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W2K bug
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wabbit
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vulture capitalist
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W2K bug
[from `Y2K bug' for the Year 2000 problem] The upcoming deployment of Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system, which hackers generally expect will be among the worst train wrecks in the history of software engineering. Such is the power of Microsoft marketing, however, that it is also expected this will not become obvious until it has incurred hundreds of millions of dollars in downtime and lost opportunity costs.
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wabbit
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WAITS
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W2K bug
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wabbit/wab'it/ n.
[almost certainly from Elmer Fudd's immortal line "You wascawwy wabbit!"] 1. A legendary early hack reported on a System/360 at RPI and elsewhere around 1978; this may have descended (if only by inspiration) from a hack called RABBITS reported from 1969 on a Burroughs 5500 at the University of Washington Computer Center. The program would make two copies of itself every time it was run, eventually crashing the system. 2. By extension, any hack that includes infinite self-replication but is not avirusorworm. Seefork bombandrabbit job, see alsocookie monster.
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WAITS
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waldo
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WAITS/wayts/ n.
The mutant cousin ofTOPS-10used on a handful of systems atSAILup to 1990. There was never an `official' expansion of WAITS (the name itself having been arrived at by a rather sideways process), but it was frequently glossed as `West-coast Alternative to ITS'. Though WAITS was less visible than ITS, there was frequent exchange of people and ideas between the two communities, and innovations pioneered at WAITS exerted enormous indirect influence. The early screen modes ofEMACS, for example, were directly inspired by WAITS's `E' editor -- one of a family of editors that were the first to do `real-time editing', in which the editing commands were invisible and where one typed text at the point of insertion/overwriting. The modern style of multi-region windowing is said to have originated there, and WAITS alumni at XEROX PARC and elsewhere played major roles in the developments that led to the XEROX Star, the Macintosh, and the Sun workstations. Also invented there werebucky bits-- thus, the ALT key on every IBM PC is a WAITS legacy. One WAITS feature very notable in pre-Web days was a news-wire interface that allowed WAITS hackers to read, store, and filter AP and UPI dispatches from their terminals; the system also featured a still-unusual level of support for what is now called `multimedia' computing, allowing analog audio and video signals to be switched to programming terminals.
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waldo
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walk
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WAITS
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waldo/wol'doh/ n.
[From Robert A. Heinlein's story "Waldo"] 1. A mechanical agent, such as a gripper arm, controlled by a human limb. When these were developed for the nuclear industry in the mid-1940s they were named after the invention described by Heinlein in the story, which he wrote in 1942. Now known by the more generic term `telefactoring', this technology is of intense interest to NASA for tasks like space station maintenance. 2. At Harvard (particularly by Tom Cheatham and students), this is used instead offoobaras a metasyntactic variable and general nonsense word. Seefoo,bar,foobar,quux.
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walk
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waldo
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walkn.,vt.
Traversal of a data structure, especially an array or linked-list data structure incore. See alsocodewalker,silly walk,clobber.
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walk off the end of
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walking drives
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walk
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walk off the end ofvt.
To run past the end of an array, list, or medium after stepping through it -- a good way to land in trouble. Often the result of anoff-by-one error. Compareclobber,roach,smash the stack.
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walking drives
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wall
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walk off the end of
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walking drivesn.
An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when they were huge, clunkywashing machines. Those olddinosaurparts carried terrific angular momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn bearings and stick-slip interactions with the floor could cause them to `walk' across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a couple of millimeters at a time. There is a legend about a drive that walked over to the only door to the computer room and jammed it shut; the staff had to cut a hole in the wall in order to get at it! Walking could also be induced by certain patterns of drive access (a fast seek across the whole width of the disk, followed by a slow seek in the other direction). Some bands of old-time hackers figured out how to induce disk-accessing patterns that would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive races.
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wall
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wall follower
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walking drives
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wallinterj.
[WPI] 1. An indication of confusion, usually spoken with a quizzical tone: "Wall??" 2. A request for further explication. Compareoctal forty. 3. [Unix, from `write all'] v. To send a message to everyone currently logged in, esp. with the wall(8) utility.
It is said that sense 1 came from the idiom `like talking to a blank wall'. It was originally used in situations where, after you had carefully answered a question, the questioner stared at you blankly, clearly having understood nothing that was explained. You would then throw out a "Hello, wall?" to elicit some sort of response from the questioner. Later, confused questioners began voicing "Wall?" themselves.
