the lexicon
230 terms
The working vocabulary of the archive: the bus signals, the glitches, the tube parts, the
retrieval words. Search it, or browse by letter.
/
C
- C'tan, def: "Star-gods of pure energy that fed on stellar power and, given necrodermis bodies by the Necrontyr, became their tyrant overlords." fiction
- CAP Theorem distsys When a network partition occurs, a distributed system must choose between consistency and availability; it cannot keep both during the split.
- Cargo kernel Rust's build tool and package manager; it resolves dependencies, compiles crates, and talks to the crates.io registry.
- Carmack games John Carmack, id's lead programmer, who wrote the DOOM renderer and later championed the source releases.
- Cartridge hardware The N64's Game Pak ROM, holding 4 to 64 MB, chosen over CD for near-instant loading and stronger copy protection.
- CD-ROM hardware A read-only optical disc holding about 650 MB, used to distribute software after floppies ran out of room.
- Chip Select kernel An SPI line the controller asserts low to address one specific peripheral on a shared bus.
- Chiptune hardware Music made with the sound chips of old game hardware, including the Game Boy's four-channel APU.
- Component monitors YPbPr analog video split into luma (Y) and two color-difference channels, carried on three BNC or RCA lines.
- Component Video hardware An analog video connection splitting the picture into luma and two color-difference channels (YPbPr), capable of carrying progressive scan.
- Composite monitors A single-cable signal carrying luma, chroma, and sync mixed together, the lowest-quality common input.
- Consensus distsys The problem of getting a set of nodes to agree on a single value even though some may fail.
- Controller/Peripheral kernel The current Linux terminology for the old master/slave roles; the controller drives SCLK and CS, the peripheral responds.
- Convergence monitors Alignment of the three electron beams so red, green, and blue land on the correct phosphors across the screen.
- Core hardware An HDL design that configures an FPGA to recreate a specific machine, such as a console or arcade board.
- Cortex-A53 kernel A 64-bit Arm application core designed for power efficiency, used in clusters of up to four on the AM625.
- Cosine Similarity meta The angle-based measure of how aligned two embedding vectors are, used to rank passages by meaning.
- Cowboy fiction A console cowboy, a freelance hacker who runs the matrix on a custom cyberspace deck.
- CPHA kernel Clock Phase; sets whether data is sampled on the leading (0) or trailing (1) clock edge.
- CPOL kernel Clock Polarity; sets whether SCLK idles low (0) or high (1).
- Credits Warp games An ACE setup whose payload jumps straight to the ending sequence, beating the game in minutes.
- Cross-Encoder Reranker meta A model that reads a question and a passage together and scores true relevance, sharper than comparing them as separate vectors.
- CRT hardware Cathode ray tube; the deep glass display that fired electron beams at colored phosphors behind the glass.
- CS kernel Chip Select, also called Slave Select (SS); an active-low line that activates one peripheral on the shared bus.
- Cyberspace fiction Gibson's term for a consensual hallucination, a navigable graphic representation of networked data.
- Cycle Accuracy hardware An emulation goal where each chip is stepped in time the way the real silicon was, so timing-dependent effects behave exactly as on hardware.
L
- LAN Party hardware A gathering where people hauled their PCs to one location and wired them together for multiplayer games.
- Latency hardware The delay between an input and its visible result; FPGA recreations can keep this very low because logic runs in parallel hardware.
- libc kernel The C standard library: the runtime implementation of printf, malloc, strcpy, and the other functions the standard defines.
- Lifetime kernel A region of code over which a reference is valid, tracked by the compiler so dangling references fail to compile.
- Linearizability distsys A strong consistency model where each operation appears to take effect instantaneously at one point between its call and return, respecting real-time order.
- Link Cable games The physical cable joining two Game Boys so players can trade and battle Pokemon.
- LKML kernel The Linux Kernel Mailing List, the main forum where patches are posted, reviewed, and argued over in public.
- Loadable Module kernel Kernel code (often a driver) that can be inserted into or removed from a running kernel without rebooting, via insmod or modprobe.
- Look-Up Table hardware A small programmable memory inside an FPGA logic cell that implements any function of a few input bits.
- LR35902 hardware Sharp's system-on-chip in the Game Boy; its CPU core (the SM83) is a hybrid of the Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80.
- LSDj hardware Little Sound Dj; a Game Boy music tracker by Johan Kotlinski that anchored the modern chiptune scene.
- LTS kernel A longterm-support kernel chosen for extended maintenance, receiving backported fixes for years rather than months.
M
- Mainline kernel The canonical kernel tree maintained by Linus Torvalds, into which all new features ultimately land.
- Maintainer kernel A developer responsible for reviewing and merging changes to a part of the kernel and keeping it working over time.
- Manual Memory Management kernel The model where the programmer explicitly allocates memory with malloc and releases it with free, with no garbage collector.
- MBC hardware Memory Bank Controller; a chip inside cartridges that swaps ROM and RAM banks in and out of the CPU's small address space.
- Megacorporation fiction A corporate entity wielding power beyond any nation-state, a stock fixture of cyberpunk worlds.
