A bug or design error that limits a program's
capabilities, and which is sufficiently egregious that nobody can quite
work up enough nerve to describe it as a feature.
Often used (esp. by marketroid types) to make it
sound as though some crippling bogosity had been intended by the designers
all along, or was forced upon them by arcane technical constraints of a
nature no mere user could possibly comprehend (these claims are almost
invariably false).
Old-time hacker Joseph M. Newcomer advises that whenever choosing a
quantifiable but arbitrary restriction, you should make it either a power
of 2 or a power of 2 minus 1. If you impose a limit of 107 items in a
list, everyone will know it is a random number — on the other hand, a
limit of 15 or 16 suggests some deep reason (involving 0- or 1-based
indexing in binary) and you will get less flamage
for it. Limits which are round numbers in base 10 are always especially
suspect.
