A

abbrev: /@·breev´/, /@·brev´/, n.

Common abbreviation for “abbreviation”.

ABEND: /a´bend/, /@·bend´/, n.

[ABnormal END]

1. Abnormal termination (of software); crash; lossage. Derives from an error message on the IBM 360; used jokingly by hackers but seriously mainly by code grinders. Usually capitalized, but may appear as “abend”. Hackers will try to persuade you that ABEND is called “abend” because it is what system operators do to the machine late on Friday when they want to call it a day, and hence is from the German Abend = “Evening”.

2. [alt.callahans] Absent By Enforced Net Deprivation - used in the subject lines of postings warning friends of an imminent loss of Internet access. (This can be because of computer downtime, loss of provider, moving or illness.) Variants of this also appear: ABVND = “Absent By Voluntary Net Deprivation” and ABSEND = “Absent By Self-Enforced Net Deprivation” have been sighted.

accumulator: //, n. obs.

1. Archaic term for a register. On-line use of it as a synonym for “register” is a fairly reliable indication that the user has been around for quite a while and/or that the architecture under discussion is quite old. The term in full is almost never used of microprocessor registers, for example, though symbolic names for arithmetic registers beginning in “A” derive from historical use of the term “accumulato” (and not, actually, from “arithmetic”. Confusingly, though, an “A” register name prefix may also stand for “address” as for example on the Motorola 680x0 family.

2. A register being used for arithmetic or logic (as opposed to addressing or a loop index), especially one being used to accumulate a sum or count of many items. This use is in context of a particular routine or stretch of code. “The FOOBAZ routine uses A3 as an accumulator.”

3. One’s in-basket (esp. among old-timers who might use sense 1). “You want this reviewed? Sure, just put it in the accumulator.” (See stack.)

ACK: /ak/, interj.

1. [common; from the ASCII mnemonic for 0000110] Acknowledge. Used to register one’s presence (compare mainstream Yo!). An appropriate response to ping or ENQ.

2. [from the comic strip Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed] An exclamation of surprised disgust, esp. in “Ack pffft!” Semi-humorous. Generally this sense is not spelled in caps (ACK) and is distinguished by a following exclamation point.

3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell them you understand their point (see NAK). Thus, for example, you might cut off an overly long explanation with “Ack. Ack. Ack. I get it now”

4. An affirmative. “Think we ought to ditch that damn NT server for a Linux box?” “ACK!”

There is also a usage “ACK?” (from sense 1) meaning “Are you there?”, often used in email when earlier mail has produced no reply, or during a lull in talk mode to see if the person has gone away (the standard humorous response is of course NAK, i.e., “I’m not here”).

Acme: //, n.

[from Greek akme highest point of perfection or achievement] The canonical supplier of bizarre, elaborate, and non-functional gadgetry - where Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson (two cartoonists who specialized in elaborate contraptions) shop. The name has been humorously expanded as A (or American) Company Making Everything. (In fact, Acme was a real brand sold from Sears Roebuck catalogs in the early 1900s.) Describing some X as an “Acme X” either means “This is insanely great”, or, more likely, “This looks insanely great on paper, but in practice it’s really easy to shoot yourself in the foot with it.” Compare pistol.

This term, specially cherished by American hackers and explained here for the benefit of our overseas brethren, comes from the Warner Brothers’ series of “Road-runner” cartoons. In these cartoons, the famished Wile E. Coyote was forever attempting to catch up with, trap, and eat the Road-runner. His attempts usually involved one or more high-technology Rube Goldberg devices – rocket jetpacks, catapults, magnetic traps, high-powered slingshots, etc. These were usually delivered in large wooden crates labeled prominently with the Acme name – which, probably not by coincidence, was the trade name of a peg bar system for superimposing animation cels used by cartoonists since forever. Acme devices invariably malfunctioned in improbable and violent ways.

ad-hockery: /ad·hok'@r·ee/, n.

[Purdue]

1. Gratuitous assumptions made inside certain programs, esp. expert systems, which lead to the appearance of semi-intelligent behavior but are in fact entirely arbitrary. For example, fuzzy-matching of input tokens that might be typing errors against a symbol table can make it look as though a program knows how to spell.

2. Special-case code to cope with some awkward input that would otherwise cause a program to choke, presuming normal inputs are dealt with in some cleaner and more regular way.

Also called “ad-hackery”, “ad-hocity” (/ad-hos'@-tee/), “ad-crockery”. See also ELIZA effect.

This is ad-hockery in action.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 74-08-18. The previous one is 73-07-29.)

address harvester: //, n.

A robot that searches web pages and/or filters netnews traffic looking for valid email addresses. Some address harvesters are benign, used only for compiling address directories. Most, unfortunately, are run by miscreants compiling address lists to spam. Address harvesters can be foiled by a teergrube.

adger: /aj´r/, vt.

