| Definition | See 2003 citation. |
| Etymology | Patterned after animal behavior term alpha, used to denote the dominant animal in a group; cf. alpha male. |
| Last Updated | 5 November 2005 |
| 1993, USENET: rec.games.frp.cyber, 25 Aug. |
The characters who follow the Cyberspunk dogma come across as screaming Alpha geeks. |
| 1995, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER, 20 Oct., p. E.01. | My alpha geek is a total luser who Spams our E-mail accounts with memos every day. |
| 1999, NEW YORK TIMES, 13 Jul., p. AR1 | I called the makers of the software and they helped me delve into the CP/M operating system (before DOS, before Windows), and I managed to retrieve the data. I felt like an alpha geek. |
| 1999, PR NEWSWIRE, 27 Jul. | Neil Forrester has been named by Chief Technical Officer Charles Cohen as beenz.com's Alpha Geek, to lead the company's development charge and conceive new opportunities for the interactive Internet currency. |
| 2003, JARGON FILE, 29 Dec. | alpha geek: n. [from animal ethologists' alpha male] The most technically accomplished or skillful person in some implied context. "Ask Larry, he's the alpha geek here." |
| Definition | A firm that hosts software for use by other firms, essentially renting software over the internet or other network. Also abbreviated as ASP. |
| Last Updated | 2 April 2005 |
| 1997, PR NEWSWIRE, 21 Jan. |
A leading networked application services provider, WorldCom, today announced it has changed its name to Interliant to better reflect its market position and mission. |
| 1999, NEW YORK TIMES, 20 Dec., p. C37 |
Further, dozens of "application service providers," or A.S.P.'s have sprung up to offer software over the Internet as a subscription service, no downloading or installation required. |
| 2002, KAPLAN, F'd Companies, p. 31 | Why would an application service provider like CalendarCentral.com, a site that provides private, shared online calendars for group scheduling, go out of business? |
| Definition | A binary data transmission/storage format where the most significant bit/byte is placed first. Also, little-endian where the least significant bit/byte comes first, and middle-endian where the least/most significant bit/byte appears in the middle, as in the date format mm/dd/yyyy. |
| Etymology | After characters in Swift's Gulliver's Travels who believed that eggs should be broken at the larger end before being eaten; political opponents of the little-endians. |
| Last Updated | 20 March 2005 |
| *1726 SWIFT, Gulliver's Travels, chap. 5 |
And so unmeasurable is the Ambition of Princes, that he seemed to think of nothing less than reducing the whole Empire of Blefuscu into a Province, and governing it by a Vice-Roy; of destroying the Big-Endian Exiles, and compelling that People to break the smaller end of their Eggs, by which he would remain the sole Monarch of the whole World. |
| 1980, COHEN, On Holy Wars, 1 Apr. | It is the question of which bit should travel first, the bit from the little end of the word, or the bit from the big end of the word? The followers of the former approach are called the Little-Endians, and the followers of the latter are called the Big-Endians. |
| 1996, DEBIAN, 6 Mar. | Note that the year should be displayed in 4 digits, and that middle-endian dates are silly and confusing especially when displayed numerically. |
| 1998, BUSINESS WIRE, 9 Nov. | Other new features of the SuperSync II family not available with legacy synchronous FIFOs include: [...] Big-Endian/Little-Endian user selectable byte representation |
| 2001, PR NEWSWIRE, 17 May | BlueCat Linux complements the Intel IXA SDK 2.0 environment by providing a big-endian version of Linux that is optimized for embedded networking applications with features such as version stabilization, embedding tools and sample code and routines. |
| Definition | An error or fault in hardware or software. |
| Etymology | Apparently coined by someone in Thomas Edison's lab; from the insect, probably because it is annoying and difficult to remove. The belief that the term stems from a 1947 incident (see citation) where computer pioneer Grace Hopper found a moth in the Harvard Mark II computer is incorrect. The term predates this incident by almost 70 years. |
| Last Updated | 13 March 2005 |
| 1878 T.EDISON, Josephson's Edison, p. 198 (in HDAS) | "Bugs"–as such little faults and difficulties are called–show themselves and months of anxious watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success...is reached. |
| 1889 PALL MALL GAZETTE, 11 Mar., p. 1/1 (in OED) | Mr. Edison, I was informed, had been up the two previous nights discovering ‘a bug’ in his |
