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@ -19,7 +19,7 @@ Free Documentation License".
* Generated
This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 07:18PM UTC
This file last generated Tuesday, 16 October 2018 02:04PM UTC
* Glossary
** (
@ -849,6 +849,9 @@ n. (Also missile address ) The form used to register a site with the Usenet mapp
*** IRC
/IRC/ , n. [Internet Relay Chat] A worldwide party line network that allows one to converse with others in real time. IRC is structured as a network of Internet servers, each of which accepts connections from client programs, one per user. The IRC community and the Usenet and MUD communities overlap to some extent, including both hackers and regular folks who have discovered the wonders of computer networks. Some Usenet jargon has been adopted on IRC, as have some conventions such as emoticon s. There is also a vigorous native jargon, represented in this lexicon by entries marked [IRC]. See also talk mode.
*** IRL
Acronym meaning "In Real Life". In the old days there was considered to be a significant difference between life online and "real" life. i.e. between cyberspace and meatspace. These days though it's all totally mixed up and so the use of IRL has declined.
*** ISO standard cup of tea
n. [South Africa] A cup of tea with milk and one teaspoon of sugar, where the milk is poured into the cup before the tea. Variations are ISO 0, with no sugar; ISO 2, with two spoons of sugar; and so on. This may derive from the NATO standard cup of coffee and tea (milk and two sugars), military slang going back to the late 1950s and parodying NATO's relentless bureaucratic drive to standardize parts across European and U.S. militaries. Like many ISO standards, this one has a faintly alien ring in North America, where hackers generally shun the decadent British practice of adulterating perfectly good tea with dairy products and prefer instead to add a wedge of lemon, if anything. If one were feeling extremely silly, one might hypothesize an analogous ANSI standard cup of tea and wind up with a political situation distressingly similar to several that arise in much more serious technical contexts. (Milk and lemon don't mix very well.) [2000 update: There is now, in fact, an ISO standard 3103: Method for preparation of a liquor of tea for use in sensory tests. , alleged to be equivalent to British Standard BS6008: How to make a standard cup of tea.
@ -1149,7 +1152,7 @@ Can be prepended to the names of internet companies or products to indicate thei
/nuksee probl@m/ , n. Refers to the problem of transferring data between machines with differing byte-order. The string UNIX might look like NUXI on a machine with a different byte sex (e.g., when transferring data from a little-endian to a big-endian , or vice-versa). See also middle-endian , swab , and bytesexual.
*** Nathan Hale
n. An asterisk (see also splat , ASCII ). Oh, you want an etymology? Notionally, from I regret that I have only one asterisk for my country! , a misquote of the famous remark uttered by Nathan Hale just before he was hanged. Hale was a (failed) spy for the rebels in the American War of Independence.
n. An asterisk (see also splat , ASCII ). Oh, you want an etymology? Notionally, from I regret that I have only one asterisk for my country!, a misquote of the famous remark uttered by Nathan Hale just before he was hanged. Hale was a (failed) spy for the rebels in the American War of Independence.
*** NeWS
/neewis/ , /n[y]oois/ , /n[y]ooz/ , n. [acronym; the Network Window System ] The road not taken in window systems, an elegant PostScript -based environment that would almost certainly have won the standards war with X if it hadn't been proprietary to Sun Microsystems. There is a lesson here that too many software vendors haven't yet heeded. Many hackers insist on the two-syllable pronunciations above as a way of distinguishing NeWS from Usenet news (the netnews software).
@ -1287,7 +1290,7 @@ Many (perhaps even most) hackers don't follow or do sports at all and are determ
n. A notorious exploit that (when first discovered) could be easily used to crash a wide variety of machines by overrunning size limits in their TCP/IP stacks. First revealed in late 1996. The open-source Unix community patched its systems to remove the vulnerability within days or weeks, the closed-source OS vendors generally took months. While the difference in response times repeated a pattern familiar from other security incidents, the accompanying glare of Web-fueled publicity proved unusually embarrassing to the OS vendors and so passed into history and myth. The term is now used to refer to any nudge delivered by network wizards over the network that causes bad things to happen on the system being nudged. For the full story on the original exploit, see http://www.insecure.org/sploits/ping-o-death.html. Compare kamikaze packet and 'Chernobyl packet.
*** Plan 9
n. In the late 1980s, researchers at Bell Labs (especially Rob Pike of Kernighan Pike fame) got bored with the limitations of UNIX and decided to reimplement the entire system. The result was called Plan 9 in the Bell Labs tradition of selecting names that make marketeers wince. The developers also wished to pay homage to the famous film, Plan 9 From Outer Space , considered by some to be the worst movie ever made. The source is available for download under open-source terms. The developers and a small fan base hang out at comp.os.
n. In the late 1980s, researchers at Bell Labs (especially Rob Pike of Kernighan Pike fame) got bored with the limitations of UNIX and decided to reimplement the entire system. The result was called Plan 9 in the Bell Labs tradition of selecting names that make marketeers wince. The developers also wished to pay homage to the famous film, Plan 9 From Outer Space, considered by some to be the worst movie ever made. The source is available for download under open-source terms. The developers and a small fan base hang out at comp.os.
*** Politics
The only safe generalization is that hackers tend to be rather anti-authoritarian, so on a political compass chart they tend to be somewhere within the libertarian left or libertarian right quadrants. Since technology impacts upon so many aspects of society it is rare for hackers to claim to be entirely apolitical, and those that do make such a claim are typically just having their viewpoints manipulated by popular media, which invariably does have a political agenda.
@ -5664,7 +5667,7 @@ n. [poss. from white-out (the blizzard variety)] A paper or presentation so encr
n. What a washing machine or, by extension, any disk drive is in when it's being used so heavily that it's shaking like an old Maytag with an unbalanced load. If prolonged for any length of time, can lead to disks becoming walking drives. In 1999 it's been some years since hard disks were large enough to do this, but the same phenomenon has recently been reported with 24X CD-ROM drives.
*** meatspace
/meetspays/ , n. The physical world, where the meat lives as opposed to cyberspace. Hackers are actually more willing to use this term than cyberspace , because it's not speculative we already have a running meatspace implementation (the universe). Compare RL.
/meetspays/ , n. The physical world, where the meat lives as opposed to cyberspace. Hackers are actually more willing to use this term than cyberspace. Compare RL or IRL.
*** meatware
n. Synonym for wetware. Less common.
@ -5685,16 +5688,18 @@ The leaking or "exfiltration" of a large amount of otherwise private information
/meg'@pen`ee/ , n. $10,000 (1 cent * 10 6 ). Used semi-humorously as a unit in comparing computer cost and performance figures.
*** meltdown, network
n. See network meltdown.
1. See network meltdown.
2. A hardware bug within Intel CPUs relating to the speculative execution of commands.
*** meme
/meem/ , n. [coined by analogy with gene , by Richard Dawkins] An idea considered as a replicator , esp. with the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do. Used esp. in the phrase meme complex denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organized belief system, such as a religion. This lexicon is an (epidemiological) vector of the hacker subculture meme complex; each entry might be considered a meme. However, meme is often misused to mean meme complex. Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has superseded biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Hackers find this idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons.
/meem/ , n. [coined by analogy with gene , by Richard Dawkins] An idea considered as a replicator , esp. with the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do. Used esp. in the phrase meme complex denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organized belief system, such as a religion. This lexicon is an (epidemiological) vector of the hacker subculture meme complex; each entry might be considered a meme. However, meme is often misused to mean meme complex. Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has superseded biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Memes have featured extensively within popular culture, used both for political satire and just plain amusement. The typical meme is a photo together with one or two captions at the top and bottom in ALLCAPS letters.
*** meme plague
n. The spread of a successful but pernicious meme , esp. one that parasitizes the victims into giving their all to propagate it. Astrology, BASIC, and the other guy's religion are often considered to be examples. This usage is given point by the historical fact that joiner ideologies like Naziism or various forms of millennarian Christianity have exhibited plague-like cycles of exponential growth followed by collapses to small reservoir populations.
Also see viral, faradize. n. The spread of a successful meme, often via social network or chat systems. Another common term for a meme plague is "going viral".
*** memetics
/memetiks/ , n. [from meme ] The study of memes. As of early 2003, this is still an extremely informal and speculative endeavor, though the first steps towards at least statistical rigor have been made by H. Keith Henson and others. Memetics is a popular topic for speculation among hackers, who like to see themselves as the architects of the new information ecologies in which memes live and replicate.
/memetiks/ , n. [from meme ] The study of memes. That is, the spread of ideas and cultural artefacts. Memetics never really got much traction within formal academia, but it has had a huge impact within popular culture. From the mid 2000s onwards the "meme" as a photo or cartoon image with some short text phrases in large ALLCAPS letters at the top and bottom became the standard format for distribution of whilmsical content on messaging forums. Photos of cats doing funny things together with some amusing caption became the most common type of meme.
*** memory farts
n. The flatulent sounds that some DOS box BIOSes (most notably AMI's) make when checking memory on bootup.
@ -5800,6 +5805,9 @@ n. [common] A general state, usually used with an adjective describing the state
*** mode bit
n. [common] A flag , usually in hardware, that selects between two (usually quite different) modes of operation. The connotations are different from flag bit in that mode bits are mainly written during a boot or set-up phase, are seldom explicitly read, and seldom change over the lifetime of an ordinary program. The classic example was the EBCDIC-vs.-ASCII bit (#12) of the Program Status Word of the IBM 360.
*** model m
A type of mechanical keyboard originally made by IBM for the early generation of PCs in the 1980s. These keyboards are known for their novel use of buckling springs rather than microswitches and metal backplate which gives them a distinctive typing sound. The design was sold to a company named Unicomp in the 1990s and these keyboards are still manufactured. The model M keyboard (either original or Unicomp versions) are popular with hackers who enjoy the historical connection to early personal computers, the build quality and the ease of key removal and cleaning. Since a hacker's main tool is their keyboard it's worth investing in something durable and ergonomic. On some older model M keyboards the plastic rivets holding the metal backplate on become brittle and fall off. These can be replaced using standard tools in a procedure known as a "bolt job". Such repairability is rare for a modern keyboard.
*** modulo
/modyuloh/ , prep. Except for. An overgeneralization of mathematical terminology; one can consider saying that 4 equals 22 except for the 9s ( 4 = 22 mod 9). Well, LISP seems to work okay now, modulo that GC bug. I feel fine today modulo a slight headache.
@ -5842,7 +5850,7 @@ n. A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of a WIMP e
A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or appreciating the full glory of the command line.
*** mouso
/mowsoh/ , n. [by analogy with typo ] An error in mouse usage resulting in an inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare thinko , braino.
/mowsoh/ , n. [by analogy with typo ] An error in mouse usage resulting in an inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare thinko, braino.
*** mu
/moo/ The correct answer to the classic trick question Have you stopped beating your wife yet?. Assuming that you have no wife or you have never beaten your wife, the answer yes is wrong because it implies that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but no is worse because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her. According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct answer is usually mu , a Japanese word alleged to mean Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions. Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm. The word mu is actually from Chinese, meaning nothing ; it is used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also mean have not (as in I have not done it ), or lack of , which may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing').
