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

Variants of this can be seen in other BSD versions, though it has been excised from some versions by humorless management {droid}s. The [nt]roff source for SunOS 4.1.1 contains a comment apparently designed to prevent this: "Take this out and a Unix Demon will dog your steps from now until the `time_t''s wrap around."

:tune: [from automotive or musical usage] vt. To optimize a program or system for a particular environment, esp. by adjusting numerical parameters designed as {hook}s for tuning, e.g., by changing #define' lines in C. One maytune for time' (fastest execution), tune for space' (least memory use), ortune for configuration' (most efficient use of hardware). See {bum}, {hot spot}, {hand-hacking}.

:turbo nerd: n. See {computer geek}.

:Turing tar-pit: n. 1. A place where anything is possible but nothing of interest is practical. Alan Turing helped lay the foundations of computer science by showing that all machines and languages capable of expressing a certain very primitive set of operations are logically equivalent in the kinds of computations they can carry out, and in principle have capabilities that differ only in speed from those of the most powerful and elegantly-designed computers. However, no machine or language exactly matching Turing's primitive set has ever been built (other than possibly as a classroom exercise), because it would be horribly slow and far too painful to use. A `Turing tar-pit' is any computer language or other tool which shares this property.

That is, it's theoretically universal --- but in practice, the harder you struggle to get any real work done, the deeper its inadequacies suck you in. Compare {bondage-and-discipline language}. 2. The perennial {holy wars} over whether language A or B is the "most powerful".

:turist: /too'rist/ n. Var. sp. of {tourist}, q.v. Also in adjectival form, turistic'. Poss. influenced by {luser} andTuring'.

:tweak: vt. 1. To change slightly, usually in reference to a value.

Also used synonymously with {twiddle}. If a program is almost correct, rather than figure out the precise problem you might just keep tweaking it until it works. See {frobnicate} and {fudge factor}; also see {shotgun debugging}. 2. To {tune}

or {bum} a program; preferred usage in the U.K.

:tweeter: [University of Waterloo] n. Syn. {perf}, {chad}

(sense 1). This term (like {woofer}) has been in use at Waterloo since 1972, but is elsewhere unknown. In audio jargon, the word refers to the treble speaker(s) on a hi-fi.

:TWENEX:: /twe'neks/ n. The TOPS-20 operating system by DEC ---

the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10 --- preferred by most PDP-10 hackers over TOPS-10 (that is, by those who were not {{ITS}} or {{WAITS}} partisans). TOPS-20 began in 1969 as Bolt, Beranek & Newman's TENEX operating system using special paging hardware. By the early 1970s, almost all of the systems on the ARPANET ran TENEX. DEC purchased the rights to TENEX from BBN and began work to make it their own. The first in-house code name for the operating system was VIROS (VIRtual memory Operating System); when customers started asking questions, the name was changed to SNARK so DEC could truthfully deny that there was any project called VIROS. When the name SNARK became known, the name was briefly reversed to become KRANS; this was quickly abandoned when it was discovered that krans' meantfuneral wreath' in Swedish. Ultimately DEC picked TOPS-20 as the name of the operating system, and it was as TOPS-20 that it was marketed. The hacker community, mindful of its origins, quickly dubbed it {{TWENEX}} (a contraction of twenty TENEX'), even though by this point very little of the original TENEX code remained (analogously to the differences between AT&T V6 UNIX and BSD). DEC people cringed when they heard "TWENEX", but the term caught on nevertheless (the written abbreviation20x' was also used).

TWENEX was successful and very popular; in fact, there was a period in the early 1980s when it commanded as fervent a culture of partisans as UNIX or ITS --- but DEC's decision to scrap all the internal rivals to the VAX architecture and its relatively stodgy VMS OS killed the DEC-20 and put a sad end to TWENEX's brief day in the sun. DEC attempted to convince TOPS-20 hackers to convert to {VMS}, but instead, by the late 1980s, most of the TOPS-20

hackers had migrated to UNIX.

:twiddle: n. 1. Tilde (ASCII 1111110, ~'). Also calledsquiggle', sqiggle' (sic --- pronounced /skig'l/), andtwaddle', but twiddle is the most common term. 2. A small and insignificant change to a program. Usually fixes one bug and generates several new ones. 3. vt. To change something in a small way. Bits, for example, are often twiddled. Twiddling a switch or knob implies much less sense of purpose than toggling or tweaking it; see {frobnicate}. To speak of twiddling a bit connotes aimlessness, and at best doesn't specify what you're doing to the bit; `toggling a bit' has a more specific meaning (see {bit twiddling}, {toggle}).

