go flatline: v. [from cyberpunk SF, refers to flattening of EEG
traces upon brain-death] (also adjectival `flatlined'). 1. To die,
terminate, or fail, esp. irreversibly. In hacker parlance, this is
used of machines only, human death being considered somewhat too
serious a matter to employ jargon-jokes about. 2. To go completely
quiescent; said of machines undergoing controlled shutdown. "You
can suffer file damage if you shut down Unix but power off before
the system has gone flatline." 3. Of a video tube, to fail by
losing vertical scan, so all one sees is a bright horizontal line
bisecting the screen.
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