The New Hacker's Dictionary
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1. adj. Not operating. "The up escalator is down" is considered a humorous thing to say (unless of course you were expecting to use it), and "The elevator is down" always means "The elevator isn't working" and never refers to what floor the elevator is on. With respect to computers, this term has passed into the mainstream; the extension to other kinds of machine is still confined to techies (e.g. boiler mechanics may speak of a boiler being down). 2. `go down' vi. To stop functioning; usually said of the [4176]system. The message from the [4177]console that every hacker hates to hear from the operator is "System going down in 5 minutes". 3. `take down', `bring down' vt. To deactivate purposely, usually for repair work or [4178]PM. "I'm taking the system down to work on that bug in the tape drive." Occasionally one hears the word `down' by itself used as a verb in this vt. sense. See [4179]crash; oppose [4180]up.
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download vt.
To transfer data or (esp.) code from a far-away system (especially a larger `host' system) over a digital communications link to a nearby system (especially a smaller `client' system. Oppose [4184]upload.
Historical use of these terms was at one time associated with transfers from large timesharing machines to PCs or peripherals (download) and vice-versa (upload). The modern usage relative to the speaker (rather than as an indicator of the size and role of the machines) evolved as machine categories lost most of their former functional importance.
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DP /D-P/ n.
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1. Data Processing. Listed here because, according to hackers, use of the term marks one immediately as a [4188]suit. See [4189]DPer. 2. Common abbrev for [4190]Dissociated Press.
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DPB /d*-pib'/ vt.
[from the PDP-10 instruction set] To plop something down in the middle. Usage: silly. "DPB yourself into that couch there." The connotation would be that the couch is full except for one slot just big enough for one last person to sit in. DPB means `DePosit Byte', and was the name of a PDP-10 instruction that inserts some bits into the middle of some other bits. Hackish usage has been kept alive by the Common LISP function of the same name.
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DPer /dee-pee-er/ n.
Data Processor. Hackers are absolutely amazed that [4197]suits use this term self-referentially. Computers process data, not people! See [4198]DP.
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Dr. Fred Mbogo /*m-boh'goh, dok'tr fred/ n.
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[Stanford] The archetypal man you don't want to see about a problem, esp. an incompetent professional; a shyster. "Do you know a good eye doctor?" "Sure, try Mbogo Eye Care and Professional Dry Cleaning." The name comes from synergy between [4202]bogus and the original Dr. Mbogo, a witch doctor who was Gomez Addams' physician on the old "Addams Family" TV show. Interestingly enough, it turns out that under the rules for Swahili noun classes, `m-' is the characteristic prefix of "nouns referring to human beings". As such, "mbogo" is quite plausible as a Swahili coinage for a person having the nature of a [4203]bogon. Compare [4204]Bloggs Family and [4205]J. Random Hacker; see also [4206]Fred Foobar and [4207]fred.
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dragon n.
[MIT] A program similar to a [4211]daemon, except that it is not invoked at all, but is instead used by the system to perform various secondary tasks. A typical example would be an accounting program, which keeps track of who is logged in, accumulates load-average statistics, etc. Under ITS, many terminals displayed a list of people logged in, where they were, what they were running, etc., along with some random picture (such as a unicorn, Snoopy, or the Enterprise), which was generated by the `name dragon'. Usage: rare outside MIT -- under Unix and most other OSes this would be called a `background demon' or [4212]daemon. The best-known Unix example of a dragon is cron(1). At SAIL, they called this sort of thing a `phantom'.
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Dragon Book n.
The classic text "Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools", by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman (Addison-Wesley 1986; ISBN 0-201-10088-6), so called because of the cover design featuring a dragon labeled `complexity of compiler design' and a knight bearing the lance `LALR parser generator' among his other trappings. This one is more specifically known as the `Red Dragon Book' (1986); an earlier edition, sans Sethi and titled "Principles Of Compiler Design" (Alfred V. Aho and Jeffrey D. Ullman; Addison-Wesley, 1977; ISBN 0-201-00022-9), was the `Green Dragon Book' (1977). (Also `New Dragon Book', `Old Dragon Book'.) The horsed knight and the Green Dragon were warily eying each other at a distance; now the knight is typing (wearing gauntlets!) at a terminal showing a video-game representation of the Red Dragon's head while the rest of the beast extends back in normal space. See also [4216]book titles.
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drain v.
[IBM] Syn. for [4220]flush (sense 2). Has a connotation of finality about it; one speaks of draining a device before taking it offline.
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dread high-bit disease n.
A condition endemic to some now-obsolete computers and peripherals (including ASR-33 teletypes and PRIME minicomputers) that results in all
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characters having their high (0x80) bit forced on. This of course makes transporting files to other systems much more difficult, not to mention the problems these machines have talking with true 8-bit devices.
This term was originally used specifically of PRIME (a.k.a. PR1ME) minicomputers. Folklore has it that PRIME adopted the reversed-8-bit convention in order to save 25 cents per serial line per machine; PRIME old-timers, on the other hand, claim they inherited the disease from Honeywell via customer NASA's compatibility requirements and struggled heroically to cure it. Whoever was responsible, this probably qualifies as one of the most [4224]cretinous design tradeoffs ever made. See [4225]meta bit.
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Dread Questionmark Disease
n. The result of saving HTML from Microsoft Word or some other program that uses the nonstandard Microsoft variant of Latin-1; the symptom is that various of those nonstandard characters in positions 128-160 show up as questionmarks. The usual culprit is the misnamed `smart quotes' feature in Microsoft Word. For more details (and a program called `demoroniser' that cleans up the mess) see [4229]http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/.
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DRECNET /drek'net/ n.
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[from Yiddish/German `dreck', meaning filth] Deliberate distortion of DECNET, a networking protocol used in the [4233]VMS community. So called because [4234]DEC helped write the Ethernet specification and then (either stupidly or as a malignant customer-control tactic) violated that spec in the design of DRECNET in a way that made it incompatible. See also [4235]connector conspiracy.
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driver n.
1. The [4239]main loop of an event-processing program; the code that gets commands and dispatches them for execution. 2. [techspeak] In `device driver', code designed to handle a particular peripheral device such as a magnetic disk or tape unit. 3. In the TeX world and the computerized typesetting world in general, a program that translates some device-independent or other common format to something a real device can actually understand.
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droid n.
[from `android', SF terminology for a humanoid robot of essentially biological (as opposed to mechanical/electronic) construction] A person (esp. a low-level bureaucrat or service-business employee) exhibiting most of the following characteristics: (a) naive trust in the wisdom of the parent organization or `the system'; (b) a blind-faith propensity to believe obvious nonsense emitted by authority figures (or computers!); (c) a rule-governed mentality, one unwilling or unable to look beyond the `letter of the law' in exceptional situations; (d) a paralyzing fear of official reprimand or worse
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if Procedures are not followed No Matter What; and (e) no interest in doing anything above or beyond the call of a very narrowly-interpreted duty, or in particular in fixing that which is broken; an "It's not my job, man" attitude.
Typical droid positions include supermarket checkout assistant and bank clerk; the syndrome is also endemic in low-level government employees. The implication is that the rules and official procedures constitute software that the droid is executing; problems arise when the software has not been properly debugged. The term `droid mentality' is also used to describe the mindset behind this behavior. Compare [4243]suit, [4244]marketroid; see [4245]-oid.
In England there is equivalent mainstream slang; a `jobsworth' is an obstructive, rule-following bureaucrat, often of the uniformed or suited variety. Named for the habit of denying a reasonable request by sucking his teeth and saying "Oh no, guv, sorry I can't help you: that's more than my job's worth".
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drone n.
Ignorant sales or customer service personnel in computer or electronics superstores. Characterized by a lack of even superficial knowledge about the products they sell, yet possessed of the conviction that they are more competent than their hacker customers. Usage: "That video board probably sucks, it was recommended by a drone at Fry's" In the year 2000, their natural habitats include Fry's Electronics, Best Buy, and CompUSA.
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drool-proof paper n.
Documentation that has been obsessively [4252]dumbed down, to the point where only a [4253]cretin could bear to read it, is said to have succumbed to the `drool-proof paper syndrome' or to have been `written on drool-proof paper'. For example, this is an actual quote from Apple's LaserWriter manual: "Do not expose your LaserWriter to open fire or flame." The SGI Indy manual is said to include the line "Do not dangle the mouse by the cord or throw it at coworkers.", but this sounds like parody.
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drop on the floor vt.
To react to an error condition by silently discarding messages or other valuable data. "The gateway ran out of memory, so it just started dropping packets on the floor." Also frequently used of faulty mail and netnews relay sites that lose messages. See also [4257]black hole, [4258]bit bucket.
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drop-ins n.
[prob. by analogy with [4262]drop-outs] Spurious characters appearing on a terminal or console as a result of line noise or a system malfunction of some sort. Esp. used when these are interspersed with one's own typed input. Compare [4263]drop-outs, sense 2.
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drop-outs n.
1. A variety of `power glitch' (see [4267]glitch); momentary 0 voltage on the electrical mains. 2. Missing characters in typed input due to software malfunction or system saturation (one cause of such behavior under Unix when a bad connection to a modem swamps the processor with spurious character interrupts; see [4268]screaming tty). 3. Mental glitches; used as a way of describing those occasions when the mind just seems to shut down for a couple of beats. See [4269]glitch, [4270]fried.
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drugged adj.
(also `on drugs') 1. Conspicuously stupid, heading toward [4274]brain-damaged. Often accompanied by a pantomime of toking a joint. 2. Of hardware, very slow relative to normal performance.
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drum adj, n.
Ancient techspeak term referring to slow, cylindrical magnetic media that were once state-of-the-art storage devices. Under BSD Unix the disk partition used for swapping is still called /dev/drum; this has led to considerable humor and not a few straight-faced but utterly bogus `explanations' getting foisted on [4278]newbies. See also "[4279]The Story
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of Mel" in Appendix A.
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drunk mouse syndrome n.
(also `mouse on drugs') A malady exhibited by the mouse pointing device of some computers. The typical symptom is for the mouse cursor on the screen to move in random directions and not in sync with the motion of the actual mouse. Can usually be corrected by unplugging the mouse and plugging it back again. Another recommended fix for optical mice is to rotate your mouse pad 90 degrees.
At Xerox PARC in the 1970s, most people kept a can of copier cleaner (isopropyl alcohol) at their desks. When the steel ball on the mouse had picked up enough [4283]cruft to be unreliable, the mouse was doused in cleaner, which restored it for a while. However, this operation left a fine residue that accelerated the accumulation of cruft, so the dousings became more and more frequent. Finally, the mouse was declared `alcoholic' and sent to the clinic to be dried out in a CFC ultrasonic bath.
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dub dub dub
[common] Spoken-only shorthand for the "www" (double-u double-u double-u) in many web host names. Nothing to do with the style of reggae music called `dub'.
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