Dictionaries & Language/Dictionaries and Language (Chestnut CD-ROM) (1993).iso/gloss/jargn298/jargon-e.txt

Text File | 1991-09-07 | 22.6 KB | 431 lines

= E =
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earthquake: [IBM] n. The ultimate real-world shock test for
   computer hardware.  Hackish sources at IBM deny the rumor that the
   Bay Area quake of 1989 was initiated by the company to test
   quality-assurance procedures at its California plants.

Easter egg: n. 1. A message hidden in the object code of a program
   as a joke, intended to be found by persons disassembling or
   browsing the code.  2. A message, graphic, or sound effect emitted
   by a program (or, on a PC, the BIOS ROM) in response to some
   undocumented set of commands or keystrokes, intended as a joke or
   to display program credits.  One well-known early Easter egg found
   in a couple of OSes caused them to respond to the command
   `make love' with `not war?'.  Many personal computers
   have much more elaborate eggs hidden in ROM, including lists of the
   developers' names, political exhortations, snatches of music, and
   (in one case) graphics images of the entire development team.

Easter egging: [IBM] n. The act of replacing unrelated parts more or
   less at random in hopes that a malfunction will go away.  Hackers
   consider this the normal operating mode of {field circus} techs and
   do not love them for it.  Compare {shotgun debugging}.

eat flaming death: imp. A construction popularized among hackers by
   the infamous {CPU Wars} comic; supposed to derive from a famously
   turgid line in a WWII-era anti-Nazi propaganda comic that ran
   "Eat flaming death, non-Aryan mongrels!" or something of the sort
   (however, it is also reported that the Firesign Theater's
   1975 album "In The Next World, You're On Your Own" included the
   phrase "Eat flaming death, fascist media pigs"; this may have been
   an influence).  Used in humorously overblown expressions of
   hostility. "Eat flaming death, {{EBCDIC}} users!"

EBCDIC:: /eb's*-dik/, /eb'see`dik/, or /eb'k*-dik/ [acronym,
   Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code] n. An alleged
   character set used on IBM {dinosaur}s.  It exists in at least six
   mutually incompatible versions, all featuring such delights as
   non-contiguous letter sequences and the absence of several ASCII
   punctuation characters fairly important for modern computer
   languages (exactly which characters are absent varies according to
   which version of EBCDIC you're looking at).  IBM adapted EBCDIC
   from {{punched card}} code in the early 1960s and promulgated it
   as a customer-control tactic (see {connector conspiracy}),
   spurning the already established ASCII standard.  Today, IBM claims
   to be an open-systems company, but IBM's own description of the
   EBCDIC variants and how to convert between them is still internally
   classified top-secret, burn-before-reading.  Hackers blanch at the
   very *name* of EBCDIC and consider it a manifestation of
   purest {evil}.  See also {fear and loathing}.

echo: [FidoNet] n. A {topic group} on {FidoNet}'s echomail
   system.  Compare {newsgroup}.

eighty-column mind: [IBM] n. The sort said to be possessed by
   persons for whom the transition from {punched card} to tape was
   traumatic (nobody has dared tell them about disks yet).  It is said
   that these people, including (according to an old joke) the founder
   of IBM, will be buried `face down, 9-edge first' (the 9-edge being
   the bottom of the card).  This directive is inscribed on IBM's
   1422 and 1602 card readers and is referenced in a famous bit of
   doggerel called "The Last Bug", the climactic lines of which
   are as follows:

        He died at the console
        Of hunger and thirst.
        Next day he was buried,
        Face down, 9-edge first.

   The eighty-column mind is thought by most hackers to dominate IBM's
   customer base and its thinking.  See {IBM}, {fear and
   loathing}, {card walloper}.

El Camino Bignum: /el' k*-mee'noh big'nuhm/ n. The road
   mundanely called El Camino Real, a road through the San Francisco
   peninsula that originally extended all the way down to Mexico City
   and many portions of which are still intact.  Navigation on the San
   Francisco peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real,
   which defines {logical} north and south even though it isn't
   really north-south many places.  El Camino Real runs right past
   Stanford University and so is familiar to hackers.

