WhatIs

/bī-ka-pə-tə-lə-ˈzā-shən/

n. The act said to have been performed on trademarks (such as NeXT, NeWS, VisiCalc, FrameMaker, TK!solver, EasyWriter) that have been raised above the ruck of common coinage by nonstandard capitalization. Too many marketroid types think this sort of thing is really cute, even the 2,317th time they do it.

Compare studlycaps.

/bī-bəl/

n. 

1. One of a small number of fundamental source books such as Knuth and K&R.
2. The most detailed and authoritative reference for a particular language, Operating System or other complex Software System.

/B-F-I/

n. See brute force and ignorance. Also encountered in the variant 'BFMI', 'brute force and *massive* ignorance'.

/bā-tə/ or (Commonwealth) /bē-tə/

n. 1. In the Real World, software often goes through two stages of testing: Alpha (in-house) and Beta (out-house?). Software is said to be 'in beta'.

2. Anything that is new and experimental is in beta. "His girlfriend is in beta" means that he is still testing for compatibility and reserving judgment.

3. Beta software is notoriously buggy, so 'in beta' connotes flakiness.

/bər-ˈsərklee/

[from 'berserk', via the name of a now-deceased record label] n. Humorous distortion of 'Berkeley' used esp. to refer to the practices or products of the BSD UNIX hackers.

See software bloat, Missed'em-five, Berkeley Quality Software.

Mainstream use of this term in reference to the cultural and political peculiarities of UC Berkeley as a whole has been reported from as far back as the 1960s.

/bər-ˈsərkiŋ/

vi. A MUD term meaning to gain points only by killing other players and mobiles (NPC; non-player characters). Hence, a Berserker-Wizard is a player character that has achieved enough points to become a wizard, but only by killing other characters.

/berk'liks/

n.,adj. [contraction of 'Berkeley UNIX']

See BSD.

Not used at Berkeley itself. May be more common among suits attempting to sound like cognoscenti than among hackers, who usually just say B-S-D.

/B-Q-S/

adj. (often abbreviated 'BQS') Term used in a pejorative sense to refer to software that was apparently created by rather spaced-out hackers late at night to solve some unique problem. It usually has nonexistent, incomplete, or incorrect documentation, has been tested on at least two examples, and core dumps when anyone else attempts to use it. This term was frequently applied to early versions of the 'dbx(1)' debugger.

See also Berzerkeley.

/bench-ˌmärk/

[techspeak]

n. An inaccurate measure of computer performance.

"In the computer industry, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and benchmarks."

Well-known ones include Whetstone, Dhrystone, Rhealstone (see h), the Gabriel LISP benchmarks (see gabriel), the SPECmark suite, and LINPACK.

See also machoflops, MIPS.

/bels, (h)wi-səls ən(d) gȯŋs/

n. A standard elaborated form of bells and whistles; typically said with a pronounced and ironic accent on the 'gongs'.