The New Hacker's Dictionary

631

There is in fact a Brandtjen & Kluge Inc., an old family business that manufactures printing equipment - interestingly, their name is pronounced /kloo'gee/! Henry Brandtjen, president of the firm, told me (ESR, 1994) that his company was co-founded by his father and an engineer named Kluge /kloo'gee/, who built and co-designed the original Kluge automatic feeder in 1919. Mr. Brandtjen claims, however, that this was a simple device (with only four cams); he says he has no idea how the myth of its complexity took hold.

[7662]TMRC and the MIT hacker culture of the early '60s seems to have developed in a milieu that remembered and still used some WWII military slang (see also [7663]foobar). It seems likely that `kluge' came to MIT via alumni of the many military electronics projects that had been located in Cambridge (many in MIT's venerable Building 20, in which [7664]TMRC is also located) during the war.

The variant `kludge' was apparently popularized by the [7665]Datamation article mentioned above; it was titled "How to Design a Kludge" (February 1962, pp. 30, 31). This spelling was probably imported from Great Britain, where [7666]kludge has an independent history (though this fact was largely unknown to hackers on either side of the Atlantic before a mid-1993 debate in the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers over the First and Second Edition versions of this entry; everybody used to think [7667]kludge was just a mutation of [7668]kluge). It now appears that the British, having forgotten the etymology of their own `kludge' when `kluge' crossed the Atlantic, repaid the U.S. by lobbing the `kludge' orthography in the other direction and confusing their American cousins' spelling!

The result of this history is a tangle. Many younger U.S. hackers pronounce the word as /klooj/ but spell it, incorrectly for its meaning and pronunciation, as `kludge'. (Phonetically, consider huge, refuge, centrifuge, and deluge as opposed to sludge, judge, budge, and fudge. Whatever its failings in other areas, English spelling is perfectly consistent about this distinction.) British hackers mostly learned /kluhj/ orally, use it in a restricted negative sense and are at least consistent. European hackers have mostly learned the word from written American sources and tend to

634

A Zen teaching riddle. Classically, koans are attractive paradoxes to be meditated on; their purpose is to help one to enlightenment by temporarily jamming normal cognitive processing so that something more interesting can happen (this practice is associated with Rinzei Zen Buddhism). Hackers are very fond of the koan form and compose their own koans for humororous and/or enlightening effect. See [7696]Some AI Koans, [7697]has the X nature, [7698]hacker humor.

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Node:kremvax, Next:[7699]kyrka, Previous:[7700]koan, Up:[7701]= K =

kremvax /krem-vaks/ n.

[from the then large number of [7702]Usenet [7703]VAXen with names of the form foovax] Originally, a fictitious Usenet site at the Kremlin, announced on April 1, 1984 in a posting ostensibly originated there by Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The posting was actually forged by Piet Beertema as an April Fool's joke. Other fictitious sites mentioned in the hoax were moskvax and [7704]kgbvax. This was probably the funniest of the many April Fool's forgeries perpetrated on Usenet (which has negligible security against them), because the notion that Usenet might ever penetrate the Iron Curtain seemed so totally absurd at the time.

In fact, it was only six years later that the first genuine site in Moscow, demos.su, joined Usenet. Some readers needed convincing that the postings from it weren't just another prank. Vadim Antonov, senior programmer at Demos and the major poster from there up to mid-1991, was quite aware of all this, referred to it frequently in his own postings, and at one point twitted some credulous readers by blandly asserting that he was a hoax!

Eventually he even arranged to have the domain's gateway site named kremvax, thus neatly turning fiction into fact and demonstrating that the hackish sense of humor transcends cultural barriers. [Mr. Antonov also contributed the Russian-language material for this lexicon. --ESR]

636

*[7715]language lawyer:

*[7716]languages of choice:

*[7717]LART:

*[7718]larval stage:

*[7719]lase:

*[7720]laser chicken:

*[7721]lasherism:

*[7722]laundromat:

*[7723]LDB:

*[7724]leaf site:

*[7725]leak:

*[7726]leaky heap:

*[7727]leapfrog attack:

*[7728]leech:

*[7729]leech mode:

*[7730]legal:

*[7731]legalese:

*[7732]LER:

637

*[7733]LERP:

*[7734]let the smoke out:

*[7735]letterbomb:

*[7736]lexer:

*[7737]lexiphage:

*[7738]life:

*[7739]Life is hard:

*[7740]light pipe:

*[7741]lightweight:

*[7742]like kicking dead whales down the beach:

*[7743]like nailing jelly to a tree:

*[7744]line 666:

*[7745]line eater the:

*[7746]line noise:

*[7747]line starve:

*[7748]linearithmic:

*[7749]link farm:

*[7750]link rot:

638

*[7751]link-dead:

*[7752]lint:

*[7753]Lintel:

*[7754]Linus:

*[7755]Linux:

*[7756]lion food:

*[7757]Lions Book:

*[7758]LISP:

*[7759]list-bomb:

*[7760]lithium lick:

*[7761]little-endian:

*[7762]live:

*[7763]live data:

*[7764]Live Free Or Die!:

*[7765]livelock:

*[7766]liveware:

*[7767]lobotomy:

*[7768]locals the:

639

*[7769]locked and loaded:

*[7770]locked up:

*[7771]logic bomb:

*[7772]logical:

*[7773]loop through:

*[7774]loose bytes:

*[7775]lord high fixer:

*[7776]lose:

*[7777]lose lose:

*[7778]loser:

*[7779]losing:

*[7780]loss:

*[7781]lossage:

*[7782]lost in the noise:

*[7783]lost in the underflow:

*[7784]lots of MIPS but no I/O:

*[7785]low-bandwidth:

*[7786]LPT: