WhatIs

/flām/

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).

/flay'm*j/

n. Flaming verbiage, esp. high-noise, low-signal postings to USENET or other electronic fora. Often in the phrase the usual flamage. Flaming is the act itself; flamage the content; a flame is a single flaming message.

See flame.

/flā-kē/

adj. (var sp. 'flakey') Subject to frequent lossage. This use is of course related to the common slang use of the word to describe a person as eccentric, crazy, or just unreliable. A system that is flaky is working, sort of -- enough that you are tempted to try to use it -- but fails frequently enough that the odds in favor of finishing what you start are low. Commonwealth hackish prefers dodgy or wonky.

/flāg dā/

n. A software change that is neither forward- nor backward-compatible and which is costly to make and costly to reverse.

"Can we install that without causing a flag day for all users?"

This term has nothing to do with the use of the word flag to mean a variable that has two values. It came into use when a massive change was made to the Multics timesharing system to convert from the old ASCII code to the new one; this was scheduled for Flag Day (a U.S. holiday), June 14, 1966.

/flāg/

n. A variable or quantity that can take on one of two values; a bit, particularly one that is used to indicate one of two outcomes or is used to control which of two things is to be done.

"This flag controls whether to clear the screen before printing the message."

"The program status word contains several flag bits."

Used of humans analogously to bit.

See also hidden flag, mode bit.

/fiks/

n.,v. What one does when a problem has been reported too many times to be ignored.

/fish kyü/

[acronym, by analogy with FIFO (First In, First Out)]

n. 'First In, Still Here'. A joking way of pointing out that processing of a particular sequence of events or requests has stopped dead. Also 'FISH mode' and 'FISHnet'; the latter may be applied to any network that is running really slowly or exhibiting extreme flakiness.

/fish/

[Adelaide University, Australia]

n. 1. Another metasyntactic variable.

See foo.

Derived originally from the Monty Python skit in the middle of "The Meaning of Life" entitled "Find the Fish".

2. A pun for 'microfiche'. A microfiche file cabinet may be referred to as a 'fish tank'.

/fer'mee/

Syn. stiffy (a 3.5-inch floppy disk).

/fī(-ə)r-ˌwərks mōd/

n. The mode a machine is sometimes said to be in when it is performing a crash and burn operation.