tube time n.
Time spent at a terminal or console. More inclusive than hacking time; commonly used in discussions of what parts of one's environment one uses most heavily. "I find I'm spending too much of my tube time reading mail since I started this revision."
tunafish n.
In hackish lore, refers to the mutated punchline of an age-old
joke to be found at the bottom of the manual pages of
tunefs(8) in the original BSD 4.2 distribution. The joke was removed in
later releases once commercial sites started using 4.2, but
apparently restored on the 4.4BSD tape and in {Net,Free,Open}BSD.
Tunefs relates to the `tuning' of file-system parameters for
optimum performance, and at the bottom of a few pages of wizardly
inscriptions was a `BUGS' section consisting of the line "You can
tune a file system, but you can't tunafish". Variants of this can
be seen in other BSD versions, though it has been excised from
some versions by humorless management droids. The [nt]roff source for SunOS 4.1.1
contains a comment apparently designed to prevent this: "Take
this out and a Unix Demon will dog your steps from now until the
time_t's wrap around."
[It has since been pointed out that indeed you can tunafish. Usually at a canning factory... --ESR]
tune vt.
[from automotive or musical usage] To optimize a program or
system for a particular environment, esp. by adjusting numerical
parameters designed as hooks for
tuning, e.g., by changing #define lines in C. One
may `tune for time' (fastest execution), `tune for space' (least
memory use), or `tune for configuration' (most efficient use of
hardware). See bum, hot spot, hand-hacking.
turbo nerd n.
See computer geek.
Turing tar-pit n.
1. A place where anything is possible but nothing of interest is practical. Alan Turing helped lay the foundations of computer science by showing that all machines and languages capable of expressing a certain very primitive set of operations are logically equivalent in the kinds of computations they can carry out, and in principle have capabilities that differ only in speed from those of the most powerful and elegantly designed computers. However, no machine or language exactly matching Turing's primitive set has ever been built (other than possibly as a classroom exercise), because it would be horribly slow and far too painful to use. A `Turing tar-pit' is any computer language or other tool that shares this property. That is, it's theoretically universal -- but in practice, the harder you struggle to get any real work done, the deeper its inadequacies suck you in. Compare bondage-and-discipline language. 2. The perennial holy wars over whether language A or B is the "most powerful".
turist /too'rist/ n.
Var. sp. of tourist, q.v. Also in adjectival form, `turistic'. Poss. influenced by luser and `Turing'.
Tux
Tux the Penguin is the official emblem of Linux, This eventuated after a logo contest in 1996, during which Linus Torvalds endorsed the idea of a penguin logo in a couple of famously funny postings. Linus explained that he was once bitten by a killer penguin in Australia and has felt a special affinity for the species ever since. (Linus has since admitted that he was also thinking of Feathers McGraw, the evil-genius penguin jewel thief who appeared in a Wallace & Grommit feature cartoon, "The Wrong Trousers".)
Larry Ewing designed the official Tux logo. It has proved a wise choice, amenable to hundreds of recognizable variations used as emblems of Linux-related projects, products, and user groups. In fact, Tux has spawned an entire mythology, of which the Gospel According to Tux and the mock-epic poem "Tuxowolf" are among the best-known examples.
There is a `real' Tux - a black-footed penguin resident at the Bristol Zoo. Several friends of Linux bought a zoo sponsorship for Linus as a birthday present in 1996.
tweak vt.
1. To change slightly, usually in reference to a value. Also used synonymously with twiddle. If a program is almost correct, rather than figure out the precise problem you might just keep tweaking it until it works. See frobnicate and fudge factor; also see shotgun debugging. 2. To tune or bum a program; preferred usage in the U.K.
tweeter n.
[University of Waterloo] Syn. perf, chad (sense 1). This term (like woofer) has been in use at Waterloo since 1972 but is elsewhere unknown. In audio jargon, the word refers to the treble speaker(s) on a hi-fi.
TWENEX /twe'neks/ n.
The TOPS-20 operating system by DEC -- the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10 -- preferred by most PDP-10 hackers over TOPS-10 (that is, by those who were not ITS or WAITS partisans). TOPS-20 began in 1969 as Bolt, Beranek & Newman's TENEX operating system using special paging hardware. By the early 1970s, almost all of the systems on the ARPANET ran TENEX. DEC purchased the rights to TENEX from BBN and began work to make it their own. The first in-house code name for the operating system was VIROS (VIRtual memory Operating System); when customers started asking questions, the name was changed to SNARK so DEC could truthfully deny that there was any project called VIROS. When the name SNARK became known, the name was briefly reversed to become KRANS; this was quickly abandoned when someone objected that `krans' meant `funeral wreath' in Swedish (though some Swedish speakers have since said it means simply `wreath'; this part of the story may be apocryphal). Ultimately DEC picked TOPS-20 as the name of the operating system, and it was as TOPS-20 that it was marketed. The hacker community, mindful of its origins, quickly dubbed it TWENEX (a contraction of `twenty TENEX'), even though by this point very little of the original TENEX code remained (analogously to the differences between AT&T V6 Unix and BSD). DEC people cringed when they heard "TWENEX", but the term caught on nevertheless (the written abbreviation `20x' was also used). TWENEX was successful and very popular; in fact, there was a period in the early 1980s when it commanded as fervent a culture of partisans as Unix or ITS -- but DEC's decision to scrap all the internal rivals to the VAX architecture and its relatively stodgy VMS OS killed the DEC-20 and put a sad end to TWENEX's brief day in the sun. DEC attempted to convince TOPS-20 users to convert to VMS, but instead, by the late 1980s, most of the TOPS-20 hackers had migrated to Unix.
twiddle n.
1. Tilde (ASCII 1111110, ~). Also called
`squiggle', `sqiggle' (sic -- pronounced /skig'l/), and
`twaddle', but twiddle is the most common term. 2. A small and
insignificant change to a program. Usually fixes one bug and
generates several new ones (see also shotgun debugging). 3. vt. To
change something in a small way. Bits, for example, are often
twiddled. Twiddling a switch or knobs
implies much less sense of purpose than toggling or tweaking it;
see frobnicate. To speak of
twiddling a bit connotes aimlessness, and at best doesn't specify
what you're doing to the bit; `toggling a bit' has a more
specific meaning (see bit
twiddling, toggle). 4.
Uncommon name for the twirling
baton prompt.
twilight zone n. //
[IRC] Notionally, the area of cyberspace where IRC operators live. An op is said to have a "connection to the twilight zone".
twink /twink/ n.
1. [Berkeley] A clue-repellant user; the next step beyond a clueless one. 2. [UCSC] A read-only user. Also reported on the Usenet group soc.motss; may derive from gay slang for a cute young thing with nothing upstairs (compare mainstream `chick').
twirling baton n.
[PLATO] The overstrike sequence -/|\-/|\- which produces an animated twirling baton. If you output it with a single backspace between characters, the baton spins in place. If you output the sequence BS SP between characters, the baton spins from left to right. If you output BS SP BS BS between characters, the baton spins from right to left. This is also occasionally called a twiddle prompt.
The twirling baton was a popular component of animated
signature files on the pioneering PLATO educational timesharing
system. The archie Internet service is perhaps the
best-known baton program today; it uses the twirling baton as an
idler indicating that the program is working on a query. The
twirling baton is also used as a boot progress indicator on
several BSD variants of Unix; if it stops you're probably going
to have a long and trying day.
two pi quant.
The number of years it takes to finish one's thesis. Occurs in stories in the following form: "He started on his thesis; 2 pi years later..."
two-to-the-N quant.
An amount much larger than N but smaller than infinity. "I have 2-to-the-N things to do before I can go out for lunch" means you probably won't show up.
twonkie /twon'kee/ n.
The software equivalent of a Twinkie (a variety of sugar-loaded junk food, or (in gay slang with a small t) the male equivalent of `chick'); a useless `feature' added to look sexy and placate a marketroid (compare Saturday-night special). The term may also be related to "The Twonky", title menace of a classic SF short story by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore), first published in the September 1942 "Astounding Science Fiction" and subsequently much anthologized.
= U =
- u-:
- UBD:
- UBE:
- UCE:
- UDP:
- UNX:
- undefined external reference:
- under the hood:
- undocumented feature:
- uninteresting:
- Unix:
- Unix brain damage:
- Unix conspiracy:
- Unix weenie:
- unixism:
- unswizzle:
- unwind the stack:
- unwind-protect:
- up:
- upload:
- upthread:
- urchin:
- URL:
- Usenet:
- Usenet Death Penalty:
- user:
- user-friendly:
- user-obsequious:
- userland:
- USG Unix:
- UTSL:
- UUCPNET:
u- pref.
Written shorthand for micro-; techspeak when applied to metric units, jargon when used otherwise. Derived from the Greek letter "mu", the first letter of "micro" (and which letter looks a lot like the English letter "u").
UBD /U-B-D/ n.
[abbreviation for `User Brain Damage'] An abbreviation used to close out trouble reports obviously due to utter cluelessness on the user's part. Compare pilot error; oppose PBD; see also brain-damaged.
UBE // n.
[abbrev., Unsoliclited Bulk Email] A widespread, more formal term for email spam. Compare UCE. The UBE term recognizes that spam is uttered by nonprofit and advocacy groups whose motives are not commercial.
UCE n.
[abbrev., Unsolicited Commercial Email] A widespread, more formal term for email spam. Compare UBE, which may be superseding it.
UDP /U-D-P/ v.,n.
[Usenet] Abbreviation for Usenet Death Penalty. Common (probably now more so than the full form), and frequently verbed. Compare IDP.
UNX n.
Used to refer to the Unix operating system (a trademark of AT&T, then of Novell, then of SCO, and then of Caldera) in writing, but avoiding the need for the ugly (TM) typography. Also used to refer to any or all varieties of Unixoid operating systems. Ironically, lawyers now say that the requirement for the trademark postfix has no legal force, but the asterisk usage is entrenched anyhow. It has been suggested that there may be a psychological connection to practice in certain religions (especially Judaism) in which the name of the deity is never written out in full, e.g., `YHWH' or `G-d' is used. See also glob and splat out.