RMS

RMS is a nautical designation that refers to Royal Mail Ship. In essence a designation granted to ships that carry mail for the British postal system. An arcane term in this modern age where mail is more often carried by air then by sea. However any ship that would still be in the service of the British postal service would most likely carry this designation.

An example of a Royal Mail Ship would be the RMS Titanic.

In GNU or Open Source Software circles, RMS is the abbreviation for Richard M. Stallman. RMS is most famous for his founding of the Free Software Foundation, which takes the idea open source software further into saying that software should be free, but free as in speech, not free as in beer.

RMS served as leader of the FSF since roughly the mid 1980s, while also working on a variety of software programs, including, most famously emacs, the text editor cum operating system, some have said.

Recently, Bradley Kuhn has become Vice President of the FSF, giving Richard more time to pursue some of the philosphical aspects of the FSF

In audio circles, RMS is an abbreviation for Root Mean Squared (mathemetical fomulae found therein) -- this term is used in many other fields, but the audio usage is taken as the power value limited by the established harmonic distortions, and is often used to describe nominal continuous load of a component or system measured in wattage. In the case of Head Units and Amplifiers it is the amount output'ed, and for speakers/drivers it is the amount that can be safely input'ed for long periods.

This is different from the other measurement used, which is Watts per Channel, or WPC, that is generally the maximum output possible in a small burst, but not continuous service.