19-letter words containing c, g, s
- languages of choice — C and Lisp. Nearly every hacker knows one of these, and most good ones are fluent in both. Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in small but influential communities. There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with Fortran, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They often prefer to be known as Real Programmers, and other hackers consider them a bit odd (see "The Story of Mel"). Assembler is generally no longer considered interesting or appropriate for anything but HLL implementation, glue, and a few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systems programs. Fortran occupies a shrinking niche in scientific programming. Most hackers tend to frown on languages like Pascal and Ada, which don't give them the near-total freedom considered necessary for hacking (see bondage-and-discipline language), and to regard everything even remotely connected with COBOL or other traditional card walloper languages as a total and unmitigated loss.
- league championship — the competition to become league champions
- legislative council — the upper house of a bicameral legislature.
- library of congress — one of the major library collections in the world, located in Washington, D.C., and functioning in some ways as the national library of the U.S. although not officially designated as such: established by Congress in 1800 for service to its members, but now also serving government agencies, other libraries, and the public.
- licensing agreement — an agreement that sets out the fees and terms of use for something available only under licence
- logical consequence — the relation that obtains between the conclusion and the premises of a formally valid argument
- logical shift right — logical shift
- lucent technologies — (company, telecommunications, Unix) The former systems and equipment portion of AT&T (including Bell Laboratories), split off in 1996.
- magnesium carbonate — a white powder, MgCO 3 , insoluble in water and alcohol, soluble in acids, used in dentifrices and cosmetics, in medicine as an antacid, and as a refractory material.
- magnetic hysteresis — hysteresis in a ferromagnetic material; the lag in the response of magnetic induction to changes of magnetic intensity.
- male chauvinist pig — male chauvinist.
- manchester encoding — (communications, protocol) A method of transmitting bits which enables the receiver to easily synchronise with the sender. A simple way of signalling bits might be to transmit a high voltage for some period for a 1-bit and a low voltage for a 0 bit: Bits Sent: 1 1 0 0 Signal: High ___ Low |___ Time: -> . . . . . However, when several identical bits are sent in succession, this provides no information to the receiver about when each bit starts and stops. Manchester encoding splits each bit period into two, and ensures that there is always a transition between the signal levels in the middle of each bit. This allows the receiver to synchronise with the sender. In normal Manchester encoding, a 1-bit is transmitted with a high voltage in the first period, and a low voltage in the second, and vice verse for the 0 bit: Bits Sent: 1 1 0 0 Signal: High Low || |_| || Time: -> . ' . ' . ' . ' . In Differential Manchester encoding, a 1-bit is indicated by making the first half of the signal equal to the last half of the previous bit's signal and a 0-bit is indicated by making the first half of the signal opposite to the last half of the previous bit's signal. That is, a zero bit is indicated by a transition at the beginning of the bit. Like normal Manchester encoding, there is always a transition in the middle of the transmission of the bit. Differential Manchester Encoding Bits Sent: 1 1 0 0 Signal: High __ Low |_| || || Time: -> . ' . ' . ' . ' . With each bit period half as long, twice as much bandwidth is required when using either of the Manchester encoding schemes.
- manned space flight — space travel in vehicles with a human crew
- mechanical scanning — Electronics. a technique for varying the sector covered by a transmitting or receiving antenna by rotating it.
- megabits per second — (unit) (Mbps, Mb/s) Millions of bits per second. A unit of data rate. 1 Mb/s = 1,000,000 bits per second (not 1,048,576). E.g. Ethernet can carry 10 Mbps.
- meningoencephalitis — Inflammation of the membranes of the brain and the adjoining cerebral tissue.
- micromesh stockings — stockings made from a material consisting of a fine mesh
- molecular biologist — a specialist in the study of biological phenomena at the molecular level
- moving spirit/force — The moving spirit or moving force behind something is the person or thing that caused it to start and to keep going, or that influenced people to take part in it.
