Chapter V: Rare: book (11)

:network, the: n. 1. The union of all the major noncommercial,
academic, and hacker-oriented networks, such as Internet, the old
ARPANET, NSFnet, {BITNET}, and the virtual UUCP and {USENET}
`networks', plus the corporate in-house networks and commercial
time-sharing services (such as CompuServe) that gateway to them. A
site is generally considered `on the network' if it can be reached
through some combination of Internet-style (@-sign) and UUCP
(bang-path) addresses. See {bang path}, {{Internet address}},
{network address}. 2. A fictional conspiracy of libertarian
hacker-subversives and anti-authoritarian monkeywrenchers described
in Robert Anton Wilson's novel `Schr"odinger's Cat', to which
many hackers have subsequently decided they belong (this is an
example of {ha ha only serious}).

In sense 1, `network' is often abbreviated to `net'. "Are
you on the net?" is a frequent question when hackers first meet
face to face, and "See you on the net!" is a frequent goodbye.

:New Jersey: [primarily Stanford/Silicon Valley] adj. Brain-damaged
or of poor design. This refers to the allegedly wretched quality
of such software as C, C++, and UNIX (which originated at Bell Labs
in Murray Hill, New Jersey). "This compiler bites the bag, but
what can you expect from a compiler designed in New Jersey?"
Compare {Berkeley Quality Software}. See also {UNIX
conspiracy}.

:New Testament: n. [C programmers] The second edition of K&R's
`The C Programming Language' (Prentice-Hall, 1988; ISBN
0-13-110362-8), describing ANSI Standard C. See {K&R}.

:newbie: /n[y]oo'bee/ n. [orig. from British public-school and
military slang variant of `new boy'] A USENET neophyte.
This term surfaced in the {newsgroup} talk.bizarre but is
now in wide use. Criteria for being considered a newbie vary
wildly; a person can be called a newbie in one newsgroup while
remaining a respected regular in another. The label `newbie'
is sometimes applied as a serious insult to a person who has been
around USENET for a long time but who carefully hides all evidence
of having a clue. See {BIFF}.

:newgroup wars: /n[y]oo'groop wohrz/ [USENET] n. The salvos of dueling
`newgroup' and `rmgroup' messages sometimes exchanged by
persons on opposite sides of a dispute over whether a {newsgroup}
should be created net-wide. These usually settle out within a week
or two as it becomes clear whether the group has a natural
constituency (usually, it doesn't). At times, especially in the
completely anarchic alt hierarchy, the names of newsgroups
themselves become a form of comment or humor; e.g., the spinoff of
alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork from alt.tv.muppets in
early 1990, or any number of specialized abuse groups named after
particularly notorious {flamer}s, e.g., alt.weemba.

:newline: /n[y]oo'li:n/ n. 1. [techspeak, primarily UNIX] The
ASCII LF character (0001010), used under {{UNIX}} as a text line
terminator. A Bell-Labs-ism rather than a Berkeleyism;
interestingly (and unusually for UNIX jargon), it is said to have
originally been an IBM usage. (Though the term `newline' appears
in ASCII standards, it never caught on in the general computing
world before UNIX). 2. More generally, any magic character,
character sequence, or operation (like Pascal's writeln procedure)
required to terminate a text record or separate lines. See
{crlf}, {terpri}.

:NeWS: /nee'wis/, /n[y]oo'is/ or /n[y]ooz/ [acronym; the
`Network Window System'] n. The road not taken in window systems,
an elegant {PostScript}-based environment that would almost certainly
have won the standards war with {X} if it hadn't been
{proprietary} to Sun Microsystems. There is a lesson here that
too many software vendors haven't yet heeded. Many hackers insist
on the two-syllable pronunciations above as a way of distinguishing
NeWS from {news} (the {netnews} software).

:news: n. See {netnews}.

:newsfroup: // [USENET] n. Silly synonym for {newsgroup},
originally a typo but now in regular use on USENET's talk.bizarre
and other lunatic-fringe groups. Compare {hing} and {filk}.

:newsgroup: [USENET] n. One of {USENET}'s huge collection of
topic groups or {fora}. Usenet groups can be `unmoderated'
(anyone can post) or `moderated' (submissions are automatically
directed to a moderator, who edits or filters and then posts the
results). Some newsgroups have parallel {mailing list}s for
Internet people with no netnews access, with postings to the group
automatically propagated to the list and vice versa. Some
moderated groups (especially those which are actually gatewayed
Internet mailing lists) are distributed as `digests', with groups
of postings periodically collected into a single large posting with
an index.

Among the best-known are comp.lang.c (the C-language forum),
comp.arch (on computer architectures), comp.unix.wizards
(for UNIX wizards), rec.arts.sf-lovers (for science-fiction
fans), and talk.politics.misc (miscellaneous political
discussions and {flamage}).

:nick: [IRC] n. Short for nickname. On {IRC}, every user must
pick a nick, which is sometimes the same as the user's real name or
login name, but is often more fanciful.

:nickle: /ni'kl/ [from `nickel', common name for the U.S.
5-cent coin] n. A {nybble} + 1; 5 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
also {deckle}.

:night mode: n. See {phase} (of people).

:Nightmare File System: n. Pejorative hackerism for Sun's Network
File System (NFS). In any nontrivial network of Suns where there
is a lot of NFS cross-mounting, when one Sun goes down, the others
often freeze up. Some machine tries to access the down one, and
(getting no response) repeats indefinitely. This causes it to
appear dead to some messages (what is actually happening is that it
is locked up in what should have been a brief excursion to a higher
{spl} level). Then another machine tries to reach either the
down machine or the pseudo-down machine, and itself becomes
pseudo-down. The first machine to discover the down one is now
trying both to access the down one and to respond to the
pseudo-down one, so it is even harder to reach. This situation
snowballs very fast, and soon the entire network of machines is
frozen --- worst of all, the user can't even abort the file access
that started the problem! Many of NFS'es problems are excused by
partisans as being an inevitable result of its statelessness, which
is held to be a great feature (critics, of course, call it a great
{misfeature}). (ITS partisans are apt to cite this as proof of
UNIX's alleged bogosity; ITS had a working NFS-like shared file
system with none of these problems in the early 1970s.) See also
{broadcast storm}.