[UCLA mutant of nadger, poss. also from the middle name of an infamous tenured graduate student] To make a bonehead move with consequences that could have been foreseen with even slight mental effort. E.g., “He started removing files and promptly adgered the whole project”. Compare dumbass attack.

admin: /ad·min´/, n.

Short for “administrator”; very commonly used in speech or on-line to refer to the systems person in charge on a computer. Common constructions on this include “sysadmin” and “site admin” (emphasizing the administrator’s role as a site contact for email and news) or “newsadmin” (focusing specifically on news). Compare postmaster, sysop, system mangler.

ADVENT: /ad´vent/, n.

The prototypical computer adventure game, first designed by Will Crowther on the PDP-10 in the mid-1970s as an attempt at computer-refereed fantasy gaming, and expanded into a puzzle-oriented game by Don Woods at Stanford in 1976. (Woods had been one of the authors of INTERCAL.) Now better known as Adventure or Colossal Cave Adventure, but the TOPS-10 operating system permitted only six-letter filenames in uppercase. See also vadding, Zork, and Infocom.
 

Orange River Chamber
You are in a splendid chamber thirty feet high.
The walls are frozen rivers of orange stone.
An awkward canyon and a good passage exit from 
east and west sides of the chamber.

A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing.

>drop rod
Dropped.

>take bird
You catch the bird in the wicker cage.

>take rod
Taken.

>w
At Top of Small Pit
At your feet is a small pit breathing traces of
white mist. A west passage ends
here except for a small crack leading on. 

Rough stone steps lead down the pit.                                      
>down

In Hall of Mists
You are at one end of a vast hall stretching
forward out of sight to the west.
There are openings to either side.
Nearby, a wide stone staircase leads downward.
The hall is filled with wisps of white mist
swaying to and fro almost as if alive.
A cold wind blows up the staircase.
There is a passage at the top
of a dome behind you.

Rough stone steps lead up the dome.

 
This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style since expected in text adventure games, and popularized several tag lines that have become fixtures of hacker-speak: “A huge green fierce snake bars the way!” “I see no X here” (for some noun X). “You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.” “You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different.” The “magic words” xyzzy and plugh also derive from this game.

Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the Mammoth & Flint Ridge cave system; it actually has a Colossal Cave and a Bedquilt as in the game, and the Y2 that also turns up is cavers' jargon for a map reference to a secondary entrance.

ADVENT sources are available for FTP at ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/doc/misc/if-archive/games/source/advent.tar.Z. You can also play it as a Java applet. There is a good page of resources at the Colossal Cave Adventure Page.

adware: //, n.

Software which is free to download and use but includes pop-up banner ads somewhere. See also -ware.

AFAIK: //, n.

[Usenet; common] Abbrev. for “As Far As I Know”. There is a variant AFAICT “As Far As I Can Tell”; where AFAIK suggests that the writer knows his knowledge is limited, AFAICT suggests that he feels his knowledge is as complete as anybody else’s but that the best available knowledge does not support firm conclusions.

AFJ: //, n.

Written-only abbreviation for “April Fool’s Joke”. Elaborate April Fool’s hoaxes are a long-established tradition on Usenet and Internet; see kremvax for an example. In fact, April Fool’s Day is the only seasonal holiday consistently marked by customary observances on Internet and other hacker networks.

AFK: //, adj.

[MUD] Abbrev. for “Away From Keyboard”. Used to notify others that you will be momentarily unavailable online. eg. “Let’s not go kill that frost giant yet, I need to go AFK to make a phone call”. Often MUDs will have a command to politely inform others of your absence when they try to talk with you. The term is not restricted to MUDs, however, and has become common in many chat situations, from IRC to Unix talk.

AI-complete: /A·I k@m·pleet'/, adj.

[MIT, Stanford: by analogy with “NP-complete” (see NP-)] Used to describe problems or subproblems in AI, to indicate that the solution presupposes a solution to the “strong AI problem” (that is, the synthesis of a human-level intelligence). A problem that is AI-complete is, in other words, just too hard.

Examples of AI-complete problems are “The Vision Problem” (building a system that can see as well as a human) and “The Natural Language Problem” (building a system that can understand and speak a natural language as well as a human). These may appear to be modular, but all attempts so far (2003) to solve them have foundered on the amount of context information and “intelligence” they seem to require. See also gedanken.

AI: /A·I/, n.

Abbreviation for “Artificial Intelligence”, so common that the full form is almost never written or spoken among hackers.

airplane rule: //, n.

“Complexity increases the possibility of failure; a twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane.” By analogy, in both software and electronics, the rule that simplicity increases robustness. It is correspondingly argued that the right way to build reliable systems is to put all your eggs in one basket, after making sure that you’ve built a really good basket. See also KISS Principle, elegant.

