:COBOL: /koh'bol/ [COmmon Business-Oriented Language] n.

(Synonymous with {evil}.) A weak, verbose, and flabby language

used by {card walloper}s to do boring mindless things on

{dinosaur} mainframes. Hackers believe that all COBOL

programmers are {suit}s or {code grinder}s, and no

self-respecting hacker will ever admit to having learned the

language. Its very name is seldom uttered without ritual

expressions of disgust or horror. See also {fear and loathing},

{software rot}.

:COBOL fingers: /koh'bol fing'grz/ n. Reported from Sweden, a

(hypothetical) disease one might get from coding in COBOL. The

language requires code verbose beyond all reason; thus it is

alleged that programming too much in COBOL causes one's fingers to

wear down to stubs by the endless typing. "I refuse to type in

all that source code again; it would give me COBOL fingers!"

:code grinder: n. 1. A {suit}-wearing minion of the sort hired in

legion strength by banks and insurance companies to implement

payroll packages in RPG and other such unspeakable horrors. In its

native habitat, the code grinder often removes the suit jacket to

reveal an underplumage consisting of button-down shirt (starch

optional) and a tie. In times of dire stress, the sleeves (if

long) may be rolled up and the tie loosened about half an inch. It

seldom helps. The {code grinder}'s milieu is about as far from

hackerdom as one can get and still touch a computer; the term

connotes pity. See {Real World}, {suit}. 2. Used of or to a

hacker, a really serious slur on the person's creative ability;

connotes a design style characterized by primitive technique,

rule-boundedness, {brute force}, and utter lack of imagination.

Compare {card walloper}; contrast {hacker}, {real

programmer}.

:code police: [by analogy with George Orwell's `thought police'] n.

A mythical team of Gestapo-like storm troopers that might burst

into one's office and arrest one for violating programming style

rules. May be used either seriously, to underline a claim that a

particular style violation is dangerous, or ironically, to suggest

that the practice under discussion is condemned mainly by

anal-retentive {weenie}s. "Dike out that goto or the code

police will get you!" The ironic usage is perhaps more common.

:codewalker: n. A program component that traverses other programs for

a living. Compilers have codewalkers in their front ends; so do

cross-reference generators and some database front ends. Other

utility programs that try to do too much with source code may turn

into codewalkers. As in "This new `vgrind' feature would require a

codewalker to implement."

:coefficient of X: n. Hackish speech makes rather heavy use of

pseudo-mathematical metaphors. Four particularly important ones

involve the terms `coefficient', `factor', `index', and

`quotient'. They are often loosely applied to things you

cannot really be quantitative about, but there are subtle

distinctions among them that convey information about the way the

speaker mentally models whatever he or she is describing.

`Foo factor' and `foo quotient' tend to describe something for

which the issue is one of presence or absence. The canonical

example is {fudge factor}. It's not important how much you're

fudging; the term simply acknowledges that some fudging is needed.

You might talk of liking a movie for its silliness factor.

Quotient tends to imply that the property is a ratio of two

opposing factors: "I would have won except for my luck quotient."

This could also be "I would have won except for the luck factor",

but using *quotient* emphasizes that it was bad luck

overpowering good luck (or someone else's good luck overpowering

your own).

`Foo index' and `coefficient of foo' both tend to imply

that foo is, if not strictly measurable, at least something that

can be larger or smaller. Thus, you might refer to a paper or

person as having a `high bogosity index', whereas you would be less

likely to speak of a `high bogosity factor'. `Foo index' suggests

that foo is a condensation of many quantities, as in the mundane

cost-of-living index; `coefficient of foo' suggests that foo is a

fundamental quantity, as in a coefficient of friction. The choice

between these terms is often one of personal preference; e.g., some

people might feel that bogosity is a fundamental attribute and thus

say `coefficient of bogosity', whereas others might feel it is a

combination of factors and thus say `bogosity index'.

:cokebottle: /kohk'bot-l/ n. Any very unusual character,

particularly one you can't type because it it isn't on your

keyboard. MIT people used to complain about the

`control-meta-cokebottle' commands at SAIL, and SAIL people

complained right back about the `{altmode}-altmode-cokebottle'

commands at MIT. After the demise of the {space-cadet

keyboard}, `cokebottle' faded away as serious usage, but was

often invoked humorously to describe an (unspecified) weird or

non-intuitive keystroke command. It may be due for a second

inning, however. The OSF/Motif window manager, `mwm(1)', has

a reserved keystroke for switching to the default set of

keybindings and behavior. This keystroke is (believe it or not)

`control-meta-bang' (see {bang}). Since the exclamation point

looks a lot like an upside down Coke bottle, Motif hackers have

begun referring to this keystroke as `cokebottle'. See also

{quadruple bucky}.

:cold boot: n. See {boot}.

:COME FROM: n. A semi-mythical language construct dual to the `go

to'; `COME FROM' <label> would cause the referenced label to

act as a sort of trapdoor, so that if the program ever reached it

control would quietly and {automagically} be transferred to the

statement following the `COME FROM'. `COME FROM' was

first proposed in R.L. Clark's "A Linguistic Contribution to

GOTO-less programming", which appeared in a 1973 {Datamation}

issue (and was reprinted in the April 1984 issue of

`Communications of the ACM'). This parodied the then-raging

`structured programming' {holy wars} (see {considered

harmful}). Mythically, some variants are the `assigned COME

FROM' and the `computed COME FROM' (parodying some nasty control

constructs in FORTRAN and some extended BASICs). Of course,

multi-tasking (or non-determinism) could be implemented by having

more than one `COME FROM' statement coming from the same

label.

In some ways the FORTRAN `DO' looks like a `COME FROM'

statement. After the terminating statement number/`CONTINUE'

is reached, control continues at the statement following the DO.

Some generous FORTRANs would allow arbitrary statements (other than

`CONTINUE') for the statement, leading to examples like:

DO 10 I=1,LIMIT

C imagine many lines of code here, leaving the

C original DO statement lost in the spaghetti...

WRITE(6,10) I,FROB(I)

10 FORMAT(1X,I5,G10.4)

in which the trapdoor is just after the statement labeled 10.

(This is particularly surprising because the label doesn't appear

to have anything to do with the flow of control at all!)

While sufficiently astonishing to the unsuspecting reader, this

form of `COME FROM' statement isn't completely general. After

all, control will eventually pass to the following statement. The

implementation of the general form was left to Univac FORTRAN,

ca. 1975 (though a roughly similar feature existed on the IBM 7040

ten years earlier). The statement `AT 100' would perform a

`COME FROM 100'. It was intended strictly as a debugging aid,

with dire consequences promised to anyone so deranged as to use it

in production code. More horrible things had already been

perpetrated in production languages, however; doubters need only

contemplate the `ALTER' verb in {COBOL}.

`COME FROM' was supported under its own name for the first

time 15 years later, in C-INTERCAL (see {INTERCAL},

{retrocomputing}); knowledgeable observers are still reeling

from the shock.

:comm mode: /kom mohd/ [ITS: from the feature supporting on-line

chat; the term may spelled with one or two m's] Syn. for {talk

mode}.

:command key: [Mac users] n. Syn. {feature key}.

:comment out: vt. To surround a section of code with comment

delimiters or to prefix every line in the section with a comment

marker; this prevents it from being compiled or interpreted. Often

done when the code is redundant or obsolete, but you want to leave

it in the source to make the intent of the active code clearer;

also when the code in that section is broken and you want to bypass

it in order to debug some other part of the code. Compare

{condition out}, usually the preferred technique in languages

(such as {C}) that make it possible.

:Commonwealth Hackish:: n. Hacker jargon as spoken outside

the U.S., esp. in the British Commonwealth. It is reported that

Commonwealth speakers are more likely to pronounce truncations like

`char' and `soc', etc., as spelled (/char/, /sok/), as

opposed to American /keir/ and /sohsh/. Dots in {newsgroup}

names tend to be pronounced more often (so soc.wibble is /sok dot

wib'l/ rather than /sohsh wib'l/). The prefix {meta} may be

pronounced /mee't*/; similarly, Greek letter beta is often

/bee't*/, zeta is often /zee't*/, and so forth. Preferred

{metasyntactic variable}s include {blurgle}, `eek',

`ook', `frodo', and `bilbo'; `wibble',

`wobble', and in emergencies `wubble'; `banana',

`wombat', `frog', {fish}, and so on and on (see

{foo}, sense 4).

Alternatives to verb doubling include suffixes `-o-rama',

`frenzy' (as in feeding frenzy), and `city' (examples: "barf

city!" "hack-o-rama!" "core dump frenzy!"). Finally, note

that the American terms `parens', `brackets', and `braces' for (),

[], and {} are uncommon; Commonwealth hackish prefers

`brackets', `square brackets', and `curly brackets'. Also, the

use of `pling' for {bang} is common outside the United States.

See also {attoparsec}, {calculator}, {chemist},

{console jockey}, {fish}, {go-faster stripes},

{grunge}, {hakspek}, {heavy metal}, {leaky heap},

{lord high fixer}, {loose bytes}, {muddie}, {nadger},

{noddy}, {psychedelicware}, {plingnet}, {raster

blaster}, {RTBM}, {seggie}, {spod}, {sun lounge},

{terminal junkie}, {tick-list features}, {weeble},

{weasel}, {YABA}, and notes or definitions under {Bad

Thing}, {barf}, {bogus}, {bum}, {chase pointers},

{cosmic rays}, {crippleware}, {crunch}, {dodgy},

{gonk}, {hamster}, {hardwarily}, {mess-dos},

{nybble}, {proglet}, {root}, {SEX}, {tweak}, and

{xyzzy}.

:compact: adj. Of a design, describes the valuable property that it

can all be apprehended at once in one's head. This generally means

the thing created from the design can be used with greater facility

and fewer errors than an equivalent tool that is not compact.

Compactness does not imply triviality or lack of power; for

example, C is compact and FORTRAN is not, but C is more powerful

than FORTRAN. Designs become non-compact through accreting

{feature}s and {cruft} that don't merge cleanly into the

overall design scheme (thus, some fans of {Classic C} maintain

that ANSI C is no longer compact).

