May 15, 2003
B1FF
/bif/ [Usenet] (alt.: BIFF) n.The most famous pseudo, and the prototypical newbie. Articles from B1FF feature all uppercase letters sprinkled liberally with bangs, typos, ‘cute’ misspellings (EVRY BUDY LUVS GOOD OLD BIFF CUZ KØ}@oslash;L DOOD AN HE RITES REEL AWESUM THINGZ IN CAPITULL LETTRS LIKE THIS!!!), use (and often misuse) of fragments of talk mode abbreviations, a long sig block (sometimes even a doubled sig), and unbounded naivete. B1FF posts articles using his elder brother's VIC-20. B1FF's location is a mystery, as his articles appear to come from a variety of sites. However, BITNET seems to be the most frequent origin. The theory that B1FF is a denizen of BITNET is supported by B1FF's (unfortunately invalid) electronic mail address: B1FF@BIT.NET.
[1993: Now It Can Be Told! My spies inform me that B1FF was
originally created by Joe Talmadge <jat@cup.hp.com>, also the author
of the infamous and much-plagiarized Flamer's Bible
. The
BIFF filter he wrote was later passed to Richard Sexton, who posted
BIFFisms much more widely. Versions have since been posted for the
amusement of the net at large. See also Jeff K.
—ESR]
B5
[common] Abbreviation for Babylon 5
, a
science-fiction TV series as revered among hackers as was the original Star
Trek.
back door
n.[common] A hole in the security of a system deliberately left in place by designers or maintainers. The motivation for such holes is not always sinister; some operating systems, for example, come out of the box with privileged accounts intended for use by field service technicians or the vendor's maintenance programmers. Syn. trap door; may also be called a wormhole. See also iron box, cracker, worm, logic bomb.
Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than anyone expected or planned, and a few have become widely known. Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM admitted the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. In this scheme, the C compiler contained code that would recognize when the login command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him.
Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to use the compiler — so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would recognize when it was compiling a version of itself, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled login the code to allow Thompson entry — and, of course, the code to recognize itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources.
The Turing lecture that reported this truly moby hack was later
published as Reflections on Trusting Trust
,
Communications of the ACM 27, 8 (August 1984),
pp. 761--763 (text available at http://www.acm.org/classics/).
Ken Thompson has since confirmed that this hack was implemented and that
the Trojan Horse code did appear in the login binary of a Unix Support
group machine. Ken says the crocked compiler was never distributed. Your
editor has heard two separate reports that suggest that the crocked login
did make it out of Bell Labs, notably to BBN, and that it enabled at least
one late-night login across the network by someone using the login name
kt
.
backbone cabal
n.
A group of large-site administrators who pushed through the
Great Renaming and reined in the chaos of
Usenet during most of the 1980s. During most of its
lifetime, the Cabal (as it was sometimes capitalized) steadfastly denied
its own existence; it was almost obligatory for anyone privy to their
secrets to respond There is no Cabal
whenever the existence
or activities of the group were speculated on in public.
The result of this policy was an attractive aura of mystery. Even a decade after the cabal mailing list disbanded in late 1988 following a bitter internal catfight, many people believed (or claimed to believe) that it had not actually disbanded but only gone deeper underground with its power intact.
This belief became a model for various paranoid theories about various Cabals with dark nefarious objectives beginning with taking over the Usenet or Internet. These paranoias were later satirized in ways that took on a life of their own. See Eric Conspiracy for one example.
See NANA for the subsequent history of
the Cabal
.
backbone site
n.,obs.Formerly, a key Usenet and email site, one that processes a large amount of third-party traffic, especially if it is the home site of any of the regional coordinators for the Usenet maps. Notable backbone sites as of early 1993, when this sense of the term was beginning to pass out of general use due to wide availability of cheap Internet connections, included uunet and the mail machines at Rutgers University, UC Berkeley, DEC's Western Research Laboratories, Ohio State University, and the University of Texas. Compare leaf site.
[2001 update: This term has passed into history. The UUCP network
world that gave it meaning is gone; everyone is on the Internet now and
network traffic is distributed in very different patterns. Today one might
see references to a backbone router
instead
—ESR]
background
n.,adj.,vt.
[common] To do a task in
background is to do it whenever
foreground matters are not claiming your undivided
attention, and to background
something means to relegate it to a lower priority. For now, we'll
just print a list of nodes and links; I'm working on the graph-printing
problem in background.
Note that this implies ongoing activity but
at a reduced level or in spare time, in contrast to mainstream ‘back
burner’ (which connotes benign neglect until some future resumption
of activity). Some people prefer to use the term for processing that they
have queued up for their unconscious minds (a tack that one can often
fruitfully take upon encountering an obstacle in creative work). Compare
amp off, slopsucker.
Technically, a task running in background is detached from the terminal where it was started (and often running at a lower priority); oppose foreground. Nowadays this term is primarily associated with Unix, but it appears to have been first used in this sense on OS/360.
backreference
n.1. In a regular expression or pattern match, the text which was matched within grouping parentheses
2. The part of the pattern which refers back to the matched text.
3. By extension, anything which refers back to something which has
been seen or discussed before. When you said ‘she’ just
now, who were you backreferencing?
backronym
n.[portmanteau of back + acronym] A word interpreted as an acronym that was not originally so intended. This is a special case of what linguists call back formation. Examples are given under recursive acronym (Cygnus), Acme, and mung. Discovering backronyms is a common form of wordplay among hackers. Compare retcon.
backward combatability
/bak´w@rd k@m·bat'@·bil'@·tee/ n.
[CMU, Tektronix: from backward
compatibility] A property of hardware or software revisions in
which previous protocols, formats, layouts, etc. are irrevocably discarded
in favor of ‘new and improved’ protocols, formats, and layouts,
leaving the previous ones not merely deprecated but actively defeated.
(Too often, the old and new versions cannot definitively be distinguished,
such that lingering instances of the previous ones yield crashes or other
infelicitous effects, as opposed to a simple version
mismatch
message.) A backwards compatible change, on the other
hand, allows old versions to coexist without crashes or error messages, but
too many major changes incorporating elaborate backwards compatibility
processing can lead to extreme software bloat. See
also flag day.
BAD
/B·A·D/ adj.
[IBM: acronym, Broken As Designed
] Said of a program
that is bogus because of bad design and misfeatures
rather than because of bugginess. See working as designed.
Bad and Wrong
adj.
[Durham, UK] Said of something that is both badly designed and
wrongly executed. This common term is the prototype of, and is used by
contrast with, three less common terms — Bad and Right (a kludge,
something ugly but functional); Good and Wrong (an overblown GUI or other
attractive nuisance); and (rare praise) Good and Right. These terms
entered common use at Durham c.1994 and may have been imported from
elsewhere; they are also in use at Oxford, and the emphatic form
Evil and Bad and Wrong
(abbreviated EBW) is reported from
there. There are standard abbreviations: they start with B&R, a typo
for Bad and Wrong
. Consequently, B&W is actually
Bad and Right
, G&R = Good and Wrong
, and
G&W = Good and Right
. Compare
evil and rude,
Good Thing, Bad Thing.
Bad Thing
n.
[very common; always pronounced as if capitalized. Orig. fr. the
1930 Sellar & Yeatman parody of British history 1066 And All
That, but well-established among hackers in the U.S. as well.]
Something that can't possibly result in improvement of the subject. This
term is always capitalized, as in Replacing all of the DSL links
with bicycle couriers would be a Bad Thing
. Oppose
Good Thing. British correspondents confirm that
Bad Thing and Good Thing
(and prob. therefore Right Thing and
Wrong Thing) come from the book referenced in the
etymology, which discusses rulers who were Good Kings but Bad Things.
This has apparently created a mainstream idiom on the British side of the
pond. It is very common among American hackers, but not in mainstream
usage in the U.S. Compare Bad and Wrong.
bag on the side
n.
[prob. originally related to a colostomy bag] An extension to an
established hack that is supposed to add some functionality to the
original. Usually derogatory, implying that the original was being
overextended and should have been thrown away, and the new product is ugly,
inelegant, or bloated. Also v. phrase,
to hang a bag on the side [of]
. C++? That's just a
bag on the side of C ....
They want me to hang a
bag on the side of the accounting system.
bagbiter
/bag´bi:t·@r/ n.
1. Something, such as a program or a computer, that fails to work,
or works in a remarkably clumsy manner. This text editor won't let
me make a file with a line longer than 80 characters! What a
bagbiter!
2. A person who has caused you some trouble, inadvertently or otherwise, typically by failing to program the computer properly. Synonyms: loser, cretin, chomper.
3. bite the bag vi. To fail in some manner. The computer
keeps crashing every five minutes.
Yes, the disk controller
is really biting the bag.
The original loading of these terms was almost undoubtedly obscene,
possibly referring to a douche bag or the scrotum (we have reports of
Bite the douche bag!
being used as a taunt at MIT 1970-1976,
and we have another report that Bite the bag!
was in common
use at least as early as 1965), but in their current usage they have become
almost completely sanitized.
bagbiting
adj.
[MIT; now rare] Having the quality of a
bagbiter. This bagbiting system won't let me
compute the factorial of a negative number.
Compare
losing, cretinous,
bletcherous, barfucious' (under
barfulous) and chomping (under
chomp).
baggy pantsing
v.
[Georgia Tech] A baggy pantsing
is used to reprimand
hackers who incautiously leave their terminals unlocked. The affected user
will come back to find a post from them on internal newsgroups discussing
exactly how baggy their pants are, an accepted stand-in for
unattentive user who left their work unprotected in the
clusters
. A properly-done baggy pantsing is highly mocking and
humorous. It is considered bad form to post a baggy pantsing to off-campus
newsgroups or the more technical, serious groups. A particularly nice
baggy pantsing may be claimed
by immediately quoting the
message in full, followed by your sig block; this
has the added benefit of keeping the embarassed victim from being able to
delete the post. Interesting baggy-pantsings have been done involving
adding commands to login scripts to repost the message every time the
unlucky user logs in; Unix boxes on the residential network, when cracked,
oftentimes have their homepages replaced (after being politely backed-up to
another file) with a baggy-pants message; .plan files are also occasionally
targeted. Usage: Prof. Greenlee fell asleep in the Solaris cluster
again; we baggy-pantsed him to git.cc.class.2430.flame.
Compare
derf.
balloonian variable
n.[Commodore users; perh. a deliberate phonetic mangling of boolean variable?] Any variable that doesn't actually hold or control state, but must nevertheless be declared, checked, or set. A typical balloonian variable started out as a flag attached to some environment feature that either became obsolete or was planned but never implemented. Compatibility concerns (or politics attached to same) may require that such a flag be treated as though it were live.
bamf
/bamf/
1. [from X-Men comics; originally bampf
] interj. Notional sound made by a person or object
teleporting in or out of the hearer's vicinity. Often used in
virtual reality (esp. MUD)
electronic fora when a character wishes to make a
dramatic entrance or exit.
2. The sound of magical transformation, used in virtual reality fora like MUDs.
3. In MUD circles, bamf
is also used to refer to the
act by which a MUD server sends a special notification to the MUD client to
switch its connection to another server (I'll set up the old site to
just bamf people over to our new location.
).
4. Used by MUDders on occasion in a more general sense related to
sense 3, to refer to directing someone to another location or resource
(A user was asking about some technobabble so I bamfed them to
&jargonurl;
.)
banana problem
n.
[from the story of the little girl who said I know how to
spell ‘banana’, but I don't know when to stop
]. Not
knowing where or when to bring a production to a close (compare
fencepost error). One may say there is a banana problem of an algorithm with
poorly defined or incorrect termination conditions, or in discussing the
evolution of a design that may be succumbing to featuritis (see also
creeping elegance,
creeping featuritis).
See item 176 under HAKMEM,
which describes a banana problem in a
Dissociated Press implementation.
Also, see one-banana problem
for a superficially similar but unrelated usage.
bandwidth
n.
1. [common] Used by hackers (in a generalization of its technical
meaning) as the volume of information per unit time that a computer,
person, or transmission medium can handle. Those are amazing
graphics, but I missed some of the detail — not enough bandwidth, I
guess.
Compare low-bandwidth; see also
brainwidth. This generalized usage began to go
mainstream after the Internet population explosion of 1993-1994.
2. Attention span.
3. On Usenet, a measure of network capacity that is often wasted by people complaining about how items posted by others are a waste of bandwidth.
bang
1. n. Common spoken name for
! (ASCII 0100001), especially when used in pronouncing a
bang path in spoken hackish. In elder days this was considered a CMUish usage, with MIT and Stanford
hackers preferring excl or
shriek; but the spread of Unix has carried
‘bang’ with it (esp. via the term bang path) and it is now certainly the most common spoken name for
!. Note that it is used exclusively for non-emphatic
written !; one would not say Congratulations
bang
(except possibly for humorous purposes), but if one wanted to
specify the exact characters foo!
one would speak Eff
oh oh bang
. See shriek,
ASCII.
2. interj. An exclamation
signifying roughly I have achieved enlightenment!
, or
The dynamite has cleared out my brain!
Often used to
acknowledge that one has perpetrated a thinko
immediately after one has been called on it.
bang on
vt.
To stress-test a piece of hardware or software: I banged on
the new version of the simulator all day yesterday and it didn't crash
once. I guess it is ready for release.
The term
pound on is synonymous.
bang path
n.[now historical] An old-style UUCP electronic-mail address specifying hops to get from some assumed-reachable location to the addressee, so called because each hop is signified by a bang sign. Thus, for example, the path ...!bigsite!foovax!barbox!me directs people to route their mail to machine bigsite (presumably a well-known location accessible to everybody) and from there through the machine foovax to the account of user me on barbox.
In the bad old days of not so long ago, before autorouting mailers became commonplace, people often published compound bang addresses using the { } convention (see glob) to give paths from several big machines, in the hopes that one's correspondent might be able to get mail to one of them reliably (example: ...!{seismo, ut-sally, ihnp4!rice!beta!gamma!me}). Bang paths of 8 to 10 hops were not uncommon. Late-night dial-up UUCP links would cause week-long transmission times. Bang paths were often selected by both transmission time and reliability, as messages would often get lost. See the network and sitename.
banner
n.1. A top-centered graphic on a web page. Esp. used in banner ad.
