WhatIs

/L-E-R/

[TMRC, from Light-Emitting Diode]

n. A light-emitting resistor (that is, one in the process of burning up). Ohm's law was broken.

See SED.

/lē-gə-ˈlēz/

n. Dense, pedantic verbiage in a language description, product specification, or interface standard; text that seems designed to obfuscate and requires a language lawyer to parse it. Though hackers are not afraid of high information density and complexity in language (indeed, they rather enjoy both), they share a deep and abiding loathing for legalese; they associate it with deception, suits, and situations in which hackers generally get the short end of the stick.

/lē-gəl/

adj. Loosely used to mean 'in accordance with all the relevant rules', esp. in connection with some set of constraints defined by software. "The older =+ alternate for += is no longer legal syntax in ANSI C." "This parser processes each line of legal input the moment it sees the trailing linefeed." Hackers often model their work as a sort of game played with the environment in which the objective is to maneuver through the thicket of 'natural laws' to achieve a desired objective.

/lē-kē hēp/

[Cambridge]

n. An arena with a memory leak.

/lēk/

n. With qualifier, one of a class of resource-management bugs that occur when resources are not freed properly after operations on them are finished, so they effectively disappear (leak out). This leads to eventual exhaustion as new allocation requests come in. memory leak and fd leak have their own entries; one might also refer, to, say, a 'window handle leak' in a window system.

/lēf sīt/

n. A machine that merely originates and reads USENET news or mail, and does not relay any third-party traffic. Often uttered in a critical tone; when the ratio of leaf sites to backbone, rib, and other relay sites gets too high, the network tends to develop bottlenecks.

Compare backbone site, rib site.

/l*'d*b/

[from the PDP-10 instruction set]

vt. To extract from the middle. "LDB me a slice of cake, please." This usage has been kept alive by Common LISP's function of the same name. Considered silly.

See also DPB.

/lȯn-drə-ˌmat/

n. Syn. disk farm; see washing machine.

/lā-zər chi-kᵊn/

n. Kung Pao Chicken, a standard Chinese dish containing chicken, peanuts, and hot red peppers in a spicy pepper-oil sauce. Many hackers call it laser chicken for two reasons: It can zap you just like a laser, and the sauce has a red color reminiscent of some laser beams.

/lāz/

vt. To print a given document via a laser printer.

"OK, let's lase that sucker and see if all those graphics-macro calls did the right things."