EOL/E-O-L/ n.
[End Of Line] Syn. fornewline, derived perhaps from the original CDC6600 Pascal. Now rare, but widely recognized and occasionally used for brevity. Used in the example entry underBNF. See alsoEOF.
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EOU/E-O-U/ n.
The mnemonic of a mythical ASCII control character (End Of User) that would make an ASR-33 Teletype explode on receipt. This construction parodies the numerous obscure delimiter and control characters left in ASCII from the days when it was associated more with wire-service teletypes than computers (e.g., FS, GS, RS, US, EM, SUB, ETX, and esp. EOT). It is worth remembering that ASR-33s were big, noisy mechanical beasts with a lot of clattering parts; the notion that one might explode was nowhere near as ridiculous as it might seem to someone sitting in front of atubeor flatscreen today.
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epochn.
[Unix: prob. from astronomical timekeeping] The time and date corresponding to 0 in an operating system's clock and timestamp values. Under most Unix versions the epoch is 00:00:00 GMT, January 1, 1970; under VMS, it's 00:00:00 of November 17, 1858 (base date of the U.S. Naval Observatory's ephemerides); on a Macintosh, it's the midnight beginning January 1 1904. System time is measured in seconds orticks past the epoch. Weird problems may ensue when the clock wraps around (seewrap around), which is not necessarily a rare event; on systems counting 10 ticks per second, a signed 32-bit count of ticks is good only for 6.8 years. The 1-tick-per-second clock of Unix is good only until January 18, 2038, assuming at least some software continues to consider it signed and that word lengths don't increase by then. See alsowall time. Microsoft Windows, on the other hand, has an epoch problem every 49.7 days - but this is seldom noticed as Windows is almost incapable of staying up continuously for that long.
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epsilon
[seedelta] 1. n. A small quantity of anything. "The cost is epsilon." 2. adj. Very small, negligible; less thanmarginal. "We can get this feature for epsilon cost." 3. `within epsilon of': close enough to be indistinguishable for all practical purposes, even closer than being `within delta of'. "That's not what I asked for, but it's within epsilon of what I wanted." Alternatively, it may mean not close enough, but very little is required to get it there: "My program is within epsilon of working."
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epsilon squaredn.
A quantity even smaller thanepsilon, as small in comparison to epsilon as epsilon is to something normal; completely negligible. If you buy a supercomputer for a million dollars, the cost of the thousand-dollar terminal to go with it isepsilon, and the cost of the ten-dollar cable to connect them is epsilon squared. Comparelost in the underflow,lost in the noise.
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eran.
Syn.epoch. Webster's Unabridged makes these words almost synonymous, but `era' more often connotes a span of time rather than a point in time, whereas the reverse is true forepoch. Theepochusage is recommended.
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Eric Conspiracy
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Eric Conspiracyn.
A shadowy group of mustachioed hackers named Eric first pinpointed as a sinister conspiracy by an infamoustalk.bizarreposting ca. 1987; this was doubtless influenced by the numerous `Eric' jokes in the Monty Python oeuvre. There do indeed seem to be considerably more mustachioed Erics in hackerdom than the frequency of these three traits can account for unless they are correlated in some arcane way. Well-known examples include Eric Allman (he of the `Allman style' described underindent style) and Erik Fair (co-author of NNTP); your editor has heard from more than sixty others by email, and the organization line `Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories' now emanates regularly from more than one site. See the Eric Conspiracy Web Page athttp://www.ccil.org/~esr/ecsl/for full details.
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Eris/e'ris/ n.
The Greek goddess of Chaos, Discord, Confusion, and Things You Know Not Of; her name was latinized to Discordia and she was worshiped by that name in Rome. Not a very friendly deity in the Classical original, she was reinvented as a more benign personification of creative anarchy starting in 1959 by the adherents ofDiscordianismand has since been a semi-serious subject of veneration in several `fringe' cultures, including hackerdom. SeeDiscordianism,Church of the SubGenius.
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erotics/ee-ro'tiks/ n.
[Helsinki University of Technology, Finland] n. English-language university slang for electronics. Often used by hackers in Helsinki, maybe because good electronics excites them and makes them warm.
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error 33[XEROX PARC] n.
1. Predicating one research effort upon the success of another. 2. Allowing your own research effort to be placed on the critical path of some other project (be it a research effort or not).
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eurodemo/yoor'o-dem`-o/
ademo, sense 4
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eviladj.
As used by hackers, implies that some system, program, person, or institution is sufficiently maldesigned as to be not worth the bother of dealing with. Unlike the adjectives in thecretinous/losing/brain-damagedseries, `evil' does not imply incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of goals or design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's. This usage is more an esthetic and engineering judgment than a moral one in the mainstream sense. "We thought about adding aBlue Glueinterface but decided it was too evil to deal with." "TECOis neat, but it can be pretty evil if you're prone to typos." Often pronounced with the first syllable lengthened, as /eeee'vil/. Compareevil and rude.
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evil and rudeadj.
Bothevilandrude, but with the additional connotation that the rudeness was due to malice rather than incompetence. Thus, for example: Microsoft's Windows NT isevilbecause it's a competent implementation of a bad design; it'srudebecause it's gratuitously incompatible with Unix in places where compatibility would have been as easy and effective to do; but it'sevil and rudebecause the incompatibilities are apparently there not to fix design bugs in Unix but rather to lock hapless customers and developers into the Microsoft way. Hackishevil and rudeis close to the mainstream sense of `evil'.
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Evil Empiren.
[from Ronald Reagan's famous characterization of the communist Soviet Union] FormerlyIBM, nowMicrosoft. Functionally, the company most hackers love to hate at any given time. Hackers like to see themselves as romantic rebels against the Evil Empire, and frequently adopt this role to the point of ascribing rather more power and malice to the Empire than it actually has. See alsoBorgand search for Evil Empire pages on the Web.
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exa-/ek's*/ pref.
[SI] Seequantifiers.
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examining the entrailsn.
The process ofgrovelling through acore dumpor hex image in an attempt to discover the bug that brought a program or system down. The reference is to divination from the entrails of a sacrified animal. Comparerunes,incantation,black art,desk check.
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EXCH/eks'ch*/ or /eksch/ vt.
To exchange two things, each for the other; to swap places. If you point to two people sitting down and say "Exch!", you are asking them to trade places. EXCH, meaning EXCHange, was originally the name of a PDP-10 instruction that exchanged the contents of a register and a memory location. Many newer hackers are probably thinking instead of thePostScriptexchange operator (which is usually written in lowercase).
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excl/eks'kl/ n.
Abbreviation for `exclamation point'. Seebang,shriek,ASCII.
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EXE/eks'ee/ or /eek'see/ or /E-X-E/ n.
An executable binary file. Some operating systems (notably MS-DOS, VMS, and TWENEX) use the extension .EXE to mark such files. This usage is also occasionally found among Unix programmers even though Unix executables don't have any required suffix.
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exec/eg-zek'/ or /eks'ek/ vt., n.
1. [Unix: from `execute'] Synonym forchain, derives from theexec(2)call. 2. [from `executive'] obs. The command interpreter for anOS(seeshell); term esp. used around mainframes, and prob. derived from UNIVAC's archaic EXEC 2 and EXEC 8 operating systems. 3. At IBM and VM/CMS shops, the equivalent of a shell command file (among VM/CMS users).
The mainstream `exec' as an abbreviation for (human) executive isnotused. To a hacker, an `exec' is a always a program, never a person.
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exercise, left as anadj.
[from technical books] Used to complete a proof when one doesn't mind ahandwave, or to avoid one entirely. The complete phrase is: "The proof [or `the rest'] is left as an exercise for the reader." This commenthasoccasionally been attached to unsolved research problems by authors possessed of either an evil sense of humor or a vast faith in the capabilities of their audiences.
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Exon/eks'on/ excl.
A generic obscenity that quickly entered wide use on the Internet and Usenet afterBlack Thursday. From the last name of Senator James Exon (Democrat-Nebraska), primary author of theCDA.
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Explodern.
Used within Microsoft to refer to the Windows Explorer, the interface component of Windows 95 and WinNT 4. Our spies report that most of the heavy guns at MS came from a Unix background and use command line utilities; even they are scornful of the over-gingerbreadedWIMP environments that they have been called upon to create.
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exploitn.
[originally cracker slang] 1. A vulnerability in software that can be used for breaking security or otherwise attacking an Internet host over the network. ThePing O' Deathis a famous exploit. 2. More grammatically, a program that exploits an exploit in sense 1,
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external memoryn.
A memo pad, palmtop computer, or written notes. "Hold on while I write that to external memory". The analogy is with store or DRAM versus nonvolatile disk storage on computers.
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eye candy/i:' kand`ee/ n.
[from mainstream slang "ear candy"] A display of some sort that's presented tolusers to keep them distracted while the program performs necessary background tasks. "Give 'em some eye candy while the back-endslurps thatBLOBinto core." Reported as mainstream usage among players of graphics-heavy computer games. We're also told this term is mainstream slang for soft pornography, but that sense does not appear to be live among hackers.
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eyeball searchn.,v.
To look for something in a mass of code or data with one's own native optical sensors, as opposed to using some sort of pattern matching software likegrepor any other automated search tool. Also called avgrep; comparevdiff,desk check.
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The Jargon Lexicon