`Undocumented feature' is a common, allegedly humorous euphemism
for a {bug}.
:feature creature: [poss. fr. slang `creature feature' for a
horror movie] n. 1. One who loves to add features to designs or
programs, perhaps at the expense of coherence, concision, or
{taste}. 2. Alternately, a semi-mythical being that induces
otherwise rational programmers to perpetrate such crocks. See also
{feeping creaturism}, {creeping featurism}.
:feature key: n. The Macintosh key with the cloverleaf graphic on
its keytop; sometimes referred to as `flower', `pretzel',
`clover', `propeller', `beanie' (an apparent reference to the
major feature of a propeller beanie), {splat}, or the `command
key'. The Mac's equivalent of an {alt} key. The proliferation
of terms for this creature may illustrate one subtle peril of
iconic interfaces.
Many people have been mystified by the cloverleaf-like symbol that
appears on the feature key. Its oldest name is `cross of St.
Hannes', but it occurs in pre-Christian Viking art as a decorative
motif. Throughout Scandinavia today the road agencies use it to
mark sites of historical interest. Many of these are old churches;
hence, the Swedish idiom for the symbol is `kyrka', cognate to
English `church' and Scots-dialect `kirk' but pronounced
/shir'k*/ in modern Swedish. This is in fact where Apple got the
symbol; they give the translation "interesting feature"!
:feature shock: [from Alvin Toffler's book title `Future
Shock'] n. A user's (or programmer's!) confusion when confronted
with a package that has too many features and poor introductory
material.
:featurectomy: /fee`ch*r-ek't*-mee/ n. The act of removing a
feature from a program. Featurectomies come in two flavors, the
`righteous' and the `reluctant'. Righteous featurectomies are
performed because the remover believes the program would be more
elegant without the feature, or there is already an equivalent and
better way to achieve the same end. (This is not quite the same
thing as removing a {misfeature}.) Reluctant featurectomies are
performed to satisfy some external constraint such as code size or
execution speed.
:feep: /feep/ 1. n. The soft electronic `bell' sound of a
display terminal (except for a VT-52); a beep (in fact, the
microcomputer world seems to prefer {beep}). 2. vi. To cause
the display to make a feep sound. ASR-33s (the original TTYs) do
not feep; they have mechanical bells that ring. Alternate forms:
{beep}, `bleep', or just about anything suitably
onomatopoeic. (Jeff MacNelly, in his comic strip "Shoe", uses
the word `eep' for sounds made by computer terminals and video
games; this is perhaps the closest written approximation yet.) The
term `breedle' was sometimes heard at SAIL, where the terminal
bleepers are not particularly soft (they sound more like the
musical equivalent of a raspberry or Bronx cheer; for a close
approximation, imagine the sound of a Star Trek communicator's beep
lasting for 5 seconds). The `feeper' on a VT-52 has been
compared to the sound of a '52 Chevy stripping its gears. See also
{ding}.
:feeper: /fee'pr/ n. The device in a terminal or workstation (usually
a loudspeaker of some kind) that makes the {feep} sound.
:feeping creature: [from {feeping creaturism}] n. An unnecessary
feature; a bit of {chrome} that, in the speaker's judgment, is
the camel's nose for a whole horde of new features.
:feeping creaturism: /fee'ping kree`ch*r-izm/ n. A deliberate
spoonerism for {creeping featurism}, meant to imply that the
system or program in question has become a misshapen creature of
hacks. This term isn't really well defined, but it sounds so neat
that most hackers have said or heard it. It is probably reinforced
by an image of terminals prowling about in the dark making their
customary noises.
:feetch feetch: /feech feech/ interj. If someone tells you about
some new improvement to a program, you might respond: "Feetch,
feetch!" The meaning of this depends critically on vocal
inflection. With enthusiasm, it means something like "Boy, that's
great! What a great hack!" Grudgingly or with obvious doubt, it
means "I don't know; it sounds like just one more unnecessary and
complicated thing". With a tone of resignation, it means, "Well,
I'd rather keep it simple, but I suppose it has to be done".
:fence: n. 1. A sequence of one or more distinguished
({out-of-band}) characters (or other data items), used to
delimit a piece of data intended to be treated as a unit (the
computer-science literature calls this a `sentinel'). The NUL
(ASCII 0000000) character that terminates strings in C is a fence.
Hex FF is also (though slightly less frequently) used this way.
See {zigamorph}. 2. [among users of optimizing compilers] Any
technique, usually exploiting knowledge about the compiler, that
blocks certain optimizations. Used when explicit mechanisms are
not available or are overkill. Typically a hack: "I call a dummy
procedure there to force a flush of the optimizer's
register-coloring info" can be expressed by the shorter "That's a
fence procedure".
:fencepost error: n. 1. A problem with the discrete equivalent of a
boundary condition. Often exhibited in programs by iterative
loops. From the following problem: "If you build a fence 100 feet
long with posts 10 feet apart, how many posts do you need?"
Either 9 or 11 is a better answer than the obvious 10. For
example, suppose you have a long list or array of items, and want
to process items m through n; how many items are there? The
obvious answer is n - m, but that is off by one; the right
answer is n - m + 1. A program that used the `obvious'
formula would have a fencepost error in it. See also {zeroth}
and {off-by-one error}, and note that not all off-by-one errors
are fencepost errors. The game of Musical Chairs involves a
catastrophic off-by-one error where N people try to sit in
N - 1 chairs, but it's not a fencepost error. Fencepost
errors come from counting things rather than the spaces between
them, or vice versa, or by neglecting to consider whether one
should count one or both ends of a row. 2. Occasionally, an error
induced by unexpectedly regular spacing of inputs, which can (for
instance) screw up your hash table.
:fepped out: /fept owt/ adj. The Symbolics 3600 Lisp Machine has a
Front-End Processor called a `FEP' (compare sense 2 of {box}).
When the main processor gets {wedged}, the FEP takes control of
the keyboard and screen. Such a machine is said to have
`fepped out'.
:FidoNet: n. A worldwide hobbyist network of personal computers
which exchange mail, discussion groups, and files. Founded in 1984
and originally consisting only of IBM PCs and compatibles, FidoNet
now includes such diverse machines as Apple ][s, Ataris, Amigas,
and UNIX systems. Though it is much younger than {USENET},
FidoNet is already (in early 1991) a significant fraction of
USENET's size at some 8000 systems.
:field circus: [a derogatory pun on `field service'] n. The field
service organization of any hardware manufacturer, but especially
DEC. There is an entire genre of jokes about DEC field circus
engineers:
Q: How can you recognize a DEC field circus engineer
with a flat tire?
A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.
Q: How can you recognize a DEC field circus engineer
who is out of gas?
A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.
[See {Easter egging} for additional insight on these jokes.]
There is also the `Field Circus Cheer' (from the {plan file} for
DEC on MIT-AI):
Maynard! Maynard!
Don't mess with us!
We're mean and we're tough!
If you get us confused
We'll screw up your stuff.
(DEC's service HQ is located in Maynard, Massachusetts.)
:field servoid: [play on `android'] /fee'ld ser'voyd/ n.
Representative of a field service organization (see {field
circus}). This has many of the implications of {droid}.
:Fight-o-net: [FidoNet] n. Deliberate distortion of {FidoNet},
often applied after a flurry of {flamage} in a particular
{echo}, especially the SYSOP echo or Fidonews (see {'Snooze}).
:File Attach: [FidoNet] 1. n. A file sent along with a mail message
from one BBS to another. 2. vt. Sending someone a file by using
the File Attach option in a BBS mailer.
