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Computer Acronyms
& Other Mysterious IT Words

compiled by Athene Bitting
from Wikipedia or listed websites
This is a work in progress; I’ll be adding to it regularly.


Other great places to find web definitions are at W3 Schools and WordPress

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A

AAAA — AAAA recordshelp.securepaynet.net

store a 128-bit Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) address that does not fit the standard A record format.
eg: 2007:0db6:85a3:0000:0000:6a2e:0371:7234 is a valid 128-bit/IPv6 address.

Access Point —DIY Network

The piece of electronic equipment that allows your WIFI devices to connect to a network (which could be the Internet).
Usually, it is built into a router, but more complex systems separate the router from the access point.
Access points are available for both indoor and outdoor use with different speed and range.

ACM—Association for Computing Machinerywww.acm.org/

is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society.
ACM provides the computing field’s premier Digital Library and leading-edge publications, conferences, and career resources.

AIEE—American Institute of Electrical EngineersWikipedia

was a US-based organization of electrical engineers from 1884 to 1963,
when it merged with the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) to form the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
Its founders included Nikola Tesla, Thomas Alva Edison, Elihu Thomson, Edwin J. Houston, and Edward Weston.

ALGOL—ALGOrithmic LanguageWikipedia

is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in the mid 1950s.
It had a great influence on many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the ACM for the next 30+ years.

ANSI C—American National Standards Institute C programming languageWikipedia

the family of successive standards published by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) for the C programming language.

API—Application Programming InterfaceWikipedia

is a source code based spec intended to be an interface by software components to communicate with each other.
It may include specs for routines, data structures, object classes, and variables.
It can take many forms, including an International Standard such as Posix or vendor documentation such as the Microsoft Windows API, or the libraries of a programming language,
e.g. Standard Template Library in C++ or Java API.
It differs from an ABI (Application Binary Interface).
API is source code based while the ABI is a binary interface; eg: POSIX is an API, while the Linux Standard Base is an ABI.

Arduino—DIY Network & www.arduino.cc

Home Automation Terms: is a micro-controller with supporting electronics all packaged together on an easy-to-use control circuit board.
These devices are blessed with simplicity of wiring and programming to automate processes around your house.
They are inexpensive ($25—$35 in 2013) but you need gear to start automating with them.
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.
It can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators.
The microcontroller on the board is programmed using the Arduino programming language (based on Wiring) and the Arduino development environment (based on Processing).
Arduino projects can be stand-alone or they can communicate with software running on a computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP).
The boards can be built by hand or purchased preassembled; the software can be downloaded for free.
The hardware reference designs (CAD files) are available under an open-source license, you are free to adapt them to your needs.
Arduino received an Honorary Mention in the Digital Communities section of the 2006 Ars Electronica Prix.
The Arduino team is: Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, Tom Igoe, Gianluca Martino, David Mellis, and several international contributors.

ARPAnet —Advanced Research Projects Agency NetworkWikipedia

was the world’s first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet.

AWS —Amazon Web Serviceshttp://aws.amazon.com/

Amazon’s commercial website service for larger scale businesses who have complex backend needs.

B

B2B —Business to BusinessWikipedia

commerce transactions between businesses, such as between a manufacturer and a wholesaler, or between a wholesaler and a retailer.
Contrasting terms are business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-government (B2G).
B2B (Business to Business) Branding is a term used in marketing.

B2C —Business to CustomerWikipedia

A retailer purchases goods or products in large quantities from manufacturers directly or through a wholesaler,
and then sells smaller quantities to the consumer for a profit.
Retailing can be done in either fixed locations or online.
Retailing includes subordinated services, such as delivery.
The term "retailer" is also applied where a service provider services the needs of a large number of individuals, such as a public utility, like electric power.

BAPP —BSD + Apache + PostgreSQL + Perl/PHP/Python

BCPL —Basic Combined Programming Language

is a procedural, imperative, and structured computer programming language designed by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge in 1966.

beta —Beta Softwarehttp://kb.iu.edu

After an initial round of in-house testing, software publishers often release new programs to be tested by the public.
These pre-release versions are called beta software, usually denoted by a "b" in the version number, e.g., Firefox 3.1b2.
Since the publisher cannot possibly test the software under all possible conditions, it is reasonable to expect that wider use of the software may uncover problems that were not discovered during in-house testing.
The publisher expects to be notified when users find such problems so that the program can be fixed before its official release.

BGA —Ball Grid Arraywww.raspberrypi.org

A type of surface mount packaging for electronics.

BGP —Border Gateway ProtocolWikipedia

is the protocol that backs the core routing decisions on the Internet.
It maintains a table of IP networks or ’prefixes’ which designate network reachability among autonomous systems (AS).
It is described as a path vector protocol.
BGP does not use traditional Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) metrics, but makes routing decisions based on path, network policies and/or rulesets.
For this reason, it is more appropriately termed a reachability protocol rather than routing protocol.
BGP was created to replace the Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) protocol to allow fully decentralized routing in order to transition from the core ARPAnet model to a decentralized system that included the NSFNET backbone and its associated regional networks.
This allowed the Internet to become a truly decentralized system.

Black Hat — hacking with malice or for profitWikipedia

Black Hat Hackers are the security breachers that security software and clients fear.
The hacker picks a network to break into.
Hacker port-scans a network for weaknesses—testing all ports on a host machine for a response.
Open ports access to the system.
Looks for ways to access the system through Social Engineering or Dumpster Diving (looking through physical trash for access info).

Blue Hat — security testing hacker under contractWikipedia

is a freelancer, independent of computer security consulting firms.
A Blue Hat tests a system prior to its launch, looking for exploits so they can be closed.
Microsoft also uses the term BlueHat to represent a series of security briefing events.

Blog —from: weBlog (web log)WordPress

is a term used to describe web sites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information.
A blog features diary-type commentary and links to articles on other Web sites, usually presented as a list of entries in reverse chronological order.
Topics have no limit—one narrow subject or a whole range.
Blogs tend to have these things in common:

  • A main content area with articles listed chronologically, newest on top.
  • Often, the articles are organized into categories.
  • An archive of older articles.
  • A way for people to leave comments about the articles.
  • A list of links to other related sites, sometimes called a "blogroll".
  • One or more "feeds" like RSS, Atom or RDF files.

Like a magazine or newsletter, blog content consists of articles (also sometimes called "posts" or "entries").
Some blogs have multiple journalists.

Block Header —The Head of a Block of Codeen.bitcoin.it

When generating Bitcoin, you constantly hash the block header. The block is also occasionally updated as you are working on it.
A block header contains these fields:

FieldPurposeUpdated when...Size (Bytes)
VersionBlock version numberYou upgrade the software and it specifies a new version4
Previous hashHash of the previous blockA new block comes in32
Merkle root256-bit hash based on all of the transactionsA transaction is accepted32
TimestampCurrent timestampEvery few seconds4
"Bits"Current target in compact formatThe difficulty is adjusted4
Nonce32-bit number (starts at 0)A hash is tried (increments)4

BML —Broadcast Markup LanguageWikipedia

is an XML-based standard developed by Japanese ARIB association
as a data broadcasting specification for digital television broadcasting.
It was finalized in 1999,
becomingARIB STD B24 Data Coding and Transmission Specification for Digital Broadcasting.

