:hung: /adj./ [from `hung up'] Equivalent to {wedged}, but
more common at Unix/C sites. Not generally used of people.
Syn. with {locked up}, {wedged}; compare {hosed}. See
also {hang}. A hung state is distinguished from {crash}ed or
{down}, where the program or system is also unusable but because
it is not running rather than because it is waiting for something.
However, the recovery from both situations is often the same.
:hungry puppy: /n./ Syn. {slopsucker}.
:hungus: /huhng'g*s/ /adj./ [perhaps related to slang `humongous'] Large, unwieldy, usually unmanageable. "TCP is a hungus piece of code." "This is a hungus set of modifications."
:hyperspace: /hi:'per-spays/ /n./ A memory location that is *far* away from where the program counter should be pointing, especially a place that is inaccessible because it is not even mapped in by the virtual-memory system. "Another core dump —- looks like the program jumped off to hyperspace somehow." (Compare {jump off into never-never land}.) This usage is from the SF notion of a spaceship jumping `into hyperspace', that is, taking a shortcut through higher-dimensional space — in other words, bypassing this universe. The variant `east hyperspace' is recorded among CMU and Bliss hackers.
:hysterical reasons: /n./ (also `hysterical raisins') A variant on the stock phrase "for historical reasons", indicating specifically that something must be done in some stupid way for backwards compatibility, and moreover that the feature it must be compatible with was the result of a bad design in the first place. "All IBM PC video adapters have to support MDA text mode for hysterical reasons." Compare {bug-for-bug compatible}.
= I = =====
:I didn't change anything!: /interj./ An aggrieved cry often heard as bugs manifest during a regression test. The {canonical} reply to this assertion is "Then it works just the same as it did before, doesn't it?" See also {one-line fix}. This is also heard from applications programmers trying to blame an obvious applications problem on an unrelated systems software change, for example a divide-by-0 fault after terminals were added to a network. Usually, their statement is found to be false. Upon close questioning, they will admit some major restructuring of the program that shouldn't have broken anything, in their opinion, but which actually {hosed} the code completely.
:I see no X here.: Hackers (and the interactive computer
games they write) traditionally favor this slightly marked usage
over other possible equivalents such as "There's no X here!" or
"X is missing." or "Where's the X?". This goes back to the
original PDP-10 {ADVENT}, which would respond in this wise if
you asked it to do something involving an object not present at
your location in the game.
:IBM: /I-B-M/ Inferior But Marketable; It's Better
Manually; Insidious Black Magic; It's Been Malfunctioning;
Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a near-{infinite} number of even
less complimentary expansions, including `International Business
Machines'. See {TLA}. These abbreviations illustrate the
considerable antipathy most hackers have long felt toward the
`industry leader' (see {fear and loathing}).
What galls hackers about most IBM machines above the PC level isn't so much that they are underpowered and overpriced (though that does count against them), but that the designs are incredibly archaic, {crufty}, and {elephantine} … and you can't *fix* them — source code is locked up tight, and programming tools are expensive, hard to find, and bletcherous to use once you've found them. With the release of the Unix-based RIOS family this may have begun to change — but then, we thought that when the PC-RT came out, too.