This is the " best of " list, containing slang in use today and in the past by coders, technophiles, app developers, geeks, nerds and hackers, from votes by 44138 site visitors. The most votes has the first spot, the second most votes the 2nd, and so on ;-) It contains a lot of folklore and humour.
WIZARD
1. Transitively, a person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works; esp. Someone who can find and fix bugs quickly in an emergency.
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 has 'wheel privileges' 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.
MISFEATURE
- A feature that eventually turns out to be more trouble than it was worth, possibly because it is inadequate for a new user or situation that has evolved.
FINGER-POINTING SYNDROME
- All-too-frequent result of bugs, esp. In new or experimental configurations. The hardware vendor points a finger at the software. The software vendor points a finger at the hardware. All the poor users get is the finger.
THE WALHALLA OF TRUTH
(also 'THE WALHALLA')
- The Internet. As in "I'm sure it must be true, I read it on the Walhalla!" or as in "Oh yeah? And what is your source? The walhallah of truth?". Alledgedly coined by photographer Patou Jones.
BRAIN DUMP
- The act of telling someone everything one knows about a particular topic or project. Typically used when someone is going to let a new party maintain a piece of code. Conceptually analogous to an operating system core dump in that it saves a lot of useful state before an exit.
VOODOO PROGRAMMING
1. The use by guess or cookbook of an obscure or hairy system, feature, or algorithm that one does not truly understand. The implication is that the technique may not work, and if it doesn't, one will never know why.
2. Things programmers do that they know shouldn't work but they try anyway, and which sometimes actually work, such as recompiling everything.
TITS ON A KEYBOARD
- Small bumps on certain keycaps to keep touch-typists registered. Usually on the 5 of a numeric keypad, and on the F and J.
WOMBAT
- Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time. Applied to problems which are both profoundly uninteresting in themselves and unlikely to benefit anyone interesting even if solved.
PLUG AND PRAY
- Parody of the techspeak term 'plug-and-play', describing a PC peripheral card which is claimed to have no need for hardware configuration via DIP switches, and which should be work as soon as it is inserted in the PC. Unfortunately, even the PCI bus is not up to pulling this off reliably, and people who have to do installation or troubleshoot PCs soon find themselves longing for the DIP switches.
FOCUS DESTROYER
- A person in a meeting who has a 'facial tic', such as eyebrow spasms. Quite difficult to stop looking, hence destroying focus completely on the subject at hand. In conversations: 'did you had a great meeting with the X group? I have some questions regarding the topic that was discussed', Answer: 'We had a focus destroyer in the group'. Reply: OK, but thanks anyway'.
SPAGHETTI CODE
- Code with a complex and tangled control structure, esp. one using many GOTOs, exceptions, or other 'unstructured' branching constructs. Pejorative. Also 'kangaroo code', doubtless because such code has so many jumps in it.
WRITE ONLY CODE
- 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.
CHEMIST
- Someone who wastes computer time on number-crunching when you'd far rather the machine were doing something more productive, such as working out anagrams of your name or printing Snoopy calendars or running life patterns.
DON'T DO THAT THEN!
- [from an old doctor's office joke about a patient with a trivial complaint] Stock response to a user complaint. 'When I type control-S, the whole system comes to a halt for thirty seconds. ' 'Don't do that, then!' (or 'So don't do that!'). Here's a classic example of 'Don't do that then!' from Neil Stephenson's 'In The Beginning Was The Command Line'. A friend of his built a network with a load of Macs and a few high-powered database servers. He found that from time to time the whole network would lock up for no apparent reason. The problem was eventually tracked down to MacOS's cooperative multitasking: when a user held down the mouse button for too long, the network stack wouldn't get a chance to run.
BLACK MAGIC
- A technique that works, though nobody really understands why. More obscure than voodoo programming.
GENIUS FROM MARS TECHNIQUE
- A visionary quality which enables one to ignore the standard approach and come up with a totally unexpected new algorithm. An attack on a problem from an offbeat angle that no one has ever thought of before, but that in retrospect makes total sense.
MISBUG
- An unintended property of a program that turns out to be useful; something that should have been a bug but turns out to be a feature.
DRUNK MOUSE SYNDROME
- (also 'mouse on drugs') A malady exhibited by the mouse pointing device of some computers. The typical symptom is for the mouse cursor on the screen to move in random directions and not in sync with the motion of the actual mouse. Can usually be corrected by unplugging the mouse and plugging it back again. Another recommended fix for optical mice is to rotate your mouse pad 90 degrees.
ANGRY FRUIT SALAD
- A bad visual-interface design that uses too many colors. (This term derives, of course, from the bizarre day-glo colors found in canned fruit salad). Too often one sees similar effects from interface designers using color window systems such as X. There is a tendency to create displays that are flashy and attention-getting but uncomfortable for long-term use.
DEEP MAGIC
- An awesomely arcane technique central to a program or system, esp. One neither generally published nor available to hackers at large, one that could only have been composed by a true wizard. Many techniques in cryptography, signal processing, graphics, and AI still are.
JUGGLING EGGS
- Keeping a lot of state in your head while modifying a program. 'Don't bother me now, I'm juggling eggs', means that an interrupt is likely to result in the program's being scrambled. In the classic 1975 first-contact SF novel 'The Mote in God's Eye', by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, an alien describes a very difficult task by saying 'We juggle priceless eggs in variable gravity'.