Brick —To render something into a paperweightforum.ppcgeeks.com

Mutiny32 from Lee’s Summit, MO said,
          ‟The origins of the term —brick comes actually from the computer CMOS chip world.
          Due to the nature of CMOS and similar semiconductors; writing data to them can be very dangerous.
          If a data write goes bad for a myriad of reasons, the CMOS chip is essentially useless.
          Since most computers and complex electronics have some sort of CMOS-type semiconductor in them used as an essential piece, it’s pretty much a fact of life.
          So now you’re stuck with a very expensive piece of useless equipment.
          Since computers, routers, phones, and most other electronics are square and usually relatively heavy,
          they are compared to the only thing you can do with heavy square objects other than make a wall out of them; use them as paperweights.
          And what is the best paperweight? A brick.”

BSD —Berkeley Software Distribution

Unix operating system derivative.

C

Caching —Computer-Aided DesignWikipedia

transparently storing data so future requests for that data can be served faster.
Data in a cache might be values computed earlier or duplicates of original values stored elsewhere.
If requested data is in the cache (cache hit), this request can be served by merely reading the cache, which is comparatively faster.
Otherwise data must be recomputed or retrieved from its original storage location (cache miss), which is comparatively slower.
The more requests that can be served from cache, the faster the overall system performance becomes.
Caches are relatively small & show:
    • spatial locality for data is requested that is physically stored close to data that has been requested already,
    • temporal locality if data is requested again that has been recently requested already.

CAD —Computer-Aided Designwww.about.com

is more efficient than drafting drawings and blueprints by hand, because the software records lines as vectors based on mathematical equations.
AKA: CADD (Computer-Aided Design & Drafting).
Architects, drafters, engineers, and artists use CAD software to create plans and construction drawings.
The whole picture will automatically adjust as portions can be twisted, stretched, or moved.
CAD Software will let the designer:

  • Switch between two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) views.
  • Zoom in and out for close-up and distant views.
  • Rotate images to view them from different perspectives.
  • Change the scale of images: When one value changes, related values are automatically adjusted.
  • Manipulate the shape of images: Changing one portion of an image automatically changes the entire picture.

CDN —Content Delivery NetworkWikipedia

is a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers in the Internet.
A CDN delivers content with high availability and performance.
    CDNs serve:
    ⚐ web objects—text, graphics, URLs and scripts
    ⚐ downloadable objects—media files, software, documents
    ⚐ applications—e-commerce, portals
    ⚐ live streaming media
    ⚐ on-demand streaming media
    ⚐ social networks
A CDN operator gets paid by content providers (eg: media companies & e-commerce vendors)
for delivering their content to their audience.
Then a CDN pays ISPs, carriers, and network operators
to host its servers in their data centers.
CDNs save money for the content provider
by relieving data congestion directly from the content provider's origin infrastructure.
They also provide protection from DoS attacks
by using their large distributed server infrastructure
to absorb the attack traffic.
Most early CDNs served content using dedicated self-owned servers.
Currently, more CDNs use a hybrid model of P2P technology—
content is served combining dedicated servers and other peer-user-owned computers.
eg: CloudFlare is a CDN that hosting services offer for free.

CG —Computer Graphicswww.cgw.com

art that is rendered on a computer.

CGI —Common Gateway InterfaceWikipedia

is how web server software delegates web pages to executable files.
Such files are known as CGI scripts—programs (often stand-alone applications) usually written in a scripting language.

CIM —Customer Interaction ManagementWikipedia

software that uses different communication and messaging channels in a —contact centre for client interaction.
We see this a lot on customer service web pages, with email, live chat, messages and so on.

COBOL —COmmon Business-Oriented Languagewww.cobol.com

is one of the oldest programming languages. Defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments.
The COBOL 2002 standard includes support for object-oriented programming and other modern language features.

CMS —Content Management SystemWikipedia

is a system providing a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment.
These procedures can be manual or computer-based. The procedures are designed to do the following:
      ☘ Allow for a large number of people to contribute to and share stored data
      ☘ Control access to data, based on user roles (defining which information users or user groups can view, edit, publish, etc.)
      ☘ Aid in easy storage and retrieval of data
      ☘ Control of data validity and compliance
      ☘ Reduce repetitive duplicate input
      ☘ Improve the ease of report writing
      ☘ Improve communication between users
In a CMS, data can be defined as nearly anything: documents, movies, text, pictures, phone numbers, scientific data, and so forth.
CMSs are frequently used for storing, controlling, revising, semantically enriching, and publishing documentation. Serving as a central repository,
the CMS increases the version level of new updates to an already existing file. Version control is one of the primary advantages of a CMS.

CNAME —Canonical NAMEhelp.securepaynet.net

is an alias for a host. Using CNAMEs, you can have more than one DNS name for a host.
CNAME records point back to the A record. When you change the IP address in your A record, all CNAME records for that domain name automatically follow the new IP address.

CPIM —Certified in Production and Inventory Management

a professional certification offered by APICS The Association for Operations Management.
The program was founded in 1973.

CRM —Customer Relationship ManagementDestination CRM

is a company-wide business strategy for reducing cost and increasing profit (through customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy).
It assembles info from all relevant data sources inside and outside the org.
It provides a real time gestalt of each customer.
Customer service employees (sales, customer support, & marketing) can make quick & informed decisions about cross-selling, upselling, target marketing, & competitive positioning.
Once thought of as a type of software, CRM has evolved into a customer-centric philosophy that must permeate an entire organization.
There are three key elements to a successful CRM initiative: people, process, and technology.

CSRG —Computer Systems Research Group

was a research group at the University of California, Berkeley that was dedicated to enhancing AT&T Unix operating system and funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

CSS —Cascading Style Sheets

a separate file that sets the style for one or more web pages.

D

Daemon —Disk And Execution MONitorkb.iu.edu

is a long-running background process that answers requests for services.
The term originated with Unix, but most operating systems use daemons in some form or another.
In Windows NT, 2000, and XP, for example, daemons are called "services".
In Unix, the names of daemons conventionally end in "d".
Some examples include inetd, httpd, nfsd, sshd, named, and lpd.

DARPA —Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military.

DCCP —Datagram Congestion Control Protocol

is a message-oriented Transport Layer protocol that implements reliable connection setup, teardown, Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN), congestion control, and feature negotiation.
Helps access congestion control mechanisms without having to implement them at the Application Layer.
Allows flow-based semantics like in Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), but does not provide reliable in-order delivery.
Sequenced delivery within multiple streams as in the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is not available in DCCP.
Useful for applications with timing constraints on data delivery(eg: streaming media, Multiplayer online games & Internet telephony).
Can be positioned to control general congestion for UDP-based applications.
Has the option for very long (48-bit) sequence numbers corresponding to a packet ID, rather than a byte ID as in TCP.
Long length sequence numbers helps guard against some blind attacks, eg: DCCP-Resets injection into the connection.

DEC —Digital Equipment Corporation

was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Also known as DEC and using the trademark DIGITAL, its PDP and VAX products were the most successful (in terms of sales) minicomputers.

DHCP —Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol

is a network configuration protocol for hosts on Internet Protocol (IP) networks.
Computers connected to IP networks must be configured before communicating with other hosts.
The most essential info needed is an IP address, and a default route and routing prefix. DHCP eliminates the manual task by a network administrator.
It also provides a central database of devices that are connected to the network and eliminates duplicate resource assignments. DHCP also provides other configuration info, particularly the IP addresses of local caching DNS resolvers, network boot servers, or other service hosts (eg: Domain Name System servers used on a network).

DHTML —Dynamic Hypertext Markup Languagewww.dynamicdrive.com

is not a language. It describs the skill of making dynamic and interactive web pages. DHTML combines HTML, JavaScript, the HTML DOM, and CSS.

