The New Hacker's Dictionary

newgroup wars /n[y]oo'groop worz/ n.

[Usenet] The salvos of dueling newgroup and rmgroup messages sometimes exchanged by persons on opposite sides of a dispute over whether a newsgroup should be created net-wide, or (even more frequently) whether an obsolete one should be removed. These usually settle out within a week or two as it becomes clear whether the group has a natural constituency (usually, it doesn't). At times, especially in the completely anarchic alt hierarchy, the names of newsgroups themselves become a form of comment or humor; e.g., the group alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork which originated as a birthday joke for a Muppets fan, or any number of specialized abuse groups named after particularly notorious flamers, e.g., alt.weemba.

newline /n[y]oo'li:n/ n.

1. [techspeak, primarily Unix] The ASCII LF character (0001010), used under Unix as a text line terminator. Though the term 'newline' appears in ASCII standards, it never caught on in the general computing world before Unix.

2. More generally, any magic character, character sequence, or operation (like Pascal's writeln procedure) required to terminate a text record or separate lines. See crlf, terpri.

NeWS /nee'wis/, /n[y]oo'is/ or /n[y]ooz/ n.

[acronym; the 'Network Window System'] The road not taken in window systems, an elegant PostScript-based environment that would almost certainly have won the standards war with X if it hadn't been proprietary to Sun Microsystems. There is a lesson here that too many software vendors haven't yet heeded. Many hackers insist on the two-syllable pronunciations above as a way of distinguishing NeWS from Usenet news (the netnews software).

newsfroup // n.

[Usenet] Silly synonym for newsgroup, originally a typo but now in regular use on Usenet's talk.bizarre, and other lunatic-fringe groups. Compare hing, grilf, pr0n and filk.

newsgroup // n.

[Usenet] One of Usenet's huge collection of topic groups or fora. Usenet groups can be 'unmoderated' (anyone can post) or 'moderated' (submissions are automatically directed to a moderator, who edits or filters and then posts the results). Some newsgroups have parallel mailing lists for Internet people with no netnews access, with postings to the group automatically propagated to the list and vice versa. Some moderated groups (especially those which are actually gatewayed Internet mailing lists) are distributed as 'digests', with groups of postings periodically collected into a single large posting with an index.