The New Hacker's Dictionary2. To continue to flame. See rave, burble. flame war // n. [common] (var. 'flamewar') An acrimonious dispute, especially when conducted on a public electronic forum such as Usenet. flamer // n. [common] One who habitually flames. Said esp. of obnoxious Usenet personalities. flap // vt. 1. [obs.] To unload a DECtape (so it goes flap, flap, flap...). Old-time hackers at MIT tell of the days when the disk was device 0 and DEC microtapes were 1, 2,... and attempting to flap device 0 would instead start a motor banging inside a cabinet near the disk. 2. By extension, to unload any magnetic tape. See also macrotape. Modern cartridge tapes no longer actually flap, but the usage has remained. (The term could well be re-applied to DEC's TK50 cartridge tape drive, a spectacularly misengineered contraption which makes a loud flapping sound, almost like an old reel-type lawnmower, in one of its many tape-eating failure modes.) flarp /flarp/ n. [Rutgers University] Yet another metasyntactic variable (see foo). Among those who use it, it is associated with a legend that any program not containing the word 'flarp' somewhere will not work. The legend is discreetly silent on the reliability of programs which do contain the magic word. flash crowd // Larry Niven's 1973 SF short story "Flash Crowd" predicted that one consequence of cheap teleportation would be huge crowds materializing almost instantly at the sites of interesting news stories. Twenty years later the term passed into common use on the Internet to describe exponential spikes in website or server usage when one passes a certain threshold of popular interest (this may also be called slashdot effect). flat // adj. 1. [common] Lacking any complex internal structure. "That bitty box has only a flat filesystem, not a hierarchical one." The verb form is flatten. |