The Jargon Lexicon
= R =
=====
rabbit job: n. [Cambridge] A batch job that does little, if
any, real work, but creates one or more copies of itself, breeding
like rabbits. Compare {wabbit}, {fork bomb}.
rain dance: n. 1. Any ceremonial action taken to correct a
hardware problem, with the expectation that nothing will be
accomplished. This especially applies to reseating printed circuit
boards, reconnecting cables, etc. "I can't boot up the machine.
We'll have to wait for Greg to do his rain dance." 2. Any arcane
sequence of actions performed with computers or software in order
to achieve some goal; the term is usually restricted to rituals
that include both an {incantation} or two and physical activity
or motion. Compare {magic}, {voodoo programming}, {black
art}, {cargo cult programming}, {wave a dead chicken}.
rainbow series: n. Any of several series of technical
manuals distinguished by cover color. The original rainbow series
was the NCSC security manuals (see {Orange Book}, {crayola
books}); the term has also been commonly applied to the PostScript
reference set (see {Red Book}, {Green Book}, {Blue Book},
{White Book}). Which books are meant by "`the' rainbow
series" unqualified is thus dependent on one's local technical
culture.
random: adj. 1. Unpredictable (closest to mathematical
definition); weird. "The system's been behaving pretty
randomly." 2. Assorted; undistinguished. "Who was at the
conference?" "Just a bunch of random business types."
3. (pejorative) Frivolous; unproductive; undirected. "He's just a
random loser." 4. Incoherent or inelegant; poorly chosen; not
well organized. "The program has a random set of misfeatures."
"That's a random name for that function." "Well, all the names
were chosen pretty randomly." 5. In no particular order, though
deterministic. "The I/O channels are in a pool, and when a file
is opened one is chosen randomly." 6. Arbitrary. "It generates
a random name for the scratch file." 7. Gratuitously wrong, i.e.,
poorly done and for no good apparent reason. For example, a
program that handles file name defaulting in a particularly useless
way, or an assembler routine that could easily have been coded
using only three registers, but redundantly uses seven for values
with non-overlapping lifetimes, so that no one else can invoke it
without first saving four extra registers. What {randomness}!
8. n. A random hacker; used particularly of high-school students
who soak up computer time and generally get in the way. 9. n.
Anyone who is not a hacker (or, sometimes, anyone not known to the
hacker speaking); the noun form of sense 2. "I went to the talk,
but the audience was full of randoms asking bogus questions".
10. n. (occasional MIT usage) One who lives at Random Hall. See
also {J. Random}, {some random X}.
random numbers:: n. When one wishes to specify a large but
random number of things, and the context is inappropriate for
{N}, certain numbers are preferred by hacker tradition (that is,
easily recognized as placeholders). These include the following:
17
Long described at MIT as `the least random number'; see 23.
23
Sacred number of Eris, Goddess of Discord (along with 17 and
5).
42
The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe,
and Everything. (Note that this answer is completely
fortuitous. `:-)')
69
From the sexual act. This one was favored in MIT's ITS
culture.
105
69 hex = 105 decimal, and 69 decimal = 105 octal.
666
The Number of the Beast.
For further enlightenment, study the "Principia Discordia",
"{The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy}", "The Joy
of Sex", and the Christian Bible (Revelation 13:18). See also
{Discordianism} or consult your pineal gland. See also {for
values of}.
randomness: n. 1. An inexplicable misfeature; gratuitous
inelegance. 2. A {hack} or {crock} that depends on a complex
combination of coincidences (or, possibly, the combination upon
which the crock depends for its accidental failure to malfunction).
"This hack can output characters 40--57 by putting the character
in the four-bit accumulator field of an XCT and then extracting six
bits -- the low 2 bits of the XCT opcode are the right thing."
"What randomness!" 3. Of people, synonymous with `flakiness'.
The connotation is that the person so described is behaving
weirdly, incompetently, or inappropriately for reasons which are
(a) too tiresome to bother inquiring into, (b) are probably as
inscrutable as quantum phenomena anyway, and (c) are likely to pass
with time. "Maybe he has a real complaint, or maybe it's just
randomness. See if he calls back."
rape: vt. 1. To {screw} someone or something, violently;
in particular, to destroy a program or information irrecoverably.