Alderson loop: //, n.

[Intel] A special version of an infinite loop where there is an exit condition available, but inaccessible in the current implementation of the code. Typically this is created while debugging user interface code. An example would be when there is a menu stating, “Select 1-3 or 9 to quit” and 9 is not allowed by the function that takes the selection from the user.

This term received its name from a programmer who had coded a modal message box in MSAccess with no Ok or Cancel buttons, thereby disabling the entire program whenever the box came up. The message box had the proper code for dismissal and even was set up so that when the non-existent OK button was pressed the proper code would be called.

aliasing bug: //, n.

A class of subtle programming errors that can arise in code that does dynamic allocation, esp. via malloc(3) or equivalent. If several pointers address (are “aliases for”) a given hunk of storage, it may happen that the storage is freed or reallocated (and thus moved) through one alias and then referenced through another, which may lead to subtle (and possibly intermittent) lossage depending on the state and the allocation history of the malloc arena. Avoidable by use of allocation strategies that never alias allocated core, or by use of higher-level languages, such as LISP, which employ a garbage collector (see GC). Also called a stale pointer bug. See also precedence lossage, smash the stack, fandango on core, memory leak, memory smash, overrun screw, spam.

Historical note: Though this term is nowadays associated with C programming, it was already in use in a very similar sense in the Algol-60 and FORTRAN communities in the 1960s.

Alice and Bob: //, n.

The archetypal individuals used as examples in discussions of cryptographic protocols. Originally, theorists would say something like: “A communicates with someone who claims to be B, So to be sure, A tests that B knows a secret number K. So A sends to B a random number X. B then forms Y by encrypting X under key K and sends Y back to A” Because this sort of thing is quite hard to follow, theorists stopped using the unadorned letters A and B to represent the main players and started calling them Alice and Bob. So now we say “Alice communicates with someone claiming to be Bob, and to be sure, Alice tests that Bob knows a secret number K. Alice sends to Bob a random number X. Bob then forms Y by encrypting X under key K and sends Y back to Alice”. A whole mythology rapidly grew up around the metasyntactic names; see http://www.conceptlabs.co.uk/alicebob.html.

In Bruce Schneier’s definitive introductory text Applied Cryptography he introduced a table of dramatis personae headed by Alice and Bob. Others include Carol (a participant in three- and four-party protocols), Dave (a participant in four-party protocols), Eve (an eavesdropper), Mallory (a malicious active attacker), Trent (a trusted arbitrator), Walter (a warden), Peggy (a prover) and Victor (a verifier). These names for roles are either already standard or, given the wide popularity of the book, may be expected to quickly become so.

All hardware sucks, all software sucks.: //, prov.

[from scary devil monastery] A general recognition of the fallibility of any computer system, ritually intoned as an attempt to quell incipient holy wars. It is a common response to any sort of bigot. When discussing Wintel systems, however, it is often snidely appended with, “but some suck more than others.”

all your base are belong to us: //, refr.

A declaration of victory or superiority. The phrase stems from a 1991 adaptation of Toaplan’s “Zero Wing” shoot-'em-up arcade game for the Sega Genesis game console. A brief introduction was added to the opening screen, and it has what many consider to be the worst Japanese-to-English translation in video game history. The introduction shows the bridge of a starship in chaos as a Borg-like figure named CATS materializes and says, “How are you gentlemen!! All your base are belong to us.” [sic] In 2001, this amusing mistranslation spread virally through the Internet, bringing with it a slew of JPEGs and a movie of hacked photographs, each showing a street sign, store front, package label, etc. hacked to read “All your base are belong to us” or one of the other many supremely dopey lines from the game (such as “Somebody set up usthe bomb!!!” or “What happen?”). When these phrases are used properly, the overall effect is both screamingly funny and somewhat chilling, reminiscent of the B movie “They Live”.

The original has been generalized to “All your X are belong to us”, where X is filled in to connote a sinister takeover of some sort. Thus, “When Joe signed up for his new job at Yoyodyne, he had to sign a draconian NDA. It basically said: All your code are belong to us.” Has many of the connotations of “Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated” (see Borg). Considered silly, and most likely to be used by the type of person that finds Jeff K. hilarious.

alpha geek: //, n.

[from animal ethologists' “alpha male”] The most technically accomplished or skillful person in some implied context. “Ask Larry, he’s the alpha geek here.”

alpha particles: //, n.

See bit rot.

alt bit: /awlt bit/, adj.

See meta bit.

alt: /awlt/

1. n. The alt shift key on an IBM PC or clone keyboard; see bucky bits, sense 2 (though typical PC usage does not simply set the 0200 bit).

