Amethyst

 view release on metacpan or  search on metacpan

factpacks/jargon.fact  view on Meta::CPAN

accumulator => n. 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 fu...
ACK => /ak/ interj. 1. [from the ASCII mnemonic for 0000110] Acknowledge. Used to register one's presence (compare mainstream *Yo!*). An appropriate response to ping or ENQ. 2. [from the comic strip "Bloom County"] An exclamation of surprised disgust...
ad-hockery => /ad-hok'*r-ee/ [Purdue] n. 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 input toke...
Ada => n. A {Pascal}-descended language that has been made mandatory for Department of Defense software projects by the Pentagon. Hackers are nearly unanimous in observing that, technically, it is precisely what one might expect given that kind of en...
adger => /aj'r/ [UCLA] vt. To make a bonehead move with consequences that could have been foreseen with a slight amount of 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...
ADVENT => /ad'vent/ n. The prototypical computer adventure game, first implemented on the PDP-10 by Will Crowther as an attempt at computer-refereed fantasy gaming, and expanded into a puzzle-oriented game by Don Woods. Now better known as Adventure,...
AI-complete => /A-I k*m-pleet'/ [MIT, Stanford by analogy with `NP-complete' (see NP-)] adj. 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 ...
AI koans => /A-I koh'anz/ pl.n. A series of pastiches of Zen teaching riddles created by Danny Hillis at the MIT AI Lab around various major figures of the Lab's culture (several are included in appendix A). See also {ha ha only serious}, mu, and {{H...
AIDS => /aydz/ n. Short for A* Infected Disk Syndrome (`A*' is a glob pattern that matches, but is not limited to, Apple), this condition is quite often the result of practicing unsafe SEX. See virus, worm, {Trojan horse}, virgin.
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 (...
airplane rule2 => 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. 
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 more than one pointer addresses (`aliases for') a given hunk of storage, it may happen that the storag...
aliasing bug2 => 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...
aliasing bug3 => 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}, {overrun screw}, spam. Historica...
aliasing bug4 => nowadays associated with C programming, it was already in use in a very similar sense in the Algol-60 and FORTRAN communities in the 1960s. 
all-elbows => adj. Of a TSR (terminate-and-stay-resident) IBM PC program, such as the N pop-up calendar and calculator utilities that circulate on BBS systems unsociable. Used to describe a program that rudely steals the resources that it needs witho...
alpha particles => n. See {bit rot}.
ALT => /awlt/ 1. n. The ALT shift key on an IBM PC or clone. 2. [possibly lowercased] n. The `clover' or `Command' key on a Macintosh; use of this term usually reveals that the speaker hacked PCs before coming to the Mac (see also {command key}). Som...
alt bit => /awlt bit/ [from alternate] adj. See {meta bit}.
Aluminum Book => [MIT] n. `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 describe...
Aluminum Book2 => also {{book titles}}. 
amoeba => n. Humorous term for the Commodore Amiga personal computer.
amp off => [Purdue] vt. To run in background. From the UNIX shell `&' operator.
amper => n. Common abbreviation for the name of the ampersand (`&', ASCII 0100110) character. See ASCII for other synonyms.
angle brackets => n. Either of the characters `<' (ASCII 0111100) and `>' (ASCII 0111110) (ASCII less-than or greater-than signs). The {Real World} angle brackets used by typographers are actually taller than a less-than or greater-than sign. See bro...
angry fruit salad => n. A bad visual-interface design that uses too many colors. This derives, of course, from the bizarre day-glo colors found in canned fruit salad. Too often one sees similar affects from interface designers using color window syst...
angry fruit salad2 => tendency to create displays that are flashy and attention-getting but uncomfortable for long-term use. 
AOS => 1. /aws/ (East Coast), /ay-os/ (West Coast) [based on a PDP-10 increment instruction] vt.,obs. To increase the amount of something. "AOS the campfire." Usage considered silly, and now obsolete. Now largely supplanted by bump. See SOS. 2. A {Mu...
app => /ap/ n. Short for `application program', as opposed to a systems program. 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...
arc => [primarily MSDOS] vt. To create a compressed archive from a group of files using SEA ARC, PKWare PKARC, or a compatible program. Rapidly becoming obsolete as the ARC compression method is falling into disuse, having been replaced by newer comp...
arc wars => [primarily MSDOS] n. {holy wars} over which archiving program one should use. The first arc war was sparked when System Enhancement Associates (SEA) sued PKWare for copyright and trademark infringement on its ARC program. PKWare's PKARC o...
arc wars2 => and speed while largely retaining compatibility (it introduced a new compression type that could be disabled for backward-compatibility). PKWare settled out of court to avoid enormous legal costs (both SEA and PKWare are small companies)...
arc wars3 => of PKARC was changed to PKPAK. The public backlash against SEA for bringing suit helped to hasten the demise of ARC as a standard when PKWare and others introduced new, incompatible archivers with better compression algorithms. 
archive => n. 1. A collection of several files bundled into one file by a program such as `ar(1)', `tar(1)', `cpio(1)', or arc for shipment or archiving (sense 2). See also {tar and feather}. 2. A collection of files or archives (sense 1) made availa...
arena => [UNIX] n. The area of memory attached to a process by `brk(2)' and `sbrk(2)' and used by `malloc(3)' as dynamic storage. So named from a semi-mythical `malloc corrupt arena' message supposedly emitted when some early versions became terminal...
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, ...
armor-plated => n. Syn. for bulletproof.
asbestos => adj. Used as a modifier to anything intended to protect one from flames. Important cases of this include {asbestos longjohns} and {asbestos cork award}, but it is used more generally.
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'. Persons in any...
asbestos cork award2 => 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 *whi...
asbestos longjohns => n. Notional garments often 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.
attoparsec => n. `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/s...
autobogotiphobia => /aw'to-boh-got`*-foh'bee-*/ n. See bogotify.
automagically => /aw-toh-maj'i-klee/ or /aw-toh-maj'i-k*l-ee/ 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....
avatar => [CMU, Tektronix] n. Syn. root, superuser. There are quite a few UNIX machines on which the name of the superuser account is `avatar' rather than `root'. This quirk was originated by a CMU hacker who disliked the term `superuser', and was pr...
awk => 1. n. [UNIX techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging text data developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (the name is from their initials). It is characterized by C-like syntax, a declaration-free approach to varia...
backbone cabal => n. A group of large-site administrators who pushed through the {Great Renaming} and reined in the chaos of USENET during most of the 1980s. The cabal {mailing list} disbanded in late 1988 after a bitter internal catfight, but the ne...
backbone site => n. A key USENET and email site; one that processes a large amount of third-party traffic, especially if it is the home site of any of the regional coordinators for the USENET maps. Notable backbone sites as of early 1991 include uune...
backbone site2 => University, UC Berkeley, DEC's Western Research Laboratories, Ohio State University, and the University of Texas. Compare {rib site}, {leaf site}. 
backgammon => See bignum, moby, and pseudoprime.
background => n.,adj.,vt. To do a task `in background' is to do it whenever foreground matters are not claiming your undivided attention, and `to background' something means to relegate it to a lower priority. "For now, we'll just print a list of nod...
backspace and overstrike => interj. Whoa! Back up. Used to suggest that someone just said or did something wrong. Common among APL programmers.
backward combatability => /bak'w*rd k*m-bat'*-bil'*-tee/ [from `backward compatibility'] n. A property of hardware or software revisions in which previous protocols, formats, and layouts are discarded in favor of `new and improved' protocols, formats...
backward combatability2 => making the transition between major releases. When the change is so drastic that the old formats are not retained in the new version, it is said to be `backward combatable'. See {flag day}. 
BAD => /B-A-D/ [IBM acronym, `Broken As Designed'] adj. Said of a program that is bogus because of bad design and misfeatures rather than because of bugginess. See {working as designed}.
Bad Thing => [from the 1930 Sellar & Yeatman parody `1066 And All That'] n. Something that can't possibly result in improvement of the subject. This term is always capitalized, as in "Replacing all of the 9600-baud modems with bicycle couriers would ...
Bad Thing2 => 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. Th...
Bad Thing3 => mainstream idiom on the British side of the pond. 
bag on the side => n. 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,...
bag on the side2 => 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'bit-*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...
bamf => /bamf/ 1. [from old X-Men comics] 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...
banana label => n. The labels often used on the sides of macrotape reels, so called because they are shaped roughly like blunt-ended bananas. This term, like macrotapes themselves, is still current but visibly headed for obsolescence.
banana problem => n. [from the story of the little girl who said "I know how to spell `banana', but I don't know when to stop"]. Not knowing where or when to bring a production to a close (compare {fencepost error}). One may say `there is a banana pr...
banana problem2 => 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...
banana problem3 => implementation.bandwidth n. 1. Used by hackers in a generalization of its technical meaning as the volume of information per unit time that a computer, person, or transmission medium can handle. "Those are amazing graphics, but I m...

