The New Hacker's Dictionary2. [Unix/C] To force buffered I/O to disk, as with an fflush(3) call. This is not an abort or deletion as in sense 1, but a demand for early completion! 3. To leave at the end of a day's work (as opposed to leaving for a meal). "I'm going to flush now." "Time to flush." 4. To exclude someone from an activity, or to ignore a person. 'Flush' was standard ITS terminology for aborting an output operation; one spoke of the text that would have been printed, but was not, as having been flushed. It is speculated that this term arose from a vivid image of flushing unwanted characters by hosing down the internal output buffer, washing the characters away before they could be printed. The Unix/C usage, on the other hand, was propagated by the fflush(3) call in C's standard I/O library (though it is reported to have been in use among BLISS programmers at DEC and on Honeywell and IBM machines as far back as 1965). Unix/C hackers found the ITS usage confusing, and vice versa. flypage /fli:'payj/ n. (alt. 'fly page') A banner, sense 1. Flyspeck 3 // n. Standard name for any font that is so tiny as to be unreadable (by analogy with names like 'Helvetica 10' for 10-point Helvetica). Legal boilerplate is usually printed in Flyspeck 3. flytrap // n. [rare] See firewall machine. FM /F-M/ n. 1. [common] Not 'Frequency Modulation' but rather an abbreviation for 'Fucking Manual', the back-formation from RTFM. Used to refer to the manual itself in the RTFM. "Have you seen the Networking FM lately?" 2. Abbreviation for "Fucking Magic", used in the sense of black magic. fnord // n. [from the "Illuminatus Trilogy"] |