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Infinite-Monkey Theoremn.
"If you put aninfinitenumber of monkeys at typewriters, eventually one will bash out the script for Hamlet." (One may also hypothesize a small number of monkeys and a very long period of time.) This theorem asserts nothing about the intelligence of the onerandommonkey that eventually comes up with the script (and note that the mob will also type out all the possibleincorrectversions of Hamlet). It may be referred to semi-seriously when justifying abrute forcemethod; the implication is that, with enough resources thrown at it, any technical challenge becomes aone-banana problem. This argument gets more respect sinceLinuxjustified thebazaarmode of development.
This theorem was first popularized by the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington. It became part of the idiom of techies via the classic SF short story "Inflexible Logic" by Russell Maloney, and many younger hackers know it through a reference in Douglas Adams's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". On 1 April 2000 the usage acquired its own Internet standard, (Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite).
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infinity
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infinityn.
1. The largest value that can be represented in a particular type of variable (register, memory location, data type, whatever). 2. `minus infinity': The smallest such value, not necessarily or even usually the simple negation of plus infinity. In N-bit twos-complement arithmetic, infinity is 2^(N-1) - 1 but minus infinity is - (2^(N-1)), not -(2^(N-1) - 1). Note also that this is different fromtime T equals minus infinity, which is closer to a mathematician's usage of infinity.
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inflatevt.
To decompress orpuffa file. Rare among Internet hackers, used primarily by MS-DOS/Windows types.
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Infocomn.
A now-legendary games company, active from 1979 to 1989, that commercialized the MDL parser technology used forZorkto produce a line of text adventure games that remain favorites among hackers. Infocom's games were intelligent, funny, witty, erudite, irreverent, challenging, satirical, and most thoroughly hackish in spirit. The physical game packages from Infocom are now prized collector's items. After being acquired by Activision in 1989 they did a few more "modern" (e.g. graphics-intensive) games which were less successful than reissues of their classics.
The software, thankfully, is still extant; Infocom games were written in a kind of P-code and distributed with a P-code interpreter core, and not only freeware emulators for that interpreter but an actual compiler as well have been written to permit the P-code to be run on platforms the games never originally graced. In fact, new games written in this P-code are still bering written. (Emulators that can run Infocom game ZIPs, and new games, are available atftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu:/doc/misc/if-archive/infocom.)
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initgame/in-it'gaym/ n.
[IRC] AnIRCversion of the trivia game "Botticelli", in which one user changes hisnickto the initials of a famous person or other named entity, and the others on the channel ask yes or no questions, with the one to guess the person getting to be "it" next. As a courtesy, the one picking the initials starts by providing a 4-letter hint of the form sex, nationality, life-status, reality-status. For example, MAAR means "Male, American, Alive, Real" (as opposed to "fictional"). Initgame can be surprisingly addictive. See alsohing.
[1996 update: a recognizable version of the initgame has become a staple of some radio talk shows in the U.S. We had it first! - ESR]
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insanely greatadj.
[Mac community, from Steve Jobs; also BSD Unix people via Bill Joy] Something so incrediblyelegantthat it is imaginable only to someone possessing the most puissant ofhacker-natures.
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installfest
[Linux community since c.1998] Common portmanteau word for "installation festival"; Linux user groups frequently run these. Computer users are invited to bring their machines to have Linux installed on their machines. The idea is to get them painlessly over the biggest hump in migrating to Linux, which is initially installing and configuring it for the user's machine.
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INTERCAL/in't*r-kal/ n.
[said by the authors to stand for `Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym'] A computer language designed by Don Woods and James Lyons in 1972. INTERCAL is purposely different from all other computer languages in all ways but one; it is purely a written language, being totally unspeakable. An excerpt from the INTERCAL Reference Manual will make the style of the language clear:
It is a well-known and oft-demonstrated fact that a person whose work is incomprehensible is held in high esteem. For example, if one were to state that the simplest way to store a value of 65536 in a 32-bit INTERCAL variable is:DO :1 <- #0$#256any sensible programmer would say that that was absurd. Since this is indeed the simplest method, the programmer would be made to look foolish in front of his boss, who would of course have happened to turn up, as bosses are wont to do. The effect would be no less devastating for the programmer having been correct.
