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zap 1. n. Spiciness. 2. vt. To make food spicy.
3. vt. To make someone
‘suffer’ by making his food spicy. (Most hackers love spicy
food. Hot-and-sour soup is considered wimpy unless it makes you wipe your
nose for the rest of the meal.) See zapped.
4. vt. To modify, usually to
correct; esp. used when the action is performed with a debugger or binary
patching tool. Also implies surgical precision. “Zap the debug
level to 6 and run it again.” In the IBM mainframe world, binary
patches are applied to programs or to the OS with a program called
‘superzap’, whose file name is ‘IMASPZAP’ (possibly
contrived from I M A SuPerZAP). 5. vt. To erase or reset.
6. To fry a chip with static electricity.
“Uh oh — I think that lightning strike may have zapped the disk
controller.”
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