Lazy people who don’t bother to think about what they’re saying or writing frequently use MIPS and FLOPS as if the s denoted plural rather than second, but another piece of jargon dredged up from the air traffic controllers at West Drayton, Middlesex makes it clear that in future any flack who talks about the Megaflop rating of his client’s supercomputer will be casting the vilest of aspersions on the machine’s reliability: apropos the antique IBM 9020D air traffic computer complex, they use FLOP to stand for Functional Lapse of Operational Performance, so a Megaflop would represent a system failure of catastrophic proportions.
DEFINE MEGAFLOP!
