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
(especially 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 17 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.