   The Spanish word `real' (which has two syllables: /ray-ahl'/)
   means `royal'; El Camino Real is `the royal road'.  In the FORTRAN
   language, a `real' quantity is a number typically precise to 7
   significant digits, and a `double precision' quantity is a larger
   floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen significant
   digits (other languages have similar `real' types).

   When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a
   long road El Camino Real was.  Making a pun on `real', he started
   calling it `El Camino Double Precision' --- but when the hacker
   was told that the road was hundreds of miles long, he renamed it
   `El Camino Bignum', and that name has stuck.  (See {bignum}.)

elder days: n. The heroic age of hackerdom (roughly, pre-1980); the
   era of the {PDP-10}, {TECO}, {{ITS}}, and the ARPANET.  This
   term has been rather consciously adopted from J. R. R. Tolkien's
   fantasy epic `The Lord of the Rings'.  Compare {Iron Age};
   see also {elvish}.

elegant: [from mathematical usage] adj. Combining simplicity, power,
   and a certain ineffable grace of design.  Higher praise than
   `clever', `winning', or even {cuspy}.

elephantine: adj. Used of programs or systems that are both
   conspicuous {hog}s (owing perhaps to poor design founded on
   {brute force and ignorance}) and exceedingly {hairy} in source
   form.  An elephantine program may be functional and even friendly,
   but (as in the old joke about being in bed with an elephant) it's
   tough to have around all the same (and, like a pachyderm, difficult
   to maintain).  In extreme cases, hackers have been known to make
   trumpeting sounds or perform expressive proboscatory mime at the
   mention of the offending program.  Usage: semi-humorous.  Compare
   `has the elephant nature' and the somewhat more pejorative
   {monstrosity}.  See also {second-system effect} and
   {baroque}.

elevator controller: n. Another archetypal dumb embedded-systems
   application, like {toaster} (which superseded it).  During one
   period (1983--84) in the deliberations of ANSI X3J11 (the
   C standardization committee) this was the canonical example of a
   really stupid, memory-limited computation environment.  "You can't
   require `printf(3)' to be part of the default runtime library
   --- what if you're targeting an elevator controller?"  Elevator
   controllers became important rhetorical weapons on both sides of
   several {holy wars}.

ELIZA effect: /*-li:'z* *-fekt'/ [AI community] n. The tendency of
   humans to attach associations to terms from prior experience.
   For example, there is nothing magic about the symbol `+' that
   makes it well-suited to indicate addition; it's just that people
   associate it with addition.  Using `+' or `plus' to mean addition
   in a computer language is taking advantage of the ELIZA effect.

   This term comes from the famous ELIZA program, which simulated a
   Rogerian psychoanalyst by rephrasing many of the patient's
   statements as questions and posing them to the patient.  It worked
   by simple pattern recognition and substitution of key words into
   canned phrases.  It was so convincing, however, that there are many
   anecdotes about people becoming very emotionally caught up in
   dealing with ELIZA.  All this was due to people's tendency to
   attach to words meanings which the computer never put there.  The
   ELIZA effect is a {Good Thing} when writing a programming
   language, but it can blind you to serious shortcomings when
   analyzing an Artificial Intelligence system.  Compare
   {ad-hockery}; see also {AI-complete}.

elvish: n. 1. The Tengwar of Feanor, a table of letterforms
   resembling the beautiful Celtic half-uncial hand of the `Book
   of Kells'.  Invented and described by J. R. R. Tolkien
   in `The Lord of The Rings' as an orthography for his fictional
   `elvish' languages, this system (which is both visually and
   phonetically elegant) has long fascinated hackers (who tend to be
   interested by artificial languages in general).  It is traditional
   for graphics printers, plotters, window systems, and the like to
   support a Feanorian typeface as one of their demo items.  See also
   {elder days}.  2. By extension, any odd or unreadable typeface
   produced by a graphics device.  3. The typeface mundanely called
   `B"ocklin', an art-decoish display font.

EMACS: /ee'maks/ [from Editing MACroS] n. The ne plus ultra of
   hacker editors, a program editor with an entire LISP system inside
   it.  It was originally written by Richard Stallman in {TECO}
   under {{ITS}} at the MIT AI lab, but the most widely used versions
   now run under UNIX.  It includes facilities to run compilation
   subprocesses and send and receive mail; many hackers spend up to
   80% of their {tube time} inside it.

