The New Hacker's Dictionary

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Thing (and prob. therefore [996]Right Thing and [997]Wrong Thing) come from the book referenced in the etymology, which discusses rulers who were Good Kings but Bad Things. This has apparently created a mainstream idiom on the British side of the pond. It is very common among American hackers, but not in mainstream usage here. Compare [998]Bad and Wrong.

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bag on the side n.

[prob. originally related to a colostomy bag] An extension to an established hack that is supposed to add some functionality to the original. Usually derogatory, implying that the original was being overextended and should have been thrown away, and the new product is ugly, inelegant, or bloated. Also v. phrase, `to hang a bag on the side [of]'. "C++? That's just a bag on the side of C ...." "They want me to hang a bag on the side of the accounting system."

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bagbiter /bag'bi:t-*r/ n.

1. Something, such as a program or a computer, that fails to work, or works in a remarkably clumsy manner. "This text editor won't let me make a file with a line longer than 80 characters! What a bagbiter!" 2. A person who has caused you some trouble, inadvertently or otherwise, typically by failing to program the computer properly. Synonyms: [1005]loser, [1006]cretin, [1007]chomper. 3. `bite the bag' vi. To fail in some manner. "The computer keeps crashing every five minutes." "Yes, the disk

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controller is really biting the bag."

The original loading of these terms was almost undoubtedly obscene, possibly referring to a douche bag or the scrotum (we have reports of "Bite the douche bag!" being used as a taunt at MIT 1970-1976, and we have another report that "Bite the bag!" was in common use at least as early as 1965), but in their current usage they have become almost completely sanitized.

ITS's [1008]lexiphage program was the first and to date only known example of a program intended to be a bagbiter.

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bagbiting adj.

Having the quality of a [1012]bagbiter. "This bagbiting system won't let me compute the factorial of a negative number." Compare [1013]losing, [1014]cretinous, [1015]bletcherous, `barfucious' (under [1016]barfulous) and `chomping' (under [1017]chomp).

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baggy pantsing v.

[Georgia Tech] A "baggy pantsing" is used to reprimand hackers who incautiously leave their terminals unlocked. The affected user will come back to find a post from them on internal newsgroups discussing exactly how baggy their pants are, an accepted stand-in for "unattentive user who left their work unprotected in the clusters". A properly-done baggy pantsing

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1. [from X-Men comics; originally "bampf"] interj. Notional sound made by a person or object teleporting in or out of the hearer's vicinity. Often used in [1028]virtual reality (esp. [1029]MUD) electronic [1030]fora when a character wishes to make a dramatic entrance or exit. 2. The sound of magical transformation, used in virtual reality [1031]fora like MUDs. 3. In MUD circles, "bamf" is also used to refer to the act by which a MUD server sends a special notification to the MUD client to switch its connection to another server ("I'll set up the old site to just bamf people over to our new location."). 4. Used by MUDders on occasion in a more general sense related to sense 3, to refer to directing someone to another location or resource ("A user was asking about some technobabble so I bamfed them to [1032]http://www.tuxedo.org/jargon/".)

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banana label n.

The labels often used on the sides of [1036]macrotape reels, so called because they are shaped roughly like blunt-ended bananas. This term, like macrotapes themselves, is still current but visibly headed for obsolescence.

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banana problem n.

[from the story of the little girl who said "I know how to spell `banana', but I don't know when to stop"]. Not knowing where or when to bring a production to a close (compare [1040]fencepost error). One may say `there is a banana problem' of an algorithm with poorly defined or incorrect termination conditions, or in discussing the evolution of a design that may

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[now historical] An old-style UUCP electronic-mail address specifying hops to get from some assumed-reachable location to the addressee, so called because each [1073]hop is signified by a [1074]bang sign. Thus, for example, the path ...!bigsite!foovax!barbox!me directs people to route their mail to machine bigsite (presumably a well-known location accessible to everybody) and from there through the machine foovax to the account of user me on barbox.

In the bad old days of not so long ago, before autorouting mailers became commonplace, people often published compound bang addresses using the { } convention (see [1075]glob) to give paths from several big machines, in the hopes that one's correspondent might be able to get mail to one of them reliably (example: ...!{seismo, ut-sally, ihnp4}!rice!beta!gamma!me). Bang paths of 8 to 10 hops were not uncommon in 1981. Late-night dial-up UUCP links would cause week-long transmission times. Bang paths were often selected by both transmission time and reliability, as messages would often get lost. See [1076]Internet address, [1077]the network, and [1078]sitename.

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banner n.

1. The title page added to printouts by most print spoolers (see [1082]spool). Typically includes user or account ID information in very large character-graphics capitals. Also called a `burst page', because it indicates where to burst (tear apart) fanfold paper to separate one user's printout from the next. 2. A similar printout generated (typically on multiple pages of fan-fold paper) from user-specified text, e.g., by a program such as Unix's banner({1,6}). 3. On interactive software, a first screen containing a logo and/or author credits and/or a copyright notice. This is probably now the commonest sense.

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banner ad n.

Any of the annoying graphical advertisements that span the tops of way too many Web pages.

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banner site n.

[warez d00dz] A FTP site storing pirated files where one must first click on several banners and/or subscribe to various `free' services, usually generating some form of revenues for the site owner, to be able to access the site. More often than not, the username/password painfully obtained by clicking on banners and subscribing to bogus services or mailing lists turns out to be non-working or gives access to a site that always responds busy. See [1089]ratio site, [1090]leech mode.

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bar /bar/ n.

1. [very common] The second [1094]metasyntactic variable, after [1095]foo and before [1096]baz. "Suppose we have two functions: FOO and BAR. FOO calls BAR...." 2. Often appended to [1097]foo to produce [1098]foobar.

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bare metal n.

1. [common] New computer hardware, unadorned with such snares and delusions as an [1102]operating system, an [1103]HLL, or even assembler. Commonly used in the phrase `programming on the bare metal', which refers to the arduous work of [1104]bit bashing needed to create these basic tools for a new machine. Real bare-metal programming involves things like building boot proms and BIOS chips, implementing basic monitors used to test device drivers, and writing the assemblers that will be used to write the compiler back ends that will give the new machine a real development environment. 2. `Programming on the bare metal' is also used to describe a style of [1105]hand-hacking that relies on bit-level peculiarities of a particular hardware design, esp. tricks for speed and space optimization that rely on crocks such as overlapping instructions (or, as in the famous case described in [1106]The Story of Mel (in Appendix A), interleaving of opcodes on a magnetic drum to minimize fetch delays due to the device's rotational latency). This sort of thing has become less common as the relative costs of programming time and machine resources have changed, but is still found in heavily constrained environments such as industrial embedded systems, and in the code of hackers who just can't let go of that low-level control. See [1107]Real Programmer.

In the world of personal computing, bare metal programming (especially in sense 1 but sometimes also in sense 2) is often considered a [1108]Good Thing, or at least a necessary evil (because these machines have often been sufficiently slow and poorly designed to make it necessary; see [1109]ill-behaved). There, the term usually refers to bypassing the BIOS or OS interface and writing the application to directly access device registers and machine addresses. "To get 19.2 kilobaud on the serial port, you need to get down to the bare metal." People who can do this sort of thing well are held in high regard.