WOMBAT /wom'bat/ adj.
[acronym: Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time] Applied to
problems which are both profoundly uninteresting in themselves and unlikely
to benefit anyone interesting even if solved. Often used in
fanciful constructions such as `wrestling with a wombat'. See
also crawling horror,
SMOP. Also note the rather different
usage as a metasyntactic variable in Commonwealth Hackish.
Users of the PDP-11 database program DATATRIEVE adopted the
wombat as their notional mascot; the program's help file
responded to "HELP WOMBAT" with factual information about Real
World wombats.
Node:womble, Next:wonky, Previous:WOMBAT, Up:= W
=
womble n.
[Unisys UK: from British animated characters] A user who has
great difficulty in communicating their requirements and/or in
using the resulting software. Extreme case of luser. An especially senior or high-ranking
womble is referred to as Great-Uncle Bulgaria.
Node:wonky, Next:woofer, Previous:womble, Up:= W
=
wonky /wong'kee/ adj.
[from Australian slang] Yet another approximate synonym for
broken. Specifically connotes a
malfunction that produces behavior seen as crazy, humorous, or
amusingly perverse. "That was the day the printer's font logic
went wonky and everybody's listings came out in Tengwar." Also in
`wonked out'. See funky, demented, bozotic.
Node:woofer, Next:workaround, Previous:wonky, Up:= W
=
woofer n.
[University of Waterloo] Some varieties of wide paper for
printers have a perforation 8.5 inches from the left margin that
allows the excess on the right-hand side to be torn off when the
print format is 80 columns or less wide. The right-hand excess
may be called `woofer'. This term (like tweeter) has been in use at Waterloo since
1972, but is elsewhere unknown. In audio jargon, the word refers
to the bass speaker(s) on a hi-fi.
Node:workaround, Next:working as designed,
Previous:woofer, Up:= W =
workaround n.
1. A temporary kluge used to
bypass, mask, or otherwise avoid a bug
or misfeature in some system.
Theoretically, workarounds are always replaced by fixes; in practice, customers often find
themselves living with workarounds for long periods of time. "The
code died on NUL characters in the input, so I fixed it to
interpret them as spaces." "That's not a fix, that's a
workaround!" 2. A procedure to be employed by the user in order
to do what some currently non-working feature should do.
Hypothetical example: "Using META-F7 crashes the 4.43 build of Weemax, but as a
workaround you can type CTRL-R, then SHIFT-F5, and delete the
remaining cruft by hand."
Node:working as designed,
Next:worm, Previous:workaround, Up:= W =
working as designed adj.
[IBM] 1. In conformance to a wrong or inappropriate
specification; useful, but misdesigned. 2. Frequently used as a
sardonic comment on a program's utility. 3. Unfortunately also
used as a bogus reason for not accepting a criticism or
suggestion. At IBM, this sense is used
in official documents! See BAD.