WhatIs

/bərn-ˌin pir-ē-əd/

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.

/be-rēd tre-zhər/

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!"

/bər-bəl/

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

/bəmp/

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.

/bəm/

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."

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.

/bu̇-lət-ˌprüf/

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.

/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 HP-SUX.

/bəg-fər-bəg kəm-ˈpa-tə-bəl/

n. Same as bug-compatible, with the additional implication that much tedious effort went into ensuring that each (known) bug was replicated.

/bəg kəm-ˈpa-tə-bəl/

adj. Said of a design or revision that has been badly compromised by a requirement to be compatible with fossils or misfeatures 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."

/bəg/

n. An unwanted and unintended property of a program or hardware, esp. one that causes it to malfunction.

Antonym of feature. Examples:

"There's a bug in the editor: it writes things out backwards." "The system crashed because of a hardware bug." "Fred is a winner, but he has a few bugs" (i.e., Fred is a good guy, but he has a few personality problems).