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24-letter words containing e, n, d, o, r, s

  • effective sound pressure — the square root of the mean of the squares of the sound pressures of a sound wave, measured at a given point over a certain time interval.
  • effort adjustment factor — (programming)   (EAF) A term used in COCOMO to calculate a cost driver attribute's effect on a project. It is the product of the effort multipliers corresponding to each of the cost drivers for the project.
  • endotracheal anaesthesia — a method of administering gaseous anaesthetics to animals through a tube inserted into the trachea
  • exponential distribution — a continuous single-parameter distribution used esp when making statements about the length of life of certain materials or waiting times between randomly occurring events. Its density function is p(x) = λe–λx for positive λ and nonnegative x, and it is a special case of the gamma distribution
  • federal power commission — FPC.
  • federal trade commission — FTC.
  • ferdinand lewis alcindor — (Ferdinand) Lew(is, Jr.) original name of Abdul-Jabbar.
  • finger-pointing syndrome — (programming)   All-too-frequent result of bugs, especially in new or experimental configurations. The hardware vendor points a finger at the software. The software vendor points a finger at the hardware. All the poor users get is the finger.
  • flue gas desulfurization — Flue gas desulfurization is the removal of pollutants containing sulfur from flue gas.
  • footloose and fancy-free — If you describe someone as footloose and fancy-free, you mean that they are not married or in a similar relationship, and you therefore consider them to have very few responsibilities or commitments.
  • fray at/around the edges — If you say that something is fraying at the edges or is fraying around the edges, you mean that it has an uncertain or unsteady quality, for example because it is gradually being spoiled or destroyed.
  • free and accepted masons — a member of a widely distributed secret order (Free and Accepted Masons) having for its object mutual assistance and the promotion of brotherly love among its members.
  • free software foundation — (body)   (FSF) An organisation devoted to the creation and dissemination of free software, i.e. software that is free from licensing fees or restrictions on use. The Foundation's main work is supporting the GNU project, started by Richard Stallman (RMS), partly to proselytise for his position that information is community property and all software source should be shared. The GNU project has developed the GNU Emacs editor and a C compiler, gcc, replacements for many Unix utilities and many other tools. A complete Unix-like operating system (HURD) is in the works (April 1994). Software is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, which also provides a good summary of the Foundation's goals and principles. The Free Software Foundation raises most of its funds from distributing its software, although it is a charity rather than a company. Although the software is freely available (e.g. by FTP - see below) users are encouraged to support the work of the FSF by paying for their distribution service or by making donations. One of the slogans of the FSF is "Help stamp out software hoarding!" This remains controversial because authors want to own, assign and sell the results of their labour. However, many hackers who disagree with RMS have nevertheless cooperated to produce large amounts of high-quality software for free redistribution under the Free Software Foundation's imprimatur. See copyleft, General Public Virus, GNU archive site. Unofficial WWW pages: PDX, DeLorie. E-mail: <[email protected]>. Address: Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. Telephone: +1 (617) 876 3296.
  • geographical determinism — the theory that human activity is determined by geographical conditions
  • get on the wrong side of — to come into disfavour with
  • get under someone's skin — to anger or irritate someone
  • glycogen storage disease — any of several inherited disorders of glycogen metabolism that result in excess accumulation of glycogen in various organs of the body.
  • gottfried von strassburg — early 13th-century German poet; author of the incomplete epic Tristan and Isolde, the version of the legend that served as the basis of Wagner's opera
  • graduated pension scheme — (between 1961 and 1975) an earnings-related pension scheme which was based on the amount of an employee's National Insurance contributions
  • grandfather, father, son — (operating system)   (GFS) A backup rotation scheme in which a "grandfather" backup is performed on the first Monday of each month, a "father" backup is performed on every other Monday and a "son" backup is performed on every other day of the week. Grandfather tapes are kept for a year, father tapes for a month and son tapes for a week. The exact schedule (and thus the number of tapes required) may vary, as may the choice of full backup or incremental backup, but the idea is that it should be possible to restore versions of any file of different ages: e.g. yesterday's, last week's or last year's version.
  • hairdressing appointment — an appointment to have your hair cut, styled, coloured, etc, at a hairdresser
  • have one's head straight — the upper part of the body in humans, joined to the trunk by the neck, containing the brain, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.
  • have the drop on someone — to have the advantage over someone
  • head and shoulders above — vastly superior to
  • high-density lipoprotein — a blood constituent involved in the transport of cholesterol and associated with a decreased risk of atherosclerosis and heart attack. Abbreviation: HDL .
  • in someone's good graces — elegance or beauty of form, manner, motion, or action: We watched her skate with effortless grace across the ice. Synonyms: attractiveness, charm, gracefulness, comeliness, ease, lissomeness, fluidity. Antonyms: stiffness, ugliness, awkwardness, clumsiness; klutziness.
  • in words of one syllable — simply; bluntly
  • industrial correspondent — a journalist who specializes in reporting the industrial news
  • internal auditory meatus — the canal extending through the petrous portion of the temporal bone, through which the glossopharyngeal nerve, the facial nerve, and the auditory nerve and artery pass.
  • international morse code — a form of Morse code used in international radiotelegraphy.
  • internet access provider — (networking, company)   (IAP) A company or other origanisation which provides access to the Internet to businesses and/or consumers. An IAP purchases an Internet link from another company that has a direct link to the Internet and resells portions of that bandwidth to the general public. For example, an IAP may purchase a T1 link (1.544Mb/s) and resell that bandwidth in chunks consisting of ISDN (64Kb/s, 128Kb/s) and analog modems (14.4Kb/s, 28.8Kb/s). The IAP's customer base is likely to include both businesses and individuals. Individual customers usually connect to the IAP via a modem and telephone line to a (preferably local) point of presence. An IAP may also be an Internet Service Provider.
  • irritable bowel syndrome — any combination of common disturbances of the bowel, as diarrhea or constipation, occurring with abdominal pain, sometimes accompanied by psychological stress. Abbreviation: IBS.
  • iterated function system — (graphics)   (IFS) A class of fractals that yield natural-looking forms like ferns or snowflakes. Iterated Function Systems use a very easy transformation that is done recursively.
  • knowledge representation — The subfield of artificial intelligence concerned with designing and using systems for storing knowledge - facts and rules about some subject. A body of formally represented knowledge is based on a conceptualisation - an abstract view of the world that we wish to represent. In order to manipulate this knowledge we must specify how the abstract conceptualisation is represented as a concrete data structure. An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualisation.
  • knowledge sharing effort — (project)   An ARPA project developing techniques and methods for building large-scale knowledge bases which are sharable and reusable.
  • lady washington geranium — show geranium.
  • least common denominator — the smallest number that is a common denominator of a given set of fractions.
  • leave no stone un turned — the hard substance, formed of mineral matter, of which rocks consist.
  • logical block addressing — (storage)   (LBA) A hard disk sector addressing scheme used on all SCSI hard disks, and on ATA-2 conforming IDE hard disks. The addressing conversion is performed by the hard disk firmware. Prior to LBA, combined limitations of IBM PC BIOS and ATA restricted the useful capacity of IDE hard disks on IBM PCs and compatibles to 1024 cylinders * 63 sectors per track * 16 heads * 512 bytes per sector = 528 million bytes = 504 megabytes. Modern BIOSes select LBA mode automatically, and work around the 1024-cylinder BIOS limit by representing a hard disk to the OS as having e.g. half as many cylinders and twice as many heads. However, there is still an unbreakable BIOS disk size limit of 1024 cylinders * 63 sectors per track * 256 heads * 512 bytes per sector = 8 gigabytes, but modern OSes (including Windows 9x, Windows NT and Linux) are not affected by it, since they issue direct LBA-based calls, bypassing the BIOS hard disk services completely.
  • long-spined sea scorpion — Cottus bubalis or Taurulus bubalis
  • look over one's shoulder — If you say that someone is looking over their shoulder, you mean that they feel anxious all the time about what someone may do to them.
  • lunar (excursion) module — the component of the Apollo spacecraft used to carry astronauts to the moon's surface and return them to the command and service modules in lunar orbit
  • make ducks and drakes of — to use recklessly; squander or waste
  • medium-scale integration — MSI.
  • network addressable unit — (networking)   (NAU) The SNA term for an addressable entity. Examples include PUs, LUs, and SSCPs.
  • network attached storage — (networking, storage)   (NAS) Fixed disks, RAID arrays, and magnetic tape drives connected directly to a Storage Area Network (SAN) or other direct network connection. This is in contrast to a file server where the peripherals are connected to the network via a computer (the server).
  • northern mariana islands — a US commonwealth territory in the N Pacific, formerly part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (1947–87). Capital: Saipan island (Capitol Hill). Pop: 51 170 (2013 est). Area: 477 sq km (184 sq miles)
  • object-oriented analysis — (programming)   (OOA) The first phase of object-oriented design.
  • object-oriented database — (database)   (OODB) A system offering DBMS facilities in an object-oriented programming environment. Data is stored as objects and can be interpreted only using the methods specified by its class. The relationship between similar objects is preserved (inheritance) as are references between objects. Queries can be faster because joins are often not needed (as in a relational database). This is because an object can be retrieved directly without a search, by following its object id. The same programming language can be used for both data definition and data manipulation. The full power of the database programming language's type system can be used to model data structures and the relationship between the different data items. OODBs typically provide better support for versioning. An object can be viewed as the set of all its versions. Also, object versions can be treated as full fledged objects. OODBs also provide systematic support for triggers and constraints which are the basis of active databases. Most, if not all, object-oriented application programs that have database needs will benefit from using an OODB.
  • open software foundation — (body)   (OSF) A foundation created by nine computer vendors, (Apollo, DEC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Bull, Nixdorf, Philips, Siemens and Hitachi) to promote "Open Computing". It is planned that common operating systems and interfaces, based on developments of Unix and the X Window System will be forthcoming for a wide range of different hardware architectures. OSF announced the release of the industry's first open operating system - OSF/1 on 23 October 1990.
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