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Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.announce
From: Darcy BROCKBANK <samurai@binkley.cs.mcgill.ca>
Subject: SUBMISSION: Barron's Dictionary demo and Hackers Lexicon 1.1
Reply-To: info@solutions.ca
Organization: Next Announcements
Approved: sanguish@digifix.com
For more info contact:
The Hutchison Avenue Software Corp.
(514) 499-2067
info@solutions.ca
I've submitted a new version of the Hacker's Lexicon,
and a demo version of Barron's to the cs.orst.edu archives.
There will be a demo of the Oxford Reference Dictionary of
Computing by the end of the week.
Here's the lowdown on each volume:
Barron's Dictionary of Finance and Investment Terms
===================================================
Publisher: Barron's Educational Series, Inc.
Authors: John Downes, and Jordan Elliot Goodman
Availability: Now.
Text: A best-seller for Barron's. Features in depth definitions of
commonly used terms, such as "BOND", acronyms such as "LIBOR" and
"NASD", and jargon such as "WRITING NAKED" or "WHITE KNIGHT". Contains
example charts for phrases such as "DOUBLE TOP", in order to explain
pricing patterns and charts in use in the financial industry.
Features: intra-text graphics, user definable presentation font,
hypertext links, three search modes (phrase matching, partial phrase
matching, and text searching), entry history, auto-saved configuration
(font family, window position and size), access through services menu.
Example
=======
The following is an example definition from Barron's. Words followed by
a '+' indicate hypertext links. The definition is formatted with bold,
italic and small cap text. The font family is chosen by the user
(default is Times-Roman, 12.0).
KICKER added feature of a debt obligation, usually designed to enhance
marketability by offering the prospect of equity participation. For
instance, a bond may be convertible to stock if the shares reach a
certain price. This makes the bond more attractive to investors, since
the bondholder potentially gets the benefit of an equity security in
addition to interest payments. Other examples of equity kickers are
RIGHTS+ and WARRANTS+. Some mortgage loans also include kickers in the
form of ownership participation or in the form of a percentage of gross
rental receipts. Kickers are also called sweeteners.
The Hacker's Lexicon
====================
Editor: Eric Raymond
This digital dictionary is available FREE, and can be found on
cs.orst.edu (Oregon State University) in
/pub/next/documents/Hackers1.1.tar, (the exact locations may
change from time to time).
The Hacker's Lexicon is an informative, irreverant and often
hilarious look at the computing world through the eyes of a
hacker. It's a must read, and of course is free.
Examples:
bogus adj.
1. Non-functional. "Your patches are bogus."
2. Useless. "OPCON is a bogus program."
3. False. "Your arguments are bogus."
4. Incorrect. "That algorithm is bogus."
5. Unbelievable. "You claim to have solved the halting problem for Turing Machines? That's totally bogus."
6. Silly. "Stop writing those bogus sagas."
Astrology is bogus. So is a bolt that is obviously about to break. So
is someone who makes blatantly false claims to have solved a
scientific problem. (This word seems to have some, but not all, of
the connotations of random, --- mostly the negative ones.)
It is claimed that `bogus' was originally used in the hackish sense at
Princeton in the late 1960s. It was spread to CMU and Yale by Michael
Shamos, a migratory Princeton alumnus. A glossary of bogus words was
compiled at Yale when the word was first popularized (see
autobogotiphobia, under bogotify,). The word spread into hackerdom
from CMU and MIT. By the early 1980s it was also current in something
like the hackish sense in West Coast teen slang, and it had gone
mainstream by 1985.
schroedinbug [MIT: from the Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment in
quantum physics] n. A design or implementation bug in a program which
doesn't manifest until someone reading source or using the program
in an unusual way notices that it never should have worked, at which
point the program promptly stops working for everybody until fixed.
Though this sounds impossible, it happens; some programs have
harbored latent schroedinbugs for years. Compare heisenbug,, Bohr
bug,, mandelbug,.
C n.
1. The third letter of the English alphabet.
2. ASCII 1000011.
3. The name of a programming language designed by Dennis Ritchie
during the early 1970s and immediately used to reimplement UNIX,; so
called because many features derived from an earlier compiler named
`B' in commemoration of *its* parent, BCPL. Before Bjarne Stroustrup
settled the question by designing C++, there was a humorous debate
over whether C's successor should be named `D' or `P'. C became
immensely popular outside Bell Labs after about 1980 and is now the
dominant language in systems and microcomputer applications
programming. See also languages of choice,, indent style,.
C is often described, with a mixture of fondness and disdain varying
according to the speaker, as "a language that combines all the
elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and
maintainability of assembly language".
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Marcel Waldvogel and Netfuture.ch.