flat (redirected from flatbed)

playa

 or pan or flat or dry lake

Flat-bottomed depression that is periodically covered by water. Playas occur in interior desert basins and adjacent to coasts in arid and semiarid regions. The water that periodically covers the playa slowly filters into the groundwater system or evaporates into the atmosphere, causing the deposition of salt, sand, and mud along the bottom and around the edges of the depression.

---

flat

Refers to structures that are not hierarchical such as a single list of items. It also refers to structures that do not contain explicit pointers to other structures. See flat file and flat address space. See also flat screen.

---

flat

1. Chiefly Brit

a. (of races, racetracks, or racecourses) not having obstacles to be jumped

b. of, relating to, or connected with flat racing as opposed to steeplechasing and hurdling

2. (of trade, business, a market, etc.) commercially inactive; sluggish

3. (of a print, photograph, or painting) lacking contrast or shading between tones

4. (of a painting) lacking perspective

5. Music

a. denoting a note of a given letter name (or the sound it represents) that has been lowered in pitch by one chromatic semitone

b. (of an instrument, voice, etc.) out of tune by being too low in pitch

6. a low-lying tract of land, esp a marsh or swamp

7. a mud bank exposed at low tide

8. Music

a. an accidental that lowers the pitch of the following note by one chromatic semitone.

b. a note affected by this accidental

9. Theatre a rectangular wooden frame covered with painted canvas, etc., used to form part of a stage setting

10. often cap; preceded by the Chiefly Brit

a. flat racing, esp as opposed to steeplechasing and hurdling

b. the season of flat racing

11. Nautical a flatboat or lighter

12. US and Canadian a shallow box or container, used for holding plants, growing seedlings, etc.

---

flat [flat]

(acoustics)

A musical note that is a half step lower than a specified note.

(engineering)

A nonglossy painted surface.

(geography)

A level tract of land.

(geology)

mud flat

(graphic arts)

The sheet of glass on which negative films are placed close together for printing on sensitized metal in the photoengraving process.

An assemblage of negative or positive films used in preparing a photo-offset plate.

(mineralogy)

An inferior grade of rough diamonds.

(navigation)

A place covered with water too shallow for ordinary navigation.

The area between high- and low-water marks along the edge of an arm of the sea, a bay, or tidal river; the term is usually used in the plural.

(naval architecture)

A partial deck below the main deck, constructed without any camber.

(science and technology)

A smooth, even surface.

An object with a broad, shallow or thin form.

---

1.		flat - Lacking any complex internal structure. "That bitty box has only a flat file system, not a hierarchical one." The verb form is flatten. Usually used pejoratively (at least with respect to file systems).
2.		flat - Said of a memory architecture like that of the VAX or Motorola 680x0 that is one big linear address space (typically with each possible value of a processor register corresponding to a unique address). This is a Good Thing. The opposite is a "segmented" architecture like that of the Intel 80x86 in which addresses are composed from a base-register/offset pair. Segmented designs are generally considered cretinous.
3.		flat - A flat domain is one where all elements except bottom are incomparable (equally well defined). E.g. the integers.