:compiler jock: n. See {jock} (sense 2).

:compress: [UNIX] vt. When used without a qualifier, generally

refers to {crunch}ing of a file using a particular

C implementation of compression by James A. Woods et al. and

widely circulated via {USENET}; use of {crunch} itself in

this sense is rare among UNIX hackers. Specifically, compress is

built around the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm as described in "A

Technique for High Performance Data Compression", Terry A. Welch,

`IEEE Computer', vol. 17, no. 6 (June 1984), pp. 8-19.

:Compu$erve: n. See {CI$}. The synonyms CompuSpend and

Compu$pend are also reported.

:computer confetti: n. Syn. {chad}. Though this term is common,

this use of punched-card chad is not a good idea, as the pieces are

stiff and have sharp corners that could injure the eyes. GLS

reports that he once attended a wedding at MIT during which he and

a few other guests enthusiastically threw chad instead of rice. The

groom later grumbled that he and his bride had spent most of the

evening trying to get the stuff out of their hair.

:computer geek: n. One who eats (computer) bugs for a living. One

who fulfills all the dreariest negative stereotypes about hackers:

an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the

personality of a cheese grater. Cannot be used by outsiders

without implied insult to all hackers; compare black-on-black usage

of `nigger'. A computer geek may be either a fundamentally

clueless individual or a proto-hacker in {larval stage}. Also

called `turbo nerd', `turbo geek'. See also {propeller head},

{clustergeeking}, {geek out}, {wannabee}, {terminal

junkie}, {spod}, {weenie}.

:computron: /kom'pyoo-tron`/ n. 1. A notional unit of computing

power combining instruction speed and storage capacity, dimensioned

roughly in instructions-per-second times megabytes-of-main-store

times megabytes-of-mass-storage. "That machine can't run GNU

EMACS, it doesn't have enough computrons!" This usage is usually

found in metaphors that treat computing power as a fungible

commodity good, like a crop yield or diesel horsepower. See

{bitty box}, {Get a real computer!}, {toy}, {crank}.

2. A mythical subatomic particle that bears the unit quantity of

computation or information, in much the same way that an electron

bears one unit of electric charge (see also {bogon}). An

elaborate pseudo-scientific theory of computrons has been developed

based on the physical fact that the molecules in a solid object

move more rapidly as it is heated. It is argued that an object

melts because the molecules have lost their information about where

they are supposed to be (that is, they have emitted computrons).

This explains why computers get so hot and require air

conditioning; they use up computrons. Conversely, it should be

possible to cool down an object by placing it in the path of a

computron beam. It is believed that this may also explain why

machines that work at the factory fail in the computer room: the

computrons there have been all used up by the other hardware.

(This theory probably owes something to the "Warlock" stories

by Larry Niven, the best known being "What Good is a Glass

Dagger?", in which magic is fueled by an exhaustible natural

resource called `mana'.)

:condition out: vt. To prevent a section of code from being compiled

by surrounding it with a conditional-compilation directive whose

condition is always false. The {canonical} examples are `#if

0' (or `#ifdef notdef', though some find this {bletcherous})

and `#endif' in C. Compare {comment out}.

:condom: n. 1. The protective plastic bag that accompanies 3.5-inch

microfloppy diskettes. Rarely, also used of (paper) disk

envelopes. Unlike the write protect tab, the condom (when left on)

not only impedes the practice of {SEX} but has also been shown

to have a high failure rate as drive mechanisms attempt to access

the disk --- and can even fatally frustrate insertion. 2. The

protective cladding on a {light pipe}.

:confuser: n. Common soundalike slang for `computer'. Usually

encountered in compounds such as `confuser room', `personal

confuser', `confuser guru'. Usage: silly.

:connector conspiracy: [probably came into prominence with the

appearance of the KL-10 (one model of the {PDP-10}), none of

whose connectors matched anything else] n. The tendency of

manufacturers (or, by extension, programmers or purveyors of

anything) to come up with new products that don't fit together

with the old stuff, thereby making you buy either all new stuff or

expensive interface devices. The KL-10 Massbus connector was

actually *patented* by DEC, which reputedly refused to license

the design and thus effectively locked third parties out of

competition for the lucrative Massbus peripherals market. This is

a source of never-ending frustration for the diehards who maintain

older PDP-10 or VAX systems. Their CPUs work fine, but they are

stuck with dying, obsolescent disk and tape drives with low

capacity and high power requirements.

(A closely related phenomenon, with a slightly different intent, is

the habit manufacturers have of inventing new screw heads so that

only Designated Persons, possessing the magic screwdrivers, can

remove covers and make repairs or install options. The Apple

Macintosh takes this one step further, requiring not only a hex

wrench but a specialized case-cracking tool to open the box.)

In these latter days of open-systems computing this term has fallen

somewhat into disuse, to be replaced by the observation that

"Standards are great! There are so *many* of them to choose

from!" Compare {backward combatability}.

:cons: /konz/ or /kons/ [from LISP] 1. vt. To add a new element

to a specified list, esp. at the top. "OK, cons picking a

replacement for the console TTY onto the agenda." 2. `cons up':

vt. To synthesize from smaller pieces: "to cons up an example".

In LISP itself, `cons' is the most fundamental operation for

building structures. It takes any two objects and returns a

`dot-pair' or two-branched tree with one object hanging from each

branch. Because the result of a cons is an object, it can be used

to build binary trees of any shape and complexity. Hackers think

of it as a sort of universal constructor, and that is where the

jargon meanings spring from.

:considered harmful: adj. Edsger W. Dijkstra's note in the

March 1968 `Communications of the ACM', "Goto Statement

Considered Harmful", fired the first salvo in the structured

programming wars. Amusingly, the ACM considered the resulting

acrimony sufficiently harmful that it will (by policy) no longer

print an article taking so assertive a position against a coding

practice. In the ensuing decades, a large number of both serious

papers and parodies have borne titles of the form "X

considered Y". The structured-programming wars eventually blew

over with the realization that both sides were wrong, but use of

such titles has remained as a persistent minor in-joke (the

`considered silly' found at various places in this lexicon is

related).

:console:: n. 1. The operator's station of a {mainframe}. In

times past, this was a privileged location that conveyed godlike

powers to anyone with fingers on its keys. Under UNIX and other

modern timesharing OSes, such privileges are guarded by passwords

instead, and the console is just the {tty} the system was booted

from. Some of the mystique remains, however, and it is traditional

for sysadmins to post urgent messages to all users from the console

(on UNIX, /dev/console). 2. On microcomputer UNIX boxes, the main

screen and keyboard (as opposed to character-only terminals talking

to a serial port). Typically only the console can do real graphics

or run {X}. See also {CTY}.

:console jockey: n. See {terminal junkie}.

:content-free: [by analogy with techspeak `context-free'] adj.

Used of a message that adds nothing to the recipient's knowledge.

Though this adjective is sometimes applied to {flamage}, it more

usually connotes derision for communication styles that exalt form

over substance or are centered on concerns irrelevant to the

subject ostensibly at hand. Perhaps most used with reference to

speeches by company presidents and other professional manipulators.

"Content-free? Uh...that's anything printed on glossy

paper." See also {four-color glossies}. "He gave a talk on

the implications of electronic networks for postmodernism and the

fin-de-siecle aesthetic. It was content-free."

:control-C: vi. 1. "Stop whatever you are doing." From the

interrupt character used on many operating systems to abort a

running program. Considered silly. 2. interj. Among BSD UNIX

hackers, the canonical humorous response to "Give me a break!"

:control-O: vi. "Stop talking." From the character used on some

operating systems to abort output but allow the program to keep on

running. Generally means that you are not interested in hearing

anything more from that person, at least on that topic; a standard

response to someone who is flaming. Considered silly. Compare

{control-S}.

:control-Q: vi. "Resume." From the ASCII DC1 or {XON}

character (the pronunciation /X-on/ is therefore also used), used

to undo a previous {control-S}.

:control-S: vi. "Stop talking for a second." From the ASCII DC3

or XOFF character (the pronunciation /X-of/ is therefore also

used). Control-S differs from {control-O} in that the person is

asked to stop talking (perhaps because you are on the phone) but

will be allowed to continue when you're ready to listen to him ---

as opposed to control-O, which has more of the meaning of

"Shut up." Considered silly.

:Conway's Law: prov. The rule that the organization of the software and

the organization of the software team will be congruent; originally

stated as "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll

get a 4-pass compiler".

This was originally promulgated by Melvin Conway, an early

proto-hacker who wrote an assembler for the Burroughs 220 called

SAVE. The name `SAVE' didn't stand for anything; it was just that

you lost fewer card decks and listings because they all had SAVE

written on them.

:cookbook: [from amateur electronics and radio] n. A book of small

code segments that the reader can use to do various {magic}

things in programs. One current example is the `{PostScript}

Language Tutorial and Cookbook' by Adobe Systems, Inc

(Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-10179-3) which has recipes for things

like wrapping text around arbitrary curves and making 3D fonts.

Cookbooks, slavishly followed, can lead one into {voodoo

programming}, but are useful for hackers trying to {monkey up}

small programs in unknown languages. This is analogous to the role

of phrasebooks in human languages.

:cooked mode: [UNIX] n. The normal character-input mode, with

interrupts enabled and with erase, kill and other special-character

interpretations done directly by the tty driver. Oppose {raw

mode}, {rare mode}. This is techspeak under UNIX but jargon

elsewhere; other operating systems often have similar mode

distinctions, and the raw/rare/cooked way of describing them has

spread widely along with the C language and other UNIX exports.

Most generally, `cooked mode' may refer to any mode of a

system that does extensive preprocessing before presenting data to

a program.

:cookie: n. A handle, transaction ID, or other token of agreement

between cooperating programs. "I give him a packet, he gives me

back a cookie." The claim check you get from a dry-cleaning shop

is a perfect mundane example of a cookie; the only thing it's

useful for is to relate a later transaction to this one (so you get

the same clothes back). Compare {magic cookie}; see also

{fortune cookie}.

