educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short
BASIC programs (on the order of 10--20 lines) very easily; writing
anything longer is (a) very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits
that will bite him/her later if he/she tries to hack in a real
language. This wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't
made BASIC so common on low-end micros. As it is, it ruins
thousands of potential wizards a year.

:batch: adj. 1. Non-interactive. Hackers use this somewhat more
loosely than the traditional technical definitions justify; in
particular, switches on a normally interactive program that prepare
it to receive non-interactive command input are often referred to
as `batch mode' switches. A `batch file' is a series of
instructions written to be handed to an interactive program running
in batch mode. 2. Performance of dreary tasks all at one sitting.
"I finally sat down in batch mode and wrote out checks for all
those bills; I guess they'll turn the electricity back on next
week..." 3. Accumulation of a number of small tasks that can be
lumped together for greater efficiency. "I'm batching up those
letters to send sometime" "I'm batching up bottles to take to the
recycling center."

:bathtub curve: n. Common term for the curve (resembling an
end-to-end section of one of those claw-footed antique bathtubs)
that describes the expected failure rate of electronics with time:
initially high, dropping to near 0 for most of the system's
lifetime, then rising again as it `tires out'. See also {burn-in
period}, {infant mortality}.

:baud: /bawd/ [simplified from its technical meaning] n. Bits per