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

a dish for princes") for the forty-third time. At this point, RPG clued me in fully. RPG, KBT, and I retreated to a table, trying to stifle our chuckles. JONL remained at the counter, talking about ice cream with the guy b.t.c., comparing Uncle Gaylord's to other ice cream shops and generally having a good old time. At length the g.b.t.c. said, "How's the ginger honey?" JONL said, "Fine! I wonder what exactly is in it?" Now Uncle Gaylord publishes all his recipes and even teaches classes on how to make his ice cream at home. So the g.b.t.c. got out the recipe, and he and JONL pored over it for a while. But the g.b.t.c. could contain his curiosity no longer, and asked again, "You really like that stuff, huh?" JONL said, "Yeah, I've been eating it constantly back in Palo Alto for the past two days. In fact, I think this batch is about as good as the cones I got back in Palo Alto!" G.b.t.c. looked him straight in the eye and said, "You're *in* Palo Alto!" JONL turned slowly around, and saw the three of us collapse in a fit of giggles. He clapped a hand to his forehead and exclaimed, "I've been hacked!"

[My spies on the West Coast inform me that there is a close relative of the raspberry found out there called an `olallieberry' --- ESR]

[Ironic footnote: it appears that the {meme} about ginger vs.

rotting meat may be an urban legend. It's not borne out by an examination of medieval recipes or period purchase records for spices, and appears full-blown in the works of Samuel Pegge, a gourmand and notorious flake case who originated numerous food myths. --- ESR]

:sagan: /say'gn/ [from Carl Sagan's TV series "Cosmos"; think "billions and billions"] n. A large quantity of anything.

"There's a sagan different ways to tweak EMACS." "The U.S. Government spends sagans on bombs and welfare --- hard to say which is more destructive."

:SAIL:: /sayl/, not /S-A-I-L/ n. 1. Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. An important site in the early development of LISP; with the MIT AI Lab, BBN, CMU, XEROX PARC, and the UNIX

community, one of the major wellsprings of technical innovation and hacker-culture traditions (see the {{WAITS}} entry for details).

The SAIL machines were officially shut down in late May 1990, scant weeks after the MIT AI Lab's ITS cluster was officially decommissioned. 2. The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language used at SAIL (sense 1). It was an Algol-60 derivative with a coroutining facility and some new data types intended for building search trees and association lists.

:salescritter: /sayls'kri`tr/ n. Pejorative hackerism for a computer salesperson. Hackers tell the following joke: Q. What's the difference between a used-car dealer and a computer salesman?

A. The used-car dealer knows he's lying. [Some versions add: ...and probably knows how to drive.]

This reflects the widespread hacker belief that salescritters are self-selected for stupidity (after all, if they had brains and the inclination to use them, they'd be in programming). The terms salesthing' andsalesdroid' are also common. Compare {marketroid}, {suit}, {droid}.

:salsman: /salz'm*n/ v. To flood a mailing list or newsgroup with huge amounts of useless, trivial or redundant information. From the name of a hacker who has frequently done this on some widely distributed mailing lists.

:salt mines: n. 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.

Compare {playpen}, {sandbox}.

:salt substrate: [MIT] n. Collective noun used to refer to potato chips, pretzels, saltines, or any other form of snack food designed primarily as a carrier for sodium chloride. From the technical term `chip substrate', used to refer to the silicon on the top of which the active parts of integrated circuits are deposited.

:same-day service: n. Ironic term used to describe long response time, particularly with respect to {{MS-DOS}} system calls (which ought to require only a tiny fraction of a second to execute).

Such response time is a major incentive for programmers to write programs that are not {well-behaved}. See also {PC-ism}.

:samurai: n. A hacker who hires out for legal cracking jobs, snooping for factions in corporate political fights, lawyers pursuing privacy-rights and First Amendment cases, and other parties with legitimate reasons to need an electronic locksmith.

