The Jargon Lexicon
= L =
=====
lace card: n.,obs. A {{punched card}} with all holes
punched (also called a `whoopee card' or `ventilator card').
Card readers tended to jam when they got to one of these, as the
resulting card had too little structural strength to avoid buckling
inside the mechanism. Card punches could also jam trying to
produce these things owing to power-supply problems. When some
practical joker fed a lace card through the reader, you needed to
clear the jam with a `card knife' -- which you used on the joker
first.
lamer: n. [prob. originated in skateboarder slang] Synonym
for {luser}, not used much by hackers but common among {warez
d00dz}, crackers, and {phreaker}s. Oppose {elite}. Has the
same connotations of self-conscious elitism that use of {luser}
does among hackers.
Crackers also use it to refer to cracker {wannabee}s. In phreak
culture, a lamer is one who scams codes off others rather than
doing cracks or really understanding the fundamental concepts. In
{warez d00dz} culture, where the ability to obtained cracked
commercial software within days of (or before) release to the
commercial market is much esteemed, the lamer might try to upload
garbage or shareware or something incredibly old (old in this
context is read as a few years to anything older than 3
days).
language lawyer: n. A person, usually an experienced or
senior software engineer, who is intimately familiar with many or
most of the numerous restrictions and features (both useful and
esoteric) applicable to one or more computer programming languages.
A language lawyer is distinguished by the ability to show you the
five sentences scattered through a 200-plus-page manual that
together imply the answer to your question "if only you had
thought to look there". Compare {wizard}, {legal},
{legalese}.
languages of choice: n. {C}, {LISP}, and {Perl}.
Nearly every hacker knows one of C or Lisp, and most good ones are
fluent in both. Over the last years, Perl has rapidly been gaining
favor, especially as a tool for systems-administration utilities
and rapid prototyping. Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in
small but influential communities.
There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with
FORTRAN, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They
often prefer to be known as {Real Programmer}s, and other
hackers consider them a bit odd (see "{The Story of Mel,
a Real Programmer}" in Appendix A). Assembler is generally
no longer considered interesting or appropriate for anything but
{HLL} implementation, {glue}, and a few time-critical and
hardware-specific uses in systems programs. FORTRAN occupies a
shrinking niche in scientific programming.
Most hackers tend to frown on languages like {{Pascal}} and
{{Ada}}, which don't give them the near-total freedom considered
necessary for hacking (see {bondage-and-discipline language}),
and to regard everything even remotely connected with {COBOL} or
other traditional {card walloper} languages as a total and
unmitigated {loss}.
larval stage: n. Describes a period of monomaniacal
concentration on coding apparently passed through by all fledgling
hackers. Common symptoms include the perpetration of more than one
36-hour {hacking run} in a given week; neglect of all other
activities including usual basics like food, sleep, and personal
hygiene; and a chronic case of advanced bleary-eye. Can last from
6 months to 2 years, the apparent median being around 18 months. A
few so afflicted never resume a more `normal' life, but the
ordeal seems to be necessary to produce really wizardly (as opposed
to merely competent) programmers. See also {wannabee}. A less
protracted and intense version of larval stage (typically lasting
about a month) may recur when one is learning a new {OS} or
programming language.
lase: /layz/ vt. To print a given document via a laser
printer. "OK, let's lase that sucker and see if all those
graphics-macro calls did the right things."
laser chicken: n. Kung Pao Chicken, a standard Chinese dish
containing chicken, peanuts, and hot red peppers in a spicy
pepper-oil sauce. Many hackers call it `laser chicken' for two
reasons: It can {zap} you just like a laser, and the sauce has a
red color reminiscent of some laser beams.
In a variation on this theme, it is reported that some Australian
hackers have redesignated the common dish `lemon chicken' as
`Chernobyl Chicken'. The name is derived from the color of the
sauce, which is considered bright enough to glow in the dark (as,
mythically, do some of the inhabitants of Chernobyl).
Lasherism: n. [Harvard] A program that solves a standard
problem (such as the Eight Queens puzzle or implementing the
{life} algorithm) in a deliberately nonstandard way.
