Amethyst
view release on metacpan or search on metacpan
factpacks/Linux.fact view on Meta::CPAN
leak => <reply> $who, Simple sysadm shell script for finding which process is leaking memory.. URL: http://www.galstar.com/~jmccorm/leak
LeakTracer => <reply> $who, Trace memory leaks in C++ programs. URL: http://www.andreasen.org/LeakTracer/
Leaky => <reply> $who, a memory leak tracer. URL: http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/tools/leaky/leaky.html
LeanWeb => <reply> $who, HTTP proxy for removing user-defined parts from Web pages.. URL: http://www.clasohm.com/leanweb/
LEAP RDBMS => <reply> $who, A free Relational Database Management System. URL: http://www.xnot.com/leap/
LED Counter => <reply> $who, All purpose counter. URL: http://gehtnix.fernuni-hagen.de/LED-Counter/index.html
Ledsm => <reply> $who, System monitor that displays CPU load and free memory using the keyboard leds. URL: http://personal5.iddeo.es/jajs/ledsm.html
Leech => <reply> $who, Recursive download automation tool. URL: http://nostamp.dynip.com/kars/phplib/projects/leech.phtml
Legato Networker => <reply> $who, Linux client to commercial backup server. URL: http://feral.com/NetWorker.html
legdoc => <reply> $who, C source code documentor. URL: http://www.moodfarm.demon.co.uk/download/index.html#legdoc
Legend => <reply> $who, A Swedish BBS/MUD system. URL: http://www.legend.se.eu.org/
LEM => <reply> $who, A small Linux/X11 distribution for embedding apps.. URL: http://linux-embedded.com
Lemon => <reply> $who, Modern parser generator. URL: http://www.hwaci.com/sw/lemon/index.html
LeoCAD => <reply> $who, CAD application that uses plastic bricks. URL: http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/3479/leocad.htm
less => <reply> $who, . URL: http://www.flash.net/~marknu/less/
Lesstif => <reply> $who, LGPL'd re-implementation of Motif. URL: http://www.lesstif.org/
LexiMUD => <reply> $who, C++ MUD Codebase for Sci-fi MUDs, based on CircleMUD. URL: http://avp.dhs.org/leximud/
Lexmark 1100 driver for Linux => <reply> $who, Converts raw ppm files to the Lexmark 1100 printer protocol.. URL: http://209.233.17.85/lexmark/
Lexmark 2070 B/W Linux Driver => <reply> $who, B/W 300dpi printer driver (filter) for the Lexmark 2070 inkjet printer. URL: http://www.studet.fh-muenster.de/~kornblum/Lexmark2070.html
Lexmark 5700/7000 Printer Driver => <reply> $who, Lexmark 5700/7000 Colorjet Printer Driver for Linux. URL: http://bimbo.fjfi.cvut.cz/~paluch/l7kdriver/
Lexmark2070 driver => <reply> $who, Driver for Lexmark 2070 Inkjet Printer. URL: http://www.studet.fh-muenster.de/~kornblum/Lexmark2070.html
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
bit bang is n. Transmission of data on a serial line, when accomplished by rapidly tweaking a single output bit at the appropriate times. The technique is a simple loop with eight OUT and SHIFT instruction pairs for each byte. Input is more...
bit bang2 is and output at the same time) is one way to separate the real hackers from the {wannabee}s. Bit bang was used on certain early models of Prime computers, presumably when UARTs were too expensive, and on archaic Z80 micros with ...
bit bang3 is instance of the {cycle of reincarnation}, this technique is now (1991) coming back into use on some RISC architectures because it consumes such an infinitesimal part of the processor that it actually makes sense not to have a UA...
bit bashing is n. (alt. `bit diddling' or {bit twiddling}) Term used to describe any of several kinds of low-level programming characterized by manipulation of {bit}, {flag}, {nybble}, and other smaller-than-character-sized pieces of data; the...
bit bashing2 is encryption algorithms, checksum and error-correcting codes, hash functions, some flavors of graphics programming (see {bitblt}), and assembler/compiler code generation. May connote either tedium or a real technical challenge...
bit bashing3 is decoding for the new tape driver looks pretty solid but the bit-bashing for the control registers still has bugs." See also {bit bang}, {mode bit}.
bit bucket is n. 1. The universal data sink (originally, the mythical receptacle used to catch bits when they fall off the end of a register during a shift instruction). Discarded, lost, or destroyed data is said to have `gone to the bit buck...
bit bucket2 is {/dev/null}. Sometimes amplified as `the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky'. 2. The place where all lost mail and news messages eventually go. The selection is performed according to {Finagle's Law}; important mail is much more lik...
bit bucket3 is mail, which has an almost 100% probability of getting delivered. Routing to the bit bucket is automatically performed by mail-transfer agents, news systems, and the lower layers of the network. 3. The ideal location for all un...
bit bucket4 is article to the bit bucket." Such a request is guaranteed to overflow one's mailbox with flames. 4. Excuse for all mail that has not been sent. "I mailed you those figures last week; they must have ended in the bit bucket." Co...
bit bucket5 is in jest. It is based on the fanciful notion that bits are objects that are not destroyed but only misplaced. This appears to have been a mutation of an earlier term `bit box', about which the same legend was current; old-time ...
bit bucket6 is told that when the CPU stored bits into memory it was actually pulling them `out of the bit box'. See also {chad box}. Another variant of this legend has it that, as a consequence of the `parity preservation law', the number ...
bit bucket7 is equal the number of 0 bits. Any imbalance results in bits filling up the bit bucket. A qualified computer technician can empty a full bit bucket as part of scheduled maintenance.
bit decay is n. See {bit rot}. People with a physics background tend to prefer this one for the analogy with particle decay. See also {computron}, {quantum bogodynamics}.
bit rot is n. Also {bit decay}. Hypothetical disease the existence of which has been deduced from the observation that unused programs or features will often stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if `nothing has changed'. The t...
bit rot2 is were radioactive. As time passes, the contents of a file or the code in a program will become increasingly garbled. There actually are physical processes that produce such effects (alpha particles generated by trace radionuclide...
bit rot3 is change the contents of a computer memory unpredictably, and various kinds of subtle media failures can corrupt files in mass storage), but they are quite rare (and computers are built with error-detecting circuitry to compensate ...
bit rot4 is hackers that cosmic rays are among the causes of such events turns out to be a myth; see the {cosmic rays} entry for details. The term {software rot} is almost synonymous. Software rot is the effect, bit rot the notional cause.
bit twiddling is n. 1. (pejorative) An exercise in {tuning} in which incredible amounts of time and effort go to produce little noticeable improvement, often with the result that the code has become incomprehensible. 2. Aimless small modifica...
bit twiddling2 is goal. 3. Approx. syn. for {bit bashing}; esp. used for the act of frobbing the device control register of a peripheral in an attempt to get it back to a known state.
bit-paired keyboard is n. obs. (alt. `bit-shift keyboard') A non-standard keyboard layout that seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several years on early computer equipment. The ASR-33 was a mechanical de...
bit-paired keyboard2 is generate the character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage. The design of the ASR-33 assigned each character key a basic pattern that could be modified by flipping bits if the SHIFT or the CTRL key was p...
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
crank is [from automotive slang] vt. Verb used to describe the performance of a machine, especially sustained performance. "This box cranks (or, cranks at) about 6 {megaflops}, with a burst mode of twice that on vectorized operations."
crash is 1. n. A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of the {system} (q.v., sense 1), sometimes of magnetic disk drives. "Three {luser}s lost their files in last night's disk crash." A disk crash that involves the read/write he...
crash2 is and scraping off the oxide may also be referred to as a `head crash', whereas the term `system crash' usually, though not always, implies that the operating system or other software was at fault. 2. v. To fail suddenly. "Has the s...
crash3 is OS!" See {down}. Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the crash (usually a person or a program, or both). "Those idiots playing {SPACEWAR} crashed the system." 3. vi. Sometimes said of people hitting the sack after a l...
crash and burn is vi.,n. A spectacular crash, in the mode of the conclusion of the car-chase scene in the movie "Bullitt" and many subsequent imitators. Sun-3 monitors losing the flyback transformer and lightning strikes on VAX-11/780 backpla...
crash and burn2 is The construction `crash-and-burn machine' is reported for a computer used exclusively for alpha or {beta} testing, or reproducing bugs (i.e., not for development). The implication is that it wouldn't be such a disaster if...
crash and burn3 is would be inconvenienced.
crawling horror is n. Ancient crufty hardware or software that is kept obstinately alive by forces beyond the control of the hackers at a site. Like {dusty deck} or {gonkulator}, but connotes that the thing described is not just an irritation...
crawling horror2 is "Mostly we code new stuff in C, but they pay us to maintain one big FORTRAN II application from nineteen-sixty-X that's a real crawling horror...." Compare {WOMBAT}.