| 1909 WARE, Pass. English, p. 53 (in HDAS) | The phraseology of Edison, to judge from his day-book records, is synthetic, strongly descriptive, and quaint...A "bug" is a difficulty which appears insurmountable to the staff. To the master it is "an ugly insect that lives on the lazy and can and must be killed." |
| 1917, NEW YORK TIMES, 14 Nov., p. 9 | Some "bugs," as defects or eccentricities are known, have developed, but up until this time all such are minor matters requiring no delay in the quantity production of engines. |
| 1937, NEW YORK TIMES, 22 Jul., p. 27 | "No building code or any code of that kind can be drawn up without bugs, defects or jokers," [La Guardia] commented. "The only thing to do with this code is to try it and be ready to amend it as soon as the bugs, defects and jokers appear. It is exactly like the airplane motor which looked perfect on the drafting board and which will not fly." |
| 1945, Mark II Log Book, Naval Museum, Naval Surface Warfare Center, 9 Sep. (in Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 3, No. 3, July 1981, pp. 285-286) | Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found. |
| The seven-and-a-half years..was not an excessive time to..get the ‘bugs’ out of a new system of that kind. | |
| 1961, NEW YORK TIMES, 19 Feb., p. 213 | In the past few months there has been a disturbing number (or, depending on one's point of view, an encouraging number) of "bugs" reported among the country's ever-increasing machine population. |
| 1970, NEW YORK TIMES, 22 Nov., p. 71 | But City Clerk George Edwards assured the critics that the "bugs" were worked out of the system and that, come November, it would finally begin to pay off |
| 1981 USENET: net.news, 25 Aug. | Sorry folks - my fault. There was a bug in our rmail program, causing it to core dump in certain cases involving arpanet mail. I claim to have fixed it - let me know of future strangeness. |
| 1999, LOS ANGELES TIMES, 18 Sep., p. 1 |
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan warned Friday that "fear-induced" reactions by consumers and businesses to the 2000 computer glitch present a bigger challenge to the economy than the millennium bug itself. |
| 2005 USENET: comp.sys.mac.system, 9 Mar. |
Is there some timeout value for rsh which can be changed, or is this a bug? Has anyone else had this problem and found a workaround? |
| Definition | The rate of operating expenditures, especially in a startup that is generating little or no revenue. |
| Etymology | A metaphor for "burning" money. |
| Last Updated | 10 April 2005 |
| *1977, NEW YORK TIMES, 28 Feb., p. 15 (Display Ad) | For Decade we use only high porosity cigarette paper. Ordinary paper inhibits the burn rate, which can diminish the taste and create the need to pull harder when you drag. |
| 1981, BOSTON GLOBE, 7 Aug., p.1 | Our investors were concerned with our high monthly burn rate (operating expenses) while the marketing of our product was going to take longer than expected. |
| 1995, NEW YORK TIMES, 9 Sep., p. 36 | They have the money they need, and just have to keep the burn rate under control and see how the market works toward adopting Telescript as a standard. |
| 2005, CANADA NEWSWIRE, 8 Apr. | Our third quarter results demonstrate, as promised, a significant reduction in our burn rate, year over year, as our Virulizin(R) fully enrolled global clinical trial continues to wind down. |
| Definition | To successfully sell a new techology or product to the mass market. |
| Etymology | A reference to the gap between early adopters of a technology and the mass market; see the 1991 citation. |
| Last Updated | 8 March 2005 |
| 1991 MOORE, G.A., Crossing the Chasm, p. 6 | Crossing The Chasm (title)
To be specific, the point of greatest peril in the development of a high-tech market lies in making the transition from an early market dominated by a few visionary customers to a mainstream market dominated by a large block of customers who are primarily pragmatists in orientation. The gap between these two markets, heretofore ignored, is in fact so significant as to warrant being called a chasm, and crossing the chasm must be the primary focus of any long-term high-tech marketing plan. |
| 1992 NEW YORK TIMES, 15 Nov., p. F1 | The PC industry is dead and the only thing you can do is aggressively cross the chasm into the next world. |
| 1993 NEW YORK TIMES, 27 Jan., p. D5 | Still, Apple's chairman who moved from the East to Silicon Valley in 1983 to become president of Apple, might be one of the few people who could cross the chasm between the Valley's technology-driven culture and IBM's marketing-driven way of life. |
| 2000 COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS (in USENET: alt.linux), 18 Apr. | We're at a state in the market where Linux is crossing the chasm into the commercial world. |
|
Definition
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See 1995 citation.
