random jargon terms

throwaway account

admin — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 19:36:11 +0200

throwaway account n.

1. An inexpensive Internet account purchased on a legitimate ISP for the sole purpose of spewing spam.

2. An inexpensive Internet account obtained for the sole purpose of doing something which requires a valid email address but being able to ignore spam since the user will not look at the account again.

Pentium

admin — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 16:04:35 +0200

Pentium n.

The name given to Intel's P5 chip, the successor to the 80486. The name was chosen because of difficulties Intel had in trademarking a number. It suggests the number five (implying 586) while (according to Intel) conveying a meaning of strength “like titanium”. Among hackers, the plural is frequently ‘pentia’. See also Pentagram Pro.

Intel did not stick to this convention when naming its P6 processor the Pentium Pro; many believe this is due to difficulties in selling a chip with “hex” or “sex” in its name. Successor chips have been called Pentium II, Pentium III, and Pentium IV.

Internet

admin — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 09:21:37 +0200

Internet n.

The mother of all networks. First incarnated beginning in 1969 as the ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defense research testbed. Though it has been widely believed that the goal was to develop a network architecture for military command-and-control that could survive disruptions up to and including nuclear war, this is a myth; in fact, ARPANET was conceived from the start as a way to get most economical use out of then-scarce large-computer resources. Robert Herzfeld, who was director of ARPA at the time, has been at some pains to debunk the “survive-a-nuclear-war” myth, but it seems unkillable.

download

admin — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 06:34:49 +0200

download vt.

To transfer data or (esp.) code from a far-away system (especially a larger host system) over a digital communications link to a nearby system (especially a smaller client system. Oppose upload.

Historical use of these terms was at one time associated with transfers from large timesharing machines to PCs or peripherals (download) and vice-versa (upload). The modern usage relative to the speaker (rather than as an indicator of the size and role of the machines) evolved as machine categories lost most of their former functional importance.

crlf

admin — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 05:44:03 +0200

crlf /ker´l@f/, sometimes /kru´l@f/ or /C·R·L·F/ n.

(often capitalized as ‘CRLF’) A carriage return (CR, ASCII 0001101) followed by a line feed (LF, ASCII 0001010). More loosely, whatever it takes to get you from the end of one line of text to the beginning of the next line. See newline. Under Unix influence this usage has become less common (Unix uses a bare line feed as its ‘CRLF’).