tense adj.
Of programs, very clever and efficient. A tense piece of code
often got that way because it was highly bummed, but sometimes it was just based on a great
idea. A comment in a clever routine by Mike Kazar, once a
grad-student hacker at CMU: "This routine is so tense it will
bring tears to your eyes." A tense programmer is one who produces
tense code.
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tentacle n.
A covert pseudo, sense 1. An
artificial identity created in cyberspace for nefarious and
deceptive purposes. The implication is that a single person may
have multiple tentacles. This term was originally floated in some
paranoid ravings on the cypherpunks list (see cypherpunk), and adopted in a spirit of
irony by other, saner members. It has since shown up, used
seriously, in the documentation for some remailer software, and
is now (1994) widely recognized on the net.
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tenured graduate student n.
One who has been in graduate school for 10 years (the usual
maximum is 5 or 6): a `ten-yeared' student (get it?). Actually,
this term may be used of any grad student beginning in his
seventh year. Students don't really get tenure, of course, the
way professors do, but a tenth-year graduate student has probably
been around the university longer than any untenured
professor.
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tera- /te'r*/ pref.
[SI] See quantifiers.
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teraflop club /te'r*-flop kluhb/ n.
[FLOP = Floating Point Operation] A mythical association of
people who consume outrageous amounts of computer time in order
to produce a few simple pictures of glass balls with intricate
ray-tracing techniques. Caltech professor James Kajiya is said to
have been the founder. Compare Knights of the Lambda
Calculus.