KILLER APP
- The application that actually makes a sustaining market for a promising but under-utilized technology. First used in the mid-1980s to describe Lotus 1-2-3 once it became evident that demand for that product had been the major driver of the early business market for IBM PCs. The term was then restrospectively applied to VisiCalc, which had played a similar role in the success of the Apple II. After 1994 it became commonplace to describe the World Wide Web as the Internet's killer app. One of the standard questions asked about each new personal-computer technology as it emerges has become 'what's the killer app?'.
DRONE
- Ignorant sales or customer service personnel in computer or electronics superstores. Characterized by a lack of even superficial knowledge about the products they sell, yet possessed of the conviction that they are more competent than their hacker customers. Usage: 'That video board probably sucks, it was recommended by a drone at Fry's' In the year 2000, their natural habitats include Fry's Electronics, Best Buy, and CompUSA.
ONE-BANANA-PROBLEM
- At mainframe shops, where the computers have operators for routine administrivia, the programmers and hardware people tend to look down on the operators and claim that a trained monkey could do their job. It is frequently observed that the incentives that would be offered said monkeys can be used as a scale to describe the difficulty of a task. A one-banana problem is simple; hence, 'It's only a one-banana job at the most; what's taking them so long?' At IBM, folklore divides the world into one-, two-, and three-banana problems. Other cultures have different hierarchies and may divide them more finely; at ICL, for example, five grapes (a bunch) equals a banana. Their upper limit for the in-house sysapes is said to be two bananas and three grapes (another source claims it's three bananas and one grape, but observes 'However, this is subject to local variations, cosmic rays and ISO'). At a complication level any higher than that, one asks the manufacturers to send someone around to check things.
ALPHA GEEK
- [from animal ethologists' `alpha male'] The most technically accomplished or skillful person in some implied context. 'Ask Larry, he's the alpha geek here'.
HALLOWEEN DOCUMENTS
- A pair of Microsoft internal strategy memoranda leaked to ESR in late 1998 that confirmed everybody's paranoia about the current Evil Empire. These documents praised the technical excellence of Linux and outlined a counterstrategy of attempting to lock in customers by 'de-commoditizing' Internet protocols and services. They were extensively cited on the Internet and in the press and proved so embarrassing that Microsoft PR barely said a word in public for six months afterwards.
SNEAKERNET
- Term used (generally with ironic intent) for transfer of electronic information by physically carrying tape, disks, or some other media from one machine to another. 'Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with magtape, or a 747 filled with CD-ROMs. ' Also called 'Tennis-Net', 'Armpit-Net', 'Floppy-Net' or 'Shoenet'; in the 1990s, 'Nike network' after a well-known sneaker brand.
A PINKY OR PINKIES
- People who are forced to work with software that contains bugs or lacks a lot of, sometimes essential, features. The software was always brought into the company by someone who is not really IT minded, to say the least, but has the power to make the decision anyway. Most of the time these people have left the company ages ago, leaving the Pinkies with the mess.
CRASH AND BURN
- A spectacular crash, in the mode of the conclusion of the car-chase scene in the movie 'Bullitt' (a Steve McQueen classic, look it up on the net) and many subsequent imitators die horribly. Sun-3 monitors losing the flyback transformer and lightning strikes on VAX-11/780 backplanes are notable crash and burn generators. The construction 'crash-and-burn machine' is reported for a computer used exclusively for alpha or beta testing, or reproducing bugs (i.e. not for development). The implication is that it wouldn't be such a disaster if that machine crashed, since only the testers would be inconvenienced.
MEATSPACE
- The physical world, where the meat lives, as opposed to cyberspace. Hackers are actually more willing to use this term than 'cyberspace', because it's not speculative, we already have a running meatspace implementation (the universe).
BROWN-PAPER-BAG BUG
- A bug in a public software release that is so embarrassing that the author notionally wears a brown paper bag over his head for a while so he won't be recognized on the net. Entered popular usage after the early-1999 release of the first Linux 2.2 which had one. The phrase was used in Linus Torvalds's apology posting.
INTERNET DEATH PENALTY
- (often abbreviated IDP) The ultimate sanction against 'spam-emitting sites
- complete shunning at the router level of all mail and packets, as well as Usenet messages, from the offending domain(s).
SUZIE-COBOL
- 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'.
BIG IRON
- Large, expensive, ultra-fast computers. Used generally of number-crunching supercomputers such as Crays, but can include more conventional big commercial IBMish mainframes.
PAPER-NET
- Hackish way of referring to the postal service, analogizing it to a very slow, low-reliability network. Common variants of this are 'Papernet' and 'P-Net'.
ALL-ELBOWS
- Used to describe a program that rudely steals the resources that it needs without considering that other TSRs (terminate-and-stay-resident) may also be resident. One particularly common form of rudeness is lock-up due to programs fighting over the keyboard interrupt.
MEGAPENNY
- $10,000 (1 cent . 10^6). Used semi-humorously as a unit in comparing computer cost and performance figures.
A COBWEB SITE
- A World Wide Web Site that hasn't been updated so long it has figuratively grown cobwebs.
LORD HIGH FIXER
- The person in an organization who knows the most about some aspect of a system.
CODE POLICE
- [by analogy with George Orwell's 'thought police'] A mythical team of Gestapo-like storm troopers that might burst into one's office and arrest one for violating programming style rules. May be used either seriously, to underline a claim that a particular style violation is dangerous, or ironically, to suggest that the practice under discussion is condemned mainly by anal-retentive weenies. 'Dike out that goto or the code police will get you!' The ironic usage is perhaps more common.
