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suit
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suitable win
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suitn.
1. Ugly and uncomfortable `business clothing' often worn by non-hackers. Invariably worn with a `tie', a strangulation device that partially cuts off the blood supply to the brain. It is thought that this explains much about the behavior of suit-wearers. Comparedroid. 2. A person who habitually wears suits, as distinct from a techie or hacker. Seepointy-haired,burble,management,Stupids,SNAFU principle,PHB, andbrain-damaged.
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suitable win
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suit
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suitable winn.
Seewin.
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suitably small
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Sun
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suitable win
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suitably smalladj.
[perverted from mathematical jargon]
An expression used ironically to characterize unquantifiable behavior that differs from expected or required behavior. For example, suppose a newly created program came up with a correct full-screen display, and one publicly exclaimed: "It works!" Then, if the program dumped core on the first mouse click, one might add: "Well, for suitably small values of `works'." Compare the characterization of pi underrandom numbers.
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Sun
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sun lounge
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Sunn.
Sun Microsystems. Hackers remember that the name was originally an acronym, Stanford University Network. Sun started out around 1980 with some hardware hackers (mainly) from Stanford talking to some software hackers (mainly) from UC Berkeley; Sun's original technology concept married a clever board design based on the Motorola 68000 toBSDUnix. Sun went on to lead the worstation industry through the 1980s, and for years afterwards remained an engineering-driven company and a good place for hackers to work. Though Sun drifted away from its techie origins after 1990 and has since made some strategic moves that disappointed and annoyed many hackers (especially by maintaining proprietary control of Java and rejecting Linux), it's still considered within the family in much the same wayDECwas in the 1970s and early 1980s.
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sun lounge
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Sun
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sun loungen.
[UK] The room where all the Sun workstations live. The humor in this term comes from the fact that it's also in mainstream use to describe a solarium, and all those Sun workstations clustered together give off an amazing amount of heat.
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sun-stools
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sunspots
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sun lounge
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sun-stoolsn.
Unflattering hackerism for SunTools, a pre-X windowing environment notorious in its day for size, slowness, and misfeatures.X, however, is larger and (some claim) slower; seesecond-system effect.
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sunspots
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sunspotsn.
1. Notional cause of an odd error. "Why did the program suddenly turn the screen blue?" "Sunspots, I guess." 2. Also the cause ofbit rot-- from the myth that sunspots will increasecosmic rays, which can flip single bits in memory. See alsophase of the moon.
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super source quench
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superloser
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super source quenchn.
A special packet designed to shut up an Internet host. The Internet Protocol (IP) has a control message called Source Quench that asks a host to transmit more slowly on a particular connection to avoid congestion. It also has a Redirect control message intended to instruct a host to send certain packets to a different local router. A "super source quench" is actually a redirect control packet, forged to look like it came from a local router, that instructs a host to send all packets to its own local loopback address. This will effectively tie many Internet hosts up in knots. CompareGodzillagram,breath-of-life packet.
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superloser
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superprogrammer
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superlosern.
[Unix] A superuser with no clue - someone with root privileges on a Unix system and no idea what he/she is doing, the moral equivalent of a three-year-old with an unsafetied Uzi. Anyone who thinks this is an uncommon situation reckons without the territorial urges ofmanagement.
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superprogrammern.
A prolific programmer; one who can code exceedingly well and quickly. Not all hackers are superprogrammers, but many are. (Productivity can vary from one programmer to another by three orders of magnitude. For example, one programmer might be able to write an average of 3 lines of working code in one day, while another, with the proper tools, might be able to write 3,000. This range is astonishing; it is matched in very few other areas of human endeavor.) The term `superprogrammer' is more commonly used within such places as IBM than in the hacker community. It tends to stress naive measures of productivity and to underweight creativity, ingenuity, and getting the jobdone-- and to sidestep the question of whether the 3,000 lines of code do more or less useful work than three lines that do theRight Thing. Hackers tend to prefer the termshackerandwizard.
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superusern.
[Unix] Syn.root,avatar. This usage has spread to non-Unix environments; the superuser is any account with allwheelbits on. A more specific term thanwheel.
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supportn.
After-sale handholding; something many software vendors promise but few deliver. To hackers, most support people are useless -- because by the time a hacker calls support he or she will usually know the software and the relevant manuals better than the support people (sadly, this isnota joke or exaggeration). A hacker's idea of `support' is a tête-à-tête with the software's designer.
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surf
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surfv.
[from the `surf' idiom for rapidly flipping TV channels] To traverse the Internet in search of interesting stuff, used esp. if one is doing so with a World Wide Web browser. It is also common to speak of `surfing in' to a particular resource.
