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@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ Free Documentation License".
</p>
<H2>Generated</H2>
<p>
This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 06:35PM UTC
</p>
<H2>Glossary</H2>
@@ -251,7 +251,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>2. Acronym, Beginning of File.</p>
<H4>BOFH</H4>
<p>
// , n. [common] Acronym, Bastard Operator From Hell. A system administrator with absolutely no tolerance for luser s. You say you need more filespace? massive-global-delete Seems to me you have plenty left... Many BOFHs (and others who would be BOFHs if they could get away with it) hang out in the newsgroup alt.sysadmin.recovery , although there has also been created a top-level newsgroup hierarchy ( bofh.* ) of their own. Several people have written stories about BOFHs. The set usually considered canonical is by Simon Travaglia and may be found at the Bastard Home Page. BOFHs and BOFH wannabes hang out on scary devil monastery and wield LART s.
// , n. [common] Acronym, Bastard Operator From Hell. A system administrator with a bad attitude towards users, who may apply excessive or unwarranted security policies.
</p>
<H4>BRS</H4>
<p>
@@ -259,7 +259,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>BSD</H4>
<p>
/BSD/ , n. [abbreviation for Berkeley Software Distribution ] a family of Unix versions for the DEC VAX and PDP-11 developed by Bill Joy and others at Berzerkeley starting around 1977, incorporating paged virtual memory, TCP/IP networking enhancements, and many other features. The BSD versions (4.1, 4.2, and 4.3) and the commercial versions derived from them (SunOS, ULTRIX, and Mt. Xinu) held the technical lead in the Unix world until AT T's successful standardization efforts after about 1986; descendants including Free/Open/NetBSD, BSD/OS and MacOS X are still widely popular. Note that BSD versions going back to 2.9 are often referred to by their version numbers alone, without the BSD prefix. See also Unix.
/BSD/ , n. [abbreviation for Berkeley Software Distribution ] a family of Unix versions for the DEC VAX and PDP-11 developed by Bill Joy and others at Berzerkeley starting around 1977, incorporating paged virtual memory, TCP/IP networking enhancements, and many other features. The BSD versions (4.1, 4.2, and 4.3) and the commercial versions derived from them (SunOS, ULTRIX, and Mt. Xinu) held the technical lead in the Unix world until AT&T's successful standardization efforts after about 1986; descendants including Free/Open/NetBSD, BSD/OS and MacOS X are still widely popular. Note that BSD versions going back to 2.9 are often referred to by their version numbers alone, without the BSD prefix. See also Unix.
</p>
<H4>BSOD</H4>
<p>
@@ -364,7 +364,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>C++</H4>
<p>
/C'pluhspluhs/ , 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. Nowadays we say this of C++.
/C'pluhspluhs/ , 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. Nowadays we say this of C++.
</p>
<H4>CDA</H4>
<p>
@@ -551,12 +551,12 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>Death Square</H4>
<p>
n. The corporate logo of Novell, the people who acquired USL after AT T let go of it (Novell eventually sold the Unix group to SCO). Coined by analogy with Death Star , because many people believed Novell was bungling the lead in Unix systems exactly as AT T did for many years.
n. The corporate logo of Novell, the people who acquired USL after AT&T let go of it (Novell eventually sold the Unix group to SCO). Coined by analogy with Death Star , because many people believed Novell was bungling the lead in Unix systems exactly as AT&T did for many years.
</p>
<H4>Death Star</H4>
<p>1. The AT T corporate logo, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Death Star in the Star Wars movies. This usage was particularly common among partisans of BSD Unix in the 1980s, who tended to regard the AT T versions as inferior and AT T as a bad guy. Copies still circulate of a poster printed by Mt. Xinu showing a starscape with a space fighter labeled 4.2 BSD streaking away from a broken AT T logo wreathed in flames. </p>
<p>1. The AT&T corporate logo, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Death Star in the Star Wars movies. This usage was particularly common among partisans of BSD Unix in the 1980s, who tended to regard the AT&T versions as inferior and AT&T as a bad guy. Copies still circulate of a poster printed by Mt. Xinu showing a starscape with a space fighter labeled 4.2 BSD streaking away from a broken AT&T logo wreathed in flames. </p>
<p>2. AT T's internal magazine, Focus , uses death star to describe an incorrectly done AT T logo in which the inner circle in the top left is dark instead of light a frequent result of dark-on-light logo images.</p>
<p>2. AT&T's internal magazine, Focus , uses death star to describe an incorrectly done AT&T logo in which the inner circle in the top left is dark instead of light a frequent result of dark-on-light logo images.</p>
<H4>Death, X of</H4>
<p>
A construction used to imbue the subject with campy menace, usually with intent to ridicule. The ancestor of this term is a famous Far Side cartoon from the 1980s in which a balloon with a fierce face painted on it is passed off as the Floating Head of Death. Hackers and SF fans have been using the suffix of Death ever since to label things which appear to be vastly threatening but will actually pop like a balloon if you prick them. Such constructions are properly spoken in a tone of over-exagerrated portentiousness: Behold! The Spinning - Pizza - of - Death ! See Blue Screen of Death , Ping O' Death , Spinning Pizza of Death , click of death. Compare Doom, X of.
@@ -824,7 +824,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>GIGO</H4>
<p>
/gi:goh/ 1. Garbage In, Garbage Out usually said in response to lusers who complain that a program didn't do the right thing when given imperfect input or otherwise mistreated in some way. Also commonly used to describe failures in human decision making due to faulty, incomplete, or imprecise data. 2.
/gi:goh/ Garbage In, Garbage Out usually said in response to users who complain that a program didn't do the right thing when given imperfect input or otherwise mistreated in some way. Also commonly used to describe failures in human decision making due to faulty, incomplete, or imprecise data.
</p>
<H4>GIPS</H4>
<p>
@@ -860,7 +860,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>GWF</H4>
<p>
n. Common abbreviation for Goober with Firewall. A luser who has equipped his desktop computer with a hypersensitive software firewall or host intrusion detection program, and who gives its alerts absolute credence. ISP tech support and abuse desks dread hearing from such persons, who insist that every packet of abnormal traffic the software detects is a hacker (sic) and, occasionally, threatening lawsuits or prosecution. GWFs have been known to assert that they are being attacked from 127.0.0.1, and that their ISP is criminally negligent for failing to block these attacks. GWF is used similarly to ID10T error and PEBKAC to flag trouble tickets opened by such users.
n. Common abbreviation for Goober with Firewall. A user who has equipped their computer with a hypersensitive software firewall or host intrusion detection program, and who gives its alerts absolute credence. ISP tech support and abuse desks dread hearing from such persons, who insist that every packet of abnormal traffic the software detects is a hacker (sic) and, occasionally, threatening lawsuits or prosecution. GWFs have been known to assert that they are being attacked from 127.0.0.1, and that their ISP is criminally negligent for failing to block these attacks. GWF is used similarly to ID10T error and PEBKAC to flag trouble tickets opened by such users.
</p>
<H4>GandhiCon</H4>
<p>
@@ -874,10 +874,6 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>
The speed of software halves every 18 months. This oft-cited law is an ironic comment on the tendency of software bloat to outpace the every-18-month doubling in hardware capacity per dollar predicted by Moore's Law. The reference is to Bill Gates; Microsoft is widely considered among the worst if not the worst of the perpetrators of bloat.
</p>
<H4>Gender and Ethnicity</H4>
<p>
Hackerdom is still predominantly male. However, the percentage of women is clearly higher than the low-single-digit range typical for technical professions, and female hackers are generally respected and dealt with as equals. In the U.S., hackerdom is predominantly Caucasian with strong minorities of Jews (East Coast) and Orientals (West Coast). The Jewish contingent has exerted a particularly pervasive cultural influence (see Food , above, and note that several common jargon terms are obviously mutated Yiddish). The ethnic distribution of hackers is understood by them to be a function of which ethnic groups tend to seek and value education. Racial and ethnic prejudice is notably uncommon and tends to be met with freezing contempt. When asked, hackers often ascribe their culture's gender- and color-blindness to a positive effect of text-only network channels, and this is doubtless a powerful influence. Also, the ties many hackers have to AI research and SF literature may have helped them to develop an idea of personhood that is inclusive rather than exclusive after all, if one's imagination readily grants full human rights to future AI programs, robots, dolphins, and extraterrestrial aliens, mere color and gender can't seem very important any more.
</p>
<H4>General Appearance</H4>
<p>
Although the mainstream media may believe otherwise, hackers do not have any particular uniform or appearance. Anyone you see in the supermarket could be a hacker. Since the majority of people are proletarians the typical hacker just looks like any other prole. Occasionally they may be distinguished by wearing T-shirts or hoodies with software/distro/conference logos on them. At the end of the 20th century hackers were mostly caucasian 20-something dudes from middle class families and living in Europe or the US, but as computing and knowledge became cheaper and more ubiquitous the initially privileged profile gave way to total generality. Today the main distinguishing feature of hackers is being interested in computers and tinkering with them, not any particular physical appearance or economic status.
@@ -894,10 +890,6 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>
In the United States, hackerdom revolves on a Bay Area-to-Boston axis; about half of the hard core seems to live within a hundred miles of Cambridge (Massachusetts) or Berkeley (California), although there are significant contingents in Los Angeles, in the Pacific Northwest, and around Washington DC. Hackers tend to cluster around large cities, especially university towns such as the Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina or Princeton, New Jersey (this may simply reflect the fact that many are students or ex-students living near their alma maters).
</p>
<H4>Get a life!</H4>
<p>
imp. Hacker-standard way of suggesting that the person to whom it is directed has succumbed to terminal geekdom (see geek ). Often heard on Usenet , esp. as a way of suggesting that the target is taking some obscure issue of theology too seriously. This exhortation was popularized by William Shatner on a 1987 Saturday Night Live episode in a speech that ended Get a life ! , but it can be traced back at least to Valley Girl slang in 1983. It was certainly in wide use among hackers for years before achieving mainstream currency via the sitcom Get A Life in 1990.
