#======= THIS IS THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 4.1.0, 12 MAR 1999 =======# This is the Jargon File, a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor. This document (the Jargon File) is in the public domain, to be freely used, shared, and modified. There are (by intention) no legal restraints on what you can do with it, but there are traditions about its proper use to which many hackers are quite strongly attached. Please extend the courtesy of proper citation when you quote the File, ideally with a version number, as it will change and grow over time. (Examples of appropriate citation form: "Jargon File 4.1.0" or "The on-line hacker Jargon File, version 4.1.0, 12 MAR 1999".) The Jargon File is a common heritage of the hacker culture. Over the years a number of individuals have volunteered considerable time to maintaining the File and been recognized by the net at large as editors of it. Editorial responsibilities include: to collate contributions and suggestions from others; to seek out corroborating information; to cross-reference related entries; to keep the file in a consistent format; and to announce and distribute updated versions periodically. Current volunteer editors include: Eric Raymond Although there is no requirement that you do so, it is considered good form to check with an editor before quoting the File in a published work or commercial product. We may have additional information that would be helpful to you and can assist you in framing your quote to reflect not only the letter of the File but its spirit as well. All contributions and suggestions about this file sent to a volunteer editor are gratefully received and will be regarded, unless otherwise labelled, as freely given donations for possible use as part of this public-domain file. From time to time a snapshot of this file has been polished, edited, and formatted for commercial publication with the cooperation of the volunteer editors and the hacker community at large. If you wish to have a bound paper copy of this file, you may find it convenient to purchase one of these. They often contain additional material not found in on-line versions. The two `authorized' editions so far are described in the Revision History section; there may be more in the future. :Introduction: ************** This document is a collection of slang terms used by various subcultures of computer hackers. Though some technical material is included for background and flavor, it is not a technical dictionary; what we describe here is the language hackers use among themselves for fun, social communication, and technical debate. The `hacker culture' is actually a loosely networked collection of subcultures that is nevertheless conscious of some important shared experiences, shared roots, and shared values. It has its own myths, heroes, villains, folk epics, in-jokes, taboos, and dreams. Because hackers as a group are particularly creative people who define themselves partly by rejection of `normal' values and working habits, it has unusually rich and conscious traditions for an intentional culture less than 40 years old. As usual with slang, the special vocabulary of hackers helps hold their culture together -- it helps hackers recognize each other's places in the community and expresses shared values and experiences. Also as usual, _not_ knowing the slang (or using it inappropriately) defines one as an outsider, a mundane, or (worst of all in hackish vocabulary) possibly even a {suit}. All human cultures use slang in this threefold way -- as a tool of communication, and of inclusion, and of exclusion. Among hackers, though, slang has a subtler aspect, paralleled perhaps in the slang of jazz musicians and some kinds of fine artists but hard to detect in most technical or scientific cultures; parts of it are code for shared states of _consciousness_. There is a whole range of altered states and problem-solving mental stances basic to high-level hacking which don't fit into conventional linguistic reality any better than a Coltrane solo or one of Maurits Escher's `trompe l'oeil' compositions (Escher is a favorite of hackers), and hacker slang encodes these subtleties in many unobvious ways. As a simple example, take the distinction between a {kluge} and an {elegant} solution, and the differing connotations attached to each. The distinction is not only of engineering significance; it reaches right back into the nature of the generative processes in program design and asserts something important about two different kinds of relationship between the hacker and the hack. Hacker slang is unusually rich in implications of this kind, of overtones and undertones that illuminate the hackish psyche. But there is more. Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay and are very conscious and inventive in their use of language. These traits seem to be common in young children, but the conformity-enforcing machine we are pleased to call an educational system bludgeons them out of most of us before adolescence. Thus, linguistic invention in most subcultures of the modern West is a halting and largely unconscious process. Hackers, by contrast, regard slang formation and use as a game to be played for conscious pleasure. Their inventions thus display an almost unique combination of the neotenous enjoyment of language-play with the discrimination of educated and powerful intelligence. Further, the electronic media which knit them together are fluid, `hot' connections, well adapted to both the dissemination of new slang and the ruthless culling of weak and superannuated specimens. The results of this process give us perhaps a uniquely intense and accelerated view of linguistic evolution in action. Hacker slang also challenges some common linguistic and anthropological assumptions. For example, it has recently become fashionable to speak of `low-context' versus `high-context' communication, and to classify cultures by the preferred context level of their languages and art forms. It is usually claimed that low-context communication (characterized by precision, clarity, and completeness of self-contained utterances) is typical in cultures which value logic, objectivity, individualism, and competition; by contrast, high-context communication (elliptical, emotive, nuance-filled, multi-modal, heavily coded) is associated with cultures which value subjectivity, consensus, cooperation, and tradition. What then are we to make of hackerdom, which is themed around extremely low-context interaction with computers and exhibits primarily "low-context" values, but cultivates an almost absurdly high-context slang style? The intensity and consciousness of hackish invention make a compilation of hacker slang a particularly effective window into the surrounding culture -- and, in fact, this one is the latest version of an evolving compilation called the `Jargon File', maintained by hackers themselves for over 15 years. This one (like its ancestors) is primarily a lexicon, but also includes topic entries which collect background or sidelight information on hacker culture that would be awkward to try to subsume under individual slang definitions. Though the format is that of a reference volume, it is intended that the material be enjoyable to browse. Even a complete outsider should find at least a chuckle on nearly every page, and much that is amusingly thought-provoking. But it is also true that hackers use humorous wordplay to make strong, sometimes combative statements about what they feel. Some of these entries reflect the views of opposing sides in disputes that have been genuinely passionate; this is deliberate. We have not tried to moderate or pretty up these disputes; rather we have attempted to ensure that _everyone's_ sacred cows get gored, impartially. Compromise is not particularly a hackish virtue, but the honest presentation of divergent viewpoints is. The reader with minimal computer background who finds some references incomprehensibly technical can safely ignore them. We have not felt it either necessary or desirable to eliminate all such; they, too, contribute flavor, and one of this document's major intended audiences -- fledgling hackers already partway inside the culture -- will benefit from them. A selection of longer items of hacker folklore and humor is included in Appendix A, {Hacker Folklore}. The `outside' reader's attention is particularly directed to Appendix B, {A Portrait of J. Random Hacker}. Appendix C, the {Bibliography}, lists some non-technical works which have either influenced or described the hacker culture. Because hackerdom is an intentional culture (one each individual must choose by action to join), one should not be surprised that the line between description and influence can become more than a little blurred. Earlier versions of the Jargon File have played a central role in spreading hacker language and the culture that goes with it to successively larger populations, and we hope and expect that this one will do likewise. :Of Slang, Jargon, and Techspeak: ================================= Linguists usually refer to informal language as `slang' and reserve the term `jargon' for the technical vocabularies of various occupations. However, the ancestor of this collection was called the `Jargon File', and hacker slang is traditionally `the jargon'. When talking about the jargon there is therefore no convenient way to distinguish it from what a _linguist_ would call hackers' jargon -- the formal vocabulary they learn from textbooks, technical papers, and manuals. To make a confused situation worse, the line between hacker slang and the vocabulary of technical programming and computer science is fuzzy, and shifts over time. Further, this vocabulary is shared with a wider technical culture of programmers, many of whom are not hackers and do not speak or recognize hackish slang. Accordingly, this lexicon will try to be as precise as the facts of usage permit about the distinctions among three categories: * `slang': informal language from mainstream English or non-technical subcultures (bikers, rock fans, surfers, etc). * `jargon': without qualifier, denotes informal `slangy' language peculiar to or predominantly found among hackers -- the subject of this lexicon. * `techspeak': the formal technical vocabulary of programming, computer science, electronics, and other fields connected to hacking. This terminology will be consistently used throughout the remainder of this lexicon. The jargon/techspeak distinction is the delicate one. A lot of techspeak originated as jargon, and there is a steady continuing uptake of jargon into techspeak. On the other hand, a lot of jargon arises from overgeneralization of techspeak terms (there is more about this in the {Jargon Construction} section below). In general, we have considered techspeak any term that communicates primarily by a denotation well established in textbooks, technical dictionaries, or standards documents. A few obviously techspeak terms (names of operating systems, languages, or documents) are listed when they are tied to hacker folklore that isn't covered in formal sources, or sometimes to convey critical historical background necessary to understand other entries to which they are cross-referenced. Some other techspeak senses of jargon words are listed in order to make the jargon senses clear; where the text does not specify that a straight technical sense is under discussion, these are marked with `[techspeak]' as an etymology. Some entries have a primary sense marked this way, with subsequent jargon meanings explained in terms of it. We have also tried to indicate (where known) the apparent origins of terms. The results are probably the least reliable information in the lexicon, for several reasons. For one thing, it is well known that many hackish usages have been independently reinvented multiple times, even among the more obscure and intricate neologisms. It often seems that the generative processes underlying hackish jargon formation have an internal logic so powerful as to create substantial parallelism across separate cultures and even in different languages! For another, the networks tend to propagate innovations so quickly that `first use' is often impossible to pin down. And, finally, compendia like this one alter what they observe by implicitly stamping cultural approval on terms and widening their use. Despite these problems, the organized collection of jargon-related oral history for the new compilations has enabled us to put to rest quite a number of folk etymologies, place credit where credit is due, and illuminate the early history of many important hackerisms such as {kluge}, {cruft}, and {foo}. We believe specialist lexicographers will find many of the historical notes more than casually instructive. :Revision History: ================== The original Jargon File was a collection of hacker jargon from technical cultures including the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI lab (SAIL), and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities including Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU), and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). The Jargon File (hereafter referred to as `jargon-1' or `the File') was begun by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975. From this time until the plug was finally pulled on the SAIL computer in 1991, the File was named AIWORD.RF[UP,DOC] there. Some terms in it date back considerably earlier ({frob} and some senses of {moby}, for instance, go back to the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT and are believed to date at least back to the early 1960s). The revisions of jargon-1 were all unnumbered and may be collectively considered `Version 1'. In 1976, Mark Crispin, having seen an announcement about the File on the SAIL computer, {FTP}ed a copy of the File to MIT. He noticed that it was hardly restricted to `AI words' and so stored the file on his directory as AI:MRC;SAIL JARGON. The file was quickly renamed JARGON > (the `>' caused versioning under ITS) as a flurry of enhancements were made by Mark Crispin and Guy L. Steele Jr. Unfortunately, amidst all this activity, nobody thought of correcting the term `jargon' to `slang' until the compendium had already become widely known as the Jargon File. Raphael Finkel dropped out of active participation shortly thereafter and Don Woods became the SAIL contact for the File (which was subsequently kept in duplicate at SAIL and MIT, with periodic resynchronizations). The File expanded by fits and starts until about 1983; Richard Stallman was prominent among the contributors, adding many MIT and ITS-related coinages. In Spring 1981, a hacker named Charles Spurgeon got a large chunk of the File published in Stewart Brand's "CoEvolution Quarterly" (issue 29, pages 26-35) with illustrations by Phil Wadler and Guy Steele (including a couple of the Crunchly cartoons). This appears to have been the File's first paper publication. A late version of jargon-1, expanded with commentary for the mass market, was edited by Guy Steele into a book published in 1983 as "The Hacker's Dictionary" (Harper & Row CN 1082, ISBN 0-06-091082-8). The other jargon-1 editors (Raphael Finkel, Don Woods, and Mark Crispin) contributed to this revision, as did Richard M. Stallman and Geoff Goodfellow. This book (now out of print) is hereafter referred to as `Steele-1983' and those six as the Steele-1983 coauthors. Shortly after the publication of Steele-1983, the File effectively stopped growing and changing. Originally, this was due to a desire to freeze the file temporarily to facilitate the production of Steele-1983, but external conditions caused the `temporary' freeze to become permanent. The AI Lab culture had been hit hard in the late 1970s by funding cuts and the resulting administrative decision to use vendor-supported hardware and software instead of homebrew whenever possible. At MIT, most AI work had turned to dedicated LISP Machines. At the same time, the commercialization of AI technology lured some of the AI Lab's best and brightest away to startups along the Route 128 strip in Massachusetts and out West in Silicon Valley. The startups built LISP machines for MIT; the central MIT-AI computer became a {TWENEX} system rather than a host for the AI hackers' beloved {ITS}. The Stanford AI Lab had effectively ceased to exist by 1980, although the SAIL computer continued as a Computer Science Department resource until 1991. Stanford became a major {TWENEX} site, at one point operating more than a dozen TOPS-20 systems; but by the mid-1980s most of the interesting software work was being done on the emerging BSD Unix standard. In April 1983, the PDP-10-centered cultures that had nourished the File were dealt a death-blow by the cancellation of the Jupiter project at Digital Equipment Corporation. The File's compilers, already dispersed, moved on to other things. Steele-1983 was partly a monument to what its authors thought was a dying tradition; no one involved realized at the time just how wide its influence was to be. By the mid-1980s the File's content was dated, but the legend that had grown up around it never quite died out. The book, and softcopies obtained off the ARPANET, circulated even in cultures far removed from MIT and Stanford; the content exerted a strong and continuing influence on hacker language and humor. Even as the advent of the microcomputer and other trends fueled a tremendous expansion of hackerdom, the File (and related materials such as the {AI Koans} in Appendix A) came to be seen as a sort of sacred epic, a hacker-culture Matter of Britain chronicling the heroic exploits of the Knights of the Lab. The pace of change in hackerdom at large accelerated tremendously -- but the Jargon File, having passed from living document to icon, remained essentially untouched for seven years. This revision contains nearly the entire text of a late version of jargon-1 (a few obsolete PDP-10-related entries were dropped after careful consultation with the editors of Steele-1983). It merges in about 80% of the Steele-1983 text, omitting some framing material and a very few entries introduced in Steele-1983 that are now also obsolete. This new version casts a wider net than the old Jargon File; its aim is to cover not just AI or PDP-10 hacker culture but all the technical computing cultures wherein the true hacker-nature is manifested. More than half of the entries now derive from {Usenet} and represent jargon now current in the C and Unix communities, but special efforts have been made to collect jargon from other cultures including IBM PC programmers, Amiga fans, Mac enthusiasts, and even the IBM mainframe world. Eric S. Raymond <> maintains the new File with assistance from Guy L. Steele Jr. <>; these are the persons primarily reflected in the File's editorial `we', though we take pleasure in acknowledging the special contribution of the other coauthors of Steele-1983. Please email all additions, corrections, and correspondence relating to the Jargon File to . (Warning: other email addresses appear in this file _but are not guaranteed to be correct_ later than the revision date on the first line. _Don't_ email us if an attempt to reach your idol bounces -- we have no magic way of checking addresses or looking up people.) The 2.9.6 version became the main text of "The New Hacker's Dictionary", by Eric Raymond (ed.), MIT Press 1991, ISBN 0-262-68069-6. The 3.0.0 version was published in September 1993 as the second edition of "The New Hacker's Dictionary", again from MIT Press (ISBN 0-262-18154-1). If you want the book, you should be able to find it at any of the major bookstore chains. Failing that, you can order by mail from The MIT Press 55 Hayward Street Cambridge, MA 02142 or order by phone at (800)-356-0343 or (617)-625-8481. The maintainers are committed to updating the on-line version of the Jargon File through and beyond paper publication, and will continue to make it available to archives and public-access sites as a trust of the hacker community. Here is a chronology of the high points in the recent on-line revisions: Version 2.1.1, Jun 12 1990: the Jargon File comes alive again after a seven-year hiatus. Reorganization and massive additions were by Eric S. Raymond, approved by Guy Steele. Many items of UNIX, C, USENET, and microcomputer-based jargon were added at that time. Version 2.9.6, Aug 16 1991: corresponds to reproduction copy for book. This version had 18952 lines, 148629 words, 975551 characters, and 1702 entries. Version 2.9.8, Jan 01 1992: first public release since the book, including over fifty new entries and numerous corrections/additions to old ones. Packaged with version 1.1 of vh(1) hypertext reader. This version had 19509 lines, 153108 words, 1006023 characters, and 1760 entries. Version 2.9.9, Apr 01 1992: folded in XEROX PARC lexicon. This version had 20298 lines, 159651 words, 1048909 characters, and 1821 entries. Version 2.9.10, Jul 01 1992: lots of new historical material. This version had 21349 lines, 168330 words, 1106991 characters, and 1891 entries. Version 2.9.11, Jan 01 1993: lots of new historical material. This version had 21725 lines, 171169 words, 1125880 characters, and 1922 entries. Version 2.9.12, May 10 1993: a few new entries & changes, marginal MUD/IRC slang and some borderline techspeak removed, all in preparation for 2nd Edition of TNHD. This version had 22238 lines, 175114 words, 1152467 characters, and 1946 entries. Version 3.0.0, Jul 27 1993: manuscript freeze for 2nd edition of TNHD. This version had 22548 lines, 177520 words, 1169372 characters, and 1961 entries. Version 3.1.0, Oct 15 1994: interim release to test WWW conversion. This version had 23197 lines, 181001 words, 1193818 characters, and 1990 entries. Version 3.2.0, Mar 15 1995: Spring 1995 update. This version had 23822 lines, 185961 words, 1226358 characters, and 2031 entries. Version 3.3.0, Jan 20 1996: Winter 1996 update. This version had 24055 lines, 187957 words, 1239604 characters, and 2045 entries. Version 3.3.1, Jan 25 1996: Copy-corrected improvement on 3.3.0 shipped to MIT Press as a step towards TNHD III. This version had 24147 lines, 188728 words, 1244554 characters, and 2050 entries. Version 3.3.2, Mar 20 1996: A number of new entries pursuant on 3.3.2. This version had 24442 lines, 190867 words, 1262468 characters, and 2061 entries. Version 3.3.3, Mar 25 1996: Cleanup before TNHD III manuscript freeze. This version had 24584 lines, 191932 words, 1269996 characters, and 2064 entries. Version 4.0.0, Jul 25 1996: The actual TNHD III version after copy-edit. This version had 24801 lines, 193697 words, 1281402 characters, and 2067 entries. Version 4.1.0, 12 Mar 1999: The File rides again. Version numbering: Version numbers should be read as major.minor.revision. Major version 1 is reserved for the `old' (ITS) Jargon File, jargon-1. Major version 2 encompasses revisions by ESR (Eric S. Raymond) with assistance from GLS (Guy L. Steele, Jr.) leading up to and including the second paper edition. From now on, major version number N.00 will probably correspond to the Nth paper edition. Usually later versions will either completely supersede or incorporate earlier versions, so there is generally no point in keeping old versions around. Our thanks to the coauthors of Steele-1983 for oversight and assistance, and to the hundreds of Usenetters (too many to name here) who contributed entries and encouragement. More thanks go to several of the old-timers on the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers, who contributed much useful commentary and many corrections and valuable historical perspective: Joseph M. Newcomer <>, Bernie Cosell <>, Earl Boebert <>, and Joe Morris <>. We were fortunate enough to have the aid of some accomplished linguists. David Stampe <> and Charles Hoequist <> contributed valuable criticism; Joe Keane <> helped us improve the pronunciation guides. A few bits of this text quote previous works. We are indebted to Brian A. LaMacchia <> for obtaining permission for us to use material from the "TMRC Dictionary"; also, Don Libes <> contributed some appropriate material from his excellent book "Life With UNIX". We thank Per Lindberg <>, author of the remarkable Swedish-language 'zine "Hackerbladet", for bringing "FOO!" comics to our attention and smuggling one of the IBM hacker underground's own baby jargon files out to us. Thanks also to Maarten Litmaath for generously allowing the inclusion of the ASCII pronunciation guide he formerly maintained. And our gratitude to Marc Weiser of XEROX PARC <> for securing us permission to quote from PARC's own jargon lexicon and shipping us a copy. It is a particular pleasure to acknowledge the major contributions of Mark Brader <> and Steve Summit <> to the File and Dictionary; they have read and reread many drafts, checked facts, caught typos, submitted an amazing number of thoughtful comments, and done yeoman service in catching typos and minor usage bobbles. Their rare combination of enthusiasm, persistence, wide-ranging technical knowledge, and precisionism in matters of language has been of invaluable help. Indeed, the sustained volume and quality of Mr. Brader's input over several years and several different editions has only allowed him to escape co-editor credit by the slimmest of margins. Finally, George V. Reilly <> helped with TeX arcana and painstakingly proofread some 2.7 and 2.8 versions, and Eric Tiedemann <> contributed sage advice throughout on rhetoric, amphigory, and philosophunculism. :How Jargon Works: ****************** :Jargon Construction: ===================== There are some standard methods of jargonification that became established quite early (i.e., before 1970), spreading from such sources as the Tech Model Railroad Club, the PDP-1 SPACEWAR hackers, and John McCarthy's original crew of LISPers. These include verb doubling, soundalike slang, the `-P' convention, overgeneralization, spoken inarticulations, and anthropomorphization. Each is discussed below. We also cover the standard comparatives for design quality. Of these six, verb doubling, overgeneralization, anthropomorphization, and (especially) spoken inarticulations have become quite general; but soundalike slang is still largely confined to MIT and other large universities, and the `-P' convention is found only where LISPers flourish. :Verb Doubling: --------------- A standard construction in English is to double a verb and use it as an exclamation, such as "Bang, bang!" or "Quack, quack!". Most of these are names for noises. Hackers also double verbs as a concise, sometimes sarcastic comment on what the implied subject does. Also, a doubled verb is often used to terminate a conversation, in the process remarking on the current state of affairs or what the speaker intends to do next. Typical examples involve {win}, {lose}, {hack}, {flame}, {barf}, {chomp}: "The disk heads just crashed." "Lose, lose." "Mostly he talked about his latest crock. Flame, flame." "Boy, what a bagbiter! Chomp, chomp!" Some verb-doubled constructions have special meanings not immediately obvious from the verb. These have their own listings in the lexicon. The {Usenet} culture has one _tripling_ convention unrelated to this; the names of `joke' topic groups often have a tripled last element. The first and paradigmatic example was alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork (a "Muppet Show" reference); other infamous examples have included: alt.french.captain.borg.borg.borg alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die comp.unix.internals.system.calls.brk.brk.brk sci.physics.edward.teller.boom.boom.boom alt.sadistic.dentists.drill.drill.drill :Soundalike slang: ------------------ Hackers will often make rhymes or puns in order to convert an ordinary word or phrase into something more interesting. It is considered particularly {flavorful} if the phrase is bent so as to include some other jargon word; thus the computer hobbyist magazine "Dr. Dobb's Journal" is almost always referred to among hackers as `Dr. Frob's Journal' or simply `Dr. Frob's'. Terms of this kind that have been in fairly wide use include names for newspapers: Boston Herald => Horrid (or Harried) Boston Globe => Boston Glob Houston (or San Francisco) Chronicle => the Crocknicle (or the Comical) New York Times => New York Slime Walll Street Journal => Wall Street Urinal However, terms like these are often made up on the spur of the moment. Standard examples include: Data General => Dirty Genitals IBM 360 => IBM Three-Sickly Government Property --- Do Not Duplicate (on keys) => Government Duplicity --- Do Not Propagate for historical reasons => for hysterical raisins Margaret Jacks Hall (the CS building at Stanford) => Marginal Hacks Hall Microsoft => Microsloth Internet Explorer => Internet Exploiter This is not really similar to the Cockney rhyming slang it has been compared to in the past, because Cockney substitutions are opaque whereas hacker punning jargon is intentionally transparent. :The `-P' convention: --------------------- Turning a word into a question by appending the syllable `P'; from the LISP convention of appending the letter `P' to denote a predicate (a boolean-valued function). The question should expect a yes/no answer, though it needn't. (See {T} and {NIL}.) At dinnertime: Q: ``Foodp?'' A: ``Yeah, I'm pretty hungry.'' or ``T!'' At any time: Q: ``State-of-the-world-P?'' A: (Straight) ``I'm about to go home.'' A: (Humorous) ``Yes, the world has a state.'' On the phone to Florida: Q: ``State-p Florida?'' A: ``Been reading JARGON.TXT again, eh?'' [One of the best of these is a {Gosperism}. Once, when we were at a Chinese restaurant, Bill Gosper wanted to know whether someone would like to share with him a two-person-sized bowl of soup. His inquiry was: "Split-p soup?" -- GLS] :Overgeneralization: -------------------- A very conspicuous feature of jargon is the frequency with which techspeak items such as names of program tools, command language primitives, and even assembler opcodes are applied to contexts outside of computing wherever hackers find amusing analogies to them. Thus (to cite one of the best-known examples) Unix hackers often {grep} for things rather than searching for them. Many of the lexicon entries are generalizations of exactly this kind. Hackers enjoy overgeneralization on the grammatical level as well. Many hackers love to take various words and add the wrong endings to them to make nouns and verbs, often by extending a standard rule to nonuniform cases (or vice versa). For example, because porous => porosity generous => generosity hackers happily generalize: mysterious => mysteriosity ferrous => ferrosity obvious => obviosity dubious => dubiosity Another class of common construction uses the suffix `-itude' to abstract a quality from just about any adjective or noun. This usage arises especially in cases where mainstream English would perform the same abstraction through `-iness' or `-ingness'. Thus: win => winnitude (a common exclamation) loss => lossitude cruft => cruftitude lame => lameitude Some hackers cheerfully reverse this transformation; they argue, for example, that the horizontal degree lines on a globe ought to be called `lats' -- after all, they're measuring latitude! Also, note that all nouns can be verbed. E.g.: "All nouns can be verbed", "I'll mouse it up", "Hang on while I clipboard it over", "I'm grepping the files". English as a whole is already heading in this direction (towards pure-positional grammar like Chinese); hackers are simply a bit ahead of the curve. However, hackers avoid the unimaginative verb-making techniques characteristic of marketroids, bean-counters, and the Pentagon; a hacker would never, for example, `productize', `prioritize', or `securitize' things. Hackers have a strong aversion to bureaucratic bafflegab and regard those who use it with contempt. Similarly, all verbs can be nouned. This is only a slight overgeneralization in modern English; in hackish, however, it is good form to mark them in some standard nonstandard way. Thus: win => winnitude, winnage disgust => disgustitude hack => hackification Further, note the prevalence of certain kinds of nonstandard plural forms. Some of these go back quite a ways; the TMRC Dictionary includes an entry which implies that the plural of `mouse' is {meeces}, and notes that the defined plural of `caboose' is `cabeese'. This latter has apparently been standard (or at least a standard joke) among railfans (railroad enthusiasts) for many years. On a similarly Anglo-Saxon note, almost anything ending in `x' may form plurals in `-xen' (see {VAXen} and {boxen} in the main text). Even words ending in phonetic /k/ alone are sometimes treated this way; e.g., `soxen' for a bunch of socks. Other funny plurals are `frobbotzim' for the plural of `frobbozz' (see {frobnitz}) and `Unices' and `Twenices' (rather than `Unixes' and `Twenexes'; see {Unix}, {TWENEX} in main text). But note that `Unixen' and `Twenexen' are never used; it has been suggested that this is because `-ix' and `-ex' are Latin singular endings that attract a Latinate plural. Finally, it has been suggested to general approval that the plural of `mongoose' ought to be `polygoose'. The pattern here, as with other hackish grammatical quirks, is generalization of an inflectional rule that in English is either an import or a fossil (such as the Hebrew plural ending `-im', or the Anglo-Saxon plural suffix `-en') to cases where it isn't normally considered to apply. This is not `poor grammar', as hackers are generally quite well aware of what they are doing when they distort the language. It is grammatical creativity, a form of playfulness. It is done not to impress but to amuse, and never at the expense of clarity. :Spoken inarticulations: ------------------------ Words such as `mumble', `sigh', and `groan' are spoken in places where their referent might more naturally be used. It has been suggested that this usage derives from the impossibility of representing such noises on a comm link or in electronic mail, MUDs, and IRC channels (interestingly, the same sorts of constructions have been showing up with increasing frequency in comic strips). Another expression sometimes heard is "Complain!", meaning "I have a complaint!" :Anthropomorphization: ---------------------- Semantically, one rich source of jargon constructions is the hackish tendency to anthropomorphize hardware and software. This isn't done in a naive way; hackers don't personalize their stuff in the sense of feeling empathy with it, nor do they mystically believe that the things they work on every day are `alive'. What _is_ common is to hear hardware or software talked about as though it has homunculi talking to each other inside it, with intentions and desires. Thus, one hears "The protocol handler got confused", or that programs "are trying" to do things, or one may say of a routine that "its goal in life is to X". One even hears explanations like "... and its poor little brain couldn't understand X, and it died." Sometimes modelling things this way actually seems to make them easier to understand, perhaps because it's instinctively natural to think of anything with a really complex behavioral repertoire as `like a person' rather than `like a thing'. :Comparatives: -------------- Finally, note that many words in hacker jargon have to be understood as members of sets of comparatives. This is especially true of the adjectives and nouns used to describe the beauty and functional quality of code. Here is an approximately correct spectrum: monstrosity brain-damage screw bug lose misfeature crock kluge hack win feature elegance perfection The last is spoken of as a mythical absolute, approximated but never actually attained. Another similar scale is used for describing the reliability of software: broken flaky dodgy fragile brittle solid robust bulletproof armor-plated Note, however, that `dodgy' is primarily Commonwealth Hackish (it is rare in the U.S.) and may change places with `flaky' for some speakers. Coinages for describing {lossage} seem to call forth the very finest in hackish linguistic inventiveness; it has been truly said that hackers have even more words for equipment failures than Yiddish has for obnoxious people. :Hacker Writing Style: ====================== We've already seen that hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more general fondness for form-versus-content language jokes that shows up particularly in hackish writing. One correspondent reports that he consistently misspells `wrong' as `worng'. Others have been known to criticize glitches in Jargon File drafts by observing (in the mode of Douglas Hofstadter) "This sentence no verb", or "Too repetetetive", or "Bad speling", or "Incorrectspa cing." Similarly, intentional spoonerisms are often made of phrases relating to confusion or things that are confusing; `dain bramage' for `brain damage' is perhaps the most common (similarly, a hacker would be likely to write "Excuse me, I'm cixelsyd today", rather than "I'm dyslexic today"). This sort of thing is quite common and is enjoyed by all concerned. Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if "Jim is going" is a phrase, and so are "Bill runs" and "Spock groks", then hackers generally prefer to write: "Jim is going", "Bill runs", and "Spock groks". This is incorrect according to standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them. Given the sorts of examples that can come up in discussions of programming, American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading. When communicating command lines or small pieces of code, extra characters can be a real pain in the neck. Consider, for example, a sentence in a {vi} tutorial that looks like this: Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd". Standard usage would make this Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd." but that would be very bad -- because the reader would be prone to type the string d-d-dot, and it happens that in `vi(1)' dot repeats the last command accepted. The net result would be to delete _two_ lines! The Jargon File follows hackish usage throughout. Interestingly, a similar style is now preferred practice in Great Britain, though the older style (which became established for typographical reasons having to do with the aesthetics of comma and quotes in typeset text) is still accepted there. "Hart's Rules" and the "Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors" call the hacker-like style `new' or `logical' quoting. Another hacker habit is a tendency to distinguish between `scare' quotes and `speech' quotes; that is, to use British-style single quotes for marking and reserve American-style double quotes for actual reports of speech or text included from elsewhere. Interestingly, some authorities describe this as correct general usage, but mainstream American English has gone to using double-quotes indiscriminately enough that hacker usage appears marked [and, in fact, I thought this was a personal quirk of mine until I checked with Usenet --ESR]. One further permutation that is definitely _not_ standard is a hackish tendency to do marking quotes by using apostrophes (single quotes) in pairs; that is, 'like this'. This is modelled on string and character literal syntax in some programming languages (reinforced by the fact that many character-only terminals display the apostrophe in typewriter style, as a vertical single quote). One quirk that shows up frequently in the {email} style of Unix hackers in particular is a tendency for some things that are normally all-lowercase (including usernames and the names of commands and C routines) to remain uncapitalized even when they occur at the beginning of sentences. It is clear that, for many hackers, the case of such identifiers becomes a part of their internal representation (the `spelling') and cannot be overridden without mental effort (an appropriate reflex because Unix and C both distinguish cases and confusing them can lead to {lossage}). A way of escaping this dilemma is simply to avoid using these constructions at the beginning of sentences. There seems to be a meta-rule behind these nonstandard hackerisms to the effect that precision of expression is more important than conformance to traditional rules; where the latter create ambiguity or lose information they can be discarded without a second thought. It is notable in this respect that other hackish inventions (for example, in vocabulary) also tend to carry very precise shades of meaning even when constructed to appear slangy and loose. In fact, to a hacker, the contrast between `loose' form and `tight' content in jargon is a substantial part of its humor! Hackers have also developed a number of punctuation and emphasis conventions adapted to single-font all-ASCII communications links, and these are occasionally carried over into written documents even when normal means of font changes, underlining, and the like are available. One of these is that TEXT IN ALL CAPS IS INTERPRETED AS `LOUD', and this becomes such an ingrained synesthetic reflex that a person who goes to caps-lock while in {talk mode} may be asked to "stop shouting, please, you're hurting my ears!". Also, it is common to use bracketing with unusual characters to signify emphasis. The asterisk is most common, as in "What the *hell*?" even though this interferes with the common use of the asterisk suffix as a footnote mark. The underscore is also common, suggesting underlining (this is particularly common with book titles; for example, "It is often alleged that Joe Haldeman wrote _The_Forever_War_ as a rebuttal to Robert Heinlein's earlier novel of the future military, _Starship_Troopers_."). Other forms exemplified by "=hell=", "\hell/", or "/hell/" are occasionally seen (it's claimed that in the last example the first slash pushes the letters over to the right to make them italic, and the second keeps them from falling over). On FidoNet, you might see #bright# and ^dark^ text, which was actually interpreted by some reader software. Finally, words may also be emphasized L I K E T H I S, or by a series of carets (^) under them on the next line of the text. There is a semantic difference between *emphasis like this* (which emphasizes the phrase as a whole), and *emphasis* *like* *this* (which suggests the writer speaking very slowly and distinctly, as if to a very young child or a mentally impaired person). Bracketing a word with the `*' character may also indicate that the writer wishes readers to consider that an action is taking place or that a sound is being made. Examples: *bang*, *hic*, *ring*, *grin*, *kick*, *stomp*, *mumble*. One might also see the above sound effects as , , , , , , . This use of angle brackets to mark their contents originally derives from conventions used in {BNF}, but since about 1993 it has been reinforced by the HTML markup used on the World Wide Web. Angle-bracket enclosure is also used to indicate that a term stands for some {random} member of a larger class (this is straight from {BNF}). Examples like the following are common: So this walks into a bar one day... There is also an accepted convention for `writing under erasure'; the text Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman, he's visiting from corporate HQ. reads roughly as "Be nice to this fool, er, gentleman...". This comes from the fact that the digraph ^H is often used as a print representation for a backspace. It parallels (and may have been influenced by) the ironic use of `slashouts' in science-fiction fanzines. A related habit uses editor commands to signify corrections to previous text. This custom is fading as more mailers get good editing capabilities, but one occasionally still sees things like this: I've seen that term used on alt.foobar often. Send it to Erik for the File. Oops...s/Erik/Eric/. The s/Erik/Eric/ says "change Erik to Eric in the preceding". This syntax is borrowed from the Unix editing tools `ed' and `sed', but is widely recognized by non-Unix hackers as well. In a formula, `*' signifies multiplication but two asterisks in a row are a shorthand for exponentiation (this derives from FORTRAN). Thus, one might write 2 ** 8 = 256. Another notation for exponentiation one sees more frequently uses the caret (^, ASCII 1011110); one might write instead `2^8 = 256'. This goes all the way back to Algol-60, which used the archaic ASCII `up-arrow' that later became the caret; this was picked up by Kemeny and Kurtz's original BASIC, which in turn influenced the design of the `bc(1)' and `dc(1)' Unix tools, which have probably done most to reinforce the convention on Usenet. (TeX math mode also uses ^ for exponention.) The notation is mildly confusing to C programmers, because `^' means bitwise exclusive-or in C. Despite this, it was favored 3:1 over ** in a late-1990 snapshot of Usenet. It is used consistently in this lexicon. In on-line exchanges, hackers tend to use decimal forms or improper fractions (`3.5' or `7/2') rather than `typewriter style' mixed fractions (`3-1/2'). The major motive here is probably that the former are more readable in a monospaced font, together with a desire to avoid the risk that the latter might be read as `three minus one-half'. The decimal form is definitely preferred for fractions with a terminating decimal representation; there may be some cultural influence here from the high status of scientific notation. Another on-line convention, used especially for very large or very small numbers, is taken from C (which derived it from FORTRAN). This is a form of `scientific notation' using `e' to replace `*10^'; for example, one year is about 3e7 seconds long. The tilde (~) is commonly used in a quantifying sense of `approximately'; that is, `~50' means `about fifty'. On Usenet and in the {MUD} world, common C boolean, logical, and relational operators such as `|', `&', `||', `&&', `!', `==', `!=', `>', `<', `>=', and `=<' are often combined with English. The Pascal not-equals, `<>', is also recognized, and occasionally one sees `/=' for not-equals (from Ada, Common Lisp, and Fortran 90). The use of prefix `!' as a loose synonym for `not-' or `no-' is particularly common; thus, `!clue' is read `no-clue' or `clueless'. A related practice borrows syntax from preferred programming languages to express ideas in a natural-language text. For example, one might see the following: In J. R. Hacker wrote: >I recently had occasion to field-test the Snafu >Systems 2300E adaptive gonkulator. The price was >right, and the racing stripe on the case looked >kind of neat, but its performance left something >to be desired. Yeah, I tried one out too. #ifdef FLAME Hasn't anyone told those idiots that you can't get decent bogon suppression with AFJ filters at today's net volumes? #endif /* FLAME */ I guess they figured the price premium for true frame-based semantic analysis was too high. Unfortunately, it's also the only workable approach. I wouldn't recommend purchase of this product unless you're on a *very* tight budget. #include -- == Frank Foonly (Fubarco Systems) In the above, the `#ifdef'/`#endif' pair is a conditional compilation syntax from C; here, it implies that the text between (which is a {flame}) should be evaluated only if you have turned on (or defined on) the switch FLAME. The `#include' at the end is C for "include standard disclaimer here"; the `standard disclaimer' is understood to read, roughly, "These are my personal opinions and not to be construed as the official position of my employer." The top section in the example, with > at the left margin, is an example of an inclusion convention we'll discuss below. More recently, following on the huge popularity of the World Wide Web, pseudo-HTML markup has become popular for similar purposes: Your father was a hamster and your mother smelt of elderberries! You'll even see this with an HTML-style modifier: You seem well-suited for a career in government. Hackers also mix letters and numbers more freely than in mainstream usage. In particular, it is good hackish style to write a digit sequence where you intend the reader to understand the text string that names that number in English. So, hackers prefer to write `1970s' rather than `nineteen-seventies' or `1970's' (the latter looks like a possessive). It should also be noted that hackers exhibit much less reluctance to use multiply nested parentheses than is normal in English. Part of this is almost certainly due to influence from LISP (which uses deeply nested parentheses (like this (see?)) in its syntax a lot), but it has also been suggested that a more basic hacker trait of enjoying playing with complexity and pushing systems to their limits is in operation. Finally, it is worth mentioning that many studies of on-line communication have shown that electronic links have a de-inhibiting effect on people. Deprived of the body-language cues through which emotional state is expressed, people tend to forget everything about other parties except what is presented over that ASCII link. This has both good and bad effects. A good one is that it encourages honesty and tends to break down hierarchical authority relationships; a bad one is that it may encourage depersonalization and gratuitous rudeness. Perhaps in response to this, experienced netters often display a sort of conscious formal politesse in their writing that has passed out of fashion in other spoken and written media (for example, the phrase "Well said, sir!" is not uncommon). Many introverted hackers who are next to inarticulate in person communicate with considerable fluency over the net, perhaps precisely because they can forget on an unconscious level that they are dealing with people and thus don't feel stressed and anxious as they would face to face. Though it is considered gauche to publicly criticize posters for poor spelling or grammar, the network places a premium on literacy and clarity of expression. It may well be that future historians of literature will see in it a revival of the great tradition of personal letters as art. :Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions: ======================================== One area where conventions for on-line writing are still in some flux is the marking of included material from earlier messages -- what would be called `block quotations' in ordinary English. From the usual typographic convention employed for these (smaller font at an extra indent), there derived a practice of included text being indented by one ASCII TAB (0001001) character, which under Unix and many other environments gives the appearance of an 8-space indent. Early mail and netnews readers had no facility for including messages this way, so people had to paste in copy manually. BSD `Mail(1)' was the first message agent to support inclusion, and early Usenetters emulated its style. But the TAB character tended to push included text too far to the right (especially in multiply nested inclusions), leading to ugly wraparounds. After a brief period of confusion (during which an inclusion leader consisting of three or four spaces became established in EMACS and a few mailers), the use of leading `>' or `> ' became standard, perhaps owing to its use in `ed(1)' to display tabs (alternatively, it may derive from the `>' that some early Unix mailers used to quote lines starting with "From" in text, so they wouldn't look like the beginnings of new message headers). Inclusions within inclusions keep their `>' leaders, so the `nesting level' of a quotation is visually apparent. The practice of including text from the parent article when posting a followup helped solve what had been a major nuisance on Usenet: the fact that articles do not arrive at different sites in the same order. Careless posters used to post articles that would begin with, or even consist entirely of, "No, that's wrong" or "I agree" or the like. It was hard to see who was responding to what. Consequently, around 1984, new news-posting software evolved a facility to automatically include the text of a previous article, marked with "> " or whatever the poster chose. The poster was expected to delete all but the relevant lines. The result has been that, now, careless posters post articles containing the _entire_ text of a preceding article, _followed_ only by "No, that's wrong" or "I agree". Many people feel that this cure is worse than the original disease, and there soon appeared newsreader software designed to let the reader skip over included text if desired. Today, some posting software rejects articles containing too high a proportion of lines beginning with `>' -- but this too has led to undesirable workarounds, such as the deliberate inclusion of zero-content filler lines which aren't quoted and thus pull the message below the rejection threshold. Because the default mailers supplied with Unix and other operating systems haven't evolved as quickly as human usage, the older conventions using a leading TAB or three or four spaces are still alive; however, >-inclusion is now clearly the prevalent form in both netnews and mail. Inclusion practice is still evolving, and disputes over the `correct' inclusion style occasionally lead to {holy wars}. Most netters view an inclusion as a promise that comment on it will immediately follow. The preferred, conversational style looks like this, > relevant excerpt 1 response to excerpt > relevant excerpt 2 response to excerpt > relevant excerpt 3 response to excerpt or for short messages like this: > entire message response to message Thanks to poor design of some PC-based mail agents, one will occasionally see the entire quoted message _after_ the response, like this response to message > entire message but this practice is strongly deprecated. Though `>' remains the standard inclusion leader, `|' is occasionally used for extended quotations where original variations in indentation are being retained (one mailer even combines these and uses `|>'). One also sees different styles of quoting a number of authors in the same message: one (deprecated because it loses information) uses a leader of `> ' for everyone, another (the most common) is `> > > > ', `> > > ', etc. (or `>>>> ', `>>>', etc., depending on line length and nesting depth) reflecting the original order of messages, and yet another is to use a different citation leader for each author, say `> ', `: ', `| ', `} ' (preserving nesting so that the inclusion order of messages is still apparent, or tagging the inclusions with authors' names). Yet _another_ style is to use each poster's initials (or login name) as a citation leader for that poster. Occasionally one sees a `# ' leader used for quotations from authoritative sources such as standards documents; the intended allusion is to the root prompt (the special Unix command prompt issued when one is running as the privileged super-user). :Hacker Speech Style: ===================== Hackish speech generally features extremely precise diction, careful word choice, a relatively large working vocabulary, and relatively little use of contractions or street slang. Dry humor, irony, puns, and a mildly flippant attitude are highly valued -- but an underlying seriousness and intelligence are essential. One should use just enough jargon to communicate precisely and identify oneself as a member of the culture; overuse of jargon or a breathless, excessively gung-ho attitude is considered tacky and the mark of a loser. This speech style is a variety of the precisionist English normally spoken by scientists, design engineers, and academics in technical fields. In contrast with the methods of jargon construction, it is fairly constant throughout hackerdom. It has been observed that many hackers are confused by negative questions -- or, at least, that the people to whom they are talking are often confused by the sense of their answers. The problem is that they have done so much programming that distinguishes between if (going) ... and if (!going) ... that when they parse the question "Aren't you going?" it seems to be asking the opposite question from "Are you going?", and so merits an answer in the opposite sense. This confuses English-speaking non-hackers because they were taught to answer as though the negative part weren't there. In some other languages (including Russian, Chinese, and Japanese) the hackish interpretation is standard and the problem wouldn't arise. Hackers often find themselves wishing for a word like French `si' or German `doch' with which one could unambiguously answer `yes' to a negative question. (See also {mu}) For similar reasons, English-speaking hackers almost never use double negatives, even if they live in a region where colloquial usage allows them. The thought of uttering something that logically ought to be an affirmative knowing it will be misparsed as a negative tends to disturb them. In a related vein, hackers sometimes make a game of answering questions containing logical connectives with a strictly literal rather than colloquial interpretation. A non-hacker who is indelicate enough to ask a question like "So, are you working on finding that bug _now_ or leaving it until later?" is likely to get the perfectly correct answer "Yes!" (that is, "Yes, I'm doing it either now or later, and you didn't ask which!"). :International Style: ===================== Although the Jargon File remains primarily a lexicon of hacker usage in American English, we have made some effort to get input from abroad. Though the hacker-speak of other languages often uses translations of jargon from English (often as transmitted to them by earlier Jargon File versions!), the local variations are interesting, and knowledge of them may be of some use to travelling hackers. There are some references herein to `Commonwealth hackish'. These are intended to describe some variations in hacker usage as reported in the English spoken in Great Britain and the Commonwealth (Canada, Australia, India, etc. -- though Canada is heavily influenced by American usage). There is also an entry on {{Commonwealth Hackish}} reporting some general phonetic and vocabulary differences from U.S. hackish. Hackers in Western Europe and (especially) Scandinavia report that they often use a mixture of English and their native languages for technical conversation. Occasionally they develop idioms in their English usage that are influenced by their native-language styles. Some of these are reported here. On the other hand, English often gives rise to grammatical and vocabulary mutations in the native language. For example, Italian hackers often use the nonexistent verbs `scrollare' (to scroll) and `deletare' (to delete) rather than native Italian `scorrere' and `cancellare'. Similarly, the English verb `to hack' has been seen conjugated in Swedish. And Spanish-speaking hackers use `linkar' (to link), `debugear' (to debug), and `lockear' (to lock). European hackers report that this happens partly because the English terms make finer distinctions than are available in their native vocabularies, and partly because deliberate language-crossing makes for amusing wordplay. A few notes on hackish usages in Russian have been added where they are parallel with English idioms and thus comprehensible to English-speakers. :Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers: =============================== From the early 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local, MS-DOS-based bulletin boards has been developing separately from Internet hackerdom. The BBS culture has, as its seamy underside, a stratum of `pirate boards' inhabited by {cracker}s, phone phreaks, and {warez d00dz}. These people (mostly teenagers running IBM-PC clones from their bedrooms) have developed their own characteristic jargon, heavily influenced by skateboard lingo and underground-rock slang. Though crackers often call themselves `hackers', they aren't (they typically have neither significant programming ability, nor Internet expertise, nor experience with UNIX or other true multi-user systems). Their vocabulary has little overlap with hackerdom's. Nevertheless, this lexicon covers much of it so the reader will be able to understand what goes by on bulletin-board systems. Here is a brief guide to cracker and {warez d00dz} usage: * Misspell frequently. The substitutions phone => fone freak => phreak are obligatory. * Always substitute `z's for `s's. (i.e. "codes" -> "codez"). * Type random emphasis characters after a post line (i.e. "Hey Dudes!#!$#$!#!$"). * Use the emphatic `k' prefix ("k-kool", "k-rad", "k-awesome") frequently. * Abbreviate compulsively ("I got lotsa warez w/ docs"). * Substitute `0' for `o' ("r0dent", "l0zer"). * TYPE ALL IN CAPS LOCK, SO IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE YELLING ALL THE TIME. These traits are similar to those of {B1FF}, who originated as a parody of naive BBS users. For further discussion of the pirate-board subculture, see {lamer}, {elite}, {leech}, {poser}, {cracker}, and especially {warez d00dz}. :How to Use the Lexicon: ************************ :Pronunciation Guide: ===================== Pronunciation keys are provided in the jargon listings for all entries that are neither dictionary words pronounced as in standard English nor obvious compounds thereof. Slashes bracket phonetic pronunciations, which are to be interpreted using the following conventions: 1. Syllables are hyphen-separated, except that an accent or back-accent follows each accented syllable (the back-accent marks a secondary accent in some words of four or more syllables). If no accent is given, the word is pronounced with equal accentuation on all syllables (this is common for abbreviations). 2. Consonants are pronounced as in American English. The letter `g' is always hard (as in "got" rather than "giant"); `ch' is soft ("church" rather than "chemist"). The letter `j' is the sound that occurs twice in "judge". The letter `s' is always as in "pass", never a z sound. The digraph `kh' is the guttural of "loch" or "l'chaim". The digraph 'gh' is the aspirated g+h of "bughouse" or "ragheap" (rare in English). 3. Uppercase letters are pronounced as their English letter names; thus (for example) /H-L-L/ is equivalent to /aych el el/. /Z/ may be pronounced /zee/ or /zed/ depending on your local dialect. 4. Vowels are represented as follows: /a/ back, that /ah/ father, palm (see note) /ar/ far, mark /aw/ flaw, caught /ay/ bake, rain /e/ less, men /ee/ easy, ski /eir/ their, software /i/ trip, hit /i:/ life, sky /o/ block, stock (see note) /oh/ flow, sew /oo/ loot, through /or/ more, door /ow/ out, how /oy/ boy, coin /uh/ but, some /u/ put, foot /y/ yet, young /yoo/ few, chew /[y]oo/ /oo/ with optional fronting as in `news' (/nooz/ or /nyooz/) The glyph /*/ is used for the `schwa' sound of unstressed or occluded vowels (the one that is often written with an upside-down `e'). The schwa vowel is omitted in syllables containing vocalic r, l, m or n; that is, `kitten' and `color' would be rendered /kit'n/ and /kuhl'r/, not /kit'*n/ and /kuhl'*r/. Note that the above table reflects mainly distinctions found in standard American English (that is, the neutral dialect spoken by TV network announcers and typical of educated speech in the Upper Midwest, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul and Philadelphia). However, we separate /o/ from /ah/, which tend to merge in standard American. This may help readers accustomed to accents resembling British Received Pronunciation. The intent of this scheme is to permit as many readers as possible to map the pronunciations into their local dialect by ignoring some subset of the distinctions we make. Speakers of British RP, for example, can smash terminal /r/ and all unstressed vowels. Speakers of many varieties of southern American will automatically map /o/ to /aw/; and so forth. (Standard American makes a good reference dialect for this purpose because it has crisp consonents and more vowel distinctions than other major dialects, and tends to retain distinctions between unstressed vowels. It also happens to be what your editor speaks.) Entries with a pronunciation of `//' are written-only usages. (No, Unix weenies, this does _not_ mean `pronounce like previous pronunciation'!) :Other Lexicon Conventions: =========================== Entries are sorted in case-blind ASCII collation order (rather than the letter-by-letter order ignoring interword spacing common in mainstream dictionaries), except that all entries beginning with nonalphabetic characters are sorted after Z. The case-blindness is a feature, not a bug. The beginning of each entry is marked by a colon (`:') at the left margin. This convention helps out tools like hypertext browsers that benefit from knowing where entry boundaries are, but aren't as context-sensitive as humans. In pure ASCII renderings of the Jargon File, you will see {} used to bracket words which themselves have entries in the File. This isn't done all the time for every such word, but it is done everywhere that a reminder seems useful that the term has a jargon meaning and one might wish to refer to its entry. In this all-ASCII version, headwords for topic entries are distinguished from those for ordinary entries by being followed by "::" rather than ":"; similarly, references are surrounded by "{{" and "}}" rather than "{" and "}". Defining instances of terms and phrases appear in `slanted type'. A defining instance is one which occurs near to or as part of an explanation of it. Prefixed ** is used as linguists do; to mark examples of incorrect usage. We follow the `logical' quoting convention described in the Writing Style section above. In addition, we reserve double quotes for actual excerpts of text or (sometimes invented) speech. Scare quotes (which mark a word being used in a nonstandard way), and philosopher's quotes (which turn an utterance into the string of letters or words that name it) are both rendered with single quotes. References such as `malloc(3)' and `patch(1)' are to Unix facilities (some of which, such as `patch(1)', are actually freeware distributed over Usenet). The Unix manuals use `foo(n)' to refer to item foo in section (n) of the manual, where n=1 is utilities, n=2 is system calls, n=3 is C library routines, n=6 is games, and n=8 (where present) is system administration utilities. Sections 4, 5, and 7 of the manuals have changed roles frequently and in any case are not referred to in any of the entries. Various abbreviations used frequently in the lexicon are summarized here: abbrev. abbreviation adj. adjective adv. adverb alt. alternate cav. caveat conj. conjunction esp. especially excl. exclamation imp. imperative interj. interjection n. noun obs. obsolete pl. plural poss. possibly pref. prefix prob. probably prov. proverbial quant. quantifier suff. suffix syn. synonym (or synonymous with) v. verb (may be transitive or intransitive) var. variant vi. intransitive verb vt. transitive verb Where alternate spellings or pronunciations are given, alt. separates two possibilities with nearly equal distribution, while var. prefixes one that is markedly less common than the primary. Where a term can be attributed to a particular subculture or is known to have originated there, we have tried to so indicate. Here is a list of abbreviations used in etymologies: Amateur Packet Radio A technical culture of ham-radio sites using AX.25 and TCP/IP for wide-area networking and BBS systems. Berkeley University of California at Berkeley BBN Bolt, Beranek & Newman Cambridge the university in England (_not_ the city in Massachusetts where MIT happens to be located!) CMU Carnegie-Mellon University Commodore Commodore Business Machines DEC The Digital Equipment Corporation (now Compaq). Fairchild The Fairchild Instruments Palo Alto development group FidoNet See the {FidoNet} entry IBM International Business Machines MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology; esp. the legendary MIT AI Lab culture of roughly 1971 to 1983 and its feeder groups, including the Tech Model Railroad Club NRL Naval Research Laboratories NYU New York University OED The Oxford English Dictionary Purdue Purdue University SAIL Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (at Stanford University) SI From Syste`me International, the name for the standard conventions of metric nomenclature used in the sciences Stanford Stanford University Sun Sun Microsystems TMRC Some MITisms go back as far as the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) at MIT c. 1960. Material marked TMRC is from "An Abridged Dictionary of the TMRC Language", originally compiled by Pete Samson in 1959 UCLA University of California at Los Angeles UK the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland) Usenet See the {Usenet} entry WPI Worcester Polytechnic Institute, site of a very active community of PDP-10 hackers during the 1970s WWW The World-Wide-Web. XEROX PARC XEROX's Palo Alto Research Center, site of much pioneering research in user interface design and networking Yale Yale University Some other etymology abbreviations such as {Unix} and {PDP-10} refer to technical cultures surrounding specific operating systems, processors, or other environments. The fact that a term is labelled with any one of these abbreviations does not necessarily mean its use is confined to that culture. In particular, many terms labelled `MIT' and `Stanford' are in quite general use. We have tried to give some indication of the distribution of speakers in the usage notes; however, a number of factors mentioned in the introduction conspire to make these indications less definite than might be desirable. A few new definitions attached to entries are marked [proposed]. These are usually generalizations suggested by editors or Usenet respondents in the process of commenting on previous definitions of those entries. These are _not_ represented as established jargon. :Format For New Entries: ======================== You can mail submissions for the Jargon File to . We welcome new jargon, and corrections to or amplifications of existing entries. You can improve your submission's chances of being included by adding background information on user population and years of currency. References to actual usage via URLs and/or DejaNews pointers are particularly welcomed. All contributions and suggestions about the Jargon File will be considered donations to be placed in the public domain as part of this File, and may be used in subsequent paper editions. Submissions may be edited for accuracy, clarity and concision. We are looking to expand the File's range of technical specialties covered. There are doubtless rich veins of jargon yet untapped in the scientific computing, graphics, and networking hacker communities; also in numerical analysis, computer architectures and VLSI design, language design, and many other related fields. Send us your jargon! We are _not_ interested in straight technical terms explained by textbooks or technical dictionaries unless an entry illuminates `underground' meanings or aspects not covered by official histories. We are also not interested in `joke' entries -- there is a lot of humor in the file but it must flow naturally out of the explanations of what hackers do and how they think. It is OK to submit items of jargon you have originated if they have spread to the point of being used by people who are not personally acquainted with you. We prefer items to be attested by independent submission from two different sites. An HTML version of the File is available at http://www.ccil.org/jargon. Please send us URLs for materials related to the entries, so we can enrich the File's link structure. The Jargon File will be regularly maintained and made available for browsing on the World Wide Web, and will include a version number. Read it, pass it around, contribute -- this is _your_ monument! The Jargon Lexicon ****************** = A = ===== :abbrev: /*-breev'/, /*-brev'/ n. Common abbreviation for `abbreviation'. :ABEND: /a'bend/, /*-bend'/ n. [ABnormal END] 1. Abnormal termination (of software); {crash}; {lossage}. Derives from an error message on the IBM 360; used jokingly by hackers but seriously mainly by {code grinder}s. Usually capitalized, but may appear as `abend'. Hackers will try to persuade you that ABEND is called `abend' because it is what system operators do to the machine late on Friday when they want to call it a day, and hence is from the German `Abend' = `Evening'. 2. [alt.callahans] Absent By Enforced Net Deprivation - used in the subject lines of postings warning friends of an imminent loss of Internet access. (This can be because of computer downtime, loss of provider, moving or illness.) Variants of this also appear: ABVND = `Absent By Voluntary Net Deprivation' and ABSEND = `Absent By Self-Enforced Net Deprivation' have been sighted. :accumulator: n. obs. 1. Archaic term for a register. On-line use of it as a synonym for `register' is a fairly reliable indication that the user has been around for quite a while and/or that the architecture under discussion is quite old. The term in full is almost never used of microprocessor registers, for example, though symbolic names for arithmetic registers beginning in `A' derive from historical use of the term `accumulator' (and not, actually, from `arithmetic'). Confusingly, though, an `A' register name prefix may also stand for `address', as for example on the Motorola 680x0 family. 2. A register being used for arithmetic or logic (as opposed to addressing or a loop index), especially one being used to accumulate a sum or count of many items. This use is in context of a particular routine or stretch of code. "The FOOBAZ routine uses A3 as an accumulator." 3. One's in-basket (esp. among old-timers who might use sense 1). "You want this reviewed? Sure, just put it in the accumulator." (See {stack}.) :ACK: /ak/ interj. 1. [from the ASCII mnemonic for 0000110] Acknowledge. Used to register one's presence (compare mainstream _Yo!_). An appropriate response to {ping} or {ENQ}. 2. [from the comic strip "Bloom County"] An exclamation of surprised disgust, esp. in "Ack pffft!" Semi-humorous. Generally this sense is not spelled in caps (ACK) and is distinguished by a following exclamation point. 