factpacks/jargon.fact  view on Meta::CPAN

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.
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, acc...
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 `complexi...
Dragon Book2 => 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 Jef...
Dragon Book3 => 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 ...
Dragon Book4 => representation of the Red Dragon's head while the rest of the beast extends back in normal space. See also {{book titles}}. 
drain => [IBM] v. 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 PRIME (a.k.a. PR1ME) minicomputers that results in all the characters having their high (0x80) bit ON rather than OFF. This of course makes transporting files to other systems much more difficult, n...
dread high-bit disease2 => devices. It is reported that PRIME adopted the reversed-8-bit convention in order to save 25 cents per serial line per machine. This probably qualifies as one of the most cretinous design tradeoffs ever made. See {meta bit}...
dread high-bit disease3 => (including the Atari 800) have exhibited similar brain damage. 
DRECNET => /drek'net/ [from Yiddish/German `dreck', meaning dirt] n. 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 mal...
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 u...
droid => n. A person (esp. a low-level bureaucrat or service-business employee) exhibiting most of the following characteristics (a) na"ive trust in the wisdom of the parent organization or `the system'; (b) a propensity to believe obvious nonsense e...
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 e...
drool-proof paper2 => from Apple's LaserWriter manual "Do not expose your LaserWriter to open fire or flame." 
drop on the floor => vt. To react to an error condition by silently discarding messages or other valuable data. "The gateway ran out of memory, so it just started dropping packets on the floor." Also frequently used of faulty mail and netnews relay s...
drop on the floor2 => {black hole}, {bit bucket}. 
drop-ins => [prob. by analogy with drop-outs] n. 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-out...
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 (this can happen under UNIX when a bad connection to a mod...
drugged => adj. (also `on drugs') 1. Conspicuously stupid, heading toward brain-damaged. Often accompanied by a pantomime of toking a joint (but see appendix B). 2. Of hardware, very slow relative to normal performance.
drunk mouse syndrome => n. 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 c...
drunk mouse syndrome2 => 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 st...
drunk mouse syndrome3 => 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 fr...
drunk mouse syndrome4 => declared `alcoholic' and sent to the clinic to be dried out in a CFC ultrasonic bath. 
dumbass attack => /duhm'as *-tak'/ [Purdue] n. Notional cause of a novice's mistake made by the experienced, especially one made while running as root under UNIX, e.g., typing `rm -r *' or `mkfs' on a mounted file system. Compare adger.
dumbed down => adj. Simplified, with a strong connotation of *over*simplified. Often, a marketroid will insist that the interfaces and documentation of software be dumbed down after the designer has burned untold gallons of midnight oil making it sma...
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 desc...
dup killer => /d[y]oop kill'r/ [FidoNet] n. Software that is supposed to detect and delete duplicates of a message that may have reached the FidoNet system via different routes.
dup loop => /d[y]oop loop/ (also `dupe loop') [FidoNet] n. An incorrectly configured system or network gateway may propagate duplicate messages on one or more echoes, with different identification information that renders {dup killer}s ineffective. I...
dup loop2 => eventually reaches a system through which it has already passed (with the original identification information), all systems passed on the way back to that system are said to be involved in a {dup loop}. 
dusty deck => n. Old software (especially applications) which one is obliged to remain compatible with (or to maintain). The term implies that the software in question is a holdover from card-punch days. Used esp. when referring to old scientific and...
dusty deck2 => of which was written in FORTRAN and very poorly documented but is believed to be too expensive to replace. See fossil. 
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 ...
dynner => /din'r/ 32 bits, by analogy with nybble and {byte}. Usage rare and extremely silly. See also playte, tayste, crumb.*earthquake [IBM] n. The ultimate real-world shock test for computer hardware. Hackish sources at IBM deny the rumor that the...
Easter egg => n. 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...
Easter egg2 => 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 elabor...
Easter egg3 => lists of the developers' names, political exhortations, snatches of music, and (in one case) graphics images of the entire development team. 
Easter egging => [IBM] n. The act of replacing unrelated parts 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. Compare {shotgun debu...
eat flaming death => imp. A construction popularized among hackers by the infamous {CPU Wars} comic; supposed to derive from a famously turgid line in a WWII-era anti-Nazi propaganda comic that ran "Eat flaming death, non-Aryan mongrels!" or somethin...
eat flaming death2 => reported that the Firesign Theater's 1975 album "In The Next World, You're On Your Own" included the phrase "Eat flaming death, fascist media pigs"; this may have been an influence). Used in humorously overblown expressions of h...
EBCDIC => /eb's*-dik/, /eb'see`dik/, or /eb'k*-dik/ [acronym, Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code] n. An alleged character set used on IBM dinosaurs. It exists in at least six mutually incompatible versions, all featuring such delights as ...
echo => [FidoNet] n. A {topic group} on FidoNet's echomail system. Compare newsgroup.
eighty-column mind => [IBM] n. 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)...
eighty-column mind2 => `face down, 9-edge first' (the 9-edge being the bottom of the card). This directive is inscribed on IBM's 1422 and 1602 card readers and is referenced in a famous bit of doggerel called "The Last Bug", the climactic lines of wh...
eighty-column mind3 => the console Of hunger and thirst. Next day he was buried, Face down, 9-edge first. The eighty-column mind is thought by most hackers to dominate IBM's customer base and its thinking. See IBM, {fear and loathing}, {card walloper...
El Camino Bignum => /el' k*-mee'noh big'nuhm/ n. The road mundanely called El Camino Real, a road through the San Francisco peninsula that originally extended all the way down to Mexico City and many portions of which are still intact. Navigation on ...
El Camino Bignum2 => usually done relative to El Camino Real, which defines logical north and south even though it isn't really north-south many places. El Camino Real runs right past Stanford University and so is familiar to hackers. The Spanish wor...
El Camino Bignum3 => /ray-ahl'/) means `royal'; El Camino Real is `the royal road'. In the FORTRAN language, a `real' quantity is a number typically precise to 7 significant digits, and a `double precision' quantity is a larger floating-point number,...
El Camino Bignum4 => 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 Pre...
El Camino Bignum5 => told that the road was hundreds of miles long, he renamed it `El Camino Bignum', and that name has stuck. (See bignum.) 
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...
elegant => [from mathematical usage] adj. Combining simplicity, power, and a certain ineffable grace of design. Higher praise than `clever', `winning', or even cuspy.
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...
elevator controller => n. Another 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 ...
elevator controller2 => 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 ...
ELIZA effect => /*-li'z* *-fekt'/ [AI community] n. 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 ...
ELIZA effect2 => 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, which simulated a Rogerian psychoanalyst by rephrasing many of the patient's statemen...
ELIZA effect3 => 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. ...
ELIZA effect4 => 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 s...
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' ...
EMACS => /ee'maks/ [from Editing MACroS] n. The ne plus ultra of hacker editors, a program editor with an entire LISP system inside it. It was originally written by Richard Stallman in TECO under {ITS} at the MIT AI lab, but the most widely used vers...
email => /ee'mayl/ 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 w...
emoticon => /ee-moh'ti-kon/ n. An ASCII glyph used to indicate an emotional state in email or news. Hundreds have been proposed, but only a few are in common use. These include (These may become more comprehensible if you tilt your head sideways, to ...
empire => n. Any of a family of military simulations derived from a game written by Peter Langston many years ago. There are five or six multi-player variants of varying degrees of sophistication, and one single-player version implemented for both UN...
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 doe...
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 pr...
enhancement => n. 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 decla...
ENQ => /enkw/ or /enk/ [from the ASCII mnemonic ENQuire for 0000101] An on-line convention for querying someone's availability. After opening a {talk mode} connection to someone apparently in heavy hack mode, one might type `SYN SYN ENQ?' (the SYNs r...
EOF => /E-O-F/ [acronym, `End Of File'] n. 1. [techspeak] Refers esp. to whatever out-of-band value is returned by C's sequential character-input functions (and their equivalents in other environments) when end of file has been reached. This value is...
EOL => /E-O-L/ [End Of Line] n. 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 could make an ASR-33 Teletype explode on receipt. This parodied the numerous obscure delimiter and control characters left in ASCII from the days when it was asso...
epoch => [UNIX prob. from astronomical timekeeping] n. The time and date corresponding to 0 in an operating system's clock and timestamp values. Under most UNIX versions the epoch is 000000 GMT, January 1, 1970. System time is measured in seconds or ...
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 prac...
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 w...
epsilon squared2 => of the ten-dollar cable to connect them is epsilon squared. Compare {lost in the underflow}, {lost in the noise}. 
the era => Syn. epoch. Webster's Unabridged makes these words almost synonymous, but `era' usually connotes a span of time rather than a point in time. 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. 1986; this was doubtless influenced by the numerous `Eric' jokes in the Monty Python oeuvre. The...
Eric Conspiracy2 => 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 ...
Eric Conspiracy3 => NNTP); your editor has heard from about fourteen others by email, and the organization line `Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories' now emanates regularly from more than one site. 
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 ...
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.
essentials => n. Things necessary to maintain a productive and secure hacking environment. "A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, a 20-megahertz 80386 box with 8 meg of core and a 300-megabyte disk supporting full UNIX with source and X windows and EMACS a...
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 ...
exa- => /ek's*/ [SI] pref. See {quantifiers}.
examining the entrails => n. The process of grovelling through a core dump or hex image in the attempt to discover the bug that brought a program or system down. Compare runes, incantation, {black art}, {desk check}.
EXCH => /eks'ch*/ or /eksch/ vt. To exchange two things, each for the other; to swap places. If you point to two people sitting down and say "Exch!", you are asking them to trade places. EXCH, meaning EXCHange, was originally the name of a PDP-10 ins...
excl => /eks'kl/ n. Abbreviation for `exclamation point'. See bang, shriek, {ASCII}.
EXE => /eks'ee/ or /eek'see/ or /E-X-E/ n. An executable binary file. Some operating systems (notably MS-DOS, VMS, and TWENEX) use the extension .EXE to mark such files. This usage is also occasionally found among UNIX programmers even though UNIX ex...
exec => /eg-zek'/ vt.,n. 1. [UNIX from `execute'] Synonym for chain, derives from the `exec(2)' call. 2. [from `executive'] obs. The command interpreter for an OS (see shell); term esp. used around mainframes, and prob. derived from UNIVAC's archaic ...
left as an exercise => [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...
left as an exercise2 => research problems by authors possessed of either an evil sense of humor or a vast faith in the capabilities of their audiences. 
eyeball search => n. 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, {...
eyeball search2 => `fabricate'] v. 1. To produce chips from a design that may have been created by someone at another company. Fabbing chips based on the designs of others is the activity of a {silicon foundry}. To a hacker, `fab' is practically neve...
eyeball search3 => line' the production system (lithography, diffusion, etching, etc.) for chips at a chip manufacturer. Different `fab lines' are run with different process parameters, die sizes, or technologies, or simply to provide more manufactur...
face time => n. Time spent interacting with somebody face-to-face (as opposed to via electronic links). "Oh, yeah, I spent some face time with him at the last Usenix."
factor => n. See coefficient.
fall over => [IBM] vi. 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...
fall through2 => 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 jumpi...
fall through3 => passing a point where one would normally expect to find a `break'. A trivial example The variant spelling `/* FALL THRU */' is also common. The effect of this code is to `do_green()' when color is `GREEN', `do_red()' when color is `R...
fall through4 => 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 i...
fall through5 => considered good practice to include a comment highlighting the fall-through where one would normally expect a break. 
fandango on core => [UNIX/C hackers, from the Mexican dance] n. 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 `...
fandango on core2 => low-end personal machines without an MMU, this can corrupt the OS itself, causing massive lossage. Other frenetic dances such as the rhumba, cha-cha, or watusi, may be substituted. See {aliasing bug}, {precedence lossage}, {smash...
FAQ list => /F-A-Q list/ [USENET] n. A compendium of accumulated lore, posted periodically to high-volume newsgroups in an attempt to forestall Frequently Asked Questions. This lexicon itself serves as a good example of a collection of one kind of lo...
FAQ list2 => regular posting. Examples "What is the proper type of NULL?" and "What's that funny name for the `#' character?" are both Frequently Asked Questions. Several extant FAQ lists do (or should) make reference to the Jargon File (the on-line ...
FAQL => /fa'kl/ n. Syn. {FAQ list}.
farming => [Adelaide University, Australia] n. What the heads of a disk drive are said to do when they plow little furrows in the magnetic media. Associated with a crash. Typically used as follows "Oh no, the machine has just crashed; I hope the hard...
fascist => adj. 1. Said of a computer system with excessive or annoying security barriers, usage limits, or access policies. The implication is that said policies are preventing hackers from getting interesting work done. The variant `fascistic' seem...
faulty => adj. Non-functional; buggy. Same denotation as bletcherous, losing, q.v., but the connotation is much milder.
fd leak => /ef dee leek/ n. A kind of programming bug analogous to a {core leak}, in which a program fails to close file descriptors (`fd's) after file operations are completed, and thus eventually runs out of them. See leak.
fear and loathing => [from Hunter Thompson] n. A state inspired by the prospect of dealing with certain real-world systems and standards that are totally brain-damaged but ubiquitous --- Intel 8086s, or COBOL, or {EBCDIC}, or any IBM machine except t...
fear and loathing2 => RS/6000). "Ack! They want PCs to be able to talk to the AI machine. Fear and loathing time!" 
feature => n. 1. A good property or behavior (as of a program). Whether it was intended or not is immaterial. 2. An intended property or behavior (as of a program). Whether it is good or not is immaterial (but if bad, it is also a misfeature). 3. A s...
feature creature => [poss. fr. slang `creature feature' for a horror movie] n. One who loves to add features to designs or programs, perhaps at the expense of coherence, concision, or taste. See also {feeping creaturism}, {creeping featurism}.
feature shock => [from Alvin Toffler's book title `Future Shock'] n. 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 mo...
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 fee...
feeper => /fee'pr/ n. The device in a terminal or workstation (usually a loudspeaker of some kind) that makes the feep sound.
feeping creature => [from {feeping creaturism}] n. 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 ...

