Amethyst
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factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
fry is 1. vi. To fail. Said especially of smoke-producing hardware failures. More generally, to become non-working. Usage never said of software, only of hardware and humans. See {fried}, {magic smoke}. 2. vt. To cause to fail; to {roach}...
fry2 is Never used of software or humans, but compare {fried}.
FTP is /F-T-P/, *not* /fit'ip/ 1. [techspeak] n. The File Transfer Protocol for transmitting files between systems on the Internet. 2. vt. To {beam} a file using the File Transfer Protocol. 3. Sometimes used as a generic even for file transf...
FTP2 is `Wuthering Heights' ftp'd from uunet."
FUBAR is n. The Failed UniBus Address Register in a VAX. A good example of how jargon can occasionally be snuck past the {suit}s; see {foobar}.
fuck me harder is excl. Sometimes uttered in response to egregious misbehavior, esp. in software, and esp. of misbehaviors which seem unfairly persistent (as though designed in by the imp of the perverse). Often theatrically elaborated "Aiigh...
fuck me harder2 is curare-tipped wrought-iron fence *and no lubricants*!" The phrase is sometimes heard abbreviated `FMH' in polite company. [This entry is an extreme example of the hackish habit of coining elaborate and evocative terms for ...
fuck me harder3 is parody of mainstream expletives that has become a running gag in part of the hacker culture; it illustrates the hackish tendency to turn any situation, even one of extreme frustration, into an intellectual game (the point be...
fuck me harder4 is long-winded description of the most anatomically absurd mental image possible --- the short forms implicitly allude to all the ridiculous long forms ever spoken). Scatological language is actually relatively uncommon among ...
fuck me harder5 is whether this entry ought to be included at all. As it reflects a live usage recognizably peculiar to the hacker culture, we feel it is in the hackish spirit of truthfulness and opposition to all forms of censorship to rec...
FUD is /fuhd/ n. Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products." The ide...
FUD2 is with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This was traditionally done by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or so...
FUD wars is /fuhd worz/ n. [from {FUD}] Political posturing engaged in by hardware and software vendors ostensibly committed to standardization but actually willing to fragment the market to protect their own shares. The UNIX International vs...
fudge is 1. vt. To perform in an incomplete but marginally acceptable way, particularly with respect to the writing of a program. "I didn't feel like going through that pain and suffering, so I fudged it --- I'll fix it later." 2. n. The res...
fudge factor is n. A value or parameter that is varied in an ad hoc way to produce the desired result. The terms `tolerance' and {slop} are also used, though these usually indicate a one-sided leeway, such as a buffer that is made larger than...
fudge factor2 is how large it needs to be, and it is better to waste a little space than to lose completely for not having enough. A fudge factor, on the other hand, can often be tweaked in more than one direction. A good example is the `fuz...
fudge factor3 is calculations two numbers being compared for equality must be allowed to differ by a small amount; if that amount is too small, a computation may never terminate, while if it is too large, results will be needlessly inaccurate....
fudge factor4 is incorrectly by programmers who don't fully understand their import. See also {coefficient of X}.
fuel up is vi. To eat or drink hurriedly in order to get back to hacking. "Food-p?" "Yeah, let's fuel up." "Time for a {great-wall}!" See also {{oriental food}}.
fuggly is /fuhg'lee/ adj. Emphatic form of {funky}; funky + ugly). Unusually for hacker jargon, this may actually derive from black street-jive. To say it properly, the first syllable should be growled rather than spoken. Usage humorous. "...
fuggly2 is that printer driver is *fuggly*." See also {wonky}.
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
HCF2 is was the first for which the HCF opcode became widely known. This instruction caused the processor to {toggle} a subset of the bus lines as rapidly as it could; in some configurations this can actually cause lines to burn up.
heads down is [Sun] adj. Concentrating, usually so heavily and for so long that everything outside the focus area is missed. See also {hack mode} and {larval stage}, although it is not confined to fledgling hackers.
heartbeat is n. 1. The signal emitted by a Level 2 Ethernet transceiver at the end of every packet to show that the collision-detection circuit is still connected. 2. A periodic synchronization signal used by software or hardware, such as a b...
heartbeat2 is `natural' oscillation frequency of a computer's clock crystal, before frequency division down to the machine's clock rate. 4. A signal emitted at regular intervals by software to demonstrate that it is still alive. Sometimes h...
heartbeat3 is stops hearing a heartbeat. See also {breath-of-life packet}.
heavy metal is [Cambridge] n. Syn. {big iron}.
heavy wizardry is n. Code or designs that trade on a particularly intimate knowledge or experience of a particular operating system or language or complex application interface. Distinguished from {deep magic}, which trades more on arcane *th...
heavy wizardry2 is drivers is heavy wizardry; so is interfacing to {X} (sense 2) without a toolkit. Esp. found in comments similar to "Heavy wizardry begins here ...". Compare {voodoo programming}.
heavyweight is adj. High-overhead; {baroque}; code-intensive; featureful, but costly. Esp. used of communication protocols, language designs, and any sort of implementation in which maximum generality and/or ease of implementation has been pu...
heavyweight2 is considerations such as speed, memory utilization, and startup time. {EMACS} is a heavyweight editor; {X} is an *extremely* heavyweight window system. This term isn't pejorative, but one man's heavyweight is another's {elephan...
heisenbug is /hi'zen-buhg/ [from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics] n. A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it. Antonym of {Bohr bug}; see also {mandelbug}. In C, nine out of ...
heisenbug2 is on core} phenomena (esp. lossage related to corruption of the malloc {arena}) or errors that {smash the stack}.
Helen Keller mode is n. State of a hardware or software system that is deaf, dumb, and blind, i.e., accepting no input and generating no output, usually due to an infinite loop or some other excursion into {deep space}. (Unfair to the real He...
Helen Keller mode2 is was triumphant.) See also {go flatline}, {catatonic}.
hello, sailor! is interj. Occasional West Coast equivalent of {hello, world}; seems to have originated at SAIL, later associated with the game {Zork} (which also included "hello, aviator" and "hello, implementor"). Originally from the tradi...
hello, sailor!2 is off the boat, of course.
hello, wall! is excl. See {wall}.
hello, world is interj. 1. The canonical minimal test message in the C/UNIX universe. 2. Any of the minimal programs that emit this message. Traditionally, the first program a C coder is supposed to write in a new environment is one that jus...
hello, world2 is (and indeed it is the first example program in {K&R}). Environments that generate an unreasonably large executable for this trivial test or which require a {hairy} compiler-linker invocation to generate it are considered to ...
hello, world3 is hacker making an entrance or requesting information from anyone present. "Hello, world! Is the {VAX} back up yet?"
hex is n. 1. Short for {{hexadecimal}}, base 16. 2. A 6-pack of anything (compare {quad}, sense 2). Neither usage has anything to do with {magic} or {black art}, though the pun is appreciated and occasionally used by hackers. True story As ...
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
tick-list features is [Acorn Computers] n. Features in software or hardware that customers insist on but never use (calculators in desktop TSRs and that sort of thing). The American equivalent would be `checklist features, but this jargon sen...
tickle a bug is vt. To cause a normally hidden bug to manifest through some known series of inputs or operations. "You can tickle the bug in the Paradise VGA cards highlight handling by trying to set bright yellow reverse video."
tiger team is [U.S. military jargon] n. A team whose purpose is to penetrate security, and thus test security measures. These people are paid professionals who do hacker-type tricks, e.g., leave cardboard signs saying "bomb" in critical defen...
tiger team2 is "Your codebooks have been stolen" (they usually havent been) inside safes, etc. After a successful penetration, some high-ranking security type shows up the next morning for a `security review and finds the sign, note, etc., ...
tiger team3 is of tiger teams sometimes lead to early retirement for base commanders and security officers (see the {patch} entry for an example). A subset of tiger teams are professional {cracker}s, testing the security of military computer...
tiger team4 is via networks or supposedly `secure comm channels. Some of their escapades, if declassified, would probably rank among the greatest hacks of all times. The term has been adopted in commercial computer-security circles in this m...
time sink is [poss. by analogy with `heat sink or `current sink] n. A project that consumes unbounded amounts of time.
time T is /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 ...
time T2 is 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 ...
time T3 is 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 is [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 u...
tinycrud is /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. Th...
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.)
factpacks/jargon.fact view on Meta::CPAN
frotzed => /frotst/ adj. down because of hardware problems. Compare fried. A machine that is merely frotzed may be fixable without replacing parts, but a fried machine is more seriously damaged.
frowney => n. (alt. `frowney face') See emoticon.
fry => 1. vi. To fail. Said especially of smoke-producing hardware failures. More generally, to become non-working. Usage never said of software, only of hardware and humans. See fried, {magic smoke}. 2. vt. To cause to fail; to roach, toast, or hose...
FTP => /F-T-P/, *not* /fit'ip/ 1. [techspeak] n. The File Transfer Protocol for transmitting files between systems on the Internet. 2. vt. To beam a file using the File Transfer Protocol. 3. Sometimes used as a generic even for file transfers not usi...
FUBAR => n. The Failed UniBus Address Register in a VAX. A good example of how jargon can occasionally be snuck past the suits; see foobar.
fuck me harder => excl. Sometimes uttered in response to egregious misbehavior, esp. in software, and esp. of misbehaviors which seem unfairly persistent (as though designed in by the imp of the perverse). Often theatrically elaborated "Aiighhh! Fuck...
fuck me harder2 => curare-tipped wrought-iron fence *and no lubricants*!" The phrase is sometimes heard abbreviated `FMH' in polite company. [This entry is an extreme example of the hackish habit of coining elaborate and evocative terms for lossage. ...
fuck me harder3 => parody of mainstream expletives that has become a running gag in part of the hacker culture; it illustrates the hackish tendency to turn any situation, even one of extreme frustration, into an intellectual game (the point being, in...
fuck me harder4 => long-winded description of the most anatomically absurd mental image possible --- the short forms implicitly allude to all the ridiculous long forms ever spoken). Scatological language is actually relatively uncommon among hackers,...
fuck me harder5 => whether this entry ought to be included at all. As it reflects a live usage recognizably peculiar to the hacker culture, we feel it is in the hackish spirit of truthfulness and opposition to all forms of censorship to record it her...
FUD => /fuhd/ n. Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products." The idea, of co...
FUD wars => /fuhd worz/ n. [from FUD] Political posturing engaged in by hardware and software vendors ostensibly committed to standardization but actually willing to fragment the market to protect their own shares. The UNIX International vs. OSF conf...
fudge => 1. vt. To perform in an incomplete but marginally acceptable way, particularly with respect to the writing of a program. "I didn't feel like going through that pain and suffering, so I fudged it --- I'll fix it later." 2. n. The resulting co...
fudge factor => n. A value or parameter that is varied in an ad hoc way to produce the desired result. The terms `tolerance' and slop are also used, though these usually indicate a one-sided leeway, such as a buffer that is made larger than necessary...
fudge factor2 => how large it needs to be, and it is better to waste a little space than to lose completely for not having enough. A fudge factor, on the other hand, can often be tweaked in more than one direction. A good example is the `fuzz' typica...
fudge factor3 => calculations two numbers being compared for equality must be allowed to differ by a small amount; if that amount is too small, a computation may never terminate, while if it is too large, results will be needlessly inaccurate. Fudge ...
fudge factor4 => incorrectly by programmers who don't fully understand their import. See also {coefficient of X}.
fuel up => vi. To eat or drink hurriedly in order to get back to hacking. "Food-p?" "Yeah, let's fuel up." "Time for a great-wall!" See also {{oriental food}}.
fuggly => /fuhg'lee/ adj. Emphatic form of funky; funky + ugly). Unusually for hacker jargon, this may actually derive from black street-jive. To say it properly, the first syllable should be growled rather than spoken. Usage humorous. "Man, the {ASC...
funky => adj. Said of something that functions, but in a slightly strange, klugey way. It does the job and would be difficult to change, so its obvious non-optimality is left alone. Often used to describe interfaces. The more bugs something has that ...
funny money => n. 1. Notional `dollar' units of computing time and/or storage handed to students at the beginning of a computer course; also called `play money' or `purple money' (in implicit opposition to real or `green' money). When your funny mone...
factpacks/jargon.fact view on Meta::CPAN
hash collision => [from the technical usage] n. (var. `hash clash') When used of people, signifies a confusion in associative memory or imagination, especially a persistent one (see thinko). True story One of us [ESR] was once on the phone with a fri...
hash collision2 => When asked what he expected Berkeley to be like, the friend replied "Well, I have this mental picture of naked women throwing Molotov cocktails, but I think that's just a collision in my hash tables." Compare {hash bucket}.
hat => n. Common (spoken) name for the circumflex (`^', ASCII 1011110) character. See ASCII for other synonyms.