DEFENESTRATION
[mythically from a traditional Czech assasination method, via SF fandom]
1. The act of exiting a window system in order to get better response time from a full-screen program. This comes from the dictionary meaning of 'defenestrate', which is to throw something out a window.
2. The act of discarding something under the assumption that it will improve matters. 'I don't have any disk space left. ' 'Well, why don't you defenestrate that 100 megs worth of old core dumps?'
3. The act of completely removing Micro$oft Windows from a PC in favor of a better OS (typically Linux).
BRAIN DANCE
- Any ceremonial action taken to correct a hardware problem, with the expectation that nothing will be accomplished. This especially applies to reseating printed circuit boards, reconnecting cables, etc. 'I can't boot up the machine. We'll have to wait for Greg to do his rain dance. '
2 Any arcane sequence of actions performed with computers or software in order to achieve some goal; the term is usually restricted to rituals that include both an incantation or two and physical activity or motion.
NAILED TO THE WALL
- [like a trophy] Said of a bug finally eliminated after protracted, and even heroic, effort.
CODE MONKEY
1 A person only capable of grinding out code, but unable to perform the higher-primate tasks of software architecture, analysis, and design. Mildly insulting. Often applied to the most junior people on a programming team.
2 Anyone who writes code for a living; a programmer.
3 A self-deprecating way of denying responsibility for a management decision, or of complaining about having to live with such decisions. As in 'Don't ask me why we need to write a compiler in+COBOL, I'm just a code monkey'.
BITTY BOX
- A computer sufficiently small, primitive, or incapable as to cause a hacker acute claustrophobia at the thought of developing software on or for it. Especially used of small, obsolescent, single-tasking-only personal machines such as the Atari 800, Osborne, Sinclair, VIC-20, TRS-80, or IBM PC. Get a real computer!.
CATATONIA
- A condition in which something is supposed to happen, but nothing does.
IRON
- Hardware, especially older and larger hardware of mainframe class with big metal cabinets housing relatively low-density electronics (but the term is also used of modern supercomputers). Often in the phrase big iron.
RAIN DANCE
1 Any ceremonial action taken to correct a hardware problem, with the expectation that nothing will be accomplished. This especially applies to reseating printed circuit boards, reconnecting cables, etc.
A CODE GRINDER
1. A suit-wearing minion of the sort hired in legion strength by banks and insurance companies to implement payroll packages in RPG and other such unspeakable horrors. In its native habitat, the code grinder often removes the suit jacket to reveal an underplumage consisting of button-down shirt (starch optional) and a tie. In times of dire stress, the sleeves (if long) may be rolled up and the tie loosened about half an inch. It seldom helps. The code grinder's milieu is about as far from hackerdom as one can get and still touch a computer; the term connotes pity.
2. Used of or to a hacker, a really serious slur on the person's creative ability, connotes a design style characterized by primitive technique, rule-boundedness, brute force, and utter lack of imagination.
BLACK ART
- A collection of arcane, unpublished, and (by implication) mostly ad-hoc techniques developed for a particular application or systems area. VLSI design and compiler code optimization were (in their beginnings) considered classic examples of black art. As theory developed they became deep magic, and once standard textbooks had been written, became merely heavy wizardry. The huge proliferation of formal and informal channels for spreading around new computer-related technologies during the last twenty years has made both the term 'black art' and what it describes less common than formerly.
INFINITE-MONKEY THEORUM
- 'If you put an infinite number of monkeys at typewriters, eventually one will bash out the script for Hamlet. ' (One may also hypothesize a small number of monkeys and a very long period of time). This theorem asserts nothing about the intelligence of the one random monkey that eventually comes up with the script (and note that the mob will also type out all the possible incorrect versions of Hamlet). It may be referred to semi-seriously when justifying a brute force method; the implication is that, with enough resources thrown at it, any technical challenge becomes a one-banana problem. This theorem was first popularized by the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington. It became part of the idiom of techies via the classic SF short story 'Inflexible Logic' by Russell Maloney, and many younger hackers know it through a reference in Douglas Adams's 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'.
A CRYPPIE
- A cryptographer. One who hacks or implements cryptographic software or hardware.
PRINTING DISCUSSION
- A protracted, low-level, time-consuming, generally pointless discussion of something only peripherally interesting to all.
DERF
- The act of exploiting a terminal which someone else has absentmindedly left logged on (or a windows/linux/... session where they didn't log off), to use that person's account, especially to post articles intended to make an ass of the victim you're impersonating. It has been alleged that the term originated as a reversal of the name of the gentleman who most usually left himself vulnerable to it, who also happened to be the head of the department that handled PLATO at the University of Delaware.
JOB SECURITY
- When some piece of code is written in a particularly obscure fashion, and no good reason (such as time or space optimization) can be discovered, it is often said that the programmer was attempting to increase his job security (i.e., by making himself indispensable for maintenance). This sour joke seldom has to be said in full; if two hackers are looking over some code together and one points at a section and says 'job security', the other one may just nod.
FINGER TROUBLE
- Mistyping, typos, or generalized keyboard incompetence (this is surprisingly common among hackers, given the amount of time they spend at keyboards). 'I keep putting colons at the end of statements instead of semicolons', 'Finger trouble again, eh?'.
