WhatIs

/tīmz-ər-də-vī-dəd-bī/

[by analogy with plus-or-minus]

quant. Term occasionally used when describing the uncertainty associated with a scheduling estimate, for either humorous or brutally honest effect.

For a software project, the factor is usually at least 2.

/tīm tē/

n. 1. An unspecified but usually well-understood time, often used in conjunction with a later time T+1.

"We'll meet on campus at time T or at Louie's at time T+1" means, in the context of going out for dinner:

"We can meet on campus and go to Louie's, or we can meet at Louie's itself a bit later." (Louie's is a Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto that is a favorite with hackers.)

/tīm siŋk/

[poss. by analogy with heat sink or current sink]

n. A project that consumes unbounded amounts of time.

/tī-gər tēm/

[U.S. military jargon]

/ti-kəl ā bəg/

vt. To cause a normally hidden bug to manifest through some known series of inputs or operations.

"You can tickle the bug in the Paradise VGA card's highlight handling by trying to set bright yellow reverse video."

/tik-list fē-chərz/

[Acorn Computers]

n. Features in software or hardware that customers insist on but never use (calculators in desktop TSRs and that sort of thing). The American equivalent would be 'checklist features', but this jargon sense of the phrase has not been reported.

/tik/

n. 1. A jiffy (sense 1).

2. In simulations, the discrete unit of time that passes between iterations of the simulation mechanism. In AI applications, this amount of time is often left unspecified, since the only constraint of interest is the ordering of events. This sort of AI simulation is often pejoratively referred to as 'tick-tick-tick' simulation, especially when the issue of simultaneity of events with long, independent chains of causes is handwaved.

/thəŋk/

n. 1. "A piece of coding which provides an address", according to P. Z. Ingerman, who invented thunks in 1961 as a way of binding actual parameters to their formal definitions in Algol-60 procedure calls. If a procedure is called with an expression in the place of a formal parameter, the compiler generates a thunk to compute the expression and leave the address of the result in some standard location.

/thəd/

n. 1. Yet another meta-syntactic variable (see foo). It is reported that at CMU from the mid-1970s the canonical series of these was foo, bar, thud, blat.

2. Rare term for the hash character, '#' (ASCII 0100011).

See ASCII for other synonyms.

/thrē-fiŋ-gər sə-lüt/

n. Syn. Vulcan nerve pinch.