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armor-plated
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asbestos
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ARMM
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armor-platedn.
Syn. forbulletproof.
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asbestos
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asbestos cork award
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armor-plated
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asbestosadj.
[common] Used as a modifier to anything intended to protect one fromflames; also in other highlyflame-suggestive usages. See, for example,asbestos longjohnsandasbestos cork award.
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asbestos cork award
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asbestos longjohns
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asbestos
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asbestos cork awardn.
Once, long ago at MIT, there was aflamerso consistently obnoxious that another hacker designed, had made, and distributed posters announcing that said flamer had been nominated for the `asbestos cork award'. (Any reader in doubt as to the intended application of the cork should consult the etymology underflame.) Since then, it is agreed that only a select few have risen to the heights of bombast required to earn this dubious dignity -- but there is no agreement onwhichfew.
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asbestos longjohns
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ASCII
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asbestos cork award
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asbestos longjohnsn.
Notional garments donned byUsenetposters just before emitting a remark they expect will elicitflamage. This is the most common of theasbestoscoinages. Also `asbestos underwear', `asbestos overcoat', etc.
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ASCII
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ASCII art
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asbestos longjohns
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ASCII/as'kee/ n.
[originally an acronym (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) but now merely conventional] The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers. The standard version uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier codes (including early drafts of of ASCII prior to June 1961) used fewer. This change allowed the inclusion of lowercase letters -- a majorwin-- but it did not provide for accented letters or any other letterforms not used in English (such as the German sharp-S or the ae-ligature which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian). It could be worse, though. It could be much worse. SeeEBCDICto understand how. A history of ASCII and its ancestors is at http://www.wps.com/texts/codes/index.html.
Computers are much pickier and less flexible about spelling than humans; thus, hackers need to be very precise when talking about characters, and have developed a considerable amount of verbal shorthand for them. Every character has one or more names -- some formal, some concise, some silly. Common jargon names for ASCII characters are collected here. See also individual entries forbang,excl,open,ques,semi,shriek,splat,twiddle, andYu-Shiang Whole Fish.
This list derives from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII pronunciation guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII order; character pairs are sorted in by first member. For each character, common names are given in rough order of popularity, followed by names that are reported but rarely seen; official ANSI/CCITT names are surrounded by brokets: <>. Square brackets mark the particularly silly names introduced byINTERCAL. The abbreviations "l/r" and "o/c" stand for left/right and "open/close" respectively. Ordinary parentheticals provide some usage information.
The pronunciation of#as `pound' is common in the U.S. but a bad idea;Commonwealth Hackishhas its own, rather more apposite use of `pound sign' (confusingly, on British keyboards the pound graphic happens to replace#; thus Britishers sometimes call#on a U.S.-ASCII keyboard `pound', compounding the American error). The U.S. usage derives from an old-fashioned commercial practice of using a#suffix to tag pound weights on bills of lading. The character is usually pronounced `hash' outside the U.S. There are more culture wars over the correct pronunciation of this character than any other, which has led to theha ha only serioussuggestion that it be pronounced `shibboleth' (see Judges 12:6 in an Old Testament or Tanakh).
The `uparrow' name for circumflex and `leftarrow' name for underline are historical relics from archaic ASCII (the 1963 version), which had these graphics in those character positions rather than the modern punctuation characters.
The `swung dash' or `approximation' sign is not quite the same as tilde in typeset material but the ASCII tilde serves for both (compareangle brackets).
Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The#,$,>, and&characters, for example, are all pronounced "hex" in different communities because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in particular,#in many assembler-programming cultures,$in the 6502 world,>at Texas Instruments, and&on the BBC Micro, Sinclair, and some Z80 machines). See alsosplat.
The inability of ASCII text to correctly represent any of the world's other major languages makes the designers' choice of 7 bits look more and more like a seriousmisfeatureas the use of international networks continues to increase (seesoftware rot). Hardware and software from the U.S. still tends to embody the assumption that ASCII is the universal character set and that characters have 7 bits; this is a major irritant to people who want to use a character set suited to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem by proliferating `national' character sets produce an evolutionary pressure to use asmallersubset common to all those in use.
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ASCII art
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ASCIIbetical order
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ASCII
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ASCII artn.
The fine art of drawing diagrams using the ASCII character set (mainly|,-,/,\, and+). Also known as `character graphics' or `ASCII graphics'; see alsoboxology. Here is a serious example:
o----)||(--+--|<----+ +---------o + D OL )||( | | | C UA I )||( +-->|-+ | +-\/\/-+--o - TC N )||( | | | | PE )||( +-->|-+--)---+--|(--+-o U)||( | | | GND To----)||(--+--|<----+----------+A power supply consisting of a full wave rectifier circuitfeeding a capacitor input filter circuit
And here are some very silly examples:
|\/\/\/| ____/| ___ |\_/| ___| | \ o.O| ACK! / \_ |` '| _/ \| | =(_)= THPHTH! / \/ \/ \| (o)(o) U / \C _) (__) \/\/\/\ _____ /\/\/\/| ,___| (oo) \/ \/| / \/-------\ U (__)/____\ || | \ /---V `v'- oo )/ \ ||---W|| * * |--| || |`. |_/\//-o-\\____---=======---____====___\ /.. ..\ /___==== Klingons rule OK!// ---\__O__/--- \\\_\ /_/
There is an important subgenre of ASCII art that puns on the standard character names in the fashion of a rebus.
+--------------------------------------------------------+| ^^^^^^^^^^^^ || ^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^ || ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ || ^^^^^^^ B ^^^^^^^^^ || ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |+--------------------------------------------------------+" A Bee in the Carrot Patch "
Within humorous ASCII art, there is for some reason an entire flourishing subgenre of pictures of silly cows. Four of these are reproduced in the examples above, here are three more:
(__) (__) (__)(\/) ($$) (**)/-------\/ /-------\/ /-------\// | 666 || / |=====|| / | ||* ||----|| * ||----|| * ||----||~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~Satanic cow This cow is a Yuppie Cow in love
Finally, here's a magnificent example of ASCII art depicting an Edwardian train station in Dunedin, New Zealand:
.-./___\|___||]_[|/ I \JL/ | \JL.-. i () | () i .-.|_| .^. /_\ LJ=======LJ /_\ .^. |_|._/___\._./___\_._._._._.L_J_/.-. .-.\_L_J._._._._._/___\._./___\._._._., |-,-| ., L_J |_| [I] |_| L_J ., |-,-| ., .,JL |-O-| JL L_J%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%L_J JL |-O-| JL JLIIIIII_HH_'-'-'_HH_IIIIII|_|=======H=======|_|IIIIII_HH_'-'-'_HH_IIIIII_HH_-------[]-------[]-------[_]----\.=I=./----[_]-------[]-------[]--------[]-_/\_ ||\\_I_//|| _/\_ [_] []_/_L_J_\_[] [_] _/\_ ||\\_I_//|| _/\_ ||\|__| ||=/_|_\=|| |__|_|_| _L_L_J_J_ |_|_|__| ||=/_|_\=|| |__| ||-|__| |||__|__||| |__[___]__--__===__--__[___]__| |||__|__||| |__| |||IIIIIII[_]IIIII[_]IIIIIL___J__II__|_|__II__L___JIIIII[_]IIIII[_]IIIIIIII[_]\_I_/ [_]\_I_/[_] \_I_[_]\II/[]\_\I/_/[]\II/[_]\_I_/ [_]\_I_/[_] \_I_/ [_]./ \.L_J/ \L_J./ L_JI I[]/ \[]I IL_J \.L_J/ \L_J./ \.L_J| |L_J| |L_J| L_J| |[]| |[]| |L_J |L_J| |L_J| |L_J|_____JL_JL___JL_JL____|-|| |[]| |[]| ||-|_____JL_JL___JL_JL_____JL_J
There is a newsgroup,alt.ascii-art, devoted to this genre; however, see alsowarlording.
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ASCIIbetical order
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astroturfing
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ASCII art
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ASCIIbetical order/as'kee-be'-t*-kl or'dr/ adj.,n.
Used to indicate that data is sorted in ASCII collated order rather than alphabetical order. This lexicon is sorted in something close to ASCIIbetical order, but with case ignored and entries beginning with non-alphabetic characters moved to the end. "At my video store, they used their computer to sort the videos into ASCIIbetical order, so I couldn't find `"Crocodile" Dundee' until I thought to look before `2001' and `48 HRS.'!"
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astroturfing
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atomic
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ASCIIbetical order
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astroturfingn.
The use of paid shills to create the impression of a popular movement, through means like letters to newspapers from soi-disant `concerned citizens', paid opinion pieces, and the formation of grass-roots lobbying groups that are actually funded by a PR group (astroturf is fake grass; hence the term). This term became common among hackers after it came to light in early 1998 that Microsoft had attempted to use such tactics to forestall the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust action against the company.
This backfired horribly, angering a number of state attorneys-general enough to induce them to go public with plans to join the Federal suit. It also set anybody defending Microsoft on the net for the accusation "You're just astroturfing!".
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atomic
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attoparsec
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astroturfing
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atomicadj.
[from Gk. `atomos', indivisible] 1. Indivisible; cannot be split up. For example, an instruction may be said to do several things `atomically', i.e., all the things are done immediately, and there is no chance of the instruction being half-completed or of another being interspersed. Used esp. to convey that an operation cannot be screwed up by interrupts. "This routine locks the file and increments the file's semaphore atomically." 2. [primarily techspeak] Guaranteed to complete successfully or not at all, usu. refers to database transactions. If an error prevents a partially-performed transaction from proceeding to completion, it must be "backed out," as the database must not be left in an inconsistent state.
Computer usage, in either of the above senses, has none of the connotations that `atomic' has in mainstream English (i.e. of particles of matter, nuclear explosions etc.).
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attoparsec
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AUP
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atomic
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attoparsecn.
About an inch. `atto-' is the standard SI prefix for multiplication by 10^(-18). A parsec (parallax-second) is 3.26 light-years; an attoparsec is thus 3.26 * 10^(-18) light years, or about 3.1 cm (thus, 1 attoparsec/microfortnightequals about 1 inch/sec). This unit is reported to be in use (though probably not very seriously) among hackers in the U.K. Seemicro-.
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AUP
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autobogotiphobia
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attoparsec
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AUP/A-U-P/
Abbreviation, "Acceptable Use Policy". The policy of a given ISP which sets out what the ISP considers to be (un)acceptable uses of its Internet resources.
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autobogotiphobia
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automagically
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AUP
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autobogotiphobia/aw'toh-boh-got`*-foh'bee-*/
n. Seebogotify.
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automagically
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avatar
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autobogotiphobia
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automagically/aw-toh-maj'i-klee/ adv.
Automatically, but in a way that, for some reason (typically because it is too complicated, or too ugly, or perhaps even too trivial), the speaker doesn't feel like explaining to you. Seemagic. "The C-INTERCAL compiler generates C, then automagically invokescc(1)to produce an executable."
This term is quite old, going back at least to the mid-70s in jargon and probably much earlier. The word `automagic' occurred in advertising (for a shirt-ironing gadget) as far back as the late 1940s.
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avatar
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awk
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avatarn. Syn.
[in Hindu mythology, the incarnation of a god] 1. Among people working on virtual reality andcyberspaceinterfaces, anavataris an icon or representation of a user in a shared virtual reality. The term is sometimes used onMUDs. 2. [CMU, Tektronix]root,superuser. There are quite a few Unix machines on which the name of the superuser account is `avatar' rather than `root'. This quirk was originated by a CMU hacker who found the terms `root' and `superuser' unimaginative, and thought `avatar' might better impress people with the responsibility they were accepting.
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awk
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B5
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avatar
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awk/awk/
1. n. [Unix techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging text data developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (the name derives from their initials). It is characterized by C-like syntax, a declaration-free approach to variable typing and declarations, associative arrays, and field-oriented text processing. See alsoPerl. 2. n. Editing term for an expression awkward to manipulate through normalregexpfacilities (for example, one containing anewline). 3. vt. To process data usingawk(1).
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= B =
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The Jargon Lexicon