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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 alsobogosity,bogus.
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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 butflameafterwards." See alsobogosity,bogus.
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bogusadj.
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 ofrandom-- 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; seebogometer,bogon,bogotify, andquantum bogodynamicsand the related but unlistedDr. 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".
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Bohr bug/bohr buhg/ n.
[from quantum physics] A repeatablebug; one that manifests reliably under a possibly unknown but well-defined set of conditions. Antonym ofheisenbug; see alsomandelbug,schroedinbug.
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boink/boynk/
[Usenet: variously ascribed to the TV series "Cheers" "Moonlighting", and "Soap"] 1. v. To have sex with; comparebounce, sense 3. (This is mainstream slang.) In Commonwealth hackish the variant `bonk' is more common. 2. n. After the original Peter Korn `Boinkon'Usenetparties, 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'; seebonk/oif.
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bomb
1. v. General synonym forcrash(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 Amigaguru 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 Amigaguru meditationnumber.MS-DOSmachines tend to getlocked upin this situation.
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bondage-and-discipline languagen.
A language (such asPascal,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". SeePascal; opposelanguages of choice.
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bonk/oif/bonk/, /oyf/ interj.
In the U.S.MUDcommunity, 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 (seeboink). Commonwealth hackers report a similar convention involving the `fish/bang' balance. See alsotalk mode.
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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. SeeAluminum Book,Blue Book,Camel Book,Cinderella Book,Devil Book,Dragon Book,Green Book,Orange Book,Purple Book,Red Book,Silver Book,White Book,Wizard Book,Yellow Book, andbible; see alsorainbow series. Since about 1983 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.
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bootv.,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 abounce(sense 4) intended to clear some state ofwedgitude. 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 themess-dosemulator, 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 apower 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.
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Borgn.
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 usuallyMicrosoft, 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, theHalloween Documentsreveal that this jargon is live within Microsoft itself. (Other companies, notably Intel and UUNet, have also occasionally been equated to the Borg.) See alsoEvil Empire,Internet Exploiter.
In IETF circles, where direct pressure from Microsoft is not a daily reality, the Borg is sometimes Cisco. This usage commemmorates 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".
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borkenadj.
(also `borked') Common deliberate typo for `broken'.
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botn
[common on IRC, MUD and among gamers; from `robot'] 1. AnIRCorMUDuser who is actually a program. On IRC, typically the robot
provides some useful service. Examples are NickServ, which tries
to prevent random users from adoptingnicks 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 athttp://www.telefragged.com/thefatal/.
3. Term used, though less commonly, for a webspider. The file for controlling spider
behavior on your site is officially the "Robots Exclusion File"
and its URL is "http://
Note that bots in all senses were `robots' when the terms first appeared in the early 1990s, but the shortened form is now habitual.
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bot spotn.
[MUD] The user on a MUD with the longest connect time. Derives from the fact thatbots on MUDS often stay constantly connected and appear at the bottom of the list.
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bottom feedern.
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 ofnetiquette. 2. Syn. forslopsucker, derived from the fishermen's and naturalists' term for finny creatures who subsist on the primordial ooze. (This sense is older.)
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bottom-up implementationn.
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 tobuildthings 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.
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bouncev.
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 alsobounce message. 2. [Stanford] To play volleyball. The now-demolishedD. C. Power Labbuilding used by the Stanford AI Lab in the 1970s had a volleyball court on the front lawn. From 5 P.M. to 7 P.M. was the scheduled maintenance time for the computer, so every afternoon at 5 would come over the intercom the cry: "Now hear this: bounce, bounce!", followed by Brian McCune loudly bouncing a volleyball on the floor outside the offices of known volleyballers. 3. 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. Compareboink. 4. To casually reboot a system in order to clear up a transient problem. Reported primarily amongVMSandUnixusers. 5. [VM/CMS programmers]Automaticwarm-start of a machine after an error. "I logged on this morning and found it had bounced 7 times during the night" 6. [IBM] Topower cyclea peripheral in order to reset it.
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bounce messagen.
[common] Notification message returned to sender by a site unable to relayemailto the intendedInternet addressrecipient or the next link in abang path(seebounce, sense 1). Reasons might include a nonexistent or misspelled username or adownrelay site. Bounce messages can themselves fail, with occasionally ugly results; seesorcerer's apprentice modeandsoftware laser. The terms `bounce mail' and `barfmail' are also common.
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boustrophedonn.
[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).
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boxn.
1. A computer; esp. in the construction `foo box' wherefoois some functional qualifier, like `graphics', or the name of an OS (thus, `Unix box', `MS-DOS box', etc.) "We preprocess the data on Unix boxes before handing it up to the mainframe." 2. [IBM] Without qualification but within an SNA-using site, this refers specifically to an IBM front-end processor or FEP /F-E-P/. An FEP is a small computer necessary to enable an IBMmainframeto communicate beyond the limits of thedinosaur pen. Typically used in expressions like the cry that goes up when an SNA network goes down: "Looks like theboxhas fallen over." (Seefall over.) See alsoIBM,fear and loathing,Blue Glue.
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boxed commentsn.
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: