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ly unique bogosities
   in the filesystem internals and elsewhere that occasionally create
   portability problems. See also TELERAT, SUN-STOOLS, TERMINAK.

HUMONGOUS (hyoo-mohng'gus) alt. HUMUNGOUS (hyoo-muhng'gus) See HUNGUS.

HUMOR, HACKER n. A distinctive style of shared intellectual humor
   found among hackers, having the following marked characteristics:

   1) Fascination with form-vs.-content jokes, paradoxes, and humor
   having to do with confusion of metalevels (see META). One way to
   make a hacker laugh: hold an index card in front of him/her with
   ``THIS IS GREEN'' written on it in bold red ink, or vice-versa
   (note, however, that this is only funny the first time).

   2) Elaborate deadpan parodies of large intellectual constructs such
   as standards documents, language descriptions (see INTERCAL) and
   even entire scientific theories (see QUANTUM BOGODYNAMICS,
   COMPUTRON).

   3) Jokes which involve screwily precise reasoning from bizarre,
   ludicrous or just grossly counter-intuitive premises.

   4) Fascination with puns and wordplay.

   5) A fondness for apparently mindless humor with subversive
   currents of intelligence in it, for example: old Warner Brothers
   and Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, Charlie Chaplin movies, the B-52s,
   and Monty Python's Flying Circus. Humor which combines this trait
   with elements of high camp and slapstick is especially favored.

   6) References to the symbol-object antinomies and associated ideas
   in Zen Buddhism and (less often) Taoism. See HAS THE X NATURE,
   DISCORDIANISM, ZEN, HA HA ONLY SERIOUS.

   See also FILK, COMPUTER; RETROCOMPUTING; and Appendix C. If you
   have an itchy feeling that all six of these traits are really
   aspects of one thing that is incredibly difficult to talk about
   exactly, you are a) correct and b) responding like a hacker. These
   traits are also recognizable (though in a less marked form)
   throughout SCIENCE-FICTION FANDOM.

HUNG [from ``hung up''] adj. Equivalent to WEDGED, q.v. but more
   common at UNIX/C sites. Not used of people.

HUNGUS (hung'ghis) [perhaps related to current slang ``humongous'';
   which one came first (if either) is unclear] adj. Large, unwieldy,
   usually unmanageable.  ``TCP is a hungus piece of code.''  ``This
   is a hungus set of modifications.''

HYPERSPACE (hie'per-spays) n. A memory location within a virtual
   memory machine that is many, many megabytes (or gigabytes) away
   from where the program counter should be pointing. ``Another core
   dump...looks like the program jumped off to hyperspace somehow.''

            = I =

IBM (ie bee em) Inferior But Marketable; It's Better Manually;
   Insidious Black Magic; Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a
   near-INFINITE number of many even less complimentary expansions,
   including ``International Business Machines''. See TLA. These
   abbreviations illustrate the considerable antipathy most hackers
   have long felt for the ``industry leader'' (see FEAR AND LOATHING).
   What galls hackers about most IBM machines above the PC level isn't
   so much that they're underpowered and overpriced (though that
   counts against them) but that the designs are incredibly archaic,
   crufty and ELEPHANTINE and you can't *fix* them -- source is locked
   up tight and programming tools are expensive, hard to find, and a
   bitch to use once you've found them. With the release of the
   UNIX-based RIOS family this may have begun to change -- but then,
   we thought that when the PC-RT came out, too.  In the spirit of
   universal peace and brotherhood the jargon list now includes a
   number of entries marked `IBM'; these derive from a rampantly
   unofficial jargon list circulated among IBM's own beleaguered
   hacker underground.

ICE [from William Gibson's cyberpunk SF: notionally, ``Intrusion
   Countermeasure Electronics''] Security software. Also, ICEBREAKER:
   a program designed for cracking security on a system. Neither term
   is in serious use yet as of 1990, but many hackers find the
   metaphor attractive and they may be in the near future.

