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an algorithm in theory, but isn't. (The Z80's LDIR instruction, ''Computed Block Transfer with increment", may also be relevant) |
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Bloggs Family, the n. An imaginary family consisting of Fred and Mary Bloggs and their children. Used as a standard example in knowledge representation to show the difference between extensional and intensional objects. For example, every occurrence of "Fred Bloggs" is the same unique person, whereas occurrences of "person" may refer to different people. Members of the Bloggs family have been known to pop up in bizarre places such as the DEC Telephone Directory. Compare Mbogo, Dr. Fred. |
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blow an EPROM /bloh  n ee'prom/ v. (alt. blast an EPROM, burn an EPROM) To program a read-only memory, e.g. for use with an embedded system. This term arose because the programming process for the Programmable Read-Only Memories (PROMs) that preceded present-day Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memories (EPROMs) involved intentionally blowing tiny electrical fuses on the chip. The usage lives on (it's too vivid and expressive to discard) even though the write process on EPROMs is nondestructive. |
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blow away vt. To remove (files and directories) from permanent storage, generally by accident. "He reformatted the wrong partition and blew away last night's netnews." Oppose nuke. |
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blow out vi. [probably from mining and tunneling jargon] Of software, to fail spectacularly; almost as serious as crash and burn. See blow past, blow up, die horribly. |
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blow past vt. To blow out despite a safeguard. "The server blew past the 5K reserve buffer." |
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blow up vi. 1. [scientific computation] To become unstable. Suggests that the computation is diverging so rapidly that it will soon overflow or at least go nonlinear. 2. Syn. blow out. |
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BLT /B-L-T/, /blt/ or (rarely) /belt/ n.,vt. Synonym for blit. This is the original form of blit and the ancestor of bitblt. It referred to any large bit-field copy or move operation (one resource-intensive memory-shuffling operation done on pre-paged versions of ITS, WAITS, and TOPS-10 was sardonically referred to as 'The Big BLT'). The jargon usage has outlasted the PDP-10 BLock Transfer instruction from which BLT derives; nowadays, the assembler mnemonic BLT almost always means 'Branch if Less Than zero'. |
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