nonlinear
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Nominal Semidestructor
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= N =
non-optimal solutionn.
(also `sub-optimal solution') An astoundingly stupid way to do something. This term is generally used in deadpan sarcasm, as its impact is greatest when the person speaking looks completely serious. Comparestunning. See alsoBad Thing.
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nonlinear
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nontrivial
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non-optimal solution
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nonlinearadj.
[scientific computation] 1. Behaving in an erratic and unpredictable fashion; unstable. When used to describe the behavior of a machine or program, it suggests that said machine or program is being forced to run far outside of design specifications. This behavior may be induced by unreasonable inputs, or may be triggered when a more mundane bug sends the computation far off from its expected course. 2. When describing the behavior of a person, suggests a tantrum or aflame. "When you talk to Bob, don't mention the drug problem or he'll go nonlinear for hours." In this context, `go nonlinear' connotes `blow up out of proportion' (proportion connotes linearity).
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nontrivial
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not ready for prime time
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nonlinear
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nontrivialadj.
Requiring real thought or significant computing power. Often used as an understated way of saying that a problem is quite difficult or impractical, or even entirely unsolvable ("Proving P=NP is nontrivial"). The preferred emphatic form is `decidedly nontrivial'. Seetrivial,uninteresting,interesting.
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not ready for prime time
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notwork
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nontrivial
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= N =
not ready for prime timeadj.
Usable, but only just so; not very robust; for internal use only. Said of a program or device. Often connotes that the thing will be made more solidReal Soon Now. This term comes from the ensemble name of the original cast of "Saturday Night Live", the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players". It has extra flavor for hackers because of the special (though now semi-obsolescent) meaning ofprime time. Comparebeta.
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notwork
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NP-
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not ready for prime time
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= N =
notwork/not'werk/ n.
A network, when it is actingflakyor isdown. Comparenyetwork. Said at IBM to have originally referred to a particular period of flakiness on IBM's VNET corporate network ca. 1988; but there are independent reports of the term from elsewhere.
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NP-
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nroff
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notwork
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= N =
NP-/N-P/ pref.
Extremely. Used to modify adjectives describing a level or quality of difficulty; the connotation is often `more so than it should be' This is generalized from the computer-science terms `NP-hard' and `NP-complete'; NP-complete problems all seem to be very hard, but so far no one has found a proof that they are. NP is the set of Nondeterministic-Polynomial algorithms, those that can be completed by a nondeterministic Turing machine in an amount of time that is a polynomial function of the size of the input; a solution for one NP-complete problem would solve all the others. "Coding a BitBlt implementation to perform correctly in every case is NP-annoying."
Note, however, that strictly speaking this usage is misleading; there are plenty of easy problems in class NP. NP-complete problems are hard not because they are in class NP, but because they are the hardest problems in class NP.
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nroff
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NSA line eater
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NP-
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= N =
nroff/N'rof/
n. [Unix, from "new roff" (seetroff)] A companion program to the Unix typesettertroff, accepting identical input but preparing output for terminals and line printers.
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NSA line eater
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NSP
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nroff
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NSA line eatern.
The National Security Agency trawling program sometimes assumed to be reading the net for the U.S. Government's spooks. Most hackers used to think it was mythical but believed in acting as though existed just in case. since the mid-1990s it has gradually become known that the NSA actually does this, quite illegaly, through its Echelon program.
The standard countermeasure is to put loaded phrases like `KGB', `Uzi', `nuclear materials', `Palestine', `cocaine', and `assassination' in theirsig blocks in a (probably futile) attempt to confuse and overload the creature. TheGNUversion ofEMACSactually has a command that randomly inserts a bunch of insidious anarcho-verbiage into your edited text.
As far back as the 1970s there was a mainstream variant of this myth involving a `Trunk Line Monitor', which supposedly used speech recognition to extract words from telephone trunks. This is much harder than noticing keywords in email, and most of the people who originally propagated it had no idea of then-current technology or the storage, signal-processing, or speech recognition needs of such a project. On the basis of mass-storage costs alone it would have been cheaper to hire 50 high-school students and just let them listen in. Twenty years and several orders of technological magnitude later, however, there are clear indications that the NSA has actually deployed such filtering (again, very much against U.S. law).
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NSP
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nude
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NSA line eater
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= N =
NSP/N-S-P/ n.
Common abbreviation for `Network Service Provider', one of the big national or regional companies that maintains a portion of the Internet backbone and resells connectivity toISPs. In 1996, major NSPs include ANS, MCI, UUNET, and Sprint. An Internet wholesaler.
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nude
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nugry
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NSP
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nudeadj.
Said of machines delivered without an operating system (comparebare metal). "We ordered 50 systems, but they all arrived nude, so we had to spend a an extra weekend with the installation disks." This usage is a recent innovation reflecting the fact that most IBM-PC clones are now delivered with an operating system pre-installed at the factory. Other kinds of hardware are still normally delivered without OS, so this term is particular to PC support groups.
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nugry
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nuke
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nude
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= N =
nugry/n[y]oo'gree/
[Usenet, 'newbie' + '-gry'] `. n. Anewbiewho posts aFAQin the rec.puzzles newsgroup, especially if it is a variant of the notorious and unanswerable "What, besides `angry' and `hungry', is the third common English word that ends in -GRY?". In the newsgroup, the canonical answer is of course `nugry' itself. Plural is `nusgry' /n[y]oos'gree/. 2. adj. Having the qualities of a nugry.
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nuke
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number-crunching
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nugry
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nuke/n[y]ook/ vt.
[common] 1. To intentionally delete the entire contents of a given directory or storage volume. "On Unix,rm -r /usrwill nuke everything in the usr filesystem." Never used for accidental deletion; contrastblow away. 2. Syn. fordike, applied to smaller things such as files, features, or code sections. Often used to express a final verdict. "What do you want me to do with that 80-megwallpaperfile?" "Nuke it." 3. Used of processes as well as files; nuke is a frequent verbal alias forkill -9on Unix. 4. On IBM PCs, a bug that results infandango on corecan trash the operating system, including the FAT (the in-core copy of the disk block chaining information). This can utterly scramble attached disks, which are then said to have been `nuked'. This term is also used of analogous lossages on Macintoshes and other micros without memory protection.
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number-crunching
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numbers
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nuke
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number-crunchingn.
[common] Computations of a numerical nature, esp. those that make extensive use of floating-point numbers. The only thingFortrashis good for. This term is in widespread informal use outside hackerdom and even in mainstream slang, but has additional hackish connotations: namely, that the computations are mindless and involve massive use ofbrute force. This is not alwaysevil, esp. if it involves ray tracing or fractals or some other use that makespretty pictures, esp. if such pictures can be used aswallpaper. See alsocrunch.
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numbers
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NUXI problem
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number-crunching
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numbersn.
[scientific computation] Output of a computation that may not be significant results but at least indicate that the program is running. May be used to placate management, grant sponsors, etc. `Making numbers' means running a program because output -- any output, not necessarily meaningful output -- is needed as a demonstration of progress. Seepretty pictures,math-out,social science number.
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NUXI problem
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nybble
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numbers
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NUXI problem/nuk'see pro'bl*m/ n.
Refers to the problem of transferring data between machines with differing byte-order. The string `UNIX' might look like `NUXI' on a machine with a different `byte sex' (e.g., when transferring data from alittle-endianto abig-endian, or vice-versa). See alsomiddle-endian,swab, andbytesexual.
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nybble
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nyetwork
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NUXI problem
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nybble/nib'l/ (alt. `nibble') n.
[from v. `nibble' by analogy with `bite' => `byte'] Four bits; onehexdigit; a half-byte. Though `byte' is now techspeak, this useful relative is still jargon. Comparebyte; see alsobit. The more mundane spelling "nibble" is also commonly used. Apparently the `nybble' spelling is uncommon in Commonwealth Hackish, as British orthography would suggest the pronunciation /ni:'bl/.
Following `bit', `byte' and `nybble' there have been quite a few analogical attempts to construct unambiguous terms for bit blocks of other sizes. All of these are strictly jargon, not techspeak, and not very common jargon at that (most hackers would recognize them in context but not use them spontaneously). We collect them here for reference together with the ambiguous techspeak terms `word', `half-word' and `double word'; some (indicated) have substantial information separate entries.
2 bits:crumb,quad,quarter, tayste, tydbit4 bits:nybble5 bits:nickle10 bits:deckle16 bits:playte,chawmp(on a 32-bit machine), word (on a 16-bit machine), half-word (on a 32-bit machine).18 bits:chawmp(on a 36-bit machine), half-word (on a 36-bit machine)32 bits:dynner,gawble(on a 32-bit machine), word (on a 32-bit machine), longword (on a 16-bit machine).36:word (on a 36-bit machine)48 bits:gawble(under circumstances that remain obscure)64 bitsdouble word (on a 32-bit machine)
The fundamental motivation for most of these jargon terms (aside from the normal hackerly enjoyment of punning wordplay) is the extreme ambiguity of the term `word' and its derivatives.
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nyetwork
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Ob-
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nybble
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nyetwork/nyet'werk/ n.
[from Russian `nyet' = no] A network, when it is actingflakyor isdown. Comparenotwork.
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= O =
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= P =
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The Jargon Lexicon
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Ob-
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Obfuscated C Contest
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nyetwork
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= O =
Ob-/ob/ pref.
Obligatory. A piece ofnetiquetteacknowledging that the author has been straying from the newsgroup's charter topic. For example, if a posting in alt.sex is a response to a part of someone else's posting that has nothing particularly to do with sex, the author may append `ObSex' (or `Obsex') and toss off a question or vignette about some unusual erotic act. It is considered a sign of greatwinnitudewhen one's Obs are more interesting than other people's whole postings.
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Obfuscated C Contest
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obi-wan error
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Ob-
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= O =
Obfuscated C Contestn.
(in full, the `International Obfuscated C Code Contest', or IOCCC) An annual contest run since 1984 over Usenet by Landon Curt Noll and friends. The overall winner is whoever produces the most unreadable, creative, and bizarre (but working) C program; various other prizes are awarded at the judges' whim. C's terse syntax and macro-preprocessor facilities give contestants a lot of maneuvering room. The winning programs often manage to be simultaneously (a) funny, (b) breathtaking works of art, and (c) horrible examples of hownotto code in C.
This relatively short and sweet entry might help convey the flavor of obfuscated C:
/** HELLO WORLD program* by Jack Applin and Robert Heckendorn, 1985* (Note: depends on being able to modify elements of argv[],* which is not guaranteed by ANSI and often not possible.)*/main(v,c)char**c;{for(v[c++]="Hello, world!\n)";(!!c)[*c]&&(v--||--c&&execlp(*c,*c,c[!!c]+!!c,!c));**c=!c)write(!!*c,*c,!!**c);}
Here's another good one:
/** Program to compute an approximation of pi* by Brian Westley, 1988* (requires pcc macro concatenation; try gcc -traditional-cpp)*/#define _ -F<00||--F-OO--;int F=00,OO=00;main(){F_OO();printf("%1.3f\n",4.*-F/OO/OO);}F_OO(){_-_-_-__-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-__-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-__-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-__-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-__-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-__-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-__-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-__-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-__-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-__-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-__-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-__-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-__-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-__-_-_-_-_-_-_-__-_-_-_}
Note that this program works by computing its own area. For more digits, write a bigger program. See alsohello world.
The IOCCC has an official home page at http://www.ioccc.org.
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obi-wan error
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Objectionable-C
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Obfuscated C Contest
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obi-wan error/oh'bee-won` er'*r/ n.
[RPI, from `off-by-one' and the Obi-Wan Kenobi character in "Star Wars"] A loop of some sort in which the index is off by 1. Common when the index should have started from 0 but instead started from 1. A kind ofoff-by-one error. See alsozeroth.