Словарь кулхацкера:
A
B1
B2
B3
C
C2
D
E
F
G
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I
J
K
L
M
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= L =
lace card:
Бесплатные программы скачать софт бесплатно хакер n. obs. A {{punched card}} with all holes punched (also
called a `whoopee card'). Card readers jammed when they got to
one of these, as the resulting card had too little structural
strength to avoid buckling inside the mechanism. Card punches
could also jam trying to produce these things owing to power-supply
problems. When some practical joker fed a lace card through the
reader, you needed to clear the jam with a `card knife' ---
which you used on the joker first.
language lawyer: n. A person, usually an experienced or senior
software engineer, who is intimately familiar with many or most of
the numerous restrictions and features (both useful and esoteric)
applicable to one or more computer programming languages. A
language lawyer is distinguished by the ability to show you the
five sentences scattered through a 200-plus-page manual that
together imply the answer to your question "if only you had
thought to look there". Compare {wizard}, {legal},
{legalese}.
languages of choice: n. {C} and {LISP}. Nearly every hacker
knows one of these, and most good ones are fluent in both. Smalltalk
and Prolog are also popular in small but influential communities.
There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with
FORTRAN, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They
often prefer to be known as {real programmer}s, and other hackers
consider them a bit odd (see "The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer"
in appendix A). Assembler is generally no longer considered
interesting or appropriate for anything but {HLL} implementation,
{glue}, and a few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systems
programs. FORTRAN occupies a shrinking niche in scientific
programming.
Most hackers tend to frown on languages like {{Pascal}} and
{{Ada}}, which don't give them the near-total freedom considered
necessary for hacking (see {bondage-and-discipline language}), and
to regard everything that's even remotely connected with {COBOL}
or other traditional {card walloper} languages as a total
and unmitigated {loss}.
larval stage: n. Describes a period of monomaniacal concentration
on coding apparently passed through by all fledgling hackers.
Common symptoms include the perpetration of more than one 36-hour
{hacking run} in a given week; neglect of all other activities
including usual basics like food, sleep, and personal hygiene; and
a chronic case of advanced bleary-eye. Can last from 6 months to 2
years, the apparent median being around 18 months. A few so
afflicted never resume a more `normal' life, but the ordeal
seems to be necessary to produce really wizardly (as opposed to
merely competent) programmers. See also {wannabee}. A less
protracted and intense version of larval stage (typically lasting
about a month) may recur when one is learning a new {OS} or
programming language.
lase: /layz/ vt. To print a given document via a laser printer.
"OK, let's lase that sucker and see if all those graphics-macro
calls did the right things."
laser chicken:
Бесплатные программы скачать софт бесплатно хакер n. Kung Pao Chicken, a standard Chinese dish
containing chicken, peanuts, and hot red peppers in a spicy
pepper-oil sauce. Many hackers call it `laser chicken' for
two reasons: It can {zap} you just like a laser, and the
sauce has a red color reminiscent of some laser beams.
In a variation on this theme, it is reported that some Australian
hackers have redesignated the common dish `lemon chicken' as
`Chernobyl Chicken'. The name is derived from the color of the
sauce, which is considered bright enough to glow in the dark (as,
mythically, do some of the inhabitants of Chernobyl).
laundromat: n. Syn. {disk farm}; see {washing machine}.
LDB: /l*'d*b/ [from the PDP-10 instruction set] vt. To extract
from the middle. "LDB me a slice of cake, please." This usage
has been kept alive by Common LISP's function of the same name.
Considered silly. See also {DPB}.
leaf site: n. A machine that merely originates and reads USENET
news or mail, and does not relay any third-party traffic. Often
uttered in a critical tone; when the ratio of leaf sites to
backbone, rib, and other relay sites gets too high, the network
tends to develop bottlenecks. Compare {backbone site}, {rib
site}.
leak: n. With qualifier, one of a class of resource-management bugs
that occur when resources are not freed properly after operations
on them are finished, so they effectively disappear (leak out).
