G
G: //, pref., suff.
1. [SI] See quantifiers.
2. The letter G has special significance in the hacker community, largely thanks to the GNU project and the GPL.
Many free software projects have names that names that begin with G. The GNU project gave many of its projects names that were acronyms beginning with the word “GNU”, such as “GNU C Compiler” (gcc) and “GNU Debugger” (gdb), and this launched a tradition. Just as many Java developers will begin their projects with J, many free software developers will begin theirs with G. It is often the case that a program with a G-prefixed name is licensed under the GNU GPL.
For example, someone may write a free Enterprise Engineering Kludge package (EEK technology is all the rage in the technical journals) and name it “geek” to imply that it is a GPL’d EEK package.
GandhiCon: //, n.
There is a quote from Mohandas Gandhi, describing the stages of establishment resistence to a winning strategy of nonviolent activism, that partisans of open source and especially Linux have embraced as almost an explanatory framework for the behaviors they observe while trying to get corporations and other large institutions to take new ways of doing things seriously:
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
In hacker usage this quote has miscegenated with the U.S military’s DefCon terminology describing “defense conditions” or degrees of war alert. At GandhiCon One, you’re being ignored. At GandhiCon Two, opponents are laughing at you and dismissing the idea that you could ever be a threat. At GandhiCon Three, they’re fighting you on the merits and/or attempting to discredit you. At GandhiCon Four, you’re winning and they are arguing to save face or stave off complete collapse of their position.
gang bang: //, n.
The use of large numbers of loosely coupled programmers in an attempt to wedge a great many features into a product in a short time. Though there have been memorable gang bangs (e.g., that over-the-weekend assembler port mentioned in Steven Levy’s Hackers), and large numbers of loosely-coupled programmers operating in bazaar mode can do very useful work when they’re not on a deadline, most are perpetrated by large companies trying to meet unrealistic deadlines; the inevitable result is enormous buggy masses of code entirely lacking in orthogonality. When market-driven managers make a list of all the features the competition has and assign one programmer to implement each, the probability of maintaining a coherent (or even functional) design goes to epsilon. See also firefighting, Conway’s Law.
Another example of the heterosexist and female-hostile hacker culture. Raymond plays dumb with respect to the more common real world meaning of this term, which may be glossed bluntly as “gang rape.”
Gang of Four: //, n.
(also abbreviated “GOF”) [prob. a play on the “Gang Of Four” who briefly ran Communist China after the death of Mao] Describes either the authors or the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software published in 1995 by Addison-Wesley. The authors forming the Gang Of Four are Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides. They are also sometimes referred to as “Gamma et. al.” The authors state at http://www.hillside.net/patterns/DPBook/GOF.html “Why are we... called this? Who knows. Somehow the name just stuck.” The term is also used to describe any of the design patterns that are used in the book, referring to the patterns within it as “Gang Of Four Patterns.”
garbage collect: //, vi.
(also “garbage collection”, n.) See GC.
garply: /gar´plee/, n.
[Stanford] Another metasyntactic variable (see foo); once popular among SAIL hackers.
gas: //, v., n.
[as in “gas chamber”] Erm – seriously? The Holocaust is no joke.
1. interj. A term of disgust and hatred, implying that gas should be dispensed in generous quantities, thereby exterminating the source of irritation. “Some loser just reloaded the system for no reason! Gas!”
2. interj. A suggestion that someone or something ought to be flushed out of mercy. “The system’s getting wedged every few minutes. Gas!”
3. vt. To flush (sense 1). “You should gas that old crufty software.”
4. [IBM] n. Dead space in nonsequentially organized files that was occupied by data that has since been deleted; the compression operation that removes it is called “degassing” (by analogy, perhaps, with the use of the same term in vacuum technology).
5. [IBM] n. Empty space on a disk that has been clandestinely allocated against future need.
Gates’s Law: //, n.
“The speed of software halves every 18 months.” This oft-cited law is an ironic comment on the tendency of software bloat to outpace the every-18-month doubling in hardware capacity per dollar predicted by Moore’s Law. The reference is to Bill Gates; Microsoft is widely considered among the worst if not the worst of the perpetrators of bloat.
gawble: /gaw´bl/, n.
See chawmp.
GC: /G·C/, v., n.
[from LISP terminology; Garbage Collect]
1. vt. To clean up and throw away useless things. “I think I’ll GC the top of my desk today.”
2. vt. To recycle, reclaim, or put to another use.
3. n. An instantiation of the garbage collector process.
“Garbage collection” is computer-science techspeak for a particular class of strategies for dynamically but transparently reallocating computer memory (i.e., without requiring explicit allocation and deallocation by higher-level software). One such strategy involves periodically scanning all the data in memory and determining what is no longer accessible; useless data items are then discarded so that the memory they occupy can be recycled and used for another purpose. Implementations of the LISP language usually use garbage collection.
In jargon, the full phrase is sometimes heard but the abbrev GC is more frequently used because it is shorter. Note that there is an ambiguity in usage that has to be resolved by context: “I’m going to garbage-collect my desk” usually means to clean out the drawers, but it could also mean to throw away or recycle the desk itself.
GCOS: /jee´kohs/, n.
A quick-and-dirty clone of System/360 DOS that emerged from GE around 1970; originally called GECOS (the General Electric Comprehensive Operating System). Later kluged to support primitive timesharing and transaction processing. After the buyout of GE’s computer division by Honeywell, the name was changed to General Comprehensive Operating System (GCOS). Other OS groups at Honeywell began referring to it as “God’s Chosen Operating System”, allegedly in reaction to the GCOS crowd’s uninformed and snotty attitude about the superiority of their product. All this might be of zero interest, except for two facts: (1) The GCOS people won the political war, and this led in the orphaning and eventual death of Honeywell Multics, and (2) GECOS/GCOS left one permanent mark on Unix. Some early Unix systems at Bell Labs used GCOS machines for print spooling and various other services; the field added to /etc/passwd to carry GCOS ID information was called the “GECOS field” and survives today as the pw_gecos member used for the user’s full name and other human-ID information. GCOS later played a major role in keeping Honeywell a dismal also-ran in the mainframe market, and was itself mostly ditched for Unix in the late 1980s when Honeywell began to retire its aging big iron designs.