- Memory Corruption games Writing values into memory the program assumes hold something else, so later reads or jumps misbehave.
- Merge Window kernel The roughly two-week period after a release when Linus pulls new features from subsystem maintainers into mainline.
- Mew Glitch games A method to obtain Mew in retail Red and Blue by exploiting the Trainer-Fly glitch without an official event.
- Microcode hardware Small programs run on the Reality Signal Processor that define the geometry and audio pipeline, letting studios reshape what the hardware does rather than calling a fixed library.
- Miguel Ojeda kernel The kernel developer who leads the Rust for Linux project and maintains its core infrastructure.
- miniDVD hardware The proprietary 8 cm optical disc the GameCube used, holding about 1.46 GB, manufactured by Matsushita to cut cost and resist copying.
- Mirrorshades fiction Bruce Sterling's 1986 anthology that fixed cyberpunk's canon; also the genre's signature mirrored sunglasses.
- MISO kernel Master In Slave Out; the data line carrying bits from the peripheral back to the controller.
- MissingNo. games A glitch Pokemon that appears from undefined data and, on capture or encounter, adds 128 to the sixth bag item.
- MiSTer hardware An open-source project that recreates old computers and consoles as FPGA logic on the Terasic DE10-Nano board rather than as software.
- Monolithic Kernel kernel A kernel design where scheduling, memory, filesystems, networking, and drivers all run in one privileged address space.
- MOSI kernel Master Out Slave In; the data line carrying bits from the controller to the peripheral.
- Move Semantics kernel Assigning or passing a non-Copy value transfers ownership and invalidates the source, preventing double frees.
- MS-DOS hardware Microsoft's command-line disk operating system that ran most PCs before and beneath Windows 95.
N
- Necrons fiction An ancient race of androids in living-metal bodies, once the flesh-and-blood Necrontyr, now slumbering across the galaxy and waking to reconquer it.
- Necrontyr fiction The short-lived, radiation-cursed organic species that built a star-empire, lost the War in Heaven, and became the Necrons through biotransference.
- Neuromancer (AI) fiction The second Tessier-Ashpool AI; a being of personality and memory that builds persistent simulated worlds.
- no_std kernel A Rust mode that drops the standard library and builds only on core (and optionally alloc), required because the kernel has no OS underneath it.
- No-Intro hardware A community database of verified, header-corrected cartridge dumps and their checksums, distributed as DAT files rather than as the games themselves.
- Nova kernel A Rust driver for GSP-based NVIDIA GPUs (Turing/RTX 20 and newer), intended successor to Nouveau, led by Danilo Krummrich at Red Hat.
- NTSC monitors The 525-line, ~60 Hz analog color standard used in North America and Japan.
R
- Raft distsys A leader-based consensus algorithm by Ongaro and Ousterhout, designed to be understandable while matching Paxos in power.
- RAM Write games Storing a chosen byte at a chosen address, the building block that lets a player author a payload in memory.
- Razorgirl fiction A street mercenary with surgically implanted weapons and combat augmentation, exemplified by Molly Millions.
- Reality Coprocessor hardware The 62.5 MHz graphics and audio chip co-designed by Nintendo and SGI, containing the Reality Signal Processor and the Reality Display Processor.
- Reanimation Protocols fiction Necron auto-repair systems that knit a damaged body back together or teleport its mind to a tomb for rebuilding.
- Reciprocal Rank Fusion meta A way to merge two ranked lists by rewarding items that rank highly in either, without needing to normalize their scores.
- Reconfigurable Logic hardware Digital circuitry whose wiring and function can be reprogrammed, as opposed to fixed gates etched at fabrication.
- Region Lock hardware Firmware and hardware checks that tie a console to NTSC-U, NTSC-J, or PAL game discs and refuse others.
- Release Candidate (-rc) kernel A weekly pre-release snapshot, rc1 through about rc7, issued during the bug-fix-only stabilization phase.
- Replication distsys Keeping copies of the same data on multiple nodes for durability, availability, or read scaling.
- Result kernel The Result<T, E> enum that carries either a success value or an error, making fallible operations explicit in the type.
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation meta Answering with a language model that is fed passages retrieved from a fixed source, so it speaks from documents rather than memory.
- RGBHV monitors RGB video with horizontal and vertical sync on separate wires, five conductors total, the VGA arrangement.
- RNG Manipulation games Steering the game's pseudorandom state to force a desired outcome on demand.
- ROM hardware A dump of the read-only memory from a cartridge or chip, the program and data image an emulator loads in place of the original media.
- RTA games Real-time attack; a run timed by a real clock from start to finish, as opposed to in-game or tool-assisted timing.
- Rumble Pak hardware A force-feedback accessory that slotted into the controller's expansion port, introduced in 1997 alongside Star Fox 64.
S
- S-Video monitors A connection that splits luma and chroma onto separate wires for a sharper image than composite.
- Safe Abstraction kernel A Rust API that wraps unsafe C kernel interfaces so callers can use them without writing unsafe code.
- Satoshi Tajiri games Game Freak founder who conceived Pokemon out of childhood insect collecting.
