                                The Jargon File

(version 4.4.7)

   -------------------------------------------------------------------------

   Table of Contents

   Welcome to the Jargon File

   I. Introduction

                1. Hacker Slang and Hacker Culture

                2. Of Slang, Jargon, and Techspeak

                3. Revision History

                4. Jargon Construction

                             Verb Doubling

                             Soundalike Slang

                             The -P Convention

                             Overgeneralization

                             Spoken inarticulations

                             Anthropomorphization

                             Comparatives

                5. Hacker Writing Style

                6. Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions

                7. Hacker Speech Style

                8. International Style

                9. Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers

                10. Pronunciation Guide

                11. Other Lexicon Conventions

                12. Format for New Entries

   II. The Jargon Lexicon

                Glossary

   III. Appendices

                A. Hacker Folklore

                             The Meaning of `Hack'

                             TV Typewriters: A Tale of Hackish Ingenuity

                             A Story About `Magic'

                             Some AI Koans

                                          Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine

                                          Moon instructs a student

                                          Sussman attains enlightenment

                                          Drescher and the toaster

                             OS and JEDGAR

                             The Story of Mel

                B. A Portrait of J. Random Hacker

                             General Appearance

                             Dress

                             Reading Habits

                             Other Interests

                             Physical Activity and Sports

                             Education

                             Things Hackers Detest and Avoid

                             Food

                             Politics

                             Gender and Ethnicity

                             Religion

                             Ceremonial Chemicals

                             Communication Style

                             Geographical Distribution

                             Sexual Habits

                             Personality Characteristics

                             Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality

                             Miscellaneous

                C. Helping Hacker Culture Grow

                Bibliography

Welcome to the Jargon File

   This is the Jargon File, a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang
   illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor.

   This document (the Jargon File) is in the public domain, to be freely
   used, shared, and modified. There are (by intention) no legal restraints
   on what you can do with it, but there are traditions about its proper use
   to which many hackers are quite strongly attached. Please extend the
   courtesy of proper citation when you quote the File, ideally with a
   version number, as it will change and grow over time. (Examples of
   appropriate citation form: "Jargon File 4.4.7" or "The on-line hacker
   Jargon File, version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003".)

   The Jargon File is a common heritage of the hacker culture. Over the
   years a number of individuals have volunteered considerable time to
   maintaining the File and been recognized by the net at large as editors
   of it. Editorial responsibilities include: to collate contributions and
   suggestions from others; to seek out corroborating information; to
   cross-reference related entries; to keep the file in a consistent format;
   and to announce and distribute updated versions periodically. Current
   volunteer editors include:

   Eric Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>

   Although there is no requirement that you do so, it is considered good
   form to check with an editor before quoting the File in a published work
   or commercial product. We may have additional information that would be
   helpful to you and can assist you in framing your quote to reflect not
   only the letter of the File but its spirit as well.

   All contributions and suggestions about this file sent to a volunteer
   editor are gratefully received and will be regarded, unless otherwise
   labelled, as freely given donations for possible use as part of this
   public-domain file.

   From time to time a snapshot of this file has been polished, edited, and
   formatted for commercial publication with the cooperation of the
   volunteer editors and the hacker community at large. If you wish to have
   a bound paper copy of this file, you may find it convenient to purchase
   one of these. They often contain additional material not found in on-line
   versions. The three `authorized' editions so far are described in the
   Revision History section; there may be more in the future.

   The Jargon File's online rendition uses an unusually large number of
   special characters. This test page lists them so you can check what your
   browser does with each one.

   +---------------------------------------+
   | glyph | description                   |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   | a     | greek character alpha         |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   | k     | greek character kappa         |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   | l     | greek character lambda        |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   | L     | greek character Lambda        |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   | n     | greek character nu            |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   | o     | greek character omicron       |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   | p     | greek character pi            |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   |      | pound sterling                |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   | *     | left angle bracket            |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   | *     | right angle bracket           |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   |      | ae ligature                   |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   |      | German sharp-s sign           |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   | ?1    | similarity sign               |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   | (+)   | circle-plus                   |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   | (x)   | circle-times                  |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   |      | times                         |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   | {}    | empty set (used for APL null) |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   |      | micro quantifier sign         |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   | ->    | right arrow                   |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   | <=>   | horizontal double arrow       |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   | (TM)  | trademark symbol              |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   |      | registered-trademark symbol   |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   | -     | minus                         |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   |      | plus-or-minus                 |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   |      | slashed-O                     |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   | @     | schwa                         |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   | '     | acute accent                  |
   |-------+-------------------------------|
   |      | medial dot                    |
   +---------------------------------------+

   We normally test with the latest build of Mozilla. If some of the special
   characters above look wrong, your browser has bugs in its
   standards-conformance and you should replace it.

                                 Introduction

   Table of Contents

   1. Hacker Slang and Hacker Culture

   2. Of Slang, Jargon, and Techspeak

   3. Revision History

   4. Jargon Construction

                Verb Doubling

                Soundalike Slang

                The -P Convention

                Overgeneralization

                Spoken inarticulations

                Anthropomorphization

                Comparatives

   5. Hacker Writing Style

   6. Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions

   7. Hacker Speech Style

   8. International Style

   9. Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers

   10. Pronunciation Guide

   11. Other Lexicon Conventions

   12. Format for New Entries

Chapter 1. Hacker Slang and Hacker Culture

   This document is a collection of slang terms used by various subcultures
   of computer hackers. Though some technical material is included for
   background and flavor, it is not a technical dictionary; what we describe
   here is the language hackers use among themselves for fun, social
   communication, and technical debate.

   The `hacker culture' is actually a loosely networked collection of
   subcultures that is nevertheless conscious of some important shared
   experiences, shared roots, and shared values. It has its own myths,
   heroes, villains, folk epics, in-jokes, taboos, and dreams. Because
   hackers as a group are particularly creative people who define themselves
   partly by rejection of `normal' values and working habits, it has
   unusually rich and conscious traditions for an intentional culture less
   than 50 years old.

   As usual with slang, the special vocabulary of hackers helps hold places
   in the community and expresses shared values and experiences. Also as
   usual, not knowing the slang (or using it inappropriately) defines one as
   an outsider, a mundane, or (worst of all in hackish vocabulary) possibly
   even a {suit}. All human cultures use slang in this threefold way -- as a
   tool of communication, and of inclusion, and of exclusion.

   Among hackers, though, slang has a subtler aspect, paralleled perhaps in
   the slang of jazz musicians and some kinds of fine artists but hard to
   detect in most technical or scientific cultures; parts of it are code for
   shared states of consciousness. There is a whole range of altered states
   and problem-solving mental stances basic to high-level hacking which
   don't fit into conventional linguistic reality any better than a Coltrane
   solo or one of Maurits Escher's surreal trompe l'oeil compositions
   (Escher is a favorite of hackers), and hacker slang encodes these
   subtleties in many unobvious ways. As a simple example, take the
   distinction between a {kluge} and an {elegant} solution, and the
   differing connotations attached to each. The distinction is not only of
   engineering significance; it reaches right back into the nature of the
   generative processes in program design and asserts something important
   about two different kinds of relationship between the hacker and the
   hack. Hacker slang is unusually rich in implications of this kind, of
   overtones and undertones that illuminate the hackish psyche.

   Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay and are very conscious and inventive in
   their use of language. These traits seem to be common in young children,
   but the conformity-enforcing machine we are pleased to call an
   educational system bludgeons them out of most of us before adolescence.
   Thus, linguistic invention in most subcultures of the modern West is a
   halting and largely unconscious process. Hackers, by contrast, regard
   slang formation and use as a game to be played for conscious pleasure.
   Their inventions thus display an almost unique combination of the
   neotenous enjoyment of language-play with the discrimination of educated
   and powerful intelligence. Further, the electronic media which knit them
   together are fluid, `hot' connections, well adapted to both the
   dissemination of new slang and the ruthless culling of weak and
   superannuated specimens. The results of this process give us perhaps a
   uniquely intense and accelerated view of linguistic evolution in action.

   Hacker slang also challenges some common linguistic and anthropological
   assumptions. For example, in the early 1990s it became fashionable to
   speak of `low-context' versus `high-context' communication, and to
   classify cultures by the preferred context level of their languages and
   art forms. It is usually claimed that low-context communication
   (characterized by precision, clarity, and completeness of self-contained
   utterances) is typical in cultures which value logic, objectivity,
   individualism, and competition; by contrast, high-context communication
   (elliptical, emotive, nuance-filled, multi-modal, heavily coded) is
   associated with cultures which value subjectivity, consensus,
   cooperation, and tradition. What then are we to make of hackerdom, which
   is themed around extremely low-context interaction with computers and
   exhibits primarily "low-context" values, but cultivates an almost
   absurdly high-context slang style?

   The intensity and consciousness of hackish invention make a compilation
   of hacker slang a particularly effective window into the surrounding
   culture -- and, in fact, this one is the latest version of an evolving
   compilation called the `Jargon File', maintained by hackers themselves
   since the early 1970s. This one (like its ancestors) is primarily a
   lexicon, but also includes topic entries which collect background or
   sidelight information on hacker culture that would be awkward to try to
   subsume under individual slang definitions.

   Though the format is that of a reference volume, it is intended that the
   material be enjoyable to browse. Even a complete outsider should find at
   least a chuckle on nearly every page, and much that is amusingly
   thought-provoking. But it is also true that hackers use humorous wordplay
   to make strong, sometimes combative statements about what they feel. Some
   of these entries reflect the views of opposing sides in disputes that
   have been genuinely passionate; this is deliberate. We have not tried to
   moderate or pretty up these disputes; rather we have attempted to ensure
   that everyone's sacred cows get gored, impartially. Compromise is not
   particularly a hackish virtue, but the honest presentation of divergent
   viewpoints is.

   The reader with minimal computer background who finds some references
   incomprehensibly technical can safely ignore them. We have not felt it
   either necessary or desirable to eliminate all such; they, too,
   contribute flavor, and one of this document's major intended audiences --
   fledgling hackers already partway inside the culture -- will benefit from
   them.

   A selection of longer items of hacker folklore and humor is included in
   Appendix A. The `outside' reader's attention is particularly directed to
   the Portrait of J. Random Hacker in Appendix B. The Bibliography, lists
   some non-technical works which have either influenced or described the
   hacker culture.

   Because hackerdom is an intentional culture (one each individual must
   choose by action to join), one should not be surprised that the line
   between description and influence can become more than a little blurred.
   Earlier versions of the Jargon File have played a central role in
   spreading hacker language and the culture that goes with it to
   successively larger populations, and we hope and expect that this one
   will do likewise.

Chapter 2. Of Slang, Jargon, and Techspeak

   Linguists usually refer to informal language as `slang' and reserve the
   term `jargon' for the technical vocabularies of various occupations.
   However, the ancestor of this collection was called the `Jargon File',
   and hacker slang is traditionally `the jargon'. When talking about the
   jargon there is therefore no convenient way to distinguish it from what a
   linguist would call hackers' jargon -- the formal vocabulary they learn
   from textbooks, technical papers, and manuals.

   To make a confused situation worse, the line between hacker slang and the
   vocabulary of technical programming and computer science is fuzzy, and
   shifts over time. Further, this vocabulary is shared with a wider
   technical culture of programmers, many of whom are not hackers and do not
   speak or recognize hackish slang.

   Accordingly, this lexicon will try to be as precise as the facts of usage
   permit about the distinctions among three categories:

   slang

           informal language from mainstream English or non-technical
           subcultures (bikers, rock fans, surfers, etc).

   jargon

           without qualifier, denotes informal `slangy' language peculiar to
           or predominantly found among hackers -- the subject of this
           lexicon.

   techspeak

           the formal technical vocabulary of programming, computer science,
           electronics, and other fields connected to hacking.

   This terminology will be consistently used throughout the remainder of
   this lexicon.

   The jargon/techspeak distinction is the delicate one. A lot of techspeak
   originated as jargon, and there is a steady continuing uptake of jargon
   into techspeak. On the other hand, a lot of jargon arises from
   overgeneralization of techspeak terms (there is more about this in the
   Jargon Construction section below).

   In general, we have considered techspeak any term that communicate
   primarily by a denotation well established in textbooks, technical
   dictionaries, or standards documents.

   A few obviously techspeak terms (names of operating systems, languages,
   or documents) are listed when they are tied to hacker folklore that isn't
   covered in formal sources, or sometimes to convey critical historical
   background necessary to understand other entries to which they are
   cross-referenced. Some other techspeak senses of jargon words are listed
   in order to make the jargon senses clear; where the text does not specify
   that a straight technical sense is under discussion, these are marked
   with `[techspeak]' as an etymology. Some entries have a primary sense
   marked this way, with subsequent jargon meanings explained in terms of
   it.

   We have also tried to indicate (where known) the apparent origins of
   terms. The results are probably the least reliable information in the
   lexicon, for several reasons. For one thing, it is well known that many
   hackish usages have been independently reinvented multiple times, even
   among the more obscure and intricate neologisms. It often seems that the
   generative processes underlying hackish jargon formation have an internal
   logic so powerful as to create substantial parallelism across separate
   cultures and even in different languages! For another, the networks tend
   to propagate innovations so quickly that `first use' is often impossible
   to pin down. And, finally, compendia like this one alter what they
   observe by implicitly stamping cultural approval on terms and widening
   their use.

   Despite these problems, the organized collection of jargon-related oral
   history for the new compilations has enabled us to put to rest quite a
   number of folk etymologies, place credit where credit is due, and
   illuminate the early history of many important hackerisms such as
   {kluge}, {cruft}, and {foo}. We believe specialist lexicographers will
   find many of the historical notes more than casually instructive.

Chapter 3. Revision History

   The original Jargon File was a collection of hacker jargon from technical
   cultures including the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI lab (SAIL), and others
   of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities including Bolt, Beranek and
   Newman (BBN), Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU), and Worcester Polytechnic
   Institute (WPI).

   The Jargon File (hereafter referred to as `jargon-1' or `the File') was
   begun by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975. From this time until the
   plug was finally pulled on the SAIL computer in 1991, the File was named
   AIWORD.RF[UP,DOC] there. Some terms in it date back considerably earlier
   ({frob} and some senses of {moby}, for instance, go back to the Tech
   Model Railroad Club at MIT and are believed to date at least back to the
   early 1960s). The revisions of jargon-1 were all unnumbered and may be
   collectively considered `Version 1'.

   In 1976, Mark Crispin, having seen an announcement about the File on the
   SAIL computer, FTPed a copy of the File to MIT. He noticed that it was
   hardly restricted to `AI words' and so stored the file on his directory
   as AI:MRC;SAIL JARGON.

   The file was quickly renamed JARGON > (the `>' caused versioning under
   ITS) as a flurry of enhancements were made by Mark Crispin and Guy L.
   Steele Jr. Unfortunately, amidst all this activity, nobody thought of
   correcting the term `jargon' to `slang' until the compendium had already
   become widely known as the Jargon File.

   Raphael Finkel dropped out of active participation shortly thereafter and
   Don Woods became the SAIL contact for the File (which was subsequently
   kept in duplicate at SAIL and MIT, with periodic resynchronizations).

   The File expanded by fits and starts until about 1983; Richard Stallman
   was prominent among the contributors, adding many MIT and ITS-related
   coinages.

   In Spring 1981, a hacker named Charles Spurgeon got a large chunk of the
   File published in Stewart Brand's CoEvolution Quarterly (issue 29, pages
   26--35) with illustrations by Phil Wadler and Guy Steele (including a
   couple of the Crunchly cartoons). This appears to have been the File's
   first paper publication.

   A late version of jargon-1, expanded with commentary for the mass market,
   was edited by Guy Steele into a book published in 1983 as The Hacker's
   Dictionary (Harper & Row CN 1082, ISBN 0-06-091082-8). The other jargon-1
   editors (Raphael Finkel, Don Woods, and Mark Crispin) contributed to this
   revision, as did Richard M. Stallman and Geoff Goodfellow. This book (now
   out of print) is hereafter referred to as `Steele-1983' and those six as
   the Steele-1983 coauthors.

   Shortly after the publication of Steele-1983, the File effectively
   stopped growing and changing. Originally, this was due to a desire to
   freeze the file temporarily to facilitate the production of Steele-1983,
   but external conditions caused the `temporary' freeze to become
   permanent.

   The AI Lab culture had been hit hard in the late 1970s by funding cuts
   and the resulting administrative decision to use vendor-supported
   hardware and software instead of homebrew whenever possible. At MIT, most
   AI work had turned to dedicated LISP Machines. At the same time, the
   commercialization of AI technology lured some of the AI Lab's best and
   brightest away to startups along the Route 128 strip in Massachusetts and
   out West in Silicon Valley. The startups built LISP machines for MIT; the
   central MIT-AI computer became a {TWENEX} system rather than a host for
   the AI hackers' beloved {ITS}.

   The Stanford AI Lab had effectively ceased to exist by 1980, although the
   SAIL computer continued as a Computer Science Department resource until
   1991. Stanford became a major {TWENEX} site, at one point operating more
   than a dozen TOPS-20 systems; but by the mid-1980s most of the
   interesting software work was being done on the emerging BSD Unix
   standard.

   In April 1983, the PDP-10-centered cultures that had nourished the File
   were dealt a death-blow by the cancellation of the Jupiter project at
   Digital Equipment Corporation. The File's compilers, already dispersed,
   moved on to other things. Steele-1983 was partly a monument to what its
   authors thought was a dying tradition; no one involved realized at the
   time just how wide its influence was to be.

   By the mid-1980s the File's content was dated, but the legend that had
   grown up around it never quite died out. The book, and softcopies
   obtained off the ARPANET, circulated even in cultures far removed from
   MIT and Stanford; the content exerted a strong and continuing influence
   on hacker language and humor. Even as the advent of the microcomputer and
   other trends fueled a tremendous expansion of hackerdom, the File (and
   related materials such as the Some AI Koans in Appendix A) came to be
   seen as a sort of sacred epic, a hacker-culture Matter of Britain
   chronicling the heroic exploits of the Knights of the Lab. The pace of
   change in hackerdom at large accelerated tremendously -- but the Jargon
   File, having passed from living document to icon, remained essentially
   untouched for seven years.

   This revision contains nearly the entire text of a late version of
   jargon-1 (a few obsolete PDP-10-related entries were dropped after
   careful consultation with the editors of Steele-1983). It merges in about
   80% of the Steele-1983 text, omitting some framing material and a very
   few entries introduced in Steele-1983 that are now also obsolete.

   This new version casts a wider net than the old Jargon File; its aim is
   to cover not just AI or PDP-10 hacker culture but all the technical
   computing cultures wherein the true hacker-nature is manifested. More
   than half of the entries now derive from {Usenet} and represent jargon
   now current in the C and Unix communities, but special efforts have been
   made to collect jargon from other cultures including IBM PC programmers,
   Amiga fans, Mac enthusiasts, and even the IBM mainframe world.

   Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com> maintains the new File with assistance
   from Guy L. Steele Jr. <gls@think.com>; these are the persons primarily
   reflected in the File's editorial `we', though we take pleasure in
   acknowledging the special contribution of the other coauthors of
   Steele-1983. Please email all additions, corrections, and correspondence
   relating to the Jargon File to Eric.

   (Warning: other email addresses and URLs appear in this file but are not
   guaranteed to be correct after date of publication. Don't email us if an
   attempt to reach someone bounces -- we have no magic way of checking
   addresses or looking up people. If a web reference goes stale, try a
   Google or Alta Vista search for relevant phrases.

   Please try to review a recent copy of the on-line document before
   submitting entries; it is available on the Web. It will often contain new
   material not recorded in the latest paper snapshot that could save you
   some typing. It also includes some submission guidelines not reproduced
   here.

   The 2.9.6 version became the main text of The New Hacker's Dictionary, by
   Eric Raymond (ed.), MIT Press 1991, ISBN 0-262-68069-6.

   The 3.0.0 version was published in August 1993 as the second edition of
   The New Hacker's Dictionary, again from MIT Press (ISBN 0-262-18154-1).

   The 4.0.0 version was published in September 1996 as the third edition of
   The New Hacker's Dictionary from MIT Press (ISBN 0-262-68092-0).

   The maintainers are committed to updating the on-line version of the
   Jargon File through and beyond paper publication, and will continue to
   make it available to archives and public-access sites as a trust of the
   hacker community.

   Here is a chronology of major revisions:

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Version| Date |Lines|Words |Characters|Entries|             Comments             |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|       |      |     |      |          |       |The Jargon File comes alive again |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |after a seven-year hiatus.        |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |Reorganization and massive        |
|2.1.1  |Jun 12|5485 |42842 |278958    |790    |additions were by Eric S. Raymond,|
|       |1990  |     |      |          |       |approved by Guy Steele. Many items|
|       |      |     |      |          |       |of UNIX, C, USENET, and           |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |microcomputer-based jargon were   |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |added at that time.               |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|       |      |     |      |          |       |Changes and additions by ESR in   |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |response to numerous USENET       |
|2.1.5  |Nov 28|6028 |46946 |307510    |866    |submissions and comment from the  |
|       |1990  |     |      |          |       |First Edition co-authors. The     |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |Bibliography (Appendix C) was also|
|       |      |     |      |          |       |appended.                         |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|       |      |     |      |          |       |Most of the contents of the 1983  |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |paper edition edited by Guy Steele|
|2.2.1  |Dec 15|9394 |75954 |490501    |1046   |was merged in. Many more USENET   |
|       |1990  |     |      |          |       |submissions added, including the  |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |International Style and the       |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |material on Commonwealth Hackish. |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|       |      |     |      |          |       |The great format change -- case is|
|       |      |     |      |          |       |no longer smashed in lexicon keys |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |and cross-references. A very few  |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |entries from jargon-1 which were  |
|       |Jan 03|     |      |          |       |basically straight techspeak were |
|2.3.1  |1991  |10728|85070 |558261    |1138   |deleted; this enabled the rest of |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |Appendix B (created in 2.1.1) to  |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |be merged back into main text and |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |the appendix replaced with the    |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |Portrait of J. Random Hacker. More|
|       |      |     |      |          |       |USENET submissions were added.    |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|       |      |     |      |          |       |The Story of Mel and many more    |
|2.4.1  |Jan 14|12362|97819 |642899    |1239   |USENET submissions merged in. More|
|       |1991  |     |      |          |       |material on hackish writing habits|
|       |      |     |      |          |       |added. Numerous typo fixes.       |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|       |      |     |      |          |       |Second great format change; no    |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |more <> around headwords or       |
|2.6.1  |Feb 12|15011|118277|774942    |1484   |references. Merged in results of  |
|       |1991  |     |      |          |       |serious copy-editing passes by Guy|
|       |      |     |      |          |       |Steele, Mark Brader. Still more   |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |entries added.                    |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|       |      |     |      |          |       |New section on                    |
|2.7.1  |Mar 01|16087|126885|831872    |1533   |slang/jargon/techspeak added.     |
|       |1991  |     |      |          |       |Results of Guy's second edit pass |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |merged in.                        |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|2.8.1  |Mar 22|17154|135647|888333    |1602   |Material from the TMRC Dictionary |
|       |1991  |     |      |          |       |and MRC's editing pass merged in. |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|2.9.6  |Aug 16|18952|148629|975551    |1702   |Corresponds to reproduction copy  |
|       |1991  |     |      |          |       |for book.                         |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|       |      |     |      |          |       |First public release since the    |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |book, including over fifty new    |
|2.9.8  |Jan 01|19509|153108|1006023   |1760   |entries and numerous              |
|       |1992  |     |      |          |       |corrections/additions to old ones.|
|       |      |     |      |          |       |Packaged with version 1.1 of vh(1)|
|       |      |     |      |          |       |hypertext reader.                 |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|2.9.9  |Apr 01|20298|159651|1048909   |1821   |Folded in XEROX PARC lexicon.     |
|       |1992  |     |      |          |       |                                  |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|2.9.10 |Jul 01|21349|168330|1106991   |1891   |lots of new historical material.  |
|       |1992  |     |      |          |       |                                  |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|2.9.11 |Jan 01|21725|171169|1125880   |1922   |Lots of new historical material.  |
|       |1993  |     |      |          |       |                                  |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|       |      |     |      |          |       |A few new entries & changes,      |
|       |May 10|     |      |          |       |marginal MUD/IRC slang and some   |
|2.9.12 |1993  |22238|175114|1152467   |1946   |borderline techspeak removed, all |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |in preparation for 2nd Edition of |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |TNHD.                             |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|3.0.0  |Jul 27|22548|177520|1169372   |1961   |Manuscript freeze for 2nd edition |
|       |1993  |     |      |          |       |of TNHD.                          |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|3.1.0  |Oct 15|23197|181001|1193818   |1990   |Interim release to test WWW       |
|       |1994  |     |      |          |       |conversion.                       |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|3.2.0  |Mar 15|23822|185961|1226358   |2031   |Spring 1995 update.               |
|       |1995  |     |      |          |       |                                  |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|3.3.0  |Jan 20|24055|187957|1239604   |2045   |Winter 1996 update.               |
|       |1996  |     |      |          |       |                                  |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|       |Jan 25|     |      |          |       |Copy-corrected improvement on     |
|3.3.1  |1996  |24147|188728|1244554   |2050   |3.3.0 shipped to MIT Press as a   |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |step towards TNHD III.            |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|4.0.0  |Jul 25|24801|193697|1281402   |2067   |The actual TNHD III version after |
|       |1996  |     |      |          |       |copy-edit                         |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|4.1.0  |8 Apr |25777|206825|1359992   |2217   |The Jargon File rides again after |
|       |1999  |     |      |          |       |three years.                      |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|4.2.0  |31 Jan|26598|214639|1412243   |2267   |Fix processing of URLs.           |
|       |2000  |     |      |          |       |                                  |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|       |      |     |      |          |       |Special edition in honor of the   |
|4.3.0  |30 Apr|27805|224978|1480215   |2319   |first implementation of RFC 1149. |
|       |2001  |     |      |          |       |Also cleaned up a number of       |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |obsolete entries.                 |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|       |      |     |      |          |       |XML-Docbook format conversion.    |
|4.4.0  |10 May|32004|230012|1707139   |2290   |Serious pruning of old slang,     |
|       |2003  |     |      |          |       |nearly 100 entries failed the     |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |Google test and were removed.     |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|4.4.1  |13 May|37157|234687|1618716   |2290   |XML-Docbook format fixes.         |
|       |2003  |     |      |          |       |                                  |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|4.4.2  |22 May|32629|227852|1555125   |2290   |Fix filename collisions and other |
|       |2003  |     |      |          |       |small problems.                   |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|4.4.3  |15 Jul|37363|235135|1629667   |2293   |Fix some stylesheet problems      |
|       |2003  |     |      |          |       |leading to missing links.         |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|4.4.4  |14 Aug|37392|235271|1630579   |2295   |Corrected build machinery; we can |
|       |2003  |     |      |          |       |make RPMS now.                    |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|4.4.5  |4 Oct |37482|235858|1634767   |2299   |Minor updates. Four new entries   |
|       |2003  |     |      |          |       |and a better original-bug picture.|
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|       |25 Oct|     |      |          |       |Added glider illustration. Amended|
|4.4.6  |2003  |37560|236406|1638454   |2302   |FUD entry pursuent to SCO's       |
|       |      |     |      |          |       |attempt to abuse it.              |
|-------+------+-----+------+----------+-------+----------------------------------|
|4.4.7  |29 Dec|37666|237206|1643609   |2307   |Winter 2003 update.               |
|       |2003  |     |      |          |       |                                  |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

   Version numbering: Version numbers should be read as
   major.minor.revision. Major version 1 is reserved for the `old' (ITS)
   Jargon File, jargon-1. Major version 2 encompasses revisions by ESR (Eric
   S. Raymond) with assistance from GLS (Guy L. Steele, Jr.) leading up to
   and including the second paper edition. From now on, major version number
   N.00 will probably correspond to the Nth paper edition. Usually later
   versions will either completely supersede or incorporate earlier
   versions, so there is generally no point in keeping old versions around.

   Our thanks to the coauthors of Steele-1983 for oversight and assistance,
   and to the hundreds of Usenetters (too many to name here) who contributed
   entries and encouragement. More thanks go to several of the old-timers on
   the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers, who contributed much useful
   commentary and many corrections and valuable historical perspective:
   Joseph M. Newcomer <jn11+@andrew.cmu.edu>, Bernie Cosell
   <cosell@bbn.com>, Earl Boebert <boebert@SCTC.com>, and Joe Morris
   <jcmorris@mwunix.mitre.org>.

   We were fortunate enough to have the aid of some accomplished linguists.
   David Stampe <stampe@hawaii.edu> and Charles Hoequist <hoequist@bnr.ca>
   contributed valuable criticism; Joe Keane <jgk@osc.osc.com> helped us
   improve the pronunciation guides.

   A few bits of this text quote previous works. We are indebted to Brian A.
   LaMacchia <bal@zurich.ai.mit.edu> for obtaining permission for us to use
   material from the TMRC Dictionary; also, Don Libes <libes@cme.nist.gov>
   contributed some appropriate material from his excellent book Life With
   UNIX. We thank Per Lindberg <per@front.se>, author of the remarkable
   Swedish-language 'zine Hackerbladet, for bringing FOO! comics to our
   attention and smuggling one of the IBM hacker underground's own baby
   jargon files out to us. Thanks also to Maarten Litmaath for generously
   allowing the inclusion of the ASCII pronunciation guide he formerly
   maintained. And our gratitude to Marc Weiser of XEROX PARC
   <Marc_Weiser.PARC@xerox.com> for securing us permission to quote from
   PARC's own jargon lexicon and shipping us a copy.

   It is a particular pleasure to acknowledge the major contributions of
   Mark Brader and Steve Summit <scs@eskimo.com> to the File and Dictionary;
   they have read and reread many drafts, checked facts, caught typos,
   submitted an amazing number of thoughtful comments, and done yeoman
   service in catching typos and minor usage bobbles. Their rare combination
   of enthusiasm, persistence, wide-ranging technical knowledge, and
   precisionism in matters of language has been of invaluable help. Indeed,
   the sustained volume and quality of Mr. Brader's input over a decade and
   several different editions has only allowed him to escape co-editor
   credit by the slimmest of margins.

   Finally, George V. Reilly <georgere@microsoft.com> helped with TeX arcana
   and painstakingly proofread some 2.7 and 2.8 versions, and Eric Tiedemann
   <est@thyrsus.com> contributed sage advice throughout on rhetoric,
   amphigory, and philosophunculism.

Chapter 4. Jargon Construction

   Table of Contents

   Verb Doubling

   Soundalike Slang

   The -P Convention

   Overgeneralization

   Spoken inarticulations

   Anthropomorphization

   Comparatives

   There are some standard methods of jargonification that became
   established quite early (i.e., before 1970), spreading from such sources
   as the Tech Model Railroad Club, the PDP-1 SPACEWAR hackers, and John
   McCarthy's original crew of LISPers. These include verb doubling,
   soundalike slang, the `-P' convention, overgeneralization, spoken
   inarticulations, and anthropomorphization. Each is discussed below. We
   also cover the standard comparatives for design quality.

   Of these six, verb doubling, overgeneralization, anthropomorphization,
   and (especially) spoken inarticulations have become quite general; but
   soundalike slang is still largely confined to MIT and other large
   universities, and the `-P' convention is found only where LISPers
   flourish.

Verb Doubling

   A standard construction in English is to double a verb and use it as an
   exclamation, such as "Bang, bang!" or "Quack, quack!". Most of these are
   names for noises. Hackers also double verbs as a concise, sometimes
   sarcastic comment on what the implied subject does. Also, a doubled verb
   is often used to terminate a conversation, in the process remarking on
   the current state of affairs or what the speaker intends to do next.
   Typical examples involve {win}, {lose}, {hack}, {flame}, {barf}, {chomp}:

     "The disk heads just crashed." "Lose, lose."

     "Mostly he talked about his latest crock. Flame, flame."

     "Boy, what a bagbiter! Chomp, chomp!

   Some verb-doubled constructions have special meanings not immediately
   obvious from the verb. These have their own listings in the lexicon.

   The {Usenet} culture has one tripling convention unrelated to this; the
   names of `joke' topic groups often have a tripled last element. The first
   and paradigmatic example was alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork (a Muppet
   Show reference); other infamous examples have included:

     o alt.french.captain.borg.borg.borg

     o alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die

     o comp.unix.internals.system.calls.brk.brk.brk

     o sci.physics.edward.teller.boom.boom.boom

     o alt.sadistic.dentists.drill.drill.drill

   These two traditions fuse in the newsgroup
   alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb, devoted to humor based on deliberately
   confounding parts of speech. Several observers have noted that the
   contents of this group is excellently representative of the peculiarities
   of hacker humor.

Soundalike Slang

   Hackers will often make rhymes or puns in order to convert an ordinary
   word or phrase into something more interesting. It is considered
   particularly {flavorful} if the phrase is bent so as to include some
   other jargon word; thus the computer hobbyist magazine Dr. Dobb's Journal
   is almost always referred to among hackers as `Dr. Frob's Journal' or
   simply `Dr. Frob's'. Terms of this kind that have been in fairly wide use
   include names for newspapers:

     o Boston Herald -> Horrid (or Harried)

     o Boston Globe -> Boston Glob

     o Houston (or San Francisco) Chronicle -> the Crocknicle (or the
       Comical)

     o New York Times -> New York Slime

     o Wall Street Journal -> Wall Street Urinal

   However, terms like these are often made up on the spur of the moment.
   Standard examples include:

     o Data General -> Dirty Genitals

     o IBM 360 -> IBM Three-Sickly

     o Government Property -- Do Not Duplicate (on keys) -> Government
       Duplicity -- Do Not Propagate

     o for historical reasons -> for hysterical raisins

     o Margaret Jacks Hall (the CS building at Stanford) -> Marginal Hacks
       Hall

     o Microsoft -> Microsloth

     o Internet Explorer -> Internet Exploiter

     o FrontPage -> AffrontPage

     o VB.NET -> VB Nyet

     o Lotus Notes -> Lotus Bloats

     o Microsoft Outlook -> Microsoft Outhouse

     o Linux -> Linsux

     o FreeBSD -> FreeLSD

     o C# -> C Flat

   This is not really similar to the Cockney rhyming slang it has been
   compared to in the past, because Cockney substitutions are opaque whereas
   hacker punning jargon is intentionally transparent.

The -P Convention

   Turning a word into a question by appending the syllable `P'; from the
   LISP convention of appending the letter `P' to denote a predicate (a
   boolean-valued function). The question should expect a yes/no answer,
   though it needn't. (See {T} and {NIL}.)

       At dinnertime:
             Q: "Foodp?"
             A: "Yeah, I'm pretty hungry." or "T!"

       At any time:
             Q: "State-of-the-world-P?"
             A: (Straight) "I'm about to go home."
             A: (Humorous) "Yes, the world has a state."

       On the phone to Florida:
             Q: "State-p Florida?"
             A: "Been reading JARGON.TXT again, eh?"

   [Once, when we were at a Chinese restaurant, Bill Gosper wanted to know
   whether someone would like to share with him a two-person-sized bowl of
   soup. His inquiry was: "Split-p soup?" -- GLS]

Overgeneralization

   A very conspicuous feature of jargon is the frequency with which
   techspeak items such as names of program tools, command language
   primitives, and even assembler opcodes are applied to contexts outside of
   computing wherever hackers find amusing analogies to them. Thus (to cite
   one of the best-known examples) Unix hackers often {grep} for things
   rather than searching for them. Many of the lexicon entries are
   generalizations of exactly this kind.

   Hackers enjoy overgeneralization on the grammatical level as well. Many
   hackers love to take various words and add the wrong endings to them to
   make nouns and verbs, often by extending a standard rule to nonuniform
   cases (or vice versa). For example, because porous -> porosity and
   generous -> generosity, hackers happily generalize:

     o mysterious -> mysteriosity

     o ferrous -> ferrosity

     o obvious -> obviosity

     o dubious -> dubiosity

   Another class of common construction uses the suffix `-itude' to abstract
   a quality from just about any adjective or noun. This usage arises
   especially in cases where mainstream English would perform the same
   abstraction through `-iness' or `-ingness'. Thus:

     o win -> winnitude (a common exclamation)

     o loss -> lossitude

     o cruft -> cruftitude

     o lame -> lameitude

   Some hackers cheerfully reverse this transformation; they argue, for
   example, that the horizontal degree lines on a globe ought to be called
   `lats' -- after all, they're measuring latitude!

   Also, note that all nouns can be verbed. E.g.: "All nouns can be verbed",
   "I'll mouse it up", "Hang on while I clipboard it over", "I'm grepping
   the files". English as a whole is already heading in this direction
   (towards pure-positional grammar like Chinese); hackers are simply a bit
   ahead of the curve.

   The suffix "-full" can also be applied in generalized and fanciful ways,
   as in "As soon as you have more than one cachefull of data, the system
   starts thrashing," or "As soon as I have more than one headfull of ideas,
   I start writing it all down." A common use is "screenfull", meaning the
   amount of text that will fit on one screen, usually in text mode where
   you have no choice as to character size. Another common form is
   "bufferfull".

   However, hackers avoid the unimaginative verb-making techniques
   characteristic of marketroids, bean-counters, and the Pentagon; a hacker
   would never, for example, `productize', `prioritize', or `securitize'
   things. Hackers have a strong aversion to bureaucratic bafflegab and
   regard those who use it with contempt.

   Similarly, all verbs can be nouned. This is only a slight
   overgeneralization in modern English; in hackish, however, it is good
   form to mark them in some standard nonstandard way. Thus:

     o win -> winnitude, winnage

     o disgust -> disgustitude

     o hack -> hackification

   Further, note the prevalence of certain kinds of nonstandard plural
   forms. Some of these go back quite a ways; the TMRC Dictionary includes
   an entry which implies that the plural of `mouse' is {meeces}, and notes
   that the defined plural of `caboose' is `cabeese'. This latter has
   apparently been standard (or at least a standard joke) among railfans
   (railroad enthusiasts) for many years

   On a similarly Anglo-Saxon note, almost anything ending in `x' may form
   plurals in `-xen' (see {VAXen} and {boxen} in the main text). Even words
   ending in phonetic /k/ alone are sometimes treated this way; e.g.,
   `soxen' for a bunch of socks. Other funny plurals are the Hebrew-style
   `frobbotzim' for the plural of `frobbozz' (see {frobnitz}) and `Unices'
   and `Twenices' (rather than `Unixes' and `Twenexes'; see {Unix}, {TWENEX}
   in main text). But note that `Twenexen' was never used, and `Unixen' was
   seldom sighted in the wild until the year 2000, thirty years after it
   might logically have come into use; it has been suggested that this is
   because `-ix' and `-ex' are Latin singular endings that attract a
   Latinate plural. Among Perl hackers it is reported that `comma' and
   `semicolon' pluralize as `commata' and `semicola' respectively. Finally,
   it has been suggested to general approval that the plural of `mongoose'
   ought to be `polygoose'.

   The pattern here, as with other hackish grammatical quirks, is
   generalization of an inflectional rule that in English is either an
   import or a fossil (such as the Hebrew plural ending `-im', or the
   Anglo-Saxon plural suffix `-en') to cases where it isn't normally
   considered to apply.

   This is not `poor grammar', as hackers are generally quite well aware of
   what they are doing when they distort the language. It is grammatical
   creativity, a form of playfulness. It is done not to impress but to
   amuse, and never at the expense of clarity.

Spoken inarticulations

   Words such as `mumble', `sigh', and `groan' are spoken in places where
   their referent might more naturally be used. It has been suggested that
   this usage derives from the impossibility of representing such noises on
   a comm link or in electronic mail, MUDs, and IRC channels (interestingly,
   the same sorts of constructions have been showing up with increasing
   frequency in comic strips). Another expression sometimes heard is
   "Complain!", meaning "I have a complaint!"

Anthropomorphization

   Semantically, one rich source of jargon constructions is the hackish
   tendency to anthropomorphize hardware and software. English purists and
   academic computer scientists frequently look down on others for
   anthropomorphizing hardware and software, considering this sort of
   behavior to be characteristic of naive misunderstanding. But most hackers
   anthropomorphize freely, frequently describing program behavior in terms
   of wants and desires.

   Thus it is common to hear hardware or software talked about as though it
   has homunculi talking to each other inside it, with intentions and
   desires. Thus, one hears "The protocol handler got confused", or that
   programs "are trying" to do things, or one may say of a routine that "its
   goal in life is to X". Or: "You can't run those two cards on the same
   bus; they fight over interrupt 9."

   One even hears explanations like "... and its poor little brain couldn't
   understand X, and it died." Sometimes modelling things this way actually
   seems to make them easier to understand, perhaps because it's
   instinctively natural to think of anything with a really complex
   behavioral repertoire as `like a person' rather than `like a thing'.

   At first glance, to anyone who understands how these programs actually
   work, this seems like an absurdity. As hackers are among the people who
   know best how these phenomena work, it seems odd that they would use
   language that seems to ascribe consciousness to them. The mind-set behind
   this tendency thus demands examination.

   The key to understanding this kind of usage is that it isn't done in a
   naive way; hackers don't personalize their stuff in the sense of feeling
   empathy with it, nor do they mystically believe that the things they work
   on every day are `alive'. To the contrary: hackers who anthropomorphize
   are expressing not a vitalistic view of program behavior but a
   mechanistic view of human behavior.

   Almost all hackers subscribe to the mechanistic, materialistic ontology
   of science (this is in practice true even of most of the minority with
   contrary religious theories). In this view, people are biological
   machines -- consciousness is an interesting and valuable epiphenomenon,
   but mind is implemented in machinery which is not fundamentally different
   in information-processing capacity from computers.

   Hackers tend to take this a step further and argue that the difference
   between a substrate of CHON atoms and water and a substrate of silicon
   and metal is a relatively unimportant one; what matters, what makes a
   thing `alive', is information and richness of pattern. This is animism
   from the flip side; it implies that humans and computers and dolphins and
   rocks are all machines exhibiting a continuum of modes of `consciousness'
   according to their information-processing capacity.

   Because hackers accept that a human machine can have intentions, it is
   therefore easy for them to ascribe consciousness and intention to other
   complex patterned systems such as computers. If consciousness is
   mechanical, it is neither more or less absurd to say that "The program
   wants to go into an infinite loop" than it is to say that "I want to go
   eat some chocolate" -- and even defensible to say that "The stone, once
   dropped, wants to move towards the center of the earth".

   This viewpoint has respectable company in academic philosophy. Daniel
   Dennett organizes explanations of behavior using three stances: the
   "physical stance" (thing-to-be-explained as a physical object), the
   "design stance" (thing-to-be-explained as an artifact), and the
   "intentional stance" (thing-to-be-explained as an agent with desires and
   intentions). Which stances are appropriate is a matter not of abstract
   truth but of utility. Hackers typically view simple programs from the
   design stance, but more complex ones are often modelled using the
   intentional stance.

   It has also been argued that the anthropomorphization of software and
   hardware reflects a blurring of the boundary between the programmer and
   his artifacts -- the human qualities belong to the programmer and the
   code merely expresses these qualities as his/her proxy. On this view, a
   hacker saying a piece of code `got confused' is really saying that he (or
   she) was confused about exactly what he wanted the computer to do, the
   code naturally incorporated this confusion, and the code expressed the
   programmer's confusion when executed by crashing or otherwise
   misbehaving.

   Note that by displacing from "I got confused" to "It got confused", the
   programmer is not avoiding responsibility, but rather getting some
   analytical distance in order to be able to consider the bug
   dispassionately.

   It has also been suggested that anthropomorphizing complex systems is
   actually an expression of humility, a way of acknowleging that simple
   rules we do understand (or that we invented) can lead to emergent
   behavioral complexities that we don't completely understand.

   All three explanations accurately model hacker psychology, and should be
   considered complementary rather than competing.

Comparatives

   Finally, note that many words in hacker jargon have to be understood as
   members of sets of comparatives. This is especially true of the
   adjectives and nouns used to describe the beauty and functional quality
   of code. Here is an approximately correct spectrum:

   monstrosity brain-damage screw bug lose misfeature crock kluge hack win
   feature elegance perfection

   The last is spoken of as a mythical absolute, approximated but never
   actually attained. Another similar scale is used for describing the
   reliability of software:

   broken flaky dodgy fragile brittle solid robust bulletproof armor-plated

   Note, however, that `dodgy' is primarily Commonwealth Hackish (it is rare
   in the U.S., where `squirrelly' may be more common) and may change places
   with `flaky' for some speakers.

   Coinages for describing {lossage} seem to call forth the very finest in
   hackish linguistic inventiveness; it has been truly said that hackers
   have even more words for equipment failures than Yiddish has for
   obnoxious people.

Chapter 5. Hacker Writing Style

   We've already seen that hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing
   grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more general fondness for
   form-versus-content language jokes that shows up particularly in hackish
   writing. One correspondent reports that he consistently misspells `wrong'
   as `worng'. Others have been known to criticize glitches in Jargon File
   drafts by observing (in the mode of Douglas Hofstadter) "This sentence no
   verb", or "Too repetetetive", or "Bad speling", or "Incorrectspa cing."
   Similarly, intentional spoonerisms are often made of phrases relating to
   confusion or things that are confusing; `dain bramage' for `brain damage'
   is perhaps the most common (similarly, a hacker would be likely to write
   "Excuse me, I'm cixelsyd today", rather than "I'm dyslexic today"). This
   sort of thing is quite common and is enjoyed by all concerned.

   Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much
   to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if "Jim is going" is a phrase,
   and so are "Bill runs" and "Spock groks", then hackers generally prefer
   to write: "Jim is going", "Bill runs", and "Spock groks". This is
   incorrect according to standard American usage (which would put the
   continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes);
   however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings
   with characters that don't belong in them. Given the sorts of examples
   that can come up in discussions of programming, American-style quoting
   can even be grossly misleading. When communicating command lines or small
   pieces of code, extra characters can be a real pain in the neck.

   Consider, for example, a sentence in a {vi} tutorial that looks like
   this:

     Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd".

   Standard usage would make this

     Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd."

   but that would be very bad -- because the reader would be prone to type
   the string d-d-dot, and it happens that in vi(1), dot repeats the last
   command accepted. The net result would be to delete two lines!

   The Jargon File follows hackish usage throughout.

   Interestingly, a similar style is now preferred practice in Great
   Britain, though the older style (which became established for
   typographical reasons having to do with the aesthetics of comma and
   quotes in typeset text) is still accepted there. Hart's Rules and the
   Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors call the hacker-like style
   `new' or `logical' quoting. This returns British English to the style
   many other languages (including Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan, and
   German) have been using all along.

   Another hacker habit is a tendency to distinguish between `scare' quotes
   and `speech' quotes; that is, to use British-style single quotes for
   marking and reserve American-style double quotes for actual reports of
   speech or text included from elsewhere. Interestingly, some authorities
   describe this as correct general usage, but mainstream American English
   has gone to using double-quotes indiscriminately enough that hacker usage
   appears marked [and, in fact, I thought this was a personal quirk of mine
   until I checked with Usenet --ESR] One further permutation that is
   definitely not standard is a hackish tendency to do marking quotes by
   using apostrophes (single quotes) in pairs; that is, 'like this'. This is
   modelled on string and character literal syntax in some programming
   languages (reinforced by the fact that many character-only terminals
   display the apostrophe in typewriter style, as a vertical single quote).

   One quirk that shows up frequently in the {email} style of Unix hackers
   in particular is a tendency for some things that are normally
   all-lowercase (including usernames and the names of commands and C
   routines) to remain uncapitalized even when they occur at the beginning
   of sentences. It is clear that, for many hackers, the case of such
   identifiers becomes a part of their internal representation (the
   `spelling') and cannot be overridden without mental effort (an
   appropriate reflex because Unix and C both distinguish cases and
   confusing them can lead to {lossage}). A way of escaping this dilemma is
   simply to avoid using these constructions at the beginning of sentences.

   There seems to be a meta-rule behind these nonstandard hackerisms to the
   effect that precision of expression is more important than conformance to
   traditional rules; where the latter create ambiguity or lose information
   they can be discarded without a second thought. It is notable in this
   respect that other hackish inventions (for example, in vocabulary) also
   tend to carry very precise shades of meaning even when constructed to
   appear slangy and loose. In fact, to a hacker, the contrast between
   `loose' form and `tight' content in jargon is a substantial part of its
   humor!

   Hackers have also developed a number of punctuation and emphasis
   conventions adapted to single-font all-ASCII communications links, and
   these are occasionally carried over into written documents even when
   normal means of font changes, underlining, and the like are available.

   One of these is that TEXT IN ALL CAPS IS INTERPRETED AS `LOUD', and this
   becomes such an ingrained synesthetic reflex that a person who goes to
   caps-lock while in {talk mode} may be asked to "stop shouting, please,
   you're hurting my ears!".

   Also, it is common to use bracketing with unusual characters to signify
   emphasis. The asterisk is most common, as in "What the *hell*?" even
   though this interferes with the common use of the asterisk suffix as a
   footnote mark. The underscore is also common, suggesting underlining
   (this is particularly common with book titles; for example, "It is often
   alleged that Joe Haldeman wrote _The_Forever_War_ as a rebuttal to Robert
   Heinlein's earlier novel of the future military, _Starship_Troopers_.").
   Other forms exemplified by "=hell=", "\hell/", or "/hell/" are
   occasionally seen (it's claimed that in the last example the first slash
   pushes the letters over to the right to make them italic, and the second
   keeps them from falling over). On FidoNet, you might see #bright# and
   ^dark^ text, which was actually interpreted by some reader software.
   Finally, words may also be emphasized L I K E T H I S, or by a series of
   carets (^) under them on the next line of the text.

   There is a semantic difference between *emphasis like this* (which
   emphasizes the phrase as a whole), and *emphasis* *like* *this* (which
   suggests the writer speaking very slowly and distinctly, as if to a very
   young child or a mentally impaired person). Bracketing a word with the
   `*' character may also indicate that the writer wishes readers to
   consider that an action is taking place or that a sound is being made.
   Examples: *bang*, *hic*, *ring*, *grin*, *kick*, *stomp*, *mumble*.

   One might also see the above sound effects as <bang>, <hic>, <ring>,
   <grin>, <kick>, <stomp>, <mumble>. This use of angle brackets to mark
   their contents originally derives from conventions used in {BNF}, but
   since about 1993 it has been reinforced by the HTML markup used on the
   World Wide Web.

   Angle-bracket enclosure is also used to indicate that a term stands for
   some {random} member of a larger class (this is straight from {BNF}).
   Examples like the following are common:

     So this <ethnic> walks into a bar one day...

   There is also an accepted convention for `writing under erasure'; the
   text>

     Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman, he's visiting from corporate HQ.

   reads roughly as "Be nice to this fool, er, gentleman...", with irony
   emphasized. The digraph ^H is often used as a print representation for a
   backspace, and was actually very visible on old-style printing terminals.
   As the text was being composed the characters would be echoed and printed
   immediately, and when a correction was made the backspace keystrokes
   would be echoed with the string `^H'. Of course, the final composed text
   would have no trace of the backspace characters (or the original
   erroneous text).

   Accidental writing under erasure occurs when using the Unix talk program
   to chat interactively to another user. On a PC-style keyboard most users
   instinctively press the backspace key to delete mistakes, but this may
   not achieve the desired effect, and merely displays a ^H symbol. The user
   typically presses backspace a few times before their brain realises the
   problem -- especially likely if the user is a touch-typist -- and since
   each character is transmitted as soon as it is typed, Freudian slips and
   other inadvertent admissions are (barring network delays) clearly visible
   for the other user to see.

   Deliberate use of ^H for writing under erasure parallels (and may have
   been influenced by) the ironic use of `slashouts' in science-fiction
   fanzines.

   A related habit uses editor commands to signify corrections to previous
   text. This custom faded in email as more mailers got good editing
   capabilities, only to take on new life on IRCs and other line-based chat
   systems.

   charlie: I've seen that term used on alt.foobar often.
   lisa: Send it to Erik for the File.
   lisa: Oops...s/Erik/Eric/.

   The s/Erik/Eric/ says "change Erik to Eric in the preceding". This syntax
   is borrowed from the Unix editing tools ed and sed, but is widely
   recognized by non-Unix hackers as well.

   In a formula, * signifies multiplication but two asterisks in a row are a
   shorthand for exponentiation (this derives from FORTRAN, and is also used
   in Ada). Thus, one might write 2 ** 8 = 256.

   Another notation for exponentiation one sees more frequently uses the
   caret (^, ASCII 1011110); one might write instead 2^8 = 256. This goes
   all the way back to Algol-60, which used the archaic ASCII `up-arrow'
   that later became the caret; this was picked up by Kemeny and Kurtz's
   original BASIC, which in turn influenced the design of the bc(1) and
   dc(1) Unix tools, which have probably done most to reinforce the
   convention on Usenet. (TeX math mode also uses ^ for exponention.) The
   notation is mildly confusing to C programmers, because ^ means bitwise
   exclusive-or in C. Despite this, it was favored 3:1 over ** in a
   late-1990 snapshot of Usenet. It is used consistently in this lexicon.

   In on-line exchanges, hackers tend to use decimal forms or improper
   fractions (`3.5' or `7/2') rather than `typewriter style' mixed fractions
   (`3-1/2'). The major motive here is probably that the former are more
   readable in a monospaced font, together with a desire to avoid the risk
   that the latter might be read as `three minus one-half'. The decimal form
   is definitely preferred for fractions with a terminating decimal
   representation; there may be some cultural influence here from the high
   status of scientific notation.

   Another on-line convention, used especially for very large or very small
   numbers, is taken from C (which derived it from FORTRAN). This is a form
   of `scientific notation' using `e' to replace `*10^'; for example, one
   year is about 3e7 (that is, 3  10 ^7) seconds long.

   The tilde (~) is commonly used in a quantifying sense of `approximately';
   that is, ~50 means `about fifty'.

   On Usenet and in the {MUD} world, common C boolean, logical, and
   relational operators such as |, &, ||, &&, !, ==, !=, >, <, >=, and <=
   are often combined with English. The Pascal not-equals, <>, is also
   recognized, and occasionally one sees /= for not-equals (from Ada, Common
   Lisp, and Fortran 90). The use of prefix `!' as a loose synonym for
   `not-' or `no-' is particularly common; thus, `!clue' is read `no-clue'
   or `clueless'.

   A related practice borrows syntax from preferred programming languages to
   express ideas in a natural-language text. For example, one might see the
   following:

   In <jrh578689@thudpucker.com> J. R. Hacker wrote:
   <I recently had occasion to field-test the Snafu
   <Systems 2300E adaptive gonkulator.  The price was
   <right, and the racing stripe on the case looked
   <kind of neat, but its performance left something
   <to be desired.

   Yeah, I tried one out too.

   #ifdef FLAME
   Hasn't anyone told those idiots that you can't get
   decent bogon suppression with AFJ filters at today's
   net volumes?
   #endif /* FLAME */

   I guess they figured the price premium for true
   frame-based semantic analysis was too high.
   Unfortunately, it's also the only workable approach.
   I wouldn't recommend purchase of this product unless
   you're on a *very* tight budget.

   #include <disclaimer.h>
   --
                    == Frank Foonly (Fubarco Systems)

   In the above, the #ifdef/#endif pair is a conditional compilation syntax
   from C; here, it implies that the text between (which is a {flame})
   should be evaluated only if you have turned on (or defined on) the switch
   FLAME. The #include at the end is C for "include standard disclaimer
   here"; the `standard disclaimer' is understood to read, roughly, "These
   are my personal opinions and not to be construed as the official position
   of my employer."

   The top section in the example, with < at the left margin, is an example
   of an inclusion convention we'll discuss below.

   More recently, following on the huge popularity of the World Wide Web,
   pseudo-HTML markup has become popular for similar purposes:

   <flame>
   Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!
   </flame>

   You'll even see this with an HTML-style attribute modifier:

   <flame intensity="100%">
   You seem well-suited for a career in government.
   </flame>

   Another recent (late 1990s) construction now common on Usenet seems to be
   borrowed from Unix shell syntax or Perl. It consists of using a dollar
   sign before an uppercased form of a word or acronym to suggest any
   {random} member of the class indicated by the word. Thus: `$PHB' means
   "any random member of the class `Pointy-Haired Boss'".

   Hackers also mix letters and numbers more freely than in mainstream
   usage. In particular, it is good hackish style to write a digit sequence
   where you intend the reader to understand the text string that names that
   number in English. So, hackers prefer to write `1970s' rather than
   `nineteen-seventies' or `1970's' (the latter looks like a possessive).

   It should also be noted that hackers exhibit much less reluctance to use
   multiply-nested parentheses than is normal in English. Part of this is
   almost certainly due to influence from LISP (which uses deeply nested
   parentheses (like this (see?)) in its syntax a lot), but it has also been
   suggested that a more basic hacker trait of enjoying playing with
   complexity and pushing systems to their limits is in operation.

   Finally, it is worth mentioning that many studies of on-line
   communication have shown that electronic links have a de-inhibiting
   effect on people. Deprived of the body-language cues through which
   emotional state is expressed, people tend to forget everything about
   other parties except what is presented over that ASCII link. This has
   both good and bad effects. A good one is that it encourages honesty and
   tends to break down hierarchical authority relationships; a bad one is
   that it may encourage depersonalization and gratuitous rudeness. Perhaps
   in response to this, experienced netters often display a sort of
   conscious formal politesse in their writing that has passed out of
   fashion in other spoken and written media (for example, the phrase "Well
   said, sir!" is not uncommon).

   Many introverted hackers who are next to inarticulate in person
   communicate with considerable fluency over the net, perhaps precisely
   because they can forget on an unconscious level that they are dealing
   with people and thus don't feel stressed and anxious as they would face
   to face.

   Though it is considered gauche to publicly criticize posters for poor
   spelling or grammar, the network places a premium on literacy and clarity
   of expression. It may well be that future historians of literature will
   see in it a revival of the great tradition of personal letters as art.

Chapter 6. Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions

   One area where conventions for on-line writing are still in some flux is
   the marking of included material from earlier messages -- what would be
   called `block quotations' in ordinary English. From the usual typographic
   convention employed for these (smaller font at an extra indent), there
   derived a practice of included text being indented by one ASCII TAB
   (0001001) character, which under Unix and many other environments gives
   the appearance of an 8-space indent.

   Early mail and netnews readers had no facility for including messages
   this way, so people had to paste in copy manually. BSD Mail(1) was the
   first message agent to support inclusion, and early Usenetters emulated
   its style. But the TAB character tended to push included text too far to
   the right (especially in multiply nested inclusions), leading to ugly
   wraparounds. After a brief period of confusion (during which an inclusion
   leader consisting of three or four spaces became established in EMACS and
   a few mailers), the use of leading > or > became standard, perhaps owing
   to its use in ed(1) to display tabs (alternatively, it may derive from
   the > that some early Unix mailers used to quote lines starting with
   "From" in text, so they wouldn't look like the beginnings of new message
   headers). Inclusions within inclusions keep their > leaders, so the
   `nesting level' of a quotation is visually apparent.

   The practice of including text from the parent article when posting a
   followup helped solve what had been a major nuisance on Usenet: the fact
   that articles do not arrive at different sites in the same order.
   Careless posters used to post articles that would begin with, or even
   consist entirely of, "No, that's wrong" or "I agree" or the like. It was
   hard to see who was responding to what. Consequently, around 1984, new
   news-posting software evolved a facility to automatically include the
   text of a previous article, marked with "> " or whatever the poster
   chose. The poster was expected to delete all but the relevant lines. The
   result has been that, now, careless posters post articles containing the
   entire text of a preceding article, followed only by "No, that's wrong"
   or "I agree".

   Many people feel that this cure is worse than the original disease, and
   there soon appeared newsreader software designed to let the reader skip
   over included text if desired. Today, some posting software rejects
   articles containing too high a proportion of lines beginning with `>' --
   but this too has led to undesirable workarounds, such as the deliberate
   inclusion of zero-content filler lines which aren't quoted and thus pull
   the message below the rejection threshold.

   Inclusion practice is still evolving, and disputes over the `correct'
   inclusion style occasionally lead to {holy wars}.

   Most netters view an inclusion as a promise that comment on it will
   immediately follow. The preferred, conversational style looks like this,

        > relevant excerpt 1
        response to excerpt
        > relevant excerpt 2
        response to excerpt
        > relevant excerpt 3
        response to excerpt

   or for short messages like this:

        > entire message
        response to message

   Thanks to poor design of some PC-based mail agents (notably Microsoft
   Outlook and Outlook Express), one will occasionally see the entire quoted
   message after the response, like this

        response to message
        > entire message

   but this practice is strongly deprecated.

   Though > remains the standard inclusion leader, | is occasionally used
   for extended quotations where original variations in indentation are
   being retained (one mailer even combines these and uses |>). One also
   sees different styles of quoting a number of authors in the same message:
   one (deprecated because it loses information) uses a leader of > for
   everyone, another (the most common) is > > > > , > > > , etc. (or >>>> ,
   >>>, etc., depending on line length and nesting depth) reflecting the
   original order of messages, and yet another is to use a different
   citation leader for each author, say > , : , | , @ (preserving nesting so
   that the inclusion order of messages is still apparent, or tagging the
   inclusions with authors' names). Yet another style is to use each
   poster's initials (or login name) as a citation leader for that poster.

   Occasionally one sees a # leader used for quotations from authoritative
   sources such as standards documents; the intended allusion is to the root
   prompt (the special Unix command prompt issued when one is running as the
   privileged super-user).

Chapter 7. Hacker Speech Style

   Hackish speech generally features extremely precise diction, careful word
   choice, a relatively large working vocabulary, and relatively little use
   of contractions or street slang. Dry humor, irony, puns, and a mildly
   flippant attitude are highly valued -- but an underlying seriousness and
   intelligence are essential. One should use just enough jargon to
   communicate precisely and identify oneself as a member of the culture;
   overuse of jargon or a breathless, excessively gung-ho attitude is
   considered tacky and the mark of a loser.

   This speech style is a variety of the precisionist English normally
   spoken by scientists, design engineers, and academics in technical
   fields. In contrast with the methods of jargon construction, it is fairly
   constant throughout hackerdom.

   It has been observed that many hackers are confused by negative questions
   -- or, at least, that the people to whom they are talking are often
   confused by the sense of their answers. The problem is that they have
   done so much programming that distinguishes between

   if (going) ...

   and

   if (!going) ...

   that when they parse the question "Aren't you going?" it may seem to be
   asking the opposite question from "Are you going?", and so to merit an
   answer in the opposite sense. This confuses English-speaking non-hackers
   because they were taught to answer as though the negative part weren't
   there. In some other languages (including Russian, Chinese, and Japanese)
   the hackish interpretation is standard and the problem wouldn't arise.
   Hackers often find themselves wishing for a word like French `si', German
   `doch', or Dutch `jawel' -- a word with which one could unambiguously
   answer `yes' to a negative question. (See also {mu})

   For similar reasons, English-speaking hackers almost never use double
   negatives, even if they live in a region where colloquial usage allows
   them. The thought of uttering something that logically ought to be an
   affirmative knowing it will be misparsed as a negative tends to disturb
   them.

   In a related vein, hackers sometimes make a game of answering questions
   containing logical connectives with a strictly literal rather than
   colloquial interpretation. A non-hacker who is indelicate enough to ask a
   question like "So, are you working on finding that bug now or leaving it
   until later?" is likely to get the perfectly correct answer "Yes!" (that
   is, "Yes, I'm doing it either now or later, and you didn't ask which!").

Chapter 8. International Style

   Although the Jargon File remains primarily a lexicon of hacker usage in
   American English, we have made some effort to get input from abroad.
   Though the hacker-speak of other languages often uses translations of
   jargon from English (often as transmitted to them by earlier Jargon File
   versions!), the local variations are interesting, and knowledge of them
   may be of some use to travelling hackers.

   There are some references herein to `Commonwealth hackish'. These are
   intended to describe some variations in hacker usage as reported in the
   English spoken in Great Britain and the Commonwealth (Canada, Australia,
   India, etc. -- though Canada is heavily influenced by American usage).
   There is also an entry on {Commonwealth Hackish} reporting some general
   phonetic and vocabulary differences from U.S. hackish.

   Hackers in Western Europe and (especially) Scandinavia report that they
   often use a mixture of English and their native languages for technical
   conversation. Occasionally they develop idioms in their English usage
   that are influenced by their native-language styles. Some of these are
   reported here.

   On the other hand, English often gives rise to grammatical and vocabulary
   mutations in the native language. For example, Italian hackers often use
   the nonexistent verbs `scrollare' (to scroll) and `deletare' (to delete)
   rather than native Italian scorrere and cancellare. Similarly, the
   English verb `to hack' has been seen conjugated in Swedish. In German,
   many Unix terms in English are casually declined as if they were German
   verbs -- thus: mount/mounten/gemountet; grep/grepen/gegrept;
   fork/forken/geforkt; core dump/core-dumpen, gecoredumpt. And
   Spanish-speaking hackers use `linkear' (to link), `debugear' (to debug),
   and `lockear' (to lock).

   European hackers report that this happens partly because the English
   terms make finer distinctions than are available in their native
   vocabularies, and partly because deliberate language-crossing makes for
   amusing wordplay.

   A few notes on hackish usages in Russian have been added where they are
   parallel with English idioms and thus comprehensible to English-speakers.

Chapter 9. Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers

   From the early 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local, MS-DOS-based
   bulletin boards developed separately from Internet hackerdom. The BBS
   culture has, as its seamy underside, a stratum of `pirate boards'
   inhabited by {cracker}s, phone phreaks, and {warez d00dz}. These people
   (mostly teenagers running IBM-PC clones from their bedrooms) have
   developed their own characteristic jargon, heavily influenced by
   skateboard lingo and underground-rock slang. While BBS technology
   essentially died out after the {Great Internet Explosion}, the cracker
   culture moved to IRC and other Internet-based network channels and
   maintained a semi-underground existence.

   Though crackers often call themselves `hackers', they aren't (they
   typically have neither significant programming ability, nor Internet
   expertise, nor experience with UNIX or other true multi-user systems).
   Their vocabulary has little overlap with hackerdom's, and hackers regard
   them with varying degrees of contempt. But ten years on the brightest
   crackers tend to become hackers, and sometimes to recall their origins by
   using cracker slang in a marked and heavily ironic way.

   This lexicon covers much of cracker slang (which is often called
   "leet-speak") so the reader will be able to understand both what leaks
   out of the cracker underground and the occasional ironic use by hackers.

   Here is a brief guide to cracker and {warez d00dz} usage:

     o Misspell frequently. The substitutions phone -> fone and freak ->
       phreak are obligatory.

     o Always substitute `z's for `s's. (i.e. "codes" -> "codez"). The
       substitution of `z' for `s' has evolved so that a `z' is now
       systematically put at the end of words to denote an illegal or
       cracking connection. Examples : Appz, passwordz, passez, utilz, MP3z,
       distroz, pornz, sitez, gamez, crackz, serialz, downloadz, FTPz, etc.

     o Type random emphasis characters after a post line (i.e. "Hey
       Dudes!#!$#$!#!$").

     o Use the emphatic `k' prefix ("k-kool", "k-rad", "k-awesome")
       frequently.

     o Abbreviate compulsively ("I got lotsa warez w/ docs").

     o TYPE ALL IN CAPS LOCK, SO IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE YELLING ALL THE TIME.

   The following letter substitutions are common:

       a -> 4
       e -> 3
       f -> ph
       i -> 1 or |
       l -> | or 1
       m -> |\/|
       n -> |\|
       o -> 0
       s -> 5
       t -> 7 or +

   Thus, "elite" comes out "31337" and "all your base are belong to us"
   becomes "4ll y0ur b4s3 4r3 b3l0ng t0 us", Other less common substitutions
   include:

       b -> 8
       c -> ( or k or |< or /<
       d -> <|
       g -> 6 or 9
       h -> |-|
       k -> |< or /<
       p -> |2
       u -> |_|
       v -> / or \/
       w -> // or \/\/
       x -> ><
       y -> '/

   The word "cool" is spelled "kewl" and normally used ironically; when
   crackers really want to praise something they use the prefix "uber" (from
   German) which comes out "ub3r" or even "|_|83r"

   These traits are similar to those of {B1FF}, who originated as a parody
   of naive {BBS} users; also of his latter-day equivalent {Jeff K.}.
   Occasionally, this sort of distortion may be used as heavy sarcasm or
   ironically by a real hacker, as in:

       > I got X Windows running under Linux!

       d00d!  u R an 31337 hax0r

   The words "hax0r" for "hacker" and "sux0r" for "sucks" are the most
   common references; more generally, to mark a term as cracker-speak one
   may add "0r" or "xor". Examples:

       "The nightly build is sux0r today."
       "Gotta go reboot those b0x0rz."
       "Man, I really ought to fix0r my .fetchmailrc."
       "Yeah, well he's a 'leet VMS operat0r now, so he's too good for us."

   The only practice resembling this in native hacker usage is the
   substitution of a dollar sign of `s' in names of products or service felt
   to be excessively expensive, e.g. Compu$erve, Micro$oft.

   For further discussion of the pirate-board subculture, see {lamer},
   {elite}, {leech}, {poser}, {cracker}, and especially {warez d00dz},
   {banner site}, {ratio site}, {leech mode}.

Chapter 10. Pronunciation Guide

   Pronunciation keys are provided in the jargon listings for all entries
   that are neither dictionary words pronounced as in standard English nor
   obvious compounds thereof. Slashes bracket phonetic pronunciations, which
   are to be interpreted using the following conventions:

   Syllables are hyphen-separated, except that an accent or back-accent
   follows each accented syllable (the back-accent marks a secondary accent
   in some words of four or more syllables). If no accent is given, the word
   is pronounced with equal accentuation on all syllables (this is common
   for abbreviations).

   Consonants are pronounced as in American English. The letter `g' is
   always hard (as in "got" rather than "giant"); `ch' is soft ("church"
   rather than "chemist"). The letter `j' is the sound that occurs twice in
   "judge". The letter `s' is always as in "pass", never a z sound. The
   digraph `kh' is the guttural of "loch" or "l'chaim". The digraph `gh' is
   the aspirated g+h of "bughouse" or "ragheap" (rare in English).

   Uppercase letters are pronounced as their English letter names; thus (for
   example) /H-L-L/ is equivalent to /aych el el/. /Z/ may be pronounced
   /zee/ or /zed/ depending on your local dialect.

   Vowels are represented as follows:

   Table 10.1. Vowels

   +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
   | a     | back, that                                                   |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | ah    | father, palm (see note)                                      |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | ar    | far, mark                                                    |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | aw    | flaw, caught                                                 |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | ay    | bake, rain                                                   |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | e     | less, men                                                    |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | ee    | easy, ski                                                    |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | eir   | their, software                                              |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | i     | trip, hit                                                    |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | i:    | life, sky                                                    |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | o     | block, stock (see note)                                      |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | oh    | flow, sew                                                    |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | oo    | loot, through                                                |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | or    | more, door                                                   |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | ow    | out, how                                                     |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | oy    | boy, coin                                                    |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | uh    | but, some                                                    |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | u     | put, foot                                                    |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | y     | yet, young                                                   |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | yoo   | few, chew                                                    |
   |-------+--------------------------------------------------------------|
   | [y]oo | /oo/ with optional fronting as in `news' (/nooz/ or /nyooz/) |
   +----------------------------------------------------------------------+

   The glyph /@/ is used for the `schwa' sound of unstressed or occluded
   vowels.

   The schwa vowel is omitted in syllables containing vocalic r, l, m or n;
   that is, `kitten' and `color' would be rendered /kit'n/ and /kuhl'r/, not
   /kit'@n/ and /kuhl'@r/.

   Note that the above table reflects mainly distinctions found in standard
   American English (that is, the neutral dialect spoken by TV network
   announcers and typical of educated speech in the Upper Midwest, Chicago,
   Minneapolis/St. Paul and Philadelphia). However, we separate /o/ from
   /ah/, which tend to merge in standard American. This may help readers
   accustomed to accents resembling British Received Pronunciation.

   The intent of this scheme is to permit as many readers as possible to map
   the pronunciations into their local dialect by ignoring some subset of
   the distinctions we make. Speakers of British RP, for example, can smash
   terminal /r/ and all unstressed vowels. Speakers of many varieties of
   southern American will automatically map /o/ to /aw/; and so forth.
   (Standard American makes a good reference dialect for this purpose
   because it has crisp consonants and more vowel distinctions than other
   major dialects, and tends to retain distinctions between unstressed
   vowels. It also happens to be what your editor speaks.)

   Entries with a pronunciation of `//' are written-only usages. (No, Unix
   weenies, this does not mean `pronounce like previous pronunciation'!)

Chapter 11. Other Lexicon Conventions

   Entries are sorted in case-blind ASCII collation order (rather than the
   letter-by-letter order ignoring interword spacing common in mainstream
   dictionaries), except that all entries beginning with nonalphabetic
   characters are sorted before A, except that leading dash is ignored. The
   case-blindness is a feature, not a bug.

   Prefix ** is used as linguists do; to mark examples of incorrect usage.

   We follow the `logical' quoting convention described in the Writing Style
   section above. In addition, we reserve double quotes for actual excerpts
   of text or (sometimes invented) speech. Scare quotes (which mark a word
   being used in a nonstandard way), and philosopher's quotes (which turn an
   utterance into the string of letters or words that name it) are both
   rendered with single quotes.

   References such as malloc(3) and patch(1) are to Unix facilities (some of
   which, such as patch(1), are actually open source distributed over
   Usenet). The Unix manuals use foo(n) to refer to item foo in section (n)
   of the manual, where n=1 is utilities, n=2 is system calls, n=3 is C
   library routines, n=6 is games, and n=8 (where present) is system
   administration utilities. Sections 4, 5, and 7 of the manuals have
   changed roles frequently and in any case are not referred to in any of
   the entries.

   Various abbreviations used frequently in the lexicon are summarized here:

   Table 11.1. Abbreviations

   +----------------------------------------------------+
   | abbrev. |               abbreviation               |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | adj.    | adjective                                |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | adv.    | adverb                                   |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | alt.    | alternate                                |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | cav.    | caveat                                   |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | conj.   | conjunction                              |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | esp.    | especially                               |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | excl.   | exclamation                              |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | imp.    | imperative                               |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | interj. | interjection                             |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | n.      | noun                                     |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | obs.    | obsolete                                 |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | pl.     | plural                                   |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | poss.   | possibly                                 |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | pref.   | prefix                                   |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | prob.   | probably                                 |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | prov.   | proverbial                               |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | quant.  | quantifier                               |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | suff.   | suffix                                   |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | syn.    | synonym (or synonymous with)             |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | v.      | verb (may be transitive or intransitive) |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | var.    | variant                                  |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | vi.     | intransitive verb                        |
   |---------+------------------------------------------|
   | vt.     | transitive verb                          |
   +----------------------------------------------------+

   Where alternate spellings or pronunciations are given, alt. separates two
   possibilities with nearly equal distribution, while var. prefixes one
   that is markedly less common than the primary.

   Where a term can be attributed to a particular subculture or is known to
   have originated there, we have tried to so indicate. Here is a list of
   abbreviations used in etymologies:

   Table 11.2. Origins

   +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
   |                      | A technical culture of ham-radio sites using   |
   | Amateur Packet Radio | AX.25 and TCP/IP for wide-area networking and  |
   |                      | BBS systems.                                   |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | Berkeley             | University of California at Berkeley           |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | BBN                  | Bolt, Beranek & Newman                         |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   |                      | the university in England (not the city in     |
   | Cambridge            | Massachusetts where MIT happens to be          |
   |                      | located!)                                      |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | CMU                  | Carnegie-Mellon University                     |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | Commodore            | Commodore Business Machines                    |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | DEC                  | The Digital Equipment Corporation (now HP).    |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | Fairchild            | The Fairchild Instruments Palo Alto            |
   |                      | development group                              |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | FidoNet              | See the FidoNet entry                          |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | IBM                  | International Business Machines                |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   |                      | Massachusetts Institute of Technology; esp.    |
   | MIT                  | the legendary MIT AI Lab culture of roughly    |
   |                      | 1971 to 1983 and its feeder groups, including  |
   |                      | the Tech Model Railroad Club                   |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | NRL                  | Naval Research Laboratories                    |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | NYU                  | New York University                            |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | OED                  | The Oxford English Dictionary                  |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | Purdue               | Purdue University                              |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | SAIL                 | Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory    |
   |                      | (at Stanford University)                       |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   |                      | From Systme International, the name for the   |
   | SI                   | standard abbreviations of metric nomenclature  |
   |                      | used in the sciences                           |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | Stanford             | Stanford University                            |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | Sun                  | Sun Microsystems                               |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   |                      | Some MITisms go back as far as the Tech Model  |
   |                      | Railroad Club (TMRC) at MIT c. 1960. Material  |
   | TMRC                 | marked TMRC is from An Abridged Dictionary of  |
   |                      | the TMRC Language, originally compiled by Pete |
   |                      | Samson in 1959                                 |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | UCLA                 | University of California, Los Angeles          |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | UK                   | the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland,  |
   |                      | Northern Ireland)                              |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | Usenet               | See the Usenet entry                           |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   |                      | Worcester Polytechnic Institute, site of a     |
   | WPI                  | very active community of PDP-10 hackers during |
   |                      | the 1970s                                      |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | WWW                  | The World-Wide-Web.                            |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   |                      | XEROX's Palo Alto Research Center, site of     |
   | XEROX PARC           | much pioneering research in user interface     |
   |                      | design and networking                          |
   |----------------------+------------------------------------------------|
   | Yale                 | Yale University                                |
   +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+

   Other etymology abbreviations such as {Unix} and {PDP-10} refer to
   technical cultures surrounding specific operating systems, processors, or
   other environments. The fact that a term is labelled with any one of
   these abbreviations does not necessarily mean its use is confined to that
   culture. In particular, many terms labelled `MIT' and `Stanford' are in
   quite general use. We have tried to give some indication of the
   distribution of speakers in the usage notes; however, a number of factors
   mentioned in the introduction conspire to make these indications less
   definite than might be desirable.

   A few new definitions attached to entries are marked [proposed]. These
   are usually generalizations suggested by editors or Usenet respondents in
   the process of commenting on previous definitions of those entries. These
   are not represented as established jargon.

Chapter 12. Format for New Entries

   We welcome new jargon, and corrections to or amplifications of existing
   entries. You can improve your submission's chances of being included by
   adding background information on user population and years of currency.
   References to actual usage via URLs and/or Google pointers are
   particularly welcomed.

   All contributions and suggestions about the Jargon File will be
   considered donations to be placed in the public domain as part of this
   File, and may be used in subsequent paper editions. Submissions may be
   edited for accuracy, clarity and concision.

   We are looking to expand the File's range of technical specialties
   covered. There are doubtless rich veins of jargon yet untapped in the
   scientific computing, graphics, and networking hacker communities; also
   in numerical analysis, computer architectures and VLSI design, language
   design, and many other related fields. Send us your jargon!

   We are not interested in straight technical terms explained by textbooks
   or technical dictionaries unless an entry illuminates `underground'
   meanings or aspects not covered by official histories. We are also not
   interested in `joke' entries -- there is a lot of humor in the file but
   it must flow naturally out of the explanations of what hackers do and how
   they think.

   It is OK to submit items of jargon you have originated if they have
   spread to the point of being used by people who are not personally
   acquainted with you. We prefer items to be attested by independent
   submission from two different sites.

   The Jargon File will be regularly maintained and made available for
   browsing on the World Wide Web, and will include a version number. Read
   it, pass it around, contribute -- this is your monument!

                              The Jargon Lexicon

   The Crunchly saga begins here.

   (The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-05-18.)

   The infamous Crunchly cartoons by The Great Quux are woven into the
   lexicon, each next to an appropriate entry. To read them in the sequence
   in which they were written, {chase pointers} from here using the `next
   cartoon' information in the captions. A few don't have next pointers;
   these are vignettes from the 1973 Crunchland tableau spread that
   inaugurated the strip.

   Here is a framed version of the glossary.

   Table of Contents

   Glossary

Glossary

   0

                (TM)

                /dev/null

                /me

                0

                1TBS

                2

                404

                404 compliant

                @-party

   A

                abbrev

                ABEND

                accumulator

                ACK

                Acme

                ad-hockery

                address harvester

                adger

                admin

                ADVENT

                adware

                AFAIK

                AFJ

                AFK

                AI

                AI-complete

                airplane rule

                Alderson loop

                aliasing bug

                Alice and Bob

                All hardware sucks, all software sucks.

                all your base are belong to us

                alpha geek

                alpha particles

                alt

                alt bit

                Aluminum Book

                ambimouseterous

                Amiga

                Amiga Persecution Complex

                amp off

                amper

                and there was much rejoicing

                Angband

                angle brackets

                angry fruit salad

                annoybot

                annoyware

                ANSI standard

                ANSI standard pizza

                anti-idiotarianism

                AOL!

                app

                Archimedes

                arena

                arg

                ARMM

                armor-plated

                asbestos

                asbestos cork award

                asbestos longjohns

                ASCII

                ASCII art

                ASCIIbetical order

                astroturfing

                atomic

                attoparsec

                Aunt Tillie

                AUP

                autobogotiphobia

                autoconfiscate

                automagically

                avatar

                awk

   B

                B1FF

                B5

                back door

                backbone cabal

                backbone site

                backgammon

                background

                backreference

                backronym

                backward combatability

                BAD

                Bad and Wrong

                Bad Thing

                bag on the side

                bagbiter

                bagbiting

                baggy pantsing

                balloonian variable

                bamf

                banana problem

                bandwidth

                bang

                bang on

                bang path

                banner

                banner ad

                banner site

                bar

                bare metal

                barf

                barfmail

                barfulation

                barfulous

                barn

                barney

                baroque

                BASIC

                batbelt

                batch

                bathtub curve

                Batman factor

                baud

                baz

                bazaar

                bboard

                BBS

                BCPL

                BDFL

                beam

                beanie key

                beep

                Befunge

                beige toaster

                bells and whistles

                bells whistles and gongs

                benchmark

                Berkeley Quality Software

                Berzerkeley

                beta

                BFI

                BI

                bible

                BiCapitalization

                biff

                big iron

                Big Red Switch

                Big Room

                big win

                big-endian

                bignum

                bigot

                bikeshedding

                binary four

                bit

                bit bang

                bit bashing

                bit bucket

                bit decay

                bit rot

                bit twiddling

                bit-paired keyboard

                bitblt

                bits

                bitty box

                bixie

                black art

                black hat

                black hole

                black magic

                Black Screen of Death

                blammo

                blargh

                blast

                blat

                bletch

                bletcherous

                blinkenlights

                blit

                blitter

                blivet

                bloatware

                BLOB

                block

                blog

                Bloggs Family

                blogosphere

                blogrolling

                blow an EPROM

                blow away

                blow out

                blow past

                blow up

                BLT

                blue box

                Blue Glue

                blue goo

                Blue Screen of Death

                blue wire

                blurgle

                BNF

                boa

                board

                boat anchor

                bob

                bodge

                BOF

                BOFH

                bogo-sort

                bogometer

                BogoMIPS

                bogon

                bogon filter

                bogon flux

                bogosity

                bogotify

                bogue out

                bogus

                Bohr bug

                boink

                bomb

                bondage-and-discipline language

                bonk/oif

                book titles

                boot

                Borg

                borken

                bot

                bottom feeder

                bottom-post

                bottom-up implementation

                bounce

                bounce message

                boustrophedon

                box

                boxed comments

                boxen

                boxology

                bozotic

                brain dump

                brain fart

                brain-damaged

                brain-dead

                braino

                brainwidth

                bread crumbs

                break

                break-even point

                breath-of-life packet

                breedle

                Breidbart Index

                brick

                bricktext

                bring X to its knees

                brittle

                broadcast storm

                broken

                broken arrow

                broken-ring network

                BrokenWindows

                broket

                Brooks's Law

                brown-paper-bag bug

                browser

                BRS

                brute force

                brute force and ignorance

                BSD

                BSOD

                BUAF

                BUAG

                bubble sort

                bucky bits

                buffer chuck

                buffer overflow

                bug

                bug-compatible

                bug-for-bug compatible

                bug-of-the-month club

                bulletproof

                bullschildt

                bump

                burble

                buried treasure

                burn a CD

                burn-in period

                burst page

                busy-wait

                buzz

                buzzword-compliant

                BWQ

                by hand

                byte

                byte sex

                bytesexual

                Bzzzt! Wrong.

   C

                C

                C Programmer's Disease

                C&C

                C++

                calculator

                Camel Book

                camelCase

                camelCasing

                can't happen

                cancelbot

                Cancelmoose[tm]

                candygrammar

                canonical

                careware

                cargo cult programming

                cascade

                case and paste

                case mod

                casters-up mode

                casting the runes

                cat

                catatonic

                cathedral

                cd tilde

                CDA

                cdr

                chad

                chad box

                chain

                chainik

                channel

                channel hopping

                channel op

                chanop

                char

                charityware

                chase pointers

                chawmp

                check

                cheerfully

                chemist

                Chernobyl chicken

                Chernobyl packet

                chicken head

                chickenboner

                chiclet keyboard

                Chinese Army technique

                choad

                choke

                chomp

                chomper

                CHOP

                Christmas tree

                Christmas tree packet

                chrome

                chug

                Church of the SubGenius

                CI$

                Cinderella Book

                Classic C

                clean

                click of death

                CLM

                clobber

                clock

                clocks

                clone

                clone-and-hack coding

                clover key

                clue-by-four

                clustergeeking

                co-lo

                coaster

                coaster toaster

                COBOL

                COBOL fingers

                cobweb site

                code

                code grinder

                code monkey

                Code of the Geeks

                code police

                codes

                codewalker

                coefficient of X

                cokebottle

                cold boot

                COME FROM

                comm mode

                command key

                comment out

                Commonwealth Hackish

                compact

                compiler jock

                compo

                compress

                Compu$erve

                computer confetti

                computron

                con

                condition out

                condom

                confuser

                connector conspiracy

                cons

                considered harmful

                console

                console jockey

                content-free

                control-C

                control-O

                control-Q

                control-S

                Conway's Law

                cookbook

                cooked mode

                cookie

                cookie bear

                cookie file

                cookie jar

                cookie monster

                copious free time

                copper

                copy protection

                copybroke

                copycenter

                copyleft

                copyparty

                copywronged

                core

                core cancer

                core dump

                core leak

                Core Wars

                cosmic rays

                cough and die

                courier

                cow orker

                cowboy

                CP/M

                CPU Wars

                crack

                crack root

                cracker

                cracking

                crank

                crapplet

                CrApTeX

                crash

                crash and burn

                crawling horror

                CRC handbook

                creationism

                creep

                creeping elegance

                creeping featurism

                creeping featuritis

                cretin

                cretinous

                crippleware

                critical mass

                crlf

                crock

                cross-post

                crossload

                crudware

                cruft

                cruft together

                cruftsmanship

                crufty

                crumb

                crunch

                cryppie

                cthulhic

                CTSS

                cube

                cup holder

                cursor dipped in X

                cuspy

                cut a tape

                cybercrud

                cyberpunk

                cyberspace

                cycle

                cycle of reincarnation

                cycle server

                cypherpunk

                C|N>K

   D

                daemon

                daemon book

                dahmum

                dancing frog

                dangling pointer

                dark-side hacker

                Datamation

                DAU

                Dave the Resurrector

                day mode

                dd

                DDT

                de-rezz

                dead

                dead beef attack

                dead code

                dead-tree version

                DEADBEEF

                deadlock

                deadly embrace

                death code

                Death Square

                Death Star

                Death, X of

                DEC

                DEC Wars

                decay

                deckle

                DED

                deep hack mode

                deep magic

                deep space

                defenestration

                defined as

                deflicted

                dehose

                Dejagoo

                deletia

                deliminator

                delint

                delta

                demented

                demigod

                demo

                demo mode

                demoeffect

                demogroup

                demon

                demon dialer

                demoparty

                demoscene

                dentro

                depeditate

                deprecated

                derf

                deserves to lose

                despew

                dickless workstation

                dictionary flame

                diddle

                die

                die horribly

                diff

                dike

                Dilbert

                ding

                dink

                dinosaur

                dinosaur pen

                dinosaurs mating

                dirtball

                dirty power

                disclaimer

                Discordianism

                disemvowel

                disk farm

                display hack

                dispress

                Dissociated Press

                distribution

                distro

                disusered

                DMZ

                do protocol

                doc

                documentation

                dodgy

                dogcow

                dogfood

                dogpile

                dogwash

                Don't do that then!

                dongle

                dongle-disk

                Doom, X of

                doorstop

                DoS attack

                dot file

                double bucky

                doubled sig

                down

                download

                DP

                DPer

                Dr. Fred Mbogo

                dragon

                Dragon Book

                drain

                dread high-bit disease

                dread questionmark disease

                DRECNET

                driver

                droid

                drone

                drool-proof paper

                drop on the floor

                drop-ins

                drop-outs

                drugged

                drum

                drunk mouse syndrome

                DSW

                dub dub dub

                Duff's device

                dumb terminal

                dumbass attack

                dumbed down

                dump

                dumpster diving

                dusty deck

                DWIM

                dynner

   E

                Easter egg

                Easter egging

                eat flaming death

                EBCDIC

                ECP

                ed

                egg

                egosurf

                eighty-column mind

                El Camino Bignum

                elder days

                elegant

                elephantine

                elevator controller

                elite

                ELIZA effect

                elvish

                EMACS

                email

                emoticon

                EMP

                empire

                engine

                English

                enhancement

                ENQ

                EOD

                EOF

                EOL

                EOU

                epoch

                epsilon

                epsilon squared

                era

                Eric Conspiracy

                Eris

                erotics

                error 33

                eurodemo

                evil

                evil and rude

                Evil Empire

                exa-

                examining the entrails

                EXCH

                excl

                EXE

                exec

                exercise, left as an

                Exon

                Exploder

                exploit

                external memory

                eye candy

                eyeball search

   F

                face time

                factor

                fairings

                fall over

                fall through

                fan

                fandango on core

                FAQ

                FAQ list

                FAQL

                faradize

                farkled

                farm

                fascist

                fat electrons

                fat pipe

                fat-finger

                faulty

                fear and loathing

                feature

                feature creature

                feature creep

                feature key

                feature shock

                featurectomy

                feep

                feeper

                feeping creature

                feeping creaturism

                feetch feetch

                fence

                fencepost error

                fiber-seeking backhoe

                FidoNet

                field circus

                field servoid

                file signature

                filk

                film at 11

                filter

                Finagle's Law

                fine

                finger

                finger trouble

                finger-pointing syndrome

                finn

                firebottle

                firefighting

                firehose syndrome

                firewall code

                firewall machine

                fireworks mode

                firmware

                fish

                FISH queue

                fisking

                FITNR

                fix

                FIXME

                flag

                flag day

                flaky

                flamage

                flame

                flame bait

                flame on

                flame war

                flamer

                flap

                flarp

                flash crowd

                flat

                flat-ASCII

                flat-file

                flatten

                flavor

                flavorful

                flippy

                flood

                flowchart

                flower key

                flush

                flypage

                Flyspeck 3

                flytrap

                FM

                fnord

                FOAF

                FOD

                fold case

                followup

                fontology

                foo

                foobar

                fool

                fool file

                Foonly

                footprint

                for free

                for the rest of us

                for values of

                fora

                foreground

                fork

                fork bomb

                forked

                Formosa's Law

                Fortrash

                fortune cookie

                forum

                fossil

                four-color glossies

                frag

                fragile

                Frankenputer

                fred

                Fred Foobar

                frednet

                free software

                freeware

                freeze

                fried

                frink

                friode

                fritterware

                frob

                frobnicate

                frobnitz

                frog

                frogging

                front end

                frotz

                frotzed

                frowney

                FRS

                fry

                fscking

                FSF

                -fu

                FUBAR

                fuck me harder

                FUD

                FUD wars

                fudge

                fudge factor

                fuel up

                Full Monty

                fum

                functino

                funky

                funny money

                furrfu

   G

                G

                gang bang

                Gang of Four

                garbage collect

                garply

                gas

                Gates's Law

                gawble

                GC

                GCOS

                GECOS

                gedanken

                geef

                geek

                geek code

                geek out

                geekasm

                gen

                gender mender

                General Public Virus

                generate

                Genius From Mars Technique

                gensym

                Get a life!

