- The strap with which a fellow with legs pulls boots over his feet.
- Also called booting. Use of small, relatively constant computer programs (the bootloader) to load larger programs, especially in multiple stages. The bootloader in a computer's BIOS loads the first sector of the disk, which loads the main bootloader from a fixed location on disk. This larger program can interpret the filesystem and load an operating system's kernel, which loads the drivers for other devices. Bootloaders on workstation machines often contain a menu: "Would you like to run Linux, BeOS, or Windows?" See also How an operating system boots, LILO, GRUB, and dual boot.
- The way out of any other analogous Catch-22 situation.
Often, an employer will require n months of paid work experience before she will hire you. An interviewer for a temporary employment agency told me that the best way to bootstrap a career is to get a first job in retail or restaurants.
There are also bootstrap issues on user-moderated message boards. A user posting a message to Slashdot or Half-empty risks some points (an explicit wager on Half-empty; risk of massive negative moderation or a bitchslap on Slashdot). Once you lose points, you can't post, or you post at such a low default score that nobody, not even a moderator, ever bothers reading what you write. Normally, these services allow a reformed troll or spammer to earn points back by doing some limited moderation (rating on Half-empty; meta-moderation on Slashdot).