- Save State hardware A snapshot of the entire emulated machine's memory and registers, written to disk so play can resume from that exact instant later.
- Scanline monitors One horizontal pass of the electron beam; visible dark gaps between lines define the CRT look.
- SCLK kernel Serial Clock; the synchronizing clock generated by the controller for every bit on the bus.
- Sector games A flat-floored, flat-ceilinged polygonal region of a DOOM map; floor and ceiling heights, light level, and textures are properties of the sector.
- SegaNet hardware Sega's North American dial-up online gaming service for the Dreamcast, launched September 7, 2000.
- Segfault kernel A segmentation fault: the OS killing a process for touching memory it is not allowed to access, often from a bad pointer.
- Serial Console kernel A text terminal exposed over a UART, giving boot logs and a login shell before any network or display works.
- SH-4 hardware The Hitachi 32-bit RISC CPU at 200 MHz with a 128-bit vector floating-point unit; the Dreamcast's main processor.
- Shadow Mask monitors A perforated metal plate behind the screen with one hole per triangular phosphor triad, the older alternative to aperture grille.
- Shareware games A distribution model where the first episode was given away free and copyable, with the remaining episodes sold by mail order.
- Simstim fiction Simulated stimulation; a technology that broadcasts one person's full sensory experience into another's nervous system.
- Single-Board Computer kernel A complete computer on one board running a full operating system, distinct from a bare-metal microcontroller.
- Song of Time games The ocarina melody that sends Link back to the dawn of the first day and saves progress on the Nintendo 64 version.
- Source Port games A community-maintained build of the released DOOM engine code, ported to new platforms and extended with higher resolutions, mouselook, and new features.
- SPI kernel Serial Peripheral Interface, a synchronous full-duplex master/slave serial bus introduced by Motorola in the 1980s.
- SPI Mode 0-3 kernel The four CPOL/CPHA combinations, with CPOL as the high bit and CPHA as the low bit; mode 0 and mode 3 are most common.
- spi_device kernel The Linux kernel structure that is the controller-side proxy for one peripheral on the bus.
- Sprawl fiction Gibson's Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, the urban setting of Neuromancer and its trilogy.
- Sprite games A flat 2D bitmap drawn to face the camera; DOOM's monsters, items, and projectiles are sprites, not polygonal models.
- SRAM hardware Static RAM on a cartridge, often kept alive by a coin cell to hold save data after power off.
- Stack Smashing games Overwriting saved return addresses on the call stack so a routine returns to a location the attacker chose.
- Stale Reference Manipulation (SRM) games A use-after-free exploit where the game keeps writing to a freed actor's old memory, letting runners corrupt whatever loads there next.
- Subsystem kernel A self-contained area of the kernel (filesystems, DRM, networking) with its own maintainers and merge process.
- Subsystem Maintainer kernel A developer responsible for a portion of the kernel who reviews patches and forwards them upstream toward mainline.
- Sync-on-Green monitors RGB where composite sync rides on the green channel, requiring only three wires (RGsB); among Sony consoles only the PS2 outputs it, and only in 480p-and-up RGB mode.
- syscall kernel A system call: the controlled entry point through which user-space programs request services from the kernel.
T
- Termina games The parallel world Link enters in Majora's Mask, centered on Clock Town with four regions facing the cardinal directions.
- The Matrix fiction Gibson's name for the global cyberspace grid; the abstract representation of all networked data.
- The Preprocessor kernel A text-substitution pass that runs before compilation, handling #include, #define macros, and #ifdef conditional compilation.
- The Silent King fiction Szarekh, last supreme monarch of the Necrons, who sealed the C'tan pact, shattered the star-gods in penance, and exiled himself before returning in the modern era.
- The Sprawl fiction The Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, a continuous domed megacity along the US east coast.
- The Warp fiction A parallel dimension of psychic energy, also called the Immaterium, that is both the source of Chaos and the only medium for faster-than-light travel.
- Three-Day Cycle games A repeating 72-hour loop, about 54 minutes of real time, that resets when the moon falls or the Song of Time is played.
- Tile hardware An 8x8-pixel, 2-bits-per-pixel bitmap; the basic unit the Game Boy draws backgrounds and sprites from.
- Tomb World fiction A planet honeycombed with stasis crypts where a Necron dynasty slept through the Great Sleep, now waking dynasty by dynasty.
- Tool-Assisted Speedrun games A run built frame by frame with emulator tools, often feeding precise byte streams through the controller ports.
- Tool-Assisted Speedrun (TAS) games A run built with slowdown, save states, and frame-by-frame input, used to find theoretical limits rather than to compete with human runs.
- Trait kernel A named set of methods a type can implement, used for shared behavior, generic bounds, and polymorphism.
- Translation Unit kernel A single source file plus everything it includes, compiled as one unit into an object file.
- Trinitron monitors Sony's aperture-grille CRT line introduced in the late 1960s, known for brightness and a flat-vertical screen.
- TVL monitors TV Lines, the horizontal resolution the tube itself can resolve, distinct from the signal's scan-line count.
- Two-Phase Commit distsys An atomic-commit protocol (prepare then commit) that blocks if the coordinator fails after votes are collected.