The New Hacker's Dictionary
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[very common] Flaming verbiage, esp. high-noise, low-signal postings to [5205]Usenet or other electronic [5206]fora. Often in the phrase `the usual flamage'. `Flaming' is the act itself; `flamage' the content; a `flame' is a single flaming message. See [5207]flame, also [5208]dahmum.
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flame
[at MIT, orig. from the phrase `flaming asshole'] 1. vi. To post an email message intended to insult and provoke. 2. vi. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude. 3. vt. Either of senses 1 or 2, directed with hostility at a particular person or people. 4. n. An instance of flaming. When a discussion degenerates into useless controversy, one might tell the participants "Now you're just flaming" or "Stop all that flamage!" to try to get them to cool down (so to speak).
The term may have been independently invented at several different places. It has been reported from MIT, Carleton College and RPI (among many other places) from as far back as 1969, and from the University of Virginia in the early 1960s.
It is possible that the hackish sense of `flame' is much older than that. The poet Chaucer was also what passed for a wizard hacker in his time; he wrote a treatise on the astrolabe, the most advanced computing device of the day. In Chaucer's "Troilus and Cressida", Cressida laments her inability to grasp the proof of a particular mathematical theorem; her uncle Pandarus then observes that it's called "the fleminge of wrecches." This phrase seems to have been intended in context as "that which puts the wretches to flight" but was probably just as ambiguous in Middle English as "the flaming of wretches" would be today. One suspects that Chaucer would feel right at home on Usenet.
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flame bait n.
[common] A posting intended to trigger a [5215]flame war, or one that invites flames in reply. See also [5216]troll.
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flame on vi.,interj.
1. To begin to [5220]flame. The punning reference to Marvel Comics's Human Torch is no longer widely recognized. 2. To continue to flame. See [5221]rave, [5222]burble.
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flame war n.
[common] (var. `flamewar') An acrimonious dispute, especially when conducted on a public electronic forum such as [5226]Usenet.
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flamer n.
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[common] One who habitually [5230]flames. Said esp. of obnoxious [5231]Usenet personalities.
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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 [5235]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.)
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flarp /flarp/ n.
[Rutgers University] Yet another [5239]metasyntactic variable (see [5240]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.
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flash crowd
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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 [5244]slashdot effect).
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flat adj.
1. [common] Lacking any complex internal structure. "That [5248]bitty box has only a flat filesystem, not a hierarchical one." The verb form is [5249]flatten. 2. Said of a memory architecture (like that of the VAX or 680x0) that is one big linear address space (typically with each possible value of a processor register corresponding to a unique core address), as opposed to a `segmented' architecture (like that of the 80x86) in which addresses are composed from a base-register/offset pair (segmented designs are generally considered [5250]cretinous).
Note that sense 1 (at least with respect to filesystems) is usually used pejoratively, while sense 2 is a [5251]Good Thing.
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flat-ASCII adj.
[common] Said of a text file that contains only 7-bit ASCII characters and uses only ASCII-standard control characters (that is, has no embedded codes specific to a particular text formatter markup language, or output device, and no [5255]meta-characters). Syn. [5256]plain-ASCII. Compare
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[5257]flat-file.
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flat-file adj.
A [5261]flattened representation of some database or tree or network structure as a single file from which the structure could implicitly be rebuilt, esp. one in [5262]flat-ASCII form. See also [5263]sharchive.
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flatten vt.
[common] To remove structural information, esp. to filter something with an implicit tree structure into a simple sequence of leaves; also tends to imply mapping to [5267]flat-ASCII. "This code flattens an expression with parentheses into an equivalent [5268]canonical form."
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flavor n.
1. [common] Variety, type, kind. "DDT commands come in two flavors." "These lights come in two flavors, big red ones and small green ones." "Linux is a flavor of Unix" See [5272]vanilla. 2. The attribute that causes something to be [5273]flavorful. Usually used in the phrase "yields additional flavor". "This convention yields additional flavor by allowing one to print text either right-side-up or upside-down." See [5274]vanilla.
