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within delta of
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within epsilon of
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wish list
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within delta ofadj.
Seedelta.
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within epsilon of
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wizard
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within delta of
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within epsilon ofadj.
Seeepsilon.
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wizard
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Wizard Book
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wizardn.
1. Transitively, a person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works (that is, whogroks it); esp. someone who can find and fix bugs quickly in an emergency. Someone is ahackerif he or she has general hacking ability, but is a wizard with respect to something only if he or she has specific detailed knowledge of that thing. A good hacker could become a wizard for something given the time to study it. 2. The term `wizard' is also used intransitively of someone who has extremely high-level hacking or problem-solving ability. 3. A person who is permitted to do things forbidden to ordinary people; one who haswheelprivileges on a system. 4. A Unix expert, esp. a Unix systems programmer. This usage is well enough established that `Unix Wizard' is a recognized job title at some corporations and to most headhunters. Seeguru,lord high fixer. See alsodeep magic,heavy wizardry,incantation,magic,mutter,rain dance,voodoo programming,wave a dead chicken.
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Wizard Bookn.
"Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (Hal Abelson, Jerry Sussman and Julie Sussman; MIT Press, 1984, 1996; ISBN 0-262-01153-0), an excellent computer science text used in introductory courses at MIT. So called because of the wizard on the jacket. One of thebibles of the LISP/Scheme world. Also, less commonly, known as thePurple Book.
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wizard hatn.
[also, after Terry Pratchett, `pointy hat'] Notional headgear worn by whoever is thewizardin a particular context. The implication is that it's a transferable role. "Talk to Alice, she's wearing the TCP/IP wizard hat while Bob is on vacation." This metaphor is sufficiently live that one may actually see hackers miming the act of putting on, taking off, or transferring a phantom hat. Comparepatch pumpkin.
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wizard mode
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wizardly
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wizard moden.
[fromrogue] A special access mode of a program or system, usually passworded, that permits some users godlike privileges. Generally not used for operating systems themselves (`root mode' or `wheel mode' would be used instead). This term is often used with respect to games that have editable state.
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wizardly
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wizardlyadj.
Pertaining to wizards. A wizardlyfeatureis one that only a wizard could understand or use properly.
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wok-on-the-walln.
A small microwave dish antenna used for cross-campus private network circuits, from the obvious resemblance between a microwave dish and the Chinese culinary utensil.
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womb boxn.
1. [TMRC] Storage space for equipment. 2. [proposed] A variety of hard-shell equipment case with heavy interior padding and/or shaped carrier cutouts in a foam-rubber matrix; mundanely called a `flight case'. Used for delicate test equipment, electronics, and musical instruments.
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WOMBAT
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womble
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WOMBAT/wom'bat/ adj.
[acronym: Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time] Applied to problems which are both profoundlyuninterestingin themselves and unlikely to benefit anyone interesting even if solved. Often used in fanciful constructions such as `wrestling with a wombat'. See alsocrawling horror,SMOP. Also note the rather different usage as a metasyntactic variable inCommonwealth Hackish.
Users of the PDP-11 database program DATATRIEVE adopted the wombat as their notional mascot; the program's help file responded to "HELP WOMBAT" with factual information about Real World wombats.
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womblen.
[Unisys UK: from British animated characters] A user who has great difficulty in communicating their requirements and/or in using the resulting software. Extreme case ofluser. An especially senior or high-ranking womble is referred to as Great-Uncle Bulgaria.
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wonky/wong'kee/ adj.
[from Australian slang] Yet another approximate synonym forbroken. Specifically connotes a malfunction that produces behavior seen as crazy, humorous, or amusingly perverse. "That was the day the printer's font logic went wonky and everybody's listings came out in Tengwar." Also in `wonked out'. Seefunky,demented,bozotic.
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woofern.
[University of Waterloo] Some varieties of wide paper for printers have a perforation 8.5 inches from the left margin that allows the excess on the right-hand side to be torn off when the print format is 80 columns or less wide. The right-hand excess may be called `woofer'. This term (liketweeter) has been in use at Waterloo since 1972, but is elsewhere unknown. In audio jargon, the word refers to the bass speaker(s) on a hi-fi.
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workaroundn.
1. A temporaryklugeused to bypass, mask, or otherwise avoid abugormisfeaturein some system. Theoretically, workarounds are always replaced byfixes; in practice, customers often find themselves living with workarounds for long periods of time. "The code died on NUL characters in the input, so I fixed it to interpret them as spaces." "That's not a fix, that's a workaround!" 2. A procedure to be employed by the user in order to do what some currently non-working feature should do. Hypothetical example: "Using META-F7crashes the 4.43 build of Weemax, but as a workaround you can type CTRL-R, then SHIFT-F5, and delete the remainingcruftby hand."
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working as designedadj.
[IBM] 1. In conformance to a wrong or inappropriate specification; useful, but misdesigned. 2. Frequently used as a sardonic comment on a program's utility. 3. Unfortunately also used as a bogus reason for not accepting a criticism or suggestion. AtIBM, this sense is used in official documents! SeeBAD.
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wormn.
[from `tapeworm' in John Brunner's novel "The Shockwave Rider", via XEROX PARC] A program that propagates itself over a network, reproducing itself as it goes. Comparevirus. Nowadays the term has negative connotations, as it is assumed that onlycrackers write worms. Perhaps the best-known example was Robert T. Morris'sGreat Wormof 1988, a `benign' one that got out of control and hogged hundreds of Suns and VAXen across the U.S. See alsocracker,RTM,Trojan horse,ice.