- multiplication sign — Arithmetic. the symbol (⋅), (×), or (∗) between two mathematical expressions, denoting multiplication of the second expression by the first. In certain algebraic notations the sign is suppressed and multiplication is indicated by immediate juxtaposition or contiguity, as in ab.
- nagling coalescence — (networking, algorithm) An algorithm for improving TCP/IP network performance by combining small packets ("tinygrams") into larger ones, thus reducing the per-packet overhead. The server transmits the packet either when it has reached a preset size or when it receives an acknowledgment of the previous packet.
- negative resistance — a characteristic of certain electronic components in which an increase in the applied voltage increases the resistance, producing a proportional decrease in current
- night-scented stock — a plant, Matthiola bicornis, of the genus Matthiola, of the Mediterranean region, cultivated for its brightly coloured flowers: Brassicaceae (crucifers)
- no strings attached — without conditions
- northern hog sucker — black sucker.
- noughts and crosses — tick-tack-toe (def 1).
- noughts-and-crosses — tick-tack-toe (def 1).
- optimising compiler — (programming, tool) compiler which attempts to analyse the code it produces and to produce more efficient code by performing program transformation such as branch elimination, partial evaluation, or peep-hole optimisation. Contrast pessimising compiler.
- orthopaedic surgeon — a surgeon specializing in the branch of surgery concerned with disorders of the spine and joints and the repair of deformities of these parts
- orthopaedic surgery — surgery concerned with disorders of the spine and joints and the repair of deformities of these parts
- oscillating circuit — a circuit producing electrical oscillations.
- parallel processing — extending in the same direction, equidistant at all points, and never converging or diverging: parallel rows of trees.
- pastoral counseling — the use of psychotherapeutic techniques by trained members of the clergy to assist parishioners who seek help for personal or emotional problems.
- pedestrian crossing — place to cross road
- percussion drilling — Percussion drilling is a drilling method which involves lifting and dropping heavy tools to break rock, and uses steel casing tubes to stop the borehole from collapsing.
- perfect progressive — a verb form including the auxiliary have followed by been and a present participle, noting the continuation of an activity or event, its incompleteness or interruption, and its connection to the temporal point of reference, as in I've been waiting for over an hour, They had been talking about her before she came into the room, or In July, he will have been living here for two years.
- performance figures — the statistics that indicate how well or badly a company or organization has performed
- performance targets — the expected or predicted success level of an individual, company or organization
- philosophical logic — the branch of philosophy that studies the relationship between formal logic and ordinary language, esp the extent to which the former can be held accurately to represent the latter
- physical addressing — (networking) The low level addressing scheme used on Ethernet. The 48-bit destination Ethernet address in a packet is compared with the receiving node's Ethernet address. Compare IP address.
- piggyback investing — Piggyback investing is a situation in which a broker repeats a trade on his own behalf immediately after trading for an investor, because he thinks the investor may have inside information.
- pneumogastric nerve — the vagus nerve.
- population genetics — the branch of genetics concerned with the hereditary makeup of populations.
- postage and packing — the cost of packing and mailing an item bought by post
- prescription charge — a charge, set by the government, to be paid by a patient for medicines
- printing discussion — [XEROX PARC] A protracted, low-level, time-consuming, generally pointless discussion of something only peripherally interesting to all.
- priority scheduling — (operating system) Processes scheduling in which the scheduler selects tasks to run based on their priority as opposed to, say, a simple round-robin. Priorities may be static or dynamic. Static priorities are assigned at the time of creation, while dynamic priorities are based on the processes' behaviour while in the system. For example, the scheduler may favour I/O-intensive tasks so that expensive requests can be issued as early as possible. A danger of priority scheduling is starvation, in which processes with lower priorities are not given the opportunity to run. In order to avoid starvation, in preemptive scheduling, the priority of a process is gradually reduced while it is running. Eventually, the priority of the running process will no longer be the highest, and the next process will start running. This method is called aging.
- process engineering — the branch of engineering concerned with industrial processes, esp continuous ones, such as the production of petrochemicals
- proctosigmoidoscope — sigmoidoscope.
- proctosigmoidoscopy — sigmoidoscopy.