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21-letter words containing s, m, a, r, y

  • multichannel analyser — an electronic instrument, such as a pulse height analyser, that splits an input waveform into a large number of channels in accordance with a particular parameter of the input
  • munchausen's syndrome — a mental disorder in which a patient feigns illness to obtain hospital treatment
  • 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.
  • one-dimensional array — (types)   An array with only one dimension; the simplest kind of array, consisting of a sequence of items ("elements"), all of the same type. An element is selected by an integer index that normally starts at zero for the first element and increases by one. The index of the last element is thus the length of the array minus one. A one-dimensional array is also known as a vector. It should not be confused with a list. In some languages, e.g. Perl, all arrays are one-dimensional and higher dimensions are represented as arrays of pointers to arrays (which can have different sizes and can themselves contain pointers to arrays and so on). A one-dimensional array maps simply to memory: the address of an element with index i is A(i) = A0 + i * s where A0 is the base address of the array and s is the size of storage used for each element, the "stride". Elements may be padded to certain address boundaries, e.g. machine words, to increase access speed, in which case the stride will be larger than the amount of data in an element.
  • prader-willi syndrome — a congenital condition characterized by obsessive eating, obesity, learning difficulties, and small genitalia
  • premenstrual syndrome — a complex of physical and emotional changes, including depression, irritability, appetite changes, bloating and water retention, breast soreness, and changes in muscular coordination, one or more of which may be experienced in the several days before the onset of menstrual flow. Abbreviation: PMS.
  • primary sex character — any of the body structures directly concerned in reproduction, as the testes, ovaries, and external genitalia.
  • psychological primary — one of a set of perceived colours (red, yellow, blue, green, black, and white) that can be used to characterize all other perceived colours
  • psychomotor agitation — agitation (def 3).
  • psychomotor-agitation — the act or process of agitating; state of being agitated: She left in great agitation.
  • psychopharmacotherapy — the use of psychoactive drugs in the symptomatic treatment or control of mental disorders or psychiatric disease.
  • public address system — loudspeaker
  • public-address system — a combination of electronic devices that makes sound audible via loudspeakers to many people, as in an auditorium or out of doors.
  • real operating system — (operating system, abuse)   The sort the speaker is used to. People from the BSDophilic academic community are likely to issue comments like "System V? Why don't you use a *real* operating system?", people from the commercial/industrial Unix sector are known to complain "BSD? Why don't you use a *real* operating system?", and people from IBM object "Unix? Why don't you use a *real* operating system?" See holy wars, religious issues, proprietary, Get a real computer!.
  • requirements analysis — (project)   The process of reviewing a business's processes to determine the business needs and functional requirements that a system must meet.
  • residual unemployment — the unemployment that remains in periods of full employment, as a result of those mentally, physically, or emotionally unfit to work
  • rocky mountain locust — a migratory locust, Melanoplus spretus, that occurs in North America, especially the Great Plains, where swarms cause great damage to crops and other vegetation.
  • rocky mountain oyster — mountain oyster.
  • salam-weinberg theory — the electroweak theory.
  • scarlet monkey flower — any of various plants belonging to the genus Mimulus, of the figwort family, as M. cardinalis (scarlet monkey flower) having spotted flowers that resemble a face.
  • secondary containment — Secondary containment is a system for dealing with hazardous spills.
  • sedimentary sequences — Sedimentary sequences are layers of rock which are derived from weathered rocks, biogenic (= of living organisms) activity, or precipitation from solution.
  • skew symmetric matrix — a matrix that is equal to the negation of its transpose
  • stokes-adams syndrome — unconsciousness accompanying atrioventricular heart block, sometimes characterized by weakness, irregular pulse, and intermittent convulsive or nonconvulsive seizures.
  • summary court-martial — a court-martial composed of one commissioned officer, authorized to try minor offenses against military law.
  • supplementary benefit — (formerly) an extra amount of money that is paid to someone by the government, in addition to their normal income. Replaced by income support in 1988
  • sympathetic vibration — a vibration induced by resonance.
  • systeme international — Système International d'Unités
  • tape operating system — (operating system)   (TOS) An IBM operating system for System 360, used in the early days around 1965 to support the IBM 360 model 30 et al. TOS was a predecessor to IBM's Disk Operating System. TOS died out really early as disks such as the 2311 and 2314 became common with the IBM 360 whereas thet had been a real luxury on the IBM 7090.
  • the maastricht treaty — a treaty on European economic and monetary union agreed by government leaders of the 12 EC states at a meeting in Maastricht in December 1991
  • the women's land army — a unit of women recruited to do agricultural work in the United Kingdom during World War I and World War II
  • to lay something bare — If you lay something bare, you uncover it completely so that it can then be seen.
  • to mix your metaphors — If you mix your metaphors, you use two conflicting metaphors. People do this accidentally, or sometimes deliberately as a joke.
  • ultraviolet astronomy — the branch of astronomy that deals with celestial objects emitting electromagnetic radiation in the ultraviolet range.
  • virtual memory system — (operating system)   (VMS) DEC's proprietary operating system originally produced for its VAX minicomputer. VMS V1 was released in August 1978. VMS was renamed "OpenVMS" around version 5.5. The first version of VMS on DEC Alpha was known as OpenVMS for AXP V1.0, and the correct way to refer to the operating system now is OpenVMS for VAX or OpenVMS for Alpha. The renaming also signified the fact that the X/Open consortium had certified OpenVMS as having a high support for POSIX standards. VMS is one of the most secure operating systems on the market (making it popular in financial institutions). It currently (October 1997) has the best clustering capability (both number and distance) and is very scalable with binaries portable from small desktop workstations up to huge mainframes. Many Unix fans generously concede that VMS would probably be the hacker's favourite commercial OS if Unix didn't exist; though true, this makes VMS fans furious.
  • water-vascular system — a system of closed, fluid-filled tubes and ducts of echinoderms used in clinging, locomotion, feeding, and respiration.
  • weinberg-salam theory — electroweak theory.
  • william of malmesbury — William of, William of Malmesbury.
  • youth training scheme — (formerly, in Britain) a scheme, run by the Training Agency, to provide vocational training for unemployed 16–17-year-olds
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