factpacks/jargon.fact  view on Meta::CPAN

firebottle => n. A large, primitive, power-hungry active electrical device, similar in function to a FET but constructed out of glass, metal, and vacuum. Characterized by high cost, low density, low reliability, high-temperature operation, and high p...
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 t...
firewall code => n. 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 ...
firewall code2 => 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. 
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 cr...
firewall machine2 => 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...
firewall machine3 => even a complete {iron box} keyable to particular incoming IDs or activity patterns. Syn. flytrap, {Venus flytrap}. 
fireworks mode => n. The mode a machine is sometimes said to be in when it is performing a {crash and burn} operation.
firmy => /fer'mee/ Syn. stiffy (a 3.5-inch floppy disk).
fish => [Adelaide University, Australia] n. 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 cabine...
FISH queue => [acronym, by analogy with FIFO (First In, First Out)] n. `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 ma...
FISH queue2 => running really slowly or exhibiting extreme flakiness. 
fix => n.,v. What one does when a problem has been reported too many times to be ignored.
flag => n. A variable or quantity that can take on one of two values; a bit, particularly one that is used to indicate one of two outcomes or is used to control which of two things is to be done. "This flag controls whether to clear the screen before...
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 day2 => two values. It came into use when a massive change was made to the {Multics} timesharing system to convert from the old ASCII code to the new one; this was scheduled for Flag Day (a U.S. holiday), June 14, 1966. See also {backward combat...
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 y...
flamage => /flay'm*j/ n. Flaming verbiage, esp. high-noise, low-signal postings to USENET or other electronic fora. Often in the phrase `the usual flamage'. `Flaming' is the act itself; `flamage' the content; a `flame' is a single flaming message. Se...
flame => 1. vi. To post an email message intended to insult and provoke. 2. vi. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude. 3. vt. Either of senses 1 or 2, directed with hostili...
flame bait => n. A posting intended to trigger a {flame war}, or one that invites flames in reply.
flame on => vi.,interj. 1. To begin to flame. The punning reference to Marvel Comics's Human Torch is no longer widely recognized. 2. To continue to flame. See rave, burble.
flame war => n. (var. `flamewar') An acrimonious dispute, especially when conducted on a public electronic forum such as USENET.
flamer => n. One who habitually flames. Said esp. of obnoxious USENET personalities.
flap => vt. 1. To unload a DECtape (so it goes flap, flap, flap...). Old-time hackers at MIT tell of the days when the disk was device 0 and microtapes were 1, 2,... and attempting to flap device 0 would instead start a motor banging inside a cabinet...
flarp => /flarp/ [Rutgers University] n. 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...
flat => adj. 1. Lacking any complex internal structure. "That {bitty box} has only a flat filesystem, not a hierarchical one." The verb form is flatten. 2. Said of a memory architecture (like that of the VAX or 680x0) that is one big linear address s...
flat-ASCII => adj. Said of a text file that contains only 7-bit ASCII characters and uses only ASCII-standard control characters (that is, has no embedded codes specific to a particular text formatter or markup language, and no meta-characters). Syn....
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.
flatten => vt. To remove structural information, esp. to filter something with an implicit tree structure into a simple sequence of leaves; also tends to imply mapping to flat-ASCII. "This code flattens an expression with parentheses into an equivale...
flavor => n. 1. Variety, type, kind. "DDT commands come in two flavors." "These lights come in two flavors, big red ones and small green ones." See vanilla. 2. The attribute that causes something to be flavorful. Usually used in the phrase "yields ad...
flavorful => adj. Full of flavor; 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.
flowchart => [techspeak] n. An archaic form of visual control-flow specification employing arrows and `speech balloons' of various shapes. Hackers never use flowcharts, consider them extremely silly, and associate them with COBOL programmers, {card w...
flower key => [Mac users] n. See {command key}.
flush => v. 1. To delete something, usually superfluous, or to abort an operation. "All that nonsense has been flushed." 2. [UNIX/C] To force buffered I/O to disk, as with an `fflush(3)' call. This is *not* an abort or deletion as in sense 1, but a d...
Flyspeck 3 => n. Standard name for any font that is so tiny as to be unreadable (by analogy with such names as `Helvetica 10' for 10-point Helvetica). Legal boilerplate is usually printed in Flyspeck 3.
flytrap => n. See {firewall machine}.
FOAF => // [USENET] n. Acronym for `Friend Of A Friend'. The source of an unverified, possibly untrue story. This was not originated by hackers (it is used in Jan Brunvand's books on urban folklore), but is much better recognized on USENET and elsewh...
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 ...
fold case => v. See {smash case}. This term tends to be used more by people who don't mind that their tools smash case. It also connotes that case is ignored but case distinctions in data processed by the tool in question aren't destroyed.
followup => n. On USENET, a posting generated in response to another posting (as opposed to a reply, which goes by email rather than being broadcast). Followups include the ID of the {parent message} in their headers; smart news-readers can use this ...
foo => /foo/ 1. interj. Term of disgust. 2. Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything, esp. programs and files (esp. scratch files). 3. First on the standard list of metasyntactic variables used in syntax examples. See also bar, ba...
foobar => n. Another common metasyntactic variable; see foo. Hackers do *not* generally use this to mean FUBAR in either the slang or jargon sense.
fool => n. As used by hackers, specifically describes a person who habitually reasons from obviously or demonstrably incorrect premises and cannot be persuaded by evidence to do otherwise; it is not generally used in its other senses, i.e., to descri...
fool file, the => [USENET] n. A notional repository of all the most dramatically and abysmally stupid utterances ever. There is a subgenre of {sig block}s that consists of the header "From the fool file" followed by some quote the poster wishes to re...
fool file, the2 => dimwittery; for this to be really effective, the quote has to be so obviously wrong as to be laughable. More than one USENETter has achieved an unwanted notoriety by being quoted in this way. 
Foonly => n. 1. The PDP-10 successor that was to have been built by the Super Foonly project at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory along with a new operating system. The intention was to leapfrog from the old DEC timesharing system SAIL ...
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.
for free => adj. Said of a capability of a programming language or hardware equipment 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 ...
for free2 => trees for free." Usually it 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 => [from the Mac slogan "The computer for the rest of us"] adj. 1. Used to describe a spiffy product whose affordability shames other comparable products, or (more often) used sarcastically to describe spiffy but very overpriced pr...
for the rest of us2 => with a limited interface, deliberately limited capabilities, non-orthogonality, inability to compose primitives, or any other limitation designed to not `confuse' a na"ive user. This places an upper bound on how far that user c...
for the rest of us3 => 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. Become...
for the rest of us4 => 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}, Macin...
fora => pl.n. Plural of forum.
foreground => [UNIX] vt. To foreground a task is to bring it 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 writ...
forked => [UNIX; prob. influenced by a mainstream expletive] adj. Terminally slow, or dead. Originated when one system slowed to incredibly bad speeds because of a process recursively spawning copies of itself (using the UNIX system call `fork(2)') a...
Fortrash => /for'trash/ n. Hackerism for the FORTRAN language, referring to its primitive design, gross and irregular syntax, limited control constructs, and slippery, exception-filled semantics.
fortune cookie => [UNIX] n. A random quote, item of trivia, joke, or maxim printed to the user's tty at login time or (less commonly) at logout time. Items from this lexicon have often been used as fortune cookies. See {cookie file}.
forum => n. [USENET, GEnie CI$; pl. `fora' or `forums'] Any discussion group accessible through a dial-in BBS, a {mailing list}, or a newsgroup (see {network, the}). A forum functions much like a bulletin board; users submit postings for all to read ...
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 o...
four-color glossies => 1. Literature created by marketroids that allegedly containing 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." ...
four-color glossies2 => superficiality even when the material is printed on ordinary paper in black and white. Four-color-glossy manuals are *never* useful for finding a problem. 2. [rare] Applied by extension to manual pages that don't contain enoug...
four-color glossies3 => program doesn't produce the expected or desired output. 
fragile => adj. Syn brittle.
fred => n. 1. The personal name most frequently used as a metasyntactic variable (see foo). Allegedly popular because it's easy for a non-touch-typist to type on a standard QWERTY keyboard. Unlike {J. Random Hacker} or `J. Random Loser', this name ha...
frednet => /fred'net/ n. Used to refer to some random and uncommon protocol encountered on a network. "We're implementing bridging in our router to solve the frednet problem."
freeware => n. Free software, often written by enthusiasts and distributed by users' groups, or via electronic mail, local bulletin boards, USENET, or other electronic media. At one time, `freeware' was a trademark of Andrew Fluegelman, the author of...
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 ...
fried => adj. 1. Non-working due to hardware failure; burnt out. Especially used of hardware brought down by a `power glitch' (see glitch), drop-outs, a short, or some other electrical event. (Sometimes this literally happens to electronic circuits! ...
friode => /fri'ohd/ [TMRC] n. A reversible (that is, fused or blown) diode. Compare fried.
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 sed...
frob => /frob/ 1. n. [MIT] The TMRC definition was "FROB = a protruding arm or trunnion"; by metaphoric extension, a `frob' is any random small thing; an object that you can comfortably hold in one hand; something you can frob. See frobnitz. 2. vt. A...
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 "Pl...
frobnitz => /frob'nits/, pl. `frobnitzem' /frob'nit-zm/ or `frobni' /frob'ni/ n. 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 ar...
frog => alt. `phrog' 1. interj. Term of disgust (we seem to have a lot of them). 2. Used as a name for just about anything. See foo. 3. n. Of things, a crock. 4. n. Of people, somewhere in between a turkey and a toad. 5. `froggy' adj. Similar to `bag...
frotz => /frots/ 1. n. See frobnitz. 2. `mumble frotz' An interjection of very mild 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.
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...
FTP => /F-T-P/, *not* /fit'ip/ 1. [techspeak] n. The File Transfer Protocol for transmitting files between systems on the Internet. 2. vt. To beam a file using the File Transfer Protocol. 3. Sometimes used as a generic even for file transfers not usi...
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.
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...
fuck me harder2 => 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. ...
fuck me harder3 => 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...
fuck me harder4 => 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,...
fuck me harder5 => 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 her...
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 co...
FUD wars => /fuhd worz/ n. [from FUD] Political posturing engaged in by hardware and software vendors ostensibly committed to standardization but actually willing to fragment the market to protect their own shares. The UNIX International vs. OSF conf...
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 co...
fudge factor => n. A value or parameter that is varied in an ad hoc way to produce the desired result. The terms `tolerance' and slop are also used, though these usually indicate a one-sided leeway, such as a buffer that is made larger than necessary...
fudge factor2 => 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' typica...
fudge factor3 => 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 ...
fudge factor4 => 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}}.
fuggly => /fuhg'lee/ adj. Emphatic form of funky; funky + ugly). Unusually for hacker jargon, this may actually derive from black street-jive. To say it properly, the first syllable should be growled rather than spoken. Usage humorous. "Man, the {ASC...
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 ...
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). When your funny mone...
funny money2 => 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 ...
funny money3 => 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'. 
fuzzball => [TCP/IP hackers] n. A DEC LSI-11 running a particular suite of homebrewed software written by Dave Mills and assorted co-conspirators, used in the early 1980s for Internet protocol testbedding and experimentation. These were used as NSFne...
gabriel => /gay'bree-*l/ [for Dick Gabriel, SAIL LISP hacker and volleyball fanatic] n. An unnecessary (in the opinion of the opponent) stalling tactic, e.g., tying one's shoelaces or combing one's hair repeatedly, asking the time, etc. Also used to ...
gag => vi. Equivalent to choke, but connotes more disgust. "Hey, this is FORTRAN code. No wonder the C compiler gagged." See also barf.
gang bang => n. The use of large numbers of loosely coupled programmers in an attempt to wedge a great many features into a product in a short time. Though there have been memorable gang bangs (e.g., that over-the-weekend assembler port mentioned in ...
gang bang2 => perpetrated by large companies trying to meet deadlines and produce 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 programm...
gang bang3 => miss the importance of maintaining a coherent design. See also firefighting, {Mongolian Hordes technique}, {Conway's Law}. 
garbage collect => vi. (also `garbage collection', n.) See GC.
garply => /gar'plee/ [Stanford] n. Another meta-syntactic 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...
gaseous => adj. Deserving of being gassed. Disseminated by Geoff Goodfellow while at SRI; became particularly popular after the Moscone-Milk killings in San Francisco, when it was learned that the defendant Dan White (a politician who had supported P...
GC => /G-C/ [from LISP terminology; `Garbage Collect'] 1. vt. To clean up and throw away useless things. "I think I'll GC the top of my desk today." When said of files, this is equivalent to GFR. 2. vt. To recycle, reclaim, or put to another use. 3. ...
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....
GECOS => /jee'kohs/ n. See {GCOS}.
gedanken => /g*-don'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 re...
geef => v. [ostensibly from `gefingerpoken'] vt. Syn. mung. See also blinkenlights.
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 something highly technical and don't have time to explain "Pardon me while ...
gen => /jen/ n.,v. Short for generate, used frequently in both spoken and written contexts.
gender mender => n. A cable connector shell with either two male or two female connectors on it, used to correct the mismatches that result when some loser didn't understand the RS232C specification and the distinction between DTE and DCE. Used esp. ...
gender mender2 => 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 p...
gender mender3 => 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 counter-commercial te...
General Public Virus2 => alleged that the copyleft `infects' software generated with GNU tools, which may in turn infect other software that reuses any of its code. The Free Software Foundation's official position as of January 1991 is that copyright...
General Public Virus3 => "programs textually incorporating significant amounts of GNU code", and that the `infection' is not passed on to third parties unless actual GNU source is transmitted (as in, for example, use of the Bison parser skeleton). Ne...
General Public Virus4 => the copyleft language is `boobytrapped' has caused many developers to avoid using GNU tools and the GPL. Recent (July 1991) changes in the language of the version 2.00 language may eliminate this problem. 
generate => vt. To produce something according to an algorithm or program or set of rules, or as a (possibly unintended) side effect of the execution of an algorithm or program. The opposite of parse. This term retains its mechanistic connotations (t...
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 g...
Get a life! => imp. Hacker-standard way of suggesting that the person to whom you are speaking has succumbed to terminal geekdom (see {computer geek}). Often heard on USENET, esp. as a way of suggesting that the target is taking some obscure issue of...
Get a life!2 => exhortation was popularized by William Shatner on a "Saturday Night Live" episode in a speech that ended "Get a *life*!", but some respondents believe it to have been in use before then. 
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 4 megabytes. This is as of mid-1991;...
Get a real computer!2 => computer' rises with time, and it may well be (for example) that machines with character-only displays will be generally considered `unreal' in a few years (GLS points out that they already are in some circles). See essential...
GFR => /G-F-R/ vt. [ITS] From `Grim File Reaper', an ITS and Lisp Machine utility. To remove a file or files according to some program-automated or semi-automatic manual procedure, especially one designed to reclaim mass storage space or reduce name-...
gig => /jig/ or /gig/ [SI] n. See {quantifiers}.
giga- => /ji'ga/ or /gi'ga/ [SI] pref. See {quantifiers}.
GIGO => /gi'goh/ [acronym] 1. `Garbage In, Garbage Out' --- usually said in response to lusers who complain that a program didn't complain about faulty data. Also commonly used to describe failures in human decision making due to faulty, incomplete, ...
gillion => /gil'y*n/ or /jil'y*n/ [formed from giga- by analogy with mega/million and tera/trillion] n. 10^9. Same as an American billion or a British `milliard'. How one pronounces this depends on whether one speaks giga- with a hard or soft `g'.
GIPS => /gips/ or /jips/ [analogy with MIPS] n. 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. Comp...
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 no...
glass => [IBM] n. Synonym for silicon.
glass tty => /glas T-T-Y/ or /glas ti'tee/ n. A terminal that has a display screen but which, because of hardware or software limitations, behaves like a teletype or some other printing terminal, thereby combining the disadvantages of both like a pri...
glass tty2 => 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. See appendix A for an interesting true story about a glass t...
glassfet => /glas'fet/ [by analogy with MOSFET, the acronym for `Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor'] n. Syn. firebottle, a humorous way to refer to a vacuum tube.
glitch => /glich/ [from German `glitschen' to slip, via Yiddish `glitshen', to slide or skid] 1. n. A sudden interruption in electric service, sanity, continuity, or program function. Sometimes recoverable. An interruption in electric service is spec...
glob => /glob/, *not* /glohb/ [UNIX] vt.,n. 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 h...
glork => /glork/ 1. interj. Term of mild surprise, usually tinged with outrage, as when one attempts to save the results of 2 hours of editing and finds that the system has just crashed. 2. Used as a name for just about anything. See foo. 3. vt. Simi...
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 in the sense of complex. "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 (rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu). GNU EMACS and the GNU C compiler, two tools desi...
GNUMACS => /gnoo'maks/ [contraction of `GNU EMACS'] Often-heard abbreviated name for the GNU project's flagship tool, EMACS. Used esp. in contrast with GOSMACS.
go flatline => [from cyberpunk SF, refers to flattening of EEG traces upon brain-death] vi., also adjectival `flatlined'. 1. To die, terminate, or fail, esp. irreversibly. In hacker parlance, this is used of machines only, human death being considere...
go flatline2 => employ jargon-jokes. 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 ...
go flatline3 => sees is a bright horizontal line bisecting the screen. 
go root => [UNIX] vi. To temporarily enter {root mode} in order to perform a privileged operation. This use is deprecated in Australia, where v. `root' refers to animal sex.
go-faster stripes => [UK] Syn. chrome.
gobble => vt. To consume or to obtain. The phrase `gobble up' tends to imply `consume', while `gobble down' tends to imply `obtain'. "The output spy gobbles characters out of a tty output buffer." "I guess I'll gobble down a copy of the documentation...
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 of this is an IP datagram whose destination IP address is [255.255.255.255]. Fortuna...
golden => adj. [prob. from folklore's `golden egg'] When used to describe a magnetic medium (e.g., `golden disk', `golden tape'), describes one containing a tested, up-to-spec, ready-to-ship software version. Compare platinum-iridium.
golf-ball printer => n. The IBM 2741, a slow but letter-quality printing device and terminal based on the IBM Selectric typewriter. The `golf ball' was a round object bearing reversed embossed images of 88 different characters arranged on four meridi...
golf-ball printer2 => font by swapping in a different 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, f...
golf-ball printer3 => character displays gave way to programmable bit-mapped devices with the flexibility to support other character sets. 
gonk => /gonk/ vt.,n. 1. To prevaricate or to embellish the truth beyond any reasonable recognition. It is alleged that in German the term is (mythically) `gonken'; in Spanish the verb becomes `gonkar'. "You're gonking me. That story you just told me...
gonkulator => /gon'kyoo-lay-tr/ [from the old "Hogan's Heroes" TV series] n. 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/ [from Hunter S. Thompson] adj. 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 impl...
Good Thing => n.,adj. Often capitalized; always pronounced as if capitalized. 1. Self-evidently wonderful to anyone in a position to notice "The Trailblazer's 19.2Kbaud PEP mode with on-the-fly Lempel-Ziv compression is a Good Thing for sites relayin...
Good Thing2 => 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", spec...
Good Thing3 => drastically reduced a programmer's work load. Oppose {Bad Thing}. 
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 t...
gorilla arm2 => their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized; hence `gorilla arm'. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; "Remember ...
gorilla arm3 => "How is this going to fly in *real* use?". 
gorp => /gorp/ [CMU perhaps from the canonical hiker's food, Good Old Raisins and Peanuts] Another metasyntactic variable, like foo and bar.
GOSMACS => /goz'maks/ [contraction of `Gosling EMACS'] n. The first EMACS-in-C implementation, predating but now largely eclipsed by GNUMACS. Originally freeware; a commercial version is now modestly popular as `UniPress EMACS'. The author (James Gos...
Gosperism => /gos'p*r-izm/ A hack, invention, or saying by arch-hacker R. William (Bill) Gosper. This notion merits its own term because there are so many of them. Many of the entries in HAKMEM are Gosperisms; see also life.
gotcha => n. A misfeature of a system, especially a programming language or environment, that tends to breed bugs or mistakes because it behaves in an unexpected way. For example, a classic gotcha in C is the fact that `if (a=b) code;' is syntactical...
GPL => /G-P-L/ n. Abbrev. for `General Public License' in widespread use; see copyleft.
GPV => /G-P-V/ n. Abbrev. for {General Public Virus} in widespread use.
grault => /grawlt/ n. Yet another meta-syntactic variable, invented by Mike Gallaher and propagated by the GOSMACS documentation. See corge.
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 bei...
gray goo2 => goo. This is the simplest of the {nanotechnology} disaster scenarios, easily refuted by arguments from energy requirements and elemental abundances. Compare {blue goo}. 
Great Renaming => n. The {flag day} 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.
Great Runes => n. Uppercase-only text or display messages. Some archaic operating systems still emit these. See also runes, {smash case}, {fold case}. Decades ago, back in the days when it was the sole supplier of long-distance hardcopy transmittal d...
Great Runes2 => Corporation was faced with a major design choice. To shorten code lengths and cut complexity in the printing mechanism, it had been decided that teletypes would use a monocase font, either ALL UPPER or all lower. The question was, whi...
Great Runes3 => conducted on readability under various conditions of bad ribbon, worn print hammers, etc. Lowercase won; it is less dense and has more distinctive letterforms, and is thus much easier to read both under ideal conditions and when the l...
Great Runes4 => obscured. The results were filtered up through management. The chairman of Teletype killed the proposal because it failed one incredibly important criterion "It would be impossible to spell the name of the Deity correctly." In this wa...
Great Runes5 => folklore has it) superstition triumphed over utility. Teletypes were the major input devices on most early computers, and terminal manufacturers looking for corners to cut naturally followed suit until well into the 1970s. Thus, that ...
Great Runes6 => Runes for thirty years. 
great-wall => [from SF fandom] vi.,n. 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,...
Green Book => n. 1. One of the three standard PostScript references `PostScript Language Program Design', bylined `Adobe Systems' (Addison-Wesley, 1988; QA76.73.P67P66 ISBN; 0-201-14396-8); see also {Red Book}, {Blue Book}). 2. Informal name for one ...
Green Book2 => SmallTalk `Smalltalk-80 Bits of History, Words of Advice', by Glenn Krasner (Addison-Wesley, 1983; QA76.8.S635S58; ISBN 0-201-11669-3) (this, too, is associated with blue and red books). 3. The `X/Open Compatibility Guide'. Defines an ...
Green Book3 => environment that is a proper superset of POSIX/SVID; also includes descriptions of a standard utility toolkit, systems administrations features, and the like. This grimoire is taken with particular seriousness in Europe. See {Purple Bo...
Green Book4 => Operating Systems Interface standard has been dubbed "The Ugly Green Book". 5. Any of the 1992 standards which will be issued by the CCITT's tenth plenary assembly. Until now, these have changed color each review cycle (1984 was {Red B...
Green Book5 => is rumored that this convention is going to be dropped before 1992. These include, among other things, the X.400 email standard and the Group 1 through 4 fax standards. See also {{book titles}}. 
green bytes => n. 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...
green bytes2 => 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...
green bytes3 => out-of-band, zigamorph, fence (sense 1). 
green card => n. [after the `IBM System/360 Reference Data' card] This is used for any summary of an assembly language, even if the color is not green. Less frequently used now because of the decrease in the use of assembly language. "I'll go get my ...
green card2 => addressing mode for that instruction." Some green cards are actually booklets. The original green card became a yellow card when the System/370 was introduced, and later a yellow booklet. An anecdote from IBM refers to a scene that too...
green card3 => 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 rapi...
green card4 => return. See also card. 
green lightning => [IBM] n. 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 k...
green lightning2 => 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...
green lightning3 => the 88000 architecture `compatibility logic', but I call it green lightning". See also feature. 
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-dra...
Green's Theorem => [TMRC] prov. For any story, in any group of people there will be at least one person who has not heard the story. [The name of this theorem is a play on a fundamental theorem in calculus. --- ESR]
grep => /grep/ [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)'] vt. To rapidly scan a file or file set l...