2. On interactive software, a first screen containing a logo and/or author credits and/or a copyright notice.
3. The title page added to printouts by most print spoolers (see spool). Typically includes user or account ID information in very large character-graphics capitals. Also called a burst page, because it indicates where to burst (tear apart) fanfold paper to separate one user's printout from the next.
4. A similar printout generated (typically on multiple pages of
fan-fold paper) from user-specified text, e.g., by a program such as Unix's
banner({1,6
)}.
banner ad
n.Any of the annoying graphical advertisements that span the tops of way too many Web pages.
banner site
n.[warez d00dz] An FTP site storing pirated files where one must first click on several banners and/or subscribe to various ‘free’ services, usually generating some form of revenues for the site owner, to be able to access the site. More often than not, the username/password painfully obtained by clicking on banners and subscribing to bogus services or mailing lists turns out to be non-working or gives access to a site that always responds busy. See ratio site, leech mode.
bar
/bar/ n.
1. [very common] The second
metasyntactic variable,
after foo and before
baz. Suppose we have two functions: FOO and
BAR. FOO calls BAR....
2. Often appended to foo to produce foobar.
bare metal
n.1. [common] New computer hardware, unadorned with such snares and delusions as an operating system, an HLL, or even assembler. Commonly used in the phrase programming on the bare metal, which refers to the arduous work of bit bashing needed to create these basic tools for a new machine. Real bare-metal programming involves things like building boot proms and BIOS chips, implementing basic monitors used to test device drivers, and writing the assemblers that will be used to write the compiler back ends that will give the new machine a real development environment.
2. Programming on the bare metal
is also used to
describe a style of hand-hacking that relies on
bit-level peculiarities of a particular hardware design, esp. tricks for
speed and space optimization that rely on crocks such as overlapping
instructions (or, as in the famous case described in The Story of Mel' (in Appendix A),
interleaving of opcodes on a magnetic drum to minimize fetch delays due to
the device's rotational latency). This sort of thing has become rare as
the relative costs of programming time and machine resources have changed,
but is still found in heavily constrained environments such as industrial
embedded systems. See Real Programmer.
barf
/barf/ n.,v.[common; from mainstream slang meaning ‘vomit’]
1. interj. Term of disgust.
This is the closest hackish equivalent of the Valspeak gag me with a
spoon
. (Like, euwww!) See bletch.
2. vi. To say
Barf!
or emit some similar expression of disgust. I
showed him my latest hack and he barfed
means only that he
complained about it, not that he literally vomited.
3. vi. To fail to work because
of unacceptable input, perhaps with a suitable error message, perhaps not.
Examples: The division operation barfs if you try to divide by
0.
(That is, the division operation checks for an attempt to divide
by zero, and if one is encountered it causes the operation to fail in some
unspecified, but generally obvious, manner.) The text editor barfs
if you try to read in a new file before writing out the old
one.
See choke. In Commonwealth Hackish, barf is generally replaced by ‘puke’ or ‘vom’. barf is sometimes also used as a metasyntactic variable, like foo or bar.
barfmail
n.Multiple bounce messages accumulating to the level of serious annoyance, or worse. The sort of thing that happens when an inter-network mail gateway goes down or wonky.
barfulation
/bar`fyoo·lay´sh@n/ interj.
Variation of barf used around the Stanford
area. An exclamation, expressing disgust. On seeing some particularly bad
code one might exclaim, Barfulation! Who wrote this,
Quux?
barfulous
/bar´fyoo·l@s/ adj.(alt.: barfucious, /bar-fyoo-sh@s/) Said of something that would make anyone barf, if only for esthetic reasons.
barn
n.
[uncommon; prob. from the nuclear military] An unexpectedly large
quantity of something: a unit of measurement. Why is /var/adm
taking up so much space?
The logs have grown to several
barns.
The source of this is clear: when physicists were first
studying nuclear interactions, the probability was thought to be
proportional to the cross-sectional area of the nucleus (this probability
is still called the cross-section). Upon experimenting, they discovered
the interactions were far more probable than expected; the nuclei were
as big as a barn
. The units for cross-sections were
christened Barns, (10-24
cm2) and the book containing cross-sections has
a picture of a barn on the cover.
barney
n.In Commonwealth hackish, barney is to fred (sense #1) as bar is to foo. That is, people who commonly use fred as their first metasyntactic variable will often use barney second. The reference is, of course, to Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble in the Flintstones cartoons.
baroque
adj.
[common] Feature-encrusted; complex; gaudy; verging on excessive.
Said of hardware or (esp.) software designs, this has many of the
connotations of elephantine or
monstrosity but is less extreme and not pejorative
in itself. Metafont even has features to introduce random
variations to its letterform output. Now that is
baroque!
See also rococo.
BASIC
/bay'·sic/ n.
A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's
experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which for many years
was the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra
observed in Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal
Perspective that It is practically impossible to teach
good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC:
as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of
regeneration.
This is another case (like
Pascal) of the cascading
lossage that happens when a language deliberately
designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can
write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10-20 lines) very easily;
writing anything longer (a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits
that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This
wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on
low-end micros in the 1980s. As it is, it probably ruined tens of
thousands of potential wizards.
[1995: Some languages called BASIC
aren't quite this
nasty any more, having acquired Pascal- and C-like procedures and control
structures and shed their line numbers. —ESR]
BASIC stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction
Code
. Earlier versions of this entry claiming this was a later
backronym were incorrect.
batbelt
n.Many hackers routinely hang numerous devices such as pagers, cell-phones, personal organizers, leatherman multitools, pocket knives, flashlights, walkie-talkies, even miniature computers from their belts. When many of these devices are worn at once, the hacker's belt somewhat resembles Batman's utility belt; hence it is referred to as a batbelt.
batch
adj.1. Non-interactive. Hackers use this somewhat more loosely than the traditional technical definitions justify; in particular, switches on a normally interactive program that prepare it to receive non-interactive command input are often referred to as batch mode switches. A batch file is a series of instructions written to be handed to an interactive program running in batch mode.
2. Performance of dreary tasks all at one sitting. I finally
sat down in batch mode and wrote out checks for all those bills; I guess
they'll turn the electricity back on next week...
3. batching up: Accumulation
of a number of small tasks that can be lumped together for greater
efficiency. I'm batching up those letters to send sometime
I'm batching up bottles to take to the recycling
center.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-03-17:5-8)
bathtub curve
n.Common term for the curve (resembling an end-to-end section of one of those claw-footed antique bathtubs) that describes the expected failure rate of electronics with time: initially high, dropping to near 0 for most of the system's lifetime, then rising again as it ‘tires out’. See also burn-in period, infant mortality.
Batman factor
n.1. An integer number representing the number of items hanging from a batbelt. In most settings, a Batman factor of more than 3 is not acceptable without odd stares and whispering. This encourages the hacker in question to choose items for the batbelt carefully to avoid awkward social situations, usually amongst non-hackers.
2. A somewhat more vaguely defined index of contribution to sense 1.
Devices that are especially obtrusive, such as large, older model cell
phones, Pocket
PC devices and walkie talkies are said to
have a high batman factor. Sleeker devices such as a later-model Palm or
StarTac phone are prized for their low batman factor and lessened
obtrusiveness and weight.
baud
/bawd/ n.[simplified from its technical meaning] n. Bits per second. Hence kilobaud or Kbaud, thousands of bits per second. The technical meaning is level transitions per second; this coincides with bps only for two-level modulation with no framing or stop bits. Most hackers are aware of these nuances but blithely ignore them.
Historical note: baud was originally a unit of telegraph signalling speed, set at one pulse per second. It was proposed at the November, 1926 conference of the Comité Consultatif International Des Communications Télégraphiques as an improvement on the then standard practice of referring to line speeds in terms of words per minute, and named for Jean Maurice Emile Baudot (1845-1903), a French engineer who did a lot of pioneering work in early teleprinters.
baz
/baz/ n.
1. [common] The third metasyntactic variable
Suppose we have three functions: FOO, BAR, and BAZ. FOO calls BAR,
which calls BAZ....
(See also
fum)
2. interj. A term of mild annoyance. In this usage the term is often drawn out for 2 or 3 seconds, producing an effect not unlike the bleating of a sheep; /baaaaaaz/.
3. Occasionally appended to foo to produce ‘foobaz’.
Earlier versions of this lexicon derived baz as a Stanford corruption of
bar. However, Pete Samson (compiler of the
TMRC lexicon) reports it was already current when he
joined TMRC in 1958. He says It came from
Pogo. Albert the Alligator, when vexed or outraged,
would shout
Bazz Fazz!
or Rowrbazzle!
The
club layout was said to model the (mythical) New England counties of
Rowrfolk and Bassex (Rowrbazzle mingled with
(Norfolk/Suffolk/Middlesex/Essex).
bazaar
n.,adj.In 1997, after meditating on the success of Linux for three years, the Jargon File's own editor ESR wrote an analytical paper on hacker culture and development models titled The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The main argument of the paper was that Brooks's Law is not the whole story; given the right social machinery, debugging can be efficiently parallelized across large numbers of programmers. The title metaphor caught on (see also cathedral), and the style of development typical in the Linux community is now often referred to as the bazaar mode. Its characteristics include releasing code early and often, and actively seeking the largest possible pool of peer reviewers. After 1998, the evident success of this way of doing things became one of the strongest arguments for open source.
bboard
/bee´bord/ n.[contraction of ‘bulletin board’]
1. Any electronic bulletin board; esp. used of BBS systems running on personal micros, less frequently of a Usenet newsgroup (in fact, use of this term for a newsgroup generally marks one either as a newbie fresh in from the BBS world or as a real old-timer predating Usenet).
2. At CMU and other colleges with similar facilities, refers to campus-wide electronic bulletin boards.
3. The term physical bboard is sometimes used to refer to an old-fashioned, non-electronic cork-and-thumbtack memo board. At CMU, it refers to a particular one outside the CS Lounge.
In either of senses 1 or 2, the term is usually prefixed by the name
of the intended board (‘the Moonlight Casino bboard’ or
‘market bboard’); however, if the context is clear, the
better-read bboards may be referred to by name alone, as in (at CMU)
Don't post for-sale ads on general
.
BBS
/B·B·S/ n.
[common; abbreviation, Bulletin Board System
] An
electronic bulletin board system; that is, a message database where people
can log in and leave broadcast messages for others grouped (typically) into
topic groups. The term was especially applied to
the thousands of local BBS systems that operated during the pre-Internet
microcomputer era of roughly 1980 to 1995, typically run by amateurs for
fun out of their homes on MS-DOS boxes with a single modem line each. Fans
of Usenet and Internet or the big commercial timesharing bboards such as
CompuServe and GEnie tended to consider local BBSes the low-rent district
of the hacker culture, but they served a valuable function by knitting
together lots of hackers and users in the personal-micro world who would
otherwise have been unable to exchange code at all. Post-Internet, BBSs
are likely to be local newsgroups on an ISP; efficiency has increased but a
certain flavor has been lost. See also
bboard.
BCPL
n.
[abbreviation, Basic Combined Programming Language
) A
programming language developed by Martin Richards in Cambridge in 1967. It
is remarkable for its rich syntax, small size of compiler (it can be run in
16k) and extreme portability. It reached break-even point at a very early
stage, and was the language in which the original hello world program was written. It has been ported to so many
different systems that its creator confesses to having lost count. It has
only one data type (a machine word) which can be used as an integer, a
character, a floating point number, a pointer, or almost anything else,
depending on context. BCPL was a precursor of C, which inherited some of
its features.
BDFL
[Python; common] Benevolent Dictator For Life. Guido, considered in his role as the project leader of Python. People who are feeling temporarily cheesed off by one of his decisions sometimes leave off the B. The mental image that goes with this, of a cigar-chomping caudillo in gold braid and sunglasses, is extremely funny to anyone who has ever met Guido in person.
beam
vt.
[from Star Trek Classic's Beam me up, Scotty!
]
1. To transfer softcopy of a file electronically; most often in combining forms such as beam me a copy or beam that over to his site.
2. Palm Pilot users very commonly use this term for the act of exchanging bits via the infrared links on their machines (this term seems to have originated with the ill-fated Newton Message Pad). Compare blast, snarf, BLT.
beep
n.,v.Syn. feep. This term is techspeak under MS-DOS/Windows and OS/2, and seems to be generally preferred among micro hobbyists.
Befunge
n.A worthy companion to INTERCAL; a computer language family which escapes the quotidian limitation of linear control flow and embraces program counters flying through multiple dimensions with exotic topologies. The Befunge home page is at http://www.catseye.mb.ca/esoteric/befunge/.
beige toaster
n.[obs.] An original Macintosh in the boxy beige case. See toaster; compare Macintrash, maggotbox.
bells and whistles
n.
[common] Features added to a program or system to make it more
flavorful from a hacker's point of view, without
necessarily adding to its utility for its primary function. Distinguished
from chrome, which is intended to attract users.
Now that we've got the basic program working, let's go back and add
some bells and whistles.
No one seems to know what distinguishes a
bell from a whistle. The recognized emphatic form is bells,
whistles, and gongs
.
It used to be thought that this term derived from the toyboxes on
theater organs. However, the and gongs
strongly suggests a
different origin, at sea. Before powered horns, ships routinely used
bells, whistles, and gongs to signal each other over longer distances than
voice can carry.
Sometimes ‘trouble’ is spelled bells and whistles...
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-06-04)
bells whistles and gongs
n.A standard elaborated form of bells and whistles; typically said with a pronounced and ironic accent on the ‘gongs’.
benchmark
n.
[techspeak] An inaccurate measure of computer performance.
In the computer industry, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn
lies, and benchmarks.
Well-known ones include Whetstone, Dhrystone,
Rhealstone (see h), the Gabriel LISP benchmarks, the
SPECmark suite, and LINPACK. See also machoflops,
MIPS, smoke and mirrors.
Berkeley Quality Software
adj.
(often abbreviated BQS
) Term used in a pejorative
sense to refer to software that was apparently created by rather spaced-out
hackers late at night to solve some unique problem. It usually has
nonexistent, incomplete, or incorrect documentation, has been tested on at
least two examples, and core dumps when anyone else attempts to use it.
This term was frequently applied to early versions of the
dbx1
debugger. See also Berzerkeley.
Note to British and Commonwealth readers: that's /berk´lee/, not /bark´lee/ as in British Received Pronunciation.