ILL BEHAVED adj. Software which bypasses the defined OS interfaces to
   do things (like screen, keyboard and disk I/O) itself, often in a
   way that depends on the hardware of the machine it is running on or
   which is nonportable or incompatible with other pieces of software.
   In the IBM PC/MS-DOS world, where this term originated, there is a
   folk theorem to the effect that (due to gross inadequacies and
   performance penalties in the OS interface) all interesting
   applications are ill-behaved. Oppose WELL-BEHAVED. See MESS-DOS.

IMHO [from SF fandom via USENET] Written acronym for In My Humble
   Opinion.  Example: ``IMHO, mixed-case C names should be avoided, as
   mistyping something in the wrong case can cause hard-to-detect
   errors -- and they look too Pascalish anyhow.''

INCANTATION n. Any particularly arbitrary or obscure command that must
   be muttered at a system to attain a desired result. Not used of
   passwords or other explicit security features.  Especially used of
   tricks that are so poorly documented they must be learned from a
   WIZARD. E.g. ``This compiler normally locates initialized data in
   the data segment, but if you mutter the right incantation they will
   be forced into text space''. See MUTTER.

INFINITE adj. Consisting of a large number of objects; extreme.  Used
   very loosely as in: ``This program produces infinite garbage.''

INFANT MORTALITY n. It is common lore among hackers that the chances
   of sudden hardware failure drop off exponentially with a machine's
   time since power-up (that is until the relatively distant time at
   which mechanical wear in I/O devices and thermal-cycling stress in
   components has accumulated enough for the machine to start going
   senile). Up to half of all chip-and-wire failures happen within a
   new system's first few weeks; such failures are often referred to
   as ``infant mortality'' problems.

INTERCAL (in'tr-kal) [said by the authors to stand for ``Compiler
   Language With No Pronounceable Acronym''] n. The language has been
   recently re-implemented as C-INTERCAL and is consequently enjoying
   an unprecedented level of unpopularity.

INTERNET ADDRESS n. An `absolute' network address of the form
   [e-mail], where foo is a user name, bar is a site name, and baz
   is a `domain' name, possibly including periods itself. Contrasts
   with BANG PATH, q.v.; see also NETWORK. All Internet machines and
   most UUCP sites can now resolve these addresses, thanks to a large
   amount of behind-the-scenes magic and PD software written since
   1980 or so. See also BANG PATH.

INTERRUPTS LOCKED OUT When someone is ignoring you. In a restaurant,
   after several fruitless attempts to get the waitress's attention, a
   hacker might well observe that ``She must have interrupts locked
   out.'' Variations of this abound; ``to have one's interrupt mask
   bit set'' is also heard.

IRON n. Hardware, especially older/larger hardware of mainframe class
   with big metal cabinets relatively low-density electronics (but
   also used of modern supercomputers). Often in the phrase BIG IRON.
   Oppose SILICON. See also DINOSAUR.

IRON BOX [UNIX/Internet] n. A special environment set up to trap a
   CRACKER logging in over remote or network connections long enough
   so he can be traced. May include a specially-gimmicked SHELL
   restricting the hacker's movements in unobvious ways, and `bait'
   files designed to keep him interested and logged on. See also BACK
   DOOR.

IRONMONGER [IBM] n. A hardware specialist. Derogatory.  Compare
   SANDBENDER, POLYGON PUSHER.

ITS (ie-tee-ess) n. Incompatible Time-Sharing System, an influential
   but highly idiosyncratic operating system written for PDP-10s at
   MIT and long used at the MIT AI lab; much AI-hacker slang derives
   from ITS folklore. After about 1982 most actual work was shifted to
   newer machines, with the remaining ITS boxes run essentially as a
   hobby and service to the hacker community.  The shutdown of the
   lab's last ITS machine in May 1990 marked the end of an era and
   sent old-time hackers into mourning nationwide. See Appendix B.

IWBNI [acronym] It Would Be Nice If.  No pronunciation, as this is
   never spoken, only written. Compare WIBNI.

IYFEG [USENET] Abbreviation for ``Insert Your Favourite Ethnic
   Group''.  Used as a meta-name when telling racist jokes in email to
   avoid offending anyone.

            = J =

JAGGIES (jag'eez) n. The `stairstep' effect observable when an edge
   (esp. a linear edge of slope far from 45 degrees) is rendered on a
   pixel device (as opposed to a vector display).

