:bomb: 1. v. General synonym for {crash} (sense 1) except that
it is not used as a noun; esp. used of software or OS failures.
"Don't run Empire with less than 32K stack, it'll bomb."
2. n.,v. Atari ST and Macintosh equivalents of a UNIX `panic' or
Amiga {guru} (sense 2), where icons of little black-powder bombs
or mushroom clouds are displayed, indicating that the system has
died. On the Mac, this may be accompanied by a decimal (or
occasionally hexadecimal) number indicating what went wrong,
similar to the Amiga {guru meditation} number. {{MS-DOS}}
machines tend to get {locked up} in this situation.
:bondage-and-discipline language: A language (such as Pascal, Ada, APL, or Prolog) that, though ostensibly general-purpose, is designed so as to enforce an author's theory of `right programming' even though said theory is demonstrably inadequate for systems hacking or even vanilla general-purpose programming. Often abbreviated `B&D'; thus, one may speak of things "having the B&D nature". See {{Pascal}}; oppose {languages of choice}.
:bonk/oif: /bonk/, /oyf/ interj. In the {MUD} community, it has become traditional to express pique or censure by `bonking' the offending person. There is a convention that one should acknowledge a bonk by saying `oif!' and a myth to the effect that failing to do so upsets the cosmic bonk/oif balance, causing much trouble in the universe. Some MUDs have implemented special commands for bonking and oifing. See also {talk mode}, {posing}.
:book titles:: There is a tradition in hackerdom of informally tagging important textbooks and standards documents with the dominant color of their covers or with some other conspicuous feature of the cover. Many of these are described in this lexicon under their own entries. See {Aluminum Book}, {Blue Book}, {Cinderella Book}, {Devil Book}, {Dragon Book}, {Green Book}, {Orange Book}, {Pink-Shirt Book}, {Purple Book}, {Red Book}, {Silver Book}, {White Book}, {Wizard Book}, {Yellow Book}, and {bible}; see also {rainbow series}.
:boot: [techspeak; from `by one's bootstraps'] v.,n. To load and initialize the operating system on a machine. This usage is no longer jargon (having passed into techspeak) but has given rise to some derivatives that are still jargon.
The derivative `reboot' implies that the machine hasn't been down for long, or that the boot is a {bounce} intended to clear some state of {wedgitude}. This is sometimes used of human thought processes, as in the following exchange: "You've lost me." "OK, reboot. Here's the theory…."
This term is also found in the variants `cold boot' (from power-off condition) and `warm boot' (with the CPU and all devices already powered up, as after a hardware reset or software crash).
Another variant: `soft boot', reinitialization of only part of a system, under control of other software still running: "If you're running the {mess-dos} emulator, control-alt-insert will cause a soft-boot of the emulator, while leaving the rest of the system running."
Opposed to this there is `hard boot', which connotes hostility towards or frustration with the machine being booted: "I'll have to hard-boot this losing Sun." "I recommend booting it hard." One often hard-boots by performing a {power cycle}.
Historical note: this term derives from `bootstrap loader', a short program that was read in from cards or paper tape, or toggled in from the front panel switches. This program was always very short (great efforts were expended on making it short in order to minimize the labor and chance of error involved in toggling it in), but was just smart enough to read in a slightly more complex program (usually from a card or paper tape reader), to which it handed control; this program in turn was smart enough to read the application or operating system from a magnetic tape drive or disk drive. Thus, in successive steps, the computer `pulled itself up by its bootstraps' to a useful operating state. Nowadays the bootstrap is usually found in ROM or EPROM, and reads the first stage in from a fixed location on the disk, called the `boot block'. When this program gains control, it is powerful enough to load the actual OS and hand control over to it.