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be uttered in a fruity imitation of Bullwinkle J. Moose. Also heard: "Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!" The canonical response is, of course, "But that trick never works!" See hacker humor. |
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thrash vi. To move wildly or violently, without accomplishing anything useful. Paging or swapping systems that are overloaded waste most of their time moving data into and out of core (rather than performing useful computation) and are therefore said to thrash. Someone who keeps changing his mind (esp. about what to work on next) is said to be thrashing. A person frantically trying to execute too many tasks at once (and not spending enough time on any single task) may also be described as thrashing. Compare multitask. |
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thread n. [Usenet, GEnie, CompuServe] Common abbreviation of topic thread, a more or less continuous chain of postings on a single topic. To follow a thread is to read a series of Usenet postings sharing a common subject or (more correctly) which are connected by Reference headers. The better newsreaders can present news in thread order automatically. |
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Interestingly, this is far from a neologism. The OED says: "That which connects the successive points in anything, esp. a narrative, train of thought, or the like; the sequence of events or ideas continuing throughout the whole course of anything;" Citations are given going back to 1642! |
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three-finger salute n. Syn. Vulcan nerve pinch. |
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thud n. 1. Yet another metasyntactic variable (see foo). It is reported that at CMU from the mid-1970s the canonical series of these was 'foo', 'bar', 'thud', 'blat'. 2. Rare term for the hash character, '#' (ASCII 0100011). See ASCII for other synonyms. |
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thumb n. The slider on a window-system scrollbar. So called because moving it allows you to browse through the contents of a text window in a way analogous to thumbing through a book. |
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thunk /thuhnk/ n. 1. "A piece of coding which provides an address", according to P. Z. Ingerman, who invented thunks in 1961 as a way of binding actual parameters to their formal definitions in Algol-60 procedure calls. If a procedure is called with an expression in the place of a formal parameter, the compiler generates a thunk which computes the expression and leaves the address of the result in some standard location. 2. Later generalized into: an expression, frozen together with its environment, for later evaluation if and when needed (similar to what in techspeak is called a 'closure'). |
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