                Get a real computer!

                GandhiCon

                gib

                GIFs at 11

                gig

                giga-

                GIGO

                gilley

                gillion

                ginger

                GIPS

                GIYF

                glark

                glass

                glass tty

                glassfet

                glitch

                glob

                glork

                glue

                gnarly

                GNU

                gnubie

                GNUMACS

                go flatline

                go gold

                go root

                go-faster stripes

                GoAT

                goat file

                gobble

                Godwin's Law

                Godzillagram

                golden

                golf-ball printer

                gonk

                gonkulator

                gonzo

                Good Thing

                google

                google juice

                gopher

                gopher hole

                gorets

                gorilla arm

                gorp

                GOSMACS

                gotcha

                GPL

                GPV

                gray goo

                gray hat

                Great Internet Explosion

                Great Renaming

                Great Runes

                Great Worm

                great-wall

                green bytes

                green card

                green lightning

                green machine

                Green's Theorem

                greenbar

                grep

                gribble

                grilf

                grind

                grind crank

                gritch

                grok

                gronk

                gronk out

                gronked

                grovel

                grue

                grunge

                gubbish

                Guido

                guiltware

                gumby

                gunch

                gunpowder chicken

                guru

                guru meditation

                gweep

                GWF

   H

                h

                ha ha only serious

                hack

                hack attack

                hack mode

                hack on

                hack together

                hack up

                hack value

                hacked off

                hacked up

                hacker

                hacker ethic

                hacker humor

                Hackers (the movie)

                hacking run

                Hacking X for Y

                Hackintosh

                hackish

                hackishness

                hackitude

                hair

                hairball

                hairy

                HAKMEM

                hakspek

                Halloween Documents

                ham

                hammer

                hamster

                HAND

                hand cruft

                hand-hacking

                hand-roll

                handle

                handshaking

                handwave

                hang

                Hanlon's Razor

                happily

                hard boot

                hardcoded

                hardwarily

                hardwired

                has the X nature

                hash bucket

                hash collision

                hat

                HCF

                heads down

                heartbeat

                heatseeker

                heavy metal

                heavy wizardry

                heavyweight

                Hed Rat

                heisenbug

                hell desk

                hello sailor!

                hello world

                hello, wall!

                hex

                hexadecimal

                hexit

                HHOK

                HHOS

                hidden flag

                high bit

                high moby

                highly

                hing

                hired gun

                hirsute

                HLL

                hoarding

                hog

                hole

                hollised

                holy penguin pee

                holy wars

                home box

                home machine

                home page

                honey pot

                hook

                hop

                horked

                hose

                hosed

                hot chat

                hot spot

                hotlink

                house wizard

                HP-SUX

                HTH

                huff

                hung

                hungry puppy

                hungus

                hyperspace

                hysterical reasons

   I

                I didn't change anything!

                I see no X here.

                I for one welcome our new X overlords

                IANAL

                IBM

                ICBM address

                ice

                ID10T error

                idempotent

                IDP

                If you want X, you know where to find it.

                ifdef out

                IIRC

                ill-behaved

                IMHO

                Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!

                in the extreme

                incantation

                include

                include war

                indent style

                Indent-o-Meter

                index of X

                infant mortality

                infinite

                infinite loop

                Infinite-Monkey Theorem

                infinity

                inflate

                Infocom

                initgame

                insanely great

                installfest

                INTERCAL

                InterCaps

                interesting

                Internet

                Internet Death Penalty

                Internet Exploder

                Internet Exploiter

                interrupt

                interrupts locked out

                intertwingled

                intro

                IRC

                iron

                Iron Age

                iron box

                ironmonger

                ISO standard cup of tea

                ISP

                Itanic

                ITS

                IWBNI

                IYFEG

   J

                J. Random

                J. Random Hacker

                jack in

                jaggies

                Java

                JCL

                JEDR

                Jeff K.

                jello

                Jeopardy-style quoting

                jibble

                jiffy

                job security

                jock

                joe code

                joe-job

                juggling eggs

                juice

                jump off into never-never land

                jupiter

   K

                K

                K&R

                k-

                kahuna

                kamikaze packet

                kangaroo code

                ken

                kernel-of-the-week club

                kgbvax

                KIBO

                kiboze

                kibozo

                kick

                kill file

                killer app

                killer micro

                killer poke

                kilo-

                kilogoogle

                KIPS

                KISS Principle

                kit

                KLB

                klone

                kludge

                kluge

                kluge around

                kluge up

                Knights of the Lambda Calculus

                knobs

                knurd

                Knuth

                koan

                kook

                Kool-Aid

                kremvax

                kyrka

   L

                lag

                lamer

                LAN party

                language lawyer

                languages of choice

                LART

                larval stage

                lase

                laser chicken

                leaf site

                leak

                leaky heap

                leapfrog attack

                leech

                leech mode

                legal

                legalese

                lenna

                LER

                LERP

                let the smoke out

                letterbomb

                lexer

                life

                Life is hard

                light pipe

                lightweight

                like kicking dead whales down the beach

                like nailing jelly to a tree

                line 666

                line eater, the

                line noise

                linearithmic

                link farm

                link rot

                link-dead

                lint

                Lintel

                Linus

                Linux

                lion food

                Lions Book

                LISP

                list-bomb

                lithium lick

                little-endian

                live

                live data

                Live Free Or Die!

                livelock

                liveware

                lobotomy

                locals, the

                locked and loaded

                locked up

                logic bomb

                logical

                loop through

                loose bytes

                lord high fixer

                lose

                lose lose

                loser

                losing

                loss

                lossage

                lossy

                lost in the noise

                lost in the underflow

                lots of MIPS but no I/O

                low-bandwidth

                Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology

                Lumber Cartel

                lunatic fringe

                lurker

                luser

   M

                M

                M$

                macdink

                machoflops

                Macintoy

                Macintrash

                macro

                macro-

                macrology

                maggotbox

                magic

                magic cookie

                magic number

                magic smoke

                mail storm

                mailbomb

                mailing list

                main loop

                mainframe

                mainsleaze

                malware

                man page

                management

                mandelbug

                manged

                mangle

                mangled name

                mangler

                manularity

                marching ants

                marbles

                marginal

                marginally

                marketroid

                Mars

                martian

                massage

                math-out

                Matrix

                mav

                maximum Maytag mode

                McQuary limit

                meatspace

                meatware

                meeces

                meg

                mega-

                megapenny

                MEGO

                meltdown, network

                meme

                meme plague

                memetics

                memory farts

                memory leak

                memory smash

                menuitis

                mess-dos

                meta

                meta bit

                metasyntactic variable

                MFTL

                mickey

                mickey mouse program

                micro-

                MicroDroid

                microfortnight

                microLenat

                microReid

                microserf

                Microsloth Windows

                Microsoft

                micros~1

                middle-endian

                middle-out implementation

                milliLampson

                minor detail

                MIPS

                misbug

                misfeature

                missile address

                MiSTing

                miswart

                MMF

                mobo

                moby

                mockingbird

                mod

                mode

                mode bit

                modulo

                mojibake

                molly-guard

                Mongolian Hordes technique

                monkey up

                monkey, scratch

                monstrosity

                monty

                Moof

                Moore's Law

                moria

                MOTAS

                MOTOS

                MOTSS

                mouse ahead

                mouse belt

                mouse droppings

                mouse elbow

                mouse pusher

                mouso

                MS-DOS

                mu

                MUD

                muddie

                mudhead

                muggle

                Multics

                multitask

                mumblage

                mumble

                munch

                munching

                munching squares

                munchkin

                mundane

                mung

                munge

                Murphy's Law

                music

                mutter

   N

                N

                nadger

                nagware

                nailed to the wall

                nailing jelly

                naive

                naive user

                NAK

                NANA

                nano

                nano-

                nanoacre

                nanobot

                nanocomputer

                nanofortnight

                nanotechnology

                narg

                nasal demons

                nastygram

                Nathan Hale

                nature

                neat hack

                neats vs. scruffies

                neep-neep

                neophilia

                nerd

                nerd knob

                net.-

                net.god

                net.personality

                net.police

                netburp

                netdead

                nethack

                netiquette

                netlag

                netnews

                Netscrape

                netsplit

                netter

                network address

                network meltdown

                New Jersey

                New Testament

                newbie

                newgroup wars

                newline

                NeWS

                newsfroup

                newsgroup

                nick

                nickle

                night mode

                Nightmare File System

                NIL

                Ninety-Ninety Rule

                nipple mouse

                NMI

                no-op

                noddy

                non-optimal solution

                nonlinear

                nontrivial

                not entirely unlike X

                not ready for prime time

                notwork

                NP-

                NSA line eater

                NSP

                nude

                nugry

                nuke

                number-crunching

                numbers

                NUXI problem

                nybble

                nyetwork

   O

                Ob-

                Obfuscated C Contest

                obi-wan error

                Objectionable-C

                obscure

                octal forty

                off the trolley

                off-by-one error

                offline

                ogg

                -oid

                old fart

                Old Testament

                on the gripping hand

                one-banana problem

                one-line fix

                one-liner wars

                ooblick

                OP

                op

                open

                open source

                open switch

                operating system

                operator headspace

                optical diff

                optical grep

                optimism

                Oracle, the

                Orange Book

                oriental food

                orphan

                orphaned i-node

                orthogonal

                OS

                OS/2

                OSS

                OT

                OTOH

                out-of-band

                overclock

                overflow bit

                overrun

                overrun screw

                owned

   P

                P.O.D.

                packet over air

                padded cell

                page in

                page out

                pain in the net

                paper-net

                param

                PARC

                parent message

                parity errors

                Parkinson's Law of Data

                parm

                parse

                Pascal

                PascalCasing

                pastie

                patch

                patch pumpkin

                patch space

                path

                pathological

                payware

                PBD

                PD

                PDP-10

                PDP-11

                PDP-20

                PEBKAC

                peek

                pencil and paper

                Pentagram Pro

                Pentium

                peon

                percent-S

                perf

                perfect programmer syndrome

                Perl

                person of no account

                pessimal

                pessimizing compiler

                peta-

                pffft

                PFY

                phage

                phase

                phase of the moon

                phase-wrapping

                PHB

                phreaker

                phreaking

                pico-

                pig-tail

                pilot error

                ping

                Ping O' Death

                ping storm

                pink contract

                pink wire

                pipe

                pistol

                pixel sort

                pizza box

                plaid screen

                plain-ASCII

                Plan 9

                plan file

                platinum-iridium

                playpen

                playte

                plokta

                plonk

                plug-and-pray

                plugh

                plumbing

                PM

                point release

                point-and-drool interface

                pointy hat

                pointy-haired

                poke

                poll

                polygon pusher

                POM

                ponytail

                pop

                poser

                post

                postcardware

                Postel's Prescription

                posting

                postmaster

                PostScript

                pound on

                power cycle

                power hit

                pr0n

                precedence lossage

                pred

                prepend

                prestidigitization

                pretty pictures

                prettyprint

                pretzel key

                priesthood

                prime time

                print

                printing discussion

                priority interrupt

                profile

                progasm

                proggy

                proglet

                program

                Programmer's Cheer

                programming

                programming fluid

                propeller head

                propeller key

                proprietary

                protocol

                provocative maintenance

                prowler

                pseudo

                pseudoprime

                pseudosuit

                psychedelicware

                psyton

                pubic directory

                puff

                pumpkin holder

                pumpking

                punched card

                punt

                Purple Book

                purple wire

                push

                Python

   Q

                quad

                quadruple bucky

                quantifiers

                quantum bogodynamics

                quarter

                ques

                quick-and-dirty

                quine

                Quirk objection

                quote chapter and verse

                quotient

                quux

                qux

                QWERTY

   R

                rabbit job

                rain dance

                rainbow series

                random

                Random Number God

                random numbers

                randomness

                rape

                rare mode

                raster blaster

                raster burn

                rasterbation

                rat belt

                rat dance

                rathole

                ratio site

                rave

                rave on!

                ravs

                raw mode

                RBL

                rc file

                RE

                read-only user

                README file

                real

                real estate

                real hack

                real operating system

                Real Programmer

                Real Soon Now

                real time

                real user

                Real World

                reality check

                reality-distortion field

                reaper

                recompile the world

                rectangle slinger

                recursion

                recursive acronym

                red wire

                regexp

                register dancing

                rehi

                reincarnation, cycle of

                reinvent the wheel

                relay rape

                religion of CHI

                religious issues

                replicator

                reply

                restriction

                retcon

                RETI

                retrocomputing

                return from the dead

                RFC

                RFE

                Right Thing

                rip

                ripoff

                RL

                roach

                robocanceller

                robot

                robust

                rococo

                rogue

                room-temperature IQ

                root

                root mode

                rootkit

                rot13

                rotary debugger

                RSN

                RTBM

                RTFAQ

                RTFB

                RTFM

                RTFS

                RTI

                RTM

                RTS

                rubber-hose cryptanalysis

                rude

                runes

                runic

                rusty iron

                rusty wire

   S

                S/N ratio

                sacred

                saga

                sagan

                SAIL

                salescritter

                salt

                salt mines

                salt substrate

                same-day service

                samizdat

                samurai

                sandbender

                sandbox

                sanity check

                Saturday-night special

                say

                scag

                scanno

                scary devil monastery

                schroedinbug

                science-fiction fandom

                SCNR

                scram switch

                scratch

                scratch monkey

                scream and die

                screaming tty

                screen

                screen name

                screen scraping

                screw

                screwage

                scribble

                script kiddies

                scrog

                scrool

                scrozzle

                scruffies

                SCSI

                SCSI voodoo

                search-and-destroy mode

                second-system effect

                secondary damage

                security through obscurity

                SED

                See figure 1

                segfault

                seggie

                segment

                segmentation fault

                segv

                self-reference

                selvage

                semi

                semi-automated

                semi-infinite

                senior bit

                September that never ended

                server

                SEX

                sex changer

                shambolic link

                shar file

                sharchive

                Share and enjoy!

                shareware

                sharing violation

                shebang

                shelfware

                shell

                shell out

                shift left (or right) logical

                shim

                shitogram

                shotgun debugging

                shovelware

                showstopper

                shriek

                Shub-Internet

                SIG

                sig block

                sig quote

                sig virus

                sigmonster

                signal-to-noise ratio

                silicon

                silly walk

                silo

                since time T equals minus infinity

                sitename

                skrog

                skulker

                slab

                slack

                slash

                slashdot effect

                sleep

                slim

                slop

                slopsucker

                Slowlaris

                slurp

                slurp the robot

                smart

                smart terminal

                smash case

                smash the stack

                smiley

                smoke

                smoke and mirrors

                smoke test

                smoking clover

                smoot

                SMOP

                smurf

                SNAFU principle

                snail

                snail-mail

                snap

                snarf

                snarf & barf

                snarf down

                snark

                sneaker

                sneakernet

                sniff

                snippage

                SO

                social engineering

                social science number

                sock puppet

                sodium substrate

                soft boot

                softcopy

                software bloat

                software hoarding

                software laser

                software rot

                softwarily

                softy

                some random X

                sorcerer's apprentice mode

                source

                source of all good bits

                space-cadet keyboard

                spaceship operator

                SPACEWAR

                spaghetti code

                spaghetti inheritance

                spam

                spam bait

                spamblock

                spamhaus

                spamvertize

                spangle

                spawn

                special-case

                speed of light

                speedometer

                spell

                spelling flame

                spider

                spider food

                spiffy

                spike

                spin

                Spinning Pizza of Death

                spl

                splash screen

                splat

                splat out

                splork!

                spod

                spoiler

                spoiler space

                sponge

                spoof

                spool

                spool file

                sporgery

                sport death

                spungle

                spyware

                squirrelcide

                stack

                stack puke

                stale pointer bug

                Stanford Bunny

                star out

                state

                stealth manager

                steam-powered

                steved

                STFW

                stir-fried random

                stomp on

                Stone Age

                stone knives and bearskins

                stoppage

                store

                STR

                strided

                stroke

                strudel

                stubroutine

                studly

                studlycaps

                stunning

                stupid-sort

                Stupids

                Sturgeon's Law

                sucking mud

                sufficiently small

                suit

                suitable win

                suitably small

                Sun

                sun lounge

                sun-stools

                sunspots

                super source quench

                superloser

                superprogrammer

                superuser

                support

                surf

                Suzie COBOL

                swab

                swap

                swap space

                swapped in

                swapped out

                Swiss-Army chainsaw

                swizzle

                sync

                syntactic salt

                syntactic sugar

                sys-frog

                sysadmin

                sysape

                sysop

                system

                system mangler

                systems jock

   T

                T

                tail recursion

                talk mode

                talker system

                TAN

                tanked

                TANSTAAFL

                tape monkey

                tar and feather

                tarball

                tardegy

                taste

                tayste

                TCB

                TCP/IP

                TECO

                tee

                teergrube

                teledildonics

                ten-finger interface

                tense

                tentacle

                tenured graduate student

                tera-

                teraflop club

                terminak

                terminal brain death

                terminal illness

                terminal junkie

                test

                TeX

                text

                thanks in advance

                That's not a bug, that's a feature!

                the literature

                the network

                the X that can be Y is not the true X

                theology

                theory

                thinko

                This can't happen

                This time, for sure!

                thrash

                thread

                three-finger salute

                throwaway account

                thud

                thumb

                thundering herd problem

                thunk

                tick

                tick-list features

                tickle a bug

                tiger team

                time bomb

                time sink

                time T

                times-or-divided-by

                timesharing

                TINC

                Tinkerbell program

                TINLC

                tip of the ice-cube

                tired iron

                tits on a keyboard

                TLA

                TMRC

                TMRCie

                TMTOWTDI

                to a first approximation

                to a zeroth approximation

                toad

                toast

                toaster

                toeprint

                TOFU

                toggle

                tool

                toolchain

                toolsmith

                toor

                top-post

                topic drift

                topic group

                TOPS-10

                TOPS-20

                TOS

                tourist

                tourist information

                touristic

                toy

                toy language

                toy problem

                toy program

                trampoline

                trap

                trap door

                trash

                trawl

                tree-killer

                treeware

                trit

                trivial

                troff

                troglodyte

                troglodyte mode

                Trojan horse

                troll

                Troll-O-Meter

                tron

                troughie

                true-hacker

                tty

                tube

                tube time

                tumbler

                tunafish

                tune

                turbo nerd

                Turing tar-pit

                turist

                Tux

                tweak

                TWENEX

                twiddle

                twilight zone

                twink

                twirling baton

                two pi

                two-to-the-N

                tyop

   U

                u-

                UBD

                UBE

                ubergeek

                UCE

                UDP

                UN*X

                undefined external reference

                under the hood

                undocumented feature

                uninteresting

                Unix

                Unix brain damage

                Unix conspiracy

                Unix weenie

                unixism

                unswizzle

                unwind the stack

                unwind-protect

                up

                upload

                upstream

                upthread

                uptime

                urchin

                URL

                Usenet

                Usenet Death Penalty

                user

                user-friendly

                user-obsequious

                userland

                Utah teapot, the

                UTSL

                UUOC

   V

                V7

                vadding

                vanilla

                vanity domain

                vannevar

                vaporware

                var

                vaston

                VAX

                VAXen

                vaxocentrism

                vdiff

                veeblefester

                velveeta

                Venus flytrap

                verbage

                verbiage

                Version 7

                vgrep

                vi

                video toaster

                videotex

                virgin

                virtual

                virtual beer

                virtual Friday

                virtual reality

                virtual shredder

                virus

                visionary

                Visual Fred

                VMS

                voice

                voice-net

                voodoo programming

                VR

                Vulcan nerve pinch

                vulture capitalist

   W

                w00t

                wabbit

                WAITS

                waldo

                walk

                walk off the end of

                walking drives

                wall

                wall follower

                wall time

                wall wart

                wallhack

                wango

                wank

                wannabee

                war dialer

                war-driving

                war-chalking

                -ware

                warez

                warez d00dz

                warez kiddies

                warlording

                warm boot

                wart

                washing machine

                washing software

                water MIPS

                wave a dead chicken

                weasel

                web pointer

                web ring

                web toaster

                webify

                webmaster

                wedged

                wedgie

                wedgitude

                weeble

                weeds

                weenie

                Weenix

                well-behaved

                well-connected

                wetware

                whack

                whack-a-mole

                whacker

                whales

                What's a spline?

                wheel

                wheel bit

                wheel of reincarnation

                wheel wars

                white hat

                whitelist

                whizzy

                Whorfian mind-lock

                wibble

                WIBNI

                widget

                wiggles

                wild side

                WIMP environment

                win

                win big

                win win

                Winchester

                windoid

                window shopping

                Windowsitis

                Windoze

                winged comments

                winkey

                winnage

                winner

                winnitude

                Wintel

                Wintendo

                wired

                wirehead

                wirewater

                wish list

                within delta of

                within epsilon of

                wizard

                Wizard Book

                wizard hat

                wizard mode

                wizardly

                wok-on-the-wall

                womb box

                WOMBAT

                womble

                wonky

                workaround

                working as designed

                worm

                wormhole

                wound around the axle

                wrap around

                write-only code

                write-only language

                write-only memory

                Wrong Thing

                wugga wugga

                wumpus

                WYSIAYG

                WYSIWYG

   X

                X

                XEROX PARC

                XOFF

                XON

                xor

                xref

                XXX

                xyzzy

   Y

                YA-

                YABA

                YAFIYGI

                yak shaving

                YAUN

                yellow card

                yellow wire

                Yet Another

                YHBT

                YKYBHTLW

                YMMV

                You are not expected to understand this

                You know you've been hacking too long when

                Your mileage may vary

                Yow!

                yoyo mode

                Yu-Shiang Whole Fish

   Z

                zap

                zapped

                Zawinski's Law

                zbeba

                zen

                zero

                zero-content

                Zero-One-Infinity Rule

                zeroth

                zigamorph

                zip

                zipperhead

                zombie

                zorch

                Zork

                zorkmid

  0

   (TM)

   /dev/null

   /me

   0

   1TBS

   2

   404

   404 compliant

   @-party

:(TM): //

        [Usenet] ASCII rendition of the (TM) appended to phrases that the
        author feels should be recorded for posterity, perhaps in future
        editions of this lexicon. Sometimes used ironically as a form of
        protest against the recent spate of software and algorithm patents
        and look and feel lawsuits. See also {UN*X}.

:/dev/null: /devnuhl/, n.

        [from the Unix null device, used as a data sink] A notional `black
        hole' in any information space being discussed, used, or referred
        to. A controversial posting, for example, might end "Kudos to
        rasputin@kremlin.org, flames to /dev/null". See {bit bucket}.

:/me: //

        [IRC; common] Under most IRC, /me is the "pose" command; if you are
        logged on as Foonly and type "/me laughs", others watching the
        channel will see "* Joe Foonly laughs". This usage has been carried
        over to mail and news, where the reader is expected to perform the
        same expansion in his or her head.

:0:

        Numeric zero, as opposed to the letter `O' (the 15th letter of the
        English alphabet). In their unmodified forms they look a lot alike,
        and various kluges invented to make them visually distinct have
        compounded the confusion. If your zero is center-dotted and letter-O
        is not, or if letter-O looks almost rectangular but zero looks more
        like an American football stood on end (or the reverse), you're
        probably looking at a modern character display (though the dotted
        zero seems to have originated as an option on IBM 3270 controllers).
        If your zero is slashed but letter-O is not, you're probably looking
        at an old-style ASCII graphic set descended from the default
        typewheel on the venerable ASR-33 Teletype (Scandinavians, for whom
         is a letter, curse this arrangement). (Interestingly, the slashed
        zero long predates computers; Florian Cajori's monumental A History
        of Mathematical Notations notes that it was used in the twelfth and
        thirteenth centuries.) If letter-O has a slash across it and the
        zero does not, your display is tuned for a very old convention used
        at IBM and a few other early mainframe makers (Scandinavians curse
        this arrangement even more, because it means two of their letters
        collide). Some Burroughs/Unisys equipment displays a zero with a
        reversed slash. Old CDC computers rendered letter O as an unbroken
        oval and 0 as an oval broken at upper right and lower left. And yet
        another convention common on early line printers left zero
        unornamented but added a tail or hook to the letter-O so that it
        resembled an inverted Q or cursive capital letter-O (this was
        endorsed by a draft ANSI standard for how to draw ASCII characters,
        but the final standard changed the distinguisher to a tick-mark in
        the upper-left corner). Are we sufficiently confused yet?

:1TBS: //, n.

        The "One True Brace Style"; see {indent style}.

:2: infix.

        In translation software written by hackers, infix 2 often represents
        the syllable to with the connotation `translate to': as in dvi2ps
        (DVI to PostScript), int2string (integer to string), and texi2roff
        (Texinfo to [nt]roff). Several versions of a joke have floated
        around the internet in which some idiot programmer fixes the Y2K bug
        by changing all the Y's in something to K's, as in Januark,
        Februark, etc.

:404: //, n.

        [from the HTTP error "file not found on server"] Extended to humans
        to convey that the subject has no idea or no clue -- sapience not
        found. May be used reflexively; "Uh, I'm 404ing" means "I'm drawing
        a blank".

:404 compliant: adj.

        The status of a website which has been completely removed, usually
        by the administrators of the hosting site as a result of net abuse
        by the website operators. The term is a tongue-in-cheek reference to
        the standard "301 compliant" Murkowski Bill disclaimer used by
        spammers. See also: {spam}, {spamvertize}.

:@-party: /at'par`tee/, n.

        [from the @-sign in an Internet address] (alt.: `@-sign party'
        /at'si:n par`tee/) A semi-closed party thrown for hackers at a
        science-fiction convention (esp. the annual World Science Fiction
        Convention or "Worldcon"); one must have a {network address} to get
        in, or at least be in company with someone who does. One of the most
        reliable opportunities for hackers to meet face to face with people
        who might otherwise be represented by mere phosphor dots on their
        screens. Compare {boink}.

        The first recorded @-party was held at the Westercon (a U.S. western
        regional SF convention) over the July 4th weekend in 1980. It is not
        clear exactly when the canonical @-party venue shifted to the
        Worldcon but it had certainly become established by Constellation in
        1983. Sadly, the @-party tradition has been in decline since about
        1996, mainly because having an @-address no longer functions as an
        effective lodge pin.

        We are informed, however, that rec.skydiving members have maintained
        a tradition of formation jumps in the shape of an @.

  A

   abbrev

   ABEND

   accumulator

   ACK

   Acme

   ad-hockery

   address harvester

   adger

   admin

   ADVENT

   adware

   AFAIK

   AFJ

   AFK

   AI

   AI-complete

   airplane rule

   Alderson loop

   aliasing bug

   Alice and Bob

   All hardware sucks, all software sucks.

   all your base are belong to us

   alpha geek

   alpha particles

   alt

   alt bit

   Aluminum Book

   ambimouseterous

   Amiga

   Amiga Persecution Complex

   amp off

   amper

   and there was much rejoicing

   Angband

   angle brackets

   angry fruit salad

   annoybot

   annoyware

   ANSI standard

   ANSI standard pizza

   anti-idiotarianism

   AOL!

   app

   Archimedes

   arena

   arg

   ARMM

   armor-plated

   asbestos

   asbestos cork award

   asbestos longjohns

   ASCII

   ASCII art

   ASCIIbetical order

   astroturfing

   atomic

   attoparsec

   Aunt Tillie

   AUP

   autobogotiphobia

   autoconfiscate

   automagically

   avatar

   awk

:abbrev: /@breev'/, /@brev/, n.

        Common abbreviation for `abbreviation'.

:ABEND: /abend/, /@bend/, n.

        [ABnormal END]

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

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

:accumulator: n. obs.

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

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

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

:ACK: /ak/, interj.

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

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

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

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

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

:Acme: n.

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

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

:ad-hockery: /adhok'@ree/, n.

        [Purdue]

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

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

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

        This is {ad-hockery} in action.

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

:address harvester: n.

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

:adger: /aj'r/, vt.

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

:admin: /admin'/, n.

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

:ADVENT: /ad'vent/, n.

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

        Figure 1. Screen shot of the original ADVENT game

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

A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing.

>drop rod
Dropped.

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

>take rod
Taken.

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

Rough stone steps lead down the pit.

>down

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

Rough stone steps lead up the dome.

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

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

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

:adware: n.

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

:AFAIK: //, n.

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

:AFJ: //, n.

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

:AFK:

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

:AI: /AI/, n.

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

:AI-complete: /AI k@mpleet'/, adj.

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

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

:airplane rule: n.

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

:Alderson loop: n.

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

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

:aliasing bug: n.

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

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

:Alice and Bob: n.

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

        In Bruce Schneier's definitive introductory text Applied
        Cryptography (2nd ed., 1996, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-11709-9)
        he introduced a table of dramatis personae headed by Alice and Bob.
        Others include Carol (a participant in three- and four-party
        protocols), Dave (a participant in four-party protocols), Eve (an
        eavesdropper), Mallory (a malicious active attacker), Trent (a
        trusted arbitrator), Walter (a warden), Peggy (a prover) and Victor
        (a verifier). These names for roles are either already standard or,
        given the wide popularity of the book, may be expected to quickly
        become so.

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

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

:all your base are belong to us:

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

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

:alpha geek: n.

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

:alpha particles: n.

        See {bit rot}.

:alt: /awlt/

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

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

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

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

:alt bit: /awlt bit/, adj.

        See {meta bit}.

:Aluminum Book: n.

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

:ambimouseterous: /amb@mows'terus/, /amb@mowstrus/, adj

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

:Amiga: n

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

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

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

:Amiga Persecution Complex: n.

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

:amp off: vt.

        [Purdue] To run in {background}. From the Unix shell `&' operator.

:amper: n.

        Common abbreviation for the name of the ampersand (`&', ASCII
        0100110) character. See {ASCII} for other synonyms.

:and there was much rejoicing:

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

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

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

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

:Angband: n., /ang'band/

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

:angle brackets: n.

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

:angry fruit salad: n.

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

:annoybot: /@noybot/, n.

        [IRC] See {bot}.

:annoyware: n.

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

:ANSI standard: /an'see stand@rd/

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

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

:ANSI standard pizza: /an'see stand@rd peetz@/

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

:anti-idiotarianism: n.

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

:AOL!: n.

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

          <AOL>Me, too!</AOL>

        is also frequently seen. See also {September that never ended}.

:app: /ap/, n.

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

:Archimedes:

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

:arena: n.

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

:arg: /arg/, n.

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

:ARMM: n.

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

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

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

:armor-plated: n.

        Syn. for {bulletproof}.

:asbestos: adj.

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

:asbestos cork award: n.

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

:asbestos longjohns: n.

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

:ASCII: /as'kee/, n.

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

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

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

        +------------------------------------------------------------------+
        |     | Common: {bang} ; pling; excl; not; shriek; ball-bat;       |
        | !   | <exclamation mark>. Rare: factorial; exclam; smash; cuss;  |
        |     | boing; yell; wow; hey; wham; eureka; [spark-spot];         |
        |     | soldier, control.                                          |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        |     | Common: double quote; quote. Rare: literal mark;           |
        | "   | double-glitch; snakebite; <quotation marks>; <dieresis>;   |
        |     | dirk; [rabbit-ears]; double prime.                         |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        |     | Common: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp;       |
        | #   | {crunch} ; hex; [mesh]. Rare: grid; crosshatch;            |
        |     | octothorpe; flash; <square>, pig-pen; tictactoe;           |
        |     | scratchmark; thud; thump; {splat} .                        |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        |     | Common: dollar; <dollar sign>. Rare: currency symbol;      |
        | $   | buck; cash; bling; string (from BASIC); escape (when used  |
        |     | as the echo of ASCII ESC); ding; cache; [big money].       |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        | %   | Common: percent; <percent sign>; mod; grapes. Rare:        |
        |     | [double-oh-seven].                                         |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        |     | Common: <ampersand>; amp; amper; and, and sign. Rare:      |
        | &   | address (from C); reference (from C++); andpersand;        |
        |     | bitand; background (from sh(1) ); pretzel. [INTERCAL       |
        |     | called this ampersand ; what could be sillier?]            |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        |     | Common: single quote; quote; <apostrophe>. Rare: prime;    |
        | '   | glitch; tick; irk; pop; [spark]; <closing single quotation |
        |     | mark>; <acute accent>.                                     |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        |     | Common: l/r paren; l/r parenthesis; left/right;            |
        |     | open/close; paren/thesis; o/c paren; o/c parenthesis; l/r  |
        | ( ) | parenthesis; l/r banana. Rare: so/already; lparen/rparen;  |
        |     | <opening/closing parenthesis>; o/c round bracket, l/r      |
        |     | round bracket, [wax/wane]; parenthisey/unparenthisey; l/r  |
        |     | ear.                                                       |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        |     | Common: star; [ {splat} ]; <asterisk>. Rare: wildcard;     |
        | *   | gear; dingle; mult; spider; aster; times; twinkle; glob    |
        |     | (see {glob} ); {Nathan Hale} .                             |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        | +   | Common: <plus>; add. Rare: cross; [intersection].          |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        | ,   | Common: <comma>. Rare: <cedilla>; [tail].                  |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        | -   | Common: dash; <hyphen>; <minus>. Rare: [worm]; option;     |
        |     | dak; bithorpe.                                             |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        | .   | Common: dot; point; <period>; <decimal point>. Rare: radix |
        |     | point; full stop; [spot].                                  |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        | /   | Common: slash; stroke; <slant>; forward slash. Rare:       |
        |     | diagonal; solidus; over; slak; virgule; [slat].            |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        | :   | Common: <colon>. Rare: dots; [two-spot].                   |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        | ;   | Common: <semicolon>; semi. Rare: weenie; [hybrid],         |
        |     | pit-thwong.                                                |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        |     | Common: <less/greater than>; bra/ket; l/r angle; l/r angle |
        | < > | bracket; l/r broket. Rare: from/{into, towards}; read      |
        |     | from/write to; suck/blow; comes-from/gozinta; in/out;      |
        |     | crunch/zap (all from UNIX); tic/tac; [angle/right angle].  |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        | =   | Common: <equals>; gets; takes. Rare: quadrathorpe;         |
        |     | [half-mesh].                                               |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        |     | Common: query; <question mark>; {ques} . Rare: quiz;       |
        | ?   | whatmark; [what]; wildchar; huh; hook; buttonhook;         |
        |     | hunchback.                                                 |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        |     | Common: at sign; at; strudel. Rare: each; vortex; whorl;   |
        | @   | [whirlpool]; cyclone; snail; ape; cat; rose; cabbage;      |
        |     | <commercial at>.                                           |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        | V   | Rare: [book].                                              |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        |     | Common: l/r square bracket; l/r bracket; <opening/closing  |
        | [ ] | bracket>; bracket/unbracket. Rare: square/unsquare; [U     |
        |     | turn/U turn back].                                         |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        |     | Common: backslash, hack, whack; escape (from C/UNIX);      |
        | \   | reverse slash; slosh; backslant; backwhack. Rare: bash;    |
        |     | <reverse slant>; reversed virgule; [backslat].             |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        |     | Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret; <circumflex>. Rare:  |
        | ^   | xor sign, chevron; [shark (or shark-fin)]; to the (`to the |
        |     | power of'); fang; pointer (in Pascal).                     |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        | _   | Common: <underline>; underscore; underbar; under. Rare:    |
        |     | score; backarrow; skid; [flatworm].                        |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        |     | Common: backquote; left quote; left single quote; open     |
        | `   | quote; <grave accent>; grave. Rare: backprime;             |
        |     | [backspark]; unapostrophe; birk; blugle; back tick; back   |
        |     | glitch; push; <opening single quotation mark>; quasiquote. |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        |     | Common: o/c brace; l/r brace; l/r squiggly; l/r squiggly   |
        |     | bracket/brace; l/r curly bracket/brace; <opening/closing   |
        | { } | brace>. Rare: brace/unbrace; curly/uncurly; leftit/rytit;  |
        |     | l/r squirrelly; [embrace/bracelet]. A balanced pair of     |
        |     | these may be called curlies .                              |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        |     | Common: bar; or; or-bar; v-bar; pipe; vertical bar. Rare:  |
        | |   | <vertical line>; gozinta; thru; pipesinta (last three from |
        |     | UNIX); [spike].                                            |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        | ~   | Common: <tilde>; squiggle; {twiddle} ; not. Rare: approx;  |
        |     | wiggle; swung dash; enyay; [sqiggle (sic)].                |
        +------------------------------------------------------------------+

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

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

        The `swung dash' or `approximation' sign (?1) is not quite the same
        as tilde ~ in typeset material, but the ASCII tilde serves for both
        (compare {angle brackets}).

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

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

:ASCII art: n.

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

            o----)||(--+--|<----+   +---------o + D O
              L  )||(  |        |   |             C U
            A I  )||(  +-->|-+  |   +-\/\/-+--o -   T
            C N  )||(        |  |   |      |        P
              E  )||(  +-->|-+--)---+--|(--+-o      U
                 )||(  |        |          | GND    T
            o----)||(--+--|<----+----------+

            A power supply consisting of a full wave rectifier circuit
            feeding a capacitor input filter circuit

        And here are some very silly examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

:ASCIIbetical order: /as'keebe't@kl ordr/, adj.,n.

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

:astroturfing: n.

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

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

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

:atomic: adj.

        [from Gk. atomos, indivisible]

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

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

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

:attoparsec: n.

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

:Aunt Tillie: n.

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

:AUP: /AUP/

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

:autobogotiphobia: /aw'tohbohgot`@fohbee@/

        n. See {bogotify}.

:autoconfiscate:

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

:automagically: /awtohmaj'iklee/, adv.

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

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

:avatar: n.

        [in Hindu mythology, the incarnation of a god]

        1. Among people working on virtual reality and {cyberspace}
        interfaces, an avatar is an icon or representation of a user in a
        shared virtual reality. The term is sometimes used on {MUD}s.

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

:awk: /awk/

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

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

        3. vt. To process data using awk(1).

  B

   B1FF

   B5

   back door

   backbone cabal

   backbone site

   backgammon

   background

   backreference

   backronym

   backward combatability

   BAD

   Bad and Wrong

   Bad Thing

   bag on the side

   bagbiter

   bagbiting

   baggy pantsing

   balloonian variable

   bamf

   banana problem

   bandwidth

   bang

   bang on

   bang path

   banner

   banner ad

   banner site

   bar

   bare metal

   barf

   barfmail

   barfulation

   barfulous

   barn

   barney

   baroque

   BASIC

   batbelt

   batch

   bathtub curve

   Batman factor

   baud

   baz

   bazaar

   bboard

   BBS

   BCPL

   BDFL

   beam

   beanie key

   beep

   Befunge

   beige toaster

   bells and whistles

   bells whistles and gongs

   benchmark

   Berkeley Quality Software

   Berzerkeley

   beta

   BFI

   BI

   bible

   BiCapitalization

   biff

   big iron

   Big Red Switch

   Big Room

   big win

   big-endian

   bignum

   bigot

   bikeshedding

   binary four

   bit

   bit bang

   bit bashing

   bit bucket

   bit decay

   bit rot

   bit twiddling

   bit-paired keyboard

   bitblt

   bits

   bitty box

   bixie

   black art

   black hat

   black hole

   black magic

   Black Screen of Death

   blammo

   blargh

   blast

   blat

   bletch

   bletcherous

   blinkenlights

   blit

   blitter

   blivet

   bloatware

   BLOB

   block

   blog

   Bloggs Family

   blogosphere

   blogrolling

   blow an EPROM

   blow away

   blow out

   blow past

   blow up

   BLT

   blue box

   Blue Glue

   blue goo

   Blue Screen of Death

   blue wire

   blurgle

   BNF

   boa

   board

   boat anchor

   bob

   bodge

   BOF

   BOFH

   bogo-sort

   bogometer

   BogoMIPS

   bogon

   bogon filter

   bogon flux

   bogosity

   bogotify

   bogue out

   bogus

   Bohr bug

   boink

   bomb

   bondage-and-discipline language

   bonk/oif

   book titles

   boot

   Borg

   borken

   bot

   bottom feeder

   bottom-post

   bottom-up implementation

   bounce

   bounce message

   boustrophedon

   box

   boxed comments

   boxen

   boxology

   bozotic

   brain dump

   brain fart

   brain-damaged

   brain-dead

   braino

   brainwidth

   bread crumbs

   break

   break-even point

   breath-of-life packet

   breedle

   Breidbart Index

   brick

   bricktext

   bring X to its knees

   brittle

   broadcast storm

   broken

   broken arrow

   broken-ring network

   BrokenWindows

   broket

   Brooks's Law

   brown-paper-bag bug

   browser

   BRS

   brute force

   brute force and ignorance

   BSD

   BSOD

   BUAF

   BUAG

   bubble sort

   bucky bits

   buffer chuck

   buffer overflow

   bug

   bug-compatible

   bug-for-bug compatible

   bug-of-the-month club

   bulletproof

   bullschildt

   bump

   burble

   buried treasure

   burn a CD

   burn-in period

   burst page

   busy-wait

   buzz

   buzzword-compliant

   BWQ

   by hand

   byte

   byte sex

   bytesexual

   Bzzzt! Wrong.

:B1FF: /bif/, BIFF, n.

        The most famous {pseudo}, and the prototypical {newbie}. Articles
        from B1FF feature all uppercase letters sprinkled liberally with
        bangs, typos, `cute' misspellings (EVRY BUDY LUVS GOOD OLD BIFF CUZ
        KL DOOD AN HE RITES REEL AWESUM THINGZ IN CAPITULL LETTRS LIKE
        THIS!!!), use (and often misuse) of fragments of {talk mode}
        abbreviations, a long {sig block} (sometimes even a {doubled sig}),
        and unbounded naivete. B1FF posts articles using his elder brother's
        VIC-20. B1FF's location is a mystery, as his articles appear to come
        from a variety of sites. However, BITNET seems to be the most
        frequent origin. The theory that B1FF is a denizen of BITNET is
        supported by B1FF's (unfortunately invalid) electronic mail address:
        B1FF@BIT.NET.

        [1993: Now It Can Be Told! My spies inform me that B1FF was
        originally created by Joe Talmadge <jat@cup.hp.com>, also the author
        of the infamous and much-plagiarized "Flamer's Bible". The BIFF
        filter he wrote was later passed to Richard Sexton, who posted
        BIFFisms much more widely. Versions have since been posted for the
        amusement of the net at large. See also {Jeff K.} --ESR]

:B5: //

        [common] Abbreviation for "Babylon 5", a science-fiction TV series
        as revered among hackers as was the original Star Trek.

:back door: n.

        [common] A hole in the security of a system deliberately left in
        place by designers or maintainers. The motivation for such holes is
        not always sinister; some operating systems, for example, come out
        of the box with privileged accounts intended for use by field
        service technicians or the vendor's maintenance programmers. Syn.
        {trap door}; may also be called a wormhole. See also {iron box},
        {cracker}, {worm}, {logic bomb}.

        Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than
        anyone expected or planned, and a few have become widely known. Ken
        Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM admitted the
        existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have
        qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time.
        In this scheme, the C compiler contained code that would recognize
        when the login command was being recompiled and insert some code
        recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the
        system whether or not an account had been created for him.

        Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the
        source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to
        recompile the compiler, you have to use the compiler -- so Thompson
        also arranged that the compiler would recognize when it was
        compiling a version of itself, and insert into the recompiled
        compiler the code to insert into the recompiled login the code to
        allow Thompson entry -- and, of course, the code to recognize itself
        and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done
        this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the
        original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the
        back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources.

        The Turing lecture that reported this truly moby hack was later
        published as "Reflections on Trusting Trust", Communications of the
        ACM 27, 8 (August 1984), pp. 761--763 (text available at
        http://www.acm.org/classics/). Ken Thompson has since confirmed that
        this hack was implemented and that the Trojan Horse code did appear
        in the login binary of a Unix Support group machine. Ken says the
        crocked compiler was never distributed. Your editor has heard two
        separate reports that suggest that the crocked login did make it out
        of Bell Labs, notably to BBN, and that it enabled at least one
        late-night login across the network by someone using the login name
        "kt".

:backbone cabal: n.

        A group of large-site administrators who pushed through the {Great
        Renaming} and reined in the chaos of {Usenet} during most of the
        1980s. During most of its lifetime, the Cabal (as it was sometimes
        capitalized) steadfastly denied its own existence; it was almost
        obligatory for anyone privy to their secrets to respond "There is no
        Cabal" whenever the existence or activities of the group were
        speculated on in public.

        The result of this policy was an attractive aura of mystery. Even a
        decade after the cabal {mailing list} disbanded in late 1988
        following a bitter internal catfight, many people believed (or
        claimed to believe) that it had not actually disbanded but only gone
        deeper underground with its power intact.

        This belief became a model for various paranoid theories about
        various Cabals with dark nefarious objectives beginning with taking
        over the Usenet or Internet. These paranoias were later satirized in
        ways that took on a life of their own. See {Eric Conspiracy} for one
        example. Part of the background for this kind of humor is that many
        hackers cultivate a fondness for conspiracy theory considered as a
        kind of surrealist art; see the bibliography entry on Illuminatus!
        for the novel that launched this trend.

        See {NANA} for the subsequent history of "the Cabal".

:backbone site: n.,obs.

        Formerly, a key Usenet and email site, one that processes a large
        amount of third-party traffic, especially if it is the home site of
        any of the regional coordinators for the Usenet maps. Notable
        backbone sites as of early 1993, when this sense of the term was
        beginning to pass out of general use due to wide availability of
        cheap Internet connections, included uunet and the mail machines at
        Rutgers University, UC Berkeley, {DEC}'s Western Research
        Laboratories, Ohio State University, and the University of Texas.
        Compare {leaf site}.

        [2001 update: This term has passed into history. The UUCP network
        world that gave it meaning is gone; everyone is on the Internet now
        and network traffic is distributed in very different patterns. Today
        one might see references to a "backbone router" instead --ESR]

:backgammon:

        See {bignum} (sense 3), {moby} (sense 4), and {pseudoprime}.

:background: n.,adj.,vt.

        [common] To do a task in background is to do it whenever
        {foreground} matters are not claiming your undivided attention, and
        to background something means to relegate it to a lower priority.
        "For now, we'll just print a list of nodes and links; I'm working on
        the graph-printing problem in background." Note that this implies
        ongoing activity but at a reduced level or in spare time, in
        contrast to mainstream `back burner' (which connotes benign neglect
        until some future resumption of activity). Some people prefer to use
        the term for processing that they have queued up for their
        unconscious minds (a tack that one can often fruitfully take upon
        encountering an obstacle in creative work). Compare {amp off},
        {slopsucker}.

        Technically, a task running in background is detached from the
        terminal where it was started (and often running at a lower
        priority); oppose {foreground}. Nowadays this term is primarily
        associated with {Unix}, but it appears to have been first used in
        this sense on OS/360.

:backreference: n.

        1. In a regular expression or pattern match, the text which was
        matched within grouping parentheses

        2. The part of the pattern which refers back to the matched text.

        3. By extension, anything which refers back to something which has
        been seen or discussed before. "When you said `she' just now, who
        were you backreferencing?"

:backronym: n.

        [portmanteau of back + acronym] A word interpreted as an acronym
        that was not originally so intended. This is a special case of what
        linguists call back formation. Examples are given under {recursive
        acronym} (Cygnus), {Acme}, and {mung}. Discovering backronyms is a
        common form of wordplay among hackers. Compare {retcon}.

:backward combatability: /bak'w@rd k@mbat'@bil'@tee/, n.

        [CMU, Tektronix: from backward compatibility] A property of hardware
        or software revisions in which previous protocols, formats, layouts,
        etc. are irrevocably discarded in favor of `new and improved'
        protocols, formats, and layouts, leaving the previous ones not
        merely deprecated but actively defeated. (Too often, the old and new
        versions cannot definitively be distinguished, such that lingering
        instances of the previous ones yield crashes or other infelicitous
        effects, as opposed to a simple "version mismatch" message.) A
        backwards compatible change, on the other hand, allows old versions
        to coexist without crashes or error messages, but too many major
        changes incorporating elaborate backwards compatibility processing
        can lead to extreme {software bloat}. See also {flag day}.

:BAD: /BAD/, adj.

        [IBM: acronym, "Broken As Designed"] Said of a program that is
        {bogus} because of bad design and misfeatures rather than because of
        bugginess. See {working as designed}.

:Bad and Wrong: adj.

        [Durham, UK] Said of something that is both badly designed and
        wrongly executed. This common term is the prototype of, and is used
        by contrast with, three less common terms -- Bad and Right (a
        kludge, something ugly but functional); Good and Wrong (an overblown
        GUI or other attractive nuisance); and (rare praise) Good and Right.
        These terms entered common use at Durham c.1994 and may have been
        imported from elsewhere; they are also in use at Oxford, and the
        emphatic form "Evil and Bad and Wrong" (abbreviated EBW) is reported
        from there. There are standard abbreviations: they start with B&R, a
        typo for "Bad and Wrong". Consequently, B&W is actually "Bad and
        Right", G&R = "Good and Wrong", and G&W = "Good and Right". Compare
        {evil and rude}, {Good Thing}, {Bad Thing}.

:Bad Thing: n.

        [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.] Something
        that can't possibly result in improvement of the subject. This term
        is always capitalized, as in "Replacing all of the DSL links with
        bicycle couriers would be a Bad Thing". Oppose {Good Thing}. British
        correspondents confirm that {Bad Thing} and {Good Thing} (and prob.
        therefore {Right Thing} and {Wrong Thing}) come from the book
        referenced in the etymology, which discusses rulers who were Good
        Kings but Bad Things. This has apparently created a mainstream idiom
        on the British side of the pond. It is very common among American
        hackers, but not in mainstream usage in the U.S. Compare {Bad and
        Wrong}.

:bag on the side: n.

        [prob. originally related to a colostomy bag] An extension to an
        established hack that is supposed to add some functionality to the
        original. Usually derogatory, implying that the original was being
        overextended and should have been thrown away, and the new product
        is ugly, inelegant, or bloated. Also v. phrase, "to hang a bag on
        the side [of]". "C++? That's just a bag on the side of C ...." "They
        want me to hang a bag on the side of the accounting system."

:bagbiter: /bag'bi:t@r/, n.

        1. Something, such as a program or a computer, that fails to work,
        or works in a remarkably clumsy manner. "This text editor won't let
        me make a file with a line longer than 80 characters! What a
        bagbiter!"

        2. A person who has caused you some trouble, inadvertently or
        otherwise, typically by failing to program the computer properly.
        Synonyms: {loser}, {cretin}, {chomper}.

        3. bite the bag vi. To fail in some manner. "The computer keeps
        crashing every five minutes." "Yes, the disk controller is really
        biting the bag."

        The original loading of these terms was almost undoubtedly obscene,
        possibly referring to a douche bag or the scrotum (we have reports
        of "Bite the douche bag!" being used as a taunt at MIT 1970-1976,
        and we have another report that "Bite the bag!" was in common use at
        least as early as 1965), but in their current usage they have become
        almost completely sanitized.

:bagbiting: adj.

        [MIT; now rare] Having the quality of a {bagbiter}. "This bagbiting
        system won't let me compute the factorial of a negative number."
        Compare {losing}, {cretinous}, {bletcherous}, barfucious (under
        {barfulous}) and chomping (under {chomp}).

:baggy pantsing: v.

        [Georgia Tech] A "baggy pantsing" is used to reprimand hackers who
        incautiously leave their terminals unlocked. The affected user will
        come back to find a post from them on internal newsgroups discussing
        exactly how baggy their pants are, an accepted stand-in for
        "unattentive user who left their work unprotected in the clusters".
        A properly-done baggy pantsing is highly mocking and humorous. It is
        considered bad form to post a baggy pantsing to off-campus
        newsgroups or the more technical, serious groups. A particularly
        nice baggy pantsing may be "claimed" by immediately quoting the
        message in full, followed by your {sig block}; this has the added
        benefit of keeping the embarassed victim from being able to delete
        the post. Interesting baggy-pantsings have been done involving
        adding commands to login scripts to repost the message every time
        the unlucky user logs in; Unix boxes on the residential network,
        when cracked, oftentimes have their homepages replaced (after being
        politely backed-up to another file) with a baggy-pants message;
        .plan files are also occasionally targeted. Usage: "Prof. Greenlee
        fell asleep in the Solaris cluster again; we baggy-pantsed him to
        git.cc.class.2430.flame." Compare {derf}.

:balloonian variable: n.

        [Commodore users; perh. a deliberate phonetic mangling of boolean
        variable?] Any variable that doesn't actually hold or control state,
        but must nevertheless be declared, checked, or set. A typical
        balloonian variable started out as a flag attached to some
        environment feature that either became obsolete or was planned but
        never implemented. Compatibility concerns (or politics attached to
        same) may require that such a flag be treated as though it were
        {live}.

:bamf: /bamf/

        1. [from X-Men comics; originally "bampf"] interj. Notional sound
        made by a person or object teleporting in or out of the hearer's
        vicinity. Often used in {virtual reality} (esp. {MUD}) electronic
        {fora} when a character wishes to make a dramatic entrance or exit.

        2. The sound of magical transformation, used in virtual reality
        {fora} like MUDs.

        3. In MUD circles, "bamf" is also used to refer to the act by which
        a MUD server sends a special notification to the MUD client to
        switch its connection to another server ("I'll set up the old site
        to just bamf people over to our new location.").

        4. Used by MUDders on occasion in a more general sense related to
        sense 3, to refer to directing someone to another location or
        resource ("A user was asking about some technobabble so I bamfed
        them to http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/".)

:banana problem: n.

        [from the story of the little girl who said "I know how to spell
        `banana', but I don't know when to stop"]. Not knowing where or when
        to bring a production to a close (compare {fencepost error}). One
        may say there is a banana problem of an algorithm with poorly
        defined or incorrect termination conditions, or in discussing the
        evolution of a design that may be succumbing to featuritis (see also
        {creeping elegance}, {creeping featuritis}). See item 176 under
        {HAKMEM}, which describes a banana problem in a {Dissociated Press}
        implementation. Also, see {one-banana problem} for a superficially
        similar but unrelated usage.

:bandwidth: n.

        1. [common] Used by hackers (in a generalization of its technical
        meaning) as the volume of information per unit time that a computer,
        person, or transmission medium can handle. "Those are amazing
        graphics, but I missed some of the detail -- not enough bandwidth, I
        guess." Compare {low-bandwidth}; see also {brainwidth}. This
        generalized usage began to go mainstream after the Internet
        population explosion of 1993-1994.

        2. Attention span.

        3. On {Usenet}, a measure of network capacity that is often wasted
        by people complaining about how items posted by others are a waste
        of bandwidth.

:bang:

        1. n. Common spoken name for ! (ASCII 0100001), especially when used
        in pronouncing a {bang path} in spoken hackish. In {elder days} this
        was considered a CMUish usage, with MIT and Stanford hackers
        preferring {excl} or {shriek}; but the spread of Unix has carried
        `bang' with it (esp. via the term {bang path}) and it is now
        certainly the most common spoken name for !. Note that it is used
        exclusively for non-emphatic written !; one would not say
        "Congratulations bang" (except possibly for humorous purposes), but
        if one wanted to specify the exact characters "foo!" one would speak
        "Eff oh oh bang". See {shriek}, {ASCII}.

        2. interj. An exclamation signifying roughly "I have achieved
        enlightenment!", or "The dynamite has cleared out my brain!" Often
        used to acknowledge that one has perpetrated a {thinko} immediately
        after one has been called on it.

:bang on: vt.

        To stress-test a piece of hardware or software: "I banged on the new
        version of the simulator all day yesterday and it didn't crash once.
        I guess it is ready for release." The term {pound on} is synonymous.

:bang path: n.

        [now historical] An old-style UUCP electronic-mail address
        specifying hops to get from some assumed-reachable location to the
        addressee, so called because each {hop} is signified by a {bang}
        sign. Thus, for example, the path ...!bigsite!foovax!barbox!me
        directs people to route their mail to machine bigsite (presumably a
        well-known location accessible to everybody) and from there through
        the machine foovax to the account of user me on barbox.

        In the bad old days of not so long ago, before autorouting mailers
        and Internet became commonplace, people often published compound
        bang addresses using the { } convention (see {glob}) to give paths
        from several big machines, in the hopes that one's correspondent
        might be able to get mail to one of them reliably (example:
        ...!{seismo, ut-sally, ihnp4!rice!beta!gamma!me}). Bang paths of 8
        to 10 hops were not uncommon. Late-night dial-up UUCP links would
        cause week-long transmission times. Bang paths were often selected
        by both transmission time and reliability, as messages would not
        infrequently get lost. See {the network} and {sitename}.

:banner: n.

        1. A top-centered graphic on a web page. Esp. used in {banner ad}.

        2. On interactive software, a first screen containing a logo and/or
        author credits and/or a copyright notice. Similar to {splash
        screen}.

        3. The title page added to printouts by most print spoolers (see
        {spool}). Typically includes user or account ID information in very
        large character-graphics capitals. Also called a burst page, because
        it indicates where to burst (tear apart) fanfold paper to separate
        one user's printout from the next.

        4. A similar printout generated (typically on multiple pages of
        fan-fold paper) from user-specified text, e.g., by a program such as
        Unix's banner({1,6)}.

:banner ad: n.

        Any of the annoying graphical advertisements that span the tops of
        way too many Web pages.

:banner site: n.

        [warez d00dz] An FTP site storing pirated files where one must first
        click on several banners and/or subscribe to various `free'
        services, usually generating some form of revenues for the site
        owner, to be able to access the site. More often than not, the
        username/password painfully obtained by clicking on banners and
        subscribing to bogus services or mailing lists turns out to be
        non-working or gives access to a site that always responds busy. See
        {ratio site}, {leech mode}.

:bar: /bar/, n.

        1. [very common] The second {metasyntactic variable}, after {foo}
        and before {baz}. "Suppose we have two functions: FOO and BAR. FOO
        calls BAR...."

        2. Often appended to {foo} to produce {foobar}.

:bare metal: n.

        1. [common] New computer hardware, unadorned with such snares and
        delusions as an {operating system}, an {HLL}, or even assembler.
        Commonly used in the phrase programming on the bare metal, which
        refers to the arduous work of {bit bashing} needed to create these
        basic tools for a new machine. Real bare-metal programming involves
        things like building boot proms and BIOS chips, implementing basic
        monitors used to test device drivers, and writing the assemblers
        that will be used to write the compiler back ends that will give the
        new machine a real development environment.

        2. "Programming on the bare metal" is also used to describe a style
        of {hand-hacking} that relies on bit-level peculiarities of a
        particular hardware design, esp. tricks for speed and space
        optimization that rely on crocks such as overlapping instructions
        (or, as in the famous case described in The Story of Mel' (in
        Appendix A), interleaving of opcodes on a magnetic drum to minimize
        fetch delays due to the device's rotational latency). This sort of
        thing has become rare as the relative costs of programming time and
        machine resources have changed, but is still found in heavily
        constrained environments such as industrial embedded systems. See
        {Real Programmer}.

:barf: /barf/, n.,v.

        [common; from mainstream slang meaning `vomit']

        1. interj. Term of disgust. This is the closest hackish equivalent
        of the Valspeak "gag me with a spoon". (Like, euwww!) See {bletch}.

        2. vi. To say "Barf!" or emit some similar expression of disgust. "I
        showed him my latest hack and he barfed" means only that he
        complained about it, not that he literally vomited.

        3. vi. To fail to work because of unacceptable input, perhaps with a
        suitable error message, perhaps not. Examples: "The division
        operation barfs if you try to divide by 0." (That is, the division
        operation checks for an attempt to divide by zero, and if one is
        encountered it causes the operation to fail in some unspecified, but
        generally obvious, manner.) "The text editor barfs if you try to
        read in a new file before writing out the old one."

        See {choke}. In Commonwealth Hackish, barf is generally replaced by
        `puke' or `vom'. {barf} is sometimes also used as a {metasyntactic
        variable}, like {foo} or {bar}.

:barfmail: n.

        Multiple {bounce message}s accumulating to the level of serious
        annoyance, or worse. The sort of thing that happens when an
        inter-network mail gateway goes down or wonky.

:barfulation: /bar`fyoolay'sh@n/, interj.

        Variation of {barf} used around the Stanford area. An exclamation,
        expressing disgust. On seeing some particularly bad code one might
        exclaim, "Barfulation! Who wrote this, Quux?"

:barfulous: /bar'fyool@s/, adj.

        (alt.: barfucious, /bar-fyoo-sh@s/) Said of something that would
        make anyone barf, if only for esthetic reasons.

:barn: n.

        [uncommon; prob. from the nuclear military] An unexpectedly large
        quantity of something: a unit of measurement. "Why is /var/adm
        taking up so much space?" "The logs have grown to several barns."
        The source of this is clear: when physicists were first studying
        nuclear interactions, the probability was thought to be proportional
        to the cross-sectional area of the nucleus (this probability is
        still called the cross-section). Upon experimenting, they discovered
        the interactions were far more probable than expected; the nuclei
        were "as big as a barn". The units for cross-sections were
        christened Barns, (10^-24 cm^2) and the book containing
        cross-sections has a picture of a barn on the cover.

:barney: n.

        In Commonwealth hackish, barney is to {fred} (sense #1) as {bar} is
        to {foo}. That is, people who commonly use fred as their first
        metasyntactic variable will often use barney second. The reference
        is, of course, to Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble in the
        Flintstones cartoons.

:baroque: adj.

        [common] Feature-encrusted; complex; gaudy; verging on excessive.
        Said of hardware or (esp.) software designs, this has many of the
        connotations of {elephantine} or {monstrosity} but is less extreme
        and not pejorative in itself. In the absence of other, more negative
        descriptions this term suggests that the software is trembling on
        the edge of bad taste but has not quite tipped over into it.
        "Metafont even has features to introduce random variations to its
        letterform output. Now that is baroque!" See also {rococo}.

:BASIC: /bay'sic/, n.

        A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's
        experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which for many
        years was the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers. Edsger
        W. Dijkstra observed in Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal
        Perspective that "It is practically impossible to teach good
        programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC:
        as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of
        regeneration." This is another case (like {Pascal}) of the cascading
        {lossage} that happens when a language deliberately designed as an
        educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short
        BASIC programs (on the order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing
        anything longer (a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits
        that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This
        wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so
        common on low-end micros in the 1980s. As it is, it probably ruined
        tens of thousands of potential wizards.

        [1995: Some languages called "BASIC" aren't quite this nasty any
        more, having acquired Pascal- and C-like procedures and control
        structures and shed their line numbers. --ESR]

        BASIC stands for "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code".
        Earlier versions of this entry claiming this was a later {backronym}
        were incorrect.

:batbelt: n.

        Many hackers routinely hang numerous devices such as pagers,
        cell-phones, personal organizers, leatherman multitools, pocket
        knives, flashlights, walkie-talkies, even miniature computers from
        their belts. When many of these devices are worn at once, the
        hacker's belt somewhat resembles Batman's utility belt; hence it is
        referred to as a batbelt.

:batch: adj.

        1. Non-interactive. Hackers use this somewhat more loosely than the
        traditional technical definitions justify; in particular, switches
        on a normally interactive program that prepare it to receive
        non-interactive command input are often referred to as batch mode
        switches. A batch file is a series of instructions written to be
        handed to an interactive program running in batch mode.

        2. Performance of dreary tasks all at one sitting. "I finally sat
        down in batch mode and wrote out checks for all those bills; I guess
        they'll turn the electricity back on next week..."

        3. batching up: Accumulation of a number of small tasks that can be
        lumped together for greater efficiency. "I'm batching up those
        letters to send sometime" "I'm batching up bottles to take to the
        recycling center."

        (The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-03-17:5-8. The previous
        one is 76-02-14.)

:bathtub curve: n.

        Common term for the curve (resembling an end-to-end section of one
        of those claw-footed antique bathtubs) that describes the expected
        failure rate of electronics with time: initially high, dropping to
        near 0 for most of the system's lifetime, then rising again as it
        `tires out'. See also {burn-in period}, {infant mortality}.

:Batman factor: n.

        1. An integer number representing the number of items hanging from a
        {batbelt}. In most settings, a Batman factor of more than 3 is not
        acceptable without odd stares and whispering. This encourages the
        hacker in question to choose items for the batbelt carefully to
        avoid awkward social situations, usually amongst non-hackers.

        2. A somewhat more vaguely defined index of contribution to sense 1.
        Devices that are especially obtrusive, such as large, older model
        cell phones, "Pocket" PC devices and walkie talkies are said to have
        a high batman factor. Sleeker devices such as a later-model Palm or
        StarTac phone are prized for their low batman factor and lessened
        obtrusiveness and weight.

:baud: /bawd/, n.

        [simplified from its technical meaning] n. Bits per second. Hence
        kilobaud or Kbaud, thousands of bits per second. The technical
        meaning is level transitions per second; this coincides with bps
        only for two-level modulation with no framing or stop bits. Most
        hackers are aware of these nuances but blithely ignore them.

        Historical note: baud was originally a unit of telegraph signalling
        speed, set at one pulse per second. It was proposed at the November,
        1926 conference of the Comit Consultatif International Des
        Communications Tlgraphiques as an improvement on the then standard
        practice of referring to line speeds in terms of words per minute,
        and named for Jean Maurice Emile Baudot (1845-1903), a French
        engineer who did a lot of pioneering work in early teleprinters.

:baz: /baz/, n.

        1. [common] The third {metasyntactic variable} "Suppose we have
        three functions: FOO, BAR, and BAZ. FOO calls BAR, which calls
        BAZ...." (See also {fum})

        2. interj. A term of mild annoyance. In this usage the term is often
        drawn out for 2 or 3 seconds, producing an effect not unlike the
        bleating of a sheep; /baaaaaaz/.

        3. Occasionally appended to {foo} to produce `foobaz'.

        Earlier versions of this lexicon derived baz as a Stanford
        corruption of {bar}. However, Pete Samson (compiler of the {TMRC}
        lexicon) reports it was already current when he joined TMRC in 1958.
        He says "It came from Pogo. Albert the Alligator, when vexed or
        outraged, would shout `Bazz Fazz!' or `Rowrbazzle!' The club layout
        was said to model the (mythical) New England counties of Rowrfolk
        and Bassex (Rowrbazzle mingled with
        (Norfolk/Suffolk/Middlesex/Essex)."

:bazaar: n.,adj.

        In 1997, after meditating on the success of {Linux} for three years,
        the Jargon File's own editor ESR wrote an analytical paper on hacker
        culture and development models titled The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
        The main argument of the paper was that {Brooks's Law} is not the
        whole story; given the right social machinery, debugging can be
        efficiently parallelized across large numbers of programmers. The
        title metaphor caught on (see also {cathedral}), and the style of
        development typical in the Linux community is now often referred to
        as the bazaar mode. Its characteristics include releasing code early
        and often, and actively seeking the largest possible pool of peer
        reviewers. After 1998, the evident success of this way of doing
        things became one of the strongest arguments for {open source}.

:bboard: /bee'bord/, n.

        [contraction of `bulletin board']

        1. Any electronic bulletin board; esp. used of {BBS} systems running
        on personal micros, less frequently of a Usenet {newsgroup} (in
        fact, use of this term for a newsgroup generally marks one either as
        a {newbie} fresh in from the BBS world or as a real old-timer
        predating Usenet).

        2. At CMU and other colleges with similar facilities, refers to
        campus-wide electronic bulletin boards.

        3. The term physical bboard is sometimes used to refer to an
        old-fashioned, non-electronic cork-and-thumbtack memo board. At CMU,
        it refers to a particular one outside the CS Lounge.

        In either of senses 1 or 2, the term is usually prefixed by the name
        of the intended board (`the Moonlight Casino bboard' or `market
        bboard'); however, if the context is clear, the better-read bboards
        may be referred to by name alone, as in (at CMU) "Don't post
        for-sale ads on general".

:BBS: /BBS/, n.

        [common; abbreviation, "Bulletin Board System"] An electronic
        bulletin board system; that is, a message database where people can
        log in and leave broadcast messages for others grouped (typically)
        into {topic group}s. The term was especially applied to the
        thousands of local BBS systems that operated during the pre-Internet
        microcomputer era of roughly 1980 to 1995, typically run by amateurs
        for fun out of their homes on MS-DOS boxes with a single modem line
        each. Fans of Usenet and Internet or the big commercial timesharing
        bboards such as CompuServe and GEnie tended to consider local BBSes
        the low-rent district of the hacker culture, but they served a
        valuable function by knitting together lots of hackers and users in
        the personal-micro world who would otherwise have been unable to
        exchange code at all. Post-Internet, BBSs are likely to be local
        newsgroups on an ISP; efficiency has increased but a certain flavor
        has been lost. See also {bboard}.

:BCPL: //, n.

        [abbreviation, "Basic Combined Programming Language") A programming
        language developed by Martin Richards in Cambridge in 1967. It is
        remarkable for its rich syntax, small size of compiler (it can be
        run in 16k) and extreme portability. It reached break-even point at
        a very early stage, and was the language in which the original
        {hello world} program was written. It has been ported to so many
        different systems that its creator confesses to having lost count.
        It has only one data type (a machine word) which can be used as an
        integer, a character, a floating point number, a pointer, or almost
        anything else, depending on context. BCPL was a precursor of C,
        which inherited some of its features.

:BDFL:

        [Python; common] Benevolent Dictator For Life. {Guido}, considered
        in his role as the project leader of {Python}. People who are
        feeling temporarily cheesed off by one of his decisions sometimes
        leave off the B. The mental image that goes with this, of a
        cigar-chomping caudillo in gold braid and sunglasses, is extremely
        funny to anyone who has ever met Guido in person.

:beam: vt.

        [from Star Trek Classic's "Beam me up, Scotty!"]

        1. To transfer {softcopy} of a file electronically; most often in
        combining forms such as beam me a copy or beam that over to his
        site.

        2. Palm Pilot users very commonly use this term for the act of
        exchanging bits via the infrared links on their machines (this term
        seems to have originated with the ill-fated Newton Message Pad).
        Compare {blast}, {snarf}, {BLT}.

:beanie key: n.

        [Mac users] See {command key}.

:beep: n.,v.

        Syn. {feep}. This term is techspeak under MS-DOS/Windows and OS/2,
        and seems to be generally preferred among micro hobbyists.

:Befunge: n.

        A worthy companion to {INTERCAL}; a computer language family which
        escapes the quotidian limitation of linear control flow and embraces
        program counters flying through multiple dimensions with exotic
        topologies. The Befunge home page is at
        http://www.catseye.mb.ca/esoteric/befunge/.

:beige toaster: n.

        [obs.] An original Macintosh in the boxy beige case. See {toaster};
        compare {Macintrash}, {maggotbox}.

:bells and whistles: n.

        [common] Features added to a program or system to make it more
        {flavorful} from a hacker's point of view, without necessarily
        adding to its utility for its primary function. Distinguished from
        {chrome}, which is intended to attract users. "Now that we've got
        the basic program working, let's go back and add some bells and
        whistles." No one seems to know what distinguishes a bell from a
        whistle. The recognized emphatic form is "bells, whistles, and
        gongs".

        It used to be thought that this term derived from the toyboxes on
        theater organs. However, the "and gongs" strongly suggests a
        different origin, at sea. Before powered horns, ships routinely used
        bells, whistles, and gongs to signal each other over longer
        distances than voice can carry.

        Sometimes `trouble' is spelled {bells and whistles}...

        (The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-06-04. The previous one
        is 73-05-28.)

:bells whistles and gongs: n.

        A standard elaborated form of {bells and whistles}; typically said
        with a pronounced and ironic accent on the `gongs'.

:benchmark: n.

        [techspeak] An inaccurate measure of computer performance. "In the
        computer industry, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies,
        and benchmarks." Well-known ones include Whetstone, Dhrystone,
        Rhealstone (see {h}), the Gabriel LISP benchmarks, the SPECmark
        suite, and LINPACK. See also {machoflops}, {MIPS}, {smoke and
        mirrors}.

:Berkeley Quality Software: adj.

        (often abbreviated "BQS") Term used in a pejorative sense to refer
        to software that was apparently created by rather spaced-out hackers
        late at night to solve some unique problem. It usually has
        nonexistent, incomplete, or incorrect documentation, has been tested
        on at least two examples, and core dumps when anyone else attempts
        to use it. This term was frequently applied to early versions of the
        dbx(1) debugger. See also {Berzerkeley}.

        Note to British and Commonwealth readers: that's /berk'lee/, not
        /barklee/ as in British Received Pronunciation.

:Berzerkeley: /b@rzer'klee/, n.

        [from `berserk', via the name of a now-deceased record label; poss.
        originated by famed columnist Herb Caen] Humorous distortion of
        "Berkeley" used esp. to refer to the practices or products of the
        {BSD} Unix hackers. See {software bloat}, {Berkeley Quality
        Software}.

        Mainstream use of this term in reference to the cultural and
        political peculiarities of UC Berkeley as a whole has been reported
        from as far back as the 1960s.

:beta: /bay't@/, /bet@/, /beet@/, n.

        1. Mostly working, but still under test; usu. used with "in": in
        beta. In the {Real World}, hardware or software systems often go
        through two stages of release testing: Alpha (in-house) and Beta
        (out-house?). Beta releases are generally made to a group of lucky
        (or unlucky) trusted customers.

        2. Anything that is new and experimental. "His girlfriend is in
        beta" means that he is still testing for compatibility and reserving
        judgment.

        3. Flaky; dubious; suspect (since beta software is notoriously
        buggy).

        Historical note: More formally, to beta-test is to test a
        pre-release (potentially unreliable) version of a piece of software
        by making it available to selected (or self-selected) customers and
        users. This term derives from early 1960s terminology for product
        cycle checkpoints, first used at IBM but later standard throughout
        the industry. Alpha Test was the unit, module, or component test
        phase; Beta Test was initial system test. These themselves came from
        earlier A- and B-tests for hardware. The A-test was a feasibility
        and manufacturability evaluation done before any commitment to
        design and development. The B-test was a demonstration that the
        engineering model functioned as specified. The C-test (corresponding
        to today's beta) was the B-test performed on early samples of the
        production design, and the D test was the C test repeated after the
        model had been in production a while.

:BFI: /BFI/, n.

        See {brute force and ignorance}. Also encountered in the variants
        BFMI, "brute force and massive ignorance" and BFBI "brute force and
        bloody ignorance". In some parts of the U.S. this abbreviation was
        probably reinforced by a company called Browning-Ferris Industries
        in the waste-management business; a large BFI logo in white-on-blue
        could be seen on the sides of garbage trucks.

:BI: //

        Common written abbreviation for {Breidbart Index}.

:bible: n.

        1. One of a small number of fundamental source books such as
        {Knuth}, {K&R}, or the {Camel Book}.

        2. The most detailed and authoritative reference for a particular
        language, operating system, or other complex software system.

:BiCapitalization: n.

        The act said to have been performed on trademarks (such as
        {PostScript}, NeXT, {NeWS}, VisiCalc, FrameMaker, TK!solver,
        EasyWriter) that have been raised above the ruck of common coinage
        by nonstandard capitalization. Too many {marketroid} types think
        this sort of thing is really cute, even the 2,317th time they do it.
        Compare {studlycaps}, {InterCaps}.

:biff: /bif/, vt.

        [now rare] To notify someone of incoming mail. From the BSD utility
        biff(1), which was in turn named after a friendly dog who used to
        chase frisbees in the halls at UCB while 4.2BSD was in development.
        There was a legend that it had a habit of barking whenever the
        mailman came, but the author of biff says this is not true. No
        relation to {B1FF}.

:big iron: n.

        [common] Large, expensive, ultra-fast computers. Used generally of
        {number-crunching} supercomputers, but can include more conventional
        big commercial IBMish mainframes. Term of approval; compare {heavy
        metal}, oppose {dinosaur}.

:Big Red Switch: n.

        [IBM] The power switch on a computer, esp. the `Emergency Pull'
        switch on an IBM {mainframe} or the power switch on an IBM PC where
        it really is large and red. "This !@%$% {bitty box} is hung again;
        time to hit the Big Red Switch." Sources at IBM report that, in tune
        with the company's passion for {TLA}s, this is often abbreviated as
        BRS (this has also become established on FidoNet and in the PC
        {clone} world). It is alleged that the emergency pull switch on an
        IBM 360/91 actually fired a non-conducting bolt into the main power
        feed; the BRSes on more recent mainframes physically drop a block
        into place so that they can't be pushed back in. People get fired
        for pulling them, especially inappropriately (see also
        {molly-guard}). Compare {power cycle}, {three-finger salute}; see
        also {scram switch}.

:Big Room: n.

        (Also Big Blue Room) The extremely large room with the blue ceiling
        and intensely bright light (during the day) or black ceiling with
        lots of tiny night-lights (during the night) found outside all
        computer installations. "He can't come to the phone right now, he's
        somewhere out in the Big Room."

:big win: n.

        1. [common] Major success.

        2. [MIT] Serendipity. "Yes, those two physicists discovered
        high-temperature superconductivity in a batch of ceramic that had
        been prepared incorrectly according to their experimental schedule.
        Small mistake; big win!" See {win big}.

:big-endian: adj.

        [common; From Swift's Gulliver's Travels via the famous paper On
        Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace by Danny Cohen, USC/ISI IEN 137,
        dated April 1, 1980]

        1. Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given
        multi-byte numeric representation, the most significant byte has the
        lowest address (the word is stored `big-end-first'). Most
        processors, including the IBM 370 family, the {PDP-10}, the Motorola
        microprocessor families, and most of the various RISC designs are
        big-endian. Big-endian byte order is also sometimes called network
        order. See {little-endian}, {middle-endian}, {NUXI problem}, {swab}.

        2. An Internet address the wrong way round. Most of the world
        follows the Internet standard and writes email addresses starting
        with the name of the computer and ending up with the name of the
        country. In the U.K.: the Joint Academic Networking Team had decided
        to do it the other way round before the Internet domain standard was
        established. Most gateway sites have {ad-hockery} in their mailers
        to handle this, but can still be confused. In particular, the
        address me@uk.ac.bris.pys.as could be interpreted in JANET's
        big-endian way as one in the U.K. (domain uk) or in the standard
        little-endian way as one in the domain as (American Samoa) on the
        opposite side of the world.

:bignum: /big'nuhm/, n.

        [common; orig. from MIT MacLISP]

        1. [techspeak] A multiple-precision computer representation for very
        large integers.

        2. More generally, any very large number. "Have you ever looked at
        the United States Budget? There's bignums for you!"

        3. [Stanford] In backgammon, large numbers on the dice especially a
        roll of double fives or double sixes (compare {moby}, sense 4). See
        also {El Camino Bignum}.

        Sense 1 may require some explanation. Most computer languages
        provide a kind of data called integer, but such computer integers
        are usually very limited in size; usually they must be smaller than
        2^31 (2,147,483,648). If you want to work with numbers larger than
        that, you have to use floating-point numbers, which are usually
        accurate to only six or seven decimal places. Computer languages
        that provide bignums can perform exact calculations on very large
        numbers, such as 1000! (the factorial of 1000, which is 1000 times
        999 times 998 times ... times 2 times 1). For example, this value
        for 1000! was computed by the MacLISP system using bignums:

        40238726007709377354370243392300398571937486421071
        46325437999104299385123986290205920442084869694048
        00479988610197196058631666872994808558901323829669
        94459099742450408707375991882362772718873251977950
        59509952761208749754624970436014182780946464962910
        56393887437886487337119181045825783647849977012476
        63288983595573543251318532395846307555740911426241
        74743493475534286465766116677973966688202912073791
        43853719588249808126867838374559731746136085379534
        52422158659320192809087829730843139284440328123155
        86110369768013573042161687476096758713483120254785
        89320767169132448426236131412508780208000261683151
        02734182797770478463586817016436502415369139828126
        48102130927612448963599287051149649754199093422215
        66832572080821333186116811553615836546984046708975
        60290095053761647584772842188967964624494516076535
        34081989013854424879849599533191017233555566021394
        50399736280750137837615307127761926849034352625200
        01588853514733161170210396817592151090778801939317
        81141945452572238655414610628921879602238389714760
        88506276862967146674697562911234082439208160153780
        88989396451826324367161676217916890977991190375403
        12746222899880051954444142820121873617459926429565
        81746628302955570299024324153181617210465832036786
        90611726015878352075151628422554026517048330422614
        39742869330616908979684825901254583271682264580665
        26769958652682272807075781391858178889652208164348
        34482599326604336766017699961283186078838615027946
        59551311565520360939881806121385586003014356945272
        24206344631797460594682573103790084024432438465657
        24501440282188525247093519062092902313649327349756
        55139587205596542287497740114133469627154228458623
        77387538230483865688976461927383814900140767310446
        64025989949022222176590433990188601856652648506179
        97023561938970178600408118897299183110211712298459
        01641921068884387121855646124960798722908519296819
        37238864261483965738229112312502418664935314397013
        74285319266498753372189406942814341185201580141233
        44828015051399694290153483077644569099073152433278
        28826986460278986432113908350621709500259738986355
        42771967428222487575867657523442202075736305694988
        25087968928162753848863396909959826280956121450994
        87170124451646126037902930912088908694202851064018
        21543994571568059418727489980942547421735824010636
        77404595741785160829230135358081840096996372524230
        56085590370062427124341690900415369010593398383577
        79394109700277534720000000000000000000000000000000
        00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
        00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
        00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
        00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
        00000000000000000.

:bigot: n.

        [common] A person who is religiously attached to a particular
        computer, language, operating system, editor, or other tool (see
        {religious issues}). Usually found with a specifier; thus, Cray
        bigot, ITS bigot, APL bigot, VMS bigot, Berkeley bigot. Real bigots
        can be distinguished from mere partisans or zealots by the fact that
        they refuse to learn alternatives even when the march of time and/or
        technology is threatening to obsolete the favored tool. It is truly
        said "You can tell a bigot, but you can't tell him much." Compare
        {weenie}, {Amiga Persecution Complex}.

:bikeshedding:

        [originally BSD, now common] Technical disputes over minor, marginal
        issues conducted while more serious ones are being overlooked. The
        implied image is of people arguing over what color to paint the
        bicycle shed while the house is not finished.

:binary four: n.

        [Usenet] The finger, in the sense of digitus impudicus. This comes
        from an analogy between binary and the hand, i.e. 1=00001=thumb,
        2=00010=index finger, 3=00011=index and thumb, 4=00100. Considered
        silly. Prob. from humorous derivative of {finger}, sense 4.

:bit: n.

        [from the mainstream meaning and "Binary digIT"]

        1. [techspeak] The unit of information; the amount of information
        obtained from knowing the answer to a yes-or-no question for which
        the two outcomes are equally probable.

        2. [techspeak] A computational quantity that can take on one of two
        values, such as true and false or 0 and 1.

        3. A mental flag: a reminder that something should be done
        eventually. "I have a bit set for you." (I haven't seen you for a
        while, and I'm supposed to tell or ask you something.)

        4. More generally, a (possibly incorrect) mental state of belief. "I
        have a bit set that says that you were the last guy to hack on
        EMACS." (Meaning "I think you were the last guy to hack on EMACS,
        and what I am about to say is predicated on this, so please stop me
        if this isn't true.") "I just need one bit from you" is a polite way
        of indicating that you intend only a short interruption for a
        question that can presumably be answered yes or no.

        A bit is said to be set if its value is true or 1, and reset or
        clear if its value is false or 0. One speaks of setting and clearing
        bits. To {toggle} or invert a bit is to change it, either from 0 to
        1 or from 1 to 0. See also {flag}, {trit}, {mode bit}.

        The term bit first appeared in print in the computer-science sense
        in a 1948 paper by information theorist Claude Shannon, and was
        there credited to the early computer scientist John Tukey (who also
        seems to have coined the term software). Tukey records that bit
        evolved over a lunch table as a handier alternative to bigit or
        binit, at a conference in the winter of 1943-44.

:bit bang: n.

        Transmission of data on a serial line, when accomplished by rapidly
        tweaking a single output bit, in software, at the appropriate times.
        The technique is a simple loop with eight OUT and SHIFT instruction
        pairs for each byte. Input is more interesting. And full duplex
        (doing input and output at the same time) is one way to separate the
        real hackers from the {wannabee}s.

        Bit bang was used on certain early models of Prime computers,
        presumably when UARTs were too expensive, and on archaic Z80 micros
        with a Zilog PIO but no SIO. In an interesting instance of the
        {cycle of reincarnation}, this technique returned to use in the
        early 1990s on some RISC architectures because it consumes such an
        infinitesimal part of the processor that it actually makes sense not
        to have a UART. Compare {cycle of reincarnation}. Nowadays it's used
        to describe I2C, a serial protocol for monitoring motherboard
        hardware.

:bit bashing: n.

        (alt.: bit diddling or {bit twiddling}) Term used to describe any of
        several kinds of low-level programming characterized by manipulation
        of {bit}, {flag}, {nybble}, and other smaller-than-character-sized
        pieces of data; these include low-level device control, encryption
        algorithms, checksum and error-correcting codes, hash functions,
        some flavors of graphics programming (see {bitblt}), and
        assembler/compiler code generation. May connote either tedium or a
        real technical challenge (more usually the former). "The command
        decoding for the new tape driver looks pretty solid but the
        bit-bashing for the control registers still has bugs." See also
        {mode bit}.

:bit bucket: n.