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Etymology
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The concept was first stated by Gordon Moore (later a co-founder of Intel) in 1965 (see citation). The label Moore's law was probably coined by Cal Tech professor Carver Mead in the 1970s, but if so the intial citation was not recorded or has been lost.
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Last Updated
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24 April 2005
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| *1965 MOORE, G.E., Electronics, 19 Apr., p. 115/2 (in OED) |
The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year . . . Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue if not to increase. |
| 1977 SCIENCE, 18 Mar., p. 1111/1 (in OED) | If the industry remains on the curve of complexity plotted as a function of time given by 'Moore's law' . . . it will achieve a complexity of 10 million interconnected components by 1985. |
| 1979, MOORE, G.E., IEEE Spectrum, Apr., p. 35 | Note that few of the products depicted in Fig. 3 are close to the "Moore's Law" limit in the figure; many miss it by large factors. |
| 1982, LIBRARY JOURNAL, 1 Jan., p. 11 | Every two years, in accordance with Moore's law, a chip doubles its storage capacity. |
| 1995, AUSTIN AMERICAN STATESMAN, 25 Dec., p. F1 | From the start, the chip industry has possessed a wonderful trait that Gordon Moore, a physicist who co-founded and is now chairman of Intel Corp., identified in a 1965 magazine article. He noticed that manufacturers had been able to double the number of circuits on a chip every year, causing an exponential leap in power each time. That leap in power meant the cost per circuit was cut in half each time. The observation became known as "Moore's Law" and has been a goal for chip engineers to sustain. Around 1976 or 1977, the doubling slowed to every 18 months and some experts say it has recently slowed again. |
| 2000, BUSINESS WIRE, 14 Aug. | NVIDIA's core strategy is to deliver a breakthrough product every six months, doubling performance with each generation at a rate of essentially Moore's Law cubed. |
|
Definition
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Informal and often jocular nickname for an urban neighborhood boasting web design and media businesses, most often referring to the area south of Market Street in San Francisco, but used for neighborhoods other cities as well.
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Etymology
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After Silicon Valley.