factpacks/jargon.fact  view on Meta::CPAN

hung => [from `hung up'] adj. 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 s...
hungry puppy => n. Syn. slopsucker.
hungus => /huhng'g*s/ [perhaps related to slang `humongous'] adj. Large, unwieldy, usually unmanageable. "TCP is a hungus piece of code." "This is a hungus set of modifications."
hyperspace => /hi'per-spays/ n. A memory location that is *far* away from where the program counter should be pointing, often inaccessible because it is not even mapped in. "Another core dump --- looks like the program jumped off to hyperspace someho...
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 orig...
I see no X here.2 => respond in this wise if you asked it to do something involving an object not present at your location in the game. 
i14y => // n. Abbrev. for `interoperability', with the `14' replacing fourteen letters. Used in the X (windows) community. Refers to portability and compatibility of data formats (even binary ones) between different programs or implementations of the...
i18n => // n. Abbrev. for `internationaliz,sation', with the 18 replacing 18 letters. Used in the X (windows) community.
IBM => /I-B-M/ Inferior But Marketable; It's Better Manually; Insidious Black Magic; It's Been Malfunctioning; Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a near-infinite number of even less complimentary expansions, including `International Business Machines'. ...
IBM discount => n. A price increase. Outside IBM, this derives from the common perception that IBM products are generally overpriced (see clone); inside, it is said to spring from a belief that large numbers of IBM employees living in an area cause p...
ice => [coined by USENETter Tom Maddox, popularized by William Gibson's cyberpunk SF novels acronym for `Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics'] Security software (in Gibson's novels, software that responds to intrusion by attempting to literally kill...
ifdef out => /if'def owt/ v. Syn. for {condition out}, specific to C.
ill-behaved => adj. 1. [numerical analysis] Said of an algorithm or computational method that tends to blow up because of accumulated roundoff error or poor convergence properties. 2. Software that bypasses the defined OS interfaces to do things (lik...
IMHO => // [from SF fandom via USENET; acronym 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 var...
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 they must ...
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 the discussion of inclusion styles under "Hacke...
include war => n. Excessive multi-leveled including 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 => [C programmers] n. The rules one uses to indent code in a readable fashion; a subject of {holy wars}. There are four major C indent styles, described below; all have the aim of making it easier for the reader to visually track the sco...
indent style2 => significant variable is the placement of `{' and `}' with respect to the statement(s) they enclose and the guard or controlling statement (`if', `else', `for', `while', or `do') on the block, if any. `K&R style' --- Named after Kerni...
indent style3 => examples in K&R are formatted this way. Also called `kernel style' because the UNIX kernel is written in it, and the `One True Brace Style' (abbrev. 1TBS) by its partisans. The basic indent shown here is eight spaces (or one tab) per...
indent style4 => seen, but are much less common. if (cond) { <body> } `Allman style' --- Named for Eric Allman, a Berkeley hacker who wrote a lot of the BSD utilities in it (it is sometimes called `BSD style'). Resembles normal indent style in Pascal...
indent style5 => indent per level shown here is eight spaces, but four is just as common (esp. in C++ code). if (cond) { <body> } `Whitesmiths style' --- popularized by the examples that came with Whitesmiths C, an early commercial C compiler. Basic ...
indent style6 => level shown here is eight spaces, but four is 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 Se...
indent style7 => 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 univ...
indent style8 => now much less common (the opening brace tends to get lost against the right paren of the guard part in an `if' or `while', which is a {Bad Thing}). Defenders of 1TBS argue that any putative gain in readability is less important than ...
indent style9 => vertical space, which enables one to see more code on one's screen at once. Doubtless these issues will continue to be the subject of {holy wars}. 
index => n. See coefficient.
infant mortality => n. It is common lore among hackers that the chances of sudden hardware failure drop off exponentially with a machine's time since power-up (that is, until the relatively distant time at which enough mechanical wear in I/O devices ...
infant mortality2 => 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, occ...
infant mortality3 => syndrome'). See {bathtub curve}, {burn-in period}. 
infinite => adj. Consisting of a large number of objects; extreme. Used very loosely as in "This program produces infinite garbage." "He is an infinite loser." The word most likely to follow `infinite', though, is hair (it has been pointed out that f...
infinite loop => n. One that never terminates (that is, the machine spins or buzzes forever; the usual symptom is catatonia). There is a standard joke that has been made about each generation's exemplar of the ultra-fast machine "The Cray-3 is so fas...
infinite loop2 => loop in under 2 seconds!" 
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 in...
insanely great => adj. [Mac community, from Steve Jobs; also BSD UNIX people via Bill Joy] Something so incredibly elegant that it is imaginable only to someone possessing the most puissant of hacker-natures.
INTERCAL => /in't*r-kal/ [said by the authors to stand for `Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym'] n. A computer language designed by Don Woods and James Lyon in 1972. INTERCAL is purposely different from all other computer languages in al...
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 time...
Internet address => n. 1. [techspeak] An absolute network address of the form foo@bar.baz, where foo is a user name, bar is a sitename, and baz is a `domain' name, possibly including periods itself. Contrast with {bang path}; see also {network, the} ...
Internet address2 => Internet machines and most UUCP sites can now resolve these addresses, thanks to a large amount of behind-the-scenes magic and PD software written since 1980 or so. See also {bang path}, domainist. 2. More loosely, any network ad...
Internet address3 => this includes {bang path} addresses and some internal corporate and government networks. Reading Internet addresses is something of an art. Here are the four most important top-level functional Internet domains followed by a sele...
Internet address4 => com commercial organizations edu educational institutions gov U.S. government civilian sites mil U.S. military sites Note that most of the sites in the com and edu domains are in the U.S. or Canada. us sites in See: Internet addr...
Internet address5 => the U.S. outside the functional domains su sites in the Soviet Union (see kremvax). uk sites in the United Kingdom Within the us domain, there are subdomains for the fifty states, each generally with a name identical to the state...
Internet address6 => abbreviation. Within the uk domain, there is an ac subdomain for academic sites and a co domain for commercial ones. Other top-level domains may be divided up in similar ways. 
interrupt => 1. [techspeak] n. On a computer, an event that interrupts normal processing and temporarily diverts flow-of-control through an "interrupt handler" routine. See also trap. 2. interj. A request for attention from a hacker. Often explicitly...
interrupt list, the => [MS-DOS] n. The list of all known software interrupt calls (both documented and undocumented) for IBM PCs and compatibles, maintained and made available for free redistribution by Ralf Brown (ralf@cs.cmu.edu). As of early 1991,...
interrupts locked out => 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 com...
interrupts locked out2 => have one's interrupt mask bit set" or "interrupts masked out" is also heard. See also spl. 
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 ...
Iron Age => n. In the history of computing, 1961--1971 --- the formative era of commercial mainframe technology, when {big iron} dinosaurs ruled the earth. These began with the delivery of the first PDP-1, coincided with the dominance of ferrite core...
Iron Age2 => introduction of the first commercial microprocessor (the Intel 4004) in 1971. See also {Stone Age}; compare {elder days}. 
iron box => [UNIX/Internet] n. 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 hacker's movements in unobvious ways, and `bait' files designed to...
iron box2 => 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). Compare {padded cell}. 
ironmonger => [IBM] n. Derogatory. A hardware specialist. Compare sandbender, {polygon pusher}.
ITS => /I-T-S/ n. 1. Incompatible Time-sharing System, an influential but 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 `...
IWBNI => // [acronym] `It Would Be Nice If'. Compare WIBNI.
IYFEG => // [USENET] Abbreviation for `Insert Your Favorite Ethnic Group'. Used as a meta-name when telling racist jokes on the net to avoid offending anyone. See JEDR.*J. Random /J rand'm/ n. [generalized from {J. Random Hacker}] Arbitrary; ordinary...
J. Random Hacker => [MIT] /J rand'm hak'r/ n. A mythical figure like the Unknown Soldier; the archetypal hacker nerd. See random, {Suzie COBOL}. This may originally have been inspired or influenced by `J. Fred Muggs', a show-biz chimpanzee whose name...
jaggies => /jag'eez/ n. The `stairstep' effect observable when an edge (esp. a linear edge of very shallow or steep slope) is rendered on a pixel device (as opposed to a vector display).
JCL => /J-C-L/ n. 1. IBM's supremely rude Job Control Language. JCL is the script language used to control the execution of programs in IBM's batch systems. JCL has a very fascist syntax, and some versions will, for example, barf if two spaces appear...
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 aft...
JFCL => /jif'kl/, /jaf'kl/, /j*-fi'kl/ vt., obs. (alt. `jfcl') To cancel or annul something. "Why don't you jfcl that out?" The fastest do-nothing instruction on older models of the PDP-10 happened to be JFCL, which stands for "Jump if Flag set and t...
jiffy => n. 1. The duration of one tick of the system clock on the 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 jif...
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....
job security2 => 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...
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 ...
joe code2 => the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and observed that usage has drifted slightly; the original sobriquet `Joe code' was intended in sense 1. 
JR[LN] => /J-R-L/, /J-R-N/ n. The names JRL and JRN were sometimes used as example names when discussing a kind of user ID used under {TOPS-10}; they were understood to be the initials of (fictitious) programmers named `J. Random Loser' and `J. Rando...
JRST => /jerst/ [based on the PDP-10 jump instruction] v.,obs. To suddenly change subjects, with no intention of returning to the previous topic. Usage rather rare except among PDP-10 diehards, and considered silly. See also AOS.
juggling eggs => vi. Keeping a lot of state in your head while modifying a program. "Don't bother me now, I'm juggling eggs", means that an interrupt is likely to result in the program's being scrambled. In the classic first-contact SF novel `The Mot...
juggling eggs2 => and Jerry Pournelle, an alien describes a very difficult task by saying "We juggle priceless eggs in variable gravity." That is a very hackish use of language. See also {hack mode}. 
jump off into never-never land => [from J. M. Barrie's `Peter Pan'] v. Same as {branch to Fishkill}, but more common in technical cultures associated with non-IBM computers that use the term `jump' rather than `branch'. Compare hyperspace.*K /K/ [fro...
jump off into never-never land2 => used both as a spoken word and a written suffix (like meg and gig for megabyte and gigabyte). See {quantifiers}. 
K&R => [Kernighan and Ritchie] n. Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie's book `The C Programming Language', esp. the classic and influential first edition (Prentice-Hall 1978; ISBN 0-113-110163-3). Syn. {White Book}, {Old Testament}. See also {New Test...
kahuna => /k*-hoo'nuh/ [IBM from the Hawaiian title for a shaman] n. 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...
kamikaze packet2 => 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 ...
kgbvax => /K-G-B'vaks/ n. See kremvax.
kill file => [USENET] n. (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) ...
kill file2 => 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 med...
killer micro => [popularized by Eugene Brooks] n. 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 downsi...
killer micro2 => architectures. The popularity of the phrase `attack of the killer micros' is doubtless reinforced by the movie title "Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes" (one of the canonical examples of so-bad-it's-wonderful among hackers). This has eve...
killer micro3 => micros have gone on the offensive not just individually (in workstations) but in hordes (within massively parallel computers). 
killer poke => n. A recipe for inducing hardware damage on a machine via insertion of invalid values (see poke) in a memory-mapped control register; used esp. of various fairly well-known tricks on {bitty box}es without hardware memory management (su...
killer poke2 => that can overload and trash analog electronics in the monitor. See also HCF. 
kilo- => [SI] pref. See {quantifiers}.
KIPS => /kips/ [acronym, by analogy with MIPS using K] n. 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 ...
kit => [USENET] n. 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 cha...
klone => /klohn/ n. See clone, sense 4.
kludge => /kluhj/ n. Common (but incorrect) variant of kluge, q.v.
kluge => /klooj/ [from the German `klug', clever] 1. n. A Rube Goldberg (or Heath Robinson) device, whether in hardware or software. (A long-ago `Datamation' article by Jackson Granholme said "An ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, form...
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 klug...
kluge up2 => 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...
Knights of the Lambda Calculus2 => unclear, but one well-known LISPer has been known to give out buttons and, in general, the *members* know who they are.... 
Knuth => [Donald E. Knuth's `The Art of Computer Programming'] n. Mythically, the reference that answers all questions about data structures or algorithms. A safe answer when you do not know "I think you can find that in Knuth." Contrast {literature,...
kremvax => /krem-vaks/ [from the then large number of USENET VAXen with names of the form foovax] n. Originally, a fictitious USENET site at the Kremlin, announced on April 1, 1984 in a posting ostensibly originated there by Soviet leader Konstantin ...
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 langu...
language lawyer2 => 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 and LISP. Nearly every hacker knows one of these, and most good ones are fluent in both. Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in small but influential communities. There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hacke...
languages of choice2 => assembler, as their language of choice. They often prefer to be known as {real programmer}s, and other hackers consider them a bit odd (see "The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer" in appendix A). Assembler is generally no longer...
languages of choice3 => 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 languag...
languages of choice4 => which don't give them the near-total freedom considered necessary for hacking (see {bondage-and-discipline language}), and to regard everything that's even remotely connected with COBOL or other traditional {card walloper} lan...
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 ac...
larval stage2 => 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 t...
larval stage3 => 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...
laser chicken2 => beams. In a variation on this theme, it is reported that some Australian hackers have redesignated the common dish `lemon chicken' as `Chernobyl Chicken'. The name is derived from the color of the sauce, which is considered bright e...
laser chicken3 => mythically, do some of the inhabitants of Chernobyl). 
laundromat => n. Syn. {disk farm}; see {washing machine}.
LDB => /l*'d*b/ [from the PDP-10 instruction set] vt. To extract from the middle. "LDB me a slice of cake, please." This usage has been kept alive by Common LISP's function of the same name. Considered silly. See also DPB.
leaf site => n. A machine that merely originates and reads USENET news or mail, and does not relay any third-party traffic. Often uttered in a critical tone; when the ratio of leaf sites to backbone, rib, and other relay sites gets too high, the netw...
leaf site2 => Compare {backbone site}, {rib site}. 
leak => n. With qualifier, one of a class of resource-management bugs that occur when resources are not freed properly after operations on them are finished, so they effectively disappear (leak out). This leads to eventual exhaustion as new allocatio...
leaky heap => [Cambridge] n. An arena with a {memory leak}.

