WhatIs

/fər t͟hē rest əv əs/

[from the Mac slogan "The computer for the rest of us"]

adj. 1. Used to describe a spiffy product whose affordability shames other comparable products, or (more often) used sarcastically to describe spiffy but very overpriced products.

/fər frē/

adj. Said of a capability of a programming language or hardware equipment that is available by its design without needing cleverness to implement:

"In APL, we get the matrix operations for free."

"And owing to the way revisions are stored in this system, you get revision trees for free."

Usually it refers to a serendipitous feature of doing things a certain way (compare big win), but it may refer to an intentional but secondary feature.

/fu̇t-ˌprint/

n. 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 also toeprint.

/fünlē/

n. 1. The PDP-10 successor that was to have been built by the Super Foonly project at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory along with a new operating system. The intention was to leapfrog from the old DEC timesharing system SAIL was 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.

/fül fī(-ə)l, t͟hə/

[USENET]

n. A notional repository of all the most dramatically and abysmally stupid utterances ever. There is a subgenre of sig blocks that 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 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.

/fül/

n. 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 also cretin, loser, fool file, the.

/fü-ˌbär/

n. Another common metasyntactic variable; see foo. Hackers do *not* generally use this to mean FUBAR in either the slang or jargon sense.

/foo/

1. interj. Term of disgust.
2. Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything, esp. programs and files (esp. scratch files).

3. First on the standard list of metasyntactic variables used in syntax examples.

/fä-lō-ˌəp/

n. On USENET, a posting generated in response to another posting (as opposed to a reply, which goes by email rather than being broadcast). Followups include the ID of the parent message in their headers; smart news-readers can use this information to present USENET news in 'conversation' sequence rather than order-of-arrival.

See thread.

/fōld kās/

v. See smash 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.