Jargon File

Jargon File

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footprint n. 1. The floor or desk area taken up by a piece of hardware.
2. [IBM] The audit trail (if any) left by a crashed program (often in plural, `footprints')....
for free adj. [common] Said of a capability of a programming language or hardware that is available by its design without needing cleverness to impleme
In APL, we get the matrix opera...
for the rest of us adj. [from the Mac slogan "The computer for the rest of us"] 1.
for values of [MIT] A common rhetorical maneuver at MIT is to use any of the canonical random numbers as placeholders for variables.
The max function takes 42 arguments, for arbitrary va...
fora pl.n. Plural of forum.
foreground vt. [Unix; common] To bring a task to the top of one's stack for immediate processing, and hackers often use it in this sense for non-computer tasks.
If your presentation is du...
fork bomb n. [Unix] A particular species of wabbit that can be written in one line of C (main() {for(
)fork();}) or shell ($0 & $0 &) on any Unix system, or occasionally created b...
forked adj. [Unix; prob. influenced by a mainstream expletive] Terminally slow, or dead.
Originated when one system was slowed to a snail's pace by an inadvertent fork bomb....
Fortrash /for'trash/ n.
fortune cookie n. [WAITS, via Unix; common] A random quote, item of trivia, joke, or maxim printed to the user's tty at login time or (less commonly) at logout time.
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