Borg n.
In "Star Trek: The Next Generation" the Borg is a species of
cyborg that ruthlessly seeks to incorporate all sentient life
into itself; their slogan is "You will be assimilated. Resistance
is futile." In hacker parlance, the Borg is usually Microsoft, which is thought to be trying
just as ruthlessly to assimilate all computers and the entire
Internet to itself (there is a widely circulated image of Bill
Gates as a Borg). Being forced to use Windows or NT is often
referred to as being "Borged". Interestingly, the Halloween Documents reveal that
this jargon is live within Microsoft itself. (Other companies,
notably Intel and UUNet, have also occasionally been equated to
the Borg.) See also Evil
Empire, Internet
Exploiter.
In IETF circles, where direct pressure from Microsoft is not a
daily reality, the Borg is sometimes Cisco. This usage
commemmorates their tendency to pay any price to hire talent away
from their competitors. In fact, at the Spring 1997 IETF, a large
number of ex-Cisco employees, all former members of Routing
Geeks, showed up with t-shirts printed with "Recovering
Borg".
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borken adj.
(also `borked') Common deliberate typo for `broken'.
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bot n
[common on IRC, MUD and among gamers; from `robot'] 1. An
IRC or MUD
user who is actually a program. On IRC, typically the robot
provides some useful service. Examples are NickServ, which tries
to prevent random users from adopting nicks already claimed by others, and MsgServ,
which allows one to send asynchronous messages to be delivered
when the recipient signs on. Also common are `annoybots', such as
KissServ, which perform no useful function except to send cute
messages to other people. Service bots are less common on MUDs;
but some others, such as the `Julia' bot active in 1990-91, have
been remarkably impressive Turing-test experiments, able to pass
as human for as long as ten or fifteen minutes of conversation.
2. An AI-controlled player in a computer game (especially a
first-person shooter such as Quake) which, unlike ordinary
monsters, operates like a human-controlled player, with access to
a player's weapons and abilities. An example can be found at http://www.telefragged.com/thefatal/.
3. Term used, though less commonly, for a web spider. The file for controlling spider
behavior on your site is officially the "Robots Exclusion File"
and its URL is "http://<somehost>/robots.txt")
Note that bots in all senses were `robots' when the terms
first appeared in the early 1990s, but the shortened form is now
habitual.
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bot spot n.
[MUD] The user on a MUD with the longest connect time. Derives
from the fact that bots on MUDS often
stay constantly connected and appear at the bottom of the
list.
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bottom feeder n.
1. An Internet user that leeches off ISPs - the sort you can
never provide good enough services for, always complains about
the price, no matter how low it may be, and will bolt off to
another service the moment there is even the slimmest price
difference. While most bottom feeders infest free or almost free
services such as AOL, MSN, and Hotmail, too many flock to
whomever happens to be the cheapest regional ISP at the time.
Bottom feeders are often the classic problem user, known for
unleashing spam, flamage, and other breaches of netiquette. 2. Syn. for slopsucker, derived from the fishermen's
and naturalists' term for finny creatures who subsist on the
primordial ooze. (This sense is older.)
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bottom-up implementation n.
Hackish opposite of the techspeak term `top-down design'. It
has been 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. Naively applied, this leads to
hacked-together bottom-up implementations; a more sophisticated
response is `middle-out implementation', in which scratch code
within primitives at the mid-level of the system is gradually
replaced with a more polished version of the lowest level at the
same time the structure above the midlevel is being built.
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bounce v.
1. [common; 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; prob. from the expression `bouncing the mattress',
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 and Unix
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.