Like nethack, moria, and rogue,
one of the large freely distributed Dungeons-and-Dragons-like
simulation games, available for a wide range of machines and
operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's Pits of Angband
(compare elder days, elvish). Has been described as "Moria on
steroids"; but, unlike Moria, many aspects of the game are
customizable. This leads many hackers and would-be hackers into
fooling with these instead of doing productive work. There are
many Angband variants, of which the most notorious is probably
the rather whimsical Zangband. In this game, when a key that does
not correspond to a command is pressed, the game will display
"Type ? for help" 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time,
random error messages including "An error has occurred because an
error of type 42 has occurred" and "Windows 95 uninstalled
successfully" will be displayed. Zangband also allows the player
to kill Santa Claus (who has some really good stuff, but also has
a lot of friends), "Bull Gates", and Barney the Dinosaur (but be
watchful; Barney has a nasty case of halitosis). There is an
official angband home page at http://www.phial.com/angband
and a zangband one at http://thangorodrim.angband.org.
See also Random Number
God.
Node:angle brackets, Next:angry fruit salad,
Previous:Angband, Up:= A =
angle brackets n.
Either of the characters < (ASCII 0111100) and
> (ASCII 0111110) (ASCII less-than or
greater-than signs). Typographers in the Real World use angle brackets which are
either taller and slimmer (the ISO `Bra' and `Ket' characters),
or significantly smaller (single or double guillemets) than the
less-than and greater-than signs. See broket, ASCII.
Node:angry fruit salad,
Next:annoybot, Previous:angle brackets, Up:= A =
angry fruit salad n.
A bad visual-interface design that uses too many colors. (This
term derives, of course, from the bizarre day-glo colors found in
canned fruit salad.) Too often one sees similar effects from
interface designers using color window systems such as X; there is a tendency to create displays that
are flashy and attention-getting but uncomfortable for long-term
use.