:NIL: /nil/ No. Used in reply to a question, particularly one
asked using the `-P' convention. Most hackers assume this derives
simply from LISP terminology for `false' (see also {T}), but
NIL as a negative reply was well-established among radio hams
decades before the advent of LISP. The historical connection
between early hackerdom and the ham radio word was strong enough
that this may have been an influence.

:NMI: /N-M-I/ n. Non-Maskable Interrupt. An IRQ 7 on the PDP-11
or 680[01234]0; the NMI line on an 80[1234]86. In contrast with a
{priority interrupt} (which might be ignored, although that is
unlikely), an NMI is *never* ignored.

:no-op: /noh'op/ alt. NOP /nop/ [no operation] n. 1. (also v.)
A machine instruction that does nothing (sometimes used in
assembler-level programming as filler for data or patch areas, or
to overwrite code to be removed in binaries). See also {JFCL}.
2. A person who contributes nothing to a project, or has nothing
going on upstairs, or both. As in "He's a no-op." 3. Any
operation or sequence of operations with no effect, such as
circling the block without finding a parking space, or putting
money into a vending machine and having it fall immediately into
the coin-return box, or asking someone for help and being told to
go away. "Oh, well, that was a no-op." Hot-and-sour soup (see
{great-wall}) that is insufficiently either is `no-op soup';
so is wonton soup if everybody else is having hot-and-sour.

:noddy: /nod'ee/ [UK: from the children's books] adj.
1. Small and un-useful, but demonstrating a point. Noddy programs
are often written by people learning a new language or system. The
archetypal noddy program is {hello, world}. Noddy code may be
used to demonstrate a feature or bug of a compiler. May be used of
real hardware or software to imply that it isn't worth using.
"This editor's a bit noddy." 2. A program that is more or less
instant to produce. In this use, the term does not necessarily
connote uselessness, but describes a {hack} sufficiently trivial
that it can be written and debugged while carrying on (and during
the space of) a normal conversation. "I'll just throw together a
noddy {awk} script to dump all the first fields." In North
America this might be called a {mickey mouse program}. See
{toy program}.

:NOMEX underwear: /noh'meks uhn'-der-weir/ [USENET] n. Syn.
{asbestos longjohns}, used mostly in auto-related mailing lists
and newsgroups. NOMEX underwear is an actual product available on
the racing equipment market, used as a fire resistance measure and
required in some racing series.

:Nominal Semidestructor: n. Sound-alike slang for `National
Semiconductor', found among other places in the 4.3BSD networking
sources. During the late 1970s to mid-1980s this company marketed
a series of microprocessors including the NS16000 and NS32000 and
several variants. At one point early in the great microprocessor
race, the specs on these chips made them look like serious
competition for the rising Intel 80x86 and Motorola 680x0 series.
Unfortunately, the actual parts were notoriously flaky and never
implemented the full instruction set promised in their literature,
apparently because the company couldn't get any of the mask
steppings to work as designed. They eventually sank without trace,
joining the Zilog Z80,000 and a few even more obscure also-rans in
the graveyard of forgotten microprocessors. Compare {HP-SUX},
{AIDX}, {buglix}, {Macintrash}, {Telerat}, {Open
DeathTrap}, {ScumOS}, {sun-stools}.

:non-optimal solution: n. (also `sub-optimal solution') An
astoundingly stupid way to do something. This term is generally
used in deadpan sarcasm, as its impact is greatest when the person
speaking looks completely serious. Compare {stunning}. See also
{Bad Thing}.

:nonlinear: adj. [scientific computation] 1. Behaving in an erratic
and unpredictable fashion; unstable. When used to describe the
behavior of a machine or program, it suggests that said machine or
program is being forced to run far outside of design
specifications. This behavior may be induced by unreasonable
inputs, or may be triggered when a more mundane bug sends the
computation far off from its expected course. 2. When describing
the behavior of a person, suggests a tantrum or a {flame}.
"When you talk to Bob, don't mention the drug problem or he'll go
nonlinear for hours." In this context, `go nonlinear' connotes
`blow up out of proportion' (proportion connotes linearity).

:nontrivial: adj. Requiring real thought or significant computing
power. Often used as an understated way of saying that a problem
is quite difficult or impractical, or even entirely unsolvable
("Proving P=NP is nontrivial"). The preferred emphatic form is
`decidedly nontrivial'. See {trivial}, {uninteresting},
{interesting}.

:notwork: /not'werk/ n. A network, when it is acting {flaky} or is
{down}. Compare {nyetwork}. Said at IBM to have orig.
referred to a particular period of flakiness on IBM's VNET
corporate network, ca. 1988; but there are independent reports of
the term from elsewhere.

:NP-: /N-P/ pref. Extremely. Used to modify adjectives
describing a level or quality of difficulty; the connotation is
often `more so than it should be' (NP-complete problems all seem
to be very hard, but so far no one has found a good a priori
reason that they should be.) "Coding a BitBlt implementation to
perform correctly in every case is NP-annoying." This is
generalized from the computer-science terms `NP-hard' and
`NP-complete'. NP is the set of Nondeterministic-Polynomial
algorithms, those that can be completed by a nondeterministic
Turing machine in an amount of time that is a polynomial function
of the size of the input; a solution for one NP-complete problem
would solve all the others. Note, however, that the NP- prefix is,
from a complexity theorist's point of view, the wrong part of
`NP-complete' to connote extreme difficulty; it is the completeness,
not the NP-ness, that puts any problem it describes in the
`hard' category.

:nroff: /en'rof/ [UNIX, from "new runoff"] n. A companion
program to the UNIX typesetter `troff', accepting identical
input but preparing output for terminals and line printers.

:NSA line eater: n. The National Security Agency trawling
program sometimes assumed to be reading {USENET} for the
U.S. Government's spooks. Most hackers describe it as a mythical
beast, but some believe it actually exists, more aren't sure, and
many believe in acting as though it exists just in case. Some
netters put loaded phrases like `KGB', `Uzi', `nuclear materials',
`Palestine', `cocaine', and `assassination' in their {sig block}s
in a (probably futile) attempt to confuse and overload the
creature. The {GNU} version of {EMACS} actually has a command
that randomly inserts a bunch of insidious anarcho-verbiage into
your edited text.