        [very common]

        1. The universal data sink (originally, the mythical receptacle used
        to catch bits when they fall off the end of a register during a
        shift instruction). Discarded, lost, or destroyed data is said to
        have gone to the bit bucket. On {Unix}, often used for {/dev/null}.
        Sometimes amplified as the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky.

        2. The place where all lost mail and news messages eventually go.
        The selection is performed according to {Finagle's Law}; important
        mail is much more likely to end up in the bit bucket than junk mail,
        which has an almost 100% probability of getting delivered. Routing
        to the bit bucket is automatically performed by mail-transfer
        agents, news systems, and the lower layers of the network.

        3. The ideal location for all unwanted mail responses: "Flames about
        this article to the bit bucket." Such a request is guaranteed to
        overflow one's mailbox with flames.

        4. Excuse for all mail that has not been sent. "I mailed you those
        figures last week; they must have landed in the bit bucket." Compare
        {black hole}.

        This term is used purely in jest. It is based on the fanciful notion
        that bits are objects that are not destroyed but only misplaced.
        This appears to have been a mutation of an earlier term `bit box',
        about which the same legend was current; old-time hackers also
        report that trainees used to be told that when the CPU stored bits
        into memory it was actually pulling them "out of the bit box". See
        also {chad box}.

        Another variant of this legend has it that, as a consequence of the
        "parity preservation law", the number of 1 bits that go to the bit
        bucket must equal the number of 0 bits. Any imbalance results in
        bits filling up the bit bucket. A qualified computer technician can
        empty a full bit bucket as part of scheduled maintenance.

        The source for all these meanings, is, historically, the fact that
        the {chad box} on a paper-tape punch was sometimes called a bit
        bucket.

        A literal {bit bucket}.

        (The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-02-14. The previous one
        is 75-10-04.)

:bit decay: n.

        See {bit rot}. People with a physics background tend to prefer this
        variant for the analogy with particle decay. See also {computron},
        {quantum bogodynamics}.

:bit rot: n.

        [common] Also {bit decay}. Hypothetical disease the existence of
        which has been deduced from the observation that unused programs or
        features will often stop working after sufficient time has passed,
        even if `nothing has changed'. The theory explains that bits decay
        as if they were radioactive. As time passes, the contents of a file
        or the code in a program will become increasingly garbled.

        There actually are physical processes that produce such effects
        (alpha particles generated by trace radionuclides in ceramic chip
        packages, for example, can change the contents of a computer memory
        unpredictably, and various kinds of subtle media failures can
        corrupt files in mass storage), but they are quite rare (and
        computers are built with error-detecting circuitry to compensate for
        them). The notion long favored among hackers that cosmic rays are
        among the causes of such events turns out to be a myth; see the
        {cosmic rays} entry for details.

        The term {software rot} is almost synonymous. Software rot is the
        effect, bit rot the notional cause.

:bit twiddling: n.

        [very common]

        1. (pejorative) An exercise in tuning (see {tune}) in which
        incredible amounts of time and effort go to produce little
        noticeable improvement, often with the result that the code becomes
        incomprehensible.

        2. Aimless small modification to a program, esp. for some pointless
        goal.

        3. Approx. syn. for {bit bashing}; esp. used for the act of frobbing
        the device control register of a peripheral in an attempt to get it
        back to a known state.

:bit-paired keyboard: n.,obs.

        (alt.: bit-shift keyboard) A non-standard keyboard layout that seems
        to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for
        several years on early computer equipment. The ASR-33 was a
        mechanical device (see {EOU}), so the only way to generate the
        character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage. The
        design of the ASR-33 assigned each character key a basic pattern
        that could be modified by flipping bits if the SHIFT or the CTRL key
        was pressed. In order to avoid making the thing even more of a kluge
        than it already was, the design had to group characters that shared
        the same basic bit pattern on one key.

        Looking at the ASCII chart, we find:

        high  low bits
        bits  0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001
         010        !    "    #    $    %    &    '    (    )
         011   0    1    2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9

        This is why the characters !"#$%&'() appear where they do on a
        Teletype (thankfully, they didn't use shift-0 for space). The
        Teletype Model 33 was actually designed before ASCII existed, and
        was originally intended to use a code that contained these two rows:

              low bits
        high  0000  0010  0100  0110  1000  1010  1100  1110
        bits     0001  0011  0101  0111  1001  1011  1101  1111
          10   )  ! bel #  $  % wru &  *  (  "  :  ?  _  ,   .
          11   0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  '  ;  /  - esc del

        The result would have been something closer to a normal keyboard.
        But as it happened, Teletype had to use a lot of persuasion just to
        keep ASCII, and the Model 33 keyboard, from looking like this
        instead:

                  !  "  ?  $  '  &  -  (  )  ;  :  *  /  ,  .
               0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  +  ~  <  >    |

        Teletype's was not the weirdest variant of the {QWERTY} layout
        widely seen, by the way; that prize should probably go to one of
        several (differing) arrangements on IBM's even clunkier 026 and 029
        card punches.

        When electronic terminals became popular, in the early 1970s, there
        was no agreement in the industry over how the keyboards should be
        laid out. Some vendors opted to emulate the Teletype keyboard, while
        others used the flexibility of electronic circuitry to make their
        product look like an office typewriter. Either choice was supported
        by the ANSI computer keyboard standard, X4.14-1971, which referred
        to the alternatives as "logical bit pairing" and "typewriter
        pairing". These alternatives became known as bit-paired and
        typewriter-paired keyboards. To a hacker, the bit-paired keyboard
        seemed far more logical -- and because most hackers in those days
        had never learned to touch-type, there was little pressure from the
        pioneering users to adapt keyboards to the typewriter standard.

        The doom of the bit-paired keyboard was the large-scale introduction
        of the computer terminal into the normal office environment, where
        out-and-out technophobes were expected to use the equipment. The
        typewriter-paired standard became universal, X4.14 was superseded by
        X4.23-1982, bit-paired hardware was quickly junked or relegated to
        dusty corners, and both terms passed into disuse.

        However, in countries without a long history of touch typing, the
        argument against the bit-paired keyboard layout was weak or
        nonexistent. As a result, the standard Japanese keyboard, used on
        PCs, Unix boxen etc. still has all of the !"#$%&'() characters above
        the numbers in the ASR-33 layout.

:bitblt: /bit'blit/, n.

        [from {BLT}, q.v.:]

        1. [common] Any of a family of closely related algorithms for moving
        and copying rectangles of bits between main and display memory on a
        bit-mapped device, or between two areas of either main or display
        memory (the requirement to do the {Right Thing} in the case of
        overlapping source and destination rectangles is what makes BitBlt
        tricky).

        2. Synonym for {blit} or {BLT}. Both uses are borderline techspeak.

:bits: pl.n.

        1. Information. Examples: "I need some bits about file formats." ("I
        need to know about file formats.") Compare {core dump}, sense 4.

        2. Machine-readable representation of a document, specifically as
        contrasted with paper: "I have only a photocopy of the Jargon File;
        does anyone know where I can get the bits?". See {softcopy}, {source
        of all good bits} See also {bit}.

:bitty box: /bit'ee boks/, n.

        1. A computer sufficiently small, primitive, or incapable as to
        cause a hacker acute claustrophobia at the thought of developing
        software on or for it. Especially used of small, obsolescent,
        single-tasking-only personal machines such as the Atari 800,
        Osborne, Sinclair, VIC-20, TRS-80, or IBM PC.

        2. [Pejorative] More generally, the opposite of `real computer' (see
        {Get a real computer!}). See also {mess-dos}, {toaster}, and {toy}.

:bixie: /bik'see/, n.

        Variant {emoticon}s used BIX (the BIX Information eXchange); the
        term survived the demise of BIX itself. The most common ({smiley})
        bixie is <@_@>, representing two cartoon eyes and a mouth. These
        were originally invented in an SF fanzine called APA-L and imported
        to BIX by one of the earliest users.

:black art: n.

        [common] A collection of arcane, unpublished, and (by implication)
        mostly ad-hoc techniques developed for a particular application or
        systems area (compare {black magic}). VLSI design and compiler code
        optimization were (in their beginnings) considered classic examples
        of black art; as theory developed they became {deep magic}, and once
        standard textbooks had been written, became merely {heavy wizardry}.
        The huge proliferation of formal and informal channels for spreading
        around new computer-related technologies during the last twenty
        years has made both the term black art and what it describes less
        common than formerly. See also {voodoo programming}.

:black hat:

        1. [common among security specialists] A {cracker}, someone bent on
        breaking into the system you are protecting. Oppose the less comon
        white hat for an ally or friendly security specialist; the term gray
        hat is in occasional use for people with cracker skills operating
        within the law, e.g. in doing security evaluations. All three terms
        derive from the dress code of formulaic Westerns, in which bad guys
        wore black hats and good guys white ones.

        2. [spamfighters] `Black hat', `white hat', and `gray hat' are also
        used to denote the spam-friendliness of ISPs: a black hat ISP
        harbors spammers and doesn't terminate them; a white hat ISP
        terminates upon the first LART; and gray hat ISPs terminate only
        reluctantly and/or slowly. This has led to the concept of a hat
        check: someone considering a potential business relationship with an
        ISP or other provider will post a query to a {NANA} group, asking
        about the provider's hat color. The term albedo has also been used
        to describe a provider's spam-friendliness.

:black hole: n.,vt.

        [common] What data (a piece of email or netnews, or a stream of
        TCP/IP packets) has fallen into if it disappears mysteriously
        between its origin and destination sites (that is, without returning
        a {bounce message}). "I think there's a black hole at foovax!"
        conveys suspicion that site foovax has been dropping a lot of stuff
        on the floor lately (see {drop on the floor}). The implied metaphor
        of email as interstellar travel is interesting in itself. Readily
        verbed as blackhole: "That router is blackholing IDP packets."
        Compare {bit bucket} and see {RBL}.

:black magic: n.

        [common] A technique that works, though nobody really understands
        why. More obscure than {voodoo programming}, which may be done by
        cookbook. Compare also {black art}, {deep magic}, and {magic number}
        (sense 2).

:Black Screen of Death:

        [prob.: related to the Floating Head of Death in a famous Far Side
        cartoon.] A failure mode of {Microsloth Windows}. On an attempt to
        launch a DOS box, a networked Windows system not uncommonly blanks
        the screen and locks up the PC so hard that it requires a cold
        {boot} to recover. This unhappy phenomenon is known as The Black
        Screen of Death. See also {Blue Screen of Death}, which has become
        rather more common.

:blammo: v.

        [Oxford Brookes University and alumni, UK] To forcibly remove
        someone from any interactive system, especially talker systems. The
        operators, who may remain hidden, may "blammo" a user who is
        misbehaving. Very similar to archaic MIT gun; in fact, the
        blammo-gun is a notional device used to "blammo" someone. While in
        actual fact the only incarnation of the blammo-gun is the command
        used to forcibly eject a user, operators speak of different levels
        of blammo-gun fire; e.g., a blammo-gun to `stun' will temporarily
        remove someone, but a blammo-gun set to `maim' will stop someone
        coming back on for a while.

:blargh: /blarg/, n.

        [MIT; now common] The opposite of {ping}, sense 5; an exclamation
        indicating that one has absorbed or is emitting a quantum of
        unhappiness. Less common than {ping}.

:blast:

        1. v.,n. Synonym for {BLT}, used esp. for large data sends over a
        network or comm line. Opposite of {snarf}. Usage: uncommon. The
        variant `blat' has been reported.

        2. vt. [HP/Apollo] Synonymous with {nuke} (sense 3). Sometimes the
        message Unable to kill all processes. Blast them (y/n)? would appear
        in the command window upon logout.

:blat: n.

        1. Syn. {blast}, sense 1.

        2. See {thud}.

:bletch: /blech/, interj.

        [very common; from Yiddish/German `brechen', to vomit, poss. via
        comic-strip exclamation `blech'] Term of disgust. Often used in
        "Ugh, bletch". Compare {barf}.

:bletcherous: /blech'@r@s/, adj.

        Disgusting in design or function; esthetically unappealing. This
        word is seldom used of people. "This keyboard is bletcherous!"
        (Perhaps the keys don't work very well, or are misplaced.) See
        {losing}, {cretinous}, {bagbiting}, {bogus}, and {random}. The term
        {bletcherous} applies to the esthetics of the thing so described;
        similarly for {cretinous}. By contrast, something that is losing or
        bagbiting may be failing to meet objective criteria. See also
        {bogus} and {random}, which have richer and wider shades of meaning
        than any of the above.

:blinkenlights: /blink'@nli:tz/, n.

        [common] Front-panel diagnostic lights on a computer, esp. a
        {dinosaur}. Now that dinosaurs are rare, this term usually refers to
        status lights on a modem, network hub, or the like.

        This term derives from the last word of the famous
        blackletter-Gothic sign in mangled pseudo-German that once graced
        about half the computer rooms in the English-speaking world. One
        version ran in its entirety as follows:

                          ACHTUNG!  ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!

        Alles touristen und non-technischen looken peepers!
        Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben.
        Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken
        mit spitzensparken.  Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
        Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das
        pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.

        This silliness dates back at least as far as 1955 at IBM and had
        already gone international by the early 1960s, when it was reported
        at London University's ATLAS computing site. There are several
        variants of it in circulation, some of which actually do end with
        the word `blinkenlights'.

        In an amusing example of turnabout-is-fair-play, German hackers have
        developed their own versions of the blinkenlights poster in
        fractured English, one of which is reproduced here:

                                      ATTENTION

        This room is fullfilled mit special electronische equippment.
        Fingergrabbing and pressing the cnoeppkes from the computers is
        allowed for die experts only!  So all the "lefthanders" stay away
        and do not disturben the brainstorming von here working
        intelligencies.  Otherwise you will be out thrown and kicked
        anderswhere!  Also: please keep still and only watchen astaunished
        the blinkenlights.

        See also {geef}.

        Old-time hackers sometimes get nostalgic for blinkenlights because
        they were so much more fun to look at than a blank panel. Sadly,
        very few computers still have them (the three LEDs on a PC keyboard
        certainly don't count). The obvious reasons (cost of wiring, cost of
        front-panel cutouts, almost nobody needs or wants to interpret
        machine-register states on the fly anymore) are only part of the
        story. Another part of it is that radio-frequency leakage from the
        lamp wiring was beginning to be a problem as far back as transistor
        machines. But the most fundamental fact is that there are very few
        signals slow enough to blink an LED these days! With slow CPUs, you
        could watch the bus register or instruction counter tick, but even
        at 33/66/150MHz (let alone gigahertz speeds) it's all a blur.

        Despite this, a couple of relatively recent computer designs of note
        have featured programmable blinkenlights that were added just
        because they looked cool. The Connection Machine, a 65,536-processor
        parallel computer designed in the mid-1980s, was a black cube with
        one side covered with a grid of red blinkenlights; the sales demo
        had them evolving {life} patterns. A few years later the ill-fated
        BeBox (a personal computer designed to run the BeOS operating
        system) featured twin rows of blinkenlights on the case front. When
        Be, Inc. decided to get out of the hardware business in 1996 and
        instead ported their OS to the PowerPC and later to the Intel
        architecture, many users suffered severely from the absence of their
        beloved blinkenlights. Before long an external version of the
        blinkenlights driven by a PC serial port became available; there is
        some sort of plot symmetry in the fact that it was assembled by a
        German.

        Finally, a version updated for the Internet has been seen on
        news.admin.net-abuse.email:

                            ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!

        Das Internet is nicht fuer gefingerclicken und giffengrabben. Ist easy
        droppenpacket der routers und overloaden der backbone mit der spammen
        und der me-tooen.  Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das
        mausklicken sichtseeren keepen das bandwit-spewin hans in das pockets
        muss; relaxen und watchen das cursorblinken.

        This newest version partly reflects reports that the word
        `blinkenlights' is (in 1999) undergoing something of a revival in
        usage, but applied to networking equipment. The transmit and receive
        lights on routers, activity lights on switches and hubs, and other
        network equipment often blink in visually pleasing and seemingly
        coordinated ways. Although this is different in some ways from
        register readings, a tall stack of Cisco equipment or a 19-inch rack
        of ISDN terminals can provoke a similar feeling of hypnotic awe,
        especially in a darkened network operations center or server room.

        The ancestor of the original blinkenlights posters of the 1950s was
        probably this:

        WWII-era machine-shop poster

        We are informed that cod-German parodies of this kind were very
        common in Allied machine shops during and following WWII. Germans,
        then as now, had a reputation for being both good with precision
        machinery and prone to officious notices.

:blit: /blit/, vt.

        1. [common] To copy a large array of bits from one part of a
        computer's memory to another part, particularly when the memory is
        being used to determine what is shown on a display screen. "The
        storage allocator picks through the table and copies the good parts
        up into high memory, and then blits it all back down again." See
        {bitblt}, {BLT}, {dd}, {cat}, {blast}, {snarf}. More generally, to
        perform some operation (such as toggling) on a large array of bits
        while moving them.

        2. [historical, rare] Sometimes all-capitalized as BLIT: an early
        experimental bit-mapped terminal designed by Rob Pike at Bell Labs,
        later commercialized as the AT&T 5620. (The folk etymology from
        "Bell Labs Intelligent Terminal" is incorrect. Its creators liked to
        claim that "Blit" stood for the Bacon, Lettuce, and Interactive
        Tomato.)

:blitter: /blit'r/, n.

        [common] A special-purpose chip or hardware system built to perform
        {blit} operations, esp. used for fast implementation of bit-mapped
        graphics. The Commodore Amiga and a few other micros have these, but
        since 1990 the trend has been away from them (however, see {cycle of
        reincarnation}). Syn. {raster blaster}.

:blivet: /bliv'@t/, n.

        [allegedly from a World War II military term meaning "ten pounds of
        manure in a five-pound bag"]

        1. An intractable problem.

        2. A crucial piece of hardware that can't be fixed or replaced if it
        breaks.

        3. A tool that has been hacked over by so many incompetent
        programmers that it has become an unmaintainable tissue of hacks.

        4. An out-of-control but unkillable development effort.

        5. An embarrassing bug that pops up during a customer demo.

        6. In the subjargon of computer security specialists, a
        denial-of-service attack performed by hogging limited resources that
        have no access controls (for example, shared spool space on a
        multi-user system).

        This term has other meanings in other technical cultures; among
        experimental physicists and hardware engineers of various kinds it
        seems to mean any random object of unknown purpose (similar to
        hackish use of {frob}). It has also been used to describe an amusing
        trick-the-eye drawing resembling a three-pronged fork that appears
        to depict a three-dimensional object until one realizes that the
        parts fit together in an impossible way.

        This is a blivet

:bloatware: n.

        [common] Software that provides minimal functionality while
        requiring a disproportionate amount of diskspace and memory.
        Especially used for application and OS upgrades. This term is very
        common in the Windows/NT world. So is its cause.

:BLOB:

        1. n. [acronym: Binary Large OBject] Used by database people to
        refer to any random large block of bits that needs to be stored in a
        database, such as a picture or sound file. The essential point about
        a BLOB is that it's an object that cannot be interpreted within the
        database itself.

        2. v. To {mailbomb} someone by sending a BLOB to him/her; esp. used
        as a mild threat. "If that program crashes again, I'm going to BLOB
        the core dump to you."

:block: v.

        [common; from process scheduling terminology in OS theory]

        1. vi. To delay or sit idle while waiting for something. "We're
        blocking until everyone gets here." Compare {busy-wait}.

        2. block on vt. To block, waiting for (something). "Lunch is blocked
        on Phil's arrival."

:blog: n.

        [common] Short for weblog, an on-line web-zine or diary (usually
        with facilities for reader comments and discussion threads) made
        accessible through the World Wide Web. This term is widespread and
        readily forms derivatives, of which the best known may be
        {blogosphere}.

:Bloggs Family: n.

        An imaginary family consisting of Fred and Mary Bloggs and their
        children. Used as a standard example in knowledge representation to
        show the difference between extensional and intensional objects. For
        example, every occurrence of "Fred Bloggs" is the same unique
        person, whereas occurrences of "person" may refer to different
        people. Members of the Bloggs family have been known to pop up in
        bizarre places such as the old {DEC} Telephone Directory. Compare
        {Dr. Fred Mbogo}; {J. Random Hacker}; {Fred Foobar}.

:blogosphere:

        The totality of all {blog}s. A culture heavily overlapping with but
        not coincident with hackerdom; a few of its key coinages
        ({blogrolling}, {fisking}, {anti-idiotarianism}) are recorded in
        this lexicon for flavor. Bloggers often divide themselves into
        warbloggers and techbloggers. The techbloggers write about
        technology and technology policy, while the warbloggers are more
        politically focused and tend to be preoccupied with U.S. and world
        response to the post-9/11 war against terrorism. The overlap with
        hackerdom is heaviest among the techbloggers, but several of the
        most prominent warbloggers are also hackers. Bloggers in general
        tend to be aware of and sympathetic to the hacker culture.

:blogrolling:

        [From the American political term `logrolling', for supporting
        another's pet bill in the legislature in exchange for reciprocal
        support,] When you hotlink to other bloggers' blogs (and-or other
        bloggers' specific blog entries) in your blog, you are blogrolling.
        This is frequently reciprocal.

:blow an EPROM: /bloh @n ee'prom/, v.

        (alt.: blast an EPROM, burn an EPROM) To program a read-only memory,
        e.g.: for use with an embedded system. This term arose because the
        programming process for the Programmable Read-Only Memories (PROMs)
        that preceded present-day Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memories
        (EPROMs) involved intentionally blowing tiny electrical fuses on the
        chip. The usage lives on (it's too vivid and expressive to discard)
        even though the write process on EPROMs is nondestructive.

:blow away: vt.

        To remove (files and directories) from permanent storage, generally
        by accident. "He reformatted the wrong partition and blew away last
        night's netnews." Oppose {nuke}.

:blow out: vi.

        [prob.: from mining and tunneling jargon] Of software, to fail
        spectacularly; almost as serious as {crash and burn}. See {blow
        past}, {blow up}, {die horribly}.

:blow past: vt.

        To {blow out} despite a safeguard. "The server blew past the 5K
        reserve buffer."

:blow up: vi.

        1. [scientific computation] To become unstable. Suggests that the
        computation is diverging so rapidly that it will soon overflow or at
        least go {nonlinear}.

        2. Syn. {blow out}.

:BLT: /BLT/, /bl@t/, /belt/, n.,vt.

        Synonym for {blit}. This is the original form of {blit} and the
        ancestor of {bitblt}. It referred to any large bit-field copy or
        move operation (one resource-intensive memory-shuffling operation
        done on pre-paged versions of ITS, WAITS, and TOPS-10 was
        sardonically referred to as "The Big BLT"). The jargon usage has
        outlasted the {PDP-10} BLock Transfer instruction from which {BLT}
        derives; nowadays, the assembler mnemonic {BLT} almost always means
        "Branch if Less Than zero".

:blue box:

        n.

        1. obs. Once upon a time, before all-digital switches made it
        possible for the phone companies to move them out of band, one could
        actually hear the switching tones used to route long-distance calls.
        Early {phreaker}s built devices called blue boxes that could
        reproduce these tones, which could be used to commandeer portions of
        the phone network. (This was not as hard as it may sound; one early
        phreak acquired the sobriquet "Captain Crunch" after he proved that
        he could generate switching tones with a plastic whistle pulled out
        of a box of Captain Crunch cereal!) There were other colors of box
        with more specialized phreaking uses; red boxes, black boxes, silver
        boxes, etc. There were boxes of other colors as well, but the blue
        box was the original and archetype.

        2. n. An {IBM} machine, especially a large (non-PC) one.

:Blue Glue: n.

        [IBM; obs.] IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture), an incredibly
        {losing} and {bletcherous} communications protocol once widely
        favored at commercial shops that didn't know any better (like other
        proprietary networking protocols, it became obsolete and effectively
        disappeared after the Internet explosion c.1994). The official IBM
        definition is "that which binds blue boxes together." See {fear and
        loathing}. It may not be irrelevant that Blue Glue is the trade name
        of a 3M product that is commonly used to hold down the carpet
        squares to the removable panel floors common in {dinosaur pen}s. A
        correspondent at U. Minn. reports that the CS department there has
        about 80 bottles of the stuff hanging about, so they often refer to
        any messy work to be done as using the blue glue.

:blue goo: n.

        Term for `police' {nanobot}s intended to prevent {gray goo},
        denature hazardous waste, destroy pollution, put ozone back into the
        stratosphere, prevent halitosis, and promote truth, justice, and the
        American way, etc. The term "Blue Goo" can be found in Dr. Seuss's
        Fox In Socks to refer to a substance much like bubblegum. `Would you
        like to chew blue goo, sir?'. See {nanotechnology}.

:Blue Screen of Death: n.

        [common] This term is closely related to the older {Black Screen of
        Death} but much more common (many non-hackers have picked it up).
        Due to the extreme fragility and bugginess of Microsoft Windows,
        misbehaving applications can readily crash the OS (and the OS
        sometimes crashes itself spontaneously). The Blue Screen of Death,
        sometimes decorated with hex error codes, is what you get when this
        happens. (Commonly abbreviated {BSOD}.) The following entry from the
        Salon Haiku Contest, seems to have predated popular use of the term:

                Windows NT crashed.
                I am the Blue Screen of Death
                No one hears your screams.

:blue wire: n.

        [IBM] Patch wires (esp. 30 AWG gauge) added to circuit boards at the
        factory to correct design or fabrication problems. Blue wire is not
        necessarily blue, the term describes function rather than color.
        These may be necessary if there hasn't been time to design and
        qualify another board version. In Great Britain this can be bodge
        wire, after mainstream slang bodge for a clumsy improvisation or
        sloppy job of work. Compare {purple wire}, {red wire}, {yellow
        wire}, {pink wire}.

:blurgle: /bler'gl/, n.

        [UK] Spoken {metasyntactic variable}, to indicate some text that is
        obvious from context, or which is already known. If several words
        are to be replaced, blurgle may well be doubled or tripled. "To look
        for something in several files use `grep string blurgle blurgle'."
        In each case, "blurgle blurgle" would be understood to be replaced
        by the file you wished to search. Compare {mumble}, sense 7.

:BNF: /BNF/, n.

        1. [techspeak] Acronym for Backus Normal Form (later retronymed to
        Backus-Naur Form because BNF was not in fact a normal form), a
        metasyntactic notation used to specify the syntax of programming
        languages, command sets, and the like. Widely used for language
        descriptions but seldom documented anywhere, so that it must usually
        be learned by osmosis from other hackers. Consider this BNF for a
        U.S. postal address:

         <postal-address> ::= <name-part> <street-address> <zip-part>

         <personal-part> ::= <name> | <initial> "."

         <name-part> ::= <personal-part> <last-name> [<jr-part>] <EOL>
                       | <personal-part> <name-part>

         <street-address> ::= [<apt>] <house-num> <street-name> <EOL>

         <zip-part> ::= <town-name> "," <state-code> <ZIP-code> <EOL>

        This translates into English as: "A postal-address consists of a
        name-part, followed by a street-address part, followed by a zip-code
        part. A personal-part consists of either a first name or an initial
        followed by a dot. A name-part consists of either: a personal-part
        followed by a last name followed by an optional jr-part (Jr., Sr.,
        or dynastic number) and end-of-line, or a personal part followed by
        a name part (this rule illustrates the use of recursion in BNFs,
        covering the case of people who use multiple first and middle names
        and/or initials). A street address consists of an optional apartment
        specifier, followed by a street number, followed by a street name. A
        zip-part consists of a town-name, followed by a comma, followed by a
        state code, followed by a ZIP-code followed by an end-of-line." Note
        that many things (such as the format of a personal-part, apartment
        specifier, or ZIP-code) are left unspecified. These are presumed to
        be obvious from context or detailed somewhere nearby. See also
        {parse}.

        2. Any of a number of variants and extensions of BNF proper,
        possibly containing some or all of the {regexp} wildcards such as *
        or +. In fact the example above isn't the pure form invented for the
        Algol-60 report; it uses [], which was introduced a few years later
        in IBM's PL/I definition but is now universally recognized.

        3. In {science-fiction fandom}, a `Big-Name Fan' (someone famous or
        notorious). Years ago a fan started handing out black-on-green BNF
        buttons at SF conventions; this confused the hacker contingent
        terribly.

:boa: n.

        Any one of the fat cables that lurk under the floor in a {dinosaur
        pen}. Possibly so called because they display a ferocious life of
        their own when you try to lay them straight and flat after they have
        been coiled for some time. It is rumored within IBM that channel
        cables for the 370 are limited to 200 feet because beyond that
        length the boas get dangerous -- and it is worth noting that one of
        the major cable makers uses the trademark `Anaconda'.

:board: n.

        1. In-context synonym for {bboard}; sometimes used even for Usenet
        newsgroups (but see usage note under {bboard}, sense 1).

        2. An electronic circuit board.

:boat anchor: n.

        [common; from ham radio]

        1. Like {doorstop} but more severe; implies that the offending
        hardware is irreversibly dead or useless. "That was a working
        motherboard once. One lightning strike later, instant boat anchor!"

        2. A person who just takes up space.

        3. Obsolete but still working hardware, especially when used of an
        old, bulky, quirky system; originally a term of annoyance, but
        became more and more affectionate as the hardware became more and
        more obsolete.

        Auctioneers use this term for a large, undesirable object such as a
        washing machine; actual boating enthusiasts, however, use "mooring
        anchor" for frustrating (not actually useless) equipment.

:bob: n.

        At Demon Internet, all tech support personnel are called "Bob".
        (Female support personnel have an option on "Bobette"). This has
        nothing to do with Bob the divine drilling-equipment salesman of the
        {Church of the SubGenius}. Nor is it acronymized from "Brother Of
        {BOFH}", though all parties agree it could have been. Rather, it was
        triggered by an unusually large draft of new tech-support people in
        1995. It was observed that there would be much duplication of names.
        To ease the confusion, it was decided that all support techs would
        henceforth be known as "Bob", and identity badges were created
        labelled "Bob 1" and "Bob 2". ("No, we never got any further"
        reports a witness).

        The reason for "Bob" rather than anything else is due to a {luser}
        calling and asking to speak to "Bob", despite the fact that no "Bob"
        was currently working for Tech Support. Since we all know "the
        customer is always right", it was decided that there had to be at
        least one "Bob" on duty at all times, just in case.

        This sillyness snowballed inexorably. Shift leaders and managers
        began to refer to their groups of "bobs". Whole ranks of support
        machines were set up (and still exist in the DNS as of 1999) as bob1
        through bobN. Then came alt.tech-support.recovery, and it was filled
        with Demon support personnel. They all referred to themselves, and
        to others, as "bob", and after a while it caught on. There is now a
        Bob Code describing the Bob nature.

:bodge:

        [Commonwealth hackish] Syn. {kludge} or {hack} (sense 1). "I'll
        bodge this in now and fix it later".

:BOF: /BOF/, /bof/, n.

        1. [common] Abbreviation for the phrase "Birds Of a Feather"
        (flocking together), an informal discussion group and/or bull
        session scheduled on a conference program. It is not clear where or
        when this term originated, but it is now associated with the USENIX
        conferences for Unix techies and was already established there by
        1984. It was used earlier than that at DECUS conferences and is
        reported to have been common at SHARE meetings as far back as the
        early 1960s.

        2. Acronym, "Beginning of File".

:BOFH: //, n.

        [common] Acronym, Bastard Operator From Hell. A system administrator
        with absolutely no tolerance for {luser}s. "You say you need more
        filespace? <massive-global-delete> Seems to me you have plenty
        left..." Many BOFHs (and others who would be BOFHs if they could get
        away with it) hang out in the newsgroup alt.sysadmin.recovery,
        although there has also been created a top-level newsgroup hierarchy
        (bofh.*) of their own.

        Several people have written stories about BOFHs. The set usually
        considered canonical is by Simon Travaglia and may be found at the
        Bastard Home Page. BOFHs and BOFH wannabes hang out on {scary devil
        monastery} and wield {LART}s.

:bogo-sort: /boh`gohsort'/, n.

        (var.: stupid-sort) The archetypical perversely awful algorithm (as
        opposed to {bubble sort}, which is merely the generic bad
        algorithm). Bogo-sort is equivalent to repeatedly throwing a deck of
        cards in the air, picking them up at random, and then testing
        whether they are in order. It serves as a sort of canonical example
        of awfulness. Looking at a program and seeing a dumb algorithm, one
        might say "Oh, I see, this program uses bogo-sort." Esp. appropriate
        for algorithms with factorial or super-exponential running time in
        the average case and probabilistically infinite worst-case running
        time. Compare {bogus}, {brute force}.

        A spectacular variant of bogo-sort has been proposed which has the
        interesting property that, if the Many Worlds interpretation of
        quantum mechanics is true, it can sort an arbitrarily large array in
        linear time. (In the Many-Worlds model, the result of any quantum
        action is to split the universe-before into a sheaf of
        universes-after, one for each possible way the state vector can
        collapse; in any one of the universes-after the result appears
        random.) The steps are: 1. Permute the array randomly using a
        quantum process, 2. If the array is not sorted, destroy the universe
        (checking that the list is sorted requires O(n) time).
        Implementation of step 2 is left as an exercise for the reader.

:bogometer: /bohgom'@ter/, n.

        A notional instrument for measuring {bogosity}. Compare the
        {Troll-O-Meter} and the `wankometer' described in the {wank} entry;
        see also {bogus}.

:BogoMIPS: /bo'gomips/, n.

        The number of million times a second a processor can do absolutely
        nothing. The {Linux} OS measures BogoMIPS at startup in order to
        calibrate some soft timing loops that will be used later on; details
        at the BogoMIPS mini-HOWTO. The name Linus chose, of course, is an
        ironic comment on the uselessness of all other {MIPS} figures.

:bogon: /boh'gon/, n.

        [very common; by analogy with proton/electron/neutron, but doubtless
        reinforced after 1980 by the similarity to Douglas Adams's `Vogons';
        see the Bibliography in Appendix C and note that Arthur Dent
        actually mispronounces `Vogons' as `Bogons' at one point]

        1. The elementary particle of bogosity (see {quantum bogodynamics}).
        For instance, "the Ethernet is emitting bogons again" means that it
        is broken or acting in an erratic or bogus fashion.

        2. A query packet sent from a TCP/IP domain resolver to a root
        server, having the reply bit set instead of the query bit.

        3. Any bogus or incorrectly formed packet sent on a network.

        4. By synecdoche, used to refer to any bogus thing, as in "I'd like
        to go to lunch with you but I've got to go to the weekly staff
        bogon".

        5. A person who is bogus or who says bogus things. This was
        historically the original usage, but has been overtaken by its
        derivative senses 1--4. See also {bogosity}, {bogus}; compare
        {psyton}, {fat electrons}, {magic smoke}.

        The bogon has become the type case for a whole bestiary of nonce
        particle names, including the `clutron' or `cluon' (indivisible
        particle of cluefulness, obviously the antiparticle of the bogon)
        and the futon (elementary particle of {randomness}, or sometimes of
        lameness). These are not so much live usages in themselves as
        examples of a live meta-usage: that is, it has become a standard
        joke or linguistic maneuver to "explain" otherwise mysterious
        circumstances by inventing nonce particle names. And these imply
        nonce particle theories, with all their dignity or lack thereof (we
        might note parenthetically that this is a generalization from
        "(bogus particle) theories" to "bogus (particle theories)"!).
        Perhaps such particles are the modern-day equivalents of trolls and
        wood-nymphs as standard starting-points around which to construct
        explanatory myths. Of course, playing on an existing word (as in the
        `futon') yields additional flavor. Compare {magic smoke}.

:bogon filter: /boh'gon fil'tr/, n.

        Any device, software or hardware, that limits or suppresses the flow
        and/or emission of bogons. "Engineering hacked a bogon filter
        between the Cray and the VAXen, and now we're getting fewer dropped
        packets." See also {bogosity}, {bogus}.

:bogon flux: /boh'gon fluhks/, n.

        A measure of a supposed field of {bogosity} emitted by a speaker,
        measured by a {bogometer}; as a speaker starts to wander into
        increasing bogosity a listener might say "Warning, warning, bogon
        flux is rising". See {quantum bogodynamics}.

:bogosity: /bohgo's@tee/, n.

        1. [orig. CMU, now very common] The degree to which something is
        {bogus}. Bogosity is measured with a {bogometer}; in a seminar, when
        a speaker says something bogus, a listener might raise his hand and
        say "My bogometer just triggered". More extremely, "You just pinned
        my bogometer" means you just said or did something so outrageously
        bogus that it is off the scale, pinning the bogometer needle at the
        highest possible reading (one might also say "You just redlined my
        bogometer"). The agreed-upon unit of bogosity is the {microLenat}.

        2. The potential field generated by a {bogon flux}; see {quantum
        bogodynamics}. See also {bogon flux}, {bogon filter}, {bogus}.

:bogotify: /bohgo't@fi:/, vt.

        To make or become bogus. A program that has been changed so many
        times as to become completely disorganized has become bogotified. If
        you tighten a nut too hard and strip the threads on the bolt, the
        bolt has become bogotified and you had better not use it any more.
        This coinage led to the notional autobogotiphobia defined as `the
        fear of becoming bogotified'; but is not clear that the latter has
        ever been `live' jargon rather than a self-conscious joke in jargon
        about jargon. See also {bogosity}, {bogus}.

:bogue out: /bohg owt/, vi.

        To become bogus, suddenly and unexpectedly. "His talk was relatively
        sane until somebody asked him a trick question; then he bogued out
        and did nothing but {flame} afterwards." See also {bogosity},
        {bogus}.

:bogus: adj.

        1. Non-functional. "Your patches are bogus."

        2. Useless. "OPCON is a bogus program."

        3. False. "Your arguments are bogus."

        4. Incorrect. "That algorithm is bogus."

        5. Unbelievable. "You claim to have solved the halting problem for
        Turing Machines? That's totally bogus."

        6. Silly. "Stop writing those bogus sagas."

        Astrology is bogus. So is a bolt that is obviously about to break.
        So is someone who makes blatantly false claims to have solved a
        scientific problem. (This word seems to have some, but not all, of
        the connotations of {random} -- mostly the negative ones.)

        It is claimed that bogus was originally used in the hackish sense at
        Princeton in the late 1960s. It was spread to CMU and Yale by
        Michael Shamos, a migratory Princeton alumnus. A glossary of bogus
        words was compiled at Yale when the word was first popularized there
        about 1975-76. These coinages spread into hackerdom from CMU and
        MIT. Most of them remained wordplay objects rather than actual
        vocabulary items or live metaphors. Examples: amboguous (having
        multiple bogus interpretations); bogotissimo (in a gloriously bogus
        manner); bogotophile (one who is pathologically fascinated by the
        bogus); paleobogology (the study of primeval bogosity).

        Some bogowords, however, obtained sufficient live currency to be
        listed elsewhere in this lexicon; see {bogometer}, {bogon},
        {bogotify}, and {quantum bogodynamics} and the related but unlisted
        {Dr. Fred Mbogo}.

        By the early 1980s `bogus' was also current in something like hacker
        usage sense in West Coast teen slang, and it had gone mainstream by
        1985. A correspondent from Cambridge reports, by contrast, that
        these uses of bogus grate on British nerves; in Britain the word
        means, rather specifically, `counterfeit', as in "a bogus 10-pound
        note". According to Merriam-Webster, the word dates back to 1825 and
        originally referred to a counterfeiting machine.

:Bohr bug: /bohr buhg/, n.

        [from quantum physics] A repeatable {bug}; one that manifests
        reliably under a possibly unknown but well-defined set of
        conditions. Antonym of {heisenbug}; see also {mandelbug},
        {schroedinbug}.

:boink: /boynk/

        1. [Usenet: variously ascribed to the TV series Cheers,
        Moonlighting, and Soap]v. To have sex with; compare {bounce}, sense
        2. (This is mainstream slang.) In Commonwealth hackish the variant
        `bonk' is more common.

        2. n. After the original Peter Korn `Boinkon' {Usenet} parties, used
        for almost any net social gathering, e.g., Miniboink, a small boink
        held by Nancy Gillett in 1988; Minniboink, a Boinkcon in Minnesota
        in 1989; Humpdayboinks, Wednesday get-togethers held in the San
        Francisco Bay Area. Compare {@-party}.

        3. Var of bonk; see {bonk/oif}.

:bomb:

        1. v. General synonym for {crash} (sense 1) except that it is not
        used as a noun; esp. used of software or OS failures. "Don't run
        Empire with less than 32K stack, it'll bomb."

        2. n.,v. Atari ST and Macintosh equivalents of a Unix panic or Amiga
        {guru meditation}, in which icons of little black-powder bombs or
        mushroom clouds are displayed, indicating that the system has died.
        On the Mac, this may be accompanied by a decimal (or occasionally
        hexadecimal) number indicating what went wrong, similar to the Amiga
        {guru meditation} number. {MS-DOS} machines tend to get {locked up}
        in this situation.

:bondage-and-discipline language: n.

        A language (such as {Pascal}, Ada, APL, or Prolog) that, though
        ostensibly general-purpose, is designed so as to enforce an author's
        theory of `right programming' even though said theory is
        demonstrably inadequate for systems hacking or even vanilla
        general-purpose programming. Often abbreviated `B&D'; thus, one may
        speak of things "having the B&D nature". See {Pascal}; oppose
        {languages of choice}.

:bonk/oif: /bonk/, /oyf/, interj.

        In the U.S. {MUD} community, it has become traditional to express
        pique or censure by bonking the offending person. Convention holds
        that one should acknowledge a bonk by saying "oif!" and there is a
        myth to the effect that failing to do so upsets the cosmic bonk/oif
        balance, causing much trouble in the universe. Some MUDs have
        implemented special commands for bonking and oifing. Note: in parts
        of the U.K. `bonk' is a sexually loaded slang term; care is advised
        in transatlantic conversations (see {boink}). Commonwealth hackers
        report a similar convention involving the `fish/bang' balance. See
        also {talk mode}.

:book titles:

        There is a tradition in hackerdom of informally tagging important
        textbooks and standards documents with the dominant color of their
        covers or with some other conspicuous feature of the cover. Many of
        these are described in this lexicon under their own entries. See
        {Aluminum Book}, {Camel Book}, {Cinderella Book}, {daemon book},
        {Dragon Book}, {Orange Book}, {Purple Book}, {Wizard Book}, and
        {bible}; see also {rainbow series}. Since about 1993 this tradition
        has gotten a boost from the popular O'Reilly and Associates line of
        technical books, which usually feature some kind of exotic animal on
        the cover and are often called by the name of that animal.

:boot: v.,n.

        [techspeak; from `by one's bootstraps'] To load and initialize the
        operating system on a machine. This usage is no longer jargon
        (having passed into techspeak) but has given rise to some
        derivatives that are still jargon.

        The derivative reboot implies that the machine hasn't been down for
        long, or that the boot is a {bounce} (sense 4) intended to clear
        some state of {wedgitude}. This is sometimes used of human thought
        processes, as in the following exchange: "You've lost me." "OK,
        reboot. Here's the theory...."

        This term is also found in the variants cold boot (from power-off
        condition) and warm boot (with the CPU and all devices already
        powered up, as after a hardware reset or software crash).

        Another variant: soft boot, reinitialization of only part of a
        system, under control of other software still running: "If you're
        running the {mess-dos} emulator, control-alt-insert will cause a
        soft-boot of the emulator, while leaving the rest of the system
        running."

        Opposed to this there is hard boot, which connotes hostility towards
        or frustration with the machine being booted: "I'll have to
        hard-boot this losing Sun." "I recommend booting it hard." One often
        hard-boots by performing a {power cycle}.

        Historical note: this term derives from bootstrap loader, a short
        program that was read in from cards or paper tape, or toggled in
        from the front panel switches. This program was always very short
        (great efforts were expended on making it short in order to minimize
        the labor and chance of error involved in toggling it in), but was
        just smart enough to read in a slightly more complex program
        (usually from a card or paper tape reader), to which it handed
        control; this program in turn was smart enough to read the
        application or operating system from a magnetic tape drive or disk
        drive. Thus, in successive steps, the computer `pulled itself up by
        its bootstraps' to a useful operating state. Nowadays the bootstrap
        is usually found in ROM or EPROM, and reads the first stage in from
        a fixed location on the disk, called the `boot block'. When this
        program gains control, it is powerful enough to load the actual OS
        and hand control over to it.

:Borg: n.

        In Star Trek: The Next Generation the Borg is a species of cyborg
        that ruthlessly seeks to incorporate all sentient life into itself;
        their slogan is "You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile." In
        hacker parlance, the Borg is usually {Microsoft}, which is thought
        to be trying just as ruthlessly to assimilate all computers and the
        entire Internet to itself (there is a widely circulated image of
        Bill Gates as a Borg). Being forced to use Windows or NT is often
        referred to as being "Borged". Interestingly, the {Halloween
        Documents} reveal that this jargon is live within Microsoft itself.
        See also {Evil Empire}, {Internet Exploiter}.

        Other companies, notably Intel and UUNet, have also occasionally
        been equated to the Borg. In IETF circles, where direct pressure
        from Microsoft is not a daily reality, the Borg is sometimes Cisco.
        This usage commemorates their tendency to pay any price to hire
        talent away from their competitors. In fact, at the Spring 1997
        IETF, a large number of ex-Cisco employees, all former members of
        Routing Geeks, showed up with t-shirts printed with "Recovering
        Borg".

:borken: adj.

        (also borked) Common deliberate typo for `broken'.

:bot: n

        [common on IRC, MUD and among gamers; from "robot"]

        1. An {IRC} or {MUD} user who is actually a program. On IRC,
        typically the robot provides some useful service. Examples are
        NickServ, which tries to prevent random users from adopting {nick}s
        already claimed by others, and MsgServ, which allows one to send
        asynchronous messages to be delivered when the recipient signs on.
        Also common are `annoybots', such as KissServ, which perform no
        useful function except to send cute messages to other people.
        Service bots are less common on MUDs; but some others, such as the
        `Julia' bot active in 1990--91, have been remarkably impressive
        Turing-test experiments, able to pass as human for as long as ten or
        fifteen minutes of conversation.

        2. An AI-controlled player in a computer game (especially a
        first-person shooter such as Quake) which, unlike ordinary monsters,
        operates like a human-controlled player, with access to a player's
        weapons and abilities. An example can be found at
        http://www.telefragged.com/thefatal/.

        3. Term used, though less commonly, for a web {spider}. The file for
        controlling spider behavior on your site is officially the "Robots
        Exclusion File" and its URL is "http://<somehost>/robots.txt")

        Note that bots in all senses were `robots' when the terms first
        appeared in the early 1990s, but the shortened form is now habitual.

:bottom feeder: n.

        1. An Internet user that leeches off ISPs -- the sort you can never
        provide good enough services for, always complains about the price,
        no matter how low it may be, and will bolt off to another service
        the moment there is even the slimmest price difference. While most
        bottom feeders infest free or almost free services such as AOL, MSN,
        and Hotmail, too many flock to whomever happens to be the cheapest
        regional ISP at the time. Bottom feeders are often the classic
        problem user, known for unleashing spam, flamage, and other breaches
        of {netiquette}.

        2. Syn. for {slopsucker}, derived from the fishermen's and
        naturalists' term for finny creatures who subsist on the primordial
        ooze. (This sense is older.)

:bottom-post: v.

        In a news or mail reply, to put the response to a news or email
        message after the quoted content from the parent message. This is
        correct form, and until around 2000 was so universal on the Internet
        that neither the term `bottom-post' nor its antonym {top-post}
        existed. Hackers consider that the best practice is actually to
        excerpt only the relevent portions of the parent message, then
        intersperse the poster's response in such a way that each section of
        response appears directly after the excerpt it applies to. This
        reduces message bulk, keeps thread content in a logical order, and
        facilitates reading.

:bottom-up implementation: n.

        Hackish opposite of the techspeak term top-down design. It has been
        received wisdom in most programming cultures that it is best to
        design from higher levels of abstraction down to lower, specifying
        sequences of action in increasing detail until you get to actual
        code. Hackers often find (especially in exploratory designs that
        cannot be closely specified in advance) that it works best to build
        things in the opposite order, by writing and testing a clean set of
        primitive operations and then knitting them together. Naively
        applied, this leads to hacked-together bottom-up implementations; a
        more sophisticated response is middle-out implementation, in which
        scratch code within primitives at the mid-level of the system is
        gradually replaced with a more polished version of the lowest level
        at the same time the structure above the midlevel is being built.

:bounce: v.

        1. [common; perhaps by analogy to a bouncing check] An electronic
        mail message that is undeliverable and returns an error notification
        to the sender is said to bounce. See also {bounce message}.

        2. To engage in sexual intercourse; prob.: from the expression
        `bouncing the mattress', but influenced by Roo's psychosexually
        loaded "Try bouncing me, Tigger!" from the Winnie-the-Pooh books.
        Compare {boink}.

        3. To casually reboot a system in order to clear up a transient
        problem (possibly editing a configuration file in the process, if it
        is one that is only re-read at boot time). Reported primarily among
        {VMS} and {Unix} users.

        4. [VM/CMS programmers] Automatic warm-start of a machine after an
        error. "I logged on this morning and found it had bounced 7 times
        during the night"

        6. [IBM] To {power cycle} a peripheral in order to reset it.

:bounce message: n.

        [common] Notification message returned to sender by a site unable to
        relay {email} to the intended Internet address recipient or the next
        link in a {bang path} (see {bounce}, sense 1). Reasons might include
        a nonexistent or misspelled username or a {down} relay site. Bounce
        messages can themselves fail, with occasionally ugly results; see
        {sorcerer's apprentice mode} and {software laser}. The terms bounce
        mail and barfmail are also common.

:boustrophedon: n.

        [from a Greek word for turning like an ox while plowing] An ancient
        method of writing using alternate left-to-right and right-to-left
        lines. This term is actually philologists' techspeak and
        typesetters' jargon. Erudite hackers use it for an optimization
        performed by some computer typesetting software and moving-head
        printers. The adverbial form `boustrophedonically' is also found
        (hackers purely love constructions like this).

:box: n.

        A computer; esp. in the construction foo box where foo is some
        functional qualifier, like graphics, or the name of an OS (thus,
        Unix box, Windows box, etc.) "We preprocess the data on Unix boxes
        before handing it up to the mainframe."

:boxed comments: n.

        Comments (explanatory notes attached to program instructions) that
        occupy several lines by themselves; so called because in assembler
        and C code they are often surrounded by a box in a style something
        like this:

        /*************************************************
         *
         * This is a boxed comment in C style
         *
         *************************************************/

        Common variants of this style omit the asterisks in column 2 or add
        a matching row of asterisks closing the right side of the box. The
        sparest variant omits all but the comment delimiters themselves; the
        `box' is implied. Oppose {winged comments}.

:boxen: /bok'sn/, pl.n.

        [very common; by analogy with {VAXen}] Fanciful plural of {box}
        often encountered in the phrase `Unix boxen', used to describe
        commodity {Unix} hardware. The connotation is that any two Unix
        boxen are interchangeable.

:boxology: /boksol'@jee/, n.

        Syn. {ASCII art}. This term implies a more restricted domain, that
        of box-and-arrow drawings. "His report has a lot of boxology in it."
        Compare {macrology}.

:bozotic: /bohzoh'tik/, /bohzotik/, adj.

        [from the name of a TV clown even more losing than Ronald McDonald]
        Resembling or having the quality of a bozo; that is, clownish,
        ludicrously wrong, unintentionally humorous. Compare {wonky},
        {demented}. Note that the noun `bozo' occurs in slang, but the
        mainstream adjectival form would be `bozo-like' or (in New England)
        `bozoish'.

:brain dump: n.

        [common] The act of telling someone everything one knows about a
        particular topic or project. Typically used when someone is going to
        let a new party maintain a piece of code. Conceptually analogous to
        an operating system {core dump} in that it saves a lot of useful
        {state} before an exit. "You'll have to give me a brain dump on
        FOOBAR before you start your new job at HackerCorp." See {core dump}
        (sense 4). At Sun, this is also known as TOI (transfer of
        information).

:brain fart: n.

        The actual result of a {braino}, as opposed to the mental glitch
        that is the braino itself. E.g., typing dir on a Unix box after a
        session with DOS.

:brain-damaged: adj.

        1. [common; generalization of "Honeywell Brain Damage" (HBD), a
        theoretical disease invented to explain certain utter cretinisms in
        Honeywell {Multics}] adj. Obviously wrong; {cretinous}; {demented}.
        There is an implication that the person responsible must have
        suffered brain damage, because he should have known better. Calling
        something brain-damaged is really bad; it also implies it is
        unusable, and that its failure to work is due to poor design rather
        than some accident. "Only six monocase characters per file name? Now
        that's brain-damaged!"

        2. [esp. in the Mac world] May refer to free demonstration software
        that has been deliberately crippled in some way so as not to compete
        with the product it is intended to sell. Syn. {crippleware}.

:brain-dead: adj.

        [common] Brain-damaged in the extreme. It tends to imply terminal
        design failure rather than malfunction or simple stupidity. "This
        comm program doesn't know how to send a break -- how brain-dead!"

:braino: /bray'no/, n.

        Syn. for {thinko}. See also {brain fart}.

:brainwidth: n.

        [Great Britain] Analagous to {bandwidth} but used strictly for human
        capacity to process information and especially to multitask.
        "Writing email is taking up most of my brainwidth right now, I can't
        look at that Flash animation."

:bread crumbs: n.

        1. Debugging statements inserted into a program that emit output or
        log indicators of the program's {state} to a file so you can see
        where it dies or pin down the cause of surprising behavior. The term
        is probably a reference to the Hansel and Gretel story from the
        Brothers Grimm or the older French folktale of Thumbelina; in
        several variants of these, a character leaves a trail of bread
        crumbs so as not to get lost in the woods.

        2. In user-interface design, any feature that allows some tracking
        of where you've been, like coloring visited links purple rather than
        blue in Netscape (also called footprinting).

:break:

        1. vt. To cause to be {broken} (in any sense). "Your latest patch to
        the editor broke the paragraph commands."

        2. v. (of a program) To stop temporarily, so that it may debugged.
        The place where it stops is a breakpoint.

        3. [techspeak] vi. To send an RS-232 break (two character widths of
        line high) over a serial comm line.

        4. [Unix] vi. To strike whatever key currently causes the tty driver
        to send SIGINT to the current process. Normally, break (sense 3),
        delete or {control-C} does this.

        5. break break may be said to interrupt a conversation (this is an
        example of verb doubling). This usage comes from radio
        communications, which in turn probably came from landline
        telegraph/teleprinter usage, as badly abused in the Citizen's Band
        craze of the early 1980s.

:break-even point: n.

        In the process of implementing a new computer language, the point at
        which the language is sufficiently effective that one can implement
        the language in itself. That is, for a new language called,
        hypothetically, FOOGOL, one has reached break-even when one can
        write a demonstration compiler for FOOGOL in FOOGOL, discard the
        original implementation language, and thereafter use working
        versions of FOOGOL to develop newer ones. This is an important
        milestone; see {MFTL}.

        Since this entry was first written, several correspondents have
        reported that there actually was a compiler for a tiny Algol-like
        language called Foogol floating around on various {VAXen} in the
        early and mid-1980s. A FOOGOL implementation is available at the
        Retrocomputing Museum http://www.catb.org/retro/.

:breath-of-life packet: n.

        [XEROX PARC] An Ethernet packet that contains bootstrap (see {boot})
        code, periodically sent out from a working computer to infuse the
        `breath of life' into any computer on the network that has happened
        to crash. Machines depending on such packets have sufficient
        hardware or firmware code to wait for (or request) such a packet
        during the reboot process. See also {dickless workstation}.

        The notional kiss-of-death packet, with a function complementary to
        that of a breath-of-life packet, is recommended for dealing with
        hosts that consume too many network resources. Though `kiss-of-death
        packet' is usually used in jest, there is at least one documented
        instance of an Internet subnet with limited address-table slots in a
        gateway machine in which such packets were routinely used to compete
        for slots, rather like Christmas shoppers competing for scarce
        parking spaces.

:breedle: n.

        See {feep}.

:Breidbart Index: /bri:d'bart ind@ks/

        A measurement of the severity of spam invented by long-time hacker
        Seth Breidbart, used for programming cancelbots. The Breidbart Index
        takes into account the fact that excessive multi-posting {EMP} is
        worse than excessive cross-posting {ECP}. The Breidbart Index is
        computed as follows: For each article in a spam, take the
        square-root of the number of newsgroups to which the article is
        posted. The Breidbart Index is the sum of the square roots of all of
        the posts in the spam. For example, one article posted to nine
        newsgroups and again to sixteen would have BI = sqrt(9) + sqrt(16) =
        7. It is generally agreed that a spam is cancelable if the Breidbart
        Index exceeds 20.

        The Breidbart Index accumulates over a 45-day window. Ten articles
        yesterday and ten articles today and ten articles tomorrow add up to
        a 30-article spam. Spam fighters will often reset the count if you
        can convince them that the spam was accidental and/or you have seen
        the error of your ways and won't repeat it. Breidbart Index can
        accumulate over multiple authors. For example, the "Make Money Fast"
        pyramid scheme exceeded a BI of 20 a long time ago, and is now
        considered "cancel on sight".

:brick: n.

        1. A piece of equipment that has been programmed or configured into
        a {hung}, {wedged},unusable state. Especially used to describe what
        happens to devices like routers or PDAs that run from firmware when
        the firmware image is damaged or its settings are somehow patched to
        impossible values. This term usually implies irreversibility, but
        equipment can sometimes be unbricked by performing a hard reset or
        some other drastic operation. Sometimes verbed: "Yeah, I bricked the
        router because I forgot about adding in the new access-list.".

        2. An outboard power transformer of the kind associated with
        laptops, modems, routers and other small computing appliances,
        especially one of the modern type with cords on both ends, as
        opposed to the older and obnoxious type that plug directly into wall
        or barrier strip.

:bricktext:

        [Usenet: common] Text which is carefully composed to be
        right-justified (and sometimes to have a deliberate gutter at
        mid-page) without use of extra spaces, just through careful
        word-length choices. A minor art form. The best examples have
        something of the quality of imagist poetry.

:bring X to its knees: v.

        [common] To present a machine, operating system, piece of software,
        or algorithm with a load so extreme or {pathological} that it grinds
        to a halt.: "To bring a MicroVAX to its knees, try twenty users
        running {vi} -- or four running {EMACS}." Compare {hog}.

:brittle: adj.

        Said of software that is functional but easily broken by changes in
        operating environment or configuration, or by any minor tweak to the
        software itself. Also, any system that responds inappropriately and
        disastrously to abnormal but expected external stimuli; e.g., a file
        system that is usually totally scrambled by a power failure is said
        to be brittle. This term is often used to describe the results of a
        research effort that were never intended to be robust, but it can be
        applied to commercial software, which (due to closed-source
        development) displays the quality far more often than it ought to.
        Oppose {robust}.

:broadcast storm: n.

        [common] An incorrect packet broadcast on a network that causes most
        hosts to respond all at once, typically with wrong answers that
        start the process over again. See {network meltdown}; compare {mail
        storm}.

:broken: adj.

        1. Not working according to design (of programs). This is the
        mainstream sense.

        2. Improperly designed, This sense carries a more or less
        disparaging implication that the designer should have known better,
        while sense 1 doesn't necessarily assign blame. Which of senses 1 or
        2 is intended is conveyed by context and nonverbal cues.

        3. Behaving strangely; especially (when used of people) exhibiting
        extreme depression.

:broken arrow: n.

        [IBM] The error code displayed on line 25 of a 3270 terminal (or a
        PC emulating a 3270) for various kinds of protocol violations and
        "unexpected" error conditions (including connection to a {down}
        computer). On a PC, simulated with `->/_', with the two center
        characters overstruck.

        Note: to appreciate this term fully, it helps to know that "broken
        arrow" is also military jargon for an accident involving nuclear
        weapons....

:broken-ring network:

        Pejorative hackerism for "token-ring network", an early and very
        slow LAN technology from IBM that lost the standards war to
        Ethernet. Though token-ring survives in a few niche markets (such as
        factory automation) that put a high premium on resistance to
        electrical noise, the term is now (2000) primarily historical.

:BrokenWindows: n.

        Abusive hackerism for the {crufty} and {elephantine} {X} environment
        on Sun machines; properly called `OpenWindows'.

:broket: /broh'k@t/, /brohket`/, n.

        [rare; by analogy with `bracket': a `broken bracket'] Either of the
        characters < and >, when used as paired enclosing delimiters. This
        word originated as a contraction of the phrase `broken bracket',
        that is, a bracket that is bent in the middle. (At MIT, and
        apparently in the {Real World} as well, these are usually called
        {angle brackets}.)

:Brooks's Law: prov.

        "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" -- a
        result of the fact that the expected advantage from splitting
        development work among N programmers is O(N) (that is, proportional
        to N), but the complexity and communications cost associated with
        coordinating and then merging their work is O(N^2) (that is,
        proportional to the square of N). The quote is from Fred Brooks, a
        manager of IBM's OS/360 project and author of The Mythical Man-Month
        (Addison-Wesley, 1975, ISBN 0-201-00650-2), an excellent early book
        on software engineering. The myth in question has been most tersely
        expressed as "Programmer time is fungible" and Brooks established
        conclusively that it is not. Hackers have never forgotten his advice
        (though it's not the whole story; see {bazaar}); too often,
        {management} still does. See also {creationism}, {second-system
        effect}, {optimism}.

:brown-paper-bag bug: n.

        A bug in a public software release that is so embarrassing that the
        author notionally wears a brown paper bag over his head for a while
        so he won't be recognized on the net. Entered popular usage after
        the early-1999 release of the first Linux 2.2, which had one. The
        phrase was used in Linus Torvalds's apology posting.

:browser: n.

        A program specifically designed to help users view and navigate
        hypertext, on-line documentation, or a database. While this general
        sense has been present in jargon for a long time, the proliferation
        of browsers for the World Wide Web after 1992 has made it much more
        popular and provided a central or default techspeak meaning of the
        word previously lacking in hacker usage. Nowadays, if someone
        mentions using a `browser' without qualification, one may assume it
        is a Web browser.

:BRS: /BRS/, n.

        Syn. {Big Red Switch}. This abbreviation is fairly common on-line.

:brute force: adj.

        Describes a primitive programming style, one in which the programmer
        relies on the computer's processing power instead of using his or
        her own intelligence to simplify the problem, often ignoring
        problems of scale and applying naive methods suited to small
        problems directly to large ones. The term can also be used in
        reference to programming style: brute-force programs are written in
        a heavyhanded, tedious way, full of repetition and devoid of any
        elegance or useful abstraction (see also {brute force and
        ignorance}).

        The {canonical} example of a brute-force algorithm is associated
        with the `traveling salesman problem' (TSP), a classical {NP-}hard
        problem: Suppose a person is in, say, Boston, and wishes to drive to
        N other cities. In what order should the cities be visited in order
        to minimize the distance travelled? The brute-force method is to
        simply generate all possible routes and compare the distances; while
        guaranteed to work and simple to implement, this algorithm is
        clearly very stupid in that it considers even obviously absurd
        routes (like going from Boston to Houston via San Francisco and New
        York, in that order). For very small N it works well, but it rapidly
        becomes absurdly inefficient when N increases (for N = 15, there are
        already 1,307,674,368,000 possible routes to consider, and for N =
        1000 -- well, see {bignum}). Sometimes, unfortunately, there is no
        better general solution than brute force. See also {NP-} and
        {rubber-hose cryptanalysis}.

        A more simple-minded example of brute-force programming is finding
        the smallest number in a large list by first using an existing
        program to sort the list in ascending order, and then picking the
        first number off the front.

        Whether brute-force programming should actually be considered stupid
        or not depends on the context; if the problem is not terribly big,
        the extra CPU time spent on a brute-force solution may cost less
        than the programmer time it would take to develop a more
        `intelligent' algorithm. Additionally, a more intelligent algorithm
        may imply more long-term complexity cost and bug-chasing than are
        justified by the speed improvement.

        Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix, is reported to have uttered the
        epigram "When in doubt, use brute force". He probably intended this
        as a {ha ha only serious}, but the original Unix kernel's preference
        for simple, robust, and portable algorithms over {brittle} `smart'
        ones does seem to have been a significant factor in the success of
        that OS. Like so many other tradeoffs in software design, the choice
        between brute force and complex, finely-tuned cleverness is often a
        difficult one that requires both engineering savvy and delicate
        esthetic judgment.

:brute force and ignorance: n.

        A popular design technique at many software houses -- {brute force}
        coding unrelieved by any knowledge of how problems have been
        previously solved in elegant ways. Dogmatic adherence to design
        methodologies tends to encourage this sort of thing. Characteristic
        of early {larval stage} programming; unfortunately, many never
        outgrow it. Often abbreviated BFI: "Gak, they used a {bubble sort}!
        That's strictly from BFI." Compare {bogosity}. A very similar usage
        is said to be mainstream in Great Britain.

:BSD: /BSD/, n.

        [abbreviation for `Berkeley Software Distribution'] a family of
        {Unix} versions for the {DEC} {VAX} and {PDP-11} developed by Bill
        Joy and others at {Berzerkeley} starting around 1977, incorporating
        paged virtual memory, TCP/IP networking enhancements, and many other
        features. The BSD versions (4.1, 4.2, and 4.3) and the commercial
        versions derived from them (SunOS, ULTRIX, and Mt. Xinu) held the
        technical lead in the Unix world until AT&T's successful
        standardization efforts after about 1986; descendants including
        Free/Open/NetBSD, BSD/OS and MacOS X are still widely popular. Note
        that BSD versions going back to 2.9 are often referred to by their
        version numbers alone, without the BSD prefix. See also {Unix}.

:BSOD: /BSOD/

        Very common abbreviation for {Blue Screen of Death}. Both spoken and
        written.

:BUAF: //, n.

        [abbreviation, from alt.fan.warlord] Big Ugly ASCII Font -- a
        special form of {ASCII art}. Various programs exist for rendering
        text strings into block, bloob, and pseudo-script fonts in cells
        between four and six character cells on a side; this is smaller than
        the letters generated by older {banner} (sense 2) programs. These
        are sometimes used to render one's name in a {sig block}, and are
        critically referred to as BUAFs. See {warlording}.

:BUAG: //, n.

        [abbreviation, from alt.fan.warlord] Big Ugly ASCII Graphic.
        Pejorative term for ugly {ASCII art}, especially as found in {sig
        block}s. For some reason, mutations of the head of Bart Simpson are
        particularly common in the least imaginative {sig block}s. See
        {warlording}.

:bubble sort: n.

        Techspeak for a particular sorting technique in which pairs of
        adjacent values in the list to be sorted are compared and
        interchanged if they are out of order; thus, list entries `bubble
        upward' in the list until they bump into one with a lower sort
        value. Because it is not very good relative to other methods and is
        the one typically stumbled on by {naive} and untutored programmers,
        hackers consider it the {canonical} example of a naive algorithm.
        (However, it's been shown by repeated experiment that below about
        5000 records bubble-sort is OK anyway.) The canonical example of a
        really bad algorithm is {bogo-sort}. A bubble sort might be used out
        of ignorance, but any use of bogo-sort could issue only from brain
        damage or willful perversity.

:bucky bits: /buh'kee bits/, n.

        1. [obs.] The bits produced by the CONTROL and META shift keys on a
        SAIL keyboard (octal 200 and 400 respectively), resulting in a 9-bit
        keyboard character set. The MIT AI TV (Knight) keyboards extended
        this with TOP and separate left and right CONTROL and META keys,
        resulting in a 12-bit character set; later, LISP Machines added such
        keys as SUPER, HYPER, and GREEK (see {space-cadet keyboard}).

        2. By extension, bits associated with `extra' shift keys on any
        keyboard, e.g., the ALT on an IBM PC or command and option keys on a
        Macintosh.

        It has long been rumored that bucky bits were named for Buckminster
        Fuller during a period when he was consulting at Stanford. Actually,
        bucky bits were invented by Niklaus Wirth when he was at Stanford in
        1964--65; he first suggested the idea of an EDIT key to set the 8th
        bit of an otherwise 7-bit ASCII character). It seems that, unknown
        to Wirth, certain Stanford hackers had privately nicknamed him
        `Bucky' after a prominent portion of his dental anatomy, and this
        nickname transferred to the bit. Bucky-bit commands were used in a
        number of editors written at Stanford, including most notably
        TV-EDIT and NLS.

        The term spread to MIT and CMU early and is now in general use.
        Ironically, Wirth himself remained unaware of its derivation for
        nearly 30 years, until GLS dug up this history in early 1993! See
        {double bucky}, {quadruple bucky}.

:buffer chuck: n.

        Shorter and ruder syn. for {buffer overflow}.

:buffer overflow: n.

        What happens when you try to stuff more data into a buffer (holding
        area) than it can handle. This problem is commonly exploited by
        {cracker}s to get arbitrary commands executed by a program running
        with root permissions. This may be due to a mismatch in the
        processing rates of the producing and consuming processes (see
        {overrun} and {firehose syndrome}), or because the buffer is simply
        too small to hold all the data that must accumulate before a piece
        of it can be processed. For example, in a text-processing tool that
        {crunch}es a line at a time, a short line buffer can result in
        {lossage} as input from a long line overflows the buffer and trashes
        data beyond it. Good defensive programming would check for overflow
        on each character and stop accepting data when the buffer is full
        up. The term is used of and by humans in a metaphorical sense. "What
        time did I agree to meet you? My buffer must have overflowed." Or
        "If I answer that phone my buffer is going to overflow." See also
        {spam}, {overrun screw}.

:bug: n.

        An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of
        hardware, esp. one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of
        {feature}. Examples: "There's a bug in the editor: it writes things
        out backwards." "The system crashed because of a hardware bug."
        "Fred is a winner, but he has a few bugs" (i.e., Fred is a good guy,
        but he has a few personality problems).

        Historical note: Admiral Grace Hopper (an early computing pioneer
        better known for inventing {COBOL}) liked to tell a story in which a
        technician solved a {glitch} in the Harvard Mark II machine by
        pulling an actual insect out from between the contacts of one of its
        relays, and she subsequently promulgated {bug} in its hackish sense
        as a joke about the incident (though, as she was careful to admit,
        she was not there when it happened). For many years the logbook
        associated with the incident and the actual bug in question (a moth)
        sat in a display case at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC).
        The entire story, with a picture of the logbook and the moth taped
        into it, is recorded in the Annals of the History of Computing, Vol.
        3, No. 3 (July 1981), pp. 285--286.

        The text of the log entry (from September 9, 1947), reads "1545
        Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being
        found". This wording establishes that the term was already in use at
        the time in its current specific sense -- and Hopper herself reports
        that the term bug was regularly applied to problems in radar
        electronics during WWII.

        The `original bug' (the caption date is incorrect)

        Indeed, the use of bug to mean an industrial defect was already
        established in Thomas Edison's time, and a more specific and rather
        modern use can be found in an electrical handbook from 1896
        (Hawkin's New Catechism of Electricity, Theo. Audel & Co.) which
        says: "The term `bug' is used to a limited extent to designate any
        fault or trouble in the connections or working of electric
        apparatus." It further notes that the term is "said to have
        originated in quadruplex telegraphy and have been transferred to all
        electric apparatus."

        The latter observation may explain a common folk etymology of the
        term; that it came from telephone company usage, in which "bugs in a
        telephone cable" were blamed for noisy lines. Though this derivation
        seems to be mistaken, it may well be a distorted memory of a joke
        first current among telegraph operators more than a century ago!

        Or perhaps not a joke. Historians of the field inform us that the
        term "bug" was regularly used in the early days of telegraphy to
        refer to a variety of semi-automatic telegraphy keyers that would
        send a string of dots if you held them down. In fact, the Vibroplex
        keyers (which were among the most common of this type) even had a
        graphic of a beetle on them (and still do)! While the ability to
        send repeated dots automatically was very useful for professional
        morse code operators, these were also significantly trickier to use
        than the older manual keyers, and it could take some practice to
        ensure one didn't introduce extraneous dots into the code by holding
        the key down a fraction too long. In the hands of an inexperienced
        operator, a Vibroplex "bug" on the line could mean that a lot of
        garbled Morse would soon be coming your way.

        Further, the term "bug" has long been used among radio technicians
        to describe a device that converts electromagnetic field variations
        into acoustic signals. It is used to trace radio interference and
        look for dangerous radio emissions. Radio community usage derives
        from the roach-like shape of the first versions used by 19th century
        physicists. The first versions consisted of a coil of wire (roach
        body), with the two wire ends sticking out and bent back to nearly
        touch forming a spark gap (roach antennae). The bug is to the radio
        technician what the stethoscope is to the stereotypical medical
        doctor. This sense is almost certainly ancestral to modern use of
        "bug" for a covert monitoring device, but may also have contributed
        to the use of "bug" for the effects of radio interference itself.

        Actually, use of bug in the general sense of a disruptive event goes
        back to Shakespeare! (Henry VI, part III - Act V, Scene II: King
        Edward: "So, lie thou there. Die thou; and die our fear; For Warwick
        was a bug that fear'd us all.") In the first edition of Samuel
        Johnson's dictionary one meaning of bug is "A frightful object; a
        walking spectre"; this is traced to `bugbear', a Welsh term for a
        variety of mythological monster which (to complete the circle) has
        recently been reintroduced into the popular lexicon through fantasy
        role-playing games.

        In any case, in jargon the word almost never refers to insects. Here
        is a plausible conversation that never actually happened: "There is
        a bug in this ant farm!" "What do you mean? I don't see any ants in
        it." "That's the bug."

        A careful discussion of the etymological issues can be found in a
        paper by Fred R. Shapiro, 1987, "Entomology of the Computer Bug:
        History and Folklore", American Speech 62(4):376-378.

        [There has been a widespread myth that the original bug was moved to
        the Smithsonian, and an earlier version of this entry so asserted. A
        correspondent who thought to check discovered that the bug was not
        there. While investigating this in late 1990, your editor discovered
        that the NSWC still had the bug, but had unsuccessfully tried to get
        the Smithsonian to accept it -- and that the present curator of
        their History of American Technology Museum didn't know this and
        agreed that it would make a worthwhile exhibit. It was moved to the
        Smithsonian in mid-1991, but due to space and money constraints was
        not actually exhibited for years afterwards. Thus, the process of
        investigating the original-computer-bug bug fixed it in an entirely
        unexpected way, by making the myth true! --ESR]

        It helps to remember that this dates from 1973.

        (The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-10-31. The previous
        cartoon was 73-07-24.)

:bug-compatible: adj.

        [common] Said of a design or revision that has been badly
        compromised by a requirement to be compatible with {fossil}s or
        {misfeature}s in other programs or (esp.) previous releases of
        itself. "MS-DOS 2.0 used \ as a path separator to be bug-compatible
        with some cretin's choice of / as an option character in 1.0."

:bug-for-bug compatible: n.

        Same as {bug-compatible}, with the additional implication that much
        tedious effort went into ensuring that each (known) bug was
        replicated.

:bug-of-the-month club: n.

        [from "book-of-the-month club", a time-honored mail-order-marketing
        technique in the U.S.] A mythical club which users of sendmail(8)
        (the Unix mail daemon) belong to; this was coined on the Usenet
        newsgroup comp.security.unix at a time when sendmail security holes,
        which allowed outside {cracker}s access to the system, were being
        uncovered at an alarming rate, forcing sysadmins to update very
        often. Also, more completely, fatal security bug-of-the-month club.
        See also {kernel-of-the-week club}.

:bulletproof: adj.

        Used of an algorithm or implementation considered extremely
        {robust}; lossage-resistant; capable of correctly recovering from
        any imaginable exception condition -- a rare and valued quality.
        Implies that the programmer has thought of all possible errors, and
        added {code} to protect against each one. Thus, in some cases, this
        can imply code that is too heavyweight, due to excessive paranoia on
        the part of the programmer. Syn. {armor-plated}.

:bullschildt: /bul'shilt/, n.

        [comp.lang.c on USENET] A confident, but incorrect, statement about
        a programming language. This immortalizes a very bad book about {C},
        Herbert Schildt's C - The Complete Reference. One reviewer commented
        "The naive errors in this book would be embarrassing even in a
        programming assignment turned in by a computer science college
        sophomore."

:bump: vt.

        Synonym for increment. Has the same meaning as C's ++ operator. Used
        esp. of counter variables, pointers, and index dummies in for,
        while, and do-while loops.

:burble: v.

        [from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky] Like {flame}, but connotes that
        the source is truly clueless and ineffectual (mere flamers can be
        competent). A term of deep contempt. "There's some guy on the phone
        burbling about how he got a DISK FULL error and it's all our comm
        software's fault." This is mainstream slang in some parts of
        England.

:buried treasure: n.

        A surprising piece of code found in some program. While usually not
        wrong, it tends to vary from {crufty} to {bletcherous}, and has lain
        undiscovered only because it was functionally correct, however
        horrible it is. Used sarcastically, because what is found is
        anything but treasure. Buried treasure almost always needs to be dug
        up and removed. "I just found that the scheduler sorts its queue
        using {bubble sort}! Buried treasure!"

:burn a CD: v.

        To write a software or document distribution on a CDR. Coined from
        the fact that a laser is used to inscribe the information by burning
        small pits in the medium, and from the fact that disk comes out of
        the drive warm to the touch. Writable CDs can be done on a normal
        desk-top machine with a suitable drive (so there is no protracted
        release cycle associated with making them) but each one takes a long
        time to make, so they are not appropriate for volume production.
        Writable CDs are suitable for software backups and for
        short-turnaround-time low-volume software distribution, such as
        sending a beta release version to a few selected field test sites.
        Compare {cut a tape}.

:burn-in period: n.

        1. A factory test designed to catch systems with {marginal}
        components before they get out the door; the theory is that burn-in
        will protect customers by outwaiting the steepest part of the
        {bathtub curve} (see {infant mortality}).

        2. A period of indeterminate length in which a person using a
        computer is so intensely involved in his project that he forgets
        basic needs such as food, drink, sleep, etc. Warning: Excessive
        burn-in can lead to burn-out. See {hack mode}, {larval stage}.

        Historical note: the origin of "burn-in" (sense 1) is apparently the
        practice of setting a new-model airplane's brakes on fire, then
        extinguishing the fire, in order to make them hold better. This was
        done on the first version of the U.S. spy-plane, the U-2.

:burst page: n.

        Syn. {banner}, sense 3.

:busy-wait: vi.

        Used of human behavior, conveys that the subject is busy waiting for
        someone or something, intends to move instantly as soon as it shows
        up, and thus cannot do anything else at the moment. "Can't talk now,
        I'm busy-waiting till Bill gets off the phone."

        Technically, busy-wait means to wait on an event by {spin}ning
        through a tight or timed-delay loop that polls for the event on each
        pass, as opposed to setting up an interrupt handler and continuing
        execution on another part of the task. In applications this is a
        wasteful technique, and best avoided on timesharing systems where a
        busy-waiting program may {hog} the processor. However, it is often
        unavoidable in kernel programming. In the Linux world, kernel
        busy-waits are usually referred to as spinlocks.

:buzz: vi.

        1. Of a program, to run with no indication of progress and perhaps
        without guarantee of ever finishing; esp. said of programs thought
        to be executing tight loops of code. A program that is buzzing
        appears to be {catatonic}, but never gets out of catatonia, while a
        buzzing loop may eventually end of its own accord. "The program
        buzzes for about 10 seconds trying to sort all the names into
        order." See {spin}; see also {grovel}.

        2. [ETA Systems] To test a wire or printed circuit trace for
        continuity, esp. by applying an AC rather than DC signal. Some wire
        faults will pass DC tests but fail an AC buzz test.

        3. To process an array or list in sequence, doing the same thing to
        each element. "This loop buzzes through the tz array looking for a
        terminator type."

:buzzword-compliant:

        [also buzzword-enabled] Used (disparagingly) of products that seem
        to have been specified to incorporate all of this month's trendy
        technologies. Key buzzwords that often show up in buzzword-compliant
        specifications as of 2001 include `XML', `Java', `peer-to-peer',
        `distributed', and `open'.

:BWQ: /BWQ/, n.

        [IBM: abbreviation, `Buzz Word Quotient'] The percentage of
        buzzwords in a speech or documents. Usually roughly proportional to
        {bogosity}. See {TLA}.

:by hand: adv.

        1. [common] Said of an operation (especially a repetitive, trivial,
        and/or tedious one) that ought to be performed automatically by the
        computer, but which a hacker instead has to step tediously through.
        "My mailer doesn't have a command to include the text of the message
        I'm replying to, so I have to do it by hand." This does not
        necessarily mean the speaker has to retype a copy of the message; it
        might refer to, say, dropping into a subshell from the mailer,
        making a copy of one's mailbox file, reading that into an editor,
        locating the top and bottom of the message in question, deleting the
        rest of the file, inserting `>' characters on each line, writing the
        file, leaving the editor, returning to the mailer, reading the file
        in, and later remembering to delete the file. Compare {eyeball
        search}.

        2. [common] By extension, writing code which does something in an
        explicit or low-level way for which a presupplied library routine
        ought to have been available. "This cretinous B-tree library doesn't
        supply a decent iterator, so I'm having to walk the trees by hand."

:byte: /bi:t/, n.

        [techspeak] A unit of memory or data equal to the amount used to
        represent one character; on modern architectures this is invariably
        8 bits. Some older architectures used byte for quantities of 6, 7,
        or (especially) 9 bits, and the PDP-10 supported bytes that were
        actually bitfields of 1 to 36 bits! These usages are now obsolete,
        killed off by universal adoption of power-of-2 word sizes.

        Historical note: The term was coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956
        during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer;
        originally it was described as 1 to 6 bits (typical I/O equipment of
        the period used 6-bit chunks of information). The move to an 8-bit
        byte happened in late 1956, and this size was later adopted and
        promulgated as a standard by the System/360. The word was coined by
        mutating the word `bite' so it would not be accidentally misspelled
        as {bit}. See also {nybble}.

:byte sex: n.

        [common] The byte sex of hardware is {big-endian} or
        {little-endian}; see those entries.

:bytesexual: /bi:t`sek'shu@l/, adj.

        [rare] Said of hardware, denotes willingness to compute or pass data
        in either {big-endian} or {little-endian} format (depending,
        presumably, on a {mode bit} somewhere). See also {NUXI problem}.

:Bzzzt! Wrong.: /bzt rong/, excl.

        [common; Usenet/Internet; punctuation varies] From a Robin Williams
        routine in the movie Dead Poets Society spoofing radio or TV quiz
        programs, such as Truth or Consequences, where an incorrect answer
        earns one a blast from the buzzer and condolences from the
        interlocutor. A way of expressing mock-rude disagreement, usually
        immediately following an included quote from another poster. The
        less abbreviated "*Bzzzzt*, wrong, but thank you for playing" is
        also common; capitalization and emphasis of the buzzer sound varies.

  C

   C

   C Programmer's Disease

   C&C

   C++

   calculator

   Camel Book

   camelCase

   camelCasing

   can't happen

   cancelbot

   Cancelmoose[tm]

   candygrammar

   canonical

   careware

   cargo cult programming

   cascade

   case and paste

   case mod

   casters-up mode

   casting the runes

   cat

   catatonic

   cathedral

   cd tilde

   CDA

   cdr

   chad

   chad box

   chain

   chainik

   channel

   channel hopping

   channel op

   chanop

   char

   charityware

   chase pointers

   chawmp

   check

   cheerfully

   chemist

   Chernobyl chicken

   Chernobyl packet

   chicken head

   chickenboner

   chiclet keyboard

   Chinese Army technique

   choad

   choke

   chomp

   chomper

   CHOP

   Christmas tree

   Christmas tree packet

   chrome

   chug

   Church of the SubGenius

   CI$

   Cinderella Book

   Classic C

   clean

   click of death

   CLM

   clobber

   clock

   clocks

   clone

   clone-and-hack coding

   clover key

   clue-by-four

   clustergeeking

   co-lo

   coaster

   coaster toaster

   COBOL

   COBOL fingers

   cobweb site

   code

   code grinder

   code monkey

   Code of the Geeks

   code police

   codes

   codewalker

   coefficient of X

   cokebottle

   cold boot

   COME FROM

   comm mode

   command key

   comment out

   Commonwealth Hackish

   compact

   compiler jock

   compo

   compress

   Compu$erve

   computer confetti

   computron

   con

   condition out

   condom

   confuser

   connector conspiracy

   cons

   considered harmful

   console

   console jockey

   content-free

   control-C

   control-O

   control-Q

   control-S

   Conway's Law

   cookbook

   cooked mode

   cookie

   cookie bear

   cookie file

   cookie jar

   cookie monster

   copious free time

   copper

   copy protection

   copybroke

   copycenter

   copyleft

   copyparty

   copywronged

   core

   core cancer

   core dump

   core leak

   Core Wars

   cosmic rays

   cough and die

   courier

   cow orker

   cowboy

   CP/M

   CPU Wars

   crack

   crack root

   cracker

   cracking

   crank

   crapplet

   CrApTeX

   crash

   crash and burn

   crawling horror

   CRC handbook

   creationism

   creep

   creeping elegance

   creeping featurism

   creeping featuritis

   cretin

   cretinous

   crippleware

   critical mass

   crlf

   crock

   cross-post

   crossload

   crudware

   cruft

   cruft together

   cruftsmanship

   crufty

   crumb

   crunch

   cryppie

   cthulhic

   CTSS

   cube

   cup holder

   cursor dipped in X

   cuspy

   cut a tape

   cybercrud

   cyberpunk

   cyberspace

   cycle

   cycle of reincarnation

   cycle server

   cypherpunk

   C|N>K

:C: n.

        1. The third letter of the English alphabet.

        2. ASCII 1000011.

        3. The name of a programming language designed by Dennis Ritchie
        during the early 1970s and immediately used to reimplement {Unix};
        so called because many features derived from an earlier compiler
        named `B' in commemoration of its parent, BCPL. (BCPL was in turn
        descended from an earlier Algol-derived language, CPL.) Before
        Bjarne Stroustrup settled the question by designing {C++}, there was
        a humorous debate over whether C's successor should be named `D' or
        `P'. C became immensely popular outside Bell Labs after about 1980
        and is now the dominant language in systems and microcomputer
        applications programming. C is often described, with a mixture of
        fondness and disdain varying according to the speaker, as "a
        language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly
        language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly
        language" See also {languages of choice}, {indent style}.

        The Crunchly on the left sounds a little ANSI.

:C Programmer's Disease: n.

        The tendency of the undisciplined C programmer to set arbitrary but
        supposedly generous static limits on table sizes (defined, if you're
        lucky, by constants in header files) rather than taking the trouble
        to do proper dynamic storage allocation. If an application user
        later needs to put 68 elements into a table of size 50, the
        afflicted programmer reasons that he or she can easily reset the
        table size to 68 (or even as much as 70, to allow for future
        expansion) and recompile. This gives the programmer the comfortable
        feeling of having made the effort to satisfy the user's
        (unreasonable) demands, and often affords the user multiple
        opportunities to explore the marvelous consequences of {fandango on
        core}. In severe cases of the disease, the programmer cannot
        comprehend why each fix of this kind seems only to further
        disgruntle the user.

:C&C: //

        [common, esp. on news.admin.net-abuse.email] Contraction of "Coffee
        & Cats". This frequently occurs as a warning label on USENET posts
        that are likely to cause you to {snarf} coffee onto your keyboard
        and startle the cat off your lap.

:C++: /C'pluhspluhs/, n.

        Designed by Bjarne Stroustrup of AT&T Bell Labs as a successor to
        {C}. Now one of the {languages of choice}, although many hackers
        still grumble that it is the successor to either Algol 68 or Ada
        (depending on generation), and a prime example of {second-system
        effect}. Almost anything that can be done in any language can be
        done in C++, but it requires a {language lawyer} to know what is and
        what is not legal -- the design is almost too large to hold in even
        hackers' heads. Much of the {cruft} results from C++'s attempt to be
        backward compatible with C. Stroustrup himself has said in his
        retrospective book The Design and Evolution of C++ (p. 207), "Within
        C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get
        out." [Many hackers would now add "Yes, and it's called {Java}"
        --ESR]

        Nowadays we say this of C++.

:calculator: n.

        Syn. for {bitty box}.

:Camel Book: n.

        Universally recognized nickname for the book Programming Perl, by
        Larry Wall and Randal L. Schwartz, O'Reilly and Associates 1991,
        ISBN 0-937175-64-1 (second edition 1996, ISBN 1-56592-149-6; third
        edition 2000, 0-596-00027-8, adding as authors Tom Christiansen and
        Jon Orwant but dropping Randal Schwartz). The definitive reference
        on {Perl}.

:camelCase:

        A variable in a programming language is sait to be camelCased when
        all words but the first are capitalized. This practice contrasts
        with the C tradition of either running syllables together or marking
        syllable breaks with underscores; thus, where a C programmer would
        write thisverylongname or this_very_long_name, the camelCased
        version would be thisVeryLongName. This practice is common in
        certain language communities (formerly Pascal; today Java and Visual
        Basic) and tends to be associated with object-oriented programming.

