The New Hacker's Dictionary
.pdf1141
*[14284]washing machine:
*[14285]washing software:
*[14286]water MIPS:
*[14287]wave a dead chicken:
*[14288]weasel:
*[14289]web pointer:
*[14290]web toaster:
*[14291]webify:
*[14292]webmaster:
*[14293]web ring:
*[14294]wedged:
*[14295]wedgie:
*[14296]wedgitude:
*[14297]weeble:
*[14298]weeds:
*[14299]weenie:
*[14300]Weenix:
*[14301]well-behaved:
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*[14302]well-connected:
*[14303]wetware:
*[14304]whack:
*[14305]whack-a-mole:
*[14306]whacker:
*[14307]whales:
*[14308]whalesong:
*[14309]What's a spline?:
*[14310]wheel:
*[14311]wheel bit:
*[14312]wheel of reincarnation:
*[14313]wheel wars:
*[14314]White Book:
*[14315]whitelist:
*[14316]whizzy:
*[14317]wibble:
*[14318]WIBNI:
*[14319]widget:
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*[14320]wiggles:
*[14321]WIMP environment:
*[14322]win:
*[14323]win big:
*[14324]win win:
*[14325]Winchester:
*[14326]windoid:
*[14327]window shopping:
*[14328]Windoze:
*[14329]winged comments:
*[14330]winkey:
*[14331]winnage:
*[14332]winner:
*[14333]winnitude:
*[14334]Wintel:
*[14335]wired:
*[14336]wirehead:
*[14337]wirewater:
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*[14338]wish list:
*[14339]within delta of:
*[14340]within epsilon of:
*[14341]wizard:
*[14342]Wizard Book:
*[14343]wizard hat:
*[14344]wizard mode:
*[14345]wizardly:
*[14346]wok-on-the-wall:
*[14347]womb box:
*[14348]WOMBAT:
*[14349]womble:
*[14350]wonky:
*[14351]woofer:
*[14352]workaround:
*[14353]working as designed:
*[14354]worm:
*[14355]wormhole:
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*[14356]wound around the axle:
*[14357]wrap around:
*[14358]write-only code:
*[14359]write-only language:
*[14360]write-only memory:
*[14361]Wrong Thing:
*[14362]wugga wugga:
*[14363]wumpus:
*[14364]WYSIAYG:
*[14365]WYSIWYG:
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Node:W2K bug, Next:[14366]wabbit, Previous:[14367]vulture capitalist, Up:[14368]= W =
W2K bug
[from `Y2K bug' for the Year 2000 problem] The upcoming deployment of Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system, which hackers generally expect will be among the worst train wrecks in the history of software engineering. Such is the power of Microsoft marketing, however, that it is also expected this will not become obvious until it has incurred hundreds of millions of dollars in downtime and lost opportunity costs.
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Node:wabbit, Next:[14369]WAITS, Previous:[14370]W2K bug, Up:[14371]= W =
wabbit /wab'it/ n.
[almost certainly from Elmer Fudd's immortal line "You wascawwy wabbit!"] 1. A legendary early hack reported on a System/360 at RPI and elsewhere around 1978; this may have descended (if only by inspiration) from a hack called RABBITS reported from 1969 on a Burroughs 5500 at the University of Washington Computer Center. The program would make two copies of itself every time it was run, eventually crashing the system. 2. By extension, any hack that includes infinite self-replication but is not a [14372]virus or [14373]worm. See [14374]fork bomb and [14375]rabbit job, see also [14376]cookie monster.
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Node:WAITS, Next:[14377]waldo, Previous:[14378]wabbit, Up:[14379]=
W =
WAITS /wayts/ n.
The mutant cousin of [14380]TOPS-10 used on a handful of systems at [14381]SAIL up to 1990. There was never an `official' expansion of WAITS (the name itself having been arrived at by a rather sideways process), but it was frequently glossed as `West-coast Alternative to ITS'. Though WAITS was less visible than ITS, there was frequent exchange of people and ideas between the two communities, and innovations pioneered at WAITS exerted enormous indirect influence. The early screen modes of [14382]EMACS, for example, were directly inspired by WAITS's `E' editor -- one of a family of editors that were the first to do `real-time editing', in which the editing commands were invisible and where one typed text at the point of insertion/overwriting. The modern style of multi-region windowing is said to have originated there, and WAITS alumni at XEROX PARC and elsewhere played major roles in the developments that led to the XEROX Star, the Macintosh, and the Sun workstations. Also invented there were
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[14383]bucky bits -- thus, the ALT key on every IBM PC is a WAITS legacy. One WAITS feature very notable in pre-Web days was a news-wire interface that allowed WAITS hackers to read, store, and filter AP and UPI dispatches from their terminals; the system also featured a still-unusual level of support for what is now called `multimedia' computing, allowing analog audio and video signals to be switched to programming terminals.
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Node:waldo, Next:[14384]walk, Previous:[14385]WAITS, Up:[14386]= W
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waldo /wol'doh/ n.
[From Robert A. Heinlein's story "Waldo"] 1. A mechanical agent, such as a gripper arm, controlled by a human limb. When these were developed for the nuclear industry in the mid-1940s they were named after the invention described by Heinlein in the story, which he wrote in 1942. Now known by the more generic term `telefactoring', this technology is of intense interest to NASA for tasks like space station maintenance. 2. At Harvard (particularly by Tom Cheatham and students), this is used instead of [14387]foobar as a metasyntactic variable and general nonsense word. See [14388]foo, [14389]bar, [14390]foobar, [14391]quux.
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Node:walk, Next:[14392]walk off the end of, Previous:[14393]waldo, Up:[14394]= W =
walk n.,vt.
Traversal of a data structure, especially an array or linked-list data structure in [14395]core. See also [14396]codewalker, [14397]silly walk, [14398]clobber.
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Node:walk off the end of, Next:[14399]walking drives,
Previous:[14400]walk, Up:[14401]= W =
walk off the end of vt.
To run past the end of an array, list, or medium after stepping through it -- a good way to land in trouble. Often the result of an [14402]off-by-one error. Compare [14403]clobber, [14404]roach, [14405]smash the stack.
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Node:walking drives, Next:[14406]wall, Previous:[14407]walk off the end of, Up:[14408]= W =
walking drives n.
An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky [14409]washing machines. Those old [14410]dinosaur parts carried terrific angular momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn bearings and stick-slip interactions with the floor could cause them to `walk' across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a couple of millimeters at a time. There is a legend about a drive that walked over to the only door to the computer room and jammed it shut; the staff had to cut a hole in the wall in order to get at it! Walking could also be induced by certain patterns of drive access (a fast seek across the whole width of the disk, followed by a slow seek in the other direction). Some bands of old-time hackers figured out how to induce disk-accessing patterns that would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive races.
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Node:wall, Next:[14411]wall follower, Previous:[14412]walking drives, Up:[14413]= W =
wall interj.
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[WPI] 1. An indication of confusion, usually spoken with a quizzical tone: "Wall??" 2. A request for further explication. Compare [14414]octal forty. 3. [Unix, from `write all'] v. To send a message to everyone currently logged in, esp. with the wall(8) utility.
It is said that sense 1 came from the idiom `like talking to a blank wall'. It was originally used in situations where, after you had carefully answered a question, the questioner stared at you blankly, clearly having understood nothing that was explained. You would then throw out a "Hello, wall?" to elicit some sort of response from the questioner. Later, confused questioners began voicing "Wall?" themselves.
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Node:wall follower, Next:[14415]wall time, Previous:[14416]wall, Up:[14417]= W =
wall follower n.
A person or algorithm that compensates for lack of sophistication or native stupidity by efficiently following some simple procedure shown to have been effective in the past. Used of an algorithm, this is not necessarily pejorative; it recalls `Harvey Wallbanger', the winning robot in an early AI contest (named, of course, after the cocktail). Harvey successfully solved mazes by keeping a `finger' on one wall and running till it came out the other end. This was inelegant, but it was mathematically guaranteed to work on simply-connected mazes -- and, in fact, Harvey outperformed more sophisticated robots that tried to `learn' each maze by building an internal representation of it. Used of humans, the term is pejorative and implies an uncreative, bureaucratic, by-the-book mentality. See also [14418]code grinder; compare [14419]droid.
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Node:wall time, Next:[14420]wall wart, Previous:[14421]wall follower, Up:[14422]= W =
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wall time n.
(also `wall clock time') 1. `Real world' time (what the clock on the wall shows), as opposed to the system clock's idea of time. 2. The real running time of a program, as opposed to the number of [14423]ticks required to execute it (on a timesharing system these always differ, as no one program gets all the ticks, and on multiprocessor systems with good thread support one may get more processor time than real time).
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Node:wall wart, Next:[14424]wallpaper, Previous:[14425]wall time, Up:[14426]= W =
wall wart n.
A small power-supply brick with integral male plug, designed to plug directly into a wall outlet; called a `wart' because when installed on a power strip it tends to block up at least one more socket than it uses.. These are frequently associated with modems and other small electronic devices which would become unacceptably bulky or hot if they had power supplies on board (there are other reasons as well having to do with the cost of UL certification).
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Node:wallpaper, Next:[14427]wango, Previous:[14428]wall wart, Up:[14429]= W =
wallpaper n.
1. A file containing a listing (e.g., assembly listing) or a transcript, esp. a file containing a transcript of all or part of a login session. (The idea was that the paper for such listings was essentially good only for wallpaper, as evidenced at Stanford, where it was used to cover windows.) Now rare, esp. since other systems have developed other terms for it (e.g., PHOTO on