DLL —Dynamic-Link Librarywww.ehow.com

DLLs are integral to the operation of almost all existing software programs.
Typically many hundreds or even thousands of DLLs reside on every computer.
They tend to be small programs, mostly between 200Kb to 600Kb.
In Windows compatible software, generally these models are found in the System32 folder under the Windows folder.
Because of the complexity of modern software programs, DLLs may fill a gigabyte or more of disk space.
They are vital to running application software and any corrupted or missing DLLs can cause a malfunction in the program.

DNS —Domain Name System

is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network.
It associates various info with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities.
Most importantly, it translates human language into machine code to locate and address these devices worldwide.
Makes it possible to assign domain names to groups of Internet resources and users in a meaningful way, no matter where they are.
Because of this, World Wide Web (WWW) hyperlinks and Internet contact info can remain consistent and constant
even if the current Internet routing arrangements change or the participant uses a mobile device.
Internet domain names are easier to remember than IP addresses such as 208.77.188.166 (IPv4) or 2001:db8:1f70::999:de8:7648:6e8 (IPv6).
Users use this in Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) and email addresses without having to know how the computer actually locates them.

DOM —Document Object Modelwww.23schools.com

is a cross-platform and language-independent standard to represent and interact with objects in HTML, XHTML and XML documents.
DOM stuff can be handled inside the syntax of whatever programming language is being used. The API specifies the DOM’s public interface.

Domotics—domocile + roboticsDIY Network

is a fancy word for home automation.

Dongle —A male plug for a female portwww.wisegeek.com

a piece of hardware that plugs into a computer in order to make a piece of secured software run.
The modern versions are also called thumb drives, and have become very small for portability.

DOS (pronounced dahz) —Disk Operating System

operating systems IBM PC compatible from 1981 to 2000.
Programs running under any one of these operating systems
(e.g. MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS, FreeDOS, PTS-DOS, ROM-DOS, Novell DOS, OpenDOS, AmigaDOS, AMSDOS, ANDOS, Apple DOS, Atari DOS, Commodore DOS, CSI-DOS, ProDOS, TRS-DOS)
won’t run under the others.

Dynamic Content— www.sitefinity.com

items that you create and edit live in the different modules are dynamic content.
They can either be published on a page or not.
eg: when you write a new blog post, it is automatically displayed on the live site if you have blogs enabled.
If you delete a page that contains these items, they remain in the module’s content repository.
Management functions that are handled online are dynamic content.
Dynamic content is very convenient when running a large site, because information used by many pages can be updated in one place.

E

ECN —Explicit Congestion Notification

is an extension to the Internet Protocol and to the Transmission Control Protocol.
ECN allows end-to-end notification of network congestion without dropping packets.
ECN is an optional feature that is only used when both endpoints support it and are willing to use it. It is only effective when supported by the underlying network.
Conventionally, TCP/IP networks signal congestion by dropping packets. When ECN is successfully negotiated, an ECN-aware router may set a mark in the IP header instead of dropping a packet in order to signal impending congestion.
The receiver of the packet echoes the congestion indication to the sender, which reduces its transmission rate as though it detected a dropped packet.
Rather than responding properly or ignoring the bits, some outdated or buggy network equipment drop packets which have ECN bits set.

EEO —Equal Employment Opportunitywww.sensus.gov

EEOC —Equal Employment Opportunity Commissionwww.eeoc.gov

ERP —Enterprise Resource Planningwhatiserp.net

Way back in the day (i.e. 1990) the phrase ERP was first coined to describe how novel and innovative business software can be developed to create a shared database across multiple business units.

Ethernet—Ether (astral electromagnetic binding substance) + Network DIY Network & Search Networking & About.com

is basically your home’s Internet and networks for most business buildings.
It is a collection of technologies to make local area networks, which enable you to connect to the world Internet.
Ethernet was invented by engineer Robert Metcalfe in the 80's.
Specified in a standard, IEEE 802.3, Ethernet was originally developed by Xerox from an earlier specification called Alohanet (for the Palo Alto Research Center Aloha network) and then developed further by Xerox, DEC, and Intel.
An Ethernet LAN typically uses coaxial cable or special grades of twisted pair wires.
Also used in WiFi, the most commonly installed Ethernet systems are called 10BASE-T and provide transmission speeds up to 10 Mbps.
Devices are connected to the cable and compete for access using a Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection (CSMA/CD) protocol.
Fast Ethernet" standards increased the maximum data rate to 100 Mbps.
Gigabit Ethernet technology further extends peak performance up to 1000 Mbps.
Internet Protocol (IP) uses Ethernet as their transmission medium.
The run length of individual Ethernet cables is limited to roughly 100 meters, but Ethernet networks can be easily extended to link entire schools or office buildings using network bridge devices.


F

Favicon —Favorites IconWikipedia & w3.org

is an image file with the extension ".ico" used to hallmark a Web site or Web page.
It’s usually 16×16 pixels Browsers that provide favicon support display it in the browser’s address bar and/or next to the page name, and/or the tab, and/or as desktop icon.

Fortran —The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System

is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language, especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing.
Originally developed in the 1950s by IBM at their campus in south San Jose, California for scientific and engineering applications, Fortran came to dominate this area of programming early.
It’s still used for numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics and computational chemistry.

FTP —File Transfer Protocol

is a standard network protocol used to transfer files from one host to another host over a TCP-based network, such as the Internet.
FTP is built on a client-server architecture and uses separate control and data connections between the client and the server.
FTP users may authenticate themselves using a clear-text sign-in protocol but can connect anonymously if the server is configured to allow it.
The first FTP client applications were interactive command-line tools, implementing standard commands and syntax. Graphical user interface are the new thing.

G

GIF —Graphics Interchange Formaten.wikipeda.org

is a bitmap image format introduced by CompuServe in 1987. The format supports up to 8 bits per pixel, allowing a single image to reference up to 256 colors from the 24-bit RGB color space.
It also supports animations, allowing 256 colors for each frame.
It is well-suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.
GIF images are compressed using the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) lossless data compression technique to reduce the file size without degrading the visual quality.
This compression technique was patented in 1985; all the relevant patents have expired.
The licensing agreement between the patent holder, Unisys, and CompuServe in 1994 spurred the development of the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) standard;

Granularity—Texture of Database organizationWiki answers

is when an object model has more classes than corresponding tables in the database (the object model is more granular than the relational model).
In parallel computing, granularity means the amount of computation in relation to communication.
Fine-grained parallelism means individual tasks have small code size and execution time.
The data moves among processors frequently in amounts of one or a few memory words.
Coarse-grained parallelism means that data move around less, after larger amounts of computation.
Finer granularity has greater potential for parallelism and speed-up, but greater reps of synchronization and communication.
The best balance between load and communication needs to be found.
If granularity is too fine, performance can suffer from increased communication overhead.
If the granularity is too coarse, performance can suffer from big code loads.

Grep —Global Regular Expression PrintWikipedia

is a command-line text-search utility originally written for Unix, created by Ken Thompson.
The grep command searches files or standard input globally for lines matching a given regular expression, and prints the lines to the program’s standard output.
Grep may behave differently depending on the name by which it is invoked, allowing fgrep, egrep, and grep to be links to the same program.
A common verb usage is the phrase "You can’t grep dead trees"(paper documents can’t be sorted and the info printed on them can’t be separated out).

Grey Hat —hacking in a moral zone between white and blackWikipedia

coined by a hacker group called L0pht in 1998.
The earliest known printed use of the term Grey Hat of computer security is in 2001.
It describes hackers who support reporting security problems directly to the software vendor.