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wall follower
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wall time
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wall
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wall followern.
A person or algorithm that compensates for lack of sophistication or native stupidity by efficiently following some simple procedure shown to have been effective in the past. Used of an algorithm, this is not necessarily pejorative; it recalls `Harvey Wallbanger', the winning robot in an early AI contest (named, of course, after the cocktail). Harvey successfully solved mazes by keeping a `finger' on one wall and running till it came out the other end. This was inelegant, but it was mathematically guaranteed to work on simply-connected mazes -- and, in fact, Harvey outperformed more sophisticated robots that tried to `learn' each maze by building an internal representation of it. Used of humans, the termispejorative and implies an uncreative, bureaucratic, by-the-book mentality. See alsocode grinder; comparedroid.
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wall time
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wall wart
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wall follower
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wall timen.
(also `wall clock time') 1. `Real world' time (what the clock on the wall shows), as opposed to the system clock's idea of time. 2. The real running time of a program, as opposed to the number ofticks required to execute it (on a timesharing system these always differ, as no one program gets all the ticks, and on multiprocessor systems with good thread support one may get more processor time than real time).
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wall wart
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wallpaper
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wall wartn.
A small power-supply brick with integral male plug, designed to plug directly into a wall outlet; called a `wart' because when installed on a power strip it tends to block up at least one more socket than it uses.. These are frequently associated with modems and other small electronic devices which would become unacceptably bulky or hot if they had power supplies on board (there are other reasons as well having to do with the cost of UL certification).
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wallpaper
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wallpapern.
1. A file containing a listing (e.g., assembly listing) or a transcript, esp. a file containing a transcript of all or part of a login session. (The idea was that the paper for such listings was essentially good only for wallpaper, as evidenced at Stanford, where it was used to cover windows.) Now rare, esp. since other systems have developed other terms for it (e.g., PHOTO on TWENEX). However, the Unix world doesn't have an equivalent term, so perhapswallpaperwill take hold there. The term probably originated on ITS, where the commands to begin and end transcript files were:WALBEGand:WALEND, with default fileWALL PAPER(the space was a path delimiter). 2. The background pattern used on graphical workstations (this is techspeak under the `Windows' graphical user interface to MS-DOS). 3. `wallpaper file' n. The file that contains the wallpaper information before it is actually printed on paper. (Even if you don't intend ever to produce a real paper copy of the file, it is still called a wallpaper file.)
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wango
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wango/wang'goh/ n.
Random bit-levelgrovelling going on in a system during some unspecified operation. Often used in combination withmumble. For example: "You start with the `.o' file, run it through this postprocessor that does mumble-wango -- and it comes out a snazzy object-oriented executable."
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wank
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wank/wangk/ n.,v.,adj.
[Columbia University: prob. by mutation from Commonwealth slang v. `wank', to masturbate] Used much ashackis elsewhere, as a noun denoting a clever technique or person or the result of such cleverness. May describe (negatively) the act of hacking for hacking's sake ("Quit wanking, let's go get supper!") or (more positively) awizard. Adj. `wanky' describes something particularly clever (a person, program, or algorithm). Conversations can also get wanky when there are too many wanks involved. This excess wankiness is signalled by an overload of the `wankometer' (comparebogometer). When the wankometer overloads, the conversation's subject must be changed, or all non-wanks will leave. Compare `neep-neeping' (underneep-neep). Usage: U.S. only. In Britain and the Commonwealth this word isextremelyrude and is best avoided unless one intends to give offense. Adjectival `wanky' is less offensive and simply means `stupid' or `broken' (this is mainstream in Great Britain).
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wannabee
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wannabee/won'*-bee/ n.
(also, more plausibly, spelled `wannabe') [from a term recently used to describe Madonna fans who dress, talk, and act like their idol; prob. originally from biker slang] A would-behacker. The connotations of this term differ sharply depending on the age and exposure of the subject. Used of a person who is in or might be enteringlarval stage, it is semi-approving; such wannabees can be annoying but most hackers remember that they, too, were once such creatures. When used of any professional programmer, CS academic, writer, orsuit, it is derogatory, implying that said person is trying to cuddle up to the hacker mystique but doesn't, fundamentally, have a prayer of understanding what it is all about. Overuse of terms from this lexicon is often an indication of thewannabeenature. Comparenewbie.
