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Eric Steven Raymond, often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book The Cathedral and the Bazaar. He wrote a guidebook for the Roguelike game NetHack. In the 1990s, he edited and updated the Jargon File, currently in print as The New Hacker's Dictionary.
The editor war is the rivalry between users of the Emacs and vi text editors. The rivalry has become a lasting part of hacker culture and the free software community.
A computer hacker is any skilled computer expert who uses their technical knowledge to overcome a problem. While "hacker" can refer to any skilled computer programmer, the term has become associated in popular culture with a "security hacker", someone who, with their technical knowledge, uses bugs or exploits to break into computer systems.
A metasyntactic variable is a specific word or set of words identified as a placeholder in computer science and specifically computer programming. These words are commonly found in source code and are intended to be modified or substituted to be applicable to the specific usage before compilation. The words foo and bar are good examples as they are used in over 330 Internet Engineering Task Force Requests for Comments, which are documents explaining foundational internet technologies like HTTP (websites), TCP/IP, and email protocols.
James Werner Zawinski, commonly known as jwz, is an American computer programmer with contributions to the free software projects Mozilla and XEmacs, and early versions of the Netscape Navigator web browser. He maintains the XScreenSaver project which provides screenblanking for Mac OS X and for Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems using the X Window System.
Internet slang prior to the popularization of the Internet in the late 1990s, defined a luser as a painfully annoying, stupid, or irritating computer user. The word is a blend of "loser" and "user". Among hackers, the word luser takes on a broad meaning, referring to any normal user, with the implication the person is also a loser. The term is partially interchangeable with the hacker term lamer.
The hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming limitations of software systems to achieve novel and clever outcomes. The act of engaging in activities in a spirit of playfulness and exploration is termed "hacking". However, the defining characteristic of a hacker is not the activities performed themselves, but the manner in which it is done and whether it is something exciting and meaningful. Activities of playful cleverness can be said to have "hack value" and therefore the term "hacks" came about, with early examples including pranks at MIT done by students to demonstrate their technical aptitude and cleverness. Therefore, the hacker culture originally emerged in academia in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Hacking originally involved entering restricted areas in a clever way without causing any major damages. Some famous hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were placing of a campus police cruiser on the roof of the Great Dome and converting the Great Dome into R2-D2.
The Unix philosophy, originated by Ken Thompson, is a set of cultural norms and philosophical approaches to minimalist, modular software development. It is based on the experience of leading developers of the Unix operating system. Early Unix developers were important in bringing the concepts of modularity and reusability into software engineering practice, spawning a "software tools" movement. Over time, the leading developers of Unix established a set of cultural norms for developing software; these norms became as important and influential as the technology of Unix itself; this has been termed the "Unix philosophy."
In computing, a magic cookie, or just cookie for short, is a token or short packet of data passed between communicating programs, where the data is typically not meaningful to the recipient program. The contents are opaque and not usually interpreted until the recipient passes the cookie data back to the sender or perhaps another program at a later time. The cookie is often used like a ticket – to identify a particular event or transaction.
A README file contains information about other files in a directory or archive of computer software. A form of documentation, it is usually a simple plain text file called READ.ME, README.TXT, README.md, README.1ST – or simply README.
According to the hackers' Jargon File, Chainik is a term that implies both ignorance and a certain amount of willingness to learn, but does not necessarily imply as little experience or short exposure time as newbie and is not as derogatory as luser. Both a novice user and someone using a computer system for a long time without any understanding of the internals can be referred to as chainiks.
Placeholder names are words that can refer to objects or people whose names do not exist, are temporarily forgotten, irrelevant, or unknown in the context in which they are being discussed.
In computing, the term wheel refers to a user account with a wheel bit, a system setting that provides additional special system privileges that empower a user to execute restricted commands that ordinary user accounts cannot access.
No Starch Press is an American publishing company, specializing in technical literature often geared towards the geek, hacker, and DIY subcultures. Popular titles include Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, Andrew Huang's Hacking the Xbox, and How Wikipedia Works.
A security hacker is someone who explores methods for breaching defenses and exploiting weaknesses in a computer system or network. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, such as profit, protest, information gathering, challenge, recreation, or to evaluate system weaknesses to assist in formulating defenses against potential hackers. The subculture that has evolved around hackers is often referred to as the "computer underground".
A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-like application is one that behaves like the corresponding Unix command or shell. There is no standard for defining the term, and some difference of opinion is possible as to the degree to which a given operating system or application is "Unix-like".
Unix is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, development starting in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.
The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities, including Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Carnegie Mellon University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It was published in paperback form in 1983 as The Hacker's Dictionary, revised in 1991 as The New Hacker's Dictionary.
Computer humour is humour on the subject of computers or their users.
References
- ↑ Appendix B. A Portrait of J. Random Hacker, from the Jargon File
- ↑ The Art of Unix Programming by Eric S. Raymond, p. 457
- ↑ Beginning Python, by Peter Norton et al., p. 322
- ↑ J. Random Hacker, Adventures of a Wi-Fi Pirate (2005) ISBN 1-930919-62-X
- ↑ The Art of Unix Programming by Eric S. Raymond, Section "The tale of J. Random Newbie"
- ↑ TCP/IP Clearly Explained, by Peter Loshin, p. 116