Jargon Chaff File

[ALGOrithmic Language] The common ancestor of C and the Pascal family (including Ada and the various versions of Modula). One of the great pioneering efforts in language design; indeed, it has been said that Algol was a great improvement over most of its successors.

/ar'kie-vr/ A utility that can pack and unpack file sets and/or entire directory hierarchies to and from an `archive' format including the file data and information such as its creation date and size. There are many of these, used both for backups but in preparing software distributions for cross-network transport. UNIX's tar(1) and cpio(1), Windows's ARC.EXE, and zoo(1) for both UNIX and Windows handle archive formats often used not only on these systems but in many other environments which must communicate with them regularly.

Said of a system in which investment in major resources (memory, disk and CPU cycles) have been matched to the job load in such a way that programs are not typically all waiting on the same resource. See bottleneck, hot spot.

A string of bits in core that is interpreted by hardware or software as enable/disable flags for some related set of options or operations. May be used either of hardware flags wired into a computer system's control logic or of software flags controlling some part of a program's execution. Connotes a relatively small set of bits (a byte or word) as opposed to a bit vector which may be of any length. See also bit bashing.

See bit mask.

1. The ASCII character ESC, hex 1b, octal 033, usually labelled ESC or (rarely) ALTMODE on terminal keyboards. Some operating systems (including older UNIXes) use this character to indicate that output is to be suspended.

2. A special character that may cause the following character to have other than its usual meaning, esp. used under UNIX for the backslash character `\'. Such a character, used to prevent the special meaning of a wildcard or other special character, is said to `escape' the character from its special meaning. Use of this sort of literalizing to quote quote characters or other special syntax is often called escapement; the use of `\' is often specifically slashification.

The default absurd mythological animal. This originated among aficionados of Live Action Role Playing, a hobby largely inhabited by hackers. A 1987 LARP game called `Starlight Rendezvous' featured several characters who were, in game, giant blue lobsters (complete with giant lobster armor artfully sculpted out of blue foam rubber). These `Klik-kliks' were obstreperous beings whose idea of diplomacy was to sidle up to other players, insult them, and declaim “We have giant blue pincer claws and we're not afraid to use them” in gruff voices resembling Richard Nixon's. Eventually one was tossed in a jacuzzi by a crowd chanting “Drawn butter! Drawn butter!”. The lobsters became a running joke in later LARPs, and have since often been invoked in conversation by hackers who were not present for the original game and, indeed, have only a vague idea about where the image derives from.

[acronym for “graphical user interface”] A combination of a particular window system (such as X, NeWS or PM) and an interface-design policy for applications. In 1990, prominant GUIs battling it out for mind-share include AT&T/Sun's Open Windows, OSF's Motif, HP's New Wave and Microsoft's Presentation Manager interface. See FUD Wars.

[acronym for Initial Program Load] Synonym for boot. Usage: now rare, reported at IBM and Motorola. Formerly more common at IBM shops.

[from UNIX, now also used elsewhere] The resident portion of the operating system; that which handles I/O dispatch, runs and schedules processes, and provides other system services to applications through TRAPs or system calls. Distinguished from application libraries (on the one hand) and the system shell or command interpreter on the other.

On hardware or software supporting several functional modes, some designed to emulate the behavior of other similar products, `native mode' is the one (usually default) command set or feature set that is not an emulation. Example: many smart CRTs support ANSI or vt100 emulations in addition to the default native mode defined by the manufacturer.

See thunk. Abandoned as a technique by HLL language designers many years ago except in explicit macro processing; it's too expensive and makes side effects too hard to track. Can be inexactly simulated in C or LISP by using the macro facility. See also pass-by-reference, pass-by-value.

A mode of argument-passing supported by Pascal `var' arguments and in some other languages which requires the caller to give the name of a variable as the actual and binds the formal to the address (in effect) of the variable. Variables passed to a function by reference can be modified in place by the function. This can be simulated in C using the address (&) operator in the function invocation and the pointer-dereference (*) operator within the body of the function. See pass-by-name, pass-by-value.

The simplest and most `natural' form of argument passing (and the default in all modern HLLs); the value of the actual argument expression is computed once at function-call time and the corresponding formal is bound to it for the scope of the function. See pass-by-name, pass-by-reference.