GECOS: /jee´kohs/, n.
See GCOS.
gedanken: /g@·dahn´kn/, adj.
Ungrounded; impractical; not well-thought-out; untried; untested.
“Gedanken” is a German word for “thought”. A thought experiment is one you carry out in your head. In physics, the term gedanken experiment is used to refer to an experiment that is impractical to carry out, but useful to consider because it can be reasoned about theoretically. (A classic gedanken experiment of relativity theory involves thinking about a man in an elevator accelerating through space.) Gedanken experiments are very useful in physics, but must be used with care. It’s too easy to idealize away some important aspect of the real world in constructing the “apparatus”.
Among hackers, accordingly, the word has a pejorative connotation. It is typically used of a project, especially one in artificial intelligence research, that is written up in grand detail (typically as a Ph.D. thesis) without ever being implemented to any great extent. Such a project is usually perpetrated by people who aren’t very good hackers or find programming distasteful or are just in a hurry. A “gedanken thesis” is usually marked by an obvious lack of intuition about what is programmable and what is not, and about what does and does not constitute a clear specification of an algorithm. See also AI-complete, DWIM.
geef: //, v.
[ostensibly from “gefingerpoken”] vt. Syn. mung. See also blinkenlights.
geek code: //, n.
(also “Code of the Geeks”). A set of codes commonly used in sig blocks to broadcast the interests, skills, and aspirations of the poster. Features a G at the left margin followed by numerous letter codes, often suffixed with plusses or minuses. Because many net users are involved in computer science, the most common prefix is “GCS”. To see a copy of the current code, browse http://www.geekcode.com/. Here is a sample geek code (that of Robert Hayden, the code’s inventor) from that page:
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GED/J d-- s:++>: a- C++(++++)$ ULUO++ P+>+++ L++ !E---- W+(---) N+++
o+ K+++ w+(---) O- M+$>++ V-- PS++(+++)>$ PE++(+)>$ Y++ PGP++ t- 5+++
X++ R+++>$ tv+ b+ DI+++ D+++ G+++++>$ e++$>++++ h r-- y+**
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
The geek code originated in 1993; it was inspired (according to the inventor) by previous “bear”, “smurf” and “twink” style-and-sexual-preference codes from lesbian and gay newsgroups. It has in turn spawned imitators; there is now even a “Saturn geek code” for owners of the Saturn car. See also geek.
geek out: //, vi.
To temporarily enter techno-nerd mode while in a non-hackish context, for example at parties held near computer equipment. Especially used when you need to do or say something highly technical and don’t have time to explain: “Pardon me while I geek out for a moment.” See geek; see also propeller head.
geek: //, n.
A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance. Geeks usually have a strong case of neophilia. Most geeks are adept with computers and treat hacker as a term of respect, but not all are hackers themselves – and some who are in fact hackers normally call themselves geeks anyway, because they (quite properly) regard “hacker” as a label that should be bestowed by others rather than self-assumed.
One description accurately if a little breathlessly enumerates “gamers, ravers, science fiction fans, punks, perverts, programmers, nerds, subgenii, and trekkies. These are people who did not go to their high school proms, and many would be offended by the suggestion that they should have even wanted to.”
Originally, a “geek” was a carnival performer who bit the heads off chickens. (In early 20th-century Scotland a “geek” was an immature coley, a type of fish.) Before about 1990 usage of this term was rather negative. Earlier versions of this lexicon defined a “computer geek” as one who eats (computer) bugs for a living – an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater. This is often still the way geeks are regarded by non-geeks, but as the mainstream culture becomes more dependent on technology and technical skill mainstream attitudes have tended to shift towards grudging respect. Correspondingly, there are now “geek pride” festivals (the implied reference to “gay pride” is not accidental).
See also propeller head, geek out, terminal junkie, weenie, geek code, alpha geek.
geekasm: //, n.
Originally from a quote on the PBS show Scientific American Frontiers (week of May 21st 2002) by MIT professor Alex Slocum: “When they build a machine, if they do the calculations right, the machine works and you get this intense – uhh – just like a geekasm, from knowing that what you created in your mind and on the computer is actually doing what you told it to do”. Unsurprisingly, this usage went live on the Web almost instantly. Every hacker knows this feeling. Compare earlier progasm.
gen: /jen/, n., v.
Short for generate, used frequently in both spoken and written contexts.
gender mender: //, n.
[common] A cable connector shell with either two male or two female connectors on it, used to correct the mismatches that result when some loser didn’t understand the RS232C specification and the distinction between DTE and DCE. Used esp. for RS-232C parts in either the original D-25 or the IBM PC’s bogus D-9 format. Also called “gender bender”, “gender blender”, “sex changer”, and even “homosexual adapter”; however, there appears to be some confusion as to whether a “male homosexual adapter” has pins on both sides (is doubly male) or sockets on both sides (connects two males).
General Public Virus: //, n.
Pejorative name for some versions of the GNU project copyleft or General Public License (GPL), which requires that any tools or apps incorporating copylefted code must be source-distributed on the same anti-proprietary terms as GNU stuff. Thus it is alleged that the copyleft “infects” software generated with GNU tools, which may in turn infect other software that reuses any of its code. The Free Software Foundation’s official position is that copyright law limits the scope of the GPL to “programs textually incorporating significant amounts of GNU code”, and that the “infection” is not passed on to third parties unless actual GNU source is transmitted. Nevertheless, widespread suspicion that the copyleft language is “boobytrapped” has caused many developers to avoid using GNU tools and the GPL. Changes in the language of the version 2.0 GPL did not eliminate this problem.
