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robust, and portable algorthms over brittle 'smart' ones does seem to have been a significant factor in the success of that OS. Like so many other tradeoffs in software design, the choice between brute force and complex, finely-tuned cleverness is often a difficult one that requires both engineering savvy and delicate esthetic judgment. |
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brute force and ignorance n. A popular design technique at many software houses brute force coding unrelieved by any knowledge of how problems have been previously solved in elegant ways. Dogmatic adherence to design methodologies tends to encourage this sort of thing. Characteristic of early larval stage programming; unfortunately, many never outgrow it. Often abbreviated BFI: "Gak, they used a bubble sort! That's strictly from BFI." Compare bogosity. |
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BSD /B-S-D/ n. [abbreviation for 'Berkeley Software Distribution'] a family of Unix versions for the DEC VAX and PDP-11 developed by Bill Joy and others at Berzerkeley starting around 1980, incorporating paged virtual memory, TCP/IP networking enhancements, and many other features. The BSD versions (4.1, 4.2, and 4.3) and the commercial versions derived from them (SunOS, ULTRIX, and Mt. Xinu) held the technical lead in the Unix world until AT&T's successful standardization efforts after about 1986, and are still widely popular. Note that BSD versions going back to 2.9 are often referred to by their version numbers, without the BSD prefix. See 4.2, Unix, USG Unix. |
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BUAF // n. [abbreviation, from alt.fan.warlord] Big Ugly ASCII Font a special form of ASCII art. Various programs exist for rendering text strings into block, bloob, and pseudo-script fonts in cells between four and six character cells on a side; this is smaller than the letters generated by older banner (sense 2) programs. These are sometimes used to render one's name in a sig block, and are critically referred to as BUAFs. See warlording. |
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BUAG // n. [abbreviation, from alt.fan.warlord] Big Ugly ASCII Graphic. Pejorative term for ugly ASCII art, especially as found in sig blocks. For some reason, mutations of the head of Bart Simpson are particularly common in the least imaginative sig blocks. See warlording. |
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bubble sort n. Techspeak for a particular sorting technique in which pairs of adjacent values in the list to be sorted are compared and interchanged if they are out of order; thus, list entries 'bubble upward' in the list until they bump into one with a lower sort value. Because it is not very good relative to other methods and is the one typically stumbled on by naive |
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