In 1991, mainstream media reported the existence of a loose-knit culture of samurai that meets electronically on BBS systems, mostly bright teenagers with personal micros; they have modeled themselves explicitly on the historical samurai of Japan and on the "net cowboys" of William Gibson's {cyberpunk} novels. Those interviewed claim to adhere to a rigid ethic of loyalty to their employers and to disdain the vandalism and theft practiced by criminal crackers as beneath them and contrary to the hacker ethic; some quote Miyamoto Musashi's `Book of Five Rings', a classic of historical samurai doctrine, in support of these principles.

See also {Stupids}, {social engineering}, {cracker}, {hacker ethic, the}, and {dark-side hacker}.

:sandbender: [IBM] n. A person involved with silicon lithography and the physical design of chips. Compare {ironmonger}, {polygon pusher}.

:sandbox: n. 1. (also `sandbox, the') Common term for the R&D department at many software and computer companies (where hackers in commercial environments are likely to be found). Half-derisive, but reflects the truth that research is a form of creative play.

Compare {playpen}. 2. Syn. {link farm}

:sanity check: n. 1. The act of checking a piece of code (or anything else, e.g., a USENET posting) for completely stupid mistakes.

Implies that the check is to make sure the author was sane when it was written; e.g., if a piece of scientific software relied on a particular formula and was giving unexpected results, one might first look at the nesting of parentheses or the coding of the formula, as a `sanity check', before looking at the more complex I/O or data structure manipulation routines, much less the algorithm itself. Compare {reality check}. 2. A run-time test, either validating input or ensuring that the program hasn't screwed up internally (producing an inconsistent value or state).

:Saturday-night special: [from police slang for a cheap handgun] n.

A program or feature kluged together during off hours, under a deadline, and in response to pressure from a {salescritter}.

Such hacks are dangerously unreliable, but all too often sneak into a production release after insufficient review.

:say: vt. 1. To type to a terminal. "To list a directory verbosely, you have to say ls -l'." Tends to imply a {newline}-terminated command (asentence'). 2. A computer may also be said to `say' things to you, even if it doesn't have a speech synthesizer, by displaying them on a terminal in response to your commands. Hackers find it odd that this usage confuses {mundane}s.

:scag: vt. To destroy the data on a disk, either by corrupting the filesystem or by causing media damage. "That last power hit scagged the system disk." Compare {scrog}, {roach}.

:scanno: n. An error in a document caused by a scanner glitch, analgous to typo or {thinko}.

:schroedinbug: [MIT: from the Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment in quantum physics] n. A design or implementation bug in a program which 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. Compare {heisenbug}, {Bohr bug}, {mandelbug}.

:science-fiction fandom:: n. Another voluntary subculture having a very heavy overlap with hackerdom; most hackers read SF and/or fantasy fiction avidly, and many go to `cons' (SF conventions) or are involved in fandom-connected activities such as the Society for Creative Anachronism. Some hacker jargon originated in SF fandom; see {defenestration}, {great-wall}, {cyberpunk}, {h}, {ha ha only serious}, {IMHO}, {mundane}, {neep-neep}, {Real Soon Now}. Additionally, the jargon terms {cowboy}, {cyberspace}, {de-rezz}, {go flatline}, {ice}, {virus}, {wetware}, {wirehead}, and {worm} originated in SF

stories.

:scram switch: [from the nuclear power industry] n. An emergency-power-off switch (see {Big Red Switch}), esp. one positioned to be easily hit by evacuating personnel. In general, this is not something you {frob} lightly; these often initiate expensive events (such as Halon dumps) and are installed in a {dinosaur pen} for use in case of electrical fire or in case some luckless {field servoid} should put 120 volts across himself while {Easter egging}. (See also {molly-guard}.) :scratch: 1. [from scratchpad'] adj. Describes a data structure or recording medium attached to a machine for testing or temporary-use purposes; one that can be {scribble}d on without loss. Usually in the combining formsscratch memory', scratch register',scratch disk', scratch tape',scratch volume'. See {scratch monkey}. 2. [primarily IBM] vt. To delete (as in a file).

:scratch monkey: n. As in "Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a {scratch monkey}", a proverb used to advise caution when dealing with irreplaceable data or devices. Used to refer to any scratch volume hooked to a computer during any risky operation as a replacement for some precious resource or data that might otherwise get trashed.

This term preserves the memory of Mabel, the Swimming Wonder Monkey, star of