WhatIs

/brān dəmp/

n. 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 core dump in that it saves a lot of useful {state} before an exit.

"You'll have to give me a brain dump on FOOBAR before you start your new job at HackerCorp."

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

/brān-ded/

adj. 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 send a break -- how brain-dead!"

/brān-da-mijd/

1. [generalization of Honeywell Brain Damage (HBD), a theoretical disease invented to explain certain utter cretinisms in Honeywell Multics] 

/B-Q-S/

adj. Syn. Berkeley Quality Software.

/boh-zoh'tik/ or /boh-zo'tik/

[ from the name of a TV clown even more losing than Ronald McDonald ]

adj. Resembling or having the quality of a bozo; that is, clownish, ludicrously wrong, unintentionally humorous.

Compare wonky, demented.

Note that the noun bozo occurs in slang, but the mainstream adjectival form would be bozo-like or (in New England) bozoish.

/bok-sol'*-jee/

n. Syn. 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 macrology.

/bok'sn/

[by analogy with VAXen]

pl.n. Fanciful plural of box often encountered in the phrase 'UNIX boxen', used to describe commodity UNIX hardware. The connotation is that any two UNIX boxen are interchangeable.

/bäks kä-ˌments/

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:

/bäks/

n. 1. 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."

/bau̇n(t)s me-sij/

[ UNIX ]