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.
[glossary]