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guru meditation number. MS-DOS machines tend to get locked up in this situation. |
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bondage-and-discipline language n. A language (such as Pascal, Ada, APL, or Prolog) that, though ostensibly general-purpose, is designed so as to enforce an author's theory of 'right programming' even though said theory is demonstrably inadequate for systems hacking or even vanilla general-purpose programming. Often abbreviated 'B&D'; thus, one may speak of things "having the B&D nature". See Pascal; oppose languages of choice. |
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bonk/oif /bonk/, /oyf/ interj. In the MUD community, it has become traditional to express pique or censure by bonking the offending person. Convention holds that one should acknowledge a bonk by saying 'oif!' and there is a myth to the effect that failing to do so upsets the cosmic bonk/oif balance, causing much trouble in the universe. Some MUDs have implemented special commands for bonking and oifing. See also talk mode. |
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book titles There is a tradition in hackerdom of informally tagging important textbooks and standards documents with the dominant color of their covers or with some other conspicuous feature of the cover. Many of these are described in this lexicon under their own entries. See Aluminum Book, Blue Book, Camel Book, Cinderella Book, Devil Book, Dragon Book, Green Book, Orange Book, Pink-Shirt Book, Purple Book, Red Book, Silver Book, White Book, Wizard Book, Yellow Book, and bible; see also rainbow series. Since about 1983 this tradition has gotten a boost from the popular O'Reilly Associates line of technical books, which usually feature some kind of exotic animal on the cover. |
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boot v.,n. [techspeak; from 'by one's bootstraps'] To load and initialize the operating system on a machine. This usage is no longer jargon (having passed into techspeak) but has given rise to some derivatives that are still jargon. |
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The derivative reboot implies that the machine hasn't been down for long, or that the boot is a bounce (sense 4) intended to clear some state of wedgitude. This is sometimes used of human thought processes, as in the following exchange: "You've lost me." "OK, reboot. Here's the theory. " |
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This term is also found in the variants cold boot (from power-off condition) and warm boot (with the CPU and all devices already powered up, as after a hardware reset or software crash). |
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Another variant: soft boot, reinitialization of only part of a system, under control of other software still running: "If you're running the mess-dos |
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