meaning of cos
1. COS 1. Cray Operating System. 2. Corporation for Open Systems. COSE Common Open Software Environment. An initiative by Hewlett-Packard, Sun, IBM, Novell, Univel and SCO to move toward consistency and interoperability between Unix suppliers. COSINE Cooperation for Open Systems Interconnection Networking in Europe. A EUREKA project. cosmic rays Notionally, the cause of bit rot. However, this is a semi-independent usage that may be invoked as a humorous way to handwave away any minor randomness that doesnt seem worth the bother of investigating. "Hey, Eric - I just got a burst of garbage on my tube, where did that come from?" "Cosmic rays, I guess. " Compare sunspots, phase of the moon. The British seem to prefer the usage "cosmic showers"; "alpha particles" is also heard, because stray alpha particles passing through a memory chip can cause single bit errors this becomes increasingly more likely as memory sizes and densities increase. Factual note: Alpha particles cause bit rot, cosmic rays do not except occasionally in spaceborne computers. Intel could not explain random bit drops in their early chips, and one hypothesis was cosmic rays. So they created the Worlds Largest Lead Safe, using 25 tons of the stuff, and used two identical boards for testing. One was placed in the safe, one outside. The hypothesis was that if cosmic rays were causing the bit drops, they should see a statistically significant difference between the error rates on the two boards. They did not observe such a difference. Further investigation demonstrated conclusively that the bit drops were due to alpha particle emissions from thorium and to a much lesser degree uranium in the encapsulation material. Since it is impossible to eliminate these radioactives they are uniformly distributed through the earths crust, with the statistically insignificant exception of uranium lodes it became obvious that one has to design memories to withstand these hits. [Jargon File] COSS Common Object Services Specification in CORBA. cost control callback
2. lettuce with long dark-green leaves in a loosely packed elongated head
Related Words
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