</p>
<H4>Get a real computer!</H4>
<p>
imp. In 1996 when this entry first entered the File, it was the typical hacker response to news that somebody is having trouble getting work done on a system that (a) was single-tasking, (b) had no hard disk, or (c) had an address space smaller than 16 megabytes. In 2003 anything less powerful than a 500MHz Pentium with a multi-gigabyte hard disk would probably be similarly written off. The threshold for real computer rises with time. See bitty box and toy.
@@ -1149,7 +1141,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>Jeff K.</H4>
<p>
The spiritual successor to B1FF and the archetype of script kiddies. is a sixteen-year-old suburbanite who fancies himself a l33t haX0r , although his knowledge of computers seems to be limited to the procedure for getting Quake up and running. His Web page http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/ features a number of hopelessly naive articles, essays, and rants, all filled with the kind of misspellings, studlycaps , and number-for-letter substitutions endemic to the script kiddie and warez d00dz communities. Jeff's offerings, among other things, include hardware advice (such as AMD VERSIS PENTIUM and HOW TO OVARCLOAK YOUR COMPUTAR ), his own Quake clan (Clan 40 OUNSCE), and his own comic strip (Wacky Fun Computar Comic Jokes). Like B1FF, is (fortunately) a hoax. was created by internet game journalist Richard Lowtax Kyanka, whose web site Something Awful (http://www.somethingawful.com) highlights unintentionally humorous news items and Web sites, as a parody of the kind of teenage luser who infests Quake servers, chat rooms, and other places where computer enthusiasts congregate. He is well-recognized in the PC game community and his influence has spread to hacker fora like Slashdot as well.
The spiritual successor to B1FF and the archetype of script kiddies is a sixteen-year-old suburbanite who fancies himself a l33t haX0r, although his knowledge of computers seems to be limited to the procedure for getting Quake up and running.
</p>
<H4>Jeopardy-style quoting</H4>
<p>
@@ -1368,7 +1360,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>Murphy's Law</H4>
<p>
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 McDonnell-Douglas's test engineers on the rocket-sled experiments that were done by the U.S. Air Force in 1949 to test human acceleration tolerances (USAF project MX981). One experiment involved a set of 16 accelerometers mounted to different parts of the subject's body. There were two ways each sensor could be glued to its mount, and somebody methodically installed all 16 in a replacement set the wrong way around. Murphy then made the original form of his pronouncement, which the test subject (Major John Paul Stapp) mis-quoted (apparently in the more general form Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong) at a news conference a few days later. Within months Murphy's Law had spread to various technical cultures connected to aerospace engineering. Before too many years had gone by variants had passed into the popular imagination, changing as they went. Most of these are variants on Anything that can go wrong, will ; this is more correctly referred to as Finagle's Law.
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. Edward A. Murphy, Jr. was one of McDonnell-Douglas's test engineers on the rocket-sled experiments that were done by the U.S. Air Force in 1949 to test human acceleration tolerances (USAF project MX981). One experiment involved a set of 16 accelerometers mounted to different parts of the subject's body. There were two ways each sensor could be glued to its mount, and somebody methodically installed all 16 in a replacement set the wrong way around. Murphy then made the original form of his pronouncement, which the test subject (Major John Paul Stapp) mis-quoted (apparently in the more general form Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong) at a news conference a few days later. Within months Murphy's Law had spread to various technical cultures connected to aerospace engineering. Before too many years had gone by variants had passed into the popular imagination, changing as they went. Most of these are variants on Anything that can go wrong, will; this is more correctly referred to as Finagle's Law.
</p>
<H3>N</H3>
<H4>NAK</H4>
@@ -1444,10 +1436,6 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>1. [Operating System] n. An abbreviation heavily used in email, occasionally in speech. </p>
<p>2. n. obs. On ITS, an output spy. See OS and JEDGAR in Appendix A.</p>
<H4>OS and JEDGAR</H4>
<p>
This story says a lot about the ITS ethos. On the ITS system there was a program that allowed you to see what was being printed on someone else's terminal. It spied on the other guy's output by examining the insides of the monitor system. The output spy program was called OS. Throughout the rest of the computer science world (and at IBM too) OS means operating system, but among old-time ITS hackers it almost always meant output spy. OS could work because ITS purposely had very little in the way of protection that prevented one user from trespassing on another's areas. Fair is fair, however. There was another program that would automatically notify you if anyone started to spy on your output. It worked in exactly the same way, by looking at the insides of the operating system to see if anyone else was looking at the insides that had to do with your output. This counterspy program was called JEDGAR (a six-letterism pronounced as two syllables: /jedgr/ ), in honor of the former head of the FBI. But there's more. JEDGAR would ask the user for license to kill. If the user said yes, then JEDGAR would actually gun the job of the luser who was spying. Unfortunately, people found that this made life too violent, especially when tourists learned about it. One of the systems hackers solved the problem by replacing JEDGAR with another program that only pretended to do its job. It took a long time to do this, because every copy of JEDGAR had to be patched. To this day no one knows how many people never figured out that JEDGAR had been defanged. Interestingly, there is still a security module named JEDGAR alive as of late 1999 in the Unisys MCP for large systems. It is unknown to us whether the name is tribute or independent invention.
</p>
<H4>OS/2</H4>
<p>
/O S too/ , n. The anointed successor to MS-DOS for Intel 286- and 386-based micros; proof that IBM/Microsoft couldn't get it right the second time, either. Often called Half-an-OS. Mentioning it is usually good for a cheap laugh among hackers the design was so baroque , and the implementation of 1.x so bad, that three years after introduction you could still count the major apps shipping for it on the fingers of two hands in unary. The 2.x versions were said to have improved somewhat, and informed hackers rated them superior to Microsoft Windows (an endorsement which, however, could easily be construed as damning with faint praise). In the mid-1990s IBM put OS/2 on life support, refraining from killing it outright purely for internal political reasons; by 1999 the success of Linux had effectively ended any possibility of a renaissance. See monstrosity , cretinous , second-system effect.
@@ -1531,7 +1519,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>PEBKAC</H4>
<p>
/pebkak/ [Abbrev., Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair ] Used by support people, particularly at call centers and help desks. Not used with the public. Denotes pilot error as the cause of the crash, especially stupid errors that even a luser could figure out. Very derogatory. Usage: Did you ever figure out why that guy couldn't print? Yeah, he kept cancelling the operation before it could finish. PEBKAC. See also ID10T. Compare pilot error , UBD.
/pebkak/ [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. Very derogatory. Usage: Did you ever figure out why that guy couldn't print? Yeah, he kept cancelling the operation before it could finish. PEBKAC. See also ID10T. Compare pilot error, UBD.
</p>
<H4>PFY</H4>
<p>
@@ -1933,7 +1921,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>TWENEX</H4>
<p>
/tweneks/ , n. The TOPS-20 operating system by DEC the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10 preferred by most PDP-10 hackers over TOPS-10 (that is, by those who were not ITS or WAITS partisans). TOPS-20 began in 1969 as Bolt, Beranek Newman's TENEX operating system using special paging hardware. By the early 1970s, almost all of the systems on the ARPANET ran TENEX. DEC purchased the rights to TENEX from BBN and began work to make it their own. The first in-house code name for the operating system was VIROS (VIRtual memory Operating System); when customers started asking questions, the name was changed to SNARK so DEC could truthfully deny that there was any project called VIROS. When the name SNARK became known, the name was briefly reversed to become KRANS; this was quickly abandoned when someone objected that krans meant funeral wreath in Swedish (though some Swedish speakers have since said it means simply wreath ; this part of the story may be apocryphal). Ultimately DEC picked TOPS-20 as the name of the operating system, and it was as TOPS-20 that it was marketed. The hacker community, mindful of its origins, quickly dubbed it TWENEX (a contraction of twenty TENEX ), even though by this point very little of the original TENEX code remained (analogously to the differences between AT T V6 Unix and BSD). DEC people cringed when they heard TWENEX , but the term caught on nevertheless (the written abbreviation 20x was also used). TWENEX was successful and very popular; in fact, there was a period in the early 1980s when it commanded as fervent a culture of partisans as Unix or ITS but DEC's decision to scrap all the internal rivals to the VAX architecture and its relatively stodgy VMS OS killed the DEC-20 and put a sad end to TWENEX's brief day in the sun. DEC attempted to convince TOPS-20 users to convert to VMS , but instead, by the late 1980s, most of the TOPS-20 hackers had migrated to Unix. There is a TOPS-20 home page.
/tweneks/ , n. The TOPS-20 operating system by DEC the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10 preferred by most PDP-10 hackers over TOPS-10 (that is, by those who were not ITS or WAITS partisans). TOPS-20 began in 1969 as Bolt, Beranek Newman's TENEX operating system using special paging hardware. By the early 1970s, almost all of the systems on the ARPANET ran TENEX. DEC purchased the rights to TENEX from BBN and began work to make it their own. The first in-house code name for the operating system was VIROS (VIRtual memory Operating System); when customers started asking questions, the name was changed to SNARK so DEC could truthfully deny that there was any project called VIROS. When the name SNARK became known, the name was briefly reversed to become KRANS; this was quickly abandoned when someone objected that krans meant funeral wreath in Swedish (though some Swedish speakers have since said it means simply wreath ; this part of the story may be apocryphal). Ultimately DEC picked TOPS-20 as the name of the operating system, and it was as TOPS-20 that it was marketed. The hacker community, mindful of its origins, quickly dubbed it TWENEX (a contraction of twenty TENEX ), even though by this point very little of the original TENEX code remained (analogously to the differences between AT&T V6 Unix and BSD). DEC people cringed when they heard TWENEX , but the term caught on nevertheless (the written abbreviation 20x was also used). TWENEX was successful and very popular; in fact, there was a period in the early 1980s when it commanded as fervent a culture of partisans as Unix or ITS but DEC's decision to scrap all the internal rivals to the VAX architecture and its relatively stodgy VMS OS killed the DEC-20 and put a sad end to TWENEX's brief day in the sun. DEC attempted to convince TOPS-20 users to convert to VMS , but instead, by the late 1980s, most of the TOPS-20 hackers had migrated to Unix. There is a TOPS-20 home page.