The GPL is not the source of the problem, the paranoia and rent-seeking of the developers in question are, though of course it is to be expected that it will be revised to better reflect the principles Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation are advocating. See Appendix D to see the 29 June 2007 GPL version 3.0 and the GNU Manifesto.
generate: //, vt.
To produce something according to an algorithm or program or set of rules, or as a (possibly unintended) side effect of the execution of an algorithm or program. The opposite of parse. This term retains its mechanistic connotations (though often humorously) when used of human behavior. “The guy is rational most of the time, but mention nuclear energy around him and he’ll generate infinite flamage.”
Genius From Mars Technique: //, n.
[TMRC] A visionary quality which enables one to ignore the standard approach and come up with a totally unexpected new algorithm. An attack on a problem from an offbeat angle that no one has ever thought of before, but that in retrospect makes total sense. Compare grok, zen.
gensym: /jen´sim/
[from MacLISP for “generated symbol”]
1. v. To invent a new name for something temporary, in such a way that the name is almost certainly not in conflict with one already in use.
2. n. The resulting name. The canonical form of a gensym is “Gnnnn” where nnnn represents a number; any LISP hacker would recognize G0093 (for example) as a gensym.
3. A freshly generated data structure with a gensymmed name. Gensymmed names are useful for storing or uniquely identifying crufties (see cruft).
Get a life!: //, imp.
Hacker-standard way of suggesting that the person to whom it is directed has succumbed to terminal geekdom (see geek). Often heard on Usenet, esp. as a way of suggesting that the target is taking some obscure issue of theology too seriously. This exhortation was popularized by William Shatner on a 1987 Saturday Night Live episode in a speech that ended “Get a life!”, but it can be traced back at least to “Valley Girl” slang in 1983. It was certainly in wide use among hackers for years before achieving mainstream currency via the sitcom Get A Life in 1990.
Get a real computer!: //, imp.
In 1996 when this entry first entered the File, it was the typical hacker response to news that somebody is having trouble getting work done on a system that (a) was single-tasking, (b) had no hard disk, or (c) had an address space smaller than 16 megabytes. (That is, it was coined when what a typically male elitist hacker of the period new good and damned well that whatever he called a “real computer” was completely unavailable outside restricted research laboratories in universities, larger companies, and a few government departments.) In 2003 anything less powerful than a 500MHz Pentium with a multi-gigabyte hard disk would probably be similarly written off. The threshold for “real computer” rises with time. See bitty box and toy.
gib: /jib/
1. vi. To destroy utterly. Like frag, but much more violent and final. “There’s no trace left. You definitely gibbed that bug”.
2. n. Remnants after total obliteration.
Originated first by id software in the game Quake. It’s short for giblets (thus pronounced “jib”), and referred to the bloody remains of slain opponents. Eventually the word was verbed, and leaked into general usage afterward.
GIFs at 11: //, n.
[Fidonet] Fidonet alternative to film at 11, especially in echoes (Fidonet topic areas) where uuencoded GIFs are permitted. Other formats, especially JPEG and MPEG, may be referenced instead.
gig: /jig/, /gig/, n.
[SI] See quantifiers.
giga-: /ji´ga/, /gi´ga/, pref.
[SI] See quantifiers.
GIGO: /gi:´goh/, expr.
1. “Garbage In, Garbage Out” – usually said in response to lusers who complain that a program didn’t “do the right thing” when given imperfect input or otherwise mistreated in some way. Also commonly used to describe failures in human decision making due to faulty, incomplete, or imprecise data.
2. “Garbage In, Gospel Out”: this more recent expansion is a sardonic comment on the tendency human beings have to put excessive trust in “computerized” data.
gilley: //, n.
[Usenet] The unit of analogical bogosity. According to its originator, the standard for one gilley was “the act of bogotoficiously comparing the shutting down of 1000 machines for a day with the killing of one person”. The milligilley has been found to suffice for most normal conversational exchanges.
gillion: /gil´y@n/, /jil´y@n/, n.
[formed from giga- by analogy with mega/million and tera/trillion] 10^9. Same as an American billion or a British “milliard”. How one pronounces this depends on whether one speaks giga- with a hard or soft “g”.
ginger: //, n.
See saga.
GIPS: /gips/, /jips/, n.
[analogy with MIPS] Giga-Instructions per Second (also possibly “Gillions of Instructions per Second”; see gillion). Compare KIPS.
GIYF: //, n.
Abbrev: Google Is Your Friend. Used to suggest, gently and politely, that you have just asked a question of human beings that would have been better directed to a search engine. See also STFW.
glark: /glark/, vt.
To figure something out from context. “The System III manuals are pretty poor, but you can generally glark the meaning from context.” Interestingly, the word was originally “glork”; the context was “This gubblick contains many nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp can be glorked [sic] from context” (David Moser, quoted by Douglas Hofstadter in his Metamagical Themas column in the January 1981 Scientific American). It is conjectured that hacker usage mutated the verb to “glark” because glork was already an established jargon term (some hackers do report using the original term). Compare grok, zen.
glass tty: /glas T·T·Y/, /glas ti´tee/, n.
[obs.] A terminal that has a display screen but which, because of hardware or software limitations, behaves like a teletype or some other printing terminal, thereby combining the disadvantages of both: like a printing terminal, it can’t do fancy display hacks, and like a display terminal, it doesn’t produce hard copy. An example is the early “dumb” version of Lear-Siegler ADM 3 (without cursor control). See tty; compare dumb terminal. See TV Typewriters (Appendix A) for an interesting true story about a glass tty.
glass: //, n.
[IBM] Synonym for silicon.
glassfet: /glas´fet/, n.
[by analogy with MOSFET, the acronym for “Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor”] Syn. firebottle, a humorous way to refer to a vacuum tube.
glitch: /glich/, n.
