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laundromat
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LDB
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lasherism
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= L =
laundromatn.
Syn.disk farm; seewashing machine.
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LDB
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leaf site
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laundromat
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LDB/l*'d*b/ vt.
[from the PDP-10 instruction set] To extract from the middle. "LDB me a slice of cake, please." This usage has been kept alive by Common LISP's function of the same name. Considered silly. See alsoDPB.
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leaf site
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leak
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LDB
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leaf siten.,obs.
Before pervasive TCP/IP, this term was used of a machine that merely originated and read Usenet news or mail, and did not relay any third-party traffic. It was often uttered in a critical tone; when the ratio of leaf sites to backbone, rib, and other relay sites got too high, the network tended to develop bottlenecks. Comparebackbone site,rib site. Now that traffic patterns depend more on the distribution of routers than of host machines this term has largely fallen out of use.
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leak
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leaky heap
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leaf site
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leakn.
With qualifier, one of a class of resource-management bugs that occur when resources are not freed properly after operations on them are finished, so they effectively disappear (leak out). This leads to eventual exhaustion as new allocation requests come in.memory leakandfd leakhave their own entries; one might also refer, to, say, a `window handle leak' in a window system.
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leaky heap
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leapfrog attack
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leak
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leaky heapn.
[Cambridge] Anarenawith amemory leak.
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leapfrog attack
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leech
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leaky heap
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leapfrog attackn.
Use of userid and password information obtained illicitly from one host (e.g., downloading a file of account IDs and passwords, tapping TELNET, etc.) to compromise another host. Also, the act of TELNETting through one or more hosts in order to confuse a trace (a standard cracker procedure).
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leech
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leech mode
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leapfrog attack
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leech
1. n. (Also `leecher'.) Among BBS types, crackers andwarez d00dz, one who consumes knowledge without generating new software, cracks, or techniques. BBS culture specifically defines a leech as someone who downloads files with few or no uploads in return, and who does not contribute to the message section. Cracker culture extends this definition to someone (alamer, usually) who constantly presses informed sources for information and/or assistance, but has nothing to contribute. 2. v. [common, Toronto area] To instantly fetch a file (other than a mail attachment) whether by FTP or IRC file req or any other method. Seems to be a holdover from the early 1990s when Toronto had a very active BBS and warez scene.
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leech mode
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legal
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leech
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leech moden.
[warez d00dz] "Leech mode" or "leech access" or (simply "leech" as in "You get leech") is the access mode on a FTP site where one can download as many files as one wants, without having to upload. Leech mode is often promised on banner sites, but rarely obtained. Seeratio site,banner site.
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legal
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legalese
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leech mode
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legaladj.
Loosely used to mean `in accordance with all the relevant rules', esp. in connection with some set of constraints defined by software. "The older =+ alternate for += is no longer legal syntax in ANSI C." "This parser processes each line of legal input the moment it sees the trailing linefeed." Hackers often model their work as a sort of game played with the environment in which the objective is to maneuver through the thicket of `natural laws' to achieve a desired objective. Their use of `legal' is flavored as much by this game-playing sense as by the more conventional one having to do with courts and lawyers. Comparelanguage lawyer,legalese.
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legalese
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LER
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legal
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legalesen.
Dense, pedantic verbiage in a language description, product specification, or interface standard; text that seems designed to obfuscate and requires alanguage lawyertoparseit. Though hackers are not afraid of high information density and complexity in language (indeed, they rather enjoy both), they share a deep and abiding loathing for legalese; they associate it with deception,suits, and situations in which hackers generally get the short end of the stick.
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LER
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LERP
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legalese
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LER/L-E-R/
n. 1. [TMRC, from `Light-Emitting Diode'] A light-emitting resistor (that is, one in the process of burning up). Ohm's law was broken. See alsoSED. 2. An incandescent light bulb (the filament emits light because it's resistively heated).
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LERP
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let the smoke out
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LER
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LERP/lerp/ vi.,n.
Quasi-acronym for Linear Interpolation, used as a verb or noun for the operation. "Bresenham's algorithm lerps incrementally between the two endpoints of the line."
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let the smoke out
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letterbomb
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LERP
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let the smoke outv.
To fry hardware (seefried). Seemagic smokefor a discussion of the underlying mythology.
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letterbomb
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lexer
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let the smoke out
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letterbomb
1. n. A piece ofemailcontaininglive dataintended to do nefarious things to the recipient's machine or terminal. It used to be possible, for example, to send letterbombs that would lock up some specific kinds of terminals when they are viewed, so thoroughly that the user must cycle power (seecycle, sense 3) to unwedge them. Under Unix, a letterbomb can also try to get part of its contents interpreted as a shell command to the mailer. The results of this could range from silly to tragic; fortunately it has been some years since any of the standard Unix/Internet mail software was vulnerable to such an attack (though, as the Melissa virus attack demonstrated in early 1999, Microsoft systems can have serious problems). See alsoTrojan horse; comparenastygram. 2. Loosely, amailbomb.
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lexer
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lexiphage
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letterbomb
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lexer/lek'sr/ n.
Common hacker shorthand for `lexical analyzer', the input-tokenizing stage in the parser for a language (the part that breaks it into word-like pieces). "Some C lexers get confused by the old-style compound ops like=-."
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lexiphage
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life
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lexiphage/lek'si-fayj`/ n.
A notorious wordchomperon ITS. Seebagbiter. This program would draw on a selected victim's bitmapped terminal the words "THE BAG" in ornate letters, followed a pair of jaws biting pieces of it off.