</p>
<H4>TeX</H4>
<p>
@@ -2006,7 +1994,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>UN*X</H4>
<p>
n. Used to refer to the Unix operating system (a trademark of AT T, then of Novell, then of Unix Systems Laboratories, then of the Open Group; the source code parted company with it after Novell and was owned by SCO, which was acquired by Caldera) in writing, but avoiding the need for the ugly typography (see also (TM) ). Also used to refer to any or all varieties of Unixoid operating systems. Ironically, lawyers now say that the requirement for the trademark postfix has no legal force, but the asterisk usage is entrenched anyhow. It has been suggested that there may be a psychological connection to practice in certain religions (especially Judaism) in which the name of the deity is never written out in full, e.g., YHWH or G--d is used. See also glob and splat out.
n. Used to refer to the Unix operating system (a trademark of AT&T, then of Novell, then of Unix Systems Laboratories, then of the Open Group; the source code parted company with it after Novell and was owned by SCO, which was acquired by Caldera) in writing, but avoiding the need for the ugly typography (see also (TM) ). Also used to refer to any or all varieties of Unixoid operating systems. Ironically, lawyers now say that the requirement for the trademark postfix has no legal force, but the asterisk usage is entrenched anyhow. It has been suggested that there may be a psychological connection to practice in certain religions (especially Judaism) in which the name of the deity is never written out in full, e.g., YHWH or G--d is used. See also glob and splat out.
</p>
<H4>URL</H4>
<p>
@@ -2014,7 +2002,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>UTSL</H4>
<p>
// , n. [Unix] On-line acronym for Use the Source, Luke (a pun on Obi-Wan Kenobi's Use the Force, Luke! in Star Wars ) analogous to RTFS (sense 1), but more polite. This is a common way of suggesting that someone would be better off reading the source code that supports whatever feature is causing confusion, rather than making yet another futile pass through the manuals, or broadcasting questions on Usenet that haven't attracted wizards to answer them. Once upon a time in elder days , everyone running Unix had source. After 1978, AT T's policy tightened up, so this objurgation was in theory appropriately directed only at associates of some outfit with a Unix source license. In practice, bootlegs of Unix source code (made precisely for reference purposes) were so ubiquitous that one could utter it at almost anyone on the network without concern. Nowadays, free Unix clones have become widely enough distributed that anyone can read source legally. The most widely distributed is certainly Linux, with variants of the NET/2 and 4.4BSD distributions running second. Cheap commercial Unixes with source such as BSD/OS are accelerating this trend.
// , n. [Unix] On-line acronym for Use the Source, Luke (a pun on Obi-Wan Kenobi's Use the Force, Luke! in Star Wars ) analogous to RTFS (sense 1), but more polite. This is a common way of suggesting that someone would be better off reading the source code that supports whatever feature is causing confusion, rather than making yet another futile pass through the manuals, or broadcasting questions on Usenet that haven't attracted wizards to answer them. Once upon a time in elder days , everyone running Unix had source. After 1978, AT&T's policy tightened up, so this objurgation was in theory appropriately directed only at associates of some outfit with a Unix source license. In practice, bootlegs of Unix source code (made precisely for reference purposes) were so ubiquitous that one could utter it at almost anyone on the network without concern. Nowadays, free Unix clones have become widely enough distributed that anyone can read source legally. The most widely distributed is certainly Linux, with variants of the NET/2 and 4.4BSD distributions running second. Cheap commercial Unixes with source such as BSD/OS are accelerating this trend.
</p>
<H4>UUOC</H4>
<p>
@@ -2030,7 +2018,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>Unix conspiracy</H4>
<p>
n. [ITS] According to a conspiracy theory long popular among ITS and TOPS-20 fans, Unix's growth is the result of a plot, hatched during the 1970s at Bell Labs, whose intent was to hobble AT T's competitors by making them dependent upon a system whose future evolution was to be under AT T's control. This would be accomplished by disseminating an operating system that is apparently inexpensive and easily portable, but also relatively unreliable and insecure (so as to require continuing upgrades from AT T). This theory was lent a substantial impetus in 1984 by the paper referenced in the back door entry. In this view, Unix was designed to be one of the first computer viruses (see virus ) but a virus spread to computers indirectly by people and market forces, rather than directly through disks and networks. Adherents of this Unix virus theory like to cite the fact that the well-known quotation Unix is snake oil was uttered by DEC president Kenneth Olsen shortly before DEC began actively promoting its own family of Unix workstations. (Olsen now claims to have been misquoted.) If there was ever such a conspiracy, it got thoroughly out of the plotters' control after 1990. AT T sold its Unix operation to Novell around the same time Linux and other free-Unix distributions were beginning to make noise.
n. [ITS] According to a conspiracy theory long popular among ITS and TOPS-20 fans, Unix's growth is the result of a plot, hatched during the 1970s at Bell Labs, whose intent was to hobble AT&T's competitors by making them dependent upon a system whose future evolution was to be under AT&T's control. This would be accomplished by disseminating an operating system that is apparently inexpensive and easily portable, but also relatively unreliable and insecure (so as to require continuing upgrades from AT&T). This theory was lent a substantial impetus in 1984 by the paper referenced in the back door entry. In this view, Unix was designed to be one of the first computer viruses (see virus ) but a virus spread to computers indirectly by people and market forces, rather than directly through disks and networks. Adherents of this Unix virus theory like to cite the fact that the well-known quotation Unix is snake oil was uttered by DEC president Kenneth Olsen shortly before DEC began actively promoting its own family of Unix workstations. (Olsen now claims to have been misquoted.) If there was ever such a conspiracy, it got thoroughly out of the plotters' control after 1990. AT&T sold its Unix operation to Novell around the same time Linux and other free-Unix distributions were beginning to make noise.
</p>
<H4>Usenet</H4>
<p>
@@ -2686,7 +2674,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>4. More generally, a (possibly incorrect) mental state of belief. I have a bit set that says that you were the last guy to hack on EMACS. (Meaning I think you were the last guy to hack on EMACS, and what I am about to say is predicated on this, so please stop me if this isn't true. ) I just need one bit from you is a polite way of indicating that you intend only a short interruption for a question that can presumably be answered yes or no. A bit is said to be set if its value is true or 1, and reset or clear if its value is false or 0. One speaks of setting and clearing bits. To toggle or invert a bit is to change it, either from 0 to 1 or from 1 to 0. See also flag , trit , mode bit. The term bit first appeared in print in the computer-science sense in a 1948 paper by information theorist Claude Shannon, and was there credited to the early computer scientist John Tukey (who also seems to have coined the term software ). Tukey records that bit evolved over a lunch table as a handier alternative to bigit or binit , at a conference in the winter of 1943-44.</p>
<H4>bit bang</H4>
<p>
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. Nowadays it's used to describe I2C, a serial protocol for monitoring motherboard hardware.
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 wannabees. Bit bang was used on certain early models of Prime computers, presumably when UARTs were too expensive, and on archaic Z80 micros with a Zilog PIO 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. Nowadays it's used to describe I2C, a serial protocol for monitoring motherboard hardware.
</p>
<H4>bit bashing</H4>
<p>
@@ -2778,6 +2766,10 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>
/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.
</p>
<H4>bling</H4>
<p>
The aesthetic appearance of a system can be described as "bling heavy" if it contains a lot of fancy animations, slick screen transitions and exquisitely designed icons and fonts. "You can bling the heck out of this desktop environment".
</p>
<H4>blinkenlights</H4>
<p>
/blink'@nli:tz/ , n. [common] Front-panel diagnostic lights on a computer, esp. a dinosaur. Now that dinosaurs are rare, this term usually refers to status lights on a modem, network hub, or the like. This term derives from the last word of the famous blackletter-Gothic sign in mangled pseudo-German that once graced about half the computer rooms in the English-speaking world. One version ran in its entirety as follows: ACHTUNG!ALLESLOOKENSPEEPERS! Allestouristenundnon-technischenlookenpeepers! Dascomputermachineistnichtfuergefingerpokenundmittengrabben. Isteasyschnappenderspringenwerk,blowenfusenundpoppencorken mitspitzensparken.Istnichtfuergewerkenbeidasdumpkopfen. Dasrubberneckensichtseerenkeependascotten-pickenenhansindas pocketsmuss;relaxenundwatchendasblinkenlichten. This silliness dates back at least as far as 1955 at IBM 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 Thisroomisfullfilledmitspecialelectronischeequippment. Fingergrabbingandpressingthecnoeppkesfromthecomputersis allowedfordieexpertsonly!Soallthe lefthanders stayaway anddonotdisturbenthebrainstormingvonhereworking intelligencies.Otherwiseyouwillbeoutthrownandkicked anderswhere!Also:pleasekeepstillandonlywatchenastaunished theblinkenlights. 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 even at 33/66/150MHz (let alone gigahertz speeds) it's all a blur. Despite this, a couple of relatively recent computer designs of note have featured programmable blinkenlights that were added just because they looked cool. The Connection Machine, a 65,536-processor parallel computer designed in the mid-1980s, was a black cube with one side covered with a grid of red blinkenlights; the sales demo had them evolving life patterns. A few years later the ill-fated BeBox (a personal computer designed to run the BeOS operating system) featured twin rows of blinkenlights on the case front. When Be, Inc. decided to get out of the hardware business in 1996 and instead ported their OS to the PowerPC and later to the Intel architecture, many users suffered severely from the absence of their beloved blinkenlights. Before long an external version of the blinkenlights driven by a PC serial port became available; there is some sort of plot symmetry in the fact that it was assembled by a German. Finally, a version updated for the Internet has been seen on news.admin.net-abuse.
