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."
