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25-letter words containing r, a, t, e

  • dataphone digital service — (communications, product)   (DDS) The first private-line digital service offered by AT&T, with data rates typically at 2.4, 4.8, 9.6 and 56 kilobits per second. DDS is now part of AT&T's Accunet family of services. Most LEC (local exchange carriers) and IXC (IntereXchange Carriers) offer similar services.
  • decision support database — A database from which data is extracted and analysed statistically (but not modified) in order to inform business or other decisions. This is in contrast to an operational database which is being continuously updated. For example, a decision support database might provide data to determine the average salary of different types of workers, whereas an operational database containing the same data would be used to calculate pay check amounts. Often, decision support data is extracted from operation databases.
  • declaration of bankruptcy — a formal statement made by a company or individual to announce that they are bankrupt
  • declaration of indulgence — a royal grant during the reigns of Charles II and James II of England giving Nonconformists and Roman Catholics a measure of religious freedom
  • decreasing term insurance — Decreasing term insurance is life insurance with the amount of coverage decreasing over the term of the policy and a lump sum payment if you die in advance.
  • defense trade regulations — (legal)   The U.S. law governening munitions export and defense technology (F-16s, TOW missiles and cryptology). According to the U.S. (and Canada) cryptography is a munition and people who export it can be charged as though they were exporting bombs or state secrets. People have been. See also EFF.
  • defined contribution plan — A defined contribution plan is a type of pension plan that specifies the annual contribution that the employer will pay on behalf of each plan participant.
  • definite relative pronoun — a relative pronoun that refers to an antecedent, as who in It was I who told you.
  • dell computer corporation — (company)   One of the biggest US manufacturers of IBM PC compatibles. "From notebooks to networks", their slogan says.
  • democratic unionist party — a Northern Irish political party, founded by Ian Paisley in 1971, advocating the maintenance of union with the UK
  • department of agriculture — the department of the U.S. federal government that institutes and administers all federal programs dealing with agriculture. Abbreviation: USDA.
  • díaz del castillo, bernal — (bɛʀˈnɑl) ; bernälˈ) 1492?-1581?; Sp. historian & soldier with Cortés
  • diesel-electric generator — A diesel-electric generator is a piece of equipment that uses diesel as a fuel to produce electricity.
  • digital rights management — (legal)   (DRM) Any technology used to limit the use of software, music, movies or other digital data. This generally relies on some interaction between the media and the system that plays it. For example, video DVDs usually include a region code. If this does not match the player's region code, the player will refuse to play the disc.
  • digital signal processing — (DSP) Computer manipulation of analog signals (commonly sound or image) which have been converted to digital form (sampled).
  • directory access protocol — X.500 protocol used for communication between a Directory User Agent and a Directory System Agent.
  • disappear without a trace — If you say that someone or something disappears without a trace, you mean that they stop existing or stop being successful very suddenly and completely.
  • discrete cosine transform — (mathematics)   (DCT) A technique for expressing a waveform as a weighted sum of cosines. The DCT is central to many kinds of signal processing, especially video compression. Given data A(i), where i is an integer in the range 0 to N-1, the forward DCT (which would be used e.g. by an encoder) is: B(k) = sum A(i) cos((pi k/N) (2 i + 1)/2) i=0 to N-1 B(k) is defined for all values of the frequency-space variable k, but we only care about integer k in the range 0 to N-1. The inverse DCT (which would be used e.g. by a decoder) is: AA(i)= sum B(k) (2-delta(k-0)) cos((pi k/N)(2 i + 1)/2) k=0 to N-1 where delta(k) is the Kronecker delta. The main difference between this and a discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is that the DFT traditionally assumes that the data A(i) is periodically continued with a period of N, whereas the DCT assumes that the data is continued with its mirror image, then periodically continued with a period of 2N. Mathematically, this transform pair is exact, i.e. AA(i) == A(i), resulting in lossless coding; only when some of the coefficients are approximated does compression occur. There exist fast DCT algorithms in analogy to the Fast Fourier Transform.
  • do-it-yourself enthusiast — an enthusiast of the hobby or process of constructing and repairing things by yourself
  • document image processing — (DIP) Storage, management and retrieval of images.
  • domain architecture model — (systems analysis)   A set of software architectures generic to a domain that define organising frameworks for constructing new application designs and implementations within the domain, consistent with the domain requirements model.
  • dopamine receptor agonist — A dopamine receptor agonist is any compound that activates dopamine receptors when dopamine is not present.
  • double taxation agreement — an agreement between two countries that lessens the tax burden on citizens of each country living in the other
  • double wingback formation — an offensive formation in which two backs line up at opposite ends of the backfield about one yard outside of the ends and about one yard behind the line of scrimmage.
  • drive someone up the wall — If you say that something or someone is driving you up the wall, you are emphasizing that they annoy and irritate you.