Often used in describing file-system damage. "So-and-so was
running a program that did absolute disk I/O and ended up raping
the master directory." 2. To strip a piece of hardware for parts.
3. [CMU/Pitt] To mass-copy files from an anonymous ftp site.
"Last night I raped Simtel's dskutl directory."
rare mode: adj. [UNIX] CBREAK mode (character-by-character
with interrupts enabled). Distinguished from {raw mode} and
{cooked mode}; the phrase "a sort of half-cooked (rare?) mode"
is used in the V7/BSD manuals to describe the mode. usage: rare.
raster blaster: n. [Cambridge] Specialized hardware for
{bitblt} operations (a {blitter}). Allegedly inspired by
`Rasta Blasta', British slang for the sort of portable stereo
Americans call a `boom box' or `ghetto blaster'.
raster burn: n. Eyestrain brought on by too many hours of
looking at low-res, poorly tuned, or glare-ridden monitors, esp.
graphics monitors. See {terminal illness}.
rat belt: n. A cable tie, esp. the sawtoothed,
self-locking plastic kind that you can remove only by cutting (as
opposed to a random twist of wire or a twist tie or one of those
humongous metal clip frobs). Small cable ties are `mouse belts'.
rave: vi. [WPI] 1. To persist in discussing a specific
subject. 2. To speak authoritatively on a subject about which one
knows very little. 3. To complain to a person who is not in a
position to correct the difficulty. 4. To purposely annoy another
person verbally. 5. To evangelize. See {flame}. 6. Also used
to describe a less negative form of blather, such as friendly
bullshitting. `Rave' differs slightly from {flame} in that
`rave' implies that it is the persistence or obliviousness of the
person speaking that is annoying, while {flame} implies somewhat
more strongly that the tone or content is offensive as well.
rave on!: imp. Sarcastic invitation to continue a {rave},
often by someone who wishes the raver would get a clue but realizes
this is unlikely.
ravs: /ravz/, also `Chinese ravs' n. Jiao-zi (steamed or
boiled) or Guo-tie (pan-fried). A Chinese appetizer, known
variously in the plural as dumplings, pot stickers (the literal
translation of guo-tie), and (around Boston) `Peking Ravioli'. The
term `rav' is short for `ravioli', which among hackers always
means the Chinese kind rather than the Italian kind. Both consist
of a filling in a pasta shell, but the Chinese kind includes no
cheese, uses a thinner pasta, has a pork-vegetable filling (good
ones include Chinese chives), and is cooked differently, either by
steaming or frying. A rav or dumpling can be cooked any way, but a
potsticker is always the fried kind (so called because it sticks to
the frying pot and has to be scraped off). "Let's get
hot-and-sour soup and three orders of ravs." See also
{{oriental food}}.
raw mode: n. A mode that allows a program to transfer bits
directly to or from an I/O device (or, under {bogus} systems
that make a distinction, a disk file) without any processing,
abstraction, or interpretation by the operating system. Compare
{rare mode}, {cooked mode}. This is techspeak under UNIX,
jargon elsewhere.
rc file: /R-C fi:l/ n. [UNIX: from `runcom files' on
the {CTSS} system ca.1955, via the startup script
`/etc/rc'] Script file containing startup instructions for an
application program (or an entire operating system), usually a text
file containing commands of the sort that might have been invoked
manually once the system was running but are to be executed
automatically each time the system starts up. See also {dot
file}, {profile} (sense 1).
RE: /R-E/ n. Common spoken and written shorthand for
{regexp}.
read-only user: n. Describes a {luser} who uses computers
almost exclusively for reading Usenet, bulletin boards, and/or
email, rather than writing code or purveying useful information.
See {twink}, {terminal junkie}, {lurker}.
