube
Goldberg devices -- rocket jetpacks, catapults, magnetic
traps, high-powered slingshots, etc. These were usually
delivered in large wooden crates labeled prominently with the
Acme name -- which, probably not by coincidence, was the trade
name of the animation rotation board used by cartoonists since
forever. Acme devices invariably malfunctioned in improbable
and violent ways.
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.
[73-10-31.png]
This is ad-hockery in action.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 74-08-18)
address harvester : n.
A robot that searches web pages and/or filters netnews traffic
looking for valid email addresses. Some address harvesters are
benign, used only for compiling address directories. Most,
unfortunately, are run by miscreants compiling address lists
to spam. Address harvesters can be foiled by a teergrube.
adger : /aj'r/ , vt.
[UCLA mutant of nadger, poss. also from the middle name of an
infamous tenured graduate student] To make a bonehead move
with consequences that could have been foreseen with even
slight mental effort. E.g., "He started removing files and
promptly adgered the whole project". Compare dumbass attack.
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. (Woods
had been one of the authors of INTERCAL.) Now better known as
Adventure or Colossal Cave Adventure, but the TOPS-10
operating system permitted only six-letter filenames. 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.
ADVENT sources are available for FTP at
ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/doc/misc/if-archive/games/source/advent.ta
r.Z. You can also play it as a Java applet.
adware : n.
Software which is free to download and use but includes pop-up
banner ads somewhere. See also -ware.
AFAIK : // , n.
[Usenet; common] Abbrev. for "As Far As I Know". There is a
variant AFAICT "As Far As I Can Tell"; where AFAIK suggests
that the writer knows his knowledge is limited, AFAICT
suggests that he feels his knowledge is as complete as anybody
else's buit that the best available knowledge does not support
firm conclusions.
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.
AFK
[MUD] Abbrev. for "Away From Keyboard". Used to notify others
that you will be momentarily unavailable online. eg. "Let's
not go kill that frost giant yet, I need to go AFK to make a
phone call". Often MUDs will have a command to politely inform
others of your absence when they try to talk with you. The
term is not restricted to MUDs, however, and has become common
in many chat situations, from IRC to Unix talk.
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 (2002)
to solve them have foundered on the amount of context
information and `intelligence' they seem to require. See also
gedanken.
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, elegant.
Alderson loop : n.
[Intel] A special version of an infinite loop where there is
an exit condition available, but inaccessible in the current
implementation of the code. Typically this is created while
debugging user interface code. An example would be when there
is a menu stating, "Select 1-3 or 9 to quit" and 9 is not
allowed by the function that takes the selection from the
user.
This term received its name from a programmer who had coded a
modal message box in MSAccess with no Ok or Cancel buttons,
thereby disabling the entire program whenever the box came up.
The message box had the proper code for dismissal and even was
set up so that when the non-existent Ok button was pressed the
proper code would be called.
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 (are aliases for) a
given hunk of storage, it may happen that the storage is freed
or reallocated (and thus moved) through one alias and then
referenced through another, which may lead to subtle (and
possibly intermittent) lossage depending on the state and the
allocation history of the malloc arena. Avoidable by use of
allocation strategies that never alias allocated core, or by
use of higher-level languages, such as LISP, which employ a
garbage collector (see GC). Also called a stale pointer bug.
See also precedence lossage, smash the stack, fandango on
core, memory leak, memory smash, overrun screw, spam.
Historical note: Though this term is nowadays associated with
C programming, it was already in use in a very similar sense
in the Algol-60 and FORTRAN communities in the 1960s.
Alice and Bob : n.
The archetypal individuals used as examples in discussions of
cryptographic protocols. Originally, theorists would say
something like: "A communicates with someone who claims to be
B, So to be sure, A tests that B knows a secret number K. So A
sends to B a random number X. B then forms Y by encrypting X
under key K and sends Y back to A" Because this sort of thing
is quite hard to follow, theorists stopped using the unadorned
letters A and B to represent the main players and started
calling them Alice and Bob. So now we say "Alice communicates
with someone claiming to be Bob, and to be sure, Alice tests
that Bob knows a secret number K. Alice sends to Bob a random
number X. Bob then forms Y by encrypting X under key K and
sends Y back to Alice". A whole mythology rapidly grew up
around the metasyntactic names; see
http://www.conceptlabs.co.uk/alicebob.html.
In Bruce Schneier's definitive introductory text Applied
Cryptography (2nd ed., 1996, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN
0-471-11709-9) he introduced a table of dramatis personae
headed by Alice and Bob. Others include Carol (a participant
in three- and four-party protocols), Dave (a participant in
four-party protocols), Eve (an eavesdropper), Mallory (a
malicious active attacker), Trent (a trusted arbitrator),
Walter (a warden), Peggy (a prover) and Victor (a verifier).
These names for roles are either already standard or, given
the wide popularity of the book, may be expected to quickly
become so.
All hardware sucks, all software sucks. : prov.
[from scary devil monastery] A general recognition of the
fallibility of any computer system, ritually intoned as an
attempt to quell incipient {holy wars}. It is a common
response to any sort of bigot. When discussing Wintel systems,
however, it is often snidely appended with, `but some suck
more than others.'
all your base are belong to us
A declaration of victory or superiority. The phrase stems from
a 1991 adaptation of Toaplan's "Zero Wing" shoot-'em-up arcade
game for the Sega Genesis game console. A brief introduction
was added to the opening screen, and it has what many consider
to be the worst Japanese-to-English translation in video game
history. The introduction shows the bridge of a starship in
chaos as a Borg-like figure named CATS materializes and says,
"How are you gentlemen!! All your base are belong to us."
[sic] In 2001, this amusing mistranslation spread virally
through the internet, bringing with it a slew of JPEGs and a
movie of hacked photographs, each showing a street sign, store
front, package label, etc. hacked to read "All your base are
belong to us" or one of the other many supremely dopey lines
from the game (such as "Somebody set us up the bomb!!!" or
"What happen?"). When these phrases are used properly, the
overall effect is both screamingly funny and somewhat
chilling, reminiscent of the B movie "They Live".
The original has been generalized to "All your X are belong to
us", where X is filled in to connote a sinister takeover of
some sort. Thus, "When Joe signed up for his new job at
Yoyodyne, he had to sign a draconian NDA. It basically said:
All your code are belong to us." Has many of the connotations
of "Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated" (see Borg).
Considered silly, and most likely to be used by the type of
person that finds Jeff K. hilarious.
alpha geek : n.
[from animal ethologists' alpha male] The most technically
accomplished or skillful person in some implied context. "Ask
Larry, he's the alpha geek here."
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 `option' key on a Macintosh; use of this term
usually reveals that the speaker hacked PCs before coming to
the Mac (see also feature key, which is sometimes incorrectly
called `alt').
3. The alt hierarchy on Usenet, the tree of newsgroups created
by users without a formal vote and approval procedure. There
is a myth, not entirely implausible, that alt is acronymic for
"anarchists, lunatics, and terrorists"; but in fact it is
simply short for "alternative".
4. n.,obs. Rare alternate name for the ASCII ESC character
(ASCII 0011011). This use, derives, with the alt key itself,
from archaic PDP-10 operating systems, especially ITS.
alt bit : /awlt bit/ , adj.
See meta bit.
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.
ambimouseterous : /am-b@-mows'ter-us/ , /am-b@-mows'trus/ , adj
[modeled on ambidextrous] Able to use a mouse with either
hand.
Amiga : n
A series of personal computer models originally sold by
Commodore, based on 680x0 processors, custom support chips and
an operating system that combined some of the best features of
Macintosh and Unix with compatibility with neither.
The Amiga was released just as the personal computing world
standardized on IBM-PC clones. This prevented it from gaining
serious market share, despite the fact that the first Amigas
had a substantial technological lead on the IBM XTs of the
time. Instead, it acquired a small but zealous population of
enthusiastic hackers who dreamt of one day unseating the
clones (see Amiga Persecution Complex). The traits of this
culture are both spoofed and illuminated in The BLAZE Humor
Viewer. The strength of the Amiga platform seeded a small
industry of companies building software and hardware for the
platform, especially in graphics and video applications (see
video toaster).
Due to spectacular mismanagement, Commodore did hardly any
R&D, allowing the competition to close Amiga's technological
lead. After Commodore went bankrupt in 1994 the technology
passed through several hands, none of whom did much with it.
However, the Amiga is still being produced in Europe under
license and has a substantial number of fans, which will
probably extend the platform's life considerably.
Amiga Persecution Complex : n.
The disorder suffered by a particularly egregious variety of
bigot, those who believe that the marginality of their
preferred machine is the result of some kind of industry-wide
conspiracy (for without a conspiracy of some kind, the eminent
superiority of their beloved shining jewel of a platform would
obviously win over all, market pressures be damned!) Those
afflicted are prone to engaging in flame wars and calling for
boycotts and mailbombings. Amiga Persecution Complex is by no
means limited to Amiga users; NeXT, NeWS, OS/2, Macintosh,
LISP, and GNU users are also common victims. Linux users used
to display symptoms very frequently before Linux started
winning; some still do. See also newbie, troll, holy wars,
weenie, Get a life!.
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.
and there was much rejoicing
[from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail.]
Acknowledgement of a notable accomplishment. Something
long-awaited, widely desired, possibly unexpected but secretly
wished-for, with a suggestion that something about the problem
(and perhaps the steps necessary to make it go away) was
deeply disturbing to hacker sensibilities.
In person, the phrase is almost invariably pronounced with the
same portentious intonation as the movie. The customary
in-person (approving) response is a weak and halfhearted
"Yaaaay...", with one index finger raised like a flag and
moved in a small circle. The reason for this, like most of the
Monty Python oeuvre, cannot easily be explained outside its
original context.
Example: "changelog entry #436: with the foo driver brain
damage taken care of, finally obsoleted BROKEN_EVIL_KLUDGE.
Removed from source tree. (And there was much rejoicing)."
Angband : n. , /ang'band/
Like nethack, moria, and rogue, one of the large freely
distributed Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games,
available for a wide range of machines and operating systems.
The name is from Tolkien's Pits of Angband (compare elder
days, elvish). Has been described as "Moria on steroids"; but,
unlike Moria, many aspects of the game are customizable. This
leads many hackers and would-be hackers into fooling with
these instead of doing productive work. There are many Angband
variants, of which the most notorious is probably the rather
whimsical Zangband. In this game, when a key that does not
correspond to a command is pressed, the game will display
"Type ? for help" 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time,
random error messages including "An error has occurred because
an error of type 42 has occurred" and "Windows 95 uninstalled
successfully" will be displayed. Zangband also allows the
player to kill Santa Claus (who has some really good stuff,
but also has a lot of friends), "Bull Gates", and Barney the
Dinosaur (but be watchful; Barney has a nasty case of
halitosis). There is an official angband home page at
http://thangorodrim.angband.org/ and a zangband one at
http://www.zangband.org/. See also Random Number God.
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 lang 〈 and rang 〉
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 bot.
annoyware : n.
A type of shareware that frequently disrupts normal program
operation to display requests for payment to the author in
return for the ability to disable the request messages. (Also
called nagware) The requests generally require user action to
acknowledge the message before normal operation is resumed and
are often tied to the most frequently used features of the
software. See also careware, charityware, crippleware,
freeware, FRS, guiltware, postcardware, and -ware; compare
payware.
ANSI standard : /an'see stan'd@rd/
The ANSI standard usage of ANSI standard refers to any
practice which is typical or broadly done. It's most
appropriately applied to things that everyone does that are
not quite regulation. For example: ANSI standard shaking of a
laser printer cartridge to get extra life from it, or the ANSI
standard word tripling in names of usenet alt groups.
This usage derives from the American National Standards
Institute. ANSI, along with the International Organization for
Standards (ISO), standardized the C programming language (see
K&R, Classic C), and promulgates many other important software
standards.
ANSI standard pizza : /an'see stan'd@rd peet'z@/
[CMU] Pepperoni and mushroom pizza. Coined allegedly because
most pizzas ordered by CMU hackers during some period leading
up to mid-1990 were of that flavor. See also rotary debugger;
compare ISO standard cup of tea.
anti-idiotarianism : n.
[very common] Opposition to idiots of all political stripes.
First coined in the blog named Little Green Footballs as part
of a post expressing disgust with inane responses to post-9/11
Islamic terrorism. Anti-idiotarian wrath has focused on
Islamic terrorists and their sympathizers in the Western
political left, but also routinely excoriated right-wing
politicians backing repressive 'anti-terror` legislation and
Christian religious figures who (in the blogosphere's view of
the matter) have descended nearly to the level of jihad
themselves.
AOL! : n.
[Usenet] Common synonym for "Me, too!" alluding to the
legendary propensity of America Online users to utter
contentless "Me, too!" postings. The number of exclamation
points following varies from zero to five or so. The
pseudo-HTML
<AOL>Me, too!</AOL>
is also frequently seen. See also September that never ended.
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.
Archimedes
The world's first RISC microcomputer, available only in the
British Commonwealth and europe. Built in 1987 in Great
Britain by Acorn Computers, it was legendary for its use of
the ARM-2 microprocessor as a CPU. Many a novice hacker in the
Commonwealth first learnt his or her skills on the Archimedes,
since it was specifically designed for use in schools and
educational institutions. Owners of Archimedes machines are
often still treated with awe and reverence. Familiarly,
"archi".
arena : n.
[common; Unix] 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
cancelbot created by Dick Depew of Munroe Falls, Ohio. ARMM
was intended to automatically cancel posts from
anonymous-posting sites. Unfortunately, the robot's recognizer
for anonymous postings triggered on its own
automatically-generated control messages! Transformed by this
stroke of programming ineptitude into a monster of
Frankensteinian proportions, it broke loose on the night of
March 30, 1993 and proceeded to spam news.admin.policy with a
recursive explosion of over 200 messages.
ARMM's bug produced a recursive cascade of messages each of
which mechanically added text to the ID and Subject and some
other headers of its parent. This produced a flood of messages
in which each header took up several screens and each message
ID and subject line got longer and longer and longer.
Reactions varied from amusement to outrage. The pathological
messages crashed at least one mail system, and upset people
paying line charges for their Usenet feeds. One poster
described the ARMM debacle as "instant Usenet history" (also
establishing the term despew), and it has since been widely
cited as a cautionary example of the havoc the combination of
good intentions and incompetence can wreak on a network. The
Usenet thread on the subject is archived here. Compare Great
Worm; sorcerer's apprentice mode. See also software laser,
network meltdown.
armor-plated : n.
Syn. for bulletproof.
asbestos : adj.
[common] Used as a modifier to anything intended to protect
one from flames; also in other highly flame-suggestive usages.
See, for example, asbestos longjohns and asbestos cork award.
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.
[originally an acronym (American Standard Code for Information
Interchange) but now merely conventional] The predominant
character set encoding of present-day computers. The standard
version uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier
codes (including early drafts of ASCII prior to June 1961)
used fewer. This change allowed the inclusion of lowercase
letters -- a major win -- but it did not provide for accented
letters or any other letterforms not used in English (such as
the German sharp-S ß. or the ae-ligature æ which is a letter
in, for example, Norwegian). It could be worse, though. It
could be much worse. See EBCDIC to understand how. A history
of ASCII and its ancestors is at
http://www.wps.com/texts/codes/index.html.
Computers are much pickier and less flexible about spelling
than humans; thus, hackers need to be very precise when
talking about characters, and have developed a considerable
amount of verbal shorthand for them. Every character has one
or more names -- some formal, some concise, some silly. Common
jargon names for ASCII characters are collected here. See also
individual entries for bang, excl, open, ques, semi, shriek,
splat, twiddle, and Yu-Shiang Whole Fish.
This list derives from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII
pronunciation guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII
order; character pairs are sorted in by first member. For each
character, common names are given in rough order of
popularity, followed by names that are reported but rarely
seen; official ANSI/CCITT names are surrounded by brokets: <>.
Square brackets mark the particularly silly names introduced
by INTERCAL. The abbreviations "l/r" and "o/c" stand for
left/right and "open/close" respectively. Ordinary
parentheticals provide some usage information.
! Common: bang ; pling; excl; not; shriek; ball-bat; <exclamation
mark>. Rare: factorial; exclam; smash; cuss; boing; yell; wow; hey;
wham; eureka; [spark-spot]; soldier, control.
" Common: double quote; quote. Rare: literal mark; double-glitch;
snakebite; <quotation marks>; <dieresis>; dirk; [rabbit-ears]; double
prime.
# Common: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp; crunch ; hex;
[mesh]. Rare: grid; crosshatch; octothorpe; flash; <square>, pig-pen;
tictactoe; scratchmark; thud; thump; splat .
$ Common: dollar; <dollar sign>. Rare: currency symbol; buck; cash;
string (from BASIC); escape (when used as the echo of ASCII ESC);
ding; cache; [big money].
% Common: percent; <percent sign>; mod; grapes. Rare:
[double-oh-seven].
& Common: <ampersand>; amp; amper; and, and sign. Rare: address (from
C); reference (from C++); andpersand; bitand; background (from sh(1)
); pretzel. [INTERCAL called this ampersand ; what could be sillier?]
' Common: single quote; quote; <apostrophe>. Rare: prime; glitch;
tick; irk; pop; [spark]; <closing single quotation mark>; <acute
accent>.
( ) Common: l/r paren; l/r parenthesis; left/right; open/close; par
en/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/unparen
thisey; l/r ear.
* Common: star; [ splat ]; <asterisk>. Rare: wildcard; gear; dingle;
mult; spider; aster; times; twinkle; glob (see glob ); Nathan Hale .
+ Common: <plus>; add. Rare: cross; [intersection].
, Common: <comma>. Rare: <cedilla>; [tail].
- Common: dash; <hyphen>; <minus>. Rare: [worm]; option; dak;
bithorpe.
. Common: dot; point; <period>; <decimal point>. Rare: radix point;
full stop; [spot].
/ Common: slash; stroke; <slant>; forward slash. Rare: diagonal;
solidus; over; slak; virgule; [slat].
: Common: <colon>. Rare: dots; [two-spot].
; Common: <semicolon>; semi. Rare: weenie; [hybrid], pit-thwong.
< > Common: <less/greater than>; bra/ket; l/r angle; l/r angle
bracket; l/r broket. Rare: from/{into, towards}; read from/write to;
suck/blow; comes-from/gozinta; in/out; crunch/zap (all from UNIX);
tic/tac; [angle/right angle].
= Common: <equals>; gets; takes. Rare: quadrathorpe; [half-mesh].
? Common: query; <question mark>; ques . Rare: quiz; whatmark;
[what]; wildchar; huh; hook; buttonhook; hunchback.
@ Common: at sign; at; strudel. Rare: each; vortex; whorl;
[whirlpool]; cyclone; snail; ape; cat; rose; cabbage; <commercial
at>.
V Rare: [book].
[ ] Common: l/r square bracket; l/r bracket; <opening/closing brack
et>; bracket/unbracket. Rare: square/unsquare; [U turn/U turn back].
\ Common: backslash, hack, whack; escape (from C/UNIX); reverse
slash; slosh; backslant; backwhack. Rare: bash; <reverse slant>;
reversed virgule; [backslat].
^ Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret; <circumflex>. Rare: xor sign,
chevron; [shark (or shark-fin)]; to the (`to the power of'); fang;
pointer (in Pascal).
_ Common: <underline>; underscore; underbar; under. Rare: score;
backarrow; skid; [flatworm].
` Common: backquote; left quote; left single quote; open quote;
<grave accent>; grave. Rare: backprime; [backspark]; unapostrophe;
birk; blugle; back tick; back glitch; push; <opening single quotation
mark>; quasiquote.
{ } Common: o/c brace; l/r brace; l/r squiggly; l/r squiggly
bracket/brace; l/r curly bracket/brace; <opening/closing brace>.
Rare: brace/unbrace; curly/uncurly; leftit/rytit; l/r squirrelly;
[embrace/bracelet]. A balanced pair of these may be called curlies .
| Common: bar; or; or-bar; v-bar; pipe; vertical bar. Rare: <vertical
line>; gozinta; thru; pipesinta (last three from UNIX); [spike].
~ Common: <tilde>; squiggle; twiddle ; not. Rare: approx; wiggle;
swung dash; enyay; [sqiggle (sic)].
The pronunciation of # as `pound' is common in the U.S. but a
bad idea; Commonwealth Hackish has its own, rather more
apposite use of `pound sign' (confusingly, on British
keyboards the £ happens to replace #; thus Britishers
sometimes call # on a U.S.-ASCII keyboard `pound', compounding
the American error). The U.S. usage derives from an
old-fashioned commercial practice of using a # suffix to tag
pound weights on bills of lading. The character is usually
pronounced `hash' outside the U.S. There are more culture wars
over the correct pronunciation of this character than any
other, which has led to the ha ha only serious suggestion that
it be pronounced `shibboleth' (see Judges 12:6 in an Old
Testament or Tanakh).
The `uparrow' name for circumflex and `leftarrow' name for
underline are historical relics from archaic ASCII (the 1963
version), which had these graphics in those character
positions rather than the modern punctuation characters.
The `swung dash' or `approximation' sign (?1) is not quite the
same as tilde ~ in typeset material, but the ASCII tilde
serves for both (compare angle brackets).
Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The #, $, >, and
& characters, for example, are all pronounced "hex" in
different communities because various assemblers use them as a
prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in particular, # in many
assembler-programming cultures, $ in the 6502 world, > at
Texas Instruments, and & on the BBC Micro, Sinclair, and some
Z80 machines). See also splat.
The inability of ASCII text to correctly represent any of the
world's other major languages makes the designers' choice of 7
bits look more and more like a serious misfeature as the use
of international networks continues to increase (see software
rot). Hardware and software from the U.S. still tends to
embody the assumption that ASCII is the universal character
set and that characters have 7 bits; this is a major irritant
to people who want to use a character set suited to their own
languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem
by proliferating `national' character sets produce an
evolutionary pressure to use a smaller subset common to all
those in use.
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 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
The next step beyond static tableaux in ASCII art is ASCII
animation. There are not many large examples of this; perhaps
the best known is the ASCII animation of the original Star
Wars movie at http://www.asciimation.co.nz/.
There is a newsgroup, alt.ascii-art, devoted to this genre;
however, see also warlording.
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 beginning. "At my video store, they used their computer to
sort the videos into ASCIIbetical order, so I couldn't find
`Crocodile Dundee' until I thought to look before `2001' and
`48 HRS.'!"
astroturfing : n.
1. The use of paid shills to create the impression of a
popular movement, through means like letters to newspapers
from soi-disant `concerned citizens', paid opinion pieces, and
the formation of grass-roots lobbying groups that are actually
funded by a PR group (AstroTurf is fake grass; hence the
term).
2. What an individual posting to a public forum under an
assumed name is said to be doing.
This term became common among hackers after it came to light
in early 1998 that Microsoft had attempted to use such tactics
to forestall the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust action
against the company. The maneuver backfired horribly, angering
a number of state attorneys-general enough to induce them to
go public with plans to join the Federal suit. It also set
anybody defending Microsoft on the net for the accusation
"You're just astroturfing!".
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-.
Aunt Tillie : n.
[linux-kernel mailing list] The archetypal non-technical user,
one's elderly and scatterbrained maiden aunt. Invoked in
discussions of usability for people who are not hackers and
geeks; one sees references to the "Aunt Tillie test".
AUP : /A-U-P/
Abbreviation, "Acceptable Use Policy". The policy of a given
ISP which sets out what the ISP considers to be (un)acceptable
uses of its Internet resources.
autobogotiphobia : /aw'toh-boh-got`@-foh'bee-@/
n. See bogotify.
autoconfiscate
To set up or modify a source-code distribution so that it
configures and builds using the GNU project's
autoconf/automake/libtools suite. Among open-source hackers, a
mere running binary of a program is not considered a full
release; what's interesting is a source tree that can be built
into binaries using standard tools. Since the mid-1990s,
autoconf and friends been the standard way to adapt a
distribution for portability so that it can be built on
multiple operating systems without change.
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 in
jargon and probably much earlier. The word `automagic'
occurred in advertising (for a shirt-ironing gadget) as far
back as the late 1940s.
avatar : n.
[in Hindu mythology, the incarnation of a god]
1. Among people working on virtual reality and cyberspace
interfaces, an avatar is an icon or representation of a user
in a shared virtual reality. The term is sometimes used on
MUDs.
2. [CMU, Tektronix] root, superuser. There are quite a few
Unix machines on which the name of the superuser account is
`avatar' rather than `root'. This quirk was originated by a
CMU hacker who found the terms root and superuser
unimaginative, and thought `avatar' might better impress
people with the responsibility they were accepting.
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
B1FF : /bif/ , BIFF , n.
The most famous pseudo, and the prototypical newbie. Articles
from B1FF feature all uppercase letters sprinkled liberally
with bangs, typos, `cute' misspellings (EVRY BUDY LUVS GOOD
OLD BIFF CUZ KØ}@oslash;L DOOD AN HE RITES REEL AWESUM THINGZ
IN CAPITULL LETTRS LIKE THIS!!!), use (and often misuse) of
fragments of talk mode abbreviations, a long sig block
(sometimes even a doubled sig), and unbounded naivete. B1FF
posts articles using his elder brother's VIC-20. B1FF's
location is a mystery, as his articles appear to come from a
variety of sites. However, BITNET seems to be the most
frequent origin. The theory that B1FF is a denizen of BITNET
is supported by B1FF's (unfortunately invalid) electronic mail
address: B1FF@BIT.NET.
[1993: Now It Can Be Told! My spies inform me that B1FF was
originally created by Joe Talmadge <jat@cup.hp.com>, also the
author of the infamous and much-plagiarized "Flamer's Bible".
The BIFF filter he wrote was later passed to Richard Sexton,
who posted BIFFisms much more widely. Versions have since been
posted for the amusement of the net at large. See also Jeff K.
--ESR]
B5 : //
[common] Abbreviation for "Babylon 5", a science-fiction TV
series as revered among hackers as was the original Star Trek.
back door : n.
[common] A hole in the security of a system deliberately left
in place by designers or maintainers. The motivation for such
holes is not always sinister; some operating systems, for
example, come out of the box with privileged accounts intended
for use by field service technicians or the vendor's
maintenance programmers. Syn. trap door; may also be called a
wormhole. See also iron box, cracker, worm, logic bomb.
Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer
than anyone expected or planned, and a few have become widely
known. Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM
admitted the existence of a back door in early Unix versions
that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security
hack of all time. In this scheme, the C compiler contained
code that would recognize when the login command was being
recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen
by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an
account had been created for him.
Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from
the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler.
But to recompile the compiler, you have to use the compiler --
so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would recognize
when it was compiling a version of itself, and insert into the
recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled
login the code to allow Thompson entry -- and, of course, the
code to recognize itself and do the whole thing again the next
time around! And having done this once, he was then able to
recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack
perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place
and active but with no trace in the sources.
The Turing lecture that reported this truly moby hack was
later published as "Reflections on Trusting Trust",
Communications of the ACM 27, 8 (August 1984), pp. 761--763
(text available at http://www.acm.org/classics/). Ken Thompson
has since confirmed that this hack was implemented and that
the Trojan Horse code did appear in the login binary of a Unix
Support group machine. Ken says the crocked compiler was never
distributed. Your editor has heard two separate reports that
suggest that the crocked login did make it out of Bell Labs,
notably to BBN, and that it enabled at least one late-night
login across the network by someone using the login name `kt'.
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. During most of its lifetime, the Cabal (as it
was sometimes capitalized) steadfastly denied its own
existence; it was almost obligatory for anyone privy to their
secrets to respond "There is no Cabal" whenever the existence
or activities of the group were speculated on in public.
The result of this policy was an attractive aura of mystery.
Even a decade after the cabal mailing list disbanded in late
1988 following a bitter internal catfight, many people
believed (or claimed to believe) that it had not actually
disbanded but only gone deeper underground with its power
intact.
This belief became a model for various paranoid theories about
various Cabals with dark nefarious objectives beginning with
taking over the Usenet or Internet. These paranoias were later
satirized in ways that took on a life of their own. See Eric
Conspiracy for one example.
See NANA for the subsequent history of "the Cabal".
backbone site : n.,obs.
Formerly, a key Usenet and email site, one that processes a
large amount of third-party traffic, especially if it is the
home site of any of the regional coordinators for the Usenet
maps. Notable backbone sites as of early 1993, when this sense
of the term was beginning to pass out of general use due to
wide availability of cheap Internet connections, included
uunet and the mail machines at Rutgers University, UC
Berkeley, DEC's Western Research Laboratories, Ohio State
University, and the University of Texas. Compare leaf site.
[2001 update: This term has passed into history. The UUCP
network world that gave it meaning is gone; everyone is on the
Internet now and network traffic is distributed in very
different patterns. Today one might see references to a
`backbone router' instead --ESR]
backgammon
See bignum (sense 3), moby (sense 4), and pseudoprime.
background : n.,adj.,vt.
[common] To do a task in background is to do it whenever
foreground matters are not claiming your undivided attention,
and to background something means to relegate it to a lower
priority. "For now, we'll just print a list of nodes and
links; I'm working on the graph-printing problem in
background." Note that this implies ongoing activity but at a
reduced level or in spare time, in contrast to mainstream
`back burner' (which connotes benign neglect until some future
resumption of activity). Some people prefer to use the term
for processing that they have queued up for their unconscious
minds (a tack that one can often fruitfully take upon
encountering an obstacle in creative work). Compare amp off,
slopsucker.
Technically, a task running in background is detached from the
terminal where it was started (and often running at a lower
priority); oppose foreground. Nowadays this term is primarily
associated with Unix, but it appears to have been first used
in this sense on OS/360.
backreference : n.
1. In a regular expression or pattern match, the text which
was matched within grouping parentheses
2. The part of the pattern which refers back to the matched
text.
3. By extension, anything which refers back to something which
has been seen or discussed before. "When you said `she' just
now, who were you backreferencing?"
backronym : n.
[portmanteau of back + acronym] A word interpreted as an
acronym that was not originally so intended. This is a special
case of what linguists call `back formation'. Examples are
given under recursive acronym (Cygnus), Acme, and mung.
Discovering backronyms is a common form of wordplay among
hackers. Compare retcon.
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 and Wrong : adj.
[Durham, UK] Said of something that is both badly designed and
wrongly executed. This common term is the prototype of, and is
used by contrast with, three less common terms -- Bad and
Right (a kludge, something ugly but functional); Good and
Wrong (an overblown GUI or other attractive nuisance); and
(rare praise) Good and Right. These terms entered common use
at Durham c.1994 and may have been imported from elsewhere;
they are also in use at Oxford, and the emphatic form "Evil
and Bad and Wrong" (abbreviated EBW) is reported from there.
There are standard abbreviations: they start with B&R, a typo
for "Bad and Wrong". Consequently, B&W is actually "Bad and
Right", G&R = "Good and Wrong", and G&W = "Good and Right".
Compare evil and rude, Good Thing, Bad Thing.
Bad Thing : n.
[very common; always pronounced as if capitalized. Orig. fr.
the 1930 Sellar & Yeatman parody of British history 1066 And
All That, but well-established among hackers in the U.S. as
well.] Something that can't possibly result in improvement of
the subject. This term is always capitalized, as in "Replacing
all of the DSL links with bicycle couriers would be a Bad
Thing". Oppose Good Thing. British correspondents confirm that
Bad Thing and Good Thing (and prob. therefore Right Thing and
Wrong Thing) come from the book referenced in the etymology,
which discusses rulers who were Good Kings but Bad Things.
This has apparently created a mainstream idiom on the British
side of the pond. It is very common among American hackers,
but not in mainstream usage in the U.S. Compare Bad and Wrong.
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 a douche bag or the scrotum (we
have reports of "Bite the douche bag!" being used as a taunt
at MIT 1970-1976, and we have another report that "Bite the
bag!" was in common use at least as early as 1965), but in
their current usage they have become almost completely
sanitized.
bagbiting : adj.
[MIT; now rare] Having the quality of a bagbiter. "This
bagbiting system won't let me compute the factorial of a
negative number." Compare losing, cretinous, bletcherous,
`barfucious' (under barfulous) and `chomping' (under chomp).
baggy pantsing : v.
[Georgia Tech] A "baggy pantsing" is used to reprimand hackers
who incautiously leave their terminals unlocked. The affected
user will come back to find a post from them on internal
newsgroups discussing exactly how baggy their pants are, an
accepted stand-in for "unattentive user who left their work
unprotected in the clusters". A properly-done baggy pantsing
is highly mocking and humorous. It is considered bad form to
post a baggy pantsing to off-campus newsgroups or the more
technical, serious groups. A particularly nice baggy pantsing
may be "claimed" by immediately quoting the message in full,
followed by your sig block; this has the added benefit of
keeping the embarassed victim from being able to delete the
post. Interesting baggy-pantsings have been done involving
adding commands to login scripts to repost the message every
time the unlucky user logs in; Unix boxes on the residential
network, when cracked, oftentimes have their homepages
replaced (after being politely backed-up to another file) with
a baggy-pants message; .plan files are also occasionally
targeted. Usage: "Prof. Greenlee fell asleep in the Solaris
cluster again; we baggy-pantsed him to
git.cc.class.2430.flame." Compare derf.
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.catb.org/~esr/jargon/".)
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. [common] Used by hackers (in a generalization of its
technical meaning) as the volume of information per unit time
that a computer, person, or transmission medium can handle.
"Those are amazing graphics, but I missed some of the detail
-- not enough bandwidth, I guess." Compare low-bandwidth; see
also brainwidth. This generalized usage began to go mainstream
after the Internet population explosion of 1993-1994.
2. Attention span.
3. On Usenet, a measure of network capacity that is often
wasted by people complaining about how items posted by others
are a waste of bandwidth.
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.
[now historical] An old-style UUCP electronic-mail address
specifying hops to get from some assumed-reachable location to
the addressee, so called because each hop is signified by a
bang sign. Thus, for example, the path
...!bigsite!foovax!barbox!me directs people to route their
mail to machine bigsite (presumably a well-known location
accessible to everybody) and from there through the machine
foovax to the account of user me on barbox.
In the bad old days of not so long ago, before autorouting
mailers became commonplace, people often published compound
bang addresses using the { } convention (see glob) to give
paths from several big machines, in the hopes that one's
correspondent might be able to get mail to one of them
reliably (example: ...!{seismo, ut-sally,
ihnp4!rice!beta!gamma!me}). Bang paths of 8 to 10 hops were
not uncommon. Late-night dial-up UUCP links would cause
week-long transmission times. Bang paths were often selected
by both transmission time and reliability, as messages would
often get lost. See the network and sitename.
banner : n.
1. A top-centered graphic on a web page. Esp. used in banner
ad.
2. On interactive software, a first screen containing a logo
and/or author credits and/or a copyright notice.
3. The title page added to printouts by most print spoolers
(see spool). Typically includes user or account ID information
in very large character-graphics capitals. Also called a burst
page, because it indicates where to burst (tear apart) fanfold
paper to separate one user's printout from the next.
4. A similar printout generated (typically on multiple pages
of fan-fold paper) from user-specified text, e.g., by a
program such as Unix's banner({1,6)}.
banner ad : n.
Any of the annoying graphical advertisements that span the
tops of way too many Web pages.
banner site : n.
[warez d00dz] An FTP site storing pirated files where one must
first click on several banners and/or subscribe to various
`free' services, usually generating some form of revenues for
the site owner, to be able to access the site. More often than
not, the username/password painfully obtained by clicking on
banners and subscribing to bogus services or mailing lists
turns out to be non-working or gives access to a site that
always responds busy. See ratio site, leech mode.
bar : /bar/ , n.
1. [very common] The second metasyntactic variable, after foo
and before baz. "Suppose we have two functions: FOO and BAR.
FOO calls BAR...."
2. Often appended to foo to produce foobar.
bare metal : n.
1. [common] New computer hardware, unadorned with such snares
and delusions as an operating system, an HLL, or even
assembler. Commonly used in the phrase programming on the bare
metal, which refers to the arduous work of bit bashing needed
to create these basic tools for a new machine. Real bare-metal
programming involves things like building boot proms and BIOS
chips, implementing basic monitors used to test device
drivers, and writing the assemblers that will be used to write
the compiler back ends that will give the new machine a real
development environment.
2. `Programming on the bare metal' is also used to describe a
style of hand-hacking that relies on bit-level peculiarities
of a particular hardware design, esp. tricks for speed and
space optimization that rely on crocks such as overlapping
instructions (or, as in the famous case described in The Story
of Mel' (in Appendix A), interleaving of opcodes on a magnetic
drum to minimize fetch delays due to the device's rotational
latency). This sort of thing has become rare as the relative
costs of programming time and machine resources have changed,
but is still found in heavily constrained environments such as
industrial embedded systems. See Real Programmer.
barf : /barf/ , n.,v.
[common; from mainstream slang meaning `vomit']
1. interj. Term of disgust. This is the closest hackish
equivalent of the Valspeak "gag me with a spoon". (Like,
euwww!) See bletch.
2. vi. To say "Barf!" or emit some similar expression of
disgust. "I showed him my latest hack and he barfed" means
only that he complained about it, not that he literally
vomited.
3. vi. To fail to work because of unacceptable input, perhaps
with a suitable error message, perhaps not. Examples: "The
division operation barfs if you try to divide by 0." (That is,
the division operation checks for an attempt to divide by
zero, and if one is encountered it causes the operation to
fail in some unspecified, but generally obvious, manner.) "The
text editor barfs if you try to read in a new file before
writing out the old one."
See choke. In Commonwealth Hackish, barf is generally replaced
by `puke' or `vom'. barf is sometimes also used as a
metasyntactic variable, like foo or bar.
barfmail : n.
Multiple bounce messages accumulating to the level of serious
annoyance, or worse. The sort of thing that happens when an
inter-network mail gateway goes down or wonky.
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.
barn : n.
[uncommon; prob. from the nuclear military] An unexpectedly
large quantity of something: a unit of measurement. "Why is
/var/adm taking up so much space?" "The logs have grown to
several barns." The source of this is clear: when physicists
were first studying nuclear interactions, the probability was
thought to be proportional to the cross-sectional area of the
nucleus (this probability is still called the cross-section).
Upon experimenting, they discovered the interactions were far
more probable than expected; the nuclei were `as big as a
barn'. The units for cross-sections were christened Barns,
(10^-24 cm2) and the book containing cross-sections has a
picture of a barn on the cover.
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.
[common] Feature-encrusted; complex; gaudy; verging on
excessive. Said of hardware or (esp.) software designs, this
has many of the connotations of elephantine or monstrosity but
is less extreme and not pejorative in itself. "Metafont even
has features to introduce random variations to its letterform
output. Now that is baroque!" See also rococo.
BASIC : /bay'-sic/ , n.
A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's
experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which for
many years was the leading cause of brain damage in
proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in Selected
Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective that "It is
practically impossible to teach good programming style to
students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential
programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of
regeneration." This is another case (like Pascal) of the
cascading lossage that happens when a language deliberately
designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A
novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10-20
lines) very easily; writing anything longer (a) is very
painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it
harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be
so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on
low-end micros in the 1980s. As it is, it probably ruined tens
of thousands of potential wizards.
[1995: Some languages called `BASIC' aren't quite this nasty
any more, having acquired Pascal- and C-like procedures and
control structures and shed their line numbers. --ESR]
BASIC stands for "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction
Code". Earlier versions of this entry claiming this was a
later backronym were incorrect.
batbelt : n.
Many hackers routinely hang numerous devices such as pagers,
cell-phones, personal organizers, leatherman multitools,
pocket knives, flashlights, walkie-talkies, even miniature
computers from their belts. When many of these devices are
worn at once, the hacker's belt somewhat resembles Batman's
utility belt; hence it is referred to as a batbelt.
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."
[crunchly-2.png]
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-03-17:5-8)
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.
Batman factor : n.
1. An integer number representing the number of items hanging
from a batbelt. In most settings, a Batman factor of more than
3 is not acceptable without odd stares and whispering. This
encourages the hacker in question to choose items for the
batbelt carefully to avoid awkward social situations, usually
amongst non-hackers.
2. A somewhat more vaguely defined index of contribution to
sense 1. Devices that are especially obtrusive, such as large,
older model cell phones, "Pocket" PC devices and walkie
talkies are said to have a high batman factor. Sleeker devices
such as a later-model Palm or StarTac phone are prized for
their low batman factor and lessened obtrusiveness and weight.
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 November, 1926 conference of the Comité Consultatif
International Des Communications Télégraphiques as an
improvement on the then standard practice of referring to line
speeds in terms of words per minute, and named for Jean
Maurice Emile Baudot (1845-1903), a French engineer who did a
lot of pioneering work in early teleprinters.
baz : /baz/ , n.
1. [common] The third metasyntactic variable "Suppose we have
three functions: FOO, BAR, and BAZ. FOO calls BAR, which calls
BAZ...." (See also fum)
2. interj. A term of mild annoyance. In this usage the term is
often drawn out for 2 or 3 seconds, producing an effect not
unlike the bleating of a sheep; /baaaaaaz/.
3. Occasionally appended to foo to produce `foobaz'.
Earlier versions of this lexicon derived baz as a Stanford
corruption of bar. However, Pete Samson (compiler of the TMRC
lexicon) reports it was already current when he joined TMRC in
1958. He says "It came from Pogo. Albert the Alligator, when
vexed or outraged, would shout `Bazz Fazz!' or `Rowrbazzle!'
The club layout was said to model the (mythical) New England
counties of Rowrfolk and Bassex (Rowrbazzle mingled with
(Norfolk/Suffolk/Middlesex/Essex)."
bazaar : n.,adj.
In 1997, after meditating on the success of Linux for three
years, the Jargon File's own editor ESR wrote an analytical
paper on hacker culture and development models titled The
Cathedral and the Bazaar. The main argument of the paper was
that Brooks's Law is not the whole story; given the right
social machinery, debugging can be efficiently parallelized
across large numbers of programmers. The title metaphor caught
on (see also cathedral), and the style of development typical
in the Linux community is now often referred to as the bazaar
mode. Its characteristics include releasing code early and
often, and actively seeking the largest possible pool of peer
reviewers. After 1998, the evident success of this way of
doing things became one of the strongest arguments for open
source.
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.
[common; abbreviation, `Bulletin Board System'] An electronic
bulletin board system; that is, a message database where
people can log in and leave broadcast messages for others
grouped (typically) into topic groups. The term was especially
applied to the thousands of local BBS systems that operated
during the pre-Internet microcomputer era of roughly 1980 to
1995, typically run by amateurs for fun out of their homes on
MS-DOS boxes with a single modem line each. Fans of Usenet and
Internet or the big commercial timesharing bboards such as
CompuServe and GEnie tended to consider local BBSes the
low-rent district of the hacker culture, but they served a
valuable function by knitting together lots of hackers and
users in the personal-micro world who would otherwise have
been unable to exchange code at all. Post-Internet, BBSs are
likely to be local newsgroups on an ISP; efficiency has
increased but a certain flavor has been lost. See also bboard.
BCPL : // , n.
[abbreviation, `Basic Combined Programming Language') A
programming language developed by Martin Richards in Cambridge
in 1967. It is remarkable for its rich syntax, small size of
compiler (it can be run in 16k) and extreme portability. It
reached break-even point at a very early stage, and was the
language in which the original hello world program was
written. It has been ported to so many different systems that
its creator confesses to having lost count. It has only one
data type (a machine word) which can be used as an integer, a
character, a floating point number, a pointer, or almost
anything else, depending on context. BCPL was a precursor of
C, which inherited some of its features.
BDFL
[Python; common] Benevolent Dictator For Life. Guido,
considered in his role as the project leader of Python. People
who are feeling temporarily cheesed off by one of his
decisions sometimes leave off the B. The mental image that
goes with this, of a cigar-chomping caudillo in gold braid and
sunglasses, is extremely funny to anyone who has ever met
Guido in person.
beam : vt.
[from Star Trek Classic's "Beam me up, Scotty!"]
1. To transfer softcopy of a file electronically; most often
in combining forms such as beam me a copy or beam that over to
his site.
2. Palm Pilot users very commonly use this term for the act of
exchanging bits via the infrared links on their machines (this
term seems to have originated with the ill-fated Newton
Message Pad). Compare blast, snarf, BLT.
beanie key : n.
[Mac users] See command key.
beep : n.,v.
Syn. feep. This term is techspeak under MS-DOS/Windows and
OS/2, and seems to be generally preferred among micro
hobbyists.
Befunge : n.
A worthy companion to INTERCAL; a computer language family
which escapes the quotidian limitation of linear control flow
and embraces program counters flying through multiple
dimensions with exotic topologies. The Befunge home page is at
http://www.catseye.mb.ca/esoteric/befunge/.
beige toaster : n.
[obs.] An original Macintosh in the boxy beige case. See
toaster; compare Macintrash, maggotbox.
bells and whistles : n.
[common] Features added to a program or system to make it more
flavorful from a hacker's point of view, without necessarily
adding to its utility for its primary function. Distinguished
from chrome, which is intended to attract users. "Now that
we've got the basic program working, let's go back and add
some bells and whistles." No one seems to know what
distinguishes a bell from a whistle. The recognized emphatic
form is "bells, whistles, and gongs".
It used to be thought that this term derived from the toyboxes
on theater organs. However, the "and gongs" strongly suggests
a different origin, at sea. Before powered horns, ships
routinely used bells, whistles, and gongs to signal each other
over longer distances than voice can carry.
[73-05-28.png]
Sometimes `trouble' is spelled bells and whistles...
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-06-04)
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 : n.
[techspeak] An inaccurate measure of computer performance. "In
the computer industry, there are three kinds of lies: lies,
damn lies, and benchmarks." Well-known ones include Whetstone,
Dhrystone, Rhealstone (see h), the Gabriel LISP benchmarks,
the SPECmark suite, and LINPACK. See also machoflops, MIPS,
smoke and mirrors.
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.
Berzerkeley : /b@r-zer'klee/ , n.
[from `berserk', via the name of a now-deceased record label;
poss. originated by famed columnist Herb Caen] Humorous
distortion of `Berkeley' used esp. to refer to the practices
or products of the BSD Unix hackers. See software bloat,
Berkeley Quality Software.
Mainstream use of this term in reference to the cultural and
political peculiarities of UC Berkeley as a whole has been
reported from as far back as the 1960s.
beta : /bay't@/ , /be't@/ , /bee't@/ , n.
1. Mostly working, but still under test; usu. used with `in':
`in beta'. In the Real World, hardware or software systems
often go through two stages of release testing: Alpha
(in-house) and Beta (out-house?). Beta releases are generally
made to a group of lucky (or unlucky) trusted customers.
2. Anything that is new and experimental. "His girlfriend is
in beta" means that he is still testing for compatibility and
reserving judgment.
3. Flaky; dubious; suspect (since beta software is notoriously
buggy).
Historical note: More formally, to beta-test is to test a
pre-release (potentially unreliable) version of a piece of
software by making it available to selected (or self-selected)
customers and users. This term derives from early 1960s
terminology for product cycle checkpoints, first used at IBM
but later standard throughout the industry. `Alpha Test' was
the unit, module, or component test phase; `Beta Test' was
initial system test. These themselves came from earlier A- and
B-tests for hardware. The A-test was a feasibility and
manufacturability evaluation done before any commitment to
design and development. The B-test was a demonstration that
the engineering model functioned as specified. The C-test
(corresponding to today's beta) was the B-test performed on
early samples of the production design, and the D test was the
C test repeated after the model had been in production a
while.
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'. In some parts of the U.S.
this abbreviation was probably reinforced by a company called
Browning-Ferris Industries in the waste-management business; a
large BFI logo in white-on-blue could be seen on the sides of
garbage trucks.
BI : //
Common written abbreviation for Breidbart Index.
bible : n.
1. One of a small number of fundamental source books such as
Knuth, K&R, or the Camel Book.
2. The most detailed and authoritative reference for a
particular language, operating system, or other complex
software system.
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, InterCaps.
biff : /bif/ , vt.
[now rare] To notify someone of incoming mail. From the BSD
utility biff(1), which was in turn named after a friendly dog
who used to chase frisbees in the halls at UCB while 4.2BSD
was in development. There was a legend that it had a habit of
barking whenever the mailman came, but the author of biff says
this is not true. No relation to B1FF.
big iron : n.
[common] Large, expensive, ultra-fast computers. Used
generally of number-crunching supercomputers, but can include
more conventional big commercial IBMish mainframes. Term of
approval; compare heavy metal, oppose dinosaur.
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 TLAs, this
is often abbreviated as BRS (this has also become established
on FidoNet and in the PC clone world). It is alleged that the
emergency pull switch on an IBM 360/91 actually fired a
non-conducting bolt into the main power feed; the BRSes on
more recent mainframes physically drop a block into place so
that they can't be pushed back in. People get fired for
pulling them, especially inappropriately (see also
molly-guard). Compare power cycle, three-finger salute; see
also scram switch.
Big Room : n.
(Also Big Blue Room) The extremely large room with the blue
ceiling and intensely bright light (during the day) or black
ceiling with lots of tiny night-lights (during the night)
found outside all computer installations. "He can't come to
the phone right now, he's somewhere out in the Big Room."
big win : n.
1. [common] Major success.
2. [MIT] Serendipity. "Yes, those two physicists discovered
high-temperature superconductivity in a batch of ceramic that
had been prepared incorrectly according to their experimental
schedule. Small mistake; big win!" See win big.
big-endian : adj.
[common; From Swift's Gulliver's Travels via the famous paper
On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace by Danny Cohen, USC/ISI IEN
137, dated April 1, 1980]
1. Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given
multi-byte numeric representation, the most significant byte
has the lowest address (the word is stored `big-end-first').
Most processors, including the IBM 370 family, the PDP-10, the
Motorola microprocessor families, and most of the various RISC
designs are big-endian. Big-endian byte order is also
sometimes called network order. See little-endian,
middle-endian, NUXI problem, swab.
2. An Internet address the wrong way round. Most of the world
follows the Internet standard and writes email addresses
starting with the name of the computer and ending up with the
name of the country. In the U.K.: the Joint Academic
Networking Team had decided to do it the other way round
before the Internet domain standard was established. Most
gateway sites have ad-hockery in their mailers to handle this,
but can still be confused. In particular, the address
me@uk.ac.bris.pys.as could be interpreted in JANET's
big-endian way as one in the U.K. (domain uk) or in the
standard little-endian way as one in the domain as (American
Samoa) on the opposite side of the world.
bignum : /big'nuhm/ , n.
[common; orig. from MIT MacLISP]
1. [techspeak] A multiple-precision computer representation
for very large integers.
2. More generally, any very large number. "Have you ever
looked at the United States Budget? There's bignums for you!"
3. [Stanford] In backgammon, large numbers on the dice
especially a roll of double fives or double sixes (compare
moby, sense 4). See also El Camino Bignum.
Sense 1 may require some explanation. Most computer languages
provide a kind of data called integer, but such computer
integers are usually very limited in size; usually they must
be smaller than 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
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00000000000000000.
bigot : n.
[common] A person who is religiously attached to a particular
computer, language, operating system, editor, or other tool
(see religious issues). Usually found with a specifier; thus,
Cray bigot, ITS bigot, APL bigot, VMS bigot, Berkeley bigot.
Real bigots can be distinguished from mere partisans or
zealots by the fact that they refuse to learn alternatives
even when the march of time and/or technology is threatening
to obsolete the favored tool. It is truly said "You can tell a
bigot, but you can't tell him much." Compare weenie, Amiga
Persecution Complex.
bikeshedding
[originally BSD, now common] Technical disputes over minor,
marginal issues conducted while more serious ones are being
overlooked. The implied image is of people arguing over what
color to paint the bicycle shed while the house is not
finished.
binary four : n.
[Usenet] The finger, in the sense of digitus impudicus. This
comes from an analogy between binary and the hand, i.e.
1=00001=thumb, 2=00010=index finger, 3=00011=index and thumb,
4=00100. Considered silly. Prob. from humorous derivative of
finger, sense 4.
bit : n.
[from the mainstream meaning and `Binary digIT']
1. [techspeak] The unit of information; the amount of
information obtained from knowing the answer to a yes-or-no
question for which the two outcomes are equally probable.
2. [techspeak] A computational quantity that can take on one
of two values, such as true and false or 0 and 1.
3. A mental flag: a reminder that something should be done
eventually. "I have a bit set for you." (I haven't seen you
for a while, and I'm supposed to tell or ask you something.)
4. More generally, a (possibly incorrect) mental state of
belief. "I have a bit set that says that you were the last guy
to hack on EMACS." (Meaning "I think you were the last guy to
hack on EMACS, and what I am about to say is predicated on
this, so please stop me if this isn't true.") "I just need one
bit from you" is a polite way of indicating that you intend
only a short interruption for a question that can presumably
be answered yes or no.
A bit is said to be set if its value is true or 1, and reset
or clear if its value is false or 0. One speaks of setting and
clearing bits. To toggle or invert a bit is to change it,
either from 0 to 1 or from 1 to 0. See also flag, trit, mode
bit.
The term bit first appeared in print in the computer-science
sense in a 1948 paper by information theorist Claude Shannon,
and was there credited to the early computer scientist John
Tukey (who also seems to have coined the term software). Tukey
records that bit evolved over a lunch table as a handier
alternative to bigit or binit, at a conference in the winter
of 1943-44.
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 mode bit.
bit bucket : n.
[very common]
1. The universal data sink (originally, the mythical
receptacle used to catch bits when they fall off the end of a
register during a shift instruction). Discarded, lost, or
destroyed data is said to have gone to the bit bucket. On
Unix, often used for /dev/null. Sometimes amplified as the
Great Bit Bucket in the Sky.
2. The place where all lost mail and news messages eventually
go. The selection is performed according to Finagle's Law;
important mail is much more likely to end up in the bit bucket
than junk mail, which has an almost 100% probability of
getting delivered. Routing to the bit bucket is automatically
performed by mail-transfer agents, news systems, and the lower
layers of the network.
3. The ideal location for all unwanted mail responses: "Flames
about this article to the bit bucket." Such a request is
guaranteed to overflow one's mailbox with flames.
4. Excuse for all mail that has not been sent. "I mailed you
those figures last week; they must have landed in the bit
bucket." Compare black hole.
This term is used purely in jest. It is based on the fanciful
notion that bits are objects that are not destroyed but only
misplaced. This appears to have been a mutation of an earlier
term `bit box', about which the same legend was current;
old-time hackers also report that trainees used to be told
that when the CPU stored bits into memory it was actually
pulling them `out of the bit box'. See also chad box.
Another variant of this legend has it that, as a consequence
of the `parity preservation law', the number of 1 bits that go
to the bit bucket must equal the number of 0 bits. Any
imbalance results in bits filling up the bit bucket. A
qualified computer technician can empty a full bit bucket as
part of scheduled maintenance.
The source for all these meanings, is, historically, the fact
that the chad box on a paper-tape punch was sometimes called a
bit bucket.
[75-10-04.png]
A literal bit bucket.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-02-14)
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.
[common] Also bit decay. Hypothetical disease the existence of
which has been deduced from the observation that unused
programs or features will often stop working after sufficient
time has passed, even if `nothing has changed'. The theory
explains that bits decay as if they were radioactive. As time
passes, the contents of a file or the code in a program will
become increasingly garbled.
There actually are physical processes that produce such
effects (alpha particles generated by trace radionuclides in
ceramic chip packages, for example, can change the contents of
a computer memory unpredictably, and various kinds of subtle
media failures can corrupt files in mass storage), but they
are quite rare (and computers are built with error-detecting
circuitry to compensate for them). The notion long favored
among hackers that cosmic rays are among the causes of such
events turns out to be a myth; see the cosmic rays entry for
details.
The term software rot is almost synonymous. Software rot is
the effect, bit rot the notional cause.
bit twiddling : n.
[very common]
1. (pejorative) An exercise in tuning (see tune) in which
incredible amounts of time and effort go to produce little
noticeable improvement, often with the result that the code
becomes incomprehensible.
2. Aimless small modification to a program, esp. for some
pointless goal.
3. Approx. syn. for bit bashing; esp. used for the act of
frobbing the device control register of a peripheral in an
attempt to get it back to a known state.
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 even more of a kluge than it
already was, the design had to group characters that shared
the same basic bit pattern on one key.
Looking at the ASCII chart, we find:
high low bits
bits 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001
010 ! " # $ % & ' ( )
011 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
This is why the characters !"#$%&'() appear where they do on a
Teletype (thankfully, they didn't use shift-0 for space). The
Teletype Model 33 was actually designed before ASCII existed,
and was originally intended to use a code that contained these
two rows:
low bits
high 0000 0010 0100 0110 1000 1010 1100 1110
bits 0001 0011 0101 0111 1001 1011 1101 1111
10 ) ! bel # $ % wru & * ( " : ? _ , .
11 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ' ; / - esc del
The result would have been something closer to a normal
keyboard. But as it happened, Teletype had to use a lot of
persuasion just to keep ASCII, and the Model 33 keyboard, from
looking like this instead:
! " ? $ ' & - ( ) ; : * / , .
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 + ~ < > × |
Teletype's was not the weirdest variant of the QWERTY layout
widely seen, by the way; that prize should probably go to one
of several (differing) arrangements on IBM's even clunkier 026
and 029 card punches.
When electronic terminals became popular, in the early 1970s,
there was no agreement in the industry over how the keyboards
should be laid out. Some vendors opted to emulate the Teletype
keyboard, while others used the flexibility of electronic
circuitry to make their product look like an office
typewriter. Either choice was supported by the ANSI computer
keyboard standard, X4.14-1971, which referred to the
alternatives as `logical bit pairing' and `typewriter
pairing'. These alternatives became known as bit-paired and
typewriter-paired keyboards. To a hacker, the bit-paired
keyboard seemed far more logical -- and because most hackers
in those days had never learned to touch-type, there was
little pressure from the pioneering users to adapt keyboards
to the typewriter standard.
The doom of the bit-paired keyboard was the large-scale
introduction of the computer terminal into the normal office
environment, where out-and-out technophobes were expected to
use the equipment. The typewriter-paired standard became
universal, X4.14 was superseded by X4.23-1982, bit-paired
hardware was quickly junked or relegated to dusty corners, and
both terms passed into disuse.
However, in countries without a long history of touch typing,
the argument against the bit-paired keyboard layout was weak
or nonexistent. As a result, the standard Japanese keyboard,
used on PCs, Unix boxen etc. still has all of the !"#$%&'()
characters above the numbers in the ASR-33 layout.
bitblt : /bit'blit/ , n.
[from BLT, q.v.:]
1. [common] Any of a family of closely related algorithms for
moving and copying rectangles of bits between main and display
memory on a bit-mapped device, or between two areas of either
main or display memory (the requirement to do the Right Thing
in the case of overlapping source and destination rectangles
is what makes BitBlt tricky).
2. Synonym for blit or BLT. Both uses are borderline
techspeak.
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 emoticons used BIX (the BIX Information eXchange); the
term survived the demise of BIX itself. The most common
(smiley) bixie is <@_@>, representing two cartoon eyes and a
mouth. These were originally invented in an SF fanzine called
APA-L and imported to BIX by one of the earliest users.
black art : n.
[common] A collection of arcane, unpublished, and (by
implication) mostly ad-hoc techniques developed for a
particular application or systems area (compare black magic).
VLSI design and compiler code optimization were (in their
beginnings) considered classic examples of black art; as
theory developed they became deep magic, and once standard
textbooks had been written, became merely heavy wizardry. The
huge proliferation of formal and informal channels for
spreading around new computer-related technologies during the
last twenty years has made both the term black art and what it
describes less common than formerly. See also voodoo
programming.
black hat
1. [common among security specialists] A cracker, someone bent
on breaking into the system you are protecting. Oppose the
less comon white hat for an ally or friendly security
specialist; the term gray hat is in occasional use for people
with cracker skills operating within the law, e.g. in doing
security evaluations. All three terms derive from the dress
code of formulaic Westerns, in which bad guys wore black hats
and good guys white ones.
2. [spamfighters] `Black hat', `white hat', and `gray hat' are
also used to denote the spam-friendliness of ISPs: a black hat
ISP harbors spammers and doesn't terminate them; a white hat
ISP terminates upon the first LART; and gray hat ISPs
terminate only reluctantly and/or slowly. This has led to the
concept of a hat check: someone considering a potential
business relationship with an ISP or other provider will post
a query to a NANA group, asking about the provider's hat
color. The term albedo has also been used to describe a
provider's spam-friendliness.
black hole : n.,vt.
[common] What data (a piece of email or netnews, or a stream
of TCP/IP packets) has fallen into if it disappears
mysteriously between its origin and destination sites (that
is, without returning a bounce message). "I think there's a
black hole at foovax!" conveys suspicion that site foovax has
been dropping a lot of stuff on the floor lately (see drop on
the floor). The implied metaphor of email as interstellar
travel is interesting in itself. Readily verbed as blackhole:
"That router is blackholing IDP packets." Compare bit bucket
and see RBL.
black magic : n.
[common] A technique that works, though nobody really
understands why. More obscure than voodoo programming, which
may be done by cookbook. Compare also black art, deep magic,
and magic number (sense 2).
Black Screen of Death :
[prob.: related to the Floating Head of Death in a famous Far
Side cartoon.] A failure mode of Microsloth Windows. On an
attempt to launch a DOS box, a networked Windows system not
uncommonly blanks the screen and locks up the PC so hard that
it requires a cold boot to recover. This unhappy phenomenon is
known as The Black Screen of Death. See also Blue Screen of
Death, which has become rather more common.
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 archaic MIT gun; in
fact, the blammo-gun is a notional device used to `blammo'
someone. While in actual fact the only incarnation of the
blammo-gun is the command used to forcibly eject a user,
operators speak of different levels of blammo-gun fire; e.g.,
a blammo-gun to `stun' will temporarily remove someone, but a
blammo-gun set to `maim' will stop someone coming back on for
a while.
blargh : /blarg/ , n.
[MIT; now common] The opposite of ping, sense 5; an
exclamation indicating that one has absorbed or is emitting a
quantum of unhappiness. Less common than ping.
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.
[very common; 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.
blinkenlights : /blink'@n-li:tz/ , n.
[common] Front-panel diagnostic lights on a computer, esp. a
dinosaur. Now that dinosaurs are rare, this term usually
refers to status lights on a modem, network hub, or the like.
This term derives from the last word of the famous
blackletter-Gothic sign in mangled pseudo-German that once
graced about half the computer rooms in the English-speaking
world. One version ran in its entirety as follows:
ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!
Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengra
bben.
Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencor
ken
mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfe
n.
Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans i
n 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 i
s
allowed for die experts only! So all the "lefthanders" stay a
way
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 astauni
shed
the blinkenlights.
See also geef.
Old-time hackers sometimes get nostalgic for blinkenlights
because they were so much more fun to look at than a blank
panel. Sadly, very few computers still have them (the three
LEDs on a PC keyboard certainly don't count). The obvious
reasons (cost of wiring, cost of front-panel cutouts, almost
nobody needs or wants to interpret machine-register states on
the fly anymore) are only part of the story. Another part of
it is that radio-frequency leakage from the lamp wiring was
beginning to be a problem as far back as transistor machines.
But the most fundamental fact is that there are very few
signals slow enough to blink an LED these days! With slow
CPUs, you could watch the bus register or instruction counter
tick, but at 33/66/150MHz it's all a blur.
Despite this, a couple of relatively recent computer designs
of note have featured programmable blinkenlights that were
added just because they looked cool. The Connection Machine, a
65,536-processor parallel computer designed in the mid-1980s,
was a black cube with one side covered with a grid of red
blinkenlights; the sales demo had them evolving life patterns.
A few years later the ill-fated BeBox (a personal computer
designed to run the BeOS operating system) featured twin rows
of blinkenlights on the case front. When Be, Inc. decided to
get out of the hardware business in 1996 and instead ported
their OS to the PowerPC and later to the Intel architecture,
many users suffered severely from the absence of their beloved
blinkenlights. Before long an external version of the
blinkenlights driven by a PC serial port became available;
there is some sort of plot symmetry in the fact that it was
assembled by a German.
Finally, a version updated for the Internet has been seen on
news.admin.net-abuse.email:
ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!
Das Internet is nicht fuer gefingerclicken und giffengrabben.
Ist easy
droppenpacket der routers und overloaden der backbone mit der
spammen
und der me-tooen. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
Das
mausklicken sichtseeren keepen das bandwit-spewin hans in das
pockets
muss; relaxen und watchen das cursorblinken.
This newest version partly reflects reports that the word
`blinkenlights' is (in 1999) undergoing something of a revival
in usage, but applied to networking equipment. The transmit
and receive lights on routers, activity lights on switches and
hubs, and other network equipment often blink in visually
pleasing and seemingly coordinated ways. Although this is
different in some ways from register readings, a tall stack of
Cisco equipment or a 19-inch rack of ISDN terminals can
provoke a similar feeling of hypnotic awe, especially in a
darkened network operations center or server room.
blit : /blit/ , vt.
1. [common] To copy a large array of bits from one part of a
computer's memory to another part, particularly when the
memory is being used to determine what is shown on a display
screen. "The storage allocator picks through the table and
copies the good parts up into high memory, and then blits it
all back down again." See bitblt, BLT, dd, cat, blast, snarf.
More generally, to perform some operation (such as toggling)
on a large array of bits while moving them.
2. [historical, rare] Sometimes all-capitalized as BLIT: an
early experimental bit-mapped terminal designed by Rob Pike at
Bell Labs, later commercialized as the AT&T 5620. (The folk
etymology from `Bell Labs Intelligent Terminal' is incorrect.
Its creators liked to claim that "Blit" stood for the Bacon,
Lettuce, and Interactive Tomato.)
blitter : /blit'r/ , n.
[common] A special-purpose chip or hardware system built to
perform blit operations, esp. used for fast implementation of
bit-mapped graphics. The Commodore Amiga and a few other
micros have these, but since 1990 the trend has been away from
them (however, see cycle of reincarnation). Syn. raster
blaster.
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.
[blivet.png]
This is a blivet
bloatware : n.
[common] Software that provides minimal functionality while
requiring a disproportionate amount of diskspace and memory.
Especially used for application and OS upgrades. This term is
very common in the Windows/NT world. So is its cause.
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.
[common; from process scheduling terminology in OS theory]
1. vi. To delay or sit idle while waiting for something.
"We're blocking until everyone gets here." Compare busy-wait.
2. block on vt. To block, waiting for (something). "Lunch is
blocked on Phil's arrival."
blog : n.
[common] Short for weblog, an on-line web-zine or diary
(usually with facilities for reader comments and discussion
threads) made accessible through the World Wide Web. This term
is widespread and readily forms derivatives, of which the best
known may be blogosphere.
Bloggs Family : n.
An imaginary family consisting of Fred and Mary Bloggs and
their children. Used as a standard example in knowledge
representation to show the difference between extensional and
intensional objects. For example, every occurrence of "Fred
Bloggs" is the same unique person, whereas occurrences of
"person" may refer to different people. Members of the Bloggs
family have been known to pop up in bizarre places such as the
old DEC Telephone Directory. Compare Dr. Fred Mbogo; J. Random
Hacker; Fred Foobar.
blogosphere
The totality of all blogs. A culture heavily overlapping with
but not coincident with hackerdom; a few of its key coinages
(blogrolling, fisking, anti-idiotarianism) are recorded in
this lexicon for flavor. Bloggers often divide themselves into
warbloggers and techbloggers. The techbloggers write about
technology and technology policy, while the warbloggers are
more politically focused and tend to be preoccupied with U.S.
and world response to the post-9/11 war against terrorism. The
overlap with hackerdom is heaviest among the techbloggers, but
several of the most prominent warbloggers are also hackers.
Bloggers in general tend to be aware of and sympathetic to the
hacker culture.
blogrolling
[From the American political term `logrolling', for supporting
another's pet bill in the legislature in exchange for
reciprocal support,] When you hotlink to other bloggers' blogs
(and-or other bloggers' specific blog entries) in your blog,
you are blogrolling. This is frequently reciprocal.
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/ , /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 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 phreakers built devices called blue
boxes that could reproduce these tones, which could be used to
commandeer portions of the phone network. (This was not as
hard as it may sound; one early phreak acquired the sobriquet
`Captain Crunch' after he proved that he could generate
switching tones with a plastic whistle pulled out of a box of
Captain Crunch cereal!) There were other colors of box with
more specialized phreaking uses; red boxes, black boxes,
silver boxes, etc. There were boxes of other colors as well,
but the blue box was the original and archetype.
2. n. An IBM machine, especially a large (non-PC) one.
Blue Glue : n.
[IBM; obs.] IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture), an
incredibly losing and bletcherous communications protocol once
widely favored at commercial shops that didn't know any better
(like other proprietary networking protocols, it became
obsolete and effectively disappeared after the Internet
explosion c.1994). The official IBM definition is "that which
binds blue boxes together." See fear and loathing. It may not
be irrelevant that Blue Glue is the trade name of a 3M product
that is commonly used to hold down the carpet squares to the
removable panel floors common in dinosaur pens. A
correspondent at U. Minn. reports that the CS department there
has about 80 bottles of the stuff hanging about, so they often
refer to any messy work to be done as using the blue glue.
blue goo : n.
Term for `police' nanobots intended to prevent gray goo,
denature hazardous waste, destroy pollution, put ozone back
into the stratosphere, prevent halitosis, and promote truth,
justice, and the American way, etc. The term "Blue Goo" can be
found in Dr. Seuss's Fox In Socks to refer to a substance much
like bubblegum. `Would you like to chew blue goo, sir?'. See
nanotechnology.
Blue Screen of Death : n.
[common] This term is closely related to the older Black
Screen of Death but much more common (many non-hackers have
picked it up). Due to the extreme fragility and bugginess of
Microsoft Windows, misbehaving applications can readily crash
the OS (and the OS sometimes crashes itself spontaneously).
The Blue Screen of Death, sometimes decorated with hex error
codes, is what you get when this happens. (Commonly
abbreviated BSOD.) The following entry from the Salon Haiku
Contest, seems to have predated popular use of the term:
Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death
No one hears your screams.
blue wire : n.
[IBM] Patch wires (esp. 30 AWG gauge) added to circuit boards
at the factory to correct design or fabrication problems. Blue
wire is not necessarily blue, the term describes function
rather than color. These may be necessary if there hasn't been
time to design and qualify another board version. In Great
Britain this can be bodge wire, after mainstream slang bodge
for a clumsy improvisation or sloppy job of work. Compare
purple wire, red wire, yellow wire, pink wire.
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 Normal Form' (later
retronymed to `Backus-Naur Form' because BNF was not in fact a
normal form), a metasyntactic notation used to specify the
syntax of programming languages, command sets, and the like.
Widely used for language descriptions but seldom documented
anywhere, so that it must usually be learned by osmosis from
other hackers. Consider this BNF for a U.S. postal address:
<postal-address> ::= <name-part> <street-address> <zip-part>
<personal-part> ::= <name> | <initial> "."
<name-part> ::= <personal-part> <last-name> [<jr-part>] <EOL>
| <personal-part> <name-part>
<street-address> ::= [<apt>] <house-num> <street-name> <EOL>
<zip-part> ::= <town-name> "," <state-code> <ZIP-code> <EOL>
This translates into English as: "A postal-address consists of
a name-part, followed by a street-address part, followed by a
zip-code part. A personal-part consists of either a first name
or an initial followed by a dot. A name-part consists of
either: a personal-part followed by a last name followed by an
optional `jr-part' (Jr., Sr., or dynastic number) and
end-of-line, or a personal part followed by a name part (this
rule illustrates the use of recursion in BNFs, covering the
case of people who use multiple first and middle names and/or
initials). A street address consists of an optional apartment
specifier, followed by a street number, followed by a street
name. A zip-part consists of a town-name, followed by a comma,
followed by a state code, followed by a ZIP-code followed by
an end-of-line." Note that many things (such as the format of
a personal-part, apartment specifier, or ZIP-code) are left
unspecified. These are presumed to be obvious from context or
detailed somewhere nearby. See also parse.
2. Any of a number of variants and extensions of BNF proper,
possibly containing some or all of the regexp wildcards such
as * or +. In fact the example above isn't the pure form
invented for the Algol-60 report; it uses [], which was
introduced a few years later in IBM's PL/I definition but is
now universally recognized.
3. In science-fiction fandom, a `Big-Name Fan' (someone famous
or notorious). Years ago a fan started handing out
black-on-green BNF buttons at SF conventions; this confused
the hacker contingent terribly.
boa : 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.
[common; from ham radio]
1. Like doorstop but more severe; implies that the offending
hardware is irreversibly dead or useless. "That was a working
motherboard once. One lightning strike later, instant boat
anchor!"
2. A person who just takes up space.
3. Obsolete but still working hardware, especially when used
of an old, bulky, quirky system; originally a term of
annoyance, but became more and more affectionate as the
hardware became more and more obsolete.
Auctioneers use this term for a large, undesirable object such
as a washing machine; actual boating enthusiasts, however, use
"mooring anchor" for frustrating (not actually useless)
equipment.
bob : n.
At Demon Internet, all tech support personnel are called
"Bob". (Female support personnel have an option on "Bobette").
This has nothing to do with Bob the divine drilling-equipment
salesman of the Church of the SubGenius. Nor is it acronymized
from "Brother Of BOFH", though all parties agree it could have
been. Rather, it was triggered by an unusually large draft of
new tech-support people in 1995. It was observed that there
would be much duplication of names. To ease the confusion, it
was decided that all support techs would henceforth be known
as "Bob", and identity badges were created labelled "Bob 1"
and "Bob 2". ("No, we never got any further" reports a
witness).
The reason for "Bob" rather than anything else is due to a
luser calling and asking to speak to "Bob", despite the fact
that no "Bob" was currently working for Tech Support. Since we
all know "the customer is always right", it was decided that
there had to be at least one "Bob" on duty at all times, just
in case.
