Integrated Drive Electronics. It is a protocol for attaching devices to computer motherboards (another one is SCSI). It is the most commonly used in x86 desktop machines running Linux or Windows, and in cheap servers (ie not BigIron). The most typical devices include HardDisks and CDROMS.
IDE HardDisk's often support SMART, which lets you query the hard disk for various bits of information, and get it to preform tests etc. If you're interested in playing with this, I recommend looking at smartmontools. (
http://smartmontools.sf.net:/ IIRC).
Integrated Development Environment. An IDE gathers all of a programmer's tools together for convenience. An IDE can can edit, compile, debug and run programs. Popular IDEs are Emacs, KDevelop and VisualStudio.
(See Acronym.)
34 pages link to IDE:
