27-letter words containing s, t, e, n, o, r
- interpretive menu processor — (language) (IMP) The language used to implement much of the user interface of the Alis office automation package from Applix, Inc.
- into disrepute/in disrepute — If something is brought into disrepute or falls into disrepute, it loses its good reputation, because it is connected with activities that people do not approve of.
- introgressive-hybridization — the introduction of genes from one species into the gene pool of another species, occurring when matings between the two produce fertile hybrids.
- iso development environment — (ISODE) /eye-so-dee-eee/ Software that implements a set of OSI upper-layer services. It supports OSI applications on top of OSI and TCP/IP networks.
- isonicotinic acid hydrazide — isoniazid.
- it never rains but it pours — You can use the expression it never rains but it pours to mean that several unfortunate events often happen at the same time.
- joint and several guarantee — a legal guarantee undertaken by multiple people in which any one guarantor can be held fully responsible for repaying the whole of the debt despite each guarantor only being partially responsible for that debt
- joint and several liability — legal responsibility for the whole of a debt for which you are only partially responsible
- keep body and soul together — the physical structure and material substance of an animal or plant, living or dead.
- keep one's head above water — If you keep your head above water, you just avoid getting into difficulties; used especially to talk about business.
- keep one's weather eye open — to stay on the alert
- knowbot information service — (networking, information science) (KIS) Also known as netaddress. The Knowbot Information Service (KIS) provides a uniform user interface to a variety of remote directory services such as whois, finger, X.500, MCIMail. By submitting a single query to KIS, a user can search a set of remote white pages services and see the results of the search in a uniform format. There are several interfaces to the KIS service including electronic mail and telnet. Another KIS interface imitates the Berkeley whois command. KIS consists of two distinct types of modules which interact with each other (typically across a network) to provide the service. One module is a user agent module that runs on the KIS mail host machine. The second module is a remote server module (possibly on a different machine) that interrogates various database services across the network and provides the results to the user agent module in a uniform fashion. Interactions between the two modules can be via messages between Knowbots or by actual movement of Knowbots. There are electronic mail interfaces for KIS at the hosts cnri.reston.va.us and sol.bucknell.edu. Send a message containing just the word "man" to <[email protected]> or <[email protected]>. Telnet: info.cnri.reston.va.us port 185.
- link state routing protocol — (networking, communications) A routing protocol such as OSPF which permits routers to exchange information with one another about the reachability of other networks and the cost or metric to reach the other networks. The cost/metric is based on number of hops, link speeds, traffic congestion, and other factors as determined by the network designer. Link state routers use Dijkstra's algorithm to calculate shortest (lowest cost) paths, and normally update other routers with whom they are connected only when their own routing tables change. Link state routing is an improvement over distance-vector routing protocols such as RIP which normally use only a single metric (such as hop count) and which exchange all of their table information with all other routers on a regular schedule. Link state routing normally requires more processing but less transmission overhead.
- little-lord-fauntleroy-suit — (italics) a children's novel (1886) by Frances H. Burnett.
- magnetostrictive delay line — (storage, history) An early storage device that used tensioned wires of nickel alloy carrying longitudinal waves produced and detected electromagnetically. They had better storage behaviour than mercury delay lines.
- management information base — (networking) (MIB) A database of managed objects acessed by network management protocols. An SNMP MIB is a set of parameters which an SNMP management station can query or set in the SNMP agent of a network device (e.g. router). Standard minimal MIBs have been defined, and many hardware (and certain software, e.g. DBMS) providers have developed private MIBs in ASN.1 format allowing them to be compiled for use in a Network Management System. In theory, any SNMP manager can talk to any SNMP agent with a properly defined MIB. See also client-server model.
- master of the queen's music — (in Britain when the sovereign is female) a court post dating from the reign of Charles I. It is an honorary title and normally held by an established English composer
- measure of central tendency — a statistic that in some way specifies the central tendency of a sample of measurements, as the mean, median, or mode.
- memorandum of understanding — a document that describes the general principles of an agreement between parties, but does not amount to a substantive contract
- memory type range registers — (architecture, video) (MTRR) Registers in the Pentium Pro and Pentium II processors that can be used to specify a strategy for communication with the external memory and caches for a number of physical address ranges. Strategies include write-through, write-back, or uncached(?). Such control is useful where the memory is located on a device and is accessed via some kind of device bus, e.g. a PCI or AGP graphics card, where caching would be of no benefit.
- michelson-morley experiment — an experiment first performed in 1887 by A. A. Michelson and E. W. Morley, in which an interferometer was used to attempt to detect a difference in the velocities of light in directions parallel and perpendicular to the earth's motion. The negative result was explained by the special theory of relativity
- military-industrial complex — a network of a nation's military force together with all of the industries that support it.
- monoamine oxidase inhibitor — any of various substances, as isocarboxazid and phenelzine, that block enzymatic breakdown of certain monoamine neurotransmitters: used to treat severe depression. Abbreviation: MAOI.
- national insurance benefits — benefits provided as a result of payments to national insurance, such a state pension, sick pay, etc
- natural language processing — (artificial intelligence) (NLP) Computer understanding, analysis, manipulation, and/or generation of natural language. This can refer to anything from fairly simple string-manipulation tasks like stemming, or building concordances of natural language texts, to higher-level AI-like tasks like processing user queries in natural language.
- netware link state protocol — (networking, protocol) (NLSP) A companion protocol to IPX for exchange of routing information in a Novell network. NLSP supersedes Novell's RIP.
- network address translation — (networking) (NAT, or Network Address Translator, Virtual LAN) A technique in which a router or firewall rewrites the source and/or destination Internet addresses in a packet as it passes through, typically to allow multiple hosts to connect to the Internet via a single external IP address. NAT keeps track of outbound connections and distributes incoming packets to the correct machine. NAT is an alternative to adopting IPv6 (IPng). It allows the same IP addresses (10.x.x.x is the conventional range) to be used on many private local networks while requiring only one of the increasingly scarce public addresses to be allocated to each private network. NAT does not however allow an external service to initiate a TCP connection to an internal host, nor does it support stateless protocols based on UDP well unless the router software has extensions to support each specific protocol.
- network application support — (networking) (NAS) DEC's approach to applications integration across a distributed multivendor environment.
- network information service — (networking, protocol) (NIS) Sun Microsystems' Yellow Pages (yp) client-server protocol for distributing system configuration data such as user and host names between computers on a network. Sun licenses the technology to virtually all other Unix vendors. The name "Yellow Pages" is a registered trademark in the United Kingdom of British Telecommunications plc for their (paper) commercial telephone directory. Sun changed the name of their system to NIS, though all the commands and functions still start with "yp", e.g. ypcat, ypmatch, ypwhich.
- neurolinguistic programming — a therapy designed to alter behaviour by reprogramming unconscious patterns of thought
- new york state canal system — system of waterways connecting Lake Erie & the Hudson River, with branches to lakes Ontario, Champlain, Cayuga, & Seneca: 524 mi (843 km)
- newton's law of gravitation — the principle that two particles attract each other with forces directly proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them
- office workstations limited — (company) (OWL) A UK software company, now a subsidiary of Matsushita (Panasonic, etc.). They previously supported the Guide hypertext system but that support is now provided by US company InfoAccess. E-mail: <[email protected]>
- old chestnut/hoary chestnut — If you refer to a statement, a story, or a joke as an old chestnut or a hoary chestnut, you mean that it has been repeated so often that it is no longer interesting.
- on the scene/from the scene — When a person or thing appears on the scene, they come into being or become involved in something. When they disappear from the scene, they are no longer there or are no longer involved.
- on the understanding (that) — If you agree to do something on the understanding that something else will be done, you do it because you have been told that the other thing will definitely be done.
- on-line process synthesizer — (simulation) (OPS) A system for discrete simulation under CTSS developed by M. Greenberger at MIT ca. 1964.
- open distributed processing — (standard) (ODP) An attempt to standardise an OSI application layer communications architecture. ODP is a natural progression from OSI, broadening the target of standardisation from the point of interconnection to the end system behaviour. The objective of ODP is to enable the construction of distributed systems in a multi-vendor environment through the provision of a general architectural framework that such systems must conform to. One of the cornerstones of this framework is a model of multiple viewpoints which enables different participants to observe a system from a suitable perspective and a suitable level of abstraction.
- open scripting architecture — (OSA) A CIL approach to the coexistence of multiple scripting systems.
- oscillating universe theory — the theory that the universe is oscillating between periods of expansion and collapse
- outline planning permission — a permission for building on land which sets out general but not yet detailed guidelines
- pelvic inflammatory disease — an inflammation of the female pelvic organs, most commonly the fallopian tubes, usually as a result of bacterial infection. Abbreviation: PID.
- perfect programmer syndrome — Arrogance; the egotistical conviction that one is above normal human error. Most frequently found among programmers of some native ability but relatively little experience (especially new graduates; their perceptions may be distorted by a history of excellent performance at solving toy problems). "Of course my program is correct, there is no need to test it." "Yes, I can see there may be a problem here, but *I'll* never type "rm -r /" while in root mode."
- personal accident insurance — accident which covers personal accidents
- plain old telephone service — (communications) (POTS) The traditional voice service provided by phone companies, especially when opposed to data services. Note that the acronym POTS is sometimes expanded as "Plain Old Telephone System" in which sense it is synonymous to Public Switched Telephone Network but used somewhat derogatively.
- portable scheme interpreter — (PSI) A portable scheme interpreter by Ozan Yigit <[email protected]>, David Keldsen and Pontus Hedman that includes a simple DAG compiler and a virtual machine. It can be used as an integrated extension interpreter in other systems and allows easy addition of new primitives. There are some unique debugging and tracing facilities. Acceptable performance results from a fairly straight-forward implementation. Continuations are fully and portably supported and perform well. PSI is based on the simple compilers and virtual machine in Kent Dbyvig's thesis. The pre-release version conforms to R4RS with a number of useful extensions.
- post-viral fatigue syndrome — Post-viral fatigue syndrome is a long-lasting illness that is thought to be caused by a virus. Its symptoms include feeling tired all the time and muscle pain.
- potassium hydrogen tartrate — a colourless or white soluble crystalline salt used in baking powders, soldering fluxes, and laxatives. Formula: KHC4H4O6
- pour oil on troubled waters — any of a large class of substances typically unctuous, viscous, combustible, liquid at ordinary temperatures, and soluble in ether or alcohol but not in water: used for anointing, perfuming, lubricating, illuminating, heating, etc.
- precession of the equinoxes — the earlier occurrence of the equinoxes in each successive sidereal year because of the slow retrograde motion of the equinoctial points along the ecliptic, caused by the precession of the earth's axis of rotation; a complete precession of the equinoxes requires about 25,800 years.