This sillyness inexorably snowballed. Shift leaders and
managers began to refer to their groups of "bobs". Whole ranks
of support machines were set up (and still exist in the DNS as
of 1999) as bob1 through bobN. Then came
alt.tech-support.recovery, and it was filled with Demon
support personnel. They all referred to themselves, and to
others, as `bob', and after a while it caught on. There is now
a Bob Code describing the Bob nature.
bodge
[Commonwealth hackish] Syn. kludge or hack (sense 1). "I'll
bodge this in now and fix it later".
BOF : /B-O-F/ , /bof/ , n.
1. [common] Abbreviation for the phrase "Birds Of a Feather"
(flocking together), an informal discussion group and/or bull
session scheduled on a conference program. It is not clear
where or when this term originated, but it is now associated
with the USENIX conferences for Unix techies and was already
established there by 1984. It was used earlier than that at
DECUS conferences and is reported to have been common at SHARE
meetings as far back as the early 1960s.
2. Acronym, `Beginning of File'.
BOFH : // , n.
[common] Acronym, Bastard Operator From Hell. A system
administrator with absolutely no tolerance for lusers. "You
say you need more filespace? <massive-global-delete> Seems to
me you have plenty left..." Many BOFHs (and others who would
be BOFHs if they could get away with it) hang out in the
newsgroup alt.sysadmin.recovery, although there has also been
created a top-level newsgroup hierarchy (bofh.*) of their own.
Several people have written stories about BOFHs. The set
usually considered canonical is by Simon Travaglia and may be
found at the Bastard Home Page. BOFHs and BOFH wannabes hang
out on scary devil monastery and wield LARTs.
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." Esp. appropriate for algorithms
with factorial or super-exponential running time in the
average case and probabilistically infinite worst-case running
time. Compare bogus, brute force.
A spectacular variant of bogo-sort has been proposed which has
the interesting property that, if the Many Worlds
interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, it can sort an
arbitrarily large array in linear time. (In the Many-Worlds
model, the result of any quantum action is to split the
universe-before into a sheaf of universes-after, one for each
possible way the state vector can collapse; in any one of the
universes-after the result appears random.) The steps are: 1.
Permute the array randomly using a quantum process, 2. If the
array is not sorted, destroy the universe (checking that the
list is sorted requires O(n) time). Implementation of step 2
is left as an exercise for the reader.
bogometer : /boh-gom'-@t-er/ , n.
A notional instrument for measuring bogosity. Compare the
Troll-O-Meter and the `wankometer' described in the wank
entry; see also bogus.
BogoMIPS : /bo'go-mips/ , n.
The number of million times a second a processor can do
absolutely nothing. The Linux OS measures BogoMIPS at startup
in order to calibrate some soft timing loops that will be used
later on; details at the BogoMIPS mini-HOWTO. The name Linus
chose, of course, is an ironic comment on the uselessness of
all other MIPS figures.
bogon : /boh'gon/ , n.
[very common; by analogy with proton/electron/neutron, but
doubtless reinforced after 1980 by the similarity to Douglas
Adams's `Vogons'; see the Bibliography in Appendix C and note
that Arthur Dent actually mispronounces `Vogons' as `Bogons'
at one point]
1. The elementary particle of bogosity (see quantum
bogodynamics). For instance, "the Ethernet is emitting bogons
again" means that it is broken or acting in an erratic or
bogus fashion.
2. A query packet sent from a TCP/IP domain resolver to a root
server, having the reply bit set instead of the query bit.
3. Any bogus or incorrectly formed packet sent on a network.
4. By synecdoche, used to refer to any bogus thing, as in "I'd
like to go to lunch with you but I've got to go to the weekly
staff bogon".
5. A person who is bogus or who says bogus things. This was
historically the original usage, but has been overtaken by its
derivative senses 1--4. See also bogosity, bogus; compare
psyton, fat electrons, magic smoke.
The bogon has become the type case for a whole bestiary of
nonce particle names, including the `clutron' or `cluon'
(indivisible particle of cluefulness, obviously the
antiparticle of the bogon) and the futon (elementary particle
of randomness, or sometimes of lameness). These are not so
much live usages in themselves as examples of a live
meta-usage: that is, it has become a standard joke or
linguistic maneuver to "explain" otherwise mysterious
circumstances by inventing nonce particle names. And these
imply nonce particle theories, with all their dignity or lack
thereof (we might note parenthetically that this is a
generalization from "(bogus particle) theories" to "bogus
(particle theories)"!). Perhaps such particles are the
modern-day equivalents of trolls and wood-nymphs as standard
starting-points around which to construct explanatory myths.
Of course, playing on an existing word (as in the `futon')
yields additional flavor. Compare magic smoke.
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. [orig. CMU, now very common] The degree to which something
is bogus. Bogosity is measured with a bogometer; in a seminar,
when a speaker says something bogus, a listener might raise
his hand and say "My bogometer just triggered". More
extremely, "You just pinned my bogometer" means you just said
or did something so outrageously bogus that it is off the
scale, pinning the bogometer needle at the highest possible
reading (one might also say "You just redlined my bogometer").
The agreed-upon unit of bogosity is the microLenat.
2. The potential field generated by a bogon flux; see quantum
bogodynamics. See also bogon flux, bogon filter, bogus.
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 there about 1975-76. These coinages spread
into hackerdom from CMU and MIT. Most of them remained
wordplay objects rather than actual vocabulary items or live
metaphors. Examples: amboguous (having multiple bogus
interpretations); bogotissimo (in a gloriously bogus manner);
bogotophile (one who is pathologically fascinated by the
bogus); paleobogology (the study of primeval bogosity).
Some bogowords, however, obtained sufficient live currency to
be listed elsewhere in this lexicon; see bogometer, bogon,
bogotify, and quantum bogodynamics and the related but
unlisted Dr. Fred Mbogo.
By the early 1980s `bogus' was also current in something like
hacker usage sense in West Coast teen slang, and it had gone
mainstream by 1985. A correspondent from Cambridge reports, by
contrast, that these uses of bogus grate on British nerves; in
Britain the word means, rather specifically, `counterfeit', as
in "a bogus 10-pound note". According to Merriam-Webster, the
word dates back to 1825 and originally referred to a
counterfeiting machine.
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/
1. [Usenet: variously ascribed to the TV series Cheers,
Moonlighting, and Soap]v. To have sex with; compare bounce,
sense 3. (This is mainstream slang.) In Commonwealth hackish
the variant `bonk' is more common.
2. n. After the original Peter Korn `Boinkon' Usenet parties,
used for almost any net social gathering, e.g., Miniboink, a
small boink held by Nancy Gillett in 1988; Minniboink, a
Boinkcon in Minnesota in 1989; Humpdayboinks, Wednesday
get-togethers held in the San Francisco Bay Area. Compare
@-party.
3. Var of bonk; see bonk/oif.
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 meditation, in which icons of little black-powder
bombs or mushroom clouds are displayed, indicating that the
system has died. On the Mac, this may be accompanied by a
decimal (or occasionally hexadecimal) number indicating what
went wrong, similar to the Amiga guru meditation number.
MS-DOS machines tend to get locked up in this situation.
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 U.S. MUD community, it has become traditional to
express pique or censure by bonking the offending person.
Convention holds that one should acknowledge a bonk by saying
`oif!' and there is a myth to the effect that failing to do so
upsets the cosmic bonk/oif balance, causing much trouble in
the universe. Some MUDs have implemented special commands for
bonking and oifing. Note: in parts of the U.K. `bonk' is a
sexually loaded slang term; care is advised in transatlantic
conversations (see boink). Commonwealth hackers report a
similar convention involving the `fish/bang' balance. See also
talk mode.
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, Camel Book,
Cinderella Book, daemon book, Dragon Book, Orange Book, Purple
Book, Wizard Book, and bible; see also rainbow series. Since
about 1993 this tradition has gotten a boost from the popular
O'Reilly and Associates line of technical books, which usually
feature some kind of exotic animal on the cover and are often
called by the name of that animal.
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.
Borg : n.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation the Borg is a species of
cyborg that ruthlessly seeks to incorporate all sentient life
into itself; their slogan is "You will be assimilated.
Resistance is futile." In hacker parlance, the Borg is usually
Microsoft, which is thought to be trying just as ruthlessly to
assimilate all computers and the entire Internet to itself
(there is a widely circulated image of Bill Gates as a Borg).
Being forced to use Windows or NT is often referred to as
being "Borged". Interestingly, the Halloween Documents reveal
that this jargon is live within Microsoft itself. See also
Evil Empire, Internet Exploiter.
Other companies, notably Intel and UUNet, have also
occasionally been equated to the Borg. In IETF circles, where
direct pressure from Microsoft is not a daily reality, the
Borg is sometimes Cisco. This usage commemorates their
tendency to pay any price to hire talent away from their
competitors. In fact, at the Spring 1997 IETF, a large number
of ex-Cisco employees, all former members of Routing Geeks,
showed up with t-shirts printed with "Recovering Borg".
borken : adj.
(also borked) Common deliberate typo for `broken'.
bot : n
[common on IRC, MUD and among gamers; from `robot']
1. An IRC or MUD user who is actually a program. On IRC,
typically the robot provides some useful service. Examples are
NickServ, which tries to prevent random users from adopting
nicks already claimed by others, and MsgServ, which allows one
to send asynchronous messages to be delivered when the
recipient signs on. Also common are `annoybots', such as
KissServ, which perform no useful function except to send cute
messages to other people. Service bots are less common on
MUDs; but some others, such as the `Julia' bot active in
1990--91, have been remarkably impressive Turing-test
experiments, able to pass as human for as long as ten or
fifteen minutes of conversation.
2. An AI-controlled player in a computer game (especially a
first-person shooter such as Quake) which, unlike ordinary
monsters, operates like a human-controlled player, with access
to a player's weapons and abilities. An example can be found
at http://www.telefragged.com/thefatal/.
3. Term used, though less commonly, for a web spider. The file
for controlling spider behavior on your site is officially the
"Robots Exclusion File" and its URL is
"http://<somehost>/robots.txt")
Note that bots in all senses were `robots' when the terms
first appeared in the early 1990s, but the shortened form is
now habitual.
bottom feeder : n.
1. An Internet user that leeches off ISPs -- the sort you can
never provide good enough services for, always complains about
the price, no matter how low it may be, and will bolt off to
another service the moment there is even the slimmest price
difference. While most bottom feeders infest free or almost
free services such as AOL, MSN, and Hotmail, too many flock to
whomever happens to be the cheapest regional ISP at the time.
Bottom feeders are often the classic problem user, known for
unleashing spam, flamage, and other breaches of netiquette.
2. Syn. for slopsucker, derived from the fishermen's and
naturalists' term for finny creatures who subsist on the
primordial ooze. (This sense is older.)
bottom-post : v.
In a news or mail reply, to put the response to a news or
email message after the quoted content from the parent
message. This is correct form, and until around 2000 was so
universal on the Internet that neither the term `bottom-post'
nor its antonym top-post existed. Hackers consider that the
best practice is actually to excerpt only the relevent
portions of the parent message, then intersperse the poster's
response in such a way that each section of response appears
directly after the excerpt it applies to. This reduces message
bulk, keeps thread content in a logical order, and facilitates
reading.
bottom-up implementation : n.
Hackish opposite of the techspeak term top-down design. It has
been received wisdom in most programming cultures that it is
best to design from higher levels of abstraction down to
lower, specifying sequences of action in increasing detail
until you get to actual code. Hackers often find (especially
in exploratory designs that cannot be closely specified in
advance) that it works best to build things in the opposite
order, by writing and testing a clean set of primitive
operations and then knitting them together. Naively applied,
this leads to hacked-together bottom-up implementations; a
more sophisticated response is middle-out implementation, in
which scratch code within primitives at the mid-level of the
system is gradually replaced with a more polished version of
the lowest level at the same time the structure above the
midlevel is being built.
bounce : v.
1. [common; perhaps by analogy to a bouncing check] An
electronic mail message that is undeliverable and returns an
error notification to the sender is said to bounce. See also
bounce message.
2. To engage in sexual intercourse; prob.: from the expression
`bouncing the mattress', but influenced by Roo's
psychosexually loaded "Try bouncing me, Tigger!" from the
Winnie-the-Pooh books. Compare boink.
3. To casually reboot a system in order to clear up a
transient problem (possibly editing a configuration file in
the process, if it is one that is only re-read at boot time).
Reported primarily among VMS and Unix users.
4. [VM/CMS programmers] Automatic warm-start of a machine
after an error. "I logged on this morning and found it had
bounced 7 times during the night"
6. [IBM] To power cycle a peripheral in order to reset it.
bounce message : n.
[common] Notification message returned to sender by a site
unable to relay email to the intended Internet address
recipient or the next link in a bang path (see bounce, sense
1). Reasons might include a nonexistent or misspelled username
or a down relay site. Bounce messages can themselves fail,
with occasionally ugly results; see sorcerer's apprentice mode
and software laser. The terms bounce mail and barfmail are
also common.
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.
A computer; esp. in the construction foo box where foo is some
functional qualifier, like graphics, or the name of an OS
(thus, Unix box, Windows box, etc.) "We preprocess the data on
Unix boxes before handing it up to the mainframe."
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.
[very common; by analogy with VAXen] Fanciful plural of box
often encountered in the phrase `Unix boxen', used to describe
commodity Unix hardware. The connotation is that any two Unix
boxen are interchangeable.
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/ , /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'.
brain dump : n.
[common] The act of telling someone everything one knows about
a particular topic or project. Typically used when someone is
going to let a new party maintain a piece of code.
Conceptually analogous to an operating system core dump in
that it saves a lot of useful state before an exit. "You'll
have to give me a brain dump on FOOBAR before you start your
new job at HackerCorp." See core dump (sense 4). At Sun, this
is also known as TOI (transfer of information).
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. [common; generalization of `Honeywell Brain Damage' (HBD),
a theoretical disease invented to explain certain utter
cretinisms in Honeywell Multics] adj. Obviously wrong;
cretinous; demented. There is an implication that the person
responsible must have suffered brain damage, because he should
have known better. Calling something brain-damaged is really
bad; it also implies it is unusable, and that its failure to
work is due to poor design rather than some accident. "Only
six monocase characters per file name? Now that's
brain-damaged!"
2. [esp. in the Mac world] May refer to free demonstration
software that has been deliberately crippled in some way so as
not to compete with the product it is intended to sell. Syn.
crippleware.
brain-dead : adj.
[common] Brain-damaged in the extreme. It tends to imply
terminal design failure rather than malfunction or simple
stupidity. "This comm program doesn't know how to send a break
-- how brain-dead!"
braino : /bray'no/ , n.
Syn. for thinko. See also brain fart.
brainwidth : n.
[Great Britain] Analagous to bandwidth but used strictly for
human capacity to process information and especially to
multitask. "Writing email is taking up most of my brainwidth
right now, I can't look at that Flash animation."
bread crumbs : n.
1. Debugging statements inserted into a program that emit
output or log indicators of the program's state to a file so
you can see where it dies or pin down the cause of surprising
behavior. The term is probably a reference to the Hansel and
Gretel story from the Brothers Grimm or the older French
folktale of Thumbelina; in several variants of these, a
character leaves a trail of bread crumbs so as not to get lost
in the woods.
2. In user-interface design, any feature that allows some
tracking of where you've been, like coloring visited links
purple rather than blue in Netscape (also called
footprinting).
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 of the early 1980s.
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.catb.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.
Breidbart Index : /bri:d'bart ind@ks/
A measurement of the severity of spam invented by long-time
hacker Seth Breidbart, used for programming cancelbots. The
Breidbart Index takes into account the fact that excessive
multi-posting EMP is worse than excessive cross-posting ECP.
The Breidbart Index is computed as follows: For each article
in a spam, take the square-root of the number of newsgroups to
which the article is posted. The Breidbart Index is the sum of
the square roots of all of the posts in the spam. For example,
one article posted to nine newsgroups and again to sixteen
would have BI = sqrt(9) + sqrt(16) = 7. It is generally agreed
that a spam is cancelable if the Breidbart Index exceeds 20.
The Breidbart Index accumulates over a 45-day window. Ten
articles yesterday and ten articles today and ten articles
tomorrow add up to a 30-article spam. Spam fighters will often
reset the count if you can convince them that the spam was
accidental and/or you have seen the error of your ways and
won't repeat it. Breidbart Index can accumulate over multiple
authors. For example, the "Make Money Fast" pyramid scheme
exceeded a BI of 20 a long time ago, and is now considered
"cancel on sight".
bricktext
[Usenet: common] Text which is carefully composed to be
right-justified (and sometimes to have a deliberate gutter at
mid-page) without use of extra spaces, just through careful
word-length choices. A minor art form. The best examples have
something of the quality of imagist poetry.
bring X to its knees : v.
[common] To present a machine, operating system, piece of
software, or algorithm with a load so extreme or pathological
that it grinds to a halt.: "To bring a MicroVAX to its knees,
try twenty users running vi -- or four running EMACS." Compare
hog.
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 commercial software, which (due to closed-source
development) displays the quality far more often than it ought
to. Oppose robust.
broadcast storm : n.
[common] An incorrect packet broadcast on a network that
causes most hosts to respond all at once, typically with wrong
answers that start the process over again. See network
meltdown; compare mail storm.
broken : adj.
1. Not working according to design (of programs). This is the
mainstream sense.
2. Improperly designed, This sense carries a more or less
disparaging implication that the designer should have known
better, while sense 1 doesn't necessarily assign blame. Which
of senses 1 or 2 is intended is conveyed by context and
nonverbal cues.
3. Behaving strangely; especially (when used of people)
exhibiting extreme depression.
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....
broken-ring network
Pejorative hackerism for "token-ring network", an early and
very slow LAN technology from IBM that lost the standards war
to Ethernet. Though token-ring survives in a few niche markets
(such as factory automation) that put a high premium on
resistance to electrical noise, the term is now (2000)
primarily historical.
BrokenWindows : n.
Abusive hackerism for the crufty and elephantine X environment
on Sun machines; properly called `OpenWindows'.
broket : /broh'k@t/ , /broh'ket`/ , n.
[rare; by analogy with `bracket': a `broken bracket'] Either
of the characters < and >, when used as paired enclosing
delimiters. This word originated as a contraction of the
phrase `broken bracket', that is, a bracket that is bent in
the middle. (At MIT, and apparently in the Real World as well,
these are usually called angle brackets.)
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 development work among N programmers is O(N) (that
is, proportional to N), but the complexity and communications
cost associated with coordinating and then merging their work
is O(N^2) (that is, proportional to the square of N). The
quote is from Fred Brooks, a manager of IBM's OS/360 project
and author of The Mythical Man-Month (Addison-Wesley, 1975,
ISBN 0-201-00650-2), an excellent early book on software
engineering. The myth in question has been most tersely
expressed as "Programmer time is fungible" and Brooks
established conclusively that it is not. Hackers have never
forgotten his advice (though it's not the whole story; see
bazaar); too often, management still does. See also
creationism, second-system effect, optimism.
brown-paper-bag bug : n.
A bug in a public software release that is so embarrassing
that the author notionally wears a brown paper bag over his
head for a while so he won't be recognized on the net. Entered
popular usage after the early-1999 release of the first Linux
2.2, which had one. The phrase was used in Linus Torvalds's
apology posting.
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 techspeak meaning of the word previously
lacking in hacker usage. Nowadays, if someone mentions using a
`browser' without qualification, one may assume it is a Web
browser.
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-
and rubber-hose cryptanalysis.
A more simple-minded example of brute-force programming is
finding the smallest number in a large list by first using an
existing program to sort the list in ascending order, and then
picking the first number off the front.
Whether brute-force programming should actually be considered
stupid or not depends on the context; if the problem is not
terribly big, the extra CPU time spent on a brute-force
solution may cost less than the programmer time it would take
to develop a more `intelligent' algorithm. Additionally, a
more intelligent algorithm may imply more long-term complexity
cost and bug-chasing than are justified by the speed
improvement.
Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix, is reported to have uttered
the epigram "When in doubt, use brute force". He probably
intended this as a ha ha only serious, but the original Unix
kernel's preference for simple, robust, and portable
algorithms over brittle `smart' ones does seem to have been a
significant factor in the success of that OS. Like so many
other tradeoffs in software design, the choice between brute
force and complex, finely-tuned cleverness is often a
difficult one that requires both engineering savvy and
delicate esthetic judgment.
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. A very similar usage is said to be
mainstream in Great Britain.
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 1977,
incorporating paged virtual memory, TCP/IP networking
enhancements, and many other features. The BSD versions (4.1,
4.2, and 4.3) and the commercial versions derived from them
(SunOS, ULTRIX, and Mt. Xinu) held the technical lead in the
Unix world until AT&T's successful standardization efforts
after about 1986; descendants including Free/Open/NetBSD,
BSD/OS and MacOS X are still widely popular. Note that BSD
versions going back to 2.9 are often referred to by their
version numbers alone, without the BSD prefix. See also Unix.
BSOD : /B-S-O-D/
Very common abbreviation for Blue Screen of Death. Both spoken
and written.
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 BUAFs.
See warlording.
BUAG : // , n.
[abbreviation, from alt.fan.warlord] Big Ugly ASCII Graphic.
Pejorative term for ugly ASCII art, especially as found in sig
blocks. For some reason, mutations of the head of Bart Simpson
are particularly common in the least imaginative sig blocks.
See warlording.
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. (However, it's been shown by
repeated experiment that below about 5000 records bubble-sort
is OK anyway.) The canonical example of a really bad algorithm
is bogo-sort. A bubble sort might be used out of ignorance,
but any use of bogo-sort could issue only from brain damage or
willful perversity.
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 problem is commonly
exploited by crackers to get arbitrary commands executed by a
program running with root permissions. This may be due to a
mismatch in the processing rates of the producing and
consuming processes (see overrun and firehose syndrome), or
because the buffer is simply too small to hold all the data
that must accumulate before a piece of it can be processed.
For example, in a text-processing tool that crunches a line at
a time, a short line buffer can result in lossage as input
from a long line overflows the buffer and trashes data beyond
it. Good defensive programming would check for overflow on
each character and stop accepting data when the buffer is full
up. The term is used of and by humans in a metaphorical sense.
"What time did I agree to meet you? My buffer must have
overflowed." Or "If I answer that phone my buffer is going to
overflow." See also spam, overrun screw.
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.
[bugpic.png]
The `original bug'
Indeed, the use of bug to mean an industrial defect was
already established in Thomas Edison's time, and a more
specific and rather modern use can be found in an electrical
handbook from 1896 (Hawkin's New Catechism of Electricity,
Theo. Audel & Co.) which says: "The term `bug' is used to a
limited extent to designate any fault or trouble in the
connections or working of electric apparatus." It further
notes that the term is "said to have originated in quadruplex
telegraphy and have been transferred to all electric
apparatus."
The latter observation may explain a common folk etymology of
the term; that it came from telephone company usage, in which
"bugs in a telephone cable" were blamed for noisy lines.
Though this derivation seems to be mistaken, it may well be a
distorted memory of a joke first current among telegraph
operators more than a century ago!
Or perhaps not a joke. Historians of the field inform us that
the term "bug" was regularly used in the early days of
telegraphy to refer to a variety of semi-automatic telegraphy
keyers that would send a string of dots if you held them down.
In fact, the Vibroplex keyers (which were among the most
common of this type) even had a graphic of a beetle on them
(and still do)! While the ability to send repeated dots
automatically was very useful for professional morse code
operators, these were also significantly trickier to use than
the older manual keyers, and it could take some practice to
ensure one didn't introduce extraneous dots into the code by
holding the key down a fraction too long. In the hands of an
inexperienced operator, a Vibroplex "bug" on the line could
mean that a lot of garbled Morse would soon be coming your
way.
Further, the term "bug" has long been used among radio
technicians to describe a device that converts electromagnetic
field variations into acoustic signals. It is used to trace
radio interference and look for dangerous radio emissions.
Radio community usage derives from the roach-like shape of the
first versions used by 19th century physicists. The first
versions consisted of a coil of wire (roach body), with the
two wire ends sticking out and bent back to nearly touch
forming a spark gap (roach antennae). The bug is to the radio
technician what the stethoscope is to the stereotypical
medical doctor. This sense is almost certainly ancestral to
modern use of "bug" for a covert monitoring device, but may
also have contributed to the use of "bug" for the effects of
radio interference itself.
Actually, use of bug in the general sense of a disruptive
event goes back to Shakespeare! (Henry VI, part III - Act V,
Scene II: King Edward: "So, lie thou there. Die thou; and die
our fear; For Warwick was a bug that fear'd us all.") In the
first edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary one meaning of
bug is "A frightful object; a walking spectre"; this is traced
to `bugbear', a Welsh term for a variety of mythological
monster which (to complete the circle) has recently been
reintroduced into the popular lexicon through fantasy
role-playing games.
In any case, in jargon the word almost never refers to
insects. Here is a plausible conversation that never actually
happened: "There is a bug in this ant farm!" "What do you
mean? I don't see any ants in it." "That's the bug."
A careful discussion of the etymological issues can be found
in a paper by Fred R. Shapiro, 1987, "Entomology of the
Computer Bug: History and Folklore", American Speech
62(4):376-378.
[There has been a widespread myth that the original bug was
moved to the Smithsonian, and an earlier version of this entry
so asserted. A correspondent who thought to check discovered
that the bug was not there. While investigating this in late
1990, your editor discovered that the NSWC still had the bug,
but had unsuccessfully tried to get the Smithsonian to accept
it -- and that the present curator of their History of
American Technology Museum didn't know this and agreed that it
would make a worthwhile exhibit. It was moved to the
Smithsonian in mid-1991, but due to space and money
constraints was not actually exhibited for years afterwards.
Thus, the process of investigating the original-computer-bug
bug fixed it in an entirely unexpected way, by making the myth
true! --ESR]
[73-07-29.png]
It helps to remember that this dates from 1973.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-10-31)
bug-compatible : adj.
[common] Said of a design or revision that has been badly
compromised by a requirement to be compatible with fossils or
misfeatures in other programs or (esp.) previous releases of
itself. "MS-DOS 2.0 used \ as a path separator to be
bug-compatible with some cretin's choice of / as an option
character in 1.0."
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(8) (the Unix mail daemon) belong to;
this was coined on the Usenet newsgroup comp.security.unix at
a time when sendmail security holes, which allowed outside
crackers access to the system, were being uncovered at an
alarming rate, forcing sysadmins to update very often. Also,
more completely, fatal security bug-of-the-month club. See
also kernel-of-the-week club.
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. Implies that the programmer has thought of all
possible errors, and added code to protect against each one.
Thus, in some cases, this can imply code that is too
heavyweight, due to excessive paranoia on the part of the
programmer. Syn. armor-plated.
bullschildt : /bul'shilt/ , n.
[comp.lang.c on USENET] A confident, but incorrect, statement
about a programming language. This immortalizes a very bad
book about C, Herbert Schildt's C - The Complete Reference.
One reviewer commented "The naive errors in this book would be
embarrassing even in a programming assignment turned in by a
computer science college sophomore."
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 a CD : v.
To write a software or document distribution on a CDR. Coined
from the fact that a laser is used to inscribe the information
by burning small pits in the medium, and from the fact that
disk comes out of the drive warm to the touch. Writable CDs
can be done on a normal desk-top machine with a suitable drive
(so there is no protracted release cycle associated with
making them) but each one takes a long time to make, so they
are not appropriate for volume production. Writable CDs are
suitable for software backups and for short-turnaround-time
low-volume software distribution, such as sending a beta
release version to a few selected field test sites. Compare
cut a tape.
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 spinning
through a tight or timed-delay loop that polls for the event
on each pass, as opposed to setting up an interrupt handler
and continuing execution on another part of the task. In
applications this is a wasteful technique, and best avoided on
timesharing systems where a busy-waiting program may hog the
processor. However, it is often unavoidable in kernel
programming. In the Linux world, kernel busy-waits are usually
referred to as spinlocks.
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, esp. by applying an AC rather than DC signal. Some
wire faults will pass DC tests but fail an AC buzz test.
3. To process an array or list in sequence, doing the same
thing to each element. "This loop buzzes through the tz array
looking for a terminator type."
buzzword-compliant
[also buzzword-enabled] Used (disparagingly) of products that
seem to have been specified to incorporate all of this month's
trendy technologies. Key buzzwords that often show up in
buzzword-compliant specifications as of 2001 include `XML',
`Java', `peer-to-peer', `distributed', and `open'.
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. [common] Said of an operation (especially a repetitive,
trivial, and/or tedious one) that ought to be performed
automatically by the computer, but which a hacker instead has
to step tediously through. "My mailer doesn't have a command
to include the text of the message I'm replying to, so I have
to do it by hand." This does not necessarily mean the speaker
has to retype a copy of the message; it might refer to, say,
dropping into a subshell from the mailer, making a copy of
one's mailbox file, reading that into an editor, locating the
top and bottom of the message in question, deleting the rest
of the file, inserting `>' characters on each line, writing
the file, leaving the editor, returning to the mailer, reading
the file in, and later remembering to delete the file. Compare
eyeball search.
2. [common] By extension, writing code which does something in
an explicit or low-level way for which a presupplied library
routine ought to have been available. "This cretinous B-tree
library doesn't supply a decent iterator, so I'm having to
walk the trees by hand."
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
invariably 8 bits. Some older architectures used byte for
quantities of 6, 7, or (especially) 9 bits, and the PDP-10
supported bytes that were actually bitfields of 1 to 36 bits!
These usages are now obsolete, killed off by universal
adoption of power-of-2 word sizes.
Historical note: The term was coined by Werner Buchholz in
1956 during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch
computer; originally it was described as 1 to 6 bits (typical
I/O equipment of the period used 6-bit chunks of information).
The move to an 8-bit byte happened in late 1956, and this size
was later adopted and promulgated as a standard by the
System/360. The word was coined by mutating the word `bite' so
it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit. See also
nybble.
byte sex : n.
[common] The byte sex of hardware is big-endian or
little-endian; see those entries.
bytesexual : /bi:t`sek'shu-@l/ , adj.
[rare] Said of hardware, denotes willingness to compute or
pass data in either big-endian or little-endian format
(depending, presumably, on a mode bit somewhere). See also
NUXI problem.
Bzzzt! Wrong. : /bzt rong/ , excl.
[common; Usenet/Internet; punctuation varies] From a Robin
Williams routine in the movie Dead Poets Society spoofing
radio or TV quiz programs, such as Truth or Consequences,
where an incorrect answer earns one a blast from the buzzer
and condolences from the interlocutor. A way of expressing
mock-rude disagreement, usually immediately following an
included quote from another poster. The less abbreviated
"*Bzzzzt*, wrong, but thank you for playing" is also common;
capitalization and emphasis of the buzzer sound varies.
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. C is often described, with a mixture
of fondness and disdain varying according to the speaker, as
"a language that combines all the elegance and power of
assembly language with all the readability and maintainability
of assembly language" See also languages of choice, indent
style.
[ansi-c.png]
The Crunchly on the left sounds a little ANSI.
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 : //
[common, esp. on news.admin.net-abuse.email] Contraction of
"Coffee & Cats". This frequently occurs as a warning label on
USENET posts that are likely to cause you to snarf coffee onto
your keyboard and startle the cat off your lap.
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 : 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 and Associates
1991, ISBN 0-937175-64-1 (second edition 1996, ISBN
1-56592-149-6; third edition 2000, 0-596-00027-8, adding as
authors Tom Christiansen and Jon Orwant but dropping Randal
Schwartz). The definitive reference on Perl.
camelCase
A variable in a programming language is sait to be camelCased
when all syllables but the first are capitalized. This
practice contrasts with the C tradition of either running
syllables together or marking syllable breaks with
underscores; thus, where a C programmer would write
thisverylongname or this_very_long_name, the camelCased
version would be thisVeryLongName. The common in certain
language communities (formerly Pascal; today Java and Visual
Basic) and tends to be associated with object-oriented
programming.
Compare BiCapitalization; but where that practice is primarily
associated with marketing, camelCasing is not aimed at
impressing anybody, and hackers consider it respectable.
camelCasing
See PascalCasing.
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).
cancelbot : /kan'sel-bot/
[Usenet: compound, cancel + robot]
1. Mythically, a robocanceller
2. In reality, most cancelbots are manually operated by being
fed lists of spam message IDs.
Cancelmoose[tm] : /kan'sel-moos/
[Usenet] The archetype and model of all good spam-fighters.
Once upon a time, the 'Moose would send out spam-cancels and
then post notice anonymously to news.admin.policy,
news.admin.misc, and alt.current-events.net-abuse. The 'Moose
stepped to the fore on its own initiative, at a time
(mid-1994) when spam-cancels were irregular and disorganized,
and behaved altogether admirably -- fair, even-handed, and
quick to respond to comments and criticism, all without
self-aggrandizement or martyrdom. Cancelmoose[tm] quickly
gained near-unanimous support from the readership of all three
above-mentioned groups.
Nobody knows who Cancelmoose[tm] really is, and there aren't
even any good rumors. However, the 'Moose now has an e-mail
address (@email{moose@cm.org}) and a web site
(http://www.cm.org/.) By early 1995, others had stepped into
the spam-cancel business, and appeared to be comporting
themselves well, after the 'Moose's manner. The 'Moose has now
gotten out of the business, and is more interested in ending
spam (and cancels) entirely.
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 similar gag in "Blazing
Saddles" --ESR] There is a moral here for those attracted to
candygrammars. Note that, in many circles, pretty much the
same ones who remember Monty Python sketches, all it takes is
the word "Candygram!", suitably timed, to get people rolling
on the floor. -- GLS]
canonical : adj.
[very common; historically, `according to religious law'] The
usual or standard state or manner of something. This word has
a somewhat more technical meaning in mathematics. Two formulas
such as 9 + x and x + 9 are said to be equivalent because they
mean the same thing, but the second one is in canonical form
because it is written in the usual way, with the highest power
of x first. Usually there are fixed rules you can use to
decide whether something is in canonical form. The jargon
meaning, a relaxation of the technical meaning, acquired its
present loading in computer-science culture largely through
its prominence in Alonzo Church's work in computation theory
and mathematical logic (see Knights of the Lambda Calculus).
Compare vanilla.
Non-technical academics do not use the adjective `canonical'
in any of the senses defined above with any regularity; they
do however use the nouns canon and canonicity (not
**canonicalness or **canonicality). The canon of a given
author is the complete body of authentic works by that author
(this usage is familiar to Sherlock Holmes fans as well as to
literary scholars). `The canon' is the body of works in a
given field (e.g., works of literature, or of art, or of
music) deemed worthwhile for students to study and for
scholars to investigate.
The word `canon' has an interesting history. It derives
ultimately from the Greek kanon (akin to the English `cane')
referring to a reed. Reeds were used for measurement, and in
Latin and later Greek the word `canon' meant a rule or a
standard. The establishment of a canon of scriptures within
Christianity was meant to define a standard or a rule for the
religion. The above non-techspeak academic usages stem from
this instance of a defined and accepted body of work.
Alongside this usage was the promulgation of `canons'
(`rules') for the government of the Catholic Church. The
techspeak usages ("according to religious law") derive from
this use of the Latin `canon'.
Hackers invest this term with a playfulness that makes an
ironic contrast with its historical meaning. A true story: One
Bob Sjoberg, new at the MIT AI Lab, expressed some annoyance
at the incessant use of jargon. Over his loud objections, GLS
and RMS made a point of using as much of it as possible in his
presence, and eventually it began to sink in. Finally, in one
conversation, he used the word canonical in jargon-like
fashion without thinking. Steele: "Aha! We've finally got you
talking jargon too!" Stallman: "What did he say?" Steele: "Bob
just used `canonical' in the canonical way."
Of course, canonicality depends on context, but it is
implicitly defined as the way hackers normally expect things
to be. Thus, a hacker may claim with a straight face that
`according to religious law' is not the canonical meaning of
canonical.
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']
The addition of a new feature to an existing system by
selecting the code from an existing feature and pasting it in
with minor changes. Common in telephony circles because most
operations in a telephone switch are selected using case
statements. Leads to software bloat.
In some circles of EMACS users this is called `programming by
Meta-W', because Meta-W is the EMACS command for copying a
block of text to a kill buffer in preparation to pasting it in
elsewhere. The term is condescending, implying that the
programmer is acting mindlessly rather than thinking carefully
about what is required to integrate the code for two similar
cases.
At DEC (now HP), this is sometimes called clone-and-hack
coding.
case mod
[from `case modification']
1. Originally a kind of hardware hack on a PC intended to
support overclocking (e.g. with cutouts for oversized fans, or
a freon-based or water-cooling system).
2. Nowadays, similar drastic surgery that's done just to make
a machine look nifty. The commonest case mods combine acrylic
case windows with LEDs to give the machine an eerie interior
glow like a B-movie flying saucer. More advanced forms of case
modding involve building machines into weird and unlikely
shapes. The effect can be quite artistic, but one of the
unwritten rules is that the machine must continue to function
as a computer.
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 Some AI Koans (in Appendix A).
A correspondent from England tells us that one of ICL's most
talented systems designers used to be called out occasionally
to service machines which the field circus had given up on.
Since he knew the design inside out, he could often find
faults simply by listening to a quick outline of the symptoms.
He used to play on this by going to some site where the field
circus had just spent the last two weeks solid trying to find
a fault, and spreading a diagram of the system out on a table
top. He'd then shake some chicken bones and cast them over the
diagram, peer at the bones intently for a minute, and then
tell them that a certain module needed replacing. The system
would start working again immediately upon the replacement.
cat : vt.
[from catenate via Unix cat(1)]
1. [techspeak] To spew an entire file to the screen or some
other output sink without pause (syn. blast).
2. By extension, to dump large amounts of data at an
unprepared target or with no intention of browsing it
carefully. Usage: considered silly. Rare outside Unix sites.
See also dd, BLT.
Among Unix fans, 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.... See also UUOC.
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.
cathedral : n.,adj.
[see bazaar for derivation] The `classical' mode of software
engineering long thought to be necessarily implied by Brooks's
Law. Features small teams, tight project control, and long
release intervals. This term came into use after analysis of
the Linux experience suggested there might be something wrong
(or at least incomplete) in the classical assumptions.
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", passed as section 502 of a
major telecommunications reform bill on February 8th, 1996
("Black Thursday"). The CDA made it a federal crime in the USA
to send a communication which is "obscene, lewd, lascivious,
filthy, or indecent, with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or
harass another person." It also threatened with imprisonment
anyone who "knowingly" makes accessible to minors any message
that "describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by
contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory
activities or organs".
While the CDA was sold as a measure to protect minors from the
putative evils of pornography, the repressive political aims
of the bill were laid bare by the Hyde amendment, which
intended to outlaw discussion of abortion on the Internet.
To say that this direct attack on First Amendment free-speech
rights was not well received on the Internet would be putting
it mildly. A firestorm of protest followed, including a
February 29th 1996 mass demonstration by thousands of netters
who turned their home pages black for 48 hours. Several
civil-rights groups and computing/telecommunications companies
mounted a constitutional challenge. The CDA was demolished by
a strongly-worded decision handed down in 8th-circuit Federal
court and subsequently affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court on
26 June 1997 ("White Thursday"). See also Exon.
cdr : /ku'dr/ , /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. [common] The perforated edge strips on printer paper, after
they have been separated from the printed portion. Also called
selvage, perf, and ripoff.
2. The confetti-like paper bits punched out of cards or paper
tape; this has also been called chaff, computer confetti, and
keypunch droppings. It's reported that this was very old Army
slang (associated with teletypewriters before the computer
era), and has been occasionally sighted in directions for
punched-card vote tabulators long after it passed out of live
use among computer programmers in the late 1970s. This sense
of `chad' returned to the mainstream during the finale of the
hotly disputed U.S. presidential election in 2000 via stories
about the Florida vote recounts. Note however that in the
revived mainstream usage chad is not a mass noun and `a chad'
is a single piece of the stuff.
There is an urban legend that chad (sense 2) derives from the
Chadless keypunch (named for its inventor), which cut little
u-shaped tabs in the card to make a hole when the tab folded
back, rather than punching out a circle/rectangle; it was
clear that if the Chadless keypunch didn't make them, then the
stuff that other keypunches made had to be `chad'. However,
serious attempts to track down "Chadless" as a personal name
or U.S. trademark have failed, casting doubt on this etymology
-- and the U.S. Patent Classification System uses "chadless"
(small c) as an adjective, suggesting that "chadless" derives
from "chad" and not the other way around. There is another
legend that the word was originally acronymic, standing for
"Card Hole Aggregate Debris", but this has all the earmarks of
a backronym. It has also been noted that the word "chad" is
Scots dialect for gravel, but nobody has proposed any
plausible reason that card chaff should be thought of as
gravel. None of these etymologies is really plausible.
[74-12-31.png]
This is one way to be chadless.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 75-10-04)
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.
chainik : /chi:'nik/
[Russian, literally "teapot"] Almost synonymous with muggle.
Implies both ignorance and a certain amount of willingness to
learn, but does not necessarily imply as little experience or
short exposure time as newbie and is not as derogatory as
luser. Both a novice user and someone using a system for a
long time without any understanding of the internals can be
referred to as chainiks. Very widespread term in Russian
hackish, often used in an English context by Russian-speaking
hackers esp. in Israel (e.g. "Our new colleague is a complete
chainik"). FidoNet discussion groups often had a "chainik"
subsection for newbies and, well, old chainiks (eg.
su.asm.chainik, ru.linux.chainik, ru.html.chainik). Public
projects often have a chainik mailing list to keep the
chainiks off the developers' and experienced users'
discussions. Today, the word is slowly slipping into
mainstream Russian due to the Russian translation of the
popular yellow-black covered "foobar for dummies" series,
which (correctly) uses "chainik" for "dummy", but its frequent
(though not excessive) use is still characteristic
hacker-speak.
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, callahans, and #report. At
times of international crisis, #report has hundreds of
members, some of whom take turns listening to various news
services and typing in summaries of the news, or in some
cases, giving first-hand accounts of the action (e.g., Scud
missile attacks in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War in 1991).
channel hopping : n.
[common; IRC, GEnie] To rapidly switch channels on IRC, or a
GEnie chat board, just as a social butterfly might hop from
one group to another at a party. This term may derive from the
TV watcher's idiom, channel surfing.
channel op : /chan'l op/ , n.
[IRC] Someone who is endowed with privileges on a particular
IRC channel; commonly abbreviated chanop or CHOP or just op
(as of 2000 these short forms have almost crowded out the
parent usage). These privileges include the right to kick
users, to change various status bits, and to make others into
CHOPs.
chanop : /chan'-op/ , n.
[IRC] See channel op.
char : /keir/ , /char/ , /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-guards).
cheerfully : adv.
See happily.
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 (within Commodore itself the
logo was always called chicken lips). Rendered in ASCII as
`C='. With the arguable exception of the Amiga, Commodore's
machines were notoriously crocky little bitty boxes, albeit
people have written multitasking Unix-like operating systems
with TCP/IP networking for them. Thus, this usage may owe
something to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep? (the basis for the movie Blade Runner; the
novel is now sold under that title), in which a `chickenhead'
is a mutant with below-average intelligence.
chickenboner : n.
[spamfighters] Derogatory term for a spammer. The image that
goes with it is of an overweight redneck with bad teeth living
in a trailer, hunched in semi-darkness over his computer and
surrounded by rotting chicken bones in half-eaten KFC buckets
and empty beer cans. See
http://www.spamfaq.net/terminology.shtml#chickenboner for
discussion.
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.
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.
[common] 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 #defines." See barf, vi.
chomp : vi.
1. To lose; specifically, to chew on something of which more
was bitten off than one can. Probably related to gnashing of
teeth.
2. To bite the bag; See bagbiter.
A hand gesture commonly accompanies this. To perform it, hold
the four fingers together and place the thumb against their
tips. Now open and close your hand rapidly to suggest a biting
action (much like what Pac-Man does in the classic video game,
though this pantomime seems to predate that). The gesture
alone means `chomp chomp' (see Verb Doubling in the Jargon
Construction section of the Prependices). The hand may be
pointed at the object of complaint, and for real emphasis you
can use both hands at once. Doing this to a person is
equivalent to saying "You chomper!" If you point the gesture
at yourself, it is a humble but humorous admission of some
failure. You might do this if someone told you that a program
you had written had failed in some surprising way and you felt
dumb for not having anticipated it.
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.) Compare Godzillagram.
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. There is a home page
at http://www.subgenius.com/.
CI$ : // , n.
Hackerism for `CIS', CompuServe Information Service. The
dollar sign refers to CompuServe's rather steep line charges.
Often used in sig blocks just before a CompuServe address.
Syn. Compu$erve.
Cinderella Book : n.
[CMU] Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and
Computation, by John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman,
(Addison-Wesley, 1979). So called because the cover depicts a
girl (putatively Cinderella) sitting in front of a Rube
Goldberg device and holding a rope coming out of it. On the
back cover, the device is in shambles after she has
(inevitably) pulled on the rope. See also book titles.
Classic C : /klas'ik C/ , n.
[a play on `Coke Classic'] The C programming language as
defined in the first edition of K&R, with some small
additions. It is also known as `K&R C'. The name came into use
while C was being standardized by the ANSI X3J11 committee.
Also `C Classic'.
An analogous construction is sometimes applied elsewhere:
thus, `X Classic', where X = Star Trek (referring to the
original TV series) or X = PC (referring to IBM's ISA-bus
machines as opposed to the PS/2 series). This construction is
especially used of product series in which the newer versions
are considered serious losers relative to the older ones.
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."
click of death : n.
A syndrome of certain Iomega ZIP drives, named for the
clicking noise that is caused by the malady. An affected drive
will, after accepting a disk, will start making a clicking
noise and refuse to eject the disk. A common solution for
retrieving the disk is to insert the bent end of a paper clip
into a small hole adjacent to the slot. "Clicked" disks are
generally unusable after being retrieved from the drive.
The clicking noise is caused by the drive's read/write head
bumping against its movement stops when it fails to find track
0 on the disk, causing the head to become misaligned. This can
happen when the drive has been subjected to a physical shock,
or when the disk is exposed to an electromagnetic field, such
as that of the CRT. Another common cause is when a package of
disks is armed with an anti-theft strip at a store. When the
clerk scans the product to disarm the strip, it can
demagnetize the disks, wiping out track 0.
There is evidence that the click of death is a communicable
disease; a "clicked" disk can cause the read/write head of a
"clean" drive to become misaligned. Iomega at first denied the
existence of the click of death, but eventually offered to
replace free of charge any drives affected by the condition.
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.
clock
n.,v.
1. [techspeak] The master oscillator that steps a CPU or other
digital circuit through its paces. This has nothing to do with
the time of day, although the software counter that keeps
track of the latter may be derived from the former.
2. vt. To run a CPU or other digital circuit at a particular
rate. "If you clock it at 1000MHz, it gets warm.". See
overclock.
3. vt. To force a digital circuit from one state to the next
by applying a single clock pulse. "The data must be stable
10ns before you clock the latch."
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, jiffy.
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. [obs] PC clone: a PC-BUS/ISA/EISA/PCI-compatible
80x86-based microcomputer (this use is sometimes spelled klone
or PClone). These invariably have much more bang for the buck
than the IBM archetypes they resemble. This term fell out of
use in the 1990s; the class of machines it describes are now
simply PCs or Intel machines.
5. [obs.] In the construction Unix clone: An OS designed to
deliver a Unix-lookalike environment without Unix license
fees, or with additional `mission-critical' features such as
support for real-time programming. Linux and the free BSDs
killed off this product category and the term with it.
6. v. To make an exact copy of something. "Let me clone that"
might mean "I want to borrow that paper so I can make a
photocopy" or "Let me get a copy of that file before you mung
it".
clone-and-hack coding : n.
[DEC] Syn. case and paste.
clover key : n.
[Mac users] See feature key.
clue-by-four
[Usenet: portmanteau, clue + two-by-four] The notional stick
with which one whacks an aggressively clueless person. This
term derives from a western American folk saying about
training a mule "First, you got to hit him with a two-by-four.
That's to get his attention." The clue-by-four is a close
relative of the LART. Syn. clue stick. This metaphor is
commonly elaborated; your editor once heard a hacker say "I
smite you with the great sword Cluebringer!"
clustergeeking : /kluh'st@r-gee`king/ , n.
[CMU] Spending more time at a computer cluster doing CS
homework than most people spend breathing.
co-lo : /koh'loh`/ , n.
[very common; first heard c.1995] Short for `co-location',
used of a machine you own that is physically sited on the
premises of an ISP in order to take advantage of the ISP's
direct access to lots of network bandwidth. Often in the
phrases co-lo box or co-lo machines. Co-lo boxes are typically
web and FTP servers remote-administered by their owners, who
may seldom or never visit the actual site.
coaster : n.
1. Unuseable CD produced during failed attempt at writing to
writeable or re-writeable CD media. Certainly related to the
coaster-like shape of a CD, and the relative value of these
failures. "I made a lot of coasters before I got a good CD."
2. Useless CDs received in the mail from the likes of AOL,
MSN, CI$, Prodigy, ad nauseam.
In the U.K., beermat is often used in these senses.
coaster toaster
A writer for recordable CD-Rs, especially cheap IDE models
that tend to produce a high proportion of coasters.
COBOL : /koh'bol/ , n.
[COmmon Business-Oriented Language] (Synonymous with evil.) A
weak, verbose, and flabby language used by code grinders to do
boring mindless things on dinosaur mainframes. Hackers believe
that all COBOL programmers are suits or code grinders, and no
self-respecting hacker will ever admit to having learned the
language. Its very name is seldom uttered without ritual
expressions of disgust or horror. One popular one is Edsger W.
Dijkstra's famous observation that "The use of COBOL cripples
the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a
criminal offense." (from Selected Writings on Computing: A
Personal Perspective) See also fear and loathing, software
rot.
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!"
cobweb site : n.
A World Wide Web Site that hasn't been updated so long it has
figuratively grown cobwebs.
code
1. n. The stuff that software writers write, either in source
form or after translation by a compiler or assembler. Often
used in opposition to "data", which is the stuff that code
operates on. Among hackers this is a mass noun, as in "How
much code does it take to do a bubble sort?", or "The code is
loaded at the high end of RAM." Among scientific programmers
it is sometimes a count noun equilvalent to "program"; thus
they may speak of "codes" in the plural. Anyone referring to
software as "the software codes" is probably a newbie or a
suit.
2. v. To write code. In this sense, always refers to source
code rather than compiled. "I coded an Emacs clone in two
hours!" This verb is a bit of a cultural marker associated
with the Unix and minicomputer traditions (and lately Linux);
people within that culture prefer v. `code' to v. `program'
whereas outside it the reverse is normally true.
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.
Contrast hacker, Real Programmer.
code monkey : n
1. A person only capable of grinding out code, but unable to
perform the higher-primate tasks of software architecture,
analysis, and design. Mildly insulting. Often applied to the
most junior people on a programming team.
2. Anyone who writes code for a living; a programmer.
3. A self-deprecating way of denying responsibility for a
management decision, or of complaining about having to live
with such decisions. As in "Don't ask me why we need to write
a compiler in COBOL, I'm just a code monkey."
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 weenies. "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 of X, and quotient. They are often
loosely applied to things you cannot really be quantitative
about, but there are subtle distinctions among them that
convey information about the way the speaker mentally models
whatever he or she is describing. Foo factor and foo quotient
tend to describe something for which the issue is one of
presence or absence. The canonical example is fudge factor.
It's not important how much you're fudging; the term simply
acknowledges that some fudging is needed. You might talk of
liking a movie for its silliness factor. Quotient tends to
imply that the property is a ratio of two opposing factors: "I
would have won except for my luck quotient." This could also
be "I would have won except for the luck factor", but using
quotient emphasizes that it was bad luck overpowering good
luck (or someone else's good luck overpowering your own). Foo
index and coefficient of foo both tend to imply that foo is,
if not strictly measurable, at least something that can be
larger or smaller. Thus, you might refer to a paper or person
as having a high bogosity index, whereas you would be less
likely to speak of a high bogosity factor. Foo index suggests
that foo is a condensation of many quantities, as in the
mundane cost-of-living index; coefficient of foo suggests that
foo is a fundamental quantity, as in a coefficient of
friction. The choice between these terms is often one of
personal preference; e.g., some people might feel that
bogosity is a fundamental attribute and thus say coefficient
of bogosity, whereas others might feel it is a combination of
factors and thus say bogosity index.
cokebottle : /kohk'bot-l/ , n.
Any very unusual character, particularly one you can't type
because it isn't on your keyboard. MIT people used to complain
about the `control-meta-cokebottle' commands at SAIL, and SAIL
people complained right back about the
`escape-escape-cokebottle' commands at MIT. After the demise
of the space-cadet keyboard, cokebottle faded away as serious
usage, but was often invoked humorously to describe an
(unspecified) weird or non-intuitive keystroke command. It may
be due for a second inning, however. The OSF/Motif window
manager, 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 first word
may be 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/).
Preferred metasyntactic variables include blurgle, eek, ook,
frodo, and bilbo; wibble, wobble, and in emergencies wubble;
flob, banana, tom, dick, harry, wombat, frog, fish, womble and
so on and on (see foo, sense 4). Alternatives to verb doubling
include suffixes -o-rama, frenzy (as in feeding frenzy), and
city (examples: "barf city!" "hack-o-rama!" "core dump
frenzy!").
All the generic differences within the anglophone world
inevitably show themselves in the associated hackish dialects.
The Greek letters beta and zeta are usually pronounced
/bee't@/ and /zee't@/; meta may also be pronounced /mee't@/.
Various punctuators (and even letters - Z is called `zed', not
`zee') are named differently: most crucially, for hackish,
where Americans use `parens', `brackets' and `braces' for (),
[] and {}, Commonwealth English uses `brackets', `square
brackets' and `curly brackets', though `parentheses' may be
used for the first; the exclamation mark, `!', is called pling
rather than bang and the pound sign, `#', is called hash;
furthermore, the term `the pound sign' is understood to mean
the £ (of course). Canadian hacker slang, as with mainstream
language, mixes American and British usages about evenly.
See also attoparsec, calculator, chemist, console jockey,
fish, go-faster stripes, grunge, hakspek, heavy metal, leaky
heap, lord high fixer, loose bytes, muddie, nadger, noddy,
psychedelicware, raster blaster, RTBM, seggie, spod, sun
lounge, terminal junkie, tick-list features, weeble, weasel,
YABA, and notes or definitions under Bad Thing, barf, bogus,
chase pointers, cosmic rays, crippleware, crunch, dodgy, gonk,
hamster, hardwarily, mess-dos, nybble, proglet, root, SEX,
tweak, womble, and xyzzy.
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 features and cruft that don't merge cleanly into the
overall design scheme (thus, some fans of Classic C maintain
that ANSI C is no longer compact).
compiler jock : n.
See jock (sense 2).
compo : n.
[demoscene] Finnish-originated slang for `competition'. Demo
compos are held at a demoparty. The usual protocol is that
several groups make demos for a compo, they are shown on a big
screen, and then the party participants vote for the best one.
Prizes (from sponsors and party entrance fees) are given.
Standard compo formats include intro compos (4k or 64k demos),
music compos, graphics compos, quick demo compos (build a demo
within 4 hours for example), etc.
compress : vt.
[Unix] When used without a qualifier, generally refers to
crunching of a file using a particular C implementation of
compression by Joseph M. Orost et al.: and widely circulated
via Usenet; use of crunch itself in this sense is rare among
Unix hackers. Specifically, compress is built around the
Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm as described in "A Technique for
High Performance Data Compression", Terry A. Welch, IEEE
Computer, vol. 17, no. 6 (June 1984), pp. 8--19.
Compu$erve : n.
See CI$. Synonyms CompuSpend and Compu$pend are also reported.
computer confetti : n.
Syn. chad. [obs.] Though this term was common at one time,
this use of punched-card chad is not a good idea, as the
pieces are stiff and have sharp corners that could injure the
eyes. GLS reports that he once attended a wedding at MIT
during which he and a few other guests enthusiastically threw
chad instead of rice. The groom later grumbled that he and his
bride had spent most of the evening trying to get the stuff
out of their hair.
[2001 update: this term has passed out of use for two reasons;
(1) the stuff it describes is now quite rare, and (2) the term
chad, which was half-forgotten in 1990, has enjoyed a revival.
--ESR]
computron : /kom'pyoo-tron`/ , n.
1. [common] A notional unit of computing power combining
instruction speed and storage capacity, dimensioned roughly in
instructions-per-second times megabytes-of-main-store times
megabytes-of-mass-storage. "That machine can't run GNU Emacs,
it doesn't have enough computrons!" This usage is usually
found in metaphors that treat computing power as a fungible
commodity good, like a crop yield or diesel horsepower. See
bitty box, Get a real computer!, toy, crank.
2. A mythical subatomic particle that bears the unit quantity
of computation or information, in much the same way that an
electron bears one unit of electric charge (see also bogon).
An elaborate pseudo-scientific theory of computrons has been
developed based on the physical fact that the molecules in a
solid object move more rapidly as it is heated. It is argued
that an object melts because the molecules have lost their
information about where they are supposed to be (that is, they
have emitted computrons). This explains why computers get so
hot and require air conditioning; they use up computrons.
Conversely, it should be possible to cool down an object by
placing it in the path of a computron beam. It is believed
that this may also explain why machines that work at the
factory fail in the computer room: the computrons there have
been all used up by the other hardware. (The popularity of
this theory probably owes something to the Warlock stories by
Larry Niven, the best known being What Good is a Glass
Dagger?, in which magic is fueled by an exhaustible natural
resource called mana.)
con : n.
[from SF fandom] A science-fiction convention. Not used of
other sorts of conventions, such as professional meetings.
This term, unlike many others imported from SF-fan slang, is
widely recognized even by hackers who aren't fans. "We'd been
corresponding on the net for months, then we met face-to-face
at a con."
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.
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.
(A closely related phenomenon, with a slightly different
intent, is the habit manufacturers have of inventing new screw
heads so that only Designated Persons, possessing the magic
screwdrivers, can remove covers and make repairs or install
options. A good 1990s example is the use of Torx screws for
cable-TV set-top boxes. Older Apple Macintoshes took this one
step further, requiring not only a long Torx screwdriver but a
specialized case-cracking tool to open the box.)
In these latter days of open-systems computing this term has
fallen somewhat into disuse, to be replaced by the observation
that "Standards are great! There are so many of them to choose
from!" Compare backward combatability.
cons : /konz/ , /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.
[very common] Edsger W. Dijkstra's note in the March 1968
Communications of the ACM, Goto Statement Considered Harmful,
fired the first salvo in the structured programming wars (text
at http://www.acm.org/classics/). As it turns out, the title
under which the letter appeared was actually supplied by
CACM's editor, Niklaus Wirth. Amusingly, the ACM considered
the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it will (by
policy) no longer print an article taking so assertive a
position against a coding practice. (Years afterwards, a
contrary view was uttered in a CACM letter called, inevitably,
`Goto considered harmful' considered harmful''. In the ensuing
decades, a large number of both serious papers and parodies
have borne titles of the form X considered Y. The
structured-programming wars eventually blew over with the
realization that both sides were wrong, but use of such titles
has remained as a persistent minor in-joke (the `considered
silly' found at various places in this lexicon is related).
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.
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; commonly
stated as "If you have four groups working on a compiler,
you'll get a 4-pass compiler". The original statement was more
general, "Organizations which design systems are constrained
to produce designs which are copies of the communication
structures of these organizations." This first appeared in the
April 1968 issue of Datamation. Compare SNAFU principle.
The law was named after Melvin Conway, an early proto-hacker
who wrote an assembler for the Burroughs 220 called SAVE. (The
name `SAVE' didn't stand for anything; it was just that you
lost fewer card decks and listings because they all had SAVE
written on them.) There is also Tom Cheatham's amendment of
Conway's Law: "If a group of N persons implements a COBOL
compiler, there will be N-1 passes. Someone in the group has
to be the manager."
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. 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). Syn. magic cookie; see also
fortune cookie. Now mainstream in the specific sense of
web-browser cookies.
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 cookies in a format that facilitates
retrieval by a fortune program. There are several different
cookie files in public distribution, and site admins often
assemble their own from various sources including this
lexicon.
cookie jar : n.
An area of memory set aside for storing cookies. Most commonly
heard in the Atari ST community; many useful ST programs
record their presence by storing a distinctive magic number in
the jar. Programs can inquire after the presence or otherwise
of other programs by searching the contents of the jar.
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 timesharing machine) or the console (on a batch mainframe),
repeatedly demanding "I WANT A COOKIE". The required responses
ranged in complexity from "COOKIE" through "HAVE A COOKIE" and
upward. Folklorist Jan Brunvand (see FOAF) has described these
programs as urban legends (implying they probably never
existed) but they existed, all right, in several different
versions. See also wabbit. Interestingly, the term cookie
monster appears to be a retcon; the original term was cookie
bear.
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
suits. "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.
copycenter : n.
[play on `copyright' and `copyleft']
1. The copyright notice carried by the various flavors of
freeware BSD. According to Kirk McKusick at BSDCon 1999: "The
way it was characterized politically, you had copyright, which
is what the big companies use to lock everything up; you had
copyleft, which is free software's way of making sure they
can't lock it up; and then Berkeley had what we called
`copycenter', which is `take it down to the copy center and
make as many copies as you want'".
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.
copyparty : n.
[C64/amiga demoscene] A computer party organized so
demosceners can meet other in real life, and to facilitate
software copying (mostly pirated software). The copyparty has
become less common as the Internet makes communication easier.
The demoscene has gradually evolved the demoparty to replace
it.
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.
[rare] 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.
[76-07-18.png]
A core dump lands our hero in hot water.
(This is the last cartoon in the Crunchly saga.)
core leak : n.
Syn. memory leak.
Core Wars : n.
A game between assembler programs in a machine or machine
simulator, where the objective is to kill your opponent's
program by overwriting it. Popularized in the 1980s by A. K.
Dewdney's column in Scientific American magazine, but
described in Software Practice And Experience a decade
earlier. The game was actually devised and played by Victor
Vyssotsky, Robert Morris Sr., and Doug McIlroy in the early
1960s (Dennis Ritchie is sometimes incorrectly cited as a
co-author, but was not involved). Their original game was
called `Darwin' and ran on a IBM 7090 at Bell Labs. See core.
For information on the modern game, do a web search for the
`rec.games.corewar FAQ' or surf to the King Of The Hill site.
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.
courier
[BBS & cracker cultures] A person who distributes newly
cracked warez, as opposed to a server who makes them available
for download or a leech who merely downloads them. Hackers
recognize this term but don't use it themselves, as the act is
not part of their culture. See also warez d00dz, cracker,
elite.
cow orker : n.
[Usenet] n. fortuitous typo for co-worker, widely used in
Usenet, with perhaps a hint that orking cows is illegal. This
term was popularized by Scott Adams (the creator of Dilbert)
but already appears in the January 1996 version of the scary
devil monastery FAQ, and has been traced back to a 1989 sig
block. Compare hing, grilf, filk, newsfroup.
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 retconned to Control Program
for Microcomputers] An early microcomputer OS written by
hacker Gary Kildall for 8080- and Z80-based machines, very
popular in the late 1970s but virtually wiped out by MS-DOS
after the release of the IBM PC in 1981. Legend has it that
Kildall's company blew its chance to write the OS for the IBM
PC because Kildall decided to spend a day IBM's reps wanted to
meet with him enjoying the perfect flying weather in his
private plane (another variant has it that Gary's wife was
much more interested in packing her suitcases for an upcoming
vacation than in clinching a deal with IBM). Many of CP/M's
features and conventions strongly resemble those of early DEC
operating systems such as TOPS-10, OS/8, RSTS, and RSX-11. See
MS-DOS, operating system.
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). The whole shebang is now
available on the Web.
It is alleged that the author subsequently received a letter
of appreciation on IBM company stationery from the head of
IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratories (at that time one
of the few islands of true hackerdom in the IBM archipelago).
The lower loop of the B in the IBM logo, it is said, had been
carefully whited out. See eat flaming death.
crack
[warez d00dz]
1. v. To break into a system (compare cracker).
2. v. Action of removing the copy protection from a commercial
program. People who write cracks consider themselves
challenged by the copy protection measures. They will often do
it as much to show that they are smarter than the developer
who designed the copy protection scheme than to actually copy
the program.
3. n. A program, instructions or patch used to remove the copy
protection of a program or to uncripple features from a
demo/time limited program.
4. An exploit.
crack root : v.
[very common] 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.
The neologism "cracker" in this sense may have been influenced
not so much by the term "safe-cracker" as by the non-jargon
term "cracker", which in Middle English meant an obnoxious
person (e.g., "What cracker is this same that deafs our ears /
With this abundance of superfluous breath?" -- Shakespeare's
King John, Act II, Scene I) and in modern colloquial American
English survives as a barely gentler synonym for "white
trash".
While it is expected that any real hacker will have done some
playful cracking and knows many of the basic techniques,
anyone past larval stage is expected to have outgrown the
desire to do so except for immediate, benign, practical
reasons (for example, if it's necessary to get around some
security in order to get some work done).
Thus, there is far less overlap between hackerdom and
crackerdom than the mundane reader misled by sensationalistic
journalism might expect. Crackers tend to gather in small,
tight-knit, very secretive groups that have little overlap
with the huge, open poly-culture this lexicon describes;
though crackers often like to describe themselves as hackers,
most true hackers consider them a separate and lower form of
life. An easy way for outsiders to spot the difference is that
crackers use grandiose screen names that conceal their
identities. Hackers never do this; they only rarely use noms
de guerre at all, and when they do it is for display rather
than concealment.
Ethical considerations aside, hackers figure that anyone who
can't imagine a more interesting way to play with their
computers than breaking into someone else's has to be pretty
losing. Some other reasons crackers are looked down on are
discussed in the entries on cracking and phreaking. See also
samurai, dark-side hacker, and hacker ethic. For a portrait of
the typical teenage cracker, see warez d00dz.
cracking : n.
[very common] The act of breaking into a computer system; what
a cracker does. Contrary to widespread myth, this does not
usually involve some mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance,
but rather persistence and the dogged repetition of a handful
of fairly well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in
the security of target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are
incompetent as hackers. This entry used to say 'mediocre', but
the spread of rootkit and other automated cracking has
depressed the average level of skill among crackers.
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."
crapplet : n.
[portmanteau, crap + applet] A worthless applet, esp. a Java
widget attached to a web page that doesn't work or even
crashes your browser. Also spelled `craplet'.
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 lusers lost their files in last
night's disk crash." A disk crash that involves the read/write
heads dropping onto the surface of the disks and scraping off
the oxide may also be referred to as a head crash, whereas the
term system crash usually, though not always, implies that the
operating system or other software was at fault.
2. v. To fail suddenly. "Has the system just crashed?"
"Something crashed the OS!" See down. Also used transitively
to indicate the cause of the crash (usually a person or a
program, or both). "Those idiots playing SPACEWAR crashed the
system."
3. vi. Sometimes said of people hitting the sack after a long
hacking run; see gronk out.
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). 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.
This usage is almost certainly derived from the fiction of
H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft may never have used the exact phrase
"crawling horror" in his writings, but one of the fearsome
Elder Gods that he wrote extensively about was Nyarlethotep,
who had as an epithet "The Crawling Chaos". Certainly the
extreme, even melodramatic horror of his characters at the
weird monsters they encounter, even to the point of going
insane with fear, is what hackers are referring to with this
phrase when they use it for horribly bad code. Compare
cthulhic.
CRC handbook
Any of the editions of the Chemical Rubber Company Handbook of
Chemistry and Physics; there are other CRC handbooks, such as
the CRC Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulae, but "the"
CRC handbook is the chemistry and physics reference. It is
massive tome full of mathematical tables, physical constants
of thousands of alloys and chemical compounds, dielectric
strengths, vapor pressure, resistivity, and the like. Hackers
have remarkably little actual use for these sorts of arcana,
but are such information junkies that a large percentage of
them acquire copies anyway and would feel vaguely bereft if
they couldn't look up the magnetic susceptibility of potassium
permanganate at a moment's notice. On hackers' bookshelves,
the CRC handbook is rather likely to keep company with an
unabridged Oxford English Dictionary and a good atlas.
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.
[common]
1. Describes a systematic tendency to load more chrome and
features onto systems at the expense of whatever elegance they
may have possessed when originally designed. See also feeping
creaturism. "You know, the main problem with BSD Unix has
always been creeping featurism."
2. More generally, the tendency for anything complicated to
become even more complicated because people keep saying "Gee,
it would be even better if it had this feature too". (See
feature.) The result is usually a patchwork because it grew
one ad-hoc step at a time, rather than being planned. Planning
is a lot of work, but it's easy to add just one extra little
feature to help someone ... and then another ... and
another.... When creeping featurism gets out of hand, it's
like a cancer. The GNU hello program, intended to illustrate
GNU command-line switch and coding conventions, is also a
wonderful parody of creeping featurism; the distribution
changelog is particularly funny. Usually this term is used to
describe computer programs, but it could also be said of the
federal government, the IRS 1040 form, and new cars. A similar
phenomenon sometimes afflicts conscious redesigns; see
second-system effect. See also creeping elegance.
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/ , /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/ , /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. [common] Software that has some important functionality
deliberately removed, so as to entice potential users to pay
for a working version.
2. [Cambridge] Variety of guiltware that exhorts you to donate
to some charity (compare careware, nagware).
3. Hardware deliberately crippled, which can be upgraded to a
more expensive model by a trivial change (e.g., cutting a
jumper).
An excellent example of crippleware (sense 3) is Intel's 486SX
chip, which is a standard 486DX chip with the co-processor
diked out (in some early versions it was present but
disabled). To upgrade, you buy a complete 486DX chip with
working co-processor (its identity thinly veiled by a
different pinout) and plug it into the board's expansion
socket. It then disables the SX, which becomes a fancy power
sink. Don't you love Intel?
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/ , /kru'l@f/ , /C-R-L-F/ , n.
(often capitalized as `CRLF') A carriage return (CR, ASCII
0001101) followed by a line feed (LF, ASCII 0001010). More
loosely, whatever it takes to get you from the end of one line
of text to the beginning of the next line. See newline. Under
Unix influence this usage has become less common (Unix uses a
bare line feed as its `CRLF').
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' 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 : vi.
[Usenet; very common] To post a single article simultaneously
to several newsgroups. Distinguished from posting the article
repeatedly, once to each newsgroup, which causes people to see
it multiple times (which is very bad form). Gratuitous
cross-posting without a Followup-To line directing responses
to a single followup group is frowned upon, as it tends to
cause followup articles to go to inappropriate newsgroups when
people respond to various parts of the original posting.
crossload : v.,n.
[proposed, by analogy with upload and download] To move files
between machines on a peer-to-peer network of nodes that act
as both servers and clients for a distributed file store. Esp.
appropriate for anonymized networks like Gnutella and Freenet.
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/
[very common; back-formation from crufty]
1. n. An unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under
your bed is cruft; the TMRC Dictionary correctly noted that
attacking it with a broom only produces more.
2. n. The results of shoddy construction.
3. vt. [from hand cruft, pun on `hand craft'] To write
assembler code for something normally (and better) done by a
compiler (see hand-hacking).
4. n. Excess; superfluous junk; used esp. of redundant or
superseded code.
5. [University of Wisconsin] n. Cruft is to hackers as gaggle
is to geese; that is, at UW one properly says "a cruft of
hackers".
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.
[very common; origin unknown; poss. from `crusty' or `cruddy']
1. Poorly built, possibly over-complex. The canonical example
is "This is standard old crufty DEC software". In fact, one
fanciful theory of the origin of crufty holds that was
originally a mutation of `crusty' applied to DEC software so
old that the `s' characters were tall and skinny, looking more
like `f' characters.
2. Unpleasant, especially to the touch, often with encrusted
junk. Like spilled coffee smeared with peanut butter and
catsup.
3. Generally unpleasant.
4. (sometimes spelled cruftie) n. A small crufty object (see
frob); often one that doesn't fit well into the scheme of
things. "A LISP property list is a good place to store
crufties (or, collectively, random cruft)."
This term is one of the oldest in the jargon and no one is
sure of its etymology, but it is suggestive that there is a
Cruft Hall at Harvard University which is part of the old
physics building; it's said to have been the physics
department's radar lab during WWII. To this day (early 1993)
the windows appear to be full of random techno-junk. MIT or
Lincoln Labs people may well have coined the term as a knock
on the competition.
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.
cryppie : /krip'ee/ , n.
A cryptographer. One who hacks or implements cryptographic
software or hardware.
cthulhic : /kthool'hik/ , adj.
Having the nature of a Cthulhu, the horrific tentacled green
monstrosity from H.P. Lovecraft's seminal horror fiction.
Cthulhu sends dreams that drive men mad, feeds on the flesh of
screaming victims rent limb from limb, and is served by a cult
of degenerates. Hackers think this describes large proprietary
systems such as traditional mainframes, installations of SAP
and Oracle, or rooms full of Windows servers remarkably well,
and the adjective is used casually. Compare Shub-Internet and
crawling horror.
CTSS : /C-T-S-S/ , n.
Compatible Time-Sharing System. An early (1963) experiment in
the design of interactive timesharing operating systems,
ancestral to Multics, Unix, and ITS. The name ITS
(Incompatible Time-sharing System) was a hack on CTSS, meant
both as a joke and to express some basic differences in
philosophy about the way I/O services should be presented to
user programs. See timesharing
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).
cup holder : n.
The tray of a CD-ROM drive, or by extension the CD drive
itself. So called because of a common tech support legend
about the idiot who called to complain that the cup holder on
his computer broke. A joke program was once distributed around
the net called "cupholder.exe", which when run simply extended
the CD drive tray. The humor of this was of course lost on
people whose drive had a slot or a caddy instead.
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.
Now rare.]
1. (of a program) Well-written.
2. Functionally excellent. A program that performs well and
interfaces well to users is cuspy. Oppose rude.
3. [NYU] Said of an attractive woman, especially one regarded
as available. Implies a certain curvaceousness.
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. See also burn a CD.
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 radix-64
for PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail) or PGP (Pretty Good Privacy)
digital signatures and certificates of authenticity. This
stuff all serves a purpose and good user interfaces should
hide it, but all too often users are forced to wade through
it.