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Last Updated
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3 April 2005
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| 1993, NEW YORK TIMES, 19 Sep., p. 108 | Aiding developers is the growing number of artists who know how to use Director, particularly in that part of San Francisco south of Market Street that has come to be known as Mulitmedia Gulch. |
| 1995, NEW YORK TIMES, 13 Feb., p. B2 | From the Flatiron district to TriBeCa to SoHo, dozens of new media entrepreneurs are hanging out shingles. In fact, so many are now situated in these neighborhoods that some in the business have taken to calling the area "Multimedia Gulch" and Business Week magazine dubbed it "Silicon Alley." |
| 2002, LOS ANGELES TIMES, 19 Oct., p. B3 | The 101 technology corridor is among several pockets of high- technology clusters that have sprung up in the Southland, including Multimedia Gulch in Glendale, Burbank, Universal City and North Hollywood; Internet Valley in Pasadena, Altadena, Monrovia and Alhambra; and Biotech Beach in San Diego. |
| 2004, LOS ANGELES TIMES, 27 Jul., p. M1 | In the 1990s, the brief but widely acclaimed rise of urban technology districts -- New York's "Silicon Alley" and San Francisco's "Multimedia Gulch" are two examples -- linked hipness and urban edginess to high-wage Information Age growth. |
| Definition | Economic conditions brought about by the introduction of information technology. Originally used negatively to indicate economic dislocation brought about by automation, later used favorably to indicate new markets and new economic rules brought about by the internet, and then negatively again after the internet bubble burst. |
| Last Updated | 2 April 2005 |
| 1983, BOSTON GLOBE, 20 Feb., p.1 | Bergsten talks about a long-range blending of the concerns of the old and new industries, with some form of manpower training to ease the transition from an old to a new economy. |
| 1983, COLUMBUS (GA) TIMES, 12 Apr., p. 11 | We may very well find ourselves running the world's most futuristic economy while many millions are without a place in it, condemned to poverty and hardship all the more glaring for co-existing with a new era of riches. If the ethical moral dimension is factored into our nation's planning, we would be hard at work devising ways to make sure that all Americans get their fair share of the new economy driven by high technology. |
| 1995, OTTAWA CITIZEN, 17 Nov., p. A7 | In the absence of this support, workers must learn to accept uncertainty. Nobody believes this will be easy. Even the cheerleaders of the new economy such as Tom Peters admit it will be "gut-wrenching'' for many people. |
| 1999, BUSINESS WIRE, 31 Dec. | I look forward to being able to focus more of my energies on EMC's strategic direction and on expanding our leadership role as the central technology infrastructure provider for the new economy. |
| 2002, KAPLAN, F'd Companies, p. 12 | Fast Company was pretty much the opposite of a dot-com dead pool--it worshipped that whole "new economy" thing--my site was their blasphemy. |
| Definition | Informal and often jocular nickname for an urban neighborhood boasting high-tech businesses, in one of a number of cities. |
| Etymology | After Silicon Valley. |
| Last Updated | 3 April 2005 |
| 1986, LOS ANGELES TIMES, 26 Mar., p. 6 | Northern California has its Silicon Valley. So why shouldn't Southern California have a Silicon Alley? The promotion of such a place was suggested Tuesday by developers from the San Fernando and Conejo valleys who have banded together to encourage high-tech businesses to settle along a 26-mile section of the Ventura Freeway. |
| 1989, BOSTON GLOBE, 10 Dec., p. A77 | Had MIT been ready to develop its new industrial and office park in the early 1970s, when it bought the land, it is conceivable that Silicon Valley would not have grown up in California. Instead, as one wag put it, Cambridge could boast Silicon Alley. |
| 1991, AUSTIN AMERICAN STATESMAN, 25 Sep., p. A1 | It looks like Austin is closer and closer to becoming a Silicon Alley - as opposed to valley - and some of those type of industries could go out there. |
| 1994, ASIAN WALL STREET JOURNAL, 16 Feb., p. 26 | Economic reforms in China are nourishing China's fledgling high-technology industry and spawning a wave of entrepreneurial talent. University graduates and professors are hatching companies of their own, often in the back streets of Zhongguancun, an area near Beijing University -- Silicon Alleys, in effect. |
