RTFM - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Ray tracing

In computer graphics, ray tracing is a technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light through pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects. The technique is capable of producing a very high degree of visual realism, usually higher than...

or within the context of BRL-CAD

BRL-CAD

BRL-CAD is a constructive solid geometry solid modeling computer-aided design system. It includes an interactive geometry editor, ray tracing support for graphics rendering and geometric analysis, computer network distributed framebuffer support, scripting, image-processing and signal-processing...

, "RTFM" may stand for "ray tracing figure of merit".

RTFM is an initialism

Acronym and initialism

Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations formed from the initial components in a phrase or a word. These components may be individual letters or parts of words . There is no universal agreement on the precise definition of the various terms , nor on written usage...

for the direction "Read The Fucking Manual". This instruction is sometimes given in response to a question when the person being asked believes that the question could be easily answered by reading the relevant user's manual

User guide

A user guide or user's guide, also commonly known as a manual, is a technical communication document intended to give assistance to people using a particular system...

or instructions. In expurgated

Expurgation

Expurgation is a form of censorship which involves purging anything deemed noxious or offensive, usually from an artistic work.This has also been called bowdlerization, especially for books, after Thomas Bowdler, who in 1818 published an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's work that he...

texts, substitutions such as "read the flaming manual" or "read the friendly manual" are used (or similar variants). Initialisms similar to the one above include GIYF ("Google

Google search

Google or Google Web Search is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. Google Search is the most-used search engine on the World Wide Web, receiving several hundred million queries each day through its various services....

is your friend") and LMGTFY ("let me google that for you"). These indicate that the item under question can easily be researched on the Internet

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

.

Many alternative expansions for "RTFM" exist (particularly expurgated ones), as do many similarly themed alternative initialisms.

Possible origins

The phrase RTFM may have first appeared in print in 1979 on the Table of Contents page of the LINPACK

LINPACK

LINPACK is a software library for performing numerical linear algebra on digital computers. It was written in Fortran by Jack Dongarra, Jim Bunch, Cleve Moler, and Gilbert Stewart, and was intended for use on supercomputers in the 1970s and early 1980s...

Users' Guide in the form: "R.T.F.M." -- Anonymous. Apocryphally, some of the authors heard it from a Tektronix

Tektronix

Tektronix, Inc. is an American company best known for its test and measurement equipment such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment. In November 2007, Tektronix became a subsidiary of Danaher Corporation....

salesman.

The phrase RTFM was in common use in the early 1950s by radio and radar technicians in the US Air Force. Operators frequently did not check simple faults, for example checking whether a fuse had blown or a power plug had become disconnected.

Context-sensitive factors in determining (in)appropriateness

The appropriateness or inappropriateness of an RTFM or GIYF response depends on the context and the people involved.

When asking represents shirking (ant-versus-grasshopper contexts)

In contexts where the people involved are peers in a harsh (or at least competitive) environment—one where everyone is equal, there is work to be done, and each ought to pull his own weight—it can be inappropriate to ask beginner-level questions of one's peers without having "done one's homework first". The asker shows a degree of either incompetence or rudeness, which harder-working colleagues do not wish to reward. The implicit subtext in the responder's mind is, "We all have to work hard, and to learn the hard way, in this environment. If I had to work my way up to where I am, why should I reward your laziness or ineptitude with free concierge

Concierge

A concierge is an employee who either works in shifts within, or lives on the premises of an apartment building or a hotel and serves guests with duties similar to those of a butler. The position can also be maintained by a security officer over the 'graveyard' shift. A similar position, known as...

service?" This kind of situation is analogous to that of The Ant and the Grasshopper

The Ant and the Grasshopper

The Ant and the Grasshopper, also known as The Grasshopper and the Ant , is one of Aesop's Fables, providing an ambivalent moral lesson about hard work and foresight. In the Perry Index it is number 373...

, in which the ant's refusal to suffer the foolishness of the grasshopper is understandable. This principle can be found among peers in workplaces, schools, and some online communities. For example:

"On the job" or "in the field". It takes a certain minimum level of competence and self-guided effort to be a programmer
Programmer
A programmer, computer programmer or coder is someone who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software. One who practices or professes a formal approach to...

