WhatIs

/thred/

[USENET, GEnie, CompuServe]

n. Common abbreviation of topic thread, a more or less continuous chain of postings on a single topic.

/thrash/

vi. To move wildly or violently, without accomplishing anything useful. Paging or swapping systems that are overloaded waste most of their time moving data into and out of core (rather than performing useful computation) and are therefore said to thrash. Someone who keeps changing his mind (esp. about what to work on next) is said to be thrashing. A person frantically trying to execute too many tasks at once (and not spending enough time on any single task) may also be described as thrashing.

Compare multitask.

/t͟his tīm, fər shu̇r!/

excl. Ritual affirmation frequently uttered during protracted debugging sessions involving numerous small obstacles (e.g., attempts to bring up a UUCP connection). For the proper effect, this must be uttered in a fruity imitation of Bullwinkle J. Moose. Also heard:

"Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!"

The canonical response is, of course, "But that trick *never* works!"

See Humor, Hacker.

/thiŋ-kō/

[by analogy with typo]

n. A momentary, correctable glitch in mental processing, especially one involving recall of information learned by rote; a bubble in the stream of consciousness.

Syn. braino.

Compare mouso.

/thē-ə-rē/

n. The consensus, idea, plan, story, or set of rules that is currently being used to inform a behavior. This is a generalization and abuse of the technical meaning.
"What's the theory on fixing this TECO loss?"
"What's the theory on dinner tonight?"
("Chinatown, I guess.")
"What's the current theory on letting lusers on during the day?"
"The theory behind this change is to fix the following well-known screw..."

/thē-ˈä-lə-jē/

n. 1. Ironically or humorously used to refer to religious issues.

2. Technical fine points of an abstruse nature, esp. those where the resolution is of theoretical interest but is relatively marginal with respect to actual use of a design or system. Used esp. around software issues with a heavy AI or language-design component, such as the smart-data vs. smart-programs dispute in AI.

/T-X-T-C-B-Y-I-N-T-T-X/

Yet another instance of hackerdom's peculiar attraction to mystical references -- a common humorous way of making exclusive statements about a class of things. The template is from the 'Tao te Ching'

"The Tao which can be spoken of is not the true Tao."

The implication is often that the X is a mystery accessible only to the enlightened.

See the trampoline entry for an example, and compare has the X nature.

/thaŋ(k)s in əd-van(t)s/

[USENET]

Conventional net.politeness ending a posted request for information or assistance. Sometimes written advTHANKSance or aTdHvAaNnKcSe or abbreviated TIA.

See net.-, netiquette.

/tekst/

n. 1. [techspeak] Executable code, esp. a pure code portion shared between multiple instances of a program running in a multitasking OS (compare English).

2. Textual material in the mainstream sense; data in ordinary ASCII or EBCDIC representation (see flat-ASCII).

"Those are text files; you can review them using the editor."

/tekh/

n. An extremely powerful macro-based text formatter written by Donald E. Knuth, very popular in the computer-science community (it is good enough to have displaced UNIX 'troff(1)', the other favored formatter, even at many UNIX installations). TeX fans insist on the correct (guttural) pronunciation, and the correct spelling (all caps, squished together, with the E depressed below the baseline; the mixed-case 'TeX' is considered an acceptable kluge on ASCII-only devices).