Hacker

Hacker may refer to:

Technology

Entertainment

Hacker culture

The hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming and circumventing limitations of systems to achieve novel and clever outcomes. The act of engaging in activities (such as programming or other media) in a spirit of playfulness and exploration is termed "hacking". However, the defining characteristic of a hacker is not the activities performed themselves (e.g. programming), but the manner in which it is done: hacking entails some form of excellence, for example exploring the limits of what is possible, thereby doing something exciting and meaningful. Activities of playful cleverness can be said to have "hack value" and are termed "hacks" (examples include pranks at MIT intended to demonstrate technical aptitude and cleverness). The hacker culture originally emerged in academia in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Mod (video gaming)

A mod or modification is the alteration of content from a video game in order to make it operate in a manner different from its original version. Mods can be created for any genre of game but are especially popular in first-person shooters, role-playing games and real-time strategy games. Mods are made by the general public or a developer and can be entirely new games in themselves, but mods are not stand-alone software and require the user to have the original release in order to run. They can include new items, modded weapons, characters, enemies, models, textures, levels, story lines, music, money, armor, life and game modes. They can be single-player or multiplayer. Mods that add new content to the underlying game are often called partial conversions, while mods that create an entirely new game are called total conversions and mods that fix bugs only are called unofficial patches.

Games running on a personal computer are often designed with change in mind, allowing modern PC games to be modified by gamers without much difficulty. These mods can add extra replay value and interest. The Internet provides an inexpensive medium to promote and distribute mods, and they have become an increasingly important factor in the commercial success of some games. Developers such as id Software, Valve Software, Re-Logic, Bethesda Softworks, Firaxis, Crytek, The Creative Assembly and Epic Games provide extensive tools and documentation to assist mod makers, leveraging the potential success brought in by a popular mod like Counter-Strike.

Swap

Swap or SWAP may refer to:

Finance

Science and technology

Other

See also

Swap (computer science)

In computer programming, the act of swapping two variables refers to mutually exchanging the values of the variables. Usually, this is done with the data in memory. For example, in a program, two variables may be defined thus (in pseudocode):

(In many programming languages where the swap function is built-in; in C++, overloads are provided allowing std::swap to swap some large structures in O(1) time.) After swap() is performed, x will contain the value 0 and y will contain 1; their values have been exchanged. Of course, this operation may be generalized to other types of values, such as strings, aggregated data types and comparison sorts, utilize swaps to change the positions of data.

Using a temporary variable

The simplest and probably most widely used method to swap two variables is to use a third temporary variable:

While this is conceptually simple and in many cases the only convenient way to swap two variables, it uses extra memory. Although this should not be a problem in most applications, the sizes of the values being swapped may be huge (which means the temporary variable may occupy a lot of memory as well), or the swap operation may need to be performed many times, as in sorting algorithms.

Swåp

Swåp are an Anglo-Swedish band that produce a musical fusion of traditional nordic music and celtic music.

Biography

Swåp was formed in 1995 by Karen Tweed (piano accordion), Ian Carr (guitar) (both UK), Ola Bäckström (fiddle, viola d'amore) and Carina Normansson (fiddle, vocals) (both Sweden). Together they have made four albums exploring a fusion of many different genres of folk music, including traditional Swedish music, English music, and the music of Brittany and Ireland. Karen Tweed left the band in 2007.

Discography