@ -5992,7 +6000,7 @@ n. See has the X nature.
n. The label used to refer to one of the continuing holy wars in AI research. This conflict tangles together two separate issues. One is the relationship between human reasoning and AI; neats tend to try to build systems that reason in some way identifiably similar to the way humans report themselves as doing, while scruffies profess not to care whether an algorithm resembles human reasoning in the least as long as it works. More importantly, neats tend to believe that logic is king, while scruffies favor looser, more ad-hoc methods driven by empirical knowledge. To a neat, scruffy methods appear promiscuous, successful only by accident, and not productive of insights about how intelligence actually works; to a scruffy, neat methods appear to be hung up on formalism and irrelevant to the hard-to-capture common sense of living intelligences.
*** neep-neep
/neep neep/ , n. [onomatopoeic, widely spread through SF fandom but reported to have originated at Caltech in the 1970s] One who is fascinated by computers. Less specific than hacker , as it need not imply more skill than is required to play games on a PC. The derived noun neeping applies specifically to the long conversations about computers that tend to develop in the corners at most SF-convention parties (the term neepery is also in wide use). Fandom has a related proverb to the effect that Hacking is a conversational black hole!. Prev Up Next neats vs.
/neep neep/ , n. [onomatopoeic, widely spread through SF fandom but reported to have originated at Caltech in the 1970s] One who is fascinated by computers. Less specific than hacker, as it need not imply more skill than is required to play games on a PC or console. The derived noun neeping applies specifically to the long conversations about computers that tend to develop in the corners at most SF-convention parties (the term neepery is also in wide use). Fandom has a related proverb to the effect that Hacking is a conversational black hole!.
*** neophilia
/nee`ohfil'ee@/ , n. The trait of being excited and pleased by novelty. Common among most hackers, SF fans, and members of several other connected leading-edge subcultures, including the pro-technology Whole Earth wing of the ecology movement, space activists, many members of Mensa, and the Discordian/neo-pagan underground (see geek ). All these groups overlap heavily and (where evidence is available) seem to share characteristic hacker tropisms for science fiction, music , and oriental food. The opposite tendency is neophobia.
@ -6018,10 +6026,10 @@ n. [Cisco] A command in a complex piece of software which is more likely to be u
/netp@lees'/ , n. (var.: net.cops ) Those Usenet readers who feel it is their responsibility to pounce on and flame any posting which they regard as offensive or in violation of their understanding of netiquette. Generally used sarcastically or pejoratively. Also spelled net police. See also net.- , code police. Prev Up Next net.
*** netburp
n. [IRC] When netlag gets really bad, and delays between servers exceed a certain threshold, the IRC network effectively becomes partitioned for a period of time, and large numbers of people seem to be signing off at the same time and then signing back on again when things get better. An instance of this is called a netburp (or, sometimes, netsplit ). Prev Up Next net.
n. [IRC] When netlag gets really bad, and delays between servers exceed a certain threshold, the IRC network effectively becomes partitioned for a period of time, and large numbers of people seem to be signing off at the same time and then signing back on again when things get better. An instance of this is called a netburp (or, more commonly, netsplit).
*** netdead
n. [IRC] The state of someone who signs off IRC , perhaps during a netburp , and doesn't sign back on until later. In the interim, he is dead to the net. Compare link-dead.
n. [IRC] The state of someone who signs off IRC, perhaps during a netburp, and doesn't sign back on until later. In the interim, he is dead to the net. Compare link-dead.
*** nethack
/nethak/ , n. [Unix] A dungeon game similar to rogue but more elaborate, distributed in C source over Usenet and very popular at Unix sites and on PC-class machines (nethack is probably the most widely distributed of the freeware dungeon games). The earliest versions, written by Jay Fenlason and later considerably enhanced by Andries Brouwer, were simply called hack. The name changed when maintenance was taken over by a group of hackers originally organized by Mike Stephenson. There is now an official site at http://www.nethack.org/. See also moria , rogue , Angband.
@ -6146,7 +6154,7 @@ n. [scientific computation] Output of a computation that may not be significant
/nyetwerk/ , n. [from Russian nyet = no] A network, when it is acting flaky or is down. Compare notwork.
*** nymwars
[aka "the nymwars"] A series of disputes which arose when Google began enforcing a "real names" policy on its social network system G+ in 2011. Many internet users were accustomed to using nicknames or pseudonyms on forums or on IRC and so objected to the forced imposition of an unfamiliar or unwanted identity. Google also failed to grok the privacy implications, saying that it did not care about the legitimate uses of pseudonyms to avoid persecution.
[aka "the nymwars"] A series of disputes which arose when Google began enforcing a "real names" policy on its social network system Google+ in 2011. Many internet users were accustomed to using nicknames or pseudonyms on forums or on IRC and so objected to the forced imposition of an unfamiliar or unwanted identity. Google also failed to grok the privacy implications, saying that it did not care about the legitimate uses of pseudonyms to avoid persecution.
** O
*** obi-wan error
@ -6185,7 +6193,7 @@ n. Tribal elder. A title self-assumed with remarkable frequency by (esp.) Usenet
In the progression that starts On the one hand... and continues On the other hand... mainstream English may add on the third hand... even though most people don't have three hands. Among hackers, it is just as likely to be on the gripping hand. This metaphor supplied the title of Larry Niven Jerry Pournelle's 1993 SF novel The Gripping Hand which involved a species of hostile aliens with three arms (the same species, in fact, referenced in juggling eggs ). As with TANSTAAFL and con , this usage became one of the naturalized imports from SF fandom frequently observed among hackers.
