The Jargon File by Eric S. Raymond (sites to read books for free .TXT) 📖

hard." One often hard-boots

by performing a [1807]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.

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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 [1811]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 [1812]Halloween Documents

reveal that this jargon is live within Microsoft itself. (Other

companies, notably Intel and UUNet, have also occasionally been

equated to the Borg.) See also [1813]Evil Empire, [1814]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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borken adj.

(also borked') Common deliberate typo forbroken'.

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bot n

[common on IRC, MUD and among gamers; from `robot'] 1. An [1821]IRC or

[1822]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 [1823]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

[1824]http://www.telefragged.com/thefatal/. 3. Term used, though less

commonly, for a web [1825]spider. The file for controlling spider

behavior on your site is officially the "Robots Exclusion File" and

its URL is "http:///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.

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bot spot n.

[MUD] The user on a MUD with the longest connect time. Derives from

the fact that [1829]bots on MUDS often stay constantly connected and

appear at the bottom of the list.

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bottom feeder n.

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

[1833]netiquette. 2. Syn. for [1834]slopsucker, 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 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.

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bounce v.

[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 [1841]bounce message. 2.

[Stanford] To play volleyball. The now-demolished [1842]D. C. Power

Lab building 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. Compare [1843]boink. 4. To casually reboot a

system in order to clear up a transient problem. Reported primarily

among [1844]VMS and [1845]Unix users. 5. [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

[1846]power cycle a peripheral in order to reset it.

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bounce message n.

[common] Notification message returned to sender by a site unable to

relay [1850]email to the intended [1851]Internet address recipient or

the next link in a [1852]bang path (see [1853]bounce, sense 1).

Reasons might include a nonexistent or misspelled username or a

[1854]down relay site. Bounce messages can themselves fail, with

occasionally ugly results; see [1855]sorcerer's apprentice mode and

[1856]software laser. The terms bounce mail' andbarfmail' are also

common.

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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).

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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',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 IBM [1863]mainframe to communicate beyond the

limits of the [1864]dinosaur pen. Typically used in expressions like

the cry that goes up when an SNA network goes down: "Looks like the

[1865]box has fallen over." (See [1866]fall over.) See also [1867]IBM,

[1868]fear and loathing, [1869]Blue Glue.

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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 [1873]winged comments.

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boxen /bok'sn/ pl.n.

[very common; by analogy with [1877]VAXen] Fanciful plural of

[1878]box often encountered in the phrase `Unix boxen', used to

describe commodity [1879]Unix hardware. The connotation is that any

two Unix boxen are interchangeable.

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boxology /bok-sol'*-jee/ n.

Syn. [1883]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 [1884]macrology.

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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 [1888]wonky,

[1889]demented. Note that the noun `bozo' occurs in slang, but the

mainstream adjectival form would be `bozo-like' or (in New England)

`bozoish'.

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BQS /B-Q-S/ adj.

Syn. [1893]Berkeley Quality Software.

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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 [1897]core dump in that it saves a lot of useful

[1898]state before an exit. "You'll have to give me a brain dump on

FOOBAR before you start your new job at HackerCorp." See [1899]core

dump (sense 4). At Sun, this is also known as `TOI' (transfer of

information).

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brain fart n.

The actual result of a [1903]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.

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brain-damaged adj.

[common; generalization of `Honeywell Brain Damage' (HBD), a

theoretical disease invented to explain certain utter cretinisms in

Honeywell [1907]Multics] adj. Obviously wrong; [1908]cretinous;

[1909]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.

[1910]crippleware.

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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