L
lag: //, n.
[MUD, IRC; very common] When used without qualification this is synonymous with netlag. Curiously, people will often complain “I’m really lagged” when in fact it is their server or network connection that is lagging.
lamer: //, n.
[originally among Amiga fans]
1. Synonym for luser, not used much by hackers but common among warez d00dz, crackers, and phreakers. A person who downloads much, but who never uploads. (Also known as “leecher”). Oppose elite. Has the same connotations of self-conscious elitism that use of luser does among hackers.
2. Someone who tries to crack a BBS.
3. Someone who annoys the sysop or other BBS users – for instance, by posting lots of silly messages, uploading virus-ridden software, frequently dropping carrier, etc.
Crackers also use it to refer to cracker wannabees. In phreak culture, a lamer is one who scams codes off others rather than doing cracks or really understanding the fundamental concepts. In warez d00dz culture, where the ability to wave around cracked commercial software within days of (or before) release to the commercial market is much esteemed, the lamer might try to upload garbage or shareware or something incredibly old (old in this context is read as a few years to anything older than 3 days). “Lamer” is also much used in the IRC world in a similar sense to the above.
This term seems to have originated in the Commodore-64 scene in the mid 1980s. It was popularized among Amiga crackers of the mid-1980s by “Lamer Exterminator”, the most famous and feared Amiga virus ever, which gradually corrupted non-write-protected floppy disks with bad sectors. The bad sectors, when looked at, were overwritten with repetitions of the string “LAMER!”.
LAN party: /lan par´tee/, n.
An event to which several users bring their boxes and hook them up to a common LAN (Local Area Network), often for the purpose of playing multiplayer computer games, especially action games such as Quake or Unreal Tournament. This is also a good venue for people to show-off their fancy new hardware. Such events can get pretty large, several hundred people attend the annual QuakeCon in Texas. The theoretical rationale behind LAN parties is that playing over the Internet often introduces too much lag in the playing experience - but just as important is the special quality of trash-talking each other across the room while playing, and the instinctive social ritual of consuming vast amounts of food and drink together.
language lawyer: //, n.
A person, usually an experienced or senior software engineer, who is intimately familiar with many or most of the numerous restrictions and features (both useful and esoteric) applicable to one or more computer programming languages. A language lawyer is distinguished by the ability to show you the five sentences scattered through a 200-plus-page manual that together imply the answer to your question “if only you had thought to look there”. Compare wizard, legal, legalese.
languages of choice: //, n.
Perl, Java and LISP – the dominant languages in open-source development. This list has changed over time, but slowly. Java bumped C++ off of it, and Python appears to be recruiting people who would otherwise gravitate to LISP (which used to be much more important than it is now). Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in small but influential communities.
The Real Programmers who loved FORTRAN and assembler have pretty much all retired or died since 1990. Assembler is generally no longer considered interesting or appropriate for anything but glue, and a few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systems programs. FORTRAN occupies a shrinking niche in scientific programming.
Most hackers tend to frown on languages like Pascal and Ada, which don’t give them the near-total freedom considered necessary for hacking (see bondage-and-discipline language), and to regard everything even remotely connected with COBOL or other traditional DP languages as a total and unmitigated loss.
LART: //, n.
Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool.
1. n. In the collective mythos of scary devil monastery, this is an essential item in the toolkit of every BOFH. The LART classic is a 2x4 or other large billet of wood usable as a club, to be applied upside the head of spammers and other people who cause sysadmins more grief than just naturally goes with the job. Perennial debates rage on alt.sysadmin.recovery over what constitutes the truly effective LART; knobkerries, automatic weapons, flamethrowers, and tactical nukes all have their partisans. Compare clue-by-four.
2. v. To use a LART. Some would add “in malice”, but some sysadmins do prefer to gently lart their users as a first (and sometimes final) warning.
3. interj. Calling for one’s LART, much as a surgeon might call “Scalpel!”.
4. interj. [rare] Used in flames as a rebuke. “LART! LART! LART!”
larval stage: //, n.
Describes a period of monomaniacal concentration on coding apparently passed through by all fledgling hackers. Common symptoms include the perpetration of more than one 36-hour hacking run in a given week; neglect of all other activities including usual basics like food, sleep, and personal hygiene; and a chronic case of advanced bleary-eye. Can last from 6 months to 2 years, the apparent median being around 18 months. A few so afflicted never resume a more “normal” life, but the ordeal seems to be necessary to produce really wizardly (as opposed to merely competent) programmers. See also wannabee. A less protracted and intense version of larval stage (typically lasting about a month) may recur when one is learning a new OS or programming language.
lase: /layz/, vt.
To print a given document via a laser printer. “OK, let’s lase that sucker and see if all those graphics-macro calls did the right things.”
laser chicken: //, n.
Kung Pao Chicken, a standard Chinese dish containing chicken, peanuts, and hot red peppers in a spicy pepper-oil sauce. Many hackers call it “laser chicken” for two reasons: It can zap you just like a laser, and the sauce has a red color reminiscent of some laser beams. The dish has also been called gunpowder chicken.
In a variation on this theme, it is reported that some Australian hackers have redesignated the common dish “lemon chicken” as Chernobyl Chicken. The name is derived from the color of the sauce, which is considered bright enough to glow in the dark (as, mythically, do some of the inhabitants of Chernobyl).
leaf site: //, n.
[obs.] Before pervasive TCP/IP, this term was used of a machine that merely originated and read Usenet news or mail, and did not relay any third-party traffic. It was often uttered in a critical tone; when the ratio of leaf sites to backbone, rib, and other relay sites got too high, the network tended to develop bottlenecks. Compare backbone site. Now that traffic patterns depend more on the distribution of routers than of host machines this term has largely fallen out of use.
leak: //, n.
With qualifier, one of a class of resource-management bugs that occur when resources are not freed properly after operations on them are finished, so they effectively disappear (leak out). This leads to eventual exhaustion as new allocation requests come in. memory leak has its own entry; one might also refer, to, say, a “window handle leak” in a window system.
leaky heap: //, n.
[Cambridge] An arena with a memory leak.
leapfrog attack: //, n.
Use of userid and password information obtained illicitly from one host (e.g., downloading a file of account IDs and passwords, tapping TELNET, etc.) to compromise another host. Also, the act of TELNETting through one or more hosts in order to confuse a trace (a standard cracker procedure).
leech mode: //, n.
[warez d00dz] “Leech mode” or “leech access” or (simply “leech” as in “You get leech”) is the access mode on a FTP site where one can download as many files as one wants, without having to upload. Leech mode is often promised on banner sites, but rarely obtained. See banner site.
leech: //, n.
1. n. (Also “leecher”.) Among BBS types, crackers and warez d00dz, one who consumes knowledge without generating new software, cracks, or techniques. BBS culture specifically defines a leech as someone who downloads files with few or no uploads in return, and who does not contribute to the message section. Cracker culture extends this definition to someone (a lamer, usually) who constantly presses informed sources for information and/or assistance, but has nothing to contribute. See troughie.
2. v. [common, Toronto area] v. To download a file across any kind of internet link. “Hop on IRC later so I can leech some MP3s from you.” Used to describe activities ranging from FTP, to IRC DCC-send, to ICQ file requests, to Napster searches (but never to downloading email with file attachments; the implication is that the download is the result of a browse or search of some sort of file server). Seems to be a holdover from the early 1990s when Toronto had a very active BBS and warez scene. Synonymous with snarf (sense 2), and contrast snarf (sense 4).
legal: //, adj.
Loosely used to mean “in accordance with all the relevant rules”, esp. in connection with some set of constraints defined by software. “The older =+ alternate for += is no longer legal syntax in ANSI C.” “This parser processes each line of legal input the moment it sees the trailing linefeed.” Hackers often model their work as a sort of game played with the environment in which the objective is to maneuver through the thicket of “natural laws” to achieve a desired objective. Their use of “legal” is flavored as much by this game-playing sense as by the more conventional one having to do with courts and lawyers. Compare language lawyer, legalese.
legalese: //, n.
Dense, pedantic verbiage in a language description, product specification, or interface standard; text that seems designed to obfuscate and requires a language lawyer to parse it. Though hackers are not afraid of high information density and complexity in language (indeed, they rather enjoy both), they share a deep and abiding loathing for legalese; they associate it with deception, suits, and situations in which hackers generally get the short end of the stick.
lenna: //, n.
The Internet’s first poster girl, a standard test load used in the image processing community. The image was originally cropped from the November 1972 issue of Playboy Magazine, which anglicized the model’s name with a double n. It has interesting properties – complex feathers, shadows, smooth (but not flat) surfaces – that are pertinent in demonstrating various processing algorithms for image compression, filtering, dithering, texture mapping, image recognition, and so on. After a quarter century of remaining completely unaware that she had become an icon, a gray-haired but still winsome Lenna finally met her fans at a computer graphics conference in 1997. There is a fan page at www.lenna.org, with more details. Compare Utah teapot and Stanford Bunny.
Miss Lena Sjööblom
LER: /L·E·R/, n.
1. [TMRC, from "Light-Emitting Diode"] A light-emitting resistor (that is, one in the process of burning up). Ohm’s law was broken. See also SED.
2. An incandescent light bulb (the filament emits light because it’s resistively heated).
LERP: /lerp/, vi., n.
Quasi-acronym for Linear Interpolation, used as a verb or noun for the operation. “Bresenham’s algorithm lerps incrementally between the two endpoints of the line.”
let the smoke out: //, v.
To fry hardware (see fried). See magic smoke for a discussion of the underlying mythology.
letterbomb: //, n.
1. n. A piece of live data intended to do nefarious things to the recipient’s machine or terminal. It used to be possible, for example, to send letterbombs that would lock up some specific kinds of terminals when they are viewed, so thoroughly that the user must cycle power (see cycle, sense 3) to unwedge them. Under Unix, a letterbomb can also try to get part of its contents interpreted as a shell command to the mailer. The results of this could range from silly to tragic; fortunately it has been some years since any of the standard Unix/Internet mail software was vulnerable to such an attack (though, as the Melissa virus attack demonstrated in early 1999, Microsoft systems can have serious problems). See also Trojan horse; compare nastygram.
2. Loosely, a mailbomb.
lexer: /lek´sr/, n.
Common hacker shorthand for “lexical analyzer”, the input-tokenizing stage in the parser for a language (the part that breaks it into word-like pieces). “Some C lexers get confused by the old-style compound ops like =-.”
Life is hard: //, prov.
[XEROX PARC] This phrase has two possible interpretations: (1) “While your suggestion may have some merit, I will behave as though I hadn’t heard it.” (2) “While your suggestion has obvious merit, equally obvious circumstances prevent it from being seriously considered.” The charm of the phrase lies precisely in this subtle but important ambiguity.
life: //, n.
1. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton Conway and first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner (Scientific American, October 1970); the game’s popularity had to wait a few years for computers on which it could reasonably be played, as it’s no fun to simulate the cells by hand. Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with it, and hackers at various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented life in TECO!). When a hacker mentions “life”, he is much more likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal, or the human state of existence. Many web resources are available starting from the Open Directory page of Life. The Life Lexicon is a good indicator of what makes the game so fascinating.
A glider, possibly the best known of the quasi-organic phenomena in the Game of Life.
2. The opposite of Usenet. As in "Get a life!"
light pipe: //, n.
Fiber optic cable. Oppose copper.
lightweight: //, adj.
Opposite of heavyweight; usually found in combining forms such as “lightweight process”.
like kicking dead whales down the beach: //, adj.
Describes a slow, difficult, and disgusting process. First popularized by a famous quote about the difficulty of getting work done under one of IBM’s mainframe OSes. “Well, you could write a C compiler in COBOL, but it would be like kicking dead whales down the beach.” See also fear and loathing.
like nailing jelly to a tree: //, adj.
Used to describe a task thought to be impossible, esp. one in which the difficulty arises from poor specification or inherent slipperiness in the problem domain. “Trying to display the ‘prettiest’ arrangement of nodes and arcs that diagrams a given graph is like nailing jelly to a tree, because nobody’s sure what ‘prettiest’ means algorithmically.”
Hacker use of this term may recall mainstream slang originated early in the 20th century by President Theodore Roosevelt. There is a legend that, weary of inconclusive talks with Colombia over the right to dig a canal through its then-province Panama, he remarked, “Negotiating with those pirates is like trying to nail currant jelly to the wall.” Roosevelt’s government subsequently encouraged the anti-Colombian insurgency that created the nation of Panama.
line 666: //, n.
[from Christian eschatological myth] n. The notional line of source at which a program fails for obscure reasons, implying either that somebody is out to get it (when you are the programmer), or that it richly deserves to be so gotten (when you are not). “It works when I trace through it, but seems to crash on line 666 when I run it.” “What happens is that whenever a large batch comes through, mmdf dies on the Line of the Beast. Probably some twit hardcoded a buffer size.”
line eater, the: //, n. obs.
1. [Usenet] A bug in some now-obsolete versions of the netnews software that used to eat up to BUFSIZ bytes of the article text. The bug was triggered by having the text of the article start with a space or tab. This bug was quickly personified as a mythical creature called the “line eater”, and postings often included a dummy line of “line eater food”. Ironically, line eater “food” not beginning with a space or tab wasn’t actually eaten, since the bug was avoided; but if there was a space or tab before it, then the line eater would eat the food and the beginning of the text it was supposed to be protecting. The practice of “sacrificing to the line eater” continued for some time after the bug had been nailed to the wall, and is still humorously referred to. The bug itself was still occasionally reported to be lurking in some mail-to-netnews gateways as late as 1991.
2. See NSA line eater.
line noise: //, n.
1. [techspeak] Spurious characters due to electrical noise in a communications link, especially an RS-232 serial connection. Line noise may be induced by poor connections, interference or crosstalk from other circuits, electrical storms, cosmic rays, or (notionally) birds crapping on the phone wires.
2. Any chunk of data in a file or elsewhere that looks like the results of line noise in sense 1.
3. Text that is theoretically a readable text or program source but employs syntax so bizarre that it looks like line noise in senses 1 or 2. Yes, there are languages this ugly. The canonical example is TECO; it is often claimed that “TECO’s input syntax is indistinguishable from line noise.” Other non-WYSIWYG editors, such as Multics qed and Unix ed, in the hands of a real hacker, also qualify easily, as do deliberately obfuscated languages such as INTERCAL.
linearithmic: //, adj.
Of an algorithm, having running time that is O(N log N). Coined as a portmanteau of “linear” and “logarithmic” in Algorithms In C by Robert Sedgewick.
link-dead: //, adj.
[MUD] The state a player is in when they kill their connection to a MUD without leaving it properly. The player is then commonly left as a statue in the game, and is only removed after a certain period of time (an hour on most MUDs). Used on IRC as well, although it is inappropriate in that context. Compare netdead.
link farm: //, n.
[Unix] A directory tree that contains many links to files in a master directory tree of files. Link farms save space when one is maintaining several nearly identical copies of the same source tree - for example, when the only difference is architecture-dependent object files. “Let’s freeze the source and then rebuild the FROBOZZ-3 and FROBOZZ-4 link farms.” Link farms may also be used to get around restrictions on the number of -I (include-file directory) arguments on older C preprocessors. However, they can also get completely out of hand, becoming the filesystem equivalent of spaghetti code. See also farm.
link rot: //, n.
The natural decay of web links as the sites they’re connected to change or die. Compare bit rot.
lint: //, n.
[from Unix’s lint(1), named for the bits of fluff it supposedly picks from programs]
1. vt. To examine a program closely for style, language usage, and portability problems, esp. if in C, esp. if via use of automated analysis tools, most esp. if the Unix utility lint(1) is used. This term used to be restricted to use of lint(1) itself, but (judging by references on Usenet) it has become a shorthand for any exhaustive review process at some non-Unix shops, even in languages other than C. Also as v. delint.
2. n. Excess verbiage in a document, as in “This draft has too much lint”.
Lintel: //, n.
The emerging Linux/Intel alliance. This term began to be used in early 1999 after it became clear that the Wintel alliance was under increasing strain and Intel started taking stakes in Linux companies.
Linus: /leen´us/, /lin´us/, /li:´nus/, n.