Distinguished from a {crock} or {kluge} by the fact that the
programmer did it on purpose as a mental exercise. Such
constructions are quite popular in exercises such as the
{Obfuscated C Contest}, and occasionally in {retrocomputing}.
Lew Lasher was a student at Harvard around 1980 who became
notorious for such behavior.
laundromat: n. Syn. {disk farm}; see {washing
machine}.
LDB: /l*'d*b/ vt. [from the PDP-10 instruction set] To
extract from the middle. "LDB me a slice of cake, please." This
usage has been kept alive by Common LISP's function of the same
name. Considered silly. See also {DPB}.
leaf site: n. A machine that merely originates and reads
Usenet news or mail, and does not relay any third-party traffic.
Often uttered in a critical tone; when the ratio of leaf sites to
backbone, rib, and other relay sites gets too high, the network
tends to develop bottlenecks. Compare {backbone site}, {rib
site}.
leak: n. With qualifier, one of a class of
resource-management bugs that occur when resources are not freed
properly after operations on them are finished, so they effectively
disappear (leak out). This leads to eventual exhaustion as new
allocation requests come in. {memory leak} and {fd leak}
have their own entries; one might also refer, to, say, a `window
handle leak' in a window system.
leaky heap: n. [Cambridge] An {arena} with a {memory
leak}.
leapfrog attack: n. Use of userid and password information
obtained illicitly from one host (e.g., downloading a file of
account IDs and passwords, tapping TELNET, etc.) to compromise
another host. Also, the act of TELNETting through one or more
hosts in order to confuse a trace (a standard cracker procedure).
leech: n. Among BBS types, crackers and {warez d00dz},
one who consumes knowledge without generating new software, cracks or
techniques. BBS culture specifically defines a leech as someone
who downloads files with few no uploads in return, and who does not
contribute to the message section. Cracker culture extends this
definition to someone (a {lamer}, usually) who constantly
presses informed sources for information and/or assistance, but has
nothing to contribute.
legal: adj. Loosely used to mean `in accordance with all the
relevant rules', esp. in connection with some set of constraints
defined by software. "The older =+ alternate for += is no longer
legal syntax in ANSI C." "This parser processes each line of
legal input the moment it sees the trailing linefeed." Hackers
often model their work as a sort of game played with the
environment in which the objective is to maneuver through the
thicket of `natural laws' to achieve a desired objective. Their
use of `legal' is flavored as much by this game-playing sense as
by the more conventional one having to do with courts and lawyers.
Compare {language lawyer}, {legalese}.
legalese: n. Dense, pedantic verbiage in a language
description, product specification, or interface standard; text
that seems designed to obfuscate and requires a {language
lawyer} to {parse} it. Though hackers are not afraid of high
information density and complexity in language (indeed, they rather
enjoy both), they share a deep and abiding loathing for legalese;
they associate it with deception, {suit}s, and situations in
which hackers generally get the short end of the stick.
LER: /L-E-R/ n. [TMRC, from `Light-Emitting Diode'] A
light-emitting resistor (that is, one in the process of burning
up). Ohm's law was broken. See also {SED}.
LERP: /lerp/ vi.,n. Quasi-acronym for Linear
Interpolation, used as a verb or noun for the
operation. "Bresenham's algorithm lerps incrementally between the
two endpoints of the line."
let the smoke out: v. To fry hardware (see {fried}). See
{magic smoke} for a discussion of the underlying mythology.
letterbomb: 1. n. A piece of {email} containing {live
data} intended to do nefarious things to the recipient's machine or
terminal. It is possible, for example, to send letterbombs that
will lock up some specific kinds of terminals when they are viewed,
so thoroughly that the user must cycle power (see {cycle}, sense
3) to unwedge them. Under UNIX, a letterbomb can also try to get
part of its contents interpreted as a shell command to the mailer.
The results of this could range from silly to tragic. See also
{Trojan horse}; compare {nastygram}. 2. Loosely, a
{mailbomb}.
lexer: /lek'sr/ n. Common hacker shorthand for `lexical
analyzer', the input-tokenizing stage in the parser for a language
(the part that breaks it into word-like pieces). "Some C lexers
get confused by the old-style compound ops like `=-'."
lexiphage: /lek'si-fayj`/ n. A notorious word {chomper}
on ITS. See {bagbiter}. This program would draw on a selected
victim's bitmapped terminal the words "THE BAG" in ornate
letters, followed a pair of jaws biting pieces of it off.
life: n. 1. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton
Conway and first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner
("Scientific American", October 1970); the game's popularity
had to wait a few years for computers on which it could reasonably
be played, as it's no fun to simulate the cells by hand. Many
hackers pass through a stage of fascination with it, and hackers at
various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of
this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented
life in {TECO}!; see {Gosperism}). When a hacker mentions
`life', he is much more likely to mean this game than the
magazine, the breakfast cereal, or the human state of existence.
2. The opposite of {Usenet}. As in "{Get a life!}"
Life is hard: prov. [XEROX PARC] This phrase has two
possible interpretations: (1) "While your suggestion may have some
merit, I will behave as though I hadn't heard it." (2) "While
your suggestion has obvious merit, equally obvious circumstances
prevent it from being seriously considered." The charm of the
phrase lies precisely in this subtle but important ambiguity.
light pipe: n. Fiber optic cable. Oppose {copper}.
lightweight: adj. Opposite of {heavyweight}; usually
found in combining forms such as `lightweight process'.
like kicking dead whales down the beach: adj. Describes a
slow, difficult, and disgusting process. First popularized by a
famous quote about the difficulty of getting work done under one of
IBM's mainframe OSes. "Well, you *could* write a C compiler
in COBOL, but it would be like kicking dead whales down the
beach." See also {fear and loathing}.
like nailing jelly to a tree: adj. Used to describe a task
thought to be impossible, esp. one in which the difficulty arises
from poor specification or inherent slipperiness in the problem
domain. "Trying to display the `prettiest' arrangement of
nodes and arcs that diagrams a given graph is like nailing jelly to
a tree, because nobody's sure what `prettiest' means
algorithmically."
line 666: [from Christian eschatological myth] n. The
notional line of source at which a program fails for obscure
reasons, implying either that *somebody* is out to get it
(when you are the programmer), or that it richly deserves to be so
gotten (when you are not). "It works when I trace through it, but
seems to crash on line 666 when I run it." "What happens is that
whenever a large batch comes through, mmdf dies on the Line of the
Beast. Probably some twit hardcoded a buffer size."
line eater, the: n. [Usenet] 1. A bug in some now-obsolete
versions of the netnews software that used to eat up to BUFSIZ
bytes of the article text. The bug was triggered by having the
text of the article start with a space or tab. This bug was
quickly personified as a mythical creature called the `line
eater', and postings often included a dummy line of `line eater
food'. Ironically, line eater `food' not beginning with a space
or tab wasn't actually eaten, since the bug was avoided; but if
there *was* a space or tab before it, then the line eater
would eat the food *and* the beginning of the text it was
supposed to be protecting. The practice of `sacrificing to the
line eater' continued for some time after the bug had been
{nailed to the wall}, and is still humorously referred to. The
bug itself is still (in mid-1991) occasionally reported to be
lurking in some mail-to-netnews gateways. 2. See {NSA line
eater}.
line noise: n. 1. [techspeak] Spurious characters due to
electrical noise in a communications link, especially an RS-232
serial connection. Line noise may be induced by poor connections,
interference or crosstalk from other circuits, electrical storms,
{cosmic rays}, or (notionally) birds crapping on the phone
wires. 2. Any chunk of data in a file or elsewhere that looks like
the results of line noise in sense 1. 3. Text that is
theoretically a readable text or program source but employs syntax
so bizarre that it looks like line noise in senses 1 or 2. Yes,
there are languages this ugly. The canonical example is {TECO};
it is often claimed that "TECO's input syntax is indistinguishable
from line noise." Other non-{WYSIWYG} editors, such as Multics
`qed' and Unix `ed', in the hands of a real hacker, also
qualify easily, as do deliberately obfuscated languages such as
{INTERCAL}.
line starve: [MIT] 1. vi. To feed paper through a printer
the wrong way by one line (most printers can't do this). On a
display terminal, to move the cursor up to the previous line of the
screen. "To print `X squared', you just output `X', line starve,
`2', line feed." (The line starve causes the `2' to appear on the
line above the `X', and the line feed gets back to the original
line.) 2. n. A character (or character sequence) that causes a
terminal to perform this action. ASCII 0011010, also called SUB or
control-Z, was one common line-starve character in the days before
microcomputers and the X3.64 terminal standard. Unlike `line
feed', `line starve' is *not* standard {{ASCII}}
terminology. Even among hackers it is considered a bit silly.
3. [proposed] A sequence such as \c (used in System V echo, as well
as {{nroff}} and {{troff}}) that suppresses a {newline} or
other character(s) that would normally be emitted.
linearithmic: adj. Of an algorithm, having running time that
is O(N log N). Coined as a portmanteau of `linear' and
`logarithmic' in "Algorithms In C" by Robert Sedgewick
(Addison-Wesley 1990, ISBN 0-201-51425-7).
link farm: n. [UNIX] A directory tree that contains many
links to files in a master directory tree of files. Link farms
save space when one is maintaining several nearly identical copies
of the same source tree -- for example, when the only difference
is architecture-dependent object files. "Let's freeze the source
and then rebuild the FROBOZZ-3 and FROBOZZ-4 link farms." Link
farms may also be used to get around restrictions on the number of
`-I' (include-file directory) arguments on older C
preprocessors. However, they can also get completely out of hand,
becoming the filesystem equivalent of {spaghetti code}.
link-dead: adj. [MUD] Said of a {MUD} character who has
frozen in place because of a dropped Internet connection.
lint: [from UNIX's `lint(1)', named for the bits of
fluff it supposedly picks from programs] 1. vt. To examine a
program closely for style, language usage, and portability
problems, esp. if in C, esp. if via use of automated analysis
tools, most esp. if the UNIX utility `lint(1)' is used.
This term used to be restricted to use of `lint(1)' itself,
but (judging by references on Usenet) it has become a shorthand for
{desk check} at some non-UNIX shops, even in languages other
than C. Also as v. {delint}. 2. n. Excess verbiage in a
document, as in "This draft has too much lint".
Linux:: n. The free UNIX workalike created by Linus Torvalds
and friends starting about 1990. This may be the most remarkable
hacker project in history -- an entire clone of UNIX for 386 and
486 micros, distributed for free with sources over the net. This
is what {GNU} aimed to be, but the Free Software Foundation
never produced the kernel to go with its UNIX toolset (which Linux
uses). Other, similar efforts like FreeBSD and NetBSD have been
much less successful. The secret of Linux's success may be that
Linus worked much harder early on to keep the development process
open and recruit other hackers, creating a snowball effect.
lion food: n. [IBM] Middle management or HQ staff (or, by
extension, administrative drones in general). From an old joke
about two lions who, escaping from the zoo, split up to increase
their chances but agree to meet after 2 months. When they finally
meet, one is skinny and the other overweight. The thin one says:
"How did you manage? I ate a human just once and they turned out
a small army to chase me -- guns, nets, it was terrible. Since
then I've been reduced to eating mice, insects, even grass." The
fat one replies: "Well, *I* hid near an IBM office and ate a
manager a day. And nobody even noticed!"
Lions Book: n. "Source Code and Commentary on UNIX
level 6", by John Lions. The two parts of this book contained (1)
the entire source listing of the UNIX Version 6 kernel, and (2) a
commentary on the source discussing the algorithms. These were
circulated internally at the University of New South Wales
beginning 1976--77, and were, for years after, the *only*
detailed kernel documentation available to anyone outside Bell
Labs. Because Western Electric wished to maintain trade secret
status on the kernel, the Lions book was never formally published
and was only supposed to be distributed to affiliates of source
licensees (it is still possible to get a Bell Labs reprint of the
book by sending a copy of a V6 source license to the right person
at Bellcore, but *real* insiders have the UNSW edition). In
spite of this, it soon spread by samizdat to a good many of the
early UNIX hackers.
LISP: n. [from `LISt Processing language', but mythically
from `Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses'] AI's mother
tongue, a language based on the ideas of (a) variable-length lists
and trees as fundamental data types, and (b) the interpretation of
code as data and vice-versa. Invented by John McCarthy at MIT in
the late 1950s, it is actually older than any other {HLL} still
in use except FORTRAN. Accordingly, it has undergone considerable
adaptive radiation over the years; modern variants are quite
different in detail from the original LISP 1.5. The dominant HLL
among hackers until the early 1980s, LISP now shares the throne
with {C}. See {languages of choice}.
All LISP functions and programs are expressions that return
values; this, together with the high memory utilization of LISPs,
gave rise to Alan Perlis's famous quip (itself a take on an Oscar
Wilde quote) that "LISP programmers know the value of everything
and the cost of nothing".
One significant application for LISP has been as a proof by example
that most newer languages, such as {COBOL} and {Ada}, are full
of unnecessary {crock}s. When the {Right Thing} has already
been done once, there is no justification for {bogosity} in newer
languages.
literature, the: n. Computer-science journals and other
publications, vaguely gestured at to answer a question that the
speaker believes is {trivial}. Thus, one might answer an
annoying question by saying "It's in the literature." Oppose
{Knuth}, which has no connotation of triviality.
lithium lick: n. [NeXT] Steve Jobs. Employees who have
gotten too much attention from their esteemed founder are said to
have `lithium lick' when they begin to show signs of Jobsian fervor
and repeat the most recent catch phrases in normal conversation ---
for example, "It just works, right out of the box!"
little-endian: adj. Describes a computer architecture in
which, within a given 16- or 32-bit word, bytes at lower addresses
have lower significance (the word is stored `little-end-first').
The PDP-11 and VAX families of computers and Intel microprocessors
and a lot of communications and networking hardware are
little-endian. See {big-endian}, {middle-endian}, {NUXI
problem}. The term is sometimes used to describe the ordering of
units other than bytes; most often, bits within a byte.
live: /li:v/ adj.,adv. Opposite of `test'. Refers to actual
real-world data or a program working with it. For example, the response
to "I think the record deleter is finished." might be "Is it live yet?"
"Have you tried it out on live data?" This usage usually carries the
connotation that live data is more fragile and must not be corrupted,
or bad things will happen. So a more appropriate response might be:
"Well, make sure it works perfectly before we throw live data at it."
The implication here is that record deletion is something pretty
significant, and a haywire record-deleter running amok live would
probably cause great harm.
live data: n. 1. Data that is written to be interpreted and
takes over program flow when triggered by some un-obvious
operation, such as viewing it. One use of such hacks is to break
security. For example, some smart terminals have commands that
allow one to download strings to program keys; this can be used to
write live data that, when listed to the terminal, infects it with
a security-breaking {virus} that is triggered the next time a
hapless user strikes that key. For another, there are some
well-known bugs in {vi} that allow certain texts to send
arbitrary commands back to the machine when they are simply viewed.
2. In C code, data that includes pointers to function {hook}s
(executable code). 3. An object, such as a {trampoline}, that
is constructed on the fly by a program and intended to be executed
as code.
Live Free Or Die!: imp. 1. The state motto of New Hampshire,
which appears on that state's automobile license plates. 2. A
slogan associated with UNIX in the romantic days when UNIX
aficionados saw themselves as a tiny, beleaguered underground
tilting against the windmills of industry. The "free" referred
specifically to freedom from the {fascist} design philosophies
and crufty misfeatures common on commercial operating systems.
Armando Stettner, one of the early UNIX developers, used to give
out fake license plates bearing this motto under a large UNIX, all
in New Hampshire colors of green and white. These are now valued
collector's items. Recently (1994) an inferior imitation of these
has been put in circulation with a red corporate logo added.
livelock: /li:v'lok/ n. A situation in which some critical
stage of a task is unable to finish because its clients perpetually
create more work for it to do after they have been serviced but
before it can clear its queue. Differs from {deadlock} in that
the process is not blocked or waiting for anything, but has a
virtually infinite amount of work to do and can never catch up.
liveware: /li:v'weir/ n. 1. Synonym for {wetware}.
Less common. 2. [Cambridge] Vermin. "Waiter, there's some
liveware in my salad..."
lobotomy: n. 1. What a hacker subjected to formal management
training is said to have undergone. At IBM and elsewhere this term
is used by both hackers and low-level management; the latter
doubtless intend it as a joke. 2. The act of removing the
processor from a microcomputer in order to replace or upgrade it.
Some very cheap {clone} systems are sold in `lobotomized' form
-- everything but the brain.
locals, the: pl.n. The users on one's local network (as
opposed, say, to people one reaches via public Internet or UUCP
connects). The marked thing about this usage is how little it has
to do with real-space distance. "I have to do some tweaking on
this mail utility before releasing it to the locals."
locked and loaded: adj. [from military slang for an M-16
rifle with magazine inserted and prepared for firing] Said of a
removable disk volume properly prepared for use -- that is, locked
into the drive and with the heads loaded. Ironically, because
their heads are `loaded' whenever the power is up, this
description is never used of {{Winchester}} drives (which are
named after a rifle).
locked up: adj. Syn. for {hung}, {wedged}.
logic bomb: n. Code surreptitiously inserted into an
application or OS that causes it to perform some destructive or
security-compromising activity whenever specified conditions are
met. Compare {back door}.
logical: adj. [from the technical term `logical device',
wherein a physical device is referred to by an arbitrary
`logical' name] Having the role of. If a person (say, Les
Earnest at SAIL) who had long held a certain post left and were
replaced, the replacement would for a while be known as the
`logical' Les Earnest. (This does not imply any judgment on the
replacement.) Compare {virtual}.
At Stanford, `logical' compass directions denote a coordinate
system in which `logical north' is toward San Francisco,
`logical west' is toward the ocean, etc., even though logical
north varies between physical (true) north near San Francisco and
physical west near San Jose. (The best rule of thumb here is that,
by definition, El Camino Real always runs logical north-and-south.)
In giving directions, one might say: "To get to Rincon Tarasco
restaurant, get onto {El Camino Bignum} going logical north."
Using the word `logical' helps to prevent the recipient from
worrying about that the fact that the sun is setting almost
directly in front of him. The concept is reinforced by North
American highways which are almost, but not quite, consistently
labeled with logical rather than physical directions. A similar
situation exists at MIT: Route 128 (famous for the electronics
industry that has grown up along it) is a 3-quarters circle
surrounding Boston at a radius of 10 miles, terminating near the
coastline at each end. It would be most precise to describe the
two directions along this highway as `clockwise' and
`counterclockwise', but the road signs all say "north" and
"south", respectively. A hacker might describe these directions
as `logical north' and `logical south', to indicate that they
are conventional directions not corresponding to the usual
denotation for those words. (If you went logical south along the
entire length of route 128, you would start out going northwest,
curve around to the south, and finish headed due east, passing
along one infamous stretch of pavement that is simultaneously route
128 south and Interstate 93 north, and is signed as such!)
loop through: vt. To process each element of a list of
things. "Hold on, I've got to loop through my paper mail."
Derives from the computer-language notion of an iterative loop;
compare `cdr down' (under {cdr}), which is less common among C
and UNIX programmers. ITS hackers used to say `IRP over' after
an obscure pseudo-op in the MIDAS PDP-10 assembler (the same IRP op
can nowadays be found in Microsoft's assembler).
loose bytes: n. Commonwealth hackish term for the padding
bytes or {shim}s many compilers insert between members of a
record or structure to cope with alignment requirements imposed by
the machine architecture.
lord high fixer: n. [primarily British, from Gilbert &
Sullivan's `lord high executioner'] The person in an organization
who knows the most about some aspect of a system. See {wizard}.
lose: [MIT] vi. 1. To fail. A program loses when it
encounters an exceptional condition or fails to work in the
expected manner. 2. To be exceptionally unesthetic or crocky.