Berzerkeley
/b@r·zer´klee/ n.
[from ‘berserk’, via the name of a now-deceased record
label; poss. originated by famed columnist Herb Caen] Humorous distortion
of Berkeley
used esp. to refer to the practices or products
of the BSD Unix hackers. See software bloat, Berkeley Quality Software.
Mainstream use of this term in reference to the cultural and political peculiarities of UC Berkeley as a whole has been reported from as far back as the 1960s.
beta
/bay´t@/, /be´t@/ or (Commonwealth) /bee´t@/ n.
1. Mostly working, but still under test; usu. used with
in
: in beta. In the
Real World, hardware or software systems often go
through two stages of release testing: Alpha (in-house) and Beta
(out-house?). Beta releases are generally made to a group of lucky (or
unlucky) trusted customers.
2. Anything that is new and experimental. His girlfriend is
in beta
means that he is still testing for compatibility and
reserving judgment.
3. Flaky; dubious; suspect (since beta software is notoriously buggy).
Historical note: More formally, to beta-test is to test a pre-release (potentially unreliable) version of a piece of software by making it available to selected (or self-selected) customers and users. This term derives from early 1960s terminology for product cycle checkpoints, first used at IBM but later standard throughout the industry. Alpha Test was the unit, module, or component test phase; Beta Test was initial system test. These themselves came from earlier A- and B-tests for hardware. The A-test was a feasibility and manufacturability evaluation done before any commitment to design and development. The B-test was a demonstration that the engineering model functioned as specified. The C-test (corresponding to today's beta) was the B-test performed on early samples of the production design, and the D test was the C test repeated after the model had been in production a while.
BFI
/B·F·I/ n.
See brute force and ignorance. Also
encountered in the variants BFMI,
brute force and massive ignorance
and
BFBI brute force and bloody
ignorance
. In some parts of the U.S. this abbreviation was probably
reinforced by a company called Browning-Ferris Industries in the
waste-management business; a large BFI logo in white-on-blue could be seen
on the sides of garbage trucks.
bible
n.1. One of a small number of fundamental source books such as Knuth, K&R, or the Camel Book.
2. The most detailed and authoritative reference for a particular language, operating system, or other complex software system.
BiCapitalization
n.The act said to have been performed on trademarks (such as PostScript, NeXT, NeWS, VisiCalc, FrameMaker, TK!solver, EasyWriter) that have been raised above the ruck of common coinage by nonstandard capitalization. Too many marketroid types think this sort of thing is really cute, even the 2,317th time they do it. Compare studlycaps, InterCaps.
biff
/bif/ vt.
[now rare] To notify someone of incoming mail. From the BSD utility
biff1,
which was in turn named after a friendly dog who used to chase frisbees in
the halls at UCB while 4.2BSD was in development. There was a legend that
it had a habit of barking whenever the mailman came, but the author of
biff
says this is not true. No relation to
B1FF.
big iron
n.[common] Large, expensive, ultra-fast computers. Used generally of number-crunching supercomputers, but can include more conventional big commercial IBMish mainframes. Term of approval; compare heavy metal, oppose dinosaur.
Big Red Switch
n.
[IBM] The power switch on a computer, esp. the ‘Emergency
Pull’ switch on an IBM mainframe or the power
switch on an IBM PC where it really is large and red. This !@%$%
bitty box is hung again; time to hit the Big Red
Switch.
Sources at IBM report that, in tune with the company's
passion for TLAs, this is often abbreviated as
BRS (this has also become established
on FidoNet and in the PC clone world). It is
alleged that the emergency pull switch on an IBM 360/91 actually fired a
non-conducting bolt into the main power feed; the BRSes on more recent
mainframes physically drop a block into place so that they can't be pushed
back in. People get fired for pulling them, especially inappropriately
(see also molly-guard). Compare power cycle, three-finger salute; see also
scram switch.
Big Room
n.
(Also Big Blue Room) The
extremely large room with the blue ceiling and intensely bright light
(during the day) or black ceiling with lots of tiny night-lights (during
the night) found outside all computer installations. He can't come
to the phone right now, he's somewhere out in the Big Room.
big win
n.1. [common] Major success.
2. [MIT] Serendipity. Yes, those two physicists discovered
high-temperature superconductivity in a batch of ceramic that had been
prepared incorrectly according to their experimental schedule. Small
mistake; big win!
See win big.
big-endian
adj.[common; From Swift's Gulliver's Travels via the famous paper On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace by Danny Cohen, USC/ISI IEN 137, dated April 1, 1980]
1. Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given multi-byte numeric representation, the most significant byte has the lowest address (the word is stored ‘big-end-first’). Most processors, including the IBM 370 family, the PDP-10, the Motorola microprocessor families, and most of the various RISC designs are big-endian. Big-endian byte order is also sometimes called network order. See little-endian, middle-endian, NUXI problem, swab.
2. An Internet address the wrong way round. Most of the world follows the Internet standard and writes email addresses starting with the name of the computer and ending up with the name of the country. In the U.K.: the Joint Academic Networking Team had decided to do it the other way round before the Internet domain standard was established. Most gateway sites have ad-hockery in their mailers to handle this, but can still be confused. In particular, the address me@uk.ac.bris.pys.as could be interpreted in JANET's big-endian way as one in the U.K. (domain uk) or in the standard little-endian way as one in the domain as (American Samoa) on the opposite side of the world.
bignum
/big´nuhm/ n.[common; orig. from MIT MacLISP]
1. [techspeak] A multiple-precision computer representation for very large integers.
2. More generally, any very large number. Have you ever
looked at the United States Budget? There's bignums for you!
3. [Stanford] In backgammon, large numbers on the dice especially a roll of double fives or double sixes (compare moby, sense 4). See also El Camino Bignum.
Sense 1 may require some explanation. Most computer languages provide a kind of data called integer, but such computer integers are usually very limited in size; usually they must be smaller than 231 (2,147,483,648) or (on a bitty box) 215 (32,768). If you want to work with numbers larger than that, you have to use floating-point numbers, which are usually accurate to only six or seven decimal places. Computer languages that provide bignums can perform exact calculations on very large numbers, such as 1000! (the factorial of 1000, which is 1000 times 999 times 998 times ... times 2 times 1). For example, this value for 1000! was computed by the MacLISP system using bignums:
40238726007709377354370243392300398571937486421071 46325437999104299385123986290205920442084869694048 00479988610197196058631666872994808558901323829669 94459099742450408707375991882362772718873251977950 59509952761208749754624970436014182780946464962910 56393887437886487337119181045825783647849977012476 63288983595573543251318532395846307555740911426241 74743493475534286465766116677973966688202912073791 43853719588249808126867838374559731746136085379534 52422158659320192809087829730843139284440328123155 86110369768013573042161687476096758713483120254785 89320767169132448426236131412508780208000261683151 02734182797770478463586817016436502415369139828126 48102130927612448963599287051149649754199093422215 66832572080821333186116811553615836546984046708975 60290095053761647584772842188967964624494516076535 34081989013854424879849599533191017233555566021394 50399736280750137837615307127761926849034352625200 01588853514733161170210396817592151090778801939317 81141945452572238655414610628921879602238389714760 88506276862967146674697562911234082439208160153780 88989396451826324367161676217916890977991190375403 12746222899880051954444142820121873617459926429565 81746628302955570299024324153181617210465832036786 90611726015878352075151628422554026517048330422614 39742869330616908979684825901254583271682264580665 26769958652682272807075781391858178889652208164348 34482599326604336766017699961283186078838615027946 59551311565520360939881806121385586003014356945272 24206344631797460594682573103790084024432438465657 24501440282188525247093519062092902313649327349756 55139587205596542287497740114133469627154228458623 77387538230483865688976461927383814900140767310446 64025989949022222176590433990188601856652648506179 97023561938970178600408118897299183110211712298459 01641921068884387121855646124960798722908519296819 37238864261483965738229112312502418664935314397013 74285319266498753372189406942814341185201580141233 44828015051399694290153483077644569099073152433278 28826986460278986432113908350621709500259738986355 42771967428222487575867657523442202075736305694988 25087968928162753848863396909959826280956121450994 87170124451646126037902930912088908694202851064018 21543994571568059418727489980942547421735824010636 77404595741785160829230135358081840096996372524230 56085590370062427124341690900415369010593398383577 79394109700277534720000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000.
bigot
n.
[common] A person who is religiously attached to a particular
computer, language, operating system, editor, or other tool (see
religious issues). Usually found with a specifier;
thus, Cray bigot, ITS bigot, APL
bigot, VMS bigot,
Berkeley bigot. Real bigots can be
distinguished from mere partisans or zealots by the fact that they refuse
to learn alternatives even when the march of time and/or technology is
threatening to obsolete the favored tool. It is truly said You can
tell a bigot, but you can't tell him much.
Compare
weenie,
Amiga Persecution Complex.
bikeshedding
[originally BSD, now common] Technical disputes over minor, marginal issues conducted while more serious ones are being overlooked. The implied image is of people arguing over what color to paint the bicycle shed while the house is not finished.
binary four
n.[Usenet] The finger, in the sense of digitus impudicus. This comes from an analogy between binary and the hand, i.e. 1=00001=thumb, 2=00010=index finger, 3=00011=index and thumb, 4=00100. Considered silly. Prob. from humorous derivative of finger, sense 4.
bit
n.
[from the mainstream meaning and Binary digIT
]
1. [techspeak] The unit of information; the amount of information obtained from knowing the answer to a yes-or-no question for which the two outcomes are equally probable.
2. [techspeak] A computational quantity that can take on one of two values, such as true and false or 0 and 1.
3. A mental flag: a reminder that something should be done
eventually. I have a bit set for you.
(I haven't seen you
for a while, and I'm supposed to tell or ask you something.)
4. More generally, a (possibly incorrect) mental state of belief.
I have a bit set that says that you were the last guy to hack on
EMACS.
(Meaning I think you were the last guy to hack on
EMACS, and what I am about to say is predicated on this, so please stop me
if this isn't true.
) I just need one bit from you
is
a polite way of indicating that you intend only a short interruption for a
question that can presumably be answered yes or no.
A bit is said to be set if its value is true or 1, and reset or clear if its value is false or 0. One speaks of setting and clearing bits. To toggle or invert a bit is to change it, either from 0 to 1 or from 1 to 0. See also flag, trit, mode bit.
The term bit first appeared in print in the computer-science sense in a 1948 paper by information theorist Claude Shannon, and was there credited to the early computer scientist John Tukey (who also seems to have coined the term software). Tukey records that bit evolved over a lunch table as a handier alternative to bigit or binit, at a conference in the winter of 1943-44.
bit bashing
n.
(alt.: bit diddling or
bit twiddling) Term used to describe any of several
kinds of low-level programming characterized by manipulation of
bit, flag,
nybble, and other smaller-than-character-sized
pieces of data; these include low-level device control, encryption
algorithms, checksum and error-correcting codes, hash functions, some
flavors of graphics programming (see bitblt), and
assembler/compiler code generation. May connote either tedium or a real
technical challenge (more usually the former). The command decoding
for the new tape driver looks pretty solid but the bit-bashing for the
control registers still has bugs.
See also
mode bit.
bit bucket
n.[very common]
1. The universal data sink (originally, the mythical receptacle used to catch bits when they fall off the end of a register during a shift instruction). Discarded, lost, or destroyed data is said to have gone to the bit bucket. On Unix, often used for /dev/null. Sometimes amplified as the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky.
2. The place where all lost mail and news messages eventually go. The selection is performed according to Finagle's Law; important mail is much more likely to end up in the bit bucket than junk mail, which has an almost 100% probability of getting delivered. Routing to the bit bucket is automatically performed by mail-transfer agents, news systems, and the lower layers of the network.
3. The ideal location for all unwanted mail responses: Flames
about this article to the bit bucket.
Such a request is guaranteed
to overflow one's mailbox with flames.
4. Excuse for all mail that has not been sent. I mailed you
those figures last week; they must have landed in the bit bucket.
Compare black hole.
This term is used purely in jest. It is based on the fanciful notion
that bits are objects that are not destroyed but only misplaced. This
appears to have been a mutation of an earlier term ‘bit box’,
about which the same legend was current; old-time hackers also report that
trainees used to be told that when the CPU stored bits into memory it was
actually pulling them out of the bit box
. See also
chad box.
Another variant of this legend has it that, as a consequence of the
parity preservation law
, the number of 1 bits that go to the
bit bucket must equal the number of 0 bits. Any imbalance results in bits
filling up the bit bucket. A qualified computer technician can empty a
full bit bucket as part of scheduled maintenance.
The source for all these meanings, is, historically, the fact that the chad box on a paper-tape punch was sometimes called a bit bucket.
A literal bit bucket.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-02-14)
bit decay
n.See bit rot. People with a physics background tend to prefer this variant for the analogy with particle decay. See also computron, quantum bogodynamics.
bit rot
n.[common] Also bit decay. Hypothetical disease the existence of which has been deduced from the observation that unused programs or features will often stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if ‘nothing has changed’. The theory explains that bits decay as if they were radioactive. As time passes, the contents of a file or the code in a program will become increasingly garbled.
There actually are physical processes that produce such effects (alpha particles generated by trace radionuclides in ceramic chip packages, for example, can change the contents of a computer memory unpredictably, and various kinds of subtle media failures can corrupt files in mass storage), but they are quite rare (and computers are built with error-detecting circuitry to compensate for them). The notion long favored among hackers that cosmic rays are among the causes of such events turns out to be a myth; see the cosmic rays entry for details.
The term software rot is almost synonymous. Software rot is the effect, bit rot the notional cause.
bit twiddling
n.[very common]
1. (pejorative) An exercise in tuning (see tune) in which incredible amounts of time and effort go to produce little noticeable improvement, often with the result that the code becomes incomprehensible.
2. Aimless small modification to a program, esp. for some pointless goal.
3. Approx. syn. for bit bashing; esp. used for the act of frobbing the device control register of a peripheral in an attempt to get it back to a known state.
bit-paired keyboard
n.,obs.(alt.: bit-shift keyboard) A non-standard keyboard layout that seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several years on early computer equipment. The ASR-33 was a mechanical device (see EOU), so the only way to generate the character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage. The design of the ASR-33 assigned each character key a basic pattern that could be modified by flipping bits if the SHIFT or the CTRL key was pressed. In order to avoid making the thing even more of a kluge than it already was, the design had to group characters that shared the same basic bit pattern on one key.