Hackers adopted this term early, but many have stopped using it since it went completely mainstream around 1995. The passive, couch-potato connotations that go with TV channel surfing were never pleasant, and hearing non-hackers wax enthusiastic about "surfing the net" tends to make hackers feel a bit as though their home is being overrun by ignorami.
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Suzie COBOL
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Suzie COBOL/soo'zee koh'bol/
1. [IBM: prob. from Frank Zappa's `Suzy Creamcheese'] n. A coder straight out of training school who knows everything except the value of comments in plain English. Also (fashionable among personkind wishing to avoid accusations of sexism) `Sammy Cobol' or (in some non-IBM circles) `Cobol Charlie'. 2. [proposed] Meta-name for anycode grinder, analogous toJ. Random Hacker.
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swab/swob/
[From the mnemonic for the PDP-11 `SWAp Byte' instruction, as immortalized in thedd(1)optionconv=swab(seedd)] 1. vt. To solve theNUXI problemby swapping bytes in a file. 2. n. The program in V7 Unix used to perform this action, or anything functionally equivalent to it. See alsobig-endian,little-endian,middle-endian,bytesexual.
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swapvt.
1. [techspeak] To move information from a fast-access memory to a slow-access memory (`swap out'), or vice versa (`swap in'). Often refers specifically to the use of disks as `virtual memory'. As pieces of data or program are needed, they are swapped intocorefor processing; when they are no longer needed they may be swapped out again. 2. The jargon use of these terms analogizes people's short-term memories with core. Cramming for an exam might be spoken of as swapping in. If you temporarily forget someone's name, but then remember it, your excuse is that it was swapped out. To `keep something swapped in' means to keep it fresh in your memory: "I reread the TECO manual every few months to keep it swapped in." If someone interrupts you just as you got a good idea, you might say "Wait a moment while I swap this out", implying that a piece of paper is your extra-somatic memory and that if you don't swap the idea out by writing it down it will get overwritten and lost as you talk. Comparepage in,page out.
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swap spacen.
Storage space, especially temporary storage space used during a move or reconfiguration. "I'm just using that corner of the machine room for swap space."
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swapped in
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swapped inn.
Seeswap. See alsopage in.
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swapped out
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swizzle
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swapped outn.
Seeswap. See alsopage out.
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swizzlev.
To convert external names, array indices, or references within a data structure into address pointers when the data structure is brought into main memory from external storage (also called `pointer swizzling'); this may be done for speed in chasing references or to simplify code (e.g., by turning lots of name lookups into pointer dereferences). The converse operation is sometimes termed `unswizzling'. See alsosnap.
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sync/sink/ n., vi.
(var. `synch') 1. To synchronize, to bring into synchronization. 2. [techspeak] To force all pending I/O to the disk; seeflush, sense 2. 3. More generally, to force a number of competing processes or agents to a state that would be `safe' if the system were to crash; thus, to checkpoint (in the database-theory sense).
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syntactic saltn.
The opposite ofsyntactic sugar, a feature designed to make it harder to write bad code. Specifically, syntactic salt is a hoop the programmer must jump through just to prove that he knows what's going on, rather than to express a program action. Some programmers consider required type declarations to be syntactic salt. A requirement to writeend if,end while,end do, etc. to terminate the last block controlled by a control construct (as opposed to justend) would definitely be syntactic salt. Syntactic salt is like the real thing in that it tends to raise hackers' blood pressures in an unhealthy way. Comparecandygrammar.
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syntactic sugarn.
[coined by Peter Landin] Features added to a language or other formalism to make it `sweeter' for humans, features which do not affect the expressiveness of the formalism (comparechrome). Used esp. when there is an obvious and trivial translation of the `sugar' feature into other constructs already present in the notation. C'sa[i]notation is syntactic sugar for*(a + i). "Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon." -- Alan Perlis.
The variants `syntactic saccharin' and `syntactic syrup' are also recorded. These denote something even more gratuitous, in that syntactic sugar serves a purpose (making something more acceptable to humans), but syntactic saccharin or syrup serve no purpose at all. Comparecandygrammar,syntactic salt.
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sysadmin
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sys-frog/sis'frog/ n.
[the PLATO system] Playful variant of `sysprog', which is in turn short for `systems programmer'.
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sysadmin
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sysadmin/sis'ad-min/ n.
Common contraction of `system admin'; seeadmin.
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sysop
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sysape/sys'ayp/ n.
A rather derogatory term for a computer operator; a play onsysopcommon at sites that use the banana hierarchy of problem complexity (seeone-banana problem).
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system
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sysop/sis'op/ n.
[esp. in the BBS world] The operator (and usually the owner) of a bulletin-board system. A common neophyte mistake onFidoNetis to address a message to `sysop' in an internationalecho, thus sending it to hundreds of sysops around the world.
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system
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