factpacks/jargon.fact  view on Meta::CPAN

line eater, the4 => is still (in mid-1991) occasionally reported to be lurking in some mail-to-netnews gateways. 2. See {NSA line eater}. 
line starve => [MIT] 1. vi. To feed paper through a printer the wrong way by one line (most printers can't do this). On a display terminal, to move the cursor up to the previous line of the screen. "To print `X squared', you just output `X', line sta...
line starve2 => starve causes the `2' to appear on the line above the `X', and the line feed gets back to the original line.) 2. n. A character (or character sequence) that causes a terminal to perform this action. Unlike `line feed', `line starve' i...
line starve3 => terminology. Even among hackers it is considered a bit silly. 3. [proposed] A sequence such as \c (used in System V echo, as well as nroff/troff) that suppresses a newline or other character(s) that would normally be emitted. 
link farm => [UNIX] n. A directory tree that contains many links to files in a master directory tree of files. Link farms save space when (for example) one is maintaining several nearly identical copies of the same source tree, e.g., when the only di...
link farm2 => 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. 
link-dead => [MUD] adj. Said of a MUD character who has frozen in place because of a dropped Internet connection.
lint => [from UNIX's `lint(1)', named perhaps for the bits of fluff it 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. ...
lion food => [IBM] n. Middle management or HQ staff (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 agreed to meet after 2 months. When they finally...
lion food2 => 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 repl...
lion food3 => 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)...
lion food4 => 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 Wester...
lion food5 => secret status on the kernel, the Lions book was never formally published and 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. 
LISP => [from `LISt Processing language', but mythically from `Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses'] n. The name of AI's mother tongue, a language based on the ideas of (a) variable-length lists and trees as fundamental data types, and (b) the...
literature, the => n. Computer-science journals and other publications, vaguely gestured at to answer a question that the speaker believes is trivial. Thus, one might answer an annoying question by saying "It's in the literature." Oppose Knuth, which...
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 micropro...
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 al...
live data2 => 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 ...
live data3 => 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 ...
live data4 => code. 4. Actual real-world data, as opposed to `test data'. For example, "I think I have the record deletion module finished." "Have you tried it out on live data?" It usually carries the connotation that live data is more fragile and m...
live data5 => things will happen. So a possible alternate response to the above claim 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 h...
live data6 => running amok on live data would cause great harm and probably require restoring from backups. 
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 tilt...
Live Free Or Die!2 => industry. The "free" referred specifically to freedom from the fascist design philosophies and crufty misfeatures common on commercial operating systems. Armando Stettner, one of the early UNIX developers, used to give out fake ...
Live Free Or Die!3 => under a large UNIX, all in New Hampshire colors of green and white. These are now valued collector's items. 
livelock => /liv'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 th...
liveware => /liv'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 p...
locked and loaded => [from military slang for an M-16 rifle with magazine inserted and prepared for firing] adj. Said of a removable disk volume properly prepared for use --- that is, locked into the drive and with the heads loaded. Ironically, becau...
locked and loaded2 => 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 in an application or OS that causes it to perform some destructive or security-compromising activity whenever specified conditions are met. Compare {back door}.
logical => [from the technical term `logical device', wherein a physical device is referred to by an arbitrary `logical' name] adj. Having the role of. If a person (say, Les Earnest at SAIL) who had long held a certain post left and were replaced, th...
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 ...
loop through2 => say `IRP over' after an obscure pseudo-op in the MIDAS PDP-10 assembler. 
lord high fixer => [primarily British, from Gilbert & Sullivan's `lord high executioner'] n. The person in an organization who knows the most about some aspect of a system. See wizard.
lose => [MIT] vi. 1. To fail. A program loses when it encounters an exceptional condition or fails to work in the expected manner. 2. To be exceptionally unesthetic or crocky. 3. Of people, to be obnoxious or unusually stupid (as opposed to ignorant)...
lose 2 => 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 ...
losing => adj. Said of anything that is or causes a lose or lossage.
loss => n. Something (not a person) that loses; a situation in which something is losing. Emphatic forms include `moby loss', and `total loss', `complete loss'. Common interjections are "What a loss!" and "What a moby loss!" Note that `moby loss' is ...
lossage => /los'*j/ n. The result of a bug or malfunction. This is a mass or collective noun. "What a loss!" and "What lossage!" are nearly synonymous. The former is slightly more particular to the speaker's present circumstances; the latter implies ...
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 hackerd...
lost in the noise2 => 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...
lost in the underflow2 => 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 p...
lost in the underflow3 => effect gets lost in the underflow." 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-outp...
lots of MIPS but no I/O2 => RS/6000, is a notorious recent example). 
low-bandwidth => [from communication theory] adj. 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, bandwidt...
LPT => /L-P-T/ or /lip'it/ or /lip-it'/ [MIT, via DEC] n. Line printer, of course. Rare under UNIX, commoner in hackers with MS-DOS or CP/M background. The printer device is called `LPT' on those systems that, like ITS, were strongly influenced by ea...
lunatic fringe => [IBM] n. Customers who can be relied upon to accept release 1 versions of software.
lurker => n. One of the `silent majority' in a electronic forum; one who posts occasionally or not at all but is known to read the group's postings regularly. This term is not pejorative and indeed is casually used reflexively "Oh, I'm just lurking."...
luser => /loo'zr/ n. A user; esp. one who is also a loser. (luser and loser are pronounced identically.) This word was coined around 1975 at MIT. Under ITS, when you first walked up to a terminal at MIT and typed Control-Z to get the computer's atten...
macdink => /mak'dink/ [from the Apple Macintosh, which is said to encourage such behavior] vt. 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...
machinable => adj. Machine-readable. Having the softcopy nature.
machoflops => /mach'oh-flops/ [pun on `megaflops', a coinage for `millions of FLoating-point Operations Per Second'] n. Refers to artificially inflated performance figures often quoted by computer manufacturers. Real applications are lucky to get hal...
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 Nort...
macro => /mak'roh/ [techspeak] n. A name (possibly followed by a formal arg list) that is equated to a text or symbolic expression to which it is to be expanded (possibly with the substitution of actual arguments) by a macro expander. This definition...
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 studyi...
macrotape => /ma'kroh-tayp/ n. An industry-standard reel of tape, as opposed to a microtape.
maggotbox => /mag'*t-boks/ n. See Macintrash. This is even more derogatory.
magic => adj. 1. As yet unexplained, or too complicated to explain; compare automagically and (Arthur C.) Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." "TTY echoing is controlled by a large number of magi...
magic cookie => [UNIX] n. 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 ...
magic cookie2 => 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 y...
magic cookie3 => 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 function...
magic cookie4 => leave a blank on the screen corresponding to mode-change magic cookies; this was also called a glitch. See also cookie. 
magic number => [UNIX/C] n. 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 `#defin...
magic number2 => 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...
magic number3 => sense actually predates and was ancestral to the more common sense 1. 3. Special data located at the beginning of a binary data file to indicate its type to a utility. Under UNIX, the system and various applications programs (especia...
magic number4 => 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; the 0407, for example, was octal for `branch...
magic number5 => 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! 
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 burn...
magic smoke2 => 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 sy...
magic smoke3 => 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 ...
magic smoke4 => 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}. 
main loop => n. Software tools are often written to perform some actions repeatedly on whatever input is handed to them, terminating when there is no more input or they are explicitly told to go away. In such programs, the loop that gets and processe...
mainframe => n. This term originally referred 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 ...
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 bure...
mandelbug => /mon'del-buhg/ [from the Mandelbrot set] n. 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 t...
manged => /monjd/ [probably from the French `manger' or Italian `mangiare', to eat; perhaps influenced by English n. `mange', `mangy'] adj. Refers to anything that is mangled or damaged, usually beyond repair. "The disk was manged after the electrica...
mangle => vt. Used similarly to mung or scribble, but more violent in its connotations; something that is mangled has been irreversibly and totally trashed.
mangler => [DEC] n. A manager. Compare mango; see also management. Note that {system mangler} is somewhat different in connotation.
mango => /mang'go/ [orig. in-house jargon at Symbolics] n. A manager. Compare mangler. See also devo and doco.
marbles => [from mainstream "lost all his/her marbles"] pl.n. 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...
marginal => adj. 1. Extremely small. "A marginal increase in core can decrease GC time drastically." In everyday terms, this means that it is a lot easier to clean off your desk if you have a spare place to put some of the junk while you sort through...
Marginal Hacks => n. Margaret Jacks Hall, a building into which the Stanford AI Lab was moved near the beginning of the 1980s (from the {D. C. Power Lab}).
marginally => adv. Slightly. "The ravs here are only marginally better than at Small Eating Place." See epsilon.
marketroid => /mar'k*-troyd/ alt. `marketing slime', `marketing droid', `marketeer' n. 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...
massage: vt. Vague term used to describe `smooth' transformations of => a data set into a different form, esp. transformations that do not lose information. Connotes less pain than munch or crunch. "He wrote a program that massages X bitmap files int...
math-out: [poss. from `white-out' (the blizzard variety)] n. 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. ...
Matrix: [FidoNet] n. 1. What the Opus BBS software and sysops call => FidoNet. 2. Fanciful term for a cyberspace expected to emerge from current networking experiments (see {network, the}). Some people refer to the totality of present networks this w...
Mbogo, Dr. Fred: /*m-boh'goh, dok'tr fred/ [Stanford] n. 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 Cleanin...
Mbogo, Dr. Fred: /*m-boh'goh, dok'tr fred/ [Stanford] n. The2 => between bogus and the original Dr. Mbogo, a witch doctor who was Gomez Addams' physician on the old "Addams Family" TV show. See also fred. 
meatware => n. Synonym for wetware. Less common.
meeces => /mees'*z/ [TMRC] n. 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. Jinx: "I hate meeces to *pieces*!" --- ESR]
meg => /meg/ n. See {quantifiers}.
mega- => /me'g*/ [SI] pref. See {quantifiers}.
megapenny => /meg'*-pen`ee/ n. $10,000 (1 cent * 10^6). Used semi-humorously as a unit in comparing computer cost and performance figures.
MEGO => /me'goh/ or /mee'goh/ [`My Eyes Glaze Over', often `Mine Eyes Glazeth (sic) Over', attributed to the futurologist Herman Kahn] Also `MEGO factor'. 1. n. A handwave intended to confuse the listener and hopefully induce agreement because the li...
meltdown, network => n. See {network meltdown}.
meme => /meem/ [coined on analogy with `gene' by Richard Dawkins] n. 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 ...
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 poi...
meme plague2 => `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/ [from meme] The study of memes. As of mid-1991, 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...
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}. See {aliasing bug}, {fandango o...
memory leak2 => {precedence lossage}, {overrun screw}, {leaky heap}, leak. 
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,...
mess-dos => /mes-dos/ n. Derisory term for MS-DOS. Often followed by the ritual banishing "Just say No!" See {MS-DOS}. Most hackers (even many MS-DOS hackers) loathe MS-DOS for its single-tasking nature, its limits on application size, its nasty prim...
meta => /me't*/ or /may't*/ or (Commonwealth) /mee't*/ [from analytic philosophy] adj.,pref. One level of description up. A meta-syntactic variable is a variable in notation used to describe syntax, and meta-language is language used to describe lang...
meta bit => n. The top bit of an 8-bit character, which is on in character values 128--255. Also called {high bit}, {alt bit}, or hobbit. Some terminals and consoles (see {space-cadet keyboard}) have a META shift key. Others (including, *mirabile dic...
meta bit2 => machines) have an ALT key. See also {bucky bits}. 
MFTL => /M-F-T-L/ [acronym: `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 ...
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 arou...
microfortnight => n. About 1.2 sec. 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 a...
microLenat => /mi:-kroh-len'-*t/ n. See bogosity.
microReid => /mi:'kroh-reed/ n. See bogosity.
Microsloth Windows => /mi:'kroh-sloth` win'dohz/ n. Hackerism for `Microsoft Windows', a windowing system for the IBM-PC which is so limited by bug-for-bug compatibility with mess-dos that it is agonizingly slow on anything less than a fast 386. Comp...
microtape => /mi:'kroh-tayp/ n. Occasionally used to mean a DECtape, as opposed to a macrotape. A DECtape is a small reel, about 4 inches in diameter, of magnetic tape about an inch wide. Unlike drivers for today's macrotapes, microtape drivers allow...
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}.
milliLampson => /mil'*-lamp`sn/ n. A unit of talking speed, abbreviated mL. Most people run about 200 milliLampsons. Butler Lampson (a CS theorist and systems implementor highly regarded among hackers) goes at 1000. A few people speak faster. This un...
minifloppies => n. 5.25-inch vanilla floppy disks, as opposed to 3.5-inch or microfloppies and the now-obsolescent 8-inch variety. At one time, this term was a trademark of Shugart Associates for their SA-400 minifloppy drive. Nobody paid any attenti...
MIPS => /mips/ [acronym] n. 1. A measure of computing speed; formally, `Million Instructions Per Second' (that's 10^6 per second, not 2^20!); often rendered by hackers as `Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed' or in other unflattering ways. This...
misbug => /mis-buhg/ [MIT] n. An unintended property of a program that turns out to be useful; something that should have been a bug but turns out to be a feature. Usage: rare. Compare {green lightning}. See miswart.
misfeature => /mis-fee'chr/ or /mis'fee`chr/ n. A feature that eventually causes lossage, possibly because it is not adequate for a new situation which has evolved. It is not the same as a bug, because fixing it involves a substantial philosophical c...
Missed'em-five => n. Pejorative hackerism for AT&T System V UNIX, generally used by BSD partisans in a bigoted mood. (The synonym `SysVile' is also encountered.) See {software bloat}, Berzerkeley.