| 2002, KAPLAN, F'd Companies, p. 13 | "Per head, it's probably the most profitable company in the history of Silicon Alley," wrote Joseph Gallivan, some crazy Brit, for the New York Post. |
| Definition | The Santa Clara Valley of California, located southeast of San Francisco and centered on the city of San José, and by extension the high-tech industries in the region. |
| Etymology | From the manufacture of silicon-based semiconductors in the region. |
| Last Updated | 3 April 2005 |
| 1974, Fortune, Jun., 135/2 (in OED) | They have turned part of Santa Clara County into 'Silicon Valley', the world capital of semiconductor technology. |
| 1983, NEW YORK TIMES, 18 Sep., p. 28 | For example, many high-technology companies have located along Route 128 near Boston and its many universities, in California's so-called Silicon Valley, near Palo Alto, the site of Stanford University, and in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, which includes Duke University and other universities. |
| 1991 MOORE, G.A., Crossing the Chasm, p. 6 | The object, in other words, is to build a reasonably successful company--not a meteor--taking reasonable risks and making reasonable demands along the way. This has not been the Silicon Valley way. But judging from the current casualty rate, it probably needs to be. |
| 2005, GONZALES, State of the City, 9 Feb., p. 5 | Let me talk to you about another big dream: making San José and Silicon Valley the global center of bioscience innovation. |
| Definition | unwanted, electronic, commercial solitiations, especially via email |
| Etymology | from the brand name of a meat product; used in a 1970 Monty Python sketch of a restaurant that served nothing but Spam and was filled with Vikings who sang the praises of the meat, hence something that is undesired, but present in abundance |
| Last Updated | 7 March 2005 |
| *1937, Official Gaz. (U.S. Patent Office) 26 Oct. 750/2 (in OED) | Geo. A. Hormel & Company, Austin, Minn... Spam..For Canned Meats–Namely, Spiced Ham. Claims use since May 11, 1937. |
| *1970, CHAPMAN, et.al. (1989), p. 17 | Mrs. Bun: I don't want any spam. Mr. Bun: Why can't she have egg, bacon, spam and sausage? Mrs. Bun: That's got spam in it! Mr. Bun: Not as much as spam, egg, sausage, and spam. Mrs. Bun: Look, could I have egg, bacon, spam and sausage without the spam. Waitress: Uuuuuuggggh! |
| 1987, USENET: comp.sys.amiga, 23 Oct: | This article contains a *little* bit of Spam. :-) Dirty Vikings! |
| 1996, NEW YORK TIMES, 22 Dec., p. SM22 | Many Internet users object violently to mass mailings of this kind, calling them "spam" and pressuring service providers to cut off the offenders. |
| 2002, GUARDIAN, 29 Apr. | But there are also dangers, and one of the biggest is the prospect of mobile phones being subjected to waves of "spam" or unsolicited messages of the kind that drives many users of email to despair. |
| Definition | to send electronic spam, especially via email |
| Etymology | from the n. |
| Last Updated | 7 March 2005 |
| 1994, USENET: news.admin.policy, 12 Apr. | Canter and Seigel spam the world |
| 2002, USA TODAY, 7 Jun. | Nothing less than a federal law that prohibits unsolicited commercial e-mail and gives people who are spammed the right to sue the spammer. |
| Definition | the practice of sending electronic spam |
| Etymology | from the v. |
| Last Updated | 7 March 2005 |
| 1994, USENET: news.admin.policy, 12 Apr. | With all the talk of commercial ads on the net, does anyone remember the 'cs...@netcom.com' spamming of the net a month or two ago? Postings from the immigration lawyers telling EVERYONE to call them about the Green Card Lottery? |
| 2005, XINHUA, 24 Feb | Speaking at a luncheon organized by six information and communication technology organizations, Tsang said spamming is a problem affecting almost everyone in Hong Kong. |
| Definition | one who sends electronic spam |
| Etymology | from the v. |
| Last Updated | 7 March 2005 |
| 1994, USENET: news.admin.policy, 13 Apr. | If nothing else it ought to get a spammer's attention. |
| 2005, LOS ANGELES TIMES, 19 Feb., p. A1 | Now spammers have gone beyond e-mail and are attacking instant-message services popular with teenagers . |
| Definition | to engage in unorthodox or creative thought processes, to disregard unwarranted assumptions and constraints |