, and most especially a hacker-grade programmer. One cannot attain the role just by asking others to hand it to him. (This is also true of many other skills in life.) Hackers have often suggested that in some situations, "RTFM" is actually the best advice that an aspiring hacker can receive. They posit that hacking is a dynamic art that requires independence and drive on the part of the hacker, and see "RTFM" as more of a long-term advisement than it is a response to any single query.
At school. There is a difference between someone who's trying hard, studying conscientiously, and just needs some tutoring (on one hand) and someone who idly shirked his homework and now expects his peers to give him the answers (on the other). The former deserves respect and help; the latter chooses to forfeit both.

When asking is excusable or even natural

The ant-versus-grasshopper argument only applies to the types of cases discussed earlier. It does not apply in cases where the asker's naïveté

Naïve

Naivety , is the state of being naive—having or showing a lack of experience, understanding or sophistication. One who is naive may be called a naif.- Etymology :...

is excusable (and often may be entirely appropriate). For example, technical support

Technical support

Technical support or tech support refers to a range of services by which enterprises provide assistance to users of technology products such as mobile phones, televisions, computers, software products or other electronic or mechanical goods...

staff for consumer software or devices would be fired for giving RTFM or GIYF responses, because it is their job to help novices. To expect minimum background knowledge on the part of the user is not always well-founded; there is a spectrum of appropriateness for different products or services. For example, with radiographic equipment such as a CT scanner, one would reasonably require the operator to have competence in radiological safety

Radiobiology

Radiobiology , as a field of clinical and basic medical sciences, originated from Leopold Freund's 1896 demonstration of the therapeutic treatment of a hairy mole using a new type of electromagnetic radiation called x-rays, which was discovered 1 year previously by the German physicist, Wilhelm...

; but for consumer electronics, the goal (distant as it often may be) is to shield the user from having to possess any arbitrary threshold of skill. In fact, when it comes to software for general-population users, the evolving standard in usability

Usability

Usability is the ease of use and learnability of a human-made object. The object of use can be a software application, website, book, tool, machine, process, or anything a human interacts with. A usability study may be conducted as a primary job function by a usability analyst or as a secondary job...

is that software be engineered (often at great pains) to be usable without a manual at all, since users don't often actually read them, and in many contexts, perhaps should not even be expected to. For example, some of the "great pains" that engineers now go to in order to shield users from complexity "under the hood" are the "contextual help" paradigm; automation

Automation

Automation is the use of control systems and information technologies to reduce the need for human work in the production of goods and services. In the scope of industrialization, automation is a step beyond mechanization...

(as with engine control unit

Engine control unit

An engine control unit is a type of electronic control unit that determines the amount of fuel, ignition timing and other parameters an internal combustion engine needs to keep running...

s, anti-lock braking system

Anti-lock braking system

An anti-lock braking system is a safety system that allows the wheels on a motor vehicle to continue interacting tractively with the road surface as directed by driver steering inputs while braking, preventing the wheels from locking up and therefore avoiding skidding.An ABS generally offers...

s, and traction control system

Traction control system

A traction control system , also known as anti-slip regulation , is typically a secondary function of the anti-lock braking system on production motor vehicles, designed to prevent loss of traction of driven road wheels...

s that make car operation closer to foolproof than it used to be); weak artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

(AI) (such as today's expert system

Expert system

In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system that emulates the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning about knowledge, like an expert, and not by following the procedure of a developer as is the case in...

s); and the ongoing quest for strong AI (to build tomorrow's expert systems).

Whenever the target market is the consumer among the general public, to assume any degree of competence is to ask for trouble, even for products that incompetents have no legitimate excuse to be operating (e.g., motor vehicle

Motor vehicle

A motor vehicle or road vehicle is a self-propelled wheeled vehicle that does not operate on rails, such as trains or trolleys. The vehicle propulsion is provided by an engine or motor, usually by an internal combustion engine, or an electric motor, or some combination of the two, such as hybrid...

s, firearm

Firearm

A firearm is a weapon that launches one, or many, projectile at high velocity through confined burning of a propellant. This subsonic burning process is technically known as deflagration, as opposed to supersonic combustion known as a detonation. In older firearms, the propellant was typically...

s, construction equipment). Even for the latter products, every effort is made in their engineering to make them as negligence-resistant and fail-safe as possible within the bounds of physics and of breaking even

Break-even (economics)

In economics & business, specifically cost accounting, the break-even point is the point at which cost or expenses and revenue are equal: there is no net loss or gain, and one has "broken even"...