factpacks/jargon.fact  view on Meta::CPAN

nuke => vt. 1. To intentionally delete the entire contents of a given directory or storage volume. "On UNIX, `rm -r /usr' will nuke everything in the usr filesystem." Never used for accidental deletion. Oppose {blow away}. 2. Syn. for dike, applied t...
number-crunching => n. Computations of a numerical nature, esp. those that make extensive use of floating-point numbers. The only thing Fortrash is good for. This term is in widespread informal use outside hackerdom and even in mainstream slang, but ...
numbers => [scientific computation] n. 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 bec...
NUXI problem => /nuk'see pro'bl*m/ n. This 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 l...
NUXI problem2 => vice-versa). See also middle-endian, swab, and bytesexual. 
nybble => /nib'l/ (alt. `nibble') [from v. `nibble' by analogy with `bite' => `byte'] n. Four bits; one hex digit; a half-byte. Though `byte' is now techspeak, this useful relative is still jargon. Compare {byte}, crumb, tayste, dynner; see also bit,...
nyetwork => /nyet'werk/ [from Russian `nyet' = no] n. A network, when it is acting flaky or is down. Compare notwork.
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 particular...
Obfuscated C Contest => n. 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 th...
Obfuscated C Contest2 => 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 ...
Obfuscated C Contest3 => entry might help convey the flavor of obfuscated C /* * HELLO WORLD program * by Jack Applin and Robert Heckendorn, 1985 */ main(v,c)char**c;{for(v[c++]="Hello, world!\n)"; (!!c)[*c]&&(v--||--c&&execlp(*c,*c,c[!!c]+!!c,!c)); ...
obi-wan error => /oh'bee-won` er'*r/ [RPI, from `off-by-one' and the Obi-Wan Kenobi character in "Star Wars"] n. A loop of some sort in which the index is off by 1. Common when the index should have started from 0 but instead started from 1. A kind o...
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...
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 it could be figu...
octal forty => /ok'tl for'tee/ n. Hackish way of saying "I'm drawing a blank." Octal 40 is the {ASCII} space character, 0100000; by an odd coincidence, hex 40 (01000000) is the {EBCDIC} space character. See wall.
off the trolley => adj. Describes the behavior of a program that malfunctions and goes catatonic, but doesn't actually crash or abort. See glitch, bug, {deep space}.
off-by-one error => n. Exceedingly common error induced in many ways, such as by starting at 0 when you should have started at 1 or vice versa, or by writing `< N' instead of `<= N' or vice-versa. Also applied to giving something to the person next t...
off-by-one error2 => 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 taken off a public newsgroup to email.
old fart => n. Tribal elder. A title self-assumed with remarkable frequency by (esp.) USENETters who have been programming for more than about 25 years; often appears in {sig block}s attached to Jargon File contributions of great archeological signif...
old fart2 => the second or third person but one of pride in first person. 
Old Testament => n. [C programmers] The first edition of K&R, the sacred text describing {Classic C}.
one-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}). 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 p...
one-liner wars2 => was practiced among TECO hackers. Ken Iverson, the inventor of APL, has been credited with a one-liner that, given a number N, produces a list of the prime numbers from 1 to N inclusive. It looks like this	(2 = 0 +.= T o.| T) / T <...
one-liner wars3 => character, the assignment arrow is a single character, and `i' represents the APL iota. 
ooblick => /oo'blik/ [from Dr. Seuss's `Bartholomew and the Oobleck'] n. 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 behavi...
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 switch => [IBM prob. from railroading] n. An unresolved question, issue, or problem.
operating system => [techspeak] n. (Often abbreviated `OS') The foundation software of a machine, of course; that which schedules tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the user between applications. The facilities an operating...
operating system2 => 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}}...
operating system3 => {CP/M}, {MS-DOS}, and {Multics} operating systems (most importantly by ITS and UNIX). 
Orange Book => n. The U.S. Government's standards document `Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, DOD standard 5200.28-STD, December, 1985' which characterize secure computing architectures and defines levels A1 (most secure) through D (least)...
Orange Book2 => can be upgraded to about C1 without excessive pain. 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...
oriental food2 => 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 f...
oriental food3 => {stir-fried random}, {laser chicken}, {Yu-Shiang Whole Fish}. Thai, Indian, Korean, and Vietnamese cuisines are also quite popular. 
orphan => [UNIX] n. A process whose parent has died; one inherited by `init(1)'. Compare zombie.
orphaned i-node => /or'f*nd i'nohd/ [UNIX] n. 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 serving no useful function within some organization, esp. ...
orthogonal => [from mathematics] adj. 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 ...
OS => /O-S/ 1. [Operating System] n. An acronym heavily used in email, occasionally in speech. 2. n.,obs. On ITS, an output spy. See 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. Mentioning it is usually good for a cheap laugh among hackers --- the design was so bar...
out-of-band => [from telecommunications and network theory] adj. 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, ...
overflow bit => n. 1. [techspeak] On some processors, an attempt to calculate a result too large for a register to hold causes a particular flag called an {overflow bit} to be set. 2. Hackers use the term of human thought too. "Well, the {Ada} descri...
overflow bit2 => 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 i...
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 your silo can hol...
overrun screw => [C programming] n. A variety of {fandango on core} produced by scribbling past the end of an array (C has no checks for this). This is relatively benign and easy to spot if the array is static; if it is auto, the result may be to {sm...
overrun screw2 => 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, pro...
overrun screw3 => 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}, {aliasing bug}, {precedence lossage}, {fandango on core}, {secondary damage}.*P.O.D. /P-O-D/ Acro...
overrun screw4 => opposed to a code section). Usage pedantic and rare. See also pod. 
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 fro...
padded cell2 => overt and not aimed at enforcing security so much as protecting others (and the luser) from the consequences of the luser's boundless na"ivet'e (see na"ive). Also `padded cell environment'. 
page in => [MIT] vi. 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." See {film at 11}. 2. Syn. `swap in'; see swap.
page out => [MIT] vi. 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 block}s not uncommonly include a "Paper-Net" header just before the sender's postal address; common variants of this a...
param => /p*-ram'/ n. Shorthand for `parameter'. See also parm; Compare arg, var.
parent message => n. See followup.
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." Deriv...
parity errors2 => nearly always correctable transient error in RAM hardware. 
Parkinson's Law of Data => prov. "Data expands to fill the space available for storage"; buying more memory encourages the use of more memory-intensive techniques. It has been observed over the last 10 years that the memory usage of evolving systems ...
Parkinson's Law of Data2 => 18 months. Fortunately, memory density available for constant dollars tends to double about once every 12 months (see {Moore's Law}); unfortunately, the laws of physics guarantee that the latter cannot continue indefinitel...
parm => /parm/ n. Further-compressed form of param. This term is an IBMism, and written use is almost unknown outside IBM shops; spoken /parm/ is more widely distributed, but the synonym arg is favored among hackers. Compare arg, var.
parse => [from linguistic terminology] vt. 1. To determine the syntactic structure of a sentence or other utterance (close to the standard English meaning). "That was the one I saw you." "I can't parse that." 2. More generally, to understand or compr...
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 e...
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 ...
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...
patch space2 => The widening use of HLLs has made this term rare; it is now primarily historical outside IBM shops. See patch (sense 4), zap (sense 4), hook. 
path => n. 1. A {bang path} or explicitly routed {{Internet address}}; a node-by-node specification of a link between two machines. 2. [UNIX] A filename, fully specified relative to the root directory (as opposed to relative to the current directory;...
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 ...
payware => /pay'weir/ n. Commercial software. Oppose shareware or freeware.
PBD => /P-B-D/ [abbrev. of `Programmer Brain Damage'] n. Applied to bug reports revealing places where the program was obviously broken by an incompetent or short-sighted programmer. Compare UBD; see also brain-damaged.
PC-ism => /P-C-izm/ n. A piece of code or coding technique that takes advantage of the unprotected single-tasking environment in IBM PCs and the like, e.g., by busy-waiting on a hardware register, direct diddling of screen memory, or using hard timin...
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...
pdl => /pid'l/ or /puhd'l/ [acronym for `Push Down List'] 1. In ITS days, the preferred MITism for stack. 2. Dave Lebling, one of the co-authors of Zork; (his {network address} on the ITS machines was at one time pdl@dms). 3. `Program Design Language...
PDP-10 => [Programmed Data Processor model 10] n. 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, ...
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 `DECSYSTE...
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 s...
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...
pencil and paper2 => 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 ...
pencil and paper3 => 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. See also appendix B. 
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'/ [From the code in C's `printf(3)' library function used to insert an arbitrary string argument] n. An unspecified person or object. "I was just talking to some percent-s in administration." Compare random.
perf => /perf/ n. See chad (sense 1). The term `perfory' /per'f*-ree/ is also heard.
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...
perfect programmer syndrome2 => excellent performance at solving {toy problem}s). "Of course my program is correct, there is no need to test it." "Yes, I can see there may be a problem here, but *I'll* never type `rm -r /' while in root." 
Perl => /perl/ [Practical Extraction and Report Language, a.k.a Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister] n. An interpreted language developed by Larry Wall (lwall@jpl.nasa.gov, author of `patch(1)' and `rn(1)') and distributed over USENET. Superficial...
pessimal => /pes'im-l/ [Latin-based antonym for `optimal'] adj. 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 som...
pessimizing compiler => /pes'*-miz`ing k*m-pil'r/ [antonym of `optimizing compiler'] n. 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 t...
pessimizing compiler2 => excessive cleverness is doing the opposite. A few pessimizing compilers have been written on purpose, however, as pranks or burlesques. 
peta- => /pe't*/ [SI] pref. See {quantifiers}.
PETSCII => /pet'skee/ [abbreviation of PET ASCII] n. The variation (many would say perversion) of the {ASCII} character set used by the Commodore Business Machines PET series of personal computers and the later Commodore C64, C16, and C128 machines. ...
phase => 1. n. The phase of one's waking-sleeping schedule with respect to the standard 24-hour cycle. This is 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...
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. "...
phase of the moon2 => channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon." True story Once upon a time there was a bug that really did depend on the phase of the moon. There is a little subroutine that had traditiona...
phase of the moon3 => 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 li...
phase of the moon4 => 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 t...
phase of the moon5 => 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 sin...
phreaking => [from `phone phreak'] n. 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 communicat...
pico- => [SI a quantifier meaning * 10^-12] pref. 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....
run like a pig => v. To run very slowly on given hardware, said of software. Distinct from hog.
pilot error => [Sun from aviation] n. 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, ...
ping => [from the TCP/IP acronym `Packet INternet Groper', prob. originally contrived to match 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 alivenes...
Pink-Shirt Book => `The Peter Norton Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC'. The original cover featured a picture of Peter Norton with a silly smirk on his face, wearing a pink shirt. Perhaps in recognition of this usage, the current edition has a differ...
Pink-Shirt Book2 => pink shirt. See also {{book titles}}. 
PIP => /pip/ [Peripheral Interchange Program] vt.,obs. To copy; from the program PIP on CP/M, RSX-11, RSTS/E, and OS/8 (derived from a utility on the PDP-6) that was used for file copying (and in OS/8 and RT-11 for just about every other file operati...
pistol => [IBM] n. A tool that makes it all too easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot. "UNIX `rm *' makes such a nice pistol!"
pizza box => [Sun] n. 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...
pizza box2 => 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. 
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 {tea,...
plain-ASCII => /playn-as'kee/ Syn. flat-ASCII.
plan file => [UNIX] n. 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...
plan file2 => almost universally to humorous and self-expressive purposes (like a {sig block}). See {Hacking X for Y}. 
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...
playpen => [IBM] n. 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.
plingnet => /pling'net/ n. Syn. UUCPNET. Also see {{Commonwealth Hackish}}, which uses `pling' for bang (as in {bang path}).
plokta => /plok't*/ [Acronym for `Press Lots Of Keys To Abort'] v. 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 syst...
plonk => [USENET possibly influenced by British slang `plonk' for cheap booze] The sound a newbie makes as he falls to the bottom of a {kill file}. Used almost exclusively in the newsgroup talk.bizarre, this term (usually written "*plonk*") is a form...
plugh => /ploogh/ [from the ADVENT game] v. See xyzzy.
plumbing => [UNIX] n. 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 c...