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 naïve and tremendously stimulating.
Gibson's work was widely imitated, in particular by the
short-lived but innovative Max Headroom TV series. See
cyberspace, ice, jack in, go flatline.
Since 1990 or so, popular culture has included a movement or
fashion trend that calls itself `cyberpunk', associated
especially with the rave/techno subculture. Hackers have mixed
feelings about this. On the one hand, self-described
cyberpunks too often seem to be shallow trendoids in black
leather who have substituted enthusiastic blathering about
technology for actually learning and doing it. Attitude is no
substitute for competence. On the other hand, at least
cyberpunks are excited about the right things and properly
respectful of hacking talent in those who have it. The general
consensus is to tolerate them politely in hopes that they'll
attract people who grow into being true hackers.
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 the
network).
2. The Internet or Matrix (sense #2) as a whole, considered as
a crude cyberspace (sense 1). Although this usage became
widely popular in the mainstream press during 1994 when the
Internet exploded into public awareness, it is strongly
deprecated among hackers because the Internet does not meet
the high, SF-inspired standards they have for true cyberspace
technology. Thus, this use of the term usually tags a wannabee
or outsider. Oppose meatspace.
3. Occasionally, the metaphoric location of the mind of a
person in hack mode. Some hackers report experiencing strong
synesthetic imagery when in hack mode; interestingly,
independent reports from multiple sources suggest that there
are common features to the experience. In particular, the
dominant colors of this subjective cyberspace are often gray
and silver, and the imagery often involves constellations of
marching dots, elaborate shifting patterns of lines and
angles, or moire patterns.
cycle
1. n. The basic unit of computation. What every hacker wants
more of (noted hacker Bill Gosper described himself as a
"cycle junkie"). One can describe an instruction as taking so
many clock cycles. Often the computer can access its memory
once on every clock cycle, and so one speaks also of memory
cycles. These are technical meanings of cycle. The jargon
meaning comes from the observation that there are only so many
cycles per second, and when you are sharing a computer the
cycles get divided up among the users. The more cycles the
computer spends working on your program rather than someone
else's, the faster your program will run. That's why every
hacker wants more cycles: so he can spend less time waiting
for the computer to respond.
2. By extension, a notional unit of human thought power,
emphasizing that lots of things compete for the typical
hacker's think time. "I refused to get involved with the
Rubik's Cube back when it was big. Knew I'd burn too many
cycles on it if I let myself."
3. vt. Syn. bounce (sense 4), from the phrase `cycle power'.
"Cycle the machine again, that serial port's still hung."
cycle of reincarnation : n.
See wheel of reincarnation.
cycle server : n.
A powerful machine that exists primarily for running large
compute-, disk-, or memory-intensive jobs (more formally
called a compute server). Implies that interactive tasks such
as editing are done on other machines on the network, such as
workstations.
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{cypherpunks-request@toad.com} coordinating work on
public-key encryption freeware, privacy, and digital cash. See
also tentacle.
C|N>K : n.
[Usenet] Coffee through Nose to Keyboard; that is, "I laughed
so hard I snarfed my coffee onto my keyboard.". Common on
alt.fan.pratchett and scary devil monastery; recognized
elsewhere. The Acronymphomania FAQ on alt.fan.pratchett
recognizes variants such as T|N>K = `Tea through Nose to
Keyboard' and C|N>S = `Coffee through Nose to Screen'.
D
daemon : /day'mn/ , /dee'mn/ , n.
[from Maxwell's Demon, later incorrectly retronymed as `Disk
And Execution MONitor'] A program that is not invoked
explicitly, but lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to
occur. The idea is that the perpetrator of the condition need
not be aware that a daemon is lurking (though often a program
will commit an action only because it knows that it will
implicitly invoke a daemon). For example, under ITS, writing a
file on the LPT spooler's directory would invoke the spooling
daemon, which would then print the file. The advantage is that
programs wanting (in this example) files printed need neither
compete for access to nor understand any idiosyncrasies of the
LPT. They simply enter their implicit requests and let the
daemon decide what to do with them. Daemons are usually
spawned automatically by the system, and may either live
forever or be regenerated at intervals.
Daemon and demon are often used interchangeably, but seem to
have distinct connotations. The term daemon was introduced to
computing by CTSS people (who pronounced it /dee'mon/) and
used it to refer to what ITS called a dragon; the prototype
was a program called DAEMON that automatically made tape
backups of the file system. Although the meaning and the
pronunciation have drifted, we think this glossary reflects
current (2000) usage.
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); or The Design and Implementation of
the 4.4 BSD Operating System by Marshall Kirk McKusick, Keith
Bostic, Michael J. Karels and John S. Quarterman
(Addison-Wesley Longman, 1996, ISBN 0-201-54979-4) Either of
the standard reference books on the internals of BSD Unix. So
called because the covers have a picture depicting a little
demon (a visual play on daemon) in sneakers, holding a
pitchfork (referring to one of the characteristic features of
Unix, the fork(2) system call).
dahmum : /dah'mum/ , n.
[Usenet] The material of which protracted flame wars,
especially those about operating systems, is composed.
Homeomorphic to spam. The term dahmum is derived from the name
of a militant OS/2 advocate, and originated when an
extensively cross-posted OS/2-versus-Linux debate was fed
through Dissociated Press.
dancing frog : n.
[Vancouver area] A problem that occurs on a computer that will
not reappear while anyone else is watching. From the classic
Warner Brothers cartoon One Froggy Evening, featuring a
dancing and singing Michigan J. Frog that just croaks when
anyone else is around (now the WB network mascot).
dangling pointer : n.
[common] A reference that doesn't actually lead anywhere (in C
and some other languages, a pointer that doesn't actually
point at anything valid). Usually this happens because it
formerly pointed to something that has moved or disappeared.
Used as jargon in a generalization of its techspeak meaning;
for example, a local phone number for a person who has since
moved to the other coast is a dangling pointer.
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 suits read. Used to
question an unbelieved quote, as in "Did you read that in
Datamation?". It used to publish something hackishly funny
every once in a while, like the original paper on COME FROM in
1973, and Ed Post's Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal ten
years later, but for a long time after that it was much more
exclusively suit-oriented and boring. Following a change of
editorship in 1994, Datamation briefly tried for more the
technical content and irreverent humor that marked its early
days, but this did not last.
DAU : /dow/ , n.
[German FidoNet] German acronym for Dümmster Anzunehmender
User (stupidest imaginable user). From the engineering-slang
GAU for Grösster Anzunehmender Unfall, worst assumable
accident, esp. of a LNG tank farm plant or something with
similarly disastrous consequences. In popular German, GAU is
used only to refer to worst-case nuclear accidents such as a
core meltdown. See cretin, fool, loser and weasel.
Dave the Resurrector : n.
[Usenet; also abbreviated DtR] A cancelbot that cancels
cancels. Dave the Resurrector originated when some
spam-spewers decided to try to impede spam-fighting by
wholesale cancellation of anti-spam coordination messages in
the news.admin.net-abuse.usenet newsgroup.
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.
[from the insecticide para-dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethene]
1. Generic term for a program that assists in debugging other
programs by showing individual machine instructions in a
readable symbolic form and letting the user change them. In
this sense the term DDT is now archaic, having been widely
displaced by debugger or names of individual programs like
adb, sdb, dbx, or gdb.
2. [ITS] Under MIT's fabled ITS operating system, DDT (running
under the alias HACTRN, a six-letterism for `Hack Translator')
was also used as the shell or top level command language used
to execute other programs.
3. Any one of several specific DDTs (sense 1) supported on
early DEC hardware and CP/M. The PDP-10 Reference Handbook
(1969) contained a footnote on the first page of the
documentation for DDT that illuminates the origin of the term:
Historical footnote: DDT was developed at MIT for the PDP-1
computer in 1961. At that time DDT stood for "DEC Debugging Tape".
Since then, the idea of an on-line debugging program has
propagated throughout the computer industry. DDT programs are now
available for all DEC computers. Since media other than tape are
now frequently used, the more descriptive name "Dynamic Debugging
Technique" has been adopted, retaining the DDT abbreviation.
Confusion between DDT-10 and another well known pesticide,
dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane C[14]H[9]Cl[5] should be minimal
since each attacks a different, and apparently mutually exclusive,
class of bugs.
(The `tape' referred to was, incidentally, not magnetic but
paper.) Sadly, this quotation was removed from later editions
of the handbook after the suits took over and DEC became much
more `businesslike'.
The history above is known to many old-time hackers. But
there's more: Peter Samson, compiler of the original TMRC
lexicon, reports that he named DDT after a similar tool on the
TX-0 computer, the direct ancestor of the PDP-1 built at MIT's
Lincoln Lab in 1957. The debugger on that ground-breaking
machine (the first transistorized computer) rejoiced in the
name FLIT (FLexowriter Interrogation Tape).
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; crashed. Especially used of hardware.
2. At XEROX PARC, software that is working but not undergoing
continued development and support.
3. Useless; inaccessible. Antonym: live. Compare dead code.
dead beef attack : n.
[cypherpunks list, 1996] An attack on a public-key
cryptosystem consisting of publishing a key having the same ID
as another key (thus making it possible to spoof a user's
identity if recipients aren't careful about verifying keys).
In PGP and GPG the key ID is the last eight hex digits of (for
RSA keys) the product of two primes. The attack was
demonstrated by creating a key whose ID was 0xdeadbeef (see
DEADBEEF).
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'.
dead-tree version
[common] A paper version of an on-line document; one printed
on dead trees. In this context, "dead trees" always refers to
paper. See also tree-killer.
DEADBEEF : /ded-beef/ , n.
The hexadecimal word-fill pattern for freshly allocated memory
under a number of IBM environments, including the RS/6000.
Some modern debugging tools deliberately fill freed memory
with this value as a way of converting heisenbugs into Bohr
bugs. As in "Your program is DEADBEEF" (meaning gone, aborted,
flushed from memory); if you start from an odd half-word
boundary, of course, you have BEEFDEAD. See also the anecdote
under fool and dead beef attack.
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.
[They were right --ESR]
Death Star : n.
[from the movie Star Wars]
1. The AT&T corporate logo, which bears an uncanny resemblance
to the Death Star in the Star Wars movies. This usage was
particularly common among partisans of BSD Unix in the 1980s,
who tended to regard the AT&T versions as inferior and AT&T as
a bad guy. Copies still circulate of a poster printed by Mt.
Xinu showing a starscape with a space fighter labeled 4.2 BSD
streaking away from a broken AT&T logo wreathed in flames.
2. AT&T's internal magazine, Focus, uses death star to
describe an incorrectly done AT&T logo in which the inner
circle in the top left is dark instead of light -- a frequent
result of dark-on-light logo images.
Death, X of
[common] A construction used to imbue the subject with campy
menace, usually with intent to ridicule. The ancestor of this
term is a famous Far Side cartoon from the 1980s in which a
balloon with a fierce face painted on it is passed off as the
"Floating Head of Death". Hackers and SF fans have been using
the suffix "of Death" ever since to label things which appear
to be vastly threatening but will actually pop like a balloon
if you prick them. Such constructions are properly spoken in a
tone of over-exagerrated portentiousness: "Behold! The
Spinning - Pizza - of - Death!" See Blue Screen of Death, Ping
O' Death, Spinning Pizza of Death, click of death. Compare
Doom, X of.
DEC : /dek/ , n.
n. Commonly used abbreviation for Digital Equipment
Corporation, later deprecated by DEC itself in favor of
"Digital" and now entirely obsolete following the buyout by
Compaq. Before the killer micro revolution of the late 1980s,
hackerdom was closely symbiotic with DEC's pioneering
timesharing machines. The first of the group of cultures
described by this lexicon nucleated around the PDP-1 (see
TMRC). Subsequently, the PDP-6, PDP-10, PDP-20, PDP-11 and VAX
were all foci of large and important hackerdoms, and DEC
machines long dominated the ARPANET and Internet machine
population. DEC was the technological leader of the
minicomputer era (roughly 1967 to 1987), but its failure to
embrace microcomputers and Unix early cost it heavily in
profits and prestige after silicon got cheap. Nevertheless,
the microprocessor design tradition owes a major debt to the
PDP-11 instruction set, and every one of the major
general-purpose microcomputer OSs so far (CP/M, MS-DOS, Unix,
OS/2, Windows NT) was either genetically descended from a DEC
OS, or incubated on DEC hardware, or both. Accordingly, DEC
was for many years still regarded with a certain wry affection
even among many hackers too young to have grown up on DEC
machines.
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.
deckle : /dek'l/ , n.
[from dec- and nybble; the original spelling seems to have
been decle] Two nickles; 10 bits. Reported among developers
for Mattel's GI 1600 (the Intellivision games processor), a
chip with 16-bit-wide RAM but 10-bit-wide ROM. See nybble for
other such terms.
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 AFJs (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.
[mythically from a traditional Bohemian assassination method,
via SF fandom]
1. Proper karmic retribution for an incorrigible punster. "Oh,
ghod, that was awful!" "Quick! Defenestrate him!"
2. The act of completely removing Micro$oft Windows from a PC
in favor of a better OS (typically Linux).
3. The act of discarding something under the assumption that
it will improve matters. "I don't have any disk space left."
"Well, why don't you defenestrate that 100 megs worth of old
core dumps?"
4. Under a GUI, the act of dragging something out of a window
(onto the screen). "Next, defenestrate the MugWump icon."
5. [obs.] The act of exiting a window system in order to get
better response time from a full-screen program. This comes
from the dictionary meaning of defenestrate, which is to throw
something out a window.
defined as : adj.
In the role of, usually in an organization-chart sense. "Pete
is currently defined as bug prioritizer." Compare logical.
deflicted
[portmanteau of "defective" and "afflicted"; common among PC
repair technicians, and probably originated among hardware
techs outside the hacker community proper] Term used of
hardware that is broken due to poor design or shoddy
manufacturing or (especially) both; less frequently used of
software and rarely of people. This term is normally employed
in a tone of weary contempt by technicians who have seen the
specific failure in the trouble report before and are
cynically confident they'll see it again. Ultimately this may
derive from Frank Zappa's 1974 album Apostrophe, on which the
Fur Trapper infamously rubs his deflicted eyes...
dehose : /dee-hohz/ , vt.
To clear a hosed condition.
Dejagoo
[Portmanteau of Dejanews and Google] Google newsgroups. Became
common in 2001 after Google acquired Dejanews, and with it the
largest on-line archive of Usenet postings.
deletia : n. , /d@-lee'sha/
[USENET; common] In an email reply, material omitted from the
quote of the original. Usually written rather than spoken;
often appears as a pseudo-tag or ellipsis in the body of the
reply, as "[deletia]" or "<deletia>" or "<snip>".
deliminator : /de-lim'-in-ay-t@r/ , n.
[portmanteau, delimiter + eliminate] A string or pattern used
to delimit text into fields, but which is itself eliminated
from the resulting list of fields. This jargon seems to have
originated among Perl hackers in connection with the Perl
split() function; however, it has been sighted in live use
among Java and even Visual Basic programmers.
delint : /dee-lint/ , v. obs.
To modify code to remove problems detected when linting.
Confusingly, this process is also referred to as `linting'
code. This term is no longer in general use because ANSI C
compilers typically issue compile-time warnings almost as
detailed as lint warnings.
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 malfunctioning
program. The connotation in this case is that the program
works as designed, but the design is bad. Said, for example,
of a program that generates large numbers of meaningless error
messages, implying that it is on the brink of imminent
collapse. Compare wonky, brain-damaged, bozotic.
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), Larry Wall (inventor of Perl),
Linus Torvalds (inventor of Linux), and most recently James
Gosling (inventor of Java, NeWS, and GOSMACS) and Guido van
Rossum (inventor of Python). In their hearts of hearts, most
hackers dream of someday becoming demigods themselves, and
more than one major software project has been driven to
completion by the author's veiled hopes of apotheosis. See
also net.god, true-hacker, ubergeek. Since 1995 or so this
term has been gradually displaced by ubergeek.
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.
4. [demoscene] A sequence of demoeffects (usually) combined
with self-composed music and hand-drawn ("pixelated")
graphics. These days (1997) usually built to attend a compo.
Often called eurodemos outside Europe, as most of the
demoscene activity seems to have gathered in northern Europe
and especially Scandinavia. See also intro, dentro.
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 apps have a demo mode they use as a screen saver,
or may go through a demo mode on startup (for example, the
Microsoft Windows opening screen -- which lets you impress
your neighbors without actually having to put up with
Microsloth Windows).
demoeffect : n.
[demoscene]
1. What among hackers is called a display hack. Classical
effects include "plasma" (colorful mess), "keftales" (x*x+y*y
and other similar patterns, usually combined with
color-cycling), realtime fractals, realtime 3d graphics, etc.
Historically, demo effects have cheated as much as possible to
gain more speed and more complexity, using low-precision math
and masses of assembler code and building animation realtime
are three common tricks, but use of special hardware to fake
effects is a Good Thing on the demoscene (though this is
becoming less common as platforms like the Amiga fade away).
2. [Finland] Opposite of dancing frog. The crash that happens
when you demonstrate a perfectly good prototype to a client.
Plagues most often CS students and small businesses, but there
is a well-known case involving Bill Gates demonstrating a
brand new version of a major operating system.
demogroup : n.
[demoscene] A group of demo (sense 4) composers. Job titles
within a group include coders (the ones who write programs),
graphicians (the ones who painstakingly pixelate the fine
art), musicians (the music composers), sysops,
traders/swappers (the ones who do the trading and other PR),
and organizers (in larger groups). It is not uncommon for one
person to do multiple jobs, but it has been observed that good
coders are rarely good composers and vice versa. [How odd.
Musical talent seems common among Internet/Unix hackers --ESR]
demon : n.
1. Often used equivalently to daemon -- especially in the Unix
world, where the latter spelling and pronunciation is
considered mildly archaic.
2. [MIT; now probably obsolete] A portion of a program that is
not invoked explicitly, but that lies dormant waiting for some
condition(s) to occur. See daemon. The distinction is that
demons are usually processes within a program, while daemons
are usually programs running on an operating system.
Demons in sense 2 are particularly common in AI programs. For
example, a knowledge-manipulation program might implement
inference rules as demons. Whenever a new piece of knowledge
was added, various demons would activate (which demons depends
on the particular piece of data) and would create additional
pieces of knowledge by applying their respective inference
rules to the original piece. These new pieces could in turn
activate more demons as the inferences filtered down through
chains of logic. Meanwhile, the main program could continue
with whatever its primary task was.
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 phreakers;
see war dialer for its contemporary progeny.
demoparty : n.
[demoscene] Aboveground descendant of the copyparty, with
emphasis shifted away from software piracy and towards compos.
Smaller demoparties, for 100 persons or less, are held quite
often, sometimes even once a month, and usually last for one
to two days. On the other end of the scale, huge demo parties
are held once a year (and four of these have grown very large
and occur annually -- Assembly in Finland, The Party in
Denmark, The Gathering in Norway, and NAID somewhere in north
America). These parties usually last for three to five days,
have room for 3000-5000 people, and have a party network with
connection to the internet.
demoscene : /dem'oh-seen/
[also `demo scene'] A culture of multimedia hackers located
primarily in Scandinavia and northern Europe. Demoscene
folklore recounts that when old-time warez d00dz cracked some
piece of software they often added an advertisement in the
beginning, usually containing colorful display hacks with
greetings to other cracking groups. The demoscene was born
among people who decided building these display hacks is more
interesting than hacking -- or anyway safer. Around 1990 there
began to be very serious police pressure on cracking groups,
including raids with SWAT teams crashing into bedrooms to
confiscate computers. Whether in response to this or for
esthetic reasons, crackers of that period began to build
self-contained display hacks of considerable elaboration and
beauty (within the culture such a hack is called a demo). As
more of these demogroups emerged, they started to have compos
at copying parties (see copyparty), which later evolved to
standalone events (see demoparty). The demoscene has retained
some traits from the warez d00dz, including their style of
handles and group names and some of their jargon.
Traditionally demos were written in assembly language, with
lots of smart tricks, self-modifying code, undocumented
op-codes and the like. Some time around 1995, people started
coding demos in C, and a couple of years after that, they also
started using Java.
Ten years on (in 1998-1999), the demoscene is changing as its
original platforms (C64, Amiga, Spectrum, Atari ST, IBM PC
under DOS) die out and activity shifts towards Windows, Linux,
and the Internet. While deeply underground in the past,
demoscene is trying to get into the mainstream as accepted art
form, and one symptom of this is the commercialization of
bigger demoparties. Older demosceners frown at this, but the
majority think it's a good direction. Many demosceners end up
working in the computer game industry. Demoscene resource
pages are available at
http://www.oldskool.org/demos/explained/ and
http://www.scene.org/.
dentro : /den'troh/
[demoscene] Combination of demo (sense 4) and intro. Other
name mixings include intmo, dentmo etc. and are used usually
when the authors are not quite sure whether the program is a
demo or an intro. Special-purpose coinages like wedtro (some
member of a group got married), invtro (invitation intro) etc.
have also been sighted.
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.
[Usage note: don't confuse this word with `depreciated', or
the verb form `deprecate' with `depreciate`. They are
different words; see any dictionary for discussion.]
derf : /derf/
[PLATO]
1. v. The act of exploiting a terminal which someone else has
absentmindedly left logged on, to use that person's account,
especially to post articles intended to make an ass of the
victim you're impersonating. It has been alleged that the term
originated as a reversal of the name of the gentleman who most
usually left himself vulnerable to it, who also happened to be
the head of the department that handled PLATO at the
University of Delaware. Compare baggy pantsing.
2. n. The victim of an act of derfing, sense 1. The most
typical posting from a derfed account read "I am a derf.".
deserves to lose : adj.
[common] Said of someone who willfully does the Wrong Thing;
humorously, if one uses a feature known to be marginal. What
is meant is that one deserves the consequences of one's losing
actions. "Boy, anyone who tries to use mess-dos deserves to
lose!" (ITS fans used to say the same thing of Unix; many
still do.) See also screw, chomp, bagbiter.
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.
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 timesharing
with all the disadvantages of distributed personal computers;
typically, they cannot even boot themselves without help (in
the form of some kind of breath-of-life packet) from the
server.
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.
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 to mean `diagonal cutters', a kind of wire cutter. To
`dike something out' means to use such cutters to remove
something. Indeed, the TMRC Dictionary defined dike as "to
attack with dikes". Among hackers this term has been
metaphorically extended to informational objects such as
sections of code.
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 pointy-haired, rat dance.
ding : n.,vi.
1. Synonym for feep. Usage: rare among hackers, but more
common in the Real World.
2. dinged: What happens when someone in authority gives you a
minor bitching about something, esp. something trivial. "I was
dinged for having a messy desk."
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 1998 Unix EXPO, Bill Joy compared the liquid-cooled
mainframe in the massive IBM display with a grazing dinosaur
"with a truck outside pumping its bodily fluids through it".
IBM was not amused. Compare big iron; see also mainframe.
2. [IBM] A very conservative user; a zipperhead.
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; originally reflected a perception by hackers that
these signal another stage in the long, slow dying of the
mainframe industry. In the mainframe industry's glory days of
the 1960s, it was `IBM and the Seven Dwarfs': Burroughs,
Control Data, General Electric, Honeywell, NCR, RCA, and
Univac. RCA and GE sold out early, and it was `IBM and the
Bunch' (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell)
for a while. Honeywell was bought out by Bull; Burroughs
merged with Univac to form Unisys (in 1984 -- this was when
the phrase dinosaurs mating was coined); and in 1991 AT&T
absorbed NCR (but spat it back out a few years later). Control
Data still exists but is no longer in the mainframe business.
In similar wave of dinosaur-matings as the PC business began
to consolidate after 1995, Digital Equipment was bought by
Compaq which was bought by Hewlett-Packard. More such
earth-shaking unions of doomed giants seem inevitable.
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 hits).
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.
disemvowel : v.
[USENET: play on `disembowel'] Less common synonym for splat
out.
disk farm : n.
A large room or rooms filled with disk drives (esp. washing
machines). This term was well established by 1990, and
generalized by about ten years later; see farm. It has become
less common as disk strange densities reached livels where
terabytes of storage can easily be fit in a single rack.
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 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.
dispress : vt.
[contraction of `Dissociated Press' due to eight-character
MS-DOS filenames] To apply the Dissociated Press algorithm to
a block of text. The resultant output is also referred to as a
'dispression'.
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. Since about 1996 unqualified use of this term often
implies `Linux distribution'. The short form distro is often
used for this sense.
2. A vague term encompassing mailing lists and Usenet
newsgroups (but not BBS fora); any topic-oriented message
channel with multiple recipients.
3. An information-space domain (usually loosely correlated
with geography) to which propagation of a Usenet message is
restricted; a much-underutilized feature.
distro : n.
Synonym for distribution, sense 1.
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.
DMZ
[common] Literally, De-Militarized Zone. Figuratively, the
portion of a private network that is visible through the
network's firewalls (see firewall machine). Coined in the late
1990s as jargon, this term is now borderline techspeak.
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. It also lurks in other Mac printer drivers,
notably those for the now-discontinued Style Writers. See
http://developer.apple.com/products/techsupport/dogcow/tn31.ht
ml.
dogfood : n.
[Microsoft, Netscape] Interim software used internally for
testing. "To eat one's own dogfood" (from which the slang noun
derives) means to use the software one is developing, as part
of one's everyday development environment (the phrase is used
outside Microsoft and Netscape). The practice is normal in the
Linux community and elsewhere, but the term `dogfood' is
seldom used as open-source betas tend to be quite tasty and
nourishing. The idea is that developers who are using their
own software will quickly learn what's missing or broken.
Dogfood is typically not even of beta quality.
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. It has been suggested that this
derives from U.S. football slang for a tackle involving three
or more people; among hackers, it seems at least as likely to
derive from an `autobiographical' Bugs Bunny cartoon in which
a gang of attacking canines actually yells "Dogpile on the
rabbit!".
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.
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.
Here's a classic example of "Don't do that then!" from Neal
Stephenson's In The Beginning Was The Command Line. A friend
of his built a network with a load of Macs and a few
high-powered database servers. He found that from time to time
the whole network would lock up for no apparent reason. The
problem was eventually tracked down to MacOS's cooperative
multitasking: when a user held down the mouse button for too
long, the network stack wouldn't get a chance to run...
dongle : /dong'gl/ , n.
1. [now obs.] A security or copy protection device for
proprietary software consisting of a serialized EPROM and some
drivers in a D-25 connector shell, which must be connected to
an I/O port of the computer while the program is run. Programs
that use a dongle query the port at startup and at programmed
intervals thereafter, and terminate if it does not respond
with the dongle's programmed validation code. Thus, users can
make as many copies of the program as they want but must pay
for each dongle. The first sighting of a dongle was in 1984,
associated with a software product called PaperClip. The idea
was clever, but it was initially a failure, as users disliked
tying up a serial port this way. By 1993, dongles would
typically pass data through the port and monitor for magic
codes (and combinations of status lines) with minimal if any
interference with devices further down the line -- this
innovation was necessary to allow daisy-chained dongles for
multiple pieces of software. These devices have become rare as
the industry has moved away from copy-protection schemes in
general.
2. By extension, any physical electronic key or transferable
ID required for a program to function. Common variations on
this theme have used parallel or even joystick ports. See
dongle-disk.
3. An adaptor cable mating a special edge-type connector on a
PCMCIA or on-board Ethernet card to a standard 8p8c Ethernet
jack. This usage seems to have surfaced in 1999 and is now
dominant. Laptop owners curse these things because they're
notoriously easy to lose and the vendors commonly charge
extortionate prices for replacements.
[Note: in early 1992, advertising copy from Rainbow
Technologies (a manufacturer of dongles) included a claim that
the word derived from "Don Gall", allegedly the inventor of
the device. The company's receptionist will cheerfully tell
you that the story is a myth invented for the ad copy.
Nevertheless, I expect it to haunt my life as a lexicographer
for at least the next ten years. :-( --ESR]
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.
Doom, X of
[common] A construction similar to ` Death, X of, but derived
rather from the Cracks of Doom in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the
Rings trilogy. The connotations are slightly different; a Foo
of Death is mainly being held up to ridicule, but one would
have to take a Foo of Doom a bit more seriously.
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.
Compare boat anchor.
DoS attack : //
[Usenet,common; note that it's unrelated to DOS as name of an
operating system] Abbreviation for Denial-Of-Service attack.
This abbreviation is most often used of attempts to shut down
newsgroups with floods of spam, or to flood network links with
large amounts of traffic, or to flood network links with large
amounts of traffic, often by abusing network broadcast
addresses. Compare slashdot effect.
dot file : 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.
doubled sig : 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 far-away system
(especially a larger host system) over a digital
communications link to a nearby system (especially a smaller
client system. Oppose upload.
Historical use of these terms was at one time associated with
transfers from large timesharing machines to PCs or
peripherals (download) and vice-versa (upload). The modern
usage relative to the speaker (rather than as an indicator of
the size and role of the machines) evolved as machine
categories lost most of their former functional importance.
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.
DPer : /dee-pee-er/ , n.
Data Processor. Hackers are absolutely amazed that suits use
this term self-referentially. Computers process data, not
people! See DP.
Dr. Fred Mbogo : /@m-boh'goh, dok'tr fred/ , n.
[Stanford] The archetypal man you don't want to see about a
problem, esp. an incompetent professional; a shyster. "Do you
know a good eye doctor?" "Sure, try Mbogo Eye Care and
Professional Dry Cleaning." The name comes from synergy
between bogus and the original Dr. Mbogo, a witch doctor who
was Gomez Addams' physician on the old Addams Family TV show.
Interestingly enough, it turns out that under the rules for
Swahili noun classes, `m-' is the characteristic prefix of
"nouns referring to human beings". As such, "mbogo" is quite
plausible as a Swahili coinage for a person having the nature
of a bogon. Actually, "mbogo" is indeed a Ki-Swahili word
referring to the African Cape Buffalo, syncerus caffer. It is
one of the "big five" dangerous African game animals, and many
people with bush experience believe it to be the most
dangerous of them. Compare Bloggs Family and J. Random Hacker;
see also Fred Foobar and fred.
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.
dread questionmark disease
n. The result of saving HTML from Microsoft Word or some other
program that uses the nonstandard Microsoft variant of
Latin-1; the symptom is that various of those nonstandard
characters in positions 128-160 show up as questionmarks. The
usual culprit is the misnamed `smart quotes' feature in
Microsoft Word. For more details (and a program called
`demoroniser' that cleans up the mess) see
http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/.
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.
In England there is equivalent mainstream slang; a `jobsworth'
is an obstructive, rule-following bureaucrat, often of the
uniformed or suited variety. Named for the habit of denying a
reasonable request by sucking his teeth and saying "Oh no,
guv, sorry I can't help you: that's more than my job's worth".
drone : n.
Ignorant sales or customer service personnel in computer or
electronics superstores. Characterized by a lack of even
superficial knowledge about the products they sell, yet
possessed of the conviction that they are more competent than
their hacker customers. Usage: "That video board probably
sucks, it was recommended by a drone at Fry's" In the year
2000, their natural habitats include Fry's Electronics, Best
Buy, and CompUSA.
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." The SGI Indy manual
included the line "[Do not] dangle the mouse by the cord or
throw it at coworkers."
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.
[73-05-20.png]
A really serious case of drop-outs.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-05-21)
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 : n.
Ancient techspeak term referring to slow, cylindrical magnetic
media that were once state-of-the-art storage devices. Under
some versions of BSD Unix the disk partition used for swapping
is still called /dev/drum; this has led to considerable humor
and not a few straight-faced but utterly bogus `explanations'
getting foisted on newbies. See also " The Story of Mel'" in
Appendix A.
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.
DSW : n.
[alt.(sysadmin|tech-support).recovery; abbrev. for Dick Size
War] A contest between two or more people boasting about who
has the faster machine, keys on (either physical or
cryptographic) keyring, greyer hair, or almost anything.
Salvos in a DSW are typically humorous and playful, often
self-mocking.
dub dub dub
[common] Spoken-only shorthand for the "www" (double-u
double-u double-u) in many web host names. Nothing to do with
the style of reggae music called `dub'.
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 optimize all
the instructions he could out of an inner loop that copied
data serially onto an output port, he decided to unroll it. He
then realized that the unrolled version could be implemented
by interlacing the structures of a switch and a loop:
register n = (count + 7) / 8; /* count > 0 assumed */
switch (count % 8)
{
case 0: do { *to = *from++;
case 7: *to = *from++;
case 6: *to = *from++;
case 5: *to = *from++;
case 4: *to = *from++;
case 3: *to = *from++;
case 2: *to = *from++;
case 1: *to = *from++;
} while (--n > 0);
}
Shocking though it appears to all who encounter it for the
first time, the device is actually perfectly valid, legal C.
C's default fall through in case statements has long been its
most controversial single feature; Duff observed that "This
code forms some sort of argument in that debate, but I'm not
sure whether it's for or against." Duff has discussed the
device in detail at
http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/duffs-device.html. Note that the
omission of postfix ++ from *to was intentional (though
confusing). Duff's device can be used to implement memory
copy, but the original aim was to copy values serially into a
magic IO register.
[For maximal obscurity, the outermost pair of braces above
could actually be removed -- GLS]
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 oversimplified.
Often, a marketroid will insist that the interfaces and
documentation of software be dumbed down after the designer
has burned untold gallons of midnight oil making it smart.
This creates friction. See user-friendly.
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.
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).
4. Of a person, someone whose directions are incomprehensible
and vague, but who nevertheless has the expectation that you
will solve the problem using the specific method he/she has in
mind.
Warren Teitelman originally wrote DWIM to fix his typos and
spelling errors, so it was somewhat idiosyncratic to his
style, and would often make hash of anyone else's typos if
they were stylistically different. Some victims of DWIM thus
claimed that the acronym stood for `Damn Warren's Infernal
Machine!'.
In one notorious incident, Warren added a DWIM feature to the
command interpreter used at Xerox PARC. One day another hacker
there typed delete *$ to free up some disk space. (The editor
there named backup files by appending $ to the original file
name, so he was trying to delete any backup files left over
from old editing sessions.) It happened that there weren't any
editor backup files, so DWIM helpfully reported *$ not found,
assuming you meant 'delete *'. It then started to delete all
the files on the disk! The hacker managed to stop it with a
Vulcan nerve pinch after only a half dozen or so files were
lost.
The disgruntled victim later said he had been sorely tempted
to go to Warren's office, tie Warren down in his chair in
front of his workstation, and then type delete *$ twice.
DWIM is often suggested in jest as a desired feature for a
complex program; it is also occasionally described as the
single instruction the ideal computer would have. Back when
proofs of program correctness were in vogue, there were also
jokes about DWIMC (Do What I Mean, Correctly). A related term,
more often seen as a verb, is DTRT (Do The Right Thing); see
Right Thing.
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
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 derived from a famously turgid line in
a WWII-era anti-Nazi propaganda comic that ran "Eat flaming
death, non-Aryan mongrels!" or something of the sort (however,
it is also reported that on the Firesign Theatre's 1975 album
In The Next World, You're On Your Own a character won the
right to scream "Eat flaming death, fascist media pigs" in the
middle of Oscar night on a game show; this may have been an
influence). Used in humorously overblown expressions of
hostility. "Eat flaming death, EBCDIC users!"
[eat-flaming-death.png]
IPM tells us to eat flaming death.
EBCDIC : /eb's@-dik/ , /eb'see`dik/ , /eb'k@-dik/ , n.
[abbreviation, Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code]
An alleged character set used on IBM dinosaurs. It exists in
at least six mutually incompatible versions, all featuring
such delights as non-contiguous letter sequences and the
absence of several ASCII punctuation characters fairly
important for modern computer languages (exactly which
characters are absent varies according to which version of
EBCDIC you're looking at). IBM adapted EBCDIC from punched
card code in the early 1960s and promulgated it as a
customer-control tactic (see connector conspiracy), spurning
the already established ASCII standard. Today, IBM claims to
be an open-systems company, but IBM's own description of the
EBCDIC variants and how to convert between them is still
internally classified top-secret, burn-before-reading. Hackers
blanch at the very name of EBCDIC and consider it a
manifestation of purest evil. See also fear and loathing.
ECP : /E-C-P/ , n.
See spam and velveeta.
ed : n.
"ed is the standard text editor." Line taken from the original
Unix manual page on ed, an ancient line-oriented editor that
is by now used only by a few Real Programmers, and even then
only for batch operations. The original line is sometimes
uttered near the beginning of an emacs vs. vi holy war on
Usenet, with the (vain) hope to quench the discussion before
it really takes off. Often followed by a standard text
describing the many virtues of ed (such as the small memory
footprint on a Timex Sinclair, and the consistent (because
nearly non-existent) user interface).
egg : n.
The binary code that is the payload for buffer overflow and
format string attacks. Typically, an egg written in assembly
and designed to enable remote access or escalate privileges
from an ordinary user account to administrator level when it
hatches. Also known as shellcode.
The name comes from a particular buffer-overflow exploit that
was co-written by a cracker named eggplant. The variable name
`egg' was used to store the payload. The usage spread from
people who saw and analyzed the code.
egosurf : vi.
To search the net for your name or links to your web pages.
Perhaps connected to long-established SF-fan slang egoscan, to
search for one's name in a fanzine.
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 was thought by most hackers to dominate
IBM's customer base and its thinking. This only began to
change in the mid-1990s when IBM began to reinvent itself
after the triumph of the killer micro. See IBM, fear and
loathing, code grinder. A copy of The Last Bug lives on the
the GNU site at http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/last.bug.html.
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.)
[GLS has since let slip that the unnamed hacker in this story
was in fact himself --ESR]
In the early 1990s, the synonym El Camino Virtual was been
reported as an alternate at IBM and Amdahl sites in the
Valley.
Mathematically literate hackers in the Valley have also been
heard to refer to some major cross-street intersecting El
Camino Real as "El Camino Imaginary". One popular theory is
that the intersection is located near Moffett Field -- where
they keep all those complex planes.
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.
elegant : adj.
[common; from mathematical usage] Combining simplicity, power,
and a certain ineffable grace of design. Higher praise than
`clever', `winning', or even cuspy.
The French aviator, adventurer, and author Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry, probably best known for his classic children's
book The Little Prince, was also an aircraft designer. He gave
us perhaps the best definition of engineering elegance when he
said "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when
there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left
to take away."
elephantine : adj.
Used of programs or systems that are both conspicuous hogs
(owing perhaps to poor design founded on brute force and
ignorance) and exceedingly hairy in source form. An
elephantine program may be functional and even friendly, but
(as in the old joke about being in bed with an elephant) it's
tough to have around all the same (and, like a pachyderm,
difficult to maintain). In extreme cases, hackers have been
known to make trumpeting sounds or perform expressive
proboscatory mime at the mention of the offending program.
Usage: semi-humorous. Compare `has the elephant nature' and
the somewhat more pejorative monstrosity. See also
second-system effect and baroque.
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 native
hacker slang; it is used primarily by crackers and warez
d00dz, for which reason hackers use it only with heavy irony.
The term used to refer to the folks allowed in to the "hidden"
or "privileged" sections of BBSes in the early 1980s (which,
typically, contained pirated software). Frequently, early
boards would only let you post, or even see, a certain subset
of the sections (or `boards') on a BBS. Those who got to the
frequently legendary `triple super secret' boards were elite.
Misspellings of this term in warez d00dz style abound; the
forms l337 eleet, and 31337 (among others) have been sighted.
A true hacker would be more likely to use `wizardly'. Oppose
lamer.
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 re
phrasing many of the patient's statements as questions and
posing them to the patient. It worked by simple pattern
recognition and substitution of key words into canned phrases.
It was so convincing, however, that there are many anecdotes
about people becoming very emotionally caught up in dealing
with ELIZA. All this was due to people's tendency to attach to
words meanings which the computer never put there. The ELIZA
effect is a Good Thing when writing a programming language,
but it can blind you to serious shortcomings when analyzing an
Artificial Intelligence system. Compare ad-hockery; see also
AI-complete. Sources for a clone of the original Eliza are
available at
ftp://ftp.cc.utexas.edu/pub/AI_ATTIC/Programs/Classic/Eliza/El
iza.c.
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 `Böcklin', an art-Noveau
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. (Its close relative
XEmacs is the second most popular version.) It includes
facilities to run compilation subprocesses and send and
receive mail or news; many hackers spend up to 80% of their
tube time inside it. Other variants include GOSMACS, CCA
EMACS, UniPress EMACS, Montgomery EMACS, jove, epsilon, and
MicroEMACS. (Though we use the original all-caps spelling
here, it is nowadays very commonly `Emacs'.) Some EMACS
versions running under window managers iconify as an
overflowing kitchen sink, perhaps to suggest the one feature
the editor does not (yet) include. Indeed, some hackers find
EMACS too heavyweight and baroque for their taste, and expand
the name as `Escape Meta Alt Control Shift' to spoof its heavy
reliance on keystrokes decorated with bucky bits. Other spoof
expansions include `Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping'
(from when that was a lot of core), `Eventually 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 émaillé (enameled) and related to
Old French emmailleüre (network). A French correspondent tells
us that in modern French, `email' is a hard enamel obtained by
heating special paints in a furnace; an `emailleur' (no final
e) is a craftsman who makes email (he generally paints some
objects (like, say, jewelry) and cooks them in a furnace).
There are numerous spelling variants of this word. In Internet
traffic up to 1995, `email' predominates, `e-mail' runs a
not-too-distant second, and `E-mail' and `Email' are a distant
third and fourth.
emoticon : /ee-moh'ti-kon/ , n.
[common] An ASCII glyph used to indicate an emotional state in
email or news. Although originally intended mostly as jokes,
emoticons (or some other explicit humor indication) are
virtually required under certain circumstances in high-volume
text-only communication forums such as Usenet; the lack of
verbal and visual cues can otherwise cause what were intended
to be humorous, sarcastic, ironic, or otherwise
non-100%-serious comments to be badly misinterpreted (not
always even by newbies), resulting in arguments and flame
wars.
Hundreds of emoticons have been proposed, but only a few are
in common use. These include:
:-) `smiley face' (for humor, laughter, friendliness, occasionally
sarcasm)
:-( `frowney face' (for sadness, anger, or upset)
;-) `half-smiley' ( ha ha only serious); also known as semi-smiley or
winkey face.
:-/ `wry face'
(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.
The invention of the original smiley and frowney emoticons is
generally credited to Scott Fahlman at CMU in 1982. He later
wrote: "I wish I had saved the original post, or at least
recorded the date for posterity, but I had no idea that I was
starting something that would soon pollute all the world's
communication channels." In September 2002 the original post
was recovered.
There is a rival claim by one Kevin McKenzie, who seems to
have proposed the smiley on the MsgGroup mailing list, April
12 1979. It seems likely these two inventions were
independent. Users of the PLATO educational system report
using emoticons composed from overlaid dot-matrix graphics in
the 1970s.
Note for the newbie: Overuse of the smiley is a mark of
loserhood! More than one per paragraph is a fairly sure sign
that you've gone over the line.
EMP : /E-M-P/
See spam.
empire : n.
Any of a family of military simulations derived from a game
written by Peter Langston many years ago. A number of
multi-player variants of varying degrees of sophistication
exist, and one single-player version implemented for both Unix
and VMS; the latter is even available as MS-DOS/Windows
freeware. All are notoriously addictive. Of various commercial
derivatives the best known is probably "Empire Deluxe" on PCs
and Amigas.
Modern empire is a real-time wargame played over the internet
by up to 120 players. Typical games last from 24 hours (blitz)
to a couple of months (long term). The amount of sleep you can
get while playing is a function of the rate at which updates
occur and the number of co-rulers of your country. Empire
server software is available for Unix-like machines, and
clients for Unix and other platforms. A comprehensive history
of the game is available at
http://www.empire.cx/infopages/History.html. The Empire
resource site is at http://www.empire.cx/.
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 hacker senses of engine are actually close to its
original, pre-Industrial-Revolution sense of a skill, clever
device, or instrument (the word is cognate to `ingenuity').
This sense had not been completely eclipsed by the modern
connotation of power-transducing machinery in Charles
Babbage's time, which explains why he named the stored-program
computer that he designed in 1844 the Analytical Engine.
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. Today the preferred shorthand is simply source.
2. The official name of the database language used by the old
Pick Operating System, actually a sort of crufty,
brain-damaged SQL with delusions of grandeur. The name
permitted marketroids to say "Yes, and you can program our
computers in English!" to ignorant suits without quite running
afoul of the truth-in-advertising laws.
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/ , /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 usually -1 under C libraries postdating V6 Unix, but
was originally 0. DOS hackers think EOF is ^Z, and a few Amiga
hackers think it's ^\.
2. [Unix] The keyboard character (usually control-D, the ASCII
EOT (End Of Transmission) character) that is mapped by the
terminal driver into an end-of-file condition.
3. Used by extension in non-computer contexts when a human is
doing something that can be modeled as a sequential read and
can't go further. "Yeah, I looked for a list of 360 mnemonics
to post as a joke, but I hit EOF pretty fast; all the library
had was a JCL manual." See also EOL.
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 ticks
past the epoch. Weird problems may ensue when the clock wraps
around (see wrap around), which is not necessarily a rare
event; on systems counting 10 ticks per second, a signed
32-bit count of ticks is good only for 6.8 years. The
1-tick-per-second clock of Unix is good only until January 18,
2038, assuming at least some software continues to consider it
signed and that word lengths don't increase by then. See also
wall time. Microsoft Windows, on the other hand, has an epoch
problem every 49.7 days -- but this is seldom noticed as
Windows is almost incapable of staying up continuously for
that long.
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 : 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 more than a hundred others
by email, and the organization line `Eric Conspiracy Secret
Laboratories' now emanates regularly from more than one site.
See the Eric Conspiracy Web Page at
http://www.catb.org/~esr/ecsl/ for full details.
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 : n.
1. [XEROX PARC] Predicating one research effort upon the
success of another.
2. Allowing your own research effort to be placed on the
critical path of some other project (be it a research effort
or not).
eurodemo : /yoor'o-dem`-o/
a demo, sense 4
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'.
Evil Empire : n.
[from Ronald Reagan's famous characterization of the communist
Soviet Union] Formerly IBM, now Microsoft. Functionally, the
company most hackers love to hate at any given time. Hackers
like to see themselves as romantic rebels against the Evil
Empire, and frequently adopt this role to the point of
ascribing rather more power and malice to the Empire than it
actually has. See also Borg and search for `Evil Empire' pages
on the Web.
exa- : /ek's@/ , pref.
[SI] See quantifiers.
examining the entrails : n.
The process of grovelling through a core dump or hex image in
an attempt to discover the bug that brought a program or
system down. The reference is to divination from the entrails
of a sacrificed animal. Compare runes, incantation, black art.
EXCH : /eks'ch@/ , /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/ , /eek'see/ , /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'/ , /eks'ek/ , 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 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 the passage of the Communications
Decency Act. From the last name of Senator James Exon
(Democrat-Nebraska), primary author of the CDA. This usage
outlasted the CDA itself, which was quashed a little over a
year later by one of the most acerbic pro-free-speech opinions
ever uttered by the Supreme Court. The campaign against it was
led by an alliance of hackers and civil libertarians, and was
the first effective political mobilization of the hacker
culture. Use of Exon's name as an expletive outlived the CDA
controversy itself.
Exploder : n.
Used within Microsoft to refer to the Windows Explorer, the
web-interface component of Windows 95 and WinNT 4. Our spies
report that most of the heavy guns at MS came from a Unix
background and use command line utilities; even they are
scornful of the over-gingerbreaded WIMP environments that they
have been called upon to create.
exploit : n.
[originally cracker slang]
1. A vulnerability in software that can be used for breaking
security or otherwise attacking an Internet host over the
network. The Ping O' Death is a famous exploit.
2. More grammatically, a program that exploits an exploit in
sense 1.
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 lusers to keep them distracted while the
program performs necessary background tasks. "Give 'em some
eye candy while the back-end slurps that BLOB into core."
Reported as mainstream usage among players of graphics-heavy
computer games. We're also told this term is mainstream slang
for soft pornography, but that sense does not appear to be
live among hackers.
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.
F
face time : n.
[common] Time spent interacting with somebody face-to-face (as
opposed to via electronic links). "Oh, yeah, I spent some face
time with him at the last Usenix."
factor : n.
See coefficient of X.
fairings : n. , /fer'ingz/
[FreeBSD; orig. a typo for fairness] A term thrown out in
discussion whenever a completely and transparently nonsensical
argument in one's favor(?) seems called for, e,g. at the end
of a really long thread for which the outcome is no longer
even cared about since everyone is now so sick of it; or in
rebuttal to another nonsensical argument ("Change the loader
to look for /kernel.pl? What about fairings?")
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 cons and tends to hang out with
other fans. Many hackers are fans, so this term has been
imported from fannish slang; however, unlike much fannish
slang it is recognized by most non-fannish hackers. Among SF
fans the plural is correctly fen, but this usage is not
automatic to hackers. "Laura reads the stuff occasionally but
isn't really a fan."
fandango on core : n.
[Unix/C hackers, from the Iberian dance] In C, a wild pointer
that runs out of bounds, causing a core dump, or corrupts the
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 (or Windows boxes,
which have an MMU but use it incompetently), this can corrupt
the OS itself, causing massive lossage. Other frenetic dances,
such as the cha-cha or the watusi, may be substituted. See
aliasing bug, precedence lossage, smash the stack, memory
leak, memory smash, overrun screw, core.
FAQ : /F-A-Q/ , /fak/ , n.
[Usenet]
1. A Frequently Asked Question.
2. A compendium of accumulated lore, posted periodically to
high-volume newsgroups in an attempt to forestall such
questions. Some people prefer the term `FAQ list' or `FAQL'
/fa'kl/, reserving `FAQ' for sense 1.
This lexicon itself serves as a good example of a collection
of one kind of lore, although it is far too big for a regular
FAQ posting. Examples: "What is the proper type of NULL?" and
"What's that funny name for the # character?" are both
Frequently Asked Questions. Several FAQs refer readers to the
Jargon File.
FAQ list : /F-A-Q list/ , /fak list/ , n.
[common; 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.
farm : n.
A group of machines, especially a large group of
near-identical machines running load-balancing software,
dedicated to a single task. Historically the term server farm,
used especially for a group of web servers, seems to have been
coined by analogy with earlier disk farm in the early 1990s;
generalization began with render farm for a group of machines
dedicated to rendering computer animations (this term appears
to have been popularized by publicity about the pioneering
"Linux render farm" used to produce the movie Titanic). By
2001 other combinations such as "compile farm" and "compute
farm" were increasingly common, and arguably borderline
techspeak. More jargon uses seem likely to arise (and be
absorbed into techspeak over time) as new uses are discovered
for networked machine clusters. Compare link farm.
fascist : adj.
1. [common] Said of a computer system with excessive or
annoying security barriers, usage limits, or access policies.
The implication is that said policies are preventing hackers
from getting interesting work done. The variant fascistic
seems to have been preferred at MIT, poss. by analogy with
touristic (see tourist or under the influence of
German/Yiddish faschistisch).
2. In the design of languages and other software tools, the
fascist alternative is the most restrictive and structured way
of capturing a particular function; the implication is that
this may be desirable in order to simplify the implementation
or provide tighter error checking. Compare
bondage-and-discipline language, although that term is global
rather than local.
[73-05-21.png]
Fascist security strikes again.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-05-28)
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.
fat pipe
A high-bandwidth connection to the Internet. When the term
gained currency in the mid-1990s, a T-1 (at 1.5 Mbits/second)
was considered a fat pipe, but the standard has risen. Now it
suggests multiple T3s.
fat-finger : vt.
1. To introduce a typo while editing in such a way that the
resulting manglification of a configuration file does
something useless, damaging, or wildly unexpected. "NSI
fat-fingered their DNS zone file and took half the net down
again."
2. More generally, any typo that produces dramatically bad
results.
faulty : adj.
Non-functional; buggy. Same denotation as bletcherous, losing,
q.v., but the connotation is much milder.
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 bigger than a workstation. "Ack!
They want PCs to be able to talk to the AI machine. Fear and
loathing time!"
feature : n.
1. [common] A good property or behavior (as of a program).
Whether it was intended or not is immaterial.
2. [common] An intended property or behavior (as of a
program). Whether it is good or not is immaterial (but if bad,
it is also a misfeature).
3. A surprising property or behavior; in particular, one that
is purposely inconsistent because it works better that way --
such an inconsistency is therefore a feature and not a bug.
This kind of feature is sometimes called a miswart; see that
entry for a classic example.
4. A property or behavior that is gratuitous or unnecessary,
though perhaps also impressive or cute. For example, one
feature of Common LISP's format function is the ability to
print numbers in two different Roman-numeral formats (see
bells whistles and gongs).
5. A property or behavior that was put in to help someone else
but that happens to be in your way.
6. [common] A bug that has been documented. To call something
a feature sometimes means the author of the program did not
consider the particular case, and that the program responded
in a way that was unexpected but not strictly incorrect. A
standard joke is that a bug can be turned into a feature
simply by documenting it (then theoretically no one can
complain about it because it's in the manual), or even by
simply declaring it to be good. "That's not a bug, that's a
feature!" is a common catchphrase. See also feetch feetch,
creeping featurism, wart, green lightning.
The relationship among bugs, features, misfeatures, warts, and
miswarts might be clarified by the following hypothetical
exchange between two hackers on an airliner:
A: "This seat doesn't recline."
B: "That's not a bug, that's a feature. There is an emergency
exit door built around the window behind you, and the route
has to be kept clear."
A: "Oh. Then it's a misfeature; they should have increased the
spacing between rows here."
B: "Yes. But if they'd increased spacing in only one section
it would have been a wart -- they would've had to make
nonstandard-length ceiling panels to fit over the displaced
seats."
A: "A miswart, actually. If they increased spacing throughout
they'd lose several rows and a chunk out of the profit margin.
So unequal spacing would actually be the Right Thing."
B: "Indeed."
Undocumented feature is a common, allegedly humorous euphemism
for a bug. There's a related joke that is sometimes referred
to as the "one-question geek test". You say to someone "I saw
a Volkswagen Beetle today with a vanity license plate that
read FEATURE". If he/she laughs, he/she is a geek.
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 creep : n.
[common] The result of creeping featurism, as in "Emacs has a
bad case of feature creep".
feature key : n.
[common] The Macintosh key with the cloverleaf graphic on its
keytop; sometimes referred to as flower, pretzel, clover,
propeller, beanie (an apparent reference to the major feature
of a propeller beanie), splat, open-apple or (officially, in
Mac documentation) the command key. In French, the term
papillon (butterfly) has been reported. The proliferation of
terms for this creature may illustrate one subtle peril of
iconic interfaces.
Many people have been mystified by the cloverleaf-like symbol
that appears on the feature key. Its oldest name is `cross of
St. Hannes', but it occurs in pre-Christian Viking art as a
decorative motif. Throughout Scandinavia today the road
agencies use it to mark sites of historical interest. Apple
picked up the symbol from an early Mac developer who happened
to be Swedish. Apple documentation gives the translation
"interesting feature"!
There is some dispute as to the proper (Swedish) name of this
symbol. It technically stands for the word sevärdhet (thing
worth seeing); many of these are old churches. Some Swedes
report as an idiom for the sign the word kyrka, cognate to
English `church' and pronounced (roughly) /chur'ka/ in modern
Swedish. Others say this is nonsense. Other idioms reported
for the sign are runa (rune) or runsten /roon'stn/
(runestone), derived from the fact that many of the
interesting features are Viking rune-stones. The term
fornminne /foorn'min'@/ (relic of antiquity, ancient monument)
is also reported, especially among those who think that the
Mac itself is a relic of antiquity.
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. [common] A problem with the discrete equivalent of a
boundary condition, often exhibited in programs by iterative
loops. From the following problem: "If you build a fence 100
feet long with posts 10 feet apart, how many posts do you
need?" (Either 9 or 11 is a better answer than the obvious
10.) For example, suppose you have a long list or array of
items, and want to process items m through n; how many items
are there? The obvious answer is n - m, but that is off by
one; the right answer is n - m + 1. A program that used the
`obvious' formula would have a fencepost error in it. See also
zeroth and off-by-one error, and note that not all off-by-one
errors are fencepost errors. The game of Musical Chairs
involves a catastrophic off-by-one error where N people try to
sit in N - 1 chairs, but it's not a fencepost error. Fencepost
errors come from counting things rather than the spaces
between them, or vice versa, or by neglecting to consider
whether one should count one or both ends of a row.
2. [rare] An error induced by unexpected regularities in input
values, which can (for instance) completely thwart a
theoretically efficient binary tree or hash table
implementation. (The error here involves the difference
between expected and worst case behaviors of an algorithm.)
fiber-seeking backhoe
[common among backbone ISP personnel] Any of a genus of large,
disruptive machines which routinely cut critical backbone
links, creating Internet outages and packet over air problems.
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. For years FidoNet actually
grew faster than Usenet, but the advent of cheap Internet
access probably means its days are numbered. In mid-2001
Fidonet has approximately 15K nodes, down from 38K in 1996 --
and most of those are probably single-user machines rather
than the thriving BBSes of yore.
field circus : n.
[a derogatory pun on `field service'] The field service
organization of any hardware manufacturer, but originally DEC.
There is an entire genre of jokes about field circus
engineers:
Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer
with a flat tire?
A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.
Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer
who is out of gas?
A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.
Q: How can you tell it's your field circus engineer?
A: The spare is flat, too.
[See Easter egging for additional insight on these jokes.]
There is also the `Field Circus Cheer' (from the old plan file
for DEC on MIT-AI):
Maynard! Maynard!
Don't mess with us!
We're mean and we're tough!
If you get us confused
We'll screw up your stuff.
(DEC's service HQ, still extant under the HP regime, is
located in Maynard, Massachusetts.)
field servoid : /fee'ld ser'voyd/ , n.
[play on `android'] Representative of a field service
organization (see field circus). This has many of the
implications of droid.
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] Originally, a popular or folk song with lyrics revised
or completely new lyrics and/or music, intended for humorous
effect when read, and/or to be sung late at night at SF
conventions. More recently (especially since the late 1980s),
filk has come to include a great deal of originally-composed
music on SFnal or fantasy themes and a range of moods wider
than simple parody or humor. Worthy of mention here because
there is a flourishing subgenre of filks called computer
filks, written by hackers and often containing rather
sophisticated technical humor. See double bucky for an
example. Compare grilf, hing, pr0n, and newsfroup.
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.
The variant "MPEGs at 11" has recently been cited (MPEG is a
digital-video format.)
filter : n.
[very common; orig. Unix] A program that processes an input
data stream into an output data stream in some well-defined
way, and does no I/O to anywhere else except possibly on error
conditions; one designed to be used as a stage in a pipeline
(see plumbing). Compare sponge.
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". May have been first
published by Francis P. Chisholm in his 1963 essay The
Chisholm Effect, later reprinted in the classic anthology A
Stress Analysis Of A Strapless Evening Gown: And Other Essays
For A Scientific Eye (Robert Baker ed, Prentice-Hall, ISBN
0-13-852608-7).
The label `Finagle's Law' was popularized by SF author Larry
Niven in several stories depicting a frontier culture of
asteroid miners; this `Belter' culture professed a religion
and/or running joke involving the worship of the dread god
Finagle and his mad prophet Murphy. Some technical and
scientific cultures (e.g., paleontologists) know it under the
name Sod's Law; this usage may be more common in Great
Britain. One variant favored among hackers is "The perversity
of the Universe tends towards a maximum"; Niven specifically
referred to this as O'Toole's Corollary of Finagle's Law. See
also Hanlon's Razor.
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', see See figure 1. Originally a humorous component of
one's plan file to deter the curious fingerer (sense 2), it
has entered the arsenal of some flamers.
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.obs.
A large, primitive, power-hungry active electrical device,
similar in function to a FET but constructed out of glass,
metal, and vacuum. Characterized by high cost, low density,
low reliability, high-temperature operation, and high power
dissipation. Sometimes mistakenly called a tube in the U.S. or
a valve in England; another hackish term is glassfet.
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 crackers. The
typical firewall is an inexpensive micro-based Unix box kept
clean of critical data, with a bunch of modems and public
network ports on it but just one carefully watched connection
back to the rest of the cluster. The special precautions may
include threat monitoring, callback, and even a complete iron
box keyable to particular incoming IDs or activity patterns.
Syn. flytrap, Venus flytrap. See also wild side.
[When first coined in the mid-1980s this term was pure jargon.
Now (1999) it is techspeak, and has been retained only as an
example of uptake --ESR]
fireworks mode : n.
1. The mode a machine is sometimes said to be in when it is
performing a crash and burn operation.
2. There is (or was) a more specific meaning of this term in
the Amiga community. The word fireworks described the effects
of a particularly serious crash which prevented the video
pointer(s) from getting reset at the start of the vertical
blank. This caused the DAC to scroll through the entire
contents of CHIP (video or video+CPU) memory. Since each bit
plane would scroll separately this was quite a spectacular
effect.
firmware : /ferm'weir/ , n.
Embedded software contained in EPROM or flash memory. It isn't
quite hardware, but at least doesn't have to be loaded from a
disk like regular software. Hacker usage differs from straight
techspeak in that hackers don't normally apply it to stuff
that you can't possibly get at, such as the program that runs
a pocket calculator. Instead, it implies that the firmware
could be changed, even if doing so would mean opening a box
and plugging in a new chip. A computer's BIOS is the classic
example, although nowadays there is firmware in disk
controllers, modems, video cards and even CD-ROM drives.
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.
fisking : n.
[blogosphere; very common] A point-by-point refutation of a
blog entry or (especially) news story. A really stylish
fisking is witty, logical, sarcastic and ruthlessly factual;
flaming or handwaving is considered poor form. Named after
Robert Fisk, a British journalist who was a frequent (and
deserving) early target of such treatment. See also MiSTing,
anti-idiotarianism
FITNR : // , adj.
[Thinking Machines, Inc.] Fixed In The Next Release. A
written-only notation attached to bug reports. Often wishful
thinking.
fix : n.,v.
What one does when a problem has been reported too many times
to be ignored.
FIXME : imp.
[common] A standard tag often put in C comments near a piece
of code that needs work. The point of doing so is that a grep
or a similar pattern-matching tool can find all such places
quickly.
/* FIXME: note this is common in GNU code. */
Compare XXX.
flag : n.
[very common] A variable or quantity that can take on one of
two values; a bit, particularly one that is used to indicate
one of two outcomes or is used to control which of two things
is to be done. "This flag controls whether to clear the screen
before printing the message." "The program status word
contains several flag bits." Used of humans analogously to
bit. See also hidden flag, mode bit.
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 change was made to the definition of the ASCII
character set during the development of Multics. The change
was scheduled for Flag Day (a U.S. holiday), June 14, 1966.
The change altered the Multics definition of ASCII from the
short-lived 1965 version of the ASCII code to the 1967 version
(in draft at the time); this moved code points for braces,
vertical bar, and circumflex. See also backward combatability.
The Great Renaming was a flag day.
[Most of the changes were made to files stored on CTSS, the
system used to support Multics development before it became
self-hosting.]
[As it happens, the first installation of a
commercially-produced computer, a Univac I, took place on Flag
Day of 1951 --ESR]
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.
[very common] Flaming verbiage, esp. high-noise, low-signal
postings to Usenet or other electronic fora. Often in the
phrase the usual flamage. Flaming is the act itself; flamage
the content; a flame is a single flaming message. See flame,
also dahmum.
flame
[at MIT, orig. from the phrase flaming asshole]
1. vi. To post an email message intended to insult and
provoke.
2. vi. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively
uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude.
3. vt. Either of senses 1 or 2, directed with hostility at a
particular person or people.
4. n. An instance of flaming. When a discussion degenerates
into useless controversy, one might tell the participants "Now
you're just flaming" or "Stop all that flamage!" to try to get
them to cool down (so to speak).
The term may have been independently invented at several
different places. It has been reported from MIT, Carleton
College and RPI (among many other places) from as far back as
1969, and from the University of Virginia in the early 1960s.
It is possible that the hackish sense of `flame' is much older
than that. The poet Chaucer was also what passed for a wizard
hacker in his time; he wrote a treatise on the astrolabe, the
most advanced computing device of the day. In Chaucer's
Troilus and Cressida, Cressida laments her inability to grasp
the proof of a particular mathematical theorem; her uncle
Pandarus then observes that it's called "the fleminge of
wrecches." This phrase seems to have been intended in context
as "that which puts the wretches to flight" but was probably
just as ambiguous in Middle English as "the flaming of
wretches" would be today. One suspects that Chaucer would feel
right at home on Usenet.
flame bait : n.
[common] A posting intended to trigger a flame war, or one
that invites flames in reply. See also troll.
flame on : 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.
[common] (var.: flamewar) An acrimonious dispute, especially
when conducted on a public electronic forum such as Usenet.
flamer : n.
[common] One who habitually flames. Said esp. of obnoxious
Usenet personalities.
flap : vt.
1. [obs.] To unload a DECtape (so it goes flap, flap,
flap...). Old-time hackers at MIT tell of the days when the
disk was device 0 and DEC microtapes were 1, 2,... and
attempting to flap device 0 would instead start a motor
banging inside a cabinet near the disk.
2. By extension, to unload any magnetic tape. Modern cartridge
tapes no longer actually flap, but the usage has remained.
(The term could well be re-applied to DEC's TK50 cartridge
tape drive, a spectacularly misengineered contraption which
makes a loud flapping sound, almost like an old reel-type
lawnmower, in one of its many tape-eating failure modes.)
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.
flash crowd
Larry Niven's 1973 SF short story Flash Crowd predicted that
one consequence of cheap teleportation would be huge crowds
materializing almost instantly at the sites of interesting
news stories. Twenty years later the term passed into common
use on the Internet to describe exponential spikes in website
or server usage when one passes a certain threshold of popular
interest (what this does to the server may also be called
slashdot effect). It has been pointed out that the effect was
anticipated years earlier in Alfred Bester's 1956 The Stars My
Destination.
flat : adj.
1. [common] Lacking any complex internal structure. "That
bitty box has only a flat filesystem, not a hierarchical one."
The verb form is flatten.
2. Said of a memory architecture (like that of the VAX or
680x0) that is one big linear address space (typically with
each possible value of a processor register corresponding to a
unique core address), as opposed to a segmented architecture
(like that of the 80x86) in which addresses are composed from
a base-register/offset pair (segmented designs are generally
considered cretinous).
Note that sense 1 (at least with respect to filesystems) is
usually used pejoratively, while sense 2 is a Good Thing.
flat-ASCII : adj.
[common] Said of a text file that contains only 7-bit ASCII
characters and uses only ASCII-standard control characters
(that is, has no embedded codes specific to a particular text
formatter markup language, or output device, and no
meta-characters). Syn. plain-ASCII. Compare flat-file.
flat-file : adj.
A flattened representation of some database or tree or network
structure as a single file from which the structure could
implicitly be rebuilt, esp. one in flat-ASCII form. See also
sharchive.
flatten : vt.
[common] To remove structural information, esp. to filter
something with an implicit tree structure into a simple
sequence of leaves; also tends to imply mapping to flat-ASCII.
"This code flattens an expression with parentheses into an
equivalent canonical form."
flavor : n.
1. [common] Variety, type, kind. "DDT commands come in two
flavors." "These lights come in two flavors, big red ones and
small green ones." "Linux is a flavor of Unix" See vanilla.
2. The attribute that causes something to be flavorful.
Usually used in the phrase "yields additional flavor". "This
convention yields additional flavor by allowing one to print
text either right-side-up or upside-down." See vanilla. This
usage was certainly reinforced by the terminology of quantum
chromodynamics, in which quarks (the constituents of, e.g.,
protons) come in six flavors (up, down, strange, charm, top,
bottom) and three colors (red, blue, green) -- however,
hackish use of flavor at MIT predated QCD.
3. The term for class (in the object-oriented sense) in the
LISP Machine Flavors system. Though the Flavors design has
been superseded (notably by the Common LISP CLOS facility),
the term flavor is still used as a general synonym for class
by some LISP hackers.
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.
[common]
1. To overwhelm a network channel with mechanically-generated
traffic; especially used of IP, TCP/IP, UDP, or ICMP
denial-of-service attacks.
2. To dump large amounts of text onto an IRC channel. This is
especially rude when the text is uninteresting and the other
users are trying to carry on a serious conversation. Also used
in a similar sense on Usenet.
3. [Usenet] To post an unusually large number or volume of
files on a related topic.
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, code
grinders, and other lower forms of life. This attitude follows
from the observations that flowcharts (at least from a
hacker's point of view) are no easier to read than code, are
less precise, and tend to fall out of sync with the code (so
that they either obfuscate it rather than explaining it, or
require extra maintenance effort that doesn't improve the
code).
flower key : n.
[Mac users] See feature key.
flush : v.
1. [common] To delete something, usually superfluous, or to
abort an operation. "All that nonsense has been flushed."
2. [Unix/C] To force buffered I/O to disk, as with an
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 found
the ITS usage confusing, and vice versa.
[crunchly-5678.png]
Crunchly gets flushed.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-05-01)
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.
[rare] See firewall machine.
FM : /F-M/ , n.
1. [common] Not `Frequency Modulation' but rather an
abbreviation for `Fucking Manual', the back-formation from
RTFM. Used to refer to the manual itself in the RTFM. "Have
you seen the Networking FM lately?"
2. Abbreviation for "Fucking Magic", used in the sense of
black magic.
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; common] Acronym for `Friend Of A Friend'. The source
of an unverified, possibly untrue story. This term was not
originated by hackers (it is used in Jan Brunvand's books on
urban folklore), but is much better recognized on Usenet and
elsewhere than in mainstream English.
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 MUDs where the wizard
command `FOD <player>' results in the immediate and total
death of <player>, usually as punishment for obnoxious
behavior. This usage migrated to other circumstances, such as
"I'm going to fod the process that is burning all the cycles."
In aviation, FOD means Foreign Object Damage, e.g., what
happens when a jet engine sucks up a rock on the runway or a
bird in flight. Finger of Death is a distressingly apt
description of what this generally does to the engine.
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.
[common] On Usenet, a posting generated in response to another
posting (as opposed to a reply, which goes by email rather
than being broadcast). Followups include the ID of the parent
message in their headers; smart news-readers can use this
information to present Usenet news in `conversation' sequence
rather than order-of-arrival. See thread.
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. [very common] Used very generally as a sample name for
absolutely anything, esp. programs and files (esp. scratch
files).
3. First on the standard list of metasyntactic variables used
in syntax examples. See also bar, baz, qux, quux, garply,
waldo, fred, plugh, xyzzy, thud.
When `foo' is used in connection with `bar' it has generally
traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym FUBAR (`Fucked Up
Beyond All Repair' or `Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition'),
later modified to foobar. Early versions of the Jargon File
interpreted this change as a post-war bowdlerization, but it
it now seems more likely that FUBAR was itself a derivative of
`foo' perhaps influenced by German furchtbar (terrible) --
`foobar' may actually have been the original form.
For, it seems, the word `foo' itself had an immediate prewar
history in comic strips and cartoons. The earliest documented
uses were in the Smokey Stover comic strip published from
about 1930 to about 1952. Bill Holman, the author of the
strip, filled it with odd jokes and personal contrivances,
including other nonsense phrases such as "Notary Sojac" and
"1506 nix nix". The word "foo" frequently appeared on license
plates of cars, in nonsense sayings in the background of some
frames (such as "He who foos last foos best" or "Many smoke
but foo men chew"), and Holman had Smokey say "Where there's
foo, there's fire".
According to the Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion Holman
claimed to have found the word "foo" on the bottom of a
Chinese figurine. This is plausible; Chinese statuettes often
have apotropaic inscriptions, and this one was almost
certainly the Mandarin Chinese word fu (sometimes
transliterated foo), which can mean "happiness" or
"prosperity" when spoken with the rising tone (the lion-dog
guardians flanking the steps of many Chinese restaurants are
properly called "fu dogs"). English speakers' reception of
Holman's `foo' nonsense word was undoubtedly influenced by
Yiddish `feh' and English `fooey' and `fool'.
Holman's strip featured a firetruck called the Foomobile that
rode on two wheels. The comic strip was tremendously popular
in the late 1930s, and legend has it that a manufacturer in
Indiana even produced an operable version of Holman's
Foomobile. According to the Encyclopedia of American Comics,
`Foo' fever swept the U.S., finding its way into popular songs
and generating over 500 `Foo Clubs.' The fad left `foo'
references embedded in popular culture (including a couple of
appearances in Warner Brothers cartoons of 1938-39; notably in
Robert Clampett's "Daffy Doc" of 1938, in which a very early
version of Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying "SILENCE IS
FOO!") When the fad faded, the origin of "foo" was forgotten.
One place "foo" is known to have remained live is in the U.S.
military during the WWII years. In 1944-45, the term `foo
fighters' was in use by radar operators for the kind of
mysterious or spurious trace that would later be called a UFO
(the older term resurfaced in popular American usage in 1995
via the name of one of the better grunge-rock bands). Because
informants connected the term directly to the Smokey Stover
strip, the folk etymology that connects it to French "feu"
(fire) can be gently dismissed.
The U.S. and British militaries frequently swapped slang terms
during the war (see kluge and kludge for another important
example) Period sources reported that `FOO' became a
semi-legendary subject of WWII British-army graffiti more or
less equivalent to the American Kilroy. Where British troops
went, the graffito "FOO was here" or something similar showed
up. Several slang dictionaries aver that FOO probably came
from Forward Observation Officer, but this (like the
contemporaneous "FUBAR") was probably a backronym . Forty
years later, Paul Dickson's excellent book "Words" (Dell,
1982, ISBN 0-440-52260-7) traced "Foo" to an unspecified
British naval magazine in 1946, quoting as follows: "Mr. Foo
is a mysterious Second World War product, gifted with bitter
omniscience and sarcasm."
Earlier versions of this entry suggested the possibility that
hacker usage actually sprang from FOO, Lampoons and Parody,
the title of a comic book first issued in September 1958, a
joint project of Charles and Robert Crumb. Though Robert Crumb
(then in his mid-teens) later became one of the most important
and influential artists in underground comics, this venture
was hardly a success; indeed, the brothers later burned most
of the existing copies in disgust. The title FOO was featured
in large letters on the front cover. However, very few copies
of this comic actually circulated, and students of Crumb's
oeuvre have established that this title was a reference to the
earlier Smokey Stover comics. The Crumbs may also have been
influenced by a short-lived Canadian parody magazine named
`Foo' published in 1951-52.
An old-time member reports that in the 1959 Dictionary of the
TMRC Language, compiled at TMRC, there was an entry that went
something like this:
FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase "FOO MANE PADME
HUM." Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning.
(For more about the legendary foo counters, see TMRC.) This
definition used Bill Holman's nonsense word, then only two
decades old and demonstrably still live in popular culture and
slang, to a ha ha only serious analogy with esoteric Tibetan
Buddhism. Today's hackers would find it difficult to resist
elaborating a joke like that, and it is not likely 1959's were
any less susceptible. Almost the entire staff of what later
became the MIT AI Lab was involved with TMRC, and the word
spread from there.
foobar : n.
[very common] Another widely used metasyntactic variable; see
foo for etymology. Probably originally propagated through
DECsystem manuals by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in
1960s and early 1970s; confirmed sightings there go back to
1972. Hackers do not generally use this to mean FUBAR in
either the slang or jargon sense. See also Fred Foobar. In
RFC1639, "FOOBAR" was made an abbreviation for "FTP Operation
Over Big Address Records", but this was an obvious backronym.
It has been plausibly suggested that "foobar" spread among
early computer engineers partly because of FUBAR and partly
because "foo bar" parses in electronics techspeak as an
inverted foo signal; if a digital signal is active low (so a
negative or zero-voltage condition represents a "1") then a
horizontal bar is commonly placed over the signal label.
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 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 : n.
[Usenet] A notional repository of all the most dramatically
and abysmally stupid utterances ever. An entire subgenre of
sig blocks consists of the header "From the fool file:"
followed by some quote the poster wishes to represent as an
immortal gem of dimwittery; for this usage to be really
effective, the quote has to be so obviously wrong as to be
laughable. More than one Usenetter has achieved an unwanted
notoriety by being quoted in this way.
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 name itself
came from FOO NLI, an error message emitted by a PDP-10
assembler at SAIL meaning "FOO is Not a Legal Identifier". The
intention was to leapfrog from the old DEC timesharing system
SAIL was then running to a new generation, bypassing TENEX
which at that time was the ARPANET standard. ARPA funding for
both the Super Foonly and the new operating system was cut in
1974. Most of the design team went to DEC and contributed
greatly to the design of the PDP-10 model KL10.
2. The name of the company formed by Dave Poole, one of the
principal Super Foonly designers, and one of hackerdom's more
colorful personalities. Many people remember the parrot which
sat on Poole's shoulder and was a regular companion.
3. Any of the machines built by Poole's company. The first was
the F-1 (a.k.a. Super Foonly), which was the computational
engine used to create the graphics in the movie TRON. The F-1
was the fastest PDP-10 ever built, but only one was ever made.
The effort drained Foonly of its financial resources, and the
company turned towards building smaller, slower, and much less
expensive machines. Unfortunately, these ran not the popular
TOPS-20 but a TENEX variant called Foonex; this seriously
limited their market. Also, the machines shipped were actually
wire-wrapped engineering prototypes requiring individual
attention from more than usually competent site personnel, and
thus had significant reliability problems. Poole's legendary
temper and unwillingness to suffer fools gladly did not help
matters. By the time DEC's "Jupiter Project" followon to the
PDP-10 was cancelled in 1983, Foonly's proposal to build
another F-1 was eclipsed by the Mars, and the company never
quite recovered. See the Mars entry for the continuation and
moral of this story.
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 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.
[common] Said of a capability of a programming language or
hardware that is available by its design without needing
cleverness to implement: "In APL, we get the matrix operations
for free." "And owing to the way revisions are stored in this
system, you get revision trees for free." The term usually
refers to a serendipitous feature of doing things a certain
way (compare big win), but it may refer to an intentional but
secondary feature.
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 p equals 3 -- for small values of p 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; common] To bring a task to the top of one's stack for
immediate processing, and hackers often use it in this sense
for non-computer tasks. "If your presentation is due next
week, I guess I'd better foreground writing up the design
document."
Technically, on a timesharing system, a task executing in
foreground is one able to accept input from and return output
to the user; oppose background. Nowadays this term is
primarily associated with Unix, but it appears first to have
been used in this sense on OS/360. Normally, there is only one
foreground task per terminal (or terminal window); having
multiple processes simultaneously reading the keyboard is a
good way to lose.
fork
In the open-source community, a fork is what occurs when two
(or more) versions of a software package's source code are
being developed in parallel which once shared a common code
base, and these multiple versions of the source code have
irreconcilable differences between them. This should not be
confused with a development branch, which may later be folded
back into the original source code base. Nor should it be
confused with what happens when a new distribution of Linux or
some other distribution is created, because that largely
assembles pieces than can and will be used in other
distributions without conflict.
Forking is uncommon; in fact, it is so uncommon that
individual instances loom large in hacker folklore. Notable in
this class were the Emacs/XEmacs fork, the GCC/EGCS fork
(later healed by a merger) and the forks among the FreeBSD,
NetBSD, and OpenBSD operating systems.
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. Also called a fork bunny. See
also logic bomb.
forked : adj.,vi.
1. [common after 1997, esp. in the Linux community] An
open-source software project is said to have forked or be
forked when the project group fissions into two or more parts
pursuing separate lines of development (or, less commonly,
when a third party unconnected to the project group begins its
own line of development). Forking is considered a Bad Thing --
not merely because it implies a lot of wasted effort in the
future, but because forks tend to be accompanied by a great
deal of strife and acrimony between the successor groups over
issues of legitimacy, succession, and design direction. There
is serious social pressure against forking. As a result, major
forks (such as the Gnu-Emacs/XEmacs split, the fissionings of
the 386BSD group into three daughter projects, and the
short-lived GCC/EGCS split) are rare enough that they are
remembered individually in hacker folklore.
2. [Unix; uncommon; prob.: influenced by a mainstream
expletive] Terminally slow, or dead. Originated when one
system was slowed to a snail's pace by an inadvertent fork
bomb.
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; common] A random quote, item of trivia,
joke, or maxim printed to the user's tty at login time or
(less commonly) at logout time. Items from this lexicon have
often been used as fortune cookies. See cookie file.
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 the network). A forum functions much like a
bulletin board; users submit postings for all to read and
discussion ensues. Contrast real-time chat via talk mode or
point-to-point personal email.
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.)
four-color glossies : n.
1. Literature created by marketroids that allegedly contains
technical specs but which is in fact as superficial as
possible without being totally content-free. "Forget the
four-color glossies, give me the tech ref manuals." Often
applied as an indication of superficiality even when the
material is printed on ordinary paper in black and white.
Four-color-glossy manuals are never useful for solving a
problem.
2. [rare] Applied by extension to manual pages that don't
contain enough information to diagnose why the program doesn't
produce the expected or desired output.
frag : n.,v.
[from Vietnam-era U.S. military slang via the games Doom and
Quake]
1. To kill another player's avatar in a multiuser game. "I
hold the office Quake record with 40 frags."
2. To completely ruin something. "Forget that power supply,
the lightning strike fragged it." See also gib.
fragile : adj.
Syn brittle.
Frankenputer : n.
1. A mostly-working computer thrown together from the spare
parts of several machines out of which the magic smoke had
been let. Most shops have a closet full of nonworking
machines. When a new machine is needed immediately (for
testing, for example) and there is no time (or budget) to
requisition a new box, someone (often an intern) is tasked
with building a Frankenputer.
2. Also used in referring to a machine that once was a
name-brand computer, but has been upgraded long beyond its
useful life, to the point at which the nameplate violates
truth-in-advertising laws (e.g., a Pentium III-class machine
inexplicably living in a case marked "Gateway 486/66").
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. In
Great Britain, `fred', `jim' and `sheila' are common
metasyntactic variables because their uppercase versions were
official names given to the 3 memory areas that held I/O
status registers on the lovingly-remembered BBC Microcomputer!
(It is reported that SHEILA was poked the most often.) Unlike
J. Random Hacker or J. Random Loser, the name `fred' has no
positive or negative loading (but see Dr. Fred Mbogo). See
also barney.
2. An acronym for `Flipping Ridiculous Electronic Device';
other F-verbs may be substituted for `flipping'.
Fred Foobar : n.
J. Random Hacker's cousin. Any typical human being, more or
less synonymous with `someone' except that Fred Foobar can be
backreferenced by name later on. "So Fred Foobar will enter
his phone number into the database, and it'll be archived with
the others. Months later, when Fred searches..." See also
Bloggs Family and Dr. Fred Mbogo
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."
free software : n.
As defined by Richard M. Stallman and used by the Free
Software movement, this means software that gives users enough
freedom to be used by the free software community.
Specifically, users must be free to modify the software for
their private use, and free to redistribute it either with or
without modifications, either commercially or noncommercially,
either gratis or charging a distribution fee. Free software
has existed since the dawn of computing; Free Software as a
movement began in 1984 with the GNU Project.
RMS observes that the English word "free" can refer either to
liberty (where it means the same as the Spanish or French
"libre") or to price (where it means the same as the Spanish
"gratis" or French "gratuit"). RMS and other people associated
with the FSF like to explain the word "free" in "free
software" by saying "Free as in speech, not as in beer."
See also open source. Hard-core proponents of the term "free
software" sometimes reject this newer term, claiming that the
style of argument associated with it ignores or downplays the
moral imperative at the heart of free software.
freeware : n.
[common] Freely-redistributable software, often written by
enthusiasts and distributed by users' groups, or via
electronic mail, local bulletin boards, Usenet, or other
electronic media. As the culture of the Internet has displaced
the older BBS world, this term has lost ground to both open
source and free software; it has increasingly tended to be
restricted to software distributed in binary rather than
source-code form. At one time, freeware was a trademark of
Andrew Fluegelman, the author of the well-known MS-DOS comm
program PC-TALK III. It wasn't enforced after his mysterious
disappearance and presumed death in 1984. See shareware, FRS.
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. [common] Non-working due to hardware failure; burnt out.
Especially used of hardware brought down by a power glitch
(see glitch), drop-outs, a short, or some other electrical
event. (Sometimes this literally happens to electronic
circuits! In particular, resistors can burn out and
transformers can melt down, emitting noxious smoke -- see
friode, SED and LER. However, this term is also used
metaphorically.) Compare frotzed.
2. [common] Of people, exhausted. Said particularly of those
who continue to work in such a state. Often used as an
explanation or excuse. "Yeah, I know that fix destroyed the
file system, but I was fried when I put it in." Esp.: common
in conjunction with brain: "My brain is fried today, I'm very
short on sleep."
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; very common] The TMRC definition was "FROB = a
protruding arm or trunnion"; by metaphoric extension, a frob
is any random small thing; an object that you can comfortably
hold in one hand; something you can frob (sense 2). See
frobnitz.
2. vt. Abbreviated form of frobnicate.
3. [from the MUD world] A command on some MUDs that changes a
player's experience level (this can be used to make wizards);
also, to request wizard privileges on the `professional
courtesy' grounds that one is a wizard elsewhere. The command
is actually `frobnicate' but is universally abbreviated to the
shorter form.
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/ , frobni ,
/frob'ni:/ , n.
[TMRC] An unspecified physical object, a widget. Also refers
to electronic black boxes. This rare form is usually
abbreviated to frotz, or more commonly to frob. Also used are
frobnule (/frob'n[y]ool/) and frobule (/frob'yool/). Starting
perhaps in 1979, frobozz /fr@-boz'/ (plural: frobbotzim
/fr@-bot'zm/) has also become very popular, largely through
its exposure as a name via Zork. These variants can also be
applied to nonphysical objects, such as data structures. For
related amusement, see the Encyclopedia Frobozzica.
Pete Samson, compiler of the original TMRC lexicon, adds,
"Under the TMRC [railroad] layout were many storage boxes,
managed (in 1958) by David R. Sawyer. Several had fanciful
designations written on them, such as `Frobnitz Coil Oil'.
Perhaps DRS intended Frobnitz to be a proper name, but the
name was quickly taken for the thing". This was almost
certainly the origin of the term.
frog : 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 : v.
1. Partial corruption of a text file or input stream by some
bug or consistent glitch, as opposed to random events like
line noise or media failures. Might occur, for example, if one
bit of each incoming character on a tty were stuck, so that
some characters were correct and others were not. See dread
high-bit disease.
2. By extension, accidental display of text in a mode where
the output device emits special symbols or mnemonics rather
than conventional ASCII. This often happens, for example, when
using a terminal or comm program on a device like an IBM PC
with a special `high-half' character set and with the
bit-parity assumption wrong. A hacker sufficiently familiar
with ASCII bit patterns might be able to read the display
anyway.
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."
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.,obs.
[obs.] Abbreviation for "Freely Redistributable Software"
which entered general use on the Internet in 1995 after years
of low-level confusion over what exactly to call software
written to be passed around and shared (contending terms
including freeware, shareware, and sourceware were never
universally felt to be satisfactory for various subtle
reasons). The first formal conference on freely
redistributable software was held in Cambridge,
Massachussetts, in February 1996 (sponsored by the Free
Software Foundation). The conference organizers used the FRS
abbreviation heavily in its calls for papers and other
literature during 1995. The term was in steady though not
common use until 1998 and the invention of open source, after
which it became swiftly obsolete.
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.
fscking : /fus'-king/ , /eff'-seek-ing/ , adj.
[Usenet; very common] Fucking, in the expletive sense (it
refers to the Unix filesystem-repair command fsck(8), of which
it can be said that if you have to use it at all you are
having a bad day). Originated on scary devil monastery and the
bofh.net newsgroups, but became much more widespread following
the passage of CDA. Also occasionally seen in the variant
"What the fsck?"
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.
-fu
[common; generalized from kung-fu] Combining form denoting
expert practice of a skill. "That's going to take some serious
code-fu." First sighted in connection with the GIMP's
remote-scripting facility, script-fu, in 1998.
FUBAR : n.
The Failed UniBus Address Register in a VAX. A good example of
how jargon can occasionally be snuck past the suits; see
foobar, and foo for a fuller etymology.
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. After 1990 the term FUD was associated increasingly
frequently with Microsoft, and has become generalized to refer
to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.
FUD wars : /fuhd worz/ , n.
1, [from FUD] Historically, oolitical posturing engaged in by
hardware and software vendors ostensibly committed to
standardization but actually willing to fragment the market to
protect their own shares. The Unix International vs.: OSF
conflict about Unix standards was one outstanding example;
Microsoft vs. Netscape vs. W3C about HTML standards is
another.
2. Since about 2000 the FUD wars have a different character;
the battle over open standards has been partly replaced and
partly subsumed by the argument between closed- and open
source proponents. Nowadays, accordingly, the term is most
likely to be used of anti-open-source propaganda emitted by
Microsoft. Compare astroturfing.
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.
[common] A value or parameter that is varied in an ad hoc way
to produce the desired result. The terms tolerance and slop
are also used, though these usually indicate a one-sided
leeway, such as a buffer that is made larger than necessary
because one isn't sure exactly how large it needs to be, and
it is better to waste a little space than to lose completely
for not having enough. A fudge factor, on the other hand, can
often be tweaked in more than one direction. A good example is
the fuzz typically allowed in floating-point calculations: two
numbers being compared for equality must be allowed to differ
by a small amount; if that amount is too small, a computation
may never terminate, while if it is too large, results will be
needlessly inaccurate. Fudge factors are frequently adjusted
incorrectly by programmers who don't fully understand their
import. See also coefficient of X.
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 : n.
See monty, sense 2.
fum : n.
[XEROX PARC] At PARC, often the third of the standard
metasyntactic variables (after foo and bar). Competes with
baz, which is more common outside PARC.
functino : n.
[uncommon, U.K.; originally a serendipitous typo in 1994] A
pointer to a function in C and C++. By association with
sub-atomic particles such as the neutrino, it accurately
conveys an impression of smallness (one pointer is four bytes
on most systems) and speed (hackers can and do use arrays of
functinos to replace a switch() statement).
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 commemorates the funny money
used for trade between COMECON countries back when the Soviet
Bloc still existed. When your funny money ran out, your
account froze and you needed to go to a professor to get more.
Fortunately, the plunging cost of timesharing cycles has made
this less common. The amounts allocated were almost invariably
too small, even for the non-hackers who wanted to slide by
with minimum work. In extreme cases, the practice led to
small-scale black markets in bootlegged computer accounts.
2. By extension, phantom money or quantity tickets of any kind
used as a resource-allocation hack within a system. Antonym:
real money.
furrfu : excl.
[Usenet; written, only rarely spoken] Written-only equivalent
of "Sheesh!"; it is, in fact, "sheesh" modified by rot13.
Evolved in mid-1992 as a response to notably silly postings
repeating urban myths on the Usenet newsgroup
alt.folklore.urban, after some posters complained that
"Sheesh!" as a response to newbies was being overused. See
also FOAF.
G
G : pref.,suff.
1. [SI] See quantifiers.
2. The letter G has special significance in the hacker
community, largely thanks to the GNU project and the GPL.
Many free software projects have names that names that begin
with G. The GNU project gave many of its projects names that
were acronyms beginning with the word "GNU", such as "GNU C
Compiler" (gcc) and "GNU Debugger" (gdb), and this launched a
tradition. Just as many Java developers will begin their
projects with J, many free software developers will begin
theirs with G. It is often the case that a program with a
G-prefixed name is licensed under the GNU GPL.
For example, someone may write a free Enterprise Engineering
Kludge package (EEK technology is all the rage in the
technical journals) and name it "geek" to imply that it is a
GPL'd EEK package.
gang bang : n.
The use of large numbers of loosely coupled programmers in an
attempt to wedge a great many features into a product in a
short time. Though there have been memorable gang bangs (e.g.,
that over-the-weekend assembler port mentioned in Steven
Levy's Hackers), and large numbers of loosely-coupled
programmers operating in bazaar mode can do very useful work
when they're not on a deadline, most are perpetrated by large
companies trying to meet unrealistic deadlines; the inevitable
result is enormous buggy masses of code entirely lacking in
orthogonality. When market-driven managers make a list of all
the features the competition has and assign one programmer to
implement each, the probability of maintaining a coherent (or
even functional) design goes to epsilon. See also
firefighting, Mongolian Hordes technique, Conway's Law.
Gang of Four : n.
(also abbreviated GOF) [prob. a play on the `Gang Of Four' who
briefly ran Communist China after the death of Mao] Describes
either the authors or the book Design Patterns: Elements of
Reusable Object-Oriented Software published in 1995 by
Addison-Wesley (ISBN 0-201-63361-2). The authors forming the
Gang Of Four are Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and
John Vlissides. They are also sometimes referred to as `Gamma
et. al.' The authors state at
http://www.hillside.net/patterns/DPBook/GOF.html "Why are we
... called this? Who knows. Somehow the name just stuck." The
term is also used to describe any of the design patterns that
are used in the book, referring to the patterns within it as
`Gang Of Four Patterns.'
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.
Gates's Law
"The speed of software halves every 18 months." This oft-cited
law is an ironic comment on the tendency of software bloat to
outpace the every-18-month doubling in hardware capacity per
dollar predicted by Moore's Law. The reference is to Bill
Gates; Microsoft is widely considered among the worst if not
the worst of the perpetrators of bloat.
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."
2. vt. To recycle, reclaim, or put to another use.
3. n. An instantiation of the garbage collector process.
Garbage collection is computer-science techspeak for a
particular class of strategies for dynamically but
transparently reallocating computer memory (i.e., without
requiring explicit allocation and deallocation by higher-level
software). One such strategy involves periodically scanning
all the data in memory and determining what is no longer
accessible; useless data items are then discarded so that the
memory they occupy can be recycled and used for another
purpose. Implementations of the LISP language usually use
garbage collection.
In jargon, the full phrase is sometimes heard but the abbrev
GC is more frequently used because it is shorter. Note that
there is an ambiguity in usage that has to be resolved by
context: "I'm going to garbage-collect my desk" usually means
to clean out the drawers, but it could also mean to throw away
or recycle the desk itself.
GCOS : /jee'kohs/ , n.
A quick-and-dirty clone of System/360 DOS that emerged from GE
around 1970; originally called GECOS (the General Electric
Comprehensive Operating System). Later kluged to support
primitive timesharing and transaction processing. After the
buyout of GE's computer division by Honeywell, the name was
changed to General Comprehensive Operating System (GCOS).
Other OS groups at Honeywell began referring to it as `God's
Chosen Operating System', allegedly in reaction to the GCOS
crowd's uninformed and snotty attitude about the superiority
of their product. All this might be of zero interest, except
for two facts: (1) The GCOS people won the political war, and
this led in the orphaning and eventual death of Honeywell
Multics, and (2) GECOS/GCOS left one permanent mark on Unix.
Some early Unix systems at Bell Labs used GCOS machines for
print spooling and various other services; the field added to
/etc/passwd to carry GCOS ID information was called the GECOS
field and survives today as the pw_gecos member used for the
user's full name and other human-ID information. GCOS later
played a major role in keeping Honeywell a dismal also-ran in
the mainframe market, and was itself mostly ditched for Unix
in the late 1980s when Honeywell began to retire its aging big
iron designs.
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 : n.
A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity;
one who pursues skill (especially technical skill) and
imagination, not mainstream social acceptance. Geeks usually
have a strong case of neophilia. Most geeks are adept with
computers and treat hacker as a term of respect, but not all
are hackers themselves -- and some who are in fact hackers
normally call themselves geeks anyway, because they (quite
properly) regard `hacker' as a label that should be bestowed
by others rather than self-assumed.
One description accurately if a little breathlessly enumerates
"gamers, ravers, science fiction fans, punks, perverts,
programmers, nerds, subgenii, and trekkies. These are people
who did not go to their high school proms, and many would be
offended by the suggestion that they should have even wanted
to."
Originally, a geek was a carnival performer who bit the heads
off chickens. (In early 20th-century Scotland a `geek' was an
immature coley, a type of fish.) Before about 1990 usage of
this term was rather negative. Earlier versions of this
lexicon defined a computer geek as one who eats (computer)
bugs for a living -- an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced
monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater. This
is often still the way geeks are regarded by non-geeks, but as
the mainstream culture becomes more dependent on technology
and technical skill mainstream attitudes have tended to shift
towards grudging respect. Correspondingly, there are now `geek
pride' festivals (the implied reference to `gay pride' is not
accidental).
See also propeller head, clustergeeking, geek out, wannabee,
terminal junkie, spod, weenie, geek code, alpha geek.
geek code : n.
(also "Code of the Geeks"). A set of codes commonly used in
sig blocks to broadcast the interests, skills, and aspirations
of the poster. Features a G at the left margin followed by
numerous letter codes, often suffixed with plusses or minuses.
Because many net users are involved in computer science, the
most common prefix is `GCS'. To see a copy of the current
code, browse http://www.geekcode.com/. Here is a sample geek
code (that of Robert Hayden, the code's inventor) from that
page:
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GED/J d-- s:++>: a- C++(++++)$ ULUO++ P+>+++ L++ !E---- W+(---
) N+++
o+ K+++ w+(---) O- M+$>++ V-- PS++(+++)>$ PE++(+)>$ Y++ PGP++
t- 5+++
X++ R+++>$ tv+ b+ DI+++ D+++ G+++++>$ e++$>++++ h r-- y+**
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
The geek code originated in 1993; it was inspired (according
to the inventor) by previous "bear", "smurf" and "twink"
style-and-sexual-preference codes from lesbian and gay
newsgroups. It has in turn spawned imitators; there is now
even a "Saturn geek code" for owners of the Saturn car. See
also geek.
geek out : vi.
To temporarily enter techno-nerd mode while in a non-hackish
context, for example at parties held near computer equipment.
Especially used when you need to do or say something highly
technical and don't have time to explain: "Pardon me while I
geek out for a moment." See geek; see also propeller head.
geekasm
Originally from a quote on the PBS show Scientific American
Frontiers (week of May 21st 2002) by MIT professor Alex
Slocum: "When they build a machine, if they do the
calculations right, the machine works and you get this intense
... uhh ... just like a geekasm, from knowing that what you
created in your mind and on the computer is actually doing
what you told it to do". Unsurprisingly, this usage went live
on the Web almost instantly. Every hacker knows this feeling.
Compare earlier progasm.
gen : /jen/ , n.,v.
Short for generate, used frequently in both spoken and written
contexts.
gender mender : n.
[common] A cable connector shell with either two male or two
female connectors on it, used to correct the mismatches that
result when some loser didn't understand the RS232C
specification and the distinction between DTE and DCE. Used
esp. for RS-232C parts in either the original D-25 or the IBM
PC's bogus D-9 format. Also called gender bender, gender
blender, sex changer, and even homosexual adapter; however,
there appears to be some confusion as to whether a male
homosexual adapter has pins on both sides (is doubly male) or
sockets on both sides (connects two males).
General Public Virus : n.
Pejorative name for some versions of the GNU project copyleft
or General Public License (GPL), which requires that any tools
or apps incorporating copylefted code must be
source-distributed on the same anti-proprietary terms as GNU
stuff. Thus it is alleged that the copyleft `infects' software
generated with GNU tools, which may in turn infect other
software that reuses any of its code. The Free Software
Foundation's official position is that copyright law limits
the scope of the GPL to "programs textually incorporating
significant amounts of GNU code", and that the `infection' is
not passed on to third parties unless actual GNU source is
transmitted. Nevertheless, widespread suspicion that the
copyleft language is `boobytrapped' has caused many developers
to avoid using GNU tools and the GPL. Changes in the language
of the version 2.0 GPL did not eliminate this problem.
generate : vt.
To produce something according to an algorithm or program or
set of rules, or as a (possibly unintended) side effect of the
execution of an algorithm or program. The opposite of parse.
This term retains its mechanistic connotations (though often
humorously) when used of human behavior. "The guy is rational
most of the time, but mention nuclear energy around him and
he'll generate infinite flamage."
Genius From Mars Technique : n.
[TMRC] A visionary quality which enables one to ignore the
standard approach and come up with a totally unexpected new
algorithm. An attack on a problem from an offbeat angle that
no one has ever thought of before, but that in retrospect
makes total sense. Compare grok, zen.
gensym : /jen'sim/
[from MacLISP for generated symbol]
1. v. To invent a new name for something temporary, in such a
way that the name is almost certainly not in conflict with one
already in use.
2. n. The resulting name. The canonical form of a gensym is
`Gnnnn' where nnnn represents a number; any LISP hacker would
recognize G0093 (for example) as a gensym.
3. A freshly generated data structure with a gensymmed name.
Gensymmed names are useful for storing or uniquely identifying
crufties (see cruft).
Get a life! : imp.
Hacker-standard way of suggesting that the person to whom it
is directed has succumbed to terminal geekdom (see geek).
Often heard on Usenet, esp. as a way of suggesting that the
target is taking some obscure issue of theology too seriously.
This exhortation was popularized by William Shatner on a 1987
Saturday Night Live episode in a speech that ended "Get a
life!", but it can be traced back at least to `Valley Girl'
slang in 1983. It was certainly in wide use among hackers for
years before achieving mainstream currency via the sitcom Get
A Life in 1990.
Get a real computer! : imp.
Typical hacker response to news that somebody is having
trouble getting work done on a system that (a) is
single-tasking, (b) has no hard disk, or (c) has an address
space smaller than 16 megabytes. This is as of early 1996;
note that the threshold for `real computer' rises with time.
See bitty box and toy.
GandhiCon
There is a quote from Mohandas Gandhi, describing the stages
of establishment resistence to a winning strategy of
nonviolent activism, that partisans of open source and
especially Linux have embraced as almost an explanatory
framework for the behaviors they observe while trying to get
corporations and other large institutions to take new ways of
doing things seriously:
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight
you. Then you win.
In hacker usage this quote has miscegenated with the U.S
military's DefCon terminology describing `defense conditions'
or degrees of war alert. At GhandiCon One, you're being
ignored. At GhandiCon Two, opponents are laughing at you and
dismissing the idea that you could ever be a threat. At
GhandiCon Three, they're fighting you on the merits and/or
attempting to discredit you. At GhandiCon Four, you're winning
and they are arguing to save face or stave off complete
collapse of their position.
gib : /jib/
1. vi. To destroy utterly. Like frag, but much more violent
and final. "There's no trace left. You definitely gibbed that
bug".
2. n. Remnants after total obliteration.
Originated first by id software in the game Quake. It's short
for giblets (thus pronounced "jib"), and referred to the
bloody remains of slain opponents. Eventually the word was
verbed, and leaked into general usage afterward.
GIFs at 11
[Fidonet] Fidonet alternative to film at 11, especially in
echoes (Fidonet topic areas) where uuencoded GIFs are
permitted. Other formats, especially JPEG and MPEG, may be
referenced instead.
gig : /jig/ , /gig/ , n.
[SI] See quantifiers.
giga- : /ji'ga/ , /gi'ga/ , pref.
[SI] See quantifiers.
GIGO : /gi:'goh/
1. `Garbage In, Garbage Out' -- usually said in response to
lusers who complain that a program didn't "do the right thing"
when given imperfect input or otherwise mistreated in some
way. Also commonly used to describe failures in human decision
making due to faulty, incomplete, or imprecise data.
2. Garbage In, Gospel Out: this more recent expansion is a
sardonic comment on the tendency human beings have to put
excessive trust in `computerized' data.
gilley : n.
[Usenet] The unit of analogical bogosity. According to its
originator, the standard for one gilley was "the act of
bogotoficiously comparing the shutting down of 1000 machines
for a day with the killing of one person". The milligilley has
been found to suffice for most normal conversational
exchanges.
gillion : /gil'y@n/ , /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'.
ginger : n.
See saga.
GIPS : /gips/ , /jips/ , n.
[analogy with MIPS] Giga-Instructions per Second (also
possibly `Gillions of Instructions per Second'; see gillion).
In 1991, this is used of only a handful of highly parallel
machines, but this is expected to change. Compare KIPS.
glark : /glark/ , vt.
To figure something out from context. "The System III manuals
are pretty poor, but you can generally glark the meaning from
context." Interestingly, the word was originally `glork'; the
context was "This gubblick contains many nonsklarkish English
flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp can be glorked [sic]
from context" (David Moser, quoted by Douglas Hofstadter in
his Metamagical Themas column in the January 1981 Scientific
American). It is conjectured that hacker usage mutated the
verb to `glark' because glork was already an established
jargon term (some hackers do report using the original term).
Compare grok, zen.
glass : n.
[IBM] Synonym for silicon.
glass tty : /glas T-T-Y/ , /glas ti'tee/ , n.
[obs.] A terminal that has a display screen but which, because
of hardware or software limitations, behaves like a teletype
or some other printing terminal, thereby combining the
disadvantages of both: like a printing terminal, it can't do
fancy display hacks, and like a display terminal, it doesn't
produce hard copy. An example is the early `dumb' version of
Lear-Siegler ADM 3 (without cursor control). See tube, tty;
compare dumb terminal. See TV Typewriters (Appendix A) for an
interesting true story about a glass tty.
glassfet : /glas'fet/ , n.
[by analogy with MOSFET, the acronym for
Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor] Syn.
firebottle, a humorous way to refer to a vacuum tube.
glitch : /glich/
[very common; from German `glitschig' slippery, via Yiddish
`glitshen', to slide or skid]
1. n. A sudden interruption in electric service, sanity,
continuity, or program function. Sometimes recoverable. An
interruption in electric service is specifically called a
power glitch (also power hit), of grave concern because it
usually crashes all the computers. In jargon, though, a hacker
who got to the middle of a sentence and then forgot how he or
she intended to complete it might say, "Sorry, I just
glitched".
2. vi. To commit a glitch. See gritch.
3. vt. [Stanford] To scroll a display screen, esp. several
lines at a time. WAITS terminals used to do this in order to
avoid continuous scrolling, which is distracting to the eye.
4. obs. Same as magic cookie, sense 2.
All these uses of glitch derive from the specific technical
meaning the term has in the electronic hardware world, where
it is now techspeak. A glitch can occur when the inputs of a
circuit change, and the outputs change to some random value
for some very brief time before they settle down to the
correct value. If another circuit inspects the output at just
the wrong time, reading the random value, the results can be
very wrong and very hard to debug (a glitch is one of many
causes of electronic heisenbugs).
[73-06-04.png]
Coping with a hydraulic glitch.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-07-24)
glob : /glob/ , not , /glohb/ , v.,n.
[Unix; common] To expand special characters in a wildcarded
name, or the act of so doing (the action is also called
globbing). The Unix conventions for filename wildcarding have
become sufficiently pervasive that many hackers use some of
them in written English, especially in email or news on
technical topics. Those commonly encountered include the
following:
* wildcard for any string (see also UN*X)
? wildcard for any single character (generally read this way only at
the beginning or in the middle of a word)
[] delimits a wildcard matching any of the enclosed characters
{} alternation of comma-separated alternatives; thus, `foo{baz,qux}'
would be read as `foobaz' or `fooqux'
Some examples: "He said his name was [KC]arl" (expresses
ambiguity). "I don't read talk.politics.*" (any of the
talk.politics subgroups on Usenet). Other examples are given
under the entry for X. Note that glob patterns are similar,
but not identical, to those used in regexps.
Historical note: The jargon usage derives from glob, the name
of a subprogram that expanded wildcards in archaic pre-Bourne
versions of the Unix shell.
glork : /glork/
1. interj. Term of mild surprise, usually tinged with outrage,
as when one attempts to save the results of two hours of
editing and finds that the system has just crashed.
2. Used as a name for just about anything. See foo.
3. vt. Similar to glitch, but usually used reflexively. "My
program just glorked itself."
4. Syn. for glark, which see.
glue : n.
Generic term for any interface logic or protocol that connects
two component blocks. For example, Blue Glue is IBM's SNA
protocol, and hardware designers call anything used to connect
large VLSI's or circuit blocks glue logic.
gnarly : /nar'lee/ , adj.
Both obscure and hairy (sense 1). "Yow! -- the tuned assembler
implementation of BitBlt is really gnarly!" From a similar but
less specific usage in surfer slang.
GNU : /gnoo/ , not , /noo/
1. [acronym: `GNU's Not Unix!', see recursive acronym] A
Unix-workalike development effort of the Free Software
Foundation headed by Richard Stallman @email{<rms@gnu.org>}.
GNU EMACS and the GNU C compiler, two tools designed for this
project, have become very popular in hackerdom and elsewhere.
The GNU project was designed partly to proselytize for RMS's
position that information is community property and all
software source should be shared. One of its slogans is "Help
stamp out software hoarding!" Though this remains
controversial (because it implicitly denies any right of
designers to own, assign, and sell the results of their
labors), many hackers who disagree with RMS have nevertheless
cooperated to produce large amounts of high-quality software
for free redistribution under the Free Software Foundation's
imprimatur. The GNU project has a web page at
http://www.gnu.org/. See EMACS, copyleft, General Public
Virus, Linux.
2. Noted Unix hacker John Gilmore @email{<gnu@toad.com>},
founder of Usenet's anarchic alt.* hierarchy.
gnubie : /noo'bee/ , n.
Written-only variant of newbie in common use on IRC channels,
which implies specifically someone who is new to the
Linux/open-source/free-software world.
GNUMACS : /gnoo'maks/ , n.
[contraction of `GNU EMACS'] Often-heard abbreviated name for
the GNU project's flagship tool, EMACS. StallMACS, referring
to Richard Stallman, is less common but also heard. Used esp.
in contrast with GOSMACS and X Emacs.
go flatline : v.
[from cyberpunk SF, refers to flattening of EEG traces upon
brain-death] (also adjectival flatlined).
1. To die, terminate, or fail, esp. irreversibly. In hacker
parlance, this is used of machines only, human death being
considered somewhat too serious a matter to employ
jargon-jokes about.
2. To go completely quiescent; said of machines undergoing
controlled shutdown. "You can suffer file damage if you shut
down Unix but power off before the system has gone flatline."
3. Of a video tube, to fail by losing vertical scan, so all
one sees is a bright horizontal line bisecting the screen.
go gold : v.
[common] See golden.
go root : vi.
[Unix; common] To temporarily enter root mode in order to
perform a privileged operation. This use is deprecated in
Australia, where v. `root' is a synonym for "fuck".
go-faster stripes : n.
[UK] Syn. chrome. Mainstream in some parts of UK.
GoAT : //
[Usenet] Abbreviation: "Go Away, Troll". See troll.
goat file
A sacrificial file used to test a computer virus, i.e. a dummy
executable that carries a sample of the virus, isolated so it
can be atudied. Not common among hackers, since the Unix
systems most use basically don't get viruses.
gobble : vt.
1. To consume, usu.: used with `up'. "The output spy gobbles
characters out of a tty output buffer."
2. To obtain, usu.: used with `down'. "I guess I'll gobble
down a copy of the documentation tomorrow." See also snarf.
Godwin's Law : prov.
[Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability
of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."
There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs,
that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has
automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's
Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper
bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also
a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering
of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects
will be unsuccessful. Godwin himself has discussed the
subject.
Godzillagram : /god-zil'@-gram/ , n.
[from Japan's national hero]
1. A network packet that in theory is a broadcast to every
machine in the universe. The typical case is an IP datagram
whose destination IP address is [255.255.255.255].
Fortunately, few gateways are foolish enough to attempt to
implement this case!
2. A network packet of maximum size. An IP Godzillagram has
65,535 octets. Compare super source quench, Christmas tree
packet, martian.
golden : adj.
[prob.: from folklore's `golden egg'] When used to describe a
magnetic medium (e.g., golden disk, golden tape), describes
one containing a tested, up-to-spec, ready-to-ship software
version. Compare platinum-iridium. One may also "go gold",
which is the act of releasing a golden version. The gold color
of many CDROMs is a coincidence; this term was well
established a decade before CDROM distribution become common
in the mid-1990s.
golf-ball printer : n. obs.
The IBM 2741, a slow but letter-quality printing device and
terminal based on the IBM Selectric typewriter. The golf ball
was a little spherical frob bearing reversed embossed images
of 88 different characters arranged on four parallels of
latitude; one could change the font by swapping in a different
golf ball. The print element spun and jerked alarmingly in
action and when in motion was sometimes described as an
infuriated golf ball. This was the technology that enabled APL
to use a non-EBCDIC, non-ASCII, and in fact completely
non-standard character set. This put it 10 years ahead of its
time -- where it stayed, firmly rooted, for the next 20, until
character displays gave way to programmable bit-mapped devices
with the flexibility to support other character sets.
gonk : /gonk/ , vi.,n.
1. [prob. back-formed from gonkulator.] To prevaricate or to
embellish the truth beyond any reasonable recognition. In
German the term is (mythically) gonken; in Spanish the verb
becomes gonkar. "You're gonking me. That story you just told
me is a bunch of gonk." In German, for example, "Du gonkst
mich" (You're pulling my leg). See also gonkulator.
2. [British] To grab some sleep at an odd time; compare gronk
out.
gonkulator : /gon'kyoo-lay-tr/ , n.
[common; from the 1960s Hogan's Heroes TV series] A
pretentious piece of equipment that actually serves no useful
purpose. Usually used to describe one's least favorite piece
of computer hardware. See gonk.
gonzo : /gon'zoh/ , adj.
[from Hunter S. Thompson]
1. With total commitment, total concentration, and a mad sort
of panache. (Thompson's original sense.)
2. More loosely: Overwhelming; outrageous; over the top; very
large, esp. used of collections of source code, source files,
or individual functions. Has some of the connotations of moby
and hairy, but without the implication of obscurity or
complexity.
Good Thing : n.,adj.
[very common; always pronounced as if capitalized. Orig. fr.
the 1930 Sellar & Yeatman parody of British history 1066 And
All That, but well-established among hackers in the U.S. as
well.]
1. Self-evidently wonderful to anyone in a position to notice:
"A language that manages dynamic memory automatically for you
is a Good Thing."
2. Something that can't possibly have any ill side-effects and
may save considerable grief later: "Removing the
self-modifying code from that shared library would be a Good
Thing."
3. When said of software tools or libraries, as in "YACC is a
Good Thing", specifically connotes that the thing has
drastically reduced a programmer's work load. Oppose Bad
Thing.
google : v.
[common] To search the Web using the Google search engine,
http://www.google.com. Google is highly esteemed among hackers
for its significance ranking system, which is so uncannily
effective that many hackers consider it to have rendered other
search engines effectively irrelevant. The name `google' has
additional flavor for hackers because most know that it was
copied from a mathematical term for ten to the 100th power,
famously first uttered as `googol' by a mathematician's
nine-year-old nephew.
google juice : n.
A hypothetical substance which attracts the index bots of
Google.com. In common usage, a web page or web site with high
placement in the results of a particular search on Google or
frequent placement in the results of a various searches is
said to have "a lot of google juice" or "good google juice".
Also used to compare web pages or web sites, for example
"CrackMonkey has more google juice than KPMG". See also juice,
kilogoogle.
gopher : n.
[obs.] A type of Internet service first floated around 1991
and obsolesced around 1995 by the World Wide Web. Gopher
presents a menuing interface to a tree or graph of links; the
links can be to documents, runnable programs, or other gopher
menus arbitrarily far across the net.
Some claim that the gopher software, which was originally
developed at the University of Minnesota, was named after the
Minnesota Gophers (a sports team). Others claim the word
derives from American slang gofer (from "go for", dialectal
"go fer"), one whose job is to run and fetch things. Finally,
observe that gophers dig long tunnels, and the idea of
tunneling through the net to find information was a defining
metaphor for the developers. Probably all three things were
true, but with the first two coming first and the
gopher-tunnel metaphor serendipitously adding flavor and
impetus to the project as it developed out of its concept
stage.
gopher hole : n.
1. Any access to a gopher.
2. [Amateur Packet Radio] The terrestrial analog of a wormhole
(sense 2), from which this term was coined. A gopher hole
links two amateur packet relays through some non-ham radio
medium.
gorets : /gor'ets/ , n.
The unknown ur-noun, fill in your own meaning. Found esp. on
the Usenet newsgroup alt.gorets, which seems to be a running
contest to redefine the word by implication in the funniest
and most peculiar way, with the understanding that no
definition is ever final. [A correspondent from the former
Soviet Union informs me that gorets is Russian for `mountain
dweller'. Another from France informs me that goret is archaic
French for a young pig --ESR] Compare frink.
gorilla arm : n.
The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream
input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s.
It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems
failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their
arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more
than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore,
cramped, and oversized -- the operator looks like a gorilla
while using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards.
This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to
human-factors designers; "Remember the gorilla arm!" is
shorthand for "How is this going to fly in real use?".
gorp : /gorp/ , n.
[CMU: perhaps from the canonical hiker's food, Good Old
Raisins and Peanuts] Another metasyntactic variable, like foo
and bar.
GOSMACS : /goz'maks/ , n.
[contraction of `Gosling EMACS'] The first EMACS-in-C
implementation, predating but now largely eclipsed by GNUMACS.
Originally freeware; a commercial version was modestly popular
as `UniPress EMACS' during the 1980s. The author, James
Gosling, went on to invent NeWS and the programming language
Java; the latter earned him demigod status.
gotcha : n.
A misfeature of a system, especially a programming language or
environment, that tends to breed bugs or mistakes because it
is both enticingly easy to invoke and completely unexpected
and/or unreasonable in its outcome. For example, a classic
gotcha in C is the fact that if (a=b) {code;} is syntactically
valid and sometimes even correct. It puts the value of b into
a and then executes code if a is non-zero. What the programmer
probably meant was if (a==b) {code;}, which executes code if a
and b are equal.
GPL : /G-P-L/ , n.
Abbreviation for `General Public License' in widespread use;
see copyleft, General Public Virus. Often mis-expanded as `GNU
Public License'.
GPV : /G-P-V/ , n.
Abbrev. for General Public Virus in widespread use.
gray goo : n.
A hypothetical substance composed of sagans of
sub-micron-sized self-replicating robots programmed to make
copies of themselves out of whatever is available. The image
that goes with the term is one of the entire biosphere of
Earth being eventually converted to robot goo. This is the
simplest of the nanotechnology disaster scenarios, easily
refuted by arguments from energy requirements and elemental
abundances. Compare blue goo.
gray hat
See black hat.
Great Internet Explosion
The mainstreaming of the Internet in 1993-1994. Used normally
in time comparatives; before the Great Internet Explosion and
after it were very different worlds from a hacker's point of
view. Before it, Internet access was expensive and available
only to an elite few through universities, research
laboratories, and well-heeled corporations; after it,
everybody's mother had access.
Great Renaming : n.
The flag day in 1987 on which all of the non-local groups on
the Usenet had their names changed from the net.- format to
the current multiple-hierarchies scheme. Used esp. in
discussing the history of newsgroup names. "The oldest sources
group is comp.sources.misc; before the Great Renaming, it was
net.sources." There is a Great Renaming FAQ on the Web.
Great Runes : n.
Uppercase-only text or display messages. Some archaic
operating systems still emit these. See also runes, smash
case, fold case.
There is a widespread legend (repeated by earlier versions of
this entry, though tagged as folklore) that the uppercase-only
support of various old character codes and I/O equipment was
chosen by a religious person in a position of power at the
Teletype Company because supporting both upper and lower cases
was too expensive and supporting lower case only would have
made it impossible to spell `God' correctly. Not true; the
upper-case interpretation of teleprinter codes was well
established by 1870, long before Teletype was even founded.
Great Worm : n.
The 1988 Internet worm perpetrated by RTM. This is a play on
Tolkien (compare elvish, elder days). In the fantasy history
of his Middle Earth books, there were dragons powerful enough
to lay waste to entire regions; two of these (Scatha and
Glaurung) were known as "the Great Worms". This usage
expresses the connotation that the RTM crack was a sort of
devastating watershed event in hacker history; certainly it
did more to make non-hackers nervous about the Internet than
anything before or since.
great-wall : vi.,n.
[from SF fandom] A mass expedition to an oriental restaurant,
esp. one where food is served family-style and shared. There
is a common heuristic about the amount of food to order,
expressed as "Get N - 1 entrees"; the value of N, which is the
number of people in the group, can be inferred from context
(see N). See oriental food, ravs, stir-fried random.
green bytes : n.
(also green words)
1. Meta-information embedded in a file, such as the length of
the file or its name; as opposed to keeping such information
in a separate description file or record. The term comes from
an IBM user's group meeting (ca. 1962) at which these two
approaches were being debated and the diagram of the file on
the blackboard had the green bytes drawn in green.
2. By extension, the non-data bits in any self-describing
format. "A GIF file contains, among other things, green bytes
describing the packing method for the image." Compare
out-of-band, zigamorph, fence (sense 1).
green card : n.
[after the IBM System/360 Reference Data card] A summary of an
assembly language, even if the color is not green and not a
card. Less frequently used now because of the decrease in the
use of assembly language. "I'll go get my green card so I can
check the addressing mode for that instruction."
The original green card became a yellow card when the
System/370 was introduced, and later a yellow booklet. An
anecdote from IBM refers to a scene that took place in a
programmers' terminal room at Yorktown in 1978. A luser
overheard one of the programmers ask another "Do you have a
green card?" The other grunted and passed the first a thick
yellow booklet. At this point the luser turned a delicate
shade of olive and rapidly left the room, never to return.
In fall 2000 it was reported from Electronic Data Systems that
the green card for 370 machines has been a blue-green booklet
since 1989.
green lightning : n.
[IBM]
1. Apparently random flashing streaks on the face of 3278-9
terminals while a new symbol set is being downloaded. This
hardware bug was left deliberately unfixed, as some genius
within IBM suggested it would let the user know that
`something is happening'. That, it certainly does. Later
microprocessor-driven IBM color graphics displays were
actually programmed to produce green lightning!
2. [proposed] Any bug perverted into an alleged feature by
adroit rationalization or marketing. "Motorola calls the CISC
cruft in the 88000 architecture `compatibility logic', but I
call it green lightning". See also feature (sense 6).
green machine : n.
A computer or peripheral device that has been designed and
built to military specifications for field equipment (that is,
to withstand mechanical shock, extremes of temperature and
humidity, and so forth). Comes from the olive-drab `uniform'
paint used for military equipment.
Green's Theorem : prov.
[TMRC] For any story, in any group of people there will be at
least one person who has not heard the story. A refinement of
the theorem states that there will be exactly one person (if
there were more than one, it wouldn't be as bad to re-tell the
story). [The name of this theorem is a play on a fundamental
theorem in calculus. --ESR]
greenbar : n.
A style of fanfolded continuous-feed paper with alternating
green and white bars on it, especially used in old-style line
printers. This slang almost certainly dates way back to
mainframe days.
grep : /grep/ , vi.
[from the qed/ed editor idiom g/re/p, where re stands for a
regular expression, to Globally search for the Regular
Expression and Print the lines containing matches to it, via
Unix 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.
[It has been alleged that the source is from the title of a
paper "A General Regular Expression Parser", but dmr confirms
the g/re/p etymology --ESR]
gribble : n.
Random binary data rendered as unreadable text. Noise
characters in a data stream are displayed as gribble Dumping a
binary file to the screen is an excellent source of gribble,
and (if the bell/speaker is active) headaches.
grilf : // , n.
Girlfriend. Like newsfroup and filk, a typo reincarnated as a
new word. Seems to have originated sometime in 1992 on Usenet.
[A friend tells me there was a Lloyd Biggle SF novel Watchers
Of The Dark, in which alien species after species goes insane
and begins to chant "Grilf! Grilf!". A human detective
eventually determines that the word means "Liar!" I hope this
has nothing to do with the popularity of the Usenet term.
--ESR]
grind : vt.
1. [MIT and Berkeley; now rare] To prettify hardcopy of code,
especially LISP code, by reindenting lines, printing keywords
and comments in distinct fonts (if available), etc. This usage
was associated with the MacLISP community and is now rare;
prettyprint was and is the generic term for such operations.
2. [Unix] To generate the formatted version of a document from
the troff, TeX, or Scribe source.
3. [common] To run seemingly interminably, esp. (but not
necessarily) if performing some tedious and inherently useless
task. Similar to crunch or grovel. Grinding has a connotation
of using a lot of CPU time, but it is possible to grind a
disk, network, etc. See also hog.
4. To make the whole system slow. "Troff really grinds a
PDP-11."
5. grind grind excl. Roughly, "Isn't the machine slow today!"
grind crank : n. , //
A mythical accessory to a terminal. A crank on the side of a
monitor, which when operated makes a zizzing noise and causes
the computer to run faster. Usually one does not refer to a
grind crank out loud, but merely makes the appropriate gesture
and noise. See grind.
Historical note: At least one real machine actually had a
grind crank -- the R1, a research machine built toward the end
of the days of the great vacuum tube computers, in 1959. R1
(also known as `The Rice Institute Computer' (TRIC) and later
as `The Rice University Computer' (TRUC)) had a
single-step/free-run switch for use when debugging programs.
Since single-stepping through a large program was rather
tedious, there was also a crank with a cam and gear
arrangement that repeatedly pushed the single-step button.
This allowed one to `crank' through a lot of code, then slow
down to single-step for a bit when you got near the code of
interest, poke at some registers using the console typewriter,
and then keep on cranking. See
http://www.cs.rice.edu/History/R1/.
gritch : /grich/
[MIT]
1. n. A complaint (often caused by a glitch).
2. vi. To complain. Often verb-doubled: "Gritch gritch".
3. A synonym for glitch (as verb or noun).
Interestingly, this word seems to have a separate history from
glitch, with which it is often confused. Back in the early
1960s, when `glitch' was strictly a hardware-tech's term of
art, the Burton House dorm at M.I.T. maintained a "Gritch
Book", a blank volume, into which the residents hand-wrote
complaints, suggestions, and witticisms. Previous years'
volumes of this tradition were maintained, dating back to
antiquity. The word "gritch" was described as a portmanteau of
"gripe" and "bitch". Thus, sense 3 above is at least
historically incorrect.
grok : /grok/ , /grohk/ , vt.
[common; from the novel Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert
A. Heinlein, where it is a Martian word meaning literally `to
drink' and metaphorically `to be one with'] The emphatic form
is grok in fullness.
1. To understand. Connotes intimate and exhaustive knowledge.
When you claim to `grok' some knowledge or technique, you are
asserting that you have not merely learned it in a detached
instrumental way but that it has become part of you, part of
your identity. For example, to say that you "know" LISP is
simply to assert that you can code in it if necessary -- but
to say you "grok" LISP is to claim that you have deeply
entered the world-view and spirit of the language, with the
implication that it has transformed your view of programming.
Contrast zen, which is similar supernal understanding
experienced as a single brief flash. See also glark.
2. Used of programs, may connote merely sufficient
understanding. "Almost all C compilers grok the void type
these days."
gronk : /gronk/ , vt.
[popularized by Johnny Hart's comic strip B.C.: but the word
apparently predates that]
1. To clear the state of a wedged device and restart it. More
severe than `to frob' (sense 2).
2. [TMRC] To cut, sever, smash, or similarly disable.
3. The sound made by many 3.5-inch diskette drives. In
particular, the microfloppies on a Commodore Amiga go "grink,
gronk".
gronk out : vi.
To cease functioning. Of people, to go home and go to sleep.
"I guess I'll gronk out now; see you all tomorrow."
gronked : adj.
1. Broken. "The teletype scanner was gronked, so we took the
system down."
2. Of people, the condition of feeling very tired or (less
commonly) sick. "I've been chasing that bug for 17 hours now
and I am thoroughly gronked!" Compare broken, which means
about the same as gronk used of hardware, but connotes
depression or mental/emotional problems in people.
grovel : vi.
1. To work interminably and without apparent progress. Often
used transitively with `over' or `through'. "The file
scavenger has been groveling through the /usr directories for
10 minutes now." Compare grind and crunch. Emphatic form:
grovel obscenely.
2. To examine minutely or in complete detail. "The compiler
grovels over the entire source program before beginning to
translate it." "I grovelled through all the documentation, but
I still couldn't find the command I wanted."
grue : n.
[from archaic English verb for shudder, as with fear] The grue
was originated in the game Zork (Dave Lebling took the name
from Jack Vance's Dying Earth fantasies) and used in several
other Infocom games as a hint that you should perhaps look for
a lamp, torch or some type of light source. Wandering into a
dark area would cause the game to prompt you, "It is very
dark. If you continue you are likely to be eaten by a grue."
If you failed to locate a light source within the next couple
of moves this would indeed be the case.
The grue, according to scholars of the Great Underground
Empire, is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of
the earth. Its favorite diet is either adventurers or
enchanters, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its
extreme fear of light. No grues have ever been seen by the
light of day, and only a few have been observed in their
underground lairs. Of those who have seen grues, few have
survived their fearsome jaws to tell the tale. Grues have
sickly glowing fur, fish-mouthed faces, sharp claws and fangs,
and an uncontrollable tendency to slaver and gurgle. They are
certainly the most evil-tempered of all creatures; to say they
are touchy is a dangerous understatement. "Sour as a grue" is
a common expression, even among grues themselves.
All this folklore is widely known among hackers.
grunge : /gruhnj/ , n.
1. That which is grungy, or that which makes it so.
2. [Cambridge] Code which is inaccessible due to changes in
other parts of the program. The preferred term in North
America is dead code.
gubbish : /guhb'@sh/ , n.
[a portmanteau of `garbage' and `rubbish'; may have originated
with SF author Philip K. Dick] Garbage; crap; nonsense. "What
is all this gubbish?" The opposite portmanteau `rubbage' is
also reported; in fact, it was British slang during the 19th
century and appears in Dickens.
Guido : /gwee'do/ , /khwee'do/
Without qualification, Guido van Rossum (author of Python).
Note that Guido answers to English /gwee'do/ but in Dutch it's
/khwee'do/. Mythically, Guido's most important attribute
besides Python itself is Guido's time machine, a device he is
reputed to possess because of the unnerving frequency with
which user requests for new features have been met with the
response "I just implemented that last night...". See BDFL.
guiltware : /gilt'weir/ , n.
1. A piece of freeware decorated with a message telling one
how long and hard the author worked on it and intimating that
one is a no-good freeloader if one does not immediately send
the poor suffering martyr gobs of money.
2. A piece of shareware that works.
gumby : /guhm'bee/ , n.
[from a class of Monty Python characters, poss. with some
influence from the 1960s claymation character]
1. An act of minor but conspicuous stupidity, often in gumby
maneuver or pull a gumby.
2. [NRL] n. A bureaucrat, or other technical incompetent who
impedes the progress of real work.
3. adj. Relating to things typically associated with people in
sense 2. (e.g. "Ran would be writing code, but Richard gave
him gumby work that's due on Friday", or, "Dammit! Travel
screwed up my plane tickets. I have to go out on gumby
patrol.")
gunch : /guhnch/ , vt.
[TMRC] To push, prod, or poke at a device that has almost (but
not quite) produced the desired result. Implies a threat to
mung.
gunpowder chicken : n.
Same as laser chicken.
guru : n.
[Unix] An expert. Implies not only wizard skill but also a
history of being a knowledge resource for others. Less often,
used (with a qualifier) for other experts on other systems, as
in VMS guru. See source of all good bits.
guru meditation : n.
Amiga equivalent of panic in Unix (sometimes just called a
guru or guru event). When the system crashes, a cryptic
message of the form "GURU MEDITATION #XXXXXXXX.YYYYYYYY" may
appear, indicating what the problem was. An Amiga guru can
figure things out from the numbers. Sometimes a guru event
must be followed by a Vulcan nerve pinch.
This term is (no surprise) an in-joke from the earliest days
of the Amiga. An earlier product of the Amiga corporation was
a device called a `Joyboard' which was basically a plastic
board built onto a joystick-like device; it was sold with a
skiing game cartridge for the Atari game machine. It is said
that whenever the prototype OS crashed, the system programmer
responsible would calm down by concentrating on a solution
while sitting cross-legged on a Joyboard trying to keep the
board in balance. This position resembled that of a meditating
guru. Sadly, the joke was removed fairly early on (but there's
a well-known patch to restore it in more recent versions).
gweep : /gweep/
[WPI]
1. v. To hack, usually at night. At WPI, from 1975 onwards,
one who gweeped could often be found at the College Computing
Center punching cards or crashing the PDP-10 or, later, the
DEC-20. A correspondent who was there at the time opines that
the term was originally onomatopoetic, describing the keyclick
sound of the Datapoint terminals long connected to the PDP-10;
others allege that `gweep' was the sound of the Datapoint's
bell (compare feep). The term has survived the demise of those
technologies, however, and was still alive in early 1999. "I'm
going to go gweep for a while. See you in the morning." "I
gweep from 8 PM till 3 AM during the week."
2. n. One who habitually gweeps in sense 1; a hacker. "He's a
hard-core gweep, mumbles code in his sleep." Around 1979 this
was considered derogatory and not used in self-reference; it
has since been proudly claimed in much the same way as geek.
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 koan.
hack
[very common]
1. n. Originally, a quick job that produces what is needed,
but not well.
2. n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming,
piece of work that produces exactly what is needed.
3. vt. To bear emotionally or physically. "I can't hack this
heat!"
4. vt. To work on something (typically a program). In an
immediate sense: "What are you doing?" "I'm hacking TECO." In
a general (time-extended) sense: "What do you do around here?"
"I hack TECO." More generally, "I hack foo" is roughly
equivalent to "foo is my major interest (or project)". "I hack
solid-state physics." See Hacking X for Y.
5. vt. To pull a prank on. See sense 2 and hacker (sense 5).
6. vi. To interact with a computer in a playful and
exploratory rather than goal-directed way. "Whatcha up to?"
"Oh, just hacking."
7. n. Short for hacker.
8. See nethack. 9. [MIT] v. To explore the basements, roof
ledges, and steam tunnels of a large, institutional building,
to the dismay of Physical Plant workers and (since this is
usually performed at educational institutions) the Campus
Police. This activity has been found to be eerily similar to
playing adventure games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Zork.
See also vadding.
Constructions on this term abound. They include happy hacking
(a farewell), how's hacking? (a friendly greeting among
hackers) and hack, hack (a fairly content-free but friendly
comment, often used as a temporary farewell). For more on this
totipotent term see The Meaning of Hack. See also neat hack,
real hack.
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 3).
Some aspects of hacker etiquette will appear quite odd to an
observer unaware of the high value placed on hack mode. For
example, if someone appears at your door, it is perfectly okay
to hold up a hand (without turning one's eyes away from the
screen) to avoid being interrupted. One may read, type, and
interact with the computer for quite some time before further
acknowledging the other's presence (of course, he or she is
reciprocally free to leave without a word). The understanding
is that you might be in hack mode with a lot of delicate state
(sense 2) in your head, and you dare not swap that context out
until you have reached a good point to pause. See also
juggling eggs.
hack on : vt.
[very common] To hack; implies that the subject is some
pre-existing hunk of code that one is evolving, as opposed to
something one might hack up.
hack together : vt.
[common] 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 the network. For
discussion of some of the basics of this culture, see the How
To Become A Hacker FAQ. It also implies that the person
described is seen to subscribe to some version of the hacker
ethic (see hacker ethic).
It is better to be described as a hacker by others than to
describe oneself that way. Hackers consider themselves
something of an elite (a meritocracy based on ability), though
one to which new members are gladly welcome. There is thus a
certain ego satisfaction to be had in identifying yourself as
a hacker (but if you claim to be one and are not, you'll
quickly be labeled bogus). See also geek, wannabee.
This term seems to have been first adopted as a badge in the
1960s by the hacker culture surrounding TMRC and the MIT AI
Lab. We have a report that it was used in a sense close to
this entry's by teenage radio hams and electronics tinkerers
in the mid-1950s.
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 open-source code and facilitating access
to information and to computing resources wherever possible.
2. The belief that system-cracking for fun and exploration is
ethically OK as long as the cracker commits no theft,
vandalism, or breach of confidentiality.
Both of these normative ethical principles are widely, but by
no means universally, accepted among hackers. Most hackers
subscribe to the hacker ethic in sense 1, and many act on it
by writing and giving away open-source software. A few go
further and assert that all information should be free and any
proprietary control of it is bad; this is the philosophy
behind the GNU project.
Sense 2 is more controversial: some people consider the act of
cracking itself to be unethical, like breaking and entering.
But the belief that `ethical' cracking excludes destruction at
least moderates the behavior of people who see themselves as
`benign' crackers (see also samurai, gray hat). On this view,
it may be one of the highest forms of hackerly courtesy to (a)
break into a system, and then (b) explain to the sysop,
preferably by email from a superuser account, exactly how it
was done and how the hole can be plugged -- acting as an
unpaid (and unsolicited) tiger team.
The most reliable manifestation of either version of the
hacker ethic is that almost all hackers are actively willing
to share technical tricks, software, and (where possible)
computing resources with other hackers. Huge cooperative
networks such as Usenet, FidoNet and the Internet itself can
function without central control because of this trait; they
both rely on and reinforce a sense of community that may be
hackerdom's most valuable intangible asset.
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, koan.
See also filk, retrocomputing, and the Portrait of J. Random
Hacker in Appendix B. If you have an itchy feeling that all
six of these traits are really aspects of one thing that is
incredibly difficult to talk about exactly, you are (a)
correct and (b) responding like a hacker. These traits are
also recognizable (though in a less marked form) throughout
science-fiction fandom.
Hackers (the movie) : n.
A notable bomb from 1995. Should have been titled Crackers,
because cracking is what the movie was about. It's
understandable that they didn't however; titles redolent of
snack food are probably a tough sell in Hollywood.
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 files).
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.
1. [Fidonet] A large batch of messages that a
store-and-forward network is failing to forward when it
should. Often used in the phrase "Fido coughed up a hairball
today", meaning that the stuck messages have just come
unstuck, producing a flood of mail where there had previously
been drought.
2. An unmanageably huge mass of source code. "JWZ thought the
Mozilla effort bogged down because the code was a huge
hairball."
3. Any large amount of garbage coming out suddenly. "Sendmail
is coughing up a hairball, so expect some slowness accessing
the Internet."
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.
There is a theorem in simplicial homology theory which states
that any continuous tangent field on a 2-sphere is null at
least in a point. Mathematically literate hackers tend to
associate the term `hairy' with the informal version of this
theorem; "You can't comb a hairy ball smooth." (Previous
versions of this entry associating the above informal
statement with the Brouwer fixed-point theorem were
incorrect.)
The adjective `long-haired' is well-attested to have been in
slang use among scientists and engineers during the early
1950s; it was equivalent to modern hairy senses 1 and 2, and
was very likely ancestral to the hackish use. In fact the noun
`long-hair' was at the time used to describe a person
satisfying sense 3. Both senses probably passed out of use
when long hair was adopted as a signature trait by the 1960s
counterculture, leaving hackish hairy as a sort of stunted
mutant relic.
In British mainstream use, "hairy" means "dangerous", and
consequently, in British programming terms, "hairy" may be
used to denote complicated and/or incomprehensible code, but
only if that complexity or incomprehesiveness is also
considered dangerous.
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 entire document is available at
http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/hakmem.html.
hakspek : /hak'speek/ , n.
A shorthand method of spelling found on many British academic
bulletin boards and talker systems. Syllables and whole words
in a sentence are replaced by single ASCII characters the
names of which are phonetically similar or equivalent, while
multiple letters are usually dropped. Hence, `for' becomes
`4'; `two', `too', and `to' become `2'; `ck' becomes `k'.
"Before I see you tomorrow" becomes "b4 i c u 2moro". First
appeared in London about 1986, and was probably caused by the
slowness of available talker systems, which operated on
archaic machines with outdated operating systems and no
standard methods of communication.
Hakspek almost disappeared after the great bandwidth explosion
of the early 1990s, as fast Internet links wiped out the
old-style talker systems. However, it has enjoyed a revival in
another medium -- the Short Message Service (SMS) associated
with GSM cellphones. SMS sends are limited to a maximum of 160
characters, and typing on a cellphone keypad is difficult and
slow anyway. There are now even published paper dictionaries
for SMS users to help them do hakspek-to-English and
vice-versa.
See also talk mode.
Halloween Documents : n.
A pair of Microsoft internal strategy memoranda leaked to ESR
in late 1998 that confirmed everybody's paranoia about the
current Evil Empire. These documents praised the technical
excellence of Linux and outlined a counterstrategy of
attempting to lock in customers by "de-commoditizing" Internet
protocols and services. They were extensively cited on the
Internet and in the press and proved so embarrassing that
Microsoft PR barely said a word in public for six months
afterwards.
ham
The opposite of spam, sense 3; that is, incoming mail that the
user actually wants to see.
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 : //
[Usenet: very common] Abbreviation: Have A Nice Day. Typically
used to close a Usenet posting, but also used to informally
close emails; often preceded by HTH.
hand cruft : vt.
[pun on `hand craft'] See cruft, sense 3.
hand-hacking : n.
1. [rare] The practice of translating hot spots from an HLL
into hand-tuned assembler, as opposed to trying to coerce the
compiler into generating better code. Both the term and the
practice are becoming uncommon. See tune, by hand; syn. with
v. cruft.
2. [common] More generally, manual construction or patching of
data sets that would normally be generated by a translation
utility and interpreted by another program, and aren't really
designed to be read or modified by humans.
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, crackers, weenies, spods, and other lower
forms of network life; true hackers travel on their own
reputations rather than invented legendry. Compare nick,
screen name.
2. A magic cookie, often in the form of a numeric index into
some array somewhere, through which you can manipulate an
object like a file or window. The form file handle is
especially common.
3. [Mac] A pointer to a pointer to dynamically-allocated
memory; the extra level of indirection allows on-the-fly
memory compaction (to cut down on fragmentation) or aging out
of unused resources, with minimal impact on the (possibly
multiple) parts of the larger program containing references to
the allocated memory. Compare snap (to snap a handle would
defeat its purpose); see also aliasing bug, dangling pointer.
handshaking : n.
[very common] Hardware or software activity designed to start
or keep two machines or programs in synchronization as they do
protocol. Often applied to human activity; thus, a hacker
might watch two people in conversation nodding their heads to
indicate that they have heard each others' points and say "Oh,
they're handshaking!". See also protocol.
handwave : /hand'wayv/
[poss. from gestures characteristic of stage magicians]
1. v. To gloss over a complex point; to distract a listener;
to support a (possibly actually valid) point with blatantly
faulty logic.
2. n. The act of handwaving. "Boy, what a handwave!"
If someone starts a sentence with "Clearly..." or
"Obviously..." or "It is self-evident that...", it is a good
bet he is about to handwave (alternatively, use of these
constructions in a sarcastic tone before a paraphrase of
someone else's argument suggests that it is a handwave). The
theory behind this term is that if you wave your hands at the
right moment, the listener may be sufficiently distracted to
not notice that what you have said is bogus. Failing that, if
a listener does object, you might try to dismiss the objection
with a wave of your hand.
The use of this word is often accompanied by gestures: both
hands up, palms forward, swinging the hands in a vertical
plane pivoting at the elbows and/or shoulders (depending on
the magnitude of the handwave); alternatively, holding the
forearms in one position while rotating the hands at the wrist
to make them flutter. In context, the gestures alone can
suffice as a remark; if a speaker makes an outrageously
unsupported assumption, you might simply wave your hands in
this way, as an accusation, far more eloquent than words could
express, that his logic is faulty.
hang : v.
1. [very common] To wait for an event that will never occur.
"The system is hanging because it can't read from the crashed
drive". See wedged, hung.
2. To wait for some event to occur; to hang around until
something happens. "The program displays a menu and then hangs
until you type a character." Compare block.
3. To attach a peripheral device, esp. in the construction
`hang off': "We're going to hang another tape drive off the
file server." Implies a device attached with cables, rather
than something that is strictly inside the machine's chassis.
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." Quoted here because it seems to be a
particular favorite of hackers, often showing up in sig
blocks, fortune cookie files and the login banners of BBS
systems and commercial networks. This probably reflects the
hacker's daily experience of environments created by
well-intentioned but short-sighted people. Compare Sturgeon's
Law, Ninety-Ninety Rule.
At http://www.statusq.org/2001/11/26.html it is claimed that
Hanlon's Razor was coined by one Robert J. Hanlon of Scranton,
PA. However, a curiously similar remark ("You have attributed
conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.")
appears in Logic of Empire, a classic 1941 SF story by Robert
A. Heinlein, who calls the error it indicates the `devil
theory' of sociology. Similar epigrams have been attributed to
William James and (on dubious evidence) Napoleon Bonaparte.
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."
Nevertheless, use of this term implies a basically benign
attitude towards the program: It didn't mean any harm, it was
just eager to do its job. We'd like to be angry at it but we
shouldn't, we should try to understand it instead. The
adjective "cheerfully" is often used in exactly the same way.
hard boot : n.
See boot.
hardcoded : adj.
1. [common] Said of data inserted directly into a program,
where it cannot be easily modified, as opposed to data in some
profile, resource (see de-rezz sense 2), or environment
variable that a user or hacker can easily modify.
2. In C, this is esp. applied to use of a literal instead of a
#define macro (see magic number).
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. See also mu.
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. Compare killer poke.
heads down : 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 was someone who, owning a 286 PC and Windows 3.0,
went out and bought Windows 3.1 (which offers no worthwhile
benefits unless you have a 386). If all customers were
heatseekers, vast amounts of money could be made by just
fixing some of the bugs in each release (n) and selling it to
them as release (n+1). Microsoft in fact seems to have
mastered this technique.
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.
[common] High-overhead; baroque; code-intensive; featureful,
but costly. Esp. used of communication protocols, language
designs, and any sort of implementation in which maximum
generality and/or ease of implementation has been pushed at
the expense of mundane considerations such as speed, memory
utilization, and startup time. EMACS is a heavyweight editor;
X is an extremely heavyweight window system. This term isn't
pejorative, but one hacker's heavyweight is another's
elephantine and a third's monstrosity. Oppose lightweight.
Usage: now borders on techspeak, especially in the compound
heavyweight process.
Hed Rat
Unflattering spoonerism of Red Hat, a popular Linux
distribution. Compare Macintrash. sun-stools, HP-SUX,
Slowlaris.
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.
hell desk
Common mispronunciation of `help desk', especially among
people who have to answer phones at one.
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. The standard response is
"Nothing happens here."; of all the Zork/Dungeon games, only
in Infocom's Zork 3 is "Hello, Sailor" actually useful
(excluding the unique situation where _knowing_ this fact is
important in Dungeon...).
hello world : interj.
1. The canonical minimal test message in the C/Unix universe.
2. Any of the minimal programs that emit this message (a
representative sample in various languages can be found at
http://www.latech.edu/~acm/helloworld/). Traditionally, the
first program a C coder is supposed to write in a new
environment is one that just prints "hello, world" to standard
output (and indeed it is the first example program in K&R).
Environments that generate an unreasonably large executable
for this trivial test or which require a hairy compiler-linker
invocation to generate it are considered to lose (see X).
3. Greeting uttered by a hacker making an entrance or
requesting information from anyone present. "Hello, world! Is
the LAN back up yet?"
hello, wall! : excl.
See wall.
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 1950s to replace earlier
sexadecimal, which was too racy and amusing for stuffy IBM,
and later adopted by the rest of the industry.
Actually, neither term is etymologically pure. If we take
binary to be paradigmatic, the most etymologically correct
term for base 10, for example, is `denary', which comes from
`deni' (ten at a time, ten each), a Latin distributive number;
the corresponding term for base-16 would be something like
`sendenary'. "Decimal" comes from the combining root of decem,
Latin for 10. If wish to create a truly analogous word for
base 16, we should start with sedecim, Latin for 16. Ergo,
sedecimal is the word that would have been created by a Latin
scholar. The `sexa-' prefix is Latin but incorrect in this
context, and `hexa-' is Greek. The word octal is similarly
incorrect; a correct form would be `octaval' (to go with
decimal), or `octonary' (to go with binary). If anyone ever
implements a base-3 computer, computer scientists will be
faced with the unprecedented dilemma of a choice between two
correct forms; both ternary and trinary have a claim to this
throne.