Linus Torvalds, the author of Linux. Nobody in the hacker culture has been as readily recognized by first name alone since ken.
Linux: /lee´nuhks/, /li´nuks/, not, /li:´nuhks/, n.
The free Unix workalike created by Linus Torvalds and friends starting about 1991. The pronunciation /li´nuhks/ is preferred because the name “Linus” has an /ee/ sound in Swedish (Linus’s family is part of Finland’s 6% ethnic-Swedish minority) and Linus considers English short /i/ to be closer to /ee/ than English long /i:/. This may be the most remarkable hacker project in history – an entire clone of Unix for 386, 486 and Pentium micros, distributed for free with sources over the net (ports to Alpha and Sparc and many other machines are also in use).
Linux is what GNU aimed to be, and it relies on the GNU toolset. But the Free Software Foundation didn’t produce the kernel to go with that toolset until 1999, which was too late. Other, similar efforts like FreeBSD and NetBSD have been technically successful but never caught fire the way Linux has; as this is written in 2003, Linux has effectively swallowed all proprietary Unixes except Solaris and is seriously challenging Microsoft. It has already captured 41% of the Internet-server market and over 25% of general business servers.
An earlier version of this entry opined “The secret of Linux’s success seems to be that Linus worked much harder early on to keep the development process open and recruit other hackers, creating a snowball effect.” Truer than we knew. See bazaar.
(Some people object that the name “Linux” should be used to refer only to the kernel, not the entire operating system. This claim is a proxy for an underlying territorial dispute; people who insist on the term “GNU/Linux” want the FSF to get most of the credit for Linux because RMS and friends wrote many of its user-level tools. Neither this theory nor the term “GNU/Linux” has gained more than minority acceptance).
lion food: //, n.
[IBM] Middle management or HQ staff (or, by extension, administrative drones in general). From an old joke about two lions who, escaping from the zoo, split up to increase their chances but agree to meet after 2 months. When they finally meet, one is skinny and the other overweight. The thin one says: “How did you manage? I ate a human just once and they turned out a small army to chase me – guns, nets, it was terrible. Since then I’ve been reduced to eating mice, insects, even grass.” The fat one replies: “Well, I hid near an IBM office and ate a manager a day. And nobody even noticed!”
Lions Book: //, n.
Source Code and Commentary on Unix Level 6, by John Lions. The two parts of this book contained (1) the entire source listing of the Unix Version 6 kernel, and (2) a commentary on the source discussing the algorithms. These were circulated internally at the University of New South Wales beginning 1976-77, and were, for years after, the only detailed kernel documentation available to anyone outside Bell Labs. Because Western Electric wished to maintain trade secret status on the kernel, the Lions Book was only supposed to be distributed to affiliates of source licensees. In spite of this, it soon spread by samizdat to a good many of the early Unix hackers.
[1996 update: The Lions book lives again! It was put back in print from Peer-To-Peer Communications, with forewords by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. In a neat bit of reflexivity, the page before the contents quotes this entry.]
[1998 update: John Lions’s death was an occasion of general mourning in the hacker community.]
LISP: //, n.
[from “LISt Processing language”, but mythically from “Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses”] AI’s mother tongue, a language based on the ideas of (a) variable-length lists and trees as fundamental data types, and (b) the interpretation of code as data and vice-versa. Invented by John McCarthy at MIT in the late 1950s, it is actually older than any other HLL still in use except FORTRAN. Accordingly, it has undergone considerable adaptive radiation over the years; modern variants are quite different in detail from the original LISP 1.5. The dominant HLL among hackers until the early 1980s, LISP has since shared the throne with C. Its partisans claim it is the only language that is truly beautiful. See languages of choice.
All LISP functions and programs are expressions that return values; this, together with the high memory utilization of LISPs, gave rise to Alan Perlis’s famous quip (itself a take on an Oscar Wilde quote) that “LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing”.
One significant application for LISP has been as a proof by example that most newer languages, such as COBOL and Ada, are full of unnecessary crocks. When the Right Thing has already been done once, there is no justification for bogosity in newer languages.
We’ve got your numbers...