cray is /kray/ n. 1. (properly, capitalized) One of the line of supercomputers designed by Cray Research. 2. Any supercomputer at all. 3. The {canonical} {number-crunching} machine. The term is actually the lowercased last name of Seymour Cr...
cray2 is co-founder of the company. Numerous vivid legends surround him, some true and some admittedly invented by Cray Research brass to shape their corporate culture and image.
cray instability is n. A shortcoming of a program or algorithm that manifests itself only when a large problem is being run on a powerful machine (see {cray}). Generally more subtle than bugs that can be detected in smaller problems running o...
crayola is /kray-oh'l*/ n. A super-mini or -micro computer that provides some reasonable percentage of supercomputer performance for an unreasonably low price. Might also be a {killer micro}.
crayon is n. 1. Someone who works on Cray supercomputers. More specifically, it implies a programmer, probably of the CDC ilk, probably male, and almost certainly wearing a tie (irrespective of gender). Systems types who have a UNIX backgrou...
crayon2 is A {computron} (sense 2) that participates only in {number-crunching}. 3. A unit of computational power equal to that of a single Cray-1. There is a standard joke about this that derives from an old Crayola crayon promotional gim...
creationism is n. The (false) belief that large, innovative designs can be completely specified in advance and then painlessly magicked out of the void by the normal efforts of a team of normally talented programmers. In fact, experience has ...
creationism2 is only from evolutionary, exploratory interaction between one (or at most a small handful of) exceptionally able designer(s) and an active user population --- and that the first try at a big new idea is always wrong. Unfortunat...
creationism3 is planning models beloved of {management}, they are generally ignored.
creeping elegance is n. Describes a tendency for parts of a design to become {elegant} past the point of diminishing return. This often happens at the expense of the less interesting parts of the design, the schedule, and other things deemed ...
creeping elegance2 is {creeping featurism}, {second-system effect}, {tense}.
creeping featurism is /kree'ping fee'chr-izm/ n. 1. Describes a systematic tendency to load more {chrome} and {feature}s onto systems at the expense of whatever elegance they may have possessed when originally designed. See also {feeping crea...
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
flame2 is people. 4. n. An instance of flaming. When a discussion degenerates into useless controversy, one might tell the participants "Now you're just flaming" or "Stop all that flamage!" to try to get them to cool down (so to speak). ...
flame3 is to 1976, adds "I am 99% certain that the use of `flame' originated at WPI. Those who made a nuisance of themselves insisting that they needed to use a TTY for `real work' came to be known as `flaming asshole lusers'. Other particu...
flame4 is ravers', which shortened to `flaming ravers', and ultimately `flamers'. I remember someone picking up on the Human Torch pun, but I don't think `flame on/off' was ever much used at WPI." See also {asbestos}. The term may have b...
flame5 is places; it is also reported that `flaming' was in use to mean something like `interminably drawn-out semi-serious discussions' (late-night bull sessions) at Carleton College during 1968--1971.
flame bait is n. A posting intended to trigger a {flame war}, or one that invites flames in reply.
flame on is 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 is n. (var. `flamewar') An acrimonious dispute, especially when conducted on a public electronic forum such as {USENET}.
flamer is n. One who habitually {flame}s. Said esp. of obnoxious {USENET} personalities.
flap is vt. 1. To unload a DECtape (so it goes flap, flap, flap...). Old-time hackers at MIT tell of the days when the disk was device 0 and {microtape}s were 1, 2,... and attempting to flap device 0 would instead start a motor banging insi...
flap2 is to unload any magnetic tape. See also {macrotape}. Modern cartridge tapes no longer actually flap, but the usage has remained.
flarp is /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 discreetl...
flarp2 is which *do* contain the magic word.
flat is 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 line...
flat2 is possible value of a processor register corresponding to a unique core address), as opposed to a `segmented' architecture (like that of the 80x86) in which addresses are composed from a base-register/offset pair (segmented designs ar...
flat-ASCII is 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}-characte...
flat-file is adj. A {flatten}ed representation of some database or tree or network structure as a single file from which the structure could implicitly be rebuilt, esp. one in {flat-ASCII} form.
flatten is 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 a...
flavor is 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 p...
flavor2 is convention yields additional flavor by allowing one to print text either right-side-up or upside-down." See {vanilla}. This usage was certainly reinforced by the terminology of quantum chromodynamics, in which quarks (the constit...
flavor3 is (up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom) and three colors (red, blue, green) --- however, hackish use of `flavor' at MIT predated QCD. 3. The term for `class' (in the object-oriented sense) in the LISP Machine Flavors system. Tho...
flavor4 is (notably by the Common LISP CLOS facility), the term `flavor' is still used as a general synonym for `class' by some LISP hackers.
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
fold case is 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 is 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 c...
followup2 is news in `conversation' sequence rather than order-of-arrival. See {thread}.
foo is /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 al...
foo2 is {grault}, {garply}, {waldo}, {fred}, {plugh}, {xyzzy}, {thud}. {foo} is the {canonical} example of a `metasyntactic variable' --- a name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is under discussion, or any random...
foo3 is discussion. To avoid confusion, hackers never use `foo' or other words like it as permanent names for anything. In filenames, a common convention is that any filename beginning `foo' is a scratch file that may be deleted at any time....
foo4 is When used in connection with `bar' it is generally traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym FUBAR (`Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition'), later bowdlerized to {foobar}. (See also {FUBAR}). However, the use of the word `foo' itself ha...
foo5 is long history in comic strips and cartoons. The old "Smokey Stover" comic strips by Bill Holman often included the word `FOO', in particular on license plates of cars; allegedly, `FOO' and `BAR' also occurred in Walt Kelly's "Pogo" st...
foo6 is early version of Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying "SILENCE IS FOO!"; oddly, this seems to refer to some approving or positive affirmative use of foo. It is even possible that hacker usage actually springs from `FOO, Lampoons and Par...
foo7 is in September 1958; the byline read `C. Crumb' but this may well have been a sort-of pseudonym for noted weird-comix artist Robert Crumb. The title FOO was featured in large letters on the front cover. An old-time member reports that...
foo8 is Language', compiled at {TMRC} there was an entry that went something like this FOO The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase "FOO MANE PADME HUM." Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning. For more abou...
foo9 is Almost the entire AI staff was involved with TMRC, so it is not clear which group introduced the other to the word FOO. Very probably, hackish `foo' had no single origin and derives through all these channels from Yiddish `feh' and/o...
foobar is n. Another common metasyntactic variable; see {foo}. Hackers do *not* generally use this to mean {FUBAR} in either the slang or jargon sense.
fool is 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...
fool2 is to reason correctly, or a clown. Indeed, in hackish experience many fools are capable of reasoning all too effectively in executing their errors. See also {cretin}, {loser}, {fool file, the}.
fool file, the is [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 wish...
fool file, the2 is 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 is 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 sy...
Foonly2 is bypassing TENEX which at that time was the ARPANET standard. ARPA funding for both the Super Foonly and the new operating system was cut in 1974. Most of the design team went to DEC and contributed greatly to the design of the PDP...
Foonly3 is formed by Dave Poole, one of the principal Super Foonly designers, and one of hackerdom's more colorful personalities. Many people remember the parrot which sat on Poole's shoulder and was a regular companion. 3. Any of the mach...
Foonly4 is the F-1 (a.k.a. Super Foonly), which was the computational engine used to create the graphics in the movie "TRON". The F-1 was the fastest PDP-10 ever built, but only one was ever made. The effort drained Foonly of its financial...
Foonly5 is smaller, slower, and much less expensive machines. Unfortunately, these ran not the popular {TOPS-20} but a TENEX varient called Foonex; this seriously limited their market. Also, the machines shipped were actually wire-wrapped en...
Foonly6 is attention from more than usually competent site personnel, and thus had significant reliability problems. Poole's legendary temper and unwillingness to suffer fools gladly did not help matters. By the time of the Jupiter project c...
Foonly7 is build another F-1 was eclipsed by the {Mars}, and the company never quite recovered. See the {Mars} entry for the continuation and moral of this story.
footprint is 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 is 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...
for free2 is 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 is [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 ov...
for the rest of us2 is 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 tha...
for the rest of us3 is 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...
for the rest of us4 is 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 environme...
fora is pl.n. Plural of {forum}.
foreground is [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 foregr...
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
Hacking X for Y is [ITS] n. The information ITS made publicly available about each user (the INQUIR record) was a sort of form in which the user could fill out fields. On display, two of these fields were combined into a project description o...
Hacking X for Y2 is `"Hacking perceptrons for Minsky"'). This form of description became traditional and has since been carried over to other systems with more general facilities for self-advertisement (such as UNIX {plan file}s).
Hackintosh is n. 1. An Apple Lisa that has been hacked into emulating a Macintosh (also called a `Mac XL'). 2. A Macintosh assembled from parts theoretically belonging to different models in the line.
hackish is /hak'ish/ adj. (also {hackishness} n.) 1. Said of something that is or involves a hack. 2. Of or pertaining to hackers or the hacker subculture. See also {true-hacker}.
hackishness is n. The quality of being or involving a hack. This term is considered mildly silly. Syn. {hackitude}.
hackitude is n. Syn. {hackishness}; this word is considered sillier.
hair is [back-formation from {hairy}] n. The complications that make something hairy. "Decoding {TECO} commands requires a certain amount of hair." Often seen in the phrase `infinite hair', which connotes extreme complexity. Also in `hairif...
hair2 is "GNUMACS Elisp encourages lusers to write complex editing modes." "Yeah, it's pretty hairiferous all right." (or just "Hair squared!")
hairy is adj. 1. Annoyingly complicated. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy." 2. Incomprehensible. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy." 3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative, rare, expert, and/or incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in context "...
hairy2 is nothing to worry about." See also {hirsute}.
HAKMEM is /hak'mem/ n. MIT AI Memo 239 (February 1972). A legendary collection of neat mathematical and programming hacks contributed by many people at MIT and elsewhere. (The title of the memo really is "HAKMEM", which is a 6-letterism for ...
HAKMEM2 is techniques, powerful theorems, or interesting unsolved problems, but most fall into the category of mathematical and computer trivia. Here is a sampling of the entries (with authors), slightly paraphrased Item 41 (Gene Salamin) T...
HAKMEM3 is than 2^18. Item 46 (Rich Schroeppel) The most *probable* suit distribution in bridge hands is 4-4-3-2, as compared to 4-3-3-3, which is the most *evenly* distributed. This is because the world likes to have unequal numbers a ther...
HAKMEM4 is the state of lowest energy, but in the state of lowest disordered energy. Item 81 (Rich Schroeppel) Count the magic squares of order 5 (that is, all the 5-by-5 arrangements of the numbers from 1 to 25 such that all rows, columns, ...
HAKMEM5 is There are about 320 million, not counting those that differ only by rotation and reflection. Item 154 (Bill Gosper) The myth that any given programming language is machine independent is easily exploded by computing the sum of pow...
HAKMEM6 is with sign +, you are on a sign-magnitude machine. If the result loops with period = 1 at -1, you are on a twos-complement machine. If the result loops with period greater than 1, including the beginning, you are on a ones-comple...
HAKMEM7 is period greater than 1, not including the beginning, your machine isn't binary --- the pattern should tell you the base. If you run out of memory, you are on a string or bignum system. If arithmetic overflow is a fatal error, som...
HAKMEM8 is to enforce machine independence. But the very ability to trap overflow is machine dependent. By this strategy, consider the universe, or, more precisely, algebra Let X = the sum of many powers of 2 = ...111111. Now add X to its...
HAKMEM9 is X = -1. Therefore algebra is run on a machine (the universe) that is two's-complement. Item 174 (Bill Gosper and Stuart Nelson) 21963283741 is the only number such that if you represent it on the {PDP-10} as both an integer and a...
HAKMEM10 is two representations are identical. Item 176 (Gosper) The "banana phenomenon" was encountered when processing a character string by taking the last 3 letters typed out, searching for a random occurrence of that sequence in the t...
HAKMEM11 is occurrence, typing it out, and iterating. This ensures that every 4-letter string output occurs in the original. The program typed BANANANANANANANA.... We note an ambiguity in the phrase, "the Nth occurrence of." In one sense...
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
mode bit is n. A {flag}, usually in hardware, that selects between two (usually quite different) modes of operation. The connotations are different from {flag} bit in that mode bits are mainly written during a boot or set-up phase, are seldom...
mode bit2 is lifetime of an ordinary program. The classic example was the EBCDIC-vs.-ASCII bit (#12) of the Program Status Word of the IBM 360. Another was the bit on a PDP-12 that controlled whether it ran the PDP-8 or the LINC instruction ...
modulo is /mo'dyu-loh/ prep. Except for. From mathematical terminology; one can consider saying that 4 = 22 except for the 9s (4 = 22 mod 9). "Well, LISP seems to work okay now, modulo that {GC} bug." "I feel fine today modulo a slight he...
molly-guard is /mol'ee-gard/ [University of Illinois] n. A shield to prevent tripping of some {Big Red Switch} by clumsy or ignorant hands. Originally used of some plexiglass covers improvised for the BRS on an IBM 4341 after a programmer's t...
molly-guard2 is twice in one day. Later generalized to covers over stop/reset switches on disk drives and networking equipment.
Mongolian Hordes technique is n. Development by {gang bang} (poss. from the Sixties counterculture expression `Mongolian clusterfuck' for a public orgy). Implies that large numbers of inexperienced programmers are being put on a job better pe...
Mongolian Hordes technique2 is `Chinese Army technique'; see also {Brooks's Law}.
monkey up is vt. To hack together hardware for a particular task, especially a one-shot job. Connotes an extremely {crufty} and consciously temporary solution. Compare {hack up}, {kluge up}, {cruft together}, {cruft together}.
monkey, scratch is n. See {scratch monkey}.
monstrosity is 1. n. A ridiculously {elephantine} program or system, esp. one that is buggy or only marginally functional. 2. The quality of being monstrous (see `Overgeneralization' in the discussion of jargonification). See also {baroque}.
Moof is /moof/ [MAC users] n. The Moof or `dogcow' is a semi-legendary creature that lurks in the depths of the Macintosh Technical Notes Hypercard stack V3.1; specifically, the full story of the dogcow is told in technical note #31 (the parti...
Moof2 is `Clarus'). Option-shift-click will cause it to emit a characteristic `Moof!' or `!fooM' sound. *Getting* to tech note 31 is the hard part; to discover how to do that, one must needs examine the stack script with a hackerly eye. Cl...
Moof3 is if you choose `Page Setup...' with a LaserWriter selected and click on the `Options' button.
Moore's Law is /morz law/ prov. The observation that the logic density of silicon integrated circuits has closely followed the curve (bits per square inch) = 2^{(n - 1962)}; that is, the amount of information storable in one square inch of si...
Moore's Law2 is since the technology was invented. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data}.
moria is /mor'ee-*/ n. Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide range of machines and operating systems. Extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for ...
MOTAS is /moh-toz/ [USENET: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] n. A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.
MOTOS is /moh-tohs/ [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via USENET: Member Of The Opposite Sex] n. A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which have largely displac...
MOTSS is /mots/ or /M-O-T-S-S/ [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via USENET, Member Of The Same Sex] n. Esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues newsgroup on USENET is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS}, which d...
mouse ahead is vi. Point-and-click analog of `type ahead'. To manipulate a computer's pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer program is ready to accept...
mouse ahead2 is accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
phase4 is to get into a different phase. 3. `change phase the easy way' To stay asleep, etc. However, some claim that either staying awake longer or sleeping longer is easy, and that it is *shortening* your day or night that's hard (see {wra...
phase5 is travelers who cross many time-zone boundaries may be attributed to two distinct causes the strain of travel per se, and the strain of changing phase. Hackers who suddenly find that they must change phase drastically in a short per...
phase6 is experience something very like jet lag without traveling.
phase of the moon is 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 dete...
phase of the moon2 is 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 ...
phase of the moon3 is 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 t...
phase of the moon4 is 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 specificatio...
phase of the moon5 is 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. Th...
phreaking is [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 co...
phreaking2 is phreaking was a semi-respectable activity among hackers; there was a gentleman's agreement that phreaking as an intellectual game and a form of exploration was OK, but serious theft of services was taboo. There was significant c...
phreaking3 is hard-core phone phreaks who ran semi-underground networks of their own through such media as the legendary `TAP Newsletter'. This ethos began to break down in the mid-1980s as wider dissemination of the techniques put them in ...
phreaking4 is the same time, changes in the phone network made old-style technical ingenuity less effective as a way of hacking it, so phreaking came to depend more on overtly criminal acts such as stealing phone-card numbers. The crimes an...
phreaking5 is turned that game very ugly. A few old-time hackers still phreak casually just to keep their hand in, but most these days have hardly even heard of `blue boxes' or any of the other paraphernalia of the great phreaks of yore.
pico- is [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 recog...
pico-2 is {{quantifiers}}, {micro-}.
run like a pig is v. To run very slowly on given hardware, said of software. Distinct from {hog}.
pilot error is [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 ...
ping is [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 ...
ping2 is a phone greeting. See {ACK}, also {ENQ}. 2. vt. To verify the presence of. 3. vt. To get the attention of. From the UNIX command `ping(1)' that sends an ICMP ECHO packet to another host. 4. vt. To send a message to all members ...
ping3 is order to verify that everybody's addresses are reachable). "We haven't heard much of anything from Geoff, but he did respond with an ACK both times I pinged jargon-friends." The funniest use of `ping' to date was described in Janua...
ping4 is comp.sys.next. He was trying to isolate a faulty cable segment on a TCP/IP Ethernet hooked up to a NeXT machine, and got tired of having to run back to his console after each cabling tweak to see if the ping packets were getting th...