2. n. The option key on a Macintosh; use of this term usually reveals that the speaker hacked PCs before coming to the Mac (see also feature key, which is sometimes incorrectly called “alt”).

3. The alt hierarchy on Usenet, the tree of newsgroups created by users without a formal vote and approval procedure. There is a myth, not entirely implausible, that alt is acronymic for “anarchists, lunatics, and terrorists”; but in fact it is simply short for “alternative”.

4. n., obs. Rare alternate name for the ASCII ESC character (ASCII 0011011). This use, derives, with the alt key itself, from archaic PDP-10 operating systems, especially ITS.

Aluminum Book: //, n.

[MIT] Common LISP: The Language, by Guy L. Steele Jr. (Digital Press, first edition 1984, second edition 1990). Note that due to a technical screwup some printings of the second edition are actually of a color the author describes succinctly as “yucky green”. See also book titles.

ambimouseterous: /am·b@·mows´ter·us/, /am·b@·mows´trus/, adj.

[modeled on “ambidextrous”] Able to use a mouse with either hand.

Amiga Persecution Complex: //, n.

The disorder suffered by a particularly egregious variety of bigot, those who believe that the marginality of their preferred machine is the result of some kind of industry-wide conspiracy (for without a conspiracy of some kind, the eminent superiority of their beloved shining jewel of a platform would obviously win over all, market pressures be damned!) Those afflicted are prone to engaging in flame wars and calling for boycotts and mailbombings. Amiga Persecution Complex is by no means limited to Amiga users; NeXT, NeWS, OS/2, Macintosh, LISP, and GNU users are also common victims. Linux users used to display symptoms very frequently before Linux started winning; some still do. See also newbie, troll, holy wars, weenie, Get a life!.

Amiga: //, n.

A series of personal computer models originally sold by Commodore, based on 680x0 processors, custom support chips and an operating system that combined some of the best features of Macintosh and Unix with compatibility with neither.

The Amiga was released just as the personal computing world standardized on IBM-PC clones. This prevented it from gaining serious market share, despite the fact that the first Amigas had a substantial technological lead on the IBM XTs of the time. Instead, it acquired a small but zealous population of enthusiastic hackers who dreamt of one day unseating the clones (see Amiga Persecution Complex). The traits of this culture are both spoofed and illuminated in The BLAZE Humor Viewer. The strength of the Amiga platform seeded a small industry of companies building software and hardware for the platform, especially in graphics and video applications (see video toaster).

Due to spectacular mismanagement, Commodore did hardly any R&D, allowing the competition to close Amiga’s technological lead. After Commodore went bankrupt in 1994 the technology passed through several hands, none of whom did much with it. However, the Amiga is still being produced in Europe under license and has a substantial number of fans, which will probably extend the platform’s life considerably.

amp off: //, vt.

[Purdue] To run in background. From the Unix shell "&" operator.

amper: //, n.

Common abbreviation for the name of the ampersand (“&”, ASCII 0100110) character. See ASCII for other synonyms.

and there was much rejoicing: //, refr.

[from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail.]

Acknowledgement of a notable accomplishment. Something long-awaited, widely desired, possibly unexpected but secretly wished-for, with a suggestion that something about the problem (and perhaps the steps necessary to make it go away) was deeply disturbing to hacker sensibilities.

In person, the phrase is almost invariably pronounced with the same portentious intonation as the movie. The customary in-person (approving) response is a weak and halfhearted “Yaaaay...”, with one index finger raised like a flag and moved in a small circle. The reason for this, like most of the Monty Python oeuvre, cannot easily be explained outside its original context.

Example: “changelog entry #436: with the foo driver brain damage taken care of, finally obsoleted BROKEN_EVIL_KLUDGE. Removed from source tree. (And there was much rejoicing).”

Angband: /ang´band/, n.

Like nethack, moria, and rogue, one of the large freely distributed Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's Pits of Angband (compare elder days, elvish). Has been described as “Moria on steroids”; but, unlike Moria, many aspects of the game are customizable. This leads many hackers and would-be hackers into fooling with these instead of doing productive work. There are many Angband variants, of which the most notorious is probably the rather whimsical Zangband. In this game, when a key that does not correspond to a command is pressed, the game will display “Type ? for help” 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time, random error messages including “An error has occurred because an error of type 42 has occurred” and “Windows 95 uninstalled successfully” will be displayed. Zangband also allows the player to kill Santa Claus (who has some really good stuff, but also has a lot of friends), “Bull Gates”, and Barney the Dinosaur (but be watchful; Barney has a nasty case of halitosis). There is an official Angband home page at http://thangorodrim.angband.org/ and a Zangband one at http://www.zangband.org/. See also Random Number God.

angle brackets: //, n.

