:user-friendly: /adj./ Programmer-hostile. Generally used by hackers in a critical tone, to describe systems that hold the user's hand so obsessively that they make it painful for the more experienced and knowledgeable to get any work done. See {menuitis}, {drool-proof paper}, {Macintrash}, {user-obsequious}.
:user-obsequious: /adj./ Emphatic form of {user-friendly}.
Connotes a system so verbose, inflexible, and determinedly
simple-minded that it is nearly unusable. "Design a system any
fool can use and only a fool will want to use it." See {WIMP
environment}, {Macintrash}.
:USG Unix: /U-S-G yoo'niks/ /n./ Refers to AT&T Unix
commercial versions after {Version 7}, especially System III and
System V releases 1, 2, and 3. So called because during most of
the lifespan of those versions AT&T's support crew was called the
`Unix Support Group'. See {BSD}, {{Unix}}.
:UTSL: // /n./ [Unix] On-line acronym for `Use the Source, Luke' (a pun on Obi-Wan Kenobi's "Use the Force, Luke!" in "Star Wars") — analogous to {RTFS} (sense 1), but more polite. This is a common way of suggesting that someone would be better off reading the source code that supports whatever feature is causing confusion, rather than making yet another futile pass through the manuals, or broadcasting questions on Usenet that haven't attracted {wizard}s to answer them.
Once upon a time in {elder days}, everyone running Unix had source. After 1978, AT&T's policy tightened up, so this objurgation was in theory appropriately directed only at associates of some outfit with a Unix source license. In practice, bootlegs of Unix source code (made precisely for reference purposes) were so ubiquitous that one could utter it at almost anyone on the network without concern.
Nowadays, free Unix clones have become widely enough distributed that anyone can read source legally. The most widely distributed is certainly Linux, with variants of the NET/2 and 4.4BSD distributions running second. Cheap commercial Unixes with source such as BSD/OS are accelerating this trend.
:UUCPNET: /n. obs./ The store-and-forward network consisting of all the world's connected Unix machines (and others running some clone of the UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) software). Any machine reachable only via a {bang path} is on UUCPNET. This term has been rendered obsolescent by the spread of cheap Internet connections in the 1990s; the few remaining UUCP links are essentially slow channels to the Internet rather than an autonomous network. See {network address}.
= V = =====
:V7: /V'sev'en/ /n./ See {Version 7}.
:vadding: /vad'ing/ /n./ [from VAD, a permutation of ADV (i.e., {ADVENT}), used to avoid a particular {admin}'s continual search-and-destroy sweeps for the game] A leisure-time activity of certain hackers involving the covert exploration of the `secret' parts of large buildings — basements, roofs, freight elevators, maintenance crawlways, steam tunnels, and the like. A few go so far as to learn locksmithing in order to synthesize vadding keys. The verb is `to vad' (compare {phreaking}; see also {hack}, sense 9). This term dates from the late 1970s, before which such activity was simply called `hacking'; the older usage is still prevalent at MIT.