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was felt to be a reincarnation of the connector conspiracy, done with less style. |
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tanked adj. Same as down, used primarily by Unix hackers. See also hosed. Popularized as a synonym for 'drunk' by Steve Dallas in the late lamented "Bloom County" comic strip. |
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TANSTAAFL /tan'stah-fl/ [acronym, from Robert Heinlein's classic The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.] "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch", often invoked when someone is balking at the prospect of using an unpleasantly heavyweight technique, or at the poor quality of some piece of free software, or at the signal-to-noise ratio of unmoderated Usenet newsgroups. "What? Don't tell me I have to implement a database back end to get my address book program to work!" "Well, TANSTAAFL you know.'' This phrase owes some of its popularity to the high concentration of science-fiction fans and political libertarians in hackerdom (see A Portrait of J. Random Hacker in Appendix B). |
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tar and feather vi. [from Unix tar (1)] To create a transportable archive from a group of files by first sticking them together with tar(1) (the Tape ARchiver) and then compressing the result (see compress). The latter action is dubbed feathering partly for euphony and (if only for contrived effect) by analogy to what you do with an airplane propeller to decrease wind resistance, or with an oar to reduce water resistance; smaller files, after all, slip through comm links more easily. |
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taste [primarily MIT] n. 1. The quality in a program that tends to be inversely proportional to the number of features, hacks, and kluges programmed into it. Also tasty, tasteful, tastefulness. "This feature comes in N tasty flavors." Although tasty and flavorful are essentially synonyms, taste and flavor are not. Taste refers to sound judgment on the part of the creator; a program or feature can exhibit taste but cannot have taste. On the other hand, a feature can have flavor. Also, flavor has the additional meaning of 'kind' or 'variety' not shared by taste. The marked sense of flavor is more popular than taste, though both are widely used. See also elegant. 2. Alt. sp. of tayste. |
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tayste /tayst/ n. Two bits; also as taste. Syn. crumb, quarter. See nybble. |
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TCB /T-C-B/ n. [IBM] 1. Trouble Came Back. An intermittent or difficult-to-reproduce problem that has failed to respond to neglect or shotgun |
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