An example of a compiler is the GNU C Compiler, or GCC for short. It reads in program code written in the C programming language, and converts it into binary machine code called an executable, so computers can understand it. On Microsoft Windows, these files end with '.exe.' To humans, these files are hard to read. Macs use other file extensions.
Windows NT
Windows NT is a series of Microsoft's Windows operating systems written in the C and C++ programming languages. They were the first to use their new 'NT' (New Technology) core. That means it had a brand new core to do more things than the MS-DOS-based one that they used in older versions of Windows. Also, it was more secure and crashed less. Windows NT 3.1 was released as alpha versions in 1991-1992 and beta versions in 1993.
Microsoft decided to create a portable operating system, compatible with OS/2 and POSIX and supporting multiprocessing, in October 1988. When development started in November 1989, Windows NT was to be known as OS/2 3.0, the third version of the operating system developed jointly by Microsoft and IBM. To ensure portability, initial development was targeted at the Intel i860XR RISC processor, switching to the MIPS R3000 in late 1989, and then the Intel i386 in 1990.
It is well believed that Dave Cutler intended the initialism 'WNT' as a pun on VMS, incrementing each letter by one. However, the project was named NT OS/2 before receiving the Windows brand. One of the original OS/2 3.0 creators, Mark Lucovsky, claims that the name was taken from the original target processor—the Intel i860, code-named N10 ('N-Ten'). Various Microsoft publications, including a 1998 question-and-answer session with Bill Gates, reveal that the letters were expanded to 'New Technology' for marketing purposes but no longer carry any specific meaning. The letters were dropped from the name of Windows 2000, though Microsoft described the product as 'Built on NT technology.'
Versions of Windows NT are Windows NT 3.1, NT 3.5, 3.51, NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Windows NT 3.1 was the first release of the Windows NT line. The version number 3.1 was from the fact that it looked very much like Windows 3.1. It was released in 1993. Next was Windows NT 3.5 and then 3.51. 3.5 was released in 1994 and 3.51 in 1995, just a few months before Windows 95. The version after that was NT 4.0, released in 1996. It was advertised as 'power of Windows NT and look of Windows 95' and included Internet Explorer version 2. The next version was NT 5.0, which was re-branded as Windows 2000 before release, followed by Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and the most recently Windows 10.
The NT version number was not used for marketing purposes after Windows NT 4.0 but is still used internally and said to reflect the degree of changes to the core of the operating system. Windows 10 changes the internal version number to 10.0, which is the first time since 1996 that the internal version number has matched the marketing number.
Windows NT can refer either an individual or following versions of Microsoft Windows:
Notes
File extension
A file extension or filename extension is a suffix at the end of a filename. It is used to show the type of a computer file. This suggests what program can understand it. For example, MYWORDS.TXT is a plain text file and may be opened by a text editor. Filename extensions come after the name of the file, and many of them are three letters long.
Some examples of common file extensions are:
There are many other commonly used file extensions.
You can change the program defaults so that the computer knows which program to open each type of file extension with.
Lagomorpha
Lagomorpha is a mammal order. It includes pikas, rabbits and hares. Although the lagomorphs look like rodents, they are not so, but are closely related to them. They have four incisors on the upper jaw, not two as in rodents. Also, they only eat plant material, not meat as rodents do to some extent.
Rabbits were classified under rodents until the 20th century. They are divided into two families, Leporidae, hares and rabbits, and Ochotonidae, the pikas.
It has been known for some time that the Lagomorpha is an unusual group, and there have been many speculations about its evolution. Darren Naish explains this.
Lupus
Lupus, or Lupus erythematosus, is a disease of the immune system. It is chronic, which means it does not go away. It is an autoimmune disease, where the person's immune system attacks their own body.
The immune system is partly made up of white blood cells in your body that fight off disease. In lupus, these white blood cells think that the healthy cells of the body around them are diseased, so they end up attacking healthy parts of the body. Lupus can be deadly. It causes swelling and tissue damage, and can attack any part of the body. It most commonly affects the heart, joints, skin, lungs, blood vessels, kidneys and the brain/nervous system. Some symptoms include: fatigue, fever with no cause, hair loss, mouth sores, sensitivity to sunlight, a skin disease, and Raynaud's syndrome. There is treatment for lupus, called immunosuppression, which is medicine that stops the white blood cells from damaging healthy cells for a while. After a while, this medicine wears off, and then the white blood cells go back to hurting healthy parts of the body again. For the disease of lupus, there is no cure that stops the white blood cells from attacking healthy parts of the body forever, but doctors are not giving up on finding a cure.
Lupus takes its name from the Latin word "lupus", meaning wolf. This is because a lupus-caused rash on a person's face makes the person's face look like the face of a wolf. In the United States alone, there may be 270,000 to 1.5 million (1,500,000) people with lupus. Worldwide, it is estimated (not known for sure, but a good guess) that over 5 million (5,000,000) people living with lupus. The disease mainly affects young women, but men can be affected as well.
Hiragana
Hiragana are part of the Japanese writing system. Japanese writing normally consists of kanji which are used for the main words in a sentence, usually content words, and hiragana which are used for the little words that make up the grammar (in English these would be words like “from” and “his”) called particles. Hiragana is also used for the endings of some of the words.
Hiragana is a syllabary, which means that each hiragana character stands for a syllable. It is therefore different from a language such as English which uses an alphabet in which most of the letters stand for one bit of sound (phoneme). There is also another syllabary called katakana which is mostly used for foreign words and names. The two kana systems are quite easy to learn, but kanji takes years of practice. In contrast, the kana systems can be learnt in two weeks.
In the past hiragana was considered as women's writing, while men wrote in kanji. Since kanji suit well in Chinese but poorly in Japanese, it was the women who wrote the first Japanese books, poems and songs. Later the Buddhist clerics, such as Rennyo (d. 1498), wrote in hiragana to make the religious message easy to understand so that everyone could read it.
Sometimes the whole of a text may be written in hiragana to make it easy. This would be used in books for young children, or for students starting to learn Japanese, or when writing the lyrics for songs underneath the music where it is important to show how the words fit the music. Some rare or strange kanji may also have so-called "furigana" characters above it. They are hiragana which show how the kanji is to be pronounced.
In Hiragana each character (kana) is either a vowel (such as "a": あ); a consonant followed by a vowel (such as "ka": か); or, at the end of a syllable, an "n": (ん), although sometimes this sounds more like an “m” or “ng”.