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
say is 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 ...
say2 is terminal in response to your commands. Hackers find it odd that this usage confuses {mundane}s.
science-fiction fandom is 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 suc...
science-fiction fandom2 is 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}, {cy...
science-fiction fandom3 is {virus}, {wetware}, {wirehead}, and {worm} originated in SF stories.
scram switch is [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 ini...
scram switch2 is 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 is 1. [from `scratchpad'] adj. Describes a data structure or recording medium attached to a machine for testing or temporary-use purposes; one that can be {scribble}d on without loss. Usually in the combining forms `scratch memory', ...
scratch2 is tape', `scratch volume'. See {scratch monkey}. 2. [primarily IBM] vt. To delete (as in a file).
scratch monkey is 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 a...
scratch monkey2 is 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 (...
scratch monkey3 is 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 {PM}ed the PD...
scratch monkey4 is {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 ...
scratch monkey5 is 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...
screw is [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 is /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 is 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 ...
scribble2 is {trash}; compare {mung}, which conveys a bit more intention, and {mangle}, which is more violent and final.
scrog is /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 is /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...
scrool2 is because an early version of the roundtable software had a bug where it would dump all 8K of scrool on a user's terminal.
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
software rot8 is day, and corrected appropriately. Compare {bit rot}.
softwarily is /soft-weir'i-lee/ adv. In a way pertaining to software. "The system is softwarily unreliable." The adjective `softwary' is *not* used. See {hardwarily}.
softy is [IBM] n. Hardware hackers' term for a software expert who is largely ignorant of the mysteries of hardware.
some random X is adj. Used to indicate a member of class X, with the implication that Xs are interchangeable. "I think some random cracker tripped over the guest timeout last night." See also {J. Random}.
sorcerer's apprentice mode is [from the film "Fantasia"] n. A bug in a protocol where, under some circumstances, the receipt of a message causes multiple messages to be sent, each of which, when received, triggers the same bug. Used esp. of s...
sorcerer's apprentice mode2 is loops in {email} software. Compare {broadcast storm}, {network meltdown}.
SOS is n.,obs. /S-O-S/ 1. An infamously {losing} text editor. Once, back in the 1960s, when a text editor was needed for the PDP-6, a hacker crufted together a {quick-and-dirty} `stopgap editor' to be used until a better one was written. Unfo...
SOS2 is discarded when new ones (in particular, {TECO}) came along. SOS is a descendant (`Son of Stopgap') of that editor, and many PDP-10 users gained the dubious pleasure of its acquaintance. Since then other programs similar in style to...
SOS3 is editor BILOS /bye'lohs/, the Brother-In-Law Of Stopgap (the alternate expansion `Bastard Issue, Loins of Stopgap' has been proposed). 2. /sos/ n. To decrease; inverse of {AOS}, from the PDP-10 instruction set.
source of all good bits is n. A person from whom (or a place from which) useful information may be obtained. If you need to know about a program, a {guru} might be the source of all good bits. The title is often applied to a particularly comp...
space-cadet keyboard is n. The Knight keyboard, a now-legendary device used on MIT LISP machines, which inspired several still-current jargon terms and influenced the design of {EMACS}. It was inspired by the Stanford keyboard and equipped wi...
space-cadet keyboard2 is keys for {bucky bits} (`control', `meta', `hyper', and `super') and three like regular shift keys, called `shift', `top', and `front'. Many keys had three symbols on them a letter and a symbol on the top, and a Greek ...
space-cadet keyboard3 is key had an `L' and a two-way arrow on the top, and the Greek letter lambda on the front. And of course each of these might also be typed with any combination of the control, meta, hyper, and super keys. On this keyb...
space-cadet keyboard4 is characters! This allowed the user to type very complicated mathematical text, and also to have thousands of single-character commands at his disposal. Many hackers were actually willing to memorize the command mean...
space-cadet keyboard5 is typing time (this attitude obviously shaped the interface of EMACS). Other hackers, however, thought having that many bucky bits was overkill, and objected that such a keyboard can require three or four hands to ope...
space-cadet keyboard6 is bucky}, {meta bit}, {quadruple bucky}.
SPACEWAR is n. A space-combat simulation game, inspired by E. E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensman" books, in which two spaceships duel around a central sun, shooting torpedoes at each other and jumping through hyperspace. This game was first implemente...
SPACEWAR2 is aficionados formed the core of the early hacker culture at MIT. Nine years later, a descendant of the game motivated Ken Thompson to build, in his spare time on a scavenged PDP-7, the operating system that became {{UNIX}}. Less ...
SPACEWAR3 is commercialized as one of the first video games; descendants are still {feep}ing in video arcades everywhere.
spaghetti code is n. Code with a complex and tangled control structure, esp. one using many GOTOs, exceptions, or other `unstructured' branching constructs. Pejorative. The synonym `kangaroo code' has been reported, doubtless because such co...
spaghetti inheritance is n. [encountered among users of object-oriented languages that use inheritance, such as Smalltalk] A convoluted class-subclass graph, often resulting from carelessly deriving subclasses from other classes just for the s...
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
tinycrud2 is how (allegedly) inconsistent and lacking in genuine atmosphere the scenarios generated in user extensible MUDs can be. Other common knocks on them are that they feature little overall plot, bad game topology, little competitive...
tinycrud3 is alleged horrors of the TinyMUD code itself. This dispute is one of the MUD worlds hardiest perennial {holy wars}.
tip of the ice-cube is [IBM] n. The visible part of something small and insignificant. Used as an ironic comment in situations where `tip of the iceberg might be appropriate if the subject were actually nontrivial.
tired iron is [IBM] n. Hardware that is perfectly functional but far enough behind the state of the art to have been superseded by new products, presumably with sufficient improvement in bang-per-buck that the old stuff is starting to look a b...
tits on a keyboard is n. Small bumps on certain keycaps to keep touch-typists registered (usually on the `5 of a numeric keypad, and on the `F and `J of a QWERTY keyboard).
TLA is /T-L-A/ [Three-Letter Acronym] n. 1. Self-describing acronym for a species with which computing terminology is infested. 2. Any confusing acronym. Examples include MCA, FTP, SNA, CPU, MMU, SCCS, DMU, FPU, NNTP, TLA. People who like th...
TLA2 is three letters, just as not all four-letter words have four letters. One also hears of `ETLA (Extended Three-Letter Acronym, pronounced /ee tee el ay/) being used to describe four-letter acronyms. The term `SFLA (Stupid Four-Letter ...
TLA3 is {YABA}. The self-effacing phrase "TDM TLA" (Too Damn Many...) is often used to bemoan the plethora of TLAs in use. In 1989, a random of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin "What do you think will be the biggest prob...
TLA4 is straight-faced response "There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms." (To be exact, there are 26^3 = 17,576.)
TMRC is /tmerk/ n. The Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, one of the wellsprings of hacker culture. The 1959 `Dictionary of the TMRC Language compiled by Peter Samson included several terms which became basics of the hackish vocabulary (see esp...
TMRC2 is legendary layout was already a marvel of complexity. The control system alone featured about 1200 relays. There were {scram switch}es located at numerous places around the room that could be pressed if something undesirable was about...
TMRC3 is an obstruction. Another feature of the system was a digital clock on the dispatch board. Normally it ran at some multiple of real time, but if someone hit a scram switch the clock stopped and the display was replaced with the word ...
TMRC4 is the Bibliography), gives a stimulating account of those early years. TMRCs Power and Signals group included most of the early PDP-1 hackers and the people who later bacame the core of the MIT AI Lab staff. Thirty years later that ...
TMRC5 is lexicon accordingly includes a number of entries from a recent revision of the TMRC Dictionary.
to a first approximation is 1. [techspeak] When one is doing certain numerical computations, an approximate solution may be computed by any of several heuristic methods, then refined to a final value. By using the starting point of a first app...
to a first approximation2 is algorithm that converges more quickly to the correct result. 2. In jargon, a preface to any comment that indicates that the comment is only approximately true. The remark "To a first approximation, I feel good" m...
to a first approximation3 is reveal that not all is perfect (e.g., a nagging cough still remains after an illness).
to a zeroth approximation is [from `to a first approximation] A *really* sloppy approximation; a wild guess. Compare {social science number}.
toast is 1. n. Any completely inoperable system or component, esp. one that has just crashed and burned "Uh, oh ... I think the serial board is toast." 2. vt. To cause a system to crash accidentally, especially in a manner that requires manua...
toast2 is {firewall machine} again."
toaster is n. 1. The archetypal really stupid application for an embedded microprocessor controller; often used in comments that imply that a scheme is inappropriate technology (but see {elevator controller}). "{DWIM} for an assembler? Thatd...
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
VMS2 is this makes VMS fans furious. One major hacker gripe with VMS concerns its slowness --- thus the following limerick There once was a system called VMS Of cycles by no means abstemious. It's chock-full of hacks ...
VMS3 is my poor stomach all squeamious. --- The Great Quux See also {VAX}, {{TOPS-10}}, {{TOPS-20}}, {{UNIX}}, {runic}.
voice is vt. To phone someone, as opposed to emailing them or connecting in talk mode. "I'm busy now; I'll voice you later."
voice-net is n. Hackish way of referring to the telephone system, analogizing it to a digital network. USENET {sig block}s not uncommonly include the sender's phone next to a "Voice" or "Voice-Net" header; common variants of this are "Voicene...
voodoo programming is [from George Bush's "voodoo economics"] n. The use by guess or cookbook of an {obscure} or {hairy} system, feature, or algorithm that one does not truly understand. The implication is that the technique may not work, and...
voodoo programming2 is Almost synonymous with {black magic}, except that black magic typically isn't documented and *nobody* understands it. Compare {magic}, {deep magic}, {heavy wizardry}, {rain dance}, {cargo cult programming}, {wave a de...
VR is // [MUD] n. On-line abbrev for {virtual reality}, as opposed to {RL}.
Vulcan nerve pinch is n. [from the old "Star Trek" TV series via Commodore Amiga hackers] The keyboard combination that forces a soft-boot or jump to ROM monitor (on machines that support such a feature). On many micros this is Ctrl-Alt-Del; ...
Vulcan nerve pinch2 is <Cmd>-<Power switch>! Also called {three-finger salute}. Compare {quadruple bucky}.
vulture capitalist is n. Pejorative hackerism for `venture capitalist', deriving from the common practice of pushing contracts that deprive inventors of control over their own innovations and most of the money they ought to have made from them...
vulture capitalist2 is Fudd's immortal line "You wascawwy wabbit!"] n. 1. A legendary early hack reported on a System/360 at RPI and elsewhere around 1978. The program would make two copies of itself every time it was run, eventually crashi...
vulture capitalist3 is includes infinite self-replication but is not a {virus} or {worm}. See also {cookie monster}.
WAITS is /wayts/ n. The mutant cousin of {{TOPS-10}} used on a handful of systems at {{SAIL}} up to 1990. There was never an `official' expansion of WAITS (the name itself having been arrived at by a rather sideways process), but it was frequ...
WAITS2 is ITS'. Though WAITS was less visible than ITS, there was frequent exchange of people and ideas between the two communities, and innovations pioneered at WAITS exerted enormous indirect influence. The early screen modes of {EMACS}, ...
WAITS3 is `E' editor --- one of a family of editors that were the first to do `real-time editing', in which the editing commands were invisible and where one typed text at the point of insertion/overwriting. The modern style of multi-region...
WAITS4 is and WAITS alumni at XEROX PARC and elsewhere played major roles in the developments that led to the XEROX Star, the Macintosh, and the Sun workstations. {Bucky bits} were also invented there --- thus, the ALT key on every IBM PC is ...
WAITS5 is seldom duplicated elsewhere was a news-wire interface that allowed WAITS hackers to read, store, and filter AP and UPI dispatches from their terminals; the system also featured a still-unusual level of support for what is now called ...
WAITS6 is and video signals to be switched to programming terminals.
waldo is /wol'doh/ [From Robert A. Heinlein's story "Waldo"] 1. A mechanical agent, such as a gripper arm, controlled by a human limb. When these were developed for the nuclear industry in the mid-1940s they were named after the invention des...
waldo2 is wrote in 1942. Now known by the more generic term `telefactoring', this technology is of intense interest to NASA for tasks like space station maintenance. 2. At Harvard (particularly by Tom Cheatham and students), this is used i...
waldo3 is and general nonsense word. See {foo}, {bar}, {foobar}, {quux}.
walk is n.,vt. Traversal of a data structure, especially an array or linked-list data structure in {core}. See also {codewalker}, {silly walk}, {clobber}.
walk off the end of is vt. To run past the end of an array, list, or medium after stepping through it --- a good way to land in trouble. Often the result of an {off-by-one error}. Compare {clobber}, {roach}, {smash the stack}.
walking drives is n. An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky {washing machine}s. Those old {dinosaur} parts carried terrific angular momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or ...
walking drives2 is with the floor could cause them to `walk' across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a couple of millimeters at a time. There is a legend about a drive that walked over to the only door to the computer room and jamme...
walking drives3 is wall in order to get at it! Walking could also be induced by certain patterns of drive access (a fast seek across the whole width of the disk, followed by a slow seek in the other direction). Some bands of old-time hacke...
walking drives4 is patterns that would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive races.
wall is [WPI] interj. 1. An indication of confusion, usually spoken with a quizzical tone "Wall??" 2. A request for further explication. Compare {octal forty}. It is said that "Wall?" really came from `like talking to a blank wall'. It w...
wall2 is you had carefully answered a question, the questioner stared at you blankly, clearly having understood nothing that was explained. You would then throw out a "Hello, wall?" to elicit some sort of response from the questioner. Late...
wall3 is themselves.
wall follower is n. A person or algorithm that compensates for lack of sophistication or native stupidity by efficiently following some simple procedure shown to have been effective in the past. Used of an algorithm, this is not necessarily p...
wall follower2 is the winning robot in an early AI contest (named, of course, after the cocktail). Harvey successfully solved mazes by keeping a `finger' on one wall and running till it came out the other end. This was inelegant, but it was ...
wall follower3 is simply-connected mazes --- and, in fact, Harvey outperformed more sophisticated robots that tried to `learn' each maze by building an internal representation of it. Used of humans, the term *is* pejorative and implies an un...
wall follower4 is See also {code grinder}, {droid}.
wall time is n. (also `wall clock time') 1. `Real world' time (what the clock on the wall shows), as opposed to the system clock's idea of time. 2. The real running time of a program, as opposed to the number of {clocks} required to execute i...
factpacks/jargon.fact view on Meta::CPAN
bit bang => n. Transmission of data on a serial line, when accomplished by rapidly tweaking a single output bit at the appropriate times. The technique is a simple loop with eight OUT and SHIFT instruction pairs for each byte. Input is more interesti...
bit bang2 => and output at the same time) is one way to separate the real hackers from the wannabees. Bit bang was used on certain early models of Prime computers, presumably when UARTs were too expensive, and on archaic Z80 micros with a Zilog PIO b...
bit bang3 => instance of the {cycle of reincarnation}, this technique is now (1991) coming back into use on some RISC architectures because it consumes such an infinitesimal part of the processor that it actually makes sense not to have a UART.
bit bashing => n. (alt. `bit diddling' or {bit twiddling}) Term used to describe any of several kinds of low-level programming characterized by manipulation of bit, flag, nybble, and other smaller-than-character-sized pieces of data; these include lo...
bit bashing2 => encryption algorithms, checksum and error-correcting codes, hash functions, some flavors of graphics programming (see bitblt), and assembler/compiler code generation. May connote either tedium or a real technical challenge (more usual...
bit bashing3 => decoding for the new tape driver looks pretty solid but the bit-bashing for the control registers still has bugs." See also {bit bang}, {mode bit}.
bit bucket => n. 1. The universal data sink (originally, the mythical receptacle used to catch bits when they fall off the end of a register during a shift instruction). Discarded, lost, or destroyed data is said to have `gone to the bit bucket'. On ...
bit bucket2 => /dev/null. Sometimes amplified as `the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky'. 2. The place where all lost mail and news messages eventually go. The selection is performed according to {Finagle's Law}; important mail is much more likely to end u...
bit bucket3 => mail, which has an almost 100% probability of getting delivered. Routing to the bit bucket is automatically performed by mail-transfer agents, news systems, and the lower layers of the network. 3. The ideal location for all unwanted ma...
bit bucket4 => article to the bit bucket." Such a request is guaranteed to overflow one's mailbox with flames. 4. Excuse for all mail that has not been sent. "I mailed you those figures last week; they must have ended in the bit bucket." Compare {bla...
bit bucket5 => in jest. It is based on the fanciful notion that bits are objects that are not destroyed but only misplaced. This appears to have been a mutation of an earlier term `bit box', about which the same legend was current; old-time hackers a...
bit bucket6 => told that when the CPU stored bits into memory it was actually pulling them `out of the bit box'. See also {chad box}. Another variant of this legend has it that, as a consequence of the `parity preservation law', the number of 1 bits ...
bit bucket7 => equal the number of 0 bits. Any imbalance results in bits filling up the bit bucket. A qualified computer technician can empty a full bit bucket as part of scheduled maintenance.
bit decay => n. See {bit rot}. People with a physics background tend to prefer this one for the analogy with particle decay. See also computron, {quantum bogodynamics}.
bit rot => n. Also {bit decay}. Hypothetical disease the existence of which has been deduced from the observation that unused programs or features will often stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if `nothing has changed'. The theory exp...
bit rot2 => were radioactive. As time passes, the contents of a file or the code in a program will become increasingly garbled. There actually are physical processes that produce such effects (alpha particles generated by trace radionuclides in ceram...
bit rot3 => change the contents of a computer memory unpredictably, and various kinds of subtle media failures can corrupt files in mass storage), but they are quite rare (and computers are built with error-detecting circuitry to compensate for them)...
bit rot4 => hackers that cosmic rays are among the causes of such events turns out to be a myth; see the {cosmic rays} entry for details. The term {software rot} is almost synonymous. Software rot is the effect, bit rot the notional cause.
bit twiddling => n. 1. (pejorative) An exercise in tuning in which incredible amounts of time and effort go to produce little noticeable improvement, often with the result that the code has become incomprehensible. 2. Aimless small modification to a ...
bit twiddling2 => goal. 3. Approx. syn. for {bit bashing}; esp. used for the act of frobbing the device control register of a peripheral in an attempt to get it back to a known state.
bit-paired keyboard => n. obs. (alt. `bit-shift keyboard') A non-standard keyboard layout that seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several years on early computer equipment. The ASR-33 was a mechanical device (se...
bit-paired keyboard2 => generate the character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage. The design of the ASR-33 assigned each character key a basic pattern that could be modified by flipping bits if the SHIFT or the CTRL key was pressed. ...
factpacks/jargon.fact view on Meta::CPAN
CPU Wars2 => many references to ADVENT and the immortal line "Eat flaming death, minicomputer mongrels!" (uttered, of course, by an IPM stormtrooper). It is alleged that the author subsequently received a letter of appreciation on IBM company station...
CPU Wars3 => J. Watson Research Laboratories (then, as now, one of the few islands of true hackerdom in the IBM archipelago). The lower loop of the B in the IBM logo, it is said, had been carefully whited out. See {eat flaming death}.
cracker => n. One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of hacker (q.v., sense 8). An earlier attempt to establish `worm' in this sense around 1981--82 on USENET was largely a failure.
crank => [from automotive slang] vt. Verb used to describe the performance of a machine, especially sustained performance. "This box cranks (or, cranks at) about 6 megaflops, with a burst mode of twice that on vectorized operations."
crash => 1. n. A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of the system (q.v., sense 1), sometimes of magnetic disk drives. "Three lusers lost their files in last night's disk crash." A disk crash that involves the read/write heads dropping o...
crash and burn => vi.,n. A spectacular crash, in the mode of the conclusion of the car-chase scene in the movie "Bullitt" and many subsequent imitators. Sun-3 monitors losing the flyback transformer and lightning strikes on VAX-11/780 backplanes are ...
crash and burn2 => The construction `crash-and-burn machine' is reported for a computer used exclusively for alpha or beta testing, or reproducing bugs (i.e., not for development). The implication is that it wouldn't be such a disaster if that machin...
crash and burn3 => would be inconvenienced.
crawling horror => n. Ancient crufty hardware or software that is kept obstinately alive by forces beyond the control of the hackers at a site. Like {dusty deck} or gonkulator, but connotes that the thing described is not just an irritation but an ac...
crawling horror2 => "Mostly we code new stuff in C, but they pay us to maintain one big FORTRAN II application from nineteen-sixty-X that's a real crawling horror...." Compare WOMBAT.
cray => /kray/ n. 1. (properly, capitalized) One of the line of supercomputers designed by Cray Research. 2. Any supercomputer at all. 3. The canonical number-crunching machine. The term is actually the lowercased last name of Seymour Cray, a noted c...
cray instability => n. A shortcoming of a program or algorithm that manifests itself only when a large problem is being run on a powerful machine (see cray). Generally more subtle than bugs that can be detected in smaller problems running on a workst...
crayola => /kray-oh'l*/ n. A super-mini or -micro computer that provides some reasonable percentage of supercomputer performance for an unreasonably low price. Might also be a {killer micro}.
crayon => n. 1. Someone who works on Cray supercomputers. More specifically, it implies a programmer, probably of the CDC ilk, probably male, and almost certainly wearing a tie (irrespective of gender). Systems types who have a UNIX background tend n...
creationism => n. The (false) belief that large, innovative designs can be completely specified in advance and then painlessly magicked out of the void by the normal efforts of a team of normally talented programmers. In fact, experience has shown re...
creeping elegance => n. Describes a tendency for parts of a design to become elegant past the point of diminishing return. This often happens at the expense of the less interesting parts of the design, the schedule, and other things deemed important ...
creeping elegance2 => {creeping featurism}, {second-system effect}, tense.
creeping featurism => /kree'ping fee'chr-izm/ n. 1. Describes a systematic tendency to load more chrome and features onto systems at the expense of whatever elegance they may have possessed when originally designed. See also {feeping creaturism}. "Yo...
creeping featurism2 => BSD UNIX has always been creeping featurism." 2. More generally, the tendency for anything complicated to become even more complicated because people keep saying "Gee, it would be even better if it had this feature too". (See f...
creeping featurism3 => a patchwork because it grew one ad-hoc step at a time, rather than being planned. Planning is a lot of work, but it's easy to add just one extra little feature to help someone ... and then another ... and another.... When creep...
creeping featurism4 => like a cancer. Usually this term is used to describe computer programs, but it could also be said of the federal government, the IRS 1040 form, and new cars. A similar phenomenon sometimes afflicts conscious redesigns; see {sec...
factpacks/jargon.fact view on Meta::CPAN
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...
factpacks/jargon.fact view on Meta::CPAN
hacker => [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] n. 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2...
hacking run => [analogy with `bombing run' or `speed run'] n. A hack session extended long outside normal working times, especially one longer than 12 hours. May cause you to `change phase the hard way' (see phase).
Hacking X for Y => [ITS] n. The information ITS made publicly available about each user (the INQUIR record) was a sort of form in which the user could fill out fields. On display, two of these fields were combined into a project description of the fo...
Hacking X for Y2 => `"Hacking perceptrons for Minsky"'). This form of description became traditional and has since been carried over to other systems with more general facilities for self-advertisement (such as UNIX {plan file}s).
Hackintosh => n. 1. An Apple Lisa that has been hacked into emulating a Macintosh (also called a `Mac XL'). 2. A Macintosh assembled from parts theoretically belonging to different models in the line.
hackish => /hak'ish/ adj. (also hackishness n.) 1. Said of something that is or involves a hack. 2. Of or pertaining to hackers or the hacker subculture. See also true-hacker.
hackishness => n. The quality of being or involving a hack. This term is considered mildly silly. Syn. hackitude.
hackitude => n. Syn. hackishness; this word is considered sillier.
hair => [back-formation from hairy] n. The complications that make something hairy. "Decoding TECO commands requires a certain amount of hair." Often seen in the phrase `infinite hair', which connotes extreme complexity. Also in `hairiferous' (tendin...
hairy => adj. 1. Annoyingly complicated. "DWIM is incredibly hairy." 2. Incomprehensible. "DWIM is incredibly hairy." 3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative, rare, expert, and/or incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in context "He knows this h...
HAKMEM => /hak'mem/ n. MIT AI Memo 239 (February 1972). A legendary collection of neat mathematical and programming hacks contributed by many people at MIT and elsewhere. (The title of the memo really is "HAKMEM", which is a 6-letterism for `hacks me...
hakspek => /hak'speek/ n. A shorthand method of spelling found on many British academic bulletin boards and {talker system}s. Syllables and whole words in a sentence are replaced by single ASCII characters the names of which are phonetically similar ...
hamster => n. 1. [Fairchild] A particularly slick little piece of code that does one thing well; a small, self-contained hack. The image is of a hamster happily spinning its exercise wheel. 2. [UK] Any item of hardware made by Amstrad, a company famo...
hand-hacking => n. 1. The practice of translating {hot spot}s from an HLL into hand-tuned assembler, as opposed to trying to coerce the compiler into generating better code. Both the term and the practice are becoming uncommon. See tune, bum, {by han...
handshaking => n. Hardware or software activity designed to start or keep two machines or programs in synchronization as they {do protocol}. Often applied to human activity; thus, a hacker might watch two people in conversation nodding their heads to...
handwave => [poss. from gestures characteristic of stage magicians] 1. v. To gloss over a complex point; to distract a listener; to support a (possibly actually valid) point with blatantly faulty logic. 2. n. The act of handwaving. "Boy, what a handw...
hang => v. 1. To wait for an event that will never occur. "The system is hanging because it can't read from the crashed drive". See wedged, hung. 2. To wait for some event to occur; to hang around until something happens. "The program displays a menu...
