Developer

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.

flag day

A software change that is neither forward- nor backward-compatible, and which is costly to make and costly to reverse. "Can we install that without causing a flag day for all users?" This term has nothing to do with the use of the word {flag} to mean a variable that has two values. It came into use when a change was made to the definition of the ASCII character set during the development of {Multics}. The change was scheduled for Flag Day (a U.S. holiday), June 14, 1966.

The change altered the Multics definition of ASCII from the short-lived 1965 version of the ASCII code to the 1967 version (in draft at the time); this moved code points for braces, vertical bar, and circumflex. See also {backward combatability}. The {Great Renaming} was a flag day.

[Most of the changes were made to files stored on {CTSS}, the system used to support Multics development before it became self-hosting.]

[As it happens, the first installation of a commercially-produced computer, a Univac I, took place on Flag Day of 1951 --ESR]

Marcadores: Code, Computer, Developer, Software

# 5/14/2009 09:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

Decodificação

O processo de converter conteúdo criptografado em sua forma original, freqüentemente o processo de converter texto criptografado em texto sem formatação. Decodificação é o oposto de criptografia.

Marcadores: Code, Criptografia, Developer

# 2/11/2002 10:00:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

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Decodificação