H

Hadoop —Named after Doug Cutting’s son’s toy elephant.hadoop.apache.org

The Apache™ Hadoop™ project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing.
The Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using a simple programming model.
It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage.
Rather than rely on hardware to deliver high-avaiability,
the library itself is designed to detect and handle failures at the application layer,
so delivering a highly-availabile service on top of a cluster of computers, each of which may be prone to failures.

HiPPO — Highest-Paid Person’s OpinionWired.com

refers to decisions made by the highest-paid person in charge, rather than by using data to reach logical answers.

Host (A) — help.securepaynet.net

uses the A record to map an IP address to a host name. This is the most common type of record on the Internet.

HTTP —Hypertext Transfer Protocol

is an application protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia info systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web.
The standards development of HTTP was coordinated by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

HUDDI —Universal Description Discovery and IntegrationWikipedia

is an (XML)-based registry for businesses to get listed globally on the web.
It’s also a tool to register and locate web service applications.
UDDI is an open industry initiative, sponsored by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).
It enables businesses to publish service listings, discover each other, and define how their services or software applications interact on the web.
UDDI is questioned by SOAP messages.
It provides access to Web Services Description Language (WSDL) documents that describe the protocol bindings and message formats needed to work with web services listed in its directory.
A UDDI business registration consists of three components:

  • White Pages — address, contact, and known identifiers;
  • Yellow Pages — industrial categorizations based on standard taxonomies;
  • Green Pages — technical information about services exposed by the business.

I

IBM —International Business Machines Corporation

founded in 1911 as the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation through a merger of three companies-the Tabulating Machine Company, the International Time Recording Company, and the Computing Scale Corporation.
CTR adopted the name International Business Machines in 1924, using a name previously designated to CTR’s subsidiary in Canada and later South America. Its distinctive culture and product branding has given it the nickname Big Blue.

ICMP —Internet Control Message Protocol

is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite.
Chiefly used by operating systems of networked computers to send error messages (eg: a requested service is not available, or a host or router could not be reached).
ICMP can also be used to relay query messages. It is assigned protocol number 1. ICMP differs from transport protocols such as TCP and UDP in that it is not typically used to exchange data between systems,
nor is it regularly employed by end-user network applications (with the exception of some diagnostic tools like ping and traceroute).

ICU —International Components for Unicode

is an open source project of mature C/C++ and Java libraries for Unicode support, software internationalization and software globalization.
ICU is widely portable to many operating systems and environments. It gives applications the same results on all platforms and between C, C++ and Java software.
IEEE-Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-is a non-profit professional association headquartered in New York City that is dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence. It has more than 400,000 members in more than 160 countries, about 45% of whom reside outside the United States.

IDE —Integrated Development Environment

a software tool for software developers to make it easier to create programs,
eg: NetBeans, VisualStudio, JCreator, Eclipse, XCode.
It allows you to run the program, fix errors, and simulate its application as though it were mounted on the internet or an intended hardware setting.

IETF —The Internet Engineering Task Force

formed an XMPP Working Group in 2002 to formalize the core protocols as an IETF instant messaging and presence technology.

INGRES —Ingres Database

is a commercially supported, open-source SQL relational database management system intended to support large commercial and government applications.
Ingres Database is fully open source with a growing global community of contributors, but Actian Corporation controls the development of Ingres and makes certified binaries available for download, as well as providing worldwide support.
Ingres was first created as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley, starting in the early 1970s and ending in the early 1980s.
The original code, like that from other projects at Berkeley, was available at minimal cost under a version of the BSD license.
Ingres has spawned a number of commercial database applications, including Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, NonStop SQL and a number of others. Postgres (Post Ingres), a project which started in the mid-1980's, later evolved into PostgreSQL.

IMAP —Internet Message Access Protocol

is one of the two most prevalent Internet standard protocols for email retrieval, the other being the Post Office Protocol (POP). Virtually all modern email clients and mail servers support both protocols as a means of transferring email messages from a server.

IP —Internet Protocol

is the principal communications protocol used for relaying datagrams (packets) across an internetwork using the Internet Protocol Suite.
It’s responsible for routing packets across network boundaries.
It’s the primary protocol that establishes the Internet in the Internet Layer of the Internet Protocol Suite and delivers datagrams from source to destination host(solely based on their addresses).
IP defines addressing methods and structures for datagram encapsulation. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn introduced IP in 1974 as the connectionless datagram service in the original Transmission Control Program (the other was the connection-oriented Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)). The Internet Protocol Suite is therefore often referred to as TCP/IP.

IPC —Inter-Process Communication

is a set of methods for the exchange of data among multiple threads in one or more processes.
Processes may be running on one or more computers connected by a network.
IPC methods are divided into methods for message passing, synchronization, shared memory, and remote procedure calls (RPC).
The method of IPC used may vary based on the bandwidth and latency of communication between the threads, and the type of data being communicated.

IPsec —Internet Protocol Security

IPsec is an end-to-end security scheme operating in the Internet Layer of the Internet Protocol Suite.
It can be used in protecting data flows between a pair of hosts (host-to-host), between a pair of security gateways (network-to-network), or between a security gateway and a host (network-to-host).
IPsec originally was developed at the Naval Research Laboratory as part of a DARPA-sponsored research project.
IPsec is officially specified by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in a series of Request for Comments documents addressing various components and extensions.
It specifies the spelling of the protocol name to be IPsec. It authenticates and encrypts each IP packet of a communication session.
IPsec also includes protocols to establish mutual authentication between agents at the beginning of the session and negotiates cryptographic keys to be used during the session.

IR—Infra + RedDIY Network

Infrared is the light that is just out of human sight on the longer end of the spectrum.
In home automation, it is used for wireless communication (like most remote controls).
Since it is light, it requires LOS, or Line of Sight, to function.
This means the IR emitter (the device sending the signal) must have an unobstructed view of the IR receiver (the device reading the signal).

IR —Information RetrievalWikipedia

is searching for documents, info in documents, metadata about documents, structured storage, relational databases, and the World Wide Web.
It includes data retrieval, document retrieval, information retrieval, and text retrieval, but each function has its own body of literature, theory, praxis, and technologies.
It is studied in computer science, mathematics, library science, information science, information architecture, cognitive psychology, linguistics,statistics and law.
Automated IR systems are to reduce information overload.
Many universities and public libraries use IR systems to provide access to books, journals and other documents.
Web search engines are the most visible IR applications.

IRC —Internet Relay Chat

is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging (chat) or synchronous conferencing.
It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer,including file sharing. IRC was created in 1988.

IRE —Institute of Radio Engineers

was a professional organization which existed from 1912 until January 1, 1963, when it merged with the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) to form the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

J

J2EE —The Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Editionwww.oracle.com

is Oracle’s enterprise java computing platform.
The platform provides an API and runtime environment for developing and running enterprise software, including network and web services, and other large-scale, multi-tiered, scalable, reliable, and secure network applications.

JavaScript— www.json.org & W3Schools

is a web language.
It helps provide enhanced user interfaces and dynamic websites.
This enables programmatic access to computational objects within a host environment.
JavaScript’s use in applications outside Web pages — for example in PDF documents, site-specific browsers, and desktop widgets — is also significant.
Newer and faster JavaScript VMs and frameworks built upon them (notably Node.js) have also increased the popularity of JavaScript for server-side web applications.
JavaScript uses syntax influenced by that of C.
ECMA-262 is the official name of the JavaScript standard.
JavaScript was invented by Brendan Eich.
It appeared in Netscape (a no longer existing browser) in 1995,
and has been adopted by ECMA (a standard association) since 1997.