For more details on LISP, the standard reference is the second edition of Common LISP the Language, by Guy L. Steele Jr. with contributions by Scott E. Fahlman, Richard P. Gabriel, David A. Moon, and Daniel L. Weinreb. It is still possible to buy printed copies, but it is now also available in an authorized web edition overseen by Guy L. Steele himself.
list-bomb: //, v.
To mailbomb someone by forging messages causing the victim to become a subscriber to many mailing lists. This is a self-defeating tactic; it merely forces mailing list servers to require confirmation by return message for every subscription.
lithium lick: //, n.
[NeXT] Steve Jobs. Employees who have gotten too much attention from their esteemed founder are said to have “lithium lick” when they begin to show signs of Jobsian fervor and repeat the most recent catch phrases in normal conversation – for example, “It just works, right out of the box!”
little-endian: //, adj.
Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given 16- or 32-bit word, bytes at lower addresses have lower significance (the word is stored “little-end-first”). The PDP-11 and VAX families of computers and Intel microprocessors and a lot of communications and networking hardware are little-endian. See big-endian, NUXI problem. The term is sometimes used to describe the ordering of units other than bytes; most often, bits within a byte.
live data: //, n.
1. Data that is written to be interpreted and takes over program flow when triggered by some un-obvious operation, such as viewing it. One use of such hacks is to break security. For example, some smart terminals have commands that allow one to download strings to program keys; this can be used to write live data that, when listed to the terminal, infects it with a security-breaking virus that is triggered the next time a hapless user strikes that key. For another, there are some well-known bugs in vi that allow certain texts to send arbitrary commands back to the machine when they are simply viewed.
2. In C code, data that includes pointers to function trampoline, that is constructed on the fly by a program and intended to be executed as code.
Live Free Or Die!: //, imp.
1. The state motto of New Hampshire, which appears on that state’s automobile license plates.
2. A slogan associated with Unix in the romantic days when Unix aficionados saw themselves as a tiny, beleaguered underground tilting against the windmills of industry. The “free” referred specifically to freedom from the fascist design philosophies and crufty misfeatures common on competing operating systems. Armando Stettner, one of the early Unix developers, used to give out fake license plates bearing this motto under a large Unix, all in New Hampshire colors of green and white. These are now valued collector’s items. In 1994 DEC put an inferior imitation of these in circulation with a red corporate logo added. Compaq (half of which was once DEC) continued the practice.
Armando Stettner’s original Unix license plate.
live: /li:v/, adj., adv.
[common] Opposite of “test”. Refers to actual real-world data or a program working with it. For example, the response to “I think the record deleter is finished” might be “Is it live yet?” or “Have you tried it out on live data?” This usage usually carries the connotation that live data is more fragile and must not be corrupted, or bad things will happen. So a more appropriate response might be: “Well, make sure it works perfectly before we throw live data at it.” The implication here is that record deletion is something pretty significant, and a haywire record-deleter running amok live would probably cause great harm.
livelock: /li:v´lok/, n.
A situation in which some critical stage of a task is unable to finish because its clients perpetually create more work for it to do after they have been serviced but before it can clear its queue. Differs from deadlock in that the process is not blocked or waiting for anything, but has a virtually infinite amount of work to do and can never catch up.
liveware: /li:v´weir/, n.
1. Synonym for wetware. Less common.
2. [Cambridge] Vermin. “Waiter, there’s some liveware in my salad...”
lobotomy: //, n.
1. What a hacker subjected to formal management training is said to have undergone. At IBM and elsewhere this term is used by both hackers and low-level management; the latter doubtless intend it as a joke.
2. The act of removing the processor from a microcomputer in order to replace or upgrade it. Some very cheap clone systems are sold in “lobotomized” form – everything but the brain.
locals, the: //, pl. n.
The users on one’s local network (as opposed, say, to people one reaches via public Internet connections). The marked thing about this usage is how little it has to do with real-space distance. “I have to do some tweaking on this mail utility before releasing it to the locals.”
locked and loaded: //, adj., obs.
[from military slang for an M-16 rifle with magazine inserted and prepared for firing] Said of a removable disk volume properly prepared for use – that is, locked into the drive and with the heads loaded. Ironically, because their heads are “loaded” whenever the power is up, this description is never used of Winchester drives (which are named after a rifle).
locked up: //, adj.
logic bomb: //, n.