  • dual tone multi frequency — (communications)   (DTMF, or "touch-tone") A method used by the telephone system to communicate the keys pressed when dialling. Pressing a key on the phone's keypad generates two simultaneous tones, one for the row and one for the column. These are decoded by the exchange to determine which key was pressed.
  • eastern aden protectorate — a former British protectorate, now the E part of the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen: composed of the Arab sheikdoms of Hadhramaut and the island of Socotra.
  • edward trowbridge collins — Edward Trowbridge ("Eddie") 1887–1951, U.S. baseball player.
  • electroconvulsive therapy — the treatment of certain psychotic conditions by passing an electric current through the brain to induce coma or convulsions
  • electromagnetic radiation — radiation consisting of self-sustaining oscillating electric and magnetic fields at right angles to each other and to the direction of propagation. It does not require a supporting medium and travels through empty space at the speed of light
  • electronic funds transfer — (application, communications)   (EFT, EFTS, - system) Transfer of money initiated through electronic terminal, automated teller machine, computer, telephone, or magnetic tape. In the late 1990s, this increasingly includes transfer initiated via the web. The term also applies to credit card and automated bill payments.
  • electronic news gathering — the collecting of a television news story using electronic equipment, such as a portable video camera, rather than a traditional film camera
  • emancipation proclamation — a proclamation issued by President Lincoln in September, 1862, effective January 1, 1863, freeing the slaves in all territory still at war with the Union
  • enhanced graphics adapter — (graphics, hardware)   (EGA) An IBM PC display standard with a resolution of 640 x 350 pixels of 16 colours.
  • entity-relationship model — (database, specification)   An approach to data modelling proposed by P. Chen in 1976. The model says that you divide your database in two logical parts, entities (e.g. "customer", "product") and relations ("buys", "pays for"). One of the first activities in specifying an application is defining the entities involved and their relationships, e.g. using an entity-relationship diagram to represent a model.
  • european court of justice — law: international court
  • examination for discovery — a pretrial meeting to disclose evidence that will be presented later
  • exhaust gas recirculation — Exhaust gas recirculation is the process of mixing exhaust gas with air taken in to make sure that all fuel is burned before entering the atmosphere.
  • expanding universe theory — the theory, developed from the observed red shifts of celestial bodies, that the space between galaxies is expanding, so that they appear to recede from us at velocities that increase with their distance
  • exploratory data analysis — (EDA)
  • extended backus-naur form — (language)   Any variation on the basic Backus-Naur Form (BNF) meta-syntax notation with (some of) the following additional constructs: square brackets "[..]" surrounding optional items, suffix "*" for Kleene closure (a sequence of zero or more of an item), suffix "+" for one or more of an item, curly brackets enclosing a list of alternatives, and super/subscripts indicating between n and m occurrences. All these constructs can be expressed in plain BNF using extra productions and have been added for readability and succinctness.
  • extended fortran language — (EFL) A Fortran preprocessor to provide structured programming constructs much like C. EFL is a descendant of RATFOR. It is written in C.
  • exterior gateway protocol — (EGP) A protocol which distributes routing information to the routers which connect autonomous systems. The term "gateway" is historical, and "router" is currently the preferred term. There is also a routing protocol called EGP defined in STD 18, RFC 904. See also Border Gateway Protocol, Interior Gateway Protocol.
  • federal capital territory — former name of Australian Capital Territory.
  • fifth generation language — (language, artificial intelligence)   A myth the Japanese spent a lot of money on. In about 1982, MITI decided it would spend ten years and a lot of money applying artificial intelligence to programming, thus solving the software crisis. The project spent its money and its ten years and in 1992 closed down with a wimper.
  • first and second manassas — two battles fought at Manassas Junction near a stream named Bull Run, during the American Civil War (July, 1861 and August, 1862), in both of which the Federal army was routed by the Confederates
  • first generation computer — (architecture)   A prototype computer based on vacuum tubes and other esoteric technologies. Chronologically, any computer designed before the mid-1950s. Examples include Howard Aiken's Mark 1 (1944), Maunchly and Eckert's ENIAC (1946), and the IAS computer.
  • first generation language — Raw machine code. When computers were first "programmed" from an input device, rather than by being rewired, they were fed input in the form of numbers, which they then interpreted as commands. This was really low level, and a program fragment might look like "010307 010307". Almost no one programs in machine language anymore, because translators are nearly trivial to write.
  • flash lights impressively — (programming, humour)   (FLI) /FLY/ A joke assembly language instruction first documented in the late 1970s in "The Hackers Dictionary". The FLI instruction was frequently referred to by engineers when minicomputers such as the DEC PDP-8, PDP-11 and some early microcomputers such as the IMSAI and Altair had dozens of front panel lights. "When the computer is about to do some long I/O operation, stick in a FLI so the accountants won't think the machine has hung again."
  • franked investment income — (formerly) dividends from one UK company received by another on which the paying company had paid corporation tax so that the receiving company had no corporation tax to pay: discontinued from 1999
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