Looking at the ASCII chart, we find:
high low bits bits 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001 010 ! " # $ % & ' ( ) 011 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
This is why the characters !"#$%&'() appear where they do on a Teletype (thankfully, they didn't use shift-0 for space). The Teletype Model 33 was actually designed before ASCII existed, and was originally intended to use a code that contained these two rows:
low bits high 0000 0010 0100 0110 1000 1010 1100 1110 bits 0001 0011 0101 0111 1001 1011 1101 1111 10 ) ! bel # $ % wru & * ( " : ? _ , . 11 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ' ; / - esc del
The result would have been something closer to a normal keyboard. But as it happened, Teletype had to use a lot of persuasion just to keep ASCII, and the Model 33 keyboard, from looking like this instead:
! " ? $ ' & - ( ) ; : * / , . 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 + ~ < > × |
Teletype's was not the weirdest variant of the QWERTY layout widely seen, by the way; that prize should probably go to one of several (differing) arrangements on IBM's even clunkier 026 and 029 card punches.
When electronic terminals became popular, in the early 1970s, there
was no agreement in the industry over how the keyboards should be laid out.
Some vendors opted to emulate the Teletype keyboard, while others used the
flexibility of electronic circuitry to make their product look like an
office typewriter. Either choice was supported by the ANSI computer
keyboard standard, X4.14-1971, which referred to the alternatives as
logical bit pairing
and typewriter
pairing
. These alternatives became known as bit-paired and typewriter-paired keyboards. To a hacker, the
bit-paired keyboard seemed far more logical — and because most
hackers in those days had never learned to touch-type, there was little
pressure from the pioneering users to adapt keyboards to the typewriter
standard.
The doom of the bit-paired keyboard was the large-scale introduction of the computer terminal into the normal office environment, where out-and-out technophobes were expected to use the equipment. The typewriter-paired standard became universal, X4.14 was superseded by X4.23-1982, bit-paired hardware was quickly junked or relegated to dusty corners, and both terms passed into disuse.
However, in countries without a long history of touch typing, the argument against the bit-paired keyboard layout was weak or nonexistent. As a result, the standard Japanese keyboard, used on PCs, Unix boxen etc. still has all of the !"#$%&'() characters above the numbers in the ASR-33 layout.
bitblt
/bit´blit/ n.[from BLT, q.v.:]
1. [common] Any of a family of closely related algorithms for moving and copying rectangles of bits between main and display memory on a bit-mapped device, or between two areas of either main or display memory (the requirement to do the Right Thing in the case of overlapping source and destination rectangles is what makes BitBlt tricky).
2. Synonym for blit or BLT. Both uses are borderline techspeak.
bits
pl.n.
1. Information. Examples: I need some bits about file
formats.
(I need to know about file formats.
)
Compare core dump, sense 4.
2. Machine-readable representation of a document, specifically as
contrasted with paper: I have only a photocopy of the Jargon File;
does anyone know where I can get the bits?
. See
softcopy,
source of all good bits See also bit.
bitty box
/bit´ee boks/ n.1. A computer sufficiently small, primitive, or incapable as to cause a hacker acute claustrophobia at the thought of developing software on or for it. Especially used of small, obsolescent, single-tasking-only personal machines such as the Atari 800, Osborne, Sinclair, VIC-20, TRS-80, or IBM PC.
2. [Pejorative] More generally, the opposite of ‘real computer’ (see Get a real computer!). See also mess-dos, toaster, and toy.
bixie
/bik´see/ n.Variant emoticons used BIX (the BIX Information eXchange); the term survived the demise of BIX itself. The most common (smiley) bixie is <@_@>, representing two cartoon eyes and a mouth. These were originally invented in an SF fanzine called APA-L and imported to BIX by one of the earliest users.
black art
n.[common] A collection of arcane, unpublished, and (by implication) mostly ad-hoc techniques developed for a particular application or systems area (compare black magic). VLSI design and compiler code optimization were (in their beginnings) considered classic examples of black art; as theory developed they became deep magic, and once standard textbooks had been written, became merely heavy wizardry. The huge proliferation of formal and informal channels for spreading around new computer-related technologies during the last twenty years has made both the term black art and what it describes less common than formerly. See also voodoo programming.
black hat
1. [common among security specialists] A cracker, someone bent on breaking into the system you are protecting. Oppose the less comon white hat for an ally or friendly security specialist; the term gray hat is in occasional use for people with cracker skills operating within the law, e.g. in doing security evaluations. All three terms derive from the dress code of formulaic Westerns, in which bad guys wore black hats and good guys white ones.
2. [spamfighters] ‘Black hat’, ‘white hat’, and ‘gray hat’ are also used to denote the spam-friendliness of ISPs: a black hat ISP harbors spammers and doesn't terminate them; a white hat ISP terminates upon the first LART; and gray hat ISPs terminate only reluctantly and/or slowly. This has led to the concept of a hat check: someone considering a potential business relationship with an ISP or other provider will post a query to a NANA group, asking about the provider's hat color. The term albedo has also been used to describe a provider's spam-friendliness.
black hole
n.,vt.
[common] What data (a piece of email or netnews, or a stream of
TCP/IP packets) has fallen into if it disappears mysteriously between its
origin and destination sites (that is, without returning a
bounce message). I think there's a black
hole at foovax!
conveys
suspicion that site foovax has
been dropping a lot of stuff on the floor lately (see
drop on the floor). The implied metaphor of email as interstellar
travel is interesting in itself. Readily verbed as blackhole: That router is blackholing
IDP packets.
Compare bit bucket and see
RBL.
black magic
n.[common] A technique that works, though nobody really understands why. More obscure than voodoo programming, which may be done by cookbook. Compare also black art, deep magic, and magic number (sense 2).
Black Screen of Death
n.[prob.: related to the Floating Head of Death in a famous Far Side cartoon.] A failure mode of Microsloth Windows. On an attempt to launch a DOS box, a networked Windows system not uncommonly blanks the screen and locks up the PC so hard that it requires a cold boot to recover. This unhappy phenomenon is known as The Black Screen of Death. See also Blue Screen of Death, which has become rather more common.
blammo
v.
[Oxford Brookes University and alumni, UK] To forcibly remove
someone from any interactive system, especially talker systems. The
operators, who may remain hidden, may blammo
a user who is
misbehaving. Very similar to archaic MIT gun; in fact, the blammo-gun is a notional device used to
blammo
someone. While in actual fact the only incarnation
of the blammo-gun is the command used to forcibly eject a user, operators
speak of different levels of blammo-gun fire; e.g., a blammo-gun to
‘stun’ will temporarily remove someone, but a blammo-gun set to
‘maim’ will stop someone coming back on for a while.
blargh
/blarg/ n.[MIT; now common] The opposite of ping, sense 5; an exclamation indicating that one has absorbed or is emitting a quantum of unhappiness. Less common than ping.
blast
1. v.,n. Synonym for BLT, used esp. for large data sends over a network or comm line. Opposite of snarf. Usage: uncommon. The variant ‘blat’ has been reported.
2. vt. [HP/Apollo] Synonymous with nuke
(sense 3). Sometimes the message Unable to kill all
processes. Blast them (y/n)?
would appear in the command window
upon logout.
bletch
/blech/ interj.
[very common; from Yiddish/German ‘brechen’, to vomit,
poss. via comic-strip exclamation ‘blech’] Term of disgust.
Often used in Ugh, bletch
. Compare
barf.
bletcherous
/blech'@·r@s/ adj.
Disgusting in design or function; esthetically unappealing. This
word is seldom used of people. This keyboard is
bletcherous!
(Perhaps the keys don't work very well, or are
misplaced.) See losing,
cretinous, bagbiting,
bogus, and random. The term
bletcherous applies to the esthetics of the thing so
described; similarly for cretinous. By contrast,
something that is losing or bagbiting may be failing to meet objective
criteria. See also bogus and
random, which have richer and wider shades of
meaning than any of the above.
blinkenlights
/blink'@n·li:tz/ n.[common] Front-panel diagnostic lights on a computer, esp. a dinosaur. Now that dinosaurs are rare, this term usually refers to status lights on a modem, network hub, or the like.
This term derives from the last word of the famous blackletter-Gothic sign in mangled pseudo-German that once graced about half the computer rooms in the English-speaking world. One version ran in its entirety as follows:
ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.
This silliness dates back at least as far as 1959 at Stanford University and had already gone international by the early 1960s, when it was reported at London University's ATLAS computing site. There are several variants of it in circulation, some of which actually do end with the word ‘blinkenlights’.
In an amusing example of turnabout-is-fair-play, German hackers have developed their own versions of the blinkenlights poster in fractured English, one of which is reproduced here:
ATTENTION This room is fullfilled mit special electronische equippment. Fingergrabbing and pressing the cnoeppkes from the computers is allowed for die experts only! So all thelefthandersstay away and do not disturben the brainstorming von here working intelligencies. Otherwise you will be out thrown and kicked anderswhere! Also: please keep still and only watchen astaunished the blinkenlights.
See also geef.
Old-time hackers sometimes get nostalgic for blinkenlights because they were so much more fun to look at than a blank panel. Sadly, very few computers still have them (the three LEDs on a PC keyboard certainly don't count). The obvious reasons (cost of wiring, cost of front-panel cutouts, almost nobody needs or wants to interpret machine-register states on the fly anymore) are only part of the story. Another part of it is that radio-frequency leakage from the lamp wiring was beginning to be a problem as far back as transistor machines. But the most fundamental fact is that there are very few signals slow enough to blink an LED these days! With slow CPUs, you could watch the bus register or instruction counter tick, but at 33/66/150MHz it's all a blur.
Despite this, a couple of relatively recent computer designs of note have featured programmable blinkenlights that were added just because they looked cool. The Connection Machine, a 65,536-processor parallel computer designed in the mid-1980s, was a black cube with one side covered with a grid of red blinkenlights; the sales demo had them evolving life patterns. A few years later the ill-fated BeBox (a personal computer designed to run the BeOS operating system) featured twin rows of blinkenlights on the case front. When Be, Inc. decided to get out of the hardware business in 1996 and instead ported their OS to the PowerPC and later to the Intel architecture, many users suffered severely from the absence of their beloved blinkenlights. Before long an external version of the blinkenlights driven by a PC serial port became available; there is some sort of plot symmetry in the fact that it was assembled by a German.
Finally, a version updated for the Internet has been seen on news.admin.net-abuse.email:
ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS! Das Internet is nicht fuer gefingerclicken und giffengrabben. Ist easy droppenpacket der routers und overloaden der backbone mit der spammen und der me-tooen. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das mausklicken sichtseeren keepen das bandwit-spewin hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das cursorblinken.
This newest version partly reflects reports that the word ‘blinkenlights’ is (in 1999) undergoing something of a revival in usage, but applied to networking equipment. The transmit and receive lights on routers, activity lights on switches and hubs, and other network equipment often blink in visually pleasing and seemingly coordinated ways. Although this is different in some ways from register readings, a tall stack of Cisco equipment or a 19-inch rack of ISDN terminals can provoke a similar feeling of hypnotic awe, especially in a darkened network operations center or server room.
blit
/blit/ vt.
1. [common] To copy a large array of bits from one part of a
computer's memory to another part, particularly when the memory is being
used to determine what is shown on a display screen. The storage
allocator picks through the table and copies the good parts up into high
memory, and then blits it all back down again.
See
bitblt, BLT,
dd, cat,
blast, snarf. More
generally, to perform some operation (such as toggling) on a large array of
bits while moving them.
2. [historical, rare] Sometimes all-capitalized as BLIT: an early experimental bit-mapped terminal
designed by Rob Pike at Bell Labs, later commercialized as the AT&T
5620. (The folk etymology from Bell Labs Intelligent
Terminal
is incorrect. Its creators liked to claim that
Blit
stood for the Bacon, Lettuce, and Interactive
Tomato.)
blitter
/blit´r/ n.[common] A special-purpose chip or hardware system built to perform blit operations, esp. used for fast implementation of bit-mapped graphics. The Commodore Amiga and a few other micros have these, but since 1990 the trend has been away from them (however, see cycle of reincarnation). Syn. raster blaster.
blivet
/bliv'@t/ n.
[allegedly from a World War II military term meaning ten
pounds of manure in a five-pound bag
]
1. An intractable problem.
2. A crucial piece of hardware that can't be fixed or replaced if it breaks.
3. A tool that has been hacked over by so many incompetent programmers that it has become an unmaintainable tissue of hacks.
4. An out-of-control but unkillable development effort.
5. An embarrassing bug that pops up during a customer demo.
6. In the subjargon of computer security specialists, a denial-of-service attack performed by hogging limited resources that have no access controls (for example, shared spool space on a multi-user system).
This term has other meanings in other technical cultures; among experimental physicists and hardware engineers of various kinds it seems to mean any random object of unknown purpose (similar to hackish use of frob). It has also been used to describe an amusing trick-the-eye drawing resembling a three-pronged fork that appears to depict a three-dimensional object until one realizes that the parts fit together in an impossible way.
This is a blivet
bloatware
n.[common] Software that provides minimal functionality while requiring a disproportionate amount of diskspace and memory. Especially used for application and OS upgrades. This term is very common in the Windows/NT world. So is its cause.
BLOB
1. n. [acronym: Binary Large OBject] Used by database people to refer to any random large block of bits that needs to be stored in a database, such as a picture or sound file. The essential point about a BLOB is that it's an object that cannot be interpreted within the database itself.
2. v. To
mailbomb someone by sending a BLOB to him/her;
esp. used as a mild threat. If that program crashes again, I'm
going to BLOB the core dump to you.
block
v.[common; from process scheduling terminology in OS theory]
1. vi. To delay or sit idle
while waiting for something. We're blocking until everyone gets
here.
Compare busy-wait.
2. block on vt. To block, waiting for (something).
Lunch is blocked on Phil's arrival.
blog
n.[common] Short for weblog, an on-line web-zine or diary (usually with facilities for reader comments and discussion threads) made accessible through the World Wide Web. This term is widespread and readily forms derivatives, of which the best known may be blogosphere.
Bloggs Family
n.
