go flatline
[Cyberpunk SF, refers to flattening of EEG traces upon brain-death] also "flatlined". 1. To die, terminate, or fail, especially 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. [Jargon File]Nearby terms:
go-faster stripes ♦ Gofer ♦ Goffin ♦ go flatline ♦ GO-GO ♦ go gold ♦ GOL
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