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22-letter words containing o, m, i, t

  • make a beeline for sth — If you make a beeline for a place, you go to it as quickly and directly as possible.
  • make a big deal out of — to attach extreme importance to; make a big fuss about
  • make common cause with — join forces
  • make contact (with sb) — If you make contact with someone, you find out where they are and talk or write to them.
  • make out like a bandit — a robber, especially a member of a gang or marauding band.
  • make/prove one's point — If you make your point or prove your point, you prove that something is true, either by arguing about it or by your actions or behaviour.
  • manner of articulation — the degree of obstruction or the type of channel imposed upon the passage of air at a given place of articulation, as denoted by such categories as stop, fricative, nasal, and semivowel.
  • master warrant officer — a noncommissioned officer in the Canadian forces junior to a chief warrant officer
  • mathematical induction — induction (def 5).
  • matrix math extensions — (processor)   (MMX) (NOT an acronym for "MultiMedia eXtension", according to Intel, but an Intel brand name) A set of 57 extra instructions built into some versions of Intel's Pentium microprocessors for supporting SIMD operations on multimedia and communications data types. MMX-enhanced processors are due to be released early in 1997. They will be fully compatible with previous Intel processors and software but software will only benefit if it is written to use the new instructions. They can handle many common multimedia operations, such as digital signal processing, normally handled by a separate sound card or video card.
  • mcculloch-pitts neuron — (artificial intelligence)   The basic building block of artificial neural networks. It receives one or more inputs and produces one or more identical outputs, each of which is a simple non-linear function of the sum of the inputs to the neuron. The non-linear function is typically a threshhold or step function which is usually smoothed (i.e. a sigmoid) to facilitate learning.
  • mechanical ventilation — life-support provided by respirator
  • meeting of (the) minds — an agreement
  • memory management unit — (hardware, memory management)   (MMU, "Paged Memory Management Unit", PMMU) A hardware device or circuit that supports virtual memory and paging by translating virtual addresses into physical addresses. The virtual address space (the range of addresses used by the processor) is divided into pages, whose size is 2^N, usually a few kilobytes. The bottom N bits of the address (the offset within a page) are left unchanged. The upper address bits are the (virtual) page number. The MMU contains a page table which is indexed (possibly associatively) by the page number. Each page table entry (PTE) gives the physical page number corresponding to the virtual one. This is combined with the page offset to give the complete physical address. A PTE may also include information about whether the page has been written to, when it was last used (for a least recently used replacement algorithm), what kind of processes (user mode, supervisor mode) may read and write it, and whether it should be cached. It is possible that no physical memory (RAM) has been allocated to a given virtual page, in which case the MMU will signal a "page fault" to the CPU. The operating system will then try to find a spare page of RAM and set up a new PTE to map it to the requested virtual address. If no RAM is free it may be necessary to choose an existing page, using some replacement algorithm, and save it to disk (this is known as "paging"). There may also be a shortage of PTEs, in which case the OS will have to free one for the new mapping. In a multitasking system all processes compete for the use of memory and of the MMU. Some memory management architectures allow each process to have its own area or configuration of the page table, with a mechanism to switch between different mappings on a process switch. This means that all processes can have the same virtual address space rather than require load-time relocation. An MMU also solves the problem of fragmentation of memory. After blocks of memory have been allocated and freed, the free memory may become fragmented (discontinuous) so that the largest contiguous block of free memory may be much smaller than the total amount. With virtual memory, a contiguous range of virtual addresses can be mapped to several non-contiguous blocks of physical memory. In early designs memory management was performed by a separate integrated circuit such as the MC 68851 used with the Motorola 68020 CPU in the Macintosh II or the Z8015 used with the Zilog Z80 family of processors. Later CPUs such as the Motorola 68030 and the ZILOG Z280 have MMUs on the same IC as the CPU.
  • methyl isobutyl ketone — a colorless, slightly water-soluble, flammable liquid, C 6 H 1 2 O, having a pleasant odor: used as a solvent for nitrocellulose, gums, resins, fats, waxes, and oils.
  • microspectrophotometer — a spectrophotometer for examining light emitted, transmitted, or reflected by minute objects.
  • microspectrophotometry — a spectrophotometer for examining light emitted, transmitted, or reflected by minute objects.
  • microwave spectroscopy — the determination of those frequencies of the microwave spectrum that are selectively absorbed by certain materials, providing information about atomic, molecular, and crystalline structure.
  • million electron volts — a unit of energy equal to the energy acquired by an electron in falling through a potential of 10 6 volts. Abbreviation: MeV .
  • miscarriage of justice — law: wrongful judgement
  • mistress of ceremonies — a woman who directs the entertainment at a party, dinner, or the like.
  • molecular distillation — a vacuum distillation in which the molecules of the distillate reach the condenser before colliding with one another.
  • monoammonium phosphate — a white, crystalline, moderately water-soluble compound, NH 4 H 2 PO 4 , used as fertilizer, in fire extinguishers, etc.
  • most significant digit — the digit farthest to the left in a number. Abbreviation: MSD.
  • mother carey's chicken — any of various small petrels, especially the stormy petrel, Oceanites oceanicus.