README file: n. Hacker's-eye introduction traditionally
included in the top-level directory of a UNIX source distribution,
containing a pointer to more detailed documentation, credits,
miscellaneous revision history, notes, etc. (The file may be named
README, or READ.ME, or rarely ReadMe or readme.txt or some other
variant.) In the Mac and PC worlds, software is not usually
distributed in source form, and the README is more likely to
contain user-oriented material like last-minute documentation
changes, error workarounds, and restrictions. When asked, hackers
invariably relate the README convention to the famous scene in
Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures In Wonderland" in which
Alice confronts magic munchies labeled "Eat Me" and "Drink Me".
real: adj. Not simulated. Often used as a specific antonym
to {virtual} in any of its jargon senses.
real estate: n. May be used for any critical resource
measured in units of area. Most frequently used of `chip real
estate', the area available for logic on the surface of an
integrated circuit (see also {nanoacre}). May also be used of
floor space in a {dinosaur pen}, or even space on a crowded
desktop (whether physical or electronic).
real hack: n. A {crock}. This is sometimes used
affectionately; see {hack}.
real operating system: n. The sort the speaker is used to.
People from the BSDophilic academic community are likely to issue
comments like "System V? Why don't you use a *real*
operating system?", people from the commercial/industrial UNIX
sector are known to complain "BSD? Why don't you use a
*real* operating system?", and people from IBM object
"UNIX? Why don't you use a *real* operating system?" Only
{MS-DOS} is universally considered unreal. See {holy wars},
{religious issues}, {proprietary}, {Get a real computer!}
Real Programmer: n. [indirectly, from the book
"Real Men Don't Eat Quiche"] A particular sub-variety of
hacker: one possessed of a flippant attitude toward complexity that
is arrogant even when justified by experience. The archetypal
`Real Programmer' likes to program on the {bare metal} and is
very good at same, remembers the binary opcodes for every machine
he has ever programmed, thinks that HLLs are sissy, and uses a
debugger to edit his code because full-screen editors are for
wimps. Real Programmers aren't satisfied with code that hasn't
been {bum}med into a state of {tense}ness just short of
rupture. Real Programmers never use comments or write
documentation: "If it was hard to write", says the Real
Programmer, "it should be hard to understand." Real Programmers
can make machines do things that were never in their spec sheets;
in fact, they are seldom really happy unless doing so. A Real
Programmer's code can awe with its fiendish brilliance, even as its
crockishness appalls. Real Programmers live on junk food and
coffee, hang line-printer art on their walls, and terrify the crap
out of other programmers -- because someday, somebody else might
have to try to understand their code in order to change it. Their
successors generally consider it a {Good Thing} that there
aren't many Real Programmers around any more. For a famous (and
somewhat more positive) portrait of a Real Programmer, see
"{The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer}" in Appendix A.
The term itself was popularized by a 1983 Datamation article
"Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" by Ed Post, still
circulating on Usenet and Internet in on-line form.
Real Soon Now: adv. [orig. from SF's fanzine community,
popularized by Jerry Pournelle's column in "BYTE"] 1. Supposed
to be available (or fixed, or cheap, or whatever) real soon now
according to somebody, but the speaker is quite skeptical. 2. When
one's gods, fates, or other time commitments permit one to get to
it (in other words, don't hold your breath). Often abbreviated
RSN. Compare {copious free time}.
real time: 1. [techspeak] adj. Describes an application
which requires a program to respond to stimuli within some small
upper limit of response time (typically milli- or microseconds).
Process control at a chemical plant is the classic example. Such
applications often require special operating systems (because
everything else must take a back seat to response time) and
speed-tuned hardware. 2. adv. In jargon, refers to doing something
while people are watching or waiting. "I asked her how to find
the calling procedure's program counter on the stack and she came
up with an algorithm in real time."
real user: n. 1. A commercial user. One who is paying
*real* money for his computer usage. 2. A non-hacker.
Someone using the system for an explicit purpose (a research
project, a course, etc.) other than pure exploration. See
{user}. Hackers who are also students may also be real users.
"I need this fixed so I can do a problem set. I'm not complaining
out of randomness, but as a real user." See also {luser}.
Real World: n. 1. Those institutions at which
`programming' may be used in the same sentence as `FORTRAN',
`{COBOL}', `RPG', `{IBM}', `DBASE', etc. Places where
programs do such commercially necessary but intellectually
uninspiring things as generating payroll checks and invoices.
2. The location of non-programmers and activities not related to
programming. 3. A bizarre dimension in which the standard dress is
shirt and tie and in which a person's working hours are defined as
9 to 5 (see {code grinder}). 4. Anywhere outside a university.
