The New Hacker's Dictionary

raster blaster // n.

[Cambridge] Specialized hardware for bitblt operations (a blitter). Allegedly inspired by 'Rasta Blasta', British slang for the sort of portable stereo Americans call a 'boom box' or 'ghetto blaster'.

raster burn // n.

Eyestrain brought on by too many hours of looking at low-res, poorly tuned, or glare-ridden monitors, esp. graphics monitors. See terminal illness.

rasterbation // n.

[portmanteau: raster + masturbation] The gratuituous use of comuputer generated images and effects in movies and graphic art which would have been better without them. Especially employed as a term of abuse by Photoshop/GIMP users and graphic artists.

rat belt // n.

A cable tie, esp. the sawtoothed, self-locking plastic kind that you can remove only by cutting (as opposed to a random twist of wire or a twist tie or one of those humongous metal clip frobs). Small cable ties are 'mouse belts'.

rat dance // n.

[from the Dilbert comic strip of November 14, 1995] A hacking run that produces results which, while superficially coherent, have little or nothing to do with its original objectives. There are strong connotations that the coding process and the objectives themselves were pretty random. (In the original comic strip, the Ratbert is invited to dance on Dilbert's keyboard in order to produce bugs for him to fix, and authors a Web browser instead.) Compare Infinite-Monkey Theorem.

This term seems to have become widely recognized quite rapidly after the original strip, a fact which testifies to Dilbert's huge popularity among hackers. All too many find the perverse incentives and Kafkaesque atmosphere of Dilbert's mythical workplace reflective of their own experiences.

ratio site //

[warez d00dz] A FTP site storing pirated files where one must first upload something before being able to download. There is a ratio, based on bytes or files count, between the uploads and download. For instance, on a 2:1 site, to download a 4 Mb file, one must first upload at least 2 Mb of files. The hotter the contents of the server are, the smaller the ratio is. More often than not, the server refuses uploads because its disk is full, making it useless for downloading -- or the connection magically breaks after one has uploaded a large amount of files, just before the downloading phase begins. See also banner site, leech mode.