The New Hacker's Dictionary

garply /gar'plee/ n.

[Stanford] Another metasyntactic variable (see foo); once popular among SAIL hackers.

gas //

[as in 'gas chamber']

1. interj. A term of disgust and hatred, implying that gas should be dispensed in generous quantities, thereby exterminating the source of irritation. "Some loser just reloaded the system for no reason! Gas!"

2. interj. A suggestion that someone or something ought to be flushed out of mercy. "The system's getting wedged every few minutes. Gas!"

3. vt. To flush (sense 1). "You should gas that old crufty software."

4. [IBM] n. Dead space in nonsequentially organized files that was occupied by data that has since been deleted; the compression operation that removes it is called 'degassing' (by analogy, perhaps, with the use of the same term in vacuum technology).

5. [IBM] n. Empty space on a disk that has been clandestinely allocated against future need.

gaseous // adj.

Deserving of being gassed. Disseminated by Geoff Goodfellow while at SRI; became particularly popular after the Moscone-Milk killings in San Francisco, when it was learned that the defendant Dan White (a politician who had supported Proposition 7) would get the gas chamber under Proposition 7 if convicted of first-degree murder (he was eventually convicted of manslaughter).

Gates's Law //

"The speed of software halves every 18 months." This oft-cited law is an ironic comment on the tendency of software bloat to outpace the every-18-month doubling in hardware capacity per dollar predicted by Moore's Law. The reference is to Bill Gates; Microsoft is widely considered among the worst if not the worst of the perpetrators of bloat.

gawble /gaw'bl/ n.

See chawmp.