DO :1 <- #0$#256
any sensible programmer would say that that was absurd. Since this is indeed the simplest method, the programmer would be made to look foolish in front of his boss, who would of course have happened to turn up, as bosses are wont to do. The effect would be no less devastating for the programmer having been correct.
INTERCAL has many other peculiar features designed to make it even more unspeakable. The Woods-Lyons implementation was actually used by many (well, at least several) people at Princeton. The language has been recently reimplemented as C-INTERCAL and is consequently enjoying an unprecedented level of unpopularity; there is even analt.lang.intercalnewsgroup devoted to the study and...appreciation of the language on Usenet.
Inevitably, INTERCAL has a home page on the Web: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/intercal/. An extended version, implemented in (what else?)Perland adding object-oriented features, is available at http://dd-sh.assurdo.com/INTERCAL. See alsoBefunge.
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interestingadj.
In hacker parlance, this word has strong connotations of `annoying', or `difficult', or both. Hackers relish a challenge, and enjoy wringing all the irony possible out of the ancient Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times". Opposetrivial,uninteresting.
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Internetn.
The mother of all networks. First incarnated beginning in 1969 as the ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defense research testbed. Though it has been widely believed that the goal was to develop a network architecture for military command-and-control that could survive disruptions up to and including nuclear war, this is a myth; in fact, ARPANET was conceived from the start as a way to get most economical use out of then-scarce large-computer resources.
As originally imagined, ARPANET's major use would have been to support what is now called remote login and more sophisticated forms of distributed computing, but the infant technology of electronic mail quickly grew to dominate actual usage. Universities, research labs and defense contractors early discovered the Internet's potential as a medium of communication betweenhumansand linked up in steadily increasing numbers, connecting together a quirky mix of academics, techies, hippies, SF fans, hackers, and anarchists. The roots of this lexicon lie in those early years.
Over the next quarter-century the Internet evolved in many ways. The typical machine/OS combination moved fromDECPDP-10s andPDP-20s, runningTOPS-10andTOPS-20, to PDP-11s and VAXes and Suns runningUnix, and in the 1990s to Unix on Intel microcomputers. The Internet's protocols grew more capable, most notably in the move from NCP/IP toTCP/IPin 1982 and the implementation of Domain Name Service in 1983. It was around this time that people began referring to the collection of interconnected networks with ARPANET at its core as "the Internet".
The ARPANET had a fairly strict set of participation guidelines - connected institutions had to be involved with a DOD-related research project. By the mid-80s, many of the organizations clamoring to join didn't fit this profile. In 1986, the National Science Foundation built NSFnet to open up access to its five regional supercomputing centers; NSFnet became the backbone of the Internet, replacing the original ARPANET pipes (which were formally shut down in 1990). Between 1990 and late 1994 the pieces of NSFnet were sold to major telecommunications companies until the Internet backbone had gone completely commercial.
That year, 1994, was also the year the mainstream culture discovered the Internet. Once again, thekiller appwas not the anticipated one - rather, what caught the public imagination was the hypertext and multimedia features of the World Wide Web. Subsequently the Internet has seen off its only serious challenger (the OSI protocol stack favored by European telecom monopolies) and is in the process of absorbing into itself many of the proprietary networks built during the second wave of wide-area networking after 1980. It is now (1996) a commonplace even in mainstream media to predict that a globally-extended Internet will become the key unifying communications technology of the next century. See alsothe networkandInternet address.
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Internet addressn.
1. [techspeak] An absolute network address of the formfoo@bar.baz, where foo is a user name, bar is asitename, and baz is a `domain' name, possibly including periods itself. Contrast withbang path; see alsothe networkandnetwork address. All Internet machines and most UUCP sites can now resolve these addresses, thanks to a large amount of behind-the-scenes magic andPDsoftware written since 1980 or so. See alsobang path,domainist. 2. More loosely, any network address reachable through Internet; this includesbang pathaddresses and some internal corporate and government networks.