This leads to eventual exhaustion as new allocation requests come
in. {memory leak} and {fd leak} have their own entries; one
might also refer, to, say, a `window handle leak' in a window
system.
leaky heap: [Cambridge]
Бесплатные программы скачать софт бесплатно хакер n. An {arena} with a {memory leak}.
legal: adj. Loosely used to mean `in accordance with all the
relevant rules', esp. in connection with some set of constraints
defined by software. "The older =+ alternate for += is no longer
legal syntax in ANSI C." "This parser processes each line of
legal input the moment it sees the trailing linefeed." Hackers
often model their work as a sort of game played with the
environment in which the objective is to maneuver through the
thicket of `natural laws' to achieve a desired objective. Their
use of `legal' is flavored as much by this game-playing sense as by
the more conventional one having to do with courts and lawyers.
Compare {language lawyer}, {legalese}.
legalese: n. Dense, pedantic verbiage in a language description,
product specification, or interface standard; text that seems
designed to obfuscate and requires a {language lawyer} to
{parse} it. Though hackers are not afraid of high information
density and complexity in language (indeed, they rather enjoy
both), they share a deep and abiding loathing for legalese; they
associate it with deception, {suit}s, and situations in which
hackers generally get the short end of the stick.
LER: /L-E-R/ [TMRC, from `Light-Emitting Diode] n. A
light-emitting resistor (that is, one in the process of burning
up). Ohm's law was broken. See {SED}.
LERP: /lerp/ vi.,n. Quasi-acronym for Linear Interpolation, used as a
verb or noun for the operation. E.g., Bresenham's algorithm lerps
incrementally between the two endpoints of the line.
let the smoke out: v. To fry hardware (see {fried}). See
{magic smoke} for the mythology behind this.
letterbomb: n. A piece of {email} containing {live data}
intended to do nefarious things to the recipient's machine or
terminal. It is possible, for example, to send letterbombs that
will lock up some specific kinds of terminals when they are viewed,
so thoroughly that the user must {cycle power} to unwedge them.
Under UNIX, a letterbomb can also try to get part of its contents
interpreted as a shell command to the mailer. The results of this
could range from silly to tragic. See also {Trojan horse};
compare {nastygram}.
lexer: /lek'sr/
Бесплатные программы скачать софт бесплатно хакер n. Common hacker shorthand for `lexical
analyzer', the input-tokenizing stage in the parser for a language
(the part that breaks it into word-like pieces). "Some C lexers
get confused by the old-style compound ops like `=-'."
lexiphage: /lek'si-fayj`/ n. A notorious word {chomper} on
ITS. See {bagbiter}.
life: n. 1. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton
Conway and first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner (`Scientific
American', October 1970). Many hackers pass through a stage of
fascination with it, and hackers at various places contributed
heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most notably
Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented life in {TECO}!; see
{Gosperism}). When a hacker mentions `life', he is much more
likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal,
or the human state of existence. 2. The opposite of {USENET}.
As in {Get a life!}
light pipe: n. Fiber optic cable. Oppose {copper}.
like kicking dead whales down the beach: adj. Describes a slow,
difficult, and disgusting process. First popularized by a famous
quote about the difficulty of getting work done under one of IBM's
mainframe OSes. "Well, you *could* write a C compiler in
COBOL, but it would be like kicking dead whales down the beach."
See also {fear and loathing}
like nailing jelly to a tree: adj. Used to describe a task thought
to be impossible, esp. one in which the difficulty arises from
poor specification or inherent slipperiness in the problem domain.