JIFFY n. 1. Interval of CPU time, commonly 1/60 second or 1
   millisecond (see TICK).  2. Indeterminate time from a few seconds
   to forever. ``I'll do it in a jiffy'' means certainly not now and
   possibly never.

JOCK n. 1. Programmer who is characterized by large and somewhat brute
   force programs. 2. When modified by another noun, describes a
   specialist in some particular computing area. The compounds
   `compiler jock' and `systems jock' seem to be the best established
   examples of this.

JOE CODE (joh kohd) [said to commemmorate a notoriously bad coder
   named Joe at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory] n. Badly written,
   possibly buggy source code.  ``Perl may be a handy program, but if
   you look at the source, it's complete joe code.'' Correspondents
   wishing to remain anonymous have fingered a particular Joe and
   observed that usage has drifted slightly; they described his code
   as ``overly TENSE and unmaintainable''.

J. RANDOM HACKER (jay rand'm hak'r) n. A mythical figure like the
   Unknown Soldier; the archetypal hacker nerd. See RANDOM.

            = K =

KAHUNA (k@-hoo'nuh) [IBM, from the Hawaiian title for a shaman] n.
   Synonym for WIZARD, GURU (q.v.).

KEN (ken) n. A flaming user.  This noun was in use by the Software
   Support group at Symbolics because the two greatest flamers in the
   user community were both named Ken.

KILL FILE [USENET] n. Some USENET readers allow users to set filter
   patterns against which news messages are compared, then ignored
   (not presented by the reader) if the match succeeds. The file in
   which these patterns are stored is called the user's kill file.
   Thus to ``add a person (or subject) to one's kill file'' is to
   arrange for that person to be ignored by your newsreader in future.
   By extension, it may be used for a decision to ignore the person or
   subject in other media.

KILLER MICRO [popularized by Eugene Brooks] n. A microprocessor-based
   machine that infringes on mini, mainframe or supercomputer
   performance turf. Often heard in ``No one will survive the attack
   of the killer micros!'', the battle cry of the downsizers. Used
   esp. of RISC architectures.

KILLER POKE n. A recipe for inducing hardware damage on a machine via
   insertion of invalid values in a memory-mapped control register;
   used esp. of various fairly well-known tricks on MMU-less BITTY
   BOXES like the IBM PC and Commodore PET that can overload and trash
   analog electronics in the monitor. See also HCF.

KLUGE (kloodj) alt. KLUDGE (kluhdj) [from the German ``klug'', clever]
   (`kloodj' is the original pronunciation, more common in the US;
   `kluhdge' is reported more common in England).  n. 1. A Rube
   Goldberg device in hardware or software.  2. A clever programming
   trick intended to solve a particular nasty case in an efficient, if
   not clear, manner.  Often used to repair bugs.  Often verges on
   being a crock.  3. Something that works for the wrong reason.  4.
   v. To insert a kluge into a program.  ``I've kluged this routine to
   get around that weird bug, but there's probably a better way.''
   Also KLUGE UP.  5. KLUGE AROUND: To avoid by inserting a kluge.  6.
   [WPI] A feature which is implemented in a RUDE manner.

KNIGHTS OF THE LAMBDA CALCULUS n. A semi-mythical organization of
   wizardly LISP and Scheme hackers. There is no enrollment list and
   the criteria for induction are unclear, but one well-known LISPer
   has been known to give out buttons and, in general, the *members*
   know who they are...
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Subject: Jargon file v2.1.5 28 NOV 1990 -- part 4 of 6
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Xref: eagle.wesleyan.edu alt.folklore.computers:5866 comp.unix.internals:1234 comp.misc:4018


            = L =

LACE CARD n. obs. A Hollerith card with all holes punched (also called
   a WHOOPEE CARD). Some cardpunches actually jammed on the amount of
   CHAD generated by one of these.

LANGUAGE LAWYER n. A person, usually an experienced or senior software
   engineer, who is intimately familiar with many or most of the
   numerous syntactic and semantic restrictions (both useful and
   esoteric) applicable to one or more computer programming languages.

LANGUAGES OF CHOICE n. C or LISP. Essentially all hackers know one of
   these and most good ones are fluent in both. Smalltalk and Prolog
   are popular in small but influential communities. Assembler used to
   be a language of choice, but is generally no longer considered
   interesting or appropriate for anything but compiler code
   generation and a few time-critical uses in systems programs.

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 and sex, and a chronic case of advanced
   bleary-eye. Can last from six months to two years, with the
   apparent median being around eighteen 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. A less protracted and intense version of
   larval stage (typically lasting about a month) may recur when
   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.'' Compare DIABLO in Appendix B.

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, leading to eventual exhaustion as new
   allocation requests come in. MEMORY LEAK and FD LEAK have their own
   entries; one might also refer, say, to a ``window handle leak'' in
   a window system.

LERP (lerp) v.,n. Quasi-acronym for Linear Interpolation, used as a
   verb or noun for the operation. Ex. Bresenham's algorithm lerps
   incrementally between the two endpoints of the line.

LEXER (lek'sr) n. Common hacker shorthand for ``lexical analyzer'', the
   input-tokenizing stage in the parser for a language. ``Some C lexers
   get confused by the old-style compound ops like =-''.

LIFE n. 1. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton Conway,
   and first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner (Scientific
   American, October 1970). Many hackers pass through a stage of
   fascination with it. 2. The opposite of USENET. As in ``Get a
   life!''.

LIKE KICKING DEAD WHALES DOWN THE BEACH adj. A slow and disgusting
   process.  First popularized by a famous quote about the difficulty
   of getting work done under one of IBM's mainframe OSs. ``Well, you
   *could* write a C compiler in COBOL, but it would be like kicking
   dead whales down the beach.''

LINE EATER, THE [USENET] n. A bug in some now-obsolete versions of the
   netnews software used to cause the first lines of articles to be
   discarded under some circumstances.  This bug was quickly
   personified as a mythical creature called ``the line eater'', and
   postings often included a dummy line of ``line eater food''. 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-1990)
   occasionally reported to be lurking in some mail-to-netnews
   gateways.

LINE STARVE [MIT] Inverse of `line feed'; a character or character
   sequence which causes a printer to back up one line depth.

LINK FARM [UNIX] n. A directory tree that contains many links to files
   in another, master directory tree of files.  Link farms save space
   when maintaining several nearly identical copies of the same source
   tree, e.g. when the only difference is architecture-dependent
   object files.  Example use: `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
   arguments on older C preprocessors.

LINT [from UNIX's lint(1)] v. 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 the USENET) has become a
   shorthand for `desk-check' at some non-UNIX shops, even in some
   languages other than C.

LION FOOD [IBM] n. Middle management or HQ staff (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
   agreed to meet after two months. When they do 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!''

LISP n. The name of AI's mother tongue, a language based on the ideas
   of 1) variable-length lists and trees as fundamental data types,
   and 2) the interpretation of code as data and vice-versa.  Invented
   by John McCarthy at Stanford 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 (of which Scheme is perhaps the most successful)
   are quite different in detail from the original LISP 1.5 at
   Stanford. The hands-down favorite of hackers until the early 1980s,
   LISP now shares the throne with C (q.v.). See LANGUAGES OF CHOICE.

LITTLE-ENDIAN adj. Describes a computer architecture in which, within
   a given 16- or 32-bit word, lower byte 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.

LIVELOCK 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've been serviced but before it can clear.
   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
   accomplishes nothing.

LIVEWARE n. Synonym for WETWARE (q.v.) Less common.

LOGIC BOMB n. Code surreptitiously inserted in an application or OS
   which causes it to perform some destructive or
   security-compromising activity whenever specified conditions are
   met.  Compare BACK DOOR.

LOGICAL [from the technical term ``logical device'', wherein a
   physical device is referred to by an arbitrary name] adj.
   Understood to have a meaning not necessarily corresponding to
   reality.  E.g., if a person who has long held a certain post (e.g.,
   Les Earnest at SAIL) left and was replaced, the replacement would
   for a while be known as the ``logical Les Earnest''.  The word
   VIRTUAL is also used.  At SAIL, ``logical'' compass directions
   denoted 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
   Franscisco and physical west near San Jose.  (The best rule of
   thumb here is that El Camino Real by definition always runs logical
   north-and-south.) The concept is perpetuated by bay area highways
   which are almost, but not quite, consistently labelled with logical
   rather than physical directions.

LORD HIGH FIXER [primarily British] n. The person in an organisation
   who knows the most about some aspect of a system. See WIZARD.

LOSE [from MIT jargon] v. 1. To fail.  A program loses when it
   encounters an exceptional condition.  2. To be exceptionally
   unaesthetic.  3. Of people, to be obnoxious or unusually stupid (as
   opposed to ignorant).  4. DESERVE TO LOSE: v. Said of someone who
   willfully does the wrong thing; humorously, if one uses a feature
   known to be marginal.  What is meant is that one deserves the
   consequences of one's losing actions.  ``Boy, anyone who tries to
   use MULTICS deserves to lose!'' See also SCREW, CHOMP, BAGBITER.
   LOSE LOSE -- a reply or comment on a situation. 5. LOSE as a noun
   refers to something which is losing, especially in the phrases
   ``That's a lose!'' or ``What a lose!''.

LOSER n. An unexpectedly bad situation, program, programmer, or
   person.  Especially ``real loser''.

LOSS n. Something which loses.  WHAT A (MOBY) LOSS!: interjection.

LOSSAGE (los'@j) n. The result of a bug or malfunction.

LPT (lip'it) [ITS] n. Line printer, of course. Rare under UNIX,
   commoner in hackers with MS-DOS or CP/M background (the printer
   device is called LPT: on those systems, which like ITS were
   strongly influenced by early DEC conventions).

LURKER n. One of the `silent majority' in a USENET or BBS newsgroup;
   one who posts occasionally or not at all but is known to read the
   group regularly. Often in `THE LURKERS', the hypothetical audience
   for the group's FLAMING regulars.

LUNATIC FRINGE [IBM] n. Customers who can be relied upon to accept
   release 1 versions of software.

LUSER (loo'zr)  See USER.

            = M =

MACDINK (mak'dink) [from the Apple Macintosh, which is said to
   encourage such behavior] v.  To make many incremental and
   unnecessary cosmetic changes to a program or file.  Frequently the
   subject of the macdinking would be better off without them.  Ex:
   ``When I left at 11pm last night, he was still macdinking the
   slides for his presentation.''

MACINTRASH (mak'in-trash) The Apple Macintosh, by someone who doesn't
   appreciate being kept away from the _real_computer_ by the
   interface. See also WIMP ENVIRONMENT, DROOL-PROOF PAPER, USER
   FRIENDLY.

MACRO (mak'ro) n. A name (possibly followed by a formal ARG list)
   which is equated to a text expression to which it is to be expanded
   (possibly with substitution of actual arguments) by a language
   translator. This definition can be found in any technical
   dictionary; what those won't tell you is how the hackish
   connotations of the term have changed over time. The term `macro'
   originated in early assemblers, which encouraged use of macros as a
   structuring and information-hiding device. During the early 70s
   macro assemblers became ubiquitous and sometimes quite as powerful
   and expensive as HLLs, only to fall from favor as improving
   compiler technology marginalized assembler programming (see
   LANGUAGES OF CHOICE). Nowadays the term is most often used in
   connection with the C preprocessor, LISP, or one of several
   special-purpose languages built around a macro-expansion facility
   (such as TEX or UNIX's nroff, troff and pic suite). Indeed, the
   meaning has drifted enough that the collective `macros' is now
   sometimes used for code in any special-purpose application-control
   language, whether or not the language is actually translated by
   text expansion.

MACROLOGY (mak-ro'l@-jee) n. Set of usually complex or crufty macros,
   e.g. as part of a large system written in LISP, TECO or (less
   commonly) assembler.  Sometimes studying the macrology of a system
   is not unlike archaeology, hence the sound-alike construction.
   Prob. influenced by THEOLOGY (q.v.).

MACROTAPE (ma'kro-tayp) n. An industry standard reel of tape, as
   opposed to a MICROTAPE.

MAGIC adj. 1. As yet unexplained, or too complicated to explain
   (compare Clarke's Second Law: ``Any sufficiently advanced
   technology is indistinguishable from magic'').  ``TTY echoing is
   controlled by a large number of magic bits.''  ``This routine
   magically computes the parity of an eight-bit byte in three
   instructions.''  2. [Stanford] A feature not generally publicized
   which allows something otherwise impossible, or a feature formerly
   in that category but now unveiled. Example: The keyboard commands
   which override the screen-hiding features.

MAGIC COOKIE [UNIX] n. 1. Something passed between routines or
   programs that enables the receiver to perform some OBSCURE
   operationl; a capability ticket.  Especially used of small data
   objects which contain data encoded in a strange or intrinsically
   machine-dependent way. For example, on non-UNIX OSs with a
   non-byte-stream model of files, the result of ftell(3) may be a
   `magic cookie' rather than a byte offset; it can be passed to
   fseek(3) but not operated on in any meaningful way.  2. A blank
   left on the screen when your terminal changes modes. Some older
   terminals would print a blank when you entered and exited special
   modes, such as underline or flash. This was also called a GLITCH.

MAGIC NUMBER [UNIX/C] n. 1. Special data located at the beginning of a
   binary data file to indicate its type to a utility. Under UNIX the
   system and various applications programs (especially the linker)
   distinguish between types of executable by looking for a magic
   number. 2. In source code, some non-obvious constant whose value is
   significant to the operation of a program and is inserted
   inconspicuously in line, rather than expanded in by a symbol set by
   a commented #define. Magic numbers in this sense are bad style.

MAGIC SMOKE n. A notional substance trapped inside IC packages that
   enables them to function. Its existence is demonstrated by what
   happens when a chip burns up -- the magic smoke gets let out, so it
   doesn't work any more. See SMOKE TEST.

MANGLE v. Used similarly to MUNG or SCRIBBLE, but more violent in its
   connotations; something that is mangled has been irreversibly and
   totally trashed.

MANGO [orig. in-house slang at Symbolics] n.  A manager.  See also
   DEVO and DOCO.

MARGINAL adj. 1. Extremely small.  ``A marginal increase in core can
   decrease GC time drastically.''  2. Of extremely small merit.
   ``This proposed new feature seems rather marginal to me.''  3. Of
   extremely small probability of winning.  ``The power supply was
   rather marginal anyway; no wonder it crapped out.''  4.
   MARGINALLY: adv.  Slightly.  ``The ravs here are only marginally
   better than at Small Eating Place.''

MARKETROID (mar'k@-troyd) alt. MARKETING SLIME, MARKETING DROID n.
   Member of a company's marketing department, esp.  one who promises
   users that the next version of a product will have features which
   are unplanned, extremely difficult to implement, and/or violate the
   laws of physics. Derogatory. Used by techies.

MARTIAN n. A packet sent on a TCP/IP network with a source address of
   the test loopback interface (127.0.0.1).  As in ``The domain server
   is getting lots of packets from Mars.  Does that gateway have a
   Martian filter?''

MASSAGE v. Vague term used to describe `smooth' transformations of a
   data set into a more useful form, esp.  transformations which do
   not lose information. Connotes less pain and more ELEGANCE than
   MUNCH or CRUNCH (q.v.). ``He wrote a program that massages X bitmap
   files into GIF format.'' Compare SLURP.

MEATWARE n. Synonym for WETWARE (q.v.). Less common.

MEGAPENNY (meg'a-pen'ee) n. $10,000 (1 cent * 10e6). Used
   semi-humorously as a unit in comparing computer cost/performance
   figures.

MEGO (mego, meego) [My Eyes Glaze Over, often Mine Eyes Glazeth Over,
   attributed to the futurologist Herman Kahn] Also MEGO FACTOR.  1.
   Handwaving intended to confuse the listener and hopefully induce
   agreement because the listener does not want to admit to not
   understanding what is going on.  MEGO is usually directed at senior
   management by engineers and contains a high proportion of TLAs
   (q.v.). 2. excl. An appropriate response to MEGO tactics.

MELTDOWN n. See BROADCAST STORM.

MEME (meem) [coined on analogy with `gene' by Richard Dawkins] n. An
   idea considered as a REPLICATOR. Used esp. in the prase `meme
   complex' denoting a group of mutually supporting memes which form
   an organized belief system, such as a religion.  This dictionary is
   a vector of the ``hacker subculture'' meme complex; each entry
   might be considered a meme.  However, ``meme'' is often misused to
   mean ``meme complex''. Use of the term connotes acceptance of the
   idea that in humans (and presumably other tool-and language-using
   sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has
   superseded biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits.

MEMETICS (mee-me-tiks) [from MEME] The study of memes. As of 1990,
   this is still an extremely informal and speculative endeavor,
   though the first steps towards at least statistical rigor have been
   made by H. Keith Henson and others. Memetics is a popular topic
   among hackers, who like to see themselves as the architects of the
   new information ecologies in which memes live and replicate.

MEME PLAGUE n. The spread of a successful but pernicious MEME, esp.
   one which `parasitizes' the victims into giving their all to
   propagate it.  Astrology, BASIC, and the other guy's religion are
   often considered to be examples. This usage is given point by the
   historical fact that `joiner' ideologies like Naziism or various
   forms of millenarian Christianity have exhibited plague-like cycles
   of exponential growth followed by collapse to small `reservoir'
   populations.

MEMORY LEAK [C/UNIX programmers] n. An error in a program's
   dynamic-store allocation logic that causes it to fail to reclaim
   discarded memory, leading to attempted hogging of main store and
   eventual collapse due to memory exhaustion. Also (esp. at CMU)
   called CORE LEAK. See ALIASING BUG, FANDANGO ON CORE, SMASH THE
   STACK, PRECEDENCE LOSSAGE, OVERRUN SCREW.

MENUITIS (men`yoo-i'tis) n. Notional disease suffered by software with
   an obsessively simple-minded menu interface and no escape.  Hackers
   find this intensely irritating and much prefer the flexibility of
   command-line or language-style interfaces, especially those
   customizable via macros or a special-purpose language in which one
   can encode useful hacks. See USER-OBSEQUIOUS, DROOL-PROOF PAPER,
   WIMP ENVIRONMENT.

MESS-DOS (mes-dos) [UNIX hackers] n. Derisory term for MS-DOS. Often
   followed by the ritual expurgation ``Just Say No!''. See MS-DOS.
   Most hackers (even many MS-DOS hackers) loathe MS-DOS for its
   single-tasking nature, its limits on application size, its nasty
   primitive interface, and its ties to IBMness (see FEAR AND
   LOATHING). Also ``mess-loss'', ``messy-dos'', ``mess-dog'' and
   various combinations thereof.

META (mayt'@) [from analytic philosophy] adj. One level of description
   up.  Thus, a meta-syntactic variable is a variable in notation used
   to describe syntax and meta-language is language used to describe
   language. This is difficult to explain out of context, but much
   hacker humor turns on deliberate confusion between meta-levels.

META BIT (mayt'@) n. Bit 8 of an 8-bit character, on in values
   128-255. Also called HIGH BIT or ALT BIT. Some terminals and
   consoles (especially those designed for LISP traditions) have a
   META-shift key. Others (including, mirabile dictu, keyboards on IBM
   PC-class machines) have an ALT key. See also BUCKY BITS.

MICROFLOPPIES n. 3-1/2 inch floppies, as opposed to 5-1/4 VANILLA or
   mini-floppies and the now-obsolescent 8-inch variety. This term may
   be headed for obsolescence as 5-1/4 inchers pass out of use, only
   to be revived if anybody floats a sub-3-inch floppy standard.

MICROTAPE n. Occasionally used to mean a DECtape, as opposed to a
   MACROTAPE.

MIDDLE-ENDIAN adj. Not BIG-ENDIAN or LITTLE-ENDIAN. Used of byte
   orders like 3-4-1-2 occasionally found in the packed-decimal
   formats from minicomputer manufacturers who shall remain nameless.

MILLILAMPSON (mil'i-lamp-sn) n.  How fast people can talk.  Most
   people run about 200 millilampsons.  Butler Lampson (a CS theorist
   highly regarded among hackers) goes at 1000.  A few people speak
   faster.

