The Hackers'''' Dictionary legal torrents phần 3 doc

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."

[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. Thus, the process of investigating the original-computer-bug bug fixed it in an

entirely unexpected way, by making the myth true! --- ESR]

[1992 update: the plot thickens! A usually reliable source reports having seen The Bug at the Smithsonian in

1978. I am unable to reconcile the conflicting histories I have been offered, and merely report this fact here.

--- ESR.]

:bug-compatible: adj. Said of a design or revision that has been badly compromised by a requirement to be

compatible with {fossil}s or {misfeature}s 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.

:buglix: /buhg'liks/ n. Pejorative term referring to DEC's ULTRIX operating system in its earlier *severely*

buggy versions. Still used to describe ULTRIX, but without venom. Compare {AIDX}, {HP-SUX},

{Nominal Semidestructor}, {Telerat}, {sun-stools}.

:bulletproof: adj. Used of an algorithm or implementation considered extremely {robust}; lossage-resistant;

capable of correctly recovering from any imaginable exception condition. This is a rare and valued quality.

Syn. {armor-plated}.

:bum: 1. vt. To make highly efficient, either in time or space, often at the expense of clarity. "I managed to

bum three more instructions out of that code." "I spent half the night bumming the interrupt code." In {elder

days}, John McCarthy (inventor of {LISP}) used to compare some efficiency-obsessed hackers among his

students to "ski bums"; thus, optimization became "program bumming", and eventually just "bumming". 2. To

squeeze out excess; to remove something in order to improve whatever it was removed from (without

changing function; this distinguishes the process from a {featurectomy}). 3. n. A small change to an

algorithm, program, or hardware device to make it more efficient. "This hardware bum makes the jump

instruction faster." Usage: now uncommon, largely superseded by v. {tune} (and n. {tweak}, {hack}), though

none of these exactly capture sense 2. All these uses are rare in Commonwealth hackish, because in the parent

dialects of English `bum' is a rude synonym for `buttocks'.

: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: [from Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"] v. 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

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burbling about how he got a DISK FULL error and it's all our comm software's fault."

: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-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}.

:burst page: n. Syn. {banner}, sense 1.

: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 {spin}ning 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. This is a wasteful technique, best avoided on time-sharing systems where a

busy-waiting program may {hog} the processor.

: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 you never get 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 by applying an AC

rather than DC signal. Some wire faults will pass DC tests but fail a 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."

:BWQ: /B-W-Q/ [IBM: abbreviation, `Buzz Word Quotient'] The percentage of buzzwords in a speech or

documents. Usually roughly proportional to {bogosity}. See {TLA}.

:by hand: adv. 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}.

:byte:: /bi:t/ [techspeak] n. A unit of memory or data equal to the amount used to represent one character; on

modern architectures this is usually 8 bits, but may be 9 on 36-bit machines. Some older architectures used

`byte' for quantities of 6 or 7 bits, and the PDP-10 supported `bytes' that were actually bitfields of 1 to 36 bits!

These usages are now obsolete, and even 9-bit bytes have become rare in the general trend toward power-of-2

word sizes.

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