HCF => /H-C-F/ n. Mnemonic for `Halt and Catch Fire', any of several undocumented and semi-mythical machine instructions with destructive side-effects, supposedly included for test purposes on several well-known architectures going as far back as the...
heads down => [Sun] adj. Concentrating, usually so heavily and for so long that everything outside the focus area is missed. See also {hack mode} and {larval stage}, although it is not confined to fledgling hackers.
heartbeat => n. 1. The signal emitted by a Level 2 Ethernet transceiver at the end of every packet to show that the collision-detection circuit is still connected. 2. A periodic synchronization signal used by software or hardware, such as a bus clock...
heavy metal => [Cambridge] n. Syn. {big iron}.
heavy wizardry => n. Code or designs that trade on a particularly intimate knowledge or experience of a particular operating system or language or complex application interface. Distinguished from {deep magic}, which trades more on arcane *theoretica...
heavy wizardry2 => drivers is heavy wizardry; so is interfacing to X (sense 2) without a toolkit. Esp. found in comments similar to "Heavy wizardry begins here ...". Compare {voodoo programming}.
heavyweight => adj. High-overhead; baroque; code-intensive; featureful, but costly. Esp. used of communication protocols, language designs, and any sort of implementation in which maximum generality and/or ease of implementation has been pushed at th...
heisenbug => /hi'zen-buhg/ [from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics] n. A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it. Antonym of {Bohr bug}; see also mandelbug. In C, nine out of ten heisenb...
Helen Keller mode => n. State of a hardware or software system that is deaf, dumb, and blind, i.e., accepting no input and generating no output, usually due to an infinite loop or some other excursion into {deep space}. (Unfair to the real Helen Kell...
Helen Keller mode2 => was triumphant.) See also {go flatline}, catatonic.
hello, sailor! => interj. Occasional West Coast equivalent of {hello, world}; seems to have originated at SAIL, later associated with the game Zork (which also included "hello, aviator" and "hello, implementor"). Originally from the traditional hooke...
hello, sailor!2 => off the boat, of course.
hello, wall! => excl. See wall.
hello, world => interj. 1. The canonical minimal test message in the C/UNIX universe. 2. Any of the minimal programs that emit this message. Traditionally, the first program a C coder is supposed to write in a new environment is one that just prints ...
hello, world2 => (and indeed it is the first example program in K&R). Environments that generate an unreasonably large executable for this trivial test or which require a hairy compiler-linker invocation to generate it are considered to lose (see X)....
hello, world3 => hacker making an entrance or requesting information from anyone present. "Hello, world! Is the VAX back up yet?"
hex => n. 1. Short for {hexadecimal}, base 16. 2. A 6-pack of anything (compare quad, sense 2). Neither usage has anything to do with magic or {black art}, though the pun is appreciated and occasionally used by hackers. True story As a joke, some hac...
hexadecimal => n. Base 16. Coined in the early 1960s to replace earlier `sexadecimal', which was too racy and amusing for stuffy IBM, and later adopted by the rest of the industry. Actually, neither term is etymologically pure. If we take `binary' to...
factpacks/jargon.fact view on Meta::CPAN
tick-list features => [Acorn Computers] n. Features in software or hardware that customers insist on but never use (calculators in desktop TSRs and that sort of thing). The American equivalent would be `checklist features, but this jargon sense of th...
tickle a bug => vt. To cause a normally hidden bug to manifest through some known series of inputs or operations. "You can tickle the bug in the Paradise VGA cards highlight handling by trying to set bright yellow reverse video."
tiger team => [U.S. military jargon] n. A team whose purpose is to penetrate security, and thus test security measures. These people are paid professionals who do hacker-type tricks, e.g., leave cardboard signs saying "bomb" in critical defense insta...
tiger team2 => "Your codebooks have been stolen" (they usually havent been) inside safes, etc. After a successful penetration, some high-ranking security type shows up the next morning for a `security review and finds the sign, note, etc., and all he...
tiger team3 => of tiger teams sometimes lead to early retirement for base commanders and security officers (see the patch entry for an example). A subset of tiger teams are professional crackers, testing the security of military computer installation...
tiger team4 => via networks or supposedly `secure comm channels. Some of their escapades, if declassified, would probably rank among the greatest hacks of all times. The term has been adopted in commercial computer-security circles in this more speci...
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}.
factpacks/usazips.fact view on Meta::CPAN
46118 => Clayton Hendricks IN
46120 => Cloverdale Putnam IN
46121 => Coatesville Hendricks IN
46122 => Danville Hendricks IN
46124 => Edinburgh Johnson IN
46125 => Eminence Morgan IN
46126 => Fairland Shelby IN
46127 => Falmouth Rush IN
46128 => Fillmore Putnam IN
46129 => Finly Hancock IN
46130 => Fountaintown Shelby IN
46131 => Franklin Johnson IN
46133 => Glenwood Fayette IN
46135 => Greencastle Putnam IN
46140 => Greenfield Hancock IN
46142 => Greenwood Johnson IN
46143 => Greenwood Johnson IN
46144 => Gwynneville Shelby IN
46146 => Homer Rush IN
46147 => Jamestown Boone IN
46148 => Knightstown Henry IN
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