:chine nual: /sheen'yu-*l/ /n. obs./ [MIT] The LISP Machine Manual, so called because the title was wrapped around the cover so only those letters showed on the front.

: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./ 1. 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 '#define's." See {barf}, {gag}, {vi}. 2. [MIT] More generally, to fail at any endeavor, but with some flair or bravado; the popular definition is "to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory."

:chomp: /vi./ To {lose}; specifically, to chew on something of which more was bitten off than one can. Probably related to gnashing of teeth. 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.)

: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}.

:Cinderella Book: [CMU] /n./ "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}}.

: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}.

:Classic C: /klas'ik C/ [a play on 'Coke Classic'] /n./ 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."

:CLM: /C-L-M/ [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}.

: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}.

: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. 'PC clone:' a PC-BUS/ISA or EISA-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. 5. 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. 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}.

:clustergeeking: /kluh'st*r-gee'king/ /n./ [CMU] Spending more time at a computer cluster doing CS homework than most people spend breathing.

:COBOL: /koh'bol/ /n./ [COmmon Business-Oriented Language] (Synonymous with {evil}.) A weak, verbose, and flabby language used by {card walloper}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 fing'grz/ /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!"

: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. Compare {card walloper}; contrast {hacker}, {Real Programmer}.

: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', 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'bot-l/ /n./ Any very unusual character, particularly one you can't type because it 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 '{altmode}-altmode-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' 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 term may 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 wib'l/). The prefix {meta} may be pronounced /mee't*/; similarly, Greek letter beta is usually /bee't*/, zeta is usually /zee't*/, and so forth. 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}, 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!"). Finally, note that the American terms 'parens', 'brackets', and 'braces' for (), [], and {} are uncommon; Commonwealth hackish prefers 'brackets', 'square brackets', and 'curly brackets'. Also, the use of 'pling' for {bang} is common outside the United States.

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}, {plingnet}, {raster blaster}, {RTBM}, {seggie}, {spod}, {sun lounge}, {terminal junkie}, {tick-list features}, {weeble}, {weasel}, {YABA}, and notes or definitions under {Bad Thing}, {barf}, {bogus}, {bum}, {chase pointers}, {cosmic rays}, {crippleware}, {crunch}, {dodgy}, {gonk}, {hamster}, {hardwarily}, {mess-dos}, {nybble}, {proglet}, {root}, {SEX}, {tweak}, 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).

:compress: [Unix] /vt./ When used without a qualifier, generally refers to {crunch}ing of a file using a particular C implementation of compression by James A. Woods 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}. Though this term is common, 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.

:computer geek: /n./ 1. One who eats (computer) bugs for a living. One who fulfills all the dreariest negative stereotypes about hackers: an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater. Cannot be used by outsiders without implied insult to all hackers; compare black-on-black vs. white-on-black usage of 'nigger'. A computer geek may be either a fundamentally clueless individual or a proto-hacker in {larval stage}. Also called 'turbo nerd', 'turbo geek'. See also {propeller head}, {clustergeeking}, {geek out}, {wannabee}, {terminal junkie}, {spod}, {weenie}. 2. Some self-described computer geeks use this term in a positive sense and protest sense 1 (this seems to have been a post-1990 development). For one such argument, see http://samsara.circus.com/~omni/geek.html.

:computron: /kom'pyoo-tron'/ /n./ 1. 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. (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: [from SF fandom] /n./ A science-fiction convention. Not used of other sorts of conventions, such as professional meetings. This term, unlike many others of 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. See {Great Worm, the}.

: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. The KL-10 Massbus connector was actually *patented* by {DEC}, which reputedly refused to license the design and thus effectively locked third parties out of competition for the lucrative Massbus peripherals market. This policy is a source of never-ending frustration for the diehards who maintain older PDP-10 or VAX systems. Their CPUs work fine, but they are stuck with dying, obsolescent disk and tape drives with low capacity and high power requirements.

