The New Hacker's Dictionary

sunspots // n.

1. Notional cause of an odd error. "Why did the program suddenly turn the screen blue?" "Sunspots, I guess."

2. Also the cause of bit rot -- from the myth that sunspots will increase cosmic rays, which can flip single bits in memory. See also phase of the moon.

super source quench // n.

A special packet designed to shut up an Internet host. The Internet Protocol (IP) has a control message called Source Quench that asks a host to transmit more slowly on a particular connection to avoid congestion. It also has a Redirect control message intended to instruct a host to send certain packets to a different local router. A "super source quench" is actually a redirect control packet, forged to look like it came from a local router, that instructs a host to send all packets to its own local loopback address. This will effectively tie many Internet hosts up in knots. Compare Godzillagram, breath-of-life packet.

superloser // n.

[Unix] A superuser with no clue -- someone with root privileges on a Unix system and no idea what he/she is doing, the moral equivalent of a three-year-old with an unsafetied Uzi. Anyone who thinks this is an uncommon situation reckons without the territorial urges of management.

superprogrammer // n.

A prolific programmer; one who can code exceedingly well and quickly. Not all hackers are superprogrammers, but many are. (Productivity can vary from one programmer to another by three orders of magnitude. For example, one programmer might be able to write an average of 3 lines of working code in one day, while another, with the proper tools, might be able to write 3,000. This range is astonishing; it is matched in very few other areas of human endeavor.) The term 'superprogrammer' is more commonly used within such places as IBM than in the hacker community. It tends to stress naive measures of productivity and to underweight creativity, ingenuity, and getting the job done -- and to sidestep the question of whether the 3,000 lines of code do more or less useful work than three lines that do the Right Thing. Hackers tend to prefer the terms hacker and wizard.

superuser // n.

[Unix] syn. root, avatar. This usage has spread to non-Unix environments; the superuser is any account with all wheel bits on. A more specific term than wheel.