        Compare {BiCapitalization}; but where that practice is primarily
        associated with marketing, camelCasing is not aimed at impressing
        anybody, and hackers consider it respectable.

:camelCasing:

        See {PascalCasing}.

:can't happen:

        The traditional program comment for code executed under a condition
        that should never be true, for example a file size computed as
        negative. Often, such a condition being true indicates data
        corruption or a faulty algorithm; it is almost always handled by
        emitting a fatal error message and terminating or crashing, since
        there is little else that can be done. Some case variant of "can't
        happen" is also often the text emitted if the `impossible' error
        actually happens! Although "can't happen" events are genuinely
        infrequent in production code, programmers wise enough to check for
        them habitually are often surprised at how frequently they are
        triggered during development and how many headaches checking for
        them turns out to head off. See also {firewall code} (sense 2).

:cancelbot: /kan'selbot/

        [Usenet: compound, cancel + robot]

        1. Mythically, a {robocanceller}

        2. In reality, most cancelbots are manually operated by being fed
        lists of spam message IDs.

:Cancelmoose[tm]: /kan'selmoos/

        [Usenet] The archetype and model of all good {spam}-fighters. Once
        upon a time, the 'Moose would send out spam-cancels and then post
        notice anonymously to news.admin.policy, news.admin.misc, and
        alt.current-events.net-abuse. The 'Moose stepped to the fore on its
        own initiative, at a time (mid-1994) when spam-cancels were
        irregular and disorganized, and behaved altogether admirably --
        fair, even-handed, and quick to respond to comments and criticism,
        all without self-aggrandizement or martyrdom. Cancelmoose[tm]
        quickly gained near-unanimous support from the readership of all
        three above-mentioned groups.

        Nobody knows who Cancelmoose[tm] really is, and there aren't even
        any good rumors. However, the 'Moose now has an e-mail address
        (<moose@cm.org>) and a web site (http://www.cm.org/.) By early 1995,
        others had stepped into the spam-cancel business, and appeared to be
        comporting themselves well, after the 'Moose's manner. The 'Moose
        has now gotten out of the business, and is more interested in ending
        spam (and cancels) entirely.

:candygrammar: n.

        A programming-language grammar that is mostly {syntactic sugar}; the
        term is also a play on `candygram'. {COBOL}, Apple's Hypertalk
        language, and a lot of the so-called `4GL' database languages share
        this property. The usual intent of such designs is that they be as
        English-like as possible, on the theory that they will then be
        easier for unskilled people to program. This intention comes to
        grief on the reality that syntax isn't what makes programming hard;
        it's the mental effort and organization required to specify an
        algorithm precisely that costs. Thus the invariable result is that
        `candygrammar' languages are just as difficult to program in as
        terser ones, and far more painful for the experienced hacker.

        [The overtones from the old Chevy Chase skit on Saturday Night Live
        should not be overlooked. This was a Jaws parody. Someone lurking
        outside an apartment door tries all kinds of bogus ways to get the
        occupant to open up, while ominous music plays in the background.
        The last attempt is a half-hearted "Candygram!" When the door is
        opened, a shark bursts in and chomps the poor occupant. [There is a
        similar gag in "Blazing Saddles" --ESR] There is a moral here for
        those attracted to candygrammars. Note that, in many circles, pretty
        much the same ones who remember Monty Python sketches, all it takes
        is the word "Candygram!", suitably timed, to get people rolling on
        the floor. -- GLS]

:canonical: adj.

        [very common; historically, `according to religious law'] The usual
        or standard state or manner of something. This word has a somewhat
        more technical meaning in mathematics. Two formulas such as 9 + x
        and x + 9 are said to be equivalent because they mean the same
        thing, but the second one is in canonical form because it is written
        in the usual way, with the highest power of x first. Usually there
        are fixed rules you can use to decide whether something is in
        canonical form. The jargon meaning, a relaxation of the technical
        meaning, acquired its present loading in computer-science culture
        largely through its prominence in Alonzo Church's work in
        computation theory and mathematical logic (see {Knights of the
        Lambda Calculus}). Compare {vanilla}.

        Non-technical academics do not use the adjective `canonical' in any
        of the senses defined above with any regularity; they do however use
        the nouns canon and canonicity (not **canonicalness or
        **canonicality). The canon of a given author is the complete body of
        authentic works by that author (this usage is familiar to Sherlock
        Holmes fans as well as to literary scholars). `The canon' is the
        body of works in a given field (e.g., works of literature, or of
        art, or of music) deemed worthwhile for students to study and for
        scholars to investigate.

        The word `canon' has an interesting history. It derives ultimately
        from the Greek kanon (akin to the English `cane') referring to a
        reed. Reeds were used for measurement, and in Latin and later Greek
        the word `canon' meant a rule or a standard. The establishment of a
        canon of scriptures within Christianity was meant to define a
        standard or a rule for the religion. The above non-techspeak
        academic usages stem from this instance of a defined and accepted
        body of work. Alongside this usage was the promulgation of `canons'
        (`rules') for the government of the Catholic Church. The techspeak
        usages ("according to religious law") derive from this use of the
        Latin `canon'.

        Hackers invest this term with a playfulness that makes an ironic
        contrast with its historical meaning. A true story: One Bob Sjoberg,
        new at the MIT AI Lab, expressed some annoyance at the incessant use
        of jargon. Over his loud objections, GLS and RMS made a point of
        using as much of it as possible in his presence, and eventually it
        began to sink in. Finally, in one conversation, he used the word
        canonical in jargon-like fashion without thinking. Steele: "Aha!
        We've finally got you talking jargon too!" Stallman: "What did he
        say?" Steele: "Bob just used `canonical' in the canonical way."

        Of course, canonicality depends on context, but it is implicitly
        defined as the way hackers normally expect things to be. Thus, a
        hacker may claim with a straight face that `according to religious
        law' is not the canonical meaning of canonical.

:careware: /keir'weir/, n.

        A variety of {shareware} for which either the author suggests that
        some payment be made to a nominated charity or a levy directed to
        charity is included on top of the distribution charge. Syn.:
        {charityware}; compare {crippleware}, sense 2.

:cargo cult programming: n.

        A style of (incompetent) programming dominated by ritual inclusion
        of code or program structures that serve no real purpose. A cargo
        cult programmer will usually explain the extra code as a way of
        working around some bug encountered in the past, but usually neither
        the bug nor the reason the code apparently avoided the bug was ever
        fully understood (compare {shotgun debugging}, {voodoo
        programming}).

        The term `cargo cult' is a reference to aboriginal religions that
        grew up in the South Pacific after World War II. The practices of
        these cults center on building elaborate mockups of airplanes and
        military style landing strips in the hope of bringing the return of
        the god-like airplanes that brought such marvelous cargo during the
        war. Hackish usage probably derives from Richard Feynman's
        characterization of certain practices as "cargo cult science" in his
        book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (W. W. Norton & Co, New York
        1985, ISBN 0-393-01921-7).

:cascade: n.

        1. A huge volume of spurious error-message output produced by a
        compiler with poor error recovery. Too frequently, one trivial
        syntax error (such as a missing `)' or `}') throws the parser out of
        synch so that much of the remaining program text is interpreted as
        garbaged or ill-formed.

        2. A chain of Usenet followups, each adding some trivial variation
        or riposte to the text of the previous one, all of which is
        reproduced in the new message; an {include war} in which the object
        is to create a sort of communal graffito.

:case and paste: n.

        [from `cut and paste']

        The addition of a new {feature} to an existing system by selecting
        the code from an existing feature and pasting it in with minor
        changes. Common in telephony circles because most operations in a
        telephone switch are selected using case statements. Leads to
        {software bloat}.

        In some circles of EMACS users this is called `programming by
        Meta-W', because Meta-W is the EMACS command for copying a block of
        text to a kill buffer in preparation to pasting it in elsewhere. The
        term is condescending, implying that the programmer is acting
        mindlessly rather than thinking carefully about what is required to
        integrate the code for two similar cases.

        At {DEC} (now HP), this is sometimes called clone-and-hack coding.

:case mod:

        [from `case modification']

        1. Originally a kind of hardware hack on a PC intended to support
        {overclocking} (e.g. with cutouts for oversized fans, or a
        freon-based or water-cooling system).

        2. Nowadays, similar drastic surgery that's done just to make a
        machine look nifty. The commonest case mods combine acrylic case
        windows with LEDs to give the machine an eerie interior glow like a
        B-movie flying saucer. More advanced forms of case modding involve
        building machines into weird and unlikely shapes. The effect can be
        quite artistic, but one of the unwritten rules is that the machine
        must continue to function as a computer.

:casters-up mode: n.

        [IBM, prob. fr. slang belly up] Yet another synonym for `broken' or
        `down'. Usually connotes a major failure. A system (hardware or
        software) which is down may be already being restarted before the
        failure is noticed, whereas one which is casters up is usually a
        good excuse to take the rest of the day off (as long as you're not
        responsible for fixing it).

:casting the runes: n.

        What a {guru} does when you ask him or her to run a particular
        program and type at it because it never works for anyone else; esp.
        used when nobody can ever see what the guru is doing different from
        what J. Random Luser does. Compare {incantation}, {runes},
        {examining the entrails}; also see the AI koan about Tom Knight in
        Some AI Koans (in Appendix A).

        A correspondent from England tells us that one of ICL's most
        talented systems designers used to be called out occasionally to
        service machines which the {field circus} had given up on. Since he
        knew the design inside out, he could often find faults simply by
        listening to a quick outline of the symptoms. He used to play on
        this by going to some site where the field circus had just spent the
        last two weeks solid trying to find a fault, and spreading a diagram
        of the system out on a table top. He'd then shake some chicken bones
        and cast them over the diagram, peer at the bones intently for a
        minute, and then tell them that a certain module needed replacing.
        The system would start working again immediately upon the
        replacement.

:cat: vt.

        [from catenate via {Unix} cat(1)]

        1. [techspeak] To spew an entire file to the screen or some other
        output sink without pause (syn. {blast}).

        2. By extension, to dump large amounts of data at an unprepared
        target or with no intention of browsing it carefully. Usage:
        considered silly. Rare outside Unix sites. See also {dd}, {BLT}.

        Among Unix fans, cat(1) is considered an excellent example of
        user-interface design, because it delivers the file contents without
        such verbosity as spacing or headers between the files, and because
        it does not require the files to consist of lines of text, but works
        with any sort of data.

        Among Unix haters, cat(1) is considered the {canonical} example of
        bad user-interface design, because of its woefully unobvious name.
        It is far more often used to {blast} a file to standard output than
        to concatenate two files. The name cat for the former operation is
        just as unintuitive as, say, LISP's {cdr}.

        Of such oppositions are {holy wars} made.... See also {UUOC}.

:catatonic: adj.

        Describes a condition of suspended animation in which something is
        so {wedged} or {hung} that it makes no response. If you are typing
        on a terminal and suddenly the computer doesn't even echo the
        letters back to the screen as you type, let alone do what you're
        asking it to do, then the computer is suffering from catatonia
        (possibly because it has crashed). "There I was in the middle of a
        winning game of {nethack} and it went catatonic on me! Aaargh!"
        Compare {buzz}.

:cathedral: n.,adj.

        [see {bazaar} for derivation] The `classical' mode of software
        engineering long thought to be necessarily implied by {Brooks's
        Law}. Features small teams, tight project control, and long release
        intervals. This term came into use after analysis of the Linux
        experience suggested there might be something wrong (or at least
        incomplete) in the classical assumptions.

:cd tilde: /CD tild@/, vi.

        To go home. From the Unix C-shell and Korn-shell command cd ~, which
        takes one to one's $HOME (cd with no arguments happens to do the
        same thing). By extension, may be used with other arguments; thus,
        over an electronic chat link, cd ~coffee would mean "I'm going to
        the coffee machine."

:CDA: /CDA/

        The "Communications Decency Act", passed as section 502 of a major
        telecommunications reform bill on February 8th, 1996 ("Black
        Thursday"). The CDA made it a federal crime in the USA to send a
        communication which is "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or
        indecent, with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass another
        person." It also threatened with imprisonment anyone who "knowingly"
        makes accessible to minors any message that "describes, in terms
        patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards,
        sexual or excretory activities or organs".

        While the CDA was sold as a measure to protect minors from the
        putative evils of pornography, the repressive political aims of the
        bill were laid bare by the Hyde amendment, which intended to outlaw
        discussion of abortion on the Internet.

        To say that this direct attack on First Amendment free-speech rights
        was not well received on the Internet would be putting it mildly. A
        firestorm of protest followed, including a February 29th 1996 mass
        demonstration by thousands of netters who turned their {home page}s
        black for 48 hours. Several civil-rights groups and
        computing/telecommunications companies mounted a constitutional
        challenge. The CDA was demolished by a strongly-worded decision
        handed down in 8th-circuit Federal court and subsequently affirmed
        by the U.S. Supreme Court on 26 June 1997 ("White Thursday"). See
        also {Exon}.

:cdr: /ku'dr/, /kuhdr/, vt.

        [from LISP] To skip past the first item from a list of things
        (generalized from the LISP operation on binary tree structures,
        which returns a list consisting of all but the first element of its
        argument). In the form cdr down, to trace down a list of elements:
        "Shall we cdr down the agenda?" Usage: silly. See also {loop
        through}.

        Historical note: The instruction format of the IBM 704 that hosted
        the original LISP implementation featured two 15-bit fields called
        the address and decrement parts. The term cdr was originally
        Contents of Decrement part of Register. Similarly, car stood for
        Contents of Address part of Register.

        The cdr and car operations have since become bases for formation of
        compound metaphors in non-LISP contexts. GLS recalls, for example, a
        programming project in which strings were represented as linked
        lists; the get-character and skip-character operations were of
        course called CHAR and CHDR.

:chad: /chad/, n.

        1. [common] The perforated edge strips on printer paper, after they
        have been separated from the printed portion. Also called {selvage},
        {perf}, and {ripoff}.

        2. The confetti-like paper bits punched out of cards or paper tape;
        this has also been called chaff, computer confetti, and keypunch
        droppings. It's reported that this was very old Army slang
        (associated with teletypewriters before the computer era), and has
        been occasionally sighted in directions for punched-card vote
        tabulators long after it passed out of live use among computer
        programmers in the late 1970s. This sense of `chad' returned to the
        mainstream during the finale of the hotly disputed U.S. presidential
        election in 2000 via stories about the Florida vote recounts. Note
        however that in the revived mainstream usage chad is not a mass noun
        and `a chad' is a single piece of the stuff.

        There is an urban legend that chad (sense 2) derives from the
        Chadless keypunch (named for its inventor), which cut little
        u-shaped tabs in the card to make a hole when the tab folded back,
        rather than punching out a circle/rectangle; it was clear that if
        the Chadless keypunch didn't make them, then the stuff that other
        keypunches made had to be `chad'. However, serious attempts to track
        down "Chadless" as a personal name or U.S. trademark have failed,
        casting doubt on this etymology -- and the U.S. Patent
        Classification System uses "chadless" (small c) as an adjective,
        suggesting that "chadless" derives from "chad" and not the other way
        around. There is another legend that the word was originally
        acronymic, standing for "Card Hole Aggregate Debris", but this has
        all the earmarks of a {backronym}. It has also been noted that the
        word "chad" is Scots dialect for gravel, but nobody has proposed any
        plausible reason that card chaff should be thought of as gravel.
        None of these etymologies is really plausible.

        This is one way to be {chad}less.

        (The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 75-10-04. The previous
        cartoon was 74-12-29.)

:chad box: n.

        A metal box about the size of a lunchbox (or in some models a large
        wastebasket), for collecting the {chad} (sense 2) that accumulated
        in {Iron Age} card punches. You had to open the covers of the card
        punch periodically and empty the chad box. The {bit bucket} was
        notionally the equivalent device in the CPU enclosure, which was
        typically across the room in another great gray-and-blue box.

:chain:

        1. vi. [orig. from BASIC's CHAIN statement] To hand off execution to
        a child or successor without going through the {OS} command
        interpreter that invoked it. The state of the parent program is lost
        and there is no returning to it. Though this facility used to be
        common on memory-limited micros and is still widely supported for
        backward compatibility, the jargon usage is semi-obsolescent; in
        particular, most Unix programmers will think of this as an {exec}.
        Oppose the more modern subshell.

        2. n. A series of linked data areas within an operating system or
        application. Chain rattling is the process of repeatedly running
        through the linked data areas searching for one which is of interest
        to the executing program. The implication is that there is a very
        large number of links on the chain.

:chainik: /chi:'nik/

        [Russian, literally "teapot"] Almost synonymous with {muggle}.
        Implies both ignorance and a certain amount of willingness to learn,
        but does not necessarily imply as little experience or short
        exposure time as {newbie} and is not as derogatory as {luser}. Both
        a novice user and someone using a system for a long time without any
        understanding of the internals can be referred to as chainiks. Very
        widespread term in Russian hackish, often used in an English context
        by Russian-speaking hackers esp. in Israel (e.g. "Our new colleague
        is a complete chainik"). FidoNet discussion groups often had a
        "chainik" subsection for newbies and, well, old chainiks (eg.
        su.asm.chainik, ru.linux.chainik, ru.html.chainik). Public projects
        often have a chainik mailing list to keep the chainiks off the
        developers' and experienced users' discussions. Today, the word is
        slowly slipping into mainstream Russian due to the Russian
        translation of the popular yellow-black covered "foobar for dummies"
        series, which (correctly) uses "chainik" for "dummy", but its
        frequent (though not excessive) use is still characteristic
        hacker-speak.

:channel: n.

        [IRC] The basic unit of discussion on {IRC}. Once one joins a
        channel, everything one types is read by others on that channel.
        Channels are named with strings that begin with a `#' sign and can
        have topic descriptions (which are generally irrelevant to the
        actual subject of discussion). Some notable channels are #initgame,
        #hottub, callahans, and #report. At times of international crisis,
        #report has hundreds of members, some of whom take turns listening
        to various news services and typing in summaries of the news, or in
        some cases, giving first-hand accounts of the action (e.g., Scud
        missile attacks in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War in 1991).

:channel hopping: n.

        [common; IRC, GEnie] To rapidly switch channels on {IRC}, or a GEnie
        chat board, just as a social butterfly might hop from one group to
        another at a party. This term may derive from the TV watcher's
        idiom, channel surfing.

:channel op: /chan'l op/, n.

        [IRC] Someone who is endowed with privileges on a particular {IRC}
        channel; commonly abbreviated chanop or CHOP or just op (as of 2000
        these short forms have almost crowded out the parent usage). These
        privileges include the right to {kick} users, to change various
        status bits, and to make others into CHOPs.

:chanop: /chan'op/, n.

        [IRC] See {channel op}.

:char: /keir/, /char/, /kar/, n.

        Shorthand for `character'. Esp.: used by C programmers, as char is
        C's typename for character data.

:charityware: /cha'riteeweir`/, n.

        Syn. {careware}.

:chase pointers:

        1. vi. To go through multiple levels of indirection, as in
        traversing a linked list or graph structure. Used esp. by
        programmers in C, where explicit pointers are a very common data
        type. This is techspeak, but it remains jargon when used of human
        networks. "I'm chasing pointers. Bob said you could tell me who to
        talk to about...." See {dangling pointer} and {snap}.

        2. [Cambridge] pointer chase or pointer hunt: The process of going
        through a {core dump} (sense 1), interactively or on a large piece
        of paper printed with hex {runes}, following dynamic
        data-structures. Used only in a debugging context.

:chawmp: n.

        [University of Florida] 16 or 18 bits (half of a machine word). This
        term was used by FORTH hackers during the late 1970s/early 1980s; it
        is said to have been archaic then, and may now be obsolete. It was
        coined in revolt against the promiscuous use of `word' for anything
        between 16 and 32 bits; `word' has an additional special meaning for
        FORTH hacks that made the overloading intolerable. For similar
        reasons, /gaw'bl/ (spelled `gawble' or possibly `gawbul') was in use
        as a term for 32 or 48 bits (presumably a full machine word, but our
        sources are unclear on this). These terms are more easily understood
        if one thinks of them as faithful phonetic spellings of `chomp' and
        `gobble' pronounced in a Florida or other Southern U.S. dialect. For
        general discussion of similar terms, see {nybble}.

:check: n.

        A hardware-detected error condition, most commonly used to refer to
        actual hardware failures rather than software-induced traps. E.g., a
        parity check is the result of a hardware-detected parity error.
        Recorded here because the word often humorously extended to
        non-technical problems. For example, the term child check has been
        used to refer to the problems caused by a small child who is curious
        to know what happens when s/he presses all the cute buttons on a
        computer's console (of course, this particular problem could have
        been prevented with {molly-guard}s).

:cheerfully: adv.

        See {happily}.

:chemist: n.

        [Cambridge] Someone who wastes computer time on {number-crunching}
        when you'd far rather the machine were doing something more
        productive, such as working out anagrams of your name or printing
        Snoopy calendars or running {life} patterns. May or may not refer to
        someone who actually studies chemistry.

:Chernobyl chicken: n.

        See {laser chicken}.

:Chernobyl packet: /chernoh'b@l pak'@t/, n.

        A network packet that induces a {broadcast storm} and/or {network
        meltdown}, in memory of the April 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl
        in Ukraine. The typical scenario involves an IP Ethernet datagram
        that passes through a gateway with both source and destination Ether
        and IP address set as the respective broadcast addresses for the
        subnetworks being gated between. Compare {Christmas tree packet}.

:chicken head: n.

        [Commodore] The Commodore Business Machines logo, which strongly
        resembles a poultry part (within Commodore itself the logo was
        always called chicken lips). Rendered in ASCII as `C='. With the
        arguable exception of the {Amiga}, Commodore's machines were
        notoriously crocky little {bitty box}es, albeit people have written
        multitasking Unix-like operating systems with TCP/IP networking for
        them. Thus, this usage may owe something to Philip K. Dick's novel
        Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the basis for the movie Blade
        Runner; the novel is now sold under that title), in which a
        `chickenhead' is a mutant with below-average intelligence.

:chickenboner: n.

        [spamfighters] Derogatory term for a spammer. The image that goes
        with it is of an overweight redneck with bad teeth living in a
        trailer, hunched in semi-darkness over his computer and surrounded
        by rotting chicken bones in half-eaten KFC buckets and empty beer
        cans. See http://www.spamfaq.net/terminology.shtml#chickenboner for
        discussion.

:chiclet keyboard: n.

        A keyboard with a small, flat rectangular or lozenge-shaped rubber
        or plastic keys that look like pieces of chewing gum. (Chiclets is
        the brand name of a variety of chewing gum that does in fact
        resemble the keys of chiclet keyboards.) Used esp. to describe the
        original IBM PCjr keyboard. Vendors unanimously liked these because
        they were cheap, and a lot of early portable and laptop products got
        launched using them. Customers rejected the idea with almost equal
        unanimity, and chiclets are not often seen on anything larger than a
        digital watch any more.

:Chinese Army technique: n.

        Syn. {Mongolian Hordes technique}.

:choad: /chohd/, n.

        Synonym for `penis' used in alt.tasteless and popularized by the
        denizens thereof. They say: "We think maybe it's from Middle English
        but we're all too damned lazy to check the OED." [I'm not. It isn't.
        --ESR] This term is alleged to have been inherited through 1960s
        underground comics, and to have been recently sighted in the Beavis
        and Butthead cartoons. Speakers of the Hindi, Bengali and Gujarati
        languages have confirmed that `choad' is in fact an Indian
        vernacular word equivalent to `fuck'; it is therefore likely to have
        entered English slang via the British Raj.

:choke: v.

        [common] To reject input, often ungracefully. "NULs make System V's
        lpr(1) choke." "I tried building an {EMACS} binary to use {X}, but
        cpp(1) choked on all those #defines." See {barf}, {vi}.

:chomp: vi.

        1. To {lose}; specifically, to chew on something of which more was
        bitten off than one can. Probably related to gnashing of teeth.

        2. To bite the bag; See {bagbiter}.

        A hand gesture commonly accompanies this. To perform it, hold the
        four fingers together and place the thumb against their tips. Now
        open and close your hand rapidly to suggest a biting action (much
        like what Pac-Man does in the classic video game, though this
        pantomime seems to predate that). The gesture alone means `chomp
        chomp' (see Verb Doubling in the Jargon Construction section of the
        Prependices). The hand may be pointed at the object of complaint,
        and for real emphasis you can use both hands at once. Doing this to
        a person is equivalent to saying "You chomper!" If you point the
        gesture at yourself, it is a humble but humorous admission of some
        failure. You might do this if someone told you that a program you
        had written had failed in some surprising way and you felt dumb for
        not having anticipated it.

:chomper: n.

        Someone or something that is chomping; a loser. See {loser},
        {bagbiter}, {chomp}.

:CHOP: /chop/, n.

        [IRC] See {channel op}.

:Christmas tree: n.

        A kind of RS-232 line tester or breakout box featuring rows of
        blinking red and green LEDs suggestive of Christmas lights.

:Christmas tree packet: n.

        A packet with every single option set for whatever protocol is in
        use. See {kamikaze packet}, {Chernobyl packet}. (The term doubtless
        derives from a fanciful image of each little option bit being
        represented by a different-colored light bulb, all turned on.)
        Compare {Godzillagram}.

:chrome: n.

        [from automotive slang via wargaming] Showy features added to
        attract users but contributing little or nothing to the power of a
        system. "The 3D icons in Motif are just chrome, but they certainly
        are pretty chrome!" Distinguished from {bells and whistles} by the
        fact that the latter are usually added to gratify developers' own
        desires for featurefulness. Often used as a term of contempt.

:chug: vi.

        To run slowly; to {grind} or {grovel}. "The disk is chugging like
        crazy."

:Church of the SubGenius: n.

        A mutant offshoot of {Discordianism} launched in 1981 as a spoof of
        fundamentalist Christianity by the `Reverend' Ivan Stang, a
        brilliant satirist with a gift for promotion. Popular among hackers
        as a rich source of bizarre imagery and references such as "Bob" the
        divine drilling-equipment salesman, the Benevolent Space Xists, and
        the Stark Fist of Removal. Much SubGenius theory is concerned with
        the acquisition of the mystical substance or quality of {slack}.
        There is a home page at http://www.subgenius.com/.

:CI$: //, n.

        Hackerism for `CIS', CompuServe Information Service. The dollar sign
        refers to CompuServe's rather steep line charges. Often used in {sig
        block}s just before a CompuServe address. Syn. {Compu$erve}.

:Cinderella Book: n.

        [CMU] Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation,
        by John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman, (Addison-Wesley, 1979). So
        called because the cover depicts a girl (putatively Cinderella)
        sitting in front of a Rube Goldberg device and holding a rope coming
        out of it. On the back cover, the device is in shambles after she
        has (inevitably) pulled on the rope. See also {book titles}.

:Classic C: /klas'ik C/, n.

        [a play on `Coke Classic'] The C programming language as defined in
        the first edition of {K&R}, with some small additions. It is also
        known as `K&R C'. The name came into use while C was being
        standardized by the ANSI X3J11 committee. Also `C Classic'.

        An analogous construction is sometimes applied elsewhere: thus, `X
        Classic', where X = Star Trek (referring to the original TV series)
        or X = PC (referring to IBM's ISA-bus machines as opposed to the
        PS/2 series). This construction is especially used of product series
        in which the newer versions are considered serious losers relative
        to the older ones.

:clean:

        1. adj. Used of hardware or software designs, implies `elegance in
        the small', that is, a design or implementation that may not hold
        any surprises but does things in a way that is reasonably intuitive
        and relatively easy to comprehend from the outside. The antonym is
        `grungy' or {crufty}.

        2. v. To remove unneeded or undesired files in a effort to reduce
        clutter: "I'm cleaning up my account." "I cleaned up the garbage and
        now have 100 Meg free on that partition."

:click of death: n.

        A syndrome of certain Iomega ZIP drives, named for the clicking
        noise that is caused by the malady. An affected drive will, after
        accepting a disk, start making a clicking noise and refuse to eject
        the disk. A common solution for retrieving the disk is to insert the
        bent end of a paper clip into a small hole adjacent to the slot.
        "Clicked" disks are generally unusable after being retrieved from
        the drive.

        The clicking noise is caused by the drive's read/write head bumping
        against its movement stops when it fails to find track 0 on the
        disk, causing the head to become misaligned. This can happen when
        the drive has been subjected to a physical shock, or when the disk
        is exposed to an electromagnetic field, such as that of the CRT.
        Another common cause is when a package of disks is armed with an
        anti-theft strip at a store. When the clerk scans the product to
        disarm the strip, it can demagnetize the disks, wiping out track 0.

        There is evidence that the click of death is a communicable disease;
        a "clicked" disk can cause the read/write head of a "clean" drive to
        become misaligned. Iomega at first denied the existence of the click
        of death, but eventually offered to replace free of charge any
        drives affected by the condition.

:CLM: /CLM/

        [Sun: `Career Limiting Move']

        1. n. An action endangering one's future prospects of getting plum
        projects and raises, and possibly one's job: "His Halloween costume
        was a parody of his manager. He won the prize for `best CLM'."

        2. adj. Denotes extreme severity of a bug, discovered by a customer
        and obviously missed earlier because of poor testing: "That's a CLM
        bug!"

:clobber: vt.

        To overwrite, usually unintentionally: "I walked off the end of the
        array and clobbered the stack." Compare {mung}, {scribble}, {trash},
        and {smash the stack}.

:clock:

        n.,v.

        1. [techspeak] The master oscillator that steps a CPU or other
        digital circuit through its paces. This has nothing to do with the
        time of day, although the software counter that keeps track of the
        latter may be derived from the former.

        2. vt. To run a CPU or other digital circuit at a particular rate.
        "If you clock it at 1000MHz, it gets warm.". See {overclock}.

        3. vt. To force a digital circuit from one state to the next by
        applying a single clock pulse. "The data must be stable 10ns before
        you clock the latch."

:clocks: n.

        Processor logic cycles, so called because each generally corresponds
        to one clock pulse in the processor's timing. The relative execution
        times of instructions on a machine are usually discussed in clocks
        rather than absolute fractions of a second; one good reason for this
        is that clock speeds for various models of the machine may increase
        as technology improves, and it is usually the relative times one is
        interested in when discussing the instruction set. Compare {cycle},
        {jiffy}.

:clone: n.

        1. An exact duplicate: "Our product is a clone of their product."
        Implies a legal reimplementation from documentation or by
        reverse-engineering. Also connotes lower price.

        2. A shoddy, spurious copy: "Their product is a clone of our
        product."

        3. A blatant ripoff, most likely violating copyright, patent, or
        trade secret protections: "Your product is a clone of my product."
        This use implies legal action is pending.

        4. [obs] PC clone: a PC-BUS/ISA/EISA/PCI-compatible 80x86-based
        microcomputer (this use is sometimes spelled klone or PClone). These
        invariably have much more bang for the buck than the IBM archetypes
        they resemble. This term fell out of use in the 1990s; the class of
        machines it describes are now simply PCs or Intel machines.

        5. [obs.] In the construction Unix clone: An OS designed to deliver
        a Unix-lookalike environment without Unix license fees, or with
        additional `mission-critical' features such as support for real-time
        programming. {Linux} and the free BSDs killed off this product
        category and the term with it.

        6. v. To make an exact copy of something. "Let me clone that" might
        mean "I want to borrow that paper so I can make a photocopy" or "Let
        me get a copy of that file before you {mung} it".

:clone-and-hack coding: n.

        [DEC] Syn. {case and paste}.

:clover key: n.

        [Mac users] See {feature key}.

:clue-by-four:

        [Usenet: portmanteau, clue + two-by-four] The notional stick with
        which one whacks an aggressively clueless person. This term derives
        from a western American folk saying about training a mule "First,
        you got to hit him with a two-by-four. That's to get his attention."
        The clue-by-four is a close relative of the {LART}. Syn. clue stick.
        This metaphor is commonly elaborated; your editor once heard a
        hacker say "I smite you with the great sword Cluebringer!"

:clustergeeking: /kluh'st@rgee`king/, n.

        [CMU] Spending more time at a computer cluster doing CS homework
        than most people spend breathing.

:co-lo: /koh'loh`/, n.

        [very common; first heard c.1995] Short for `co-location', used of a
        machine you own that is physically sited on the premises of an ISP
        in order to take advantage of the ISP's direct access to lots of
        network bandwidth. Often in the phrases co-lo box or co-lo machines.
        Co-lo boxes are typically web and FTP servers remote-administered by
        their owners, who may seldom or never visit the actual site.

:coaster: n.

        1. Unuseable CD produced during failed attempt at writing to
        writeable or re-writeable CD media. Certainly related to the
        coaster-like shape of a CD, and the relative value of these
        failures. "I made a lot of coasters before I got a good CD."

        2. Useless CDs received in the mail from the likes of AOL, MSN, CI$,
        Prodigy, ad nauseam.

        In the U.K., beermat is often used in these senses.

:coaster toaster:

        A writer for recordable CD-Rs, especially cheap IDE models that tend
        to produce a high proportion of {coaster}s.

:COBOL: /koh'bol/, n.

        [COmmon Business-Oriented Language] (Synonymous with {evil}.) A
        weak, verbose, and flabby language used by {code grinder}s to do
        boring mindless things on {dinosaur} mainframes. Hackers believe
        that all COBOL programmers are {suit}s or {code grinder}s, and no
        self-respecting hacker will ever admit to having learned the
        language. Its very name is seldom uttered without ritual expressions
        of disgust or horror. One popular one is Edsger W. Dijkstra's famous
        observation that "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching
        should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense." (from
        Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective) See also
        {fear and loathing}, {software rot}.

:COBOL fingers: /koh'bol finggrz/, n.

        Reported from Sweden, a (hypothetical) disease one might get from
        coding in COBOL. The language requires code verbose beyond all
        reason (see {candygrammar}); thus it is alleged that programming too
        much in COBOL causes one's fingers to wear down to stubs by the
        endless typing. "I refuse to type in all that source code again; it
        would give me COBOL fingers!"

:cobweb site: n.

        A World Wide Web Site that hasn't been updated so long it has
        figuratively grown cobwebs.

:code:

        1. n. The stuff that software writers write, either in source form
        or after translation by a compiler or assembler. Often used in
        opposition to "data", which is the stuff that code operates on.
        Among hackers this is a mass noun, as in "How much code does it take
        to do a {bubble sort}?", or "The code is loaded at the high end of
        RAM." Among scientific programmers it is sometimes a count noun
        equilvalent to "program"; thus they may speak of "codes" in the
        plural. Anyone referring to software as "the software codes" is
        probably a {newbie} or a {suit}.

        2. v. To write code. In this sense, always refers to source code
        rather than compiled. "I coded an Emacs clone in two hours!" This
        verb is a bit of a cultural marker associated with the Unix and
        minicomputer traditions (and lately Linux); people within that
        culture prefer v. `code' to v. `program' whereas outside it the
        reverse is normally true.

:code grinder: n.

        1. A {suit}-wearing minion of the sort hired in legion strength by
        banks and insurance companies to implement payroll packages in RPG
        and other such unspeakable horrors. In its native habitat, the code
        grinder often removes the suit jacket to reveal an underplumage
        consisting of button-down shirt (starch optional) and a tie. In
        times of dire stress, the sleeves (if long) may be rolled up and the
        tie loosened about half an inch. It seldom helps. The {code
        grinder}'s milieu is about as far from hackerdom as one can get and
        still touch a computer; the term connotes pity. See {Real World},
        {suit}.

        2. Used of or to a hacker, a really serious slur on the person's
        creative ability; connotes a design style characterized by primitive
        technique, rule-boundedness, {brute force}, and utter lack of
        imagination.

        Contrast {hacker}, {Real Programmer}.

:code monkey: n

        1. A person only capable of grinding out code, but unable to perform
        the higher-primate tasks of software architecture, analysis, and
        design. Mildly insulting. Often applied to the most junior people on
        a programming team.

        2. Anyone who writes code for a living; a programmer.

        3. A self-deprecating way of denying responsibility for a
        {management} decision, or of complaining about having to live with
        such decisions. As in "Don't ask me why we need to write a compiler
        in COBOL, I'm just a code monkey."

:Code of the Geeks: n.

        see {geek code}.

:code police: n.

        [by analogy with George Orwell's `thought police'] A mythical team
        of Gestapo-like storm troopers that might burst into one's office
        and arrest one for violating programming style rules. May be used
        either seriously, to underline a claim that a particular style
        violation is dangerous, or ironically, to suggest that the practice
        under discussion is condemned mainly by anal-retentive {weenie}s.
        "Dike out that goto or the code police will get you!" The ironic
        usage is perhaps more common.

:codes: n.

        [scientific computing] Programs. This usage is common in people who
        hack supercomputers and heavy-duty {number-crunching}, rare to
        unknown elsewhere (if you say "codes" to hackers outside scientific
        computing, their first association is likely to be "and cyphers").

:codewalker: n.

        A program component that traverses other programs for a living.
        Compilers have codewalkers in their front ends; so do
        cross-reference generators and some database front ends. Other
        utility programs that try to do too much with source code may turn
        into codewalkers. As in "This new vgrind feature would require a
        codewalker to implement."

:coefficient of X: n.

        Hackish speech makes heavy use of pseudo-mathematical metaphors.
        Four particularly important ones involve the terms coefficient,
        factor, index of X, and quotient. They are often loosely applied to
        things you cannot really be quantitative about, but there are subtle
        distinctions among them that convey information about the way the
        speaker mentally models whatever he or she is describing. Foo factor
        and foo quotient tend to describe something for which the issue is
        one of presence or absence. The canonical example is {fudge factor}.
        It's not important how much you're fudging; the term simply
        acknowledges that some fudging is needed. You might talk of liking a
        movie for its silliness factor. Quotient tends to imply that the
        property is a ratio of two opposing factors: "I would have won
        except for my luck quotient." This could also be "I would have won
        except for the luck factor", but using quotient emphasizes that it
        was bad luck overpowering good luck (or someone else's good luck
        overpowering your own). Foo index and coefficient of foo both tend
        to imply that foo is, if not strictly measurable, at least something
        that can be larger or smaller. Thus, you might refer to a paper or
        person as having a high bogosity index, whereas you would be less
        likely to speak of a high bogosity factor. Foo index suggests that
        foo is a condensation of many quantities, as in the mundane
        cost-of-living index; coefficient of foo suggests that foo is a
        fundamental quantity, as in a coefficient of friction. The choice
        between these terms is often one of personal preference; e.g., some
        people might feel that bogosity is a fundamental attribute and thus
        say coefficient of bogosity, whereas others might feel it is a
        combination of factors and thus say bogosity index.

:cokebottle: /kohk'botl/, n.

        Any very unusual character, particularly one you can't type because
        it isn't on your keyboard. MIT people used to complain about the
        `control-meta-cokebottle' commands at SAIL, and SAIL people
        complained right back about the `escape-escape-cokebottle' commands
        at MIT. After the demise of the {space-cadet keyboard}, cokebottle
        faded away as serious usage, but was often invoked humorously to
        describe an (unspecified) weird or non-intuitive keystroke command.
        It may be due for a second inning, however. The OSF/Motif window
        manager, mwm(1), has a reserved keystroke for switching to the
        default set of keybindings and behavior. This keystroke is (believe
        it or not) `control-meta-bang' (see {bang}). Since the exclamation
        point looks a lot like an upside down Coke bottle, Motif hackers
        have begun referring to this keystroke as cokebottle. See also
        {quadruple bucky}.

:cold boot: n.

        See {boot}.

:COME FROM: n.

        A semi-mythical language construct dual to the `go to'; COME FROM
        <label> would cause the referenced label to act as a sort of
        trapdoor, so that if the program ever reached it control would
        quietly and {automagically} be transferred to the statement
        following the COME FROM. COME FROM was first proposed in R. Lawrence
        Clark's A Linguistic Contribution to GOTO-less programming, which
        appeared in a 1973 {Datamation} issue (and was reprinted in the
        April 1984 issue of Communications of the ACM). This parodied the
        then-raging `structured programming' {holy wars} (see {considered
        harmful}). Mythically, some variants are the assigned COME FROM and
        the computed COME FROM (parodying some nasty control constructs in
        FORTRAN and some extended BASICs). Of course, multi-tasking (or
        non-determinism) could be implemented by having more than one COME
        FROM statement coming from the same label.

        In some ways the FORTRAN DO looks like a COME FROM statement. After
        the terminating statement number/CONTINUE is reached, control
        continues at the statement following the DO. Some generous FORTRANs
        would allow arbitrary statements (other than CONTINUE) for the
        statement, leading to examples like:

              DO 10 I=1,LIMIT
        C imagine many lines of code here, leaving the
        C original DO statement lost in the spaghetti...
              WRITE(6,10) I,FROB(I)
         10   FORMAT(1X,I5,G10.4)

        in which the trapdoor is just after the statement labeled 10. (This
        is particularly surprising because the label doesn't appear to have
        anything to do with the flow of control at all!) While sufficiently
        astonishing to the unsuspecting reader, this form of COME FROM
        statement isn't completely general. After all, control will
        eventually pass to the following statement. The implementation of
        the general form was left to Univac FORTRAN, ca. 1975 (though a
        roughly similar feature existed on the IBM 7040 ten years earlier).
        The statement AT 100 would perform a COME FROM 100. It was intended
        strictly as a debugging aid, with dire consequences promised to
        anyone so deranged as to use it in production code. More horrible
        things had already been perpetrated in production languages,
        however; doubters need only contemplate the ALTER verb in {COBOL}.
        COME FROM was supported under its own name for the first time 15
        years later, in C-INTERCAL (see {INTERCAL}, {retrocomputing});
        knowledgeable observers are still reeling from the shock.

:comm mode: /kom mohd/, n.

        [ITS: from the feature supporting on-line chat; the first word may
        be spelled with one or two m's] Syn. for {talk mode}.

:command key: n.

        [Mac users] Syn. {feature key}.

:comment out: vt.

        To surround a section of code with comment delimiters or to prefix
        every line in the section with a comment marker; this prevents it
        from being compiled or interpreted. Often done when the code is
        redundant or obsolete, but is being left in the source to make the
        intent of the active code clearer; also when the code in that
        section is broken and you want to bypass it in order to debug some
        other part of the code. Compare {condition out}, usually the
        preferred technique in languages (such as {C}) that make it
        possible.

:Commonwealth Hackish: n.

        Hacker jargon as spoken in English outside the U.S., esp. in the
        British Commonwealth. It is reported that Commonwealth speakers are
        more likely to pronounce truncations like `char' and `soc', etc., as
        spelled (/char/, /sok/), as opposed to American /keir/ and /sohsh/.
        Dots in {newsgroup} names (especially two-component names) tend to
        be pronounced more often (so soc.wibble is /sok dot wib'l/ rather
        than /sohsh wibl/).

        Preferred {metasyntactic variable}s include {blurgle}, eek, ook,
        frodo, and bilbo; {wibble}, wobble, and in emergencies wubble; flob,
        banana, tom, dick, harry, wombat, frog, {fish}, {womble} and so on
        and on (see {foo}, sense 4). Alternatives to verb doubling include
        suffixes -o-rama, frenzy (as in feeding frenzy), and city (examples:
        "barf city!" "hack-o-rama!" "core dump frenzy!").

        All the generic differences within the anglophone world inevitably
        show themselves in the associated hackish dialects. The Greek
        letters beta and zeta are usually pronounced /bee't@/ and /zeet@/;
        meta may also be pronounced /mee't@/. Various punctuators (and even
        letters - Z is called `zed', not `zee') are named differently: most
        crucially, for hackish, where Americans use `parens', `brackets' and
        `braces' for (), [] and {}, Commonwealth English uses `brackets',
        `square brackets' and `curly brackets', though `parentheses' may be
        used for the first; the exclamation mark, `!', is called pling
        rather than bang and the pound sign, `#', is called hash;
        furthermore, the term `the pound sign' is understood to mean the 
        (of course). Canadian hacker slang, as with mainstream language,
        mixes American and British usages about evenly.

        See also {attoparsec}, {calculator}, {chemist}, {console jockey},
        {fish}, {go-faster stripes}, {grunge}, {hakspek}, {heavy metal},
        {leaky heap}, {lord high fixer}, {loose bytes}, {muddie}, {nadger},
        {noddy}, {psychedelicware}, {raster blaster}, {RTBM}, {seggie},
        {spod}, {sun lounge}, {terminal junkie}, {tick-list features},
        {weeble}, {weasel}, {YABA}, and notes or definitions under {Bad
        Thing}, {barf}, {bogus}, {chase pointers}, {cosmic rays},
        {crippleware}, {crunch}, {dodgy}, {gonk}, {hamster}, {hardwarily},
        {mess-dos}, {nybble}, {proglet}, {root}, {SEX}, {tweak}, {womble},
        and {xyzzy}.

:compact: adj.

        Of a design, describes the valuable property that it can all be
        apprehended at once in one's head. This generally means the thing
        created from the design can be used with greater facility and fewer
        errors than an equivalent tool that is not compact. Compactness does
        not imply triviality or lack of power; for example, C is compact and
        FORTRAN is not, but C is more powerful than FORTRAN. Designs become
        non-compact through accreting {feature}s and {cruft} that don't
        merge cleanly into the overall design scheme (thus, some fans of
        {Classic C} maintain that ANSI C is no longer compact).

:compiler jock: n.

        See {jock} (sense 2).

:compo: n.

        [{demoscene}] Finnish-originated slang for `competition'. Demo
        compos are held at a {demoparty}. The usual protocol is that several
        groups make demos for a compo, they are shown on a big screen, and
        then the party participants vote for the best one. Prizes (from
        sponsors and party entrance fees) are given. Standard compo formats
        include {intro} compos (4k or 64k demos), music compos, graphics
        compos, quick {demo} compos (build a demo within 4 hours for
        example), etc.

:compress: vt.

        [Unix] When used without a qualifier, generally refers to
        {crunch}ing of a file using a particular C implementation of
        compression by Joseph M. Orost et al.: and widely circulated via
        {Usenet}; use of {crunch} itself in this sense is rare among Unix
        hackers. Specifically, compress is built around the Lempel-Ziv-Welch
        algorithm as described in "A Technique for High Performance Data
        Compression", Terry A. Welch, IEEE Computer, vol. 17, no. 6 (June
        1984), pp. 8--19.

:Compu$erve: n.

        See {CI$}. Synonyms CompuSpend and Compu$pend are also reported.

:computer confetti: n.

        Syn. {chad}. [obs.] Though this term was common at one time, this
        use of punched-card chad is not a good idea, as the pieces are stiff
        and have sharp corners that could injure the eyes. GLS reports that
        he once attended a wedding at MIT during which he and a few other
        guests enthusiastically threw chad instead of rice. The groom later
        grumbled that he and his bride had spent most of the evening trying
        to get the stuff out of their hair.

        [2001 update: this term has passed out of use for two reasons; (1)
        the stuff it describes is now quite rare, and (2) the term {chad},
        which was half-forgotten in 1990, has enjoyed a revival. --ESR]

:computron: /kom'pyootron`/, n.

        1. [common] A notional unit of computing power combining instruction
        speed and storage capacity, dimensioned roughly in
        instructions-per-second times megabytes-of-main-store times
        megabytes-of-mass-storage. "That machine can't run GNU Emacs, it
        doesn't have enough computrons!" This usage is usually found in
        metaphors that treat computing power as a fungible commodity good,
        like a crop yield or diesel horsepower. See {bitty box}, {Get a real
        computer!}, {toy}, {crank}.

        2. A mythical subatomic particle that bears the unit quantity of
        computation or information, in much the same way that an electron
        bears one unit of electric charge (see also {bogon}). An elaborate
        pseudo-scientific theory of computrons has been developed based on
        the physical fact that the molecules in a solid object move more
        rapidly as it is heated. It is argued that an object melts because
        the molecules have lost their information about where they are
        supposed to be (that is, they have emitted computrons). This
        explains why computers get so hot and require air conditioning; they
        use up computrons. Conversely, it should be possible to cool down an
        object by placing it in the path of a computron beam. It is believed
        that this may also explain why machines that work at the factory
        fail in the computer room: the computrons there have been all used
        up by the other hardware. (The popularity of this theory probably
        owes something to the Warlock stories by Larry Niven, the best known
        being What Good is a Glass Dagger?, in which magic is fueled by an
        exhaustible natural resource called mana.)

:con: n.

        [from SF fandom] A science-fiction convention. Not used of other
        sorts of conventions, such as professional meetings. This term,
        unlike many others imported from SF-fan slang, is widely recognized
        even by hackers who aren't {fan}s. "We'd been corresponding on the
        net for months, then we met face-to-face at a con."

:condition out: vt.

        To prevent a section of code from being compiled by surrounding it
        with a conditional-compilation directive whose condition is always
        false. The {canonical} examples of these directives are #if 0 (or
        #ifdef notdef, though some find the latter {bletcherous}) and #endif
        in C. Compare {comment out}.

:condom: n.

        1. The protective plastic bag that accompanies 3.5-inch microfloppy
        diskettes. Rarely, also used of (paper) disk envelopes. Unlike the
        write protect tab, the condom (when left on) not only impedes the
        practice of {SEX} but has also been shown to have a high failure
        rate as drive mechanisms attempt to access the disk -- and can even
        fatally frustrate insertion.

        2. The protective cladding on a {light pipe}.

        3. keyboard condom: A flexible, transparent plastic cover for a
        keyboard, designed to provide some protection against dust and
        {programming fluid} without impeding typing.

        4. elephant condom: the plastic shipping bags used inside cardboard
        boxes to protect hardware in transit.

        5. n. obs. A dummy directory /usr/tmp/sh, created to foil the {Great
        Worm} by exploiting a portability bug in one of its parts. So named
        in the title of a comp.risks article by Gene Spafford during the
        Worm crisis, and again in the text of The Internet Worm Program: An
        Analysis, Purdue Technical Report CSD-TR-823.

:confuser: n.

        Common soundalike slang for `computer'. Usually encountered in
        compounds such as confuser room, personal confuser, confuser guru.
        Usage: silly.

:connector conspiracy: n.

        [probably came into prominence with the appearance of the KL-10 (one
        model of the {PDP-10}), none of whose connectors matched anything
        else] The tendency of manufacturers (or, by extension, programmers
        or purveyors of anything) to come up with new products that don't
        fit together with the old stuff, thereby making you buy either all
        new stuff or expensive interface devices.

        (A closely related phenomenon, with a slightly different intent, is
        the habit manufacturers have of inventing new screw heads so that
        only Designated Persons, possessing the magic screwdrivers, can
        remove covers and make repairs or install options. A good 1990s
        example is the use of Torx screws for cable-TV set-top boxes. Older
        Apple Macintoshes took this one step further, requiring not only a
        long Torx screwdriver but a specialized case-cracking tool to open
        the box.)

        In these latter days of open-systems computing this term has fallen
        somewhat into disuse, to be replaced by the observation that
        "Standards are great! There are so many of them to choose from!"
        Compare {backward combatability}.

:cons: /konz/, /kons/

        [from LISP]

        1. vt. To add a new element to a specified list, esp. at the top.
        "OK, cons picking a replacement for the console TTY onto the
        agenda."

        2. cons up: vt. To synthesize from smaller pieces: "to cons up an
        example".

        In LISP itself, cons is the most fundamental operation for building
        structures. It takes any two objects and returns a dot-pair or
        two-branched tree with one object hanging from each branch. Because
        the result of a cons is an object, it can be used to build binary
        trees of any shape and complexity. Hackers think of it as a sort of
        universal constructor, and that is where the jargon meanings spring
        from.

:considered harmful: adj.

        [very common] Edsger W. Dijkstra's note in the March 1968
        Communications of the ACM, Goto Statement Considered Harmful, fired
        the first salvo in the structured programming wars (text at
        http://www.acm.org/classics/). As it turns out, the title under
        which the letter appeared was actually supplied by CACM's editor,
        Niklaus Wirth. Amusingly, the ACM considered the resulting acrimony
        sufficiently harmful that it will (by policy) no longer print an
        article taking so assertive a position against a coding practice.
        (Years afterwards, a contrary view was uttered in a CACM letter
        called, inevitably, `Goto considered harmful' considered harmful''.
        In the ensuing decades, a large number of both serious papers and
        parodies have borne titles of the form X considered Y. The
        structured-programming wars eventually blew over with the
        realization that both sides were wrong, but use of such titles has
        remained as a persistent minor in-joke (the `considered silly' found
        at various places in this lexicon is related).

:console: n.

        1. The operator's station of a {mainframe}. In times past, this was
        a privileged location that conveyed godlike powers to anyone with
        fingers on its keys. Under Unix and other modern timesharing OSes,
        such privileges are guarded by passwords instead, and the console is
        just the {tty} the system was booted from. Some of the mystique
        remains, however, and it is traditional for sysadmins to post urgent
        messages to all users from the console (on Unix, /dev/console).

        2. On microcomputer Unix boxes, the main screen and keyboard (as
        opposed to character-only terminals talking to a serial port).
        Typically only the console can do real graphics or run {X}.

:console jockey: n.

        See {terminal junkie}.

:content-free: adj.

        [by analogy with techspeak context-free] Used of a message that adds
        nothing to the recipient's knowledge. Though this adjective is
        sometimes applied to {flamage}, it more usually connotes derision
        for communication styles that exalt form over substance or are
        centered on concerns irrelevant to the subject ostensibly at hand.
        Perhaps most used with reference to speeches by company presidents
        and other professional manipulators. "Content-free? Uh... that's
        anything printed on glossy paper." (See also {four-color glossies}.)
        "He gave a talk on the implications of electronic networks for
        postmodernism and the fin-de-siecle aesthetic. It was content-free."

:control-C: vi.

        1. "Stop whatever you are doing." From the interrupt character used
        on many operating systems to abort a running program. Considered
        silly.

        2. interj. Among BSD Unix hackers, the canonical humorous response
        to "Give me a break!"

:control-O: vi.

        "Stop talking." From the character used on some operating systems to
        abort output but allow the program to keep on running. Generally
        means that you are not interested in hearing anything more from that
        person, at least on that topic; a standard response to someone who
        is flaming. Considered silly. Compare {control-S}.

:control-Q: vi.

        "Resume." From the ASCII DC1 or {XON} character (the pronunciation
        /X-on/ is therefore also used), used to undo a previous {control-S}.

:control-S: vi.

        "Stop talking for a second." From the ASCII DC3 or XOFF character
        (the pronunciation /X-of/ is therefore also used). Control-S differs
        from {control-O} in that the person is asked to stop talking
        (perhaps because you are on the phone) but will be allowed to
        continue when you're ready to listen to him -- as opposed to
        control-O, which has more of the meaning of "Shut up." Considered
        silly.

:Conway's Law: prov.

        The rule that the organization of the software and the organization
        of the software team will be congruent; commonly stated as "If you
        have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass
        compiler". The original statement was more general, "Organizations
        which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are
        copies of the communication structures of these organizations." This
        first appeared in the April 1968 issue of {Datamation}. Compare
        {SNAFU principle}.

        The law was named after Melvin Conway, an early proto-hacker who
        wrote an assembler for the Burroughs 220 called SAVE. (The name
        `SAVE' didn't stand for anything; it was just that you lost fewer
        card decks and listings because they all had SAVE written on them.)
        There is also Tom Cheatham's amendment of Conway's Law: "If a group
        of N persons implements a COBOL compiler, there will be N-1 passes.
        Someone in the group has to be the manager."

:cookbook: n.

        [from amateur electronics and radio] A book of small code segments
        that the reader can use to do various {magic} things in programs.
        Cookbooks, slavishly followed, can lead one into {voodoo
        programming}, but are useful for hackers trying to {monkey up} small
        programs in unknown languages. This function is analogous to the
        role of phrasebooks in human languages.

:cooked mode: n.

        [Unix, by opposition from {raw mode}] The normal character-input
        mode, with interrupts enabled and with erase, kill and other
        special-character interpretations performed directly by the tty
        driver. Oppose {raw mode}, {rare mode}. This term is techspeak under
        Unix but jargon elsewhere; other operating systems often have
        similar mode distinctions, and the raw/rare/cooked way of describing
        them has spread widely along with the C language and other Unix
        exports. Most generally, cooked mode may refer to any mode of a
        system that does extensive preprocessing before presenting data to a
        program.

:cookie: n.

        A handle, transaction ID, or other token of agreement between
        cooperating programs. "I give him a packet, he gives me back a
        cookie." The claim check you get from a dry-cleaning shop is a
        perfect mundane example of a cookie; the only thing it's useful for
        is to relate a later transaction to this one (so you get the same
        clothes back). Syn. {magic cookie}; see also {fortune cookie}. Now
        mainstream in the specific sense of web-browser cookies.

:cookie bear: n. obs.

        Original term, pre-Sesame-Street, for what is now universally called
        a {cookie monster}. A correspondent observes "In those days, hackers
        were actually getting their yucks from...sit down now...Andy
        Williams. Yes, that Andy Williams. Seems he had a rather hip (by the
        standards of the day) TV variety show. One of the best parts of the
        show was the recurring `cookie bear' sketch. In these sketches, a
        guy in a bear suit tried all sorts of tricks to get a cookie out of
        Williams. The sketches would always end with Williams shrieking (and
        I don't mean figuratively), `No cookies! Not now, not
        ever...NEVER!!!' And the bear would fall down. Great stuff."

:cookie file: n.

        A collection of {fortune cookie}s in a format that facilitates
        retrieval by a fortune program. There are several different cookie
        files in public distribution, and site admins often assemble their
        own from various sources including this lexicon.

:cookie jar: n.

        An area of memory set aside for storing {cookie}s. Most commonly
        heard in the Atari ST community; many useful ST programs record
        their presence by storing a distinctive {magic number} in the jar.
        Programs can inquire after the presence or otherwise of other
        programs by searching the contents of the jar.

:cookie monster: n.

        [from the children's TV program Sesame Street] Any of a family of
        early (1970s) hacks reported on {TOPS-10}, {ITS}, {Multics}, and
        elsewhere that would lock up either the victim's terminal (on a
        timesharing machine) or the {console} (on a batch {mainframe}),
        repeatedly demanding "I WANT A COOKIE". The required responses
        ranged in complexity from "COOKIE" through "HAVE A COOKIE" and
        upward. Folklorist Jan Brunvand (see {FOAF}) has described these
        programs as urban legends (implying they probably never existed) but
        they existed, all right, in several different versions. See also
        {wabbit}. Interestingly, the term cookie monster appears to be a
        {retcon}; the original term was {cookie bear}.

:copious free time: n.

        [Apple; orig. fr. the intro to Tom Lehrer's song It Makes A Fellow
        Proud To Be A Soldier]

        1. [used ironically to indicate the speaker's lack of the quantity
        in question] A mythical schedule slot for accomplishing tasks held
        to be unlikely or impossible. Sometimes used to indicate that the
        speaker is interested in accomplishing the task, but believes that
        the opportunity will not arise. "I'll implement the automatic layout
        stuff in my copious free time."

        2. [Archly] Time reserved for bogus or otherwise idiotic tasks, such
        as implementation of {chrome}, or the stroking of {suit}s. "I'll get
        back to him on that feature in my copious free time."

:copper: n.

        Conventional electron-carrying network cable with a core conductor
        of copper -- or aluminum! Opposed to {light pipe} or, say, a
        short-range microwave link.

:copy protection: n.

        A class of methods for preventing incompetent pirates from stealing
        software and legitimate customers from using it. Considered silly.

:copybroke: /kop'eebrohk/, adj.

        1. [play on copyright] Used to describe an instance of a
        copy-protected program that has been `broken'; that is, a copy with
        the copy-protection scheme disabled. Syn. {copywronged}.

        2. Copy-protected software which is unusable because of some bit-rot
        or bug that has confused the anti-piracy check. See also {copy
        protection}.

:copycenter: n.

        [play on `copyright' and `copyleft']

        1. The copyright notice carried by the various flavors of freeware
        BSD. According to Kirk McKusick at BSDCon 1999: "The way it was
        characterized politically, you had copyright, which is what the big
        companies use to lock everything up; you had copyleft, which is free
        software's way of making sure they can't lock it up; and then
        Berkeley had what we called `copycenter', which is `take it down to
        the copy center and make as many copies as you want'".

:copyleft: /kop'eeleft/, n.

        [play on copyright]

        1. The copyright notice (`General Public License') carried by {GNU}
        {EMACS} and other Free Software Foundation software, granting reuse
        and reproduction rights to all comers (but see also {General Public
        Virus}).

        2. By extension, any copyright notice intended to achieve similar
        aims.

:copyparty: n.

        [C64/amiga {demoscene}] A computer party organized so demosceners
        can meet other in real life, and to facilitate software copying
        (mostly pirated software). The copyparty has become less common as
        the Internet makes communication easier. The demoscene has gradually
        evolved the {demoparty} to replace it.

:copywronged: /kop'eerongd/, adj.

        [play on copyright] Syn. for {copybroke}.

:core: n.

        Main storage or RAM. Dates from the days of ferrite-core memory; now
        archaic as techspeak most places outside IBM, but also still used in
        the Unix community and by old-time hackers or those who would sound
        like them. Some derived idioms are quite current; in core, for
        example, means `in memory' (as opposed to `on disk'), and both {core
        dump} and the core image or core file produced by one are terms in
        favor. Some varieties of Commonwealth hackish prefer {store}.

:core cancer: n.

        [rare] A process that exhibits a slow but inexorable resource {leak}
        -- like a cancer, it kills by crowding out productive tissue.

:core dump: n.

        [common {Iron Age} jargon, preserved by Unix]

        1. [techspeak] A copy of the contents of {core}, produced when a
        process is aborted by certain kinds of internal error.

        2. By extension, used for humans passing out, vomiting, or
        registering extreme shock. "He dumped core. All over the floor. What
        a mess." "He heard about X and dumped core."

        3. Occasionally used for a human rambling on pointlessly at great
        length; esp. in apology: "Sorry, I dumped core on you".

        4. A recapitulation of knowledge (compare {bits}, sense 1). Hence,
        spewing all one knows about a topic (syn. {brain dump}), esp. in a
        lecture or answer to an exam question. "Short, concise answers are
        better than core dumps" (from the instructions to an exam at
        Columbia). See {core}.

        A {core dump} lands our hero in hot water.

        (This is the last cartoon in the Crunchly saga. The previous cartoon
        was 76-05-01.)

:core leak: n.

        Syn. {memory leak}.

:Core Wars: n.

        A game between assembler programs in a machine or machine simulator,
        where the objective is to kill your opponent's program by
        overwriting it. Popularized in the 1980s by A. K. Dewdney's column
        in Scientific American magazine, but described in Software Practice
        And Experience a decade earlier. The game was actually devised and
        played by Victor Vyssotsky, Robert Morris Sr., and Doug McIlroy in
        the early 1960s (Dennis Ritchie is sometimes incorrectly cited as a
        co-author, but was not involved). Their original game was called
        `Darwin' and ran on a IBM 7090 at Bell Labs. See {core}. For
        information on the modern game, do a web search for the
        `rec.games.corewar FAQ' or surf to the King Of The Hill site.

:cosmic rays: n.

        Notionally, the cause of {bit rot}. However, this is a
        semi-independent usage that may be invoked as a humorous way to
        {handwave} away any minor {randomness} that doesn't seem worth the
        bother of investigating. "Hey, Eric -- I just got a burst of garbage
        on my {tube}, where did that come from?" "Cosmic rays, I guess."
        Compare {sunspots}, {phase of the moon}. The British seem to prefer
        the usage cosmic showers; alpha particles is also heard, because
        stray alpha particles passing through a memory chip can cause
        single-bit errors (this becomes increasingly more likely as memory
        sizes and densities increase).

        Factual note: Alpha particles cause bit rot, cosmic rays do not
        (except occasionally in spaceborne computers). Intel could not
        explain random bit drops in their early chips, and one hypothesis
        was cosmic rays. So they created the World's Largest Lead Safe,
        using 25 tons of the stuff, and used two identical boards for
        testing. One was placed in the safe, one outside. The hypothesis was
        that if cosmic rays were causing the bit drops, they should see a
        statistically significant difference between the error rates on the
        two boards. They did not observe such a difference. Further
        investigation demonstrated conclusively that the bit drops were due
        to alpha particle emissions from thorium (and to a much lesser
        degree uranium) in the encapsulation material. Since it is
        impossible to eliminate these radioactives (they are uniformly
        distributed through the earth's crust, with the statistically
        insignificant exception of uranium lodes) it became obvious that one
        has to design memories to withstand these hits.

:cough and die: v.

        Syn. {barf}. Connotes that the program is throwing its hands up by
        design rather than because of a bug or oversight. "The parser saw a
        control-A in its input where it was looking for a printable, so it
        coughed and died." Compare {die}, {die horribly}, {scream and die}.

:courier:

        [BBS & cracker cultures] A person who distributes newly cracked
        {warez}, as opposed to a {server} who makes them available for
        download or a {leech} who merely downloads them. Hackers recognize
        this term but don't use it themselves, as the act is not part of
        their culture. See also {warez d00dz}, {cracker}, {elite}.

:cow orker: n.

        [Usenet] n. fortuitous typo for co-worker, widely used in Usenet,
        with perhaps a hint that orking cows is illegal. This term was
        popularized by Scott Adams (the creator of {Dilbert}) but already
        appears in the January 1996 version of the {scary devil monastery}
        FAQ, and has been traced back to a 1989 {sig block}. Compare {hing},
        {grilf}, {filk}, {newsfroup}.

:cowboy: n.

        [Sun, from William Gibson's {cyberpunk} SF] Synonym for {hacker}. It
        is reported that at Sun this word is often said with reverence.

:CP/M: /CPM/, n.

        [Control Program/Monitor; later {retcon}ned to Control Program for
        Microcomputers] An early microcomputer {OS} written by hacker Gary
        Kildall for 8080- and Z80-based machines, very popular in the late
        1970s but virtually wiped out by MS-DOS after the release of the IBM
        PC in 1981. Legend has it that Kildall's company blew its chance to
        write the OS for the IBM PC because Kildall decided to spend a day
        IBM's reps wanted to meet with him enjoying the perfect flying
        weather in his private plane (another variant has it that Gary's
        wife was much more interested in packing her suitcases for an
        upcoming vacation than in clinching a deal with IBM). Many of CP/M's
        features and conventions strongly resemble those of early {DEC}
        operating systems such as {TOPS-10}, OS/8, RSTS, and RSX-11. See
        {MS-DOS}, {operating system}.

:CPU Wars: /CPU worz/, n.

        A 1979 large-format comic by Chas Andres chronicling the attempts of
        the brainwashed androids of IPM (Impossible to Program Machines) to
        conquer and destroy the peaceful denizens of HEC (Human Engineered
        Computers). This rather transparent allegory featured many
        references to {ADVENT} and the immortal line "Eat flaming death,
        minicomputer mongrels!" (uttered, of course, by an IPM
        stormtrooper). The whole shebang is now available on the Web.

        It is alleged that the author subsequently received a letter of
        appreciation on IBM company stationery from the head of IBM's Thomas
        J. Watson Research Laboratories (at that time one of the few islands
        of true hackerdom in the IBM archipelago). The lower loop of the B
        in the IBM logo, it is said, had been carefully whited out. See {eat
        flaming death}.

:crack:

        [warez d00dz]

        1. v. To break into a system (compare {cracker}).

        2. v. Action of removing the copy protection from a commercial
        program. People who write cracks consider themselves challenged by
        the copy protection measures. They will often do it as much to show
        that they are smarter than the developer who designed the copy
        protection scheme than to actually copy the program.

        3. n. A program, instructions or patch used to remove the copy
        protection of a program or to uncripple features from a demo/time
        limited program.

        4. An {exploit}.

:crack root: v.

        [very common] To defeat the security system of a Unix machine and
        gain {root} privileges thereby; see {cracking}.

:cracker: n.

        One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in
        defense against journalistic misuse of {hacker} (q.v., sense 8). An
        earlier attempt to establish worm in this sense around 1981--82 on
        Usenet was largely a failure.

        Use of both these neologisms reflects a strong revulsion against the
        theft and vandalism perpetrated by cracking rings. The neologism
        "cracker" in this sense may have been influenced not so much by the
        term "safe-cracker" as by the non-jargon term "cracker", which in
        Middle English meant an obnoxious person (e.g., "What cracker is
        this same that deafs our ears / With this abundance of superfluous
        breath?" -- Shakespeare's King John, Act II, Scene I) and in modern
        colloquial American English survives as a barely gentler synonym for
        "white trash".

        While it is expected that any real hacker will have done some
        playful cracking and knows many of the basic techniques, anyone past
        {larval stage} is expected to have outgrown the desire to do so
        except for immediate, benign, practical reasons (for example, if
        it's necessary to get around some security in order to get some work
        done).

        Thus, there is far less overlap between hackerdom and crackerdom
        than the {mundane} reader misled by sensationalistic journalism
        might expect. Crackers tend to gather in small, tight-knit, very
        secretive groups that have little overlap with the huge, open
        poly-culture this lexicon describes; though crackers often like to
        describe themselves as hackers, most true hackers consider them a
        separate and lower form of life. An easy way for outsiders to spot
        the difference is that crackers use grandiose screen names that
        conceal their identities. Hackers never do this; they only rarely
        use noms de guerre at all, and when they do it is for display rather
        than concealment.

        Ethical considerations aside, hackers figure that anyone who can't
        imagine a more interesting way to play with their computers than
        breaking into someone else's has to be pretty {losing}. Some other
        reasons crackers are looked down on are discussed in the entries on
        {cracking} and {phreaking}. See also {samurai}, {dark-side hacker},
        and {hacker ethic}. For a portrait of the typical teenage cracker,
        see {warez d00dz}.

:cracking: n.

        [very common] The act of breaking into a computer system; what a
        {cracker} does. Contrary to widespread myth, this does not usually
        involve some mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance, but rather
        persistence and the dogged repetition of a handful of fairly
        well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the security of
        target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are incompetent as
        hackers. This entry used to say 'mediocre', but the spread of
        {rootkit} and other automated cracking has depressed the average
        level of skill among crackers.

:crank: vt.

        [from automotive slang] Verb used to describe the performance of a
        machine, especially sustained performance. "This box cranks (or,
        cranks at) about 6 megaflops, with a burst mode of twice that on
        vectorized operations."

:crapplet: n.

        [portmanteau, crap + applet] A worthless applet, esp. a Java widget
        attached to a web page that doesn't work or even crashes your
        browser. Also spelled `craplet'.

:CrApTeX: /krap'tekh/, n.

        [University of York, England] Term of abuse used to describe TeX and
        LaTeX when they don't work (when used by TeXhackers), or all the
        time (by everyone else). The non-TeX-enthusiasts generally dislike
        it because it is more verbose than other formatters (e.g. {troff})
        and because (particularly if the standard Computer Modern fonts are
        used) it generates vast output files. See {religious issues}, {TeX}.

:crash:

        1. n. A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of the
        {system} (q.v., sense 1), esp. of magnetic disk drives (the term
        originally described what happens when the air gap of a hard disk
        collapses). "Three {luser}s lost their files in last night's disk
        crash." A disk crash that involves the read/write heads dropping
        onto the surface of the disks and scraping off the oxide may also be
        referred to as a head crash, whereas the term system crash usually,
        though not always, implies that the operating system or other
        software was at fault.

        2. v. To fail suddenly. "Has the system just crashed?" "Something
        crashed the OS!" See {down}. Also used transitively to indicate the
        cause of the crash (usually a person or a program, or both). "Those
        idiots playing {SPACEWAR} crashed the system."

        3. vi. Sometimes said of people hitting the sack after a long
        {hacking run}; see {gronk out}.

:crash and burn: vi.,n.

        A spectacular crash, in the mode of the conclusion of the car-chase
        scene in the movie Bullitt and many subsequent imitators (compare
        {die horribly}). The construction crash-and-burn machine is reported
        for a computer used exclusively for alpha or {beta} testing, or
        reproducing bugs (i.e., not for development). The implication is
        that it wouldn't be such a disaster if that machine crashed, since
        only the testers would be inconvenienced.

:crawling horror: n.

        Ancient crufty hardware or software that is kept obstinately alive
        by forces beyond the control of the hackers at a site. Like {dusty
        deck} or {gonkulator}, but connotes that the thing described is not
        just an irritation but an active menace to health and sanity.
        "Mostly we code new stuff in C, but they pay us to maintain one big
        FORTRAN II application from nineteen-sixty-X that's a real crawling
        horror...." Compare {WOMBAT}.

        This usage is almost certainly derived from the fiction of H.P.
        Lovecraft. Lovecraft may never have used the exact phrase "crawling
        horror" in his writings, but one of the fearsome Elder Gods that he
        wrote extensively about was Nyarlethotep, who had as an epithet "The
        Crawling Chaos". Certainly the extreme, even melodramatic horror of
        his characters at the weird monsters they encounter, even to the
        point of going insane with fear, is what hackers are referring to
        with this phrase when they use it for horribly bad code. Compare
        {cthulhic}.

:CRC handbook:

        Any of the editions of the Chemical Rubber Company Handbook of
        Chemistry and Physics; there are other CRC handbooks, such as the
        CRC Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulae, but "the" CRC
        handbook is the chemistry and physics reference. It is massive tome
        full of mathematical tables, physical constants of thousands of
        alloys and chemical compounds, dielectric strengths, vapor pressure,
        resistivity, and the like. Hackers have remarkably little actual use
        for these sorts of arcana, but are such information junkies that a
        large percentage of them acquire copies anyway and would feel
        vaguely bereft if they couldn't look up the magnetic susceptibility
        of potassium permanganate at a moment's notice. On hackers'
        bookshelves, the CRC handbook is rather likely to keep company with
        an unabridged Oxford English Dictionary and a good atlas.

:creationism: n.

        The (false) belief that large, innovative software designs can be
        completely specified in advance and then painlessly magicked out of
        the void by the normal efforts of a team of normally talented
        programmers. In fact, experience has shown repeatedly that good
        designs arise only from evolutionary, exploratory interaction
        between one (or at most a small handful of) exceptionally able
        designer(s) and an active user population -- and that the first try
        at a big new idea is always wrong. Unfortunately, because these
        truths don't fit the planning models beloved of {management}, they
        are generally ignored.

:creep: v.

        To advance, grow, or multiply inexorably. In hackish usage this verb
        has overtones of menace and silliness, evoking the creeping horrors
        of low-budget monster movies.

:creeping elegance: n.

        Describes a tendency for parts of a design to become {elegant} past
        the point of diminishing return, something which often happens at
        the expense of the less interesting parts of the design, the
        schedule, and other things deemed important in the {Real World}. See
        also {creeping featurism}, {second-system effect}, {tense}.

:creeping featurism: /kree'ping feechrizm/, n.

        [common]

        1. Describes a systematic tendency to load more {chrome} and
        {feature}s onto systems at the expense of whatever elegance they may
        have possessed when originally designed. See also {feeping
        creaturism}. "You know, the main problem with {BSD} Unix has always
        been creeping featurism."

        2. More generally, the tendency for anything complicated to become
        even more complicated because people keep saying "Gee, it would be
        even better if it had this feature too". (See {feature}.) The result
        is usually a patchwork because it grew one ad-hoc step at a time,
        rather than being planned. Planning is a lot of work, but it's easy
        to add just one extra little feature to help someone ... and then
        another ... and another.... When creeping featurism gets out of
        hand, it's like a cancer. The GNU hello program, intended to
        illustrate {GNU} command-line switch and coding conventions, is also
        a wonderful parody of creeping featurism; the distribution changelog
        is particularly funny. Usually this term is used to describe
        computer programs, but it could also be said of the federal
        government, the IRS 1040 form, and new cars. A similar phenomenon
        sometimes afflicts conscious redesigns; see {second-system effect}.
        See also {creeping elegance}.

:creeping featuritis: /kree'ping fee'chri:`t@s/, n.

        Variant of {creeping featurism}, with its own spoonerization:
        feeping creaturitis. Some people like to reserve this form for the
        disease as it actually manifests in software or hardware, as opposed
        to the lurking general tendency in designers' minds. (After all,
        -ism means `condition' or `pursuit of', whereas -itis usually means
        `inflammation of'.)

:cretin: /kret'in/, /kreetn/, n.

        Congenital {loser}; an obnoxious person; someone who can't do
        anything right. It has been observed that many American hackers tend
        to favor the British pronunciation /kret'in/ over standard American
        /kree'tn/; it is thought this may be due to the insidious phonetic
        influence of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

:cretinous: /kret'n@s/, /kreetn@s/, adj.

        Wrong; stupid; non-functional; very poorly designed. Also used
        pejoratively of people. See {dread high-bit disease} for an example.
        Approximate synonyms: {bletcherous}, {bagbiting}, {losing},
        {brain-damaged}.

:crippleware: n.

        1. [common] Software that has some important functionality
        deliberately removed, so as to entice potential users to pay for a
        working version.

        2. [Cambridge] Variety of {guiltware} that exhorts you to donate to
        some charity (compare {careware}, {nagware}).

        3. Hardware deliberately crippled, which can be upgraded to a more
        expensive model by a trivial change (e.g., cutting a jumper).

        An excellent example of crippleware (sense 3) is Intel's 486SX chip,
        which is a standard 486DX chip with the co-processor diked out (in
        some early versions it was present but disabled). To upgrade, you
        buy a complete 486DX chip with working co-processor (its identity
        thinly veiled by a different pinout) and plug it into the board's
        expansion socket. It then disables the SX, which becomes a fancy
        power sink. Don't you love Intel?

:critical mass: n.

        In physics, the minimum amount of fissionable material required to
        sustain a chain reaction. Of a software product, describes a
        condition of the software such that fixing one bug introduces one
        plus {epsilon} bugs. (This malady has many causes: {creeping
        featurism}, ports to too many disparate environments, poor initial
        design, etc.) When software achieves critical mass, it can never be
        fixed; it can only be discarded and rewritten.

:crlf: /ker'l@f/, /krul@f/, /CRLF/, n.

        (often capitalized as `CRLF') A carriage return (CR, ASCII 0001101)
        followed by a line feed (LF, ASCII 0001010). More loosely, whatever
        it takes to get you from the end of one line of text to the
        beginning of the next line. See {newline}. Under {Unix} influence
        this usage has become less common (Unix uses a bare line feed as its
        `CRLF').

:crock: n.

        [from the American scatologism crock of shit]

        1. An awkward feature or programming technique that ought to be made
        cleaner. For example, using small integers to represent error codes
        without the program interpreting them to the user (as in, for
        example, Unix make(1), which returns code 139 for a process that
        dies due to {segfault}).

        2. A technique that works acceptably, but which is quite prone to
        failure if disturbed in the least. For example, a too-clever
        programmer might write an assembler which mapped instruction
        mnemonics to numeric opcodes algorithmically, a trick which depends
        far too intimately on the particular bit patterns of the opcodes.
        (For another example of programming with a dependence on actual
        opcode values, see The Story of Mel' in Appendix A.) Many crocks
        have a tightly woven, almost completely unmodifiable structure. See
        {kluge}, {brittle}. The adjectives crockish and crocky, and the
        nouns crockishness and crockitude, are also used.

:cross-post: vi.

        [Usenet; very common] To post a single article simultaneously to
        several newsgroups. Distinguished from posting the article
        repeatedly, once to each newsgroup, which causes people to see it
        multiple times (which is very bad form). Gratuitous cross-posting
        without a Followup-To line directing responses to a single followup
        group is frowned upon, as it tends to cause {followup} articles to
        go to inappropriate newsgroups when people respond to various parts
        of the original posting.

:crossload: v.,n.

        [proposed, by analogy with {upload} and {download}] To move files
        between machines on a peer-to-peer network of nodes that act as both
        servers and clients for a distributed file store. Esp. appropriate
        for anonymized networks like Gnutella and Freenet.

:crudware: /kruhd'weir/, n.

        Pejorative term for the hundreds of megabytes of low-quality
        {freeware} circulated by user's groups and BBS systems in the
        micro-hobbyist world. "Yet another set of disk catalog utilities for
        {MS-DOS}? What crudware!"

:cruft: /kruhft/

        [very common; back-formation from {crufty}]

        1. n. An unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under your bed
        is cruft; the TMRC Dictionary correctly noted that attacking it with
        a broom only produces more.

        2. n. The results of shoddy construction.

        3. vt. [from hand cruft, pun on `hand craft'] To write assembler
        code for something normally (and better) done by a compiler (see
        {hand-hacking}).

        4. n. Excess; superfluous junk; used esp. of redundant or superseded
        code.

        5. [University of Wisconsin] n. Cruft is to hackers as gaggle is to
        geese; that is, at UW one properly says "a cruft of hackers".

:cruft together: vt.

        (also cruft up) To throw together something ugly but temporarily
        workable. Like vt. {kluge up}, but more pejorative. "There isn't any
        program now to reverse all the lines of a file, but I can probably
        cruft one together in about 10 minutes." See {hack together}, {hack
        up}, {kluge up}, {crufty}.

:cruftsmanship: /kruhfts'm@nship /, n.

        [from {cruft}] The antithesis of craftsmanship.

:crufty: /kruhf'tee/, adj.

        [very common; origin unknown; poss. from `crusty' or `cruddy']

        1. Poorly built, possibly over-complex. The {canonical} example is
        "This is standard old crufty {DEC} software". In fact, one fanciful
        theory of the origin of crufty holds that was originally a mutation
        of `crusty' applied to DEC software so old that the `s' characters
        were tall and skinny, looking more like `f' characters.

        2. Unpleasant, especially to the touch, often with encrusted junk.
        Like spilled coffee smeared with peanut butter and catsup.

        3. Generally unpleasant.

        4. (sometimes spelled cruftie) n. A small crufty object (see
        {frob}); often one that doesn't fit well into the scheme of things.
        "A LISP property list is a good place to store crufties (or,
        collectively, {random} cruft)."

        This term is one of the oldest in the jargon and no one is sure of
        its etymology, but it is suggestive that there is a Cruft Hall at
        Harvard University which is part of the old physics building; it's
        said to have been the physics department's radar lab during WWII. To
        this day (early 1993) the windows appear to be full of random
        techno-junk. MIT or Lincoln Labs people may well have coined the
        term as a knock on the competition.

:crumb: n.

        Two binary digits; a {quad}. Larger than a {bit}, smaller than a
        {nybble}. Considered silly. Syn. {tayste}. General discussion of
        such terms is under {nybble}.

:crunch:

        1. vi. To process, usually in a time-consuming or complicated way.
        Connotes an essentially trivial operation that is nonetheless
        painful to perform. The pain may be due to the triviality's being
        embedded in a loop from 1 to 1,000,000,000. "FORTRAN programs do
        mostly {number-crunching}."

        2. vt. To reduce the size of a file by a complicated scheme that
        produces bit configurations completely unrelated to the original
        data, such as by a Huffman code. (The file ends up looking something
        like a paper document would if somebody crunched the paper into a
        wad.) Since such compression usually takes more computations than
        simpler methods such as run-length encoding, the term is doubly
        appropriate. (This meaning is usually used in the construction file
        crunch(ing) to distinguish it from {number-crunching}.) See
        {compress}.

        3. n. The character #. Used at XEROX and CMU, among other places.
        See {ASCII}.

        4. vt. To squeeze program source into a minimum-size representation
        that will still compile or execute. The term came into being
        specifically for a famous program on the BBC micro that crunched
        BASIC source in order to make it run more quickly (it was a wholly
        interpretive BASIC, so the number of characters mattered).
        {Obfuscated C Contest} entries are often crunched; see the first
        example under that entry.

:cryppie: /krip'ee/, n.

        A cryptographer. One who hacks or implements cryptographic software
        or hardware.

:cthulhic: /kthool'hik/, adj.

        Having the nature of a Cthulhu, the horrific tentacled green
        monstrosity from H.P. Lovecraft's seminal horror fiction. Cthulhu
        sends dreams that drive men mad, feeds on the flesh of screaming
        victims rent limb from limb, and is served by a cult of degenerates.
        Hackers think this describes large {proprietary} systems such as
        traditional {mainframe}s, installations of SAP and Oracle, or rooms
        full of Windows servers remarkably well, and the adjective is used
        casually. Compare {Shub-Internet} and {crawling horror}.

:CTSS: /CTSS/, n.

        Compatible Time-Sharing System. An early (1963) experiment in the
        design of interactive timesharing operating systems, ancestral to
        {Multics}, {Unix}, and {ITS}. The name {ITS} (Incompatible
        Time-sharing System) was a hack on CTSS, meant both as a joke and to
        express some basic differences in philosophy about the way I/O
        services should be presented to user programs. See {timesharing}

:cube: n.

        1. [short for `cubicle'] A module in the open-plan offices used at
        many programming shops. "I've got the manuals in my cube."

        2. A NeXT machine (which resembles a matte-black cube).

:cup holder: n.

        The tray of a CD-ROM drive, or by extension the CD drive itself. So
        called because of a common tech support legend about the idiot who
        called to complain that the cup holder on his computer broke. A joke
        program was once distributed around the net called "cupholder.exe",
        which when run simply extended the CD drive tray. The humor of this
        was of course lost on people whose drive had a slot or a caddy
        instead.

:cursor dipped in X: n.

        There are a couple of metaphors in English of the form `pen dipped
        in X' (perhaps the most common values of X are `acid', `bile', and
        `vitriol'). These map over neatly to this hackish usage (the cursor
        being what moves, leaving letters behind, when one is composing
        on-line). "Talk about a {nastygram}! He must've had his cursor
        dipped in acid when he wrote that one!"

:cuspy: /kuhs'pee/, adj.

        [WPI: from the {DEC} abbreviation CUSP, for `Commonly Used System
        Program', i.e., a utility program used by many people. Now rare.]

        1. (of a program) Well-written.

        2. Functionally excellent. A program that performs well and
        interfaces well to users is cuspy. Oppose {rude}.

        3. [NYU] Said of an attractive woman, especially one regarded as
        available. Implies a certain curvaceousness.

:cut a tape: vi.

        To write a software or document distribution on magnetic tape for
        shipment. Has nothing to do with physically cutting the medium!
        Early versions of this lexicon claimed that one never analogously
        speaks of `cutting a disk', but this has since been reported as live
        usage. Related slang usages are mainstream business's `cut a check',
        the recording industry's `cut a record', and the military's `cut an
        order'.

        All of these usages reflect physical processes in obsolete recording
        and duplication technologies. The first stage in manufacturing an
        old-style vinyl record involved cutting grooves in a stamping die
        with a precision lathe. More mundanely, the dominant technology for
        mass duplication of paper documents in pre-photocopying days
        involved "cutting a stencil", punching away portions of the wax
        overlay on a silk screen. More directly, paper tape with holes
        punched in it was an important early storage medium. See also {burn
        a CD}.

:cybercrud: /si:'berkruhd/, n.

        1. [coined by Ted Nelson] Obfuscatory tech-talk. Verbiage with a
        high {MEGO} factor. The computer equivalent of bureaucratese.

        2. Incomprehensible stuff embedded in email. First there were the
        "Received" headers that show how mail flows through systems, then
        MIME (Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions) headers and part
        boundaries, and now huge blocks of radix-64 for PEM (Privacy
        Enhanced Mail) or PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) digital signatures and
        certificates of authenticity. This stuff all serves a purpose and
        good user interfaces should hide it, but all too often users are
        forced to wade through it.

:cyberpunk: /si:'berpuhnk/, n.,adj.

        [orig. by SF writer Bruce Bethke and/or editor Gardner Dozois] A
        subgenre of SF launched in 1982 by William Gibson's epoch-making
        novel Neuromancer (though its roots go back through Vernor Vinge's
        True Names (see the Bibliography in Appendix C) to John Brunner's
        1975 novel The Shockwave Rider). Gibson's near-total ignorance of
        computers and the present-day hacker culture enabled him to
        speculate about the role of computers and hackers in the future in
        ways hackers have since found both irritatingly nave and
        tremendously stimulating. Gibson's work was widely imitated, in
        particular by the short-lived but innovative Max Headroom TV series.
        See {cyberspace}, {ice}, {jack in}, {go flatline}.

        Since 1990 or so, popular culture has included a movement or fashion
        trend that calls itself `cyberpunk', associated especially with the
        rave/techno subculture. Hackers have mixed feelings about this. On
        the one hand, self-described cyberpunks too often seem to be shallow
        trendoids in black leather who have substituted enthusiastic
        blathering about technology for actually learning and doing it.
        Attitude is no substitute for competence. On the other hand, at
        least cyberpunks are excited about the right things and properly
        respectful of hacking talent in those who have it. The general
        consensus is to tolerate them politely in hopes that they'll attract
        people who grow into being true hackers.

:cyberspace: /si:'brspays`/, n.

