WhatIs

/kän-ˌwāz lȯ/

prov. The rule that the organization of the software and the organization of the software team will be congruent; originally stated as "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler".

This was originally promulgated by Melvin Conway, an early proto-hacker who wrote an assembler for the Burroughs 220 called SAVE. The name 'SAVE' didn't stand for anything; it was just that you lost fewer card decks and listings because they all had SAVE written on them.

/kən-ˈtrōl es/

vi. "Stop talking for a second." From the ASCII XOFF character (this is also pronounced XOFF /X-of/). Control-S differs from Control-O in that the person is asked to stop talking (perhaps because you are on the phone) but will be allowed to continue when you're ready to listen to him -- as opposed to Control-O, which has more of the meaning of "Shut up." Considered silly.

/kən-ˈtrōl kyü/

vi. "Resume." From the ASCII XON character used to undo a previous control-S (in fact it is also pronounced XON /X-on/).

/kən-ˈtrōl ō/

vi. "Stop talking." From the character used on some operating systems to abort output but allow the program to keep on running. Generally means that you are not interested in hearing anything more from that person, at least on that topic; a standard response to someone who is flaming. Considered silly.

/kən-ˈtrōl sē/

vi. 1. "Stop whatever you are doing."

From the interrupt character used on many operating systems to abort a running program. Considered silly.

2. interj. Among BSD UNIX hackers, the canonical humorous response to

"Give me a break!"

/kän-ˌtent frē/

[by analogy with techspeak 'context-free']

adj. Used of a message that adds nothing to the recipient's knowledge. Though this adjective is sometimes applied to flamage, it more usually connotes derision for communication styles that exalt form over substance or are centered on concerns irrelevant to the subject ostensibly at hand. Perhaps most used with reference to speeches by company presidents and other professional manipulators.

"Content-free? Uh... that's anything printed on glossy paper."

/kän-ˌsōl jä-kē/

n. See terminal junkie.

/kän-ˌsōl/

n. 1. The operator's station of a mainframe. In times past, this was a privileged location that conveyed godlike powers to anyone with fingers on its keys. Under UNIX and other modern timesharing OSes, such privileges are guarded by passwords instead, and the console is just the tty the system was booted from. Some of the mystique remains, however, and it is traditional for sysadmins to post urgent messages to all users from the console (on UNIX, /dev/console).

/kən-ˈsi-dərd härm-fəl/

adj. Edsger W. Dijkstra's note in the March 1968 'Communications of the ACM', "Goto Statement Considered Harmful", fired the first salvo in the structured programming wars. Amusingly, the ACM considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it will (by policy) no longer print an article taking so assertive a position against a coding practice. In the ensuing decades, a large number of both serious papers and parodies have borne titles of the form "X considered Y".

/konz/ or /kons/

[from LISP]

1. vt. To add a new element to a specified list, esp. at the top.

"OK, cons picking a replacement for the console TTY onto the agenda."