| Etymology | A reference to a puzzle popular with management consultants where one has to connect nine dots, arranged in a square grid, with four straight lines. The only solution to this puzzle is one where some of the lines extend beyond the border of the grid (or box). |
| Last Updated | 7 March 2005 |
| 1975, AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOL., 14 July, p. 9 (in OED) | We must step back and see if the solutions to our problems lie outside the box. |
| 1984, FORTUNE (in OED), 6 Feb., p. 114/3 | He tells his managers to be ‘cross-functional’ and to ‘think outside the box' of their own specialty. |
| 1995, USENET: seattle.jobs.offered, 19 May | We need to hire even more problem solvers who thrive in a fast-paced environment and think outside the box. |
| 2005, USENET: alt.html, 13 Jan. | If you stop to think outside the box you can see that this would be a pretty simple thing to do. |
| Definition | A self-replicating computer program, usually with malicious functionality, that propagates itself throughout a computer network |
| Etymology | From analogy with a biological virus; first conceived in science fiction writing before it became a technical reality in the mid-1980s |
| Last Updated | 8 May 2005 |
| 1972, GERROLD, D., When HARLIE Was One | p. 175: You have a computer with an auto-dial phone link. You put the VIRUS program into it and it starts dialing phone numbers at random until it connects to another computer with an auto-dial. The VIRUS program then injects itself into the new computer. Or rather it reprograms the new computer with a VIRUS program of its own and then erases itself from the first computer. The second machine then begins to dial phone numbers at random until it connects with a third machine.
p. 177: You can tap into any computer you want, raid it for any information you want, and do it all without any possibility of being detected. Or, you could set the VIRUS program to alter information in another computer, falsify it according to your direction, or just scramble it at random, if you wanted to sabotage some other company. |
| 1982, CLAREMONT, C. Uncanny X-Men, # 158, June | NO PROBLEM. WE SIMPLY DESIGN AN OPEN-ENDED VIRUS PROGRAM TO ERASE ANY AND ALL REFERENCES TO THE X-MEN AND PLUG IT INTO A CENTRAL FEDERAL DATA BANK. FROM THERE, IT'LL INFECT THE ENTIRE SYSTEM IN NO TIME. |
| 1984, GUNN, J.B., Use of Virus Functions | We propose the name virus function for a global function like VFN, which, by a simple reference from inside any host function, is able to subvert the code of the latter completely to its own ends. |
| 1995, USENET: rec.sport.orienteering, 2 May | I too received the message regarding a killer virus under the name "Good Times" travelling the internet. As far as I can acertain, this message is a hoax. |
| 2005, COMMUNICATIONS, Vol. 48, No. 3, March, p. 11 | Email represents a great advance in human communication, but spam (along with viruses, phishing, and other pathogens) comes close to making it unusable. |
| Definition | An internet service offering a limited number of web sites or other services to browse and use |
| Etymology | From analogy with literal walled garden, keeping unwanted visitors out |
| Last Updated | 6 November 2005 |
| 1998, FINANCIAL TIMES, 22 Sep. | The move is aimed at reducing confusion about its service after it said last year it would offer a "walled garden" version of the internet. This would have allowed viewers to gain access to a limited selection of sites. |
| 1998, GUARDIAN, 13 Oct. | If your school worries about `unsuitable websites', consider signing up to a `Walled Garden' service, or investigate Nanny software |
| 1999, OBSERVER, 8 Aug. | This service, introduced next month, gives you a `walled garden' effect which allows your child to learn how to use the net and gain access to a host of activities and entertainment, chat, and e-mail without any chance of them stumbling onto unsuitable material. |
| 2002, BUSINESS WIRE, 23 Sep. | Access Control -- Allows the hotel to create a "walled garden" within the Internet where unauthenticated users can be granted access to selected sites while also providing the ability to completely block access to certain locations for all guests. |
| 2005, FRIEDMAN, T. L.,World Is Flat | I am not going to sign up to your walled garden anymore. |
Introduction to the Dictionary
© 2005 by The Business & High-Tech Dictionary Project. All rights reserved.
