:WOMBAT: [Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time] adj. 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}}.
:wonky: /wong'kee/ [from Australian slang] adj. 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}.
:woofer: [University of Waterloo] n. 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}, which see)
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.
:workaround: n. A temporary {kluge} inserted in a system under
development or test in order to avoid the effects of a {bug} or
{misfeature} so that work can continue. Theoretically,
workarounds are always replaced by {fix}es; in practice,
customers often find themselves living with workarounds in the
first couple of releases. "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!"
:working as designed: [IBM] adj. 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}.
:worm: [from `tapeworm' in John Brunner's novel `The Shockwave Rider', via XEROX PARC] n. A program that propagates itself over a network, reproducing itself as it goes. Compare {virus}. Nowadays the term has negative connotations, as it is assumed that only {cracker}s write worms. Perhaps the best-known example was Robert T. Morris's `Internet Worm' of 1988, a `benign' one that got out of control and hogged hundreds of Suns and VAXen across the U.S. See also {cracker}, {RTM}, {Trojan horse}, {ice}, and {Great Worm, the}.
:wound around the axle: adj. In an infinite loop. Often used by older computer types.
:wrap around: vi. (also n. `wraparound' and v. shorthand `wrap') 1. [techspeak] The action of a counter that starts over at zero or at `minus infinity' (see {infinity}) after its maximum value has been reached, and continues incrementing, either because it is programmed to do so or because of an overflow (as when a car's odometer starts over at 0). 2. To change {phase} gradually and continuously by maintaining a steady wake-sleep cycle somewhat longer than 24 hours, e.g., living six long (28-hour) days in a week (or, equivalently, sleeping at the rate of 10 microhertz). See also {phase-wrapping}.