WhatIs

/hau̇s wi-zərd/

[prob. from ad-agency lingo, house freak]

n. A hacker occupying a technical-specialist, R&D, or systems position at a commercial shop. A really effective house wizard can have influence out of all proportion to his/her ostensible rank and still not have to wear a suit. Used esp. of UNIX wizards. The term house guru is equivalent.

/hät spät/

n. 1. [primarily used by C/UNIX programmers, but spreading] It is received wisdom that in most programs, less than 10% of the code eats 90% of the execution time; if one were to graph instruction visits versus code addresses, one would typically see a few huge spikes amidst a lot of low-level noise. Such spikes are called 'hot spots' and are good candidates for heavy optimization or hand-hacking.

/hōz'd/

adj. Same as down. Used primarily by UNIX hackers. Humorous: also implies a condition thought to be relatively easy to reverse. Probably derived from the Canadian slang 'hoser' popularized by the Bob and Doug Mackenzie skits on SCTV. See {hose}. It is also widely used of people in the mainstream sense of 'in an extremely unfortunate situation'.

/hōz/

1. vt. To make non-functional or greatly degraded in performance.

"That big ray-tracing program really hoses the system."

See hosed.

2. n. A narrow channel through which data flows under pressure. Generally denotes data paths that represent performance bottlenecks.

3. n. Cabling, especially thick Ethernet cable. This is sometimes called 'bit hose' or 'hosery' (play on 'hosiery') or 'etherhose'.

See also washing machine.

/häp/

n. One file transmission in a series required to get a file from point A to point B on a store-and-forward network. On such networks (including UUCPNET and FidoNet), the important inter-machine metric is the number of hops in the shortest path between them, rather than their geographical separation.

See bang path.

/hu̇k/

n. A software or hardware feature included in order to simplify later additions or changes by a user. For example, a simple program that prints numbers might always print them in base 10, but a more flexible version would let a variable determine what base to use; setting the variable to 5 would make the program print numbers in base 5. The variable is a simple hook. An even more flexible program might examine the variable and treat a value of 16 or less as the base to use, but treat any other number as the address of a user-supplied routine for printing a number.

/hōm bäks/

n. 

A hacker's personal machine, especially one he or she owns.
"Yeah? Well, *my* home box runs a full 4.2 BSD, so there!"

/hō-lē wȯrs/

[from USENET, but may predate it]

/häg/

n.,vt. 1. Favored term to describe programs or hardware that seem to eat far more than their share of a system's resources, esp. those which noticeably degrade interactive response. *Not* used of programs that are simply extremely large or complex or that are merely painfully slow themselves (see pig, run like a). More often than not encountered in qualified forms, e.g., 'memory hog', 'core hog', 'hog the processor', 'hog the disk'.

/hä-bət/

n. 1. The High Order Bit of a byte; same as the meta bit or high bit.

2. The non-ITS name of vad@ai.mit.edu (*Hobbit*), master of lasers.