hollised /hol'ist/ adj.
[Usenet: _sci.space_] To be hollised is to have been
ordered by one's employer not to post any even remotely
job-related material to Usenet (or, by extension, to other
Internet media). The original and most notorious case of this
involved one Ken Hollis, a Lockheed employee and space-program
enthusiast who posted publicly available material on access to
Space Shuttle launches to _sci.space_. He was gagged under
threat of being fired in 1994 at the behest of NASA
public-relations officers. The result was, of course, a huge
publicity black eye for NASA. Nevertheless several other NASA
contractor employees were subsequently hollised for similar
activities. Use of this term carries the strong connotation that
the persons doing the gagging are bureaucratic idiots blinded to
their own best interests by territorial reflexes.
Node:holy wars, Next:home box, Previous:hollised, Up:=
H =
holy wars n.
[from Usenet, but may predate it;
common] n. flame wars over
religious issues. The
paper by Danny Cohen that popularized the terms big-endian and little-endian in connection with the
LSB-first/MSB-first controversy was entitled "On Holy Wars and a
Plea for Peace".
Great holy wars of the past have included ITS vs. Unix, Unix vs. VMS,
BSD Unix vs. USG Unix, C vs.
Pascal, C
vs. FORTRAN, etc. In the year 2000, popular favorites of the day
are KDE vs, GNOME, vim vs. elvis, Linux vs. [Free|Net|Open]BSD.
Hardy perennials include EMACS vs.
vi, my personal computer vs. everyone
else's personal computer, ad nauseam. The characteristic that
distinguishes holy wars from normal technical disputes is that in
a holy war most of the participants spend their time trying to
pass off personal value choices and cultural attachments as
objective technical evaluations. This happens precisely because
in a true holy war, the actual substantive differences between
the sides are relatively minor. See also theology.