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. [common] By extension, the most significant part of
something other than a data byte: "Spare me the whole saga,
just give me the high bit." See also meta bit, dread high-bit
disease, and compare the mainstream slang bottom line.
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 grokked 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 lusers, oversimplified to the
point of being misleading or incorrect (compare drool-proof
paper). In other computing cultures, postfixing of in the
extreme might be preferred.
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.
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. 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 penguin pee : n.
[Linux] Notional substance said to be sprinkled by Linus onto
other people's contributions. With this ritual, he blesses
them, officially making them part of the kernel. First used in
November 1998 just after Linus had handed the maintenance of
the stable kernel over to Alan Cox.
holy wars : n.
[from Usenet, but may predate it; common] n. flame wars over
religious issues. The paper by Danny Cohen that popularized
the terms big-endian and little-endian in connection with the
LSB-first/MSB-first controversy was entitled On Holy Wars and
a Plea for Peace.
Great holy wars of the past have included ITS vs.: Unix, Unix
vs.: VMS, BSD Unix vs.: System V, C vs.: Pascal, C vs.:
FORTRAN, etc. In the year 2000, popular favorites of the day
are KDE vs, GNOME, vim vs. elvis, Linux vs.
[Free|Net|Open]BSD. Hardy perennials include EMACS vs.: vi, my
personal computer vs.: everyone else's personal computer, ad
nauseam. The characteristic that distinguishes holy wars from
normal technical disputes is that in a holy war most of the
participants spend their time trying to pass off personal
value choices and cultural attachments as objective technical
evaluations. This happens precisely because in a true holy
war, the actual substantive differences between the sides are
relatively minor. See also theology.
home box : n.
A hacker's personal machine, especially one he or she owns.
"Yeah? Well, my home box runs a full 4.4 BSD, so there!"
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.
honey pot : n.
1. A box designed to attract crackers so that they can be
observed in action. It is usually well isolated from the rest
of the network, but has extensive logging (usually network
layer, on a different machine). Different from an iron box in
that its purpose is to attract, not merely observe. Sometimes,
it is also a defensive network security tactic -- you set up
an easy-to-crack box so that your real servers don't get
messed with. The concept was presented in Cheswick &
Bellovin's book Firewalls and Internet Security.
2. A mail server that acts as an open relay when a single
message is attempted to send through it, but discards or
diverts for examination messages that are detected to be part
of a spam run.
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. [common] One file transmission in a series required to
get a file from point A to point B on a store-and-forward
network. On such networks (including the old UUCP network and
and FidoNet), an important inter-machine metric is the number
of hops in the shortest path between them, which can be more
significant than their geographical separation. See bang path.
2. v. [rare] To log in to a remote machine, esp. via rlogin or
telnet. "I'll hop over to foovax to FTP that."
horked : adj.
Broken. Confused. Trashed. Now common; seems to be post-1995.
There is an entertaining web page of related definitions, few
of which seem to be in live use but many of which would be in
the recognition vocabulary of anyone familiar with the
adjective.
hose
1. vt. [common] To make non-functional or greatly degraded in
performance. "That big ray-tracing program really hoses the
system." See hosed.
2. n. A narrow channel through which data flows under
pressure. Generally denotes data paths that represent
performance bottlenecks.
3. n. Cabling, especially thick Ethernet cable. This is
sometimes called bit hose or hosery (play on `hosiery') or
`etherhose'. See also washing machine.
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, hand-hacking.
2. The active location of a cursor on a bit-map display. "Put
the mouse's hot spot on the `ON' widget and click the left
button."
3. A screen region that is sensitive to mouse gestures, which
trigger some action. World Wide Web pages now provide the
canonical examples; WWW browsers present hypertext links as
hot spots which, when clicked on, point the browser at another
document (these are specifically called hotlinks).
4. In a massively parallel computer with shared memory, the
one location that all 10,000 processors are trying to read or
write at once (perhaps because they are all doing a busy-wait
on the same lock).
5. More generally, any place in a hardware design that turns
into a performance bottleneck due to resource contention.
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. See sun-stools, Slowlaris.
HTH : //
[Usenet: very common] Abbreviation: Hope This Helps (e.g.
following a response to a technical question). Often used just
before HAND. See also YHBT.
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.
hung : adj.
[from `hung up'; common] Equivalent to wedged, but more common
at Unix/C sites. Not generally used of people. Syn. with
locked up, wedged; compare hosed. See also hang. A hung state
is distinguished from crashed or down, where the program or
system is also unusable but because it is not running rather
than because it is waiting for something. However, the
recovery from both situations is often the same. It is also
distinguished from the similar but more drastic state wedged
-- hung software can be woken up with easy things like
interrupt keys, but wedged will need a kill -9 or even reboot.
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." The Infocom text adventure
game Beyond Zork included two monsters called hunguses.
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.
IANAL : //
[Usenet] Abbreviation, "I Am Not A Lawyer". Usually precedes
legal advice.
IBM : /I-B-M/
Once upon a time, the computer company most hackers loved to
hate; today, the one they are most puzzled to find themselves
liking.
From hackerdom's beginnings in the mid-1960s to the early
1990s, IBM was regarded with active loathing. Common
expansions of the corporate name included: Inferior But
Marketable; It's Better Manually; Insidious Black Magic; It's
Been Malfunctioning; Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a
near-infinite number of even less complimentary expansions
(see also fear and loathing). What galled hackers about most
IBM machines above the PC level wasn't so much that they were
underpowered and overpriced (though that counted against
them), but that the designs were incredibly archaic, crufty,
and elephantine ... and you couldn't fix them -- source code
was locked up tight, and programming tools were expensive,
hard to find, and bletcherous to use once you had found them.
We didn't know how good we had it back then. In the 1980s IBM
had its own troubles with Microsoft and lost its strategic
way, receding from the hacker community's view. Then, in the
1990s, Microsoft became more noxious and omnipresent than IBM
had ever been.
In the late 1990s IBM re-invented itself as a services
company, began to release open-source software through its
AlphaWorks group, and began shipping Linux systems and
building ties to the Linux community. To the astonishment of
all parties, IBM emerged as a staunch friend of the hacker
community and open source development.
This lexicon includes a number of entries attributed to `IBM';
these derive from some rampantly unofficial jargon lists
circulated within IBM's formerly beleaguered hacker
underground.
ICBM address : n.
(Also missile address) The form used to register a site with
the Usenet mapping project, back before the day of pervasive
Internet, included a blank for longitude and latitude,
preferably to seconds-of-arc accuracy. This was actually used
for generating geographically-correct maps of Usenet links on
a plotter; however, it became traditional to refer to this as
one's ICBM address or missile address, and some people include
it in their sig block with that name. (A real missile address
would include target elevation.)
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 late 2002, but many
hackers find the metaphor attractive, and each may develop a
denotation in the future. In the meantime, the speculative
usage could be confused with `ICE', an acronym for "in-circuit
emulator".
In ironic reference to the speculative usage, however, some
hackers and computer scientists formed ICE (International
Cryptographic Experiment) in 1994. ICE is a consortium to
promote uniform international access to strong cryptography.
ID10T error : /I-D-ten-T er'@r/
Synonym for PEBKAC, e.g. "The user is being an idiot".
Tech-support people passing a problem report to someone higher
up the food chain (and presumably better equipped to deal with
idiots) may ask the user to convey that there seems to be an
I-D-ten-T error. Users never twig.
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.
IDP : /I-D-P/ , v.,n.
[Usenet] Abbreviation for Internet Death Penalty. Common
(probably now more so than the full form), and frequently
verbed. Compare UDP.
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.
IIRC : //
Common abbreviation for "If I Recall Correctly".
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. [obs.] Software that bypasses the defined OS interfaces to
do things (like screen, keyboard, and disk I/O) itself, often
in a way that depends on the hardware of the machine it is
running on or which is nonportable or incompatible with other
pieces of software. In the MS-DOS world, there was a folk
theorem (nearly true) to the effect that (owing to gross
inadequacies and performance penalties in the OS interface)
all interesting applications were ill-behaved. See also bare
metal. Oppose well-behaved. See also mess-dos.
3. In modern usage, a program is called ill-behaved if it uses
interfaces to the OS or other programs that are private,
undocumented, or grossly non-portable. Another way to be
ill-behaved is to use headers or files that are theoretically
private to another application.
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.
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 blocks
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
flames and the urge to start a kill file.
indent style : n.
[C, C++, and Java programmers] The rules one uses to indent
code in a readable fashion. There are four major C indent
styles, described below; all have the aim of making it easier
for the reader to visually track the scope of control
constructs. They have been inherited by C++ and Java, which
have C-like syntaxes. The significant variable is the
placement of { and } with respect to the statement(s) they
enclose and to the guard or controlling statement (if, else,
for, while, or do) on the block, if any.
K&R style -- Named after Kernighan & Ritchie, because the
examples in K&R are formatted this way. Also called kernel
style because the Unix kernel is written in it, and the `One
True Brace Style' (abbrev. 1TBS) by its partisans. In C code,
the body is typically indented by eight spaces (or one tab)
per level, as shown here. Four spaces are occasionally seen in
C, but in C++ and Java four tends to be the rule rather than
the exception.
if (<cond>) {
<body>
}
Allman style -- Named for Eric Allman, a Berkeley hacker who
wrote a lot of the BSD utilities in it (it is sometimes called
BSD style). Resembles normal indent style in Pascal and Algol.
It is the only style other than K&R in widespread use among
Java programmers. Basic indent per level shown here is eight
spaces, but four (or sometimes three) spaces are generally
preferred by C++ and Java programmers.
if (<cond>)
{
<body>
}
Whitesmiths style -- popularized by the examples that came
with Whitesmiths C, an early commercial C compiler. Basic
indent per level shown here is eight spaces, but four spaces
are occasionally seen.
if (<cond>)
{
<body>
}
GNU style -- Used throughout GNU EMACS and the Free Software
Foundation code, and just about nowhere else. Indents are
always four spaces per level, with { and } halfway between the
outer and inner indent levels.
if (<cond>)
{
<body>
}
Surveys have shown the Allman and Whitesmiths styles to be the
most common, with about equal mind shares. K&R/1TBS used to be
nearly universal, but is now much less common in C (the
opening brace tends to get lost against the right paren of the
guard part in an if or while, which is a Bad Thing). Defenders
of 1TBS argue that any putative gain in readability is less
important than their style's relative economy with vertical
space, which enables one to see more code on one's screen at
once. The Java Language Specification legislates not only the
capitalization of identifiers, but where nouns, adjectives,
and verbs should be in method, class, interface, and variable
names (section 6.8). While the specification stops short of
also standardizing on a bracing style, all source code
originating from Sun Laboratories uses the K&R style. This has
set a precedent for Java programmers, which most follow.
Doubtless these issues will continue to be the subject of holy
wars.
Indent-o-Meter
[] A fiendishly clever ASCII display hack that became a brief
fad in 1993-1994; it used combinations of tabs and spaces to
produce an analog indicator of the amount of indentation an
included portion of a reply had undergone. The full story is
at http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/indent.html.
index of X : 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.
[common] Consisting of a large number of objects; extreme.
Used very loosely as in: "This program produces infinite
garbage." "He is an infinite loser." The word most likely to
follow infinite, though, is hair. (It has been pointed out
that fractals are an excellent example of infinite hair.)
These uses are abuses of the word's mathematical meaning. The
term semi-infinite, denoting an immoderately large amount of
some resource, is also heard. "This compiler is taking a
semi-infinite amount of time to optimize my program." See also
semi.
infinite loop : n.
One that never terminates (that is, the machine spins or
buzzes forever and goes catatonic). There is a standard joke
that has been made about each generation's exemplar of the
ultra-fast machine: "The Cray-3 is so fast it can execute an
infinite loop in under 2 seconds!"
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
argument gets more respect since Linux justified the bazaar
mode of development.
Other hackers maintain that the Infinite-Monkey Theorem cannot
be true -- otherwise the exponential expansion of AOL would
have reproduced the entire canon of great literature by now.
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. On 1
April 2000 the usage acquired its own Internet standard,
RFC2795 (Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite).
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. After being acquired
by Activision in 1989 they did a few more "modern" (e.g.
graphics-intensive) games which were less successful than
reissues of their classics.
The software, thankfully, is still extant; Infocom games were
written in a kind of P-code (called, actually, z-code) and
distributed with a P-code interpreter core, and not only
open-source emulators for that interpreter but an actual
compiler as well have been written to permit the P-code to be
run on platforms the games never originally graced. In fact,
new games written in this P-code are still being written.
There is a home page at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/, and it
is even possible to play these games in your browser if it is
Java-capable.
initgame : /in-it'gaym/ , n.
[IRC] An IRC version of the trivia game "Botticelli", in which
one user changes his nick to the initials of a famous person
or other named entity, and the others on the channel ask yes
or no questions, with the one to guess the person getting to
be "it" next. As a courtesy, the one picking the initials
starts by providing a 4-letter hint of the form sex,
nationality, life-status, reality-status. For example, MAAR
means "Male, American, Alive, Real" (as opposed to
"fictional"). Initgame can be surprisingly addictive. See also
hing.
[1996 update: a recognizable version of the initgame has
become a staple of some radio talk shows in the U.S. We had it
first! -- ESR]
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.
installfest
[Linux community since c.1998] Common portmanteau word for
"installation festival"; Linux user groups frequently run
these. Computer users are invited to bring their machines to
have Linux installed on their machines. The idea is to get
them painlessly over the biggest hump in migrating to Linux,
which is initially installing and configuring it for the
user's machine.
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.
Inevitably, INTERCAL has a home page on the Web:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/intercal/. An extended version,
implemented in (what else?) Perl and adding object-oriented
features, is rumored to exist. See also Befunge.
InterCaps
[Great Britain] Synonym for BiCapitalization.
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. Robert Herzfeld,
who was director of ARPA at the time, has been at some pains
to debunk the "survive-a-nuclear-war" myth, but it seems
unkillable.
As originally imagined, ARPANET's major use would have been to
support what is now called remote login and more sophisticated
forms of distributed computing, but the infant technology of
electronic mail quickly grew to dominate actual usage.
Universities, research labs and defense contractors early
discovered the Internet's potential as a medium of
communication between humans and linked up in steadily
increasing numbers, connecting together a quirky mix of
academics, techies, hippies, SF fans, hackers, and anarchists.
The roots of this lexicon lie in those early years.
Over the next quarter-century the Internet evolved in many
ways. The typical machine/OS combination moved from DEC
PDP-10s and PDP-20s, running TOPS-10 and TOPS-20, to PDP-11s
and VAXen and Suns running Unix, and in the 1990s to Unix on
Intel microcomputers. The Internet's protocols grew more
capable, most notably in the move from NCP/IP to TCP/IP in
1982 and the implementation of Domain Name Service in 1983. It
was around this time that people began referring to the
collection of interconnected networks with ARPANET at its core
as "the Internet".
The ARPANET had a fairly strict set of participation
guidelines -- connected institutions had to be involved with a
DOD-related research project. By the mid-80s, many of the
organizations clamoring to join didn't fit this profile. In
1986, the National Science Foundation built NSFnet to open up
access to its five regional supercomputing centers; NSFnet
became the backbone of the Internet, replacing the original
ARPANET pipes (which were formally shut down in 1990). Between
1990 and late 1994 the pieces of NSFnet were sold to major
telecommunications companies until the Internet backbone had
gone completely commercial.
That year, 1994, was also the year the mainstream culture
discovered the Internet. Once again, the killer app was not
the anticipated one -- rather, what caught the public
imagination was the hypertext and multimedia features of the
World Wide Web. Subsequently the Internet has seen off its
only serious challenger (the OSI protocol stack favored by
European telecoms monopolies) and is in the process of
absorbing into itself many of the proprietary networks built
during the second wave of wide-area networking after 1980. By
1996 it had become a commonplace even in mainstream media to
predict that a globally-extended Internet would become the key
unifying communications technology of the next century. See
also the network.
Internet Death Penalty
[Usenet] (often abbreviated IDP) The ultimate sanction against
spam-emitting sites -- complete shunning at the router level
of all mail and packets, as well as Usenet messages, from the
offending domain(s). Compare Usenet Death Penalty, with which
it is sometimes confused.
Internet Exploder
[very common] Pejorative hackerism for Microsoft's "Internet
Explorer" web browser (also "Internet Exploiter"). Compare
HP-SUX, Macintrash, sun-stools, Slowlaris.
Internet Exploiter : n.
Another common name-of-insult for Internet Explorer,
Microsoft's overweight Web Browser; more hostile than Internet
Exploder. Reflects widespread hostility to Microsoft and a
sense that it is seeking to hijack, monopolize, and corrupt
the Internet. Compare Exploder and the less pejorative
Netscrape.
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.
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.
intertwingled
adj. [Invented by Theodor Holm Nelson, prob. a blend of
"mingled" and "intertwined".] Connected together in a complex
way; specifically, composed of one another's components.
intro : n.
[demoscene] Introductory screen of some production.
2. A short demo, usually showing just one or two screens.
3. Small, usually 64k, 40k or 4k demo. Sizes are generally
dictated by compo rules. See also dentro, demo.
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 emoticons. 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 dinosaurs
ruled the earth. The Iron Age began, ironically enough, with
the delivery of the first minicomputer (the PDP-1) and ended
with the introduction of the first commercial microprocessor
(the Intel 4004) in 1971. See also Stone Age; compare elder
days.
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, honey pot.
ironmonger : n.
[IBM] A hardware specialist (derogatory). Compare sandbender,
polygon pusher.
ISO standard cup of tea : n.
[South Africa] A cup of tea with milk and one teaspoon of
sugar, where the milk is poured into the cup before the tea.
Variations are ISO 0, with no sugar; ISO 2, with two spoons of
sugar; and so on.
This may derive from the "NATO standard" cup of coffee and tea
(milk and two sugars), military slang going back to the late
1950s and parodying NATO's relentless bureaucratic drive to
standardize parts across European and U.S. militaries.
Like many ISO standards, this one has a faintly alien ring in
North America, where hackers generally shun the decadent
British practice of adulterating perfectly good tea with dairy
products and prefer instead to add a wedge of lemon, if
anything. If one were feeling extremely silly, one might
hypothesize an analogous ANSI standard cup of tea and wind up
with a political situation distressingly similar to several
that arise in much more serious technical contexts. (Milk and
lemon don't mix very well.)
[2000 update: There is now, in fact, an ISO standard 3103:
`Method for preparation of a liquor of tea for use in sensory
tests.', alleged to be equivalent to British Standard BS6008:
`How to make a standard cup of tea.' --ESR]
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). There is an ITS home
page.
2. A mythical image of operating-system perfection worshiped
by a bizarre, fervent retro-cult of old-time hackers and
ex-users (see troglodyte, sense 2). ITS worshipers manage
somehow to continue believing that an OS maintained by
assembly-language hand-hacking that supported only monocase
6-character filenames in one directory per account remains
superior to today's state of commercial art (their venom
against Unix is particularly intense). See also holy wars,
Weenix.
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.
[common; generalized from J. Random Hacker] Arbitrary;
ordinary; any one; any old. `J. Random' is often prefixed to a
noun to make a name out of it. It means roughly some
particular or any specific one. "Would you let J. Random Loser
marry your daughter?" The most common uses are `J. Random
Hacker', `J. Random Loser', and `J. Random Nerd' ("Should J.
Random Loser be allowed to kill other peoples' processes?"),
but it can be used simply as an elaborate version of random in
any sense.
J. Random Hacker : /J rand'm hak'r/ , n.
[very common] A mythical figure like the Unknown Soldier; the
archetypal hacker nerd. This term is one of the oldest in the
jargon, apparently going back to MIT in the 1960s. See random,
Suzie COBOL. This may originally have been inspired by `J.
Fred Muggs', a show-biz chimpanzee whose name was a household
word back in the early days of TMRC, and was probably
influenced by `J. Presper Eckert' (one of the co-inventors of
the electronic computer). See also Fred Foobar.
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).
Java
An object-oriented language originally developed at Sun by
James Gosling (and known by the name "Oak") with the intention
of being the successor to C++ (the project was however
originally sold to Sun as an embedded language for use in
set-top boxes). After the great Internet explosion of
1993-1994, Java was hacked into a byte-interpreted language
and became the focus of a relentless hype campaign by Sun,
which touted it as the new language of choice for distributed
applications.
Java is indeed a stronger and cleaner design than C++ and has
been embraced by many in the hacker community -- but it has
been a considerable source of frustration to many others, for
reasons ranging from uneven support on different Web browser
platforms, performance issues, and some notorious deficiencies
in some of the standard toolkits (AWT in particular).
Microsoft's determined attempts to corrupt the language (which
it rightly sees as a threat to its OS monopoly) have not
helped. As of 2002, these issues are still in the process of
being resolved.
Despite many attractive features and a good design, it is
difficult to find people willing to praise Java who have tried
to implement a complex, real-world system with it (but to be
fair it is early days yet, and no other language has ever been
forced to spend its childhood under the limelight the way Java
has). On the other hand, Java has already been a big win in
academic circles, where it has taken the place of Pascal as
the preferred tool for teaching the basics of good programming
to the next generation of hackers.
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.catb.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 retconned by expanding these initials as `Joke
Ethnic/Denomination/Race'.) After much sound and fury JEDR
faded away; this term appears to be doing likewise. JEDR's
only permanent effect on the net.culture was to discredit
`sensitivity' arguments for censorship so thoroughly that more
recent attempts to raise them have met with immediate and
near-universal rejection.
Jeff K.
The spiritual successor to B1FF and the archetype of script
kiddies. Jeff K. is a sixteen-year-old suburbanite who fancies
himself a "l33t haX0r", although his knowledge of computers
seems to be limited to the procedure for getting Quake up and
running. His Web page http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/
features a number of hopelessly naive articles, essays, and
rants, all filled with the kind of misspellings, studlycaps,
and number-for-letter substitutions endemic to the script
kiddie and warez d00dz communities. Jeff's offerings, among
other things, include hardware advice (such as "AMD VERSIS
PENTIUM" and "HOW TO OVARCLOAK YOUR COMPUTAR"), his own Quake
clan (Clan 40 OUNSCE), and his own comic strip (Wacky Fun
Computar Comic Jokes).
Like B1FF, Jeff K. is (fortunately) a hoax. Jeff K. was
created by internet game journalist Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka,
whose web site Something Awful (http://www.somethingawful.com)
highlights unintentionally humorous news items and Web sites,
as a parody of the kind of teenage luser who infests Quake
servers, chat rooms, and other places where computer
enthusiasts congregate. He is well-recognized in the PC game
community and his influence has spread to hacker fora like
Slashdot as well.
jello : n.
[Usenet: by analogy with spam] A message that is both
excessively cross-posted and too frequently posted, as opposed
to spam (which is merely too frequently posted) or velveeta
(which is merely excessively cross-posted). This term is
widely recognized but not commonly used; most people refer to
both kinds of abuse or their combination as spam.
Jeopardy-style quoting
See top-post.
jibble
[UK] Unspecified stuff. An unspecified action. A deliberately
blank word; compare gorets. A deliberate experiment in
tracking the spread of a near-meaningless word. See
http://www.jibble.org/jibblemeaning.php.
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.
3. Even more confusingly, physicists semi-jokingly use `jiffy'
to mean the time required for light to travel one foot in a
vacuum, which turns out to be close to one nanosecond. Other
physicists use the term for the quantum-nechanical lower bound
on meaningful time lengths,
4. Indeterminate time from a few seconds to forever. "I'll do
it in a jiffy" means certainly not now and possibly never.
This is a bit contrary to the more widespread use of the word.
Oppose nano. See also Real Soon Now.
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.
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 1975 first-contact SF novel The Mote
in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, an alien
describes a very difficult task by saying "We juggle priceless
eggs in variable gravity." It is possible that this was
intended as tribute to a less colorful use of the same image
in Robert Heinlein's influential 1961 novel Stranger in a
Strange Land. See also hack mode and on the gripping hand.
juice : n.
The weight of a given node in some sort of graph (like a web
of trust or a relevance-weighted search query). This appears
to have been generalized from google juice, but mat derive
from black urban slang for power or a respect. Example: "I
signed your key, but I really don't have the juice to be
authoritative."
jump off into never-never land : v.
[from J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan] An unexpected jump in a
program that produces catastrophic or just plain weird
results. Compare hyperspace.
jupiter : vt.
[IRC] To kill an IRC bot or user and then take its place by
adopting its nick so that it cannot reconnect. Named after a
particular IRC user who did this to NickServ, the robot in
charge of preventing people from inadvertently using a nick
claimed by another user. Now commonly shortened to jupe.
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 : n.
Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie's book The C Programming
Language, esp. the classic and influential first edition
(Prentice-Hall 1978; ISBN 0-13-110163-3). Syn. Old Testament.
See also New Testament.
k- : pref.
[rare; poss fr. kilo- prefix] Extremely. Rare among hackers,
but quite common among crackers and warez d00dz in compounds
such as k-kool /K'kool'/, k-rad /K'rad'/, and k-awesome
/K'aw`sm/. Also used to intensify negatives; thus, k-evil,
k-lame, k-screwed, and k-annoying. Overuse of this prefix, or
use in more formal or technical contexts, is considered an
indicator of lamer status.
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.
kernel-of-the-week club
The fictional society that BSD bigots claim Linux users belong
to, alluding to the release-early-release-often style
preferred by the kernel maintainers. See bazaar. This was
almost certainly inspired by the earlier bug-of-the-month
club.
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 <kibo@world.std.com>, a Usenetter infamous for
various surrealist net.pranks and an uncanny, machine-assisted
knack for joining any thread in which his nom de guerre is
mentioned. He has a website at http://www.kibo.com/.
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 kibozes but is not Kibo (see KIBO, sense 2).
kick : v.
1. [IRC] To cause somebody to be removed from a IRC channel,
an option only available to channel ops. This is an extreme
measure, often used to combat extreme flamage or flooding, but
sometimes used at the CHOP's whim.
2. To reboot a machine or kill a running process. "The
server's down, let me go kick it."
kill file : n.
[Usenet; very common] (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 sustaining market for a
promising but under-utilized technology. First used in the
mid-1980s to describe Lotus 1-2-3 once it became evident that
demand for that product had been the major driver of the early
business market for IBM PCs. The term was then retrospectively
applied to VisiCalc, which had played a similar role in the
success of the Apple II. After 1994 it became commonplace to
describe the World Wide Web as the Internet's killer app. One
of the standard questions asked about each new
personal-computer technology as it emerges has become "what's
the killer app?"
killer micro : n.
[popularized by Eugene Brooks c.1990] A microprocessor-based
machine that infringes on mini, mainframe, or supercomputer
performance turf. Often heard in "No one will survive the
attack of the killer micros!", the battle cry of the
downsizers.
The popularity of the phrase `attack of the killer micros' is
doubtless reinforced by the title of the movie Attack Of The
Killer Tomatoes (one of the canonical examples of
so-bad-it's-wonderful among hackers). This has even more
flavor now that killer micros have gone on the offensive not
just individually (in workstations) but in hordes (within
massively parallel computers).
[2002 update: Eugene Brooks was right. Since this term first
entered the Jargon File in 1990, the minicomputer has
effectively vanished, the mainframe sector is in deep and
apparently terminal decline, and even the supercomputer
business has contracted into a smaller niche. It's networked
killer micros as far as the eye can see. --ESR]
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 boxes without hardware memory management (such
as the IBM PC and Commodore PET) that can overload and trash
analog electronics in the monitor. See also HCF.
kilo- : pref.
[SI] See quantifiers.
kilogoogle : n.
The standard unit of measurement for Web search hits: a
thousand Google matches. "There are about a kilogoogle and a
half sites with that band's name on it." Compare google juice.
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.
KLB : n.
[common among Perl hackers] Known Lazy Bastard. Used to
describe somebody who perpetually asks questions which are
easily answered by referring to the reference material or
manual.
klone : /klohn/ , n.
See clone, sense 4.
kludge
1. /kluhj/ n. Incorrect (though regrettably common) spelling
of kluge (US). These two words have been confused in American
usage since the early 1960s, and widely confounded in Great
Britain since the end of World War II.
2. [TMRC] A crock that works. (A long-ago Datamation article
by Jackson Granholme similarly said: "An ill-assorted
collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing
whole.")
3. v. To use a kludge to get around a problem. "I've kludged
around it for now, but I'll fix it up properly later."
This word appears to have derived from Scots kludge or kludgie
for a common toilet, via British military slang. It apparently
became confused with U.S. kluge during or after World War II;
some Britons from that era use both words in definably
different ways, but kluge is now uncommon in Great Britain.
`Kludge' in Commonwealth hackish differs in meaning from
`kluge' in that it lacks the positive senses; a kludge is
something no Commonwealth hacker wants to be associated too
closely with. Also, `kludge' is more widely known in British
mainstream slang than `kluge' is in the U.S.
kluge : /klooj/
[from the German `klug', clever; poss. related to Polish &
Russian `klucz' (a key, a hint, a main point)]
1. n. A Rube Goldberg (or Heath Robinson) device, whether in
hardware or software.
2. n. A clever programming trick intended to solve a
particular nasty case in an expedient, if not clear, manner.
Often used to repair bugs. Often involves ad-hockery and
verges on being a crock.
3. n. Something that works for the wrong reason.
4. vt. To insert a kluge into a program. "I've kluged this
routine to get around that weird bug, but there's probably a
better way."
5. [WPI] n. A feature that is implemented in a rude manner.
Nowadays this term is often encountered in the variant
spelling `kludge'. Reports from old farts are consistent that
`kluge' was the original spelling, reported around computers
as far back as the mid-1950s and, at that time, used
exclusively of hardware kluges. In 1947, the New York Folklore
Quarterly reported a classic shaggy-dog story `Murgatroyd the
Kluge Maker' then current in the Armed Forces, in which a
`kluge' was a complex and puzzling artifact with a trivial
function. Other sources report that `kluge' was common Navy
slang in the WWII era for any piece of electronics that worked
well on shore but consistently failed at sea.
However, there is reason to believe this slang use may be a
decade older. Several respondents have connected it to the
brand name of a device called a "Kluge paper feeder", an
adjunct to mechanical printing presses. Legend has it that the
Kluge feeder was designed before small, cheap electric motors
and control electronics; it relied on a fiendishly complex
assortment of cams, belts, and linkages to both power and
synchronize all its operations from one motive driveshaft. It
was accordingly temperamental, subject to frequent breakdowns,
and devilishly difficult to repair -- but oh, so clever!
People who tell this story also aver that `Kluge' was the name
of a design engineer.
There is in fact a Brandtjen & Kluge Inc., an old family
business that manufactures printing equipment --
interestingly, their name is pronounced /kloo'gee/! Henry
Brandtjen, president of the firm, told me (ESR, 1994) that his
company was co-founded by his father and an engineer named
Kluge /kloo'gee/, who built and co-designed the original Kluge
automatic feeder in 1919. Mr. Brandtjen claims, however, that
this was a simple device (with only four cams); he says he has
no idea how the myth of its complexity took hold. Other
correspondents differ with Mr. Brandtjen's history of the
device and his allegation that it was a simple rather than
complex one, but agree that the Kluge automatic feeder was the
most likely source of the folklore.
TMRC and the MIT hacker culture of the early '60s seems to
have developed in a milieu that remembered and still used some
WWII military slang (see also foobar). It seems likely that
`kluge' came to MIT via alumni of the many military
electronics projects that had been located in Cambridge (many
in MIT's venerable Building 20, in which TMRC is also located)
during the war.
The variant `kludge' was apparently popularized by the
Datamation article mentioned under kludge; it was titled How
to Design a Kludge (February 1962, pp. 30, 31). This spelling
was probably imported from Great Britain, where kludge has an
independent history (though this fact was largely unknown to
hackers on either side of the Atlantic before a mid-1993
debate in the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers over the
First and Second Edition versions of this entry; everybody
used to think kludge was just a mutation of kluge). It now
appears that the British, having forgotten the etymology of
their own `kludge' when `kluge' crossed the Atlantic, repaid
the U.S. by lobbing the `kludge' orthography in the other
direction and confusing their American cousins' spelling!
The result of this history is a tangle. Many younger U.S.
hackers pronounce the word as /klooj/ but spell it,
incorrectly for its meaning and pronunciation, as `kludge'.
(Phonetically, consider huge, refuge, centrifuge, and deluge
as opposed to sludge, judge, budge, and fudge. Whatever its
failings in other areas, English spelling is perfectly
consistent about this distinction.) British hackers mostly
learned /kluhj/ orally, use it in a restricted negative sense
and are at least consistent. European hackers have mostly
learned the word from written American sources and tend to
pronounce it /kluhj/ but use the wider American meaning!
Some observers consider this mess appropriate in view of the
word's meaning.
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....
knobs : pl.n.
Configurable options, even in software and even those you
can't adjust in real time. Anything you can twiddle is a knob.
"Has this PNG viewer got an alpha knob?" Software may be
described as having "knobs and switches" or occasionally
"knobs and lights". See also nerd knob
Knuth : /ka-nooth'/ , n.
[Donald E. Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming]
Mythically, the reference that answers all questions about
data structures or algorithms. A safe answer when you do not
know: "I think you can find that in Knuth." Contrast the
literature. See also bible. There is a Donald Knuth home page
at http://Sunburn.Stanford.EDU/~knuth/.
koan : /koh'an/ , n.
A Zen teaching riddle. Classically, koans are attractive
paradoxes to be meditated on; their purpose is to help one to
enlightenment by temporarily jamming normal cognitive
processing so that something more interesting can happen (this
practice is associated with Rinzai Zen Buddhism). Defined here
because hackers are very fond of the koan form and compose
their own koans for humorous and/or enlightening effect. See
Some AI Koans, has the X nature, hacker humor.
kook
[Usenet; originally and more formally, net.kook] Term used to
describe a regular poster who continually posts messages with
no apparent grounding in reality. Different from a troll,
which implies a sort of sly wink on the part of a poster who
knows better, kooks really believe what they write, to the
extent that they believe anything.
The kook trademark is paranoia and grandiosity. Kooks will
often build up elaborate imaginary support structures, fake
corporations and the like, and continue to act as if those
things are real even after their falsity has been documented
in public.
While they may appear harmless, and are usually filtered out
by the other regular participants in a newsgroup of mailing
list, they can still cause problems because the necessity for
these measures is not immediately apparent to newcomers; there
are several instances on record, for example, of journalists
writing stories with quotes from kooks who caught them
unaware.
An entertaining web page chronicling the activities of many
notable kooks can be found at
http://www.crank.net/usenet.html.
Kool-Aid
[from a kid's sugar-enriched drink in fruity flavors] When
someone who should know better succumbs to marketing
influences and actually begins to believe the propaganda being
dished out by a vendor, they are said to have drunk the
Kool-Aid. Usually the decortication process is slow and almost
unnoticeable until one day the victim emerges as a True
Believer and begins spreading the faith himself. The term
originates in the suicide of 914 followers of Jim Jones's
People's Temple cult in Guyana in 1978. What they actually
drank was cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid, a cheap knockoff, rather
than Kool-Aid itself. There is a FAQ on this topic.
This has live variants. When a suit is blithering on about
their latest technology and how it will save the world, that's
`pouring Kool-Aid'. When the suit does not violate the laws of
physics, doesn't make impossible claims, and in fact says
something reasonable and believable, that's pouring good
Kool-Aid, usually used in the sentence "He pours good
Kool-Aid, doesn't he?" This connotes that the speaker might be
about to drink same.
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 : /chur'ka/ , n.
[Swedish] See feature key.
L
lag : n.
[MUD, IRC; very common] When used without qualification this
is synonymous with netlag. Curiously, people will often
complain "I'm really lagged" when in fact it is their server
or network connection that is lagging.
lamer : n.
[originally among Amiga fans]
1. Synonym for luser, not used much by hackers but common
among warez d00dz, crackers, and phreakers. A person who
downloads much, but who never uploads. (Also known as
leecher). Oppose elite. Has the same connotations of
self-conscious elitism that use of luser does among hackers.
2. Someone who tries to crack a BBS.
3. Someone who annoys the sysop or other BBS users -- for
instance, by posting lots of silly messages, uploading
virus-ridden software, frequently dropping carrier, etc.
Crackers also use it to refer to cracker wannabees. In phreak
culture, a lamer is one who scams codes off others rather than
doing cracks or really understanding the fundamental concepts.
In warez d00dz culture, where the ability to wave around
cracked commercial software within days of (or before) release
to the commercial market is much esteemed, the lamer might try
to upload garbage or shareware or something incredibly old
(old in this context is read as a few years to anything older
than 3 days). `Lamer' is also much used in the IRC world in a
similar sense to the above.
This term seems to have originated in the Commodore-64 scene
in the mid 1980s. It was popularized among Amiga crackers of
the mid-1980s by `Lamer Exterminator', the most famous and
feared Amiga virus ever, which gradually corrupted
non-write-protected floppy disks with bad sectors. The bad
sectors, when looked at, were overwritten with repetitions of
the string `LAMER!'.
LAN party : /lan par'tee/
An event to which several users bring their boxes and hook
them up to a common LAN (Local Area Network), often for the
purpose of playing multiplayer computer games, especially
action games such as Quake or Unreal Tournament. This is also
a good venue for people to show-off their fancy new hardware.
Such events can get pretty large, several hundred people
attend the annual QuakeCon in Texas. The theoretical rationale
behind LAN parties is that playing over the Internet often
introduces too much lag in the playing experience -- but just
as important is the special quality of trash-talking each
other across the room while playing, and the instinctive
social ritual of consuming vast amounts of food and drink
together.
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, Perl, Python, Java and LISP -- the dominant languages in
open-source development. This list has changed over time, but
slowly. Java bumped C++ off of it, and Python appears to be
recruiting people who would otherwise gravitate to LISP (which
used to be much more important than it is now). Smalltalk and
Prolog are also popular in small but influential communities.
The Real Programmers who loved FORTRAN and assembler have
pretty much all retired or died since 1990. Assembler is
generally no longer considered interesting or appropriate for
anything but HLL implementation, glue, and a few time-critical
and hardware-specific uses in systems programs. FORTRAN
occupies a shrinking niche in scientific programming.
Most hackers tend to frown on languages like Pascal and Ada,
which don't give them the near-total freedom considered
necessary for hacking (see bondage-and-discipline language),
and to regard everything even remotely connected with COBOL or
other traditional DP languages as a total and unmitigated
loss.
LART : //
Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool.
1. n. In the collective mythos of scary devil monastery, this
is an essential item in the toolkit of every BOFH. The LART
classic is a 2x4 or other large billet of wood usable as a
club, to be applied upside the head of spammers and other
people who cause sysadmins more grief than just naturally goes
with the job. Perennial debates rage on alt.sysadmin.recovery
over what constitutes the truly effective LART; knobkerries,
automatic weapons, flamethrowers, and tactical nukes all have
their partisans. Compare clue-by-four.
2. v. To use a LART. Some would add "in malice", but some
sysadmins do prefer to gently lart their users as a first (and
sometimes final) warning.
3. interj. Calling for one's LART, much as a surgeon might
call "Scalpel!".
4. interj. [rare] Used in flames as a rebuke. "LART! LART!
LART!"
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. The dish has also been called gunpowder
chicken.
In a variation on this theme, it is reported that some
Australian hackers have redesignated the common dish `lemon
chicken' as Chernobyl Chicken. The name is derived from the
color of the sauce, which is considered bright enough to glow
in the dark (as, mythically, do some of the inhabitants of
Chernobyl).
leaf site : n.
[obs.] Before pervasive TCP/IP, this term was used of a
machine that merely originated and read Usenet news or mail,
and did not relay any third-party traffic. It was often
uttered in a critical tone; when the ratio of leaf sites to
backbone, rib, and other relay sites got too high, the network
tended to develop bottlenecks. Compare backbone site. Now that
traffic patterns depend more on the distribution of routers
than of host machines this term has largely fallen out of use.
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 has its own entry;
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
1. n. (Also leecher.) Among BBS types, crackers and warez
d00dz, one who consumes knowledge without generating new
software, cracks, or techniques. BBS culture specifically
defines a leech as someone who downloads files with few or no
uploads in return, and who does not contribute to the message
section. Cracker culture extends this definition to someone (a
lamer, usually) who constantly presses informed sources for
information and/or assistance, but has nothing to contribute.
See troughie.
2. v. [common, Toronto area] v. To download a file across any
kind of internet link. "Hop on IRC later so I can leech some
MP3s from you." Used to describe activities ranging from FTP,
to IRC DCC-send, to ICQ file requests, to Napster searches
(but never to downloading email with file attachments; the
implication is that the download is the result of a browse or
search of some sort of file server). Seems to be a holdover
from the early 1990s when Toronto had a very active BBS and
warez scene. Synonymous with snarf (sense 2), and contrast
snarf (sense 4).
leech mode : n.
[warez d00dz] "Leech mode" or "leech access" or (simply
"leech" as in "You get leech") is the access mode on a FTP
site where one can download as many files as one wants,
without having to upload. Leech mode is often promised on
banner sites, but rarely obtained. See ratio site, banner
site.
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, suits, and situations in which hackers
generally get the short end of the stick.
lenna
The Internet's first poster girl, a standard test load used in
the image processing community. The image was originally
cropped from the November 1972 issue of Playboy Magazine,
which anglicized the model's name with a double n. It has
interesting properties -- complex feathers, shadows, smooth
(but not flat) surfaces -- that are pertinent in demonstrating
various processing algorithms for image compression,
filtering, dithering, texture mapping, image recognition, and
so on. After a quarter century of remaining completely unaware
that she had become an icon, a gray-haired but still winsome
Lenna finally met her fans at a computer graphics conference
in 1997. There is a fan page at www.lenna.org, with more
details. Compare Utah teapot and Stanford Bunny
[len_std.jpg]
Miss Lena Sjööblom
LER : /L-E-R/
n.
1. [TMRC, from `Light-Emitting Diode'] A light-emitting
resistor (that is, one in the process of burning up). Ohm's
law was broken. See also SED.
2. An incandescent light bulb (the filament emits light
because it's resistively heated).
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
used to be possible, for example, to send letterbombs that
would lock up some specific kinds of terminals when they are
viewed, so thoroughly that the user must cycle power (see
cycle, sense 3) to unwedge them. Under Unix, a letterbomb can
also try to get part of its contents interpreted as a shell
command to the mailer. The results of this could range from
silly to tragic; fortunately it has been some years since any
of the standard Unix/Internet mail software was vulnerable to
such an attack (though, as the Melissa virus attack
demonstrated in early 1999, Microsoft systems can have serious
problems). See also Trojan horse; compare nastygram.
2. Loosely, a mailbomb.
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 =-."
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!). 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.
1. [Usenet] A bug in some now-obsolete versions of the netnews
software that used to eat up to BUFSIZ bytes of the article
text. The bug was triggered by having the text of the article
start with a space or tab. This bug was quickly personified as
a mythical creature called the line eater, and postings often
included a dummy line of line eater food. Ironically, line
eater `food' not beginning with a space or tab wasn't actually
eaten, since the bug was avoided; but if there was a space or
tab before it, then the line eater would eat the food and the
beginning of the text it was supposed to be protecting. The
practice of sacrificing to the line eater continued for some
time after the bug had been nailed to the wall, and is still
humorously referred to. The bug itself was still occasionally
reported to be lurking in some mail-to-netnews gateways as
late as 1991.
2. See NSA line eater.
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.
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.
See also farm.
link rot : n.
The natural decay of web links as the sites they're connected
to change or die. Compare bit rot.
link-dead : adj.
[MUD] The state a player is in when they kill their connection
to a MUD without leaving it properly. The player is then
commonly left as a statue in the game, and is only removed
after a certain period of time (an hour on most MUDs). Used on
IRC as well, although it is inappropriate in that context.
Compare netdead.
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 any exhaustive review process at some
non-Unix shops, even in languages other than C. Also as v.
delint.
2. n. Excess verbiage in a document, as in "This draft has too
much lint".
Lintel : n.
The emerging Linux/Intel alliance. This term began to be used
in early 1999 after it became clear that the Wintel alliance
was under increasing strain and Intel started taking stakes in
Linux companies.
Linus : /leen'us'/ , /lin'us'/ , /li:'nus/
Linus Torvalds, the author of Linux. Nobody in the hacker
culture has been as readily recognized by first name alone
since ken.
Linux : /lee'nuhks/ , /li'nuks/ , not , /li:'nuhks/ , n.
The free Unix workalike created by Linus Torvalds and friends
starting about 1991. The pronunciation /li'nuhks/ is preferred
because the name `Linus' has an /ee/ sound in Swedish (Linus's
family is part of Finland's 6% ethnic-Swedish minority) and
Linus considers English short /i/ to be closer to /ee/ than
English long /i:/. This may be the most remarkable hacker
project in history -- an entire clone of Unix for 386, 486 and
Pentium micros, distributed for free with sources over the net
(ports to Alpha and Sparc and many other machines are also in
use).
Linux is what GNU aimed to be, and it relies on the GNU
toolset. But the Free Software Foundation didn't produce the
kernel to go with that toolset until 1999, which was too late.
Other, similar efforts like FreeBSD and NetBSD have been
technically successful but never caught fire the way Linux
has; as this is written in 2002, Linux has effectively
swallowed all proprietary Unixes except Solaris and is
seriously challenging Microsoft. It has already captured 37%
of the Internet-server market and over 25% of general business
servers.
An earlier version of this entry opined "The secret of Linux's
success seems to be that Linus worked much harder early on to
keep the development process open and recruit other hackers,
creating a snowball effect." Truer than we knew. See bazaar.
(Some people object that the name `Linux' should be used to
refer only to the kernel, not the entire operating system.
This claim is a proxy for an underlying territorial dispute;
people who insist on the term GNU/Linux want the FSF to get
most of the credit for Linux because RMS and friends wrote
many of its user-level tools. Neither this theory nor the term
GNU/Linux has gained more than minority acceptance).
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 was put back in
print as ISBN 1-57398-013-7 from Peer-To-Peer Communications,
with forewords by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. In a neat
bit of reflexivity, the page before the contents quotes this
entry.]
[1998 update: John Lions's death was an occasion of general
mourning in the hacker community.]
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 has since shared the throne with C. Its partisans claim
it is the only language that is truly beautiful. See languages
of choice.
All LISP functions and programs are expressions that return
values; this, together with the high memory utilization of
LISPs, gave rise to Alan Perlis's famous quip (itself a take
on an Oscar Wilde quote) that "LISP programmers know the value
of everything and the cost of nothing".
One significant application for LISP has been as a proof by
example that most newer languages, such as COBOL and Ada, are
full of unnecessary crocks. When the Right Thing has already
been done once, there is no justification for bogosity in
newer languages.
[lisp.png]
We've got your numbers....
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.
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.
[common] Opposite of `test'. Refers to actual real-world data
or a program working with it. For example, the response to "I
think the record deleter is finished" might be "Is it live
yet?" or "Have you tried it out on live data?" This usage
usually carries the connotation that live data is more fragile
and must not be corrupted, or bad things will happen. So a
more appropriate response might be: "Well, make sure it works
perfectly before we throw live data at it." The implication
here is that record deletion is something pretty significant,
and a haywire record-deleter running amok live would probably
cause great harm.
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 hooks
(executable code).
3. An object, such as a trampoline, that is constructed on the
fly by a program and intended to be executed as code.
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 competing
operating systems. Armando Stettner, one of the early Unix
developers, used to give out fake license plates bearing this
motto under a large Unix, all in New Hampshire colors of green
and white. These are now valued collector's items. In 1994 DEC
put an inferior imitation of these in circulation with a red
corporate logo added. Compaq (half of which was once DEC)
continued the practice.
[licenseplate.jpg]
Armando Stettner's original Unix license plate.
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 connections). The marked thing
about this usage is how little it has to do with real-space
distance. "I have to do some tweaking on this mail utility
before releasing it to the locals."
locked and loaded : adj.,obs.
[from military slang for an M-16 rifle with magazine inserted
and prepared for firing] Said of a removable disk volume
properly prepared for use -- that is, locked into the drive
and with the heads loaded. Ironically, because their heads are
`loaded' whenever the power is up, this description is never
used of Winchester drives (which are named after a rifle).
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 relative to El Camino Real, in which `logical north' is
always toward San Francisco and `logical south' is always
toward San Jose--in spite of the fact that El Camino Real runs
physical north/south near San Francisco, physical east/west
near San Jose, and along a curve everywhere in between. (The
best rule of thumb here is that, by definition, El Camino Real
always runs logical north-south.)
In giving directions, one might say: "To get to Rincon Tarasco
restaurant, get onto El Camino Bignum going logical north."
Using the word `logical' helps to prevent the recipient from
worrying about that the fact that the sun is setting almost
directly in front of him. The concept is reinforced by North
American highways which are almost, but not quite,
consistently labeled with logical rather than physical
directions. A similar situation exists at MIT: Route 128
(famous for the electronics industry that grew up along it)
wraps roughly 3 quarters around Boston at a radius of 10
miles, terminating near the coastline at each end. It would be
most precise to describe the two directions along this highway
as `clockwise' and `counterclockwise', but the road signs all
say "north" and "south", respectively. A hacker might describe
these directions as logical north and logical south, to
indicate that they are conventional directions not
corresponding to the usual denotation for those words.
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 shims 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 : vi.
1. [very common] To fail. A program loses when it encounters
an exceptional condition or fails to work in the expected
manner.
2. To be exceptionally unesthetic or crocky.
3. Of people, to be obnoxious or unusually stupid (as opposed
to ignorant). See also deserves to lose.
4. n. Refers to something that is losing, especially in the
phrases "That's a lose!" and "What a lose!"
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. "The
compiler is losing badly when I try to use templates."
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.
[very common] The result of a bug or malfunction. This is a
mass or collective noun. "What a loss!" and "What lossage!"
are nearly synonymous. The former is slightly more particular
to the speaker's present circumstances; the latter implies a
continuing lose of which the speaker is currently a victim.
Thus (for example) a temporary hardware failure is a loss, but
bugs in an important tool (like a compiler) are serious
lossage.
lossy : adj.
[Usenet]
1. Said of people, this indicates a poor memory, usually
short-term. This usage is analogical to the same term applied
to data compression and analysis. "He's very lossy." means
that you can't rely on him to accurately remember recent
experiences or conversations, or requests. Not to be confused
with a `loser', which is a person who is in a continual state
of lossiness, as in sense 2 (see below).
2. Said of an attitude or a situation, this indicates a
general downturn in emotions, lack of success in attempted
endeavors, etc. Eg, "I'm having a lossy day today." means that
the speaker has 'lost' or is `losing' in all of their
activities, and that this is causing some increase in negative
emotions.
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, was a notorious 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 suits!" Compare zero-content, bandwidth, math-out.
Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology : prov.
"There is always one more bug."
Lumber Cartel : n.
A mythical conspiracy accused by spam-spewers of funding
anti-spam activism in order to force the direct-mail
promotions industry back onto paper. Hackers, predictably,
responded by forming a "Lumber Cartel" spoofing this paranoid
theory; the web page is http://come.to/the.lumber.cartel/.
Members often include the tag TINLC ("There Is No Lumber
Cartel") in their postings; see TINC, backbone cabal and NANA
for explanation.
lunatic fringe : n.
[IBM] Customers who can be relied upon to accept release 1
versions of software. Compare heatseeker.
lurker : n.
One of the `silent majority' in an electronic forum; one who
posts occasionally or not at all but is known to read the
group's postings regularly. This term is not pejorative and
indeed is casually used reflexively: "Oh, I'm just lurking."
Often used in the lurkers, the hypothetical audience for the
group's flamage-emitting regulars. When a lurker speaks up for
the first time, this is called delurking.
The creator of the popular science-fiction TV series Babylon 5
has ties to SF fandom and the hacker culture. In that series,
the use of the term `lurker' for a homeless or displaced
person is a conscious reference to the jargon term.
luser : /loo'zr/ , n.
[common] A user; esp. one who is also a loser. (luser and
loser are pronounced identically.) This word was coined around
1975 at MIT. Under ITS, when you first walked up to a terminal
at MIT and typed Control-Z to get the computer's attention, it
printed out some status information, including how many people
were already using the computer; it might print "14 users",
for example. Someone thought it would be a great joke to patch
the system to print "14 losers" instead. There ensued a great
controversy, as some of the users didn't particularly want to
be called losers to their faces every time they used the
computer. For a while several hackers struggled covertly, each
changing the message behind the back of the others; any time
you logged into the computer it was even money whether it
would say "users" or "losers". Finally, someone tried the
compromise "lusers", and it stuck. Later one of the ITS
machines supported luser as a request-for-help command. ITS
died the death in mid-1990, except as a museum piece; the
usage lives on, however, and the term luser is often seen in
program comments and on Usenet. Compare mundane, muggle,
newbie, chainik.
M
M : pref.
[SI] See quantifiers.
M$
Common net abbreviation for Microsoft, everybody's least
favorite monopoly.
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
11PM last night, he was still macdinking the slides for his
presentation." See also fritterware, window shopping.
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/ , n.
[techspeak] A name (possibly followed by a formal arg list)
that is equated to a text or symbolic expression to which it
is to be expanded (possibly with the substitution of actual
arguments) by a macro expander. This definition can be found
in any technical dictionary; what those won't tell you is how
the hackish connotations of the term have changed over time.
The term macro originated in early assemblers, which
encouraged the use of macros as a structuring and
information-hiding device. During the early 1970s, macro
assemblers became ubiquitous, and sometimes quite as powerful
and expensive as HLLs, only to fall from favor as improving
compiler technology marginalized assembler programming (see
languages of choice). Nowadays the term is most often used in
connection with the C preprocessor, LISP, or one of several
special-purpose languages built around a macro-expansion
facility (such as TeX or Unix's [nt]roff suite).
Indeed, the meaning has drifted enough that the collective
macros is now sometimes used for code in any special-purpose
application control language (whether or not the language is
actually translated by text expansion), and for macro-like
entities such as the keyboard macros supported in some text
editors (and PC TSR or Macintosh INIT/CDEV keyboard
enhancers).
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.
maggotbox : /mag'@t-boks/ , n.
See Macintrash. This is even more derogatory.
magic
1. adj. As yet unexplained, or too complicated to explain;
compare automagically and (Arthur C.) Clarke's Third Law: "Any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic." "TTY echoing is controlled by a large number of magic
bits." "This routine magically computes the parity of an 8-bit
byte in three instructions."
2. adj. Characteristic of something that works although no one
really understands why (this is especially called black
magic).
3. n. [Stanford] A feature not generally publicized that
allows something otherwise impossible, or a feature formerly
in that category but now unveiled.
4. n. The ultimate goal of all engineering & development,
elegance in the extreme; from the first corollary to Clarke's
Third Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is
insufficiently advanced".
Parodies playing on these senses of the term abound; some have
made their way into serious documentation, as when a MAGIC
directive was described in the Control Card Reference for GCOS
c.1978. For more about hackish `magic', see Appendix A.
Compare black magic, wizardly, deep magic, heavy wizardry.
magic cookie : n.
[Unix; common]
1. Something passed between routines or programs that enables
the receiver to perform some operation; a capability ticket or
opaque identifier. Especially used of small data objects that
contain data encoded in a strange or intrinsically
machine-dependent way. E.g., on non-Unix OSes with a
non-byte-stream model of files, the result of 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; common]
1. In source code, some non-obvious constant whose value is
significant to the operation of a program and that is inserted
inconspicuously in-line (hardcoded), rather than expanded in
by a symbol set by a commented #define. Magic numbers in this
sense are bad style.
2. A number that encodes critical information used in an
algorithm in some opaque way. The classic examples of these
are the numbers used in hash or CRC functions, or the
coefficients in a linear congruential generator for
pseudo-random numbers. This sense actually predates and was
ancestral to the more common sense
3. Special data located at the beginning of a binary data file
to indicate its type to a utility. Under Unix, the system and
various applications programs (especially the linker)
distinguish between types of executable file by looking for a
magic number. Once upon a time, these magic numbers were
PDP-11 branch instructions that skipped over header data to
the start of executable code; 0407, for example, was octal for
`branch 16 bytes relative'. Many other kinds of files now have
magic numbers somewhere; some magic numbers are, in fact,
strings, like the !<arch> at the beginning of a Unix archive
file or the %! leading PostScript files. Nowadays only a
wizard knows the spells to create magic numbers. How do you
choose a fresh magic number of your own? Simple -- you pick
one at random. See? It's magic!
4. An input that leads to a computational boundary condition,
where algorithm behavior becomes discontinuous. Numeric
overflows (particularly with signed data types) and run-time
errors (divide by zero, stack overflows) are indications of
magic numbers. The Y2K scare was probably the most notorious
magic number non-incident.
The magic number, on the other hand, is 7±2. See The magical
number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity
for processing information by George Miller, in the
Psychological Review 63:81-97 (1956). This classic paper
established the number of distinct items (such as numeric
digits) that humans can hold in short-term memory. Among other
things, this strongly influenced the interface design of the
phone system.
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 dinosaurs surviving from
computing's Stone Age.
It has been common wisdom among hackers since the late 1980s
that the mainframe architectural tradition is essentially dead
(outside of the tiny market for number-crunching
supercomputers having been swamped by the recent huge advances
in IC technology and low-cost personal computing. The wave of
failures, takeovers, and mergers among traditional mainframe
makers in the early 1990s bore this out. The biggest
mainframer of all, IBM, was compelled to re-invent itself as a
huge systems-consulting house. (See dinosaurs mating and
killer micro).
However, in yet another instance of the cycle of
reincarnation, the port of Linux to the IBM S/390 architecture
in 1999 -- assisted by IBM -- produced a resurgence of
interest in mainframe computing as a way of providing huge
quantities of easily maintainable, reliable virtual Linux
servers, saving IBM's mainframe division from almost certain
extinction.
mainsleaze : n.
[spam fighters] A big-time spammer, with their own fat pipe,
their own mailservers, and a pink contract. Almost impossible
to get shut down.
man page : n.
A page from the Unix Programmer's Manual, documenting one of
Unix's many commands, system calls, library subroutines,
device driver interfaces, file formats, games, macro packages,
or maintenance utilities. By extension, the term "man page"
may be used to refer to documentation of any kind, under any
system, though it is most likely to be confined to short
on-line references.
As mentioned in Chapter 11, there is a standard syntax for
referring to man page entries: the phrase "foo(n)" refers to
the page for "foo" in chapter n of the manual, where chapter 1
is user commands, chapter 2 is system calls, etc.
The man page format is beloved, or berated, for having the
same sort of pithy utility as the rest of Unix. Man pages tend
to be written as very compact, concise descriptions which are
complete but not forgiving of the lazy or careless reader.
Their stylized format does a good job of summarizing the
essentials: invocation syntax, options, basic functionality.
While such a concise reference is perfect for the
do-one-thing-and-do-it-well tools which are favored by the
Unix philosophy, it admittedly breaks down when applied to a
command which is itself a major subsystem.
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.
1. Used similarly to mung or scribble, but more violent in its
connotations; something that is mangled has been irreversibly
and totally trashed.
2. To produce the mangled name corresponding to a C++
declaration.
mangled name : n.
A name, appearing in a C++ object file, that is a coded
representation of the object declaration as it appears in the
source. Mangled names are used because C++ allows multiple
objects to have the same name, as long as they are
distinguishable in some other way, such as by having different
parameter types. Thus, the internal name must have that
additional information embedded in it, using the limited
character set allowed by most linkers. For instance, one
popular compiler encodes the standard library function
declaration "memchr(const void*,int,unsigned int)" as
"@memchr$qpxviui".
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).
marching ants
The animated dotted-line marquee that indicates a rectangle or
item select in Adobe Photoshop, the GIMP, and other similar
image-editing programs.
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.
[common]
1. [techspeak] An extremely small change. "A marginal increase
in core can decrease GC time drastically." In everyday terms,
this means that it is a lot easier to clean off your desk if
you have a spare place to put some of the junk while you sort
through it.
2. Of little merit. "This proposed new feature seems rather
marginal to me."
3. Of extremely small probability of winning. "The power
supply was rather marginal anyway; no wonder it fried."
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-25, and the never-built superprocessor SC-40.
These machines were marvels of engineering design; although
not much slower than the unique Foonly F-1, they were
physically smaller and consumed less power than the much
slower DEC KS10 or Foonly F-2, F-3, or F-4 machines. They were
also completely compatible with the DEC KL10, and ran all KL10
binaries (including the operating system) with no
modifications at about 2--3 times faster than a KL10.
When DEC cancelled the Jupiter project in 1983 (their followup
to the PDP-10), Systems Concepts should have made a bundle
selling their machine into shops with a lot of software
investment in PDP-10s, and in fact their spring 1984
announcement generated a great deal of excitement in the
PDP-10 world. TOPS-10 was running on the Mars by the summer of
1984, and TOPS-20 by early fall. Unfortunately, the hackers
running Systems Concepts were much better at designing
machines than at mass producing or selling them; the company
allowed itself to be sidetracked by a bout of perfectionism
into continually improving the design, and lost credibility as
delivery dates continued to slip. They also overpriced the
product ridiculously; they believed they were competing with
the KL10 and VAX 8600 and failed to reckon with the likes of
Sun Microsystems and other hungry startups building
workstations with power comparable to the KL10 at a fraction
of the price. By the time SC shipped the first SC-30M to
Stanford in late 1985, most customers had already made the
traumatic decision to abandon the PDP-10, usually for VMS or
Unix boxes. Most of the Mars computers built ended up being
purchased by CompuServe.
This tale and the related saga of Foonly hold a lesson for
hackers: if you want to play in the Real World, you need to
learn Real World moves.
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?" Compare
Christmas tree packet, Godzillagram.
massage : vt.
[common] Vague term used to describe `smooth' transformations
of a data set into a different form, esp. transformations that
do not lose information. Connotes less pain than munch or
crunch. "He wrote a program that massages X bitmap files into
GIF format." Compare slurp.
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.
[73-05-18.png]
A math-out approach to history.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-05-19)
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 the network). The name of
the rather good 1999 cypherpunk movie The Matrix played on
this sense, which however had been established for years
before.
3. The totality of present-day computer networks (popularized
in this sense by John Quarterman; rare outside academic
literature).
maximum Maytag mode : n.
What a washing machine or, by extension, any disk drive is in
when it's being used so heavily that it's shaking like an old
Maytag with an unbalanced load. If prolonged for any length of
time, can lead to disks becoming walking drives. In 1999 it's
been some years since hard disks were large enough to do this,
but the same phenomenon has recently been reported with 24X
CD-ROM drives.
McQuary limit
[from the name of the founder of alt.fan.warlord; see
warlording.] 4 lines of at most 80 characters each, sometimes
still cited on Usenet as the maximum acceptable size of a sig
block. Before the great bandwidth explosion of the early
1990s, long sigs actually cost people running Usenet servers
significant amounts of money. Nowadays social pressure against
long sigs is intended to avoid waste of human attention rather
than machine bandwidth. Accordingly, the McQuary limit should
be considered a rule of thumb rather than a hard limit; it's
best to avoid sigs that are large, repetitive, and
distracting. See also warlording.
meatspace : /meet'spays/ , n.
The physical world, where the meat lives -- as opposed to
cyberspace. Hackers are actually more willing to use this term
than `cyberspace', because it's not speculative -- we already
have a running meatspace implementation (the universe).
Compare RL.
meatware : n.
Synonym for wetware. Less common.
meeces : /mees'@z/ , n.
[TMRC] Occasional furry visitors who are not urchins. [That
is, mice. This may no longer be in live use; it clearly
derives from the refrain of the early-1960s cartoon character
Mr. Jinks: "I hate meeces to pieces!" -- ESR]
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/ , /mee'goh/
["My Eyes Glaze Over", often "Mine Eyes Glazeth (sic) Over",
attributed to the futurologist Herman Kahn] Also MEGO factor.
1. n. A handwave intended to confuse the listener and
hopefully induce agreement because the listener does not want
to admit to not understanding what is going on. MEGO is
usually directed at senior management by engineers and
contains a high proportion of TLAs.
2. excl. An appropriate response to MEGO tactics.
3. Among non-hackers, often refers not to behavior that causes
the eyes to glaze, but to the eye-glazing reaction itself,
which may be triggered by the mere threat of excessive
technical detail as effectively as by an actual excess of it.
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 1999, this is
still an extremely informal and speculative endeavor, though
the first steps towards at least statistical rigor have been
made by H. Keith Henson and others. Memetics is a popular
topic for speculation among hackers, who like to see
themselves as the architects of the new information ecologies
in which memes live and replicate.
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 memory
to a rubble of bits. Note that this is subtly different from
(and more general than) related terms such as a memory leak or
fandango on core because it doesn't imply an allocation error
or overrun condition.
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.
[semi-obsolescent now that DOS is] Derisory term for MS-DOS.
Often followed by the ritual banishing "Just say No!" See
MS-DOS. Most hackers (even many MS-DOS hackers) loathed MS-DOS
for its single-tasking nature, its limits on application size,
its nasty primitive interface, and its ties to IBMness and
Microsoftness (see fear and loathing). Also mess-loss,
messy-dos, mess-dog, mess-dross, mush-dos, and various
combinations thereof. In Ireland and the U.K. it is even
sometimes called `Domestos' after a brand of toilet cleanser.
meta : /me't@/ , /may't@/ , /mee't@/ , 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. 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.
Metasyntactic variables are so called because (1) they are
variables in the metalanguage used to talk about programs etc;
(2) they are variables whose values are often variables (as in
usages like "the value of f(foo,bar) is the sum of foo and
bar"). However, it has been plausibly suggested that the real
reason for the term "metasyntactic variable" is that it sounds
good. To some extent, the list of one's preferred
metasyntactic variables is a cultural signature. They occur
both in series (used for related groups of variables or
objects) and as singletons. Here are a few common signatures:
foo, bar, baz, quux, quuux, quuuux...: MIT/Stanford usage, now found
everywhere (thanks largely to early versions of this lexicon!). At
MIT (but not at Stanford), baz dropped out of use for a while in the
1970s and '80s. A common recent mutation of this sequence inserts
quxbefore quux.
bazola, ztesch: Stanford (from mid-'70s on).
foo, bar, thud, grunt: This series was popular at CMU. Other
CMU-associated variables include gorp.
foo, bar, bletch: Waterloo University. We are informed that the CS
club at Waterloo formerly had a sign on its door reading "Ye Olde Foo
Bar and Grill"; this led to an attempt to establish "grill" as the
third metasyntactic variable, but it never caught on.
foo, bar, fum: This series is reported to be common at XEROX PARC.
fred, jim, sheila, barney: See the entry for fred. These tend to be
Britishisms.
flarp: Popular at Rutgers University and among GOSMACS hackers.
zxc, spqr, wombat: Cambridge University (England).
shme Berkeley, GeoWorks, Ingres. Pronounced /shme/ with a short /e/.
foo, bar, baz, bongo Yale, late 1970s.
spam, eggs Python programmers.
snork Brown University, early 1970s.
foo, bar, zot Helsinki University of Technology, Finland.
blarg, wibble New Zealand.
toto, titi, tata, tutu France.
pippo, pluto, paperino Italy. Pippo /pee'po/ and Paperino
/pa-per-ee'-no/ are the Italian names for Goofy and Donald Duck.
aap, noot, mies The Netherlands. These are the first words a child
used to learn to spell on a Dutch spelling board.
oogle, foogle, boogle; zork, gork, bork These two series (which may
be continued with other initial consonents) are reportedly common in
England, and said to go back to Lewis Carroll.
Of all these, only foo and bar are universal (and baz nearly
so). The compounds foobar and foobaz also enjoy very wide
currency. Some jargon terms are also used as metasyntactic
names; barf and mumble, for example. See also Commonwealth
Hackish for discussion of numerous metasyntactic variables
found in Great Britain and the Commonwealth.
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 (compiled)
language that cannot even be used to write its own compiler is
beneath contempt. (The qualification has become necessary
because of the increasing popularity of interpreted languages
like Perl and Python.) See break-even point. (On a related
note, Doug McIlroy once proposed a test of the generality and
utility of a language and the operating system under which it
is compiled: "Is the output of a FORTRAN program acceptable as
input to the FORTRAN compiler?" In other words, can you write
programs that write programs? (See toolsmith.) Alarming
numbers of (language, OS) pairs fail this test, particularly
when the language is FORTRAN; aficionados are quick to point
out that Unix (even using FORTRAN) passes it handily. That the
test could ever be failed is only surprising to those who have
had the good fortune to have worked only under modern systems
which lack OS-supported and -imposed "file types".)
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
fundamentalist missionaries. See also astroturfing; compare
microserf.
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 9 imperial gallons;
the mass unit of the system is taken to be a firkin of water).
The VMS operating system has a lot of tuning parameters that
you can set with the SYSGEN utility, and one of these is
TIMEPROMPTWAIT, the time the system will wait for an operator
to set the correct date and time at boot if it realizes that
the current value is bogus. This time is specified in
microfortnights!
Multiple uses of the millifortnight (about 20 minutes) and
nanofortnight have also been reported.
microLenat : /mi:`-kroh-len'-@t/ , n.
The unit of bogosity. Abbreviated µL or mL in ASCII Consensus
is that this is the largest unit practical for everyday use.
The microLenat, originally invented by David Jefferson, was
promulgated as an attack against noted computer scientist Doug
Lenat by a tenured graduate student at CMU. Doug had failed
the student on an important exam because the student gave only
"AI is bogus" as his answer to the questions. The slur is
generally considered unmerited, but it has become a running
gag nevertheless. Some of Doug's friends argue that of course
a microLenat is bogus, since it is only one millionth of a
Lenat. Others have suggested that the unit should be
redesignated after the grad student, as the microReid.
microReid : /mi:'kroh-reed/ , n.
See microLenat.
microserf : /mi:'kro-s@rf/
[popularized, though not originated, by Douglas Coupland's
book Microserfs] A programmer at Microsoft, especially a
low-level coder with little chance of fame or fortune. Compare
MicroDroid.
Microsloth Windows : /mi:'kroh-sloth` win'dohz/ , n.
(Variants combine {Microshift, Macroshaft, Microsuck} with
{Windoze, WinDOS}. Hackerism(s) for `Microsoft Windows'. A
thirty-two bit extension and graphical shell to a sixteen-bit
patch to an eight-bit operating system originally coded for a
four-bit microprocessor which was written by a two-bit company
that can't stand one bit of competition. Also just called
Windoze, with the implication that you can fall asleep waiting
for it to do anything; the latter term is extremely common on
Usenet. See Black Screen of Death and Blue Screen of Death;
compare X, sun-stools.
Microsoft
The new Evil Empire (the old one was IBM). The basic
complaints are, as formerly with IBM, that (a) their system
designs are horrible botches, (b) we can't get source to fix
them, and (c) they throw their weight around a lot. See also
Halloween Documents.
micros~1
An abbreviation of the full name Microsoft resembling the
rather bogus way Windows 9x's VFAT filesystem truncates long
file names to fit in the MS-DOS 8+3 scheme (the real filename
is stored elsewhere). If other files start with the same
prefix, they'll be called micros~2 and so on, causing lots of
problems with backups and other routine system-administration
problems. During the US Antitrust trial against Microsoft the
names Micros~1 and Micros~2 were suggested for the two
companies that would exist after a break-up.
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 little-endian dd/mm/yy, and Japanese use
big-endian yy/mm/dd for Western dates).
middle-out implementation
See bottom-up implementation.
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.
minor detail
Often used in an ironic sense about brokenness or problems
that while apparently major, are in principle solvable. "It
works -- the fact that it crashes the system right after is a
minor detail." Compare SMOP.
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, such as
`Meaningless Information Provided by Salesmen'. This joke
expresses an attitude nearly universal among hackers about the
value of most benchmark claims, said attitude being one of the
great cultural divides between hackers and marketroids (see
also BogoMIPS). The singular is sometimes `1 MIP' even though
this is clearly etymologically wrong. See also KIPS and GIPS.
2. Computers, especially large computers, considered
abstractly as sources of computrons. "This is just a
workstation; the heavy MIPS are hidden in the basement."
3. The corporate name of a particular RISC-chip company, later
acquired by SGI.
4. Acronym for `Meaningless Information per Second' (a joke,
prob.: from sense 1).
misbug : /mis-buhg/ , n.
[MIT; rare (like its referent)] An unintended property of a
program that turns out to be useful; something that should
have been a bug but turns out to be a feature. Compare green
lightning. See miswart.
misfeature : /mis-fee'chr/ , /mis'fee`chr/ , n.
[common] A feature that eventually causes lossage, possibly
because it is not adequate for a new situation that has
evolved. Since it results from a deliberate and properly
implemented feature, a misfeature is not a bug. Nor is it a
simple unforeseen side effect; the term implies that the
feature in question was carefully planned, but its long-term
consequences were not accurately or adequately predicted
(which is quite different from not having thought ahead at
all). A misfeature can be a particularly stubborn problem to
resolve, because fixing it usually involves a substantial
philosophical change to the structure of the system involved.
Many misfeatures (especially in user-interface design) arise
because the designers/implementors mistake their personal
tastes for laws of nature. Often a former feature becomes a
misfeature because trade-offs were made whose parameters
subsequently change (possibly only in the judgment of the
implementors). "Well, yeah, it is kind of a misfeature that
file names are limited to six characters, but the original
implementors wanted to save directory space and we're stuck
with it for now."
missile address : n.
See ICBM address.
MiSTing
[blogosphere] A variant of fisking patterned on the protocol
of Mystery Science Theater 3000, In a MiSTing, the satire is
spoken through characters purporting to be the MST3K robots or
other suitably bizarre characters, such as the Roman emperors
Augustus and Caligula.
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.
MMF : //
[Usenet; common] Abbreviation: "Make Money Fast". Refers to
any kind of scheme which promises participants large profits
with little or no risk or effort. Typically, it is a some kind
of multi-level marketing operation which involves recruiting
more members, or an illegal pyramid scam. The term is also
used to refer to any kind of spam which promotes this. For
more information, see the Make Money Fast Myth Page.
mobo : /moh'bo/
Written and (rarely) spoken contraction of "motherboard"
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'). Now common.]
1. adj. Large, immense, complex, impressive. "A Saturn V
rocket is a truly moby frob." "Some MIT undergrads pulled off
a moby hack at the Harvard-Yale game." (See Appendix A for
discussion.)
2. n. obs. The maximum address space of a machine (see below).
For a 680[234]0 or VAX or most modern 32-bit architectures, it
is 4,294,967,296 8-bit bytes (4 gigabytes).
3. A title of address (never of third-person reference),
usually used to show admiration, respect, and/or friendliness
to a competent hacker. "Greetings, moby Dave. How's that
address-book thing for the Mac going?"
4. adj. In backgammon, doubles on the dice, as in moby sixes,
moby ones, etc. Compare this with bignum (sense 3): double
sixes are both bignums and moby sixes, but moby ones are not
bignums (the use of moby to describe double ones is
sarcastic). Standard emphatic forms: Moby foo, moby win, moby
loss. Foby moo: a spoonerism due to Richard Greenblatt.
5. The largest available unit of something which is available
in discrete increments. Thus, ordering a "moby Coke" at the
local fast-food joint is not just a request for a large Coke,
it's an explicit request for the largest size they sell.
This term entered hackerdom with the Fabritek 256K memory
added to the MIT AI PDP-6 machine, which was considered
unimaginably huge when it was installed in the 1960s (at a
time when a more typical memory size for a timesharing system
was 72 kilobytes). Thus, a moby is classically 256K 36-bit
words, the size of a PDP-6 or PDP-10 moby. Back when address
registers were narrow the term was more generally useful,
because when a computer had virtual memory mapping, it might
actually have more physical memory attached to it than any one
program could access directly. One could then say "This
computer has 6 mobies" meaning that the ratio of physical
memory to address space is 6, without having to say
specifically how much memory there actually is. That in turn
implied that the computer could timeshare six `full-sized'
programs without having to swap programs between memory and
disk.
Nowadays the low cost of processor logic means that address
spaces are usually larger than the most physical memory you
can cram onto a machine, so most systems have much less than
one theoretical `native' moby of core. Also, more modern
memory-management techniques (esp. paging) make the `moby
count' less significant. However, there is one series of
widely-used chips for which the term could stand to be revived
-- the Intel 8088 and 80286 with their incredibly
brain-damaged segmented-memory designs. On these, a moby would
be the 1-megabyte address span of a segment/offset pair (by
coincidence, a PDP-10 moby was exactly 1 megabyte of 9-bit
bytes).
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.
[very common]
1. Short for `modify' or `modification'. Very commonly used --
in fact the full terms are considered markers that one is
being formal. The plural `mods' is used esp. with reference to
bug fixes or minor design changes in hardware or software,
most esp. with respect to patch sets or a diff. See also case
mod.
2. Short for modulo but used only for its techspeak sense.
mode : n.
[common] A general state, usually used with an adjective
describing the state. Use of the word `mode' rather than
`state' implies that the state is extended over time, and
probably also that some activity characteristic of that state
is being carried out. "No time to hack; I'm in thesis mode."
In its jargon sense, `mode' is most often attributed to
people, though it is sometimes applied to programs and
inanimate objects. In particular, see hack mode, day mode,
night mode, demo mode, fireworks mode, and yoyo mode; also
talk mode.
One also often hears the verbs enable and disable used in
connection with jargon modes. Thus, for example, a sillier way
of saying "I'm going to crash" is "I'm going to enable crash
mode now". One might also hear a request to "disable flame
mode, please".
In a usage much closer to techspeak, a mode is a special state
that certain user interfaces must pass into in order to
perform certain functions. For example, in order to insert
characters into a document in the Unix editor vi, one must
type the "i" key, which invokes the "Insert" command. The
effect of this command is to put vi into "insert mode", in
which typing the "i" key has a quite different effect (to wit,
it inserts an "i" into the document). One must then hit
another special key, "ESC", in order to leave "insert mode".
Nowadays, modeful interfaces are generally considered losing
but survive in quite a few widely used tools built in less
enlightened times.
mode bit : n.
[common] A flag, usually in hardware, that selects between two
(usually quite different) modes of operation. The connotations
are different from flag bit in that mode bits are mainly
written during a boot or set-up phase, are seldom explicitly
read, and seldom change over the lifetime of an ordinary
program. The classic example was the EBCDIC-vs.-ASCII bit
(#12) of the Program Status Word of the IBM 360.
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."
mojibake : n. , /mo'jee-ba-ke/
Japanese for "ghost characters", the garbage that comes out
when one tries to display international character sets through
software not configured for them. There is a page on the topic
at http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/mojibake/.
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. In hardware
catalogues, you'll see the much less interesting description
"guarded button".
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 (but
see bazaar). 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 files off the network.
2. [Great Britain; commonly capitalized as Monty or as the
Full Monty] 16 megabytes of memory, when fitted to an IBM-PC
or compatible. A standard PC-compatible using the AT- or
ISA-bus with a normal BIOS cannot access more than 16
megabytes of RAM. Generally used of a PC, Unix workstation,
etc. to mean fully populated with memory, disk-space or some
other desirable resource. See the World Wide Words article
"The Full Monty" for discussion of the rather complex
etymology that may lie behind this phrase. Compare American
moby.
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.
Any one of several similar folk theorems that fit computing
capacity or cost to a 2^t exponential curve, with doubling
time close to a year. The most common fits component density
to such a curve (previous versions of this entry gave that
form). Another variant asserts that the dollar cost of
constant computing power decreases on the same curve. The
original Moore's Law, first uttered in 1965 by semiconductor
engineer Gordon Moore (who co-founded Intel four years later),
spoke of the number of components on the lowest-cost silicon
integrated circuits -- but Moore's own formulation varied
somewhat over the years, and reconstructing the meaning of the
terminology he used in the original turns out to be fraught
with difficulties. Further variants were spawned by Intel's PR
department and various journalists.
It has been shown that none of the variants of Moore's Law
actually fit the data very well (the price curves within DRAM
generations perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law
is constantly invoked to set up expectations about the next
generation of computing technology. See also Parkinson's Law
of Data and Gates's Law.
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. See also nethack, rogue, Angband.
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 has largely displaced it.
MOTSS : /mots/ , /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 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.
mouse pusher
[common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard;
originally used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication
is that the person has nothing but the most superficial
knowledge of the software he/she is employing, and is
incapable of using or appreciating the full glory of the
command line.
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 in order to have something to
demo for IBM on time, and the rest is history. Numerous
features, including vaguely Unix-like but rather broken
support for subdirectories, I/O redirection, and pipelines,
were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and subsequent versions; as a
result, there are two or more incompatible versions of many
system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never agree on basic
things like what character to use as an option switch or
whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is
now the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply
as DOS, which annoys people familiar with other similarly
abbreviated operating systems (the name goes back to the
mid-1960s, when it was attached to IBM's first disk operating
system for the 360). The name further annoys those who know
what the term operating system does (or ought to) connote; DOS
is more properly a set of relatively simple interrupt
services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like "dose", as in
"I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a dose of
brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See mess-dos.
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. In Chinese it can also mean "have not" (as in
"I have not done it"), or "lack of", which may or may not be a
definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers of Japanese do
not recognize the Discordian question-denying use, which
almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
in the following well-known Rinzai Zen koan:
A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
retorted, "Mu!"
See also has the X nature, Some AI Koans, and Douglas
Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
(pointer in the Bibliography in Appendix C.
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 (in writing, these social MUDs are sometimes
referred to as `MU*', with `MUD' implicitly reserved for the
more game-oriented ones). By 1991, over 50% of MUD sites were
of a third major variety, LPMUD, which synthesizes the
combat/puzzle aspects of AberMUD and older systems with the
extensibility of TinyMud. In 1996 the cutting edge of the
technology is Pavel Curtis's MOO, even more extensible using a
built-in object-oriented language. The trend toward greater
programmability and flexibility will doubtless continue.
The state of the art in MUD design is still moving very
rapidly, with new simulation designs appearing (seemingly)
every month. Around 1991 there was an unsuccessful movement to
deprecate the term MUD itself, as newer designs exhibit an
exploding variety of names corresponding to the different
simulation styles being explored. It survived. See also
bonk/oif, FOD, link-dead, mudhead, talk mode.
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 Theatre album Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the
Pliers, in which there is a character named "Mudhead".
muggle
[from J.K. Rowling's `Harry Potter' books, 1998] A non-wizard.
Not as disparaging as luser; implies vague pity rather than
contempt. In the universe of Rowling's enormously (and
deservedly) popular children's series, muggles and wizards
inhabit the same modern world, but each group is ignorant of
the commonplaces of the others' existence -- most muggles are
unaware that wizards exist, and wizards (used to magical ways
of doing everything) are perplexed and fascinated by muggle
artifacts.
In retrospect it seems completely inevitable that hackers
would adopt this metaphor, and in hacker usage it readily
forms compounds such as muggle-friendly. Compare luser,
mundane, chainik, newbie.
Multics : /muhl'tiks/ , n.
[from "MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service"] An
early timesharing operating system co-designed by a consortium
including MIT, GE, and Bell Laboratories as a successor to
CTSS. The design was first presented in 1965, planned for
operation in 1967, first operational in 1969, and took several
more years to achieve respectable performance and stability.
Multics was very innovative for its time -- among other
things, it provided a hierarchical file system with access
control on individual files and introduced the idea of
treating all devices uniformly as special files. It was also
the first OS to run on a symmetric multiprocessor, and the
only general-purpose system to be awarded a B2 security rating
by the NSA (see Orange Book).
Bell Labs left the development effort in 1969 after judging
that second-system effect had bloated Multics to the point of
practical unusability. Honeywell commercialized Multics in
1972 after buying out GE's computer group, but it was never
very successful: at its peak in the 1980s, there were between
75 and 100 Multics sites, each a multi-million dollar
mainframe.
One of the former Multics developers from Bell Labs was Ken
Thompson, and Unix deliberately carried through and extended
many of Multics' design ideas; indeed, Thompson described the
very name `Unix' as `a weak pun on Multics'. For this and
other reasons, aspects of the Multics design remain a topic of
occasional debate among hackers. See also brain-damaged and
GCOS.
MIT ended its development association with Multics in 1977.
Honeywell sold its computer business to Bull in the mid 80s,
and development on Multics was stopped in 1988. Four Multics
sites were known to be still in use as late as 1998, but the
last one (a Canadian military site) was decommissioned in
November 2000. There is a Multics page at
http://www.stratus.com/pub/vos/multics/tvv/multics.html.
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 glarked
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, muggle.
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. In the wake of the spam epidemics of the 1990s, mung is now
commonly used to describe the act of modifying an email
address in a sig block in a way that human beings can readily
reverse but that will fool an address harvester. Example:
johnNOSPAMsmith@isp.net.
4. The kind of beans the sprouts of which are used in Chinese
food. (That's their real name! Mung beans! Really!)
Like many early hacker terms, this one seems to have
originated at TMRC; it was already in use there in 1958. Peter
Samson (compiler of the original TMRC lexicon) thinks it may
originally have been onomatopoeic for the sound of a relay
spring (contact) being twanged. However, it is known that
during the World Wars, `mung' was U.S.: army slang for the
ersatz creamed chipped beef better known as `SOS', and it
seems quite likely that the word in fact goes back to
Scots-dialect munge.
Charles Mackay's 1874 book Lost Beauties of the English
Language defined "mung" as follows: "Preterite of ming, to
ming or mingle; when the substantive meaning of mingled food
of bread, potatoes, etc. thrown to poultry. In America, `mung
news' is a common expression applied to false news, but
probably having its derivation from mingled (or mung) news, in
which the true and the false are so mixed up together that it
is impossible to distinguish one from another."
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).
4. To add spamblock to an email address.
This term is often confused with mung, which probably was
derived from it. However, it also appears the word munge was
in common use in Scotland in the 1940s, and in Yorkshire in
the 1950s, as a verb, meaning to munch up into a masticated
mess, and as a noun, meaning the result of munging something
up (the parallel with the kluge/kludge pair is amusing). The
OED reports `munge' as an archaic verb meaning "to wipe (a
person's nose)".
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
lusers. For example, you don't make a two-pin plug symmetrical
and then label it `THIS WAY UP'; if it matters which way it is
plugged in, then you make the design asymmetrical (see also
the anecdote under magic smoke).
Edward A. Murphy, Jr. was one of McDonnell-Douglas's
quality-control engineers on the rocket-sled experiments that
were done by the U.S. Air Force in 1949 to test human
acceleration tolerances (USAF project MX981). One experiment
involved a set of 16 accelerometers mounted to different parts
of the subject's body. There were two ways each sensor could
be glued to its mount, and somebody methodically installed all
16 in a replacement set the wrong way around. Murphy then made
the original form of his pronouncement, which the test subject
(Major John Paul Stapp) mis-quoted (apparently in the more
general form "Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong)" at a news
conference a few days later.
Within months `Murphy's Law' had spread to various technical
cultures connected to aerospace engineering. Before too many
years had gone by variants had passed into the popular
imagination, changing as they went. Most of these are variants
on "Anything that can go wrong, will"; this is more correctly
referred to as Finagle's Law. The memetic drift apparent in
these mutants clearly demonstrates Murphy's Law acting on
itself!
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.
4. "Now for the Nth and last time..." In the specific context
"Nth-year grad student", N is generally assumed to be at least
4, and is usually 5 or more (see tenured graduate student).
See also random numbers, two-to-the-N.
nadger : /nad'jr/ , v.
[UK, from rude slang noun nadgers for testicles; compare
American & British bollixed] Of software or hardware (not
people), to twiddle some object in a hidden manner, generally
so that it conforms better to some format. For instance,
string printing routines on 8-bit processors often take the
string text from the instruction stream, thus a print call
looks like jsr print:"Hello world". The print routine has to
nadger the saved instruction pointer so that the processor
doesn't try to execute the text as instructions when the
subroutine returns. See adger.
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 annoyware,
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.
1. Untutored in the perversities of some particular program or
system; one who still tries to do things in an intuitive way,
rather than the right way (in really good designs these
coincide, but most designs aren't `really good' in the
appropriate sense). This trait is completely unrelated to
general maturity or competence, or even competence at any
other specific program. It is a sad commentary on the
primitive state of computing that the natural opposite of this
term is often claimed to be experienced user but is really
more like cynical user.
2. Said of an algorithm that doesn't take advantage of some
superior but advanced technique, e.g., the bubble sort. It may
imply naivete on the part of the programmer, although there
are situations where a naive algorithm is preferred, because
it is more important to keep the code comprehensible than to
go for maximum performance. "I know the linear search is
naive, but in this case the list typically only has half a
dozen items." Compare brute force.
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!"
4. A negative answer. "OK if I boot the server?" "NAK!"
NANA : //
[Usenet] The newsgroups news.admin.net-abuse.*, devoted to
fighting spam and network abuse. Each individual newsgroup is
often referred to by adding a letter to NANA. For example,
NANAU would refer to news.admin.net-abuse.usenet.
When spam began to be a serious problem around 1995, and a
loose network of anti-spammers formed to combat it, spammers
immediately accused them of being the backbone cabal, or the
Cabal reborn. Though this was not true, spam-fighters
ironically accepted the label and the tag line "There is No
Cabal" reappeared (later, and now commonly, abbreviated to
"TINC"). Nowadays "the Cabal" is generally understood to refer
to the NANA regulars.
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 (there's an
authorized transcription at
http://www.foresight.org/EOC/index.html). See also blue goo,
gray goo, nanobot.
narg
[Cambridge] Short for "Not A Real Gentleman", i.e. one who
excessively talks shop out of hours.
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. The original post is web-accessible at
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&selm=10195%40ksr.com.
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.
[very common]
1. A clever technique.
2. A brilliant practical joke, where neatness is correlated
with cleverness, harmlessness, and surprise value. Example:
the Caltech Rose Bowl card display switch (see Appendix A for
discussion). See also hack.
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 play games on a PC. The derived
noun neeping applies specifically to the long conversations
about computers that tend to develop in the corners at most
SF-convention parties (the term neepery is also in wide use).
Fandom has a related proverb to the effect that "Hacking is a
conversational black hole!".
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 (see geek). All these groups
overlap heavily and (where evidence is available) seem to
share characteristic hacker tropisms for science fiction,
music, and oriental food. The opposite tendency is neophobia.
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 geek.
The word itself appears to derive from the lines "And then,
just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And Bring Back an
It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo, / A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a
Seersucker, too!" in the Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo
(1950). (The spellings `nurd' and `gnurd' also used to be
current at MIT, where `nurd' is reported from as far back as
1957.) How it developed its mainstream meaning is unclear, but
sense 1 seems to have entered mass culture in the early 1970s
(there are reports that in the mid-1960s it meant roughly
"annoying misfit" without the connotation of intelligence.
An IEEE Spectrum article (4/95, page 16) once derived `nerd'
in its variant form `knurd' from the word `drunk' backwards,
but this bears all the hallmarks of a bogus folk etymology.
Apparently this etymology was folklore at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute around 1979.
Hackers developed sense 2 in self-defense perhaps ten years
later, and some actually wear "Nerd Pride" buttons, only half
as a joke. At MIT one can find not only buttons but (what
else?) pocket protectors bearing the slogan and the MIT seal.
nerd knob : n.
[Cisco] A command in a complex piece of software which is more
likely to be used by an extremely experienced user to tweak a
setting of one sort or another - a setting which the average
user may not even know exists. Nerd knobs tend to be toggles,
turning on or off a particular, specific, narrowly defined
behavior. Special case of knobs.
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.gods, net.goddesses (various charismatic net.women with
circles of on-line admirers), net.lurkers (see lurker),
net.person, net.parties (a synonym for boink, sense 2), and
many similar constructs. See also net.police.
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.godhood.
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.
netburp : n.
[IRC] When netlag gets really bad, and delays between servers
exceed a certain threshold, the IRC network effectively
becomes partitioned for a period of time, and large numbers of
people seem to be signing off at the same time and then
signing back on again when things get better. An instance of
this is called a netburp (or, sometimes, netsplit).
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". Compare link-dead.
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.
There is now an official site at http://www.nethack.org/. See
also moria, rogue, Angband.
netiquette : /net'ee-ket/ , /net'i-ket/ , n.
[Coined by Chuq von Rospach c.1983] [portmanteau, network +
etiquette] The conventions of politeness recognized on Usenet,
such as avoidance of cross-posting to inappropriate groups and
refraining from commercial pluggery outside the biz groups.
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.) Often shortened to just `lag'.
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."
Netscrape : n.
[sometimes elaborated to Netscrape Fornicator, also Nutscrape]
Standard name-of-insult for Netscape Navigator/Communicator,
Netscape's overweight Web browser. Compare Internet Exploiter.
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 the network; this used to include bang path
addresses but now always implies an Internet address). Net
addresses are often used in email text as a more concise
substitute for personal names; indeed, hackers may come to
know each other quite well by network names without ever
learning each others' `legal' monikers. Display of a network
address (e.g. on business cards) used to function as an
important hacker identification signal, like lodge pins among
Masons or tie-dyed T-shirts among Grateful Dead fans. In the
day of pervasive Internet this is less true, but you can still
be fairly sure that anyone with a network address handwritten
on his or her convention badge is a hacker.
network meltdown : n.
A state of complete network overload; the network equivalent
of thrashing. This may be induced by a Chernobyl packet. See
also broadcast storm, kamikaze packet.
Network meltdown is often a result of network designs that are
optimized for a steady state of moderate load and don't cope
well with the very jagged, bursty usage patterns of the real
world. One amusing instance of this is triggered by the
popular and very bloody shoot-'em-up game Doom on the PC. When
used in multiplayer mode over a network, the game uses
broadcast packets to inform other machines when bullets are
fired. This causes problems with weapons like the chain gun
which fire rapidly -- it can blast the network into a meltdown
state just as easily as it shreds opposing monsters.
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.
[very common; orig. from British public-school and military
slang variant of `new boy'] A Usenet neophyte. This term
surfaced in the newsgroup talk.bizarre but is now in wide use
(the combination "clueless newbie" is especially common).
Criteria for being considered a newbie vary wildly; a person
can be called a newbie in one newsgroup while remaining a
respected regular in another. The label newbie is sometimes
applied as a serious insult to a person who has been around
Usenet for a long time but who carefully hides all evidence of
having a clue. See B1FF; see also gnubie. Compare chainik,
luser.
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 group
alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork which originated as a birthday
joke for a Muppets fan, or any number of specialized abuse
groups named after particularly notorious flamers, e.g.,
alt.weemba.
newline : /n[y]oo'li:n/ , n.
1. [techspeak, primarily Unix] The ASCII LF character
(0001010), used under Unix as a text line terminator. Though
the term newline appears in ASCII standards, it never caught
on in the general computing world before Unix.
2. More generally, any magic character, character sequence, or
operation (like Pascal's writeln procedure) required to
terminate a text record or separate lines. See crlf.
NeWS : /nee'wis/ , /n[y]oo'is/ , /n[y]ooz/ , n.
[acronym; the `Network Window System'] The road not taken in
window systems, an elegant PostScript-based environment that
would almost certainly have won the standards war with X if it
hadn't been proprietary to Sun Microsystems. There is a lesson
here that too many software vendors haven't yet heeded. Many
hackers insist on the two-syllable pronunciations above as a
way of distinguishing NeWS from Usenet news (the netnews
software).
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, pr0n 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 lists for Internet
people with no netnews access, with postings to the group
automatically propagated to the list and vice versa. Some
moderated groups (especially those which are actually
gatewayed Internet mailing lists) are distributed as digests,
with groups of postings periodically collected into a single
large posting with an index.
Among the best-known are comp.lang.c (the C-language forum),
comp.arch (on computer architectures), comp.unix.wizards (for
Unix wizards), rec.arts.sf.written and siblings (for
science-fiction fans), and talk.politics.misc (miscellaneous
political discussions and flamage).
nick : n.
[IRC; very common] Short for nickname. On IRC, every user must
pick a nick, which is sometimes the same as the user's real
name or login name, but is often more fanciful. Compare
handle, screen name.
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. Other
maxims in the same vein include the law attributed to the
early British computer scientist Douglas Hartree: "The time
from now until the completion of the project tends to become
constant."
nipple mouse : n.
Var. clit mouse, clitoris Common term for the pointing device
used on IBM ThinkPads and a few other laptop computers. The
device, which sits between the `g' and `h' keys on the
keyboard, indeed resembles a rubber nipple intended to be
tweaked by a forefinger. Many hackers consider these superior
to the glide pads found on most laptops, which are harder to
control precisely.
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).
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.
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 entirely unlike X
Used ironically of things which are in fact almost entirely
unlike X, except for one feature which the speaker clearly
regards as insignificant. "That is not entirely unlike
cool...at least it's small." Comes directly from the
Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy scene in which the food
synthesizer on the starship Heart of Gold dispenses something
"almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea".
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 proof that they
are. NP is the set of Nondeterministic-Polynomial problems,
those that can be completed by a nondeterministic Turing
machine in an amount of time that is a polynomial function of
the size of the input; a solution for one NP-complete problem
would solve all the others. "Coding a BitBlt implementation to
perform correctly in every case is NP-annoying."
Note, however, that strictly speaking this usage is
misleading; there are plenty of easy problems in class NP.
NP-complete problems are hard not because they are in class
NP, but because they are the hardest problems in class NP.
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 used to think it was mythical but
believed in acting as though existed just in case. Since the
mid-1990s it has gradually become known that the NSA actually
does this, quite illegally, through its Echelon program.
The standard countermeasure is to put loaded phrases like
`KGB', `Uzi', `nuclear materials', `Palestine', `cocaine', and
`assassination' in their sig blocks in a (probably futile)
attempt to confuse and overload the creature. The GNU version
of EMACS actually has a command that randomly inserts a bunch
of insidious anarcho-verbiage into your edited text.
As far back as the 1970s there was a mainstream variant of
this myth involving a `Trunk Line Monitor', which supposedly
used speech recognition to extract words from telephone
trunks. This is much harder than noticing keywords in email,
and most of the people who originally propagated it had no
idea of then-current technology or the storage,
signal-processing, or speech recognition needs of such a
project. On the basis of mass-storage costs alone it would
have been cheaper to hire 50 high-school students and just let
them listen in.
Twenty years and several orders of technological magnitude
later, however, there are clear indications that the NSA has
actually deployed such filtering (again, very much against
U.S. law). In 2000, the FBI wants to get into this act with
its `Carnivore' surveillance system.
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 ISPs. 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 an extra weekend with the
installation disks." This usage is a recent innovation
reflecting the fact that most IBM-PC clones are now delivered
with an operating system pre-installed at the factory. Other
kinds of hardware are still normally delivered without OS, so
this term is particular to PC support groups.
nugry : /n[y]oo'gree/
[Usenet, 'newbie' + '-gry'] `. n. A newbie who posts a FAQ in
the rec.puzzles newsgroup, especially if it is a variant of
the notorious trick question: "Think of words ending in 'gry'.
Angry and hungry are two of them. There are three words in the
English language. What is the third word?" In the newsgroup,
the canonical answer is of course `nugry' itself. Plural is
nusgry /n[y]oos'gree/.
2. adj. Having the qualities of a nugry.
nuke : /n[y]ook/ , vt.
[common]
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; contrast 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 session
file?" "Nuke it."
3. Used of processes as well as files; nuke is a frequent
verbal alias for kill -9 on Unix.
4. On IBM PCs, a bug that results in fandango on core can
trash the operating system, including the FAT (the in-core
copy of the disk block chaining information). This can utterly
scramble attached disks, which are then said to have been
nuked. This term is also used of analogous lossages on
Macintoshes and other micros without memory protection.
number-crunching : n.
[common] Computations of a numerical nature, esp. those that
make extensive use of floating-point numbers. The only thing
Fortrash is good for. This term is in widespread informal use
outside hackerdom and even in mainstream slang, but has
additional hackish connotations: namely, that the computations
are mindless and involve massive use of brute force. This is
not always evil, esp. if it involves ray tracing or fractals
or some other use that makes pretty pictures, esp. if such
pictures can be used as screen backgrounds. See also crunch.
[74-12-25.png]
Hydrodynamic number-crunching.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 74-12-29)
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/ , nibble , n.
[from v. nibble by analogy with `bite' -> `byte'] Four bits;
one hex digit; a half-byte. Though `byte' is now techspeak,
this useful relative is still jargon. Compare byte; see also
bit. The more mundane spelling "nibble" is also commonly used.
Apparently the `nybble' spelling is uncommon in Commonwealth
Hackish, as British orthography would suggest the
pronunciation /ni:'bl/.
Following `bit', `byte' and `nybble' there have been quite a
few analogical attempts to construct unambiguous terms for bit
blocks of other sizes. All of these are strictly jargon, not
techspeak, and not very common jargon at that (most hackers
would recognize them in context but not use them
spontaneously). We collect them here for reference together
with the ambiguous techspeak terms `word', `half-word',
`double word', and `quad' or quad word; some (indicated) have
substantial information separate entries.
2 bits: crumb, quad, quarter, tayste, tydbit, morsel
4 bits: nybble
5 bits: nickle
10 bits: deckle
16 bits: playte, chawmp (on a 32-bit machine), word (on a 16-bit
machine), half-word (on a 32-bit machine).
18 bits: chawmp (on a 36-bit machine), half-word (on a 36-bit
machine)
32 bits: dynner, gawble (on a 32-bit machine), word (on a 32-bit
machine), longword (on a 16-bit machine).
36 bits: word (on a 36-bit machine)
48 bits: gawble (under circumstances that remain obscure)
64 bits: double word (on a 32-bit machine) quad (on a 16-bit machine)
128 bits: quad (on a 32-bit machine)
The fundamental motivation for most of these jargon terms
(aside from the normal hackerly enjoyment of punning wordplay)
is the extreme ambiguity of the term word and its derivatives.
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
* (Note: depends on being able to modify elements of argv[],
* which is not guaranteed by ANSI and often not possible.)
*/
main(v,c)char**c;{for(v[c++]="Hello, world!\n)";
(!!c)[*c]&&(v--||--c&&execlp(*c,*c,c[!!c]+!!c,!c));
**c=!c)write(!!*c,*c,!!**c);}
Here's another good one:
/*
* Program to compute an approximation of pi
* by Brian Westley, 1988
* (requires pcc macro concatenation; try gcc -traditional-cpp)
*/
#define _ -F<00||--F-OO--;
int F=00,OO=00;
main(){F_OO();printf("%1.3f\n",4.*-F/OO/OO);}F_OO()
{
_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_
}
Note that this program works by computing its own area. For
more digits, write a bigger program. See also hello world.
The IOCCC has an official home page at http://www.ioccc.org/.
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
2. 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, wedged.
This term is much older than computing, and is (uncommon)
slang elsewhere. A trolley is the small wheel that trolls, or
runs against, the heavy wire that carries the current to run a
streetcar. It's at the end of the long pole (the trolley pole)
that reaches from the roof of the streetcar to the overhead
line. When the trolley stops making contact with the wire
(from passing through a switch, going over bumpy track, or
whatever), the streetcar comes to a halt, (usually) without
crashing. The streetcar is then said to be off the trolley, or
off the wire. Later on, trolley came to mean the streetcar
itself. Since streetcars became common in the 1890s, the term
is more than 100 years old. Nowadays, trolleys are only seen
on historic streetcars, since modern streetcars use
pantographs to contact the wire.
off-by-one error : n.
[common] Exceedingly common error induced in many ways, such
as by starting at 0 when you should have started at 1 or
vice-versa, or by writing < N instead of <= N or vice-versa.
Also applied to giving something to the person next to the one
who should have gotten it. Often confounded with fencepost
error, which is properly a particular subtype of it.
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, not his tactics." However, the
traditional answer to the newbie question "What does ogg
mean?" is just "Pick up some armies and I'll show you."
2. In other games, to forcefully attack an opponent with the
expectation that the resources expended will be renewed faster
than the opponent will be able to regain his previous
advantage. Taken more seriously as a tactic since it has
gained a simple name.
3. To do anything forcefully, possibly without consideration
of the drain on future resources. "I guess I'd better go ogg
the problem set that's due tomorrow." "Whoops! I looked down
at the map for a sec and almost ogged that oncoming car."
-oid : suff.
[from Greek suffix -oid = in the image of]
1. Used as in mainstream slang English to indicate a poor
imitation, a counterfeit, or some otherwise slightly bogus
resemblance. Hackers will happily use it with all sorts of
non-Greco/Latin stem words that wouldn't keep company with it
in mainstream English. For example, "He's a nerdoid" means
that he superficially resembles a nerd but can't make the
grade; a modemoid might be a 300-baud box (Real Modems run at
28.8 or up); a computeroid might be any bitty box. The word
keyboid could be used to describe a chiclet keyboard, but
would have to be written; spoken, it would confuse the
listener as to the speaker's city of origin.
2. More specifically, an indicator for `resembling an android'
which in the past has been confined to science-fiction fans
and hackers. It too has recently (in 1991) started to go
mainstream (most notably in the term `trendoid' for victims of
terminal hipness). This is probably traceable to the
popularization of the term droid in Star Wars and its sequels.
(See also windoid.)
Coinages in both forms have been common in science fiction for
at least fifty years, and hackers (who are often SF fans) have
probably been making `-oid' jargon for almost that long
[though GLS and I can personally confirm only that they were
already common in the mid-1970s --ESR].
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 blocks attached to Jargon
File contributions of great archeological significance. This
is a term of insult in the second or third person but one of
pride in first person.
Old Testament : n.
[C programmers] The first edition of K&R, the sacred text
describing Classic C.
on the gripping hand
In the progression that starts "On the one hand..." and
continues "On the other hand..." mainstream English may add
"on the third hand..." even though most people don't have
three hands. Among hackers, it is just as likely to be "on the
gripping hand". This metaphor supplied the title of Larry
Niven & Jerry Pournelle's 1993 SF novel "The Gripping Hand"
which involved a species of hostile aliens with three arms
(the same species, in fact, referenced in juggling eggs). As
with TANSTAAFL and con, this usage became one of the
naturalized imports from SF fandom frequently observed among
hackers.
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 sysapes is said to
be two bananas and three grapes (another source claims it's
three bananas and one grape, but observes "However, this is
subject to local variations, cosmic rays and ISO"). At a
complication level any higher than that, one asks the
manufacturers to send someone around to check things.
See also Infinite-Monkey Theorem.
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{}.|T)/T<-iN
Here's a Perl program that prints primes:
perl -wle '(1 x $_) !~ /^(11+)\1+$/ && print while ++ $_'
In the Perl world this game is sometimes called Perl Golf
because the player with the fewest (key)strokes wins.
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 : //
[Usenet; common] Abbreviation for "original poster", the
originator of a particular thread.
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 source : n.
[common; also adj. open-source] Term coined in March 1998
following the Mozilla release to describe software distributed
in source under licenses guaranteeing anybody rights to freely
use, modify, and redistribute, the code. The intent was to be
able to sell the hackers' ways of doing software to industry
and the mainstream by avoiding the negative connotations (to
suits) of the term "free software". For discussion of the
follow-on tactics and their consequences, see the Open Source
Initiative site.
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; that which schedules tasks, allocates storage,
and presents a default interface to the user between
applications. The facilities an operating system provides and
its general design philosophy exert an extremely strong
influence on programming style and on the technical cultures
that grow up around its host machines. Hacker folklore has
been shaped primarily by the Unix, ITS, TOPS-10,
TOPS-20/TWENEX, WAITS, CP/M, MS-DOS, and Multics operating
systems (most importantly by ITS and Unix). See also
timesharing.
operator headspace
[common] More fully, "operator headspace error". Synonym for
pilot error -- a dumb move, especially one pulled by someone
who ought to know better. Often used reflexively.
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.
Oracle, the
The all-knowing, all-wise Internet Oracle rec.humor.oracle, or
one of the foreign language derivatives of same. Newbies
frequently confuse the Oracle with Oracle, a database vendor.
As a result, the unmoderated rec.humor.oracle.d is frequently
cross-posted to by the clueless, looking for advice on SQL. As
more than one person has said in similar situations, "Don't
people bother to look at the newsgroup description line
anymore?" (To which the standard response is, "Did people ever
read it in the first place?")
Orange Book : n.
The U.S. Government's (now obsolete) standards document
Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, DOD standard
5200.28-STD, December, 1985 which characterize secure
computing architectures and defines levels A1 (most secure)
through D (least). Modern Unixes are roughly C2. See also book
titles.
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, Burmese,
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
three years after introduction you could still count the major
apps shipping for it on the fingers of two hands -- in unary.
The 2.x versions were said to have improved somewhat, and
informed hackers rated them superior to Microsoft Windows (an
endorsement which, however, could easily be construed as
damning with faint praise). In the mid-1990s IBM put OS/2 on
life support, refraining from killing it outright purely for
internal political reasons; by 1999 the success of Linux had
effectively ended any possibility of a renaissance. See
monstrosity, cretinous, second-system effect.
OSS
Written-only acronym for "Open Source Software" (see open
source). This is a rather ugly TLA, and the principals in the
open-source movement don't use it, but it has (perhaps
inevitably) spread through the trade press like kudzu.
OT : //
[Usenet: common] Abbreviation for "off-topic". This is used to
respond to a question that is inappropriate for the newsgroup
that the questioner posted to. Often used in an HTML-style
modifier or with adverbs. See also TAN.
OTOH : //
[Usenet; very common] 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.
overclock : /oh'vr-klok'/ , vt.
To operate a CPU or other digital logic device at a rate
higher than it was designed for, under the assumption that the
manufacturer put some slop into the specification to account
for manufacturing tolerances. Overclocking something can
result in intermittent crashes, and can even burn things out,
since power dissipation is directly proportional to clock
frequency. People who make a hobby of this are sometimes
called "overclockers"; they are thrilled that they can run
their 450MHz CPU at 500MHz, even though they can only tell the
difference by running a benchmark program. See also case mod.
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."
[73-07-24.png]
Crunchly and the overflow bit.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-07-29)
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 thrashing at tasks, the next person to make a
request might be told "Overrun!" Compare firehose syndrome.
3. More loosely, may refer to a buffer overflow not
necessarily related to processing time (as in overrun screw).
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
heisenbugs 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.
owned
1. [cracker slang; often written "0wned"] Your condition when
your machine has been cracked by a root exploit, and the
attacker can do anything with it. This sense is occasionally
used by hackers.
2. [gamers, IRC, crackers] To be dominated, controlled,
mastered. For example, if you make a statement completely and
utterly false, and someone else corrects it in a way that
humiliates or removes you, you are said to "have been owned"
by that person. When referring to games, "I own0r UT GOTYE"
means that one has mastered Unreal Tournament, Game of the
Year Edition to such a level that even the hardest AI
characters are mere lunchmeat, and that no ordinary mortal
player would even receive a point in competition. There are
several spelling variants: 0wned, 0wn0r3d, even pwn0r3d.
Hackers do not use this sense.
P
P.O.D. : /P-O-D/
[rare; sometimes `POD' without the periods] Acronym for `Piece
Of Data' or `Plain Old Data' (as opposed to a code section, or
a section containing mixed code and data). The latter
expansion was in use by the C++ standards committee, for which
it indicated a struct or class which only contains data (as in
C), distinguished from one which has a constructor and member
functions. There are things which you can do with a P.O.D.
which you can't with a more general class.
packet over air
[common among backbone ISPs] The protocol notionally being
used by Internet data attempting to traverse a physical gap or
break in the network, such as might be caused by a
fiber-seeking backhoe. "I see why you're dropping packets. You
seem to have a packet over air problem."
padded cell : n.
Where you put lusers so they can't hurt anything. A program
that limits a luser to a carefully restricted subset of the
capabilities of the host system (for example, the 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.
paper-net : n.
Hackish way of referring to the postal service, analogizing it
to a very slow, low-reliability network. Usenet sig blocks
sometimes include a "Paper-Net:" header just before the
sender's postal address; common variants of this are
"Papernet" and "P-Net". Note that the standard netiquette
guidelines discourage this practice as a waste of bandwidth,
since netters are quite unlikely to casually use postal
addresses. Compare voice-net, snail-mail.
param : /p@-ram'/ , n.
[common] 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 memory hardware. It predates RAM; in fact,
this term is reported to have already have been in use in its
jargon sense back in the 1960s when magnetic cores ruled.
Parity errors can also afflict mass storage and serial
communication lines; this is more serious because not always
correctable.
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. (The original 1958 Parkinson's Law described the
structural tendency of bureaucracies to make work for
themselves.) It has been observed since the mid-1980s that the
memory usage of evolving systems tends to double roughly once
every 18 months. Fortunately, memory density available for
constant dollars also tends to about double once every 18
months (see Moore's Law); unfortunately, the laws of physics
guarantee that the latter cannot continue indefinitely.
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 : 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 many years of
improvement and could also stand as an indictment of many
other bondage-and-discipline languages. (The entire essay is
available at http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html.)
At the end of a summary of the case against Pascal, Kernighan
wrote:
9. There is no escape
This last point is perhaps the most important. The language is
inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape
its limitations. There are no casts to disable the type-checking
when necessary. There is no way to replace the defective run-time
environment with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler
that defines the "standard procedures". The language is closed.
People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal
trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But
each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look
like whatever language they really want. Extensions for separate
compilation, FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types, internal
static variables, initialization, octal numbers, bit operators,
etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but
destroy its portability to others.
I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond
its original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy language,
suitable for teaching but not for real programming.
Pascal has since been entirely displaced (mainly by C) from
the niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems
programming, and from its role as a teaching language by Java.
PascalCasing
The practice of marking all word boundaries in long
identifiers (such as ThisIsASampleVariable) (including the
first letter of the identifier) with uppercase. Constrasts
with camelCasing, in which the first character of the
identifier is left in lowercase (thisIsASampleVariable), and
with the traditional C style of short all-lower-case names
with internal word breaks marked by an underscore
(sample_var).
Where these terms are used, they usually go with advice to use
PascalCasing for public interfaces and camelCasing for private
ones. They may have originated at Microsoft, but are in more
general use in ECMA standards, among Java programmers, and
elsewhere.
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 r 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 doors or any way to penetrate security of IBM's
OS, so they made a site visit to an IBM office (remember,
these were official military types who were purportedly on
official business), swiped some IBM stationery, and created a
fake patch. The patch was actually the trapdoor they needed.
The patch was distributed at about the right time for an IBM
patch, had official stationery and all accompanying
documentation, and was dutifully installed. The installation
manager very shortly thereafter learned something about proper
procedures.
patch pumpkin : n.
[Perl hackers] A notional token passed around among the
members of a project. Possession of the patch pumpkin means
one has the exclusive authority to make changes on the
project's master source tree. The implicit assumption is that
pumpkin holder status is temporary and rotates periodically
among senior project members.
This term comes from the Perl development community, but has
been sighted elsewhere. It derives from a stuffed-toy pumpkin
that was passed around at a development shop years ago as the
access control for a shared backup-tape drive.
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 near-universal use of compilers
and interpreters has made this term rare; it is now primarily
historical outside IBM shops. See patch (sense 4), zap (sense
4), hook.
path : n.
1. A bang path or explicitly routed Internet address; a
node-by-node specification of a link between two machines.
Though these are now obsolete as a form of addressing, they
still show up in diagnostics and trace headers occasionally
(e.g. in NNTP headers).
2. [Unix] A filename, fully specified relative to the root
directory (as opposed to relative to the current directory;
the latter is sometimes called a relative path). This is also
called a pathname.
3. [Unix and MS-DOS/Windows] The search path, an environment
variable specifying the directories in which the shell
(COMMAND.COM, under MS-DOS) should look for commands. Other,
similar constructs abound under Unix (for example, the C
preprocessor has a search path it uses in looking for #include
files).
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.
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.
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, BLT, DDT, EXCH, HAKMEM, pop,
push. See also http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/.
PDP-11
Possibly the single most successful minicomputer design in
history, a favorite of hackers for many years, and the first
major Unix machine, The first PDP-11s (the 11/15 and 11/20)
shipped in 1970 from DEC; the last (11/93 and 11/94) in 1990.
Along the way, the 11 gave birth to the VAX, strongly
influenced the design of microprocessors such as the Motorola
6800 and Intel 386, and left a permanent imprint on the C
language (which has an odd preference for octal embedded in
its syntax because of the way PDP-11 machine instructions were
formatted). There is a history site.
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).
PEBKAC : /peb'kak/
[Abbrev., "Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair"] Used by
support people, particularly at call centers and help desks.
Not used with the public. Denotes pilot error as the cause of
the crash, especially stupid errors that even a luser could
figure out. Very derogatory. Usage: "Did you ever figure out
why that guy couldn't print?" "Yeah, he kept cancelling the
operation before it could finish. PEBKAC". See also ID10T.
Compare pilot error, UBD.
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 used to consist of peeking around memory, more
or less at random, to find the location where the system keeps
interesting stuff. Long (and variably accurate) lists of such
addresses for various computers circulated. The results of
pokes at these addresses may be highly useful, mildly amusing,
useless but neat, or (most likely) total lossage (see killer
poke).
Since a real operating system provides useful, higher-level
services for the tasks commonly performed with peeks and pokes
on micros, and real languages tend not to encourage low-level
memory groveling, a question like "How do I do a peek in C?"
is diagnostic of the newbie. (Of course, OS kernels often have
to do exactly this; a real kernel hacker would unhesitatingly,
if unportably, assign an absolute address to a pointer
variable and indirect through it.)
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.
Pentagram Pro : n.
A humorous corruption of "Pentium Pro", with a Satanic
reference, implying that the chip is inherently evil. Often
used with "666 MHz"; there is a T-shirt. See Pentium
Pentium : n.
The name given to Intel's P5 chip, the successor to the 80486.
The name was chosen because of difficulties Intel had in
trademarking a number. It suggests the number five (implying
586) while (according to Intel) conveying a meaning of
strength "like titanium". Among hackers, the plural is
frequently `pentia'. See also Pentagram Pro.
Intel did not stick to this convention when naming its P6
processor the Pentium Pro; many believe this is due to
difficulties in selling a chip with "hex" or "sex" in its
name. Successor chips have been called Pentium II, Pentium
III, and Pentium IV.
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 problems). "Of course
my program is correct, there is no need to test it." "Yes, I
can see there may be a problem here, but I'll never type rm -r
/ while in root mode."
Perl : /perl/ , n.
[Practical Extraction and Report Language, a.k.a.
Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister] An interpreted
language developed by Larry Wall (@email{<larry@wall.org>},
author of patch(1) and rn(1)). 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, generally consider it one of the languages of choice,
and it is by far the most widely used tool for making `live'
web pages via CGI. Perl has been described, in a parody of a
famous remark about lex(1), as the Swiss-Army chainsaw of Unix
programming. Though Perl is very useful, it would be a stretch
to describe it as pretty or elegant; people who like clean,
spare design generally prefer Python. See also Camel Book,
TMTOWTDI.
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
bill@random.com". 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.
[antonym of techspeak `optimizing compiler'] A compiler that
produces object code that is worse than the straightforward or
obvious hand translation. The implication is that the compiler
is actually trying to optimize the program, but through
excessive cleverness is doing the opposite. A few pessimizing
compilers have been written on purpose, however, as pranks or
burlesques.
peta- : /pe't@/
[SI] See quantifiers.
pffft : interj.
[IRC] A metamorphic expletive which can be used to convey
emotion, particularly shock or surprise, disgust or anger. The
amplitude of the reaction can be measured by counting
intermediary fs. For example:
<jrandom> someone stole my hotdog
<fred> pffft
<frodo> Cthulhu stole my hotdog
<joe> pffffffffffffft!
PFY : n.
[Usenet; common, originally from the BOFH mythos] Abbreviation
for Pimply-Faced Youth. A BOFH in training, esp. one
apprenticed to an elder BOFH aged in evil.
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 8PM lately, but I'm going to wrap
around to the day schedule by Friday." A person who is roughly
12 hours out of phase is sometimes said to be in night mode.
(The term day mode is also (but less frequently) used, meaning
you're working 9 to 5 (or, more likely, 10 to 6).) The act of
altering one's cycle is called changing phase; phase shifting
has also been recently reported from Caltech.
2. change phase the hard way: To stay awake for a very long
time in order to get into a different phase.
3. change phase the easy way: To stay asleep, etc. However,
some claim that either staying awake longer or sleeping longer
is easy, and that it is shortening your day or night that is
really hard (see wrap around). The `jet lag' that afflicts
travelers who cross many time-zone boundaries may be
attributed to two distinct causes: the strain of travel per
se, and the strain of changing phase. Hackers who suddenly
find that they must change phase drastically in a short period
of time, particularly the hard way, experience something very
like jet lag without traveling.
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 program bug that
really did depend on the phase of the moon. There was a little
subroutine that had traditionally been used in various
programs at MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon's
true phase. GLS incorporated this routine into a LISP program
that, when it wrote out a file, would print a timestamp line
almost 80 characters long. Very occasionally the first line of
the message would be too long and would overflow onto the next
line, and when the file was later read back in the program
would barf. The length of the first line depended on both the
precise date and time and the length of the phase
specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the bug
literally depended on the phase of the moon!
The first paper edition of the Jargon File (Steele-1983)
included an example of one of the timestamp lines that
exhibited this bug, but the typesetter `corrected' it. This
has since been described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug.
However, beware of assumptions. A few years ago, engineers of
CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) were baffled by
some errors in experiments conducted with the LEP particle
accelerator. As the formidable amount of data generated by
such devices is heavily processed by computers before being
seen by humans, many people suggested the software was somehow
sensitive to the phase of the moon. A few desperate engineers
discovered the truth; the error turned out to be the result of
a tiny change in the geometry of the 27km circumference ring,
physically caused by the deformation of the Earth by the
passage of the Moon! This story has entered physics folklore
as a Newtonian vengeance on particle physics and as an example
of the relevance of the simplest and oldest physical laws to
the most modern science.
phase-wrapping : n.
[MIT] Syn. wrap around, sense 2.
PHB : /P-H-B/
[Usenet; common; rarely spoken] Abbreviation, "Pointy-Haired
Boss". From the Dilbert character, the archetypal halfwitted
middle-management type. See also pointy-haired.
phreaker : /freek'r/ , n.
One who engages in phreaking. See also blue box.
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-tail
[radio hams] A short piece of cable with two connectors on
each end for converting between one connector type and
another. Common pig-tails are 9-to-25-pin serial-port
converters and cables to connect PCMCIA network cards to an
RJ-45 network cable.
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." Compare PEBKAC,
UBD, ID10T.
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 an acronym
for `Packet INternet Groper'). Occasionally used as a phone
greeting. See ACK, also ENQ.
2. vt. To verify the presence of.
3. vt. To get the attention of.
4. vt. To send a message to all members of a mailing list
requesting an ACK (in order to verify that everybody's
addresses are reachable). "We haven't heard much of anything
from Geoff, but he did respond with an ACK both times I pinged
jargon-friends."
5. n. A quantum packet of happiness. People who are very happy
tend to exude pings; furthermore, one can intentionally create
pings and aim them at a needy party (e.g., a depressed
person). This sense of ping may appear as an exclamation;
"Ping!" (I'm happy; I am emitting a quantum of happiness; I
have been struck by a quantum of happiness). The form
"pingfulness", which is used to describe people who exude
pings, also occurs. (In the standard abuse of language,
"pingfulness" can also be used as an exclamation, in which
case it's a much stronger exclamation than just "ping"!).
Oppose blargh.
The funniest use of `ping' to date was described in January
1991 by Steve Hayman on the Usenet group comp.sys.next. He was
trying to isolate a faulty cable segment on a TCP/IP Ethernet
hooked up to a NeXT machine, and got tired of having to run
back to his console after each cabling tweak to see if the
ping packets were getting through. So he used the
sound-recording feature on the NeXT, then wrote a script that
repeatedly invoked 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.
Ping O' Death : n.
A notorious exploit that (when first discovered) could be
easily used to crash a wide variety of machines by overrunning
size limits in their TCP/IP stacks. First revealed in late
1996. The open-source Unix community patched its systems to
remove the vulnerability within days or weeks, the
closed-source OS vendors generally took months. While the
difference in response times repeated a pattern familiar from
other security incidents, the accompanying glare of Web-fueled
publicity proved unusually embarrassing to the OS vendors and
so passed into history and myth. The term is now used to refer
to any nudge delivered by network wizards over the network
that causes bad things to happen on the system being nudged.
For the full story on the original exploit, see
http://www.insecure.org/sploits/ping-o-death.html. Compare
kamikaze packet and 'Chernobyl packet.'
ping storm : n.
A form of DoS attack consisting of a flood of ping requests
(normally used to check network conditions) designed to
disrupt the normal activity of a system. This act is sometimes
called ping lashing or ping flood. Compare mail storm,
broadcast storm.
pink contract
[spamfighters: from the color of the tinned meat] A contract
from an Internet service provider to a spammer exempting the
spammer from the usual terms of service prohibiting spamming.
Usually pink contracts come about because ISPs can charge the
spammer a great deal more than they would a normal client.
pink wire : n.
[from the pink PTFE wire used in military equipment] As blue
wire, but used in military applications.
2. vi. To add a pink wire to a board.
pipe : n.
[common] Idiomatically, one's connection to the Internet; in
context, the expansion "bit pipe" is understood. A "fat pipe"
is a line with T1 or higher capacity. A person with a 28.8
modem might be heard to complain "I need a bigger pipe".
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 crunching it.
Disparagingly used for `lossy' methods such as JPEG. The
theory, of course, is that these methods are only used on
photographic images in which minor loss-of-data is not visible
to the human eye. The term pixel sort implies distrust of this
theory. Compare bogo-sort.
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.
plaid screen : n.
[XEROX PARC] A `special effect' that occurs when certain kinds
of memory smashes overwrite the control blocks or image memory
of a bit-mapped display. The term "salt and pepper" may refer
to a different pattern of similar origin. Though the term as
coined at PARC refers to the result of an error, some of the X
demos induce plaid-screen effects deliberately as a display
hack.
plain-ASCII : /playn-as'kee/
Syn. flat-ASCII.
Plan 9 : n.
In the late 1980s, researchers at Bell Labs (especially Rob
Pike of Kernighan & Pike fame) got bored with the limitations
of UNIX and decided to reimplement the entire system. The
result was called Plan 9 in "the Bell Labs tradition of
selecting names that make marketeers wince." The developers
also wished to pay homage to the famous film, "Plan 9 From
Outer Space", considered by some to be the worst movie ever
made. The source is available for download under
almost-open-source terms. The developers and a small fan base
hang out at comp.os.plan9, where one can occasionally hear "If
you want UNIX, you know where to find it"
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.
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.
plug-and-pray : adj.,vi.
Parody of the techspeak term plug-and-play, describing a PC
peripheral card which is claimed to have no need for hardware
configuration via jumpers or DIP switches, and which should
work as soon as it is inserted in the PC. Unfortunately, even
the PCI bus is all too often not up to pulling this off
reliably, and people who have to do installation or
troubleshoot PCs soon find themselves longing for the jumpers
and switches.
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.
point-and-drool interface : n.
Parody of the techspeak term point-and-click interface,
describing a windows, icons, and mouse-based interface such as
is found on the Macintosh. The implication, of course, is that
such an interface is only suitable for idiots. See for the
rest of us, WIMP environment, Macintrash, drool-proof paper.
Also point-and-grunt interface.
pointy hat : n.
See wizard hat. This synonym specifically refers to the
wizards of Unseen University in Terry Pratchett's Discworld
series of humorous fantasies; these books are extremely
popular among hackers.
pointy-haired : adj.
[after the character in the Dilbert comic strip] Describes the
extreme form of the property that separates suits and
marketroids from hackers. Compare brain-dead; demented; see
PHB. Always applied to people, never to ideas. The plural form
is often used as a noun. "The pointy-haireds ordered me to use
Windows NT, but I set up a Linux server with Samba instead."
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.
ponytail : n.
1. A hairstyle in which long hair is held back so as to hang
down like a pony's tail.
2. A descriptive term for a man having a ponytail hairstyle,
or such character traits as might be associated with having a
ponytail, eg: effeminacy, narcissism, undue concern with
fashion etc.
3. A general term used by hackers for 'creatives': advertising
copywriters, graphic designers, video compositors, users
characterised by a preference for the Macintosh, recreational
drug use, and better sex lives than programmers.
4. A derogatory term for web designers and other persons
peripherally associated with IT projects, devoid of
programming skills and dismissed as being concerned with
visual presentation to the exclusion of actual technical
reality.
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. If a person says
he/she has popped something from his stack, that means he/she
has finally finished working on it and can now remove it from
the list of things hanging overhead.
2. When a discussion gets to a level of detail so deep that
the main point of the discussion is being lost, someone will
shout "Pop!", meaning "Get back up to a higher level!" The
shout is frequently accompanied by an upthrust arm with a
finger pointing to the ceiling.
3. [all-caps, as `POP'] Point of Presence, a bank of dial-in
lines allowing customers to make (local) calls into an ISP.
This is borderline techspeak.
poser : n.
[from French poseur] A wannabee; not hacker slang, but used
among crackers, phreaks and warez d00dz. Not as negative as
lamer or leech. Probably derives from a similar usage among
punk-rockers and metalheads, putting down those who "talk the
talk but don't walk the walk".
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.)
Postel's Prescription
[proposed] Several of the key Internet RFCs, especially 1122
and 791 contain a piece of advice due to Jon Postel, which is
most often stated as:
"Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you
send."
That is, a well-engineered implementation of any of the
Internet protocols should be willing to deal with marginal and
imperfectly-formed inputs, but should not assume that the
program on the other end (that is, the program dealing with
the well-engineered implementation's output) will be anything
other than rigid and inflexible, and perhaps even incomplete
or downright buggy.
This property is valuable because a network of programs
adhering to it will be much more robust in the presence of any
uncertainties in the protocol specifications, or any
individual implementor's failure to understand those
specifications perfectly. Though the policy does tend to
accommodate broken implementations it is held to more
important to get the communication flowing than to immediately
(but terminally) diagnose the broken implementations at the
expense of the people trying to use them.
The principle is a well-known one in the design of programs
that handle Internet wire protocols, especially network relays
and servers, and it is regularly applied by extension in any
situation where two or more separately-implemented pieces of
software are supposed to interoperate even though the various
implementors have never talked to each other and have
absolutely nothing whatsoever in common other than having all
read the same protocol specification. The principle travels
under several different names, including "the Internet credo",
"the IETF maxim", "the Internet Engineering Principle", and
"the liberal/conservative rule"; the [proposed] term "Postel'
Prescription" is a tribute to its inventor, the first RFC
editor and (until his untimely death) probably the single most
respected individual in the Internet engineering community.
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 network. Often, but not always, the same as the admin.
The Internet standard for electronic mail (RFC-822) requires
each machine to have a `postmaster' address; usually it is
aliased to this person.
PostScript : n.
A page description language, based on work originally done by
John Gaffney at Evans and Sutherland in 1976, evolving through
`JaM' (`John and Martin', Martin Newell) at XEROX PARC, and
finally implemented in its current form by John Warnock et al.
after he and Chuck Geschke founded Adobe Systems Incorporated
in 1982. PostScript gets its leverage by using a full
programming language, rather than a series of low-level escape
sequences, to describe an image to be printed on a laser
printer or other output device (in this it parallels EMACS,
which exploited a similar insight about editing tasks). It is
also noteworthy for implementing on-the fly rasterization,
from Bezier curve descriptions, of high-quality fonts at low
(e.g. 300 dpi) resolution (it was formerly believed that
hand-tuned bitmap fonts were required for this task). Hackers
consider PostScript to be among the most elegant hacks of all
time, and the combination of technical merits and widespread
availability has made PostScript the language of choice for
graphical output.
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 gronked state. See also Big Red Switch.
Compare Vulcan nerve pinch, bounce (sense 4), and boot, and
see the Some AI Koans (in Appendix A) about Tom Knight and the
novice.
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).
pr0n : //
[Usenet, IRC] Pornography. Originally this referred only to
Internet porn but since then it has expanded to refer to just
about any kind. The term comes from the warez kiddies tendency
to replace letters with numbers. At some point on IRC someone
mistyped, swapping the middle two characters, and the name
stuck. It then propagated over into mainstream hacker usage.
New versions of the Mozilla web browser internally refer to
the image library as "libpr0n". Compare filk, grilf, hing and
newsfroup.
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.
pred : //
[Usenet; orig. fr. the Island MUD via Oxford University]
Abbreviation for "predictable", used to signify or preempt
responses that are extremely predictable but have to be filled
in for the sake of form (the phrase is bracketed by
<pred>...</pred>). X-Pred headers in mail or news serve the
same end. Figuring out the connection between the X-Pred
tagline and the thread is part of the entertainment. For
example, it is said that any thread about taxation must
contain a reference to Raquel Welch, if only to stop other
people from mentioning her. This is allegedly due to a Monty
Python sketch where a character declares that he would tax
Raquel Welch, and he has a feeling she would tax him.
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 grinding
(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.
[TMRC; obs.] The select group of system managers responsible
for the operation and maintenance of a batch computer system.
On these computers, a user never had direct access to a
computer, but had to submit his/her data and programs to a
priest for execution. Results were returned days or even weeks
later.
prime time : n.
[from TV programming] Normal high-usage hours on a system or
network. Back in the days of big timesharing machines `prime
time' was when lots of people were competing for limited
cycles, usually the day shift. Avoidance of prime time was
traditionally given as a major reason for night mode hacking.
The term fell into disuse during the early PC era, but has
been revived to refer to times of day or evening at which the
Internet tends to be heavily loaded, making Web access slow.
The hackish tendency to late-night hacking runs has changed
not a bit.
print : v.
To output, even if to a screen. If a hacker says that a
program "printed a message", he means this; if he refers to
printing a file, he probably means it in the conventional
sense of writing to a hardcopy device (compounds like `print
job' and `printout', on the other hand, always refer to the
latter). This very common term is likely a holdover from the
days when printing terminals were the norm, perpetuated by
programming language constructs like C's printf(3). See senses
1 and 2 of tty.
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 spots
in it. This sense is often verbed. Some profiling modes report
units other than time (such as call counts) and/or report at
granularities other than per-routine, but the idea is similar.
3.[techspeak] A subset of a standard used for a particular
purpose. This sense confuses hackers who wander into the weird
world of ISO standards no end!
progasm : /proh'gaz-m/ , n.
[University of Wisconsin] The euphoria experienced upon the
completion of a program or other computer-related project.or
example, the rush you get when you finally run the code you've
been hacking for the past week and it works first time. (The
quality of the experience is directly proportional to the
complexity of the code and inversely proportional to the
amount of debugging it took to get the code working.) Compare
geekasm.
proggy : n.
1. Any computer program that is considered a full application.
2. Any computer program that is made up of or otherwise
contains proglets.
3. Any computer program that is large enough to be normally
distributed as an RPM or tarball.
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.
4. The least fun you can have with your clothes off.
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 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. Often used in the phrase
"proprietary crap".
3. Synonym for closed-source, e.g. software issued in binary
without source and under a restrictive license.
Since the coining of the term open source, many hackers have
made a conscious effort to distinguish between proprietary and
commercial software. It is possible for software to be
commercial (that is, intended to make a profit for the
producers) without being proprietary. The reverse is also
possible, for example in binary-only freeware.
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 unusable 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 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
number theory: a number that passes a certain kind of
"primality test" may be called a pseudoprime (all primes pass
any such test, but so do some composite numbers), and any
number that passes several is, in some sense, almost certainly
prime. The hacker backgammon usage stems from the idea that a
pseudoprime is almost as good as a prime: it will do the same
job unless you are unlucky.
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.
pumpkin holder : n.
See patch pumpkin.
pumpking : n.
Syn. for pumpkin holder; see patch pumpkin.
punched card :
[techspeak] (alt.: punch card) The signature medium of
computing's Stone Age, now obsolescent. The punched card
actually predated computers considerably, originating in 1801
as a control device for mechanical looms. The version patented
by Hollerith and used with mechanical tabulating machines in
the 1890 U.S. Census was a piece of cardboard about 90 mm by
215 mm. There is a widespread myth that it was designed to fit
in the currency trays used for that era's larger dollar bills,
but recent investigations have falsified this.
IBM (which originated as a tabulating-machine manufacturer)
married the punched card to computers, encoding binary
information as patterns of small rectangular holes; one
character per column, 80 columns per card. Other coding
schemes, sizes of card, and hole shapes were tried at various
times.
The 80-column width of most character terminals is a legacy of
the IBM punched card; so is the size of the quick-reference
cards distributed with many varieties of computers even today.
See chad, chad box, eighty-column mind, green card, dusty
deck, code grinder.
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."
5. To knock someone off an Internet or chat connection; a
punter thus, is a person or program that does this.
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. 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.
Python : /pi:'thon/
In the words of its author, "the other scripting language"
(other than Perl, that is). Python's design is notably clean,
elegant, and well thought through; it tends to attract the
sort of programmers who find Perl grubby and exiguous. Some
people revolt at its use of whitespace to define logical
structure by indentation, objecting that this harks back to
the horrible old fixed-field languages of the 1960s. Python's
relationship with Perl is rather like the BSD community's
relationship to Linux -- it's the smaller party in a (usually
friendly) rivalry, but the average quality of its developers
is generally conceded to be rather higher than in the larger
community it competes with. There's a Python resource page at
http://www.python.org. See also Guido, BDFL.
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 (Système International) conventions for scientific
measurement have dual uses. With units of time or things that
come in powers of 10, such as money, they retain their usual
meanings of multiplication by powers of 1000 = 10^3. But when
used with bytes or other things that naturally come in powers
of 2, they usually denote multiplication by powers of 1024 =
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 prefix for the appropriate power of
ten; the `binary' column lists jargon abbreviations and words
for the corresponding power of 2. The B-suffixed forms are
commonly used for byte quantities; the words `meg' and `gig'
are nouns that may (but do not always) pluralize with `s'.
prefix decimal binary pronunciation}
kilo- k K, KB, kay
mega- M M, MB, meg meg
giga- G G, GB, gig gig,jig
Confusingly, hackers often use K or M as though they were
suffix or numeric multipliers rather than a prefix; thus "2K
dollars", "2M of disk space". This is also true (though less
commonly) of G.
Note that the formal SI metric prefix for 1000 is `k'; some
use this strictly, reserving `K' for multiplication by 1024
(KB is thus `kilobytes').
K, M, and G used alone refer to quantities of bytes; thus, 64G
is 64 gigabytes and `a K' is a kilobyte (compare mainstream
use of `a G' as short for `a grand', that is, $1000). Whether
one pronounces `gig' with hard or soft `g' depends on what one
thinks the proper pronunciation of `giga-' is.
Confusing 1000 and 1024 (or other powers of 2 and 10 close in
magnitude) -- for example, describing a memory in units of
500K or 524K instead of 512K -- is a sure sign of the
marketroid. One example of this: it is common to refer to the
capacity of 3.5" floppies as `1.44 MB' In fact, this is a
completely bogus number. The correct size is 1440 KB, that is,
1440 * 1024 = 1474560 bytes. So the `mega' in `1.44 MB' is
compounded of two `kilos', one of which is 1024 and the other
of which is 1000. The correct number of megabytes would of
course be 1440 / 1024 = 1.40625. Alas, this fine point is
probably lost on the world forever. [1993 update: hacker
Morgan Burke has proposed, to general approval on Usenet, the
following additional prefixes:
groucho 10^-30
harpo 10^-27
harpi 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 suits in general), bogon sinks (such as
taxpayers and computers), and bogosity potential fields. Bogon
absorption, of course, causes human beings to behave
mindlessly and machines to fail (and may also cause both to
emit secondary bogons); however, the precise mechanics of the
bogon-computron interaction are not yet understood and remain
to be elucidated. Quantum bogodynamics is most often invoked
to explain the sharp increase in hardware and software
failures in the presence of suits; the latter emit bogons,
which the former absorb. See bogon, computron, suit, psyton.
Here is a representative QBD theory: The bogon is a boson
(integral spin, +1 or -1), and has zero rest mass. In this
respect it is very much like a photon. However, it has a much
greater momentum, thus explaining its destructive effect on
computer electronics and human nervous systems. The corollary
to this is that bogons also have tremendous inertia, and
therefore a bogon beam is deflected only with great
difficulty. When the bogon encounters its antiparticle, the
cluon, they mutually annihilate each other, releasing magic
smoke. Furthermore 1 Lenat = 1 mole (6.022E23) of bogons (see
microLenat).
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.
[common] Describes a crock put together under time or user
pressure. Used esp. when you want to convey that you think the
fast way might lead to trouble further down the road. "I can
have a quick-and-dirty fix in place tonight, but I'll have to
rewrite the whole module to solve the underlying design
problem." See also kluge.
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. (We ignore some variants of BASIC in which
a program consisting of a single empty string literal
reproduces itself trivially.) Here is one classic quine:
((lambda (x)
(list x (list (quote quote) x)))
(quote
(lambda (x)
(list x (list (quote quote) x)))))
This one works in LISP or Scheme. It's relatively easy to
write quines in other languages such as Postscript which
readily handle programs as data; much harder (and thus more
challenging!) in languages like C which do not. Here is a
classic C quine for ASCII machines:
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main()
{printf(f,34,f,34,10);}%c";
main(){printf(f,34,f,34,10);}
For excruciatingly exact quinishness, remove the interior line
breaks. Here is another elegant quine in ANSI C:
#define q(k)main(){return!puts(#k"\nq("#k")");}
q(#define q(k)main(){return!puts(#k"\nq("#k")");})
Some infamous Obfuscated C Contest entries have been quines
that reproduced in exotic ways. There is an amusing Quine Home
Page.
Quirk objection : interj.
[Named for Captain Gym Z. Quirk, the first to raise it.]
"Objection! Assumes organ not in evidence!" Used in
news.admin.net-abuse.email to point out that a comment assumes
the presence of something whose existence has not been proven,
such as a spammer's brain or gonads. This is not used to refer
to things that are definitely proven not to exist, such as a
spammer's ethics. It's applicable to enough postings there
that a poster wishing to raise the objection often need merely
say "ObQuirk!", an instance of the Ob- convention.
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
non-US-ASCII layouts or a space-cadet keyboard or APL
keyboard.
Historical note: The QWERTY layout is a fine example of a
fossil. It is sometimes said that it was designed to slow down
the typist, but this is wrong; it was designed to allow faster
typing -- under a constraint now long obsolete. In early
typewriters, fast typing using nearby type-bars jammed the
mechanism. So Sholes fiddled the layout to separate the
letters of many common digraphs (he did a far from perfect
job, though; `th', `tr', `ed', and `er', for example, each use
two nearby keys). Also, putting the letters of `typewriter' on
one line allowed it to be typed with particular speed and
accuracy for demos. The jamming problem was essentially solved
soon afterward by a suitable use of springs, but the keyboard
layout lives on.
The QWERTY keyboard has also spawned some unhelpful economic
myths about how technical standards get and stay established;
see http://www.reasonmag.com/9606/Fe.QWERTY.html.
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). These are now available via the
web. the term has also been commonly applied to the PostScript
reference set. Which books are meant by "the rainbow series"
unqualified is thus dependent on one's local technical
culture.
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.
11. [UK] Conversationally, a non sequitur or something
similarly out-of-the-blue. As in: "Stop being so random!" This
sense equates to `hatstand', taken from the Viz comic
character "Roger Irrelevant - He's completely Hatstand."
Random Number God
[rec.games.roguelike.angband; often abbreviated `RNG'] The
malign force which lurks behind the random number generator in
Angband (and by extension elsewhere). A dark god that demands
sacrifices and toys with its victims. "I just found a really
great item; I suppose the RNG is about to punish me..."
Apparently, Angband's random number generator occasionally
gets locked in a repetition, so you get something with a 3%
chance happening 8 times in a row. Improbable, but far too
common to be pure chance. Compare Shub-Internet.
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 also 23. This
may be Discordian in origin, or it may be related to some in-jokes
about 17 and "yellow pig" propagated by the mathematician Michael
Spivak.
23
Sacred number of Eris, Goddess of Discord (along with 17 and 5).
37
The most random two-digit number is 37, When groups of people are
polled to pick a "random number between 1 and 100", the most commonly
chosen number is 37.
42
The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and
Everything ("what is 6 times 9", correct in base 13). (This answer is
perhaps not completely fortuitous; in Kabbalism, the true unspeakable
name of God is said to have 42 characters.)
69
From the sexual act. This one was favored in MIT's ITS culture.
105
69 hex = 105 decimal, and 69 decimal = 105 octal.
666
In Christian mythology, the Number of the Beast.
For further enlightenment, study the Principia Discordia, The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Joy of Sex, and the
Christian Bible (Revelation 13:18). See also Discordianism or
consult your pineal gland. See also for values of.
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."
Despite the negative connotations of most jargon uses of this
term have, it is worth noting that randomness can actually be
a valuable resource, very useful for applications in
cryptography and elsewhere. Computers are so thoroughly
deterministic that they have a hard time generating
high-quality randomness, so hackers have sometimes felt the
need to built special-purpose contraptions for this purpose
alone. One well-known website offers random bits generated by
radioactive decay. Another derives random bits from images of
Lava Lite lamps. (Hackers invariably find the latter
hilarious. If you have to ask why, you'll never get it.)
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.
rasterbation : n.
[portmanteau: raster + masturbation] The gratuitous use of
computer-generated images and effects in movies and graphic
art which would have been better without them. Especially
employed as a term of abuse by Photoshop/GIMP users and
graphic artists.
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.
rathole
[from the English idiom "down a rathole" for a waste of money
or time] A technical subject that is known to be able to
absorb infinite amounts of discussion time without more than
an infinitesimal probability of arrival at a conclusion or
consensus. "That's a rathole" (or just "Rathole!") is
considered a pre-emptive bid to change the subject. The
difference between ratholes and religious issues is that a
holy war cannot be pre-empted in this way. Canonical examples
are XML namespaces and open-source licensing.
ratio site
[warez d00dz] An FTP site storing pirated files where one must
first upload something before being able to download. There is
a ratio, based on bytes or files count, between the uploads
and download. For instance, on a 2:1 site, to download a 4 Mb
file, one must first upload at least 2 Mb of files. The hotter
the contents of the server are, the smaller the ratio is. More
often than not, the server refuses uploads because its disk is
full, making it useless for downloading -- or the connection
magically breaks after one has uploaded a large amount of
files, just before the downloading phase begins. See also
banner site, leech mode.
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/ , Chinese ravs , n.
[primarily MIT/Boston usage] Jiao-zi (steamed or boiled) or
Guo-tie (pan-fried). A Chinese appetizer, known variously in
the plural as dumplings, pot stickers (the literal translation
of guo-tie), and (around Boston) `Peking Ravioli'. The term
rav is short for `ravioli', and among hackers always means the
Chinese kind rather than the Italian kind. Both consist of a
filling in a pasta shell, but the Chinese kind includes no
cheese, uses a thinner pasta, has a pork-vegetable filling
(good ones include Chinese chives), and is cooked differently,
either by steaming or frying. A rav or dumpling can be cooked
any way, but a potsticker is always the pan-fried kind (so
called because it sticks to the frying pot and has to be
scraped off). "Let's get hot-and-sour soup and three orders of
ravs." See also oriental food.
raw mode : n.
A mode that allows a program to transfer bits directly to or
from an I/O device (or, under bogus operating systems that
make a distinction, a disk file) without any processing,
abstraction, or interpretation by the operating system.
Compare rare mode, cooked mode. This is techspeak under Unix,
jargon elsewhere.
RBL : /R-B-L/
Abbreviation: "Realtime Blackhole List". A service that allows
people to blacklist sites for emitting spam, and makes the
blacklist available in real time to electronic-mail transport
programs that know how to use RBL so they can filter out mail
from those sites. Drastic (and controversial) but effective.
There is an RBL home page.
rc file : /R-C fi:l/ , n.
[Unix: from runcom files on the CTSS system 1962-63, via the
startup script /etc/rc] Script file containing startup
instructions for an application program (or an entire
operating system), usually a text file containing commands of
the sort that might have been invoked manually once the system
was running but are to be executed automatically each time the
system starts up. See also dot file, profile (sense 1).