"Poor fellow, he's left MIT and gone into the Real World." Used
pejoratively by those not in residence there. In conversation,
talking of someone who has entered the Real World is not unlike
speaking of a deceased person. It is also noteworthy that on the
campus of Cambridge University in England, there is a gaily-painted
lamp-post which bears the label `REALITY CHECKPOINT'. It marks the
boundary between university and the Real World; check your notions
of reality before passing. This joke is funnier because the
Cambridge `campus' is actually coextensive with the center of
Cambridge. See also {fear and loathing}, {mundane}, and
{uninteresting}.
reality check: n. 1. The simplest kind of test of software
or hardware; doing the equivalent of asking it what 2 + 2 is
and seeing if you get 4. The software equivalent of a {smoke
test}. 2. The act of letting a {real user} try out prototype
software. Compare {sanity check}.
reaper: n. A {prowler} that {GFR}s files. A file
removed in this way is said to have been `reaped'.
rectangle slinger: n. See {polygon pusher}.
recursion: n. See {recursion}. See also {tail
recursion}.
recursive acronym:: n. A hackish (and especially MIT)
tradition is to choose acronyms/abbreviations that refer humorously
to themselves or to other acronyms/abbreviations. The classic
examples were two MIT editors called EINE ("EINE Is Not EMACS")
and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE Initially"). More recently, there is a
Scheme compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and
{GNU} (q.v., sense 1) stands for "GNU's Not UNIX!" -- and a
company with the name CYGNUS, which expands to "Cygnus, Your GNU
Support". See also {mung}, {EMACS}.
Red Book: n. 1. Informal name for one of the three standard
references on {{PostScript}} ("PostScript Language Reference
Manual", Adobe Systems (Addison-Wesley, 1985; QA76.73.P67P67; ISBN
0-201-10174-2, or the 1990 second edition ISBN 0-201-18127-4); the
others are known as the {Green Book}, the {Blue Book}, and
the {White Book} (sense 2). 2. Informal name for one of the 3
standard references on Smalltalk ("Smalltalk-80: The
Interactive Programming Environment" by Adele Goldberg
(Addison-Wesley, 1984; QA76.8.S635G638; ISBN 0-201-11372-4); this
too is associated with blue and green books). 3. Any of the 1984
standards issued by the CCITT eighth plenary assembly. These
include, among other things, the X.400 email spec and the Group 1
through 4 fax standards. 4. The new version of the {Green Book}
(sense 4) -- IEEE 1003.1-1990, a.k.a ISO 9945-1 -- is (because of
the color and the fact that it is printed on A4 paper) known in the
U.S.A. as "the Ugly Red Book That Won't Fit On The Shelf" and in
Europe as "the Ugly Red Book That's A Sensible Size". 5. The NSA
"Trusted Network Interpretation" companion to the {Orange
Book}. See also {{book titles}}.
red wire: n. [IBM] Patch wires installed by programmers who have
no business mucking with the hardware. It is said that the only
thing more dangerous than a hardware guy with a code patch is a
{softy} with a soldering iron.... Compare {blue wire},
{yellow wire}, {purple wire}.
regexp: /reg'eksp/ n. [UNIX] (alt. `regex' or `reg-ex')
1. Common written and spoken abbreviation for `regular
expression', one of the wildcard patterns used, e.g., by UNIX
utilities such as `grep(1)', `sed(1)', and `awk(1)'.
These use conventions similar to but more elaborate than those
described under {glob}. For purposes of this lexicon, it is
sufficient to note that regexps also allow complemented character
sets using `^'; thus, one can specify `any non-alphabetic
character' with `[^A-Za-z]'. 2. Name of a well-known PD
regexp-handling package in portable C, written by revered Usenetter
Henry Spencer .
register dancing: n. Many older processor architectures
suffer from a serious shortage of general-purpose registers. This
is especially a problem for compiler-writers, because their
generated code needs places to store temporaries for things like
intermediate values in expression evaluation. Some designs with
this problem, like the Intel 80x86, do have a handful of
special-purpose registers that can be pressed into service,
providing suitable care is taken to avoid unpleasant side effects
on the state of the processor: while the special-purpose register
is being used to hold an intermediate value, a delicate minuet is
required in which the previous value of the register is saved and
then restored just before the official function (and value) of the
special-purpose register is again needed.
reincarnation, cycle of: n. See {cycle of reincarnation}.