@@ -2876,7 +2868,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>3. Obsolete but still working hardware, especially when used of an old, bulky, quirky system; originally a term of annoyance, but became more and more affectionate as the hardware became more and more obsolete. Auctioneers use this term for a large, undesirable object such as a washing machine; actual boating enthusiasts, however, use mooring anchor for frustrating (not actually useless) equipment.</p>
<H4>bob</H4>
<p>
n. At Demon Internet , all tech support personnel are called Bob. (Female support personnel have an option on Bobette ). This has nothing to do with Bob the divine drilling-equipment salesman of the Church of the SubGenius. Nor is it acronymized from Brother Of BOFH , though all parties agree it could have been. Rather, it was triggered by an unusually large draft of new tech-support people in 1995. It was observed that there would be much duplication of names. To ease the confusion, it was decided that all support techs would henceforth be known as Bob , and identity badges were created labelled Bob 1 and Bob 2. ( No, we never got any further reports a witness). The reason for Bob rather than anything else is due to a luser calling and asking to speak to Bob , despite the fact that no Bob was currently working for Tech Support. Since we all know the customer is always right , it was decided that there had to be at least one Bob on duty at all times, just in case. This sillyness snowballed inexorably. Shift leaders and managers began to refer to their groups of bobs. Whole ranks of support machines were set up (and still exist in the DNS as of 1999) as bob1 through bobN. Then came alt.tech-support.recovery , and it was filled with Demon support personnel. They all referred to themselves, and to others, as bob , and after a while it caught on. There is now a Bob Code describing the Bob nature.
n. In the 1990s at an early ISP called Demon Internet, all tech support personnel are called either Bob (masc) or Bobette (fem). 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 or Bobette, and identity badges were created labelled Bob 1 and Bob 2. (No, we never got any further reports a witness). The reason for Bob/Bobette rather than anything else is due to a someone 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 snowballed inexorably. Shift leaders and managers began to refer to their groups of bobs. Whole ranks of support machines were set up (and still exist in the DNS as of 1999) as bob1 through bobN. Then came alt.tech-support.recovery, and it was filled with Demon support personnel. They all referred to themselves, and to others, as bob, and after a while it caught on. There is now a Bob Code describing the Bob nature.
</p>
<H4>bodge</H4>
<p>
@@ -3327,7 +3319,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>chainik</H4>
<p>
/chi:nik/ [Russian, literally teapot ] Almost synonymous with muggle. Implies both ignorance and a certain amount of willingness to learn, but does not necessarily imply as little experience or short exposure time as newbie and is not as derogatory as luser. Both a novice user and someone using a system for a long time without any understanding of the internals can be referred to as chainiks. Very widespread term in Russian hackish, often used in an English context by Russian-speaking hackers esp. in Israel (e.g. Our new colleague is a complete chainik ). FidoNet discussion groups often had a chainik subsection for newbies and, well, old chainiks (eg. su.asm.chainik, ru.linux.chainik, ru.html.chainik). Public projects often have a chainik mailing list to keep the chainiks off the developers' and experienced users' discussions. Today, the word is slowly slipping into mainstream Russian due to the Russian translation of the popular yellow-black covered foobar for dummies series, which (correctly) uses chainik for dummy , but its frequent (though not excessive) use is still characteristic hacker-speak.
/chi:nik/ [Russian, literally teapot ] Almost synonymous with muggle. Implies both ignorance and a certain amount of willingness to learn, but does not necessarily imply as little experience or short exposure time as newbie. Both a novice user and someone using a system for a long time without any understanding of the internals can be referred to as chainiks. Very widespread term in Russian hackish, often used in an English context by Russian-speaking hackers esp. in Israel (e.g. Our new colleague is a complete chainik ). FidoNet discussion groups often had a chainik subsection for newbies and, well, old chainiks (eg. su.asm.chainik, ru.linux.chainik, ru.html.chainik). Public projects often have a chainik mailing list to keep the chainiks off the developers' and experienced users' discussions. Today, the word is slowly slipping into mainstream Russian due to the Russian translation of the popular yellow-black covered foobar for dummies series, which (correctly) uses chainik for dummy , but its frequent (though not excessive) use is still characteristic hacker-speak.
</p>
<H4>channel</H4>
<p>
@@ -3405,6 +3397,10 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>
vi. To run slowly; to grind or grovel. The download is chugging like crazy.
</p>
<H4>class</H4>
<p>
Hackers tend to come from the working or middle classes. They tend not to originate from the upper part of the middle class, since the offspring of wealthy elites tend to be discouraged from pursuing anything which might resemble engineering. In terms of class composition anyone you see in the street or in a supermarket could potentially be a hacker. They don't wear any particular uniform or look like any particular stereotype. Most hackers are working class, with no capital income, but some get offered shares in companies or go into fintech and become partially or wholly bourgeois.
</p>
<H4>clean</H4>
<p>
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.
@@ -3758,11 +3754,11 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
The art and science of creating cryptographic algorithms which contain back doors or bug doors, sometimes also known as "secure golden key", "front door" or "key escrow".
</p>
<H4>crash</H4>
<p>1. n. A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of the system (q.v., sense 1), esp. of magnetic disk drives (the term originally described what happens when the air gap of a hard disk collapses). Three lusers lost their files in last night's disk . A disk that involves the read/write heads dropping onto the surface of the disks and scraping off the oxide may also be referred to as a head , whereas the term system usually, though not always, implies that the operating system or other software was at fault. </p>
<p>1. n. A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of the system (q.v., sense 1), esp. of magnetic disk drives (the term originally described what happens when the air gap of a hard disk collapses). A disk that involves the read/write heads dropping onto the surface of the disks and scraping off the oxide may also be referred to as a head, whereas the term system usually, though not always, implies that the operating system or other software was at fault. </p>
<p>2. v. To fail suddenly. Has the system just ed? Something ed the OS! See down. Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the (usually a person or a program, or both). Those idiots playing SPACEWAR ed the system. </p>
<p>2. v. To fail suddenly. Has the system just crashed? Something crashed the OS! See down. Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the crash (usually a person or a program, or both). Those idiots playing SPACEWAR crashed the system. </p>
<p>3. vi. Sometimes said of people hitting the sack after a long hacking run ; see gronk out.</p>
<p>3. vi. Sometimes said of people hitting the sack after a long hacking run; see gronk out.</p>
<H4>crash and burn</H4>
<p>
vi.,n. A spectacular crash, in the mode of the conclusion of the car-chase scene in the movie Bullitt and many subsequent imitators (compare die horribly ). The construction crash-and-burn machine is reported for a computer used exclusively for alpha or beta testing, or reproducing bugs (i.e., not for development). The implication is that it wouldn't be such a disaster if that machine crashed, since only the testers would be inconvenienced.
@@ -4393,7 +4389,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>2. A backup. This usage is typical only at large timesharing installations.</p>
<H4>dumpster diving</H4>
<p>1. The practice of sifting refuse from an office or technical installation to extract confidential data, especially security-compromising information ( dumpster is an Americanism for what is elsewhere called a skip ). Back in AT T's monopoly days, before paper shredders became common office equipment, phone phreaks (see phreaking ) used to organize regular dumpster runs against phone company plants and offices. Discarded and damaged copies of AT T internal manuals taught them much. The technique is still rumored to be a favorite of crackers operating against careless targets. </p>
<p>1. The practice of sifting refuse from an office or technical installation to extract confidential data, especially security-compromising information ( dumpster is an Americanism for what is elsewhere called a skip ). Back in AT&T's monopoly days, before paper shredders became common office equipment, phone phreaks (see phreaking ) used to organize regular dumpster runs against phone company plants and offices. Discarded and damaged copies of AT&T internal manuals taught them much. The technique is still rumored to be a favorite of crackers operating against careless targets. </p>
<p>2. The practice of raiding the dumpsters behind buildings where producers and/or consumers of high-tech equipment are located, with the expectation (usually justified) of finding discarded but still-valuable equipment to be nursed back to health in some hacker's den. Experienced dumpster-divers not infrequently accumulate basements full of moldering (but still potentially useful) cruft.</p>
<H4>dusty deck</H4>
@@ -4503,6 +4499,10 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>1. [XEROX PARC] Predicating one research effort upon the success of another. </p>
<p>2. Allowing your own research effort to be placed on the critical path of some other project (be it a research effort or not).</p>
<H4>ethnicity</H4>
<p>
The ethnicity of hackers varies depending upon where you are and it tends to follow whatever is normative for the region. So if you're in Europe or North America it's overwhelmingly Caucasian. In those areas anyone non-Caucasian tends to be kept out of commercial software development due to entrenched discrimination.
</p>
<H4>eurodemo</H4>
<p>
/yoorodem`o/ a demo , sense 4 Prev Up Next error 33 Home evil
@@ -4551,7 +4551,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>eye candy</H4>
<p>
/i: kand`ee/ , n. [from mainstream slang ear candy ] A display of some sort that's presented to lusers to keep them distracted while the program performs necessary background tasks. Give 'em some eye candy while the back-end slurps that BLOB into core. Reported as mainstream usage among players of graphics-heavy computer games. We're also told this term is mainstream slang for soft pornography, but that sense does not appear to be live among hackers.
/i: kand`ee/ , n. [from mainstream slang ear candy ] A display of some sort. In mainstream usage among players of graphics-heavy computer games. Can also be used in the context of desktop operating system appearance, as in: "KDE Plasma has a lot of eye candy". Also see bling.
</p>
<H4>eyeball search</H4>
<p>
@@ -4937,7 +4937,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<H4>for the rest of us</H4>
<p>1. Used to describe a spiffy product whose affordability shames other comparable products, or (more often) used sarcastically to describe spiffy but very overpriced products. </p>
<p>2. Describes a program with a limited interface, deliberately limited capabilities, non-orthogonality, inability to compose primitives, or any other limitation designed to not confuse a naive user. This places an upper bound on how far that user can go before the program begins to get in the way of the task instead of helping accomplish it. Used in reference to Macintosh software which doesn't provide obvious capabilities because it is thought that the poor lusers might not be able to handle them. Becomes the rest of them when used in third-party reference; thus, Yes, it is an attractive program, but it's designed for The Rest Of Them means a program that superficially looks neat but has no depth beyond the surface flash. See also WIMP environment , Macintrash , point-and-drool interface , user-friendly.</p>
<p>2. Describes a program with a limited interface, deliberately limited capabilities, non-orthogonality, inability to compose primitives, or any other limitation designed to not confuse a naive user. This places an upper bound on how far that user can go before the program begins to get in the way of the task instead of helping accomplish it. Used in reference to Macintosh software which doesn't provide obvious capabilities because they are thought to exceed the capabilities of average users. Becomes the rest of them when used in third-party reference; thus, Yes, it is an attractive program, but it's designed for The Rest Of Them means a program that superficially looks neat but has no depth beyond the surface flash. See also WIMP environment, Macintrash, point-and-drool interface, user-friendly.</p>
<H4>for values of</H4>
<p>
A common rhetorical maneuver at MIT is to use any of the canonical random numbers as placeholders for variables. The max function takes 42 arguments, for arbitrary values of 42.: There are 69 ways to leave your lover, for 69 = 50. This is especially likely when the speaker has uttered a random number and realizes that it was not recognized as such, but even non-random numbers are occasionally used in this fashion. A related joke is that equals 3 for small values of and large values of 3. Historical note: at MIT this usage has traditionally been traced to the programming language MAD (Michigan Algorithm Decoder), an Algol-58-like language that was the most common choice among mainstream (non-hacker) users at MIT in the mid-60s. It inherited from Algol-58 a control structure FOR VALUES OF X = 3, 7, 99 DO. .. that would repeat the indicated instructions for each value in the list (unlike the usual FOR that only works for arithmetic sequences of values). MAD is long extinct, but similar for-constructs still flourish (e.g., in Unix's shell languages).
@@ -5173,6 +5173,10 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>
/jen/ , n.,v. Short for generate , used frequently in both spoken and written contexts.
</p>
<H4>gender</H4>
<p>
Currently (2018) about 25% women in commercial software development. FOSS projects are more difficult to assess due to the common use of pseudonyms, but the percentage is probably similar. Before 1970 people writing software code were more like 50% women or above, and this early change in gender composition has now been well documented.
</p>
<H4>gender mender</H4>
<p>
n. [common] A cable connector shell with either two male or two female connectors on it, used to correct the mismatches that result when some loser didn't understand the RS232C specification and the distinction between DTE and DCE. Used esp. for RS-232C parts in either the original D-25 or the IBM PC's bogus D-9 format. Also called gender bender , gender blender , sex changer , and even homosexual adapter; however, there appears to be some confusion as to whether a male homosexual adapter has pins on both sides (is doubly male) or sockets on both sides (connects two males).
@@ -5313,6 +5317,10 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>
n. A hypothetical substance which attracts the index bots of Google.com. In common usage, a web page or web site with high placement in the results of a particular search on Google or frequent placement in the results of a various searches is said to have a lot of google juice or good google juice. Also used to compare web pages or web sites, for example CrackMonkey has more google juice than KPMG. See also juice , kilogoogle.
</p>
<H4>googler</H4>
<p>
A software engineer who works at Google. Overpaid. Possibly overtly sexist. Likely to be a suit and talk like suits. Probably deficient in hacker ethics. Syn for a failed hacker who went to the dark side.
</p>
<H4>gopher</H4>
<p>
n. [obs.] A type of Internet service first floated around 1991 and obsolesced around 1995 by the World Wide Web. Gopher presents a menuing interface to a tree or graph of links; the links can be to documents, runnable programs, or other gopher menus arbitrarily far across the net. Some claim that the gopher software, which was originally developed at the University of Minnesota, was named after the Minnesota Gophers (a sports team). Others claim the word derives from American slang gofer (from go for , dialectal go fer ), one whose job is to run and fetch things. Finally, observe that gophers dig long tunnels, and the idea of tunneling through the net to find information was a defining metaphor for the developers. Probably all three things were true, but with the first two coming first and the gopher-tunnel metaphor serendipitously adding flavor and impetus to the project as it developed out of its concept stage.
@@ -5355,7 +5363,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>2. By extension, the non-data bits in any self-describing format. A GIF file contains, among other things, green bytes describing the packing method for the image. Compare out-of-band , zigamorph , fence (sense 1).</p>
<H4>green card</H4>
<p>
n. [after the IBM System/360 Reference Data card] A summary of an assembly language, even if the color is not green and not a card. Less frequently used now because of the decrease in the use of assembly language. I'll go get my green card so I can check the addressing mode for that instruction. The original green card became a yellow card when the System/370 was introduced, and later a yellow booklet. An anecdote from IBM refers to a scene that took place in a programmers' terminal room at Yorktown in 1978. A luser overheard one of the programmers ask another Do you have a green card? The other grunted and passed the first a thick yellow booklet. At this point the luser turned a delicate shade of olive and rapidly left the room, never to return. In fall 2000 it was reported from Electronic Data Systems that the green card for 370 machines has been a blue-green booklet since 1989.
n. [after the IBM System/360 Reference Data card] A summary of an assembly language, even if the color is not green and not a card. Less frequently used now because of the decrease in the use of assembly language. I'll go get my green card so I can check the addressing mode for that instruction. The original green card became a yellow card when the System/370 was introduced, and later a yellow booklet. In fall 2000 it was reported from Electronic Data Systems that the green card for 370 machines has been a blue-green booklet since 1989.
</p>
<H4>green lightning</H4>
<p>1. Apparently random flashing streaks on the face of 3278-9 terminals while a new symbol set is being downloaded. This hardware bug was left deliberately unfixed, as some genius within IBM suggested it would let the user know that something is happening. That, it certainly does. Later microprocessor-driven IBM color graphics displays were actually programmed to produce green lightning! </p>
@@ -5468,7 +5476,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<H3>H</H3>
<H4>ha ha only serious</H4>
<p>
A phrase (often seen abbreviated as HHOS) that aptly captures the flavor of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to parodies, absurdities, and ironic jokes that are both intended and perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or truths that are constructed on in-joke and self-parody. This lexicon contains many examples of ha-ha-only-serious in both form and content. Indeed, the entirety of hacker culture is often perceived as ha-ha-only-serious by hackers themselves; to take it either too lightly or too seriously marks a person as an outsider, a wannabee , or in larval stage. For further enlightenment on this subject, consult any Zen master. See also hacker humor , and koan.
A phrase (often seen abbreviated as HHOS) that aptly captures the flavor of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to parodies, absurdities, and ironic jokes that are both intended and perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or truths that are constructed on in-joke and self-parody. This lexicon contains many examples of ha-ha-only-serious in both form and content. Indeed, the entirety of hacker culture is often perceived as ha-ha-only-serious by hackers themselves; to take it either too lightly or too seriously marks a person as an outsider, a wannabee, or in larval stage. For further enlightenment on this subject, consult any Zen master. See also hacker humor, and koan.
</p>
<H4>hack</H4>
<p>1. n. Originally, a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well. </p>
@@ -5580,7 +5588,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>hair</H4>
<p>
n. [back-formation from hairy ] The complications that make something hairy. Decoding TECO commands requires a certain amount of hair. Often seen in the phrase infinite hair , which connotes extreme complexity. Also in hairiferous (tending to promote hair growth): GNUMACS elisp encourages lusers to write complex editing modes. Yeah, it's pretty hairiferous all right.
n. [back-formation from hairy ] The complications that make something hairy. Decoding TECO commands requires a certain amount of hair. Often seen in the phrase infinite hair, which connotes extreme complexity. Also in hairiferous (tending to promote hair growth): EMACS elisp is pretty hairiferous all right.
</p>
<H4>hairball</H4>
<p>1. [Fidonet] A large batch of messages that a store-and-forward network is failing to forward when it should. Often used in the phrase Fido coughed up a hairball today , meaning that the stuck messages have just come unstuck, producing a flood of mail where there had previously been drought. </p>
@@ -5756,7 +5764,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>highly</H4>
<p>
adv. [scientific computation] The preferred modifier for overstating an understatement. As in: highly nonoptimal , the worst possible way to do something; highly nontrivial , either impossible or requiring a major research project; highly nonlinear , completely erratic and unpredictable; highly nontechnical , drivel written for luser s, oversimplified to the point of being misleading or incorrect (compare drool-proof paper ). In other computing cultures, postfixing of in the extreme might be preferred.
adv. [scientific computation] The preferred modifier for overstating an understatement. As in: highly nonoptimal, the worst possible way to do something; highly nontrivial, either impossible or requiring a major research project; highly nonlinear, completely erratic and unpredictable. In other computing cultures, postfixing of in the extreme might be preferred.
