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emulator, control-alt-insert will cause a soft-boot of the emulator, while leaving the rest of the system running." |
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Opposed to this there is hard boot, which connotes hostility towards or frustration with the machine being booted: "I'll have to hard-boot this losing Sun." "I recommend booting it hard." One often hard-boots by performing a power cycle. |
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Historical note: this term derives from 'bootstrap loader', a short program that was read in from cards or paper tape, or toggled in from the front panel switches. This program was always very short (great efforts were expended on making it short in order to minimize the labor and chance of error involved in toggling it in), but was just smart enough to read in a slightly more complex program (usually from a card or paper tape reader), to which it handed control; this program in turn was smart enough to read the application or operating system from a magnetic tape drive or disk drive. Thus, in successive steps, the computer 'pulled itself up by its bootstraps' to a useful operating state. Nowadays the bootstrap is usually found in ROM or EPROM, and reads the first stage in from a fixed location on the disk, called the 'boot block'. When this program gains control, it is powerful enough to load the actual OS and hand control over to it. |
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bottom feeder n. Syn. for slopsucker, derived from the fishermen's and naturalists' term for finny creatures who subsist on the primordial ooze. |
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bottom-up implementation n. Hackish opposite of the techspeak term 'top-down design'. It is now received wisdom in most programming cultures that it is best to design from higher levels of abstraction down to lower, specifying sequences of action in increasing detail until you get to actual code. Hackers often find (especially in exploratory designs that cannot be closely specified in advance) that it works best to build things in the opposite order, by writing and testing a clean set of primitive operations and then knitting them together. |
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bounce v. 1. [perhaps by analogy to a bouncing check] An electronic mail message that is undeliverable and returns an error notification to the sender is said to bounce. See also bounce message. 2. [Stanford] To play volleyball. The now-demolished D. C. Power Lab building used by the Stanford AI Lab in the 1970s had a volleyball court on the front lawn. From 5 P.M. to 7 P.M. was the scheduled maintenance time for the computer, so every afternoon at 5 would come over the intercom the cry: "Now hear this: bounce, bounce!", followed by Brian McCune loudly bouncing a volleyball on the floor outside the offices of known volleyballers. 3. To engage in sexual intercourse; probably from the expression 'bouncing the mattress', |
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