factpacks/jargon.fact  view on Meta::CPAN

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), ...
quantum bogodynamics2 => 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 unde...
quantum bogodynamics3 => Quantum bogodynamics is most often invoked to explain the sharp increase in hardware and software failures in the presence of suits; the latter emit bogons, which the former absorb. See bogon, computron, suit, psyton. 
quarter => n. Two bits. This in turn comes from the `pieces of eight' famed in pirate movies --- Spanish gold pieces that could be broken into eight pie-slice-shaped `bits' to make change. Early in American history the Spanish coin was considered equ...
ques => /kwes/ 1. n. The question mark character (`?', ASCII 0111111). 2. interj. What? Also frequently verb-doubled as "Ques ques?" See wall.
quick-and-dirty => adj. Describes a crock put together under time or user pressure. Used esp. when you want to convey that you think the fast way might lead to trouble further down the road. "I can have a quick-and-dirty fix in place tonight, but I'l...
quote chapter and verse => [by analogy with the mainstream phrase] v. To reproduce 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 ver...
quotient => n. See coefficient.
quux => /kwuhks/ 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, usin...
qux => /kwuhks/ The fourth of the standard metasyntactic variables, 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 of the standard series just run foo, bar, baz, ...
QWERTY => /kwer'tee/ [from the keycaps at the upper left] adj. Pertaining to a standard English-language typewriter keyboard (sometimes called the Sholes keyboard after its inventor), as opposed to Dvorak or foreign-language layouts or a {space-cadet...
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; ...
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 1...
random numbers2 => as `the least random number'; see 23. 23 Sacred number of Eris, Goddess of Discord (along with 17 and 5). 42 The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Note that this answer is completely fortuitous...
random numbers3 => 69 From the sexual act. This one was favored in MIT's ITS culture. 105 69 hex = 105 decimal, and 69 decimal = 105 octal. 666 The Number of the Beast. For further enlightenment, consult the `Principia Discordia', `The Hitchhiker's G...
random numbers4 => to the Galaxy', `The Joy of Sex', and the Christian Bible (Revelation 138). See also Discordianism or consult your pineal gland. One common rhetorical maneuver uses any of the canonical random numbers as placeholders for variables....
random numbers5 => 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-ran...
random numbers6 => this fashion. A related joke is that pi equals 3 --- for small values of pi and large values of 3. 
randomness => n. An inexplicable misfeature; gratuitous inelegance. Also, 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). "T...
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 th...
rare mode => [UNIX] adj. CBREAK mode (character-by-character with interrupts enabled). Distinguished from {raw mode} and `cooked mode'; the phrase "a sort of half-cooked (rare?) mode" is used in the V7/BSD manuals to describe the mode. Usage rare.
raster blaster => n. [Cambridge] Specialized hardware for bitblt operations (a blitter). Allegedly inspired by `Rasta Blasta', British slang for the sort of portable stereo Americans call a `boom box' or `ghetto blaster'.
raster burn => n. Eyestrain brought on by too many hours of looking at low-res, poorly tuned, or glare-ridden monitors, esp. graphics monitors. See {terminal illness}.
rat belt => n. A cable tie, esp. the sawtoothed, self-locking plastic kind that you can remove only by cutting (as opposed to a random twist of wire or a twist tie or one of those humongous metal clip frobs). Small cable ties are `mouse belts'.
rave => [WPI] vi. 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...
rave on! => imp. Sarcastic invitation to continue a rave, often by someone who wishes the raver would get a clue but realizes this is unlikely.
ravs => /ravz/, also `Chinese ravs' n. Jiao-zi (steamed or boiled) or Guo-tie (pan-fried). A Chinese appetizer, known variously in the plural as dumplings, pot stickers (the literal translation of guo-tie), and (around Boston) `Peking Ravioli'. The t...
raw mode => n. A mode that allows a program to transfer bits directly to or from an I/O device without any processing, abstraction, or interpretation by the operating system. Compare rare. This is techspeak under UNIX, jargon elsewhere.
rc file => /R-C fil/ [UNIX from the startup script `/etc/rc', but this is commonly believed to have been named after older scripts to `run commands'] n. Script file containing startup instructions for an application program (or an entire operating sy...
rc file2 => 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}. 
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. By convention, the top-level directory of a UNIX source distribution always contains a file named `README' (or READ.ME, or rarely ReadMe or some other variant), which is a hacker's-eye introduction containing a pointer to more detai...
README file2 => miscellaneous revision history notes, etc. When asked, hackers invariably relate this to the famous scene in Lewis Carroll's `Alice's Adventures In Wonderland' in which Alice confronts magic munchies labeled "Eat Me" and "Drink Me". 
real 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 i...
real estate2 => 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 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...
real operating system2 => a *real* operating system?", and people from IBM object "UNIX? Why don't you use a *real* operating system?" See {holy wars}, {religious issues}, proprietary, {Get a real computer!} 
real programmer => [indirectly, from the book `Real Men Don't Eat Quiche'] n. 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 programme...
real programmer2 => 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 a...
real programmer3 => been bummed 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 m...
real programmer4 => 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...
real programmer5 => 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 programmer6 => For a famous (and somewhat more positive) portrait of a Real Programmer, see "The Story of Mel" in appendix A. 
Real Soon Now => [orig. from SF's fanzine community, popularized by Jerry Pournelle's column in `BYTE'] adv. 1. Supposed to be available (or fixed, or cheap, or whatever) real soon now according to somebody, but the speaker is quite skeptical. 2. Whe...
Real Soon Now2 => commitments permit one to get to it (in other words, don't hold your breath). Often abbreviated RSN. 
real time => 1. [techspeak] adj. Describes an application which requires a program to respond to stimuli within some small upper limit of response time (typically milli- or microseconds). Process control at a chemical plant is the classic example. Su...
real time2 => 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...
real time3 => 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...
real user2 => 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...
Real World2 => 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. Anyw...
Real World3 => 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. See also {fear and ...
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 softwa...
reaper => n. A prowler that GFRs files. A file removed in this way is said to have been `reaped'.
rectangle slinger => n. See {polygon pusher}.
recursion => n. See recursion. See also {tail recursion}.
recursive acronym => pl.n. A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose acronyms that refer humorously to themselves or to other acronyms. The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE ("EINE Is Not EMACS") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE I...
recursive acronym2 => a Scheme compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and GNU (q.v., sense 1) stands for "GNU's Not UNIX!" --- and a company with the name CYGNUS, which expands to "Cygnus, Your GNU Support". See also mung, EMACS. 
Red Book => n. 1. Informal name for one of the three standard references on PostScript (`PostScript Language Reference Manual', Adobe Systems (Addison-Wesley, 1985; QA76.73.P67P67; ISBN 0-201-10174-2); the others are known as the {Green Book} and the...
Red Book2 => one of the 3 standard references on Smalltalk (`Smalltalk-80 The Interactive Programming Environment' by Adele Goldberg (Addison-Wesley, 1984; QA76.8.S635G638; ISBN 0-201-11372-4); this too is associated with blue and green books). 3. An...
Red Book3 => CCITT eighth plenary assembly. Until now, these have changed color each review cycle (1988 was {Blue Book}, 1992 will be {Green Book}); however, it is rumored that this convention is going to be dropped before 1992. These include, among ...
Red Book4 => and the Group 1 through 4 fax standards. 4. The new version of the {Green Book} (sense 4) --- IEEE 1003.1-1990, a.k.a ISO 9945-1 --- is (because of the color and the fact that it is printed on A4 paper) known in the U.S.A. as "the Ugly R...
Red Book5 => and in Europe as "the Ugly Red Book That's A Sensible Size". 5. The NSA `Trusted Network Interpretation' companion to the {Orange Book}. See also {{book titles}}. 
regexp => /reg'eksp/ [UNIX] n. (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 ...
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 roll...
reinvent the wheel2 => 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. 
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?"...
religious issues2 => Jargon File?" See {holy wars}; see also theology, bigot. This term is an example of {ha ha only serious}. People actually develop the most amazing and religiously intense attachments to their tools, even when the tools are intang...
religious issues3 => 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 worm, wabbit, and virus), a pattern in a cellular automaton (see life, sense 1), or (speculatively) a robot or n...
reply => n. See followup.
reset => [the MUD community] v. In AberMUD, to bring all dead mobiles to life and move items back to their initial starting places. New players who can't find anything shout "Reset! Reset!" quite a bit. Higher-level players shout back "No way!" since...
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...
retcon => /ret'kon/ [`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...
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 o...
RFC => /R-F-C/ [Request For Comment] n. One of a long-established series of numbered Internet standards widely followed by commercial and PD software in the Internet and UNIX communities. Perhaps the single most influential one has been RFC-822 (the ...
RFE => /R-F-E/ n. 1. [techspeak] Request For Enhancement. 2. [from `Radio Free Europe', Bellcore and Sun] Radio Free Ethernet, a system (originated by Peter Langston) for broadcasting audio among Sun SPARCstations over the ethernet.
rib site => [by analogy with {backbone site}] n. A machine that has an on-demand high-speed link to a {backbone site} and serves as a regional distribution point for lots of third-party traffic in email and USENET news. Compare {leaf site}, {backbone...
rice box => [from ham radio slang] n. Any Asian-made commodity computer, esp. an 80x86-based machine built to IBM PC-compatible ISA or EISA-bus standards.
Right Thing => n. That which is compellingly the correct or appropriate thing to use, do, say, etc. Often capitalized, always emphasized in speech as though capitalized. Use of this term often implies that in fact reasonable people may disagree. "Wha...
Right Thing2 => do when it sees `(mod a 0)'? Should it return `a', or give a divide-by-0 error?" Oppose {Wrong Thing}. 
RL => // [MUD community] n. Real Life. "Firiss laughs in RL" means that Firiss's player is laughing. Oppose VR.
roach => [Bell Labs] vt. To destroy, esp. of a data structure. Hardware gets toasted or fried, software gets roached.
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 add...
rococo => adj. Baroque in the extreme. 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...
rogue => [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 to support `rog...
room-temperature IQ => [IBM] quant. 80 or below. 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 insultin...
root => [UNIX] n. 1. The superuser account that ignores permission bits, user number 0 on a UNIX system. This account has the user name `root'. The term avatar is also used. 2. The top node of the system directory structure (home directory of the roo...
root mode => n. Syn. with {wizard mode} or `wheel mode'. Like these, it is often generalized to describe privileged states in systems other than OSes.
rot13 => /rot ther'teen/ [USENET from `rotate alphabet 13 places'] n., v. 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 ohgyr...
rotary debugger => [Commodore] n. Essential equipment for those late-night or early-morning debugging sessions. Mainly used as sustenance for the hacker. Comes in many decorator colors, such as Sausage, Pepperoni, and Garbage. See {pizza, ANSI standa...
RSN => // adj. See {Real Soon Now}.
RTFAQ => /R-T-F-A-Q/ [USENET primarily written, by analogy with RTFM] imp. Abbrev. for `Read the FAQ!', an exhortation that the person addressed ought to read the newsgroup's {FAQ list} before posting questions.
RTFM => /R-T-F-M/ [UNIX] imp. Acronym 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 ou...
RTI => /R-T-I/ interj. The mnemonic for the `return from interrupt' instruction on many computers including the 6502 and 6800. The variant `RETI' is found among former Z80 hackers (almost nobody programs these things in assembler anymore). Equivalent...
RTM => /R-T-M/ [USENET acronym for `Read The Manual'] 1. Politer variant of RTFM. 2. Robert T. Morris, perpetrator of the great Internet worm of 1988; villain to many, na"ive hacker gone wrong to a few. Morris claimed that the worm that brought the I...
rude => [WPI] adj. 1. (of a program) Badly written. 2. Functionally poor, e.g., a program that is very difficult to use because of gratuitously poor (random?) design decisions. See cuspy.
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. Compare {casting the runes}, {Great Runes}. 2. Special display characters (for exam...
runic => adj. Syn. obscure. VMS fans sometimes refer to UNIX as `Runix'; UNIX fans return the compliment by expanding VMS to `Very Messy Syntax' or `Vachement Mauvais Syst`eme' (French; lit. "Cowlike Bad System", idiomatically "Bitchy Bad System").
rusty iron => n. Syn. {tired iron}. It has been claimed that this is the inevitable fate of {water MIPS}.
rusty memory => n. Mass-storage that uses iron-oxide-based magnetic media (esp. tape and the pre-Winchester removable disk packs used in {washing machine}s). Compare donuts.*S/N ratio // n. (also `s/n ratio', `sn ratio'). Syn. {signal-to-noise ratio}...
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 ...
saga => [WPI] n. A cuspy but bogus raving story about N random broken people.
sagan => /say'gn/ [from Carl Sagan's TV series "Cosmos"; think "billions and billions"] n. 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...
SAIL => /sayl/, not /S-A-I-L/ n. 1. Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. An important site in the early development of LISP; with the MIT AI Lab, BBN, CMU, and the UNIX community, one of the major wellsprings of technical innovation and hacker-cultu...
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. This reflects the ...
salsman => /salz'm*n/ v. To flood a mailing list or newsgroup with huge amounts of useless, trivial or redundant information. From the name of a hacker who has frequently done this on some widely distributed mailing lists.
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 => [MIT] n. 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. From the technical term `chip substrate', used to refer to the silicon ...
salt substrate2 => of integrated circuits are deposited. 
same-day service => n. Ironic term used to describe long response time, particularly with respect to {MS-DOS} system calls (which ought to require only a tiny fraction of a second to execute). Such response time is a major incentive for programmers t...
same-day service2 => well-behaved. See also PC-ism. 
sandbender => [IBM] n. A person involved with silicon lithography and the physical design of chips. Compare ironmonger, {polygon pusher}.
sandbox => n. (or `sandbox, the') Common term for the R&D department at many software and computer companies (where hackers in commercial environments are likely to be found). Half-derisive, but reflects the truth that research is a form of creative ...
sanity check => n. 1. The act of checking a piece of code (or anything else, e.g., a USENET posting) for completely stupid mistakes. Implies that the check is to make sure the author was sane when it was written; e.g., if a piece of scientific softwa...
sanity check2 => 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 algori...
sanity check3 => 2. A run-time test, either validating input or ensuring that the program hasn't screwed up internally (producing an inconsistent value or state). 
Saturday night special => [from police slang for a cheap handgun] n. A 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 sn...
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 synthes...
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 th...
science-fiction fandom2 => 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 flat...
science-fiction fandom3 => virus, wetware, wirehead, and worm originated in SF stories. 
scram switch => [from the nuclear power industry] n. 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 expens...
scram switch2 => 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}. 
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 re...
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...
scratch monkey2 => 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 ca. 1986. Mabel was not (so the leg...
scratch monkey3 => 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 DEC PMed the PDP-11 contr...
scratch monkey4 => {provocative maintainance}). It is recorded 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 aske...
scratch monkey5 => 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...
screw => [MIT] n. 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...
scrog => /skrog/ [Bell Labs] vt. 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". Equivalent to scribble or mangle.
scrool => /skrool/ [from the pioneering Roundtable chat system in Houston ca. 1984; prob. originated as a typo for `scroll'] n. The log of old messages, available for later perusal or to help one get back in synch with the conversation. It was origin...
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!"
SCSI => [Small Computer System Interface] n. 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/) ...
search-and-destroy mode => n. Hackerism for the 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 elep...
second-system effect2 => 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 t...
second-system effect3 => 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 des...
second-system effect4 => 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 ana...
secondary damage2 => 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 ...
secondary damage3 => 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 => n. A name applied by hackers to most OS vendors' favorite way of coping with security holes --- namely, ignoring them and not documenting them and trusting that nobody will find out about them and that people who do find...
security through obscurity2 => This never works for long and occasionally sets the world up for debacles like the RTM worm of 1988, but once the brief moments of panic created by such events subside most vendors are all too willing to turn over and g...
security through obscurity3 => 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 im...
security through obscurity4 => 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 It is claimed (with dissent from {ITS} fans who say they used...
security through obscurity5 => in a positive sense) that this term was first used in the USENET newsgroup in comp.sys.apollo during a campaign to get HP/Apollo to fix security problems in its UNIX-clone Aegis/DomainOS. They didn't change a thing. 
SED => [TMRC, from `Light-Emitting Diode'] /S-E-D/ n. Smoke-emitting diode. A friode that lost the war. See LER.
segfault => n.,vi. Syn. segment, seggie.
seggie => /seg'ee/ [UNIX] n. Shorthand for {segmentation fault} reported from Britain.
segment => /seg'ment/ vi. To experience a {segmentation fault}. Confusingly, this is often pronounced more like the noun `segment' than like mainstream v. segment; this is because it is actually a noun shorthand that has been verbed.
segmentation fault => n. [UNIX] 1. An error in which a running program attempts to access memory not allocated to it and {core dump}s with a segmentation violation error. 2. To lose a train of thought or a line of reasoning. Also uttered as an exclam...
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/ [from sewing] n. See chad (sense 1).
semi => /se'mee/ or /se'mi/ 1. n. Abbreviation for `semicolon', when speaking. "Commands to grind are prefixed by semi-semi-star" means that the prefix is `;;*', not 1/4 of a star. 2. A prefix used with words such as `immediately' as a qualifier. "Wh...

