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condomn.
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 ofSEXbut 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 alight pipe. 3. `keyboard condom': A flexible, transparent plastic cover for a keyboard, designed to provide some protection against dust andprogramming fluidwithout 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 theGreat Wormby exploiting a portability bug in one of its parts. So named in the title of acomp.risksarticle 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.
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confuser
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connector conspiracy
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condom
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confusern.
Common soundalike slang for `computer'. Usually encountered in compounds such as `confuser room', `personal confuser', `confuser guru'. Usage: silly.
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connector conspiracy
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cons
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confuser
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connector conspiracyn.
[probably came into prominence with the appearance of the KL-10 (one model of thePDP-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 actuallypatentedbyDEC, 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 long Torx screwdriver 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!" Comparebackward combatability.
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cons
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considered harmful
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connector conspiracy
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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,consis 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.
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considered harmful
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console
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cons
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considered harmfuladj.
[very common] 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. (Years afterwards, a contrary view was uttered in a CACM letter called, inevitably, "`Goto considered harmful' considered harmful'"'. 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).
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console
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console jockey
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considered harmful
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consolen.
1. The operator's station of amainframe. 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 thettythe 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 runX.
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console jockey
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content-free
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console
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console jockeyn.
Seeterminal junkie.
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content-free
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control-C
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console jockey
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content-freeadj.
[by analogy with techspeak `context-free'] Used of a message that adds nothing to the recipient's knowledge. Though this adjective is sometimes applied toflamage, 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 alsofour-color glossies.) "He gave a talk on the implications of electronic networks for postmodernism and the fin-de-siecle aesthetic. It was content-free."
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control-C
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control-O
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content-free
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control-Cvi.
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!"
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control-O
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control-Q
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control-Ovi.
"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. Comparecontrol-S.
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control-Q
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control-S
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control-O
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control-Qvi.
"Resume." From the ASCII DC1 orXONcharacter (the pronunciation /X-on/ is therefore also used), used to undo a previouscontrol-S.
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control-S
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Conway's Law
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control-Svi.
"Stop talking for a second." From the ASCII DC3 or XOFF character (the pronunciation /X-of/ is therefore also used). Control-S differs fromcontrol-Oin 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.
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Conway's Law
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cookbook
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Conway's Lawprov.
The rule that the organization of the software and the organization of the software team will be congruent; commonly stated as "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler". The original statement was more general, "Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." This first appeared in the April 1968 issue ofDatamation. CompareSNAFU principle.
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."
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cookbook
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cookbookn.
[from amateur electronics and radio] A book of small code segments that the reader can use to do variousmagicthings in programs. One current example is the "PostScriptLanguage Tutorial and Cookbook" by Adobe Systems, Inc (Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-10179-3), also known as theBlue Bookwhich has recipes for things like wrapping text around arbitrary curves and making 3D fonts. Cookbooks, slavishly followed, can lead one intovoodoo programming, but are useful for hackers trying tomonkey upsmall programs in unknown languages. This function is analogous to the role of phrasebooks in human languages.
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cooked mode
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cookie
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cooked moden.
[Unix, by opposition fromraw mode] The normal character-input mode, with interrupts enabled and with erase, kill and other special-character interpretations performed directly by the tty driver. Opposeraw 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.
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cookie
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cookien.
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). Comparemagic cookie; see alsofortune cookie. Now mainstream in the specific sense of web-browser cookies.
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cookie bear
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cookie file
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cookie bearn. obs.
Original term, pre-Sesame-Street, for what is now universally called acookie monster. A correspondent observes "In those days, hackers were actually getting their yucks from...sit down now...Andy Williams. Yes,thatAndy 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."
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cookie file
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cookie filen.
A collection offortune cookies 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.
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cookie jar
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cookie jarn.
An area of memory set aside for storingcookies. Most commonly heard in the Atari ST community; many useful ST programs record their presence by storing a distinctivemagic numberin the jar. Programs can inquire after the presence or otherwise of other programs by searching the contents of the jar.
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cookie monster
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cookie monstern.
[from the children's TV program "Sesame Street"] Any of a family of early (1970s) hacks reported onTOPS-10,ITS,Multics, and elsewhere that would lock up either the victim's terminal (on a time-sharing machine) or theconsole(on a batchmainframe), repeatedly demanding "I WANT A COOKIE". The required responses ranged in complexity from "COOKIE" through "HAVE A COOKIE" and upward. Folklorist Jan Brunvand (seeFOAF) has described these programs as urban legends (implying they probably never existed) but they existed, all right, in several different versions. See alsowabbit. Interestingly, the term `cookie monster' appears to be aretcon; the original term wascookie bear.
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copious free time
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copious free timen.
[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 ofchrome, or the stroking ofsuits. "I'll get back to him on that feature in my copious free time."
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copper
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copy protection
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coppern.
Conventional electron-carrying network cable with a core conductor of copper -- or aluminum! Opposed tolight pipeor, say, a short-range microwave link.
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copy protection
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copybroke
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copper
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copy protectionn.
A class of methods for preventing incompetent pirates from stealing software and legitimate customers from using it. Considered silly.
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copybroke
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copycenter
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copy protection
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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 alsocopy protection.
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copycenter
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copyleft
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copycentern.
[play on `copyright' and `copyleft'] 1. The copyright notice carried by the various flavors of freeware BSD. According to Kirk McKusick at BSDCon 1999: "The way it was characterized politically, you had copyright, which is what the big companies use to lock everything up; you had copyleft, which is free software's way of making sure they can't lock it up; and then Berkeley had what we called "copycenter", which is "take it down to the copy center and make as many copies as you want".
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copyleft
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copyparty
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copyleft/kop'ee-left/ n.
[play on `copyright'] 1. The copyright notice (`General Public License') carried byGNUEMACSand other Free Software Foundation software, granting reuse and reproduction rights to all comers (but see alsoGeneral Public Virus). 2. By extension, any copyright notice intended to achieve similar aims.