   Some versions running under window managers iconify as an
   overflowing kitchen sink, perhaps to suggest the one feature the
   editor does not (yet) include.  Indeed, some hackers find EMACS too
   heavyweight and {baroque} for their taste, and expand the name as
   `Escape Meta Alt Control Shift' to spoof its heavy reliance on
   keystrokes decorated with {bucky bits}.  Other spoof expansions
   include `Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping', `Eventually
   `malloc()'s All Computer Storage', and `EMACS Makes A Computer
   Slow' (see {{recursive acronym}}).  See also {vi}.

email: /ee'mayl/ 1. n. Electronic mail automatically passed
   through computer networks and/or via modems over common-carrier
   lines.  Contrast {snail-mail}, {paper-net}, {voice-net}.  See
   {network address}.  2. vt. To send electronic mail.

   Oddly enough, the word `emailed' is actually listed in the OED; it
   means "embossed (with a raised pattern) or arranged in a net work".
   A use from 1480 is given. The word is derived from French
   `emmailleure', network.

emoticon: /ee-moh'ti-kon/ n. An ASCII glyph used to indicate an
   emotional state in email or news.  Hundreds have been proposed, but
   only a few are in common use.  These include:

     :-)
          `smiley face' (for humor, laughter, friendliness,
          occasionally sarcasm)

     :-(
          `frowney face' (for sadness, anger, or upset)

     ;-)
          `half-smiley' ({ha ha only serious});
          also known as `semi-smiley' or `winkey face'.

     :-/
          `wry face'

   (These may become more comprehensible if you tilt your head
   sideways, to the left.)

   The first 2 listed are by far the most frequently encountered.
   Hyphenless forms of them are common on CompuServe, GEnie, and BIX;
   see also {bixie}.  On {USENET}, `smiley' is often used as a
   generic term synonymous with {emoticon}, as well as specifically
   for the happy-face emoticon.

   It appears that the emoticon was invented by one Scott Fahlman on
   the CMU {bboard} systems around 1980.  He later wrote: "I wish I
   had saved the original post, or at least recorded the date for
   posterity, but I had no idea that I was starting something that
   would soon pollute all the world's communication channels."  [GLS
   confirms that he remembers this original posting].

   Note for the {newbie}: Overuse of the smiley is a mark of
   loserhood!  More than one per paragraph is a fairly sure sign that
   you've gone over the line.

empire: n. Any of a family of military simulations derived from a
   game written by Peter Langston many years ago.  There are five or six
   multi-player variants of varying degrees of sophistication, and one
   single-player version implemented for both UNIX and VMS; the latter is
   even available as MS-DOS freeware.  All are notoriously addictive.

engine: n. 1. A piece of hardware that encapsulates some function
   but can't be used without some kind of {front end}.  Today we
   have, especially, `print engine': the guts of a laser printer.
   2. An analogous piece of software; notionally, one that does a lot
   of noisy crunching, such as a `database engine'.

   The hackish senses of `engine' are actually close to its original,
   pre-Industrial-Revolution sense of a skill, clever device, or
   instrument (the word is cognate to `ingenuity').  This sense had
   not been completely eclipsed by the modern connotation of
   power-transducing machinery in Charles Babbage's time, which
   explains why he named the stored-program computer that
   he designed in 1844 the `Analytical Engine'.

English: 1. n.,obs. The source code for a program, which may be in
   any language, as opposed to the linkable or executable binary
   produced from it by a compiler.  The idea behind the term is that
   to a real hacker, a program written in his favorite programming
   language is at least as readable as English.  Usage: used mostly by
   old-time hackers, though recognizable in context.  2. The official
   name of the database language used by the Pick Operating System,
   actually a sort of crufty interpreted BASIC with delusions of
   grandeur.  The name permits {marketroid}s to say "Yes, and you
   can program our computers in English!" to ignorant {suit}s
   without quite running afoul of the truth-in-advertising laws.

enhancement: n. {Marketroid}-speak for a bug {fix}.  This abuse
   of language is a popular and time-tested way to turn incompetence
   into increased revenue.  A hacker being ironic would instead call
   the fix a {feature} --- or perhaps save some effort by declaring
   the bug itself to be a feature.

