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u- pref. Written shorthand for micro-; techspeak when applied to metric units, jargon when used otherwise. Derived from the Greek letter "mu", the first letter of "micro" (and which letter looks a lot like the English letter "u"). |
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UBD /U-B-D/ n. [abbreviation for 'User Brain Damage'] An abbreviation used to close out trouble reports obviously due to utter cluelessness on the user's part. Compare pilot error; oppose PBD; see also brain-damaged. |
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UN*X n. Used to refer to the Unix operating system (a trademark of AT&T) in writing, but avoiding the need for the ugly typography (see also (TM)). Also used to refer to any or all varieties of Unixoid operating systems. Ironically, lawyers now say that the requirement for the TM-postfix has no legal force, but the asterisk usage is entrenched anyhow. It has been suggested that there may be a psychological connection to practice in certain religions (especially Judaism) in which the name of the deity is never written out in full, e.g., 'YHWH' or 'Gd' is used. See also glob. |
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undefined external reference excl. [Unix] A message from Unix's linker. Used in speech to flag loose ends or dangling references in an argument or discussion. |
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under the hood adj. [hot-rodder talk] 1. Used to introduce the underlying implementation of a product (hardware, software, or idea). Implies that the implementation is not intuitively obvious from the appearance, but the speaker is about to enable the listener to grok it. "Let's now look under the hood to see how " 2. Can also imply that the implementation is much simpler than the appearance would indicate: "Under the hood, we are just fork/execing the shell." 3. Inside a chassis, as in "Under the hood, this baby has a 40MHz 68030!" |
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undocumented feature n. See feature. |
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uninteresting adj. 1. Said of a problem that, although nontrivial, can be solved simply by throwing sufficient resources at it. 2. Also said of problems for which a solution would neither advance the state of the art nor be fun to design and code. |
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Hackers regard uninteresting problems as intolerable wastes of time, to be solved (if at all) by lesser mortals. Real hackers (see toolsmith) generalize uninteresting problems enough to make them interesting and solve them thus solving the original problem as a special case (and, it must be |
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