:File Request: [FidoNet] 1. n. The {FidoNet} equivalent of
{FTP}, in which one BBS system automatically dials another and
{snarf}s one or more files. Often abbreviated `FReq'; files
are often announced as being "available for FReq" in the same way
that files are announced as being "available for/by anonymous
FTP" on the Internet. 2. vt. The act of getting a copy of a file
by using the File Request option of the BBS mailer.
:file signature: n. A {magic number} sense 3.
:filk: /filk/ [from SF fandom, where a typo for `folk' was
adopted as a new word] n.,v. A `filk' is a popular or folk song
with lyrics revised or completely new lyrics, intended for humorous
effect when read and/or to be sung late at night at SF conventions.
There is a flourishing subgenre of these called `computer filks',
written by hackers and often containing rather sophisticated
technical humor. See {double bucky} for an example. Compare
{hing} and {newsfroup}.
:film at 11: [MIT: in parody of TV newscasters] 1. Used in
conversation to announce ordinary events, with a sarcastic
implication that these events are earth-shattering. "{{ITS}}
crashes; film at 11." "Bug found in scheduler; film at 11."
2. Also widely used outside MIT to indicate that additional
information will be available at some future time, *without*
the implication of anything particularly ordinary about the
referenced event. For example, "The mail file server died this
morning; we found garbage all over the root directory. Film at
11." would indicate that a major failure had occurred but the
people working on it have no additional information about it. Use
of the phrase in this way suggests gently people would appreciate
it if users would quit bothering them and wait for the 11:00 news
for additional information.
:filter: [orig. {{UNIX}}, now also in {{MS-DOS}}] n. A program that
processes an input data stream into an output data stream in some
well-defined way, and does no I/O to anywhere else except possibly
on error conditions; one designed to be used as a stage in a
`pipeline' (see {plumbing}).
:Finagle's Law: n. The generalized or `folk' version of
{Murphy's Law}, fully named "Finagle's Law of Dynamic
Negatives" and usually rendered "Anything that can go wrong,
will". One variant favored among hackers is "The perversity of
the Universe tends towards a maximum" (but see also {Hanlon's
Razor}). The label `Finagle's Law' was popularized by SF author
Larry Niven in several stories depicting a frontier culture of
asteroid miners; this `Belter' culture professed a religion
and/or running joke involving the worship of the dread god Finagle
and his mad prophet Murphy.
:fine: [WPI] adj. Good, but not good enough to be {cuspy}. The word
`fine' is used elsewhere, of course, but without the implicit
comparison to the higher level implied by {cuspy}.
:finger: [WAITS, via BSD UNIX] 1. n. A program that displays a
particular user or all users logged on the system or a remote
system. Typically shows full name, last login time, idle time,
terminal line, and terminal location (where applicable). May also
display a {plan file} left by the user. 2. vt. To apply finger
to a username. 3. vt. By extension, to check a human's current
state by any means. "Foodp?" "T!" "OK, finger Lisa and see
if she's idle." 4. Any picture (composed of ASCII characters)
depicting `the finger'. Originally a humorous component of one's
plan file to deter the curious fingerer (sense 2), it has entered
the arsenal of some {flamer}s.
:finger-pointing syndrome: n. All-too-frequent result of bugs, esp.
in new or experimental configurations. The hardware vendor points
a finger at the software. The software vendor points a finger
at the hardware. All the poor users get is the finger.
:finn: [IRC] v. To pull rank on somebody based on the amount of
time one has spent on {IRC}. The term derives from the fact
that IRC was originally written in Finland in 1987.
:firebottle: n. A large, primitive, power-hungry active electrical
device, similar in function to a FET but constructed out of glass,
metal, and vacuum. Characterized by high cost, low density, low
reliability, high-temperature operation, and high power
dissipation. Sometimes mistakenly called a `tube' in the U.S.
or a `valve' in England; another hackish term is {glassfet}.
:firefighting: n. 1. What sysadmins have to do to correct sudden
operational problems. An opposite of hacking. "Been hacking your
new newsreader?" "No, a power glitch hosed the network and I spent
the whole afternoon fighting fires." 2. The act of throwing lots
of manpower and late nights at a project, esp. to get it out
before deadline. See also {gang bang}, {Mongolian Hordes
technique}; however, the term `firefighting' connotes that the
effort is going into chasing bugs rather than adding features.
:firehose syndrome: n. In mainstream folklore it is observed that
trying to drink from a firehose can be a good way to rip your lips
off. On computer networks, the absence or failure of flow control
mechanisms can lead to situations in which the sending system
sprays a massive flood of packets at an unfortunate receiving
system; more than it can handle. Compare {overrun}, {buffer
overflow}.
:firewall code: n. The code you put in a system (say, a telephone
switch) to make sure that the users can't do any damage. Since
users always want to be able to do everything but never want to
suffer for any mistakes, the construction of a firewall is a
question not only of defensive coding but also of interface
presentation, so that users don't even get curious about those
corners of a system where they can burn themselves.
:firewall machine: n. A dedicated gateway machine with special
security precautions on it, used to service outside network
connections and dial-in lines. The idea is to protect a cluster of
more loosely administered machines hidden behind it from
{cracker}s. The typical firewall is an inexpensive micro-based
UNIX box kept clean of critical data, with a bunch of modems and
public network ports on it but just one carefully watched
connection back to the rest of the cluster. The special
precautions may include threat monitoring, callback, and even a
complete {iron box} keyable to particular incoming IDs or
activity patterns. Syn. {flytrap}, {Venus flytrap}.
:fireworks mode: n. The mode a machine is sometimes said to be in when
it is performing a {crash and burn} operation.
:firmy: /fer'mee/ Syn. {stiffy} (a 3.5-inch floppy disk).
:fish: [Adelaide University, Australia] n. 1. Another {metasyntactic
variable}. See {foo}. Derived originally from the Monty Python
skit in the middle of "The Meaning of Life" entitled
"Find the Fish". 2. A pun for `microfiche'. A microfiche
file cabinet may be referred to as a `fish tank'.
:FISH queue: [acronym, by analogy with FIFO (First In, First Out)]
n. `First In, Still Here'. A joking way of pointing out that
processing of a particular sequence of events or requests has
stopped dead. Also `FISH mode' and `FISHnet'; the latter
may be applied to any network that is running really slowly or
exhibiting extreme flakiness.
:FITNR: // [Thinking Machines, Inc.] Fixed In the Next Release.
A written-only notation attached to bug reports. Often wishful
thinking.
:fix: n.,v. What one does when a problem has been reported too many
times to be ignored.
:flag: n. A variable or quantity that can take on one of two
values; a bit, particularly one that is used to indicate one of two
outcomes or is used to control which of two things is to be done.
"This flag controls whether to clear the screen before printing
the message." "The program status word contains several flag
bits." Used of humans analogously to {bit}. See also
{hidden flag}, {mode bit}.
:flag day: n. A software change that is neither forward- nor
backward-compatible, and which is costly to make and costly to
reverse. "Can we install that without causing a flag day for all
users?" This term has nothing to do with the use of the word
{flag} to mean a variable that has two values. It came into use
when a massive change was made to the {{Multics}} timesharing
system to convert from the old ASCII code to the new one; this was
scheduled for Flag Day (a U.S. holiday), June 14, 1966. See also
{backward combatability}.
:flaky: adj. (var sp. `flakey') Subject to frequent {lossage}.
This use is of course related to the common slang use of the word
to describe a person as eccentric, crazy, or just unreliable. A
system that is flaky is working, sort of --- enough that you are
tempted to try to use it --- but fails frequently enough that the
odds in favor of finishing what you start are low. Commonwealth
hackish prefers {dodgy} or {wonky}.
:flamage: /flay'm*j/ n. Flaming verbiage, esp. high-noise,
low-signal postings to {USENET} or other electronic {fora}.
Often in the phrase `the usual flamage'. `Flaming' is the act
itself; `flamage' the content; a `flame' is a single flaming
message. See {flame}.
:flame: 1. vi. To post an email message intended to insult and
provoke. 2. vi. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some
relatively uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous
attitude. 3. vt. Either of senses 1 or 2, directed with
hostility at a particular person or people. 4. n. An instance of
flaming. When a discussion degenerates into useless controversy,
one might tell the participants "Now you're just flaming" or
"Stop all that flamage!" to try to get them to cool down (so to
speak).
USENETter Marc Ramsey, who was at WPI from 1972 to 1976, adds: "I
am 99% certain that the use of `flame' originated at WPI. Those
who made a nuisance of themselves insisting that they needed to use
a TTY for `real work' came to be known as `flaming asshole lusers'.
Other particularly annoying people became `flaming asshole ravers',
which shortened to `flaming ravers', and ultimately `flamers'. I
remember someone picking up on the Human Torch pun, but I don't
think `flame on/off' was ever much used at WPI." See also
{asbestos}.
The term may have been independently invented at several different
places; it is also reported that `flaming' was in use to mean
something like `interminably drawn-out semi-serious discussions'
(late-night bull sessions) at Carleton College during 1968--1971.
It's possible that the hackish sense of `flame' is much older than
that. The poet Chaucer was also what passed for a wizard hacker in
his time; he wrote a treatise on the astrolabe, the most advanced
computing device of the day. In Chaucer's `Troilus and
Cressida', Cressida laments her inability to grasp the proof of a
particular mathematical theorem; her uncle Pandarus then observes
that it's called "the fleminge of wrecches." This phrase seems
to have been intended in context as "that which puts the wretches
to flight" but was probably just as ambiguous in Middle English as
"the flaming of wretches" would be today. One suspects that
Chaucer would be right at home on USENET.
:flame bait: n. A posting intended to trigger a {flame war}, or one
that invites flames in reply.
:flame on: vi.,interj. 1. To begin to {flame}. The punning
reference to Marvel Comics's Human Torch is no longer widely
recognized. 2. To continue to flame. See {rave}, {burble}.
:flame war: n. (var. `flamewar') An acrimonious dispute,
especially when conducted on a public electronic forum such as
{USENET}.
:flamer: n. One who habitually {flame}s. Said esp. of obnoxious
{USENET} personalities.
:flap: vt. 1. To unload a DECtape (so it goes flap, flap,
flap...). Old-time hackers at MIT tell of the days when the
disk was device 0 and {microtape}s were 1, 2,... and
attempting to flap device 0 would instead start a motor banging
inside a cabinet near the disk. 2. By extension, to unload any
magnetic tape. See also {macrotape}. Modern cartridge tapes no
longer actually flap, but the usage has remained. (The term could
well be re-applied to DEC's TK50 cartridge tape drive, a
spectacularly misengineered contraption which makes a loud flapping
sound, almost like an old reel-type lawnmower, in one of its many
tape-eating failure modes.)
:flarp: /flarp/ [Rutgers University] n. Yet another {metasyntactic
variable} (see {foo}). Among those who use it, it is associated
with a legend that any program not containing the word `flarp'
somewhere will not work. The legend is discreetly silent on the
reliability of programs which *do* contain the magic word.
:flat: adj. 1. Lacking any complex internal structure. "That
{bitty box} has only a flat filesystem, not a hierarchical
one." The verb form is {flatten}. 2. Said of a memory
architecture (like that of the VAX or 680x0) that is one big linear
address space (typically with each possible value of a processor
register corresponding to a unique core address), as opposed to a
`segmented' architecture (like that of the 80x86) in which
addresses are composed from a base-register/offset pair (segmented
designs are generally considered {cretinous}).
Note that sense 1 (at least with respect to filesystems) is usually
used pejoratively, while sense 2 is a {Good Thing}.
:flat-ASCII: adj. Said of a text file that contains only 7-bit ASCII
characters and uses only ASCII-standard control characters (that
is, has no embedded codes specific to a particular text formatter
or markup language, and no {meta}-characters). Syn.
{plain-ASCII}. Compare {flat-file}.
:flat-file: adj. A {flatten}ed representation of some database or
tree or network structure as a single file from which the
structure could implicitly be rebuilt, esp. one in {flat-ASCII}
form.
:flatten: vt. To remove structural information, esp. to filter
something with an implicit tree structure into a simple sequence of
leaves; also tends to imply mapping to {flat-ASCII}. "This code
flattens an expression with parentheses into an equivalent
{canonical} form."
:flavor: n. 1. Variety, type, kind. "DDT commands come in two
flavors." "These lights come in two flavors, big red ones and
small green ones." See {vanilla}. 2. The attribute that causes
something to be {flavorful}. Usually used in the phrase "yields
additional flavor". "This convention yields additional flavor by
allowing one to print text either right-side-up or upside-down."
See {vanilla}. This usage was certainly reinforced by the
terminology of quantum chromodynamics, in which quarks (the
constituents of, e.g., protons) come in six flavors (up, down,
strange, charm, top, bottom) and three colors (red, blue, green)
--- however, hackish use of `flavor' at MIT predated QCD. 3. The
term for `class' (in the object-oriented sense) in the LISP Machine
Flavors system. Though the Flavors design has been superseded
(notably by the Common LISP CLOS facility), the term `flavor' is
still used as a general synonym for `class' by some LISP hackers.
:flavorful: adj. Full of {flavor}; esthetically pleasing. See
{random} and {losing} for antonyms. See also the entries for
{taste} and {elegant}.
:flippy: /flip'ee/ n. A single-sided floppy disk altered for
double-sided use by addition of a second write-notch, so called
because it must be flipped over for the second side to be
accessible. No longer common.
:flood: [IRC] v. To dump large amounts of text onto an {IRC}
channel. This is especially rude when the text is uninteresting
and the other users are trying to carry on a serious conversation.
:flowchart:: [techspeak] n. An archaic form of visual control-flow
specification employing arrows and `speech balloons' of various
shapes. Hackers never use flowcharts, consider them extremely
silly, and associate them with {COBOL} programmers, {card
walloper}s, and other lower forms of life. This is because (from a
hacker's point of view) they are no easier to read than code, are
less precise, and tend to fall out of sync with the code (so that
they either obfuscate it rather than explaining it or require
extra maintenance effort that doesn't improve the code). See also
{pdl}, sense 3.
:flower key: [Mac users] n. See {feature key}.
:flush: v. 1. To delete something, usually superfluous, or to abort
an operation. "All that nonsense has been flushed." 2. [UNIX/C]
To force buffered I/O to disk, as with an `fflush(3)' call.
This is *not* an abort or deletion as in sense 1, but a
demand for early completion! 3. To leave at the end of a day's
work (as opposed to leaving for a meal). "I'm going to flush
now." "Time to flush." 4. To exclude someone from an activity,
or to ignore a person.
`Flush' was standard ITS terminology for aborting an output
operation; one spoke of the text that would have been printed, but
was not, as having been flushed. It is speculated that this term
arose from a vivid image of flushing unwanted characters by hosing
down the internal output buffer, washing the characters away before
they can be printed. The UNIX/C usage, on the other hand, was
propagated by the `fflush(3)' call in C's standard I/O library
(though it is reported to have been in use among BLISS programmers
at DEC and on Honeywell and IBM machines as far back as 1965).
UNIX/C hackers find the ITS usage confusing, and vice versa.
:flypage: /fli: payj/n. (alt. `fly page') A {banner}, sense 1.
:Flyspeck 3: n. Standard name for any font that is so tiny as to be
unreadable (by analogy with such names as `Helvetica 10' for
10-point Helvetica). Legal boilerplate is usually printed in
Flyspeck 3.
