tarball n.
[very common; prob. based on the "tar baby" in the Uncle Remus
folk tales] An archive, created with the Unix tar(1) utility,
containing myriad related files. "Here, I'll just ftp you a
tarball of the whole project." Tarballs have been the standard
way to ship around source-code distributions since the mid-1980s;
in retrospect it seems odd that this term did not enter common
usage until the late 1990s.
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tardegy
n. [deliberate mangling of `tragedy'] An incident in which
someone who clearly deserves to be selected out of the gene pool
on grounds of extreme stupidity meets with a messy end. Coined on
the Darwin list, which is dedicated to chronicling such
incidents; but almost all hackers would instantly recognize the
intention of the term and laugh.
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taste [primarily MIT] n.
1. The quality in a program that tends to be inversely
proportional to the number of features, hacks, and kluges
programmed into it. Also `tasty', `tasteful', `tastefulness'.
"This feature comes in N tasty flavors." Although `tasty' and
`flavorful' are essentially synonyms, `taste' and flavor are not. Taste refers to sound judgment
on the part of the creator; a program or feature can
exhibit taste but cannot have taste. On the
other hand, a feature can have flavor. Also, flavor has the additional meaning of `kind' or
`variety' not shared by `taste'. The marked sense of flavor is more popular than `taste', though
both are widely used. See also elegant. 2. Alt. sp. of tayste.
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tayste /tayst/
n. Two bits; also as taste. Syn.
crumb, quarter. See nybble.
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TCB /T-C-B/ n.
[IBM] 1. Trouble Came Back. An intermittent or
difficult-to-reproduce problem that has failed to respond to
neglect or shotgun
debugging. Compare heisenbug. Not to be confused with: 2.
Trusted Computing Base, an `official' jargon term from the Orange Book.