History

Great Renaming

The {flag day} in 1987 on which all of the non-local groups on the {Usenet} had their names changed from the net.- format to the current multiple-hierarchies scheme. Used esp. in discussing the history of newsgroup names. "The oldest sources group is comp.sources.misc; before the Great Renaming, it was net.sources." There is a Great Renaming FAQ on the Web.

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Marcadores: FAQ, History, Newsgroups, Source, Usenet

# 5/22/2009 02:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

ARMM

ARMM:

[acronym, `Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation'] A Usenet, cancelbot created by Dick Depew of Munroe Falls, Ohio. ARMM was intended to automatically cancel posts from anonymous-posting sites. Unfortunately, the robot's recognizer for anonymous postings triggered on its own automatically-generated control messages! Transformed by this stroke of programming ineptitude into a monster of Frankensteinian proportions, it broke loose on the night of March 30, 1993 and proceeded to spam news.admin.policy with a recursive explosion of over 200 messages. ARMM's bug produced a recursive {cascade} of messages each of which mechanically added text to the ID and Subject and some other headers of its parent. This produced a flood of messages in which each header took up several screens and each message ID and subject line got longer and longer and longer. Reactions varied from amusement to outrage. The pathological messages crashed at least one mail system, and upset people paying line charges for their Usenet feeds. One poster described the ARMM debacle as "instant Usenet history" (also establishing the term {despew}), and it has since been widely cited as a cautionary example of the havoc the combination of good intentions and incompetence can wreak on a network. The Usenet thread on the subject is archived here. Compare Great Worm; sorcerer's apprentice mode.

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# 5/20/2009 10:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

McQuary limit

[from the name of the founder of alt.fan.warlord; see {warlording}.] 4 lines of at most 80 characters each, sometimes still cited on Usenet as the maximum acceptable size of a {sig block}. Before the great bandwidth explosion of the early 1990s, long sigs actually cost people running Usenet servers significant amounts of money. Nowadays social pressure against long sigs is intended to avoid waste of human attention rather than machine bandwidth. Accordingly, the McQuary limit should be considered a rule of thumb rather than a hard limit; it's best to avoid sigs that are large, repetitive, and distracting. See also {warlording}.

Marcadores: 1990s, Bandwidth, History, Newsgroups, Server, Usenet

# 5/19/2009 10:31:00 PM, 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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# 5/19/2009 08:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

Version 7

The first widely distributed version of {Unix}, released unsupported by Bell Labs in 1978. The term is used adjectivally to describe Unix features and programs that date from that release, and are thus guaranteed to be present and portable in all Unix versions (this was the standard gauge of portability before the POSIX and IEEE 1003 standards). Note that this usage does not derive from the release being the "seventh version of {Unix}"; research {Unix} at Bell Labs has traditionally been numbered according to the edition of the associated documentation. Indeed, only the widely-distributed Sixth and Seventh Editions are widely known as V[67]; the OS that might today be known as `V10' is instead known in full as "Tenth Edition, Research Unix" or just "Tenth Edition" for short. For this reason, "V7" is often read by cognoscenti as "Seventh Edition". See {BSD}, {Unix}. Some old-timers impatient with commercialization and kernel bloat still maintain that V7 was the Last True Unix.

Marcadores: Bell Labs, BSD, Documentation, History, Network, POSIX, Unix

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

seggie

[Unix] Shorthand for segmentation fault reported from Britain.

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Marcadores: Documentation, dreeping, History, IPhone, itunes, Linux, Unix

# 5/12/2009 10:31:00 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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# 5/07/2009 09:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

include

[Usenet]

To duplicate a portion (or whole) of another's message (typically with attribution to the source) in a reply or followup, for clarifying the context of one's response. See the discussion of inclusion styles under Hacker Writing Style.
[from {C}] #include has appeared in {sig block}s to refer to a notional standard {disclaimer} file.

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# 2/19/2009 03:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,