:cookie bear: n. Syn. {cookie monster}.

:cookie file: n. A collection of {fortune cookie}s in a format

that facilitates retrieval by a fortune program. There are several

different ones in public distribution, and site admins often

assemble their own from various sources including this lexicon.

:cookie monster: [from "Sesame Street"] n. Any of a family of

early (1970s) hacks reported on {{TOPS-10}}, {{ITS}}, {{Multics}},

and elsewhere that would lock up either the victim's terminal (on a

time-sharing machine) or the {{console}} (on a batch

{mainframe}), repeatedly demanding "I WANT A COOKIE". The

required responses ranged in complexity from "COOKIE" through

"HAVE A COOKIE" and upward. See also {wabbit}.

:copious free time: [Apple; orig. fr. the intro to Tom Lehrer's

song "It Makes A Fellow Proud To Be A Soldier"] n. 1. [used

ironically to indicate the speaker's lack of the quantity in

question] A mythical schedule slot for accomplishing tasks held to

be unlikely or impossible. Sometimes used to indicate that the

speaker is interested in accomplishing the task, but believes that

the opportunity will not arise. "I'll implement the automatic

layout stuff in my copious free time." 2. [Archly] Time reserved

for bogus or otherwise idiotic tasks, such as implementation of

{chrome}, or the stroking of {suit}s. "I'll get back to him

on that feature in my copious free time."

:copper: n. Conventional electron-carrying network cable with a

core conductor of copper --- or aluminum! Opposed to {light

pipe} or, say, a short-range microwave link.

:copy protection: n. A class of (occasionally clever) methods for

preventing incompetent pirates from stealing software and

legitimate customers from using it. Considered silly.

:copybroke: /ko'pee-brohk/ adj. 1. [play on `copyright'] Used

to describe an instance of a copy-protected program that has been

`broken'; that is, a copy with the copy-protection scheme

disabled. Syn. {copywronged}. 2. Copy-protected software

which is unusable because of some bit-rot or bug that has confused

the anti-piracy check.

:copyleft: /kop'ee-left/ [play on `copyright'] n. 1. The

copyright notice (`General Public License') carried by {GNU}

{EMACS} and other Free Software Foundation software, granting reuse

and reproduction rights to all comers (but see also {General

Public Virus}). 2. By extension, any copyright notice intended to

achieve similar aims.

:copywronged: /ko'pee-rongd/ [play on `copyright'] adj. Syn. for

{copybroke}.

:core: n. Main storage or RAM. Dates from the days of ferrite-core

memory; now archaic as techspeak most places outside IBM, but also

still used in the UNIX community and by old-time hackers or those

who would sound like them. Some derived idioms are quite current;

`in core', for example, means `in memory' (as opposed to `on

disk'), and both {core dump} and the `core image' or `core

file' produced by one are terms in favor. Commonwealth hackish

prefers {store}.

:core cancer: n. A process which exhibits a slow but inexorable

resource {leak} --- like a cancer, it kills by crowding out

productive `tissue'.

:core dump: n. [common {Iron Age} jargon, preserved by UNIX]

1. [techspeak] A copy of the contents of {core}, produced when a

process is aborted by certain kinds of internal error. 2. By

extension, used for humans passing out, vomiting, or registering

extreme shock. "He dumped core. All over the floor. What a

mess." "He heard about X and dumped core." 3. Occasionally

used for a human rambling on pointlessly at great length; esp. in

apology: "Sorry, I dumped core on you". 4. A recapitulation of

knowledge (compare {bits}, sense 1). Hence, spewing all one

knows about a topic (syn. {brain dump}), esp. in a lecture or

answer to an exam question. "Short, concise answers are better

than core dumps" (from the instructions to an exam at Columbia).

See {core}.

:core leak: n. Syn. {memory leak}.

:Core Wars: n. A game between `assembler' programs in a

simulated machine, where the objective is to kill your opponent's

program by overwriting it. Popularized by A. K. Dewdney's column

in `Scientific American' magazine, this was actually

devised by Victor Vyssotsky, Robert Morris, and Dennis Ritchie in

the early 1960s (their original game was called `Darwin' and ran on

a PDP-1 at Bell Labs). See {core}.

:corge: /korj/ [originally, the name of a cat] n. Yet another

{metasyntactic variable}, invented by Mike Gallaher and propagated

by the {GOSMACS} documentation. See {grault}.

:cosmic rays: n. Notionally, the cause of {bit rot}. However, this is

a semi-independent usage that may be invoked as a humorous way to

{handwave} away any minor {randomness} that doesn't seem worth the

bother of investigating. "Hey, Eric --- I just got a burst of

garbage on my {tube}, where did that come from?" "Cosmic rays, I

guess." Compare {sunspots}, {phase of the moon}. The British seem

to prefer the usage `cosmic showers'; `alpha particles' is also

heard, because stray alpha particles passing through a memory chip

can cause single-bit errors (this becomes increasingly more likely

as memory sizes and densities increase).

Factual note: Alpha particles cause bit rot, cosmic rays do not

(except occasionally in spaceborne computers). Intel could not

explain random bit drops in their early chips, and one hypothesis

was cosmic rays. So they created the World's Largest Lead Safe,

using 25 tons of the stuff, and used two identical boards for

testing. One was placed in the safe, one outside. The hypothesis

was that if cosmic rays were causing the bit drops, they should see

a statistically significant difference between the error rates on

the two boards. They did not observe such a difference. Further

investigation demonstrated conclusively that the bit drops were due

to alpha particle emissions from thorium (and to a much lesser

degree uranium) in the encapsulation material. Since it is

impossible to eliminate these radioactives (they are uniformly

distributed through the earth's crust, with the statistically

insignificant exception of uranium lodes) it became obvious that

you have to design memories to withstand these hits.

:cough and die: v. Syn. {barf}. Connotes that the program is

throwing its hands up by design rather than because of a bug or

oversight. "The parser saw a control-A in its input where it was

looking for a printable, so it coughed and died." Compare

{die}, {die horribly}.

:cowboy: [Sun, from William Gibson's {cyberpunk} SF] n. Synonym

for {hacker}. It is reported that at Sun this word is often

said with reverence.

:CP/M:: /C-P-M/ n. [Control Program for Microcomputers] An early

microcomputer {OS} written by hacker Gary Kildall for 8080- and

Z80-based machines, very popular in the late 1970s but virtually

wiped out by MS-DOS after the release of the IBM PC in 1981.

Legend has it that Kildall's company blew its chance to write the

OS for the IBM PC because Kildall decided to spend a day IBM's reps

wanted to meet with him enjoying the perfect flying weather in his

private plane. Many of CP/M's features and conventions strongly

resemble those of early DEC operating systems such as

{{TOPS-10}}, OS/8, RSTS, and RSX-11. See {{MS-DOS}},

{operating system}.

:CPU Wars: /C-P-U worz/ n. A 1979 large-format comic by Chas

Andres chronicling the attempts of the brainwashed androids of IPM

(Impossible to Program Machines) to conquer and destroy the

peaceful denizens of HEC (Human Engineered Computers). This rather

transparent allegory featured many references to {ADVENT} and

the immortal line "Eat flaming death, minicomputer mongrels!"

(uttered, of course, by an IPM stormtrooper). It is alleged that

the author subsequently received a letter of appreciation on IBM

company stationery from the head of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research

Laboratories (then, as now, one of the few islands of true

hackerdom in the IBM archipelago). The lower loop of the B in the

IBM logo, it is said, had been carefully whited out. See {eat

flaming death}.

:crack root: v. To defeat the security system of a UNIX machine and

gain {root} privileges thereby; see {cracking}.

:cracker: n. One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985

by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of {hacker}

(q.v., sense 8). An earlier attempt to establish `worm' in this

sense around 1981--82 on USENET was largely a failure.

Both these neologisms reflected a strong revulsion against the

theft and vandalism perpetrated by cracking rings. While it is

expected that any real hacker will have done some playful cracking

and knows many of the basic techniques, anyone past {larval

stage} is expected to have outgrown the desire to do so.

Thus, there is far less overlap between hackerdom and crackerdom

than the {mundane} reader misled by sensationalistic journalism

might expect. Crackers tend to gather in small, tight-knit, very

secretive groups that have little overlap with the huge, open

poly-culture this lexicon describes; though crackers often like to

describe *themselves* as hackers, most true hackers consider

them a separate and lower form of life.

Ethical considerations aside, hackers figure that anyone who can't

imagine a more interesting way to play with their computers than

breaking into someone else's has to be pretty {losing}. Some

other reasons crackers are looked down on are discussed in the

entries on {cracking} and {phreaking}. See also

{samurai}, {dark-side hacker}, and {hacker ethic,

the}.

:cracking: n. The act of breaking into a computer system; what a

{cracker} does. Contrary to widespread myth, this does not

usually involve some mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance, but

rather persistence and the dogged repetition of a handful of fairly

well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the security of

target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are only mediocre

hackers.

:crank: [from automotive slang] vt. Verb used to describe the

performance of a machine, especially sustained performance. "This

box cranks (or, cranks at) about 6 megaflops, with a burst mode

of twice that on vectorized operations."

:crash: 1. n. A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said

of the {system} (q.v., sense 1), esp. of magnetic disk drives

(the term originally described what happened when the air gap of a

Winchester disk collapses). "Three {luser}s lost their files

in last night's disk crash." A disk crash that involves the

read/write heads dropping onto the surface of the disks and

scraping off the oxide may also be referred to as a `head crash',

whereas the term `system crash' usually, though not always,

implies that the operating system or other software was at fault.

2. v. To fail suddenly. "Has the system just crashed?"

"Something crashed the OS!" See {down}. Also used

transitively to indicate the cause of the crash (usually a person

or a program, or both). "Those idiots playing {SPACEWAR}

crashed the system." 3. vi. Sometimes said of people hitting the

sack after a long {hacking run}; see {gronk out}.