[very common; from German “glitschig” slippery, via Yiddish “glitshen”, to slide or skid]
1. n. A sudden interruption in electric service, sanity, continuity, or program function. Sometimes recoverable. An interruption in electric service is specifically called a “power glitch” (also power hit), of grave concern because it usually crashes all the computers. In jargon, though, a hacker who got to the middle of a sentence and then forgot how he or she intended to complete it might say, “Sorry, I just glitched”.
2. vi. To commit a glitch. See gritch.
3. vt. [Stanford] To scroll a display screen, esp. several lines at a time. WAITS terminals used to do this in order to avoid continuous scrolling, which is distracting to the eye.
4. obs. Same as magic cookie, sense 2.
All these uses of “glitch” derive from the specific technical meaning the term has in the electronic hardware world, where it is now techspeak. A glitch can occur when the inputs of a circuit change, and the outputs change to some random value for some very brief time before they settle down to the correct value. If another circuit inspects the output at just the wrong time, reading the random value, the results can be very wrong and very hard to debug (a glitch is one of many causes of electronic glitch.
Coping with a hydraulic glitch.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-07-24. The previous one is 73-05-28.)
glob: /glob/, not, /glohb/, v., n.
[Unix; common] To expand special characters in a wildcarded name, or the act of so doing (the action is also called "globbing"). The Unix conventions for filename wildcarding have become sufficiently pervasive that many hackers use some of them in written English, especially in email or news on technical topics. Those commonly encountered include the following:
| * | wildcard for any string (see also UN*X) |
| ? | wildcard for any single character (generally read this way only at the beginning or in the middle of a word) |
| [] | delimits a wildcard matching any of the enclosed characters |
| {} | alternation of comma-separated alternatives; thus, "foo{baz,qux}" would be read as "foobaz" or "fooqux" |
Some examples: “He said his name was [KC]arl” (expresses ambiguity). “I don’t read talk.politics.*” (any of the talk.politics subgroups on Usenet). Other examples are given under the entry for X. Note that glob patterns are similar, but not identical, to those used in regexps.
Historical note: The jargon usage derives from glob, the name of a subprogram that expanded wildcards in archaic pre-Bourne versions of the Unix shell.
glork: /glork/, v.
1. interj. Term of mild surprise, usually tinged with outrage, as when one attempts to save the results of two hours of editing and finds that the system has just crashed.
2. Used as a name for just about anything. See foo.
3. vt. Similar to glitch, but usually used reflexively. “My program just glorked itself.”
4. Syn. for glark, which see.
glue: //, n.
Generic term for any interface logic or protocol that connects two component blocks. For example, Blue Glue is IBM’s SNA protocol, and hardware designers call anything used to connect large VLSI’s or circuit blocks “glue logic”.
gnarly: /nar´lee/, adj.
Both hairy (sense 1). “Yow! – the tuned assembler implementation of BitBlt is really gnarly!” From a similar but less specific usage in surfer slang.
GNU: /gnoo/, not, /noo/, n.
1. [acronym: “GNU’s Not Unix!”, see recursive acronym] A Unix-workalike development effort of the Free Software Foundation headed by Richard Stallman. GNU EMACS and the GNU C compiler, two tools designed for this project, have become very popular in hackerdom and elsewhere. The GNU project was designed partly to proselytize for RMS’s position that information is community property and all software source should be shared. One of its slogans is “Help stamp out software hoarding!” Though this remains controversial (because it implicitly denies any right of designers to own, assign, and sell the results of their labors), many hackers who disagree with RMS have nevertheless cooperated to produce large amounts of high-quality software for free redistribution under the Free Software Foundation’s imprimatur. The GNU project has a web page at http://www.gnu.org/. See copyleft, General Public Virus, Linux. If you'd like to see how Richard Stallman originally described the Free Software initiative and the GNU suite of tools that the majority of software development and operating systems depend on, it is possible to read his original call out message sent 27 September 1983.
2. Noted Unix hacker John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>}, founder of Usenet’s anarchic alt.* hierarchy.
gnubie: /noo´bee/, n.
Written-only variant of newbie in common use on IRC channels, which implies specifically someone who is new to the Linux/open-source/free-software world.
GNUMACS: /gnoo´maks/, n.
[contraction of “GNU EMACS”] Often-heard abbreviated name for the GNU project’s flagship tool, EMACS. “StallMACS”, referring to Richard Stallman, is less common but also heard. Used esp. in contrast with GOSMACS and X Emacs.
go-faster stripes://, n.
[UK] Syn. chrome. Mainstream in some parts of UK.
go flatline: //, v.
[from cyberpunk SF, refers to flattening of EEG traces upon brain-death] (also adjectival “flatlined”).
1. To die, terminate, or fail, esp. irreversibly. In hacker parlance, this is used of machines only, human death being considered somewhat too serious a matter to employ jargon-jokes about.
2. To go completely quiescent; said of machines undergoing controlled shutdown. “You can suffer file damage if you shut down Unix but power off before the system has gone flatline.”
3. Of a video tube, to fail by losing vertical scan, so all one sees is a bright horizontal line bisecting the screen.
go gold: //, v.
[common] See golden.
go root: //, vi.
[Unix; common] To temporarily enter root mode in order to perform a privileged operation. This use is deprecated in Australia, where v. “root” is a synonym for “fuck”.
goat file: //, n.
A sacrificial file used to test a computer virus, i.e. a dummy executable that carries a sample of the virus, isolated so it can be studied. Not common among hackers, since the Unix systems most use basically don’t get viruses.
GoAT: //, refr.
[Usenet] Abbreviation: “Go Away, Troll”. See troll.
gobble: //, vt.
1. To consume, usu.: used with “up”. “The output spy gobbles characters out of a tty output buffer.”
2. To obtain, usu.: used with “down”. “I guess I’ll gobble down a copy of the documentation tomorrow.” See also snarf.
Godwin’s Law: //, prov.
