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zap

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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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