One Hit Kill Hack Wow 2.4.3
[Reduced Instruction Set Computer] An architectural approach to processor pioneered at Berkeley in the early 1980s which emphasizes simple fixed-length instructions implemented in random logic or PLAs, as opposed to the older style that came to be called CISC [Complex Instruction Set Computer] architectures typified by the VAX in which elaborate microcode is used to implement bushels of addressing modes and special-case instructions of wildly varying length. RISC processors also generally feature a large file of orthogonal registers and register windowing to reduce HLL function-call overhead. The theory behind all this was to optimize to the code-generating style of HLL compilers rather than human programmers, trading away instruction-set complexity to eliminate decode overhead and improve performance. It worked; see killer micro.
One Hit Kill Hack Wow 2.4.3
Nom de guerre of Richard M. Stallman, archetypal AI hacker famous in particular for 1) inventing EMACS, 2) his belief that making money from software is evil, and 3) the consequent creation of the Free Software Foundation. See copyleft, demigod, EMACS, GNU, Symbolics.
In floating-point arithmetic, the maximum difference allowed between two quantities for them to compare equal. Has to be set properly relative to the FPU's precision limits. See fudge factor. This term is particularly common among APL hackers.
The connection between the central processor and memory is often called the von Neumann bottleneck. This term was coined by John Backus in his 1978 Turing Award lecture; it is now standard in the computer science literature but is also the canonical example of a bottleneck to hackers.
A physical paper printout (as opposed to on-screen display) of program source, or of the results (interspersed with error and status messages) of a compilation or assembly run. What one grovels over when performing a desk check. Both the term `listing' and the thing it describes are now much less common than formerly, as modern time-sharing operating systems and powerful interactive editors have made it advantageous for hackers to do effectively all of their work on-line.
To graft some pieces from newer technology onto a piece of software or hardware representing an older one. This often results in a crocky, inelegant compromise between new and old. The term implies use of the older stuff in ways the designers didn't anticipate. Some of the bizarre things done during the 1970s to old-style batch operating systems like GECOS and IBM's OS/360 in order to make them crudely interactive stand out as examples. More recently, personal computer hackers have frequently been known to graft new floppy and hard-disk devices onto obsolete hardware in order to preserve software written for a particular processor, screen and keyboard combination.
2. To undertake an all-night programming/hacking session, interspersed with stints of mudding as a change of pace. This term arose on the British academic network amongst students who worked nights and logged onto Essex University's MUDs during public-access hours (2 @scA.M. to 7 @scA.M.). Usually more mudding than work was done in these sessions.
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, Macintrash Nominal Semidestructor, ScumOS, sun-stools, HP-SUX.
For similar reasons, AOJ meant `Add One and do not Jump'. Even more bizarre, SKIP meant `do not SKIP'! If you wanted to skip the next instruction, you had to say `SKIPA'. Likewise, JUMP meant `do not JUMP'; the unconditional form was JUMPA. However, hackers never did this. By some quirk of the 10's design, the JRST (Jump and ReSTore flag with no flag specified) was actually faster and so was invariably used. Such were the perverse mysteries of assembler programming.
Deserving of being gassed. Disseminated by Geoff Goodfellow while at SRI; became particularly popular after the Moscone-Milk killings in San Francisco, when it was learned that the defendant Dan White (a politician who had supported Proposition 7) would get the gas chamber under Proposition 7 if convicted of first-degree murder (he was eventually convicted of manslaughter).
[MS-DOS] The original IBM PC Technical Reference Manual, including the BIOS listing and complete schematics for the PC. The only PC documentation in the original-issue package that was considered serious by real hackers.
[FidoNet] An infinite stream of duplicated, near-identical messages on a FidoNet echo, the only difference being unique or mangled identification information applied by a faulty or incorrectly configured system or network gateway, thus rendering dup killers ineffective. If such a duplicate message eventually reaches a system through which it has already passed (with the original identification information), all systems passed on the way back to that system are said to be involved in a dup loop.
The garbage one gets on a terminal (or terminal emulator) when using a modem connection with some protocol setting (esp.: line speed) incorrect, or when someone picks up a voice extension on the same line, or when really bad line noise disrupts the connection. Baud barf is not completely random, by the way; hackers with a lot of serial-line experience can usually tell whether the device at the other end is expecting a higher or lower speed than the terminal is set to. Really experienced ones can identify particular speeds.
A situation wherein the number of people trying to use a computer simultaneously has reached the point where no one can get enough cycles because they are spread too thin and the system has probably begun to thrash. This scenario is an inevitable result of Parkinson's Law applied to timesharing. Usually the only solution is to buy more computer. Happily, this has rapidly become easier since the mid-1980s, so much so that the very term `cycle crunch' now has a faintly archaic flavor; most hackers now use workstations or personal computers as opposed to traditional timesharing systems, and are far more likely to complain of `bandwidth crunch' on their shared networks rather than cycle crunch.
[TCP/IP hackers] A DEC LSI-11 running a particular suite of homebrewed software written by Dave Mills and assorted co-conspirators, used in the early 1980s for Internet protocol testbedding and experimentation. These were used as NSFnet backbone sites in its early 56kb-line days; a few were still active on the Internet as late as mid-1993, doing odd jobs such as network time service.
[for Dick Gabriel, SAIL LISP hacker and volleyball fanatic] An unnecessary (in the opinion of the opponent) stalling tactic, e.g., tying one's shoelaces or combing one's hair repeatedly, asking the time, etc. Also used to refer to the perpetrator of such tactics. Also, pulling a Gabriel, Gabriel mode.
A hack, invention, or saying due to elder days arch-hacker R. William (Bill) Gosper. This notion merits its own term because there are so many of them. Many of the entries in HAKMEM are Gosperisms; see also life.
Unflattering hackerism for SunOS, the BSD Unix variant supported on Sun Microsystems's Unix workstations (see also sun-stools), and compare Macintrash, HP-SUX. Despite what this term might suggest, Sun was founded by hackers and still enjoys excellent relations with hackerdom; usage is more often in exasperation than outright loathing.
[from `Y2K bug' for the Year 2000 problem] The deployment of Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system, which hackers generally expect will turn out to have been among the worst train wrecks in the history of software engineering. Such is the power of Microsoft marketing, however, that it is also expected this will not become obvious until it has incurred hundreds of millions of dollars in downtime and lost opportunity costs.
n.,obs. An infamously losing text editor. Once, back in the 1960s, when a text editor was needed for the PDP-6, a hacker crufted together a quick-and-dirty `stopgap editor' to be used until a better one was written. Unfortunately, the old one was never really discarded when new ones came along. SOS is a descendant (`Son of Stopgap') of that editor, and many PDP-10 users gained the dubious pleasure of its acquaintance. Since then other programs similar in style to SOS have been written, notably the early font editor BILOS /bye'lohs/, the Brother-In-Law Of Stopgap (the alternate expansion `Bastard Issue, Loins of Stopgap' has been proposed).
A series of pastiches of Zen teaching riddles created by Danny Hillis at the MIT AI Lab around various major figures of the Lab's culture (several are included under Some AI Koans in Appendix A). See also ha ha only serious, mu, and hacker humor.
[Commodore BBS culture] Any file that is written with the intention of being read by a human rather than a machine, such as the Jargon File, documentation, humor files, hacker lore, and technical materials.
2. n. A character (or character sequence) that causes a terminal to perform this action. ASCII 0011010, also called SUB or control-Z, was one common line-starve character in the days before microcomputers and the X3.64 terminal standard. Today, the term might be used for the ISO reverse line feed character 0x8D. Unlike line feed, line starve is not standard ASCII terminology. Even among hackers it is considered a bit silly.
1. Line printer (originally Line Printing Terminal). Rare under Unix, more common among hackers who grew up with ITS, MS-DOS, CP/M and other operating systems that were strongly influenced by early DEC conventions.
The warrior is a very capable player killer with a mix of strong offensive and defensive abilities and excellent burst damage. The class has good attack speed and mobility and can close on a target quickly, combine this with an essential pvp debuff of 25% less healing on his target and Taste for Blood makes the class very dangerous. The warrior always does damage and does not need to break for mana. The more damage warriors take the stronger they become(while in Berserker Stance) , give them a healer and they become one of the best group pvp classes. Warriors have retribution damage: if he suffers damage, he gains rage and his strikes will become much more deadly. A warrior's major problem is often to avoid being kited by more ranged-oriented classes or being starved for rage. For this, combat controlling abilities such as Hamstring, Piercing Howl, Staggering Shout and Double Time are excellent remedies, also this simple array of abilities means damage can be maintained even with limited rage.