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20-letter words containing m, a, t, p

  • essential complexity — (programming)   A measure of the "structuredness" of a program.
  • explicit parallelism — A feature of a programming language for a parallel processing system which allows or forces the programmer to annotate his program to indicate which parts should be executed as independent parallel tasks. This is obviously more work for the programmer than a system with implicit parallelism (where the system decides automatically which parts to run in parallel) but may allow higher performance.
  • fore-topgallant mast — the spar or section of a spar forming the topgallant portion of a foremast on a ship.
  • fulminating compound — a fulminate.
  • fundamental particle — elementary particle.
  • get a real computer! — (jargon)   A typical hacker response to news that somebody is having trouble getting work done on a toy system or bitty box. The threshold for "real computer" rises with time. As of mid-1993 it meant multi-tasking, with a hard disk, and an address space bigger than 16 megabytes. At this time, according to GLS, computers with character-only displays were verging on "unreal". In 2001, a real computer has a one gigahertz processor, 128 MB of RAM, 20 GB of hard disk, and runs Linux.
  • glucosamine sulphate — a compound used in some herbal remedies and dietary supplements, esp to strengthen joint cartilage
  • hampton court palace — a royal palace in Hampton, London, built in 1515 by Cardinal Wolsey
  • have an itching palm — to desire money greedily
  • hire-purchase system — a system of payment for a commodity in regular installments while using it.
  • houses of parliament — In Britain, the Houses of Parliament are the British parliament, which consists of two parts, the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The buildings where the British parliament does its work are also called the Houses of Parliament.
  • human genome project — a federally funded U.S. scientific project to identify both the genes and the entire sequence of DNA base pairs that make up the human genome.
  • hyperadrenocorticism — Cushing's syndrome.
  • hypercholesterolemia — the presence of an excessive amount of cholesterol in the blood.
  • hyperhomocysteinemia — (medicine) The presence of an excessive amount of homocysteine in the blood.
  • hyperlipoproteinemia — Pathology. any of various disorders of lipoprotein metabolism, usually characterized by abnormally high levels of cholesterol and certain lipoproteins in the blood.
  • implicit parallelism — (parallel)   A feature of a programming language for a parallel processing system which decides automatically which parts to run in parallel. The best way of providing implicit parallelism is still (1995) an active research topic. The problem is to generate the right number of parallel tasks of the right size (or "granularity"). Too many tasks and the system gets bogged down in house-keeping, or memory for waiting tasks runs out, too few tasks and processors are left idle. The best performance is usually achieved with explicit parallelism where the programmer can annotate his program to indicate which parts should be executed as independent parallel tasks.
  • imported currantworm — the larva of any of several insects, as a sawfly, Nematus ribesii (imported currantworm) which infests and feeds on the leaves and fruit of currants.
  • in the public domain — able to be discussed and examined freely by the general public
  • income tax inspector — a person whose job is to assess individuals' income tax liability
  • incomplete dominance — the appearance in a heterozygote of a trait that is intermediate between either of the trait's homozygous phenotypes.
  • incorporated company — a legally constituted company
  • initial program load — (operating system)   (IPL) The procedure used to (re-)start a computer system by copying the operating system kernel into main memory and running it. Part of the boot sequence.
  • inland revenue stamp — a certificate issued by the Inland Revenue to acknowledge payment of tax
  • innerspring mattress — a mattress with built-in coil springs
  • insulin-coma therapy — a former treatment for mental illness, especially schizophrenia, employing insulin-induced hypoglycemia as a method for producing convulsive seizures.
  • james prescott joule — James Prescott, 1818–89, English physicist.
  • java development kit — (language, compiler)   (JDK) A free Sun Microsystems product which provides the environment required for programming in Java. The JDK is available for a variety of platforms, but most notably Sun Solaris and Microsoft Windows.
  • joseph of arimathaea — a member of the Sanhedrin who placed the body of Jesus in the tomb. Matt. 27:57–60; Mark 15:43.
  • kamin's interpreters — (language, tool)   A set of interpreters for Pascal, Lisp, APL, Scheme, SASL, CLU, Smalltalk, and Prolog. Tim Budd <[email protected]> implemented them as subclasses in C++ sometime before 1991-09-12.
  • kingston upon thames — a borough of Greater London, England.
  • laboratory equipment — apparatus for scientific research and experiments
  • language development — the development verbal communication skills in children
  • life-support machine — A life-support machine is the equipment that is used to keep a person alive when they are very ill and cannot breathe without help.
  • like death warmed up — very ill
  • literate programming — (programming, text)   Combining the use of a text formatting language such as TeX and a conventional programming language so as to maintain documentation and source code together. Literate programming may use the inverse comment convention.
  • long topgallant mast — a single spar fitted above a topmast to carry topgallants, a royal, and all sails above.
  • lump in one's throat — the passage from the mouth to the stomach or to the lungs, including the pharynx, esophagus, larynx, and trachea.
  • lymphogranulomatosis — widespread infectious granuloma of the lymphatic system.
  • magneto-optical disk — (hardware, storage)   (MO) A plastic or glass disk coated with a compound (often TbFeCo) with special optical, magnetic and thermal properties. The disk is read by bouncing a low-intensity laser off the disk. Originally the laser was infrared, but frequencies up to blue may be possible giving higher storage density. The polarisation of the reflected light depends on the polarity of the stored magnetic field. To write, a higher intensity laser heats the coating up to its Curie point, allowing its magnetisation to be altered in a way that is retained when it has cooled. Although optical, they appear as hard drives to the operating system and do not require a special filesystem (they can be formatted as FAT, HPFS, NTFS, etc.). The initial 5.25" MO drives, introduced at the end of the 1980s, were the size of a full-height 5.25" hard drive (like in IBM PC XT) and the disks looked like a CD-ROM enclosed in an old-style cartridge In 2006, a 3.5" drive has the size of 1.44 megabyte diskette drive with disks about the size of a regular 1.44MB floppy disc but twice the thickness.
  • magnetoencephalogram — a record of the magnetic field of the brain. Abbreviation: MEG.
  • mail transport agent — Message Transfer Agent
  • make sheep's eyes at — to look shyly but amorously at
  • marginal probability — (in a multivariate distribution) the probability of one variable taking a specific value irrespective of the values of the others
  • marketing department — the department of a commercial organization that deals with the marketing of products
  • matched-pairs design — (of an experiment) concerned with measuring the values of the dependent variables for pairs of subjects that have been matched to eliminate individual differences and that are respectively subjected to the control and the experimental condition
  • material implication — equivalence (def 4a).
  • maternal deprivation — the lack of a mother in a child's life, considered a cause of psychological problems later in life
  • medical practitioner — doctor
  • megabytes per second — (unit)   (MBps, MB/s) Millions of bytes per second. A unit of data rate. 1 MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes per second (not 1,048,576).
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