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heavyweightadj.
[common] High-overhead;baroque; code-intensive; featureful, but costly. Esp. used of communication protocols, language designs, and any sort of implementation in which maximum generality and/or ease of implementation has been pushed at the expense of mundane considerations such as speed, memory utilization, and startup time.EMACSis a heavyweight editor;Xis anextremelyheavyweight window system. This term isn't pejorative, but one hacker's heavyweight is another'selephantineand a third'smonstrosity. Oppose `lightweight'. Usage: now borders on techspeak, especially in the compound `heavyweight process'.
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heisenbug
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Helen Keller mode
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heavyweight
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heisenbug/hi:'zen-buhg/ n.
[from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics] A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it. (This usage is not even particularly fanciful; the use of a debugger sometimes alters a program's operating environment significantly enough that buggy code, such as that which relies on the values of uninitialized memory, behaves quite differently.) Antonym ofBohr bug; see alsomandelbug,schroedinbug. In C, nine out of ten heisenbugs result from uninitialized auto variables,fandango on corephenomena (esp. lossage related to corruption of the mallocarena) or errors thatsmash the stack.
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Helen Keller mode
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hello sailor!
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heisenbug
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Helen Keller moden.
1. State of a hardware or software system that is deaf, dumb, and blind, i.e., accepting no input and generating no output, usually due to an infinite loop or some other excursion intodeep space. (Unfair to the real Helen Keller, whose success at learning speech was triumphant.) See alsogo flatline,catatonic. 2. On IBM PCs under DOS, refers to a specific failure mode in which a screen saver has kicked in over anill-behavedapplication which bypasses the very interrupts the screen saver watches for activity. Your choices are to try to get from the program's current state through a successful save-and-exit without being able to see what you're doing, or to re-boot the machine. This isn't (strictly speaking) a crash.
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hello sailor!
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hello wall!
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Helen Keller mode
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hello sailor!interj.
Occasional West Coast equivalent ofhello world; seems to have originated at SAIL, later associated with the gameZork(which also included "hello, aviator" and "hello, implementor"). Originally from the traditional hooker's greeting to a swabbie fresh off the boat, of course. The standard response is "Nothing happens here."; of all the Zork/Dungeon games, only in Infocom's Zork 3 is "Hello, Sailor" actually useful (excluding the unique situation where _knowing_ this fact is important in Dungeon...).
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hello wall!
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hello world
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hello sailor!
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hello, wall!excl.
Seewall.
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hello world
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hex
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hello wall!
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hello worldinterj.
1. The canonical minimal test message in the C/Unix universe. 2. Any of the minimal programs that emit this message. Traditionally, the first program a C coder is supposed to write in a new environment is one that just prints "hello, world" to standard output (and indeed it is the first example program inK&R). Environments that generate an unreasonably large executable for this trivial test or which require ahairycompiler-linker invocation to generate it are considered tolose(seeX). 3. Greeting uttered by a hacker making an entrance or requesting information from anyone present. "Hello, world! Is the LAN back up yet?"
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hex
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hexadecimal
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hello world
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hexn.
1. Short forhexadecimal, base 16. 2. A 6-pack of anything (comparequad, sense 2). Neither usage has anything to do withmagicorblack art, though the pun is appreciated and occasionally used by hackers. True story: As a joke, some hackers once offered some surplus ICs for sale to be worn as protective amulets against hostile magic. The chips were, of course, hex inverters.
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hexadecimal
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hexit
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hex
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hexadecimaln.
Base 16. Coined in the early 1960s to replace earlier `sexadecimal', which was too racy and amusing for stuffy IBM, and later adopted by the rest of the industry.
Actually, neither term is etymologically pure. If we take `binary' to be paradigmatic, the most etymologically correct term for base 10, for example, is `denary', which comes from `deni' (ten at a time, ten each), a Latin `distributive' number; the corresponding term for base-16 would be something like `sendenary'. `Decimal' is from an ordinal number; the corresponding prefix for 6 would imply something like `sextidecimal'. The `sexa-' prefix is Latin but incorrect in this context, and `hexa-' is Greek. The word `octal' is similarly incorrect; a correct form would be `octaval' (to go with decimal), or `octonary' (to go with binary). If anyone ever implements a base-3 computer, computer scientists will be faced with the unprecedented dilemma of a choice between twocorrectforms; both `ternary' and `trinary' have a claim to this throne.
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hexit
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HHOK
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hexit/hek'sit/ n.
A hexadecimal digit (0-9, and A-F or a-f). Used by people who claim that there are onlytendigits, dammit; sixteen-fingered human beings are rather rare, despite what some keyboard designs might seem to imply (seespace-cadet keyboard).
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HHOK
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HHOS
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hexit
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HHOK
Seeha ha only serious.
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HHOS
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hidden flag
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HHOK
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HHOS
Seeha ha only serious.
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hidden flag
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high bit
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HHOS
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hidden flagn.
[scientific computation] An extra option added to a routine without changing the calling sequence. For example, instead of adding an explicit input variable to instruct a routine to give extra diagnostic output, the programmer might just add a test for some otherwise meaningless feature of the existing inputs, such as a negative mass. The use of hidden flags can make a program very hard to debug and understand, but is all too common wherever programs are hacked on in a hurry.
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high bit
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high moby
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hidden flag
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high bitn.
