17
Long described at MIT as `the least random number'; see 23.
23
Sacred number of Eris, Goddess of Discord (along with 17 and
5).
42
The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and
Everything. (Note that this answer is completely fortuitous.
`:-)')
69
From the sexual act. This one was favored in MIT's ITS
culture.
105
69 hex = 105 decimal, and 69 decimal = 105 octal.
666
The Number of the Beast.
For further enlightenment, study the "Principia Discordia",
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", "The Joy
of Sex", and the Christian Bible (Revelation 13:18). See also
Discordianism or consult your pineal gland. See also [for
values of}.
This term is a prime example of ha ha only serious. People
actually develop the most amazing and religiously intense
attachments to their tools, even when the tools are intangible.
The most constructive thing one can do when one stumbles into the
crossfire is mumble Get a life! and leave --- unless, of course,
one's *own* unassailably rational and obviously correct
choices are being slammed.
Old-time hacker Joseph M. Newcomer advises that whenever choosing a
quantifiable but arbitrary restriction, you should make it either a
power of 2 or a power of 2 minus 1. If you impose a limit of
17 items in a list, everyone will know it is a random number --- on
the other hand, a limit of 15 or 16 suggests some deep reason
(involving 0- or 1-based indexing in binary) and you will get less
flamage for it. Limits which are round numbers in base 10 are
always especially suspect.
[This term is included because it is a good example of hackish
linguistic innovation in a field completely unrelated to computers.
The word `retcon' will probably spread through comics fandom and
lose its association with hackerdom within a couple of years; for
the record, it started here. --- ESR]
[1993 update: some comics fans on the net now claim that retcon was
independently in use in comics fandom before rec.arts.comics.
In lexicography, nothing is ever simple. --- ESR]
The RFC tradition of pragmatic, experience-driven, after-the-fact
standard writing done by individuals or small working groups has
important advantages over the more formal, committee-driven process
typical of ANSI or ISO. Emblematic of some of these advantages is
the existence of a flourishing tradition of `joke' RFCs; usually
at least one a year is published, 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.
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.
Of the various RTF? forms, `RTFB' is the least pejorative against
anyone asking a question for which RTFB is the answer; the anger
here is directed at the absence of both source *and* adequate
documentation.