MIPS (mips) [acronym] Formally, ``Millions of Instructions Per
   Second''; often rendered by hackers as ``Meaningless Indication of
   Processor Speed''. This joke expresses a nearly universal attitude
   about the value of BENCHMARK (q.v.) claims, said attitude being one
   of the great cultural divides between hackers and MARKETROIDS.

MISFEATURE (mis-fee'chr) n. A feature which eventually screws someone,
   possibly because it is not adequate for a new situation which has
   evolved.  It is not the same as a bug because fixing it involves a
   gross philosophical change to the structure of the system involved.
   Often a former feature becomes a misfeature because a tradeoff was
   made whose parameters subsequently changed (possibly only in the
   judgment of the implementors).  ``Well, yeah, it's kind of a
   misfeature that file names are limited to six characters, but we're
   stuck with it for now.''

MOBY [seems to have been in use among model railroad fans years ago.
   Derived from Melville's ``Moby Dick'' (some say from ``Moby
   Pickle'').]  1. adj. Large, immense, or complex.  ``A moby frob.''
   2.  n. The maximum address space of a machine (see Appendix B).  3.
   A title of address (never of third-person reference), usually used
   to show admiration, respect, and/or friendliness to a competent
   hacker.  ``So, moby Knight, how's the CONS machine doing?''  4.
   adj. In backgammon, doubles on the dice, as in ``moby sixes'',
   ``moby ones'', etc.  MOBY FOO, MOBY WIN, MOBY LOSS: standard
   emphatic forms.  FOBY MOO: a spoonerism due to Greenblatt.  The
   MOBY constructions are now relatively rare outside MIT.

MODE n. A general state, usually used with an adjective describing the
   state.  ``No time to hack; I'm in thesis mode.''  Usage: in its
   jargon sense, MODE is most often said of people, though it is
   sometimes applied to programs and inanimate objects.  ``If you're
   on a TTY, E will switch to non-display mode.''  In particular, see
   HACK MODE, DAY MODE, NIGHT MODE, and YOYO MODE; also TALK MODE, and
   GABRIEL MODE.

MODULO (mod'yuh-low) prep. Except for.  From mathematical terminology:
   one can consider saying that 4=22 ``except for the 9's'' (4=22 mod
   9).  ``Well, LISP seems to work okay now, modulo that GC bug.''

MONKEY UP v. To hack together hardware for a particular task,
   especially a one-shot job. Connotes an extremely CRUFTY and
   consciously temporary solution.

MONSTROSITY 1. n. A ridiculously ELEPHANTINE program or system, esp.
   one which is buggy or only marginally functional.  2.  The quality
   of being monstrous (see `Peculiar nouns' in the discussion of
   jargonification).

MOORE'S LAW (morz law) [folklore] The observation that the logic
   density of silicon integrated circuits has closely followed the
   curve (bits per inch ** 2) = 2 ** (n - 1962); that is, the amount
   of information storable in one square inch of silicon has roughly
   doubled yearly every year since the technology was invented.

MOTAS (moh-tahs) [USENET, Member Of The Appropriate Sex] n. A
   potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See MOTOS, MOTSS,
   S.O.

MOTOS (moh-tohs) [USENET, Member Of The Other Sex] n. A potential or
   (less often) actual sex partner. See MOTAS, MOTSS, S.O. Less common
   than MOTSS or MOTAS, which has largely displaced it.

MOTSS (mots) [USENET, Member Of The Same Sex] n. Esp. one considered
   as a possible sexual partner, e.g. by a gay or lesbian.  The
   gay-issues board on USENET is called soc.motss. See MOTOS and
   MOTAS, which derive from it. Also see S.O.

MOUNT v. 1. To attach a removable storage volume to a machine.  In
   elder days and on mainframes this verb was used almost exclusively
   of tapes; nowadays (especially under UNIX) it is more likely to
   refer to a disk volume. 2. By extension, to attach any removable
   device such as a sensor, robot arm, or MEATWARE subsystem (see
   Appendix A).

MOUSE AROUND v. To explore public portions of a large system, esp. a
   network such as Internet via FTP or TELNET, look