reinvent the wheel: v. To design or implement a tool
equivalent to an existing one or part of one, with the implication
that doing so is silly or a waste of time. This is often a valid
criticism. On the other hand, automobiles don't use wooden
rollers, and some kinds of wheel have to be reinvented many times
before you get them right. On the third hand, people reinventing
the wheel do tend to come up with the moral equivalent of a
trapezoid with an offset axle.
religion of CHI: /ki:/ n. [Case Western Reserve
University] Yet another hackish parody religion (see also
{Church of the SubGenius}, {Discordianism}). In the mid-70s,
the canonical "Introduction to Programming" courses at CWRU were
taught in Algol, and student exercises were punched on cards and
run on a Univac 1108 system using a homebrew operating system named
CHI. The religion had no doctrines and but one ritual: whenever
the worshipper noted that a digital clock read 11:08, he or she
would recite the phrase "It is 11:08; ABS, ALPHABETIC, ARCSIN,
ARCCOS, ARCTAN." The last five words were the first five
functions in the appropriate chapter of the Algol manual; note the
special pronunciations /obz/ and /ark'sin/ rather than the more
common /ahbz/ and /ark'si:n/. Using an alarm clock to warn of
11:08's arrival was {considered harmful}.
religious issues: n. Questions which seemingly cannot be
raised without touching off {holy wars}, such as "What is the
best operating system (or editor, language, architecture, shell,
mail reader, news reader)?", "What about that Heinlein guy,
eh?", "What should we add to the new Jargon File?" See
{holy wars}; see also {theology}, {bigot}.
This term is a prime example of {ha ha only serious}. People
actually develop the most amazing and religiously intense
attachments to their tools, even when the tools are intangible.
The most constructive thing one can do when one stumbles into the
crossfire is mumble {Get a life!} and leave -- unless, of course,
one's *own* unassailably rational and obviously correct
choices are being slammed.
replicator: n. Any construct that acts to produce copies of
itself; this could be a living organism, an idea (see {meme}), a
program (see {quine}, {worm}, {wabbit}, {fork bomb},
and {virus}), a pattern in a cellular automaton (see {life},
sense 1), or (speculatively) a robot or {nanobot}. It is even
claimed by some that {{UNIX}} and {C} are the symbiotic halves
of an extremely successful replicator; see {UNIX conspiracy}.
reply: n. See {followup}.
restriction: n. 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
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.
retcon: /ret'kon/ [short for `retroactive continuity',
from the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.comics] 1. n. The common
situation in pulp fiction (esp. comics or soap operas) where a
new story `reveals' things about events in previous stories,
usually leaving the `facts' the same (thus preserving
continuity) while completely changing their interpretation. For
example, revealing that a whole season of "Dallas" was a
dream was a retcon. 2. vt. To write such a story about a character
or fictitious object. "Byrne has retconned Superman's cape so
that it is no longer unbreakable." "Marvelman's old adventures
were retconned into synthetic dreams." "Swamp Thing was
retconned from a transformed person into a sentient vegetable."
"Darth Vader was retconned into Luke Skywalker's father in
"The Empire Strikes Back".
[This term is included because it is a good example of hackish
linguistic innovation in a field completely unrelated to computers.
The word `retcon' will probably spread through comics fandom and
lose its association with hackerdom within a couple of years; for
the record, it started here. -- ESR]
[1993 update: some comics fans on the net now claim that retcon was
independently in use in comics fandom before rec.arts.comics.
In lexicography, nothing is ever simple. -- ESR]
RETI: v. Syn. {RTI}
retrocomputing: /ret'-roh-k*m-pyoo'ting/ n. Refers to
emulations of way-behind-the-state-of-the-art hardware or software,
or implementations of never-was-state-of-the-art; esp. if such
implementations are elaborate practical jokes and/or parodies,
written mostly for {hack value}, of more `serious' designs.
Perhaps the most widely distributed retrocomputing utility was the
`pnch(6)' or `bcd(6)' program on V7 and other early UNIX
versions, which would accept up to 80 characters of text argument
and display the corresponding pattern in {{punched card}} code.