Either of the characters < (ASCII 0111100) and > (ASCII 0111110) (ASCII less-than or greater-than signs). Typographers in the Real World use angle brackets which are either taller and slimmer (the ISO lang 〈 and rang 〉 characters), or significantly smaller (single ‹ › or double « » guillemets) than the less-than and greater-than signs. See broket, ASCII.

angry fruit salad: //, n.

A bad visual-interface design that uses too many colors. (This term derives, of course, from the bizarre day-glo colors found in canned fruit salad.) Too often one sees similar effects from interface designers using color window systems such as X; there is a tendency to create displays that are flashy and attention-getting but uncomfortable for long-term use.

annoybot: /@·noy·bot/, n.

[IRC] See bot.

annoyware: //, n.

A type of shareware that frequently disrupts normal program operation to display requests for payment to the author in return for the ability to disable the request messages. (Also called "nagware") The requests generally require user action to acknowledge the message before normal operation is resumed and are often tied to the most frequently used features of the software. See also careware, charityware, crippleware, freeware, FRS, guiltware, postcardware, and -ware; compare payware.

ANSI standard pizza: /an´see stan´d@rd peet´z@/, n.

[CMU] Pepperoni and mushroom pizza. Coined allegedly because most pizzas ordered by CMU hackers during some period leading up to mid-1990 were of that flavor. See also rotary debugger; compare ISO standard cup of tea.

ANSI standard: /an´see stan´d@rd/, n.

The ANSI standard usage of “ANSI standard” refers to any practice which is typical or broadly done. It’s most appropriately applied to things that everyone does that are not quite regulation. For example: ANSI standard shaking of a laser printer cartridge to get extra life from it, or the ANSI standard word tripling in names of usenet alt groups.

This usage derives from the American National Standards Institute. ANSI, along with the International Organization for Standards (ISO), standardized the C programming language (see K&R, Classic C), and promulgates many other important software standards.

anti-idiotarianism: //, n.

[very common] Opposition to idiots of all political stripes. First coined in the blog named Little Green Footballs as part of a post expressing disgust with inane responses to post-9/11 Islamic terrorism. Anti-idiotarian wrath has focused on Islamic terrorists and their sympathizers in the Western political left, but also routinely excoriated right-wing politicians backing repressive “anti-terror” legislation and Christian religious figures who (in the blogosphere’s view of the matter) have descended nearly to the level of jihad themselves.

Actually, I would recommend either going into lurk mode or leaving any forum where this term pops up. In my experience, the flavour of ESR’s tone here, and analogous examples by other writers, tends to mean that if you have any critical thoughts on u.s. foreign policy at all, all adult conversation will end and any american posters will pile on with insults and accusations. It’s a shame, but not atypical of topics that are in effect holy wars.

AOL!: //, n.

[Usenet] Common synonym for “Me, too!” alluding to the legendary propensity of America Online users to utter contentless “Me, too!” postings. The number of exclamation points following varies from zero to five or so. The pseudo-HTML:

<AOL>Me, too!</AOL>

is also frequently seen. See also the September that never ended.

Or, for those of us forced to endure AOL internet service for a period of our lives, especially in the mid to late 1990s, this is properly pronounced “A-O-hell!” in light of the mollases-like consistency of the AOL network and the enforced trip through their padded cell “user environment”. I have heard it repurposed to refer to the Time-Warner-AOL entertainment conglomerate. (How entertaining its offerings are, especially nowadays, can be debated.)

app: /ap/, n.

Short for “application program”, as opposed to a systems program. Apps are what systems vendors are forever chasing developers to create for their environments so they can sell more boxes. Hackers tend not to think of the things they themselves run as apps; thus, in hacker parlance the term excludes compilers, program editors, games, and messaging systems, though a user would consider all those to be apps. (Broadly, an app is often a self-contained environment for performing some well-defined task such as “word processing”; hackers tend to prefer more general-purpose tools.) See killer app; oppose tool, operating system.

Archimedes: //, n.

The world’s first RISC microcomputer, available only in the British Commonwealth and Europe. Built in 1987 in Great Britain by Acorn Computers, it was legendary for its use of the ARM-2 microprocessor as a CPU. Many a novice hacker in the Commonwealth first learnt his or her skills on the Archimedes, since it was specifically designed for use in schools and educational institutions. Owners of Archimedes machines are often still treated with awe and reverence. Familiarly, “archi”.

arena: //, n.

[common; Unix] The area of memory attached to a process by brk(2) and sbrk(2) and used by malloc(3) as dynamic storage. So named from a malloc: corrupt arena message emitted when some early versions detected an impossible value in the free block list. See overrun screw, aliasing bug, memory leak, memory smash, smash the stack.

arg: /arg/, n.

Abbreviation for “argument” (to a function), used so often as to have become a new word (like “piano” from “pianoforte”). “The sine function takes 1 arg, but the arc-tangent function can take either 1 or 2 args.” Compare param, parm, var.

