The New Hacker's Dictionary

pistol // n.

[IBM] A tool that makes it all too easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot. "Unix rm * makes such a nice pistol!"

pixel sort // n.

[Commodore users] Any compression routine which irretrievably loses valuable data in the process of crunching it. Disparagingly used for 'lossy' methods such as JPEG. The theory, of course, is that these methods are only used on photographic images in which minor loss-of-data is not visible to the human eye. The term 'pixel sort' implies distrust of this theory. Compare bogo-sort.

pizza box // n.

[Sun] The largish thin box housing the electronics in (especially Sun) desktop workstations, so named because of its size and shape and the dimpled pattern that looks like air holes.

Two meg single-platter removable disk packs used to be called pizzas, and the huge drive they were stuck into was referred to as a pizza oven. It's an index of progress that in the old days just the disk was pizza-sized, while now the entire computer is.

plaid screen // n.

[XEROX PARC] A 'special effect' that occurs when certain kinds of memory smashes overwrite the control blocks or image memory of a bit-mapped display. The term "salt and pepper" may refer to a different pattern of similar origin. Though the term as coined at PARC refers to the result of an error, some of the X demos induce plaid-screen effects deliberately as a display hack.

plain-ASCII /playn-as'kee/

syn. flat-ASCII.

plan file // n.

[Unix] On systems that support finger, the '.plan' file in a user's home directory is displayed when the user is fingered. This feature was originally intended to be used to keep potential fingerers apprised of one's location and near-future plans, but has been turned almost universally to humorous and self-expressive purposes (like a sig block). See also Hacking X for Y.