WhatIs

/kəm-ˈpakt/

adj. Of a design, describes the valuable property that it can all be apprehended at once in one's head. This generally means the thing created from the design can be used with greater facility and fewer errors than an equivalent tool that is not compact. Compactness does not imply triviality or lack of power; for example, C is compact and FORTRAN is not, but C is more powerful than FORTRAN.

/kä-mən-welth ha-kish/

n. Hacker jargon as spoken outside the U.S., esp. in the British Commonwealth. It is reported that Commonwealth speakers are more likely to pronounce truncations like 'char' and 'soc', etc., as spelled (/char/, /sok/), as opposed to American /keir/ and /sohsh/. Dots in newsgroup names tend to be pronounced more often (so soc.wibble is /sok dot wib'l/ rather than /sohsh wib'l/). The prefix meta may be pronounced /mee't*/; similarly, Greek letter beta is often /bee't*/, zeta is often /zee't*/, and so forth.

/kä-ˌment au̇t/

vt. To surround a section of code with comment delimiters or to prefix every line in the section with a comment marker; this prevents it from being compiled or interpreted. Often done when the code is redundant or obsolete, but you want to leave it in the source to make the intent of the active code clearer; also when the code in that section is broken and you want to bypass it in order to debug some other part of the code.

/kə-ˈmand kē/

[Mac users]

n. The Macintosh key with the cloverleaf graphic on its keytop; sometimes referred to as 'flower', 'pretzel', 'clover', 'propeller', 'beanie' (an apparent reference to the major feature of a propeller beanie), or splat. The Mac's equivalent of an ALT key. The proliferation of terms for this creature may illustrate one subtle peril of iconic interfaces.

/kom mohd/

[ITS: from the feature supporting online chat; the term may be spelled with one or two Ms]

Syn. for talk mode.

/kəm frəm/

n. 

/kə-lü-zhən/

wherein several participants cooperate to deduce the identity of a sender or receiver, or to break a cipher. Most cryptosystems are sensitive to some forms of collusion. Much of the work on implementing DC Nets, for example, involves ensuring that colluders cannot isolate message senders and thereby trace origins and destinations of mail.

/kōld büt/

n. See boot.

/kohk'bot-l/

n. Any very unusual character, particularly one you can't type because it it isn't on your keyboard. MIT people used to complain about the 'control-meta-cokebottle' commands at SAIL, and SAIL people complained right back about the 'altmode-altmode-cokebottle' commands at MIT. After the demise of the space-cadet keyboard, 'cokebottle' faded away as serious usage, but was often invoked humorously to describe an (unspecified) weird or non-intuitive keystroke command. It may be due for a second inning, however.

/kō-ə-ˈfi-shənt əv eks/

n. Hackish speech makes rather heavy use of pseudo-mathematical metaphors. Four particularly important ones involve the terms 'coefficient', 'factor', 'index', and 'quotient'. They are often loosely applied to things you cannot really be quantitative about, but there are subtle distinctions among them that convey information about the way the speaker mentally models whatever he or she is describing.