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wormhole/werm'hohl/ n.
[from the `wormhole' singularities hypothesized in some versions of General Relativity theory] 1. [n.,obs.] A location in a monitor which contains the address of a routine, with the specific intent of making it easy to substitute a different routine. This term is now obsolescent; modern operating systems use clusters of wormholes extensively (for modularization of I/O handling in particular, as in the Unix device-driver organization) but the preferred techspeak for these clusters is `device tables', `jump tables' or `capability tables'. 2. [Amateur Packet Radio] A network path using a commercial satellite link to join two or more amateur VHF networks. So called because traffic routed through a wormhole leaves and re-enters the amateur network over great distances with usually little clue in the message routing header as to how it got from one relay to the other. Comparegopher hole(sense 2).
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wound around the axleadj.
In an infinite loop. Often used by older computer types.
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wrap aroundvi.
(also n. `wraparound' and v. shorthand `wrap') 1. [techspeak] The action of a counter that starts over at zero or at `minus infinity' (seeinfinity) after its maximum value has been reached, and continues incrementing, either because it is programmed to do so or because of an overflow (as when a car's odometer starts over at 0). 2. To changephasegradually and continuously by maintaining a steady wake-sleep cycle somewhat longer than 24 hours, e.g., living six long (28-hour) days in a week (or, equivalently, sleeping at the rate of 10 microhertz). This sense is also calledphase-wrapping.
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write-only coden.
[a play on `read-only memory'] Code so arcane, complex, or ill-structured that it cannot be modified or even comprehended by anyone but its author, and possibly not even by him/her. ABad Thing.
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write-only languagen.
A language with syntax (or semantics) sufficiently dense and bizarre that any routine of significant size is automaticallywrite-only code. A sobriquet applied occasionally to C and often to APL, thoughINTERCALandTECOcertainly deserve it more. See alsoBefunge.
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write-only memoryn.
The obvious antonym to `read-only memory'. Out of frustration with the long and seemingly useless chain of approvals required of component specifications, during which no actual checking seemed to occur, an engineer at Signetics once created a specification for a write-only memory and included it with a bunch of other specifications to be approved. This inclusion came to the attention of Signeticsmanagementonly when regular customers started calling and asking for pricing information. Signetics published a corrected edition of the data book and requested the return of the `erroneous' ones. Later, in 1972, Signetics bought a double-page spread in "Electronics" magazine's April issue and used the spec as an April Fools' Day joke. Instead of the more conventional characteristic curves, the 25120 "fully encoded, 9046 x N, Random Access, write-only-memory" data sheet included diagrams of "bit capacity vs. Temp.", "Iff vs. Vff", "Number of pins remaining vs. number of socket insertions", and "AQL vs. selling price". The 25120 required a 6.3 VAC VFF supply, a +10V VCC, and VDD of 0V, +/- 2%.
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Wrong Thingn.
A design, action, or decision that is clearly incorrect or inappropriate. Often capitalized; always emphasized in speech as if capitalized. The opposite of theRight Thing; more generally, anything that is not the Right Thing. In cases where `the good is the enemy of the best', the merely good -- although good -- is nevertheless the Wrong Thing. "In C, the default is for module-level declarations to be visible everywhere, rather than just within the module. This is clearly the Wrong Thing."
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wugga wugga/wuh'g* wuh'g*/ n.
Imaginary sound that a computer program makes as it labors with a tedious or difficult task.grind(sense 4).
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wumpus/wuhm'p*s/ n.
The central monster (and, in many versions, the name) of a famous family of very early computer games called "Hunt The Wumpus'. The original was invented in 1970 (several years beforeADVENT) by Gregory Yob. The wumpus lived somewhere in a cave with the topology of an dodecahedron's edge/vertex graph (later versions supported other topologies, including an icosahedron and Möbius strip). The player started somewhere at random in the cave with five `crooked arrows'; these could be shot through up to three connected rooms, and would kill the wumpus on a hit (later versions introduced the wounded wumpus, which got very angry). Unfortunately for players, the movement necessary to map the maze was made hazardous not merely by the wumpus (which would eat you if you stepped on him) but also by bottomless pits and colonies of super bats that would pick you up and drop you at a random location (later versions added `anaerobic termites' that ate arrows, bat migrations, and earthquakes that randomly changed pit locations).
This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like the even older Star Trek games). In this respect, as in the dungeon-like setting and its terse, amusing messages, it prefiguredADVENTandZorkand was directly ancestral to the latter (Zork acknowledged this heritage by including a super-bat colony). A C emulation of the original Basic game is available at the Retrocomputing Museum, http://www.ccil.org/retro.
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WYSIAYG/wiz'ee-ayg/ adj.
Describes a user interface under which "What You See IsAllYou Get"; an unhappy variant ofWYSIWYG. Visual, `point-and-shoot'-style interfaces tend to have easy initial learning curves, but also to lack depth; they often frustrate advanced users who would be better served by a command-style interface. When this happens, the frustrated user has a WYSIAYG problem. This term is most often used of editors, word processors, and document formatting programs. WYSIWYG `desktop publishing' programs, for example, are a clear win for creating small documents with lots of fonts and graphics in them, especially things like newsletters and presentation slides. When typesetting book-length manuscripts, on the other hand, scale changes the nature of the task; one quickly runs into WYSIAYG limitations, and the increased power and flexibility of a command-driven formatter likeTeXor Unix'stroffbecomes not just desirable but a necessity. CompareYAFIYGI.