Related:

• protocol n. As used by hackers, this never refers to niceties about the proper form for addressing letters to the Papal Nuncio or the order in which one should use the forks in a Russian-style place setting
  hackers don't care about such things. It is used instead to describe any set of rules that allow different machines or pieces of software to coordinate with each other without ambiguity....
• vaxocentrism /vak`soh-sen'trizm/ n. [analogy with `ethnocentrism'] A notional disease said to afflict C programmers who persist in coding according to certain assumptions that are valid (esp.
  under Unix) on VAXen but false elsewhere. Among these are...
• fence: n. 1. A sequence of one or more distinguished ({out-of-band}) characters (or other data items)
  used to delimit a piece of data intended to be treated as a unit (the computer-science literature calls this a `sentinel')....
• ASCII /as'kee/ n. [originally an acronym (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) but now merely conventional] The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers.
  The standard version uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier codes (including early drafts of of ASCII prior to June 1961) used fewer....
• indent style n. [C, C++, and Java programmers] The rules one uses to indent code in a readable fashion.
  There are four major C indent styles, described below...
• orthogonal: [from mathematics] adj. Mutually independe
  well separated; sometimes, irrelevant to. Used in a generalization of its mathematical meaning to describe sets of primitives or capabilities that, like a vector basis in geometry, span the entire `capability space' of the system and are in some sense non-overlapping or mutually independent....
• Blue Glue: [IBM] n. IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture), an incredibly {losing} and {bletcherous} communications protocol widely favored at commercial shops that don't know any better.
  The official IBM definition is "that which binds blue boxes together....
• Christmas tree packet: n. A packet with every single option set for whatever protocol is in use.
  See {kamikaze packet}, {Chernobyl packet}. (The term doubtless derives from a fanciful image of each little option bit being represented by a different-colored light bulb, all turned on....
• handshaking: n. Hardware or software activity designed to start or keep two machines or programs in synchronization as they {do protocol}.
  Often applied to human activity; thus, a hacker might watch two people in conversation nodding their heads to indicate that they have heard each others' points and say "Oh, they're handshaking!...