*** one-banana problem
n. At mainframe shops, where the computers have operators for routine administrivia, the programmers and hardware people tend to look down on the operators and claim that a trained monkey could do their job. It is frequently observed that the incentives that would be offered said monkeys can be used as a scale to describe the difficulty of a task. A one-banana problem is simple; hence, It's only a one-banana job at the most; what's taking them so long? At IBM, folklore divides the world into one-, two-, and three-banana problems. Other cultures have different hierarchies and may divide them more finely; at ICL, for example, five grapes (a bunch) equals a banana. Their upper limit for the in-house sysapes is said to be two bananas and three grapes (another source claims it's three bananas and one grape, but observes However, this is subject to local variations, cosmic rays and ISO ). At a complication level any higher than that, one asks the manufacturers to send someone around to check things. See also Infinite-Monkey Theorem.
n. At mainframe shops, where the computers had operators for routine administrivia, the programmers and hardware people tended to look down on the operators and claim that a trained monkey could do their job. It was frequently observed that the incentives that would be offered said monkeys could be used as a scale to describe the difficulty of a task. A one-banana problem is simple; hence, It's only a one-banana job at the most; what's taking them so long? At IBM, folklore divided the world into one-, two-, and three-banana problems. Other cultures had different hierarchies and divided them more finely; at ICL, for example, five grapes (a bunch) equals a banana. Their upper limit for the in-house sysapes was said to be two bananas and three grapes (another source claimed it was three bananas and one grape, but observed however, this is subject to local variations, cosmic rays and ISO ). At a complication level any higher than that, one asked the manufacturers to send someone around to check things. See also Infinite-Monkey Theorem.
*** one-line fix
n. Used (often sarcastically) of a change to a program that is thought to be trivial or insignificant right up to the moment it crashes the system. Usually cured by another one-line fix.
@ -6383,7 +6391,7 @@ Alternative name for a mobile phone, due to their extensive personal data collec
Within data protection laws Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is the data about people which is being stored or processed by an organization.
*** pessimal
/pesiml/ , adj. [Latin-based antonym for optimal ] Maximally bad. This is a pessimal situation. Also pessimize vt. To make as bad as possible. These words are the obvious Latin-based antonyms for optimal and optimize , but for some reason they do not appear in most English dictionaries, although pessimize is listed in the OED.
/pesiml/ , adj. [Latin-based antonym for optimal ] Maximally bad. This is a pessimal situation. Also pessimize vt. To make as bad as possible. These words are the obvious Latin-based antonyms for optimal and optimize, but for some reason they do not appear in most English dictionaries, although pessimize is listed in the OED.
*** pessimizing compiler
/pes'@mi:z`ing k@mpi:lr/ , n. [antonym of techspeak optimizing compiler ] A compiler that produces object code that is worse than the straightforward or obvious hand translation. The implication is that the compiler is actually trying to optimize the program, but through excessive cleverness is doing the opposite. A few pessimizing compilers have been written on purpose, however, as pranks or burlesques.
@ -6727,7 +6735,7 @@ n. [IBM] Wire installed by Field Engineers to work around problems discovered du
2. On a Stanford or MIT keyboard in raw mode , use of four shift keys while typing a fifth character, where the four shift keys are the control and meta keys on both sides of the keyboard. This was very difficult to do! One accepted technique was to press the left-control and left-meta keys with your left hand, the right-control and right-meta keys with your right hand, and the fifth key with your nose. Quadruple-bucky combinations were very seldom used in practice, because when one invented a new command one usually assigned it to some character that was easier to type. If you want to imply that a program has ridiculously many commands or features, you can say something like: Oh, the command that makes it spin the tapes while whistling Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is quadruple-bucky-cokebottle. See double bucky , bucky bits , cokebottle.
*** quantifiers
Prev Up Next quadruple bucky Home quantum bogodynamics
In techspeak and jargon, the standard metric prefixes used in the SI (Systeme International) conventions for scientific measurement have dual uses. With units of time or things that come in powers of 10, such as money, they retain their usual meanings of multiplication by powers of 1000 = 10^3. But when used with bytes or other things that naturally come in powers of 2, they usually denote multiplication by powers of 1024 = 2^10. Here are the SI magnifying prefixes, along with the corresponding decimal interpretations in common use: kilo (K, KB) 1,024 mega (M, MB) 1,048,576 giga (G, GB) 1,073,741,824 tera (T, TB) 1,099,511,627,776 peta (P, PB) 1,125,899,906,842,624 exa (EX) 1,152,921,504,606,846,976<37> zetta 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 yotta 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 Here are the SI fractional prefixes: milli 1000^-1 micro 1000^-2 nano 1000^-3 pico 1000^-4 femto 1000^-5 atto 1000^-6 zepto 1000^-7 yocto 1000^-8 The prefixes zetta-, yotta-, zepto-, and yocto- have been included in these tables purely for completeness and giggle value; they were adopted in 1990 by the 19th Conference Generale des Poids et Mesures. The binary peta- and exa- loadings, though well established, are not in jargon use either — yet. The prefix milli-, denoting multiplication by 1/1000, has always been rare in jargon (there is, however, a standard joke about the millihelen — notionally, the amount of beauty required to launch one ship). See the entries on micro-, pico-, and nano- for more information on connotative jargon use of these terms. ‘Femto’ and ‘atto’ (which, interestingly, derive not from Greek but from Danish) have not yet acquired jargon loadings, though it is easy to predict what those will be once computing technology enters the required realms of magnitude (however, see attoparsec). There are, of course, some standard unit prefixes for powers of 10. In the following table, the ‘prefix’ column is the international standard prefix for the appropriate power of ten; the ‘binary’ column lists jargon abbreviations and words for the corresponding power of 2. The B-suffixed forms are commonly used for byte quantities; the words ‘meg’ and ‘gig’ are nouns that may (but do not always) pluralize with ‘s’. Confusingly, hackers often use K or M as though they were suffix or numeric multipliers rather than a prefix; thus “2K dollars”, “2M of disk space”. This is also true (though less commonly) of G. Note that the formal SI metric prefix for 1000 is ‘k’; some use this strictly, reserving ‘K’ for multiplication by 1024 (KB is thus ‘kilobytes’). K, M, and G used alone refer to quantities of bytes; thus, 64G is 64 gigabytes and ‘a K’ is a kilobyte (compare mainstream use of ‘a G’ as short for ‘a grand’, that is, $1000). Whether one pronounces ‘gig’ with hard or soft ‘g’ depends on what one thinks the proper pronunciation of ‘giga-’ is. Confusing 1000 and 1024 (or other powers of 2 and 10 close in magnitude) — for example, describing a memory in units of 500K or 524K instead of 512K — is a sure sign of the marketroid. One example of this: it is common to refer to the capacity of 3.5" floppies as ‘1.44 MB’ In fact, this is a completely bogus number. The correct size is 1440 KB, that is, 1440 * 1024 = 1474560 bytes. So the ‘mega’ in ‘1.44 MB’ is compounded of two ‘kilos’, one of which is 1024 and the other of which is 1000. The correct number of megabytes would of course be 1440 / 1024 = 1.40625. Alas, this fine point is probably lost on the world forever.
*** quantum bogodynamics
/kwontm boh`gohdi:namiks/ , n. A theory that characterizes the universe in terms of bogon sources (such as politicians, used-car salesmen, TV evangelists, and suits in general), bogon sinks (such as taxpayers and computers), and bogosity potential fields. Bogon absorption, of course, causes human beings to behave mindlessly and machines to fail (and may also cause both to emit secondary bogons); however, the precise mechanics of the bogon-computron interaction are not yet understood and remain to be elucidated. Quantum bogodynamics is most often invoked to explain the sharp increase in hardware and software failures in the presence of suits; the latter emit bogons, which the former absorb. See bogon , computron , suit , psyton. Here is a representative QBD theory: The bogon is a boson (integral spin, +1 or -1), and has zero rest mass. In this respect it is very much like a photon. However, it has a much greater momentum, thus explaining its destructive effect on computer electronics and human nervous systems. The corollary to this is that bogons also have tremendous inertia, and therefore a bogon beam is deflected only with great difficulty. When the bogon encounters its antiparticle, the cluon, they mutually annihilate each other, releasing magic smoke. Furthermore 1 Lenat = 1 mole (6.022E23) of bogons (see microLenat ).
@ -7174,6 +7182,9 @@ n. See infinite.
*** senior bit
n. [IBM; rare] Syn. meta bit.
*** series of tubes
A phrase used by US senator Ted Stevens in 2006 to describe the workings of the internet. "It's a series of tubes!", "The internet is not a big truck" and "what happens to your own personal internet?" soon became viral phrases. This rambling and highly incoherent speech about the internet - difficult to really tell whether it was for or against net neutrality - is a classic example of a suit who doesn't really understand the technology nevertheless attempting to appear authoritative.
*** server
n. A kind of daemon that performs a service for the requester and which often runs on a computer other than the one on which the requestor/client runs. A particularly common term on the Internet, which is rife with web servers , name servers , domain servers , news servers , finger servers , and the like.

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@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ Free Documentation License".
</p>
<H2>Generated</H2>
<p>
This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 07:18PM UTC
This file last generated Tuesday, 16 October 2018 02:04PM UTC
</p>
<H2>Glossary</H2>
@ -1046,6 +1046,10 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 07:18PM UTC
<p>
/IRC/ , n. [Internet Relay Chat] A worldwide party line network that allows one to converse with others in real time. IRC is structured as a network of Internet servers, each of which accepts connections from client programs, one per user. The IRC community and the Usenet and MUD communities overlap to some extent, including both hackers and regular folks who have discovered the wonders of computer networks. Some Usenet jargon has been adopted on IRC, as have some conventions such as emoticon s. There is also a vigorous native jargon, represented in this lexicon by entries marked [IRC]. See also talk mode.
</p>
<H4>IRL</H4>
<p>
Acronym meaning "In Real Life". In the old days there was considered to be a significant difference between life online and "real" life. i.e. between cyberspace and meatspace. These days though it's all totally mixed up and so the use of IRL has declined.
</p>
<H4>ISO standard cup of tea</H4>
<p>
n. [South Africa] A cup of tea with milk and one teaspoon of sugar, where the milk is poured into the cup before the tea. Variations are ISO 0, with no sugar; ISO 2, with two spoons of sugar; and so on. This may derive from the NATO standard cup of coffee and tea (milk and two sugars), military slang going back to the late 1950s and parodying NATO's relentless bureaucratic drive to standardize parts across European and U.S. militaries. Like many ISO standards, this one has a faintly alien ring in North America, where hackers generally shun the decadent British practice of adulterating perfectly good tea with dairy products and prefer instead to add a wedge of lemon, if anything. If one were feeling extremely silly, one might hypothesize an analogous ANSI standard cup of tea and wind up with a political situation distressingly similar to several that arise in much more serious technical contexts. (Milk and lemon don't mix very well.) [2000 update: There is now, in fact, an ISO standard 3103: Method for preparation of a liquor of tea for use in sensory tests. , alleged to be equivalent to British Standard BS6008: How to make a standard cup of tea.
@ -1401,7 +1405,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 07:18PM UTC
</p>
<H4>Nathan Hale</H4>
<p>
n. An asterisk (see also splat , ASCII ). Oh, you want an etymology? Notionally, from I regret that I have only one asterisk for my country! , a misquote of the famous remark uttered by Nathan Hale just before he was hanged. Hale was a (failed) spy for the rebels in the American War of Independence.
n. An asterisk (see also splat , ASCII ). Oh, you want an etymology? Notionally, from I regret that I have only one asterisk for my country!, a misquote of the famous remark uttered by Nathan Hale just before he was hanged. Hale was a (failed) spy for the rebels in the American War of Independence.