[Usenet] “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin’s Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin’s Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful. Godwin himself has discussed the subject. See also Formosa’s Law.
Godzillagram: /god·zil'@·gram/, n.
[from Japan’s national hero]
1. A network packet that in theory is a broadcast to every machine in the universe. The typical case is an IP datagram whose destination IP address is [255.255.255.255]. Fortunately, few gateways are foolish enough to attempt to implement this case!
2. A network packet of maximum size. An IP Godzillagram has 65,535 octets. Compare super source quench, Christmas tree packet, martian.
golden: //, adj.
[prob.: from folklore’s “golden egg”] When used to describe a magnetic medium (e.g., “golden disk”, “golden tape”), describes one containing a tested, up-to-spec, ready-to-ship software version. Compare platinum-iridium. One may also “go gold”, which is the act of releasing a golden version. The gold color of many CDROMs is a coincidence; this term was well established a decade before CDROM distribution become common in the mid-1990s.
golf-ball printer: //, n. obs.
The IBM 2741, a slow but letter-quality printing device and terminal based on the IBM Selectric typewriter. The “golf ball” was a little spherical frob bearing reversed embossed images of 88 different characters arranged on four parallels of latitude; one could change the font by swapping in a different golf ball. The print element spun and jerked alarmingly in action and when in motion was sometimes described as an “infuriated golf ball”. This was the technology that enabled APL to use a non-EBCDIC, non-ASCII, and in fact completely non-standard character set. This put it 10 years ahead of its time – where it stayed, firmly rooted, for the next 20, until character displays gave way to programmable bit-mapped devices with the flexibility to support other character sets.
gonk: /gonk/, vi., n.
1. [prob. back-formed from gonkulator.] To prevaricate or to embellish the truth beyond any reasonable recognition. In German the term is (mythically) “gonken”; in Spanish the verb becomes “gonkar”. “You’re gonking me. That story you just told me is a bunch of gonk.” In German, for example, “Du gonkst mich” (You’re pulling my leg). See also gonkulator.
2. [British] To grab some sleep at an odd time; compare gronk out.
gonkulator: /gon´kyoo·lay·tr/, n.
[common; from the 1960s Hogan’s Heroes TV series] A pretentious piece of equipment that actually serves no useful purpose. Usually used to describe one’s least favorite piece of computer hardware. See gonk.
gonzo: /gon´zoh/, adj.
[from Hunter S. Thompson]
1. With total commitment, total concentration, and a mad sort of panache. (Thompson’s original sense.)
2. More loosely: Overwhelming; outrageous; over the top; very large, esp. used of collections of source code, source files, or individual functions. Has some of the connotations of moby and hairy, but without the implication of obscurity or complexity.
Good Thing: //, n., adj.
[very common; always pronounced as if capitalized. Orig. fr. the 1930 Sellar & Yeatman parody of British history 1066 And All That, but well-established among hackers in the U.S. as well.]
1. Self-evidently wonderful to anyone in a position to notice: “A language that manages dynamic memory automatically for you is a Good Thing.”
2. Something that can’t possibly have any ill side-effects and may save considerable grief later: “Removing the self-modifying code from that shared library would be a Good Thing.”
3. When said of software tools or libraries, as in “YACC is a Good Thing”, specifically connotes that the thing has drastically reduced a programmer’s work load. Oppose Bad Thing.
google juice: //, n.
Dated. A hypothetical substance which attracts the index bots of Google.com. In common usage, a web page or web site with high placement in the results of a particular search on Google or frequent placement in the results of a various searches is said to have “a lot of google juice” or “good google juice”. Also used to compare web pages or web sites, for example “CrackMonkey has more google juice than KPMG”. See also juice, kilogoogle.
google: //, v.
[common] To search the Web using the Google search engine, http://www.google.com. Google was once unequivocally highly esteemed among hackers for its significance ranking system, which in earlier versions was so uncannily effective that many hackers considered it to have rendered other search engines effectively irrelevant. The name “google” has additional flavor for hackers because most know that it was copied from a mathematical term for ten to the 100th power, famously first uttered as “googol” by a mathematician’s nine-year-old nephew.
Since roughly 2005, as google revealed that it was after all, an advertising and surveillance company, not primarily a search engine, its algorithm is now quite different. It now features such biases as ranking websites higher based on connection to legacy mainstream media, and downranking sites providing information or services that compete with similar google offerings. In addition, like facebook google engages in heavy duty user profiling and datamining, using the results to further shape the results of a given query. Not everyone considers this a bad thing, especially if they wish to find more of the same or at least very similar search results.
gopher hole: //, n.
1. Any access to a gopher.
2. [Amateur Packet Radio] The terrestrial analog of a wormhole (sense 2), from which this term was coined. A gopher hole links two amateur packet relays through some non-ham radio medium.
gopher: //, n.
[obs.] A type of Internet service first floated around 1991 and obsolesced around 1995 by the World Wide Web. Gopher presents a menuing interface to a tree or graph of links; the links can be to documents, runnable programs, or other gopher menus arbitrarily far across the net.
Some claim that the gopher software, which was originally developed at the University of Minnesota, was named after the Minnesota Gophers (a sports team). Others claim the word derives from American slang “gofer” (from “go for”, dialectal “go fer”), one whose job is to run and fetch things. Finally, observe that gophers dig long tunnels, and the idea of tunneling through the net to find information was a defining metaphor for the developers. Probably all three things were true, but with the first two coming first and the gopher-tunnel metaphor serendipitously adding flavor and impetus to the project as it developed out of its concept stage.
gorets: /gor´ets/, n.
The unknown ur-noun, fill in your own meaning. Found esp. on the Usenet newsgroup alt.gorets, which seems to be a running contest to redefine the word by implication in the funniest and most peculiar way, with the understanding that no definition is ever final. [A correspondent from the former Soviet Union informs me that gorets is Russian for “mountain dweller”. Another from France informs me that goret is archaic French for a young pig – ESR] Compare frink.
gorilla arm: //, n.
The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren’t designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized – the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; “Remember the gorilla arm!” is shorthand for “How is this going to fly in real use?”.
gorp: /gorp/, n.
[CMU: perhaps from the canonical hiker’s food, Good Old Raisins and Peanuts] Another metasyntactic variable, like bar.
GOSMACS: /goz´maks/, n.
[contraction of “Gosling EMACS”] The first EMACS-in-C implementation, predating but now largely eclipsed by GNUMACS. Originally freeware; a commercial version was modestly popular as “UniPress EMACS” during the 1980s. The author, James Gosling, went on to invent NeWS and the programming language Java; the latter earned him demigod status.
gotcha: //, n.
A misfeature of a system, especially a programming language or environment, that tends to breed bugs or mistakes because it is both enticingly easy to invoke and completely unexpected and/or unreasonable in its outcome. For example, a classic gotcha in C is the fact that if (a=b) {code;} is syntactically valid and sometimes even correct. It puts the value of b into a and then executes code if a is non-zero. What the programmer probably meant was if (a==b) {code;}, which executes code if a and b are equal.
GPL: /G·P·L/, n.
Abbreviation for “General Public License” in widespread use; see General Public Virus. Often mis-expanded as “GNU Public License”.
GPV: /G·P·V/, n.
Abbrev. for General Public Virus in widespread use.
gray goo: //, n.
A hypothetical substance composed of sagans of sub-micron-sized self-replicating robots programmed to make copies of themselves out of whatever is available. The image that goes with the term is one of the entire biosphere of Earth being eventually converted to robot goo. This is the simplest of the nanotechnology disaster scenarios, easily refuted by arguments from energy requirements and elemental abundances. Compare blue goo.
gray hat: //, n.
See black hat.
Great Internet Explosion: //, n.
The mainstreaming of the Internet in 1993-1994. Used normally in time comparatives; before the Great Internet Explosion and after it were very different worlds from a hacker’s point of view. Before it, Internet access was expensive and available only to an elite few through universities, research laboratories, and well-heeled corporations; after it, everybody’s mother had access.
Great Renaming: //, n.
The flag day in 1987 on which all of the non-local groups on the Usenet had their names changed from the net.- format to the current multiple-hierarchies scheme. Used esp. in discussing the history of newsgroup names. “The oldest sources group is comp.sources.misc; before the Great Renaming, it was net.sources.” There is a Great Renaming FAQ on the Web.
Great Runes: //, n.
Uppercase-only text or display messages. Some archaic operating systems still emit these. See also runes, fold case.
There is a widespread legend (repeated by earlier versions of this entry, though tagged as folklore) that the uppercase-only support of various old character codes and I/O equipment was chosen by a religious person in a position of power at the Teletype Company because supporting both upper and lower cases was too expensive and supporting lower case only would have made it impossible to spell “God” correctly. Not true; the upper-case interpretation of teleprinter codes was well established by 1870, long before Teletype was even founded.
great-wall: //, vi., n.
[from SF fandom] A mass expedition to an oriental restaurant, esp. one where food is served family-style and shared. There is a common heuristic about the amount of food to order, expressed as “Get N - 1 entrees”; the value of N, which is the number of people in the group, can be inferred from context (see N). See ravs, stir-fried random.
Great Worm: //, n.
The 1988 Internet worm perpetrated by RTM. This is a play on Tolkien (compare elder days). In the fantasy history of his Middle Earth books, there were dragons powerful enough to lay waste to entire regions; two of these (Scatha and Glaurung) were known as “the Great Worms”. This usage expresses the connotation that the RTM crack was a sort of devastating watershed event in hacker history; certainly it did more to make non-hackers nervous about the Internet than anything before or since.
green bytes: //, n.
(also “green words”)
1. Meta-information embedded in a file, such as the length of the file or its name; as opposed to keeping such information in a separate description file or record. The term comes from an IBM user’s group meeting (ca. 1962) at which these two approaches were being debated and the diagram of the file on the blackboard had the “green bytes” drawn in green.
2. By extension, the non-data bits in any self-describing format. “A GIF file contains, among other things, green bytes describing the packing method for the image.” Compare zigamorph, fence (sense 1).
green card: //, n.
[after the IBM System/360 Reference Data card] A summary of an assembly language, even if the color is not green and not a card. Less frequently used now because of the decrease in the use of assembly language. “I’ll go get my green card so I can check the addressing mode for that instruction.”
The original green card became a yellow card when the System/370 was introduced, and later a yellow booklet. An anecdote from IBM refers to a scene that took place in a programmers’ terminal room at Yorktown in 1978. A luser overheard one of the programmers ask another “Do you have a green card?” The other grunted and passed the first a thick yellow booklet. At this point the luser turned a delicate shade of olive and rapidly left the room, never to return.
In fall 2000 it was reported from Electronic Data Systems that the green card for 370 machines has been a blue-green booklet since 1989.
green lightning: //, n.
[IBM]
1. Apparently random flashing streaks on the face of 3278-9 terminals while a new symbol set is being downloaded. This hardware bug was left deliberately unfixed, as some genius within IBM suggested it would let the user know that “something is happening”. That, it certainly does. Later microprocessor-driven IBM color graphics displays were actually programmed to produce green lightning!
2. [proposed] Any bug perverted into an alleged feature by adroit rationalization or marketing. “Motorola calls the CISC cruft in the 88000 architecture ‘compatibility logic’, but I call it green lightning”. See also feature (sense 6).
green machine: //, n.
A computer or peripheral device that has been designed and built to military specifications for field equipment (that is, to withstand mechanical shock, extremes of temperature and humidity, and so forth). Comes from the olive-drab “uniform” paint used for military equipment.
greenbar: //, n.
A style of fanfolded continuous-feed paper with alternating green and white bars on it, especially used in old-style line printers. This slang almost certainly dates way back to mainframe days.
Green’s Theorem: //, prov.
[TMRC] For any story, in any group of people there will be at least one person who has not heard the story. A refinement of the theorem states that there will be exactly one person (if there were more than one, it wouldn’t be as bad to re-tell the story). [The name of this theorem is a play on a fundamental theorem in calculus. - ESR]
grep: /grep/, vi.
[from the qed/ed editor idiom g/re/p, where re stands for a regular expression, to Globally search for the Regular Expression and Print the lines containing matches to it, via Unix grep(1)] To rapidly scan a file or set of files looking for a particular string or pattern (when browsing through a large set of files, one may speak of “grepping around”). By extension, to look for something by pattern. “Grep the bulletin board for the system backup schedule, would you?” See also vgrep.
[It has been alleged that the source is from the title of a paper “A General Regular Expression Parser”, but dmr confirms the g/re/p etymology – ESR]
gribble: //, n.
Random binary data rendered as unreadable text. Noise characters in a data stream are displayed as gribble. Dumping a binary file to the screen is an excellent source of gribble, and (if the bell/speaker is active) headaches.
grilf: //, n.
Girlfriend. Like newsfroup and filk, a typo reincarnated as a new word. Seems to have originated sometime in 1990 on Usenet. [A friend tells me there was a Lloyd Biggle SF novel Watchers Of The Dark, in which alien species after species goes insane and begins to chant “Grilf! Grilf!”. A human detective eventually determines that the word means “Liar!” I hope this has nothing to do with the popularity of the Usenet term. – ESR]
grind crank: //, n.
A mythical accessory to a terminal. A crank on the side of a monitor, which when operated makes a zizzing noise and causes the computer to run faster. Usually one does not refer to a grind crank out loud, but merely makes the appropriate gesture and noise. See grind.
Historical note: At least one real machine actually had a grind crank - the R1, a research machine built toward the end of the days of the great vacuum tube computers, in 1959. R1 (also known as “The Rice Institute Computer” (TRIC) and later as “The Rice University Computer” (TRUC)) had a single-step/free-run switch for use when debugging programs. Since single-stepping through a large program was rather tedious, there was also a crank with a cam and gear arrangement that repeatedly pushed the single-step button. This allowed one to “crank” through a lot of code, then slow down to single-step for a bit when you got near the code of interest, poke at some registers using the console typewriter, and then keep on cranking. See http://www.cs.rice.edu/History/R1/.
grind: //, vt.
1. [MIT and Berkeley; now rare] To prettify hardcopy of code, especially LISP code, by reindenting lines, printing keywords and comments in distinct fonts (if available), etc. This usage was associated with the MacLISP community and is now rare; prettyprint was and is the generic term for such operations.
2. [Unix] To generate the formatted version of a document from the TeX, or Scribe source.
3. [common] To run seemingly interminably, esp. (but not necessarily) if performing some tedious and inherently useless task. Similar to grovel. Grinding has a connotation of using a lot of CPU time, but it is possible to grind a disk, network, etc. See also hog.
4. To make the whole system slow. “Troff really grinds a PDP-11.”
5. “grind grind” excl. Roughly, “Isn’t the machine slow today!”
gritch: /grich/
[MIT]
1. n. A complaint (often caused by a glitch).
2. vi. To complain. Often verb-doubled: “Gritch gritch”.
3. A synonym for glitch (as verb or noun).
Interestingly, this word seems to have a separate history from glitch, with which it is often confused. Back in the early 1960s, when “glitch” was strictly a hardware-tech’s term of art, the Burton House dorm at M.I.T. maintained a “Gritch Book”, a blank volume, into which the residents hand-wrote complaints, suggestions, and witticisms. Previous years’ volumes of this tradition were maintained, dating back to antiquity. The word “gritch” was described as a portmanteau of “gripe” and “bitch”. Thus, sense 3 above is at least historically incorrect.
grok: /grok/, /grohk/, vt.
[common; from the novel Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein, where it is a Martian word meaning literally “to drink” and metaphorically “to be one with”] The emphatic form is “grok in fullness”.
1. To understand. Connotes intimate and exhaustive knowledge. When you claim to “grok” some knowledge or technique, you are asserting that you have not merely learned it in a detached instrumental way but that it has become part of you, part of your identity. For example, to say that you “know” LISP is simply to assert that you can code in it if necessary – but to say you “grok” LISP is to claim that you have deeply entered the world-view and spirit of the language, with the implication that it has transformed your view of programming. Contrast zen, which is similar supernal understanding experienced as a single brief flash. See also glark.
2. Used of programs, may connote merely sufficient understanding. “Almost all C compilers grok the void type these days.”
gronk out: //, vi.
To cease functioning. Of people, to go home and go to sleep. “I guess I’ll gronk out now; see you all tomorrow.”
gronk: /gronk/, vt.
[popularized by Johnny Hart’s comic strip B.C.: but the word apparently predates that]
1. To clear the state of a wedged device and restart it. More severe than “to frob” (sense 2).
2. [TMRC] To cut, sever, smash, or similarly disable.
3. The sound made by many 3.5-inch diskette drives. In particular, the microfloppies on a Commodore Amiga go “grink, gronk”.
gronked: //, adj.
1. Broken. “The teletype scanner was gronked, so we took the system down.”
2. Of people, the condition of feeling very tired or (less commonly) sick. “I’ve been chasing that bug for 17 hours now and I am thoroughly gronked!” Compare broken, which means about the same as gronk used of hardware, but connotes depression or mental/emotional problems in people.
grovel: //, vi.
