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

mail, but you remember your {network address} faster than your postal one.

your {SO} kisses you on the neck and the first thing you think is "Uh, oh, {priority interrupt}."

you go to balance your checkbook and discover that you're doing it in octal.

your computers have a higher street value than your car.

in your universe, `round numbers' are powers of 2, not 10.

more than once, you have woken up recalling a dream in some programming language.

you realize you have never seen half of your best friends.

[An early version of this entry said "All but one of these have been reliably reported as hacker traits (some of them quite often). Even hackers may have trouble spotting the ringer." The ringer was balancing one's checkbook in octal, which I made up out of whole cloth. Although more respondents picked that one out as fiction than any of the others, I also received multiple independent reports of its actually happening. --- ESR]

:Your mileage may vary: cav. [from the standard disclaimer attached to EPA mileage ratings by American car manufacturers] 1. A ritual warning often found in UNIX freeware distributions. Translates roughly as "Hey, I tried to write this portably, but who knows what'll happen on your system?" 2. A qualifier more generally attached to advice. "I find that sending flowers works well, but your mileage may vary."

:Yow!: /yow/ [from "Zippy the Pinhead" comix] interj. A favored hacker expression of humorous surprise or emphasis. "Yow! Check out what happens when you twiddle the foo option on this display hack!"

Compare {gurfle}.

:yoyo mode: n. The state in which the system is said to be when it rapidly alternates several times between being up and being down.

Interestingly (and perhaps not by coincidence), many hardware vendors give out free yoyos at Usenix exhibits.

Sun Microsystems gave out logoized yoyos at SIGPLAN '88. Tourists staying at one of Atlanta's most respectable hotels were subsequently treated to the sight of 200 of the country's top computer scientists testing yo-yo algorithms in the lobby.

:Yu-Shiang Whole Fish: /yoo-shyang hohl fish/ n. obs. The character gamma (extended SAIL ASCII 0001001), which with a loop in its tail looks like a little fish swimming down the page. The term is actually the name of a Chinese dish in which a fish is cooked whole (not {parse}d) and covered with Yu-Shiang (or Yu-Hsiang) sauce. Usage: primarily by people on the MIT LISP Machine, which could display this character on the screen. Tends to elicit incredulity from people who hear about it second-hand.

= Z =

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:zap: 1. n. Spiciness. 2. vt. To make food spicy. 3. vt. To make someone `suffer' by making his food spicy. (Most hackers love spicy food. Hot-and-sour soup is considered wimpy unless it makes you wipe your nose for the rest of the meal.) See {zapped}.

vt. To modify, usually to correct; esp. used when the action is performed with a debugger or binary patching tool. Also implies surgical precision. "Zap the debug level to 6 and run it again."

In the IBM mainframe world, binary patches are applied to programs or to the OS with a program called superzap', whose file name isIMASPZAP' (possibly contrived from I M A SuPerZAP). 5. vt. To erase or reset. 6. To {fry} a chip with static electricity.

"Uh oh --- I think that lightning strike may have zapped the disk controller."

:zapped: adj. Spicy. This term is used to distinguish between food that is hot (in temperature) and food that is spicy-hot.

For example, the Chinese appetizer Bon Bon Chicken is a kind of chicken salad that is cold but zapped; by contrast, {vanilla}

wonton soup is hot but not zapped. See also {{oriental food}}, {laser chicken}. See {zap}, senses 1 and 2.

:zen: vt. To figure out something by meditation or by a sudden flash of enlightenment. Originally applied to bugs, but occasionally applied to problems of life in general. "How'd you figure out the buffer allocation problem?" "Oh, I zenned it." Contrast {grok}, which connotes a time-extended version of zenning a system.

Compare {hack mode}. See also {guru}.

:zero: vt. 1. To set to 0. Usually said of small pieces of data, such as bits or words (esp. in the construction zero out'). 2. To erase; to discard all data from. Said of disks and directories, wherezeroing' need not involve actually writing zeroes throughout the area being zeroed. One may speak of something being logically zeroed' rather than beingphysically zeroed'. See {scribble}.

:zero-content: adj. Syn. {content-free}.

:zeroth: /zee'rohth/ adj. First. Among software designers, comes from C's and LISP's 0-based indexing of arrays. Hardware people also tend to start counting at 0 instead of 1; this is natural since, e.g., the 256 states of 8 bits correspond to the binary numbers 0, 1, ..., 255 and the digital devices known as `counters'

count in this way.

