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the words "THE BAG" in ornate letters, followed a pair of jaws biting pieces of it off. |
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life n. 1. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton Conway and first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner (Scientific American, October 1970); the game's popularity had to wait a few years for computers on which it could reasonably be played, as it's no fun to simulate the cells by hand. Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with it, and hackers at various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented life in TECO!; see Gosperism). When a hacker mentions 'life', he is much more likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal, or the human state of existence. 2. The opposite of Usenet. As in "Get a life!" |
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Life is hard prov. [XEROX PARC] This phrase has two possible interpretations: (1) "While your suggestion may have some merit, I will behave as though I hadn't heard it." (2) "While your suggestion has obvious merit, equally obvious circumstances prevent it from being seriously considered." The charm of the phrase lies precisely in this subtle but important ambiguity. |
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light pipe n. Fiber optic cable. Oppose copper. |
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lightweight adj, Opposite of heavyweight; usually found in combining forms such as 'lightweight process'. |
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like kicking dead whales down the beach adj. Describes a slow, difficult, and disgusting process. First popularized by a famous quote about the difficulty of getting work done under one of IBM's mainframe OSes. "Well, you could write a C compiler in COBOL, but it would be like kicking dead whales down the beach." See also fear and loathing. |
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like nailing jelly to a tree adj. Used to describe a task thought to be impossible, esp. one in which the difficulty arises from poor specification or inherent slipperiness in the problem domain. "Trying to display the 'prettiest' arrangement of nodes and arcs that diagrams a given graph is like nailing jelly to a tree, because nobody's sure what 'prettiest' means algorithmically." |
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Hacker use of this term may recall mainstream slang originated early in the 20th century by President Theodore Roosevelt. There is a legend that, weary of inconclusive talks with Colombia over the right to dig a canal through its then-province Panama, he remarked, "Negotiating with those pirates is likely trying to nail currant jelly to the wall." Roosevelt's government |
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