ARMM: //, n.

[acronym, “Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation”] A Usenet cancelbot created by Dick Depew of Munroe Falls, Ohio. ARMM was intended to automatically cancel posts from anonymous-posting sites. Unfortunately, the robot’s recognizer for anonymous postings triggered on its own automatically-generated control messages! Transformed by this stroke of programming ineptitude into a monster of Frankensteinian proportions, it broke loose on the night of March 30, 1993 and proceeded to spam news.admin.policy with a recursive explosion of over 200 messages.

ARMM’s bug produced a recursive cascade of messages each of which mechanically added text to the ID and Subject and some other headers of its parent. This produced a flood of messages in which each header took up several screens and each message ID and subject line got longer and longer and longer.

Reactions varied from amusement to outrage. The pathological messages crashed at least one mail system, and upset people paying line charges for their Usenet feeds. One poster described the ARMM debacle as “instant Usenet history” (also establishing the term despew), and it has since been widely cited as a cautionary example of the havoc the combination of good intentions and incompetence can wreak on a network. The Usenet thread on the subject is archived here. Compare Great Worm; sorcerer’s apprentice mode. See also software laser, network meltdown.

armor-plated: //, n.

Syn. for bulletproof.

asbestos cork award: //, n.

Once, long ago at MIT, there was a flamer so consistently obnoxious that another hacker designed, had made, and distributed posters announcing that said flamer had been nominated for the “asbestos cork award”. (Any reader in doubt as to the intended application of the cork should consult the etymology under flame.) Since then, it is agreed that only a select few have risen to the heights of bombast required to earn this dubious dignity – but there is no agreement on which few.

asbestos longjohns: //, n.

Notional garments donned by Usenet posters just before emitting a remark they expect will elicit flamage. This is the most common of the asbestos coinages. Also “asbestos underwear”, “asbestos overcoat”, etc.

asbestos: //, adj.

[common] Used as a modifier to anything intended to protect one from flames; also in other highly flame-suggestive usages. See, for example, asbestos longjohns and asbestos cork award.

ASCII art: //, n.

The fine art of drawing diagrams using the ASCII character set (mainly |, -, /, \, and +). Also known as “character graphics” or “ASCII graphics”; see also boxology. Here is a serious example:

o----)||(--+--|<----+    +---------o + D O 
   L )||(  |        |    |             C U
 A I )||(  +-->|-+  |    +-\/\/-+--o -   T
 C N )||(        |  |    |      |        P 
   E )||(  +-->|-+--)---+--|(--+-o       U
     )||(  |        |          | GND     T
o----)||(--+--|<----+----------+   
A power supply consisting of a full wave rectifier circuit
feeding a capacitor input filter circuit.

And here are some very silly examples:

  |\/\/\/|     ____/|              ___    |\_/|    ___
  |      |     \ o.O|   ACK!      /   \_  |` '|  _/   \
  |      |      =(_)=  THPHTH!   /      \/     \/      \
  | (o)(o)        U             /                       \
  C      _)  (__)                \/\/\/\  _____  /\/\/\/
  | ,___|    (oo)                       \/     \/
  |   /       \/-------\         U                  (__)
 /____\        ||     | \    /---V  `v'-            oo )
/      \       ||---W||  *  * |--|   || |`.         |_/\

               //-o-\\
        ____---=======---____
    ====___\   /.. ..\   /___====      Klingons rule OK!
  //        ---\__O__/---        \\
  \_\                           /_/

There is an important subgenre of ASCII art that puns on the standard character names in the fashion of a rebus.

+--------------------------------------------------------+
|      ^^^^^^^^^^^^                                      |
| ^^^^^^^^^^^            ^^^^^^^^^                       |
|                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |
|        ^^^^^^^         B       ^^^^^^^^^               |
|  ^^^^^^^^^          ^^^            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^      |
+--------------------------------------------------------+
"A Bee in the Carrot Patch"

Within humorous ASCII art, there is for some reason an entire flourishing subgenre of pictures of silly cows. Four of these are reproduced in the examples above, here are three more:

         (__)              (__)              (__)
         (\/)              ($$)              (**)
  /-------\/        /-------\/        /-------\/
 / | 666 ||        / |=====||        / |     ||
*  ||----||       *  ||----||       *  ||----||
   ~~    ~~          ~~    ~~          ~~    ~~  
Satanic cow   This cow is a Yuppie  Cow in love

Finally, here’s a magnificent example of ASCII art depicting an Edwardian train station in Dunedin, New Zealand:

