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Dictionary of Computer/Hacker Jargon

 

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I didn't change anything! interj. An aggrieved cry often heard as bugs manifest during a regression test. The {canonical} reply to this assertion is "Then it works just the same as it did before, doesn't it?" See also {one-line fix}. This is also heard from applications programmers trying to blame an obvious applications problem on an unrelated systems software change, for example a divide-by-0 fault after terminals were added to a network. Usually, their statement is found to be false. Upon close questioning, they will admit some major restructuring of the program that shouldn't have broken anything, in their opinion, but which actually {hosed} the code completely.
I see no X here. . Hackers (and the interactive computer games they write) traditionally favor this slightly marked usage over other possible equivalents such as "There's no X here!" or "X is missing." or "Where's the X?". This goes back to the original PDP-10 {ADVENT}, which would respond in this wise if you asked it to do something involving an object not present at your location in the game.
I for one welcome our new X overlords . Variants of this phrase with various values of X came into common use in 2002-2003, generally used to suggest that whatever party referred to as the new overlords is deeply evil. In the original Simpsons episode (#96, Homer In Space) X = "insect" and th line is part of a speech in which a smarmy newscaster expresses his willingness to collaborate with an invading race of giant space ants.
IANAL . [Usenet] Abbreviation, "I Am Not A Lawyer". Usually precedes legal advice.
IBM /I·B·M/. Once upon a time, the computer company most hackers loved to hate; today, the one they are most puzzled to find themselves liking. From hackerdom's beginnings in the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, IBM was regarded with active loathing. Common expansions of the corporate name included: Inferior But Marketable; It's Better Manually; Insidious Black Magic; It's Been Malfunctioning; Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a near-{infinite} number of even less complimentary expansions (see also {fear and loathing}). What galled hackers about most IBM machines above the PC level wasn't so much that they were underpowered and overpriced (though that counted against them), but that the designs were incredibly archaic, {crufty}, and {elephantine} ... and you couldn't fix them -- source code was locked up tight, and programming tools were expensive, hard to find, and bletcherous to use once you had found them. We didn't know how good we had it back then. In the 1980s IBM had its own troubles with Microsoft and lost its strategic way, receding from the hacker community's view. Then, in the 1990s, Microsoft became more noxious and omnipresent than IBM had ever been. In the late 1990s IBM re-invented itself as a services company, began to release open-source software through its AlphaWorks group, and began shipping {Linux} systems and building ties to the Linux community. To the astonishment of all parties, IBM emerged as a staunch friend of the hacker community and {open source} development, with ironic consequences noted in the {FUD} entry. This lexicon includes a number of entries attributed to 'IBM'; these derive from some rampantly unofficial jargon lists circulated within IBM's formerly beleaguered hacker underground.
 
Based on The Jargon File maintained by Eric Raymond
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