Chapter 51

[Unix; often written `.sig' there] Short for `signature', used specifically to refer to the electronic signature block that most Unix mail- and news-posting software will automagically append to outgoing mail and news. The composition of one's sig can be quite an art form, including an ASCII logo or one's choice of witty sayings (see sig quote, fool file); but many consider large sigs a waste of bandwidth, and it has been observed that the size of one's sig block is usually inversely proportional to one's longevity and level of prestige on the net. See also doubled sig.

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sig quote /sig kwoht/ n.

[Usenet] A maxim, quote, proverb, joke, or slogan embedded in one's sig block and intended to convey something of one's philosophical stance, pet peeves, or sense of humor. "Calm down, it's only ones and zeroes."

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sig virus n.

A parasitic meme embedded in a sig block. There was a meme plague or fad for these on Usenet in late 1991. Most were equivalents of "I am a .sig virus. Please reproduce me in your .sig block.". Of course, the .sig virus's memetic hook is the giggle value of going along with the gag; this, however, was a self-limiting phenomenon as more and more people picked up on the idea. There were creative variants on it; some people stuck `sig virus antibody' texts in their sigs, and there was at least one instance of a sig virus eater.

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signal-to-noise ratio [from analog electronics] n.

Used by hackers in a generalization of its technical meaning. `Signal' refers to useful information conveyed by some communications medium, and `noise' to anything else on that medium. Hence a low ratio implies that it is not worth paying attention to the medium in question. Figures for such metaphorical ratios are never given. The term is most often applied to Usenet newsgroups during flame wars. Compare bandwidth. See also coefficient of X, lost in the noise.

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silicon n.

Hardware, esp. ICs or microprocessor-based computer systems (compare iron). Contrasted with software. See also sandbender.

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silly walk vi.

[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." 2. Syn. fandango on core.

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silo n.

The FIFO input-character buffer in an RS-232 line card. So called from DEC terminology used on DH and DZ line cards for the VAX and PDP-11, presumably because it was a storage space for fungible stuff that went in at the top and came out at the bottom.

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Silver Book n.

Jensen and Wirth's infamous "Pascal User Manual and Report", so called because of the silver cover of the widely distributed Springer-Verlag second edition of 1978 (ISBN 0-387-90144-2). See book titles, Pascal.

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since time T equals minus infinity adv.

A long time ago; for as long as anyone can remember; at the time that some particular frob was first designed. Usually the word `time' is omitted. See also time T; contrast epoch.

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sitename /si:t'naym/ n.

[Unix/Internet] The unique electronic name of a computer system, used to identify it in UUCP mail, Usenet, or other forms of electronic information interchange. The folklore interest of sitenames stems from the creativity and humor they often display. Interpreting a sitename is not unlike interpreting a vanity license plate; one has to mentally unpack it, allowing for mono-case and length restrictions and the lack of whitespace. Hacker tradition deprecates dull, institutional-sounding names in favor of punchy, humorous, and clever coinages (except that it is considered appropriate for the official public gateway machine of an organization to bear the organization's name or acronym). Mythological references, cartoon characters, animal names, and allusions to SF or fantasy literature are probably the most popular sources for sitenames (in roughly descending order). The obligatory comment when discussing these is Harris's Lament: "All the good ones are taken!" See also network address.

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skrog v.

Syn. scrog.

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skulker n.

Syn. prowler.

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slab [Apple]

1. n. A continuous horizontal line of pixels, all with the same color. 2. vi. To paint a slab on an output device. Apple's QuickDraw, like most other professional-level graphics systems, renders polygons and lines not with Bresenham's algorithm, but by calculating `slab points' for each scan line on the screen in succession, and then slabbing in the actual image pixels.

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slack n.

1. Space allocated to a disk file but not actually used to store useful information. The techspeak equivalent is `internal fragmentation'. Antonym: hole. 2. In the theology of the Church of the SubGenius, a mystical substance or quality that is the prerequisite of all human happiness.

Since Unix files are stored compactly, except for the unavoidable wastage in the last block or fragment, it might be said that "Unix has no slack". See ha ha only serious.

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slap on the side n.

(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.

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slash n.

Common name for the slant (`/', ASCII 0101111) character. See ASCII for other synonyms.

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slashdot effect n.

1. Also spelled "/. effect"; what is said to have happened when a website being virtually unreachable because too many people are hitting it after the site was mentioned in an interesting article on the popular Slashdot news service. The term is quite widely used by /. readers, including variants like "That site has been slashdotted again!" 2. In a perhaps inevitable generation, the term is being used to describe any similar effect from being listed on a popular site. This would better be described as a flash crowd.

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sleep vi.

1. [techspeak] To relinquish a claim (of a process on a multitasking system) for service; to indicate to the scheduler that a process may be deactivated until some given event occurs or a specified time delay elapses. 2. In jargon, used very similarly to v. block; also in `sleep on', syn. with `block on'. Often used to indicate that the speaker has relinquished a demand for resources until some (possibly unspecified) external event: "They can't get the fix I've been asking for into the next release, so I'm going to sleep on it until the release, then start hassling them again."

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slim n.

A small, derivative change (e.g., to code).

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slop n.

1. A one-sided fudge factor, that is, an allowance for error but in only one of two directions. For example, if you need a piece of wire 10 feet long and have to guess when you cut it, you make very sure to cut it too long, by a large amount if necessary, rather than too short by even a little bit, because you can always cut off the slop but you can't paste it back on again. When discrete quantities are involved, slop is often introduced to avoid the possibility of being on the losing side of a fencepost error. 2. The percentage of `extra' code generated by a compiler over the size of equivalent assembler code produced by hand-hacking; i.e., the space (or maybe time) you lose because you didn't do it yourself. This number is often used as a measure of the goodness of a compiler; slop below 5% is very good, and 10% is usually acceptable. With modern compiler technology, esp. on RISC machines, the compiler's slop may actually be negative; that is, humans may be unable to generate code as good. This is one of the reasons assembler programming is no longer common.

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slopsucker /slop'suhk-r/ n.

A lowest-priority task that waits 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'. One common variety of slopsucker hunts for large prime numbers. Compare background.

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Slowlaris /slo'-lahr-is/ n.

[Usenet; poss. from the variety of prosimian called a "slow loris". The variant `Slowlartus' is also common, related to LART] Common hackish term for Solaris, Sun's System VR4 version of UNIX that came out of the standardization wars of the early 1990s. So named because especially on older hardware, responsiveness was much less crisp than under the preceding SunOS. Early releases of Solaris (that is, Solaris 2, as some marketroids at Sun retroactively rechristened SunOS as Solaris 1) were quite buggy, and Sun was forced by customer demand to support SunOS for quite some time. Newer versions are acknowledged to be among the best commercial UNIX variants in 1998, but still lose single-processor benchmarks to Sparc Linux. Compare AIDX, HP-SUX, Nominal Semidestructor, Telerat, sun-stools.

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slurp vt.

To read a large data file entirely into core before working on it. This may be contrasted with the strategy of reading a small piece at a time, processing it, and then reading the next piece. "This program slurps in a 1K-by-1K matrix and does an FFT." See also sponge.

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smart adj.

Said of a program that does the Right Thing in a wide variety of complicated circumstances. There is a difference between calling a program smart and calling it intelligent; in particular, there do not exist any intelligent programs (yet -- see AI-complete). Compare robust (smart programs can be brittle).

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smart terminal n.

1. A terminal that has enough computing capability to render graphics or to offload some kind of front-end processing from the computer it talks to. The development of workstations and personal computers has made this term and the product it describes semi-obsolescent, but one may still hear variants of the phrase `act like a smart terminal' used to describe the behavior of workstations or PCs with respect to programs that execute almost entirely out of a remote server's storage, using local devices as displays. 2. obs. Any terminal with an addressable cursor; the opposite of a glass tty. Today, a terminal with merely an addressable cursor, but with none of the more-powerful features mentioned in sense 1, is called a dumb terminal.

There is a classic quote from Rob Pike (inventor of the blit terminal): "A smart terminal is not a smartass terminal, but rather a terminal you can educate." This illustrates a common design problem: The attempt to make peripherals (or anything else) intelligent sometimes results in finicky, rigid `special features' that become just so much dead weight if you try to use the device in any way the designer didn't anticipate. Flexibility and programmability, on the other hand, are really smart. Compare hook.

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smash case vi.

To lose or obliterate the uppercase/lowercase distinction in text input. "MS-DOS will automatically smash case in the names of all the files you create." Compare fold case.

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smash the stack n.

[C programming] To corrupt the execution stack by writing past the end of a local array or other data structure. Code that smashes the stack can cause a return from the routine to jump to a random address, resulting in some of the most insidious data-dependent bugs known to mankind. Variants include `trash' the stack, scribble the stack, mangle the stack; the term **mung the stack is not used, as this is never done intentionally. See spam; see also aliasing bug, fandango on core, memory leak, memory smash, precedence lossage, overrun screw.

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smiley n.

See emoticon.

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smoke vi.

1. To crash or 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." Compare magic smoke.

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smoke and mirrors n.

Marketing deceptions. The term is mainstream in this general sense. Among hackers it's strongly associated with bogus demos and crocked benchmarks (see also MIPS, machoflops). "They claim their new box cranks 50 MIPS for under $5000, but didn't specify the instruction mix -- sounds like smoke and mirrors to me." The phrase, popularized by newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin c.1975, has been said to derive from carnie slang for magic acts and `freak show' displays that depend on `trompe l'oeil' effects, but also calls to mind the fierce Aztec god Tezcatlipoca (lit. "Smoking Mirror") for whom the hearts of huge numbers of human sacrificial victims were regularly cut out. Upon hearing about a rigged demo or yet another round of fantasy-based marketing promises, hackers often feel analogously disheartened. See also stealth manager.

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smoke test n.

1. A rudimentary form of testing applied to electronic equipment following repair or reconfiguration, in which power is applied and the tester checks for sparks, smoke, or other dramatic signs of fundamental failure. See magic smoke. 2. By extension, the first run of a piece of software after construction or a critical change. See and compare reality check.

There is an interesting semi-parallel to this term among typographers and printers: When new typefaces are being punch-cut by hand, a `smoke test' (hold the letter in candle smoke, then press it onto paper) is used to check out new dies.

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smoking clover n.

[ITS] A display hack originally due to Bill Gosper. Many convergent lines are drawn on a color monitor in such a way that every pixel struck has its color incremented. The lines all have one endpoint in the middle of the screen; the other endpoints are spaced one pixel apart around the perimeter of a large square. The color map is then repeatedly rotated. This results in a striking, rainbow-hued, shimmering four-leaf clover. Gosper joked about keeping it hidden from the FDA (the U.S.'s Food and Drug Administration) lest its hallucinogenic properties cause it to be banned.

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smoot /smoot/ n.

[MIT] A unit of length equal five feet seven inches. The length of the Harvard Bridge in Boston is famously 364.4 smoots plus or minus an ear (the ear stands for epsilon). This legend began with a fraternity prank in 1958 during which the body length of Oliver Smoot (class of '62) was actually used to measure out that distance. It is commemorated by smoot marks that MIT students repaint every few years; the tradition even survived the demolition and rebuilding of the bridge in the late 1980s. The Boston police have been known to use smoot markers to indicate accident locations on the bridge.

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SMOP /S-M-O-P/ n.

[Simple (or Small) Matter of Programming] 1. A piece of code, not yet written, whose anticipated length is significantly greater than its complexity. Used to refer to a program that could obviously be written, but is not worth the trouble. Also used ironically to imply that a difficult problem can be easily solved because a program can be written to do it; the irony is that it is very clear that writing such a program will be a great deal of work. "It's easy to enhance a FORTRAN compiler to compile COBOL as well; it's just an SMOP." 2. Often used ironically by the intended victim when a suggestion for a program is made which seems easy to the suggester, but is obviously (to the victim) a lot of work.

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smurf /smerf/ n.

1. [from the _soc.motss_ newsgroup on Usenet, after some obnoxiously gooey cartoon characters] A newsgroup regular with a habitual style that is irreverent, silly, and _cute_. Like many other hackish terms for people, this one may be praise or insult depending on who uses it. In general, being referred to as a smurf is probably not going to make your day unless you've previously adopted the label yourself in a spirit of irony. Compare old fart. 2. [techspeak] A ping packet with a forged source address sent to some other network's broadcast address. All the machines on the destination network will send a ping response to the forged source address (the victim). This both overloads the victim's network and hides the location of the attacker.

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SNAFU principle /sna'foo prin'si-pl/ n.

[from a WWII Army acronym for `Situation Normal, All Fucked Up'] "True communication is possible only between equals, because inferiors are more consistently rewarded for telling their superiors pleasant lies than for telling the truth." -- a central tenet of Discordianism, often invoked by hackers to explain why authoritarian hierarchies screw up so reliably and systematically. The effect of the SNAFU principle is a progressive disconnection of decision-makers from reality. This lightly adapted version of a fable dating back to the early 1960s illustrates the phenomenon perfectly:

In the beginning was the plan,

and then the specification;

And the plan was without form,

and the specification was void.

And darkness

was on the faces of the implementors thereof;

And they spake unto their leader,

saying:

"It is a crock of shit,

and smells as of a sewer."

And the leader took pity on them,

and spoke to the project leader:

"It is a crock of excrement,

and none may abide the odor thereof."

And the project leader

spake unto his section head, saying:

"It is a container of excrement,

and it is very strong, such that none may abide it."

The section head then hurried to his department manager,

and informed him thus:

"It is a vessel of fertilizer,

and none may abide its strength."

The department manager carried these words

to his general manager,

and spoke unto him

saying:

"It containeth that which aideth the growth of plants,

and it is very strong."

And so it was that the general manager rejoiced

and delivered the good news unto the Vice President.

"It promoteth growth,

and it is very powerful."

The Vice President rushed to the President's side,

and joyously exclaimed:

"This powerful new software product

will promote the growth of the company!"

And the President looked upon the product,

and saw that it was very good.

After the subsequent and inevitable disaster, the suits protect themselves by saying "I was misinformed!", and the implementors are demoted or fired. Compare Conway's Law.

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snail vt.

To snail-mail something. "Snail me a copy of those graphics, will you?"

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snail-mail n.

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 even been parody posters and stamps made. Also (less commonly) called `P-mail', from `paper mail' or `physical mail'. Oppose email.

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snap v.

To replace a pointer to a pointer with a direct pointer; to replace an old address with the forwarding address found there. If you telephone the main number for an institution and ask for a particular person by name, the operator may tell you that person's extension before connecting you, in the hopes that you will `snap your pointer' and dial direct next time. The underlying metaphor may be that of a rubber band stretched through a number of intermediate points; if you remove all the thumbtacks in the middle, it snaps into a straight line from first to last. See chase pointers.

Often, the behavior of a trampoline is to perform an error check once and then snap the pointer that invoked it so as henceforth to bypass the trampoline (and its one-shot error check). In this context one also speaks of `snapping links'. For example, in a LISP implementation, a function interface trampoline might check to make sure that the caller is passing the correct number of arguments; if it is, and if the caller and the callee are both compiled, then snapping the link allows that particular path to use a direct procedure-call instruction with no further overhead.

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snarf /snarf/ vt.

1. To grab, esp. to grab a large document or file for the purpose of using it with or without the author's permission. See also BLT. 2. [in the Unix community] To fetch a file or set of files across a network. See also blast. This term was mainstream in the late 1960s, meaning `to eat piggishly'. It may still have this connotation in context. "He's in the snarfing phase of hacking -- FTPing megs of stuff a day." 3. To acquire, with little concern for legal forms or _politesse_ (but not quite by stealing). "They were giving away samples, so I snarfed a bunch of them." 4. Syn. for slurp. "This program starts by snarfing the entire database into core, then...." 5. [GEnie] To spray food or programming fluids due to laughing at the wrong moment. "I was drinking coffee, and when I read your post I snarfed all over my desk." "If I keep reading this topic, I think I'll have to snarf-proof my computer with a keyboard condom." [This sense appears to be widespread among mundane teenagers --ESR]

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snarf & barf /snarf'n-barf`/ n.

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.

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snarf down v.

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."

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snark n.