Jeff K.
The spiritual successor to B1FF and
the archetype of script
kiddies. Jeff K. is a sixteen-year-old suburbanite who
fancies himself a "l33t haX0r", although his knowledge of
computers seems to be limited to the procedure for getting Quake
up and running. His Web page http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk
features a number of hopelessly naive articles, essays, and
rants, all filled with the kind of misspellings, studlycaps, and number-for-letter
substitutions endemic to the script kiddie and warez d00dz communities. Jeff's
offerings, among other things, include hardware advice (such as
"AMD VERSIS PENTIUM" and "HOW TO OVARCLOAK YOUR COMPUTAR"), his
own Quake clan (Clan 40 OUNSCE), and his own comic strip (Wacky
Fun Computar Comic Jokes).
Like B1FF, Jeff K. is (fortunately) a hoax. Jeff K. was
created by internet game journalist Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka,
whose web site Something Awful (http://www.somethingawful.com)
highlights unintentionally humorous news items and Web sites, as
a parody of the kind of teenage luser
who infests Quake servers, chat rooms, and other places where
computer enthusiasts congregate. He is well-recognized in the PC
game community and his influence has spread to hacker fora like Slashdot as well.
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J =
jello n.
[Usenet: by analogy with spam] A
message that is both excessively cross-posted and too frequently
posted, as opposed to spam (which is
merely too frequently posted) or velveeta (which is merely excessively
cross-posted). This term is widely recognized but not commonly
used; most people refer to both kinds of abuse or their
combination as spam.
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jiffy n.
1. The duration of one tick of the system clock on your
computer (see tick). Often one AC
cycle time (1/60 second in the U.S. and Canada, 1/50 most other
places), but more recently 1/100 sec has become common. "The
swapper runs every 6 jiffies" means that the virtual memory
management routine is executed once for every 6 ticks of the
clock, or about ten times a second. 2. Confusingly, the term is
sometimes also used for a 1-millisecond wall time interval. 3. Even more
confusingly, physicists semi-jokingly use `jiffy' to mean the
time required for light to travel one foot in a vacuum, which
turns out to be close to one nanosecond. 4.
Indeterminate time from a few seconds to forever. "I'll do it in
a jiffy" means certainly not now and possibly never. This is a
bit contrary to the more widespread use of the word. Oppose nano. See also Real Soon Now.
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job security n.
When some piece of code is written in a particularly obscure fashion, and no good reason (such
as time or space optimization) can be discovered, it is often
said that the programmer was attempting to increase his job
security (i.e., by making himself indispensable for maintenance).
This sour joke seldom has to be said in full; if two hackers are
looking over some code together and one points at a section and
says "job security", the other one may just nod.