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DEC
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DEC Wars
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DEC/dek/ n.
1. v. Verbal (and only rarely written) shorthand fordecrement, i.e. `decrease by one'. Especially used by assembly programmers, as many assembly languages have adecmnemonic. Antonym:inc. 2. n. Commonly used abbreviation for Digital Equipment Corporation, later deprecated by DEC itself in favor of "Digital" and now entirely obsolete following the buyout by Compaq. Before thekiller microrevolution of the late 1980s, hackerdom was closely symbiotic with DEC's pioneering timesharing machines. The first of the group of cultures described by this lexicon nucleated around the PDP-1 (seeTMRC). Subsequently, the PDP-6,PDP-10,PDP-20, PDP-11 andVAXwere all foci of large and important hackerdoms, and DEC machines long dominated the ARPANET and Internet machine population. DEC was the technological leader of the minicomputer era (roughly 1967 to 1987), but its failure to embrace microcomputers and Unix early cost it heavily in profits and prestige aftersilicongot cheap. Nevertheless, the microprocessor design tradition owes a major debt to the PDP-11 instruction set, and every one of the major general-purpose microcomputer OSs so far (CP/M, MS-DOS, Unix, OS/2, Windows NT) was either genetically descended from a DEC OS, or incubated on DEC hardware, or both. Accordingly, DEC was for many years still regarded with a certain wry affection even among many hackers too young to have grown up on DEC machines.
DEC reclaimed some of its old reputation among techies in the first half of the 1990s. The success of the Alpha, an innovatively-designed and very high-performancekiller micro, helped a lot. So did DEC's newfound receptiveness to Unix and open systems in general. When Compaq acquired DEC at the end of 1998 there was some concern that these gains would be lost along with the DEC nameplate, but the merged company has so far turned out to be culturally dominated by the ex-DEC side.
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DEC Wars
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DEC Warsn.
A 1983Usenetposting by Alan Hastings and Steve Tarr spoofing the "Star Wars" movies in hackish terms. Some years later, ESR (disappointed by Hastings and Tarr's failure to exploit a great premise more thoroughly) posted a 3-times-longer complete rewrite called Unix WARS; the two are often confused.
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decay
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decayn.,vi
[from nuclear physics] An automatic conversion which is applied to most array-valued expressions inC; they `decay into' pointer-valued expressions pointing to the array's first element. This term is borderline techspeak, but is not used in the official standard for the language.
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deckle
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deckle/dek'l/ n.
[from dec- andnybble; the original spelling seems to have been `decle'] Twonickles; 10 bits. Reported among developers for Mattel's GI 1600 (the Intellivision games processor), a chip with 16-bit-wide RAM but 10-bit-wide ROM. Seenybblefor other such terms.
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DED
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DED/D-E-D/ n.
Dark-Emitting Diode (that is, a burned-out LED). CompareSED,LER,write-only memory. In the early 1970s both Signetics and Texas instruments released DED spec sheets asAFJs (suggested uses included "as a power-off indicator").
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deep hack mode
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deep magic
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deep hack moden.
Seehack mode.
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deep magic
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deep space
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deep magicn.
[poss. from C. S. Lewis's "Narnia" books] An awesomely arcane technique central to a program or system, esp. one neither generally published nor available to hackers at large (compareblack art); one that could only have been composed by a truewizard. Compiler optimization techniques and many aspects ofOSdesign used to bedeep magic; many techniques in cryptography, signal processing, graphics, and AI still are. Compareheavy wizardry. Esp. found in comments of the form "Deep magic begins here...". Comparevoodoo programming.
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deep space
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deep spacen.
1. Describes the notional location of any program that has goneoff the trolley. Esp. used of programs that just sit there silently grinding long after either failure or some output is expected. "Uh oh. I should have gotten a prompt ten seconds ago. The program's in deep space somewhere." Comparebuzz,catatonic,hyperspace. 2. The metaphorical location of a human so dazed and/or confused or caught up in some esoteric form ofbogositythat he or she no longer responds coherently to normal communication. Comparepage out.
