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what J. Random Luser does. Compare incantation, runes, examining the entrails; also see the AI koan about Tom Knight in "AI Koans" (Appendix A). |
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A correspondent from England tells us that one of ICL's most talented systems designers used to be called out occasionally to service machines which the field circus had given up on. Since he knew the design inside out, he could often find faults simply by listening to a quick outline of the symptoms. He used to play on this by going to some site where the field circus had just spent the last two weeks solid trying to find a fault, and spreading a diagram of the system out on a table top. He'd then shake some chicken bones and cast them over the diagram, peer at the bones intently for a minute, and then tell them that a certain module needed replacing. The system would start working again immediately upon the replacement. |
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cat [from 'catenate' via Unix cat (1)] vt. 1. [techspeak] To spew an entire file to the screen or some other output sink without pause. 2. By extension, to dump large amounts of data at an unprepared target or with no intention of browsing it carefully. Usage: considered silly. Rare outside Unix sites. See also dd, BLT. |
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Among Unix fans, cat (1) is considered an excellent example of user-interface design, because it delivers the file contents without such verbosity as spacing or headers between the files, and because it does not require the files to consist of lines of text, but works with any sort of data. |
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Among Unix haters, cat (1) is considered the canonical example of bad user-interface design, because of its woefully unobvious name. It is far more often used to blast a file to standard output than to concatenate two files. The name cat for the former operation is just as unintuitive as, say, LISP's cdr. |
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Of such oppositions are holy wars made. |
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catatonic adj. Describes a condition of suspended animation in which something is so wedged or hung that it makes no response. If you are typing on a terminal and suddenly the computer doesn't even echo the letters back to the screen as you type, let alone do what you're asking it to do, then the computer is suffering from catatonia (possibly because it has crashed). "There I was in the middle of a winning game of nethack and it went catatonic on me! Aaargh!" Compare buzz. |
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cd tilde /C-D til-d / vi. To go home. From the Unix C-shell and Korn-shell command cd ~, which takes one to one's $HOME (cd with no arguments happens to do the same thing). By extension, may be used with other |
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