3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell them you understand their point (see {NAK}). Thus, for example, you might cut off an overly long explanation with "Ack. Ack. Ack. I get it now". There is also a usage "ACK?" (from sense 1) meaning "Are you there?", often used in email when earlier mail has produced no reply, or during a lull in {talk mode} to see if the person has gone away (the standard humorous response is of course {NAK} (sense 2), i.e., "I'm not here"). :Acme: n. The canonical supplier of bizarre, elaborate, and non-functional gadgetry - where Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson (two cartoonists who specialized in elaborate contraptions) shop. The name has been humorously expanded as A Company Making Everything. Describing some X as an "Acme X" either means "This is {insanely great}", or, more likely, "This looks {insanely great} on paper, but in practice it's really easy to shoot yourself in the foot with it." Compare {pistol}. This term, specially cherished by American hackers and explained here for the benefit of our overseas brethren, comes from the Warner Brothers' series of "Roadrunner" cartoons. In these cartoons, the famished Wile E. Coyote was forever attempting to catch up with, trap, and eat the Roadrunner. His attempts usually involved one or more high-technology Rube Goldberg devices - rocket jetpacks, catapults, magnetic traps, high-powered slingshots, etc. These were usually delivered in large cardboard boxes, labeled prominently with the Acme name. These devices invariably malfunctioned in improbable and violent ways. :acolyte: n. obs. [TMRC] An {OSU} privileged enough to submit data and programs to a member of the {priesthood}. :ad-hockery: /ad-hok'*r-ee/ n. [Purdue] 1. Gratuitous assumptions made inside certain programs, esp. expert systems, which lead to the appearance of semi-intelligent behavior but are in fact entirely arbitrary. For example, fuzzy-matching of input tokens that might be typing errors against a symbol table can make it look as though a program knows how to spell. 2. Special-case code to cope with some awkward input that would otherwise cause a program to {choke}, presuming normal inputs are dealt with in some cleaner and more regular way. Also called `ad-hackery', `ad-hocity' (/ad-hos'*-tee/), `ad-crockery'. See also {ELIZA effect}. :Ada:: n. A {{Pascal}}-descended language that has been made mandatory for Department of Defense software projects by the Pentagon. Hackers are nearly unanimous in observing that, technically, it is precisely what one might expect given that kind of endorsement by fiat; designed by committee, crockish, difficult to use, and overall a disastrous, multi-billion-dollar boondoggle (one common description is "The PL/I of the 1980s"). Hackers find Ada's exception-handling and inter-process communication features particularly hilarious. Ada Lovelace (the daughter of Lord Byron who became the world's first programmer while cooperating with Charles Babbage on the design of his mechanical computing engines in the mid-1800s) would almost certainly blanch at the use to which her name has latterly been put; the kindest thing that has been said about it is that there is probably a good small language screaming to get out from inside its vast, {elephantine} bulk. :address harvester: n. A robot that searches web pages and/or filters netnews traffic looking for valid email addresses. Some address harvesters are benign, used only for compiling address directories. Most, unfortunately, are run by miscreants compiling address lists to {spam}. Address harvesters can be foiled by a {teergrube}. :adger: /aj'r/ vt. [UCLA mutant of {nadger}, poss. from the middle name of an infamous {tenured graduate student}] To make a bonehead move with consequences that could have been foreseen with even slight mental effort. E.g., "He started removing files and promptly adgered the whole project". Compare {dumbass attack}. :admin: /ad-min'/ n. Short for `administrator'; very commonly used in speech or on-line to refer to the systems person in charge on a computer. Common constructions on this include `sysadmin' and `site admin' (emphasizing the administrator's role as a site contact for email and news) or `newsadmin' (focusing specifically on news). Compare {postmaster}, {sysop}, {system mangler}. :ADVENT: /ad'vent/ n. The prototypical computer adventure game, first designed by Will Crowther on the {PDP-10} in the mid-1970s as an attempt at computer-refereed fantasy gaming, and expanded into a puzzle-oriented game by Don Woods at Stanford in 1976. (Crowther went on to write the first core software for the first TCP/IP router.) Now better known as Adventure, but the {{TOPS-10}} operating system permitted only six-letter filenames. See also {vadding}, {Zork}, and {Infocom}. This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style since expected in text adventure games, and popularized several tag lines that have become fixtures of hacker-speak: "A huge green fierce snake bars the way!" "I see no X here" (for some noun X). "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." "You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different." The `magic words' {xyzzy} and {plugh} also derive from this game. Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the Mammoth & Flint Ridge cave system; it actually _has_ a `Colossal Cave' and a `Bedquilt' as in the game, and the `Y2' that also turns up is cavers' jargon for a map reference to a secondary entrance. :AFAIK: // n. [Usenet] Abbrev. for "As Far As I Know". :AFJ: // n. Written-only abbreviation for "April Fool's Joke". Elaborate April Fool's hoaxes are a long-established tradition on Usenet and Internet; see {kremvax} for an example. In fact, April Fool's Day is the _only_ seasonal holiday consistently marked by customary observances on Internet and other hacker networks. :AI: /A-I/ n. Abbreviation for `Artificial Intelligence', so common that the full form is almost never written or spoken among hackers. :AI-complete: /A-I k*m-pleet'/ adj. [MIT, Stanford: by analogy with `NP-complete' (see {NP-})] Used to describe problems or subproblems in AI, to indicate that the solution presupposes a solution to the `strong AI problem' (that is, the synthesis of a human-level intelligence). A problem that is AI-complete is, in other words, just too hard. Examples of AI-complete problems are `The Vision Problem' (building a system that can see as well as a human) and `The Natural Language Problem' (building a system that can understand and speak a natural language as well as a human). These may appear to be modular, but all attempts so far (1999) to solve them have foundered on the amount of context information and `intelligence' they seem to require. See also {gedanken}. :AI koans: /A-I koh'anz/ pl.n. A series of pastiches of Zen teaching riddles created by Danny Hillis at the MIT AI Lab around various major figures of the Lab's culture (several are included under {AI Koans} in Appendix A). See also {ha ha only serious}, {mu}, and {{hacker humor}}. :AIDS: /aydz/ n. Short for A* Infected Disk Syndrome (`A*' is a {glob} pattern that matches, but is not limited to, Apple or Amiga), this condition is quite often the result of practicing unsafe {SEX}. See {virus}, {worm}, {Trojan horse}, {virgin}. :AIDX: /ayd'k*z/ n. Derogatory term for IBM's perverted version of Unix, AIX, especially for the AIX 3.? used in the IBM RS/6000 series (some hackers think it is funnier just to pronounce "AIX" as "aches"). A victim of the dreaded "hybridism" disease, this attempt to combine the two main currents of the Unix stream ({BSD} and {USG Unix}) became a {monstrosity} to haunt system administrators' dreams. For example, if new accounts are created while many users are logged on, the load average jumps quickly over 20 due to silly implementation of the user databases. For a quite similar disease, compare {HP-SUX}. Also, compare {Macintrash}, {Nominal Semidestructor}, {ScumOS}, {sun-stools}. :airplane rule: n. "Complexity increases the possibility of failure; a twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane." By analogy, in both software and electronics, the rule that simplicity increases robustness. It is correspondingly argued that the right way to build reliable systems is to put all your eggs in one basket, after making sure that you've built a really _good_ basket. See also {KISS Principle}. :Alderson loop: n. [Intel] A special version of an {infinite loop} where there is an exit condition available, but inaccessible in the current implementation of the code. Typically this is created while debugging user interface code. An example would be when there is a menu stating, "Select 1-3 or 9 to quit" and 9 is not allowed by the function that takes the selection from the user. This term received its name from a programmer who had coded a modal message box in MSAccess with no Ok or Cancel buttons, thereby disabling the entire program whenever the box came up. The message box had the proper code for dismissal and even was set up so that when the non-existent Ok button was pressed the proper code would be called. :aliasing bug: n. A class of subtle programming errors that can arise in code that does dynamic allocation, esp. via `malloc(3)' or equivalent. If several pointers address (`aliases for') a given hunk of storage, it may happen that the storage is freed or reallocated (and thus moved) through one alias and then referenced through another, which may lead to subtle (and possibly intermittent) lossage depending on the state and the allocation history of the malloc {arena}. Avoidable by use of allocation strategies that never alias allocated core, or by use of higher-level languages, such as {LISP}, which employ a garbage collector (see {GC}). Also called a {stale pointer bug}. See also {precedence lossage}, {smash the stack}, {fandango on core}, {memory leak}, {memory smash}, {overrun screw}, {spam}. Historical note: Though this term is nowadays associated with C programming, it was already in use in a very similar sense in the Algol-60 and FORTRAN communities in the 1960s. :all-elbows: adj. [MS-DOS] Of a TSR (terminate-and-stay-resident) IBM PC program, such as the N pop-up calendar and calculator utilities that circulate on {BBS} systems: unsociable. Used to describe a program that rudely steals the resources that it needs without considering that other TSRs may also be resident. One particularly common form of rudeness is lock-up due to programs fighting over the keyboard interrupt. See {rude}, also {mess-dos}. :alpha geek: n. [from animal ethologists' `alpha male'] The most technically accomplished or skillful person in some implied context. "Ask Larry, he's the alpha geek here." :alpha particles: n. See {bit rot}. :alt: /awlt/ 1. n. The alt shift key on an IBM PC or {clone} keyboard; see {bucky bits}, sense 2 (though typical PC usage does not simply set the 0200 bit). 2. n. The `option' key on a Macintosh; use of this term usually reveals that the speaker hacked PCs before coming to the Mac (see also {feature key}, which is sometines incorrectly called `alt'). 3. n.,obs. [PDP-10; often capitalized to ALT] Alternate name for the ASCII ESC character (ASCII 0011011), after the keycap labeling on some older terminals; also `altmode' (/awlt'mohd/). This character was almost never pronounced `escape' on an ITS system, in {TECO}, or under TOPS-10 -- always alt, as in "Type alt alt to end a TECO command" or "alt-U onto the system" (for "log onto the [ITS] system"). This usage probably arose because alt is more convenient to say than `escape', especially when followed by another alt or a character (or another alt _and_ a character, for that matter). 4. The alt hierarchy on Usenet, the tree of newsgroups created by users without a formal vote and approval procedure. There is a myth, not entirely implausible, that alt is acronymic for "anarchists, lunatics, and terrorists"; but in fact it is simply short for "alternative". :alt bit: /awlt bit/ [from alternate] adj. See {meta bit}. :altmode: n. Syn. {alt} sense 3. :Aluminum Book: n. [MIT] "Common LISP: The Language", by Guy L. Steele Jr. (Digital Press, first edition 1984, second edition 1990). Note that due to a technical screwup some printings of the second edition are actually of a color the author describes succinctly as "yucky green". See also {{book titles}}. :ambimouseterous: /am-b*-mows'ter-us/ or /am-b*-mows'trus/ adj. [modeled on ambidextrous] Able to use a mouse with either hand. :Amiga: n A series of personal computer models originally sold by Commodore, based on 680x0 processors, custom support chips and an operating system that combined some of the best features of Macintosh and Unix with compatibility with neither. The Amiga was released just as the personal computing world standardized on IBM-PC clones. This prevented it from gaining serious market share, despite the fact that the first Amigas had a substantial technological lead on the IBM XTs of the time. Instead, it acquired a small but zealous population of enthusiastic hackers who dreamt of one day unseating the clones (see {Amiga Persecution Complex}). The strength of the Amiga platform seeded a small industry of companies building software and hardware for the platform, especially in graphics and video applications (see {video toaster}). Due to spectacular mismanagement, Commodore did hardly any R&D, allowing the competition to close Amiga's technological lead. After Commodore went bankrupt in 1994 the technology passed through several hands, none of whom did much with it. However, the Amiga is still being produced in Europe under license and has a substantial number of fans, which will probably extend the platform's life considerably. :Amiga Persecution Complex: n. The disorder suffered by a particularly egregious variety of {bigot}, those who believe that the marginality of their preferred machine is the result of some kind of industry-wide conspiracy (for without a conspiracy of some kind, the eminent superiority of their beloved shining jewel of a platform would obviously win over all, market pressures be damned!) Those afflicted are prone to engaging in {flame war}s and calling for boycotts and mailbombings. Amiga Persecution Complex is by no means limited to Amiga users; NeXT, {NeWS}, {OS/2}, Macintosh, {LISP}, and {GNU} users are also common victims (and {Linux} users frequently used to display symptoms before Linux started winning). See also {newbie}, {troll}, {holy wars}, {weenie}, {Get a life!}. :amoeba: n. Humorous term for the Commodore Amiga personal computer. :amp off: vt. [Purdue] To run in {background}. From the Unix shell `&' operator. :amper: n. Common abbreviation for the name of the ampersand (`&', ASCII 0100110) character. See {{ASCII}} for other synonyms. :angle brackets: n. Either of the characters `<' (ASCII 0111100) and `>' (ASCII 0111110) (ASCII less-than or greater-than signs). Typographers in the {Real World} use angle brackets which are either taller and slimmer (the ISO `Bra' and `Ket' characters), or significantly smaller (single or double guillemets) than the less-than and greater-than signs. See {broket}, {{ASCII}}. :angry fruit salad: n. A bad visual-interface design that uses too many colors. (This term derives, of course, from the bizarre day-glo colors found in canned fruit salad.) Too often one sees similar effects from interface designers using color window systems such as {X}; there is a tendency to create displays that are flashy and attention-getting but uncomfortable for long-term use. :annoybot: /*-noy-bot/ n. [IRC] See {robot}. :annoyware: n. A type of {shareware} that frequently disrupts normal program operation to display requests for payment to the author in return for the ability to disable the request messages. The requests generally require user action to acknowledge the message before normal operation is resumed and are often tied to the most frequently used features of the software. See also {careware}, {charityware}, {crippleware}, {freeware}, {FRS}, {guiltware}, {postcardware}, and {-ware}; compare {payware}. :ANSI: /an'see/ 1. n. [techspeak] The American National Standards Institute. ANSI, along with the International Organization for Standards (ISO), standardized the C programming language (see {K&R}, {Classic C}), and promulgates many other important software standards. 2. n. [techspeak] A terminal may be said to be `ANSI' if it meets the ANSI X.364 standard for terminal control. Unfortunately, this standard was both over-complicated and too permissive. It has been retired and replaced by the ECMA-48 standard, which shares both flaws. 3. n. [BBS jargon] The set of screen-painting codes that most MS-DOS and Amiga computers accept. This comes from the ANSI.SYS device driver that must be loaded on an MS-DOS computer to view such codes. Unfortunately, neither DOS ANSI nor the BBS ANSIs derived from it exactly match the ANSI X.364 terminal standard. For example, the ESC-[1m code turns on the bold highlight on large machines, but in IBM PC/MS-DOS ANSI, it turns on `intense' (bright) colors. Also, in BBS-land, the term `ANSI' is often used to imply that a particular computer uses or can emulate the IBM high-half character set from MS-DOS. Particular use depends on context. Occasionally, the vanilla ASCII character set is used with the color codes, but on BBSs, ANSI and `IBM characters' tend to go together. :ANSI standard pizza: /an'see stan'd*rd peet'z*/ [CMU] Pepperoni and mushroom pizza. Coined allegedly because most pizzas ordered by CMU hackers during some period leading up to mid-1990 were of that flavor. See also {rotary debugger}; compare {ISO standard cup of tea}. :AOL!: n. [USENET] Common synonym for "Me, too!" alluding to the legendary propensity of America On Line users to utter contentless "Me, too!" postings. The number of exclamation points following varies from zero to five or so. The psuedo-HTML Me, too! is also frequently seen. :AOS: 1. /aws/ (East Coast), /ay'os/ (West Coast) vt. obs. To increase the amount of something. "AOS the campfire." [based on a PDP-10 increment instruction] Usage: considered silly, and now obsolete. Now largely supplanted by {bump}. See {SOS}. 2. n. A {{Multics}}-derived OS supported at one time by Data General. This was pronounced /A-O-S/ or /A-os/. A spoof of the standard AOS system administrator's manual ("How to Load and Generate your AOS System") was created, issued a part number, and circulated as photocopy folklore; it was called "How to Goad and Levitate your CHAOS System". 3. n. Algebraic Operating System, in reference to those calculators which use infix instead of postfix (reverse Polish) notation. 4. A {BSD}-like operating system for the IBM RT. Historical note: AOS in sense 1 was the name of a {PDP-10} instruction that took any memory location in the computer and added 1 to it; AOS meant `Add One and do not Skip'. Why, you may ask, does the `S' stand for `do not Skip' rather than for `Skip'? Ah, here was a beloved piece of PDP-10 folklore. There were eight such instructions: AOSE added 1 and then skipped the next instruction if the result was Equal to zero; AOSG added 1 and then skipped if the result was Greater than 0; AOSN added 1 and then skipped if the result was Not 0; AOSA added 1 and then skipped Always; and so on. Just plain AOS didn't say when to skip, so it never skipped. For similar reasons, AOJ meant `Add One and do not Jump'. Even more bizarre, SKIP meant `do not SKIP'! If you wanted to skip the next instruction, you had to say `SKIPA'. Likewise, JUMP meant `do not JUMP'; the unconditional form was JUMPA. However, hackers never did this. By some quirk of the 10's design, the {JRST} (Jump and ReSTore flag with no flag specified) was actually faster and so was invariably used. Such were the perverse mysteries of assembler programming. :app: /ap/ n. Short for `application program', as opposed to a systems program. Apps are what systems vendors are forever chasing developers to create for their environments so they can sell more boxes. Hackers tend not to think of the things they themselves run as apps; thus, in hacker parlance the term excludes compilers, program editors, games, and messaging systems, though a user would consider all those to be apps. (Broadly, an app is often a self-contained environment for performing some well-defined task such as `word processing'; hackers tend to prefer more general-purpose tools.) See {killer app}; oppose {tool}, {operating system}. :arena: [Unix] n. The area of memory attached to a process by `brk(2)' and `sbrk(2)' and used by `malloc(3)' as dynamic storage. So named from a `malloc: corrupt arena' message emitted when some early versions detected an impossible value in the free block list. See {overrun screw}, {aliasing bug}, {memory leak}, {memory smash}, {smash the stack}. :arg: /arg/ n. Abbreviation for `argument' (to a function), used so often as to have become a new word (like `piano' from `pianoforte'). "The sine function takes 1 arg, but the arc-tangent function can take either 1 or 2 args." Compare {param}, {parm}, {var}. :ARMM: n. [acronym, `Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation'] A Usenet {cancelbot} created by Dick Depew of Munroe Falls, Ohio. ARMM was intended to automatically cancel posts from anonymous-posting sites. Unfortunately, the robot's recognizer for anonymous postings triggered on its own automatically-generated control messages! Transformed by this stroke of programming ineptitude into a monster of Frankensteinian proportions, it broke loose on the night of March 31, 1993 and proceeded to {spam} news.admin.policy with a recursive explosion of over 200 messages. ARMM's bug produced a recursive {cascade} of messages each of which mechanically added text to the ID and Subject and some other headers of its parent. This produced a flood of messages in which each header took up several screens and each message ID and subject line got longer and longer and longer. Reactions varied from amusement to outrage. The pathological messages crashed at least one mail system, and upset people paying line charges for their Usenet feeds. One poster described the ARMM debacle as "instant Usenet history" (also establishing the term {despew}), and it has since been widely cited as a cautionary example of the havoc the combination of good intentions and incompetence can wreak on a network. Compare {Great Worm}; {sorcerer's apprentice mode}. See also {software laser}, {network meltdown}. :armor-plated: n. Syn. for {bulletproof}. :asbestos: adj. Used as a modifier to anything intended to protect one from {flame}s; also in other highly {flame}-suggestive usages. See, for example, {asbestos longjohns} and {asbestos cork award}. :asbestos cork award: n. Once, long ago at MIT, there was a {flamer} so consistently obnoxious that another hacker designed, had made, and distributed posters announcing that said flamer had been nominated for the `asbestos cork award'. (Any reader in doubt as to the intended application of the cork should consult the etymology under {flame}.) Since then, it is agreed that only a select few have risen to the heights of bombast required to earn this dubious dignity -- but there is no agreement on _which_ few. :asbestos longjohns: n. Notional garments donned by {Usenet} posters just before emitting a remark they expect will elicit {flamage}. This is the most common of the {asbestos} coinages. Also `asbestos underwear', `asbestos overcoat', etc. :ASCII:: /as'kee/ n. [acronym: American Standard Code for Information Interchange] The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers. The modern version uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier codes (including an early version of ASCII) used fewer. This change allowed the inclusion of lowercase letters -- a major {win} -- but it did not provide for accented letters or any other letterforms not used in English (such as the German sharp-S or the ae-ligature which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian). It could be worse, though. It could be much worse. See {{EBCDIC}} to understand how. Computers are much pickier and less flexible about spelling than humans; thus, hackers need to be very precise when talking about characters, and have developed a considerable amount of verbal shorthand for them. Every character has one or more names -- some formal, some concise, some silly. Common jargon names for ASCII characters are collected here. See also individual entries for {bang}, {excl}, {open}, {ques}, {semi}, {shriek}, {splat}, {twiddle}, and {Yu-Shiang Whole Fish}. This list derives from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII pronunciation guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII order; character pairs are sorted in by first member. For each character, common names are given in rough order of popularity, followed by names that are reported but rarely seen; official ANSI/CCITT names are surrounded by brokets: <>. Square brackets mark the particularly silly names introduced by {INTERCAL}. The abbreviations "l/r" and "o/c" stand for left/right and "open/close" respectively. Ordinary parentheticals provide some usage information. ! Common: {bang}; pling; excl; shriek; . Rare: factorial; exclam; smash; cuss; boing; yell; wow; hey; wham; eureka; [spark-spot]; soldier, control. " Common: double quote; quote. Rare: literal mark; double-glitch; ; ; dirk; [rabbit-ears]; double prime. # Common: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp; {crunch}; hex; [mesh]. Rare: grid; crosshatch; octothorpe; flash; , pig-pen; tictactoe; scratchmark; thud; thump; {splat}. $ Common: dollar; . Rare: currency symbol; buck; cash; string (from BASIC); escape (when used as the echo of ASCII ESC); ding; cache; [big money]. % Common: percent; ; mod; grapes. Rare: [double-oh-seven]. & Common: ; amper; and. Rare: address (from C); reference (from C++); andpersand; bitand; background (from `sh(1)'); pretzel; amp. [INTERCAL called this `ampersand'; what could be sillier?] ' Common: single quote; quote; . Rare: prime; glitch; tick; irk; pop; [spark]; ; . ( ) Common: l/r paren; l/r parenthesis; left/right; open/close; paren/thesis; o/c paren; o/c parenthesis; l/r parenthesis; l/r banana. Rare: so/already; lparen/rparen; ; o/c round bracket, l/r round bracket, [wax/wane]; parenthisey/unparenthisey; l/r ear. * Common: star; [{splat}]; . Rare: wildcard; gear; dingle; mult; spider; aster; times; twinkle; glob (see {glob}); {Nathan Hale}. + Common: ; add. Rare: cross; [intersection]. , Common: . Rare: ; [tail]. - Common: dash; ; . Rare: [worm]; option; dak; bithorpe. . Common: dot; point; ; . Rare: radix point; full stop; [spot]. / Common: slash; stroke; ; forward slash. Rare: diagonal; solidus; over; slak; virgule; [slat]. : Common: . Rare: dots; [two-spot]. ; Common: ; semi. Rare: weenie; [hybrid], pit-thwong. < > Common: ; bra/ket; l/r angle; l/r angle bracket; l/r broket. Rare: from/{into, towards}; read from/write to; suck/blow; comes-from/gozinta; in/out; crunch/zap (all from UNIX); [angle/right angle]. = Common: ; gets; takes. Rare: quadrathorpe; [half-mesh]. ? Common: query; ; {ques}. Rare: whatmark; [what]; wildchar; huh; hook; buttonhook; hunchback. @ Common: at sign; at; strudel. Rare: each; vortex; whorl; [whirlpool]; cyclone; snail; ape; cat; rose; cabbage; . V Rare: [book]. [ ] Common: l/r square bracket; l/r bracket; ; bracket/unbracket. Rare: square/unsquare; [U turn/U turn back]. \ Common: backslash, hack; escape (from C/UNIX); reverse slash; slosh; backslant; backwhack. Rare: bash; ; reversed virgule; [backslat]. ^ Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret; . Rare: chevron; [shark (or shark-fin)]; to the (`to the power of'); fang; pointer (in Pascal). _ Common: ; underscore; underbar; under. Rare: score; backarrow; skid; [flatworm]. ` Common: backquote; left quote; left single quote; open quote; ; grave. Rare: backprime; [backspark]; unapostrophe; birk; blugle; back tick; back glitch; push; ; quasiquote. { } Common: o/c brace; l/r brace; l/r squiggly; l/r squiggly bracket/brace; l/r curly bracket/brace; . Rare: brace/unbrace; curly/uncurly; leftit/rytit; l/r squirrelly; [embrace/bracelet]. | Common: bar; or; or-bar; v-bar; pipe; vertical bar. Rare: ; gozinta; thru; pipesinta (last three from UNIX); [spike]. ~ Common: ; squiggle; {twiddle}; not. Rare: approx; wiggle; swung dash; enyay; [sqiggle (sic)]. The pronunciation of `#' as `pound' is common in the U.S. but a bad idea; {{Commonwealth Hackish}} has its own, rather more apposite use of `pound sign' (confusingly, on British keyboards the pound graphic happens to replace `#'; thus Britishers sometimes call `#' on a U.S.-ASCII keyboard `pound', compounding the American error). The U.S. usage derives from an old-fashioned commercial practice of using a `#' suffix to tag pound weights on bills of lading. The character is usually pronounced `hash' outside the U.S. There are more culture wars over the correct pronunciation of this character than any other, which has led to the {ha ha only serious} suggestion that it be pronounced `shibboleth' (see Judges 12.6 in an Old Testament or Torah). The `uparrow' name for circumflex and `leftarrow' name for underline are historical relics from archaic ASCII (the 1963 version), which had these graphics in those character positions rather than the modern punctuation characters. The `swung dash' or `approximation' sign is not quite the same as tilde in typeset material but the ASCII tilde serves for both (compare {angle brackets}). Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The `#', `$', `>', and `&' characters, for example, are all pronounced "hex" in different communities because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in particular, `#' in many assembler-programming cultures, `$' in the 6502 world, `>' at Texas Instruments, and `&' on the BBC Micro, Sinclair, and some Z80 machines). See also {splat}. The inability of ASCII text to correctly represent any of the world's other major languages makes the designers' choice of 7 bits look more and more like a serious {misfeature} as the use of international networks continues to increase (see {software rot}). Hardware and software from the U.S. still tends to embody the assumption that ASCII is the universal character set and that characters have 7 bits; this is a major irritant to people who want to use a character set suited to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem by proliferating `national' character sets produce an evolutionary pressure to use a _smaller_ subset common to all those in use. :ASCII art: n. The fine art of drawing diagrams using the ASCII character set (mainly `|', `-', `/', `\', and `+'). Also known as `character graphics' or `ASCII graphics'; see also {boxology}. Here is a serious example: o----)||(--+--|<----+ +---------o + D O L )||( | | | C U A I )||( +-->|-+ | +-\/\/-+--o - T C N )||( | | | | P E )||( +-->|-+--)---+--)|--+-o U )||( | | | GND T o----)||(--+--|<----+----------+ A power supply consisting of a full wave rectifier circuit feeding a capacitor input filter circuit And here are some very silly examples: |\/\/\/| ____/| ___ |\_/| ___ | | \ o.O| ACK! / \_ |` '| _/ \ | | =(_)= THPHTH! / \/ \/ \ | (o)(o) U / \ C _) (__) \/\/\/\ _____ /\/\/\/ | ,___| (oo) \/ \/ | / \/-------\ U (__) /____\ || | \ /---V `v'- oo ) / \ ||---W|| * * |--| || |`. |_/\ //-o-\\ ____---=======---____ ====___\ /.. ..\ /___==== Klingons rule OK! // ---\__O__/--- \\ \_\ /_/ There is an important subgenre of ASCII art that puns on the standard character names in the fashion of a rebus. +--------------------------------------------------------+ | ^^^^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^ B ^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ | +--------------------------------------------------------+ " A Bee in the Carrot Patch " Within humorous ASCII art, there is for some reason an entire flourishing subgenre of pictures of silly cows. Four of these are reproduced in the silly examples above, here are three more: (__) (__) (__) (\/) ($$) (**) /-------\/ /-------\/ /-------\/ / | 666 || / |=====|| / | || * ||----|| * ||----|| * ||----|| ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ Satanic cow This cow is a Yuppie Cow in love Finally, here's a magnificent example of ASCII art depicting an Edwardian train station in Dunedin, New Zealand: .-. /___\ |___| |]_[| / I \ JL/ | \JL .-. i () | () i .-. |_| .^. /_\ LJ=======LJ /_\ .^. |_| ._/___\._./___\_._._._._.L_J_/.-. .-.\_L_J._._._._._/___\._./___\._._._ ., |-,-| ., L_J |_| [I] |_| L_J ., |-,-| ., ., JL |-O-| JL L_J%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%L_J JL |-O-| JL JL IIIIII_HH_'-'-'_HH_IIIIII|_|=======H=======|_|IIIIII_HH_'-'-'_HH_IIIIII_HH_ -------[]-------[]-------[_]----\.=I=./----[_]-------[]-------[]--------[]- _/\_ ||\\_I_//|| _/\_ [_] []_/_L_J_\_[] [_] _/\_ ||\\_I_//|| _/\_ ||\ |__| ||=/_|_\=|| |__|_|_| _L_L_J_J_ |_|_|__| ||=/_|_\=|| |__| ||- |__| |||__|__||| |__[___]__--__===__--__[___]__| |||__|__||| |__| ||| IIIIIII[_]IIIII[_]IIIIIL___J__II__|_|__II__L___JIIIII[_]IIIII[_]IIIIIIII[_] \_I_/ [_]\_I_/[_] \_I_[_]\II/[]\_\I/_/[]\II/[_]\_I_/ [_]\_I_/[_] \_I_/ [_] ./ \.L_J/ \L_J./ L_JI I[]/ \[]I IL_J \.L_J/ \L_J./ \.L_J | |L_J| |L_J| L_J| |[]| |[]| |L_J |L_J| |L_J| |L_J |_____JL_JL___JL_JL____|-|| |[]| |[]| ||-|_____JL_JL___JL_JL_____JL_J There is a newsgroup, rec.arts.ascii, devoted to this genre; however, see also {warlording}. :ASCIIbetical order: /as'kee-be'-t*-kl or'dr/ adj.,n. Used to indicate that data is sorted in ASCII collated order rather than alphabetical order. This lexicon is sorted in something close to ASCIIbetical order, but with case ignored and entries beginning with non-alphabetic characters moved to the end. "At my video store, they used their computer to sort the videos into ASCIIbetical order, so I couldn't find `"Crocodile" Dundee' until I thought to look before `2001' and `48 HRS.'!" :astroturfing: n. The use of paid shills to create the impression of a popular movement, through means like letters to newspapers from soi-disant `concerned citizens', paid opinion pieces, and the formation of grass-roots lobbying groups that are actually funded by a PR group (astroturf is fake grass; hence the term). This term became common among hackers after it came to light in early 1998 that Microsoft had attempted to use such tactics to forestall the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust action against the company. This backfired horribly, angering a number of state attorneys-general enough to induce them to go public with plans to join the Federal suit. It also set anybody defending Microsoft on the net for the accusation "You're just astroturfing!". :atomic: adj. [from Gk. `atomos', indivisible] 1. Indivisible; cannot be split up. For example, an instruction may be said to do several things `atomically', i.e., all the things are done immediately, and there is no chance of the instruction being half-completed or of another being interspersed. Used esp. to convey that an operation cannot be screwed up by interrupts. "This routine locks the file and increments the file's semaphore atomically." 2. [primarily techspeak] Guaranteed to complete successfully or not at all, usu. refers to database transactions. If an error prevents a partially-performed transaction from proceeding to completion, it must be "backed out," as the database must not be left in an inconsistent state. Computer usage, in either of the above senses, has none of the connotations that `atomic' has in mainstream English (i.e. of particles of matter, nuclear explosions etc.). :attoparsec: n. About an inch. `atto-' is the standard SI prefix for multiplication by 10^(-18). A parsec (parallax-second) is 3.26 light-years; an attoparsec is thus 3.26 * 10^(-18) light years, or about 3.1 cm (thus, 1 attoparsec/{microfortnight} equals about 1 inch/sec). This unit is reported to be in use (though probably not very seriously) among hackers in the U.K. See {micro-}. :AUP: /A-U-P/ Abbreviation, "Acceptable Use Policy". The policy of a given ISP which sets out what the ISP considers to be (un)acceptable uses of its Internet resources. :autobogotiphobia: /aw'toh-boh-got`*-foh'bee-*/ n. See {bogotify}. :automagically: /aw-toh-maj'i-klee/ adv. Automatically, but in a way that, for some reason (typically because it is too complicated, or too ugly, or perhaps even too trivial), the speaker doesn't feel like explaining to you. See {magic}. "The C-INTERCAL compiler generates C, then automagically invokes `cc(1)' to produce an executable." This term is quite old, going back at least to the mid-70s and probably much earlier. The word `automagic' occurred in advertising (for a shirt-ironing gadget) as far back as the late 1940s. :avatar: n. Syn. [in Hindu mythology, the incarnation of a god] 1. Among people working on virtual reality and {cyberspace} interfaces, an "avatar" is an icon or representation of a user in a shared virtual reality. The term is sometimes used on {MUD}s. 2. [CMU, Tektronix] {root}, {superuser}. There are quite a few Unix machines on which the name of the superuser account is `avatar' rather than `root'. This quirk was originated by a CMU hacker who found the terms `root' and `superuser' unimaginative, and thought `avatar' might better impress people with the \responsibility they were accepting. :awk: /awk/ 1. n. [Unix techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging text data developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (the name derives from their initials). It is characterized by C-like syntax, a declaration-free approach to variable typing and declarations, associative arrays, and field-oriented text processing. See also {Perl}. 2. n. Editing term for an expression awkward to manipulate through normal {regexp} facilities (for example, one containing a {newline}). 3. vt. To process data using `awk(1)'. = B = ===== :back door: n. A hole in the security of a system deliberately left in place by designers or maintainers. The motivation for such holes is not always sinister; some operating systems, for example, come out of the box with privileged accounts intended for use by field service technicians or the vendor's maintenance programmers. Syn. {trap door}; may also be called a `wormhole'. See also {iron box}, {cracker}, {worm}, {logic bomb}. Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than anyone expected or planned, and a few have become widely known. Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM admitted the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. In this scheme, the C compiler contained code that would recognize when the `login' command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him. Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to _use_ the compiler -- so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would _recognize when it was compiling a version of itself_, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled `login' the code to allow Thompson entry -- and, of course, the code to recognize itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources. The talk that suggested this truly moby hack was published as "Reflections on Trusting Trust", "Communications of the ACM 27", 8 (August 1984), pp. 761-763 (text available at `http://www.acm.org/classics'). Ken Thompson has since confirmed that this hack was implemented and that the Trojan Horse code did appear in the login binary of a Unix Support group machine. Ken says the crocked compiler was never distributed. Your editor has heard two separate reports that suggest that the crocked login did make it out of Bell Labs, notably to BBN, and that it enabled at least one late-night login across the network by someone using the login name `kt'. :backbone cabal: n. A group of large-site administrators who pushed through the {Great Renaming} and reined in the chaos of {Usenet} during most of the 1980s. During most of its lifetime, the Cabal (as it was sometimes capitalized) steadfastly denied its own existence; it was almost obligatory for anyone privy to their secrets to respond "There is no Cabal" whenever the existence or activities of the group were speculated on in public. The result of this policy was an attractive aura of mystery. Even a decade after the cabal {mailing list} disbanded in late 1988 following a bitter internal catfight, many people believed (or claimed to believe) that it had not actually disbanded but only gone deeper underground with its power intact. This belief became a model for various paranoid theories about various Cabals with dark nefarious objectives beginning with taking over the USENET or Internet. These paranoias were later satirized in ways that took on a life of their own. See {Eric Conspiracy} for one example. See {NANA} for the subsequent history of "the Cabal". :backbone site: n. A key Usenet and email site; one that processes a large amount of third-party traffic, especially if it is the home site of any of the regional coordinators for the Usenet maps. Notable backbone sites as of early 1993, when this sense of the term was beginning to pass out of general use due to wide availability of cheap Internet connections, included uunet and the mail machines at Rutgers University, UC Berkeley, {DEC}'s Western Research Laboratories, Ohio State University, and the University of Texas. Compare {rib site}, {leaf site}. [1996 update: This term is seldom heard any more. The UUCP network world that gave it meaning has nearly disappeared; everyone is on the Internet now and network traffic is distributed in very different patterns. --ESR] :backgammon:: See {bignum} (sense 3), {moby} (sense 4), and {pseudoprime}. :background: n.,adj.,vt. To do a task `in background' is to do it whenever {foreground} matters are not claiming your undivided attention, and `to background' something means to relegate it to a lower priority. "For now, we'll just print a list of nodes and links; I'm working on the graph-printing problem in background." Note that this implies ongoing activity but at a reduced level or in spare time, in contrast to mainstream `back burner' (which connotes benign neglect until some future resumption of activity). Some people prefer to use the term for processing that they have queued up for their unconscious minds (a tack that one can often fruitfully take upon encountering an obstacle in creative work). Compare {amp off}, {slopsucker}. Technically, a task running in background is detached from the terminal where it was started (and often running at a lower priority); oppose {foreground}. Nowadays this term is primarily associated with {{Unix}}, but it appears to have been first used in this sense on OS/360. :backreference: n. 1. In a regular expression or pattern match, the text which was matched within grouping parentheses parentheses. 2. The part of the pattern which refers back to the matched text. 3. By extension, anything which refers back to something which has been seen or discussed before. "When you said `she' just now, who were you backreferencing?" :backronym: n. [portmanteau of back + acronym] A word interpreted as an acronym that was not originally so intended. Examples are given under {BASIC}, {recursive acronym} (Cygnus), {Acme}, and {mung}. Discovering backronyms is a common form of wordplay among hackers. :backspace and overstrike: interj. Whoa! Back up. Used to suggest that someone just said or did something wrong. Common among APL programmers. :backward combatability: /bak'w*rd k*m-bat'*-bil'*-tee/ n. [CMU, Tektronix: from `backward compatibility'] A property of hardware or software revisions in which previous protocols, formats, layouts, etc. are irrevocably discarded in favor of `new and improved' protocols, formats, and layouts, leaving the previous ones not merely deprecated but actively defeated. (Too often, the old and new versions cannot definitively be distinguished, such that lingering instances of the previous ones yield crashes or other infelicitous effects, as opposed to a simple "version mismatch" message.) A backwards compatible change, on the other hand, allows old versions to coexist without crashes or error messages, but too many major changes incorporating elaborate backwards compatibility processing can lead to extreme {software bloat}. See also {flag day}. :BAD: /B-A-D/ adj. [IBM: acronym, `Broken As Designed'] Said of a program that is {bogus} because of bad design and misfeatures rather than because of bugginess. See {working as designed}. :Bad and Wrong: adj. [Durham, UK] Said of something that is both badly designed and wrongly executed. This common term is the prototype of, and is used by contrast with, three less common terms - Bad and Right (a kludge, something ugly but functional); Good and Wrong (an overblown GUI or other attractive nuisance); and (rare praise) Good and Right. These terms entered common use at Durham c.1994 and may have been imported from elsewhere. There are standard abbreviations: they start with B&R, a typo for "Bad and Wrong". Consequently, B&W is actually "Bad and Right", G&R = "Good and Wrong", and G&W = "Good and Right". Compare {evil and rude}, {Good Thing}, {Bad Thing}. :Bad Thing: n. [from the 1930 Sellar & Yeatman parody "1066 And All That"] Something that can't possibly result in improvement of the subject. This term is always capitalized, as in "Replacing all of the 9600-baud modems with bicycle couriers would be a Bad Thing". Oppose {Good Thing}. British correspondents confirm that {Bad Thing} and {Good Thing} (and prob. therefore {Right Thing} and {Wrong Thing}) come from the book referenced in the etymology, which discusses rulers who were Good Kings but Bad Things. This has apparently created a mainstream idiom on the British side of the pond. Compare {Bad and Wrong}. :bag on the side: n. [prob. originally related to a colostomy bag] An extension to an established hack that is supposed to add some functionality to the original. Usually derogatory, implying that the original was being overextended and should have been thrown away, and the new product is ugly, inelegant, or bloated. Also v. phrase, `to hang a bag on the side [of]'. "C++? That's just a bag on the side of C ...." "They want me to hang a bag on the side of the accounting system." :bagbiter: /bag'bi:t-*r/ n. 1. Something, such as a program or a computer, that fails to work, or works in a remarkably clumsy manner. "This text editor won't let me make a file with a line longer than 80 characters! What a bagbiter!" 2. A person who has caused you some trouble, inadvertently or otherwise, typically by failing to program the computer properly. Synonyms: {loser}, {cretin}, {chomper}. 3. `bite the bag' vi. To fail in some manner. "The computer keeps crashing every five minutes." "Yes, the disk controller is really biting the bag." The original loading of these terms was almost undoubtedly obscene, possibly referring to a douche bag or the scrotum (we have reports of "Bite the douche bag!" being used as an insult at MIT 1970-1976), but in their current usage they have become almost completely sanitized. ITS's `lexiphage' program was the first and to date only known example of a program _intended_ to be a bagbiter. :bagbiting: adj. Having the quality of a {bagbiter}. "This bagbiting system won't let me compute the factorial of a negative number." Compare {losing}, {cretinous}, {bletcherous}, `barfucious' (under {barfulous}) and `chomping' (under {chomp}). :balloonian variable: n. [Commodore users; perh. a deliberate phonetic mangling of `boolean variable'?] Any variable that doesn't actually hold or control state, but must nevertheless be declared, checked, or set. A typical balloonian variable started out as a flag attached to some environment feature that either became obsolete or was planned but never implemented. Compatibility concerns (or politics attached to same) may require that such a flag be treated as though it were {live}. :bamf: /bamf/ 1. [from X-Men comics; originally "bampf"] interj. Notional sound made by a person or object teleporting in or out of the hearer's vicinity. Often used in {virtual reality} (esp. {MUD}) electronic {fora} when a character wishes to make a dramatic entrance or exit. 2. The sound of magical transformation, used in virtual reality {fora} like MUDs. 3. In MUD circles, "bamf" is also used to refer to the act by which a MUD server sends a special notification to the MUD client to switch its connection to another server ("I'll set up the old site to just bamf people over to our new location."). 4. Used by MUDders on occasion in a more general sense related to sense 3, to refer to directing someone to another location or resource ("A user was asking about some technobabble so I bamfed them to http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon.html.") :banana label: n. The labels often used on the sides of {macrotape} reels, so called because they are shaped roughly like blunt-ended bananas. This term, like macrotapes themselves, is still current but visibly headed for obsolescence. :banana problem: n. [from the story of the little girl who said "I know how to spell `banana', but I don't know when to stop"]. Not knowing where or when to bring a production to a close (compare {fencepost error}). One may say `there is a banana problem' of an algorithm with poorly defined or incorrect termination conditions, or in discussing the evolution of a design that may be succumbing to featuritis (see also {creeping elegance}, {creeping featuritis}). See item 176 under {HAKMEM}, which describes a banana problem in a {Dissociated Press} implementation. Also, see {one-banana problem} for a superficially similar but unrelated usage. :binary four: n. [USENET] The finger, in the sense of `digitus impudicus'. This comes from an analogy between binary and the hand, i.e. 1=00001=thumb, 2=00010=index finger, 3=00011=index and thumb, 4=00100. Considered silly. Prob. from humorous derivative of {finger}, sense 4. :bandwidth: n. 1. Used by hackers (in a generalization of its technical meaning) as the volume of information per unit time that a computer, person, or transmission medium can handle. "Those are amazing graphics, but I missed some of the detail -- not enough bandwidth, I guess." Compare {low-bandwidth}. 2. Attention span. 3. On {Usenet}, a measure of network capacity that is often wasted by people complaining about how items posted by others are a waste of bandwidth. :bang: 1. n. Common spoken name for `!' (ASCII 0100001), especially when used in pronouncing a {bang path} in spoken hackish. In {elder days} this was considered a CMUish usage, with MIT and Stanford hackers preferring {excl} or {shriek}; but the spread of Unix has carried `bang' with it (esp. via the term {bang path}) and it is now certainly the most common spoken name for `!'. Note that it is used exclusively for non-emphatic written `!'; one would not say "Congratulations bang" (except possibly for humorous purposes), but if one wanted to specify the exact characters `foo!' one would speak "Eff oh oh bang". See {shriek}, {{ASCII}}. 2. interj. An exclamation signifying roughly "I have achieved enlightenment!", or "The dynamite has cleared out my brain!" Often used to acknowledge that one has perpetrated a {thinko} immediately after one has been called on it. :bang on: vt. To stress-test a piece of hardware or software: "I banged on the new version of the simulator all day yesterday and it didn't crash once. I guess it is ready for release." The term {pound on} is synonymous. :bang path: n. An old-style UUCP electronic-mail address specifying hops to get from some assumed-reachable location to the addressee, so called because each {hop} is signified by a {bang} sign. Thus, for example, the path ...!bigsite!foovax!barbox!me directs people to route their mail to machine bigsite (presumably a well-known location accessible to everybody) and from there through the machine foovax to the account of user me on barbox. In the bad old days of not so long ago, before autorouting mailers became commonplace, people often published compound bang addresses using the { } convention (see {glob}) to give paths from _several_ big machines, in the hopes that one's correspondent might be able to get mail to one of them reliably (example: ...!{seismo, ut-sally, ihnp4}!rice!beta!gamma!me). Bang paths of 8 to 10 hops were not uncommon in 1981. Late-night dial-up UUCP links would cause week-long transmission times. Bang paths were often selected by both transmission time and reliability, as messages would often get lost. See {{Internet address}}, {the network}, and {sitename}. :banner: n. 1. The title page added to printouts by most print spoolers (see {spool}). Typically includes user or account ID information in very large character-graphics capitals. Also called a `burst page', because it indicates where to burst (tear apart) fanfold paper to separate one user's printout from the next. 2. A similar printout generated (typically on multiple pages of fan-fold paper) from user-specified text, e.g., by a program such as Unix's `banner({1,6})'. 3. On interactive software, a first screen containing a logo and/or author credits and/or a copyright notice. :bar: /bar/ n. 1. The second {metasyntactic variable}, after {foo} and before {baz}. "Suppose we have two functions: FOO and BAR. FOO calls BAR...." 2. Often appended to {foo} to produce {foobar}. :bare metal: n. 1. New computer hardware, unadorned with such snares and delusions as an {operating system}, an {HLL}, or even assembler. Commonly used in the phrase `programming on the bare metal', which refers to the arduous work of {bit bashing} needed to create these basic tools for a new machine. Real bare-metal programming involves things like building boot proms and BIOS chips, implementing basic monitors used to test device drivers, and writing the assemblers that will be used to write the compiler back ends that will give the new machine a real development environment. 2. `Programming on the bare metal' is also used to describe a style of {hand-hacking} that relies on bit-level peculiarities of a particular hardware design, esp. tricks for speed and space optimization that rely on crocks such as overlapping instructions (or, as in the famous case described in {The Story of Mel} (in Appendix A), interleaving of opcodes on a magnetic drum to minimize fetch delays due to the device's rotational latency). This sort of thing has become less common as the relative costs of programming time and machine resources have changed, but is still found in heavily constrained environments such as industrial embedded systems, and in the code of hackers who just can't let go of that low-level control. See {Real Programmer}. In the world of personal computing, bare metal programming (especially in sense 1 but sometimes also in sense 2) is often considered a {Good Thing}, or at least a necessary evil (because these machines have often been sufficiently slow and poorly designed to make it necessary; see {ill-behaved}). There, the term usually refers to bypassing the BIOS or OS interface and writing the application to directly access device registers and machine addresses. "To get 19.2 kilobaud on the serial port, you need to get down to the bare metal." People who can do this sort of thing well are held in high regard. :barf: /barf/ n.,v. [from mainstream slang meaning `vomit'] 1. interj. Term of disgust. This is the closest hackish equivalent of the Valspeak "gag me with a spoon". (Like, euwww!) See {bletch}. 2. vi. To say "Barf!" or emit some similar expression of disgust. "I showed him my latest hack and he barfed" means only that he complained about it, not that he literally vomited. 3. vi. To fail to work because of unacceptable input, perhaps with a suitable error message, perhaps not. Examples: "The division operation barfs if you try to divide by 0." (That is, the division operation checks for an attempt to divide by zero, and if one is encountered it causes the operation to fail in some unspecified, but generally obvious, manner.) "The text editor barfs if you try to read in a new file before writing out the old one." See {choke}, {gag}. In Commonwealth Hackish, `barf' is generally replaced by `puke' or `vom'. {barf} is sometimes also used as a {metasyntactic variable}, like {foo} or {bar}. :barfmail: n. Multiple {bounce message}s accumulating to the level of serious annoyance, or worse. The sort of thing that happens when an inter-network mail gateway goes down or wonky. :barfulation: /bar`fyoo-lay'sh*n/ interj. Variation of {barf} used around the Stanford area. An exclamation, expressing disgust. On seeing some particularly bad code one might exclaim, "Barfulation! Who wrote this, Quux?" :barfulous: /bar'fyoo-l*s/ adj. (alt. `barfucious', /bar-fyoo-sh*s/) Said of something that would make anyone barf, if only for esthetic reasons. :barn: n. [uncommon; prob. from the nuclear military] An unexpectedly large quantity of something: a unit of measurement. "Why is /var/adm taking up so much space?" "The logs have grown to several barns." The source of this is clear: when physicists were first studying nuclear interactions, the probability was thought to be proportional to the cross-sectional area of the nucleus (this probability is still called the cross-section). Upon experimenting, they discovered the interactions were far more probable than expected; the nuclei were `as big as a barn'. The units for cross-sections were christened Barns, (10^-24 cm^2) and the book containing cross-sections has a picture of a barn on the cover. :barney: n. In Commonwealth hackish, `barney' is to {fred} (sense #1) as {bar} is to {foo}. That is, people who commonly use `fred' as their first metasyntactic variable will often use `barney' second. The reference is, of course, to Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble in the Flintstones cartoons. :baroque: adj. Feature-encrusted; complex; gaudy; verging on excessive. Said of hardware or (esp.) software designs, this has many of the connotations of {elephantine} or {monstrosity} but is less extreme and not pejorative in itself. "Metafont even has features to introduce random variations to its letterform output. Now _that_ is baroque!" See also {rococo}. :BASIC: /bay'-sic/ n. A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which has since become the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in "Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective" that "It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." This is another case (like {Pascal}) of the cascading lossage that happens when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer (a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros. As it is, it ruins thousands of potential wizards a year. [1995: Some languages called `BASIC' aren't quite this nasty any more, having acquired Pascal- and C-like procedures and control structures and shed their line numbers. --ESR] Note: the name is commonly parsed as Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, but this is a {backronym}. BASIC was originally named Basic, simply because it was a simple and basic programming language. Because most programming language names were in fact acronyms, BASIC was often capitalized just out of habit or to be silly. No acronym for BASIC originally existed or was intended (as one can verify by reading texts through the early 1970s). Later, around the mid-1970s, people began to make up backronyms for BASIC because they weren't sure. Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code is the onethat caught on. :batbelt: n. Many hackers routinely hang numerous devices such as pagers, cell-phones, personal organizers, leatherman multitools, pocket knives, flashlights, walkie-talkies, even miniature computers from their belts. When many of these devices are worn at once, the hacker's belt somewhat resembles Batman's utility belt; hence it is referred to as a batbelt. :batch: adj. 1. Non-interactive. Hackers use this somewhat more loosely than the traditional technical definitions justify; in particular, switches on a normally interactive program that prepare it to receive non-interactive command input are often referred to as `batch mode' switches. A `batch file' is a series of instructions written to be handed to an interactive program running in batch mode. 2. Performance of dreary tasks all at one sitting. "I finally sat down in batch mode and wrote out checks for all those bills; I guess they'll turn the electricity back on next week..." 3. `batching up': Accumulation of a number of small tasks that can be lumped together for greater efficiency. "I'm batching up those letters to send sometime" "I'm batching up bottles to take to the recycling center." :bathtub curve: n. Common term for the curve (resembling an end-to-end section of one of those claw-footed antique bathtubs) that describes the expected failure rate of electronics with time: initially high, dropping to near 0 for most of the system's lifetime, then rising again as it `tires out'. See also {burn-in period}, {infant mortality}. :baud: /bawd/ n. [simplified from its technical meaning] n. Bits per second. Hence kilobaud or Kbaud, thousands of bits per second. The technical meaning is `level transitions per second'; this coincides with bps only for two-level modulation with no framing or stop bits. Most hackers are aware of these nuances but blithely ignore them. Historical note: `baud' was originally a unit of telegraph signalling speed, set at one pulse per second. It was proposed at the International Telegraph Conference of 1927, and named after J.M.E. Baudot (1845-1903), the French engineer who constructed the first successful teleprinter. :baud barf: /bawd barf/ n. The garbage one gets on the monitor when using a modem connection with some protocol setting (esp. line speed) incorrect, or when someone picks up a voice extension on the same line, or when really bad line noise disrupts the connection. Baud barf is not completely {random}, by the way; hackers with a lot of serial-line experience can usually tell whether the device at the other end is expecting a higher or lower speed than the terminal is set to. _Really_ experienced ones can identify particular speeds. :baz: /baz/ n. 1. The third {metasyntactic variable} "Suppose we have three functions: FOO, BAR, and BAZ. FOO calls BAR, which calls BAZ...." (See also {fum}) 2. interj. A term of mild annoyance. In this usage the term is often drawn out for 2 or 3 seconds, producing an effect not unlike the bleating of a sheep; /baaaaaaz/. 3. Occasionally appended to {foo} to produce `foobaz'. Earlier versions of this lexicon derived `baz' as a Stanford corruption of {bar}. However, Pete Samson (compiler of the {TMRC} lexicon) reports it was already current when he joined TMRC in 1958. He says "It came from "Pogo". Albert the Alligator, when vexed or outraged, would shout `Bazz Fazz!' or `Rowrbazzle!' The club layout was said to model the (mythical) New England counties of Rowrfolk and Bassex (Rowrbazzle mingled with (Norfolk/Suffolk/Middlesex/Essex)." :bazaar: n.,adj. In 1997, after contemplating the success of {Linux} for three years, the Jargon File's own editor ESR wrote an analytical paper on hacker culture and development models titled The Cathedral and the Bazaar (http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/). The title metaphor caught on (see also {cathedral}), and the style of development typical in the Linux community is often referred to as the bazaar mode. Its characteristics include releasing code early and often, and actively seeking the largest possible pool of peer reviewers. :bboard: /bee'bord/ n. [contraction of `bulletin board'] 1. Any electronic bulletin board; esp. used of {BBS} systems running on personal micros, less frequently of a Usenet {newsgroup} (in fact, use of this term for a newsgroup generally marks one either as a {newbie} fresh in from the BBS world or as a real old-timer predating Usenet). 2. At CMU and other colleges with similar facilities, refers to campus-wide electronic bulletin boards. 3. The term `physical bboard' is sometimes used to refer to an old-fashioned, non-electronic cork-and-thumbtack memo board. At CMU, it refers to a particular one outside the CS Lounge. In either of senses 1 or 2, the term is usually prefixed by the name of the intended board (`the Moonlight Casino bboard' or `market bboard'); however, if the context is clear, the better-read bboards may be referred to by name alone, as in (at CMU) "Don't post for-sale ads on general". :BBS: /B-B-S/ n. [abbreviation, `Bulletin Board System'] An electronic bulletin board system; that is, a message database where people can log in and leave broadcast messages for others grouped (typically) into {topic group}s. Thousands of local BBS systems are in operation throughout the U.S., typically run by amateurs for fun out of their homes on MS-DOS boxes with a single modem line each. Fans of Usenet and Internet or the big commercial timesharing bboards such as CompuServe and GEnie tend to consider local BBSes the low-rent district of the hacker culture, but they serve a valuable function by knitting together lots of hackers and users in the personal-micro world who would otherwise be unable to exchange code at all. See also {bboard}. :BCPL: // n. [acronym, `Basic Combined Programming Language') A programming language developed by Martin Richards in Cambridge in 1967. It is remarkable for its rich syntax, small size of compiler (it can be run in 16k) and extreme portability. It reached break-even point at a very early stage, and was the language in which the original {hello world} program was written. It has been ported to so many different systems that its creator confesses to having lost count. It has only one data type (a machine word) which can be used as an integer, a character, a floating point number, a pointer, or almost anything else, depending on context. BCPL was a precursor of C, which inherited some of its features. :beam: vt. [from Star Trek Classic's "Beam me up, Scotty!"] To transfer {softcopy} of a file electronically; most often in combining forms such as `beam me a copy' or `beam that over to his site'. Compare {blast}, {snarf}, {BLT}. :beanie key: n. [Mac users] See {command key}. :beep: n.,v. Syn. {feep}. This term is techspeak under MS-DOS and OS/2, and seems to be generally preferred among micro hobbyists. :Befunge: n. A worthy companion to {INTERCAL}; a computer language family which escapes the quotidian limitation of linear control flow and embraces program counters flying through multiple dimensions with exotic topologies. For details, see the Befunge home page at `http://www.cats-eye.com/cet/soft/lang/befunge/'. :beige toaster: n. A Macintosh. See {toaster}; compare {Macintrash}, {maggotbox}. :bells and whistles: n. Features added to a program or system to make it more {flavorful} from a hacker's point of view, without necessarily adding to its utility for its primary function. Distinguished from {chrome}, which is intended to attract users. "Now that we've got the basic program working, let's go back and add some bells and whistles." No one seems to know what distinguishes a bell from a whistle. The recognized emphatic form is "bells, whistles, and gongs". It used to be thought that this term derived from the toyboxes on theater organs. However, the "and gongs" strongly suggests a different origin, at sea. Before powered horns, ships routinely used bells, whistles, and gongs to signal each other over longer distances than voice can carry. :bells whistles and gongs: n. A standard elaborated form of {bells and whistles}; typically said with a pronounced and ironic accent on the `gongs'. :benchmark: [techspeak] n. An inaccurate measure of computer performance. "In the computer industry, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and benchmarks." Well-known ones include Whetstone, Dhrystone, Rhealstone (see {h}), the Gabriel LISP benchmarks (see {gabriel}), the SPECmark suite, and LINPACK. See also {machoflops}, {MIPS}, {smoke and mirrors}. :Berkeley Quality Software: adj. (often abbreviated `BQS') Term used in a pejorative sense to refer to software that was apparently created by rather spaced-out hackers late at night to solve some unique problem. It usually has nonexistent, incomplete, or incorrect documentation, has been tested on at least two examples, and core dumps when anyone else attempts to use it. This term was frequently applied to early versions of the `dbx(1)' debugger. See also {Berzerkeley}. Note to British and Commonwealth readers: that's /berk'lee/, not /bark'lee/ as in British Received Pronunciation. :berklix: /berk'liks/ n.,adj. [contraction of `Berkeley Unix'] See {BSD}. Not used at Berkeley itself. May be more common among {suit}s attempting to sound like cognoscenti than among hackers, who usually just say `BSD'. :Berzerkeley: /b*r-zer'klee/ n. [from `berserk', via the name of a now-deceased record label; poss. originated by famed columnist Herb Caen] Humorous distortion of `Berkeley' used esp. to refer to the practices or products of the {BSD} Unix hackers. See {software bloat}, {Missed'em-five}, {Berkeley Quality Software}. Mainstream use of this term in reference to the cultural and political peculiarities of UC Berkeley as a whole has been reported from as far back as the 1960s. :beta: /bay't*/, /be't*/ or (Commonwealth) /bee't*/ n. 1. Mostly working, but still under test; usu. used with `in': `in beta'. In the {Real World}, systems (hardware or software) software often go through two stages of release testing: Alpha (in-house) and Beta (out-house?). Beta releases are generally made to a group of lucky (or unlucky) trusted customers. 2. Anything that is new and experimental. "His girlfriend is in beta" means that he is still testing for compatibility and reserving judgment. 3. Flaky; dubious; suspect (since beta software is notoriously buggy). Historical note: More formally, to beta-test is to test a pre-release (potentially unreliable) version of a piece of software by making it available to selected (or self-selected) customers and users. This term derives from early 1960s terminology for product cycle checkpoints, first used at IBM but later standard throughout the industry. `Alpha Test' was the unit, module, or component test phase; `Beta Test' was initial system test. These themselves came from earlier A- and B-tests for hardware. The A-test was a feasibility and manufacturability evaluation done before any commitment to design and development. The B-test was a demonstration that the engineering model functioned as specified. The C-test (corresponding to today's beta) was the B-test performed on early samples of the production design, and the D test was the C test repeated after the model had been in production a while. :BFI: /B-F-I/ n. See {brute force and ignorance}. Also encountered in the variants `BFMI', `brute force and _massive_ ignorance' and `BFBI' `brute force and bloody ignorance'. :bible: n. 1. One of a small number of fundamental source books such as {Knuth} and {K&R}. 2. The most detailed and authoritative reference for a particular language, operating system, or other complex software system. :BiCapitalization: n. The act said to have been performed on trademarks (such as {PostScript}, NeXT, {NeWS}, VisiCalc, FrameMaker, TK!solver, EasyWriter) that have been raised above the ruck of common coinage by nonstandard capitalization. Too many {marketroid} types think this sort of thing is really cute, even the 2,317th time they do it. Compare {studlycaps}. :B1FF: /bif/ [Usenet] (alt. `BIFF') n. The most famous {pseudo}, and the prototypical {newbie}. Articles from B1FF feature all uppercase letters sprinkled liberally with bangs, typos, `cute' misspellings (EVRY BUDY LUVS GOOD OLD BIFF CUZ HE"S A K00L DOOD AN HE RITES REEL AWESUM THINGZ IN CAPITULL LETTRS LIKE THIS!!!), use (and often misuse) of fragments of {talk mode} abbreviations, a long {sig block} (sometimes even a {doubled sig}), and unbounded naivete. B1FF posts articles using his elder brother's VIC-20. B1FF's location is a mystery, as his articles appear to come from a variety of sites. However, {BITNET} seems to be the most frequent origin. The theory that B1FF is a denizen of BITNET is supported by B1FF's (unfortunately invalid) electronic mail address: B1FF@BIT.NET. [1993: Now It Can Be Told! My spies inform me that B1FF was originally created by Joe Talmadge , also the author of the infamous and much-plagiarized "Flamer's Bible". The BIFF filter he wrote was later passed to Richard Sexton, who posted BIFFisms much more widely. Versions have since been posted for the amusement of the net at large. --ESR] :biff: /bif/ vt. To notify someone of incoming mail. From the BSD utility `biff(1)', which was in turn named after a friendly dog who used to chase frisbees in the halls at UCB while 4.2BSD was in development. There was a legend that it had a habit of barking whenever the mailman came, but the author of `biff' says this is not true. No relation to {B1FF}. :Big Gray Wall: n. What faces a {VMS} user searching for documentation. A full VMS kit comes on a pallet, the documentation taking up around 15 feet of shelf space before the addition of layered products such as compilers, databases, multivendor networking, and programming tools. Recent (since VMS version 5) documentation comes with gray binders; under VMS version 4 the binders were orange (`big orange wall'), and under version 3 they were blue. See {VMS}. Often contracted to `Gray Wall'. :big iron: n. Large, expensive, ultra-fast computers. Used generally of {number-crunching} supercomputers such as Crays, but can include more conventional big commercial IBMish mainframes. Term of approval; compare {heavy metal}, oppose {dinosaur}. :Big Red Switch: n. [IBM] The power switch on a computer, esp. the `Emergency Pull' switch on an IBM {mainframe} or the power switch on an IBM PC where it really is large and red. "This !@%$% {bitty box} is hung again; time to hit the Big Red Switch." Sources at IBM report that, in tune with the company's passion for {TLA}s, this is often abbreviated as `BRS' (this has also become established on FidoNet and in the PC {clone} world). It is alleged that the emergency pull switch on an IBM 360/91 actually fired a non-conducting bolt into the main power feed; the BRSes on more recent mainframes physically drop a block into place so that they can't be pushed back in. People get fired for pulling them, especially inappropriately (see also {molly-guard}). Compare {power cycle}, {three-finger salute}, {120 reset}; see also {scram switch}. :Big Room: n. The extremely large room with the blue ceiling and intensely bright light (during the day) or black ceiling with lots of tiny night-lights (during the night) found outside all computer installations. "He can't come to the phone right now, he's somewhere out in the Big Room." :big win: n. Serendipity. "Yes, those two physicists discovered high-temperature superconductivity in a batch of ceramic that had been prepared incorrectly according to their experimental schedule. Small mistake; big win!" See {win big}. :big-endian: adj. [From Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" via the famous paper "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace" by Danny Cohen, USC/ISI IEN 137, dated April 1, 1980] 1. Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given multi-byte numeric representation, the most significant byte has the lowest address (the word is stored `big-end-first'). Most processors, including the IBM 370 family, the {PDP-10}, the Motorola microprocessor families, and most of the various RISC designs are big-endian. Big-endian byte order is also sometimes called `network order'. See {little-endian}, {middle-endian}, {NUXI problem}, {swab}. 2. An {{Internet address}} the wrong way round. Most of the world follows the Internet standard and writes email addresses starting with the name of the computer and ending up with the name of the country. In the U.K. the Joint Networking Team had decided to do it the other way round before the Internet domain standard was established. Most gateway sites have {ad-hockery} in their mailers to handle this, but can still be confused. In particular, the address me@uk.ac.bris.pys.as could be interpreted in JANET's big-endian way as one in the U.K. (domain uk) or in the standard little-endian way as one in the domain as (American Samoa) on the opposite side of the world. :bignum: /big'nuhm/ n. [orig. from MIT MacLISP] 1. [techspeak] A multiple-precision computer representation for very large integers. 2. More generally, any very large number. "Have you ever looked at the United States Budget? There's bignums for you!" 3. [Stanford] In backgammon, large numbers on the dice especially a roll of double fives or double sixes (compare {moby}, sense 4). See also {El Camino Bignum}. Sense 1 may require some explanation. Most computer languages provide a kind of data called `integer', but such computer integers are usually very limited in size; usually they must be smaller than 2^(31) (2,147,483,648) or (on a {bitty box}) 2^(15) (32,768). If you want to work with numbers larger than that, you have to use floating-point numbers, which are usually accurate to only six or seven decimal places. Computer languages that provide bignums can perform exact calculations on very large numbers, such as 1000! (the factorial of 1000, which is 1000 times 999 times 998 times ... times 2 times 1). For example, this value for 1000! was computed by the MacLISP system using bignums: 40238726007709377354370243392300398571937486421071 46325437999104299385123986290205920442084869694048 00479988610197196058631666872994808558901323829669 94459099742450408707375991882362772718873251977950 59509952761208749754624970436014182780946464962910 56393887437886487337119181045825783647849977012476 63288983595573543251318532395846307555740911426241 74743493475534286465766116677973966688202912073791 43853719588249808126867838374559731746136085379534 52422158659320192809087829730843139284440328123155 86110369768013573042161687476096758713483120254785 89320767169132448426236131412508780208000261683151 02734182797770478463586817016436502415369139828126 48102130927612448963599287051149649754199093422215 66832572080821333186116811553615836546984046708975 60290095053761647584772842188967964624494516076535 34081989013854424879849599533191017233555566021394 50399736280750137837615307127761926849034352625200 01588853514733161170210396817592151090778801939317 81141945452572238655414610628921879602238389714760 88506276862967146674697562911234082439208160153780 88989396451826324367161676217916890977991190375403 12746222899880051954444142820121873617459926429565 81746628302955570299024324153181617210465832036786 90611726015878352075151628422554026517048330422614 39742869330616908979684825901254583271682264580665 26769958652682272807075781391858178889652208164348 34482599326604336766017699961283186078838615027946 59551311565520360939881806121385586003014356945272 24206344631797460594682573103790084024432438465657 24501440282188525247093519062092902313649327349756 55139587205596542287497740114133469627154228458623 77387538230483865688976461927383814900140767310446 64025989949022222176590433990188601856652648506179 97023561938970178600408118897299183110211712298459 01641921068884387121855646124960798722908519296819 37238864261483965738229112312502418664935314397013 74285319266498753372189406942814341185201580141233 44828015051399694290153483077644569099073152433278 28826986460278986432113908350621709500259738986355 42771967428222487575867657523442202075736305694988 25087968928162753848863396909959826280956121450994 87170124451646126037902930912088908694202851064018 21543994571568059418727489980942547421735824010636 77404595741785160829230135358081840096996372524230 56085590370062427124341690900415369010593398383577 79394109700277534720000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000. :bigot: n. A person who is religiously attached to a particular computer, language, operating system, editor, or other tool (see {religious issues}). Usually found with a specifier; thus, `cray bigot', `ITS bigot', `APL bigot', `VMS bigot', `Berkeley bigot'. Real bigots can be distinguished from mere partisans or zealots by the fact that they refuse to learn alternatives even when the march of time and/or technology is threatening to obsolete the favored tool. It is truly said "You can tell a bigot, but you can't tell him much." Compare {weenie}. :bit: n. [from the mainstream meaning and `Binary digIT'] 1. [techspeak] The unit of information; the amount of information obtained by asking a yes-or-no question for which the two outcomes are equally probable. 2. [techspeak] A computational quantity that can take on one of two values, such as true and false or 0 and 1. 3. A mental flag: a reminder that something should be done eventually. "I have a bit set for you." (I haven't seen you for a while, and I'm supposed to tell or ask you something.) 4. More generally, a (possibly incorrect) mental state of belief. "I have a bit set that says that you were the last guy to hack on EMACS." (Meaning "I think you were the last guy to hack on EMACS, and what I am about to say is predicated on this, so please stop me if this isn't true.") "I just need one bit from you" is a polite way of indicating that you intend only a short interruption for a question that can presumably be answered yes or no. A bit is said to be `set' if its value is true or 1, and `reset' or `clear' if its value is false or 0. One speaks of setting and clearing bits. To {toggle} or `invert' a bit is to change it, either from 0 to 1 or from 1 to 0. See also {flag}, {trit}, {mode bit}. The term `bit' first appeared in print in the computer-science sense in 1949, and seems to have been coined by early computer scientist John Tukey. Tukey records that it evolved over a lunch table as a handier alternative to `bigit' or `binit'. :bit bang: n. Transmission of data on a serial line, when accomplished by rapidly tweaking a single output bit, in software, at the appropriate times. The technique is a simple loop with eight OUT and SHIFT instruction pairs for each byte. Input is more interesting. And full duplex (doing input and output at the same time) is one way to separate the real hackers from the {wannabee}s. Bit bang was used on certain early models of Prime computers, presumably when UARTs were too expensive, and on archaic Z80 micros with a Zilog PIO but no SIO. In an interesting instance of the {cycle of reincarnation}, this technique returned to use in the early 1990s on some RISC architectures because it consumes such an infinitesimal part of the processor that it actually makes sense not to have a UART. Compare {cycle of reincarnation}. :bit bashing: n. (alt. `bit diddling' or {bit twiddling}) Term used to describe any of several kinds of low-level programming characterized by manipulation of {bit}, {flag}, {nybble}, and other smaller-than-character-sized pieces of data; these include low-level device control, encryption algorithms, checksum and error-correcting codes, hash functions, some flavors of graphics programming (see {bitblt}), and assembler/compiler code generation. May connote either tedium or a real technical challenge (more usually the former). "The command decoding for the new tape driver looks pretty solid but the bit-bashing for the control registers still has bugs." See also {bit bang}, {mode bit}. :bit bucket: n. 1. The universal data sink (originally, the mythical receptacle used to catch bits when they fall off the end of a register during a shift instruction). Discarded, lost, or destroyed data is said to have `gone to the bit bucket'. On {{Unix}}, often used for {/dev/null}. Sometimes amplified as `the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky'. 2. The place where all lost mail and news messages eventually go. The selection is performed according to {Finagle's Law}; important mail is much more likely to end up in the bit bucket than junk mail, which has an almost 100% probability of getting delivered. Routing to the bit bucket is automatically performed by mail-transfer agents, news systems, and the lower layers of the network. 3. The ideal location for all unwanted mail responses: "Flames about this article to the bit bucket." Such a request is guaranteed to overflow one's mailbox with flames. 4. Excuse for all mail that has not been sent. "I mailed you those figures last week; they must have landed in the bit bucket." Compare {black hole}. This term is used purely in jest. It is based on the fanciful notion that bits are objects that are not destroyed but only misplaced. This appears to have been a mutation of an earlier term `bit box', about which the same legend was current; old-time hackers also report that trainees used to be told that when the CPU stored bits into memory it was actually pulling them `out of the bit box'. See also {chad box}. Another variant of this legend has it that, as a consequence of the `parity preservation law', the number of 1 bits that go to the bit bucket must equal the number of 0 bits. Any imbalance results in bits filling up the bit bucket. A qualified computer technician can empty a full bit bucket as part of scheduled maintenance. :bit decay: n. See {bit rot}. People with a physics background tend to prefer this variant for the analogy with particle decay. See also {computron}, {quantum bogodynamics}. :bit rot: n. Also {bit decay}. Hypothetical disease the existence of which has been deduced from the observation that unused programs or features will often stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if `nothing has changed'. The theory explains that bits decay as if they were radioactive. As time passes, the contents of a file or the code in a program will become increasingly garbled. There actually are physical processes that produce such effects (alpha particles generated by trace radionuclides in ceramic chip packages, for example, can change the contents of a computer memory unpredictably, and various kinds of subtle media failures can corrupt files in mass storage), but they are quite rare (and computers are built with error-detecting circuitry to compensate for them). The notion long favored among hackers that cosmic rays are among the causes of such events turns out to be a myth; see the {cosmic rays} entry for details. The term {software rot} is almost synonymous. Software rot is the effect, bit rot the notional cause. :bit twiddling: n. 1. (pejorative) An exercise in tuning (see {tune}) in which incredible amounts of time and effort go to produce little noticeable improvement, often with the result that the code becomes incomprehensible. 2. Aimless small modification to a program, esp. for some pointless goal. 3. Approx. syn. for {bit bashing}; esp. used for the act of frobbing the device control register of a peripheral in an attempt to get it back to a known state. :bit-paired keyboard: n. obs. (alt. `bit-shift keyboard') A non-standard keyboard layout that seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several years on early computer equipment. The ASR-33 was a mechanical device (see {EOU}), so the only way to generate the character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage. The design of the ASR-33 assigned each character key a basic pattern that could be modified by flipping bits if the SHIFT or the CTRL key was pressed. In order to avoid making the thing even more of a kluge than it already was, the design had to group characters that shared the same basic bit pattern on one key. Looking at the ASCII chart, we find: high low bits bits 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001 010 ! " # $ % & ' ( ) 011 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 This is why the characters !"#$%&'() appear where they do on a Teletype (thankfully, they didn't use shift-0 for space). This was _not_ the weirdest variant of the {QWERTY} layout widely seen, by the way; that prize should probably go to one of several (differing) arrangements on IBM's even clunkier 026 and 029 card punches. When electronic terminals became popular, in the early 1970s, there was no agreement in the industry over how the keyboards should be laid out. Some vendors opted to emulate the Teletype keyboard, while others used the flexibility of electronic circuitry to make their product look like an office typewriter. These alternatives became known as `bit-paired' and `typewriter-paired' keyboards. To a hacker, the bit-paired keyboard seemed far more logical -- and because most hackers in those days had never learned to touch-type, there was little pressure from the pioneering users to adapt keyboards to the typewriter standard. The doom of the bit-paired keyboard was the large-scale introduction of the computer terminal into the normal office environment, where out-and-out technophobes were expected to use the equipment. The `typewriter-paired' standard became universal, `bit-paired' hardware was quickly junked or relegated to dusty corners, and both terms passed into disuse. However, in countries without a long history of touch typing, the argument against the bit-paired keyboard layout was weak or nonexistent. As a result, the standard Japanese keyboard, used on PC's, Unix boxen etc. still has all of the !"#$%&'() characters above the numbers in the ASR-33 layout. :bitblt: /bit'blit/ n. [from {BLT}, q.v.] 1. Any of a family of closely related algorithms for moving and copying rectangles of bits between main and display memory on a bit-mapped device, or between two areas of either main or display memory (the requirement to do the {Right Thing} in the case of overlapping source and destination rectangles is what makes BitBlt tricky). 2. Synonym for {blit} or {BLT}. Both uses are borderline techspeak. :BITNET: /bit'net/ n., obs. [acronym: Because It's Time NETwork] Everybody's least favorite piece of the network (see {the network}). The BITNET hosts were a collection of IBM dinosaurs and VAXen (the latter with lobotomized comm hardware) that communicate using 80-character {{EBCDIC}} card images (see {eighty-column mind}); thus, they tend to mangle the headers and text of third-party traffic from the rest of the ASCII/{RFC}-822 world with annoying regularity. BITNET was also notorious as the apparent home of {B1FF}. By 1995 it had, much to everyone's relief, been obsolesced and absorbed into the Internet. :bits: pl.n. 1. Information. Examples: "I need some bits about file formats." ("I need to know about file formats.") Compare {core dump}, sense 4. 2. Machine-readable representation of a document, specifically as contrasted with paper: "I have only a photocopy of the Jargon File; does anyone know where I can get the bits?". See {softcopy}, {source of all good bits} See also {bit}. :bitty box: /bit'ee boks/ n. 1. A computer sufficiently small, primitive, or incapable as to cause a hacker acute claustrophobia at the thought of developing software on or for it. Especially used of small, obsolescent, single-tasking-only personal machines such as the Atari 800, Osborne, Sinclair, VIC-20, TRS-80, or IBM PC. 2. [Pejorative] More generally, the opposite of `real computer' (see {Get a real computer!}). See also {mess-dos}, {toaster}, and {toy}. :bixie: /bik'see/ n. Variant {emoticon}s used on BIX (the Byte Information eXchange). The most common ({smiley}) bixie is <@_@>, apparently intending to represent two cartoon eyes and a mouth (the bixie conventions have been influenced by Japanese anime). A few others have been reported: `^_^ ^-^' two variant smileys `-_-' frown; closest equivalent of :-( `@_@' bewilderment (uncommon) `O_o o_O' bewilderment (more common) `?_?' puzzlement `!_! O_O' surprise `$_$' money on the mind `%_% ;_;' crying `*_*' zoned out `>_<' puckered up, squinting `(C)_(C)' looking crosseyed at somebody, "Oh, please!" A period (.) can be substituted for the underbar mouth where felt appropriate, for example: `o.O' as opposed to `o_O'. This is sometimes considered to amplify what is being sent over. Equals signs (=) can be appended to one to denote hair or a feline, as in `=^_^='. In the Japanese anime modern bixies often are modeled on, when a character is noted to be nervous a big water-drop-like thing forms somewhere around its head - also called a sweat drop or "bigsweat". This is denoted by a semicolon after the bixie, as in `^_^;;'. :black art: n. A collection of arcane, unpublished, and (by implication) mostly ad-hoc techniques developed for a particular application or systems area (compare {black magic}). VLSI design and compiler code optimization were (in their beginnings) considered classic examples of black art; as theory developed they became {deep magic}, and once standard textbooks had been written, became merely {heavy wizardry}. The huge proliferation of formal and informal channels for spreading around new computer-related technologies during the last twenty years has made both the term `black art' and what it describes less common than formerly. See also {voodoo programming}. :black hole: n. What a piece of email or netnews has fallen into if it disappears mysteriously between its origin and destination sites (that is, without returning a {bounce message}). "I think there's a black hole at foovax!" conveys suspicion that site foovax has been dropping a lot of stuff on the floor lately (see {drop on the floor}). The implied metaphor of email as interstellar travel is interesting in itself. Compare {bit bucket}. :black magic: n. A technique that works, though nobody really understands why. More obscure than {voodoo programming}, which may be done by cookbook. Compare also {black art}, {deep magic}, and {magic number} (sense 2). :Black Screen of Death: n. [prob. related to the Floating Head of Death in a famous "Far Side" cartoon.] A failure mode of {Microsloth Windows}. On an attempt to launch a DOS box, a networked Windows system not uncommonly blanks the screen and locks up the PC so hard that it requires a cold {boot} to recover. This unhappy phenomenon is known as The Black Screen of Death. See also {Blue Screen of Death}. :Black Thursday: n. February 8th, 1996 - the day of the signing into law of the {CDA}, so called by analogy with the catastrophic "Black Friday" in 1929 that began the Great Depression. :blammo: v. [Oxford Brookes University and alumni, UK] To forcibly remove someone from any interactive system, especially talker systems. The operators, who may remain hidden, may `blammo' a user who is misbehaving. Very similar to MIT {gun}; in fact, the `blammo-gun' is a notional device used to `blammo' someone. While in actual fact the only incarnation of the blammo-gun is the command used to forcibly eject a user, operators speak of different levels of blammo-gun fire; e.g., a blammo-gun to `stun' will temporarily remove someone, but a blammo-gun set to `maim' will stop someone coming back on for a while. :blargh: /blarg/ n. [MIT] The opposite of {ping}, sense 5; an exclamation indicating that one has absorbed or is emitting a quantum of unhappiness. Less common than {ping}. :blast: 1. v.,n. Synonym for {BLT}, used esp. for large data sends over a network or comm line. Opposite of {snarf}. Usage: uncommon. The variant `blat' has been reported. 2. vt. [HP/Apollo] Synonymous with {nuke} (sense 3). Sometimes the message `Unable to kill all processes. Blast them (y/n)?' would appear in the command window upon logout. :blat: n. 1. Syn. {blast}, sense 1. 2. See {thud}. :bletch: /blech/ interj. [from Yiddish/German `brechen', to vomit, poss. via comic-strip exclamation `blech'] Term of disgust. Often used in "Ugh, bletch". Compare {barf}. :bletcherous: /blech'*-r*s/ adj. Disgusting in design or function; esthetically unappealing. This word is seldom used of people. "This keyboard is bletcherous!" (Perhaps the keys don't work very well, or are misplaced.) See {losing}, {cretinous}, {bagbiting}, {bogus}, and {random}. The term {bletcherous} applies to the esthetics of the thing so described; similarly for {cretinous}. By contrast, something that is `losing' or `bagbiting' may be failing to meet objective criteria. See also {bogus} and {random}, which have richer and wider shades of meaning than any of the above. :blink: vi.,n. To use a navigator or off-line message reader to minimize time spent on-line to a commercial network service. As of late 1994, this term was said to be in wide use in the UK, but is rare or unknown in the US. :blinkenlights: /blink'*n-li:tz/ n. Front-panel diagnostic lights on a computer, esp. a {dinosaur}. Derives from the last word of the famous blackletter-Gothic sign in mangled pseudo-German that once graced about half the computer rooms in the English-speaking world. One version ran in its entirety as follows: ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten. This silliness dates back at least as far as 1959 at Stanford University and had already gone international by the early 1960s, when it was reported at London University's ATLAS computing site. There are several variants of it in circulation, some of which actually do end with the word `blinkenlights'. In an amusing example of turnabout-is-fair-play, German hackers have developed their own versions of the blinkenlights poster in fractured English, one of which is reproduced here: ATTENTION This room is fullfilled mit special electronische equippment. Fingergrabbing and pressing the cnoeppkes from the computers is allowed for die experts only! So all the "lefthanders" stay away and do not disturben the brainstorming von here working intelligencies. Otherwise you will be out thrown and kicked anderswhere! Also: please keep still and only watchen astaunished the blinkenlights. See also {geef}. Old-time hackers sometimes get nostalgic for blinkenlights because they were so much more fun to look at than a blank panel. Sadly, very few computers still have them (the three LEDs on a PC keyboard certainly don't count). The obvious reasons (cost of wiring, cost of front-panel cutouts, almost nobody needs or wants to interpret machine-register states on the fly anymore) are only part of the story. Another part of it is that radio-frequency leakage from the lamp wiring was beginning to be a problem as far back as transistor machines. But the most fundamental fact is that there are very few signals slow enough to blink an LED these days! With slow CPUs, you could watch the bus register or instruction counter tick, but at 33/66/150MHz it's all a blur. Finally, a version updated for the Internet has been seen on news.admin.net-abuse.email: ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS! Das Internet is nicht fuer gefingerclicken und giffengrabben. Ist easy droppenpacket der routers und overloaden der backbone mit der spammen und der me-tooen. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das mausklicken sichtseeren keepen das bandwit-spewin hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das cursorblinken. :blit: /blit/ vt. 1. To copy a large array of bits from one part of a computer's memory to another part, particularly when the memory is being used to determine what is shown on a display screen. "The storage allocator picks through the table and copies the good parts up into high memory, and then blits it all back down again." See {bitblt}, {BLT}, {dd}, {cat}, {blast}, {snarf}. More generally, to perform some operation (such as toggling) on a large array of bits while moving them. 2. Sometimes all-capitalized as `BLIT': an early experimental bit-mapped terminal designed by Rob Pike at Bell Labs, later commercialized as the AT&T 5620. (The folk etymology from `Bell Labs Intelligent Terminal' is incorrect. Its creators liked to claim that "Blit" stood for the Bacon, Lettuce, and Interactive Tomato.) :blitter: /blit'r/ n. A special-purpose chip or hardware system built to perform {blit} operations, esp. used for fast implementation of bit-mapped graphics. The Commodore Amiga and a few other micros have these, but since 1990 the trend has been away from them (however, see {cycle of reincarnation}). Syn. {raster blaster}. :blivet: /bliv'*t/ n. [allegedly from a World War II military term meaning "ten pounds of manure in a five-pound bag"] 1. An intractable problem. 2. A crucial piece of hardware that can't be fixed or replaced if it breaks. 3. A tool that has been hacked over by so many incompetent programmers that it has become an unmaintainable tissue of hacks. 4. An out-of-control but unkillable development effort. 5. An embarrassing bug that pops up during a customer demo. 6. In the subjargon of computer security specialists, a denial-of-service attack performed by hogging limited resources that have no access controls (for example, shared spool space on a multi-user system). This term has other meanings in other technical cultures; among experimental physicists and hardware engineers of various kinds it seems to mean any random object of unknown purpose (similar to hackish use of {frob}). It has also been used to describe an amusing trick-the-eye drawing resembling a three-pronged fork that appears to depict a three-dimensional object until one realizes that the parts fit together in an impossible way. :bloatware: n. Software that provides minimal functionality while requiring a disproportionate amount of diskspace and memory. Especially used application and OS upgrades. This term is very common in the Windows/NT world. So is its cause. :BLOB: 1. n. [acronym: Binary Large OBject] Used by database people to refer to any random large block of bits that needs to be stored in a database, such as a picture or sound file. The essential point about a BLOB is that it's an object that cannot be interpreted within the database itself. 2. v. To {mailbomb} someone by sending a BLOB to him/her; esp. used as a mild threat. "If that program crashes again, I'm going to BLOB the core dump to you." :block: v. [from process scheduling terminology in OS theory] 1. vi. To delay or sit idle while waiting for something. "We're blocking until everyone gets here." Compare {busy-wait}. 2. `block on' vt. To block, waiting for (something). "Lunch is blocked on Phil's arrival." :block transfer computations: n. [from the television series "Dr. Who"] Computations so fiendishly subtle and complex that they could not be performed by machines. Used to refer to any task that should be expressible as an algorithm in theory, but isn't. (The Z80's LDIR instruction, "Computed Block Transfer with increment", may also be relevant.) :Bloggs Family: n. An imaginary family consisting of Fred and Mary Bloggs and their children. Used as a standard example in knowledge representation to show the difference between extensional and intensional objects. For example, every occurrence of "Fred Bloggs" is the same unique person, whereas occurrences of "person" may refer to different people. Members of the Bloggs family have been known to pop up in bizarre places such as the old {DEC} Telephone Directory. Compare {Dr. Fred Mbogo}; {J. Random Hacker}; {Fred Foobar}. :blow an EPROM: /bloh *n ee'prom/ v. (alt. `blast an EPROM', `burn an EPROM') To program a read-only memory, e.g. for use with an embedded system. This term arose because the programming process for the Programmable Read-Only Memories (PROMs) that preceded present-day Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memories (EPROMs) involved intentionally blowing tiny electrical fuses on the chip. The usage lives on (it's too vivid and expressive to discard) even though the write process on EPROMs is nondestructive. :blow away: vt. To remove (files and directories) from permanent storage, generally by accident. "He reformatted the wrong partition and blew away last night's netnews." Oppose {nuke}. :blow out: vi. [prob. from mining and tunneling jargon] Of software, to fail spectacularly; almost as serious as {crash and burn}. See {blow past}, {blow up}, {die horribly}. :blow past: vt. To {blow out} despite a safeguard. "The server blew past the 5K reserve buffer." :blow up: vi. 1. [scientific computation] To become unstable. Suggests that the computation is diverging so rapidly that it will soon overflow or at least go {nonlinear}. 2. Syn. {blow out}. :BLT: /B-L-T/, /bl*t/ or (rarely) /belt/ n.,vt. Synonym for {blit}. This is the original form of {blit} and the ancestor of {bitblt}. It referred to any large bit-field copy or move operation (one resource-intensive memory-shuffling operation done on pre-paged versions of ITS, WAITS, and TOPS-10 was sardonically referred to as `The Big BLT'). The jargon usage has outlasted the {PDP-10} BLock Transfer instruction from which {BLT} derives; nowadays, the assembler mnemonic {BLT} almost always means `Branch if Less Than zero'. :Blue Book: n. 1. Informal name for one of the four standard references on the page-layout and graphics-control language {{PostScript}} ("PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook", Adobe Systems, Addison-Wesley 1985, QA76.73.P67P68, ISBN 0-201-10179-3); the other three official guides are known as the {Green Book}, the {Red Book}, and the {White Book} (sense 2). 2. Informal name for one of the three standard references on Smalltalk: "Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation", David Robson, Addison-Wesley 1983, QA76.8.S635G64, ISBN 0-201-11371-63 (this book also has green and red siblings). 3. Any of the 1988 standards issued by the CCITT's ninth plenary assembly. These include, among other things, the X.400 email spec and the Group 1 through 4 fax standards. See also {{book titles}}. :blue box: n. 1. obs. Once upon a time, before all-digital switches made it possible for the phone companies to move them out of band, one could actually hear the switching tones used to route long-distance calls. Early {phreaker}s built devices called `blue boxes' that could reproduce these tones, which could be used to commandeer portions of the phone network. (This was not as hard as it may sound; one early phreak acquired the sobriquet `Captain Crunch' after he proved that he could generate switching tones with a plastic whistle pulled out of a box of Captain Crunch cereal!) There were other colors of box with more specialized phreaking uses; red boxes, black boxes, silver boxes, etc. 2. n. An {IBM} machine, especially a large (non-PC) one. :Blue Glue: n. [IBM] IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture), an incredibly {losing} and {bletcherous} communications protocol widely favored at commercial shops that don't know any better. The official IBM definition is "that which binds blue boxes together." See {fear and loathing}. It may not be irrelevant that Blue Glue is the trade name of a 3M product that is commonly used to hold down the carpet squares to the removable panel floors common in {dinosaur pen}s. A correspondent at U. Minn. reports that the CS department there has about 80 bottles of the stuff hanging about, so they often refer to any messy work to be done as `using the blue glue'. :blue goo: n. Term for `police' {nanobot}s intended to prevent {gray goo}, denature hazardous waste, destroy pollution, put ozone back into the stratosphere, prevent halitosis, and promote truth, justice, and the American way, etc. The term `Blue Goo' can be found in Dr. Seuss's "Fox In Socks" to refer to a substance much like bubblegum. `Would you like to chew blue goo, sir?'. See {{nanotechnology}}. :Blue Screen of Death: n. This term is closely related to {Black Screen of Death} but much more common (many non-hackers have picked it up). Due to the extreme fragility and bugginess of Microsoft Windows (3.1/95/NT versions), misbehaving applications can crash the OS. The Blue Screen of Death, decorated with hex error codes, is what you get when this happens. (Commonly abbreviated {BSOD}.) This event is sufficiently common to have inspired the following haiku from Alan Tuplin: Your system which soared So freely on gliding wings now hangs, frozen and blue There is an anoymous haiku, which seems to have predated popular use of the term (and may indeed have inspired it): Windows NT crashed. I am the Blue Screen of Death No one hears your screams. :blue wire: n. [IBM] Patch wires added to circuit boards at the factory to correct design or fabrication problems. These may be necessary if there hasn't been time to design and qualify another board version. Compare {purple wire}, {red wire}, {yellow wire}, {pink wire}. :blurgle: /bler'gl/ n. [UK] Spoken {metasyntactic variable}, to indicate some text that is obvious from context, or which is already known. If several words are to be replaced, blurgle may well be doubled or tripled. "To look for something in several files use `grep string blurgle blurgle'." In each case, "blurgle blurgle" would be understood to be replaced by the file you wished to search. Compare {mumble}, sense 7. :BNF: /B-N-F/ n. 1. [techspeak] Acronym for `Backus-Naur Form', a metasyntactic notation used to specify the syntax of programming languages, command sets, and the like. Widely used for language descriptions but seldom documented anywhere, so that it must usually be learned by osmosis from other hackers. Consider this BNF for a U.S. postal address: ::= ::= | "." ::= [] | ::= [] ::= "," This translates into English as: "A postal-address consists of a name-part, followed by a street-address part, followed by a zip-code part. A personal-part consists of either a first name or an initial followed by a dot. A name-part consists of either: a personal-part followed by a last name followed by an optional `jr-part' (Jr., Sr., or dynastic number) and end-of-line, or a personal part followed by a name part (this rule illustrates the use of recursion in BNFs, covering the case of people who use multiple first and middle names and/or initials). A street address consists of an optional apartment specifier, followed by a street number, followed by a street name. A zip-part consists of a town-name, followed by a comma, followed by a state code, followed by a ZIP-code followed by an end-of-line." Note that many things (such as the format of a personal-part, apartment specifier, or ZIP-code) are left unspecified. These are presumed to be obvious from context or detailed somewhere nearby. See also {parse}. 2. Any of a number of variants and extensions of BNF proper, possibly containing some or all of the {regexp} wildcards such as `*' or `+'. In fact the example above isn't the pure form invented for the Algol-60 report; it uses `[]', which was introduced a few years later in IBM's PL/I definition but is now universally recognized. 3. In {{science-fiction fandom}}, a `Big-Name Fan' (someone famous or notorious). Years ago a fan started handing out black-on-green BNF buttons at SF conventions; this confused the hacker contingent terribly. :boa: [IBM] n. Any one of the fat cables that lurk under the floor in a {dinosaur pen}. Possibly so called because they display a ferocious life of their own when you try to lay them straight and flat after they have been coiled for some time. It is rumored within IBM that channel cables for the 370 are limited to 200 feet because beyond that length the boas get dangerous -- and it is worth noting that one of the major cable makers uses the trademark `Anaconda'. :board: n. 1. In-context synonym for {bboard}; sometimes used even for Usenet newsgroups (but see usage note under {bboard}, sense 1). 2. An electronic circuit board. :boat anchor: n. [from ham radio] 1. Like {doorstop} but more severe; implies that the offending hardware is irreversibly dead or useless. "That was a working motherboard once. One lightning strike later, instant boat anchor!" 2. A person who just takes up space. 3. Obsolete but still working hardware, especially when used of an old S100-bus hobbyist system; originally a term of annoyance, but became more and more affectionate as the hardware became more and more obsolete. :bob: n. At Demon Internet, all tech support personal are called "Bob". (Female support personnel have an option on "Bobette"). This has nothing to do with Bob the divine drilling-equipment salesman of the {Church of the SubGenius}. Nor is it acronymized from "Brother Of {BOFH}", though all parties agree it could have been. Rather, it was triggered by an unusually large draft of new tech-support people in 1995. It was observed that there would be much duplication of names. To ease the confusion, it was decided that all support techs would henceforth be known as "Bob", and identity badges were created labelled "Bob 1" and "Bob 2". (No, we never got any further). The reason for "Bob" rather than anything else is due to a {luser} calling and asking to speak to "Bob", despite the fact that no "Bob" was currently working for Tech Support. Since we all know "the customer is always right", it was decided that there had to be at least one "Bob" on duty at all times, just in case. This sillyness inexorably snowballed. Shift leaders and managers began to refer to their groups of "bobs". Whole ranks of support machines were set up (and still exist in the DNS as of 1999) as bob1 through bobN. Then came alt.tech-support.recovery, and it was filled with Demon support personnel. They all referred to themselves, and to others, as `bob', and after a while it caught on. There is now a Bob Code (http://bob.bob.bofh.org/~giolla/bobcode.html) describing the Bob nature. :bodysurf code: n. A program or segment of code written quickly in the heat of inspiration without the benefit of formal design or deep thought. Like its namesake sport, the result is too often a wipeout that leaves the programmer eating sand. :BOF: /B-O-F/ or /bof/ n. 1. Abbreviation for the phrase "Birds Of a Feather" (flocking together), an informal discussion group and/or bull session scheduled on a conference program. It is not clear where or when this term originated, but it is now associated with the USENIX conferences for Unix techies and was already established there by 1984. It was used earlier than that at DECUS conferences and is reported to have been common at SHARE meetings as far back as the early 1960s. 2. Acronym, `Beginning of File'. :BOFH: // n. Acronym, Bastard Operator From Hell. A system administrator with absolutely no tolerance for {luser}s. "You say you need more filespace? Seems to me you have plenty left..." Many BOFHs (and others who would be BOFHs if they could get away with it) hang out in the newsgroup alt.sysadmin.recovery, although there has also been created a top-level newsgroup hierarchy (bofh.*) of their own. Several people have written stories about BOFHs. The set usually considered canonical is by Simon Travaglia and may be found at the Bastard Home Page, `http://prime-mover.cc.waikato.ac.nz/Bastard.html'. BOFHs and BOFH wannabes hang out on {scary devil monastery} and wield {LART}s. :bogo-sort: /boh`goh-sort'/ n. (var. `stupid-sort') The archetypical perversely awful algorithm (as opposed to {bubble sort}, which is merely the generic _bad_ algorithm). Bogo-sort is equivalent to repeatedly throwing a deck of cards in the air, picking them up at random, and then testing whether they are in order. It serves as a sort of canonical example of awfulness. Looking at a program and seeing a dumb algorithm, one might say "Oh, I see, this program uses bogo-sort." Esp. appropriate for algorithms with factorial or super-exponential running time in the average case and probabilistically infinite worst-case running time. Compare {bogus}, {brute force}, {Lasherism}. A spectacular variant of bogo-sort has been proposed which has the interesting property that, if the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, it can sort an arbitrarily large array in constant time. (In the Many-Worlds model, the result of any quantum action is to split the universe-before into a sheaf of universes-after, one for each possible way the state vector can collapse; in any one of the universes-after the result appears random.) The steps are: 1. Permute the array randomly using a quantum process, 2. If the array is not sorted, destroy the universe. Implementation of step 2 is left as an exercise for the reader. :bogometer: /boh-gom'-*t-er/ n. A notional instrument for measuring {bogosity}. Compare the {Troll-O-Meter} and the `wankometer' described in the {wank} entry; see also {bogus}. :bogon: /boh'gon/ n. [by analogy with proton/electron/neutron, but doubtless reinforced after 1980 by the similarity to Douglas Adams's `Vogons'; see the {Bibliography} in Appendix C and note that Arthur Dent actually mispronounces `Vogons' as `Bogons' at one point] 1. The elementary particle of bogosity (see {quantum bogodynamics}). For instance, "the Ethernet is emitting bogons again" means that it is broken or acting in an erratic or bogus fashion. 2. A query packet sent from a TCP/IP domain resolver to a root server, having the reply bit set instead of the query bit. 3. Any bogus or incorrectly formed packet sent on a network. 4. By synecdoche, used to refer to any bogus thing, as in "I'd like to go to lunch with you but I've got to go to the weekly staff bogon". 5. A person who is bogus or who says bogus things. This was historically the original usage, but has been overtaken by its derivative senses 1-4. See also {bogosity}, {bogus}; compare {psyton}, {fat electrons}, {magic smoke}. The bogon has become the type case for a whole bestiary of nonce particle names, including the `clutron' or `cluon' (indivisible particle of cluefulness, obviously the antiparticle of the bogon) and the futon (elementary particle of {randomness}, or sometimes of lameness). These are not so much live usages in themselves as examples of a live meta-usage: that is, it has become a standard joke or linguistic maneuver to "explain" otherwise mysterious circumstances by inventing nonce particle names. And these imply nonce particle theories, with all their dignity or lack thereof (we might note parenthetically that this is a generalization from "(bogus particle) theories" to "bogus (particle theories)"!). Perhaps such particles are the modern-day equivalents of trolls and wood-nymphs as standard starting-points around which to construct explanatory myths. Of course, playing on an existing word (as in the `futon') yields additional flavor. Compare {magic smoke}. :bogon filter: /boh'gon fil'tr/ n. Any device, software or hardware, that limits or suppresses the flow and/or emission of bogons. "Engineering hacked a bogon filter between the Cray and the VAXen, and now we're getting fewer dropped packets." See also {bogosity}, {bogus}. :bogon flux: /boh'gon fluhks/ n. A measure of a supposed field of {bogosity} emitted by a speaker, measured by a {bogometer}; as a speaker starts to wander into increasing bogosity a listener might say "Warning, warning, bogon flux is rising". See {quantum bogodynamics}. :bogosity: /boh-go's*-tee/ n. 1. The degree to which something is {bogus}. At CMU, bogosity is measured with a {bogometer}; in a seminar, when a speaker says something bogus, a listener might raise his hand and say "My bogometer just triggered". More extremely, "You just pinned my bogometer" means you just said or did something so outrageously bogus that it is off the scale, pinning the bogometer needle at the highest possible reading (one might also say "You just redlined my bogometer"). The agreed-upon unit of bogosity is the {microLenat}. 2. The potential field generated by a {bogon flux}; see {quantum bogodynamics}. See also {bogon flux}, {bogon filter}, {bogus}. :bogotify: /boh-go't*-fi:/ vt. To make or become bogus. A program that has been changed so many times as to become completely disorganized has become bogotified. If you tighten a nut too hard and strip the threads on the bolt, the bolt has become bogotified and you had better not use it any more. This coinage led to the notional `autobogotiphobia' defined as `the fear of becoming bogotified'; but is not clear that the latter has ever been `live' jargon rather than a self-conscious joke in jargon about jargon. See also {bogosity}, {bogus}. :bogue out: /bohg owt/ vi. To become bogus, suddenly and unexpectedly. "His talk was relatively sane until somebody asked him a trick question; then he bogued out and did nothing but {flame} afterwards." See also {bogosity}, {bogus}. :bogus: adj. 1. Non-functional. "Your patches are bogus." 2. Useless. "OPCON is a bogus program." 3. False. "Your arguments are bogus." 4. Incorrect. "That algorithm is bogus." 5. Unbelievable. "You claim to have solved the halting problem for Turing Machines? That's totally bogus." 6. Silly. "Stop writing those bogus sagas." Astrology is bogus. So is a bolt that is obviously about to break. So is someone who makes blatantly false claims to have solved a scientific problem. (This word seems to have some, but not all, of the connotations of {random} -- mostly the negative ones.) It is claimed that `bogus' was originally used in the hackish sense at Princeton in the late 1960s. It was spread to CMU and Yale by Michael Shamos, a migratory Princeton alumnus. A glossary of bogus words was compiled at Yale when the word was first popularized there about 1975-76. These coinages spread into hackerdom from CMU and MIT. Most of them remained wordplay objects rather than actual vocabulary items or live metaphors. Examples: `amboguous' (having multiple bogus interpretations); `bogotissimo' (in a gloriously bogus manner); `bogotophile' (one who is pathologically fascinated by the bogus); `paleobogology' (the study of primeval bogosity). Some bogowords, however, obtained sufficient live currency to be listed elsewhere in this lexicon; see {bogometer}, {bogon}, {bogotify}, and {quantum bogodynamics} and the related but unlisted {Dr. Fred Mbogo}. By the early 1980s `bogus' was also current in something like hacker usage sense in West Coast teen slang, and it had gone mainstream by 1985. A correspondent from Cambridge reports, by contrast, that these uses of `bogus' grate on British nerves; in Britain the word means, rather specifically, `counterfeit', as in "a bogus 10-pound note". :Bohr bug: /bohr buhg/ n. [from quantum physics] A repeatable {bug}; one that manifests reliably under a possibly unknown but well-defined set of conditions. Antonym of {heisenbug}; see also {mandelbug}, {schroedinbug}. :boink: /boynk/ [Usenet: variously ascribed to the TV series "Cheers" "Moonlighting", and "Soap"] 1. v. To have sex with; compare {bounce}, sense 3. (This is mainstream slang.) In Commonwealth hackish the variant `bonk' is more common. 2. n. After the original Peter Korn `Boinkon' {Usenet} parties, used for almost any net social gathering, e.g., Miniboink, a small boink held by Nancy Gillett in 1988; Minniboink, a Boinkcon in Minnesota in 1989; Humpdayboinks, Wednesday get-togethers held in the San Francisco Bay Area. Compare {@-party}. 3. Var of `bonk'; see {bonk/oif}. :bomb: 1. v. General synonym for {crash} (sense 1) except that it is not used as a noun; esp. used of software or OS failures. "Don't run Empire with less than 32K stack, it'll bomb." 2. n.,v. Atari ST and Macintosh equivalents of a Unix `panic' or Amiga {guru} (sense 2), in which icons of little black-powder bombs or mushroom clouds are displayed, indicating that the system has died. On the Mac, this may be accompanied by a decimal (or occasionally hexadecimal) number indicating what went wrong, similar to the Amiga {guru meditation} number. {{MS-DOS}} machines tend to get {locked up} in this situation. :bondage-and-discipline language: n. A language (such as {{Pascal}}, {{Ada}}, APL, or Prolog) that, though ostensibly general-purpose, is designed so as to enforce an author's theory of `right programming' even though said theory is demonstrably inadequate for systems hacking or even vanilla general-purpose programming. Often abbreviated `B&D'; thus, one may speak of things "having the B&D nature". See {{Pascal}}; oppose {languages of choice}. :bonk/oif: /bonk/, /oyf/ interj. In the {MUD} community, it has become traditional to express pique or censure by `bonking' the offending person. Convention holds that one should acknowledge a bonk by saying `oif!' and there is a myth to the effect that failing to do so upsets the cosmic bonk/oif balance, causing much trouble in the universe. Some MUDs have implemented special commands for bonking and oifing. See also {talk mode}. :book titles:: There is a tradition in hackerdom of informally tagging important textbooks and standards documents with the dominant color of their covers or with some other conspicuous feature of the cover. Many of these are described in this lexicon under their own entries. See {Aluminum Book}, {Blue Book}, {Camel Book}, {Cinderella Book}, {Devil Book}, {Dragon Book}, {Green Book}, {Orange Book}, {Pink-Shirt Book}, {Purple Book}, {Red Book}, {Silver Book}, {White Book}, {Wizard Book}, {Yellow Book}, and {bible}; see also {rainbow series}. Since about 1983 this tradition has gotten a boost from the popular O'Reilly Associates line of technical books, which usually feature some kind of exotic animal on the cover. :boot: v.,n. [techspeak; from `by one's bootstraps'] To load and initialize the operating system on a machine. This usage is no longer jargon (having passed into techspeak) but has given rise to some derivatives that are still jargon. The derivative `reboot' implies that the machine hasn't been down for long, or that the boot is a {bounce} (sense 4) intended to clear some state of {wedgitude}. This is sometimes used of human thought processes, as in the following exchange: "You've lost me." "OK, reboot. Here's the theory...." This term is also found in the variants `cold boot' (from power-off condition) and `warm boot' (with the CPU and all devices already powered up, as after a hardware reset or software crash). Another variant: `soft boot', reinitialization of only part of a system, under control of other software still running: "If you're running the {mess-dos} emulator, control-alt-insert will cause a soft-boot of the emulator, while leaving the rest of the system running." Opposed to this there is `hard boot', which connotes hostility towards or frustration with the machine being booted: "I'll have to hard-boot this losing Sun." "I recommend booting it hard." One often hard-boots by performing a {power cycle}. Historical note: this term derives from `bootstrap loader', a short program that was read in from cards or paper tape, or toggled in from the front panel switches. This program was always very short (great efforts were expended on making it short in order to minimize the labor and chance of error involved in toggling it in), but was just smart enough to read in a slightly more complex program (usually from a card or paper tape reader), to which it handed control; this program in turn was smart enough to read the application or operating system from a magnetic tape drive or disk drive. Thus, in successive steps, the computer `pulled itself up by its bootstraps' to a useful operating state. Nowadays the bootstrap is usually found in ROM or EPROM, and reads the first stage in from a fixed location on the disk, called the `boot block'. When this program gains control, it is powerful enough to load the actual OS and hand control over to it. :Borg: n. In "Star Trek: The New Generation" the Borg is a species of cyborg that ruthlessly seeks to incorporate all sentient life into itself; their slogan is "Resistence is useless. You will be assimilated." In hacker parlance, the Borg is Microsoft, which is thought to be trying just as ruthlessly to assimilate all computers and the entire Internet to itself (there is a widely circulated image of Bill Gates as a Borg). Being forced to use Windows or NT is often referred to as being "Borged". Interestingly, the {Halloween Documents} reveal that this jargon is live within Microsoft itself. See also {Evil Empire}, {Internet Exploiter}. :bot: n [IRC, MUD; from `robot'] An {IRC} or {MUD} user who is actually a program. On IRC, typically the robot provides some useful service. Examples are NickServ, which tries to prevent random users from adopting {nick}s already claimed by others, and MsgServ, which allows one to send asynchronous messages to be delivered when the recipient signs on. Also common are `annoybots', such as KissServ, which perform no useful function except to send cute messages to other people. Service bots are less common on MUDs; but some others, such as the `Julia' bot active in 1990-91, have been remarkably impressive Turing-test experiments, able to pass as human for as long as ten or fifteen minutes of conversation. Note that bots used to be `robots' when the term first appeared in the early 1990s, but the shortened form is now habitual. :bottom feeder: n. Syn. for {slopsucker}, derived from the fishermen's and naturalists' term for finny creatures who subsist on the primordial ooze. :bottom-up implementation: n. Hackish opposite of the techspeak term `top-down design'. It is now received wisdom in most programming cultures that it is best to design from higher levels of abstraction down to lower, specifying sequences of action in increasing detail until you get to actual code. Hackers often find (especially in exploratory designs that cannot be closely specified in advance) that it works best to _build_ things in the opposite order, by writing and testing a clean set of primitive operations and then knitting them together. :bounce: v. 1. [perhaps by analogy to a bouncing check] An electronic mail message that is undeliverable and returns an error notification to the sender is said to `bounce'. See also {bounce message}. 2. [Stanford] To play volleyball. The now-demolished {D. C. Power Lab} building used by the Stanford AI Lab in the 1970s had a volleyball court on the front lawn. From 5 P.M. to 7 P.M. was the scheduled maintenance time for the computer, so every afternoon at 5 would come over the intercom the cry: "Now hear this: bounce, bounce!", followed by Brian McCune loudly bouncing a volleyball on the floor outside the offices of known volleyballers. 3. To engage in sexual intercourse; prob. from the expression `bouncing the mattress', but influenced by Roo's psychosexually loaded "Try bouncing me, Tigger!" from the "Winnie-the-Pooh" books. Compare {boink}. 4. To casually reboot a system in order to clear up a transient problem. Reported primarily among {VMS} and {Unix} users. 5. [VM/CMS programmers] _Automatic_ warm-start of a machine after an error. "I logged on this morning and found it had bounced 7 times during the night" 6. [IBM] To {power cycle} a peripheral in order to reset it. :bounce message: n. [Unix] Notification message returned to sender by a site unable to relay {email} to the intended {{Internet address}} recipient or the next link in a {bang path} (see {bounce}, sense 1). Reasons might include a nonexistent or misspelled username or a {down} relay site. Bounce messages can themselves fail, with occasionally ugly results; see {sorcerer's apprentice mode} and {software laser}. The terms `bounce mail' and `barfmail' are also common. :boustrophedon: n. [from a Greek word for turning like an ox while plowing] An ancient method of writing using alternate left-to-right and right-to-left lines. This term is actually philologists' techspeak and typesetters' jargon. Erudite hackers use it for an optimization performed by some computer typesetting software and moving-head printers. The adverbial form `boustrophedonically' is also found (hackers purely love constructions like this). :box: n. 1. A computer; esp. in the construction `foo box' where foo is some functional qualifier, like `graphics', or the name of an OS (thus, `Unix box', `MS-DOS box', etc.) "We preprocess the data on Unix boxes before handing it up to the mainframe." 2. [IBM] Without qualification but within an SNA-using site, this refers specifically to an IBM front-end processor or FEP /F-E-P/. An FEP is a small computer necessary to enable an IBM {mainframe} to communicate beyond the limits of the {dinosaur pen}. Typically used in expressions like the cry that goes up when an SNA network goes down: "Looks like the {box} has fallen over." (See {fall over}.) See also {IBM}, {fear and loathing}, {fepped out}, {Blue Glue}. :boxed comments: n. Comments (explanatory notes attached to program instructions) that occupy several lines by themselves; so called because in assembler and C code they are often surrounded by a box in a style something like this: /************************************************* * * This is a boxed comment in C style * *************************************************/ Common variants of this style omit the asterisks in column 2 or add a matching row of asterisks closing the right side of the box. The sparest variant omits all but the comment delimiters themselves; the `box' is implied. Oppose {winged comments}. :boxen: /bok'sn/ pl.n. [by analogy with {VAXen}] Fanciful plural of {box} often encountered in the phrase `Unix boxen', used to describe commodity {{Unix}} hardware. The connotation is that any two Unix boxen are interchangeable. :boxology: /bok-sol'*-jee/ n. Syn. {ASCII art}. This term implies a more restricted domain, that of box-and-arrow drawings. "His report has a lot of boxology in it." Compare {macrology}. :bozotic: /boh-zoh'tik/ or /boh-zo'tik/ adj. [from the name of a TV clown even more losing than Ronald McDonald] Resembling or having the quality of a bozo; that is, clownish, ludicrously wrong, unintentionally humorous. Compare {wonky}, {demented}. Note that the noun `bozo' occurs in slang, but the mainstream adjectival form would be `bozo-like' or (in New England) `bozoish'. :BQS: /B-Q-S/ adj. Syn. {Berkeley Quality Software}. :brain dump: n. The act of telling someone everything one knows about a particular topic or project. Typically used when someone is going to let a new party maintain a piece of code. Conceptually analogous to an operating system {core dump} in that it saves a lot of useful {state} before an exit. "You'll have to give me a brain dump on FOOBAR before you start your new job at HackerCorp." See {core dump} (sense 4). At Sun, this is also known as `TOI' (transfer of information). :brain fart: n. The actual result of a {braino}, as opposed to the mental glitch that is the braino itself. E.g., typing `dir' on a Unix box after a session with DOS. :brain-damaged: adj. 1. [generalization of `Honeywell Brain Damage' (HBD), a theoretical disease invented to explain certain utter cretinisms in Honeywell {{Multics}}] adj. Obviously wrong; {cretinous}; {demented}. There is an implication that the person responsible must have suffered brain damage, because he should have known better. Calling something brain-damaged is really bad; it also implies it is unusable, and that its failure to work is due to poor design rather than some accident. "Only six monocase characters per file name? Now _that's_ brain-damaged!" 2. [esp. in the Mac world] May refer to free demonstration software that has been deliberately crippled in some way so as not to compete with the commercial product it is intended to sell. Syn. {crippleware}. :brain-dead: adj. Brain-damaged in the extreme. It tends to imply terminal design failure rather than malfunction or simple stupidity. "This comm program doesn't know how to send a break -- how brain-dead!" :braino: /bray'no/ n. Syn. for {thinko}. See also {brain fart}. :branch to Fishkill: n. [IBM: from the location of one of the corporation's facilities] Any unexpected jump in a program that produces catastrophic or just plain weird results. See {jump off into never-never land}, {hyperspace}. :bread crumbs: n. Debugging statements inserted into a program that emit output or log indicators of the program's {state} to a file so you can see where it dies or pin down the cause of surprising behavior. The term is probably a reference to the Hansel and Gretel story from the Brothers Grimm or the older French folktale of Thumbelina; in several variants of these, a character leaves a trail of bread crumbs so as not to get lost in the woods. :break: 1. vt. To cause to be {broken} (in any sense). "Your latest patch to the editor broke the paragraph commands." 2. v. (of a program) To stop temporarily, so that it may debugged. The place where it stops is a `breakpoint'. 3. [techspeak] vi. To send an RS-232 break (two character widths of line high) over a serial comm line. 4. [Unix] vi. To strike whatever key currently causes the tty driver to send SIGINT to the current process. Normally, break (sense 3), delete or {control-C} does this. 5. `break break' may be said to interrupt a conversation (this is an example of verb doubling). This usage comes from radio communications, which in turn probably came from landline telegraph/teleprinter usage, as badly abused in the Citizen's Band craze a few years ago. :break-even point: n. In the process of implementing a new computer language, the point at which the language is sufficiently effective that one can implement the language in itself. That is, for a new language called, hypothetically, FOOGOL, one has reached break-even when one can write a demonstration compiler for FOOGOL in FOOGOL, discard the original implementation language, and thereafter use working versions of FOOGOL to develop newer ones. This is an important milestone; see {MFTL}. Since this entry was first written, several correspondents have reported that there actually was a compiler for a tiny Algol-like language called Foogol floating around on various {VAXen} in the early and mid-1980s. A FOOGOL implementation is available at the Retrocomputing Museum `http://www.ccil.org/retro'. :breath-of-life packet: n. [XEROX PARC] An Ethernet packet that contains bootstrap (see {boot}) code, periodically sent out from a working computer to infuse the `breath of life' into any computer on the network that has happened to crash. Machines depending on such packets have sufficient hardware or firmware code to wait for (or request) such a packet during the reboot process. See also {dickless workstation}. The notional `kiss-of-death packet', with a function complementary to that of a breath-of-life packet, is recommended for dealing with hosts that consume too many network resources. Though `kiss-of-death packet' is usually used in jest, there is at least one documented instance of an Internet subnet with limited address-table slots in a gateway machine in which such packets were routinely used to compete for slots, rather like Christmas shoppers competing for scarce parking spaces. :breedle: n. See {feep}. :Breidbart Index: /bri:d'bart ind*ks/ A measurement of the severity of spam invented by long-time hacker Seth Breidbart, used for programming cancelbots. The Breidbart Index takes into account the fact that excessive multi-posting {EMP} is worse than excessive cross-posting {ECP}. The Breidbart Index is computed as follows: For each article in a spam, take the square-root of the number of newsgroups to which the article is posted. The Breidbart Index is the sum of the square roots of all of the posts in the spam. For example, one article posted to nine newsgroups and again to sixteen would have BI = sqrt(9) + sqrt(16) = 7. It is generally agreed that a spam is cancelable if the Breidbart Index exceeds 20. The Breidbart Index accumulates over a 45-day window. Ten articles yesterday and ten articles today and ten articles tomorrow add up to a 30-article spam. Spam fighters will often reset the count if you can convince them that the spam was accidental and/or you have seen the error of your ways and won't repeat it. Breidbart Index can accumulate over multiple authors. For example, the "Make Money Fast" pyramid scheme exceeded a BI of 20 a long time ago, and is now considered "cancel on sight". :bring X to its knees: v. To present a machine, operating system, piece of software, or algorithm with a load so extreme or {pathological} that it grinds to a halt. "To bring a MicroVAX to its knees, try twenty users running {vi} -- or four running {EMACS}." Compare {hog}. :brittle: adj. Said of software that is functional but easily broken by changes in operating environment or configuration, or by any minor tweak to the software itself. Also, any system that responds inappropriately and disastrously to abnormal but expected external stimuli; e.g., a file system that is usually totally scrambled by a power failure is said to be brittle. This term is often used to describe the results of a research effort that were never intended to be robust, but it can be applied to commercially developed software, which displays the quality far more often than it ought to. Oppose {robust}. :broadcast storm: n. An incorrect packet broadcast on a network that causes most hosts to respond all at once, typically with wrong answers that start the process over again. See {network meltdown}; compare {mail storm}. :brochureware: n. Planned but non-existent product like {vaporware}, but with the added implication that marketing is actively selling and promoting it (they've printed brochures). Brochureware is often deployed as a strategic weapon; the idea is to con customers into not committing to an existing product of the competition's. It is a safe bet that when a brochureware product finally becomes real, it will be more expensive than and inferior to the alternatives that had been available for years. :broken: adj. 1. Not working properly (of programs). 2. Behaving strangely; especially (when used of people) exhibiting extreme depression. :broken arrow: n. [IBM] The error code displayed on line 25 of a 3270 terminal (or a PC emulating a 3270) for various kinds of protocol violations and "unexpected" error conditions (including connection to a {down} computer). On a PC, simulated with `->/_', with the two center characters overstruck. Note: to appreciate this term fully, it helps to know that `broken arrow' is also military jargon for an accident involving nuclear weapons.... :BrokenWindows: n. Abusive hackerism for the {crufty} and {elephantine} {X} environment on Sun machines; properly called `OpenWindows'. :broket: /broh'k*t/ or /broh'ket`/ n. [by analogy with `bracket': a `broken bracket'] Either of the characters `<' and `>', when used as paired enclosing delimiters. This word originated as a contraction of the phrase `broken bracket', that is, a bracket that is bent in the middle. (At MIT, and apparently in the {Real World} as well, these are usually called {angle brackets}.) :Brooks's Law: prov. "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" -- a result of the fact that the expected advantage from splitting work among N programmers is O(N) (that is, proportional to N), but the complexity and communications cost associated with coordinating and then merging their work is O(N^2) (that is, proportional to the square of N). The quote is from Fred Brooks, a manager of IBM's OS/360 project and author of "The Mythical Man-Month" (Addison-Wesley, 1975, ISBN 0-201-00650-2), an excellent early book on software engineering. The myth in question has been most tersely expressed as "Programmer time is fungible" and Brooks established conclusively that it is not. Hackers have never forgotten his advice; too often, {management} still does. See also {creationism}, {second-system effect}, {optimism}. :brown-paper-bag bug: n. A bug in a public software release that is so embarassing that the author notionally wears a brown paper bag over his head for a while so he won't be recognized on the net. Entered popular usage after the early-1999 release of the first Linux 2.2, which had one. The phrase was used in Linus Torvalds's apology posting. :browser: n. A program specifically designed to help users view and navigate hypertext, on-line documentation, or a database. While this general sense has been present in jargon for a long time, the proliferation of browsers for the World Wide Web after 1992 has made it much more popular and provided a central or default meaning of the word previously lacking in hacker usage. Nowadays, if someone mentions using a `browser' without qualification, one may assume it is a Web browser. :BRS: /B-R-S/ n. Syn. {Big Red Switch}. This abbreviation is fairly common on-line. :brute force: adj. Describes a primitive programming style, one in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing power instead of using his or her own intelligence to simplify the problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive methods suited to small problems directly to large ones. The term can also be used in reference to programming style: brute-force programs are written in a heavyhanded, tedious way, full of repetition and devoid of any elegance or useful abstraction (see also {brute force and ignorance}). The {canonical} example of a brute-force algorithm is associated with the `traveling salesman problem' (TSP), a classical {NP-}hard problem: Suppose a person is in, say, Boston, and wishes to drive to N other cities. In what order should the cities be visited in order to minimize the distance travelled? The brute-force method is to simply generate all possible routes and compare the distances; while guaranteed to work and simple to implement, this algorithm is clearly very stupid in that it considers even obviously absurd routes (like going from Boston to Houston via San Francisco and New York, in that order). For very small N it works well, but it rapidly becomes absurdly inefficient when N increases (for N = 15, there are already 1,307,674,368,000 possible routes to consider, and for N = 1000 -- well, see {bignum}). Sometimes, unfortunately, there is no better general solution than brute force. See also {NP-}. A more simple-minded example of brute-force programming is finding the smallest number in a large list by first using an existing program to sort the list in ascending order, and then picking the first number off the front. Whether brute-force programming should actually be considered stupid or not depends on the context; if the problem is not terribly big, the extra CPU time spent on a brute-force solution may cost less than the programmer time it would take to develop a more `intelligent' algorithm. Additionally, a more intelligent algorithm may imply more long-term complexity cost and bug-chasing than are justified by the speed improvement. Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix, is reported to have uttered the epigram "When in doubt, use brute force". He probably intended this as a {ha ha only serious}, but the original Unix kernel's preference for simple, robust, and portable algorithms over {brittle} `smart' ones does seem to have been a significant factor in the success of that OS. Like so many other tradeoffs in software design, the choice between brute force and complex, finely-tuned cleverness is often a difficult one that requires both engineering savvy and delicate esthetic judgment. :brute force and ignorance: n. A popular design technique at many software houses -- {brute force} coding unrelieved by any knowledge of how problems have been previously solved in elegant ways. Dogmatic adherence to design methodologies tends to encourage this sort of thing. Characteristic of early {larval stage} programming; unfortunately, many never outgrow it. Often abbreviated BFI: "Gak, they used a {bubble sort}! That's strictly from BFI." Compare {bogosity}. :BSD: /B-S-D/ n. [abbreviation for `Berkeley Software Distribution'] a family of {{Unix}} versions for the {DEC} {VAX} and PDP-11 developed by Bill Joy and others at {Berzerkeley} starting around 1980, incorporating paged virtual memory, TCP/IP networking enhancements, and many other features. The BSD versions (4.1, 4.2, and 4.3) and the commercial versions derived from them (SunOS, ULTRIX, and Mt. Xinu) held the technical lead in the Unix world until AT&T's successful standardization efforts after about 1986, and are still widely popular. Note that BSD versions going back to 2.9 are often referred to by their version numbers, without the BSD prefix. See {4.2}, {{Unix}}, {USG Unix}. :BSOD: // Very commmon abbreviation for {Blue Screen of Death}. Both spoken and written. :BUAF: // n. [abbreviation, from alt.fan.warlord] Big Ugly ASCII Font -- a special form of {ASCII art}. Various programs exist for rendering text strings into block, bloob, and pseudo-script fonts in cells between four and six character cells on a side; this is smaller than the letters generated by older {banner} (sense 2) programs. These are sometimes used to render one's name in a {sig block}, and are critically referred to as `BUAF's. See {warlording}. :BUAG: // n. [abbreviation, from alt.fan.warlord] Big Ugly ASCII Graphic. Pejorative term for ugly {ASCII art}, especially as found in {sig block}s. For some reason, mutations of the head of Bart Simpson are particularly common in the least imaginative {sig block}s. See {warlording}. :bubble sort: n. Techspeak for a particular sorting technique in which pairs of adjacent values in the list to be sorted are compared and interchanged if they are out of order; thus, list entries `bubble upward' in the list until they bump into one with a lower sort value. Because it is not very good relative to other methods and is the one typically stumbled on by {naive} and untutored programmers, hackers consider it the {canonical} example of a naive algorithm. The canonical example of a really _bad_ algorithm is {bogo-sort}. A bubble sort might be used out of ignorance, but any use of bogo-sort could issue only from brain damage or willful perversity. :bucky bits: /buh'kee bits/ n. 1. obs. The bits produced by the CONTROL and META shift keys on a SAIL keyboard (octal 200 and 400 respectively), resulting in a 9-bit keyboard character set. The MIT AI TV (Knight) keyboards extended this with TOP and separate left and right CONTROL and META keys, resulting in a 12-bit character set; later, LISP Machines added such keys as SUPER, HYPER, and GREEK (see {space-cadet keyboard}). 2. By extension, bits associated with `extra' shift keys on any keyboard, e.g., the ALT on an IBM PC or command and option keys on a Macintosh. It has long been rumored that `bucky bits' were named for Buckminster Fuller during a period when he was consulting at Stanford. Actually, bucky bits were invented by Niklaus Wirth when _he_ was at Stanford in 1964-65; he first suggested the idea of an EDIT key to set the 8th bit of an otherwise 7-bit ASCII character). It seems that, unknown to Wirth, certain Stanford hackers had privately nicknamed him `Bucky' after a prominent portion of his dental anatomy, and this nickname transferred to the bit. Bucky-bit commands were used in a number of editors written at Stanford, including most notably TV-EDIT and NLS. The term spread to MIT and CMU early and is now in general use. Ironically, Wirth himself remained unaware of its derivation for nearly 30 years, until GLS dug up this history in early 1993! See {double bucky}, {quadruple bucky}. :buffer chuck: n. Shorter and ruder syn. for {buffer overflow}. :buffer overflow: n. What happens when you try to stuff more data into a buffer (holding area) than it can handle. This may be due to a mismatch in the processing rates of the producing and consuming processes (see {overrun} and {firehose syndrome}), or because the buffer is simply too small to hold all the data that must accumulate before a piece of it can be processed. For example, in a text-processing tool that {crunch}es a line at a time, a short line buffer can result in {lossage} as input from a long line overflows the buffer and trashes data beyond it. Good defensive programming would check for overflow on each character and stop accepting data when the buffer is full up. The term is used of and by humans in a metaphorical sense. "What time did I agree to meet you? My buffer must have overflowed." Or "If I answer that phone my buffer is going to overflow." See also {spam}, {overrun screw}. :bug: n. An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of hardware, esp. one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of {feature}. Examples: "There's a bug in the editor: it writes things out backwards." "The system crashed because of a hardware bug." "Fred is a winner, but he has a few bugs" (i.e., Fred is a good guy, but he has a few personality problems). Historical note: Admiral Grace Hopper (an early computing pioneer better known for inventing {COBOL}) liked to tell a story in which a technician solved a {glitch} in the Harvard Mark II machine by pulling an actual insect out from between the contacts of one of its relays, and she subsequently promulgated {bug} in its hackish sense as a joke about the incident (though, as she was careful to admit, she was not there when it happened). For many years the logbook associated with the incident and the actual bug in question (a moth) sat in a display case at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC). The entire story, with a picture of the logbook and the moth taped into it, is recorded in the "Annals of the History of Computing", Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 1981), pp. 285-286. The text of the log entry (from September 9, 1947), reads "1545 Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found". This wording establishes that the term was already in use at the time in its current specific sense -- and Hopper herself reports that the term `bug' was regularly applied to problems in radar electronics during WWII. Indeed, the use of `bug' to mean an industrial defect was already established in Thomas Edison's time, and a more specific and rather modern use can be found in an electrical handbook from 1896 ("Hawkin's New Catechism of Electricity", Theo. Audel & Co.) which says: "The term `bug' is used to a limited extent to designate any fault or trouble in the connections or working of electric apparatus." It further notes that the term is "said to have originated in quadruplex telegraphy and have been transferred to all electric apparatus." The latter observation may explain a common folk etymology of the term; that it came from telephone company usage, in which "bugs in a telephone cable" were blamed for noisy lines. Though this derivation seems to be mistaken, it may well be a distorted memory of a joke first current among _telegraph_ operators more than a century ago! Or perhaps not a joke. Historians of the field inform us that the term "bug" was regularly used in the early days of telegraphy to refer to a variety of semi-automatic telegraphy keyers that would send a string of dots if you held them down. In fact, the Vibroplex keyers (which were among the most common of this type) even had a graphic of a beetle on them (and still do)! While the ability to send repeated dots automatically was very useful for professional morse code operators, these were also significantly trickier to use than the older manual keyers, and it could take some practice to ensure one didn't introduce extraneous dots into the code by holding the key down a fraction too long. In the hands of an inexperienced operator, a Vibroplex "bug" on the line could mean that a lot of garbled Morse would soon be coming your way. Further, the term "bug" has long been used among radio technicians to describe a device that converts electromagnetic field variations into acoustic signals. It is used to trace radio interference and look for dangerous radio emissions. Radio community usage derives from the roach-like shape of the first versions used by 19th century physicists. The first versions consisted of a coil of wire (roach body), with the two wire ends sticking out and bent back to nearly touch forming a spark gap (roach antennae). The bug is to the radio technician what the stethoscope is to the stereotype medical doctor. This sense is almost certainly ancestral to modern use of "bug" for a covert monitoring device, but may also have contributed to the use of "bug" for the effects of radio interference itself. Actually, use of `bug' in the general sense of a disruptive event goes back to Shakespeare! (Henry VI, part III - Act V, Scene II: King Edward: "So, lie thou there. Die thou; and die our fear; For Warwick was a bug that fear'd us all.") In the first edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary one meaning of `bug' is "A frightful object; a walking spectre"; this is traced to `bugbear', a Welsh term for a variety of mythological monster which (to complete the circle) has recently been reintroduced into the popular lexicon through fantasy role-playing games. In any case, in jargon the word almost never refers to insects. Here is a plausible conversation that never actually happened: "There is a bug in this ant farm!" "What do you mean? I don't see any ants in it." "That's the bug." A careful discussion of the etymological issues can be found in a paper by Fred R. Shapiro, 1987, "Entomology of the Computer Bug: History and Folklore", American Speech 62(4):376-378. [There has been a widespread myth that the original bug was moved to the Smithsonian, and an earlier version of this entry so asserted. A correspondent who thought to check discovered that the bug was not there. While investigating this in late 1990, your editor discovered that the NSWC still had the bug, but had unsuccessfully tried to get the Smithsonian to accept it -- and that the present curator of their History of American Technology Museum didn't know this and agreed that it would make a worthwhile exhibit. It was moved to the Smithsonian in mid-1991, but due to space and money constraints was not actually exhibited years afterwards. Thus, the process of investigating the original-computer-bug bug fixed it in an entirely unexpected way, by making the myth true! --ESR] :bug-compatible: adj. Said of a design or revision that has been badly compromised by a requirement to be compatible with {fossil}s or {misfeature}s in other programs or (esp.) previous releases of itself. "MS-DOS 2.0 used \ as a path separator to be bug-compatible with some cretin's choice of / as an option character in 1.0." :bug-for-bug compatible: n. Same as {bug-compatible}, with the additional implication that much tedious effort went into ensuring that each (known) bug was replicated. :bug-of-the-month club: n. [from "book-of-the-month club", a time-honored mail-order-marketing technique in the U.S.] A mythical club which users of `sendmail(8)' (the UNIX mail daemon) belong to; this was coined on the Usenet newsgroup comp.security.unix at a time when sendmail security holes, which allowed outside {cracker}s access to the system, were being uncovered at an alarming rate, forcing sysadmins to update very often. Also, more completely, `fatal security bug-of-the-month club'. :buglix: /buhg'liks/ n. Pejorative term referring to {DEC}'s ULTRIX operating system in its earlier _severely_ buggy versions. Still used to describe ULTRIX, but without nearly so much venom. Compare {AIDX}, {HP-SUX}, {Nominal Semidestructor}, {Telerat}, {sun-stools}. :bulletproof: adj. Used of an algorithm or implementation considered extremely {robust}; lossage-resistant; capable of correctly recovering from any imaginable exception condition -- a rare and valued quality. Syn. {armor-plated}. :bum: 1. vt. To make highly efficient, either in time or space, often at the expense of clarity. "I managed to bum three more instructions out of that code." "I spent half the night bumming the interrupt code." In 1996, this term and the practice it describes are semi-obsolete. In {elder days}, John McCarthy (inventor of {LISP}) used to compare some efficiency-obsessed hackers among his students to "ski bums"; thus, optimization became "program bumming", and eventually just "bumming". 2. To squeeze out excess; to remove something in order to improve whatever it was removed from (without changing function; this distinguishes the process from a {featurectomy}). 3. n. A small change to an algorithm, program, or hardware device to make it more efficient. "This hardware bum makes the jump instruction faster." Usage: now uncommon, largely superseded by v. {tune} (and n. {tweak}, {hack}), though none of these exactly capture sense 2. All these uses are rare in Commonwealth hackish, because in the parent dialects of English the noun `bum' is a rude synonym for `buttocks' and the verb `bum' for buuggery. :bump: vt. Synonym for increment. Has the same meaning as C's ++ operator. Used esp. of counter variables, pointers, and index dummies in `for', `while', and `do-while' loops. :burble: v. [from Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"] Like {flame}, but connotes that the source is truly clueless and ineffectual (mere flamers can be competent). A term of deep contempt. "There's some guy on the phone burbling about how he got a DISK FULL error and it's all our comm software's fault." This is mainstream slang in some parts of England. :buried treasure: n. A surprising piece of code found in some program. While usually not wrong, it tends to vary from {crufty} to {bletcherous}, and has lain undiscovered only because it was functionally correct, however horrible it is. Used sarcastically, because what is found is anything _but_ treasure. Buried treasure almost always needs to be dug up and removed. "I just found that the scheduler sorts its queue using {bubble sort}! Buried treasure!" :burn-in period: n. 1. A factory test designed to catch systems with {marginal} components before they get out the door; the theory is that burn-in will protect customers by outwaiting the steepest part of the {bathtub curve} (see {infant mortality}). 2. A period of indeterminate length in which a person using a computer is so intensely involved in his project that he forgets basic needs such as food, drink, sleep, etc. Warning: Excessive burn-in can lead to burn-out. See {hack mode}, {larval stage}. Historical note: the origin of "burn-in" (sense 1) is apparently the practice of setting a new-model airplane's brakes on fire, then extinguishing the fire, in order to make them hold better. This was done on the first version of the U.S. spy-plane, the U-2. :burst page: n. Syn. {banner}, sense 1. :busy-wait: vi. Used of human behavior, conveys that the subject is busy waiting for someone or something, intends to move instantly as soon as it shows up, and thus cannot do anything else at the moment. "Can't talk now, I'm busy-waiting till Bill gets off the phone." Technically, `busy-wait' means to wait on an event by {spin}ning through a tight or timed-delay loop that polls for the event on each pass, as opposed to setting up an interrupt handler and continuing execution on another part of the task. This is a wasteful technique, best avoided on time-sharing systems where a busy-waiting program may {hog} the processor. :buzz: vi. 1. Of a program, to run with no indication of progress and perhaps without guarantee of ever finishing; esp. said of programs thought to be executing tight loops of code. A program that is buzzing appears to be {catatonic}, but never gets out of catatonia, while a buzzing loop may eventually end of its own accord. "The program buzzes for about 10 seconds trying to sort all the names into order." See {spin}; see also {grovel}. 2. [ETA Systems] To test a wire or printed circuit trace for continuity by applying an AC rather than DC signal. Some wire faults will pass DC tests but fail a buzz test. 3. To process an array or list in sequence, doing the same thing to each element. "This loop buzzes through the tz array looking for a terminator type." :BWQ: /B-W-Q/ n. [IBM: abbreviation, `Buzz Word Quotient'] The percentage of buzzwords in a speech or documents. Usually roughly proportional to {bogosity}. See {TLA}. :by hand: adv. 1. Said of an operation (especially a repetitive, trivial, and/or tedious one) that ought to be performed automatically by the computer, but which a hacker instead has to step tediously through. "My mailer doesn't have a command to include the text of the message I'm replying to, so I have to do it by hand." This does not necessarily mean the speaker has to retype a copy of the message; it might refer to, say, dropping into a subshell from the mailer, making a copy of one's mailbox file, reading that into an editor, locating the top and bottom of the message in question, deleting the rest of the file, inserting `>' characters on each line, writing the file, leaving the editor, returning to the mailer, reading the file in, and later remembering to delete the file. Compare {eyeball search}. 2. By extension, writing code which does something in an explicit or low-level way for which a presupplied library routine ought to have been available. "This cretinous B-tree library doesn't supply a decent iterator, so I'm having to walk the trees by hand." :byte:: /bi:t/ n. [techspeak] A unit of memory or data equal to the amount used to represent one character; on modern architectures this is usually 8 bits, but may be 9 on 36-bit machines. Some older architectures used `byte' for quantities of 6 or 7 bits, and the PDP-10 supported `bytes' that were actually bitfields of 1 to 36 bits! These usages are now obsolete, and even 9-bit bytes have become rare in the general trend toward power-of-2 word sizes. Historical note: The term was coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956 during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer; originally it was described as 1 to 6 bits (typical I/O equipment of the period used 6-bit chunks of information). The move to an 8-bit byte happened in late 1956, and this size was later adopted and promulgated as a standard by the System/360. The word was coined by mutating the word `bite' so it would not be accidentally misspelled as {bit}. See also {nybble}. :byte sex: n. [common] The byte sex of hardware is {big-endian} or {little-endian}; see those entries. :bytesexual: /bi:t`sek'shu-*l/ adj. [rare] Said of hardware, denotes willingness to compute or pass data in either {big-endian} or {little-endian} format (depending, presumably, on a {mode bit} somewhere). See also {NUXI problem}. :Bzzzt! Wrong.: /bzt rong/ excl. [Usenet/Internet; punctuation varies] From a Robin Williams routine in the movie "Dead Poets Society" spoofing radio or TV quiz programs, such as _Truth or Consequences_, where an incorrect answer earns one a blast from the buzzer and condolences from the interlocutor. A way of expressing mock-rude disagreement, usually immediately following an included quote from another poster. The less abbreviated "*Bzzzzt*, wrong, but thank you for playing" is also common; capitalization and emphasis of the buzzer sound varies. = C = ===== :C: n. 1. The third letter of the English alphabet. 2. ASCII 1000011. 3. The name of a programming language designed by Dennis Ritchie during the early 1970s and immediately used to reimplement {{Unix}}; so called because many features derived from an earlier compiler named `B' in commemoration of _its_ parent, BCPL. (BCPL was in turn descended from an earlier Algol-derived language, CPL.) Before Bjarne Stroustrup settled the question by designing {C++}, there was a humorous debate over whether C's successor should be named `D' or `P'. C became immensely popular outside Bell Labs after about 1980 and is now the dominant language in systems and microcomputer applications programming. See also {languages of choice}, {indent style}. C is often described, with a mixture of fondness and disdain varying according to the speaker, as "a language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language". :C Programmer's Disease: n. The tendency of the undisciplined C programmer to set arbitrary but supposedly generous static limits on table sizes (defined, if you're lucky, by constants in header files) rather than taking the trouble to do proper dynamic storage allocation. If an application user later needs to put 68 elements into a table of size 50, the afflicted programmer reasons that he or she can easily reset the table size to 68 (or even as much as 70, to allow for future expansion) and recompile. This gives the programmer the comfortable feeling of having made the effort to satisfy the user's (unreasonable) demands, and often affords the user multiple opportunities to explore the marvelous consequences of {fandango on core}. In severe cases of the disease, the programmer cannot comprehend why each fix of this kind seems only to further disgruntle the user. :C++: /C'-pluhs-pluhs/ n. Designed by Bjarne Stroustrup of AT&T Bell Labs as a successor to {C}. Now one of the {languages of choice}, although many hackers still grumble that it is the successor to either Algol 68 or {Ada} (depending on generation), and a prime example of {second-system effect}. Almost anything that can be done in any language can be done in C++, but it requires a {language lawyer} to know what is and what is not legal-- the design is _almost_ too large to hold in even hackers' heads. Much of the {cruft} results from C++'s attempt to be backward compatible with C. Stroustrup himself has said in his retrospective book "The Design and Evolution of C++" (p. 207), "Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out." [Many hackers would now add "Yes, and it's called Java" --ESR] :calculator: [Cambridge] n. Syn. for {bitty box}. :Camel Book: n. Universally recognized nickname for the book "Programming Perl", by Larry Wall and Randal L. Schwartz, O'Reilly Associates 1991, ISBN 0-937175-64-1 (second edition 1996, ISBN 1-56592-149-6). The definitive reference on {Perl}. :can: vt. To abort a job on a time-sharing system. Used esp. when the person doing the deed is an operator, as in "canned from the {{console}}". Frequently used in an imperative sense, as in "Can that print job, the LPT just popped a sprocket!" Synonymous with {gun}. It is said that the ASCII character with mnemonic CAN (0011000) was used as a kill-job character on some early OSes. Alternatively, this term may derive from mainstream slang `canned' for being laid off or fired. :can't happen: The traditional program comment for code executed under a condition that should never be true, for example a file size computed as negative. Often, such a condition being true indicates data corruption or a faulty algorithm; it is almost always handled by emitting a fatal error message and terminating or crashing, since there is little else that can be done. Some case variant of "can't happen" is also often the text emitted if the `impossible' error actually happens! Although "can't happen" events are genuinely infrequent in production code, programmers wise enough to check for them habitually are often surprised at how frequently they are triggered during development and how many headaches checking for them turns out to head off. See also {firewall code} (sense 2). :cancelbot: /kan'sel-bot/ [USENET: portmanteau, cancel + robot] 1. Mythically, a {robocanceller} 2. In reality, most cancelbots are manually operated by being fed lists of spam message IDs. :Cancelmoose[tm]: /kan'sel-moos/ [USENET] The archetype and model of all good {spam}-fighters. Once upon a time, the 'Moose would send out spam-cancels and then post notice anonymously to news.admin.policy, news.admin.misc, and alt.current-events.net-abuse. The 'Moose stepped to the fore on its own initiative, at a time (mid-1994) when spam-cancels were irregular and disorganized, and behaved altogether admirably - fair, even-handed, and quick to respond to comments and criticism, all without self-aggrandizement or martyrdom. Cancelmoose[tm] quickly gained near-unanimous support from the readership of all three above-mentioned groups. Nobody knows who Cancelmoose[tm] really is, and there aren't even any good rumors. However, the 'Moose now has an e-mail address () and a web site (`http://www.cm.org'.) By early 1995, others had stepped into the spam-cancel business, and appeared to be comporting themselves well, after the 'Moose's manner. The 'Moose has now gotten out of the business, and is more interested in ending spam (and cancels) entirely. :candygrammar: n. A programming-language grammar that is mostly {syntactic sugar}; the term is also a play on `candygram'. {COBOL}, Apple's Hypertalk language, and a lot of the so-called `4GL' database languages share this property. The usual intent of such designs is that they be as English-like as possible, on the theory that they will then be easier for unskilled people to program. This intention comes to grief on the reality that syntax isn't what makes programming hard; it's the mental effort and organization required to specify an algorithm precisely that costs. Thus the invariable result is that `candygrammar' languages are just as difficult to program in as terser ones, and far more painful for the experienced hacker. [The overtones from the old Chevy Chase skit on Saturday Night Live should not be overlooked. This was a "Jaws" parody. Someone lurking outside an apartment door tries all kinds of bogus ways to get the occupant to open up, while ominous music plays in the background. The last attempt is a half-hearted "Candygram!" When the door is opened, a shark bursts in and chomps the poor occupant. [There is a similar gag in "Blazing Saddles" --ESR] There is a moral here for those attracted to candygrammars. Note that, in many circles, pretty much the same ones who remember Monty Python sketches, all it takes is the word "Candygram!", suitably timed, to get people rolling on the floor. -- GLS] :canonical: adj. [historically, `according to religious law'] The usual or standard state or manner of something. This word has a somewhat more technical meaning in mathematics. Two formulas such as 9 + x and x + 9 are said to be equivalent because they mean the same thing, but the second one is in `canonical form' because it is written in the usual way, with the highest power of x first. Usually there are fixed rules you can use to decide whether something is in canonical form. The jargon meaning, a relaxation of the technical meaning, acquired its present loading in computer-science culture largely through its prominence in Alonzo Church's work in computation theory and mathematical logic (see {Knights of the Lambda Calculus}). Compare {vanilla}. Non-technical academics do not use the adjective `canonical' in any of the senses defined above with any regularity; they do however use the nouns `canon' and `canonicity' (not **canonicalness or **canonicality). The `canon' of a given author is the complete body of authentic works by that author (this usage is familiar to Sherlock Holmes fans as well as to literary scholars). `_The_ canon' is the body of works in a given field (e.g., works of literature, or of art, or of music) deemed worthwhile for students to study and for scholars to investigate. The word `canon' has an interesting history. It derives ultimately from the Greek `kanon' (akin to the English `cane') referring to a reed. Reeds were used for measurement, and in Latin and later Greek the word `canon' meant a rule or a standard. The establishment of a canon of scriptures within Christianity was meant to define a standard or a rule for the religion. The above non-techspeak academic usages stem from this instance of a defined and accepted body of work. Alongside this usage was the promulgation of `canons' (`rules') for the government of the Catholic Church. The techspeak usages ("according to religious law") derive from this use of the Latin `canon'. Hackers invest this term with a playfulness that makes an ironic contrast with its historical meaning. A true story: One Bob Sjoberg, new at the MIT AI Lab, expressed some annoyance at the incessant use of jargon. Over his loud objections, GLS and RMS made a point of using as much of it as possible in his presence, and eventually it began to sink in. Finally, in one conversation, he used the word `canonical' in jargon-like fashion without thinking. Steele: "Aha! We've finally got you talking jargon too!" Stallman: "What did he say?" Steele: "Bob just used `canonical' in the canonical way." Of course, canonicality depends on context, but it is implicitly defined as the way _hackers_ normally expect things to be. Thus, a hacker may claim with a straight face that `according to religious law' is _not_ the canonical meaning of `canonical'. :card walloper: n. An EDP programmer who grinds out batch programs that do stupid things like print people's paychecks. Compare {code grinder}. See also {{punched card}}, {eighty-column mind}. :careware: /keir'weir/ n. A variety of {shareware} for which either the author suggests that some payment be made to a nominated charity or a levy directed to charity is included on top of the distribution charge. Syn. {charityware}; compare {crippleware}, sense 2. :cargo cult programming: n. A style of (incompetent) programming dominated by ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose. A cargo cult programmer will usually explain the extra code as a way of working around some bug encountered in the past, but usually neither the bug nor the reason the code apparently avoided the bug was ever fully understood (compare {shotgun debugging}, {voodoo programming}). The term `cargo cult' is a reference to aboriginal religions that grew up in the South Pacific after World War II. The practices of these cults center on building elaborate mockups of airplanes and military style landing strips in the hope of bringing the return of the god-like airplanes that brought such marvelous cargo during the war. Hackish usage probably derives from Richard Feynman's characterization of certain practices as "cargo cult science" in his book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" (W. W. Norton & Co, New York 1985, ISBN 0-393-01921-7). :cascade: n. 1. A huge volume of spurious error-message output produced by a compiler with poor error recovery. Too frequently, one trivial syntax error (such as a missing `)' or `}') throws the parser out of synch so that much of the remaining program text is interpreted as garbaged or ill-formed. 2. A chain of Usenet followups, each adding some trivial variation or riposte to the text of the previous one, all of which is reproduced in the new message; an {include war} in which the object is to create a sort of communal graffito. :case and paste: n. [from `cut and paste'] 1. The addition of a new {feature} to an existing system by selecting the code from an existing feature and pasting it in with minor changes. Common in telephony circles because most operations in a telephone switch are selected using `case' statements. Leads to {software bloat}. In some circles of EMACS users this is called `programming by Meta-W', because Meta-W is the EMACS command for copying a block of text to a kill buffer in preparation to pasting it in elsewhere. The term is condescending, implying that the programmer is acting mindlessly rather than thinking carefully about what is required to integrate the code for two similar cases. At {DEC} (now Compaq), this is sometimes called `clone-and-hack' coding. :casters-up mode: n. [IBM, prob. fr. slang belly up] Yet another synonym for `broken' or `down'. Usually connotes a major failure. A system (hardware or software) which is `down' may be already being restarted before the failure is noticed, whereas one which is `casters up' is usually a good excuse to take the rest of the day off (as long as you're not responsible for fixing it). :casting the runes: n. What a {guru} does when you ask him or her to run a particular program and type at it because it never works for anyone else; esp. used when nobody can ever see what the guru is doing different from what J. Random Luser does. Compare {incantation}, {runes}, {examining the entrails}; also see the AI koan about Tom Knight in "{AI Koans}" (Appendix A). A correspondent from England tells us that one of ICL's most talented systems designers used to be called out occasionally to service machines which the {field circus} had given up on. Since he knew the design inside out, he could often find faults simply by listening to a quick outline of the symptoms. He used to play on this by going to some site where the field circus had just spent the last two weeks solid trying to find a fault, and spreading a diagram of the system out on a table top. He'd then shake some chicken bones and cast them over the diagram, peer at the bones intently for a minute, and then tell them that a certain module needed replacing. The system would start working again immediately upon the replacement. :cat: [from `catenate' via {{Unix}} `cat(1)'] vt. 1. [techspeak] To spew an entire file to the screen or some other output sink without pause. 2. By extension, to dump large amounts of data at an unprepared target or with no intention of browsing it carefully. Usage: considered silly. Rare outside Unix sites. See also {dd}, {BLT}. Among Unix fans, `cat(1)' is considered an excellent example of user-interface design, because it delivers the file contents without such verbosity as spacing or headers between the files, and because it does not require the files to consist of lines of text, but works with any sort of data. Among Unix haters, `cat(1)' is considered the {canonical} example of _bad_ user-interface design, because of its woefully unobvious name. It is far more often used to {blast} a file to standard output than to concatenate two files. The name `cat' for the former operation is just as unintuitive as, say, LISP's {cdr}. Of such oppositions are {holy wars} made.... :catatonic: adj. Describes a condition of suspended animation in which something is so {wedged} or {hung} that it makes no response. If you are typing on a terminal and suddenly the computer doesn't even echo the letters back to the screen as you type, let alone do what you're asking it to do, then the computer is suffering from catatonia (possibly because it has crashed). "There I was in the middle of a winning game of {nethack} and it went catatonic on me! Aaargh!" Compare {buzz}. :cathedral: n.,adj. [see {bazaar} for derivation] The `classical' mode of software engineering long thought to be neccessarily implied by {Brooks's Law}. Features small teams, tight project control, and long release intervals. This term came into use after analysis of the Linux experience suggested there might be something wrong (or at least incomplete) in the classical assumptions. :cd tilde: /C-D til-d*/ vi. To go home. From the Unix C-shell and Korn-shell command `cd ~', which takes one to one's `$HOME' (`cd' with no arguments happens to do the same thing). By extension, may be used with other arguments; thus, over an electronic chat link, `cd ~coffee' would mean "I'm going to the coffee machine." :CDA: /C-D-A/ The "Communications Decency Act" of 1996, passed on {Black Thursday} as section 502 of a major telecommunications reform bill. The CDA made it a federal crime in the USA to send a communication which is "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent, with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass another person." It also threatened with imprisonment anyone who "knowingly" makes accessible to minors any message that "describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs". While the CDA was sold as a measure to protect minors from the putative evils of pornography, the repressive political aims of the bill were laid bare by the Hyde amendment, which intended to outlaw discussion of abortion on the Internet. To say that this direct attack on First Amendment free-speech rights was not well received on the Internet would be putting it mildly. A firestorm of protest followed, including a February 29th mass demonstration by thousands of netters who turned their {home page}s black for 48 hours. Several civil-rights groups and computing/telecommunications companies mounted a constitutional challenge. The CDA was demolished by a strongly-worded decision handed down on in 8th-circuit Federal court and subsequently affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court on 26 June 1997 (`White Thursday'). See also {Exon}. To join the fight against Internet censorship, visit the Center for Democracy and Technology Home Page at `http://www.cdt.org'. :cdr: /ku'dr/ or /kuh'dr/ vt. [from LISP] To skip past the first item from a list of things (generalized from the LISP operation on binary tree structures, which returns a list consisting of all but the first element of its argument). In the form `cdr down', to trace down a list of elements: "Shall we cdr down the agenda?" Usage: silly. See also {loop through}. Historical note: The instruction format of the IBM 704 that hosted the original LISP implementation featured two 15-bit fields called the `address' and `decrement' parts. The term `cdr' was originally `Contents of Decrement part of Register'. Similarly, `car' stood for `Contents of Address part of Register'. The cdr and car operations have since become bases for formation of compound metaphors in non-LISP contexts. GLS recalls, for example, a programming project in which strings were represented as linked lists; the get-character and skip-character operations were of course called CHAR and CHDR. :chad: /chad/ n. 1. The perforated edge strips on printer paper, after they have been separated from the printed portion. Also called {selvage}, {perf}, and {ripoff}. 2. obs. The confetti-like paper bits punched out of cards or paper tape; this has also been called `chaff', `computer confetti', and `keypunch droppings'. It's reported that this was very old Army slang, and it may now be mainstream; it has been reported seen (1993) in directions for a card-based voting machine in California. Historical note: One correspondent believes `chad' (sense 2) derives from the Chadless keypunch (named for its inventor), which cut little u-shaped tabs in the card to make a hole when the tab folded back, rather than punching out a circle/rectangle; it was clear that if the Chadless keypunch didn't make them, then the stuff that other keypunches made had to be `chad'. There is a legend that the word was originally acronymic, standing for "Card Hole Aggregate Debris", but this has all the earmarks of a {backronym}. :chad box: n. A metal box about the size of a lunchbox (or in some models a large wastebasket), for collecting the {chad} (sense 2) that accumulated in {Iron Age} card punches. You had to open the covers of the card punch periodically and empty the chad box. The {bit bucket} was notionally the equivalent device in the CPU enclosure, which was typically across the room in another great gray-and-blue box. :chain: 1. vi. [orig. from BASIC's `CHAIN' statement] To hand off execution to a child or successor without going through the {OS} command interpreter that invoked it. The state of the parent program is lost and there is no returning to it. Though this facility used to be common on memory-limited micros and is still widely supported for backward compatibility, the jargon usage is semi-obsolescent; in particular, most Unix programmers will think of this as an {exec}. Oppose the more modern `subshell'. 2. n. A series of linked data areas within an operating system or application. `Chain rattling' is the process of repeatedly running through the linked data areas searching for one which is of interest to the executing program. The implication is that there is a very large number of links on the chain. :channel: n. [IRC] The basic unit of discussion on {IRC}. Once one joins a channel, everything one types is read by others on that channel. Channels are named with strings that begin with a `#' sign and can have topic descriptions (which are generally irrelevant to the actual subject of discussion). Some notable channels are `#initgame', `#hottub', and `#report'. At times of international crisis, `#report' has hundreds of members, some of whom take turns listening to various news services and typing in summaries of the news, or in some cases, giving first-hand accounts of the action (e.g., Scud missile attacks in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War in 1991). :channel hopping: n. [IRC, GEnie] To rapidly switch channels on {IRC}, or a GEnie chat board, just as a social butterfly might hop from one group to another at a party. This term may derive from the TV watcher's idiom, `channel surfing'. :channel op: /chan'l op/ n. [IRC] Someone who is endowed with privileges on a particular {IRC} channel; commonly abbreviated `chanop' or `CHOP'. These privileges include the right to {kick} users, to change various status bits, and to make others into CHOPs. :chanop: /chan'-op/ n. [IRC] See {channel op}. :char: /keir/ or /char/; rarely, /kar/ n. Shorthand for `character'. Esp. used by C programmers, as `char' is C's typename for character data. :charityware: /cha'rit-ee-weir`/ n. Syn. {careware}. :chase pointers: 1. vi. To go through multiple levels of indirection, as in traversing a linked list or graph structure. Used esp. by programmers in C, where explicit pointers are a very common data type. This is techspeak, but it remains jargon when used of human networks. "I'm chasing pointers. Bob said you could tell me who to talk to about...." See {dangling pointer} and {snap}. 2. [Cambridge] `pointer chase' or `pointer hunt': The process of going through a {core dump} (sense 1), interactively or on a large piece of paper printed with hex {runes}, following dynamic data-structures. Used only in a debugging context. :chawmp: n. [University of Florida] 16 or 18 bits (half of a machine word). This term was used by FORTH hackers during the late 1970s/early 1980s; it is said to have been archaic then, and may now be obsolete. It was coined in revolt against the promiscuous use of `word' for anything between 16 and 32 bits; `word' has an additional special meaning for FORTH hacks that made the overloading intolerable. For similar reasons, /gaw'bl/ (spelled `gawble' or possibly `gawbul') was in use as a term for 32 or 48 bits (presumably a full machine word, but our sources are unclear on this). These terms are more easily understood if one thinks of them as faithful phonetic spellings of `chomp' and `gobble' pronounced in a Florida or other Southern U.S. dialect. For general discussion of similar terms, see {nybble}. :check: n. A hardware-detected error condition, most commonly used to refer to actual hardware failures rather than software-induced traps. E.g., a `parity check' is the result of a hardware-detected parity error. Recorded here because the word often humorously extended to non-technical problems. For example, the term `child check' has been used to refer to the problems caused by a small child who is curious to know what happens when s/he presses all the cute buttons on a computer's console (of course, this particular problem could have been prevented with {molly-guard}s). :chemist: n. [Cambridge] Someone who wastes computer time on {number-crunching} when you'd far rather the machine were doing something more productive, such as working out anagrams of your name or printing Snoopy calendars or running {life} patterns. May or may not refer to someone who actually studies chemistry. :Chernobyl chicken: n. See {laser chicken}. :Chernobyl packet: /cher-noh'b*l pak'*t/ n. A network packet that induces a {broadcast storm} and/or {network meltdown}, in memory of the April 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine. The typical scenario involves an IP Ethernet datagram that passes through a gateway with both source and destination Ether and IP address set as the respective broadcast addresses for the subnetworks being gated between. Compare {Christmas tree packet}. :chicken head: n. [Commodore] The Commodore Business Machines logo, which strongly resembles a poultry part. Rendered in ASCII as `C='. With the arguable exception of the Amiga (see {amoeba}), Commodore's machines are notoriously crocky little {bitty box}es (see also {PETSCII}). Thus, this usage may owe something to Philip K. Dick's novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (the basis for the movie "Blade Runner"; the novel is now sold under that title), in which a `chickenhead' is a mutant with below-average intelligence. :chiclet keyboard: n. A keyboard with a small, flat rectangular or lozenge-shaped rubber or plastic keys that look like pieces of chewing gum. (Chiclets is the brand name of a variety of chewing gum that does in fact resemble the keys of chiclet keyboards.) Used esp. to describe the original IBM PCjr keyboard. Vendors unanimously liked these because they were cheap, and a lot of early portable and laptop products got launched using them. Customers rejected the idea with almost equal unanimity, and chiclets are not often seen on anything larger than a digital watch any more. :chine nual: /sheen'yu-*l/ n. obs. [MIT] The LISP Machine Manual, so called because the title was wrapped around the cover so only those letters showed on the front. :Chinese Army technique: n. Syn. {Mongolian Hordes technique}. :choad: /chohd/ n. Synonym for `penis' used in alt.tasteless and popularized by the denizens thereof. They say: "We think maybe it's from Middle English but we're all too damned lazy to check the OED." [I'm not. It isn't. --ESR] This term is alleged to have been inherited through 1960s underground comics, and to have been recently sighted in the Beavis and Butthead cartoons. Speakers of the Hindi, Bengali and Gujarati languages have confirmed that `choad' is in fact an Indian vernacular word equivalent to `fuck'; it is therefore likely to have entered English slang via the British Raj. :choke: v. 1. To reject input, often ungracefully. "NULs make System V's `lpr(1)' choke." "I tried building an {EMACS} binary to use {X}, but `cpp(1)' choked on all those `#define's." See {barf}, {gag}, {vi}. 2. [MIT] More generally, to fail at any endeavor, but with some flair or bravado; the popular definition is "to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory." :chomp: vi. 1. To {lose}; specifically, to chew on something of which more was bitten off than one can. Probably related to gnashing of teeth. 2. To bite the bag; See {bagbiter}. A hand gesture commonly accompanies this. To perform it, hold the four fingers together and place the thumb against their tips. Now open and close your hand rapidly to suggest a biting action (much like what Pac-Man does in the classic video game, though this pantomime seems to predate that). The gesture alone means `chomp chomp' (see "{Verb Doubling}" in the "{Jargon Construction}" section of the Prependices). The hand may be pointed at the object of complaint, and for real emphasis you can use both hands at once. Doing this to a person is equivalent to saying "You chomper!" If you point the gesture at yourself, it is a humble but humorous admission of some failure. You might do this if someone told you that a program you had written had failed in some surprising way and you felt dumb for not having anticipated it. :chomper: n. Someone or something that is chomping; a loser. See {loser}, {bagbiter}, {chomp}. :CHOP: /chop/ n. [IRC] See {channel op}. :Christmas tree: n. A kind of RS-232 line tester or breakout box featuring rows of blinking red and green LEDs suggestive of Christmas lights. :Christmas tree packet: n. A packet with every single option set for whatever protocol is in use. See {kamikaze packet}, {Chernobyl packet}. (The term doubtless derives from a fanciful image of each little option bit being represented by a different-colored light bulb, all turned on.) :chrome: n. [from automotive slang via wargaming] Showy features added to attract users but contributing little or nothing to the power of a system. "The 3D icons in Motif are just chrome, but they certainly are _pretty_ chrome!" Distinguished from {bells and whistles} by the fact that the latter are usually added to gratify developers' own desires for featurefulness. Often used as a term of contempt. :chug: vi. To run slowly; to {grind} or {grovel}. "The disk is chugging like crazy." :Church of the SubGenius: n. A mutant offshoot of {Discordianism} launched in 1981 as a spoof of fundamentalist Christianity by the `Reverend' Ivan Stang, a brilliant satirist with a gift for promotion. Popular among hackers as a rich source of bizarre imagery and references such as "Bob" the divine drilling-equipment salesman, the Benevolent Space Xists, and the Stark Fist of Removal. Much SubGenius theory is concerned with the acquisition of the mystical substance or quality of {slack}. :Cinderella Book: [CMU] n. "Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation", by John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman, (Addison-Wesley, 1979). So called because the cover depicts a girl (putatively Cinderella) sitting in front of a Rube Goldberg device and holding a rope coming out of it. On the back cover, the device is in shambles after she has (inevitably) pulled on the rope. See also {{book titles}}. :CI$: // n. Hackerism for `CIS', CompuServe Information Service. The dollar sign refers to CompuServe's rather steep line charges. Often used in {sig block}s just before a CompuServe address. Syn. {Compu$erve}. :Classic C: /klas'ik C/ [a play on `Coke Classic'] n. The C programming language as defined in the first edition of {K&R}, with some small additions. It is also known as `K&R C'. The name came into use while C was being standardized by the ANSI X3J11 committee. Also `C Classic'. An analogous construction is sometimes applied elsewhere: thus, `X Classic', where X = Star Trek (referring to the original TV series) or X = PC (referring to IBM's ISA-bus machines as opposed to the PS/2 series). This construction is especially used of product series in which the newer versions are considered serious losers relative to the older ones. :clean: 1. adj. Used of hardware or software designs, implies `elegance in the small', that is, a design or implementation that may not hold any surprises but does things in a way that is reasonably intuitive and relatively easy to comprehend from the outside. The antonym is `grungy' or {crufty}. 2. v. To remove unneeded or undesired files in a effort to reduce clutter: "I'm cleaning up my account." "I cleaned up the garbage and now have 100 Meg free on that partition." :CLM: /C-L-M/ [Sun: `Career Limiting Move'] 1. n. An action endangering one's future prospects of getting plum projects and raises, and possibly one's job: "His Halloween costume was a parody of his manager. He won the prize for `best CLM'." 2. adj. Denotes extreme severity of a bug, discovered by a customer and obviously missed earlier because of poor testing: "That's a CLM bug!" :clobber: vt. To overwrite, usually unintentionally: "I walked off the end of the array and clobbered the stack." Compare {mung}, {scribble}, {trash}, and {smash the stack}. :clocks: n. Processor logic cycles, so called because each generally corresponds to one clock pulse in the processor's timing. The relative execution times of instructions on a machine are usually discussed in clocks rather than absolute fractions of a second; one good reason for this is that clock speeds for various models of the machine may increase as technology improves, and it is usually the relative times one is interested in when discussing the instruction set. Compare {cycle}. :clone: n. 1. An exact duplicate: "Our product is a clone of their product." Implies a legal reimplementation from documentation or by reverse-engineering. Also connotes lower price. 2. A shoddy, spurious copy: "Their product is a clone of our product." 3. A blatant ripoff, most likely violating copyright, patent, or trade secret protections: "Your product is a clone of my product." This use implies legal action is pending. 4. `PC clone:' a PC-BUS/ISA or EISA-compatible 80x86-based microcomputer (this use is sometimes spelled `klone' or `PClone'). These invariably have much more bang for the buck than the IBM archetypes they resemble. 5. In the construction `Unix clone': An OS designed to deliver a Unix-lookalike environment without Unix license fees, or with additional `mission-critical' features such as support for real-time programming. 6. v. To make an exact copy of something. "Let me clone that" might mean "I want to borrow that paper so I can make a photocopy" or "Let me get a copy of that file before you {mung} it". :clone-and-hack coding: n. [DEC] Syn. {case and paste}. :clover key: n. [Mac users] See {feature key}. :clue-by-four: [USENET: portmanteau, clue + two-by-four] The notional stick with which one whacks an aggressively clueless person. This term derives from a western American folk saying about training a mule "First, you got to hit him with a two-by-four. That's to get his attention." The clue-by-four is a close relative of the {LART}. :clustergeeking: /kluh'st*r-gee`king/ n. [CMU] Spending more time at a computer cluster doing CS homework than most people spend breathing. :compo: n. [{demoscene}] Finnish-originated slang for `competition'. Demo compos are held at a {demoparty}. The usual protocol is that several groups make demos for a compo, they are shown on a big screen, and then the party participants vote for the best one. Prizes (from sponsors and party entrance fees) are given. Standard compo formats include {intro} compos (4k or 64k demos), music compos, graphics compos, quick {demo} compos (build a demo within 4 hours for example), etc. :coaster: n. Unuseable CD produced during failed attempt at writing to writeable or re-writeable CD media. Certainly related to the coaster-like shape of a CD, and the relative value of these failures. "I made a lot of coasters before I got a good CD." :COBOL: /koh'bol/ n. [COmmon Business-Oriented Language] (Synonymous with {evil}.) A weak, verbose, and flabby language used by {card walloper}s to do boring mindless things on {dinosaur} mainframes. Hackers believe that all COBOL programmers are {suit}s or {code grinder}s, and no self-respecting hacker will ever admit to having learned the language. Its very name is seldom uttered without ritual expressions of disgust or horror. One popular one is Edsger W. Dijkstra's famous observation that "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense." (from "Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective") See also {fear and loathing}, {software rot}. :COBOL fingers: /koh'bol fing'grz/ n. Reported from Sweden, a (hypothetical) disease one might get from coding in COBOL. The language requires code verbose beyond all reason (see {candygrammar}); thus it is alleged that programming too much in COBOL causes one's fingers to wear down to stubs by the endless typing. "I refuse to type in all that source code again; it would give me COBOL fingers!" :cobweb site: n. A World Wide Web Site that hasn't been updated so long it has figuratively grown cobwebs.

:code grinder: n. 1. A {suit}-wearing minion of the sort hired in legion strength by banks and insurance companies to implement payroll packages in RPG and other such unspeakable horrors. In its native habitat, the code grinder often removes the suit jacket to reveal an underplumage consisting of button-down shirt (starch optional) and a tie. In times of dire stress, the sleeves (if long) may be rolled up and the tie loosened about half an inch. It seldom helps. The {code grinder}'s milieu is about as far from hackerdom as one can get and still touch a computer; the term connotes pity. See {Real World}, {suit}. 2. Used of or to a hacker, a really serious slur on the person's creative ability; connotes a design style characterized by primitive technique, rule-boundedness, {brute force}, and utter lack of imagination. Compare {card walloper}; contrast {hacker}, {Real Programmer}. :Code of the Geeks: n. see {geek code}. :code police: n. [by analogy with George Orwell's `thought police'] A mythical team of Gestapo-like storm troopers that might burst into one's office and arrest one for violating programming style rules. May be used either seriously, to underline a claim that a particular style violation is dangerous, or ironically, to suggest that the practice under discussion is condemned mainly by anal-retentive {weenie}s. "Dike out that goto or the code police will get you!" The ironic usage is perhaps more common. :codes: n. [scientific computing] Programs. This usage is common in people who hack supercomputers and heavy-duty {number-crunching}, rare to unknown elsewhere (if you say "codes" to hackers outside scientific computing, their first association is likely to be "and cyphers"). :codewalker: n. A program component that traverses other programs for a living. Compilers have codewalkers in their front ends; so do cross-reference generators and some database front ends. Other utility programs that try to do too much with source code may turn into codewalkers. As in "This new `vgrind' feature would require a codewalker to implement." :coefficient of X: n. Hackish speech makes heavy use of pseudo-mathematical metaphors. Four particularly important ones involve the terms `coefficient', `factor', `index', and `quotient'. They are often loosely applied to things you cannot really be quantitative about, but there are subtle distinctions among them that convey information about the way the speaker mentally models whatever he or she is describing. `Foo factor' and `foo quotient' tend to describe something for which the issue is one of presence or absence. The canonical example is {fudge factor}. It's not important how much you're fudging; the term simply acknowledges that some fudging is needed. You might talk of liking a movie for its silliness factor. Quotient tends to imply that the property is a ratio of two opposing factors: "I would have won except for my luck quotient." This could also be "I would have won except for the luck factor", but using _quotient_ emphasizes that it was bad luck overpowering good luck (or someone else's good luck overpowering your own). `Foo index' and `coefficient of foo' both tend to imply that foo is, if not strictly measurable, at least something that can be larger or smaller. Thus, you might refer to a paper or person as having a `high bogosity index', whereas you would be less likely to speak of a `high bogosity factor'. `Foo index' suggests that foo is a condensation of many quantities, as in the mundane cost-of-living index; `coefficient of foo' suggests that foo is a fundamental quantity, as in a coefficient of friction. The choice between these terms is often one of personal preference; e.g., some people might feel that bogosity is a fundamental attribute and thus say `coefficient of bogosity', whereas others might feel it is a combination of factors and thus say `bogosity index'. :cokebottle: /kohk'bot-l/ n. Any very unusual character, particularly one you can't type because it isn't on your keyboard. MIT people used to complain about the `control-meta-cokebottle' commands at SAIL, and SAIL people complained right back about the `{altmode}-altmode-cokebottle' commands at MIT. After the demise of the {space-cadet keyboard}, `cokebottle' faded away as serious usage, but was often invoked humorously to describe an (unspecified) weird or non-intuitive keystroke command. It may be due for a second inning, however. The OSF/Motif window manager, `mwm(1)', has a reserved keystroke for switching to the default set of keybindings and behavior. This keystroke is (believe it or not) `control-meta-bang' (see {bang}). Since the exclamation point looks a lot like an upside down Coke bottle, Motif hackers have begun referring to this keystroke as `cokebottle'. See also {quadruple bucky}. :cold boot: n. See {boot}. :COME FROM: n. A semi-mythical language construct dual to the `go to'; `COME FROM'

:language lawyer: n. A person, usually an experienced or senior software engineer, who is intimately familiar with many or most of the numerous restrictions and features (both useful and esoteric) applicable to one or more computer programming languages. A language lawyer is distinguished by the ability to show you the five sentences scattered through a 200-plus-page manual that together imply the answer to your question "if only you had thought to look there". Compare {wizard}, {legal}, {legalese}. :languages of choice: n. {C}, {C++}, {LISP}, and {Perl}. Nearly every hacker knows one of C or LISP, and most good ones are fluent in both. C++, despite some serious drawbacks, is generally preferred to other object-oriented languages (though in 1999 it looks as though Java has displaced it in the affections of hackers, if not everywhere). Since around 1990 Perl has rapidly been gaining favor, especially as a tool for systems-administration utilities and rapid prototyping. Python, Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in small but influential communities. There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with FORTRAN, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They often prefer to be known as {Real Programmer}s, and other hackers consider them a bit odd (see "{The Story of Mel}" in Appendix A). Assembler is generally no longer considered interesting or appropriate for anything but {HLL} implementation, {glue}, and a few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systems programs. FORTRAN occupies a shrinking niche in scientific programming. Most hackers tend to frown on languages like {{Pascal}} and {{Ada}}, which don't give them the near-total freedom considered necessary for hacking (see {bondage-and-discipline language}), and to regard everything even remotely connected with {COBOL} or other traditional {card walloper} languages as a total and unmitigated {loss}. :LART: // Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool. 1. n. In the collective mythos of {scary devil monastery}, this is an essential item in the toolkit of every {BOFH}. The LART classic is a 2x4 or other large billet of wood usable as a club, to be applied upside the head of spammers and other people who cause sysadmins more grief than just naturally goes with the job. Perennial debates rage on alt.sysadmin.discovery over what constitutes the truly effective LARP; knobkerries, semiautomatic weapons, flamethrowers, and tactical nukes all have their partisans. Compare {clue-by-four}. 2. v. To use a LART. Some would add "in malice", but some sysadmins do prefer to gently lart their users as a first (and sometimes final) warning. 3. interj. Calling for one's LART, much as a surgeon might call "Scalpel!". 4. interj. [rare] Used in {flame}s as a rebuke. "LART! LART! LART!" :larval stage: n. Describes a period of monomaniacal concentration on coding apparently passed through by all fledgling hackers. Common symptoms include the perpetration of more than one 36-hour {hacking run} in a given week; neglect of all other activities including usual basics like food, sleep, and personal hygiene; and a chronic case of advanced bleary-eye. Can last from 6 months to 2 years, the apparent median being around 18 months. A few so afflicted never resume a more `normal' life, but the ordeal seems to be necessary to produce really wizardly (as opposed to merely competent) programmers. See also {wannabee}. A less protracted and intense version of larval stage (typically lasting about a month) may recur when one is learning a new {OS} or programming language. :lase: /layz/ vt. To print a given document via a laser printer. "OK, let's lase that sucker and see if all those graphics-macro calls did the right things." :laser chicken: n. Kung Pao Chicken, a standard Chinese dish containing chicken, peanuts, and hot red peppers in a spicy pepper-oil sauce. Many hackers call it `laser chicken' for two reasons: It can {zap} you just like a laser, and the sauce has a red color reminiscent of some laser beams. The dish has also been called `gunpowder chicken'. In a variation on this theme, it is reported that some Australian hackers have redesignated the common dish `lemon chicken' as `Chernobyl Chicken'. The name is derived from the color of the sauce, which is considered bright enough to glow in the dark (as, mythically, do some of the inhabitants of Chernobyl). :Lasherism: n. [Harvard] A program that solves a standard problem (such as the Eight Queens puzzle or implementing the {life} algorithm) in a deliberately nonstandard way. Distinguished from a {crock} or {kluge} by the fact that the programmer did it on purpose as a mental exercise. Such constructions are quite popular in exercises such as the {Obfuscated C Contest}, and occasionally in {retrocomputing}. Lew Lasher was a student at Harvard around 1980 who became notorious for such behavior. :laundromat: n. Syn. {disk farm}; see {washing machine}. :LDB: /l*'d*b/ vt. [from the PDP-10 instruction set] To extract from the middle. "LDB me a slice of cake, please." This usage has been kept alive by Common LISP's function of the same name. Considered silly. See also {DPB}. :leaf site: n. A machine that merely originates and reads Usenet news or mail, and does not relay any third-party traffic. Often uttered in a critical tone; when the ratio of leaf sites to backbone, rib, and other relay sites gets too high, the network tends to develop bottlenecks. Compare {backbone site}, {rib site}. :leak: n. With qualifier, one of a class of resource-management bugs that occur when resources are not freed properly after operations on them are finished, so they effectively disappear (leak out). This leads to eventual exhaustion as new allocation requests come in. {memory leak} and {fd leak} have their own entries; one might also refer, to, say, a `window handle leak' in a window system. :leaky heap: n. [Cambridge] An {arena} with a {memory leak}. :leapfrog attack: n. Use of userid and password information obtained illicitly from one host (e.g., downloading a file of account IDs and passwords, tapping TELNET, etc.) to compromise another host. Also, the act of TELNETting through one or more hosts in order to confuse a trace (a standard cracker procedure). :leech: n. Among BBS types, crackers and {warez d00dz}, one who consumes knowledge without generating new software, cracks, or techniques. BBS culture specifically defines a leech as someone who downloads files with few or no uploads in return, and who does not contribute to the message section. Cracker culture extends this definition to someone (a {lamer}, usually) who constantly presses informed sources for information and/or assistance, but has nothing to contribute. :legal: adj. Loosely used to mean `in accordance with all the relevant rules', esp. in connection with some set of constraints defined by software. "The older =+ alternate for += is no longer legal syntax in ANSI C." "This parser processes each line of legal input the moment it sees the trailing linefeed." Hackers often model their work as a sort of game played with the environment in which the objective is to maneuver through the thicket of `natural laws' to achieve a desired objective. Their use of `legal' is flavored as much by this game-playing sense as by the more conventional one having to do with courts and lawyers. Compare {language lawyer}, {legalese}. :legalese: n. Dense, pedantic verbiage in a language description, product specification, or interface standard; text that seems designed to obfuscate and requires a {language lawyer} to {parse} it. Though hackers are not afraid of high information density and complexity in language (indeed, they rather enjoy both), they share a deep and abiding loathing for legalese; they associate it with deception, {suit}s, and situations in which hackers generally get the short end of the stick. :LER: /L-E-R/ n. [TMRC, from `Light-Emitting Diode'] A light-emitting resistor (that is, one in the process of burning up). Ohm's law was broken. See also {SED}. :LERP: /lerp/ vi.,n. Quasi-acronym for Linear Interpolation, used as a verb or noun for the operation. "Bresenham's algorithm lerps incrementally between the two endpoints of the line." :let the smoke out: v. To fry hardware (see {fried}). See {magic smoke} for a discussion of the underlying mythology. :letterbomb: 1. n. A piece of {email} containing {live data} intended to do nefarious things to the recipient's machine or terminal. It is possible, for example, to send letterbombs that will lock up some specific kinds of terminals when they are viewed, so thoroughly that the user must cycle power (see {cycle}, sense 3) to unwedge them. Under Unix, a letterbomb can also try to get part of its contents interpreted as a shell command to the mailer. The results of this could range from silly to tragic. See also {Trojan horse}; compare {nastygram}. 2. Loosely, a {mailbomb}. :lexer: /lek'sr/ n. Common hacker shorthand for `lexical analyzer', the input-tokenizing stage in the parser for a language (the part that breaks it into word-like pieces). "Some C lexers get confused by the old-style compound ops like `=-'." :lexiphage: /lek'si-fayj`/ n. A notorious word {chomper} on ITS. See {bagbiter}. This program would draw on a selected victim's bitmapped terminal the words "THE BAG" in ornate letters, followed a pair of jaws biting pieces of it off. :life: n. 1. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton Conway and first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner ("Scientific American", October 1970); the game's popularity had to wait a few years for computers on which it could reasonably be played, as it's no fun to simulate the cells by hand. Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with it, and hackers at various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented life in {TECO}!; see {Gosperism}). When a hacker mentions `life', he is much more likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal, or the human state of existence. 2. The opposite of {Usenet}. As in "{Get a life!}" :Life is hard: prov. [XEROX PARC] This phrase has two possible interpretations: (1) "While your suggestion may have some merit, I will behave as though I hadn't heard it." (2) "While your suggestion has obvious merit, equally obvious circumstances prevent it from being seriously considered." The charm of the phrase lies precisely in this subtle but important ambiguity. :light pipe: n. Fiber optic cable. Oppose {copper}. :lightweight: adj. Opposite of {heavyweight}; usually found in combining forms such as `lightweight process'. :like kicking dead whales down the beach: adj. Describes a slow, difficult, and disgusting process. First popularized by a famous quote about the difficulty of getting work done under one of IBM's mainframe OSes. "Well, you _could_ write a C compiler in COBOL, but it would be like kicking dead whales down the beach." See also {fear and loathing}. :like nailing jelly to a tree: adj. Used to describe a task thought to be impossible, esp. one in which the difficulty arises from poor specification or inherent slipperiness in the problem domain. "Trying to display the `prettiest' arrangement of nodes and arcs that diagrams a given graph is like nailing jelly to a tree, because nobody's sure what `prettiest' means algorithmically." Hacker use of this term may recall mainstream slang originated early in the 20th century by President Theodore Roosevelt. There is a legend that, weary of inconclusive talks with Colombia over the right to dig a canal through its then-province Panama, he remarked, "Negotiating with those pirates is like trying to nail currant jelly to the wall." Roosevelt's government subsequently encouraged the anti-Colombian insurgency that created the nation of Panama. :line 666: [from Christian eschatological myth] n. The notional line of source at which a program fails for obscure reasons, implying either that _somebody_ is out to get it (when you are the programmer), or that it richly deserves to be so gotten (when you are not). "It works when I trace through it, but seems to crash on line 666 when I run it." "What happens is that whenever a large batch comes through, mmdf dies on the Line of the Beast. Probably some twit hardcoded a buffer size." :line eater, the: n. obs. [Usenet] 1. A bug in some now-obsolete versions of the netnews software that used to eat up to BUFSIZ bytes of the article text. The bug was triggered by having the text of the article start with a space or tab. This bug was quickly personified as a mythical creature called the `line eater', and postings often included a dummy line of `line eater food'. Ironically, line eater `food' not beginning with a space or tab wasn't actually eaten, since the bug was avoided; but if there _was_ a space or tab before it, then the line eater would eat the food _and_ the beginning of the text it was supposed to be protecting. The practice of `sacrificing to the line eater' continued for some time after the bug had been {nailed to the wall}, and is still humorously referred to. The bug itself was still occasionally reported to be lurking in some mail-to-netnews gateways as late as 1991. 2. See {NSA line eater}. :line noise: n. 1. [techspeak] Spurious characters due to electrical noise in a communications link, especially an RS-232 serial connection. Line noise may be induced by poor connections, interference or crosstalk from other circuits, electrical storms, {cosmic rays}, or (notionally) birds crapping on the phone wires. 2. Any chunk of data in a file or elsewhere that looks like the results of line noise in sense 1. 3. Text that is theoretically a readable text or program source but employs syntax so bizarre that it looks like line noise in senses 1 or 2. Yes, there are languages this ugly. The canonical example is {TECO}; it is often claimed that "TECO's input syntax is indistinguishable from line noise." Other non-{WYSIWYG} editors, such as Multics `qed' and Unix `ed', in the hands of a real hacker, also qualify easily, as do deliberately obfuscated languages such as {INTERCAL}. :line starve: [MIT] 1. vi. To feed paper through a printer the wrong way by one line (most printers can't do this). On a display terminal, to move the cursor up to the previous line of the screen. "To print `X squared', you just output `X', line starve, `2', line feed." (The line starve causes the `2' to appear on the line above the `X', and the line feed gets back to the original line.) 2. n. A character (or character sequence) that causes a terminal to perform this action. ASCII 0011010, also called SUB or control-Z, was one common line-starve character in the days before microcomputers and the X3.64 terminal standard. Unlike `line feed', `line starve' is _not_ standard {{ASCII}} terminology. Even among hackers it is considered a bit silly. 3. [proposed] A sequence such as \c (used in System V echo, as well as {{nroff}} and {{troff}}) that suppresses a {newline} or other character(s) that would normally be emitted. :linearithmic: adj. Of an algorithm, having running time that is O(N log N). Coined as a portmanteau of `linear' and `logarithmic' in "Algorithms In C" by Robert Sedgewick (Addison-Wesley 1990, ISBN 0-201-51425-7). :link farm: n. [Unix] A directory tree that contains many links to files in a master directory tree of files. Link farms save space when one is maintaining several nearly identical copies of the same source tree -- for example, when the only difference is architecture-dependent object files. "Let's freeze the source and then rebuild the FROBOZZ-3 and FROBOZZ-4 link farms." Link farms may also be used to get around restrictions on the number of `-I' (include-file directory) arguments on older C preprocessors. However, they can also get completely out of hand, becoming the filesystem equivalent of {spaghetti code}. :link rot: n. The natural decay of web links as the sites they're connected to change or die. Compare {bit rot}. :link-dead: adj. [MUD] The state a player is in when they kill their connection to a {MUD} without leaving it properly. The player is then commonly left as a statue in the game, and is only removed after a certain period of time (an hour on most MUDs). Used on {IRC} as well, although it is inappropriate in that context. Compare {netdead}. :lint: [from Unix's `lint(1)', named for the bits of fluff it supposedly picks from programs] 1. vt. To examine a program closely for style, language usage, and portability problems, esp. if in C, esp. if via use of automated analysis tools, most esp. if the Unix utility `lint(1)' is used. This term used to be restricted to use of `lint(1)' itself, but (judging by references on Usenet) it has become a shorthand for {desk check} at some non-Unix shops, even in languages other than C. Also as v. {delint}. 2. n. Excess verbiage in a document, as in "This draft has too much lint". :Lintel: n. The emerging {Linux}/Intel alliance. This term began to be used in early 1999 after it became clear that the {Wintel} alliance was under increasing strain snd Intel started taking stakes in Linux companies. :Linux:: /lee'nuhks/ or /li'nuks/, _not_ /li:'nuhks/ n. The free Unix workalike created by Linus Torvalds and friends starting about 1991 (the pronunciation /lee'nuhks/ is preferred because the name `Linus' has an /ee/ sound in Swedish). This may be the most remarkable hacker project in history -- an entire clone of Unix for 386, 486 and Pentium micros, distributed for free with sources over the net (ports Alpha and Sparc and many other machines are also in use). Linux is what {GNU} aimed to be, and it relies on the GNU toolset. But the Free Software Foundation didn't produce the kernel to go with that toolset until 1999, which was too late. Other, similar efforts like FreeBSD and NetBSD have been technically successful but never caught fire the way Linux has; as this is written in 1999, Linux is seriously challenging Microsoft's OS dominance. An earlier version of this entry opined "The secret of Linux's success seems to be that Linus worked much harder early on to keep the development process open and recruit other hackers, creating a snowball effect." Truer than we knew. See {bazaar}. :lion food: n. [IBM] Middle management or HQ staff (or, by extension, administrative drones in general). From an old joke about two lions who, escaping from the zoo, split up to increase their chances but agree to meet after 2 months. When they finally meet, one is skinny and the other overweight. The thin one says: "How did you manage? I ate a human just once and they turned out a small army to chase me -- guns, nets, it was terrible. Since then I've been reduced to eating mice, insects, even grass." The fat one replies: "Well, _I_ hid near an IBM office and ate a manager a day. And nobody even noticed!" :Lions Book: n. "Source Code and Commentary on Unix level 6", by John Lions. The two parts of this book contained (1) the entire source listing of the Unix Version 6 kernel, and (2) a commentary on the source discussing the algorithms. These were circulated internally at the University of New South Wales beginning 1976-77, and were, for years after, the _only_ detailed kernel documentation available to anyone outside Bell Labs. Because Western Electric wished to maintain trade secret status on the kernel, the Lions Book was only supposed to be distributed to affiliates of source licensees. In spite of this, it soon spread by samizdat to a good many of the early Unix hackers. [1996 update: The Lions book lives again! It was put back in print as ISBN 1-57398-013-7 from Peer-To-Peer Communications, with forewords by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. In a neat bit of reflexivity, the page before the contents quotes this entry.] :LISP: n. [from `LISt Processing language', but mythically from `Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses'] AI's mother tongue, a language based on the ideas of (a) variable-length lists and trees as fundamental data types, and (b) the interpretation of code as data and vice-versa. Invented by John McCarthy at MIT in the late 1950s, it is actually older than any other {HLL} still in use except FORTRAN. Accordingly, it has undergone considerable adaptive radiation over the years; modern variants are quite different in detail from the original LISP 1.5. The dominant HLL among hackers until the early 1980s, LISP now shares the throne with {C}. See {languages of choice}. All LISP functions and programs are expressions that return values; this, together with the high memory utilization of LISPs, gave rise to Alan Perlis's famous quip (itself a take on an Oscar Wilde quote) that "LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing". One significant application for LISP has been as a proof by example that most newer languages, such as {COBOL} and {Ada}, are full of unnecessary {crock}s. When the {Right Thing} has already been done once, there is no justification for {bogosity} in newer languages. :list-bomb: v. To {mailbomb} someone by forging messages causing the victim to become a subscriber to many mailing lists. This is a self-defeating tactic; it merely forces mailing list servers to require confirmation by return message for every subscription. :lithium lick: n. [NeXT] Steve Jobs. Employees who have gotten too much attention from their esteemed founder are said to have `lithium lick' when they begin to show signs of Jobsian fervor and repeat the most recent catch phrases in normal conversation -- for example, "It just works, right out of the box!" :little-endian: adj. Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given 16- or 32-bit word, bytes at lower addresses have lower significance (the word is stored `little-end-first'). The PDP-11 and VAX families of computers and Intel microprocessors and a lot of communications and networking hardware are little-endian. See {big-endian}, {middle-endian}, {NUXI problem}. The term is sometimes used to describe the ordering of units other than bytes; most often, bits within a byte. :live: /li:v/ adj.,adv. Opposite of `test'. Refers to actual real-world data or a program working with it. For example, the response to "I think the record deleter is finished" might be "Is it live yet?" or "Have you tried it out on live data?" This usage usually carries the connotation that live data is more fragile and must not be corrupted, or bad things will happen. So a more appropriate response might be: "Well, make sure it works perfectly before we throw live data at it." The implication here is that record deletion is something pretty significant, and a haywire record-deleter running amok live would probably cause great harm. :live data: n. 1. Data that is written to be interpreted and takes over program flow when triggered by some un-obvious operation, such as viewing it. One use of such hacks is to break security. For example, some smart terminals have commands that allow one to download strings to program keys; this can be used to write live data that, when listed to the terminal, infects it with a security-breaking {virus} that is triggered the next time a hapless user strikes that key. For another, there are some well-known bugs in {vi} that allow certain texts to send arbitrary commands back to the machine when they are simply viewed. 2. In C code, data that includes pointers to function {hook}s (executable code). 3. An object, such as a {trampoline}, that is constructed on the fly by a program and intended to be executed as code. :Live Free Or Die!: imp. 1. The state motto of New Hampshire, which appears on that state's automobile license plates. 2. A slogan associated with Unix in the romantic days when Unix aficionados saw themselves as a tiny, beleaguered underground tilting against the windmills of industry. The "free" referred specifically to freedom from the {fascist} design philosophies and crufty misfeatures common on commercial operating systems. Armando Stettner, one of the early Unix developers, used to give out fake license plates bearing this motto under a large Unix, all in New Hampshire colors of green and white. These are now valued collector's items. Recently (1994) an inferior imitation of these has been put in circulation with a red corporate logo added. :livelock: /li:v'lok/ n. A situation in which some critical stage of a task is unable to finish because its clients perpetually create more work for it to do after they have been serviced but before it can clear its queue. Differs from {deadlock} in that the process is not blocked or waiting for anything, but has a virtually infinite amount of work to do and can never catch up. :liveware: /li:v'weir/ n. 1. Synonym for {wetware}. Less common. 2. [Cambridge] Vermin. "Waiter, there's some liveware in my salad..." :lobotomy: n. 1. What a hacker subjected to formal management training is said to have undergone. At IBM and elsewhere this term is used by both hackers and low-level management; the latter doubtless intend it as a joke. 2. The act of removing the processor from a microcomputer in order to replace or upgrade it. Some very cheap {clone} systems are sold in `lobotomized' form -- everything but the brain. :locals, the: pl.n. The users on one's local network (as opposed, say, to people one reaches via public Internet or UUCP connects). The marked thing about this usage is how little it has to do with real-space distance. "I have to do some tweaking on this mail utility before releasing it to the locals." :locked and loaded: adj. [from military slang for an M-16 rifle with magazine inserted and prepared for firing] Said of a removable disk volume properly prepared for use -- that is, locked into the drive and with the heads loaded. Ironically, because their heads are `loaded' whenever the power is up, this description is never used of {{Winchester}} drives (which are named after a rifle). :locked up: adj. Syn. for {hung}, {wedged}. :logic bomb: n. Code surreptitiously inserted into an application or OS that causes it to perform some destructive or security-compromising activity whenever specified conditions are met. Compare {back door}. :logical: adj. [from the technical term `logical device', wherein a physical device is referred to by an arbitrary `logical' name] Having the role of. If a person (say, Les Earnest at SAIL) who had long held a certain post left and were replaced, the replacement would for a while be known as the `logical' Les Earnest. (This does not imply any judgment on the replacement.) Compare {virtual}. At Stanford, `logical' compass directions denote a coordinate system in which `logical north' is toward San Francisco, `logical west' is toward the ocean, etc., even though logical north varies between physical (true) north near San Francisco and physical west near San Jose. (The best rule of thumb here is that, by definition, El Camino Real always runs logical north-and-south.) In giving directions, one might say: "To get to Rincon Tarasco restaurant, get onto {El Camino Bignum} going logical north." Using the word `logical' helps to prevent the recipient from worrying about that the fact that the sun is setting almost directly in front of him. The concept is reinforced by North American highways which are almost, but not quite, consistently labeled with logical rather than physical directions. A similar situation exists at MIT: Route 128 (famous for the electronics industry that has grown up along it) is a 3-quarters circle surrounding Boston at a radius of 10 miles, terminating near the coastline at each end. It would be most precise to describe the two directions along this highway as `clockwise' and `counterclockwise', but the road signs all say "north" and "south", respectively. A hacker might describe these directions as `logical north' and `logical south', to indicate that they are conventional directions not corresponding to the usual denotation for those words. (If you went logical south along the entire length of route 128, you would start out going northwest, curve around to the south, and finish headed due east, passing along one infamous stretch of pavement that is simultaneously route 128 south and Interstate 93 north, and is signed as such!) :loop through: vt. To process each element of a list of things. "Hold on, I've got to loop through my paper mail." Derives from the computer-language notion of an iterative loop; compare `cdr down' (under {cdr}), which is less common among C and Unix programmers. ITS hackers used to say `IRP over' after an obscure pseudo-op in the MIDAS PDP-10 assembler (the same IRP op can nowadays be found in Microsoft's assembler). :loose bytes: n. Commonwealth hackish term for the padding bytes or {shim}s many compilers insert between members of a record or structure to cope with alignment requirements imposed by the machine architecture. :lord high fixer: n. [primarily British, from Gilbert & Sullivan's `lord high executioner'] The person in an organization who knows the most about some aspect of a system. See {wizard}. :lose: [MIT] vi. 1. To fail. A program loses when it encounters an exceptional condition or fails to work in the expected manner. 2. To be exceptionally unesthetic or crocky. 3. Of people, to be obnoxious or unusually stupid (as opposed to ignorant). See also {deserves to lose}. 4. n. Refers to something that is {losing}, especially in the phrases "That's a lose!" and "What a lose!" :lose lose: interj. A reply to or comment on an undesirable situation. "I accidentally deleted all my files!" "Lose, lose." :loser: n. An unexpectedly bad situation, program, programmer, or person. Someone who habitually loses. (Even winners can lose occasionally.) Someone who knows not and knows not that he knows not. Emphatic forms are `real loser', `total loser', and `complete loser' (but not **`moby loser', which would be a contradiction in terms). See {luser}. :losing: adj. Said of anything that is or causes a {lose} or {lossage}. :loss: n. Something (not a person) that loses; a situation in which something is losing. Emphatic forms include `moby loss', and `total loss', `complete loss'. Common interjections are "What a loss!" and "What a moby loss!" Note that `moby loss' is OK even though **`moby loser' is not used; applied to an abstract noun, moby is simply a magnifier, whereas when applied to a person it implies substance and has positive connotations. Compare {lossage}. :lossage: /los'*j/ n. The result of a bug or malfunction. This is a mass or collective noun. "What a loss!" and "What lossage!" are nearly synonymous. The former is slightly more particular to the speaker's present circumstances; the latter implies a continuing {lose} of which the speaker is currently a victim. Thus (for example) a temporary hardware failure is a loss, but bugs in an important tool (like a compiler) are serious lossage. :lost in the noise: adj. Syn. {lost in the underflow}. This term is from signal processing, where signals of very small amplitude cannot be separated from low-intensity noise in the system. Though popular among hackers, it is not confined to hackerdom; physicists, engineers, astronomers, and statisticians all use it. :lost in the underflow: adj. Too small to be worth considering; more specifically, small beyond the limits of accuracy or measurement. This is a reference to `floating underflow', a condition that can occur when a floating-point arithmetic processor tries to handle quantities smaller than its limit of magnitude. It is also a pun on `undertow' (a kind of fast, cold current that sometimes runs just offshore and can be dangerous to swimmers). "Well, sure, photon pressure from the stadium lights alters the path of a thrown baseball, but that effect gets lost in the underflow." Compare {epsilon}, {epsilon squared}; see also {overflow bit}. :lots of MIPS but no I/O: adj. Used to describe a person who is technically brilliant but can't seem to communicate with human beings effectively. Technically it describes a machine that has lots of processing power but is bottlenecked on input-output (in 1991, the IBM Rios, a.k.a. RS/6000, was a notorious example). :low-bandwidth: adj. [from communication theory] Used to indicate a talk that, although not {content-free}, was not terribly informative. "That was a low-bandwidth talk, but what can you expect for an audience of {suit}s!" Compare {zero-content}, {bandwidth}, {math-out}. :LPT: /L-P-T/ or /lip'it/ or /lip-it'/ n. 1. Line printer (originally Line Printing Terminal). Rare under Unix, more common among hackers who grew up with ITS, MS-DOS, CP/M and other operating systems that were strongly influenced by early {DEC} conventions. 2. Local PorT. Used among MS-DOS programmers (and so expanded in the MS-DOS 5 manual). It seems likely this is a {backronym}. :Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology: prov. "There is _always_ one more bug." :Lumber Cartel: n. A mythical conspiracy accused by {spam}-spewers of funding anti-spam activism in order to force the direct-mail promotions industry back onto paper. Hackers, predictably, responded by forming half a dozen "Lumber Cartels" spoofing this paranoid theory; a representative web page is `http://come.to/the.lumber.cartel'. Members often include the tag TINLC ("There Is No Lumber Cartel") in their postings; see {TINC}, {backbone cabal} and {NANA} for explanation. :lunatic fringe: n. [IBM] Customers who can be relied upon to accept release 1 versions of software. :lurker: n. One of the `silent majority' in a electronic forum; one who posts occasionally or not at all but is known to read the group's postings regularly. This term is not pejorative and indeed is casually used reflexively: "Oh, I'm just lurking." Often used in `the lurkers', the hypothetical audience for the group's {flamage}-emitting regulars. When a lurker speaks up for the first time, this is called `delurking'. The creator of the popular science-fiction TV series "Babylon V" has ties to SF fandom and the hacker culture. In that series, the use of the term `lurker' for a homeless or displaced person is a conscious reference to the jargon term. :luser: /loo'zr/ n. A {user}; esp. one who is also a {loser}. ({luser} and {loser} are pronounced identically.) This word was coined around 1975 at MIT. Under ITS, when you first walked up to a terminal at MIT and typed Control-Z to get the computer's attention, it printed out some status information, including how many people were already using the computer; it might print "14 users", for example. Someone thought it would be a great joke to patch the system to print "14 losers" instead. There ensued a great controversy, as some of the users didn't particularly want to be called losers to their faces every time they used the computer. For a while several hackers struggled covertly, each changing the message behind the back of the others; any time you logged into the computer it was even money whether it would say "users" or "losers". Finally, someone tried the compromise "lusers", and it stuck. Later one of the ITS machines supported `luser' as a request-for-help command. ITS died the death in mid-1990, except as a museum piece; the usage lives on, however, and the term `luser' is often seen in program comments. = M = ===== :M: pref. (on units) suff. (on numbers) [SI] See {{quantifiers}}. :M$: Common net abbreviation for Microsoft, everybody's least favorite monopoly. :macdink: /mak'dink/ vt. [from the Apple Macintosh, which is said to encourage such behavior] To make many incremental and unnecessary cosmetic changes to a program or file. Often the subject of the macdinking would be better off without them. "When I left at 11 P.M. last night, he was still macdinking the slides for his presentation." See also {fritterware}, {window shopping}. :machinable: adj. Machine-readable. Having the {softcopy} nature. :machoflops: /mach'oh-flops/ n. [pun on `megaflops', a coinage for `millions of FLoating-point Operations Per Second'] Refers to artificially inflated performance figures often quoted by computer manufacturers. Real applications are lucky to get half the quoted speed. See {Your mileage may vary}, {benchmark}. :Macintoy: /mak'in-toy/ n. The Apple Macintosh, considered as a {toy}. Less pejorative than {Macintrash}. :Macintrash: /mak'in-trash`/ n. The Apple Macintosh, as described by a hacker who doesn't appreciate being kept away from the _real computer_ by the interface. The term {maggotbox} has been reported in regular use in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. Compare {Macintoy}. See also {beige toaster}, {WIMP environment}, {point-and-drool interface}, {drool-proof paper}, {user-friendly}. :macro: /mak'roh/ [techspeak] n. A name (possibly followed by a formal {arg} list) that is equated to a text or symbolic expression to which it is to be expanded (possibly with the substitution of actual arguments) by a macro expander. This definition can be found in any technical dictionary; what those won't tell you is how the hackish connotations of the term have changed over time. The term `macro' originated in early assemblers, which encouraged the use of macros as a structuring and information-hiding device. During the early 1970s, macro assemblers became ubiquitous, and sometimes quite as powerful and expensive as {HLL}s, only to fall from favor as improving compiler technology marginalized assembler programming (see {languages of choice}). Nowadays the term is most often used in connection with the C preprocessor, LISP, or one of several special-purpose languages built around a macro-expansion facility (such as TeX or Unix's [nt]roff suite). Indeed, the meaning has drifted enough that the collective `macros' is now sometimes used for code in any special-purpose application control language (whether or not the language is actually translated by text expansion), and for macro-like entities such as the `keyboard macros' supported in some text editors (and PC TSR or Macintosh INIT/CDEV keyboard enhancers). :macro-: pref. Large. Opposite of {micro-}. In the mainstream and among other technical cultures (for example, medical people) this competes with the prefix {mega-}, but hackers tend to restrict the latter to quantification. :macrology: /mak-rol'*-jee/ n. 1. Set of usually complex or crufty macros, e.g., as part of a large system written in {LISP}, {TECO}, or (less commonly) assembler. 2. The art and science involved in comprehending a macrology in sense 1. Sometimes studying the macrology of a system is not unlike archeology, ecology, or {theology}, hence the sound-alike construction. See also {boxology}. :macrotape: /mak'roh-tayp/ n. An industry-standard reel of tape. Originally, as opposed to a DEC microtape; nowadays, as opposed to modern QIC and DDS tapes. Syn. {round tape}. :maggotbox: /mag'*t-boks/ n. See {Macintrash}. This is even more derogatory. :magic: 1. adj. As yet unexplained, or too complicated to explain; compare {automagically} and (Arthur C.) Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." "TTY echoing is controlled by a large number of magic bits." "This routine magically computes the parity of an 8-bit byte in three instructions." 2. adj. Characteristic of something that works although no one really understands why (this is especially called {black magic}). 3. n. [Stanford] A feature not generally publicized that allows something otherwise impossible, or a feature formerly in that category but now unveiled. 4. n. The ultimate goal of all engineering & development, elegance in the extreme; from the first corollary to Clarke's Third Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced". For more about hackish `magic', see {A Story About `Magic'} in Appendix A. Compare {black magic}, {wizardly}, {deep magic}, {heavy wizardry}. :magic cookie: n. [Unix] 1. Something passed between routines or programs that enables the receiver to perform some operation; a capability ticket or opaque identifier. Especially used of small data objects that contain data encoded in a strange or intrinsically machine-dependent way. E.g., on non-Unix OSes with a non-byte-stream model of files, the result of `ftell(3)' may be a magic cookie rather than a byte offset; it can be passed to `fseek(3)', but not operated on in any meaningful way. The phrase `it hands you a magic cookie' means it returns a result whose contents are not defined but which can be passed back to the same or some other program later. 2. An in-band code for changing graphic rendition (e.g., inverse video or underlining) or performing other control functions (see also {cookie}). Some older terminals would leave a blank on the screen corresponding to mode-change magic cookies; this was also called a {glitch} (or occasionally a `turd'; compare {mouse droppings}). See also {cookie}. :magic number: n. [Unix/C] 1. In source code, some non-obvious constant whose value is significant to the operation of a program and that is inserted inconspicuously in-line ({hardcoded}), rather than expanded in by a symbol set by a commented `#define'. Magic numbers in this sense are bad style. 2. A number that encodes critical information used in an algorithm in some opaque way. The classic examples of these are the numbers used in hash or CRC functions, or the coefficients in a linear congruential generator for pseudo-random numbers. This sense actually predates and was ancestral to the more commonsense 1. 3. Special data located at the beginning of a binary data file to indicate its type to a utility. Under Unix, the system and various applications programs (especially the linker) distinguish between types of executable file by looking for a magic number. Once upon a time, these magic numbers were PDP-11 branch instructions that skipped over header data to the start of executable code; 0407, for example, was octal for `branch 16 bytes relative'. Many other kinds of files now have magic numbers somewhere; some magic numbers are, in fact, strings, like the `!' at the beginning of a Unix archive file or the `%!' leading PostScript files. Nowadays only a {wizard} knows the spells to create magic numbers. How do you choose a fresh magic number of your own? Simple -- you pick one at random. See? It's magic! _The_ magic number, on the other hand, is 7+/-2. See "The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information" by George Miller, in the "Psychological Review" 63:81-97 (1956). This classic paper established the number of distinct items (such as numeric digits) that humans can hold in short-term memory. Among other things, this strongly influenced the interface design of the phone system. :magic smoke: n. A substance trapped inside IC packages that enables them to function (also called `blue smoke'; this is similar to the archaic `phlogiston' hypothesis about combustion). Its existence is demonstrated by what happens when a chip burns up -- the magic smoke gets let out, so it doesn't work any more. See {smoke test}, {let the smoke out}. Usenetter Jay Maynard tells the following story: "Once, while hacking on a dedicated Z80 system, I was testing code by blowing EPROMs and plugging them in the system, then seeing what happened. One time, I plugged one in backwards. I only discovered that _after_ I realized that Intel didn't put power-on lights under the quartz windows on the tops of their EPROMs -- the die was glowing white-hot. Amazingly, the EPROM worked fine after I erased it, filled it full of zeros, then erased it again. For all I know, it's still in service. Of course, this is because the magic smoke didn't get let out." Compare the original phrasing of {Murphy's Law}. :mail storm: n. [from {broadcast storm}, influenced by `maelstrom'] What often happens when a machine with an Internet connection and active users re-connects after extended downtime -- a flood of incoming mail that brings the machine to its knees. See also {hairball}. :mailbomb: (also mail bomb) [Usenet] 1. v. To send, or urge others to send, massive amounts of {email} to a single system or person, esp. with intent to crash or {spam} the recipient's system. Sometimes done in retaliation for a perceived serious offense. Mailbombing is itself widely regarded as a serious offense -- it can disrupt email traffic or other facilities for innocent users on the victim's system, and in extreme cases, even at upstream sites. 2. n. An automatic procedure with a similar effect. 3. n. The mail sent. Compare {letterbomb}, {nastygram}, {BLOB} (sense 2), {list-bomb}. :mailing list: n. (often shortened in context to `list') 1. An {email} address that is an alias (or {macro}, though that word is never used in this connection) for many other email addresses. Some mailing lists are simple `reflectors', redirecting mail sent to them to the list of recipients. Others are filtered by humans or programs of varying degrees of sophistication; lists filtered by humans are said to be `moderated'. 2. The people who receive your email when you send it to such an address. Mailing lists are one of the primary forms of hacker interaction, along with {Usenet}. They predate Usenet, having originated with the first UUCP and ARPANET connections. They are often used for private information-sharing on topics that would be too specialized for or inappropriate to public Usenet groups. Though some of these maintain almost purely technical content (such as the Internet Engineering Task Force mailing list), others (like the `sf-lovers' list maintained for many years by Saul Jaffe) are recreational, and many are purely social. Perhaps the most infamous of the social lists was the eccentric bandykin distribution; its latter-day progeny, lectroids and tanstaafl, still include a number of the oddest and most interesting people in hackerdom. Mailing lists are easy to create and (unlike Usenet) don't tie up a significant amount of machine resources (until they get very large, at which point they can become interesting torture tests for mail software). Thus, they are often created temporarily by working groups, the members of which can then collaborate on a project without ever needing to meet face-to-face. Much of the material in this lexicon was criticized and polished on just such a mailing list (called `jargon-friends'), which included all the co-authors of Steele-1983. :main loop: n. The top-level control flow construct in an input- or event-driven program, the one which receives and acts or dispatches on the program's input. See also {driver}. :mainframe: n. Term originally referring to the cabinet containing the central processor unit or `main frame' of a room-filling {Stone Age} batch machine. After the emergence of smaller `minicomputer' designs in the early 1970s, the traditional {big iron} machines were described as `mainframe computers' and eventually just as mainframes. The term carries the connotation of a machine designed for batch rather than interactive use, though possibly with an interactive timesharing operating system retrofitted onto it; it is especially used of machines built by IBM, Unisys, and the other great {dinosaur}s surviving from computing's {Stone Age}. It has been common wisdom among hackers since the late 1980s that the mainframe architectural tradition is essentially dead (outside of the tiny market for {number-crunching} supercomputers (see {cray})), having been swamped by the recent huge advances in IC technology and low-cost personal computing. The wave of failures, takeovers, and mergers among traditional mainframe makers in the early 1990s bore this out. The biggest mainframer of all, IBM, was compelled to re-invent itself as a huge systems-consulting house. (See {dinosaurs mating} and {killer micro}). :management: n. 1. Corporate power elites distinguished primarily by their distance from actual productive work and their chronic failure to manage (see also {suit}). Spoken derisively, as in "_Management_ decided that ...". 2. Mythically, a vast bureaucracy responsible for all the world's minor irritations. Hackers' satirical public notices are often signed `The Mgt'; this derives from the "Illuminatus" novels (see the {Bibliography} in Appendix C). :mandelbug: /man'del-buhg/ n. [from the Mandelbrot set] A bug whose underlying causes are so complex and obscure as to make its behavior appear chaotic or even non-deterministic. This term implies that the speaker thinks it is a {Bohr bug}, rather than a {heisenbug}. See also {schroedinbug}. :manged: /mahnjd/ n. [probably from the French `manger' or Italian `mangiare', to eat; perhaps influenced by English `mange', `mangy'] adj. Refers to anything that is mangled or damaged, usually beyond repair. "The disk was manged after the electrical storm." Compare {mung}. :mangle: vt. Used similarly to {mung} or {scribble}, but more violent in its connotations; something that is mangled has been irreversibly and totally trashed. :mangler: n. [DEC] A manager. Compare {management}. Note that {system mangler} is somewhat different in connotation. :manularity: /man`yoo-la'ri-tee/ n. [prob. fr. techspeak `manual' + `granularity'] A notional measure of the manual labor required for some task, particularly one of the sort that automation is supposed to eliminate. "Composing English on paper has much higher manularity than using a text editor, especially in the revising stage." Hackers tend to consider manularity a symptom of primitive methods; in fact, a true hacker confronted with an apparent requirement to do a computing task {by hand} will inevitably seize the opportunity to build another tool (see {toolsmith}). :marbles: pl.n. [from mainstream "lost all his/her marbles"] The minimum needed to build your way further up some hierarchy of tools or abstractions. After a bad system crash, you need to determine if the machine has enough marbles to come up on its own, or enough marbles to allow a rebuild from backups, or if you need to rebuild from scratch. "This compiler doesn't even have enough marbles to compile {hello world}." :marginal: adj. 1. Extremely small. "A marginal increase in {core} can decrease {GC} time drastically." In everyday terms, this means that it is a lot easier to clean off your desk if you have a spare place to put some of the junk while you sort through it. 2. Of extremely small merit. "This proposed new feature seems rather marginal to me." 3. Of extremely small probability of {win}ning. "The power supply was rather marginal anyway; no wonder it fried." :Marginal Hacks: n. Margaret Jacks Hall, a building into which the Stanford AI Lab was moved near the beginning of the 1980s (from the {D. C. Power Lab}). :marginally: adv. Slightly. "The ravs here are only marginally better than at Small Eating Place." See {epsilon}. :marketroid: /mar'k*-troyd/ n. alt. `marketing slime', `marketeer', `marketing droid', `marketdroid'. A member of a company's marketing department, esp. one who promises users that the next version of a product will have features that are not actually scheduled for inclusion, are extremely difficult to implement, and/or are in violation of the laws of physics; and/or one who describes existing features (and misfeatures) in ebullient, buzzword-laden adspeak. Derogatory. Compare {droid}. :Mars: n. A legendary tragic failure, the archetypal Hacker Dream Gone Wrong. Mars was the code name for a family of PDP-10 compatible computers built by Systems Concepts (now, The SC Group): the multi-processor SC-30M, the small uniprocessor SC-25M, and the never-built superprocessor SC-40M. These machines were marvels of engineering design; although not much slower than the unique {Foonly} F-1, they were physically smaller and consumed less power than the much slower {DEC} KS10 or Foonly F-2, F-3, or F-4 machines. They were also completely compatible with the DEC KL10, and ran all KL10 binaries (including the operating system) with no modifications at about 2-3 times faster than a KL10. When DEC cancelled the Jupiter project in 1983, Systems Concepts should have made a bundle selling their machine into shops with a lot of software investment in PDP-10s, and in fact their spring 1984 announcement generated a great deal of excitement in the PDP-10 world. TOPS-10 was running on the Mars by the summer of 1984, and TOPS-20 by early fall. Unfortunately, the hackers running Systems Concepts were much better at designing machines than at mass producing or selling them; the company allowed itself to be sidetracked by a bout of perfectionism into continually improving the design, and lost credibility as delivery dates continued to slip. They also overpriced the product ridiculously; they believed they were competing with the KL10 and VAX 8600 and failed to reckon with the likes of Sun Microsystems and other hungry startups building workstations with power comparable to the KL10 at a fraction of the price. By the time SC shipped the first SC-30M to Stanford in late 1985, most customers had already made the traumatic decision to abandon the PDP-10, usually for VMS or Unix boxes. Most of the Mars computers built ended up being purchased by CompuServe. This tale and the related saga of {Foonly} hold a lesson for hackers: if you want to play in the {Real World}, you need to learn Real World moves. :martian: n. A packet sent on a TCP/IP network with a source address of the test loopback interface [127.0.0.1]. This means that it will come back labeled with a source address that is clearly not of this earth. "The domain server is getting lots of packets from Mars. Does that gateway have a martian filter?" :massage: vt. Vague term used to describe `smooth' transformations of a data set into a different form, esp. transformations that do not lose information. Connotes less pain than {munch} or {crunch}. "He wrote a program that massages X bitmap files into GIF format." Compare {slurp}. :math-out: n. [poss. from `white-out' (the blizzard variety)] A paper or presentation so encrusted with mathematical or other formal notation as to be incomprehensible. This may be a device for concealing the fact that it is actually {content-free}. See also {numbers}, {social science number}. :Matrix: n. [FidoNet] 1. What the Opus BBS software and sysops call {FidoNet}. 2. Fanciful term for a {cyberspace} expected to emerge from current networking experiments (see {the network}). 3. The totality of present-day computer networks. :maximum Maytag mode: n. What a {washing machine} or, by extension, any hard disk is in when it's being used so heavily that it's shaking like an old Maytag with an unbalanced load. If prolonged for any length of time, can lead to disks becoming {walking drives}. :meatware: n. Synonym for {wetware}. Less common. :meeces: /mees'*z/ n. [TMRC] Occasional furry visitors who are not {urchin}s. [That is, mice. This may no longer be in live use; it clearly derives from the refrain of the early-1960s cartoon character Mr. Jinx: "I hate meeces to _pieces_!" -- ESR] :meg: /meg/ n. See {{quantifiers}}. :mega-: /me'g*/ pref. [SI] See {{quantifiers}}. :megapenny: /meg'*-pen`ee/ n. $10,000 (1 cent * 10^6). Used semi-humorously as a unit in comparing computer cost and performance figures. :MEGO: /me'goh/ or /mee'goh/ [`My Eyes Glaze Over', often `Mine Eyes Glazeth (sic) Over', attributed to the futurologist Herman Kahn] Also `MEGO factor'. 1. n. A {handwave} intended to confuse the listener and hopefully induce agreement because the listener does not want to admit to not understanding what is going on. MEGO is usually directed at senior management by engineers and contains a high proportion of {TLA}s. 2. excl. An appropriate response to MEGO tactics. 3. Among non-hackers, often refers not to behavior that causes the eyes to glaze, but to the eye-glazing reaction itself, which may be triggered by the mere threat of technical detail as effectively as by an actual excess of it. :meltdown, network: n. See {network meltdown}. :meme: /meem/ n. [coined by analogy with `gene', by Richard Dawkins] An idea considered as a {replicator}, esp. with the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do. Used esp. in the phrase `meme complex' denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organized belief system, such as a religion. This lexicon is an (epidemiological) vector of the `hacker subculture' meme complex; each entry might be considered a meme. However, `meme' is often misused to mean `meme complex'. Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has superseded biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Hackers find this idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons. :meme plague: n. The spread of a successful but pernicious {meme}, esp. one that parasitizes the victims into giving their all to propagate it. Astrology, BASIC, and the other guy's religion are often considered to be examples. This usage is given point by the historical fact that `joiner' ideologies like Naziism or various forms of millennarian Christianity have exhibited plague-like cycles of exponential growth followed by collapses to small reservoir populations. :memetics: /me-met'iks/ n. [from {meme}] The study of memes. As of early 1999, this is still an extremely informal and speculative endeavor, though the first steps towards at least statistical rigor have been made by H. Keith Henson and others. Memetics is a popular topic for speculation among hackers, who like to see themselves as the architects of the new information ecologies in which memes live and replicate. :memory farts: n. The flatulent sounds that some DOS box BIOSes (most notably AMI's) make when checking memory on bootup. :memory leak: n. An error in a program's dynamic-store allocation logic that causes it to fail to reclaim discarded memory, leading to eventual collapse due to memory exhaustion. Also (esp. at CMU) called {core leak}. These problems were severe on older machines with small, fixed-size address spaces, and special "leak detection" tools were commonly written to root them out. With the advent of virtual memory, it is unfortunately easier to be sloppy about wasting a bit of memory (although when you run out of memory on a VM machine, it means you've got a _real_ leak!). See {aliasing bug}, {fandango on core}, {smash the stack}, {precedence lossage}, {overrun screw}, {leaky heap}, {leak}. :memory smash: n. [XEROX PARC] Writing through a pointer that doesn't point to what you think it does. This occasionally reduces your machine to a rubble of bits. Note that this is subtly different from (and more general than) related terms such as a {memory leak} or {fandango on core} because it doesn't imply an allocation error or overrun condition. :menuitis: /men`yoo-i:'tis/ n. Notional disease suffered by software with an obsessively simple-minded menu interface and no escape. Hackers find this intensely irritating and much prefer the flexibility of command-line or language-style interfaces, especially those customizable via macros or a special-purpose language in which one can encode useful hacks. See {user-obsequious}, {drool-proof paper}, {WIMP environment}, {for the rest of us}. :mess-dos: /mes-dos/ n. Derisory term for MS-DOS. Often followed by the ritual banishing "Just say No!" See {{MS-DOS}}. Most hackers (even many MS-DOS hackers) loathe MS-DOS for its single-tasking nature, its limits on application size, its nasty primitive interface, and its ties to IBMness (see {fear and loathing}). Also `mess-loss', `messy-dos', `mess-dog', `mess-dross', `mush-dos', and various combinations thereof. In Ireland and the U.K. it is even sometimes called `Domestos' after a brand of toilet cleanser. :meta: /me't*/ or /may't*/ or (Commonwealth) /mee't*/ adj.,pref. [from analytic philosophy] One level of description up. A metasyntactic variable is a variable in notation used to describe syntax, and meta-language is language used to describe language. This is difficult to explain briefly, but much hacker humor turns on deliberate confusion between meta-levels. See {{hacker humor}}. :meta bit: n. The top bit of an 8-bit character, which is on in character values 128-255. Also called {high bit}, {alt bit}, or {hobbit}. Some terminals and consoles (see {space-cadet keyboard}) have a META shift key. Others (including, _mirabile dictu_, keyboards on IBM PC-class machines) have an ALT key. See also {bucky bits}. Historical note: although in modern usage shaped by a universe of 8-bit bytes the meta bit is invariably hex 80 (octal 0200), things were different on earlier machines with 36-bit words and 9-bit bytes. The MIT and Stanford keyboards (see {space-cadet keyboard}) generated hex 100 (octal 400) from their meta keys. :metasyntactic variable: n. A name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is under discussion, or any random member of a class of things under discussion. The word {foo} is the {canonical} example. To avoid confusion, hackers never (well, hardly ever) use `foo' or other words like it as permanent names for anything. In filenames, a common convention is that any filename beginning with a metasyntactic-variable name is a {scratch} file that may be deleted at any time. Metasyntactic variables are so called because (1) they are variables in the metalanguage used to talk about programs etc; (2) they are variables whose values are often variables (as in usages usages like "the value of f(foo,bar) is the sum of foo and bar"). However, it has been plausibly suggested that the real reason for the term "metasyntactic variable" is that it sounds good. To some extent, the list of one's preferred metasyntactic variables is a cultural signature. They occur both in series (used for related groups of variables or objects) and as singletons. Here are a few common signatures: {foo}, {bar}, {baz}, {quux}, quuux, quuuux...: MIT/Stanford usage, now found everywhere (thanks largely to early versions of this lexicon!). At MIT (but not at Stanford), {baz} dropped out of use for a while in the 1970s and '80s. A common recent mutation of this sequence inserts {qux} before {quux}. bazola, ztesch: Stanford (from mid-'70s on). {foo}, {bar}, thud, grunt: This series was popular at CMU. Other CMU-associated variables include {gorp}. {foo}, {bar}, fum: This series is reported to be common at XEROX PARC. {fred}, jim, sheila, {barney}: See the entry for {fred}. These tend to be Britishisms. {corge}, {grault}, {flarp}: Popular at Rutgers University and among {GOSMACS} hackers. zxc, spqr, wombat: Cambridge University (England). shme Berkeley, GeoWorks, Ingres. Pronounced /shme/ with a short /e/. snork Brown University, early 1970s. {foo}, {bar}, zot Helsinki University of Technology, Finland. blarg, wibble New Zealand. toto, titi, tata, tutu France. pippo, pluto, paperino Italy. Pippo /pee'po/ and Paperino /pa-per-ee'-no/ are the Italian names for Goofy and Donald Duck. aap, noot, mies The Netherlands. These are the first words a child used to learn to spell on a Dutch spelling board. Of all these, only `foo' and `bar' are universal (and {baz} nearly so). The compounds {foobar} and `foobaz' also enjoy very wide currency. Some jargon terms are also used as metasyntactic names; {barf} and {mumble}, for example. See also {{Commonwealth Hackish}} for discussion of numerous metasyntactic variables found in Great Britain and the Commonwealth. :MFTL: /M-F-T-L/ [abbreviation: `My Favorite Toy Language'] 1. adj. Describes a talk on a programming language design that is heavy on the syntax (with lots of BNF), sometimes even talks about semantics (e.g., type systems), but rarely, if ever, has any content (see {content-free}). More broadly applied to talks -- even when the topic is not a programming language -- in which the subject matter is gone into in unnecessary and meticulous detail at the sacrifice of any conceptual content. "Well, it was a typical MFTL talk". 2. n. Describes a language about which the developers are passionate (often to the point of proselytic zeal) but no one else cares about. Applied to the language by those outside the originating group. "He cornered me about type resolution in his MFTL." The first great goal in the mind of the designer of an MFTL is usually to write a compiler for it, then bootstrap the design away from contamination by lesser languages by writing a compiler for it in itself. Thus, the standard put-down question at an MFTL talk is "Has it been used for anything besides its own compiler?" On the other hand, a language that cannot even be used to write its own compiler is beneath contempt. See {break-even point}. (On a related note, Doug McIlroy once proposed a test of the generality and utility of a language and the operating system under which it is compiled: "Is the output of a FORTRAN program acceptable as input to the FORTRAN compiler?" In other words, can you write programs that write programs? (See {toolsmith}.) Alarming numbers of (language, OS) pairs fail this test, particularly when the language is FORTRAN; aficionados are quick to point out that {Unix} (even using FORTRAN) passes it handily. That the test could ever be failed is only surprising to those who have had the good fortune to have worked only under modern systems which lack OS-supported and -imposed "file types".) :mickey: n. The resolution unit of mouse movement. It has been suggested that the `disney' will become a benchmark unit for animation graphics performance. :mickey mouse program: n. North American equivalent of a {noddy} (that is, trivial) program. Doesn't necessarily have the belittling connotations of mainstream slang "Oh, that's just mickey mouse stuff!"; sometimes trivial programs can be very useful. :micro-: pref. 1. Very small; this is the root of its use as a quantifier prefix. 2. A quantifier prefix, calling for multiplication by 10^(-6) (see {{quantifiers}}). Neither of these uses is peculiar to hackers, but hackers tend to fling them both around rather more freely than is countenanced in standard English. It is recorded, for example, that one CS professor used to characterize the standard length of his lectures as a microcentury -- that is, about 52.6 minutes (see also {attoparsec}, {nanoacre}, and especially {microfortnight}). 3. Personal or human-scale -- that is, capable of being maintained or comprehended or manipulated by one human being. This sense is generalized from `microcomputer', and is esp. used in contrast with `macro-' (the corresponding Greek prefix meaning `large'). 4. Local as opposed to global (or {macro-}). Thus a hacker might say that buying a smaller car to reduce pollution only solves a microproblem; the macroproblem of getting to work might be better solved by using mass transit, moving to within walking distance, or (best of all) telecommuting. :MicroDroid: n. [Usenet] A Microsoft employee, esp. one who posts to various operating-system advocacy newsgroups. MicroDroids post follow-ups to any messages critical of Microsoft's operating systems, and often end up sounding like visiting Mormon missionaries. :microfloppies: n. 3.5-inch floppies, as opposed to 5.25-inch {vanilla} or mini-floppies and the now-obsolete 8-inch variety. This term may be headed for obsolescence as 5.25-inchers pass out of use, only to be revived if anybody floats a sub-3-inch floppy standard. See {stiffy}, {minifloppies}. :microfortnight: n. 1/1000000 of the fundamental unit of time in the Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight system of measurement; 1.2096 sec. (A furlong is 1/8th of a mile; a firkin is 1/4th of a barrel; the mass unit of the system is taken to be a firkin of water). The VMS operating system has a lot of tuning parameters that you can set with the SYSGEN utility, and one of these is TIMEPROMPTWAIT, the time the system will wait for an operator to set the correct date and time at boot if it realizes that the current value is bogus. This time is specified in microfortnights! Multiple uses of the millifortnight (about 20 minutes) and {nanofortnight} have also been reported. :microLenat: /mi:`-kroh-len'-*t/ n. The unit of {bogosity}, written uL (or mL in plain ASCII); the consensus is that this is the largest unit practical for everyday use. The microLenat, originally invented by David Jefferson, was promulgated as an attack against noted computer scientist Doug Lenat by a {tenured graduate student} at CMU. Doug had failed the student on an important exam for giving only "AI is bogus" as his answer to the questions. The slur is generally considered unmerited, but it has become a running gag nevertheless. Some of Doug's friends argue that _of course_ a microLenat is bogus, since it is only one millionth of a Lenat. Others have suggested that the unit should be redesignated after the grad student, as the microReid. :microReid: /mi:'kroh-reed/ n. See {microLenat}. :Microsloth Windows: /mi:'kroh-sloth` win'dohz/ n. Hackerism for `Microsoft Windows', a windowing system for the IBM-PC which is so limited by bug-for-bug compatibility with {mess-dos} that it is agonizingly slow on anything less than a fast 486. Also just called `Windoze', with the implication that you can fall asleep waiting for it to do anything; the latter term is extremely common on Usenet. See {Black Screen of Death}; compare {X}, {sun-stools}. :Microsoft: The new {Evil Empire} (the old one was {IBM}). The basic complaints are, as formerly with IBM, that (a) their system designs are horrible botches, (b) we can't get source to fix them, and (c) they throw their weight around a lot. :middle-endian: adj. Not {big-endian} or {little-endian}. Used of perverse byte orders such as 3-4-1-2 or 2-1-4-3, occasionally found in the packed-decimal formats of minicomputer manufacturers who shall remain nameless. See {NUXI problem}. Non-US hackers use this term to describe the American mm/dd/yy style of writing dates (Europeans write little-endian dd/mm/yy, and Japanese use big-endian yy/mm/dd for Western dates). :milliLampson: /mil'*-lamp`sn/ n. A unit of talking speed, abbreviated mL. Most people run about 200 milliLampsons. The eponymous Butler Lampson (a CS theorist and systems implementor highly regarded among hackers) goes at 1000. A few people speak faster. This unit is sometimes used to compare the (sometimes widely disparate) rates at which people can generate ideas and actually emit them in speech. For example, noted computer architect C. Gordon Bell (designer of the PDP-11) is said, with some awe, to think at about 1200 mL but only talk at about 300; he is frequently reduced to fragments of sentences as his mouth tries to keep up with his speeding brain. :minifloppies: n. 5.25-inch {vanilla} floppy disks, as opposed to 3.5-inch or {microfloppies} and the now-obsolescent 8-inch variety. At one time, this term was a trademark of Shugart Associates for their SA-400 minifloppy drive. Nobody paid any attention. See {stiffy}. :MIPS: /mips/ n. [abbreviation] 1. A measure of computing speed; formally, `Million Instructions Per Second' (that's 10^6 per second, not 2^(20)!); often rendered by hackers as `Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed' or in other unflattering ways. This joke expresses a nearly universal attitude about the value of most {benchmark} claims, said attitude being one of the great cultural divides between hackers and {marketroid}s. The singular is sometimes `1 MIP' even though this is clearly etymologically wrong. See also {KIPS} and {GIPS}. 2. Computers, especially large computers, considered abstractly as sources of {computron}s. "This is just a workstation; the heavy MIPS are hidden in the basement." 3. The corporate name of a particular RISC-chip company; among other things, they designed the processor chips used in {DEC}'s 3100 workstation series. 4. Acronym for `Meaningless Information per Second' (a joke, prob. from sense 1). :misbug: /mis-buhg/ n. [MIT] An unintended property of a program that turns out to be useful; something that should have been a {bug} but turns out to be a {feature}. Usage: rare. Compare {green lightning}. See {miswart}. :misfeature: /mis-fee'chr/ or /mis'fee`chr/ n. A feature that eventually causes lossage, possibly because it is not adequate for a new situation that has evolved. Since it results from a deliberate and properly implemented feature, a misfeature is not a bug. Nor is it a simple unforeseen side effect; the term implies that the feature in question was carefully planned, but its long-term consequences were not accurately or adequately predicted (which is quite different from not having thought ahead at all). A misfeature can be a particularly stubborn problem to resolve, because fixing it usually involves a substantial philosophical change to the structure of the system involved. Many misfeatures (especially in user-interface design) arise because the designers/implementors mistake their personal tastes for laws of nature. Often a former feature becomes a misfeature because trade-offs were made whose parameters subsequently change (possibly only in the judgment of the implementors). "Well, yeah, it is kind of a misfeature that file names are limited to six characters, but the original implementors wanted to save directory space and we're stuck with it for now." :Missed'em-five: n. Pejorative hackerism for AT&T System V Unix, generally used by {BSD} partisans in a bigoted mood. (The synonym `SysVile' is also encountered.) See {software bloat}, {Berzerkeley}. :missile address: n. See {ICBM address}. :miswart: /mis-wort/ n. [from {wart} by analogy with {misbug}] A {feature} that superficially appears to be a {wart} but has been determined to be the {Right Thing}. For example, in some versions of the {EMACS} text editor, the `transpose characters' command exchanges the character under the cursor with the one before it on the screen, _except_ when the cursor is at the end of a line, in which case the two characters before the cursor are exchanged. While this behavior is perhaps surprising, and certainly inconsistent, it has been found through extensive experimentation to be what most users want. This feature is a miswart. :MMF: // [USENET] Abbreviation: "Make Money Fast". Refers to any kind of scheme which promises participants large profits with little or no risk or effort. Typically, it is a some kind of multi-level marketing operation which involves recruiting more members, or an illegal pyramid scam. The term is also used to refer to any kind of spam which promotes this. For more information, see the Make Money Fast Myth Page (http://www.stopspam.org/usenet/mmf/). :moby: /moh'bee/ [MIT: seems to have been in use among model railroad fans years ago. Derived from Melville's "Moby Dick" (some say from `Moby Pickle').] 1. adj. Large, immense, complex, impressive. "A Saturn V rocket is a truly moby frob." "Some MIT undergrads pulled off a moby hack at the Harvard-Yale game." (See "{The Meaning of `Hack'}"). 2. n. obs. The maximum address space of a machine (see below). For a 680[234]0 or VAX or most modern 32-bit architectures, it is 4,294,967,296 8-bit bytes (4 gigabytes). 3. A title of address (never of third-person reference), usually used to show admiration, respect, and/or friendliness to a competent hacker. "Greetings, moby Dave. How's that address-book thing for the Mac going?" 4. adj. In backgammon, doubles on the dice, as in `moby sixes', `moby ones', etc. Compare this with {bignum} (sense 3): double sixes are both bignums and moby sixes, but moby ones are not bignums (the use of `moby' to describe double ones is sarcastic). Standard emphatic forms: `Moby foo', `moby win', `moby loss'. `Foby moo': a spoonerism due to Richard Greenblatt. 5. The largest available unit of something which is available in discrete increments. Thus, ordering a "moby Coke" at the local fast-food joint is not just a request for a large Coke, it's an explicit request for the largest size they sell. This term entered hackerdom with the Fabritek 256K memory added to the MIT AI PDP-6 machine, which was considered unimaginably huge when it was installed in the 1960s (at a time when a more typical memory size for a timesharing system was 72 kilobytes). Thus, a moby is classically 256K 36-bit words, the size of a PDP-6 or PDP-10 moby. Back when address registers were narrow the term was more generally useful, because when a computer had virtual memory mapping, it might actually have more physical memory attached to it than any one program could access directly. One could then say "This computer has 6 mobies" meaning that the ratio of physical memory to address space is 6, without having to say specifically how much memory there actually is. That in turn implied that the computer could timeshare six `full-sized' programs without having to swap programs between memory and disk. Nowadays the low cost of processor logic means that address spaces are usually larger than the most physical memory you can cram onto a machine, so most systems have much _less_ than one theoretical `native' moby of {core}. Also, more modern memory-management techniques (esp. paging) make the `moby count' less significant. However, there is one series of widely-used chips for which the term could stand to be revived -- the Intel 8088 and 80286 with their incredibly {brain-damaged} segmented-memory designs. On these, a `moby' would be the 1-megabyte address span of a segment/offset pair (by coincidence, a PDP-10 moby was exactly 1 megabyte of 9-bit bytes). :mockingbird: n. Software that intercepts communications (especially login transactions) between users and hosts and provides system-like responses to the users while saving their responses (especially account IDs and passwords). A special case of {Trojan horse}. :mod: vt.,n. 1. Short for `modify' or `modification'. Very commonly used -- in fact the full terms are considered markers that one is being formal. The plural `mods' is used esp. with reference to bug fixes or minor design changes in hardware or software, most esp. with respect to {patch} sets or a {diff}. 2. Short for {modulo} but used _only_ for its techspeak sense. :mode: n. A general state, usually used with an adjective describing the state. Use of the word `mode' rather than `state' implies that the state is extended over time, and probably also that some activity characteristic of that state is being carried out. "No time to hack; I'm in thesis mode." In its jargon sense, `mode' is most often attributed to people, though it is sometimes applied to programs and inanimate objects. In particular, see {hack mode}, {day mode}, {night mode}, {demo mode}, {fireworks mode}, and {yoyo mode}; also {talk mode}. One also often hears the verbs `enable' and `disable' used in connection with jargon modes. Thus, for example, a sillier way of saying "I'm going to crash" is "I'm going to enable crash mode now". One might also hear a request to "disable flame mode, please". In a usage much closer to techspeak, a mode is a special state that certain user interfaces must pass into in order to perform certain functions. For example, in order to insert characters into a document in the Unix editor `vi', one must type the "i" key, which invokes the "Insert" command. The effect of this command is to put vi into "insert mode", in which typing the "i" key has a quite different effect (to wit, it inserts an "i" into the document). One must then hit another special key, "ESC", in order to leave "insert mode". Nowadays, modeful interfaces are generally considered {losing} but survive in quite a few widely used tools built in less enlightened times. :mode bit: n. A {flag}, usually in hardware, that selects between two (usually quite different) modes of operation. The connotations are different from {flag} bit in that mode bits are mainly written during a boot or set-up phase, are seldom explicitly read, and seldom change over the lifetime of an ordinary program. The classic example was the EBCDIC-vs.-ASCII bit (#12) of the Program Status Word of the IBM 360. :modulo: /mod'yu-loh/ prep. Except for. An overgeneralization of mathematical terminology; one can consider saying that 4 equals 22 except for the 9s (4 = 22 mod 9). "Well, LISP seems to work okay now, modulo that {GC} bug." "I feel fine today modulo a slight headache." :molly-guard: /mol'ee-gard/ n. [University of Illinois] A shield to prevent tripping of some {Big Red Switch} by clumsy or ignorant hands. Originally used of the plexiglass covers improvised for the BRS on an IBM 4341 after a programmer's toddler daughter (named Molly) frobbed it twice in one day. Later generalized to covers over stop/reset switches on disk drives and networking equipment. :Mongolian Hordes technique: n. [poss. from the Sixties counterculture expression `Mongolian clusterfuck' for a public orgy] Development by {gang bang}. Implies that large numbers of inexperienced programmers are being put on a job better performed by a few skilled ones. Also called `Chinese Army technique'; see also {Brooks's Law}. :monkey up: vt. To hack together hardware for a particular task, especially a one-shot job. Connotes an extremely {crufty} and consciously temporary solution. Compare {hack up}, {kluge up}, {cruft together}. :monkey, scratch: n. See {scratch monkey}. :monstrosity: 1. n. A ridiculously {elephantine} program or system, esp. one that is buggy or only marginally functional. 2. adj. The quality of being monstrous (see `Overgeneralization' in the discussion of jargonification). See also {baroque}. :monty: /mon'tee/ n. 1. [US Geological Survey] A program with a ludicrously complex user interface written to perform extremely trivial tasks. An example would be a menu-driven, button clicking, pulldown, pop-up windows program for listing directories. The original monty was an infamous weather-reporting program, Monty the Amazing Weather Man, written at the USGS. Monty had a widget-packed X-window interface with over 200 buttons; and all monty actually _did_ was {FTP} files off the network. 2. [Great Britain; commonly capitalized as `Monty' or as `the Full Monty'] 16 megabytes of memory, when fitted to an IBM-PC or compatible. A standard PC-compatible using the AT- or ISA-bus with a normal BIOS cannot access more than 16 megabytes of RAM. Generally used of a PC, Unix workstation, etc. to mean `fully populated with' memory, disk-space or some other desirable resource. This usage may be related to a TV commercial for Del Monte fruit juice, in which one of the characters insisted on "the full Del Monte"; but see the World Wide Words article "The Full Monty" (http://clever.net/quinion/words/articles/monty.htm) for discussion of the rather complex etymology that may lie behind this. Compare American {moby}. :Moof: /moof/ [Macintosh users] 1. n. The call of a semi-legendary creature, properly called the {dogcow}. (Some previous versions of this entry claimed, incorrectly, that Moof was the name of the _creature_.) 2. adj. Used to flag software that's a hack, something untested and on the edge. On one Apple CD-ROM, certain folders such as "Tools & Apps (Moof!)" and "Development Platforms (Moof!)", are so marked to indicate that they contain software not fully tested or sanctioned by the powers that be. When you open these folders you cross the boundary into hackerland. 3. v. On the Microsoft Network, the term `moof' has gained popularity as a verb meaning `to be suddenly disconnected by the system'. One might say "I got moofed". :Moore's Law: /morz law/ prov. The observation that the logic density of silicon integrated circuits has closely followed the curve (bits per square inch) = 2^(t - 1962) where t is time in years; that is, the amount of information storable on a given amount of silicon has roughly doubled every year since the technology was invented. This relation, first uttered in 1964 by semiconductor engineer Gordon Moore (who co-founded Intel four years later) held until the late 1970s, at which point the doubling period slowed to 18 months. The doubling period remained at that value through time of writing (late 1999). See also {Parkinson's Law of Data}. :moose call: n. See {whalesong}. :moria: /mor'ee-*/ n. Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for hacking. :MOTAS: /moh-tahz/ n. [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}. :MOTOS: /moh-tohs/ n. [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has largely displaced it. :MOTSS: /mots/ or /M-O-T-S-S/ n. [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex, esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS}, which derive from it. See also {SO}. :mouse ahead: vi. Point-and-click analog of `type ahead'. To manipulate a computer's pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface. :mouse around: vi. To explore public portions of a large system, esp. a network such as Internet via {FTP} or {TELNET}, looking for interesting stuff to {snarf}. :mouse belt: n. See {rat belt}. :mouse droppings: n. [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use. :mouse elbow: n. A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, `mouse shoulder'; GLS reports that he used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous. :mouso: /mow'soh/ n. [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare {thinko}, {braino}. :MS-DOS:: /M-S-dos/ n. [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {{CP/M}} for the 8088 crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since. Microsoft licensed QDOS order to have something to demo for IBM on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS, which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}, {ill-behaved}. :mu: /moo/ The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her. According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm. The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is used in mainstream Japanese in that sense, but native speakers do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use. It almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer in the following well-known Rinzei Zen teaching riddle: A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu retorted, "Mu!" See also {has the X nature}, {AI Koans}, and Douglas Hofstadter's "Go"del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" (pointer in the {Bibliography} in Appendix C. :MUD: /muhd/ n. [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt. Multi-User Dimension] 1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat, traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability for characters to build more structure onto the database that represents the existing world. 2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or verbed; thus, one may speak of `going mudding', etc. Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU- form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that game still exist today and are sometimes generically called BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto: "You haven't _lived_ 'til you've _died_ on MUD!"); however, this is false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the myth. Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD). Many of these had associated bulletin-board systems for social interaction. Because these had an image as `research' they often survived administrative hostility to BBSs in general. This, together with the fact that Usenet feeds were often spotty and difficult to get in the U.K., made the MUDs major foci of hackish social interaction there. AberMUD and other variants crossed the Atlantic around 1988 and quickly gained popularity in the U.S.; they became nuclei for large hacker communities with only loose ties to traditional hackerdom (some observers see parallels with the growth of Usenet in the early 1980s). The second wave of MUDs (TinyMUD and variants) tended to emphasize social interaction, puzzles, and cooperative world-building as opposed to combat and competition (in writing, these social MUDs are sometimes referred to as `MU*', with `MUD' implicitly reserved for the more game-oriented ones). By 1991, over 50% of MUD sites were of a third major variety, LPMUD, which synthesizes the combat/puzzle aspects of AberMUD and older systems with the extensibility of TinyMud. In 1996 the cutting edge of the technology is Pavel Curtis's MOO, even more extensible using a built-in object-oriented language. The trend toward greater programmability and flexibility will doubtless continue. The state of the art in MUD design is still moving very rapidly, with new simulation designs appearing (seemingly) every month. Around 1991 there was an unsuccessful movement to deprecate the term {MUD} itself, as newer designs exhibit an exploding variety of names corresponding to the different simulation styles being explored. It survived. See also {bonk/oif}, {FOD}, {link-dead}, {mudhead}, {talk mode}. :muddie: n. Syn. {mudhead}. More common in Great Britain, possibly because system administrators there like to mutter "bloody muddies" when annoyed at the species. :mudhead: n. Commonly used to refer to a {MUD} player who eats, sleeps, and breathes MUD. Mudheads have been known to fail their degrees, drop out, etc., with the consolation, however, that they made wizard level. When encountered in person, on a MUD, or in a chat system, all a mudhead will talk about is three topics: the tactic, character, or wizard that is supposedly always unfairly stopping him/her from becoming a wizard or beating a favorite MUD; why the specific game he/she has experience with is so much better than any other; and the MUD he or she is writing or going to write because his/her design ideas are so much better than in any existing MUD. See also {wannabee}. To the anthropologically literate, this term may recall the Zuni/Hopi legend of the mudheads or `koyemshi', mythical half-formed children of an unnatural union. Figures representing them act as clowns in Zuni sacred ceremonies. Others may recall the `High School Madness' sequence from the Firesign Theatre album "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers", in which there is a character named "Mudhead". :multician: /muhl-ti'shn/ n. [coined at Honeywell, ca. 1970] Competent user of {{Multics}}. Perhaps oddly, no one has ever promoted the analogous `Unician'. :Multics:: /muhl'tiks/ n. [from "MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service"] An early time-sharing {operating system} co-designed by a consortium including MIT, GE, and Bell Laboratories as a successor to {CTSS}. The design was first presented in 1965, planned for operation in 1967, first operational in 1969, and took several more years to achieve respectable performance and stability. Multics was very innovative for its time -- among other things, it provided a hierarchical file system with access control on individual files and introduced the idea of treating all devices uniformly as special files. It was also the first OS to run on a symmetric multiprocessor, and the only general-purpose system to be awarded a B2 security rating by the NSA (see {Orange Book}). Bell Labs left the development effort in 1969 after judging that {second-system effect} had bloated Multics to the point of practical unusability. Honeywell commercialized Multics in 1972 after buying out GE's computer group, but it was never very successful: at its peak in the 1980s, there were between 75 and 100 Multics sites, each a multi-million dollar mainframe. One of the former Multics developers from Bell Labs was Ken Thompson, and {Unix} deliberately carried through and extended many of Multics' design ideas; indeed, Thompson described the very name `Unix' as `a weak pun on Multics'. For this and other reasons, aspects of the Multics design remain a topic of occasional debate among hackers. See also {brain-damaged} and {GCOS}. MIT ended its development association with Multics in 1977. Honeywell sold its computer business to Bull in the mid 80s, and development on Multics was stopped in 1988. Four Multics sites were known to be still in use as late as 1998. There is a Multics page at `http://www.stratus.com/pub/vos/multics/tvv/multics.html'. :multitask: n. Often used of humans in the same meaning it has for computers, to describe a person doing several things at once (but see {thrash}). The term `multiplex', from communications technology (meaning to handle more than one channel at the same time), is used similarly. :mumblage: /muhm'bl*j/ n. The topic of one's mumbling (see {mumble}). "All that mumblage" is used like "all that stuff" when it is not quite clear how the subject of discussion works, or like "all that crap" when `mumble' is being used as an implicit replacement for pejoratives. :mumble: interj. 