|
|
|
|
|
|
|
amoeba n. Humorous term for the Commodore Amiga personal computer. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
amp off vt. [Purdue] To run in background. From the Unix shell '&' operator. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
amper n. Common abbreviation for the name of the ampersand ('&', ASCII 0100110) character. See ASCII for other synonyms. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
angle brackets n. Either of the characters '<' (ASCII 0111100) and '>' (ASCII 0111110) (ASCII less-than or greater-than signs). Typographers in the Real World use angle brackets which are either taller and slimmer (the ISO 'Bra' and 'Ket' characters), or significantly smaller (single or double guillemets) than the less-than and greater-than signs. The typeset left angle bracket is '<'; the typeset right angle bracket is '>'. See broket, ASCII. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
angry fruit salad n. A bad visual-interface design that uses too many colors. (This term derives, of course, from the bizarre day-glo colors found in canned fruit salad.) Too often one sees similar effects from interface designers using color window systems such as X; there is a tendency to create displays that are flashy and attention-getting but uncomfortable for long-term use. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
annoybot / -noy-bot/ n. [IRC] See robot. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
ANSI /an'see/ 1. n. [techspeak] The American National Standards Institute. ANSI, along with the International Organization for Standards (ISO), standardized the C programming language (see K&R, Classic C), and promulgates many other important software standards. 2. n. [techspeak] A terminal may be said to be 'ANSI' if it meets the ANSI X.364 standard for terminal control. Unfortunately, this standard was both over-complicated and too permissive. It has been retired and replaced by the ECMA-48 standard, which shares both flaws. 3. n. [BBS jargon] The set of screen-painting codes that most MS-DOS and Amiga computers accept. This comes from the ANSI.SYS device driver that must be loaded on an MS-DOS computer to view such codes. Unfortunately, neither DOS ANSI nor the BBS ANSIs derived from it exactly match the ANSI X.364 terminal standard. For example, the ESC-[1m code turns on the bold highlight on large machines, but in IBM PC/MS-DOS ANSI, it turns on 'intense' (bright) colors. Also, in BBS-land, the term 'ANSI' is often used to imply that a particular computer uses or can emulate the IBM high-half character set from MS-DOS. Particular use depends on context. Occasionally, the vanilla ASCII character set is |
|
|
|
|
|