JSON —JavaScript Object Notationwww.json.org

is a subset of the object literal notation of JavaScript. Since JSON is a subset of JavaScript, it can be used in the language with no muss or fuss.
JSON is syntax for storing and exchanging text information.
Much like XML. JSON is smaller than XML, and faster and easier to parse.
JSON uses JavaScript syntax for describing data objects, but JSON is still language and platform independent.
JSON parsers and JSON libraries exists for many different programming languages.

JSP —JavaServer Pageswww.oracle.com

is a Java technology to help software developers serve dynamically generated web pages based on HTML, XML, or other document types.
Released in 1999 as Sun’s answer to ASP and PHP, JSP was designed to address the perception that the Java programming environment didn’t provide developers with enough support for the Web.
To deploy and run, a compatible web server with servlet container is required.
The Java Servlet and the JavaServer Pages (JSP) specifications from Sun Microsystems and the JCP (Java Community Process) must both be supported by the container.

K

KB —Knowledge BaseWikipedia

is a special kind of database for collecting and organizing KM (knowledge management).

Kernel— searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com

is the essential center of a computer operating system, the core that provides basic services for all other parts of the operating system.

Keywords— www.sitefinity.com

Metatags keywords are used by browsers or search engines to find and categorize your page.

KM —Knowledge ManagementWikipedia

identifies, creates, represents, distributes, and enables the use of insights and experiences.
this is a Nonaka discipline established in 1991. (see: http://hbr.org/2007/07/the-knowledge-creating-company/es)

K&R C —Kernighan & Ritchie C programming language

In 1978, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie published the first edition of The C Programming Language.
This book, known to C programmers as "K&R", served for many years as an informal specification of the language.
The version of C that it describes is commonly referred to as K&R C. The second edition of the book covers the later ANSI C standard.

long some_function();
/* int */ other_function();
/* int */ calling_function()
{
      long test1;
      register /* int */ test2;
      test1 = some_function();
      if (test1 > 0)
           test2 = 0;
      else
           test2 = other_function();
      return test2;
}

All the above commented-out int declarations could be omitted in K&R C.

KNF —Kernel Normal Form

is the coding style used in the development of code for the BSD operating systems.
Based on the original KNF concept from the Computer Systems Research Group, it dictates a programming style to which contributed code should adhere prior to its inclusion into the codebase.
KNF started out as a codification of how Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie formatted the original UNIX C source code.
It describes such things as how to name variables, use indents and the use of ANSI C or K&R C code styles.
Each BSD variant has its own KNF rules, which have evolved over time to differ from each other in small ways.

L

LDAP —Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

is an application protocol tp access and maintain distributed directory info services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network.
LDAP is defined in terms of ASN.1 and transmitted using BER.
Directory services may provide any organized set of records, often with a hierarchical structure, such as a corporate electronic mail directory,
just like a telephone directory is a list of subscribers with an address and a phone number.
LDAP is specified in a series of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Standard Track Requests for comments (RFCs).

Lemmatization —Greek λήμμα (sounds like leema), meaning sectionWikipedia

in computational linguistics, lemmatisation is the algorithmic process of determining the lemma for a given word.
The program finds the root word for the variation/inflection being used (eg: "was" has the root "be").
Of course, this requires knowledge of all the possible variations of a word in order to work.
Lemmatisation is like stemming, but a stemmer operates on a single word without knowledge of the context, so it can’t discriminate spelling puns.
Stemmers are simpler, easier to implement, and run faster. The reduced accuracy may not matter for some applications.

Linux—LINUs torvald uniX

is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution.
Linux runs on a wide variety of computer hardware, including mobile phones, tablet computers, network routers, televisions, video game consoles, desktop computers, mainframes and supercomputers.
Applications commonly used with desktop Linux systems include the Mozilla Firefox web browser, the OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice office application suites, and the GIMP image editor.
The main supporting user space system tools and libraries orginated in the GNU Project, initiated in 1983 by Richard Stallman.
The Free Software Foundation prefers the name GNU/Linux.

Lisp —Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol

is a family of computer programming languages.
Lisp has a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish prefix notation.
Origins in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today; only Fortran is older (by one year).
Like Fortran, Lisp has changed a great deal since its early days, and a number of dialects have existed over its history.
Today, the most widely known general-purpose Lisp dialects are Common Lisp, Scheme, and Clojure.

Loosely Typed—referring to data type

You don’t declare a data type.
PHP is a Loosely Typed Language.
The variable is declared automatically when you use it.

Low-Voltage —DIY Network

devices that require small amounts of energy to run.
Many electronic components are this way, eg: activity light indicators, electronic circuits, mp3 players, thumb drives, and telephones.
In contrast, High Voltage examples are: electrical outlets, switches, etc. and complex devices (TVs, ethernet, audio/video setups, etc.)

M

MAC —Media Access Aontrol

data communication protocol sub-layer, also known as the medium access control, is a sublayer of the data link layer specified in the seven-layer OSI model (layer 2).
It provides addressing and channel access control mechanisms. These make possible several terminals or network nodes communicating in a multiple-access-network (incorporating a shared medium, e.g. Ethernet).
The hardware that implements the MAC is referred to as a medium access controller. The MAC sub-layer acts as interface between the logical link control (LLC) sublayer and network’s physical layer.
The MAC layer emulates a full-duplex logical communication channel in a multi-point network. This channel may provide unicast, multicast or broadcast communication service.

MACH —Multiprocessor Universal Communication Kernel

According to Tevanian, “Mach” comes from a mispronounciation.
As he and others headed to lunch on a rainy Pittsburgh day avoiding mud puddles, Tevanian jokingly suggested that they name their new microkernel MUCK, for “Multi-User Communication Kernel” or “Multiprocessor Universal Communication Kernel”.
An Italian colleague mispronounced MUCK as “Mach”, which Rashid liked.
Mach is an operating system kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University to support operating system research, primarily distributed and parallel computation.
Although Mach is often mentioned as one of the earliest examples of a microkernel, not all versions of Mach are microkernels.
Mach’s derivatives are the basis of the modern operating system kernels in Mac OS X (which is not a microkernel) and GNU Hurd (which is a microkernel).

Manga —Japanese for: humorous picturescomicbooks.about.com

are Japanese comic books. Manga is often made into Japanese cartoons, or Anime. The art in Manga has a very definite look to it and is often referred to as “Manga Style”.
Manga became very popular in the 20th century when laws prohibiting the publication of those kinds of items were lifted and has become a huge part of Japanese culture.
In Japan, much Anime is based on popular Manga.
In America, publishers will normally wait until an Anime has been released and then publish the Manga in conjunction with the release of the cartoon.

Macro —short for macro-instructionDIY Network

is a combination of individual commands.
An example is a button you might program called “Start Movie.”
It would turn off the lights, turn on the TV and DVD, and start your movie.

Master Page — www.sitefinity.com

enables developers to define what every page will share, such as headers, footers, navigation etc.
A master page allows you to put the common code in a single file and have it visually inherited by content pages
This creates a consistent appearance and behavior in your application.

Membership Services — www.sitefinity.com

enables the administrator to validate and manage user info for the Web application.
Provides functionality to validate user credentials, create and modify membership users, and manage user settings (eg: passwords and email addresses).

Menu Label — www.sitefinity.com

the name of the link page that appears in the navigation controls, for example the menu page.

Mesh Network —DIY Network

This is a network that becomes stronger the bigger you make it.
Each device in the network boosts the signal by both transmitting and receiving all the data.
This allows you to have a centralized processor to which each device in your home automation system would connect back, while allowing the further devices to “puddle jump” using devices closer to the processor.

MGCP —Media Gateway Control Protocol

is a signalling and call control protocol used within Voice over IP (VoIP) systems that typically interoperate with the public switched telephone network (PSTN).
I’s for controlling media gateways on Internet Protocol (IP) networks and the public switched telephone network (PSTN).

MNG —Multiple-image Network GraphicsWikipedia & www.libpng.org

is closely related to the PNG image format.
When PNG development started in early 1995, developers decided not to incorporate support for animation, not least because this feature of GIF was seldom used at the time.
However, work soon started on MNG as an animation-supporting version of PNG. Version 1.0 of the MNG specification was released on January 31, 2001.

Modem—modulator + demodulatorDIY Network & Wikipedia & Search Mobile Computing

This device translates the Internet signal coming from your ISP (Internet Service Provider) to something your computer can use.
It modulates outgoing digital signals from a computer or other digital device to analog signals for a conventional copper twisted pair telephone line and demodulates the incoming analog signal and converts it to a digital signal for the digital device.
From early 1998, most new personal computers came with 56 Kbps modems.
By comparison, using a digital Integrated Services Digital Network adapter instead of a conventional modem, the same telephone wire can now carry up to 128 Kbps.
With Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) systems, now being deployed in a number of communities, bandwidth on twisted-pair can be in the megabit range.
These are typically rented from your ISP provider.
It is fairly illegal to hack them, but it does control your Internet speed (you’ve been warned).

MRP —Material Requirements Planning

is a production planning and inventory control system used to manage manufacturing processes.
Most MRP systems are software-based, while it is possible to conduct MRP by hand as well. An MRP system is intended to simultaneously meet three objectives:
      ☂ Ensure materials are available for production and products are available for delivery to customers.
      ☂ Maintain the lowest possible material and product levels in store
      ☂ Plan manufacturing activities, delivery schedules and purchasing activities.

MSA —Matt’s Script Archivewww.scriptarchive.com

offering free CGI scripts to the web community since 1995.
Is a free tutorial Perl script website, now kinda replaced by NMS.

MT —Machine Translationwww.eamt.org

is the application of computers to the task of translating texts from one natural language to another.
See NLP (Natural Language Processing).
One of the very earliest pursuits in computer science, MT has proved to be an elusive goal, but today a number of systems are available which produce output which, if not perfect, is of sufficient quality to be useful.

MVC —Model-View-Controllerwww.asp.net

is a software architecture, currently considered an architectural pattern used in software engineering.
The pattern isolates “domain logic” (the application logic for the user) from the user interface (input and presentation), permitting independent development, testing and maintenance of each (separation of concerns).
The pattern creates applications that separate the different aspects of the application (input logic, business logic, and UI logic), while providing a loose coupling between these elements.

MySQL —My Structured Query Languagewww.mysql.com

is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases.
It is named after developer Michael Widenius’ daughter, My. The SQL phrase stands for Structured Query Language. The MySQL development project has made its source code available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, as well as under a variety of proprietary agreements.
MySQL was owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now owned by Oracle Corporation.

MX —Mail eXchangerhelp.securepaynet.net

provides the mail server information for that zone to deliver email to the correct location.

N

NS —Name Serverhelp.securepaynet.net

the NS record contains the name server information for the zone.

NDP —Neighbor Discovery Protocol

operates in the Link Layer of the Internet model (RFC 1122) and is responsible for
address autoconfiguration of nodes, discovery of other nodes on the link, determining the Link Layer addresses of other nodes, duplicate address detection,
finding available routers and Domain Name System (DNS) servers, address prefix discovery, and maintaining reachability info about the paths to other active neighbor nodes (RFC 4861).
It improves robustness of packet delivery in the presence of failing routers or links, or mobile nodes.

NFS —Network File Systemwww.freebsd.org

allows a system to share directories and files with others over a network. By using NFS, users and programs can access files on remote systems almost as if they were local files. Some of the most notable benefits that NFS can provide are:
☺ Local workstations use less disk space because commonly used data can be stored on a single machine and still remain accessible to others over the network.
☺ There is no need for users to have separate home directories on every network machine. Home directories could be set up on the NFS server and made available throughout the network.
☺ Storage devices such as floppy disks, CDROM drives, and Zip® drives can be used by other machines on the network. This may reduce the number of removable media drives throughout the network.

How NFS Works

NFS consists of at least two main parts: a server and one or more clients. The client remotely accesses the data that is stored on the server machine.
In order for this to function properly a few processes have to be configured and running.
The server has to be running the following daemons:
DaemonDescription
nfsdThe NFS daemon which services requests from the NFS clients.
mountdThe NFS mount daemon which carries out the requests that nfsd(8) passes on to it.
rpcbindThis daemon allows NFS clients to discover which port the NFS server is using.
The client can also run a daemon, known as nfsiod. The nfsiod daemon services the requests from the NFS server. This is optional and improves performance.

NLP —Natural Language ProcessingWikipedia

concerns the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages.
It studies linguistics and artificial intelligence-machine learning.
A computer extracts meaningful information from NL input/producing NL output.
NL understanding is AKA an AI-complete problem—possibly requiring (1)much knowledge about our world and (2)the ability to manipulate it.

NMS —Not Matt’s Scriptsnms-cgi.sourceforge.net

is a Perl project hosted at SourceForge.
The project has drop-in replacements for all of Matt’s scripts.
This means that someone who uses one of Matt’s scripts should be able to get the nms replacement and just drop it in in place of the original script.
Everything should then work exactly as before, except that the user will sleep easier knowing that their web site is that little more secure.
Any contributed scripts must therefore follow certain rules:
They must run under Perl 5.004_04 or later.
They must not use any non-standard Perl modules. I know this is a bit contentious, but I really think that the target audience will have problems installing modules from CPAN.
They must run with no errors or warnings under use strict and -wT. One of the worst legacies of Matt’s scripts is that people use them to learn Perl.
None of the MSA scripts use these constraints and therefore people copying them will learn bad habits.
If people learn Perl from NMS they will at least learn better programming habits.

NNTP —Network News Transfer Protocol

is an Internet application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles (netnews) between news servers and for reading and posting articles by end user client applications.
Brian Kantor of the University of California, San Diego and Phil Lapsley of the University of California, Berkeley authored RFC 977, the specification for the Network News Transfer Protocol, in March 1986.
Other contributors included Stan O. Barber from the Baylor College of Medicine and Erik Fair of Apple Computer.

Nonce —Cryptographic Noncehttp://www.intertwingly.net & http://wiki.answers.com

according to Webster, from Middle English "then once", meaning "for the moment".
A number or bit string used only once in security engineering that plays a serious role in a number of security implementations.
Generating a nonce is easy—a random number or the current time or a combination of the two is sufficient.
However, the key to preventing replay attacks is for the recipient to ensure that no nonce is ever reused; this is quite a serious obligation—forever is a long time.

NTP —Network Time Protocol

is a protocol and software implementation for synchronizing the clocks of computer systems over packet-switched, variable-latency data networks.
Originally designed by David L. Mills of the University of Delaware and still maintained by him and a team of volunteers, it was first used before 1985 and is one of the oldest Internet protocols.
NTP is not related to the simpler Daytime Protocol or the Time Protocol.

O

OEM —Original Equipment ManufacturerWikipedia

manufactures products or components that are purchased by a company and retailed under that purchasing company’s brand name.

