Common

Once upon a time, the computer company most hackers loved to hate; today, the one they are most puzzled to find themselves liking.
From hackerdom's beginnings in the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, IBM was regarded with active loathing. Common expansions of the corporate name included: Inferior But Marketable; It's Better Manually; Insidious Black Magic; It's Been Malfunctioning; Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a near-{infinite} number of even less complimentary expansions (see also {fear and loathing}). What galled hackers about most IBM machines above the PC level wasn't so much that they were underpowered and overpriced (though that counted against them), but that the designs were incredibly archaic, {crufty}, and {elephantine} ... and you couldn't fix them -- source code was locked up tight, and programming tools were expensive, hard to find, and bletcherous to use once you had found them.
We didn't know how good we had it back then. In the 1980s IBM had its own troubles with Microsoft and lost its strategic way, receding from the hacker community's view. Then, in the 1990s, Microsoft became more noxious and omnipresent than IBM had ever been.
In the late 1990s IBM re-invented itself as a services company, began to release open-source software through its AlphaWorks group, and began shipping {Linux} systems and building ties to the Linux community. To the astonishment of all parties, IBM emerged as a staunch friend of the hacker community and {open source} development, with ironic consequences noted in the {FUD} entry.
This lexicon includes a number of entries attributed to `IBM'; these derive from some rampantly unofficial jargon lists circulated within IBM's formerly beleaguered hacker underground.

Blue Glue

[IBM; obs.] IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture), an incredibly {losing} and {bletcherous} communications protocol once widely favored at commercial shops that didn't know any better (like other proprietary networking protocols, it became obsolete and effectively disappeared after the Internet explosion c.1994). The official IBM definition is "that which binds blue boxes together." See {fear and loathing}. It may not be irrelevant that Blue Glue is the trade name of a 3M product that is commonly used to hold down the carpet squares to the removable panel floors common in {dinosaur pen}s. A correspondent at U. Minn. reports that the CS department there has about 80 bottles of the stuff hanging about, so they often refer to any messy work to be done as using the blue glue.

Marcadores: Common, IBM, Internet, Microsoft

# 5/26/2009 08:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

trap

n. A program interrupt, usually an interrupt caused by some exceptional situation in the user program. In most cases, the OS performs some action, then returns control to the program.
vi. To cause a trap. "These instructions trap to the monitor." Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the trap. "The monitor traps all input/output instructions."
This term is associated with assembler programming (interrupt or exception is more common among {HLL} programmers) and appears to be fading into history among programmers as the role of assembler continues to shrink. However, it is still important to computer architects and systems hackers (see {system}, sense 1), who use it to distinguish deterministically repeatable exceptions from timing-dependent ones (such as I/O interrupts).

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Marcadores: Assembly, Common, Computer, Languages, Programming, Trap

# 5/23/2009 12:01:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

virtual

[via the technical term virtual memory, prob.: from the term virtual image in optics]

Common alternative to {logical}; often used to refer to the artificial objects (like addressable virtual memory larger than physical memory) simulated by a computer system as a convenient way to manage access to shared resources.
Simulated; performing the functions of something that isn't really there. An imaginative child's doll may be a virtual playmate. Oppose {real}.

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Marcadores: Common, Components, Computer, Hardware, Memory, Optics

# 5/20/2009 01:30:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

PFY

[Usenet; common, originally from the {BOFH} mythos] Abbreviation for Pimply-Faced Youth. A {BOFH} in training, esp. one apprenticed to an elder BOFH aged in evil.

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Marcadores: Abbreviation, Common, Etiquette, FAQs, History, Netherlands, Newsgroups, Usenet

# 5/19/2009 08:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

asbestos

[common] Used as a modifier to anything intended to protect one from {flame}s; also in other highly {flame}-suggestive usages. See, for example, {asbestos longjohns} and {asbestos cork award}.

Marcadores: Common

# 5/19/2009 12:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

bit twiddling

[very common]

(pejorative) An exercise in tuning (see {tune}) in which incredible amounts of time and effort go to produce little noticeable improvement, often with the result that the code becomes incomprehensible.
Aimless small modification to a program, esp. for some pointless goal.
Approx. syn. for {bit bashing}; esp. used for the act of frobbing the device control register of a peripheral in an attempt to get it back to a known state.

Marcadores: Code, Common

# 5/19/2009 09:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

blog

[common] Short for weblog, an on-line web-zine or diary (usually with facilities for reader comments and discussion threads) made accessible through the World Wide Web. This term is widespread and readily forms derivatives, of which the best known may be {blogosphere}.

Marcadores: Common

# 5/19/2009 08:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

channel hopping

[common; IRC, GEnie] To rapidly switch channels on {IRC}, or a GEnie chat board, just as a social butterfly might hop from one group to another at a party. This term may derive from the TV watcher's idiom, channel surfing.

Marcadores: Common

# 5/19/2009 03:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

delta

[techspeak] A quantitative change, especially a small or incremental one (this use is general in physics and engineering). "I just doubled the speed of my program!" "What was the delta on program size?" "About 30 percent." (He doubled the speed of his program, but increased its size by only 30 percent.)
[Unix] A {diff}, especially a {diff} stored under the set of version-control tools called SCCS (Source Code Control System) or RCS (Revision Control System).
n. A small quantity, but not as small as {epsilon}. The jargon usage of {delta} and {epsilon} stems from the traditional use of these letters in mathematics for very small numerical quantities, particularly in `epsilon-delta' proofs in limit theory (as in the differential calculus). The term {delta} is often used, once {epsilon} has been mentioned, to mean a quantity that is slightly bigger than {epsilon} but still very small. "The cost isn't epsilon, but it's delta" means that the cost isn't totally negligible, but it is nevertheless very small. Common constructions include within delta of --, within epsilon of --: that is, `close to' and `even closer to'.

Marcadores: Code, Common, Source

# 5/18/2009 08:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

dub dub dub

[common] Spoken-only shorthand for the "www" (double-u double-u double-u) in many web host names. Nothing to do with the style of reggae music called `dub'.

Marcadores: Common, Music

# 5/18/2009 05:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

fall through

(n. fallthrough, var.: fall-through)

To exit a loop by exhaustion, i.e., by having fulfilled its exit condition rather than via a break or exception condition that exits from the middle of it. This usage appears to be really old, dating from the 1940s and 1950s.
To fail a test that would have passed control to a subroutine or some other distant portion of code.
In C, `fall-through' occurs when the flow of execution in a switch statement reaches a case label other than by jumping there from the switch header, passing a point where one would normally expect to find a break. A trivial example:
switch (color) { case GREEN: do_green(); break; case PINK: do_pink(); /* FALL THROUGH */ case RED: do_red(); break; default: do_blue(); break; }

The variant spelling /* FALL THRU */ is also common.

The effect of the above code is to do_green() when color is GREEN, do_red() when color is RED, do_blue() on any other color other than PINK, and (and this is the important part) do_pink() and then do_red() when color is PINK. Fall-through is {considered harmful} by some, though there are contexts (such as the coding of state machines) in which it is natural; it is generally considered good practice to include a comment highlighting the fall-through where one would normally expect a break. See also {Duff's device}.

Marcadores: Code, Common

# 5/18/2009 03:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

flush

[common] To delete something, usually superfluous, or to abort an operation. "All that nonsense has been flushed."
[Unix/C] To force buffered I/O to disk, as with an fflush(3) call. This is not an abort or deletion as in sense 1, but a demand for early completion!
To leave at the end of a day's work (as opposed to leaving for a meal). "I'm going to flush now." "Time to flush."
To exclude someone from an activity, or to ignore a person.
`Flush' was standard ITS terminology for aborting an output operation; one spoke of the text that would have been printed, but was not, as having been flushed. It is speculated that this term arose from a vivid image of flushing unwanted characters by hosing down the internal output buffer, washing the characters away before they could be printed. The Unix/C usage, on the other hand, was propagated by the fflush(3) call in C's standard I/O library (though it is reported to have been in use among BLISS programmers at {DEC} and on Honeywell and IBM machines as far back as 1965). Unix/C hackers found the ITS usage confusing, and vice versa.

[crunchly-5678.png]

Crunchly gets {flush}ed.

(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-05-01. The previous cartoon was 76-02-20:2.)

Marcadores: Common, IBM

# 5/18/2009 12:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

golden

[prob.: from folklore's `golden egg'] When used to describe a magnetic medium (e.g., golden disk, golden tape), describes one containing a tested, up-to-spec, ready-to-ship software version. Compare {platinum-iridium}. One may also "go gold", which is the act of releasing a golden version. The gold color of many CDROMs is a coincidence; this term was well established a decade before CDROM distribution become common in the mid-1990s.

Marcadores: Common, Software

# 5/18/2009 08:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

hack on

[very common] To {hack}; implies that the subject is some pre-existing hunk of code that one is evolving, as opposed to something one might {hack up}.

Marcadores: Code, Common

# 5/18/2009 06:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

hop

n. [common] One file transmission in a series required to get a file from point A to point B on a store-and-forward network. On such networks (including the old UUCP network and and {FidoNet}), an important inter-machine metric is the number of hops in the shortest path between them, which can be more significant than their geographical separation. See {bang path}.
v. [rare] To log in to a remote machine, esp. via rlogin or telnet. "I'll hop over to foovax to FTP that."

Marcadores: Common

# 5/18/2009 03:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

shim

A small piece of data inserted in order to achieve a desired memory alignment or other addressing property. For example, the {PDP-11} Unix linker, in split I&D (instructions and data) mode, inserts a two-byte shim at location 0 in data space so that no data object will have an address of 0 (and be confused with the C null pointer). See also {loose bytes}.
A type of small transparent image inserted into HTML documents by certain WYSIWYG HTML editors, used to set the spacing of elements meant to have a fixed positioning within a TABLE or DIVision. Hackers who work on the HTML code of such pages afterwards invariably curse these for their crocky dependence on the particular spacing of original image file, the editor that generated them, and the version of the browser used to view them. Worse, they are a poorly designed {kludge} which the advent of Cascading Style Sheets makes wholly unnecessary; Any fool can plainly see that use of borders, layers and positioned elements is the Right Thing (or would be if adequate support for CSS were more common).

Marcadores: Code, Common, Memory

# 5/17/2009 01:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

surf

[from the `surf' idiom for rapidly flipping TV channels] To traverse the Internet in search of interesting stuff, used esp. if one is doing so with a World Wide Web browser. It is also common to speak of surfing in to a particular resource.

Hackers adopted this term early, but many have stopped using it since it went completely mainstream around 1995. The passive, couch-potato connotations that go with TV channel surfing were never pleasant, and hearing non-hackers wax enthusiastic about "surfing the net" tends to make hackers feel a bit as though their home is being overrun by ignorami.

Marcadores: Common, Internet

# 5/16/2009 07:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

tarball

[very common; prob. based on the "tar baby" in the Uncle Remus folk tales] An archive, created with the Unix tar(1) utility, containing myriad related files. "Here, I'll just ftp you a tarball of the whole project." Tarballs have been the standard way to ship around source-code distributions since the mid-1980s; in retrospect it seems odd that this term did not enter common usage until the late 1990s.

Marcadores: Code, Common, Source

# 5/16/2009 06:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

trash

To destroy the contents of (said of a data structure). The most common of the family of near-synonyms including {mung}, {mangle}, {scribble}, and {roach}.

Marcadores: Common

# 5/16/2009 03:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

userland

Image via Wikipedia

userland:

Anywhere outside the kernel. "That code belongs in userland." This term has been in common use among Unix kernel hackers since at least 1985, and may have have originated in that community. The earliest sighting was reported from the usenet group net.unix-wizards.

-fu

[common; generalized from kung-fu] Combining form denoting expert practice of a skill. "That's going to take some serious code-fu." First sighted in connection with the GIMP's remote-scripting facility, script-fu, in 1998.

Marcadores: Code, Common

# 5/16/2009 07:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

Blue Screen of Death

[common] This term is closely related to the older {Black Screen of Death} but much more common (many non-hackers have picked it up). Due to the extreme fragility and bugginess of Microsoft Windows, misbehaving applications can readily crash the OS (and the OS sometimes crashes itself spontaneously). The Blue Screen of Death, sometimes decorated with hex error codes, is what you get when this happens. (Commonly abbreviated {BSOD}.) The following entry from the Salon Haiku Contest, seems to have predated popular use of the term:

Windows NT crashed. I am the Blue Screen of Death No one hears your screams.

Marcadores: Abbreviation, Code, Common, Microsoft

# 5/16/2009 04:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

DMZ

[common] Literally, De-Militarized Zone. Figuratively, the portion of a private network that is visible through the network's firewalls (see {firewall machine}). Coined in the late 1990s as jargon, this term is now borderline techspeak.

Marcadores: Common

# 5/16/2009 02:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

PHB

[Usenet; common; rarely spoken] Abbreviation, "Pointy-Haired Boss". From the {Dilbert} character, the archetypal halfwitted middle-{management} type. See also {pointy-haired}.

Marcadores: Abbreviation, Common, Newsgroups, Usenet

# 5/15/2009 04:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

SIG

(also common as a prefix in combining forms) A Special Interest Group, in one of several technical areas, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery; well-known ones include SIGPLAN (the Special Interest Group on Programming Languages), SIGARCH (the Special Interest Group for Computer Architecture) and SIGGRAPH (the Special Interest Group for Computer Graphics). Hackers, not surprisingly, like to overextend this naming convention to less formal associations like SIGBEER (at ACM conferences) and SIGFOOD (at University of Illinois).

Marcadores: Common, Computer, Languages

# 5/15/2009 02:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

TANSTAAFL

[acronym, from Robert Heinlein's classic SF novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.] "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch", often invoked when someone is balking at the prospect of using an unpleasantly {heavyweight} technique, or at the poor quality of some piece of software, or at the {signal-to-noise ratio} of unmoderated Usenet newsgroups. "What? Don't tell me I have to implement a database back end to get my address book program to work!" "Well, TANSTAAFL you know." This phrase owes some of its popularity to the high concentration of science-fiction fans and political libertarians in hackerdom (see Appendix B for discussion).

Outside hacker circles the variant TINSTAAFL ("There is No Such Thing...") is apparently more common, and can be traced back to 1952 in the writings of ethicist Alvin Hansen. TANSTAAFL may well have arisen from it by mutation.

Marcadores: Acronym, Common, Newsgroups, Software, Usenet

# 5/15/2009 01:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

astroturfing

The use of paid shills to create the impression of a popular movement, through means like letters to newspapers from soi-disant `concerned citizens', paid opinion pieces, and the formation of grass-roots lobbying groups that are actually funded by a PR group (AstroTurf is fake grass; hence the term). See also {sock puppet}, {tentacle}.
What an individual posting to a public forum under an assumed name is said to be doing.
This term became common among hackers after it came to light in early 1998 that Microsoft had attempted to use such tactics to forestall the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust action against the company. The maneuver backfired horribly, angering a number of state attorneys-general enough to induce them to go public with plans to join the Federal suit. It also set anybody defending Microsoft on the net for the accusation "You're just astroturfing!".

bandwidth

Image via Wikipedia

bandwidth:

[common] Used by hackers (in a generalization of its technical meaning) as the volume of information per unit time that a computer, person, or transmission medium can handle. "Those are amazing graphics, but I missed some of the detail -- not enough bandwidth, I guess." Compare {low-bandwidth}; see also {brainwidth}. This generalized usage began to go mainstream after the Internet, population explosion of 1993-1994.
Attention span.
On {Usenet}, a measure of network capacity that is often wasted by people complaining about how items posted by others are a waste of bandwidth.

brain-damaged

[common; generalization of "Honeywell Brain Damage" (HBD), a theoretical disease invented to explain certain utter cretinisms in Honeywell {Multics}] adj. Obviously wrong; {cretinous}; {demented}. There is an implication that the person responsible must have suffered brain damage, because he should have known better. Calling something brain-damaged is really bad; it also implies it is unusable, and that its failure to work is due to poor design rather than some accident. "Only six monocase characters per file name? Now that's brain-damaged!"
[esp. in the Mac world] May refer to free demonstration software that has been deliberately crippled in some way so as not to compete with the product it is intended to sell. Syn. {crippleware}.

