WhatIs

/ē-vəl/

adj. As used by hackers, implies that some system, program, person, or institution is sufficiently maldesigned as to be not worth the bother of dealing with. Unlike the adjectives in the cretinous/losing/brain-damaged series, 'evil' does not imply incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of goals or design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's. This is more an esthetic and engineering judgment than a moral one in the mainstream sense.

/i-ˈsen(t)-shəl/

n. Things necessary to maintain a productive and secure hacking environment.

"A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, a 20-megahertz 80386 box with 8 meg of core and a 300-megabyte disk supporting full UNIX with source and X windows and EMACS and UUCP via a 'blazer to a friendly Internet site, and thou."

/ee-ro'tiks/

n. [Helsinki University of Technology, Finland] 

n. English-language university slang for electronics. Often used by hackers in Helsinki, maybe because good electronics excites them and makes them warm.

/e'ris/

n. The Greek goddess of Chaos, Discord, Confusion, and Things You Know Not Of; her name was latinized to Discordia and she was worshiped by that name in Rome. Not a very friendly deity in the Classical original, she was reinvented as a more benign personification of creative anarchy starting in 1959 by the adherents of Discordianism and has since been a semi-serious subject of veneration in several 'fringe' cultures, including hackerdom.

/erik kən-ˈspir-ə-sē/

n. A shadowy group of mustachioed hackers named Eric first pinpointed as a sinister conspiracy by an infamous talk.bizarre posting ca. 1986; this was doubtless influenced by the numerous 'Eric' jokes in the Monty Python oeuvre. There do indeed seem to be considerably more mustachioed Erics in hackerdom than the frequency of these three traits can account for unless they are correlated in some arcane way.

/e-rə, t͟hə/

Syn. epoch. Webster's Unabridged makes these words almost synonymous, but 'era' usually connotes a span of time rather than a point in time. The epoch usage is recommended.

/ep-sə-ˌlän skwered/

n. A quantity even smaller than epsilon, as small in comparison to epsilon as epsilon is to something normal; completely negligible. If you buy a supercomputer for a million dollars, the cost of the thousand-dollar terminal to go with it is epsilon, and the cost of the ten-dollar cable to connect them is epsilon squared.

Compare lost in the underflow, lost in the noise.

/ep-sə-ˌlän/

[see delta]

1. n. A small quantity of anything.

"The cost is epsilon."

2. adj. Very small, negligible; less than marginal.

"We can get this feature for epsilon cost."

3. 'within epsilon of': close enough to be indistinguishable for all practical purposes. This is even closer than being 'within delta of'.

"That's not what I asked for, but it's within epsilon of what I wanted."

/e-pək/

[UNIX: prob. from Astronomical timekeeping]

/E-O-U/

n. The mnemonic of a mythical ASCII control character (End Of User) that could make an ASR-33 Teletype explode on receipt. This parodied the numerous obscure delimiter and control characters left in ASCII from the days when it was associated more with wire-service teletypes than computers (e.g., FS, GS, RS, US, EM, SUB, ETX, and esp. EOT).