Other well-known retrocomputing hacks have included the programming
language {INTERCAL}, a {JCL}-emulating shell for UNIX, the
card-punch-emulating editor named 029, and various elaborate PDP-11
hardware emulators and RT-11 OS emulators written just to keep an
old, sourceless {Zork} binary running.
return from the dead: v. To regain access to the net after a
long absence. Compare {person of no account}.
RFC: /R-F-C/ n. [Request For Comment] One of a
long-established series of numbered Internet informational
documents and standards widely followed by commercial software and
freeware in the Internet and UNIX communities. Perhaps the single
most influential one has been RFC-822 (the Internet mail-format
standard). The RFCs are unusual in that they are floated by
technical experts acting on their own initiative and reviewed by
the Internet at large, rather than formally promulgated through an
institution such as ANSI. For this reason, they remain known as
RFCs even once adopted as standards.
The RFC tradition of pragmatic, experience-driven, after-the-fact
standard writing done by individuals or small working groups has
important advantages over the more formal, committee-driven process
typical of ANSI or ISO. Emblematic of some of these advantages is
the existence of a flourishing tradition of `joke' RFCs; usually
at least one a year is published, usually on April 1st. Well-known
joke RFCs have included 527 ("ARPAWOCKY", R. Merryman, UCSD; 22
June 1973), 748 ("Telnet Randomly-Lose Option", Mark R. Crispin;
1 April 1978), and 1149 ("A Standard for the Transmission of IP
Datagrams on Avian Carriers", D. Waitzman, BBN STC; 1 April
1990). The first was a Lewis Carroll pastiche; the second a parody
of the TCP-IP documentation style, and the third a deadpan
skewering of standards-document legalese, describing protocols for
transmitting Internet data packets by carrier pigeon.
The RFCs are most remarkable for how well they work -- they manage
to have neither the ambiguities that are usually rife in informal
specifications, nor the committee-perpetrated misfeatures that
often haunt formal standards, and they define a network that has
grown to truly worldwide proportions.
RFE: /R-F-E/ n. 1. [techspeak] Request For Enhancement
(compare {RFC}). 2. [from `Radio Free Europe', Bellcore and
Sun] Radio Free Ethernet, a system (originated by Peter Langston)
for broadcasting audio among Sun SPARCstations over the ethernet.
rib site: n. [by analogy with {backbone site}] A machine
that has an on-demand high-speed link to a {backbone site} and
serves as a regional distribution point for lots of third-party
traffic in email and Usenet news. Compare {leaf site},
{backbone site}.
rice box: n. [from ham radio slang] Any Asian-made commodity
computer, esp. an 80x86-based machine built to IBM PC-compatible
ISA or EISA-bus standards.
Right Thing: n. That which is *compellingly* the
correct or appropriate thing to use, do, say, etc. Often
capitalized, always emphasized in speech as though capitalized.
Use of this term often implies that in fact reasonable people may
disagree. "What's the right thing for LISP to do when it sees
`(mod a 0)'? Should it return `a', or give a divide-by-0
error?" Oppose {Wrong Thing}.
RL: // n. [MUD community] Real Life. "Firiss laughs in
RL" means that Firiss's player is laughing. Oppose {VR}.
roach: vt. [Bell Labs] To destroy, esp. of a data
structure. Hardware gets {toast}ed or {fried}, software gets
roached.
robot: n. [IRC, MUD] An {IRC} or {MUD} user who is
actually a program. On IRC, typically the robot provides some
useful service. Examples are NickServ, which tries to prevent
random users from adopting {nick}s already claimed by others,
and MsgServ, which allows one to send asynchronous messages to be
delivered when the recipient signs on. Also common are
`annoybots', such as KissServ, which perform no useful function
except to send cute messages to other people. Service robots are
less common on MUDs; but some others, such as the `Julia' robot
active in 1990--91, have been remarkably impressive Turing-test
experiments, able to pass as human for as long as ten or fifteen
minutes of conversation.
robust: adj. Said of a system that has demonstrated an
ability to recover gracefully from the whole range of exceptional
inputs and situations in a given environment. One step below
{bulletproof}. Carries the additional connotation of elegance
in addition to just careful attention to detail. Compare
{smart}, oppose {brittle}.
