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abbrev
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abbrev/*-breev'/, /*-brev'/ n.
Common abbreviation for `abbreviation'.
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ABEND
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ABEND/a'bend/, /*-bend'/ n.
[ABnormal END] 1. Abnormal termination (of software);crash;lossage. Derives from an error message on the IBM 360; used jokingly by hackers but seriously mainly bycode grinders. Usually capitalized, but may appear as `abend'. Hackers will try to persuade you that ABEND is called `abend' because it is what system operators do to the machine late on Friday when they want to call it a day, and hence is from the German `Abend' = `Evening'. 2. [alt.callahans] Absent By Enforced Net Deprivation - used in the subject lines of postings warning friends of an imminent loss of Internet access. (This can be because of computer downtime, loss of provider, moving or illness.) Variants of this also appear: ABVND = `Absent By Voluntary Net Deprivation' and ABSEND = `Absent By Self-Enforced Net Deprivation' have been sighted.
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accumulator
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accumulatorn. obs.
1. Archaic term for a register. On-line use of it as a synonym for `register' is a fairly reliable indication that the user has been around for quite a while and/or that the architecture under discussion is quite old. The term in full is almost never used of microprocessor registers, for example, though symbolic names for arithmetic registers beginning in `A' derive from historical use of the term `accumulator' (and not, actually, from `arithmetic'). Confusingly, though, an `A' register name prefix may also stand for `address', as for example on the Motorola 680x0 family. 2. A register being used for arithmetic or logic (as opposed to addressing or a loop index), especially one being used to accumulate a sum or count of many items. This use is in context of a particular routine or stretch of code. "The FOOBAZ routine uses A3 as an accumulator." 3. One's in-basket (esp. among old-timers who might use sense 1). "You want this reviewed? Sure, just put it in the accumulator." (Seestack.)
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ACK
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Acme
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ACK/ak/ interj.
1. [common; from the ASCII mnemonic for 0000110] Acknowledge. Used to register one's presence (compare mainstreamYo!). An appropriate response topingorENQ. 2. [from the comic strip "Bloom County"] An exclamation of surprised disgust, esp. in "Ack pffft!" Semi-humorous. Generally this sense is not spelled in caps (ACK) and is distinguished by a following exclamation point. 3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell them you understand their point (seeNAK). Thus, for example, you might cut off an overly long explanation with "Ack. Ack. Ack. I get it now". 4. An affirmative. "Think we ought to ditch that damn NT server for a Linux box?" "ACK!"
There is also a usage "ACK?" (from sense 1) meaning "Are you there?", often used in email when earlier mail has produced no reply, or during a lull intalk modeto see if the person has gone away (the standard humorous response is of courseNAK(sense 1), i.e., "I'm not here").
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Acmen.
The canonical supplier of bizarre, elaborate, and non-functional gadgetry - where Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson (two cartoonists who specialized in elaborate contraptions) shop. The name has been humorously expanded as A (or American) Company Making Everything. (In fact, Acme was a real brand sold from Sears Roebuck catalogs in the early 1900s.) Describing some X as an "Acme X" either means "This isinsanely great", or, more likely, "This looksinsanely greaton paper, but in practice it's really easy to shoot yourself in the foot with it." Comparepistol.
This term, specially cherished by American hackers and explained here for the benefit of our overseas brethren, comes from the Warner Brothers' series of "Roadrunner" cartoons. In these cartoons, the famished Wile E. Coyote was forever attempting to catch up with, trap, and eat the Roadrunner. His attempts usually involved one or more high-technology Rube Goldberg devices - rocket jetpacks, catapults, magnetic traps, high-powered slingshots, etc. These were usually delivered in large cardboard boxes, labeled prominently with the Acme name. These devices invariably malfunctioned in improbable and violent ways.
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acolyte
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acolyten. obs.
[TMRC] AnOSUprivileged enough to submit data and programs to a member of thepriesthood.
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ad-hockery
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ad-hockery/ad-hok'*r-ee/ n.
[Purdue] 1. Gratuitous assumptions made inside certain programs, esp. expert systems, which lead to the appearance of semi-intelligent behavior but are in fact entirely arbitrary. For example, fuzzy-matching of input tokens that might be typing errors against a symbol table can make it look as though a program knows how to spell. 2. Special-case code to cope with some awkward input that would otherwise cause a program tochoke, presuming normal inputs are dealt with in some cleaner and more regular way. Also called `ad-hackery', `ad-hocity' (/ad-hos'*-tee/), `ad-crockery'. See alsoELIZA effect.