.ogg —from ogging, in the computer game Netrek.ogg & Xiph.org & ogging

an .ogg file is a form of video.
The "ogg" is a kamikaze-style attack in Natrek, frequently coordinated between multiple ships, with the goal of eliminating a target of high importance (when destroying the target is more valuable than protecting the attacking ships).
It was typically used to destroy enemy ships carrying armies or as a coordinated multi-ship ogg against a starbase.
Since 2007, the Xiph.Org Foundation recommends that .ogg only be used for Ogg Vorbis audio files.
These files can only be made by a downloaded program for Windows or Linux.

OOA —Object-Oriented Analysisumsl.edu

models a system as a group of interacting objects. Each object represents an entity in the system; characterised by class, state (data elements), and behavior.
Various models can be created to show the static structure, dynamic behavior, and run-time deployment of these collaborating objects.
There are different notations representing these models, eg: Unified Modeling Language (UML).
OOA applies object-modeling techniques to analyze a system’s functional requirements.
Object-oriented design (OOD) elaborates the models with implementation specs. OOA focuses on what the system does, OOD on how the system does it.

OpenCL —Open Computing LanguageWikipedia

“lets any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications.”
The technology is based on the C programming language, according to Apple.

OpenGL —Open Graphics Libraryopengl.org

Most Widely Adopted Graphics Standard
OpenGL is the premier environment for developing portable, interactive 2D and 3D graphics applications.
Introduced in 1992, it has become the industry’s most widely used and supported 2D and 3D graphics application programming interface (API), bringing thousands of applications to a wide variety of computer platforms.
fosters innovation and speeds application development by incorporating a broad set of rendering, texture mapping, special effects, and other powerful visualization functions.
Developers can leverage the power of OpenGL across all popular desktop and workstation platforms, ensuring wide application deployment.

The Open Group

is a vendor and technology-neutral industry consortium, currently with over three hundred member organizations.
Formed in 1996 when X/Open merged with the Open Software Foundation. Services provided include strategy, management, innovation and research, standards, certification, and test development.
The Open Group is most famous as the certifying body for the UNIX trademark, and its publication of the Single UNIX Specification technical standard.
It also develops and manages the TOGAF standard (an industry standard enterprise architecture framework).
Members include a range of IT buyers and vendors as well as government agencies, eg: Capgemini, Fujitsu, Oracle, Hitachi, HP, Orbus Software, IBM, Kingdee, NEC, SAP, US Department of Defense, NASA and others.

ORM —Object-Relational MappingHibernate

is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems in object-oriented programming languages.
This creates, in effect, a "virtual object database" that can be used from within the programming language.
There are both free and commercial packages available that perform object-relational mapping, although some programmers opt to create their own ORM tools.

OSPF —Open Shortest Path First

is an adaptive routing protocol for Internet Protocol (IP) networks.
It uses a link state routing algorithm and falls into the group of interior routing protocols, operating within a single autonomous system (AS).
It is defined as OSPF Version 2 in RFC 2328 (1998) for IPv4. The updates for IPv6 are specified as OSPF Version 3 in RFC 5340 (2008). OSPF is perhaps the most widely-used interior gateway protocol (IGP) in large enterprise networks. IS-IS, another link-state dynamic routing protocol, is more common in large service provider networks.
The most widely-used exterior gateway protocol is the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the principal routing protocol between autonomous systems on the Internet.

P

PA DSS —Payment Application Data Security StandardPCI Standards Council

is a document to be used by Payment Application-Qualified Security Assessors (PA-QSAs) conducting payment application reviews,
so that software vendors can validate that a payment application complies with the PCI DSS Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS).
This document is also to be used by PA-QSAs as a template to create the Report on Validation.

Park a Domain —A website domain name that isn’t activewww.thesitewizard.com

when you register a domain name (a website address) and have not yet put up any active pages, the server puts up a placeholder web page in its place, with name-related links and ads.
You can type in the address and get somewhere, even it it’s not your real website.
The ads on your own actual web pages are the only ads that will earn you money.

PBD —PowerBuilder Dynamic Libraryparetologic.com

each file with the .pbd file extension contains reports written in codes.
The PowerBuilder DLLS are created to convert modified reports into a comprehensible syntax.
PowerBuilder can store the objects contained in an application in one or more dynamic libraries.
It can do this depending on the structure of a particular program.
Also associated with the program file Palm Database from Palm, Inc.
This mobile database stores address books and other contact information in files with the .pbd file extension.
The FaxIt Phonebook program, another fax software from the company Siena, also uses this file extension.
PowerBuilder uses the PBD file extension:
        ☛ When adding its files to the library list of the application.
        ☛ Whenever an application is opened or written on P-Code or Pseudo-Code language.
        ☛ When converted to a binary form (rather than compiled)
and stores information on the files with the .pbd file extension as a Pseudo-code rather than as machine language.
Files that are executable and the files with the .pbd file extension produced on a P-code are stored separately in PowerBuilder libraries.

PCI —Payment Card IndustryPractical Ecommerce

The major credit card issuers created PCI compliance standards
to protect personal information and ensure security when transactions are processed using a payment card.
All members of the payment card industry (financial institutions, credit card companies and merchants)
must comply with these standards if they want to accept credit cards.
Failure to meet compliance standards can result in
fines from credit card companies and banks and even the loss of the ability to process credit cards.
There are six categories of PCI standards that must be met in order for a retailer to be deemed compliant:

  • Maintain a Secure Network
  • Protect Cardholder Data/li>
  • Maintain a Vulnerability Management Program
  • Implement Strong Access Control Measures
  • Regularly Monitor and Test Networks
  • Maintain an Information Security Policy

PCI DSS —Payment Card Industry Data Security StandardPCI Standards Council

security standard that includes requirements for Personal Identification Numbers to help organizations proactively protect customer account data.
This includes security management, policies, procedures, network architecture, software design and other critical protective measures.

PCI PTS —Payment Card Industry PIN Transaction SecurityPCI Standards Council

The PCI DSS is a multifaceted security standard that includes requirements for
security management, policies, procedures, network architecture, software design and other critical protective measures.
This comprehensive standard is intended to help organizations proactively protect customer account data.

PCI P2PE —Payment Card Industry Point-to-Point EncryptionPCI Standards Council

The Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE) program is optional
and provides a comprehensive set of security requirements for P2PE solution providers
to validate their hardware-based solutions,
and may help reduce the PCI DSS scope of merchants using such solutions.
P2PE is a cross-functional program that results in validated solutions
incorporating the PTS Standards, PA-DSS, PCI DSS, and the PCI PIN Security Standard.

Persistence — Wikipedia

means that we would like our application’s data to outlive the applications process.
This allows us to store the information in a memory device so that it's not lost after the session.
Otherwise, the RAM would lose the info after the computer shuts down.
In Java terms, we would like the state of (some of) our objects to live beyond the scope of the JVM so that the same state is available later.

PDP —Programmed Data ProcessorWikipedia

was the name of a series of minicomputers made by Digital Equipment Corporation.
The term ‘PDP’ intentionally avoided the use of the term ‘computer’
because, at the time of the first PDPs, computers had a reputation of being large, complicated, and expensive machines,
and the venture capitalists behind Digital (especially Georges Doriot)
would not support Digital’s attempting to build a "computer"; the word "minicomputer" had not yet been coined.

.pm —Perl module -or- Saint Pierre and Miquelon Wikipedia Perl Module & Wikipedia St Pierre & Miquelon

for a file extension, it means the content of the file is a Perl Module.
In an internet url, it means that the country of origin is Saint Pierre and Miquelon (an island territory of France near Newfoundland).

