:hose: 1. /vt./ To make non-functional or greatly degraded in
performance. "That big ray-tracing program really hoses the
system." See {hosed}. 2. /n./ A narrow channel through which
data flows under pressure. Generally denotes data paths that
represent performance bottlenecks. 3. /n./ Cabling, especially
thick
Ethernet cable. This is sometimes called `bit hose' or
`hosery' (play on `hosiery') or `etherhose'. See also
{washing machine}.

:hosed: /adj./ Same as {down}. Used primarily by Unix hackers. Humorous: also implies a condition thought to be relatively easy to reverse. Probably derived from the Canadian slang `hoser' popularized by the Bob and Doug Mackenzie skits on SCTV, but this usage predated SCTV by years in hackerdom (it was certainly already live at CMU in the 1970s). See {hose}. It is also widely used of people in the mainstream sense of `in an extremely unfortunate situation'.

Once upon a time, a Cray that had been experiencing periodic difficulties crashed, and it was announced to have been hosed. It was discovered that the crash was due to the disconnection of some coolant hoses. The problem was corrected, and users were then assured that everything was OK because the system had been rehosed. See also {dehose}.

:hot chat: /n./ Sexually explicit one-on-one chat. See {teledildonics}.

:hot spot: /n./ 1. [primarily used by C/Unix programmers, but spreading] It is received wisdom that in most programs, less than 10% of the code eats 90% of the execution time; if one were to graph instruction visits versus code addresses, one would typically see a few huge spikes amidst a lot of low-level noise. Such spikes are called `hot spots' and are good candidates for heavy optimization or {hand-hacking}. The term is especially used of tight loops and recursions in the code's central algorithm, as opposed to (say) initial set-up costs or large but infrequent I/O operations. See {tune}, {bum}, {hand-hacking}. 2. The active location of a cursor on a bit-map display. "Put the mouse's hot spot on the `ON' widget and click the left button." 3. A screen region that is sensitive to mouse gestures, which trigger some action. World Wide Web pages now provide the {canonical} examples; WWW browsers present hypertext links as hot spots which, when clicked on, point the browser at another document (these are specifically called {hotlink}s). 4. In a massively parallel computer with shared memory, the one location that all 10,000 processors are trying to read or write at once (perhaps because they are all doing a {busy-wait} on the same lock). 5. More generally, any place in a hardware design that turns into a performance bottleneck due to resource contention.

:hotlink: /hot'link/ /n./ A {hot spot} on a World Wide Web page; an area, which, when clicked or selected, chases a URL. Also spelled `hot link'. Use of this term focuses on the link's role as an immediate part of your display, as opposed to the timeless sense of logical connection suggested by {web pointer}. Your screen shows hotlinks but your document has web pointers, not (in normal usage) the other way around.

:house wizard: /n./ [prob. from ad-agency tradetalk, `house freak'] A hacker occupying a technical-specialist, R&D, or systems position at a commercial shop. A really effective house wizard can have influence out of all proportion to his/her ostensible rank and still not have to wear a suit. Used esp. of Unix wizards. The term `house guru' is equivalent.

:HP-SUX: /H-P suhks/ /n./ Unflattering hackerism for HP-UX, Hewlett-Packard's Unix port, which features some truly unique bogosities in the filesystem internals and elsewhere (these occasionally create portability problems). HP-UX is often referred to as `hockey-pux' inside HP, and one respondent claims that the proper pronunciation is /H-P ukkkhhhh/ as though one were about to spit. Another such alternate spelling and pronunciation is "H-PUX" /H-puhks/. Hackers at HP/Apollo (the former Apollo Computers which was swallowed by HP in 1989) have been heard to complain that Mr. Packard should have pushed to have his name first, if for no other reason than the greater eloquence of the resulting acronym. Compare {AIDX}, {buglix}. See also {Nominal Semidestructor}, {Telerat}, {Open DeathTrap}, {ScumOS}, {sun-stools}.

:huff: /v./ To compress data using a Huffman code. Various programs that use such methods have been called `HUFF' or some variant thereof. Oppose {puff}. Compare {crunch}, {compress}.

:humma: // /excl./ A filler word used on various `chat'
and `talk' programs when you had nothing to say but felt that it
was important to say something. The word apparently originated (at
least with this definition) on the MECC Timeshare System (MTS, a
now-defunct educational time-sharing system running in Minnesota
during the 1970s and the early 1980s) but was later sighted on
early Unix systems. Compare the U.K's {wibble}.