:crash and burn: vi.,n. A spectacular crash, in the mode of the

conclusion of the car-chase scene in the movie "Bullitt" and

many subsequent imitators (compare {die horribly}). Sun-3

monitors losing the flyback transformer and lightning strikes on

VAX-11/780 backplanes are notable crash and burn generators. The

construction `crash-and-burn machine' is reported for a computer

used exclusively for alpha or {beta} testing, or reproducing

bugs (i.e., not for development). The implication is that it

wouldn't be such a disaster if that machine crashed, since only the

testers would be inconvenienced.

:crawling horror: n. Ancient crufty hardware or software that is

kept obstinately alive by forces beyond the control of the hackers

at a site. Like {dusty deck} or {gonkulator}, but connotes

that the thing described is not just an irritation but an active

menace to health and sanity. "Mostly we code new stuff in C, but

they pay us to maintain one big FORTRAN II application from

nineteen-sixty-X that's a real crawling horror...." Compare

{WOMBAT}.

:cray: /kray/ n. 1. (properly, capitalized) One of the line of

supercomputers designed by Cray Research. 2. Any supercomputer at

all. 3. The {canonical} {number-crunching} machine.

The term is actually the lowercased last name of Seymour Cray, a

noted computer architect and co-founder of the company. Numerous

vivid legends surround him, some true and some admittedly invented

by Cray Research brass to shape their corporate culture and image.

:cray instability: n. A shortcoming of a program or algorithm that

manifests itself only when a large problem is being run on a

powerful machine (see {cray}). Generally more subtle than bugs

that can be detected in smaller problems running on a workstation

or mini.

:crayola: /kray-oh'l*/ n. A super-mini or -micro computer that

provides some reasonable percentage of supercomputer performance

for an unreasonably low price. Might also be a {killer micro}.

:crayon: n. 1. Someone who works on Cray supercomputers. More

specifically, it implies a programmer, probably of the CDC ilk,

probably male, and almost certainly wearing a tie (irrespective of

gender). Systems types who have a UNIX background tend not to be

described as crayons. 2. A {computron} (sense 2) that

participates only in {number-crunching}. 3. A unit of

computational power equal to that of a single Cray-1. There is a

standard joke about this that derives from an old Crayola crayon

promotional gimmick: When you buy 64 crayons you get a free

sharpener.

:creationism: n. The (false) belief that large, innovative software

designs can be completely specified in advance and then painlessly

magicked out of the void by the normal efforts of a team of

normally talented programmers. In fact, experience has shown

repeatedly that good designs arise only from evolutionary,

exploratory interaction between one (or at most a small handful of)

exceptionally able designer(s) and an active user population ---

and that the first try at a big new idea is always wrong.

Unfortunately, because these truths don't fit the planning models

beloved of {management}, they are generally ignored.

:creep: v. To advance, grow, or multiply inexorably. In hackish usage

this verb has overtones of menace and silliness, evoking the

creeping horrors of low-budget monster movies.

:creeping elegance: n. Describes a tendency for parts of a design to

become {elegant} past the point of diminishing return. This

often happens at the expense of the less interesting parts of the

design, the schedule, and other things deemed important in the

{Real World}. See also {creeping featurism}, {second-system

effect}, {tense}.

:creeping featurism: /kree'ping fee'chr-izm/ n. 1. Describes a

systematic tendency to load more {chrome} and {feature}s onto

systems at the expense of whatever elegance they may have possessed

when originally designed. See also {feeping creaturism}. "You

know, the main problem with {BSD} UNIX has always been creeping

featurism." 2. More generally, the tendency for anything

complicated to become even more complicated because people keep

saying "Gee, it would be even better if it had this feature too".

(See {feature}.) The result is usually a patchwork because it

grew one ad-hoc step at a time, rather than being planned.

Planning is a lot of work, but it's easy to add just one extra

little feature to help someone ... and then another ... and

another.... When creeping featurism gets out of hand, it's

like a cancer. Usually this term is used to describe computer

programs, but it could also be said of the federal government, the

IRS 1040 form, and new cars. A similar phenomenon sometimes

afflicts conscious redesigns; see {second-system effect}. See

also {creeping elegance}.

:creeping featuritis: /kree'ping fee'-chr-i:`t*s/ n. Variant of

{creeping featurism}, with its own spoonerization: `feeping

creaturitis'. Some people like to reserve this form for the

disease as it actually manifests in software or hardware, as

opposed to the lurking general tendency in designers' minds.

(After all, -ism means `condition' or `pursuit of', whereas

-itis usually means `inflammation of'.)

:cretin: /kret'n/ or /kree'tn/ n. Congenital {loser}; an obnoxious

person; someone who can't do anything right. It has been observed

that many American hackers tend to favor the British pronunciation

/kre'tn/ over standard American /kree'tn/; it is thought this may

be due to the insidious phonetic influence of Monty Python's Flying

Circus.

:cretinous: /kret'n-*s/ or /kreet'n-*s/ adj. Wrong; stupid;

non-functional; very poorly designed. Also used pejoratively of

people. See {dread high-bit disease} for an example.

Approximate synonyms: {bletcherous}, `bagbiting' (see

{bagbiter}), {losing}, {brain-damaged}.

:crippleware: n. 1. Software that has some important functionality

deliberately removed, so as to entice potential users to pay for a

working version. 2. [Cambridge] {Guiltware} that exhorts you to

donate to some charity (compare {careware}). 3. Hardware

deliberately crippled, which can be upgraded to a more expensive

model by a trivial change (e.g., cutting a jumper).

An excellent example of crippleware (sense 3) is Intel's 486SX

chip, which is a standard 486DX chip with the co-processor

disabled. To upgrade, you buy another 486 chip with everything

*but* the co-processor disabled. When you put them together

you have two crippled chips doing the work of one. Don't you love

Intel?

:critical mass: n. In physics, the minimum amount of fissionable

material required to sustain a chain reaction. Of a software

product, describes a condition of the software such that fixing one

bug introduces one plus {epsilon} bugs. When software achieves

critical mass, it can only be discarded and rewritten.

:crlf: /ker'l*f/, sometimes /kru'l*f/ or /C-R-L-F/ n. (often

capitalized as `CRLF') A carriage return (CR) followed by a line

feed (LF). More loosely, whatever it takes to get you from the

end of one line of text to the beginning of the next line. See

{newline}, {terpri}. Under {{UNIX}} influence this usage

has become less common (UNIX uses a bare line feed as its `CRLF').

:crock: [from the obvious mainstream scatologism] n. 1. An awkward

feature or programming technique that ought to be made cleaner.

Using small integers to represent error codes without the

program interpreting them to the user (as in, for example, UNIX

`make(1)', which returns code 139 for a process that dies due

to {segfault}). 2. A technique that works acceptably, but which

is quite prone to failure if disturbed in the least, for example

depending on the machine opcodes having particular bit patterns so

that you can use instructions as data words too; a tightly woven,

almost completely unmodifiable structure. See {kluge},

{brittle}. Also in the adjectives `crockish' and

`crocky', and the nouns `crockishness' and `crockitude'.

:cross-post: [USENET] vi. To post a single article simultaneously to

several newsgroups. Distinguished from posting the article

repeatedly, once to each newsgroup, which causes people to see it

multiple times (this is very bad form). Gratuitous cross-posting

without a Followup-To line directing responses to a single followup

group is frowned upon, as it tends to cause {followup} articles

to go to inappropriate newsgroups when people respond to only one

part of the original posting.

:crudware: /kruhd'weir/ n. Pejorative term for the hundreds of

megabytes of low-quality {freeware} circulated by user's groups

and BBS systems in the micro-hobbyist world. "Yet *another*

set of disk catalog utilities for {{MS-DOS}}? What crudware!"

:cruft: /kruhft/ [back-formation from {crufty}] 1. n. An

unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under your bed is

cruft; the TMRC Dictionary correctly noted that attacking it with a

broom only produces more. 2. n. The results of shoddy

construction. 3. vt. [from `hand cruft', pun on `hand craft']

To write assembler code for something normally (and better) done by

a compiler (see {hand-hacking}). 4. n. Excess; superfluous

junk. Esp. used of redundant or superseded code.

This term is one of the oldest in the jargon and no one is sure of

its etymology, but it is suggestive that there is a Cruft Hall at

Harvard University which is part of the old physics building; it's

said to have been the physics department's radar lab during WWII.

To this day (early 1992) the windows appear to be full of random

techno-junk. MIT or Lincoln Labs people may well have coined the

term as a knock on the competition.

:cruft together: vt. (also `cruft up') To throw together

something ugly but temporarily workable. Like vt. {kluge up},

but more pejorative. "There isn't any program now to reverse all

the lines of a file, but I can probably cruft one together in about

10 minutes." See {hack together}, {hack up}, {kluge up},

{crufty}.

:cruftsmanship: /kruhfts'm*n-ship / n. [from {cruft}] The

antithesis of craftsmanship.

:crufty: /kruhf'tee/ [origin unknown; poss. from `crusty' or

`cruddy'] adj. 1. Poorly built, possibly over-complex. The

{canonical} example is "This is standard old crufty DEC

software". In fact, one fanciful theory of the origin of

`crufty' holds that was originally a mutation of `crusty'

applied to DEC software so old that the `s' characters were tall

and skinny, looking more like `f' characters. 2. Unpleasant,

especially to the touch, often with encrusted junk. Like spilled

coffee smeared with peanut butter and catsup. 3. Generally

unpleasant. 4. (sometimes spelled `cruftie') n. A small crufty

object (see {frob}); often one that doesn't fit well into the

scheme of things. "A LISP property list is a good place to store

crufties (or, collectively, {random} cruft)."

:crumb: n. Two binary digits; a {quad}. Larger than a {bit},

smaller than a {nybble}. Considered silly. Syn. {tayste}.

:crunch: 1. vi. To process, usually in a time-consuming or

complicated way. Connotes an essentially trivial operation that is

nonetheless painful to perform. The pain may be due to the

triviality's being embedded in a loop from 1 to 1,000,000,000.

"FORTRAN programs do mostly {number-crunching}." 2. vt. To

reduce the size of a file by a complicated scheme that produces bit

configurations completely unrelated to the original data, such as

by a Huffman code. (The file ends up looking like a paper document

would if somebody crunched the paper into a wad.) Since such

compression usually takes more computations than simpler methods

such as run-length encoding, the term is doubly appropriate. (This

meaning is usually used in the construction `file crunch(ing)' to

distinguish it from {number-crunching}.) See {compress}.

3. n. The character `#'. Used at XEROX and CMU, among other

places. See {{ASCII}}. 4. vt. To squeeze program source into a

minimum-size representation that will still compile or execute.

The term came into being specifically for a famous program on the

BBC micro that crunched BASIC source in order to make it run more

quickly (it was a wholly interpretive BASIC, so the number of

characters mattered). {Obfuscated C Contest} entries are often

crunched; see the first example under that entry.

:cruncha cruncha cruncha: /kruhn'ch* kruhn'ch* kruhn'ch*/ interj.

An encouragement sometimes muttered to a machine bogged down in a

serious {grovel}. Also describes a notional sound made by

groveling hardware. See {wugga wugga}, {grind} (sense 3).

:cryppie: /krip'ee/ n. A cryptographer. One who hacks or implements

cryptographic software or hardware.

:CTSS: /C-T-S-S/ n. Compatible Time-Sharing System. An early

(1963) experiment in the design of interactive time-sharing

operating systems, ancestral to {{Multics}}, {{UNIX}}, and

{{ITS}}. The name {{ITS}} (Incompatible Time-sharing System)

was a hack on CTSS, meant both as a joke and to express some basic

differences in philosophy about the way I/O services should be

presented to user programs.

:CTY: /sit'ee/ or /C-T-Y/ n. [MIT] The terminal physically

associated with a computer's system {{console}}. The term is a

contraction of `Console {tty}', that is, `Console TeleTYpe'.

This {{ITS}}- and {{TOPS-10}}-associated term has become less

common, as most UNIX hackers simply refer to the CTY as `the

console'.

:cube: n. 1. [short for `cubicle'] A module in the open-plan

offices used at many programming shops. "I've got the manuals in

my cube." 2. A NeXT machine (which resembles a matte-black cube).

:cubing: [parallel with `tubing'] vi. 1. Hacking on an IPSC (Intel

Personal SuperComputer) hypercube. "Louella's gone cubing

*again*!!" 2. Hacking Rubik's Cube or related puzzles,

either physically or mathematically. 3. An indescribable form of

self-torture (see sense 1 or 2).

:cursor dipped in X: n. There are a couple of metaphors in English

of the form `pen dipped in X' (perhaps the most common values of X

are `acid', `bile', and `vitriol'). These map over neatly to this

hackish usage (the cursor being what moves, leaving letters behind,

when one is composing on-line). "Talk about a {nastygram}! He

must've had his cursor dipped in acid when he wrote that one!"

:cuspy: /kuhs'pee/ [WPI: from the DEC abbreviation CUSP, for `Commonly

Used System Program', i.e., a utility program used by many people]

adj. 1. (of a program) Well-written. 2. Functionally excellent. A

program that performs well and interfaces well to users is cuspy.

See {rude}. 3. [NYU] Said of an attractive woman, especially one

regarded as available. Implies a certain curvaceousness.

:cut a tape: vi. To write a software or document distribution on

magnetic tape for shipment. Has nothing to do with physically

cutting the medium! Early versions of this lexicon claimed that

one never analogously speaks of `cutting a disk', but this has

since been reported as live usage. Related slang usages are

mainstream business's `cut a check', the recording industry's

`cut a record', and the military's `cut an order'.

All of these usages reflect physical processes in obsolete

recording and duplication technologies. The first stage in

manufacturing an old-style vinyl record involved cutting grooves in

a stamping die with a precision lathe. More mundanely, the

dominant technology for mass duplication of paper documents in

pre-photocopying days involved "cutting a stencil", punching away

portions of the wax overlay on a silk screen. More directly,

paper tape with holes punched in it was an inportant early storage

medium.

:cybercrud: /si:'ber-kruhd/ [coined by Ted Nelson] n. Obfuscatory

tech-talk. Verbiage with a high {MEGO} factor. The computer

equivalent of bureaucratese.

:cyberpunk: /si:'ber-puhnk/ [orig. by SF writer Bruce Bethke

and/or editor Gardner Dozois] n.,adj. A subgenre of SF launched

in 1982 by William Gibson's epoch-making novel `Neuromancer'

(though its roots go back through Vernor Vinge's `True Names'

(see "{True Names ... and Other Dangers}" in

appendix C) to John Brunner's 1975 novel `The Shockwave

Rider'). Gibson's near-total ignorance of computers and the

present-day hacker culture enabled him to speculate about the role

of computers and hackers in the future in ways hackers have since

found both irritatingly na"ive and tremendously stimulating.

Gibson's work was widely imitated, in particular by the short-lived

but innovative "Max Headroom" TV series. See

{cyberspace}, {ice}, {jack in}, {go flatline}.

:cyberspace: /si:'ber-spays/ n. 1. Notional `information-space'

loaded with visual cues and navigable with brain-computer

interfaces called `cyberspace decks'; a characteristic prop of

{cyberpunk} SF. At the time of this writing (mid-1991),

serious efforts to construct {virtual reality} interfaces

modeled explicitly on Gibsonian cyberspace are already under way,

using more conventional devices such as glove sensors and binocular

TV headsets. Few hackers are prepared to deny outright the

possibility of a cyberspace someday evolving out of the network

(see {network, the}). 2. Occasionally, the metaphoric location

of the mind of a person in {hack mode}. Some hackers report

experiencing strong eidetic imagery when in hack mode;

interestingly, independent reports from multiple sources suggest

that there are common features to the experience. In particular,

the dominant colors of this subjective `cyberspace' are often

gray and silver, and the imagery often involves constellations of

marching dots, elaborate shifting patterns of lines and angles, or

moire patterns.

:cycle: 1. n. The basic unit of computation. What every hacker

wants more of (noted hacker Bill Gosper describes himself as a

"cycle junkie"). One can describe an instruction as taking so

many `clock cycles'. Often the computer can access its

memory once on every clock cycle, and so one speaks also of

`memory cycles'. These are technical meanings of {cycle}. The

jargon meaning comes from the observation that there are only so

many cycles per second, and when you are sharing a computer the

cycles get divided up among the users. The more cycles the

computer spends working on your program rather than someone else's,

the faster your program will run. That's why every hacker wants

more cycles: so he can spend less time waiting for the computer to

respond. 2. By extension, a notional unit of *human* thought

power, emphasizing that lots of things compete for the typical

hacker's think time. "I refused to get involved with the Rubik's

Cube back when it was big. Knew I'd burn too many cycles on it if

I let myself." 3. vt. Syn. {bounce}, {120 reset}; from the

phrase `cycle power'. "Cycle the machine again, that serial port's

still hung."

:cycle crunch: n. A situation where the number of people trying to

use the computer simultaneously has reached the point where no one

can get enough cycles because they are spread too thin and the

system has probably begun to {thrash}. This is an inevitable

result of Parkinson's Law applied to timesharing. Usually the only

solution is to buy more computer. Happily, this has rapidly become

easier in recent years, so much so that the very term `cycle

crunch' now has a faintly archaic flavor; most hackers now use

workstations or personal computers as opposed to traditional

timesharing systems.

:cycle drought: n. A scarcity of cycles. It may be due to a {cycle

crunch}, but it could also occur because part of the computer is

temporarily not working, leaving fewer cycles to go around.

"The {high moby} is {down}, so we're running with only

half the usual amount of memory. There will be a cycle drought

until it's fixed."

:cycle of reincarnation: [coined by Ivan Sutherland ca. 1970] n.

Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a

computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose

peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward

more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that

it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the

architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at

which point the cycle begins again. Several iterations of this

cycle have been observed in graphics-processor design, and at least

one or two in communications and floating-point processors. Also

known as `the Wheel of Life', `the Wheel of Samsara', and other

variations of the basic Hindu/Buddhist theological idea.

:cycle server: n. A powerful machine that exists primarily for

running large {batch} jobs. Implies that interactive tasks such as

editing are done on other machines on the network, such as

workstations.

= D =

=====

:D. C. Power Lab: n. The former site of {{SAIL}}. Hackers thought

this was very funny because the obvious connection to electrical

engineering was nonexistent --- the lab was named for a Donald C.

Power. Compare {Marginal Hacks}.

:daemon: /day'mn/ or /dee'mn/ [from the mythological meaning,

later rationalized as the acronym `Disk And Execution MONitor'] n.

A program that is not invoked explicitly, but lies dormant waiting

for some condition(s) to occur. The idea is that the perpetrator

of the condition need not be aware that a daemon is lurking (though

often a program will commit an action only because it knows that it

will implicitly invoke a daemon). For example, under {{ITS}}

writing a file on the {LPT} spooler's directory would invoke the

spooling daemon, which would then print the file. The advantage is

that programs wanting (in this example) files printed need not

compete for access to the {LPT}. They simply enter their

implicit requests and let the daemon decide what to do with them.

Daemons are usually spawned automatically by the system, and may

either live forever or be regenerated at intervals. Daemon and

{demon} are often used interchangeably, but seem to have

distinct connotations. The term `daemon' was introduced to

computing by {CTSS} people (who pronounced it /dee'mon/) and

used it to refer to what ITS called a {dragon}. Although the

meaning and the pronunciation have drifted, we think this glossary

reflects current (1991) usage.

:dangling pointer: n. A reference that doesn't actually lead

anywhere (in C and some other languages, a pointer that doesn't

actually point at anything valid). Usually this is because it

formerly pointed to something that has moved or disappeared. Used

as jargon in a generalization of its techspeak meaning; for

example, a local phone number for a person who has since moved to

the other coast is a dangling pointer.

:dark-side hacker: n. A criminal or malicious hacker; a

{cracker}. From George Lucas's Darth Vader, "seduced by the

dark side of the Force". The implication that hackers form a

sort of elite of technological Jedi Knights is intended. Oppose

{samurai}.

:Datamation: /day`t*-may'sh*n/ n. A magazine that many hackers

assume all {suit}s read. Used to question an unbelieved quote,

as in "Did you read that in `Datamation?'" It used to

publish something hackishly funny every once in a while, like the

original paper on {COME FROM} in 1973, but it has since become much

more exclusively {suit}-oriented and boring.

:day mode: n. See {phase} (sense 1). Used of people only.

:dd: /dee-dee/ [UNIX: from IBM {JCL}] vt. Equivalent to

{cat} or {BLT}. This was originally the name of a UNIX copy

command with special options suitable for block-oriented devices.

Often used in heavy-handed system maintenance, as in "Let's

`dd' the root partition onto a tape, then use the boot PROM to

load it back on to a new disk". The UNIX `dd(1)' was

designed with a weird, distinctly non-UNIXy keyword option syntax

reminiscent of IBM System/360 JCL (which had an elaborate DD `Data

Definition' specification for I/O devices); though the command

filled a need, the interface design was clearly a prank. The

jargon usage is now very rare outside UNIX sites and now nearly

obsolete even there, as `dd(1)' has been {deprecated} for a

long time (though it has no exact replacement). Replaced by

{BLT} or simple English `copy'.

:DDT: /D-D-T/ n. 1. Generic term for a program that assists in

debugging other programs by showing individual machine instructions

in a readable symbolic form and letting the user change them. In

this sense the term DDT is now archaic, having been widely

displaced by `debugger' or names of individual programs like

`dbx', `adb', `gdb', or `sdb'. 2. [ITS] Under

MIT's fabled {{ITS}} operating system, DDT (running under the alias

HACTRN) was also used as the {shell} or top level command

language used to execute other programs. 3. Any one of several

specific DDTs (sense 1) supported on early DEC hardware. The DEC

PDP-10 Reference Handbook (1969) contained a footnote on the first

page of the documentation for DDT which illuminates the origin of

the term:

Historical footnote: DDT was developed at MIT for the PDP-1

computer in 1961. At that time DDT stood for "DEC Debugging Tape".

Since then, the idea of an on-line debugging program has propagated

throughout the computer industry. DDT programs are now available

for all DEC computers. Since media other than tape are now

frequently used, the more descriptive name "Dynamic Debugging

Technique" has been adopted, retaining the DDT abbreviation.

Confusion between DDT-10 and another well known pesticide,

dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (C14-H9-Cl5) should be minimal

since each attacks a different, and apparently mutually exclusive,

class of bugs.

Sadly, this quotation was removed from later editions of the

handbook after the {suit}s took over and DEC became much more

`businesslike'.

The history above is known to many old-time hackers. But there's

more: Peter Samson, author of the {TMRC} lexicon, reports that

he named `DDT' after a similar tool on the TX-0 computer, the

direct ancestor of the PDP-1 built at MIT's Lincoln Lab in 1957.

The debugger on that ground-breaking machine (the first

transistorized computer) rejoiced in the name FLIT (FLexowriter

Interrogation Tape).

:de-rezz: /dee-rez'/ [from `de-resolve' via the movie "Tron"]

(also `derez') 1. vi. To disappear or dissolve; the image that goes

with it is of an object breaking up into raster lines and static

and then dissolving. Occasionally used of a person who seems to

have suddenly `fuzzed out' mentally rather than physically.

Usage: extremely silly, also rare. This verb was actually invented

as *fictional* hacker jargon, and adopted in a spirit of irony

by real hackers years after the fact. 2. vt. On a Macintosh, many

program structures (including the code itself) are managed in small

segments of the program file known as `resources'. The standard

resource compiler is Rez. The standard resource decompiler is

DeRez. Thus, decompiling a resource is `derezzing'. Usage: very

common.

:dead: adj. 1. Non-functional; {down}; {crash}ed. Especially

used of hardware. 2. At XEROX PARC, software that is working but

not undergoing continued development and support.

:dead code: n. Routines that can never be accessed because all calls

to them have been removed, or code that cannot be reached because

it is guarded by a control structure that provably must always

transfer control somewhere else. The presence of dead code may

reveal either logical errors due to alterations in the program or

significant changes in the assumptions and environment of the

program (see also {software rot}); a good compiler should report

dead code so a maintainer can think about what it means. Syn.

{grunge}.

:DEADBEEF: /ded-beef/ n. The hexadecimal word-fill pattern for

freshly allocated memory (decimal -21524111) under a number of

IBM environments, including the RS/6000. As in "Your program is

DEADBEEF" (meaning gone, aborted, flushed from memory); if you

start from an odd half-word boundary, of course, you have

BEEFDEAD.

:deadlock: n. 1. [techspeak] A situation wherein two or more

processes are unable to proceed because each is waiting for one of

the others to do something. A common example is a program

communicating to a server, which may find itself waiting for output

from the server before sending anything more to it, while the

server is similarly waiting for more input from the controlling

program before outputting anything. (It is reported that this

particular flavor of deadlock is sometimes called a `starvation

deadlock', though the term `starvation' is more properly used for

situations where a program can never run simply because it never

gets high enough priority. Another common flavor is

`constipation', where each process is trying to send stuff to

the other but all buffers are full because nobody is reading

anything.) See {deadly embrace}. 2. Also used of

deadlock-like interactions between humans, as when two people meet

in a narrow corridor, and each tries to be polite by moving aside

to let the other pass, but they end up swaying from side to side

without making any progress because they always both move the same

way at the same time.

:deadly embrace: n. Same as {deadlock}, though usually used only when

exactly 2 processes are involved. This is the more popular term in

Europe, while {deadlock} predominates in the United States.

:death code: n. A routine whose job is to set everything in the

computer --- registers, memory, flags, everything --- to zero,

including that portion of memory where it is running; its last act

is to stomp on its own "store zero" instruction. Death code

isn't very useful, but writing it is an interesting hacking

challenge on architectures where the instruction set makes it

possible, such as the PDP-8 (it has also been done on the DG Nova).

Death code is much less common, and more anti-social, on modern

multi-user machines. It was very impressive on earlier hardware

that provided front panel switches and displays to show register

and memory contents, esp. when these were used to prod the corpse

to see why it died.

Perhaps the ultimate death code is on the TI 990 series, where all

registers are actually in RAM, and the instruction "store immediate

0" has the opcode "0". The PC will immediately wrap around core as

many times as it can until a user hits HALT. Any empty memory

location is death code. Worse, the manufacturer recommended use of

this instruction in startup code (which would be in ROM and

therefore survive).

:Death Star: [from the movie "Star Wars"] 1. The AT&T corporate

logo, which appears on computers sold by AT&T and bears an uncanny

resemblance to the `Death Star' in the movie. This usage is

particularly common among partisans of {BSD} UNIX, who tend to

regard the AT&T versions as inferior and AT&T as a bad guy. Copies

still circulate of a poster printed by Mt. Xinu showing a starscape

with a space fighter labeled 4.2 BSD streaking away from a broken

AT&T logo wreathed in flames. 2. AT&T's internal magazine,

`Focus', uses `death star' for an incorrectly done AT&T logo

in which the inner circle in the top left is dark instead of light

--- a frequent result of dark-on-light logo images.

:DEC Wars: n. A 1983 {USENET} posting by Alan Hastings and Steve

Tarr spoofing the "Star Wars" movies in hackish terms. Some

years later, ESR (disappointed by Hastings and Tarr's failure to

exploit a great premise more thoroughly) posted a 3-times-longer

complete rewrite called "UNIX WARS"; the two are often

confused.

:DEChead: /dek'hed/ n. 1. A DEC {field servoid}. Not flattering.

2. [from `deadhead'] A Grateful Dead fan working at DEC.

:deckle: /dek'l/ [from dec- and {nybble}; the original

spelling seems to have been `decle'] n. Two {nickle}s;

10 bits. Reported among developers for Mattel's GI 1600 (the

Intellivision games processor), a chip with 16-bit-wide RAM but

10-bit-wide ROM.

:deep hack mode: n. See {hack mode}.

:deep magic: [poss. from C. S. Lewis's "Narnia" books] n. An

awesomely arcane technique central to a program or system, esp. one

not generally published and available to hackers at large (compare

{black art}); one that could only have been composed by a true

{wizard}. Compiler optimization techniques and many aspects of

{OS} design used to be {deep magic}; many techniques in

cryptography, signal processing, graphics, and AI still are.

Compare {heavy wizardry}. Esp. found in comments of the form

"Deep magic begins here...". Compare {voodoo programming}.

:deep space: n. 1. Describes the notional location of any program

that has gone {off the trolley}. Esp. used of programs that

just sit there silently grinding long after either failure or some

output is expected. "Uh oh. I should have gotten a prompt ten

seconds ago. The program's in deep space somewhere." Compare

{buzz}, {catatonic}, {hyperspace}. 2. The metaphorical

location of a human so dazed and/or confused or caught up in some

esoteric form of {bogosity} that he or she no longer responds

coherently to normal communication. Compare {page out}.

:defenestration: [from the traditional Czechoslovak method of

assassinating prime ministers, via SF fandom] n. 1. Proper karmic

retribution for an incorrigible punster. "Oh, ghod, that was

*awful*!" "Quick! Defenestrate him!" 2. The act of

exiting a window system in order to get better response time from a

full-screen program. This comes from the dictionary meaning of

`defenestrate', which is to throw something out a window. 3. The

act of discarding something under the assumption that it will

improve matters. "I don't have any disk space left." "Well,

why don't you defenestrate that 100 megs worth of old core dumps?"

4. [proposed] The requirement to support a command-line interface.

"It has to run on a VT100." "Curses! I've been

defenestrated!"

:defined as: adj. In the role of, usually in an organization-chart

sense. "Pete is currently defined as bug prioritizer." Compare

{logical}.

:dehose: /dee-hohz/ vt. To clear a {hosed} condition.

:delint: /dee-lint/ v. To modify code to remove problems detected

when {lint}ing. Confusingly, this is also referred to as

`linting' code.