:flytrap: n. See {firewall machine}.
:FM: n. *Not* `Frequency Modulation' but rather an
abbreviation for `Fucking Manual', the back-formation from
{RTFM}. Used to refer to the manual itself in the {RTFM}.
"Have you seen the Networking FM lately?"
:FOAF: // [USENET] n. Acronym for `Friend Of A Friend'. The
source of an unverified, possibly untrue story. This was not
originated by hackers (it is used in Jan Brunvand's books on urban
folklore), but is much better recognized on USENET and elsewhere
than in mainstream English.
:FOD: /fod/ v. [Abbreviation for `Finger of Death', originally a
spell-name from fantasy gaming] To terminate with extreme prejudice
and with no regard for other people. From {MUD}s where the
wizard command `FOD <player>' results in the immediate and total
death of <player>, usually as punishment for obnoxious behavior.
This migrated to other circumstances, such as "I'm going to fod
the process that is burning all the cycles." Compare {gun}.
In aviation, FOD means Foreign Object Damage, e.g., what happens
when a jet engine sucks up a rock on the runway or a bird in
flight. Finger of Death is a distressingly apt description of
what this does to the engine.
:fold case: v. See {smash case}. This term tends to be used
more by people who don't mind that their tools smash case. It also
connotes that case is ignored but case distinctions in data
processed by the tool in question aren't destroyed.
:followup: n. On USENET, a {posting} generated in response to
another posting (as opposed to a {reply}, which goes by email
rather than being broadcast). Followups include the ID of the
{parent message} in their headers; smart news-readers can use
this information to present USENET news in `conversation' sequence
rather than order-of-arrival. See {thread}.
:fontology: [XEROX PARC] n. The body of knowledge dealing with the
construction and use of new fonts (e.g. for window systems and
typesetting software). It has been said that fontology
recapitulates file-ogeny.
[Unfortunately, this reference to the embryological dictum that
"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is not merely a joke. On the
Macintosh, for example, System 7 has to go through contortions to
compensate for an earlier design error that created a whole
different set of abstractions for fonts parallel to `files' and
`folders' --- ESR]
:foo: /foo/ 1. interj. Term of disgust. 2. Used very generally
as a sample name for absolutely anything, esp. programs and files
(esp. scratch files). 3. First on the standard list of
{metasyntactic variable}s used in syntax examples. See also
{bar}, {baz}, {qux}, {quux}, {corge}, {grault},
{garply}, {waldo}, {fred}, {plugh}, {xyzzy},
{thud}.
The etymology of hackish `foo' is obscure. When used in
connection with `bar' it is generally traced to the WWII-era Army
slang acronym FUBAR (`Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition'), later
bowdlerized to {foobar}. (See also {FUBAR}).
However, the use of the word `foo' itself has more complicated
antecedents, including a long history in comic strips and cartoons.
The old "Smokey Stover" comic strips by Bill Holman often
included the word `FOO', in particular on license plates of cars;
allegedly, `FOO' and `BAR' also occurred in Walt Kelly's
"Pogo" strips. In the 1938 cartoon "Daffy Doc", a very
early version of Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying "SILENCE IS
FOO!"; oddly, this seems to refer to some approving or positive
affirmative use of foo. It has been suggested that this might be
related to the Chinese word `fu' (sometimes transliterated
`foo'), which can mean "happiness" when spoken with the proper
tone (the lion-dog guardians flanking the steps of many Chinese
restaurants are properly called "fu dogs").
It is even possible that hacker usage actually springs from
`FOO, Lampoons and Parody', the title of a comic book first
issued in September 1958; the byline read `C. Crumb' but the style
of the art suggests this may well have been a sort-of pseudonym for
noted weird-comix artist Robert Crumb. The title FOO was featured
in large letters on the front cover. What the word meant to Mr.
Crumb is anybody's guess.
An old-time member reports that in the 1959 `Dictionary of the
TMRC Language', compiled at {TMRC} there was an entry that went
something like this:
FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase "FOO MANE PADME
HUM." Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning.
For more about the legendary foo counters, see {TMRC}. Almost
the entire staff of what became the MIT AI LAB was involved with
TMRC, and probably picked the word up there.
Very probably, hackish `foo' had no single origin and derives
through all these channels from Yiddish `feh' and/or English
`fooey'.
:foobar: n. Another common {metasyntactic variable}; see {foo}.
Hackers do *not* generally use this to mean {FUBAR} in
either the slang or jargon sense.
:fool: n. As used by hackers, specifically describes a person who
habitually reasons from obviously or demonstrably incorrect
premises and cannot be persuaded by evidence to do otherwise; it is
not generally used in its other senses, i.e., to describe a person
with a native incapacity to reason correctly, or a clown. Indeed,
in hackish experience many fools are capable of reasoning all too
effectively in executing their errors. See also {cretin},
{loser}, {fool file, the}.
:fool file, the: [USENET] n. A notional repository of all the most
dramatically and abysmally stupid utterances ever. There is a
subgenre of {sig block}s that consists of the header "From the
fool file:" followed by some quote the poster wishes to represent
as an immortal gem of dimwittery; for this to be really effective,
the quote has to be so obviously wrong as to be laughable. More
than one USENETter has achieved an unwanted notoriety by being
quoted in this way.
:Foonly: n. 1. The {PDP-10} successor that was to have been built by
the Super Foonly project at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory along with a new operating system. The intention was to
leapfrog from the old DEC timesharing system SAIL was running to a
new generation, bypassing TENEX which at that time was the ARPANET
standard. ARPA funding for both the Super Foonly and the new
operating system was cut in 1974. Most of the design team went to
DEC and contributed greatly to the design of the PDP-10 model KL10.
2. The name of the company formed by Dave Poole, one of the
principal Super Foonly designers, and one of hackerdom's more
colorful personalities. Many people remember the parrot which sat
on Poole's shoulder and was a regular companion. 3. Any of the
machines built by Poole's company. The first was the F-1 (a.k.a.
Super Foonly), which was the computational engine used to create
the graphics in the movie "TRON". The F-1 was the fastest
PDP-10 ever built, but only one was ever made. The effort drained
Foonly of its financial resources, and they turned towards building
smaller, slower, and much less expensive machines. Unfortunately,
these ran not the popular {TOPS-20} but a TENEX variant called
Foonex; this seriously limited their market. Also, the machines
shipped were actually wire-wrapped engineering prototypes requiring
individual attention from more than usually competent site
personnel, and thus had significant reliability problems. Poole's
legendary temper and unwillingness to suffer fools gladly did not
help matters. By the time of the Jupiter project cancellation in
1983 Foonly's proposal to build another F-1 was eclipsed by the
{Mars}, and the company never quite recovered. See the
{Mars} entry for the continuation and moral of this story.
:footprint: n. 1. The floor or desk area taken up by a piece of
hardware. 2. [IBM] The audit trail (if any) left by a crashed
program (often in plural, `footprints'). See also
{toeprint}.
:for free: adj. Said of a capability of a programming language or
hardware equipment that is available by its design without needing
cleverness to implement: "In APL, we get the matrix operations for
free." "And owing to the way revisions are stored in this
system, you get revision trees for free." Usually it refers to a
serendipitous feature of doing things a certain way (compare
{big win}), but it may refer to an intentional but secondary
feature.
:for the rest of us: [from the Mac slogan "The computer for the
rest of us"] adj. 1. Used to describe a {spiffy} product whose
affordability shames other comparable products, or (more often)
used sarcastically to describe {spiffy} but very overpriced
products. 2. Describes a program with a limited interface,
deliberately limited capabilities, non-orthogonality, inability to
compose primitives, or any other limitation designed to not
`confuse' a na"ive user. This places an upper bound on how far
that user can go before the program begins to get in the way of the
task instead of helping accomplish it. Used in reference to
Macintosh software which doesn't provide obvious capabilities
because it is thought that the poor lusers might not be able to
handle them. Becomes `the rest of *them*' when used in
third-party reference; thus, "Yes, it is an attractive program,
but it's designed for The Rest Of Them" means a program that
superficially looks neat but has no depth beyond the surface flash.
