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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 RTFM. |
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RTS /R-T-S/ imp. Acronym for 'Read The Screen'. Mainly used by hackers in the microcomputer world. Refers to what one would like to tell the 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 decisions. Oppose cuspy. 3. Anything that manipulates a shared resource without regard for its other users in such a way as to cause a (nonfatal) 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 all-elbows. |
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runes pl.n. 1. Anything that requires heavy wizardry or black art to parse: core dumps, JCL commands, APL, or code in a language you haven't a clue how to read. Not quite as bad as line noise, but close. Compare casting the runes, 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. obscure. VMS fans sometimes refer to Unix as 'Runix'; Unix fans return the compliment by expanding VMS to 'Very Messy Syntax' or 'Vachement Mauvais Système' (French idiom, "Hugely Bad System"). |
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rusty iron n. Syn. tired iron. It has been claimed that this is the inevitable fate of water MIPS. |
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rusty memory n. Mass-storage that uses iron-oxide-based magnetic media (esp. tape and the pre-Winchester removable disk packs used in washing machines). Compare donuts. |
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rusty wire n. [Amateur Packet Radio] Any very noisy network medium, in which the packets are subject to frequent corruption. Most prevalent in reference to wireless links subject to all the vagaries of RF noise and marginal propagation conditions. "Yes, but how good is your whizbang new protocol on really rusty wire?". |
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