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ravevi.
[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. Seeflame. 6. Also used to describe a less negative form of blather, such as friendly bullshitting. `Rave' differs slightly fromflamein that `rave' implies that it is the persistence or obliviousness of the person speaking that is annoying, whileflameimplies somewhat more strongly that the tone or content is offensive as well.
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rave on!
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rave on!imp.
Sarcastic invitation to continue arave, often by someone who wishes the raver would get a clue but realizes this is unlikely.
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ravs
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ravs/ravz/, also `Chinese ravs' n.
[primarily MIT/Boston usage] 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', and 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 pan-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 alsooriental food.
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raw mode
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raw moden.
A mode that allows a program to transfer bits directly to or from an I/O device (or, underbogusoperating systems that make a distinction, a disk file) without any processing, abstraction, or interpretation by the operating system. Comparerare mode,cooked mode. This is techspeak under Unix, jargon elsewhere.
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RBL/R-B-L/
Abbreviation: "Realtime Blackhole List". A service that allows people to blacklist sites for emittingspam, and makes the blacklist available in real time to electronic-mail transport programs that know how to use RBL so they can filter out mail from those sites. Drastic (and controversial) but effective. There is an RBL home page.
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rc file/R-C fi:l/ n.
[Unix: from `runcom files' on theCTSSsystem 1962-63, 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 alsodot file,profile(sense 1).
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RE
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RE/R-E/ n.
Common spoken and written shorthand forregexp.
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read-only user
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read-only usern.
Describes aluserwho uses computers almost exclusively for reading Usenet, bulletin boards, and/or email, rather than writing code or purveying useful information. Seetwink,terminal junkie,lurker.
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README filen.
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".
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real
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realadj.
Not simulated. Often used as a specific antonym tovirtualin any of its jargon senses.
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real estaten.
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 alsonanoacre). May also be used of floor space in adinosaur pen, or even space on a crowded desktop (whether physical or electronic).
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real hack
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real hackn.
Acrock. This is sometimes used affectionately; seehack.
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real operating system
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real operating systemn.
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 arealoperating system?", people from the commercial/industrial Unix sector are known to complain "BSD? Why don't you use arealoperating system?", and people from IBM object "Unix? Why don't you use arealoperating system?" OnlyMS-DOSis universally considered unreal. Seeholy wars,religious issues,proprietary,Get a real computer!
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Real Programmern.
[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 thebare metaland 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 beenbummed into a state oftenseness 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 aGood Thingthat 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" 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. You can browse "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" from the Datamation home page http://www.datamation.com.
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Real Soon Nowadv.
[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. Comparecopious free time.
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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 thecanonicalexample. 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."
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real usern.
1. A commercial user. One who is payingrealmoney 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. Seeuser. 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 alsoluser.
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Real Worldn.
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 (seecode 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 town. See alsofear and loathing,mundane, anduninteresting.
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reality checkn.
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 asmoke test. 2. The act of letting areal usertry out prototype software. Comparesanity check.
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reality-distortion fieldn.
An expression used to describe the persuasive ability of managers like Steve Jobs (the term originated at Apple in the 1980s to describe his peculiar charisma). Those close to these managers become passionately committed to possibly insane projects, without regard to the practicality of their implementation or competitive forces in the marketpace.
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reaper
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reapern.
AprowlerthatGFRs files. A file removed in this way is said to have been `reaped'.
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recompile the world
The surprisingly large amount of work that needs to be done as the result of any small but globally visible program change. "The world" may mean the entirety of some huge program, or may in theory refer to every program of a certain class in the entire known universe. For instance, "Add one #define to stdio.h, and you have to recompile the world." This means that any minor change to the standard-I/O header file theoretically mandates recompiling every C program in existence, even if only to verify that the change didn't screw something else up. In practice, you may not actually have to recompile the world, but the implication is that some human cleverness is required to figure out what parts can be safely left out.
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rectangle slingern.
Seepolygon pusher.
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recursion
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recursionn.
Seerecursion. See alsotail recursion.
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recursive acronym
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recursive acronymn.
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), andGNU(q.v., sense 1) stands for "GNU's Not Unix!" -- and a company with the name Cygnus, which expands to "Cygnus, Your GNU Support" (though Cygnus people say this is abackronym). See alsomung,EMACS.
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Red Book
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Red Bookn.
1. Informal name for one of the four standard references onPostScript("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 theGreen Book, theBlue Book, and theWhite 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 theGreen 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 USA 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 theOrange Book. 6. Nemeth, Snyder, Seebass, Hein; "Unix System Administration Handbook, Second Edition" (Prentice Hall PTR, New Jersey; 1995; QA76.76.063N45; ISBN 0-13-151051-7). See alsobook titles.