        1. Notional `information-space' loaded with visual cues and
        navigable with brain-computer interfaces called cyberspace decks; a
        characteristic prop of {cyberpunk} SF. Serious efforts to construct
        {virtual reality} interfaces modeled explicitly on Gibsonian
        cyberspace are under way, using more conventional devices such as
        glove sensors and binocular TV headsets. Few hackers are prepared to
        deny outright the possibility of a cyberspace someday evolving out
        of the network (see {the network}).

        2. The Internet or {Matrix} (sense #2) as a whole, considered as a
        crude cyberspace (sense 1). Although this usage became widely
        popular in the mainstream press during 1994 when the Internet
        exploded into public awareness, it is strongly deprecated among
        hackers because the Internet does not meet the high, SF-inspired
        standards they have for true cyberspace technology. Thus, this use
        of the term usually tags a {wannabee} or outsider. Oppose
        {meatspace}.

        3. Occasionally, the metaphoric location of the mind of a person in
        {hack mode}. Some hackers report experiencing strong synesthetic
        imagery when in hack mode; interestingly, independent reports from
        multiple sources suggest that there are common features to the
        experience. In particular, the dominant colors of this subjective
        cyberspace are often gray and silver, and the imagery often involves
        constellations of marching dots, elaborate shifting patterns of
        lines and angles, or moire patterns.

:cycle:

        1. n. The basic unit of computation. What every hacker wants more of
        (noted hacker Bill Gosper described himself as a "cycle junkie").
        One can describe an instruction as taking so many clock cycles.
        Often the computer can access its memory once on every clock cycle,
        and so one speaks also of memory cycles. These are technical
        meanings of {cycle}. The jargon meaning comes from the observation
        that there are only so many cycles per second, and when you are
        sharing a computer the cycles get divided up among the users. The
        more cycles the computer spends working on your program rather than
        someone else's, the faster your program will run. That's why every
        hacker wants more cycles: so he can spend less time waiting for the
        computer to respond.

        2. By extension, a notional unit of human thought power, emphasizing
        that lots of things compete for the typical hacker's think time. "I
        refused to get involved with the Rubik's Cube back when it was big.
        Knew I'd burn too many cycles on it if I let myself."

        3. vt. Syn. {bounce} (sense 4), from the phrase `cycle power'.
        "Cycle the machine again, that serial port's still hung."

:cycle of reincarnation: n.

        See {wheel of reincarnation}.

:cycle server: n.

        A powerful machine that exists primarily for running large compute-,
        disk-, or memory-intensive jobs (more formally called a compute
        server). Implies that interactive tasks such as editing are done on
        other machines on the network, such as workstations.

:cypherpunk: n.

        [from {cyberpunk}] Someone interested in the uses of encryption via
        electronic ciphers for enhancing personal privacy and guarding
        against tyranny by centralized, authoritarian power structures,
        especially government. There is an active cypherpunks mailing list
        at <cypherpunks-request@toad.com> coordinating work on public-key
        encryption freeware, privacy, and digital cash. See also {tentacle}.

:C|N>K: n.

        [Usenet] Coffee through Nose to Keyboard; that is, "I laughed so
        hard I {snarf}ed my coffee onto my keyboard.". Common on
        alt.fan.pratchett and {scary devil monastery}; recognized elsewhere.
        The Acronymphomania FAQ on alt.fan.pratchett recognizes variants
        such as T|N>K = `Tea through Nose to Keyboard' and C|N>S = `Coffee
        through Nose to Screen'. (The sound of this happening is,
        canonically, {splork!})

  D

   daemon

   daemon book

   dahmum

   dancing frog

   dangling pointer

   dark-side hacker

   Datamation

   DAU

   Dave the Resurrector

   day mode

   dd

   DDT

   de-rezz

   dead

   dead beef attack

   dead code

   dead-tree version

   DEADBEEF

   deadlock

   deadly embrace

   death code

   Death Square

   Death Star

   Death, X of

   DEC

   DEC Wars

   decay

   deckle

   DED

   deep hack mode

   deep magic

   deep space

   defenestration

   defined as

   deflicted

   dehose

   Dejagoo

   deletia

   deliminator

   delint

   delta

   demented

   demigod

   demo

   demo mode

   demoeffect

   demogroup

   demon

   demon dialer

   demoparty

   demoscene

   dentro

   depeditate

   deprecated

   derf

   deserves to lose

   despew

   dickless workstation

   dictionary flame

   diddle

   die

   die horribly

   diff

   dike

   Dilbert

   ding

   dink

   dinosaur

   dinosaur pen

   dinosaurs mating

   dirtball

   dirty power

   disclaimer

   Discordianism

   disemvowel

   disk farm

   display hack

   dispress

   Dissociated Press

   distribution

   distro

   disusered

   DMZ

   do protocol

   doc

   documentation

   dodgy

   dogcow

   dogfood

   dogpile

   dogwash

   Don't do that then!

   dongle

   dongle-disk

   Doom, X of

   doorstop

   DoS attack

   dot file

   double bucky

   doubled sig

   down

   download

   DP

   DPer

   Dr. Fred Mbogo

   dragon

   Dragon Book

   drain

   dread high-bit disease

   dread questionmark disease

   DRECNET

   driver

   droid

   drone

   drool-proof paper

   drop on the floor

   drop-ins

   drop-outs

   drugged

   drum

   drunk mouse syndrome

   DSW

   dub dub dub

   Duff's device

   dumb terminal

   dumbass attack

   dumbed down

   dump

   dumpster diving

   dusty deck

   DWIM

   dynner

:daemon: /day'mn/, /deemn/, n.

        [from Maxwell's Demon, later incorrectly retronymed as `Disk And
        Execution MONitor'] A program that is not invoked explicitly, but
        lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. The idea is
        that the perpetrator of the condition need not be aware that a
        daemon is lurking (though often a program will commit an action only
        because it knows that it will implicitly invoke a daemon). For
        example, under {ITS}, writing a file on the LPT spooler's directory
        would invoke the spooling daemon, which would then print the file.
        The advantage is that programs wanting (in this example) files
        printed need neither compete for access to nor understand any
        idiosyncrasies of the LPT. They simply enter their implicit requests
        and let the daemon decide what to do with them. Daemons are usually
        spawned automatically by the system, and may either live forever or
        be regenerated at intervals.

        Daemon and {demon} are often used interchangeably, but seem to have
        distinct connotations. The term daemon was introduced to computing
        by {CTSS} people (who pronounced it /dee'mon/) and used it to refer
        to what ITS called a {dragon}; the prototype was a program called
        DAEMON that automatically made tape backups of the file system.
        Although the meaning and the pronunciation have drifted, we think
        this glossary reflects current (2003) usage.

:daemon book: n.

        The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System,
        by Samuel J. Leffler, Marshall Kirk McKusick, Michael J. Karels, and
        John S. Quarterman (Addison-Wesley Publishers, 1989, ISBN
        0-201-06196-1); or The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD
        Operating System by Marshall Kirk McKusick, Keith Bostic, Michael J.
        Karels and John S. Quarterman (Addison-Wesley Longman, 1996, ISBN
        0-201-54979-4) Either of the standard reference books on the
        internals of {BSD} Unix. So called because the covers have a picture
        depicting a little demon (a visual play on {daemon}) in sneakers,
        holding a pitchfork (referring to one of the characteristic features
        of Unix, the fork(2) system call).

:dahmum: /dah'mum/, n.

        [Usenet] The material of which protracted {flame war}s, especially
        those about operating systems, is composed. Homeomorphic to {spam}.
        The term dahmum is derived from the name of a militant {OS/2}
        advocate, and originated when an extensively cross-posted
        OS/2-versus-{Linux} debate was fed through {Dissociated Press}.

:dancing frog: n.

        [Vancouver area] A problem that occurs on a computer that will not
        reappear while anyone else is watching. From the classic Warner
        Brothers cartoon One Froggy Evening, featuring a dancing and singing
        Michigan J. Frog that just croaks when anyone else is around (now
        the WB network mascot).

:dangling pointer: n.

        [common] A reference that doesn't actually lead anywhere (in C and
        some other languages, a pointer that doesn't actually point at
        anything valid). Usually this happens because it formerly pointed to
        something that has moved or disappeared. Used as jargon in a
        generalization of its techspeak meaning; for example, a local phone
        number for a person who has since moved to the other coast is a
        dangling pointer.

:dark-side hacker: n.

        A criminal or malicious hacker; a {cracker}. From George Lucas's
        Darth Vader, "seduced by the dark side of the Force". The
        implication that hackers form a sort of elite of technological Jedi
        Knights is intended. Oppose {samurai}.

:Datamation: /day`t@may'sh@n/, n.

        A magazine that many hackers assume all {suit}s read. Used to
        question an unbelieved quote, as in "Did you read that in
        Datamation?". It used to publish something hackishly funny every
        once in a while, like the original paper on {COME FROM} in 1973, and
        Ed Post's Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal ten years later, but for
        a long time after that it was much more exclusively {suit}-oriented
        and boring. Following a change of editorship in 1994, Datamation
        briefly tried for more the technical content and irreverent humor
        that marked its early days, but this did not last.

:DAU: /dow/, n.

        [German FidoNet] German acronym for Dmmster Anzunehmender User
        (stupidest imaginable user). From the engineering-slang GAU for
        Grsster Anzunehmender Unfall, worst assumable accident, esp. of a
        LNG tank farm plant or something with similarly disastrous
        consequences. In popular German, GAU is used only to refer to
        worst-case nuclear accidents such as a core meltdown. See {cretin},
        {fool}, {loser} and {weasel}.

:Dave the Resurrector: n.

        [Usenet; also abbreviated DtR] A {cancelbot} that cancels cancels.
        Dave the Resurrector originated when some {spam}-spewers decided to
        try to impede spam-fighting by wholesale cancellation of anti-spam
        coordination messages in the news.admin.net-abuse.usenet newsgroup.

:day mode: n.

        See {phase} (sense 1). Used of people only.

:dd: /deedee/, vt.

        [Unix: from IBM {JCL}] Equivalent to {cat} or {BLT}. Originally the
        name of a Unix copy command with special options suitable for
        block-oriented devices; it was often used in heavy-handed system
        maintenance, as in "Let's dd the root partition onto a tape, then
        use the boot PROM to load it back on to a new disk". The Unix dd(1)
        was designed with a weird, distinctly non-Unixy keyword option
        syntax reminiscent of IBM System/360 JCL (which had an elaborate DD
        `Dataset Definition' specification for I/O devices); though the
        command filled a need, the interface design was clearly a prank. The
        jargon usage is now very rare outside Unix sites and now nearly
        obsolete even there, as dd(1) has been {deprecated} for a long time
        (though it has no exact replacement). The term has been displaced by
        {BLT} or simple English `copy'.

:DDT: /DDT/, n.

        [from the insecticide para-dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethene]

        1. Generic term for a program that assists in debugging other
        programs by showing individual machine instructions in a readable
        symbolic form and letting the user change them. In this sense the
        term DDT is now archaic, having been widely displaced by debugger or
        names of individual programs like adb, sdb, dbx, or gdb.

        2. [ITS] Under MIT's fabled {ITS} operating system, DDT (running
        under the alias HACTRN, a six-letterism for `Hack Translator') was
        also used as the {shell} or top level command language used to
        execute other programs.

        3. Any one of several specific DDTs (sense 1) supported on early
        {DEC} hardware and CP/M. The PDP-10 Reference Handbook (1969)
        contained a footnote on the first page of the documentation for DDT
        that illuminates the origin of the term:

          Historical footnote: DDT was developed at MIT for the PDP-1
          computer in 1961. At that time DDT stood for "DEC Debugging Tape".
          Since then, the idea of an on-line debugging program has
          propagated throughout the computer industry. DDT programs are now
          available for all DEC computers. Since media other than tape are
          now frequently used, the more descriptive name "Dynamic Debugging
          Technique" has been adopted, retaining the DDT abbreviation.
          Confusion between DDT-10 and another well known pesticide,
          dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane C[14]H[9]Cl[5] should be minimal
          since each attacks a different, and apparently mutually exclusive,
          class of bugs.

        (The `tape' referred to was, incidentally, not magnetic but paper.)
        Sadly, this quotation was removed from later editions of the
        handbook after the {suit}s took over and {DEC} became much more
        `businesslike'.

        The history above is known to many old-time hackers. But there's
        more: Peter Samson, compiler of the original {TMRC} lexicon, reports
        that he named DDT after a similar tool on the TX-0 computer, the
        direct ancestor of the PDP-1 built at MIT's Lincoln Lab in 1957. The
        debugger on that ground-breaking machine rejoiced in the name FLIT
        (FLexowriter Interrogation Tape). Flit was for many years the
        trade-name of a popular insecticide.

:de-rezz: /deerez'/

        [from `de-resolve' via the movie Tron] (also derez)

        1. vi. To disappear or dissolve; the image that goes with it is of
        an object breaking up into raster lines and static and then
        dissolving. Occasionally used of a person who seems to have suddenly
        `fuzzed out' mentally rather than physically. Usage: extremely
        silly, also rare. This verb was actually invented as fictional
        hacker jargon, and adopted in a spirit of irony by real hackers
        years after the fact.

        2. vt. The Macintosh resource decompiler. On a Macintosh, many
        program structures (including the code itself) are managed in small
        segments of the program file known as resources; Rez and DeRez are a
        pair of utilities for compiling and decompiling resource files.
        Thus, decompiling a resource is derezzing. Usage: very common.

:dead: adj.

        1. Non-functional; {down}; {crash}ed. Especially used of hardware.

        2. At XEROX PARC, software that is working but not undergoing
        continued development and support.

        3. Useless; inaccessible. Antonym: live. Compare {dead code}.

:dead beef attack: n.

        [cypherpunks list, 1996] An attack on a public-key cryptosystem
        consisting of publishing a key having the same ID as another key
        (thus making it possible to spoof a user's identity if recipients
        aren't careful about verifying keys). In PGP and GPG the key ID is
        the last eight hex digits of (for RSA keys) the product of two
        primes. The attack was demonstrated by creating a key whose ID was
        0xdeadbeef (see {DEADBEEF}).

:dead code: n.

        Routines that can never be accessed because all calls to them have
        been removed, or code that cannot be reached because it is guarded
        by a control structure that provably must always transfer control
        somewhere else. The presence of dead code may reveal either logical
        errors due to alterations in the program or significant changes in
        the assumptions and environment of the program (see also {software
        rot}); a good compiler should report dead code so a maintainer can
        think about what it means. (Sometimes it simply means that an
        extremely defensive programmer has inserted {can't happen} tests
        which really can't happen -- yet.) Syn. {grunge}. See also {dead},
        and The Story of Mel'.

:dead-tree version:

        [common] A paper version of an on-line document; one printed on dead
        trees. In this context, "dead trees" always refers to paper. See
        also {tree-killer}.

:DEADBEEF: /dedbeef/, n.

        The hexadecimal word-fill pattern for freshly allocated memory under
        a number of IBM environments, including the RS/6000. Some modern
        debugging tools deliberately fill freed memory with this value as a
        way of converting {heisenbug}s into {Bohr bug}s. As in "Your program
        is DEADBEEF" (meaning gone, aborted, flushed from memory); if you
        start from an odd half-word boundary, of course, you have BEEFDEAD.
        See also the anecdote under {fool} and {dead beef attack}.

:deadlock: n.

        1. [techspeak] A situation wherein two or more processes are unable
        to proceed because each is waiting for one of the others to do
        something. A common example is a program communicating to a server,
        which may find itself waiting for output from the server before
        sending anything more to it, while the server is similarly waiting
        for more input from the controlling program before outputting
        anything. (It is reported that this particular flavor of deadlock is
        sometimes called a starvation deadlock, though the term starvation
        is more properly used for situations where a program can never run
        simply because it never gets high enough priority. Another common
        flavor is constipation, in which each process is trying to send
        stuff to the other but all buffers are full because nobody is
        reading anything.) See {deadly embrace}.

        2. Also used of deadlock-like interactions between humans, as when
        two people meet in a narrow corridor, and each tries to be polite by
        moving aside to let the other pass, but they end up swaying from
        side to side without making any progress because they always move
        the same way at the same time.

:deadly embrace: n.

        Same as {deadlock}, though usually used only when exactly two
        processes are involved. This is the more popular term in Europe,
        while {deadlock} predominates in the United States.

:death code: n.

        A routine whose job is to set everything in the computer --
        registers, memory, flags, everything -- to zero, including that
        portion of memory where it is running; its last act is to {stomp on}
        its own "store zero" instruction. Death code isn't very useful, but
        writing it is an interesting hacking challenge on architectures
        where the instruction set makes it possible, such as the PDP-8 (it
        has also been done on the DG Nova).

        Perhaps the ultimate death code is on the TI 990 series, where all
        registers are actually in RAM, and the instruction "store immediate
        0" has the opcode "0". The PC will immediately wrap around core as
        many times as it can until a user hits HALT. Any empty memory
        location is death code. Worse, the manufacturer recommended use of
        this instruction in startup code (which would be in ROM and
        therefore survive).

:Death Square: n.

        The corporate logo of Novell, the people who acquired USL after AT&T
        let go of it (Novell eventually sold the Unix group to SCO). Coined
        by analogy with {Death Star}, because many people believed Novell
        was bungling the lead in Unix systems exactly as AT&T did for many
        years.

        [They were right --ESR]

:Death Star: n.

        [from the movie Star Wars]

        1. The AT&T corporate logo, which bears an uncanny resemblance to
        the Death Star in the Star Wars movies. This usage was particularly
        common among partisans of {BSD} Unix in the 1980s, who tended to
        regard the AT&T versions as inferior and AT&T as a bad guy. Copies
        still circulate of a poster printed by Mt. Xinu showing a starscape
        with a space fighter labeled 4.2 BSD streaking away from a broken
        AT&T logo wreathed in flames.

        2. AT&T's internal magazine, Focus, uses death star to describe an
        incorrectly done AT&T logo in which the inner circle in the top left
        is dark instead of light -- a frequent result of dark-on-light logo
        images.

        3. The IBM DeskStar 75GXP drive series, which suffered manufacturing
        problems and had an uncanny ability to die after a few months in the
        field. This drive series single-handedly destroyed IBM's previously
        very good reputation in the hard disk market, and ended up with IBM
        selling their hard disk business to Hitachi.

:Death, X of:

        [common] A construction used to imbue the subject with campy menace,
        usually with intent to ridicule. The ancestor of this term is a
        famous Far Side cartoon from the 1980s in which a balloon with a
        fierce face painted on it is passed off as the "Floating Head of
        Death". Hackers and SF fans have been using the suffix "of Death"
        ever since to label things which appear to be vastly threatening but
        will actually pop like a balloon if you prick them. Such
        constructions are properly spoken in a tone of over-exagerrated
        portentiousness: "Behold! The Spinning - Pizza - of - Death!" See
        {Blue Screen of Death}, {Ping O' Death}, {Spinning Pizza of Death},
        {click of death}. Compare {Doom, X of}.

:DEC: /dek/, n.

        n. Commonly used abbreviation for Digital Equipment Corporation,
        later deprecated by DEC itself in favor of "Digital" and now
        entirely obsolete following the buyout by Compaq. Before the {killer
        micro} revolution of the late 1980s, hackerdom was closely symbiotic
        with DEC's pioneering timesharing machines. The first of the group
        of cultures described by this lexicon nucleated around the PDP-1
        (see {TMRC}). Subsequently, the PDP-6, {PDP-10}, {PDP-20}, {PDP-11}
        and {VAX} were all foci of large and important hackerdoms, and DEC
        machines long dominated the ARPANET and Internet machine population.
        DEC was the technological leader of the minicomputer era (roughly
        1967 to 1987), but its failure to embrace microcomputers and Unix
        early cost it heavily in profits and prestige after {silicon} got
        cheap. Nevertheless, the microprocessor design tradition owes a
        major debt to the {PDP-11} instruction set, and every one of the
        major general-purpose microcomputer OSs so far (CP/M, MS-DOS, Unix,
        OS/2, Windows NT) was either genetically descended from a DEC OS, or
        incubated on DEC hardware, or both. Accordingly, DEC was for many
        years still regarded with a certain wry affection even among many
        hackers too young to have grown up on DEC machines.

:DEC Wars: n.

        A 1983 {Usenet} posting by Alan Hastings and Steve Tarr spoofing the
        Star Wars movies in hackish terms. Some years later, ESR
        (disappointed by Hastings and Tarr's failure to exploit a great
        premise more thoroughly) posted a 3-times-longer complete rewrite
        called Unix WARS; the two are often confused.

:decay: n.,vi

        [from nuclear physics] An automatic conversion which is applied to
        most array-valued expressions in {C}; they `decay into'
        pointer-valued expressions pointing to the array's first element.
        This term is borderline techspeak, but is not used in the official
        standard for the language.

:deckle: /dek'l/, n.

        [from dec- and {nybble}; the original spelling seems to have been
        decle] Two {nickle}s; 10 bits. Reported among developers for
        Mattel's GI 1600 (the Intellivision games processor), a chip with
        16-bit-wide RAM but 10-bit-wide ROM. See {nybble} for other such
        terms.

:DED: /DED/, n.

        Dark-Emitting Diode (that is, a burned-out LED). Compare {SED},
        {LER}, {write-only memory}. In the early 1970s both Signetics and
        Texas instruments released DED spec sheets as {AFJ}s (suggested uses
        included "as a power-off indicator").

:deep hack mode: n.

        See {hack mode}.

:deep magic: n.

        [poss. from C. S. Lewis's Narnia books] An awesomely arcane
        technique central to a program or system, esp. one neither generally
        published nor available to hackers at large (compare {black art});
        one that could only have been composed by a true {wizard}. Compiler
        optimization techniques and many aspects of {OS} design used to be
        {deep magic}; many techniques in cryptography, signal processing,
        graphics, and AI still are. Compare {heavy wizardry}. Esp.: found in
        comments of the form "Deep magic begins here...". Compare {voodoo
        programming}.

:deep space: n.

        1. Describes the notional location of any program that has gone {off
        the trolley}. Esp.: used of programs that just sit there silently
        grinding long after either failure or some output is expected. "Uh
        oh. I should have gotten a prompt ten seconds ago. The program's in
        deep space somewhere." Compare {buzz}, {catatonic}, {hyperspace}.

        2. The metaphorical location of a human so dazed and/or confused or
        caught up in some esoteric form of {bogosity} that he or she no
        longer responds coherently to normal communication. Compare {page
        out}.

:defenestration: n.

        [mythically from a traditional Bohemian assassination method, via SF
        fandom]

        1. Proper karmic retribution for an incorrigible punster. "Oh, ghod,
        that was awful!" "Quick! Defenestrate him!"

        2. The act of completely removing Micro$oft Windows from a PC in
        favor of a better OS (typically Linux).

        3. The act of discarding something under the assumption that it will
        improve matters. "I don't have any disk space left." "Well, why
        don't you defenestrate that 100 megs worth of old core dumps?"

        4. Under a GUI, the act of dragging something out of a window (onto
        the screen). "Next, defenestrate the MugWump icon."

        5. [obs.] The act of exiting a window system in order to get better
        response time from a full-screen program. This comes from the
        dictionary meaning of defenestrate, which is to throw something out
        a window.

:defined as: adj.

        In the role of, usually in an organization-chart sense. "Pete is
        currently defined as bug prioritizer." Compare {logical}.

:deflicted:

        [portmanteau of "defective" and "afflicted"; common among PC repair
        technicians, and probably originated among hardware techs outside
        the hacker community proper] Term used of hardware that is broken
        due to poor design or shoddy manufacturing or (especially) both;
        less frequently used of software and rarely of people. This term is
        normally employed in a tone of weary contempt by technicians who
        have seen the specific failure in the trouble report before and are
        cynically confident they'll see it again. Ultimately this may derive
        from Frank Zappa's 1974 album Apostrophe, on which the Fur Trapper
        infamously rubs his deflicted eyes...

:dehose: /deehohz/, vt.

        To clear a {hosed} condition.

:Dejagoo:

        [Portmanteau of Dejanews and Google] Google newsgroups. Became
        common in 2001 after Google acquired Dejanews, and with it the
        largest on-line archive of Usenet postings.

:deletia: n., /d@lee'sha/

        [USENET; common] In an email reply, material omitted from the quote
        of the original. Usually written rather than spoken; often appears
        as a pseudo-tag or ellipsis in the body of the reply, as "[deletia]"
        or "<deletia>" or "<snip>".

:deliminator: /delim'inayt@r/, n.

        [portmanteau, delimiter + eliminate] A string or pattern used to
        delimit text into fields, but which is itself eliminated from the
        resulting list of fields. This jargon seems to have originated among
        Perl hackers in connection with the Perl split() function; however,
        it has been sighted in live use among Java and even Visual Basic
        programmers.

:delint: /deelint/, v. obs.

        To modify code to remove problems detected when {lint}ing.
        Confusingly, this process is also referred to as linting code. This
        term is no longer in general use because ANSI C compilers typically
        issue compile-time warnings almost as detailed as lint warnings.

:delta: n.

        1. [techspeak] A quantitative change, especially a small or
        incremental one (this use is general in physics and engineering). "I
        just doubled the speed of my program!" "What was the delta on
        program size?" "About 30 percent." (He doubled the speed of his
        program, but increased its size by only 30 percent.)

        2. [Unix] A {diff}, especially a {diff} stored under the set of
        version-control tools called SCCS (Source Code Control System) or
        RCS (Revision Control System).

        3. n. A small quantity, but not as small as {epsilon}. The jargon
        usage of {delta} and {epsilon} stems from the traditional use of
        these letters in mathematics for very small numerical quantities,
        particularly in `epsilon-delta' proofs in limit theory (as in the
        differential calculus). The term {delta} is often used, once
        {epsilon} has been mentioned, to mean a quantity that is slightly
        bigger than {epsilon} but still very small. "The cost isn't epsilon,
        but it's delta" means that the cost isn't totally negligible, but it
        is nevertheless very small. Common constructions include within
        delta of --, within epsilon of --: that is, `close to' and `even
        closer to'.

:demented: adj.

        Yet another term of disgust used to describe a malfunctioning
        program. The connotation in this case is that the program works as
        designed, but the design is bad. Said, for example, of a program
        that generates large numbers of meaningless error messages, implying
        that it is on the brink of imminent collapse. Compare {wonky},
        {brain-damaged}, {bozotic}.

:demigod: n.

        A hacker with years of experience, a world-wide reputation, and a
        major role in the development of at least one design, tool, or game
        used by or known to more than half of the hacker community. To
        qualify as a genuine demigod, the person must recognizably identify
        with the hacker community and have helped shape it. Major demigods
        include Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (co-inventors of {Unix} and
        {C}), Richard M. Stallman (inventor of {EMACS}), Larry Wall
        (inventor of {Perl}), Linus Torvalds (inventor of {Linux}), and most
        recently James Gosling (inventor of Java, {NeWS}, and {GOSMACS}) and
        Guido van Rossum (inventor of {Python}). In their hearts of hearts,
        most hackers dream of someday becoming demigods themselves, and more
        than one major software project has been driven to completion by the
        author's veiled hopes of apotheosis. See also {net.god},
        {true-hacker}, {ubergeek}. Since 1995 or so this term has been
        gradually displaced by {ubergeek}.

:demo: /de'moh/

        [short for `demonstration']

        1. v. To demonstrate a product or prototype. A far more effective
        way of inducing bugs to manifest than any number of {test} runs,
        especially when important people are watching.

        2. n. The act of demoing. "I've gotta give a demo of the drool-proof
        interface; how does it work again?"

        3. n. Esp. as demo version, can refer either to an early,
        barely-functional version of a program which can be used for
        demonstration purposes as long as the operator uses exactly the
        right commands and skirts its numerous bugs, deficiencies, and
        unimplemented portions, or to a special version of a program
        (frequently with some features crippled) which is distributed at
        little or no cost to the user for enticement purposes.

        4. [{demoscene}] A sequence of {demoeffect}s (usually) combined with
        self-composed music and hand-drawn ("pixelated") graphics. These
        days (1997) usually built to attend a {compo}. Often called
        eurodemos outside Europe, as most of the {demoscene} activity seems
        to have gathered in northern Europe and especially Scandinavia. See
        also {intro}, {dentro}.

:demo mode: n.

        1. [Sun] The state of being {heads down} in order to finish code in
        time for a {demo}, usually due yesterday.

        2. A mode in which video games sit by themselves running through a
        portion of the game, also known as attract mode. Some serious {app}s
        have a demo mode they use as a screen saver, or may go through a
        demo mode on startup (for example, the Microsoft Windows opening
        screen -- which lets you impress your neighbors without actually
        having to put up with {Microsloth Windows}).

:demoeffect: n.

        [{demoscene}]

        1. What among hackers is called a {display hack}. Classical effects
        include "plasma" (colorful mess), "keftales" (x*x+y*y and other
        similar patterns, usually combined with color-cycling), realtime
        fractals, realtime 3d graphics, etc. Historically, demo effects have
        cheated as much as possible to gain more speed and more complexity,
        using low-precision math and masses of assembler code and building
        animation realtime are three common tricks, but use of special
        hardware to fake effects is a {Good Thing} on the demoscene (though
        this is becoming less common as platforms like the Amiga fade away).

        2. [Finland] Opposite of {dancing frog}. The crash that happens when
        you demonstrate a perfectly good prototype to a client. Plagues most
        often CS students and small businesses, but there is a well-known
        case involving Bill Gates demonstrating a brand new version of a
        major operating system.

:demogroup: n.

        [{demoscene}] A group of {demo} (sense 4) composers. Job titles
        within a group include coders (the ones who write programs),
        graphicians (the ones who painstakingly pixelate the fine art),
        musicians (the music composers), {sysop}s, traders/swappers (the
        ones who do the trading and other PR), and organizers (in larger
        groups). It is not uncommon for one person to do multiple jobs, but
        it has been observed that good coders are rarely good composers and
        vice versa. [How odd. Musical talent seems common among
        Internet/Unix hackers --ESR]

:demon: n.

        1. Often used equivalently to {daemon} -- especially in the {Unix}
        world, where the latter spelling and pronunciation is considered
        mildly archaic.

        2. [MIT; now probably obsolete] A portion of a program that is not
        invoked explicitly, but that lies dormant waiting for some
        condition(s) to occur. See {daemon}. The distinction is that demons
        are usually processes within a program, while daemons are usually
        programs running on an operating system.

        Demons in sense 2 are particularly common in AI programs. For
        example, a knowledge-manipulation program might implement inference
        rules as demons. Whenever a new piece of knowledge was added,
        various demons would activate (which demons depends on the
        particular piece of data) and would create additional pieces of
        knowledge by applying their respective inference rules to the
        original piece. These new pieces could in turn activate more demons
        as the inferences filtered down through chains of logic. Meanwhile,
        the main program could continue with whatever its primary task was.

:demon dialer: n.

        A program which repeatedly calls the same telephone number. Demon
        dialing may be benign (as when a number of communications programs
        contend for legitimate access to a {BBS} line) or malign (that is,
        used as a prank or denial-of-service attack). This term dates from
        the {blue box} days of the 1970s and early 1980s and is now
        semi-obsolescent among {phreaker}s; see {war dialer} for its
        contemporary progeny.

:demoparty: n.

        [{demoscene}] Aboveground descendant of the {copyparty}, with
        emphasis shifted away from software piracy and towards {compo}s.
        Smaller demoparties, for 100 persons or less, are held quite often,
        sometimes even once a month, and usually last for one to two days.
        On the other end of the scale, huge demo parties are held once a
        year (and four of these have grown very large and occur annually --
        Assembly in Finland, The Party in Denmark, The Gathering in Norway,
        and NAID somewhere in north America). These parties usually last for
        three to five days, have room for 3000-5000 people, and have a party
        network with connection to the internet.

:demoscene: /dem'ohseen/

        [also `demo scene'] A culture of multimedia hackers located
        primarily in Scandinavia and northern Europe. Demoscene folklore
        recounts that when old-time {warez d00dz} cracked some piece of
        software they often added an advertisement in the beginning, usually
        containing colorful {display hack}s with greetings to other cracking
        groups. The demoscene was born among people who decided building
        these display hacks is more interesting than hacking -- or anyway
        safer. Around 1990 there began to be very serious police pressure on
        cracking groups, including raids with SWAT teams crashing into
        bedrooms to confiscate computers. Whether in response to this or for
        esthetic reasons, crackers of that period began to build
        self-contained display hacks of considerable elaboration and beauty
        (within the culture such a hack is called a {demo}). As more of
        these {demogroup}s emerged, they started to have {compo}s at copying
        parties (see {copyparty}), which later evolved to standalone events
        (see {demoparty}). The demoscene has retained some traits from the
        {warez d00dz}, including their style of handles and group names and
        some of their jargon.

        Traditionally demos were written in assembly language, with lots of
        smart tricks, self-modifying code, undocumented op-codes and the
        like. Some time around 1995, people started coding demos in C, and a
        couple of years after that, they also started using Java.

        Ten years on (in 1998-1999), the demoscene is changing as its
        original platforms (C64, Amiga, Spectrum, Atari ST, IBM PC under
        DOS) die out and activity shifts towards Windows, Linux, and the
        Internet. While deeply underground in the past, demoscene is trying
        to get into the mainstream as accepted art form, and one symptom of
        this is the commercialization of bigger demoparties. Older
        demosceners frown at this, but the majority think it's a good
        direction. Many demosceners end up working in the computer game
        industry. Demoscene resource pages are available at
        http://www.oldskool.org/demos/explained/ and http://www.scene.org/.

:dentro: /den'troh/

        [{demoscene}] Combination of {demo} (sense 4) and {intro}. Other
        name mixings include intmo, dentmo etc. and are used usually when
        the authors are not quite sure whether the program is a {demo} or an
        {intro}. Special-purpose coinages like wedtro (some member of a
        group got married), invtro (invitation intro) etc. have also been
        sighted.

:depeditate: /deeped'@tayt/, n.

        [by (faulty) analogy with decapitate] Humorously, to cut off the
        feet of. When one is using some computer-aided typesetting tools,
        careless placement of text blocks within a page or above a rule can
        result in chopped-off letter descenders. Such letters are said to
        have been depeditated.

:deprecated: adj.

        Said of a program or feature that is considered obsolescent and in
        the process of being phased out, usually in favor of a specified
        replacement. Deprecated features can, unfortunately, linger on for
        many years. This term appears with distressing frequency in
        standards documents when the committees writing the documents
        realize that large amounts of extant (and presumably happily
        working) code depend on the feature(s) that have passed out of
        favor. See also {dusty deck}.

        [Usage note: don't confuse this word with `depreciated', or the verb
        form `deprecate' with `depreciate'. They are different words; see
        any dictionary for discussion.]

:derf: /derf/

        [PLATO]

        1. v. The act of exploiting a terminal which someone else has
        absentmindedly left logged on, to use that person's account,
        especially to post articles intended to make an ass of the victim
        you're impersonating. It has been alleged that the term originated
        as a reversal of the name of the gentleman who most usually left
        himself vulnerable to it, who also happened to be the head of the
        department that handled PLATO at the University of Delaware. Compare
        {baggy pantsing}.

        2. n. The victim of an act of derfing, sense 1. The most typical
        posting from a derfed account read "I am a derf.".

:deserves to lose: adj.

        [common] Said of someone who willfully does the {Wrong Thing};
        humorously, if one uses a feature known to be {marginal}. What is
        meant is that one deserves the consequences of one's {losing}
        actions. "Boy, anyone who tries to use {mess-dos} deserves to
        {lose}!" ({ITS} fans used to say the same thing of {Unix}; many
        still do.) See also {screw}, {chomp}, {bagbiter}.

:despew: /d@spyoo'/, v.

        [Usenet] To automatically generate a large amount of garbage to the
        net, esp. from an automated posting program gone wild. See {ARMM}.

:dickless workstation: n.

        Extremely pejorative hackerism for `diskless workstation', a class
        of botches including the Sun 3/50 and other machines designed
        exclusively to network with an expensive central disk server. These
        combine all the disadvantages of timesharing with all the
        disadvantages of distributed personal computers; typically, they
        cannot even {boot} themselves without help (in the form of some kind
        of {breath-of-life packet}) from the server.

:dictionary flame: n.

        [Usenet] An attempt to sidetrack a debate away from issues by
        insisting on meanings for key terms that presuppose a desired
        conclusion or smuggle in an implicit premise. A common tactic of
        people who prefer argument over definitions to disputes about
        reality. Compare {spelling flame}.

:diddle:

        1. vt. To work with or modify in a not-particularly-serious manner.
        "I diddled a copy of {ADVENT} so it didn't double-space all the
        time." "Let's diddle this piece of code and see if the problem goes
        away." See {tweak} and {twiddle}.

        2. n. The action or result of diddling.

        See also {tweak}, {twiddle}, {frob}.

:die: v.

        Syn. {crash}. Unlike {crash}, which is used primarily of hardware,
        this verb is used of both hardware and software. See also {go
        flatline}, {casters-up mode}.

:die horribly: v.

        The software equivalent of {crash and burn}, and the preferred
        emphatic form of {die}. "The converter choked on an FF in its input
        and died horribly".

:diff: /dif/, n.

        1. A change listing, especially giving differences between (and
        additions to) source code or documents (the term is often used in
        the plural diffs). "Send me your diffs for the Jargon File!" Compare
        {vdiff}.

        2. Specifically, such a listing produced by the diff(1) command,
        esp. when used as specification input to the patch(1) utility (which
        can actually perform the modifications; see {patch}). This is a
        common method of distributing patches and source updates in the
        Unix/C world.

        3. v. To compare (whether or not by use of automated tools on
        machine-readable files); see also {vdiff}, {mod}.

:dike: vt.

        To remove or disable a portion of something, as a wire from a
        computer or a subroutine from a program. A standard slogan is "When
        in doubt, dike it out". (The implication is that it is usually more
        effective to attack software problems by reducing complexity than by
        increasing it.) The word `dikes' is widely used to mean `diagonal
        cutters', a kind of wire cutter. To `dike something out' means to
        use such cutters to remove something. Indeed, the TMRC Dictionary
        defined dike as "to attack with dikes". Among hackers this term has
        been metaphorically extended to informational objects such as
        sections of code.

:Dilbert:

        n. Name and title character of a comic strip nationally syndicated
        in the U.S. and enormously popular among hackers. Dilbert is an
        archetypical engineer-nerd who works at an anonymous high-technology
        company; the strips present a lacerating satire of insane working
        conditions and idiotic {management} practices all too readily
        recognized by hackers. Adams, who spent nine years in {cube} 4S700R
        at Pacific Bell (not {DEC} as often reported), often remarks that he
        has never been able to come up with a fictional management blunder
        that his correspondents didn't quickly either report to have
        actually happened or top with a similar but even more bizarre
        incident. In 1996 Adams distilled his insights into the collective
        psychology of businesses into an even funnier book, The Dilbert
        Principle (HarperCollins, ISBN 0-887-30787-6). See also
        {pointy-haired}, {rat dance}.

:ding: n.,vi.

        1. Synonym for {feep}. Usage: rare among hackers, but more common in
        the {Real World}.

        2. dinged: What happens when someone in authority gives you a minor
        bitching about something, esp. something trivial. "I was dinged for
        having a messy desk."

:dink: /dink/, adj.

        Said of a machine that has the {bitty box} nature; a machine too
        small to be worth bothering with -- sometimes the system you're
        currently forced to work on. First heard from an MIT hacker working
        on a CP/M system with 64K, in reference to any 6502 system, then
        from fans of 32-bit architectures about 16-bit machines. "GNUMACS
        will never work on that dink machine." Probably derived from
        mainstream `dinky', which isn't sufficiently pejorative. See
        {macdink}.

:dinosaur: n.

        1. Any hardware requiring raised flooring and special power. Used
        especially of old minis and mainframes, in contrast with newer
        microprocessor-based machines. In a famous quote from the 1998 Unix
        EXPO, Bill Joy compared the liquid-cooled mainframe in the massive
        IBM display with a grazing dinosaur "with a truck outside pumping
        its bodily fluids through it". IBM was not amused. Compare {big
        iron}; see also {mainframe}.

        2. [IBM] A very conservative user; a {zipperhead}.

:dinosaur pen: n.

        A traditional {mainframe} computer room complete with raised
        flooring, special power, its own ultra-heavy-duty air conditioning,
        and a side order of Halon fire extinguishers. See {boa}.

:dinosaurs mating: n.

        Said to occur when yet another {big iron} merger or buyout occurs;
        originally reflected a perception by hackers that these signal
        another stage in the long, slow dying of the {mainframe} industry.
        In the mainframe industry's glory days of the 1960s, it was `IBM and
        the Seven Dwarfs': Burroughs, Control Data, General Electric,
        Honeywell, NCR, RCA, and Univac. RCA and GE sold out early, and it
        was `IBM and the Bunch' (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and
        Honeywell) for a while. Honeywell was bought out by Bull; Burroughs
        merged with Univac to form Unisys (in 1984 -- this was when the
        phrase dinosaurs mating was coined); and in 1991 AT&T absorbed NCR
        (but spat it back out a few years later). Control Data still exists
        but is no longer in the mainframe business. In similar wave of
        dinosaur-matings as the PC business began to consolidate after 1995,
        Digital Equipment was bought by Compaq which was bought by
        Hewlett-Packard. More such earth-shaking unions of doomed giants
        seem inevitable.

:dirtball: n.

        [XEROX PARC] A small, perhaps struggling outsider; not in the major
        or even the minor leagues. For example, "Xerox is not a dirtball
        company".

        [Outsiders often observe in the PARC culture an institutional
        arrogance which usage of this term exemplifies. The brilliance and
        scope of PARC's contributions to computer science have been such
        that this superior attitude is not much resented. --ESR]

:dirty power: n.

        Electrical mains voltage that is unfriendly to the delicate innards
        of computers. Spikes, {drop-outs}, average voltage significantly
        higher or lower than nominal, or just plain noise can all cause
        problems of varying subtlety and severity (these are collectively
        known as {power hit}s).

:disclaimer: n.

        [Usenet] Statement ritually appended to many Usenet postings
        (sometimes automatically, by the posting software) reiterating the
        fact (which should be obvious, but is easily forgotten) that the
        article reflects its author's opinions and not necessarily those of
        the organization running the machine through which the article
        entered the network.

:Discordianism: /diskor'di@nism/, n.

        The veneration of {Eris}, a.k.a. Discordia; widely popular among
        hackers. Discordianism was popularized by Robert Shea and Robert
        Anton Wilson's novel Illuminatus! as a sort of self-subverting
        Dada-Zen for Westerners -- it should on no account be taken
        seriously but is far more serious than most jokes. Consider, for
        example, the Fifth Commandment of the Pentabarf, from Principia
        Discordia: "A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing What he Reads."
        Discordianism is usually connected with an elaborate conspiracy
        theory/joke involving millennia-long warfare between the
        anarcho-surrealist partisans of Eris and a malevolent, authoritarian
        secret society called the Illuminati. See Religion in Appendix B,
        {Church of the SubGenius}, and {ha ha only serious}.

:disemvowel: v.

        [USENET: play on `disembowel'] Less common synonym for {splat out}.

:disk farm: n.

        A large room or rooms filled with disk drives (esp. {washing
        machine}s). This term was well established by 1990, and generalized
        by about ten years later; see {farm}. It has become less common as
        disk strange densities reached livels where terabytes of storage can
        easily be fit in a single rack.

:display hack: n.

        A program with the same approximate purpose as a kaleidoscope: to
        make pretty pictures. Famous display hacks include {munching
        squares}, {smoking clover}, the BSD Unix rain(6) program, worms(6)
        on miscellaneous Unixes, and the {X} kaleid(1) program. Display
        hacks can also be implemented by creating text files containing
        numerous escape sequences for interpretation by a video terminal;
        one notable example displayed, on any VT100, a Christmas tree with
        twinkling lights and a toy train circling its base. The {hack value}
        of a display hack is proportional to the esthetic value of the
        images times the cleverness of the algorithm divided by the size of
        the code. Syn. {psychedelicware}.

:dispress: vt.

        [contraction of `Dissociated Press' due to eight-character MS-DOS
        filenames] To apply the {Dissociated Press} algorithm to a block of
        text. The resultant output is also referred to as a 'dispression'.

:Dissociated Press: n.

        [play on `Associated Press'; perhaps inspired by a reference in the
        1950 Bugs Bunny cartoon What's Up, Doc?] An algorithm for
        transforming any text into potentially humorous garbage even more
        efficiently than by passing it through a {marketroid}. The algorithm
        starts by printing any N consecutive words (or letters) in the text.
        Then at every step it searches for any random occurrence in the
        original text of the last N words (or letters) already printed and
        then prints the next word or letter. {EMACS} has a handy command for
        this. Here is a short example of word-based Dissociated Press
        applied to an earlier version of this Jargon File:

          wart: n. A small, crocky {feature} that sticks out of an array (C
          has no checks for this). This is relatively benign and easy to
          spot if the phrase is bent so as to be not worth paying attention
          to the medium in question.

        Here is a short example of letter-based Dissociated Press applied to
        the same source:

          window sysIWYG: n. A bit was named aften /bee't@/ prefer to use
          the other guy's re, especially in every cast a chuckle on neithout
          getting into useful informash speech makes removing a featuring a
          move or usage actual abstractionsidered interj. Indeed spectace
          logic or problem!

        A hackish idle pastime is to apply letter-based Dissociated Press to
        a random body of text and {vgrep} the output in hopes of finding an
        interesting new word. (In the preceding example, `window sysIWYG'
        and `informash' show some promise.) Iterated applications of
        Dissociated Press usually yield better results. Similar techniques
        called travesty generators have been employed with considerable
        satirical effect to the utterances of Usenet flamers; see {pseudo}.

:distribution: n.

        1. A software source tree packaged for distribution; but see {kit}.
        Since about 1996 unqualified use of this term often implies `{Linux}
        distribution'. The short form {distro} is often used for this sense.

        2. A vague term encompassing mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups
        (but not {BBS} {fora}); any topic-oriented message channel with
        multiple recipients.

        3. An information-space domain (usually loosely correlated with
        geography) to which propagation of a Usenet message is restricted; a
        much-underutilized feature.

:distro: n.

        Synonym for {distribution}, sense 1.

:disusered: adj.

        [Usenet] Said of a person whose account on a computer has been
        removed, esp. for cause rather than through normal attrition. "He
        got disusered when they found out he'd been cracking through the
        school's Internet access." The verbal form disuser is live but less
        common. Both usages probably derive from the DISUSER account status
        flag on VMS; setting it disables the account. Compare {star out}.

:DMZ:

        [common] Literally, De-Militarized Zone. Figuratively, the portion
        of a private network that is visible through the network's firewalls
        (see {firewall machine}). Coined in the late 1990s as jargon, this
        term is now borderline techspeak.

:do protocol: vi.

        [from network protocol programming] To perform an interaction with
        somebody or something that follows a clearly defined procedure. For
        example, "Let's do protocol with the check" at a restaurant means to
        ask for the check, calculate the tip and everybody's share, collect
        money from everybody, generate change as necessary, and pay the
        bill. See {protocol}.

:doc: /dok/, n.

        Common spoken and written shorthand for `documentation'. Often used
        in the plural docs and in the construction doc file (i.e.,
        documentation available on-line).

:documentation: n.

        The multiple kilograms of macerated, pounded, steamed, bleached, and
        pressed trees that accompany most modern software or hardware
        products (see also {tree-killer}). Hackers seldom read paper
        documentation and (too) often resist writing it; they prefer theirs
        to be terse and on-line. A common comment on this predilection is
        "You can't {grep} dead trees". See {drool-proof paper}, {verbiage},
        {treeware}.

:dodgy: adj.

        Syn. with {flaky}. Preferred outside the U.S.

:dogcow: /dog'kow/, n.

        See {Moof}. The dogcow is a semi-legendary creature that lurks in
        the depths of the Macintosh Technical Notes Hypercard stack V3.1.
        The full story of the dogcow is told in technical note #31 (the
        particular dogcow illustrated is properly named `Clarus').
        Option-shift-click will cause it to emit a characteristic "Moof!" or
        "!fooM" sound. Getting to tech note 31 is the hard part; to discover
        how to do that, one must needs examine the stack script with a
        hackerly eye. Clue: {rot13} is involved. A dogcow also appears if
        you choose `Page Setup...' with a LaserWriter selected and click on
        the `Options' button. It also lurks in other Mac printer drivers,
        notably those for the now-discontinued Style Writers. See
        http://developer.apple.com/products/techsupport/dogcow/tn31.html.

:dogfood: n.

        [Microsoft, Netscape] Interim software used internally for testing.
        "To eat one's own dogfood" (from which the slang noun derives) means
        to use the software one is developing, as part of one's everyday
        development environment (the phrase is used outside Microsoft and
        Netscape). The practice is normal in the Linux community and
        elsewhere, but the term `dogfood' is seldom used as open-source
        betas tend to be quite tasty and nourishing. The idea is that
        developers who are using their own software will quickly learn
        what's missing or broken. Dogfood is typically not even of {beta}
        quality.

:dogpile: v.

        [Usenet: prob. fr. mainstream "puppy pile"] When many people post
        unfriendly responses in short order to a single posting, they are
        sometimes said to "dogpile" or "dogpile on" the person to whom
        they're responding. For example, when a religious missionary posts a
        simplistic appeal to alt.atheism, he can expect to be dogpiled. It
        has been suggested that this derives from U.S. football slang for a
        tackle involving three or more people; among hackers, it seems at
        least as likely to derive from an `autobiographical' Bugs Bunny
        cartoon in which a gang of attacking canines actually yells "Dogpile
        on the rabbit!".

:dogwash: /dog'wosh/

        [From a quip in the `urgency' field of a very optional software
        change request, ca.: 1982. It was something like "Urgency: Wash your
        dog first".]

        1. n. A project of minimal priority, undertaken as an escape from
        more serious work.

        2. v. To engage in such a project. Many games and much {freeware}
        get written this way.

:Don't do that then!: imp.

        [from an old doctor's office joke about a patient with a trivial
        complaint] Stock response to a user complaint. "When I type
        control-S, the whole system comes to a halt for thirty seconds."
        "Don't do that, then!" (or "So don't do that!"). Compare {RTFM}.

        Here's a classic example of "Don't do that then!" from Neal
        Stephenson's In The Beginning Was The Command Line. A friend of his
        built a network with a load of Macs and a few high-powered database
        servers. He found that from time to time the whole network would
        lock up for no apparent reason. The problem was eventually tracked
        down to MacOS's cooperative multitasking: when a user held down the
        mouse button for too long, the network stack wouldn't get a chance
        to run...

:dongle: /dong'gl/, n.

        1. [now obs.] A security or {copy protection} device for proprietary
        software consisting of a serialized EPROM and some drivers in a D-25
        connector shell, which must be connected to an I/O port of the
        computer while the program is run. Programs that use a dongle query
        the port at startup and at programmed intervals thereafter, and
        terminate if it does not respond with the dongle's programmed
        validation code. Thus, users can make as many copies of the program
        as they want but must pay for each dongle. The first sighting of a
        dongle was in 1984, associated with a software product called
        PaperClip. The idea was clever, but it was initially a failure, as
        users disliked tying up a serial port this way. By 1993, dongles
        would typically pass data through the port and monitor for {magic}
        codes (and combinations of status lines) with minimal if any
        interference with devices further down the line -- this innovation
        was necessary to allow daisy-chained dongles for multiple pieces of
        software. These devices have become rare as the industry has moved
        away from copy-protection schemes in general.

        2. By extension, any physical electronic key or transferable ID
        required for a program to function. Common variations on this theme
        have used parallel or even joystick ports. See {dongle-disk}.

        3. An adaptor cable mating a special edge-type connector on a PCMCIA
        or on-board Ethernet card to a standard 8p8c Ethernet jack. This
        usage seems to have surfaced in 1999 and is now dominant. Laptop
        owners curse these things because they're notoriously easy to lose
        and the vendors commonly charge extortionate prices for
        replacements.

        [Note: in early 1992, advertising copy from Rainbow Technologies (a
        manufacturer of dongles) included a claim that the word derived from
        "Don Gall", allegedly the inventor of the device. The company's
        receptionist will cheerfully tell you that the story is a myth
        invented for the ad copy. Nevertheless, I expect it to haunt my life
        as a lexicographer for at least the next ten years. :-( --ESR]

:dongle-disk: /don'gl disk/, n.

        A special floppy disk that is required in order to perform some
        task. Some contain special coding that allows an application to
        identify it uniquely, others are special code that does something
        that normally-resident programs don't or can't. (For example, AT&T's
        "Unix PC" would only come up in {root mode} with a special boot
        disk.) Also called a key disk. See {dongle}.

:Doom, X of:

        [common] A construction similar to `{Death, X of}, but derived
        rather from the Cracks of Doom in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings
        trilogy. The connotations are slightly different; a Foo of Death is
        mainly being held up to ridicule, but one would have to take a Foo
        of Doom a bit more seriously.

:doorstop: n.

        Used to describe equipment that is non-functional and halfway
        expected to remain so, especially obsolete equipment kept around for
        political reasons or ostensibly as a backup. Compare {boat anchor}.

:DoS attack: //

        [Usenet,common; note that it's unrelated to DOS as name of an
        operating system] Abbreviation for Denial-Of-Service attack. This
        abbreviation is most often used of attempts to shut down newsgroups
        with floods of {spam}, or to flood network links with large amounts
        of traffic, or to flood network links with large amounts of traffic,
        often by abusing network broadcast addresses. Compare {slashdot
        effect}.

:dot file: n.

        A file that is not visible by default to normal directory-browsing
        tools (on Unix, files named with a leading dot are, by convention,
        not normally presented in directory listings). Many programs define
        one or more dot files in which startup or configuration information
        may be optionally recorded; a user can customize the program's
        behavior by creating the appropriate file in the current or home
        directory. (Therefore, dot files tend to {creep} -- with every
        nontrivial application program defining at least one, a user's home
        directory can be filled with scores of dot files, of course without
        the user's really being aware of it.) See also {profile} (sense 1),
        {rc file}.

:double bucky: adj.

        Using both the CTRL and META keys. "The command to burn all LEDs is
        double bucky F."

        This term originated on the Stanford extended-ASCII keyboard, and
        was later taken up by users of the {space-cadet keyboard} at MIT. A
        typical MIT comment was that the Stanford {bucky bits} (control and
        meta shifting keys) were nice, but there weren't enough of them; you
        could type only 512 different characters on a Stanford keyboard. An
        obvious way to address this was simply to add more shifting keys,
        and this was eventually done; but a keyboard with that many shifting
        keys is hard on touch-typists, who don't like to move their hands
        away from the home position on the keyboard. It was half-seriously
        suggested that the extra shifting keys be implemented as pedals;
        typing on such a keyboard would be very much like playing a full
        pipe organ. This idea is mentioned in a parody of a very fine song
        by Jeffrey Moss called Rubber Duckie, which was published in The
        Sesame Street Songbook (Simon and Schuster 1971, ISBN
        0-671-21036-X). These lyrics were written on May 27, 1978, in
        celebration of the Stanford keyboard:

        Double Bucky

        Double bucky, you're the one!
        You make my keyboard lots of fun.
            Double bucky, an additional bit or two:
        (Vo-vo-de-o!)
        Control and meta, side by side,
        Augmented ASCII, nine bits wide!
            Double bucky!  Half a thousand glyphs, plus a few!
        Oh,
        I sure wish that I
        Had a couple of
            Bits more!
        Perhaps a
        Set of pedals to
        Make the number of
            Bits four:
        Double double bucky!
        Double bucky, left and right
        OR'd together, outta sight!
            Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of
            Double bucky, I'm happy I heard of
            Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of you!

        -- The Great Quux (with apologies to Jeffrey Moss)

        [This, by the way, is an excellent example of computer {filk} --ESR]
        See also {meta bit}, {cokebottle}, and {quadruple bucky}.

:doubled sig: n.

        A {sig block} that has been included twice in a {Usenet} article or,
        less commonly, in an electronic mail message. An article or message
        with a doubled sig can be caused by improperly configured software.
        More often, however, it reveals the author's lack of experience in
        electronic communication. See {B1FF}, {pseudo}.

:down:

        1. adj. Not operating. "The up escalator is down" is considered a
        humorous thing to say (unless of course you were expecting to use
        it), and "The elevator is down" always means "The elevator isn't
        working" and never refers to what floor the elevator is on. With
        respect to computers, this term has passed into the mainstream; the
        extension to other kinds of machine is still confined to techies
        (e.g. boiler mechanics may speak of a boiler being down).

        2. go down vi. To stop functioning; usually said of the {system}.
        The message from the {console} that every hacker hates to hear from
        the operator is "System going down in 5 minutes".

        3. take down, bring down vt. To deactivate purposely, usually for
        repair work or {PM}. "I'm taking the system down to work on that bug
        in the tape drive." Occasionally one hears the word down by itself
        used as a verb in this vt. sense.

        See {crash}; oppose {up}.

:download: vt.

        To transfer data or (esp.) code from a far-away system (especially a
        larger host system) over a digital communications link to a nearby
        system (especially a smaller client system. Oppose {upload}.

        Historical use of these terms was at one time associated with
        transfers from large timesharing machines to PCs or peripherals
        (download) and vice-versa (upload). The modern usage relative to the
        speaker (rather than as an indicator of the size and role of the
        machines) evolved as machine categories lost most of their former
        functional importance.

:DP: /DP/, n.

        1. Data Processing. Listed here because, according to hackers, use
        of the term marks one immediately as a {suit}. See {DPer}.

        2. Common abbrev for {Dissociated Press}.

:DPer: /deepeeer/, n.

        Data Processor. Hackers are absolutely amazed that {suit}s use this
        term self-referentially. Computers process data, not people! See
        {DP}.

:Dr. Fred Mbogo: /@mboh'goh, doktr fred/, n.

        [Stanford] The archetypal man you don't want to see about a problem,
        esp. an incompetent professional; a shyster. "Do you know a good eye
        doctor?" "Sure, try Mbogo Eye Care and Professional Dry Cleaning."
        The name comes from synergy between {bogus} and the original Dr.
        Mbogo, a witch doctor who was Gomez Addams' physician on the old
        Addams Family TV show. Interestingly enough, it turns out that under
        the rules for Swahili noun classes, `m-' is the characteristic
        prefix of "nouns referring to human beings". As such, "mbogo" is
        quite plausible as a Swahili coinage for a person having the nature
        of a {bogon}. Actually, "mbogo" is indeed a Ki-Swahili word
        referring to the African Cape Buffalo, syncerus caffer. It is one of
        the "big five" dangerous African game animals, and many people with
        bush experience believe it to be the most dangerous of them. Compare
        {Bloggs Family} and {J. Random Hacker}; see also {Fred Foobar} and
        {fred}.

:dragon: n.

        [MIT] A program similar to a {daemon}, except that it is not invoked
        at all, but is instead used by the system to perform various
        secondary tasks. A typical example would be an accounting program,
        which keeps track of who is logged in, accumulates load-average
        statistics, etc. Under ITS, many terminals displayed a list of
        people logged in, where they were, what they were running, etc.,
        along with some random picture (such as a unicorn, Snoopy, or the
        Enterprise), which was generated by the `name dragon'. Usage: rare
        outside MIT -- under Unix and most other OSes this would be called a
        background demon or {daemon}. The best-known Unix example of a
        dragon is cron(1). At SAIL, they called this sort of thing a
        phantom.

:Dragon Book: n.

        The classic text Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools, by
        Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman (Addison-Wesley
        1986; ISBN 0-201-10088-6), so called because of the cover design
        featuring a dragon labeled `complexity of compiler design' and a
        knight bearing the lance `LALR parser generator' among his other
        trappings. This one is more specifically known as the `Red Dragon
        Book' (1986); an earlier edition, sans Sethi and titled Principles
        Of Compiler Design (Alfred V. Aho and Jeffrey D. Ullman;
        Addison-Wesley, 1977; ISBN 0-201-00022-9), was the ``reen Dragon
        Book' (1977). (Also New Dragon Book, Old Dragon Book.) The horsed
        knight and the Green Dragon were warily eying each other at a
        distance; now the knight is typing (wearing gauntlets!) at a
        terminal showing a video-game representation of the Red Dragon's
        head while the rest of the beast extends back in normal space. See
        also {book titles}.

:drain: v.

        [IBM] Syn. for {flush} (sense 2). Has a connotation of finality
        about it; one speaks of draining a device before taking it offline.

:dread high-bit disease: n.

        A condition endemic to some now-obsolete computers and peripherals
        (including ASR-33 teletypes and PRIME minicomputers) that results in
        all characters having their high (0x80) bit forced on. This of
        course makes transporting files to other systems much more
        difficult, not to mention the problems these machines have talking
        with true 8-bit devices.

        This term was originally used specifically of PRIME (a.k.a. PR1ME)
        minicomputers. Folklore has it that PRIME adopted the reversed-8-bit
        convention in order to save 25 cents per serial line per machine;
        PRIME old-timers, on the other hand, claim they inherited the
        disease from Honeywell via customer NASA's compatibility
        requirements and struggled heroically to cure it. Whoever was
        responsible, this probably qualifies as one of the most {cretinous}
        design tradeoffs ever made. See {meta bit}.

:dread questionmark disease:

        n. The result of saving HTML from Microsoft Word or some other
        program that uses the nonstandard Microsoft variant of Latin-1; the
        symptom is that various of those nonstandard characters in positions
        128-160 show up as questionmarks. The usual culprit is the misnamed
        `smart quotes' feature in Microsoft Word. For more details (and a
        program called demoroniser that cleans up the mess) see
        http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/.

:DRECNET: /drek'net/, n.

        [from Yiddish/German `dreck', meaning filth] Deliberate distortion
        of DECNET, a networking protocol used in the {VMS} community. So
        called because {DEC} helped write the Ethernet specification and
        then (either stupidly or as a malignant customer-control tactic)
        violated that spec in the design of DRECNET in a way that made it
        incompatible. See also {connector conspiracy}.

:driver: n.

        1. The {main loop} of an event-processing program; the code that
        gets commands and dispatches them for execution.

        2. [techspeak] In device driver, code designed to handle a
        particular peripheral device such as a magnetic disk or tape unit.

        3. In the TeX world and the computerized typesetting world in
        general, a program that translates some device-independent or other
        common format to something a real device can actually understand.

:droid: n.

        [from android, SF terminology for a humanoid robot of essentially
        biological (as opposed to mechanical/electronic) construction] A
        person (esp. a low-level bureaucrat or service-business employee)
        exhibiting most of the following characteristics: (a) naive trust in
        the wisdom of the parent organization or `the system'; (b) a
        blind-faith propensity to believe obvious nonsense emitted by
        authority figures (or computers!); (c) a rule-governed mentality,
        one unwilling or unable to look beyond the `letter of the law' in
        exceptional situations; (d) a paralyzing fear of official reprimand
        or worse if Procedures are not followed No Matter What; and (e) no
        interest in doing anything above or beyond the call of a very
        narrowly-interpreted duty, or in particular in fixing that which is
        broken; an "It's not my job, man" attitude.

        Typical droid positions include supermarket checkout assistant and
        bank clerk; the syndrome is also endemic in low-level government
        employees. The implication is that the rules and official procedures
        constitute software that the droid is executing; problems arise when
        the software has not been properly debugged. The term droid
        mentality is also used to describe the mindset behind this behavior.
        Compare {suit}, {marketroid}; see {-oid}.

        In England there is equivalent mainstream slang; a `jobsworth' is an
        obstructive, rule-following bureaucrat, often of the uniformed or
        suited variety. Named for the habit of denying a reasonable request
        by sucking his teeth and saying "Oh no, guv, sorry I can't help you:
        that's more than my job's worth".

:drone: n.

        Ignorant sales or customer service personnel in computer or
        electronics superstores. Characterized by a lack of even superficial
        knowledge about the products they sell, yet possessed of the
        conviction that they are more competent than their hacker customers.
        Usage: "That video board probably sucks, it was recommended by a
        drone at Fry's" In the year 2000, their natural habitats include
        Fry's Electronics, Best Buy, and CompUSA.

:drool-proof paper: n.

        Documentation that has been obsessively {dumbed down}, to the point
        where only a {cretin} could bear to read it, is said to have
        succumbed to the `drool-proof paper syndrome' or to have been
        `written on drool-proof paper'. For example, this is an actual quote
        from Apple's LaserWriter manual: "Do not expose your LaserWriter to
        open fire or flame." The SGI Indy manual included the line "[Do not]
        dangle the mouse by the cord or throw it at coworkers."

:drop on the floor: vt.

        To react to an error condition by silently discarding messages or
        other valuable data. "The gateway ran out of memory, so it just
        started dropping packets on the floor." Also frequently used of
        faulty mail and netnews relay sites that lose messages. See also
        {black hole}, {bit bucket}.

:drop-ins: n.

        [prob.: by analogy with {drop-outs}] Spurious characters appearing
        on a terminal or console as a result of line noise or a system
        malfunction of some sort. Esp.: used when these are interspersed
        with one's own typed input. Compare {drop-outs}, sense 2.

:drop-outs: n.

        1. A variety of power glitch (see {glitch}); momentary 0 voltage on
        the electrical mains.

        2. Missing characters in typed input due to software malfunction or
        system saturation (one cause of such behavior under Unix when a bad
        connection to a modem swamps the processor with spurious character
        interrupts; see {screaming tty}).

        3. Mental glitches; used as a way of describing those occasions when
        the mind just seems to shut down for a couple of beats. See
        {glitch}, {fried}.

        A really serious case of {drop-outs}.

        (The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-05-21. The previous one
        is 73-05-19.)

:drugged: adj.

        (also on drugs)

        1. Conspicuously stupid, heading toward {brain-damaged}. Often
        accompanied by a pantomime of toking a joint.

        2. Of hardware, very slow relative to normal performance.

:drum: n.

        Ancient techspeak term referring to slow, cylindrical magnetic media
        that were once state-of-the-art storage devices. Under some versions
        of BSD Unix the disk partition used for swapping is still called
        /dev/drum; this has led to considerable humor and not a few
        straight-faced but utterly bogus `explanations' getting foisted on
        {newbie}s. See also " The Story of Mel'" in Appendix A.

:drunk mouse syndrome: n.

        (also mouse on drugs) A malady exhibited by the mouse pointing
        device of some computers. The typical symptom is for the mouse
        cursor on the screen to move in random directions and not in sync
        with the motion of the actual mouse. Can usually be corrected by
        unplugging the mouse and plugging it back again. Another recommended
        fix for optical mice is to rotate your mouse pad 90 degrees.

        At Xerox PARC in the 1970s, most people kept a can of copier cleaner
        (isopropyl alcohol) at their desks. When the steel ball on the mouse
        had picked up enough {cruft} to be unreliable, the mouse was doused
        in cleaner, which restored it for a while. However, this operation
        left a fine residue that accelerated the accumulation of cruft, so
        the dousings became more and more frequent. Finally, the mouse was
        declared `alcoholic' and sent to the clinic to be dried out in a CFC
        ultrasonic bath.

:DSW: n.

        [alt.(sysadmin|tech-support).recovery; abbrev. for Dick Size War] A
        contest between two or more people boasting about who has the faster
        machine, keys on (either physical or cryptographic) keyring, greyer
        hair, or almost anything. Salvos in a DSW are typically humorous and
        playful, often self-mocking.

:dub dub dub:

        [common] Spoken-only shorthand for the "www" (double-u double-u
        double-u) in many web host names. Nothing to do with the style of
        reggae music called `dub'.

:Duff's device: n.

        The most dramatic use yet seen of {fall through} in C, invented by
        Tom Duff when he was at Lucasfilm. Trying to optimize all the
        instructions he could out of an inner loop that copied data serially
        onto an output port, he decided to unroll it. He then realized that
        the unrolled version could be implemented by interlacing the
        structures of a switch and a loop:

           register n = (count + 7) / 8;      /* count > 0 assumed */

           switch (count % 8)
           {
           case 0:        do {  *to = *from++;
           case 7:              *to = *from++;
           case 6:              *to = *from++;
           case 5:              *to = *from++;
           case 4:              *to = *from++;
           case 3:              *to = *from++;
           case 2:              *to = *from++;
           case 1:              *to = *from++;
                              } while (--n > 0);
           }

        Shocking though it appears to all who encounter it for the first
        time, the device is actually perfectly valid, legal C. C's default
        {fall through} in case statements has long been its most
        controversial single feature; Duff observed that "This code forms
        some sort of argument in that debate, but I'm not sure whether it's
        for or against." Duff has discussed the device in detail at
        http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/duffs-device.html. Note that the
        omission of postfix ++ from *to was intentional (though confusing).
        Duff's device can be used to implement memory copy, but the original
        aim was to copy values serially into a magic IO register.

        [For maximal obscurity, the outermost pair of braces above could
        actually be removed -- GLS]

:dumb terminal: n.

        A terminal that is one step above a {glass tty}, having a minimally
        addressable cursor but no on-screen editing or other features
        normally supported by a {smart terminal}. Once upon a time, when
        glass ttys were common and addressable cursors were something
        special, what is now called a dumb terminal could pass for a smart
        terminal.

:dumbass attack: /duhm'as @tak/, n.

        [Purdue] Notional cause of a novice's mistake made by the
        experienced, especially one made while running as {root} under Unix,
        e.g., typing rm -r * or mkfs on a mounted file system. Compare
        {adger}.

:dumbed down: adj.

        Simplified, with a strong connotation of oversimplified. Often, a
        {marketroid} will insist that the interfaces and documentation of
        software be dumbed down after the designer has burned untold gallons
        of midnight oil making it smart. This creates friction. See
        {user-friendly}.

:dump: n.

        1. An undigested and voluminous mass of information about a problem
        or the state of a system, especially one routed to the slowest
        available output device (compare {core dump}), and most especially
        one consisting of hex or octal {runes} describing the byte-by-byte
        state of memory, mass storage, or some file. In {elder days},
        debugging was generally done by groveling over a dump (see
        {grovel}); increasing use of high-level languages and interactive
        debuggers has made such tedium uncommon, and the term dump now has a
        faintly archaic flavor.

        2. A backup. This usage is typical only at large timesharing
        installations.

:dumpster diving: /dump'ster di:'ving/, n.

        1. The practice of sifting refuse from an office or technical
        installation to extract confidential data, especially
        security-compromising information (`dumpster' is an Americanism for
        what is elsewhere called a skip). Back in AT&T's monopoly days,
        before paper shredders became common office equipment, phone phreaks
        (see {phreaking}) used to organize regular dumpster runs against
        phone company plants and offices. Discarded and damaged copies of
        AT&T internal manuals taught them much. The technique is still
        rumored to be a favorite of crackers operating against careless
        targets.

        2. The practice of raiding the dumpsters behind buildings where
        producers and/or consumers of high-tech equipment are located, with
        the expectation (usually justified) of finding discarded but
        still-valuable equipment to be nursed back to health in some
        hacker's den. Experienced dumpster-divers not infrequently
        accumulate basements full of moldering (but still potentially
        useful) {cruft}.

:dusty deck: n.

        Old software (especially applications) which one is obliged to
        remain compatible with, or to maintain ({DP} types call this legacy
        code, a term hackers consider smarmy and excessively reverent). The
        term implies that the software in question is a holdover from
        card-punch days. Used esp. when referring to old scientific and
        {number-crunching} software, much of which was written in FORTRAN
        and very poorly documented but is believed to be too expensive to
        replace. See {fossil}; compare {crawling horror}.

:DWIM: /dwim/

        [acronym, `Do What I Mean']

        1. adj. Able to guess, sometimes even correctly, the result intended
        when bogus input was provided.

        2. n. obs. The BBNLISP/INTERLISP function that attempted to
        accomplish this feat by correcting many of the more common errors.
        See {hairy}.

        3. Occasionally, an interjection hurled at a balky computer, esp.
        when one senses one might be tripping over legalisms (see
        {legalese}).

        4. Of a person, someone whose directions are incomprehensible and
        vague, but who nevertheless has the expectation that you will solve
        the problem using the specific method he/she has in mind.

        Warren Teitelman originally wrote DWIM to fix his typos and spelling
        errors, so it was somewhat idiosyncratic to his style, and would
        often make hash of anyone else's typos if they were stylistically
        different. Some victims of DWIM thus claimed that the acronym stood
        for `Damn Warren's Infernal Machine!'.

        In one notorious incident, Warren added a DWIM feature to the
        command interpreter used at Xerox PARC. One day another hacker there
        typed delete *$ to free up some disk space. (The editor there named
        backup files by appending $ to the original file name, so he was
        trying to delete any backup files left over from old editing
        sessions.) It happened that there weren't any editor backup files,
        so DWIM helpfully reported *$ not found, assuming you meant 'delete
        *'. It then started to delete all the files on the disk! The hacker
        managed to stop it with a {Vulcan nerve pinch} after only a half
        dozen or so files were lost.

        The disgruntled victim later said he had been sorely tempted to go
        to Warren's office, tie Warren down in his chair in front of his
        workstation, and then type delete *$ twice.

        DWIM is often suggested in jest as a desired feature for a complex
        program; it is also occasionally described as the single instruction
        the ideal computer would have. Back when proofs of program
        correctness were in vogue, there were also jokes about DWIMC (Do
        What I Mean, Correctly). A related term, more often seen as a verb,
        is DTRT (Do The Right Thing); see {Right Thing}.

:dynner: /din'r/, n.

        32 bits, by analogy with {nybble} and {byte}. Usage: rare and
        extremely silly. See also {playte}, {tayste}, {crumb}. General
        discussion of such terms is under {nybble}.

  E

   Easter egg

   Easter egging

   eat flaming death

   EBCDIC

   ECP

   ed

   egg

   egosurf

   eighty-column mind

   El Camino Bignum

   elder days

   elegant

   elephantine

   elevator controller

   elite

   ELIZA effect

   elvish

   EMACS

   email

   emoticon

   EMP

   empire

   engine

   English

   enhancement

   ENQ

   EOD

   EOF

   EOL

   EOU

   epoch

   epsilon

   epsilon squared

   era

   Eric Conspiracy

   Eris

   erotics

   error 33

   eurodemo

   evil

   evil and rude

   Evil Empire

   exa-

   examining the entrails

   EXCH

   excl

   EXE

   exec

   exercise, left as an

   Exon

   Exploder

   exploit

   external memory

   eye candy

   eyeball search

:Easter egg: n.

        [from the custom of the Easter Egg hunt observed in the U.S. and
        many parts of Europe]

        1. A message hidden in the object code of a program as a joke,
        intended to be found by persons disassembling or browsing the code.

        2. A message, graphic, or sound effect emitted by a program (or, on
        a PC, the BIOS ROM) in response to some undocumented set of commands
        or keystrokes, intended as a joke or to display program credits. One
        well-known early Easter egg found in a couple of OSes caused them to
        respond to the command make love with not war?. Many personal
        computers have much more elaborate eggs hidden in ROM, including
        lists of the developers' names, political exhortations, snatches of
        music, and (in one case) graphics images of the entire development
        team.

:Easter egging: n.

        [IBM] The act of replacing unrelated components more or less at
        random in hopes that a malfunction will go away. Hackers consider
        this the normal operating mode of {field circus} techs and do not
        love them for it. See also the jokes under {field circus}. Compare
        {shotgun debugging}.

:eat flaming death: imp.

        A construction popularized among hackers by the infamous {CPU Wars}
        comic; supposedly derived from a famously turgid line in a WWII-era
        anti-Nazi propaganda comic that ran "Eat flaming death, non-Aryan
        mongrels!" or something of the sort (however, it is also reported
        that on the Firesign Theatre's 1975 album In The Next World, You're
        On Your Own a character won the right to scream "Eat flaming death,
        fascist media pigs" in the middle of Oscar night on a game show;
        this may have been an influence). Used in humorously overblown
        expressions of hostility. "Eat flaming death, {EBCDIC} users!"

        IPM tells us to {eat flaming death}.

:EBCDIC: /eb's@dik/, /ebsee`dik/, /ebk@dik/, n.

        [abbreviation, Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code] An
        alleged character set used on IBM {dinosaur}s. It exists in at least
        six mutually incompatible versions, all featuring such delights as
        non-contiguous letter sequences and the absence of several ASCII
        punctuation characters fairly important for modern computer
        languages (exactly which characters are absent varies according to
        which version of EBCDIC you're looking at). IBM adapted EBCDIC from
        {punched card} code in the early 1960s and promulgated it as a
        customer-control tactic (see {connector conspiracy}), spurning the
        already established ASCII standard. Today, IBM claims to be an
        open-systems company, but IBM's own description of the EBCDIC
        variants and how to convert between them is still internally
        classified top-secret, burn-before-reading. Hackers blanch at the
        very name of EBCDIC and consider it a manifestation of purest
        {evil}. See also {fear and loathing}.

:ECP: /ECP/, n.

        See {spam} and {velveeta}.

:ed: n.

        "ed is the standard text editor." Line taken from the original
        {Unix} manual page on ed, an ancient line-oriented editor that is by
        now used only by a few {Real Programmer}s, and even then only for
        batch operations. The original line is sometimes uttered near the
        beginning of an emacs vs. vi holy war on {Usenet}, with the (vain)
        hope to quench the discussion before it really takes off. Often
        followed by a standard text describing the many virtues of ed (such
        as the small memory {footprint} on a Timex Sinclair, and the
        consistent (because nearly non-existent) user interface).

:egg: n.

        The binary code that is the payload for buffer overflow and format
        string attacks. Typically, an egg written in assembly and designed
        to enable remote access or escalate privileges from an ordinary user
        account to administrator level when it hatches. Also known as
        shellcode.

        The name comes from a particular buffer-overflow exploit that was
        co-written by a cracker named eggplant. The variable name `egg' was
        used to store the payload. The usage spread from people who saw and
        analyzed the code.

:egosurf: vi.

        To search the net for your name or links to your web pages. Perhaps
        connected to long-established SF-fan slang egoscan, to search for
        one's name in a fanzine.

:eighty-column mind: n.

        [IBM] The sort said to be possessed by persons for whom the
        transition from {punched card} to tape was traumatic (nobody has
        dared tell them about disks yet). It is said that these people,
        including (according to an old joke) the founder of IBM, will be
        buried `face down, 9-edge first' (the 9-edge being the bottom of the
        card). This directive is inscribed on IBM's 1402 and 1622 card
        readers and is referenced in a famous bit of doggerel called The
        Last Bug, the climactic lines of which are as follows:

           He died at the console
           Of hunger and thirst.
           Next day he was buried,
           Face down, 9-edge first.

        The eighty-column mind was thought by most hackers to dominate IBM's
        customer base and its thinking. This only began to change in the
        mid-1990s when IBM began to reinvent itself after the triumph of the
        {killer micro}. See {IBM}, {fear and loathing}, {code grinder}. A
        copy of The Last Bug lives on the the GNU site at
        http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/last.bug.html.

:El Camino Bignum: /el' k@meenoh bignuhm/, n.

        The road mundanely called El Camino Real, running along San
        Francisco peninsula. It originally extended all the way down to
        Mexico City; many portions of the old road are still intact.
        Navigation on the San Francisco peninsula is usually done relative
        to El Camino Real, which defines {logical} north and south even
        though it isn't really north-south in many places. El Camino Real
        runs right past Stanford University and so is familiar to hackers.

        The Spanish word `real' (which has two syllables: /rayahl'/) means
        `royal'; El Camino Real is `the royal road'. In the FORTRAN
        language, a real quantity is a number typically precise to seven
        significant digits, and a double precision quantity is a larger
        floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen significant
        digits (other languages have similar real types).

        When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a
        long road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on `real', he started
        calling it `El Camino Double Precision' -- but when the hacker was
        told that the road was hundreds of miles long, he renamed it `El
        Camino Bignum', and that name has stuck. (See {bignum}.)

        [GLS has since let slip that the unnamed hacker in this story was in
        fact himself --ESR]

        In the early 1990s, the synonym El Camino Virtual was been reported
        as an alternate at IBM and Amdahl sites in the Valley.

        Mathematically literate hackers in the Valley have also been heard
        to refer to some major cross-street intersecting El Camino Real as
        "El Camino Imaginary". One popular theory is that the intersection
        is located near Moffett Field -- where they keep all those complex
        planes.

:elder days: n.

        The heroic age of hackerdom (roughly, pre-1980); the era of the
        {PDP-10}, {TECO}, {ITS}, and the ARPANET. This term has been rather
        consciously adopted from J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy epic The Lord of
        the Rings. Compare {Iron Age}; see also {elvish} and {Great Worm}.

:elegant: adj.

        [common; from mathematical usage] Combining simplicity, power, and a
        certain ineffable grace of design. Higher praise than `clever',
        `winning', or even {cuspy}.

        The French aviator, adventurer, and author Antoine de Saint-Exupry,
        probably best known for his classic children's book The Little
        Prince, was also an aircraft designer. He gave us perhaps the best
        definition of engineering elegance when he said "A designer knows he
        has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but
        when there is nothing left to take away."

:elephantine: adj.

        Used of programs or systems that are both conspicuous {hog}s (owing
        perhaps to poor design founded on {brute force and ignorance}) and
        exceedingly {hairy} in source form. An elephantine program may be
        functional and even friendly, but (as in the old joke about being in
        bed with an elephant) it's tough to have around all the same (and,
        like a pachyderm, difficult to maintain). In extreme cases, hackers
        have been known to make trumpeting sounds or perform expressive
        proboscatory mime at the mention of the offending program. Usage:
        semi-humorous. Compare `has the elephant nature' and the somewhat
        more pejorative {monstrosity}. See also {second-system effect} and
        {baroque}.

:elevator controller: n.

        An archetypal dumb embedded-systems application, like {toaster}
        (which superseded it). During one period (1983--84) in the
        deliberations of ANSI X3J11 (the C standardization committee) this
        was the canonical example of a really stupid, memory-limited
        computation environment. "You can't require printf(3) to be part of
        the default runtime library -- what if you're targeting an elevator
        controller?" Elevator controllers became important rhetorical
        weapons on both sides of several {holy wars}.

:elite: adj.

        Clueful. Plugged-in. One of the cognoscenti. Also used as a general
        positive adjective. This term is not actually native hacker slang;
        it is used primarily by crackers and {warez d00dz}, for which reason
        hackers use it only with heavy irony. The term used to refer to the
        folks allowed in to the "hidden" or "privileged" sections of BBSes
        in the early 1980s (which, typically, contained pirated software).
        Frequently, early boards would only let you post, or even see, a
        certain subset of the sections (or `boards') on a BBS. Those who got
        to the frequently legendary `triple super secret' boards were elite.
        Misspellings of this term in warez d00dz style abound; the forms
        l337 eleet, and 31337 (among others) have been sighted.

        A true hacker would be more likely to use `wizardly'. Oppose
        {lamer}.

:ELIZA effect: /@li:'z@ @fekt/, n.

        [AI community] The tendency of humans to attach associations to
        terms from prior experience. For example, there is nothing magic
        about the symbol + that makes it well-suited to indicate addition;
        it's just that people associate it with addition. Using + or `plus'
        to mean addition in a computer language is taking advantage of the
        ELIZA effect.

        This term comes from the famous ELIZA program by Joseph Weizenbaum,
        which simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist by rephrasing many of the
        patient's statements as questions and posing them to the patient. It
        worked by simple pattern recognition and substitution of key words
        into canned phrases. It was so convincing, however, that there are
        many anecdotes about people becoming very emotionally caught up in
        dealing with ELIZA. All this was due to people's tendency to attach
        to words meanings which the computer never put there. The ELIZA
        effect is a {Good Thing} when writing a programming language, but it
        can blind you to serious shortcomings when analyzing an Artificial
        Intelligence system. Compare {ad-hockery}; see also {AI-complete}.
        Sources for a clone of the original Eliza are available at
        ftp://ftp.cc.utexas.edu/pub/AI_ATTIC/Programs/Classic/Eliza/Eliza.c.

:elvish: n.

        1. The Tengwar of Feanor, a table of letterforms resembling the
        beautiful Celtic half-uncial hand of the Book of Kells. Invented and
        described by J. R. R. Tolkien in The Lord of The Rings as an
        orthography for his fictional `elvish' languages, this system (which
        is both visually and phonetically {elegant}) has long fascinated
        hackers (who tend to be intrigued by artificial languages in
        general). It is traditional for graphics printers, plotters, window
        systems, and the like to support a Feanorian typeface as one of
        their demo items. See also {elder days}.

        2. By extension, any odd or unreadable typeface produced by a
        graphics device.

        3. The typeface mundanely called `Bcklin', an art-Noveau display
        font.

:EMACS: /ee'maks/, n.

        [from Editing MACroS] The ne plus ultra of hacker editors, a
        programmable text editor with an entire LISP system inside it. It
        was originally written by Richard Stallman in {TECO} under {ITS} at
        the MIT AI lab; AI Memo 554 described it as "an advanced,
        self-documenting, customizable, extensible real-time display
        editor". It has since been reimplemented any number of times, by
        various hackers, and versions exist that run under most major
        operating systems. Perhaps the most widely used version, also
        written by Stallman and now called "{GNU} EMACS" or {GNUMACS}, runs
        principally under Unix. (Its close relative XEmacs is the second
        most popular version.) It includes facilities to run compilation
        subprocesses and send and receive mail or news; many hackers spend
        up to 80% of their {tube time} inside it. Other variants include
        {GOSMACS}, CCA EMACS, UniPress EMACS, Montgomery EMACS, jove,
        epsilon, and MicroEMACS. (Though we use the original all-caps
        spelling here, it is nowadays very commonly `Emacs'.) Some EMACS
        versions running under window managers iconify as an overflowing
        kitchen sink, perhaps to suggest the one feature the editor does not
        (yet) include. Indeed, some hackers find EMACS too {heavyweight} and
        {baroque} for their taste, and expand the name as `Escape Meta Alt
        Control Shift' to spoof its heavy reliance on keystrokes decorated
        with {bucky bits}. Other spoof expansions include `Eight Megabytes
        And Constantly Swapping' (from when that was a lot of {core}),
        `Eventually malloc()s All Computer Storage', and `EMACS Makes A
        Computer Slow' (see {recursive acronym}). See also {vi}.

:email: /ee'mayl/

        (also written `e-mail' and `E-mail')

        1. n. Electronic mail automatically passed through computer networks
        and/or via modems over common-carrier lines. Contrast {snail-mail},
        {paper-net}, {voice-net}. See {network address}.

        2. vt. To send electronic mail.

        Oddly enough, the word emailed is actually listed in the OED; it
        means "embossed (with a raised pattern) or perh. arranged in a net
        or open work". A use from 1480 is given. The word is probably
        derived from French maill (enameled) and related to Old French
        emmaillere (network). A French correspondent tells us that in
        modern French, `email' is a hard enamel obtained by heating special
        paints in a furnace; an `emailleur' (no final e) is a craftsman who
        makes email (he generally paints some objects (like, say, jewelry)
        and cooks them in a furnace).

        There are numerous spelling variants of this word. In Internet
        traffic up to 1995, `email' predominates, `e-mail' runs a
        not-too-distant second, and `E-mail' and `Email' are a distant third
        and fourth.

:emoticon: /eemoh'tikon/, n.

        [common] An ASCII glyph used to indicate an emotional state in email
        or news. Although originally intended mostly as jokes, emoticons (or
        some other explicit humor indication) are virtually required under
        certain circumstances in high-volume text-only communication forums
        such as Usenet; the lack of verbal and visual cues can otherwise
        cause what were intended to be humorous, sarcastic, ironic, or
        otherwise non-100%-serious comments to be badly misinterpreted (not
        always even by {newbie}s), resulting in arguments and {flame war}s.

        Hundreds of emoticons have been proposed, but only a few are in
        common use. These include:

        +------------------------------------------------------------------+
        | :-) | `smiley face' (for humor, laughter, friendliness,          |
        |     | occasionally sarcasm)                                      |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        | :-( | `frowney face' (for sadness, anger, or upset)              |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        | ;-) | `half-smiley' ( {ha ha only serious}); also known as       |
        |     | semi-smiley or winkey face.                                |
        |-----+------------------------------------------------------------|
        | :-/ | `wry face'                                                 |
        +------------------------------------------------------------------+

        (These may become more comprehensible if you tilt your head
        sideways, to the left.) The first two listed are by far the most
        frequently encountered. Hyphenless forms of them are common on
        CompuServe, GEnie, and BIX; see also {bixie}. On {Usenet}, smiley is
        often used as a generic term synonymous with {emoticon}, as well as
        specifically for the happy-face emoticon.

        The invention of the original smiley and frowney emoticons is
        generally credited to Scott Fahlman at CMU in 1982. He later wrote:
        "I wish I had saved the original post, or at least recorded the date
        for posterity, but I had no idea that I was starting something that
        would soon pollute all the world's communication channels." In
        September 2002 the original post was recovered.

        There is a rival claim by one Kevin McKenzie, who seems to have
        proposed the smiley on the MsgGroup mailing list, April 12 1979. It
        seems likely these two inventions were independent. Users of the
        PLATO educational system report using emoticons composed from
        overlaid dot-matrix graphics in the 1970s.

        Note for the {newbie}: Overuse of the smiley is a mark of loserhood!
        More than one per paragraph is a fairly sure sign that you've gone
        over the line.

:EMP: /EMP/

        See {spam}.

:empire: n.

        Any of a family of military simulations derived from a game written
        by Peter Langston many years ago. A number of multi-player variants
        of varying degrees of sophistication exist, and one single-player
        version implemented for both Unix and VMS; the latter is even
        available as MS-DOS/Windows freeware. All are notoriously addictive.
        Of various commercial derivatives the best known is probably "Empire
        Deluxe" on PCs and Amigas.

        Modern empire is a real-time wargame played over the internet by up
        to 120 players. Typical games last from 24 hours (blitz) to a couple
        of months (long term). The amount of sleep you can get while playing
        is a function of the rate at which updates occur and the number of
        co-rulers of your country. Empire server software is available for
        Unix-like machines, and clients for Unix and other platforms. A
        comprehensive history of the game is available at
        http://www.empire.cx/infopages/History.html. The Empire resource
        site is at http://www.empire.cx/.

:engine: n.

        1. A piece of hardware that encapsulates some function but can't be
        used without some kind of {front end}. Today we have, especially,
        print engine: the guts of a laser printer.

        2. An analogous piece of software; notionally, one that does a lot
        of noisy crunching, such as a database engine.

        The hacker senses of engine are actually close to its original,
        pre-Industrial-Revolution sense of a skill, clever device, or
        instrument (the word is cognate to `ingenuity'). This sense had not
        been completely eclipsed by the modern connotation of
        power-transducing machinery in Charles Babbage's time, which
        explains why he named the stored-program computer that he designed
        in 1844 the Analytical Engine.

:English:

        1. n. obs. The source code for a program, which may be in any
        language, as opposed to the linkable or executable binary produced
        from it by a compiler. The idea behind the term is that to a real
        hacker, a program written in his favorite programming language is at
        least as readable as English. Usage: mostly by old-time hackers,
        though recognizable in context. Today the preferred shorthand is
        simply {source}.

        2. The official name of the database language used by the old Pick
        Operating System, actually a sort of crufty, brain-damaged SQL with
        delusions of grandeur. The name permitted {marketroid}s to say "Yes,
        and you can program our computers in English!" to ignorant {suit}s
        without quite running afoul of the truth-in-advertising laws.

:enhancement: n.

        Common {marketroid}-speak for a bug {fix}. This abuse of language is
        a popular and time-tested way to turn incompetence into increased
        revenue. A hacker being ironic would instead call the fix a
        {feature} -- or perhaps save some effort by declaring the bug itself
        to be a feature.

:ENQ: /enkw/, /enk/

        [from the ASCII mnemonic ENQuire for 0000101] An on-line convention
        for querying someone's availability. After opening a {talk mode}
        connection to someone apparently in heavy hack mode, one might type
        SYN SYN ENQ? (the SYNs representing notional synchronization bytes),
        and expect a return of {ACK} or {NAK} depending on whether or not
        the person felt interruptible. Compare {ping}, {finger}, and the
        usage of FOO? listed under {talk mode}.

:EOD: n.

        [IRC, Usenet] Abbreviation: End of Discussion. Used when the speaker
        believes he has stated his case and will not respond to further
        arguments or attacks.

:EOF: /EOF/, n.

        [abbreviation, `End Of File']

        1. [techspeak] The {out-of-band} value returned by C's sequential
        character-input functions (and their equivalents in other
        environments) when end of file has been reached. This value is
        usually -1 under C libraries postdating V6 Unix, but was originally
        0. DOS hackers think EOF is ^Z, and a few Amiga hackers think it's
        ^\.

        2. [Unix] The keyboard character (usually control-D, the ASCII EOT
        (End Of Transmission) character) that is mapped by the terminal
        driver into an end-of-file condition.

        3. Used by extension in non-computer contexts when a human is doing
        something that can be modeled as a sequential read and can't go
        further. "Yeah, I looked for a list of 360 mnemonics to post as a
        joke, but I hit EOF pretty fast; all the library had was a {JCL}
        manual." See also {EOL}.

:EOL: /EOL/, n.

        [End Of Line] Syn. for {newline}, derived perhaps from the original
        CDC6600 Pascal. Now rare, but widely recognized and occasionally
        used for brevity. Used in the example entry under {BNF}. See also
        {EOF}.

:EOU: /EOU/, n.

        The mnemonic of a mythical ASCII control character (End Of User)
        that would make an ASR-33 Teletype explode on receipt. This
        construction parodies the numerous obscure delimiter and control
        characters left in ASCII from the days when it was associated more
        with wire-service teletypes than computers (e.g., FS, GS, RS, US,
        EM, SUB, ETX, and esp. EOT). It is worth remembering that ASR-33s
        were big, noisy mechanical beasts with a lot of clattering parts;
        the notion that one might explode was nowhere near as ridiculous as
        it might seem to someone sitting in front of a {tube} or flatscreen
        today.

:epoch: n.

        [Unix: prob.: from astronomical timekeeping] The time and date
        corresponding to 0 in an operating system's clock and timestamp
        values. Under most Unix versions the epoch is 00:00:00 GMT, January
        1, 1970; under VMS, it's 00:00:00 of November 17, 1858 (base date of
        the U.S. Naval Observatory's ephemerides); on a Macintosh, it's the
        midnight beginning January 1 1904. System time is measured in
        seconds or {tick}s past the epoch. Weird problems may ensue when the
        clock wraps around (see {wrap around}), which is not necessarily a
        rare event; on systems counting 10 ticks per second, a signed 32-bit
        count of ticks is good only for 6.8 years. The 1-tick-per-second
        clock of Unix is good only until January 18, 2038, assuming at least
        some software continues to consider it signed and that word lengths
        don't increase by then. See also {wall time}. Microsoft Windows, on
        the other hand, has an epoch problem every 49.7 days -- but this is
        seldom noticed as Windows is almost incapable of staying up
        continuously for that long.

:epsilon:

        [see {delta}]

        1. n. A small quantity of anything. "The cost is epsilon."

        2. adj. Very small, negligible; less than {marginal}. "We can get
        this feature for epsilon cost."

        3. within epsilon of: close enough to be indistinguishable for all
        practical purposes, even closer than being within delta of. "That's
        not what I asked for, but it's within epsilon of what I wanted."
        Alternatively, it may mean not close enough, but very little is
        required to get it there: "My program is within epsilon of working."

:epsilon squared: n.

        A quantity even smaller than {epsilon}, as small in comparison to
        epsilon as epsilon is to something normal; completely negligible. If
        you buy a supercomputer for a million dollars, the cost of the
        thousand-dollar terminal to go with it is {epsilon}, and the cost of
        the ten-dollar cable to connect them is epsilon squared. Compare
        {lost in the underflow}, {lost in the noise}.

:era: n.

        Syn. {epoch}. Webster's Unabridged makes these words almost
        synonymous, but era more often connotes a span of time rather than a
        point in time, whereas the reverse is true for {epoch}. The {epoch}
        usage is recommended.

:Eric Conspiracy: n.

        A shadowy group of mustachioed hackers named Eric first pinpointed
        as a sinister conspiracy by an infamous talk.bizarre posting ca.
        1987; this was doubtless influenced by the numerous `Eric' jokes in
        the Monty Python oeuvre. There do indeed seem to be considerably
        more mustachioed Erics in hackerdom than the frequency of these
        three traits can account for unless they are correlated in some
        arcane way. Well-known examples include Eric Allman (he of the
        `Allman style' described under {indent style}) and Erik Fair
        (co-author of NNTP); your editor has heard from more than a hundred
        others by email, and the organization line `Eric Conspiracy Secret
        Laboratories' now emanates regularly from more than one site. See
        the Eric Conspiracy Web Page at http://www.catb.org/~esr/ecsl/ for
        full details.

:Eris: /e'ris/, n.

        The Greek goddess of Chaos, Discord, Confusion, and Things You Know
        Not Of; her name was latinized to Discordia and she was worshiped by
        that name in Rome. Not a very friendly deity in the Classical
        original, she was reinvented as a more benign personification of
        creative anarchy starting in 1959 by the adherents of
        {Discordianism} and has since been a semi-serious subject of
        veneration in several `fringe' cultures, including hackerdom. See
        {Discordianism}, {Church of the SubGenius}.

:erotics: /eero'tiks/, n.

        [Helsinki University of Technology, Finland] n. English-language
        university slang for electronics. Often used by hackers in Helsinki,
        maybe because good electronics excites them and makes them warm.

:error 33: n.

        1. [XEROX PARC] Predicating one research effort upon the success of
        another.

        2. Allowing your own research effort to be placed on the critical
        path of some other project (be it a research effort or not).

:eurodemo: /yoor'odem`o/

        a {demo}, sense 4

:evil: adj.

        As used by hackers, implies that some system, program, person, or
        institution is sufficiently maldesigned as to be not worth the
        bother of dealing with. Unlike the adjectives in the
        {cretinous}/{losing}/{brain-damaged} series, evil does not imply
        incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of goals or design
        criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's. This usage is more
        an esthetic and engineering judgment than a moral one in the
        mainstream sense. "We thought about adding a {Blue Glue} interface
        but decided it was too evil to deal with." "{TECO} is neat, but it
        can be pretty evil if you're prone to typos." Often pronounced with
        the first syllable lengthened, as /eeee'vil/. Compare {evil and
        rude}.

:evil and rude: adj.

        Both {evil} and {rude}, but with the additional connotation that the
        rudeness was due to malice rather than incompetence. Thus, for
        example: Microsoft's Windows NT is evil because it's a competent
        implementation of a bad design; it's rude because it's gratuitously
        incompatible with Unix in places where compatibility would have been
        as easy and effective to do; but it's evil and rude because the
        incompatibilities are apparently there not to fix design bugs in
        Unix but rather to lock hapless customers and developers into the
        Microsoft way. Hackish evil and rude is close to the mainstream
        sense of `evil'.

:Evil Empire: n.

        [from Ronald Reagan's famous characterization of the communist
        Soviet Union] Formerly {IBM}, now {Microsoft}. Functionally, the
        company most hackers love to hate at any given time. Hackers like to
        see themselves as romantic rebels against the Evil Empire, and
        frequently adopt this role to the point of ascribing rather more
        power and malice to the Empire than it actually has. See also {Borg}
        and search for `Evil Empire' pages on the Web.

:exa-: /ek's@/, pref.

        [SI] See {quantifiers}.

:examining the entrails: n.

        The process of {grovel}ling through a {core dump} or hex image in an
        attempt to discover the bug that brought a program or system down.
        The reference is to divination from the entrails of a sacrificed
        animal. Compare {runes}, {incantation}, {black art}.

:EXCH: /eks'ch@/, /eksch/, vt.

        To exchange two things, each for the other; to swap places. If you
        point to two people sitting down and say "Exch!", you are asking
        them to trade places. EXCH, meaning EXCHange, was originally the
        name of a PDP-10 instruction that exchanged the contents of a
        register and a memory location. Many newer hackers are probably
        thinking instead of the {PostScript} exchange operator (which is
        usually written in lowercase).

:excl: /eks'kl/, n.

        Abbreviation for `exclamation point'. See {bang}, {shriek}, {ASCII}.

:EXE: /eks'ee/, /eeksee/, /EXE/, n.

        An executable binary file. Some operating systems (notably MS-DOS,
        VMS, and TWENEX) use the extension .EXE to mark such files. This
        usage is also occasionally found among Unix programmers even though
        Unix executables don't have any required suffix.

:exec: /egzek'/, /eksek/, n.

        1. [Unix: from execute] Synonym for {chain}, derives from the
        exec(2) call.

        2. [from executive] obs. The command interpreter for an {OS} (see
        {shell}); term esp. used around mainframes, and prob.: derived from
        UNIVAC's archaic EXEC 2 and EXEC 8 operating systems.

        3. At IBM and VM/CMS shops, the equivalent of a shell command file
        (among VM/CMS users).

        The mainstream `exec' as an abbreviation for (human) executive is
        not used. To a hacker, an `exec' is always a program, never a
        person.

:exercise, left as an: adj.

        [from technical books] Used to complete a proof when one doesn't
        mind a {handwave}, or to avoid one entirely. The complete phrase is:
        "The proof [or `the rest'] is left as an exercise for the reader."
        This comment has occasionally been attached to unsolved research
        problems by authors possessed of either an evil sense of humor or a
        vast faith in the capabilities of their audiences.

:Exon: /eks'on/, excl.

        A generic obscenity that quickly entered wide use on the Internet
        and Usenet after the passage of the Communications Decency Act. From
        the last name of Senator James Exon (Democrat-Nebraska), primary
        author of the {CDA}. This usage outlasted the CDA itself, which was
        quashed a little over a year later by one of the most acerbic
        pro-free-speech opinions ever uttered by the Supreme Court. The
        campaign against it was led by an alliance of hackers and civil
        libertarians, and was the first effective political mobilization of
        the hacker culture. Use of Exon's name as an expletive outlived the
        CDA controversy itself.

:Exploder: n.

        Used within Microsoft to refer to the Windows Explorer, the
        web-interface component of Windows 95 and WinNT 4. Our spies report
        that most of the heavy guns at MS came from a Unix background and
        use command line utilities; even they are scornful of the
        over-gingerbreaded {WIMP environment}s that they have been called
        upon to create.

:exploit: n.

        [originally cracker slang]

        1. A vulnerability in software that can be used for breaking
        security or otherwise attacking an Internet host over the network.
        The {Ping O' Death} is a famous exploit.

        2. More grammatically, a program that exploits an exploit in sense
        1.

:external memory: n.

        A memo pad, palmtop computer, or written notes. "Hold on while I
        write that to external memory". The analogy is with store or DRAM
        versus nonvolatile disk storage on computers.

:eye candy: /i:' kand`ee/, n.

        [from mainstream slang "ear candy"] A display of some sort that's
        presented to {luser}s to keep them distracted while the program
        performs necessary background tasks. "Give 'em some eye candy while
        the back-end {slurp}s that {BLOB} into core." Reported as mainstream
        usage among players of graphics-heavy computer games. We're also
        told this term is mainstream slang for soft pornography, but that
        sense does not appear to be live among hackers.

:eyeball search: n.,v.

        To look for something in a mass of code or data with one's own
        native optical sensors, as opposed to using some sort of pattern
        matching software like {grep} or any other automated search tool.
        Also called a {vgrep}; compare {vdiff}.

  F

   face time

   factor

   fairings

   fall over

   fall through

   fan

   fandango on core

   FAQ

   FAQ list

   FAQL

   faradize

   farkled

   farm

   fascist

   fat electrons

   fat pipe

   fat-finger

   faulty

   fear and loathing

   feature

   feature creature

   feature creep

   feature key

   feature shock

   featurectomy

   feep

   feeper

   feeping creature

   feeping creaturism

   feetch feetch

   fence

   fencepost error

   fiber-seeking backhoe

   FidoNet

   field circus

   field servoid

   file signature

   filk

   film at 11

   filter

   Finagle's Law

   fine

   finger

   finger trouble

   finger-pointing syndrome

   finn

   firebottle

   firefighting

   firehose syndrome

   firewall code

   firewall machine

   fireworks mode

   firmware

   fish

   FISH queue

   fisking

   FITNR

   fix

   FIXME

   flag

   flag day

   flaky

   flamage

   flame

   flame bait

   flame on

   flame war

   flamer

   flap

   flarp

   flash crowd

   flat

   flat-ASCII

   flat-file

   flatten

   flavor

   flavorful

   flippy

   flood

   flowchart

   flower key

   flush

   flypage

   Flyspeck 3

   flytrap

   FM

   fnord

   FOAF

   FOD

   fold case

   followup

   fontology

   foo

   foobar

   fool

   fool file

   Foonly

   footprint

   for free

   for the rest of us

   for values of

   fora

   foreground

   fork

   fork bomb

   forked

   Formosa's Law

   Fortrash

   fortune cookie

   forum

   fossil

   four-color glossies

   frag

   fragile

   Frankenputer

   fred

   Fred Foobar

   frednet

   free software

   freeware

   freeze

   fried

   frink

   friode

   fritterware

   frob

   frobnicate

   frobnitz

   frog

   frogging

   front end

   frotz

   frotzed

   frowney

   FRS

   fry

   fscking

   FSF

   -fu

   FUBAR

   fuck me harder

   FUD

   FUD wars

   fudge

   fudge factor

   fuel up

   Full Monty

   fum

   functino

   funky

   funny money

   furrfu

:face time: n.

        [common] Time spent interacting with somebody face-to-face (as
        opposed to via electronic links). "Oh, yeah, I spent some face time
        with him at the last Usenix."

:factor: n.

        See {coefficient of X}.

:fairings: n., /fer'ingz/

        [FreeBSD; orig. a typo for fairness] A term thrown out in discussion
        whenever a completely and transparently nonsensical argument in
        one's favor(?) seems called for, e,g. at the end of a really long
        thread for which the outcome is no longer even cared about since
        everyone is now so sick of it; or in rebuttal to another nonsensical
        argument ("Change the loader to look for /kernel.pl? What about
        fairings?")

:fall over: vi.

        [IBM] Yet another synonym for {crash} or {lose}. `Fall over hard'
        equates to {crash and burn}.

:fall through: v.

        (n. fallthrough, var.: fall-through)

        1. To exit a loop by exhaustion, i.e., by having fulfilled its exit
        condition rather than via a break or exception condition that exits
        from the middle of it. This usage appears to be really old, dating
        from the 1940s and 1950s.

        2. To fail a test that would have passed control to a subroutine or
        some other distant portion of code.

        3. In C, `fall-through' occurs when the flow of execution in a
        switch statement reaches a case label other than by jumping there
        from the switch header, passing a point where one would normally
        expect to find a break. A trivial example:

        switch (color)
        {
        case GREEN:
           do_green();
           break;
        case PINK:
           do_pink();
           /* FALL THROUGH */
        case RED:
           do_red();
           break;
        default:
           do_blue();
           break;
        }

        The variant spelling /* FALL THRU */ is also common.

        The effect of the above code is to do_green() when color is GREEN,
        do_red() when color is RED, do_blue() on any other color other than
        PINK, and (and this is the important part) do_pink() and then
        do_red() when color is PINK. Fall-through is {considered harmful} by
        some, though there are contexts (such as the coding of state
        machines) in which it is natural; it is generally considered good
        practice to include a comment highlighting the fall-through where
        one would normally expect a break. See also {Duff's device}.

:fan: n.

        Without qualification, indicates a fan of science fiction,
        especially one who goes to {con}s and tends to hang out with other
        fans. Many hackers are fans, so this term has been imported from
        fannish slang; however, unlike much fannish slang it is recognized
        by most non-fannish hackers. Among SF fans the plural is correctly
        fen, but this usage is not automatic to hackers. "Laura reads the
        stuff occasionally but isn't really a fan."

:fandango on core: n.

        [Unix/C hackers, from the Iberian dance] In C, a wild pointer that
        runs out of bounds, causing a {core dump}, or corrupts the malloc(3)
        {arena} in such a way as to cause mysterious failures later on, is
        sometimes said to have `done a fandango on core'. On low-end
        personal machines without an MMU (or Windows boxes, which have an
        MMU but use it incompetently), this can corrupt the OS itself,
        causing massive lossage. Other frenetic dances, such as the cha-cha
        or the watusi, may be substituted. See {aliasing bug}, {precedence
        lossage}, {smash the stack}, {memory leak}, {memory smash}, {overrun
        screw}, {core}.

:FAQ: /FAQ/, /fak/, n.

        [Usenet]

        1. A Frequently Asked Question.

        2. A compendium of accumulated lore, posted periodically to
        high-volume newsgroups in an attempt to forestall such questions.
        Some people prefer the term `FAQ list' or `FAQL' /fa'kl/, reserving
        `FAQ' for sense 1.

        This lexicon itself serves as a good example of a collection of one
        kind of lore, although it is far too big for a regular FAQ posting.
        Examples: "What is the proper type of NULL?" and "What's that funny
        name for the # character?" are both Frequently Asked Questions.
        Several FAQs refer readers to the Jargon File.

:FAQ list: /FAQ list/, /fak list/, n.

        [common; Usenet] Syn {FAQ}, sense 2.

:FAQL: /fa'kl/, n.

        Syn. {FAQ list}.

:faradize: /far'@di:z/, v.

        [US Geological Survey] To start any hyper-addictive process or
        trend, or to continue adding current to such a trend. Telling one
        user about a new octo-tetris game you compiled would be a faradizing
        act -- in two weeks you might find your entire department playing
        the faradic game.

:farkled: /far'kld/, adj.

        [DeVry Institute of Technology, Atlanta] Syn. {hosed}. Poss. owes
        something to Yiddish farblondjet and/or the `Farkle Family' skits on
        Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, a popular comedy show of the late
        1960s.

:farm: n.

        A group of machines, especially a large group of near-identical
        machines running load-balancing software, dedicated to a single
        task. Historically the term server farm, used especially for a group
        of web servers, seems to have been coined by analogy with earlier
        {disk farm} in the early 1990s; generalization began with render
        farm for a group of machines dedicated to rendering computer
        animations (this term appears to have been popularized by publicity
        about the pioneering "Linux render farm" used to produce the movie
        Titanic). By 2001 other combinations such as "compile farm" and
        "compute farm" were increasingly common, and arguably borderline
        techspeak. More jargon uses seem likely to arise (and be absorbed
        into techspeak over time) as new uses are discovered for networked
        machine clusters. Compare {link farm}.

:fascist: adj.

        1. [common] Said of a computer system with excessive or annoying
        security barriers, usage limits, or access policies. The implication
        is that said policies are preventing hackers from getting
        interesting work done. The variant fascistic seems to have been
        preferred at MIT, poss. by analogy with touristic (see {tourist} or
        under the influence of German/Yiddish faschistisch).

        2. In the design of languages and other software tools, the fascist
        alternative is the most restrictive and structured way of capturing
        a particular function; the implication is that this may be desirable
        in order to simplify the implementation or provide tighter error
        checking. Compare {bondage-and-discipline language}, although that
        term is global rather than local.

        Fascist security strikes again.

        (The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-05-28. The previous one
        is 73-05-20.)

:fat electrons: n.

        Old-time hacker David Cargill's theory on the causation of computer
        glitches. Your typical electric utility draws its line current out
        of the big generators with a pair of coil taps located near the top
        of the dynamo. When the normal tap brushes get dirty, they take them
        off line to clean them up, and use special auxiliary taps on the
        bottom of the coil. Now, this is a problem, because when they do
        that they get not ordinary or `thin' electrons, but the fat'n'sloppy
        electrons that are heavier and so settle to the bottom of the
        generator. These flow down ordinary wires just fine, but when they
        have to turn a sharp corner (as in an integrated-circuit via),
        they're apt to get stuck. This is what causes computer glitches.
        [Fascinating. Obviously, fat electrons must gain mass by {bogon}
        absorption --ESR] Compare {bogon}, {magic smoke}.

:fat pipe:

        A high-bandwidth connection to the Internet. When the term gained
        currency in the mid-1990s, a T-1 (at 1.5 Mbits/second) was
        considered a fat pipe, but the standard has risen. Now it suggests
        multiple T3s.

:fat-finger: vt.

        1. To introduce a typo while editing in such a way that the
        resulting manglification of a configuration file does something
        useless, damaging, or wildly unexpected. "NSI fat-fingered their DNS
        zone file and took half the net down again."

        2. More generally, any typo that produces dramatically bad results.

:faulty: adj.

        Non-functional; buggy. Same denotation as {bletcherous}, {losing},
        q.v., but the connotation is much milder.

:fear and loathing: n.

        [from Hunter S. Thompson] A state inspired by the prospect of
        dealing with certain real-world systems and standards that are
        totally {brain-damaged} but ubiquitous -- Intel 8086s, or {COBOL},
        or {EBCDIC}, or any {IBM} machine bigger than a workstation. "Ack!
        They want PCs to be able to talk to the AI machine. Fear and
        loathing time!"

:feature: n.

        1. [common] A good property or behavior (as of a program). Whether
        it was intended or not is immaterial.

        2. [common] An intended property or behavior (as of a program).
        Whether it is good or not is immaterial (but if bad, it is also a
        {misfeature}).

        3. A surprising property or behavior; in particular, one that is
        purposely inconsistent because it works better that way -- such an
        inconsistency is therefore a {feature} and not a {bug}. This kind of
        feature is sometimes called a {miswart}; see that entry for a
        classic example.

        4. A property or behavior that is gratuitous or unnecessary, though
        perhaps also impressive or cute. For example, one feature of Common
        LISP's format function is the ability to print numbers in two
        different Roman-numeral formats (see {bells whistles and gongs}).

        5. A property or behavior that was put in to help someone else but
        that happens to be in your way.

        6. [common] A bug that has been documented. To call something a
        feature sometimes means the author of the program did not consider
        the particular case, and that the program responded in a way that
        was unexpected but not strictly incorrect. A standard joke is that a
        bug can be turned into a {feature} simply by documenting it (then
        theoretically no one can complain about it because it's in the
        manual), or even by simply declaring it to be good. "That's not a
        bug, that's a feature!" is a common catchphrase. See also {feetch
        feetch}, {creeping featurism}, {wart}, {green lightning}.

        The relationship among bugs, features, misfeatures, warts, and
        miswarts might be clarified by the following hypothetical exchange
        between two hackers on an airliner:

        A: "This seat doesn't recline."

        B: "That's not a bug, that's a feature. There is an emergency exit
        door built around the window behind you, and the route has to be
        kept clear."

        A: "Oh. Then it's a misfeature; they should have increased the
        spacing between rows here."

        B: "Yes. But if they'd increased spacing in only one section it
        would have been a wart -- they would've had to make
        nonstandard-length ceiling panels to fit over the displaced seats."

        A: "A miswart, actually. If they increased spacing throughout they'd
        lose several rows and a chunk out of the profit margin. So unequal
        spacing would actually be the Right Thing."

        B: "Indeed."

        Undocumented feature is a common, allegedly humorous euphemism for a
        {bug}. There's a related joke that is sometimes referred to as the
        "one-question geek test". You say to someone "I saw a Volkswagen
        Beetle today with a vanity license plate that read FEATURE". If
        he/she laughs, he/she is a {geek}.

:feature creature: n.

        [poss. fr. slang `creature feature' for a horror movie]

        1. One who loves to add features to designs or programs, perhaps at
        the expense of coherence, concision, or {taste}.

        2. Alternately, a mythical being that induces otherwise rational
        programmers to perpetrate such crocks. See also {feeping
        creaturism}, {creeping featurism}.

:feature creep: n.

        [common] The result of {creeping featurism}, as in "Emacs has a bad
        case of feature creep".

:feature key: n.

        [common] The Macintosh key with the cloverleaf graphic on its
        keytop; sometimes referred to as flower, pretzel, clover, propeller,
        beanie (an apparent reference to the major feature of a propeller
        beanie), {splat}, open-apple or (officially, in Mac documentation)
        the command key. In French, the term papillon (butterfly) has been
        reported. The proliferation of terms for this creature may
        illustrate one subtle peril of iconic interfaces.

        Many people have been mystified by the cloverleaf-like symbol that
        appears on the feature key. Its oldest name is `cross of St.
        Hannes', but it occurs in pre-Christian Viking art as a decorative
        motif. Throughout Scandinavia today the road agencies use it to mark
        sites of historical interest. Apple picked up the symbol from an
        early Mac developer who happened to be Swedish. Apple documentation
        gives the translation "interesting feature"!

        There is some dispute as to the proper (Swedish) name of this
        symbol. It technically stands for the word sevrdhet (thing worth
        seeing); many of these are old churches. Some Swedes report as an
        idiom for the sign the word kyrka, cognate to English `church' and
        pronounced (roughly) /chur'ka/ in modern Swedish. Others say this is
        nonsense. Other idioms reported for the sign are runa (rune) or
        runsten /roon'stn/ (runestone), derived from the fact that many of
        the interesting features are Viking rune-stones. The term fornminne
        /foorn'min'@/ (relic of antiquity, ancient monument) is also
        reported, especially among those who think that the Mac itself is a
        relic of antiquity.

:feature shock: n.

        [from Alvin Toffler's book title Future Shock] A user's (or
        programmer's!) confusion when confronted with a package that has too
        many features and poor introductory material.

:featurectomy: /fee`ch@rek't@mee/, n.

        The act of removing a feature from a program. Featurectomies come in
        two flavors, the righteous and the reluctant. Righteous
        featurectomies are performed because the remover believes the
        program would be more elegant without the feature, or there is
        already an equivalent and better way to achieve the same end. (Doing
        so is not quite the same thing as removing a {misfeature}.)
        Reluctant featurectomies are performed to satisfy some external
        constraint such as code size or execution speed.

:feep: /feep/

        1. n. The soft electronic `bell' sound of a display terminal (except
        for a VT-52); a beep (in fact, the microcomputer world seems to
        prefer {beep}).

        2. vi. To cause the display to make a feep sound. ASR-33s (the
        original TTYs) do not feep; they have mechanical bells that ring.
        Alternate forms: {beep}, `bleep', or just about anything suitably
        onomatopoeic. (Jeff MacNelly, in his comic strip Shoe, uses the word
        `eep' for sounds made by computer terminals and video games; this is
        perhaps the closest written approximation yet.) The term `breedle'
        was sometimes heard at SAIL, where the terminal bleepers are not
        particularly soft (they sound more like the musical equivalent of a
        raspberry or Bronx cheer; for a close approximation, imagine the
        sound of a Star Trek communicator's beep lasting for five seconds).
        The `feeper' on a VT-52 has been compared to the sound of a '52
        Chevy stripping its gears. See also {ding}.

:feeper: /fee'pr/, n.

        The device in a terminal or workstation (usually a loudspeaker of
        some kind) that makes the {feep} sound.

:feeping creature: n.

        [from {feeping creaturism}] An unnecessary feature; a bit of
        {chrome} that, in the speaker's judgment, is the camel's nose for a
        whole horde of new features.

:feeping creaturism: /fee'ping kree`ch@rizm/, n.

        A deliberate spoonerism for {creeping featurism}, meant to imply
        that the system or program in question has become a misshapen
        creature of hacks. This term isn't really well defined, but it
        sounds so neat that most hackers have said or heard it. It is
        probably reinforced by an image of terminals prowling about in the
        dark making their customary noises.

:feetch feetch: /feech feech/, interj.

        If someone tells you about some new improvement to a program, you
        might respond: "Feetch, feetch!" The meaning of this depends
        critically on vocal inflection. With enthusiasm, it means something
        like "Boy, that's great! What a great hack!" Grudgingly or with
        obvious doubt, it means "I don't know; it sounds like just one more
        unnecessary and complicated thing". With a tone of resignation, it
        means, "Well, I'd rather keep it simple, but I suppose it has to be
        done".

:fence:

        n.

        1. A sequence of one or more distinguished ({out-of-band})
        characters (or other data items), used to delimit a piece of data
        intended to be treated as a unit (the computer-science literature
        calls this a sentinel). The NUL (ASCII 0000000) character that
        terminates strings in C is a fence. Hex FF is also (though slightly
        less frequently) used this way. See {zigamorph}.

        2. An extra data value inserted in an array or other data structure
        in order to allow some normal test on the array's contents also to
        function as a termination test. For example, a highly optimized
        routine for finding a value in an array might artificially place a
        copy of the value to be searched for after the last slot of the
        array, thus allowing the main search loop to search for the value
        without having to check at each pass whether the end of the array
        had been reached.

        3. [among users of optimizing compilers] Any technique, usually
        exploiting knowledge about the compiler, that blocks certain
        optimizations. Used when explicit mechanisms are not available or
        are overkill. Typically a hack: "I call a dummy procedure there to
        force a flush of the optimizer's register-coloring info" can be
        expressed by the shorter "That's a fence procedure".

:fencepost error: n.

        1. [common] A problem with the discrete equivalent of a boundary
        condition, often exhibited in programs by iterative loops. From the
        following problem: "If you build a fence 100 feet long with posts 10
        feet apart, how many posts do you need?" (Either 9 or 11 is a better
        answer than the obvious 10.) For example, suppose you have a long
        list or array of items, and want to process items m through n; how
        many items are there? The obvious answer is n - m, but that is off
        by one; the right answer is n - m + 1. A program that used the
        `obvious' formula would have a fencepost error in it. See also
        {zeroth} and {off-by-one error}, and note that not all off-by-one
        errors are fencepost errors. The game of Musical Chairs involves a
        catastrophic off-by-one error where N people try to sit in N - 1
        chairs, but it's not a fencepost error. Fencepost errors come from
        counting things rather than the spaces between them, or vice versa,
        or by neglecting to consider whether one should count one or both
        ends of a row.

        2. [rare] An error induced by unexpected regularities in input
        values, which can (for instance) completely thwart a theoretically
        efficient binary tree or hash table implementation. (The error here
        involves the difference between expected and worst case behaviors of
        an algorithm.)

:fiber-seeking backhoe:

        [common among backbone ISP personnel] Any of a genus of large,
        disruptive machines which routinely cut critical backbone links,
        creating Internet outages and {packet over air} problems.

:FidoNet: n.

        A worldwide hobbyist network of personal computers which exchanges
        mail, discussion groups, and files. Founded in 1984 and originally
        consisting only of IBM PCs and compatibles, FidoNet now includes
        such diverse machines as Apple ][s, Ataris, Amigas, and Unix
        systems. For years FidoNet actually grew faster than Usenet, but the
        advent of cheap Internet access probably means its days are
        numbered. FidoNet's site count has dropped from 38K nodes in 1996
        through 15K nodes in 2001 to 10K nodes in late 2003, and most of
        those are probably single-user machines rather than the thriving
        BBSes of yore.

:field circus: n.

        [a derogatory pun on `field service'] The field service organization
        of any hardware manufacturer, but originally {DEC}. There is an
        entire genre of jokes about field circus engineers:

        Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer
           with a flat tire?
        A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.

        Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer
           who is out of gas?
        A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.

        Q: How can you tell it's your field circus engineer?
        A: The spare is flat, too.

        [See {Easter egging} for additional insight on these jokes.]

        There is also the `Field Circus Cheer' (from the old {plan file} for
        DEC on MIT-AI):

        Maynard! Maynard!
        Don't mess with us!
        We're mean and we're tough!
        If you get us confused
        We'll screw up your stuff.

        (DEC's service HQ, still extant under the HP regime, is located in
        Maynard, Massachusetts.)

:field servoid: /fee'ld servoyd/, n.

        [play on `android'] Representative of a field service organization
        (see {field circus}). This has many of the implications of {droid}.

:file signature: n.

        A {magic number}, sense 3.

:filk: /filk/, n.,v.

        [from SF fandom, where a typo for `folk' was adopted as a new word]
        Originally, a popular or folk song with lyrics revised or completely
        new lyrics and/or music, intended for humorous effect when read,
        and/or to be sung late at night at SF conventions. More recently
        (especially since the late 1980s), filk has come to include a great
        deal of originally-composed music on SFnal or fantasy themes and a
        range of moods wider than simple parody or humor. Worthy of mention
        here because there is a flourishing subgenre of filks called
        computer filks, written by hackers and often containing rather
        sophisticated technical humor. See {double bucky} for an example.
        Compare {grilf}, {hing}, {pr0n}, and {newsfroup}.

:film at 11:

        [MIT: in parody of TV newscasters]

        1. Used in conversation to announce ordinary events, with a
        sarcastic implication that these events are earth-shattering. "{ITS}
        crashes; film at 11." "Bug found in scheduler; film at 11."

        2. Also widely used outside MIT to indicate that additional
        information will be available at some future time, without the
        implication of anything particularly ordinary about the referenced
        event. For example, "The mail file server died this morning; we
        found garbage all over the root directory. Film at 11." would
        indicate that a major failure had occurred but that the people
        working on it have no additional information about it as yet; use of
        the phrase in this way suggests gently that the problem is liable to
        be fixed more quickly if the people doing the fixing can spend time
        doing the fixing rather than responding to questions, the answers to
        which will appear on the normal "11:00 news", if people will just be
        patient.

        The variant "MPEGs at 11" has recently been cited (MPEG is a
        digital-video format.)

:filter: n.

        [very common; orig. {Unix}] A program that processes an input data
        stream into an output data stream in some well-defined way, and does
        no I/O to anywhere else except possibly on error conditions; one
        designed to be used as a stage in a pipeline (see {plumbing}).
        Compare {sponge}.

:Finagle's Law: n.

        The generalized or `folk' version of {Murphy's Law}, fully named
        "Finagle's Law of Dynamic Negatives" and usually rendered "Anything
        that can go wrong, will". May have been first published by Francis
        P. Chisholm in his 1963 essay The Chisholm Effect, later reprinted
        in the classic anthology A Stress Analysis Of A Strapless Evening
        Gown: And Other Essays For A Scientific Eye (Robert Baker ed,
        Prentice-Hall, ISBN 0-13-852608-7).

        The label `Finagle's Law' was popularized by SF author Larry Niven
        in several stories depicting a frontier culture of asteroid miners;
        this `Belter' culture professed a religion and/or running joke
        involving the worship of the dread god Finagle and his mad prophet
        Murphy. Some technical and scientific cultures (e.g.,
        paleontologists) know it under the name Sod's Law; this usage may be
        more common in Great Britain. One variant favored among hackers is
        "The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum"; Niven
        specifically referred to this as O'Toole's Corollary of Finagle's
        Law. See also {Hanlon's Razor}.

:fine: adj.

        [WPI] Good, but not good enough to be {cuspy}. The word fine is used
        elsewhere, of course, but without the implicit comparison to the
        higher level implied by {cuspy}.

:finger:

        [WAITS, via BSD Unix]

        1. n. A program that displays information about a particular user or
        all users logged on the system, or a remote system. Typically shows
        full name, last login time, idle time, terminal line, and terminal
        location (where applicable). May also display a {plan file} left by
        the user (see also {Hacking X for Y}).

        2. vt. To apply finger to a username.

        3. vt. By extension, to check a human's current state by any means.
        "Foodp?" "T!" "OK, finger Lisa and see if she's idle."

        4. Any picture (composed of ASCII characters) depicting `the
        finger', see {See figure 1}. Originally a humorous component of
        one's plan file to deter the curious fingerer (sense 2), it has
        entered the arsenal of some {flamer}s.

:finger trouble: n.

        Mistyping, typos, or generalized keyboard incompetence (this is
        surprisingly common among hackers, given the amount of time they
        spend at keyboards). "I keep putting colons at the end of statements
        instead of semicolons", "Finger trouble again, eh?".

:finger-pointing syndrome: n.

        All-too-frequent result of bugs, esp. in new or experimental
        configurations. The hardware vendor points a finger at the software.
        The software vendor points a finger at the hardware. All the poor
        users get is the finger.

:finn: v.

        [IRC] To pull rank on somebody based on the amount of time one has
        spent on {IRC}. The term derives from the fact that IRC was
        originally written in Finland in 1987. There may be some influence
        from the `Finn' character in William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk
        novel Count Zero, who at one point says to another (much younger)
        character "I have a pair of shoes older than you are, so shut up!"

:firebottle: n.obs.

        A large, primitive, power-hungry active electrical device, similar
        in function to a FET but constructed out of glass, metal, and
        vacuum. Characterized by high cost, low density, low reliability,
        high-temperature operation, and high power dissipation. Sometimes
        mistakenly called a tube in the U.S. or a valve in England; another
        hackish term is {glassfet}.

:firefighting: n.

        1. What sysadmins have to do to correct sudden operational problems.
        An opposite of hacking. "Been hacking your new newsreader?" "No, a
        power glitch hosed the network and I spent the whole afternoon
        fighting fires."

        2. The act of throwing lots of manpower and late nights at a
        project, esp. to get it out before deadline. See also {gang bang},
        {Mongolian Hordes technique}; however, the term firefighting
        connotes that the effort is going into chasing bugs rather than
        adding features.

:firehose syndrome: n.

        In mainstream folklore it is observed that trying to drink from a
        firehose can be a good way to rip your lips off. On computer
        networks, the absence or failure of flow control mechanisms can lead
        to situations in which the sending system sprays a massive flood of
        packets at an unfortunate receiving system, more than it can handle.
        Compare {overrun}, {buffer overflow}.

:firewall code: n.

        1. The code you put in a system (say, a telephone switch) to make
        sure that the users can't do any damage. Since users always want to
        be able to do everything but never want to suffer for any mistakes,
        the construction of a firewall is a question not only of defensive
        coding but also of interface presentation, so that users don't even
        get curious about those corners of a system where they can burn
        themselves.

        2. Any sanity check inserted to catch a {can't happen} error. Wise
        programmers often change code to fix a bug twice: once to fix the
        bug, and once to insert a firewall which would have arrested the bug
        before it did quite as much damage.

:firewall machine: n.

        A dedicated gateway machine with special security precautions on it,
        used to service outside network connections and dial-in lines. The
        idea is to protect a cluster of more loosely administered machines
        hidden behind it from {cracker}s. The typical firewall is an
        inexpensive micro-based Unix box kept clean of critical data, with a
        bunch of modems and public network ports on it but just one
        carefully watched connection back to the rest of the cluster. The
        special precautions may include threat monitoring, callback, and
        even a complete {iron box} keyable to particular incoming IDs or
        activity patterns. Syn. {flytrap}, {Venus flytrap}. See also {wild
        side}.

        [When first coined in the mid-1980s this term was pure jargon. Now
        (1999) it is techspeak, and has been retained only as an example of
        uptake --ESR]

:fireworks mode: n.

        1. The mode a machine is sometimes said to be in when it is
        performing a {crash and burn} operation.

        2. There is (or was) a more specific meaning of this term in the
        Amiga community. The word fireworks described the effects of a
        particularly serious crash which prevented the video pointer(s) from
        getting reset at the start of the vertical blank. This caused the
        DAC to scroll through the entire contents of CHIP (video or
        video+CPU) memory. Since each bit plane would scroll separately this
        was quite a spectacular effect.

:firmware: /ferm'weir/, n.

        Embedded software contained in EPROM or flash memory. It isn't quite
        hardware, but at least doesn't have to be loaded from a disk like
        regular software. Hacker usage differs from straight techspeak in
        that hackers don't normally apply it to stuff that you can't
        possibly get at, such as the program that runs a pocket calculator.
        Instead, it implies that the firmware could be changed, even if
        doing so would mean opening a box and plugging in a new chip. A
        computer's BIOS is the classic example, although nowadays there is
        firmware in disk controllers, modems, video cards and even CD-ROM
        drives.

:fish: n.

        [Adelaide University, Australia]

        1. Another {metasyntactic variable}. See {foo}. Derived originally
        from the Monty Python skit in the middle of The Meaning of Life
        entitled Find the Fish.

        2. A pun for microfiche. A microfiche file cabinet may be referred
        to as a fish tank.

:FISH queue: n.

        [acronym, by analogy with FIFO (First In, First Out)] `First In,
        Still Here'. A joking way of pointing out that processing of a
        particular sequence of events or requests has stopped dead. Also
        FISH mode and FISHnet; the latter may be applied to any network that
        is running really slowly or exhibiting extreme flakiness.

:fisking: n.

        [blogosphere; very common] A point-by-point refutation of a {blog}
        entry or (especially) news story. A really stylish fisking is witty,
        logical, sarcastic and ruthlessly factual; flaming or handwaving is
        considered poor form. Named after Robert Fisk, a British journalist
        who was a frequent (and deserving) early target of such treatment.
        See also {MiSTing}, {anti-idiotarianism}

:FITNR: //, adj.

        [Thinking Machines, Inc.] Fixed In The Next Release. A written-only
        notation attached to bug reports. Often wishful thinking.

:fix: n.,v.

        What one does when a problem has been reported too many times to be
        ignored.

:FIXME: imp.

        [common] A standard tag often put in C comments near a piece of code
        that needs work. The point of doing so is that a grep or a similar
        pattern-matching tool can find all such places quickly.

        /* FIXME: note this is common in {GNU} code. */

        Compare {XXX}.

:flag: n.

        [very common] A variable or quantity that can take on one of two
        values; a bit, particularly one that is used to indicate one of two
        outcomes or is used to control which of two things is to be done.
        "This flag controls whether to clear the screen before printing the
        message." "The program status word contains several flag bits." Used
        of humans analogously to {bit}. See also {hidden flag}, {mode bit}.

:flag day: n.

        A software change that is neither forward- nor backward-compatible,
        and which is costly to make and costly to reverse. "Can we install
        that without causing a flag day for all users?" This term has
        nothing to do with the use of the word {flag} to mean a variable
        that has two values. It came into use when a change was made to the
        definition of the ASCII character set during the development of
        {Multics}. The change was scheduled for Flag Day (a U.S. holiday),
        June 14, 1966.

        The change altered the Multics definition of ASCII from the
        short-lived 1965 version of the ASCII code to the 1967 version (in
        draft at the time); this moved code points for braces, vertical bar,
        and circumflex. See also {backward combatability}. The {Great
        Renaming} was a flag day.

        [Most of the changes were made to files stored on {CTSS}, the system
        used to support Multics development before it became self-hosting.]

        [As it happens, the first installation of a commercially-produced
        computer, a Univac I, took place on Flag Day of 1951 --ESR]

:flaky: adj.

        (var sp. flakey) Subject to frequent {lossage}. This use is of
        course related to the common slang use of the word to describe a
        person as eccentric, crazy, or just unreliable. A system that is
        flaky is working, sort of -- enough that you are tempted to try to
        use it -- but fails frequently enough that the odds in favor of
        finishing what you start are low. Commonwealth hackish prefers
        {dodgy} or {wonky}.

:flamage: /flay'm@j/, n.

        [very common] Flaming verbiage, esp. high-noise, low-signal postings
        to {Usenet} or other electronic {fora}. Often in the phrase the
        usual flamage. Flaming is the act itself; flamage the content; a
        flame is a single flaming message. See {flame}, also {dahmum}.

:flame:

        [at MIT, orig. from the phrase flaming asshole]

        1. vi. To post an email message intended to insult and provoke.

        2. vi. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively
        uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude.

        3. vt. Either of senses 1 or 2, directed with hostility at a
        particular person or people.

        4. n. An instance of flaming. When a discussion degenerates into
        useless controversy, one might tell the participants "Now you're
        just flaming" or "Stop all that flamage!" to try to get them to cool
        down (so to speak).

        The term may have been independently invented at several different
        places. It has been reported from MIT, Carleton College and RPI
        (among many other places) from as far back as 1969, and from the
        University of Virginia in the early 1960s.

        It is possible that the hackish sense of `flame' is much older than
        that. The poet Chaucer was also what passed for a wizard hacker in
        his time; he wrote a treatise on the astrolabe, the most advanced
        computing device of the day. In Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida,
        Cressida laments her inability to grasp the proof of a particular
        mathematical theorem; her uncle Pandarus then observes that it's
        called "the fleminge of wrecches." This phrase seems to have been
        intended in context as "that which puts the wretches to flight" but
        was probably just as ambiguous in Middle English as "the flaming of
        wretches" would be today. One suspects that Chaucer would feel right
        at home on Usenet.

:flame bait: n.

        [common] A posting intended to trigger a {flame war}, or one that
        invites flames in reply. See also {troll}.

:flame on: interj.

        1. To begin to {flame}. The punning reference to Marvel Comics's
        Human Torch is no longer widely recognized.

        2. To continue to flame. See {rave}, {burble}.

:flame war: n.

        [common] (var.: flamewar) An acrimonious dispute, especially when
        conducted on a public electronic forum such as {Usenet}.

:flamer: n.

        [common] One who habitually {flame}s. Said esp. of obnoxious
        {Usenet} personalities.

:flap: vt.

        1. [obs.] To unload a DECtape (so it goes flap, flap, flap...).
        Old-time hackers at MIT tell of the days when the disk was device 0
        and DEC microtapes were 1, 2,... and attempting to flap device 0
        would instead start a motor banging inside a cabinet near the disk.

        2. By extension, to unload any magnetic tape. Modern cartridge tapes
        no longer actually flap, but the usage has remained. (The term could
        well be re-applied to DEC's TK50 cartridge tape drive, a
        spectacularly misengineered contraption which makes a loud flapping
        sound, almost like an old reel-type lawnmower, in one of its many
        tape-eating failure modes.)

:flarp: /flarp/, n.

        [Rutgers University] Yet another {metasyntactic variable} (see
        {foo}). Among those who use it, it is associated with a legend that
        any program not containing the word flarp somewhere will not work.
        The legend is discreetly silent on the reliability of programs which
        do contain the magic word.

:flash crowd:

        Larry Niven's 1973 SF short story Flash Crowd predicted that one
        consequence of cheap teleportation would be huge crowds
        materializing almost instantly at the sites of interesting news
        stories. Twenty years later the term passed into common use on the
        Internet to describe exponential spikes in website or server usage
        when one passes a certain threshold of popular interest (what this
        does to the server may also be called {slashdot effect}). It has
        been pointed out that the effect was anticipated years earlier in
        Alfred Bester's 1956 The Stars My Destination.

:flat: adj.

        1. [common] Lacking any complex internal structure. "That {bitty
        box} has only a flat filesystem, not a hierarchical one." The verb
        form is {flatten}.

        2. Said of a memory architecture (like that of the {VAX} or 680x0)
        that is one big linear address space (typically with each possible
        value of a processor register corresponding to a unique core
        address), as opposed to a segmented architecture (like that of the
        80x86) in which addresses are composed from a base-register/offset
        pair (segmented designs are generally considered {cretinous}).

        Note that sense 1 (at least with respect to filesystems) is usually
        used pejoratively, while sense 2 is a {Good Thing}.

:flat-ASCII: adj.

        [common] Said of a text file that contains only 7-bit ASCII
        characters and uses only ASCII-standard control characters (that is,
        has no embedded codes specific to a particular text formatter markup
        language, or output device, and no {meta}-characters). Syn.
        {plain-ASCII}. Compare {flat-file}.

:flat-file: adj.

        A {flatten}ed representation of some database or tree or network
        structure as a single file from which the structure could implicitly
        be rebuilt, esp. one in {flat-ASCII} form. See also {sharchive}.

:flatten: vt.

        [common] To remove structural information, esp. to filter something
        with an implicit tree structure into a simple sequence of leaves;
        also tends to imply mapping to {flat-ASCII}. "This code flattens an
        expression with parentheses into an equivalent {canonical} form."

:flavor: n.

        1. [common] Variety, type, kind. "DDT commands come in two flavors."
        "These lights come in two flavors, big red ones and small green
        ones." "Linux is a flavor of Unix" See {vanilla}.

        2. The attribute that causes something to be {flavorful}. Usually
        used in the phrase "yields additional flavor". "This convention
        yields additional flavor by allowing one to print text either
        right-side-up or upside-down." See {vanilla}. This usage was
        certainly reinforced by the terminology of quantum chromodynamics,
        in which quarks (the constituents of, e.g., protons) come in six
        flavors (up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom) and three colors
        (red, blue, green) -- however, hackish use of flavor at MIT predated
        QCD.

        3. The term for class (in the object-oriented sense) in the LISP
        Machine Flavors system. Though the Flavors design has been
        superseded (notably by the Common LISP CLOS facility), the term
        flavor is still used as a general synonym for class by some LISP
        hackers.

:flavorful: adj.

        Full of {flavor} (sense 2); esthetically pleasing. See {random} and
        {losing} for antonyms. See also the entries for {taste} and
        {elegant}.

:flippy: /flip'ee/, n.

        A single-sided floppy disk altered for double-sided use by addition
        of a second write-notch, so called because it must be flipped over
        for the second side to be accessible. No longer common.

:flood: v.

        [common]

        1. To overwhelm a network channel with mechanically-generated
        traffic; especially used of IP, TCP/IP, UDP, or ICMP
        denial-of-service attacks.

        2. To dump large amounts of text onto an {IRC} channel. This is
        especially rude when the text is uninteresting and the other users
        are trying to carry on a serious conversation. Also used in a
        similar sense on Usenet.

        3. [Usenet] To post an unusually large number or volume of files on
        a related topic.

:flowchart: n.

        [techspeak] An archaic form of visual control-flow specification
        employing arrows and speech balloons of various shapes. Hackers
        never use flowcharts, consider them extremely silly, and associate
        them with {COBOL} programmers, {code grinder}s, and other lower
        forms of life. This attitude follows from the observations that
        flowcharts (at least from a hacker's point of view) are no easier to
        read than code, are less precise, and tend to fall out of sync with
        the code (so that they either obfuscate it rather than explaining
        it, or require extra maintenance effort that doesn't improve the
        code).

:flower key: n.

        [Mac users] See {feature key}.

:flush: v.

        1. [common] To delete something, usually superfluous, or to abort an
        operation. "All that nonsense has been flushed."

        2. [Unix/C] To force buffered I/O to disk, as with an fflush(3)
        call. This is not an abort or deletion as in sense 1, but a demand
        for early completion!

        3. To leave at the end of a day's work (as opposed to leaving for a
        meal). "I'm going to flush now." "Time to flush."

        4. To exclude someone from an activity, or to ignore a person.

        `Flush' was standard ITS terminology for aborting an output
        operation; one spoke of the text that would have been printed, but
        was not, as having been flushed. It is speculated that this term
        arose from a vivid image of flushing unwanted characters by hosing
        down the internal output buffer, washing the characters away before
        they could be printed. The Unix/C usage, on the other hand, was
        propagated by the fflush(3) call in C's standard I/O library (though
        it is reported to have been in use among BLISS programmers at {DEC}
        and on Honeywell and IBM machines as far back as 1965). Unix/C
        hackers found the ITS usage confusing, and vice versa.

        Crunchly gets {flush}ed.

        (The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-05-01. The previous
        cartoon was 76-02-20:2.)

:flypage: /fli:'payj/, n.

        (alt.: fly page) A {banner}, sense 1.

:Flyspeck 3: n.

        Standard name for any font that is so tiny as to be unreadable (by
        analogy with names like Helvetica 10 for 10-point Helvetica). Legal
        boilerplate is usually printed in Flyspeck 3.

:flytrap: n.

        [rare] See {firewall machine}.

:FM: /FM/, n.

        1. [common] Not `Frequency Modulation' but rather an abbreviation
        for `Fucking Manual', the back-formation from {RTFM}. Used to refer
        to the manual itself in the {RTFM}. "Have you seen the Networking FM
        lately?"

        2. Abbreviation for "Fucking Magic", used in the sense of {black
        magic}.

:fnord: n.

        [from the Illuminatus Trilogy]

        1. A word used in email and news postings to tag utterances as
        surrealist mind-play or humor, esp. in connection with
        {Discordianism} and elaborate conspiracy theories. "I heard that
        David Koresh is sharing an apartment in Argentina with Hitler.
        (Fnord.)" "Where can I fnord get the Principia Discordia from?"

        2. A {metasyntactic variable}, commonly used by hackers with ties to
        {Discordianism} or the {Church of the SubGenius}.

:FOAF: //, n.

        [Usenet; common] Acronym for `Friend Of A Friend'. The source of an
        unverified, possibly untrue story. This term was not originated by
        hackers (it is used in Jan Brunvand's books on urban folklore), but
        is much better recognized on Usenet and elsewhere than in mainstream
        English.

:FOD: /fod/, v.

        [Abbreviation for `Finger of Death', originally a spell-name from
        fantasy gaming] To terminate with extreme prejudice and with no
        regard for other people. From {MUD}s where the wizard command `FOD
        <player>' results in the immediate and total death of <player>,
        usually as punishment for obnoxious behavior. This usage migrated to
        other circumstances, such as "I'm going to fod the process that is
        burning all the cycles."

        In aviation, FOD means Foreign Object Damage, e.g., what happens
        when a jet engine sucks up a rock on the runway or a bird in flight.
        Finger of Death is a distressingly apt description of what this
        generally does to the engine.

:fold case: v.

        See {smash case}. This term tends to be used more by people who
        don't mind that their tools smash case. It also connotes that case
        is ignored but case distinctions in data processed by the tool in
        question aren't destroyed.

:followup: n.

        [common] On Usenet, a {posting} generated in response to another
        posting (as opposed to a {reply}, which goes by email rather than
        being broadcast). Followups include the ID of the {parent message}
        in their headers; smart news-readers can use this information to
        present Usenet news in `conversation' sequence rather than
        order-of-arrival. See {thread}.

:fontology: n.

        [XEROX PARC] The body of knowledge dealing with the construction and
        use of new fonts (e.g., for window systems and typesetting
        software). It has been said that fontology recapitulates file-ogeny.

        [Unfortunately, this reference to the embryological dictum that
        "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is not merely a joke. On the
        Macintosh, for example, System 7 has to go through contortions to
        compensate for an earlier design error that created a whole
        different set of abstractions for fonts parallel to `files' and
        `folders' --ESR]

:foo: /foo/

        1. interj. Term of disgust.

        2. [very common] Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely
        anything, esp. programs and files (esp. scratch files).

        3. First on the standard list of {metasyntactic variable}s used in
        syntax examples. See also {bar}, {baz}, {qux}, {quux}, {garply},
        {waldo}, {fred}, {plugh}, {xyzzy}, {thud}.

        When `foo' is used in connection with `bar' it has generally traced
        to the WWII-era Army slang acronym {FUBAR} (`Fucked Up Beyond All
        Repair' or `Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition'), later modified to
        {foobar}. Early versions of the Jargon File interpreted this change
        as a post-war bowdlerization, but it it now seems more likely that
        FUBAR was itself a derivative of `foo' perhaps influenced by German
        furchtbar (terrible) -- `foobar' may actually have been the original
        form.

        For, it seems, the word `foo' itself had an immediate prewar history
        in comic strips and cartoons. The earliest documented uses were in
        the Smokey Stover comic strip published from about 1930 to about
        1952. Bill Holman, the author of the strip, filled it with odd jokes
        and personal contrivances, including other nonsense phrases such as
        "Notary Sojac" and "1506 nix nix". The word "foo" frequently
        appeared on license plates of cars, in nonsense sayings in the
        background of some frames (such as "He who foos last foos best" or
        "Many smoke but foo men chew"), and Holman had Smokey say "Where
        there's foo, there's fire".

        According to the Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion Holman claimed to
        have found the word "foo" on the bottom of a Chinese figurine. This
        is plausible; Chinese statuettes often have apotropaic inscriptions,
        and this one was almost certainly the Mandarin Chinese word fu
        (sometimes transliterated foo), which can mean "happiness" or
        "prosperity" when spoken with the rising tone (the lion-dog
        guardians flanking the steps of many Chinese restaurants are
        properly called "fu dogs"). English speakers' reception of Holman's
        `foo' nonsense word was undoubtedly influenced by Yiddish `feh' and
        English `fooey' and `fool'.

        Holman's strip featured a firetruck called the Foomobile that rode
        on two wheels. The comic strip was tremendously popular in the late
        1930s, and legend has it that a manufacturer in Indiana even
        produced an operable version of Holman's Foomobile. According to the
        Encyclopedia of American Comics, `Foo' fever swept the U.S., finding
        its way into popular songs and generating over 500 `Foo Clubs.' The
        fad left `foo' references embedded in popular culture (including a
        couple of appearances in Warner Brothers cartoons of 1938-39;
        notably in Robert Clampett's "Daffy Doc" of 1938, in which a very
        early version of Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying "SILENCE IS
        FOO!") When the fad faded, the origin of "foo" was forgotten.

        One place "foo" is known to have remained live is in the U.S.
        military during the WWII years. In 1944-45, the term `foo fighters'
        was in use by radar operators for the kind of mysterious or spurious
        trace that would later be called a UFO (the older term resurfaced in
        popular American usage in 1995 via the name of one of the better
        grunge-rock bands). Because informants connected the term directly
        to the Smokey Stover strip, the folk etymology that connects it to
        French "feu" (fire) can be gently dismissed.

        The U.S. and British militaries frequently swapped slang terms
        during the war (see {kluge} and {kludge} for another important
        example) Period sources reported that `FOO' became a semi-legendary
        subject of WWII British-army graffiti more or less equivalent to the
        American Kilroy. Where British troops went, the graffito "FOO was
        here" or something similar showed up. Several slang dictionaries
        aver that FOO probably came from Forward Observation Officer, but
        this (like the contemporaneous "FUBAR") was probably a {backronym} .
        Forty years later, Paul Dickson's excellent book "Words" (Dell,
        1982, ISBN 0-440-52260-7) traced "Foo" to an unspecified British
        naval magazine in 1946, quoting as follows: "Mr. Foo is a mysterious
        Second World War product, gifted with bitter omniscience and
        sarcasm."

        Earlier versions of this entry suggested the possibility that hacker
        usage actually sprang from FOO, Lampoons and Parody, the title of a
        comic book first issued in September 1958, a joint project of
        Charles and Robert Crumb. Though Robert Crumb (then in his
        mid-teens) later became one of the most important and influential
        artists in underground comics, this venture was hardly a success;
        indeed, the brothers later burned most of the existing copies in
        disgust. The title FOO was featured in large letters on the front
        cover. However, very few copies of this comic actually circulated,
        and students of Crumb's oeuvre have established that this title was
        a reference to the earlier Smokey Stover comics. The Crumbs may also
        have been influenced by a short-lived Canadian parody magazine named
        `Foo' published in 1951-52.

        An old-time member reports that in the 1959 Dictionary of the TMRC
        Language, compiled at {TMRC}, there was an entry that went something
        like this:

          FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase "FOO MANE PADME
          HUM." Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning.

        (For more about the legendary foo counters, see {TMRC}.) This
        definition used Bill Holman's nonsense word, then only two decades
        old and demonstrably still live in popular culture and slang, to a
        {ha ha only serious} analogy with esoteric Tibetan Buddhism. Today's
        hackers would find it difficult to resist elaborating a joke like
        that, and it is not likely 1959's were any less susceptible. Almost
        the entire staff of what later became the MIT AI Lab was involved
        with TMRC, and the word spread from there.

:foobar: n.

        [very common] Another widely used {metasyntactic variable}; see
        {foo} for etymology. Probably originally propagated through
        DECsystem manuals by Digital Equipment Corporation ({DEC}) in 1960s
        and early 1970s; confirmed sightings there go back to 1972. Hackers
        do not generally use this to mean {FUBAR} in either the slang or
        jargon sense. See also {Fred Foobar}. In RFC1639, "FOOBAR" was made
        an abbreviation for "FTP Operation Over Big Address Records", but
        this was an obvious {backronym}. It has been plausibly suggested
        that "foobar" spread among early computer engineers partly because
        of FUBAR and partly because "foo bar" parses in electronics
        techspeak as an inverted foo signal; if a digital signal is active
        low (so a negative or zero-voltage condition represents a "1") then
        a horizontal bar is commonly placed over the signal label.

:fool: n.

        As used by hackers, specifically describes a person who habitually
        reasons from obviously or demonstrably incorrect premises and cannot
        be persuaded by evidence to do otherwise; it is not generally used
        in its other senses, i.e., to describe a person with a native
        incapacity to reason correctly, or a clown. Indeed, in hackish
        experience many fools are capable of reasoning all too effectively
        in executing their errors. See also {cretin}, {loser}, {fool file}.

        The Algol 68-R compiler used to initialize its storage to the
        character string "F00LF00LF00LF00L..." because as a pointer or as a
        floating point number it caused a crash, and as an integer or a
        character string it was very recognizable in a dump. Sadly, one day
        a very senior professor at Nottingham University wrote a program
        that called him a fool. He proceeded to demonstrate the correctness
        of this assertion by lobbying the university (not quite
        successfully) to forbid the use of Algol on its computers. See also
        {DEADBEEF}.

:fool file: n.

        [Usenet] A notional repository of all the most dramatically and
        abysmally stupid utterances ever. An entire subgenre of {sig block}s
        consists of the header "From the fool file:" followed by some quote
        the poster wishes to represent as an immortal gem of dimwittery; for
        this usage to be really effective, the quote has to be so obviously
        wrong as to be laughable. More than one Usenetter has achieved an
        unwanted notoriety by being quoted in this way.

:Foonly: n.

        1. The {PDP-10} successor that was to have been built by the Super
        Foonly project at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
        along with a new operating system. (The name itself came from FOO
        NLI, an error message emitted by a PDP-10 assembler at SAIL meaning
        "FOO is Not a Legal Identifier". The intention was to leapfrog from
        the old {DEC} timesharing system SAIL was then running to a new
        generation, bypassing TENEX which at that time was the ARPANET
        standard. ARPA funding for both the Super Foonly and the new
        operating system was cut in 1974. Most of the design team went to
        DEC and contributed greatly to the design of the PDP-10 model KL10.

        2. The name of the company formed by Dave Poole, one of the
        principal Super Foonly designers, and one of hackerdom's more
        colorful personalities. Many people remember the parrot which sat on
        Poole's shoulder and was a regular companion.

        3. Any of the machines built by Poole's company. The first was the
        F-1 (a.k.a. Super Foonly), which was the computational engine used
        to create the graphics in the movie TRON. The F-1 was the fastest
        PDP-10 ever built, but only one was ever made. The effort drained
        Foonly of its financial resources, and the company turned towards
        building smaller, slower, and much less expensive machines.
        Unfortunately, these ran not the popular {TOPS-20} but a TENEX
        variant called Foonex; this seriously limited their market. Also,
        the machines shipped were actually wire-wrapped engineering
        prototypes requiring individual attention from more than usually
        competent site personnel, and thus had significant reliability
        problems. Poole's legendary temper and unwillingness to suffer fools
        gladly did not help matters. By the time DEC's "Jupiter Project"
        followon to the PDP-10 was cancelled in 1983, Foonly's proposal to
        build another F-1 was eclipsed by the {Mars}, and the company never
        quite recovered. See the {Mars} entry for the continuation and moral
        of this story.

:footprint: n.

        1. The floor or desk area taken up by a piece of hardware.

        2. [IBM] The audit trail (if any) left by a crashed program (often
        in plural, footprints). See also {toeprint}.

        3. RAM footprint: The minimum amount of RAM which an OS or other
        program takes; this figure gives one an idea of how much will be
        left for other applications. How actively this RAM is used is
        another matter entirely. Recent tendencies to featuritis and
        software bloat can expand the RAM footprint of an OS to the point of
        making it nearly unusable in practice. [This problem is, thankfully,
        limited to operating systems so stupid that they don't do virtual
        memory -- ESR]

:for free: adj.

        [common] Said of a capability of a programming language or hardware
        that is available by its design without needing cleverness to
        implement: "In APL, we get the matrix operations for free." "And
        owing to the way revisions are stored in this system, you get
        revision trees for free." The term usually refers to a serendipitous
        feature of doing things a certain way (compare {big win}), but it
        may refer to an intentional but secondary feature.

:for the rest of us: adj.

        [from the Mac slogan "The computer for the rest of us"]

        1. Used to describe a {spiffy} product whose affordability shames
        other comparable products, or (more often) used sarcastically to
        describe {spiffy} but very overpriced products.

        2. Describes a program with a limited interface, deliberately
        limited capabilities, non-orthogonality, inability to compose
        primitives, or any other limitation designed to not `confuse' a
        naive user. This places an upper bound on how far that user can go
        before the program begins to get in the way of the task instead of
        helping accomplish it. Used in reference to Macintosh software which
        doesn't provide obvious capabilities because it is thought that the
        poor lusers might not be able to handle them. Becomes `the rest of
        them' when used in third-party reference; thus, "Yes, it is an
        attractive program, but it's designed for The Rest Of Them" means a
        program that superficially looks neat but has no depth beyond the
        surface flash. See also {WIMP environment}, {Macintrash},
        {point-and-drool interface}, {user-friendly}.

:for values of:

        [MIT] A common rhetorical maneuver at MIT is to use any of the
        canonical {random numbers} as placeholders for variables. "The max
        function takes 42 arguments, for arbitrary values of 42.:" "There
        are 69 ways to leave your lover, for 69 = 50." This is especially
        likely when the speaker has uttered a random number and realizes
        that it was not recognized as such, but even `non-random' numbers
        are occasionally used in this fashion. A related joke is that p
        equals 3 -- for small values of p and large values of 3.

        Historical note: at MIT this usage has traditionally been traced to
        the programming language MAD (Michigan Algorithm Decoder), an
        Algol-58-like language that was the most common choice among
        mainstream (non-hacker) users at MIT in the mid-60s. It inherited
        from Algol-58 a control structure FOR VALUES OF X = 3, 7, 99 DO ...
        that would repeat the indicated instructions for each value in the
        list (unlike the usual FOR that only works for arithmetic sequences
        of values). MAD is long extinct, but similar for-constructs still
        flourish (e.g., in Unix's shell languages).

:fora: pl.n.

        Plural of {forum}.

:foreground: vt.

        [Unix; common] To bring a task to the top of one's {stack} for
        immediate processing, and hackers often use it in this sense for
        non-computer tasks. "If your presentation is due next week, I guess
        I'd better foreground writing up the design document."

        Technically, on a timesharing system, a task executing in foreground
        is one able to accept input from and return output to the user;
        oppose {background}. Nowadays this term is primarily associated with
        {Unix}, but it appears first to have been used in this sense on
        OS/360. Normally, there is only one foreground task per terminal (or
        terminal window); having multiple processes simultaneously reading
        the keyboard is a good way to {lose}.

:fork:

        In the open-source community, a fork is what occurs when two (or
        more) versions of a software package's source code are being
        developed in parallel which once shared a common code base, and
        these multiple versions of the source code have irreconcilable
        differences between them. This should not be confused with a
        development branch, which may later be folded back into the original
        source code base. Nor should it be confused with what happens when a
        new distribution of Linux or some other distribution is created,
        because that largely assembles pieces than can and will be used in
        other distributions without conflict.

        Forking is uncommon; in fact, it is so uncommon that individual
        instances loom large in hacker folklore. Notable in this class were
        the Emacs/XEmacs fork, the GCC/EGCS fork (later healed by a merger)
        and the forks among the FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD operating
        systems.

:fork bomb: n.

        [Unix] A particular species of {wabbit} that can be written in one
        line of C (main() {for(;;)fork();}) or shell ($0 & $0 &) on any Unix
        system, or occasionally created by an egregious coding bug. A fork
        bomb process `explodes' by recursively spawning copies of itself
        (using the Unix system call fork(2)). Eventually it eats all the
        process table entries and effectively wedges the system.
        Fortunately, fork bombs are relatively easy to spot and kill, so
        creating one deliberately seldom accomplishes more than to bring the
        just wrath of the gods down upon the perpetrator. Also called a fork
        bunny. See also {logic bomb}.

:forked: adj.,vi.

        1. [common after 1997, esp. in the Linux community] An open-source
        software project is said to have forked or be forked when the
        project group fissions into two or more parts pursuing separate
        lines of development (or, less commonly, when a third party
        unconnected to the project group begins its own line of
        development). Forking is considered a {Bad Thing} -- not merely
        because it implies a lot of wasted effort in the future, but because
        forks tend to be accompanied by a great deal of strife and acrimony
        between the successor groups over issues of legitimacy, succession,
        and design direction. There is serious social pressure against
        forking. As a result, major forks (such as the Gnu-Emacs/XEmacs
        split, the fissionings of the 386BSD group into three daughter
        projects, and the short-lived GCC/EGCS split) are rare enough that
        they are remembered individually in hacker folklore.

        2. [Unix; uncommon; prob.: influenced by a mainstream expletive]
        Terminally slow, or dead. Originated when one system was slowed to a
        snail's pace by an inadvertent {fork bomb}.

:Formosa's Law: n.

        "The truly insane have enough on their plates without us adding to
        it." That is, flaming someone with an obvious mental problem can't
        make it any better. Most often cited on alt.usenet.kooks as a reason
        not to issue a Kook-of the-Month Award; often cited as a companion
        to {Godwin's Law}.

:Fortrash: /for'trash/, n.

        Hackerism for the FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) language, referring
        to its primitive design, gross and irregular syntax, limited control
        constructs, and slippery, exception-filled semantics.

:fortune cookie: n.

        [WAITS, via Unix; common] A random quote, item of trivia, joke, or
        maxim printed to the user's tty at login time or (less commonly) at
        logout time. Items from this lexicon have often been used as fortune
        cookies. See {cookie file}.

:forum: n.

        [Usenet, GEnie, CI$; pl. fora or forums] Any discussion group
        accessible through a dial-in {BBS}, a {mailing list}, or a
        {newsgroup} (see {the network}). A forum functions much like a
        bulletin board; users submit {posting}s for all to read and
        discussion ensues. Contrast real-time chat via {talk mode} or
        point-to-point personal {email}.

:fossil: n.

        1. In software, a misfeature that becomes understandable only in
        historical context, as a remnant of times past retained so as not to
        break compatibility. Example: the retention of octal as default base
        for string escapes in {C}, in spite of the better match of
        hexadecimal to ASCII and modern byte-addressable architectures. See
        {dusty deck}.

        2. More restrictively, a feature with past but no present utility.
        Example: the force-all-caps (LCASE) bits in the V7 and {BSD} Unix
        tty driver, designed for use with monocase terminals. (In a
        perversion of the usual backward-compatibility goal, this
        functionality has actually been expanded and renamed in some later
        USG Unix releases as the IUCLC and OLCUC bits.)

:four-color glossies: n.

        1. Literature created by {marketroid}s that allegedly contains
        technical specs but which is in fact as superficial as possible
        without being totally {content-free}. "Forget the four-color
        glossies, give me the tech ref manuals." Often applied as an
        indication of superficiality even when the material is printed on
        ordinary paper in black and white. Four-color-glossy manuals are
        never useful for solving a problem.

        2. [rare] Applied by extension to manual pages that don't contain
        enough information to diagnose why the program doesn't produce the
        expected or desired output.

:frag: n.,v.

        [from Vietnam-era U.S. military slang via the games Doom and Quake]

        1. To kill another player's {avatar} in a multiuser game. "I hold
        the office Quake record with 40 frags."

        2. To completely ruin something. "Forget that power supply, the
        lightning strike fragged it." See also {gib}.

:fragile: adj.

        Syn {brittle}.

:Frankenputer: n.

        1. A mostly-working computer thrown together from the spare parts of
        several machines out of which the {magic smoke} had been let. Most
        shops have a closet full of nonworking machines. When a new machine
        is needed immediately (for testing, for example) and there is no
        time (or budget) to requisition a new box, someone (often an intern)
        is tasked with building a Frankenputer.

        2. Also used in referring to a machine that once was a name-brand
        computer, but has been upgraded long beyond its useful life, to the
        point at which the nameplate violates truth-in-advertising laws
        (e.g., a Pentium III-class machine inexplicably living in a case
        marked "Gateway 486/66").

:fred: n.

        1. The personal name most frequently used as a {metasyntactic
        variable} (see {foo}). Allegedly popular because it's easy for a
        non-touch-typist to type on a standard QWERTY keyboard. In Great
        Britain, `fred', `jim' and `sheila' are common metasyntactic
        variables because their uppercase versions were official names given
        to the 3 memory areas that held I/O status registers on the
        lovingly-remembered BBC Microcomputer! (It is reported that SHEILA
        was poked the most often.) Unlike {J. Random Hacker} or J. Random
        Loser, the name `fred' has no positive or negative loading (but see
        {Dr. Fred Mbogo}). See also {barney}.

        2. An acronym for `Flipping Ridiculous Electronic Device'; other
        F-verbs may be substituted for `flipping'.

:Fred Foobar: n.

        {J. Random Hacker}'s cousin. Any typical human being, more or less
        synonymous with `someone' except that Fred Foobar can be
        {backreference}d by name later on. "So Fred Foobar will enter his
        phone number into the database, and it'll be archived with the
        others. Months later, when Fred searches..." See also {Bloggs
        Family} and {Dr. Fred Mbogo}

:frednet: /fred'net/, n.

        Used to refer to some {random} and uncommon protocol encountered on
        a network. "We're implementing bridging in our router to solve the
        frednet problem."

:free software: n.

        As defined by Richard M. Stallman and used by the Free Software
        movement, this means software that gives users enough freedom to be
        used by the free software community. Specifically, users must be
        free to modify the software for their private use, and free to
        redistribute it either with or without modifications, either
        commercially or noncommercially, either gratis or charging a
        distribution fee. Free software has existed since the dawn of
        computing; Free Software as a movement began in 1984 with the GNU
        Project.

        RMS observes that the English word "free" can refer either to
        liberty (where it means the same as the Spanish or French "libre")
        or to price (where it means the same as the Spanish "gratis" or
        French "gratuit"). RMS and other people associated with the FSF like
        to explain the word "free" in "free software" by saying "Free as in
        speech, not as in beer."

        See also {open source}. Hard-core proponents of the term "free
        software" sometimes reject this newer term, claiming that the style
        of argument associated with it ignores or downplays the moral
        imperative at the heart of free software.

:freeware: n.

        [common] Freely-redistributable software, often written by
        enthusiasts and distributed by users' groups, or via electronic
        mail, local bulletin boards, {Usenet}, or other electronic media. As
        the culture of the Internet has displaced the older BBS world, this
        term has lost ground to both {open source} and {free software}; it
        has increasingly tended to be restricted to software distributed in
        binary rather than source-code form. At one time, freeware was a
        trademark of Andrew Fluegelman, the author of the well-known MS-DOS
        comm program PC-TALK III. It wasn't enforced after his mysterious
        disappearance and presumed death in 1984. See {shareware}, {FRS}.

:freeze: v.

        To lock an evolving software distribution or document against
        changes so it can be released with some hope of stability. Carries
        the strong implication that the item in question will `unfreeze' at
        some future date. "OK, fix that bug and we'll freeze for release."
        There are more specific constructions on this term. A feature
        freeze, for example, locks out modifications intended to introduce
        new features but still allows bugfixes and completion of existing
        features; a code freeze connotes no more changes at all. At Sun
        Microsystems and elsewhere, one may also hear references to code
        slush -- that is, an almost-but-not-quite frozen state.

:fried: adj.

        1. [common] Non-working due to hardware failure; burnt out.
        Especially used of hardware brought down by a power glitch (see
        {glitch}), {drop-outs}, a short, or some other electrical event.
        (Sometimes this literally happens to electronic circuits! In
        particular, resistors can burn out and transformers can melt down,
        emitting noxious smoke -- see {friode}, {SED} and {LER}. However,
        this term is also used metaphorically.) Compare {frotzed}.

        2. [common] Of people, exhausted. Said particularly of those who
        continue to work in such a state. Often used as an explanation or
        excuse. "Yeah, I know that fix destroyed the file system, but I was
        fried when I put it in." Esp.: common in conjunction with brain: "My
        brain is fried today, I'm very short on sleep."

:frink: /frink/, v.

        The unknown ur-verb, fill in your own meaning. Found esp. on the
        Usenet newsgroup alt.fan.lemurs, where it is said that the lemurs
        know what `frink' means, but they aren't telling. Compare {gorets}.

:friode: /fri:'ohd/, n.

        [TMRC] A reversible (that is, fused or blown) diode. Compare
        {fried}; see also {SED}, {LER}.

:fritterware: n.

        An excess of capability that serves no productive end. The canonical
        example is font-diddling software on the Mac (see {macdink}); the
        term describes anything that eats huge amounts of time for quite
        marginal gains in function but seduces people into using it anyway.
        See also {window shopping}.

:frob: /frob/

        1. n. [MIT; very common] The {TMRC} definition was "FROB = a
        protruding arm or trunnion"; by metaphoric extension, a frob is any
        random small thing; an object that you can comfortably hold in one
        hand; something you can frob (sense 2). See {frobnitz}.

        2. vt. Abbreviated form of {frobnicate}.

        3. [from the {MUD} world] A command on some MUDs that changes a
        player's experience level (this can be used to make wizards); also,
        to request {wizard} privileges on the `professional courtesy'
        grounds that one is a wizard elsewhere. The command is actually
        `frobnicate' but is universally abbreviated to the shorter form.

:frobnicate: /frob'nikayt/, vt.

        [Poss. derived from {frobnitz}, and usually abbreviated to {frob},
        but frobnicate is recognized as the official full form.:] To
        manipulate or adjust, to tweak. One frequently frobs bits or other
        2-state devices. Thus: "Please frob the light switch" (that is, flip
        it), but also "Stop frobbing that clasp; you'll break it". One also
        sees the construction to frob a frob. See {tweak} and {twiddle}.

        Usage: frob, twiddle, and tweak sometimes connote points along a
        continuum. `Frob' connotes aimless manipulation; twiddle connotes
        gross manipulation, often a coarse search for a proper setting;
        tweak connotes fine-tuning. If someone is turning a knob on an
        oscilloscope, then if he's carefully adjusting it, he is probably
        tweaking it; if he is just turning it but looking at the screen, he
        is probably twiddling it; but if he's just doing it because turning
        a knob is fun, he's frobbing it. The variant frobnosticate has been
        recently reported.

:frobnitz: /frob'nits/, pl., frobnitzem, /frobnitzm/, frobni, /frob'ni:/,
n.

        [TMRC] An unspecified physical object, a widget. Also refers to
        electronic black boxes. This rare form is usually abbreviated to
        frotz, or more commonly to {frob}. Also used are frobnule
        (/frob'n[y]ool/) and frobule (/frobyool/). Starting perhaps in
        1979, frobozz /fr@-boz'/ (plural: frobbotzim /fr@-botzm/) has also
        become very popular, largely through its exposure as a name via
        {Zork}. These variants can also be applied to nonphysical objects,
        such as data structures. For related amusement, see the Encyclopedia
        Frobozzica.

        Pete Samson, compiler of the original {TMRC} lexicon, adds, "Under
        the TMRC [railroad] layout were many storage boxes, managed (in
        1958) by David R. Sawyer. Several had fanciful designations written
        on them, such as `Frobnitz Coil Oil'. Perhaps DRS intended Frobnitz
        to be a proper name, but the name was quickly taken for the thing".
        This was almost certainly the origin of the term.

:frog: phrog

        1. interj. Term of disgust (we seem to have a lot of them).

        2. Used as a name for just about anything. See {foo}.

        3. n. Of things, a crock.

        4. n. Of people, somewhere in between a turkey and a toad.

        5. froggy: adj. Similar to {bagbiting}, but milder. "This froggy
        program is taking forever to run!"

:frogging: v.

        1. Partial corruption of a text file or input stream by some bug or
        consistent glitch, as opposed to random events like line noise or
        media failures. Might occur, for example, if one bit of each
        incoming character on a tty were stuck, so that some characters were
        correct and others were not. See {dread high-bit disease}.

        2. By extension, accidental display of text in a mode where the
        output device emits special symbols or mnemonics rather than
        conventional ASCII. This often happens, for example, when using a
        terminal or comm program on a device like an IBM PC with a special
        `high-half' character set and with the bit-parity assumption wrong.
        A hacker sufficiently familiar with ASCII bit patterns might be able
        to read the display anyway.

:front end: n.

        1. An intermediary computer that does set-up and filtering for
        another (usually more powerful but less friendly) machine (a back
        end).

        2. What you're talking to when you have a conversation with someone
        who is making replies without paying attention. "Look at the dancing
        elephants!" "Uh-huh." "Do you know what I just said?" "Sorry, you
        were talking to the front end."

        3. Software that provides an interface to another program `behind'
        it, which may not be as user-friendly. Probably from analogy with
        hardware front-ends (see sense 1) that interfaced with mainframes.

:frotz: /frots/

        1. n. See {frobnitz}.

        2. mumble frotz: An interjection of mildest disgust. The word
        `frotzen' is live in this sense in some eastern German dialects; the
        safe bet is that it came to hackers via Yiddish.

:frotzed: /frotst/, adj.

        To be {down} because of hardware problems. Compare {fried}. A
        machine that is merely frotzed may be fixable without replacing
        parts, but a fried machine is more seriously damaged.

:frowney: n.

        (alt.: frowney face) See {emoticon}.

:FRS: //, n.,obs.

        [obs.] Abbreviation for "Freely Redistributable Software" which
        entered general use on the Internet in 1995 after years of low-level
        confusion over what exactly to call software written to be passed
        around and shared (contending terms including {freeware},
        {shareware}, and sourceware were never universally felt to be
        satisfactory for various subtle reasons). The first formal
        conference on freely redistributable software was held in Cambridge,
        Massachussetts, in February 1996 (sponsored by the Free Software
        Foundation). The conference organizers used the FRS abbreviation
        heavily in its calls for papers and other literature during 1995.
        The term was in steady though not common use until 1998 and the
        invention of {open source}, after which it became swiftly obsolete.

:fry:

        1. vi. To fail. Said especially of smoke-producing hardware
        failures. More generally, to become non-working. Usage: never said
        of software, only of hardware and humans. See {fried}, {magic
        smoke}.

        2. vt. To cause to fail; to {roach}, {toast}, or {hose} a piece of
        hardware. Never used of software or humans, but compare {fried}.

:fscking: /fus'king/, /eff'seeking/, adj.

        [Usenet; very common] Fucking, in the expletive sense (it refers to
        the Unix filesystem-repair command fsck(8), of which it can be said
        that if you have to use it at all you are having a bad day).
        Originated on {scary devil monastery} and the bofh.net newsgroups,
        but became much more widespread following the passage of {CDA}. Also
        occasionally seen in the variant "What the fsck?"

:FSF: /FSF/, abbrev.

        Common abbreviation (both spoken and written) for the name of the
        Free Software Foundation, a nonprofit educational association formed
        to support the {GNU} project.

:-fu:

        [common; generalized from kung-fu] Combining form denoting expert
        practice of a skill. "That's going to take some serious code-fu."
        First sighted in connection with the GIMP's remote-scripting
        facility, script-fu, in 1998.

:FUBAR: n.

        The Failed UniBus Address Register in a {VAX}. A good example of how
        jargon can occasionally be snuck past the {suit}s; see {foobar}, and
        {foo} for a fuller etymology.

:fuck me harder: excl.

        Sometimes uttered in response to egregious misbehavior, esp. in
        software, and esp. of misbehaviors which seem unfairly persistent
        (as though designed in by the imp of the perverse). Often
        theatrically elaborated: "Aiighhh! Fuck me with a piledriver and 16
        feet of curare-tipped wrought-iron fence and no lubricants!" The
        phrase is sometimes heard abbreviated FMH in polite company.

        [This entry is an extreme example of the hackish habit of coining
        elaborate and evocative terms for lossage. Here we see a quite
        self-conscious parody of mainstream expletives that has become a
        running gag in part of the hacker culture; it illustrates the
        hackish tendency to turn any situation, even one of extreme
        frustration, into an intellectual game (the point being, in this
        case, to creatively produce a long-winded description of the most
        anatomically absurd mental image possible -- the short forms
        implicitly allude to all the ridiculous long forms ever spoken).
        Scatological language is actually relatively uncommon among hackers,
        and there was some controversy over whether this entry ought to be
        included at all. As it reflects a live usage recognizably peculiar
        to the hacker culture, we feel it is in the hackish spirit of
        truthfulness and opposition to all forms of censorship to record it
        here. --ESR & GLS]

:FUD: /fuhd/, n.

        Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company:
        "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people
        instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering
        [Amdahl] products." The idea, of course, was to persuade them to go
        with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This
        implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that
        Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark
        Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or
        software. See {IBM}. After 1990 the term FUD was associated
        increasingly frequently with {Microsoft}, and has become generalized
        to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.

        [In 2003, SCO sued IBM in an action which, among other things,
        alleged SCO's proprietary control of {Linux}. The SCO suit rapidly
        became infamous for the number and magnitude of falsehoods alleged
        in SCO's filings. In October 2003, SCO's lawyers filed a memorandum
        in which they actually had the temerity to link to the web version
        of this entry in furtherance of their claims. Whilst we appreciate
        the compliment of being treated as an authority, we can return it
        only by observing that SCO has become a nest of liars and thieves
        compared to which IBM at its historic worst looked positively
        angelic. Any judge or law clerk reading this should surf through to
        my collected resources on this topic for the appalling
        details.--ESR]

:FUD wars: /fuhd worz/, n.

        1, [from {FUD}] Historically, political posturing engaged in by
        hardware and software vendors ostensibly committed to
        standardization but actually willing to fragment the market to
        protect their own shares. The Unix International vs.: OSF conflict
        about Unix standards was one outstanding example; Microsoft vs.
        Netscape vs. W3C about HTML standards is another.

        2. Since about 2000 the FUD wars have a different character; the
        battle over open standards has been partly replaced and partly
        subsumed by the argument between closed- and {open source}
        proponents. Nowadays, accordingly, the term is most likely to be
        used of anti-open-source propaganda emitted by Microsoft. Compare
        {astroturfing}.

:fudge:

        1. vt. To perform in an incomplete but marginally acceptable way,
        particularly with respect to the writing of a program. "I didn't
        feel like going through that pain and suffering, so I fudged it --
        I'll fix it later."

        2. n. The resulting code.

:fudge factor: n.

        [common] A value or parameter that is varied in an ad hoc way to
        produce the desired result. The terms tolerance and {slop} are also
        used, though these usually indicate a one-sided leeway, such as a
        buffer that is made larger than necessary because one isn't sure
        exactly how large it needs to be, and it is better to waste a little
        space than to lose completely for not having enough. A fudge factor,
        on the other hand, can often be tweaked in more than one direction.
        A good example is the fuzz typically allowed in floating-point
        calculations: two numbers being compared for equality must be
        allowed to differ by a small amount; if that amount is too small, a
        computation may never terminate, while if it is too large, results
        will be needlessly inaccurate. Fudge factors are frequently adjusted
        incorrectly by programmers who don't fully understand their import.
        See also {coefficient of X}.

:fuel up: vi.

        To eat or drink hurriedly in order to get back to hacking. "Food-p?"
        "Yeah, let's fuel up." "Time for a {great-wall}!" See also {oriental
        food}.

:Full Monty: n.

        See {monty}, sense 2.

:fum: n.

        [XEROX PARC] At PARC, often the third of the standard {metasyntactic
        variable}s (after {foo} and {bar}). Competes with {baz}, which is
        more common outside PARC.

:functino: n.

        [uncommon, U.K.; originally a serendipitous typo in 1994] A pointer
        to a function in C and C++. By association with sub-atomic particles
        such as the neutrino, it accurately conveys an impression of
        smallness (one pointer is four bytes on most systems) and speed
        (hackers can and do use arrays of functinos to replace a switch()
        statement).

:funky: adj.

        Said of something that functions, but in a slightly strange, klugey
        way. It does the job and would be difficult to change, so its
        obvious non-optimality is left alone. Often used to describe
        interfaces. The more bugs something has that nobody has bothered to
        fix because workarounds are easier, the funkier it is. {TECO} and
        UUCP are funky. The Intel i860's exception handling is
        extraordinarily funky. Most standards acquire funkiness as they age.
        "The new mailer is installed, but is still somewhat funky; if it
        bounces your mail for no reason, try resubmitting it." "This UART is
        pretty funky. The data ready line is active-high in interrupt mode
        and active-low in DMA mode."

:funny money: n.

        1. Notional `dollar' units of computing time and/or storage handed
        to students at the beginning of a computer course; also called play
        money or purple money (in implicit opposition to real or green
        money). In New Zealand and Germany the odd usage paper money has
        been recorded; in Germany, the particularly amusing synonym transfer
        ruble commemorates the funny money used for trade between COMECON
        countries back when the Soviet Bloc still existed. When your funny
        money ran out, your account froze and you needed to go to a
        professor to get more. Fortunately, the plunging cost of timesharing
        cycles has made this less common. The amounts allocated were almost
        invariably too small, even for the non-hackers who wanted to slide
        by with minimum work. In extreme cases, the practice led to
        small-scale black markets in bootlegged computer accounts.

        2. By extension, phantom money or quantity tickets of any kind used
        as a resource-allocation hack within a system. Antonym: real money.

:furrfu: excl.

        [Usenet; written, only rarely spoken] Written-only equivalent of
        "Sheesh!"; it is, in fact, "sheesh" modified by {rot13}. Evolved in
        mid-1992 as a response to notably silly postings repeating urban
        myths on the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban, after some posters
        complained that "Sheesh!" as a response to {newbie}s was being
        overused. See also {FOAF}.

  G

   G

   gang bang

   Gang of Four

   garbage collect

   garply

   gas

   Gates's Law

   gawble

   GC

   GCOS

   GECOS

   gedanken

   geef

   geek

   geek code

   geek out

   geekasm

   gen

   gender mender

   General Public Virus

   generate

   Genius From Mars Technique

   gensym

   Get a life!

   Get a real computer!

   GandhiCon

   gib

   GIFs at 11

   gig

   giga-

   GIGO

   gilley

   gillion

   ginger

   GIPS

   GIYF

   glark

   glass

   glass tty

   glassfet

   glitch

   glob

   glork

   glue

   gnarly

   GNU

   gnubie

   GNUMACS

   go flatline

   go gold

   go root

   go-faster stripes

   GoAT

   goat file

   gobble

   Godwin's Law

   Godzillagram

   golden

   golf-ball printer

   gonk

   gonkulator

   gonzo

   Good Thing

   google

   google juice

   gopher

   gopher hole

   gorets

   gorilla arm

   gorp

   GOSMACS

   gotcha

   GPL

   GPV

   gray goo

   gray hat

   Great Internet Explosion

   Great Renaming

   Great Runes

   Great Worm

   great-wall

   green bytes

   green card

   green lightning

   green machine

   Green's Theorem

   greenbar

   grep

   gribble

   grilf

   grind

   grind crank

   gritch

   grok

   gronk

   gronk out

   gronked

   grovel

   grue

   grunge

   gubbish

   Guido

   guiltware

   gumby

   gunch

   gunpowder chicken

   guru

   guru meditation

   gweep

   GWF

: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.

: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 {orthogonal}ity. 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}, {Mongolian Hordes
        technique}, {Conway's Law}.

: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 (ISBN
        0-201-63361-2). 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:

        [as in `gas chamber']

        1. interj. A term of disgust and hatred, implying that gas should be
        dispensed in generous quantities, thereby exterminating the source
        of irritation. "Some loser just reloaded the system for no reason!
        Gas!"

        2. interj. A suggestion that someone or something ought to be
        flushed out of mercy. "The system's getting {wedged} every few
        minutes. Gas!"

        3. vt. To {flush} (sense 1). "You should gas that old crufty
        software."

        4. [IBM] n. Dead space in nonsequentially organized files that was
        occupied by data that has 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:

        "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: /GC/

        [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@dahnkn/, 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: 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}, {clustergeeking}, {geek out}, {wannabee},
        {terminal junkie}, {spod}, {weenie}, {geek code}, {alpha geek}.

:geek code: n.

        (also "Code of the Geeks"). A set of codes commonly used in {sig
        block}s 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 {newsgroup}s.
        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}.

:geekasm:

        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
        {app}s 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.

: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. 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}.

:GandhiCon:

        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.

: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.

        Popilarized by id software in the game Quake, but actually goes back
        to an earlier game called Rise of the Triad. 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:

        [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/, /giga/, pref.

        [SI] See {quantifiers}.

:GIGO: /gi:goh/

        1. `Garbage In, Garbage Out' -- usually said in response to {luser}s
        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/, /jily@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: n.

        [IBM] Synonym for {silicon}.

:glass tty: /glas TTY/, /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 {tube}, {tty}; compare {dumb terminal}. See TV
        Typewriters (Appendix A) for an interesting true story about a glass
        tty.

: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/

        [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 {heisenbug}s).

        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
        {regexp}s.

        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/

        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 {obscure} and {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/

        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 {EMACS}, {copyleft}, {General
        Public Virus}, {Linux}.

        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 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".

:go-faster stripes: n.

        [UK] Syn. {chrome}. Mainstream in some parts of UK.

:GoAT: //

        [Usenet] Abbreviation: "Go Away, Troll". See {troll}.

:goat file:

        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.

: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: /godzil'@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'kyoolaytr/, 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: v.

        [common] To search the Web using the Google search engine,
        http://www.google.com. Google is highly esteemed among hackers for
        its significance ranking system, which is so uncannily effective
        that many hackers consider 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.

:google juice: n.

        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}.

: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.

: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.

: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 {foo} and {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: /GPL/, n.

        Abbreviation for `General Public License' in widespread use; see
        {copyleft}, {General Public Virus}. Often mis-expanded as `GNU
        Public License'.

:GPV: /GPV/, n.

        Abbrev. for {General Public Virus} in widespread use.

:gray goo: n.

        A hypothetical substance composed of {sagan}s 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:

        See {black hat}.

:Great Internet Explosion:

        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}, {smash case}, {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 Worm: n.

        The 1988 Internet {worm} perpetrated by {RTM}. This is a play on
        Tolkien (compare {elvish}, {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.

: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 {oriental food},
        {ravs}, {stir-fried random}.

: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 {out-of-band}, {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.

: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]

: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.

: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: 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
        {troff}, {TeX}, or Scribe source.

        3. [common] To run seemingly interminably, esp. (but not
        necessarily) if performing some tedious and inherently useless task.
        Similar to {crunch} or {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!"

: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/.

: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: /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".

: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."

: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/, /khweedo/

        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: 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}.

: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).

:gweep: /gweep/

        [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.

  H

   h

   ha ha only serious

   hack

   hack attack

   hack mode

   hack on

   hack together

   hack up

   hack value

   hacked off

   hacked up

   hacker

   hacker ethic

   hacker humor

   Hackers (the movie)

   hacking run

   Hacking X for Y

   Hackintosh

   hackish

   hackishness

   hackitude

   hair

   hairball

   hairy

   HAKMEM

   hakspek

   Halloween Documents

   ham

   hammer

   hamster

   HAND

   hand cruft

   hand-hacking

   hand-roll

   handle

   handshaking

   handwave

   hang

   Hanlon's Razor

   happily

   hard boot

   hardcoded

   hardwarily

   hardwired

   has the X nature

   hash bucket

   hash collision

   hat

   HCF

   heads down

   heartbeat

   heatseeker

   heavy metal

   heavy wizardry

   heavyweight

   Hed Rat

   heisenbug

   hell desk

   hello sailor!

   hello world

   hello, wall!

   hex

   hexadecimal

   hexit

   HHOK

   HHOS

   hidden flag

   high bit

   high moby

   highly

   hing

   hired gun

   hirsute

   HLL

   hoarding

   hog

   hole

   hollised

   holy penguin pee

   holy wars

   home box

   home machine

   home page

   honey pot

   hook

   hop

   horked

   hose

   hosed

   hot chat

   hot spot

   hotlink

   house wizard

   HP-SUX

   HTH

   huff

   hung

   hungry puppy

   hungus

   hyperspace

   hysterical reasons

:h:

        [from SF fandom] A method of `marking' common words, i.e., calling
        attention to the fact that they are being used in a nonstandard,
        ironic, or humorous way. Originated in the fannish catchphrase
        "Bheer is the One True Ghod!" from decades ago. H-infix marking of
        `Ghod' and other words spread into the 1960s counterculture via
        underground comix, and into early hackerdom either from the
        counterculture or from SF fandom (the three overlapped heavily at
        the time). More recently, the h infix has become an expected feature
        of benchmark names (Dhrystone, Rhealstone, etc.); this is probably
        patterning on the original Whetstone (the name of a laboratory) but
        influenced by the fannish/counterculture h infix.

:ha ha only serious:

        [from SF fandom, orig. as mutation of HHOK, `Ha Ha Only Kidding'] A
        phrase (often seen abbreviated as HHOS) that aptly captures the
        flavor of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to parodies,
        absurdities, and ironic jokes that are both intended and perceived
        to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or truths that
        are constructed on in-joke and self-parody. This lexicon contains
        many examples of ha-ha-only-serious in both form and content.
        Indeed, the entirety of hacker culture is often perceived as
        ha-ha-only-serious by hackers themselves; to take it either too
        lightly or too seriously marks a person as an outsider, a
        {wannabee}, or in {larval stage}. For further enlightenment on this
        subject, consult any Zen master. See also {hacker humor}, and
        {koan}.

:hack:

        [very common]

        1. n. Originally, a quick job that produces what is needed, but not
        well.

        2. n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of
        work that produces exactly what is needed.

        3. vt. To bear emotionally or physically. "I can't hack this heat!"

        4. vt. To work on something (typically a program). In an immediate
        sense: "What are you doing?" "I'm hacking TECO." In a general
        (time-extended) sense: "What do you do around here?" "I hack TECO."
        More generally, "I hack foo" is roughly equivalent to "foo is my
        major interest (or project)". "I hack solid-state physics." See
        {Hacking X for Y}.

        5. vt. To pull a prank on. See sense 2 and {hacker} (sense 5).

        6. vi. To interact with a computer in a playful and exploratory
        rather than goal-directed way. "Whatcha up to?" "Oh, just hacking."

        7. n. Short for {hacker}.

        8. See {nethack}.

        9. [MIT] v. To explore the basements, roof ledges, and steam tunnels
        of a large, institutional building, to the dismay of Physical Plant
        workers and (since this is usually performed at educational
        institutions) the Campus Police. This activity has been found to be
        eerily similar to playing adventure games such as Dungeons and
        Dragons and {Zork}. See also {vadding}.

        Constructions on this term abound. They include happy hacking (a
        farewell), how's hacking? (a friendly greeting among hackers) and
        hack, hack (a fairly content-free but friendly comment, often used
        as a temporary farewell). For more on this totipotent term see The
        Meaning of Hack. See also {neat hack}, {real hack}.

:hack attack: n.

        [poss. by analogy with `Big Mac Attack' from ads for the McDonald's
        fast-food chain; the variant big hack attack is reported] Nearly
        synonymous with {hacking run}, though the latter more strongly
        implies an all-nighter.

:hack mode: n.

        1. What one is in when hacking, of course.

        2. More specifically, a Zen-like state of total focus on The Problem
        that may be achieved when one is hacking (this is why every good
        hacker is part mystic). Ability to enter such concentration at will
        correlates strongly with wizardliness; it is one of the most
        important skills learned during {larval stage}. Sometimes amplified
        as deep hack mode.

        Being yanked out of hack mode (see {priority interrupt}) may be
        experienced as a physical shock, and the sensation of being in hack
        mode is more than a little habituating. The intensity of this
        experience is probably by itself sufficient explanation for the
        existence of hackers, and explains why many resist being promoted
        out of positions where they can code. See also {cyberspace} (sense
        3).

        Some aspects of hacker etiquette will appear quite odd to an
        observer unaware of the high value placed on hack mode. For example,
        if someone appears at your door, it is perfectly okay to hold up a
        hand (without turning one's eyes away from the screen) to avoid
        being interrupted. One may read, type, and interact with the
        computer for quite some time before further acknowledging the
        other's presence (of course, he or she is reciprocally free to leave
        without a word). The understanding is that you might be in {hack
        mode} with a lot of delicate {state} (sense 2) in your head, and you
        dare not {swap} that context out until you have reached a good point
        to pause. See also {juggling eggs}.

:hack on: vt.

        [very common] To {hack}; implies that the subject is some
        pre-existing hunk of code that one is evolving, as opposed to
        something one might {hack up}.

:hack together: vt.

        [common] To throw something together so it will work. Unlike kluge
        together or {cruft together}, this does not necessarily have
        negative connotations.

:hack up: vt.

        To {hack}, but generally implies that the result is a hack in sense
        1 (a quick hack). Contrast this with {hack on}. To hack up on
        implies a {quick-and-dirty} modification to an existing system.
        Contrast {hacked up}; compare {kluge up}, {monkey up}, {cruft
        together}.

:hack value: n.

        Often adduced as the reason or motivation for expending effort
        toward a seemingly useless goal, the point being that the
        accomplished goal is a hack. For example, MacLISP had features for
        reading and printing Roman numerals, which were installed purely for
        hack value. See {display hack} for one method of computing hack
        value, but this cannot really be explained, only experienced. As
        Louis Armstrong once said when asked to explain jazz: "Man, if you
        gotta ask you'll never know." (Feminists please note Fats Waller's
        explanation of rhythm: "Lady, if you got to ask, you ain't got it.")

:hacked off: adj.

        [analogous to `pissed off'] Said of system administrators who have
        become annoyed, upset, or touchy owing to suspicions that their
        sites have been or are going to be victimized by crackers, or used
        for inappropriate, technically illegal, or even overtly criminal
        activities. For example, having unreadable files in your home
        directory called `worm', `lockpick', or `goroot' would probably be
        an effective (as well as impressively obvious and stupid) way to get
        your sysadmin hacked off at you.

        It has been pointed out that there is precedent for this usage in
        U.S. Navy slang, in which officers under discipline are sometimes
        said to be "in hack" and one may speak of "hacking off the C.O.".

:hacked up: adj.

        Sufficiently patched, kluged, and tweaked that the surgical scars
        are beginning to crowd out normal tissue (compare {critical mass}).
        Not all programs that are hacked become hacked up; if modifications
        are done with some eye to coherence and continued maintainability,
        the software may emerge better for the experience. Contrast {hack
        up}.

:hacker: n.

        [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe]

        1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems
        and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who
        prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet
        Users' Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights
        in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a
        system, computers and computer networks in particular.

        2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who
        enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.

        3. A person capable of appreciating {hack value}.

        4. A person who is good at programming quickly.

        5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does
        work using it or on it; as in `a Unix hacker'. (Definitions 1
        through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.)

        6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy
        hacker, for example.

        7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively
        overcoming or circumventing limitations.

        8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive
        information by poking around. Hence password hacker, network hacker.
        The correct term for this sense is {cracker}.

        The term `hacker' also tends to connote membership in the global
        community defined by the net (see {the network}. For discussion of
        some of the basics of this culture, see the How To Become A Hacker
        FAQ. It also implies that the person described is seen to subscribe
        to some version of the hacker ethic (see {hacker ethic}).

        It is better to be described as a hacker by others than to describe
        oneself that way. Hackers consider themselves something of an elite
        (a meritocracy based on ability), though one to which new members
        are gladly welcome. There is thus a certain ego satisfaction to be
        had in identifying yourself as a hacker (but if you claim to be one
        and are not, you'll quickly be labeled {bogus}). See also {geek},
        {wannabee}.

        This term seems to have been first adopted as a badge in the 1960s
        by the hacker culture surrounding TMRC and the MIT AI Lab. We have a
        report that it was used in a sense close to this entry's by teenage
        radio hams and electronics tinkerers in the mid-1950s.

:hacker ethic: n.

        1. The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good,
        and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise
        by writing open-source code and facilitating access to information
        and to computing resources wherever possible.

        2. The belief that system-cracking for fun and exploration is
        ethically OK as long as the cracker commits no theft, vandalism, or
        breach of confidentiality.

        Both of these normative ethical principles are widely, but by no
        means universally, accepted among hackers. Most hackers subscribe to
        the hacker ethic in sense 1, and many act on it by writing and
        giving away open-source software. A few go further and assert that
        all information should be free and any proprietary control of it is
        bad; this is the philosophy behind the {GNU} project.

        Sense 2 is more controversial: some people consider the act of
        cracking itself to be unethical, like breaking and entering. But the
        belief that `ethical' cracking excludes destruction at least
        moderates the behavior of people who see themselves as `benign'
        crackers (see also {samurai}, {gray hat}). On this view, it may be
        one of the highest forms of hackerly courtesy to (a) break into a
        system, and then (b) explain to the sysop, preferably by email from
        a {superuser} account, exactly how it was done and how the hole can
        be plugged -- acting as an unpaid (and unsolicited) {tiger team}.

        The most reliable manifestation of either version of the hacker
        ethic is that almost all hackers are actively willing to share
        technical tricks, software, and (where possible) computing resources
        with other hackers. Huge cooperative networks such as {Usenet},
        {FidoNet} and the Internet itself can function without central
        control because of this trait; they both rely on and reinforce a
        sense of community that may be hackerdom's most valuable intangible
        asset.

:hacker humor:

        A distinctive style of shared intellectual humor found among
        hackers, having the following marked characteristics:

        1. Fascination with form-vs.-content jokes, paradoxes, and humor
        having to do with confusion of metalevels (see {meta}). One way to
        make a hacker laugh: hold a red index card in front of him/her with
        "GREEN" written on it, or vice-versa (note, however, that this is
        funny only the first time).

        2. Elaborate deadpan parodies of large intellectual constructs, such
        as specifications (see {write-only memory}), standards documents,
        language descriptions (see {INTERCAL}), and even entire scientific
        theories (see {quantum bogodynamics}, {computron}).

        3. Jokes that involve screwily precise reasoning from bizarre,
        ludicrous, or just grossly counter-intuitive premises.

        4. Fascination with puns and wordplay.

        5. A fondness for apparently mindless humor with subversive currents
        of intelligence in it -- for example, old Warner Brothers and Rocky
        & Bullwinkle cartoons, the Marx brothers, the early B-52s, and Monty
        Python's Flying Circus. Humor that combines this trait with elements
        of high camp and slapstick is especially favored.

        6. References to the symbol-object antinomies and associated ideas
        in Zen Buddhism and (less often) Taoism. See {has the X nature},
        {Discordianism}, {zen}, {ha ha only serious}, {koan}.

        See also {filk}, {retrocomputing}, and the Portrait of J. Random
        Hacker in Appendix B. If you have an itchy feeling that all six of
        these traits are really aspects of one thing that is incredibly
        difficult to talk about exactly, you are (a) correct and (b)
        responding like a hacker. These traits are also recognizable (though
        in a less marked form) throughout {science-fiction fandom}.

:Hackers (the movie): n.

        A notable bomb from 1995. Should have been titled Crackers, because
        cracking is what the movie was about. It's understandable that they
        didn't however; titles redolent of snack food are probably a tough
        sell in Hollywood.

:hacking run: n.

        [analogy with `bombing run' or `speed run'] A hack session extended
        long outside normal working times, especially one longer than 12
        hours. May cause you to change phase the hard way (see {phase}).

:Hacking X for Y: n.

        [ITS] Ritual phrasing of part of the information which ITS made
        publicly available about each user. This information (the INQUIR
        record) was a sort of form in which the user could fill out various
        fields. On display, two of these fields were always combined into a
        project description of the form "Hacking X for Y" (e.g., "Hacking
        perceptrons for Minsky"). This form of description became
        traditional and has since been carried over to other systems with
        more general facilities for self-advertisement (such as Unix {plan
        file}s).

:Hackintosh: n.

        1. An Apple Lisa that has been hacked into emulating a Macintosh
        (also called a `Mac XL').

        2. A Macintosh assembled from parts theoretically belonging to
        different models in the line.

:hackish: /hak'ish/, adj.

        (also {hackishness} n.)

        1. Said of something that is or involves a hack.

        2. Of or pertaining to hackers or the hacker subculture. See also
        {true-hacker}.

:hackishness: n.

        The quality of being or involving a hack. This term is considered
        mildly silly. Syn. {hackitude}.

:hackitude: n.

        Syn. {hackishness}; this word is considered sillier.

:hair: n.

        [back-formation from {hairy}] The complications that make something
        hairy. "Decoding {TECO} commands requires a certain amount of hair."
        Often seen in the phrase infinite hair, which connotes extreme
        complexity. Also in hairiferous (tending to promote hair growth):
        "GNUMACS elisp encourages lusers to write complex editing modes."
        "Yeah, it's pretty hairiferous all right." (or just: "Hair
        squared!")

:hairball: n.

        1. [Fidonet] A large batch of messages that a store-and-forward
        network is failing to forward when it should. Often used in the
        phrase "Fido coughed up a hairball today", meaning that the stuck
        messages have just come unstuck, producing a flood of mail where
        there had previously been drought.

        2. An unmanageably huge mass of source code. "JWZ thought the
        Mozilla effort bogged down because the code was a huge hairball."

        3. Any large amount of garbage coming out suddenly. "Sendmail is
        coughing up a hairball, so expect some slowness accessing the
        Internet."

:hairy: adj.

        1. Annoyingly complicated. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy."

        2. Incomprehensible. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy."

        3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative, rare, expert, and/or
        incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in context: "He knows this
        hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to worry about." See also
        {hirsute}.

        There is a theorem in simplicial homology theory which states that
        any continuous tangent field on a 2-sphere is null at least in a
        point. Mathematically literate hackers tend to associate the term
        `hairy' with the informal version of this theorem; "You can't comb a
        hairy ball smooth." (Previous versions of this entry associating the
        above informal statement with the Brouwer fixed-point theorem were
        incorrect.)

        The adjective `long-haired' is well-attested to have been in slang
        use among scientists and engineers during the early 1950s; it was
        equivalent to modern hairy senses 1 and 2, and was very likely
        ancestral to the hackish use. In fact the noun `long-hair' was at
        the time used to describe a person satisfying sense 3. Both senses
        probably passed out of use when long hair was adopted as a signature
        trait by the 1960s counterculture, leaving hackish hairy as a sort
        of stunted mutant relic.

        In British mainstream use, "hairy" means "dangerous", and
        consequently, in British programming terms, "hairy" may be used to
        denote complicated and/or incomprehensible code, but only if that
        complexity or incomprehesiveness is also considered dangerous.

:HAKMEM: /hak'mem/, n.

        MIT AI Memo 239 (February 1972). A legendary collection of neat
        mathematical and programming hacks contributed by many people at MIT
        and elsewhere. (The title of the memo really is "HAKMEM", which is a
        6-letterism for `hacks memo'.) Some of them are very useful
        techniques, powerful theorems, or interesting unsolved problems, but
        most fall into the category of mathematical and computer trivia.
        Here is a sampling of the entries (with authors), slightly
        paraphrased:

        Item 41 (Gene Salamin): There are exactly 23,000 prime numbers less
        than 2^18.

        Item 46 (Rich Schroeppel): The most probable suit distribution in
        bridge hands is 4-4-3-2, as compared to 4-3-3-3, which is the most
        evenly distributed. This is because the world likes to have unequal
        numbers: a thermodynamic effect saying things will not be in the
        state of lowest energy, but in the state of lowest disordered
        energy.

        Item 81 (Rich Schroeppel): Count the magic squares of order 5 (that
        is, all the 5-by-5 arrangements of the numbers from 1 to 25 such
        that all rows, columns, and diagonals add up to the same number).
        There are about 320 million, not counting those that differ only by
        rotation and reflection.

        Item 154 (Bill Gosper): The myth that any given programming language
        is machine independent is easily exploded by computing the sum of
        powers of 2. If the result loops with period = 1 with sign +, you
        are on a sign-magnitude machine. If the result loops with period = 1
        at -1, you are on a twos-complement machine. If the result loops
        with period greater than 1, including the beginning, you are on a
        ones-complement machine. If the result loops with period greater
        than 1, not including the beginning, your machine isn't binary --
        the pattern should tell you the base. If you run out of memory, you
        are on a string or bignum system. If arithmetic overflow is a fatal
        error, some fascist pig with a read-only mind is trying to enforce
        machine independence. But the very ability to trap overflow is
        machine dependent. By this strategy, consider the universe, or, more
        precisely, algebra: Let X = the sum of many powers of 2 = ...111111
        (base 2). Now add X to itself: X + X = ...111110. Thus, 2X = X - 1,
        so X = -1. Therefore algebra is run on a machine (the universe) that
        is two's-complement.

        Item 174 (Bill Gosper and Stuart Nelson): 21963283741 is the only
        number such that if you represent it on the {PDP-10} as both an
        integer and a floating-point number, the bit patterns of the two
        representations are identical.

        Item 176 (Gosper): The "banana phenomenon" was encountered when
        processing a character string by taking the last 3 letters typed
        out, searching for a random occurrence of that sequence in the text,
        taking the letter following that occurrence, typing it out, and
        iterating. This ensures that every 4-letter string output occurs in
        the original. The program typed BANANANANANANANA.... We note an
        ambiguity in the phrase, "the Nth occurrence of." In one sense,
        there are five 00's in 0000000000; in another, there are nine. The
        editing program TECO finds five. Thus it finds only the first ANA in
        BANANA, and is thus obligated to type N next. By Murphy's Law, there
        is but one NAN, thus forcing A, and thus a loop. An option to find
        overlapped instances would be useful, although it would require
        backing up N  - 1 characters before seeking the next N-character
        string.

        Note: This last item refers to a {Dissociated Press} implementation.
        See also {banana problem}.

        HAKMEM also contains some rather more complicated mathematical and
        technical items, but these examples show some of its fun flavor.

        An HTML transcription of the entire document is available at
        http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/hakmem.html.

:hakspek: /hak'speek/, n.

        A shorthand method of spelling found on many British academic
        bulletin boards and {talker system}s. Syllables and whole words in a
        sentence are replaced by single ASCII characters the names of which
        are phonetically similar or equivalent, while multiple letters are
        usually dropped. Hence, `for' becomes `4'; `two', `too', and `to'
        become `2'; `ck' becomes `k'. "Before I see you tomorrow" becomes
        "b4 i c u 2moro". First appeared in London about 1986, and was
        probably caused by the slowness of available talker systems, which
        operated on archaic machines with outdated operating systems and no
        standard methods of communication.

        Hakspek almost disappeared after the great bandwidth explosion of
        the early 1990s, as fast Internet links wiped out the old-style
        talker systems. However, it has enjoyed a revival in another medium
        -- the Short Message Service (SMS) associated with GSM cellphones.
        SMS sends are limited to a maximum of 160 characters, and typing on
        a cellphone keypad is difficult and slow anyway. There are now even
        published paper dictionaries for SMS users to help them do
        hakspek-to-English and vice-versa.

        See also {talk mode}.

:Halloween Documents: n.

        A pair of Microsoft internal strategy memoranda leaked to ESR in
        late 1998 that confirmed everybody's paranoia about the current
        {Evil Empire}. These documents praised the technical excellence of
        {Linux} and outlined a counterstrategy of attempting to lock in
        customers by "de-commoditizing" Internet protocols and services.
        They were extensively cited on the Internet and in the press and
        proved so embarrassing that Microsoft PR barely said a word in
        public for six months afterwards.

:ham:

        The opposite of {spam}, sense 3; that is, incoming mail that the
        user actually wants to see.

:hammer: vt.

        Commonwealth hackish syn. for {bang on}.

:hamster: n.

        1. [Fairchild] A particularly slick little piece of code that does
        one thing well; a small, self-contained hack. The image is of a
        hamster {happily} spinning its exercise wheel.

        2. A tailless mouse; that is, one with an infrared link to a
        receiver on the machine, as opposed to the conventional cable.

        3. [UK] Any item of hardware made by Amstrad, a company famous for
        its cheap plastic PC-almost-compatibles.

:HAND: //

        [Usenet: very common] Abbreviation: Have A Nice Day. Typically used
        to close a {Usenet} posting, but also used to informally close
        emails; often preceded by {HTH}.

:hand cruft: vt.

        [pun on `hand craft'] See {cruft}, sense 3.

:hand-hacking: n.

        1. [rare] The practice of translating {hot spot}s from an {HLL} into
        hand-tuned assembler, as opposed to trying to coerce the compiler
        into generating better code. Both the term and the practice are
        becoming uncommon. See {tune}, {by hand}; syn. with v. {cruft}.

        2. [common] More generally, manual construction or patching of data
        sets that would normally be generated by a translation utility and
        interpreted by another program, and aren't really designed to be
        read or modified by humans.

:hand-roll: v.

        [from obs. mainstream slang hand-rolled in opposition to ready-made,
        referring to cigarettes] To perform a normally automated software
        installation or configuration process {by hand}; implies that the
        normal process failed due to bugs in the configurator or was
        defeated by something exceptional in the local environment. "The
        worst thing about being a gateway between four different nets is
        having to hand-roll a new sendmail configuration every time any of
        them upgrades."

:handle: n.

        1. [from CB slang] An electronic pseudonym; a nom de guerre intended
        to conceal the user's true identity. Network and BBS handles
        function as the same sort of simultaneous concealment and display
        one finds on Citizen's Band radio, from which the term was adopted.
        Use of grandiose handles is characteristic of {warez d00dz},
        {cracker}s, {weenie}s, {spod}s, and other lower forms of network
        life; true hackers travel on their own reputations rather than
        invented legendry. Compare {nick}, {screen name}.

        2. A {magic cookie}, often in the form of a numeric index into some
        array somewhere, through which you can manipulate an object like a
        file or window. The form file handle is especially common.

        3. [Mac] A pointer to a pointer to dynamically-allocated memory; the
        extra level of indirection allows on-the-fly memory compaction (to
        cut down on fragmentation) or aging out of unused resources, with
        minimal impact on the (possibly multiple) parts of the larger
        program containing references to the allocated memory. Compare
        {snap} (to snap a handle would defeat its purpose); see also
        {aliasing bug}, {dangling pointer}.

:handshaking: n.

        [very common] Hardware or software activity designed to start or
        keep two machines or programs in synchronization as they {do
        protocol}. Often applied to human activity; thus, a hacker might
        watch two people in conversation nodding their heads to indicate
        that they have heard each others' points and say "Oh, they're
        handshaking!". See also {protocol}.

:handwave: /hand'wayv/

        [poss. from gestures characteristic of stage magicians]

        1. v. To gloss over a complex point; to distract a listener; to
        support a (possibly actually valid) point with blatantly faulty
        logic.

        2. n. The act of handwaving. "Boy, what a handwave!"

        If someone starts a sentence with "Clearly..." or "Obviously..." or
        "It is self-evident that...", it is a good bet he is about to
        handwave (alternatively, use of these constructions in a sarcastic
        tone before a paraphrase of someone else's argument suggests that it
        is a handwave). The theory behind this term is that if you wave your
        hands at the right moment, the listener may be sufficiently
        distracted to not notice that what you have said is {bogus}. Failing
        that, if a listener does object, you might try to dismiss the
        objection with a wave of your hand.

        The use of this word is often accompanied by gestures: both hands
        up, palms forward, swinging the hands in a vertical plane pivoting
        at the elbows and/or shoulders (depending on the magnitude of the
        handwave); alternatively, holding the forearms in one position while
        rotating the hands at the wrist to make them flutter. In context,
        the gestures alone can suffice as a remark; if a speaker makes an
        outrageously unsupported assumption, you might simply wave your
        hands in this way, as an accusation, far more eloquent than words
        could express, that his logic is faulty.

:hang: v.

        1. [very common] To wait for an event that will never occur. "The
        system is hanging because it can't read from the crashed drive". See
        {wedged}, {hung}.

        2. To wait for some event to occur; to hang around until something
        happens. "The program displays a menu and then hangs until you type
        a character." Compare {block}.

        3. To attach a peripheral device, esp. in the construction `hang
        off': "We're going to hang another tape drive off the file server."
        Implies a device attached with cables, rather than something that is
        strictly inside the machine's chassis.

:Hanlon's Razor: prov.

        A corollary of {Finagle's Law}, similar to Occam's Razor, that reads
        "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by
        stupidity." Quoted here because it seems to be a particular favorite
        of hackers, often showing up in {sig block}s, {fortune cookie} files
        and the login banners of BBS systems and commercial networks. This
        probably reflects the hacker's daily experience of environments
        created by well-intentioned but short-sighted people. Compare
        {Sturgeon's Law}, {Ninety-Ninety Rule}.

        At http://www.statusq.org/2001/11/26.html it is claimed that
        Hanlon's Razor was coined by one Robert J. Hanlon of Scranton, PA.
        However, a curiously similar remark ("You have attributed conditions
        to villainy that simply result from stupidity.") appears in Logic of
        Empire, a classic 1941 SF story by Robert A. Heinlein, who calls the
        error it indicates the `devil theory' of sociology. Similar epigrams
        have been attributed to William James and (on dubious evidence)
        Napoleon Bonaparte.

:happily: adv.

        Of software, used to emphasize that a program is unaware of some
        important fact about its environment, either because it has been
        fooled into believing a lie, or because it doesn't care. The sense
        of `happy' here is not that of elation, but rather that of blissful
        ignorance. "The program continues to run, happily unaware that its
        output is going to /dev/null." Also used to suggest that a program
        or device would really rather be doing something destructive, and is
        being given an opportunity to do so. "If you enter an O here instead
        of a zero, the program will happily erase all your data."
        Nevertheless, use of this term implies a basically benign attitude
        towards the program: It didn't mean any harm, it was just eager to
        do its job. We'd like to be angry at it but we shouldn't, we should
        try to understand it instead. The adjective "cheerfully" is often
        used in exactly the same way.

:hard boot: n.

        See {boot}.

:hardcoded: adj.

        1. [common] Said of data inserted directly into a program, where it
        cannot be easily modified, as opposed to data in some {profile},
        resource (see {de-rezz} sense 2), or environment variable that a
        {user} or hacker can easily modify.

        2. In C, this is esp. applied to use of a literal instead of a
        #define macro (see {magic number}).

:hardwarily: /hardweir'@lee/, adv.

        In a way pertaining to hardware. "The system is hardwarily
        unreliable." The adjective `hardwary' is not traditionally used,
        though it has recently been reported from the U.K. See {softwarily}.

:hardwired: adj.

        1. In software, syn. for {hardcoded}.

        2. By extension, anything that is not modifiable, especially in the
        sense of customizable to one's particular needs or tastes.

:has the X nature:

        [seems to derive from Zen Buddhist koans of the form "Does an X have
        the Buddha-nature?"] adj. Common hacker construction for `is an X',
        used for humorous emphasis. "Anyone who can't even use a program
        with on-screen help embedded in it truly has the {loser} nature!"
        See also {the X that can be Y is not the true X}. See also {mu}.

:hash bucket: n.

        A notional receptacle, a set of which might be used to apportion
        data items for sorting or lookup purposes. When you look up a name
        in the phone book (for example), you typically hash it by extracting
        its first letter; the hash buckets are the alphabetically ordered
        letter sections. This term is used as techspeak with respect to code
        that uses actual hash functions; in jargon, it is used for human
        associative memory as well. Thus, two things `in the same hash
        bucket' are more difficult to discriminate, and may be confused. "If
        you hash English words only by length, you get too many common
        grammar words in the first couple of hash buckets." Compare {hash
        collision}.

:hash collision: n.

        [from the techspeak] (var.: hash clash) When used of people,
        signifies a confusion in associative memory or imagination,
        especially a persistent one (see {thinko}). True story: One of us
        [ESR] was once on the phone with a friend about to move out to
        Berkeley. When asked what he expected Berkeley to be like, the
        friend replied: "Well, I have this mental picture of naked women
        throwing Molotov cocktails, but I think that's just a collision in
        my hash tables." Compare {hash bucket}.

:hat: n.

        Common (spoken) name for the circumflex (`^', ASCII 1011110)
        character. See {ASCII} for other synonyms.

:HCF: /HCF/, n.

        Mnemonic for `Halt and Catch Fire', any of several undocumented and
        semi-mythical machine instructions with destructive side-effects,
        supposedly included for test purposes on several well-known
        architectures going as far back as the IBM 360. The MC6800
        microprocessor was the first for which an HCF opcode became widely
        known. This instruction caused the processor to {toggle} a subset of
        the bus lines as rapidly as it could; in some configurations this
        could actually cause lines to burn up. Compare {killer poke}.

:heads down: adj.

        Concentrating, usually so heavily and for so long that everything
        outside the focus area is missed. See also {hack mode} and {larval
        stage}, although this mode is hardly confined to fledgling hackers.

:heartbeat: n.

        1. The signal emitted by a Level 2 Ethernet transceiver at the end
        of every packet to show that the collision-detection circuit is
        still connected.

        2. A periodic synchronization signal used by software or hardware,
        such as a bus clock or a periodic interrupt.

        3. The `natural' oscillation frequency of a computer's clock
        crystal, before frequency division down to the machine's clock rate.

        4. A signal emitted at regular intervals by software to demonstrate
        that it is still alive. Sometimes hardware is designed to reboot the
        machine if it stops hearing a heartbeat. See also {breath-of-life
        packet}.

:heatseeker: n.

        [IBM] A customer who can be relied upon to buy, without fail, the
        latest version of an existing product (not quite the same as a
        member of the {lunatic fringe}). A 1993 example of a heatseeker was
        someone who, owning a 286 PC and Windows 3.0, went out and bought
        Windows 3.1 (which offers no worthwhile benefits unless you have a
        386). If all customers were heatseekers, vast amounts of money could
        be made by just fixing some of the bugs in each release (n) and
        selling it to them as release (n+1). Microsoft in fact seems to have
        mastered this technique.

:heavy metal: n.

        [Cambridge] Syn. {big iron}.

:heavy wizardry: n.

        Code or designs that trade on a particularly intimate knowledge or
        experience of a particular operating system or language or complex
        application interface. Distinguished from {deep magic}, which trades
        more on arcane theoretical knowledge. Writing device drivers is
        heavy wizardry; so is interfacing to {X} (sense 2) without a
        toolkit. Esp.: found in source-code comments of the form "Heavy
        wizardry begins here". Compare {voodoo programming}.

:heavyweight: adj.

        [common] High-overhead; {baroque}; code-intensive; featureful, but
        costly. Esp. used of communication protocols, language designs, and
        any sort of implementation in which maximum generality and/or ease
        of implementation has been pushed at the expense of mundane
        considerations such as speed, memory utilization, and startup time.
        {EMACS} is a heavyweight editor; {X} is an extremely heavyweight
        window system. This term isn't pejorative, but one hacker's
        heavyweight is another's {elephantine} and a third's {monstrosity}.
        Oppose lightweight. Usage: now borders on techspeak, especially in
        the compound heavyweight process.

:Hed Rat:

        Unflattering spoonerism of Red Hat, a popular {Linux} distribution.
        Compare {Macintrash}. {sun-stools}, {HP-SUX}, {Slowlaris}.

:heisenbug: /hi:'zenbuhg/, n.

        [from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics] A bug
        that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or
        isolate it. (This usage is not even particularly fanciful; the use
        of a debugger sometimes alters a program's operating environment
        significantly enough that buggy code, such as that which relies on
        the values of uninitialized memory, behaves quite differently.)
        Antonym of {Bohr bug}; see also {mandelbug}, {schroedinbug}. In C,
        nine out of ten heisenbugs result from uninitialized auto variables,
        {fandango on core} phenomena (esp. lossage related to corruption of
        the malloc {arena}) or errors that {smash the stack}.

:hell desk:

        Common mispronunciation of `help desk', especially among people who
        have to answer phones at one.

:hello sailor!: interj.

        Occasional West Coast equivalent of {hello world}; seems to have
        originated at SAIL, later associated with the game {Zork} (which
        also included "hello, aviator" and "hello, implementor"). Originally
        from the traditional hooker's greeting to a swabbie fresh off the
        boat, of course. The standard response is "Nothing happens here.";
        of all the Zork/Dungeon games, only in Infocom's Zork 3 is "Hello,
        Sailor" actually useful (excluding the unique situation where
        _knowing_ this fact is important in Dungeon...).

:hello world: interj.

        1. The canonical minimal test message in the C/Unix universe.

        2. Any of the minimal programs that emit this message (a
        representative sample in various languages can be found at
        http://www.latech.edu/~acm/helloworld/). Traditionally, the first
        program a C coder is supposed to write in a new environment is one
        that just prints "hello, world" to standard output (and indeed it is
        the first example program in {K&R}). Environments that generate an
        unreasonably large executable for this trivial test or which require
        a {hairy} compiler-linker invocation to generate it are considered
        to {lose} (see {X}).

        3. Greeting uttered by a hacker making an entrance or requesting
        information from anyone present. "Hello, world! Is the LAN back up
        yet?"

:hello, wall!: excl.

        See {wall}.

:hex: n.

        1. Short for {hexadecimal}, base 16.

        2. A 6-pack of anything (compare {quad}, sense 2). Neither usage has
        anything to do with {magic} or {black art}, though the pun is
        appreciated and occasionally used by hackers. True story: As a joke,
        some hackers once offered some surplus ICs for sale to be worn as
        protective amulets against hostile magic. The chips were, of course,
        hex inverters.

:hexadecimal: n.

        Base 16. Coined in the early 1950s to replace earlier sexadecimal,
        which was too racy and amusing for stuffy IBM, and later adopted by
        the rest of the industry.

        Actually, neither term is etymologically pure. If we take binary to
        be paradigmatic, the most etymologically correct term for base 10,
        for example, is `denary', which comes from `deni' (ten at a time,
        ten each), a Latin distributive number; the corresponding term for
        base-16 would be something like `sendenary'. "Decimal" comes from
        the combining root of decem, Latin for 10. If wish to create a truly
        analogous word for base 16, we should start with sedecim, Latin for
        16. Ergo, sedecimal is the word that would have been created by a
        Latin scholar. The `sexa-' prefix is Latin but incorrect in this
        context, and `hexa-' is Greek. The word octal is similarly
        incorrect; a correct form would be `octaval' (to go with decimal),
        or `octonary' (to go with binary). If anyone ever implements a
        base-3 computer, computer scientists will be faced with the
        unprecedented dilemma of a choice between two correct forms; both
        ternary and trinary have a claim to this throne.

:hexit: /hek'sit/, n.

        A hexadecimal digit (0-9, and A-F or a-f). Used by people who claim
        that there are only ten digits, dammit; sixteen-fingered human
        beings are rather rare, despite what some keyboard designs might
        seem to imply (see {space-cadet keyboard}).

:HHOK:

        See {ha ha only serious}.

:HHOS:

        See {ha ha only serious}.

:hidden flag: n.

        [scientific computation] An extra option added to a routine without
        changing the calling sequence. For example, instead of adding an
        explicit input variable to instruct a routine to give extra
        diagnostic output, the programmer might just add a test for some
        otherwise meaningless feature of the existing inputs, such as a
        negative mass. The use of hidden flags can make a program very hard
        to debug and understand, but is all too common wherever programs are
        hacked on in a hurry.

:high bit: n.

        [from high-order bit]

        1. The most significant bit in a byte.

        2. [common] By extension, the most significant part of something
        other than a data byte: "Spare me the whole {saga}, just give me the
        high bit." See also {meta bit}, {dread high-bit disease}, and
        compare the mainstream slang bottom line.

:high moby: /hi:' mohbee/, n.

        The high half of a 512K {PDP-10}'s physical address space; the other
        half was of course the low moby. This usage has been generalized in
        a way that has outlasted the {PDP-10}; for example, at the 1990
        Washington D.C. Area Science Fiction Conclave (Disclave), when a
        miscommunication resulted in two separate wakes being held in
        commemoration of the shutdown of MIT's last {ITS} machines, the one
        on the upper floor was dubbed the `high moby' and the other the `low
        moby'. All parties involved {grok}ked this instantly. See {moby}.

:highly: adv.

        [scientific computation] The preferred modifier for overstating an
        understatement. As in: highly nonoptimal, the worst possible way to
        do something; highly nontrivial, either impossible or requiring a
        major research project; highly nonlinear, completely erratic and
        unpredictable; highly nontechnical, drivel written for {luser}s,
        oversimplified to the point of being misleading or incorrect
        (compare {drool-proof paper}). In other computing cultures,
        postfixing of {in the extreme} might be preferred.

:hing: //, n.

        [IRC] Fortuitous typo for `hint', now in wide intentional use among
        players of {initgame}. Compare {newsfroup}, {filk}.

:hired gun: n.

        A contract programmer, as opposed to a full-time staff member. All
        the connotations of this term suggested by innumerable spaghetti
        Westerns are intentional.

:hirsute: adj.

        Occasionally used humorously as a synonym for {hairy}.

:HLL: /HLL/, n.

        [High-Level Language (as opposed to assembler)] Found primarily in
        email and news rather than speech. Rarely, the variants `VHLL' and
        `MLL' are found. VHLL stands for `Very-High-Level Language' and is
        used to describe a {bondage-and-discipline language} that the
        speaker happens to like; Prolog and Backus's FP are often called
        VHLLs. `MLL' stands for `Medium-Level Language' and is sometimes
        used half-jokingly to describe {C}, alluding to its
        `structured-assembler' image. See also {languages of choice}.

:hoarding: n.

        See {software hoarding}.

:hog: n.,vt.

        1. Favored term to describe programs or hardware that seem to eat
        far more than their share of a system's resources, esp. those which
        noticeably degrade interactive response. Not used of programs that
        are simply extremely large or complex or that are merely painfully
        slow themselves. More often than not encountered in qualified forms,
        e.g., memory hog, core hog, hog the processor, hog the disk. "A
        controller that never gives up the I/O bus gets killed after the
        bus-hog timer expires."

        2. Also said of people who use more than their fair share of
        resources (particularly disk, where it seems that 10% of the people
        use 90% of the disk, no matter how big the disk is or how many
        people use it). Of course, once disk hogs fill up one filesystem,
        they typically find some other new one to infect, claiming to the
        sysadmin that they have an important new project to complete.

:hole: n.

        A region in an otherwise {flat} entity which is not actually
        present. For example, some Unix filesystems can store large files
        with holes so that unused regions of the file are never actually
        stored on disk. (In techspeak, these are referred to as `sparse'
        files.) As another example, the region of memory in IBM PCs reserved
        for memory-mapped I/O devices which may not actually be present is
        called `the I/O hole', since memory-management systems must skip
        over this area when filling user requests for memory.

:hollised: /hol'ist/, adj.

        [Usenet: sci.space] To be hollised is to have been ordered by one's
        employer not to post any even remotely job-related material to
        Usenet (or, by extension, to other Internet media). The original and
        most notorious case of this involved one Ken Hollis, a Lockheed
        employee and space-program enthusiast who posted publicly available
        material on access to Space Shuttle launches to sci.space. He was
        gagged under threat of being fired in 1994 at the behest of NASA
        public-relations officers. The result was, of course, a huge
        publicity black eye for NASA. Nevertheless several other NASA
        contractor employees were subsequently hollised for similar
        activities. Use of this term carries the strong connotation that the
        persons doing the gagging are bureaucratic idiots blinded to their
        own best interests by territorial reflexes.

:holy penguin pee: n.

        [Linux] Notional substance said to be sprinkled by {Linus} onto
        other people's contributions. With this ritual, he blesses them,
        officially making them part of the kernel. First used in November
        1998 just after Linus had handed the maintenance of the stable
        kernel over to Alan Cox.

:holy wars: n.

        [from {Usenet}, but may predate it; common] n. {flame war}s over
        {religious issues}. The paper by Danny Cohen that popularized the
        terms {big-endian} and {little-endian} in connection with the
        LSB-first/MSB-first controversy was entitled On Holy Wars and a Plea
        for Peace.

        Great holy wars of the past have included {ITS} vs.: {Unix}, {Unix}
        vs.: {VMS}, {BSD} Unix vs.: System V, {C} vs.: {Pascal}, {C} vs.:
        FORTRAN, etc. In the year 2003, popular favorites of the day are KDE
        vs, GNOME, vim vs. elvis, Linux vs. [Free|Net|Open]BSD. Hardy
        perennials include {EMACS} vs.: {vi}, my personal computer vs.:
        everyone else's personal computer, ad nauseam. The characteristic
        that distinguishes holy wars from normal technical disputes is that
        in a holy war most of the participants spend their time trying to
        pass off personal value choices and cultural attachments as
        objective technical evaluations. This happens precisely because in a
        true holy war, the actual substantive differences between the sides
        are relatively minor. See also {theology}.

:home box: n.

        A hacker's personal machine, especially one he or she owns. "Yeah?
        Well, my home box runs a full 4.4 BSD, so there!"

:home machine: n.

        1. Syn. {home box}.

        2. The machine that receives your email. These senses might be
        distinct, for example, for a hacker who owns one computer at home,
        but reads email at work.

:home page: n.

        1. One's personal billboard on the World Wide Web. The term `home
        page' is perhaps a bit misleading because home directories and
        physical homes in {RL} are private, but home pages are designed to
        be very public.

        2. By extension, a WWW repository for information and links related
        to a project or organization. Compare {home box}.

:honey pot: n.

        1. A box designed to attract {cracker}s so that they can be observed
        in action. It is usually well isolated from the rest of the network,
        but has extensive logging (usually network layer, on a different
        machine). Different from an {iron box} in that its purpose is to
        attract, not merely observe. Sometimes, it is also a defensive
        network security tactic -- you set up an easy-to-crack box so that
        your real servers don't get messed with. The concept was presented
        in Cheswick & Bellovin's book Firewalls and Internet Security.

        2. A mail server that acts as an open relay when a single message is
        attempted to send through it, but discards or diverts for
        examination messages that are detected to be part of a spam run.

:hook: n.

        A software or hardware feature included in order to simplify later
        additions or changes by a user. For example, a simple program that
        prints numbers might always print them in base 10, but a more
        flexible version would let a variable determine what base to use;
        setting the variable to 5 would make the program print numbers in
        base 5. The variable is a simple hook. An even more flexible program
        might examine the variable and treat a value of 16 or less as the
        base to use, but treat any other number as the address of a
        user-supplied routine for printing a number. This is a {hairy} but
        powerful hook; one can then write a routine to print numbers as
        Roman numerals, say, or as Hebrew characters, and plug it into the
        program through the hook. Often the difference between a good
        program and a superb one is that the latter has useful hooks in
        judiciously chosen places. Both may do the original job about
        equally well, but the one with the hooks is much more flexible for
        future expansion of capabilities ({EMACS}, for example, is all
        hooks). The term user exit is synonymous but much more formal and
        less hackish.

:hop:

        1. n. [common] One file transmission in a series required to get a
        file from point A to point B on a store-and-forward network. On such
        networks (including the old UUCP network and and {FidoNet}), an
        important inter-machine metric is the number of hops in the shortest
        path between them, which can be more significant than their
        geographical separation. See {bang path}.

        2. v. [rare] To log in to a remote machine, esp. via rlogin or
        telnet. "I'll hop over to foovax to FTP that."

:horked: adj.

        Broken. Confused. Trashed. Now common; seems to be post-1995. There
        is an entertaining web page of related definitions, few of which
        seem to be in live use but many of which would be in the recognition
        vocabulary of anyone familiar with the adjective.

:hose:

        1. vt. [common] To make non-functional or greatly degraded in
        performance. "That big ray-tracing program really hoses the system."
        See {hosed}.

        2. n. A narrow channel through which data flows under pressure.
        Generally denotes data paths that represent performance bottlenecks.

        3. n. Cabling, especially thick Ethernet cable. This is sometimes
        called bit hose or hosery (play on `hosiery') or `etherhose'. See
        also {washing machine}.

:hosed: adj.

        Same as {down}. Used primarily by Unix hackers. Humorous: also
        implies a condition thought to be relatively easy to reverse.
        Probably derived from the Canadian slang `hoser' popularized by the
        Bob and Doug Mackenzie skits on SCTV, but this usage predated SCTV
        by years in hackerdom (it was certainly already live at CMU in the
        1970s). See {hose}. It is also widely used of people in the
        mainstream sense of `in an extremely unfortunate situation'.

        Once upon a time, a Cray that had been experiencing periodic
        difficulties crashed, and it was announced to have been hosed. It
        was discovered that the crash was due to the disconnection of some
        coolant hoses. The problem was corrected, and users were then
        assured that everything was OK because the system had been rehosed.
        See also {dehose}.

:hot chat: n.

        Sexually explicit one-on-one chat. See {teledildonics}.

:hot spot: n.

        1. [primarily used by C/Unix programmers, but spreading] It is
        received wisdom that in most programs, less than 10% of the code
        eats 90% of the execution time; if one were to graph instruction
        visits versus code addresses, one would typically see a few huge
        spikes amidst a lot of low-level noise. Such spikes are called hot
        spots and are good candidates for heavy optimization or
        {hand-hacking}. The term is especially used of tight loops and
        recursions in the code's central algorithm, as opposed to (say)
        initial set-up costs or large but infrequent I/O operations. See
        {tune}, {hand-hacking}.

        2. The active location of a cursor on a bit-map display. "Put the
        mouse's hot spot on the `ON' widget and click the left button."

        3. A screen region that is sensitive to mouse gestures, which
        trigger some action. World Wide Web pages now provide the
        {canonical} examples; WWW browsers present hypertext links as hot
        spots which, when clicked on, point the browser at another document
        (these are specifically called {hotlink}s).

        4. In a massively parallel computer with shared memory, the one
        location that all 10,000 processors are trying to read or write at
        once (perhaps because they are all doing a {busy-wait} on the same
        lock).

        5. More generally, any place in a hardware design that turns into a
        performance bottleneck due to resource contention.

:hotlink: /hot'link/, n.

        A {hot spot} on a World Wide Web page; an area, which, when clicked
        or selected, chases a URL. Also spelled `hot link'. Use of this term
        focuses on the link's role as an immediate part of your display, as
        opposed to the timeless sense of logical connection suggested by
        {web pointer}. Your screen shows hotlinks but your document has web
        pointers, not (in normal usage) the other way around.

:house wizard: n.

        [prob.: from ad-agency tradetalk, `house freak'] A hacker occupying
        a technical-specialist, R&D, or systems position at a commercial
        shop. A really effective house wizard can have influence out of all
        proportion to his/her ostensible rank and still not have to wear a
        suit. Used esp. of Unix wizards. The term house guru is equivalent.

:HP-SUX: /HP suhks/, n.

        Unflattering hackerism for HP-UX, Hewlett-Packard's Unix port, which
        features some truly unique bogosities in the filesystem internals
        and elsewhere (these occasionally create portability problems).
        HP-UX is often referred to as `hockey-pux' inside HP, and one
        respondent claims that the proper pronunciation is /HP ukkkhhhh/ as
        though one were about to spit. Another such alternate spelling and
        pronunciation is "H-PUX" /H-puhks/. Hackers at HP/Apollo (the former
        Apollo Computers which was swallowed by HP in 1989) have been heard
        to complain that Mr. Packard should have pushed to have his name
        first, if for no other reason than the greater eloquence of the
        resulting acronym. See {sun-stools}, {Slowlaris}.

:HTH: //

        [Usenet: very common] Abbreviation: Hope This Helps (e.g. following
        a response to a technical question). Often used just before {HAND}.
        See also {YHBT}.

:huff: v.

        To compress data using a Huffman code. Various programs that use
        such methods have been called `HUFF' or some variant thereof. Oppose
        {puff}. Compare {crunch}, {compress}.

:hung: adj.

        [from `hung up'; common] Equivalent to {wedged}, but more common at
        Unix/C sites. Not generally used of people. Syn. with {locked up},
        {wedged}; compare {hosed}. See also {hang}. A hung state is
        distinguished from {crash}ed or {down}, where the program or system
        is also unusable but because it is not running rather than because
        it is waiting for something. However, the recovery from both
        situations is often the same. It is also distinguished from the
        similar but more drastic state {wedged} -- hung software can be
        woken up with easy things like interrupt keys, but wedged will need
        a kill -9 or even reboot.

:hungry puppy: n.

        Syn. {slopsucker}.

:hungus: /huhng'g@s/, adj.

        [perhaps related to slang `humongous'] Large, unwieldy, usually
        unmanageable. "TCP is a hungus piece of code." "This is a hungus set
        of modifications." The {Infocom} text adventure game Beyond Zork
        included two monsters called hunguses.

:hyperspace: /hi:'perspays/, n.

        A memory location that is far away from where the program counter
        should be pointing, especially a place that is inaccessible because
        it is not even mapped in by the virtual-memory system. "Another core
        dump -- looks like the program jumped off to hyperspace somehow."
        (Compare {jump off into never-never land}.) This usage is from the
        SF notion of a spaceship jumping into hyperspace, that is, taking a
        shortcut through higher-dimensional space -- in other words,
        bypassing this universe. The variant east hyperspace is recorded
        among CMU and Bliss hackers.

:hysterical reasons: n.

        (also hysterical raisins) A variant on the stock phrase "for
        historical reasons", indicating specifically that something must be
        done in some stupid way for backwards compatibility, and moreover
        that the feature it must be compatible with was the result of a bad
        design in the first place. "All IBM PC video adapters have to
        support MDA text mode for hysterical reasons." Compare {bug-for-bug
        compatible}.

  I

   I didn't change anything!

   I see no X here.

   I for one welcome our new X overlords

   IANAL

   IBM

   ICBM address

   ice

   ID10T error

   idempotent

   IDP

   If you want X, you know where to find it.

   ifdef out

   IIRC

   ill-behaved

   IMHO

   Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!

   in the extreme

   incantation

   include

   include war

   indent style

   Indent-o-Meter

   index of X

   infant mortality

   infinite

   infinite loop

   Infinite-Monkey Theorem

   infinity

   inflate

   Infocom

   initgame

   insanely great

   installfest

   INTERCAL

   InterCaps

   interesting

   Internet

   Internet Death Penalty

   Internet Exploder

   Internet Exploiter

   interrupt

   interrupts locked out

   intertwingled

   intro

   IRC

   iron

   Iron Age

   iron box

   ironmonger

   ISO standard cup of tea

   ISP

   Itanic

   ITS

   IWBNI

   IYFEG

:I didn't change anything!: interj.

        An aggrieved cry often heard as bugs manifest during a regression
        test. The {canonical} reply to this assertion is "Then it works just
        the same as it did before, doesn't it?" See also {one-line fix}.
        This is also heard from applications programmers trying to blame an
        obvious applications problem on an unrelated systems software
        change, for example a divide-by-0 fault after terminals were added
        to a network. Usually, their statement is found to be false. Upon
        close questioning, they will admit some major restructuring of the
        program that shouldn't have broken anything, in their opinion, but
        which actually {hosed} the code completely.

:I see no X here.:

        Hackers (and the interactive computer games they write)
        traditionally favor this slightly marked usage over other possible
        equivalents such as "There's no X here!" or "X is missing." or
        "Where's the X?". This goes back to the original PDP-10 {ADVENT},
        which would respond in this wise if you asked it to do something
        involving an object not present at your location in the game.

:I for one welcome our new X overlords:

        Variants of this phrase with various values of X came into common
        use in 2002-2003, generally used to suggest that whatever party
        referred to as the new overlords is deeply evil. In the original
        Simpsons episode (#96, Homer In Space) X = "insect" and th line is
        part of a speech in which a smarmy newscaster expresses his
        willingness to collaborate with an invading race of giant space
        ants.

:IANAL: //

        [Usenet] Abbreviation, "I Am Not A Lawyer". Usually precedes legal
        advice.

:IBM: /IBM/

        Once upon a time, the computer company most hackers loved to hate;
        today, the one they are most puzzled to find themselves liking.

        From hackerdom's beginnings in the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, IBM
        was regarded with active loathing. Common expansions of the
        corporate name included: Inferior But Marketable; It's Better
        Manually; Insidious Black Magic; It's Been Malfunctioning;
        Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a near-{infinite} number of even
        less complimentary expansions (see also {fear and loathing}). What
        galled hackers about most IBM machines above the PC level wasn't so
        much that they were underpowered and overpriced (though that counted
        against them), but that the designs were incredibly archaic,
        {crufty}, and {elephantine} ... and you couldn't fix them -- source
        code was locked up tight, and programming tools were expensive, hard
        to find, and bletcherous to use once you had found them.

        We didn't know how good we had it back then. In the 1980s IBM had
        its own troubles with Microsoft and lost its strategic way, receding
        from the hacker community's view. Then, in the 1990s, Microsoft
        became more noxious and omnipresent than IBM had ever been.

        In the late 1990s IBM re-invented itself as a services company,
        began to release open-source software through its AlphaWorks group,
        and began shipping {Linux} systems and building ties to the Linux
        community. To the astonishment of all parties, IBM emerged as a
        staunch friend of the hacker community and {open source}
        development, with ironic consequences noted in the {FUD} entry.

        This lexicon includes a number of entries attributed to `IBM'; these
        derive from some rampantly unofficial jargon lists circulated within
        IBM's formerly beleaguered hacker underground.

:ICBM address: n.

        (Also missile address) The form used to register a site with the
        Usenet mapping project, back before the day of pervasive Internet,
        included a blank for longitude and latitude, preferably to
        seconds-of-arc accuracy. This was actually used for generating
        geographically-correct maps of Usenet links on a plotter; however,
        it became traditional to refer to this as one's ICBM address or
        missile address, and some people include it in their {sig block}
        with that name. (A real missile address would include target
        elevation.)

:ice: n.

        [coined by Usenetter Tom Maddox, popularized by William Gibson's
        cyberpunk SF novels: a contrived acronym for `Intrusion
        Countermeasure Electronics'] Security software (in Gibson's novels,
        software that responds to intrusion by attempting to immobilize or
        even literally kill the intruder). Hence, icebreaker: a program
        designed for cracking security on a system.

        Neither term is in serious use yet as of late 2003, but many hackers
        find the metaphor attractive, and each may develop a denotation in
        the future. In the meantime, the speculative usage could be confused
        with `ICE', an acronym for "in-circuit emulator".

        In ironic reference to the speculative usage, however, some hackers
        and computer scientists formed ICE (International Cryptographic
        Experiment) in 1994. ICE is a consortium to promote uniform
        international access to strong cryptography.

:ID10T error: /IDtenT er'@r/

        Synonym for {PEBKAC}, e.g. "The user is being an idiot".
        Tech-support people passing a problem report to someone higher up
        the food chain (and presumably better equipped to deal with idiots)
        may ask the user to convey that there seems to be an I-D-ten-T
        error. Users never twig.

:idempotent: adj.

        [from mathematical techspeak] Acting as if used only once, even if
        used multiple times. This term is often used with respect to {C}
        header files, which contain common definitions and declarations to
        be included by several source files. If a header file is ever
        included twice during the same compilation (perhaps due to nested
        #include files), compilation errors can result unless the header
        file has protected itself against multiple inclusion; a header file
        so protected is said to be idempotent. The term can also be used to
        describe an initialization subroutine that is arranged to perform
        some critical action exactly once, even if the routine is called
        several times.

:IDP: /IDP/, v.,n.

        [Usenet] Abbreviation for {Internet Death Penalty}. Common (probably
        now more so than the full form), and frequently verbed. Compare
        {UDP}.

:If you want X, you know where to find it.:

        There is a legend that Dennis Ritchie, inventor of {C}, once
        responded to demands for features resembling those of what at the
        time was a much more popular language by observing "If you want
        PL/I, you know where to find it." Ever since, this has been hackish
        standard form for fending off requests to alter a new design to
        mimic some older (and, by implication, inferior and {baroque}) one.
        The case X = {Pascal} manifests semi-regularly on Usenet's
        comp.lang.c newsgroup. Indeed, the case X = X has been reported in
        discussions of graphics software (see {X}).

:ifdef out: /if'def owt/, v.

        Syn. for {condition out}, specific to {C}.

:IIRC: //

        Common abbreviation for "If I Recall Correctly".

:ill-behaved: adj.

        1. [numerical analysis] Said of an algorithm or computational method
        that tends to blow up because of accumulated roundoff error or poor
        convergence properties.

        2. [obs.] Software that bypasses the defined {OS} interfaces to do
        things (like screen, keyboard, and disk I/O) itself, often in a way
        that depends on the hardware of the machine it is running on or
        which is nonportable or incompatible with other pieces of software.
        In the MS-DOS world, there was a folk theorem (nearly true) to the
        effect that (owing to gross inadequacies and performance penalties
        in the OS interface) all interesting applications were ill-behaved.
        See also {bare metal}. Oppose {well-behaved}. See also {mess-dos}.

        3. In modern usage, a program is called ill-behaved if it uses
        interfaces to the OS or other programs that are private,
        undocumented, or grossly non-portable. Another way to be ill-behaved
        is to use headers or files that are theoretically private to another
        application.

:IMHO: //, abbrev.

        [from SF fandom via Usenet; abbreviation for `In My Humble Opinion']
        "IMHO, mixed-case C names should be avoided, as mistyping something
        in the wrong case can cause hard-to-detect errors -- and they look
        too Pascalish anyhow." Also seen in variant forms such as IMNSHO (In
        My Not-So-Humble Opinion) and IMAO (In My Arrogant Opinion).

:Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!: prov.

        [Usenet] Since {Usenet} first got off the ground in 1980--81, it has
        grown exponentially, approximately doubling in size every year. On
        the other hand, most people feel the {signal-to-noise ratio} of
        Usenet has dropped steadily. These trends led, as far back as
        mid-1983, to predictions of the imminent collapse (or death) of the
        net. Ten years and numerous doublings later, enough of these gloomy
        prognostications have been confounded that the phrase "Imminent
        Death Of The Net Predicted!" has become a running joke, hauled out
        any time someone grumbles about the {S/N ratio} or the huge and
        steadily increasing volume, or the possible loss of a key node or
        link, or the potential for lawsuits when ignoramuses post
        copyrighted material, etc., etc., etc.

:in the extreme: adj.

        A preferred superlative suffix for many hackish terms. See, for
        example, obscure in the extreme under {obscure}, and compare
        {highly}.

:incantation: n.

        Any particularly arbitrary or obscure command that one must mutter
        at a system to attain a desired result. Not used of passwords or
        other explicit security features. Especially used of tricks that are
        so poorly documented that they must be learned from a {wizard}.
        "This compiler normally locates initialized data in the data
        segment, but if you {mutter} the right incantation they will be
        forced into text space."

:include: vt.

        [Usenet]

        1. To duplicate a portion (or whole) of another's message (typically
        with attribution to the source) in a reply or followup, for
        clarifying the context of one's response. See the discussion of
        inclusion styles under Hacker Writing Style.

        2. [from {C}] #include <disclaimer.h> has appeared in {sig block}s
        to refer to a notional standard {disclaimer} file.

:include war: n.

        Excessive multi-leveled inclusion within a discussion {thread}, a
        practice that tends to annoy readers. In a forum with high-traffic
        newsgroups, such as Usenet, this can lead to {flame}s and the urge
        to start a {kill file}.

:indent style: n.

        [C, C++, and Java programmers] The rules one uses to indent code in
        a readable fashion. There are four major C indent styles, described
        below; all have the aim of making it easier for the reader to
        visually track the scope of control constructs. They have been
        inherited by C++ and Java, which have C-like syntaxes. The
        significant variable is the placement of { and } with respect to the
        statement(s) they enclose and to the guard or controlling statement
        (if, else, for, while, or do) on the block, if any.

        K&R style -- Named after Kernighan & Ritchie, because the examples
        in {K&R} are formatted this way. Also called kernel style because
        the Unix kernel is written in it, and the `One True Brace Style'
        (abbrev. 1TBS) by its partisans. In C code, the body is typically
        indented by eight spaces (or one tab) per level, as shown here. Four
        spaces are occasionally seen in C, but in C++ and Java four tends to
        be the rule rather than the exception.

        if (<cond>) {
                <body>
        }

        Allman style -- Named for Eric Allman, a Berkeley hacker who wrote a
        lot of the BSD utilities in it (it is sometimes called BSD style).
        Resembles normal indent style in Pascal and Algol. It is the only
        style other than K&R in widespread use among Java programmers. Basic
        indent per level shown here is eight spaces, but four (or sometimes
        three) spaces are generally preferred by C++ and Java programmers.

        if (<cond>)
        {
                <body>
        }

        Whitesmiths style -- popularized by the examples that came with
        Whitesmiths C, an early commercial C compiler. Basic indent per
        level shown here is eight spaces, but four spaces are occasionally
        seen.

        if (<cond>)
                {
                <body>
                }

        GNU style -- Used throughout GNU EMACS and the Free Software
        Foundation code, and just about nowhere else. Indents are always
        four spaces per level, with { and } halfway between the outer and
        inner indent levels.

        if (<cond>)
          {
            <body>
          }

        Surveys have shown the Allman and Whitesmiths styles to be the most
        common, with about equal mind shares. K&R/1TBS used to be nearly
        universal, but is now much less common in C (the opening brace tends
        to get lost against the right paren of the guard part in an if or
        while, which is a {Bad Thing}). Defenders of 1TBS argue that any
        putative gain in readability is less important than their style's
        relative economy with vertical space, which enables one to see more
        code on one's screen at once. The Java Language Specification
        legislates not only the capitalization of identifiers, but where
        nouns, adjectives, and verbs should be in method, class, interface,
        and variable names (section 6.8). While the specification stops
        short of also standardizing on a bracing style, all source code
        originating from Sun Laboratories uses the K&R style. This has set a
        precedent for Java programmers, which most follow.

        Doubtless these issues will continue to be the subject of {holy
        wars}.

:Indent-o-Meter:

        [] A fiendishly clever ASCII display hack that became a brief fad in
        1993-1994; it used combinations of tabs and spaces to produce an
        analog indicator of the amount of indentation an included portion of
        a reply had undergone. The full story is at
        http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/indent.html.

:index of X: n.

        See {coefficient of X}.

:infant mortality: n.

        It is common lore among hackers (and in the electronics industry at
        large; this term is possibly techspeak by now) that the chances of
        sudden hardware failure drop off exponentially with a machine's time
        since first use (that is, until the relatively distant time at which
        enough mechanical wear in I/O devices and thermal-cycling stress in
        components has accumulated for the machine to start going senile).
        Up to half of all chip and wire failures happen within a new
        system's first few weeks; such failures are often referred to as
        infant mortality problems (or, occasionally, as sudden infant death
        syndrome). See {bathtub curve}, {burn-in period}.

:infinite: adj.

        [common] Consisting of a large number of objects; extreme. Used very
        loosely as in: "This program produces infinite garbage." "He is an
        infinite loser." The word most likely to follow infinite, though, is
        {hair}. (It has been pointed out that fractals are an excellent
        example of infinite hair.) These uses are abuses of the word's
        mathematical meaning. The term semi-infinite, denoting an
        immoderately large amount of some resource, is also heard. "This
        compiler is taking a semi-infinite amount of time to optimize my
        program." See also {semi}.

:infinite loop: n.

        One that never terminates (that is, the machine {spin}s or {buzz}es
        forever and goes {catatonic}). There is a standard joke that has
        been made about each generation's exemplar of the ultra-fast
        machine: "The Cray-3 is so fast it can execute an infinite loop in
        under 2 seconds!"

:Infinite-Monkey Theorem: n.

        "If you put an {infinite} number of monkeys at typewriters,
        eventually one will bash out the script for Hamlet." (One may also
        hypothesize a small number of monkeys and a very long period of
        time.) This theorem asserts nothing about the intelligence of the
        one {random} monkey that eventually comes up with the script (and
        note that the mob will also type out all the possible incorrect
        versions of Hamlet). It may be referred to semi-seriously when
        justifying a {brute force} method; the implication is that, with
        enough resources thrown at it, any technical challenge becomes a
        {one-banana problem}. This argument gets more respect since {Linux}
        justified the {bazaar} mode of development.

        Other hackers maintain that the Infinite-Monkey Theorem cannot be
        true -- otherwise Usenet would have reproduced the entire canon of
        great literature by now.

        In mid-2002, researchers at Plymouth Univesity in England actually
        put a working computer in a cage with six crested macaques. The
        monkeys proceeded to bash the machine with a rock, urinate on it,
        and type the letter S a lot (later, the letters A, J, L, and M also
        crept in). The results were published in a limited-edition book,
        Notes Towards The Complete Works of Shakespeare. A researcher
        reported: "They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw
        that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level
        of intention there." Scattered field reports that there are AOL
        users this competent have been greeted with well-deserved
        skepticism.

        This theorem has been traced to the mathematiciamn mile Borel in
        1913, and was first popularized by the astronomer Sir Arthur
        Eddington. It became part of the idiom of techies via the classic SF
        short story Inflexible Logic by Russell Maloney, and many younger
        hackers know it through a reference in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's
        Guide to the Galaxy. Some other references have been collected on
        the Web. On 1 April 2000 the usage acquired its own Internet
        standard, RFC2795 (Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite).

:infinity: n.

        1. The largest value that can be represented in a particular type of
        variable (register, memory location, data type, whatever).

        2. minus infinity: The smallest such value, not necessarily or even
        usually the simple negation of plus infinity. In N-bit
        twos-complement arithmetic, infinity is 2^N-1 - 1 but minus infinity
        is - (2^N-1), not -(2^N-1 - 1). Note also that this is different
        from time T equals minus infinity, which is closer to a
        mathematician's usage of infinity.

:inflate: vt.

        To decompress or {puff} a file. Rare among Internet hackers, used
        primarily by MS-DOS/Windows types.

:Infocom: n.

        A now-legendary games company, active from 1979 to 1989, that
        commercialized the MDL parser technology used for {Zork} to produce
        a line of text adventure games that remain favorites among hackers.
        Infocom's games were intelligent, funny, witty, erudite, irreverent,
        challenging, satirical, and most thoroughly hackish in spirit. The
        physical game packages from Infocom are now prized collector's
        items. After being acquired by Activision in 1989 they did a few
        more "modern" (e.g. graphics-intensive) games which were less
        successful than reissues of their classics.

        The software, thankfully, is still extant; Infocom games were
        written in a kind of P-code (called, actually, z-code) and
        distributed with a P-code interpreter core, and not only open-source
        emulators for that interpreter but an actual compiler as well have
        been written to permit the P-code to be run on platforms the games
        never originally graced. In fact, new games written in this P-code
        are still being written. There is a home page at
        http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/, and it is even possible to play
        these games in your browser if it is Java-capable.

:initgame: /init'gaym/, n.

        [IRC] An {IRC} version of the trivia game "Botticelli", in which one
        user changes his {nick} to the initials of a famous person or other
        named entity, and the others on the channel ask yes or no questions,
        with the one to guess the person getting to be "it" next. As a
        courtesy, the one picking the initials starts by providing a
        4-letter hint of the form sex, nationality, life-status,
        reality-status. For example, MAAR means "Male, American, Alive,
        Real" (as opposed to "fictional"). Initgame can be surprisingly
        addictive. See also {hing}.

        [1996 update: a recognizable version of the initgame has become a
        staple of some radio talk shows in the U.S. We had it first! -- ESR]

:insanely great: adj.

        [Mac community, from Steve Jobs; also BSD Unix people via Bill Joy]
        Something so incredibly {elegant} that it is imaginable only to
        someone possessing the most puissant of {hacker}-natures.

:installfest:

        [Linux community since c.1998] Common portmanteau word for
        "installation festival"; Linux user groups frequently run these.
        Computer users are invited to bring their machines to have Linux
        installed on their machines. The idea is to get them painlessly over
        the biggest hump in migrating to Linux, which is initially
        installing and configuring it for the user's machine.

:INTERCAL: /in't@rkal/, n.

        [said by the authors to stand for Compiler Language With No
        Pronounceable Acronym] A computer language designed by Don Woods and
        James Lyons in 1972. INTERCAL is purposely different from all other
        computer languages in all ways but one; it is purely a written
        language, being totally unspeakable. An excerpt from the INTERCAL
        Reference Manual will make the style of the language clear:

          It is a well-known and oft-demonstrated fact that a person whose
          work is incomprehensible is held in high esteem. For example, if
          one were to state that the simplest way to store a value of 65536
          in a 32-bit INTERCAL variable is:

          DO :1 <- #0$#256

          any sensible programmer would say that that was absurd. Since this
          is indeed the simplest method, the programmer would be made to
          look foolish in front of his boss, who would of course have
          happened to turn up, as bosses are wont to do. The effect would be
          no less devastating for the programmer having been correct.

        INTERCAL has many other peculiar features designed to make it even
        more unspeakable. The Woods-Lyons implementation was actually used
        by many (well, at least several) people at Princeton. The language
        has been recently reimplemented as C-INTERCAL and is consequently
        enjoying an unprecedented level of unpopularity; there is even an
        alt.lang.intercal newsgroup devoted to the study and ...
        appreciation of the language on Usenet.

        Inevitably, INTERCAL has a home page on the Web:
        http://www.catb.org/~esr/intercal/. An extended version, implemented
        in (what else?) {Perl} and adding object-oriented features, is
        rumored to exist. See also {Befunge}.

:InterCaps:

        [Great Britain] Synonym for {BiCapitalization}.

:interesting: adj.

        In hacker parlance, this word has strong connotations of `annoying',
        or `difficult', or both. Hackers relish a challenge, and enjoy
        wringing all the irony possible out of the ancient Chinese curse
        "May you live in interesting times". Oppose {trivial},
        {uninteresting}.

:Internet: n.

        The mother of all networks. First incarnated beginning in 1969 as
        the ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defense research testbed. Though
        it has been widely believed that the goal was to develop a network
        architecture for military command-and-control that could survive
        disruptions up to and including nuclear war, this is a myth; in
        fact, ARPANET was conceived from the start as a way to get most
        economical use out of then-scarce large-computer resources. Robert
        Herzfeld, who was director of ARPA at the time, has been at some
        pains to debunk the "survive-a-nuclear-war" myth, but it seems
        unkillable.

        As originally imagined, ARPANET's major use would have been to
        support what is now called remote login and more sophisticated forms
        of distributed computing, but the infant technology of electronic
        mail quickly grew to dominate actual usage. Universities, research
        labs and defense contractors early discovered the Internet's
        potential as a medium of communication between humans and linked up
        in steadily increasing numbers, connecting together a quirky mix of
        academics, techies, hippies, SF fans, hackers, and anarchists. The
        roots of this lexicon lie in those early years.

        Over the next quarter-century the Internet evolved in many ways. The
        typical machine/OS combination moved from {DEC} {PDP-10}s and
        {PDP-20}s, running {TOPS-10} and {TOPS-20}, to PDP-11s and {VAX}en
        and Suns running {Unix}, and in the 1990s to Unix on Intel
        microcomputers. The Internet's protocols grew more capable, most
        notably in the move from NCP/IP to {TCP/IP} in 1982 and the
        implementation of Domain Name Service in 1983. It was around this
        time that people began referring to the collection of interconnected
        networks with ARPANET at its core as "the Internet".

        The ARPANET had a fairly strict set of participation guidelines --
        connected institutions had to be involved with a DOD-related
        research project. By the mid-80s, many of the organizations
        clamoring to join didn't fit this profile. In 1986, the National
        Science Foundation built NSFnet to open up access to its five
        regional supercomputing centers; NSFnet became the backbone of the
        Internet, replacing the original ARPANET pipes (which were formally
        shut down in 1990). Between 1990 and late 1994 the pieces of NSFnet
        were sold to major telecommunications companies until the Internet
        backbone had gone completely commercial.

        That year, 1994, was also the year the mainstream culture discovered
        the Internet. Once again, the {killer app} was not the anticipated
        one -- rather, what caught the public imagination was the hypertext
        and multimedia features of the World Wide Web. Subsequently the
        Internet has seen off its only serious challenger (the OSI protocol
        stack favored by European telecoms monopolies) and is in the process
        of absorbing into itself many of the proprietary networks built
        during the second wave of wide-area networking after 1980. By 1996
        it had become a commonplace even in mainstream media to predict that
        a globally-extended Internet would become the key unifying
        communications technology of the next century. See also {the
        network}.

:Internet Death Penalty:

        [Usenet] (often abbreviated IDP) The ultimate sanction against
        {spam}-emitting sites -- complete shunning at the router level of
        all mail and packets, as well as Usenet messages, from the offending
        domain(s). Compare {Usenet Death Penalty}, with which it is
        sometimes confused.

:Internet Exploder:

        [very common] Pejorative hackerism for Microsoft's "Internet
        Explorer" web browser (also "Internet Exploiter"). Compare {HP-SUX},
        {Macintrash}, {sun-stools}, {Slowlaris}.

:Internet Exploiter: n.

        Another common name-of-insult for Internet Explorer, Microsoft's
        overweight Web Browser; more hostile than {Internet Exploder}.
        Reflects widespread hostility to Microsoft and a sense that it is
        seeking to hijack, monopolize, and corrupt the Internet. Compare
        {Exploder} and the less pejorative {Netscrape}.

:interrupt:

        1. [techspeak] n. On a computer, an event that interrupts normal
        processing and temporarily diverts flow-of-control through an
        "interrupt handler" routine. See also {trap}.

        2. interj. A request for attention from a hacker. Often explicitly
        spoken. "Interrupt -- have you seen Joe recently?" See {priority
        interrupt}.

:interrupts locked out: adj.

        When someone is ignoring you. In a restaurant, after several
        fruitless attempts to get the waitress's attention, a hacker might
        well observe "She must have interrupts locked out". The synonym
        interrupts disabled is also common. Variations abound; "to have
        one's interrupt mask bit set" and "interrupts masked out" are also
        heard. See also {spl}.

:intertwingled:

        adj. [Invented by Theodor Holm Nelson, prob. a blend of "mingled"
        and "intertwined".] Connected together in a complex way;
        specifically, composed of one another's components.

:intro: n.

        [{demoscene}] Introductory {screen} of some production.

        2. A short {demo}, usually showing just one or two {screen}s.

        3. Small, usually 64k, 40k or 4k {demo}. Sizes are generally
        dictated by {compo} rules. See also {dentro}, {demo}.

:IRC: /IRC/, n.

        [Internet Relay Chat] A worldwide "party line" network that allows
        one to converse with others in real time. IRC is structured as a
        network of Internet servers, each of which accepts connections from
        client programs, one per user. The IRC community and the {Usenet}
        and {MUD} communities overlap to some extent, including both hackers
        and regular folks who have discovered the wonders of computer
        networks. Some Usenet jargon has been adopted on IRC, as have some
        conventions such as {emoticon}s. There is also a vigorous native
        jargon, represented in this lexicon by entries marked `[IRC]'. See
        also {talk mode}.

:iron: n.

        Hardware, especially older and larger hardware of {mainframe} class
        with big metal cabinets housing relatively low-density electronics
        (but the term is also used of modern supercomputers). Often in the
        phrase {big iron}. Oppose {silicon}. See also {dinosaur}.

:Iron Age: n.

        In the history of computing, 1961-1971 -- the formative era of
        commercial {mainframe} technology, when ferrite-core {dinosaur}s
        ruled the earth. The Iron Age began, ironically enough, with the
        delivery of the first minicomputer (the PDP-1) and ended with the
        introduction of the first commercial microprocessor (the Intel 4004)
        in 1971. See also {Stone Age}; compare {elder days}.

:iron box: n.

        [Unix/Internet] A special environment set up to trap a {cracker}
        logging in over remote connections long enough to be traced. May
        include a modified {shell} restricting the cracker's movements in
        unobvious ways, and `bait' files designed to keep him interested and
        logged on. See also {back door}, {firewall machine}, {Venus
        flytrap}, and Clifford Stoll's account in The Cuckoo's Egg of how he
        made and used one (see the Bibliography in Appendix C). Compare
        {padded cell}, {honey pot}.

:ironmonger: n.

        [IBM] A hardware specialist (derogatory). Compare {sandbender},
        {polygon pusher}.

:ISO standard cup of tea: n.

        [South Africa] A cup of tea with milk and one teaspoon of sugar,
        where the milk is poured into the cup before the tea. Variations are
        ISO 0, with no sugar; ISO 2, with two spoons of sugar; and so on.

        This may derive from the "NATO standard" cup of coffee and tea (milk
        and two sugars), military slang going back to the late 1950s and
        parodying NATO's relentless bureaucratic drive to standardize parts
        across European and U.S. militaries.

        Like many ISO standards, this one has a faintly alien ring in North
        America, where hackers generally shun the decadent British practice
        of adulterating perfectly good tea with dairy products and prefer
        instead to add a wedge of lemon, if anything. If one were feeling
        extremely silly, one might hypothesize an analogous ANSI standard
        cup of tea and wind up with a political situation distressingly
        similar to several that arise in much more serious technical
        contexts. (Milk and lemon don't mix very well.)

        [2000 update: There is now, in fact, an ISO standard 3103: `Method
        for preparation of a liquor of tea for use in sensory tests.',
        alleged to be equivalent to British Standard BS6008: How to make a
        standard cup of tea. --ESR]

:ISP: /ISP/

        Common abbreviation for Internet Service Provider, a kind of company
        that barely existed before 1993. ISPs sell Internet access to the
        mass market. While the big nationwide commercial BBSs with Internet
        access (like America Online, CompuServe, GEnie, Netcom, etc.) are
        technically ISPs, the term is usually reserved for local or regional
        small providers (often run by hackers turned entrepreneurs) who
        resell Internet access cheaply without themselves being information
        providers or selling advertising. Compare {NSP}.

:Itanic: n.

        The Intel Itanium, so called in reference to the legendary disaster
        that was the Titanic. This term bubbled up in several places on the
        Internet in 1999 when it was beginning to become clear that the
        Itanium was turning into the most expensive and protracted flop in
        the history of the semiconductor industry.

:ITS: /ITS/, n.

        1. Incompatible Time-sharing System, an influential though highly
        idiosyncratic operating system written for PDP-6s and PDP-10s at MIT
        and long used at the MIT AI Lab. Much AI-hacker jargon derives from
        ITS folklore, and to have been `an ITS hacker' qualifies one
        instantly as an old-timer of the most venerable sort. ITS pioneered
        many important innovations, including transparent file sharing
        between machines and terminal-independent I/O. After about 1982,
        most actual work was shifted to newer machines, with the remaining
        ITS boxes run essentially as a hobby and service to the hacker
        community. The shutdown of the lab's last ITS machine in May 1990
        marked the end of an era and sent old-time hackers into mourning
        nationwide (see {high moby}). There is an ITS home page.

        2. A mythical image of operating-system perfection worshiped by a
        bizarre, fervent retro-cult of old-time hackers and ex-users (see
        {troglodyte}, sense 2). ITS worshipers manage somehow to continue
        believing that an OS maintained by assembly-language hand-hacking
        that supported only monocase 6-character filenames in one directory
        per account remains superior to today's state of commercial art
        (their venom against {Unix} is particularly intense). See also {holy
        wars}, {Weenix}.

:IWBNI: //

        Abbreviation for `It Would Be Nice If'. Compare {WIBNI}.

:IYFEG: //

        [Usenet] Abbreviation for `Insert Your Favorite Ethnic Group'. Used
        as a meta-name when telling ethnic jokes on the net to avoid
        offending anyone. See {JEDR}.

  J

   J. Random

   J. Random Hacker

   jack in

   jaggies

   Java

   JCL

   JEDR

   Jeff K.

   jello

   Jeopardy-style quoting

   jibble

   jiffy

   job security

   jock

   joe code

   joe-job

   juggling eggs

   juice

   jump off into never-never land

   jupiter

:J. Random: /J rand'm/, n.

        [common; generalized from {J. Random Hacker}] Arbitrary; ordinary;
        any one; any old. `J. Random' is often prefixed to a noun to make a
        name out of it. It means roughly some particular or any specific
        one. "Would you let J. Random Loser marry your daughter?" The most
        common uses are `J. Random Hacker', `J. Random Loser', and `J.
        Random Nerd' ("Should J. Random Loser be allowed to kill other
        peoples' processes?"), but it can be used simply as an elaborate
        version of {random} in any sense.

:J. Random Hacker: /J rand'm hakr/, n.

        [very common] A mythical figure like the Unknown Soldier; the
        archetypal hacker nerd. This term is one of the oldest in the
        jargon, apparently going back to MIT in the 1960s. See {random},
        {Suzie COBOL}. This may originally have been inspired by `J. Fred
        Muggs', a show-biz chimpanzee whose name was a household word back
        in the early days of {TMRC}, and was probably influenced by `J.
        Presper Eckert' (one of the co-inventors of the electronic
        computer). See also {Fred Foobar}.

:jack in: v.

        To log on to a machine or connect to a network or {BBS}, esp. for
        purposes of entering a {virtual reality} simulation such as a {MUD}
        or {IRC} (leaving is "jacking out"). This term derives from
        {cyberpunk} SF, in which it was used for the act of plugging an
        electrode set into neural sockets in order to interface the brain
        directly to a virtual reality. It is primarily used by MUD and IRC
        fans and younger hackers on BBS systems.

:jaggies: /jag'eez/, n.

        The `stairstep' effect observable when an edge (esp. a linear edge
        of very shallow or steep slope) is rendered on a pixel device (as
        opposed to a vector display).

:Java:

        An object-oriented language originally developed at Sun by James
        Gosling (and known by the name "Oak") with the intention of being
        the successor to {C++} (the project was however originally sold to
        Sun as an embedded language for use in set-top boxes). After the
        great Internet explosion of 1993-1994, Java was hacked into a
        byte-interpreted language and became the focus of a relentless hype
        campaign by Sun, which touted it as the new language of choice for
        distributed applications.

        Java is indeed a stronger and cleaner design than C++ and has been
        embraced by many in the hacker community -- but it has been a
        considerable source of frustration to many others, for reasons
        ranging from uneven support on different Web browser platforms,
        performance issues, and some notorious deficiencies in some of the
        standard toolkits (AWT in particular). {Microsoft}'s determined
        attempts to corrupt the language (which it rightly sees as a threat
        to its OS monopoly) have not helped. As of 2003, these issues are
        still in the process of being resolved.

        Despite many attractive features and a good design, it is difficult
        to find people willing to praise Java who have tried to implement a
        complex, real-world system with it (but to be fair it is early days
        yet, and no other language has ever been forced to spend its
        childhood under the limelight the way Java has). On the other hand,
        Java has already been a big {win} in academic circles, where it has
        taken the place of {Pascal} as the preferred tool for teaching the
        basics of good programming to the next generation of hackers.

:JCL: /JCL/, n.

        1. IBM's supremely {rude} Job Control Language. JCL is the script
        language used to control the execution of programs in IBM's batch
        systems. JCL has a very {fascist} syntax, and some versions will,
        for example, {barf} if two spaces appear where it expects one. Most
        programmers confronted with JCL simply copy a working file (or card
        deck), changing the file names. Someone who actually understands and
        generates unique JCL is regarded with the mixed respect one gives to
        someone who memorizes the phone book. It is reported that hackers at
        IBM itself sometimes sing "Who's the breeder of the crud that
        mangles you and me? I-B-M, J-C-L, M-o-u-s-e" to the tune of the
        Mickey Mouse Club theme to express their opinion of the beast.

        2. A comparative for any very {rude} software that a hacker is
        expected to use. "That's as bad as JCL." As with {COBOL}, JCL is
        often used as an archetype of ugliness even by those who haven't
        experienced it. See also {IBM}, {fear and loathing}.

        A (poorly documented, naturally) shell simulating JCL syntax is
        available at the Retrocomputing Museum http://www.catb.org/retro/.

:JEDR: //, n.

        Synonymous with {IYFEG}. At one time, people in the Usenet newsgroup
        rec.humor.funny tended to use `JEDR' instead of {IYFEG} or
        `<ethnic>'; this stemmed from a public attempt to suppress the group
        once made by a loser with initials JEDR after he was offended by an
        ethnic joke posted there. (The practice was {retcon}ned by expanding
        these initials as `Joke Ethnic/Denomination/Race'.) After much sound
        and fury JEDR faded away; this term appears to be doing likewise.
        JEDR's only permanent effect on the net.culture was to discredit
        `sensitivity' arguments for censorship so thoroughly that more
        recent attempts to raise them have met with immediate and
        near-universal rejection.

:Jeff K.:

        The spiritual successor to {B1FF} and the archetype of {script
        kiddies}. Jeff K. is a sixteen-year-old suburbanite who fancies
        himself a "l33t haX0r", although his knowledge of computers seems to
        be limited to the procedure for getting Quake up and running. His
        Web page http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/ features a number of
        hopelessly naive articles, essays, and rants, all filled with the
        kind of misspellings, {studlycaps}, and number-for-letter
        substitutions endemic to the script kiddie and {warez d00dz}
        communities. Jeff's offerings, among other things, include hardware
        advice (such as "AMD VERSIS PENTIUM" and "HOW TO OVARCLOAK YOUR
        COMPUTAR"), his own Quake clan (Clan 40 OUNSCE), and his own comic
        strip (Wacky Fun Computar Comic Jokes).

        Like B1FF, Jeff K. is (fortunately) a hoax. Jeff K. was created by
        internet game journalist Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka, whose web site
        Something Awful (http://www.somethingawful.com) highlights
        unintentionally humorous news items and Web sites, as a parody of
        the kind of teenage {luser} who infests Quake servers, chat rooms,
        and other places where computer enthusiasts congregate. He is
        well-recognized in the PC game community and his influence has
        spread to hacker {fora} like Slashdot as well.

:jello: n.

        [Usenet: by analogy with {spam}] A message that is both excessively
        cross-posted and too frequently posted, as opposed to {spam} (which
        is merely too frequently posted) or {velveeta} (which is merely
        excessively cross-posted). This term is widely recognized but not
        commonly used; most people refer to both kinds of abuse or their
        combination as spam.

:Jeopardy-style quoting:

        See {top-post}.

:jibble:

        [UK] Unspecified stuff. An unspecified action. A deliberately blank
        word; compare {gorets}. A deliberate experiment in tracking the
        spread of a near-meaningless word. See
        http://www.jibble.org/jibblemeaning.php.

:jiffy: n.

        1. The duration of one tick of the system clock on your computer
        (see {tick}). Often one AC cycle time (1/60 second in the U.S. and
        Canada, 1/50 most other places), but more recently 1/100 sec has
        become common. "The swapper runs every 6 jiffies" means that the
        virtual memory management routine is executed once for every 6 ticks
        of the clock, or about ten times a second.

        2. Confusingly, the term is sometimes also used for a 1-millisecond
        {wall time} interval.

        3. Even more confusingly, physicists semi-jokingly use `jiffy' to
        mean the time required for light to travel one foot in a vacuum,
        which turns out to be close to one nanosecond. Other physicists use
        the term for the quantum-nechanical lower bound on meaningful time
        lengths,

        4. Indeterminate time from a few seconds to forever. "I'll do it in
        a jiffy" means certainly not now and possibly never. This is a bit
        contrary to the more widespread use of the word. Oppose {nano}. See
        also {Real Soon Now}.

:job security: n.

        When some piece of code is written in a particularly {obscure}
        fashion, and no good reason (such as time or space optimization) can
        be discovered, it is often said that the programmer was attempting
        to increase his job security (i.e., by making himself indispensable
        for maintenance). This sour joke seldom has to be said in full; if
        two hackers are looking over some code together and one points at a
        section and says "job security", the other one may just nod.

:jock: n.

        1. A programmer who is characterized by large and somewhat
        brute-force programs. See {brute force}.

        2. When modified by another noun, describes a specialist in some
        particular computing area. The compounds compiler jock and systems
        jock seem to be the best-established examples.

:joe code: /joh' kohd`/, n.

        1. Code that is overly {tense} and unmaintainable. "{Perl} may be a
        handy program, but if you look at the source, it's complete joe
        code."

        2. Badly written, possibly buggy code.

        Correspondents wishing to remain anonymous have fingered a
        particular Joe at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and observed that
        usage has drifted slightly; the original sobriquet `Joe code' was
        intended in sense 1.

        1994 update: This term has now generalized to `<name> code', used to
        designate code with distinct characteristics traceable to its
        author. "This section doesn't check for a NULL return from malloc()!
        Oh. No wonder! It's Ed code!". Used most often with a programmer who
        has left the shop and thus is a convenient scapegoat for anything
        that is wrong with the project.

:joe-job: n., vt.

        A spam run forged to appear as though it came from an innocent
        party, who is then generally flooded by the bounces; or, the act of
        performing such a run. The original incident is described here.

:juggling eggs: vi.

        Keeping a lot of {state} in your head while modifying a program.
        "Don't bother me now, I'm juggling eggs", means that an interrupt is
        likely to result in the program's being scrambled. In the classic
        1975 first-contact SF novel The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven
        and Jerry Pournelle, an alien describes a very difficult task by
        saying "We juggle priceless eggs in variable gravity." It is
        possible that this was intended as tribute to a less colorful use of
        the same image in Robert Heinlein's influential 1961 novel Stranger
        in a Strange Land. See also {hack mode} and {on the gripping hand}.

:juice: n.

        The weight of a given node in some sort of graph (like a web of
        trust or a relevance-weighted search query). This appears to have
        been generalized from {google juice}, but may derive from black
        urban slang for power or a respect. Example: "I signed your key, but
        I really don't have the juice to be authoritative."

:jump off into never-never land: v.

        [from J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan] An unexpected jump in a program that
        produces catastrophic or just plain weird results. Compare
        {hyperspace}.

:jupiter: vt.

        [IRC] To kill an {IRC} {bot} or user and then take its place by
        adopting its {nick} so that it cannot reconnect. Named after a
        particular IRC user who did this to NickServ, the robot in charge of
        preventing people from inadvertently using a nick claimed by another
        user. Now commonly shortened to jupe.

  K

   K

   K&R

   k-

   kahuna

   kamikaze packet

   kangaroo code

   ken

   kernel-of-the-week club

   kgbvax

   KIBO

   kiboze

   kibozo

   kick

   kill file

   killer app

   killer micro

   killer poke

   kilo-

   kilogoogle

   KIPS

   KISS Principle

   kit

   KLB

   klone

   kludge

   kluge

   kluge around

   kluge up

   Knights of the Lambda Calculus

   knobs

   knurd

   Knuth

   koan

   kook

   Kool-Aid

   kremvax

   kyrka

:K: /K/, n.

        [from {kilo-}] A kilobyte. Used both as a spoken word and a written
        suffix (like {meg} and {gig} for megabyte and gigabyte). See
        {quantifiers}.

:K&R: n.

        Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie's book The C Programming
        Language, esp. the classic and influential first edition
        (Prentice-Hall 1978; ISBN 0-13-110163-3). Syn. {Old Testament}. See
        also {New Testament}.

:k-: pref.

        [rare; poss fr. kilo- prefix] Extremely. Rare among hackers, but
        quite common among crackers and {warez d00dz} in compounds such as
        k-kool /K'kool/, k-rad /Krad/, and k-awesome /Kaw`sm/. Also used
        to intensify negatives; thus, k-evil, k-lame, k-screwed, and
        k-annoying. Overuse of this prefix, or use in more formal or
        technical contexts, is considered an indicator of {lamer} status.

:kahuna: /k@hoo'n@/, n.

        [IBM: from the Hawaiian title for a shaman] Synonym for {wizard},
        {guru}.

:kamikaze packet: n.

        The `official' jargon for what is more commonly called a {Christmas
        tree packet}. {RFC}-1025, TCP and IP Bake Off says:

          10 points for correctly being able to process a "Kamikaze" packet
          (AKA nastygram, christmas tree packet, lamp test segment, et al.).
          That is, correctly handle a segment with the maximum combination
          of features at once (e.g., a SYN URG PUSH FIN segment with options
          and data).

        See also {Chernobyl packet}.

:kangaroo code: n.

        Syn. {spaghetti code}.

:ken: /ken/, n.

        1. [Unix] Ken Thompson, principal inventor of Unix. In the early
        days he used to hand-cut distribution tapes, often with a note that
        read "Love, ken". Old-timers still use his first name (sometimes
        uncapitalized, because it's a login name and mail address) in
        third-person reference; it is widely understood (on Usenet, in
        particular) that without a last name `Ken' refers only to Ken
        Thompson. Similarly, `Dennis' without last name means Dennis Ritchie
        (and he is often known as dmr). See also {demigod}, {Unix}.

        2. A flaming user. This was originated by the Software Support group
        at Symbolics because the two greatest flamers in the user community
        were both named Ken.

:kernel-of-the-week club:

        The fictional society that {BSD} {bigot}s claim {Linux} users belong
        to, alluding to the release-early-release-often style preferred by
        the kernel maintainers. See {bazaar}. This was almost certainly
        inspired by the earlier {bug-of-the-month club}.

:kgbvax: /KGB'vaks/, n.

        See {kremvax}.

:KIBO: /ki:boh/

        1. [acronym] Knowledge In, Bullshit Out. A summary of what happens
        whenever valid data is passed through an organization (or person)
        that deliberately or accidentally disregards or ignores its
        significance. Consider, for example, what an advertising campaign
        can do with a product's actual specifications. Compare {GIGO}; see
        also {SNAFU principle}.

        2. James Parry <kibo@world.std.com>, a Usenetter infamous for
        various surrealist net.pranks and an uncanny, machine-assisted knack
        for joining any thread in which his nom de guerre is mentioned. He
        has a website at http://www.kibo.com/.

:kiboze: v.

        [Usenet] To {grep} the Usenet news for a string, especially with the
        intention of posting a follow-up. This activity was popularised by
        Kibo (see {KIBO}, sense 2).

:kibozo: /ki:boh'zoh/, n.

        [Usenet] One who {kiboze}s but is not Kibo (see {KIBO}, sense 2).

:kick: v.

        1. [IRC] To cause somebody to be removed from a {IRC} channel, an
        option only available to channel ops. This is an extreme measure,
        often used to combat extreme {flamage} or {flood}ing, but sometimes
        used at the {CHOP}'s whim.

        2. To reboot a machine or kill a running process. "The server's
        down, let me go kick it."

:kill file: n.

        [Usenet; very common] (alt.: KILL file) Per-user file(s) used by
        some {Usenet} reading programs (originally Larry Wall's rn(1)) to
        discard summarily (without presenting for reading) articles matching
        some particularly uninteresting (or unwanted) patterns of subject,
        author, or other header lines. Thus to add a person (or subject) to
        one's kill file is to arrange for that person to be ignored by one's
        newsreader in future. By extension, it may be used for a decision to
        ignore the person or subject in other media. See also {plonk}.

:killer app:

        The application that actually makes a sustaining market for a
        promising but under-utilized technology. First used in the mid-1980s
        to describe Lotus 1-2-3 once it became evident that demand for that
        product had been the major driver of the early business market for
        IBM PCs. The term was then retrospectively applied to VisiCalc,
        which had played a similar role in the success of the Apple II.
        After 1994 it became commonplace to describe the World Wide Web as
        the Internet's killer app. One of the standard questions asked about
        each new personal-computer technology as it emerges has become
        "what's the killer app?"

:killer micro: n.

        [popularized by Eugene Brooks c.1990] A microprocessor-based machine
        that infringes on mini, mainframe, or supercomputer performance
        turf. Often heard in "No one will survive the attack of the killer
        micros!", the battle cry of the downsizers.

        The popularity of the phrase `attack of the killer micros' is
        doubtless reinforced by the title of the movie Attack Of The Killer
        Tomatoes (one of the {canonical} examples of so-bad-it's-wonderful
        among hackers). This has even more {flavor} now that killer micros
        have gone on the offensive not just individually (in workstations)
        but in hordes (within massively parallel computers).

        [2002 update: Eugene Brooks was right. Since this term first entered
        the Jargon File in 1990, the minicomputer has effectively vanished,
        the {mainframe} sector is in deep and apparently terminal decline,
        and even the supercomputer business has contracted into a smaller
        niche. It's networked killer micros as far as the eye can see.
        --ESR]

:killer poke: n.

        A recipe for inducing hardware damage on a machine via insertion of
        invalid values (see {poke}) into a memory-mapped control register;
        used esp. of various fairly well-known tricks on {bitty box}es
        without hardware memory management (such as the IBM PC and Commodore
        PET) that can overload and trash analog electronics in the monitor.
        See also {HCF}.

:kilo-: pref.

        [SI] See {quantifiers}.

:kilogoogle: n.

        The standard unit of measurement for Web search hits: a thousand
        Google matches. "There are about a kilogoogle and a half sites with
        that band's name on it." Compare {google juice}.

:KIPS: /kips/, n.

        [abbreviation, by analogy with {MIPS} using {K}] Thousands (not
        1024s) of Instructions Per Second. Usage: rare.

:KISS Principle: /kis' prinsipl/, n.

        "Keep It Simple, Stupid". A maxim often invoked when discussing
        design to fend off {creeping featurism} and control development
        complexity. Possibly related to the {marketroid} maxim on sales
        presentations, "Keep It Short and Simple".

:kit: n.

        [Usenet; poss.: fr.: {DEC} slang for a full software distribution,
        as opposed to a patch or upgrade] A source software distribution
        that has been packaged in such a way that it can (theoretically) be
        unpacked and installed according to a series of steps using only
        standard Unix tools, and entirely documented by some reasonable
        chain of references from the top-level {README file}. The more
        general term {distribution} may imply that special tools or more
        stringent conditions on the host environment are required.

:KLB: n.

        [common among Perl hackers] Known Lazy Bastard. Used to describe
        somebody who perpetually asks questions which are easily answered by
        referring to the reference material or manual.

:klone: /klohn/, n.

        See {clone}, sense 4.

:kludge:

        1. /kluhj/ n. Incorrect (though regrettably common) spelling of
        {kluge} (US). These two words have been confused in American usage
        since the early 1960s, and widely confounded in Great Britain since
        the end of World War II.

        2. [TMRC] A {crock} that works. (A long-ago Datamation article by
        Jackson Granholme similarly said: "An ill-assorted collection of
        poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole.")

        3. v. To use a kludge to get around a problem. "I've kludged around
        it for now, but I'll fix it up properly later."

        This word appears to have derived from Scots kludge or kludgie for a
        common toilet, via British military slang. It apparently became
        confused with U.S. {kluge} during or after World War II; some
        Britons from that era use both words in definably different ways,
        but {kluge} is now uncommon in Great Britain. `Kludge' in
        Commonwealth hackish differs in meaning from `kluge' in that it
        lacks the positive senses; a kludge is something no Commonwealth
        hacker wants to be associated too closely with. Also, `kludge' is
        more widely known in British mainstream slang than `kluge' is in the
        U.S.

:kluge: /klooj/

        [from the German `klug', clever; poss. related to Polish & Russian
        `klucz' (a key, a hint, a main point)]

        1. n. A Rube Goldberg (or Heath Robinson) device, whether in
        hardware or software.

        2. n. A clever programming trick intended to solve a particular
        nasty case in an expedient, if not clear, manner. Often used to
        repair bugs. Often involves {ad-hockery} and verges on being a
        {crock}.

        3. n. Something that works for the wrong reason.

        4. vt. To insert a kluge into a program. "I've kluged this routine
        to get around that weird bug, but there's probably a better way."

        5. [WPI] n. A feature that is implemented in a {rude} manner.

        Nowadays this term is often encountered in the variant spelling
        `kludge'. Reports from {old fart}s are consistent that `kluge' was
        the original spelling, reported around computers as far back as the
        mid-1950s and, at that time, used exclusively of hardware kluges. In
        1947, the New York Folklore Quarterly reported a classic shaggy-dog
        story `Murgatroyd the Kluge Maker' then current in the Armed Forces,
        in which a `kluge' was a complex and puzzling artifact with a
        trivial function. Other sources report that `kluge' was common Navy
        slang in the WWII era for any piece of electronics that worked well
        on shore but consistently failed at sea.

        However, there is reason to believe this slang use may be a decade
        older. Several respondents have connected it to the brand name of a
        device called a "Kluge paper feeder", an adjunct to mechanical
        printing presses. Legend has it that the Kluge feeder was designed
        before small, cheap electric motors and control electronics; it
        relied on a fiendishly complex assortment of cams, belts, and
        linkages to both power and synchronize all its operations from one
        motive driveshaft. It was accordingly temperamental, subject to
        frequent breakdowns, and devilishly difficult to repair -- but oh,
        so clever! People who tell this story also aver that `Kluge' was the
        name of a design engineer.

        There is in fact a Brandtjen & Kluge Inc., an old family business
        that manufactures printing equipment -- interestingly, their name is
        pronounced /kloo'gee/! Henry Brandtjen, president of the firm, told
        me (ESR, 1994) that his company was co-founded by his father and an
        engineer named Kluge /kloo'gee/, who built and co-designed the
        original Kluge automatic feeder in 1919. Mr. Brandtjen claims,
        however, that this was a simple device (with only four cams); he
        says he has no idea how the myth of its complexity took hold. Other
        correspondents differ with Mr. Brandtjen's history of the device and
        his allegation that it was a simple rather than complex one, but
        agree that the Kluge automatic feeder was the most likely source of
        the folklore.

        {TMRC} and the MIT hacker culture of the early '60s seems to have
        developed in a milieu that remembered and still used some WWII
        military slang (see also {foobar}). It seems likely that `kluge'
        came to MIT via alumni of the many military electronics projects
        that had been located in Cambridge (many in MIT's venerable Building
        20, in which {TMRC} is also located) during the war.

        The variant `kludge' was apparently popularized by the {Datamation}
        article mentioned under {kludge}; it was titled How to Design a
        Kludge (February 1962, pp. 30, 31). This spelling was probably
        imported from Great Britain, where {kludge} has an independent
        history (though this fact was largely unknown to hackers on either
        side of the Atlantic before a mid-1993 debate in the Usenet group
        alt.folklore.computers over the First and Second Edition versions of
        this entry; everybody used to think {kludge} was just a mutation of
        {kluge}). It now appears that the British, having forgotten the
        etymology of their own `kludge' when `kluge' crossed the Atlantic,
        repaid the U.S. by lobbing the `kludge' orthography in the other
        direction and confusing their American cousins' spelling!

        The result of this history is a tangle. Many younger U.S. hackers
        pronounce the word as /klooj/ but spell it, incorrectly for its
        meaning and pronunciation, as `kludge'. (Phonetically, consider
        huge, refuge, centrifuge, and deluge as opposed to sludge, judge,
        budge, and fudge. Whatever its failings in other areas, English
        spelling is perfectly consistent about this distinction.) British
        hackers mostly learned /kluhj/ orally, use it in a restricted
        negative sense and are at least consistent. European hackers have
        mostly learned the word from written American sources and tend to
        pronounce it /kluhj/ but use the wider American meaning!

        Some observers consider this mess appropriate in view of the word's
        meaning.

:kluge around: vt.

        To avoid a bug or difficult condition by inserting a {kluge}.
        Compare {workaround}.

:kluge up: vt.

        To lash together a quick hack to perform a task; this is milder than
        {cruft together} and has some of the connotations of {hack up}
        (note, however, that the construction kluge on corresponding to
        {hack on} is never used). "I've kluged up this routine to dump the
        buffer contents to a safe place."

:Knights of the Lambda Calculus: n.

        A semi-mythical organization of wizardly LISP and Scheme hackers.
        The name refers to a mathematical formalism invented by Alonzo
        Church, with which LISP is intimately connected. There is no
        enrollment list and the criteria for induction are unclear, but one
        well-known LISPer has been known to give out buttons and, in
        general, the members know who they are....

:knobs: pl.n.

        Configurable options, even in software and even those you can't
        adjust in real time. Anything you can {twiddle} is a knob. "Has this
        PNG viewer got an alpha knob?" Software may be described as having
        "knobs and switches" or occasionally "knobs and lights". See also
        {nerd knob}

:knurd: n.

        1. [RPI] Renssaleer Polytechnic Institute local slang roughly
        equivalent to the positive sense of {geek}, referring to people who
        prefer technical hobbies to socializing.

        2. In older usage at RPI, the term signified someone new to college
        life, fresh out of high school, and wet behind the ears.

        An IEEE Spectrum article (4/95, page 16) once derived `nerd' in its
        variant form `knurd' from the word `drunk' backwards; this etymology
        was common at RPI. Though it is commonly confused with {nerd}, it
        appears these words have separate origins (compare the
        {kluge}/{kludge} pair).

:Knuth: /kanooth'/, n.

        [Donald E. Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming] Mythically, the
        reference that answers all questions about data structures or
        algorithms. A safe answer when you do not know: "I think you can
        find that in Knuth." Contrast {the literature}. See also {bible}.
        There is a Donald Knuth home page at
        http://Sunburn.Stanford.EDU/~knuth/.

:koan: /koh'an/, n.

        A Zen teaching riddle. Classically, koans are attractive paradoxes
        to be meditated on; their purpose is to help one to enlightenment by
        temporarily jamming normal cognitive processing so that something
        more interesting can happen (this practice is associated with Rinzai
        Zen Buddhism). Defined here because hackers are very fond of the
        koan form and compose their own koans for humorous and/or
        enlightening effect. See Some AI Koans, {has the X nature}, {hacker
        humor}.

:kook:

        [Usenet; originally and more formally, net.kook] Term used to
        describe a regular poster who continually posts messages with no
        apparent grounding in reality. Different from a {troll}, which
        implies a sort of sly wink on the part of a poster who knows better,
        kooks really believe what they write, to the extent that they
        believe anything.

        The kook trademark is paranoia and grandiosity. Kooks will often
        build up elaborate imaginary support structures, fake corporations
        and the like, and continue to act as if those things are real even
        after their falsity has been documented in public.

        While they may appear harmless, and are usually filtered out by the
        other regular participants in a newsgroup of mailing list, they can
        still cause problems because the necessity for these measures is not
        immediately apparent to newcomers; there are several instances on
        record, for example, of journalists writing stories with quotes from
        kooks who caught them unaware.

        An entertaining web page chronicling the activities of many notable
        kooks can be found at http://www.crank.net/usenet.html.

:Kool-Aid:

        [from a kid's sugar-enriched drink in fruity flavors] When someone
        who should know better succumbs to marketing influences and actually
        begins to believe the propaganda being dished out by a vendor, they
        are said to have drunk the Kool-Aid. Usually the decortication
        process is slow and almost unnoticeable until one day the victim
        emerges as a True Believer and begins spreading the faith himself.
        The term originates in the suicide of 914 followers of Jim Jones's
        People's Temple cult in Guyana in 1978 (there are also resonances
        with Ken Kesey's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests from the 1960s). What
        the Jonestown victims actually drank was cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid, a
        cheap knockoff, rather than Kool-Aid itself. There is a FAQ on this
        topic.

        This has live variants. When a suit is blithering on about their
        latest technology and how it will save the world, that's `pouring
        Kool-Aid'. When the suit does not violate the laws of physics,
        doesn't make impossible claims, and in fact says something
        reasonable and believable, that's pouring good Kool-Aid, usually
        used in the sentence "He pours good Kool-Aid, doesn't he?" This
        connotes that the speaker might be about to drink same.

:kremvax: /kremvaks/, n.

        [from the then-large number of {Usenet} {VAXen} with names of the
        form foovax] Originally, a fictitious Usenet site at the Kremlin,
        announced on April 1, 1984 in a posting ostensibly originated there
        by Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The posting was actually
        forged by Piet Beertema as an April Fool's joke. Other fictitious
        sites mentioned in the hoax were moskvax and {kgbvax}. This was
        probably the funniest of the many April Fool's forgeries perpetrated
        on Usenet (which has negligible security against them), because the
        notion that Usenet might ever penetrate the Iron Curtain seemed so
        totally absurd at the time.

        In fact, it was only six years later that the first genuine site in
        Moscow, demos.su, joined Usenet. Some readers needed convincing that
        the postings from it weren't just another prank. Vadim Antonov,
        senior programmer at Demos and the major poster from there up to
        mid-1991, was quite aware of all this, referred to it frequently in
        his own postings, and at one point twitted some credulous readers by
        blandly asserting that he was a hoax!

        Eventually he even arranged to have the domain's gateway site named
        kremvax, thus neatly turning fiction into fact and demonstrating
        that the hackish sense of humor transcends cultural barriers. [Mr.
        Antonov also contributed the Russian-language material for this
        lexicon. --ESR]

        In an even more ironic historical footnote, kremvax became an
        electronic center of the anti-communist resistance during the
        bungled hard-line coup of August 1991. During those three days the
        Soviet UUCP network centered on kremvax became the only trustworthy
        news source for many places within the USSR. Though the sysops were
        concentrating on internal communications, cross-border postings
        included immediate transliterations of Boris Yeltsin's decrees
        condemning the coup and eyewitness reports of the demonstrations in
        Moscow's streets. In those hours, years of speculation that
        totalitarianism would prove unable to maintain its grip on
        politically-loaded information in the age of computer networking
        were proved devastatingly accurate -- and the original kremvax joke
        became a reality as Yeltsin and the new Russian revolutionaries of
        glasnost and perestroika made kremvax one of the timeliest means of
        their outreach to the West.

:kyrka: /chur'ka/, n.

        [Swedish] See {feature key}.

  L

   lag

   lamer

   LAN party

   language lawyer

   languages of choice

   LART

   larval stage

   lase

   laser chicken

   leaf site

   leak

   leaky heap

   leapfrog attack

   leech

   leech mode

   legal

   legalese

   lenna

   LER

   LERP

   let the smoke out

   letterbomb

   lexer

   life

   Life is hard

   light pipe

   lightweight

   like kicking dead whales down the beach

   like nailing jelly to a tree

   line 666

   line eater, the

   line noise

   linearithmic

   link farm

   link rot

   link-dead

   lint

   Lintel

   Linus

   Linux

   lion food

   Lions Book

   LISP

   list-bomb

   lithium lick

   little-endian

   live

   live data

   Live Free Or Die!

   livelock

   liveware

   lobotomy

   locals, the

   locked and loaded

   locked up

   logic bomb

   logical

   loop through

   loose bytes

   lord high fixer

   lose

   lose lose

   loser

   losing

   loss

   lossage

   lossy

   lost in the noise

   lost in the underflow

   lots of MIPS but no I/O

   low-bandwidth

   Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology

   Lumber Cartel

   lunatic fringe

   lurker

   luser

: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 {phreaker}s. 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 {wannabee}s. 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/

        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.

        {C}, {Perl}, {Python}, {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 Programmer}s 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 {HLL}
        implementation, {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: //

        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 {flame}s 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:

        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).

: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
        {ratio site}, {banner site}.

: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,
        {suit}s, and situations in which hackers generally get the short end
        of the stick.

:lenna:

        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 Sjblom

:LER: /LER/

        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:

        1. n. A piece of {email} containing {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: 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!}"

: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.

: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:

        [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 (Addison-Wesley 1990, ISBN 0-201-51425-7).

: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}.

: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}.

:lint:

        [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/, /linus/, /li:nus/

        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/, /linuks/, 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
        as ISBN 1-57398-013-7 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 {crock}s. When the {Right Thing} has already been done
        once, there is no justification for {bogosity} in newer languages.

        We've got your numbers....

: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},
        {middle-endian}, {NUXI problem}. The term is sometimes used to
        describe the ordering of units other than bytes; most often, bits
        within a byte.

: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.

: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 {hook}s
        (executable code).

        3. An object, such as a {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.

: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.

        Syn. for {hung}, {wedged}.

: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 {shim}s 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: 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!"

:lose lose: interj.

        A reply to or comment on an undesirable situation. "I accidentally
        deleted all my files!" "Lose, 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 OK 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}, {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
        {suit}s!" Compare {zero-content}, {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},
        {backbone cabal} and {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}, {muggle}, {newbie}, {chainik}.

  M

   M

   M$

   macdink

   machoflops

   Macintoy

   Macintrash

   macro

   macro-

   macrology

   maggotbox

   magic

   magic cookie

   magic number

   magic smoke

   mail storm

   mailbomb

   mailing list

   main loop

   mainframe

   mainsleaze

   malware

   man page

   management

   mandelbug

   manged

   mangle

   mangled name

   mangler

   manularity

   marching ants

   marbles

   marginal

   marginally

   marketroid

   Mars

   martian

   massage

   math-out

   Matrix

   mav

   maximum Maytag mode

   McQuary limit

   meatspace

   meatware

   meeces

   meg

   mega-

   megapenny

   MEGO

   meltdown, network

   meme

   meme plague

   memetics

   memory farts

   memory leak

   memory smash

   menuitis

   mess-dos

   meta

   meta bit

   metasyntactic variable

   MFTL

   mickey

   mickey mouse program

   micro-

   MicroDroid

   microfortnight

   microLenat

   microReid

   microserf

   Microsloth Windows

   Microsoft

   micros~1

   middle-endian

   middle-out implementation

   milliLampson

   minor detail

   MIPS

   misbug

   misfeature

   missile address

   MiSTing

   miswart

   MMF

   mobo

   moby

   mockingbird

   mod

   mode

   mode bit

   modulo

   mojibake

   molly-guard

   Mongolian Hordes technique

   monkey up

   monkey, scratch

   monstrosity

   monty

   Moof

   Moore's Law

   moria

   MOTAS

   MOTOS

   MOTSS

   mouse ahead

   mouse belt

   mouse droppings

   mouse elbow

   mouse pusher

   mouso

   MS-DOS

   mu

   MUD

   muddie

   mudhead

   muggle

   Multics

   multitask

   mumblage

   mumble

   munch

   munching

   munching squares

   munchkin

   mundane

   mung

   munge

   Murphy's Law

   music

   mutter

:M: pref.

        [SI] See {quantifiers}.

:M$:

        Common net abbreviation for Microsoft, everybody's least favorite
        monopoly.

:macdink: /mak'dink/, vt.

        [from the Apple Macintosh, which is said to encourage such behavior]
        To make many incremental and unnecessary cosmetic changes to a
        program or file. Often the subject of the macdinking would be better
        off without them. "When I left at 11PM last night, he was still
        macdinking the slides for his presentation." See also {fritterware},
        {window shopping}.

:machoflops: /mach'ohflops/, n.

        [pun on megaflops, a coinage for `millions of FLoating-point
        Operations Per Second'] Refers to artificially inflated performance
        figures often quoted by computer manufacturers. Real applications
        are lucky to get half the quoted speed. See {Your mileage may vary},
        {benchmark}.

:Macintoy: /mak'intoy/, n.

        The Apple Macintosh, considered as a {toy}. Less pejorative than
        {Macintrash}.

:Macintrash: /mak'intrash`/, n.

        The Apple Macintosh, as described by a hacker who doesn't appreciate
        being kept away from the real computer by the interface. The term
        {maggotbox} has been reported in regular use in the Research
        Triangle area of North Carolina. Compare {Macintoy}. See also {beige
        toaster}, {WIMP environment}, {point-and-drool interface},
        {drool-proof paper}, {user-friendly}.

:macro: /mak'roh/, n.

        [techspeak] A name (possibly followed by a formal {arg} list) that
        is equated to a text or symbolic expression to which it is to be
        expanded (possibly with the substitution of actual arguments) by a
        macro expander. This definition can be found in any technical
        dictionary; what those won't tell you is how the hackish
        connotations of the term have changed over time.

        The term macro originated in early assemblers, which encouraged the
        use of macros as a structuring and information-hiding device. During
        the early 1970s, macro assemblers became ubiquitous, and sometimes
        quite as powerful and expensive as {HLL}s, only to fall from favor
        as improving compiler technology marginalized assembler programming
        (see {languages of choice}). Nowadays the term is most often used in
        connection with the C preprocessor, LISP, or one of several
        special-purpose languages built around a macro-expansion facility
        (such as TeX or Unix's [nt]roff suite).

        Indeed, the meaning has drifted enough that the collective macros is
        now sometimes used for code in any special-purpose application
        control language (whether or not the language is actually translated
        by text expansion), and for macro-like entities such as the keyboard
        macros supported in some text editors (and PC TSR or Macintosh
        INIT/CDEV keyboard enhancers).

:macro-: pref.

        Large. Opposite of {micro-}. In the mainstream and among other
        technical cultures (for example, medical people) this competes with
        the prefix {mega-}, but hackers tend to restrict the latter to
        quantification.

:macrology: /makrol'@jee/, n.

        1. Set of usually complex or crufty macros, e.g., as part of a large
        system written in {LISP}, {TECO}, or (less commonly) assembler.

        2. The art and science involved in comprehending a macrology in
        sense 1. Sometimes studying the macrology of a system is not unlike
        archeology, ecology, or {theology}, hence the sound-alike
        construction. See also {boxology}.

:maggotbox: /mag'@tboks/, n.

        See {Macintrash}. This is even more derogatory.

:magic:

        1. adj. As yet unexplained, or too complicated to explain; compare
        {automagically} and (Arthur C.) Clarke's Third Law: "Any
        sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
        "TTY echoing is controlled by a large number of magic bits." "This
        routine magically computes the parity of an 8-bit byte in three
        instructions."

        2. adj. Characteristic of something that works although no one
        really understands why (this is especially called {black magic}).

        3. n. [Stanford] A feature not generally publicized that allows
        something otherwise impossible, or a feature formerly in that
        category but now unveiled.

        4. n. The ultimate goal of all engineering & development, elegance
        in the extreme; from the first corollary to Clarke's Third Law: "Any
        technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced".

        Parodies playing on these senses of the term abound; some have made
        their way into serious documentation, as when a MAGIC directive was
        described in the Control Card Reference for GCOS c.1978. For more
        about hackish `magic', see Appendix A. Compare {black magic},
        {wizardly}, {deep magic}, {heavy wizardry}.

:magic cookie: n.

        [Unix; common]

        1. Something passed between routines or programs that enables the
        receiver to perform some operation; a capability ticket or opaque
        identifier. Especially used of small data objects that contain data
        encoded in a strange or intrinsically machine-dependent way. E.g.,
        on non-Unix OSes with a non-byte-stream model of files, the result
        of ftell(3) may be a magic cookie rather than a byte offset; it can
        be passed to fseek(3), but not operated on in any meaningful way.
        The phrase it hands you a magic cookie means it returns a result
        whose contents are not defined but which can be passed back to the
        same or some other program later.

        2. An in-band code for changing graphic rendition (e.g., inverse
        video or underlining) or performing other control functions (see
        also {cookie}). Some older terminals would leave a blank on the
        screen corresponding to mode-change magic cookies; this was also
        called a {glitch} (or occasionally a turd; compare {mouse
        droppings}). See also {cookie}.

:magic number: n.

        [Unix/C; common]

        1. In source code, some non-obvious constant whose value is
        significant to the operation of a program and that is inserted
        inconspicuously in-line ({hardcoded}), rather than expanded in by a
        symbol set by a commented #define. Magic numbers in this sense are
        bad style.

        2. A number that encodes critical information used in an algorithm
        in some opaque way. The classic examples of these are the numbers
        used in hash or CRC functions, or the coefficients in a linear
        congruential generator for pseudo-random numbers. This sense
        actually predates and was ancestral to the more common sense

        3. Special data located at the beginning of a binary data file to
        indicate its type to a utility. Under Unix, the system and various
        applications programs (especially the linker) distinguish between
        types of executable file by looking for a magic number. Once upon a
        time, these magic numbers were {PDP-11} branch instructions that
        skipped over header data to the start of executable code; 0407, for
        example, was octal for `branch 16 bytes relative'. Many other kinds
        of files now have magic numbers somewhere; some magic numbers are,
        in fact, strings, like the !<arch> at the beginning of a Unix
        archive file or the %! leading PostScript files. Nowadays only a
        {wizard} knows the spells to create magic numbers. How do you choose
        a fresh magic number of your own? Simple -- you pick one at random.
        See? It's magic!

        4. An input that leads to a computational boundary condition, where
        algorithm behavior becomes discontinuous. Numeric overflows
        (particularly with signed data types) and run-time errors (divide by
        zero, stack overflows) are indications of magic numbers. The Y2K
        scare was probably the most notorious magic number non-incident.

        The magic number, on the other hand, is 72. See The magical number
        seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing
        information by George Miller, in the Psychological Review 63:81-97
        (1956). This classic paper established the number of distinct items
        (such as numeric digits) that humans can hold in short-term memory.
        Among other things, this strongly influenced the interface design of
        the phone system.

:magic smoke: n.

        A substance trapped inside IC packages that enables them to function
        (also called blue smoke; this is similar to the archaic phlogiston
        hypothesis about combustion). Its existence is demonstrated by what
        happens when a chip burns up -- the magic smoke gets let out, so it
        doesn't work any more. See {smoke test}, {let the smoke out}.

        Usenetter Jay Maynard tells the following story: "Once, while
        hacking on a dedicated Z80 system, I was testing code by blowing
        EPROMs and plugging them in the system, then seeing what happened.
        One time, I plugged one in backwards. I only discovered that after I
        realized that Intel didn't put power-on lights under the quartz
        windows on the tops of their EPROMs -- the die was glowing
        white-hot. Amazingly, the EPROM worked fine after I erased it,
        filled it full of zeros, then erased it again. For all I know, it's
        still in service. Of course, this is because the magic smoke didn't
        get let out." Compare the original phrasing of {Murphy's Law}.

:mail storm: n.

        [from {broadcast storm}, influenced by maelstrom] What often happens
        when a machine with an Internet connection and active users
        re-connects after extended downtime -- a flood of incoming mail that
        brings the machine to its knees. See also {hairball}.

:mailbomb:

        (also mail bomb) [Usenet]

        1. v. To send, or urge others to send, massive amounts of {email} to
        a single system or person, esp. with intent to crash or {spam} the
        recipient's system. Sometimes done in retaliation for a perceived
        serious offense. Mailbombing is itself widely regarded as a serious
        offense -- it can disrupt email traffic or other facilities for
        innocent users on the victim's system, and in extreme cases, even at
        upstream sites.

        2. n. An automatic procedure with a similar effect.

        3. n. The mail sent. Compare {letterbomb}, {nastygram}, {BLOB}
        (sense 2), {list-bomb}.

:mailing list: n.

        (often shortened in context to list)

        1. An {email} address that is an alias (or {macro}, though that word
        is never used in this connection) for many other email addresses.
        Some mailing lists are simple reflectors, redirecting mail sent to
        them to the list of recipients. Others are filtered by humans or
        programs of varying degrees of sophistication; lists filtered by
        humans are said to be moderated.

        2. The people who receive your email when you send it to such an
        address.

        Mailing lists are one of the primary forms of hacker interaction,
        along with {Usenet}. They predate Usenet, having originated with the
        first UUCP and ARPANET connections. They are often used for private
        information-sharing on topics that would be too specialized for or
        inappropriate to public Usenet groups. Though some of these maintain
        almost purely technical content (such as the Internet Engineering
        Task Force mailing list), others (like the `sf-lovers' list
        maintained for many years by Saul Jaffe) are recreational, and many
        are purely social. Perhaps the most infamous of the social lists was
        the eccentric bandykin distribution; its latter-day progeny,
        lectroids and tanstaafl, still include a number of the oddest and
        most interesting people in hackerdom.

        Mailing lists are easy to create and (unlike Usenet) don't tie up a
        significant amount of machine resources (until they get very large,
        at which point they can become interesting torture tests for mail
        software). Thus, they are often created temporarily by working
        groups, the members of which can then collaborate on a project
        without ever needing to meet face-to-face. Much of the material in
        this lexicon was criticized and polished on just such a mailing list
        (called `jargon-friends'), which included all the co-authors of
        Steele-1983.

:main loop: n.

        The top-level control flow construct in an input- or event-driven
        program, the one which receives and acts or dispatches on the
        program's input. See also {driver}.

:mainframe: n.

        Term originally referring to the cabinet containing the central
        processor unit or `main frame' of a room-filling {Stone Age} batch
        machine. After the emergence of smaller minicomputer designs in the
        early 1970s, the traditional {big iron} machines were described as
        `mainframe computers' and eventually just as mainframes. The term
        carries the connotation of a machine designed for batch rather than
        interactive use, though possibly with an interactive timesharing
        operating system retrofitted onto it; it is especially used of
        machines built by IBM, Unisys, and the other great {dinosaur}s
        surviving from computing's {Stone Age}.

        It has been common wisdom among hackers since the late 1980s that
        the mainframe architectural tradition is essentially dead (outside
        of the tiny market for {number-crunching} supercomputers having been
        swamped by the recent huge advances in IC technology and low-cost
        personal computing. The wave of failures, takeovers, and mergers
        among traditional mainframe makers in the early 1990s bore this out.
        The biggest mainframer of all, IBM, was compelled to re-invent
        itself as a huge systems-consulting house. (See {dinosaurs mating}
        and {killer micro}).

        However, in yet another instance of the {cycle of reincarnation},
        the port of Linux to the IBM S/390 architecture in 1999 -- assisted
        by IBM -- produced a resurgence of interest in mainframe computing
        as a way of providing huge quantities of easily maintainable,
        reliable virtual Linux servers, saving IBM's mainframe division from
        almost certain extinction.

:mainsleaze: n.

        1. Spam emitted by a reputable, mainstream company (as opposed to
        fly-by-night Viagra oeddlers and the like). Sometime this happens in
        honest ignorance, but the reputation danage can take years to live
        down.

        2. Occasionally used for a big-time spammer, with its own {fat
        pipe}, their own mailservers, and a {pink contract}. Almost
        impossible to get shut down.

:malware: n.

        [Common] Malicious software. Software intended to cause consequences
        the unwitting user would not choose; especially used of {virus} or
        {Trojan horse} software.

:man page: n.

        A page from the Unix Programmer's Manual, documenting one of Unix's
        many commands, system calls, library subroutines, device driver
        interfaces, file formats, games, macro packages, or maintenance
        utilities. By extension, the term "man page" may be used to refer to
        documentation of any kind, under any system, though it is most
        likely to be confined to short on-line references.

        As mentioned in Chapter 11, Other Lexicon Conventions, there is a
        standard syntax for referring to man page entries: the phrase
        "foo(n)" refers to the page for "foo" in chapter n of the manual,
        where chapter 1 is user commands, chapter 2 is system calls, etc.

        The man page format is beloved, or berated, for having the same sort
        of pithy utility as the rest of Unix. Man pages tend to be written
        as very compact, concise descriptions which are complete but not
        forgiving of the lazy or careless reader. Their stylized format does
        a good job of summarizing the essentials: invocation syntax,
        options, basic functionality. While such a concise reference is
        perfect for the do-one-thing-and-do-it-well tools which are favored
        by the Unix philosophy, it admittedly breaks down when applied to a
        command which is itself a major subsystem.

:management: n.

        1. Corporate power elites distinguished primarily by their distance
        from actual productive work and their chronic failure to manage (see
        also {suit}). Spoken derisively, as in "Management decided that
        ...".

        2. Mythically, a vast bureaucracy responsible for all the world's
        minor irritations. Hackers' satirical public notices are often
        signed `The Mgt'; this derives from the Illuminatus novels (see the
        Bibliography in Appendix C).

:mandelbug: /man'delbuhg/, n.

        [from the Mandelbrot set] A bug whose underlying causes are so
        complex and obscure as to make its behavior appear chaotic or even
        non-deterministic. This term implies that the speaker thinks it is a
        {Bohr bug}, rather than a {heisenbug}. See also {schroedinbug}.

:manged: /mahnjd/, n.

        [probably from the French `manger' or Italian `mangiare', to eat;
        perhaps influenced by English `mange', `mangy'] adj. Refers to
        anything that is mangled or damaged, usually beyond repair. "The
        disk was manged after the electrical storm." Compare {mung}.

:mangle: vt.

        1. Used similarly to {mung} or {scribble}, but more violent in its
        connotations; something that is mangled has been irreversibly and
        totally trashed.

        2. To produce the {mangled name} corresponding to a C++ declaration.

:mangled name: n.

        A name, appearing in a C++ object file, that is a coded
        representation of the object declaration as it appears in the
        source. Mangled names are used because C++ allows multiple objects
        to have the same name, as long as they are distinguishable in some
        other way, such as by having different parameter types. Thus, the
        internal name must have that additional information embedded in it,
        using the limited character set allowed by most linkers. For
        instance, one popular compiler encodes the standard library function
        declaration "memchr(const void*,int,unsigned int)" as
        "@memchr$qpxviui".

:mangler: n.

        [DEC] A manager. Compare {management}. Note that {system mangler} is
        somewhat different in connotation.

:manularity: /man`yoola'ritee/, n.

        [prob. fr. techspeak manual + granularity] A notional measure of the
        manual labor required for some task, particularly one of the sort
        that automation is supposed to eliminate. "Composing English on
        paper has much higher manularity than using a text editor,
        especially in the revising stage." Hackers tend to consider
        manularity a symptom of primitive methods; in fact, a true hacker
        confronted with an apparent requirement to do a computing task {by
        hand} will inevitably seize the opportunity to build another tool
        (see {toolsmith}).

:marching ants:

        The animated dotted-line marquee that indicates a rectangle or item
        select in Adobe Photoshop, the GIMP, and other similar image-editing
        programs.

:marbles: pl.n.

        [from mainstream "lost all his/her marbles"] The minimum needed to
        build your way further up some hierarchy of tools or abstractions.
        After a bad system crash, you need to determine if the machine has
        enough marbles to come up on its own, or enough marbles to allow a
        rebuild from backups, or if you need to rebuild from scratch. "This
        compiler doesn't even have enough marbles to compile {hello world}."

:marginal: adj.

        [common]

        1. [techspeak] An extremely small change. "A marginal increase in
        {core} can decrease {GC} time drastically." In everyday terms, this
        means that it is a lot easier to clean off your desk if you have a
        spare place to put some of the junk while you sort through it.

        2. Of little merit. "This proposed new feature seems rather marginal
        to me."

        3. Of extremely small probability of {win}ning. "The power supply
        was rather marginal anyway; no wonder it fried."

:marginally: adv.

        Slightly. "The ravs here are only marginally better than at Small
        Eating Place." See {epsilon}.

:marketroid: /mar'k@troyd/, n.

        alt.: marketing slime, marketeer, marketing droid, marketdroid. A
        member of a company's marketing department, esp. one who promises
        users that the next version of a product will have features that are
        not actually scheduled for inclusion, are extremely difficult to
        implement, and/or are in violation of the laws of physics; and/or
        one who describes existing features (and misfeatures) in ebullient,
        buzzword-laden adspeak. Derogatory. Compare {droid}.

:Mars: n.

        A legendary tragic failure, the archetypal Hacker Dream Gone Wrong.
        Mars was the code name for a family of PDP-10-compatible computers
        built by Systems Concepts (now, The SC Group): the multi-processor
        SC-30M, the small uniprocessor SC-25, and the never-built
        superprocessor SC-40. These machines were marvels of engineering
        design; although not much slower than the unique {Foonly} F-1, they
        were physically smaller and consumed less power than the much slower
        {DEC} KS10 or Foonly F-2, F-3, or F-4 machines. They were also
        completely compatible with the DEC KL10, and ran all KL10 binaries
        (including the operating system) with no modifications at about 2--3
        times faster than a KL10.

        When DEC cancelled the Jupiter project in 1983 (their followup to
        the PDP-10), Systems Concepts should have made a bundle selling
        their machine into shops with a lot of software investment in
        PDP-10s, and in fact their spring 1984 announcement generated a
        great deal of excitement in the PDP-10 world. TOPS-10 was running on
        the Mars by the summer of 1984, and TOPS-20 by early fall.
        Unfortunately, the hackers running Systems Concepts were much better
        at designing machines than at mass producing or selling them; the
        company allowed itself to be sidetracked by a bout of perfectionism
        into continually improving the design, and lost credibility as
        delivery dates continued to slip. They also overpriced the product
        ridiculously; they believed they were competing with the KL10 and
        {VAX} 8600 and failed to reckon with the likes of Sun Microsystems
        and other hungry startups building workstations with power
        comparable to the KL10 at a fraction of the price. By the time SC
        shipped the first SC-30M to Stanford in late 1985, most customers
        had already made the traumatic decision to abandon the PDP-10,
        usually for VMS or Unix boxes. Most of the Mars computers built
        ended up being purchased by CompuServe.

        This tale and the related saga of {Foonly} hold a lesson for
        hackers: if you want to play in the {Real World}, you need to learn
        Real World moves.

:martian: n.

        A packet sent on a TCP/IP network with a source address of the test
        loopback interface [127.0.0.1]. This means that it will come back
        labeled with a source address that is clearly not of this earth.
        "The domain server is getting lots of packets from Mars. Does that
        gateway have a martian filter?" Compare {Christmas tree packet},
        {Godzillagram}.

:massage: vt.

        [common] Vague term used to describe `smooth' transformations of a
        data set into a different form, esp. transformations that do not
        lose information. Connotes less pain than {munch} or {crunch}. "He
        wrote a program that massages X bitmap files into GIF format."
        Compare {slurp}.

:math-out: n.

        [poss. from `white-out' (the blizzard variety)] A paper or
        presentation so encrusted with mathematical or other formal notation
        as to be incomprehensible. This may be a device for concealing the
        fact that it is actually {content-free}. See also {numbers}, {social
        science number}.

        A {math-out} approach to history.

        (The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-05-19. The previous one
        is the frontispiece.)

:Matrix: n.

        [FidoNet]

        1. What the Opus BBS software and sysops call {FidoNet}.

        2. Fanciful term for a {cyberspace} expected to emerge from current
        networking experiments (see {the network}). The name of the rather
        good 1999 {cypherpunk} movie The Matrix played on this sense, which
        however had been established for years before.

        3. The totality of present-day computer networks (popularized in
        this sense by John Quarterman; rare outside academic literature).

:mav: n.

        [MUD, IRC; common] Term used when an individual accidently sends a
        comment to the wrong location. Generally, this is MUD-to-MUD
        (MU*-to-MU*), or in various IRC channels. However, it can also refer
        to a comment made in private that was dropped to the entire world,
        or accidentally directing to one person when it was supposed to go
        to another.

:maximum Maytag mode: n.

        What a {washing machine} or, by extension, any disk drive is in when
        it's being used so heavily that it's shaking like an old Maytag with
        an unbalanced load. If prolonged for any length of time, can lead to
        disks becoming {walking drives}. In 1999 it's been some years since
        hard disks were large enough to do this, but the same phenomenon has
        recently been reported with 24X CD-ROM drives.

:McQuary limit:

        [from the name of the founder of alt.fan.warlord; see {warlording}.]
        4 lines of at most 80 characters each, sometimes still cited on
        Usenet as the maximum acceptable size of a {sig block}. Before the
        great bandwidth explosion of the early 1990s, long sigs actually
        cost people running Usenet servers significant amounts of money.
        Nowadays social pressure against long sigs is intended to avoid
        waste of human attention rather than machine bandwidth. Accordingly,
        the McQuary limit should be considered a rule of thumb rather than a
        hard limit; it's best to avoid sigs that are large, repetitive, and
        distracting. See also {warlording}.

:meatspace: /meet'spays/, n.

        The physical world, where the meat lives -- as opposed to
        {cyberspace}. Hackers are actually more willing to use this term
        than `cyberspace', because it's not speculative -- we already have a
        running meatspace implementation (the universe). Compare {RL}.

:meatware: n.

        Synonym for {wetware}. Less common.

:meeces: /mees'@z/, n.

        [TMRC] Occasional furry visitors who are not {urchin}s. [That is,
        mice. This may no longer be in live use; it clearly derives from the
        refrain of the early-1960s cartoon character Mr. Jinks: "I hate
        meeces to pieces!" -- ESR]

:meg: /meg/, n.

        See {quantifiers}.

:mega-: /me'g@/, pref.

        [SI] See {quantifiers}.

:megapenny: /meg'@pen`ee/, n.

        $10,000 (1 cent * 10^6). Used semi-humorously as a unit in comparing
        computer cost and performance figures.

:MEGO: /me'goh/, /meegoh/

        ["My Eyes Glaze Over", often "Mine Eyes Glazeth (sic) Over",
        attributed to the futurologist Herman Kahn] Also MEGO factor.

        1. n. A {handwave} intended to confuse the listener and hopefully
        induce agreement because the listener does not want to admit to not
        understanding what is going on. MEGO is usually directed at senior
        management by engineers and contains a high proportion of {TLA}s.

        2. excl. An appropriate response to MEGO tactics.

        3. Among non-hackers, often refers not to behavior that causes the
        eyes to glaze, but to the eye-glazing reaction itself, which may be
        triggered by the mere threat of excessive technical detail as
        effectively as by an actual excess of it.

:meltdown, network: n.

        See {network meltdown}.

:meme: /meem/, n.

        [coined by analogy with `gene', by Richard Dawkins] An idea
        considered as a {replicator}, esp. with the connotation that memes
        parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do. Used
        esp. in the phrase meme complex denoting a group of mutually
        supporting memes that form an organized belief system, such as a
        religion. This lexicon is an (epidemiological) vector of the `hacker
        subculture' meme complex; each entry might be considered a meme.
        However, meme is often misused to mean meme complex. Use of the term
        connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other
        tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection
        of adaptive ideas has superseded biological evolution by selection
        of hereditary traits. Hackers find this idea congenial for tolerably
        obvious reasons.

:meme plague: n.

        The spread of a successful but pernicious {meme}, esp. one that
        parasitizes the victims into giving their all to propagate it.
        Astrology, BASIC, and the other guy's religion are often considered
        to be examples. This usage is given point by the historical fact
        that `joiner' ideologies like Naziism or various forms of
        millennarian Christianity have exhibited plague-like cycles of
        exponential growth followed by collapses to small reservoir
        populations.

:memetics: /memet'iks/, n.

        [from {meme}] The study of memes. As of early 2003, this is still an
        extremely informal and speculative endeavor, though the first steps
        towards at least statistical rigor have been made by H. Keith Henson
        and others. Memetics is a popular topic for speculation among
        hackers, who like to see themselves as the architects of the new
        information ecologies in which memes live and replicate.

:memory farts: n.

        The flatulent sounds that some DOS box BIOSes (most notably AMI's)
        make when checking memory on bootup.

:memory leak: n.

        An error in a program's dynamic-store allocation logic that causes
        it to fail to reclaim discarded memory, leading to eventual collapse
        due to memory exhaustion. Also (esp. at CMU) called {core leak}.
        These problems were severe on older machines with small, fixed-size
        address spaces, and special "leak detection" tools were commonly
        written to root them out. With the advent of virtual memory, it is
        unfortunately easier to be sloppy about wasting a bit of memory
        (although when you run out of memory on a VM machine, it means
        you've got a real leak!). See {aliasing bug}, {fandango on core},
        {smash the stack}, {precedence lossage}, {overrun screw}, {leaky
        heap}, {leak}.

:memory smash: n.

        [XEROX PARC] Writing through a pointer that doesn't point to what
        you think it does. This occasionally reduces your memory to a rubble
        of bits. Note that this is subtly different from (and more general
        than) related terms such as a {memory leak} or {fandango on core}
        because it doesn't imply an allocation error or overrun condition.

:menuitis: /men`yooi:'tis/, n.

        Notional disease suffered by software with an obsessively
        simple-minded menu interface and no escape. Hackers find this
        intensely irritating and much prefer the flexibility of command-line
        or language-style interfaces, especially those customizable via
        macros or a special-purpose language in which one can encode useful
        hacks. See {user-obsequious}, {drool-proof paper}, {WIMP
        environment}, {for the rest of us}.

:mess-dos: /mesdos/, n.

        [semi-obsolescent now that DOS is] Derisory term for MS-DOS. Often
        followed by the ritual banishing "Just say No!" See {MS-DOS}. Most
        hackers (even many MS-DOS hackers) loathed MS-DOS for its
        single-tasking nature, its limits on application size, its nasty
        primitive interface, and its ties to IBMness and Microsoftness (see
        {fear and loathing}). Also mess-loss, messy-dos, mess-dog,
        mess-dross, mush-dos, and various combinations thereof. In Ireland
        and the U.K. it is even sometimes called `Domestos' after a brand of
        toilet cleanser.

:meta: /me't@/, /mayt@/, /meet@/, pref.

        [from analytic philosophy] One level of description up. A
        metasyntactic variable is a variable in notation used to describe
        syntax, and meta-language is language used to describe language.
        This is difficult to explain briefly, but much hacker humor turns on
        deliberate confusion between meta-levels. See {hacker humor}.

:meta bit: n.

        The top bit of an 8-bit character, which is on in character values
        128--255. Also called {high bit}, {alt bit}. Some terminals and
        consoles (see {space-cadet keyboard}) have a META shift key. Others
        (including, mirabile dictu, keyboards on IBM PC-class machines) have
        an ALT key. See also {bucky bits}.

        Historical note: although in modern usage shaped by a universe of
        8-bit bytes the meta bit is invariably hex 80 (octal 0200), things
        were different on earlier machines with 36-bit words and 9-bit
        bytes. The MIT and Stanford keyboards (see {space-cadet keyboard})
        generated hex 100 (octal 400) from their meta keys.

:metasyntactic variable: n.

        A name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing
        is under discussion, or any random member of a class of things under
        discussion. The word {foo} is the {canonical} example. To avoid
        confusion, hackers never (well, hardly ever) use `foo' or other
        words like it as permanent names for anything. In filenames, a
        common convention is that any filename beginning with a
        metasyntactic-variable name is a {scratch} file that may be deleted
        at any time.

        Metasyntactic variables are so called because (1) they are variables
        in the metalanguage used to talk about programs etc; (2) they are
        variables whose values are often variables (as in usages like "the
        value of f(foo,bar) is the sum of foo and bar"). However, it has
        been plausibly suggested that the real reason for the term
        "metasyntactic variable" is that it sounds good. To some extent, the
        list of one's preferred metasyntactic variables is a cultural
        signature. They occur both in series (used for related groups of
        variables or objects) and as singletons. Here are a few common
        signatures:

        +------------------------------------------------------------------+
        |                       | MIT/Stanford usage, now found everywhere |
        |                       | (thanks largely to early versions of     |
        | {foo}, {bar}, {baz},  | this lexicon!). At MIT (but not at       |
        | {quux}, quuux,        | Stanford), {baz} dropped out of use for  |
        | quuuux...:            | a while in the 1970s and '80s. A common  |
        |                       | recent mutation of this sequence inserts |
        |                       | {qux}before {quux}.                      |
        |-----------------------+------------------------------------------|
        | bazola, ztesch:       | Stanford (from mid-'70s on).             |
        |-----------------------+------------------------------------------|
        | {foo}, {bar}, thud,   | This series was popular at CMU. Other    |
        | grunt:                | CMU-associated variables include {gorp}. |
        |-----------------------+------------------------------------------|
        |                       | Waterloo University. We are informed     |
        |                       | that the CS club at Waterloo formerly    |
        |                       | had a sign on its door reading "Ye Olde  |
        | {foo}, {bar}, bletch: | Foo Bar and Grill"; this led to an       |
        |                       | attempt to establish "grill" as the      |
        |                       | third metasyntactic variable, but it     |
        |                       | never caught on.                         |
        |-----------------------+------------------------------------------|
        | {foo}, {bar}, fum:    | This series is reported to be common at  |
        |                       | XEROX PARC.                              |
        |-----------------------+------------------------------------------|
        | {fred}, jim, sheila,  | See the entry for {fred}. These tend to  |
        | {barney}:             | be Britishisms.                          |
        |-----------------------+------------------------------------------|
        | {flarp}:              | Popular at Rutgers University and among  |
        |                       | {GOSMACS} hackers.                       |
        |-----------------------+------------------------------------------|
        | zxc, spqr, wombat:    | Cambridge University (England).          |
        |-----------------------+------------------------------------------|
        | shme                  | Berkeley, GeoWorks, Ingres. Pronounced   |
        |                       | /shme/ with a short /e/.                 |
        |-----------------------+------------------------------------------|
        | foo, bar, baz, bongo  | Yale, late 1970s.                        |
        |-----------------------+------------------------------------------|
        | spam, eggs            | {Python} programmers.                    |
        |-----------------------+------------------------------------------|
        | snork                 | Brown University, early 1970s.           |
        |-----------------------+------------------------------------------|
        | {foo}, {bar}, zot     | Helsinki University of Technology,       |
        |                       | Finland.                                 |
        |-----------------------+------------------------------------------|
        | blarg, {wibble}       | New Zealand.                             |
        |-----------------------+------------------------------------------|
        | toto, titi, tata,     | France.                                  |
        | tutu                  |                                          |
        |-----------------------+------------------------------------------|
        |                       | Italy. Pippo /pee'po/ and Paperino       |
        | pippo, pluto,         | /paperee'no/ are the Italian names    |
        | paperino              | for Goofy and Donald Duck. Pluto, of     |
        |                       | course, is Mickey's dog.                 |
        |-----------------------+------------------------------------------|
        |                       | The Netherlands. These are the first     |
        | aap, noot, mies       | words a child used to learn to spell on  |
        |                       | a Dutch spelling board.                  |
        |-----------------------+------------------------------------------|
        | oogle, foogle,        | These two series (which may be continued |
        | boogle; zork, gork,   | with other initial consonents) are       |
        | bork                  | reportedly common in England, and said   |
        |                       | to go back to Lewis Carroll.             |
        +------------------------------------------------------------------+

        Of all these, only foo and bar are universal (and {baz} nearly so).
        The compounds {foobar} and foobaz also enjoy very wide currency.
        Some jargon terms are also used as metasyntactic names; {barf} and
        {mumble}, for example. See also {Commonwealth Hackish} for
        discussion of numerous metasyntactic variables found in Great
        Britain and the Commonwealth.

:MFTL: /MFTL/

        [abbreviation: `My Favorite Toy Language']

        1. adj. Describes a talk on a programming language design that is
        heavy on the syntax (with lots of BNF), sometimes even talks about
        semantics (e.g., type systems), but rarely, if ever, has any content
        (see {content-free}). More broadly applied to talks -- even when the
        topic is not a programming language -- in which the subject matter
        is gone into in unnecessary and meticulous detail at the sacrifice
        of any conceptual content. "Well, it was a typical MFTL talk".

        2. n. Describes a language about which the developers are passionate
        (often to the point of proselytic zeal) but no one else cares about.
        Applied to the language by those outside the originating group. "He
        cornered me about type resolution in his MFTL."

        The first great goal in the mind of the designer of an MFTL is
        usually to write a compiler for it, then bootstrap the design away
        from contamination by lesser languages by writing a compiler for it
        in itself. Thus, the standard put-down question at an MFTL talk is
        "Has it been used for anything besides its own compiler?" On the
        other hand, a (compiled) language that cannot even be used to write
        its own compiler is beneath contempt. (The qualification has become
        necessary because of the increasing popularity of interpreted
        languages like {Perl} and {Python}.) See {break-even point}. (On a
        related note, Doug McIlroy once proposed a test of the generality
        and utility of a language and the operating system under which it is
        compiled: "Is the output of a FORTRAN program acceptable as input to
        the FORTRAN compiler?" In other words, can you write programs that
        write programs? (See {toolsmith}.) Alarming numbers of (language,
        OS) pairs fail this test, particularly when the language is FORTRAN;
        aficionados are quick to point out that {Unix} (even using FORTRAN)
        passes it handily. That the test could ever be failed is only
        surprising to those who have had the good fortune to have worked
        only under modern systems which lack OS-supported and -imposed "file
        types".)

:mickey: n.

        The resolution unit of mouse movement. It has been suggested that
        the disney will become a benchmark unit for animation graphics
        performance.

:mickey mouse program: n.

        North American equivalent of a {noddy} (that is, trivial) program.
        Doesn't necessarily have the belittling connotations of mainstream
        slang "Oh, that's just mickey mouse stuff!"; sometimes trivial
        programs can be very useful.

:micro-: pref.

        1. Very small; this is the root of its use as a quantifier prefix.

        2. A quantifier prefix, calling for multiplication by 10^-6 (see
        {quantifiers}). Neither of these uses is peculiar to hackers, but
        hackers tend to fling them both around rather more freely than is
        countenanced in standard English. It is recorded, for example, that
        one CS professor used to characterize the standard length of his
        lectures as a microcentury -- that is, about 52.6 minutes (see also
        {attoparsec}, {nanoacre}, and especially {microfortnight}).

        3. Personal or human-scale -- that is, capable of being maintained
        or comprehended or manipulated by one human being. This sense is
        generalized from microcomputer, and is esp. used in contrast with
        macro- (the corresponding Greek prefix meaning `large').

        4. Local as opposed to global (or {macro-}). Thus a hacker might say
        that buying a smaller car to reduce pollution only solves a
        microproblem; the macroproblem of getting to work might be better
        solved by using mass transit, moving to within walking distance, or
        (best of all) telecommuting.

:MicroDroid: n.

        [Usenet] A Microsoft employee, esp. one who posts to various
        operating-system advocacy newsgroups. MicroDroids post follow-ups to
        any messages critical of Microsoft's operating systems, and often
        end up sounding like visiting fundamentalist missionaries. See also
        {astroturfing}; compare {microserf}.

:microfortnight: n.

        1/1000000 of the fundamental unit of time in the
        Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight system of measurement; 1.2096 sec. (A
        furlong is 1/8th of a mile; a firkin is 9 imperial gallons; the mass
        unit of the system is taken to be a firkin of water). The VMS
        operating system has a lot of tuning parameters that you can set
        with the SYSGEN utility, and one of these is TIMEPROMPTWAIT, the
        time the system will wait for an operator to set the correct date
        and time at boot if it realizes that the current value is bogus.
        This time is specified in microfortnights!

        Multiple uses of the millifortnight (about 20 minutes) and
        {nanofortnight} have also been reported.

:microLenat: /mi:`krohlen'@t/, n.

        The unit of {bogosity}. Abbreviated L or mL in ASCII Consensus is
        that this is the largest unit practical for everyday use. The
        microLenat, originally invented by David Jefferson, was promulgated
        as an attack against noted computer scientist Doug Lenat by a
        {tenured graduate student} at CMU. Doug had failed the student on an
        important exam because the student gave only "AI is bogus" as his
        answer to the questions. The slur is generally considered unmerited,
        but it has become a running gag nevertheless. Some of Doug's friends
        argue that of course a microLenat is bogus, since it is only one
        millionth of a Lenat. Others have suggested that the unit should be
        redesignated after the grad student, as the microReid.

:microReid: /mi:'krohreed/, n.

        See {microLenat}.

:microserf: /mi:kros@rf/

        [popularized, though not originated, by Douglas Coupland's book
        Microserfs] A programmer at {Microsoft}, especially a low-level
        coder with little chance of fame or fortune. Compare {MicroDroid}.

:Microsloth Windows: /mi:'krohsloth` windohz/, n.

        (Variants combine {Microshift, Macroshaft, Microsuck} with {Windoze,
        WinDOS}. Hackerism(s) for `Microsoft Windows'. A thirty-two bit
        extension and graphical shell to a sixteen-bit patch to an eight-bit
        operating system originally coded for a four-bit microprocessor
        which was written by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of
        competition. Also just called Windoze, with the implication that you
        can fall asleep waiting for it to do anything; the latter term is
        extremely common on Usenet. See {Black Screen of Death} and {Blue
        Screen of Death}; compare {X}, {sun-stools}.

:Microsoft:

        The new {Evil Empire} (the old one was {IBM}). The basic complaints
        are, as formerly with IBM, that (a) their system designs are
        horrible botches, (b) we can't get {source} to fix them, and (c)
        they throw their weight around a lot. See also {Halloween
        Documents}.

:micros~1:

        An abbreviation of the full name {Microsoft} resembling the rather
        {bogus} way Windows 9x's VFAT filesystem truncates long file names
        to fit in the MS-DOS 8+3 scheme (the real filename is stored
        elsewhere). If other files start with the same prefix, they'll be
        called micros~2 and so on, causing lots of problems with backups and
        other routine system-administration problems. During the US
        Antitrust trial against Microsoft the names Micros~1 and Micros~2
        were suggested for the two companies that would exist after a
        break-up.

:middle-endian: adj.

        Not {big-endian} or {little-endian}. Used of perverse byte orders
        such as 3-4-1-2 or 2-1-4-3, occasionally found in the packed-decimal
        formats of minicomputer manufacturers who shall remain nameless. See
        {NUXI problem}. Non-US hackers use this term to describe the
        American mm/dd/yy style of writing dates (Europeans write
        little-endian dd/mm/yy, and Japanese use big-endian yy/mm/dd for
        Western dates).

:middle-out implementation:

        See {bottom-up implementation}.

:milliLampson: /mil'@lamp`sn/, n.

        A unit of talking speed, abbreviated mL. Most people run about 200
        milliLampsons. The eponymous Butler Lampson (a CS theorist and
        systems implementor highly regarded among hackers) goes at 1000. A
        few people speak faster. This unit is sometimes used to compare the
        (sometimes widely disparate) rates at which people can generate
        ideas and actually emit them in speech. For example, noted computer
        architect C. Gordon Bell (designer of the {PDP-11}) is said, with
        some awe, to think at about 1200 mL but only talk at about 300; he
        is frequently reduced to fragments of sentences as his mouth tries
        to keep up with his speeding brain.

:minor detail:

        Often used in an ironic sense about brokenness or problems that
        while apparently major, are in principle solvable. "It works -- the
        fact that it crashes the system right after is a minor detail."
        Compare {SMOP}.

:MIPS: /mips/, n.

        [abbreviation]

        1. A measure of computing speed; formally, `Million Instructions Per
        Second' (that's 10^6 per second, not 2^20!); often rendered by
        hackers as `Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed' or in other
        unflattering ways, such as `Meaningless Information Provided by
        Salesmen'. This joke expresses an attitude nearly universal among
        hackers about the value of most {benchmark} claims, said attitude
        being one of the great cultural divides between hackers and
        {marketroid}s (see also {BogoMIPS}). The singular is sometimes `1
        MIP' even though this is clearly etymologically wrong. See also
        {KIPS} and {GIPS}.

        2. Computers, especially large computers, considered abstractly as
        sources of {computron}s. "This is just a workstation; the heavy MIPS
        are hidden in the basement."

        3. The corporate name of a particular RISC-chip company, later
        acquired by SGI.

        4. Acronym for `Meaningless Information per Second' (a joke, prob.:
        from sense 1).

:misbug: /misbuhg/, n.

        [MIT; rare (like its referent)] An unintended property of a program
        that turns out to be useful; something that should have been a {bug}
        but turns out to be a {feature}. Compare {green lightning}. See
        {miswart}.

:misfeature: /misfee'chr/, /misfee`chr/, n.

        [common] A feature that eventually causes lossage, possibly because
        it is not adequate for a new situation that has evolved. Since it
        results from a deliberate and properly implemented feature, a
        misfeature is not a bug. Nor is it a simple unforeseen side effect;
        the term implies that the feature in question was carefully planned,
        but its long-term consequences were not accurately or adequately
        predicted (which is quite different from not having thought ahead at
        all). A misfeature can be a particularly stubborn problem to
        resolve, because fixing it usually involves a substantial
        philosophical change to the structure of the system involved.

        Many misfeatures (especially in user-interface design) arise because
        the designers/implementors mistake their personal tastes for laws of
        nature. Often a former feature becomes a misfeature because
        trade-offs were made whose parameters subsequently change (possibly
        only in the judgment of the implementors). "Well, yeah, it is kind
        of a misfeature that file names are limited to six characters, but
        the original implementors wanted to save directory space and we're
        stuck with it for now."

:missile address: n.

        See {ICBM address}.

:MiSTing:

        [blogosphere] A variant of {fisking} patterned on the protocol of
        Mystery Science Theater 3000, In a MiSTing, the satire is spoken
        through characters purporting to be the MST3K robots or other
        suitably bizarre characters, such as the Roman emperors Augustus and
        Caligula.

:miswart: /miswort/, n.

        [from {wart} by analogy with {misbug}] A {feature} that
        superficially appears to be a {wart} but has been determined to be
        the {Right Thing}. For example, in some versions of the {EMACS} text
        editor, the `transpose characters' command exchanges the character
        under the cursor with the one before it on the screen, except when
        the cursor is at the end of a line, in which case the two characters
        before the cursor are exchanged. While this behavior is perhaps
        surprising, and certainly inconsistent, it has been found through
        extensive experimentation to be what most users want. This feature
        is a miswart.

:MMF: //

        [Usenet; common] Abbreviation: "Make Money Fast". Refers to any kind
        of scheme which promises participants large profits with little or
        no risk or effort. Typically, it is a some kind of multi-level
        marketing operation which involves recruiting more members, or an
        illegal pyramid scam. The term is also used to refer to any kind of
        spam which promotes this. For more information, see the Make Money
        Fast Myth Page.

:mobo: /moh'bo/

        Written and (rarely) spoken contraction of "motherboard"

:moby: /moh'bee/

        [MIT: seems to have been in use among model railroad fans years ago.
        Derived from Melville's Moby Dick (some say from `Moby Pickle'). Now
        common.]

        1. adj. Large, immense, complex, impressive. "A Saturn V rocket is a
        truly moby frob." "Some MIT undergrads pulled off a moby hack at the
        Harvard-Yale game." (See Appendix A for discussion.)

        2. n. obs. The maximum address space of a machine (see below). For a
        680[234]0 or {VAX} or most modern 32-bit architectures, it is
        4,294,967,296 8-bit bytes (4 gigabytes).

        3. A title of address (never of third-person reference), usually
        used to show admiration, respect, and/or friendliness to a competent
        hacker. "Greetings, moby Dave. How's that address-book thing for the
        Mac going?"

        4. adj. In backgammon, doubles on the dice, as in moby sixes, moby
        ones, etc. Compare this with {bignum} (sense 3): double sixes are
        both bignums and moby sixes, but moby ones are not bignums (the use
        of moby to describe double ones is sarcastic). Standard emphatic
        forms: Moby foo, moby win, moby loss. Foby moo: a spoonerism due to
        Richard Greenblatt.

        5. The largest available unit of something which is available in
        discrete increments. Thus, ordering a "moby Coke" at the local
        fast-food joint is not just a request for a large Coke, it's an
        explicit request for the largest size they sell.

        This term entered hackerdom with the Fabritek 256K memory added to
        the MIT AI PDP-6 machine, which was considered unimaginably huge
        when it was installed in the 1960s (at a time when a more typical
        memory size for a timesharing system was 72 kilobytes). Thus, a moby
        is classically 256K 36-bit words, the size of a PDP-6 or PDP-10
        moby. Back when address registers were narrow the term was more
        generally useful, because when a computer had virtual memory
        mapping, it might actually have more physical memory attached to it
        than any one program could access directly. One could then say "This
        computer has 6 mobies" meaning that the ratio of physical memory to
        address space is 6, without having to say specifically how much
        memory there actually is. That in turn implied that the computer
        could timeshare six `full-sized' programs without having to swap
        programs between memory and disk.

        Nowadays the low cost of processor logic means that address spaces
        are usually larger than the most physical memory you can cram onto a
        machine, so most systems have much less than one theoretical
        `native' moby of {core}. Also, more modern memory-management
        techniques (esp. paging) make the `moby count' less significant.
        However, there is one series of widely-used chips for which the term
        could stand to be revived -- the Intel 8088 and 80286 with their
        incredibly {brain-damaged} segmented-memory designs. On these, a
        moby would be the 1-megabyte address span of a segment/offset pair
        (by coincidence, a PDP-10 moby was exactly 1 megabyte of 9-bit
        bytes).

:mockingbird: n.

        Software that intercepts communications (especially login
        transactions) between users and hosts and provides system-like
        responses to the users while saving their responses (especially
        account IDs and passwords). A special case of {Trojan horse}.

:mod: vt.,n.

        [very common]

        1. Short for `modify' or `modification'. Very commonly used -- in
        fact the full terms are considered markers that one is being formal.
        The plural `mods' is used esp. with reference to bug fixes or minor
        design changes in hardware or software, most esp. with respect to
        {patch} sets or a {diff}. See also {case mod}.

        2. Short for {modulo} but used only for its techspeak sense.

:mode: n.

        [common] A general state, usually used with an adjective describing
        the state. Use of the word `mode' rather than `state' implies that
        the state is extended over time, and probably also that some
        activity characteristic of that state is being carried out. "No time
        to hack; I'm in thesis mode." In its jargon sense, `mode' is most
        often attributed to people, though it is sometimes applied to
        programs and inanimate objects. In particular, see {hack mode}, {day
        mode}, {night mode}, {demo mode}, {fireworks mode}, and {yoyo mode};
        also {talk mode}.

        One also often hears the verbs enable and disable used in connection
        with jargon modes. Thus, for example, a sillier way of saying "I'm
        going to crash" is "I'm going to enable crash mode now". One might
        also hear a request to "disable flame mode, please".

        In a usage much closer to techspeak, a mode is a special state that
        certain user interfaces must pass into in order to perform certain
        functions. For example, in order to insert characters into a
        document in the Unix editor vi, one must type the "i" key, which
        invokes the "Insert" command. The effect of this command is to put
        vi into "insert mode", in which typing the "i" key has a quite
        different effect (to wit, it inserts an "i" into the document). One
        must then hit another special key, "ESC", in order to leave "insert
        mode". Nowadays, modeful interfaces are generally considered
        {losing} but survive in quite a few widely used tools built in less
        enlightened times.

:mode bit: n.

        [common] A {flag}, usually in hardware, that selects between two
        (usually quite different) modes of operation. The connotations are
        different from {flag} bit in that mode bits are mainly written
        during a boot or set-up phase, are seldom explicitly read, and
        seldom change over the lifetime of an ordinary program. The classic
        example was the EBCDIC-vs.-ASCII bit (#12) of the Program Status
        Word of the IBM 360.

:modulo: /mod'yuloh/, prep.

        Except for. An overgeneralization of mathematical terminology; one
        can consider saying that 4 equals 22 except for the 9s (4 = 22 mod
        9). "Well, LISP seems to work okay now, modulo that {GC} bug." "I
        feel fine today modulo a slight headache."

:mojibake: n., /mo'jeebake/

        Japanese for "ghost characters", the garbage that comes out when one
        tries to display international character sets through software not
        configured for them. There is a page on the topic at
        http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/mojibake/.

:molly-guard: /mol'eegard/, n.

        [University of Illinois] A shield to prevent tripping of some {Big
        Red Switch} by clumsy or ignorant hands. Originally used of the
        plexiglass covers improvised for the BRS on an IBM 4341 after a
        programmer's toddler daughter (named Molly) frobbed it twice in one
        day. Later generalized to covers over stop/reset switches on disk
        drives and networking equipment. In hardware catalogues, you'll see
        the much less interesting description "guarded button".

:Mongolian Hordes technique: n.

        [poss. from the Sixties counterculture expression Mongolian
        clusterfuck for a public orgy] Development by {gang bang}. Implies
        that large numbers of inexperienced programmers are being put on a
        job better performed by a few skilled ones (but see {bazaar}). Also
        called Chinese Army technique; see also {Brooks's Law}.

:monkey up: vt.

        To hack together hardware for a particular task, especially a
        one-shot job. Connotes an extremely {crufty} and consciously
        temporary solution. Compare {hack up}, {kluge up}, {cruft together}.

:monkey, scratch: n.

        See {scratch monkey}.

:monstrosity:

        1. n. A ridiculously {elephantine} program or system, esp. one that
        is buggy or only marginally functional.

        2. adj. The quality of being monstrous (see the section called
        "Overgeneralization" in the discussion of jargonification). See also
        {baroque}.

:monty: /mon'tee/, n.

        1. [US Geological Survey] A program with a ludicrously complex user
        interface written to perform extremely trivial tasks. An example
        would be a menu-driven, button clicking, pulldown, pop-up windows
        program for listing directories. The original monty was an infamous
        weather-reporting program, Monty the Amazing Weather Man, written at
        the USGS. Monty had a widget-packed X-window interface with over 200
        buttons; and all monty actually did was files off the network.

        2. [Great Britain; commonly capitalized as Monty or as the Full
        Monty] 16 megabytes of memory, when fitted to an IBM-PC or
        compatible. A standard PC-compatible using the AT- or ISA-bus with a
        normal BIOS cannot access more than 16 megabytes of RAM. Generally
        used of a PC, Unix workstation, etc. to mean fully populated with
        memory, disk-space or some other desirable resource. See the World
        Wide Words article "The Full Monty" for discussion of the rather
        complex etymology that may lie behind this phrase. Compare American
        {moby}.

:Moof: /moof/

        [Macintosh users]

        1. n. The call of a semi-legendary creature, properly called the
        {dogcow}. (Some previous versions of this entry claimed,
        incorrectly, that Moof was the name of the creature.)

        2. adj. Used to flag software that's a hack, something untested and
        on the edge. On one Apple CD-ROM, certain folders such as "Tools &
        Apps (Moof!)" and "Development Platforms (Moof!)", are so marked to
        indicate that they contain software not fully tested or sanctioned
        by the powers that be. When you open these folders you cross the
        boundary into hackerland.

        3. v. On the Microsoft Network, the term `moof' has gained
        popularity as a verb meaning `to be suddenly disconnected by the
        system'. One might say "I got moofed".

:Moore's Law: /morz law/, prov.

        Any one of several similar folk theorems that fit computing capacity
        or cost to a 2^t exponential curve, with doubling time close to a
        year. The most common fits component density to such a curve
        (previous versions of this entry gave that form). Another variant
        asserts that the dollar cost of constant computing power decreases
        on the same curve. The original Moore's Law, first uttered in 1965
        by semiconductor engineer Gordon Moore (who co-founded Intel four
        years later), spoke of the number of components on the lowest-cost
        silicon integrated circuits -- but Moore's own formulation varied
        somewhat over the years, and reconstructing the meaning of the
        terminology he used in the original turns out to be fraught with
        difficulties. Further variants were spawned by Intel's PR department
        and various journalists.

        It has been shown that none of the variants of Moore's Law actually
        fit the data very well (the price curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
        false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
        in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
        claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the
        myth.

        Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
        MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
        Many of these      curves within DRAM generations
        perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly
        invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
        computing technology. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and
        {Gates's Law}.

:moria: /mor'ee@/, n.

        Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD
        Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide
        range of machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's
        Mines of Moria; compare {elder days}, {elvish}. The game is
        extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for
        hacking. See also {nethack}, {rogue}, {Angband}.

:MOTAS: /mohtahz/, n.

        [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] A
        potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.

:MOTOS: /mohtohs/, n.

        [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The
        Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See
        {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which has
        largely displaced it.

:MOTSS: /mots/, /MOTSS/, n.

        [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex,
        esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues
        newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS},
        which derive from it. See also {SO}.

:mouse ahead: vi.

        Point-and-click analog of type ahead. To manipulate a computer's
        pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not
        necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer
        program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the
        program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it
        can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the
        users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.

:mouse belt: n.

        See {rat belt}.

:mouse droppings: n.

        [MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when
        the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the
        screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left
        droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs
        that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's
        current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse
        drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.

:mouse elbow: n.

        A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of
        a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, mouse shoulder; GLS reports that he
        used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.

:mouse pusher:

        [common] A person that prefers a mouse over a keyboard; originally
        used for Macintosh fans. The derogatory implication is that the
        person has nothing but the most superficial knowledge of the
        software he/she is employing, and is incapable of using or
        appreciating the full glory of the command line.

:mouso: /mow'soh/, n.

        [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an
        inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare
        {thinko}, {braino}.

:MS-DOS: /MSdos/, n.

        [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
        crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
        Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
        Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
        Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM
        on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
        vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
        redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
        subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
        versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never
        agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch
        or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now
        the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS,
        which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated
        operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was
        attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
        further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does
        (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
        simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like
        "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a
        dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation
        among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}.

:mu: /moo/

        The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped
        beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have
        never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies
        that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse
        because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.
        According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct
        answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your
        question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
        assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies
        in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.
        The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is
        used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also
        mean "have not" (as in "I have not done it"), or "lack of", which
        may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers
        of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use,
        which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer
        in the following well-known Rinzai Zen {koan}:

          A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu
          retorted, "Mu!"

        See also {has the X nature}, Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's
        Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pointer in the
        Bibliography in Appendix C.

:MUD: /muhd/, n.

        [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]

        1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
        Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
        multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
        traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
        for characters to build more structure onto the database that
        represents the existing world.

        2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
        verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.

        Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
        form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
        University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
        game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
        BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
        earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked
        to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
        "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is
  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