The New Hacker's Dictionary

1011

spoiler space

[also `spoiler spoo'] A screenful of blank lines (and, often, form-feeds) deliberately inserted in a message following a [12640]spoiler warning, so the actual spoiler can't be seen without hitting a key.

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sponge n.

[Unix] A special case of a [12644]filter that reads its entire input before writing any output; the canonical example is a sort utility. Unlike most filters, a sponge can conveniently overwrite the input file with the output data stream. If a file system has versioning (as ITS did and VMS does now) the sponge/filter distinction loses its usefulness, because directing filter output would just write a new version. See also [12645]slurp.

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spoof vi.

To capture, alter, and retransmit a communication stream in a way that misleads the recipient. As used by hackers, refers especially to altering TCP/IP packet source addresses or other packet-header data in order to masquerade as a trusted machine. This term has become very widespread and is borderline techspeak.

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1012

spool vi.

[from early IBM `Simultaneous Peripheral Operation On-Line', but is widely thought to be a [12652]backronym] To send files to some device or program (a `spooler') that queues them up and does something useful with them later. Without qualification, the spooler is the `print spooler' controlling output of jobs to a printer; but the term has been used in connection with other peripherals (especially plotters and graphics devices) and occasionally even for input devices. See also [12653]demon.

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spool file n.

Any file to which data is [12657]spooled to await the next stage of processing. Especially used in circumstances where spooling the data copes with a mismatch between speeds in two devices or pieces of software. For example, when you send mail under Unix, it's typically copied to a spool file to await a transport [12658]demon's attentions. This is borderline techspeak.

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spungle n.

[Durham, UK; portmanteau, [12662]spangle + bungle] A [12663]spangle of no actual usefulness. Example: Roger the Bent Paperclip in Microsoft Word '98. A spungle's only virtue is that it looks pretty, unless you find creeping featurism ugly.

1013

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square tape n.

Mainframe magnetic tape cartridges for use with IBM 3480 or compatible tape drives; or QIC tapes used on workstations and micros. The term comes from the square (actually rectangular) shape of the cartridges; contrast [12667]round tape.

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squirrelcide n.

[common on Usenet's comp.risks newsgroup.] (alt. `squirrelicide') What all too frequently happens when a squirrel decides to exercise its species's unfortunate penchant for shorting out power lines with their little furry bodies. Result: one dead squirrel, one down computer installation. In this situation, the computer system is said to have been squirrelcided.

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stack n.

The set of things a person has to do in the future. One speaks of the next project to be attacked as having risen to the top of the stack. "I'm afraid I've got real work to do, so this'll have to be pushed way down on my stack." "I haven't done it yet because every time I pop my stack something new gets

1014

pushed." If you are interrupted several times in the middle of a conversation, "My stack overflowed" means "I forget what we were talking about." The implication is that more items were pushed onto the stack than could be remembered, so the least recent items were lost. The usual physical example of a stack is to be found in a cafeteria: a pile of plates or trays sitting on a spring in a well, so that when you put one on the top they all sink down, and when you take one off the top the rest spring up a bit. See also [12674]push and [12675]pop.

At MIT, [12676]PDL used to be a more common synonym for [12677]stack in all these contexts, and this may still be true. Everywhere else [12678]stack seems to be the preferred term. [12679]Knuth ("The Art of Computer Programming", second edition, vol. 1, p. 236) says:

Many people who realized the importance of stacks and queues independently have given other names to these structures: stacks have been called push-down lists, reversion storages, cellars, nesting stores, piles, last-in-first-out ("LIFO") lists, and even yo-yo lists!

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stack puke n.

Some processor architectures are said to `puke their guts onto the stack' to save their internal state during exception processing. The Motorola 68020, for example, regurgitates up to 92 bytes on a bus fault. On a pipelined machine, this can take a while.

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1015

stale pointer bug n.

Synonym for [12686]aliasing bug used esp. among microcomputer hackers.

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star out v.

[University of York, England] To replace a user's encrypted password in /etc/passwd with a single asterisk. Under Unix this is not a legal encryption of any password; hence the user is not permitted to log in. In general, accounts like adm, news, and daemon are permanently "starred out"; occasionally a real user might have the this inflicted upon him/her as a punishment, e.g. "Graham was starred out for playing Omega in working hours". Also occasionally known as The Order Of The Gold Star in this context. "Don't do that, or you'll be awarded the Order of the Gold Star..." Compare [12690]disusered.

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state n.

1. Condition, situation. "What's the state of your latest hack?" "It's winning away." "The system tried to read and write the disk simultaneously and got into a totally [12694]wedged state." The standard question "What's your state?" means "What are you doing?" or "What are you about to do?" Typical answers are "about to gronk out", or "hungry". Another standard question is "What's the state of the world?", meaning "What's new?" or "What's going on?". The more terse and humorous way of asking these questions would be "State-p?". Another way of phrasing the first question

1016

under sense 1 would be "state-p latest hack?". 2. Information being maintained in non-permanent memory (electronic or human).

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stealth manager n.

[Corporate DP] A manager that appears out of nowhere, promises undeliverable software to unknown end users, and vanishes before the programming staff realizes what has happened. See [12698]smoke and mirrors.

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steam-powered adj.

Old-fashioned or underpowered; archaic. This term does not have a strong negative loading and may even be used semi-affectionately for something that clanks and wheezes a lot but hangs in there doing the job.

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STFW imp. /S-T-F-W/

[Usenet] Commmon abbreviation for "Search The Fucking Web", a suggestion that what you're asking for is a query better handled by a search engine than a human being. Usage is common and exactly parallel to both

1018

To inadvertently overwrite something important, usually automatically. "All the work I did this weekend got stomped on last night by the nightly server script." Compare [12722]scribble, [12723]mangle, [12724]trash, [12725]scrog, [12726]roach.

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Stone Age n.,adj.

1. In computer folklore, an ill-defined period from ENIAC (ca. 1943) to the mid-1950s; the great age of electromechanical [12730]dinosaurs. Sometimes used for the entire period up to 1960-61 (see [12731]Iron Age); however, it is funnier and more descriptive to characterize the latter period in terms of a `Bronze Age' era of transistor-logic, pre-ferrite-[12732]core machines with drum or CRT mass storage (as opposed to just mercury delay lines and/or relays). See also [12733]Iron Age. 2. More generally, a pejorative for any crufty, ancient piece of hardware or software technology. Note that this is used even by people who were there for the [12734]Stone Age (sense 1).

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stone knives and bearskins n.

[from the Star Trek Classic episode "The City on the Edge of Forever"] A term traditionally used to describe (and deprecate) computing environments that are grotesquely primitive in light of what is known about good ways to design things. As in "Don't get too used to the facilities here. Once you leave SAIL it's stone knives and bearskins as far as the eye can see". Compare [12738]steam-powered.

1019

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stoppage /sto'p*j/ n.

Extreme [12742]lossage that renders something (usually something vital) completely unusable. "The recent system stoppage was caused by a [12743]fried transformer."

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store n.

[prob. from techspeak `main store'] In some varieties of Commonwealth hackish, the preferred synonym for [12747]core. Thus, `bringing a program into store' means not that one is returning shrink-wrapped software but that a program is being [12748]swapped in.

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strided /stri:'d*d/ adj.

[scientific computing] Said of a sequence of memory reads and writes to addresses, each of which is separated from the last by a constant interval called the `stride length'. These can be a worst-case access pattern for the standard memory-caching schemes when the stride length is a multiple of the cache line size. Strided references are often generated by loops through an array, and (if your data is large enough that access-time is significant) it can be worthwhile to tune for better locality by inverting double loops or by