[from `Y2K bug' for the Year 2000 problem] The upcoming
deployment of Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system, which
hackers generally expect will be among the worst train wrecks in
the history of software engineering. Such is the power of
Microsoft marketing, however, that it is also expected this will
not become obvious until it has incurred hundreds of millions of
dollars in downtime and lost opportunity costs.
Node:wabbit, Next:WAITS, Previous:W2K bug, Up:=
W =
wabbit /wab'it/ n.
[almost certainly from Elmer Fudd's immortal line "You
wascawwy wabbit!"] 1. A legendary early hack reported on a
System/360 at RPI and elsewhere around 1978; this may have
descended (if only by inspiration) from a hack called RABBITS
reported from 1969 on a Burroughs 5500 at the University of
Washington Computer Center. The program would make two copies of
itself every time it was run, eventually crashing the system. 2.
By extension, any hack that includes infinite self-replication
but is not a virus or worm. See fork
bomb and rabbit job,
see also cookie
monster.
Node:WAITS, Next:waldo, Previous:wabbit, Up:= W
=
WAITS /wayts/ n.
The mutant cousin of TOPS-10
used on a handful of systems at SAIL
up to 1990. There was never an `official' expansion of WAITS (the
name itself having been arrived at by a rather sideways process),
but it was frequently glossed as `West-coast Alternative to ITS'.
Though WAITS was less visible than ITS, there was frequent
exchange of people and ideas between the two communities, and
innovations pioneered at WAITS exerted enormous indirect
influence. The early screen modes of EMACS, for example, were directly inspired by
WAITS's `E' editor -- one of a family of editors that were the
first to do `real-time editing', in which the editing commands
were invisible and where one typed text at the point of
insertion/overwriting. The modern style of multi-region windowing
is said to have originated there, and WAITS alumni at XEROX PARC
and elsewhere played major roles in the developments that led to
the XEROX Star, the Macintosh, and the Sun workstations. Also
invented there were bucky bits
-- thus, the ALT key on every IBM PC is a WAITS legacy. One WAITS
feature very notable in pre-Web days was a news-wire interface
that allowed WAITS hackers to read, store, and filter AP and UPI
dispatches from their terminals; the system also featured a
still-unusual level of support for what is now called
`multimedia' computing, allowing analog audio and video signals
to be switched to programming terminals.
Node:waldo, Next:walk, Previous:WAITS, Up:= W
=
waldo /wol'doh/ n.
[From Robert A. Heinlein's story "Waldo"] 1. A mechanical
agent, such as a gripper arm, controlled by a human limb. When
these were developed for the nuclear industry in the mid-1940s
they were named after the invention described by Heinlein in the
story, which he wrote in 1942. Now known by the more generic term
`telefactoring', this technology is of intense interest to NASA
for tasks like space station maintenance. 2. At Harvard
(particularly by Tom Cheatham and students), this is used instead
of foobar as a metasyntactic
variable and general nonsense word. See foo, bar, foobar, quux.
Node:walk, Next:walk off the end of,
Previous:waldo, Up:= W =
walk n.,vt.
Traversal of a data structure, especially an array or
linked-list data structure in core.
See also codewalker, silly walk, clobber.
Node:walk off the end
of, Next:walking
drives, Previous:walk,
Up:= W =
walk off the end of vt.
To run past the end of an array, list, or medium after
stepping through it -- a good way to land in trouble. Often the
result of an off-by-one
error. Compare clobber,
roach, smash the stack.