                                  .-.
                                 /___\
                                 |___|
                                 |]_[|
                                 / I \
                              JL/  |  \JL
   .-.                    i   ()   |   ()   i                    .-.
   |_|     .^.           /_\  LJ=======LJ  /_\           .^.     |_|
._/___\._./___\_._._._._.L_J_/.-.     .-.\_L_J._._._._._/___\._./___\._._._
       ., |-,-| .,       L_J  |_| [I] |_|  L_J       ., |-,-| .,        ., 
       JL |-O-| JL       L_J%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%L_J       JL |-O-| JL        JL 
IIIIII_HH_'-'-'_HH_IIIIII|_|=======H=======|_|IIIIII_HH_'-'-'_HH_IIIIII_HH_
-------[]-------[]-------[_]----\.=I=./----[_]-------[]-------[]--------[]-
 _/\_  ||\\_I_//||  _/\_ [_] []_/_L_J_\_[] [_] _/\_  ||\\_I_//||  _/\_  ||\
 |__|  ||=/_|_\=||  |__|_|_|   _L_L_J_J_   |_|_|__|  ||=/_|_\=||  |__|  ||-
 |__|  |||__|__|||  |__[___]__--__===__--__[___]__|  |||__|__|||  |__|  |||
IIIIIII[_]IIIII[_]IIIIIL___J__II__|_|__II__L___JIIIII[_]IIIII[_]IIIIIIII[_]
 \_I_/ [_]\_I_/[_] \_I_[_]\II/[]\_\I/_/[]\II/[_]\_I_/ [_]\_I_/[_] \_I_/ [_]
./   \.L_J/   \L_J./   L_JI  I[]/     \[]I  IL_J    \.L_J/   \L_J./   \.L_J
|     |L_J|   |L_J|    L_J|  |[]|     |[]|  |L_J     |L_J|   |L_J|     |L_J
|_____JL_JL___JL_JL____|-||  |[]|     |[]|  ||-|_____JL_JL___JL_JL_____JL_J

The next step beyond static tableaux in ASCII art is ASCII animation. There are not many large examples of this; perhaps the best known is the ASCII animation of the original Star Wars movie at http://www.asciimation.co.nz/.

There is a newsgroup, alt.ascii-art, devoted to this genre; however, see also warlording.

ASCII: /as´kee/, n.

[originally an acronym (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) but now merely conventional] The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers. The standard version uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier codes (including early drafts of ASCII prior to June 1961) used fewer. This change allowed the inclusion of lowercase letters - a major win - but it did not provide for accented letters or any other letterforms not used in English (such as the German sharp-S ß. or the ae-ligature æ which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian). It could be worse, though. It could be much worse. See EBCDIC to understand how. A history of ASCII and its ancestors is at http://www.wps.com/texts/codes/index.html.

Computers are much pickier and less flexible about spelling than humans; thus, hackers need to be very precise when talking about characters, and have developed a considerable amount of verbal shorthand for them. Every character has one or more names - some formal, some concise, some silly. Common jargon names for ASCII characters are collected here. See also individual entries for bang, excl, open, ques, semi, shriek, splat, twiddle, and Yu-Shiang Whole Fish.

This list derives from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII pronunciation guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII order; character pairs are sorted in by first member. For each character, common names are given in rough order of popularity, followed by names that are reported but rarely seen; official ANSI/CCITT names are surrounded by brokets: <>. Square brackets mark the particularly silly names introduced by INTERCAL. The abbreviations “l/r” and “o/c” stand for left/right and “open/close” respectively. Ordinary parentheticals provide some usage information.
 

The pronunciation of # as “pound” is common in the U.S. but a bad idea; Commonwealth Hackish has its own, rather more apposite use of “pound sign” (confusingly, on British keyboards the £ happens to replace #; thus Britishers sometimes call # on a U.S.-ASCII keyboard “pound”, compounding the American error). The U.S. usage derives from an old-fashioned commercial practice of using a # suffix to tag pound weights on bills of lading. The character is usually pronounced “hash” outside the U.S. There are more culture wars over the correct pronunciation of this character than any other, which has led to the ha ha only serious suggestion that it be pronounced “shibboleth” (see Judges 12:6 in an Old Testament or Tanakh).

The “uparrow” name for circumflex and “leftarrow” name for underline are historical relics from archaic ASCII (the 1963 version), which had these graphics in those character positions rather than the modern punctuation characters.

The “swung dash” or “approximation” sign (∼) is not quite the same as tilde ~ in typeset material, but the ASCII tilde serves for both (compare angle brackets).

Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The #, $, >, and & characters, for example, are all pronounced “hex” in different communities because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in particular, # in many assembler-programming cultures, $ in the 6502 world, > at Texas Instruments, and & on the BBC Micro, Sinclair, and some Z80 machines). See also splat.