rococo: adj. Terminally {baroque}. Used to imply that a
program has become so encrusted with the software equivalent of
gold leaf and curlicues that they have completely swamped the
underlying design. Called after the later and more extreme forms
of Baroque architecture and decoration prevalent during the
mid-1700s in Europe. Alan Perlis said: "Every program eventually
becomes rococo, and then rubble." Compare {critical mass}.
rogue: n. [UNIX] A Dungeons-and-Dragons-like game using character
graphics, written under BSD UNIX and subsequently ported to other
UNIX systems. The original BSD `curses(3)' screen-handling
package was hacked together by Ken Arnold to support
`rogue(6)' and has since become one of UNIX's most important
and heavily used application libraries. Nethack, Omega, Larn, and
an entire subgenre of computer dungeon games all took off from the
inspiration provided by `rogue(6)'. See also {nethack}.
room-temperature IQ: quant. [IBM] 80 or below (nominal room
temperature is 72 degrees Fahrenheit, 22 degrees Celsius). Used in
describing the expected intelligence range of the {luser}.
"Well, but how's this interface going to play with the
room-temperature IQ crowd?" See {drool-proof paper}. This is
a much more insulting phrase in countries that use Celsius
thermometers.
root: n. [UNIX] 1. The {superuser} account (with user name
`root') that ignores permission bits, user number 0 on a UNIX
system. The term {avatar} is also used. 2. The top node of the
system directory structure (home directory of the root user).
3. By extension, the privileged system-maintenance login on any
OS. See {root mode}, {go root}, see also {wheel}.
root mode: n. Syn. with {wizard mode} or `wheel mode'.
Like these, it is often generalized to describe privileged states
in systems other than OSes.
rot13: /rot ther'teen/ n.,v. [Usenet: from `rotate
alphabet 13 places'] The simple Caesar-cypher encryption that
replaces each English letter with the one 13 places forward or back
along the alphabet, so that "The butler did it!" becomes "Gur
ohgyre qvq vg!" Most Usenet news reading and posting programs
include a rot13 feature. It is used to enclose the text in a
sealed wrapper that the reader must choose to open -- e.g., for
posting things that might offend some readers, or {spoiler}s. A
major advantage of rot13 over rot(N) for other N is
that it is self-inverse, so the same code can be used for encoding
and decoding.
rotary debugger: n. [Commodore] Essential equipment for
those late-night or early-morning debugging sessions. Mainly used
as sustenance for the hacker. Comes in many decorator colors, such
as Sausage, Pepperoni, and Garbage. See {pizza, ANSI standard}.
round tape: n. Industry-standard 1/2-inch magnetic tape (7-
or 9-track) on traditional circular reels. See {macrotape},
oppose {square tape}.
RSN: /R-S-N/ adj. See {Real Soon Now}.
RTBM: /R-T-B-M/ imp. [UNIX] Commonwealth Hackish variant
of {RTFM}; expands to `Read The Bloody Manual'. RTBM is often
the entire text of the first reply to a question from a
{newbie}; the *second* would escalate to "RTFM".
RTFAQ: /R-T-F-A-Q/ imp. [Usenet: primarily written, by
analogy with {RTFM}] Abbrev. for `Read the FAQ!', an
exhortation that the person addressed ought to read the newsgroup's
{FAQ list} before posting questions.
RTFB: /R-T-F-B/ imp. [UNIX] Acronym for `Read The Fucking
Binary'. Used when neither documentation nor source for the
problem at hand exists, and the only thing to do is use some
debugger or monitor and directly analyze the assembler or even the
machine code. "No source for the buggy port driver? Aaargh! I
*hate* proprietary operating systems. Time to RTFB."
Of the various RTF? forms, `RTFB' is the least pejorative against
anyone asking a question for which RTFB is the answer; the anger
here is directed at the absence of both source *and* adequate
documentation.
RTFM: /R-T-F-M/ imp. [UNIX] Acronym for `Read The Fucking
Manual'. 1. Used by {guru}s to brush off questions they
consider trivial or annoying. Compare {Don't do that, then!}.
2. Used when reporting a problem to indicate that you aren't just
asking out of {randomness}. "No, I can't figure out how to
interface UNIX to my toaster, and yes, I have RTFM." Unlike
sense 1, this use is considered polite. See also {FM},
{RTFAQ}, {RTFB}, {RTFS}, {RTM}, all of which mutated
from RTFM, and compare {UTSL}.
