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.

