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The funniest use of 'ping' to date was described in January 1991 by Steve Hayman on the Usenet group comp.sys.next. He was trying to isolate a faulty cable segment on a TCP/IP Ethernet hooked up to a NeXT machine, and got tired of having to run back to his console after each cabling tweak to see if the ping packets were getting through. So he used the sound-recording feature on the NeXT, then wrote a script that repeatedly invoked ping(8), listened for an echo, and played back the recording on each returned packet. Result? A program that caused the machine to repeat, over and over, "Ping ping ping " as long as the network was up. He turned the volume to maximum, ferreted through the building with one ear cocked, and found a faulty tee connector in no time. |
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Pink-Shirt Book The Peter Norton Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC. The original cover featured a picture of Peter Norton with a silly smirk on his face, wearing a pink shirt. Perhaps in recognition of this usage, the current edition has a different picture of Norton wearing a pink shirt. See also book titles. |
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PIP /pip/ vt.,obs. [Peripheral Interchange Program] To copy; from the program PIP on CP/M, RSX-11, RSTS/E, TOPS-10, and OS/8 (derived from a utility on the PDP-6) that was used for file copying (and in OS/8 and RT-11 for just about every other file operation you might want to do). It is said that when the program was originated, during the development of the PDP-6 in 1963, it was called ATLATL ('Anything, Lord, to Anything, Lord'; this played on the Nahuatl word 'atlatl' for a spear-thrower, with connotations of utility and primitivity that were no doubt quite intentional). See also BLT, dd, cat. |
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pistol n. [IBM] A tool that makes it all too easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot. "Unix rm * makes such a nice pistol!" |
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pixel sort n. [Commodore users] Any compression routine which irretrievably loses valuable data in the process of crunching it. Disparagingly used for 'lossy' methods such as JPEG. The theory, of course, is that these methods are only used on photographic images in which minor loss-of-data is not visible to the human eye. The term pixel sort implies distrust of this theory. Compare bogo-sort. |
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pizza box n. [Sun] The largish thin box housing the electronics in (especially Sun) desktop workstations, so named because of its size and shape and the dimpled pattern that looks like air holes. |
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