</p>
<H4>NeWS</H4>
<p>
@ -1579,7 +1583,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 07:18PM UTC
</p>
<H4>Plan 9</H4>
<p>
n. In the late 1980s, researchers at Bell Labs (especially Rob Pike of Kernighan Pike fame) got bored with the limitations of UNIX and decided to reimplement the entire system. The result was called Plan 9 in the Bell Labs tradition of selecting names that make marketeers wince. The developers also wished to pay homage to the famous film, Plan 9 From Outer Space , considered by some to be the worst movie ever made. The source is available for download under open-source terms. The developers and a small fan base hang out at comp.os.
n. In the late 1980s, researchers at Bell Labs (especially Rob Pike of Kernighan Pike fame) got bored with the limitations of UNIX and decided to reimplement the entire system. The result was called Plan 9 in the Bell Labs tradition of selecting names that make marketeers wince. The developers also wished to pay homage to the famous film, Plan 9 From Outer Space, considered by some to be the worst movie ever made. The source is available for download under open-source terms. The developers and a small fan base hang out at comp.os.
</p>
<H4>Politics</H4>
<p>
@ -6617,7 +6621,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 07:18PM UTC
</p>
<H4>meatspace</H4>
<p>
/meetspays/ , n. The physical world, where the meat lives as opposed to cyberspace. Hackers are actually more willing to use this term than cyberspace , because it's not speculative we already have a running meatspace implementation (the universe). Compare RL.
/meetspays/ , n. The physical world, where the meat lives as opposed to cyberspace. Hackers are actually more willing to use this term than cyberspace. Compare RL or IRL.
</p>
<H4>meatware</H4>
<p>
@ -6644,20 +6648,20 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 07:18PM UTC
/meg'@pen`ee/ , n. $10,000 (1 cent * 10 6 ). Used semi-humorously as a unit in comparing computer cost and performance figures.
</p>
<H4>meltdown, network</H4>
<p>
n. See network meltdown.
</p>
<p>1. See network meltdown. </p>
<p>2. A hardware bug within Intel CPUs relating to the speculative execution of commands.</p>
<H4>meme</H4>
<p>
/meem/ , n. [coined by analogy with gene , by Richard Dawkins] An idea considered as a replicator , esp. with the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do. Used esp. in the phrase meme complex denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organized belief system, such as a religion. This lexicon is an (epidemiological) vector of the hacker subculture meme complex; each entry might be considered a meme. However, meme is often misused to mean meme complex. Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has superseded biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Hackers find this idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons.
/meem/ , n. [coined by analogy with gene , by Richard Dawkins] An idea considered as a replicator , esp. with the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do. Used esp. in the phrase meme complex denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organized belief system, such as a religion. This lexicon is an (epidemiological) vector of the hacker subculture meme complex; each entry might be considered a meme. However, meme is often misused to mean meme complex. Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has superseded biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Memes have featured extensively within popular culture, used both for political satire and just plain amusement. The typical meme is a photo together with one or two captions at the top and bottom in ALLCAPS letters.
</p>
<H4>meme plague</H4>
<p>
n. The spread of a successful but pernicious meme , esp. one that parasitizes the victims into giving their all to propagate it. Astrology, BASIC, and the other guy's religion are often considered to be examples. This usage is given point by the historical fact that joiner ideologies like Naziism or various forms of millennarian Christianity have exhibited plague-like cycles of exponential growth followed by collapses to small reservoir populations.
Also see viral, faradize. n. The spread of a successful meme, often via social network or chat systems. Another common term for a meme plague is "going viral".
</p>
<H4>memetics</H4>
<p>
/memetiks/ , n. [from meme ] The study of memes. As of early 2003, this is still an extremely informal and speculative endeavor, though the first steps towards at least statistical rigor have been made by H. Keith Henson and others. Memetics is a popular topic for speculation among hackers, who like to see themselves as the architects of the new information ecologies in which memes live and replicate.
/memetiks/ , n. [from meme ] The study of memes. That is, the spread of ideas and cultural artefacts. Memetics never really got much traction within formal academia, but it has had a huge impact within popular culture. From the mid 2000s onwards the "meme" as a photo or cartoon image with some short text phrases in large ALLCAPS letters at the top and bottom became the standard format for distribution of whilmsical content on messaging forums. Photos of cats doing funny things together with some amusing caption became the most common type of meme.
</p>
<H4>memory farts</H4>
<p>
@ -6787,6 +6791,10 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 07:18PM UTC
<p>
n. [common] A flag , usually in hardware, that selects between two (usually quite different) modes of operation. The connotations are different from flag bit in that mode bits are mainly written during a boot or set-up phase, are seldom explicitly read, and seldom change over the lifetime of an ordinary program. The classic example was the EBCDIC-vs.-ASCII bit (#12) of the Program Status Word of the IBM 360.
</p>
<H4>model m</H4>
<p>
A type of mechanical keyboard originally made by IBM for the early generation of PCs in the 1980s. These keyboards are known for their novel use of buckling springs rather than microswitches and metal backplate which gives them a distinctive typing sound. The design was sold to a company named Unicomp in the 1990s and these keyboards are still manufactured. The model M keyboard (either original or Unicomp versions) are popular with hackers who enjoy the historical connection to early personal computers, the build quality and the ease of key removal and cleaning. Since a hacker's main tool is their keyboard it's worth investing in something durable and ergonomic. On some older model M keyboards the plastic rivets holding the metal backplate on become brittle and fall off. These can be replaced using standard tools in a procedure known as a "bolt job". Such repairability is rare for a modern keyboard.
