Chapter 57

1. [From the Usenet group _alt.folklore.urban_] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it. See also YHBT. 2. An individual who chronically trolls in sense 1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are recognizable by the fact that the have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand - they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in, "Oh, ignore him, he's just a troll." 3. [Berkeley] Computer lab monitor. A popular campus job for CS students. Duties include helping newbies and ensuring that lab policies are followed. Probably so-called because it involves lurking in dark cavelike corners.

Some people claim that the troll (sense 1) is properly a narrower category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial. See also Troll-O-Meter.

The use of `troll' in either sense is a live metaphor that readily produces elaborations and combining forms. For example, one not infrequently sees the warning "Do not feed the troll" as part of a followup to troll postings.

Node:Troll-O-Meter, Next:tron, Previous:troll, Up:= T =

Troll-O-Meter n.

Common Usenet jargon for a notional instrument used to measure the quality of a Usenet troll. "Come on, everyone! If the above doesn't set off the Troll-O-Meter, we're going to have to get him to run around with a big blinking sign saying `I am a troll, I'm only in it for the controversy and flames' and shooting random gobs of Jell-O(tm) at us before the point is proven." Mentions of the Troll-O-Meter are often accompanied by an ASCII picture of an arrow pointing at a numeric scale. Compare bogometer.

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tron v.

[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". One may also speak of `tron mode'; compare spod.

Note that many dialects of BASIC have a TRON/TROFF command pair that enables/disables line number tracing; this has no obvious relationship to the slang usage.

Node:true-hacker, Next:tty, Previous:tron, Up:= T =

true-hacker n.

[analogy with `trufan' from SF fandom] One who exemplifies the primary values of hacker culture, esp. competence and helpfulness to other hackers. A high compliment. "He spent 6 hours helping me bring up UUCP and netnews on my FOOBAR 4000 last week -- manifestly the act of a true-hacker." Compare demigod, oppose munchkin.

Node:tty, Next:tube, Previous:true-hacker, Up:= T =

tty /T-T-Y/, /tit'ee/ n.

The latter pronunciation was primarily ITS, but some Unix people say it this way as well; this pronunciation is not considered to have sexual undertones. 1. A terminal of the teletype variety, characterized by a noisy mechanical printer, a very limited character set, and poor print quality. Usage: antiquated (like the TTYs themselves). See also bit-paired keyboard. 2. [especially Unix] Any terminal at all; sometimes used to refer to the particular terminal controlling a given job. 3. [Unix] Any serial port, whether or not the device connected to it is a terminal; so called because under Unix such devices have names of the form tty*. Ambiguity between senses 2 and 3 is common but seldom bothersome.

Node:tube, Next:tube time, Previous:tty, Up:= T =

tube

1. n. 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?"

Node:tube time, Next:tunafish, Previous:tube, Up:= T =

tube time n.

Time spent at a terminal or console. More inclusive than hacking time; commonly used in discussions of what parts of one's environment one uses most heavily. "I find I'm spending too much of my tube time reading mail since I started this revision."

Node:tunafish, Next:tune, Previous:tube time, Up:= T =

tunafish n.

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, but apparently restored on the 4.4BSD tape and in {Net,Free,Open}BSD. 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."

[It has since been pointed out that indeed you can tunafish. Usually at a canning factory... --ESR]

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tune vt.

[from automotive or musical usage] To optimize a program or system for a particular environment, esp. by adjusting numerical parameters designed as hooks for tuning, e.g., by changing #define lines in C. One may `tune for time' (fastest execution), `tune for space' (least memory use), or `tune for configuration' (most efficient use of hardware). See bum, hot spot, hand-hacking.

Node:turbo nerd, Next:Turing tar-pit, Previous:tune, Up:= T =

turbo nerd n.

See computer geek.

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Turing tar-pit n.

1. A place where anything is possible but nothing of interest is practical. Alan Turing helped lay the foundations of computer science by showing that all machines and languages capable of expressing a certain very primitive set of operations are logically equivalent in the kinds of computations they can carry out, and in principle have capabilities that differ only in speed from those of the most powerful and elegantly designed computers. However, no machine or language exactly matching Turing's primitive set has ever been built (other than possibly as a classroom exercise), because it would be horribly slow and far too painful to use. A `Turing tar-pit' is any computer language or other tool that shares this property. That is, it's theoretically universal -- but in practice, the harder you struggle to get any real work done, the deeper its inadequacies suck you in. Compare bondage-and-discipline language. 2. The perennial holy wars over whether language A or B is the "most powerful".

Node:turist, Next:Tux, Previous:Turing tar-pit, Up:= T =

turist /too'rist/ n.

Var. sp. of tourist, q.v. Also in adjectival form, `turistic'. Poss. influenced by luser and `Turing'.

Node:Tux, Next:tweak, Previous:turist, Up:= T =

Tux

Tux the Penguin is the official emblem of Linux, This eventuated after a logo contest in 1996, during which Linus Torvalds endorsed the idea of a penguin logo in a couple of famously funny postings. Linus explained that he was once bitten by a killer penguin in Australia and has felt a special affinity for the species ever since. (Linus has since admitted that he was also thinking of Feathers McGraw, the evil-genius penguin jewel thief who appeared in a Wallace & Grommit feature cartoon, "The Wrong Trousers".)

Larry Ewing designed the official Tux logo. It has proved a wise choice, amenable to hundreds of recognizable variations used as emblems of Linux-related projects, products, and user groups. In fact, Tux has spawned an entire mythology, of which the Gospel According to Tux and the mock-epic poem "Tuxowolf" are among the best-known examples.

There is a `real' Tux - a black-footed penguin resident at the Bristol Zoo. Several friends of Linux bought a zoo sponsorship for Linus as a birthday present in 1996.

Node:tweak, Next:tweeter, Previous:Tux, Up:= T =

tweak vt.

1. To change slightly, usually in reference to a value. Also used synonymously with twiddle. If a program is almost correct, rather than figure out the precise problem you might just keep tweaking it until it works. See frobnicate and fudge factor; also see shotgun debugging. 2. To tune or bum a program; preferred usage in the U.K.

Node:tweeter, Next:TWENEX, Previous:tweak, Up:= T =

tweeter n.

[University of Waterloo] Syn. perf, chad (sense 1). This term (like woofer) has been in use at Waterloo since 1972 but is elsewhere unknown. In audio jargon, the word refers to the treble speaker(s) on a hi-fi.

Node:TWENEX, Next:twiddle, Previous:tweeter, Up:= T =

TWENEX /twe'neks/ n.

The TOPS-20 operating system by DEC -- the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10 -- preferred by most PDP-10 hackers over TOPS-10 (that is, by those who were not ITS or WAITS partisans). TOPS-20 began in 1969 as Bolt, Beranek & Newman's TENEX operating system using special paging hardware. By the early 1970s, almost all of the systems on the ARPANET ran TENEX. DEC purchased the rights to TENEX from BBN and began work to make it their own. The first in-house code name for the operating system was VIROS (VIRtual memory Operating System); when customers started asking questions, the name was changed to SNARK so DEC could truthfully deny that there was any project called VIROS. When the name SNARK became known, the name was briefly reversed to become KRANS; this was quickly abandoned when someone objected that `krans' meant `funeral wreath' in Swedish (though some Swedish speakers have since said it means simply `wreath'; this part of the story may be apocryphal). Ultimately DEC picked TOPS-20 as the name of the operating system, and it was as TOPS-20 that it was marketed. The hacker community, mindful of its origins, quickly dubbed it TWENEX (a contraction of `twenty TENEX'), even though by this point very little of the original TENEX code remained (analogously to the differences between AT&T V6 Unix and BSD). DEC people cringed when they heard "TWENEX", but the term caught on nevertheless (the written abbreviation `20x' was also used). TWENEX was successful and very popular; in fact, there was a period in the early 1980s when it commanded as fervent a culture of partisans as Unix or ITS -- but DEC's decision to scrap all the internal rivals to the VAX architecture and its relatively stodgy VMS OS killed the DEC-20 and put a sad end to TWENEX's brief day in the sun. DEC attempted to convince TOPS-20 users to convert to VMS, but instead, by the late 1980s, most of the TOPS-20 hackers had migrated to Unix.

Node:twiddle, Next:twilight zone, Previous:TWENEX, Up:= T =

twiddle n.

1. Tilde (ASCII 1111110, ~). Also called `squiggle', `sqiggle' (sic -- pronounced /skig'l/), and `twaddle', but twiddle is the most common term. 2. A small and insignificant change to a program. Usually fixes one bug and generates several new ones (see also shotgun debugging). 3. vt. To change something in a small way. Bits, for example, are often twiddled. Twiddling a switch or knobs implies much less sense of purpose than toggling or tweaking it; see frobnicate. To speak of twiddling a bit connotes aimlessness, and at best doesn't specify what you're doing to the bit; `toggling a bit' has a more specific meaning (see bit twiddling, toggle). 4. Uncommon name for the twirling baton prompt.

Node:twilight zone, Next:twink, Previous:twiddle, Up:= T =

twilight zone n. //

[IRC] Notionally, the area of cyberspace where IRC operators live. An op is said to have a "connection to the twilight zone".

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twink /twink/ n.

1. [Berkeley] A clue-repellant user; the next step beyond a clueless one. 2. [UCSC] A read-only user. Also reported on the Usenet group _soc.motss_; may derive from gay slang for a cute young thing with nothing upstairs (compare mainstream `chick').

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twirling baton n.

[PLATO] The overstrike sequence -/|\-/|\- which produces an animated twirling baton. If you output it with a single backspace between characters, the baton spins in place. If you output the sequence BS SP between characters, the baton spins from left to right. If you output BS SP BS BS between characters, the baton spins from right to left. This is also occasionally called a twiddle prompt.

The twirling baton was a popular component of animated signature files on the pioneering PLATO educational timesharing system. The archie Internet service is perhaps the best-known baton program today; it uses the twirling baton as an idler indicating that the program is working on a query. The twirling baton is also used as a boot progress indicator on several BSD variants of Unix; if it stops you're probably going to have a long and trying day.

Node:two pi, Next:two-to-the-N, Previous:twirling baton, Up:= T =

two pi quant.

The number of years it takes to finish one's thesis. Occurs in stories in the following form: "He started on his thesis; 2 pi years later..."

Node:two-to-the-N, Next:twonkie, Previous:two pi, Up:= T =

two-to-the-N quant.

An amount much larger than N but smaller than infinity. "I have 2-to-the-N things to do before I can go out for lunch" means you probably won't show up.

Node:twonkie, Next:u-, Previous:two-to-the-N, Up:= T =

twonkie /twon'kee/ n.

The software equivalent of a Twinkie (a variety of sugar-loaded junk food, or (in gay slang with a small t) the male equivalent of `chick'); a useless `feature' added to look sexy and placate a marketroid (compare Saturday-night special). The term may also be related to "The Twonky", title menace of a classic SF short story by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore), first published in the September 1942 "Astounding Science Fiction" and subsequently much anthologized.

Node:= U =, Next:= V =, Previous:= T =, Up:The Jargon Lexicon

= U =

u-:

UBD:

UBE:

UCE:

UDP:

UN*X:

undefined external reference:

under the hood:

undocumented feature:

uninteresting:

Unix:

Unix brain damage:

Unix conspiracy:

Unix weenie:

unixism:

unswizzle:

unwind the stack:

unwind-protect:

up:

upload:

upthread:

urchin:

URL:

Usenet:

Usenet Death Penalty:

user:

user-friendly:

user-obsequious:

userland:

USG Unix:

UTSL:

UUCPNET:

Node:u-, Next:UBD, Previous:twonkie, Up:= U =

u- pref.

Written shorthand for micro-; techspeak when applied to metric units, jargon when used otherwise. Derived from the Greek letter "mu", the first letter of "micro" (and which letter looks a lot like the English letter "u").

Node:UBD, Next:UBE, Previous:u-, Up:= U =

UBD /U-B-D/ n.

[abbreviation for `User Brain Damage'] An abbreviation used to close out trouble reports obviously due to utter cluelessness on the user's part. Compare pilot error; oppose PBD; see also brain-damaged.

Node:UBE, Next:UCE, Previous:UBD, Up:= U =

UBE // n.

[abbrev., Unsoliclited Bulk Email] A widespread, more formal term for email spam. Compare UCE. The UBE term recognizes that spam is uttered by nonprofit and advocacy groups whose motives are not commercial.

Node:UCE, Next:UDP, Previous:UBE, Up:= U =

UCE n.

[abbrev., Unsolicited Commercial Email] A widespread, more formal term for email spam. Compare UBE, which may be superseding it.

Node:UDP, Next:UN*X, Previous:UCE, Up:= U =

UDP /U-D-P/ v.,n.

[Usenet] Abbreviation for Usenet Death Penalty. Common (probably now more so than the full form), and frequently verbed. Compare IDP.

Node:UN*X, Next:undefined external reference, Previous:UDP, Up:= U =

UN*X n.

Used to refer to the Unix operating system (a trademark of AT&T, then of Novell, then of SCO, and then of Caldera) in writing, but avoiding the need for the ugly (TM) typography. Also used to refer to any or all varieties of Unixoid operating systems. Ironically, lawyers now say that the requirement for the trademark postfix has no legal force, but the asterisk usage is entrenched anyhow. It has been suggested that there may be a psychological connection to practice in certain religions (especially Judaism) in which the name of the deity is never written out in full, e.g., `YHWH' or `G-d' is used. See also glob and splat out.

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undefined external reference excl.

[Unix] A message from Unix's linker. Used in speech to flag loose ends or dangling references in an argument or discussion.

Node:under the hood, Next:undocumented feature, Previous:undefined external reference, Up:= U =

under the hood adj.

[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!"

Node:undocumented feature, Next:uninteresting, Previous:under the hood, Up:= U =

undocumented feature n.

See feature.

Node:uninteresting, Next:Unix, Previous:undocumented feature, Up:= U =

uninteresting adj.

1. Said of a problem that, although nontrivial, can be solved simply by throwing sufficient resources at it. 2. Also said of problems for which a solution would neither advance the state of the art nor be fun to design and code.

Hackers regard uninteresting problems as intolerable wastes of time, to be solved (if at all) by lesser mortals. Real hackers (see toolsmith) generalize uninteresting problems enough to make them interesting and solve them -- thus solving the original problem as a special case (and, it must be admitted, occasionally turning a molehill into a mountain, or a mountain into a tectonic plate). See WOMBAT, SMOP; compare toy problem, oppose interesting.

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Unix /yoo'niks/ n.

[In the authors' words, "A weak pun on Multics"; very early on it was `UNICS'] (also `UNIX') An interactive time-sharing system invented in 1969 by Ken Thompson after Bell Labs left the Multics project, originally so he could play games on his scavenged PDP-7. Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of C, is considered a co-author of the system. The turning point in Unix's history came when it was reimplemented almost entirely in C during 1972-1974, making it the first source-portable OS. Unix subsequently underwent mutations and expansions at the hands of many different people, resulting in a uniquely flexible and developer-friendly environment. By 1991, Unix had become the most widely used multiuser general-purpose operating system in the world - and since 1996 the variiant called Linux has been at the cutting edge of the open source movement. Many people consider the success of Unix the most important victory yet of hackerdom over industry opposition (but see Unix weenie and Unix conspiracy for an opposing point of view). See Version 7, BSD, USG Unix, Linux.

Some people are confused over whether this word is appropriately `UNIX' or `Unix'; both forms are common, and used interchangeably. Dennis Ritchie says that the `UNIX' spelling originally happened in CACM's 1974 paper "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" because "we had a new typesetter and troff had just been invented and we were intoxicated by being able to produce small caps." Later, dmr tried to get the spelling changed to `Unix' in a couple of Bell Labs papers, on the grounds that the word is not acronymic. He failed, and eventually (his words) "wimped out" on the issue. So, while the trademark today is `UNIX', both capitalizations are grounded in ancient usage; the Jargon File uses `Unix' in deference to dmr's wishes.

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Unix brain damage n.

Something that has to be done to break a network program (typically a mailer) on a non-Unix system so that it will interoperate with Unix systems. The hack may qualify as `Unix brain damage' if the program conforms to published standards and the Unix program in question does not. Unix brain damage happens because it is much easier for other (minority) systems to change their ways to match non-conforming behavior than it is to change all the hundreds of thousands of Unix systems out there.

An example of Unix brain damage is a kluge in a mail server to recognize bare line feed (the Unix newline) as an equivalent form to the Internet standard newline, which is a carriage return followed by a line feed. Such things can make even a hardened jock weep.

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Unix conspiracy n.

[ITS] According to a conspiracy theory long popular among ITS and TOPS-20 fans, Unix's growth is the result of a plot, hatched during the 1970s at Bell Labs, whose intent was to hobble AT&T's competitors by making them dependent upon a system whose future evolution was to be under AT&T's control. This would be accomplished by disseminating an operating system that is apparently inexpensive and easily portable, but also relatively unreliable and insecure (so as to require continuing upgrades from AT&T). This theory was lent a substantial impetus in 1984 by the paper referenced in the back door entry.

In this view, Unix was designed to be one of the first computer viruses (see virus) -- but a virus spread to computers indirectly by people and market forces, rather than directly through disks and networks. Adherents of this `Unix virus' theory like to cite the fact that the well-known quotation "Unix is snake oil" was uttered by DEC president Kenneth Olsen shortly before DEC began actively promoting its own family of Unix workstations. (Olsen now claims to have been misquoted.)

[If there was ever such a conspiracy, it got thoroughly out of the plotters' control after 1990. AT&T sold its UNIX operation to Novell around the same time Linux and other free-UNIX distributions were beginning to make noise. --ESR]

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Unix weenie n.

[ITS] 1. A derogatory play on `Unix wizard', common among hackers who use Unix by necessity but would prefer alternatives. The implication is that although the person in question may consider mastery of Unix arcana to be a wizardly skill, the only real skill involved is the ability to tolerate (and the bad taste to wallow in) the incoherence and needless complexity that is alleged to infest many Unix programs. "This shell script tries to parse its arguments in 69 bletcherous ways. It must have been written by a real Unix weenie." 2. A derogatory term for anyone who engages in uncritical praise of Unix. Often appearing in the context "stupid Unix weenie". See Weenix, Unix conspiracy. See also weenie.

Node:unixism, Next:unswizzle, Previous:Unix weenie, Up:= U =

unixism n.