The New Hacker's Dictionary

1. A stage of development of a process or function that, owing to incomplete implementation or to the complexity of the system, requires human interaction to simulate or replace some or all of the actions, inputs, or outputs of the process or function.

2. Of or pertaining to a process or function whose apparent operations are wholly or partially falsified.

3. Requiring prestidigitization.

The ultimate pnambic product was "Dan Bricklin's Demo", a program which supported flashy user-interface design prototyping. There is a related maxim among hackers: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo." See magic, sense 1, for illumination of this point.

pod // n.

[allegedly from abbreviation POD for 'Prince Of Darkness'] A Diablo 630 (or, latterly, any letter-quality impact printer). From the DEC-10 PODTYPE program used to feed formatted text to it. Not to be confused with P.O.D..

point-and-drool interface // n.

Parody of the techspeak term 'point-and-shoot interface', describing a windows, icons, and mouse-based interface such as is found on the Macintosh. The implication, of course, is that such an interface is only suitable for idiots. See for the rest of us, WIMP environment, Macintrash, drool-proof paper. Also 'point-and-grunt interface'.

pointy hat // n.

See wizard hat. This synonym specifically refers to the wizards of Unseen University in Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" serious of humorous fantasies; these books are extremely popular among hackers.

pointy-haired // adj.

[after the character in the Dilbert comic strip] Describes the extreme form of the property that separates suits and marketroids from hackers. Compare brain-dead; demented; see PHB. Always applied to people, never to ideas. The plural form is often used as a noun. "The pointy-haireds ordered me to use Windows NT, but I set up a Linux server with Samba instead."

poke // n., vt.

See peek.