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What's a spline?
[XEROX PARC] This phrase expands to: "You have just used a term that I've heard for a year and a half, and I feel I should know, but don't. My curiosity has finally overcome my guilt." The PARC lexicon adds "Moral: don't hesitate to ask questions, even if they seem obvious."
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wheel
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What's a spline?
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wheeln.
[from slang `big wheel' for a powerful person] A person who has an activewheel bit. "We need to find a wheel to unwedge the hung tape drives." (Seewedged, sense 1.) The traditional name of security group zero inBSD(to which the major system-internal users likerootbelong) is `wheel'. Some vendors have expanded on this usage, modifying Unix so that only members of group `wheel' cango root.
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wheel bit
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wheel
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wheel bitn.
A privilege bit that allows the possessor to perform some restricted operation on a timesharing system, such as read or write any file on the system regardless of protections, change or look at any address in the running monitor, crash or reload the system, and kill or create jobs and user accounts. The term was invented on the TENEX operating system, and carried over to TOPS-20, XEROX-IFS, and others. The state of being in a privileged logon is sometimes called `wheel mode'. This term entered the Unix culture from TWENEX in the mid-1980s and has been gaining popularity there (esp. at university sites). See alsoroot.
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wheel of reincarnation
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wheel of reincarnation
[coined in a paper by T. H. Myer and I.E. Sutherland "On the Design of Display Processors", Comm. ACM, Vol. 11, no. 6, June 1968)] Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again.
Several iterations of this cycle have been observed in graphics-processor design, and at least one or two in communications and floating-point processors. Also known as `the Wheel of Life', `the Wheel of Samsara', and other variations of the basic Hindu/Buddhist theological idea. See alsoblitter,bit bang.
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wheel wars
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wheel warsn.
[Stanford University] A period inlarval stageduring which student hackers hassle each other by attempting to log each other out of the system, delete each other's files, and otherwise wreak havoc, usually at the expense of the lesser users.
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White Book
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White Bookn.
1. Syn.K&R. 2. Adobe's fourth book in the PostScript series, describing the previously-secret format of Type 1 fonts; "Adobe Type 1 Font Format, version 1.1", (Addison-Wesley, 1990, ISBN 0-201-57044-0). See alsoRed Book,Green Book,Blue Book.
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whitelist
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whitelistn.
The opposite of a blacklist. That is, instead of being an explicit list of people who are banned, it's an explicit list of people who are to be admitted. Hackers use this especially of lists of email addresses that are explicitly enabled to get past strict anti-spam filters.
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whizzy
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whizzyadj.
(alt. `wizzy') [Sun] Describes acuspyprogram; one that is feature-rich and well presented.
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wibble
[UK, perh. originally from the first "Roger Irrelevant" strip in "VIZ" comics, spread via "Your Sinclair magazine in the 1980s and early 1990s"] 1. n.,v. Commonly used to describe chatter, content-free remarks or other essentially meaningless contributions to threads in newsgroups. "Oh, rspence is wibbling again". 2. [UK IRC] An explicit on-line no-op equivalent tohumma. 3. One of the preferredmetasyntactic variables in the UK, forming a series withwobble,wubble, andflob(attributed to the hilarious historical comedy "Blackadder"). 4. A pronounciation of the letters "www", as seen in URLs; i.e., www.foo.com may be pronounced "wibble dot foo dot com" (comparedub dub dub).
The ancestral sense of this word is reported to have been "My brain is packing it in now. I give up.Tilt! Tilt! Tilt!"
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WIBNI
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WIBNI// n.
[Bell Labs: Wouldn't It Be Nice If] What most requirements documents and specifications consist entirely of. CompareIWBNI.
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widget
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widgetn.
1. A meta-thing. Used to stand for a real object in didactic examples (especially database tutorials). Legend has it that the original widgets were holders for buggy whips. "But suppose the parts list for a widget has 52 entries...." 2. [poss. evoking `window gadget'] A user interface object inXgraphical user interfaces.
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wigglesn.
[scientific computation] In solving partial differential equations by finite difference and similar methods, wiggles are sawtooth (up-down-up-down) oscillations at the shortest wavelength representable on the grid. If an algorithm is unstable, this is often the most unstable waveform, so it grows to dominate the solution. Alternatively, stable (though inaccurate) wiggles can be generated near a discontinuity by a Gibbs phenomenon.
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win
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WIMP environmentn.