The inability of ASCII text to correctly represent any of the world’s other major languages makes the designers' choice of 7 bits look more and more like a serious misfeature as the use of international networks continues to increase (see software rot). Hardware and software from the U.S. still tends to embody the assumption that ASCII is the universal character set and that characters have 7 bits; this is a major irritant to people who want to use a character set suited to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem by proliferating “national” character sets produce an evolutionary pressure to use a smaller subset common to all those in use.

ASCIIbetical order: /as´kee·be'·t@·kl or´dr/, adj., n.

Used to indicate that data is sorted in ASCII collated order rather than alphabetical order. This lexicon is sorted in something close to ASCIIbetical order, but with case ignored and entries beginning with non-alphabetic characters moved to the beginning.

astroturfing: //, n.

1. The use of paid shills to create the impression of a popular movement, through means like letters to newspapers from soi-disant (self-proclaimed) “concerned citizens”, paid opinion pieces, and the formation of grass-roots lobbying groups that are actually funded by a PR group (AstroTurf is fake grass; hence the term). See also sock puppet, tentacle.

2. What an individual posting to a public forum under an assumed name is said to be doing.

This term became common among hackers after it came to light in early 1998 that Microsoft had attempted to use such tactics to forestall the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust action against the company. The maneuver backfired horribly, angering a number of state attorneys-general enough to induce them to go public with plans to join the Federal suit. It also set anybody defending Microsoft on the net for the accusation “You’re just astroturfing!”.

atomic: //, adj.

[from Gk. atomos, indivisible]

1. Indivisible; cannot be split up. For example, an instruction may be said to do several things “atomically”, i.e., all the things are done immediately, and there is no chance of the instruction being half-completed or of another being interspersed. Used esp. to convey that an operation cannot be screwed up by interrupts. “This routine locks the file and increments the file’s semaphore atomically.”

2. [primarily techspeak] Guaranteed to complete successfully or not at all, usu. refers to database transactions. If an error prevents a partially-performed transaction from proceeding to completion, it must be “backed out”, as the database must not be left in an inconsistent state.

Computer usage, in either of the above senses, has none of the connotations that “atomic” has in mainstream English (i.e. of particles of matter, nuclear explosions etc.).

attoparsec: //, n.

About an inch. atto- is the standard SI prefix for multiplication by 10-18. A parsec (parallax-second) is 3.26 light-years; an attoparsec is thus 3.26 × 10-18 light years, or about 3.1 cm (thus, 1 attoparsec/microfortnight equals about 1 inch/sec). This unit is reported to be in use (though probably not very seriously) among hackers in the U.K. See micro-.

Aunt Tillie: //, n.

[linux-kernel mailing list] The archetypal non-technical user, one’s elderly and scatterbrained maiden aunt. Invoked in discussions of usability for people who are not hackers and geeks; one sees references to the “Aunt Tillie test”.

AUP: /A·U·P/

Abbreviation, “Acceptable Use Policy”. The policy of a given ISP which sets out what the ISP considers to be (un)acceptable uses of its Internet resources.

autobogotiphobia: /aw´toh·boh·got`@·foh´bee·@/

n. See bogotify.

autoconfiscate: //, v.

To set up or modify a source-code distribution so that it configures and builds using the GNU project’s autoconf/automake/libtools suite. Among open-source hackers, a mere running binary of a program is not considered a full release; what’s interesting is a source tree that can be built into binaries using standard tools. Since the mid-1990s, autoconf and friends been the standard way to adapt a distribution for portability so that it can be built on multiple operating systems without change.

automagically: /aw·toh·maj´i·klee/, adv.

Automatically, but in a way that, for some reason (typically because it is too complicated, or too ugly, or perhaps even too trivial), the speaker doesn’t feel like explaining to you. See magic. “The C-INTERCAL compiler generates C, then automagically invokes cc(1) to produce an executable.”

This term is quite old, going back at least to the mid-70s in jargon and probably much earlier. The word “automagic” occurred in advertising (for a shirt-ironing gadget) as far back as the late 1940s.

avatar: //, n.

[in Hindu mythology, the incarnation of a deity]

1. Among people working on virtual reality and cyberspace interfaces, an “avatar” is an icon or representation of a user in a shared virtual reality. The term is sometimes used on MUDs.

2. [CMU, Tektronix] root, superuser. There are quite a few Unix machines on which the name of the superuser account is “avatar” rather than “root”. This quirk was originated by a CMU hacker who found the terms “root” and “superuser” unimaginative, and thought “avatar” might better impress people with the responsibility they were accepting.

awk: /awk/, n.

1. n. [Unix techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging text data developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (the name derives from their initials). It is characterized by C-like syntax, a declaration-free approach to variable typing and declarations, associative arrays, and field-oriented text processing. See also Perl.

2. n. Editing term for an expression awkward to manipulate through normal regexp facilities (for example, one containing a newline).

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