Jargon's New Writeups

Yellow Book (idea)

2006-02-05T04:19:45Z

Yellow Book n.

The print version of this Jargon File; "The New Hacker's Dictionary" from MIT Press; The book includes essentially all the material in the File, plus a Foreword by Guy L. Steele Jr. and a Preface by Eric S. Raymond. Most importantly, the book version is nicely typeset and includes almost all of the infamous Crunchly cartoons by the Great Quux, each attached to an appropriate entry. The first edition (1991, ISBN 0-262-68069-6) corresponded to the Jargon File version 2.9.6. The second edition (1993, ISBN 0-262-68079-3) corresponded to the Jargon File 3.0.0. The third (1996, ISBN 0-262-68092-0) corresponded to 4.0.0.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, this entry manually entered by rootbeer277.

woofer (idea)

2006-02-05T04:17:31Z

wonky = W = workaround

woofer n.

[University of Waterloo] Some varieties of wide paper for printers have a perforation 8.5 inches from the left margin that allows the excess on the right-hand side to be torn off when the print format is 80 columns or less wide. The right-hand excess may be called `woofer'. This term (like tweeter) has been in use at Waterloo since 1972, but is elsewhere unknown. In audio jargon, the word refers to the bass speaker(s) on a hi-fi.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, this entry manually entered by rootbeer277.

White Book (idea)

2006-02-05T04:17:25Z

wheel wars = W = white hat

White Book n.

1. Syn. K&R. 2. Adobe's fourth book in the PostScript series, describing the previously-secret format of Type 1 fonts; "Adobe Type 1 Font Format, version 1.1", (Addison-Wesley, 1990, ISBN 0-201-57044-0). See also Red Book, Green Book, Blue Book.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, this entry manually entered by rootbeer277.

wallpaper (idea)

2006-02-05T04:17:21Z

wall wart = W = wango

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…

W2K bug (idea)

2006-02-05T04:17:18Z

vulture capitalist = W = wabbit

W2K bug

[from `Y2K bug' for the Year 2000 problem] The deployment of Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system, which hackers generally expect will turn out to have been among the worst train wrecks in the history of software engineering. Such is the power of Microsoft marketing, however, that it is also expected this will not become obvious until it has incurred hundreds of millions of dollars in downtime and lost opportunity costs.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, this entry manually entered by rootbeer277.

lace card (idea)

2006-02-03T19:40:00Z

kyrka = L = lag

lace card n. obs.

A punched card with all holes punched (also called a `whoopee card' or `ventilator card'). Card readers tended to jam when they got to one of these, as the resulting card had too little structural strength to avoid buckling inside the mechanism. Card punches could also jam trying to produce these things owing to power-supply problems. When some practical joker fed a lace card through the reader, you needed to clear the jam with a `card knife' -- which you used on the joker first.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, this entry manually entered by rootbeer277.