An imaginary family consisting of Fred and Mary Bloggs and their
children. Used as a standard example in knowledge representation to show
the difference between extensional and intensional objects. For example,
every occurrence of Fred Bloggs
is the same unique person,
whereas occurrences of person
may refer to different people.
Members of the Bloggs family have been known to pop up in bizarre places
such as the old DEC Telephone Directory. Compare
Dr. Fred Mbogo;
J. Random Hacker; Fred Foobar.
blogosphere
The totality of all blogs. A culture heavily overlapping with but not coincident with hackerdom; a few of its key coinages (blogrolling, fisking, anti-idiotarianism) are recorded in this lexicon for flavor. Bloggers often divide themselves into warbloggers and techbloggers. The techbloggers write about technology and technology policy, while the warbloggers are more politically focused and tend to be preoccupied with U.S. and world response to the post-9/11 war against terrorism. The overlap with hackerdom is heaviest among the techbloggers, but several of the most prominent warbloggers are also hackers. Bloggers in general tend to be aware of and sympathetic to the hacker culture.
blogrolling
[From the American political term ‘logrolling’, for supporting another's pet bill in the legislature in exchange for reciprocal support,] When you hotlink to other bloggers' blogs (and-or other bloggers' specific blog entries) in your blog, you are blogrolling. This is frequently reciprocal.
blow an EPROM
/bloh @n ee´prom/ v.(alt.: blast an EPROM, burn an EPROM) To program a read-only memory, e.g.: for use with an embedded system. This term arose because the programming process for the Programmable Read-Only Memories (PROMs) that preceded present-day Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memories (EPROMs) involved intentionally blowing tiny electrical fuses on the chip. The usage lives on (it's too vivid and expressive to discard) even though the write process on EPROMs is nondestructive.
blow away
vt.
To remove (files and directories) from permanent storage, generally
by accident. He reformatted the wrong partition and blew away last
night's netnews.
Oppose nuke.
blow out
vi.[prob.: from mining and tunneling jargon] Of software, to fail spectacularly; almost as serious as crash and burn. See blow past, blow up, die horribly.
blow up
vi.1. [scientific computation] To become unstable. Suggests that the computation is diverging so rapidly that it will soon overflow or at least go nonlinear.
2. Syn. blow out.
BLT
/B·L·T/, /bl@t/ or (rarely) /belt/ n.,vt.
Synonym for blit. This is the original form
of blit and the ancestor of
bitblt. It referred to any large bit-field copy or
move operation (one resource-intensive memory-shuffling operation done on
pre-paged versions of ITS, WAITS, and TOPS-10 was sardonically referred to
as The Big BLT
). The jargon usage has outlasted the
PDP-10 BLock Transfer instruction from which
BLT derives; nowadays, the assembler mnemonic
BLT almost always means Branch if Less Than
zero
.
blue box
n.
1. obs. Once upon a time, before all-digital switches made it
possible for the phone companies to move them out of band, one could
actually hear the switching tones used to route long-distance calls. Early
phreakers built devices called blue boxes that could reproduce these tones,
which could be used to commandeer portions of the phone network. (This was
not as hard as it may sound; one early phreak acquired the sobriquet
Captain Crunch
after he proved that he could generate
switching tones with a plastic whistle pulled out of a box of Captain
Crunch cereal!) There were other colors of box with more specialized
phreaking uses; red boxes, black boxes, silver boxes, etc. There were
boxes of other
colors as well, but the blue box was the original and
archetype.
2. n. An IBM machine, especially a large (non-PC) one.
Blue Glue
n.
[IBM; obs.] IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture), an incredibly
losing and bletcherous
communications protocol once widely favored at commercial shops that didn't
know any better (like other proprietary networking protocols, it became
obsolete and effectively disappeared after the Internet explosion c.1994).
The official IBM definition is that which binds blue boxes
together.
See fear and loathing. It may not
be irrelevant that Blue Glue is the trade name of a 3M product that is
commonly used to hold down the carpet squares to the removable panel floors
common in dinosaur pens. A correspondent at
U. Minn. reports that the CS department there has about 80 bottles of the
stuff hanging about, so they often refer to any messy work to be done as
using the blue glue.
blue goo
n.
Term for ‘police’ nanobots
intended to prevent gray goo, denature hazardous
waste, destroy pollution, put ozone back into the stratosphere, prevent
halitosis, and promote truth, justice, and the American way, etc. The term
Blue Goo
can be found in Dr. Seuss's Fox In
Socks to refer to a substance much like bubblegum.
‘Would you like to chew blue goo, sir?’. See
nanotechnology.
Blue Screen of Death
n.[common] This term is closely related to the older Black Screen of Death but much more common (many non-hackers have picked it up). Due to the extreme fragility and bugginess of Microsoft Windows, misbehaving applications can readily crash the OS (and the OS sometimes crashes itself spontaneously). The Blue Screen of Death, sometimes decorated with hex error codes, is what you get when this happens. (Commonly abbreviated BSOD.) The following entry from the Salon Haiku Contest, seems to have predated popular use of the term:
Windows NT crashed. I am the Blue Screen of Death No one hears your screams.
blue wire
n.[IBM] Patch wires (esp. 30 AWG gauge) added to circuit boards at the factory to correct design or fabrication problems. Blue wire is not necessarily blue, the term describes function rather than color. These may be necessary if there hasn't been time to design and qualify another board version. In Great Britain this can be bodge wire, after mainstream slang bodge for a clumsy improvisation or sloppy job of work. Compare purple wire, red wire, yellow wire, pink wire.
blurgle
/bler´gl/ n.
[UK] Spoken metasyntactic variable, to
indicate some text that is obvious from context, or which is already
known. If several words are to be replaced, blurgle may well be doubled or
tripled. To look for something in several files use ‘grep
string blurgle blurgle’.
In each case, blurgle
blurgle
would be understood to be replaced by the file you wished
to search. Compare mumble, sense 7.
BNF
/B·N·F/ n.1. [techspeak] Acronym for Backus Normal Form (later retronymed to Backus-Naur Form because BNF was not in fact a normal form), a metasyntactic notation used to specify the syntax of programming languages, command sets, and the like. Widely used for language descriptions but seldom documented anywhere, so that it must usually be learned by osmosis from other hackers. Consider this BNF for a U.S. postal address:
<postal-address> ::= <name-part> <street-address> <zip-part> <personal-part> ::= <name> | <initial> "." <name-part> ::= <personal-part> <last-name> [<jr-part>] <EOL> | <personal-part> <name-part> <street-address> ::= [<apt>] <house-num> <street-name> <EOL> <zip-part> ::= <town-name> "," <state-code> <ZIP-code> <EOL>
This translates into English as: A postal-address consists of
a name-part, followed by a street-address part, followed by a zip-code
part. A personal-part consists of either a first name or an initial
followed by a dot. A name-part consists of either: a personal-part
followed by a last name followed by an optional jr-part (Jr., Sr., or
dynastic number) and end-of-line, or a personal part followed by a name
part (this rule illustrates the use of recursion in BNFs, covering the case
of people who use multiple first and middle names and/or initials). A
street address consists of an optional apartment specifier, followed by a
street number, followed by a street name. A zip-part consists of a
town-name, followed by a comma, followed by a state code, followed by a
ZIP-code followed by an end-of-line.
Note that many things (such as
the format of a personal-part, apartment specifier, or ZIP-code) are left
unspecified. These are presumed to be obvious from context or detailed
somewhere nearby. See also parse.
2. Any of a number of variants and extensions of BNF proper,
possibly containing some or all of the regexp
wildcards such as *
or +
. In fact the example above isn't the pure form
invented for the Algol-60 report; it uses []
, which was introduced a few years later in IBM's
PL/I definition but is now universally recognized.
3. In science-fiction fandom, a ‘Big-Name Fan’ (someone famous or notorious). Years ago a fan started handing out black-on-green BNF buttons at SF conventions; this confused the hacker contingent terribly.
boa
[IBM] n.Any one of the fat cables that lurk under the floor in a dinosaur pen. Possibly so called because they display a ferocious life of their own when you try to lay them straight and flat after they have been coiled for some time. It is rumored within IBM that channel cables for the 370 are limited to 200 feet because beyond that length the boas get dangerous — and it is worth noting that one of the major cable makers uses the trademark ‘Anaconda’.
board
n.1. In-context synonym for bboard; sometimes used even for Usenet newsgroups (but see usage note under bboard, sense 1).
2. An electronic circuit board.
boat anchor
n.[common; from ham radio]
1. Like doorstop but more severe; implies
that the offending hardware is irreversibly dead or useless. That
was a working motherboard once. One lightning strike later, instant boat
anchor!
2. A person who just takes up space.
3. Obsolete but still working hardware, especially when used of an old, bulky, quirky system; originally a term of annoyance, but became more and more affectionate as the hardware became more and more obsolete.
Auctioneers use this term for a large, undesirable object such as a
washing machine; actual boating enthusiasts, however, use mooring
anchor
for frustrating (not actually useless) equipment.
bob
n.
At Demon Internet, all
tech support personnel are called Bob
. (Female support
personnel have an option on Bobette
). This has nothing to
do with Bob the divine drilling-equipment salesman of the
Church of the SubGenius. Nor is it acronymized from Brother Of
BOFH
, though all parties agree it could have
been. Rather, it was triggered by an unusually large draft of new
tech-support people in 1995. It was observed that there would be much
duplication of names. To ease the confusion, it was decided that all
support techs would henceforth be known as Bob
, and identity
badges were created labelled Bob 1
and Bob 2
.
(No, we never got any further
reports a witness).
The reason for Bob
rather than anything else is due to
a luser calling and asking to speak to
Bob
, despite the fact that no Bob
was
currently working for Tech Support. Since we all know the customer
is always right
, it was decided that there had to be at least one
Bob
on duty at all times, just in case.
This sillyness snowballed inexorably. Shift leaders and managers
began to refer to their groups of bobs
. Whole ranks of
support machines were set up (and still exist in the DNS as of 1999) as
bob1 through bobN. Then came alt.tech-support.recovery, and it was filled
with Demon support personnel. They all referred to themselves, and to
others, as bob
, and after a while it caught on. There is
now a Bob
Code describing the Bob nature.
bodge
[Commonwealth hackish] Syn. kludge or
hack (sense 1). I'll bodge this in now and
fix it later
.
BOF
/B·O·F/ or /bof/ n.
1. [common] Abbreviation for the phrase Birds Of a
Feather
(flocking together), an informal discussion group and/or
bull session scheduled on a conference program. It is not clear where or
when this term originated, but it is now associated with the USENIX
conferences for Unix techies and was already established there by 1984. It
was used earlier than that at DECUS conferences and is reported to have
been common at SHARE meetings as far back as the early 1960s.
2. Acronym, Beginning of File
.
BOFH
n.
[common] Acronym, Bastard Operator From Hell. A system
administrator with absolutely no tolerance for
lusers. You say you need more filespace?
<massive-global-delete> Seems to me you have plenty left...
Many BOFHs (and others who would be BOFHs if they could get away with it)
hang out in the newsgroup alt.sysadmin.recovery, although there has
also been created a top-level newsgroup hierarchy (bofh.*) of their own.
Several people have written stories about BOFHs. The set usually considered canonical is by Simon Travaglia and may be found at the Bastard Home Page. BOFHs and BOFH wannabes hang out on scary devil monastery and wield LARTs.
bogo-sort
/boh`goh·sort´/ n.
(var.: stupid-sort) The
archetypical perversely awful algorithm (as opposed to
bubble sort, which is merely the generic bad
algorithm). Bogo-sort is equivalent to repeatedly throwing a deck of cards
in the air, picking them up at random, and then testing whether they are in
order. It serves as a sort of canonical example of awfulness. Looking at
a program and seeing a dumb algorithm, one might say Oh, I see, this
program uses bogo-sort.
Esp. appropriate for algorithms with
factorial or super-exponential running time in the average case and
probabilistically infinite worst-case running time. Compare
bogus, brute force.
A spectacular variant of bogo-sort has been proposed which has the interesting property that, if the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, it can sort an arbitrarily large array in linear time. (In the Many-Worlds model, the result of any quantum action is to split the universe-before into a sheaf of universes-after, one for each possible way the state vector can collapse; in any one of the universes-after the result appears random.) The steps are: 1. Permute the array randomly using a quantum process, 2. If the array is not sorted, destroy the universe (checking that the list is sorted requires O(n) time). Implementation of step 2 is left as an exercise for the reader.
bogometer
/boh·gom'·@t·er/ n.A notional instrument for measuring bogosity. Compare the Troll-O-Meter and the ‘wankometer’ described in the wank entry; see also bogus.
BogoMIPS
/bo´go·mips/ n.The number of million times a second a processor can do absolutely nothing. The Linux OS measures BogoMIPS at startup in order to calibrate some soft timing loops that will be used later on; details at the BogoMIPS mini-HOWTO. The name Linus chose, of course, is an ironic comment on the uselessness of all other MIPS figures.
bogon
/boh´gon/ n.[very common; by analogy with proton/electron/neutron, but doubtless reinforced after 1980 by the similarity to Douglas Adams's ‘Vogons’; see the Bibliography in Appendix C and note that Arthur Dent actually mispronounces ‘Vogons’ as ‘Bogons’ at one point]
1. The elementary particle of bogosity (see
quantum bogodynamics). For instance, the Ethernet is emitting
bogons again
means that it is broken or acting in an erratic or
bogus fashion.
2. A query packet sent from a TCP/IP domain resolver to a root server, having the reply bit set instead of the query bit.
3. Any bogus or incorrectly formed packet sent on a network.
4. By synecdoche, used to refer to any bogus thing, as in I'd
like to go to lunch with you but I've got to go to the weekly staff
bogon
.
5. A person who is bogus or who says bogus things. This was historically the original usage, but has been overtaken by its derivative senses 1--4. See also bogosity, bogus; compare psyton, fat electrons, magic smoke.
The bogon has become the type case for a whole bestiary of nonce
particle names, including the ‘clutron’ or ‘cluon’
(indivisible particle of cluefulness, obviously the antiparticle of the
bogon) and the futon (elementary particle of
randomness, or sometimes of lameness). These are
not so much live usages in themselves as examples of a live meta-usage:
that is, it has become a standard joke or linguistic maneuver to
explain
otherwise mysterious circumstances by inventing
nonce particle names. And these imply nonce particle theories, with all
their dignity or lack thereof (we might note parenthetically that this is a
generalization from (bogus particle) theories
to
bogus (particle theories)
!). Perhaps such particles are the
modern-day equivalents of trolls and wood-nymphs as standard
starting-points around which to construct explanatory myths. Of course,
playing on an existing word (as in the ‘futon’) yields
additional flavor. Compare magic smoke.
bogon filter
/boh´gon fil'tr/ n.
Any device, software or hardware, that limits or suppresses the flow
and/or emission of bogons. Engineering hacked a bogon filter
between the Cray and the VAXen, and now we're getting fewer dropped
packets.
See also bogosity,
bogus.
bogon flux
/boh´gon fluhks/ n.
A measure of a supposed field of bogosity
emitted by a speaker, measured by a bogometer; as a
speaker starts to wander into increasing bogosity a listener might say
Warning, warning, bogon flux is rising
. See
quantum bogodynamics.
bogosity
/boh·go´s@·tee/ n.
1. [orig. CMU, now very common] The degree to which something is
bogus. Bogosity is measured with a
bogometer; in a seminar, when a speaker says
something bogus, a listener might raise his hand and say My
bogometer just triggered
. More extremely, You just pinned
my bogometer
means you just said or did something so outrageously
bogus that it is off the scale, pinning the bogometer needle at the highest
possible reading (one might also say You just redlined my
bogometer
). The agreed-upon unit of bogosity is the
microLenat.
2. The potential field generated by a bogon flux; see quantum bogodynamics. See also bogon flux, bogon filter, bogus.
bogotify
/boh·go´t@·fi:/ vt.To make or become bogus. A program that has been changed so many times as to become completely disorganized has become bogotified. If you tighten a nut too hard and strip the threads on the bolt, the bolt has become bogotified and you had better not use it any more. This coinage led to the notional autobogotiphobia defined as ‘the fear of becoming bogotified’; but is not clear that the latter has ever been ‘live’ jargon rather than a self-conscious joke in jargon about jargon. See also bogosity, bogus.
bogue out
/bohg owt/ vi.
To become bogus, suddenly and unexpectedly. His talk was
relatively sane until somebody asked him a trick question; then he bogued
out and did nothing but flame afterwards.
See also bogosity,
bogus.
bogus
adj.
1. Non-functional. Your patches are bogus.
2. Useless. OPCON is a bogus program.
3. False. Your arguments are bogus.
4. Incorrect. That algorithm is bogus.
5. Unbelievable. You claim to have solved the halting
problem for Turing Machines? That's totally bogus.
6. Silly. Stop writing those bogus sagas.
Astrology is bogus. So is a bolt that is obviously about to break. So is someone who makes blatantly false claims to have solved a scientific problem. (This word seems to have some, but not all, of the connotations of random — mostly the negative ones.)
It is claimed that bogus was originally used in the hackish sense at Princeton in the late 1960s. It was spread to CMU and Yale by Michael Shamos, a migratory Princeton alumnus. A glossary of bogus words was compiled at Yale when the word was first popularized there about 1975-76. These coinages spread into hackerdom from CMU and MIT. Most of them remained wordplay objects rather than actual vocabulary items or live metaphors. Examples: amboguous (having multiple bogus interpretations); bogotissimo (in a gloriously bogus manner); bogotophile (one who is pathologically fascinated by the bogus); paleobogology (the study of primeval bogosity).
Some bogowords, however, obtained sufficient live currency to be listed elsewhere in this lexicon; see bogometer, bogon, bogotify, and quantum bogodynamics and the related but unlisted Dr. Fred Mbogo.
By the early 1980s ‘bogus’ was also current in something
like hacker usage sense in West Coast teen slang, and it had gone
mainstream by 1985. A correspondent from Cambridge reports, by contrast,
that these uses of bogus grate on
British nerves; in Britain the word means, rather specifically,
‘counterfeit’, as in a bogus 10-pound note
.
According to Merriam-Webster, the word dates back to 1825 and originally
referred to a counterfeiting machine.
Bohr bug
/bohr buhg/ n.[from quantum physics] A repeatable bug; one that manifests reliably under a possibly unknown but well-defined set of conditions. Antonym of heisenbug; see also mandelbug, schroedinbug.
boink
/boynk/1. [Usenet: variously ascribed to the TV series Cheers, Moonlighting, and Soap]v. To have sex with; compare bounce, sense 3. (This is mainstream slang.) In Commonwealth hackish the variant ‘bonk’ is more common.
2. n. After the original Peter Korn ‘Boinkon’ Usenet parties, used for almost any net social gathering, e.g., Miniboink, a small boink held by Nancy Gillett in 1988; Minniboink, a Boinkcon in Minnesota in 1989; Humpdayboinks, Wednesday get-togethers held in the San Francisco Bay Area. Compare @-party.
3. Var of bonk; see bonk/oif.
bomb
1. v. General synonym for
crash (sense 1) except that it is not used as a
noun; esp. used of software or OS failures. Don't run Empire with
less than 32K stack, it'll bomb.
2. n.,v. Atari ST and Macintosh equivalents of a Unix panic or Amiga guru meditation, in which icons of little black-powder bombs or mushroom clouds are displayed, indicating that the system has died. On the Mac, this may be accompanied by a decimal (or occasionally hexadecimal) number indicating what went wrong, similar to the Amiga guru meditation number. MS-DOS machines tend to get locked up in this situation.
bondage-and-discipline language
n.
A language (such as Pascal, Ada, APL, or
Prolog) that, though ostensibly general-purpose, is designed so as to
enforce an author's theory of ‘right programming’ even though
said theory is demonstrably inadequate for systems hacking or even vanilla
general-purpose programming. Often abbreviated ‘B&D’;
thus, one may speak of things having the B&D nature
.
See Pascal; oppose languages of choice.
bonk/oif
/bonk/, /oyf/ interj.
In the U.S. MUD community, it has become
traditional to express pique or censure by bonking the offending person. Convention holds
that one should acknowledge a bonk by saying oif!
and there
is a myth to the effect that failing to do so upsets the cosmic bonk/oif
balance, causing much trouble in the universe. Some MUDs have implemented
special commands for bonking and oifing. Note: in parts of the
U.K. ‘bonk’ is a sexually loaded slang term; care is advised in
transatlantic conversations (see boink).
Commonwealth hackers report a similar convention involving the
‘fish/bang’ balance. See also talk mode.
book titles
There is a tradition in hackerdom of informally tagging important textbooks and standards documents with the dominant color of their covers or with some other conspicuous feature of the cover. Many of these are described in this lexicon under their own entries. See Aluminum Book, Camel Book, Cinderella Book, daemon book, Dragon Book, Orange Book, Purple Book, Wizard Book, and bible; see also rainbow series. Since about 1993 this tradition has gotten a boost from the popular O'Reilly and Associates line of technical books, which usually feature some kind of exotic animal on the cover and are often called by the name of that animal.
boot
v.,n.[techspeak; from ‘by one's bootstraps’] To load and initialize the operating system on a machine. This usage is no longer jargon (having passed into techspeak) but has given rise to some derivatives that are still jargon.
The derivative reboot implies
that the machine hasn't been down for long, or that the boot is a
bounce (sense 4) intended to clear some state of
wedgitude. This is sometimes used of human thought
processes, as in the following exchange: You've lost me.
OK, reboot. Here's the theory....
This term is also found in the variants cold boot (from power-off condition) and warm boot (with the CPU and all devices already powered up, as after a hardware reset or software crash).
Another variant: soft boot,
reinitialization of only part of a system, under control of other software
still running: If you're running the mess-dos
emulator, control-alt-insert will cause a soft-boot of the emulator, while
leaving the rest of the system running.
Opposed to this there is hard
boot, which connotes hostility towards or frustration with the
machine being booted: I'll have to hard-boot this losing
Sun.
I recommend booting it hard.
One often
hard-boots by performing a power cycle.
Historical note: this term derives from bootstrap loader, a short program that was read in from cards or paper tape, or toggled in from the front panel switches. This program was always very short (great efforts were expended on making it short in order to minimize the labor and chance of error involved in toggling it in), but was just smart enough to read in a slightly more complex program (usually from a card or paper tape reader), to which it handed control; this program in turn was smart enough to read the application or operating system from a magnetic tape drive or disk drive. Thus, in successive steps, the computer ‘pulled itself up by its bootstraps’ to a useful operating state. Nowadays the bootstrap is usually found in ROM or EPROM, and reads the first stage in from a fixed location on the disk, called the ‘boot block’. When this program gains control, it is powerful enough to load the actual OS and hand control over to it.
Borg
n.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation the Borg is
a species of cyborg that ruthlessly seeks to incorporate all sentient life
into itself; their slogan is You will be assimilated. Resistance is
futile.
In hacker parlance, the Borg is usually
Microsoft, which is thought to be trying just as
ruthlessly to assimilate all computers and the entire Internet to itself
(there is a widely circulated image of Bill Gates as a Borg). Being forced
to use Windows or NT is often referred to as being Borged
.
Interestingly, the Halloween Documents reveal that
this jargon is live within Microsoft itself. See also
Evil Empire,
Internet Exploiter.
Other companies, notably Intel and UUNet, have also occasionally been
equated to the Borg. In IETF circles, where direct pressure from Microsoft
is not a daily reality, the Borg is sometimes Cisco. This usage
commemorates their tendency to pay any price to hire talent away from their
competitors. In fact, at the Spring 1997 IETF, a large number of ex-Cisco
employees, all former members of Routing Geeks, showed up with t-shirts
printed with Recovering Borg
.
bot
n
[common on IRC, MUD and among gamers; from robot
]
1. An IRC or MUD user who is actually a program. On IRC, typically the robot provides some useful service. Examples are NickServ, which tries to prevent random users from adopting nicks already claimed by others, and MsgServ, which allows one to send asynchronous messages to be delivered when the recipient signs on. Also common are ‘annoybots’, such as KissServ, which perform no useful function except to send cute messages to other people. Service bots are less common on MUDs; but some others, such as the ‘Julia’ bot active in 1990--91, have been remarkably impressive Turing-test experiments, able to pass as human for as long as ten or fifteen minutes of conversation.
2. An AI-controlled player in a computer game (especially a first-person shooter such as Quake) which, unlike ordinary monsters, operates like a human-controlled player, with access to a player's weapons and abilities. An example can be found at http://www.telefragged.com/thefatal/.
3. Term used, though less commonly, for a web
spider. The file for controlling spider behavior on
your site is officially the Robots Exclusion File
and its
URL is http://<somehost>/robots.txt
)
Note that bots in all senses were ‘robots’ when the terms first appeared in the early 1990s, but the shortened form is now habitual.
bottom feeder
n.1. An Internet user that leeches off ISPs — the sort you can never provide good enough services for, always complains about the price, no matter how low it may be, and will bolt off to another service the moment there is even the slimmest price difference. While most bottom feeders infest free or almost free services such as AOL, MSN, and Hotmail, too many flock to whomever happens to be the cheapest regional ISP at the time. Bottom feeders are often the classic problem user, known for unleashing spam, flamage, and other breaches of netiquette.
2. Syn. for slopsucker, derived from the fishermen's and naturalists' term for finny creatures who subsist on the primordial ooze. (This sense is older.)
bottom-post
v.In a news or mail reply, to put the response to a news or email message after the quoted content from the parent message. This is correct form, and until around 2000 was so universal on the Internet that neither the term ‘bottom-post’ nor its antonym top-post existed. Hackers consider that the best practice is actually to excerpt only the relevent portions of the parent message, then intersperse the poster's response in such a way that each section of response appears directly after the excerpt it applies to. This reduces message bulk, keeps thread content in a logical order, and facilitates reading.
bottom-up implementation
n.Hackish opposite of the techspeak term top-down design. It has been received wisdom in most programming cultures that it is best to design from higher levels of abstraction down to lower, specifying sequences of action in increasing detail until you get to actual code. Hackers often find (especially in exploratory designs that cannot be closely specified in advance) that it works best to build things in the opposite order, by writing and testing a clean set of primitive operations and then knitting them together. Naively applied, this leads to hacked-together bottom-up implementations; a more sophisticated response is middle-out implementation, in which scratch code within primitives at the mid-level of the system is gradually replaced with a more polished version of the lowest level at the same time the structure above the midlevel is being built.
bounce
v.1. [common; perhaps by analogy to a bouncing check] An electronic mail message that is undeliverable and returns an error notification to the sender is said to bounce. See also bounce message.
2. To engage in sexual intercourse; prob.: from the expression
‘bouncing the mattress’, but influenced by Roo's psychosexually
loaded Try bouncing me, Tigger!
from the
Winnie-the-Pooh books. Compare
boink.
3. To casually reboot a system in order to clear up a transient problem (possibly editing a configuration file in the process, if it is one that is only re-read at boot time). Reported primarily among VMS and Unix users.
4. [VM/CMS programmers] Automatic warm-start
of a machine after an error. I logged on this morning and found it
had bounced 7 times during the night
6. [IBM] To power cycle a peripheral in order to reset it.
bounce message
n.[common] Notification message returned to sender by a site unable to relay email to the intended Internet address recipient or the next link in a bang path (see bounce, sense 1). Reasons might include a nonexistent or misspelled username or a down relay site. Bounce messages can themselves fail, with occasionally ugly results; see sorcerer's apprentice mode and software laser. The terms bounce mail and barfmail are also common.
boustrophedon
n.[from a Greek word for turning like an ox while plowing] An ancient method of writing using alternate left-to-right and right-to-left lines. This term is actually philologists' techspeak and typesetters' jargon. Erudite hackers use it for an optimization performed by some computer typesetting software and moving-head printers. The adverbial form ‘boustrophedonically’ is also found (hackers purely love constructions like this).
box
n.
A computer; esp. in the construction foo box where foo
is some functional qualifier, like graphics, or the name of an OS (thus, Unix box, Windows
box, etc.) We preprocess the data on Unix boxes before
handing it up to the mainframe.
boxed comments
n.Comments (explanatory notes attached to program instructions) that occupy several lines by themselves; so called because in assembler and C code they are often surrounded by a box in a style something like this: /************************************************* * * This is a boxed comment in C style * *************************************************/
Common variants of this style omit the asterisks in column 2 or add a matching row of asterisks closing the right side of the box. The sparest variant omits all but the comment delimiters themselves; the ‘box’ is implied. Oppose winged comments.
boxen
/bok´sn/ pl.n.[very common; by analogy with VAXen] Fanciful plural of box often encountered in the phrase ‘Unix boxen’, used to describe commodity Unix hardware. The connotation is that any two Unix boxen are interchangeable.
boxology
/bok·sol'@·jee/ n.