Marcadores: Common, Software

# 5/15/2009 02:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

camelCase

Image by coderkind via Flickr

camelCase

A variable in a programming language is sait to be camelCased when all words but the first are capitalized. This practice contrasts with the C tradition of either running syllables together or marking syllable breaks with underscores; thus, where a C programmer would write thisverylongname or this_very_long_name, the camelCased version would be thisVeryLongName. This practice is common in certain language communities (formerly Pascal; today Java and Visual Basic) and tends to be associated with object-oriented programming.
Compare {BiCapitalization}; but where that practice is primarily associated with marketing, camelCasing is not aimed at impressing anybody, and hackers consider it respectable.

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Marcadores: Common, Java, Languages, Object-Oriented, Programming

# 5/15/2009 12:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

cracking

[very common] The act of breaking into a computer system; what a {cracker} does. Contrary to widespread myth, this does not usually involve some mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance, but rather persistence and the dogged repetition of a handful of fairly well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the security of target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are incompetent as hackers. This entry used to say 'mediocre', but the spread of {rootkit} and other automated cracking has depressed the average level of skill among crackers.

crufty

[very common; origin unknown; poss. from `crusty' or `cruddy']

Poorly built, possibly over-complex. The {canonical} example is "This is standard old crufty {DEC} software". In fact, one fanciful theory of the origin of crufty holds that was originally a mutation of `crusty' applied to DEC software so old that the `s' characters were tall and skinny, looking more like `f' characters.
Unpleasant, especially to the touch, often with encrusted junk. Like spilled coffee smeared with peanut butter and catsup.
Generally unpleasant.
(sometimes spelled cruftie) n. A small crufty object (see {frob}); often one that doesn't fit well into the scheme of things. "A LISP property list is a good place to store crufties (or, collectively, {random} cruft)."
This term is one of the oldest in the jargon and no one is sure of its etymology, but it is suggestive that there is a Cruft Hall at Harvard University which is part of the old physics building; it's said to have been the physics department's radar lab during WWII. To this day (early 1993) the windows appear to be full of random techno-junk. MIT or Lincoln Labs people may well have coined the term as a knock on the competition.

Marcadores: Common, Cruft, Harvard, Microsoft, Software, University

# 5/14/2009 06:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

ding

Synonym for {feep}. Usage: rare among hackers, but more common in the {Real World}.
dinged: What happens when someone in authority gives you a minor bitching about something, esp. something trivial. "I was dinged for having a messy desk."

Marcadores: Common

# 5/14/2009 03:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

dongle

[now obs.] A security or {copy protection} device for proprietary software consisting of a serialized EPROM and some drivers in a D-25 connector shell, which must be connected to an I/O port of the computer while the program is run. Programs that use a dongle query the port at startup and at programmed intervals thereafter, and terminate if it does not respond with the dongle's programmed validation code. Thus, users can make as many copies of the program as they want but must pay for each dongle. The first sighting of a dongle was in 1984, associated with a software product called PaperClip. The idea was clever, but it was initially a failure, as users disliked tying up a serial port this way. By 1993, dongles would typically pass data through the port and monitor for {magic} codes (and combinations of status lines) with minimal if any interference with devices further down the line -- this innovation was necessary to allow daisy-chained dongles for multiple pieces of software. These devices have become rare as the industry has moved away from copy-protection schemes in general.
By extension, any physical electronic key or transferable ID required for a program to function. Common variations on this theme have used parallel or even joystick ports. See {dongle-disk}.
An adaptor cable mating a special edge-type connector on a PCMCIA or on-board Ethernet card to a standard 8p8c Ethernet jack. This usage seems to have surfaced in 1999 and is now dominant. Laptop owners curse these things because they're notoriously easy to lose and the vendors commonly charge extortionate prices for replacements.
[Note: in early 1992, advertising copy from Rainbow Technologies (a manufacturer of dongles) included a claim that the word derived from "Don Gall", allegedly the inventor of the device. The company's receptionist will cheerfully tell you that the story is a myth invented for the ad copy. Nevertheless, I expect it to haunt my life as a lexicographer for at least the next ten years. :-( --ESR]