1. Said when the correct response is too complicated to enunciate, or the speaker has not thought it out. Often prefaces a longer answer, or indicates a general reluctance to get into a long discussion. "Don't you think that we could improve LISP performance by using a hybrid reference-count transaction garbage collector, if the cache is big enough and there are some extra cache bits for the microcode to use?" "Well, mumble ... I'll have to think about it." 2. [MIT] Expression of not-quite-articulated agreement, often used as an informal vote of consensus in a meeting: "So, shall we dike out the COBOL emulation?" "Mumble!" 3. Sometimes used as an expression of disagreement (distinguished from sense 2 by tone of voice and other cues). "I think we should buy a {VAX}." "Mumble!" Common variant: `mumble frotz' (see {frotz}; interestingly, one does not say `mumble frobnitz' even though `frotz' is short for `frobnitz'). 4. Yet another {metasyntactic variable}, like {foo}. 5. When used as a question ("Mumble?") means "I didn't understand you". 6. Sometimes used in `public' contexts on-line as a placefiller for things one is barred from giving details about. For example, a poster with pre-released hardware in his machine might say "Yup, my machine now has an extra 16M of memory, thanks to the card I'm testing for Mumbleco." 7. A conversational wild card used to designate something one doesn't want to bother spelling out, but which can be {glark}ed from context. Compare {blurgle}. 8. [XEROX PARC] A colloquialism used to suggest that further discussion would be fruitless. :munch: vt. [often confused with {mung}, q.v.] To transform information in a serial fashion, often requiring large amounts of computation. To trace down a data structure. Related to {crunch} and nearly synonymous with {grovel}, but connotes less pain. :munching: n. Exploration of security holes of someone else's computer for thrills, notoriety, or to annoy the system manager. Compare {cracker}. See also {hacked off}. :munching squares: n. A {display hack} dating back to the PDP-1 (ca. 1962, reportedly discovered by Jackson Wright), which employs a trivial computation (repeatedly plotting the graph Y = X XOR T for successive values of T -- see {HAKMEM} items 146-148) to produce an impressive display of moving and growing squares that devour the screen. The initial value of T is treated as a parameter, which, when well-chosen, can produce amazing effects. Some of these, later (re)discovered on the LISP machine, have been christened `munching triangles' (try AND for XOR and toggling points instead of plotting them), `munching w's', and `munching mazes'. More generally, suppose a graphics program produces an impressive and ever-changing display of some basic form, foo, on a display terminal, and does it using a relatively simple program; then the program (or the resulting display) is likely to be referred to as `munching foos'. [This is a good example of the use of the word {foo} as a {metasyntactic variable}.] :munchkin: /muhnch'kin/ n. [from the squeaky-voiced little people in L. Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz"] A teenage-or-younger micro enthusiast hacking BASIC or something else equally constricted. A term of mild derision -- munchkins are annoying but some grow up to be hackers after passing through a {larval stage}. The term {urchin} is also used. See also {wannabee}, {bitty box}. :mundane: n. [from SF fandom] 1. A person who is not in science fiction fandom. 2. A person who is not in the computer industry. In this sense, most often an adjectival modifier as in "in my mundane life...." See also {Real World}. :mung: /muhng/ vt. [in 1960 at MIT, `Mash Until No Good'; sometime after that the derivation from the {{recursive acronym}} `Mung Until No Good' became standard; but see {munge}] 1. To make changes to a file, esp. large-scale and irrevocable changes. See {BLT}. 2. To destroy, usually accidentally, occasionally maliciously. The system only mungs things maliciously; this is a consequence of {Finagle's Law}. See {scribble}, {mangle}, {trash}, {nuke}. Reports from {Usenet} suggest that the pronunciation /muhnj/ is now usual in speech, but the spelling `mung' is still common in program comments (compare the widespread confusion over the proper spelling of {kluge}). 3. The kind of beans the sprouts of which are used in Chinese food. (That's their real name! Mung beans! Really!) Like many early hacker terms, this one seems to have originated at {TMRC}; it was already in use there in 1958. Peter Samson (compiler of the original TMRC lexicon) thinks it may originally have been onomatopoeic for the sound of a relay spring (contact) being twanged. However, it is known that during the World Wars, `mung' was U.S. army slang for the ersatz creamed chipped beef better known as `SOS', and it seems quite likely that the word in fact goes back to Scots-dialect {munge}. :munge: /muhnj/ vt. 1. [derogatory] To imperfectly transform information. 2. A comprehensive rewrite of a routine, data structure or the whole program. 3. To modify data in some way the speaker doesn't need to go into right now or cannot describe succinctly (compare {mumble}). 4. To add a {spamblock} to an email address. This term is often confused with {mung}, which probably was derived from it. However, it also appears the word `munge' was in common use in Scotland in the 1940s, and in Yorkshire in the 1950s, as a verb, meaning to munch up into a masticated mess, and as a noun, meaning the result of munging something up (the parallel with the {kluge}/{kludge} pair is amusing). :Murphy's Law: prov. The correct, _original_ Murphy's Law reads: "If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it." This is a principle of defensive design, cited here because it is usually given in mutant forms less descriptive of the challenges of design for {luser}s. For example, you don't make a two-pin plug symmetrical and then label it `THIS WAY UP'; if it matters which way it is plugged in, then you make the design asymmetrical (see also the anecdote under {magic smoke}). Edward A. Murphy, Jr. was one of the engineers on the rocket-sled experiments that were done by the U.S. Air Force in 1949 to test human acceleration tolerances (USAF project MX981). One experiment involved a set of 16 accelerometers mounted to different parts of the subject's body. There were two ways each sensor could be glued to its mount, and somebody methodically installed all 16 the wrong way around. Murphy then made the original form of his pronouncement, which the test subject (Major John Paul Stapp) quoted at a news conference a few days later. Within months `Murphy's Law' had spread to various technical cultures connected to aerospace engineering. Before too many years had gone by variants had passed into the popular imagination, changing as they went. Most of these are variants on "Anything that can go wrong, will"; this is correctly referred to as {Finagle's Law}. The memetic drift apparent in these mutants clearly demonstrates Murphy's Law acting on itself! :music:: n. A common extracurricular interest of hackers (compare {{science-fiction fandom}}, {{oriental food}}; see also {filk}). Hackish folklore has long claimed that musical and programming abilities are closely related, and there has been at least one large-scale statistical study that supports this. Hackers, as a rule, like music and often develop musical appreciation in unusual and interesting directions. Folk music is very big in hacker circles; so is electronic music, and the sort of elaborate instrumental jazz/rock that used to be called `progressive' and isn't recorded much any more. The hacker's musical range tends to be wide; many can listen with equal appreciation to (say) Talking Heads, Yes, Gentle Giant, Pat Metheny, Scott Joplin, Tangerine Dream, Dream Theater, King Sunny Ade, The Pretenders, Screaming Trees, or the Brandenburg Concerti. It is also apparently true that hackerdom includes a much higher concentration of talented amateur musicians than one would expect from a similar-sized control group of {mundane} types. :mutter: vt. To quietly enter a command not meant for the ears, eyes, or fingers of ordinary mortals. Often used in `mutter an {incantation}'. See also {wizard}. = N = ===== :N: /N/ quant. 1. A large and indeterminate number of objects: "There were N bugs in that crock!" Also used in its original sense of a variable name: "This crock has N bugs, as N goes to infinity." (The true number of bugs is always at least N + 1; see {Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology}.) 2. A variable whose value is inherited from the current context. For example, when a meal is being ordered at a restaurant, N may be understood to mean however many people there are at the table. From the remark "We'd like to order N wonton soups and a family dinner for N - 1" you can deduce that one person at the table wants to eat only soup, even though you don't know how many people there are (see {great-wall}). 3. `Nth': adj. The ordinal counterpart of N, senses 1 and 2. "Now for the Nth and last time..." In the specific context "Nth-year grad student", N is generally assumed to be at least 4, and is usually 5 or more (see {tenured graduate student}). See also {{random numbers}}, {two-to-the-N}. :nadger: /nad'jr/ v. [UK] Of software or hardware (not people), to twiddle some object in a hidden manner, generally so that it conforms better to some format. For instance, string printing routines on 8-bit processors often take the string text from the instruction stream, thus a print call looks like `jsr print:"Hello world"'. The print routine has to `nadger' the saved instruction pointer so that the processor doesn't try to execute the text as instructions when the subroutine returns. Apparently this word originated on a now-legendary 1950s radio comedy program called "The Goon Show". The Goon Show usage of "nadger" was definitely in the sense of "jinxed" "clobbered" "fouled up". The American mutation {adger} seems to have preserved more of the original flavor. :nagware: /nag'weir/ n. [Usenet] The variety of {shareware} that displays a large screen at the beginning or end reminding you to register, typically requiring some sort of keystroke to continue so that you can't use the software in batch mode. Compare {crippleware}. :nailed to the wall: adj. [like a trophy] Said of a bug finally eliminated after protracted, and even heroic, effort. :nailing jelly: vi. See {like nailing jelly to a tree}. :naive: adj. Untutored in the perversities of some particular program or system; one who still tries to do things in an intuitive way, rather than the right way (in really good designs these coincide, but most designs aren't `really good' in the appropriate sense). This trait is completely unrelated to general maturity or competence, or even competence at any other specific program. It is a sad commentary on the primitive state of computing that the natural opposite of this term is often claimed to be `experienced user' but is really more like `cynical user'. :naive user: n. A {luser}. Tends to imply someone who is ignorant mainly owing to inexperience. When this is applied to someone who _has_ experience, there is a definite implication of stupidity. :NAK: /nak/ interj. [from the ASCII mnemonic for 0010101] 1. On-line joke answer to {ACK}?: "I'm not here." 2. On-line answer to a request for chat: "I'm not available." 3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell them you don't understand their point or that they have suddenly stopped making sense. See {ACK}, sense 3. "And then, after we recode the project in COBOL...." "Nak, Nak, Nak! I thought I heard you say COBOL!" :NANA: // [USENET] The newsgroups news.admin.net-abuse.*, devoted to fighting {spam} and network abuse. Each individual newsgroup is often referred to by adding a letter to NANA. For example, NANAU would refer to news.admin.net-abuse.usenet. When spam began to be a serious problem around 1995, and a loose network of anti-spammers formed to combat it, spammers immediately accused them of being the {backbone cabal}, or the Cabal reborn. Though this was not true, spam-fighters ironically accepted the label and the tag line "There is No Cabal" reappeared (later, and now commonly, abbreviated to "TINC"). Nowadays "the Cabal" is generally understood to refer to the NANA regulars. :nano: /nan'oh/ n. [CMU: from `nanosecond'] A brief period of time. "Be with you in a nano" means you really will be free shortly, i.e., implies what mainstream people mean by "in a jiffy" (whereas the hackish use of `jiffy' is quite different -- see {jiffy}). :nano-: pref. [SI: the next quantifier below {micro-}; meaning * 10^(-9)] Smaller than {micro-}, and used in the same rather loose and connotative way. Thus, one has {{nanotechnology}} (coined by hacker K. Eric Drexler) by analogy with `microtechnology'; and a few machine architectures have a `nanocode' level below `microcode'. Tom Duff at Bell Labs has also pointed out that "Pi seconds is a nanocentury". See also {{quantifiers}}, {pico-}, {nanoacre}, {nanobot}, {nanocomputer}, {nanofortnight}. :nanoacre: /nan'oh-ay`kr/ n. A unit (about 2 mm square) of real estate on a VLSI chip. The term gets its giggle value from the fact that VLSI nanoacres have costs in the same range as real acres once one figures in design and fabrication-setup costs. :nanobot: /nan'oh-bot/ n. A robot of microscopic proportions, presumably built by means of {{nanotechnology}}. As yet, only used informally (and speculatively!). Also called a `nanoagent'. :nanocomputer: /nan'oh-k*m-pyoo'tr/ n. A computer with molecular-sized switching elements. Designs for mechanical nanocomputers which use single-molecule sliding rods for their logic have been proposed. The controller for a {nanobot} would be a nanocomputer. :nanofortnight: n. [Adelaide University] 1 fortnight * 10^(-9), or about 1.2 msec. This unit was used largely by students doing undergraduate practicals. See {microfortnight}, {attoparsec}, and {micro-}. :nanotechnology:: /nan'-oh-tek-no`l*-jee/ n. A hypothetical fabrication technology in which objects are designed and built with the individual specification and placement of each separate atom. The first unequivocal nanofabrication experiments took place in 1990, for example with the deposition of individual xenon atoms on a nickel substrate to spell the logo of a certain very large computer company. Nanotechnology has been a hot topic in the hacker subculture ever since the term was coined by K. Eric Drexler in his book "Engines of Creation" (Anchor/Doubleday, ISBN 0-385-19973-2), where he predicted that nanotechnology could give rise to replicating assemblers, permitting an exponential growth of productivity and personal wealth (there's an authorized transcription at `http://www.foresight.org/EOC/index.html.'). See also {blue goo}, {gray goo}, {nanobot}. :nasal demons: n. Recognized shorthand on the Usenet group comp.std.c for any unexpected behavior of a C compiler on encountering an undefined construct. During a discussion on that group in early 1992, a regular remarked "When the compiler encounters [a given undefined construct] it is legal for it to make demons fly out of your nose" (the implication is that the compiler may choose any arbitrarily bizarre way to interpret the code without violating the ANSI C standard). Someone else followed up with a reference to "nasal demons", which quickly became established. :nastygram: /nas'tee-gram/ n. 1. A protocol packet or item of email (the latter is also called a {letterbomb}) that takes advantage of misfeatures or security holes on the target system to do untoward things. 2. Disapproving mail, esp. from a {net.god}, pursuant to a violation of {netiquette} or a complaint about failure to correct some mail- or news-transmission problem. Compare {shitogram}, {mailbomb}. 3. A status report from an unhappy, and probably picky, customer. "What'd Corporate say in today's nastygram?" 4. [deprecated] An error reply by mail from a {daemon}; in particular, a {bounce message}. :Nathan Hale: n. An asterisk (see also {splat}, {{ASCII}}). Oh, you want an etymology? Notionally, from "I regret that I have only one asterisk for my country!", a misquote of the famous remark uttered by Nathan Hale just before he was hanged. Hale was a (failed) spy for the rebels in the American War of Independence. :nature: n. See {has the X nature}. :neat hack: n. 1. A clever technique. 2. A brilliant practical joke, where neatness is correlated with cleverness, harmlessness, and surprise value. Example: the Caltech Rose Bowl card display switch (see "{The Meaning of `Hack'}", Appendix A). See also {hack}. :neats vs. scruffies: n. The label used to refer to one of the continuing {holy wars} in AI research. This conflict tangles together two separate issues. One is the relationship between human reasoning and AI; `neats' tend to try to build systems that `reason' in some way identifiably similar to the way humans report themselves as doing, while `scruffies' profess not to care whether an algorithm resembles human reasoning in the least as long as it works. More importantly, neats tend to believe that logic is king, while scruffies favor looser, more ad-hoc methods driven by empirical knowledge. To a neat, scruffy methods appear promiscuous, successful only by accident, and not productive of insights about how intelligence actually works; to a scruffy, neat methods appear to be hung up on formalism and irrelevant to the hard-to-capture `common sense' of living intelligences. :neep-neep: /neep neep/ n. [onomatopoeic, widely spread through SF fandom but reported to have originated at Caltech in the 1970s] One who is fascinated by computers. Less specific than {hacker}, as it need not imply more skill than is required to boot games on a PC. The derived noun `neeping' applies specifically to the long conversations about computers that tend to develop in the corners at most SF-convention parties (the term `neepery' is also in wide use). Fandom has a related proverb to the effect that "Hacking is a conversational black hole!". :neophilia: /nee`oh-fil'-ee-*/ n. The trait of being excited and pleased by novelty. Common among most hackers, SF fans, and members of several other connected leading-edge subcultures, including the pro-technology `Whole Earth' wing of the ecology movement, space activists, many members of Mensa, and the Discordian/neo-pagan underground. All these groups overlap heavily and (where evidence is available) seem to share characteristic hacker tropisms for science fiction, {{music}}, and {{oriental food}}. The opposite tendency is `neophobia'. :nerd: n. 1. [mainstream slang] Pejorative applied to anyone with an above-average IQ and few gifts at small talk and ordinary social rituals. 2. [jargon] Term of praise applied (in conscious ironic reference to sense 1) to someone who knows what's really important and interesting and doesn't care to be distracted by trivial chatter and silly status games. Compare the two senses of {computer geek}. The word itself appears to derive from the lines "And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo, / A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!" in the Dr. Seuss book "If I Ran the Zoo" (1950). (The spellings `nurd' and `gnurd' also used to be current at MIT.) How it developed its mainstream meaning is unclear, but sense 1 seems to have entered mass culture in the early 1970s (there are reports that in the mid-1960s it meant roughly "annoying misfit" without the connotation of intelligence). An IEEE Spectrum article (4/95, page 16) once derived `nerd' in its variant form `knurd' from the word `drunk' backwards, but this bears all the earmarks of a bogus folk etymology. Hackers developed sense 2 in self-defense perhaps ten years later, and some actually wear "Nerd Pride" buttons, only half as a joke. At MIT one can find not only buttons but (what else?) pocket protectors bearing the slogan and the MIT seal. :net.-: /net dot/ pref. [Usenet] Prefix used to describe people and events related to Usenet. From the time before the {Great Renaming}, when most non-local newsgroups had names beginning `net.'. Includes {net.god}s, `net.goddesses' (various charismatic net.women with circles of on-line admirers), `net.lurkers' (see {lurker}), `net.person', `net.parties' (a synonym for {boink}, sense 2), and many similar constructs. See also {net.police}. :net.god: /net god/ n. Accolade referring to anyone who satisfies some combination of the following conditions: has been visible on Usenet for more than 5 years, ran one of the original backbone sites, moderated an important newsgroup, wrote news software, or knows Gene, Mark, Rick, Mel, Henry, Chuq, and Greg personally. See {demigod}. Net.goddesses such as Rissa or the Slime Sisters have (so far) been distinguished more by personality than by authority. :net.personality: /net per`sn-al'-*-tee/ n. Someone who has made a name for him or herself on {Usenet}, through either longevity or attention-getting posts, but doesn't meet the other requirements of {net.god}hood. :net.police: /net-p*-lees'/ n. (var. `net.cops') Those Usenet readers who feel it is their responsibility to pounce on and {flame} any posting which they regard as offensive or in violation of their understanding of {netiquette}. Generally used sarcastically or pejoratively. Also spelled `net police'. See also {net.-}, {code police}. :NetBOLLIX: n. [from bollix: to bungle] {IBM}'s NetBIOS, an extremely {brain-damaged} network protocol that, like {Blue Glue}, is used at commercial shops that don't know any better. :netburp: n. [IRC] When {netlag} gets really bad, and delays between servers exceed a certain threshhold, the {IRC} network effectively becomes partitioned for a period of time, and large numbers of people seem to be signing off at the same time and then signing back on again when things get better. An instance of this is called a `netburp' (or, sometimes, {netsplit}). :netdead: n. [IRC] The state of someone who signs off {IRC}, perhaps during a {netburp}, and doesn't sign back on until later. In the interim, he is "dead to the net". Compare {link-dead}. :nethack: /net'hak/ n. [Unix] A dungeon game similar to {rogue} but more elaborate, distributed in C source over {Usenet} and very popular at Unix sites and on PC-class machines (nethack is probably the most widely distributed of the freeware dungeon games). The earliest versions, written by Jay Fenlason and later considerably enhanced by Andries Brouwer, were simply called `hack'. The name changed when maintenance was taken over by a group of hackers originally organized by Mike Stephenson; the current contact address (as of early 1999) is `http://pinky.wtower.com/nethack/'. :netiquette: /net'ee-ket/ or /net'i-ket/ n. [portmanteau from "network etiquette"] The conventions of politeness recognized on {Usenet}, such as avoidance of cross-posting to inappropriate groups and refraining from commercial pluggery outside the biz groups. :netlag: n. [IRC, MUD] A condition that occurs when the delays in the {IRC} network or on a {MUD} become severe enough that servers briefly lose and then reestablish contact, causing messages to be delivered in bursts, often with delays of up to a minute. (Note that this term has nothing to do with mainstream "jet lag", a condition which hackers tend not to be much bothered by.) Often shortened to just `lag'. :netnews: /net'n[y]ooz/ n. 1. The software that makes {Usenet} run. 2. The content of Usenet. "I read netnews right after my mail most mornings." :netrock: /net'rok/ n. [IBM] A {flame}; used esp. on VNET, IBM's internal corporate network. :Netscrape: n. Standard name-of-insult for Netscape Navigator/Communicator, Netscape's overweight Web browser. Compare {Internet Exploiter}. :netsplit: n. Syn. {netburp}. :netter: n. 1. Loosely, anyone with a {network address}. 2. More specifically, a {Usenet} regular. Most often found in the plural. "If you post _that_ in a technical group, you're going to be flamed by angry netters for the rest of time!" :network address: n. (also `net address') As used by hackers, means an address on `the' network (see {the network}; this used to include {bang path} addresses but now almost always implies an {{Internet address}}). Display of a network address is essential if one wants to be to be taken seriously by hackers; in particular, persons or organizations that claim to understand, work with, sell to, or recruit from among hackers but _don't_ display net addresses are quietly presumed to be clueless poseurs and mentally flushed (see {flush}, sense 4). Hackers often put their net addresses on their business cards and wear them prominently in contexts where they expect to meet other hackers face-to-face (see also {{science-fiction fandom}}). This is mostly functional, but is also a signal that one identifies with hackerdom (like lodge pins among Masons or tie-dyed T-shirts among Grateful Dead fans). Net addresses are often used in email text as a more concise substitute for personal names; indeed, hackers may come to know each other quite well by network names without ever learning each others' `legal' monikers. See also {sitename}, {domainist}. [1996 update: the lodge-pin function of the network address has been gradually eroding in the last two years as Internet and World Wide Web usage have become common outside hackerdom. - ESR] :network meltdown: n. A state of complete network overload; the network equivalent of {thrash}ing. This may be induced by a {Chernobyl packet}. See also {broadcast storm}, {kamikaze packet}. Network meltdown is often a result of network designs that are optimized for a steady state of moderate load and don't cope well with the very jagged, bursty usage patterns of the real world. One amusing instance of this is triggered by the popular and very bloody shoot-'em-up game Doom on the PC. When used in multiplayer mode over a network, the game uses broadcast packets to inform other machines when bullets are fired. This causes problems with weapons like the chain gun which fire rapidly -- it can blast the network into a meltdown state just as easily as it shreds opposing monsters. :New Jersey: adj. [primarily Stanford/Silicon Valley] Brain-damaged or of poor design. This refers to the allegedly wretched quality of such software as C, C++, and Unix (which originated at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey). "This compiler bites the bag, but what can you expect from a compiler designed in New Jersey?" Compare {Berkeley Quality Software}. See also {Unix conspiracy}. :New Testament: n. [C programmers] The second edition of K&R's "The C Programming Language" (Prentice-Hall, 1988; ISBN 0-13-110362-8), describing ANSI Standard C. See {K&R}; this version is also called `K&R2'. :newbie: /n[y]oo'bee/ n. [orig. from British public-school and military slang variant of `new boy'] A Usenet neophyte. This term surfaced in the {newsgroup} talk.bizarre but is now in wide use. Criteria for being considered a newbie vary wildly; a person can be called a newbie in one newsgroup while remaining a respected regular in another. The label `newbie' is sometimes applied as a serious insult to a person who has been around Usenet for a long time but who carefully hides all evidence of having a clue. See {B1FF}. :newgroup wars: /n[y]oo'groop worz/ n. [Usenet] The salvos of dueling `newgroup' and `rmgroup' messages sometimes exchanged by persons on opposite sides of a dispute over whether a {newsgroup} should be created net-wide, or (even more frequently) whether an obsolete one should be removed. These usually settle out within a week or two as it becomes clear whether the group has a natural constituency (usually, it doesn't). At times, especially in the completely anarchic alt hierarchy, the names of newsgroups themselves become a form of comment or humor; e.g., the group alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork which originated as a birthday joke for a Muppets fan, or any number of specialized abuse groups named after particularly notorious {flamer}s, e.g., alt.weemba. :newline: /n[y]oo'li:n/ n. 1. [techspeak, primarily Unix] The ASCII LF character (0001010), used under {{Unix}} as a text line terminator. A Bell-Labs-ism rather than a Berkeleyism; interestingly (and unusually for Unix jargon), it is said to have originally been an IBM usage. (Though the term `newline' appears in ASCII standards, it never caught on in the general computing world before Unix). 2. More generally, any magic character, character sequence, or operation (like Pascal's writeln procedure) required to terminate a text record or separate lines. See {crlf}, {terpri}. :NeWS: /nee'wis/, /n[y]oo'is/ or /n[y]ooz/ n. [acronym; the `Network Window System'] The road not taken in window systems, an elegant {{PostScript}}-based environment that would almost certainly have won the standards war with {X} if it hadn't been {proprietary} to Sun Microsystems. There is a lesson here that too many software vendors haven't yet heeded. Many hackers insist on the two-syllable pronunciations above as a way of distinguishing NeWS from {news} (the {netnews} software). :news: n. See {netnews}. :newsfroup: // n. [Usenet] Silly synonym for {newsgroup}, originally a typo but now in regular use on Usenet's talk.bizarre and other lunatic-fringe groups. Compare {hing}, {grilf}, and {filk}. :newsgroup: n. [Usenet] One of {Usenet}'s huge collection of topic groups or {fora}. Usenet groups can be `unmoderated' (anyone can post) or `moderated' (submissions are automatically directed to a moderator, who edits or filters and then posts the results). Some newsgroups have parallel {mailing list}s for Internet people with no netnews access, with postings to the group automatically propagated to the list and vice versa. Some moderated groups (especially those which are actually gatewayed Internet mailing lists) are distributed as `digests', with groups of postings periodically collected into a single large posting with an index. Among the best-known are comp.lang.c (the C-language forum), comp.arch (on computer architectures), comp.unix.wizards (for Unix wizards), rec.arts.sf.written and siblings (for science-fiction fans), and talk.politics.misc (miscellaneous political discussions and {flamage}). :nick: n. [IRC] Short for nickname. On {IRC}, every user must pick a nick, which is sometimes the same as the user's real name or login name, but is often more fanciful. Compare {handle}, {screen name}. :nickle: /ni'kl/ n. [from `nickel', common name for the U.S. 5-cent coin] A {nybble} + 1; 5 bits. Reported among developers for Mattel's GI 1600 (the Intellivision games processor), a chip with 16-bit-wide RAM but 10-bit-wide ROM. See also {deckle}, and {nybble} for names of other bit units. :night mode: n. See {phase} (of people). :Nightmare File System: n. Pejorative hackerism for Sun's Network File System (NFS). In any nontrivial network of Suns where there is a lot of NFS cross-mounting, when one Sun goes down, the others often freeze up. Some machine tries to access the down one, and (getting no response) repeats indefinitely. This causes it to appear dead to some messages (what is actually happening is that it is locked up in what should have been a brief excursion to a higher {spl} level). Then another machine tries to reach either the down machine or the pseudo-down machine, and itself becomes pseudo-down. The first machine to discover the down one is now trying both to access the down one and to respond to the pseudo-down one, so it is even harder to reach. This situation snowballs very quickly, and soon the entire network of machines is frozen -- worst of all, the user can't even abort the file access that started the problem! Many of NFS's problems are excused by partisans as being an inevitable result of its statelessness, which is held to be a great feature (critics, of course, call it a great {misfeature}). (ITS partisans are apt to cite this as proof of Unix's alleged bogosity; ITS had a working NFS-like shared file system with none of these problems in the early 1970s.) See also {broadcast storm}. :NIL: /nil/ No. Used in reply to a question, particularly one asked using the `-P' convention. Most hackers assume this derives simply from LISP terminology for `false' (see also {T}), but NIL as a negative reply was well-established among radio hams decades before the advent of LISP. The historical connection between early hackerdom and the ham radio world was strong enough that this may have been an influence. :Ninety-Ninety Rule: n. "The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time." Attributed to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs, and popularized by Jon Bentley's September 1985 "Bumper-Sticker Computer Science" column in "Communications of the ACM". It was there called the "Rule of Credibility", a name which seems not to have stuck. Other maxims in the same vain include the law attributed to the early British computer scientist Douglas Hartree: "The time from now until the completion of the project tends to become constant." :NMI: /N-M-I/ n. Non-Maskable Interrupt. An IRQ 7 on the PDP-11 or 680[01234]0; the NMI line on an 80[1234]86. In contrast with a {priority interrupt} (which might be ignored, although that is unlikely), an NMI is _never_ ignored. Except, that is, on {clone} boxes, where NMI is often ignored on the motherboard because flaky hardware can generate many spurious ones. :no-op: /noh'op/ n.,v. alt. NOP /nop/ [no operation] 1. A machine instruction that does nothing (sometimes used in assembler-level programming as filler for data or patch areas, or to overwrite code to be removed in binaries). See also {JFCL}. 2. A person who contributes nothing to a project, or has nothing going on upstairs, or both. As in "He's a no-op." 3. Any operation or sequence of operations with no effect, such as circling the block without finding a parking space, or putting money into a vending machine and having it fall immediately into the coin-return box, or asking someone for help and being told to go away. "Oh, well, that was a no-op." Hot-and-sour soup (see {great-wall}) that is insufficiently either is `no-op soup'; so is wonton soup if everybody else is having hot-and-sour. :noddy: /nod'ee/ adj. [UK: from the children's books] 1. Small and un-useful, but demonstrating a point. Noddy programs are often written by people learning a new language or system. The archetypal noddy program is {hello world}. Noddy code may be used to demonstrate a feature or bug of a compiler. May be used of real hardware or software to imply that it isn't worth using. "This editor's a bit noddy." 2. A program that is more or less instant to produce. In this use, the term does not necessarily connote uselessness, but describes a {hack} sufficiently trivial that it can be written and debugged while carrying on (and during the space of) a normal conversation. "I'll just throw together a noddy {awk} script to dump all the first fields." In North America this might be called a {mickey mouse program}. See {toy program}. :node: n. 1. [Internet, UUCP] A host machine on the network. 2. [MS-DOS BBSes] A dial-in line on a BBS. Thus an MS-DOS {sysop} might say that his BBS has 4 nodes even though it has a single machine and no Internet link, confusing an Internet hacker no end. :NOMEX underwear: /noh'meks uhn'-der-weir/ n. [Usenet] Syn. {asbestos longjohns}, used mostly in auto-related mailing lists and newsgroups. NOMEX underwear is an actual product available on the racing equipment market, used as a fire resistance measure and required in some racing series. :Nominal Semidestructor: n. Soundalike slang for `National Semiconductor', found among other places in the Networking/2 networking sources. During the late 1970s to mid-1980s this company marketed a series of microprocessors including the NS16000 and NS32000 and several variants. At one point early in the great microprocessor race, the specs on these chips made them look like serious competition for the rising Intel 80x86 and Motorola 680x0 series. Unfortunately, the actual parts were notoriously flaky and never implemented the full instruction set promised in their literature, apparently because the company couldn't get any of the mask steppings to work as designed. They eventually sank without trace, joining the Zilog Z8000 and a few even more obscure also-rans in the graveyard of forgotten microprocessors. Compare {HP-SUX}, {AIDX}, {buglix}, {Macintrash}, {Telerat}, {ScumOS}, {sun-stools}, {Slowlaris}. :non-optimal solution: n. (also `sub-optimal solution') An astoundingly stupid way to do something. This term is generally used in deadpan sarcasm, as its impact is greatest when the person speaking looks completely serious. Compare {stunning}. See also {Bad Thing}. :nonlinear: adj. [scientific computation] 1. Behaving in an erratic and unpredictable fashion; unstable. When used to describe the behavior of a machine or program, it suggests that said machine or program is being forced to run far outside of design specifications. This behavior may be induced by unreasonable inputs, or may be triggered when a more mundane bug sends the computation far off from its expected course. 2. When describing the behavior of a person, suggests a tantrum or a {flame}. "When you talk to Bob, don't mention the drug problem or he'll go nonlinear for hours." In this context, `go nonlinear' connotes `blow up out of proportion' (proportion connotes linearity). :nontrivial: adj. Requiring real thought or significant computing power. Often used as an understated way of saying that a problem is quite difficult or impractical, or even entirely unsolvable ("Proving P=NP is nontrivial"). The preferred emphatic form is `decidedly nontrivial'. See {trivial}, {uninteresting}, {interesting}. :not ready for prime time: adj. Usable, but only just so; not very robust; for internal use only. Said of a program or device. Often connotes that the thing will be made more solid {Real Soon Now}. This term comes from the ensemble name of the original cast of "Saturday Night Live", the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players". It has extra flavor for hackers because of the special (though now semi-obsolescent) meaning of {prime time}. Compare {beta}. :notwork: /not'werk/ n. A network, when it is acting {flaky} or is {down}. Compare {nyetwork}. Said at IBM to have originally referred to a particular period of flakiness on IBM's VNET corporate network ca. 1988; but there are independent reports of the term from elsewhere. :NP-: /N-P/ pref. Extremely. Used to modify adjectives describing a level or quality of difficulty; the connotation is often `more so than it should be' This is generalized from the computer-science terms `NP-hard' and `NP-complete'; NP-complete problems all seem to be very hard, but so far no one has found a proof that they are. NP is the set of Nondeterministic-Polynomial algorithms, those that can be completed by a nondeterministic Turing machine in an amount of time that is a polynomial function of the size of the input; a solution for one NP-complete problem would solve all the others. "Coding a BitBlt implementation to perform correctly in every case is NP-annoying." Note, however, that strictly speaking this usage is misleading; there are plenty of easy problems in class NP. NP-complete problems are hard not because they are in class NP, but because they are the hardest problems in class NP. :nroff:: /N'rof/ n. [Unix, from "new roff" (see {{troff}})] A companion program to the Unix typesetter {{troff}}, accepting identical input but preparing output for terminals and line printers. :NSA line eater: n. The National Security Agency trawling program sometimes assumed to be reading the net for the U.S. Government's spooks. Most hackers describe it as a mythical beast, but some believe it actually exists, more aren't sure, and many believe in acting as though it exists just in case. Some netters put loaded phrases like `KGB', `Uzi', `nuclear materials', `Palestine', `cocaine', and `assassination' in their {sig block}s in a (probably futile) attempt to confuse and overload the creature. The {GNU} version of {EMACS} actually has a command that randomly inserts a bunch of insidious anarcho-verbiage into your edited text. There is a mainstream variant of this myth involving a `Trunk Line Monitor', which supposedly used speech recognition to extract words from telephone trunks. This one was making the rounds in the late 1970s, spread by people who had no idea of then-current technology or the storage, signal-processing, or speech recognition needs of such a project. On the basis of mass-storage costs alone it would have been cheaper to hire 50 high-school students and just let them listen in. Speech-recognition technology can't do this job even now (1999), and almost certainly won't in this millennium, either. The peak of silliness came with a letter to an alternative paper in New Haven, Connecticut, laying out the factoids of this Big Brotherly affair. The letter writer then revealed his actual agenda by offering -- at an amazing low price, just this once, we take VISA and MasterCard -- a scrambler guaranteed to daunt the Trunk Trawler and presumably allowing the would-be Baader-Meinhof gangs of the world to get on with their business. :NSP: /N-S-P/ n. Common abbreviation for `Network Service Provider', one of the big national or regional companies that maintains a portion of the Internet backbone and resells connectivity to {ISP}s. In 1996, major NSPs include ANS, MCI, UUNET, and Sprint. An Internet wholesaler. :nude: adj. Said of machines delivered without an operating system (compare {bare metal}). "We ordered 50 systems, but they all arrived nude, so we had to spend a an extra weekend with the installation disks." This usage is a recent innovation reflecting the fact that most IBM-PC clones are now delivered with an operating system pre-installed at the factory. Other kinds of hardware are still normally delivered without OS, so this term is particular to PC support groups. :nugry: /n[y]oo'gree/ [Usenet, 'newbie' + '-gry'] `. n. A {newbie} who posts a {FAQ} in the rec.puzzles newsgroup, especially if it is a variant of the notorious and unanswerable "What, besides `angry' and `hungry', is the third common English word that ends in -GRY?". In the newsgroup, the canonical answer is of course `nugry' itself. Plural is `nusgry' /n[y]oos'gree/. 2. adj. Having the qualities of a nugry. :nuke: /n[y]ook/ vt. 1. To intentionally delete the entire contents of a given directory or storage volume. "On Unix, `rm -r /usr' will nuke everything in the usr filesystem." Never used for accidental deletion. Oppose {blow away}. 2. Syn. for {dike}, applied to smaller things such as files, features, or code sections. Often used to express a final verdict. "What do you want me to do with that 80-meg {wallpaper} file?" "Nuke it." 3. Used of processes as well as files; nuke is a frequent verbal alias for `kill -9' on Unix. 4. On IBM PCs, a bug that results in {fandango on core} can trash the operating system, including the FAT (the in-core copy of the disk block chaining information). This can utterly scramble attached disks, which are then said to have been `nuked'. This term is also used of analogous lossages on Macintoshes and other micros without memory protection. :number-crunching: n. Computations of a numerical nature, esp. those that make extensive use of floating-point numbers. The only thing {Fortrash} is good for. This term is in widespread informal use outside hackerdom and even in mainstream slang, but has additional hackish connotations: namely, that the computations are mindless and involve massive use of {brute force}. This is not always {evil}, esp. if it involves ray tracing or fractals or some other use that makes {pretty pictures}, esp. if such pictures can be used as {wallpaper}. See also {crunch}. :numbers: n. [scientific computation] Output of a computation that may not be significant results but at least indicate that the program is running. May be used to placate management, grant sponsors, etc. `Making numbers' means running a program because output -- any output, not necessarily meaningful output -- is needed as a demonstration of progress. See {pretty pictures}, {math-out}, {social science number}. :NUXI problem: /nuk'see pro'bl*m/ n. Refers to the problem of transferring data between machines with differing byte-order. The string `UNIX' might look like `NUXI' on a machine with a different `byte sex' (e.g., when transferring data from a {little-endian} to a {big-endian}, or vice-versa). See also {middle-endian}, {swab}, and {bytesexual}. :nybble: /nib'l/ (alt. `nibble') n. [from v. `nibble' by analogy with `bite' => `byte'] Four bits; one {hex} digit; a half-byte. Though `byte' is now techspeak, this useful relative is still jargon. Compare {{byte}}; see also {bit}, Apparently the `nybble' spelling is uncommon in Commonwealth Hackish, as British orthography suggests the pronunciation /ni:'bl/. Following `bit', `byte' and `nybble' there have been quite a few analogical attempts to construct unambiguous terms for bit blocks of other sizes. All of these are strictly jargon, not techspeak, and not very common jargon at that (most hackers would recognize them in context but not use them spontaneously). We collect them here for reference together with the ambiguous techspeak terms `word', `half-word' and `double word'; some (indicated) have substantial information separate entries. 2 bits: {crumb}, {quad}, {quarter}, tayste 4 bits: nybble 5 bits: {nickle} 10 bits: {deckle} 16 bits: playte, {chawmp} (on a 32-bit machine), word (on a 16-bit machine), half-word (on a 32-bit machine). 18 bits: {chawmp} (on a 36-bit machine), half-word (on a 36-bit machine) 32 bits: dynner, {gawble} (on a 32-bit machine), word (on a 32-bit machine), longword (on a 16-bit machine). 36: word (on a 36-bit machine) 48 bits: {gawble} (under circumstances that remain obscure) 64 bits double word (on a 32-bit machine) The fundamental motivation for most of these jargon terms (aside from the normal hackerly enjoyment of punning wordplay) is the extreme ambiguity of the term `word' and its derivatives. :nyetwork: /nyet'werk/ n. [from Russian `nyet' = no] A network, when it is acting {flaky} or is {down}. Compare {notwork}. = O = ===== :Ob-: /ob/ pref. Obligatory. A piece of {netiquette} acknowledging that the author has been straying from the newsgroup's charter topic. For example, if a posting in alt.sex is a response to a part of someone else's posting that has nothing particularly to do with sex, the author may append `ObSex' (or `Obsex') and toss off a question or vignette about some unusual erotic act. It is considered a sign of great {winnitude} when one's Obs are more interesting than other people's whole postings. :Obfuscated C Contest: n. (in full, the `International Obfuscated C Code Contest', or IOCCC) An annual contest run since 1984 over Usenet by Landon Curt Noll and friends. The overall winner is whoever produces the most unreadable, creative, and bizarre (but working) C program; various other prizes are awarded at the judges' whim. C's terse syntax and macro-preprocessor facilities give contestants a lot of maneuvering room. The winning programs often manage to be simultaneously (a) funny, (b) breathtaking works of art, and (c) horrible examples of how _not_ to code in C. This relatively short and sweet entry might help convey the flavor of obfuscated C: /* * HELLO WORLD program * by Jack Applin and Robert Heckendorn, 1985 * (Note: depends on being able to modify elements of argv[], * which is not guaranteed by ANSI and often not possible.) */ main(v,c)char**c;{for(v[c++]="Hello, world!\n)"; (!!c)[*c]&&(v--||--c&&execlp(*c,*c,c[!!c]+!!c,!c)); **c=!c)write(!!*c,*c,!!**c);} Here's another good one: /* * Program to compute an approximation of pi * by Brian Westley, 1988 * (requires pcc macro concatenation; try gcc -traditional-cpp) */ #define _ -F<00||--F-OO--; int F=00,OO=00; main(){F_OO();printf("%1.3f\n",4.*-F/OO/OO);}F_OO() { _-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_ } Note that this program works by computing its own area. For more digits, write a bigger program. See also {hello world}. The IOCCC has an official home page at `http://reality.sgi.com/csp/ioccc'. :obi-wan error: /oh'bee-won` er'*r/ n. [RPI, from `off-by-one' and the Obi-Wan Kenobi character in "Star Wars"] A loop of some sort in which the index is off by 1. Common when the index should have started from 0 but instead started from 1. A kind of {off-by-one error}. See also {zeroth}. :Objectionable-C: n. Hackish take on "Objective-C", the name of an object-oriented dialect of C in competition with the better-known C++ (it is used to write native applications on the NeXT machine). Objectionable-C uses a Smalltalk-like syntax, but lacks the flexibility of Smalltalk method calls, and (like many such efforts) comes frustratingly close to attaining the {Right Thing} without actually doing so. :obscure: adj. Used in an exaggeration of its normal meaning, to imply total incomprehensibility. "The reason for that last crash is obscure." "The `find(1)' command's syntax is obscure!" The phrase `moderately obscure' implies that something could be figured out but probably isn't worth the trouble. The construction `obscure in the extreme' is the preferred emphatic form. :octal forty: /ok'tl for'tee/ n. Hackish way of saying "I'm drawing a blank." Octal 40 is the {{ASCII}} space character, 0100000; by an odd coincidence, {hex} 40 (01000000) is the {{EBCDIC}} space character. See {wall}. :off the trolley: adj. Describes the behavior of a program that malfunctions and goes catatonic, but doesn't actually {crash} or abort. See {glitch}, {bug}, {deep space}, {wedged}. This term is much older than computing, and is (uncommon) slang elsewhere. A trolley is the small wheel that trolls, or runs against, the heavy wire that carries the current to run a streetcar. It's at the end of the long pole (the trolley pole) that reaches from the roof of the streetcar to the overhead line. When the trolley stops making contact with the wire (from passing through a switch, going over bumpy track, or whatever), the streetcar comes to a halt, (usually) without crashing. The streetcar is then said to be off the trolley, or off the wire. Later on, trolley came to mean the streetcar itself. Since streetcars became common in the 1890s, the term is more than 100 years old. Nowadays, trolleys are only seen on historic streetcars, since modern streetcars use pantographs to contact the wire. :off-by-one error: n. Exceedingly common error induced in many ways, such as by starting at 0 when you should have started at 1 or vice-versa, or by writing `< N' instead of `<= N' or vice-versa. Also applied to giving something to the person next to the one who should have gotten it. Often confounded with {fencepost error}, which is properly a particular subtype of it. :offline: adv. Not now or not here. "Let's take this discussion offline." Specifically used on {Usenet} to suggest that a discussion be moved off a public newsgroup to email. :ogg: /og/ v. [CMU] 1. In the multi-player space combat game Netrek, to execute kamikaze attacks against enemy ships which are carrying armies or occupying strategic positions. Named during a game in which one of the players repeatedly used the tactic while playing Orion ship G, showing up in the player list as "Og". This trick has been roundly denounced by those who would return to the good old days when the tactic of dogfighting was dominant, but as Sun Tzu wrote, "What is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy, not his tactics." However, the traditional answer to the newbie question "What does ogg mean?" is just "Pick up some armies and I'll show you." 2. In other games, to forcefully attack an opponent with the expectation that the resources expended will be renewed faster than the opponent will be able to regain his previous advantage. Taken more seriously as a tactic since it has gained a simple name. 3. To do anything forcefully, possibly without consideration of the drain on future resources. "I guess I'd better go ogg the problem set that's due tomorrow." "Whoops! I looked down at the map for a sec and almost ogged that oncoming car." :old fart: n. Tribal elder. A title self-assumed with remarkable frequency by (esp.) Usenetters who have been programming for more than about 25 years; often appears in {sig block}s attached to Jargon File contributions of great archeological significance. This is a term of insult in the second or third person but one of pride in first person. :Old Testament: n. [C programmers] The first edition of {K&R}, the sacred text describing {Classic C}. :one-banana problem: n. At mainframe shops, where the computers have operators for routine administrivia, the programmers and hardware people tend to look down on the operators and claim that a trained monkey could do their job. It is frequently observed that the incentives that would be offered said monkeys can be used as a scale to describe the difficulty of a task. A one-banana problem is simple; hence, "It's only a one-banana job at the most; what's taking them so long?" At IBM, folklore divides the world into one-, two-, and three-banana problems. Other cultures have different hierarchies and may divide them more finely; at ICL, for example, five grapes (a bunch) equals a banana. Their upper limit for the in-house {sysape}s is said to be two bananas and three grapes (another source claims it's three bananas and one grape, but observes "However, this is subject to local variations, cosmic rays and ISO"). At a complication level any higher than that, one asks the manufacturers to send someone around to check things. See also {Infinite-Monkey Theorem}. :one-line fix: n. Used (often sarcastically) of a change to a program that is thought to be trivial or insignificant right up to the moment it crashes the system. Usually `cured' by another one-line fix. See also {I didn't change anything!} :one-liner wars: n. A game popular among hackers who code in the language APL (see {write-only language} and {line noise}). The objective is to see who can code the most interesting and/or useful routine in one line of operators chosen from APL's exceedingly {hairy} primitive set. A similar amusement was practiced among {TECO} hackers and is now popular among {Perl} aficionados. Ken Iverson, the inventor of APL, has been credited with a one-liner that, given a number N, produces a list of the prime numbers from 1 to N inclusive. It looks like this: (2 = 0 +.= T o.| T) / T <- iN where `o' is the APL null character, the assignment arrow is a single character, and `i' represents the APL iota. Here's equivalent {Perl}: perl -le '$_ = 1; (1 x $_) !~ /^(11+)\1+$/ && print while $_++' :ooblick: /oo'blik/ n. [from the Dr. Seuss title "Bartholomew and the Oobleck"; the spelling `oobleck' is still current in the mainstream] A bizarre semi-liquid sludge made from cornstarch and water. Enjoyed among hackers who make batches during playtime at parties for its amusing and extremely non-Newtonian behavior; it pours and splatters, but resists rapid motion like a solid and will even crack when hit by a hammer. Often found near lasers. Here is a field-tested ooblick recipe contributed by GLS: 1 cup cornstarch 1 cup baking soda 3/4 cup water N drops of food coloring This recipe isn't quite as non-Newtonian as a pure cornstarch ooblick, but has an appropriately slimy feel. Some, however, insist that the notion of an ooblick _recipe_ is far too mechanical, and that it is best to add the water in small increments so that the various mixed states the cornstarch goes through as it _becomes_ ooblick can be grokked in fullness by many hands. For optional ingredients of this experience, see the "{Ceremonial Chemicals}" section of Appendix B. :op: /op/ n. 1. In England and Ireland, common verbal abbreviation for `operator', as in system operator. Less common in the U.S., where {sysop} seems to be preferred. 2. [IRC] Someone who is endowed with privileges on {IRC}, not limited to a particular channel. These are generally people who are in charge of the IRC server at their particular site. Sometimes used interchangeably with {CHOP}. Compare {sysop}. :open: n. Abbreviation for `open (or left) parenthesis' -- used when necessary to eliminate oral ambiguity. To read aloud the LISP form (DEFUN FOO (X) (PLUS X 1)) one might say: "Open defun foo, open eks close, open, plus eks one, close close." :open switch: n. [IBM: prob. from railroading] An unresolved question, issue, or problem. :operating system:: n. [techspeak] (Often abbreviated `OS') The foundation software of a machine; that which schedules tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the user between applications. The facilities an operating system provides and its general design philosophy exert an extremely strong influence on programming style and on the technical cultures that grow up around its host machines. Hacker folklore has been shaped primarily by the {{Unix}}, {{ITS}}, {{TOPS-10}}, {{TOPS-20}}/{{TWENEX}}, {{WAITS}}, {{CP/M}}, {{MS-DOS}}, and {{Multics}} operating systems (most importantly by ITS and Unix). :optical diff: n. See {vdiff}. :optical grep: n. See {vgrep}. :optimism: n. What a programmer is full of after fixing the last bug and before discovering the _next_ last bug. Fred Brooks's book "The Mythical Man-Month" (See "Brooks's Law") contains the following paragraph that describes this extremely well: All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists. But however the selection process works, the result is indisputable: "This time it will surely run," or "I just found the last bug.". See also {Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology}. :Orange Book: n. The U.S. Government's standards document "Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, DOD standard 5200.28-STD, December, 1985" which characterize secure computing architectures and defines levels A1 (most secure) through D (least). Modern Unixes are roughly C2. See also {{crayola books}}, {{book titles}}. :oriental food:: n. Hackers display an intense tropism towards oriental cuisine, especially Chinese, and especially of the spicier varieties such as Szechuan and Hunan. This phenomenon (which has also been observed in subcultures that overlap heavily with hackerdom, most notably science-fiction fandom) has never been satisfactorily explained, but is sufficiently intense that one can assume the target of a hackish dinner expedition to be the best local Chinese place and be right at least three times out of four. See also {ravs}, {great-wall}, {stir-fried random}, {laser chicken}, {Yu-Shiang Whole Fish}. Thai, Indian, Korean, and Vietnamese cuisines are also quite popular. :orphan: n. [Unix] A process whose parent has died; one inherited by `init(1)'. Compare {zombie}. :orphaned i-node: /or'f*nd i:'nohd/ n. [Unix] 1. [techspeak] A file that retains storage but no longer appears in the directories of a filesystem. 2. By extension, a pejorative for any person no longer serving a useful function within some organization, esp. {lion food} without subordinates. :orthogonal: adj. [from mathematics] Mutually independent; well separated; sometimes, irrelevant to. Used in a generalization of its mathematical meaning to describe sets of primitives or capabilities that, like a vector basis in geometry, span the entire `capability space' of the system and are in some sense non-overlapping or mutually independent. For example, in architectures such as the PDP-11 or VAX where all or nearly all registers can be used interchangeably in any role with respect to any instruction, the register set is said to be orthogonal. Or, in logic, the set of operators `not' and `or' is orthogonal, but the set `nand', `or', and `not' is not (because any one of these can be expressed in terms of the others). Also used in comments on human discourse: "This may be orthogonal to the discussion, but...." :OS: /O-S/ 1. [Operating System] n. An abbreviation heavily used in email, occasionally in speech. 2. n. obs. On ITS, an output spy. See "{OS and JEDGAR}" in Appendix A. :OS/2: /O S too/ n. The anointed successor to MS-DOS for Intel 286- and 386-based micros; proof that IBM/Microsoft couldn't get it right the second time, either. Often called `Half-an-OS'. Mentioning it is usually good for a cheap laugh among hackers -- the design was so {baroque}, and the implementation of 1.x so bad, that 3 years after introduction you could still count the major {app}s shipping for it on the fingers of two hands -- in unary. The 2.x versions are said to have improved somewhat, and informed hackers now rate them superior to Microsoft Windows (an endorsement which, however, could easily be construed as damning with faint praise). See {monstrosity}, {cretinous}, {second-system effect}. :OSU: /O-S-U/ n. obs. [TMRC] Acronym for Officially Sanctioned User; a user who is recognized as such by the computer authorities and allowed to use the computer above the objections of the security monitor. :OTOH: // [USENET] On The Other Hand. :out-of-band: adj. [from telecommunications and network theory] 1. In software, describes values of a function which are not in its `natural' range of return values, but are rather signals that some kind of exception has occurred. Many C functions, for example, return a nonnegative integral value, but indicate failure with an out-of-band return value of -1. Compare {hidden flag}, {green bytes}, {fence}. 2. Also sometimes used to describe what communications people call `shift characters', such as the ESC that leads control sequences for many terminals, or the level shift indicators in the old 5-bit Baudot codes. 3. In personal communication, using methods other than email, such as telephones or {snail-mail}. :overflow bit: n. 1. [techspeak] A {flag} on some processors indicating an attempt to calculate a result too large for a register to hold. 2. More generally, an indication of any kind of capacity overload condition. "Well, the {{Ada}} description was {baroque} all right, but I could hack it OK until they got to the exception handling ... that set my overflow bit." 3. The hypothetical bit that will be set if a hacker doesn't get to make a trip to the Room of Porcelain Fixtures: "I'd better process an internal interrupt before the overflow bit gets set." :overflow pdl: n. [MIT] The place where you put things when your {pdl} is full. If you don't have one and too many things get pushed, you forget something. The overflow pdl for a person's memory might be a memo pad. This usage inspired the following doggerel: Hey, diddle, diddle The overflow pdl To get a little more stack; If that's not enough Then you lose it all, And have to pop all the way back. -The Great Quux The term {pdl} seems to be primarily an MITism; outside MIT this term is replaced by `overflow {stack}' (but that wouldn't rhyme with `diddle'). :overrun: n. 1. [techspeak] Term for a frequent consequence of data arriving faster than it can be consumed, esp. in serial line communications. For example, at 9600 baud there is almost exactly one character per millisecond, so if a {silo} can hold only two characters and the machine takes longer than 2 msec to get to service the interrupt, at least one character will be lost. 2. Also applied to non-serial-I/O communications. "I forgot to pay my electric bill due to mail overrun." "Sorry, I got four phone calls in 3 minutes last night and lost your message to overrun." When {thrash}ing at tasks, the next person to make a request might be told "Overrun!" Compare {firehose syndrome}. 3. More loosely, may refer to a {buffer overflow} not necessarily related to processing time (as in {overrun screw}). :overrun screw: n. [C programming] A variety of {fandango on core} produced by scribbling past the end of an array (C implementations typically have no checks for this error). This is relatively benign and easy to spot if the array is static; if it is auto, the result may be to {smash the stack} -- often resulting in {heisenbug}s of the most diabolical subtlety. The term `overrun screw' is used esp. of scribbles beyond the end of arrays allocated with `malloc(3)'; this typically trashes the allocation header for the next block in the {arena}, producing massive lossage within malloc and often a core dump on the next operation to use `stdio(3)' or `malloc(3)' itself. See {spam}, {overrun}; see also {memory leak}, {memory smash}, {aliasing bug}, {precedence lossage}, {fandango on core}, {secondary damage}. = P = ===== :P-mail: n. Physical mail, as opposed to {email}. Synonymous with {snail-mail}, but much less common. :P.O.D.: /P-O-D/ Acronym for `Piece Of Data' (as opposed to a code section). Usage: pedantic and rare. See also {pod}. :padded cell: n. Where you put {luser}s so they can't hurt anything. A program that limits a luser to a carefully restricted subset of the capabilities of the host system (for example, the `rsh(1)' utility on USG Unix). Note that this is different from an {iron box} because it is overt and not aimed at enforcing security so much as protecting others (and the luser) from the consequences of the luser's boundless naivete (see {naive}). Also `padded cell environment'. :page in: v. [MIT] 1. To become aware of one's surroundings again after having paged out (see {page out}). Usually confined to the sarcastic comment: "Eric pages in, {film at 11}!" 2. Syn. `swap in'; see {swap}. :page out: vi. [MIT] 1. To become unaware of one's surroundings temporarily, due to daydreaming or preoccupation. "Can you repeat that? I paged out for a minute." See {page in}. Compare {glitch}, {thinko}. 2. Syn. `swap out'; see {swap}. :pain in the net: n. A {flamer}. :Pangloss parity: n. [from Dr. Pangloss, the eternal optimist in Voltaire's "Candide"] In corporate DP shops, a common condition of severe but equally shared {lossage} resulting from the theory that as long as everyone in the organization has the exactly the _same_ model of obsolete computer, everything will be fine. :paper-net: n. Hackish way of referring to the postal service, analogizing it to a very slow, low-reliability network. Usenet {sig block}s sometimes include a "Paper-Net:" header just before the sender's postal address; common variants of this are "Papernet" and "P-Net". Note that the standard {netiquette} guidelines discourage this practice as a waste of bandwidth, since netters are quite unlikely to casually use postal addresses. Compare {voice-net}, {snail-mail}, {P-mail}. :param: /p*-ram'/ n. Shorthand for `parameter'. See also {parm}; compare {arg}, {var}. :PARC: n. See {XEROX PARC}. :parent message: n. What a {followup} follows up. :parity errors: pl.n. Little lapses of attention or (in more severe cases) consciousness, usually brought on by having spent all night and most of the next day hacking. "I need to go home and crash; I'm starting to get a lot of parity errors." Derives from a relatively common but nearly always correctable transient error in memory hardware. It predates RAM; in fact, this term is reported to have already have been in use in its jargoin sense back in the 1960s when magnetic cores ruled. Parity errors can also afflict mass storage and serial communication lines; this is more serious because not always correctable. :Parkinson's Law of Data: prov. "Data expands to fill the space available for storage"; buying more memory encourages the use of more memory-intensive techniques. It has been observed since the mid-1980s that the memory usage of evolving systems tends to double roughly once every 18 months. Fortunately, memory density available for constant dollars also tends to about double once every 18 months (see {Moore's Law}); unfortunately, the laws of physics guarantee that the latter cannot continue indefinitely. :parm: /parm/ n. Further-compressed form of {param}. This term is an IBMism, and written use is almost unknown outside IBM shops; spoken /parm/ is more widely distributed, but the synonym {arg} is favored among hackers. Compare {arg}, {var}. :parse: [from linguistic terminology] vt. 1. To determine the syntactic structure of a sentence or other utterance (close to the standard English meaning). "That was the one I saw you." "I can't parse that." 2. More generally, to understand or comprehend. "It's very simple; you just kretch the glims and then aos the zotz." "I can't parse that." 3. Of fish, to have to remove the bones yourself. "I object to parsing fish", means "I don't want to get a whole fish, but a sliced one is okay". A `parsed fish' has been deboned. There is some controversy over whether `unparsed' should mean `bony', or also mean `deboned'. :Pascal:: n. An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967-68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact, became the ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and {{Ada}} (see also {bondage-and-discipline language}). The hackish point of view on Pascal was probably best summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of {K&R} fame) entitled "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language", which was turned down by the technical journals but circulated widely via photocopies. It was eventually published in "Comparing and Assessing Programming Languages", edited by Alan Feuer and Narain Gehani (Prentice-Hall, 1984). Part of his discussion is worth repeating here, because its criticisms are still apposite to Pascal itself after ten years of improvement and could also stand as an indictment of many other bondage-and-discipline languages. At the end of a summary of the case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote: 9. There is no escape This last point is perhaps the most important. The language is inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape its limitations. There are no casts to disable the type-checking when necessary. There is no way to replace the defective run-time environment with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler that defines the "standard procedures". The language is closed. People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look like whatever language they really want. Extensions for separate compilation, FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types, internal static variables, initialization, octal numbers, bit operators, etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but destroy its portability to others. I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond its original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy language, suitable for teaching but not for real programming. Pascal has since been almost entirely displaced (by {C}) from the niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems programming, but retains some popularity as a hobbyist language in the MS-DOS and Macintosh worlds. :pastie: /pay'stee/ n. An adhesive-backed label designed to be attached to a key on a keyboard to indicate some non-standard character which can be accessed through that key. Pasties are likely to be used in APL environments, where almost every key is associated with a special character. A pastie on the R key, for example, might remind the user that it is used to generate the rho character. The term properly refers to nipple-concealing devices formerly worn by strippers in concession to indecent-exposure laws; compare {tits on a keyboard}. :patch: 1. n. A temporary addition to a piece of code, usually as a {quick-and-dirty} remedy to an existing bug or misfeature. A patch may or may not work, and may or may not eventually be incorporated permanently into the program. Distinguished from a {diff} or {mod} by the fact that a patch is generated by more primitive means than the rest of the program; the classical examples are instructions modified by using the front panel switches, and changes made directly to the binary executable of a program originally written in an {HLL}. Compare {one-line fix}. 2. vt. To insert a patch into a piece of code. 3. [in the Unix world] n. A {diff} (sense 2). 4. A set of modifications to binaries to be applied by a patching program. IBM operating systems often receive updates to the operating system in the form of absolute hexadecimal patches. If you have modified your OS, you have to disassemble these back to the source. The patches might later be corrected by other patches on top of them (patches were said to "grow scar tissue"). The result was often a convoluted {patch space} and headaches galore. 5. [Unix] the `patch(1)' program, written by Larry Wall, which automatically applies a patch (sense 3) to a set of source code. There is a classic story of a {tiger team} penetrating a secure military computer that illustrates the danger inherent in binary patches (or, indeed, any patches that you can't -- or don't -- inspect and examine before installing). They couldn't find any {trap door}s or any way to penetrate security of IBM's OS, so they made a site visit to an IBM office (remember, these were official military types who were purportedly on official business), swiped some IBM stationery, and created a fake patch. The patch was actually the trapdoor they needed. The patch was distributed at about the right time for an IBM patch, had official stationery and all accompanying documentation, and was dutifully installed. The installation manager very shortly thereafter learned something about proper procedures. :patch pumpkin: n. [Perl hackers] A notional token passed around among the members of a project. Possession of the patch pumpkin means one has the exclusive authority to make changes on the project's master source tree. The implicit assumption is that `pumpkin holder' status is temporary and rotates periodically among senior project members.

