BWQ /B-W-Q/ n.
[IBM: abbreviation, `Buzz Word Quotient'] The percentage of
buzzwords in a speech or documents. Usually roughly proportional
to bogosity. See TLA.
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by hand adv.
[common] 1. Said of an operation (especially a repetitive,
trivial, and/or tedious one) that ought to be performed
automatically by the computer, but which a hacker instead has to
step tediously through. "My mailer doesn't have a command to
include the text of the message I'm replying to, so I have to do
it by hand." This does not necessarily mean the speaker has to
retype a copy of the message; it might refer to, say, dropping
into a subshell from the mailer, making a copy of one's mailbox
file, reading that into an editor, locating the top and bottom of
the message in question, deleting the rest of the file, inserting
`>' characters on each line, writing the file, leaving the
editor, returning to the mailer, reading the file in, and later
remembering to delete the file. Compare eyeball search. 2. By extension,
writing code which does something in an explicit or low-level way
for which a presupplied library routine ought to have been
available. "This cretinous B-tree library doesn't supply a decent
iterator, so I'm having to walk the trees by hand."
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B =
byte /bi:t/ n.
[techspeak] A unit of memory or data equal to the amount used
to represent one character; on modern architectures this is
usually 8 bits, but may be 9 on 36-bit machines. Some older
architectures used `byte' for quantities of 6 or 7 bits, and the
PDP-10 supported `bytes' that were actually bitfields of 1 to 36
bits! These usages are now obsolete, and even 9-bit bytes have
become rare in the general trend toward power-of-2 word
sizes.
Historical note: The term was coined by Werner Buchholz in
1956 during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer;
originally it was described as 1 to 6 bits (typical I/O equipment
of the period used 6-bit chunks of information). The move to an
8-bit byte happened in late 1956, and this size was later adopted
and promulgated as a standard by the System/360. The word was
coined by mutating the word `bite' so it would not be
accidentally misspelled as bit. See
also nybble.