:flood: /v./ [IRC] To dump large amounts of text onto an
{IRC} channel. This is especially rude when the text is
uninteresting and the other users are trying to carry on a serious
conversation.
: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 {COBOL} programmers, {card walloper}s, 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 {pdl}, sense 3.
:flower key: /n./ [Mac users] See {feature key}.
:flush: /v./ 1. 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 DEC and on Honeywell and IBM machines as far back as 1965). Unix/C hackers find 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./ See {firewall machine}.
:FM: /F-M/ /n./ 1. *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">[ 1. A word used in email and news postings to tag utterances as surrealist mind-play or humor, esp. in connection with {Discordianism} and 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. A {metasyntactic variable}, commonly used by hackers with ties to {Discordianism} or the {Church of the SubGenius}.