Marcadores: Code, Common, Computer, Security, Software

# 5/14/2009 02:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

dumb terminal

A terminal that is one step above a {glass tty}, having a minimally addressable cursor but no on-screen editing or other features normally supported by a {smart terminal}. Once upon a time, when glass ttys were common and addressable cursors were something special, what is now called a dumb terminal could pass for a smart terminal.

Marcadores: Common

# 5/14/2009 01:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

fencepost error

[common] A problem with the discrete equivalent of a boundary condition, often exhibited in programs by iterative loops. From the following problem: "If you build a fence 100 feet long with posts 10 feet apart, how many posts do you need?" (Either 9 or 11 is a better answer than the obvious 10.) For example, suppose you have a long list or array of items, and want to process items m through n; how many items are there? The obvious answer is n - m, but that is off by one; the right answer is n - m + 1. A program that used the `obvious' formula would have a fencepost error in it. See also {zeroth} and {off-by-one error}, and note that not all off-by-one errors are fencepost errors. The game of Musical Chairs involves a catastrophic off-by-one error where N people try to sit in N - 1 chairs, but it's not a fencepost error. Fencepost errors come from counting things rather than the spaces between them, or vice versa, or by neglecting to consider whether one should count one or both ends of a row.
[rare] An error induced by unexpected regularities in input values, which can (for instance) completely thwart a theoretically efficient binary tree or hash table implementation. (The error here involves the difference between expected and worst case behaviors of an algorithm.)

Marcadores: Common, Games

# 5/14/2009 10:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

fudge factor

[common] A value or parameter that is varied in an ad hoc way to produce the desired result. The terms tolerance and {slop} are also used, though these usually indicate a one-sided leeway, such as a buffer that is made larger than necessary because one isn't sure exactly how large it needs to be, and it is better to waste a little space than to lose completely for not having enough. A fudge factor, on the other hand, can often be tweaked in more than one direction. A good example is the fuzz typically allowed in floating-point calculations: two numbers being compared for equality must be allowed to differ by a small amount; if that amount is too small, a computation may never terminate, while if it is too large, results will be needlessly inaccurate. Fudge factors are frequently adjusted incorrectly by programmers who don't fully understand their import. See also {coefficient of X}.

Marcadores: Common

# 5/14/2009 06:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

handle

[from CB slang] An electronic pseudonym; a nom de guerre intended to conceal the user's true identity. Network and BBS handles function as the same sort of simultaneous concealment and display one finds on Citizen's Band radio, from which the term was adopted. Use of grandiose handles is characteristic of {warez d00dz}, {cracker}s, {weenie}s, {spod}s, and other lower forms of network life; true hackers travel on their own reputations rather than invented legendry. Compare {nick}, {screen name}.
A {magic cookie}, often in the form of a numeric index into some array somewhere, through which you can manipulate an object like a file or window. The form file handle is especially common.
[Mac] A pointer to a pointer to dynamically-allocated memory; the extra level of indirection allows on-the-fly memory compaction (to cut down on fragmentation) or aging out of unused resources, with minimal impact on the (possibly multiple) parts of the larger program containing references to the allocated memory. Compare {snap} (to snap a handle would defeat its purpose); see also {aliasing bug}, {dangling pointer}.

Marcadores: Common, Memory, Microsoft

# 5/14/2009 01:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

horked

Broken. Confused. Trashed. Now common; seems to be post-1995. There is an entertaining web page of related definitions, few of which seem to be in live use but many of which would be in the recognition vocabulary of anyone familiar with the adjective.