NONLINEAR
1. Behaving in an erratic and unpredictable fashion; unstable. When used to describe the behavior of a machine or program, it suggests that said machine or program is being forced to run far outside of design specifications. This behavior may be induced by unreasonable inputs, or may be triggered when a more mundane bug sends the computation far off from its expected course.
2. When describing the behavior of a person, suggests a tantrum or a flame. 'When you talk to Bob, don't mention the drug problem or he'll go nonlinear for hours. ' In this context, 'go nonlinear' connotes 'blow up out of proportion' (proportion connotes linearity).
BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH
- A failure mode of Microsloth Windows. On an attempt to launch a DOS box, a networked Windows system not uncommonly blanks the screen and locks up the PC so hard that it requires a cold boot to recover. This unhappy phenomenon is known as The Black Screen of Death (also Blue Screen of Deatch which is now more common).
FIREWALL CODE
1. The code you put in a system (say, a telephone switch) to make sure that the users can't do any damage. Since users always want to be able to do everything but never want to suffer for any mistakes, the construction of a firewall is a question not only of defensive coding but also of interface presentation, so that users don't even get curious about those corners of a system where they can burn themselves.
2 Any sanity check inserted to catch a 'can't happen' error. Wise programmers often change code to fix a bug twice: once to fix the bug, and once to insert a firewall which would have arrested the bug before it did quite as much damage.
VULCAN NERVE PINCH or THREE FINGER SALUTE
- The keyboard combination that forces a soft-boot or jump to ROM monitor (on machines that support such a feature). On PC clones this is Ctrl-Alt-Del; on Macintoshes, it is
DEMIGOD
- A hacker with years of experience, a world-wide reputation, and a major role in the development of at least one design, tool, or game used by or known to more than half of the hacker community. To qualify as a genuine demigod, the person must recognizably identify with the hacker community and have helped shape it. Major demigods include Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (co-inventors of Unix and C, Richard M. Stallman (inventor of EMACS, Larry Wall (inventor of Perl, Linus Torvalds (inventor of Linux, and most recently James Gosling (inventor of Java) and Guido van Rossum (inventor of Python. In their hearts of hearts, most hackers dream of someday becoming demigods themselves, and more than one major software project has been driven to completion by the author's veiled hopes of apotheosis.
REALITY CHECK
1. The simplest kind of test of software or hardware; doing the equivalent of asking it what 2 + 2 is and seeing if you get 4. The software equivalent of a smoke test.
2. The act of letting a real user try out prototype software.
AIRPLANE RULE
- Complexity increases the possibility of failure, a twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane. By analogy, in both software and electronics, the rule that simplicity increases robustness. It is correspondingly argued that the right way to build reliable systems is to put all your eggs in one basket, after making sure that you've built a really good basket.
HIRED GUN
- A contract programmer, as opposed to a full-time staff member. All the connotations of this term suggested by innumerable spaghetti Westerns are intentional.
SLURP
- To read a large data file into memory before using or processing data.
EASTER EGGING
- The act of replacing unrelated components more or less at random in hopes that a malfunction will go away. Hackers consider this the normal operating mode of field circus techs and do not love them for it.
EGOSURF
- To search the net for your name or links to your web pages. Perhaps connected to long-established SF-fan slang 'egoscan', to search for one's name in a fanzine.
WIZARD MODE
- A special access mode of a program or system, usually passworded, that permits some users godlike privileges.
SOURCE OF ALL GOOD BITS
- A person from whom (or a place from which) useful information may be obtained. If you need to know about a program, a guru might be the source of all good bits. The title is often applied to a particularly competent secretary.
DINOSAURS MATING
- Said to occur when yet another big companies merger or buyout occurs; reflects a perception by hackers that these signal another stage in the long, slow dying of the mainframe industry. In its glory days of the 1960s, it was 'IBM and the Seven Dwarves': Burroughs, Control Data, General Electric, Honeywell, NCR, RCA, and Univac. RCA and GE sold out early, and it was 'IBM and the Bunch' (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell) for a while. Honeywell was bought out by Bull; Burroughs merged with Univac to form Unisys (in 1984 -- this was when the phrase 'dinosaurs mating' was coined); and in 1991 AT&T absorbed NCR (but spat it back out a few years later). Control Data still exists but is no longer in the mainframe business. More such earth-shaking unions of doomed giants seem inevitable.
TUX
- Tux the Penguin is the official emblem of Linux, This eventuated after a logo contest in 1996, during which Linus Torvalds endorsed the idea of a penguin logo in a couple of famously funny postings. Linus explained that he was once bitten by a killer penguin in Australia and has felt a special affinity for the species ever since.
DOORSTOP
- Used to describe equipment that is non-functional and halfway expected to remain so, especially obsolete equipment kept around for political reasons or ostensibly as a backup. 'When we receive our brand new i7 desktop in here, that Pentium4 PC will turn into a doorstop'.
STURGEON'S LAW
- 'Ninety percent of everything is crap'. Derived from a quote by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who once said, 'Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud. ' Oddly, when Sturgeon's Law is cited, the final word is almost invariably changed to 'crap'. Though this maxim originated in SF fandom, most hackers recognize it and are all too aware of its truth.
FUEL UP
- To eat or drink hurriedly in order to get back to hacking. 'Food-p?' 'Yeah, let's fuel up'.
ZIPPERHEAD
- A person with a closed mind.