This term comes from the Perl development community, but has been sighted elsewhere. It derives from a stuffed-toy pumpkin that was passed around at a development shop years ago as the access control for a shared backup-tape drive. :patch space: n. An unused block of bits left in a binary so that it can later be modified by insertion of machine-language instructions there (typically, the patch space is modified to contain new code, and the superseded code is patched to contain a jump or call to the patch space). The near-universal use of compilers and interpreters has made this term rare; it is now primarily historical outside IBM shops. See {patch} (sense 4), {zap} (sense 4), {hook}. :path: n. 1. A {bang path} or explicitly routed {{Internet address}}; a node-by-node specification of a link between two machines. 2. [Unix] A filename, fully specified relative to the root directory (as opposed to relative to the current directory; the latter is sometimes called a `relative path'). This is also called a `pathname'. 3. [Unix and MS-DOS] The `search path', an environment variable specifying the directories in which the {shell} (COMMAND.COM, under MS-DOS) should look for commands. Other, similar constructs abound under Unix (for example, the C preprocessor has a `search path' it uses in looking for `#include' files). :pathological: adj. 1. [scientific computation] Used of a data set that is grossly atypical of normal expected input, esp. one that exposes a weakness or bug in whatever algorithm one is using. An algorithm that can be broken by pathological inputs may still be useful if such inputs are very unlikely to occur in practice. 2. When used of test input, implies that it was purposefully engineered as a worst case. The implication in both senses is that the data is spectacularly ill-conditioned or that someone had to explicitly set out to break the algorithm in order to come up with such a crazy example. 3. Also said of an unlikely collection of circumstances. "If the network is down and comes up halfway through the execution of that command by root, the system may just crash." "Yes, but that's a pathological case." Often used to dismiss the case from discussion, with the implication that the consequences are acceptable, since they will happen so infrequently (if at all) that it doesn't seem worth going to the extra trouble to handle that case (see sense 1). :payware: /pay'weir/ n. Commercial software. Oppose {shareware} or {freeware}. :PBD: /P-B-D/ n. [abbrev. of `Programmer Brain Damage'] Applied to bug reports revealing places where the program was obviously broken by an incompetent or short-sighted programmer. Compare {UBD}; see also {brain-damaged}. :PC-ism: /P-C-izm/ n. A piece of code or coding technique that takes advantage of the unprotected single-tasking environment in IBM PCs and the like running DOS, e.g., by busy-waiting on a hardware register, direct diddling of screen memory, or using hard timing loops. Compare {ill-behaved}, {vaxism}, {unixism}. Also, `PC-ware' n., a program full of PC-isms on a machine with a more capable operating system. Pejorative. :PD: /P-D/ adj. Common abbreviation for `public domain', applied to software distributed over {Usenet} and from Internet archive sites. Much of this software is not in fact public domain in the legal sense but travels under various copyrights granting reproduction and use rights to anyone who can {snarf} a copy. See {copyleft}. :PDL: /P-D-L/, /pid'l/, /p*d'l/ or /puhd'l/ 1. n. `Program Design Language'. Any of a large class of formal and profoundly useless pseudo-languages in which {management} forces one to design programs. Too often, management expects PDL descriptions to be maintained in parallel with the code, imposing massive overhead to little or no benefit. See also {{flowchart}}. 2. v. To design using a program design language. "I've been pdling so long my eyes won't focus beyond 2 feet." 3. n. `Page Description Language'. Refers to any language which is used to control a graphics device, usually a laserprinter. The most common example is, of course, Adobe's {{PostScript}} language, but there are many others, such as Xerox InterPress, etc. :pdl: /pid'l/ or /puhd'l/ n. [abbreviation for `Push Down List'] 1. In ITS days, the preferred MITism for {stack}. See {overflow pdl}. 2. Dave Lebling, one of the co-authors of {Zork}; (his {network address} on the ITS machines was at one time pdl@dms). 3. Rarely, any sense of {PDL}, as these are not invariably capitalized. :PDP-10: n. [Programmed Data Processor model 10] The machine that made timesharing real. It looms large in hacker folklore because of its adoption in the mid-1970s by many university computing facilities and research labs, including the MIT AI Lab, Stanford, and CMU. Some aspects of the instruction set (most notably the bit-field instructions) are still considered unsurpassed. The 10 was eventually eclipsed by the VAX machines (descendants of the PDP-11) when {DEC} recognized that the 10 and VAX product lines were competing with each other and decided to concentrate its software development effort on the more profitable VAX. The machine was finally dropped from DEC's line in 1983, following the failure of the Jupiter Project at DEC to build a viable new model. (Some attempts by other companies to market clones came to nothing; see {Foonly} and {Mars}.) This event spelled the doom of {{ITS}} and the technical cultures that had spawned the original Jargon File, but by mid-1991 it had become something of a badge of honorable old-timerhood among hackers to have cut one's teeth on a PDP-10. See {{TOPS-10}}, {{ITS}}, {AOS}, {BLT}, {DDT}, {DPB}, {EXCH}, {HAKMEM}, {JFCL}, {LDB}, {pop}, {push}. :PDP-20: n. The most famous computer that never was. {PDP-10} computers running the {{TOPS-10}} operating system were labeled `DECsystem-10' as a way of differentiating them from the PDP-11. Later on, those systems running {TOPS-20} were labeled `DECSYSTEM-20' (the block capitals being the result of a lawsuit brought against DEC by Singer, which once made a computer called `system-10'), but contrary to popular lore there was never a `PDP-20'; the only difference between a 10 and a 20 was the operating system and the color of the paint. Most (but not all) machines sold to run TOPS-10 were painted `Basil Blue', whereas most TOPS-20 machines were painted `Chinese Red' (often mistakenly called orange). :PEBKAC: [Abbrev., "Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair"] Used by support people, particularly at call centers and help desks. Not used with the public. Denotes pilot error as the cause of the crash, especially stupid errors that even a luser could figure out. Very derogatory. Usage: "Did you ever figure out why that guy couldn't print?" "Yeah, he kept cancelling the operation before it could finish. PEBKAC." :peek: n.,vt. (and {poke}) The commands in most microcomputer BASICs for directly accessing memory contents at an absolute address; often extended to mean the corresponding constructs in any {HLL} (peek reads memory, poke modifies it). Much hacking on small, non-MMU micros consists of `peek'ing around memory, more or less at random, to find the location where the system keeps interesting stuff. Long (and variably accurate) lists of such addresses for various computers circulate (see {{interrupt list}}). The results of `poke's at these addresses may be highly useful, mildly amusing, useless but neat, or (most likely) total {lossage} (see {killer poke}). Since a {real operating system} provides useful, higher-level services for the tasks commonly performed with peeks and pokes on micros, and real languages tend not to encourage low-level memory groveling, a question like "How do I do a peek in C?" is diagnostic of the {newbie}. (Of course, OS kernels often have to do exactly this; a real C hacker would unhesitatingly, if unportably, assign an absolute address to a pointer variable and indirect through it.) :pencil and paper: n. An archaic information storage and transmission device that works by depositing smears of graphite on bleached wood pulp. More recent developments in paper-based technology include improved `write-once' update devices which use tiny rolling heads similar to mouse balls to deposit colored pigment. All these devices require an operator skilled at so-called `handwriting' technique. These technologies are ubiquitous outside hackerdom, but nearly forgotten inside it. Most hackers had terrible handwriting to begin with, and years of keyboarding tend to have encouraged it to degrade further. Perhaps for this reason, hackers deprecate pencil-and-paper technology and often resist using it in any but the most trivial contexts. :Pentagram Pro: n. A humorous corruption of "Pentium Pro", with a Satanic reference, implying that the chip is inherently {evil}. Often used with "666 MHz"; there is a T-shirt. See {Pentium} :Pentium: n. The name given to Intel's P5 chip, the successor to the 80486. The name was chosen because of difficulties Intel had in trademarking a number. It suggests the number five (implying 586) while (according to Intel) conveying a meaning of strength "like titanium". Among hackers, the plural is frequently `pentia'. See also {Pentagram Pro}. Intel did not stick to this convention when naming its P6 processor the Pentium Pro; many believe this is due to difficulties in selling a chip with "sex" in its name. :peon: n. A person with no special ({root} or {wheel}) privileges on a computer system. "I can't create an account on _foovax_ for you; I'm only a peon there." :percent-S: /per-sent' es'/ n. [From the code in C's `printf(3)' library function used to insert an arbitrary string argument] An unspecified person or object. "I was just talking to some percent-s in administration." Compare {random}. :perf: /perf/ n. Syn. {chad} (sense 1). The term `perfory' /per'f*-ree/ is also heard. The term {perf} may also refer to the perforations themselves, rather than the chad they produce when torn (philatelists use it this way). :perfect programmer syndrome: n. Arrogance; the egotistical conviction that one is above normal human error. Most frequently found among programmers of some native ability but relatively little experience (especially new graduates; their perceptions may be distorted by a history of excellent performance at solving {toy problem}s). "Of course my program is correct, there is no need to test it." "Yes, I can see there may be a problem here, but _I'll_ never type `rm -r /' while in {root mode}." :Perl: /perl/ n. [Practical Extraction and Report Language, a.k.a. Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister] An interpreted language developed by Larry Wall (<>, author of `patch(1)' and `rn(1)') and distributed over Usenet. Superficially resembles {awk}, but is much hairier, including many facilities reminiscent of `sed(1)' and shells and a comprehensive Unix system-call interface. Unix sysadmins, who are almost always incorrigible hackers, increasingly consider it one of the {languages of choice}. Perl has been described, in a parody of a famous remark about `lex(1)', as the "Swiss-Army chainsaw" of Unix programming. See also {Camel Book}, {TMTOWTDI}. :person of no account: n. [University of California at Santa Cruz] Used when referring to a person with no {network address}, frequently to forestall confusion. Most often as part of an introduction: "This is Bill, a person of no account, but he used to be bill@random.com". Compare {return from the dead}. :pessimal: /pes'im-l/ adj. [Latin-based antonym for `optimal'] Maximally bad. "This is a pessimal situation." Also `pessimize' vt. To make as bad as possible. These words are the obvious Latin-based antonyms for `optimal' and `optimize', but for some reason they do not appear in most English dictionaries, although `pessimize' is listed in the OED. :pessimizing compiler: /pes'*-mi:z`ing k*m-pi:l'r/ n. A compiler that produces object [antonym of `optimizing compiler'] code that is worse than the straightforward or obvious hand translation. The implication is that the compiler is actually trying to optimize the program, but through excessive cleverness is doing the opposite. A few pessimizing compilers have been written on purpose, however, as pranks or burlesques. :peta-: /pe't*/ pref [SI] See {{quantifiers}}. :PETSCII: /pet'skee/ n. obs. [abbreviation of PET ASCII] The variation (many would say perversion) of the {{ASCII}} character set used by the Commodore Business Machines PET series of personal computers and the later Commodore C64, C16, C128, and VIC20 machines. The PETSCII set used left-arrow and up-arrow (as in old-style ASCII) instead of underscore and caret, placed the unshifted alphabet at positions 65-90, put the shifted alphabet at positions 193-218, and added graphics characters. :phage: n. A program that modifies other programs or databases in unauthorized ways; esp. one that propagates a {virus} or {Trojan horse}. See also {worm}, {mockingbird}. The analogy, of course, is with phage viruses in biology. :phase: 1. n. The offset of one's waking-sleeping schedule with respect to the standard 24-hour cycle; a useful concept among people who often work at night and/or according to no fixed schedule. It is not uncommon to change one's phase by as much as 6 hours per day on a regular basis. "What's your phase?" "I've been getting in about 8 P.M. lately, but I'm going to {wrap around} to the day schedule by Friday." A person who is roughly 12 hours out of phase is sometimes said to be in `night mode'. (The term `day mode' is also (but less frequently) used, meaning you're working 9 to 5 (or, more likely, 10 to 6).) The act of altering one's cycle is called `changing phase'; `phase shifting' has also been recently reported from Caltech. 2. `change phase the hard way': To stay awake for a very long time in order to get into a different phase. 3. `change phase the easy way': To stay asleep, etc. However, some claim that either staying awake longer or sleeping longer is easy, and that it is _shortening_ your day or night that is really hard (see {wrap around}). The `jet lag' that afflicts travelers who cross many time-zone boundaries may be attributed to two distinct causes: the strain of travel per se, and the strain of changing phase. Hackers who suddenly find that they must change phase drastically in a short period of time, particularly the hard way, experience something very like jet lag without traveling. :phase of the moon: n. Used humorously as a random parameter on which something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine. "This feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon." See also {heisenbug}. True story: Once upon a time there was a program bug that really did depend on the phase of the moon. There was a little subroutine that had traditionally been used in various programs at MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon's true phase. GLS incorporated this routine into a LISP program that, when it wrote out a file, would print a timestamp line almost 80 characters long. Very occasionally the first line of the message would be too long and would overflow onto the next line, and when the file was later read back in the program would {barf}. The length of the first line depended on both the precise date and time and the length of the phase specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the bug literally depended on the phase of the moon! The first paper edition of the Jargon File (Steele-1983) included an example of one of the timestamp lines that exhibited this bug, but the typesetter `corrected' it. This has since been described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug. However, beware of assumptions. A few years ago, engineers of CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) were baffled by some errors in experiments conducted with the LEP particle accelerator. As the formidable amount of data generated by such devices is heavily processed by computers before being seen by humans, many people suggested the software was somehow sensitive to the phase of the moon. A few desperate engineers discovered the truth; the error turned out to be the result of a tiny change in the geometry of the 27km circonference ring, physically caused by the deformation of the Earth by the passage of the Moon! This story has entered physics folklore as a Newtonian vengeance on particle physics and as an example of the relevance of the simplest and oldest physical laws to the most modern science. :phase-wrapping: n. [MIT] Syn. {wrap around}, sense 2. :phreaker: /freek'r/ n. One who engages in {phreaking}. :phreaking: /freek'ing/ n. [from `phone phreak'] 1. The art and science of {cracking} the phone network (so as, for example, to make free long-distance calls). 2. By extension, security-cracking in any other context (especially, but not exclusively, on communications networks) (see {cracking}). At one time phreaking was a semi-respectable activity among hackers; there was a gentleman's agreement that phreaking as an intellectual game and a form of exploration was OK, but serious theft of services was taboo. There was significant crossover between the hacker community and the hard-core phone phreaks who ran semi-underground networks of their own through such media as the legendary "TAP Newsletter". This ethos began to break down in the mid-1980s as wider dissemination of the techniques put them in the hands of less responsible phreaks. Around the same time, changes in the phone network made old-style technical ingenuity less effective as a way of hacking it, so phreaking came to depend more on overtly criminal acts such as stealing phone-card numbers. The crimes and punishments of gangs like the `414 group' turned that game very ugly. A few old-time hackers still phreak casually just to keep their hand in, but most these days have hardly even heard of `blue boxes' or any of the other paraphernalia of the great phreaks of yore. :pico-: pref. [SI: a quantifier meaning * 10^-12] Smaller than {nano-}; used in the same rather loose connotative way as {nano-} and {micro-}. This usage is not yet common in the way {nano-} and {micro-} are, but should be instantly recognizable to any hacker. See also {{quantifiers}}, {micro-}. :pig-tail: [radio hams] A short piece of cable with two connectors on each end for converting between one connector type and another. Common pig-tails are 9-to-25-pin serial-port converters and cables to connect PCMCIA network cards to an RJ-45 network cable. This word probably came from ham radio hackers. :pilot error: n. [Sun: from aviation] A user's misconfiguration or misuse of a piece of software, producing apparently buglike results (compare {UBD}). "Joe Luser reported a bug in sendmail that causes it to generate bogus headers." "That's not a bug, that's pilot error. His `sendmail.cf' is hosed." :ping: [from the submariners' term for a sonar pulse] 1. n. Slang term for a small network message (ICMP ECHO) sent by a computer to check for the presence and alertness of another. The Unix command `ping(8)' can be used to do this manually (note that `ping(8)''s author denies the widespread folk etymology that the name was ever intended as acronym `Packet INternet Groper'). Occasionally used as a phone greeting. See {ACK}, also {ENQ}. 2. vt. To verify the presence of. 3. vt. To get the attention of. 4. vt. To send a message to all members of a {mailing list} requesting an {ACK} (in order to verify that everybody's addresses are reachable). "We haven't heard much of anything from Geoff, but he did respond with an ACK both times I pinged jargon-friends." 5. n. A quantum packet of happiness. People who are very happy tend to exude pings; furthermore, one can intentionally create pings and aim them at a needy party (e.g., a depressed person). This sense of ping may appear as an exclamation; "Ping!" (I'm happy; I am emitting a quantum of happiness; I have been struck by a quantum of happiness). The form "pingfulness", which is used to describe people who exude pings, also occurs. (In the standard abuse of language, "pingfulness" can also be used as an exclamation, in which case it's a much stronger exclamation than just "ping"!). Oppose {blargh}. The funniest use of `ping' to date was described in January 1991 by Steve Hayman on the Usenet group comp.sys.next. He was trying to isolate a faulty cable segment on a TCP/IP Ethernet hooked up to a NeXT machine, and got tired of having to run back to his console after each cabling tweak to see if the ping packets were getting through. So he used the sound-recording feature on the NeXT, then wrote a script that repeatedly invoked `ping(8)', listened for an echo, and played back the recording on each returned packet. Result? A program that caused the machine to repeat, over and over, "Ping ... ping ... ping ..." as long as the network was up. He turned the volume to maximum, ferreted through the building with one ear cocked, and found a faulty tee connector in no time. :Ping O' Death: n. A notorious {exploit} that (when first discovered) could be easily used to crash a wide variety of machines by overunning size limits in their TCP/IP stacks. First revealed in late 1996. The open-source Unix community patched its systems to remove the vulnerability within days or weeks, the closed-source OS vendors generally took months. While the difference in response times repeated a pattern familiar from other security incidents, the accompanying glare of Web-fueled publicity proved unusually embarrassing to the OS vendors and so passed into history and myth. The term is now used to refer to any nudge delivered by network wizards over the network that causes bad things to happen on the system being nudged. For the full story on the original exploit, see `http://www.insecure.org/sploits/ping-o-death.html'. Compare with 'kamikaze packet,' 'Finger of Death' and 'Chernobyl packet.' :ping storm: n. A form of {DOS attack} consisting of a flood of {ping} requests (normally used to check network conditions) designed to disrupt the normal activity of a system. This act is sometimes called `ping lashing' or `ping flood'. Compare {mail storm}, {broadcast storm}. :pink wire: n. [from the pink PTFE wire used in military equipment] As {blue wire}, but used in military applications. 2. vi. To add a pink wire to a board. :Pink-Shirt Book: "The Peter Norton Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC". The original cover featured a picture of Peter Norton with a silly smirk on his face, wearing a pink shirt. Perhaps in recognition of this usage, the current edition has a different picture of Norton wearing a pink shirt. See also {{book titles}}. :PIP: /pip/ vt.,obs. [Peripheral Interchange Program] To copy; from the program PIP on CP/M, RSX-11, RSTS/E, TOPS-10, and OS/8 (derived from a utility on the PDP-6) that was used for file copying (and in OS/8 and RT-11 for just about every other file operation you might want to do). It is said that when the program was originated, during the development of the PDP-6 in 1963, it was called ATLATL (`Anything, Lord, to Anything, Lord'; this played on the Nahuatl word `atlatl' for a spear-thrower, with connotations of utility and primitivity that were no doubt quite intentional). See also {BLT}, {dd}, {cat}. :pipe: n. Idiomatically, one's connection to the Internet; in context, the expansion "bit pipe" is understood. A "fat pipe" is a line with T1 or higher capacity. A person with a 28.8 modem might be heard to complain "I need a bigger pipe". :pistol: n. [IBM] A tool that makes it all too easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot. "Unix `rm *' makes such a nice pistol!" :pixel sort: n. [Commodore users] Any compression routine which irretrievably loses valuable data in the process of {crunch}ing it. Disparagingly used for `lossy' methods such as JPEG. The theory, of course, is that these methods are only used on photographic images in which minor loss-of-data is not visible to the human eye. The term `pixel sort' implies distrust of this theory. Compare {bogo-sort}. :pizza box: n. [Sun] The largish thin box housing the electronics in (especially Sun) desktop workstations, so named because of its size and shape and the dimpled pattern that looks like air holes. Two meg single-platter removable disk packs used to be called pizzas, and the huge drive they were stuck into was referred to as a pizza oven. It's an index of progress that in the old days just the disk was pizza-sized, while now the entire computer is. :plaid screen: n. [XEROX PARC] A `special effect' that occurs when certain kinds of {memory smash}es overwrite the control blocks or image memory of a bit-mapped display. The term "salt and pepper" may refer to a different pattern of similar origin. Though the term as coined at PARC refers to the result of an error, some of the {X} demos induce plaid-screen effects deliberately as a {display hack}. :plain-ASCII: /playn-as'kee/ Syn. {flat-ASCII}. :plan file: n. [Unix] On systems that support {finger}, the `.plan' file in a user's home directory is displayed when the user is fingered. This feature was originally intended to be used to keep potential fingerers apprised of one's location and near-future plans, but has been turned almost universally to humorous and self-expressive purposes (like a {sig block}). See also {Hacking X for Y}. A recent innovation in plan files has been the introduction of "scrolling plan files" which are one-dimensional animations made using only the printable ASCII character set, carriage return and line feed, avoiding terminal specific escape sequences, since the {finger} command will (for security reasons; see {letterbomb}) not pass the escape character. Scrolling .plan files have become art forms in miniature, and some sites have started competitions to find who can create the longest running, funniest, and most original animations. Various animation characters include: Centipede: mmmmme Lorry/Truck: oo-oP Andalusian Video Snail: _@/ and a compiler (ASP) is available on Usenet for producing them. See also {twirling baton}. :platinum-iridium: adj. Standard, against which all others of the same category are measured. Usage: silly. The notion is that one of whatever it is has actually been cast in platinum-iridium alloy and placed in the vault beside the Standard Kilogram at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris. (From 1889 to 1960, the meter was defined to be the distance between two scratches in a platinum-iridium bar kept in that same vault -- this replaced an earlier definition as 10^(-7) times the distance between the North Pole and the Equator along a meridian through Paris; unfortunately, this had been based on an inexact value of the circumference of the Earth. From 1960 to 1984 it was defined to be 1650763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red line of krypton-86 propagating in a vacuum. It is now defined as the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in the time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second. The kilogram is now the only unit of measure officially defined in terms of a unique artifact.) "This garbage-collection algorithm has been tested against the platinum-iridium cons cell in Paris." Compare {golden}. :playpen: n. [IBM] A room where programmers work. Compare {salt mines}. :playte: /playt/ 16 bits, by analogy with {nybble} and {{byte}}. Usage: rare and extremely silly. See also {dynner} and {crumb}. General discussion of such terms is under {nybble}. :plingnet: /pling'net/ n. Syn. {UUCPNET}. Also see {{Commonwealth Hackish}}, which uses `pling' for {bang} (as in {bang path}). :plokta: /plok't*/ v. [acronym: Press Lots Of Keys To Abort] To press random keys in an attempt to get some response from the system. One might plokta when the abort procedure for a program is not known, or when trying to figure out if the system is just sluggish or really hung. Plokta can also be used while trying to figure out any unknown key sequence for a particular operation. Someone going into `plokta mode' usually places both hands flat on the keyboard and mashes them down, hoping for some useful response. A slightly more directed form of plokta can often be seen in mail messages or Usenet articles from new users -- the text might end with ^X^C q quit :q ^C end x exit ZZ ^D ? help as the user vainly tries to find the right exit sequence, with the incorrect tries piling up at the end of the message.... :plonk: excl.,vt. [Usenet: possibly influenced by British slang `plonk' for cheap booze, or `plonker' for someone behaving stupidly (latter is lit. equivalent to Yiddish `schmuck')] The sound a {newbie} makes as he falls to the bottom of a {kill file}. While it originated in the {newsgroup} talk.bizarre, this term (usually written "*plonk*") is now (1994) widespread on Usenet as a form of public ridicule. :plug-and-pray: adj.,vi. Parody of the techspeak term `plug-and-play', describing a PC peripheral card which is claimed to have no need for hardware configuration via DIP switches, and which should be work as soon as it is inserted in the PC. Unfortunately, even the PCI bus is not up to pulling this off reliably, and people who have to do installation or troubleshoot PCs soon find themselves longing for the DIP switches. :plugh: /ploogh/ v. [from the {ADVENT} game] See {xyzzy}. :plumbing: n. [Unix] Term used for {shell} code, so called because of the prevalence of `pipelines' that feed the output of one program to the input of another. Under Unix, user utilities can often be implemented or at least prototyped by a suitable collection of pipelines and temp-file grinding encapsulated in a shell script; this is much less effort than writing C every time, and the capability is considered one of Unix's major winning features. A few other OSs such as IBM's VM/CMS support similar facilities. Esp. used in the construction `hairy plumbing' (see {hairy}). "You can kluge together a basic spell-checker out of `sort(1)', `comm(1)', and `tr(1)' with a little plumbing." See also {tee}. :PM: /P-M/ 1. v. (from `preventive maintenance') To bring down a machine for inspection or test purposes. See {provocative maintenance}; see also {scratch monkey}. 2. n. Abbrev. for `Presentation Manager', an {elephantine} OS/2 graphical user interface. :pnambic: /p*-nam'bik/ [Acronym from the scene in the film version of "The Wizard of Oz" in which the true nature of the wizard is first discovered: "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."] 1. A stage of development of a process or function that, owing to incomplete implementation or to the complexity of the system, requires human interaction to simulate or replace some or all of the actions, inputs, or outputs of the process or function. 2. Of or pertaining to a process or function whose apparent operations are wholly or partially falsified. 3. Requiring {prestidigitization}. The ultimate pnambic product was "Dan Bricklin's Demo", a program which supported flashy user-interface design prototyping. There is a related maxim among hackers: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo." See {magic}, sense 1, for illumination of this point. :pod: n. [allegedly from abbreviation POD for `Prince Of Darkness'] A Diablo 630 (or, latterly, any letter-quality impact printer). From the DEC-10 PODTYPE program used to feed formatted text to it. Not to be confused with {P.O.D.}. :point-and-drool interface: n. Parody of the techspeak term `point-and-shoot interface', describing a windows, icons, and mouse-based interface such as is found on the Macintosh. The implication, of course, is that such an interface is only suitable for idiots. See {for the rest of us}, {WIMP environment}, {Macintrash}, {drool-proof paper}. Also `point-and-grunt interface'. :pointy-haired: adj. [after the character in the {Dilbert} comic strip] Describes the extreme form of the property that separates {suit}s and {marketroid}s from hackers. Compare {brain-dead}; {demented}. Always applied to people, never to ideas. The plural form is often used as a noun. "The pointy-haireds ordered me to use Windows NT, but I set up a Linux server with Samba instead." :poke: n.,vt. See {peek}. :poll: v.,n. 1. [techspeak] The action of checking the status of an input line, sensor, or memory location to see if a particular external event has been registered. 2. To repeatedly call or check with someone: "I keep polling him, but he's not answering his phone; he must be swapped out." 3. To ask. "Lunch? I poll for a takeout order daily." :polygon pusher: n. A chip designer who spends most of his or her time at the physical layout level (which requires drawing _lots_ of multi-colored polygons). Also `rectangle slinger'. :POM: /P-O-M/ n. Common abbreviation for {phase of the moon}. Usage: usually in the phrase `POM-dependent', which means {flaky}. :pop: /pop/ [from the operation that removes the top of a stack, and the fact that procedure return addresses are usually saved on the stack] (also capitalized `POP') 1. vt. To remove something from a {stack} or {pdl}. If a person says he/she has popped something from his stack, that means he/she has finally finished working on it and can now remove it from the list of things hanging overhead. 2. When a discussion gets to a level of detail so deep that the main point of the discussion is being lost, someone will shout "Pop!", meaning "Get back up to a higher level!" The shout is frequently accompanied by an upthrust arm with a finger pointing to the ceiling. :POPJ: /pop'J/ n.,v. [from a {PDP-10} return-from-subroutine instruction] To return from a digression. By verb doubling, "Popj, popj" means roughly "Now let's see, where were we?" See {RTI}. :poser: n. A {wannabee}; not hacker slang, but used among crackers, phreaks and {warez d00dz}. Not as negative as {lamer} or {leech}. Probably derives from a similar usage among punk-rockers and metalheads, putting down those who "talk the talk but don't walk the walk". :post: v. To send a message to a {mailing list} or {newsgroup}. Distinguished in context from `mail'; one might ask, for example: "Are you going to post the patch or mail it to known users?" :postcardware: n. A kind of {shareware} that borders on {freeware}, in that the author requests only that satisfied users send a postcard of their home town or something. (This practice, silly as it might seem, serves to remind users that they are otherwise getting something for nothing, and may also be psychologically related to real estate `sales' in which $1 changes hands just to keep the transaction from being a gift.) :posting: n. Noun corresp. to v. {post} (but note that {post} can be nouned). Distinguished from a `letter' or ordinary {email} message by the fact that it is broadcast rather than point-to-point. It is not clear whether messages sent to a small mailing list are postings or email; perhaps the best dividing line is that if you don't know the names of all the potential recipients, it is a posting. :postmaster: n. The email contact and maintenance person at a site connected to the Internet or UUCPNET. Often, but not always, the same as the {admin}. The Internet standard for electronic mail ({RFC}-822) requires each machine to have a `postmaster' address; usually it is aliased to this person. :PostScript:: n. A Page Description Language ({PDL}), based on work originally done by John Gaffney at Evans and Sutherland in 1976, evolving through `JaM' (`John and Martin', Martin Newell) at {XEROX PARC}, and finally implemented in its current form by John Warnock et al. after he and Chuck Geschke founded Adobe Systems Incorporated in 1982. PostScript gets its leverage by using a full programming language, rather than a series of low-level escape sequences, to describe an image to be printed on a laser printer or other output device (in this it parallels {EMACS}, which exploited a similar insight about editing tasks). It is also noteworthy for implementing on-the fly rasterization, from Bezier curve descriptions, of high-quality fonts at low (e.g. 300 dpi) resolution (it was formerly believed that hand-tuned bitmap fonts were required for this task). Hackers consider PostScript to be among the most elegant hacks of all time, and the combination of technical merits and widespread availability has made PostScript the language of choice for graphical output. :pound on: vt. Syn. {bang on}. :power cycle: vt. (also, `cycle power' or just `cycle') To power off a machine and then power it on immediately, with the intention of clearing some kind of {hung} or {gronk}ed state. Syn. {120 reset}; see also {Big Red Switch}. Compare {Vulcan nerve pinch}, {bounce} (sense 4), and {boot}, and see the "{AI Koans}" (in Appendix A) about Tom Knight and the novice. :power hit: n. A spike or drop-out in the electricity supplying your machine; a power {glitch}. These can cause crashes and even permanent damage to your machine(s). :PPN: /P-P-N/, /pip'n/ n. obs. [from `Project-Programmer Number'] A user-ID under {{TOPS-10}} and its various mutant progeny at SAIL, BBN, CompuServe, and elsewhere. Old-time hackers from the PDP-10 era sometimes use this to refer to user IDs on other systems as well. :precedence lossage: /pre's*-dens los'*j/ n. [C programmers] Coding error in an expression due to unexpected grouping of arithmetic or logical operators by the compiler. Used esp. of certain common coding errors in C due to the nonintuitively low precedence levels of `&', `|', `^', `<<', and `>>' (for this reason, experienced C programmers deliberately forget the language's {baroque} precedence hierarchy and parenthesize defensively). Can always be avoided by suitable use of parentheses. {LISP} fans enjoy pointing out that this can't happen in _their_ favorite language, which eschews precedence entirely, requiring one to use explicit parentheses everywhere. See {aliasing bug}, {memory leak}, {memory smash}, {smash the stack}, {fandango on core}, {overrun screw}. :prepend: /pree`pend'/ vt. [by analogy with `append'] To prefix. As with `append' (but not `prefix' or `suffix' as a verb), the direct object is always the thing being added and not the original word (or character string, or whatever). "If you prepend a semicolon to the line, the translation routine will pass it through unaltered." :prestidigitization: /pres`t*-di`j*-ti:-zay'sh*n/ n. 1. The act of putting something into digital notation via sleight of hand. 2. Data entry through legerdemain. :pretty pictures: n. [scientific computation] The next step up from {numbers}. Interesting graphical output from a program that may not have any sensible relationship to the system the program is intended to model. Good for showing to {management}. :prettyprint: /prit'ee-print/ v. (alt. `pretty-print') 1. To generate `pretty' human-readable output from a {hairy} internal representation; esp. used for the process of {grind}ing (sense 1) program code, and most esp. for LISP code. 2. To format in some particularly slick and nontrivial way. :pretzel key: n. [Mac users] See {feature key}. :priesthood: n. obs. [TMRC] The select group of system managers responsible for the operation and maintenance of a batch operated computer system. On these computers, a user never had direct access to a computer, but had to submit his/her data and programs to a priest for execution. Results were returned days or even weeks later. See {acolyte}. :prime time: n. [from TV programming] Normal high-usage hours on a system or network. Back in the days of big timesharing machines `prime time' was when lots of people were competing for limited cycles, usually the day shift. Avoidance of prime time was traditionally given as a major reason for {night mode} hacking. The term fell into disuse during the early PC era, but has been revived to refer to times of day or evening at which the Internet tends to be heavily loaded, making Web access slow. The hackish tendency to late-night {hacking run}s has changed not a bit. :print: v. To output, even if to a screen. If a hacker says that a program "printed a message", he means this; if he refers to printing a file, he probably means it in the conventional sense of writing to a hardcopy device (compounds like `print job' and `printout', on the other hand, always refer to the latter). This very common term is likely a holdover from the days when printing terminals were the norm, perpetuated by programming language constructs like {C}'s printf(3). See senses 1 and 2 of {tty}. :printing discussion: n. [XEROX PARC] A protracted, low-level, time-consuming, generally pointless discussion of something only peripherally interesting to all. :priority interrupt: n. [from the hardware term] Describes any stimulus compelling enough to yank one right out of {hack mode}. Classically used to describe being dragged away by an {SO} for immediate sex, but may also refer to more mundane interruptions such as a fire alarm going off in the near vicinity. Also called an {NMI} (non-maskable interrupt), especially in PC-land. :profile: n. 1. A control file for a program, esp. a text file automatically read from each user's home directory and intended to be easily modified by the user in order to customize the program's behavior. Used to avoid {hardcoded} choices (see also {dot file}, {rc file}). 2. [techspeak] A report on the amounts of time spent in each routine of a program, used to find and {tune} away the {hot spot}s in it. This sense is often verbed. Some profiling modes report units other than time (such as call counts) and/or report at granularities other than per-routine, but the idea is similar. 3.[techspeak] A subset of a standard used for a particular purpose. This sense confuses hackers who wander into the weird world of ISO standards no end! :progasm: /proh'gaz-m/ n. [University of Wisconsin] The euphoria experienced upon the completion of a program or other computer-related project. :proglet: /prog'let/ n. [UK] A short extempore program written to meet an immediate, transient need. Often written in BASIC, rarely more than a dozen lines long, and containing no subroutines. The largest amount of code that can be written off the top of one's head, that does not need any editing, and that runs correctly the first time (this amount varies significantly according to one's skill and the language one is using). Compare {toy program}, {noddy}, {one-liner wars}. :program: n. 1. A magic spell cast over a computer allowing it to turn one's input into error messages. 2. An exercise in experimental epistemology. 3. A form of art, ostensibly intended for the instruction of computers, which is nevertheless almost inevitably a failure if other programmers can't understand it. :Programmer's Cheer: "Shift to the left! Shift to the right! Pop up, push down! Byte! Byte! Byte!" A joke so old it has hair on it. :programming: n. 1. The art of debugging a blank sheet of paper (or, in these days of on-line editing, the art of debugging an empty file). "Bloody instructions which, being taught, return to plague their inventor" ("Macbeth", Act 1, Scene 7) 2. A pastime similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward. 3. The most fun you can have with your clothes on (although clothes are not mandatory). :programming fluid: n. 1. Coffee. 2. Cola. 3. Any caffeinacious stimulant. Many hackers consider these essential for those all-night hacking runs. See {wirewater}. :propeller head: n. Used by hackers, this is syn. with {computer geek}. Non-hackers sometimes use it to describe all techies. Prob. derives from SF fandom's tradition (originally invented by old-time fan Ray Faraday Nelson) of propeller beanies as fannish insignia (though nobody actually wears them except as a joke). :propeller key: n. [Mac users] See {feature key}. :proprietary: adj. 1. In {marketroid}-speak, superior; implies a product imbued with exclusive magic by the unmatched brilliance of the company's own hardware or software designers. 2. In the language of hackers and users, inferior; implies a product not conforming to open-systems standards, and thus one that puts the customer at the mercy of a vendor able to gouge freely on service and upgrade charges after the initial sale has locked the customer in. :protocol: n. As used by hackers, this never refers to niceties about the proper form for addressing letters to the Papal Nuncio or the order in which one should use the forks in a Russian-style place setting; hackers don't care about such things. It is used instead to describe any set of rules that allow different machines or pieces of software to coordinate with each other without ambiguity. So, for example, it does include niceties about the proper form for addressing packets on a network or the order in which one should use the forks in the Dining Philosophers Problem. It implies that there is some common message format and an accepted set of primitives or commands that all parties involved understand, and that transactions among them follow predictable logical sequences. See also {handshaking}, {do protocol}. :provocative maintenance: n. [common ironic mutation of `preventive maintenance'] Actions performed upon a machine at regularly scheduled intervals to ensure that the system remains in a usable state. So called because it is all too often performed by a {field servoid} who doesn't know what he is doing; such `maintenance' often _induces_ problems, or otherwise results in the machine's remaining in an _un_usable state for an indeterminate amount of time. See also {scratch monkey}. :prowler: n. [Unix] A {daemon} that is run periodically (typically once a week) to seek out and erase {core} files, truncate administrative logfiles, nuke `lost+found' directories, and otherwise clean up the {cruft} that tends to pile up in the corners of a file system. See also {GFR}, {reaper}, {skulker}. :pseudo: /soo'doh/ n. [Usenet: truncation of `pseudonym'] 1. An electronic-mail or {Usenet} persona adopted by a human for amusement value or as a means of avoiding negative repercussions of one's net.behavior; a `nom de Usenet', often associated with forged postings designed to conceal message origins. Perhaps the best-known and funniest hoax of this type is {B1FF}. See also {tentacle}. 2. Notionally, a {flamage}-generating AI program simulating a Usenet user. Many flamers have been accused of actually being such entities, despite the fact that no AI program of the required sophistication yet exists. However, in 1989 there was a famous series of forged postings that used a phrase-frequency-based travesty generator to simulate the styles of several well-known flamers; it was based on large samples of their back postings (compare {Dissociated Press}). A significant number of people were fooled by the forgeries, and the debate over their authenticity was settled only when the perpetrator came forward to publicly admit the hoax. :pseudoprime: n. A backgammon prime (six consecutive occupied points) with one point missing. This term is an esoteric pun derived from number theory: a number that passes a certain kind of "primality test" may be called a `pseudoprime' (all primes pass any such test, but so do some composite numbers), and any number that passes several is, in some sense, almost certainly prime. The hacker backgammon usage stems from the idea that a pseudoprime is almost as good as a prime: it will do the same job unless you are unlucky. :pseudosuit: /soo'doh-s[y]oot`/ n. A {suit} wannabee; a hacker who has decided that he wants to be in management or administration and begins wearing ties, sport coats, and (shudder!) suits voluntarily. It's his funeral. See also {lobotomy}. :psychedelicware: /si:`k*-del'-ik-weir/ n. [UK] Syn. {display hack}. See also {smoking clover}. :psyton: /si:'ton/ n. [TMRC] The elementary particle carrying the sinister force. The probability of a process losing is proportional to the number of psytons falling on it. Psytons are generated by observers, which is why demos are more likely to fail when lots of people are watching. [This term appears to have been largely superseded by {bogon}; see also {quantum bogodynamics}. --ESR] :pubic directory: /pyoob'ik d*-rek't*-ree/) n. [NYU] (also `pube directory' /pyoob' d*-rek't*-ree/) The `pub' (public) directory on a machine that allows {FTP} access. So called because it is the default location for {SEX} (sense 1). "I'll have the source in the pube directory by Friday." :puff: vt. To decompress data that has been crunched by Huffman coding. At least one widely distributed Huffman decoder program was actually _named_ `PUFF', but these days it is usually packaged with the encoder. Oppose {huff}, see {inflate}. :pumpkin holder: n. See {patch pumpkin}. :pumpking: n. Syn. for {pumpkin holder}; see {patch pumpkin}. :punched card:: n.obs. [techspeak] (alt. `punch card') The signature medium of computing's {Stone Age}, now obsolescent outside of some IBM shops. The punched card actually predated computers considerably, originating in 1801 as a control device for mechanical looms. The version patented by Hollerith and used with mechanical tabulating machines in the 1890 U.S. Census was a piece of cardboard about 90 mm by 215 mm. There is a widespread myth that it was designed to fit in the currency trays used for that era's larger dollar bills, but recent investigations have falsified this. IBM (which originated as a tabulating-machine manufacturer) married the punched card to computers, encoding binary information as patterns of small rectangular holes; one character per column, 80 columns per card. Other coding schemes, sizes of card, and hole shapes were tried at various times. The 80-column width of most character terminals is a legacy of the IBM punched card; so is the size of the quick-reference cards distributed with many varieties of computers even today. See {chad}, {chad box}, {eighty-column mind}, {green card}, {dusty deck}, {lace card}, {card walloper}. :punt: v. [from the punch line of an old joke referring to American football: "Drop back 15 yards and punt!"] 1. To give up, typically without any intention of retrying. "Let's punt the movie tonight." "I was going to hack all night to get this feature in, but I decided to punt" may mean that you've decided not to stay up all night, and may also mean you're not ever even going to put in the feature. 2. More specifically, to give up on figuring out what the {Right Thing} is and resort to an inefficient hack. 3. A design decision to defer solving a problem, typically because one cannot define what is desirable sufficiently well to frame an algorithmic solution. "No way to know what the right form to dump the graph in is -- we'll punt that for now." 4. To hand a tricky implementation problem off to some other section of the design. "It's too hard to get the compiler to do that; let's punt to the runtime system." 5. To knock someone off an Internet or chat connection; a `punter' thus, is a person or program that does this. :Purple Book: n. 1. The "System V Interface Definition". The covers of the first editions were an amazingly nauseating shade of off-lavender. 2. Syn. {Wizard Book}. Donald Lewine's "POSIX Programmer's Guide" (O'Reilly, 1991, ISBN 0-937175-73-0). See also {{book titles}}. :purple wire: n. [IBM] Wire installed by Field Engineers to work around problems discovered during testing or debugging. These are called `purple wires' even when (as is frequently the case) their actual physical color is yellow.... Compare {blue wire}, {yellow wire}, and {red wire}. :push: [from the operation that puts the current information on a stack, and the fact that procedure return addresses are saved on a stack] (Also PUSH /push/ or PUSHJ /push'J/, the latter based on the PDP-10 procedure call instruction.) 1. To put something onto a {stack} or {pdl}. If one says that something has been pushed onto one's stack, it means that the Damoclean list of things hanging over ones's head has grown longer and heavier yet. This may also imply that one will deal with it _before_ other pending items; otherwise one might say that the thing was `added to my queue'. 2. vi. To enter upon a digression, to save the current discussion for later. Antonym of {pop}; see also {stack}, {pdl}. = Q = ===== :quad: n. 1. Two bits; syn. for {quarter}, {crumb}, {tayste}. 2. A four-pack of anything (compare {hex}, sense 2). 3. The rectangle or box glyph used in the APL language for various arcane purposes mostly related to I/O. Former Ivy-Leaguers and Oxford types are said to associate it with nostalgic memories of dear old University. :quadruple bucky: n. obs. 1. On an MIT {space-cadet keyboard}, use of all four of the shifting keys (control, meta, hyper, and super) while typing a character key. 2. On a Stanford or MIT keyboard in {raw mode}, use of four shift keys while typing a fifth character, where the four shift keys are the control and meta keys on _both_ sides of the keyboard. This was very difficult to do! One accepted technique was to press the left-control and left-meta keys with your left hand, the right-control and right-meta keys with your right hand, and the fifth key with your nose. Quadruple-bucky combinations were very seldom used in practice, because when one invented a new command one usually assigned it to some character that was easier to type. If you want to imply that a program has ridiculously many commands or features, you can say something like: "Oh, the command that makes it spin the tapes while whistling Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is quadruple-bucky-cokebottle." See {double bucky}, {bucky bits}, {cokebottle}. :quantifiers:: In techspeak and jargon, the standard metric prefixes used in the SI (Syste`me International) conventions for scientific measurement have dual uses. With units of time or things that come in powers of 10, such as money, they retain their usual meanings of multiplication by powers of 1000 = 10^3. But when used with bytes or other things that naturally come in powers of 2, they usually denote multiplication by powers of 1024 = 2^(10). Here are the SI magnifying prefixes, along with the corresponding binary interpretations in common use: prefix decimal binary kilo- 1000^1 1024^1 = 2^10 = 1,024 mega- 1000^2 1024^2 = 2^20 = 1,048,576 giga- 1000^3 1024^3 = 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 tera- 1000^4 1024^4 = 2^40 = 1,099,511,627,776 peta- 1000^5 1024^5 = 2^50 = 1,125,899,906,842,624 exa- 1000^6 1024^6 = 2^60 = 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 zetta- 1000^7 1024^7 = 2^70 = 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 yotta- 1000^8 1024^8 = 2^80 = 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 Here are the SI fractional prefixes: _prefix decimal jargon usage_ milli- 1000^-1 (seldom used in jargon) micro- 1000^-2 small or human-scale (see {micro-}) nano- 1000^-3 even smaller (see {nano-}) pico- 1000^-4 even smaller yet (see {pico-}) femto- 1000^-5 (not used in jargon---yet) atto- 1000^-6 (not used in jargon---yet) zepto- 1000^-7 (not used in jargon---yet) yocto- 1000^-8 (not used in jargon---yet) The prefixes zetta-, yotta-, zepto-, and yocto- have been included in these tables purely for completeness and giggle value; they were adopted in 1990 by the `19th Conference Generale des Poids et Mesures'. The binary peta- and exa- loadings, though well established, are not in jargon use either -- yet. The prefix milli-, denoting multiplication by 1/1000, has always been rare in jargon (there is, however, a standard joke about the `millihelen' -- notionally, the amount of beauty required to launch one ship). See the entries on {micro-}, {pico-}, and {nano-} for more information on connotative jargon use of these terms. `Femto' and `atto' (which, interestingly, derive not from Greek but from Danish) have not yet acquired jargon loadings, though it is easy to predict what those will be once computing technology enters the required realms of magnitude (however, see {attoparsec}). There are, of course, some standard unit prefixes for powers of 10. In the following table, the `prefix' column is the international standard suffix for the appropriate power of ten; the `binary' column lists jargon abbreviations and words for the corresponding power of 2. The B-suffixed forms are commonly used for byte quantities; the words `meg' and `gig' are nouns that may (but do not always) pluralize with `s'. prefix decimal binary pronunciation kilo- k K, KB, /kay/ mega- M M, MB, meg /meg/ giga- G G, GB, gig /gig/,/jig/ Confusingly, hackers often use K or M as though they were suffix or numeric multipliers rather than a prefix; thus "2K dollars", "2M of disk space". This is also true (though less commonly) of G. Note that the formal SI metric prefix for 1000 is `k'; some use this strictly, reserving `K' for multiplication by 1024 (KB is thus `kilobytes'). K, M, and G used alone refer to quantities of bytes; thus, 64G is 64 gigabytes and `a K' is a kilobyte (compare mainstream use of `a G' as short for `a grand', that is, $1000). Whether one pronounces `gig' with hard or soft `g' depends on what one thinks the proper pronunciation of `giga-' is. Confusing 1000 and 1024 (or other powers of 2 and 10 close in magnitude) -- for example, describing a memory in units of 500K or 524K instead of 512K -- is a sure sign of the {marketroid}. One example of this: it is common to refer to the capacity of 3.5" {microfloppies} as `1.44 MB' In fact, this is a completely {bogus} number. The correct size is 1440 KB, that is, 1440 * 1024 = 1474560 bytes. So the `mega' in `1.44 MB' is compounded of two `kilos', one of which is 1024 and the other of which is 1000. The correct number of megabytes would of course be 1440 / 1024 = 1.40625. Alas, this fine point is probably lost on the world forever. [1993 update: hacker Morgan Burke has proposed, to general approval on Usenet, the following additional prefixes: groucho 10^(-30) harpo 10^(-27) harpi 10^(27) grouchi 10^(30) We observe that this would leave the prefixes zeppo-, gummo-, and chico- available for future expansion. Sadly, there is little immediate prospect that Mr. Burke's eminently sensible proposal will be ratified.] [1999 upate: there is an IEC proposal (ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/pub/doc/ISO/information-units) for binary multipliers, but no evidence that any of its proposals are in live use.] :quantum bogodynamics: /kwon'tm boh`goh-di:-nam'iks/ n. A theory that characterizes the universe in terms of bogon sources (such as politicians, used-car salesmen, TV evangelists, and {suit}s in general), bogon sinks (such as taxpayers and computers), and bogosity potential fields. Bogon absorption, of course, causes human beings to behave mindlessly and machines to fail (and may also cause both to emit secondary bogons); however, the precise mechanics of the bogon-computron interaction are not yet understood and remain to be elucidated. Quantum bogodynamics is most often invoked to explain the sharp increase in hardware and software failures in the presence of suits; the latter emit bogons, which the former absorb. See {bogon}, {computron}, {suit}, {psyton}. :quarter: n. Two bits. This in turn comes from the `pieces of eight' famed in pirate movies -- Spanish silver crowns that could be broken into eight pie-slice-shaped `bits' to make change. Early in American history the Spanish coin was considered equal to a dollar, so each of these `bits' was considered worth 12.5 cents. Syn. {tayste}, {crumb}, {quad}. Usage: rare. General discussion of such terms is under {nybble}. :ques: /kwes/ 1. n. The question mark character (`?', ASCII 0111111). 2. interj. What? Also frequently verb-doubled as "Ques ques?" See {wall}. :quick-and-dirty: adj. Describes a {crock} put together under time or user pressure. Used esp. when you want to convey that you think the fast way might lead to trouble further down the road. "I can have a quick-and-dirty fix in place tonight, but I'll have to rewrite the whole module to solve the underlying design problem." See also {kluge}. :quine: /kwi:n/ n. [from the name of the logician Willard van Orman Quine, via Douglas Hofstadter] A program that generates a copy of its own source text as its complete output. Devising the shortest possible quine in some given programming language is a common hackish amusement. Here is one classic quine: ((lambda (x) (list x (list (quote quote) x))) (quote (lambda (x) (list x (list (quote quote) x))))) This one works in LISP or Scheme. It's relatively easy to write quines in other languages such as Postscript which readily handle programs as data; much harder (and thus more challenging!) in languages like C which do not. Here is a classic C quine for ASCII machines: char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main() {printf(f,34,f,34,10);}%c"; main(){printf(f,34,f,34,10);} For excruciatingly exact quinishness, remove the interior line breaks. Some infamous {Obfuscated C Contest} entries have been quines that reproduced in exotic ways. :quote chapter and verse: v. [by analogy with the mainstream phrase] To cite a relevant excerpt from an appropriate {bible}. "I don't care if `rn' gets it wrong; `Followup-To: poster' is explicitly permitted by {RFC}-1036. I'll quote chapter and verse if you don't believe me." See also {legalese}, {language lawyer}, {RTFS} (sense 2). :quotient: n. See {coefficient of X}. :quux: /kwuhks/ n. [Mythically, from the Latin semi-deponent verb quuxo, quuxare, quuxandum iri; noun form variously `quux' (plural `quuces', anglicized to `quuxes') and `quuxu' (genitive plural is `quuxuum', for four u-letters out of seven in all, using up all the `u' letters in Scrabble).] 1. Originally, a {metasyntactic variable} like {foo} and {foobar}. Invented by Guy Steele for precisely this purpose when he was young and naive and not yet interacting with the real computing community. Many people invent such words; this one seems simply to have been lucky enough to have spread a little. In an eloquent display of poetic justice, it has returned to the originator in the form of a nickname. 2. interj. See {foo}; however, denotes very little disgust, and is uttered mostly for the sake of the sound of it. 3. Guy Steele in his persona as `The Great Quux', which is somewhat infamous for light verse and for the `Crunchly' cartoons. 4. In some circles, used as a punning opposite of `crux'. "Ah, that's the quux of the matter!" implies that the point is _not_ crucial (compare {tip of the ice-cube}). 5. quuxy: adj. Of or pertaining to a quux. :qux: /kwuhks/ The fourth of the standard {metasyntactic variable}, after {baz} and before the quu(u...)x series. See {foo}, {bar}, {baz}, {quux}. This appears to be a recent mutation from {quux}, and many versions (especially older versions) of the standard series just run {foo}, {bar}, {baz}, {quux}, .... :QWERTY: /kwer'tee/ adj. [from the keycaps at the upper left] Pertaining to a standard English-language typewriter keyboard (sometimes called the Sholes keyboard after its inventor), as opposed to Dvorak or foreign-language layouts or a {space-cadet keyboard} or APL keyboard. Historical note: The QWERTY layout is a fine example of a {fossil}. It is sometimes said that it was designed to slow down the typist, but this is wrong; it was designed to allow _faster_ typing -- under a constraint now long obsolete. In early typewriters, fast typing using nearby type-bars jammed the mechanism. So Sholes fiddled the layout to separate the letters of many common digraphs (he did a far from perfect job, though; `th', `tr', `ed', and `er', for example, each use two nearby keys). Also, putting the letters of `typewriter' on one line allowed it to be typed with particular speed and accuracy for {demo}s. The jamming problem was essentially solved soon afterward by a suitable use of springs, but the keyboard layout lives on. = R = ===== :rabbit job: n. [Cambridge] A batch job that does little, if any, real work, but creates one or more copies of itself, breeding like rabbits. Compare {wabbit}, {fork bomb}. :rain dance: n. 1. Any ceremonial action taken to correct a hardware problem, with the expectation that nothing will be accomplished. This especially applies to reseating printed circuit boards, reconnecting cables, etc. "I can't boot up the machine. We'll have to wait for Greg to do his rain dance." 2. Any arcane sequence of actions performed with computers or software in order to achieve some goal; the term is usually restricted to rituals that include both an {incantation} or two and physical activity or motion. Compare {magic}, {voodoo programming}, {black art}, {cargo cult programming}, {wave a dead chicken}; see also {casting the runes}. :rainbow series: n. Any of several series of technical manuals distinguished by cover color. The original rainbow series was the NCSC security manuals (see {Orange Book}, {crayola books}); the term has also been commonly applied to the PostScript reference set (see {Red Book}, {Green Book}, {Blue Book}, {White Book}). Which books are meant by "`the' rainbow series" unqualified is thus dependent on one's local technical culture. :random: adj. 1. Unpredictable (closest to mathematical definition); weird. "The system's been behaving pretty randomly." 2. Assorted; undistinguished. "Who was at the conference?" "Just a bunch of random business types." 3. (pejorative) Frivolous; unproductive; undirected. "He's just a random loser." 4. Incoherent or inelegant; poorly chosen; not well organized. "The program has a random set of misfeatures." "That's a random name for that function." "Well, all the names were chosen pretty randomly." 5. In no particular order, though deterministic. "The I/O channels are in a pool, and when a file is opened one is chosen randomly." 6. Arbitrary. "It generates a random name for the scratch file." 7. Gratuitously wrong, i.e., poorly done and for no good apparent reason. For example, a program that handles file name defaulting in a particularly useless way, or an assembler routine that could easily have been coded using only three registers, but redundantly uses seven for values with non-overlapping lifetimes, so that no one else can invoke it without first saving four extra registers. What {randomness}! 8. n. A random hacker; used particularly of high-school students who soak up computer time and generally get in the way. 9. n. Anyone who is not a hacker (or, sometimes, anyone not known to the hacker speaking); the noun form of sense 2. "I went to the talk, but the audience was full of randoms asking bogus questions". 10. n. (occasional MIT usage) One who lives at Random Hall. See also {J. Random}, {some random X}. 11. [UK] Conversationally, a non sequitur or something similarly out-of-the-blue. As in: "Stop being so random!" This sense equates to `hatstand', taken from the Viz comic character "Roger Irrelevant - He's completely Hatstand." :random numbers:: n. When one wishes to specify a large but random number of things, and the context is inappropriate for {N}, certain numbers are preferred by hacker tradition (that is, easily recognized as placeholders). These include the following: 17 Long described at MIT as `the least random number'; see 23. 23 Sacred number of Eris, Goddess of Discord (along with 17 and 5). 42 The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Note that this answer is completely fortuitous. `:-)') 69 From the sexual act. This one was favored in MIT's ITS culture. 105 69 hex = 105 decimal, and 69 decimal = 105 octal. Also, 105 is 69 in base 42. 666 The Number of the Beast. For further enlightenment, study the "Principia Discordia", "{The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy}", "The Joy of Sex", and the Christian Bible (Revelation 13:18). See also {Discordianism} or consult your pineal gland. See also {for values of}. :randomness: n. 1. An inexplicable misfeature; gratuitous inelegance. 2. A {hack} or {crock} that depends on a complex combination of coincidences (or, possibly, the combination upon which the crock depends for its accidental failure to malfunction). "This hack can output characters 40-57 by putting the character in the four-bit accumulator field of an XCT and then extracting six bits -- the low 2 bits of the XCT opcode are the right thing." "What randomness!" 3. Of people, synonymous with `flakiness'. The connotation is that the person so described is behaving weirdly, incompetently, or inappropriately for reasons which are (a) too tiresome to bother inquiring into, (b) are probably as inscrutable as quantum phenomena anyway, and (c) are likely to pass with time. "Maybe he has a real complaint, or maybe it's just randomness. See if he calls back." Despite the negative connotations jargon uses of this term have, it is worth noting that randomness can actually be a valuable resource, very useful for applications in cryptography and elsewhere. Computers are so thoroughly deterministic that they have a hard time generating high-quality randomess, so hackers have sometimes felt the need to built special-purpose contraptions for this purpose alone. One well-known website offers random bits generated by radioactive decay (http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/). Another derives random bits from images of Lava Lite lamps (http://lavarand.sgi.com/). (Hackers invariably find the latter hilarious. If you have to ask why, you'll never get it.) :rape: vt. 1. To {screw} someone or something, violently; in particular, to destroy a program or information irrecoverably. Often used in describing file-system damage. "So-and-so was running a program that did absolute disk I/O and ended up raping the master directory." 2. To strip a piece of hardware for parts. 3. [CMU/Pitt] To mass-copy files from an anonymous ftp site. "Last night I raped Simtel's dskutl directory." :rare mode: adj. [Unix] CBREAK mode (character-by-character with interrupts enabled). Distinguished from {raw mode} and {cooked mode}; the phrase "a sort of half-cooked (rare?) mode" is used in the V7/BSD manuals to describe the mode. Usage: rare. :raster blaster: n. [Cambridge] Specialized hardware for {bitblt} operations (a {blitter}). Allegedly inspired by `Rasta Blasta', British slang for the sort of portable stereo Americans call a `boom box' or `ghetto blaster'. :raster burn: n. Eyestrain brought on by too many hours of looking at low-res, poorly tuned, or glare-ridden monitors, esp. graphics monitors. See {terminal illness}. :rasterbation: n. [portmanteau: raster + masturbation] The gratuituous use of comuputer generated images and effects in movies and graphic art which would have been better without them. Especially employed as a term of abuse by Photoshop/GIMP users and graphic artists. :rat belt: n. A cable tie, esp. the sawtoothed, self-locking plastic kind that you can remove only by cutting (as opposed to a random twist of wire or a twist tie or one of those humongous metal clip frobs). Small cable ties are `mouse belts'. :rat dance: n. [From the {Dilbert} comic strip of November 14, 1995] A {hacking run} that produces results which, while superficially coherent, have little or nothing to do with its original objectives. There are strong connotations that the coding process and the objectives themselves were pretty {random}. (In the original comic strip, the Ratbert is invited to dance on Dilbert's keyboard in order to produce bugs for him to fix, and authors a Web browser instead.) Compare {Infinite-Monkey Theorem}. This term seems to have become widely recognized quite rapidly after the original strip, a fact which testifies to Dilbert's huge popularity among hackers. All too many find the perverse incentives and Kafkaesque atmosphere of Dilbert's mythical workplace reflective of their own experiences. :rave: vi. [WPI] 1. To persist in discussing a specific subject. 2. To speak authoritatively on a subject about which one knows very little. 3. To complain to a person who is not in a position to correct the difficulty. 4. To purposely annoy another person verbally. 5. To evangelize. See {flame}. 