WhatIs

/c-p-u/

CPU, or Central Processing Unit, is the heart and brain of your computer. It is a tiny yet incredibly powerful chip that performs all the essential calculations and tasks required to run software and execute commands. Just like a brain processes information, the CPU carries out instructions from programs and coordinates various operations within your computer. From opening applications to editing documents and playing games, every action you perform on your computer involves the CPU's lightning-fast calculations.

/C-P-M/

n. [Control Program for Microcomputers] An early microcomputer OS written by hacker Gary Kildall for 8080- and Z80-based machines, very popular in the late 1970s but virtually wiped out by MS-DOS after the release of the IBM PC in 1981.

/kau̇-ˌbȯi/

[Sun, from William Gibson's cyberpunk SF]

n. Synonym for hacker. It is reported that at Sun this word is often said with reverence.

/kȯf ən(d) dī/

v. Syn. barf. Connotes that the program is throwing its hands up by design rather than because of a bug or oversight.

"The parser saw a Control-A in its input where it was looking for a printable, so it coughed and died."

/käz-mik rāz/

n. Notionally, the cause of bit rot. However, this is a semi-independent usage that may be invoked as a humorous way to handwave away any minor randomness that doesn't seem worth the bother of investigating.

"Hey, Eric -- I just got a burst of garbage on my tube, where did that come from?"

"Cosmic rays, I guess."

/korj/

[originally the name of a cat]

n. Yet another meta-syntactic variable, invented by Mike Gallaher and propagated by the GOSMACS documentation.

See grault.

/kȯr wȯrs/

n. A game between 'Assembler' programs in a simulated machine, where the objective is to kill your opponent's program by overwriting it. Popularized by A. K. Dewdney's column in 'Scientific American' magazine, this was actually devised by Victor Vyssotsky, Robert Morris, and Dennis Ritchie in the early 1960s (their original game was called 'Darwin' and ran on a PDP-1 at Bell Labs).

See core.

/kȯr lēk/

n. Syn. memory leak.

/kȯr dəmp/

n. [common Iron Age jargon, preserved by UNIX]

1. [techspeak] A copy of the contents of core, produced when a process is aborted by certain kinds of internal error.

2. By extension, used for humans passing out, vomiting, or registering extreme shock.

"He dumped core. All over the floor. What a mess."

"He heard about X and dumped core."

3. Occasionally used for a human rambling on pointlessly at great length; esp. in apology:

/kȯr/

n. Main storage or RAM. Dates from the days of ferrite-core memory; now archaic as techspeak most places outside IBM, but also still used in the UNIX community and by old-time hackers or those who would sound like them. Some derived idioms are quite current; 'in core', for example, means 'in memory' (as opposed to 'on disk'), and both {core dump} and the 'core image' or 'core file' produced by one are terms in favor. Commonwealth hackish prefers store.