3. Of people, to be obnoxious or unusually stupid (as opposed to
ignorant). See also {deserves to lose}. 4. n. Refers to
something that is {losing}, especially in the phrases "That's a
lose!" and "What a lose!"
lose lose: interj. A reply to or comment on an undesirable
situation. "I accidentally deleted all my files!" "Lose,
lose."
loser: n. An unexpectedly bad situation, program,
programmer, or person. Someone who habitually loses. (Even
winners can lose occasionally.) Someone who knows not and knows
not that he knows not. Emphatic forms are `real loser', `total
loser', and `complete loser' (but not **`moby loser', which
would be a contradiction in terms). See {luser}.
losing: adj. Said of anything that is or causes a {lose}
or {lossage}.
loss: n. Something (not a person) that loses; a situation in
which something is losing. Emphatic forms include `moby loss',
and `total loss', `complete loss'. Common interjections are
"What a loss!" and "What a moby loss!" Note that `moby
loss' is OK even though **`moby loser' is not used; applied to an
abstract noun, moby is simply a magnifier, whereas when applied to
a person it implies substance and has positive connotations.
Compare {lossage}.
lossage: /los'*j/ n. The result of a bug or malfunction.
This is a mass or collective noun. "What a loss!" and "What
lossage!" are nearly synonymous. The former is slightly more
particular to the speaker's present circumstances; the latter
implies a continuing {lose} of which the speaker is currently a
victim. Thus (for example) a temporary hardware failure is a loss,
but bugs in an important tool (like a compiler) are serious
lossage.
lost in the noise: adj. Syn. {lost in the underflow}.
This term is from signal processing, where signals of very small
amplitude cannot be separated from low-intensity noise in the
system. Though popular among hackers, it is not confined to
hackerdom; physicists, engineers, astronomers, and statisticians
all use it.
lost in the underflow: adj. Too small to be worth
considering; more specifically, small beyond the limits of accuracy
or measurement. This is a reference to `floating underflow', a
condition that can occur when a floating-point arithmetic processor
tries to handle quantities smaller than its limit of magnitude. It
is also a pun on `undertow' (a kind of fast, cold current that
sometimes runs just offshore and can be dangerous to swimmers).
"Well, sure, photon pressure from the stadium lights alters the
path of a thrown baseball, but that effect gets lost in the
underflow." Compare {epsilon}, {epsilon squared}; see also
{overflow bit}.
lots of MIPS but no I/O: adj. Used to describe a person who
is technically brilliant but can't seem to communicate with human
beings effectively. Technically it describes a machine that has
lots of processing power but is bottlenecked on input-output (in
1991, the IBM Rios, a.k.a. RS/6000, is a notorious recent example).
low-bandwidth: adj. [from communication theory] Used to
indicate a talk that, although not {content-free}, was not
terribly informative. "That was a low-bandwidth talk, but what
can you expect for an audience of {suit}s!" Compare
{zero-content}, {bandwidth}, {math-out}.
LPT: /L-P-T/ or /lip'it/ or /lip-it'/ n. Line printer,
of course. Rare under UNIX, more common among hackers who grew up
with ITS, MS-DOS, CP/M and other operating systems that were
strongly influenced by early DEC conventions.
Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology: prov. "There is
*always* one more bug."
lunatic fringe: n. [IBM] Customers who can be relied upon to
accept release 1 versions of software.
lurker: n. One of the `silent majority' in a electronic
forum; one who posts occasionally or not at all but is known to
read the group's postings regularly. This term is not pejorative
and indeed is casually used reflexively: "Oh, I'm just lurking."
Often used in `the lurkers', the hypothetical audience for the
group's {flamage}-emitting regulars.
luser: n. /loo'zr/ A {user}; esp. one who is also a
{loser}. ({luser} and {loser} are pronounced
identically.) This word was coined around 1975 at MIT. Under
ITS, when you first walked up to a terminal at MIT and typed
Control-Z to get the computer's attention, it printed out some
status information, including how many people were already using
the computer; it might print "14 users", for example. Someone
thought it would be a great joke to patch the system to print "14
losers" instead. There ensued a great controversy, as some of the
users didn't particularly want to be called losers to their faces
every time they used the computer. For a while several hackers
struggled covertly, each changing the message behind the back of
the others; any time you logged into the computer it was even money
whether it would say "users" or "losers". Finally, someone
tried the compromise "lusers", and it stuck. Later one of the
ITS machines supported `luser' as a request-for-help command.
ITS died the death in mid-1990, except as a museum piece; the usage
lives on, however, and the term `luser' is often seen in program
comments.