FUNKY
- Said of something that functions, but in a slightly strange, klugey way. It does the job and would be difficult to change, so its obvious non-optimality is left alone. Often used to describe interfaces. The more bugs something has that nobody has bothered to fix because workarounds are easier, the funkier it is. TECO and UUCP are funky. The Intel i860's exception handling is extraordinarily funky. Most standards acquire funkiness as they age. 'The new mailer is installed, but is still somewhat funky; if it bounces your mail for no reason, try resubmitting it'.
DOGFOOD
- Interim software used internally for testing. 'To eat one's own dogfood' (from which the slang noun derives) means to use the software one is developing, as part of one's everyday development environment (the phrase is used outside Microsoft and Netscape). The practice is normal in the Linux community and elsewhere, but the term 'dogfood' is seldom used as open-source betas tend to be quite tasty and nourishing. The idea is that developers who are using their own software will quickly learn what's missing or broken. Dogfood is typically not even of beta quality.
COBOL FINGERS
- Reported from Sweden, a (hypothetical) disease one might get from coding in COBOL. The language requires code verbose beyond all reason, thus it is alleged that programming too much in COBOL causes one's fingers to wear down to stubs by the endless typing. 'I refuse to type in all that source code again; it would give me COBOL fingers!'.
GET A REAL COMPUTER!
- Typical hacker response to news that somebody is having trouble getting work done on a system that (a) is single-tasking, (b) has no hard disk, or (c) has an address space smaller than 16 megabytes. This is as of early 1996; note that the threshold for 'real computer' rises with time.
AFK
- 'Away From Keyboard' Used to notify others that you will be momentarily unavailable online. Also: 'let's meet AFK' which used to be 'Let's meet IRL' (In Real Life) but since the internet and surfing is also in real life (!), AFK became the definitive term to use.
DOGWASH
- [From a quip in the 'urgency' field of a very optional software change request, ca. 1982. It was something like 'Urgency: Wash your dog first'. 1. A project of minimal priority, undertaken as an escape from more serious work.
2. To engage in such a project. Many games and much freeware get written this way.
SHITOGRAM
- A really nasty piece of email.
DEMENTED
- Yet another term of disgust used to describe a malfunctioning program. The connotation in this case is that the program works as designed, but the design is bad. Said, for example, of a program that generates large numbers of meaningless error messages, implying that it is on the brink of imminent collapse.
NOP AROUND or NOPPING
- Hanging out, not doing much, not programming.
DEEP SPACE
- Describes the notional location of any program that has gone off the trolley. Especially used of programs that just sit there silently grinding long after either failure or some output is expected. 'Uh oh. I should have gotten a prompt ten seconds ago. The program's in deep space somewhere'.
TREEWARE
- Printouts, books, and other information media made from pulped dead trees.
HEATSEEKER
- A customer who can be relied upon to buy, without fail, the latest version of an existing product. A 1993 example of a heatseeker was someone who, owning a 286 PC and Windows 3.0, went out and bought Windows 3.1 (which offers no worthwhile benefits unless you have a 386). If all customers were heatseekers, vast amounts of money could be made by just fixing some of the bugs in each release (n) and selling it to them as release (n+1). Microsoft in fact seems to have mastered this technique.
BATBELT
- Many hackers routinely hang numerous devices such as pagers, cell-phones, personal organizers, leatherman multitools, pocket knives, flashlights, walkie-talkies, even miniature computers from their belts. When many of these devices are worn at once, the hacker's belt somewhat resembles Batman's utility belt, hence it is referred to as a batbelt.
HEAVY WIZARDRY
- Code or designs that trade on a particularly intimate knowledge or experience of a particular operating system or language or complex application interface. Distinguished from deep magic, which trades more on arcane theoretical knowledge. Writing device drivers is heavy wizardry; so is interfacing to X (sense 2) without a toolkit. Esp. Found in source-code comments of the form 'Heavy wizardry begins here'.
TICKLE A BUG
- To cause a normally hidden bug to manifest itself through some known series of inputs or operations.
DROOL-PROOF PAPER
- Documentation that has been obsessively dumbed down, to the point where only a cretin could bear to read it, is said to have succumbed to the 'drool-proof paper syndrome' or to have been 'written on drool-proof paper'. For example, this is an actual quote from Apple's LaserWriter manual: 'Do not expose your LaserWriter to open fire or flame. ' The SGI Indy manual is said to include the line 'Do not dangle the mouse by the cord or throw it at coworkers. ', but this sounds like parody.
SUNSPOTS
1. Notional cause of an odd error. 'Why did the program suddenly turn the screen blue?' 'Sunspots, I guess'.
2. Also the cause of bit rot -- from the myth that sunspots will increase cosmic rays, which can flip single bits in memory.
CONTENT FREE
- [by analogy with techspeak 'context-free'] Used of a message that adds nothing to the recipient's knowledge. It usually connotes derision for communication styles that exalt form over substance or are centered on concerns irrelevant to the subject ostensibly at hand. Perhaps most used with reference to speeches by company presidents and other professional manipulators. 'Content-free? Uh... That's anything printed on glossy paper'. 'He gave a talk on the implications of electronic networks for postmodernism and the fin-de-siecle aesthetic. It was content-free'.
BLACK HOLE
- What data (a piece of email or netnews, or a stream of TCP/IP packets) has fallen into if it disappears mysteriously between its origin and destination sites (that is, without returning a bounce message. The implied metaphor of email as interstellar travel is interesting in itself. Readily verbed as 'blackhole': 'That router is blackholing IDP packets'.
