flat store

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flat store (plural flat stores)

1. (gambling, slang) A crooked gambling establishment, such as a casino running rigged or fixed (dishonest) games of chance.[1]
   • 1962: Saul Bellow & Keith Botsford, The Noble Savage, p59 (World Pub. Co)

     He had told me that in the old days in Chicago he had run a flat-store with a partner who had tuberculosis and also smoked cigars.

   • 1998, Michael Maher, Jean-Francois Puget, Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming — CP98‎, Springer, →ISBN, page 1, →ISBN:

     In shared-memory languages for parallel programming, the model is one of a global flat store equipped with various synchronization primitives.

   • 2000: Syngress Media, Inc, MCSE Windows 2000 Server Study Guide (exam 70–215), p75 (McGraw–Hill Professional; →ISBN (10), →ISBN (13))

     The PDC uses the AD but exposes the data as a flat store, as in Windows NT.

   • 2001: Elizabeth A. Wheeler, Uncontained: Urban Fiction in Postwar America, p139 (The Rutgers University Press; →ISBN (10), →ISBN (13)); quoting an unknown source

     “It sat on the top of a steep, unpaved hill and commanded an uninspiring view of clean, gray concrete that was six lanes wide and an assortment of boxy, flat store buildings and spacious super gas-stations” (117).

   • 2004, Peter Golob, Crop Post-Harvest: Science and Technology Durables‎, Blackwell Publishing, →ISBN, page 80, →ISBN:

     These systems are often cheaper to install than conventional horizontal ducting and have the advantage over above-floor ducts that they are unlikely to be damaged by tractors unloading the flat store.

2. A storage facility in which the material stored is simply piled on a floor (as opposed to a bin or silo).
   • 1994, Norman Leslie Kent, A. D. Evers, Technology of Cereals, →ISBN:

     It is sometimes necessary to provide storage for grain beyond the normal capacity of an elevator facility or elsewhere. In such conditions a relatively inexpensive expedient is the flat store. This is little more than a cover for a pile of dry grain adopting its natural form as poured.

   • 1996, Aluminium - Volume 72, page 616:

     The space-saving arrangement of the stores and the controlled cooling down of coils in the flat store which led to reduced handling times and inventory volume had a very positive effect on the efficiency of the cold rolling mill and product availability for shipment.

   • 1998, Bulk Solids Handling::

     In some flat stores a small trough or day silo is located on the perimeter inside the flat store which is also accessed from the outside of the flat store.

• (crooked gambling establishment): flat joint