The New Hacker's Dictionary

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rococo adj.

Terminally [11356]baroque. 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. Alan Perlis said: "Every program eventually becomes rococo, and then rubble." Compare [11357]critical mass.

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rogue

1. [Unix] n. A Dungeons-and-Dragons-like game using character graphics, written under BSD Unix and subsequently ported to other Unix systems. The original BSD curses(3) screen-handling package was hacked together by Ken Arnold primarily to support games, and the development of rogue(6) popularized its use; it has since become one of Unix's most important and heavily used application libraries. Nethack, Omega, Larn, Angband, and an entire subgenre of computer dungeon games (all known as `roguelikes') all took off from the inspiration provided by rogue(6); the popular Windows game Diablo, though graphics-intensive, has very similar play logic. See also [11361]nethack. 2. [Usenet] adj. An [11362]ISP which permits net abuse (usually in the form of [11363]spamming) by its customers, or which itself engages in such activities. Rogue ISPs are sometimes subject to [11364]IDPs or [11365]UDPs. Sometimes deliberately mispelled as "rouge". See also [11366]nethack, [11367]moria, [11368]Angband.

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room-temperature IQ quant.

[IBM] 80 or below (nominal room temperature is 72 degrees Fahrenheit, 22 degrees Celsius). Used in describing the expected intelligence range of the [11372]luser. "Well, but how's this interface going to play with the room-temperature IQ crowd?" See [11373]drool-proof paper. This is a much more insulting phrase in countries that use Celsius thermometers.

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root n.

[Unix] 1. The [11377]superuser account (with user name `root') that ignores permission bits, user number 0 on a Unix system. The term [11378]avatar is also used. 2. The top node of the system directory structure; historically the home directory of the root user, but probably named after the root of an (inverted) tree. 3. By extension, the privileged system-maintenance login on any OS. See [11379]root mode, [11380]go root, see also [11381]wheel.

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root mode n.

Syn. with [11385]wizard mode or `wheel mode'. Like these, it is often generalized to describe privileged states in systems other than OSes.

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RTFS /R-T-F-S/

[Unix] 1. imp. Abbreviation for `Read The Fucking Source'. Variant form of [11433]RTFM, used when the problem at hand is not necessarily obvious and not answerable from the manuals -- or the manuals are not yet written and maybe never will be. For even trickier situations, see [11434]RTFB. Unlike RTFM, the anger inherent in RTFS is not usually directed at the person asking the question, but rather at the people who failed to provide adequate documentation. 2. imp. `Read The Fucking Standard'; this oath can only be used when the problem area (e.g., a language or operating system interface) has actually been codified in a ratified standards document. The existence of these standards documents (and the technically inappropriate but politically mandated compromises that they inevitably contain, and the impenetrable [11435]legalese in which they are invariably written, and the unbelievably tedious bureaucratic process by which they are produced) can be unnerving to hackers, who are used to a certain amount of ambiguity in the specifications of the systems they use. (Hackers feel that such ambiguities are acceptable as long as the [11436]Right Thing to do is obvious to any thinking observer; sadly, this casual attitude towards specifications becomes unworkable when a system becomes popular in the [11437]Real World.) Since a hacker is likely to feel that a standards document is both unnecessary and technically deficient, the deprecation inherent in this term may be directed as much against the standard as against the person who ought to read it.

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RTI /R-T-I/ interj.

The mnemonic for the `return from interrupt' instruction on many computers including the 6502 and 6800. The variant `RETI' is found among former Z80 hackers (almost nobody programs these things in assembler anymore). Equivalent to "Now, where was I?" or used to end a conversational digression. See [11441]pop; see also [11442]POPJ.

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RTM /R-T-M/

[Usenet: abbreviation for `Read The Manual'] 1. Politer variant of [11446]RTFM. 2. Robert Tappan Morris, perpetrator of the great Internet worm of 1988 (see [11447]Great Worm); 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 username on ITS was hacked from RTM to [11448]RTFM.

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RTS /R-T-S/ imp.

Abbreviation for `Read The Screen'. Mainly used by hackers in the microcomputer world. Refers to what one would like to tell the [11452]suit one is forced to explain an extremely simple application to. Particularly appropriate when the suit failed to notice the `Press any key to continue' prompt, and wishes to know `why won't it do anything'. Also seen as `RTFS' in especially deserving cases.

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rude [WPI] adj.

1. (of a program) Badly written. 2. Functionally poor, e.g., a program that is very difficult to use because of gratuitously poor (random?) design

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decisions. Oppose [11456]cuspy. 3. Anything that manipulates a shared resource without regard for its other users in such a way as to cause a (non-fatal) problem. Examples: programs that change tty modes without resetting them on exit, or windowing programs that keep forcing themselves to the top of the window stack. Compare [11457]all-elbows.

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runes pl.n.

1. Anything that requires [11461]heavy wizardry or [11462]black art to [11463]parse: core dumps, JCL commands, APL, or code in a language you haven't a clue how to read. Not quite as bad as [11464]line noise, but close. Compare [11465]casting the runes, [11466]Great Runes. 2. Special display characters (for example, the high-half graphics on an IBM PC). 3. [borderline techspeak] 16-bit characters from the Unicode multilingual character set.

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runic adj.

Syn. [11470]obscure. VMS fans sometimes refer to Unix as `Runix'; Unix fans return the compliment by expanding VMS to `Very Messy Syntax' or `Vachement Mauvais Systme' (French idiom, "Hugely Bad System").

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