[from `high-order bit'] 1. The most significant bit in a byte. 2. [common] By extension, the most significant part of something other than a data byte: "Spare me the wholesaga, just give me the high bit." See alsometa bit,hobbit,dread high-bit disease, and compare the mainstream slang `bottom line'.
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high moby
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highly
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high bit
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high moby/hi:' mohb'ee/ n.
The high half of a 512KPDP-10's physical address space; the other half was of course the low moby. This usage has been generalized in a way that has outlasted thePDP-10; for example, at the 1990 Washington D.C. Area Science Fiction Conclave (Disclave), when a miscommunication resulted in two separate wakes being held in commemoration of the shutdown of MIT's lastITSmachines, the one on the upper floor was dubbed the `high moby' and the other the `low moby'. All parties involvedgrokked this instantly. Seemoby.
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highly
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hing
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highlyadv.
[scientific computation] The preferred modifier for overstating an understatement. As in: `highly nonoptimal', the worst possible way to do something; `highly nontrivial', either impossible or requiring a major research project; `highly nonlinear', completely erratic and unpredictable; `highly nontechnical', drivel written forlusers, oversimplified to the point of being misleading or incorrect (comparedrool-proof paper). In other computing cultures, postfixing ofin the extrememight be preferred.
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hing
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hired gun
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hing// n.
[IRC] Fortuitous typo for `hint', now in wide intentional use among players ofinitgame. Comparenewsfroup,filk.
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hired gun
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hirsute
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hing
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hired gunn.
A contract programmer, as opposed to a full-time staff member. All the connotations of this term suggested by innumerable spaghetti Westerns are intentional.
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hirsute
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HLL
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hired gun
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hirsuteadj.
Occasionally used humorously as a synonym forhairy.
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HLL
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hoarding
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HLL/H-L-L/ n.
[High-Level Language (as opposed to assembler)] Found primarily in email and news rather than speech. Rarely, the variants `VHLL' and `MLL' are found. VHLL stands for `Very-High-Level Language' and is used to describe abondage-and-discipline languagethat the speaker happens to like; Prolog and Backus's FP are often called VHLLs. `MLL' stands for `Medium-Level Language' and is sometimes used half-jokingly to describeC, alluding to its `structured-assembler' image. See alsolanguages of choice.
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hoarding
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hobbit
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hoardingn.
Seesoftware hoarding.
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hobbit
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hog
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hobbitn.
1. [rare] The High Order BIT of a byte; same as themeta bitorhigh bit. 2. The non-ITS name of vad@ai.mit.edu (*Hobbit*), master of lasers.
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hog
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hole
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hogn.,vt.
1. Favored term to describe programs or hardware that seem to eat far more than their share of a system's resources, esp. those which noticeably degrade interactive response.Notused of programs that are simply extremely large or complex or that are merely painfully slow themselves. More often than not encountered in qualified forms, e.g., `memory hog', `core hog', `hog the processor', `hog the disk'. "A controller that never gives up the I/O bus gets killed after the bus-hog timer expires." 2. Also said ofpeoplewho use more than their fair share of resources (particularly disk, where it seems that 10% of the people use 90% of the disk, no matter how big the disk is or how many people use it). Of course, once disk hogs fill up one filesystem, they typically find some other new one to infect, claiming to the sysadmin that they have an important new project to complete.
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hole
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hollised
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holen.
A region in an otherwiseflatentity which is not actually present. For example, some Unix filesystems can store large files with holes so that unused regions of the file are never actually stored on disk. (In techspeak, these are referred to as `sparse' files.) As another example, the region of memory in IBM PCs reserved for memory-mapped I/O devices which may not actually be present is called `the I/O hole', since memory-management systems must skip over this area when filling user requests for memory.
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hollised
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hollised/hol'ist/ adj.
[Usenet:sci.space] To be hollised is to have been ordered by one's employer not to post any even remotely job-related material to Usenet (or, by extension, to other Internet media). The original and most notorious case of this involved one Ken Hollis, a Lockheed employee and space-program enthusiast who posted publicly available material on access to Space Shuttle launches tosci.space. He was gagged under threat of being fired in 1994 at the behest of NASA public-relations officers. The result was, of course, a huge publicity black eye for NASA. Nevertheless several other NASA contractor employees were subsequently hollised for similar activities. Use of this term carries the strong connotation that the persons doing the gagging are bureaucratic idiots blinded to their own best interests by territorial reflexes.
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holy wars
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home box
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holy warsn.
[fromUsenet, but may predate it; common] n.flame wars overreligious issues. The paper by Danny Cohen that popularized the termsbig-endianandlittle-endianin connection with the LSB-first/MSB-first controversy was entitled "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace".
Great holy wars of the past have includedITSvs.Unix,Unixvs.VMS,BSDUnix vs.USG Unix,Cvs.Pascal,Cvs. FORTRAN, etc. In the year 2000, popular favorites of the day are KDE vs, GNOME, vim vs. elvis, Linux vs. [Free|Net|Open]BSD. Hardy perennials includeEMACSvs.vi, my personal computer vs. everyone else's personal computer, ad nauseam. The characteristic that distinguishes holy wars from normal technical disputes is that in a holy war most of the participants spend their time trying to pass off personal value choices and cultural attachments as objective technical evaluations. This happens precisely because in a true holy war, the actual substantive differences between the sides are relatively minor. See alsotheology.
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home box
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home machine
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holy wars
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home boxn.
A hacker's personal machine, especially one he or she owns. "Yeah? Well,myhome box runs a full 4.4 BSD, so there!"
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home machine
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home page