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" Zorkmid "
| The canonical unit of currency in hacker-written games. This originated in Zork but has spread to nethack and is referred to in several other games. |
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
" Zork "
| The second of the great early experiments in computer fantasy gaming; see ADVENT . Originally written on MIT-DM during 1977-1979, later distributed with BSD Unix (as a patched, sourceless RT-11 FORTRAN binary; see retrocomputing) and commercialized as ‘The Zork Trilogy’ by Infocom . The FORTRAN source was later rewritten for portability and released to Usenet under the name Dungeon. Both FORTRAN Dungeon and translated C versions are available at many FTP sites; the commercial Zork trilogy is available at http://www.ifarchive.org/ . See also grue . You can play Zork via a Java Applet . |
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
" Zorch "
| 1. [TMRC] To attack with an inverse heat sink. 2. [TMRC] To travel, with v approaching c [that is, with velocity approaching lightspeed —ESR]. 3. [MIT] To propel something very quickly. The new comm software is very fast; it really zorches files through the network. 4. [MIT] Influence. Brownie points. Good karma. The intangible and fuzzy currency in which favors are measured. I'd rather not ask him for that just yet; I think I've used up my quota of zorch with him for the week. 5. [MIT] Energy, drive, or ability. I think I'll punt that change for now; I've been up for 30 hours and I've run out of zorch. 6. [MIT] To flunk an exam or course. A track called Zorch was the B-side of a single called Captain Hideous , released by novelty artist Nervous Norvous in 1955. Norvous was heavily influemced by a radio comedian named Red Blanchard; the word zorch appears to have been coined on Blanchard's show in the early 1950s. The word itself had no meaning, but there where compounds using it that did — zorch cow, for example, was a variant of the Chicago-area slang black cow for a root beer float. |
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
" Zombie "
| 1. [Unix] A process that has died but has not yet relinquished its process table slot (because the parent process hasn't executed a wait 2 for it yet). These can be seen in ps 1 listings occasionally. Compare orphan . 2. A machine, especially someone's home box, that has been cracked and is being used as part of a second-stage attack by miscreants trying to mask their home IP address. Especially used of machines being exploited in large gangs for a mechanized denial-of-service attack like Tribe Flood Network; the image that goes with this is of a veritable army of zombies mindlessly doing the bidding of a necromancer. |
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
" Zipperhead "
| [IBM] A person with a closed mind. |
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
" Zip "
| [primarily MS-DOS/Windows] To create a compressed archive from a group of files using PKWare's PKZIP or a compatible archiver. Its use is spreading now that portable implementations of the algorithm have been written. Commonly used as follows: I'll zip it up and send it to you. See tar and feather . |
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
" Zigamorph "
| 1. Hex FF (11111111) when used as a delimiter or fence character. Usage: primarily at IBM shops. 2. [proposed] The Unicode non-character U+FFFF (1111111111111111), a character code which is not assigned to any character, and so is usable as end-of-string. (Unicode is a 16-bit character code intended to cover all of the world's writing systems, including Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese, hiragana, katakana, Devanagari, Thai, Laotian and many other scripts — support for elvish is planned for a future release). |
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
" Zeroth "
| First. Among software designers, comes from C's and LISP's 0-based indexing of arrays. Hardware people also tend to start counting at 0 instead of 1; this is natural since, e.g., the 256 states of 8 bits correspond to the binary numbers 0, 1, &ellipsis;, 255 and the digital devices known as count in this way.Hackers and computer scientists often like to call the first chapter of a publication ‘Chapter 0’, especially if it is of an introductory nature (one of the classic instances was in the First Edition of K&R). In recent years this trait has also been observed among many pure mathematicians (who have an independent tradition of numbering from 0). Zero-based numbering tends to reduce fencepost error s, though it cannot eliminate them entirely. |
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
" Zero-One-Infinity Rule "
| Allow none of foo, one of foo, or any number of foo . A rule of thumb for software design, which instructs one to not place random limits on the number of instances of a given entity (such as: windows in a window system, letters in an OS's filenames, etc.). Specifically, one should either disallow the entity entirely, allow exactly one instance (an exception), or allow as many as the user wants — address space and memory permitting.The logic behind this rule is that there are often situations where it makes clear sense to allow one of something instead of none. However, if one decides to go further and allow N (for N > 1), then why not N+1? And if N+1, then why not N+2, and so on? Once above 1, there's no excuse not to allow any N; hence, infinity . Many hackers recall in this connection Isaac Asimov's SF novel The Gods Themselves in which a character announces that the number 2 is impossible — if you're going to believe in more than one universe, you might as well believe in an infinite number of them. |
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
" Zero-content "
| Syn. content-free . |
+ Associated link: http://xoops.underpop.com
Original module: Pascal Le Boustoufler (V1.6 for xoops 1.0 RC3)
Jargon 2.2 for xoops 2.X was adapted by Martialito from http://www.toplenet.com
Jargon 2.2 for xoops 2.X was adapted by Martialito from http://www.toplenet.com
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