| ACK | to acknowledge one's presence |
| AFAIK | as far as I know |
| AFJ | April Fool's joke (a long-time tradition on Usenet and the Internet) |
| AFK | away from keyboard; used to notify others that you will be temporarily unavailable online |
| alpha geek | the most technically accomplished or skillful person in a particular situation |
| ambimousterous | able to use a mouse with either hand |
| annoyware | a type of shareware that periodically interrupts normal program operation to display a request for payment |
| bloatware | software that provides minimal functionality while requiring a great deal of disk space and memory |
| cobweb site | a dead Web page; a Web site that has not been updated for a long time |
| cookie jar | an area of memory set aside for storing cookies |
| cybercad | the electronic equivalent of a lounge lizard |
| daemon | a program that is not called up explicitly but lies dormant waiting for some condition to occur |
| dancing frog | a problem that occurs on a computer but will not reappear while anyone else is watching |
| doc | program documentation |
| egosurf | to search the Net for your name or links to your Web pages |
| elder days | the heroic age of hackerdom (pre-1980); adopted from The Lord of the Rings |
| farkled | crashed, down, not operating |
| finger | a program that displays information about a particular user or all users logged on to a system |
| fried | not working due to hardware failure; burned out; especially used of hardware brought down by a power glitch |
| gib | to destroy completely, with no trace left |
| Godzillagram | a network packet that in theory is a broadcast to every machine in the universe; a network packet of maximum size |
| hamster | a mouse without a tail (but with an infrared link to a receiver on the computer) |
| hang (v.) | to wait for an event that will never occur; typically said of a system that has stopped operating |
| ice | security software |
| icebreaker | a program designed to crack a system's security |
| IM-ing | communicating via instant messaging |
| jiffy | the duration of one tick of the system clock on your computer |
| kyrka | from Swedish; the Macintosh feature key with the cloverleaf graphic |
| Lintel | the emergin Linus/Intel alliance |
| lurker | a person who posts messages only occasionally in an electronic forum, but who regularly reads the group's postings |
| mobo | written contraction of motherboard |
| moby | large, immense, complex, impressive |
| monty | a program with a ludicrously complex user interface written to perform extremely trivial tasks |
| NAK | "not at keyboard," meaning "I'm not here" or not available for an online chat |
| nerd knob | a toggle or command in a complex piece of software which is more likely to be used by an extremely experienced user to tweak a setting that the average user may not even know exists |
| nybble | four bits or a half-byte |
| overclock | to operate a CPU or other digital logic device at a rate higher than it was designed for |
| phage | a program that modifies other programs or databases in unauthorized ways; especially one that propagates a virus or Trojan horse |
| ping | a small network message sent by a computer to check for the presence and alertness of another; the UNIX command |
| plokta | from the acronym for "press lots of keys to abort;" to press random keys in an attempt to get some response from the system |
| quad | two bits; synonym for tayste or crumb |
| rehi | "hello again;" commonly used to greet people upon returning to an IRC message area |
| screen name | an electronic pseudonym used in an IRC to conceal the user's true identify |
| snail-mail | paper mail as opposed to electronic mail |
| spamhaus | pejorative term for an ISP that permits or even encourages spam mailings |
| spider food | keywords embedded into a Web page to attract search engines (spiders) |
| strudel | common name for the at-sign (@) character |
| tense | in describing programs, very clever and efficient |
| terminack | any malfunctioning computer terminal |
| tired iron | hardware that is perfectly functional but far enough behind the state of the art to have been superseded by new products |
| thumb | the slider on a Windows-system scrollbar |
| treeware | printouts, books, and other information media made from pulped dead trees |
| upthread | earlier in the discussion (in newsgroups, for example) |
| vaporware | products announced far in advance of any release (which may or may not take place) |
| visionary | an AI researcher working on the problem of getting computers to "see" things using TV cameras |
| wallpaper | a file containing a listing or a transcript, especially a file containing a transcript of all or part of a login session |
| Web toaster | a small specialized computer, shipped with no monitor or keyboard or any other external peripherals, preconfigured to be controlled through an Ethernet port and function as a WWW server; often about the size of a toaster |
| xor | exclusive or |
| YABA | yet another bloody acronym |
| zeroth | first (hardware engineers tend to start counting at zero instead of 1) |