Reading Internet addresses is something of an art. Here are the four most important top-level functional Internet domains followed by a selection of geographical domains:
comcommercial organizationsedueducational institutionsgovU.S. government civilian sitesmilU.S. military sites
Note that most of the sites in thecomandedudomains are in the U.S. or Canada.
ussites in the U.S. outside the functional domainssusites in the ex-Soviet Union (seekremvax).uksites in the United Kingdom
Within theusdomain, there are subdomains for the fifty states, each generally with a name identical to the state's postal abbreviation. Within theukdomain, there is anacsubdomain for academic sites and acodomain for commercial ones. Other top-level domains may be divided up in similar ways.
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Internet Death Penalty
[Usenet] (often abbreviated IDP) The ultimate sanction againstspam-emitting sites - complete shunning at the router level of all mail and packets, as well as Usenet messages, from the offending domain(s). CompareUsenet Death Penalty, with which it is sometimes confused.
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Internet Exploder
[very common] Pejorative hackerism for Microsoft's "Internet Explorer" web browser (also "Internet Exploiter"). CompareHP-SUX,AIDX,buglix,Macintrash,Telerat,ScumOS,sun-stools,Slowlaris.
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Internet Exploitern.
Another common name-of-insult for Internet Explorer, Microsoft's overweight Web Browser; more hostile thanInternet Exploder. Reflects widespread hostility to Microsoft and a sense that it is seeking to hijack, monopolize, and corrupt the Internet. CompareExploderand the less pejorativeNetscrape.
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interrupt
1. [techspeak] n. On a computer, an event that interrupts normal processing and temporarily diverts flow-of-control through an "interrupt handler" routine. See alsotrap. 2. interj. A request for attention from a hacker. Often explicitly spoken. "Interrupt -- have you seen Joe recently?" Seepriority interrupt. 3. Under MS-DOS, nearly synonymous with `system call', because the OS and BIOS routines are both called using the INT instruction (seeinterrupt list) and because programmers so often have to bypass the OS (going directly to a BIOS interrupt) to get reasonable performance.
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interrupt listn.
[MS-DOS] The list of all known software interrupt calls (both documented and undocumented) for IBM PCs and compatibles, maintained and made available for free redistribution by Ralf Brown. As of late 1992, it had grown to approximately two megabytes in length.
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interrupts locked outadj.
When someone is ignoring you. In a restaurant, after several fruitless attempts to get the waitress's attention, a hacker might well observe "She must have interrupts locked out". The synonym `interrupts disabled' is also common. Variations abound; "to have one's interrupt mask bit set" and "interrupts masked out" are also heard. See alsospl.
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intron.
[demoscene] Introductoryscreenof some production. 2. A shortdemo, usually showing just one or twoscreens. 3. Small, usually 64k, 40k or 4kdemo. Sizes are generally dictated bycomporules. See alsodentro,demo.
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IRC/I-R-C/ n.
[Internet Relay Chat] A worldwide "party line" network that allows one to converse with others in real time. IRC is structured as a network of Internet servers, each of which accepts connections from client programs, one per user. The IRC community and theUsenetandMUDcommunities overlap to some extent, including both hackers and regular folks who have discovered the wonders of computer networks. Some Usenet jargon has been adopted on IRC, as have some conventions such asemoticons. There is also a vigorous native jargon, represented in this lexicon by entries marked `[IRC]'. See alsotalk mode.
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ironn.
Hardware, especially older and larger hardware ofmainframeclass with big metal cabinets housing relatively low-density electronics (but the term is also used of modern supercomputers). Often in the phrasebig iron. Opposesilicon. See alsodinosaur.
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Iron Agen.
In the history of computing, 1961-1971 -- the formative era of commercialmainframetechnology, when ferrite-coredinosaurs ruled the earth. The Iron Age began, ironically enough, with the delivery of the first minicomputer (the PDP-1) and ended with the introduction of the first commercial microprocessor (the Intel 4004) in 1971. See alsoStone Age; compareelder days.
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iron boxn.
[Unix/Internet] A special environment set up to trap acrackerlogging in over remote connections long enough to be traced. May include a modifiedshellrestricting the cracker's movements in unobvious ways, and `bait' files designed to keep him interested and logged on. See alsoback door,firewall machine,Venus flytrap, and Clifford Stoll's account in "The Cuckoo's Egg" of how he made and used one (see theBibliographyin Appendix C). Comparepadded cell,honey pot.