The Hacker's Dictionary, - [best reads of all time .txt] 📗

for detecting omissions in therear' file, it can also be used with printouts of graphics, a claim few if any diff programs can make. See {diff}.

:veeblefester: /vee'b*l-fes`tr/ [from the "Born Loser"

comix via Commodore; prob. originally from Mad' Magazine'sVeeblefeetzer' parodies ca. 1960] n. Any obnoxious person engaged in the (alleged) professions of marketing or management. Antonym of {hacker}. Compare {suit}, {marketroid}.

:Venus flytrap: [after the insect-eating plant] n. See {firewall machine}.

:verbage: /ver'b*j/ n. A deliberate misspelling and mispronunciation of {verbiage} that assimilates it to the word garbage'. Compare {content-free}. More pejorative thanverbiage'.

:verbiage: n. When the context involves a software or hardware system, this refers to {{documentation}}. This term borrows the connotations of mainstream `verbiage' to suggest that the documentation is of marginal utility and that the motives behind its production have little to do with the ostensible subject.

:Version 7: alt. V7 /vee' se'vn/ n. The 1978 unsupported release of {{UNIX}} ancestral to all current commercial versions. Before the release of the POSIX/SVID standards, V7's features were often treated as a UNIX portability baseline. See {BSD}, {USG UNIX}, {{UNIX}}. Some old-timers impatient with commercialization and kernel bloat still maintain that V7 was the Last True UNIX.

:vgrep: /vee'grep/ v.,n. Visual grep. The operation of finding patterns in a file optically rather than digitally (also called an `optical grep'). See {grep}; compare {vdiff}.

:vi: /V-I/, not /vi:/ and never /siks/ [from `Visual Interface'] n. A screen editor crufted together by Bill Joy for an early {BSD} release. Became the de facto standard UNIX editor and a nearly undisputed hacker favorite outside of MIT

until the rise of {EMACS} after about 1984. Tends to frustrate new users no end, as it will neither take commands while expecting input text nor vice versa, and the default setup provides no indication of which mode one is in (one correspondent accordingly reports that he has often heard the editor's name pronounced /vi:l/). Nevertheless it is still widely used (about half the respondents in a 1991 USENET poll preferred it), and even EMACS

fans often resort to it as a mail editor and for small editing jobs (mainly because it starts up faster than the bulkier versions of EMACS). See {holy wars}.

:videotex: n. obs. An electronic service offering people the privilege of paying to read the weather on their television screens instead of having somebody read it to them for free while they brush their teeth. The idea bombed everywhere it wasn't government-subsidized, because by the time videotex was practical the installed base of personal computers could hook up to timesharing services and do the things for which videotex might have been worthwhile better and cheaper. Videotex planners badly overestimated both the appeal of getting information from a computer and the cost of local intelligence at the user's end.

Like the {gorilla arm} effect, this has been a cautionary tale to hackers ever since. See also {vannevar}.

:virgin: adj. Unused; pristine; in a known initial state. "Let's bring up a virgin system and see if it crashes again." (Esp.

useful after contracting a {virus} through {SEX}.) Also, by extension, buffers and the like within a program that have not yet been used.

:virtual: [via the technical term virtual memory', prob. from the termvirtual image' in optics] adj. 1. Common alternative to {logical}; often used to refer to the artificial objects created by a computer system to help the system control access to shared resources. 2. Simulated; performing the functions of something that isn't really there. An imaginative child's doll may be a virtual playmate. Oppose {real}.

:virtual Friday: n. The last day before an extended weekend, if that day is not a real' Friday. For example, the U.S. holiday Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday. The next day is often also a holiday or taken as an extra day off, in which case Wednesday of that week is a virtual Friday (and Thursday is a virtual Saturday, as is Friday). There are alsovirtual Mondays' that are actually Tuesdays, after the three-day weekends associated with many national holidays in the U.S.

:virtual reality: n. 1. Computer simulations that use 3-D graphics and devices such as the Dataglove to allow the user to interact with the simulation. See {cyberspace}. 2. A form of network interaction incorporating aspects of role-playing games, interactive theater, improvisational comedy, and `true confessions'

magazines. In a virtual reality forum (such as USENET's alt.callahans newsgroup or the {MUD} experiments on Internet), interaction between the participants is written like a shared novel complete with scenery, foreground characters' that may be personae utterly unlike the people who write them, and commonbackground characters' manipulable by all parties. The one iron law is that you may not write irreversible changes to a character without the consent of the person who `owns' it.