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life
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Life is hard
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lexiphage
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lifen.
1. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton Conway and first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner ("Scientific American", October 1970); the game's popularity had to wait a few years for computers on which it could reasonably be played, as it's no fun to simulate the cells by hand. Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with it, and hackers at various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented life inTECO!; seeGosperism). When a hacker mentions `life', he is much more likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal, or the human state of existence. 2. The opposite ofUsenet. As in "Get a life!"
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Life is hard
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light pipe
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life
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Life is hardprov.
[XEROX PARC] This phrase has two possible interpretations: (1) "While your suggestion may have some merit, I will behave as though I hadn't heard it." (2) "While your suggestion has obvious merit, equally obvious circumstances prevent it from being seriously considered." The charm of the phrase lies precisely in this subtle but important ambiguity.
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light pipe
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lightweight
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Life is hard
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light pipen.
Fiber optic cable. Opposecopper.
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lightweight
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like kicking dead whales down the beach
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light pipe
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lightweightadj.
Opposite ofheavyweight; usually found in combining forms such as `lightweight process'.
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like kicking dead whales down the beach
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lightweight
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like kicking dead whales down the beachadj.
Describes a slow, difficult, and disgusting process. First popularized by a famous quote about the difficulty of getting work done under one of IBM's mainframe OSes. "Well, youcouldwrite a C compiler in COBOL, but it would be like kicking dead whales down the beach." See alsofear and loathing.
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like nailing jelly to a tree
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line 666
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like nailing jelly to a treeadj.
Used to describe a task thought to be impossible, esp. one in which the difficulty arises from poor specification or inherent slipperiness in the problem domain. "Trying to display the `prettiest' arrangement of nodes and arcs that diagrams a given graph is like nailing jelly to a tree, because nobody's sure what `prettiest' means algorithmically."
Hacker use of this term may recall mainstream slang originated early in the 20th century by President Theodore Roosevelt. There is a legend that, weary of inconclusive talks with Colombia over the right to dig a canal through its then-province Panama, he remarked, "Negotiating with those pirates is like trying to nail currant jelly to the wall." Roosevelt's government subsequently encouraged the anti-Colombian insurgency that created the nation of Panama.
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line 666
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line eater the
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line 666[from Christian eschatological myth] n.
The notional line of source at which a program fails for obscure reasons, implying either thatsomebodyis out to get it (when you are the programmer), or that it richly deserves to be so gotten (when you are not). "It works when I trace through it, but seems to crash on line 666 when I run it." "What happens is that whenever a large batch comes through, mmdf dies on the Line of the Beast. Probably some twit hardcoded a buffer size."
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line eater the
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line noise
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line eater, then. obs.
[Usenet] 1. A bug in some now-obsolete versions of the netnews software that used to eat up to BUFSIZ bytes of the article text. The bug was triggered by having the text of the article start with a space or tab. This bug was quickly personified as a mythical creature called the `line eater', and postings often included a dummy line of `line eater food'. Ironically, line eater `food' not beginning with a space or tab wasn't actually eaten, since the bug was avoided; but if therewasa space or tab before it, then the line eater would eat the foodandthe beginning of the text it was supposed to be protecting. The practice of `sacrificing to the line eater' continued for some time after the bug had beennailed to the wall, and is still humorously referred to. The bug itself was still occasionally reported to be lurking in some mail-to-netnews gateways as late as 1991. 2. SeeNSA line eater.
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line noise
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line noisen.
1. [techspeak] Spurious characters due to electrical noise in a communications link, especially an RS-232 serial connection. Line noise may be induced by poor connections, interference or crosstalk from other circuits, electrical storms,cosmic rays, or (notionally) birds crapping on the phone wires. 2. Any chunk of data in a file or elsewhere that looks like the results of line noise in sense 1. 3. Text that is theoretically a readable text or program source but employs syntax so bizarre that it looks like line noise in senses 1 or 2. Yes, there are languages this ugly. The canonical example isTECO; it is often claimed that "TECO's input syntax is indistinguishable from line noise." Other non-WYSIWYGeditors, such as Multicsqedand Unixed, in the hands of a real hacker, also qualify easily, as do deliberately obfuscated languages such asINTERCAL.
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line starve
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linearithmic
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line starve
[MIT] 1. vi. To feed paper through a printer the wrong way by one line (most printers can't do this). On a display terminal, to move the cursor up to the previous line of the screen. "To print `X squared', you just output `X', line starve, `2', line feed." (The line starve causes the `2' to appear on the line above the `X', and the line feed gets back to the original line.) 2. n. A character (or character sequence) that causes a terminal to perform this action. ASCII 0011010, also called SUB or control-Z, was one common line-starve character in the days before microcomputers and the X3.64 terminal standard. Today, the term might be used for the ISO reverse line feed character 0x8D. Unlike `line feed', `line starve' isnotstandardASCIIterminology. Even among hackers it is considered a bit silly. 3. [proposed] A sequence such as \c (used in System V echo, as well asnroffandtroff) that suppresses anewlineor other character(s) that would normally be emitted.
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linearithmic
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link farm
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line starve
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linearithmicadj.
Of an algorithm, having running time that is O(N log N). Coined as a portmanteau of `linear' and `logarithmic' in "Algorithms In C" by Robert Sedgewick (Addison-Wesley 1990, ISBN 0-201-51425-7).
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link farm
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link rot
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linearithmic