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copyparty
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copywronged
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copyleft
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copypartyn.
[C64/amigademoscene]A computer party organized so demosceners can meet other in real life, and to facilitate software copying (mostly pirated software). The copyparty has become less common as the Internet makes communication easier. The demoscene has gradually evolved thedemopartyto replace it.
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copywronged
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core
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copyparty
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copywronged/kop'ee-rongd/ adj.
[play on `copyright'] Syn. forcopybroke.
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core
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core cancer
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copywronged
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coren.
Main storage or RAM. Dates from the days of ferrite-core memory; now archaic as techspeak most places outside IBM, but also still used in the Unix community and by old-time hackers or those who would sound like them. Some derived idioms are quite current; `in core', for example, means `in memory' (as opposed to `on disk'), and bothcore dumpand the `core image' or `core file' produced by one are terms in favor. Some varieties of Commonwealth hackish preferstore.
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core cancer
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core dump
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core
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core cancern.
[rare] A process that exhibits a slow but inexorable resourceleak-- like a cancer, it kills by crowding out productive `tissue'.
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core dump
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core leak
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core cancer
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core dumpn.
[commonIron Agejargon, preserved by Unix] 1. [techspeak] A copy of the contents ofcore, produced when a process is aborted by certain kinds of internal error. 2. By extension, used for humans passing out, vomiting, or registering extreme shock. "He dumped core. All over the floor. What a mess." "He heard about X and dumped core." 3. Occasionally used for a human rambling on pointlessly at great length; esp. in apology: "Sorry, I dumped core on you". 4. A recapitulation of knowledge (comparebits, sense 1). Hence, spewing all one knows about a topic (syn.brain dump), esp. in a lecture or answer to an exam question. "Short, concise answers are better than core dumps" (from the instructions to an exam at Columbia). Seecore.
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core leak
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Core Wars
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core dump
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core leakn.
Syn.memory leak.
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Core Wars
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corge
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core leak
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Core Warsn.
A game between `assembler' programs in a machine or machine simulator, where the objective is to kill your opponent's program by overwriting it. Popularized in the 1980s by A. K. Dewdney's column in "Scientific American" magazine, but described in "Software Practice And Experience" a decade earlier. The game was actually devised and played by Victor Vyssotsky, Robert Morris Sr., and Doug McIlroy in the early 1960s (Dennis Ritchie is sometimes incorrectly cited as a co-author, but was not involved). Their original game was called `Darwin' and ran on a IBM 7090 at Bell Labs. Seecore. For information on the modern game, do a web search for the `rec.games.corewar FAQ' or surf to the King Of The Hill site.
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corge
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cosmic rays
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corge/korj/ n.
[originally, the name of a cat] Yet anothermetasyntactic variable, invented by Mike Gallaher and propagated by theGOSMACSdocumentation. Seegrault.
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cosmic rays
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cough and die
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cosmic raysn.
Notionally, the cause ofbit rot. However, this is a semi-independent usage that may be invoked as a humorous way tohandwaveaway any minorrandomnessthat doesn't seem worth the bother of investigating. "Hey, Eric -- I just got a burst of garbage on mytube, where did that come from?" "Cosmic rays, I guess." Comparesunspots,phase of the moon. The British seem to prefer the usage `cosmic showers'; `alpha particles' is also heard, because stray alpha particles passing through a memory chip can cause single-bit errors (this becomes increasingly more likely as memory sizes and densities increase).
Factual note: Alpha particles cause bit rot, cosmic rays do not (except occasionally in spaceborne computers). Intel could not explain random bit drops in their early chips, and one hypothesis was cosmic rays. So they created the World's Largest Lead Safe, using 25 tons of the stuff, and used two identical boards for testing. One was placed in the safe, one outside. The hypothesis was that if cosmic rays were causing the bit drops, they should see a statistically significant difference between the error rates on the two boards. They did not observe such a difference. Further investigation demonstrated conclusively that the bit drops were due to alpha particle emissions from thorium (and to a much lesser degree uranium) in the encapsulation material. Since it is impossible to eliminate these radioactives (they are uniformly distributed through the earth's crust, with the statistically insignificant exception of uranium lodes) it became obvious that one has to design memories to withstand these hits.
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cough and die
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courier
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cosmic rays
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cough and diev.
Syn.barf. Connotes that the program is throwing its hands up by design rather than because of a bug or oversight. "The parser saw a control-A in its input where it was looking for a printable, so it coughed and died." Comparedie,die horribly,scream and die.
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courier
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cow orker
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cough and die
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courier
[BBS & cracker cultures] A person who distributes newly crackedwarez, as opposed to aserverwho makes them available for download or aleechwho merely downloads them. Hackers recognize this term but don't use it themselves, as the act is not part of their culture. See alsowarez d00dz,cracker,elite.
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cow orker
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cowboy
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courier
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cow orkern.
[Usenet] n. fortuitous typo for co-worker, widely used in Usenet, with perhaps a hint that orking cows is illegal. This term was popularized by Scott Adams (the creator ofDilbert) but already appears in the January 1996 version of thescary devil monasteryFAQ. There are plausible reports that it was in use ontalk.bizarreas early as 1992. Comparehing,grilf,filk,newsfroup.
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cowboy
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CP/M
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cowboyn.
[Sun, from William Gibson'scyberpunkSF] Synonym forhacker. It is reported that at Sun this word is often said with reverence.
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CP/M
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CPU Wars
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CP/M/C-P-M/ n.
[Control Program/Monitor; laterretconned to Control Program for Microcomputers] An early microcomputerOSwritten by hacker Gary Kildall for 8080- and Z80-based machines, very popular in the late 1970s but virtually wiped out by MS-DOS after the release of the IBM PC in 1981. Legend has it that Kildall's company blew its chance to write the OS for the IBM PC because Kildall decided to spend a day IBM's reps wanted to meet with him enjoying the perfect flying weather in his private plane. Many of CP/M's features and conventions strongly resemble those of earlyDECoperating systems such asTOPS-10, OS/8, RSTS, and RSX-11. SeeMS-DOS,operating system.
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CPU Wars
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crack
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CPU Wars/C-P-U worz/ n.
A 1979 large-format comic by Chas Andres chronicling the attempts of the brainwashed androids of IPM (Impossible to Program Machines) to conquer and destroy the peaceful denizens of HEC (Human Engineered Computers). This rather transparent allegory featured many references toADVENTand the immortal line "Eat flaming death, minicomputer mongrels!" (uttered, of course, by an IPM stormtrooper). The whole shebang is now available on the Web.
It is alleged that the author subsequently received a letter of appreciation on IBM company stationery from the head of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratories (then, as now, one of the few islands of true hackerdom in the IBM archipelago). The lower loop of the B in the IBM logo, it is said, had been carefully whited out. Seeeat flaming death.
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crack
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crack
[warez d00dz] 1. v. To break into a system (comparecracker). 2. v. Action of removing the copy protection from a commercial program. People who write cracks consider themselves challenged by the copy protection measures. They will often do it as much to show that they are smarter than the developper who designed the copy protection scheme than to actually copy the program. 3. n. A program, instructions or patch used to remove the copy protection of a program or to uncripple features from a demo/time limited program. 4. Anexploit.
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crack root
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cracker
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crack
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crack rootv.
[very common] To defeat the security system of a Unix machine and gainrootprivileges thereby; seecracking.
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cracker
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cracking
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crackern.
One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse ofhacker(q.v., sense 8). An earlier attempt to establish `worm' in this sense around 1981-82 on Usenet was largely a failure.
Use of both these neologisms reflects a strong revulsion against the theft and vandalism perpetrated by cracking rings. While it is expected that any real hacker will have done some playful cracking and knows many of the basic techniques, anyone pastlarval stageis expected to have outgrown the desire to do so except for immediate, benign, practical reasons (for example, if it's necessary to get around some security in order to get some work done).
Thus, there is far less overlap between hackerdom and crackerdom than themundanereader misled by sensationalistic journalism might expect. Crackers tend to gather in small, tight-knit, very secretive groups that have little overlap with the huge, open poly-culture this lexicon describes; though crackers often like to describethemselvesas hackers, most true hackers consider them a separate and lower form of life.
Ethical considerations aside, hackers figure that anyone who can't imagine a more interesting way to play with their computers than breaking into someone else's has to be prettylosing. Some other reasons crackers are looked down on are discussed in the entries oncrackingandphreaking. See alsosamurai,dark-side hacker, andhacker ethic. For a portrait of the typical teenage cracker, seewarez d00dz.
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cracking
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crackingn.
[very common] The act of breaking into a computer system; what acrackerdoes. Contrary to widespread myth, this does not usually involve some mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance, but rather persistence and the dogged repetition of a handful of fairly well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the security of target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are only mediocre hackers.
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crank
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crankvt.
[from automotive slang] Verb used to describe the performance of a machine, especially sustained performance. "This box cranks (or, cranks at) about 6 megaflops, with a burst mode of twice that on vectorized operations."
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crapplet
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CrApTeX
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crank
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crappletn.
[portmanteau, crap + applet] A worthless applet, esp. a Java widget attached to a web page that doesn't work or even crashes your browser. Also spelled `craplet'.
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CrApTeX
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crash
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crapplet
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CrApTeX/krap'tekh/ n.
[University of York, England] Term of abuse used to describe TeX and LaTeX when they don't work (when used by TeXhackers), or all the time (by everyone else). The non-TeX-enthusiasts generally dislike it because it is more verbose than other formatters (e.g.troff) and because (particularly if the standard Computer Modern fonts are used) it generates vast output files. Seereligious issues,TeX.
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crash
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crash
1. n. A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of thesystem(q.v., sense 1), esp. of magnetic disk drives (the term originally described what happens when the air gap of a hard disk collapses). "Threelusers lost their files in last night's disk crash." A disk crash that involves the read/write heads dropping onto the surface of the disks and scraping off the oxide may also be referred to as a `head crash', whereas the term `system crash' usually, though not always, implies that the operating system or other software was at fault. 2. v. To fail suddenly. "Has the system just crashed?" "Something crashed the OS!" Seedown. Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the crash (usually a person or a program, or both). "Those idiots playingSPACEWARcrashed the system." 3. vi. Sometimes said of people hitting the sack after a longhacking run; seegronk out.
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crash and burn
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crash and burnvi.,n.
A spectacular crash, in the mode of the conclusion of the car-chase scene in the movie "Bullitt" and many subsequent imitators (comparedie horribly). Sun-3 monitors losing the flyback transformer and lightning strikes on VAX-11/780 backplanes are notable crash and burn generators. The construction `crash-and-burn machine' is reported for a computer used exclusively for alpha orbetatesting, or reproducing bugs (i.e., not for development). The implication is that it wouldn't be such a disaster if that machine crashed, since only the testers would be inconvenienced.
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crawling horror
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cray
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