Marcadores: Common

# 5/13/2009 11:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

infant mortality

It is common lore among hackers (and in the electronics industry at large; this term is possibly techspeak by now) that the chances of sudden hardware failure drop off exponentially with a machine's time since first use (that is, until the relatively distant time at which enough mechanical wear in I/O devices and thermal-cycling stress in components has accumulated for the machine to start going senile). Up to half of all chip and wire failures happen within a new system's first few weeks; such failures are often referred to as infant mortality problems (or, occasionally, as sudden infant death syndrome). See {bathtub curve}, {burn-in period}.

Marcadores: Common, Hardware

# 5/13/2009 10:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

leech

n. (Also leecher.) Among BBS types, crackers and {warez d00dz}, one who consumes knowledge without generating new software, cracks, or techniques. BBS culture specifically defines a leech as someone who downloads files with few or no uploads in return, and who does not contribute to the message section. Cracker culture extends this definition to someone (a {lamer}, usually) who constantly presses informed sources for information and/or assistance, but has nothing to contribute. See {troughie}.
v. [common, Toronto area] v. To download a file across any kind of internet link. "Hop on IRC later so I can leech some MP3s from you." Used to describe activities ranging from FTP, to IRC DCC-send, to ICQ file requests, to Napster searches (but never to downloading email with file attachments; the implication is that the download is the result of a browse or search of some sort of file server). Seems to be a holdover from the early 1990s when Toronto had a very active BBS and warez scene. Synonymous with {snarf} (sense 2), and contrast {snarf} (sense 4).

Marcadores: Common, Download, Internet, Server, Software, Source

# 5/13/2009 07:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

mouse pusher

[common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or appreciating the full glory of the command line.

Marcadores: apple, Common, Macintosh, Software

# 5/13/2009 01:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

grind

[MIT and Berkeley; now rare] To prettify hardcopy of code, especially LISP code, by reindenting lines, printing keywords and comments in distinct fonts (if available), etc. This usage was associated with the MacLISP community and is now rare; {prettyprint} was and is the generic term for such operations.
[Unix] To generate the formatted version of a document from the troff, TeX, or Scribe source.
[common] To run seemingly interminably, esp. (but not necessarily) if performing some tedious and inherently useless task. Similar to {crunch} or {grovel}. Grinding has a connotation of using a lot of CPU time, but it is possible to grind a disk, network, etc. See also {hog}.
To make the whole system slow. "Troff really grinds a PDP-11."
grind grind excl. Roughly, "Isn't the machine slow today!"

Marcadores: Code, Common, Languages, Lisp, MIT, PDP-11, Programming, Source, TeX, Unix

# 5/09/2009 11:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

OP

Image by Marc_Smith via Flickr

OP

[Usenet; common] Abbreviation for "original poster", the originator of a particular thread.

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Marcadores: Abbreviation, Common, Etiquette, FAQs, FTD, Hierarchies, History, Newsgroups, Server, Usenet

# 5/07/2009 09:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

freeware

[common] Freely-redistributable software, often written by enthusiasts and distributed by users' groups, or via electronic mail, local bulletin boards, {Usenet}, or other electronic media. As the culture of the Internet has displaced the older BBS world, this term has lost ground to both {open source} and {free software}; it has increasingly tended to be restricted to software distributed in binary rather than source-code form. At one time, freeware was a trademark of Andrew Fluegelman, the author of the well-known MS-DOS comm program PC-TALK III. It wasn't enforced after his mysterious disappearance and presumed death in 1984. See {shareware}, {FRS}.

Marcadores: Code, Common, Internet, Newsgroups, Software, Source, Usenet

# 4/23/2009 11:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

google

Image by jlori via Flickr

google

[common] To search the Web using the Google search engine, http://www.google.com. Google is highly esteemed among hackers for its significance ranking system, which is so uncannily effective that many hackers consider it to have rendered other search engines effectively irrelevant. The name `google' has additional flavor for hackers because most know that it was copied from a mathematical term for ten to the 100th power, famously first uttered as `googol' by a mathematician's nine-year-old nephew.

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Marcadores: Common, Google, Mathematician, Mathematics, Ranking, Search

# 4/23/2009 08:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,