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

a biological research program at the University of Toronto ca. 1986. Mabel was not (so the legend goes) your ordinary monkey; the university had spent years teaching her how to swim, breathing through a regulator, in order to study the effects of different gas mixtures on her physiology. Mabel suffered an untimely demise one day when DEC {PM}ed the PDP-11 controlling her regulator (see also {provocative maintenance}).

It is recorded that, after calming down an understandably irate customer sufficiently to ascertain the facts of the matter, a DEC

troubleshooter called up the {field circus} manager responsible and asked him sweetly, "Can you swim?"

Not all the consequences to humans were so amusing; the sysop of the machine in question was nearly thrown in jail at the behest of certain clueless droids at the local `humane' society. The moral is clear: When in doubt, always mount a scratch monkey.

:screw: [MIT] n. A {lose}, usually in software. Especially used for user-visible misbehavior caused by a bug or misfeature. This use has become quite widespread outside MIT.

:screwage: /skroo'*j/ n. Like {lossage} but connotes that the failure is due to a designed-in misfeature rather than a simple inadequacy or a mere bug.

:scribble: n. To modify a data structure in a random and unintentionally destructive way. "Bletch! Somebody's disk-compactor program went berserk and scribbled on the i-node table." "It was working fine until one of the allocation routines scribbled on low core." Synonymous with {trash}; compare {mung}, which conveys a bit more intention, and {mangle}, which is more violent and final.

:scrog: /skrog/ [Bell Labs] vt. To damage, trash, or corrupt a data structure. "The list header got scrogged." Also reported as `skrog', and ascribed to the comic strip "The Wizard of Id". Compare {scag}; possibly the two are related. Equivalent to {scribble} or {mangle}.

:scrool: /skrool/ [from the pioneering Roundtable chat system in Houston ca. 1984; prob. originated as a typo for scroll'] n. The log of old messages, available for later perusal or to help one get back in synch with the conversation. It was originally called thescrool monster', because an early version of the roundtable software had a bug where it would dump all 8K of scrool on a user's terminal.

:scrozzle: /skroz'l/ vt. Used when a self-modifying code segment runs incorrectly and corrupts the running program or vital data. "The damn compiler scrozzled itself again!"

:scruffies: n. See {neats vs. scruffies}.

:SCSI: [Small Computer System Interface] n. A bus-independent standard for system-level interfacing between a computer and intelligent devices. Typically annotated in literature with `sexy'

(/sek'see/), sissy' (/sis'ee/), andscuzzy' (/skuh'zee/) as pronunciation guides --- the last being the overwhelmingly predominant form, much to the dismay of the designers and their marketing people. One can usually assume that a person who pronounces it /S-C-S-I/ is clueless.

:ScumOS: n. Unflattering hackerism for SunOS, the UNIX variant supported on Sun Microsystems's UNIX workstations (see also {sun-stools}), and compare {AIDX}, {terminak}, {Macintrash} {Nominal Semidestructor}, {Open DeathTrap}, {HP-SUX}. Despite what this term might suggest, Sun was founded by hackers and still enjoys excellent relations with hackerdom; usage is more often in exasperation than outright loathing.

:search-and-destroy mode: n. Hackerism for the search-and-replace facility in an editor, so called because an incautiously chosen match pattern can cause {infinite} damage.

:second-system effect: n. (sometimes, more euphoniously, second-system syndrome') When one is designing the successor to a relatively small, elegant, and successful system, there is a tendency to become grandiose in one's success and design an {elephantine} feature-laden monstrosity. The term was first used by Fred Brooks in his classicThe Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering' (Addison-Wesley, 1975; ISBN

0-201-00650-2). It described the jump from a set of nice, simple operating systems on the IBM 70xx series to OS/360 on the 360 series. A similar effect can also happen in an evolving system; see {Brooks's Law}, {creeping elegance}, {creeping featurism}. See also {{Multics}}, {OS/2}, {X}, {software bloat}.

This version of the jargon lexicon has been described (with altogether too much truth for comfort) as an example of second-system effect run amok on jargon-1....

:secondary damage: n. When a fatal error occurs (esp. a {segfault}) the immediate cause may be that a pointer has been trashed due to a previous {fandango on core}. However, this fandango may have been due to an earlier fandango, so no amount of analysis will reveal (directly) how the damage occurred.

"The data structure was clobbered, but it was secondary damage."

By extension, the corruption resulting from N cascaded fandangoes on core is Nth-level damage'. There is at least one case on record in which 17 hours of {grovel}ling withadb' actually dug up the underlying bug behind an instance of seventh-level damage! The hacker who accomplished this near-superhuman feat was presented with an award by his fellows.

:security through obscurity: n. A name applied by hackers to most OS vendors' favorite way of coping with security holes --- namely, ignoring them and not documenting them and trusting that nobody will find out about them and that people who do find out about them won't exploit them. This never works for long and occasionally sets the world up for debacles like the {RTM} worm of 1988 (see {Great Worm, the}), but once the brief moments of panic created by such events subside most vendors are all too willing to turn over and go back to sleep. After all, actually fixing the bugs would siphon off the resources needed to implement the next user-interface frill on marketing's wish list --- and besides, if they started fixing security bugs customers might begin to expect it and imagine that their warranties of merchantability gave them some sort of right to a system with fewer holes in it than a shotgunned Swiss cheese, and then where would we be?

Historical note: There are conflicting stories about the origin of this term. It has been claimed that it was first used in the USENET newsgroup in comp.sys.apollo during a campaign to get HP/Apollo to fix security problems in its UNIX-{clone}

Aegis/DomainOS (they didn't change a thing). {ITS} fans, on the other hand, say it was coined years earlier in opposition to the incredibly paranoid {Multics} people down the hall, for whom security was everything. In the ITS culture it referred to (1) the fact that that by the time a tourist figured out how to make trouble he'd generally gotten over the urge to make it, because he felt part of the community; and (2) (self-mockingly) the poor coverage of the documentation and obscurity of many commands. One instance of deliberate security through obscurity is recorded; the command to allow patching the running ITS system ({altmode} altmode control-R) echoed as $$^D. If you actually typed alt alt ^D, that set a flag which would prevent patching the system even if you later got it right.

:SED: [TMRC, from `Light-Emitting Diode'] /S-E-D/ n.

Smoke-emitting diode. A {friode} that lost the war. See {LER}.

:segfault: n.,vi. Syn. {segment}, {seggie}.

:seggie: /seg'ee/ [UNIX] n. Shorthand for {segmentation fault}

reported from Britain.

:segment: /seg'ment/ vi. To experience a {segmentation fault}.

Confusingly, this is often pronounced more like the noun `segment'

than like mainstream v. segment; this is because it is actually a noun shorthand that has been verbed.

:segmentation fault: n. [UNIX] 1. An error in which a running program attempts to access memory not allocated to it and {core dump}s with a segmentation violation error. 2. To lose a train of thought or a line of reasoning. Also uttered as an exclamation at the point of befuddlement.

:segv: /seg'vee/ n.,vi. Yet another synonym for {segmentation fault} (actually, in this case, `segmentation violation').

:self-reference: n. See {self-reference}.

:selvage: /sel'v*j/ [from sewing] n. See {chad} (sense 1).

:semi: /se'mee/ or /se'mi:/ 1. n. Abbreviation for semicolon', when speaking. "Commands to {grind} are prefixed by semi-semi-star" means that the prefix is;;*', not 1/4 of a star. 2. A prefix used with words such as `immediately' as a qualifier. "When is the system coming up?"

"Semi-immediately." (That is, maybe not for an hour.) "We did consider that possibility semi-seriously." See also {infinite}.

:semi-infinite: n. See {infinite}.

:senior bit: [IBM] n. Syn. {meta bit}.

:server: n. A kind of {daemon} that performs a service for the requester and which often runs on a computer other than the one on which the server runs. A particularly common term on the Internet, which is rife with name servers',domain servers', news servers',finger servers', and the like.

:SEX: /seks/ [Sun Users' Group & elsewhere] n. 1. Software EXchange. A technique invented by the blue-green algae hundreds of millions of years ago to speed up their evolution, which had been terribly slow up until then. Today, SEX parties are popular among hackers and others (of course, these are no longer limited to exchanges of genetic software). In general, SEX parties are a {Good Thing}, but unprotected SEX can propagate a {virus}.

See also {pubic directory}. 2. The rather Freudian mnemonic often used for Sign EXtend, a machine instruction found in the PDP-11 and many other architectures. The RCA 1802 chip used in the early Elf and SuperElf personal computers had a `SEt X register'

SEX instruction, but this seems to have had little folkloric impact.

DEC's engineers nearly got a PDP-11 assembler that used the SEX' mnemonic out the door at one time, but (for once) marketing wasn't asleep and forced a