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usually on April 1st. Well-known joke RFCs have included 527 ("ARPAWOCKY", R. Merryman, UCSD; 22 June 1973), 748 ("Telnet Randomly-Lose Option", Mark R. Crispin; 1 April 1978), and 1149 ("A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers", D. Waitzman, BBN STC; 1 April 1990). The first was a Lewis Carroll pastiche; the second a parody of the TCP-IP documentation style, and the third a deadpan skewering of standards-document legalese, describing protocols for transmitting Internet data packets by carrier pigeon. |
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The RFCs are most remarkable for how well they work they manage to have neither the ambiguities that are usually rife in informal specifications, nor the committee-perpetrated misfeatures that often haunt formal standards, and they define a network that has grown to truly worldwide proportions. |
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RFE /R-F-E/ n. 1. [techspeak] Request For Enhancement (compare RFC). 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. |
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rib site n. [by analogy with backbone site] A machine that has an ondemand 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. |
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rice box n. [from ham radio slang] Any Asian-made commodity computer, esp. an 80×86-based machine built to IBM PC-compatible ISA or EISA-bus standards. |
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Right Thing 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. |
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RL // n. [MUD community] Real Life. "Firiss laughs in RL" means that Firiss's player is laughing. Oppose VR. |
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roach vt. [Bell Labs] To destroy, esp. of a data structure. Hardware gets toasted or fried, software gets roached. |
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