:control-S: vi. "Stop talking for a second." From the ASCII DC3 or XOFF character (the pronunciation /X-of/ is therefore also used). Control-S differs from {control-O} in that the person is asked to stop talking (perhaps because you are on the phone) but will be allowed to continue when you're ready to listen to him —- as opposed to control-O, which has more of the meaning of "Shut up." Considered silly.
:Conway's Law: prov. The rule that the organization of the software and the organization of the software team will be congruent; originally stated as "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler".
This was originally promulgated by Melvin Conway, an early proto-hacker who wrote an assembler for the Burroughs 220 called SAVE. The name `SAVE' didn't stand for anything; it was just that you lost fewer card decks and listings because they all had SAVE written on them.
:cookbook: [from amateur electronics and radio] n. A book of small
code segments that the reader can use to do various {magic}
things in programs. One current example is the `{PostScript}
Language Tutorial and Cookbook' by Adobe Systems, Inc
(Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-10179-3) which has recipes for things
like wrapping text around arbitrary curves and making 3D fonts.
Cookbooks, slavishly followed, can lead one into {voodoo
programming}, but are useful for hackers trying to {monkey up}
small programs in unknown languages. This is analogous to the role
of phrasebooks in human languages.
:cooked mode: [UNIX] n. The normal character-input mode, with
interrupts enabled and with erase, kill and other special-character
interpretations done directly by the tty driver. Oppose {raw
mode}, {rare mode}. This is techspeak under UNIX but jargon
elsewhere; other operating systems often have similar mode
distinctions, and the raw/rare/cooked way of describing them has
spread widely along with the C language and other UNIX exports.
Most generally, `cooked mode' may refer to any mode of a
system that does extensive preprocessing before presenting data to
a program.
:cookie: n. A handle, transaction ID, or other token of agreement between cooperating programs. "I give him a packet, he gives me back a cookie." The claim check you get from a dry-cleaning shop is a perfect mundane example of a cookie; the only thing it's useful for is to relate a later transaction to this one (so you get the same clothes back). Compare {magic cookie}; see also {fortune cookie}.
:cookie bear: n. Syn. {cookie monster}.
:cookie file: n. A collection of {fortune cookie}s in a format that facilitates retrieval by a fortune program. There are several different ones in public distribution, and site admins often assemble their own from various sources including this lexicon.
:cookie monster: [from "Sesame Street">[ n. Any of a family of early (1970s) hacks reported on {{TOPS-10}}, {{ITS}}, {{Multics}}, and elsewhere that would lock up either the victim's terminal (on a time-sharing machine) or the {{console}} (on a batch {mainframe}), repeatedly demanding "I WANT A COOKIE". The required responses ranged in complexity from "COOKIE" through "HAVE A COOKIE" and upward. See also {wabbit}.
:copious free time: [Apple; orig. fr. the intro to Tom Lehrer's song "It Makes A Fellow Proud To Be A Soldier">[ n. 1. [used ironically to indicate the speaker's lack of the quantity in question] A mythical schedule slot for accomplishing tasks held to be unlikely or impossible. Sometimes used to indicate that the speaker is interested in accomplishing the task, but believes that the opportunity will not arise. "I'll implement the automatic layout stuff in my copious free time." 2. [Archly] Time reserved for bogus or otherwise idiotic tasks, such as implementation of {chrome}, or the stroking of {suit}s. "I'll get back to him on that feature in my copious free time."