A class of bug in multi-tasking, multi-threaded or event-driven systems arising from situations in which code will fail if one task gets to a particular execution point before another has had time to prepare for that event. In UNIX, often used to refer to various kinds of lossage due to V7 and USG UNIX's non-self-resetting signal(2) facilities; if two signals hit a process in rapid succession, the second may arrive before the signal handler can reset itself, resulting in process death and potentially infinite screwage.

[Reduced Instruction Set Computer] An architectural approach to processor pioneered at Berkeley in the early 1980s which emphasizes simple fixed-length instructions implemented in random logic or PLAs, as opposed to the older style that came to be called CISC [Complex Instruction Set Computer] architectures typified by the VAX in which elaborate microcode is used to implement bushels of addressing modes and special-case instructions of wildly varying length. RISC processors also generally feature a large file of orthogonal registers and register windowing to reduce HLL function-call overhead. The theory behind all this was to optimize to the code-generating style of HLL compilers rather than human programmers, trading away instruction-set complexity to eliminate decode overhead and improve performance. It worked; see killer micro.

Nom de guerre of Richard M. Stallman, archetypal AI hacker famous in particular for 1) inventing EMACS, 2) his belief that making money from software is evil, and 3) the consequent creation of the Free Software Foundation. See copyleft, demigod, EMACS, GNU, Symbolics.

[from UNIX] A software interrupt, especially one which dispatches to a handler written in an application (as opposed to merely triggering a system-level event).

In the subjargon of computer security specialists, an attack which relies on the inability of users or computer programs to verify the identity or location of a communication partner. A mockingbird spoofs the computer's login sequence to fool a user; some cracking software repeatedly spoofs human login actions to fool the computer.

A dummy routine which either performs no action or simply announces its presence, inserted at the bottom of a call hierarchy to verify that the control flow at all levels above it is functioning as intended.

[aka `Slymebolics' /sliem-bah'liks/] A manufacturer of Lisp Machines that evolved out of the MIT lisp machines. Once thought by some to be evil incarnate because they were making money from software. (See RMS) They lost this status when they proved that they weren't interested in making money from software. See seer.

To take a marginally successful but poorly managed company and drive it completely into the ground. The word comes from Brian Seer, a man who was brought in from the outside to manage Symbolics. His tenure there led to the following joke:

[Editorial disclaimer: RMS protest that this joke misrepresents his position] See also GNU.

[esp. in C/UNIX shops]

1. Any sequence of the characters space, newline, tab, carriage-return and (sometimes) vertical tab.

2. Parts of a code layout style where the code is not, whether inserted because of parsing requirements or for human readability. "Remember, C hackers -- whitespace is your friend!"

To buffer data for writing to a device at a convenient time in the future, without holding up the computation of the process doing the writing. Oppose write through.

To write data from a process to disk, with no buffering, each time and every time the process does an I/O request. Oppose write behind. Safer, but slower.

1. To behave spastically or erratically; more often, to commit a single gross error. “Boy, is he spazzing!”

2. n. One who spazzes. “Boy, what a spazz!”

3. n. The result of spazzing. “Boy, what a spazz!”

A deadly sport practiced mainly by Sussman's graduate students. It, along with chair bowling, is the most evident manifestation of the "locker room atmosphere" said to reign in that sphere. (Sussman doesn't approve.)

[As of 11/82, it's reported that the sport has given way to a new game called “disc-boot”, and Sussman even participates occasionally.]

Large quantity. Usage: Exclusive to MIT-AI. "Go away, I have 69 things to do to DDT before worrying about fixing the bug in the phase of the moon output routine..."

[Note: Actually, any number less than 100 but large enough to have no obvious magic properties will be recognized as a "large number". There is no denying that "69" is the local favorite. I don't know whether its origins are related to the obscene interpretation, but I do know that 69 decimal = 105 octal, and 69 hexadecimal = 105 decimal, which is a nice property. - GLS]

Pseudo TTY, a simulated TTY used to run a job under the supervision of another job. PTYJOB /pi'tee/ n. The job being run on the PTY. Also a common general-purpose program for creating and using PTYs. This is DEC and SAIL terminology; the MIT equivalent is STY.

1. A celestial object whose phase is very important to hackers. See phase of the moon.

2. Dave Moon (MOON@MC).

[standard ASCII terminology]

1. v. To feed the paper through a terminal by one line (in order to print on the next line).

2. n. The “character” that causes the terminal to perform this action.

[LISP] The now-standard way of writing LISP expressions as nested lists, with parens and spaces; as opposed to the earlier and technically purer practice of writing full S-expressions with cons dots. Supposedly invented as a KLUGE because a full parser for S-expressions would have been harder to write.