(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 hex wrench 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/ or /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./ 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). 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. 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}. See also {CTY}.

: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; originally stated as "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler".

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. One current example is the "{{PostScript}} Language Tutorial and Cookbook" by Adobe Systems, Inc (Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-10179-3), also known as the {Blue Book} which has recipes for things like wrapping text around arbitrary curves and making 3D fonts. 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). Compare {magic cookie}; see also {fortune cookie}.

: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 time-sharing 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'ee-brohk/ /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}.

:copyleft: /kop'ee-left/ /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.

:copywronged: /kop'ee-rongd/ /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./ 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}.

:core leak: /n./ Syn. {memory leak}.

:Core Wars: /n./ A game between 'assembler' programs in a simulated machine, where the objective is to kill your opponent's program by overwriting it. Popularized by A. K. Dewdney's column in "Scientific American" magazine, this was actually devised by Victor Vyssotsky, Robert Morris Sr., and Dennis Ritchie in the early 1960s (their original game was called 'Darwin' and ran on a PDP-1 at Bell Labs). See {core}.

:corge: /korj/ /n./ [originally, the name of a cat] Yet another {metasyntactic variable}, invented by Mike Gallaher and propagated by the {GOSMACS} documentation. See {grault}.

: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}.

: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:: /C-P-M/ /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. 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: /C-P-U 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). 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 (then, as now, 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 root: /v./ 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. 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.

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./ 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 only mediocre hackers.

: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."

: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}). Sun-3 monitors losing the flyback transformer and lightning strikes on VAX-11/780 backplanes are notable crash and burn generators. 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}.

:cray: /kray/ /n./ 1. (properly, capitalized) One of the line of supercomputers designed by Cray Research. 2. Any supercomputer at all. 3. The {canonical} {number-crunching} machine.

The term is actually the lowercased last name of Seymour Cray, a noted computer architect and co-founder of the company. Numerous vivid legends surround him, some true and some admittedly invented by Cray Research brass to shape their corporate culture and image.

:cray instability: /n./ 1. A shortcoming of a program or algorithm that manifests itself only when a large problem is being run on a powerful machine (see {cray}). Generally more subtle than bugs that can be detected in smaller problems running on a workstation or mini. 2. More specifically, a shortcoming of algorithms which are well behaved when run on gentle floating point hardware (such as IEEE-standard or DEC) but which break down badly when exposed to a Cray's unique 'rounding' rules.

:crayola: /kray-oh'l*/ /n./ A super-mini or -micro computer that provides some reasonable percentage of supercomputer performance for an unreasonably low price. Might also be a {killer micro}.

:crayola books: /n./ The {rainbow series} of National Computer Security Center (NCSC) computer security standards (see {Orange Book}). Usage: humorous and/or disparaging.

:crayon: /n./ 1. Someone who works on Cray supercomputers. More specifically, it implies a programmer, probably of the CDC ilk, probably male, and almost certainly wearing a tie (irrespective of gender). Systems types who have a Unix background tend not to be described as crayons. 2. A {computron} (sense 2) that participates only in {number-crunching}. 3. A unit of computational power equal to that of a single Cray-1. There is a standard joke about this usage that derives from an old Crayola crayon promotional gimmick: When you buy 64 crayons you get a free sharpener.

: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 fee'chr-izm/ /n./ 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. 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'-chr-i:'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/ or /kree'tn/ /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/ or /kreet'n-*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. 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 dyked 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/, sometimes /kru'l*f/ or /C-R-L-F/ /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}, {terpri}. 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, a Real Programmer} 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: [Usenet] /vi./ 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 only one part of the original posting.

: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/ [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*n-ship / /n./ [from {cruft}] The antithesis of craftsmanship.

:crufty: /kruhf'tee/ /adj./ [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.

:cruncha cruncha cruncha: /kruhn'ch* kruhn'ch* kruhn'ch*/ /interj./ An encouragement sometimes muttered to a machine bogged down in a serious {grovel}. Also describes a notional sound made by groveling hardware. See {wugga wugga}, {grind} (sense 3).

:cryppie: /krip'ee/ /n./ A cryptographer. One who hacks or implements cryptographic software or hardware.

:CTSS: /C-T-S-S/ /n./ Compatible Time-Sharing System. An early (1963) experiment in the design of interactive time-sharing 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.

:CTY: /sit'ee/ or /C-T-Y/ /n./ [MIT] The terminal physically associated with a computer's system {{console}}. The term is a contraction of 'Console {tty}', that is, 'Console TeleTYpe'. This {{ITS}}- and {{TOPS-10}}-associated term has become less common, as most Unix hackers simply refer to the CTY as 'the console'.

: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).

:cubing: /vi./ [parallel with 'tubing'] 1. Hacking on an IPSC (Intel Personal SuperComputer) hypercube. "Louella's gone cubing *again*!!" 2. Hacking Rubik's Cube or related puzzles, either physically or mathematically. 3. An indescribable form of self-torture (see sense 1 or 2).

: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] 1. (of a program) Well-written. 2. Functionally excellent. A program that performs well and interfaces well to users is cuspy. See {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.

:cybercrud: /si:'ber-kruhd/ /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 hex for PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail) or PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) digital signatures and certificates of authenticity. This stuff all services a purpose and good user interfaces should hide it, but all too often users are forced to wade through it.

:cyberpunk: /si:'ber-puhnk/ /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 na"ive 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:'br-spays'/ /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 {network, the}). 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. 3. Occasionally, the metaphoric location of the mind of a person in {hack mode}. Some hackers report experiencing strong eidetic 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 describes 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), {120 reset}; from the phrase 'cycle power'. "Cycle the machine again, that serial port's still hung."

:cycle crunch: /n./ A situation wherein the number of people trying to use a computer simultaneously has reached the point where no one can get enough cycles because they are spread too thin and the system has probably begun to {thrash}. This scenario is an inevitable result of Parkinson's Law applied to timesharing. Usually the only solution is to buy more computer. Happily, this has rapidly become easier since the mid-1980s, so much so that the very term 'cycle crunch' now has a faintly archaic flavor; most hackers now use workstations or personal computers as opposed to traditional timesharing systems.

:cycle drought: /n./ A scarcity of cycles. It may be due to a {cycle crunch}, but it could also occur because part of the computer is temporarily not working, leaving fewer cycles to go around. "The {high moby} is {down}, so we're running with only half the usual amount of memory. There will be a cycle drought until it's fixed."

:cycle of reincarnation: /n./ [coined in a paper by T. H. Myer and I.E. Sutherland "On the Design of Display Processors", Comm. ACM, Vol. 11, no. 6, June 1968)] Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again.

Several iterations of this cycle have been observed in graphics-processor design, and at least one or two in communications and floating-point processors. Also known as 'the Wheel of Life', 'the Wheel of Samsara', and other variations of the basic Hindu/Buddhist theological idea. See also {blitter}, {bit bang}.

:cycle server: /n./ A powerful machine that exists primarily for running large compute-, disk-, or memory-intensive jobs. 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}.

= D = =====

:D. C. Power Lab: /n./ The former site of {{SAIL}}. Hackers thought this was very funny because the obvious connection to electrical engineering was nonexistent — the lab was named for a Donald C. Power. Compare {Marginal Hacks}.

:daemon: /day'mn/ or /dee'mn/ /n./ [from the mythological meaning, later rationalized as the acronym '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}. Although the meaning and the pronunciation have drifted, we think this glossary reflects current (1996) 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) — the standard reference book on the internals of {BSD} Unix. So called because the cover has a picture depicting a little devil (a visual play on {daemon}) in sneakers, holding a pitchfork (referring to one of the characteristic features of Unix, the 'fork(2)' system call). Also known as the {Devil Book}.

: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 crossposted OS/2-versus-{Linux} debate was fed through {Dissociated Press}.

:dangling pointer: /n./ 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. Compare {dead link}.

: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?'" (But see below; this slur may be dated by the time you read this.) 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 is trying for more of the technical content and irreverent humor that marked its early days.

Datamation now has a WWW page at http://www.datamation.com worth visiting for its selection of computer humor, including "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" and the 'Bastard Operator From Hell' stories by Simon Travaglia (see {BOFH}).

:DAU: /dow/ [German FidoNet] /n./ German acronym for D"ummster Anzunehmender User (stupidest imaginable user). From the engineering-slang GAU for Gr"osster 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 acidents such as a core meltdown. See {cretin}, {fool}, {loser} and {weasel}.

:day mode: /n./ See {phase} (sense 1). Used of people only.

:dd: /dee-dee/ /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: /D-D-T/ /n./ 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. The DEC 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 (C14-H9-Cl5) 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 (the first transistorized computer) rejoiced in the name FLIT (FLexowriter Interrogation Tape).

:de-rezz: /dee-rez'/ [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 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, a Real Programmer}.

:dead link: /n./ [WWW] A World-Wide-Web URL that no longer points to the information it was written to reach. Usually this happens because the document has been moved or deleted. Lots of dead links make a WWW page frustrating and useless and are the #1 sign of poor page maintainance. Compare {dangling pointer}.

:DEADBEEF: /ded-beef/ /n./ The hexadecimal word-fill pattern for freshly allocated memory (decimal -21524111) 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}.

: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.

:Death Star: /n./ [from the movie "Star Wars"] 1. The AT&T corporate logo, which appears on computers sold by AT&T and bears an uncanny resemblance to the Death Star in the movie. This usage is particularly common among partisans of {BSD} Unix, who tend 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.

:DEC:: /dek/ /n./ Commonly used abbreviation for Digital Equipment Corporation, now deprecated by DEC itself in favor of "Digital". 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 heavy 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 is still regarded with a certain wry affection even among many hackers too young to have grown up on DEC machines. The contrast with {IBM} is instructive.

[1996 update: DEC has gradually been reclaiming some of its old reputation among techies in the last five years. The success of the Alpha, an innovatively-designed and very high-performance {killer micro}, has helped a lot. So has DEC's newfound receptiveness to Unix and open systems in general. —ESR]

:dec: /dek/ /v./ Verbal (and only rarely written) shorthand for decrement, i.e. 'decrease by one'. Especially used by assembly programmers, as many assembly languages have a 'dec' mnemonic. Antonym: {inc}.

: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.

:DEChead: /dek'hed/ /n./ 1. A {DEC} {field servoid}. Not flattering. 2. [from 'deadhead'] A Grateful Dead fan working at DEC.

: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: /D-E-D/ /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./ [from the traditional Czechoslovakian method of assassinating prime ministers, via SF fandom] 1. Proper karmic retribution for an incorrigible punster. "Oh, ghod, that was *awful*!" "Quick! Defenestrate him!" 2. 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. 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. [proposed] The requirement to support a command-line interface. "It has to run on a VT100." "Curses! I've been defenestrated!"

:defined as: /adj./ In the role of, usually in an organization-chart sense. "Pete is currently defined as bug prioritizer." Compare {logical}.

:dehose: /dee-hohz/ /vt./ To clear a {hosed} condition.

:delint: /dee-lint/ /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 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}, {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}), Linus Torvalds (inventor of Linux), and most recently James Gosling (inventor of Java). 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}.

: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.

: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}).

:demon: /n./ 1. [MIT] 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. 2. [outside MIT] Often used equivalently to {daemon} — especially in the {{Unix}} world, where the latter spelling and pronunciation is considered mildly archaic.

Demons in sense 1 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.