Code surreptitiously inserted into an application or OS that causes it to perform some destructive or security-compromising activity whenever specified conditions are met. Compare back door.
logical: //, adj.
[from the technical term “logical device”, wherein a physical device is referred to by an arbitrary “logical” name] Having the role of. If a person (say, Les Earnest at SAIL) who had long held a certain post left and were replaced, the replacement would for a while be known as the “logical” Les Earnest. (This does not imply any judgment on the replacement.) Compare virtual.
At Stanford, “logical” compass directions denote a coordinate system relative to El Camino Real, in which "logical north" is always toward San Francisco and “logical south” is always toward San Jose – in spite of the fact that El Camino Real runs physical north/south near San Francisco, physical east/west near San Jose, and along a curve everywhere in between. (The best rule of thumb here is that, by definition, El Camino Real always runs logical north-south.)
In giving directions, one might say: “To get to Rincon Tarasco restaurant, get onto El Camino Bignum going logical north.” Using the word “logical” helps to prevent the recipient from worrying about that the fact that the sun is setting almost directly in front of him. The concept is reinforced by North American highways which are almost, but not quite, consistently labeled with logical rather than physical directions. A similar situation exists at MIT: Route 128 (famous for the electronics industry that grew up along it) wraps roughly 3 quarters around Boston at a radius of 10 miles, terminating near the coastline at each end. It would be most precise to describe the two directions along this highway as “clockwise” and “counterclockwise”, but the road signs all say “north” and “south”, respectively. A hacker might describe these directions as “logical north” and “logical south”, to indicate that they are conventional directions not corresponding to the usual denotation for those words.
loop through: //, vt.
To process each element of a list of things. “Hold on, I’ve got to loop through my paper mail.” Derives from the computer-language notion of an iterative loop; compare “cdr down” (under cdr), which is less common among C and Unix programmers. ITS hackers used to say “IRP over” after an obscure pseudo-op in the MIDAS PDP-10 assembler (the same IRP op can nowadays be found in Microsoft’s assembler).
loose bytes: //, n.
Commonwealth hackish term for the padding bytes or shims many compilers insert between members of a record or structure to cope with alignment requirements imposed by the machine architecture.
lord high fixer: //, n.
[primarily British, from Gilbert & Sullivan’s “lord high executioner”] The person in an organization who knows the most about some aspect of a system. See wizard.
lose lose: //, interj.
A reply to or comment on an undesirable situation. “I accidentally deleted all my files!” “Lose, lose.”
lose: //, vi.
1. [very common] To fail. A program loses when it encounters an exceptional condition or fails to work in the expected manner.
2. To be exceptionally unesthetic or crocky.
3. Of people, to be obnoxious or unusually stupid (as opposed to ignorant). See also deserves to lose.
4. n. Refers to something that is losing, especially in the phrases “That’s a lose!” and “What a lose!”
loser: //, n.
An unexpectedly bad situation, program, programmer, or person. Someone who habitually loses. (Even winners can lose occasionally.) Someone who knows not and knows not that he knows not. Emphatic forms are “real loser”, “total loser”, and “complete loser” (but not **“moby loser”, which would be a contradiction in terms). See luser.
losing: //, adj.
Said of anything that is or causes a lose or lossage. “The compiler is losing badly when I try to use templates.”
loss: //, n.
Something (not a person) that loses; a situation in which something is losing. Emphatic forms include “moby loss”, and “total loss”, “complete loss”. Common interjections are “What a loss!” and “What a moby loss!” Note that “moby loss” is okay even though **“moby loser” is not used; applied to an abstract noun, moby is simply a magnifier, whereas when applied to a person it implies substance and has positive connotations. Compare lossage.
lossage: /los'@j/, n.
[very common] The result of a bug or malfunction. This is a mass or collective noun. “What a loss!” and “What lossage!” are nearly synonymous. The former is slightly more particular to the speaker’s present circumstances; the latter implies a continuing lose of which the speaker is currently a victim. Thus (for example) a temporary hardware failure is a loss, but bugs in an important tool (like a compiler) are serious lossage.
lossy: //, adj.
[Usenet]
1. Said of people, this indicates a poor memory, usually short-term. This usage is analogical to the same term applied to data compression and analysis. “He’s very lossy.” means that you can’t rely on him to accurately remember recent experiences or conversations, or requests. Not to be confused with a “loser”, which is a person who is in a continual state of lossiness, as in sense 2 (see below).
2. Said of an attitude or a situation, this indicates a general downturn in emotions, lack of success in attempted endeavors, etc. Eg, “I’m having a lossy day today.” means that the speaker has “lost” or is “losing” in all of their activities, and that this is causing some increase in negative emotions.
lost in the noise: //, adj.
Syn. lost in the underflow. This term is from signal processing, where signals of very small amplitude cannot be separated from low-intensity noise in the system. Though popular among hackers, it is not confined to hackerdom; physicists, engineers, astronomers, and statisticians all use it.
lost in the underflow: //, adj.
Too small to be worth considering; more specifically, small beyond the limits of accuracy or measurement. This is a reference to “floating underflow”, a condition that can occur when a floating-point arithmetic processor tries to handle quantities smaller than its limit of magnitude. It is also a pun on “undertow” (a kind of fast, cold current that sometimes runs just offshore and can be dangerous to swimmers). “Well, sure, photon pressure from the stadium lights alters the path of a thrown baseball, but that effect gets lost in the underflow.” Compare epsilon squared; see also overflow bit.
lots of MIPS but no I/O: //, adj.
Used to describe a person who is technically brilliant but can’t seem to communicate with human beings effectively. Technically it describes a machine that has lots of processing power but is bottlenecked on input-output (in 1991, the IBM Rios, a.k.a. RS/6000, was a notorious example).
low-bandwidth: //, adj.
[from communication theory] Used to indicate a talk that, although not content-free, was not terribly informative. “That was a low-bandwidth talk, but what can you expect for an audience of suits!” Compare bandwidth, math-out.
Lubarsky’s Law of Cybernetic Entomology: //, prov.
“There is always one more bug.”
Lumber Cartel: //, n.
A mythical conspiracy accused by spam-spewers of funding anti-spam activism in order to force the direct-mail promotions industry back onto paper. Hackers, predictably, responded by forming a “Lumber Cartel” spoofing this paranoid theory; the web page is http://come.to/the.lumber.cartel/. Members often include the tag TINLC (“There Is No Lumber Cartel”) in their postings; see TINC, NANA for explanation.
lunatic fringe: //, n.
[IBM] Customers who can be relied upon to accept release 1 versions of software. Compare heatseeker.
lurker: //, n.
One of the “silent majority” in an electronic forum; one who posts occasionally or not at all but is known to read the group’s postings regularly. This term is not pejorative and indeed is casually used reflexively: “Oh, I’m just lurking.” Often used in “the lurkers”, the hypothetical audience for the group’s flamage-emitting regulars. When a lurker speaks up for the first time, this is called “delurking”.
The creator of the popular science-fiction TV series Babylon 5 has ties to SF fandom and the hacker culture. In that series, the use of the term “lurker” for a homeless or displaced person is a conscious reference to the jargon term.
luser: /loo´zr/, n.
[common] A user; esp. one who is also a loser. (luser and loser are pronounced identically.) This word was coined around 1975 at MIT. Under ITS, when you first walked up to a terminal at MIT and typed Control-Z to get the computer’s attention, it printed out some status information, including how many people were already using the computer; it might print “14 users”, for example. Someone thought it would be a great joke to patch the system to print “14 losers” instead. There ensued a great controversy, as some of the users didn’t particularly want to be called losers to their faces every time they used the computer. For a while several hackers struggled covertly, each changing the message behind the back of the others; any time you logged into the computer it was even money whether it would say “users” or “losers”. Finally, someone tried the compromise “lusers”, and it stuck. Later one of the ITS machines supported luser as a request-for-help command. ITS died the death in mid-1990, except as a museum piece; the usage lives on, however, and the term “luser” is often seen in program comments and on Usenet. Compare mundane, newbie, chainik.