1. To work interminably and without apparent progress. Often used transitively with “over” or “through”. “The file scavenger has been groveling through the /usr directories for 10 minutes now.” Compare grind and crunch. Emphatic form: “grovel obscenely”.
2. To examine minutely or in complete detail. “The compiler grovels over the entire source program before beginning to translate it.” “I grovelled through all the documentation, but I still couldn’t find the command I wanted.”
grue: //, n.
[from archaic English verb for “shudder”, as with fear] The grue was originated in the game Zork (Dave Lebling took the name from Jack Vance’s Dying Earth fantasies) and used in several other Infocom games as a hint that you should perhaps look for a lamp, torch or some type of light source. Wandering into a dark area would cause the game to prompt you, “It is very dark. If you continue you are likely to be eaten by a grue.” If you failed to locate a light source within the next couple of moves this would indeed be the case.
The grue, according to scholars of the Great Underground Empire, is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is either adventurers or enchanters, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its extreme fear of light. No grues have ever been seen by the light of day, and only a few have been observed in their underground lairs. Of those who have seen grues, few have survived their fearsome jaws to tell the tale. Grues have sickly glowing fur, fish-mouthed faces, sharp claws and fangs, and an uncontrollable tendency to slaver and gurgle. They are certainly the most evil-tempered of all creatures; to say they are touchy is a dangerous understatement. “Sour as a grue” is a common expression, even among grues themselves.
All this folklore is widely known among hackers.
grunge: /gruhnj/, n.
1. That which is grungy, or that which makes it so.
2. [Cambridge] Code which is inaccessible due to changes in other parts of the program. The preferred term in North America is dead code.
gubbish: /guhb'@sh/, n.
[a portmanteau of “garbage” and “rubbish”; may have originated with SF author Philip K. Dick] Garbage; crap; nonsense. “What is all this gubbish?” The opposite portmanteau “rubbage” is also reported; in fact, it was British slang during the 19th century and appears in Dickens.
Guido: /gwee´do/, /khwee´do/, n.
Without qualification, Guido van Rossum (author of Python). Note that Guido answers to English /gwee´do/ but in Dutch it’s /khwee´do/. Mythically, Guido’s most important attribute besides Python itself is Guido’s time machine, a device he is reputed to possess because of the unnerving frequency with which user requests for new features have been met with the response “I just implemented that last night...”. See BDFL.
guiltware: /gilt´weir/, n.
1. A piece of freeware decorated with a message telling one how long and hard the author worked on it and intimating that one is a no-good freeloader if one does not immediately send the poor suffering martyr gobs of money.
2. A piece of shareware that works.
gumby: /guhm´bee/, n.
[from a class of Monty Python characters, poss. with some influence from the 1960s claymation character]
1. An act of minor but conspicuous stupidity, often in “gumby maneuver” or “pull a gumby”.
2. [NRL] n. A bureaucrat, or other technical incompetent who impedes the progress of real work.
3. adj. Relating to things typically associated with people in sense 2. (e.g. “Ran would be writing code, but Richard gave him gumby work that’s due on Friday”, or, “Dammit! Travel screwed up my plane tickets. I have to go out on gumby patrol.”)
gunch: /guhnch/, vt.
[TMRC] To push, prod, or poke at a device that has almost (but not quite) produced the desired result. Implies a threat to mung.
gunpowder chicken: //, n.
Same as laser chicken.
guru meditation: //, n.
Amiga equivalent of “panic” in Unix (sometimes just called a “guru” or “guru event”). When the system crashes, a cryptic message of the form “GURU MEDITATION #XXXXXXXX.YYYYYYYY” may appear, indicating what the problem was. An Amiga guru can figure things out from the numbers. Sometimes a guru event must be followed by a Vulcan nerve pinch.
This term is (no surprise) an in-joke from the earliest days of the Amiga. An earlier product of the Amiga corporation was a device called a “Joyboard” which was basically a plastic board built onto a joystick-like device; it was sold with a skiing game cartridge for the Atari game machine. It is said that whenever the prototype OS crashed, the system programmer responsible would calm down by concentrating on a solution while sitting cross-legged on a Joyboard trying to keep the board in balance. This position resembled that of a meditating guru. Sadly, the joke was removed fairly early on (but there’s a well-known patch to restore it in more recent versions).
guru: //, n.
[Unix] An expert. Implies not only wizard skill but also a history of being a knowledge resource for others. Less often, used (with a qualifier) for other experts on other systems, as in “VMS guru”. See source of all good bits.
gweep: /gweep/, v.
[WPI]
1. v. To hack, usually at night. At WPI, from 1975 onwards, one who gweeped could often be found at the College Computing Center punching cards or crashing the PDP-10 or, later, the DEC-20. A correspondent who was there at the time opines that the term was originally onomatopoetic, describing the keyclick sound of the Datapoint terminals long connected to the PDP-10; others allege that “gweep” was the sound of the Datapoint’s bell (compare feep). The term has survived the demise of those technologies, however, and was still alive in early 1999. “I’m going to go gweep for a while. See you in the morning.” “I gweep from 8 PM till 3 AM during the week.”
2. n. One who habitually gweeps in sense 1; a hacker. “He’s a hard-core gweep, mumbles code in his sleep.” Around 1979 this was considered derogatory and not used in self-reference; it has since been proudly claimed in much the same way as geek.
GWF: //, n.
“Common abbreviation for Goober with Firewall”. A luser who has equipped his desktop computer with a hypersensitive “software firewall” or host intrusion detection program, and who gives its alerts absolute credence. ISP tech support and abuse desks dread hearing from such persons, who insist that every packet of abnormal traffic the software detects is “a hacker” (sic) and, occasionally, threatening lawsuits or prosecution. GWFs have been known to assert that they are being attacked from 127.0.0.1, and that their ISP is criminally negligent for failing to block these attacks. “GWF” is used similarly to ID10T error and PEBKAC to flag trouble tickets opened by such users.