1. A computer or item of special-purpose hardware that links two or more normally incompatible data networks and does protocol translation between them.

2. On compatible or common-carrier networks, a piece of software that translates between normally incompatible data formats and addressing conventions.

See regular expressions.

[from old-time science-fiction fandom] Equivalent to mainstream "make out" describing sexual activity, especially exploratory. Most often encountered as participle snogging. “Oh, they're off snogging somewhere.”

1. A program translator that allows human beings to generate machine code using mnemonics and symbolic names for memory locations rather than raw binary; distinguished from an HLL by the fact that a single assembler step generally maps to a single machine instruction (see also languages of choice).

2. A nanobot which is a physical replicator (This is the `official' term, coined by Eric Drexler; see nanotechnology).

The object code for a program.

[C programmers] The use of increment and decrement operations on address pointers to traverse arrays or structure fields. See also bump.

[from Usenet, but may predate it] flame wars over religious issues.

An often-discussed probable consequence of nanotechnology; nanobots specifically programmed to repair tissue at the cellular level. Possible uses include reversing freezing damage from cryonics procedures and correction of mutagen-damaged DNA (including eradication of retroviruses and oncogenes).

[obs.] Shuffling operation on the PDP-10 under some operating systems that consumes a significant amount of computer time. See BLT in the main listing.

[short for BINARY; used as a second file name on ITS]

1. n. Binary.

2. BIN FILE: A file containing the BIN for a program. Usage: used at MIT, which runs on ITS. The equivalent term at Stanford is DMP (pronounced "dump") FILE. Other names used include SAV ("save") FILE (DEC and Tenex), SHR ("share") and LOW FILES (DEC), and EXE ("ex'ee") FILE (DEC and Twenex). Also in this category are the input files to the various flavors of linking loaders (LOADER, LINK-10, STINK), called REL FILES.

The practice of freezing oneself in hopes of being revived in the future by cell-repair machines. A possible route to technological immortality already taken by 1990 by more than a handful of persons with terminal illnesses.

1. [from the Diablo printer] n. Any letter- quality printing device. n.

2. v. To produce letter-quality output from such a device. See lase.

See BIN.

[ITS; UNIX calls this a daemon or demon] A program similar to a daemon, except that it doesn't sit around waiting for something to happen, but is instead used by the system to perform various useful tasks that just have to be done periodically. A typical example would be an accounting program that accumulates statistics, keeps track of who is logged in, and so on. Another example: most timesharing systems have several terminals, and at any given time some are in use and some are sitting idle; the idle ones usually sit there with some idiotic message on their screens, such as “Logged off.”, from the last time someone used it. The ITS timesharing system at MIT puts these idle terminals to good use by displaying useful information on them, such as who is using the computer, where they are, what they're doing, what their telephone numbers are, and so on, along with other information such as pretty pictures (the picture collection included a unicorn, Snoopy, and the U.S.S. Enterprise from Star Trek). All this information was displayed on idle terminals by the `name dragon', so called because it originally printed just the names of the users. (That it now shows all kinds of things, including useless though pretty pictures, is an example of creeping featurism.) The name dragon is a program started up by the system, and it runs about every five minutes and updates the information on all idle terminals.

In floating-point arithmetic, the maximum difference allowed between two quantities for them to compare equal. Has to be set properly relative to the FPU's precision limits. See fudge factor. This term is particularly common among APL hackers.

The names JRN and JRL were sometimes used as example names when discussing PPNs (q.v.); they were understood to be programmer names for (fictitious) programmers named “J. Random Nerd” and “J. Random Loser” (see J. Random). For example, one might say “To log in, type log one comma jay are en” (that is, “[log1,JRN]”), and the listener will understand that he should use his own computer id in place of “[JRN]”.

See TELNET. This term is now nearly obsolete.

[Jump to SYStem] See UUO.

On the ITS system there was a program that allowed you to see what is being printed on someone else's terminal. It works by “spying” on the other guy's output, by examining the insides of the monitor system. It could do this because the MIT system purposely had very little in the way of “protection” that prevents one user from interfering with another. Fair is fair, however. There was another program that would automatically notify you if anyone starts to spy on your output. It worked in exactly the same way, by looking at the insides of the operating system to see if anyone else was looking at the insides that have to do with your output. This “counterspy” program was called JEDGAR (pronounced as two syllables: /jed'gr/), in honor of the former head of the FBI. By the way, the output spy program is called OS. Throughout the rest of computer science, and also at IBM, OS means “operating system”, but among old-time ITS hackers it almost always meant “output spy”.

