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but influenced by Roo's psychosexually loaded "Try bouncing me, Tigger!" from the "Winnie-the-Pooh" books. Compare boink. 4. To casually reboot a system in order to clear up a transient problem. Reported primarily among VMS users. 5. [VM/CMS programmers] Automatic warm-start of a machine after an error. ''I logged on this morning and found it had bounced 7 times during the night" 6. [IBM] To power cycle a peripheral in order to reset it. |
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bounce message n. [Unix] Notification message returned to sender by a site unable to relay email to the intended Internet address recipient or the next link in a bang path (see bounce, sense 1). Reasons might include a nonexistent or misspelled username or a down relay site. Bounce messages can themselves fail, with occasionally ugly results; see sorcerer's apprentice mode and software laser. The terms bounce mail and barfmail are also common. |
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boustrophedon n. [from a Greek word for turning like an ox while plowing] An ancient method of writing using alternate left-to-right and right-to-left lines. This term is actually philologists' techspeak and typesetters' jargon. Erudite hackers use it for an optimization performed by some computer typesetting software and moving-head printers. The adverbial form 'boustrophedonically' is also found (hackers purely love constructions like this). |
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box n. 1. A computer; esp. in the construction foo box where foo is some functional qualifier, like 'graphics', or the name of an OS (thus, Unix box, MS-DOS box, etc.) "We preprocess the data on Unix boxes before handing it up to the mainframe." 2. [IBM] Without qualification but within an SNA-using site, this refers specifically to an IBM front-end processor or FEP /F-E-P/. An FEP is a small computer necessary to enable an IBM mainframe to communicate beyond the limits of the dinosaur pen. Typically used in expressions like the cry that goes up when an SNA network goes down: "Looks like the box has fallen over." (See fall over.) See also IBM, fear and loathing, fepped out, Blue Glue. |
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boxed comments n. Comments (explanatory notes attached to program instructions) that occupy several lines by themselves; so called because in assembler and C code they are often surrounded by a box in a style something like this: |
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/************************************************** |
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*
* This is a boxed comment in C style
* |
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**************************************************/ |
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