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24-letter words containing a, e, r, i, l

  • open data-link interface — (networking, standard)   (ODI) A Novell-developed network card API that provides media and protocol independence. It allows the sharing of a single card by multiple transport layer protocols and resolves conflicts.
  • operational requirements — (programming)   Qualitative and quantitative parameters that specify the desired capabilities of a system and serve as a basis for determining the operational effectiveness and suitability of a system prior to deployment.
  • optical character reader — the process or technology of reading data in printed form by a device (optical character reader) that scans and identifies characters. Abbreviation: OCR.
  • optical signal processor — optical computing
  • orbital angular momentum — the component of angular momentum of an electron in an atom or a nucleon in a nucleus, arising from its orbital motion rather than from its spin.
  • other things being equal — If you say 'other things being equal' or 'all things being equal' when talking about a possible situation, you mean if nothing unexpected happens or if there are no other factors which affect the situation.
  • parallel cousin marriage — marriage between the children of two brothers or two sisters.
  • parallel virtual machine — (parallel, networking, tool)   (PVM) 1. A software system designed to allow a network of heterogeneous machines to be used as a single distributed parallel processor. PVM was developed by the University of Tennessee, The Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Emory University. 2. The intermediate language used by the Gambit compiler for Scheme.
  • parliamentary government — government by a body of cabinet ministers who are chosen from and responsible to the legislature and act as advisers to a nominal chief of state.
  • particulate fluidization — Particulate fluidization is a condition when particles in a fluidized bed are individually suspended.
  • passive balance of trade — a negative balance of trade
  • people's liberation army — See under Huk (def 1).
  • permeability coefficient — the volume of an incompressible fluid that will flow in unit time through a unit cube of a porous substance across which a unit pressure difference is maintained
  • photomechanical transfer — a method of producing photographic prints or offset printing plates from paper negatives by a chemical transfer process rather than by exposure to light
  • physiological atmosphere — ecosphere.
  • plantation walking horse — one of a breed of saddle horses developed largely from Standardbred and Morgan stock.
  • pluck sth out of the air — If you say that someone plucks a figure, name, or date out of the air, you mean that they say it without thinking much about it before they speak.
  • polychlorinated biphenyl — PCB.
  • polymer matrix composite — A polymer matrix composite is a material consisting of a composite made stronger by adding fibers or particles to it.
  • port address translation — (networking)   (PAT) A function provided by some routers which allows hosts on a LAN to communicate with the rest of a network (such as the Internet) without revealing their own private IP address. All outbound packets have their IP address translated to the routers external IP address. Replies come back to the router which then translates them back into the private IP address of the original host for final delivery. Compare SOCKS.
  • potassium cobaltinitrite — a yellow, crystalline, slightly water-soluble powder, K 3 Co(NO 2) 6 , used as a pigment in oil and watercolor paints, and for coloring surfaces of glass, porcelain, etc.
  • pre-emptive multitasking — (operating system, parallel)   A type of multitasking where the scheduler can interrupt and suspend ("swap out") the currently running task in order to start or continue running ("swap in") another task. The tasks under pre-emptive multitasking can be written as though they were the only task and the scheduler decides when to swap them. The scheduler must ensure that when swapping tasks, sufficient state is saved and restored that tasks do not interfere. The length of time for which a process runs is known as its "time slice" and may depend on the task's priority or its use of resources such as memory and I/O. This contrasts with cooperative multitasking where each task must include calls to allow it to be descheduled periodically.
  • principal quantum number — the nonnegative, integral quantum number that defines the stationary orbits in the Bohr model of the atom.
  • private health insurance — insurance against the need for medical treatment as a private patient
  • privileged communication — a communication that one cannot legally be compelled to divulge, as that to a lawyer from a client
  • professional association — a body of persons engaged in the same profession, formed usually to control entry into the profession, maintain standards, and represent the profession in discussions with other bodies
  • professional corporation — a corporation formed by one or more licensed practitioners, especially medical or legal, to operate their practices on a corporate plan. Abbreviation: PC, P.C.
  • professional programming — paranoid programming
  • program information file — (file format)   Under Windows, a file providing information on how a non-Windows application program should be run, including how much memory should be allocated to it and what graphics interface it requires.
  • programmable array logic — (hardware)   (PAL) A family of fuse-programmable logic integrated circuits originally developed by MMI. Registered or combinatorial output functions are modelled in a sum of products form. Each output is a sum (logical or) of a fixed number of products (logical and) of the input signals. This structure is well suited for automatic generation of programming patterns by logic compilers. PAL devices are programmed by blowing the fuses permanently using overvoltage. Today, more complex devices based on the same original architecture are available (CPLD's for Complex PLD's) that incorporate the equivalent of several original PAL chips. PAL chips are, however, still popular due to their high speed.
  • progressive assimilation — assimilation in which a preceding sound has an effect on a following one, as in shortening captain to cap'm rather than cap'n.
  • psychopathic personality — an antisocial personality characterized by the failure to develop any sense of moral responsibility and the capability of performing violent or antisocial acts
  • public international law — Also called public law. the law governing the legal relations between independent states or nations and, increasingly, between these and individuals.
  • public relations officer — a person who is responsible for communications with the public
  • pure functional language — purely functional language
  • quadrature of the circle — the insoluble problem of constructing, by the methods of Euclidean geometry, a square equal in area to a given circle.
  • quick-assembly furniture — furniture such as shelves and cupboards which you buy as a number of separate pieces and assemble yourself
  • quinacrine hydrochloride — Atabrine
  • rapid eye movement sleep — REM sleep.
  • rational-emotive therapy — a form of therapy in which a patient is asked to reject irrational attitudes and assumptions in order to deal effectively with stressful situations.
  • read someone like a book — to understand a person, or his motives, character, etc, thoroughly and clearly
  • reciprocal translocation — an exchange of segments between two nonhomologous chromosomes.
  • recommended retail price — the selling price of a product officially suggested by a manufacturer to a retailer
  • reconnaissance satellite — a military satellite designed to carry out photographic surveillance, gather electronic intelligence, detect nuclear explosions, or provide early warning of strategic-missile launchings.
  • referential transparency — (programming)   An expression E is referentially transparent if any subexpression and its value (the result of evaluating it) can be interchanged without changing the value of E. This is not the case if the value of an expression depends on global state which can change value. The most common example of changing global state is assignment to a global variable. For example, if y is a global variable in: f(x) { return x+y; } g(z) { a = f(1); y = y + z; return a + f(1); } function g has the "side-effect" that it alters the value of y. Since f's result depends on y, the two calls to f(1) will return different results even though the argument is the same. Thus f is not referentially transparent. Changing the order of evaluation of the statements in g will change its result. We could make f above referentially transparent by passing in y as an argument: f(x, y) = x+y Similarly, g would need to take y as an argument and return its new value as part of the result: g(z, y) { a = f(1, y); y' = y+z; return (a + f(1, y'), y'); } Referentially transparent programs are more amenable to formal methods and easier to reason about because the meaning of an expression depends only on the meaning of its subexpressions and not on the order of evaluation or side-effects of other expressions. We can stretch the concept of referential transparency to include input and output if we consider the whole program to be a function from its input to its output. The program as a whole is referentially transparent because it will always produce the same output when given the same input. This is stretching the concept because the program's input may include what the user types, the content of certain files or even the time of day. If we do not consider global state like the contents of files as input, then writing to a file and reading what was written behaves just like assignment to a global variable. However, if we must consider the state of the universe as an input rather than global state then any deterministic system would be referentially transparent! See also extensional equality, observational equivalence.
  • registered general nurse — (in Britain) a nurse who has completed a three-year training course in all aspects of nursing care to enable him or her to be registered with the United Kingdom Central Council for Nursing, Midwifery, and Health Visiting
  • regular checking account — a checking account for which the monthly fee is usually based on the average balance maintained and the number of transactions recorded.
  • relative record data set — (database)   (RRDS) One of the access methods used by IBM's VSAM.
  • renewable term insurance — Renewable term insurance is term life insurance that may be renewed for another period without the policyholder needing to provide further evidence of their insurability.
  • repondez s'il vous plait — Répondez s'il vous plait
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