fossil n.
1. In software, a misfeature that becomes understandable only
in historical context, as a remnant of times past retained so as
not to break compatibility. Example: the retention of octal as
default base for string escapes in C, in
spite of the better match of hexadecimal to ASCII and modern
byte-addressable architectures. See dusty deck. 2. More restrictively, a
feature with past but no present utility. Example: the
force-all-caps (LCASE) bits in the V7 and BSD Unix tty driver, designed for use with
monocase terminals. (In a perversion of the usual
backward-compatibility goal, this functionality has actually been
expanded and renamed in some later USG
Unix releases as the IUCLC and OLCUC bits.) 3. The FOSSIL
(Fido/Opus/Seadog Standard Interface Level) driver specification
for serial-port access to replace the brain-dead routines in the IBM PC ROMs.
Fossils are used by most MS-DOS BBS
software in preference to the `supported' ROM routines, which do
not support interrupt-driven operation or setting speeds above
9600; the use of a semistandard FOSSIL library is preferable to
the bare metal serial port
programming otherwise required. Since the FOSSIL specification
allows additional functionality to be hooked in, drivers that use
the hook but do not provide
serial-port access themselves are named with a modifier, as in
`video fossil'.
Node:four-color glossies,
Next:frag, Previous:fossil, Up:= F =
four-color glossies n.
1. Literature created by marketroids that allegedly contains
technical specs but which is in fact as superficial as possible
without being totally content-free. "Forget the four-color
glossies, give me the tech ref manuals." Often applied as an
indication of superficiality even when the material is printed on
ordinary paper in black and white. Four-color-glossy manuals are
never useful for solving a problem. 2. [rare] Applied by
extension to manual pages that don't contain enough information
to diagnose why the program doesn't produce the expected or
desired output.