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. In the Mac and PC
worlds, software is not usually distributed in source form,
and the README is more likely to contain user-oriented
material like last-minute documentation changes, error
workarounds, and restrictions. When asked, hackers invariably
relate the README convention to the famous scene in Lewis
Carroll's Alice's Adventures In Wonderland in which Alice
confronts magic munchies labeled "Eat Me" and "Drink Me".
The file may be named README, or READ.ME, or rarely ReadMe or
readme.txt or some other variant. The all-upper-case
spellings, however, are universal among Unix programmers. By
ancient tradition, real source files have all-lowercase names
and all-uppercase is reserved for metadata, comments, and
grafitti. This is functional; necause 'A' sorts before 'a' in
ASCII, the README will appear in directory listings before any
source file.
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 tuned
into a state of tenseness just short of rupture. Real
Programmers never use comments or write documentation: "If it
was hard to write", says the Real Programmer, "it should be
hard to understand." Real Programmers can make machines do
things that were never in their spec sheets; in fact, they are
seldom really happy unless doing so. A Real Programmer's code
can awe with its fiendish brilliance, even as its crockishness
appalls. Real Programmers live on junk food and coffee, hang
line-printer art on their walls, and terrify the crap out of
other programmers -- because someday, somebody else might have
to try to understand their code in order to change it. Their
successors generally consider it a Good Thing that there
aren't many Real Programmers around any more. For a famous
(and somewhat more positive) portrait of a Real Programmer,
see The Story of Mel' in Appendix A. The term itself was
popularized by a letter to the editor in the July 1983
Datamation titled Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal by Ed
Post, still circulating on Usenet and Internet in on-line
form.
Typing Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal into a web search
engine should turn up a copy.
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 canonical example. Such
applications often require special operating systems (because
everything else must take a back seat to response time) and
speed-tuned hardware.
2. adv. In jargon, refers to doing something while people are
watching or waiting. "I asked her how to find the calling
procedure's program counter on the stack and she came up with
an algorithm in real time."
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.
[cobol.png]
()
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.
reality-distortion field : n.
An expression used to describe the persuasive ability of
managers like Steve Jobs (the term originated at Apple in the
1980s to describe his peculiar charisma). Those close to these
managers become passionately committed to possibly insane
projects, without regard to the practicality of their
implementation or competitive forces in the marketplace.
reaper : n.
A prowler that removes files. A file removed in this way is
said to have been reaped.
recompile the world
The surprisingly large amount of work that needs to be done as
the result of any small but globally visible program change.
"The world" may mean the entirety of some huge program, or may
in theory refer to every program of a certain class in the
entire known universe. For instance, "Add one #define to
stdio.h, and you have to recompile the world." This means that
any minor change to the standard-I/O header file theoretically
mandates recompiling every C program in existence, even if
only to verify that the change didn't screw something else up.
In practice, you may not actually have to recompile the world,
but the implication is that some human cleverness is required
to figure out what parts can be safely left out.
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 original of the breed may
have been TINT ("TINT Is Not TECO"). The classic examples were
two MIT editors called EINE ("EINE Is Not EMACS") and ZWEI
("ZWEI Was EINE Initially"). More recently, there is a Scheme
compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and
GNU (q.v., sense 1) stands for "GNU's Not Unix!" -- and a
company with the name Cygnus, which expands to "Cygnus, Your
GNU Support" (though Cygnus people say this is a backronym).
See also mung, EMACS.
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{<henry@zoo.toronto.edu>}.
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.
rehi
[IRC, MUD] "Hello again." Very commonly used to greet people
upon returning to an IRC channel after channel hopping.
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.
relay rape : n.
The hijacking of a third party's unsecured mail server to
deliver spam.
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 worshiper noted
that a digital clock read 11:08, he or she would recite the
phrase "It is 11:08; ABS, ALPHABETIC, ARCSIN, ARCCOS, ARCTAN."
The last five words were the first five functions in the
appropriate chapter of the Algol manual; note the special
pronunciations /obz/ and /ark'sin/ rather than the more common
/ahbz/ and /ark'si:n/. Using an alarm clock to warn of 11:08's
arrival was considered harmful.
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, and compare rathole.
This term is a prime example of ha ha only serious. People
actually develop the most amazing and religiously intense
attachments to their tools, even when the tools are
intangible. The most constructive thing one can do when one
stumbles into the crossfire is mumble Get a life! and leave --
unless, of course, one's own unassailably rational and
obviously correct choices are being slammed.
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."
[This term is included because it is a good example of hackish
linguistic innovation in a field completely unrelated to
computers. The word retcon will probably spread through comics
fandom and lose its association with hackerdom within a couple
of years; for the record, it started here. --ESR]
[1993 update: some comics fans on the net now claim that
retcon was independently in use in comics fandom before
rec.arts.comics, and have citations from around 1981. In
lexicography, nothing is ever simple. --ESR]
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.catb.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 (since actually implemented; see Appendix A). See also
Infinite-Monkey Theorem.
The RFCs are most remarkable for how well they work -- they
frequently manage to have neither the ambiguities that are
usually rife in informal specifications, nor the
committee-perpetrated misfeatures that often haunt formal
standards, and they define a network that has grown to truly
worldwide proportions.
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.
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.
rip : v.
1. To extract the digital representation of a piece of music
from an audio CD. Software that does this is often called a
"CD ripper".
2. [Amiga hackers] To extract sound or graphics from a program
that they have been compiled/assembled into, or which
generates them at run-time. In the case of older Amiga games
this entails searching through memory shortly after a reboot.
This sense has been in use for many years and probably gave
rise to the (now more common) sense 1.
ripoff : n.
Synonym for chad, sense 1.
RL : // , n.
[MUD community] Real Life. "Firiss laughs in RL" means that
Firiss's player is laughing. Compare meatspace; oppose VR.
roach : vt.
[Bell Labs] To destroy, esp. of a data structure. Hardware
gets toasted or fried, software gets roached. Probably derived
from '70s and '80s drug slang; marijuana smokers used `roach'
to refer to the unsmokable remnant of a joint, and to `roach'
a joint was therefore to destroy it.
robocanceller : /roh-boh-kan'sel-@r/
A program that monitors Usenet feeds, attempting to detect and
eliminate spam by sending appropriate cancel messages.
Robocancellers may use the Breidbart Index as a trigger.
Programming them is not a game for amateurs; see ARMM. See
also Dave the Resurrector.
robot : n.
See bot.
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
1. [Unix] n. A Dungeons-and-Dragons-like game using character
graphics, written under BSD Unix and subsequently ported to
other Unix systems. The original BSD curses(3) screen-handling
package was hacked together by Ken Arnold primarily to support
games, and the development of rogue(6) popularized its use; it
has since become one of Unix's most important and heavily used
application libraries. Nethack, Omega, Larn, Angband, and an
entire subgenre of computer dungeon games (all known as
`roguelikes') all took off from the inspiration provided by
rogue(6); the popular Windows game Diablo, though
graphics-intensive, has very similar play logic. See also
nethack, moria, Angband.
2. [Usenet] adj. An ISP which permits net abuse (usually in
the form of spamming) by its customers, or which itself
engages in such activities. Rogue ISPs are sometimes subject
to IDPs or UDPs. Sometimes deliberately misspelled as "rouge".
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.
1. [Unix] The superuser account (with user name `root') that
ignores permission bits, user number 0 on a Unix system. The
term avatar is also used.
2. The top node of the system directory structure;
historically the home directory of the root user, but probably
named after the root of an (inverted) tree.
3. By extension, the privileged system-maintenance login on
any OS. See root mode, go root, see also wheel.
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.
rootkit : /root'kit/ , n.
[very common] A kit for getting root; an automated cracking
tool. What script kiddies use. The existence of rootkits mean
ths that large-scale attacks on insecure computers can be done
by people with no technical skills other than the ability to
follow directions. Rootkits designed to crack Microsoft
operating systems and webservers are especially common,
because their software is so porous and easy to crack.
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 spoilers. A major
advantage of rot13 over rot(N) for other N is that it is
self-inverse, so the same code can be used for encoding and
decoding. See also spoiler space, which has partly displaced
rot13 since non-Unix-based newsreaders became common.
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 ANSI standard pizza.
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] Abbreviation for `Read The Fucking Binary'. Used when
neither documentation nor source for the problem at hand
exists, and the only thing to do is use some debugger or
monitor and directly analyze the assembler or even the machine
code. "No source for the buggy port driver? Aaargh! I hate
proprietary operating systems. Time to RTFB."
Of the various RTF? forms, `RTFB' is the least pejorative
against anyone asking a question for which RTFB is the answer;
the anger here is directed at the absence of both source and
adequate documentation.
RTFM : /R-T-F-M/ , imp.
[Unix] Abbreviation for `Read The Fucking Manual'.
1. Used by gurus to brush off questions they consider trivial
or annoying. Compare Don't do that then!.
2. Used when reporting a problem to indicate that you aren't
just asking out of randomness. "No, I can't figure out how to
interface Unix to my toaster, and yes, I have RTFM." Unlike
sense 1, this use is considered polite. See also FM, RTFAQ,
RTFB, RTFS, STFW, RTM, all of which mutated from RTFM, and
compare UTSL.
RTFS : /R-T-F-S/
[Unix]
1. imp. Abbreviation for `Read The Fucking Source'. Variant
form of RTFM, used when the problem at hand is not necessarily
obvious and not answerable from the manuals -- or the manuals
are not yet written and maybe never will be. For even trickier
situations, see RTFB. Unlike RTFM, the anger inherent in RTFS
is not usually directed at the person asking the question, but
rather at the people who failed to provide adequate
documentation.
2. imp. `Read The Fucking Standard'; this oath can only be
used when the problem area (e.g., a language or operating
system interface) has actually been codified in a ratified
standards document. The existence of these standards documents
(and the technically inappropriate but politically mandated
compromises that they inevitably contain, and the impenetrable
legalese in which they are invariably written, and the
unbelievably tedious bureaucratic process by which they are
produced) can be unnerving to hackers, who are used to a
certain amount of ambiguity in the specifications of the
systems they use. (Hackers feel that such ambiguities are
acceptable as long as the Right Thing to do is obvious to any
thinking observer; sadly, this casual attitude towards
specifications becomes unworkable when a system becomes
popular in the Real World.) Since a hacker is likely to feel
that a standards document is both unnecessary and technically
deficient, the deprecation inherent in this term may be
directed as much against the standard as against the person
who ought to read it.
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 Z80 hackers. Equivalent to "Now, where was I?"
or used to end a conversational digression. See pop.
RTM : /R-T-M/
1. [Usenet: abbreviation for `Read The Manual'] Politer
variant of RTFM.
2. Robert Tappan Morris, perpetrator of the great Internet
worm of 1988 (see Great Worm); villain to many, naive hacker
gone wrong to a few. Morris claimed that the worm that brought
the Internet to its knees was a benign experiment that got out
of control as the result of a coding error. After the storm of
negative publicity that followed this blunder, Morris's
username on ITS was hacked from RTM to RTFM.
RTS : /R-T-S/ , imp.
Abbreviation for `Read The Screen'. Mainly used by hackers in
the microcomputer world. Refers to what one would like to tell
the suit one is forced to explain an extremely simple
application to. Particularly appropriate when the suit failed
to notice the `Press any key to continue' prompt, and wishes
to know `why won't it do anything'. Also seen as `RTFS' in
especially deserving cases.
rubber-hose cryptanalysis : n.
[sci.crypt newsgroup] The technique of breaking a code or
cipher by finding someone who has the key and applying a
rubber hose vigorously and repeatedly to the soles of that
luckless person's feet until the key is discovered. Shorthand
for any method of coercion: the originator of the term drily
noted that it "can take a surprisingly short time and is quite
computationally inexpensive" relative to other cryptanalysis
methods. Compare social engineering, brute force.
rude : 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.
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 Système' (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 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).
RPG picked us up at the San Francisco airport and drove us back to
Palo Alto (going logical south on route 101, parallel to El Camino
Bignum). Palo Alto is adjacent to Stanford University and about 40
miles south of San Francisco. We ate at The Good Earth, a `health
food' restaurant, very popular, the sort whose milkshakes all
contain honey and protein powder. JONL ordered such a shake -- the
waitress claimed the flavor of the day was "lalaberry". I still
have no idea what that might be, but it became a running joke. It
was the color of raspberry, and JONL said it tasted rather bitter.
I ate a better tostada there than I have ever had in a Mexican
restaurant.
After this we went to the local Uncle Gaylord's Old Fashioned Ice
Cream Parlor. They make ice cream fresh daily, in a variety of
intriguing flavors. It's a chain, and they have a slogan: "If you
don't live near an Uncle Gaylord's -- MOVE!" Also, Uncle Gaylord
(a real person) wages a constant battle to force big-name ice
cream makers to print their ingredients on the package (like air
and plastic and other non-natural garbage). JONL and I had first
discovered Uncle Gaylord's the previous August, when we had flown
to a computer-science conference in Berkeley, California, the
first time either of us had been on the West Coast. When not in
the conference sessions, we had spent our time wandering the
length of Telegraph Avenue, which (like Harvard Square in
Cambridge) was lined with picturesque street vendors and
interesting little shops. On that street we discovered Uncle
Gaylord's Berkeley store. The ice cream there was very good.
During that August visit JONL went absolutely bananas (so to
speak) over one particular flavor, ginger honey.
Therefore, after eating at The Good Earth -- indeed, after every
lunch and dinner and before bed during our April visit -- a trip
to Uncle Gaylord's (the one in Palo Alto) was mandatory. We had
arrived on a Wednesday, and by Thursday evening we had been there
at least four times. Each time, JONL would get ginger honey ice
cream, and proclaim to all bystanders that "Ginger was the spice
that drove the Europeans mad! That's why they sought a route to
the East! They used it to preserve their otherwise off-taste
meat." After the third or fourth repetition RPG and I were getting
a little tired of this spiel, and began to paraphrase him: "Wow!
Ginger! The spice that makes rotten meat taste good!" "Say! Why
don't we find some dog that's been run over and sat in the sun for
a week and put some ginger on it for dinner?!" "Right! With a
lalaberry shake!" And so on. This failed to faze JONL; he took it
in good humor, as long as we kept returning to Uncle Gaylord's. He
loves ginger honey ice cream.
Now RPG and his then-wife KBT (Kathy Tracy) were putting us up
(putting up with us?) in their home for our visit, so to thank
them JONL and I took them out to a nice French restaurant of their
choosing. I unadventurously chose the filet mignon, and KBT had je
ne sais quoi du jour, but RPG and JONL had lapin (rabbit).
(Waitress: "Oui, we have fresh rabbit, fresh today." RPG: "Well,
JONL, I guess we won't need any ginger!")
We finished the meal late, about 11PM, which is 2AM Boston time,
so JONL and I were rather droopy. But it wasn't yet midnight. Off
to Uncle Gaylord's!
Now the French restaurant was in Redwood City, north of Palo Alto.
In leaving Redwood City, we somehow got onto route 101 going north
instead of south. JONL and I wouldn't have known the difference
had RPG not mentioned it. We still knew very little of the local
geography. I did figure out, however, that we were headed in the
direction of Berkeley, and half-jokingly suggested that we
continue north and go to Uncle Gaylord's in Berkeley.
RPG said "Fine!" and we drove on for a while and talked. I was
drowsy, and JONL actually dropped off to sleep for 5 minutes. When
he awoke, RPG said, "Gee, JONL, you must have slept all the way
over the bridge!", referring to the one spanning San Francisco
Bay. Just then we came to a sign that said "University Avenue". I
mumbled something about working our way over to Telegraph Avenue;
RPG said "Right!" and maneuvered some more. Eventually we pulled
up in front of an Uncle Gaylord's.
Now, I hadn't really been paying attention because I was so
sleepy, and I didn't really understand what was happening until
RPG let me in on it a few moments later, but I was just alert
enough to notice that we had somehow come to the Palo Alto Uncle
Gaylord's after all.
JONL noticed the resemblance to the Palo Alto store, but hadn't
caught on. (The place is lit with red and yellow lights at night,
and looks much different from the way it does in daylight.) He
said, "This isn't the Uncle Gaylord's I went to in Berkeley! It
looked like a barn! But this place looks just like the one back in
Palo Alto!"
RPG deadpanned, "Well, this is the one I always come to when I'm
in Berkeley. They've got two in San Francisco, too. Remember,
they're a chain."
JONL accepted this bit of wisdom. And he was not totally ignorant
-- he knew perfectly well that University Avenue was in Berkeley,
not far from Telegraph Avenue. What he didn't know was that there
is a completely different University Avenue in Palo Alto.
JONL went up to the counter and asked for ginger honey. The guy at
the counter asked whether JONL would like to taste it first,
evidently their standard procedure with that flavor, as not too
many people like it.
JONL said, "I'm sure I like it. Just give me a cone." The guy
behind the counter insisted that JONL try just a taste first.
"Some people think it tastes like soap." JONL insisted, "Look, I
love ginger. I eat Chinese food. I eat raw ginger roots. I already
went through this hassle with the guy back in Palo Alto. I know I
like that flavor!"
At the words "back in Palo Alto" the guy behind the counter got a
very strange look on his face, but said nothing. KBT caught his
eye and winked. Through my stupor I still hadn't quite grasped
what was going on, and thought RPG was rolling on the floor
laughing and clutching his stomach just because JONL had launched
into his spiel ("makes rotten meat a dish for princes") for the
forty-third time. At this point, RPG clued me in fully.
RPG, KBT, and I retreated to a table, trying to stifle our
chuckles. JONL remained at the counter, talking about ice cream
with the guy b.t.c., comparing Uncle Gaylord's to other ice cream
shops and generally having a good old time.
At length the g.b.t.c.: said, "How's the ginger honey?" JONL said,
"Fine! I wonder what exactly is in it?" Now Uncle Gaylord
publishes all his recipes and even teaches classes on how to make
his ice cream at home. So the g.b.t.c.: got out the recipe, and he
and JONL pored over it for a while. But the g.b.t.c.: could
contain his curiosity no longer, and asked again, "You really like
that stuff, huh?" JONL said, "Yeah, I've been eating it constantly
back in Palo Alto for the past two days. In fact, I think this
batch is about as good as the cones I got back in Palo Alto!"
G.b.t.c.: looked him straight in the eye and said, "You're in Palo
Alto!"
JONL turned slowly around, and saw the three of us collapse in a
fit of giggles. He clapped a hand to his forehead and exclaimed,
"I've been hacked!"
[My spies on the West Coast inform me that there is a close
relative of the raspberry found out there called an
`ollalieberry' --ESR]
[Ironic footnote: the meme about ginger vs. rotting meat is an
urban legend. It's not borne out by an examination of medieval
recipes or period purchase records for spices, and appears
full-blown in the works of Samuel Pegge, a gourmand and
notorious flake case who originated numerous food myths. The
truth seems to be that ginger was used to cover not rot but
the extreme salt taste of meat packed in brine, which was the
best method available before refrigeration. --ESR]
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/ , /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 and Windows system calls (which ought
to require only a tiny fraction of a second to execute). Such
response time is a major incentive for programmers to write
programs that are not well-behaved.
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.
(also `sandbox, the')
1. Common term for the R&D department at many software and
computer companies (where hackers in commercial environments
are likely to be found). Half-derisive, but reflects the truth
that research is a form of creative play. Compare playpen.
2. Syn. link farm.
3. A controlled environment within which potentially dangerous
programs are run. Used esp. in reference to Java
implementations.
4. A checked-out copy of a source tree, on which one may
safely perform builds without interfereing with others.
sanity check : n.
[very common]
1. The act of checking a piece of code (or anything else,
e.g., a Usenet posting) for completely stupid mistakes.
Implies that the check is to make sure the author was sane
when it was written; e.g., if a piece of scientific software
relied on a particular formula and was giving unexpected
results, one might first look at the nesting of parentheses or
the coding of the formula, as a sanity check, before looking
at the more complex I/O or data structure manipulation
routines, much less the algorithm itself. Compare reality
check.
2. A run-time test, either validating input or ensuring that
the program hasn't screwed up internally (producing an
inconsistent value or state).
3. Conversationally, saying "sanity check" means you are
requesting a check of your assumptions. "Wait a minute, sanity
check, are we talking about the same Kevin here?"
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 mundanes.
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.
scary devil monastery : n.
Anagram frequently used to refer to the newsgroup
alt.sysadmin.recovery, which is populated with characters that
rather justify the reference.
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.
SCNR : abbrev
[common] Sorry, Could Not Resist. Normally used to
semi-apologize for an obvious wisecrack.
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.)
"Scram" was in origin a backronym for "Safety Cut Rope Axe
Man" coined by Enrico Fermi himself. The story goes that in
the earliest nuclear power experiments the engineers
recognized the possibility that the reactor wouldn't behave
exactly as predicted by their mathematical models.
Accordingly, they made sure that they had mechanisms in place
that would rapidly drop the control rods back into the
reactor. One mechanism took the form of `scram technicians'.
These individuals stood next to the ropes or cables that
raised and lowered the control rods. Equipped with axes or
cable-cutters, these technicians stood ready for the (literal)
`scram' command. If necessary, they would cut the cables, and
gravity would expeditiously return the control rods to the
reactor, thereby averting yet another kind of core dump.
Modern reactor control rods are held in place with claw-like
devices, held closed by current. SCRAM switches are circuit
breakers that immediately open the circuit to the rod arms,
resulting in the rapid insertion and subsequent bottoming of
the control rods.
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 scribbled on without
loss. Usually in the combining forms scratch memory, scratch
register, scratch disk, scratch tape, scratch volume. See also
scratch monkey.
2. [primarily IBM, also Commodore] vt. To delete (as in a
file).
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 field circus
engineer troubleshooting a crash on the program's VAX
inadvertently interfered with some custom hardware that was
wired to Mabel.
It is reported that, after calming down an understandably
irate customer sufficiently to ascertain the facts of the
matter, a DEC troubleshooter called up the field circus
manager responsible and asked him sweetly, "Can you swim?" Not
all the consequences to humans were so amusing; the sysop of
the machine in question was nearly thrown in jail at the
behest of certain clueless droids at the local `humane'
society. The moral is clear: When in doubt, always mount a
scratch monkey. [The actual incident occured in 1979 or 1980.
There is a version of this story, complete with reported
dialogue between one of the project people and DEC field
service, that has been circulating on Internet since 1986. It
is hilarious and mythic, but gets some facts wrong. For
example, it reports the machine as a PDP-11 and alleges that
Mabel's demise occurred when DEC PMed the machine. Earlier
versions of this entry were based on that story; this one has
been corrected from an interview with the hapless sysop.
--ESR]
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.
screen : n.
[Atari ST demoscene] One demoeffect or one screenful of them.
Probably comes from old Sierra-style adventures or
shoot-em-ups where one travels from one place to another one
screenful at a time.
screen name : n.
A handle sense
1. This term has been common among users of IRC, MUDs, and
commercial on-line services since the mid-1990s. Hackers
recognize the term but don't generally use it.
screen scraping : v.
The act of capturing data from a system or program by snooping
the contents of some display that is not actually intended for
data transport or inspection by programs. Around 1980 this
term referred to tricks like reading the display memory of a
smart terminal through its auxiliary port. Nowadays it often
refers to parsing the HTML in generated web pages with
programs designed to mine out particular patterns of content.
In either guise screen-scraping is an ugly, ad-hoc,
last-resort technique that is very likely to break on even
minor changes to the format of the data being snooped.
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.
script kiddies : pl.n.
1. [very common] The lowest form of cracker; script kiddies do
mischief with scripts and rootkits written by others, often
without understanding the exploit they are using. Used of
people with limited technical expertise using easy-to-operate,
pre-configured, and/or automated tools to conduct disruptive
activities against networked systems. Since most of these
tools are fairly well-known by the security community, the
adverse impact of such actions is usually minimal.
2. People who cannot program, but who create tacky HTML pages
by copying JavaScript routines from other tacky HTML pages.
More generally, a script kiddie writes (or more likely cuts
and pastes) code without either having or desiring to have a
mental model of what the code does; someone who thinks of code
as magical incantations and asks only "what do I need to type
to make this happen?"
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.
SCSI voodoo : /skuz'ee voo'doo/
[common among Mac users] SCSI interface hardware is
notoriously fickle of temperament. Often, the SCSI bus will
fail to work unless the cable order of devices is re-arranged,
SCSI termination is added or removed (sometimes
double-termination or no termination will fix the problem), or
particular devices are given particular SCSI IDs. The skills
needed to trick the naturally skittish demons of SCSI into
working are collectively known as SCSI voodoo. Compare magic,
deep magic, heavy wizardry, rain dance, cargo cult
programming, wave a dead chicken, voodoo programming.
While ordinary mortals frequently experience near-terminal
frustration when attempting to configure SCSI device chains,
it is said that a true master of this arcane art can (through
rituals involving chicken blood, ground rhino horn, hairs of a
virgin, eye of newt, etc.) hook up your personal computer with
three scanners, a Zip drive, an IDE hard drive, a home weather
station, a Smith-Corona typewriter, and the neighbor's garage
door.
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 grovelling with adb actually dug up the
underlying bug behind an instance of seventh-level damage! The
hacker who accomplished this near-superhuman feat was
presented with an award by his fellows.
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), but once the brief moments of panic
created by such events subside most vendors are all too
willing to turn over and go back to sleep. After all, actually
fixing the bugs would siphon off the resources needed to
implement the next user-interface frill on marketing's wish
list -- and besides, if they started fixing security bugs
customers might begin to expect it and imagine that their
warranties of merchantability gave them some sort of right to
a system with fewer holes in it than a shotgunned Swiss
cheese, and then where would we be?
Historical note: There are conflicting stories about the
origin of this term. It has been claimed that it was first
used in the Usenet newsgroup comp.sys.apollo during a campaign
to get HP/Apollo to fix security problems in its Unix-clone
Aegis/DomainOS (they didn't change a thing). ITS fans, on the
other hand, say it was coined years earlier in opposition to
the incredibly paranoid Multics people down the hall, for whom
security was everything. In the ITS culture it referred to (1)
the fact that by the time a tourist figured out how to make
trouble he'd generally gotten over the urge to make it,
because he felt part of the community; and (2)
(self-mockingly) the poor coverage of the documentation and
obscurity of many commands. One instance of deliberate
security through obscurity is recorded; the command to allow
patching the running ITS system (escape escape control-R)
echoed as $$^D. If you actually typed alt alt ^D, that set a
flag that would prevent patching the system even if you later
got it right.
SED : /S-E-D/ , n.
[TMRC, from `Light-Emitting Diode'] Smoke-emitting diode. A
friode that lost the war. See also LER. [Not to be confused
with sed(1), the Unix stream editor. --ESR]
See figure 1
Metaphorically, "Get stuffed." From the title of a famous
parody that can easily be found with a web search on this
phrase; figure 1, in fact, depicts the digitus impudicus.
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. [techspeak] An error in which a running program attempts to
access memory not allocated to it and core dumps with a
segmentation violation error. This is often caused by improper
usage of pointers in the source code, dereferencing a null
pointer, or (in C) inadvertently using a non-pointer variable
as a pointer. The classic example is:
int i;
scanf ("%d", i); /* should have used &i */
2. To lose a train of thought or a line of reasoning. Also
uttered as an exclamation at the point of befuddlement.
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/ , /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-automated : adj.
[US Geological Survey] A procedure that has yet to be
completely automated; it still requires a smidge of clueful
human interaction. Semi-automated programs usually come with
written-out operator instructions that are worth their weight
in gold -- without them, very nasty things can happen. At USGS
semi-automated programs are often referred to as
"semi-automated weapons".
semi-infinite : n.
See infinite.
senior bit : n.
[IBM; rare] Syn. meta bit.
September that never ended
All time since September 1993. One of the seasonal rhythms of
the Usenet used to be the annual September influx of clueless
newbies who, lacking any sense of netiquette, made a general
nuisance of themselves. This coincided with people starting
college, getting their first internet accounts, and plunging
in without bothering to learn what was acceptable. These
relatively small drafts of newbies could be assimilated within
a few months. But in September 1993, AOL users became able to
post to Usenet, nearly overwhelming the old-timers' capacity
to acculturate them; to those who nostalgically recall the
period before, this triggered an inexorable decline in the
quality of discussions on newsgroups. Syn. eternal September.
See also AOL!.
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
requestor/client runs. A particularly common term on the
Internet, which is rife with web servers, name servers, domain
servers, `news servers', finger servers, and the like.
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. The Data General instruction set also had SEX.
DEC's engineers nearly got a PDP-11 assembler that used the
SEX mnemonic out the door at one time, but (for once)
marketing wasn't asleep and forced a change. That wasn't the
last time this happened, either. The author of The Intel 8086
Primer, who was one of the original designers of the 8086,
noted that there was originally a SEX instruction on that
processor, too. He says that Intel management got cold feet
and decreed that it be changed, and thus the instruction was
renamed CBW and CWD (depending on what was being extended).
Amusingly, the Intel 8048 (the microcontroller used in IBM PC
keyboards) is also missing straight SEX but has logical-or and
logical-and instructions ORL and ANL.
The Motorola 6809, used in the Radio Shack Color Computer and
in U.K.'s `Dragon 32' personal computer, actually had an
official SEX instruction; the 6502 in the Apple II with which
it competed did not. British hackers thought this made perfect
mythic sense; after all, it was commonly observed, you could
(on some theoretical level) have sex with a dragon, but you
can't have sex with an apple.
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 flattened
representation of a set of one or more files, with the unique
property that it can be unflattened (the original files
restored) by feeding it through a standard Unix shell; thus, a
sharchive can be distributed to anyone running Unix, and no
special unpacking software is required. Sharchives are also
intriguing in that they are typically created by shell
scripts; the script that produces sharchives is thus a script
which produces self-unpacking scripts, which may themselves
contain scripts. Sharchives are also commonly referred to as
`shar files' after the name of the most common program for
generating them.
The downsides of sharchives are that they are an ideal venue
for Trojan horse attacks and that, for recipients not running
Unix, no simple un-sharchiving program is possible; sharchives
can and do make use of arbitrarily-powerful shell features.
For these reasons, this technique has largely fallen out of
use sine the mid-1990s.
Share and enjoy! : imp.
1. Commonly found at the end of software release announcements
and README files, this phrase indicates allegiance to the
hacker ethic of free information sharing (see hacker ethic,
sense 1).
2. The motto of the complaints division of Sirius Cybernetics
Corporation (the ultimate gaggle of incompetent suits) in
Douglas Adams's Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The irony
of using this as a cultural recognition signal appeals to
hackers.
shareware : /sheir'weir/ , n.
A kind of freeware for which the author requests some payment,
usually in the accompanying documentation files or in an
announcement made by the software itself. Such payment may or
may not buy additional support or functionality. See also
careware, charityware, crippleware, FRS, guiltware,
postcardware, and -ware; compare payware.
sharing violation
[From a file error common to several OSes] A response to
receiving information, typically of an excessively personal
nature, that you were probably happier not knowing. "You know
those little noises that Pat makes in bed?" "Whoa! Sharing
violation!" In contrast to the original file error, which
indicated that you were not being given data that you did
want.
shebang : /sh@-bang/ , n.
The character sequence "#!" that frequently begins executable
shell scripts under Unix. Probably derived from "shell bang"
under the influence of American slang "the whole shebang"
(everything, the works).
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 : n.
[orig. Multics techspeak, widely propagated via Unix]
1. [techspeak] The command interpreter used to pass commands
to an operating system; so called because it is the part of
the operating system that interfaces with the outside world.
2. More generally, any interface program that mediates access
to a special resource or server for convenience, efficiency,
or security reasons; for this meaning, the usage is usually a
shell around whatever. This sort of program is also called a
wrapper.
3. A skeleton program, created by hand or by another program
(like, say, a parser generator), which provides the necessary
incantations to set up some task and the control flow to drive
it (the term driver is sometimes used synonymously). The user
is meant to fill in whatever code is needed to get real work
done. This usage is common in the AI and Microsoft Windows
worlds, and confuses Unix hackers.
Historical note: Apparently, the original Multics shell (sense
1) was so called because it was a shell (sense 3); it ran user
programs not by starting up separate processes, but by
dynamically linking the programs into its own code, calling
them as subroutines, and then dynamically de-linking them on
return. The VMS command interpreter still does something very
like this.
shell out : vi.
[Unix] To spawn an interactive subshell from within a program
(e.g., a mailer or editor). "Bang foo runs foo in a subshell,
while bang alone shells out."
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 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.
1. A small piece of data inserted in order to achieve a
desired memory alignment or other addressing property. For
example, the PDP-11 Unix linker, in split I&D (instructions
and data) mode, inserts a two-byte shim at location 0 in data
space so that no data object will have an address of 0 (and be
confused with the C null pointer). See also loose bytes.
2. A type of small transparent image inserted into HTML
documents by certain WYSIWYG HTML editors, used to set the
spacing of elements meant to have a fixed positioning within a
TABLE or DIVision. Hackers who work on the HTML code of such
pages afterwards invariably curse these for their crocky
dependence on the particular spacing of original image file,
the editor that generated them, and the version of the browser
used to view them. Worse, they are a poorly designed kludge
which the advent of Cascading Style Sheets makes wholly
unnecessary; Any fool can plainly see that use of borders,
layers and positioned elements is the Right Thing (or would be
if adequate support for CSS were more common).
shitogram : /shit'oh-gram/ , n.
A really nasty piece of email. Compare nastygram, flame.
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.
1. Extra software dumped onto a CD-ROM or tape to fill up the
remaining space on the medium after the software distribution
it's intended to carry, but not integrated with the
distribution.
2. A slipshod compilation of software dumped onto a CD-ROM
without much care for organization or even usability.
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 it is the cause of all network slowdown. Often heard
as in "Freela casts a tac nuke at Shub-Internet for slowing
her down." (A forged response often follows along the lines
of: "Shub-Internet gulps down the tac nuke and burps
happily.") Also cursed by users of the Web, FTP and telnet
when the network lags. The dread name of Shub-Internet is
seldom spoken aloud, as it is said that repeating it three
times will cause the being to wake, deep within its lair
beneath the Pentagon. Compare Random Number God.
[January 1996: It develops that one of the computer
administrators in the basement of the Pentagon read this entry
and fell over laughing. As a result, you too can now poke
Shub-Internet by pinging shub-internet.ims.disa.mil. Compare
kremvax. --ESR]
[April 1999: shub-internet.ims.disa.mil is no more, alas. But
Shub-Internet lives, and even has a home page. --ESR]
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.
[Internet and Usenet; often written `.sig' there] Short for
`signature', used specifically to refer to the electronic
signature block that most Unix mail- and news-posting software
will automagically append to outgoing mail and news. The
composition of one's sig can be quite an art form, including
an ASCII logo, one's choice of witty sayings (see sig quote,
fool file), or even source code for small programs about which
the author wishes to make a statement; but many consider large
sigs a waste of bandwidth, and it has been observed that the
size of one's sig block is usually inversely proportional to
one's longevity and level of prestige on the net. See also
doubled sig, McQuary limit.
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.
sigmonster : n.
[common] A beast that randomly chooses one of a selection of
signatures for appending to mail and news messages. The
creature is most often mentioned directly when it has been in
particularly good form and selected a signature appropriate to
the topic being discussed; the construction "P.S.: good
sigmonster, have a cookie" is not uncommon. While the are
sigmonster programs floating around on the net, most hackers
who keep one use a silly little Perl or Python script that
they threw together in the middle of the night under the
influence of far too much caffeine.
signal-to-noise ratio : n.
[from analog electronics] Used by hackers in a generalization
of its technical meaning. `Signal' refers to useful
information conveyed by some communications medium, and
`noise' to anything else on that medium. Hence a low ratio
implies that it is not worth paying attention to the medium in
question. Figures for such metaphorical ratios are never
given. The term is most often applied to Usenet newsgroups
during flame wars. Compare bandwidth. See also coefficient of
X, lost in the noise.
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.
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 email, Usenet, or other forms
of electronic information interchange. The folklore interest
of sitenames stems from the creativity and humor they often
display. Interpreting a sitename is not unlike interpreting a
vanity license plate; one has to mentally unpack it, allowing
for mono-case and length restrictions and the lack of
whitespace. Hacker tradition deprecates dull,
institutional-sounding names in favor of punchy, humorous, and
clever coinages (except that it is considered appropriate for
the official public gateway machine of an organization to bear
the organization's name or acronym). Mythological references,
cartoon characters, animal names, and allusions to SF or
fantasy literature are probably the most popular sources for
sitenames (in roughly descending order). The obligatory
comment when discussing these is Harris's Lament: "All the
good ones are taken!" See also network address.
skrog : v.
Syn. scrog.
skulker : n.
Syn. prowler.
slab :
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.
slash : n.
Common name for the slant (`/', ASCII 0101111) character. See
ASCII for other synonyms.
slashdot effect : n.
1. Also spelled "/. effect"; what is said to have happened
when a website becoming virtually unreachable because too many
people are hitting it after the site was mentioned in an
interesting article on the popular Slashdot news service. The
term is quite widely used by /. readers, including variants
like "That site has been slashdotted again!"
2. In a perhaps inevitable generation, the term is being used
to describe any similar effect from being listed on a popular
site. This would better be described as a flash crowd. Differs
from a DoS attack in being unintentional.
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.
Slowlaris : /slo'-lahr-is/ , n.
[Usenet; poss. from the variety of prosimian called a "slow
loris". The variant `Slowlartus' is also common, related to
LART] Common hackish term for Solaris, Sun's System VR4
version of Unix that came out of the standardization wars of
the early 1990s. So named because especially on older
hardware, responsiveness was much less crisp than under the
preceding SunOS. Early releases of Solaris (that is, Solaris
2, as some marketroids at Sun retroactively rechristened SunOS
as Solaris 1) were quite buggy, and Sun was forced by customer
demand to support SunOS for quite some time. Newer versions
are acknowledged to be among the best commercial Unix variants
in 1998, but still lose single-processor benchmarks to Sparc
Linux. Compare HP-SUX, sun-stools.
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.
slurp the robot
See STR.
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 smartass terminal, but
rather a terminal you can educate." This illustrates a common
design problem: The attempt to make peripherals (or anything
else) intelligent sometimes results in finicky, rigid `special
features' that become just so much dead weight if you try to
use the device in any way the designer didn't anticipate.
Flexibility and programmability, on the other hand, are really
smart. Compare hook.
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 benchmarks (see also MIPS, machoflops). "They
claim their new box cranks 50 MIPS for under $5000, but didn't
specify the instruction mix -- sounds like smoke and mirrors
to me." The phrase, popularized by newspaper columnist Jimmy
Breslin c.1975, has been said to derive from carnie slang for
magic acts and `freak show' displays that depend on trompe
l'oeil effects, but also calls to mind the fierce Aztec god
Tezcatlipoca (lit. "Smoking Mirror") for whom the hearts of
huge numbers of human sacrificial victims were regularly cut
out. Upon hearing about a rigged demo or yet another round of
fantasy-based marketing promises, hackers often feel
analogously disheartened. See also stealth manager.
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 such a way
that every pixel struck has its color incremented. The lines
all have one endpoint in the middle of the screen; the other
endpoints are spaced one pixel apart around the perimeter of a
large square. The color map is then repeatedly rotated. This
results in a striking, rainbow-hued, shimmering four-leaf
clover. Gosper joked about keeping it hidden from the FDA (the
U.S.'s Food and Drug Administration) lest its hallucinogenic
properties cause it to be banned.
smoot : /smoot/ , n.
[MIT] A unit of length equal five feet seven inches. The
length of the Harvard Bridge in Boston is famously 364.4
smoots plus an ear (the ear is allegedly the width of the
earhole in the side of the football helmet the victim was
wearing when he was rolled over the bridge). This legend began
with a fraternity prank in 1958 during which the body length
of Oliver Smoot (class of '62) was actually used to measure
out that distance. It is commemorated by smoot marks that MIT
students repaint every few years; the tradition even survived
the demolition and rebuilding of the bridge in the late 1980s.
The Boston police have been known to use smoot markers to
indicate accident locations on the bridge. Apparently Smoot's
experience as a unit of measurement led to a life-long career;
he eventually became Chairman of the Board of the American
National Standards Institute.
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 a
SMOP."
2. Often used ironically by the intended victim when a
suggestion for a program is made which seems easy to the
suggester, but is obviously (to the victim) a lot of work.
Compare minor detail.
smurf : /smerf/ , n.
1. [from the soc.motss newsgroup on Usenet, after some
obnoxiously gooey cartoon characters] A newsgroup regular with
a habitual style that is irreverent, silly, and cute. Like
many other hackish terms for people, this one may be praise or
insult depending on who uses it. In general, being referred to
as a smurf is probably not going to make your day unless
you've previously adopted the label yourself in a spirit of
irony. Compare old fart.
2. [techspeak] A ping packet with a forged source address sent
to some other network's broadcast address. All the machines on
the destination network will send a ping response to the
forged source address (the victim). This both overloads the
victim's network and hides the location of the attacker.
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 suits
protect themselves by saying "I was misinformed!", and the
implementors are demoted or fired. Compare Conway's Law.
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.
(Note: Actual garden snails progress at about 10 meters per
hour, which is about 25-50 times slower than the U.K.'s Royal
Mail; comparable measurements for other countries have not yet
been made. More biologically apt terms might be "sloth-mail"
at 250 m/hr or "tortoise-mail" at 270 m/hr. See
http://www.newscientist.com/lastword/answers/789communication.
jsp?tp=communication for details.)
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 -- FTPing megs of stuff a day."
3. To acquire, with little concern for legal forms or
politesse (but not quite by stealing). "They were giving away
samples, so I snarfed a bunch of them."
4. Syn. for slurp. "This program starts by snarfing the entire
database into core, then...."
5. [GEnie] To spray food or programming fluids due to laughing
at the wrong moment. "I was drinking coffee, and when I read
your post I snarfed all over my desk." "If I keep reading this
topic, I think I'll have to snarf-proof my computer with a
keyboard condom." [This sense appears to be widespread among
mundane teenagers --ESR] The sound of snarfing is splork!.
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.
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'; in the
1990s, `Nike network' after a well-known sneaker brand.
sniff : v.,n.
1. To watch IP packets traversing a local network. Most often
in the phrase packet sniffer, a program for doing same. 2.
Synonym for poll.
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 crackers and samurai for cracking techniques
that rely on weaknesses in wetware rather than software; the
aim is to trick people into revealing passwords or other
information that compromises a target system's security.
Classic scams include phoning up a mark who has the required
information and posing as a field service tech or a fellow
employee with an urgent access problem. See also the tiger
team story in the patch entry, and rubber-hose cryptanalysis.
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.
sock puppet : n.
[Usenet: from the act of placing a sock over your hand and
talking to it and pretending it's talking back] In Usenet
parlance, a pseudo through which the puppeteer posts
follow-ups to their own original message to give the
appearance that a number of people support the views held in
the original message.
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.
software bloat : n.
The results of second-system effect or creeping featuritis.
Commonly cited examples include ls(1), X, BSD, 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 and free software.
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 messages can produce closely analogous
results, with a cascade of messages escaping to flood nearby
systems. By mid-1993 there had been at least two publicized
incidents of this kind.
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. Syn. code rot. See also link rot.
For example, owing to endemic shortsightedness in the design
of COBOL programs, a good number of them succumbed to software
rot when their 2-digit year counters underwent wrap around at
the beginning of the year 2000. Actually, related lossages
often afflict centenarians who have to deal with computer
software designed by unimaginative clods. One such incident
became the focus of a minor public flap in 1990, when a
gentleman born in 1889 applied for a driver's license renewal
in Raleigh, North Carolina. The new system refused to issue
the card, probably because with 2-digit years the ages 101 and
1 cannot be distinguished.
Historical note: Software rot in an even funnier sense than
the mythical one was a real problem on early research
computers (e.g., the R1; see grind crank). If a program that
depended on a peculiar instruction hadn't been run in quite a
while, the user might discover that the opcodes no longer did
the same things they once did. ("Hey, so-and-so needs an
instruction to do such-and-such. We can snarf this opcode,
right? No one uses it.") Another classic example of this
sprang from the time an MIT hacker found a simple way to
double the speed of the unconditional jump instruction on a
PDP-6, so he patched the hardware. Unfortunately, this broke
some fragile timing software in a music-playing program,
throwing its output out of tune. This was fixed by adding a
defensive initialization routine to compare the speed of a
timing loop with the real-time clock; in other words, it
figured out how fast the PDP-6 was that day, and corrected
appropriately.
Compare bit rot.
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 in the film Fantasia.] A bug in a protocol where,
under some circumstances, the receipt of a message causes
multiple messages to be sent, each of which, when received,
triggers the same bug. Used esp. of such behavior caused by
bounce message loops in email software. Compare broadcast
storm, network meltdown, software laser, ARMM.
source : n.
[very common] In reference to software, source is invariably
shorthand for `source code', the preferred human-readable and
human-modifiable form of the program. This is as opposed to
object code, the derived binary executable form of a program.
This shorthand readily takes derivative forms; one may speak
of "the sources of a system" or of "having source".
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 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 l
front-shift-L L
top-L <=> (front and shift are ignored)
And of course each of these might also be typed with any
combination of the control, meta, hyper, and super keys. On
this keyboard, you could type over 8000 different characters!
This allowed the user to type very complicated mathematical
text, and also to have thousands of single-character commands
at his disposal. 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.
[symbolics-keyboard.jpg]
The space-cadet keyboard
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.
[73-05-19.png]
An early space-cadet keyboard
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-05-20)
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 1962. In 1968-69, a descendant of the game
motivated Ken Thompson to build, in his spare time on a
scavenged PDP-7, the operating system that became Unix. Less
than nine years after that, SPACEWAR was commercialized as one
of the first video games; descendants are still feeping in
video arcades everywhere.
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-posting (e.g. any message which is
cross-posted to alt.rush-limbaugh and
alt.politics.homosexuality will almost inevitably spam both
groups). This overlaps with troll behavior; the latter more
specific term has become more common.
3. To send many identical or nearly-identical messages
separately to a large number of Usenet newsgroups. This is
more specifically called ECP, Excessive Cross-Posting. This is
one sure way to infuriate nearly everyone on the Net. See also
velveeta and jello.
4. To bombard a newsgroup with multiple copies of a message.
This is more specifically called EMP, Excessive Multi-Posting.
5. To mass-mail unrequested identical or nearly-identical
email messages, particularly those containing advertising.
Especially used when the mail addresses have been culled from
network traffic or databases without the consent of the
recipients. Synonyms include UCE, UBE. As a noun, `spam'
refers to the messages so sent.
6. Any large, annoying, quantity of output. For instance,
someone on IRC who walks away from their screen and comes back
to find 200 lines of text might say "Oh no, spam".
The later definitions have become much more prevalent as the
Internet has opened up to non-techies, and to most people
senses 3 4 and 5 are now primary. All three behaviors are
considered abuse of the net, and are almost universally
grounds for termination of the originator's email account or
network connection. In these senses the term `spam' has gone
mainstream, though without its original sense or folkloric
freight -- there is apparently a widespread myth among lusers
that "spamming" is what happens when you dump cans of Spam
into a revolving fan. Hormel, the makers of Spam, have
published a surprisingly enlightened position statement on the
Internet usage.
spam bait : n.
Email addresses included in, or comprising the entirety of, a
Usenet message so that spammers mining a newsgroup with an
address harvester will collect them. These addresses can be
people who have offended or annoyed the poster, or who are
included so that a spammer will spam an official, thereby
causing himself trouble. One particularly effective form of
spam bait is the address of a teergrube.
spamblock : /spam'blok/ , n.
[poss. by analogy to sunblock] Text inserted in an email
address to render it invalid and thus useless to spammers. For
example, the address `jrandom@hacker.org' might be transformed
to `jrandom@NOSPAM.hacker.org'. Adding spamblock to an address
is often referred to as munging it (see munge)-. This evasion
tactic depends on the fact that most spammers collect names
with some sort of address harvester on volumes too high to
de-mung by hand, but individual humans reading an email
message can readily spot and remove a spamblock in the From
address.
Note: This is not actually a very effective tactic, and may
already be passing out of use in early 1999 after about two
years of life. In both mail and news, it's essentially
impossible to keep a smart address harvester from mining out
the addresses in the message header and trace lines. Therefore
the only people who can be protected are third parties
mentioned by email address in the message -- not a common
enough case to interest spammers.
spamhaus : spam'hows , n.
Pejorative term for an internet service provider that permits
or even encourages spam mailings from its systems. The plural
is spamhausen. There is a web page devoted to tracking
spamhausen.
The most notorious of the spamhausen was Sanford Wallace's
Cyber Promotions Inc., shut down by a lawsuit on 16 October
1997. The anniversary of the shutdown is celebrated on Usenet
as Spam Freedom Day, but lesser imitators of the Spamford
still infest various murky corners of the net. Since
prosecution of spammers became routine under the junk-fax laws
and statues specifically targeting spam, spamhausen have
declined in relative importance; today, hit-and-run attacks by
spammers using relay rape and throwaway accounts on reputable
ISPs seem to account for most of the flow.
spamvertize : v.
To advertise using spam. Pejorative.
spangle : n.
[UK] The singular of bells and whistles. See also spungle.
spawn : n.,vi.
1. [techspeak] In Unix parlance, to create a child process
from within a process. Technically this is a `fork'; the term
`spawn' is a bit more general and is used for threads
(lightweight processes) as well as traditional heavyweight
processes.
2. In gaming, meant to indicate where (spawn-point) and when a
player comes to life (or re-spawns) after being killed.
Opposite of frag.
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 flags in the input of a batch program or
filter.
speed of light
The absolutely fastest a particular algorithm or application
could be implemented, given a set of constraints that are
assumed to be unchangeable. For example, "This would take 60
microseconds without any processing whatsoever, so that's the
speed of light." However, as one brilliant hacker once
commented: "Remember that the speed of light only is constant
if you can't redesign the universe."
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.
spider
The Web-walking part of a search engine that collects pages
for indexing in the search engine's database. Also called a
bot. The best-known spider is Scooter, the web-walker for the
Alta Vista search engine.
spider food : n.
Keywords embedded (usually invisibly) into a web page to
attract search engines (spiders). The intended result of
including spider food in one's web page is to insure that the
page appears high on the list of matching entries to a search
engine query. There are right and wrong ways to do this; the
right way is a discreet `meta keywords' tag, the wrong way is
to embed many repeats of a keyword in comments (and many
search engines now detect and ignore the latter).
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.
1. To defeat a selection mechanism by introducing a (sometimes
temporary) device that forces a specific result. The word is
used in several industries; telephone engineers refer to
spiking a relay by inserting a pin to hold the relay in either
the closed or open state, and railroaders refer to spiking a
track switch so that it cannot be moved. In programming
environments it normally refers to a temporary change, usually
for testing purposes (as opposed to a permanent change, which
would be called hardwired).
2. [borderline techspeak] A visible peak in an otherwise
rather constant graph (e.g. a sudden surge in line voltage, an
unexpected short "high" on a logical line in a circuit).
Hackers frequently use this for a sudden short increase in
some quantity such as system load or network traffic.
spin : vi.
Equivalent to buzz. More common among C and Unix programmers.
See the discussion of `spinlock' under busy-wait.
Spinning Pizza of Death : n.
[OS X; common] The quartered-circle busy indicator on Mac OS X
versions before 10.2, after which it was replaced by a sort of
rainbow pinwheel thingy. It was analogous to the Microsoft
Windows hourglass, but OS X 10.0's legendary slowness under
the Aqua toolkit made this term rather more evocative. See
Death, X of.
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. The feature key on a Mac (same as alt, sense 2).
4. obs. Name used by some people for the Stanford/ITS extended
ASCII (×) character. This character is also called blobby and
frob, among other names; it is sometimes used by
mathematicians as a notation for tensor product.
5. obs. Name for the semi-mythical Stanford extended ASCII (+)
character. See also ASCII.
splat out : v.
[Usenet; syn. disemvowel] To partially obscure a potentially
provocative word by substituting splat characters for some of
its letters (usually, but not always, the vowels). The purpose
is not to make the word unrecognizable but to make it a
mention rather than a use, so that no flamewar ensues. Words
often splatted out include N*z* (see Godwin's Law), k*bo* (see
KIBO, sense 2), *v*l*t**n (anywhere fundamentalists might be
lurking), *b*rt**n, and g*n c*ntr*l. Compare UN*X.
splork!
[Usenet; common] The sound of coffee (or other beverage)
hitting the monitor and/or keyboard after being forced out of
the mouth via the nose. It usually follows an unexpectedly
funny thing in a Usenet post. Compare snarf.
spod : n.
[UK]
1. A lower form of life found on talker systems and MUDs. The
spod has few friends in RL and uses talkers instead, finding
communication easier and preferable over the net. He has all
the negative traits of the computer geek without having any
interest in computers per se. Lacking any knowledge of or
interest in how networks work, and considering his access a
God-given right, he is a major irritant to sysadmins, clogging
up lines in order to reach new MUDs, following passed-on
instructions on how to sneak his way onto Internet ("Wow! It's
in America!") and complaining when he is not allowed to use
busy routes. A true spod will start any conversation with "Are
you male or female?" (and follow it up with "Got any good
numbers/IDs/passwords?") and will not talk to someone
physically present in the same terminal room until they log
onto the same machine that he is using and enter talk mode.
Compare newbie, tourist, weenie, twink, terminal junkie, warez
d00dz.
2. A backronym for "Sole Purpose, Obtain a Degree"; according
to some self-described spods, this term is used by indifferent
students to condemn their harder-working fellows. Compare the
defiant adoption of the term geek in the mid-1990s by people
who would previously have been stigmatized by it. Spods in the
positive sense are talker users who've accumulated a large
amount of spod time, that is, they spend a lot of time logged
in to that talker (for example, my spod time on Uberworld as
of this moment is 131 days, 15 hours and 20 minutes). Spods
are generally highly knowledgeable about talkers and
SGXStalker coding, as well as computers and the internet in
general.
3. [Glasgow University] An otherwise competent hacker who
spends way too much time on talker systems.
4. [obs.] An ordinary person; a random. This is the meaning
with which the term was coined, but the inventor informs us he
has himself accepted sense 1.
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, spoiler space or some
combination of these techniques.
spoiler space
[also spoiler spoo or spoiler protection] A screenful of blank
or spacer lines deliberately inserted in a message following a
spoiler warning, so the actual spoiler can't be seen without
hitting a key. Formfeeds used to be used for this, but are now
rare because so many people read news through Web interfaces
on which they have no good interpretation.
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.
spoof : vi.
To capture, alter, and retransmit a communication stream in a
way that misleads the recipient. As used by hackers, refers
especially to altering TCP/IP packet source addresses or other
packet-header data in order to masquerade as a trusted
machine. This term has become very widespread and is
borderline techspeak. Interestingly, it was already in use in
its modern sense more than a century ago among Victorian
teklegraphers; it shows up in Kipling.
spool : vi.
[from early IBM `Simultaneous Peripheral Operation On-Line',
but is widely thought to be a backronym] To send files to some
device or program (a spooler) that queues them up and does
something useful with them later. Without qualification, the
spooler is the print spooler controlling output of jobs to a
printer; but the term has been used in connection with other
peripherals (especially plotters and graphics devices) and
occasionally even for input devices. See also demon.
spool file : n.
Any file to which data is spooled to await the next stage of
processing. Especially used in circumstances where spooling
the data copes with a mismatch between speeds in two devices
or pieces of software. For example, when you send mail under
Unix, it's typically copied to a spool file to await a
transport demon's attentions. This is borderline techspeak.
sporgery
[portmanteau of `spam' or `spew' and `forgery'. Massive floods
of forged articles intended to disrupt a newsgroup. Typically
these have reasonable-looking headers but complete gibberish
for content, making the legitimate articles too difficult to
find. This tactic has been most notoriously used by the Church
of Scientology to disrupt discussion on the newsgroup
alt.religion.scientology, but is unfortunately not by any
means confined to that group.
sport death : n.
[MIT] The masochistic extreme of hacking, where the body and
mind are pushed until their limits are reached, and the body
is barely able to support the mind. Then, once your extremes
are reached, you push as far beyond that point as you can, far
beyond normal notions of all-nighters and caffeine diets.
spungle : n.
[Durham, UK; portmanteau, spangle + bungle] A spangle of no
actual usefulness. Example: Roger the Bent Paperclip in
Microsoft Word '98. A spungle's only virtue is that it looks
pretty, unless you find creeping featurism ugly.
spyware : n.
1. Software which, when installed by a user insufficiently
enlightened to avoid it, enables third parties to snoop the
user's hard drive or monitor their network transactions.
Though the term seems to have entered use in the late 1990s,
it achieved real popularity as applied to Microsoft Windows
XP. Some back door features in XP permit Microsoft to (for
example) covertly scan your disk directories for the names of
files it might deem to be warez.
2. Systems for spying on email and web traffic, such as the
FBI's Carnivore.
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.
(The Art of Computer Programming, second edition, vol. 1, p.
236) says:
Many people who realized the importance of stacks and queues
independently have given other names to these structures: stacks
have been called push-down lists, reversion storages, cellars,
nesting stores, piles, last-in-first-out ("LIFO") lists, and even
yo-yo lists!
The term "stack" was originally coined by Edsger Dijkstra, who
was quite proud of it.
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.
Stanford Bunny
The successor of the Utah Teapot. The model is of a chocolate
Easter bunny consisting of about 5000 polygons. It is small by
2002 standards, but is more illustrative than the teapot of of
techniques such as surface radiance (e.g. radiosity) and
self-reflection. There is a history page. Compare lenna.
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 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.
steved : adj.,v. , /steevd/
[Apple employees and users] Terminated, said of a development
project. Originated after Steven P. Jobs returned to Apple as
acting CEO in 1997. Jobs immediated axed several development
projects, including OpenDoc and Newton that had been launched
by John Sculley, the man who had ousted Jobs in the mid 1980s.
Now any project shut down at Apple and often at any large firm
connected with Apple may be said to have gotten steved. It is
usually spelled lowercase despite the origin. It is almost
always past-tense and used quasi-adjectivally.
STFW : imp. , /S-T-F-W/
[Usenet] Common abbreviation for "Search The Fucking Web", a
suggestion that what you're asking for is a query better
handled by a search engine than a human being. Usage is common
and exactly parallel to both senses of RTFM.
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.
[76-05-01.png]
How things weren't in the Stone Age.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-07-18)
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
dinosaurs. Sometimes used for the entire period up to 1960--61
(see Iron Age); however, it is funnier and more descriptive to
characterize the latter period in terms of a `Bronze Age' era
of transistor-logic, pre-ferrite-core machines with drum or
CRT mass storage (as opposed to just mercury delay lines
and/or relays). See also Iron Age.
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 swapped
in.
STR
Spot the reference. Used in scary devil monastery to mark the
witticism one just uttered as a quote from some work of art or
literature, the more obscure the better. Those who know where
the reference comes from reply in the form "You are
$CHARACTER, and you owe me $ITEM", where $CHARACTER is a
character from the story being referenced and $ITEM is
something associated with that character. This acronym is
never actually expanded to its proper meaning in the
newsgroup; posters instead use obscure expansions, the most
common being "slurp the robot", leading to comments like "I
pulled my hair out, but couldn't figure out which robot you're
slurping".
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 suits who employ them; succinctly
expresses an attitude at least as common, though usually
better disguised, among other subcultures of hackers. There
may be intended reference here to an SF story originally
published in 1952 but much anthologized since, Mark Clifton's
Star, Bright. In it, a super-genius child classifies humans
into a very few `Brights' like herself, a huge majority of
`Stupids', and a minority of `Tweens', the merely ordinary
geniuses.
Sturgeon's Law : prov.
"Ninety percent of everything is crud". Derived from a quote
by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who once said,
"Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of
everything is crud." Sturgeon himself called this "Sturgeon's
Revelation", and it first appeared in the March 1958 issue of
Venture Science Fiction; he gave Sturgeon's Law as "Nothing is
always absolutely so." Oddly, when Sturgeon's Revelation is
cited, the final word is almost invariably changed to `crap'.
Compare Hanlon's Razor, Ninety-Ninety Rule. Though this maxim
originated in SF fandom, most hackers recognize it and are all
too aware of its truth.
sucking mud : adj.
[Applied Data Research] (also pumping mud) Crashed or wedged.
Usually said of a machine that provides some service to a
network, such as a file server. This Dallas regionalism
derives from the East Texas oilfield lament, "Shut 'er down,
Ma, she's a-suckin' mud". Often used as a query. "We are going
to reconfigure the network, are you ready to suck mud?"
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 pointy-haired, burble, management,
Stupids, SNAFU principle, PHB, and brain-damaged.
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'."
Sun : n.
Sun Microsystems. Hackers remember that the name was
originally an acronym, Stanford University Network. Sun
started out around 1980 with some hardware hackers (mainly)
from Stanford talking to some software hackers (mainly) from
UC Berkeley; Sun's original technology concept married a
clever board design based on the Motorola 68000 to BSD Unix.
Sun went on to lead the workstation industry through the
1980s, and for years afterwards remained an engineering-driven
company and a good place for hackers to work. Though Sun
drifted away from its techie origins after 1990 and has since
made some strategic moves that disappointed and annoyed many
hackers (especially by maintaining proprietary control of Java
and rejecting Linux), it's still considered within the family
in much the same way DEC was in the 1970s and early 1980s.
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 (some claim) 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 têete-à-têete
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.
Hackers adopted this term early, but many have stopped using
it since it went completely mainstream around 1995. The
passive, couch-potato connotations that go with TV channel
surfing were never pleasant, and hearing non-hackers wax
enthusiastic about "surfing the net" tends to make hackers
feel a bit as though their home is being overrun by ignorami.
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.
Swiss-Army chainsaw
In early Unix days, a well-known technical paper analogized
the lexical analyzer generator lex(1) to a Swiss-army knife;
this was a comment on the remarkable variety of more general
uses discovered for a program originally designed as a
special-purpose code generator for writing compilers. Two
decades later, well-known hacker Henry Spencer described the
Perl scripting language as a "Swiss-Army chainsaw", intending
to convey his evaluation of the language as exceedingly
powerful but ugly and noisy and prone to belch noxious fumes.
This had two results: (1) Perl fans adopted the epithet as a
badge of pride, and (2) it entered more general usage to
describe software that is highly versatile but distressingly
inelegant.
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/ , 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, but which do not
affect the expressiveness of the formalism (compare chrome).
Used esp. when there is an obvious and trivial translation of
the `sugar' feature into other constructs already present in
the notation. C's a[i] notation is syntactic sugar for *(a +
i). "Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon." -- Alan
Perlis.
The variants syntactic saccharin and syntactic syrup are also
recorded. These denote something even more gratuitous, in that
syntactic sugar serves a purpose (making something more
acceptable to humans), but syntactic saccharin or syrup serve
no purpose at all. Compare candygrammar, syntactic salt.
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
FodoNet board, 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)
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.
T
systems jock : n.
See jock, sense 2.
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 and some other OSes that allows
two or more logged-in users to set up a real-time on-line
conversation. It combines the immediacy of talking with all
the precision (and verbosity) that written language entails.
It is difficult to communicate inflection, though conventions
have arisen for some of these (see the section on writing
style in the Prependices for details).
Talk mode has a special set of jargon words, used to save
typing, which are not used orally. Some of these are identical
to (and probably derived from) Morse-code jargon used by
ham-radio amateurs since the 1920s.
AFAIAC as far as I am concerned
AFAIK as far as I know
BCNU be seeing you
BTW by the way
BYE? are you ready to unlink? (this is the standard way to end a
talk-mode conversation; the other person types BYE to confirm, or
else continues the conversation)
CUL see you later
ENQ? are you busy? (expects ACK or NAK in return)
FOO? are you there? (often used on unexpected links, meaning also
"Sorry if I butted in &ellipsis;" (linker) or "What's up?" (linkee))
FWIW for what it's worth
FYI for your information
FYA for your amusement
GA go ahead (used when two people have tried to type simultaneously;
this cedes the right to type to the other)
GRMBL grumble (expresses disquiet or disagreement)
HELLOP hello? (an instance of the `-P' convention)
IIRC if I recall correctly
JAM just a minute (equivalent to SEC.... )
MIN same as JAM
NIL no (see NIL)
NP no problem
O over to you
OO over and out
/ another form of "over to you" (from x/y as "x over y")
\ lambda (used in discussing LISPy things)
OBTW oh, by the way
OTOH on the other hand
R U THERE? are you there?
SEC wait a second (sometimes written SEC... )
SYN Are you busy? (expects ACK, SYN|ACK, or RST in return; this is
modeled on the TCP/IP handshake sequence)
T yes (see the main entry for T)
TNX thanks
TNX 1.0E6 thanks a million (humorous)
TNXE6 another form of "thanks a million"
TTBOMK to the best of my knowledge
WRT with regard to, or with respect to.
WTF the universal interrogative particle; WTF knows what it means?
WTH what the hell?
<double newline> When the typing party has finished, he/she types two
newlines to signal that he/she is done; this leaves a blank line
between 'speeches' in the conversation, making it easier to reread
the preceding text.
YHTBT You Had To Be There. Used of a situation which loses
significant meaning in the telling, usually because it's difficult to
convey tone and timing.
<name>: When three or more terminals are linked, it is conventional
for each typist to prepend his/her login name or handle and a colon
(or a hyphen) to each line to indicate who is typing (some
conferencing facilities do this automatically). The login name is
often shortened to a unique prefix (possibly a single letter) during
a very long conversation.
/\/\/\ A giggle or chuckle. On a MUD, this usually means 'earthquake
fault'.
<g> grin
<gd&r> grinning, ducking, and running
BBL be back later
BRB be right back
HHOJ ha ha only joking
HHOK ha ha only kidding
HHOS ha ha only serious
IMHO in my humble opinion (see IMHO)
LOL laughing out loud
NHOH Never Heard of Him/Her (often used in initgame)
ROTF rolling on the floor
ROTFL rolling on the floor laughing
AFK away from keyboard
b4 before
CU l8tr see you later
MORF male or female?
TTFN ta-ta for now
TTYL talk to you later
OIC oh, I see
rehi hello again
Most of these are not used at universities or in the Unix
world, though ROTF and TTFN have gained some currency there
and IMHO is common; conversely, most of the people who know
these are unfamiliar with FOO?, BCNU, HELLOP, NIL, and T.
The MUD community uses a mixture of Usenet/Internet emoticons,
a few of the more natural of the old-style talk-mode abbrevs,
and some of the `social' list above; specifically, MUD
respondents report use of BBL, BRB, LOL, b4, BTW, WTF, TTFN,
and WTH. The use of rehi is also common; in fact, mudders are
fond of re- compounds and will frequently rehug or rebonk (see
bonk/oif) people. The word re by itself is taken as `regreet'.
In general, though, MUDders express a preference for typing
things out in full rather than using abbreviations; this may
be due to the relative youth of the MUD cultures, which tend
to include many touch typists and to assume high-speed links.
The following uses specific to MUDs are reported:
CU l8er see you later (mutant of CU l8tr)
FOAD fuck off and die (use of this is generally OTT)
OTT over the top (excessive, uncalled for)
ppl abbrev for "people"
THX thanks (mutant of TNX; clearly this comes in batches of 1138 (the
Lucasian K)).
UOK? are you OK?
Some B1FFisms (notably the variant spelling d00d) appear to be
passing into wider use among some subgroups of MUDders.
One final note on talk mode style: neophytes, when in talk
mode, often seem to think they must produce letter-perfect
prose because they are typing rather than speaking. This is
not the best approach. It can be very frustrating to wait
while your partner pauses to think of a word, or repeatedly
makes the same spelling error and backs up to fix it. It is
usually best just to leave typographical errors behind and
plunge forward, unless severe confusion may result; in that
case it is often fastest just to type "xxx" and start over
from before the mistake.
See also hakspek, emoticon.
talker system : n.
British hackerism for software that enables real-time chat or
talk mode.
TAN : adj.
[Usenet, particularly rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan]
Abbrev. of `tangent', as in "off on a tangent", and synonym
for OT. A number of hacker-humor synonyms are used for TAN in
some newsgroups. Instances such as BEIGE, OFF-WHITE,
BROWNISH-GRAY, and LIGHT BROWN have been observed. It is
generally understood on newsgroups with this convention that
any color descriptor is a TAN synonym if (a) used as the first
word(s) of the topic of a Usenet post, (b) written in ALL
CAPS, and (c) followed immediately by a colon. Usage:
"OFF-WHITE: 2000 Presidential candidates" on an SF newsgroup.
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 SF novel The Moon is
a Harsh Mistress.] "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free
Lunch", often invoked when someone is balking at the prospect
of using an unpleasantly heavyweight technique, or at the poor
quality of some piece of software, or at the signal-to-noise
ratio of unmoderated Usenet newsgroups. "What? Don't tell me I
have to implement a database back end to get my address book
program to work!" "Well, TANSTAAFL you know." This phrase owes
some of its popularity to the high concentration of
science-fiction fans and political libertarians in hackerdom
(see Appendix B for discussion).
Outside hacker circles the variant TINSTAAFL ("There is No
Such Thing...") is apparently more common, and can be traced
back to 1952 in the writings of ethicist Alvin Hansen.
TANSTAAFL may well have arisen from it by mutation.
tape monkey : n.
A junior system administrator, one who might plausibly be
assigned to do physical swapping of tapes and subsequent
storage. When a backup needs to be restored, one might holler
"Tape monkey!" (Compare one-banana problem) Also used to
dismiss jobs not worthy of a highly trained sysadmin's
ineffable talents: "Cable up her PC? You must be joking -- I'm
no tape monkey."
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. Compare the
more common tarball. Earlier, the phrase referred to a
punishment in which the victims had tar being poured upon them
and then, whilst the tar was still sticky, having a pillow
full of feathers - or other material -- thrown at them. See
http://www.nwta.com/Spy/spring99/tar.html.
tarball : n.
[very common; prob. based on the "tar baby" in the Uncle Remus
folk tales] An archive, created with the Unix tar(1) utility,
containing myriad related files. "Here, I'll just ftp you a
tarball of the whole project." Tarballs have been the standard
way to ship around source-code distributions since the
mid-1980s; in retrospect it seems odd that this term did not
enter common usage until the late 1990s.
tardegy : tar'djee , n.
[deliberate mangling of tragedy] An incident in which someone
who clearly deserves to be selected out of the gene pool on
grounds of extreme stupidity meets with a messy end. Coined on
the Darwin list, which is dedicated to chronicling such
incidents; but almost all hackers would instantly recognize
the intention of the term and laugh.
taste : 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] Formerly expanded as "The Crap Phil
Is Pushing". The reference is to Phil Karn, KA9Q, and the
context was an ongoing technical/political war between the
majority of sites still running AX.25 and the TCP/IP relays.
TCP/IP won.
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'.
teergrube : /teer'groob/ , n.
[German for tar pit] A trap set to punish spammers who use an
address harvester; a mail server deliberately set up to be
really, really slow. To activate it, scatter addresses that
look like users on the teergrube's host in places where the
address harvester will be trolling (one popular way is to
embed the fake address in a Usenet sig block next to a
human-readable warning not to send mail to it). The address
harvester will dutifully collect the address. When the spammer
tries to mailbomb it, his mailer will get stuck.
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 MUDs and the
like. The term, however, is widely recognized in the VR
community as a ha ha only serious projection of things to
come. "When we can sustain a multi-sensory surround good
enough for teledildonics, then we'll know we're getting
somewhere." See also hot chat.
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 tuned, but sometimes
it was just based on a great idea. A comment in a clever
routine by Mike Kazar, once a grad-student hacker at CMU:
"This routine is so tense it will bring tears to your eyes." A
tense programmer is one who produces tense code.
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 sun-stools, HP-SUX, Slowlaris.
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. Appropriately, this term was used in the works
of William S. Burroughs to describe a heroin addict with an
unlimited supply.
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
2007. The impact and influence of TeX's design has been such
that nobody minds this very much. Many grand hackish projects
have started as a bit of toolsmithing on the way to something
else; Knuth's diversion was simply on a grander scale than
most.
TeX has also been a noteworthy example of free, shared, but
high-quality software. Knuth offers a monetary award to anyone
who found and reported bugs dating from before the 1989 code
freeze; as the years wore on and the few remaining bugs were
fixed (and new ones even harder to find), the bribe went up.
Though well-written, TeX is so large (and so full of cutting
edge technique) that it is said to have unearthed at least one
bug in every Pascal system it has been compiled with.
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 literature : 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.
the network : n.
1. Historically, the union of all the major noncommercial,
academic, and hacker-oriented networks, such as Internet, the
pre-1990 ARPANET, NSFnet, BITNET, and the virtual UUCP and
Usenet `networks', plus the corporate in-house networks and
commercial timesharing services (such as CompuServe, GEnie and
AOL) that gateway to them. A site is generally considered on
the network if it can be reached through some combination of
Internet-style (@-sign) and UUCP (bang-path) addresses. See
Internet, bang path, network address.
2. Following the mass-culture discovery of the Internet in
1994 and subsequent proliferation of cheap TCP/IP connections,
"the network" is increasingly synonymous with the Internet
itself (as it was before the second wave of wide-area computer
networking began around 1980).
3. A fictional conspiracy of libertarian hacker-subversives
and anti-authoritarian monkeywrenchers described in Robert
Anton Wilson's novel Schrödinger's Cat, to which many hackers
have subsequently decided they belong (this is an example of
ha ha only serious).
In sense 1, the network is often abbreviated to the net. "Are
you on the net?" is a frequent question when hackers first
meet face to face, and "See you on the net!" is a frequent
goodbye.
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. Not to be confused
with the techspeak sense of `thread', e.g. a lightweight
process.
Interestingly, this is far from a neologism. The OED says:
"That which connects the successive points in anything, esp. a
narrative, train of thought, or the like; the sequence of
events or ideas continuing throughout the whole course of
anything;" Citations are given going back to 1642!
three-finger salute : n.
Syn. Vulcan nerve pinch.
throwaway account : n.