Hanlon's Razor => prov. A corollary of {Finagle's Law}, similar to Occam's Razor, that reads "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." The derivation of the common title Hanlon's Razor is unknown; a similar epig...
Hanlon's Razor2 => James. Quoted here because it seems to be a particular favorite of hackers, often showing up in {fortune cookie} files and the login banners of BBS systems and commercial networks. This probably reflects the hacker's daily experien...
Hanlon's Razor3 => well-intentioned but short-sighted people.
happily => adv. Of software, used to emphasize that a program is unaware of some important fact about its environment, either because it has been fooled into believing a lie, or because it doesn't care. The sense of `happy' here is not that of elatio...
factpacks/jargon.fact view on Meta::CPAN
mode => n. A general state, usually used with an adjective describing the state. Use of the word `mode' rather than `state' implies that the state is extended over time, and probably also that some activity characteristic of that state is being carri...
mode bit => n. A flag, usually in hardware, that selects between two (usually quite different) modes of operation. The connotations are different from flag bit in that mode bits are mainly written during a boot or set-up phase, are seldom explicitly ...
mode bit2 => lifetime of an ordinary program. The classic example was the EBCDIC-vs.-ASCII bit (#12) of the Program Status Word of the IBM 360. Another was the bit on a PDP-12 that controlled whether it ran the PDP-8 or the LINC instruction set.
modulo => /mo'dyu-loh/ prep. Except for. From mathematical terminology; one can consider saying that 4 = 22 except for the 9s (4 = 22 mod 9). "Well, LISP seems to work okay now, modulo that GC bug." "I feel fine today modulo a slight headache."
molly-guard => /mol'ee-gard/ [University of Illinois] n. A shield to prevent tripping of some {Big Red Switch} by clumsy or ignorant hands. Originally used of some plexiglass covers improvised for the BRS on an IBM 4341 after a programmer's toddler d...
Mongolian Hordes technique => n. Development by {gang bang} (poss. from the Sixties counterculture expression `Mongolian clusterfuck' for a public orgy). Implies that large numbers of inexperienced programmers are being put on a job better performed ...
Mongolian Hordes technique2 => `Chinese Army technique'; see also {Brooks's Law}.
monkey up => vt. To hack together hardware for a particular task, especially a one-shot job. Connotes an extremely crufty and consciously temporary solution. Compare {hack up}, {kluge up}, {cruft together}, {cruft together}.
monkey, scratch => n. See {scratch monkey}.
monstrosity => 1. n. A ridiculously elephantine program or system, esp. one that is buggy or only marginally functional. 2. The quality of being monstrous (see `Overgeneralization' in the discussion of jargonification). See also baroque.
Moof => /moof/ [MAC users] n. The Moof or `dogcow' is a semi-legendary creature that lurks in the depths of the Macintosh Technical Notes Hypercard stack V3.1; specifically, the full story of the dogcow is told in technical note #31 (the particular M...
Moore's Law => /morz law/ prov. The observation that the logic density of silicon integrated circuits has closely followed the curve (bits per square inch) = 2^{(n - 1962)}; that is, the amount of information storable in one square inch of silicon ha...
Moore's Law2 => since the technology was invented. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data}.
moria => /mor'ee-*/ n. Like nethack and rogue, one of the large PD Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide range of machines and operating systems. Extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for hacking.
MOTAS => /moh-toz/ [USENET: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after MOTOS and MOTSS] n. A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also SO.
MOTOS => /moh-tohs/ [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via USENET: Member Of The Opposite Sex] n. A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See MOTAS, MOTSS, SO. Less common than MOTSS or MOTAS, which have largely displaced it.
MOTSS => /mots/ or /M-O-T-S-S/ [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via USENET, Member Of The Same Sex] n. Esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues newsgroup on USENET is called soc.motss. See MOTOS and MOTAS, which derive from it...
mouse ahead => vi. Point-and-click analog of `type ahead'. To manipulate a computer's pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer program is ready to accept such in...
mouse ahead2 => accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.
mouse around => vi. To explore public portions of a large system, esp. a network such as Internet via FTP or TELNET, looking for interesting stuff to snarf.
mouse belt => n. See {rat belt}.
factpacks/jargon.fact view on Meta::CPAN
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.
factpacks/jargon.fact view on Meta::CPAN
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/) ...
factpacks/jargon.fact view on Meta::CPAN
software rot6 => We can snarf this opcode, right? No one uses it.") Another classic example of this sprang from the time an MIT hacker found a simple way to double the speed of the unconditional jump instruction on a PDP-6, so he patched the hardware...
software rot7 => fragile timing software in a music-playing program, throwing its output out of tune. This was fixed by adding a defensive initialization routine to compare the speed of a timing loop with the real-time clock; in other words, it figur...
software rot8 => day, and corrected appropriately. Compare {bit rot}.
softwarily => /soft-weir'i-lee/ adv. In a way pertaining to software. "The system is softwarily unreliable." The adjective `softwary' is *not* used. See hardwarily.
softy => [IBM] n. Hardware hackers' term for a software expert who is largely ignorant of the mysteries of hardware.
some random X => adj. Used to indicate a member of class X, with the implication that Xs are interchangeable. "I think some random cracker tripped over the guest timeout last night." See also {J. Random}.
sorcerer's apprentice mode => [from the film "Fantasia"] n. A bug in a protocol where, under some circumstances, the receipt of a message causes multiple messages to be sent, each of which, when received, triggers the same bug. Used esp. of such beha...
sorcerer's apprentice mode2 => loops in email software. Compare {broadcast storm}, {network meltdown}.
SOS => n.,obs. /S-O-S/ 1. An infamously losing text editor. Once, back in the 1960s, when a text editor was needed for the PDP-6, a hacker crufted together a quick-and-dirty `stopgap editor' to be used until a better one was written. Unfortunately, t...
source of all good bits => n. A person from whom (or a place from which) useful information may be obtained. If you need to know about a program, a guru might be the source of all good bits. The title is often applied to a particularly competent secr...
space-cadet keyboard => n. The Knight keyboard, a now-legendary device used on MIT LISP machines, which inspired several still-current jargon terms and influenced the design of EMACS. It was inspired by the Stanford keyboard and equipped with no fewe...
space-cadet keyboard2 => keys for {bucky bits} (`control', `meta', `hyper', and `super') and three like regular shift keys, called `shift', `top', and `front'. Many keys had three symbols on them a letter and a symbol on the top, and a Greek letter o...
space-cadet keyboard3 => key had an `L' and a two-way arrow on the top, and the Greek letter lambda on the front. And of course each of these might also be typed with any combination of the control, meta, hyper, and super keys. On this keyboard, you ...
space-cadet keyboard4 => characters! This allowed the user to type very complicated mathematical text, and also to have thousands of single-character commands at his disposal. Many hackers were actually willing to memorize the command meanings of tha...
space-cadet keyboard5 => typing time (this attitude obviously shaped the interface of EMACS). Other hackers, however, thought having that many bucky bits was overkill, and objected that such a keyboard can require three or four hands to operate. See ...
space-cadet keyboard6 => bucky}, {meta bit}, {quadruple bucky}.
