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# $VER: Jokes.TXT data for TheJoker ©1994 Ron Klinkien. All rights reserved. # Frank Zappa "I might be moving to Montanna soon, just to raise me up a crop of Dental Floss" -- Montana, Frank Zappa "Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny." -- Frank Zappa "Nuclear explosions under the Nevada desert? What the fuck are we testing for? We already know the shit blows up." -- Frank Zappa "Who are the brain police?" -- Frank Zappa "Star Wars won't work. Star Wars won't work. The gas still gets through; it could get right on you. And what about those germs, now? Star Wars won't work." -- Frank Zappa "He used to cut the grass, he was a very nice boy." -- Frank Zappa "She's just like a penguin in bondage, boy!" -- Frank Zappa Nobody looks good wearing _brown lipstick_. --Frank Zappa ...the book says: "He made us all to be just like Him" so . . . if we're dumb . . . then God is dumb . . . (An' maybe even a little ugly on the side) -- Frank Zappa, 1940-1993 "Baby Snakes, late at night is when they come out Baby Snakes, sure you know what I'm talking about Pink and wet, they make the best kinda pet Baby Snakes" -- Frank Zappa 'Remember, Information is not knowledge; Knowledge is not Wisdom; Wisdom is not truth; Truth is not beauty; Beauty is not love; Love is not music; Music is the best.' -- Frank Zappa Senator Danforth: 'There is nothing on the face of the album which would notify you if the record has pornographics material or material glorifying violence?' Tipper Gore: 'No, there is nothing that would suggest that to me.' Frank Zappa: 'I would say that a buzz saw blade between the guy's legs on the album cover is good indication that it's not for little Johnny.' -- The Senate Commerce Committee hearing on rock lyrics, from The Village Voice, 6 Oct 1985 Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read. -- Frank Zappa Watch out where the huskies go, and don't you eat that yellow snow. - Frank Zappa "Thank you masked man....Hi-ho Silver..away" Ike Willis - from "Keep It Greasy" # Beavis & Butthead 'These guys are cool - for a bunch of mimes.' Beavis & Butthead (about Kiss) 'Drums, guitar and Death. They finally got it right.' Beavis & Butthead 'Tattoos are cool.' 'Yeah, I wish I was born with one.' 'You're not born with tattoos, dumbass. You get them when you join the navy.' Beavis & Butthead 'These guys are pretty cool - even though they're sixty.' Beavis & Butthead (about Aerosmith) 'I don't like video's that suck' Beavis & Butthead 'Hey Beavis. Guess where his hand's been.' Beavis & Butthead (about Germaine Jackson's video) 'You're a man? Eh heh heh, I don't think so.' 'He's not even a boy.' Beavis & Butthead (about Boy George video) 'Calm down Beavis. You're gonna soil your drawers.' Beavis & Butthead 'Where's the explosion?' 'They never show the good stuff.' Beavis & Butthead 'Whoa! It's the President of England!' 'Yeah, she jams!' Beavis & Butthead (About Queen Elizabeth II) 'Hey Beavis, let's pretend we're dead.' 'Yeah, eh heh heh, that would be cool.' Beavis & Butthead 'Look, I'm strokin' my weiner.' Beavis & Butthead 'These chicks look like guys.' 'Yeah. That one's not wearin' a bra.' Beavis & Butthead (about Nelson) 'Hey Butthead, do you think I'm beautiful?' Beavis & Butthead 'Everything I know, I learned from my Dad.' 'Yeah. Me too.' 'Really? You both have the same dad?' 'We don't know. It's possible.' Beavis & Butthead 'I wish this video had some explosions.' 'That would be cool.' Beavis & Butthead 'I wish this video had some explosions. That would be cool.' 'Heh heh henh hmm heh. It does have some explosions. Heh henh hmm.' 'Faries grant wishes. Huh huh heh huh hunh.' Beavis & Butthead Background: (flush of a toilet) 'Butthead! Butthead! Come quick! Bare ass on TV!!' Beavis & Butthead 'Mr. Buzzcut! Mr. Buzzcut!' 'Yes, Butthead?' 'I can't do this assignment. I'm dietetic.' Beavis & Butthead 'We don't know how to take care of a baby.' 'Let's give it a bath.' 'I'm gonna slap you around like a red-headed step child.' 'Uh oh...' 'You drowned it.' 'We'll never get to see it grow up.' Beavis & Butthead 'And so it is with utmost regret that I must report that our baby was stolen by gypsies in the night.' 'Yeah, sorry about that. Heh heh.' Beavis & Butthead /usr/earth is 98% full ... please delete anyone you can A bad random number generator: 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 4.33e+67, 1, 1, 1 ... A clean, neat, and orderly work place is a sure sign of a sick mind. Sex is like snow... You never know how many inches you're going to get or how long it will last. Bell Labs Unix -- Reach out and grep someone. CChheecckk yyoouurr dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh.. If God had wanted man to go around nude, He would have given him bigger hands. Every 4 seconds a woman has a baby. Our problem is to find this woman and stop her. The Gurus of Unix Meeting of Minds (GUMM) takes place Wednesday, April 1, 2076 (check THAT in your perpetual calendar program), 14 feet above the ground directly in front of the Milpitas Gumps. Members will grep each other by the hand (after intro),yyacc a lot, smoke filtered chroots in pipes, chown with forks, use the wc (unless uuclean), fseek nice zombie processes, strip, and sleep, but not, we hope, od. Three days will be devoted to discussion of the ramifications of whodo. Two seconds have been allotted for a complete rundown of all the user- friendly features of Unix. Seminars include 'Everything You Know is Wrong', led by Tom Kempson, 'Batman or Cat:man?' led by Richie Dennis 'cc C? Si! Si!' led by Kerwin Bernighan, and 'Document Unix, Are You Kidding?' led by Jan Yeats. No Reader Service No. is necessary because all GUGUs (Gurus of Unix Group of Users) already know everything we could tell them. -- Dr. Dobb's Journal, June '84 Got Mole problems? Call Avogardo 6.02 x 10^23 Imagine that Cray computer decides to make a personal computer. It has a 150 MHz processor, 200 megabytes of RAM, 1500 megabytes of disk storage, a screen resolution of 4096 x 4096 pixels, relies entirely on voice recognition for input, fits in your shirt pocket and costs $300. What's the first question that the computer community asks? 