See also {WIMP environment}, {Macintrash},
{point-and-drool interface}, {user-friendly}.
:for values of: [MIT] A common rhetorical maneuver at MIT is to use
any of the canonical {random numbers} as placeholders for
variables. "The max function takes 42 arguments, for arbitrary
values of 42." "There are 69 ways to leave your lover, for
69 = 50." This is especially likely when the speaker has uttered
a random number and realizes that it was not recognized as such,
but even `non-random' numbers are occasionally used in this
fashion. A related joke is that pi equals 3 --- for
small values of pi and large values of 3.
Historical note: this usage probably derives from the programming
language MAD (Michigan Algorithm Decoder), an Algol-like language
that was the most common choice among mainstream (non-hacker) users
at MIT in the mid-60s. It had a control structure FOR VALUES OF X
= 3, 7, 99 DO ... that would repeat the indicated instructions for
each value in the list (unlike the usual FOR that only works for
arithmetic sequences of values). MAD is long extinct, but similar
for-constructs still flourish (e.g. in UNIX's shell languages).
:fora: pl.n. Plural of {forum}.
:foreground: [UNIX] vt. To foreground a task is to bring it to
the top of one's {stack} for immediate processing, and hackers
often use it in this sense for non-computer tasks. "If your
presentation is due next week, I guess I'd better foreground
writing up the design document."
Technically, on a time-sharing system, a task executing in
foreground is one able to accept input from and return output to
the user; oppose {background}. Nowadays this term is primarily
associated with {{UNIX}}, but it appears first to have been used
in this sense on OS/360. Normally, there is only one foreground
task per terminal (or terminal window); having multiple processes
simultaneously reading the keyboard is a good way to {lose}.
:fork bomb: [UNIX] n. A particular species of {wabbit} that can
be written in one line of C (`main() {for(;;)fork();}') or shell
(`$0 & $0 &') on any UNIX system, or occasionally created by an
egregious coding bug. A fork bomb process `explodes' by
recursively spawning copies of itself (using the UNIX system call
`fork(2)'). Eventually it eats all the process table entries
and effectively wedges the system. Fortunately, fork bombs are
relatively easy to spot and kill, so creating one deliberately
seldom accomplishes more than to bring the just wrath of the gods
down upon the perpetrator. See also {logic bomb}.
:forked: [UNIX; prob. influenced by a mainstream expletive] adj.
Terminally slow, or dead. Originated when one system was slowed to
a snail's pace by an inadvertent {fork bomb}.
:Fortrash: /for'trash/ n. Hackerism for the FORTRAN language,
referring to its primitive design, gross and irregular syntax,
limited control constructs, and slippery, exception-filled
semantics.
:fortune cookie: [WAITS, via UNIX] n. A random quote, item of
trivia, joke, or maxim printed to the user's tty at login time or
(less commonly) at logout time. Items from this lexicon have often
been used as fortune cookies. See {cookie file}.
:forum: n. [USENET, GEnie, CI$; pl. `fora' or `forums'] Any
discussion group accessible through a dial-in {BBS}, a
{mailing list}, or a {newsgroup} (see {network, the}). A
forum functions much like a bulletin board; users submit
{posting}s for all to read and discussion ensues. Contrast
real-time chat via {talk mode} or point-to-point personal
{email}.
:fossil: n. 1. In software, a misfeature that becomes
understandable only in historical context, as a remnant of times
past retained so as not to break compatibility. Example: the
retention of octal as default base for string escapes in {C}, in
spite of the better match of hexadecimal to ASCII and modern
byte-addressable architectures. See {dusty deck}. 2. More
restrictively, a feature with past but no present utility.
Example: the force-all-caps (LCASE) bits in the V7 and {BSD}
UNIX tty driver, designed for use with monocase terminals. In a
perversion of the usual backward-compatibility goal, this
functionality has actually been expanded and renamed in some later
{USG UNIX} releases as the IUCLC and OLCUC bits. 3. The FOSSIL
(Fido/Opus/Seadog Standard Interface Level) driver specification
for serial-port access to replace the {brain-dead} routines in
the IBM PC ROMs. Fossils are used by most MS-DOS {BBS} software
in preference to the `supported' ROM routines, which do not support
interrupt-driven operation or setting speeds above 9600; the use of
a semistandard FOSSIL library is preferable to the {bare metal}
serial port programming otherwise required. Since the FOSSIL
specification allows additional functionality to be hooked in,
drivers that use the {hook} but do not provide serial-port
access themselves are named with a modifier, as in `video
fossil'.
:four-color glossies: 1. Literature created by {marketroid}s
that allegedly contains technical specs but which is in fact as
superficial as possible without being totally {content-free}.
"Forget the four-color glossies, give me the tech ref manuals."
Often applied as an indication of superficiality even when the
material is printed on ordinary paper in black and white.
Four-color-glossy manuals are *never* useful for finding a
problem. 2. [rare] Applied by extension to manual pages that don't
contain enough information to diagnose why the program doesn't
produce the expected or desired output.
:fragile: adj. Syn {brittle}.
:fred: n. 1. The personal name most frequently used as a
{metasyntactic variable} (see {foo}). Allegedly popular
because it's easy for a non-touch-typist to type on a standard
QWERTY keyboard. Unlike {J. Random Hacker} or `J. Random
Loser', this name has no positive or negative loading (but see
{Mbogo, Dr. Fred}). See also {barney}. 2. An acronym for
`Flipping Ridiculous Electronic Device'; other F-verbs may be
substituted for `flipping'.
:frednet: /fred'net/ n. Used to refer to some {random} and
uncommon protocol encountered on a network. "We're implementing
bridging in our router to solve the frednet problem."
:freeware: n. Free software, often written by enthusiasts and
distributed by users' groups, or via electronic mail, local
bulletin boards, {USENET}, or other electronic media. At one
time, `freeware' was a trademark of Andrew Fluegelman, the author
of the well-known MS-DOS comm program PC-TALK III. It wasn't
enforced after his mysterious disappearance and presumed death
in 1984. See {shareware}.
:freeze: v. To lock an evolving software distribution or document
against changes so it can be released with some hope of stability.
Carries the strong implication that the item in question will
`unfreeze' at some future date. "OK, fix that bug and we'll
freeze for release."
There are more specific constructions on this. A `feature freeze',
for example, locks out modifications intended to introduce new
features; a `code freeze' connotes no more changes at all.
At Sun Microsystems and elsewhere, one may also hear references to
`code slush' --- that is, an almost-but-not-quite frozen state.
:fried: adj. 1. Non-working due to hardware failure; burnt out.
Especially used of hardware brought down by a `power glitch' (see
{glitch}), {drop-outs}, a short, or some other electrical
event. (Sometimes this literally happens to electronic circuits!
In particular, resistors can burn out and transformers can melt
down, emitting noxious smoke --- see {friode}, {SED} and
{LER}. However, this term is also used metaphorically.)
Compare {frotzed}. 2. Of people, exhausted. Said particularly
of those who continue to work in such a state. Often used as an
explanation or excuse. "Yeah, I know that fix destroyed the file
system, but I was fried when I put it in." Esp. common in
conjunction with `brain': "My brain is fried today, I'm very
short on sleep."
:friode: /fri:'ohd/ [TMRC] n. A reversible (that is, fused or
blown) diode. Compare {fried}; see also {SED}, {LER}.
:fritterware: n. An excess of capability that serves no productive
end. The canonical example is font-diddling software on the Mac
(see {macdink}); the term describes anything that eats huge
amounts of time for quite marginal gains in function but seduces
people into using it anyway.
:frob: /frob/ 1. n. [MIT] The {TMRC} definition was "FROB = a
protruding arm or trunnion"; by metaphoric extension, a `frob'
is any random small thing; an object that you can comfortably hold
in one hand; something you can frob. See {frobnitz}. 2. vt.
Abbreviated form of {frobnicate}. 3. [from the {MUD} world]
A command on some MUDs that changes a player's
experience level (this can be used to make wizards); also, to
request {wizard} privileges on the `professional courtesy'
grounds that one is a wizard elsewhere. The command is actually
`frobnicate' but is universally abbreviated to the shorter form.
:frobnicate: /frob'ni-kayt/ vt. [Poss. derived from
{frobnitz}, and usually abbreviated to {frob}, but
`frobnicate' is recognized as the official full form.] To
manipulate or adjust, to tweak. One frequently frobs bits or other
2-state devices. Thus: "Please frob the light switch" (that is,
flip it), but also "Stop frobbing that clasp; you'll break it".
One also sees the construction `to frob a frob'. See {tweak}
and {twiddle}. Usage: frob, twiddle, and tweak sometimes
connote points along a continuum. `Frob' connotes aimless
manipulation; `twiddle' connotes gross manipulation, often a
coarse search for a proper setting; `tweak' connotes fine-tuning.
If someone is turning a knob on an oscilloscope, then if he's
carefully adjusting it, he is probably tweaking it; if he is just
turning it but looking at the screen, he is probably twiddling it;
but if he's just doing it because turning a knob is fun, he's
frobbing it. The variant `frobnosticate' has been recently
reported.
:frobnitz: /frob'nits/, pl. `frobnitzem' /frob'nit-zm/ or
`frobni' /frob'ni:/ [TMRC] n. An unspecified physical object, a
widget. Also refers to electronic black boxes. This rare form is
usually abbreviated to `frotz', or more commonly to {frob}.
Also used are `frobnule' (/frob'n[y]ool/) and `frobule'
(/frob'yool/). Starting perhaps in 1979, `frobozz'
/fr*-boz'/ (plural: `frobbotzim' /fr*-bot'zm/) has also
become very popular, largely through its exposure as a name via
{Zork}. These can also be applied to nonphysical objects, such
as data structures.
Pete Samson, compiler of the {TMRC} lexicon, adds, "Under the
TMRC [railroad] layout were many storage boxes, managed (in 1958)
by David R. Sawyer. Several had fanciful designations written on
them, such as `Frobnitz Coil Oil'. Perhaps DRS intended Frobnitz
to be a proper name, but the name was quickly taken for the
thing". This was almost certainly the origin of the term.
:frog: alt. `phrog' 1. interj. Term of disgust (we seem to have
a lot of them). 2. Used as a name for just about anything. See
{foo}. 3. n. Of things, a crock. 4. n. Of people, somewhere
in between a turkey and a toad. 5. `froggy': adj. Similar to
`bagbiting' (see {bagbiter}), but milder. "This froggy
program is taking forever to run!"
:frogging: [University of Waterloo] v. 1. Partial corruption of a text
file or input stream by some bug or consistent glitch, as opposed
to random events like line noise or media failures. Might occur,
for example, if one bit of each incoming character on a tty were
stuck, so that some characters were correct and others were not.
See {terminak} for a historical example. 2. By extension,
accidental display of text in a mode where the output device emits
special symbols or mnemonics rather than conventional ASCII. Often
happens, for example, when using a terminal or comm program on a
device like an IBM PC with a special `high-half' character set and
with the bit-parity assumption wrong. A hacker sufficiently
familiar with ASCII bit patterns might be able to read the display
anyway.
:front end: n. 1. An intermediary computer that does set-up and
filtering for another (usually more powerful but less friendly)
machine (a `back end'). 2. What you're talking to when you
have a conversation with someone who is making replies without
paying attention. "Look at the dancing elephants!" "Uh-huh."
"Do you know what I just said?" "Sorry, you were talking to the
front end." See also {fepped out}. 3. Software that provides
an interface to another program `behind' it, which may not be as
user-friendly. Probably from analogy with hardware front-ends (see
sense 1) that interfaced with mainframes.
:frotz: /frots/ 1. n. See {frobnitz}. 2. `mumble frotz': An
interjection of very mild disgust.
:frotzed: /frotst/ adj. {down} because of hardware problems. Compare
{fried}. A machine that is merely frotzed may be fixable
without replacing parts, but a fried machine is more seriously
damaged.
:frowney: n. (alt. `frowney face') See {emoticon}.
:fry: 1. vi. To fail. Said especially of smoke-producing hardware
failures. More generally, to become non-working. Usage: never
said of software, only of hardware and humans. See {fried},
{magic smoke}. 2. vt. To cause to fail; to {roach}, {toast},
or {hose} a piece of hardware. Never used of software or humans,
but compare {fried}.
:FTP: /F-T-P/, *not* /fit'ip/ 1. [techspeak] n. The File
Transfer Protocol for transmitting files between systems on the
Internet. 2. vt. To {beam} a file using the File Transfer
Protocol. 3. Sometimes used as a generic even for file transfers
not using {FTP}. "Lemme get a copy of `Wuthering
Heights' ftp'd from uunet."
:FUBAR: n. The Failed UniBus Address Register in a VAX. A good
example of how jargon can occasionally be snuck past the {suit}s;
see {foobar}, and {foo} for a fuller etymology.
:fuck me harder: excl. Sometimes uttered in response to egregious
misbehavior, esp. in software, and esp. of misbehaviors which
seem unfairly persistent (as though designed in by the imp of the
perverse). Often theatrically elaborated: "Aiighhh! Fuck me with
a piledriver and 16 feet of curare-tipped wrought-iron fence
*and no lubricants*!" The phrase is sometimes heard
abbreviated `FMH' in polite company.
[This entry is an extreme example of the hackish habit of coining
elaborate and evocative terms for lossage. Here we see a quite
self-conscious parody of mainstream expletives that has become a
running gag in part of the hacker culture; it illustrates the
hackish tendency to turn any situation, even one of extreme
frustration, into an intellectual game (the point being, in this
case, to creatively produce a long-winded description of the
most anatomically absurd mental image possible --- the short forms
implicitly allude to all the ridiculous long forms ever spoken).
Scatological language is actually relatively uncommon among
hackers, and there was some controversy over whether this entry
ought to be included at all. As it reflects a live usage
recognizably peculiar to the hacker culture, we feel it is
in the hackish spirit of truthfulness and opposition to all
forms of censorship to record it here. --ESR & GLS]
:FUD: /fuhd/ n. Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found
his own company: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM
sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might
be considering [Amdahl] products." The idea, of course, was to
persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with
competitors' equipment. This was traditionally done by promising
that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but
Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or
software. See {IBM}.
:FUD wars: /fuhd worz/ n. [from {FUD}] Political posturing engaged in
by hardware and software vendors ostensibly committed to
standardization but actually willing to fragment the market to
protect their own shares. The UNIX International vs. OSF conflict
is but one outstanding example.
:fudge: 1. vt. To perform in an incomplete but marginally acceptable
way, particularly with respect to the writing of a program. "I
didn't feel like going through that pain and suffering, so I fudged
it --- I'll fix it later." 2. n. The resulting code.
