WhatIs

/{kən, kan}/

vt. To abort a job on a time-sharing system. Used esp. when the person doing the deed is an operator, as in "canned from the console". Frequently used in an imperative sense, as in "Can that print job, the LPT just popped a sprocket!" Synonymous with gun. It is said that the ASCII character with mnemonic CAN (0011000) was used as a kill-job character on some early OSes.

/kal-kyə-ˌlā-tər/

[ Cambridge ]

n. Syn. for bitty box.

/cee/

n. 

1. The third letter of the English alphabet.
2. ASCII 01000011.

3. The name of a programming language designed by Dennis Ritchie during the early 1970s and immediately used to reimplement UNIX.

/bi:t`sek'shu-*l/

adj. 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.

/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.

/bī 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."

/B-W-Q/

[ IBM: acronym, 'Buzz Word Quotient' ]

The percentage of buzzwords in a speech or documents. Usually roughly proportional to bogosity.

See TLA.

/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.

/bi-zē wāt/

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 til Bill gets off the phone."

/bərst pāj/

n. Syn. banner, sense 1.