Hackers and computer scientists often like to call the first chapter of a publication `chapter 0', especially if it is of an introductory nature (one of the classic instances was in the First Edition of {K&R}). In recent years this trait has also been observed among many pure mathematicians (who have an independent tradition of numbering from 0). Zero-based numbering tends to reduce {fencepost error}s, though it cannot eliminate them entirely.

:zigamorph: /zig'*-morf/ n. Hex FF (11111111) when used as a delimiter or {fence} character. Usage: primarily at IBM

shops.

:zip: [primarily MS-DOS] vt. To create a compressed archive from a group of files using PKWare's PKZIP or a compatible archiver. Its use is spreading now that portable implementations of the algorithm have been written. Commonly used as follows: "I'll zip it up and send it to you." See {arc}, {tar and feather}.

:zipperhead: [IBM] n. A person with a closed mind.

:zombie: [UNIX] n. A process that has died but has not yet relinquished its process table slot (because the parent process hasn't executed a wait(2)' for it yet). These can be seen inps(1)' listings occasionally. Compare {orphan}.

:zorch: /zorch/ 1. [TMRC] v. To attack with an inverse heat sink.

[TMRC] v. To travel, with v approaching c [that is, with velocity approaching lightspeed --- ESR]. 3. [MIT] v. To propel something very quickly. "The new comm software is very fast; it really zorches files through the network." 4. [MIT] n.

Influence. Brownie points. Good karma. The intangible and fuzzy currency in which favors are measured. "I'd rather not ask him for that just yet; I think I've used up my quota of zorch with him for the week." 5. [MIT] n. Energy, drive, or ability. "I think I'll {punt} that change for now; I've been up for 30 hours and I've run out of zorch."

:Zork: /zork/ n. The second of the great early experiments in computer fantasy gaming; see {ADVENT}. Originally written on MIT-DM

during the late 1970s, later distributed with BSD UNIX (as a patched, sourceless RT-11 Fortran binary; see {retrocomputing}) and commercialized as `The Zork Trilogy' by Infocom.

:zorkmid: /zork'mid/ n. The canonical unit of currency in hacker-written games. This originated in {zork} but has spread to {nethack} and is referred to in several other games.

= [^A-Za-z] (see {regexp}) =

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:'Snooze: /snooz/ [FidoNet] n. Fidonews, the weekly official on-line newsletter of FidoNet. As the editorial policy of Fidonews is "anything that arrives, we print", there are often large articles completely unrelated to FidoNet, which in turn tend to elicit {flamage} in subsequent issues.

:(TM): // [USENET] ASCII rendition of the trademark-superscript symbol appended to phrases that the author feels should be recorded for posterity, perhaps in future editions of this lexicon. Sometimes used ironically as a form of protest against the recent spate of software and algorithm patents and `look and feel' lawsuits. See also {UN*X}.

:-oid: [from android'] suff. 1. This suffix is used as in mainstream English to indicate a poor imitation, a counterfeit, or some otherwise slightly bogus resemblance. Hackers will happily use it with all sorts of non-Greco/Latin stem words that wouldn't keep company with it in mainstream English. For example, "He's a nerdoid" means that he superficially resembles a nerd but can't make the grade; amodemoid' might be a 300-baud box (Real Modems run at 9600); a computeroid' might be any {bitty box}. The wordkeyboid' could be used to describe a {chiclet keyboard}, but would have to be written; spoken, it would confuse the listener as to the speaker's city of origin. 2. There is a more specific sense of oid' as an indicator forresembling an android'

which in the past has been confined to science-fiction fans and hackers. It too has recently (in 1991) started to go mainstream (most notably in the term `trendoid' for victims of terminal hipness). This is probably traceable to the popularization of the term {droid} in "Star Wars" and its sequels.

Coinages in both forms have been common in science fiction for at least fifty years, and hackers (who are often SF fans) have probably been making `-oid' jargon for almost that long [though GLS and I can personally confirm only that they were already common in the mid-1970s --- ESR].

:-ware: [from `software'] suff. Commonly used to form jargon terms for classes of software. For examples, see {careware}, {crippleware}, {crudware}, {freeware}, {fritterware}, {guiltware}, {liveware}, {meatware}, {payware}, {psychedelicware}, {shareware},