SILLY WALK
- [Monty Python's Flying Circus] A ridiculous procedure required to accomplish a task.
REAL USER
1. A commercial user. One who is paying real money for his computer usage.
2. A non-hacker. Someone using the system for an explicit purpose (a research project, a course, etc. other than pure exploration. Hackers who are also students may also be real users. 'I need this fixed so I can do a problem set. I'm not complaining out of randomness, but as a real user'.
404'ing
- from the HTTP error 'file not found on server' Extended to humans to convey that the subject has no idea or no clue. May be used reflexively: 'Uh, I'm 404ing' which means I'm drawing a blank.
EVIL EMPIRE
- [from Ronald Reagan's famous characterization of the communist Soviet Union] Formerly IBM, now Microsoft. Functionally, the company most hackers love to hate at any given time. Hackers like to see themselves as romantic rebels against the Evil Empire, and frequently adopt this role to the point of ascribing rather more power and malice to the Empire than it actually has (or does it?).
VIRTUAL FRIDAY
- The last day before an extended weekend, if that day is not a 'real' Friday. There are also 'virtual Mondays' that are actually Tuesdays, after the three-day weekends associated with many national holidays in Europe and the US.
DUB DUB DUB
- Spoken-only shorthand for the 'WWW' (double-u double-u double-u) in many web host names. Nothing to do with the style of reggae music called 'dub'.
HYSTERICAL REASONS
- (also `hysterical raisins') A variant on the stock phrase 'for historical reasons', indicating specifically that something must be done in some stupid way for backwards compatibility, and moreover that the feature it must be compatible with was the result of a bad design in the first place. 'All IBM PC video adapters have to support MDA text mode for hysterical reasons'.
BAGBITER
- Something, such as a program or a computer, that fails to work, or works in a remarkably clumsy manner. 'This text editor won't let me make a file with a line longer than 80 characters! What a bagbiter!' ALSO: 'bite the bag' To fail in some manner. 'The computer keeps crashing every five minutes...' and 'Yes, the disk controller is really biting the bag'.
TENSE
- Of programs, very clever and efficient. A tense piece of code often got that way because it was highly bummed, but sometimes it was just based on a great idea. A comment in a clever routine by Mike Kazar, once a grad-student hacker at CMU: 'This routine is so tense it will bring tears to your eyes. ' A tense programmer is one who produces tense code.
OCTAL FORTY
- Hackish way of saying 'I'm drawing a blank. ' Octal 40 is the ASCII space character, 0100000; by an odd coincidence, hex 40 (01000000) is the EBCDIC space character.
GONKULATOR
- A pretentious piece of equipment that actually serves no useful urpose. Usually used to describe one's least favorite piece of computer hardware.
TREEKILLER
1. A printer
2. A person who wastes paper.
TROGLODYTE MODE
- Programming with the lights turned off, sunglasses on, and the terminal inverted (black on white) because you've been up for so many days straight that your eyes hurt. Loud music blaring from a stereo stacked in the corner is optional but recommended.
EASTER EGG
- [from the custom of the Easter Egg hunt observed in the US and many parts of Europe] 1. A message hidden in the object code of a program as a joke, intended to be found by persons disassembling or browsing the code.
2. A message, graphic, or sound effect emitted by a program (or, on a PC, the BIOS ROM) in response to some undocumented set of commands or keystrokes, intended as a joke or to display program credits. One well-known early Easter egg found in a couple of OSes caused them to respond to the command make love with not war? Many personal computers have much more elaborate eggs hidden in ROM, including lists of the developers' names, political exhortations, snatches of music, and (in one case) graphics images of the entire development team.
CONFUSER
- Common soundalike slang for 'computer'. Usually encountered in compounds such as 'confuser room', 'personal confuser', 'confuser guru'. Usage: silly.
UNDOCUMENTED FEATURE
- 'Undocumented feature' is a common, allegedly humorous euphemism for a bug. There's a related joke that is sometimes referred to as the 'one-question geek test'. You say to someone 'I saw a Volkswagen Beetle today with a vanity license plate that read FEATURE'. If he/she laughs, he/she is a geek.
GUN
- To forcibly terminate a program or job (computer, not career). 'Some idiot left a background process running soaking up half the cycles, so I gunned it'.
MAGIC
1. Adj. As yet unexplained, or too complicated to explain; compare automagically and (Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ' 'TTY echoing is controlled by a large number of magic bits. ' 'This routine magically computes the parity of an 8-bit byte in three instructions. '
2. Adj. Characteristic of something that works although no one really understands why (this is especially called black magic.
3. [Stanford] A feature not generally publicized that allows something otherwise impossible, or a feature formerly in that category but now unveiled.
4. The ultimate goal of all engineering & development, elegance in the extreme; from the first corollary to Clarke's Third Law: 'Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced'.
BROCHUREWARE
- Planned but non-existent product, but with the added implication that marketing is actively selling and promoting it (they've printed brochures). Brochureware is often deployed as a strategic weapon; the idea is to con customers into not committing to an existing product of the competition's. It is a safe bet that when a brochureware product finally becomes real, it will be more expensive than and inferior to the alternatives that had been available for years.
