WhatIs

/rāv/

[WPI]

vi. 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.

/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.