'Is it PC compatible?' Q: How many IBM types does it take to change a light bulb? A: 100. Ten to do it, and 90 to write document number GC7500439-0001, Multitasking Incandescent Source System Facility, of which 10% of the pages state only 'This page intentionally left blank', and 20% of the definitions are of the form 'A ...... consists of sequences of non-blank characters separated by blanks'. Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand. Satellite Safety Tip #14: If you see a bright streak in the sky coming at you, duck. Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. 'Yes' is the answer. -- Swami X 'Virtual' means never knowing where your next byte is coming from. Waiter: 'Tea or coffee, gentlemen?' 1st customer: 'I'll have tea.' 2nd customer: 'Me, too -- and be sure the glass is clean!' (Waiter exits, returns) Waiter: 'Two teas. Which one asked for the clean glass?' This login session: $13.99, but for you $11.88 Your lucky number is 3552664958674928. Watch for it everywhere. Grep me no patterns and I'll tell you no lines. I was playing poker the other night... with Tarot cards. I got a full house and 4 people died. -- Steven Wright The fortune '$ rm -r $HOME' could be extremely unsettling!! Why are there no blue M&M's? You are connected t&%&ibp*l an error free line. If you think sex is a pain in the ass, try different position. Man: 'Hey, Baby, I'd sure like to get in your pants!' Woman: 'No, thanks, I've already got one ass-hole in there now.' Sure eating yogurt will improve your sex life. People know that if you'll eat that stuff, you'll eat anything. Vegetarians for oral sex -- 'The only meat that's fit to eat' Never, ever, insult a telephone answering machine. They have ways of getting even. Next Friday will not be your lucky day. As a matter of fact, you don't have a lucky day this year. 'The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected.' -- <UNIX Programmer's Manual>, 2nd Ed., June 1972 'Regular backups should be made of your filesystems so that, should any corruption occur, you have something to restore.' -- SCO Unix V Install. Guide Eat Shit! 10 Billion flies can't be wrong. In order not to maintain the integrity of the language, 'sizeof' remains an int. -- 80286 C Compiler notes PS/2: Yesterday's hardware today. OS/2: Yesterday's software tomorrow. Real Unix system programmers don't use menus. Real computers don't say 'Abort, Retry, Ignore'. Save gas, don't eat beans. Somebody's terminal is dropping bits. I found a pile of them over in the corner. System going down at 1:45 this afternoon for disk crashing. Take an astronaut to launch. Think of it! With VLSI we can pack 100 ENIACs in 1 sq. cm.! To keep up with user demand for RAM, a CPU will have to add an address pin a year. UNIX is many things to many people, but it's never been everything to anybody. What is the use of having a 'great' source-level debugger when the compilers put bugs in that AREN'T in the source? When IBM says '4th quarter', don't say '9/89', say '12/31/89' - W. Christensen Why didn't Microsoft, the world's biggest software company, do a decent job on its flagship operating system in the first place? -- The Washington Post Your Zip file is open. Don't patch bad code -- rewrite it. Sign: HAIRCUTS WHILE YOU WAIT A Smartmodem often isn't. A king's castle is his home. Let me play with it first and I'll tell you what it is later. -- Miles Davis Single tasking: Just Say No. # The following is taken from the Jargon file 9-2-12... Benchmark: An inaccurate measure of computer performance. 'In the computer industry, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and benchmarks.' Well-known ones include Whetstone, Dhrystone and Rhealstone... Bit Bang: Transmission of data on a serial line, when accomplished by rapidly tweaking a single loop with eight OUT and SHIFT instruction pairs for each byte. Input is more interesting. And full duplex (doing input and output at the same time) is one way to separate the real hackers from the wannabee's. Boat Anchor: Implies that the offending hardware is irreversibly dead or useless. 'That was a working motherboard once. One lightning strike later, instant boat anchor!' COBOL: [COmmon Business-Oriented Language] A weak, verbose, and flabby language used by card wallopers to do boring mindless things on dinosaur mainframes. Hackers believe that all COBOL programmers are suits or code grinders, and no self-respecting hacker will ever admit to having learned the language. Its very name is seldom uttered without ritual expressions of disgust or horror. Condom: The protective plastic bag that accompanies 3.5-inch microfloppy diskettes. Rarely, also used of (paper) disk envelopes. Unlike the write protect tab, the condom (when left on) not only impedes the practice of sex but also been shown to have a high failure rate as drive mechanisms attempt to access the disk and can even fatally frustrate insertion. Dickless Workstation: Extremely pejorative hackerism for `diskless workstation', a class of botches including the Sun 3/50 and other machines designed exclusively to network with an expensive central disk server. These combine all the disadvantages of time-sharing with all the disadvantages of distributed personal computers; typically, they cannot even boot themselves without help (in the form of some kind of breath-of-life packet) from the server. Dinosaur: Any hardware requiring raised flooring and special power. Used especially of old minis and mainframes, in contrast with newer microprocessor-based machines. In a famous quote from the 1988 UNIX EXPO, Bill Joy compared the mainframe in the massive IBM display with a grazing dinosaur 'with a truck outside pumping its bodily fluids through it'. IBM was not amused. Feature Creature: One who loves to add features to designs or programs, perhaps at the expense of coherence, concision, or taste. Fight-O-net: Deliberate distortion of FidoNet, often applied after a flurry of flamage in a particular echo, ecpecially the SYSOP echo or FidoNews. FritterWare: An excess of capability that serves no productive end. The term describes anything that eats huge amounts of time for quite marginal gains in function but seduces people to use it anyway. GuiltWare: (1) A piece of freeware decorated with a message telling one how long and hard the author worked on it and intimating that one is a no-good freeloader if one does not immediately send the poor suffering martyr gobs of money. (2) Shareware that works. HeatSeeker: A customer who can relied upon to always buy the latest version of an existing product. A 1992 example of a heatseeker is someone who, owning a 286 PC and Windows 3.0, goes out and buys Windows 3.1 (which offers no worthwhile benefits unless you have a 386). 