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Ada
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Adan.
APascal-descended language that was at one time made mandatory for Department of Defense software projects by the Pentagon. Hackers are nearly unanimous in observing that, technically, it is precisely what one might expect given that kind of endorsement by fiat; designed by committee, crockish, difficult to use, and overall a disastrous, multi-billion-dollar boondoggle (one common description wss "The PL/I of the 1980s"). Hackers find Ada's exception-handling and inter-process communication features particularly hilarious. Ada Lovelace (the daughter of Lord Byron who became the world's first programmer while cooperating with Charles Babbage on the design of his mechanical computing engines in the mid-1800s) would almost certainly blanch at the use to which her name has latterly been put; the kindest thing that has been said about it is that there is probably a good small language screaming to get out from inside its vast,elephantinebulk.
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address harvester
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address harvestern.
A robot that searches web pages and/or filters netnews traffic looking for valid email addresses. Some address harvesters are benign, used only for compiling address directories. Most, unfortunately, are run by miscreants compiling address lists tospam. Address harvesters can be foiled by ateergrube.
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adger/aj'r/ vt.
[UCLA mutant ofnadger, poss. also from the middle name of an infamoustenured graduate student] To make a bonehead move with consequences that could have been foreseen with even slight mental effort. E.g., "He started removing files and promptly adgered the whole project". Comparedumbass attack.
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admin
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admin/ad-min'/ n.
Short for `administrator'; very commonly used in speech or on-line to refer to the systems person in charge on a computer. Common constructions on this include `sysadmin' and `site admin' (emphasizing the administrator's role as a site contact for email and news) or `newsadmin' (focusing specifically on news). Comparepostmaster,sysop,system mangler.
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ADVENT/ad'vent/ n.
The prototypical computer adventure game, first designed by Will Crowther on thePDP-10in the mid-1970s as an attempt at computer-refereed fantasy gaming, and expanded into a puzzle-oriented game by Don Woods at Stanford in 1976. (Woods had been one of the authors ofINTERCAL.) Now better known as Adventure or Colossal Cave Adventure, but theTOPS-10operating system permitted only six-letter filenames. See alsovadding,Zork, andInfocom.
This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style since expected in text adventure games, and popularized several tag lines that have become fixtures of hacker-speak: "A huge green fierce snake bars the way!" "I see no X here" (for some noun X). "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." "You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different." The `magic words'xyzzyandplughalso derive from this game.
Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the Mammoth & Flint Ridge cave system; it actuallyhasa `Colossal Cave' and a `Bedquilt' as in the game, and the `Y2' that also turns up is cavers' jargon for a map reference to a secondary entrance.
ADVENT sources are available for FTP atftp://ftp.wustl.edu/doc/misc/if-archive/games/source/advent.tar.Z.
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AFAIK// n.
[Usenet] Abbrev. for "As Far As I Know".
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AFJ// n.
Written-only abbreviation for "April Fool's Joke". Elaborate April Fool's hoaxes are a long-established tradition on Usenet and Internet; seekremvaxfor an example. In fact, April Fool's Day is theonlyseasonal holiday consistently marked by customary observances on Internet and other hacker networks.
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AFK
[MUD] Abbrev. for "Away From Keyboard". Used to notify others that you will be momentarily unavailable online. eg. "Let's not go kill that frost giant yet, I need to go AFK to make a phone call". Often MUDs will have a command to politely inform others of your absence when they try to talk with you. The term is not restricted to MUDs, however, and has become common in many chat situations, from IRC to Unix talk.
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AI
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AI/A-I/ n.
Abbreviation for `Artificial Intelligence', so common that the full form is almost never written or spoken among hackers.
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AI-complete/A-I k*m-pleet'/ adj.
[MIT, Stanford: by analogy with `NP-complete' (seeNP-)] Used to describe problems or subproblems in AI, to indicate that the solution presupposes a solution to the `strong AI problem' (that is, the synthesis of a human-level intelligence). A problem that is AI-complete is, in other words, just too hard.
Examples of AI-complete problems are `The Vision Problem' (building a system that can see as well as a human) and `The Natural Language Problem' (building a system that can understand and speak a natural language as well as a human). These may appear to be modular, but all attempts so far (1999) to solve them have foundered on the amount of context information and `intelligence' they seem to require. See alsogedanken.
