blivet
blivet: /bliv'*t/ n. [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 realizes that
the parts fit together in an impossible way.
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