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defenestration
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defenestrationn.
[mythically from a traditional Czech assasination method, via SF fandom] 1. Proper karmic retribution for an incorrigible punster. "Oh, ghod, that wasawful!" "Quick! Defenestrate him!" 2. The act of exiting a window system in order to get better response time from a full-screen program. This comes from the dictionary meaning of `defenestrate', which is to throw something out a window. 3. The act of discarding something under the assumption that it will improve matters. "I don't have any disk space left." "Well, why don't you defenestrate that 100 megs worth of old core dumps?" 4. Under a GUI, the act of dragging something out of a window (onto the screen). "Next, defenestrate the MugWump icon." 5. The act of completely removing Micro$oft Windows from a PC in favor of a better OS (typically Linux).
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defined asadj.
In the role of, usually in an organization-chart sense. "Pete is currently defined as bug prioritizer." Comparelogical.
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dehose
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dehose/dee-hohz/ vt.
To clear ahosedcondition.
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deletia
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deletian. /d*-lee'sha/
[USENET; common] In an email reply, material omitted from the
quote of the original. Usually written rather than spoken; often
appears as a pseudo-tag or ellipsis in the body of the reply, as
"[deletia]" or "
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deliminator/de-lim'-in-ay-t*r/ n.
[portmanteau, delimiter + eliminate] A string or pattern used to delimit text into fields, but which is itself eliminated from the resulting list of fields. This jargon seems to have originated among Perl hackers in connection with the Perl split() function; however, it has been sighted in live use among Java and even Visual Basic programmers.
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delint/dee-lint/ v. obs.
To modify code to remove problems detected whenlinting. Confusingly, this process is also referred to as `linting' code. This term is no longer in general use because ANSI C compilers typically issue compile-time warnings almost as detailed as lint warnings.
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deltan.
1. [techspeak] A quantitative change, especially a small or incremental one (this use is general in physics and engineering). "I just doubled the speed of my program!" "What was the delta on program size?" "About 30 percent." (He doubled the speed of his program, but increased its size by only 30 percent.) 2. [Unix] Adiff, especially adiffstored under the set of version-control tools called SCCS (Source Code Control System) or RCS (Revision Control System). 3. n. A small quantity, but not as small asepsilon. The jargon usage ofdeltaandepsilonstems from the traditional use of these letters in mathematics for very small numerical quantities, particularly in `epsilon-delta' proofs in limit theory (as in the differential calculus). The termdeltais often used, onceepsilonhas been mentioned, to mean a quantity that is slightly bigger thanepsilonbut still very small. "The cost isn't epsilon, but it's delta" means that the cost isn't totally negligible, but it is nevertheless very small. Common constructions include `within delta of --', `within epsilon of --': that is, `close to' and `even closer to'.
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dementedadj.
Yet another term of disgust used to describe a malfunctioning program. The connotation in this case is that the program works as designed, but the design is bad. Said, for example, of a program that generates large numbers of meaningless error messages, implying that it is on the brink of imminent collapse. Comparewonky,brain-damaged,bozotic.
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demigod
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demigodn.
A hacker with years of experience, a world-wide reputation, and a major role in the development of at least one design, tool, or game used by or known to more than half of the hacker community. To qualify as a genuine demigod, the person must recognizably identify with the hacker community and have helped shape it. Major demigods include Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (co-inventors ofUnixandC), Richard M. Stallman (inventor ofEMACS), Larry Wall (inventor ofPerl), Linus Torvalds (inventor ofLinux), and most recently James Gosling (inventor of Java,NeWS, andGOSMACS) and Guido van Rossum (inventor ofPython). In their hearts of hearts, most hackers dream of someday becoming demigods themselves, and more than one major software project has been driven to completion by the author's veiled hopes of apotheosis. See alsonet.god,true-hacker.
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demo/de'moh/
[short for `demonstration'] 1. v. To demonstrate a product or prototype. A far more effective way of inducing bugs to manifest than any number oftestruns, especially when important people are watching. 2. n. The act of demoing. "I've gotta give a demo of the drool-proof interface; how does it work again?" 3. n. Esp. as `demo version', can refer either to an early, barely-functional version of a program which can be used for demonstration purposes as long as the operator usesexactlythe right commands and skirts its numerous bugs, deficiencies, and unimplemented portions, or to a special version of a program (frequently with some features crippled) which is distributed at little or no cost to the user for enticement purposes. 4. [demoscene] A sequence ofdemoeffects (usually) combined with self-composed music and hand-drawn ("pixelated") graphics. These days (1997) usually built to attend acompo. Often called `eurodemos' outside Europe, as most of thedemosceneactivity seems to have gathered in northern Europe and especially Scandinavia. See alsointro,dentro.
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demo moden.
1. [Sun] The state of beingheads downin order to finish code in time for ademo, usually due yesterday. 2. A mode in which video games sit by themselves running through a portion of the game, also known as `attract mode'. Some seriousapps have a demo mode they use as a screen saver, or may go through a demo mode on startup (for example, the Microsoft Windows opening screen -- which lets you impress your neighbors without actually having to put up withMicrosloth Windows).
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demoeffectn.
[demoscene] What among hackers is called adisplay hack. Classical effects include "plasma" (colorful mess), "keftales" (x*x+y*y and other similar patterns, usually combined with color-cycling), realtime fractals, realtime 3d graphics, etc. Historically, demo effects have cheated as much as possible to gain more speed and more complexity, using low-precision math and masses of assembler code and building animation realtime are three common tricks, but use of special hardware to fake effects is aGood Thingon the demoscene (though this is becoming less common as platforms like the Amiga fade away).
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demogroupn.
[demoscene] A group ofdemo(sense 4) composers. Job titles within a group include coders (the ones who write programs), graphicians (the ones who painstakingly pixelate the fine art), musicians (the music composers),sysops, traders/swappers (the ones who do the trading and other PR), and organizers (in larger groups). It is not uncommon for one person to do multiple jobs, but it has been observed that good coders are rarely good composers and vice versa. [How odd. Musical talent seems common among Internet/Unix hackers --ESR]
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demonn.
1. [MIT] A portion of a program that is not invoked explicitly, but that lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. Seedaemon. The distinction is that demons are usually processes within a program, while daemons are usually programs running on an operating system. 2. [outside MIT] Often used equivalently todaemon-- especially in theUnixworld, where the latter spelling and pronunciation is considered mildly archaic.
Demons in sense 1 are particularly common in AI programs. For example, a knowledge-manipulation program might implement inference rules as demons. Whenever a new piece of knowledge was added, various demons would activate (which demons depends on the particular piece of data) and would create additional pieces of knowledge by applying their respective inference rules to the original piece. These new pieces could in turn activate more demons as the inferences filtered down through chains of logic. Meanwhile, the main program could continue with whatever its primary task was.
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demon dialer
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demon dialern.
A program which repeatedly calls the same telephone number. Demon dialing may be benign (as when a number of communications programs contend for legitimate access to aBBSline) or malign (that is, used as a prank or denial-of-service attack). This term dates from theblue boxdays of the 1970s and early 1980s and is now semi-obsolescent amongphreakers; seewar dialerfor its contemporary progeny.
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demoparty
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demoscene
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demopartyn.
[demoscene] Aboveground descendant of thecopyparty, with emphasis shifted away from software piracy and towardscompos. Smaller demoparties, for 100 persons or less, are held quite often, sometimes even once a month, and usually last for one to two days. On the other end of the scale, huge demo parties are held once a year (and four of these have grown very large and occur annually - Assembly in Finland, The Party in Denmark, The Gathering in Norway, and NAID somewhere in north America). These parties usually last for three to five days, have room for 3000-5000 people, and have a party network with connection to the internet.