21-letter words containing h, a, s, t, l
- nightmare file system — Pejorative hackerism for Sun's Network File System (NFS). In any nontrivial network of Suns where there is a lot of NFS cross-mounting, when one Sun goes down, the others often freeze up. Some machine tries to access the down one, and (getting no response) repeats indefinitely. This causes it to appear dead to some messages (what is actually happening is that it is locked up in what should have been a brief excursion to a higher spl level). Then another machine tries to reach either the down machine or the pseudo-down machine, and itself becomes pseudo-down. The first machine to discover the down one is now trying both to access the down one and to respond to the pseudo-down one, so it is even harder to reach. This situation snowballs very quickly, and soon the entire network of machines is frozen - worst of all, the user can't even abort the file access that started the problem! Many of NFS's problems are excused by partisans as being an inevitable result of its statelessness, which is held to be a great feature (critics, of course, call it a great misfeature). ITS partisans are apt to cite this as proof of Unix's alleged bogosity; ITS had a working NFS-like shared file system with none of these problems in the early 1970s. See also broadcast storm.
- no less a person than — a person of no lower importance, rank, etc. than
- northumberland strait — the part of the Gulf of St. Lawrence that separates Prince Edward Island from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, in SE Canada. About 200 miles (320 km) long; 9–30 miles (15–48 km) wide.
- not hold one's breath — If you say that you won't hold your breath, you mean that you do not expect something to happen even though someone has suggested that it might.
- old spanish practices — irregular practices among a group of workers to gain increased financial allowances, reduced working hours, etc
- otorhinolaryngologist — (medicine) Doctor specializing in otorhinolaryngology, the study of ear, nose, and throat.
- peephole optimisation — (compiler) A kind of low-level code optimisation that considers only a few adjacent machine code instructions at a time and looks for certain combinations which can be replaced with more efficient sequences. E.g. ADD R0, #1 ADD R0, #1 (add one to register R0) could be replaced by ADD R0, #2 as long as there were no jumps to the second instruction.
- phrase-structure rule — a rule that generates a sentence or other syntactic construction from words and phrases and identifies its constituent structure.
- physical anthropology — the branch of anthropology dealing with the evolutionary changes in human anatomy and physiology, using mensurational and descriptive techniques.
- pipelined burst cache — Pipeline Burst Cache
- populist shop steward — a shop steward who operates in a delegate role, putting the immediate interests of his members before union principles and policies
- public health service — the agency that is responsible for the health of the general public
- pull sth out of a hat — To pull something out of the hat means to do something unexpected which helps you to succeed, often when you are failing.
- pulse height analyser — a multichannel analyser that sorts pulses into selected amplitude ranges
- pulse height analyzer — an instrument that records or counts an electrical pulse if its amplitude falls within specified limits: used in nuclear physics research for the determination of energy spectra of nuclear radiations
- put sb in their place — If you put someone in their place, you show them that they are less important or clever than they think they are.
- ralph roister doister — a play (1553?) by Nicholas Udall: the earliest known English comedy.
- rap over the knuckles — to reprimand
- rayleigh distribution — (mathematics) A curve that yields a good approximation to the actual labour curves on software projects.
- reconnaissance flight — a flight made by an aircraft in order to obtain military information about a particular place
- reverse polish syntax — postfix notation
- rolling in the aisles — (of an audience) overcome with laughter
- safe in the knowledge — If you do something safe in the knowledge that something else is the case, you do the first thing confidently because you are sure of the second thing.
- sail against the wind — to sail a course that slants slightly away from the true direction of the wind; sail closehauled
- salam-weinberg theory — the electroweak theory.
- satellite dish aerial — a parabolic aerial for reception from or transmission to an artificial satellite
- schlieren photography — a type of photography which records schlieren
- scholastic philosophy — the system of philosophy, theology, and teaching that dominated medieval western Europe and was based on the writings of the Church Fathers and (from the 12th century) Aristotle, the Greek philosopher (384–322 bc)
- scorched earth policy — a military practice of devastating the property and agriculture of an area before abandoning it to an advancing enemy.
- scorched-earth policy — a military practice of devastating the property and agriculture of an area before abandoning it to an advancing enemy.
- sealed-beam headlight — a headlight in which the reflector and lens are hermetically sealed together with the filament in a single unit.
- secure hash algorithm —
- self-characterization — portrayal; description: the actor's characterization of a politician.
- settle someone's hash — a dish of diced or chopped meat and often vegetables, as of leftover corned beef or veal and potatoes, sautéed in a frying pan or of meat, potatoes, and carrots cooked together in gravy.
- silicon tetrachloride — a colorless, fuming liquid, SiCl 4 , used chiefly for making smoke screens and various derivatives of silicon.
- single spanish burton — a tackle having a runner as well as the fall supporting the load, giving a mechanical advantage of three, neglecting friction.
- skeleton at the feast — a person or event that brings gloom or sadness to an occasion of joy or celebration
- slatwall merchandiser — A slatwall merchandiser is a three-dimensional display unit with grooves cut into its surface into which metal hanging rails can be fixed at various heights.
- social anthropologist — an anthropologist who deals with cultural and social phenomena such as kinship systems or beliefs, esp of nonliterate peoples
- sodium metabisulphite — an inorganic compound with the chemical formula Na2S2O5 that is used as a preservative, antioxidant and disinfectant
- sovereign wealth fund — an investment fund created using the financial assets of a national government
- space shuttle orbiter — orbiter (def 1).
- spherical coordinates — Usually, spherical coordinates. any of three coordinates used to locate a point in space by the length of its radius vector and the angles this vector makes with two perpendicular polar planes.
- spicebush swallowtail — a swallowtail butterfly, Papilio troilus, having a dark body with yellow spots on the forewings and greenish hind wings.
- splice the main brace — to join together or unite (two ropes or parts of a rope) by the interweaving of strands.
- spotted alfalfa aphid — a pale yellowish aphid, Therioaphis maculata, of the southern U.S., especially west of the Mississippi River, that is marked with black spots and has fine spines on its back: a pest mainly of alfalfa and some other legumes, as clover.
- statistical mechanics — the science that deals with average properties of the molecules, atoms, or elementary particles in random motion in a system of many such particles and relates these properties to the thermodynamic and other macroscopic properties of the system.
- steal someone's heart — to cause someone to feel love or affection
- steer clear of sb/sth — If you steer clear of someone or something, you deliberately avoid them.
- structural psychology — psychology centering on the analysis of the structure or content of conscious mental states by introspective methods.