WhatIs

/R-T-M/

[USENET: acronym for Read The Manual]

1. Politer variant of RTFM.

2. Robert T. Morris, perpetrator of the great Internet worm of 1988; 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 name on ITS was hacked from RTM to RTFM.

/R-T-F-M/

[UNIX]

imp. Acronym for 'Read The Fucking Manual'. 1. Used by gurus 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.

/R-T-F-A-Q/

[USENET: primarily written, by analogy with RTFM]

imp. Abbrev. for 'Read the FAQ!', an exhortation that the person addressed ought to read the newsgroup's FAQ list before posting questions.

/R-S-N/

adj. See Real Soon Now.

/rō-tə-rē dē-bəg-ər/

[Commodore]

n. 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.

/rät thər(t)-tēn/

[USENET: from rotate alphabet 13 places]

/rüt mōd/

n. Syn. with wizard mode or wheel mode. Like these, it is often generalized to describe privileged states in systems other than OSes.

/rüm tem-pər-chu̇r ī-kyü/

[IBM]

quant. 80 or below. 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.

/rōg/

[UNIX]

n. A Dungeons-and-Dragons-like game using character graphics, written under BSD UNIX and subsequently ported to other UNIX system gue(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).

/rə-kō-kō/

adj. Baroque in the extreme. 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. Fred Brooks (the man who coined second-system effect) said:

"Every program eventually becomes rococo, and then rubble."