Jargon
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109 definitions for W
- Category: Cyberculture
W00t : An interjection similar to Yay!, as in: w00t!!! I just got a raise! Often used for small victories the speaker dies not expect to be of special interest to anyone else. Some claim this is a bastardization of root, the highest level of access to a system (particularly UNIX), originated by script kiddies as a 133tspeak equivalent of root, and said as an exclamation upon gaining root access. Others claim it originated in the Everquest multiplayer game as an abbreviation of wonderful loot. Still other claim it on originated on IRC as the Ewok victory cheer. Adj. has the sense of cool or nifty. This is one of the few leet-speak coinages to have crossed over into non-ironic use among hackers.
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
- Category: Cyberculture
Wabbit : [almost certainly from Elmer Fudd's immortal line You wascawwy wabbit!] 1. A legendary early hack reported on a System/360 at RPI and elsewhere around 1978; this may have descended (if only by inspiration) from a hack called RABBITS reported from 1969 on a Burroughs 5500 at the University of Washington Computer Center. The program would make two copies of itself every time it was run, eventually crashing the system. 2. By extension, any hack that includes infinite self-replication but is not a virus or worm . See fork bomb and rabbit job, see also cookie monster .
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
- Category: Cyberculture
WAITS : The mutant cousin of TOPS-10 used on a handful of systems at SAIL up to 1990. There was never an ‘official’ expansion of WAITS (the name itself having been arrived at by a rather sideways process), but it was frequently glossed as ‘West-coast Alternative to ITS’. Though WAITS was less visible than ITS, there was frequent exchange of people and ideas between the two communities, and innovations pioneered at WAITS exerted enormous indirect influence. The early screen modes of EMACS, for example, were directly inspired by WAITS's ‘E’ editor — one of a family of editors that were the first to do ‘real-time editing’, in which the editing commands were invisible and where one typed text at the point of insertion/overwriting. The modern style of multi-region windowing is said to have originated there, and WAITS alumni at XEROX PARC and elsewhere played major roles in the developments that led to the XEROX Star, the Macintosh, and the Sun workstations. Also invented there were bucky bits — thus, the ALT key on every IBM PC is a WAITS legacy. One WAITS feature very notable in pre-Web days was a news-wire interface that allowed WAITS hackers to read, store, and filter AP and UPI dispatches from their terminals; the system also featured a still-unusual level of support for what is now called multimedia computing, allowing analog audio and video signals to be switched to programming terminals.
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
- Category: Cyberculture
Waldo : [From Robert A. Heinlein's story Waldo ] 1. A mechanical agent, such as a gripper arm, controlled by a human limb. When these were developed for the nuclear industry in the mid-1940s they were named after the invention described by Heinlein in the story, which he wrote in 1942. Now known by the more generic term telefactoring , this technology is of intense interest to NASA for tasks like space station maintenance. 2. At Harvard (particularly by Tom Cheatham and students), this is used instead of foobar as a metasyntactic variable and general nonsense word. See foo, bar, foobar, quux .
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
- Category: Cyberculture
Walk : Traversal of a data structure, especially an array or linked-list data structure in core . See also codewalker, silly walk, clobber .
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
- Category: Cyberculture
Walk off the end of : To run past the end of an array, list, or medium after stepping through it — a good way to land in trouble. Often the result of an off-by-one error . Compare clobber, roach, smash the stack .
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
- Category: Cyberculture
Walking drives : An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky washing machine s. Those old dinosaur parts carried terrific angular momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn bearings and stick-slip interactions with the floor could cause them to ‘walk’ across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a couple of millimeters at a time. There is a legend about a drive that walked over to the only door to the computer room and jammed it shut; the staff had to cut a hole in the wall in order to get at it! Walking could also be induced by certain patterns of drive access (a fast seek across the whole width of the disk, followed by a slow seek in the other direction). Some bands of old-time hackers figured out how to induce disk-accessing patterns that would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive races.
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
- Category: Cyberculture
Wall : [WPI] 1. An indication of confusion, usually spoken with a quizzical tone: Wall?? 2. A request for further explication. Compare octal forty . 3. [Unix, from ‘write all’] v. To send a message to everyone currently logged in, esp. with the wall 8 utility.It is said that sense 1 came from the idiom ‘like talking to a blank wall’. It was originally used in situations where, after you had carefully answered a question, the questioner stared at you blankly, clearly having understood nothing that was explained. You would then throw out a Hello, wall? to elicit some sort of response from the questioner. Later, confused questioners began voicing Wall? themselves.
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
- Category: Cyberculture
Wall follower : A person or algorithm that compensates for lack of sophistication or native stupidity by efficiently following some simple procedure shown to have been effective in the past. Used of an algorithm, this is not necessarily pejorative; it recalls ‘Harvey Wallbanger’, the winning robot in an early AI contest (named, of course, after the cocktail). Harvey successfully solved mazes by keeping a ‘finger’ on one wall and running till it came out the other end. This was inelegant, but it was mathematically guaranteed to work on simply-connected mazes — and, in fact, Harvey outperformed more sophisticated robots that tried to ‘learn’ each maze by building an internal representation of it. Used of humans, the term is[/b] pejorative and implies an uncreative, bureaucratic, by-the-book mentality. See also code grinder ; compare droid .
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
- Category: Cyberculture
Wall time : (also) 1. ‘Real world’ time (what the clock on the wall shows), as opposed to the system clock's idea of time. 2. The real running time of a program, as opposed to the number of tick s required to execute it (on a timesharing system these always differ, as no one program gets all the ticks, and on multiprocessor systems with good thread support one may get more processor time than real time).
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
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Jargon 2.2 for xoops 2.X was adapted by Martialito from http://www.toplenet.com