:fudge factor: n. A value or parameter that is varied in an ad hoc way
to produce the desired result. The terms `tolerance' and
{slop} are also used, though these usually indicate a one-sided
leeway, such as a buffer that is made larger than necessary
because one isn't sure exactly how large it needs to be, and it is
better to waste a little space than to lose completely for not
having enough. A fudge factor, on the other hand, can often be
tweaked in more than one direction. A good example is the `fuzz'
typically allowed in floating-point calculations: two numbers being
compared for equality must be allowed to differ by a small amount;
if that amount is too small, a computation may never terminate,
while if it is too large, results will be needlessly inaccurate.
Fudge factors are frequently adjusted incorrectly by programmers
who don't fully understand their import. See also {coefficient
of X}.
:fuel up: vi. To eat or drink hurriedly in order to get back to
hacking. "Food-p?" "Yeah, let's fuel up." "Time for a
{great-wall}!" See also {{oriental food}}.
:fuggly: /fuhg'lee/ adj. Emphatic form of {funky}; funky +
ugly). Unusually for hacker jargon, this may actually derive from
black street-jive. To say it properly, the first syllable should
be growled rather than spoken. Usage: humorous. "Man, the
{{ASCII}}-to-{{EBCDIC}} code in that printer driver is
*fuggly*." See also {wonky}.
:fum: [XEROX PARC] n. At PARC, often the third of the standard
{metasyntactic variable}s (after {foo} and {bar}. Competes
with {baz}, which is more common outside PARC.
:funky: adj. Said of something that functions, but in a slightly
strange, klugey way. It does the job and would be difficult to
change, so its obvious non-optimality is left alone. Often used to
describe interfaces. The more bugs something has that nobody has
bothered to fix because workarounds are easier, the funkier it is.
{TECO} and UUCP are funky. The Intel i860's exception handling is
extraordinarily funky. Most standards acquire funkiness as they
age. "The new mailer is installed, but is still somewhat funky;
if it bounces your mail for no reason, try resubmitting it."
"This UART is pretty funky. The data ready line is active-high in
interrupt mode and active-low in DMA mode." See {fuggly}.
:funny money: n. 1. Notional `dollar' units of computing time and/or
storage handed to students at the beginning of a computer course;
also called `play money' or `purple money' (in implicit
opposition to real or `green' money). In New Zealand and Germany
the odd usage `paper money' has been recorded; in Gremany, the
particularly amusing synonym `transfer rouble' commemmorates the
worthlessness of the ex-USSR's currency. When your funny money
ran out, your account froze and you needed to go to a professor to
get more. Fortunately, the plunging cost of timesharing cycles has
made this less common. The amounts allocated were almost
invariably too small, even for the non-hackers who wanted to slide
by with minimum work. In extreme cases, the practice led to
small-scale black markets in bootlegged computer accounts. 2. By
extension, phantom money or quantity tickets of any kind used as a
resource-allocation hack within a system. Antonym: `real
money'.
:fuzzball: [TCP/IP hackers] n. A DEC LSI-11 running a particular
suite of homebrewed software written by Dave Mills and assorted
co-conspirators, used in the early 1980s for Internet protocol
testbedding and experimentation. These were used as NSFnet
backbone sites in its early 56KB-line days; a few are still active
on the Internet as of early 1991, doing odd jobs such as network
time service.
= G =
=====
:G: [SI] pref.,suff. See {{quantifiers}}.
:gabriel: /gay'bree-*l/ [for Dick Gabriel, SAIL LISP hacker and
volleyball fanatic] n. An unnecessary (in the opinion of the
opponent) stalling tactic, e.g., tying one's shoelaces or combing
one's hair repeatedly, asking the time, etc. Also used to refer to
the perpetrator of such tactics. Also, `pulling a Gabriel',
`Gabriel mode'.
:gag: vi. Equivalent to {choke}, but connotes more disgust. "Hey,
this is FORTRAN code. No wonder the C compiler gagged." See also
{barf}.
:gang bang: n. The use of large numbers of loosely coupled
programmers in an attempt to wedge a great many features into a
product in a short time. Though there have been memorable gang
bangs (e.g., that over-the-weekend assembler port mentioned in
Steven Levy's `Hackers'), most are perpetrated by large
companies trying to meet deadlines and produce enormous buggy
masses of code entirely lacking in {orthogonal}ity. When
market-driven managers make a list of all the features the
competition has and assign one programmer to implement each, they
often miss the importance of maintaining a coherent design. See
also {firefighting}, {Mongolian Hordes technique},
{Conway's Law}.
:garbage collect: vi. (also `garbage collection', n.) See {GC}.
:garply: /gar'plee/ [Stanford] n. Another metasyntactic variable (see
{foo}); once popular among SAIL hackers.
:gas: [as in `gas chamber'] 1. interj. A term of disgust and
hatred, implying that gas should be dispensed in generous
quantities, thereby exterminating the source of irritation. "Some
loser just reloaded the system for no reason! Gas!" 2. interj. A
suggestion that someone or something ought to be flushed out of
mercy. "The system's getting {wedged} every few minutes.
Gas!" 3. vt. To {flush} (sense 1). "You should gas that old
crufty software." 4. [IBM] n. Dead space in nonsequentially
organized files that was occupied by data that has been deleted;
the compression operation that removes it is called `degassing' (by
analogy, perhaps, with the use of the same term in vacuum
technology). 5. [IBM] n. Empty space on a disk that has been
clandestinely allocated against future need.
:gaseous: adj. Deserving of being {gas}sed. Disseminated by
Geoff Goodfellow while at SRI; became particularly popular after
the Moscone-Milk killings in San Francisco, when it was learned
that the defendant Dan White (a politician who had supported
Proposition 7) would get the gas chamber under Proposition 7 if
convicted of first-degree murder (he was eventually convicted of
manslaughter).
:GC: /G-C/ [from LISP terminology; `Garbage Collect']
1. vt. To clean up and throw away useless things. "I think I'll
GC the top of my desk today." When said of files, this is
equivalent to {GFR}. 2. vt. To recycle, reclaim, or put to
another use. 3. n. An instantiation of the garbage collector
process.
`Garbage collection' is computer-science jargon for a particular
class of strategies for dynamically reallocating computer memory.
One such strategy involves periodically scanning all the data in
memory and determining what is no longer accessible; useless data
items are then discarded so that the memory they occupy can be
recycled and used for another purpose. Implementations of the LISP
language usually use garbage collection.
In jargon, the full phrase is sometimes heard but the {abbrev} is
more frequently used because it is shorter. Note that there is an
ambiguity in usage that has to be resolved by context: "I'm going
to garbage-collect my desk" usually means to clean out the
drawers, but it could also mean to throw away or recycle the desk
itself.
:GCOS:: /jee'kohs/ n. A {quick-and-dirty} {clone} of
System/360 DOS that emerged from GE around 1970; originally called
GECOS (the General Electric Comprehensive Operating System). Later
kluged to support primitive timesharing and transaction processing.
After the buyout of GE's computer division by Honeywell, the name
was changed to General Comprehensive Operating System (GCOS).
Other OS groups at Honeywell began referring to it as `God's Chosen
Operating System', allegedly in reaction to the GCOS crowd's
uninformed and snotty attitude about the superiority of their
product. All this might be of zero interest, except for two facts:
(1) The GCOS people won the political war, and this led in the
orphaning and eventual death of Honeywell {{Multics}}, and
(2) GECOS/GCOS left one permanent mark on UNIX. Some early UNIX
systems at Bell Labs used GCOS machines for print spooling and
various other services; the field added to `/etc/passwd' to
carry GCOS ID information was called the `GECOS field' and
survives today as the `pw_gecos' member used for the user's
full name and other human-ID information. GCOS later played a
major role in keeping Honeywell a dismal also-ran in the mainframe
market, and was itself ditched for UNIX in the late 1980s when
Honeywell retired its aging {big iron} designs.
:GECOS:: /jee'kohs/ n. See {{GCOS}}.
:gedanken: /g*-don'kn/ adj. Ungrounded; impractical; not
well-thought-out; untried; untested. `Gedanken' is a German word
for `thought'. A thought experiment is one you carry out in your
head. In physics, the term `gedanken experiment' is used to
refer to an experiment that is impractical to carry out, but useful
to consider because you can reason about it theoretically. (A
classic gedanken experiment of relativity theory involves thinking
about a man in an elevator accelerating through space.) Gedanken
experiments are very useful in physics, but you have to be careful.
It's too easy to idealize away some important aspect of the real
world in contructing your `apparatus'.
Among hackers, accordingly, the word has a pejorative connotation.
It is said of a project, especially one in artificial intelligence
research, that is written up in grand detail (typically as a Ph.D.
thesis) without ever being implemented to any great extent. Such a
project is usually perpetrated by people who aren't very good
hackers or find programming distasteful or are just in a hurry. A
`gedanken thesis' is usually marked by an obvious lack of
intuition about what is programmable and what is not, and about
what does and does not constitute a clear specification of an
algorithm. See also {AI-complete}, {DWIM}.
:geef: v. [ostensibly from `gefingerpoken'] vt. Syn. {mung}. See
also {blinkenlights}.
:geek out: vi. To temporarily enter techno-nerd mode while in a
non-hackish context, for example at parties held near computer
equipment. Especially used when you need to do something highly
technical and don't have time to explain: "Pardon me while I geek
out for a moment." See {computer geek}.
:gen: /jen/ n.,v. Short for {generate}, used frequently in both spoken
and written contexts.
:gender mender: n. A cable connector shell with either two male or two
female connectors on it, used to correct the mismatches that result
when some {loser} didn't understand the RS232C specification and
the distinction between DTE and DCE. Used esp. for RS-232C
parts in either the original D-25 or the IBM PC's bogus D-9 format.
Also called `gender bender', `gender blender', `sex
changer', and even `homosexual adapter'; however, there appears
to be some confusion as to whether a `male homosexual adapter' has
pins on both sides (is male) or sockets on both sides (connects two
males).
:General Public Virus: n. Pejorative name for some versions of the
{GNU} project {copyleft} or General Public License (GPL), which
requires that any tools or {app}s incorporating copylefted code
must be source-distributed on the same counter-commercial terms as
GNU stuff. Thus it is alleged that the copyleft `infects' software
generated with GNU tools, which may in turn infect other software
that reuses any of its code. The Free Software Foundation's
official position as of January 1991 is that copyright law limits
the scope of the GPL to "programs textually incorporating
significant amounts of GNU code", and that the `infection' is not
passed on to third parties unless actual GNU source is transmitted
(as in, for example, use of the Bison parser skeleton).
Nevertheless, widespread suspicion that the {copyleft} language
is `boobytrapped' has caused many developers to avoid using GNU
tools and the GPL. Recent (July 1991) changes in the language of
the version 2.00 license may eliminate this problem.
:generate: vt. To produce something according to an algorithm or
program or set of rules, or as a (possibly unintended) side effect
of the execution of an algorithm or program. The opposite of
{parse}. This term retains its mechanistic connotations (though
often humorously) when used of human behavior. "The guy is
rational most of the time, but mention nuclear energy around him
and he'll generate {infinite} flamage."
:gensym: /jen'sim/ [from MacLISP for `generated symbol'] 1. v.
To invent a new name for something temporary, in such a way that
the name is almost certainly not in conflict with one already in
use. 2. n. The resulting name. The canonical form of a gensym is
`Gnnnn' where nnnn represents a number; any LISP hacker would
recognize G0093 (for example) as a gensym. 3. A freshly generated
data structure with a gensymmed name. These are useful for storing
or uniquely identifying crufties (see {cruft}).
:Get a life!: imp. Hacker-standard way of suggesting that the person
to whom you are speaking has succumbed to terminal geekdom (see
{computer geek}). Often heard on {USENET}, esp. as a way of
suggesting that the target is taking some obscure issue of
{theology} too seriously. This exhortation was popularized by
William Shatner on a "Saturday Night Live" episode in a speech that
ended "Get a *life*!", but some respondents believe it to
have been in use before then. It was certainly in wide use among
hackers for at least five years before achieving mainstream
currency around early 1992.
:Get a real computer!: imp. Typical hacker response to news that
somebody is having trouble getting work done on a system that
(a) is single-tasking, (b) has no hard disk, or (c) has an address
space smaller than 4 megabytes. This is as of mid-1991; note that
the threshold for `real computer' rises with time, and it may well
be (for example) that machines with character-only displays will be
generally considered `unreal' in a few years (GLS points out that
they already are in some circles). See {essentials}, {bitty
box}, and {toy}.
:GFR: /G-F-R/ vt. [ITS] From `Grim File Reaper', an ITS and Lisp
Machine utility. To remove a file or files according to some
program-automated or semi-automatic manual procedure, especially
one designed to reclaim mass storage space or reduce name-space
clutter (the original GFR actually moved files to tape). Often
generalized to pieces of data below file level. "I used to have
his phone number, but I guess I {GFR}ed it." See also
{prowler}, {reaper}. Compare {GC}, which discards only
provably worthless stuff.
:gig: /jig/ or /gig/ [SI] n. See {{quantifiers}}.
:giga-: /ji'ga/ or /gi'ga/ [SI] pref. See {{quantifiers}}.
:GIGO: /gi:'goh/ [acronym] 1. `Garbage In, Garbage Out' ---
usually said in response to {luser}s who complain that a program
didn't complain about faulty data. Also commonly used to describe
failures in human decision making due to faulty, incomplete, or
imprecise data. 2. `Garbage In, Gospel Out': this more recent
expansion is a sardonic comment on the tendency human beings have
to put excessive trust in `computerized' data.
:gilley: [USENET] n. The unit of analogical bogosity. According to
its originator, the standard for one gilley was "the act of
bogotoficiously comparing the shutting down of 1000 machines for a
day with the killing of one person". The milligilley has been
found to suffice for most normal conversational exchanges.
:gillion: /gil'y*n/ or /jil'y*n/ [formed from {giga-} by analogy
with mega/million and tera/trillion] n. 10^9. Same as an
American billion or a British `milliard'. How one pronounces
this depends on whether one speaks {giga-} with a hard or
soft `g'.
:GIPS: /gips/ or /jips/ [analogy with {MIPS}] n.
Giga-Instructions per Second (also possibly `Gillions of
Instructions per Second'; see {gillion}). In 1991, this is used
of only a handful of highly parallel machines, but this is expected
to change. Compare {KIPS}.
:glark: /glark/ vt. To figure something out from context. "The
System III manuals are pretty poor, but you can generally glark the
meaning from context." Interestingly, the word was originally
`glork'; the context was "This gubblick contains many
nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp can be
glorked [sic] from context" (David Moser, quoted by Douglas
Hofstadter in his "Metamagical Themas" column in the
January 1981 `Scientific American'). It is conjectured that
hackish usage mutated the verb to `glark' because {glork} was
already an established jargon term. Compare {grok},
{zen}.
:glass: [IBM] n. Synonym for {silicon}.
:glass tty: /glas T-T-Y/ or /glas ti'tee/ n. A terminal that
has a display screen but which, because of hardware or software
limitations, behaves like a teletype or some other printing
terminal, thereby combining the disadvantages of both: like a
printing terminal, it can't do fancy display hacks, and like a
display terminal, it doesn't produce hard copy. An example is the
early `dumb' version of Lear-Siegler ADM 3 (without cursor
control). See {tube}, {tty}; compare {dumb terminal}, {smart
terminal}. See "{TV Typewriters}" (appendix A) for an
interesting true story about a glass tty.