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can hide behind their terminals. More likely, if you were given a sample of 100 people, the person whose handle is Hellraiser is the last person you'd associate with the name. |
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The contrast with Internet hackers is stark and instructive. See cracker, wannabee, handle, elite; compare weenie, spod. |
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warlording v. [from the Usenet group alt.fan.warlord] The act of excoriating a bloated, ugly, or derivative sig block. Common grounds for warlording include the presence of a signature rendered in a BUAF, over-used or cliched sig quotes, ugly ASCII art, or simply excessive size. The original 'Warlord' was a B1FF-like newbie c.1991 who featured in his sig a particularly large and obnoxious ASCII graphic resembling the sword of Conan the Barbarian in the 1981 John Milius movie; the group name alt.fan.warlord was sarcasm, and the characteristic mode of warlording is devastatingly sarcastic praise. |
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wart n. A small, crocky feature that sticks out of an otherwise clean design. Something conspicuous for localized ugliness, especially a special-case exception to a general rule. For example, in some versions of csh (1), single quotes literalize every character inside them except '!'. In ANSI C, the '??' syntax used for obtaining ASCII characters in a foreign environment is a wart. See also miswart. |
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washing machine n. 1. Old-style 14-inch hard disks in floor-standing cabinets. So called because of the size of the cabinet and the 'top-loading' access to the media packs and, of course, they were always set on 'spin cycle'. The washing-machine idiom transcends language barriers; it is even used in Russian hacker jargon. See also walking drives. The thick channel cables connecting these were called bit hoses (see hose, sense 3). 2. [CMU] A machine used exclusively for washing software. CMU has clusters of these. |
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washing software n. The process of recompiling a software distribution (used more often when the recompilation is occuring from scratch) to pick up and merge together all of the various changes that have been made to the source. |
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water MIPS n. (see MIPS, sense 2) Large, water-cooled machines of either today's ECL-supercomputer flavor or yesterday's traditional mainframe type. |
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