</p>
<H4>hing</H4>
<p>
@@ -5792,7 +5800,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>holy wars</H4>
<p>
n. [from Usenet , but may predate it; common] n. flame wars over religious issues. The paper by Danny Cohen that popularized the terms big-endian and little-endian in connection with the LSB-first/MSB-first controversy was entitled On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace. Great holy wars of the past have included ITS vs.: Unix , Unix vs.: VMS , BSD Unix vs.: System V, C vs.: Pascal , C vs.: FORTRAN, etc. In the year 2003, popular favorites of the day are KDE vs, GNOME, vim vs. elvis, Linux vs. [Free|Net|Open]BSD. Hardy perennials include EMACS vs.: vi , my personal computer vs.: everyone else's personal computer, ad nauseam. The characteristic that distinguishes holy wars from normal technical disputes is that in a holy war most of the participants spend their time trying to pass off personal value choices and cultural attachments as objective technical evaluations. This happens precisely because in a true holy war, the actual substantive differences between the sides are relatively minor. See also theology.
n. [from Usenet , but may predate it; common] n. flame wars over religious issues. The paper by Danny Cohen that popularized the terms big-endian and little-endian in connection with the LSB-first/MSB-first controversy was entitled On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace. Great holy wars of the past have included ITS vs Unix, Unix vs VMS, BSD Unix vs System V, C vs Rust, Python vs Perl, init vs systemd, vim vs Emacs, etc. The characteristic that distinguishes holy wars from normal technical disputes is that in a holy war most of the participants spend their time trying to pass off personal value choices and cultural attachments as objective technical evaluations. This happens precisely because in a true holy war, the actual substantive differences between the sides are relatively minor. See also theology.
</p>
<H4>home box</H4>
<p>
@@ -6197,11 +6205,11 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
n. [MUD, IRC; very common] When used without qualification this is synonymous with netlag. Curiously, people will often complain I'm really lagged when in fact it is their server or network connection that is lagging.
</p>
<H4>lamer</H4>
<p>1. Synonym for luser , not used much by hackers but common among warez d00dz , crackers, and phreaker s. A person who downloads much, but who never uploads. (Also known as leecher ). Oppose elite. Has the same connotations of self-conscious elitism that use of luser does among hackers. </p>
<p>1. Someone who is not very good at their craft. Perhaps a wannabe. </p>
<p>2. Someone who tries to crack a BBS. </p>
<p>2. Trying but failing at something. "I tried to install this but failed. Is it broken or am I just too lame?". </p>
<p>3. Someone who annoys the sysop or other BBS users for instance, by posting lots of silly messages, uploading virus-ridden software, frequently dropping carrier, etc. Crackers also use it to refer to cracker wannabee s. In phreak culture, a lamer is one who scams codes off others rather than doing cracks or really understanding the fundamental concepts. In warez d00dz culture, where the ability to wave around cracked commercial software within days of (or before) release to the commercial market is much esteemed, the lamer might try to upload garbage or shareware or something incredibly old (old in this context is read as a few years to anything older than 3 days). Lamer is also much used in the IRC world in a similar sense to the above. This term seems to have originated in the Commodore-64 scene in the mid 1980s. It was popularized among Amiga crackers of the mid-1980s by Lamer Exterminator , the most famous and feared Amiga virus ever, which gradually corrupted non-write-protected floppy disks with bad sectors. The bad sectors, when looked at, were overwritten with repetitions of the string LAMER!.</p>
<p>3. A system which is designed or operates in a significantly suboptimal manner. "Microsoft Windows is utterly lame".</p>
<H4>language lawyer</H4>
<p>
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.
@@ -6414,10 +6422,6 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>
interj. A reply to or comment on an undesirable situation. I accidentally deleted all my files! Lose, lose.
</p>
<H4>loser</H4>
<p>
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.
</p>
<H4>losing</H4>
<p>
adj. Said of anything that is or causes a lose or lossage. The compiler is losing badly when I try to use templates.
@@ -6458,10 +6462,6 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>
n. One of the silent majority in an electronic forum; one who posts occasionally or not at all but is known to read the group's postings regularly. This term is not pejorative and indeed is casually used reflexively: Oh, I'm just lurking. Often used in the lurkers , the hypothetical audience for the group's flamage -emitting regulars. When a lurker speaks up for the first time, this is called delurking. The creator of the popular science-fiction TV series Babylon 5 has ties to SF fandom and the hacker culture. In that series, the use of the term lurker for a homeless or displaced person is a conscious reference to the jargon term.
</p>
<H4>luser</H4>
<p>
/loozr/ , n. [common] A user ; esp. one who is also a loser. ( luser and loser are pronounced identically.) This word was coined around 1975 at MIT. Under ITS, when you first walked up to a terminal at MIT and typed Control-Z to get the computer's attention, it printed out some status information, including how many people were already using the computer; it might print 14 users , for example. Someone thought it would be a great joke to patch the system to print 14 losers instead. There ensued a great controversy, as some of the users didn't particularly want to be called losers to their faces every time they used the computer. For a while several hackers struggled covertly, each changing the message behind the back of the others; any time you logged into the computer it was even money whether it would say users or losers. Finally, someone tried the compromise lusers , and it stuck. Later one of the ITS machines supported luser as a request-for-help command. ITS died the death in mid-1990, except as a museum piece; the usage lives on, however, and the term luser is often seen in program comments and on Usenet. Compare mundane , muggle , newbie , chainik.
</p>
<H3>M</H3>
<H4>macdink</H4>
<p>
@@ -6849,7 +6849,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>muggle</H4>
<p>
A non- wizard. Not as disparaging as luser ; implies vague pity rather than contempt. In the universe of Rowling's enormously (and deservedly) popular children's series, muggles and wizards inhabit the same modern world, but each group is ignorant of the commonplaces of the others' existence most muggles are unaware that wizards exist, and wizards (used to magical ways of doing everything) are perplexed and fascinated by muggle artifacts. In retrospect it seems completely inevitable that hackers would adopt this metaphor, and in hacker usage it readily forms compounds such as muggle-friendly. Compare luser , mundane , chainik , newbie.
A non- wizard. Implies vague pity rather than contempt. In the universe of Rowling's popular children's series, muggles and wizards inhabit the same modern world, but each group is ignorant of the commonplaces of the others' existence most muggles are unaware that wizards exist, and wizards (used to magical ways of doing everything) are perplexed and fascinated by muggle artifacts. In retrospect it seems completely inevitable that hackers would adopt this metaphor, and in hacker usage it readily forms compounds such as muggle-friendly. Compare mundane, chainik, newbie, wannabe.
</p>
<H4>multitask</H4>
<p>
@@ -6889,7 +6889,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>munchkin</H4>
<p>
/muhnchkin/ , 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.
/muhnchkin/ , 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.
</p>
<H4>mundane</H4>
<p>1. A person who is not in science fiction fandom. </p>
@@ -6942,7 +6942,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>2. Said of an algorithm that doesn't take advantage of some superior but advanced technique, e.g., the bubble sort. It may imply naivete on the part of the programmer, although there are situations where a naive algorithm is preferred, because it is more important to keep the code comprehensible than to go for maximum performance. I know the linear search is naive, but in this case the list typically only has half a dozen items. Compare brute force.</p>
<H4>naive user</H4>
<p>
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.
n. Tends to imply someone who is ignorant mainly owing to inexperience.
</p>
<H4>nakamoto scheme</H4>
<p>
@@ -7082,7 +7082,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>newbie</H4>
<p>
/n[y]oobee/ , n. [very common; orig. from British public-school and military slang variant of new boy ] A Usenet neophyte. This term surfaced in the newsgroup talk.bizarre but is now in wide use (the combination clueless newbie is especially common). Criteria for being considered a newbie vary wildly; a person can be called a newbie in one newsgroup while remaining a respected regular in another. The label newbie is sometimes applied as a serious insult to a person who has been around Usenet for a long time but who carefully hides all evidence of having a clue. See B1FF ; see also gnubie. Compare chainik , luser.
/n[y]oobee/ , n. A new user of some system. This term surfaced in the Usenet newsgroup talk.bizarre but is now in wide use (the combination clueless newbie is especially common). Criteria for being considered a newbie vary wildly; a person can be called a newbie in one newsgroup while remaining a respected regular in another. The label newbie is sometimes applied as a serious insult to a person who has been around Usenet for a long time but who carefully hides all evidence of having a clue. See B1FF; see also gnubie. Compare chainik.
</p>
<H4>newgroup wars</H4>
<p>
@@ -7352,7 +7352,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>padded cell</H4>
<p>
n. Where you put lusers so they can't hurt anything. A program that limits a luser to a carefully restricted subset of the capabilities of the host system (for example, the rsh (1) utility on USG Unix). Note that this is different from an iron box because it is overt and not aimed at enforcing security so much as protecting others (and the luser) from the consequences of the luser's boundless naivete (see naive ). Also padded cell environment.
Also known as jailware. Proprietary software is often a padded cell. A padded cell may be nice in appearance. It may have attractive features and some convenience factor, but it still robs the user of essential freedoms. Much Apple software is like this. High on bling, low on freedom.
</p>
<H4>page in</H4>
<p>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 ! </p>
@@ -7642,10 +7642,6 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>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. </p>
<p>3. [all-caps, as POP ] Point of Presence, a bank of dial-in lines allowing customers to make (local) calls into an ISP. This is borderline techspeak.</p>
<H4>poser</H4>
<p>
n. [from French poseur ] A wannabee ; not hacker slang, but used among crackers, phreaks and warez d00dz. Not as negative as lamer or leech. Probably derives from a similar usage among punk-rockers and metalheads, putting down those who talk the talk but don't walk the walk.
</p>
<H4>post</H4>
<p>
v. To send a message to a mailing list or newsgroup.
@@ -7804,7 +7800,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>pseudosuit</H4>
<p>
/soodohs[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.
/soodohs[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 googler.
</p>
<H4>psychedelicware</H4>
<p>
@@ -8002,7 +7998,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>read-only user</H4>
<p>
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.
