In the day of sysop nerds I was a flunkie Jolt in my brains and body feeling chunky With the plastic mouse balls spray paint the Commodore System install with the hard drive on the floor Kill the process and put it in /dev/null Email flaming with the user hitting D-control Shell's called Reno and it's written in C Got a couple of xterms, keys set to repeat Root came sayin' I'm insane to complain About an online wedding and a stain on my screen Don't believe everything that you make You get a cracker from Europe and a login that's fake So write your code in Perl in the dark Saving all your hacks for working at a tech park Yo - punch it So - dumping core I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill me? (Double dense floppy) So - dumping core I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill me? Forces of evil in a MUD/MOO nightmare Ban all the members in a phony #chat channel 'cause One's got a handle and the other's got a .plan One online spammed the other and ran With the FTP and the insane print job The daytime crap of the alt.test slob He hung himself with a call to ping Twenty milliseconds and it's spitting out another string RTFM if you can't relate Trade the Sun for a car and the Web for a date And MIME is a nifty hack for mailing to a newbie That's choking on my MPEGs So - dumping core I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill me? (Get crazy with the caps lock) So - dumping core I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill me? (Drive-by BIFF post) Yo, bring it on down I'm a hacker, I'm a winner Program's gonna work, I can feel it So - dumping core I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill me? (I can't retrieve you) So - dumping core I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill me? (NULL) So - dumping core I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill me? (Sprecken sie DOS, eh, baby) So - dumping core I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill me? (Know what I'm typin'?)
user n.
1. Someone doing `real work' with the computer, using it as a means rather than an end. Someone who pays to use a computer. See real user. 2. A programmer who will believe anything you tell him. One who asks silly questions. [GLS observes: This is slightly unfair. It is true that users ask questions (of necessity). Sometimes they are thoughtful or deep. Very often they are annoying or downright stupid, apparently because the user failed to think for two seconds or look in the documentation before bothering the maintainer.] See luser. 3. Someone who uses a program from the outside, however skillfully, without getting into the internals of the program. One who reports bugs instead of just going ahead and fixing them.
The general theory behind this term is that there are two classes of people who work with a program: there are implementors (hackers) and lusers. The users are looked down on by hackers to some extent because they don't understand the full ramifications of the system in all its glory. (The few users who do are known as `real winners'.) The term is a relative one: a skilled hacker may be a user with respect to some program he himself does not hack. A LISP hacker might be one who maintains LISP or one who uses LISP (but with the skill of a hacker). A LISP user is one who uses LISP, whether skillfully or not. Thus there is some overlap between the two terms; the subtle distinctions must be resolved by context.
--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.
Us"er (?), n.
1.
One who uses.
Shak.
2. Law
Enjoyment of property; use.
Mozley & W.
© Webster 1913.
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