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

Double bucky, I'm happy I heard of Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of you! --- The Great Quux (with apologies to Jeffrey Moss) [This, by the way, is an excellent example of computer {filk}

--- ESR] See also {meta bit}, {cokebottle}, and {quadruple bucky}.

:double DECkers: n. Used to describe married couples in which both partners work for Digital Equipment Corporation.

:doubled sig: [USENET] n. A {sig block} that has been included twice in a {USENET} article or, less commonly, in an electronic mail message. An article or message with a doubled sig can be caused by improperly configured software. More often, however, it reveals the author's lack of experience in electronic communication. See {BIFF}, {pseudo}.

:down: 1. adj. Not operating. "The up escalator is down" is considered a humorous thing to say, and "The elevator is down"

always means "The elevator isn't working" and never refers to what floor the elevator is on. With respect to computers, this usage has passed into the mainstream; the extension to other kinds of machine is still hackish. 2. go down' vi. To stop functioning; usually said of the {system}. The message from the {console} that every hacker hates to hear from the operator is "The system will go down in 5 minutes". 3.take down', bring down' vt. To deactivate purposely, usually for repair work or {PM}. "I'm taking the system down to work on that bug in the tape drive." Occasionally one hears the worddown' by itself used as a verb in this vt. sense. See {crash}; oppose {up}.

:download: vt. To transfer data or (esp.) code from a larger `host'

system (esp. a {mainframe}) over a digital comm link to a smaller `client' system, esp. a microcomputer or specialized peripheral.

Oppose {upload}.

However, note that ground-to-space communications has its own usage rule for this term. Space-to-earth transmission is always download and the reverse upload regardless of the relative size of the computers involved. So far the in-space machines have invariably been smaller; thus the upload/download distinction has been reversed from its usual sense.

:DP: /D-P/ n. 1. Data Processing. Listed here because, according to hackers, use of the term marks one immediately as a {suit}. See {DPer}. 2. Common abbrev for {Dissociated Press}.

:DPB: /d*-pib'/ [from the PDP-10 instruction set] vt. To plop something down in the middle. Usage: silly. "DPB

yourself into that couch there." The connotation would be that the couch is full except for one slot just big enough for you to sit in. DPB means `DePosit Byte', and was the name of a PDP-10

instruction that inserts some bits into the middle of some other bits. This usage has been kept alive by the Common LISP function of the same name.

:DPer: /dee-pee-er/ n. Data Processor. Hackers are absolutely amazed that {suit}s use this term self-referentially.

"Computers process data, not people!" See {DP}.

:dragon: n. [MIT] A program similar to a {daemon}, except that it is not invoked at all, but is instead used by the system to perform various secondary tasks. A typical example would be an accounting program, which keeps track of who is logged in, accumulates load-average statistics, etc. Under ITS, many terminals displayed a list of people logged in, where they were, what they were running, etc., along with some random picture (such as a unicorn, Snoopy, or the Enterprise), which was generated by the name dragon'. Usage: rare outside MIT --- under UNIX and most other OSes this would be called abackground demon' or {daemon}. The best-known UNIX example of a dragon is cron(1)'. At SAIL, they called this sort of thing aphantom'.

:Dragon Book: n. The classic text `Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools', by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D.

Ullman (Addison-Wesley 1986; ISBN 0-201-10088-6), so called because of the cover design featuring a dragon labeled complexity of compiler design' and a knight bearing the lanceLALR parser generator' among his other trappings. This one is more specifically known as the Red Dragon Book' (1986); an earlier edition, sans Sethi and titledPrinciples Of Compiler Design'

(Alfred V. Aho and Jeffrey D. Ullman; Addison-Wesley, 1977; ISBN

0-201-00022-9), was the Green Dragon Book' (1977). (AlsoNew Dragon Book', `Old Dragon Book'.) The horsed knight and the Green Dragon were warily eying each other at a distance; now the knight is typing (wearing gauntlets!) at a terminal showing a video-game representation of the Red Dragon's head while the rest of the beast extends back in normal space. See also {{book titles}}.

:drain: [IBM] v. Syn. for {flush} (sense 2). Has a connotation of finality about it; one speaks of draining a device before taking it offline.

:dread high-bit disease: n. A condition endemic to PRIME (a.k.a.

PR1ME) minicomputers that results in all the characters having their high (0x80) bit ON rather than OFF. This of course makes transporting files to other systems much more difficult, not to mention talking to true 8-bit devices. Folklore had it that PRIME

adopted the reversed-8-bit convention in order to save 25 cents per serial line per machine; PRIME old-timers, on the other hand, claim they inherited the disease from Honeywell via customer NASA's compatibility requirements and struggled manfully to cure it.

Whoever was responsible, this probably qualifies as one of the most {cretinous} design tradeoffs ever made. See {meta bit}.

A few other machines have exhibited similar brain damage.

:DRECNET: /drek'net/ [from Yiddish/German `dreck', meaning dirt] n. Deliberate distortion of DECNET, a networking protocol used in the {VMS} community. So called because DEC helped write the Ethernet specification and then (either stupidly or as a malignant customer-control tactic) violated that spec in the design of DRECNET in a way that made it incompatible. See also {connector conspiracy}.

:driver: n. 1. The {main loop} of an event-processing program; the code that gets commands and dispatches them for execution.

[techspeak] In `device driver', code designed to handle a particular peripheral device such as a magnetic disk or tape unit.

In the TeX world and the computerized typesetting world in general, `driver' also means a program that translates some device-independent or other common format to something a real device can actually understand.

:droid: n. A person (esp. a low-level bureaucrat or service-business employee) exhibiting most of the following characteristics: (a) na"ive trust in the wisdom of the parent organization or the system'; (b) a propensity to believe obvious nonsense emitted by authority figures (or computers!); blind faith; (c) a rule-governed mentality, one unwilling or unable to look beyond theletter of the law' in exceptional situations; and (d) no interest in fixing that which is broken; an "It's not my job, man" attitude.

Typical droid positions include supermarket checkout assistant and bank clerk; the syndrome is also endemic in low-level government employees. The implication is that the rules and official procedures constitute software that the droid is executing. This becomes a problem when the software has not been properly debugged.

The term `droid mentality' is also used to describe the mindset behind this behavior. Compare {suit}, {marketroid}; see {-oid}.

:drool-proof paper: n. 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 beenwritten 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."

:drop on the floor: vt. To react to an error condition by silently discarding messages or other valuable data. "The gateway ran out of memory, so it just started dropping packets on the floor." Also frequently used of faulty mail and netnews relay sites that lose messages. See also {black hole}, {bit bucket}.

:drop-ins: [prob. by analogy with {drop-outs}] n. Spurious characters appearing on a terminal or console as a result of line noise or a system malfunction of some sort. Esp. used when these are interspersed with one's own typed input. Compare {drop-outs}.

:drop-outs: n. 1. A variety of `power glitch' (see {glitch}); momentary 0 voltage on the electrical mains. 2. Missing characters in typed input due to software malfunction or system saturation (this can happen under UNIX when a bad connection to a modem swamps the processor with spurious character interrupts). 3. Mental glitches; used as a way of describing those occasions when the mind just seems to shut down for a couple of beats. See {glitch}, {fried}.

:drugged: adj. (also `on drugs') 1. Conspicuously stupid, heading toward {brain-damaged}. Often accompanied by a pantomime of toking a joint (but see {appendix B}). 2. Of hardware, very slow relative to normal performance.

:drum: adj,n. Ancient techspeak term referring to slow, cylindrical magnetic media which were once state-of-the-art mass-storage devices. Under BSD UNIX the disk partition used for swapping is still called /dev/drum'; this has led to considerable humor and not a few straight-faced but utterly bogusexplanations' getting foisted on {newbie}s. See also "{The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer}" in {appendix A}.

:drunk mouse syndrome: (also `mouse on drugs') n. 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.