The New Hacker's Dictionary
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[acronym: Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time] Applied to problems which are both profoundly [14839]uninteresting in themselves and unlikely to benefit anyone interesting even if solved. Often used in fanciful constructions such as `wrestling with a wombat'. See also [14840]crawling horror, [14841]SMOP. Also note the rather different usage as a metasyntactic variable in [14842]Commonwealth Hackish.
Users of the PDP-11 database program DATATRIEVE adopted the wombat as their notional mascot; the program's help file responded to "HELP WOMBAT" with factual information about Real World wombats.
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womble n.
[Unisys UK: from British animated characters] A user who has great difficulty in communicating their requirements and/or in using the resulting software. Extreme case of [14846]luser. An especially senior or high-ranking womble is referred to as Great-Uncle Bulgaria.
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wonky /wong'kee/ adj.
[from Australian slang] Yet another approximate synonym for [14850]broken. Specifically connotes a malfunction that produces behavior seen as crazy, humorous, or amusingly perverse. "That was the day the printer's font logic went wonky and everybody's listings came out in Tengwar." Also in `wonked out'. See [14851]funky, [14852]demented, [14853]bozotic.
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woofer n.
[University of Waterloo] Some varieties of wide paper for printers have a perforation 8.5 inches from the left margin that allows the excess on the right-hand side to be torn off when the print format is 80 columns or less wide. The right-hand excess may be called `woofer'. This term (like [14857]tweeter) has been in use at Waterloo since 1972, but is elsewhere unknown. In audio jargon, the word refers to the bass speaker(s) on a hi-fi.
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workaround n.
1. A temporary [14861]kluge used to bypass, mask, or otherwise avoid a [14862]bug or [14863]misfeature in some system. Theoretically, workarounds are always replaced by [14864]fixes; in practice, customers often find themselves living with workarounds for long periods of time. "The code died on NUL characters in the input, so I fixed it to interpret them as spaces." "That's not a fix, that's a workaround!" 2. A procedure to be employed by the user in order to do what some currently non-working feature should do. Hypothetical example: "Using META-F7 [14865]crashes the 4.43 build of Weemax, but as a workaround you can type CTRL-R, then SHIFT-F5, and delete the remaining [14866]cruft by hand."
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working as designed adj.
[IBM] 1. In conformance to a wrong or inappropriate specification; useful, but misdesigned. 2. Frequently used as a sardonic comment on a program's utility. 3. Unfortunately also used as a bogus reason for not accepting a criticism or suggestion. At [14870]IBM, this sense is used in official documents! See [14871]BAD.
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worm n.
[from `tapeworm' in John Brunner's novel "The Shockwave Rider", via XEROX PARC] A program that propagates itself over a network, reproducing itself as it goes. Compare [14875]virus. Nowadays the term has negative connotations, as it is assumed that only [14876]crackers write worms. Perhaps the best-known example was Robert T. Morris's [14877]Great Worm of 1988, a `benign' one that got out of control and hogged hundreds of Suns and VAXen across the U.S. See also [14878]cracker, [14879]RTM, [14880]Trojan horse, [14881]ice.
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wormhole /werm'hohl/ n.
[from the `wormhole' singularities hypothesized in some versions of General Relativity theory] 1. [n.,obs.] A location in a monitor which contains the address of a routine, with the specific intent of making it easy to substitute a different routine. This term is now obsolescent; modern operating systems use clusters of wormholes extensively (for
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modularization of I/O handling in particular, as in the Unix device-driver organization) but the preferred techspeak for these clusters is `device tables', `jump tables' or `capability tables'. 2. [Amateur Packet Radio] A network path using a commercial satellite link to join two or more amateur VHF networks. So called because traffic routed through a wormhole leaves and re-enters the amateur network over great distances with usually little clue in the message routing header as to how it got from one relay to the other. Compare [14885]gopher hole (sense 2).
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wound around the axle adj.
In an infinite loop. Often used by older computer types.
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wrap around vi.
(also n. `wraparound' and v. shorthand `wrap') 1. [techspeak] The action of a counter that starts over at zero or at `minus infinity' (see [14892]infinity) after its maximum value has been reached, and continues incrementing, either because it is programmed to do so or because of an overflow (as when a car's odometer starts over at 0). 2. To change [14893]phase gradually and continuously by maintaining a steady wake-sleep cycle somewhat longer than 24 hours, e.g., living six long (28-hour) days in a week (or, equivalently, sleeping at the rate of 10 microhertz). This sense is also called [14894]phase-wrapping.
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write-only code n.
[a play on `read-only memory'] Code so arcane, complex, or ill-structured that it cannot be modified or even comprehended by anyone but its author, and possibly not even by him/her. A [14898]Bad Thing.
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write-only language n.
A language with syntax (or semantics) sufficiently dense and bizarre that any routine of significant size is automatically [14902]write-only code. A sobriquet applied occasionally to C and often to APL, though [14903]INTERCAL and [14904]TECO certainly deserve it more. See also [14905]Befunge.
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write-only memory n.
The obvious antonym to `read-only memory'. Out of frustration with the long and seemingly useless chain of approvals required of component specifications, during which no actual checking seemed to occur, an engineer at Signetics once created a specification for a write-only memory and included it with a bunch of other specifications to be approved. This inclusion came to the attention of Signetics [14909]management only when regular customers started calling and asking for pricing information.
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Signetics published a corrected edition of the data book and requested the return of the `erroneous' ones. Later, in 1972, Signetics bought a double-page spread in "Electronics" magazine's April issue and used the spec as an April Fools' Day joke. Instead of the more conventional characteristic curves, the 25120 "fully encoded, 9046 x N, Random Access, write-only-memory" data sheet included diagrams of "bit capacity vs. Temp.", "Iff vs. Vff", "Number of pins remaining vs. number of socket insertions", and "AQL vs. selling price". The 25120 required a 6.3 VAC VFF supply, a +10V VCC, and VDD of 0V, +/- 2%.
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Wrong Thing n.
A design, action, or decision that is clearly incorrect or inappropriate. Often capitalized; always emphasized in speech as if capitalized. The opposite of the [14913]Right Thing; more generally, anything that is not the Right Thing. In cases where `the good is the enemy of the best', the merely good -- although good -- is nevertheless the Wrong Thing. "In C, the default is for module-level declarations to be visible everywhere, rather than just within the module. This is clearly the Wrong Thing."
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wugga wugga /wuh'g* wuh'g*/ n.
Imaginary sound that a computer program makes as it labors with a tedious or difficult task.[14917]grind (sense 4).
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wumpus /wuhm'p*s/ n.
The central monster (and, in many versions, the name) of a famous family of very early computer games called "Hunt The Wumpus'. The original was invented in 1970 (several years before [14921]ADVENT) by Gregory Yob. The wumpus lived somewhere in a cave with the topology of an dodecahedron's edge/vertex graph (later versions supported other topologies, including an icosahedron and Mšbius strip). The player started somewhere at random in the cave with five `crooked arrows'; these could be shot through up to three connected rooms, and would kill the wumpus on a hit (later versions introduced the wounded wumpus, which got very angry). Unfortunately for players, the movement necessary to map the maze was made hazardous not merely by the wumpus (which would eat you if you stepped on him) but also by bottomless pits and colonies of super bats that would pick you up and drop you at a random location (later versions added `anaerobic termites' that ate arrows, bat migrations, and earthquakes that randomly changed pit locations).
This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like the even older Star Trek games). In this respect, as in the dungeon-like setting and its terse, amusing messages, it prefigured [14922]ADVENT and [14923]Zork and was directly ancestral to the latter (Zork acknowledged this heritage by including a super-bat colony). A C emulation of the original Basic game is available at the Retrocomputing Museum, [14924]http://www.ccil.org/retro.
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WYSIAYG /wiz'ee-ayg/ adj.
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Describes a user interface under which "What You See Is All You Get"; an unhappy variant of [14928]WYSIWYG. Visual, `point-and-shoot'-style interfaces tend to have easy initial learning curves, but also to lack depth; they often frustrate advanced users who would be better served by a command-style interface. When this happens, the frustrated user has a WYSIAYG problem. This term is most often used of editors, word processors, and document formatting programs. WYSIWYG `desktop publishing' programs, for example, are a clear win for creating small documents with lots of fonts and graphics in them, especially things like newsletters and presentation slides. When typesetting book-length manuscripts, on the other hand, scale changes the nature of the task; one quickly runs into WYSIAYG limitations, and the increased power and flexibility of a command-driven formatter like [14929]TeX or Unix's [14930]troff becomes not just desirable but a necessity. Compare [14931]YAFIYGI.
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WYSIWYG /wiz'ee-wig/ adj.
[Traced to Flip Wilson's "Geraldine" character c.1970] Describes a user interface under which "What You See Is What You Get", as opposed to one that uses more-or-less obscure commands that do not result in immediate visual feedback. True WYSIWYG in environments supporting multiple fonts or graphics is a a rarely-attained ideal; there are variants of this term to express real-world manifestations including WYSIAWYG (What You See Is Almost What You Get) and WYSIMOLWYG (What You See Is More or Less What You Get). All these can be mildly derogatory, as they are often used to refer to dumbed-down [14935]user-friendly interfaces targeted at non-programmers; a hacker has no fear of obscure commands (compare [14936]WYSIAYG). On the other hand, [14937]EMACS was one of the very first WYSIWYG editors, replacing (actually, at first overlaying) the extremely obscure, command-based [14938]TECO. See
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also [14939]WIMP environment. [Oddly enough, WYSIWYG has already made it into the OED, in lower case yet. --ESR]
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*[14943]X:
*[14944]XEROX PARC:
*[14945]XOFF:
*[14946]XON:
*[14947]xor:
*[14948]xref:
*[14949]XXX:
*[14950]xyzzy:
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X /X/ n.
1. Used in various speech and writing contexts (also in lowercase) in roughly its algebraic sense of `unknown within a set defined by context' (compare [14954]N). Thus, the abbreviation 680x0 stands for 68000,
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68010, 68020, 68030, or 68040, and 80x86 stands for 80186, 80286, 80386, 80486, 80586 or 80686 (note that a Unix hacker might write these as 680[0-6]0 and 80[1-6]86 or 680?0 and 80?86 respectively; see [14955]glob). 2. [after the name of an earlier window system called `W'] An over-sized, over-featured, over-engineered and incredibly over-complicated window system developed at MIT and widely used on Unix systems.
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XEROX PARC /zee'roks park'/ n.
The famed Palo Alto Research Center. For more than a decade, from the early 1970s into the mid-1980s, PARC yielded an astonishing volume of groundbreaking hardware and software innovations. The modern mice, windows, and icons style of software interface was invented there. So was the laser printer and the local-area network; and PARC's series of D machines anticipated the powerful personal computers of the 1980s by a decade. Sadly, the prophets at PARC were without honor in their own company, so much so that it became a standard joke to describe PARC as a place that specialized in developing brilliant ideas for everyone else.
The stunning shortsightedness and obtusity of XEROX's top-level [14959]suits has been well anatomized in "Fumbling The Future: How XEROX Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer" by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander (William Morrow & Co., 1988, ISBN 0-688-09511-9).
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