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This usage was certainly reinforced by the terminology of quantum chromodynamics, in which quarks (the constituents of, e.g., protons) come in six flavors (up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom) and three colors (red, blue, green) -- however, hackish use of `flavor' at MIT predated QCD. 3. The term for `class' (in the object-oriented sense) in the LISP Machine Flavors system. Though the Flavors design has been superseded (notably by the Common LISP CLOS facility), the term `flavor' is still used as a general synonym for `class' by some LISP hackers.
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flavorful adj.
Full of [5278]flavor (sense 2); esthetically pleasing. See [5279]random and [5280]losing for antonyms. See also the entries for [5281]taste and [5282]elegant.
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flippy /flip'ee/ n.
A single-sided floppy disk altered for double-sided use by addition of a second write-notch, so called because it must be flipped over for the second side to be accessible. No longer common.
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flood v.
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[common] 1. To overwhelm a network channel with mechanically-generated traffic; especially used of IP, TCP/IP, UDP, or ICMP denial-of-service attacks. 2. To dump large amounts of text onto an [5289]IRC channel. This is especially rude when the text is uninteresting and the other users are trying to carry on a serious conversation. Also used in a similar sense on Usenet. 3. [Usenet] To post an unusually large number or volume of files on a related topic.
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flowchart n.
[techspeak] An archaic form of visual control-flow specification employing arrows and `speech balloons' of various shapes. Hackers never use flowcharts, consider them extremely silly, and associate them with [5293]COBOL programmers, [5294]card wallopers, and other lower forms of life. This attitude follows from the observations that flowcharts (at least from a hacker's point of view) are no easier to read than code, are less precise, and tend to fall out of sync with the code (so that they either obfuscate it rather than explaining it, or require extra maintenance effort that doesn't improve the code). See also [5295]PDL, sense 1.
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flower key n.
[Mac users] See [5299]feature key.
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flush v.
1. [common] To delete something, usually superfluous, or to abort an operation. "All that nonsense has been flushed." 2. [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 [5303]DEC and on Honeywell and IBM machines as far back as 1965). Unix/C hackers found the ITS usage confusing, and vice versa.
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flypage /fli:'payj/ n.
(alt. `fly page') A [5307]banner, sense 1.
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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.
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flytrap n.
[rare] See [5314]firewall machine.
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FM /F-M/ n.
1. [common] Not `Frequency Modulation' but rather an abbreviation for `Fucking Manual', the back-formation from [5318]RTFM. Used to refer to the manual itself in the [5319]RTFM. "Have you seen the Networking FM lately?" 2. Abbreviation for "Fucking Magic", used in the sense of [5320]black magic.
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fnord n.
[from the "Illuminatus Trilogy"] 1. A word used in email and news postings to tag utterances as surrealist mind-play or humor, esp. in connection with [5324]Discordianism and elaborate conspiracy theories. "I heard that David Koresh is sharing an apartment in Argentina with Hitler. (Fnord.)" "Where
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can I fnord get the Principia Discordia from?" 2. A [5325]metasyntactic variable, commonly used by hackers with ties to [5326]Discordianism or the [5327]Church of the SubGenius.
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FOAF // n.
[Usenet; common] Acronym for `Friend Of A Friend'. The source of an unverified, possibly untrue story. This term was not originated by hackers (it is used in Jan Brunvand's books on urban folklore), but is much better recognized on Usenet and elsewhere than in mainstream English.
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FOD /fod/ v.
[Abbreviation for `Finger of Death', originally a spell-name from fantasy gaming] To terminate with extreme prejudice and with no regard for other people. From [5334]MUDs where the wizard command `FOD <player>' results in the immediate and total death of <player>, usually as punishment for obnoxious behavior. This usage migrated to other circumstances, such as "I'm going to fod the process that is burning all the cycles." Compare [5335]gun.
In aviation, FOD means Foreign Object Damage, e.g., what happens when a jet engine sucks up a rock on the runway or a bird in flight. Finger of Death is a distressingly apt description of what this generally does to the engine.
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