  • motorcycle combination — a motorcycle with a sidecar attached
  • motoring correspondent — a journalist who reviews and writes about cars
  • mountain standard time — one of the standard times used in North America, seven hours behind Greenwich Mean Time
  • much ado about nothing — a comedy (1598?) by Shakespeare.
  • myalgic encephalopathy — a condition characterized by painful muscles, extreme fatigue, and general debility, sometimes occurring as a sequel to viral illness
  • national semiconductor — (company)   A semiconductor manufacturer, responsible for the SC/MP, National Semiconductor 16000 and National Semiconductor 32000 series of microprocessors.
  • negative reinforcement — form of conditioning
  • newton's law of motion — any of three laws of classical mechanics, either the law that a body remains at rest or in motion with a constant velocity unless an external force acts on the body (first law of motion) the law that the sum of the forces acting on a body is equal to the product of the mass of the body and the acceleration produced by the forces, with motion in the direction of the resultant of the forces (second law of motion) or the law that for every force acting on a body, the body exerts a force having equal magnitude and the opposite direction along the same line of action as the original force (third law of motion or law of action and reaction)
  • no room to swing a cat — If you say 'There's no room to swing a cat' or 'You can't swing a cat', you mean that the place you are talking about is very small or crowded.
  • nodal switching system — (NSS) Main routing nodes in the NSFnet backbone.
  • nominal semidestructor — (abuse)   Slang for "National Semiconductor", found among other places in the 4.3BSD networking sources. During the late 1970s to mid-1980s this company marketed a series of microprocessors including the National Semiconductor 16000 and National Semiconductor 32000. At one point early in the great microprocessor race, the specs on these chips made them look like serious competition for the rising Intel 80x86 and Motorola 680x0 series. Unfortunately, the actual parts were notoriously flaky and never implemented the full instruction set promised in their literature, apparently because the company couldn't get any of the mask steppings to work as designed. They eventually sank without trace, joining the Zilog Z8000 and a few even more obscure also-rans in the graveyard of forgotten microprocessors.
  • non-euclidean geometry — geometry based upon one or more postulates that differ from those of Euclid, especially from the postulate that only one line may be drawn through a given point parallel to a given line.
  • non-maskable interrupt — (NMI) An IRQ 7 on the PDP-11 or 680x0 or the NMI line on an 80x86. In contrast with a priority interrupt (which might be ignored, although that is unlikely), an NMI is *never* ignored.
  • nonrepresentationalism — not resembling or portraying any object in physical nature: a nonrepresentational painting.
  • nonterminating decimal — a decimal numeral that does not end in an infinite sequence of zeros (contrasted with terminating decimal).
  • normal order reduction — Under this evaluation strategy an expression is evaluated by reducing the leftmost outermost redex first. This method will terminate for any expression for which termination is possible, whereas applicative order reduction may not. This method is equivalent to passing arguments unevaluated because arguments are initially to the right of functions applied to them. See also computational adequacy theorem.
  • oak processionary moth — a moth, (Thaumetopoea processionea), of the family Thaumetopoeidae, the larvae of which leave the communal shelter nightly for food in a V-shaped procession
  • of the first magnitude — of the greatest importance
  • on someone's coattails — the back of the skirt on a man's coat or jacket.
  • open network computing — (ONC) Sun's network protocols.
  • open-market operations — the purchase and sale on the open market of government securities by the Bank of England for the purpose of regulating the supply of money and credit to the economy
  • operation desert storm — the codename for the US-led UN operation to liberate Kuwait from Iraq (1991)
  • ousterhout's dichotomy — (language)   John Ousterhout's division of high-level languages into "system programming languages" and "scripting languages". This distinction underlies the design of his language Tcl. System programming languages (or "applications languages") are strongly typed, allow arbitrarily complex data structures, and programs in them are compiled, and are meant to operate largely independently of other programs. Prototypical system programming languages are C and Modula-2. By contrast, scripting languages (or "glue languages") are weakly typed or untyped, have little or no provision for complex data structures, and programs in them ("scripts") are interpreted. Scripts need to interact either with other programs (often as glue) or with a set of functions provided by the interpreter, as with the file system functions provided in a UNIX shell and with Tcl's GUI functions. Prototypical scripting languages are AppleScript, C Shell, MS-DOS batch files and Tcl. Many believe that this is a highly arbitrary dichotomy, and refer to it as "Ousterhout's fallacy" or "Ousterhout's false dichotomy". While strong-versus-weak typing, data structure complexity, and independent versus stand-alone might be said to be unrelated features, the usual critique of Ousterhout's dichotomy is of its distinction of compilation versus interpretation, since neither semantics nor syntax depend significantly on whether code is compiled into machine-language, interpreted, tokenized, or byte-compiled at the start of each run, or any mixture of these. Many languages fall between being interpreted or compiled (e.g. Lisp, Forth, UCSD Pascal, Perl, and Java). This makes compilation versus interpretation a dubious parameter in a taxonomy of programming languages.
  • parker morris standard — (in Britain) a set of minimum criteria for good housing construction, design, and facilities, recommended by the 1961 report of the Central Housing Advisory Committee chaired by Sir Parker Morris. Subsequent governments have urged private and local authority house-builders to achieve these standards
  • parliamentary election — an election to select the members of a national parliament
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