WhatIs

/rē(-ə)l hak/

n. A crock. This is sometimes used affectionately; see hack.

/rē(-ə)l i-stāt/

n. 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 also nanoacre). May also be used of floor space in a dinosaur pen, or even space on a crowded desktop (whether physical or electronic).

/rēd-mē fī(-ə)l/

n. By convention, the top-level directory of a UNIX source distribution always contains a file named 'README' (or READ.ME, or rarely ReadMe or some other variant), which is a hacker's-eye introduction containing a pointer to more detailed documentation, credits, miscellaneous revision history notes, etc. When asked, hackers invariably relate this 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".

/rēd-ōn-lē yü-zər/

n. Describes a luser who uses computers almost exclusively for reading USENET, bulletin boards, and/or email, rather than writing code or purveying useful information.

See twink, terminal junkie, lurker.

/R-E/

n. Common spoken and written shorthand for regexp.

/R-C fī(-ə)l/

[UNIX: from the startup script '/etc/rc', but this is commonly believed to have been named after older scripts to 'run commands']

n. 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 also dot file.

/rȯ mōd/

n. A mode that allows a program to transfer bits directly to or from an I/O device without any processing, abstraction, or interpretation by the operating system.

Compare rare.

This is techspeak under UNIX, jargon elsewhere.

/rāvz/ also 'Chinese ravs'

n. 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', which 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.

/rāv ȯn/

imp. Sarcastic invitation to continue a rave, often by someone who wishes the raver would get a clue but realizes this is unlikely.

/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.