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Simpyrandom
This page provides a list of random terms extracted from the jargon file. Check us often, this page is updated every hour!
tourist
tourist n.
1. [ITS] A guest on the system, especially one who generally logs in over a network from a remote location for comm mode, email, games, and other trivial purposes. One step below luser. ITS hackers often used to spell this turist, perhaps by some sort of tenuous analogy with luser (this usage may also have expressed the ITS culture's penchant for six-letterisms, and/or been some sort of tribute to Alan Turing). Compare twink, lurker, read-only user.
fear and loathing
fear and loathing n.
[from Hunter S. Thompson] A state inspired by the prospect of dealing with certain real-world systems and standards that are totally brain-damaged but ubiquitous — Intel 8086s, or COBOL, or EBCDIC, or any IBM machine bigger than a workstation. “Ack! They want PCs to be able to talk to the AI machine. Fear and loathing time!”
vanity domain
vanity domain n.
[common; from ‘vanity plate’ as in car license plate] An Internet domain, particularly in the .com or .org top-level domains, apparently created for no reason other than boosting the creator's ego.
HP-SUX
HP-SUX /H·P suhks/ n.
Unflattering hackerism for HP-UX, Hewlett-Packard's Unix port, which features some truly unique bogosities in the filesystem internals and elsewhere (these occasionally create portability problems). HP-UX is often referred to as ‘hockey-pux’ inside HP, and one respondent claims that the proper pronunciation is /H·P ukkkhhhh/ as though one were about to spit. Another such alternate spelling and pronunciation is “H-PUX” /H-puhks/. Hackers at HP/Apollo (the former Apollo Computers which was swallowed by HP in 1989) have been heard to complain that Mr. Packard should have pushed to have his name first, if for no other reason than the greater eloquence of the resulting acronym. See sun-stools, Slowlaris.
zigamorph
zigamorph /zig'@·morf/ n.
1. Hex FF (11111111) when used as a delimiter or fence character. Usage: primarily at IBM shops.
2. [proposed] n. The Unicode non-character U+FFFF (1111111111111111), a character code which is not assigned to any character, and so is usable as end-of-string. (Unicode is a 16-bit character code intended to cover all of the world's writing systems, including Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese, hiragana, katakana, Devanagari, Thai, Laotian and many other scripts — support for elvish is planned for a future release).