ENQ: /enkw/ or /enk/ [from the ASCII mnemonic ENQuire for
   0000101] An on-line convention for querying someone's availability.
   After opening a {talk mode} connection to someone apparently in
   heavy hack mode, one might type `SYN SYN ENQ?' (the SYNs
   representing notional synchronization bytes), and expect a return
   of {ACK} or {NAK} depending on whether or not the person felt
   interruptible.  Compare {ping}, {finger}, and the usage of
   `FOO?' listed under {talk mode}.

EOF: /E-O-F/ [acronym, `End Of File'] n. 1. [techspeak] Refers
   esp. to whatever {out-of-band} value is returned by
   C's sequential character-input functions (and their equivalents in
   other environments) when end of file has been reached.  This value
   is -1 under C libraries postdating V6 UNIX, but was
   originally 0.  2. Used by extension in non-computer contexts when a
   human is doing something that can be modeled as a sequential read
   and can't go further.  "Yeah, I looked for a list of 360 mnemonics
   to post as a joke, but I hit EOF pretty fast; all the library had
   was a {JCL} manual."  See also {EOL}.

EOL: /E-O-L/ [End Of Line] n. Syn. for {newline}, derived
   perhaps from the original CDC6600 Pascal.  Now rare, but widely
   recognized and occasionally used for brevity.  Used in the
   example entry under {BNF}.  See also {EOF}.

EOU: /E-O-U/ n. The mnemonic of a mythical ASCII control
   character (End Of User) that could make an ASR-33 Teletype explode
   on receipt.  This parodied the numerous obscure delimiter and
   control characters left in ASCII from the days when it was
   associated more with wire-service teletypes than computers (e.g.,
   FS, GS, RS, US, EM, SUB, ETX, and esp. EOT).  It is worth
   remembering that ASR-33s were big, noisy mechanical beasts with a
   lot of clattering parts; the notion that one might explode was
   nowhere near as ridiculous as it might seem to someone sitting in
   front of a {tube} or flatscreen today.

epoch: [UNIX: prob. from astronomical timekeeping] n. The time and
   date corresponding to 0 in an operating system's clock and
   timestamp values.  Under most UNIX versions the epoch is 00:00:00
   GMT, January 1, 1970.  System time is measured in seconds or
   {tick}s past the epoch.  Weird problems may ensue when the clock
   wraps around (see {wrap around}), which is not necessarily a
   rare event; on systems counting 10 ticks per second, a signed
   32-bit count of ticks is good only for 6.8 years.  The
   1-tick-per-second clock of UNIX is good only until January 18,
   2038, assuming word lengths don't increase by then.  See also
   {wall time}.

epsilon: [see {delta}] 1. n. A small quantity of anything.  "The
   cost is epsilon."  2. adj. Very small, negligible; less than
   {marginal}.  "We can get this feature for epsilon cost."
   3. `within epsilon of': close enough to be indistinguishable for
   all practical purposes.  This is even closer than being `within
   delta of'.  "That's not what I asked for, but it's within
   epsilon of what I wanted."  Alternatively, it may mean not close
   enough, but very little is required to get it there: "My program
   is within epsilon of working."

epsilon squared: n. A quantity even smaller than {epsilon}, as
   small in comparison to epsilon as epsilon is to something normal;
   completely negligible.  If you buy a supercomputer for a million
   dollars, the cost of the thousand-dollar terminal to go with it is
   {epsilon}, and the cost of the ten-dollar cable to connect them
   is epsilon squared.  Compare {lost in the underflow}, {lost
   in the noise}.

era, the: Syn. {epoch}.  Webster's Unabridged makes these words
   almost synonymous, but `era' usually connotes a span of time rather
   than a point in time.  The {epoch} usage is recommended.

Eric Conspiracy: n. A shadowy group of mustachioed hackers named
   Eric first pinpointed as a sinister conspiracy by an infamous
   talk.bizarre posting ca. 1986; this was doubtless influenced by the
   numerous `Eric' jokes in the Monty Python oeuvre.  There do indeed
   seem to be considerably more mustachioed Erics in hackerdom than
   the frequency of these three traits can account for unless they are
   correlated in some arcane way.  Well-known examples include Eric
   Allman (he of the `Allman style' described under {indent style})
   and Erik Fair (co-author of NNTP); your editor has heard from about
   fourteen others by email, and the organization line `Eric
   Conspiracy Secret Laboratories' now emanates regularly from more
   than one site.

Eris: /e'ris/ n. The Greek goddess of Chaos, Discord, Confusion,
   and Things You Know Not Of; her name was latinized to Discordia and
   she was worshiped by that name in Rome.  Not a very friendly deity
   in the Classical original, she was reinvented as a more benign
   personification of creative anarchy starting in 1959 by the
   adherents of {Discordianism} and has since been a semi-serious
   subject of veneration in several `fringe' cultures, including
   hackerdom.  See {Discordianism}, {Church of the SubGenius}.

erotics: /ee-ro'tiks/ n. [Helsinki University of Technology,
   Finland] n. English-language university slang for electronics.
   Often used by hackers in Helsinki, maybe because good electronics
   excites them and makes them warm.

essentials: n. Things necessary to maintain a productive and secure
   hacking environment.  "A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, a
   20-megahertz 80386 box with 8 meg of core and a 300-megabyte disk
   supporting full UNIX with source and X windows and EMACS and UUCP
   via a 'blazer to a friendly Internet site, and thou."

evil: adj. As used by hackers, implies that some system, program,
   person, or institution is sufficiently maldesigned as to be not
   worth the bother of dealing with.  Unlike the adjectives in the
   {cretinous}/{losing}/{brain-damaged} series, `evil' does not
   imply incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of goals or
   design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's.  This is
   more an esthetic and engineering judgment than a moral one in the
   mainstream sense.  "We thought about adding a {Blue Glue}
   interface but decided it was too evil to deal with."  "{TECO}
   is neat, but it can be pretty evil if you're prone to typos."
   Often pronounced with the first syllable lengthened, as /eeee'vil/.

exa-: /ek's*/ [SI] pref. See {{quantifiers}}.

examining the entrails: n. The process of {grovel}ling through a
   core dump or hex image in the attempt to discover the bug that
   brought a program or system down.  Compare {runes},
   {incantation}, {black art}, {desk check}.

EXCH: /eks'ch*/ or /eksch/ vt. To exchange two things, each for the
   other; to swap places.  If you point to two people sitting down and
   say "Exch!", you are asking them to trade places.  EXCH,
   meaning EXCHange, was originally the name of a PDP-10 instruction
   that exchanged the contents of a register and a memory location.
   Many newer hackers tend to be thinking instead of the PostScript
   exchange operator (which is usually written in lowercase).

excl: /eks'kl/ n. Abbreviation for `exclamation point'.  See
   {bang}, {shriek}, {{ASCII}}.

EXE: /eks'ee/ or /eek'see/ or /E-X-E/ n. An executable
   binary file.  Some operating systems (notably MS-DOS, VMS, and
   TWENEX) use the extension .EXE to mark such files.  This usage is
   also occasionally found among UNIX programmers even though UNIX
   executables don't have any required suffix.

exec: /eg-zek'/ vt.,n.  1. [UNIX: from `execute'] Synonym for
   {chain}, derives from the `exec(2)' call.  2. [from
   `executive'] obs. The command interpreter for an {OS} (see
   {shell}); term esp. used around mainframes, and prob. derived from
   UNIVAC's archaic EXEC 2 and EXEC 8 operating systems.  3. At IBM,
   the equivalent of a shell command file (among VM/CMS users).

   The mainstream `exec' as an abbreviation for (human) executive is
   *not* used.  To a hacker, an `exec' is a always a program,
   never a person.

exercise, left as an: [from technical books] Used to complete a
   proof when one doesn't mind a {handwave}, or to avoid one
   entirely.  The complete phrase is: "The proof (or the rest) is left as
   an exercise for the reader."  This comment *has* occasionally
   been attached to unsolved research problems by authors possessed of
   either an evil sense of humor or a vast faith in the capabilities
   of their audiences.

eyeball search: n. To look for something in a mass of code or data
   with one's own native optical sensors, as opposed to using some
   sort of pattern matching software like {grep} or any other
   automated search tool.  Also called a {vgrep}; compare
   {vdiff}, {desk check}.