The New Hacker's Dictionary

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Node:troglodyte, Next:[13642]troglodyte mode, Previous:[13643]troff, Up:[13644]= T =

troglodyte n.

[Commodore] 1. A hacker who never leaves his cubicle. The term `gnoll' (from Dungeons & Dragons) is also reported. 2. A curmudgeon attached to an obsolescent computing environment. The combination `ITS troglodyte' was flung around some during the Usenet and email wringle-wrangle attending the 2.x.x revision of the Jargon File; at least one of the people it was intended to describe adopted it with pride.

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Node:troglodyte mode, Next:[13645]Trojan horse,

Previous:[13646]troglodyte, Up:[13647]= T =

troglodyte mode n.

[Rice University] Programming with the lights turned off, sunglasses on, and the terminal inverted (black on white) because you've been up for so many days straight that your eyes hurt (see [13648]raster burn). Loud music blaring from a stereo stacked in the corner is optional but recommended. See [13649]larval stage, [13650]hack mode.

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Node:Trojan horse, Next:[13651]troll, Previous:[13652]troglodyte mode, Up:[13653]= T =

Trojan horse n.

[coined by MIT-hacker-turned-NSA-spook Dan Edwards] A malicious, security-breaking program that is disguised as something benign, such as a directory lister, archiver, game, or (in one notorious 1990 case on the Mac) a program to find and destroy viruses! See [13654]back door, [13655]virus,

1092

[13656]worm, [13657]phage, [13658]mockingbird.

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Node:troll, Next:[13659]Troll-O-Meter, Previous:[13660]Trojan horse, Up:[13661]= T =

troll v.,n.

1. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on [13662]Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or [13663]flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase "trolling for [13664]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 [13665]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 [13666]flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial. See also [13667]Troll-O-Meter.

1093

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.

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Node:Troll-O-Meter, Next:[13668]tron, Previous:[13669]troll,

Up:[13670]= T =

Troll-O-Meter n.

Common Usenet jargon for a notional instrument used to measure the quality of a Usenet [13671]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 [13672]bogometer.

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Node:tron, Next:[13673]true-hacker, Previous:[13674]Troll-O-Meter,

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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 [13676]spod.

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

1095

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?"

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Node:tube time, Next:[13689]tunafish, Previous:[13690]tube, Up:[13691]= 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."

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Node:tunafish, Next:[13692]tune, Previous:[13693]tube time, Up:[13694]= 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 [13695]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

1096

versions by humorless management [13696]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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Node:tune, Next:[13697]turbo nerd, Previous:[13698]tunafish, Up:[13699]= T =

tune vt.

[from automotive or musical usage] To optimize a program or system for a particular environment, esp. by adjusting numerical parameters designed as [13700]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 [13701]bum, [13702]hot spot, [13703]hand-hacking.

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Node:turbo nerd, Next:[13704]Turing tar-pit, Previous:[13705]tune, Up:[13706]= T =

turbo nerd n.

See [13707]computer geek.

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Node:Turing tar-pit, Next:[13708]turist, Previous:[13709]turbo nerd, Up:[13710]= T =

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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 [13711]bondage-and-discipline language. 2. The perennial [13712]holy wars over whether language A or B is the "most powerful".

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Node:turist, Next:[13713]Tux, Previous:[13714]Turing tar-pit, Up:[13715]= T =

turist /too'rist/ n.

Var. sp. of [13716]tourist, q.v. Also in adjectival form, `turistic'. Poss. influenced by [13717]luser and `Turing'.

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Node:Tux, Next:[13718]tweak, Previous:[13719]turist, Up:[13720]= T =

Tux

Tux the Penguin is the official emblem of [13721]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 [13722]postings. Linus

1099

[University of Waterloo] Syn. [13737]perf, [13738]chad (sense 1). This term (like [13739]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.

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Node:TWENEX, Next:[13740]twiddle, Previous:[13741]tweeter,

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TWENEX /twe'neks/ n.

The TOPS-20 operating system by [13743]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 [13744]ITS or [13745]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