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furrfu
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fuzzball
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funny money
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= F =
furrfuexcl.
[Usenet; written, only rarely spoken] Written-only equivalent of "Sheesh!"; it is, in fact, "sheesh" modified byrot13. Evolved in mid-1992 as a response to notably silly postings repeating urban myths on the Usenet newsgroupalt.folklore.urban, after some posters complained that "Sheesh!" as a response tonewbies was being overused. See alsoFOAF.
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fuzzball
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G
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furrfu
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= F =
fuzzballn.
[TCP/IP hackers] A DEC LSI-11 running a particular suite of homebrewed software written by Dave Mills and assorted co-conspirators, used in the early 1980s for Internet protocol testbedding and experimentation. These were used as NSFnet backbone sites in its early 56kb-line days; a few were still active on the Internet as late as mid-1993, doing odd jobs such as network time service.
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= G =
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= H =
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The Jargon Lexicon
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G
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g-file
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fuzzball
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= G =
Gpref.,suff.
[SI] Seequantifiers.
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g-file
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gabriel
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G
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g-filen.
[Commodore BBS culture] Any file that is written with the intention of being read by a human rather than a machine, such as the Jargon File, documentation, humor files, hacker lore, and technical materials.
This term survives from the nearly forgotten Commodore 64 underground and BBS community. In the early 80s, C-Net had emerged as the most popular C64 BBS software for systems which encouraged messaging (as opposed to file transfer). There were three main options for files: Program files (p-files), which served the same function as `doors' in today's systems, UD files (the user upload/download section), and g-files. Anything that was meant to be read was included in g-files.
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gabriel
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gag
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g-file
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= G =
gabriel/gay'bree-*l/ n.
[for Dick Gabriel, SAIL LISP hacker and volleyball fanatic] An unnecessary (in the opinion of the opponent) stalling tactic, e.g., tying one's shoelaces or combing one's hair repeatedly, asking the time, etc. Also used to refer to the perpetrator of such tactics. Also, `pulling a Gabriel', `Gabriel mode'.
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gag
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gang bang
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gabriel
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= G =
gagvi.
Equivalent tochoke, but connotes more disgust. "Hey, this is FORTRAN code. No wonder the C compiler gagged." See alsobarf.
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gang bang
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garbage collect
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gag
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= G =
gang bangn.
The use of large numbers of loosely coupled programmers in an attempt to wedge a great many features into a product in a short time. Though there have been memorable gang bangs (e.g., that over-the-weekend assembler port mentioned in Steven Levy's "Hackers"), most are perpetrated by large companies trying to meet deadlines; the inevitable result is enormous buggy masses of code entirely lacking inorthogonality. When market-driven managers make a list of all the features the competition has and assign one programmer to implement each, the probability of maintaining a coherent (or even functional) design goes infinitesimal. See alsofirefighting,Mongolian Hordes technique,Conway's Law.
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garbage collect
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garply
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gang bang
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= G =
garbage collectvi.
(also `garbage collection', n.) SeeGC.
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garply
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gas
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garbage collect
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= G =
garply/gar'plee/ n.
[Stanford] Another metasyntactic variable (seefoo); once popular among SAIL hackers.
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gas
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gaseous
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garply
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= G =
gas
[as in `gas chamber'] 1. interj. A term of disgust and hatred, implying that gas should be dispensed in generous quantities, thereby exterminating the source of irritation. "Some loser just reloaded the system for no reason! Gas!" 2. interj. A suggestion that someone or something ought to be flushed out of mercy. "The system's gettingwedgedevery few minutes. Gas!" 3. vt. Toflush(sense 1). "You should gas that old crufty software." 4. [IBM] n. Dead space in nonsequentially organized files that was occupied by data that has since been deleted; the compression operation that removes it is called `degassing' (by analogy, perhaps, with the use of the same term in vacuum technology). 5. [IBM] n. Empty space on a disk that has been clandestinely allocated against future need.
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gaseous
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Gates's Law
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gas
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gaseousadj.
Deserving of beinggassed. Disseminated by Geoff Goodfellow while at SRI; became particularly popular after the Moscone-Milk killings in San Francisco, when it was learned that the defendant Dan White (a politician who had supported Proposition 7) would get the gas chamber under Proposition 7 if convicted of first-degree murder (he was eventually convicted of manslaughter).
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Gates's Law
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gawble
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gaseous
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Gates's Law
"The speed of software halves every 18 months." This oft-cited law is an ironic comment on the tendency of software bloat to outpace the every-18-month doubling in hardware caopacity per dollar predicted byMoore's Law. The reference is to Bill Gates; Microsoft is widely considered among the worst if not the worst of the perpetrators of bloat.
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gawble
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GC
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Gates's Law
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= G =
gawble/gaw'bl/ n.
Seechawmp.
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GC
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GCOS
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gawble
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GC/G-C/
[from LISP terminology; `Garbage Collect'] 1. vt. To clean up and throw away useless things. "I think I'll GC the top of my desk today." When said of files, this is equivalent toGFR. 2. vt. To recycle, reclaim, or put to another use. 3. n. An instantiation of the garbage collector process.
`Garbage collection' is computer-science techspeak for a particular class of strategies for dynamically but transparently reallocating computer memory (i.e., without requiring explicit allocation and deallocation by higher-level software). One such strategy involves periodically scanning all the data in memory and determining what is no longer accessible; useless data items are then discarded so that the memory they occupy can be recycled and used for another purpose. Implementations of the LISP language usually use garbage collection.
In jargon, the full phrase is sometimes heard but theabbrevGC is more frequently used because it is shorter. Note that there is an ambiguity in usage that has to be resolved by context: "I'm going to garbage-collect my desk" usually means to clean out the drawers, but it could also mean to throw away or recycle the desk itself.
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GCOS
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GECOS
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GC
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GCOS/jee'kohs/ n.
Aquick-and-dirtycloneof System/360 DOS that emerged from GE around 1970; originally called GECOS (the General Electric Comprehensive Operating System). Later kluged to support primitive timesharing and transaction processing. After the buyout of GE's computer division by Honeywell, the name was changed to General Comprehensive Operating System (GCOS). Other OS groups at Honeywell began referring to it as `God's Chosen Operating System', allegedly in reaction to the GCOS crowd's uninformed and snotty attitude about the superiority of their product. All this might be of zero interest, except for two facts: (1) The GCOS people won the political war, and this led in the orphaning and eventual death of HoneywellMultics, and (2) GECOS/GCOS left one permanent mark on Unix. Some early Unix systems at Bell Labs used GCOS machines for print spooling and various other services; the field added to/etc/passwdto carry GCOS ID information was called the `GECOS field' and survives today as thepw_gecosmember used for the user's full name and other human-ID information. GCOS later played a major role in keeping Honeywell a dismal also-ran in the mainframe market, and was itself mostly ditched for Unix in the late 1980s when Honeywell began to retire its agingbig irondesigns.
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GECOS
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gedanken
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GCOS
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= G =
GECOS/jee'kohs/ n.
SeeGCOS.
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gedanken
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geef
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GECOS
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gedanken/g*-dahn'kn/ adj.
Ungrounded; impractical; not well-thought-out; untried; untested.
`Gedanken' is a German word for `thought'. A thought experiment is one you carry out in your head. In physics, the term `gedanken experiment' is used to refer to an experiment that is impractical to carry out, but useful to consider because it can be reasoned about theoretically. (A classic gedanken experiment of relativity theory involves thinking about a man in an elevator accelerating through space.) Gedanken experiments are very useful in physics, but must be used with care. It's too easy to idealize away some important aspect of the real world in constructing the `apparatus'.
Among hackers, accordingly, the word has a pejorative connotation. It is typically used of a project, especially one in artificial intelligence research, that is written up in grand detail (typically as a Ph.D. thesis) without ever being implemented to any great extent. Such a project is usually perpetrated by people who aren't very good hackers or find programming distasteful or are just in a hurry. A `gedanken thesis' is usually marked by an obvious lack of intuition about what is programmable and what is not, and about what does and does not constitute a clear specification of an algorithm. See alsoAI-complete,DWIM.
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geef
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geek code
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gedanken
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= G =
geefv.
[ostensibly from `gefingerpoken'] vt. Syn.mung. See alsoblinkenlights.
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geek code
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geek out
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geef
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= G =
geek coden.
(also "Code of the Geeks"). A set of codes commonly used insig blocks to broadcast the interests, skills, and aspirations of the poster. Features a G at the left margin followed by numerous letter codes, often suffixed with plusses or minuses. Because many net users are involved in computer science, the most common prefix is `GCS'. To see a copy of the current code, browse http://www.geekcode.com. Here is a sample geek code (that of Robert Hayden, the code's inventor) from that page:
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----Version: 3.1GED/J d-- s:++>: a- C++(++++)$ ULUO++ P+>+++ L++ !E---- W+(---) N+++o+ K+++ w+(---) O- M+$>++ V-- PS++(+++)>$ PE++(+)>$ Y++ PGP++ t- 5+++X++ R+++>$ tv+ b+ DI+++ D+++ G+++++>$ e++$>++++ h r-- y+**------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
The geek code originated in 1993; it was inspired (according to the inventor) by previous "bear", "smurf" and "twink" style-and-sexual-preference codes from lesbian and gaynewsgroups. It has in turn spawned imitators; there is now even a "Saturn geek code" for owners of the Saturn car. See alsocomputer geek.