Text B Study some terms from «The New Hacker's Dictionary» mentioned in Text A, and try to appreciate the humor.

angry fruit salad: n. A bad interface design that uses too many colors. baud barf: /bawd barf/ n. The garbage one sometimes gets on the monitor when encountering spurious data, caused, for example, by an incorrect protocol setting. beige toaster: n. A Macintosh PC.	spurious _ wrong, false
bit rot: n. The hypotethical disease of unused programs or features that stop working after enough time has passed, even if «nothing has changed». The theory explains that bits decay as if radioactive. bletcherous:/blech-(e)-rus/ adj. Disgusting in design or function; esthetically unappealing.
bulletproof: adj. Descriptive of an algorithm or implementation considered extremely robust and capable of correctly recovering from any imaginable exception condition. This is a rare and valued quality. chrome: n. Showy features contributing little or nothing to the power of a system.	robust — strong, effective
glork:/glork/ interj. Term of surprise, uttered when, say, trying to save the results of two hours of editing, you find that the system has crashed. guru: n. An expert, implying not only the possession of wizardly skill but a history of being a knowledge resource for others. demigod: n. Hacker with a national reputation and a major role in the development of a design, tool, or game known to over half of the hacker community. face time: n. Time spent interacting with somebody face-to-face (as opposed to over an electronic link).
New Testament: n. The second edition of K&R's (Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie's) «The С Programming Language» (Prentice-Hall, 1988), describing ANSI Standard C. The first edition is referred to as the Old Testament. programming: n. 1. Classically, the art of debugging ablank sheet of paper. 2. A pastime akin to banging one's head against a wall, but less rewarding. softy: n. Hardware hackers' term for a software expert ignorant of hardware.	to debug — to search for or remove bugs (faults) in a computer program a bug — (informal) a fault or difficulty in a machine, system, computer program akin — similar, having the same character or nature

 

Chapter 4

 

spaghetti code: n. Code with a complex and tangled control structure, especially one using many GOTO's, exceptions, or other unstructured branching constructs. tense: adj. Of programs, very clever and efficient.	tangle — confused, disordered mass/state
troglodyte mode: n. Programming with the lights turned off, sunglasses on, and the terminal inverted (black on white) because your eyes hurt. vaporware: Products announced far in advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place). wedged: adj. Stuck, incapable of proceeding without help (whereas crashing describes total nonfunctioning). The system may be capable of doing a few things, but is not fully operational. WIMP environment: [acronym of Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing device] n. A graphical user— interface-based environment, as described by a hacker who prefers command-line interfaces for their superior flexibility and extensibility. Macintoshes and Microsoft Windows use WIMP interfaces.
wizard: n. A person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works and can find and fix bugs quickly in an emergency.	wizard — a person with unusual, almost magical abilities

 

Exercise 13. Choose the correct word and fill in the blanks.

(to) create creation creativity creative

 

1. His designs are always ______

2. You should use your ____.

3. The project will _____ a sensation.

4. The report proposed is the ____ of an independent committee.

 

(to be) capable of capability

 

5. We are not ____ improving it.

6. They will not doubt her _____ for the job.

 

(to) modify modification(s)

 

7. A few ___ to the plan will _____ it.

8. The design has been ____.

9. Scientists _____ their views in the light of new evidence.