Someone who operates in consumer mode only. They never create anything, only "consume" content. See twink, terminal junkie, lurker.
</p>
<H4>real</H4>
<p>
@@ -8027,7 +8023,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<H4>real user</H4>
<p>1. A commercial user. One who is paying real money for his computer usage. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<H4>reality check</H4>
<p>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. </p>
@@ -8086,7 +8082,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>religious issues</H4>
<p>
n. Questions which seemingly cannot be raised without touching off holy wars , such as What is the best operating system (or editor, language, architecture, shell, mail reader, news reader)? , What about that Heinlein guy, eh? , What should we add to the new Jargon File? See holy wars ; see also theology , bigot , and compare rathole. This term is a prime example of ha ha only serious. People actually develop the most amazing and religiously intense attachments to their tools, even when the tools are intangible. The most constructive thing one can do when one stumbles into the crossfire is mumble Get a life! and leave unless, of course, one's own unassailably rational and obviously correct choices are being slammed.
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)? See holy wars; see also theology , bigot , and compare rathole. People actually develop the most amazing and religiously intense attachments to their tools, even when the tools are intangible.
</p>
<H4>replicator</H4>
<p>
@@ -8148,10 +8144,6 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>
n. A Dungeons-and-Dragons-like game using character graphics, written under BSD Unix and subsequently ported to other Unix systems. The original BSD curses (3) screen-handling package was hacked together by Ken Arnold primarily to support games, and the development of rogue (6) popularized its use; it has since become one of Unix's most important and heavily used application libraries. Nethack, Omega, Larn, Angband, and an entire subgenre of computer dungeon games (all known as roguelikes ) all took off from the inspiration provided by rogue (6) ; the popular Windows game Diablo, though graphics-intensive, has very similar play logic. See also nethack , moria , Angband. 2.
</p>
<H4>room-temperature IQ</H4>
<p>
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.
</p>
<H4>root</H4>
<p>1. [Unix] The superuser account (with user name root ) that ignores permission bits, user number 0 on a Unix system. The term avatar is also used. </p>
@@ -8754,7 +8746,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<H4>spam</H4>
<p>1. To crash a program by overrunning a fixed-size buffer with excessively large input data. See also buffer overflow , overrun screw , smash the stack. </p>
<p>2. To cause a newsgroup to be flooded with irrelevant or inappropriate messages. You can spam a newsgroup with as little as one well- (or ill-) planned message (e.g. asking What do you think of abortion? on soc.women ). This is often done with cross-post ing (e.g. any message which is cross-posted to alt.rush-limbaugh and alt.politics.homosexuality will almost inevitably spam both groups). This overlaps with troll behavior; the latter more specific term has become more common. </p>
<p>2. To cause a newsgroup to be flooded with irrelevant or inappropriate messages. This overlaps with troll behavior; the latter more specific term has become more common. </p>
<p>3. To send many identical or nearly-identical messages separately to a large number of Usenet newsgroups. This is more specifically called ECP , Excessive Cross-Posting. This is one sure way to infuriate nearly everyone on the Net. See also velveeta and jello. </p>
@@ -8762,7 +8754,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>5. To mass-mail unrequested identical or nearly-identical email messages, particularly those containing advertising. Especially used when the mail addresses have been culled from network traffic or databases without the consent of the recipients. Synonyms include UCE , UBE. As a noun, spam refers to the messages so sent. </p>
<p>6. Any large, annoying, quantity of output. For instance, someone on IRC who walks away from their screen and comes back to find 200 lines of text might say Oh no, spam. The later definitions have become much more prevalent as the Internet has opened up to non-techies, and to most people senses 3 4 and 5 are now primary. All three behaviors are considered abuse of the net, and are almost universally grounds for termination of the originator's email account or network connection. In these senses the term spam has gone mainstream, though without its original sense or folkloric freight there is apparently a widespread myth among lusers that spamming is what happens when you dump cans of Spam into a revolving fan. Hormel, the makers of Spam, have published a surprisingly enlightened position statement on the Internet usage.</p>
<p>6. Any large, annoying, quantity of output. For instance, someone on IRC who walks away from their screen and comes back to find 200 lines of text might say Oh no, spam. The later definitions have become much more prevalent as the Internet has opened up to non-techies, and to most people senses 3 4 and 5 are now primary. All three behaviors are considered abuse of the net, and are almost universally grounds for termination of the originator's email account or network connection. Hormel, the makers of Spam, published a surprisingly enlightened position statement on the Internet usage.</p>
<H4>spam bait</H4>
<p>
n. Email addresses included in, or comprising the entirety of, a Usenet message so that spammers mining a newsgroup with an address harvester will collect them. These addresses can be people who have offended or annoyed the poster, or who are included so that a spammer will spam an official, thereby causing himself trouble. One particularly effective form of spam bait is the address of a teergrube.
@@ -9248,7 +9240,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>2. Technical fine points of an abstruse nature, esp. those where the resolution is of theoretical interest but is relatively marginal with respect to actual use of a design or system. Used esp. around software issues with a heavy AI or language-design component, such as the smart-data vs. smart-programs dispute in AI.</p>
<H4>theory</H4>
<p>
n. The consensus, idea, plan, story, or set of rules that is currently being used to inform a behavior. This usage is a generalization and (deliberate) abuse of the technical meaning. What's the theory on fixing this TECO loss? What's the theory on dinner tonight? ( Chinatown, I guess. ) What's the current theory on letting lusers on during the day? The theory behind this change is to fix the following well-known screw....
n. The consensus, idea, plan, story, or set of rules that is currently being used to inform a behavior. This usage is a generalization and (deliberate) abuse of the technical meaning. What's the theory on fixing this TECO loss? What's the theory on dinner tonight? (Chinatown, I guess.) What's the current theory on letting users loose on this new feature? The theory behind this change is to fix the following well-known screw.
</p>
<H4>thinko</H4>
<p>
@@ -9405,9 +9397,9 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
n. Syn. forum.
</p>
<H4>tourist</H4>
<p>1. [ITS] A guest on the system, especially one who generally logs in over a network from a remote location for comm mode , email, games, and other trivial purposes. One step below luser. ITS hackers often used to spell this turist , perhaps by some sort of tenuous analogy with luser (this usage may also have expressed the ITS culture's penchant for six-letterisms, and/or been some sort of tribute to Alan Turing). Compare twink , lurker , read-only user. </p>
<p>1. [ITS] A guest on the system, especially one who generally logs in over a network from a remote location for comm mode, email, games, and other common purposes. ITS hackers often used to spell this turist, perhaps by some sort of tenuous analogy with user (this usage may also have expressed the ITS culture's penchant for six-letterisms, and/or been some sort of tribute to Alan Turing). Compare twink, lurker, read-only user. </p>
<p>2. [IRC] An IRC user who goes from channel to channel without saying anything; see channel hopping.</p>
<p>2. [IRC] A chat system user who goes from channel to channel without saying anything; see channel hopping.</p>
<H4>tourist information</H4>
<p>
n. Information in an on-line display that is not immediately useful, but contributes to a viewer's gestalt of what's going on with the software or hardware behind it. Whether a given piece of info falls in this category depends partly on what the user is looking for at any given time. The bytes free information at the bottom of an MS-DOS or Windows dir display is tourist information; so (most of the time) is the TIME information in a Unix ps (1) display.
@@ -9474,7 +9466,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>4. Any problem one has already solved (some claim that hackish trivial usually evaluates to I've seen it before ). Hackers' notions of triviality may be quite at variance with those of non-hackers. See nontrivial , uninteresting. The physicist Richard Feynman, who had the hacker nature to an amazing degree (see his essay Los Alamos From Below in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! ), defined trivial theorem as one that has already been proved.</p>
<H4>troff</H4>
<p>
/Trof/ , /trof/ , n. [Unix] The gray eminence of Unix text processing; a formatting and phototypesetting program, written originally in PDP-11 assembler and then in barely-structured early C by the late Joseph Ossanna, modeled after the earlier ROFF which was in turn modeled after the Multics and CTSS program RUNOFF by Jerome Saltzer ( that name came from the expression to run off a copy ). A companion program, nroff , formats output for terminals and line printers. In 1979, Brian Kernighan modified troff so that it could drive phototypesetters other than the Graphic Systems CAT. His paper describing that work ( A Typesetter-independent troff, AT T CSTR #97) explains troff's durability. After discussing the program's obvious deficiencies a rebarbative input syntax, mysterious and undocumented properties in some areas, and a voracious appetite for computer resources and noting the ugliness and extreme hairiness of the code and internals, Kernighan concludes: None of these remarks should be taken as denigrating Ossanna's accomplishment with TROFF. It has proven a remarkably robust tool, taking unbelievable abuse from a variety of preprocessors and being forced into uses that were never conceived of in the original design, all with considerable grace under fire. The success of TeX and desktop publishing systems have reduced troff 's relative importance, but this tribute perfectly captures the strengths that secured troff a place in hacker folklore; indeed, it could be taken more generally as an indication of those qualities of good programs that, in the long run, hackers most admire.
/Trof/ , /trof/ , n. [Unix] The gray eminence of Unix text processing; a formatting and phototypesetting program, written originally in PDP-11 assembler and then in barely-structured early C by the late Joseph Ossanna, modeled after the earlier ROFF which was in turn modeled after the Multics and CTSS program RUNOFF by Jerome Saltzer ( that name came from the expression to run off a copy ). A companion program, nroff , formats output for terminals and line printers. In 1979, Brian Kernighan modified troff so that it could drive phototypesetters other than the Graphic Systems CAT. His paper describing that work (A Typesetter-independent troff, AT&T CSTR #97) explains troff's durability. After discussing the program's obvious deficiencies a rebarbative input syntax, mysterious and undocumented properties in some areas, and a voracious appetite for computer resources and noting the ugliness and extreme hairiness of the code and internals, Kernighan concludes: None of these remarks should be taken as denigrating Ossanna's accomplishment with TROFF. It has proven a remarkably robust tool, taking unbelievable abuse from a variety of preprocessors and being forced into uses that were never conceived of in the original design, all with considerable grace under fire. The success of TeX and desktop publishing systems have reduced troff 's relative importance, but this tribute perfectly captures the strengths that secured troff a place in hacker folklore; indeed, it could be taken more generally as an indication of those qualities of good programs that, in the long run, hackers most admire.
</p>
<H4>troglodyte</H4>
<p>1. A hacker who never leaves his cubicle. The term gnoll (from Dungeons Dragons) is also reported. </p>
@@ -9490,7 +9482,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>tron</H4>
<p>
v. [NRL, CMU; prob. fr. the movie Tron ] To become inaccessible except via email or talk (1) , especially when one is normally available via telephone or in person. Frequently used in the past tense, as in: Ran seems to have tronned on us this week or Gee, Ran, glad you were able to un-tron yourself. One may also speak of tron mode ; compare spod. Note that many dialects of BASIC have a TRON/TROFF command pair that enables/disables line number tracing; this has no obvious relationship to the slang usage.
v. [NRL, CMU; prob. fr. the movie Tron ] To become inaccessible except via email or talk (1) , especially when one is normally available via telephone or in person. Frequently used in the past tense, as in: Ran seems to have tronned on us this week or Gee, Ran, glad you were able to un-tron yourself. One may also speak of tron mode. Note that many dialects of BASIC have a TRON/TROFF command pair that enables/disables line number tracing; this has no obvious relationship to the slang usage.
</p>
<H4>troughie</H4>
<p>
@@ -9532,7 +9524,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>turist</H4>
<p>
/toorist/ , n. Var. sp. of tourist , q.v. Also in adjectival form, turistic. Poss. influenced by luser and Turing.
/toorist/ , n. Var. sp. of tourist , q.v. Also in adjectival form, turistic. Poss. influenced by user and Turing.
</p>
<H4>tweak</H4>
<p>1. To change slightly, usually in reference to a value. Also used synonymously with twiddle. If a program is almost correct, rather than figure out the precise problem you might just keep tweaking it until it works. See frobnicate and fudge factor ; also see shotgun debugging. </p>
@@ -9654,11 +9646,9 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
n. See munchkin.
</p>
<H4>user</H4>
<p>1. Someone doing real work with the computer, using it as a means rather than an end. Someone who pays to use a computer. See real user. </p>
<p>2. A programmer who will believe anything you tell him. One who asks silly questions. [GLS observes: This is slightly unfair. It is true that users ask questions (of necessity). Sometimes they are thoughtful or deep. Very often they are annoying or downright stupid, apparently because the user failed to think for two seconds or look in the documentation before bothering the maintainer.] See luser. </p>
<p>3. Someone who uses a program from the outside, however skillfully, without getting into the internals of the program. One who reports bugs instead of just going ahead and fixing them. The general theory behind this term is that there are two classes of people who work with a program: there are implementors (hackers) and luser s. The users are looked down on by hackers to some extent because they don't understand the full ramifications of the system in all its glory. (The few users who do are known as real winners. ) The term is a relative one: a skilled hacker may be a user with respect to some program he himself does not hack. A LISP hacker might be one who maintains LISP or one who uses LISP (but with the skill of a hacker). A LISP user is one who uses LISP, whether skillfully or not. Thus there is some overlap between the two terms; the subtle distinctions must be resolved by context.</p>
<p>
n. Someone who uses a computer system. Within the conventional client/server paradigm there are two classes of people: those who administrate the system and those who use it. The term user is very conventional, going back to the early days of time-sharing mainframes, but may be controversial in some contexts due to having other negative associations, such as "drug user" or someone who exploits other people for cynical and self-serving reasons, as in "he was just a user". A possible alternative to user is "member".
</p>
<H4>user-friendly</H4>
<p>
adj. Programmer-hostile. Generally used by hackers in a critical tone, to describe systems that hold the user's hand so obsessively that they make it painful for the more experienced and knowledgeable to get any work done. See menuitis , drool-proof paper , Macintrash , user-obsequious.
@@ -9774,7 +9764,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>virus</H4>
<p>
n. [from the obvious analogy with biological viruses, via SF] A cracker program that searches out other programs and infects them by embedding a copy of itself in them, so that they become Trojan horse s. When these programs are executed, the embedded virus is executed too, thus propagating the infection. This normally happens invisibly to the user. Unlike a worm , a virus cannot infect other computers without assistance. It is propagated by vectors such as humans trading programs with their friends (see SEX ). The virus may do nothing but propagate itself and then allow the program to run normally. Usually, however, after propagating silently for a while, it starts doing things like writing cute messages on the terminal or playing strange tricks with the display (some viruses include nice display hack s). Many nasty viruses, written by particularly perversely minded cracker s, do irreversible damage, like nuking all the user's files. In the 1990s, viruses became a serious problem, especially among Windows users; the lack of security on these machines enables viruses to spread easily, even infecting the operating system (Unix machines, by contrast, are immune to such attacks). The production of special anti-virus software has become an industry, and a number of exaggerated media reports have caused outbreaks of near hysteria among users; many lusers tend to blame everything that doesn't work as they had expected on virus attacks. Accordingly, this sense of virus has passed not only into techspeak but into also popular usage (where it is often incorrectly used to denote a worm or even a Trojan horse ). See phage ; compare back door ; see also Unix conspiracy.
n. [from the obvious analogy with biological viruses, via SF] A cracker program that searches out other programs and infects them by embedding a copy of itself in them, so that they become Trojan horse s. When these programs are executed, the embedded virus is executed too, thus propagating the infection. This normally happens invisibly to the user. Unlike a worm , a virus cannot infect other computers without assistance. It is propagated by vectors such as humans trading programs with their friends (see SEX ). The virus may do nothing but propagate itself and then allow the program to run normally. Usually, however, after propagating silently for a while, it starts doing things like writing cute messages on the terminal or playing strange tricks with the display (some viruses include nice display hack s). Many nasty viruses, written by particularly perversely minded cracker s, do irreversible damage, like nuking all the user's files. In the 1990s, viruses became a serious problem, especially among Windows users; the lack of security on these machines enables viruses to spread easily, even infecting the operating system (Unix machines, by contrast, are immune to such attacks). The production of special anti-virus software has become an industry, and a number of exaggerated media reports have caused outbreaks of near hysteria among users; many lusers tend to blame everything that doesn't work as they had expected on virus attacks. See phage; compare back door; see also Unix conspiracy.
</p>
<H4>visionary</H4>
<p>1. One who hacks vision, in the sense of an Artificial Intelligence researcher working on the problem of getting computers to see things using TV cameras. (There isn't any problem in sending information from a TV camera to a computer. The problem is, how can the computer be programmed to make use of the camera information? See SMOP , AI-complete. ) </p>
@@ -9857,7 +9847,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
</p>
<H4>wannabee</H4>
<p>
/won'@bee/ , n. (also, more plausibly, spelled wannabe ) [from a term recently used to describe Madonna fans who dress, talk, and act like their idol; prob.: originally from biker slang] A would-be hacker. The connotations of this term differ sharply depending on the age and exposure of the subject. Used of a person who is in or might be entering larval stage , it is semi-approving; such wannabees can be annoying but most hackers remember that they, too, were once such creatures. When used of any professional programmer, CS academic, writer, or suit , it is derogatory, implying that said person is trying to cuddle up to the hacker mystique but doesn't, fundamentally, have a prayer of understanding what it is all about. Overuse of terms from this lexicon is often an indication of the wannabee nature. Compare newbie. Historical note: The wannabee phenomenon has a slightly different flavor now (1993) than it did ten or fifteen years ago. When the people who are now hackerdom's tribal elders were in larval stage , the process of becoming a hacker was largely unconscious and unaffected by models known in popular culture communities formed spontaneously around people who, as individuals , felt irresistibly drawn to do hackerly things, and what wannabees experienced was a fairly pure, skill-focused desire to become similarly wizardly. Those days of innocence are gone forever; society's adaptation to the advent of the microcomputer after 1980 included the elevation of the hacker as a new kind of folk hero, and the result is that some people semi-consciously set out to be hackers and borrow hackish prestige by fitting the popular image of hackers. Fortunately, to do this really well, one has to actually become a wizard. Nevertheless, old-time hackers tend to share a poorly articulated disquiet about the change; among other things, it gives them mixed feelings about the effects of public compendia of lore like this one.
/won'@bee/ , n. Someone who wants to be a hacker. A novice or rookie.
</p>
<H4>war dialer</H4>
<p>
@@ -10125,10 +10115,6 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 02:14PM UTC
<p>1. [TMRC] Storage space for equipment. </p>
<p>2. [proposed] A variety of hard-shell equipment case with heavy interior padding and/or shaped carrier cutouts in a foam-rubber matrix; mundanely called a flight case. Used for delicate test equipment, electronics, and musical instruments.</p>
<H4>womble</H4>
<p>
n. [Unisys UK: from British puppet-show characters] A user who has great difficulty in communicating their requirements and/or in using the resulting software. Extreme case of luser. An especially senior or high-ranking womble is referred to as Great-Uncle Bulgaria. Compare Aunt Tillie.
</p>
<H4>wonky</H4>
<p>
/wongkee/ , adj. [from Australian slang] Yet another approximate synonym for broken. Specifically connotes a malfunction that produces behavior seen as crazy, humorous, or amusingly perverse. That was the day the printer's font logic went wonky and everybody's listings came out in Tengwar. Also in wonked out. See funky , demented , bozotic.