:delta: n. 1. [techspeak] A quantitative change, especially a small

or incremental one (this use is general in physics and

engineering). "I just doubled the speed of my program!" "What

was the delta on program size?" "About 30 percent." (He

doubled the speed of his program, but increased its size by only 30

percent.) 2. [UNIX] A {diff}, especially a {diff} stored

under the set of version-control tools called SCCS (Source Code

Control System) or RCS (Revision Control System). 3. n. A small

quantity, but not as small as {epsilon}. The jargon usage of

{delta} and {epsilon} stems from the traditional use of these

letters in mathematics for very small numerical quantities,

particularly in `epsilon-delta' proofs in limit theory (as in the

differential calculus). The term {delta} is often used, once

{epsilon} has been mentioned, to mean a quantity that is

slightly bigger than {epsilon} but still very small. "The cost

isn't epsilon, but it's delta" means that the cost isn't totally

negligible, but it is nevertheless very small. Common

constructions include `within delta of ---', `within epsilon of

---': that is, close to and even closer to.

:demented: adj. Yet another term of disgust used to describe a

program. The connotation in this case is that the program works as

designed, but the design is bad. Said, for example, of a program

that generates large numbers of meaningless error messages,

implying that it is on the brink of imminent collapse. Compare

{wonky}, {bozotic}.

:demigod: n. A hacker with years of experience, a national reputation,

and a major role in the development of at least one design, tool,

or game used by or known to more than half of the hacker community.

To qualify as a genuine demigod, the person must recognizably

identify with the hacker community and have helped shape it. Major

demigods include Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (co-inventors of

{{UNIX}} and {C}) and Richard M. Stallman (inventor of

{EMACS}). In their hearts of hearts, most hackers dream of

someday becoming demigods themselves, and more than one major

software project has been driven to completion by the author's

veiled hopes of apotheosis. See also {net.god}, {true-hacker}.

:demo: /de'moh/ [short for `demonstration'] 1. v. To

demonstrate a product or prototype. A far more effective way of

inducing bugs to manifest than any number of {test} runs,

especially when important people are watching. 2. n. The act of

demoing. 3. n. Esp. as `demo version', can refer to either a

special version of a program (frequently with some features

crippled) which is distributed at little or no cost to the user for

demonstration purposes.

:demo mode: [Sun] n. 1. The state of being {heads down} in order

to finish code in time for a {demo}, usually due yesterday.

2. A mode in which video games sit there by themselves running

through a portion of the game, also known as `attract mode'.

Some serious {app}s have a demo mode they use as a screen saver,

or may go through a demo mode on startup (for example, the

Microsoft Windows opening screen --- which lets you impress your

neighbors without actually having to put up with {Microsloth

Windows}).

:demon: n. 1. [MIT] A portion of a program that is not invoked

explicitly, but that lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to

occur. See {daemon}. The distinction is that demons are

usually processes within a program, while daemons are usually

programs running on an operating system. Demons are particularly

common in AI programs. For example, a knowledge-manipulation

program might implement inference rules as demons. Whenever a new

piece of knowledge was added, various demons would activate (which

demons depends on the particular piece of data) and would create

additional pieces of knowledge by applying their respective

inference rules to the original piece. These new pieces could in

turn activate more demons as the inferences filtered down through

chains of logic. Meanwhile, the main program could continue with

whatever its primary task was. 2. [outside MIT] Often used

equivalently to {daemon} --- especially in the {{UNIX}} world,

where the latter spelling and pronunciation is considered mildly

archaic.

:depeditate: /dee-ped'*-tayt/ [by (faulty) analogy with

`decapitate'] vt. Humorously, to cut off the feet of. When one is

using some computer-aided typesetting tools, careless placement of

text blocks within a page or above a rule can result in chopped-off

letter descenders. Such letters are said to have been depeditated.

:deprecated: adj. Said of a program or feature that is considered

obsolescent and in the process of being phased out, usually in

favor of a specified replacement. Deprecated features can,

unfortunately, linger on for many years. This term appears with

distressing frequency in standards documents when the committees

which write them decide that a sufficient number of users have

written code which depends on specific features which are out of

favor.

:deserves to lose: adj. Said of someone who willfully does the

{Wrong Thing}; humorously, if one uses a feature known to be

{marginal}. What is meant is that one deserves the consequences

of one's {losing} actions. "Boy, anyone who tries to use

{mess-dos} deserves to {lose}!" ({{ITS}} fans used to say this

of {{UNIX}}; many still do.) See also {screw}, {chomp},

{bagbiter}.

:desk check: n.,v. To {grovel} over hardcopy of source code,

mentally simulating the control flow; a method of catching bugs.

No longer common practice in this age of on-screen editing, fast

compiles, and sophisticated debuggers --- though some maintain

stoutly that it ought to be. Compare {eyeball search},

{vdiff}, {vgrep}.

:Devil Book: n. `The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD

UNIX Operating System', by Samuel J. Leffler, Marshall Kirk

McKusick, Michael J. Karels, and John S. Quarterman (Addison-Wesley

Publishers, 1989) --- the standard reference book on the internals

of {BSD} UNIX. So called because the cover has a picture

depicting a little devil (a visual play on {daemon}) in

sneakers, holding a pitchfork (referring to one of the

characteristic features of UNIX, the `fork(2)' system call).

:devo: /dee'voh/ [orig. in-house jargon at Symbolics] n. A person in a

development group. See also {doco} and {mango}.

:dickless workstation: n. Extremely pejorative hackerism for

`diskless workstation', a class of botches including the Sun 3/50

and other machines designed exclusively to network with an

expensive central disk server. These combine all the disadvantages

of time-sharing with all the disadvantages of distributed personal

computers; typically, they cannot even {boot} themselves without

help (in the form of some kind of {breath-of-life packet}) from

the server.

:dictionary flame: [USENET] n. An attempt to sidetrack a debate

away from issues by insisting on meanings for key terms that

presuppose a desired conclusion or smuggle in an implicit premise.

A common tactic of people who prefer argument over definitions to

disputes about reality.

:diddle: 1. vt. To work with or modify in a not particularly

serious manner. "I diddled a copy of {ADVENT} so it didn't

double-space all the time." "Let's diddle this piece of code and

see if the problem goes away." See {tweak} and {twiddle}.

2. n. The action or result of diddling. See also {tweak},

{twiddle}, {frob}.

:die: v. Syn. {crash}. Unlike {crash}, which is used

primarily of hardware, this verb is used of both hardware and

software. See also {go flatline}, {casters-up mode}.

:die horribly: v. The software equivalent of {crash and burn},

and the preferred emphatic form of {die}. "The converter

choked on an FF in its input and died horribly".

:diff: /dif/ n. 1. A change listing, especially giving differences

between (and additions to) source code or documents (the term is

often used in the plural `diffs'). "Send me your diffs for the

Jargon File!" Compare {vdiff}. 2. Specifically, such a listing

produced by the `diff(1)' command, esp. when used as

specification input to the `patch(1)' utility (which can

actually perform the modifications; see {patch}). This is a

common method of distributing patches and source updates in the

UNIX/C world. See also {vdiff}, {mod}.

:digit: n. An employee of Digital Equipment Corporation. See also

{VAX}, {VMS}, {PDP-10}, {{TOPS-10}}, {DEChead}, {double

DECkers}, {field circus}.

:dike: vt. To remove or disable a portion of something, as a wire

from a computer or a subroutine from a program. A standard slogan

is "When in doubt, dike it out". (The implication is that it is

usually more effective to attack software problems by reducing

complexity than by increasing it.) The word `dikes' is widely

used among mechanics and engineers to mean `diagonal cutters',

esp. a heavy-duty metal-cutting device, but may also refer to a

kind of wire-cutters used by electronics techs. To `dike

something out' means to use such cutters to remove something.

Indeed, the TMRC Dictionary defined dike as "to attack with

dikes". Among hackers this term has been metaphorically extended

to informational objects such as sections of code.

:ding: n.,vi. 1. Synonym for {feep}. Usage: rare among hackers,

but commoner in the {Real World}. 2. `dinged': What happens

when someone in authority gives you a minor bitching about

something, esp. something trivial. "I was dinged for having a

messy desk."

:dink: /dink/ n. Said of a machine that has the {bitty box}

nature; a machine too small to be worth bothering with ---

sometimes the system you're currently forced to work on. First

heard from an MIT hacker working on a CP/M system with 64K, in

reference to any 6502 system, then from fans of 32-bit

architectures about 16-bit machines. "GNUMACS will never work on

that dink machine." Probably derived from mainstream `dinky',

which isn't sufficiently pejorative.

:dinosaur: n. 1. Any hardware requiring raised flooring and special

power. Used especially of old minis and mainframes, in contrast

with newer microprocessor-based machines. In a famous quote from

the 1988 UNIX EXPO, Bill Joy compared the mainframe in the massive

IBM display with a grazing dinosaur "with a truck outside pumping

its bodily fluids through it". IBM was not amused. Compare

{big iron}; see also {mainframe}. 2. [IBM] A very conservative

user; a {zipperhead}.

:dinosaur pen: n. A traditional {mainframe} computer room complete with

raised flooring, special power, its own ultra-heavy-duty air

conditioning, and a side order of Halon fire extinguishers. See

{boa}.

:dinosaurs mating: n. Said to occur when yet another {big iron}

merger or buyout occurs; reflects a perception by hackers that

these signal another stage in the long, slow dying of the

{mainframe} industry. In its glory days of the 1960s, it was

`IBM and the Seven Dwarves': Burroughs, Control Data, General

Electric, Honeywell, NCR, RCA, and Univac. RCA and GE sold out

early, and it was `IBM and the Bunch' (Burroughs, Univac, NCR,

Control Data, and Honeywell) for a while. Honeywell was bought out

by Bull; Burroughs merged with Univac to form Unisys (in 1984 ---

this was when the phrase `dinosaurs mating' was coined); and as

this is written (early 1991) AT&T is attempting to recover from a

disastrously bad first six years in the hardware industry by

absorbing NCR. More such earth-shaking unions of doomed giants

seem inevitable.

:dirtball: [XEROX PARC] n. A small, perhaps struggling outsider;

not in the major or even the minor leagues. For example, "Xerox

is not a dirtball company".