1. An inexpensive Internet account purchased on a legitimate
ISP for the sole purpose of spewing spam.
2. An inexpensive Internet account obtained for the sole
purpose of doing something which requires a valid email
address but being able to ignore spam since the user will not
look at the account again.
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.
thundering herd problem
Scheduler thrashing. This can happen under Unix when you have
a number of processes that are waiting on a single event. When
that event (a connection to the web server, say) happens,
every process which could possibly handle the event is
awakened. In the end, only one of those processes will
actually be able to do the work, but, in the meantime, all the
others wake up and contend for CPU time before being put back
to sleep. Thus the system thrashes briefly while a herd of
processes thunders through. If this starts to happen many
times per second, the performance impact can be significant.
thunk : /thuhnk/ , n.
1. [obs.]"A piece of coding which provides an address:",
according to P. Z. Ingerman, who invented thunks in 1961 as a
way of binding actual parameters to their formal definitions
in Algol-60 procedure calls. If a procedure is called with an
expression in the place of a formal parameter, the compiler
generates a thunk which computes the expression and leaves the
address of the result in some standard location.
2. Later generalized into: an expression, frozen together with
its environment, for later evaluation if and when needed
(similar to what in techspeak is called a closure). The
process of unfreezing these thunks is called forcing.
3. A stubroutine, in an overlay programming environment, that
loads and jumps to the correct overlay. Compare trampoline.
4. Microsoft and IBM have both defined, in their Intel-based
systems, a "16-bit environment" (with bletcherous segment
registers and 64K address limits) and a "32-bit environment"
(with flat addressing and semi-real memory management). The
two environments can both be running on the same computer and
OS (thanks to what is called, in the Microsoft world, WOW
which stands for Windows On Windows). MS and IBM have both
decided that the process of getting from 16- to 32-bit and
vice versa is called a "thunk"; for Windows 95, there is even
a tool THUNK.EXE called a "thunk compiler".
5. A person or activity scheduled in a thunklike manner. "It
occurred to me the other day that I am rather accurately
modeled by a thunk -- I frequently need to be forced to
completion.:" -- paraphrased from a plan file.
Historical note: There are a couple of onomatopoeic myths
circulating about the origin of this term. The most common is
that it is the sound made by data hitting the stack; another
holds that the sound is that of the data hitting an
accumulator. Yet another suggests that it is the sound of the
expression being unfrozen at argument-evaluation time. In
fact, according to the inventors, it was coined after they
realized (in the wee hours after hours of discussion) that the
type of an argument in Algol-60 could be figured out in
advance with a little compile-time thought, simplifying the
evaluation machinery. In other words, it had `already been
thought of'; thus it was christened a thunk, which is "the
past tense of `think' at two in the morning".
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 handwaved.
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 sneakers) whose purpose is to
penetrate security, and thus test security measures. These
people are paid professionals who do hacker-type tricks, e.g.,
leave cardboard signs saying "bomb" in critical defense
installations, hand-lettered notes saying "Your codebooks have
been stolen" (they usually haven't been) inside safes, etc.
After a successful penetration, some high-ranking security
type shows up the next morning for a `security review' and
finds the sign, note, etc., and all hell breaks loose. Serious
successes of tiger teams sometimes lead to early retirement
for base commanders and security officers (see the patch entry
for an example).
2. Recently, and more generally, any official inspection team
or special firefighting group called in to look at a problem.
A subset of tiger teams are professional crackers, testing the
security of military computer installations by attempting
remote attacks via networks or supposedly `secure' comm
channels. Some of their escapades, if declassified, would
probably rank among the greatest hacks of all times. The term
has been adopted in commercial computer-security circles in
this more specific sense.
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.
timesharing
[now primarily historical] Timesharing is the technique of
scheduling a computer's time so that they are shared across
multiple tasks and multiple users, with each user having the
illusion that his or her computation is going on continuously.
John McCarthy, the inventor of LISP, first imagined this
technique in the late 1950s. The first timesharing operating
systems, BBN's "Little Hospital" and CTSS, were deplayed in
1962-63. The early hacker culture of the 1960s and 1970s grew
up around the first generation of relatively cheap timesharing
computers, notably the DEC 10, 11, and VAX lines. But these
were only cheap in a relative sense; though quite a bit less
powerful than today's personal computers, they had to be
shared by dozens or even hundreds of people each. The early
hacker comunities nucleated around places where it was
relatively easy to get access to a timesharing account.
Nowadays, communications bandwidth is usually the most
important constraint on what you can do with your computer.
Not so back then; timesharing machines were often loaded to
capacity, and it was not uncommon for everyone's work to grind
to a halt while the machine scheduler thrashed, trying to
figure out what to do next. Early hacker slang was replete
with terms like cycle crunch and cycle drought for describing
the consequences of too few instructions-per-second spread
among too many users. As GLS has noted, this sort of problem
influenced the tendency of many hackers to work odd schedules.
One reason this is worth noting here is to make the point that
the earliest hacker communities were physical, not distributed
via networks; they consisted of hackers who shared a machine
and therefore had to deal with many of the same problems with
respect to it. A system crash could idle dozens of eager
programmers, all sitting in the same terminal room and with
little to do but talk with each other until normal operation
resumed.
Timesharing moved from being the luxury of a few large
universities runing semi-experimental operating systems to
being more generally available about 1975-76. Hackers in
search of more cycles and more control over their programming
environment began to migrate off timesharing machines and onto
what are now called workstations around 1983. It took another
ten years, the development of powerful 32-bit personal micros,
the Great Internet Explosion before the migration was
complete. It is no coincidence that the last stages of this
migration coincided with the development of the first
open-source operating systems.
TINC : //
[Usenet] Abbreviation: "There Is No Cabal". See backbone cabal
and NANA, but note that this abbreviation did not enter use
until long after the dispersal of the backbone cabal.
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.
TINLC : //
Abbreviation: "There Is No Lumber Cartel". See Lumber Cartel.
TINLC is a takeoff on TINC.
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 older Macs (like pre-PC
electric typewriters) had them on the D and K keys (this
changed in 1999).
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 terms
`SFLA' (Stupid Four-Letter Acronym), `LFLA' (Longer Four
Letter Acronym), and VLFLA (Very Long Five Letter Acronym)
have also been reported. See also YABA.
The self-effacing phrase "TDM TLA" (Too Damn Many...) is often
used to bemoan the plethora of TLAs in use. In 1989, a random
of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin "What
do you think will be the biggest problem in computing in the
90s?" Paul's straight-faced response: "There are only 17,000
three-letter acronyms." (To be exact, there are 26^3 =
17,576.) There is probably some karmic justice in the fact
that Paul Boutin subsequently became a journalist.
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 years since. All the features
described here were still present when the old layout was
decommissioned in 1998 just before the demolition of MIT
Building 20, and will almost certainly be retained when the
old layout is rebuilt (expected in 2003). The control system
alone featured about 1200 relays. There were scram switches
located at numerous places around the room that could be
thwacked if something undesirable was about to occur, such as
a train going full-bore at an obstruction. Another feature of
the system was a digital clock on the dispatch board, which
was itself something of a wonder in those bygone days before
cheap LEDs and seven-segment displays. When someone hit a
scram switch the clock stopped and the display was replaced
with the word `FOO'; at TMRC the scram switches are therefore
called foo switches.
Steven Levy, in his book Hackers (see the Bibliography in
Appendix C), gives a stimulating account of those early years.
TMRC's Signals and Power Committee included many of the early
PDP-1 hackers and the people who later became the core of the
MIT AI Lab staff. Thirty years later that connection is still
very much alive, and this lexicon accordingly includes a
number of entries from a recent revision of the TMRC
dictionary.
TMRC has a web page at http://tmrc-www.mit.edu/. The TMRC
Dictionary is available there, at
http://tmrc-www.mit.edu/dictionary.html.
TMRCie : /tmerk'ee/ , n.
[MIT] A denizen of TMRC.
TMTOWTDI : /tim-toh'-dee/ , abbrev.
There's More Than One Way To Do It. This abbreviation of the
official motto of Perl is frequently used on newsgroups and
mailing lists related to that language.
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.
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." (This sense went mainstream around
1993.)
2. vt. To cause a system to crash accidentally, especially in
a manner that requires manual rebooting. "Rick just toasted
the firewall machine again." Compare fried.
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. a Mac in the original unitary case. Some
hold that this is implied by sense 2.
4. A peripheral device. "I bought my box without toasters, but
since then I've added two boards and a second disk drive."
5. A specialized computer used as an appliance. See web
toaster, video toaster.
toeprint : n.
A footprint of especially small size.
TOFU
Text Over, Fullquote Under; see top-post.
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; see
also toolchain.
2. [Unix] An application program with a simple, `transparent'
(typically text-stream) interface designed specifically to be
used in programmed combination with other tools (see filter,
plumbing).
3. [MIT: general to students there] vi. To work; to study
(connotes tedium). The TMRC Dictionary defined this as "to set
one's brain to the grindstone". See hack.
4. n. [MIT] A student who studies too much and hacks too
little. (MIT's student humor magazine rejoices in the name
Tool and Die.)
toolchain
A collection of tools used to develop for a particular
hardware target, or to work with a particular data format
(thus `the Crusoe development toolchain', or the `DocBook
toolchain'). Often used in the context of building software on
one system which will be installed or run on some other
device; in that case the chain of tools usually consists of
such items as a particular version of a compiler, libraries,
special headers, etc. May also be used of text-formatting,
page layout, or multimedia tools which render from some markup
to a variety of production formats. Differs from `toolkit' in
that the former implies a collection of semi-independent tools
with complementary functions, while `toolchain' implies that
each of the parts is a serial stage in a rather tightly bound
pipeline. Seems to have become current in early 1999 and 2000;
now common.
toolsmith : n.
The software equivalent of a tool-and-die specialist; one who
specializes in making the tools with which other programmers
create applications. Many hackers consider this more fun than
applications per se; to understand why, see uninteresting. Jon
Bentley, in the "Bumper-Sticker Computer Science" chapter of
his book More Programming Pearls, quotes Dick Sites from DEC
as saying "I'd rather write programs to write programs than
write programs".
toor : n.
The Bourne-Again Super-user. An alternate account with UID of
0, created on Unix machines where the root user has an
inconvenient choice of shell. Compare avatar.
top-post : n. , v.
[common] To put the newly-added portion of an email or Usenet
response before the quoted part, as opposed to the more
logical sequence of quoted portion first with original
following. The problem with this practice is neatly summed up
by the following FAQ entry:
A: No.
Q: Should I include quotations after my reply?
This term is generally used pejoratively with the implication
that the offending person is a newbie, a Microsoft addict
(Microsoft mail tools produce a similar format by default), or
simply a common-and-garden-variety idiot.
One major problem with top-posting is that people who do it
all too frequently quote the entire parent message rather than
trimming it down to those portions relevent to their reply --
this makes threads bulky and unnecessarily difficult to read
and arouses the righteous ire of experienced Internet
residents (this style is called "TOFU" for "text over,
fullquote under", or sometimes "jeopardy-style quoting").
Another problem is that top-posters often word their replies
on the assumption that you just read the previous message,
even though their perversity has put it further down the page
than you have yet read. Oppose bottom-post.
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. The header in each post can be changed to keep
current with the posts, but usually isn't due to forgetfulness
or laziness. A single post may often result in several posts
each responding to a different point in the original. Some
subthreads will actually be in response to some off-the-cuff
side comment, possibly degenerating into a flame war, or just
as often evolving into a separate discussion. Hence,
discussions aren't really so much threads as they are trees.
Except that they don't really have leaves, or multiple
branching roots; usually some lines of discussion will just
sort of die off after everyone gets tired of them. This could
take anywhere from hours to weeks, or even longer.
The term `topic drift' is often used in gentle reminders that
the discussion has strayed off any useful track. "I think we
started with a question about Niven's last book, but we've
ended up discussing the sexual habits of the common marmoset.
Now that's topic drift!"
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 long extinct. A fountain of hacker
folklore; see Appendix A. See also ITS, TOPS-20, TWENEX, VMS,
operating system. TOPS-10 was sometimes called BOTS-10 (from
`bottoms-ten') as a comment on the inappropriateness of
describing it as the top of anything.
TOPS-20 : /tops-twen'tee/ , n.
See TWENEX.
TOS : vt.
[from the acronym for `Terms Of Service' playing on the verb
"toss"]
1. The act of terminating an Internet access account because
the owner breached the terms of service (e.g. by spamming).
2. To successfully complain to the ISP for that reason so that
they then close the account.
tourist : n.
1. [ITS] A guest on the system, especially one who generally
logs in over a network from a remote location for comm mode,
email, games, and other trivial purposes. One step below
luser. ITS hackers often used to spell this turist, perhaps by
some sort of tenuous analogy with luser (this usage may also
have expressed the ITS culture's penchant for six-letterisms,
and/or been some sort of tribute to Alan Turing). Compare
twink, lurker, read-only user.
2. [IRC] An IRC user who goes from channel to channel without
saying anything; see channel hopping.
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 or Windows 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 computrons
for the speaker's preferred uses. This is not condemnatory, as
is bitty box; toys can at least be fun. It is also strongly
conditioned by one's expectations; Cray XMP users sometimes
consider the Cray-1 a toy, and certainly all RISC boxes and
mainframes are toys by their standards. See also Get a real
computer!.
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 Things can
result when a toy language is promoted as a general purpose
solution for programming (see bondage-and-discipline
language); the classic example is Pascal. Several moderately
well-known formalisms for conceptual tasks such as programming
Turing machines also qualify as toy languages in a less
negative sense. See also MFTL.
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. Under BSD and possibly in other Unixes,
trampoline code is used to transfer control from the kernel
back to user mode when a signal (which has had a handler
installed) is sent to a process. These pieces of live data are
called trampolines. Trampolines are notoriously difficult to
understand in action; in fact, it is said by those who use
this term that the trampoline that doesn't bend your brain is
not the true trampoline. See also snap.
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 Things 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, scribble, and roach.
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
suits are tree-killers.
It is likely that both senses derive their flavor from the
epithet `tree-killer' applied by Treebeard the Ent to the Orcs
in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. See also elvish, elder
days, and especially dead-tree version.
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, log_{2$(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/ , /trof/ , n.
[Unix] The gray eminence of Unix text processing; a formatting
and phototypesetting program, written originally in PDP-11
assembler and then in barely-structured early C by the late
Joseph Ossanna, modeled after the earlier ROFF which was in
turn modeled after the Multics and CTSS program RUNOFF by
Jerome Saltzer (that name came from the expression "to run off
a copy"). A companion program, nroff, formats output for
terminals and line printers.
In 1979, Brian Kernighan modified troff so that it could drive
phototypesetters other than the Graphic Systems CAT. His paper
describing that work ("A Typesetter-independent troff," AT&T
CSTR #97) explains troff's durability. After discussing the
program's "obvious deficiencies -- a rebarbative input syntax,
mysterious and undocumented properties in some areas, and a
voracious appetite for computer resources" and noting the
ugliness and extreme hairiness of the code and internals,
Kernighan concludes:
None of these remarks should be taken as denigrating Ossanna's
accomplishment with TROFF. It has proven a remarkably robust tool,
taking unbelievable abuse from a variety of preprocessors and
being forced into uses that were never conceived of in the
original design, all with considerable grace under fire.
The success of TeX and desktop publishing systems have reduced
troff's relative importance, but this tribute perfectly
captures the strengths that secured troff a place in hacker
folklore; indeed, it could be taken more generally as an
indication of those qualities of good programs that, in the
long run, hackers most admire.
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
1. v.,n. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a
posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or
flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase "trolling
for newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a
style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely
spot hoping for a bite. The well-constructed troll is a post
that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves
look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly
conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact
a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to
be in on it. See also YHBT.
2. n. An individual who chronically trolls in sense 1;
regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks
to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other
purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls
are recognizable by the fact that they have no real interest
in learning about the topic at hand - they simply want to
utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named
after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and as such,
they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in,
"Oh, ignore him, he's just a troll." Compare kook.
3. n. [Berkeley] Computer lab monitor. A popular campus job
for CS students. Duties include helping newbies and ensuring
that lab policies are followed. Probably so-called because it
involves lurking in dark cavelike corners.
Some people claim that the troll (sense 1) is properly a
narrower category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized
by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly
controversial. See also Troll-O-Meter.
The use of `troll' in any of these senses is a live metaphor
that readily produces elaborations and combining forms. For
example, one not infrequently sees the warning "Do not feed
the troll" as part of a followup to troll postings.
Troll-O-Meter : n.
Common Usenet jargon for a notional instrument used to measure
the provocation level of a Usenet troll. "Come on, everyone!
If the above doesn't set off the Troll-O-Meter, we're going to
have to get him to run around with a big blinking sign saying
`I am a troll, I'm only in it for the controversy and flames'
and shooting random gobs of Jell-O(tm) at us before the point
is proven." Mentions of the Troll-O-Meter are often
accompanied by an ASCII picture of an arrow pointing at a
numeric scale. Compare bogometer, Indent-o-Meter.
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.
Note that many dialects of BASIC have a TRON/TROFF command
pair that enables/disables line number tracing; this has no
obvious relationship to the slang usage.
troughie : /traw'fee/ , n.
[British BBS scene] Synonym for leech, sense 1. The implied
metaphor is that of a pig at a trough.
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 Looney Toons,
Rocky & Bullwinkle, Trek Classic, the Simpsons, Babylon 5, and
the occasional cheesy old swashbuckler movie.
2. [IBM] To send a copy of something to someone else's
terminal. "Tube me that note?"
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, but apparently restored on the 4.4BSD tape and in
{Net,Free,Open}BSD. Tunefs relates to the tuning of
file-system parameters for optimum performance, and at the
bottom of a few pages of wizardly inscriptions was a `BUGS'
section consisting of the line "You can tune a file system,
but you can't tunafish". Variants of this can be seen in other
BSD versions, though it has been excised from some versions by
humorless management droids. The [nt]roff source for SunOS
4.1.1 contains a comment apparently designed to prevent this:
"Take this out and a Unix Demon will dog your steps from now
until the time_t's wrap around."
[It has since been pointed out that indeed you can tunafish.
Usually at a canning factory... --ESR]
tune : vt.
[from automotive or musical usage] To optimize a program or
system for a particular environment, esp. by adjusting
numerical parameters designed as hooks for tuning, e.g., by
changing #define lines in C. One may tune for time (fastest
execution), tune for space (least memory use), or tune for
configuration (most efficient use of hardware). See hot spot,
hand-hacking.
turbo nerd : n.
See 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'.
Tux
Tux the Penguin is the official emblem of Linux, This
eventuated after a logo contest in 1996, during which Linus
Torvalds endorsed the idea of a penguin logo in a couple of
famously funny postings. Linus explained that he was once
bitten by a killer penguin in Australia and has felt a special
affinity for the species ever since. (Linus has since admitted
that he was also thinking of Feathers McGraw, the evil-genius
penguin jewel thief who appeared in a Wallace & Grommit
feature cartoon, The Wrong Trousers.)
Larry Ewing designed the official Tux logo. It has proved a
wise choice, amenable to hundreds of recognizable variations
used as emblems of Linux-related projects, products, and user
groups. In fact, Tux has spawned an entire mythology, of which
the Gospel According to Tux and the mock-epic poem Tuxowolf
are among the best-known examples.
There is a `real' Tux -- a black-footed penguin resident at
the Bristol Zoo. Several friends of Linux bought a zoo
sponsorship for Linus as a birthday present in 1996.
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 a program; preferred usage in the U.K.
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. There is a TOPS-20 home page.
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 knobs implies much
less sense of purpose than toggling or tweaking it; see
frobnicate. To speak of twiddling a bit connotes aimlessness,
and at best doesn't specify what you're doing to the bit;
`toggling a bit' has a more specific meaning (see bit
twiddling, toggle). 4. Uncommon name for the twirling baton
prompt.
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.
1. [Berkeley] A clue-repellant user; the next step beyond a
clueless one.
2. [UCSC] A read-only user. Also reported on the Usenet group
soc.motss; may derive from gay slang for a cute young thing
with nothing upstairs (compare mainstream `chick').
3. On MU* systems that specialize in role-playing, refers to
behavior of a (usually inexperienced) player that either
ignores rules or social convention, or disrupts the natural
flow of a scene to show off super powers.
We are informed that in Indian country, the term twink
generally refers to blondes into generic `Native American
spirituality'. Signs include Indian jewelry with MADE IN
THAILAND stamped on it, crystals, Clairol black hair, wearing
swimsuits to powwows, Cherokee princess grandmas, a love of
Dances with Wolves, and a fear of AIM and the NCAI. The twink
nature is everywhere.
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. This is also
occasionally called a twiddle prompt.
The twirling baton was a popular component of animated
signature files on the pioneering PLATO educational
timesharing system. The archie Internet service is perhaps the
best-known baton program today; it uses the twirling baton as
an idler indicating that the program is working on a query.
The twirling baton is also used as a boot progress indicator
on several BSD variants of Unix; if it stops, you're probably
going to have a long and trying day.
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.
U
u- : pref.
Written shorthand for micro-; techspeak when applied to metric
units, jargon when used otherwise. Derived from the Greek
letter µ the first letter of "micro" (and which letter looks a
lot like the English letter "u").
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, PEBKAC, ID10T; oppose
PBD; see also brain-damaged.
UBE : // , n.
[abbrev., Unsolicited Bulk Email] A widespread, more formal
term for email spam. Compare UCE. The UBE term recognizes that
spam is uttered by nonprofit and advocacy groups whose motives
are not commercial.
ubergeek : n. , /oo'ber-geek/
[common; often spelled with initial ü; from German über +
geek] Almost synonymous with demigod; used as a compliment of
someone regarded as a paragon of geek achievement and virtue.
Has partially replaced earlier demigod.
UCE : n.
[abbrev., Unsolicited Commercial Email] A widespread, more
formal term for email spam. Compare UBE, which may be
superseding it.
UDP : /U-D-P/ , v.,n.
[Usenet] Abbreviation for Usenet Death Penalty. Common
(probably now more so than the full form), and frequently
verbed. Compare IDP.
UN*X : n.
Used to refer to the Unix operating system (a trademark of
AT&T, then of Novell, then of Unix Systems Laboratories, then
of the Open Group; the source code parted company with it
after Novell and was owned by SCO, which was acquired by
Caldera) in writing, but avoiding the need for the ugly (TM)
typography (see also (TM)). Also used to refer to any or all
varieties of Unixoid operating systems. Ironically, lawyers
now say that the requirement for the trademark postfix has no
legal force, but the asterisk usage is entrenched anyhow. It
has been suggested that there may be a psychological
connection to practice in certain religions (especially
Judaism) in which the name of the deity is never written out
in full, e.g., `YHWH' or `G--d' is used. See also glob and
splat out.
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 timesharing
system invented in 1969 by Ken Thompson after Bell Labs left
the Multics project, originally so he could play games on his
scavenged PDP-7. Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of C, is
considered a co-author of the system. The turning point in
Unix's history came when it was reimplemented almost entirely
in C during 1972--1974, making it the first source-portable
OS. Unix subsequently underwent mutations and expansions at
the hands of many different people, resulting in a uniquely
flexible and developer-friendly environment. By 1991, Unix had
become the most widely used multiuser general-purpose
operating system in the world -- and since 1996 the variant
called Linux has been at the cutting edge of the open source
movement. Many people consider the success of Unix the most
important victory yet of hackerdom over industry opposition
(but see Unix weenie and Unix conspiracy for an opposing point
of view). See Version 7, BSD, Linux.
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.
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 unixisms 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 or C++
with throw/catch. See also smash the stack.
2. People can unwind the stack as well, by quickly dealing
with a bunch of problems: "Oh heck, let's do lunch. Just a
second while I unwind my stack."
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 system near you (especially a
smaller or peripheral client system) to one further away from
you (especially a larger or central host system). A transfer
in the other direction is, of course, called a download
2. [speculatively] To move the essential patterns and
algorithms that make up one's mind from one's brain into a
computer. Those who are convinced that such patterns and
algorithms capture the complete essence of the self view this
prospect with pleasant anticipation.
upstream : adj.
[common] Towards the original author(s) or maintainer(s) of a
project. Used in connection with software that is distributed
both in its original source form and in derived, adapted
versions through a distribution (like the Debian version of
Linux or one of the BSD ports) that has component maintainers
for each of their parts. When a component maintainer receives
a bug report or patch, he may choose to retain the patch as a
porting tweak to the distribution's derivative of the project,
or to pass it upstream to the project's maintainer. The
antonym downstream is rare.
upthread : adv.
Earlier in the discussion (see thread), i.e., `above'. "As Joe
pointed out upthread, ..." See also followup.
uptime : n.
Technically, a machine's time since last reboot; jargonically,
how long a hacker has gone without sleep. "What's your
uptime?" "Oh, about 28 hours so far, but I think I can
probably do another 12." This is, of course, a reference to
the uptime command and the pride with which most Unix types
note how long their computers go without reboots. Uptime is a
testament to the stability of the OS and the stamina of the
hacker.
urchin : n.
See munchkin.
URL : /U-R-L/ , /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/ , /yooz'net/ , n.
[from `Users' Network'; the original spelling was USENET, but
the mixed-case form is now widely preferred] A distributed
bboard (bulletin board) system supported mainly by Unix
machines. Originally implemented in 1979--1980 by Steve
Bellovin, Jim Ellis, Tom Truscott, and Steve Daniel at Duke
University, it has swiftly grown to become international in
scope and is now probably the largest decentralized
information utility in existence. As of late 2002, it hosts
over 100,000 newsgroups and an unguessably huge volume of new
technical articles, news, discussion, chatter, and flamage
every day (and that leaves out the graphics...).
By the year the Internet hit the mainstream (1994) the
original UUCP transport for Usenet was fading out of use --
almost all Usenet connections were over Internet links. A lot
of newbies and journalists began to refer to "Internet
newsgroups" as though Usenet was and always had been just
another Internet service. This ignorance greatly annoys
experienced Usenetters.
Usenet Death Penalty
[Usenet] A sanction against sites that habitually spew Usenet
spam. This can be either passive or active. A passive UDP
refers to the dropping of all postings by a particular domain
so as to inhibit propagation. An active UDP refers to
third-party cancellation of all postings by the UDPed domain.
A partial UDP is one which applies only to certain newsgroups
or hierarchies in Usenet. Compare Internet Death Penalty, with
which this term is sometimes confused.
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 lusers. The users are looked down
on by hackers to some extent because they don't understand the
full ramifications of the system in all its glory. (The few
users who do are known as real winners.) The term is a
relative one: a skilled hacker may be a user with respect to
some program he himself does not hack. A LISP hacker might be
one who maintains LISP or one who uses LISP (but with the
skill of a hacker). A LISP user is one who uses LISP, whether
skillfully or not. Thus there is some overlap between the two
terms; the subtle distinctions must be resolved by context.
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.
userland : n.
Anywhere outside the kernel. "That code belongs in userland."
This term has been in common use among Unix kernel hackers
since at least 1985, and may have have originated in that
community. The earliest sighting was reported from the usenet
group net.unix-wizards.
Utah teapot, the
This object is historically one of the first complex 3D models
to be rendered in computer graphics. It consisted of about 110
vertices, and was generated by Martin Newell in 1974 using
hand-drawn Bezier curves, based on a real teapot that he and
his wife had bought. This model served as a basis for
comparing various 3D rendering methodologies for lighting,
textures, bump-mapping, etc. By the standards of 2002, the
model is trivial to render and thus is often not suited to
demonstrate the complexity of modern research. Despite this,
the tea pot still appears, now and then, in recent papers.
More on the teapot's history lives at The History Of The
Teapot. Compare lenna, Stanford Bunny
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 wizards to answer them.
Once upon a time in elder days, everyone running Unix had
source. After 1978, AT&T's policy tightened up, so this
objurgation was in theory appropriately directed only at
associates of some outfit with a Unix source license. In
practice, bootlegs of Unix source code (made precisely for
reference purposes) were so ubiquitous that one could utter it
at almost anyone on the network without concern.
Nowadays, free Unix clones have become widely enough
distributed that anyone can read source legally. The most
widely distributed is certainly Linux, with variants of the
NET/2 and 4.4BSD distributions running second. Cheap
commercial Unixes with source such as BSD/OS are accelerating
this trend.
UUOC
[from the comp.unix.shell group on Usenet] Stands for Useless
Use of cat; the reference is to the Unix command cat(1), not
the feline animal. As received wisdom on comp.unix.shell
observes, "The purpose of cat is to concatenate (or
`catenate') files. If it's only one file, concatenating it
with nothing at all is a waste of time, and costs you a
process." Nevertheless one sees people doing
cat file | some_command and its args ...
instead of the equivalent and cheaper
<file some_command and its args ...
or (equivalently and more classically)
some_command and its args ... <file
Since 1995, occasional awards for UUOC have been given out,
usually by Perl luminary Randal L. Schwartz. There is a web
page devoted to this and other similar awards.
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!
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.
vanity domain : n.
[common; from `vanity plate' as in car license plate] An
Internet domain, particularly in the .com or .org top-level
domains, apparently created for no reason other than boosting
the creator's ego.
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).
var : /veir/ , /var/ , n.
Short for variable. Compare arg, param.
vaston : n.
[Durham, UK] The unit of `load average'. A measure of how much
work a computer is doing. A meter displaying this as a
function of time is known as a vastometer. First used during a
computing practical in December 1996.
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 micros after about 1986, the
VAX was probably the hacker's favorite machine of them all,
esp. after the 1982 release of 4.2 BSD Unix (see BSD).
Especially noted for its large, assembler-programmer-friendly
instruction set -- an asset that became a liability after the
RISC revolution.
It is worth noting that the standard plural of VAX was `vaxen'
and that VAX system operators were sometimes referred to as
`vaxherds'
2. A major brand of vacuum cleaner in Britain. Cited here
because its sales pitch, "Nothing sucks like a VAX!" became a
sort of battle-cry of RISC partisans. It is even sometimes
claimed that DEC actually entered a cross-licensing deal with
the vacuum-Vax people that allowed them to market VAX
computers in the U.K. in return for not challenging the vacuum
cleaner trademark in the U.S.
A rival brand actually pioneered the slogan: its original form
was "Nothing sucks like Electrolux". It has apparently become
a classic example (used in advertising textbooks) of the
perils of not knowing the local idiom. But in 1996, the press
manager of Electrolux AB, while confirming that the company
used this slogan in the late 1960s, also tells us that their
marketing people were fully aware of the possible double
entendre and intended it to gain attention.
And gain attention it did -- the VAX-vacuum-cleaner people
thought the slogan a sufficiently good idea to copy it.
Several British hackers report that VAX's promotions used it
in 1986--1987, and we have one report from a New Zealander
that the infamous slogan surfaced there in TV ads for the
product in 1992.
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.
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 (and on 64-bit systems like the Alpha, of course).
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.
An interesting variant of the vdiff technique usable by anyone
who has sufficient control over the parallax of their eyeballs
(e.g. those who can easily view random-dot stereograms), is to
hold up two paper printouts and go cross-eyed to superimpose
them. This invokes deep, fast, built-in image comparison
wetware (the same machinery responsible for depth perception)
and differences stand out almost immediately. This technique
is good for finding edits in graphical images, or for
comparing an image with a compressed version to spot
artifacts.
veeblefester : /vee'b@l-fes`tr/ , n.
[from the Born Loser comix via Commodore; prob.: originally
from Mad Magazine's `Veeblefetzer' parodies beginning in #15,
1954] Any obnoxious person engaged in the (alleged)
professions of marketing or management. Antonym of hacker.
Compare suit, marketroid.
velveeta : n.
[Usenet: by analogy with spam. The trade name Velveeta is
attached in the U.S. to a particularly nasty processed-cheese
spread.] Also knows as ECP; a message that is excessively
cross-posted, as opposed to spam which is too frequently
posted. This term is widely recognized but not commonly used;
most people refer to both kinds of abuse as spam. Compare
jello.
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 : /vee' se'vn/ , n.
The first widely distributed version of Unix, released
unsupported by Bell Labs in 1978. The term is used
adjectivally to describe Unix features and programs that date
from that release, and are thus guaranteed to be present and
portable in all Unix versions (this was the standard gauge of
portability before the POSIX and IEEE 1003 standards). Note
that this usage does not derive from the release being the
"seventh version of Unix"; research Unix at Bell Labs has
traditionally been numbered according to the edition of the
associated documentation. Indeed, only the widely-distributed
Sixth and Seventh Editions are widely known as V[67]; the OS
that might today be known as `V10' is instead known in full as
"Tenth Edition Research Unix" or just "Tenth Edition" for
short. For this reason, "V7" is often read by cognoscenti as
"Seventh Edition". See BSD, Unix. Some old-timers impatient
with commercialization and kernel bloat still maintain that V7
was the Last True Unix.
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:/ , never , /siks/ , n.
[from `Visual Interface'] A screen editor crufted together by
Bill Joy for an early BSD release. Became the de facto
standard Unix editor and a nearly undisputed hacker favorite
outside of MIT until the rise of EMACS after about 1984. Tends
to frustrate new users no end, as it will neither take
commands while expecting input text nor vice versa, and the
default setup on older versions provides no indication of
which mode the editor is in (years ago, a correspondent
reported that he has often heard the editor's name pronounced
/vi:l/; there is now a vi clone named vile). Nevertheless vi
(and variants such as vim and elvis) is still widely used
(about half the respondents in a 1991 Usenet poll preferred
it), and even EMACS fans often resort to it as a mail editor
and for small editing jobs (mainly because it starts up faster
than the bulkier versions of EMACS). See holy wars.
video toaster : n.
Historically, an Amiga fitted with a particular line of
special video effects hardware from NewTek -- long a popular
platform at special-effects and video production houses. More
generally, any computer system designed specifically for video
production and manipulation. Compare web toaster and see
toaster.
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 beer : n.
Praise or thanks. Used universally in the Linux community.
Originally this term signified cash, after a famous incident
in which some Britishers who wanted to buy Linus a beer sent
him money to Finland to do so.
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 horses. When these programs are executed, the
embedded virus is executed too, thus propagating the
`infection'. This normally happens invisibly to the user.
Unlike a worm, a virus cannot infect other computers without
assistance. It is propagated by vectors such as humans trading
programs with their friends (see SEX). The virus may do
nothing but propagate itself and then allow the program to run
normally. Usually, however, after propagating silently for a
while, it starts doing things like writing cute messages on
the terminal or playing strange tricks with the display (some
viruses include nice display hacks). Many nasty viruses,
written by particularly perversely minded crackers, do
irreversible damage, like nuking all the user's files.
In the 1990s, viruses became a serious problem, especially
among Windows users; the lack of security on these machines
enables viruses to spread easily, even infecting the operating
system (Unix machines, by contrast, are immune to such
attacks). The production of special anti-virus software has
become an industry, and a number of exaggerated media reports
have caused outbreaks of near hysteria among users; many
lusers tend to blame everything that doesn't work as they had
expected on virus attacks. Accordingly, this sense of virus
has passed not only into techspeak but into also popular usage
(where it is often incorrectly used to denote a worm or even a
Trojan horse). See phage; compare back door; see also Unix
conspiracy.
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 blocks not uncommonly
include the sender's phone next to a "Voice:" or "Voice-Net:"
header; common variants of this are "Voicenet" and "V-Net".
Compare paper-net, snail-mail.
voodoo programming : n.
[from George Bush's "voodoo economics"]
1. The use by guess or cookbook of an obscure or hairy system,
feature, or algorithm that one does not truly understand. The
implication is that the technique may not work, and if it
doesn't, one will never know why. Almost synonymous with black
magic, except that black magic typically isn't documented and
nobody understands it. Compare magic, deep magic, heavy
wizardry, rain dance, cargo cult programming, wave a dead
chicken, SCSI voodoo.
2. Things programmers do that they know shouldn't work but
they try anyway, and which sometimes actually work, such as
recompiling everything.
VR : // , 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
Amigas this is <Ctrl>-<Left-Amiga>-<Right-Amiga>; on PC clones
this is Ctrl-Alt-Del; on Suns, L1-A; on Macintoshes, it is
<Cmd>-<Power switch> or <Cmd>-<Ctrl>-<Power>! On IRIX,
<Left-Ctrl><Left-Shift><F12><Keypad-Slash>, which kills and
restarts the X server, is sometimes called a vulcan nerve
pinch. Also called three-finger salute and Vulcan death grip.
At shops with a lot of Microsoft Windows machines, this is
often called the Microsoft Maneuver because of the distressing
frequency with which Microsoft's unreliable software requires
it. Compare quadruple bucky.
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
w00t
An interjection similar to "Yay!", as in: "w00t!!! I just got
a raise!" Often used for small victories the speaker dies not
expect to be of speciall interest to anyone else. Some claim
this is a bastardization of "root", the highest level of
access to a system (particularly UNIX), originated by script
kiddies as a 133tspeak equivalent of "root", and said as an
exclamation upon gaining root access. Others claim it
originated in the Everquest multiplayer game as an
abbreviation of "wonderful loot". Still other claim it on
originated on IRC as the "Ewok victory cheer"] Adj. w00table
has the sense of "cool" or "nifty". This is one of the few
leet-speak coinages to have crossed over into non-ironic use
among hackers.
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 WAITS
feature very notable in pre-Web days was a news-wire interface
that allowed WAITS hackers to read, store, and filter AP and
UPI dispatches from their terminals; the system also featured
a still-unusual level of support for what is now called
multimedia computing, allowing analog audio and video signals
to be switched to programming terminals.
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 machines. Those old
dinosaur parts carried terrific angular momentum; the
combination of a misaligned spindle or worn bearings and
stick-slip interactions with the floor could cause them to
`walk' across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a
couple of millimeters at a time. There is a legend about a
drive that walked over to the only door to the computer room
and jammed it shut; the staff had to cut a hole in the wall in
order to get at it! Walking could also be induced by certain
patterns of drive access (a fast seek across the whole width
of the disk, followed by a slow seek in the other direction).
Some bands of old-time hackers figured out how to induce
disk-accessing patterns that would do this to particular drive
models and held disk-drive races.
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 ticks required to execute it (on a timesharing
system these always differ, as no one program gets all the
ticks, and on multiprocessor systems with good thread support
one may get more processor time than real time).
wall wart : n.
A small power-supply brick with integral male plug, designed
to plug directly into a wall outlet; called a `wart' because
when installed on a power strip it tends to block up at least
one more socket than it uses. These are frequently associated
with modems and other small electronic devices which would
become unacceptably bulky or hot if they had power supplies on
board (there are other reasons as well having to do with the
cost of UL certification).
wallhack
A form of game cheat especially associated with first-person
shooters like Quake, in which the walls in the simulated maze
or dungeon are rendered transparent to the cheater. This gives
the cheater normally hidden information about the whereabouts
of other players. Beyond gaming, a wallhack is the paradigm
case of a whole class of security problems that stem from the
fact that a server cannot trust client software, and server
authors must assume that all computation farmed out to a
client is exposed to and can be interfered with by the user.
wango : /wang'goh/ , n.
Random bit-level grovelling going on in a system during some
unspecified operation. Often used in combination with mumble.
For example: "You start with the `.o' file, run it through
this postprocessor that does mumble-wango -- and it comes out
a snazzy object-oriented executable."
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. Adjectival `wanky' is less
offensive and simply means `stupid' or `broken' (this is
mainstream in Great Britain).
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 dialers.
war-driving
[play on war dialer; also as single word wardriving] Driving
around looking for unsecured wireless Internet access points
to connect to. More at the War Driving home page. Compare
war-chalking.
war-chalking
[play on war-driving; the first syllable has since been
reinterpreted as an acronym for "wireless access revolution"]
The practice of using chalk marks similar to hobo signs to
indicate the nearby presence of a wireless Internet access
point, a boon to strolling hackers with laptops. The concept
was first floated in early 2002 and was instantly seized upon
with cries of glee by hackers all over the portions of the
world urbanized enough to have sidewalks and access points.
The process rather recalls the explosive spread of heraldry in
the medieval Europe of the 1120s. There is a site that
explains the symbology;.
-ware : suff.
[from `software'] Commonly used to form jargon terms for
classes of software. For examples, see annoyware, careware,
crippleware, crudware, freeware, fritterware, guiltware,
liveware, meatware, payware, psychedelicware, shareware,
shelfware, vaporware, wetware, spyware, adware.
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, courier, leech,
elite.
warez d00dz : /weirz doodz/ , n.
A substantial subculture of crackers refer to themselves as
warez d00dz; there is evidently some connection with B1FF
here. As `Ozone Pilot', one former warez d00d, wrote:
Warez d00dz get illegal copies of copyrighted software. If it has
copy protection on it, they break the protection so the software
can be copied. Then they distribute it around the world via
several gateways. Warez d00dz form badass group names like RAZOR
and the like. They put up boards that distribute the latest ware,
or pirate program. The whole point of the Warez sub-culture is to
get the pirate program released and distributed before any other
group. I know, I know. But don't ask, and it won't hurt as much.
This is how they prove their poweress [sic]. It gives them the
right to say, "I released King's Quest IVXIX before you so
obviously my testicles are larger." Again don't ask...
The studly thing to do if one is a warez d00d, it appears, is
emit 0-day warez, that is copies of commercial software copied
and cracked on the same day as its retail release. Warez d00ds
also hoard software in a big way, collecting untold megabytes
of arcade-style games, pornographic JPGs, and applications
they'll never use onto their hard disks. As Ozone Pilot
acutely observes:
[BELONG] is the only word you will need to know. Warez d00dz want
to belong. They have been shunned by everyone, and thus turn to
cyberspace for acceptance. That is why they always start groups
like TGW, FLT, USA and the like. Structure makes them happy. [...]
Warez d00dz will never have a handle like "Pink Daisy" because
warez d00dz are insecure. Only someone who is very secure with a
good dose of self-esteem can stand up to the cries of fag and
girlie-man. More likely you will find warez d00dz with handles
like: Doctor Death, Deranged Lunatic, Hellraiser, Mad Prince,
Dreamdevil, The Unknown, Renegade Chemist, Terminator, and Twin
Turbo. They like to sound badass when they can hide behind their
terminals. More likely, if you were given a sample of 100 people,
the person whose handle is Hellraiser is the last person you'd
associate with the name.
The contrast with Internet hackers is stark and instructive.
See cracker, wannabee, handle, elite, courier, leech; compare
weenie, spod.
warez kiddies : n.
Even more derogatory way of referring to warez d00dz; refers
to the fact that most warez d00dz are around the age of
puberty. Compare script kiddies.
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 quotes, ugly ASCII art, or
simply excessive size. The original `Warlord' was a B1FF-like
newbie c.1991 who featured in his sig a particularly large and
obnoxious ASCII graphic resembling the sword of Conan the
Barbarian in the 1981 John Milius movie; the group name
alt.fan.warlord was sarcasm, and the characteristic mode of
warlording is devastatingly sarcastic praise. See also McQuary
limit.
warm boot : n.
See boot.
wart : n.
A small, crocky feature that sticks out of an otherwise clean
design. Something conspicuous for localized ugliness,
especially a special-case exception to a general rule. For
example, in some versions of 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).
[76-02-14.png]
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-03-17:2)
2. [CMU] A machine used exclusively for washing software. CMU
has clusters of these.
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.
[74-08-18.png]
A really unusual kind of water MIPS.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 74-12-25)
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; see also casting
the runes.
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.
web ring : n.
Two or more web sites connected by prominent links between
sites sharing a common interest or theme. Usually such cliques
have the topology of a ring, in order to make it easy for
visitors to navigate through all of them.
web toaster : n.
A small specialized computer, shipped with no monitor or
keyboard or any other external peripherals, pre-configured to
be controlled through an Ethernet port and function as a WWW
server. Products of this kind (for example the Cobalt Qube)
are often about the size of a toaster. See toaster; compare
video toaster.
webify : n.
To put a piece of (possibly already existing) material on the
WWW. Frequently used for papers ("Why don't you webify all
your publications?") or for demos ("They webified their 6.866
final project"). This term seems to have been (rather
logically) independently invented multiple times in the early
1990s.
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
deadlocks with another (but not all instances of wedging are
deadlocks). See also gronk, locked up, hosed, hung (wedged is
more severe than hung).
2. Often refers to humans suffering misconceptions. "He's
totally wedged -- he's convinced that he can levitate through
meditation."
3. [Unix] Specifically used to describe the state of a TTY
left in a losing state by abort of a screen-oriented program
or one that has messed with the line discipline in some
obscure way.
There is some dispute over the origin of this term. It is
usually thought to derive from a common description of
recto-cranial inversion; however, it may actually have
originated with older `hot-press' printing technology in which
physical type elements were locked into type frames with
wedges driven in by mallets. Once this had been done, no
changes in the typesetting for that page could be made.
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....".
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 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, 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.
1. [ITS] A derogatory term for Unix, derived from Unix weenie.
According to one noted ex-ITSer, it is "the operating system
preferred by Unix Weenies: typified by poor modularity, poor
reliability, hard file deletion, no file version numbers, case
sensitivity everywhere, and users who believe that these are
all advantages". (Some ITS fans behave as though they believe
Unix stole a future that rightfully belonged to them. See ITS,
sense 2.)
2. [Brown University] A Unix-like OS developed for tutorial
purposes at Brown University. See
http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs167/weenix.html. Named
independently of the ITS usage.
well-behaved : adj.
1. Software that does its job quietly and without
counterintuitive effects. Esp.: said of software having an
interface spec sufficiently simple and well-defined that it
can be used as a tool by other software. See cat.
2. Said of an algorithm that doesn't crash or blow up, even
when given pathological input. Implies that the stability of
the algorithm is intrinsic, which makes this somewhat
different from bulletproof.
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 glarking
things from context. As a trivial example, it is relatively
easy to change all stderr writes to stdout writes in a piece
of C filter code which remains otherwise mysterious.
whack-a-mole : n.
[from the carnival game which involves quickly and repeatedly
hitting the heads of mechanical moles with a mallet as they
pop up from their holes.]
1. The practice of repeatedly causing spammers' throwaway
accounts and drop boxes to be terminated.
2. After sense 1 became established in the mid-1990s the term
passed into more generalized use, and now is commonly found in
such combinations as whack-a-mole windows; the obnoxious
pop-up advertisement windows spawned in flocks when you surf
to sites like Angelfire or Lycos.
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.
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 of reincarnation
[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.
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 hat
See black hat.
whitelist : n.
The opposite of a blacklist. That is, instead of being an
explicit list of people who are banned, it's an explicit list
of people who are to be admitted. Hackers use this especially
of lists of email addresses that are explicitly enabled to get
past strict anti-spam filters.
whizzy : adj.
(alt.: wizzy) [Sun] Describes a cuspy program; one that is
feature-rich and well presented.
Whorfian mind-lock
[from the Lojban-language list] Software designs are often
restricted in unavoidable ways by the capacities of the
operating system or hardware they have to work with. Sometimes
they are restricted in avoidable ways by mental habits a
developer has picked up from a particular language or
environment (perhaps a now-obsolete one) and never discarded.
When a design develops complications that are the result of a
mental habit that is no longer adaptive, the developer has
succumbed to Whorfian mind-lock. The design itself has been
`whorfed'.
For example, some Unix designs are whorfed by the assumption
that directory searches are linear and expensive for large
directories; therefore directories must be kept small. Another
common way to succumb to Whorfian mind-lock is to do serial
processing with a small working set rather than slurping an
entire file or data structure into memory; the hidden
assumption here is that not much core is available and virtual
memory works poorly if at all. Detecting Whorfian mind-lock is
important, because it tends to introduce unnecessary
complexity and bugs.
wibble
[UK, perh. originally from the first Roger Irrelevant strip in
VIZ comics, spread via Your Sinclair magazine in the 1980s and
early 1990s]
1. n.,v. Commonly used to describe chatter, content-free
remarks or other essentially meaningless contributions to
threads in newsgroups. "Oh, rspence is wibbling again".
2. [UK IRC] An explicit on-line no-op.
3. One of the preferred metasyntactic variables in the UK,
forming a series with wobble, wubble, and flob (attributed to
the hilarious historical comedy Blackadder).
4. A pronunciation of the letters "www", as seen in URLs;
i.e., www.foo.com may be pronounced "wibble dot foo dot com"
(compare dub dub dub).
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.
wild side
The public or uncontrolled side of a firewall machine.
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; now common everywhere]
1. vi. To succeed. A program wins if no unexpected conditions
arise, or (especially) if it is sufficiently robust to take
exceptions in stride.
2. n. Success, or a specific instance thereof. A pleasing
outcome. "So it turned out I could use a lexer generator
instead of hand-coding my own pattern recognizer. What a win!"
Emphatic forms: moby win, super win, hyper-win (often used
interjectively as a reply). For some reason suitable win is
also common at MIT, usually in reference to a satisfactory
solution to a problem. Oppose lose; see also big win, which
isn't quite just an intensification of win.
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). (It is sometimes
incorrectly claimed that Winchester was 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.) than
a standard window.
window shopping : n.
[US Geological Survey] Among users of WIMP environments like X
or the Macintosh, extended experimentation with new window
colors, fonts, and icon shapes. This activity can take up
hours of what might otherwise have been productive working
time. "I spent the afternoon window shopping until I found the
coolest shade of green for my active window borders -- now
they perfectly match my medium slate blue background." Serious
window shoppers will spend their days with bitmap editors,
creating new and different icons and background patterns for
all to see. Also: window dressing, the act of applying new
fonts, colors, etc. See fritterware, compare macdink.
Windowsitis
1. As a disease of people: the tendency of inexperienced (or
Windows-experienced) Web developers have to use backslashes in
URLs, rather than the correct forward slashes.
2. As a disease of programs: to be a rigid, clunky, bug-prone
monstrosity, all glossy surface with a hollow interior.
Windoze : /win'dohz/ , n.
See Microsloth Windows. (Also Losedoze.)
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.
[74-12-29.png]
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 75-10-04)
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.
Wintel : n.
Microsoft Windows plus Intel -- the tacit alliance that
dominated desktop computing in the 1990s. After 1999 it began
to brwak up under pressure from Linux; see Lintel.
Wintendo : /win-ten'doh/ , n.
[Play on "Nintendo"] A PC running the Windows operating system
kept primarily for the purpose of viewing multimedia and
playing games. The implication is that the speaker uses a
Linux or *BSD box for everything else.
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. Transitively, a person who knows how a complex piece of
software or hardware works (that is, who groks it); esp.
someone who can find and fix bugs quickly in an emergency.
Someone is a hacker if he or she has general hacking ability,
but is a wizard with respect to something only if he or she
has specific detailed knowledge of that thing. A good hacker
could become a wizard for something given the time to study
it.
2. The term `wizard' is also used intransitively of someone
who has extremely high-level hacking or problem-solving
ability.
3. A person who is permitted to do things forbidden to
ordinary people; one who has wheel privileges on a system.
4. A Unix expert, esp. a Unix systems programmer. This usage
is well enough established that `Unix Wizard' is a recognized
job title at some corporations and to most headhunters.
See guru, lord high fixer. See also deep magic, heavy
wizardry, incantation, magic, mutter, rain dance, voodoo
programming, wave a dead chicken.
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 bibles of the LISP/Scheme
world. Also, less commonly, known as the Purple Book. Now
available on the
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
wizard hat : n.
[also, after Terry Pratchett, pointy hat] Notional headgear
worn by whoever is the wizard in a particular context. The
implication is that it's a transferable role. "Talk to Alice,
she's wearing the TCP/IP wizard hat while Bob is on vacation."
This metaphor is sufficiently live that one may actually see
hackers miming the act of putting on, taking off, or
transferring a phantom hat. See also pointy hat, compare patch
pumpkin.
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.
womble : n.
[Unisys UK: from British puppet-show characters] A user who
has great difficulty in communicating their requirements
and/or in using the resulting software. Extreme case of luser.
An especially senior or high-ranking womble is referred to as
Great-Uncle Bulgaria. Compare Aunt Tillie.
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.
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 fixes; in practice, customers often
find themselves living with workarounds for long periods of
time. "The code died on NUL characters in the input, so I
fixed it to interpret them as spaces." "That's not a fix,
that's a workaround!"
2. A procedure to be employed by the user in order to do what
some currently non-working feature should do. Hypothetical
example: "Using META-F7 crashes the 4.43 build of Weemax, but
as a workaround you can type CTRL-R, then SHIFT-F5, and delete
the remaining cruft by hand."
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 crackers write worms. Perhaps the best-known example
was Robert T. Morris's Great Worm of 1988, a `benign' one that
got out of control and hogged hundreds of Suns and VAXen
across the U.S. See also cracker, RTM, Trojan horse, ice.
wormhole : /werm'hohl/ , n.
[from the wormhole singularities hypothesized in some versions
of General Relativity theory]
1. [n.,obs.] A location in a monitor which contains the
address of a routine, with the specific intent of making it
easy to substitute a different routine. This term is now
obsolescent; modern operating systems use clusters of
wormholes extensively (for modularization of I/O handling in
particular, as in the Unix device-driver organization) but the
preferred techspeak for these clusters is `device tables',
`jump tables' or `capability tables'.
2. [Amateur Packet Radio] A network path using a commercial
satellite link to join two or more amateur VHF networks. So
called because traffic routed through a wormhole leaves and
re-enters the amateur network over great distances with
usually little clue in the message routing header as to how it
got from one relay to the other. Compare gopher hole (sense
2).
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. See also Befunge.
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, in 1972, Signetics bought a double-page spread in
Electronics magazine's April issue and used the spec as an
April Fools' Day joke. Instead of the more conventional
characteristic curves, the 25120 "fully encoded, 9046 x N,
Random Access, write-only-memory" data sheet included diagrams
of "bit capacity vs.: Temp.", "Iff vs. Vff", "Number of pins
remaining vs.: number of socket insertions", and "AQL vs.:
selling price". The 25120 required a 6.3 VAC VFF supply, a
+10V VCC, and VDD of 0V, ±2%.
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.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. The original was invented in 1970 (several years
before ADVENT) by Gregory Yob. The wumpus lived somewhere in a
cave with the topology of an dodecahedron's edge/vertex graph
(later versions supported other topologies, including an
icosahedron and Möbius strip). The player started somewhere at
random in the cave with five `crooked arrows'; these could be
shot through up to three connected rooms, and would kill the
wumpus on a hit (later versions introduced the wounded wumpus,
which got very angry). Unfortunately for players, the movement
necessary to map the maze was made hazardous not merely by the
wumpus (which would eat you if you stepped on him) but also by
bottomless pits and colonies of super bats that would pick you
up and drop you at a random location (later versions added
`anaerobic termites' that ate arrows, bat migrations, and
earthquakes that randomly changed pit locations).
This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random
graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like
the even older Star Trek games). In this respect, as in the
dungeon-like setting and its terse, amusing messages, it
prefigured ADVENT and Zork and was directly ancestral to the
latter (Zork acknowledged this heritage by including a
super-bat colony). A C emulation of the original Basic game is
available at the Retrocomputing Museum,
http://www.catb.org/retro/.
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/ , /wiss'ee-wig/ , adj.
[Traced to Flip Wilson's "Geraldine" character c.1970]
Describes a user interface under which "What You See Is What
You Get", as opposed to one that uses more-or-less obscure
commands that do not result in immediate visual feedback. True
WYSIWYG in environments supporting multiple fonts or graphics
is a rarely-attained ideal; there are variants of this term to
express real-world manifestations including WYSIAWYG (What You
See Is Almost What You Get) and WYSIMOLWYG (What You See Is
More or Less What You Get). All these can be mildly
derogatory, as they are often used to refer to dumbed-down
user-friendly interfaces targeted at non-programmers; a hacker
has no fear of obscure commands (compare WYSIAYG). On the
other hand, EMACS was one of the very first WYSIWYG editors,
replacing (actually, at first overlaying) the extremely
obscure, command-based TECO. See also WIMP environment. [Oddly
enough, WYSIWYG made it into the 1986 supplement to the OED,
in lower case yet. --ESR]
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, 80486, 80586 or 80686
(note that a Unix hacker might write these as 680[0-6]0 and
80[1-6]86 or 680?0 and 80?86 respectively; see glob).
2. [after the name of an earlier window system called `W'] An
over-sized, over-featured, over-engineered and incredibly
over-complicated window system developed at MIT and widely
used on Unix systems.
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 suits has been well anatomized in Fumbling The
Future: How XEROX Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal
Computer by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander (William
Morrow & Co., 1988, ISBN 0-688-09511-9).
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/ , /ik-ziz'ee/ , adj.
[from the ADVENT game] The canonical `magic word'. This comes
from ADVENT, in which the idea is to explore an underground
cave with many rooms and to collect the treasures you find
there. If you type xyzzy at the appropriate time, you can move
instantly between two otherwise distant points. If, therefore,
you encounter some bit of magic, you might remark on this
quite succinctly by saying simply "Xyzzy!" "Ordinarily you
can't look at someone else's screen if he has protected it,
but if you type quadruple-bucky-clear the system will let you
do it anyway." "Xyzzy!" It's traditional for xyzzy to be an
Easter egg in games with text interfaces.
Xyzzy has actually been implemented as an undocumented no-op
command on several OSes; in Data General's AOS/VS, for
example, it would typically respond "Nothing happens", just as
ADVENT did if the magic was invoked at the wrong spot or
before a player had performed the action that enabled the
word. In more recent 32-bit versions, by the way, AOS/VS
responds "Twice as much happens".
Early versions of the popular `minesweeper' game under
Microsoft Windows had a cheat mode triggered by the command
`xyzzy<enter><right-shift>' that turns the top-left pixel of
the screen different colors depending on whether or not the
cursor is over a bomb. This feature temporarily disappeared in
Windows 98, but reappeared in Windows 2000.
The following passage from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L.
Frank Baum, suggesting a possible pre-ADVENT origin, has
recently come to light: "Ziz-zy, zuz-zy, zik!" said Dorothy,
who was now standing on both feet. This ended the saying of
the charm, and they heard a great chattering and flapping of
wings, as the band of Winged Monkeys flew up to them.
The text can be viewed at Project Gutenberg.
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 Programmers); the
acronym is a more recent invention.
yak shaving
[MIT AI Lab, after 2000: orig. probably from a Ren & Stimpy
episode.] Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually
necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which,
several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem
you're working on.
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 card : n.
See green card.
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.
YHBT : //
[Usenet: very common] Abbreviation: You Have Been Trolled (see
troll, sense 1). Especially used in "YHBT. YHL. HAND.", which
is widely understood to expand to "You Have Been Trolled. You
Have Lost. Have A Nice Day". You are quite likely to see this
if you respond incautiously to a flame-provoking post that was
obviously floated as sucker bait.
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 : cav.
[Unix] The canonical comment describing something magic or too
complicated to bother explaining properly. From an infamous
comment in the context-switching code of the V6 Unix kernel.
Dennis Ritchie has explained this in detail.
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 see the word "Oxford" and mentally trip over the fact
that `r' is not a hex digit.
+ you realize you have never seen half of your best friends.
A list of these can be found by searching for this phrase on
the web.
[An early version of this entry said "All but one of these
have been reliably reported as hacker traits (some of them
quite often). Even hackers may have trouble spotting the
ringer." The ringer was balancing one's checkbook in octal,
which I made up out of whole cloth. Although more respondents
picked that one out as fiction than any of the others, I also
received multiple independent reports of its actually
happening, most famously to Grace Hopper while she was working
with BINAC in 1949. --ESR]
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!".
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 parsed) and covered with Yu-Shiang
(or Yu-Hsiang) sauce. Usage: primarily by people on the MIT
LISP Machine, which could display this character on the
screen. Tends to elicit incredulity from people who hear about
it second-hand.
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.
Zawinski's Law
"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.
Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones
which can." Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the "Law
of Software Envelopment") to express his belief that all truly
useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits
and application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just
a side effect of that). It is commonly cited, though with
widely varying degrees of accuracy.
zbeba : n.
[USENET] The word `moron' in rot13. Used to describe newbies
who are behaving with especial cluelessness.
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 errors, 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 is
a 16-bit character code intended to cover all of the world's
writing systems, including Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese,
hiragana, katakana, Devanagari, Thai, Laotian and many other
scripts -- support for elvish is planned for a future
release).
zip : vt.
[primarily MS-DOS/Windows] To create a compressed archive from
a group of files using PKWare's PKZIP or a compatible
archiver. Its use is spreading now that portable
implementations of the algorithm have been written. Commonly
used as follows: "I'll zip it up and send it to you." See tar
and feather.
zipperhead : n.
[IBM] A person with a closed mind.
zombie : n.
1. [Unix] A process that has died but has not yet relinquished
its process table slot (because the parent process hasn't
executed a wait(2) for it yet). These can be seen in ps(1)
listings occasionally. Compare orphan.
2. A machine, especially someone's home box, that has been
cracked and is being used as part of a second-stage attack by
miscreants trying to mask their home IP address. Especially
used of machines being exploited in large gangs for a
mechanized denial-of-service attack like Tribe Flood Network;
the image that goes with this is of a veritable army of
zombies mindlessly doing the bidding of a necromancer.
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; the
commercial Zork trilogy is available at
http://www.ifarchive.org/. See also grue.
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.
Appendix A. Hacker Folklore
Table of Contents
The Meaning of `Hack'
TV Typewriters: A Tale of Hackish Ingenuity
A Story About `Magic'
Some AI Koans
Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine
Moon instructs a student
Sussman attains enlightenment
Drescher and the toaster
OS and JEDGAR
The Story of Mel
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 AM,
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://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/Gallery.html. There is a sequel entitled
Is This The Way To Baker House?. The Caltech Alumni Association has
published two similar books titled Legends of Caltech and More
Legends of Caltech.
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' (card with all positions punched).
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 killed 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 Windows 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.
Finally, here is a wonderful hack story for the new millennium:
1990's addition to the hallowed tradition of April Fool RFCs was RFC
1149, A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian
Carriers. This sketched a method for transmitting IP packets via
carrier pigeons.
Eleven years later, on 28 April 2001, the Bergen Linux User's Group
successfully demonstrated CPIP (Carrier Pigeon IP) between two Linux
machines running on opposite sides of a small mountain in Bergen,
Norway. Their network stack used printers to hex-dump packets onto
paper, pigeons to transport the paper, and OCR software to read the
dumps at the other end and feed them to the receiving machine's
network layer.
Here is the actual log of the ping command they successfully
executed. Note the exceptional packet times.
Script started on Sat Apr 28 11:24:09 2001
vegard@gyversalen:~$ /sbin/ifconfig tun0
tun0 Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
inet addr:10.0.3.2 P-t-P:10.0.3.1 Mask:255.255.255.255
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST MTU:150 Metric:1
RX packets:1 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:2 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0
RX bytes:88 (88.0 b) TX bytes:168 (168.0 b)
vegard@gyversalen:~$ ping -i 450 10.0.3.1
PING 10.0.3.1 (10.0.3.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=6165731.1 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=255 time=3211900.8 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=5124922.8 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=6388671.9 ms
-- 10.0.3.1 ping statistics --
9 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 55% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 3211900.8/5222806.6/6388671.9 ms
vegard@gyversalen:~$ exit
Script done on Sat Apr 28 14:14:28 2001
A web page documenting the event, with pictures, is at
http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/. In the finest Internet tradition,
all software involved was open-source; the custom parts are available
for download from the site.
While all acknowledged the magnitude of this achievement, some debate
ensued over whether BLUG's implementation was properly conformant to
the RFC. It seems they had not used the duct tape specified in 1149
to attach messages to pigeon legs, but instead employed other methods
less objectionable to the pigeons. The debate was properly resolved
when it was pointed out that the duct-tape specification was not
prefixed by a MUST, and was thus a recommendation rather than a
requirement.
The perpetrators finished their preliminary writeup in this wise:
"Now, we're waiting for someone to write other implementations, so
that we can do interoperability tests, and maybe we finally can get
the RFC into the standards track... ".
The logical next step should be an implementation of RFC2549.
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. And, in fact, the device was not
entirely useless; when combined with a modem board, it became a crude
but serviceable terminal. --ESR]
[Antihistorical note: On September 23rd, 1992, the L.A. Times ran the
following bit in Steve Harvey's `Only in L.A.' column:
It must have been borrowed from a museum: 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
diked 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.
Some AI Koans
Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine
Moon instructs a student
Sussman attains enlightenment
Drescher and the toaster
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, who would later found Connection Machines,
Inc. 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.
Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine
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.
Moon instructs a student
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.]
Sussman attains enlightenment
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.
Drescher and the toaster
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 world (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 1999 -- in the Unisys MCP for large systems. It is unknown to
us whether the name is tribute or independent invention.
The Story of Mel
This was posted to Usenet by its author, Ed Nather
(<nather@astro.as.utexas.edu>), 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. (But 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 than his prose original...]
[1999 update: Mel's last name is now known. The manual for the LGP-30
refers to "Mel Kaye of Royal McBee who did the bulk of the
programming [...] of the ACT 1 system".]
[2001: The Royal McBee LPG-30 turns out to have one other claim to
fame. It turns out that meteorologist Edward Lorenz was doing weather
simulations on an LGP-30 when, in 1961, he discovered the "Butterfly
Effect" and computational chaos. This seems, somehow, appropriate.]
[2002: A copy of the programming manual for the LGP-30 lives at
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/lgp-30-man.html]
Appendix B. A Portrait of J. Random Hacker
Table of Contents
General Appearance
Dress
Reading Habits
Other Interests
Physical Activity and Sports
Education
Things Hackers Detest and Avoid
Food
Politics
Gender and Ethnicity
Religion
Ceremonial Chemicals
Communication Style
Geographical Distribution
Sexual Habits
Personality Characteristics
Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality
Miscellaneous
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,
Birk-enstocks (or bare feet). Long hair, beards, and moustaches are
common. High incidence of tie-dye and intellectual or humorous
`slogan' T-shirts. Until the mid-1990s such T-shirts were seldom
computer-related, as that would have been too obvious -- but the
hacker culture has since developed its own icons, and J. Random
Hacker now often wears a Linux penguin or BSD daemon or a DeCSS
protest shirt.
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.
After about 1995 hacker dress styles assimilated some influence from
punk, gothic, and rave subcultures. This was relatively mild and has
manifested mostly as a tendency to wear a lot of black, especially
when `dressed up' to the limit of formality. Other markers of those
subcultures such as piercings, chains, and dyed hair remain
relatively uncommon. Hackers appear to wear black more because it
goes with everything and hides dirt than because they want to look
like goths.
Very few hackers 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. When they are somehow backed into conforming to a dress code,
they will find ways to subvert it, for example by wearing absurd
novelty ties.
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, skydiving, scuba diving. Hackers' delight
in techno-toys also tends to draw them towards hobbies with nifty
complicated equipment that they can tinker with.
The popularity of martial arts in the hacker culture deserves special
mention. Many observers have noted it, and the connection has grown
noticeably stronger over time. In the 1970s, many hackers admired
martial arts disciplines from a distance, sensing a compatible ideal
in their exaltation of skill through rigorous self-discipline and
concentration. As martial arts became increasingly mainstreamed in
the U.S. and other western countries, hackers moved from admiring to
doing in large numbers. In 1997, for example, your humble editor
recalls sitting down with five strangers at the first Perl conference
and discovering that four of us were in active training in some sort
of martial art -- and, what is more interesting, nobody at the table
found this high perecentage at all odd.
Today (2000), martial arts seems to have become firmly established as
the hacker exercise form of choice, and the martial-arts culture
combining skill-centered elitism with a willingness to let anybody
join seems a stronger parallel to hacker behavior than ever. Common
usages in hacker slang un-ironically analogize programming to kung fu
(thus, one hears talk of "code-fu" or in reference to specific skills
like "HTML-fu"). Albeit with slightly more irony, today's hackers
readily analogize assimilation into the hacker culture with the plot
of a Jet Li movie: the aspiring newbie studies with masters of the
tradition, develops his art through deep meditation, ventures forth
to perform heroic feats of hacking, and eventually becomes a master
who trains the next generation of newbies in the hacker way.
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
All the works of Microsoft. Smurfs, Ewoks, and other forms of
offensive cuteness. Bureaucracies. Stupid people. Easy listening
music. Television (with occasional exceptions for cartoons, movies,
and good SF like Star Trek classic or Babylon 5). 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 déclassé). 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
Formerly vaguely liberal-moderate, more recently
moderate-to-neoconservative (hackers too were affected by the
collapse of socialism). There is a 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 paleoconservatism 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. However, there has been something of a trend towards exotic
beers since about 1995, especially among younger Linux hackers
apparently influenced by Linus Torvalds's fondness for Guinness.
Limited use of non-addictive psychedelic drugs, such as cannabis,
LSD, psilocybin, 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. But on the gripping 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.
Another weakness of the hacker personality is a perverse tendancy to
attack all problems from the most technically complicated angle, just
because it may mean more interesting problems to solve, or cooler
toys to play with. Hackers sometimes have trouble grokking that the
bubble gum and paperclip hardware fix is actually the way to go, and
that they really don't need to convince the client to buy that shiny
new tool they've had your eye on for two months.
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
and Linux hackers; Unix aficionados despise VMS and Windows; 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 MUDs 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 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 (ADD), supposedly characterized by (among other
things) a combination of short attention span with an ability to
`hyperfocus' imaginatively on interesting tasks. In 1998-1999 another
syndrome that is said to overlap with many hacker traits entered
popular awareness: Asperger's syndrome (AS). This disorder is also
sometimes called `high-function autism', though researchers are
divided on whether AS is in fact a mild form of autism or a distinct
syndrome with a different etiology. AS patients exhibit mild to
severe deficits in interpreting facial and body-language cues and in
modeling or empathizing with others' emotions. Though some AS
patients exhibit mild retardation, others compensate for their
deficits with high intelligence and analytical ability, and
frequently seek out technical fields where problem-solving abilities
are at a premium and people skills are relatively unimportant. Both
syndromes are thought to relate to abnormalities in neurotransmitter
chemistry, especially the brain's processing of serotonin.
Many hackers have noticed that mainstream culture has shown a
tendency to pathologize and medicalize normal variations in
personality, especially those variations that make life more
complicated for authority figures and conformists. Thus, hackers
aware of the issue tend to be among those questioning whether ADD and
AS actually exist; and if so whether they are really `diseases'
rather than extremes of a normal genetic variation like having
freckles or being able to taste DPT. In either case, they have a
sneaking tendency to wonder if these syndromes are over-diagnosed and
over-treated. After all, people in authority will always be
inconvenienced by schoolchildren or workers or citizens who are
prickly, intelligent individualists -- thus, any social system that
depends on authority relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize
and therapize and drug such `abnormal' people until they are properly
docile and stupid and `well-socialized'.
So hackers tend to believe they have good reason for skepticism about
clinical explanations of the hacker personality. That being said,
most would also concede that some hacker traits coincide with
indicators for non-hyperactive ADD and AS -- the status of caffeine
as a hacker beverage of choice may be connected to the fact that it
bonds to the same neural receptors as Ritalin, the drug most commonly
prescribed for ADD. It is probably true that boosters of both would
find a rather higher rate of clinical ADD among hackers than the
supposedly mainstream-normal 3-5% (AS is rarer at 0.4-0.5%).
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.
Appendix C. Helping Hacker Culture Grow
If you have 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 straighten 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 proprietary software `solution' that costs more than
it's worth, be ready to blow the competition away with
open-source software running over a Unix.
* Contribute to organizations like the Free Software Foundation
that promote the production of high-quality free and open-source
software. You can reach the Free Software Foundation at
<gnu@gnu.org>, 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 <lpf@@uunet.uu.net>. by phone at +1 617
621 7084, or by snail-mail at 1 Kendall Square #143, P.O.Box
9171, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 USA.
* Join the continuing fight against Internet censorship, visit the
Center for Democracy and Technology Home Page at
http://www.cdt.org/.
* If you do nothing else, please help fight government attempts to
seize political control of Internet content and restrict strong
cryptography. The so-called `Communications Decency Act' was
declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, but U.S.
cryptography policy still infringes our First Amendment rights.
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.
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.
Appendix D. Bibliography
Table of Contents
Bibliography
Here are some other books you can read to help you understand the
hacker mindset.
Bibliography
[Hofstadter] Göodel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Douglas
Hofstadter. Copyright © 1979. Basic Books. 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.
[Shea-ampersand-Wilson] The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Robert Shea and
Robert Anton Wilson. DTP. ISBN 0440539811.
(Originally in three volumes: The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden
Apple, and Leviathan).
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 Göodel, Escher, Bach. See Eris, Discordianism, random
numbers, Church of the SubGenius.
[Adams] The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams. Pocket
Books. Copyright © 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'.
[Geoffrey] The Tao of Programming. James Geoffrey. Infobooks.
Copyright © 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."
[Levy] Hackers. Steven Levy. Anchor/Doubleday. Copyright © 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 networksthough, and his
enshrinement of Richard Stallman as "the last true hacker" turns out
(thankfully) to have been quite misleading. Despite being a bit dated
and containing some minor errors (many fixed in the paperback
edition), this remains a useful and stimulating book that captures
the feel of several important hacker subcultures.
[Kelly-Bootle] The Computer Contradictionary. Stan Kelly-Bootle. MIT
Press. Copyright © 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;
that work had some stylistic influence on TNHD-1.
[Jennings] The Devouring Fungus: Tales from the Computer Age. Karla
Jennings. Norton. Copyright © 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.
[Kidder] The Soul of a New Machine. Tracy Kidder. Avon. Copyright ©
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."
[Libes] Life with UNIX: a Guide for Everyone. Don Libes. Sandy
Ressler. Prentice-Hall. Copyright © 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.
[Vinge] True Names ... and Other Dangers. Vernor Vinge. Baen Books.
Copyright © 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.
[Stephenson] Snow Crash. Neal Stephenson. Bantam. Copyright © 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.
[Markoff-ampersand-Hafner] Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the
Computer Frontier. Katie Hafner. John Markoff. Simon & Schuster.
Copyright © 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.
[Stoll] The Cuckoo's Egg. Clifford Stoll. Doubleday. Copyright ©
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 ====================#