:Eric Conspiracy: n. A shadowy group of mustachioed hackers named Eric first pinpointed as a sinister conspiracy by an infamous talk.bizarre posting ca. 1986; this was doubtless influenced by the numerous `Eric' jokes in the Monty Python oeuvre. There do indeed seem to be considerably more mustachioed Erics in hackerdom than the frequency of these three traits can account for unless they are correlated in some arcane way. Well-known examples include Eric Allman (he of the `Allman style' described under {indent style}) and Erik Fair (co-author of NNTP); your editor has heard from about fourteen others by email, and the organization line `Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories' now emanates regularly from more than one site.
:Eris: /e'ris/ n. The Greek goddess of Chaos, Discord, Confusion, and Things You Know Not Of; her name was latinized to Discordia and she was worshiped by that name in Rome. Not a very friendly deity in the Classical original, she was reinvented as a more benign personification of creative anarchy starting in 1959 by the adherents of {Discordianism} and has since been a semi-serious subject of veneration in several `fringe' cultures, including hackerdom. See {Discordianism}, {Church of the SubGenius}.
:erotics: /ee-ro'tiks/ n. [Helsinki University of Technology,
Finland] n. English-language university slang for electronics.
Often used by hackers in Helsinki, maybe because good electronics
excites them and makes them warm.
:error 33: [XEROX PARC] n. 1. Predicating one research effort upon
the success of another. 2. Allowing your own research effort to be
placed on the critical path of some other project (be it a research
effort or not).
:essentials: n. Things necessary to maintain a productive and secure hacking environment. "A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, a 20-megahertz 80386 box with 8 meg of core and a 300-megabyte disk supporting full UNIX with source and X windows and EMACS and UUCP via a 'blazer to a friendly Internet site, and thou."
:evil: adj. As used by hackers, implies that some system, program, person, or institution is sufficiently maldesigned as to be not worth the bother of dealing with. Unlike the adjectives in the {cretinous}/{losing}/{brain-damaged} series, `evil' does not imply incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of goals or design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's. This is more an esthetic and engineering judgment than a moral one in the mainstream sense. "We thought about adding a {Blue Glue} interface but decided it was too evil to deal with." "{TECO} is neat, but it can be pretty evil if you're prone to typos." Often pronounced with the first syllable lengthened, as /eeee'vil/.
:exa-: /ek's*/ [SI] pref. See {{quantifiers}}.
:examining the entrails: n. The process of {grovel}ling through a core dump or hex image in the attempt to discover the bug that brought a program or system down. The reference is to divination from the entrails of a sacrified animal. Compare {runes}, {incantation}, {black art}, {desk check}.
:EXCH: /eks'ch*/ or /eksch/ vt. To exchange two things, each for the other; to swap places. If you point to two people sitting down and say "Exch!", you are asking them to trade places. EXCH, meaning EXCHange, was originally the name of a PDP-10 instruction that exchanged the contents of a register and a memory location. Many newer hackers tend to be thinking instead of the {PostScript} exchange operator (which is usually written in lowercase).
:excl: /eks'kl/ n. Abbreviation for `exclamation point'. See {bang}, {shriek}, {{ASCII}}.