Comparisons

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, salient means:

as an adjective:

1. Projecting or jutting beyond a line or surface; protruding.
2. Strikingly conspicuous; prominent.
3. Springing; jumping: salient tree toads.

as a noun:

1. A military position that projects into the position of the enemy.
2. A projecting angle or part.

definition 1 :-

1. total rejection of established laws and institutions. 2. anarchy, terrorism, or other revolutionary activity. 3. total and absolute destructiveness, esp. toward the world at large and including oneself: the power-mad nihilism that marked Hitler's last years. 4. Philosophy. a. an extreme form of skepticism: the denial of all real existence or the possibility of an objective basis for truth. b. nothingness or nonexistence. 5. (sometimes initial capital letter) the principles of a Russian revolutionary group, active in the latter half of the 19th century, holding that existing social and political institutions must be destroyed in order to clear the way for a new state of society and employing extreme measures, including terrorism and assassination. 6.

annihilation of the self, or the individual consciousness, esp. as an aspect of mystical experience.

definition 2 :-

1. Philosophy
2. An extreme form of skepticism that denies all existence.
3. A doctrine holding that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.
4. Rejection of all distinctions in moral or religious value and a willingness to repudiate all previous theories of morality or religious belief.
5. The belief that destruction of existing political or social institutions is necessary for future improvement.
6. also Nihilism A diffuse, revolutionary movement of mid 19th-century Russia that scorned authority and tradition and believed in reason, materialism, and radical change in society and government through terrorism and assassination.
7. Psychiatry A delusion, experienced in some mental disorders, that the world or one's mind, body, or self does not exist.

definition 3 :-

1. someone who rejects all theories of morality or religious belief 2. an advocate of anarchism [syn: anarchist]

nice to know

When implemented with the same technology, an analog computer will always be faster than a digital computer. This is because of the data representation: an analog computer represents data using one continuously variable signal per item, this signal is capable of changing as fast as possible with the given technology; a digital computer represents data using several discontinuously variable signals encoding the value of each item, these signals must be allowed to settle and stabilize to a valid code after each calculation forcing the computer to wait, slowing it down. This cannot be avoided and is an inherent difference between the two classes of computer.

Another reason analog computers are faster is architectural. Analog computers do not separate calculation and data storage like modern digital computers do. The calculations are distributed throughout the machine while the data stays put. Digital computers waste a lot of time moving data from memory to a central group of ALUs and back to memory. This could be avoided by use of different digital computer architectures (e.g. DDAs) but these usually sacrifice the benefits of stored programming and make the digital computer as hard to program as most analog computers.