WhatIs

/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.

/ra-stər bərn/

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.

/ra-stər bla-stər/

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'.

/rer mōd/

[UNIX]

adj. 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.

/rāp/

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.

/ran-dəm-nəs/

n. An inexplicable misfeature; gratuitous inelegance. Also, 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!"

/ran-dəm nəm-bərz/

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).

/ran-dəm/

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."

/ram/

RAM, or Random Access Memory, is an essential component of your computer that functions as its short-term memory. 

Unlike the long-term storage provided by your hard drive or solid-state drive, RAM is used to temporarily hold data and instructions that your computer needs to access quickly. 

/rān dan(t)s/

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.