[acronym: `Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing device (or Pull-down menu)'] A graphical-user-interface environment such asXor the Macintosh interface, esp. as described by a hacker who prefers command-line interfaces for their superior flexibility and extensibility. However, it is also used without negative connotations; one must pay attention to voice tone and other signals to interpret correctly. Seemenuitis,user-obsequious.
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win
[MIT; now common everywhere] 1. vi. To succeed. A program wins if no unexpected conditions arise, or (especially) if it sufficientlyrobustto take exceptions in stride. 2. n. Success, or a specific instance thereof. A pleasing outcome. "So it turned out I could use alexergenerator instead of hand-coding my own pattern recognizer. What a win!" Emphatic forms: `moby win', `super win', `hyper-win' (often used interjectively as a reply). For some reason `suitable win' is also common at MIT, usually in reference to a satisfactory solution to a problem. Opposelose; see alsobig win, which isn't quite just an intensification of `win'.
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win big
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win
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win bigvi.
To experience serendipity. "I went shopping and won big; there was a 2-for-1 sale." Seebig win.
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win win
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Winchester
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win big
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win winexcl.
Expresses pleasure at awin.
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Winchester
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Winchestern.
Informal generic term for sealed-enclosure magnetic-disk drives in which the read-write head planes over the disk surface on an air cushion. There is a legend that the name arose because the original 1973 engineering prototype for what later became the IBM 3340 featured two 30-megabyte volumes; 30-30 became `Winchester' when somebody noticed the similarity to the common term for a famous Winchester rifle (in the latter, the first 30 referred to caliber and the second to the grain weight of the charge). (It is sometimes incorrectly claimed that Winchester was the laboratory in which the technology was developed.)
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windoidn.
In the Macintosh world, a style of window with much less adornment (smaller or missing title bar, zoom box, etc, etc) than a standard window.
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window shoppingn.
[US Geological Survey] Among users ofWIMP environments likeXor the Macintosh, extended experimentation with new window colors, fonts, and icon shapes. This activity can take up hours of what might otherwise have been productive working time. "I spent the afternoon window shopping until I found the coolest shade of green for my active window borders -- now they perfectly match my medium slate blue background." Serious window shoppers will spend their days with bitmap editors, creating new and different icons and background patterns for all to see. Also: `window dressing', the act of applying new fonts, colors, etc. Seefritterware, comparemacdink.
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Windoze
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Windoze/win'dohz/ n.
SeeMicrosloth Windows.
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winged comments
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winged commentsn.
Comments set on the same line as code, as opposed toboxed comments. In C, for example:
d = sqrt(x*x + y*y); /* distance from origin */
Generally these refer only to the action(s) taken on that line.
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winkey
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winkeyn.
(alt. `winkey face') Seeemoticon.
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winnage
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winnage/win'*j/ n.
The situation when a lossage is corrected, or when something is winning.
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winner
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winner
1. n. An unexpectedly good situation, program, programmer, or person. 2. `real winner': Often sarcastic, but also used as high praise (see also the note underuser). "He's a real winner -- never reports a bug till he can duplicate it and send in an example."
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winnitude
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winnitude/win'*-t[y]ood/ n.
The quality of winning (as opposed towinnage, which is the result of winning). "Guess what? They tweaked the microcode and now the LISP interpreter runs twice as fast as it used to." "That's really great! Boy, what winnitude!" "Yup. I'll probably get a half-hour's winnage on the next run of my program." Perhaps curiously, the obvious antonym `lossitude' is rare.
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Wintel
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Winteln.
Microsoft Windows plus Intel - the tacit alliance that dominated desktop computing in the 1990s. Now (1999) possibly on the verge of breaking up under pressure fromLinux; seeLintel.
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wired
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wiredn.
Seehardwired.
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wirehead
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wirehead/wi:r'hed/ n.
[prob. from SF slang for an electrical-brain-stimulation addict] 1. A hardware hacker, especially one who concentrates on communications hardware. 2. An expert in local-area networks. A wirehead can be a network software wizard too, but will always have the ability to deal with network hardware, down to the smallest component. Wireheads are known for their ability to lash up an Ethernet terminator from spare resistors, for example.
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wirewater
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wirehead
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wirewatern.
Syn.programming fluid. This melds the mainstream slang adjective `wired' (stimulated, up, hyperactive) with `firewater'; however, it refers to caffeinacious rather than alcoholic beverages.
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wish list
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within delta of
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wirewater
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wish listn.
A list of desired features or bug fixes that probably won't get done for a long time, usually because the person responsible for the code is too busy or can't think of a clean way to do it. "OK, I'll add automatic filename completion to the wish list for the new interface." Comparetick-list features.