flamer n.
[common] One who habitually flames. Said esp. of obnoxious 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 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 metasyntactic variable (see
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
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 slashdot
effect).