WhatIs

/rōch/

[Bell Labs]

vt. To destroy, esp. of a data structure. Hardware gets toasted or fried, software gets roached.

/R-L/

[MUD community]

n. Real Life.

"Firiss laughs in RL" means that Firiss's player is laughing.

Oppose VR.

/rīt thiŋ/

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.

/rīs bäks/

[from ham radio slang]

n. Any Asian-made commodity computer, esp. an 80x86-based machine built to IBM PC-compatible ISA or EISA-bus standards.

/rib sīt/

[by analogy with backbone site]

n. 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.

/R-F-E/

n. 1. [techspeak] Request For Enhancement.

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.

/R-F-C/

[Request For Comment]

n. One of a long-established series of numbered Internet standards widely followed by commercial and PD software 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.

/re-trō-kəm-pyüt-iŋ/

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 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.

/R-E-T-I/

v. Syn. RTI

/ret'kon/

[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. E.g., revealing that a whole season of "Dallas" was a dream was a retcon.