blivet /bliv'*t/ n.
[allegedly from a World War II
military term meaning "ten pounds of manure in a five-pound bag"]
1. An intractable problem. 2. A crucial piece of hardware that
can't be fixed or replaced if it breaks. 3. A tool that has been
hacked over by so many incompetent programmers that it has become
an unmaintainable tissue of hacks. 4. An out-of-control but
unkillable development effort. 5. An embarrassing bug that pops up
during a customer demo. 6. In the subjargon of computer security
specialists, a denial-of-service attack performed by hogging
limited resources that have no access controls (for example, shared
spool space on a multi-user system).
This term has other meanings in other technical cultures; among
experimental physicists and hardware engineers of various kinds it
seems to mean any random object of unknown purpose (similar to
hackish use of frob). It has also been used to describe an
amusing trick-the-eye drawing resembling a three-pronged fork that
appears to depict a three-dimensional object until one realizes
that the parts fit together in an impossible way.
[allegedly from a World War II
military term meaning "ten pounds of manure in a five-pound bag"]
1. An intractable problem. 2. A crucial piece of hardware that
can't be fixed or replaced if it breaks. 3. A tool that has been
hacked over by so many incompetent programmers that it has become
an unmaintainable tissue of hacks. 4. An out-of-control but
unkillable development effort. 5. An embarrassing bug that pops up
during a customer demo. 6. In the subjargon of computer security
specialists, a denial-of-service attack performed by hogging
limited resources that have no access controls (for example, shared
spool space on a multi-user system).
This term has other meanings in other technical cultures; among
experimental physicists and hardware engineers of various kinds it
seems to mean any random object of unknown purpose (similar to
hackish use of frob). It has also been used to describe an
amusing trick-the-eye drawing resembling a three-pronged fork that
appears to depict a three-dimensional object until one realizes
that the parts fit together in an impossible way.
Related:
- blivet: /bliv'*t/ [allegedly from a World War II military term
meaning "ten pounds of manure in a five-pound bag"] n.
1. An intractable problem. 2. A crucial piece of... - bug n.
An unwanted and unintended property of a program or
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[from "Monty Python's Flying
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1. The duration of one tick of the system clock on
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Often one AC cycle time (1/60 second in the U.S... - TeX /tekh/ n.
An extremely powerful macro-based text formatter written by
Donald E.
Knuth, very popular in the computer-science community... - moby /moh'bee/
[MIT: seems to have been in use among
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Derived from Melville's "Moby Dick" (some say from... - Internet n.
The mother of all networks. First
incarnated beginning in 1969 as the ARPANET,
a U.S. Department of Defense research testbed. ... - DDT /D-D-T/ n.
[from the insecticide
para-dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethene] 1.
Generic term for a program that assists in debugging... - software rot n.
Term used to describe the tendency of
software that has not been used in a while to lose;
such failure may be semi-humorously ascribed to...
