blivet

/bliv'*t/ [allegedly from a World War II military term meaning

"ten pounds of manure in a five-pound bag"] 1. An intractable

problem.

2. A crucial piece of hardware that can't be fixed or replaced

if it breaks.

3. A tool that has been hacked over by so many incompetent

programmers that it has become an unmaintainable tissue of

hacks.

4. An out-of-control but unkillable development effort.

5. An embarrassing bug that pops up during a customer demo.

6. In the subjargon of computer security specialists, a

denial-of-service attack performed by hogging limited

resources that have no access controls (for example, shared

spool space on a multi-user system).

This term has other meanings in other technical cultures;

among experimental physicists and hardware engineers of

various kinds it seems to mean any random object of unknown

purpose (similar to hackish use of frob). It has also been

used to describe an amusing trick-the-eye drawing resembling a

three-pronged fork that appears to depict a three-dimensional

object until one realises that the parts fit together in an

impossible way.

[Jargon File]