</p>
<H4>modulo</H4>
<p>
/modyuloh/ , prep. Except for. An overgeneralization of mathematical terminology; one can consider saying that 4 equals 22 except for the 9s ( 4 = 22 mod 9). Well, LISP seems to work okay now, modulo that GC bug. I feel fine today modulo a slight headache.
@ -6841,7 +6849,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 07:18PM UTC
</p>
<H4>mouso</H4>
<p>
/mowsoh/ , n. [by analogy with typo ] An error in mouse usage resulting in an inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare thinko , braino.
/mowsoh/ , n. [by analogy with typo ] An error in mouse usage resulting in an inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare thinko, braino.
</p>
<H4>mu</H4>
<p>
@ -7014,7 +7022,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 07:18PM UTC
</p>
<H4>neep-neep</H4>
<p>
/neep neep/ , n. [onomatopoeic, widely spread through SF fandom but reported to have originated at Caltech in the 1970s] One who is fascinated by computers. Less specific than hacker , as it need not imply more skill than is required to play games on a PC. The derived noun neeping applies specifically to the long conversations about computers that tend to develop in the corners at most SF-convention parties (the term neepery is also in wide use). Fandom has a related proverb to the effect that Hacking is a conversational black hole!. Prev Up Next neats vs.
/neep neep/ , n. [onomatopoeic, widely spread through SF fandom but reported to have originated at Caltech in the 1970s] One who is fascinated by computers. Less specific than hacker, as it need not imply more skill than is required to play games on a PC or console. The derived noun neeping applies specifically to the long conversations about computers that tend to develop in the corners at most SF-convention parties (the term neepery is also in wide use). Fandom has a related proverb to the effect that Hacking is a conversational black hole!.
</p>
<H4>neophilia</H4>
<p>
@ -7046,11 +7054,11 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 07:18PM UTC
</p>
<H4>netburp</H4>
<p>
n. [IRC] When netlag gets really bad, and delays between servers exceed a certain threshold, the IRC network effectively becomes partitioned for a period of time, and large numbers of people seem to be signing off at the same time and then signing back on again when things get better. An instance of this is called a netburp (or, sometimes, netsplit ). Prev Up Next net.
n. [IRC] When netlag gets really bad, and delays between servers exceed a certain threshold, the IRC network effectively becomes partitioned for a period of time, and large numbers of people seem to be signing off at the same time and then signing back on again when things get better. An instance of this is called a netburp (or, more commonly, netsplit).
</p>
<H4>netdead</H4>
<p>
n. [IRC] The state of someone who signs off IRC , perhaps during a netburp , and doesn't sign back on until later. In the interim, he is dead to the net. Compare link-dead.
n. [IRC] The state of someone who signs off IRC, perhaps during a netburp, and doesn't sign back on until later. In the interim, he is dead to the net. Compare link-dead.
</p>
<H4>nethack</H4>
<p>
@ -7196,7 +7204,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 07:18PM UTC
</p>
<H4>nymwars</H4>
<p>
[aka "the nymwars"] A series of disputes which arose when Google began enforcing a "real names" policy on its social network system G+ in 2011. Many internet users were accustomed to using nicknames or pseudonyms on forums or on IRC and so objected to the forced imposition of an unfamiliar or unwanted identity. Google also failed to grok the privacy implications, saying that it did not care about the legitimate uses of pseudonyms to avoid persecution.
[aka "the nymwars"] A series of disputes which arose when Google began enforcing a "real names" policy on its social network system Google+ in 2011. Many internet users were accustomed to using nicknames or pseudonyms on forums or on IRC and so objected to the forced imposition of an unfamiliar or unwanted identity. Google also failed to grok the privacy implications, saying that it did not care about the legitimate uses of pseudonyms to avoid persecution.
</p>
<H3>O</H3>
<H4>obi-wan error</H4>
@ -7241,7 +7249,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 07:18PM UTC
</p>
<H4>one-banana problem</H4>
<p>
n. At mainframe shops, where the computers have operators for routine administrivia, the programmers and hardware people tend to look down on the operators and claim that a trained monkey could do their job. It is frequently observed that the incentives that would be offered said monkeys can be used as a scale to describe the difficulty of a task. A one-banana problem is simple; hence, It's only a one-banana job at the most; what's taking them so long? At IBM, folklore divides the world into one-, two-, and three-banana problems. Other cultures have different hierarchies and may divide them more finely; at ICL, for example, five grapes (a bunch) equals a banana. Their upper limit for the in-house sysapes is said to be two bananas and three grapes (another source claims it's three bananas and one grape, but observes However, this is subject to local variations, cosmic rays and ISO ). At a complication level any higher than that, one asks the manufacturers to send someone around to check things. See also Infinite-Monkey Theorem.
n. At mainframe shops, where the computers had operators for routine administrivia, the programmers and hardware people tended to look down on the operators and claim that a trained monkey could do their job. It was frequently observed that the incentives that would be offered said monkeys could be used as a scale to describe the difficulty of a task. A one-banana problem is simple; hence, It's only a one-banana job at the most; what's taking them so long? At IBM, folklore divided the world into one-, two-, and three-banana problems. Other cultures had different hierarchies and divided them more finely; at ICL, for example, five grapes (a bunch) equals a banana. Their upper limit for the in-house sysapes was said to be two bananas and three grapes (another source claimed it was three bananas and one grape, but observed however, this is subject to local variations, cosmic rays and ISO ). At a complication level any higher than that, one asked the manufacturers to send someone around to check things. See also Infinite-Monkey Theorem.
</p>
<H4>one-line fix</H4>
<p>
@ -7474,7 +7482,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 07:18PM UTC
</p>
<H4>pessimal</H4>
<p>
/pesiml/ , adj. [Latin-based antonym for optimal ] Maximally bad. This is a pessimal situation. Also pessimize vt. To make as bad as possible. These words are the obvious Latin-based antonyms for optimal and optimize , but for some reason they do not appear in most English dictionaries, although pessimize is listed in the OED.
