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tools, might be able to write 3,000. This range is astonishing; it is matched in very few other areas of human endeavor.) The term superprogrammer is more commonly used within such places as IBM than in the hacker community. It tends to stress naive measures of productivity and to underweight creativity, ingenuity, and getting the job done and to sidestep the question of whether the 3,000 lines of code do more or less useful work than three lines that do the Right Thing. Hackers tend to prefer the terms hacker and wizard. |
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superuser n. [Unix] Syn. root, avatar. This usage has spread to non-Unix environments; the superuser is any account with all wheel bits on. A more specific term than wheel. |
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support n. After-sale handholding; something many software vendors promise but few deliver. To hackers, most support people are useless because by the time a hacker calls support he or she will usually know the software and the relevant manuals better than the support people (sadly, this is not a joke or exaggeration). A hacker's idea of 'support' is a tête-à-tête with the software's designer. |
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surf v. [from the 'surf' idiom for rapidly flipping TV channels] To traverse the Internet in search of interesting stuff, used esp. if one is doing so with a World Wide Web browser. It is also common to speak of surfing in to a particular resource. |
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Suzie COBOL /soo'zee koh'bol/ 1. [IBM: probably from Frank Zappa's 'Suzy Creamcheese'] n. A coder straight out of training school who knows everything except the value of comments in plain English. Also (fashionable among personkind wishing to avoid accusations of sexism) 'Sammy Cobol' or (in some non-IBM circles) 'Cobol Charlie'. 2. [proposed] Meta-name for any code grinder, analogous to J. Random Hacker. |
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swab /swob/ [From the mnemonic for the PDP-11 'SWAp Byte' instruction, as immortalized in the dd(1) option conv=swab (see dd)] 1. vt. To solve the NUXI problem by swapping bytes in a file. 2. n. The program in V7 Unix used to perform this action, or anything functionally equivalent to it. See also big-endian, little-endian, middle-endian, bytesexual. |
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swap vt. 1. [techspeak] To move information from a fast-access memory to a slow-access memory (swap out), or vice versa (swap in). Often refers specifically to the use of disks as 'virtual memory'. As pieces of data or program are needed, they are swapped into core for processing; when they |
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