'The Cray-3 is so fast it can execute an infinite loop in under 2 seconds!' Hackintosh: 1. An Apple Lisa that has been hacked into emulating a Macintosh (also called a `Mac XL'). 2. A Macintosh assembled from parts theoretically belonging to different models in the line. HP-SUX: Unflattering hackerism for HP-UX, Hewlett-Packard's UNIX port, which features some truly unique bogosities in the filesystem internals and elsewhere (these occasionally create portability problems). HP-UX is often referred to as `hockey-pux' inside HP, and one respondent claims that the proper pronunciation is H-P ukkkhhhh as though one were about to spit. Macintrash: The Apple Macintosh, as described by a hacker who doesn't appreciate being kept away from the *real computer* by the interface. Mickey: The resolution unit of mouse movement. It has been suggested that the 'Disney' will become a benchmark unit for animation graphics. MS-DOS: [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A clone of CP/M for the 8088 crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson, who is said to have regretted it ever since. Numerous features, including vaguely UNIX-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into 2.0 and subsequent versions. As a result, there are two or more incompatible versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting mess is now the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS, which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). NAK: [from the ASCII mnemonic for 0010101] interj. 1. On-line joke answer to ACK?: 'I'm not here.' 2. On-line answer to a request for chat: 'I'm not available.' 3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell them you don't understand their point or that they have suddenly stopped making sense. 'And then, after we recode the project in COBOL....' 'Nak, Nak, Nak! I thought I heard you say COBOL!' NetBurp: When netlag gets really bad, and delays between servers exceed a certain threshhold, the <IRC> network effectively becomes partitioned for a period of time, and large numbers of people seem to be signing off at the same time and then signing back on again when things get better. An instance of this is called a `netburp' (or, sometimes, netsplit). Nightmare File System: Pejorative hackerism for Sun's Network File System (NFS). In any nontrivial network of Suns where there is a lot of NFS cross-mounting, when one Sun goes down, the others often freeze up. Some machine tries to access the down one, and (getting no response) repeats indefinitely. This causes it to appear dead to some messages (what is actually happening is that it is locked up in what should have been a brief excursion to a higher spl level). Then another machine tries to reach either the down machine or the pseudo-down machine, and itself becomes pseudo-down. The first machine to discover the down one is now trying both to access the down one and to respond to the pseudo-down one, so it is even harder to reach. This situation snowballs very fast, and soon the entire network of machines is frozen --- worst of all, the user can't even abort the file access that started the problem! Many of NFS'es problems are excused by partisans as being an inevitable result of its statelessness, which is held to be a great feature (critics, of course, call it a great <misfeature>). (ITS partisans are apt to cite this as proof of UNIX's alleged bogosity; ITS had a working NFS-like shared file system with none of these problems in the early 1970s.) NMI: Non-Maskable Interrupt. An IRQ 7 on the PDP-11 or 680[01234]0. The NMI line on an 80[1234]86. In contrast with a priority interrupt (which might be ignored, although that is unlikely), an NMI is *never* ignored. NUXI problem: This refers to the problem of transferring data between machines with differing byte-order. The string `UNIX' might look like `NUXI' on a machine with a different `byte sex' (e.g., when transferring data from a little-endian to a big-endian, or vice-versa). Nominal Semidestructor: Sound-alike slang for `National Semiconductor', found among other places in the 4.3BSD networking sources. During the late 1970s to mid-1980s this company marketed a series of microprocessors including the NS16000 and NS32000 and several variants. At one point early in the great microprocessor race, the specs on these chips made them look like serious competition for the rising Intel 80x86 and Motorola 680x0 series. Unfortunately, the actual parts were notoriously flaky and never implemented the full instruction set promised in their literature, apparently because the company couldn't get any of the mask steppings to work as designed. They eventually sank without trace, joining the Zilog Z80,000 and a few even more obscure also-rans in the graveyard of forgotten microprocessors. Open DeathTrap: Abusive hackerism for the Santa Cruz Operation's `Open DeskTop' product, a Motif-based graphical interface over their UNIX. The funniest part is that this was coined by SCO's own developers... OS/2: The anointed successor to MS-DOS for Intel 286- and 386-based micros. Proof that IBM/Microsoft couldn't get it right the second time, either. Mentioning it is usually good for a cheap laugh among hackers --- the design was so baroque, and the implementation of 1.x so bad, that 3 years after introduction you could still count the major apps shipping for it on the fingers of two hands --- in unary. Often called `Half-an-OS'. On January 28, 1991, Microsoft announced that it was dropping its OS/2 development to concentrate on Windows, leaving the OS entirely in the hands of IBM; on January 29 they claimed the media had got the story wrong, but were vague about how. It looks as though OS/2 is moribund. Pistol: [IBM] A tool that makes it all too easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot. 