:twilight zone: [IRC] n. Notionally, the area of cyberspace where {IRC}

operators live. An {op} is said to have a "connection to the twilight zone".

:twink: /twink/ [UCSC] n. Equivalent to {read-only user}.

Also reported on the USENET group soc.motss; may derive from gay slang for a cute young thing with nothing upstairs (compare mainstream `chick').

:two pi: quant. The number of years it takes to finish one's thesis. Occurs in stories in the following form: "He started on his thesis; 2 pi years later..."

:two-to-the-N: quant. An amount much larger than {N} but smaller than {infinity}. "I have 2-to-the-N things to do before I can go out for lunch" means you probably won't show up.

:twonkie: /twon'kee/ n. The software equivalent of a Twinkie (a variety of sugar-loaded junk food, or (in gay slang) the male equivalent of chick'); a uselessfeature' added to look sexy and placate a {marketroid} (compare {Saturday-night special}). This may also be related to "The Twonky", title menace of a classic SF short story by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore), first published in the September 1942

`Astounding Science Fiction' and subsequently much anthologized.

= U =

=====

:UBD: /U-B-D/ [abbreviation for `User Brain Damage'] An abbreviation used to close out trouble reports obviously due to utter cluelessness on the user's part. Compare {pilot error}; oppose {PBD}; see also {brain-damaged}.

:UN*X: n. Used to refer to the UNIX operating system (a trademark of AT&T) in writing, but avoiding the need for the ugly {(TM)} typography.

Also used to refer to any or all varieties of Unixoid operating systems. Ironically, lawyers now say (1990) that the requirement for the TM-postfix has no legal force, but the asterisk usage is entrenched anyhow. It has been suggested that there may be a psychological connection to practice in certain religions (especially Judaism) in which the name of the deity is never written out in full, e.g., YHWH' orG--d' is used. See also {glob}.

:undefined external reference: excl. [UNIX] A message from UNIX's linker. Used in speech to flag loose ends or dangling references in an argument or discussion.

:under the hood: prep. [hot-rodder talk] 1. Used to introduce the underlying implementation of a product (hardware, software, or idea). Implies that the implementation is not intuitively obvious from the appearance, but the speaker is about to enable the listener to {grok} it. "Let's now look under the hood to see how ...." 2. Can also imply that the implementation is much simpler than the appearance would indicate: "Under the hood, we are just fork/execing the shell." 3. Inside a chassis, as in "Under the hood, this baby has a 40MHz 68030!"

:undocumented feature: n. See {feature}.

:uninteresting: adj. 1. Said of a problem that, although {nontrivial}, can be solved simply by throwing sufficient resources at it. 2. Also said of problems for which a solution would neither advance the state of the art nor be fun to design and code.

Hackers regard uninteresting problems as intolerable wastes of time, to be solved (if at all) by lesser mortals. Real

hackers (see {toolsmith}) generalize uninteresting problems enough to make them interesting and solve them --- thus solving the original problem as a special case (and, it must be admitted, occasionally turning a molehill into a mountain, or a mountain into a tectonic plate). See {WOMBAT}, {SMOP}; compare {toy problem}, oppose {interesting}.

:UNIX:: /yoo'niks/ [In the authors' words, "A weak pun on Multics"] n. (also `Unix') An interactive time-sharing system originally invented in 1969 by Ken Thompson after Bell Labs left the Multics project, originally so he could play games on his scavenged PDP-7. Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of C, is considered a co-author of the system. The turning point in UNIX's history came when it was reimplemented almost entirely in C during 1972--1974, making it the first source-portable OS. UNIX

subsequently underwent mutations and expansions at the hands of many different people, resulting in a uniquely flexible and developer-friendly environment. In 1991, UNIX is the most widely used multiuser general-purpose operating system in the world. Many people consider this the most important victory yet of hackerdom over industry opposition (but see {UNIX weenie} and {UNIX

conspiracy} for an opposing point of view). See {Version 7}, {BSD}, {USG UNIX}.

:UNIX brain damage: n. Something that has to be done to break a network program (typically a mailer) on