WhatIs

/bawd barf/

The garbage one gets on the monitor when using a modem connection with some protocol setting (esp. line speed) incorrect, or when someone picks up a voice extension on the same line, or when really bad line noise disrupts the connection.

Baud barf is not completely random, by the way; hackers with a lot of serial-line experience can usually tell whether the device at the other end is expecting a higher or lower speed than the terminal is set to.

*Really* experienced ones can identify particular speeds.

/bȯd/

[ simplified from its technical meaning ]

n. Bits per second. Hence kilobaud or Kbaud, thousands of bits per second. The technical meaning is 'level transitions per second'; this coincides with bps only for two-level modulation with no framing or stop bits. Most hackers are aware of these nuances but blithely ignore them.

/bath-ˌtəb kərv/

n. Common term for the curve (resembling an end-to-end section of one of those claw-footed antique bathtubs) that describes the expected failure rate of electronics with time: initially high, dropping to near 0 for most of the system's lifetime, then rising again as it 'tires out'.

See also burn-in period, infant mortality.

/bach/

adj. 1. Non-interactive. Hackers use this somewhat more loosely than the traditional technical definitions justify; in particular, switches on a normally interactive program that prepare it to receive non-interactive command input are often referred to as 'batch mode' switches. A 'batch file' is a series of instructions written to be handed to an interactive program running in batch mode.

2. Performance of dreary tasks all at one sitting.

/bā-sik/

n. A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which has since become the leading cause of brain-damage in proto-hackers. This is another case (like Pascal) of the bad things that happen when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously.

/bar'tl-muhd/

n. Any of the MUDs derived from the original MUD game by Richard Bartle (see MUD). BartleMUDs are noted for their (usually slightly offbeat) humor, dry but friendly syntax, and lack of adjectives in object descriptions, so a player is likely to come across 'brand172', for instance (see brand brand brand). Some MUDders intensely dislike Bartle and this term, and prefer to speak of 'MUD-1'.

/bə-ˈrōk/

adj. Feature-encrusted; complex; gaudy; verging on excessive. Said of hardware or (esp.) software designs, this has many of the connotations of elephantine or monstrosity but is less extreme and not pejorative in itself. "Metafont even has features to introduce random variations to its letterform output. Now *that* is baroque!"

See also rococo.

/bar'fyoo-l*s/

adj. (alt. 'barfucious', /bar-fyoo-sh*s/) Said of something that would make anyone barf, if only for aesthetic reasons.

/bar'fyoo-lay'sh*n/

interj. Variation of barf used around the Stanford area. An exclamation, expressing disgust. On seeing some particularly bad code one might exclaim, "Barfulation! Who wrote this, Quux?"

/barf/

[from mainstream slang meaning 'vomit']

1. interj. Term of disgust. This is the closest hackish equivalent of the Val\-speak "gag me with a spoon". (like ewww!)

See bletch.

2. vi. To say "Barf!" or emit some similar expression of disgust. "I showed him my latest hack and he barfed" means only that he complained about it, not that he literally vomited.

3. vi. To fail to work because of unacceptable input. May mean to give an error message.