6. Also used to describe a less negative form of blather, such as friendly bullshitting. `Rave' differs slightly from {flame} in that `rave' implies that it is the persistence or obliviousness of the person speaking that is annoying, while {flame} implies somewhat more strongly that the tone or content is offensive as well. :rave on!: imp. Sarcastic invitation to continue a {rave}, often by someone who wishes the raver would get a clue but realizes this is unlikely. :ravs: /ravz/, also `Chinese ravs' n. Jiao-zi (steamed or boiled) or Guo-tie (pan-fried). A Chinese appetizer, known variously in the plural as dumplings, pot stickers (the literal translation of guo-tie), and (around Boston) `Peking Ravioli'. The term `rav' is short for `ravioli', and among hackers always means the Chinese kind rather than the Italian kind. Both consist of a filling in a pasta shell, but the Chinese kind includes no cheese, uses a thinner pasta, has a pork-vegetable filling (good ones include Chinese chives), and is cooked differently, either by steaming or frying. A rav or dumpling can be cooked any way, but a potsticker is always the fried kind (so called because it sticks to the frying pot and has to be scraped off). "Let's get hot-and-sour soup and three orders of ravs." See also {{oriental food}}. :raw mode: n. A mode that allows a program to transfer bits directly to or from an I/O device (or, under {bogus} systems that make a distinction, a disk file) without any processing, abstraction, or interpretation by the operating system. Compare {rare mode}, {cooked mode}. This is techspeak under Unix, jargon elsewhere. :RBL: /R-B-L/ Abbreviation: "Realtime Blackhole List". A service that allows people to blacklist sites for emitting {spam}, and makes the blacklist available in real time to electronic-mail transport programs that know how to use RBL so they can filter out mail from those sites. Drastic but effective. There is an RBL home page (http://maps.vix.com/rbl/usage.html). :rc file: /R-C fi:l/ n. [Unix: from `runcom files' on the {CTSS} system ca.1955, via the startup script `/etc/rc'] Script file containing startup instructions for an application program (or an entire operating system), usually a text file containing commands of the sort that might have been invoked manually once the system was running but are to be executed automatically each time the system starts up. See also {dot file}, {profile} (sense 1). :RE: /R-E/ n. Common spoken and written shorthand for {regexp}. :read-only user: n. Describes a {luser} who uses computers almost exclusively for reading Usenet, bulletin boards, and/or email, rather than writing code or purveying useful information. See {twink}, {terminal junkie}, {lurker}. :README file: n. Hacker's-eye introduction traditionally included in the top-level directory of a Unix source distribution, containing a pointer to more detailed documentation, credits, miscellaneous revision history, notes, etc. (The file may be named README, or READ.ME, or rarely ReadMe or readme.txt or some other variant.) In the Mac and PC worlds, software is not usually distributed in source form, and the README is more likely to contain user-oriented material like last-minute documentation changes, error workarounds, and restrictions. When asked, hackers invariably relate the README convention to the famous scene in Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures In Wonderland" in which Alice confronts magic munchies labeled "Eat Me" and "Drink Me". :real: adj. Not simulated. Often used as a specific antonym to {virtual} in any of its jargon senses. :real estate: n. May be used for any critical resource measured in units of area. Most frequently used of `chip real estate', the area available for logic on the surface of an integrated circuit (see also {nanoacre}). May also be used of floor space in a {dinosaur pen}, or even space on a crowded desktop (whether physical or electronic). :real hack: n. A {crock}. This is sometimes used affectionately; see {hack}. :real operating system: n. The sort the speaker is used to. People from the BSDophilic academic community are likely to issue comments like "System V? Why don't you use a _real_ operating system?", people from the commercial/industrial Unix sector are known to complain "BSD? Why don't you use a _real_ operating system?", and people from IBM object "Unix? Why don't you use a _real_ operating system?" Only {MS-DOS} is universally considered unreal. See {holy wars}, {religious issues}, {proprietary}, {Get a real computer!} :Real Programmer: n. [indirectly, from the book "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche"] A particular sub-variety of hacker: one possessed of a flippant attitude toward complexity that is arrogant even when justified by experience. The archetypal `Real Programmer' likes to program on the {bare metal} and is very good at same, remembers the binary opcodes for every machine he has ever programmed, thinks that HLLs are sissy, and uses a debugger to edit his code because full-screen editors are for wimps. Real Programmers aren't satisfied with code that hasn't been {bum}med into a state of {tense}ness just short of rupture. Real Programmers never use comments or write documentation: "If it was hard to write", says the Real Programmer, "it should be hard to understand." Real Programmers can make machines do things that were never in their spec sheets; in fact, they are seldom really happy unless doing so. A Real Programmer's code can awe with its fiendish brilliance, even as its crockishness appalls. Real Programmers live on junk food and coffee, hang line-printer art on their walls, and terrify the crap out of other programmers -- because someday, somebody else might have to try to understand their code in order to change it. Their successors generally consider it a {Good Thing} that there aren't many Real Programmers around any more. For a famous (and somewhat more positive) portrait of a Real Programmer, see "{The Story of Mel}" in Appendix A. The term itself was popularized by a 1983 Datamation article "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" by Ed Post, still circulating on Usenet and Internet in on-line form. You can browse "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" from the Datamation home page `http://www.datamation.com'. :Real Soon Now: adv. [orig. from SF's fanzine community, popularized by Jerry Pournelle's column in "BYTE"] 1. Supposed to be available (or fixed, or cheap, or whatever) real soon now according to somebody, but the speaker is quite skeptical. 2. When one's gods, fates, or other time commitments permit one to get to it (in other words, don't hold your breath). Often abbreviated RSN. Compare {copious free time}. :real time: 1. [techspeak] adj. Describes an application which requires a program to respond to stimuli within some small upper limit of response time (typically milli- or microseconds). Process control at a chemical plant is the classic example. Such applications often require special operating systems (because everything else must take a back seat to response time) and speed-tuned hardware. 2. adv. In jargon, refers to doing something while people are watching or waiting. "I asked her how to find the calling procedure's program counter on the stack and she came up with an algorithm in real time." :real user: n. 1. A commercial user. One who is paying _real_ money for his computer usage. 2. A non-hacker. Someone using the system for an explicit purpose (a research project, a course, etc.) other than pure exploration. See {user}. Hackers who are also students may also be real users. "I need this fixed so I can do a problem set. I'm not complaining out of randomness, but as a real user." See also {luser}. :Real World: n. 1. Those institutions at which `programming' may be used in the same sentence as `FORTRAN', `{COBOL}', `RPG', `{IBM}', `DBASE', etc. Places where programs do such commercially necessary but intellectually uninspiring things as generating payroll checks and invoices. 2. The location of non-programmers and activities not related to programming. 3. A bizarre dimension in which the standard dress is shirt and tie and in which a person's working hours are defined as 9 to 5 (see {code grinder}). 4. Anywhere outside a university. "Poor fellow, he's left MIT and gone into the Real World." Used pejoratively by those not in residence there. In conversation, talking of someone who has entered the Real World is not unlike speaking of a deceased person. It is also noteworthy that on the campus of Cambridge University in England, there is a gaily-painted lamp-post which bears the label `REALITY CHECKPOINT'. It marks the boundary between university and the Real World; check your notions of reality before passing. This joke is funnier because the Cambridge `campus' is actually coextensive with the center of Cambridge town. See also {fear and loathing}, {mundane}, and {uninteresting}. :reality check: n. 1. The simplest kind of test of software or hardware; doing the equivalent of asking it what 2 + 2 is and seeing if you get 4. The software equivalent of a {smoke test}. 2. The act of letting a {real user} try out prototype software. Compare {sanity check}. :reality-distortion field: n. An expression used to describe the persuasive ability of managers like Steve Jobs (the term originated at Apple in the 1980s to describe his peculiar charisma). Those close to these managers become passionately committed to possibly insane projects, without regard to the practicality of their implementation or competitive forces in the marketpace. :reaper: n. A {prowler} that {GFR}s files. A file removed in this way is said to have been `reaped'. :rectangle slinger: n. See {polygon pusher}. :recursion: n. See {recursion}. See also {tail recursion}. :recursive acronym:: n. A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose acronyms/abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other acronyms/abbreviations. The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE ("EINE Is Not EMACS") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE Initially"). More recently, there is a Scheme compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and {GNU} (q.v., sense 1) stands for "GNU's Not Unix!" -- and a company with the name Cygnus, which expands to "Cygnus, Your GNU Support" (though Cygnus people say this is a {backronym}). See also {mung}, {EMACS}. :Red Book: n. 1. Informal name for one of the three standard references on {{PostScript}} ("PostScript Language Reference Manual", Adobe Systems (Addison-Wesley, 1985; QA76.73.P67P67; ISBN 0-201-10174-2, or the 1990 second edition ISBN 0-201-18127-4); the others are known as the {Green Book}, the {Blue Book}, and the {White Book} (sense 2). 2. Informal name for one of the 3 standard references on Smalltalk ("Smalltalk-80: The Interactive Programming Environment" by Adele Goldberg (Addison-Wesley, 1984; QA76.8.S635G638; ISBN 0-201-11372-4); this too is associated with blue and green books). 3. Any of the 1984 standards issued by the CCITT eighth plenary assembly. These include, among other things, the X.400 email spec and the Group 1 through 4 fax standards. 4. The new version of the {Green Book} (sense 4) -- IEEE 1003.1-1990, a.k.a ISO 9945-1 -- is (because of the color and the fact that it is printed on A4 paper) known in the USA as "the Ugly Red Book That Won't Fit On The Shelf" and in Europe as "the Ugly Red Book That's A Sensible Size". 5. The NSA "Trusted Network Interpretation" companion to the {Orange Book}. See also {{book titles}}. :red wire: n. [IBM] Patch wires installed by programmers who have no business mucking with the hardware. It is said that the only thing more dangerous than a hardware guy with a code patch is a {softy} with a soldering iron.... Compare {blue wire}, {yellow wire}, {purple wire}. :regexp: /reg'eksp/ n. [Unix] (alt. `regex' or `reg-ex') 1. Common written and spoken abbreviation for `regular expression', one of the wildcard patterns used, e.g., by Unix utilities such as `grep(1)', `sed(1)', and `awk(1)'. These use conventions similar to but more elaborate than those described under {glob}. For purposes of this lexicon, it is sufficient to note that regexps also allow complemented character sets using `^'; thus, one can specify `any non-alphabetic character' with `[^A-Za-z]'. 2. Name of a well-known PD regexp-handling package in portable C, written by revered Usenetter Henry Spencer <>. :register dancing: n. Many older processor architectures suffer from a serious shortage of general-purpose registers. This is especially a problem for compiler-writers, because their generated code needs places to store temporaries for things like intermediate values in expression evaluation. Some designs with this problem, like the Intel 80x86, do have a handful of special-purpose registers that can be pressed into service, providing suitable care is taken to avoid unpleasant side effects on the state of the processor: while the special-purpose register is being used to hold an intermediate value, a delicate minuet is required in which the previous value of the register is saved and then restored just before the official function (and value) of the special-purpose register is again needed. :rehi: [IRC] "Hello again." Very commonly used to greet people upon returning to an IRC channel after {channel hopping}. :reincarnation, cycle of: n. See {cycle of reincarnation}. :reinvent the wheel: v. To design or implement a tool equivalent to an existing one or part of one, with the implication that doing so is silly or a waste of time. This is often a valid criticism. On the other hand, automobiles don't use wooden rollers, and some kinds of wheel have to be reinvented many times before you get them right. On the third hand, people reinventing the wheel do tend to come up with the moral equivalent of a trapezoid with an offset axle. :relay rape: n. The hijacking of a third party's unsecured mail server to deliver {spam}. :religion of CHI: /ki:/ n. [Case Western Reserve University] Yet another hackish parody religion (see also {Church of the SubGenius}, {Discordianism}). In the mid-70s, the canonical "Introduction to Programming" courses at CWRU were taught in Algol, and student exercises were punched on cards and run on a Univac 1108 system using a homebrew operating system named CHI. The religion had no doctrines and but one ritual: whenever the worshipper noted that a digital clock read 11:08, he or she would recite the phrase "It is 11:08; ABS, ALPHABETIC, ARCSIN, ARCCOS, ARCTAN." The last five words were the first five functions in the appropriate chapter of the Algol manual; note the special pronunciations /obz/ and /ark'sin/ rather than the more common /ahbz/ and /ark'si:n/. Using an alarm clock to warn of 11:08's arrival was {considered harmful}. :religious issues: n. Questions which seemingly cannot be raised without touching off {holy wars}, such as "What is the best operating system (or editor, language, architecture, shell, mail reader, news reader)?", "What about that Heinlein guy, eh?", "What should we add to the new Jargon File?" See {holy wars}; see also {theology}, {bigot}. This term is a prime example of {ha ha only serious}. People actually develop the most amazing and religiously intense attachments to their tools, even when the tools are intangible. The most constructive thing one can do when one stumbles into the crossfire is mumble {Get a life!} and leave -- unless, of course, one's _own_ unassailably rational and obviously correct choices are being slammed. :replicator: n. Any construct that acts to produce copies of itself; this could be a living organism, an idea (see {meme}), a program (see {quine}, {worm}, {wabbit}, {fork bomb}, and {virus}), a pattern in a cellular automaton (see {life}, sense 1), or (speculatively) a robot or {nanobot}. It is even claimed by some that {{Unix}} and {C} are the symbiotic halves of an extremely successful replicator; see {Unix conspiracy}. :reply: n. See {followup}. :restriction: n. A {bug} or design error that limits a program's capabilities, and which is sufficiently egregious that nobody can quite work up enough nerve to describe it as a {feature}. Often used (esp. by {marketroid} types) to make it sound as though some crippling bogosity had been intended by the designers all along, or was forced upon them by arcane technical constraints of a nature no mere user could possibly comprehend (these claims are almost invariably false). Old-time hacker Joseph M. Newcomer advises that whenever choosing a quantifiable but arbitrary restriction, you should make it either a power of 2 or a power of 2 minus 1. If you impose a limit of 107 items in a list, everyone will know it is a random number -- on the other hand, a limit of 15 or 16 suggests some deep reason (involving 0- or 1-based indexing in binary) and you will get less {flamage} for it. Limits which are round numbers in base 10 are always especially suspect. :retcon: /ret'kon/ [short for `retroactive continuity', from the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.comics] 1. n. The common situation in pulp fiction (esp. comics or soap operas) where a new story `reveals' things about events in previous stories, usually leaving the `facts' the same (thus preserving continuity) while completely changing their interpretation. For example, revealing that a whole season of "Dallas" was a dream was a retcon. 2. vt. To write such a story about a character or fictitious object. "Byrne has retconned Superman's cape so that it is no longer unbreakable." "Marvelman's old adventures were retconned into synthetic dreams." "Swamp Thing was retconned from a transformed person into a sentient vegetable." "Darth Vader was retconned into Luke Skywalker's father in "The Empire Strikes Back". [This term is included because it is a good example of hackish linguistic innovation in a field completely unrelated to computers. The word `retcon' will probably spread through comics fandom and lose its association with hackerdom within a couple of years; for the record, it started here. --ESR] [1993 update: some comics fans on the net now claim that retcon was independently in use in comics fandom before rec.arts.comics. In lexicography, nothing is ever simple. --ESR] :RETI: v. Syn. {RTI} :retrocomputing: /ret'-roh-k*m-pyoo'ting/ n. Refers to emulations of way-behind-the-state-of-the-art hardware or software, or implementations of never-was-state-of-the-art; esp. if such implementations are elaborate practical jokes and/or parodies, written mostly for {hack value}, of more `serious' designs. Perhaps the most widely distributed retrocomputing utility was the `pnch(6)' or `bcd(6)' program on V7 and other early Unix versions, which would accept up to 80 characters of text argument and display the corresponding pattern in {{punched card}} code. Other well-known retrocomputing hacks have included the programming language {INTERCAL}, a {JCL}-emulating shell for Unix, the card-punch-emulating editor named 029, and various elaborate PDP-11 hardware emulators and RT-11 OS emulators written just to keep an old, sourceless {Zork} binary running. A tasty selection of retrocomputing programs are made available at the Retrocomputing Museum, `http://www.ccil.org/retro'. :return from the dead: v. To regain access to the net after a long absence. Compare {person of no account}. :RFC: /R-F-C/ n. [Request For Comment] One of a long-established series of numbered Internet informational documents and standards widely followed by commercial software and freeware in the Internet and Unix communities. Perhaps the single most influential one has been RFC-822 (the Internet mail-format standard). The RFCs are unusual in that they are floated by technical experts acting on their own initiative and reviewed by the Internet at large, rather than formally promulgated through an institution such as ANSI. For this reason, they remain known as RFCs even once adopted as standards. The RFC tradition of pragmatic, experience-driven, after-the-fact standard writing done by individuals or small working groups has important advantages over the more formal, committee-driven process typical of ANSI or ISO. Emblematic of some of these advantages is the existence of a flourishing tradition of `joke' RFCs; usually at least one a year is published, usually on April 1st. Well-known joke RFCs have included 527 ("ARPAWOCKY", R. Merryman, UCSD; 22 June 1973), 748 ("Telnet Randomly-Lose Option", Mark R. Crispin; 1 April 1978), and 1149 ("A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers", D. Waitzman, BBN STC; 1 April 1990). The first was a Lewis Carroll pastiche; the second a parody of the TCP-IP documentation style, and the third a deadpan skewering of standards-document legalese, describing protocols for transmitting Internet data packets by carrier pigeon. The RFCs are most remarkable for how well they work -- they manage to have neither the ambiguities that are usually rife in informal specifications, nor the committee-perpetrated misfeatures that often haunt formal standards, and they define a network that has grown to truly worldwide proportions. :RFE: /R-F-E/ n. 1. [techspeak] Request For Enhancement (compare {RFC}). 2. [from `Radio Free Europe', Bellcore and Sun] Radio Free Ethernet, a system (originated by Peter Langston) for broadcasting audio among Sun SPARCstations over the ethernet. :rib site: n. [by analogy with {backbone site}] A machine that has an on-demand high-speed link to a {backbone site} and serves as a regional distribution point for lots of third-party traffic in email and Usenet news. Compare {leaf site}, {backbone site}. :rice box: n. [from ham radio slang] Any Asian-made commodity computer, esp. an 80x86-based machine built to IBM PC-compatible ISA or EISA-bus standards. :Right Thing: n. That which is _compellingly_ the correct or appropriate thing to use, do, say, etc. Often capitalized, always emphasized in speech as though capitalized. Use of this term often implies that in fact reasonable people may disagree. "What's the right thing for LISP to do when it sees `(mod a 0)'? Should it return `a', or give a divide-by-0 error?" Oppose {Wrong Thing}. :ripoff: n. Synonym for {chad}, sense 1. :RL: // n. [MUD community] Real Life. "Firiss laughs in RL" means that Firiss's player is laughing. Oppose {VR}. :roach: vt. [Bell Labs] To destroy, esp. of a data structure. Hardware gets {toast}ed or {fried}, software gets roached. :robocanceller: /roh-boh-kan'sel-*r/ A program that monitors USENET feeds, attempting to detect and elimnate {spam} by sending appropriate cancel messages . Robocancellers may use the {Breidbart Index} as a trigger. Programming them is not a game for amateurs; see {ARMM}. See also {Dave the Resurrector}. :robot: n. See {bot}. :robust: adj. Said of a system that has demonstrated an ability to recover gracefully from the whole range of exceptional inputs and situations in a given environment. One step below {bulletproof}. Carries the additional connotation of elegance in addition to just careful attention to detail. Compare {smart}, oppose {brittle}. :rococo: adj. Terminally {baroque}. Used to imply that a program has become so encrusted with the software equivalent of gold leaf and curlicues that they have completely swamped the underlying design. Called after the later and more extreme forms of Baroque architecture and decoration prevalent during the mid-1700s in Europe. Alan Perlis said: "Every program eventually becomes rococo, and then rubble." Compare {critical mass}. :rogue: 1. [Unix] n. A Dungeons-and-Dragons-like game using character graphics, written under BSD Unix and subsequently ported to other Unix systems. The original BSD `curses(3)' screen-handling package was hacked together by Ken Arnold to support `rogue(6)' and has since become one of Unix's most important and heavily used application libraries. Nethack, Omega, Larn, Angband, and an entire subgenre of computer dungeon games all took off from the inspiration provided by `rogue(6)'; the popular Windows game Diablo, though graphics-intensive, has very similar play logic. See also {nethack}. 2. [USENET] adj. An {ISP} which permits net abuse (usually in the form of {spam}ming) by its customers, or which itself engages in such activities. Rogue ISPs are sometimes subject to {IDP}s or {UDP}s. Sometimes deliberately mispelled as "rouge". :room-temperature IQ: quant. [IBM] 80 or below (nominal room temperature is 72 degrees Fahrenheit, 22 degrees Celsius). Used in describing the expected intelligence range of the {luser}. "Well, but how's this interface going to play with the room-temperature IQ crowd?" See {drool-proof paper}. This is a much more insulting phrase in countries that use Celsius thermometers. :root: n. [Unix] 1. The {superuser} account (with user name `root') that ignores permission bits, user number 0 on a Unix system. The term {avatar} is also used. 2. The top node of the system directory structure; historically the home directory of the root user, but probably named after the root of an (inverted) tree. 3. By extension, the privileged system-maintenance login on any OS. See {root mode}, {go root}, see also {wheel}. :root mode: n. Syn. with {wizard mode} or `wheel mode'. Like these, it is often generalized to describe privileged states in systems other than OSes. :rot13: /rot ther'teen/ n.,v. [Usenet: from `rotate alphabet 13 places'] The simple Caesar-cypher encryption that replaces each English letter with the one 13 places forward or back along the alphabet, so that "The butler did it!" becomes "Gur ohgyre qvq vg!" Most Usenet news reading and posting programs include a rot13 feature. It is used to enclose the text in a sealed wrapper that the reader must choose to open -- e.g., for posting things that might offend some readers, or {spoiler}s. A major advantage of rot13 over rot(N) for other N is that it is self-inverse, so the same code can be used for encoding and decoding. :rotary debugger: n. [Commodore] Essential equipment for those late-night or early-morning debugging sessions. Mainly used as sustenance for the hacker. Comes in many decorator colors, such as Sausage, Pepperoni, and Garbage. See {ANSI standard pizza}. :round tape: n. Industry-standard 1/2-inch magnetic tape (7- or 9-track) on traditional circular reels. See {macrotape}, oppose {square tape}. :RSN: /R-S-N/ adj. See {Real Soon Now}. :RTBM: /R-T-B-M/ imp. [Unix] Commonwealth Hackish variant of {RTFM}; expands to `Read The Bloody Manual'. RTBM is often the entire text of the first reply to a question from a {newbie}; the _second_ would escalate to "RTFM". :RTFAQ: /R-T-F-A-Q/ imp. [Usenet: primarily written, by analogy with {RTFM}] Abbrev. for `Read the FAQ!', an exhortation that the person addressed ought to read the newsgroup's {FAQ list} before posting questions. :RTFB: /R-T-F-B/ imp. [Unix] Abbreviation for `Read The Fucking Binary'. Used when neither documentation nor source for the problem at hand exists, and the only thing to do is use some debugger or monitor and directly analyze the assembler or even the machine code. "No source for the buggy port driver? Aaargh! I _hate_ proprietary operating systems. Time to RTFB." Of the various RTF? forms, `RTFB' is the least pejorative against anyone asking a question for which RTFB is the answer; the anger here is directed at the absence of both source _and_ adequate documentation. :RTFM: /R-T-F-M/ imp. [Unix] Abbreviation for `Read The Fucking Manual'. 1. Used by {guru}s to brush off questions they consider trivial or annoying. Compare {Don't do that then!}. 2. Used when reporting a problem to indicate that you aren't just asking out of {randomness}. "No, I can't figure out how to interface Unix to my toaster, and yes, I have RTFM." Unlike sense 1, this use is considered polite. See also {FM}, {RTFAQ}, {RTFB}, {RTFS}, {STFW}, {RTM}, all of which mutated from RTFM, and compare {UTSL}. :RTFS: /R-T-F-S/ [Unix] 1. imp. Abbreviation for `Read The Fucking Source'. Variant form of {RTFM}, used when the problem at hand is not necessarily obvious and not answerable from the manuals -- or the manuals are not yet written and maybe never will be. For even trickier situations, see {RTFB}. Unlike RTFM, the anger inherent in RTFS is not usually directed at the person asking the question, but rather at the people who failed to provide adequate documentation. 2. imp. `Read The Fucking Standard'; this oath can only be used when the problem area (e.g., a language or operating system interface) has actually been codified in a ratified standards document. The existence of these standards documents (and the technically inappropriate but politically mandated compromises that they inevitably contain, and the impenetrable {legalese} in which they are invariably written, and the unbelievably tedious bureaucratic process by which they are produced) can be unnerving to hackers, who are used to a certain amount of ambiguity in the specifications of the systems they use. (Hackers feel that such ambiguities are acceptable as long as the {Right Thing} to do is obvious to any thinking observer; sadly, this casual attitude towards specifications becomes unworkable when a system becomes popular in the {Real World}.) Since a hacker is likely to feel that a standards document is both unnecessary and technically deficient, the deprecation inherent in this term may be directed as much against the standard as against the person who ought to read it. :RTI: /R-T-I/ interj. The mnemonic for the `return from interrupt' instruction on many computers including the 6502 and 6800. The variant `RETI' is found among former Z80 hackers (almost nobody programs these things in assembler anymore). Equivalent to "Now, where was I?" or used to end a conversational digression. See {pop}; see also {POPJ}. :RTM: /R-T-M/ [Usenet: abbreviation for `Read The Manual'] 1. Politer variant of {RTFM}. 2. Robert Tappan Morris, perpetrator of the great Internet worm of 1988 (see {Great Worm}); villain to many, naive hacker gone wrong to a few. Morris claimed that the worm that brought the Internet to its knees was a benign experiment that got out of control as the result of a coding error. After the storm of negative publicity that followed this blunder, Morris's username on ITS was hacked from RTM to {RTFM}. :RTS: /R-T-S/ imp. Abbreviation for `Read The Screen'. Mainly used by hackers in the microcomputer world. Refers to what one would like to tell the {suit} one is forced to explain an extremely simple application to. Particularly appropriate when the suit failed to notice the `Press any key to continue' prompt, and wishes to know `why won't it do anything'. Also seen as `RTFS' in especially deserving cases. :rude: [WPI] adj. 1. (of a program) Badly written. 2. Functionally poor, e.g., a program that is very difficult to use because of gratuitously poor (random?) design decisions. Oppose {cuspy}. 3. Anything that manipulates a shared resource without regard for its other users in such a way as to cause a (non-fatal) problem. Examples: programs that change tty modes without resetting them on exit, or windowing programs that keep forcing themselves to the top of the window stack. Compare {all-elbows}. :runes: pl.n. 1. Anything that requires {heavy wizardry} or {black art} to {parse}: core dumps, JCL commands, APL, or code in a language you haven't a clue how to read. Not quite as bad as {line noise}, but close. Compare {casting the runes}, {Great Runes}. 2. Special display characters (for example, the high-half graphics on an IBM PC). 3. [borderline techspeak] 16-bit characters from the Unicode multilingual character set. :runic: adj. Syn. {obscure}. VMS fans sometimes refer to Unix as `Runix'; Unix fans return the compliment by expanding VMS to `Very Messy Syntax' or `Vachement Mauvais Syste`me' (French idiom, "Hugely Bad System"). :rusty iron: n. Syn. {tired iron}. It has been claimed that this is the inevitable fate of {water MIPS}. :rusty memory: n. Mass-storage that uses iron-oxide-based magnetic media (esp. tape and the pre-Winchester removable disk packs used in {washing machine}s). Compare {donuts}. :rusty wire: n. [Amateur Packet Radio] Any very noisy network medium, in which the packets are subject to frequent corruption. Most prevalent in reference to wireless links subject to all the vagaries of RF noise and marginal propagation conditions. "Yes, but how good is your whizbang new protocol on really rusty wire?". = S = ===== :S/N ratio: // n. (also `s/n ratio', `s:n ratio'). Syn. {signal-to-noise ratio}. Often abbreviated `SNR'. :sacred: adj. Reserved for the exclusive use of something (an extension of the standard meaning). Often means that anyone may look at the sacred object, but clobbering it will screw whatever it is sacred to. The comment "Register 7 is sacred to the interrupt handler" appearing in a program would be interpreted by a hacker to mean that if any _other_ part of the program changes the contents of register 7, dire consequences are likely to ensue. :saga: n. [WPI] A cuspy but bogus raving story about N random broken people. Here is a classic example of the saga form, as told by Guy L. Steele: Jon L. White (login name JONL) and I (GLS) were office mates at MIT for many years. One April, we both flew from Boston to California for a week on research business, to consult face-to-face with some people at Stanford, particularly our mutual friend Richard P. Gabriel (RPG; see {gabriel}). RPG picked us up at the San Francisco airport and drove us back to Palo Alto (going {logical} south on route 101, parallel to {El Camino Bignum}). Palo Alto is adjacent to Stanford University and about 40 miles south of San Francisco. We ate at The Good Earth, a `health food' restaurant, very popular, the sort whose milkshakes all contain honey and protein powder. JONL ordered such a shake -- the waitress claimed the flavor of the day was "lalaberry". I still have no idea what that might be, but it became a running joke. It was the color of raspberry, and JONL said it tasted rather bitter. I ate a better tostada there than I have ever had in a Mexican restaurant. After this we went to the local Uncle Gaylord's Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor. They make ice cream fresh daily, in a variety of intriguing flavors. It's a chain, and they have a slogan: "If you don't live near an Uncle Gaylord's -- MOVE!" Also, Uncle Gaylord (a real person) wages a constant battle to force big-name ice cream makers to print their ingredients on the package (like air and plastic and other non-natural garbage). JONL and I had first discovered Uncle Gaylord's the previous August, when we had flown to a computer-science conference in Berkeley, California, the first time either of us had been on the West Coast. When not in the conference sessions, we had spent our time wandering the length of Telegraph Avenue, which (like Harvard Square in Cambridge) was lined with picturesque street vendors and interesting little shops. On that street we discovered Uncle Gaylord's Berkeley store. The ice cream there was very good. During that August visit JONL went absolutely bananas (so to speak) over one particular flavor, ginger honey. Therefore, after eating at The Good Earth -- indeed, after every lunch and dinner and before bed during our April visit -- a trip to Uncle Gaylord's (the one in Palo Alto) was mandatory. We had arrived on a Wednesday, and by Thursday evening we had been there at least four times. Each time, JONL would get ginger honey ice cream, and proclaim to all bystanders that "Ginger was the spice that drove the Europeans mad! That's why they sought a route to the East! They used it to preserve their otherwise off-taste meat." After the third or fourth repetition RPG and I were getting a little tired of this spiel, and began to paraphrase him: "Wow! Ginger! The spice that makes rotten meat taste good!" "Say! Why don't we find some dog that's been run over and sat in the sun for a week and put some _ginger_ on it for dinner?!" "Right! With a lalaberry shake!" And so on. This failed to faze JONL; he took it in good humor, as long as we kept returning to Uncle Gaylord's. He loves ginger honey ice cream. Now RPG and his then-wife KBT (Kathy Tracy) were putting us up (putting up with us?) in their home for our visit, so to thank them JONL and I took them out to a nice French restaurant of their choosing. I unadventurously chose the filet mignon, and KBT had je ne sais quoi du jour, but RPG and JONL had lapin (rabbit). (Waitress: "Oui, we have fresh rabbit, fresh today." RPG: "Well, JONL, I guess we won't need any _ginger_!") We finished the meal late, about 11 P.M., which is 2 A.M Boston time, so JONL and I were rather droopy. But it wasn't yet midnight. Off to Uncle Gaylord's! Now the French restaurant was in Redwood City, north of Palo Alto. In leaving Redwood City, we somehow got onto route 101 going north instead of south. JONL and I wouldn't have known the difference had RPG not mentioned it. We still knew very little of the local geography. I did figure out, however, that we were headed in the direction of Berkeley, and half-jokingly suggested that we continue north and go to Uncle Gaylord's in Berkeley. RPG said "Fine!" and we drove on for a while and talked. I was drowsy, and JONL actually dropped off to sleep for 5 minutes. When he awoke, RPG said, "Gee, JONL, you must have slept all the way over the bridge!", referring to the one spanning San Francisco Bay. Just then we came to a sign that said "University Avenue". I mumbled something about working our way over to Telegraph Avenue; RPG said "Right!" and maneuvered some more. Eventually we pulled up in front of an Uncle Gaylord's. Now, I hadn't really been paying attention because I was so sleepy, and I didn't really understand what was happening until RPG let me in on it a few moments later, but I was just alert enough to notice that we had somehow come to the Palo Alto Uncle Gaylord's after all. JONL noticed the resemblance to the Palo Alto store, but hadn't caught on. (The place is lit with red and yellow lights at night, and looks much different from the way it does in daylight.) He said, "This isn't the Uncle Gaylord's I went to in Berkeley! It looked like a barn! But this place looks _just like_ the one back in Palo Alto!" RPG deadpanned, "Well, this is the one _I_ always come to when I'm in Berkeley. They've got two in San Francisco, too. Remember, they're a chain." JONL accepted this bit of wisdom. And he was not totally ignorant -- he knew perfectly well that University Avenue was in Berkeley, not far from Telegraph Avenue. What he didn't know was that there is a completely different University Avenue in Palo Alto. JONL went up to the counter and asked for ginger honey. The guy at the counter asked whether JONL would like to taste it first, evidently their standard procedure with that flavor, as not too many people like it. JONL said, "I'm sure I like it. Just give me a cone." The guy behind the counter insisted that JONL try just a taste first. "Some people think it tastes like soap." JONL insisted, "Look, I _love_ ginger. I eat Chinese food. I eat raw ginger roots. I already went through this hassle with the guy back in Palo Alto. I _know_ I like that flavor!" At the words "back in Palo Alto" the guy behind the counter got a very strange look on his face, but said nothing. KBT caught his eye and winked. Through my stupor I still hadn't quite grasped what was going on, and thought RPG was rolling on the floor laughing and clutching his stomach just because JONL had launched into his spiel ("makes rotten meat a dish for princes") for the forty-third time. At this point, RPG clued me in fully. RPG, KBT, and I retreated to a table, trying to stifle our chuckles. JONL remained at the counter, talking about ice cream with the guy b.t.c., comparing Uncle Gaylord's to other ice cream shops and generally having a good old time. At length the g.b.t.c. said, "How's the ginger honey?" JONL said, "Fine! I wonder what exactly is in it?" Now Uncle Gaylord publishes all his recipes and even teaches classes on how to make his ice cream at home. So the g.b.t.c. got out the recipe, and he and JONL pored over it for a while. But the g.b.t.c. could contain his curiosity no longer, and asked again, "You really like that stuff, huh?" JONL said, "Yeah, I've been eating it constantly back in Palo Alto for the past two days. In fact, I think this batch is about as good as the cones I got back in Palo Alto!" G.b.t.c. looked him straight in the eye and said, "You're _in_ Palo Alto!" JONL turned slowly around, and saw the three of us collapse in a fit of giggles. He clapped a hand to his forehead and exclaimed, "I've been hacked!" [My spies on the West Coast inform me that there is a close relative of the raspberry found out there called an `ollalieberry' --ESR] [Ironic footnote: it appears that the {meme} about ginger vs. rotting meat may be an urban legend. It's not borne out by an examination of medieval recipes or period purchase records for spices, and appears full-blown in the works of Samuel Pegge, a gourmand and notorious flake case who originated numerous food myths. --ESR] :sagan: /say'gn/ n. [from Carl Sagan's TV series "Cosmos"; think "billions and billions"] A large quantity of anything. "There's a sagan different ways to tweak EMACS." "The U.S. Government spends sagans on bombs and welfare -- hard to say which is more destructive." :SAIL:: /sayl/, not /S-A-I-L/ n. 1. The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. An important site in the early development of LISP; with the MIT AI Lab, BBN, CMU, XEROX PARC, and the Unix community, one of the major wellsprings of technical innovation and hacker-culture traditions (see the {{WAITS}} entry for details). The SAIL machines were shut down in late May 1990, scant weeks after the MIT AI Lab's ITS cluster was officially decommissioned. 2. The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language used at SAIL (sense 1). It was an Algol-60 derivative with a coroutining facility and some new data types intended for building search trees and association lists. :salescritter: /sayls'kri`tr/ n. Pejorative hackerism for a computer salesperson. Hackers tell the following joke: Q. What's the difference between a used-car dealer and a computer salesman? A. The used-car dealer knows he's lying. [Some versions add: ...and probably knows how to drive.] This reflects the widespread hacker belief that salescritters are self-selected for stupidity (after all, if they had brains and the inclination to use them, they'd be in programming). The terms `salesthing' and `salesdroid' are also common. Compare {marketroid}, {suit}, {droid}. :salt: n. A tiny bit of near-random data inserted where too much regularity would be undesirable; a data {frob} (sense 1). For example, the Unix crypt(3) man page mentions that "the salt string is used to perturb the DES algorithm in one of 4096 different ways." :salt mines: n. Dense quarters housing large numbers of programmers working long hours on grungy projects, with some hope of seeing the end of the tunnel in N years. Noted for their absence of sunshine. Compare {playpen}, {sandbox}. :salt substrate: n. [MIT] Collective noun used to refer to potato chips, pretzels, saltines, or any other form of snack food designed primarily as a carrier for sodium chloride. Also `sodium substrate'. From the technical term `chip substrate', used to refer to the silicon on the top of which the active parts of integrated circuits are deposited. :same-day service: n. Ironic term used to describe long response time, particularly with respect to {{MS-DOS}} system calls (which ought to require only a tiny fraction of a second to execute). Such response time is a major incentive for programmers to write programs that are not {well-behaved}. See also {PC-ism}. :samizdat: /sahm-iz-daht/ n. [Russian, literally "self publishing"] The process of disseminating documentation via underground channels. Originally referred to underground duplication and distribution of banned books in the Soviet Union; now refers by obvious extension to any less-than-official promulgation of textual material, esp. rare, obsolete, or never-formally-published computer documentation. Samizdat is obviously much easier when one has access to high-bandwidth networks and high-quality laser printers. Note that samizdat is properly used only with respect to documents which contain needed information (see also {hacker ethic}) but which are for some reason otherwise unavailable, but _not_ in the context of documents which are available through normal channels, for which unauthorized duplication would be unethical copyright violation. See {Lions Book} for a historical example. :samurai: n. A hacker who hires out for legal cracking jobs, snooping for factions in corporate political fights, lawyers pursuing privacy-rights and First Amendment cases, and other parties with legitimate reasons to need an electronic locksmith. In 1991, mainstream media reported the existence of a loose-knit culture of samurai that meets electronically on BBS systems, mostly bright teenagers with personal micros; they have modeled themselves explicitly on the historical samurai of Japan and on the "net cowboys" of William Gibson's {cyberpunk} novels. Those interviewed claim to adhere to a rigid ethic of loyalty to their employers and to disdain the vandalism and theft practiced by criminal crackers as beneath them and contrary to the hacker ethic; some quote Miyamoto Musashi's "Book of Five Rings", a classic of historical samurai doctrine, in support of these principles. See also {sneaker}, {Stupids}, {social engineering}, {cracker}, {hacker ethic}, and {dark-side hacker}. :sandbender: n. [IBM] A person involved with silicon lithography and the physical design of chips. Compare {ironmonger}, {polygon pusher}. :sandbox: n. 1. (also `sandbox, the') Common term for the R&D department at many software and computer companies (where hackers in commercial environments are likely to be found). Half-derisive, but reflects the truth that research is a form of creative play. Compare {playpen}. 2. Syn. {link farm}. :sanity check: n. 1. The act of checking a piece of code (or anything else, e.g., a Usenet posting) for completely stupid mistakes. Implies that the check is to make sure the author was sane when it was written; e.g., if a piece of scientific software relied on a particular formula and was giving unexpected results, one might first look at the nesting of parentheses or the coding of the formula, as a `sanity check', before looking at the more complex I/O or data structure manipulation routines, much less the algorithm itself. Compare {reality check}. 2. A run-time test, either validating input or ensuring that the program hasn't screwed up internally (producing an inconsistent value or state). :Saturday-night special: n. [from police slang for a cheap handgun] A {quick-and-dirty} program or feature kluged together during off hours, under a deadline, and in response to pressure from a {salescritter}. Such hacks are dangerously unreliable, but all too often sneak into a production release after insufficient review. :say: vt. 1. To type to a terminal. "To list a directory verbosely, you have to say `ls -l'." Tends to imply a {newline}-terminated command (a `sentence'). 2. A computer may also be said to `say' things to you, even if it doesn't have a speech synthesizer, by displaying them on a terminal in response to your commands. Hackers find it odd that this usage confuses {mundane}s. :scag: vt. To destroy the data on a disk, either by corrupting the filesystem or by causing media damage. "That last power hit scagged the system disk." Compare {scrog}, {roach}. :scanno: /skan'oh/ n. An error in a document caused by a scanner glitch, analogous to a typo or {thinko}. :scary devil monastery: n. Anagram frequently used to refer to the newsgroup alt.sysadmin.recovery, which is populated with characters that rather justify the reference. :schroedinbug: /shroh'din-buhg/ n. [MIT: from the Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment in quantum physics] A design or implementation bug in a program that doesn't manifest until someone reading source or using the program in an unusual way notices that it never should have worked, at which point the program promptly stops working for everybody until fixed. Though (like {bit rot}) this sounds impossible, it happens; some programs have harbored latent schroedinbugs for years. Compare {heisenbug}, {Bohr bug}, {mandelbug}. :science-fiction fandom:: n. Another voluntary subculture having a very heavy overlap with hackerdom; most hackers read SF and/or fantasy fiction avidly, and many go to `cons' (SF conventions) or are involved in fandom-connected activities such as the Society for Creative Anachronism. Some hacker jargon originated in SF fandom; see {defenestration}, {great-wall}, {cyberpunk}, {h}, {ha ha only serious}, {IMHO}, {mundane}, {neep-neep}, {Real Soon Now}. Additionally, the jargon terms {cowboy}, {cyberspace}, {de-rezz}, {go flatline}, {ice}, {phage}, {virus}, {wetware}, {wirehead}, and {worm} originated in SF stories. :scram switch: n. [from the nuclear power industry] An emergency-power-off switch (see {Big Red Switch}), esp. one positioned to be easily hit by evacuating personnel. In general, this is _not_ something you {frob} lightly; these often initiate expensive events (such as Halon dumps) and are installed in a {dinosaur pen} for use in case of electrical fire or in case some luckless {field servoid} should put 120 volts across himself while {Easter egging}. (See also {molly-guard}, {TMRC}.) A correspondent reports a legend that "Scram" is an acronym for "Start Cutting Right Away, Man" (another less plausible variant of this legend refers to "Safety Controil Rod Axe Man"; these are almost certainly both {backronym}s). The story goes that in the earliest nuclear power experiments the engineers recognized the possibility that the reactor wouldn't behave exactly as predicted by their mathematical models. Accordingly, they made sure that they had mechanisms in place that would rapidly drop the control rods back into the reactor. One mechanism took the form of `scram technicians'. These individuals stood next to the cables that raised and lowered the control rods (though certainly not next to the reactor itself) . Equipped with cable-cutters, these technicians stood ready for the (literal) `scram' command. If necessary, they would cut the cables, and gravity would expeditiously return the control rods to the reactor, thereby averting yet another kind of {core dump}. :scratch: 1. [from `scratchpad'] adj. Describes a data structure or recording medium attached to a machine for testing or temporary-use purposes; one that can be {scribble}d on without loss. Usually in the combining forms `scratch memory', `scratch register', `scratch disk', `scratch tape', `scratch volume'. See also {scratch monkey}. 2. [primarily IBM] vt. To delete (as in a file). :scratch monkey: n. As in "Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a {scratch monkey}", a proverb used to advise caution when dealing with irreplaceable data or devices. Used to refer to any scratch volume hooked to a computer during any risky operation as a replacement for some precious resource or data that might otherwise get trashed. This term preserves the memory of Mabel, the Swimming Wonder Monkey, star of a biological research program at the University of Toronto. Mabel was not (so the legend goes) your ordinary monkey; the university had spent years teaching her how to swim, breathing through a regulator, in order to study the effects of different gas mixtures on her physiology. Mabel suffered an untimely demise one day when a {DEC} {field circus} engineer troubleshooting a crash on the program's VAX inadvertently interfered with some custom hardware that was wired to Mabel. It is reported that, after calming down an understandably irate customer sufficiently to ascertain the facts of the matter, a DEC troubleshooter called up the {field circus} manager responsible and asked him sweetly, "Can you swim?" Not all the consequences to humans were so amusing; the sysop of the machine in question was nearly thrown in jail at the behest of certain clueless {droid}s at the local `humane' society. The moral is clear: When in doubt, always mount a scratch monkey. [The actual incident occured in 1979 or 1980. There is a version of this story, complete with reported dialogue between one of the project people and DEC field service, that has been circulating on Internet since 1986. It is hilarious and mythic, but gets some facts wrong. For example, it reports the machine as a PDP-11 and alleges that Mabel's demise occurred when DEC {PM}ed the machine. Earlier versions of this entry were based on that story; this one has been corrected from an interview with the hapless sysop. --ESR] :scream and die: v. Syn. {cough and die}, but connotes that an error message was printed or displayed before the program crashed. :screaming tty: n. [Unix] A terminal line which spews an infinite number of random characters at the operating system. This can happen if the terminal is either disconnected or connected to a powered-off terminal but still enabled for login; misconfiguration, misimplementation, or simple bad luck can start such a terminal screaming. A screaming tty or two can seriously degrade the performance of a vanilla Unix system; the arriving "characters" are treated as userid/password pairs and tested as such. The Unix password encryption algorithm is designed to be computationally intensive in order to foil brute-force crack attacks, so although none of the logins succeeds; the overhead of rejecting them all can be substantial. :screen: n. [Atari ST {demoscene}] One {demoeffect} or one screenful of them. Probably comes from old Sierra-style adventures or shoot-em-ups where one travels from one place to another one screenful at a time. :screen name: n. A {handle} sense 1. This term has been common among users of IRC, MUDs, and commercial on-line services since the mid-1990s. Hackers recognize the term but don't generally use it. :screw: n. [MIT] A {lose}, usually in software. Especially used for user-visible misbehavior caused by a bug or misfeature. This use has become quite widespread outside MIT. :screwage: /skroo'*j/ n. Like {lossage} but connotes that the failure is due to a designed-in misfeature rather than a simple inadequacy or a mere bug. :scribble: n. To modify a data structure in a random and unintentionally destructive way. "Bletch! Somebody's disk-compactor program went berserk and scribbled on the i-node table." "It was working fine until one of the allocation routines scribbled on low core." Synonymous with {trash}; compare {mung}, which conveys a bit more intention, and {mangle}, which is more violent and final. :script kiddies: pl.n. The lowest form of {cracker}; script kiddies do mischief with scripts and programs written by others, often without understanding the {exploit}. :scrog: /skrog/ vt. [Bell Labs] To damage, trash, or corrupt a data structure. "The list header got scrogged." Also reported as `skrog', and ascribed to the comic strip "The Wizard of Id". Compare {scag}; possibly the two are related. Equivalent to {scribble} or {mangle}. :scrool: /skrool/ n. [from the pioneering Roundtable chat system in Houston ca. 1984; prob. originated as a typo for `scroll'] The log of old messages, available for later perusal or to help one get back in synch with the conversation. It was originally called the `scrool monster', because an early version of the roundtable software had a bug where it would dump all 8K of scrool on a user's terminal. :scrozzle: /skroz'l/ vt. Used when a self-modifying code segment runs incorrectly and corrupts the running program or vital data. "The damn compiler scrozzled itself again!" :scruffies: n. See {neats vs. scruffies}. :SCSI: n. [Small Computer System Interface] A bus-independent standard for system-level interfacing between a computer and intelligent devices. Typically annotated in literature with `sexy' (/sek'see/), `sissy' (/sis'ee/), and `scuzzy' (/skuh'zee/) as pronunciation guides -- the last being the overwhelmingly predominant form, much to the dismay of the designers and their marketing people. One can usually assume that a person who pronounces it /S-C-S-I/ is clueless. :ScumOS: /skuhm'os/ or /skuhm'O-S/ n. Unflattering hackerism for SunOS, the BSD Unix variant supported on Sun Microsystems's Unix workstations (see also {sun-stools}), and compare {AIDX}, {Macintrash}, {Nominal Semidestructor}, {HP-SUX}. Despite what this term might suggest, Sun was founded by hackers and still enjoys excellent relations with hackerdom; usage is more often in exasperation than outright loathing. :search-and-destroy mode: n. Hackerism for a noninteractive search-and-replace facility in an editor, so called because an incautiously chosen match pattern can cause {infinite} damage. :second-system effect: n. (sometimes, more euphoniously, `second-system syndrome') When one is designing the successor to a relatively small, elegant, and successful system, there is a tendency to become grandiose in one's success and design an {elephantine} feature-laden monstrosity. The term was first used by Fred Brooks in his classic "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering" (Addison-Wesley, 1975; ISBN 0-201-00650-2). It described the jump from a set of nice, simple operating systems on the IBM 70xx series to OS/360 on the 360 series. A similar effect can also happen in an evolving system; see {Brooks's Law}, {creeping elegance}, {creeping featurism}. See also {{Multics}}, {OS/2}, {X}, {software bloat}. This version of the jargon lexicon has been described (with altogether too much truth for comfort) as an example of second-system effect run amok on jargon-1.... :secondary damage: n. When a fatal error occurs (esp. a {segfault}) the immediate cause may be that a pointer has been trashed due to a previous {fandango on core}. However, this fandango may have been due to an _earlier_ fandango, so no amount of analysis will reveal (directly) how the damage occurred. "The data structure was clobbered, but it was secondary damage." By extension, the corruption resulting from N cascaded fandangoes on core is `Nth-level damage'. There is at least one case on record in which 17 hours of {grovel}ling with `adb' actually dug up the underlying bug behind an instance of seventh-level damage! The hacker who accomplished this near-superhuman feat was presented with an award by his fellows. :security through obscurity: (alt. `security by obscurity') A term applied by hackers to most OS vendors' favorite way of coping with security holes -- namely, ignoring them, documenting neither any known holes nor the underlying security algorithms, trusting that nobody will find out about them and that people who do find out about them won't exploit them. This "strategy" never works for long and occasionally sets the world up for debacles like the {RTM} worm of 1988 (see {Great Worm}), but once the brief moments of panic created by such events subside most vendors are all too willing to turn over and go back to sleep. After all, actually fixing the bugs would siphon off the resources needed to implement the next user-interface frill on marketing's wish list -- and besides, if they started fixing security bugs customers might begin to _expect_ it and imagine that their warranties of merchantability gave them some sort of _right_ to a system with fewer holes in it than a shotgunned Swiss cheese, and _then_ where would we be? Historical note: There are conflicting stories about the origin of this term. It has been claimed that it was first used in the Usenet newsgroup in comp.sys.apollo during a campaign to get HP/Apollo to fix security problems in its Unix-{clone} Aegis/DomainOS (they didn't change a thing). {ITS} fans, on the other hand, say it was coined years earlier in opposition to the incredibly paranoid {Multics} people down the hall, for whom security was everything. In the ITS culture it referred to (1) the fact that by the time a tourist figured out how to make trouble he'd generally gotten over the urge to make it, because he felt part of the community; and (2) (self-mockingly) the poor coverage of the documentation and obscurity of many commands. One instance of _deliberate_ security through obscurity is recorded; the command to allow patching the running ITS system ({altmode} altmode control-R) echoed as $$^D. If you actually typed alt alt ^D, that set a flag that would prevent patching the system even if you later got it right. :SED: /S-E-D/ n. [TMRC, from `Light-Emitting Diode'] Smoke-emitting diode. A {friode} that lost the war. See also {LER}. :segfault: n.,vi. Syn. {segment}, {segmentation fault}. :seggie: /seg'ee/ n. [Unix] Shorthand for {segmentation fault} reported from Britain. :segment: /seg'ment/ vi. To experience a {segmentation fault}. Confusingly, this is often pronounced more like the noun `segment' than like mainstream v. segment; this is because it is actually a noun shorthand that has been verbed. :segmentation fault: n. [Unix] 1. An error in which a running program attempts to access memory not allocated to it and {core dump}s with a segmentation violation error. 2. To lose a train of thought or a line of reasoning. Also uttered as an exclamation at the point of befuddlement. :segv: /seg'vee/ n.,vi. Yet another synonym for {segmentation fault} (actually, in this case, `segmentation violation'). :self-reference: n. See {self-reference}. :selvage: /sel'v*j/ n. [from sewing and weaving] See {chad} (sense 1). :semi: /se'mee/ or /se'mi:/ 1. n. Abbreviation for `semicolon', when speaking. "Commands to {grind} are prefixed by semi-semi-star" means that the prefix is `;;*', not 1/4 of a star. 2. A prefix used with words such as `immediately' as a qualifier. "When is the system coming up?" "Semi-immediately." (That is, maybe not for an hour.) "We did consider that possibility semi-seriously." See also {infinite}. :semi-automated: adj. [US Geological Survey] A procedure that has yet to be completely automated; it still requires a smidge of clueful human interaction. Semi-automated programs usually come with written-out operator instructions that are worth their weight in gold - without them, very nasty things can happen. At USGS semi-automated programs are often referred to as "semi-automated weapons". :semi-infinite: n. See {infinite}. :senior bit: n. [IBM] Syn. {meta bit}. :server: n. A kind of {daemon} that performs a service for the requester and which often runs on a computer other than the one on which the server runs. A particularly common term on the Internet, which is rife with `web servers', `name servers', `domain servers', `news servers', `finger servers', and the like. :SEX: /seks/ [Sun Users' Group & elsewhere] n. 1. Software EXchange. A technique invented by the blue-green algae hundreds of millions of years ago to speed up their evolution, which had been terribly slow up until then. Today, SEX parties are popular among hackers and others (of course, these are no longer limited to exchanges of genetic software). In general, SEX parties are a {Good Thing}, but unprotected SEX can propagate a {virus}. See also {pubic directory}. 2. The rather Freudian mnemonic often used for Sign EXtend, a machine instruction found in the PDP-11 and many other architectures. The RCA 1802 chip used in the early Elf and SuperElf personal computers had a `SEt X register' SEX instruction, but this seems to have had little folkloric impact. {DEC}'s engineers nearly got a PDP-11 assembler that used the `SEX' mnemonic out the door at one time, but (for once) marketing wasn't asleep and forced a change. That wasn't the last time this happened, either. The author of "The Intel 8086 Primer", who was one of the original designers of the 8086, noted that there was originally a `SEX' instruction on that processor, too. He says that Intel management got cold feet and decreed that it be changed, and thus the instruction was renamed `CBW' and `CWD' (depending on what was being extended). Amusingly, the Intel 8048 (the microcontroller used in IBM PC keyboards) is also missing straight `SEX' but has logical-or and logical-and instructions `ORL' and `ANL'. The Motorola 6809, used in the Radio Shack Color Computer and in U.K.'s `Dragon 32' personal computer, actually had an official `SEX' instruction; the 6502 in the Apple II with which it competed did not. British hackers thought this made perfect mythic sense; after all, it was commonly observed, you could (on some theoretical level) have sex with a dragon, but you can't have sex with an apple. :sex changer: n. Syn. {gender mender}. :shambolic link: /sham-bol'ik link/ n. A Unix symbolic link, particularly when it confuses you, points to nothing at all, or results in your ending up in some completely unexpected part of the filesystem.... :shar file: /shar' fi:l/ n. Syn. {sharchive}. :sharchive: /shar'ki:v/ n. [Unix and Usenet; from /bin/sh archive] A {flatten}ed representation of a set of one or more files, with the unique property that it can be unflattened (the original files restored) by feeding it through a standard Unix shell; thus, a sharchive can be distributed to anyone running Unix, and no special unpacking software is required. Sharchives are also intriguing in that they are typically created by shell scripts; the script that produces sharchives is thus a script which produces self-unpacking scripts, which may themselves contain scripts. (The downsides of sharchives are that they are an ideal venue for {Trojan horse} attacks and that, for recipients not running Unix, no simple un-sharchiving program is possible; sharchives can and do make use of arbitrarily-powerful shell features.) Sharchives are also commonly referred to as `shar files' after the name of the most common program for generating them. :Share and enjoy!: imp. 1. Commonly found at the end of software release announcements and {README file}s, this phrase indicates allegiance to the hacker ethic of free information sharing (see {hacker ethic}, sense 1). 2. The motto of the complaints division of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation (the ultimate gaggle of incompetent {suit}s) in Douglas Adams's "Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy". The irony of using this as a cultural recognition signal appeals to hackers. :shareware: /sheir'weir/ n. A kind of {freeware} (sense 1) for which the author requests some payment, usually in the accompanying documentation files or in an announcement made by the software itself. Such payment may or may not buy additional support or functionality. See also {careware}, {charityware}, {crippleware}, {FRS}, {guiltware}, {postcardware}, and {-ware}; compare {payware}. :sharing violation: [From a file error common to several {OS}s] A response to receiving information, typically of an excessively personal nature, that you were probably happier not knowing. "You know those little noises that Pat makes in bed..?" "Whoa! Sharing violation!" In contrast to the original file error, which indicated that you were _not_ being given data that you _did_ want. :shelfware: /shelf'weir/ n. Software purchased on a whim (by an individual user) or in accordance with policy (by a corporation or government agency), but not actually required for any particular use. Therefore, it often ends up on some shelf. :shell: [orig. {{Multics}} n. techspeak, widely propagated via Unix] 1. [techspeak] The command interpreter used to pass commands to an operating system; so called because it is the part of the operating system that interfaces with the outside world. 2. More generally, any interface program that mediates access to a special resource or {server} for convenience, efficiency, or security reasons; for this meaning, the usage is usually `a shell around' whatever. This sort of program is also called a `wrapper'. 3. A skeleton program, created by hand or by another program (like, say, a parser generator), which provides the necessary {incantation}s to set up some task and the control flow to drive it (the term {driver} is sometimes used synonymously). The user is meant to fill in whatever code is needed to get real work done. This usage is common in the AI and Microsoft Windows worlds, and confuses Unix hackers. Historical note: Apparently, the original Multics shell (sense 1) was so called because it was a shell (sense 3); it ran user programs not by starting up separate processes, but by dynamically linking the programs into its own code, calling them as subroutines, and then dynamically de-linking them on return. The VMS command interpreter still does something very like this. :shell out: n. [Unix] To {spawn} an interactive subshell from within a program (e.g., a mailer or editor). "Bang foo runs foo in a subshell, while bang alone shells out." :shift left (or right) logical: [from any of various machines' instruction sets] 1. vi. To move oneself to the left (right). To move out of the way. 2. imper. "Get out of that (my) seat! You can shift to that empty one to the left (right)." Often used without the `logical', or as `left shift' instead of `shift left'. Sometimes heard as LSH /lish/, from the {PDP-10} instruction set. See {Programmer's Cheer}. :shim: n. A small piece of data inserted in order to achieve a desired memory alignment or other addressing property. For example, the PDP-11 Unix linker, in split I&D (instructions and data) mode, inserts a two-byte shim at location 0 in data space so that no data object will have an address of 0 (and be confused with the C null pointer). See also {loose bytes}. :shitogram: /shit'oh-gram/ n. A _really_ nasty piece of email. Compare {nastygram}, {flame}. :short card: n. A half-length IBM XT expansion card or adapter that will fit in one of the two short slots located towards the right rear of a standard chassis (tucked behind the floppy disk drives). See also {tall card}. :shotgun debugging: n. The software equivalent of {Easter egging}; the making of relatively undirected changes to software in the hope that a bug will be perturbed out of existence. This almost never works, and usually introduces more bugs. :shovelware: /shuh'v*l-weir`/ n. 1. Extra software dumped onto a CD-ROM or tape to fill up the remaining space on the medium after the software distribution it's intended to carry, but not integrated with the distribution. 2. A slipshod compilation of software dumped onto a CD-ROM without much care for organization or even usability. :showstopper: n. A hardware or (especially) software bug that makes an implementation effectively unusable; one that absolutely has to be fixed before development can go on. Opposite in connotation from its original theatrical use, which refers to something stunningly _good_. :shriek: n. See {excl}. Occasional CMU usage, also in common use among APL fans and mathematicians, especially category theorists. :Shub-Internet: /shuhb' in't*r-net/ n. [MUD: from H. P. Lovecraft's evil fictional deity Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat with a Thousand Young] The harsh personification of the Internet: Beast of a Thousand Processes, Eater of Characters, Avatar of Line Noise, and Imp of Call Waiting; the hideous multi-tendriled entity formed of all the manifold connections of the net. A sect of MUDders worships Shub-Internet, sacrificing objects and praying for good connections. To no avail -- its purpose is malign and evil, and is the cause of all network slowdown. Often heard as in "Freela casts a tac nuke at Shub-Internet for slowing her down." (A forged response often follows along the lines of: "Shub-Internet gulps down the tac nuke and burps happily.") Also cursed by users of the Web, {FTP} and {TELNET} when the system slows down. The dread name of Shub-Internet is seldom spoken aloud, as it is said that repeating it three times will cause the being to wake, deep within its lair beneath the Pentagon. [January 1996: It develops that one of the computer administrators in the basement of the Pentagon read this entry and fell over laughing. As a result, you too can now poke Shub-Internet by {ping}ing shub-internet.ims.disa.mil. See also {kremvax}. - ESR] [April 1999: shub-internet.ims.disa.mil is no more, alas. But Shub-Internet lives o^$#$*^ - ESR] :sidecar: n. 1. Syn. {slap on the side}. Esp. used of add-ons for the late and unlamented IBM PCjr. 2. The IBM PC compatibility box that could be bolted onto the side of an Amiga. Designed and produced by Commodore, it broke all of the company's own design rules. If it worked with any other peripherals, it was by {magic}. 3. More generally, any of various devices designed to be connected to the expansion slot on the left side of the Amiga 500 (and later, 600 & 1200), which included a hard drive controller, a hard drive, and additional memory. :SIG: /sig/ n. (also common as a prefix in combining forms) A Special Interest Group, in one of several technical areas, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery; well-known ones include SIGPLAN (the Special Interest Group on Programming Languages), SIGARCH (the Special Interest Group for Computer Architecture) and SIGGRAPH (the Special Interest Group for Computer Graphics). Hackers, not surprisingly, like to overextend this naming convention to less formal associations like SIGBEER (at ACM conferences) and SIGFOOD (at University of Illinois). :sig block: /sig blok/ n. [Unix; often written `.sig' there] Short for `signature', used specifically to refer to the electronic signature block that most Unix mail- and news-posting software will {automagically} append to outgoing mail and news. The composition of one's sig can be quite an art form, including an ASCII logo or one's choice of witty sayings (see {sig quote}, {fool file}); but many consider large sigs a waste of {bandwidth}, and it has been observed that the size of one's sig block is usually inversely proportional to one's longevity and level of prestige on the net. See also {doubled sig}. :sig quote: /sig kwoht/ n. [Usenet] A maxim, quote, proverb, joke, or slogan embedded in one's {sig block} and intended to convey something of one's philosophical stance, pet peeves, or sense of humor. "Calm down, it's only ones and zeroes." :sig virus: n. A parasitic {meme} embedded in a {sig block}. There was a {meme plague} or fad for these on Usenet in late 1991. Most were equivalents of "I am a .sig virus. Please reproduce me in your .sig block.". Of course, the .sig virus's memetic hook is the giggle value of going along with the gag; this, however, was a self-limiting phenomenon as more and more people picked up on the idea. There were creative variants on it; some people stuck `sig virus antibody' texts in their sigs, and there was at least one instance of a sig virus eater. :signal-to-noise ratio: [from analog electronics] n. Used by hackers in a generalization of its technical meaning. `Signal' refers to useful information conveyed by some communications medium, and `noise' to anything else on that medium. Hence a low ratio implies that it is not worth paying attention to the medium in question. Figures for such metaphorical ratios are never given. The term is most often applied to {Usenet} newsgroups during {flame war}s. Compare {bandwidth}. See also {coefficient of X}, {lost in the noise}. :silicon: n. Hardware, esp. ICs or microprocessor-based computer systems (compare {iron}). Contrasted with software. See also {sandbender}. :silly walk: vi. [from Monty Python's Flying Circus] 1. A ridiculous procedure required to accomplish a task. Like {grovel}, but more {random} and humorous. "I had to silly-walk through half the /usr directories to find the maps file." 2. Syn. {fandango on core}. :silo: n. The FIFO input-character buffer in an RS-232 line card. So called from {DEC} terminology used on DH and DZ line cards for the VAX and PDP-11, presumably because it was a storage space for fungible stuff that went in at the top and came out at the bottom. :Silver Book: n. Jensen and Wirth's infamous "Pascal User Manual and Report", so called because of the silver cover of the widely distributed Springer-Verlag second edition of 1978 (ISBN 0-387-90144-2). See {{book titles}}, {Pascal}. :since time T equals minus infinity: adv. A long time ago; for as long as anyone can remember; at the time that some particular frob was first designed. Usually the word