Otherwise anything goes. See {bamf}, {cyberspace}.

:virus: [from the obvious analogy with biological viruses, via SF]

n. A cracker program that searches out other programs and `infects'

them by embedding a copy of itself in them, so that they become {Trojan Horse}s. When these programs are executed, the embedded virus is executed too, thus propagating the `infection'. This normally happens invisibly to the user. Unlike a {worm}, a virus cannot infect other computers without assistance. It is propagated by vectors such as humans trading programs with their friends (see {SEX}). The virus may do nothing but propagate itself and then allow the program to run normally. Usually, however, after propagating silently for a while, it starts doing things like writing cute messages on the terminal or playing strange tricks with your display (some viruses include nice {display hack}s). Many nasty viruses, written by particularly perversely minded {cracker}s, do irreversible damage, like nuking all the user's files.

In the 1990s, viruses have become a serious problem, especially among IBM PC and Macintosh users (the lack of security on these machines enables viruses to spread easily, even infecting the operating system). The production of special anti-virus software has become an industry, and a number of exaggerated media reports have caused outbreaks of near hysteria among users; many {luser}s tend to blame everything that doesn't work as they had expected on virus attacks. Accordingly, this sense of `virus' has passed not only into techspeak but into also popular usage (where it is often incorrectly used to denote a {worm} or even a {Trojan horse}). Compare {back door}; see also {UNIX conspiracy}.

:visionary: n. 1. One who hacks vision, in the sense of an Artificial Intelligence researcher working on the problem of getting computers to `see' things using TV cameras. (There isn't any problem in sending information from a TV camera to a computer.

The problem is, how can the computer be programmed to make use of the camera information? See {SMOP}, {AI-complete}.) 2. [IBM]

One who reads the outside literature. At IBM, apparently, such a penchant is viewed with awe and wonder.

:VMS: /V-M-S/ n. DEC's proprietary operating system for its VAX

minicomputer; one of the seven or so environments that loom largest in hacker folklore. Many UNIX fans generously concede that VMS

would probably be the hacker's favorite commercial OS if UNIX

didn't exist; though true, this makes VMS fans furious. One major hacker gripe with VMS concerns its slowness --- thus the following limerick:

There once was a system called VMS Of cycles by no means abstemious. It's chock-full of hacks And runs on a VAX And makes my poor stomach all squeamious. --- The Great Quux See also {VAX}, {{TOPS-10}}, {{TOPS-20}}, {{UNIX}}, {runic}.

:voice: vt. To phone someone, as opposed to emailing them or connecting in {talk mode}. "I'm busy now; I'll voice you later."

:voice-net: n. Hackish way of referring to the telephone system, analogizing it to a digital network. USENET {sig block}s not uncommonly include the sender's phone next to a "Voice:" or "Voice-Net:" header; common variants of this are "Voicenet" and "V-Net". Compare {paper-net}, {snail-mail}.

:voodoo programming: [from George Bush's "voodoo economics"] n.

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. Almost synonymous with {black magic}, except that black magic typically isn't documented and nobody understands it. Compare {magic}, {deep magic}, {heavy wizardry}, {rain dance}, {cargo cult programming}, {wave a dead chicken}.

:VR: // [MUD] n. On-line abbrev for {virtual reality}, as opposed to {RL}.

:Vulcan nerve pinch: n. [from the old "Star Trek" TV series via Commodore Amiga hackers] The keyboard combination that forces a soft-boot or jump to ROM monitor (on machines that support such a feature). On many micros this is Ctrl-Alt-Del; on Suns, L1-A; on some Macintoshes, it is -! Also called {three-finger salute}. Compare {quadruple bucky}.

:vulture capitalist: n. Pejorative hackerism for `venture capitalist', deriving from the common practice of pushing contracts that deprive inventors of control over their own innovations and most of the money they ought to have made from them.

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:wabbit: /wab'it/ [almost certainly from Elmer Fudd's immortal