The New Hacker's Dictionary
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widely displaced by `debugger' or names of individual programs like adb, sdb, dbx, or gdb. 2. [ITS] Under MIT's fabled [3663]ITS operating system, DDT (running under the alias HACTRN, a six-letterism for `Hack Translator') was also used as the [3664]shell or top level command language used to execute other programs. 3. Any one of several specific DDTs (sense 1) supported on early [3665]DEC hardware and CP/M. The PDP-10 Reference Handbook (1969) contained a footnote on the first page of the documentation for DDT that illuminates the origin of the term:
Historical footnote: DDT was developed at MIT for the PDP-1 computer in 1961. At that time DDT stood for "DEC Debugging Tape". Since then, the idea of an on-line debugging program has propagated throughout the computer industry. DDT programs are now available for all DEC computers. Since media other than tape are now frequently used, the more descriptive name "Dynamic Debugging Technique" has been adopted, retaining the DDT abbreviation. Confusion between DDT-10 and another well known pesticide, dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (C14-H9-Cl5) should be minimal since each attacks a different, and apparently mutually exclusive, class of bugs.
(The `tape' referred to was, incidentally, not magnetic but paper.) Sadly, this quotation was removed from later editions of the handbook after the [3666]suits took over and [3667]DEC became much more `businesslike'.
The history above is known to many old-time hackers. But there's more: Peter Samson, compiler of the original [3668]TMRC lexicon, reports that he named `DDT' after a similar tool on the TX-0 computer, the direct ancestor of the PDP-1 built at MIT's Lincoln Lab in 1957. The debugger on that ground-breaking machine (the first transistorized computer) rejoiced in the name FLIT (FLexowriter Interrogation Tape).
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de-rezz /dee-rez'/
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[from `de-resolve' via the movie "Tron"] (also `derez') 1. vi. To disappear or dissolve; the image that goes with it is of an object breaking up into raster lines and static and then dissolving. Occasionally used of a person who seems to have suddenly `fuzzed out' mentally rather than physically. Usage: extremely silly, also rare. This verb was actually invented as fictional hacker jargon, and adopted in a spirit of irony by real hackers years after the fact. 2. vt. The Macintosh resource decompiler. On a Macintosh, many program structures (including the code itself) are managed in small segments of the program file known as `resources'; `Rez' and `DeRez' are a pair of utilities for compiling and decompiling resource files. Thus, decompiling a resource is `derezzing'. Usage: very common.
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dead adj.
1. Non-functional; [3675]down; [3676]crashed. Especially used of hardware. 2. At XEROX PARC, software that is working but not undergoing continued development and support. 3. Useless; inaccessible. Antonym: `live'. Compare [3677]dead code.
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dead beef attack n.
[cypherpunks list, 1996] An attack on a public-key cryptosystem consisting of publishing a key having the same ID as another key (thus making it possible to spoof a user's identity if recipients aren't careful about verifying keys). In PGP and GPG the key ID is the last eight hex digits of (for RSA keys) the product of two primes. The attack was demonstrated by creating a
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key whose ID was 0xdeadbeef (see [3681]DEADBEEF).
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dead code n.
Routines that can never be accessed because all calls to them have been removed, or code that cannot be reached because it is guarded by a control structure that provably must always transfer control somewhere else. The presence of dead code may reveal either logical errors due to alterations in the program or significant changes in the assumptions and environment of the program (see also [3685]software rot); a good compiler should report dead code so a maintainer can think about what it means. (Sometimes it simply means that an extremely defensive programmer has inserted [3686]can't happen tests which really can't happen -- yet.) Syn. [3687]grunge. See also [3688]dead, and [3689]The Story of Mel.
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dead link n.
[very common] A World-Wide-Web URL that no longer points to the information it was written to reach. Usually this happens because the document has been moved or deleted. Lots of dead links make a WWW page frustrating and useless and are the #1 sign of poor page maintainance. Compare [3693]dangling pointer, [3694]link rot.
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DEADBEEF /ded-beef/ n.
The hexadecimal word-fill pattern for freshly allocated memory (decimal -21524111) under a number of IBM environments, including the RS/6000. Some modern debugging tools deliberately fill freed memory with this value as a way of converting [3698]heisenbugs into [3699]Bohr bugs. As in "Your program is DEADBEEF" (meaning gone, aborted, flushed from memory); if you start from an odd half-word boundary, of course, you have BEEFDEAD. See also the anecdote under [3700]fool and [3701]dead beef attack.
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deadlock n.
1. [techspeak] A situation wherein two or more processes are unable to proceed because each is waiting for one of the others to do something. A common example is a program communicating to a server, which may find itself waiting for output from the server before sending anything more to it, while the server is similarly waiting for more input from the controlling program before outputting anything. (It is reported that this particular flavor of deadlock is sometimes called a `starvation deadlock', though the term `starvation' is more properly used for situations where a program can never run simply because it never gets high enough priority. Another common flavor is `constipation', in which each process is trying to send stuff to the other but all buffers are full because nobody is reading anything.) See [3705]deadly embrace. 2. Also used of deadlock-like interactions between humans, as when two people meet in a narrow corridor, and each tries to be polite by moving aside to let the other pass, but they end up swaying from side to side without making any progress because they always move the
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same way at the same time.
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deadly embrace n.
Same as [3709]deadlock, though usually used only when exactly two processes are involved. This is the more popular term in Europe, while [3710]deadlock predominates in the United States.
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death code n.
A routine whose job is to set everything in the computer -- registers, memory, flags, everything -- to zero, including that portion of memory where it is running; its last act is to stomp on its own "store zero" instruction. Death code isn't very useful, but writing it is an interesting hacking challenge on architectures where the instruction set makes it possible, such as the PDP-8 (it has also been done on the DG Nova).
Perhaps the ultimate death code is on the TI 990 series, where all registers are actually in RAM, and the instruction "store immediate 0" has the opcode "0". The PC will immediately wrap around core as many times as it can until a user hits HALT. Any empty memory location is death code. Worse, the manufacturer recommended use of this instruction in startup code (which would be in ROM and therefore survive).
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Death Square n.
The corporate logo of Novell, the people who acquired USL after AT&T let go of it (Novell eventually sold the Unix group to SCO). Coined by analogy with [3717]Death Star, because many people believed Novell was bungling the lead in Unix systems exactly as AT&T did for many years.
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Death Star n.
[from the movie "Star Wars"] 1. The AT&T corporate logo, which appears on computers sold by AT&T and bears an uncanny resemblance to the Death Star in the movie. This usage is particularly common among partisans of [3721]BSD Unix, who tend to regard the AT&T versions as inferior and AT&T as a bad guy. Copies still circulate of a poster printed by Mt. Xinu showing a starscape with a space fighter labeled 4.2 BSD streaking away from a broken AT&T logo wreathed in flames. 2. AT&T's internal magazine, "Focus", uses `death star' to describe an incorrectly done AT&T logo in which the inner circle in the top left is dark instead of light -- a frequent result of dark-on-light logo images.
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DEC /dek/ n.
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1. v. Verbal (and only rarely written) shorthand for decrement, i.e. `decrease by one'. Especially used by assembly programmers, as many assembly languages have a dec mnemonic. Antonym: [3725]inc. 2. n. Commonly used abbreviation for Digital Equipment Corporation, later deprecated by DEC itself in favor of "Digital" and now entirely obsolete following the buyout by Compaq. Before the [3726]killer micro revolution of the late 1980s, hackerdom was closely symbiotic with DEC's pioneering timesharing machines. The first of the group of cultures described by this lexicon nucleated around the PDP-1 (see [3727]TMRC). Subsequently, the PDP-6, [3728]PDP-10, [3729]PDP-20, PDP-11 and [3730]VAX were all foci of large and important hackerdoms, and DEC machines long dominated the ARPANET and Internet machine population. DEC was the technological leader of the minicomputer era (roughly 1967 to 1987), but its failure to embrace microcomputers and Unix early cost it heavily in profits and prestige after [3731]silicon got cheap. Nevertheless, the microprocessor design tradition owes a major debt to the PDP-11 instruction set, and every one of the major general-purpose microcomputer OSs so far (CP/M, MS-DOS, Unix, OS/2, Windows NT) was either genetically descended from a DEC OS, or incubated on DEC hardware, or both. Accordingly, DEC was for many years still regarded with a certain wry affection even among many hackers too young to have grown up on DEC machines.
DEC reclaimed some of its old reputation among techies in the first half of the 1990s. The success of the Alpha, an innovatively-designed and very high-performance [3732]killer micro, helped a lot. So did DEC's newfound receptiveness to Unix and open systems in general. When Compaq acquired DEC at the end of 1998 there was some concern that these gains would be lost along with the DEC nameplate, but the merged company has so far turned out to be culturally dominated by the ex-DEC side.
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DEC Wars n.
A 1983 [3736]Usenet posting by Alan Hastings and Steve Tarr spoofing the "Star Wars" movies in hackish terms. Some years later, ESR (disappointed by Hastings and Tarr's failure to exploit a great premise more thoroughly) posted a 3-times-longer complete rewrite called [3737]Unix WARS; the two are often confused.
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decay n.,vi
[from nuclear physics] An automatic conversion which is applied to most array-valued expressions in [3741]C; they `decay into' pointer-valued expressions pointing to the array's first element. This term is borderline techspeak, but is not used in the official standard for the language.
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deckle /dek'l/ n.
[from decand [3745]nybble; the original spelling seems to have been `decle'] Two [3746]nickles; 10 bits. Reported among developers for Mattel's GI 1600 (the Intellivision games processor), a chip with 16-bit-wide RAM but 10-bit-wide ROM. See [3747]nybble for other such terms.
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DED /D-E-D/ n.
Dark-Emitting Diode (that is, a burned-out LED). Compare [3751]SED, [3752]LER, [3753]write-only memory. In the early 1970s both Signetics and Texas instruments released DED spec sheets as [3754]AFJs (suggested uses included "as a power-off indicator").
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deep hack mode n.
See [3758]hack mode.
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deep magic n.
[poss. from C. S. Lewis's "Narnia" books] An awesomely arcane technique central to a program or system, esp. one neither generally published nor available to hackers at large (compare [3762]black art); one that could only have been composed by a true [3763]wizard. Compiler optimization techniques and many aspects of [3764]OS design used to be [3765]deep magic; many techniques in cryptography, signal processing, graphics, and AI still are. Compare [3766]heavy wizardry. Esp. found in comments of the form "Deep magic begins here...". Compare [3767]voodoo programming.
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deep space n.
1. Describes the notional location of any program that has gone [3771]off the trolley. Esp. used of programs that just sit there silently grinding long after either failure or some output is expected. "Uh oh. I should have gotten a prompt ten seconds ago. The program's in deep space somewhere." Compare [3772]buzz, [3773]catatonic, [3774]hyperspace. 2. The metaphorical location of a human so dazed and/or confused or caught up in some esoteric form of [3775]bogosity that he or she no longer responds coherently to normal communication. Compare [3776]page out.
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defenestration n.
[mythically from a traditional Czech assasination method, via SF fandom] 1. Proper karmic retribution for an incorrigible punster. "Oh, ghod, that was awful!" "Quick! Defenestrate him!" 2. The act of exiting a window system in order to get better response time from a full-screen program. This comes from the dictionary meaning of `defenestrate', which is to throw something out a window. 3. The act of discarding something under the assumption that it will improve matters. "I don't have any disk space left." "Well, why don't you defenestrate that 100 megs worth of old core dumps?" 4. Under a GUI, the act of dragging something out of a window (onto the screen). "Next, defenestrate the MugWump icon." 5. The act of completely removing Micro$oft Windows from a PC in favor of a better OS (typically Linux).
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defined as adj.