|
|
|
|
|
|
|
a request is guaranteed to overflow one's mailbox with flames. 4. Excuse for all mail that has not been sent. "I mailed you those figures last week; they must have landed in the bit bucket." Compare black hole. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This term is used purely in jest. It is based on the fanciful notion that bits are objects that are not destroyed but only misplaced. This appears to have been a mutation of an earlier term 'bit box', about which the same legend was current; old-time hackers also report that trainees used to be told that when the CPU stored bits into memory it was actually pulling them 'out of the bit box'. See also chad box. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Another variant of this legend has it that, as a consequence of the 'parity preservation law', the number of 1 bits that go to the bit bucket must equal the number of 0 bits. Any imbalance results in bits filling up the bit bucket. A qualified computer technician can empty a full bit bucket as part of scheduled maintenance. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
bit decay n. See bit rot. People with a physics background tend to prefer this variant for the analogy with particle decay. See also computron, quantum bogodynamics. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
bit rot n. Also bit decay. Hypothetical disease the existence of which has been deduced from the observation that unused programs or features will often stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if 'nothing has changed'. The theory explains that bits decay as if they were radioactive. As time passes, the contents of a file or the code in a program will become increasingly garbled. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
There actually are physical processes that produce such effects (alpha particles generated by trace radionuclides in ceramic chip packages, for example, can change the contents of a computer memory unpredictably, and various kinds of subtle media failures can corrupt files in mass storage), but they are quite rare (and computers are built with error-detecting circuitry to compensate for them). The notion long favored among hackers that cosmic rays are among the causes of such events turns out to be a myth; see the cosmic rays entry for details. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The term software rot is almost synonymous. Software rot is the effect, bit rot the notional cause. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
bit twiddling n. 1. (pejorative) An exercise in tuning (see tune) in which incredible amounts of time and effort go to produce little noticeable improvement, often with the result that the code becomes incomprehensible. 2. Aimless small modification to a program, esp. for some pointless goal. |
|
|
|
|
|