INTERRUPTS LOCKED OUT
- When someone is ignoring you. In a restaurant, after several fruitless attempts to get the waitress's attention, a hacker might well observe 'She must have interrupts locked out'. The synonym 'interrupts disabled' is also common. Variations abound; 'to have one's interrupt mask bit set' and 'interrupts masked out' are also heard.
ONE-LINE FIX
- Used (often sarcastically) of a change to a program that is thought to be trivial or insignificant right up to the moment it crashes the system. Usually 'cured' by another one-line fix.
EYE CANDY
- A display of some sort that's presented to computer users to keep them distracted while the program performs necessary background tasks. Reported as mainstream usage among players of graphics-heavy computer games. We're also told this term is mainstream slang for soft pornography, but that sense does not appear to be live among hackers.
PAGE OUT
- To become unaware of one's surroundings temporarily, due to daydreaming or preoccupation. 'Can you repeat that? I paged out for a minute'.
LOGAN'S LAW
- After receiving a NO at first, ask the same question with some intervals for the 29th time and the answer will be Yes! But you better run away as soon as you got your positive reply. Wink wink to the SF cult classic 'Logan's Run'. In a conversation: 'did he finally get his requested data export? Yes, he used Logan's Law'.
DIE HORRIBLY
- The software equivalent of 'crash and burn' (hardware), and the preferred emphatic form of DIE. 'The converter choked on an FF in its input and died horribly'.
PLOKTA
- [acronym: Press Lots Of Keys To Abort] To press random keys in an attempt to get some response from the system. One might plokta when the abort procedure for a program is not known, or when trying to figure out if the system is just sluggish or really hung. Plokta can also be used while trying to figure out any unknown key sequence for a particular operation. Someone going into 'plokta mode' usually places both hands flat on the keyboard and mashes them down, hoping for some useful response.
ANSI STANDARD PIZZA
- Pepperoni and mushroom pizza. Coined allegedly because most pizzas ordered by hackers during some period leading up to mid-1990 were of that flavour.
POINT AND DROOL
- Parody of the techspeak term 'point-and-shoot interface', describing a windows, icons, and mouse-based interface such as is found on the Macintosh. The implication, of course, is that such an interface is only suitable for idiots.
BARE METAL
- New computer hardware, unadorned with such snares and delusions as an operating system or even assembler. Commonly used in the phrase 'programming on the bare metal', which refers to the arduous work needed to create these basic tools for a new machine. Real bare-metal programming involves things like building boot proms and BIOS chips, implementing basic monitors used to test device drivers, and writing the assemblers that will be used to write the compiler back ends that will give the new machine a real development environment. In the world of personal computing, bare metal programming is often considered a Good Thing, or at least a necessary evil (because these machines have often been sufficiently slow and poorly designed to make it necessary. The term usually refers to bypassing the BIOS or OS interface and writing the application to directly access device registers and machine addresses. 'To get 19.2 kilobaud on the serial port, you need to get down to the bare metal'.
RASTERBATION
- The gratuituous use of comuputer generated images and effects in movies and graphic art which would have been better without them. Especially employed as a term of abuse by Photoshop/GIMP users and graphic artists.
GREEN BYTES
- (also 'green words') 1. Meta-information embedded in a file, such as the length of the file or its name; as opposed to keeping such information in a separate description file or record. The term comes from an IBM user's group meeting (ca. 1962) at which these two approaches were being debated and the diagram of the file on the blackboard had the 'green bytes' drawn in green.
2. By extension, the non-data bits in any self-describing format. 'A GIF file contains, among other things, green bytes describing the packing method for the image'.
DIDDLE
- To work with or modify in a not particularly serious manner. 'Let's diddle this piece of code and see if the problem goes away'.
VAPORWARE
- Products announced far in advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place).
SATURDAY NIGHT SPECIAL
- A quick-and-dirty program or feature kluged together during off hours, under a deadline, and in response to pressure from a salesperson from the company. Such hacks are dangerously unreliable, but all too often sneak into a production release after insufficient review.
WOMBLE
- A user who has great difficulty in communicating their requirements and/or in using the resulting software. An especially senior or high-ranking womble is referred to as Great-Uncle Bulgaria.
PROGLET
- A short extempore program written to meet an immediate, transient need. Often written in BASIC, rarely more than a dozen lines long, and containing no subroutines. The largest amount of code that can be written off the top of one's head, that does not need any editing, and that runs correctly the first time (this amount varies significantly according to one's skill and the language one is using).
NERD
1. [mainstream slang] Pejorative applied to anyone with an above-average IQ and few gifts at small talk and ordinary social rituals.
2. [jargon] Term of praise applied (in conscious ironic reference to sense 1) to someone who knows what's really important and interesting and doesn't care to be distracted by trivial chatter and silly status games. The word itself appears to derive from the lines 'And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo, / A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!' in the Dr. Seuss book 'If I Ran the Zoo' (1950) (The spellings 'nurd' and 'gnurd' also used to be current at MIT, where 'nurd' is reported from as far back as 1957. How it developed its mainstream meaning is unclear, but sense 1 seems to have entered mass culture in the early 1970s (there are reports that in the mid-1960s it meant roughly 'annoying misfit' without the connotation of intelligence).
PR0N
- Pornography. Originally this referred only to Internet porn but since then it has expanded to refer to just about anything. The term comes from the warez kiddies tendency to replace letters with numbers. At some point on IRC someone mistyped, swapped the middle two letters, and the name stuck, then propagated over into mainstream hacker usage.
SLAP ON THE SIDE
- Also called a 'sidecar'. A type of external expansion hardware marketed by computer manufacturers (e.g. Commodore for the Amiga 500/1000 series and IBM for the hideous failure called 'PCjr'). Various boxes provided necessities such as memory, hard drive controllers, and conventional expansion slots.
HOME BOX
- A hacker's personal machine, especially one he or she owns. 'Yeah? Well, my home box runs a full 4.4 BSD, so there!'
HOMEMACHINE
1. Syn. Home box.
2. The machine that receives your email. These senses might be distinct, for example, for a hacker who owns one computer at home, but reads email at work.
BIGOT
- A person who is religiously attached to a particular computer, language, operating system, editor, or other tool. Usually found with a specifier such as 'Assembler bigot', 'Apple bigot', 'Windows bigot', 'Unix bigot', 'Microsoft bigot'. Real bigots can be distinguished by the fact that they refuse to learn alternatives even when the march of time and/or technology is threatening to obsolete the favored tool. It is truly said 'You can tell a bigot, but you can't tell him much'.
USERLAND
- Anywhere outside the kernel. This term has been in common use among Linux kernel hackers since at leat 1997, and seems to have originated in that community.
RTBM
- Read The Bloody Manual. RTBM is often the entire text of the first reply to a question from a newbie. The second would escalate to 'RTFM'.
GONZO
1. With total commitment, total concentration, and a mad sort of panache (Thompson's original sense).
2. More loosely: Overwhelming; outrageous; over the top; very large, esp. Used of collections of source code, source files, or individual functions.
SPIFFY
1. Said of programs having a pretty, clever, or exceptionally well-designed interface. 'Have you seen the spiffy X version of empire yet?'
2. Said sarcastically of a program that is perceived to have little more than a flashy interface going for it. Which meaning should be drawn depends delicately on tone of voice and context. This word was common mainstream slang during the 1940s, in a sense close to 1.
HALT AND CATCH FIRE
- HCF is the Mnemonic for `Halt and Catch Fire', any of several undocumented and semi-mythical machine instructions with destructive side-effects, supposedly included for test purposes on several well-known architectures going as far back as the IBM 360. The MC6800 microprocessor was the first for which an HCF opcode became widely known. This instruction caused the processor to toggle a subset of the bus lines as rapidly as it could; in some configurations this could actually cause lines to burn up.
SALT MINES
- Dense quarters housing large numbers of programmers working long hours on grungy projects, with some hope of seeing the end of the tunnel in N years. Noted for their absence of sunshine.
MICRODROID
- A Microsoft employee, esp. One who posts to various operating-system advocacy newsgroups. MicroDroids post follow-ups to any messages critical of Microsoft's operating systems, and often end up sounding like visiting fundamentalist missionaries.
SHELFWARE
- Software purchased on a whim (by an individual user) or in accordance with policy (by a corporation or government agency), but not actually required for any particular use. Therefore, it often ends up on some shelf.
CHROME
- Showy features added to attract users but contributing little or nothing to the power of a system. 'The 3D icons in Motif are just chrome, but they certainly are pretty chrome!' Distinguished from bells and whistles by the fact that the latter are usually added to gratify developers' own desires for featurefulness. Often used as a term of contempt.
SCHROEDINGBUG
- [from the Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment in quantum physics] A design or implementation bug in a program that doesn't manifest until someone reading source or using the program in an unusual way notices that it never should have worked, at which point the program promptly stops working for everybody until fixed. Though this sounds impossible, it happens. Some programs have harbored latent schroedinbugs for years.
DIKE
- To remove or disable a portion of something, as a wire from a computer or a subroutine from a program. A standard slogan is 'When in doubt, dike it out'. (The implication is that it is usually more effective to attack software problems by reducing complexity than by increasing it. The word 'dikes' is widely used among mechanics and engineers to mean 'diagonal cutters', esp. the heavy-duty metal-cutting version, but may also refer to a kind of wire-cutters used by electronics techs. To 'dike something out' means to use such cutters to remove something. Indeed, the TMRC Dictionary defined dike as 'to attack with dikes'. Among hackers this term has been metaphorically extended to informational objects such as sections of code.
STEALTH MANAGER
- [Corporate DP] A manager that appears out of nowhere, promises undeliverable software to unknown end users, and vanishes before the programming staff realizes what has happened.
IBM
- Inferior But Marketable; It's Better Manually; Insidious Black Magic; It's Been Malfunctioning; Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a near-infinite number of even less complimentary expansions, including 'International Business Machines'. These abbreviations illustrate the considerable antipathy most hackers long felt toward the 'industry leader'. What galled hackers about most IBM machines above the PC level wasn't so much that they were underpowered and overpriced (though that does count against them), but that the designs are incredibly archaic, crufty, and elephantine ... and you can't fix them -- source code is locked up tight, and programming tools are expensive, hard to find, and bletcherous to use once you've found them. For many years, before Microsoft, IBM was the company hackers loved to hate. But everything changes. In the 1980s IBM had its own troubles with Microsoft. In the late 1990s IBM re-invented itself as a services company, began to release open-source software through its AlphaWorks group, and began shipping Linux systems and building ties to the Linux community. To the astonishment of all parties, IBM emerged as a friend of the hacker community.
SHOTGUN DEBUGGING
- The software equivalent of Easter egging, the making of relatively undirected changes to software in the hope that a bug will be perturbed out of existence. This almost never works, and usually introduces more bugs.