glassfet /glas'fet/ n.
[by analogy with MOSFET, the acronym for
`Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor'] Syn. firebottle, a humorous way to refer to
a vacuum tube.
Node:glitch, Next:glob, Previous:glassfet, Up:=
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glitch /glich/
[very common; from German `glitschig' to slip, via Yiddish
`glitshen', to slide or skid] 1. n. A sudden interruption in
electric service, sanity, continuity, or program function.
Sometimes recoverable. An interruption in electric service is
specifically called a `power glitch' (also power hit), of grave concern because it
usually crashes all the computers. In jargon, though, a hacker
who got to the middle of a sentence and then forgot how he or she
intended to complete it might say, "Sorry, I just glitched". 2.
vi. To commit a glitch. See gritch.
3. vt. [Stanford] To scroll a display screen, esp. several lines
at a time. WAITS terminals used to do
this in order to avoid continuous scrolling, which is distracting
to the eye. 4. obs. Same as magic
cookie, sense 2.
All these uses of `glitch' derive from the specific technical
meaning the term has in the electronic hardware world, where it
is now techspeak. A glitch can occur when the inputs of a circuit
change, and the outputs change to some random value for some very brief time before
they settle down to the correct value. If another circuit
inspects the output at just the wrong time, reading the random
value, the results can be very wrong and very hard to debug (a
glitch is one of many causes of electronic heisenbugs).
Node:glob, Next:glork, Previous:glitch, Up:= G
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glob /glob/, not /glohb/ v.,n.
[Unix; common] To expand special characters in a wildcarded
name, or the act of so doing (the action is also called
`globbing'). The Unix conventions for filename wildcarding have
become sufficiently pervasive that many hackers use some of them
in written English, especially in email or news on technical
topics. Those commonly encountered include the following:
*
wildcard for any string (see also UN*X)
?
wildcard for any single character (generally read this way
only at the beginning or in the middle of a word)
[]
delimits a wildcard matching any of the enclosed
characters
{}
alternation of comma-separated alternatives; thus,
`foo{baz,qux}' would be read as `foobaz' or `fooqux'
Some examples: "He said his name was [KC]arl" (expresses
ambiguity). "I don't read talk.politics.*" (any of the
talk.politics subgroups on Usenet).
Other examples are given under the entry for X. Note that glob patterns are similar, but not
identical, to those used in regexps.
Historical note: The jargon usage derives from
glob, the name of a subprogram that expanded
wildcards in archaic pre-Bourne versions of the Unix shell.