SPACEWAR => n. A space-combat simulation game, inspired by E. E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensman" books, in which two spaceships duel around a central sun, shooting torpedoes at each other and jumping through hyperspace. This game was first implemented on the...
spaghetti code => n. Code with a complex and tangled control structure, esp. one using many GOTOs, exceptions, or other `unstructured' branching constructs. Pejorative. The synonym `kangaroo code' has been reported, doubtless because such code has ma...
spaghetti inheritance => n. [encountered among users of object-oriented languages that use inheritance, such as Smalltalk] A convoluted class-subclass graph, often resulting from carelessly deriving subclasses from other classes just for the sake of ...
spaghetti inheritance2 => (successful) attempt to discourage such practice, through guilt-by-association with {spaghetti code}.
spam => [from the MUD community] vt. To crash a program by overrunning a fixed-size buffer with excessively large input data. See also {buffer overflow}, {overrun screw}, {smash the stack}.
factpacks/jargon.fact view on Meta::CPAN
time sink => [poss. by analogy with `heat sink or `current sink] n. A project that consumes unbounded amounts of time.
time T => /tim T/ n. 1. An unspecified but usually well-understood time, often used in conjunction with a later time T+1. "Well meet on campus at time T or at Louies at time T+1" means, in the context of going out for dinner "We can meet on campus an...
time T2 => Louies itself a bit later." (Louies is a Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto that is a favorite with hackers.) Had the number 30 been used instead of the number 1, it would have implied that the travel time from campus to Louies is 30 minutes;...
time T3 => hasnt been decided on yet), you can meet half an hour later at Louies than you could on campus and end up eating at the same time. See also {since time T equals minus infinity}.
times-or-divided-by => [by analogy with `plus-or-minus] quant. Term occasionally used when describing the uncertainty associated with a scheduling estimate, for either humorous or brutally honest effect. For a software project, the factor is usually ...
tinycrud => /tinee-kruhd/ n. A pejorative used by habitues of older game-oriented MUD versions for TinyMUDs and other user-extensible MUD variants; esp. common among users of the rather violent and competitive AberMUD and MIST systems. These people j...
tip of the ice-cube => [IBM] n. The visible part of something small and insignificant. Used as an ironic comment in situations where `tip of the iceberg might be appropriate if the subject were actually nontrivial.
tired iron => [IBM] n. Hardware that is perfectly functional but far enough behind the state of the art to have been superseded by new products, presumably with sufficient improvement in bang-per-buck that the old stuff is starting to look a bit like...
tits on a keyboard => n. Small bumps on certain keycaps to keep touch-typists registered (usually on the `5 of a numeric keypad, and on the `F and `J of a QWERTY keyboard).
TLA => /T-L-A/ [Three-Letter Acronym] n. 1. Self-describing acronym for a species with which computing terminology is infested. 2. Any confusing acronym. Examples include MCA, FTP, SNA, CPU, MMU, SCCS, DMU, FPU, NNTP, TLA. People who like this looser...
TMRC => /tmerk/ n. The Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, one of the wellsprings of hacker culture. The 1959 `Dictionary of the TMRC Language compiled by Peter Samson included several terms which became basics of the hackish vocabulary (see esp. foo an...
to a first approximation => 1. [techspeak] When one is doing certain numerical computations, an approximate solution may be computed by any of several heuristic methods, then refined to a final value. By using the starting point of a first approximat...
to a first approximation2 => algorithm that converges more quickly to the correct result. 2. In jargon, a preface to any comment that indicates that the comment is only approximately true. The remark "To a first approximation, I feel good" might indi...
to a first approximation3 => reveal that not all is perfect (e.g., a nagging cough still remains after an illness).
to a zeroth approximation => [from `to a first approximation] A *really* sloppy approximation; a wild guess. Compare {social science number}.
toast => 1. n. Any completely inoperable system or component, esp. one that has just crashed and burned "Uh, oh ... I think the serial board is toast." 2. vt. To cause a system to crash accidentally, especially in a manner that requires manual reboot...
toaster => n. 1. The archetypal really stupid application for an embedded microprocessor controller; often used in comments that imply that a scheme is inappropriate technology (but see {elevator controller}). "DWIM for an assembler? Thatd be as sill...
toeprint => n. A footprint of especially small size.
toggle => vt. To change a bit from whatever state it is in to the other state; to change from 1 to 0 or from 0 to 1. This comes from `toggle switches, such as standard light switches, though the word `toggle actually refers to the mechanism that keep...
tool => 1. n. A program used primarily to create, manipulate, modify, or analyze other programs, such as a compiler or an editor or a cross-referencing program. Oppose app, {operating system}. 2. [UNIX] An application program with a simple, `transpar...
toolsmith => n. The software equivalent of a tool-and-die specialist; one who specializes in making the tools with which other programmers create applications. See also uninteresting.
factpacks/jargon.fact view on Meta::CPAN
visionary => n. 1. One who hacks vision, in the sense of an Artificial Intelligence researcher working on the problem of getting computers to `see' things using TV cameras. (There isn't any problem in sending information from a TV camera to a compute...
VMS => /V-M-S/ n. DEC's proprietary operating system for its VAX minicomputer; one of the seven or so environments that loom largest in hacker folklore. Many UNIX fans generously concede that VMS would probably be the hacker's favorite commercial OS ...
voice => vt. To phone someone, as opposed to emailing them or connecting in talk mode. "I'm busy now; I'll voice you later."
voice-net => n. Hackish way of referring to the telephone system, analogizing it to a digital network. USENET {sig block}s not uncommonly include the sender's phone next to a "Voice" or "Voice-Net" header; common variants of this are "Voicenet" and "...
voodoo programming => [from George Bush's "voodoo economics"] n. The use by guess or cookbook of an obscure or hairy system, feature, or algorithm that one does not truly understand. The implication is that the technique may not work, and if it doesn...
voodoo programming2 => Almost synonymous with {black magic}, except that black magic typically isn't documented and *nobody* understands it. Compare magic, {deep magic}, {heavy wizardry}, {rain dance}, {cargo cult programming}, {wave a dead chicken}....
VR => // [MUD] n. On-line abbrev for {virtual reality}, as opposed to RL.
Vulcan nerve pinch => n. [from the old "Star Trek" TV series via Commodore Amiga hackers] The keyboard combination that forces a soft-boot or jump to ROM monitor (on machines that support such a feature). On many micros this is Ctrl-Alt-Del; on Suns,...
Vulcan nerve pinch2 => <Cmd>-<Power switch>! Also called {three-finger salute}. Compare {quadruple bucky}.
vulture capitalist => n. Pejorative hackerism for `venture capitalist', deriving from the common practice of pushing contracts that deprive inventors of control over their own innovations and most of the money they ought to have made from them.*wabbi...
vulture capitalist2 => Fudd's immortal line "You wascawwy wabbit!"] n. 1. A legendary early hack reported on a System/360 at RPI and elsewhere around 1978. The program would make two copies of itself every time it was run, eventually crashing the sys...
vulture capitalist3 => includes infinite self-replication but is not a virus or worm. See also {cookie monster}.
WAITS => /wayts/ n. The mutant cousin of {TOPS-10} used on a handful of systems at {SAIL} up to 1990. There was never an `official' expansion of WAITS (the name itself having been arrived at by a rather sideways process), but it was frequently glosse...
waldo => /wol'doh/ [From Robert A. Heinlein's story "Waldo"] 1. A mechanical agent, such as a gripper arm, controlled by a human limb. When these were developed for the nuclear industry in the mid-1940s they were named after the invention described b...
walk => n.,vt. Traversal of a data structure, especially an array or linked-list data structure in core. See also codewalker, {silly walk}, clobber.
walk off the end of => vt. To run past the end of an array, list, or medium after stepping through it --- a good way to land in trouble. Often the result of an {off-by-one error}. Compare clobber, roach, {smash the stack}.
walking drives => n. An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky {washing machine}s. Those old dinosaur parts carried terrific angular momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn beari...
walking drives2 => with the floor could cause them to `walk' across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a couple of millimeters at a time. There is a legend about a drive that walked over to the only door to the computer room and jammed it shu...
walking drives3 => wall in order to get at it! Walking could also be induced by certain patterns of drive access (a fast seek across the whole width of the disk, followed by a slow seek in the other direction). Some bands of old-time hackers figured ...
walking drives4 => patterns that would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive races.
wall => [WPI] interj. 1. An indication of confusion, usually spoken with a quizzical tone "Wall??" 2. A request for further explication. Compare {octal forty}. It is said that "Wall?" really came from `like talking to a blank wall'. It was initially ...
wall follower => n. A person or algorithm that compensates for lack of sophistication or native stupidity by efficiently following some simple procedure shown to have been effective in the past. Used of an algorithm, this is not necessarily pejorativ...
wall follower2 => the winning robot in an early AI contest (named, of course, after the cocktail). Harvey successfully solved mazes by keeping a `finger' on one wall and running till it came out the other end. This was inelegant, but it was mathemati...
wall follower3 => simply-connected mazes --- and, in fact, Harvey outperformed more sophisticated robots that tried to `learn' each maze by building an internal representation of it. Used of humans, the term *is* pejorative and implies an uncreative,...
wall follower4 => See also {code grinder}, droid.
wall time => n. (also `wall clock time') 1. `Real world' time (what the clock on the wall shows), as opposed to the system clock's idea of time. 2. The real running time of a program, as opposed to the number of clocks required to execute it (on a ti...
wall time2 => differ, as no one program gets all the clocks, and on multiprocessor systems with good thread support one may get more processor clocks than real-time clocks).
wallpaper => n. 1. A file containing a listing (e.g., assembly listing) or a transcript, esp. a file containing a transcript of all or part of a login session. (The idea was that the paper for such listings was essentially good only for wallpaper, as...
( run in 0.469 second using v1.01-cache-2.11-cpan-49f99fa48dc )