"Trying to display the `prettiest' arrangement of nodes and arcs
that diagrams a given graph is like nailing jelly to a tree,
because nobody's sure what `prettiest' means algorithmically."
line eater, the: [USENET]
Бесплатные программы скачать софт бесплатно хакер n. 1. A bug in some now-obsolete
versions of the netnews software that used to eat up to BUFSIZ
bytes of the article text. The bug was triggered by having the
text of the article start with a space or tab. This bug was
quickly personified as a mythical creature called the `line
eater', and postings often included a dummy line of `line eater
food'. Ironically, line eater `food' not beginning with a space or
tab wasn't actually eaten, since the bug was avoided; but if there
*was* a space or tab before it, then the line eater would eat
the food *and* the beginning of the text it was supposed to be
protecting. The practice of `sacrificing to the line eater'
continued for some time after the bug had been {nailed to the
wall}, and is still humorously referred to. The bug itself is
still (in mid-1991) occasionally reported to be lurking in some
mail-to-netnews gateways. 2. See {NSA line eater}.
line starve: [MIT] 1. vi. To feed paper through a printer the wrong
way by one line (most printers can't do this). On a display
terminal, to move the cursor up to the previous line of the screen.
"To print `X squared', you just output `X', line starve,
`2', line feed." (The line starve causes the `2' to appear on the
line above the `X', and the line feed gets back to the original
line.) 2. n. A character (or character sequence) that causes a
terminal to perform this action. Unlike `line feed', `line starve'
is *not* standard {{ASCII}} terminology. Even among hackers
it is considered a bit silly. 3. [proposed] A sequence such as \c
(used in System V echo, as well as nroff/troff) that suppresses a
{newline} or other character(s) that would normally be emitted.
link farm: [UNIX] n. A directory tree that contains many links to
files in a master directory tree of files. Link farms save space
when (for example) one is maintaining several nearly identical
copies of the same source tree, e.g., when the only difference is
architecture-dependent object files. "Let's freeze the source and
then rebuild the FROBOZZ-3 and FROBOZZ-4 link farms." Link farms
may also be used to get around restrictions on the number of
`-I' (include-file directory) arguments on older
C preprocessors.
link-dead: [MUD] adj. Said of a {MUD} character who has frozen in
place because of a dropped Internet connection.
lint: [from UNIX's `lint(1)', named perhaps for the bits of
fluff it picks from programs] 1. vt. To examine a program closely
for style, language usage, and portability problems, esp. if
in C, esp. if via use of automated analysis tools, most esp. if
the UNIX utility `lint(1)' is used. This term used to be
restricted to use of `lint(1)' itself, but (judging by
references on USENET) it has become a shorthand for {desk check}
at some non-UNIX shops, even in languages other than C. Also as
v. {delint}. 2. n. Excess verbiage in a document, as in "this
draft has too much lint".
lion food: [IBM]
Бесплатные программы скачать софт бесплатно хакер n. Middle management or HQ staff (by extension,
administrative drones in general). From an old joke about two
lions who, escaping from the zoo, split up to increase their
chances but agreed to meet after 2 months. When they finally
meet, one is skinny and the other overweight. The thin one says:
"How did you manage? I ate a human just once and they turned out
a small army to chase me --- guns, nets, it was terrible. Since
then I've been reduced to eating mice, insects, even grass." The
fat one replies: "Well, *I* hid near an IBM office and ate a
manager a day. And nobody even noticed!"
Lions Book: n. `Source Code and Commentary on UNIX level 6',
by John Lions. The two parts of this book contained (1) the entire
source listing of the UNIX Version 6 kernel, and (2) a commentary
on the source discussing the algorithms. These were circulated
internally at the University of New South Wales beginning 1976--77,
and were for years after the *only* detailed kernel
documentation available to anyone outside Bell Labs. Because
Western Electric wished to maintain trade secret status on the
kernel, the Lions book was never formally published and was only
supposed to be distributed to affiliates of source licensees. In
spite of this, it soon spread by samizdat to a good many of the
early UNIX hackers.
LISP: [from `LISt Processing language', but mythically from
`Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses'] n. The name of AI's
mother tongue, a language based on the ideas of (a) variable-length
lists and trees as fundamental data types, and (b) the
interpretation of code as data and vice-versa. Invented by John
McCarthy at MIT in the late 1950s, it is actually older than any
other {HLL} still in use except FORTRAN. Accordingly, it has
undergone considerable adaptive radiation over the years; modern
variants are quite different in detail from the original LISP 1.5.
The dominant HLL among hackers until the early 1980s, LISP now
shares the throne with {C}. See {languages of choice}.
All LISP functions and programs are expressions that return
values; this, together with the high memory utilization of LISPs,
gave rise to Alan Perlis's famous quip (itself a take on an Oscar
Wilde quote) that "LISP programmers know the value of everything
and the cost of nothing".
One significant application for LISP has been as a proof by example
that most newer languages, such as {COBOL} and {Ada}, are full
of unnecessary {crock}s. When the {Right Thing} has already
been done once, there is no justification for {bogosity} in newer
languages.
literature, the: n. Computer-science journals and other
publications, vaguely gestured at to answer a question that the
speaker believes is {trivial}. Thus, one might answer an
annoying question by saying "It's in the literature." Oppose
{Knuth}, which has no connotation of triviality.
little-endian: adj. Describes a computer architecture in which,
within a given 16- or 32-bit word, bytes at lower addresses have
lower significance (the word is stored `little-end-first'). The
PDP-11 and VAX families of computers and Intel microprocessors and
a lot of communications and networking hardware are little-endian.
See {big-endian}, {middle-endian}, {NUXI problem}. The term
is sometimes used to describe the ordering of units other than
bytes; most often these are bits within a byte.
live data: n. 1. Data that is written to be interpreted and takes
over program flow when triggered by some un-obvious operation, such
as viewing it. One use of such hacks is to break security. For
example, some smart terminals have commands that allow one to
download strings to program keys; this can be used to write live
data that, when listed to the terminal, infects it with a
security-breaking {virus} that is triggered the next time a
hapless user strikes that key. For another, there are some
well-known bugs in {vi} that allow certain texts to send
arbitrary commands back to the machine when they are simply viewed.
2. In C code, data that includes pointers to function {hook}s
(executable code). 3. An object, such as a {trampoline}, that is
constructed on the fly by a program and intended to be executed as
code. 4. Actual real-world data, as opposed to `test data'.
For example, "I think I have the record deletion module
finished." "Have you tried it out on live data?" It usually
carries the connotation that live data is more fragile and must not
be corrupted, else bad things will happen. So a possible alternate
response to the above claim might be: "Well, make sure it works
perfectly before we throw live data at it." The implication here
is that record deletion is something pretty significant, and a
haywire record-deletion module running amok on live data would
cause great harm and probably require restoring from backups.
Live Free Or Die!: imp. 1. The state motto of New Hampshire, which
appears on that state's automobile license plates. 2. A slogan
associated with UNIX in the romantic days when UNIX aficionados saw
themselves as a tiny, beleaguered underground tilting against the
windmills of industry. The "free" referred specifically to
freedom from the {fascist} design philosophies and crufty
misfeatures common on commercial operating systems. Armando
Stettner, one of the early UNIX developers, used to give out fake
license plates bearing this motto under a large UNIX, all in New
Hampshire colors of green and white. These are now valued
collector's items.
livelock: /li:v'lok/
Бесплатные программы скачать софт бесплатно хакер n. A situation in which some critical stage
of a task is unable to finish because its clients perpetually
create more work for it to do after they have been serviced but
before it can clear its queue. Differs from {deadlock} in that
the process is not blocked or waiting for anything, but has a
virtually infinite amount of work to do and can never catch up.
liveware: /li:v'weir/ n. 1. Synonym for {wetware}. Less
common. 2. [Cambridge] Vermin. "Waiter, there's some liveware in my
salad..."
lobotomy: n. 1. What a hacker subjected to formal management
training is said to have undergone. At IBM and elsewhere this term
is used by both hackers and low-level management; the latter
doubtless intend it as a joke. 2. The act of removing the
processor from a microcomputer in order to replace or upgrade it.
Some very cheap {clone} systems are sold in `lobotomized' form
--- everything but the brain.
locked and loaded: [from military slang for an M-16 rifle with
magazine inserted and prepared for firing] adj. Said of a removable
disk volume properly prepared for use --- that is, locked into the
drive and with the heads loaded. Ironically, because their heads
are `loaded' whenever the power is up, this description is never
used of {{Winchester}} drives (which are named after a rifle).
locked up: adj. Syn. for {hung}, {wedged}.
logic bomb: n. Code surreptitiously inserted in an application or
OS that causes it to perform some destructive or
security-compromising activity whenever specified conditions are
met. Compare {back door}.
logical: [from the technical term `logical device', wherein a
physical device is referred to by an arbitrary `logical' name]
adj. Having the role of. If a person (say, Les Earnest at SAIL)
who had long held a certain post left and were replaced, the
replacement would for a while be known as the `logical' Les
Earnest. (This does not imply any judgment on the replacement.)
Compare {virtual}.
At Stanford, `logical' compass directions denote a coordinate
system in which `logical north' is toward San Francisco,
`logical west' is toward the ocean, etc., even though logical
north varies between physical (true) north near San Francisco and
physical west near San Jose. (The best rule of thumb here is that,
by definition, El Camino Real always runs logical north-and-south.)
In giving directions, one might say: "To get to Rincon Tarasco
restaurant, get onto {El Camino Bignum} going logical north."
Using the word `logical' helps to prevent the recipient from
worrying about that the fact that the sun is setting almost
directly in front of him. The concept is reinforced by North
American highways which are almost, but not quite, consistently
labeled with logical rather than physical directions. A similar
situation exists at MIT. Route 128 (famous for the electronics
industry that has grown up along it) is a 3-quarters circle
surrounding Boston at a radius of 10 miles, terminating near the
coastline at each end. It would be most precise to describe the
two directions along this highway as `clockwise' and
`counterclockwise', but the road signs all say "north" and
"south", respectively. A hacker might describe these directions
as `logical north' and `logical south', to indicate that they
are conventional directions not corresponding to the usual
denotation for those words. (If you went logical south along the
entire length of route 128, you would start out going northwest,
curve around to the south, and finish headed due east!)
loop through: vt. To process each element of a list of things.
"Hold on, I've got to loop through my paper mail." Derives from
the computer-language notion of an iterative loop; compare `cdr
down' (under {cdr}), which is less common among C and UNIX
programmers. ITS hackers used to say `IRP over' after an
obscure pseudo-op in the MIDAS PDP-10 assembler.
lord high fixer: [primarily British, from Gilbert & Sullivan's
`lord high executioner']
Бесплатные программы скачать софт бесплатно хакер n. The person in an organization who knows
the most about some aspect of a system. See {wizard}.
lose: [MIT] vi. 1. To fail. A program loses when it encounters
an exceptional condition or fails to work in the expected manner.
2. To be exceptionally unesthetic or crocky. 3. Of people, to
be obnoxious or unusually stupid (as opposed to ignorant). See
also {deserves to lose}. 4. n. Refers to something that is
{losing}, especially in the phrases "That's a lose!" and "What
a lose!"
lose lose: interj. A reply to or comment on an undesirable
situation. "I accidentally deleted all my files!" "Lose,
lose."
loser: n. An unexpectedly bad situation, program, programmer, or
person. Someone who habitually loses. (Even winners can lose
occasionally.) Someone who knows not and knows not that he knows
not. Emphatic forms are `real loser', `total loser', and
`complete loser' (but not *`moby loser', which would be a
contradiction in terms). See {luser}.
losing: adj. Said of anything that is or causes a {lose} or
{lossage}.
loss:
Бесплатные программы скачать софт бесплатно хакер n. Something (not a person) that loses; a situation in which
something is losing. Emphatic forms include `moby loss', and
`total loss', `complete loss'. Common interjections are
"What a loss!" and "What a moby loss!" Note that `moby loss'
is OK even though `moby loser' is not used; applied to an abstract
noun, moby is simply a magnifier, whereas when applied to a person
it implies substance and has positive connotations. Compare
{lossage}.
lossage: /los'*j/ n. The result of a bug or malfunction. This
is a mass or collective noun. "What a loss!" and "What
lossage!" are nearly synonymous. The former is slightly more
particular to the speaker's present circumstances; the latter
implies a continuing {lose} of which the speaker is currently
a victim. Thus (for example) a temporary hardware failure is a loss,
but bugs in an important tool (like a compiler) are serious
lossage.
lost in the noise: adj. Syn. {lost in the underflow}. This term
is from signal processing, where signals of very small amplitude
cannot be separated from low-intensity noise in the system. Though
popular among hackers, it is not confined to hackerdom; physicists,
engineers, astronomers, and statisticians all use it.
lost in the underflow: adj. Too small to be worth considering;
more specifically, small beyond the limits of accuracy or
measurement. This is a reference to `floating underflow', a
condition that can occur when a floating-point arithmetic processor
tries to handle quantities smaller than its limit of magnitude. It
is also a pun on `undertow' (a kind of fast, cold current that
sometimes runs just offshore and can be dangerous to swimmers).
"Well, sure, photon pressure from the stadium lights alters the
path of a thrown baseball, but that effect gets lost in the
underflow." See also {overflow bit}.
lots of MIPS but no I/O: adj. Used to describe a person who is
technically brilliant but can't seem to communicate with human
beings effectively. Technically it describes a machine that has
lots of processing power but is bottlenecked on input-output (in
1991, the IBM Rios, a.k.a. RS/6000, is a notorious recent
example).
low-bandwidth: [from communication theory] adj. Used to indicate a
talk that, although not {content-free}, was not terribly
informative. "That was a low-bandwidth talk, but what can you
expect for an audience of {suit}s!" Compare {zero-content},
{bandwidth}, {math-out}.
LPT: /L-P-T/ or /lip'it/ or /lip-it'/ [MIT, via DEC] n. Line
printer, of course. Rare under UNIX, commoner in hackers with
MS-DOS or CP/M background. The printer device is called
`LPT:' on those systems that, like ITS, were strongly
influenced by early DEC conventions.
lunatic fringe: [IBM]
Бесплатные программы скачать софт бесплатно хакер n. Customers who can be relied upon to accept
release 1 versions of software.
lurker: n. One of the `silent majority' in a electronic forum;
one who posts occasionally or not at all but is known to read the
group's postings regularly. This term is not pejorative and indeed
is casually used reflexively: "Oh, I'm just lurking." Often used
in `the lurkers', the hypothetical audience for the group's
{flamage}-emitting regulars.
luser: /loo'zr/ n. A {user}; esp. one who is also a {loser}.
({luser} and {loser} are pronounced identically.) This word
was coined around 1975 at MIT. Under ITS, when you first walked up
to a terminal at MIT and typed Control-Z to get the computer's
attention, it printed out some status information, including how
many people were already using the computer; it might print
"14 users", for example. Someone thought it would be a great joke to
patch the system to print "14 losers" instead. There ensued a
great controversy, as some of the users didn't particularly want to
be called losers to their faces every time they used the computer.
For a while several hackers struggled covertly, each changing the
message behind the back of the others; any time you logged into the
computer it was even money whether it would say "users" or
"losers". Finally, someone tried the compromise "lusers", and it
stuck. Later one of the ITS machines supported `luser' as a
request-for-help command. ITS died the death in mid-1990, except
as a museum piece; the usage lives on, however, and the term
`luser' is often seen in program comments.