[Stanford] The SAIL equivalent of a dragon Typical phantoms included the accounting program, the news-wire monitor, and the LPT and XGP spoolers. UNIX and most other environments call this sort of program a background demon or daemon.

See BIN: TOPS-10 is long dead. in the main listing. Short for `relocatable', used on the old TOPS-10 OS.

See BIN.

See BIN.

[ITS] A pseudo-teletype, which is a two-way pipeline with a job on one end and a fake keyboard-tty on the other. Also, a standard program which provides a pipeline from its controlling tty to a pseudo-teletype (and thence to another tty, thereby providing a “sub-tty”). This is MIT terminology; the SAIL, DEC and UNIX equivalent is PTY (see main text).

[short for “Un-Used Operation”] A PDP-10 system monitor call. The term “Un-Used Operation” comes from the fact that, on PDP-10 systems, monitor calls are implemented as invalid or illegal machine instructions, which cause traps to the monitor (see trap). The SAIL manual describing the available UUOs has a cover picture showing an unidentified underwater object. See YOYO. [Note: DEC salescritters since decided that “Un-Used Operation” sounds bad, so UUO now stands for “Unimplemented User Operation”.] Tenex and Twenex systems use the JSYS machine instruction (q.v.), which is halfway between a legal machine instruction and a UUO, since KA-10 Tenices implement it as a hardware instruction which can be used as an ordinary subroutine call (sort of a “pure JSR”).

1. n. Xerox Graphics Printer.

2. v. To print something on the XGP. “You shouldn't XGP such a large file.”

DEC service engineers' slang for UUO. Usage: rare at Stanford and MIT, has been found at random DEC installations.

A new release or version of a product, sufficiently different to merit a new designation but including all the bugs and problems of the previous product architecture (this is the usual result of being “compatible” with previous releases).

To vanish inexplicably. Normally used in a kind of prayer or litany: “With a bit of luck, that problem will go away when we install Release XXX”.

A plaintive litany used when venturing suggestions for changes. Immediately precedes some preposterously difficult proposal which to the requestor (and any other reasonable person) seems simple. From experienced users, a wry acknowledgement that the proposition may well be costly, but is nevertheless desirable. “How hard would it be to remove the length restriction on userids?” See also WIBNI.

[from the MIDAS pseudo-op which generates a block of code repeatedly, substituting in various places the car and/or cdr of the list(s) supplied at the IRP] To perform a series of tasks repeatedly with a minor substitution each time through. “I guess I'll IRP over these homework papers so I can give them some random grade for this semester.”

A collection of hardware or software that can be considered to form a layer within the structure of an operating system or architecture. Conceptually, layers are smoothly overlaid on each other with a clean interface between each, as in an onion. Upon detailed inspection, however, it will be often be seen that the tough-skinned and prickly globe artichoke is often a more accurate model.

1. At the forefront of innovation and technology.

2. Used in marketroid-speak to describe technology that is four years out of date and is therefore mature enough to be used in a commercial product.

[IBM] A parody of some fashionable techniques for improving the quality of software. Reportedly, the output from a compilation or assembly of the suspect program is placed on the floor, with a large flat dish on top of it, and an indoor plant in a pot is placed in the centre of the dish. The dish is then filled with water. The principle is that any bugs in the program will be attracted towards the house plant and drown as they try to cross the intervening water. From statistical evidence this seems about as effective a technique as many others currently in use.

An undefined measure of value-for-money. As in “The XYZ offers improved price/performance”. See benchmark, machoflops.

A program that provides a general service that may have a variety of uses. For example, sorting and printing programs are often called utilities. The name implies a lack of novelty, and describes a `bread-and-butter' program.

1. A period during which a processor is idle, for example, waiting for input, output, or memory activity to complete.

2. Also used of humans waiting on some event to act.

[think of a dead fish] Down, and it stinks. Used of hardware which suddenly stops working, especially when the stoppage is ideally timed to disrupt a development schedule. Esp. found in the phrase `to go belly up' or `gone belly up'. See also casters-up mode. down.

Something which is sealed off (opaque) so the inner workings aren't visible, typically said of very complex algorithms. “That image restoration technique is a black box.” The application to hardware is general technical English, of course.

A slow code section, algorithm, or hardware subsystem through which computation must pass (see also hot spot); anything with lower bandwidth than is available for the rest of the computation. A system is said to be bottlenecked when performance is usually limited by contention for one particular resource (such as disk, memory, or processor clocks); the opposite condition is called balanced, which is more jargon in the strict sense and may be found in technical dictionaries.

The connection between the central processor and memory is often called the von Neumann bottleneck. This term was coined by John Backus in his 1978 Turing Award lecture; it is now standard in the computer science literature but is also the canonical example of a bottleneck to hackers.

[from the verb `to close', thus the /z/ sound]

1. n. Abbreviation for `close (or right) parenthesis', used when necessary to eliminate oral ambiguity. See open.

2. adj. Of a delimiting character, used at the right-hand end of a grouping. Used in such terms as close parenthesis, close bracket, etc.

3. vt. To release a file or communication channel after access.

1. n. A keystroke (or combination of keystrokes) that switches environments; esp. used if it flips between different modes or screens of a full-screen interface. Perhaps so called because they are always active or `hot'; possibly related to hot buttons in marketroid-speak.

2. v. To switch environments.

A network connection between two machines. Usage: “Is that link down again?”

A physical paper printout (as opposed to on-screen display) of program source, or of the results (interspersed with error and status messages) of a compilation or assembly run. What one grovels over when performing a desk check. Both the term `listing' and the thing it describes are now much less common than formerly, as modern time-sharing operating systems and powerful interactive editors have made it advantageous for hackers to do effectively all of their work on-line.

Of source code, commentary, system messages, etc., not in all upper case or all lower case, and therefore easy to read and understand. Used esp. in opposition to older designs that are case-insensitive and use an all-caps character set.

1. To attach a removable physical storage volume to a machine. In elder days and on mainframes this verb was used almost exclusively of tapes; nowadays it is more likely to refer to a disk or disk pack.

2. By extension, to attach any removable device such as a sensor, robot arm, or meatware subsystem (see scratch monkey).

3. [UNIX] To make a logical volume of some sort available for use. The volume in question may or may not be removable and may be just one partition of a physical device.

[techspeak] A logical input/output device connected to the bit bucket; when you write to it nothing happens, when you read from it you see an end-of-file condition. Useful for discarding unwanted output or using interactive programs in a batch mode. See /dev/null.

[UNIX] An action taken by a process or the entire operating system when an unrecoverable error is discovered. The action usually consists of: (1) displaying localized information on the controlling terminal, (2) saving, or preparing for saving, a memory image of the process or operating system, and (3) terminating the process or rebooting the system.

1. v.,n. Describes the act of moving, translating, reconfiguring, and adapting software from one machine architecture and/or operating system (the source environment) to run on a different one (the target environment). Until recently and except among a relatively small group of modern operating systems this process has ranged from extremely painful up to flat-out impossible. The ubiquity of the C language and the spread of the UNIX operating system have, fortunately, done much to change this.

2. [from mainstream `port' for a door or gate] n. Anything one might plug a peripheral or communications line into; as in a `serial port' or `parallel port'.

To graft some pieces from newer technology onto a piece of software or hardware representing an older one. This often results in a crocky, inelegant compromise between new and old. The term implies use of the older stuff in ways the designers didn't anticipate. Some of the bizarre things done during the 1970s to old-style batch operating systems like GECOS and IBM's OS/360 in order to make them crudely interactive stand out as examples. More recently, personal computer hackers have frequently been known to graft new floppy and hard-disk devices onto obsolete hardware in order to preserve software written for a particular processor, screen and keyboard combination.

University slang for statistics and probability theory, often used by hackers.

1. A program written in shell; a batch file (see batch). A set of instructions which can be fed to a machine as though the user had typed them.

2. A transcript of some interaction with a machine.

To communicate with another ARPAnet host using the SUPDUP program, which is a SUPer-DUPer TELNET talking a special display protocol used mostly in talking to ITS sites. Sometimes abbreviated to SD.

Incredibly dirty, greasy, or grubby. Anything which has been washed within the last year is not really grungy. Also used metaphorically; hence some programs (especially crocks) can be described as grungy.

The earliest print use anybody has reported to us of `grungy' is from the National Lampoon parody Bored Of the Rings, dating from the late 1960s. It has been suggested that this term originated with Vietnam vets. It has recently (as of 1991) also become common in mainstream English.

See excl.

Infinitely close to. This is used in a generalization of its mathematical meaning to allege that something is within epsilon of some standard, reference, or goal (see epsilon).

[MS-DOS/Windows] Abbreviation for batch file, the MSDOS equivalent of the UNIX shell script, derived from the .BAT extension required for the command interpreter to find the batch file and execute it.

Hackish variant of `sluggish'. Used only of people, esp. someone just waking up after a long gronk out.

[Cambridge] A busy-wait. Preferred in Britain.

From the older (per-task) method of using secondary storage devices to implement support for multitasking. Something which is swapped in is available for immediate use in main memory, and otherwise is swapped out. Often used metaphorically to refer to people's memories (“I read the Scheme Report every few months to keep the information swapped in.”) or to their own availability (“I'll swap you in as soon as I finish looking at this other problem.”). Compare page in, page out.

The question mark character ("?"). See QUES. Usage: rare, used particularly in conjunction with wow.

See hungus.

(alt.: 'blazer) Nickname for any of the Telebit Trailblazers, a line of expensive but extremely reliable and effective high-speed modems, popular at UNIX sites that pass large volumes of email and USENET news.

1. Brokenness and the consequent mess.

2. [IBM] n. The extra people that must be added to an organization because its master plan has changed; used esp.: of software and hardware development teams.

[FidoNet] Abbreviation for File Attach.

Software installed into a computer-based piece of equipment on ROM. So-called because it's harder to change than software but easier than hardware.

[FidoNet] Abbreviation for File Request.

This was the output from the old UNIX V6 `1' command. The `1' command then did a random number roll that gave it a one-in-ten chance of recursively executing itself.

[UNIX: orig. by Doug McIlroy; now also used under MS-DOS and elsewhere] A chain of filter programs connected `head-to-tail' so that the output of one becomes the input of the next. Under UNIX, user utilities can often be implemented or at least prototyped by a suitable collection of pipelines and temp-file grinding encapsulated in a shell script (this is called plumbing); this is much less effort than writing C every time, and the capability is considered one of UNIX's major winning features.

To flood a mailing list or newsgroup with huge amounts of useless, trivial or redundant information. From the name of a hacker who has frequently done this on some widely distributed mailing lists.

1. A collection of several files bundled into one file by a program such as ar(1), tar(1), cpio(1), or arc for shipment or archiving (sense 2). See also tar and feather.

2. A collection of files or archives (sense 1) made available from an archive site via FTP or an email server.

[primarily MSDOS] holy wars over which archiving program one should use. The first arc war was sparked when System Enhancement Associates (SEA) sued PKWare for copyright and trademark infringement on its ARC program. PKWare's PKARC outperformed ARC on both compression and speed while largely retaining compatibility (it introduced a new compression type that could be disabled for backward-compatibility). PKWare settled out of court to avoid enormous legal costs (both SEA and PKWare are small companies); as part of the settlement, the name of PKARC was changed to PKPAK. The public backlash against SEA for bringing suit helped to hasten the demise of ARC as a standard when PKWare and others introduced new, incompatible archivers with better compression algorithms.

A MUD term meaning to gain points only by killing other players and mobiles (non-player characters). Hence, a Berserker-Wizard is a player character that has achieved enough points to become a wizard, but only by killing other characters. Berserking is sometimes frowned upon because of its inherently antisocial nature, but some MUDs have a berserker mode in which a player becomes permanently berserk, can never flee from a fight, cannot use magic, gets no score for treasure, but does get double kill points. “Berserker wizards can seriously damage your elf!”

Abbrev. for ‘interoperability’, with the ‘14’ replacing fourteen letters. Used in the X (windows) community. Refers to portability and compatibility of data formats (even binary ones) between different programs or implementations of the same program on different machines.

Abbrev. for `internationali{z,s}ation', with the 18 replacing 18 letters. Used in the X (windows) community.

Weak; losing; not up to the job. Hackish use resembles the mainstream idiom in phrases like “a lame excuse” but has special connotations. Some hacker subcultures use it for people or designs that display intelligence but never follow through on their promise. Thus, a lame design might have clever ideas in it, but fail due to laziness or poor debugging on the part of the implementer. A lame person (or lamer) may be bright and interesting, but unable to accomplish much due to chronic flakiness. Marked compounds like ‘non-lame’ and ‘lameitude’ flourish.

Any of the MUDs derived from the original MUD game by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw (see MUD). BartleMUDs are noted for their (usually slightly offbeat) humor, dry but friendly syntax, and