RTFS: /R-T-F-S/ [UNIX] 1. imp. Acronym for `Read The
Fucking Source'. Variant form of {RTFM}, used when the problem
at hand is not necessarily obvious and not answerable from the
manuals -- or the manuals are not yet written and maybe never will
be. For even trickier situations, see {RTFB}. Unlike RTFM, the
anger inherent in RTFS is not usually directed at the person asking
the question, but rather at the people who failed to provide
adequate documentation. 2. imp. `Read The Fucking Standard'; this
oath can only be used when the problem area (e.g., a language or
operating system interface) has actually been codified in a
ratified standards document. The existence of these standards
documents (and the technically inappropriate but politically
mandated compromises that they inevitably contain, and the
impenetrable {legalese} in which they are invariably written,
and the unbelievably tedious bureaucratic process by which they are
produced) can be unnerving to hackers, who are used to a certain
amount of ambiguity in the specifications of the systems they use.
(Hackers feel that such ambiguities are acceptable as long as the
{Right Thing} to do is obvious to any thinking observer; sadly,
this casual attitude towards specifications becomes unworkable when
a system becomes popular in the {Real World}.) Since a hacker
is likely to feel that a standards document is both unnecessary and
technically deficient, the deprecation inherent in this term may be
directed as much against the standard as against the person who
ought to read it.
RTI: /R-T-I/ interj. The mnemonic for the `return from
interrupt' instruction on many computers including the 6502 and
6800. The variant `RETI' is found among former Z80 hackers
(almost nobody programs these things in assembler anymore).
Equivalent to "Now, where was I?" or used to end a
conversational digression. See {pop}; see also {POPJ}.
RTM: /R-T-M/ [Usenet: abbreviation for `Read The Manual']
1. Politer variant of {RTFM}. 2. Robert T. Morris Jr.,
perpetrator of the great Internet worm of 1988 (see {Great Worm,
the}); villain to many, naive hacker gone wrong to a few. Morris
claimed that the worm that brought the Internet to its knees was a
benign experiment that got out of control as the result of a coding
error. After the storm of negative publicity that followed this
blunder, Morris's username on ITS was hacked from RTM to
{RTFM}.
RTS: /R-T-S/ imp. Acronym for `Read The Screen'. Mainly
used by hackers in the microcomputer world. Refers to what one
would like to tell the {suit} one is forced to explain an
extremely simple application to. Particularly appropriate when the
suit failed to notice the `Press any key to continue' prompt, and
wishes to know `why won't it do anything'. Also seen as `RTFS' in
especially deserving cases.
rude: [WPI] adj. 1. (of a program) Badly written.
2. Functionally poor, e.g., a program that is very difficult to use
because of gratuitously poor (random?) design decisions. Oppose
{cuspy}. 3. Anything that manipulates a shared resource without
regard for its other users in such a way as to cause a (non-fatal)
problem. examples: programs that change tty modes without
resetting them on exit, or windowing programs that keep forcing
themselves to the top of the window stack. Compare
{all-elbows}.
runes: pl.n. 1. Anything that requires {heavy wizardry}
or {black art} to {parse}: core dumps, JCL commands, APL, or
code in a language you haven't a clue how to read. Not quite as
bad as {line noise}, but close. Compare {casting the runes},
{Great Runes}. 2. Special display characters (for example, the
high-half graphics on an IBM PC).
runic: adj. Syn. {obscure}. VMS fans sometimes refer to
UNIX as `Runix'; UNIX fans return the compliment by expanding VMS
to `Very Messy Syntax' or `Vachement Mauvais Syst`eme' (French
idiom, "Hugely Bad System").
rusty iron: n. Syn. {tired iron}. It has been claimed
that this is the inevitable fate of {water MIPS}.
rusty wire: n. [Amateur Packet Radio] Any very noisy network
medium, in which the packets are subject to frequent corruption.
Most prevalent in reference to wireless links subject to all the
vagaries of RF noise and marginal propagation conditions. "Yes,
but how good is your whizbang new protocol on really rusty
wire?".
rusty memory: n. Mass-storage that uses iron-oxide-based
magnetic media (esp. tape and the pre-Winchester removable disk
packs used in {washing machine}s). Compare {donuts}.