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flavorful
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flippy
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flavor
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flavorfuladj.
Full offlavor(sense 2); esthetically pleasing. Seerandomandlosingfor antonyms. See also the entries fortasteandelegant.
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flippy
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flood
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flavorful
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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
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flowchart
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floodv.
[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 anIRCchannel. 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
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flower key
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flowchartn.
[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 withCOBOLprogrammers,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 alsoPDL, sense 1.
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flower key
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flush
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flowchart
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flower keyn.
[Mac users] Seefeature key.
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flush
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flypage
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flower key
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flushv.
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 anfflush(3)call. This isnotan 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 thefflush(3)call in C's standard I/O library (though it is reported to have been in use among BLISS programmers atDECand 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
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Flyspeck 3
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flush
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flypage/fli:'payj/ n.
(alt. `fly page') Abanner, sense 1.
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Flyspeck 3
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flytrap
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flypage
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Flyspeck 3n.
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
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FM
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flytrapn.
[rare] Seefirewall machine.
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FM
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fnord
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FM/F-M/ n.
1. [common]Not`Frequency Modulation' but rather an abbreviation for `Fucking Manual', the back-formation fromRTFM. Used to refer to the manual itself in theRTFM. "Have you seen the Networking FM lately?" 2. Abbreviation for "Fucking Magic", used in the sense ofblack magic.
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fnord
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FOAF
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fnordn.
[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 withDiscordianismand elaborate conspiracy theories. "I heard that David Koresh is sharing an apartment in Argentina with Hitler. (Fnord.)" "Where can I fnord get the Principia Discordia from?" 2. Ametasyntactic variable, commonly used by hackers with ties toDiscordianismor theChurch of the SubGenius.
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FOAF
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FOD
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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
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fold case
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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. FromMUDs
where the wizard command `FOD
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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fold case
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followup
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fold casev.
Seesmash case. This term tends to be used more by people who don't mind that their tools smash case. It also connotes that case is ignored but case distinctions in data processed by the tool in question aren't destroyed.
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followup
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fontology
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followupn.
[common] On Usenet, apostinggenerated in response to another posting (as opposed to areply, which goes by email rather than being broadcast). Followups include the ID of theparent messagein their headers; smart news-readers can use this information to present Usenet news in `conversation' sequence rather than order-of-arrival. Seethread.
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fontology
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foo
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fontologyn.
[XEROX PARC] The body of knowledge dealing with the construction and use of new fonts (e.g., for window systems and typesetting software). It has been said that fontology recapitulates file-ogeny.
[Unfortunately, this reference to the embryological dictum that "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is not merely a joke. On the Macintosh, for example, System 7 has to go through contortions to compensate for an earlier design error that created a whole different set of abstractions for fonts parallel to `files' and `folders' --ESR]
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foo
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foo/foo/
1. interj. Term of disgust. 2. [very common] Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything, esp. programs and files (esp. scratch files). 3. First on the standard list ofmetasyntactic variables used in syntax examples. See alsobar,baz,qux,quux,corge,grault,garply,waldo,fred,plugh,xyzzy,thud.
When `foo' is used in connection with `bar' it has generally traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronymFUBAR(`Fucked Up Beyond All Repair'), later modified tofoobar. Early versions of the Jargon File interpreted this change as a post-war bowdlerization, but it it now seems more likely that FUBAR was itself a derivative of `foo' perhaps influenced by German `furchtbar' (terrible) - `foobar' may actually have been theoriginalform.
For, it seems, the word `foo' itself had an immediate prewar history in comic strips and cartoons. The earliest documented uses were in the "Smokey Stover" comic strip popular in the 1930s, which frequently included the word "foo". Bill Holman, the author of the strip, filled it with odd jokes and personal contrivances, including other nonsense phrases such as "Notary Sojac" and "1506 nix nix". According to the Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion Holman claimed to have found the word "foo" on the bottom of a Chinese figurine. This is plausible; Chinese statuettes often have apotropaic inscriptions, and this may have been the Chinese word `fu' (sometimes transliterated `foo'), which can mean "happiness" when spoken with the proper tone (the lion-dog guardians flanking the steps of many Chinese restaurants are properly called "fu dogs"). English speakers' reception of Holman's `foo' nonsense word was undoubtedly influenced by Yiddish `feh' and English `fooey' and `fool'.
Holman's strip featured a firetruck called the Foomobile that rode on two wheels. The comic strip was tremendously popular in the late 1930s, and legend has it that a manufacturer in Indiana even produced an operable version of Holman's Foomobile. According to the Encyclopedia of American Comics, `Foo' fever swept the U.S., finding its way into popular songs and generating over 500 `Foo Clubs.' The fad left `foo' references embedded in popular culture (including a couple of appearances in Warner Brothers cartoons of 1938-39) but with their origins rapidly forgotten.
One place they are known to have remained live is in the U.S. military during the WWII years. In 1944-45, the term `foo fighters' was in use by radar operators for the kind of mysterious or spurious trace that would later be called a UFO (the older term resurfaced in popular American usage in 1995 via the name of one of the better grunge-rock bands). Informants connected the term to the Smokey Stover strip.
The U.S. and British militaries frequently swapped slang terms during the war (seeklugeandkludgefor another important example) Period sources reported that `FOO' became a semi-legendary subject of WWII British-army graffiti more or less equivalent to the American Kilroy. Where British troops went, the graffito "FOO was here" or something similar showed up. Several slang dictionaries aver that FOO probably came from Forward Observation Officer, but this (like the contemporaneous "FUBAR") was probably abackronym. Forty years later, Paul Dickson's excellent book "Words" (Dell, 1982, ISBN 0-440-52260-7) traced "Foo" to an unspecified British naval magazine in 1946, quoting as follows: "Mr. Foo is a mysterious Second World War product, gifted with bitter omniscience and sarcasm."
Earlier versions of this entry suggested the possibility that hacker usage actually sprang from "FOO, Lampoons and Parody", the title of a comic book first issued in September 1958, a joint project of Charles and Robert Crumb. Though Robert Crumb (then in his mid-teens) later became one of the most important and influential artists in underground comics, this venture was hardly a success; indeed, the brothers later burned most of the existing copies in disgust. The title FOO was featured in large letters on the front cover. However, very few copies of this comic actually circulated, and students of Crumb's `oeuvre' have established that this title was a reference to the earlier Smokey Stover comics. The Crumbs may also have been influenced by a short-lived Canadian parody magazine named `Foo' published in 1951-52.
An old-time member reports that in the 1959 "Dictionary of the TMRC Language", compiled atTMRC, there was an entry that went something like this:
FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase "FOO MANE PADME HUM." Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning.
(For more about the legendary foo counters, seeTMRC.) This definition used Bill Holman's nonsense word, only then two decades old and demonstrably still live in popular culture and slang, to aha ha only seriousanalogy with esoteric Tibetan Buddhism. Today's hackers would find it difficult to resist elaborating a joke like that, and it is not likely 1959's were any less susceptible. Almost the entire staff of what later became the MIT AI Lab was involved with TMRC, and the word spread from there.
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foobarn.
[very common] Another widely usedmetasyntactic variable; seefoofor etymology. Probably originally propagated through DECsystem manuals by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1960s and early 1970s; confirmed sightings there go back to 1972. Hackers donotgenerally use this to meanFUBARin either the slang or jargon sense. See alsoFred Foobar. In RFC1639, "FOOBAR" was made an abbreviation for "FTP Operation Over Big Address Records", but this was an obviousbackronym.
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fool
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fooln.
As used by hackers, specifically describes a person who habitually reasons from obviously or demonstrably incorrect premises and cannot be persuaded by evidence to do otherwise; it is not generally used in its other senses, i.e., to describe a person with a native incapacity to reason correctly, or a clown. Indeed, in hackish experience many fools are capable of reasoning all too effectively in executing their errors. See alsocretin,loser,fool file.
The Algol 68-R compiler used to initialize its storage to the character string "F00LF00LF00LF00L..." because as a pointer or as a floating point number it caused a crash, and as an integer or a character string it was very recognizable in a dump. Sadly, one day a very senior professor at Nottingham University wrote a program that called him a fool. He proceeded to demonstrate the correctness of this assertion by lobbying the university (not quite successfully) to forbid the use of Algol on its computers. See alsoDEADBEEF.
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fool file
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fool filen.
[Usenet] A notional repository of all the most dramatically and abysmally stupid utterances ever. An entire subgenre ofsig blocks consists of the header "From the fool file:" followed by some quote the poster wishes to represent as an immortal gem of dimwittery; for this usage to be really effective, the quote has to be so obviously wrong as to be laughable. More than one Usenetter has achieved an unwanted notoriety by being quoted in this way.
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Foonly
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footprint
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Foonlyn.
1. ThePDP-10successor that was to have been built by the Super Foonly project at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory along with a new operating system. (The name itself came from FOO NLI, an error message emitted by a PDP-10 assembler at SAIL meaning "FOO is Not a Legal Identifier". The intention was to leapfrog from the oldDECtimesharing system SAIL was then running to a new generation, bypassing TENEX which at that time was the ARPANET standard. ARPA funding for both the Super Foonly and the new operating system was cut in 1974. Most of the design team went to DEC and contributed greatly to the design of the PDP-10 model KL10. 2. The name of the company formed by Dave Poole, one of the principal Super Foonly designers, and one of hackerdom's more colorful personalities. Many people remember the parrot which sat on Poole's shoulder and was a regular companion. 3. Any of the machines built by Poole's company. The first was the F-1 (a.k.a. Super Foonly), which was the computational engine used to create the graphics in the movie "TRON". The F-1 was the fastest PDP-10 ever built, but only one was ever made. The effort drained Foonly of its financial resources, and the company turned towards building smaller, slower, and much less expensive machines. Unfortunately, these ran not the popularTOPS-20but a TENEX variant called Foonex; this seriously limited their market. Also, the machines shipped were actually wire-wrapped engineering prototypes requiring individual attention from more than usually competent site personnel, and thus had significant reliability problems. Poole's legendary temper and unwillingness to suffer fools gladly did not help matters. By the time of the Jupiter project cancellation in 1983, Foonly's proposal to build another F-1 was eclipsed by theMars, and the company never quite recovered. See theMarsentry for the continuation and moral of this story.
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footprint
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for free
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footprintn.
1. The floor or desk area taken up by a piece of hardware. 2. [IBM] The audit trail (if any) left by a crashed program (often in plural, `footprints'). See alsotoeprint. 3.RAM footprint: The minimum amount of RAM which an OS or other program takes; this figure gives one an idea of how much will be left for other applications. How actively this RAM is used is another matter entirely. Recent tendencies to featuritis and software bloat can expand the RAM footprint of an OS to the point of making it nearly unusable in practice. [This problem is, thankfully, limited to operating systems so stupid that they don't do virtual memory - ESR]
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for free
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for the rest of us
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footprint