There is a mainstream variant of this myth involving a `Trunk Line
Monitor', which supposedly used speech recognition to extract words
from telephone trunks. This one was making the rounds in the
late 1970s, spread by people who had no idea of then-current
technology or the storage, signal-processing, or speech recognition
needs of such a project. On the basis of mass-storage costs alone
it would have been cheaper to hire 50 high-school students and just
let them listen in. Speech-recognition technology can't do this
job even now (1991), and almost certainly won't in this millennium,
either. The peak of silliness came with a letter to an alternative
paper in New Haven, Connecticut, laying out the factoids of this
Big Brotherly affair. The letter writer then revealed his actual
agenda by offering --- at an amazing low price, just this once, we
take VISA and MasterCard --- a scrambler guaranteed to daunt the
Trunk Trawler and presumably allowing the would-be Baader-Meinhof
gangs of the world to get on with their business.

:nuke: vt. 1. To intentionally delete the entire contents of a
given directory or storage volume. "On UNIX, `rm -r /usr'
will nuke everything in the usr filesystem." Never used for
accidental deletion. Oppose {blow away}. 2. Syn. for
{dike}, applied to smaller things such as files, features, or
code sections. Often used to express a final verdict. "What do
you want me to do with that 80-meg {wallpaper} file?" "Nuke
it." 3. Used of processes as well as files; nuke is a frequent
verbal alias for `kill -9' on UNIX. 4. On IBM PCs, a bug
that results in {fandango on core} can trash the operating
system, including the FAT (the in-core copy of the disk block
chaining information). This can utterly scramble attached disks,
which are then said to have been `nuked'. This term is also
used of analogous lossages on Macintoshes and other micros without
memory protection.

:number-crunching: n. Computations of a numerical nature, esp.
those that make extensive use of floating-point numbers. The only
thing {Fortrash} is good for. This term is in widespread
informal use outside hackerdom and even in mainstream slang, but
has additional hackish connotations: namely, that the computations
are mindless and involve massive use of {brute force}. This is
not always {evil}, esp. if it involves ray tracing or fractals
or some other use that makes {pretty pictures}, esp. if such
pictures can be used as {wallpaper}. See also {crunch}.

:numbers: [scientific computation] n. Output of a computation that
may not be significant results but at least indicate that the
program is running. May be used to placate management, grant
sponsors, etc. `Making numbers' means running a program
because output --- any output, not necessarily meaningful output
--- is needed as a demonstration of progress. See {pretty
pictures}, {math-out}, {social science number}.

:NUXI problem: /nuk'see pro'bl*m/ n. This refers to the problem of
transferring data between machines with differing byte-order. The
string `UNIX' might look like `NUXI' on a machine with a
different `byte sex' (e.g., when transferring data from a
{little-endian} to a {big-endian}, or vice-versa). See also
{middle-endian}, {swab}, and {bytesexual}.

:nybble: /nib'l/ (alt. `nibble') [from v. `nibble' by analogy
with `bite' => `byte'] n. Four bits; one {hex} digit;
a half-byte. Though `byte' is now techspeak, this useful relative
is still jargon. Compare {{byte}}, {crumb}, {tayste},
{dynner}; see also {bit}, {nickle}, {deckle}. Apparently
this spelling is uncommon in Commonwealth Hackish, as British
orthography suggests the pronunciation /ni:'bl/.

:nyetwork: /nyet'werk/ [from Russian `nyet' = no] n. A network,
when it is acting {flaky} or is {down}. Compare {notwork}.

= O = =====

:Ob-: /ob/ pref. Obligatory. A piece of {netiquette}
acknowledging that the author has been straying from the
newsgroup's charter topic. For example, if a posting in alt.sex is
a response to a part of someone else's posting that has nothing
particularly to do with sex, the author may append `ObSex' (or
`Obsex') and toss off a question or vignette about some unusual
erotic act. It is considered a sign of great {winnitude} when
your Obs are more interesting than other people's whole postings.

:Obfuscated C Contest: n. An annual contest run since 1984 over
USENET by Landon Curt Noll and friends. The overall winner is
whoever produces the most unreadable, creative, and bizarre (but
working) C program; various other prizes are awarded at the judges'
whim. C's terse syntax and macro-preprocessor facilities give
contestants a lot of maneuvering room. The winning programs often
manage to be simultaneously (a) funny, (b) breathtaking works of
art, and (c) horrible examples of how *not* to code in C.

This relatively short and sweet entry might help convey the flavor
of obfuscated C:

/*
* HELLO WORLD program
* by Jack Applin and Robert Heckendorn, 1985
*/
main(v,c)char**c;{for(v[c++]="Hello, world!\n)";
(!!c)[*c]&&(v--||--c&&execlp(*c,*c,c[!!c]+!!c,!c));
**c=!c)write(!!*c,*c,!!**c);}

Here's another good one:

/*
* Program to compute an approximation of pi
* by Brian Westley, 1988
*/

#define _ -F<00||--F-OO--;
int F=00,OO=00;
main(){F_OO();printf("%1.3f\n",4.*-F/OO/OO);}F_OO()
{
_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_
}

See also {hello, world}.

:obi-wan error: /oh'bee-won` er'*r/ [RPI, from `off-by-one' and
the Obi-Wan Kenobi character in "Star Wars"] n. A loop of
some sort in which the index is off by 1. Common when the index
should have started from 0 but instead started from 1. A kind of
{off-by-one error}. See also {zeroth}.

:Objectionable-C: n. Hackish take on "Objective-C", the name of
an object-oriented dialect of C in competition with the
better-known C++ (it is used to write native applications on the
NeXT machine). Objectionable-C uses a Smalltalk-like syntax, but
lacks the flexibility of Smalltalk method calls, and (like many
such efforts) comes frustratingly close to attaining the {Right
Thing} without actually doing so.

:obscure: adj. Used in an exaggeration of its normal meaning, to
imply total incomprehensibility. "The reason for that last crash
is obscure." "The `find(1)' command's syntax is obscure!"
The phrase `moderately obscure' implies that it could be
figured out but probably isn't worth the trouble. The construction
`obscure in the extreme' is the preferred emphatic form.

:octal forty: /ok'tl for'tee/ n. Hackish way of saying "I'm
drawing a blank." Octal 40 is the {{ASCII}} space character,
0100000; by an odd coincidence, {hex} 40 (01000000) is the
{{EBCDIC}} space character. See {wall}.

:off the trolley: adj. Describes the behavior of a program that
malfunctions and goes catatonic, but doesn't actually {crash} or
abort. See {glitch}, {bug}, {deep space}.

:off-by-one error: n. Exceedingly common error induced in many
ways, such as by starting at 0 when you should have started at 1 or
vice versa, or by writing `< N' instead of `<= N' or
vice-versa. Also applied to giving something to the person next to
the one who should have gotten it. Often confounded with
{fencepost error}, which is properly a particular subtype of it.

:offline: adv. Not now or not here. "Let's take this
discussion offline." Specifically used on {USENET} to suggest
that a discussion be taken off a public newsgroup to email.

:old fart: n. Tribal elder. A title self-assumed with remarkable
frequency by (esp.) USENETters who have been programming for more
than about 25 years; often appears in {sig block}s attached to
Jargon File contributions of great archeological significance.
This is a term of insult in the second or third person but one of
pride in first person.

:Old Testament: n. [C programmers] The first edition of {K&R}, the
sacred text describing {Classic C}.

:one-banana problem: n. At mainframe shops, where the computers
have operators for routine administrivia, the programmers and
hardware people tend to look down on the operators and claim that a
trained monkey could do their job. It is frequently observed that
the incentives which would be offered said monkeys can be used
as a scale to describe the difficulty of a task. A one-banana
problem is simple; hence "It's only a one-banana job at the most;
what's taking them so long?"

At IBM, folklore divides the world into one-, two-, and
three-banana problems. Other cultures have different hierarchies
and may divide them more finely; at ICL, for example, five grapes
(a bunch) equals a banana. Their upper limit for the in-house
{sysape}s is said to be two bananas and three grapes (another
source claims it's three bananas and one grape, but observes
"However, this is subject to local variations, cosmic rays and
ISO"). At a complication level any higher than that, one asks the
manufacturers to send someone around to check things.

:one-line fix: n. Used (often sarcastically) of a change to a
program that is thought to be trivial or insignificant right up to
the moment it crashes the system. Usually `cured' by another
one-line fix. See also {I didn't change anything!}

:one-liner wars: n. A game popular among hackers who code in the
language APL (see {write-only language} and {line noise}).
The objective is to see who can code the most interesting and/or
useful routine in one line of operators chosen from
APL's exceedingly {hairy} primitive set. A similar amusement
was practiced among {TECO} hackers and is now popular among
{Perl} aficionados.

Ken Iverson, the inventor of APL, has been credited with a
one-liner that, given a number N, produces a list of the
prime numbers from 1 to N inclusive. It looks like this:

(2 = 0 +.= T o.| T) / T <- iN

where `o' is the APL null character, the assignment arrow is a
single character, and `i' represents the APL iota.

:ooblick: /oo'blik/ [from Dr. Seuss's `Bartholomew and the
Oobleck'] n. A bizarre semi-liquid sludge made from cornstarch and
water. Enjoyed among hackers who make batches during playtime at
parties for its amusing and extremely non-Newtonian behavior; it
pours and splatters, but resists rapid motion like a solid and will
even crack when hit by a hammer. Often found near lasers.

Here is a field-tested ooblick recipe contributed by GLS:

1 cup cornstarch

1 cup baking soda

3/4 cup water

N drops of food coloring

This recipe isn't quite as non-Newtonian as a pure cornstarch
ooblick, but has an appropriately slimy feel.

Some, however, insist that the notion of an ooblick *recipe*
is far too mechanical, and that it is best to add the water in
small increments so that the various mixed states the cornstarch
goes through as it *becomes* ooblick can be grokked in
fullness by many hands. For optional ingredients of this
experience, see the "{Ceremonial Chemicals}" section of
{appendix B}.

:op: /op/ [IRC] n. Someone who is endowed with privileges on
{IRC}, not limited to a particular channel. These are generally
people who are in charge of the IRC server at their particular
site. Sometimes used interchangably with {CHOP}. Compare
{sysop}.

:open: n. Abbreviation for `open (or left) parenthesis' --- used when
necessary to eliminate oral ambiguity. To read aloud the LISP form
(DEFUN FOO (X) (PLUS X 1)) one might say: "Open defun foo, open
eks close, open, plus eks one, close close."

:Open DeathTrap: n. Abusive hackerism for the Santa Cruz
Operation's `Open DeskTop' product, a Motif-based graphical
interface over their UNIX. The funniest part is that this was
coined by SCO's own developers...compare {AIDX},
{terminak}, {Macintrash} {Nominal Semidestructor},
{ScumOS}, {sun-stools}, {HP-SUX}.

:open switch: [IBM: prob. from railroading] n. An unresolved
question, issue, or problem.

:operating system:: [techspeak] n. (Often abbreviated `OS') The
foundation software of a machine, of course; that which schedules
tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the
user between applications. The facilities an operating system
provides and its general design philosophy exert an extremely
strong influence on programming style and on the technical cultures
that grow up around its host machines. Hacker folklore has been
shaped primarily by the {{UNIX}}, {{ITS}}, {{TOPS-10}},
{{TOPS-20}}/{{TWENEX}}, {{WAITS}}, {{CP/M}}, {{MS-DOS}}, and
{{Multics}} operating systems (most importantly by ITS and
UNIX).

:optical diff: n. See {vdiff}.

:optical grep: n. See {vgrep}.

:Orange Book: n. The U.S. Government's standards document
`Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, DOD standard
5200.28-STD, December, 1985' which characterize secure computing
architectures and defines levels A1 (most secure) through D
(least). Stock UNIXes are roughly C1, and can be upgraded to
about C2 without excessive pain. See also {{book titles}}.

:oriental food:: n. Hackers display an intense tropism towards
oriental cuisine, especially Chinese, and especially of the spicier
varieties such as Szechuan and Hunan. This phenomenon (which has
also been observed in subcultures that overlap heavily with
hackerdom, most notably science-fiction fandom) has never been
satisfactorily explained, but is sufficiently intense that one can
assume the target of a hackish dinner expedition to be the best
local Chinese place and be right at least three times out of four.
See also {ravs}, {great-wall}, {stir-fried random},
{laser chicken}, {Yu-Shiang Whole Fish}. Thai, Indian,
Korean, and Vietnamese cuisines are also quite popular.

:orphan: [UNIX] n. A process whose parent has died; one inherited by
`init(1)'. Compare {zombie}.

:orphaned i-node: /or'f*nd i:'nohd/ [UNIX] n. 1. [techspeak] A
file that retains storage but no longer appears in the directories
of a filesystem. 2. By extension, a pejorative for any person
serving no useful function within some organization, esp.
{lion food} without subordinates.

:orthogonal: [from mathematics] adj. Mutually independent; well
separated; sometimes, irrelevant to. Used in a generalization of
its mathematical meaning to describe sets of primitives or
capabilities that, like a vector basis in geometry, span the
entire `capability space' of the system and are in some sense
non-overlapping or mutually independent. For example, in
architectures such as the PDP-11 or VAX where all or nearly all
registers can be used interchangeably in any role with respect to
any instruction, the register set is said to be orthogonal. Or, in
logic, the set of operators `not' and `or' is orthogonal,
but the set `nand', `or', and `not' is not (because any
one of these can be expressed in terms of the others). Also used
in comments on human discourse: "This may be orthogonal to the
discussion, but...."

:OS: /O-S/ 1. [Operating System] n. An abbreviation heavily used in email,
occasionally in speech. 2. n.,obs. On ITS, an output spy. See
"{OS and JEDGAR}" (in {appendix A}).

:OS/2: /O S too/ n. The anointed successor to MS-DOS for Intel
286- and 386-based micros; proof that IBM/Microsoft couldn't get it
right the second time, either. Mentioning it is usually good for a
cheap laugh among hackers --- the design was so {baroque}, and
the implementation of 1.x so bad, that 3 years after introduction
you could still count the major {app}s shipping for it on the
fingers of two hands --- in unary. Often called `Half-an-OS'. On
January 28, 1991, Microsoft announced that it was dropping its OS/2
development to concentrate on Windows, leaving the OS entirely in
the hands of IBM; on January 29 they claimed the media had got the
story wrong, but were vague about how. It looks as though OS/2 is
moribund. See {vaporware}, {monstrosity}, {cretinous},
{second-system effect}.

:out-of-band: [from telecommunications and network theory] adj.
1. In software, describes values of a function which are not in its
`natural' range of return values, but are rather signals that
some kind of exception has occurred. Many C functions, for
example, return either a nonnegative integral value, or indicate
failure with an out-of-band return value of -1. Compare
{hidden flag}, {green bytes}. 2. Also sometimes used to
describe what communications people call `shift characters',
like the ESC that leads control sequences for many terminals, or
the level shift indicators in the old 5-bit Baudot codes. 3. In
personal communication, using methods other than email, such as
telephones or {snail-mail}.

:overflow bit: n. 1. [techspeak] On some processors, an attempt to
calculate a result too large for a register to hold causes a
particular {flag} called an {overflow bit} to be set.
2. Hackers use the term of human thought too. "Well, the {{Ada}}
description was {baroque} all right, but I could hack it OK until
they got to the exception handling ... that set my overflow bit."
3. The hypothetical bit that will be set if a hacker doesn't get to
make a trip to the Room of Porcelain Fixtures: "I'd better process
an internal interrupt before the overflow bit gets set".

:overflow pdl: [MIT] n. The place where you put things when your
{pdl} is full. If you don't have one and too many things get
pushed, you forget something. The overflow pdl for a person's
memory might be a memo pad. This usage inspired the following
doggerel:

Hey, diddle, diddle
The overflow pdl
To get a little more stack;
If that's not enough
Then you lose it all,
And have to pop all the way back.
--The Great Quux

The term {pdl} seems to be primarily an MITism; outside MIT this
term would logically be replaced by `overflow {stack}', but
the editors have heard no report of the latter term actually being
in use.

:overrun: n. 1. [techspeak] Term for a frequent consequence of data
arriving faster than it can be consumed, esp. in serial line
communications. For example, at 9600 baud there is almost exactly
one character per millisecond, so if your {silo} can hold only
two characters and the machine takes longer than 2 msec to get to
service the interrupt, at least one character will be lost.
2. Also applied to non-serial-I/O communications. "I forgot to pay
my electric bill due to mail overrun." "Sorry, I got four phone
calls in 3 minutes last night and lost your message to overrun."
When {thrash}ing at tasks, the next person to make a request
might be told "Overrun!" Compare {firehose syndrome}. 3. More
loosely, may refer to a {buffer overflow} not necessarily
related to processing time (as in {overrun screw}).

:overrun screw: [C programming] n. A variety of {fandango on
core} produced by scribbling past the end of an array (C
implementations typically have no checks for this error). This is
relatively benign and easy to spot if the array is static; if it is
auto, the result may be to {smash the stack} --- often resulting
in {heisenbug}s of the most diabolical subtlety. The term
`overrun screw' is used esp. of scribbles beyond the end of
arrays allocated with `malloc(3)'; this typically trashes the
allocation header for the next block in the {arena}, producing
massive lossage within malloc and often a core dump on the next
operation to use `stdio(3)' or `malloc(3)' itself. See
{spam}, {overrun}; see also {memory leak}, {memory
smash}, {aliasing bug}, {precedence lossage}, {fandango on
core}, {secondary damage}.

= P = =====

:P.O.D.: /P-O-D/ Acronym for `Piece Of Data' (as opposed to a
code section). Usage: pedantic and rare. See also {pod}.

:padded cell: n. Where you put {luser}s so they can't hurt
anything. A program that limits a luser to a carefully restricted
subset of the capabilities of the host system (for example, the
`rsh(1)' utility on USG UNIX). Note that this is different
from an {iron box} because it is overt and not aimed at
enforcing security so much as protecting others (and the luser)
from the consequences of the luser's boundless na"ivet'e (see
{na"ive}). Also `padded cell environment'.

:page in: [MIT] vi. 1. To become aware of one's surroundings again
after having paged out (see {page out}). Usually confined to
the sarcastic comment: "Eric pages in. Film at 11." See
{film at 11}. 2. Syn. `swap in'; see {swap}.

:page out: [MIT] vi. 1. To become unaware of one's surroundings
temporarily, due to daydreaming or preoccupation. "Can you repeat
that? I paged out for a minute." See {page in}. Compare
{glitch}, {thinko}. 2. Syn. `swap out'; see {swap}.

:pain in the net: n. A {flamer}.

:paper-net: n. Hackish way of referring to the postal service,
analogizing it to a very slow, low-reliability network. USENET
{sig block}s not uncommonly include a "Paper-Net:" header just
before the sender's postal address; common variants of this are
"Papernet" and "P-Net". Compare {voice-net}, {snail-mail}.

:param: /p*-ram'/ n. Shorthand for `parameter'. See also
{parm}; compare {arg}, {var}.

:PARC: n. See {XEROX PARC}.

:parent message: n. See {followup}.

:parity errors: pl.n. Little lapses of attention or (in more severe
cases) consciousness, usually brought on by having spent all night
and most of the next day hacking. "I need to go home and crash;
I'm starting to get a lot of parity errors." Derives from a
relatively common but nearly always correctable transient error in
RAM hardware.

:Parkinson's Law of Data: prov. "Data expands to fill the space
available for storage"; buying more memory encourages the use of
more memory-intensive techniques. It has been observed over the
last 10 years that the memory usage of evolving systems tends to
double roughly once every 18 months. Fortunately, memory density
available for constant dollars tends to double about once every
12 months (see {Moore's Law}); unfortunately, the laws of
physics guarantee that the latter cannot continue indefinitely.

:parm: /parm/ n. Further-compressed form of {param}. This term
is an IBMism, and written use is almost unknown outside IBM
shops; spoken /parm/ is more widely distributed, but the synonym
{arg} is favored among hackers. Compare {arg}, {var}.

:parse: [from linguistic terminology] vt. 1. To determine the
syntactic structure of a sentence or other utterance (close to the
standard English meaning). "That was the one I saw you." "I
can't parse that." 2. More generally, to understand or
comprehend. "It's very simple; you just kretch the glims and then
aos the zotz." "I can't parse that." 3. Of fish, to have to
remove the bones yourself. "I object to parsing fish", means "I
don't want to get a whole fish, but a sliced one is okay". A
`parsed fish' has been deboned. There is some controversy over
whether `unparsed' should mean `bony', or also mean
`deboned'.

:Pascal:: n. An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth
on the CDC 6600 around 1967--68 as an instructional tool for
elementary programming. This language, designed primarily to keep
students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus extremely
restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of view, was
later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact, became the
ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and
{{Ada}} (see also {bondage-and-discipline language}). The
hackish point of view on Pascal was probably best summed up by a
devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper
by Brian Kernighan (of {K&R} fame) entitled "Why Pascal is
Not My Favorite Programming Language", which was turned down by the
technical journals but circulated widely via photocopies. It was
eventually published in "Comparing and Assessing Programming
Languages", edited by Alan Feuer and Narain Gehani (Prentice-Hall,
1984). Part of his discussion is worth repeating here, because its
criticisms are still apposite to Pascal itself after ten years of
improvement and could also stand as an indictment of many other
bondage-and-discipline languages. At the end of a summary of the
case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote:

9. There is no escape

This last point is perhaps the most important. The language is
inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape its
limitations. There are no casts to disable the type-checking when
necessary. There is no way to replace the defective run-time
environment with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler
that defines the "standard procedures". The language is closed.

People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal
trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But
each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look
like whatever language they really want. Extensions for separate
compilation, FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types, internal
static variables, initialization, octal numbers, bit operators,
etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but
destroy its portability to others.

I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond
its original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy language,
suitable for teaching but not for real programming.

Pascal has since been almost entirely displaced (by {C}) from the
niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems
programming, but retains some popularity as a hobbyist language in
the MS-DOS and Macintosh worlds.

:pastie: /pay'stee/ n. An adhesive-backed label designed to be
attached to a key on a keyboard to indicate some non-standard
character which can be accessed through that key. Pasties are
likely to be used in APL environments, where almost every key is
associated with a special character. A pastie on the R key, for
example, would remind the user that it is used to generate the rho
character. The term properly refers to nipple-concealing devices
formerly worn by strippers in concession to indecent-exposure
laws; compare {tits on a keyboard}.

:patch: 1. n. A temporary addition to a piece of code, usually as a
{quick-and-dirty} remedy to an existing bug or misfeature. A
patch may or may not work, and may or may not eventually be
incorporated permanently into the program. Distinguished from a
{diff} or {mod} by the fact that a patch is generated by more
primitive means than the rest of the program; the classical
examples are instructions modified by using the front panel
switches, and changes made directly to the binary executable of a
program originally written in an {HLL}. Compare {one-line
fix}. 2. vt. To insert a patch into a piece of code. 3. [in the
UNIX world] n. A {diff} (sense 2). 4. A set of modifications to
binaries to be applied by a patching program. IBM operating
systems often receive updates to the operating system in the form
of absolute hexadecimal patches. If you have modified your OS, you
have to disassemble these back to the source. The patches might
later be corrected by other patches on top of them (patches were
said to "grow scar tissue"). The result was often a convoluted
{patch space} and headaches galore. 5. [UNIX] the
`patch(1)' program, written by Larry Wall, which automatically
applies a patch (sense 3) to a set of source code.

There is a classic story of a {tiger team} penetrating a secure
military computer that illustrates the danger inherent in binary
patches (or, indeed, any that you can't --- or don't --- inspect
and examine before installing). They couldn't find any {trap
door}s or any way to penetrate security of IBM's OS, so they made a
site visit to an IBM office (remember, these were official military
types who were purportedly on official business), swiped some IBM
stationery, and created a fake patch. The patch was actually the
trapdoor they needed. The patch was distributed at about the right
time for an IBM patch, had official stationery and all accompanying
documentation, and was dutifully installed. The installation
manager very shortly thereafter learned something about proper
procedures.

:patch space: n. An unused block of bits left in a binary so that
it can later be modified by insertion of machine-language
instructions there (typically, the patch space is modified to
contain new code, and the superseded code is patched to contain a
jump or call to the patch space). The widening use of HLLs has
made this term rare; it is now primarily historical outside IBM
shops. See {patch} (sense 4), {zap} (sense 4), {hook}.

:path: n. 1. A {bang path} or explicitly routed {{Internet
address}}; a node-by-node specification of a link between two
machines. 2. [UNIX] A filename, fully specified relative to the
root directory (as opposed to relative to the current directory;
the latter is sometimes called a `relative path'). This is also
called a `pathname'. 3. [UNIX and MS-DOS] The `search
path', an environment variable specifying the directories in which
the {shell} (COMMAND.COM, under MS-DOS) should look for commands.
Other, similar constructs abound under UNIX (for example, the
C preprocessor has a `search path' it uses in looking for
`#include' files).

:pathological: adj. 1. [scientific computation] Used of a data set
that is grossly atypical of normal expected input, esp. one that
exposes a weakness or bug in whatever algorithm one is using. An
algorithm that can be broken by pathological inputs may still be
useful if such inputs are very unlikely to occur in practice.
2. When used of test input, implies that it was purposefully
engineered as a worst case. The implication in both senses is that
the data is spectacularly ill-conditioned or that someone had to
explicitly set out to break the algorithm in order to come up with
such a crazy example. 3. Also said of an unlikely collection of
circumstances. "If the network is down and comes up halfway
through the execution of that command by root, the system may
just crash." "Yes, but that's a pathological case." Often used
to dismiss the case from discussion, with the implication that the
consequences are acceptable since that they will happen so
infrequently (if at all) that there is no justification for
going to extra trouble to handle that case (see sense 1).

:payware: /pay'weir/ n. Commercial software. Oppose {shareware}
or {freeware}.

:PBD: /P-B-D/ [abbrev. of `Programmer Brain Damage'] n. Applied
to bug reports revealing places where the program was obviously
broken by an incompetent or short-sighted programmer. Compare
{UBD}; see also {brain-damaged}.

:PC-ism: /P-C-izm/ n. A piece of code or coding technique that
takes advantage of the unprotected single-tasking environment in
IBM PCs and the like, e.g., by busy-waiting on a hardware register,
direct diddling of screen memory, or using hard timing loops.
Compare {ill-behaved}, {vaxism}, {unixism}. Also,
`PC-ware' n., a program full of PC-isms on a machine with a more
capable operating system. Pejorative.

:PD: /P-D/ adj. Common abbreviation for `public domain', applied
to software distributed over {USENET} and from Internet archive
sites. Much of this software is not in fact public domain in
the legal sense but travels under various copyrights granting
reproduction and use rights to anyone who can {snarf} a copy. See
{copyleft}.

:pdl: /pid'l/ or /puhd'l/ [abbreviation for `Push Down List']
1. n. In ITS days, the preferred MITism for {stack}. See
{overflow pdl}. 2. n. Dave Lebling, one of the co-authors of
{Zork}; (his {network address} on the ITS machines was at one
time pdl@dms). 3. n. `Program Design Language'. Any of a large
class of formal and profoundly useless pseudo-languages in which
{management} forces one to design programs. {Management}
often expects it to be maintained in parallel with the code. See
also {{flowchart}}. 4. v. To design using a program design
language. "I've been pdling so long my eyes won't focus beyond 2
feet." 5. n. `Page Description Language'. Refers to any language
which is used to control a graphics device, usually a laserprinter.
The most common example, is of course, Adobe's {PostScript}
language, but there are many others, such as Xerox InterPress,
etc.

:PDP-10: [Programmed Data Processor model 10] n. The machine that
made timesharing real. It looms large in hacker folklore because
of its adoption in the mid-1970s by many university computing
facilities and research labs, including the MIT AI Lab, Stanford,
and CMU. Some aspects of the instruction set (most notably the
bit-field instructions) are still considered unsurpassed. The 10
was eventually eclipsed by the VAX machines (descendants of the
PDP-11) when DEC recognized that the 10 and VAX product lines were
competing with each other and decided to concentrate its software
development effort on the more profitable VAX. The machine was
finally dropped from DEC's line in 1983, following the failure of
the Jupiter Project at DEC to build a viable new model. (Some
attempts by other companies to market clones came to nothing; see
{Foonly}) This event spelled the doom of {{ITS}} and the
technical cultures that had spawned the original Jargon File, but
by mid-1991 it had become something of a badge of honorable
old-timerhood among hackers to have cut one's teeth on a PDP-10.
See {{TOPS-10}}, {{ITS}}, {AOS}, {BLT}, {DDT}, {DPB},
{EXCH}, {HAKMEM}, {JFCL}, {LDB}, {pop}, {push},
{appendix A}.

:PDP-20: n. The most famous computer that never was. {PDP-10}
computers running the {{TOPS-10}} operating system were labeled
`DECsystem-10' as a way of differentiating them from the PDP-11.
Later on, those systems running {TOPS-20} were labeled
`DECSYSTEM-20' (the block capitals being the result of a lawsuit
brought against DEC by Singer, which once made a computer called
`system-10'), but contrary to popular lore there was never a
`PDP-20'; the only difference between a 10 and a 20 was the
operating system and the color of the paint. Most (but not all)
machines sold to run TOPS-10 were painted `Basil Blue', whereas
most TOPS-20 machines were painted `Chinese Red' (often mistakenly
called orange).

:peek: n.,vt. (and {poke}) The commands in most microcomputer
BASICs for directly accessing memory contents at an absolute
address; often extended to mean the corresponding constructs in any
{HLL} (peek reads memory, poke modifies it). Much hacking on
small, non-MMU micros consists of `peek'ing around memory, more
or less at random, to find the location where the system keeps
interesting stuff. Long (and variably accurate) lists of such
addresses for various computers circulate (see {{interrupt list,
the}}). The results of `poke's at these addresses may be highly
useful, mildly amusing, useless but neat, or (most likely) total
{lossage} (see {killer poke}).

Since a {real operating system} provides useful, higher-level
services for the tasks commonly performed with peeks and pokes on
micros, and real languages tend not to encourage low-level memory
groveling, a question like "How do I do a peek in C?" is
diagnostic of the {newbie}. (Of course, OS kernels often have to
do exactly this; a real C hacker would unhesitatingly, if
unportably, assign an absolute address to a pointer variable and
indirect through it.)

:pencil and paper: n. An archaic information storage and
transmission device that works by depositing smears of graphite on
bleached wood pulp. More recent developments in paper-based
technology include improved `write-once' update devices which use
tiny rolling heads similar to mouse balls to deposit colored
pigment. All these devices require an operator skilled at
so-called `handwriting' technique. These technologies are
ubiquitous outside hackerdom, but nearly forgotten inside it. Most
hackers had terrible handwriting to begin with, and years of
keyboarding tend to have encouraged it to degrade further. Perhaps
for this reason, hackers deprecate pencil-and-paper technology and
often resist using it in any but the most trivial contexts. See
also {appendix B}.

:peon: n. A person with no special ({root} or {wheel})
privileges on a computer system. "I can't create an account on
*foovax* for you; I'm only a peon there."

:percent-S: /per-sent' es'/ [From the code in C's `printf(3)'
library function used to insert an arbitrary string argument] n. An
unspecified person or object. "I was just talking to some
percent-s in administration." Compare {random}.

:perf: /perf/ n. See {chad} (sense 1). The term `perfory'
/per'f*-ree/ is also heard. The term {perf} may also refer to
the preforations themselves, rather than the chad they produce when
torn.

:perfect programmer syndrome: n. Arrogance; the egotistical
conviction that one is above normal human error. Most frequently
found among programmers of some native ability but relatively
little experience (especially new graduates; their perceptions may
be distorted by a history of excellent performance at solving {toy
problem}s). "Of course my program is correct, there is no need to
test it." "Yes, I can see there may be a problem here, but
*I'll* never type `rm -r /' while in {root}."

:Perl: /perl/ [Practical Extraction and Report Language, a.k.a
Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister] n. An interpreted language
developed by Larry Wall <[email protected]>, author of
`patch(1)' and `rn(1)') and distributed over USENET.
Superficially resembles `awk(1)', but is much hairier (see
{awk}). UNIX sysadmins, who are almost always incorrigible
hackers, increasingly consider it one of the {languages of
choice}. Perl has been described, in a parody of a famous remark
about `lex(1)', as the "Swiss-Army chainsaw" of UNIX
programming.

:pessimal: /pes'im-l/ [Latin-based antonym for `optimal'] adj.
Maximally bad. "This is a pessimal situation." Also `pessimize'
vt. To make as bad as possible. These words are the obvious
Latin-based antonyms for `optimal' and `optimize', but for some
reason they do not appear in most English dictionaries, although
`pessimize' is listed in the OED.

:pessimizing compiler: /pes'*-mi:z`ing k*m-pi:l'r/ [antonym of
`optimizing compiler'] n. A compiler that produces object code that
is worse than the straightforward or obvious hand translation. The
implication is that the compiler is actually trying to optimize the
program, but through excessive cleverness is doing the opposite. A
few pessimizing compilers have been written on purpose, however, as
pranks or burlesques.

:peta-: /pe't*/ [SI] pref. See {{quantifiers}}.

:PETSCII: /pet'skee/ [abbreviation of PET ASCII] n. The variation
(many would say perversion) of the {{ASCII}} character set used by
the Commodore Business Machines PET series of personal computers
and the later Commodore C64, C16, and C128 machines. The PETSCII
set used left-arrow and up-arrow (as in old-style ASCII) instead of
underscore and caret, placed the unshifted alphabet at positions
65--90, put the shifted alphabet at positions 193--218, and added
graphics characters.

:phase: 1. n. The phase of one's waking-sleeping schedule with
respect to the standard 24-hour cycle. This is a useful concept
among people who often work at night and/or according to no fixed
schedule. It is not uncommon to change one's phase by as much as 6
hours per day on a regular basis. "What's your phase?" "I've
been getting in about 8 P.M. lately, but I'm going to {wrap
around} to the day schedule by Friday." A person who is roughly
12 hours out of phase is sometimes said to be in `night mode'.
(The term `day mode' is also (but less frequently) used, meaning
you're working 9 to 5 (or, more likely, 10 to 6).) The act of
altering one's cycle is called `changing phase'; `phase
shifting' has also been recently reported from Caltech.
2. `change phase the hard way': To stay awake for a very long
time in order to get into a different phase. 3. `change phase
the easy way': To stay asleep, etc. However, some claim that
either staying awake longer or sleeping longer is easy, and that it
is *shortening* your day or night that's hard (see {wrap
around}). The `jet lag' that afflicts travelers who cross many
time-zone boundaries may be attributed to two distinct causes: the
strain of travel per se, and the strain of changing phase. Hackers
who suddenly find that they must change phase drastically in a
short period of time, particularly the hard way, experience
something very like jet lag without traveling.

:phase of the moon: n. Used humorously as a random parameter on which
something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of
whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems to be dependent on
conditions nobody has been able to determine. "This feature
depends on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo
switch set, and on the phase of the moon."

True story: Once upon a time there was a bug that really did depend
on the phase of the moon. There is a little subroutine that had
traditionally been used in various programs at MIT to calculate an
approximation to the moon's true phase. GLS incorporated this
routine into a LISP program that, when it wrote out a file, would
print a timestamp line almost 80 characters long. Very
occasionally the first line of the message would be too long and
would overflow onto the next line, and when the file was later read
back in the program would {barf}. The length of the first line
depended on both the precise date and time and the length of the
phase specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the bug
literally depended on the phase of the moon!

The first paper edition of the Jargon File (Steele-1983) included
an example of one of the timestamp lines that exhibited this bug,
but the typesetter `corrected' it. This has since been
described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug.

:phase-wrapping: [MIT] n. Syn. {wrap around}, sense 2.

:phreaking: /freek'ing/ [from `phone phreak'] n. 1. The art and
science of cracking the phone network (so as, for example, to make
free long-distance calls). 2. By extension, security-cracking in
any other context (especially, but not exclusively, on
communications networks) (see {cracking}).

At one time phreaking was a semi-respectable activity among
hackers; there was a gentleman's agreement that phreaking as an
intellectual game and a form of exploration was OK, but serious
theft of services was taboo. There was significant crossover
between the hacker community and the hard-core phone phreaks who
ran semi-underground networks of their own through such media as
the legendary `TAP Newsletter'. This ethos began to break
down in the mid-1980s as wider dissemination of the techniques put
them in the hands of less responsible phreaks. Around the same
time, changes in the phone network made old-style technical
ingenuity less effective as a way of hacking it, so phreaking came
to depend more on overtly criminal acts such as stealing phone-card
numbers. The crimes and punishments of gangs like the `414 group'
turned that game very ugly. A few old-time hackers still phreak
casually just to keep their hand in, but most these days have
hardly even heard of `blue boxes' or any of the other
paraphernalia of the great phreaks of yore.