WhatIs

/tü pī/

quant. The number of years it takes to finish one's thesis. Occurs in stories in the following form:
"He started on his thesis; 2 pi years later..."

/twiŋk/

[UCSC]

n. Equivalent to read-only user. Also reported on the USENET group soc.motss; may derive from gay slang for a cute young thing with nothing upstairs.

/twi-dᵊl/

n. 1. Tilde (ASCII 1111110, '~'). Also called 'squiggle', 'sqiggle' (sic -- pronounced /skig'l/), and 'twaddle', but twiddle is the most common term.

2. A small and insignificant change to a program. Usually fixes one bug and generates several new ones.

/twe-neks/

n. The TOPS-20 operating system by DEC -- the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10 -- preferred by most PDP-10 hackers over TOPS-10 (that is, by those who were not ITS or WAITS partisans). TOPS-20 began in 1969 as Bolt, Beranek & Newman's TENEX operating system using special paging hardware. By the early 1970s, almost all of the systems on the ARPANET ran TENEX. DEC purchased the rights to TENEX from BBN and began work to make it their own.

/twēk/

vt. 1. To change slightly, usually in reference to a value. Also used synonymously with twiddle. If a program is almost correct, rather than figure out the precise problem you might just keep tweaking it until it works.

See frobnicate and fudge factor; also see shotgun debugging.

2. To tune or bum a program; preferred usage in the U.K.

/tu̇r-ist/

n. Var. sp. of tourist, q.v. Also in adjectival form, turistic. Poss. influenced by luser and Turing.

/tər-bō nərd/

n. See computer geek.

/tün/

[from automotive or musical usage]

vt. To optimize a program or system for a particular environment, esp. by adjusting numerical parameters designed as hooks for tuning, e.g., by changing '#define' lines in C. One may 'tune for time' (fastest execution), 'tune for space' (least memory use), or 'tune for configuration' (most efficient use of hardware).

See bum, hot spot, hand-hacking.

/tü-nəfish/

n. In hackish lore, refers to the mutated punchline of an age-old joke to be found at the bottom of the manual pages of 'tunefs(8)' in the original BSD 4.2 distribution. The joke was removed in later releases once commercial sites started developing in 4.2. Tunefs relates to the 'tuning' of file-system parameters for optimum performance, and at the bottom of a few pages of wizardly inscriptions was a 'BUGS' section consisting of the line "You can tune a file system, but you can't tunafish".

/tyüb tīm/

n. Time spent at a terminal or console. More inclusive than hacking time; commonly used in discussions of what parts of one's environment one uses most heavily.

"I find I'm spending too much of my tube time reading mail since I started this revision."