/pesiml/ , adj. [Latin-based antonym for optimal ] Maximally bad. This is a pessimal situation. Also pessimize vt. To make as bad as possible. These words are the obvious Latin-based antonyms for optimal and optimize, but for some reason they do not appear in most English dictionaries, although pessimize is listed in the OED.
</p>
<H4>pessimizing compiler</H4>
<p>
@ -7873,7 +7881,7 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 07:18PM UTC
<p>2. On a Stanford or MIT keyboard in raw mode , use of four shift keys while typing a fifth character, where the four shift keys are the control and meta keys on both sides of the keyboard. This was very difficult to do! One accepted technique was to press the left-control and left-meta keys with your left hand, the right-control and right-meta keys with your right hand, and the fifth key with your nose. Quadruple-bucky combinations were very seldom used in practice, because when one invented a new command one usually assigned it to some character that was easier to type. If you want to imply that a program has ridiculously many commands or features, you can say something like: Oh, the command that makes it spin the tapes while whistling Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is quadruple-bucky-cokebottle. See double bucky , bucky bits , cokebottle.</p>
<H4>quantifiers</H4>
<p>
Prev Up Next quadruple bucky Home quantum bogodynamics
In techspeak and jargon, the standard metric prefixes used in the SI (Systeme International) conventions for scientific measurement have dual uses. With units of time or things that come in powers of 10, such as money, they retain their usual meanings of multiplication by powers of 1000 = 10^3. But when used with bytes or other things that naturally come in powers of 2, they usually denote multiplication by powers of 1024 = 2^10. Here are the SI magnifying prefixes, along with the corresponding decimal interpretations in common use: kilo (K, KB) 1,024 mega (M, MB) 1,048,576 giga (G, GB) 1,073,741,824 tera (T, TB) 1,099,511,627,776 peta (P, PB) 1,125,899,906,842,624 exa (EX) 1,152,921,504,606,846,976<37> zetta 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 yotta 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 Here are the SI fractional prefixes: milli 1000^-1 micro 1000^-2 nano 1000^-3 pico 1000^-4 femto 1000^-5 atto 1000^-6 zepto 1000^-7 yocto 1000^-8 The prefixes zetta-, yotta-, zepto-, and yocto- have been included in these tables purely for completeness and giggle value; they were adopted in 1990 by the 19th Conference Generale des Poids et Mesures. The binary peta- and exa- loadings, though well established, are not in jargon use either — yet. The prefix milli-, denoting multiplication by 1/1000, has always been rare in jargon (there is, however, a standard joke about the millihelen — notionally, the amount of beauty required to launch one ship). See the entries on micro-, pico-, and nano- for more information on connotative jargon use of these terms. ‘Femto’ and ‘atto’ (which, interestingly, derive not from Greek but from Danish) have not yet acquired jargon loadings, though it is easy to predict what those will be once computing technology enters the required realms of magnitude (however, see attoparsec). There are, of course, some standard unit prefixes for powers of 10. In the following table, the ‘prefix’ column is the international standard prefix for the appropriate power of ten; the ‘binary’ column lists jargon abbreviations and words for the corresponding power of 2. The B-suffixed forms are commonly used for byte quantities; the words ‘meg’ and ‘gig’ are nouns that may (but do not always) pluralize with ‘s’. Confusingly, hackers often use K or M as though they were suffix or numeric multipliers rather than a prefix; thus “2K dollars”, “2M of disk space”. This is also true (though less commonly) of G. Note that the formal SI metric prefix for 1000 is ‘k’; some use this strictly, reserving ‘K’ for multiplication by 1024 (KB is thus ‘kilobytes’). K, M, and G used alone refer to quantities of bytes; thus, 64G is 64 gigabytes and ‘a K’ is a kilobyte (compare mainstream use of ‘a G’ as short for ‘a grand’, that is, $1000). Whether one pronounces ‘gig’ with hard or soft ‘g’ depends on what one thinks the proper pronunciation of ‘giga-’ is. Confusing 1000 and 1024 (or other powers of 2 and 10 close in magnitude) — for example, describing a memory in units of 500K or 524K instead of 512K — is a sure sign of the marketroid. One example of this: it is common to refer to the capacity of 3.5" floppies as ‘1.44 MB’ In fact, this is a completely bogus number. The correct size is 1440 KB, that is, 1440 * 1024 = 1474560 bytes. So the ‘mega’ in ‘1.44 MB’ is compounded of two ‘kilos’, one of which is 1024 and the other of which is 1000. The correct number of megabytes would of course be 1440 / 1024 = 1.40625. Alas, this fine point is probably lost on the world forever.
</p>
<H4>quantum bogodynamics</H4>
<p>
@ -8411,6 +8419,10 @@ This file last generated Monday, 15 October 2018 07:18PM UTC
<p>
n. [IBM; rare] Syn. meta bit.
</p>
<H4>series of tubes</H4>
<p>
A phrase used by US senator Ted Stevens in 2006 to describe the workings of the internet. "It's a series of tubes!", "The internet is not a big truck" and "what happens to your own personal internet?" soon became viral phrases. This rambling and highly incoherent speech about the internet - difficult to really tell whether it was for or against net neutrality - is a classic example of a suit who doesn't really understand the technology nevertheless attempting to appear authoritative.
</p>
<H4>server</H4>
<p>
n. A kind of daemon that performs a service for the requester and which often runs on a computer other than the one on which the requestor/client runs. A particularly common term on the Internet, which is rife with web servers , name servers , domain servers , news servers , finger servers , and the like.