snivitz/sniv'itz/ n.
A hiccup in hardware or software; a small, transient problem of unknown origin (less serious than asnark). Compareglitch.
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'Snooze/snooz/ [FidoNet] n.
Fidonews, the weekly official on-line newsletter of FidoNet. As the editorial policy of Fidonews is "anything that arrives, we print", there are often large articles completely unrelated to FidoNet, which in turn tend to elicitflamagein subsequent issues.
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SO/S-O/ n.
1. (also `S.O.') Abbrev. for Significant Other, almost invariably written abbreviated and pronounced /S-O/ by hackers. Used to refer to one's primary relationship, esp. a live-in to whom one is not married. SeeMOTAS,MOTOS,MOTSS. 2. [techspeak] The Shift Out control character in ASCII (Control-N, 0001110).
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social engineeringn.
Term used amongcrackers andsamuraifor cracking techniques that rely on weaknesses inwetwarerather than software; the aim is to trick people into revealing passwords or other information that compromises a target system's security. Classic scams include phoning up a mark who has the required information and posing as a field service tech or a fellow employee with an urgent access problem. See also thetiger teamstory in thepatchentry.
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social science numbern. //
[IBM] A statistic that iscontent-free, or nearly so. A measure derived via methods of questionable validity from data of a dubious and vague nature. Predictively, having a social science number in hand is seldom much better than nothing, and can be considerably worse. As a rule,managementloves them. See alsonumbers,math-out,pretty pictures.
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sock puppetn.
[Usenet: from the act of placing a sock over your hand and talking to it and pretending it's talking back] In Usenet parlance, apseudothrough which the puppeteer posts follow-ups to their own original message to give the appearance that a number of people support the views held in the original message.
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sodium substraten.
Synsalt substrate.
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soft bootn.
Seeboot.
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softcopy/soft'kop-ee/ n.
[by analogy with `hardcopy'] A machine-readable form of corresponding hardcopy. Seebits,machinable.
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software bloatn.
The results ofsecond-system effectorcreeping featuritis. Commonly cited examples includels(1),X,BSD,Missed'em-five, andOS/2.
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software hoardingn.
Pejorative term employed by members and adherents of theGNUproject to describe the act of holding software proprietary, keeping it under trade secret or license terms which prohibit free redistribution and modification. Used primarily in Free Software Foundation propaganda. For a summary of related issues, seeGNU.
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software lasern.
An optical laser works by bouncing photons back and forth between two mirrors, one totally reflective and one partially reflective. If the lasing material (usually a crystal) has the right properties, photons scattering off the atoms in the crystal will excite cascades of more photons, all in lockstep. Eventually the beam will escape through the partially-reflective mirror. One kind ofsorcerer's apprentice modeinvolvingbounce messages can produce closely analogous results, with acascadeof messages escaping to flood nearby systems. By mid-1993 there had been at least two publicized incidents of this kind.
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software rotn.
Term used to describe the tendency of software that has not been used in a while tolose; such failure may be semi-humorously ascribed tobit rot. More commonly, `software rot' strikes when a program's assumptions become out of date. If the design was insufficientlyrobust, this may cause it to fail in mysterious ways. Syn. `code rot'. See alsolink rot.
For example, owing to endemic shortsightedness in the design of COBOL programs, a good number of them succumbed to software rot when their 2-digit year counters underwentwrap aroundat the beginning of the year 2000. Actually, related lossages often afflict centenarians who have to deal with computer software designed by unimaginative clods. One such incident became the focus of a minor public flap in 1990, when a gentleman born in 1889 applied for a driver's license renewal in Raleigh, North Carolina. The new system refused to issue the card, probably because with 2-digit years the ages 101 and 1 cannot be distinguished.
Historical note: Software rot in an even funnier sense than the mythical one was a real problem on early research computers (e.g., the R1; seegrind crank). If a program that depended on a peculiar instruction hadn't been run in quite a while, the user might discover that the opcodes no longer did the same things they once did. ("Hey, so-and-so needs an instruction to do such-and-such. We cansnarfthis opcode, right? No one uses it.")
Another classic example of this sprang from the time an MIT hacker found a simple way to double the speed of the unconditional jump instruction on a PDP-6, so he patched the hardware. Unfortunately, this broke some fragile timing software in a music-playing program, throwing its output out of tune. This was fixed by adding a defensive initialization routine to compare the speed of a timing loop with the real-time clock; in other words, it figured out how fast the PDP-6 was that day, and corrected appropriately.
Comparebit rot.
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softwarily/soft-weir'i-lee/ adv.
In a way pertaining to software. "The system is softwarily unreliable." The adjective **`softwary' isnotused. Seehardwarily.
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softyn.
[IBM] Hardware hackers' term for a software expert who is largely ignorant of the mysteries of hardware.
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some random Xadj.
Used to indicate a member of class X, with the implication that Xs are interchangeable. "I think some random cracker tripped over the guest timeout last night." See alsoJ. Random.
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sorcerer's apprentice moden.
[from Goethe's "Der Zauberlehrling" via Paul Dukas's "L'apprenti sorcier" the film "Fantasia"] A bug in a protocol where, under some circumstances, the receipt of a message causes multiple messages to be sent, each of which, when received, triggers the same bug. Used esp. of such behavior caused bybounce messageloops inemailsoftware. Comparebroadcast storm,network meltdown,software laser,ARMM.
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SOS/S-O-S/
n.,obs. An infamouslylosingtext editor. Once, back in the 1960s, when a text editor was needed for the PDP-6, a hacker crufted together aquick-and-dirty`stopgap editor' to be used until a better one was written. Unfortunately, the old one was never really discarded when new ones came along. SOS is a descendant (`Son of Stopgap') of that editor, and many PDP-10 users gained the dubious pleasure of its acquaintance. Since then other programs similar in style to SOS have been written, notably the early font editor BILOS /bye'lohs/, the Brother-In-Law Of Stopgap (the alternate expansion `Bastard Issue, Loins of Stopgap' has been proposed).
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sourcen.
[very common] In reference to software, `source' is invariably shorthand for `source code', the preferred human-readable and human-modifiable form of the program. This is as opposed to object code, the derived binary executable form of a program. This shorthand readily takes derivative forms; one may speak of "the sources of a system" or of "having source".
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source of all good bitsn.
A person from whom (or a place from which) useful information may be obtained. If you need to know about a program, agurumight be the source of all good bits. The title is often applied to a particularly competent secretary.
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space-cadet keyboardn.
A now-legendary device used on MIT LISP machines, which inspired several still-current jargon terms and influenced the design ofEMACS. It was equipped with no fewer thansevenshift keys: four keys forbucky bits(`control', `meta', `hyper', and `super') and three like regular shift keys, called `shift', `top', and `front'. Many keys had three symbols on them: a letter and a symbol on the top, and a Greek letter on the front. For example, the `L' key had an `L' and a two-way arrow on the top, and the Greek letter lambda on the front. By pressing this key with the right hand while playing an appropriate `chord' with the left hand on the shift keys, you could get the following results:
Llowercase lshift-Luppercase Lfront-Llowercase lambdafront-shift-Luppercase lambdatop-Ltwo-way arrow (front and shift are ignored)
And of course each of these might also be typed with any combination of the control, meta, hyper, and super keys. On this keyboard, you could type over 8000 different characters! This allowed the user to type very complicated mathematical text, and also to have thousands of single-character commands at his disposal. Many hackers were actually willing to memorize the command meanings of that many characters if it reduced typing time (this attitude obviously shaped the interface of EMACS). Other hackers, however, thought having that many bucky bits was overkill, and objected that such a keyboard can require three or four hands to operate. Seebucky bits,cokebottle,double bucky,meta bit,quadruple bucky.
Note: early versions of this entry incorrectly identified the space-cadet keyboard with the `Knight keyboard'. Though both were designed by Tom Knight, the latter term was properly applied only to a keyboard used for ITS on the PDP-10 and modeled on the Stanford keyboard (as described underbucky bits). The true space-cadet keyboard evolved from the first Knight keyboard.
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spaceship operatorn.
The glyph<=>, so-called apparently because in the low-resolution constant-width font used on many terminals it vaguely resembles a flying saucer.Perluses this to denote the signum-of-difference operation.
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SPACEWARn.
A space-combat simulation game, inspired by E. E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensman" books, in which two spaceships duel around a central sun, shooting torpedoes at each other and jumping through hyperspace. This game was first implemented on the PDP-1 at MIT in 1962. In 1968-69, a descendant of the game motivated Ken Thompson to build, in his spare time on a scavenged PDP-7, the operating system that becameUnix. Less than nine years after that, SPACEWAR was commercialized as one of the first video games; descendants are stillfeeping in video arcades everywhere.
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spaghetti coden.
Code with a complex and tangled control structure, esp. one using many GOTOs, exceptions, or other `unstructured' branching constructs. Pejorative. The synonym `kangaroo code' has been reported, doubtless because such code has so many jumps in it.
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spaghetti inheritancen.
[encountered among users of object-oriented languages that use inheritance, such as Smalltalk] A convoluted class-subclass graph, often resulting from carelessly deriving subclasses from other classes just for the sake of reusing their code. Coined in a (successful) attempt to discourage such practice, through guilt-by-association withspaghetti code.
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spamvt.,vi.,n.
[from "Monty Python's Flying Circus"] 1. To crash a program by overrunning a fixed-size buffer with excessively large input data. See alsobuffer overflow,overrun screw,smash the stack. 2. To cause a newsgroup to be flooded with irrelevant or inappropriate messages. You can spam a newsgroup with as little as one well- (or ill-) planned message (e.g. asking "What do you think of abortion?" onsoc.women). This is often done withcross-posting (e.g. any message which is crossposted toalt.rush-limbaughandalt.politics.homosexualitywill almost inevitably spam both groups). This overlaps withtrollbehavior; the latter more specific term has become more common. 3. To send many identical or nearly-identical messages separately to a large number of Usenet newsgroups. This is more specifically called `ECP', Excessive Cross-Posting. This is one sure way to infuriate nearly everyone on the Net. See alsovelveetaandjello. 4. To bombard a newsgroup with multiple copies of a message. This is more specifically called `EMP', Excessive Multi-Posting. 5. To mass-mail unrequested identical or nearly-identical email messages, particularly those containing advertising. Especially used when the mail addresses have been culled from network traffic or databases without the consent of the recipients. Synonyms includeUCE,UBE. 6. Any large, annoying, quantity of output. For instance, someone on IRC who walks away from their screen and comes back to find 200 lines of text might say "Oh no, spam".
The later definitions have become much more prevalent as the Internet has opened up to non-techies, and to most people senses 3 4 and 5 are now primary. All three behaviors are considered abuse of the net, and are almost universally grounds for termination of the originator's email account or network connection. In these senses the term `spam' has gone mainstream, though without its original sense or folkloric freight - there is apparently a widespread myth amonglusers that "spamming" is what happens when you dump cans of Spam into a revolving fan.