factpacks/jargon.fact  view on Meta::CPAN

whales => n. See {like kicking dead whales down the beach}.
wheel => [from slang `big wheel' for a powerful person] n. A person who has an active a {wheel bit}. "We need to find a wheel to unwedge the hung tape drives."
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, cras...
wheel bit2 => 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 UNI...
wheel bit3 => mid-1980s and has been gaining popularity there (esp. at university sites). See also root. 
wheel wars => [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 lesse...
White Book => n. Syn. K&R.
whizzy => [Sun] adj. (alt. `wizzy') Describes a cuspy program; one that is feature-rich and well presented.
WIBNI => // [Bell Labs Wouldn't It Be Nice If] n. 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. ...
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 un...
WIMP environment => n. [acronymic from `Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing device (or Pull-down menu)'] A graphical-user-interface-based environment such as X or the Macintosh interface, as described by a hacker who prefers command-line interfaces for thei...
WIMP environment2 => extensibility. See menuitis, user-obsequious. 
win => [MIT] 1. vi. To succeed. A program wins if no unexpected conditions arise, or (especially) if it sufficiently robust to take exceptions in stride. 2. n. Success, or a specific instance thereof. A pleasing outcome. A feature. Emphatic forms `mo...
win big => vi. To experience serendipity. "I went shopping and won big; there was a 2-for-1 sale." See {big win}.
win win => interj. Expresses pleasure at a win.
Winchester => n. Informal generic term for `floating-head' magnetic-disk drives in which the read-write head planes over the disk surface on an air cushion. The name arose because the original 1973 engineering prototype for what later became the IBM ...
winged comments => n. Comments set on the same line as code, as opposed to {boxed comments}. In C, for example d = sqrt(x*x + y*y); /* distance from origin */ Generally these refer only to the action(s) taken on that line.
winkey => n. (alt. `winkey face') See emoticon.
winnage => /win'*j/ n. The situation when a lossage is corrected, or when something is winning.
winner => 1. n. An unexpectedly good situation, program, programmer, or person. "So it turned out I could use a lexer generator instead of hand-coding my own pattern recognizer. What a win!" 2. `real winner' Often sarcastic, but also used as high pra...
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 wi...
wired => n. See hardwired.
wirehead => /wir'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 wiza...
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 ...
wish list2 => interface." Compare {tick-list features}. 
within delta of => adj. See delta.
within epsilon of => adj. See epsilon.
wizard => n. 1. A person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works (that is, who 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 wizar...
Wizard Book => n. Hal Abelson and Jerry Sussman's `Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs' (MIT Press, 1984; ISBN 0-262-01077-1, an excellent computer science text used in introductory courses at MIT. So called because of the wizard on the...
Wizard Book2 => LISP/Scheme world. 
wizard mode => [from rogue] n. 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).
wizardly => adj. Pertaining to wizards. A wizardly feature is one that only a wizard could understand or use properly.
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 equ...
WOMBAT => [Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time] adj. 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 womb...
wonky => /wong'kee/ [from Australian slang] adj. 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 wo...
workaround => n. A temporary kluge inserted in a system under development or test in order to avoid the effects of a bug or misfeature so that work can continue. Theoretically, workarounds are always replaced by fixes; in practice, customers often fi...
working as designed => [IBM] adj. 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 ...
working as designed2 => this sense is used in official documents! See BAD. 
worm => [from `tapeworm' in John Brunner's novel `The Shockwave Rider', via XEROX PARC] n. 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 th...
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 becau...
wrap around2 => 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 (...
wrap around3 => rate of 10 microhertz). 
write-only code => [a play on `read-only memory'] n. 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 {write-only code}. A sobriquet applied occasionally to C and often to APL, though INTERCAL and TECO certainly deser...
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 Signeti...
write-only memory2 => 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...
write-only memory3 => edition of the data book and requested the return of the `erroneous' ones. Later, around 1974, Signetics bought a double-page spread in `Electronics' magazine's April issue and used the spec as an April Fools' Day joke. Instead ...
write-only memory4 => 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", an...
write-only memory5 => 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 ...
Wrong Thing2 => of the best', the merely good --- although good --- is nevertheless the Wrong Thing. "In C, the default is for module-level declarations to be visible everywhere, rather than just within the module. This is clearly the Wrong Thing." 
wugga wugga => /wuh'g* wuh'g*/ n. Imaginary sound that a computer program makes as it labors with a tedious or difficult task. Compare {cruncha cruncha cruncha}, grind (sense 4).
WYSIWYG => /wiz'ee-wig/ adj. Describes a user interface under which "What You See Is What You Get", as opposed to one that uses more-or-less obscure commands which do not result in immediate visual feedback. The term can be mildly derogatory, as it i...
XOFF => /X'of/ n. Syn. control-s.
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 argu...
xref => /X'ref/ vt., 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.
xyzzy => /X-Y-Z-Z-Y/, /X-Y-ziz'ee/, /ziz'ee/, or /ik-ziz'ee/ [from the ADVENT game] adj. 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 the...
YA- => [Yet Another] abbrev. In hackish acronyms this almost invariably expands to {Yet Another}, following the precedent set by UNIX `yacc(1)'. See YABA.
YABA => /ya'b*/ [Cambridge] n. 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 t...
YAUN => /yawn/ [Acronym for `Yet Another UNIX Nerd'] n. Reported from the San Diego Computer Society (predominantly a microcomputer users' group) as a good-natured punning insult aimed at UNIX zealots.
Yellow Book => [proposed] n. The print version of this Jargon File; `The New Hacker's Dictionary', forthcoming from MIT Press, 1991. Includes all the material in the File, plus a Foreword by Guy L. Steele and a Preface by Eric S. Raymond. Most import...
Yellow Book2 => typeset and includes almost all of the infamous Crunchly cartoons by the Great Quux, each attached to an appropriate entry. 
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 Anoth...
Yet Another2 => Simulated Annealing Algorithm'. 2. Of others' work Describes something of which there are far too many. See also YA-, YABA, YAUN. 
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.
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 {networ...
You know you've been hacking too long when...2 => 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 comp...
You know you've been hacking too long when...3 => value than your car. * in your universe, `round numbers' are powers of 2, not 10. * more than once, you have woken up recalling a dream in some programming language. * you realize you have never seen ...
You know you've been hacking too long when...4 => 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 balan...
You know you've been hacking too long when...5 => 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. --- 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...
Your mileage may vary2 => system?" 2. A qualifier more generally attached to advice. "I find that sending flowers works well, but your mileage may vary." 
Yow! => /yow/ [from "Zippy the Pinhead" comix] interj. A favored hacker expression of humorous surprise or emphasis. "Yow! Check out what happens when you twiddle the foo option on this display hack!" Compare gurfle.
yoyo mode => n. The state in which the system is said to be when it rapidly alternates several times between being up and being down. Interestingly (and perhaps not by coincidence), many hardware vendors give out free yoyos at Usenix exhibits. Sun Mi...
yoyo mode2 => 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 i...
Yu-Shiang Whole Fish2 => 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. 
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...
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...
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." Cont...
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 zer...
zero-content => adj. Syn. content-free.
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 b...
zigamorph => /zig'*-morf/ n. Hex FF (11111111) when used as a delimiter or fence character. Usage primarily at IBM shops.
zip => [primarily MS-DOS] vt. 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'l...
zipperhead => [IBM] n. A person with a closed mind.
zombie => [UNIX] n. A process that has died but has not yet relinquished its process table slot (because the parent process hasn't executed a `wait(2)' for it yet). These can be seen in `ps(1)' listings occasionally. Compare orphan.
zorch => /zorch/ 1. [TMRC] v. To attack with an inverse heat sink. 2. [TMRC] v. To travel, with v approaching c [that is, with velocity approaching lightspeed --- ESR]. 3. [MIT] v. To propel something very quickly. "The new comm software is very fast...
Zork => /zork/ n. The second of the great early experiments in computer fantasy gaming; see ADVENT. Originally written on MIT-DM during the late 1970s, later distributed with BSD UNIX and commercialized as `The Zork Trilogy' by Infocom.
zorkmid => /zork'mid/ n. The canonical unit of currency in hacker-written games. This originated in zork but has spread to nethack and is referred to in several other games.= [^A-Za-z] (see regexp) =
'Snooze => /snooz/ [FidoNet] n. Fidonews, the weekly official on-line newsletter of FidoNet. As the editorial policy of Fidonews is "anything that arrives, we print", there are often large articles completely unrelated to FidoNet, which in turn tend ...
(TM) => // [USENET] ASCII rendition of the trademark-superscript symbol appended to phrases that the author feels should be recorded for posterity, perhaps in future editions of this lexicon. Sometimes used ironically as a form of protest against the...
-oid => [from `android'] suff. 1. This suffix is used as in mainstream English to indicate a poor imitation, a counterfeit, or some otherwise slightly bogus resemblance. Hackers will happily use it with all sorts of non-Greco/Latin stem words that wo...
-ware => [from `software'] suff. Commonly used to form jargon terms for classes of software. For examples, see careware, crippleware, crudware, freeware, fritterware, guiltware, liveware, meatware, payware, psychedelicware, shareware, shelfware, vapo...
/dev/null => /dev-nuhl/ [from the UNIX null device, used as a data sink] n. 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...
120 reset => /wuhn-twen'tee ree'set/ [from 120 volts, U.S. wall voltage] n. To cycle power on a machine in order to reset or unjam it. Compare {Big Red Switch}, {power cycle}.
2 => infix. In translation software written by hackers, infix 2 often represents the syllable *to* with the connotation `translate to' as in dvi2ps (DVI to PostScript), int2string (integer to string), and texi2roff (Texinfo to [nt]roff).
@-party => /at'par`tee/ [from the @-sign in an Internet address] n. (alt. `@-sign party' /at'sin par`tee/) A semi-closed party thrown for hackers at a science-fiction convention (esp. the annual Worldcon); one must have a {network address} to get in,...
@Begin => // See \begin.
\begin => // [from the LaTeX command] With \end, used humorously in writing to indicate a context or to remark on the surrounded text. For example \beginflame Predicate logic is the only good programming language. Anyone who would use anything else i...