Gray areas (gradients between ant-vs-grasshopper and legitimate needs)

There are contexts and participants for which a gradient of RTFM (in)appropriateness exists. These are the gray areas between black and white. Some examples are given in the following sections.

Internet forums

An internet forum

Internet forum

An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...

where users should read the FAQ

FAQ

Frequently asked questions are listed questions and answers, all supposed to be commonly asked in some context, and pertaining to a particular topic. "FAQ" is usually pronounced as an initialism rather than an acronym, but an acronym form does exist. Since the acronym FAQ originated in textual...

before posting their questions is more likely to have a better signal-to-noise ratio than one that is filled with repetitive postings, and hence is more useful and more likely to attract continued participation. When evaluating whether it is acceptable to express sentiments like RTFM, one must consider the trade-off between maintaining the usability

Usability

of a forum for its existing users, and making a forum welcoming to newcomers. The balance point for a particular forum depends on how general the audience is intended to be; but, as with the motor vehicle and firearm examples earlier, one must allow for the inevitability that people will find their way into the user population who do not meet the expectations. And unlike with motor vehicles and firearms (where unqualified users are committing an infraction by the very act of participating), there is nothing inappropriate about novices learning, for example, to play games or to use office software suite

Office suite

In computing, an office suite, sometimes called an office software suite or productivity suite is a collection of programs intended to be used by knowledge workers...

s. In these cases, as in the technical support example, there is no reasonable expectation of minimum skill requirements. In such environments, frequent users of RTFM or GIYF responses are simply expressing elitism

Elitism

Elitism is the belief or attitude that some individuals, who form an elite — a select group of people with intellect, wealth, specialized training or experience, or other distinctive attributes — are those whose views on a matter are to be taken the most seriously or carry the most...

, stroking a personality flaw such as a need to tear others down to seek self-esteem. Their time could better be spent adding the question and answer to an FAQ, pointing the user to a helpful website, or simply not responding. This is especially true when, for example, it is not even clear which "manual" the receiver of the RTFM response should be reading. One of the most frequent criticisms of the open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

community is lack of friendly support for newcomers. The Ubuntu

Ubuntu (operating system)

Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu...

Forums and LinuxQuestions.org, for instance, have instituted "no RTFM" policies to promote a welcoming atmosphere.

Superior-to-subordinate feedback in workplaces or schools

Unlike with feedback between peers in workplaces or schools (where the ant-and-grasshopper model may often clearly apply), feedback from superiors to subordinates involves a degree of forbearance regarding incompetence. Not all incompetence is permanent, and not all infractions are grave. Managers and teachers have to walk a line and find the right balance. Laziness and incompetence are themselves teachable faults to some degree, which means that a superior has a responsibility "to help the asker to learn to help himself", even if it takes time and various attempts; but at some point, a line may be crossed, where fairness to others (and duty to other obligations) precludes any further "hand holding" or "training wheels". In the workplace, the worker might have to be fired; in the school, the student may have to be disciplined (if able but unwilling) or (more likely) referred for special help or shifted into a different group of students. The school environment is more complex than the workplace, with greater responsibility on the part of the superior, because a schoolteacher always has a responsibility to recognize possible attention deficit or learning disability, and to refer the student for help in those areas (without which help, the student's inability to help himself is, to an important degree, not his own fault). In the business world, however, where the very employment itself is conditional on competence, the manager does not shoulder that responsibility beyond a basic degree of "giving a fair shake". Although there exists such a thing as improper termination, an RTFM/GIYF response from a manager tends to be more justified than one from a teacher. Even a teacher, though, is usually justified in saying, "If you didn't want to fail the quiz, then you should have done your homework instead of skateboarding/watching TV/etc."

Technological evolution catching workers off guard

The rapid advance of technology has caught many workers off guard, and they find that "the bar was raised and I didn't see it coming." Competencies that formerly were optional have become minimum requirements; certain knowledge, which they were formerly not responsible for having, has become a sine qua non, either in general culture or at least in the culture of a particular occupation. Common examples are digital literacy

Digital literacy

Digital literacy is the ability to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and analyze information using digital technology. It involves a working knowledge of current high-technology, and an understanding of how it can be used. Further, digital literacy involves a consciousness of the...

and initialism

Acronym and initialism

literacy in the workplace. Many workers today might agree that someone who doesn't know what the initialisms "FYI" or "OS" stand for is probably not competent to continue holding a white-collar job, because such jobs require a minimum degree of general knowledge, and initialisms such as those are no longer just slang