'UNIX `rm *' makes such a nice pistol!' Pizza Box: [Sun] The largish thin box housing the electronics in (especially Sun) desktop workstations, so named because of its size and shape and the dimpled pattern that looks like air holes. Plokta: [Acronym for `Press Lots Of Keys To Abort'] To press random keys in an attempt to get some response from the system. One might plokta when the abort procedure for a program is not known, or when trying to figure out if the system is just sluggish or really hung. Plokta can also be used while trying to figure out any unknown key sequence for a particular operation. Someone going into `plokta mode' usually places both hands flat on the keyboard and presses down, hoping for some useful response. Point-and-Drool Interface: Parody of the techspeak term `point-and-shoot interface', describing a windows, icons, and mice-based interface such as is found on the Macintosh. The implication, of course, is that such an interface is only suitable for idiots. Program: 1. A magic spell cast over a computer allowing it to turn one's input into error messages. 2. An exercise in experimental epistemology. 3. A form of art, ostensibly intended for the instruction of computers, which is nevertheless almost inevitably a failure if other programmers can't understand it. Programming: 1. The art of debugging a blank sheet of paper (or, in these days of on-line editing, the art of debugging an empty file). 2. A pastime similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward. 3. The most fun you can have with your clothes on (although clothes are not mandatory). Prowler: [UNIX] A daemon that is run periodically (typically once a week) to seek out and erase core files, truncate administrative logfiles, nuke `lost+found' directories, and otherwise clean up the cruft that tends to pile up in the corners of a file system. Rain Dance: 1. Any ceremonial action taken to correct a hardware problem, with the expectation that nothing will be accomplished. This especially applies to reseating printed circuit boards, reconnecting cables, etc. 'I can't boot up the machine. We'll have to wait for Greg to do his rain dance.' 2. Any arcane sequence of actions performed with computers or software in order to achieve some goal; the term is usually restricted to rituals that include both an incantation or two and physical activity or motion. Raster Blaster: [Cambridge] Specialized hardware for bitblt operations (a blitter). Allegedly inspired by `Rasta Blasta', British slang for the sort of portable stereo Americans call a `boom box' or `ghetto blaster'. Register Dancing: Many older processor architectures suffer from a serious shortage of general-purpose registers. This is especially a problem for compiler-writers, because their generated code needs places to store temporaries for things like intermediate values in expression evaluation. Some designs with this problem, like the Intel 80x86, do have a handful of special-purpose registers that can be pressed into service, providing suitable care is taken to avoid unpleasant side effects on the state of the processor: while the special-purpose register is being used to hold an intermediate value, a delicate minuet is required in which the previous value of the register is saved and then restored just before the official function (and value) of the special-purpose register is again needed. RTFB: [UNIX] Acronym for `Read The Fucking Binary'. Used when neither documentation nor the the source for the problem at hand exists, and the only thing to do is use some debugger or monitor and directly analyze the assembler or even the machine code. 'No source for the buggy port driver? Aaargh! I *hate* proprietary operating systems. Time to RTFB.' Salt Mines: 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. Sandbender: [IBM] A person involved with silicon lithography and the physical design of chips. Saturday-night special): [from police slang for a cheap handgun] 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. Scanno: An error in a document caused by a scanner glitch, analogous to a typo or thinko. Scram Switch: [from the nuclear power industry] An emergency-power-off 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. Scrozzle: Used when a self-modifying code segment runs incorrectly and corrupts the running program or vital data. 'The damn compiler scrozzled itself again!' SCSI: [Small Computer System Interface] A bus-independent standard for system-level interfacing between a computer and intelligent devices. Typically annotated in literature with `sexy' ,`sissy', and `scuzzy' 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: Unflattering hackerism for SunOS, the UNIX variant supported on Sun Microsystems's UNIX workstations. 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: Hackerism for the search-and-replace facility in an editor, so called because an incautiously chosen match pattern can cause infinite damage. SED: [TMRC, from `Light-Emitting Diode'] Smoke-emitting diode. A friode that lost the war. Segmentation Fault: [UNIX] 1. An error in which a running program attempts to access memory not allocated to it and core dumps 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. SEX: [Sun Users' Group & elsewhere] 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. 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. Shambolic Link: A UNIX symbolic link, particularly when it confuses you, points to nothing at all, or results in you ending up in some completely unexpected part of the filesystem.... ShelfWare: Software purchased on a whim (by an individual user) or in accordance with policy (by a corporation or government agency), but not actually required for any particular use. Therefore, it often ends up on some shelf. Shotgun Debugging: The software equivalent of Easter egging the making of relatively undirected changes to software in the hope that a bug will be perturbed out of existence. This almost never works, and usually introduces more bugs. ShovelWare: Extra software dumped onto a CD-ROM or tape to fill up the remaining space on the medium after the software distribution it's intended to carry, but not integrated with the distribution. ShowStopper: A hardware or (especially) software bug that makes an implementation effectively unusable; one that absolutely has to be fixed before development can go on. Opposite in connotation from its original theatrical use, which refers to something stunningly *good*. SideCar: 1. Syn. {slap on the side}. Esp. used of add-ons for the late and unlamented IBM PCjr. 2. The IBM PC compatibility box that could be bolted onto the side of an Amiga. Designed and produced by Commodore, it broke all of the company's own design rules. If it worked with any other peripherals, it was by magic. Silly Walk: [from Monty Python's Flying Circus] 1. A ridiculous procedure required to accomplish a task. Like grovel, but more random and humorous. 'I had to silly-walk through half the /usr directories to find the maps file.' Slap on the side: (also called a sidecar, or abbreviated `SOTS'.) A type of external expansion hardware marketed by computer manufacturers (e.g., Commodore for the Amiga 500/1000 series and IBM for the hideous failure called `PCjr'). Various SOTS boxes provided necessities such as memory, hard drive controllers, and conventional expansion slots. SlopSucker: A lowest-priority task that must wait around until everything else has `had its fill' of machine resources. Only when the machine would otherwise be idle is the task allowed to `suck up the slop'. Also called a `hungry puppy' or `bottom feeder'. Smoke: 1. To crash, blow up, usually spectacularly. 'The new version smoked, just like the last one.' Used for both hardware (where it often describes an actual physical event), and software (where it's merely colorful). 2. [from automotive slang] To be conspicuously fast. 'That processor really smokes.' Snail-Mail: Paper mail, as opposed to electronic. Sometimes written as the single word `SnailMail'. One's postal address is, correspondingly, a `snail address'. Derives from earlier coinage `USnail' (from `U.S. Mail'), for which there have been parody posters and stamps made. Snarf & Barf: Under a WIMP environment, the act of grabbing a region of text and then stuffing the contents of that region into another region (or the same one) to avoid retyping a command line. In the late 1960s, this was a mainstream expression for an `eat now, regret it later' cheap-restaurant expedition. Snarf Down: To snarf, with the connotation of absorbing, processing, or understanding. 'I'll snarf down the latest version of the nethack user's guide, It's been a while since I played last and I don't know what's changed recently.' Snark: [Lewis Carroll, via the Michigan Terminal System] 1. A system failure. When a user's process bombed, the operator would get the message 'Help, Help, Snark in MTS!' 2. More generally, any kind of unexplained or threatening event on a computer (especially if it might be a boojum). Often used to refer to an event or a log file entry that might indicate an attempted security violation. 3. UUCP name of snark.thyrsus.com, home site of the Jargon File 2.*.* Sneakernet: Term used (generally with ironic intent) for transfer of electronic information by physically carrying tape, disks, or some other media from one machine to another. 'Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with magtape, or a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.' Also called `Tennis-Net', `Armpit-Net', `Floppy-Net' or `Shoenet'. Snivitz: A hiccup in hardware or software; a small, transient problem of unknown origin (less serious than a snark). Softy: [IBM] Hardware hackers' term for a software expert who is largely ignorant of the mysteries of hardware. Spiffy: 1. Said of programs having a pretty, clever, or exceptionally well-designed interface. 'Have you seen the spiffy version of empire yet?' 2. Said sarcastically of a program that is perceived to have little more than a flashy interface going for it. Which meaning should be drawn depends delicately on tone of voice and context. This word was common mainstream slang during the 1940s, in a sense close to #1. SPL: [abbrev, from Set Priority Level] The way traditional UNIX kernels implement mutual exclusion by running code at high interrupt levels. Used in jargon to describe the act of tuning in or tuning out ordinary communication. Classically, spl levels run from 1 to 7; 'Fred's at spl 6 today.' would mean that he is very hard to interrupt. 'Wait till I finish this, I'll spl down then.' Stack Puke: Some processor architectures are said to `puke their guts onto the stack' to save their internal state during exception processing. The Motorola 68020, for example, regurgitates up to 92 bytes on a bus fault. On a pipelined machine, this can take a while. Stiffy: [University of Lowell, Massachusetts.] 3.5-inch microfloppies, so called because their jackets are more firm than those of the 5.25-inch and the 8-inch floppy. Elsewhere this might be called a `firmy'. Stir-fried Random: alt. `stir-fried mumble' Term used for the best dish of many of those hackers who can cook. Consists of random fresh veggies and meat wokked with random spices. Tasty and economical. Stomp On: To inadvertently overwrite something important, usually automatically. 'All the work I did this weekend got stomped on last night by the nightly server script.' Stunning: adj. Mind-bogglingly stupid. Usually used in sarcasm. 'You want to code *what* in ADA? That's ... a stunning idea!' Sun Lounge: [Great Britain] The room where all the Sun workstations live. The humor in this term comes from the fact that it's also in mainstream use to describe a solarium, and all those Sun workstations clustered together give off an amazing amount of heat. Sun-stools: Unflattering hackerism for SunTools, a pre-X windowing environment notorious in its day for size, slowness, and misfeatures. Sunspots: 1. Notional cause of an odd error. 'Why did the program suddenly turn the screen blue?' 'Sunspots, I guess.' 2. Also the cause of bit rot, from the myth that sunspots will increase, which can flip single bits in memory. Support: After-sale handholding, something many software vendors promise but few deliver. To hackers, most support people are useless, because by the time a hacker calls support he or she will usually know the relevant manuals better than the support people (sadly, this is *not* a joke or exaggeration). A hacker's idea of `support' is a t^ete-`a-t^ete with the software's designer. Suzie COBOL: [IBM: prob. from Frank Zappa's `Suzy Creamcheese'] 1. A coder straight out of training school who knows everything except the value of comments in plain English. Also (fashionable among personkind wishing to avoid accusations of sexism) `Sammy Cobol' or (in some non-IBM circles) `Cobol Charlie'. 2. Meta-name for any code grinder, analogous to J. Random Hacker. Swap Space: Storage space, especially temporary storage space used during a move or reconfiguration. 'I'm just using that corner of the machine room for swap space.' SysOp: [esp. in the BBS world] The operator (and usually the owner) of a bulletin-board system. A common neophyte mistake on FidoNet is to address a message to `sysop' in an international echo, thus sending it to hundreds of sysops around the world. System Mangler: Humorous synonym for `system manager', poss. from the fact that one major IBM OS had a root account called SYSMANGR. Refers specifically to a systems programmer in charge of administration, software maintenance, and updates at some site. Unlike admin, this term emphasizes the technical end of the skills involved. Tee: A carbon copy of an electronic transmission. 'Oh, you're sending him the bits to that? Slap on a tee for me.' From the UNIX command `tee(1)', itself named after a pipe fitting. Can also mean `save one for me', as in 'Tee a slice for me!' Teledildonics: Sex in a computer simulated virtual reality, esp. computer-mediated sexual interaction between the VR presences of two humans. This practice is not yet possible except in the rather limited form of erotic conversation on MUDs and the like. The term, however, is widely recognized in the VR community as a {ha ha only serious} projection of things to come. 'When we can sustain a multi-sensory surround good enough for teledildonics, *then* we'll know we're getting somewhere.' Teraflop Club: [FLOP = Floating Point Operation] A mythical association of people who consume outrageous amounts of computer time in order to produce a few simple pictures of glass balls with intricate ray-tracing techniques. Caltech professor James Kajiya is said to have been the founder. Terminak: [Caltech, ca. 1979] Any malfunctioning computer terminal. A common failure mode of Lear-Siegler ADM 3a terminals caused the `L' key to produce the `K' code instead, complaints about this tended to look like 'Terminak #3 has a bad keyboard. Pkease fix.' Thumb: The slider on a window-system scrollbar. So called because moving it allows you to browse through the contents of a text window in a way analogous to thumbing through a book. Tickle a Bug: To cause a normally hidden bug to manifest through some known series of inputs or operations. 'You can tickle the bug in the Paradise VGA card's highlight handling by trying to set bright yellow reverse video.' Tired Iron: [IBM] Hardware that is perfectly functional but far enough behind the state of the art to have been superseded by new products, presumably with sufficient improvement in bang-per-buck that the old stuff is starting to look a bit like a dinosaur. Tits on a Keyboard: Small bumps on certain keycaps to keep touch-typists registered (usually on the `5' of a numeric keypad, and on the `F' and `J' of a QWERTY keyboard, but the Mac, perverse as usual, has them on the `D' and `K' keys). Toast: 1. Any completely inoperable system or component, esp. one that has just crashed and burned: 'Uh, oh ... I think the serial board is toast.' 2. To cause a system to crash accidentally, especially in a manner that requires manual rebooting. 'Rick just toasted the firewall machine again.' Tourist Information: Information in an on-line display that is not immediately useful, but contributes to a viewer's gestalt of what's going on with the software or hardware behind it. Whether a given piece of info falls in this category depends partly on what the user is looking for at any given time. The `bytes free' information at the bottom of an MS-DOS `dir' display is tourist information; so (most of the time) is the TIME information in a UNIX `ps(1)' display. Trampoline: An incredibly hairy technique, found in some program-overlay implementations (e.g., on the Macintosh), that involves on-the-fly generation of small executable (and, likely as not, self-modifying) code objects to do indirection between code sections. These pieces of live data are called `trampolines'. Trampolines are notoriously difficult to understand in action, in fact, it is said by those who use this term that the trampoline that doesn't bend your brain is not the true trampoline. Trap Door: 1. Syn. back door --- a Bad Thing. 2. A `trap-door function' is one which is easy to compute but very difficult to compute the inverse of. Such functions are Good Things with important applications in cryptography, specifically in the construction of public-key cryptosystems. Tree-killer: [Sun] 1. A printer. 2. A person who wastes paper. This should be interpreted in a broad sense, `wasting paper' includes the production of spiffy but content-free documents. Thus, most suits are tree-killers. The negative loading of this term may reflect the epithet `tree-killer' applied by Treebeard the Ent to the Orcs in J.R.R. Tolkien's `Lord of the Rings' TreeWare: Printouts, books, and other information media made from pulped dead trees. Troglodyte Mode: [Rice University] Programming with the lights turned off, sunglasses on, and the terminal inverted (black on white) because you've been up for so many days straight that your eyes hurt. Loud music blaring from a stereo stacked in the corner is optional but recommended. Trojan horse: [coined by MIT-hacker-turned-NSA-spook Dan Edwards] A program designed to break security or damage a system that is disguised as something else benign, such as a directory lister, archiver, a game, or (in one notorious 1990 case on the Mac) a program to find and destroy viruses! Tron: [NRL, CMU; prob. fr. the movie `Tron'] To become inaccessible except via email or `talk(1)', especially when one is normally available via telephone or in person. Frequently used in the past tense, as in: 'Ran seems to have tronned on us this week' or 'Gee, Ran, glad you were able to un-tron yourself'. Tube: 1. A CRT terminal. Never used in the mainstream sense of TV, real hackers don't watch TV, except for Loony Toons, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Trek Classic, the Simpsons, and the occasional cheesy old swashbuckler movie. 2. [IBM] To send a copy of something to someone else's terminal. 'Tube me that note?' Tunafish: In hackish lore, refers to the mutated punchline of an age-old joke to be found at the bottom of the manual pages of `tunefs(8)' in the original BSD 4.2 distribution. The joke was removed in later releases once commercial sites started using 4.2. Tunefs relates to the `tuning' of file-system parameters for optimum performance, and at the bottom of a few pages of wizardly inscriptions was a `BUGS' section consisting of the line 'You can tune a file system, but you can't tunafish'. Variants of this can be seen in other BSD versions, though it has been excised from some versions by humorless management droids. 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.' Turbo Nerd: One who eats (computer) bugs for a living. One who fulfills all the dreariest negative stereotypes about hackers: an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater. Cannot be used by outsiders without implied insult to all hackers, compare black-on-black usage of `nigger'. A turbo nerd may be either a fundamentally clueless individual or a proto-hacker in larval stage. Under the hood: [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!' Unleaded: adj. Said of decaffeinated coffee, Diet Coke, and other imitation programming fluids. 'Do you want regular or unleaded?' Appears to be widespread among programmers associated with the oil industry in Texas (and probably elsewhere). VaporWare: Products announced far in advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place). Virgin: adj. Unused; pristine; in a known initial state. 'Let's bring up a virgin system and see if it crashes again.' (Esp. useful after contracting a virus through SEX.) Also, by extension, buffers and the like within a program that have not yet been used. Vulcan Nerve Pinch: [from the old 'Star Trek' TV series via Commodore Amiga hackers] The keyboard combination that forces a soft-boot or jump to ROM monitor (on machines that support such a feature). On many micros this is Ctrl-Alt-Del; on Suns, L1-A; on some Macintoshes, it is <Cmd>-<Power switch>! Also called three-finger salute. Wabbit: [almost certainly from Elmer Fudd's immortal line 'You wascawwy wabbit!'] 1. A legendary early hack reported on a System/360 at RPI and elsewhere around 1978; this may have descended (if only by inspiration) from hack called RABBITS reported from 1969 on a Burroughs 55000 at the University of Washington Computer Center. The program would make two copies of itself every time it was run, eventually crashing the system. 2. By extension, any hack that includes infinite self-replication but is not a virus. Walking Drives: An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky washing machines. Those old dinosaur parts carried terrific angular momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn bearings and stick-slip interactions with the floor could cause them to `walk' across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a couple of millimeters at a time. There is a legend about a drive that walked over to the only door to the computer room and jammed it shut; the staff had to cut a hole in the wall in order to get at it! Walking could also be induced by certain patterns of drive access (a fast seek across the whole width of the disk, followed by a slow seek in the other direction). Some bands of old-time hackers figured out how to induce disk-accessing patterns that would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive races. Wall Time: 1. `Real world' time (what the clock on the wall shows), as opposed to the system clock's idea of time. 2. The real running time of a program, as opposed to the number of clocks required to execute it (on a timesharing system these will differ, as no one program gets all the clocks, and on multiprocessor systems with good thread support one may get more processor clocks than real-time clocks). Wave a dead chicken: To perform a ritual in the direction of crashed software or hardware that one believes to be futile but is nevertheless necessary so that others are satisfied that an appropriate degree of effort has been expended. 'I'll wave a dead chicken over the source code, but I really think we've run into an OS bug.' Weasel: A naive user, one who deliberately or accidentally does things that are stupid or ill-advised. Weeble: Used to denote frustration, usually at amazing stupidity. 'I stuck the disk in upside down.' 'Weeble....' WetWare: [prob. from the novels of Rudy Rucker] 1. The human nervous system, as opposed to computer hardware or software. 'Wetware has 7 plus or minus 2 temporary registers.' 