WhatIs

/frēd/

n. 1. The personal name most frequently used as a metasyntactic variable (see foo). Allegedly popular because it's easy for a non-touch-typist to type on a standard QWERTY keyboard. Unlike J. Random Hacker or 'J. Random Loser', this name has no positive or negative loading (but see Mbogo, Dr. Fred).

2. An acronym for Flipping Ridiculous Electronic Device; other F-verbs may be substituted for flipping.

/fra-jəl/

adj. Syn brittle.

/fȯr kə-lər glä-sē/

1. Literature created by marketroids that allegedly containing technical specs but which is in fact as superficial as possible without being totally content-free.

"Forget the four-color glossies, give me the tech ref manuals."

Often applied as an indication of superficiality even when the material is printed on ordinary paper in black and white. Four-color-glossy manuals are *never* useful for finding a problem.

/fä-səl/

n. 1. In software, a misfeature that becomes understandable only in historical context, as a remnant of times past retained so as not to break compatibility. Example: the retention of octal as default base for string escapes in C, in spite of the better match of hexadecimal to ASCII and modern byte-addressable architectures.

See dusty deck.

/fȯr-əm/

n. [USENET, GEnie CI$; pl. fora or 'forums']

/fȯr-chən ku̇-kē/

[UNIX]

n. A random quote, item of trivia, joke, or maxim printed to the user's tty at login time or (less commonly) at logout time. Items from this lexicon have often been used as fortune cookies.

See cookie file.

/fȯr'trash/

n. Hackerism for the FORTRAN language, referring to its primitive design, gross and irregular syntax, limited control constructs, and slippery, exception-filled semantics.

/fȯrkt/

[UNIX; prob. influenced by a mainstream expletive]

adj. Terminally slow, or dead. Originated when one system slowed to incredibly bad speeds because of a process recursively spawning copies of itself (using the UNIX system call 'fork(2)') and taking up all the process table entries.

/fȯr-ˌgrau̇nd/

[UNIX]

vt. To foreground a task is to bring it to the top of one's stack for immediate processing, and hackers often use it in this sense for non-computer tasks.

"If your presentation is due next week, I guess I'd better foreground writing up the design document."

/fərə/

pl.n. Plural of forum.