Syn. ASCII art. This term implies a more
restricted domain, that of box-and-arrow drawings. His report has a
lot of boxology in it.
Compare
macrology.
bozotic
/boh·zoh´tik/ or /boh·zo´tik/ adj.[from the name of a TV clown even more losing than Ronald McDonald] Resembling or having the quality of a bozo; that is, clownish, ludicrously wrong, unintentionally humorous. Compare wonky, demented. Note that the noun ‘bozo’ occurs in slang, but the mainstream adjectival form would be ‘bozo-like’ or (in New England) ‘bozoish’.
brain dump
n.
[common] The act of telling someone everything one knows about a
particular topic or project. Typically used when someone is going to let a
new party maintain a piece of code. Conceptually analogous to an operating
system core dump in that it saves a lot of useful
state before an exit. You'll have to give me
a brain dump on FOOBAR before you start your new job at HackerCorp.
See core dump (sense 4). At Sun, this is also known
as TOI (transfer of
information).
brain fart
n.
The actual result of a braino, as opposed to
the mental glitch that is the braino itself. E.g., typing dir
on a Unix box after a session with DOS.
brain-damaged
adj.
1. [common; generalization of Honeywell Brain Damage
(HBD), a theoretical disease invented to explain certain utter cretinisms
in Honeywell Multics] adj. Obviously wrong;
cretinous; demented. There
is an implication that the person responsible must have suffered brain
damage, because he should have known better. Calling something
brain-damaged is really bad; it also implies it is unusable, and that its
failure to work is due to poor design rather than some accident.
Only six monocase characters per file name? Now
that's brain-damaged!
2. [esp. in the Mac world] May refer to free demonstration software that has been deliberately crippled in some way so as not to compete with the product it is intended to sell. Syn. crippleware.
brain-dead
adj.
[common] Brain-damaged in the extreme. It tends to imply terminal
design failure rather than malfunction or simple stupidity. This
comm program doesn't know how to send a break — how
brain-dead!
brainwidth
n.
[Great Britain] Analagous to bandwidth but
used strictly for human capacity to process information and especially to
multitask. Writing email is taking up most of my brainwidth right
now, I can't look at that Flash animation.
bread crumbs
n.1. Debugging statements inserted into a program that emit output or log indicators of the program's state to a file so you can see where it dies or pin down the cause of surprising behavior. The term is probably a reference to the Hansel and Gretel story from the Brothers Grimm or the older French folktale of Thumbelina; in several variants of these, a character leaves a trail of bread crumbs so as not to get lost in the woods.
2. In user-interface design, any feature that allows some tracking of where you've been, like coloring visited links purple rather than blue in Netscape (also called footprinting).
break
1. vt. To cause to be
broken (in any sense). Your latest patch to
the editor broke the paragraph commands.
2. v. (of a program) To stop temporarily, so that it may debugged. The place where it stops is a breakpoint.
3. [techspeak] vi. To send an RS-232 break (two character widths of line high) over a serial comm line.
4. [Unix] vi. To strike whatever key currently causes the tty driver to send SIGINT to the current process. Normally, break (sense 3), delete or control-C does this.
5. break break may be said to interrupt a conversation (this is an example of verb doubling). This usage comes from radio communications, which in turn probably came from landline telegraph/teleprinter usage, as badly abused in the Citizen's Band craze of the early 1980s.
break-even point
n.In the process of implementing a new computer language, the point at which the language is sufficiently effective that one can implement the language in itself. That is, for a new language called, hypothetically, FOOGOL, one has reached break-even when one can write a demonstration compiler for FOOGOL in FOOGOL, discard the original implementation language, and thereafter use working versions of FOOGOL to develop newer ones. This is an important milestone; see MFTL.
Since this entry was first written, several correspondents have reported that there actually was a compiler for a tiny Algol-like language called Foogol floating around on various VAXen in the early and mid-1980s. A FOOGOL implementation is available at the Retrocomputing Museum http://www.catb.org/retro/.
breath-of-life packet
n.[XEROX PARC] An Ethernet packet that contains bootstrap (see boot) code, periodically sent out from a working computer to infuse the ‘breath of life’ into any computer on the network that has happened to crash. Machines depending on such packets have sufficient hardware or firmware code to wait for (or request) such a packet during the reboot process. See also dickless workstation.
The notional kiss-of-death packet, with a function complementary to that of a breath-of-life packet, is recommended for dealing with hosts that consume too many network resources. Though ‘kiss-of-death packet’ is usually used in jest, there is at least one documented instance of an Internet subnet with limited address-table slots in a gateway machine in which such packets were routinely used to compete for slots, rather like Christmas shoppers competing for scarce parking spaces.
Breidbart Index
/bri:d´bart ind@ks/A measurement of the severity of spam invented by long-time hacker Seth Breidbart, used for programming cancelbots. The Breidbart Index takes into account the fact that excessive multi-posting EMP is worse than excessive cross-posting ECP. The Breidbart Index is computed as follows: For each article in a spam, take the square-root of the number of newsgroups to which the article is posted. The Breidbart Index is the sum of the square roots of all of the posts in the spam. For example, one article posted to nine newsgroups and again to sixteen would have BI = sqrt(9) + sqrt(16) = 7. It is generally agreed that a spam is cancelable if the Breidbart Index exceeds 20.
The Breidbart Index accumulates over a 45-day window. Ten articles
yesterday and ten articles today and ten articles tomorrow add up to a
30-article spam. Spam fighters will often reset the count if you can
convince them that the spam was accidental and/or you have seen the error
of your ways and won't repeat it. Breidbart Index can accumulate over
multiple authors. For example, the Make Money Fast
pyramid
scheme exceeded a BI of 20 a long time ago, and is now considered
cancel on sight
.
bricktext
[Usenet: common] Text which is carefully composed to be right-justified (and sometimes to have a deliberate gutter at mid-page) without use of extra spaces, just through careful word-length choices. A minor art form. The best examples have something of the quality of imagist poetry.
bring X to its knees
v.
[common] To present a machine, operating system, piece of software,
or algorithm with a load so extreme or pathological
that it grinds to a halt.: To bring a MicroVAX to its knees, try
twenty users running vi — or four running
EMACS.
Compare
hog.
brittle
adj.Said of software that is functional but easily broken by changes in operating environment or configuration, or by any minor tweak to the software itself. Also, any system that responds inappropriately and disastrously to abnormal but expected external stimuli; e.g., a file system that is usually totally scrambled by a power failure is said to be brittle. This term is often used to describe the results of a research effort that were never intended to be robust, but it can be applied to commercial software, which (due to closed-source development) displays the quality far more often than it ought to. Oppose robust.
broadcast storm
n.[common] An incorrect packet broadcast on a network that causes most hosts to respond all at once, typically with wrong answers that start the process over again. See network meltdown; compare mail storm.
broken
adj.1. Not working according to design (of programs). This is the mainstream sense.
2. Improperly designed, This sense carries a more or less disparaging implication that the designer should have known better, while sense 1 doesn't necessarily assign blame. Which of senses 1 or 2 is intended is conveyed by context and nonverbal cues.
3. Behaving strangely; especially (when used of people) exhibiting extreme depression.
broken arrow
n.
[IBM] The error code displayed on line 25 of a 3270 terminal (or a
PC emulating a 3270) for various kinds of protocol violations and
unexpected
error conditions (including connection to a
down computer). On a PC, simulated with
‘->/_’, with the two center characters overstruck.
Note: to appreciate this term fully, it helps to know that
broken arrow
is also military jargon for an accident
involving nuclear weapons....
broken-ring network
Pejorative hackerism for token-ring network
, an early
and very slow LAN technology from IBM that lost the standards war to
Ethernet. Though token-ring survives in a few niche markets (such as
factory automation) that put a high premium on resistance to electrical
noise, the term is now (2000) primarily historical.
BrokenWindows
n.Abusive hackerism for the crufty and elephantine X environment on Sun machines; properly called ‘OpenWindows’.
broket
/broh´k@t/ or /broh´ket`/ n.[rare; by analogy with ‘bracket’: a ‘broken bracket’] Either of the characters < and >, when used as paired enclosing delimiters. This word originated as a contraction of the phrase ‘broken bracket’, that is, a bracket that is bent in the middle. (At MIT, and apparently in the Real World as well, these are usually called angle brackets.)
Brooks's Law
prov.
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it
later
— a result of the fact that the expected advantage from
splitting development work among N
programmers is O(N) (that is, proportional
to N), but the complexity and
communications cost associated with coordinating and then merging their
work is O(N^2) (that is, proportional to
the square of N). The quote is from Fred
Brooks, a manager of IBM's OS/360 project and author of The
Mythical Man-Month (Addison-Wesley, 1975, ISBN 0-201-00650-2),
an excellent early book on software engineering. The myth in question has
been most tersely expressed as Programmer time is fungible
and Brooks established conclusively that it is not. Hackers have never
forgotten his advice (though it's not the whole story; see
bazaar); too often,
management still does. See also
creationism,
second-system effect, optimism.
brown-paper-bag bug
n.A bug in a public software release that is so embarrassing that the author notionally wears a brown paper bag over his head for a while so he won't be recognized on the net. Entered popular usage after the early-1999 release of the first Linux 2.2, which had one. The phrase was used in Linus Torvalds's apology posting.
browser
n.A program specifically designed to help users view and navigate hypertext, on-line documentation, or a database. While this general sense has been present in jargon for a long time, the proliferation of browsers for the World Wide Web after 1992 has made it much more popular and provided a central or default techspeak meaning of the word previously lacking in hacker usage. Nowadays, if someone mentions using a ‘browser’ without qualification, one may assume it is a Web browser.
brute force
adj.Describes a primitive programming style, one in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing power instead of using his or her own intelligence to simplify the problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive methods suited to small problems directly to large ones. The term can also be used in reference to programming style: brute-force programs are written in a heavyhanded, tedious way, full of repetition and devoid of any elegance or useful abstraction (see also brute force and ignorance).
The canonical example of a brute-force algorithm is associated with the ‘traveling salesman problem’ (TSP), a classical NP-hard problem: Suppose a person is in, say, Boston, and wishes to drive to N other cities. In what order should the cities be visited in order to minimize the distance travelled? The brute-force method is to simply generate all possible routes and compare the distances; while guaranteed to work and simple to implement, this algorithm is clearly very stupid in that it considers even obviously absurd routes (like going from Boston to Houston via San Francisco and New York, in that order). For very small N it works well, but it rapidly becomes absurdly inefficient when N increases (for N = 15, there are already 1,307,674,368,000 possible routes to consider, and for N = 1000 — well, see bignum). Sometimes, unfortunately, there is no better general solution than brute force. See also NP- and rubber-hose cryptanalysis.
A more simple-minded example of brute-force programming is finding the smallest number in a large list by first using an existing program to sort the list in ascending order, and then picking the first number off the front.
Whether brute-force programming should actually be considered stupid or not depends on the context; if the problem is not terribly big, the extra CPU time spent on a brute-force solution may cost less than the programmer time it would take to develop a more ‘intelligent’ algorithm. Additionally, a more intelligent algorithm may imply more long-term complexity cost and bug-chasing than are justified by the speed improvement.
Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix, is reported to have uttered the
epigram When in doubt, use brute force
. He probably
intended this as a ha ha only serious, but the
original Unix kernel's preference for simple, robust, and portable
algorithms over brittle ‘smart’ ones
does seem to have been a significant factor in the success of that OS.
Like so many other tradeoffs in software design, the choice between brute
force and complex, finely-tuned cleverness is often a difficult one that
requires both engineering savvy and delicate esthetic judgment.
brute force and ignorance
n.
A popular design technique at many software houses —
brute force coding unrelieved by any knowledge of
how problems have been previously solved in elegant ways. Dogmatic
adherence to design methodologies tends to encourage this sort of thing.
Characteristic of early larval stage programming;
unfortunately, many never outgrow it. Often abbreviated BFI: Gak,
they used a bubble sort! That's strictly from
BFI.
Compare bogosity. A very similar usage
is said to be mainstream in Great Britain.
BSD
/B·S·D/ n.[abbreviation for ‘Berkeley Software Distribution’] a family of Unix versions for the DEC VAX and PDP-11 developed by Bill Joy and others at Berzerkeley starting around 1977, incorporating paged virtual memory, TCP/IP networking enhancements, and many other features. The BSD versions (4.1, 4.2, and 4.3) and the commercial versions derived from them (SunOS, ULTRIX, and Mt. Xinu) held the technical lead in the Unix world until AT&T's successful standardization efforts after about 1986; descendants including Free/Open/NetBSD, BSD/OS and MacOS X are still widely popular. Note that BSD versions going back to 2.9 are often referred to by their version numbers alone, without the BSD prefix. See also Unix.
BUAF
n.[abbreviation, from alt.fan.warlord] Big Ugly ASCII Font — a special form of ASCII art. Various programs exist for rendering text strings into block, bloob, and pseudo-script fonts in cells between four and six character cells on a side; this is smaller than the letters generated by older banner (sense 2) programs. These are sometimes used to render one's name in a sig block, and are critically referred to as BUAFs. See warlording.
BUAG
n.[abbreviation, from alt.fan.warlord] Big Ugly ASCII Graphic. Pejorative term for ugly ASCII art, especially as found in sig blocks. For some reason, mutations of the head of Bart Simpson are particularly common in the least imaginative sig blocks. See warlording.
bubble sort
n.Techspeak for a particular sorting technique in which pairs of adjacent values in the list to be sorted are compared and interchanged if they are out of order; thus, list entries ‘bubble upward’ in the list until they bump into one with a lower sort value. Because it is not very good relative to other methods and is the one typically stumbled on by naive and untutored programmers, hackers consider it the canonical example of a naive algorithm. (However, it's been shown by repeated experiment that below about 5000 records bubble-sort is OK anyway.) The canonical example of a really bad algorithm is bogo-sort. A bubble sort might be used out of ignorance, but any use of bogo-sort could issue only from brain damage or willful perversity.
bucky bits
/buh´kee bits/ n.1. [obs.] The bits produced by the CONTROL and META shift keys on a SAIL keyboard (octal 200 and 400 respectively), resulting in a 9-bit keyboard character set. The MIT AI TV (Knight) keyboards extended this with TOP and separate left and right CONTROL and META keys, resulting in a 12-bit character set; later, LISP Machines added such keys as SUPER, HYPER, and GREEK (see space-cadet keyboard).
