Go Flatline

[from cyberpunk SF, refers to flattening of EEG traces upon brain-death]

vi., 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.

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.