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bug-for-bug compatible n. Same as bug-compatible, with the additional implication that much tedious effort went into ensuring that each (known) bug was replicated. |
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bug-of-the-month club n. [from ''book-of-the-month club", a time-honored mail-order-marketing technique in the U.S.] A mythical club which users of 'sendmail(1)' (the UNIX mail daemon) belong to; this was coined on the Usenet newsgroup comp.security.unix at a time when sendmail security holes, which allowed outside crackers access to the system, were being uncovered at an alarming rate, forcing sysadmins to update very often. Also, more completely, fatal security bug-of-the-month club. |
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buglix /buhg'liks/ n. Pejorative term referring to DEC's ULTRIX operating system in its earlier severely buggy versions. Still used to describe ULTRIX, but without nearly so much venom. Compare AIDX, HP-SUX, Nominal Semidestructor, Telerat, sun-stools. |
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bulletproof adj. Used of an algorithm or implementation considered extremely robust; lossage-resistant; capable of correctly recovering from any imaginable exception condition a rare and valued quality. Syn. armorplated. |
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bum 1. vt. To make highly efficient, either in time or space, often at the expense of clarity. "I managed to bum three more instructions out of that code." "I spent half the night bumming the interrupt code." In 1996, this term and the practice it describes are semi-obsolete. In elder days, John McCarthy (inventor of LISP) used to compare some efficiency-obsessed hackers among his students to "ski bums"; thus, optimization became "program bumming", and eventually just "bumming". 2. To squeeze out excess; to remove something in order to improve whatever it was removed from (without changing function; this distinguishes the process from a featurectomy). 3. n. A small change to an algorithm, program, or hardware device to make it more efficient. "This hardware bum makes the jump instruction faster." Usage: now uncommon, largely superseded by v. tune (and n. tweak, hack), though none of these exactly capture sense 2. All these uses are rare in Commonwealth hackish, because in the parent dialects of English 'bum' is a rude synonym for 'buttocks'. |
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bump vt. Synonym for increment. Has the same meaning as C's ++ operator. Used esp. of counter variables, pointers, and index dummies in for, while, and do-while loops. |
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