Bill Sommerfeld's Weblog

Wednesday June 08, 2005

On the conversion of working systems into warm bricks... Operating systems development communities wind up inventing and using a fair bit of slang.  The existing Solaris development community within Sun tends to use one particular metaphor a fair bit: the brick.  That's what you get when you take your test machine, add your latest test bits, and, well, something goes wrong in a big way and your system (whether a low end PC or high end multiprocessor) winds up having all of the capability of a Warm Brick, at least until you get  a chance to reinstall it. 

Typical usage: "Oops, I bricked it."   "Hey, when you brickify a test machine, at least reinstall a good build on it before you move on..", and "Bugs in the packaging scripts may still result in brickification".

(Note: members of another OS development community have been known to use "brick" as short for  "throw a brick at".   As far as I can tell, these usages are completely unrelated).
(2005-06-08 16:22:54.0) Permalink Comments [1]