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more sophisticated robots that tried to 'learn' each maze by building an internal representation of it. Used of humans, the term is pejorative and implies an uncreative, bureaucratic, by-the-book mentality. See also code grinder; compare droid. |
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wall time n. (also wall clock time) 1. 'Real world' time (what the clock on the wall shows), as opposed to the system clock's idea of time. 2. The real running time of a program, as opposed to the number of ticks required to execute it (on a timesharing system these always differ, as no one program gets all the ticks, and on multiprocessor systems with good thread support one may get more processor time than real time). |
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wallpaper n. 1. A file containing a listing (e.g., assembly listing) or a transcript, esp. a file containing a transcript of all or part of a login session. (The idea was that the paper for such listings was essentially good only for wallpaper, as evidenced at Stanford, where it was used to cover windows.) Now rare, esp. since other systems have developed other terms for it (e.g., PHOTO on TWENEX). However, the Unix world doesn't have an equivalent term, so perhaps wallpaper will take hold there. The term probably originated on ITS, where the commands to begin and end transcript files were :WALBEG and :WALEND, with default file WALL PAPER (the space was a path delimiter). 2. The background pattern used on graphical workstations (this is techspeak under the 'Windows' graphical user interface to MS-DOS). 3. wallpaper file n. The file that contains the wallpaper information before it is actually printed on paper. (Even if you don't intend ever to produce a real paper copy of the file, it is still called a wallpaper file.) |
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wango /wang'goh/ n. Random bit-level grovelling going on in a system during some unspecified operation. Often used in combination with mumble. For example: "You start with the '.o' file, run it through this postprocessor that does mumble-wangoand it comes out a snazzy object-oriented executable." |
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wank /wangk/ n.,v.,adj. [Columbia University: probably by mutation from Commonwealth slang v. wank, to masturbate] Used much as hack is elsewhere, as a noun denoting a clever technique or person or the result of such cleverness. May describe (negatively) the act of hacking for hacking's sake ("Quit wanking, let's go get supper!") or (more positively) a wizard. Adj. wanky describes something particularly clever (a person, program, or algorithm). Conversations can also get wanky when there are too many wanks involved. This excess wankiness is signalled by an overload of the |
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