Slang

Slang is the use of informal words and expressions that are not considered standard in the speaker's language or dialect but are considered more acceptable when used socially. Slang is often to be found in areas of the lexicon that refer to things considered taboo...

for comp-sci

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

geeks but rather have become common vocabulary in the general knowledge of all but IT illiterates. In other words, at some point in history, terms that used to be slang shift into basic vocabulary, and this principle applies to decades-old internet slang

Internet slang

Internet slang is a type of slang that Internet users have popularized, and in many cases, have coined. Such terms often originate with the purpose of saving keystrokes. Many people use the same abbreviations in texting and instant messaging, and social networking websites...

just as it has always applied to many other kinds of slang. If, on top of that, the asker also doesn't know that they should search its expansion before asking someone, then once again, there may be legitimate resentment in his subordinates that they must "manage upward" to such a mollycoddling degree, because the very GIYF principle itself has been shifting into the area of "general knowledge that is lacked only by incompetents." The degree of mollycoddling needed also indicates that the executives further up the line are themselves failing to do their jobs, because they have not provided adequate training or retraining (beyond mere on-the-job scrambling). Other example pieces of knowledge that used to be optional but have become a minimum requirement in the business world include basic file management

File manager

A file manager or file browser is a computer program that provides a user interface to work with file systems. The most common operations performed on files or groups of files are: create, open, edit, view, print, play, rename, move, copy, delete, search/find, and modify file attributes, properties...

. The grayer areas are ones where incompetence is currently stretching past annoyance toward negligence. The shade of gray for any particular skill (or lack thereof) depends on the occupation.

List of expurgated expansions

Read the field manual
Field Manual
__FORCETOC__Field Manual is the second solo album by Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla, released on January 29, 2008 on Barsuk Records. The album is Walla's first under his own name...

(military contexts)
Read the fine manual
Read the freaking manual
Read the friendly manual
Read the full manual
Read the full-on manual

Encouraging the reading of the manual or other background information

("read the bloody manual") (In some countries, e.g., the UK and Australia, this is a fractionally more polite alternative with identical meaning) ("read the fucking article"—common on news forums such as Fark.com

Fark.com

Fark is a community website created by Drew Curtis that allows members to comment on a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites. As of June 2009, the site boasts approximately four million unique visitors per month, which puts it among the top 100 English language websites...

and Slashdot

Slashdot

Slashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...

, where using "TFA" instead of "the article" has become a meme

Internet meme

The term Internet meme is used to describe a concept that spreads via the Internet. The term is a reference to the concept of memes, although the latter concept refers to a much broader category of cultural information.-Description:...

) ("read the fucking e-mail") ("read the fucking code" [also "reboot the fucking computer" or "read the fucking card"]) ("read the fucking source code

Source code

In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...

") ("read the fucking SWIFT

Swift

The swifts are a family, Apodidae, of highly aerial birds. They are superficially similar to swallows, but are actually not closely related to passerine species at all; swifts are in the separate order Apodiformes, which they share with hummingbirds...

message") ("read the fucking question") ("read the fucking frequently asked questions") ("use the fucking help") ("use the source, Luke", a play on the famous Star Wars quote, "Use the Force

Force (Star Wars)

The Force is a binding, metaphysical and ubiquitous power in the fictional universe of the Star Wars galaxy created by George Lucas. Mentioned in the first film in the series, it is integral to all subsequent incarnations of Star Wars, including the expanded universe of comic books, novels, and...

, Luke

Luke Skywalker

Luke Skywalker is a fictional character and the main protagonist of the original film trilogy of the Star Wars franchise, where he is portrayed by Mark Hamill. He is introduced in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, in which he is forced to leave home, and finds himself apprenticed to the Jedi master...

", referring to freely available source code

Source code

)

Encouraging the use of at least a basic search

("Use the fucking Google") ("Google is your friend") ("just fucking Google it") ("just fucking Wiki

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

it") ("just Google it, you noob") ("search the fucking Google

Google search

" (the initials are consonant with STFU

Shut up

Shut up is a slang term meaning "be quiet". Referring to "close your mouth", it is usually considered to be rude. It may also refer to:*"Shut Up ", a single by Sin With Sebastian*"Shut Up"...

) ("search

Web search engine

A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results often referred to as SERPS, or "search engine results pages". The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other...

the fucking Web