monitor (redirected from monitorships)

monitor, in zoology

monitor, any of various dragonlike, mostly tropical lizards. A monitor lizard has a heavy body, long head and neck, long tail that comes to a whiplike end, and strong legs with sharp claws. Its slender, forked tongue is protrusible. Monitors range in size from the 8-in. (20-cm) short-tailed species of W Australia to the 10-ft, 300-lb (3-m, 136-kg) Komodo dragon, the giant among living lizards, that lives only on the small Indonesian island of Komodo. Some monitor species spend their lives in trees, and others inhabit lakes and rivers; they can be found on the oceanic islands and continents of the Eastern Hemisphere in all types of warm habitats, from tropical forest to desert. They feed on various kinds of animal matter, including eggs, rats, frogs, and decaying meat. The larger species will attack small deer and pigs. They often tear the prey with claws and teeth, but generally swallow it whole or in large chunks. Monitors lay from 7 to 35 leathery eggs, usually in holes in the ground or in trees. They are classified in the phylum Chordata, subphylum Vertebrata, class Reptilia, order Squamata, family Varanidae, genus Varanus.

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monitor, type of warship

monitor, type of turreted warship (no longer used) carrying heavy guns, having little draft, and lying low in the water. Monitors were so called from the first of the class, the Monitor, built for the Union navy in the U.S. Civil War by John Ericsson. Launched in Jan., 1862, the Monitor was 179 ft (55 m) long, of 41.5-ft (13-m) beam, and weighed 1,200 tons. A revolving turret, protected by 8 in. (20.3 cm) of iron armor and containing two 11-in. (27.9-cm) smooth-bore guns, was its main feature. The sides were covered by iron plates from 3 to 5 in. (7.6–12.7 cm) thick, with about 27 in. (69 cm) of wood backing, and the deck, only 18 in. (46 cm) above water, was shielded with 1-in. (2.54-cm) armor. The ship was moved by steam power, with a screw propeller. (See Monitor and Merrimack for more information.) Monitors were used extensively in the Civil War, but the type had limitations—it was too heavy to navigate the oceans—and was eventually abandoned. However, they were used by the British navy in World War I.

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monitor

Ironclad warship originally designed for use in shallow harbours and rivers to blockade the Confederate states in the American Civil War. The original ironclad, built by John Ericsson, was named Monitor Its innovative design included minimal exposure above the waterline, a heavily armoured deck and hull, and a revolving gun turret. The inconclusive Battle of the Monitor and Merrimack (1862) was the first between ironclad warships. Never seaworthy, the Monitor sank during a gale off Cape Hatteras that same year, but the U.S. Navy built many improved monitors during the war. The British navy kept its monitors in service as late as World War II.

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(1) A display screen used to present output from a computer, video camera, VCR or other video generator. The clarity of a CRT monitor is based on video bandwidth, dot pitch, refresh rate and convergence. See CRT, analog monitor and digital monitor.

(2) Software that monitors the progress of activities within a computer system. See computer monitoring.

(3) A device that gathers performance statistics of a running system via direct attachment to the CPU's circuit boards. See also network analyzer.

(4) Software that provides utility and control functions such as setting communications parameters. It typically resides in a ROM chip and contains startup and diagnostic routines.

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1.		monitor - A cathode-ray tube and associated electronics connected to a computer's video output. A monitor may be either monochrome (black and white) or colour (RGB). Colour monitors may show either digital colour (each of the red, green and blue signals may be either on or off, giving eight possible colours: black, white, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta and yellow) or analog colour (red, green and blue signals are continuously variable allowing any combination to be displayed). Digital monitors are sometimes known as TTL because the voltages on the red, green and blue inputs are compatible with TTL logic chips. See also gamut, multisync, visual display unit.
2.		monitor - A programming language construct which encapsulates variables, access procedures and initialisation code within an abstract data type. The monitor's variable may only be accessed via its access procedures and only one process may be actively accessing the monitor at any one time. The access procedures are critical sections. A monitor may have a queue of processes which are waiting to access it.
3.		monitor - A hardware device that measures electrical events such as pulses or voltage levels in a digital computer.
4.		monitor - To oversee a program during execution. For example, the monitor function in the Unix C library enables profiling of a certain range of code addresses. A histogram is produced showing how often the program counter was found to be at each position and how often each profiled function was called. Unix man page: monitor(3).
5.		monitor - A control program within the operating system that manages the allocation of system resources to active programs.
6.		monitor - A program that measures software performance.