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AI koans/A-I koh'anz/ pl.n.
A series of pastiches of Zen teaching riddles created by Danny Hillis at the MIT AI Lab around various major figures of the Lab's culture (several are included underSome AI Koansin Appendix A). See alsoha ha only serious,mu, andhacker humor.
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AIDS/aydz/ n.
Short for A* Infected Disk Syndrome (`A*' is aglobpattern that matches, but is not limited to, Apple or Amiga), this condition is quite often the result of practicing unsafeSEX. Seevirus,worm,Trojan horse,virgin.
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AIDX/ayd'k*z/ n.
Derogatory term for IBM's perverted version of Unix, AIX, especially for the AIX 3.? used in the IBM RS/6000 series (some hackers think it is funnier just to pronounce "AIX" as "aches"). A victim of the dreaded "hybridism" disease, this attempt to combine the two main currents of the Unix stream (BSDandUSG Unix) became amonstrosityto haunt system administrators' dreams. For example, if new accounts are created while many users are logged on, the load average jumps quickly over 20 due to silly implementation of the user databases. For a quite similar disease, compareHP-SUX. Also, compareMacintrash,Nominal Semidestructor,ScumOS,sun-stools.
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airplane rule
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airplane rulen.
"Complexity increases the possibility of failure; a twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane." By analogy, in both software and electronics, the rule that simplicity increases robustness. It is correspondingly argued that the right way to build reliable systems is to put all your eggs in one basket, after making sure that you've built a reallygoodbasket. See alsoKISS Principle,elegant.
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Alderson loop
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Alderson loopn.
[Intel] A special version of aninfinite loopwhere there is an exit condition available, but inaccessible in the current implementation of the code. Typically this is created while debugging user interface code. An example would be when there is a menu stating, "Select 1-3 or 9 to quit" and 9 is not allowed by the function that takes the selection from the user.
This term received its name from a programmer who had coded a modal message box in MSAccess with no Ok or Cancel buttons, thereby disabling the entire program whenever the box came up. The message box had the proper code for dismissal and even was set up so that when the non-existent Ok button was pressed the proper code would be called.
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aliasing bug
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aliasing bugn.
A class of subtle programming errors that can arise in code that does dynamic allocation, esp. viamalloc(3)or equivalent. If several pointers address (`aliases for') a given hunk of storage, it may happen that the storage is freed or reallocated (and thus moved) through one alias and then referenced through another, which may lead to subtle (and possibly intermittent) lossage depending on the state and the allocation history of the mallocarena. Avoidable by use of allocation strategies that never alias allocated core, or by use of higher-level languages, such asLISP, which employ a garbage collector (seeGC). Also called astale pointer bug. See alsoprecedence lossage,smash the stack,fandango on core,memory leak,memory smash,overrun screw,spam.
Historical note: Though this term is nowadays associated with C programming, it was already in use in a very similar sense in the Algol-60 and FORTRAN communities in the 1960s.
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Alice and Bob
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Alice and Bobn.
The archetypal individuals used as examples in discussions of cryptographic protocols. Originally, theorists would say something like: "A communicates with someone who claims to be B, So to be sure, A tests that B knows a secret number K. So A sends to B a random number X. B then forms Y by encrypting X under key K and sends Y back to A" Because this sort of thing is is quite hard to follow, theorists stopped using the unadorned letters A and B to represent the main players and started calling them Alice and Bob. So now we say "Alice communicates with someone claiming to be Bob, and to be sure, So Alice tests that Bob knows a secret number K. Alice sends to Bob a random number X. Bob then forms Y by encrypting X under key K and sends Y back to Alice". A whole mythology rapidly grew up around the metasyntactic names; see http://www.conceptlabs.co.uk/alicebob.html.
In Bruce Schneier's definitive introductory text "Applied Cryptography" (2nd ed., 1996, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-11709-9) he introduces a table of dramatis personae headed by Alice and Bob. Others include Carol (a participant in three- and four-party protocols), Dave (a participant in four-party protocols), Eve (an eavesdropper), Mallory (a malicious active attacker), Trent (a trusted arbitrator), Walter (a warden), Peggy (a prover) and Victor (a verifier). These names for roles are either already standard or, given the wide popularity of the book, may be expected to quickly become so.