[Outsiders often observe in the PARC culture an institutional

arrogance which usage of this term exemplifies. The brilliance and

scope of PARC's contributions to computer science have been such

that this superior attitude is not much resented. --- ESR]

:dirty power: n. Electrical mains voltage that is unfriendly to

the delicate innards of computers. Spikes, {drop-outs}, average

voltage significantly higher or lower than nominal, or just plain

noise can all cause problems of varying subtlety and severity

(these are collectively known as {power hit}s).

:disclaimer: n. [USENET] n. Statement ritually appended to many USENET

postings (sometimes automatically, by the posting software) reiterating

the fact (which should be obvious, but is easily forgotten) that the

article reflects its author's opinions and not necessarily those of

the organization running the machine through which the article

entered the network.

:Discordianism: /dis-kor'di-*n-ism/ n. The veneration of

{Eris}, a.k.a. Discordia; widely popular among hackers.

Discordianism was popularized by Robert Shea and Robert Anton

Wilson's `{Illuminatus!}' trilogy as a sort of

self-subverting Dada-Zen for Westerners --- it should on no account

be taken seriously but is far more serious than most jokes.

Consider, for example, the Fifth Commandment of the Pentabarf, from

`Principia Discordia': "A Discordian is Prohibited of

Believing What he Reads." Discordianism is usually connected with

an elaborate conspiracy theory/joke involving millennia-long

warfare between the anarcho-surrealist partisans of Eris and a

malevolent, authoritarian secret society called the Illuminati.

See {Religion} under {appendix B}, {Church of the

SubGenius}, and {ha ha only serious}.

:disk farm: n. (also {laundromat}) A large room or rooms filled

with disk drives (esp. {washing machine}s).

:display hack: n. A program with the same approximate purpose as a

kaleidoscope: to make pretty pictures. Famous display hacks

include {munching squares}, {smoking clover}, the BSD UNIX

`rain(6)' program, `worms(6)' on miscellaneous UNIXes,

and the {X} `kaleid(1)' program. Display hacks can also be

implemented without programming by creating text files containing

numerous escape sequences for interpretation by a video terminal;

one notable example displayed, on any VT100, a Christmas tree with

twinkling lights and a toy train circling its base. The {hack

value} of a display hack is proportional to the esthetic value of

the images times the cleverness of the algorithm divided by the

size of the code. Syn. {psychedelicware}.

:Dissociated Press: [play on `Associated Press'; perhaps inspired

by a reference in the 1949 Bugs Bunny cartoon "What's Up,

Doc?"] n. An algorithm for transforming any text into potentially

humorous garbage even more efficiently than by passing it through a

{marketroid}. You start by printing any N consecutive

words (or letters) in the text. Then at every step you search for

any random occurrence in the original text of the last N

words (or letters) already printed and then print the next word or

letter. {EMACS} has a handy command for this. Here is a short

example of word-based Dissociated Press applied to an earlier

version of this Jargon File:

wart: n. A small, crocky {feature} that sticks out of

an array (C has no checks for this). This is relatively

benign and easy to spot if the phrase is bent so as to be

not worth paying attention to the medium in question.

Here is a short example of letter-based Dissociated Press applied

to the same source:

window sysIWYG: n. A bit was named aften /bee't*/ prefer

to use the other guy's re, especially in every cast a

chuckle on neithout getting into useful informash speech

makes removing a featuring a move or usage actual

abstractionsidered interj. Indeed spectace logic or problem!

A hackish idle pastime is to apply letter-based Dissociated Press

to a random body of text and {vgrep} the output in hopes of finding

an interesting new word. (In the preceding example, `window

sysIWYG' and `informash' show some promise.) Iterated applications

of Dissociated Press usually yield better results. Similar

techniques called `travesty generators' have been employed with

considerable satirical effect to the utterances of USENET flamers;

see {pseudo}.

:distribution: n. 1. A software source tree packaged for

distribution; but see {kit}. 2. A vague term encompassing

mailing lists and USENET newsgroups (but not {BBS} {fora}); any

topic-oriented message channel with multiple recipients. 3. An

information-space domain (usually loosely correlated with

geography) to which propagation of a USENET message is restricted;

a much-underutilized feature.

:do protocol: [from network protocol programming] vi. To perform an

interaction with somebody or something that follows a clearly

defined procedure. For example, "Let's do protocol with the

check" at a restaurant means to ask for the check, calculate the

tip and everybody's share, collect money from everybody, generate

change as necessary, and pay the bill. See {protocol}.

:doc: /dok/ n. Common spoken and written shorthand for

`documentation'. Often used in the plural `docs' and in the

construction `doc file' (documentation available on-line).

:doco: /do'koh/ [orig. in-house jargon at Symbolics] n. A

documentation writer. See also {devo} and {mango}.

:documentation:: n. The multiple kilograms of macerated, pounded,

steamed, bleached, and pressed trees that accompany most modern

software or hardware products (see also {tree-killer}). Hackers

seldom read paper documentation and (too) often resist writing it;

they prefer theirs to be terse and on-line. A common comment on

this is "You can't {grep} dead trees". See {drool-proof

paper}, {verbiage}.

:dodgy: adj. Syn. with {flaky}. Preferred outside the U.S.

:dogcow: /dog'kow/ n. See {Moof}.

:dogwash: /dog'wosh/ [From a quip in the `urgency' field of a very

optional software change request, ca. 1982. It was something like

"Urgency: Wash your dog first".] 1. n. A project of minimal

priority, undertaken as an escape from more serious work. 2. v.

To engage in such a project. Many games and much {freeware} get

written this way.

:domainist: /doh-mayn'ist/ adj. 1. Said of an {{Internet

address}} (as opposed to a {bang path}) because the part to the

right of the `@' specifies a nested series of `domains';

for example, eric@snark.thyrsus.com specifies the machine

called snark in the subdomain called thyrsus within the

top-level domain called com. See also {big-endian}, sense 2.

2. Said of a site, mailer, or routing program which knows how to

handle domainist addresses. 3. Said of a person (esp. a site

admin) who prefers domain addressing, supports a domainist mailer,

or prosyletizes for domainist addressing and disdains {bang

path}s. This is now (1991) semi-obsolete, as most sites have

converted.

:Don't do that, then!: [from an old doctor's office joke about a

patient with a trivial complaint] Stock response to a user

complaint. "When I type control-S, the whole system comes to a

halt for thirty seconds." "Don't do that, then!" (or "So don't

do that!"). Compare {RTFM}.

:dongle: /dong'gl/ n. 1. A security or {copy protection}

device for commercial microcomputer programs consisting of a

serialized EPROM and some drivers in a D-25 connector shell, which

must be connected to an I/O port of the computer while the program

is run. Programs that use a dongle query the port at startup and

at programmed intervals thereafter, and terminate if it does not

respond with the dongle's programmed validation code. Thus, users

can make as many copies of the program as they want but must pay

for each dongle. The idea was clever, but it was initially a

failure, as users disliked tying up a serial port this way. Most

dongles on the market today (1991) will pass data through the port

and monitor for {magic} codes (and combinations of status lines)

with minimal if any interference with devices further down the line

--- this innovation was necessary to allow daisy-chained dongles

for multiple pieces of software. The devices are still not widely

used, as the industry has moved away from copy-protection schemes

in general. 2. By extension, any physical electronic key or

transferrable ID required for a program to function. See

{dongle-disk}.

[Note: in early 1992, advertising copy from Rainbow Technologies (a

manufacturer of dongles) included a claim that the word derived from

"Don Gall", allegedly the inventor of the device. The company's

receptionist will cheerfully tell you that the story is a myth

invented for the ad copy. Nevertheless, I expect it to haunt my

life as a lexicographer for at least the next ten years. ---ESR]

:dongle-disk: /don'gl disk/ n. See {dongle}; a `dongle-disk'

is a floppy disk which is required in order to perform some task.

Some contain special coding that allows an application to identify

it uniquely, others *are* special code that does something

that normally-resident programs don't or can't. (For example,

AT&T's "Unix PC" would only come up in {root mode} with a

special boot disk.) Also called a `key disk'.

:donuts: n.obs. A collective noun for any set of memory bits. This

is extremely archaic and may no longer be live jargon; it dates

from the days of ferrite-{core} memories in which each bit was

implemented by a doughnut-shaped magnetic flip-flop.

:doorstop: n. Used to describe equipment that is non-functional and

halfway expected to remain so, especially obsolete equipment kept

around for political reasons or ostensibly as a backup. "When we

get another Wyse-50 in here, that ADM 3 will turn into a doorstop."

Compare {boat anchor}.

:dot file: [UNIX] n. A file which is not visible by default to

normal directory-browsing tools (on UNIX, files named with a

leading dot are, by convention, not normally presented in directory

listings). Many programs define one or more dot files in which

startup or configuration information may be optionally recorded; a

user can customize the program's behavior by creating the

appropriate file in the current or home directory. (Therefore, dot

files tend to {creep} --- with every nontrivial application

program defining at least one, a user's home directory can be

filled with scores of dot files, of course without the user's

really being aware of it.) See also {rc file}.

:double bucky: adj. Using both the CTRL and META keys. "The

command to burn all LEDs is double bucky F."

This term originated on the Stanford extended-ASCII keyboard, and

was later taken up by users of the {space-cadet keyboard} at

MIT. A typical MIT comment was that the Stanford {bucky bits}

(control and meta shifting keys) were nice, but there weren't

enough of them; you could type only 512 different characters on a

Stanford keyboard. An obvious way to address this was simply to

add more shifting keys, and this was eventually done; but a

keyboard with that many shifting keys is hard on touch-typists, who

don't like to move their hands away from the home position on the

keyboard. It was half-seriously suggested that the extra shifting

keys be implemented as pedals; typing on such a keyboard would be

very much like playing a full pipe organ. This idea is mentioned

in a parody of a very fine song by Jeffrey Moss called

"Rubber Duckie", which was published in `The Sesame

Street Songbook' (Simon and Schuster 1971, ISBN 0-671-21036-X).

These lyrics were written on May 27, 1978, in celebration of the

Stanford keyboard: