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lithium lick n. [NeXT] Steve Jobs. Employees who have gotten too much attention from their esteemed founder are said to have 'lithium lick' when they begin to show signs of Jobsian fervor and repeat the most recent catch phrases in normal conversation for example, "It just works, right out of the box!" |
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little-endian adj. Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given 16- or 32-bit word, bytes at lower addresses have lower significance (the word is stored 'little-end-first'). The PDP-11 and VAX families of computers and Intel microprocessors and a lot of communications and networking hardware are little-endian. See big-endian, middle-endian, NUXI problem. The term is sometimes used to describe the ordering of units other than bytes; most often, bits within a byte. |
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live /l v/ adj.,adv. Opposite of 'test'. Refers to actual real-world data or a program working with it. For example, the response to "I think the record deleter is finished" might be "Is it live yet?" or "Have you tried it out on live data?" This usage usually carries the connotation that live data is more fragile and must not be corrupted, or bad things will happen. So a more appropriate response might be: "Well, make sure it works perfectly before we throw live data at it.'' The implication here is that record deletion is something pretty significant, and a haywire record-deleter running amok live would probably cause great harm. |
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live data n. 1. Data that is written to be interpreted and takes over program flow when triggered by some un-obvious operation, such as viewing it. One use of such hacks is to break security. For example, some smart terminals have commands that allow one to download strings to program keys; this can be used to write live data that, when listed to the terminal, infects it with a security-breaking virus that is triggered the next time a hapless user strikes that key. For another, there are some well-known bugs in vi that allow certain texts to send arbitrary commands back to the machine when they are simply viewed. 2. In C code, data that includes pointers to function hooks (executable code). 3. An object, such as a trampoline, that is constructed on the fly by a program and intended to be executed as code. |
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Live Free Or Die! imp. 1. The state motto of New Hampshire, which appears on that state's automobile license plates. 2. A slogan associated with Unix in the romantic days when Unix aficionados saw themselves as a tiny, beleaguered underground tilting against the windmills of industry. The "free" referred specifically to freedom from the fascist design philosophies and |
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