2. By extension, bits associated with ‘extra’ shift keys on any keyboard, e.g., the ALT on an IBM PC or command and option keys on a Macintosh.
It has long been rumored that bucky bits were named for Buckminster Fuller during a period when he was consulting at Stanford. Actually, bucky bits were invented by Niklaus Wirth when he was at Stanford in 1964--65; he first suggested the idea of an EDIT key to set the 8th bit of an otherwise 7-bit ASCII character). It seems that, unknown to Wirth, certain Stanford hackers had privately nicknamed him ‘Bucky’ after a prominent portion of his dental anatomy, and this nickname transferred to the bit. Bucky-bit commands were used in a number of editors written at Stanford, including most notably TV-EDIT and NLS.
The term spread to MIT and CMU early and is now in general use. Ironically, Wirth himself remained unaware of its derivation for nearly 30 years, until GLS dug up this history in early 1993! See double bucky, quadruple bucky.
buffer overflow
n.
What happens when you try to stuff more data into a buffer (holding
area) than it can handle. This problem is commonly exploited by
crackers to get arbitrary commands executed by a
program running with root permissions. This may be due to a mismatch in
the processing rates of the producing and consuming processes (see
overrun and
firehose syndrome), or because the buffer is simply too small to hold
all the data that must accumulate before a piece of it can be processed.
For example, in a text-processing tool that crunches
a line at a time, a short line buffer can result in
lossage as input from a long line overflows the
buffer and trashes data beyond it. Good defensive programming would check
for overflow on each character and stop accepting data when the buffer is
full up. The term is used of and by humans in a metaphorical sense.
What time did I agree to meet you? My buffer must have
overflowed.
Or If I answer that phone my buffer is going to
overflow.
See also spam,
overrun screw.
bug
n.
An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of
hardware, esp. one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of
feature. Examples: There's a bug in the
editor: it writes things out backwards.
The system crashed
because of a hardware bug.
Fred is a winner, but he has a
few bugs
(i.e., Fred is a good guy, but he has a few personality
problems).
Historical note: Admiral Grace Hopper (an early computing pioneer better known for inventing COBOL) liked to tell a story in which a technician solved a glitch in the Harvard Mark II machine by pulling an actual insect out from between the contacts of one of its relays, and she subsequently promulgated bug in its hackish sense as a joke about the incident (though, as she was careful to admit, she was not there when it happened). For many years the logbook associated with the incident and the actual bug in question (a moth) sat in a display case at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC). The entire story, with a picture of the logbook and the moth taped into it, is recorded in the Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 1981), pp. 285--286.
The text of the log entry (from September 9, 1947), reads 1545
Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being
found
. This wording establishes that the term was already in use
at the time in its current specific sense — and Hopper herself
reports that the term bug was
regularly applied to problems in radar electronics during WWII.
The ‘original bug’
Indeed, the use of bug to mean
an industrial defect was already established in Thomas Edison's time, and a
more specific and rather modern use can be found in an electrical handbook
from 1896 (Hawkin's New Catechism of Electricity,
Theo. Audel & Co.) which says: The term ‘bug’ is
used to a limited extent to designate any fault or trouble in the
connections or working of electric apparatus.
It further notes that
the term is said to have originated in quadruplex telegraphy and
have been transferred to all electric apparatus.
The latter observation may explain a common folk etymology of the
term; that it came from telephone company usage, in which bugs in a
telephone cable
were blamed for noisy lines. Though this
derivation seems to be mistaken, it may well be a distorted memory of a
joke first current among telegraph operators more than
a century ago!
Or perhaps not a joke. Historians of the field inform us that the
term bug
was regularly used in the early days of telegraphy
to refer to a variety of semi-automatic telegraphy keyers that would send a
string of dots if you held them down. In fact, the Vibroplex keyers (which
were among the most common of this type) even had a graphic of a beetle on
them (and still do)! While the ability to send repeated dots automatically
was very useful for professional morse code operators, these were also
significantly trickier to use than the older manual keyers, and it could
take some practice to ensure one didn't introduce extraneous dots into the
code by holding the key down a fraction too long. In the hands of an
inexperienced operator, a Vibroplex bug
on the line could
mean that a lot of garbled Morse would soon be coming your way.
Further, the term bug
has long been used among radio
technicians to describe a device that converts electromagnetic field
variations into acoustic signals. It is used to trace radio interference
and look for dangerous radio emissions. Radio community usage derives from
the roach-like shape of the first versions used by 19th century physicists.
The first versions consisted of a coil of wire (roach body), with the two
wire ends sticking out and bent back to nearly touch forming a spark gap
(roach antennae). The bug is to the radio technician what the stethoscope
is to the stereotypical medical doctor. This sense is almost certainly
ancestral to modern use of bug
for a covert monitoring
device, but may also have contributed to the use of bug
for
the effects of radio interference itself.
Actually, use of bug in the
general sense of a disruptive event goes back to Shakespeare! (Henry VI,
part III - Act V, Scene II: King Edward: So, lie thou there. Die
thou; and die our fear; For Warwick was a bug that fear'd us all.
)
In the first edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary one meaning of
bug is A frightful object; a
walking spectre
; this is traced to ‘bugbear’, a Welsh
term for a variety of mythological monster which (to complete the circle)
has recently been reintroduced into the popular lexicon through fantasy
role-playing games.
In any case, in jargon the word almost never refers to insects. Here
is a plausible conversation that never actually happened: There is a
bug in this ant farm!
What do you mean? I don't see any
ants in it.
That's the bug.
A careful discussion of the etymological issues can be found in a
paper by Fred R. Shapiro, 1987, Entomology of the Computer Bug:
History and Folklore
, American Speech 62(4):376-378.
[There has been a widespread myth that the original bug was moved to the Smithsonian, and an earlier version of this entry so asserted. A correspondent who thought to check discovered that the bug was not there. While investigating this in late 1990, your editor discovered that the NSWC still had the bug, but had unsuccessfully tried to get the Smithsonian to accept it — and that the present curator of their History of American Technology Museum didn't know this and agreed that it would make a worthwhile exhibit. It was moved to the Smithsonian in mid-1991, but due to space and money constraints was not actually exhibited for years afterwards. Thus, the process of investigating the original-computer-bug bug fixed it in an entirely unexpected way, by making the myth true! —ESR]
It helps to remember that this dates from 1973.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-10-31)
bug-compatible
adj.
[common] Said of a design or revision that has been badly
compromised by a requirement to be compatible with
fossils or misfeatures in
other programs or (esp.) previous releases of itself. MS-DOS 2.0
used \ as a path separator to be bug-compatible with some cretin's choice
of / as an option character in 1.0.
bug-for-bug compatible
n.Same as bug-compatible, with the additional implication that much tedious effort went into ensuring that each (known) bug was replicated.
bug-of-the-month club
n.
[from book-of-the-month club
, a time-honored
mail-order-marketing technique in the U.S.] A mythical club which users of
sendmail8 (the Unix mail daemon)
belong to; this was coined on the Usenet newsgroup comp.security.unix at a
time when sendmail security holes, which allowed outside
crackers access to the system, were being uncovered
at an alarming rate, forcing sysadmins to update very often. Also, more
completely, fatal security bug-of-the-month
club. See also
kernel-of-the-week club.
bulletproof
adj.Used of an algorithm or implementation considered extremely robust; lossage-resistant; capable of correctly recovering from any imaginable exception condition — a rare and valued quality. Implies that the programmer has thought of all possible errors, and added code to protect against each one. Thus, in some cases, this can imply code that is too heavyweight, due to excessive paranoia on the part of the programmer. Syn. armor-plated.
bullschildt
/bul´shilt/ n.
[comp.lang.c on USENET] A confident, but incorrect, statement about
a programming language. This immortalizes a very bad book about
C, Herbert Schildt's C - The Complete
Reference. One reviewer commented The naive errors in
this book would be embarrassing even in a programming assignment turned in
by a computer science college sophomore.
bump
vt.
Synonym for increment. Has the same meaning as C's ++ operator.
Used esp. of counter variables, pointers, and index dummies in for
, while
, and
do-while
loops.
burble
v.
[from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky] Like
flame, but connotes that the source is truly
clueless and ineffectual (mere flamers can be competent). A term of deep
contempt. There's some guy on the phone burbling about how he got a
DISK FULL error and it's all our comm software's fault.
This is
mainstream slang in some parts of England.
buried treasure
n.
A surprising piece of code found in some program. While usually not
wrong, it tends to vary from crufty to
bletcherous, and has lain undiscovered only because
it was functionally correct, however horrible it is. Used sarcastically,
because what is found is anything but treasure.
Buried treasure almost always needs to be dug up and removed. I
just found that the scheduler sorts its queue using
bubble sort! Buried treasure!
burn a CD
v.To write a software or document distribution on a CDR. Coined from the fact that a laser is used to inscribe the information by burning small pits in the medium, and from the fact that disk comes out of the drive warm to the touch. Writable CDs can be done on a normal desk-top machine with a suitable drive (so there is no protracted release cycle associated with making them) but each one takes a long time to make, so they are not appropriate for volume production. Writable CDs are suitable for software backups and for short-turnaround-time low-volume software distribution, such as sending a beta release version to a few selected field test sites. Compare cut a tape.
burn-in period
n.1. A factory test designed to catch systems with marginal components before they get out the door; the theory is that burn-in will protect customers by outwaiting the steepest part of the bathtub curve (see infant mortality).
2. A period of indeterminate length in which a person using a computer is so intensely involved in his project that he forgets basic needs such as food, drink, sleep, etc. Warning: Excessive burn-in can lead to burn-out. See hack mode, larval stage.
Historical note: the origin of burn-in
(sense 1) is
apparently the practice of setting a new-model airplane's brakes on fire,
then extinguishing the fire, in order to make them hold better. This was
done on the first version of the U.S. spy-plane, the U-2.
busy-wait
vi.
Used of human behavior, conveys that the subject is busy waiting for
someone or something, intends to move instantly as soon as it shows up, and
thus cannot do anything else at the moment. Can't talk now, I'm
busy-waiting till Bill gets off the phone.
Technically, busy-wait means to wait on an event by spinning through a tight or timed-delay loop that polls for the event on each pass, as opposed to setting up an interrupt handler and continuing execution on another part of the task. In applications this is a wasteful technique, and best avoided on timesharing systems where a busy-waiting program may hog the processor. However, it is often unavoidable in kernel programming. In the Linux world, kernel busy-waits are usually referred to as spinlocks.
buzz
vi.
1. Of a program, to run with no indication of progress and perhaps
without guarantee of ever finishing; esp. said of programs thought to be
executing tight loops of code. A program that is buzzing appears to be
catatonic, but never gets out of catatonia, while a
buzzing loop may eventually end of its own accord. The program
buzzes for about 10 seconds trying to sort all the names into
order.
See spin; see also
grovel.
2. [ETA Systems] To test a wire or printed circuit trace for continuity, esp. by applying an AC rather than DC signal. Some wire faults will pass DC tests but fail an AC buzz test.
3. To process an array or list in sequence, doing the same thing to
each element. This loop buzzes through the tz array looking for a
terminator type.
buzzword-compliant
[also buzzword-enabled] Used (disparagingly) of products that seem to have been specified to incorporate all of this month's trendy technologies. Key buzzwords that often show up in buzzword-compliant specifications as of 2001 include ‘XML’, ‘Java’, ‘peer-to-peer’, ‘distributed’, and ‘open’.
BWQ
/B·W·Q/ n.[IBM: abbreviation, `Buzz Word Quotient'] The percentage of buzzwords in a speech or documents. Usually roughly proportional to bogosity. See TLA.
by hand
adv.
1. [common] Said of an operation (especially a repetitive, trivial,
and/or tedious one) that ought to be performed automatically by the
computer, but which a hacker instead has to step tediously through.
My mailer doesn't have a command to include the text of the message
I'm replying to, so I have to do it by hand.
This does not
necessarily mean the speaker has to retype a copy of the message; it might
refer to, say, dropping into a subshell from the mailer, making a copy of
one's mailbox file, reading that into an editor, locating the top and
bottom of the message in question, deleting the rest of the file, inserting
`>' characters on each line, writing the file, leaving the editor,
returning to the mailer, reading the file in, and later remembering to
delete the file. Compare eyeball search.
2. [common] By extension, writing code which does something in an
explicit or low-level way for which a presupplied library routine ought to
have been available. This cretinous B-tree library doesn't supply a
decent iterator, so I'm having to walk the trees by hand.
byte
/bi:t/ n.[techspeak] A unit of memory or data equal to the amount used to represent one character; on modern architectures this is invariably 8 bits. Some older architectures used byte for quantities of 6, 7, or (especially) 9 bits, and the PDP-10 supported bytes that were actually bitfields of 1 to 36 bits! These usages are now obsolete, killed off by universal adoption of power-of-2 word sizes.
Historical note: The term was coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956 during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer; originally it was described as 1 to 6 bits (typical I/O equipment of the period used 6-bit chunks of information). The move to an 8-bit byte happened in late 1956, and this size was later adopted and promulgated as a standard by the System/360. The word was coined by mutating the word ‘bite’ so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit. See also nybble.
bytesexual
/bi:t`sek´shu·@l/ adj.[rare] Said of hardware, denotes willingness to compute or pass data in either big-endian or little-endian format (depending, presumably, on a mode bit somewhere). See also NUXI problem.
Bzzzt! Wrong.
/bzt rong/ excl.
[common; Usenet/Internet; punctuation varies] From a Robin Williams
routine in the movie Dead Poets Society spoofing
radio or TV quiz programs, such as Truth or
Consequences, where an incorrect answer earns one a blast from
the buzzer and condolences from the interlocutor. A way of expressing
mock-rude disagreement, usually immediately following an included quote
from another poster. The less abbreviated *Bzzzzt*, wrong, but
thank you for playing
is also common; capitalization and emphasis
of the buzzer sound varies.