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22-letter words containing r, i, d

  • liquid crystal display — (hardware)   (LCD) An electro-optical device used to display digits, characters or images, commonly used in digital watches, calculators, and portable computers. The heart of the liquid crystal display is a piece of liquid crystal material placed between a pair of transparent electrodes. The liquid crystal changes the phase of the light passing through it and this phase change can be controlled by the voltage applied between the electrodes. If such a unit is placed between a pair of plane polariser plates then light can pass through it only if the correct voltage is applied. Liquid crystal displays are formed by integrating a number of such cells, or more usually, by using a single liquid crystal plate and a pattern of electrodes. The simplest kind of liquid crystal displays, those used in digital watches and calculators, contain a common electrode plane covering one side and a pattern of electrodes on the other. These electrodes can be individually controlled to produce the appropriate display. Computer displays, however, require far too many pixels (typically between 50,000 and several millions) to make this scheme, in particular its wiring, feasible. The electrodes are therefore replaced by a number of row electrodes on one side and column electrodes on the other. By applying voltage to one row and several columns the pixels at the intersections are set. The pixels being set one row after the other, in passive matrix displays the number of rows is limited by the ratio of the setting and fading times. In the setup described above (known as "twisted nematic") the number of rows is limited to about 20. Using an alternative "supertwisted nematic" setup VGA quality displays (480 rows) can be easily built. As of 1995 most notebook computers used this technique. Fading can be slowed by putting an active element, such as a transistor, on the top of each pixel. This "remembers" the setting of that pixel. These active matrix displays are of much better quality (as good as CRTs) but are much more expensive than the passive matrix displays. LCDs are slimmer, lighter and consume less power than the previous dominant display type, the cathode ray tube, hence their importance for portable computers.
  • little lord fauntleroy — (italics) a children's novel (1886) by Frances H. Burnett.
  • little st bernard pass — a pass over the Savoy Alps, between Bourg-Saint-Maurice, France, and La Thuile, Italy: 11th-century hospice. Height: 2187 m (7177 ft)
  • lord high commissioner — the Queen's representative
  • lord justice of appeal — an ordinary judge of the Court of Appeal
  • lower canada rebellion — an uprising of 1837, quickly crushed by the British militia, against the British colonial administration in Quebec.
  • lunar excursion module — lunar module. Abbreviation: LEM.
  • manufacturing industry — the industry of manufacturing goods from raw materials
  • martin luther king day — the third Monday in January, a legal holiday in some states of the U.S., commemorating the birthday (Jan. 15) of Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • merry wives of windsor — a comedy (1598–1602?) by Shakespeare.
  • middle-distance runner — someone who runs races of a length between the sprints and the distance events, esp the 800 metres and the 1500 metres
  • miguel primo de rivera — Diego [dye-gaw] /ˈdyɛ gɔ/ (Show IPA), 1886–1957, Mexican painter.
  • mind your own business — an occupation, profession, or trade: His business is poultry farming.
  • mind-your-own-business — baby's-tears.
  • modified american plan — (in hotels) a system of paying a single fixed rate that covers room, breakfast, and one other meal, usually dinner. Abbreviation: MAP.
  • mohammed al-khawarizmi — Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
  • molecular distillation — a vacuum distillation in which the molecules of the distillate reach the condenser before colliding with one another.
  • monday morning disease — azoturia (def 2).
  • 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
  • mpeg-2.5 audio layer 3 — (compression, standard, algorithm, file format)   A non-standard extention of MPEG-2 audio layer 3 by FhG for lowest sampling rates (8-12 kHz) targeting bit rates from 16-32 kbps (possibly 8-160 kbps).
  • national semiconductor — (company)   A semiconductor manufacturer, responsible for the SC/MP, National Semiconductor 16000 and National Semiconductor 32000 series of microprocessors.
  • neighborhood bike code — (humour, programming)   A piece of code that every programmer at the company has touched.
  • netherlands new guinea — a former name of Irian Jaya.
  • network interface card — network interface controller
  • network node interface — (networking)   (NNI) The ATM Forum's specification for connections between network nodes. NNI makes network routing possible. It typically refers to backbone trunk connections between ATM switching equipment. See also: UNI.
  • nickel-cadmium battery — a storage battery, with an alkaline electrolyte, having nickel oxide as the positive element and cadmium as the negative.
  • nicky nicky nine doors — the practice of knocking on a door or ringing a doorbell and running away before it is answered
  • nigger in the woodpile — a hidden snag or hindrance
  • nitrohydrochloric acid — aqua regia.
  • 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.
  • nondestructive testing — any of several methods of detecting flaws in metals without causing damage. The most common techniques involve the use of X-rays, gamma rays, and ultrasonic vibrations
  • 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.
  • object-oriented design — (programming)   (OOD) A design method in which a system is modelled as a collection of cooperating objects and individual objects are treated as instances of a class within a class hierarchy. Four stages can be identified: identify the classes and objects, identify their semantics, identify their relationships and specify class and object interfaces and implementation. Object-oriented design is one of the stages of object-oriented programming.
  • object-oriented pascal — Object Pascal
  • object-oriented turing — (language)   An extension of Turing and a replacement for Turing Plus by R.C. Holt <[email protected]>, U Toronto, 1991. Object-Oriented Turing supports imperative programming, object-oriented programming and concurrent programming. It has modules, classes, single inheritance, processes, exception handling and optional machine-dependent programming. There is an integrated environment under the X Window System and a demo version. Versions exist for Sun-4, MIPS, RS-6000 and others. E-mail: <[email protected]>.
  • of the first magnitude — of the greatest importance
  • office of fair trading — a government department established in the UK in 1973, which acts as an economic regulator, responsible for ensuring fairness in consumer protection and competition law
  • on a shoestring budget — with very little money to spend
  • on a wing and a prayer — with only the slightest hope of succeeding
  • one's foot in the door — (in vertebrates) the terminal part of the leg, below the ankle joint, on which the body stands and moves.
  • open source definition — (standard)   (OSD) Definition of distribution terms for open source software, promoted by the Open Source Initiative.
  • operation desert storm — the codename for the US-led UN operation to liberate Kuwait from Iraq (1991)
  • operational data store — (database)   (ODS) A group of integrated databases designed to support the monitoring of operations. Unlike function oriented databases, an ODS contains subject-oriented, dynamic, current enterprise-wide information that is continually updated to show the current state of operations.
  • other side of the coin — a piece of metal stamped and issued by the authority of a government for use as money.
  • 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.
  • out-of-body experience — a vivid feeling of being detached from one's body, usually involving observing it and its environment from nearby
  • outside awareness port — (humour)   (OAP) A humorous IBM term for a window (the glass kind) rather than the GUI kind.
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