Historical note: The wannabee phenomenon has a slightly different flavor now (1993) than it did ten or fifteen years ago. When the people who are now hackerdom's tribal elders were inlarval stage, the process of becoming a hacker was largely unconscious and unaffected by models known in popular culture -- communities formed spontaneously around people who,as individuals, felt irresistibly drawn to do hackerly things, and what wannabees experienced was a fairly pure, skill-focused desire to become similarly wizardly. Those days of innocence are gone forever; society's adaptation to the advent of the microcomputer after 1980 included the elevation of the hacker as a new kind of folk hero, and the result is that some people semi-consciously set out tobe hackersand borrow hackish prestige by fitting the popular image of hackers. Fortunately, to do this really well, one has to actually become a wizard. Nevertheless, old-time hackers tend to share a poorly articulated disquiet about the change; among other things, it gives them mixed feelings about the effects of public compendia of lore like this one.
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war dialer
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war dialern.
A cracking tool, a program that calls a given list or range of phone numbers and records those which answer with handshake tones (and so might be entry points to computer or telecommunications systems). Some of these programs have become quite sophisticated, and can now detect modem, fax, or PBX tones and log each one separately. The war dialer is one of the most important tools in thephreaker's kit. These programs evolved from earlydemon dialers.
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-waresuff.
[from `software'] Commonly used to form jargon terms for classes of software. For examples, seeannoyware,careware,crippleware,crudware,freeware,fritterware,guiltware,liveware,meatware,payware,psychedelicware,shareware,shelfware,vaporware,wetware.
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warez
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warez/weirz/ n.
Widely used incrackersubcultures to denote cracked version of commercial software, that is versions from which copy-protection has been stripped. Hackers recognize this term but don't use it themselves. Seewarez d00dz,courier,leech,elite.
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warez d00dz/weirz doodz/ n.
A substantial subculture ofcrackers refer to themselves as `warez d00dz'; there is evidently some connection withB1FFhere. As `Ozone Pilot', one former warez d00d, wrote:
Warez d00dz get illegal copies of copyrighted software. If it has copy protection on it, they break the protection so the software can be copied. Then they distribute it around the world via several gateways. Warez d00dz form badass group names like RAZOR and the like. They put up boards that distribute the latest ware, or pirate program. The whole point of the Warez sub-culture is to get the pirate program released and distributed before any other group. I know, I know. But don't ask, and it won't hurt as much. This is how they prove their poweress [sic]. It gives them the right to say, "I released King's Quest IVXIX before you so obviously my testicles are larger." Again don't ask...
The studly thing to do if one is a warez d00d, it appears, is emit `0-day warez', that is copies of commercial software copied and cracked on the same day as its retail release. Warez d00ds also hoard software in a big way, collecting untold megabytes of arcade-style games, pornographic JPGs, and applications they'll never use onto their hard disks. As Ozone Pilot acutely observes:
[BELONG] is the only word you will need to know. Warez d00dz want to belong. They have been shunned by everyone, and thus turn to cyberspace for acceptance. That is why they always start groups like TGW, FLT, USA and the like. Structure makes them happy. [...] Warez d00dz will never have a handle like "Pink Daisy" because warez d00dz are insecure. Only someone who is very secure with a good dose of self-esteem can stand up to the cries of fag and girlie-man. More likely you will find warez d00dz with handles like: Doctor Death, Deranged Lunatic, Hellraiser, Mad Prince, Dreamdevil, The Unknown, Renegade Chemist, Terminator, and Twin Turbo. They like to sound badass when they can hide behind their terminals. More likely, if you were given a sample of 100 people, the person whose handle is Hellraiser is the last person you'd associate with the name.
The contrast with Internet hackers is stark and instructive. Seecracker,wannabee,handle,elite,courier,leech; compareweenie,spod.
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warez kiddies
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warez kiddiesn.
Even more derogatory way of referring towarez d00dz; refers to the fact that most warez d00dz are around the age of puberty. Comparescript kiddies.
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warlording
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warm boot
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warez kiddies
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warlordingv.
[from the Usenet groupalt.fan.warlord] The act of excoriating a bloated, ugly, or derivativesig block. Common grounds for warlording include the presence of a signature rendered in aBUAF, over-used or clichedsig quotes, uglyASCII art, or simply excessive size. The original `Warlord' was aB1FF-likenewbiec.1991 who featured in his sig a particularly large and obnoxious ASCII graphic resembling the sword of Conan the Barbarian in the 1981 John Milius movie; the group namealt.fan.warlordwas sarcasm, and the characteristic mode of warlording is devastatingly sarcastic praise.
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warm boot
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