What is "orca"

Orca \Or"ca\ ([^o]r"k[.a]), prop. n. The killer whale ( Orcinus orca).

"killer whale," introduced as a generic term for the species by 1841, from earlier use in scientific names, from Latin orca "cetacean, a kind of whale." Earlier in English, orc, ork "large whale" (c.1590), from French orque, had been used vaguely of sea monsters (see orc).

n. A sea mammal (''Orcinus orca'') related to dolphins and porpoises, commonly called the killer whale.

n. predatory black-and-white toothed whale with large dorsal fin; common in cold seas [syn: killer whale, killer, grampus, sea wolf, Orcinus orca]

Orca (also called Orca: The Killer Whale) is an American 1977 supernatural horror drama film director by Michael Anderson and produced by Dino De Laurentiis, starring Richard Harris, Charlotte Rampling, and Will Sampson. It is based on Arthur Herzog's novel of the same name. The film was poorly received by critics and audiences alike due in part to its similarities to the film Jaws released two years prior. Upon release the film received only minor theatrical success, but in recent years the film has achieved a cult following among fans of the natural horror subgenre.

Orca is a name for the killer whale, a large marine mammal.

Orca or Orcas may also refer to:

Orca is a fictional DC Comics supervillain.

Orca is the seventh book in Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series, set in the fantasy world of Dragaera. Originally published in 1996 by Ace Books, it was republished in 2003 along with Athyra in the omnibus The Book of Athyra. Following the trend of the Vlad Taltos books, it is named after one of the Great Houses and features that House as an important element to its plot.

Orca was a male golden retriever trained by the UK charity Canine Partners as an assistance dog. he was one of 12 dogs to be awarded the PDSA Gold Medal, the highest award for outstanding bravery and dedication by an assistance dog, for remarkable dedication, tenacity and initiative in saving his owners' life in 2003, when he was still a young dog of 17 months age.

As a result of this and other achievements, Orca was also the first dog in the county to be officially recognised in 2004 as a " carer" by the City of York council, entitling him to an allowance for equipment and food.

Orca is a free and open source, flexible, extensible screen reader from the GNOME project for individuals who are blind or visually impaired. Using various combinations of speech synthesis and braille, Orca helps provide access to applications and toolkits that support the AT-SPI (e.g., the GNOME desktop, Mozilla Firefox/ Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org/ LibreOffice and GTK+, Qt and Java Swing/ SWT applications).

The development of Orca was started by the Accessibility Program Office (APO) of Sun Microsystems, Inc. (now Oracle) with contributions from many community members. The original idea and the first working prototype for Orca was started in May 2004 by Mark Mulcahy, a blind programmer who worked for Sun Microsystems. When Mark left Sun Microsystems and ventured out to start his own company, the Accessibility Program Office took Mark's work, continued with it and released the first official version on September 3, 2006. When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010 they cut developer jobs of full-time developers working on GNOME accessibility components, including Orca main maintainer Willie Walker. Since then, Orca is run by volunteers, led by Joanmarie Diggs. In September 7, 2011, Igalia, a company specialized in Free Software, hired Joanmarie Diggs and is supporting her work in Orca.

The name Orca, which is another term for a killer whale, is a nod to the long-standing tradition of naming screen readers after aquatic creatures, including the Assistive Technology product on Windows called JAWS (which stands for Job Access With Speech), the early DOS screen reader called Flipper, and the UK vision impairment company Dolphin Computer Access.

As of GNOME 2.16, Orca is the default screen reader of the GNOME platform, replacing Gnopernicus. As a result, Orca follows the GNOME stable release cycles of approximately six-months. Orca is provided by default on a number of operating system distributions, including Solaris, Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu.

Linux Screen Reader (LSR) was an alternative screen reader to Orca led by IBM and started in 2006. However, it was ceased the following year because IBM focused their resources in other projects.

Orca: The Killer Whale of the Hood is the 12th studio album (13th overall) by American rapper C-Bo, which was released on July 3, 2012 through his own imprint West Coast Mafia Records and Uneek-Music. The album features guest performances by Young Buck, WC, Yukmouth, BG Knocc Out, Brotha Lynch Hung E-40, Paul Wall, Slick Pulla ( CTE) and more.

ORCA was a mobile-optimized web application used as a component of the " get out the vote" (GOTV) efforts for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign. It was intended to enable volunteers in polling stations around the country to report which voters had turned out, so that "missing" Republican voters and underperforming precincts could be targeted for last-minute efforts to get voters to the polls. According to Romney himself, it would provide an "unprecedented advantage" to the campaign to "ensure that every last supporter makes it to the polls."

The system had major technical problems during Election Day that prevented many volunteers from using it. It crashed periodically and at one point was intentionally taken down when a surge of traffic from campaign volunteers was misinterpreted as a denial of service attack. Frustrated volunteers reported being unable to access ORCA and criticised a lack of prior briefing, misleading instructions and patchy on-the-day support. A Romney aide commented that " Orca is lying on the beach with a harpoon in it." The system's failings have been attributed by technology writers to a combination of factors including not doing prior quality assurance or beta testing, inadequate documentation and poor design.

The Romney campaign subsequently defended ORCA as a success, though campaign officials admitted that the system "had its challenges". Conservative activists and writers blamed ORCA for depressing Republican turnout on election day. While political scientists have rebutted these claims, suggested that it probably did not have a decisive effect on the outcome, it may have negatively affected turnout figures. ORCA has been compared unfavorably with a "get out the vote" and data effort from President Obama, including Project Narwhal, seen as more robust.

ORCA (Quantum Chemistry Program) is an ab initio quantum chemistry program package that contains modern electronic structure methods including density functional theory, many-body perturbation, coupled cluster, multireference methods, and semi-empirical quantum chemistry methods. Its main field of application is larger molecules, transition metal complexes, and their spectroscopic properties. ORCA is developed in the research group of Frank Neese and is free for academic use.