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of propeller beanies as fannish insignia (though nobody actually wears them except as a joke). |
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propeller key n. [Mac users] See feature key. |
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proprietary adj. 1. In marketroid-speak, superior; implies a product imbued with exclusive magic by the unmatched brilliance of the company's own hardware or software designers. 2. In the language of hackers and users, inferior; implies a product not conforming to open-systems standards, and thus one that puts the customer at the mercy of a vendor able to gouge freely on service and upgrade charges after the initial sale has locked the customer in. |
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protocol n. As used by hackers, this never refers to niceties about the proper form for addressing letters to the Papal Nuncio or the order in which one should use the forks in a Russian-style place setting; hackers don't care about such things. It is used instead to describe any set of rules that allow different machines or pieces of software to coordinate with each other without ambiguity. So, for example, it does include niceties about the proper form for addressing packets on a network or the order in which one should use the forks in the Dining Philosophers Problem. It implies that there is some common message format and an accepted set of primitives or commands that all parties involved understand, and that transactions among them follow predictable logical sequences. See also handshaking, do protocol. |
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provocative maintenance n. [common ironic mutation of 'preventive maintenance'] Actions performed upon a machine at regularly scheduled intervals to ensure that the system remains in a usable state. So called because it is all too often performed by a field servoid who doesn't know what he is doing; such 'maintenance' often induces problems, or otherwise results in the machine's remaining in an unusable state for an indeterminate amount of time. See also scratch monkey. |
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prowler n. [Unix] A daemon that is run periodically (typically once a week) to seek out and erase core files, truncate administrative logfiles, nuke lost+found directories, and otherwise clean up the cruft that tends to pile up in the corners of a file system. See also GFR, reaper, skulker. |
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pseudo /soo'doh/ n. [Usenet: truncation of 'pseudonym'] 1. An electronicmail or Usenet persona adopted by a human for amusement value or as a means of avoiding negative repercussions of one's net.behavior; a 'nom de |
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