bug (redirected from True bugs)

bug, in zoology

bug, common name correctly applied to insects belonging to the order Hemiptera, although members of the order Homoptera (e.g., mealybug) are sometimes referred to as bugs, as are other insects in general. The true bugs (Hemipterans) have a characteristic pair of front wings that are partially thickened and darkened at the base and partially membranous at the apex. Development is gradual through an incomplete metamorphosis with a number of nymphal stages before the reproductively mature adult stage is reached. Most bugs are terrestrial, but many are aquatic (e.g., various water bugs).

Although bugs vary greatly in size, color, and physical appearance, they all have piercing-sucking mouthparts in the form of a jointed beak. Most species suck plant juices (e.g., the squash bug and chinch bug); however, some suck the blood of other insects and spiders (e.g., the assassin bug and backswimmer). Others, such as the bedbug, feed on people and other animals. Many of these insects characteristically secrete defensive substances (e.g., the stinkbug). The true bugs are classified in the phylum Arthropoda, class Insecta, order Hemiptera.

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Bug, river, E Europe, also known as Western Bug

Bug (bg, bŭg), Pol. Bug, Ukr. Buh or Zakhidnyy Buh, river, c.480 mi (770 km) long, rising in the Volhynian-Podolian hills, W Ukraine. It flows N along the Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Belarusian borders past Brest and then NW through Poland to join the Vistula River (with the Narew) near Warsaw. It is linked with the Dnieper by the Dnieper-Bug Canal via the Pina River and with the Niemen by the Augustov Canal via the Narva River. The Bug is also known as the Western Bug.

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Bug, river, Ukraine, also known as Southern Bug

Bug or Southern Bug, river, Ukraine: see Buh.

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bug

Coding error in a computer program that prevents it from functioning as designed. Most software companies have a quality-assurance department which is charged with finding program bugs while the program is in development (debugging); bugs are also often detected by means of beta testing (testing of a product, often by potential consumers, before it is placed on the market). The term originated in a computer context in 1945 when a moth flew into and jammed an electrical relay of the Harvard Mark II computer; it was extracted and taped into the log book with the inscription “First actual case of bug being found” (the term having previously been used for other kinds of mechanical defects).

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bug

Commonly, any insect; scientifically, any member of the insect order Heteroptera. In scientific usage, when the word “bug” is part of the common name for a member of the order Heteroptera, it is a separate word (e.g., “chinch bug”); when used as part of the common name for an organism that is not a heteropteran, it is not separated (e.g., the ladybug, in the order Coleoptera). In common usage, there are many exceptions to this convention (e.g., bedbugs are heteropterans).

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A persistent error in software or hardware. If the bug is in software, it can be corrected by changing the program. If the bug is in hardware, new circuits have to be designed.

Although the derivation of bug is generally attributed to the moth that was found squashed between the points of an electromechanical relay in a computer in the 1940s, the term goes back to the 1800s to refer to flaws in mechanical systems. See buggy, bug fix, software bug, broken and Web bug. Contrast with glitch.

A Note from the Author
On October 19, 1992, I found my first "real bug." When I fired up my laser printer, it printed blotchy pages. Upon inspection, I found a bug lying belly up in the trough below the corona wire. The printer worked fine after removing it!

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(programming)

bug - An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of hardware, especially one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of feature. E.g. "There's a bug in the editor: it writes things out backward." The identification and removal of bugs in a program is called "debugging". Admiral Grace Hopper (an early computing pioneer better known for inventing COBOL) liked to tell a story in which a technician solved a glitch in the Harvard Mark II machine by pulling an actual insect out from between the contacts of one of its relays, and she subsequently promulgated bug in its hackish sense as a joke about the incident (though, as she was careful to admit, she was not there when it happened). For many years the logbook associated with the incident and the actual bug in question (a moth) sat in a display case at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC). The entire story, with a picture of the logbook and the moth taped into it, is recorded in the "Annals of the History of Computing", Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 1981), pp. 285--286. The text of the log entry (from September 9, 1947), reads "1545 Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found". This wording establishes that the term was already in use at the time in its current specific sense - and Hopper herself reports that the term "bug" was regularly applied to problems in radar electronics during WWII. Indeed, the use of "bug" to mean an industrial defect was already established in Thomas Edison's time, and a more specific and rather modern use can be found in an electrical handbook from 1896 ("Hawkin's New Catechism of Electricity", Theo. Audel & Co.) which says: "The term "bug" is used to a limited extent to designate any fault or trouble in the connections or working of electric apparatus." It further notes that the term is "said to have originated in quadruplex telegraphy and have been transferred to all electric apparatus." The latter observation may explain a common folk etymology of the term; that it came from telephone company usage, in which "bugs in a telephone cable" were blamed for noisy lines. Though this derivation seems to be mistaken, it may well be a distorted memory of a joke first current among *telegraph* operators more than a century ago! Actually, use of "bug" in the general sense of a disruptive event goes back to Shakespeare! In the first edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary one meaning of "bug" is "A frightful object; a walking spectre"; this is traced to "bugbear", a Welsh term for a variety of mythological monster which (to complete the circle) has recently been reintroduced into the popular lexicon through fantasy role-playing games. In any case, in jargon the word almost never refers to insects. Here is a plausible conversation that never actually happened: "There is a bug in this ant farm!" "What do you mean? I don't see any ants in it." "That's the bug." [There has been a widespread myth that the original bug was moved to the Smithsonian, and an earlier version of this entry so asserted. A correspondent who thought to check discovered that the bug was not there. While investigating this in late 1990, your editor discovered that the NSWC still had the bug, but had unsuccessfully tried to get the Smithsonian to accept it - and that the present curator of their History of American Technology Museum didn't know this and agreed that it would make a worthwhile exhibit. It was moved to the Smithsonian in mid-1991, but due to space and money constraints has not yet been exhibited. Thus, the process of investigating the original-computer-bug bug fixed it in an entirely unexpected way, by making the myth true! - ESR]