2. Human beings (programmers, operators, administrators) attached to a computer system, as opposed to the system's hardware or software. WhaleSong: The peculiar clicking and whooshing sounds made by a PEP modem such as the Telebit Trailblazer as it tries to synchronize with another PEP modem for their special high-speed mode. This sound isn't anything like the normal two-tone handshake between conventional modems and is instantly recognizable to anyone who has heard it more than once. It sounds, in fact, very much like whale songs. Wirehead: [prob. from SF slang for an electrical-brain-stimulation addict] 1. A hardware hacker, especially one who concentrates on communications hardware. 2. An expert in local-area networks. A wirehead can be a network software wizard too, but will always have the ability to deal with network hardware, down to the smallest component. Wireheads are known for their ability to lash up an Ethernet terminator from spare resistors, for example. Wish List: A list of desired features or bug fixes that probably won't get done for a long time, usually because the person responsible for the code is too busy or can't think of a clean way to do it. 'OK, I'll add automatic filename completion to the wish list for the new interface.' WOMBAT: [Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time] Applied to problems which are both profoundly uninteresting in themselves and unlikely to benefit anyone interesting even if solved. Often used in fanciful constructions such as `wrestling with a wombat'. Write-only code: [a play on `read-only memory'] Code so arcane, complex, or ill-structured that it cannot be modified or even comprehended by anyone but its author, and possibly not even by him/her. A Bad Thing. Wugga Wugga: Imaginary sound that a computer program makes as it labors with a tedious or difficult task. WYSIAYG: Describes a user interface under which 'What You See Is *All* You Get', an unhappy variant of WYSIWYG. X: 1. Used in various speech and writing contexts (also in lowercase) in roughly its algebraic sense of `unknown within a set defined by context'. Thus, the abbreviation 680x0 stands for 68000, 68010, 68020, 68030, or 68040, and 80x86 stands for 80186, 80286 80386 or 80486 (note that a UNIX hacker might write these as 680[0-4]0 and 80[1-4]86 or 680?0 and 80?86 respectively. 2. [after the name of an earlier window system called `W'.] An over-sized, over-featured, over-engineered and incredibly over-complicated window system developed at MIT and widely used on UNIX systems. YA-: [Yet Another] abbrev. In hackish acronyms this almost invariably expands to Yet Another, following the precedent set by UNIX `yacc(1)' (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler). YABA: Yet Another Bloody Acronym. Whenever some program is being named, someone invariably suggests that it be given a name that is acronymic. The response from those with a trace of originality is to remark ironically that the proposed name would then be `YABA-compatible'. Yow!: [from 'Zippy the Pinhead' comix] A favored hacker expression of humorous surprise or emphasis. 'Yow! Check out what happens when you twiddle the foo option on this display hack!' Yoyo Mode: The state in which the system is said to be when it rapidly alternates several times between being up and being down. Interestingly (and perhaps not by coincidence), many hardware vendors give out free yoyos at Usenix exhibits. Sun Microsystems gave out logoized yoyos at SIGPLAN '88. Tourists staying at one of Atlanta's most respectable hotels were subsequently treated to the sight of 200 of the country's top computer scientists testing yo-yo algorithms in the lobby. Zap: 1. Spiciness. 2. To make food spicy. 3. To make someone `suffer' by making his food spicy. (Most hackers love spicy food. Hot-and-sour soup is considered wimpy unless it makes you wipe your nose for the rest of the meal.) 4. To modify, usually to correct; esp. used when the action is performed with a debugger or binary patching tool. Also implies surgical precision. 'Zap the debug level to 6 and run it again.' In the IBM mainframe world, binary patches are applied to programs or to the OS with a program called `superzap', whose file name is `IMASPZAP' erase or reset. 6. To fry a chip with static electricity. 'Uh oh I think that lightning strike may have zapped the disk controller.' Zombie: [UNIX] A process that has died but has not yet relinquished its process table slot (because the parent process hasn't executed a `wait(2)' for it yet). These can be seen in `ps(1)' listings occasionally. Zork: The second of the great early experiments in computer fantasy gaming. During the late 1970s, later distributed with BSD UNIX (as a patched, sourceless RT-11 FORTRAN binary) and commercialized as `The Zork Trilogy' by Infocom. The FORTRAN source was later rewritten for portability and released to USENET under the name 'Dungeon'. Both FORTRAN 'Dungeon' and translated C versions are available at many FTP sites. /dev/null: [from the UNIX null device, used as a data sink] A notional `black hole' in any information space being discussed, used, or referred to. A controversial posting, for example, might end 'Kudos to rasputin@kremlin.org, flames to /dev/null'. The worst thing about censorship is #################. 'The most dangerous animal in the world is not the tiger, or the shark, or the elephant...it is a shark riding on the back of the elephant, trampling and eating everything they see.' Refrigerator: A place where you store the food before you throw it away. To spot the expert, pick the one who predicts the job will take the longest and cost the most. 'We must be open minded, but not so open minded that our brains fall out.' -- James Randi Convert your 386 or 486 into a GameBoy, run Windows! How to MultiTask MSDOS: Run PCTask twice on an Amiga! AMIGA, the other 'girl' in my life! AMIGA: User-frendly, not LOSER-friendly Beam an AMIGA down Scotty, no intelligent CLONES here!! If Windows is an operating system then my house multitasks!... 'Is that vee-gee-aa?', drooling audiences asked, watching demos on Amiga 500.. Bulletin board: Mechanism to allow the socially autistic to masquerade as real people and communicate with one another by posting clever near-random commentary on a remote computer. On a clear disk you can seek forever.