PLC —Power Line Carrier or Power Line CommunicationDIY Network

is kind of the opposite of POE.
It sends communication data (eg: network or Internet) along your electricity lines.
Could you plug in a lamp so it could surf the Internet? It would, but you couldn't use it.

PNG —Portable Network GraphicsWikipedia

was designed as a replacement for the GIF format in order to avoid infringement of Unisys’ patent on the LZW compression technique.
PNG offers better compression and more features than GIF, animation being the only significant exception.
PNG is more suitable than GIF in instances where true-color imaging and alpha transparency are required.
MNG was originally developed as a PNG-based solution for animations, but has not been widely adopted.
The GIF format is still preferred for animation over PNG, although true Animated Portable Network Graphics are under development by Mozilla and are supported in Firefox 3.
Although support for PNG format came slowly, new web browsers generally support PNG.
Older versions of Internet Explorer do not support all features of PNG.
PNG files can be much larger than GIF files in situations where a GIF and a PNG file were created from the same high-quality image source, as PNG is capable of storing more color depth and transparency information than GIF.
However, for identical 8-bit (or lower) image data, PNG files are typically smaller than the equivalent GIFs, due to the more efficient compression techniques used in PNG encoding.
Complete support for the GIF format is complicated chiefly by the complex canvas structure it allows, though this is what enables the compact animation features.

POE —Power over EthernetDIY Network

sends electricity through your ethernet (example: network or Internet) lines.
While this isn’t a lot of electricity, it is enough to run small devices like access points and cameras.

POP —Post Office ProtocolWikipedia

is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by local email clients to retrieve email from a remote server over a TCP/IP connection.
POP and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) are the two most prevalent Internet standard protocols for email retrieval.Virtually all modern email clients and servers support both.
The POP protocol has been developed through several versions, with version 3 (POP3) being the current standard. Like IMAP, POP3 is supported by most webmail services such as Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail.

Porting —from the Latin portare: to carry Wikipedia & https://www.haiku-os.org/

is the process of adapting software for a computing environment different from the one it was originally designed for
      (e.g. different CPU, operating system, or third party library).
Also used when software/hardware is changed to be usable in different environments.
Software is portable when it costs less to port it to a new platform than to write it from scratch.
The more portable a software is, the less is its cost of porting it, relative to its implementation cost.

eg:To make a program written for Windows work on Haiku
the source code of the program needs to be adjusted to use APIs which are available on Haiku,
whereas probably it will be using APIs for Windows. Sometimes this might just mean changing a name,
or re-organising some parameters,
but often it will mean extensive changes,
even re-thinking how part of the program works.

PPP —Point-to-Point ProtocolWikipedia

is used to establish a direct connection between two networking nodes.
It can provide connection authentication, transmission encryption (using ECP, RFC 1968), and compression.
PPP is used over many types of physical networks including serial cable, phone line, trunk line, cellular telephone, specialized radio links, and fiber optic links such as SONET.
PPP is also used over Internet access connections (now marketed as “broadband”).
Internet service providers (ISPs) have used PPP for customer dial-up access to the Internet, since IP packets cannot be transmitted over a modem line on their own, without some data link protocol.
Two encapsulated forms of PPP, Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) and Point-to-Point Protocol over ATM (PPPoA), are used most commonly by Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
to establish a Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) Internet service connection with customers.
PPP is commonly used as a data link layer protocol for connection over synchronous and asynchronous circuits, where it has largely superseded the older Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP)
and telephone company mandated standards (such as Link Access Protocol, Balanced (LAPB) in the X.25 protocol suite).
PPP was designed to work with numerous network layer protocols, including Internet Protocol (IP), TRILL, Novell’s Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX), NBF and AppleTalk.

Q

R

Rasberry Pi —An ARM GNU/Linux box for $25. Take a byte!Raspberry Pi

The idea behind a tiny and cheap computer for kids came in 2006,
when Eben Upton and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, including Rob Mullins, Jack Lang and Alan Mycroft,
became concerned about the year-on-year decline in the numbers and skills levels of the A Level students applying to read Computer Science in each academic year.
From 2006 to 2008, Eben designed several versions of what has now become the Raspberry Pi.
By 2008, processors designed for mobile devices were becoming more affordable, and powerful enough to provide excellent multimedia,
a feature we felt would make the board desirable to kids who wouldn't initially be interested in a purely programming-oriented device.
The project started to look very realisable.
Eben (now a chip architect at Broadcom), Rob, Jack and Alan, teamed up with Pete Lomas, MD
of hardware design and manufacture company Norcott Technologies, and David Braben, co-author of the seminal BBC Micro game Elite,
to form the Raspberry Pi Foundation to make it a reality.
Three years later, we're just going into mass production through licensed manufacture deals with Elenment 14/Premier Farnell and RS Electronics—
although it's just the beginning of the Raspberry Pi story.

Relay —DIY Network

is a special type of switch that triggers a bigger switch.
In home automation, relays trigger other devices, eg: hooking up your garage door opener to your system so you can open it up from your phone.

RFID —Radio Frequency Identificationrfid.org

a scanner reads a chip in a card or document. The chip is coded with user info to process a transaction.
The chip can be blocked with aluminum foil or some metallic skin.

RIP —Routing Info Protocol

is a distance-vector routing protocol, which employs the hop count as a routing metric.
RIP prevents routing loops by implementing a limit on the number of hops allowed in a path from the source to a destination.
The maximum number of hops allowed for RIP is 15. This hop limit, however, also limits the size of networks that RIP can support.
A hop count of 16 is considered an infinite distance and used to deprecate inaccessible, inoperable, or otherwise undesirable routes in the selection process. RIP implements the split horizon, route poisoning and holddown mechanisms to prevent incorrect routing info from being propagated.
With RMTI, it is possible to detect every possible loop with a very small computation effort.

Router —DIY Network

connects multiple Internet devices to your modem.
It allows you to have more than one computer connected to the Internet and connects them to each other for sharing files and services.
That is an overly simplified explanation and if you really want to fry your brain you can learn about the OSI model.

RPC —Remote Procedure Call

is an inter-process communication that allows a computer program to cause a subroutine or procedure to execute in another address space (commonly on another computer on a shared network) without the programmer explicitly coding the details for this remote interaction.
The programmer writes essentially the same code whether the subroutine is local to the executing program, or remote.
When the software in question uses object-oriented principles, RPC is called remote invocation or remote method invocation. Many different (often incompatible) technologies can be used to implement the concept.

RSS —Really Simple Syndicationwww.w3schools.com

is written in XML, was designed to show selected data.
can distribute updated web content from one web site to thousands of other web sites around the world—you can syndicate your site content.
allows fast browsing for news and updates, files can be automatically updated.
defines an easy way to share and view headlines and content, allows personalized views for different sites.

RSTS —Resource Sharing Timesharing System Extended

is a multi-user time-sharing operating system, developed by Digital Equipment Corporation—DEC—now part of Hewlett Packard—for the PDP-11 series of 16–bit minicomputers.
First was implemented in 1970 by DEC. RSTS-11 and RSTS/E are usually referred to just as RSTS.

RSVP —Resource Reservation Protocol

is a Transport Layer protocol designed to reserve resources across a network for an integrated services Internet.
Operates over an IPv4 or IPv6 Internet Layer and provides receiver-initiated setup of resource reservations for multicast or unicast data flows with scaling and robustness.
Does not transport application data but is similar to a control protocol, like ICMP or IGMP.
Can be used by either hosts or routers to request or deliver specific levels of quality of service (QoS) for application data streams or flows.
Defines how applications place reservations and how they can relinquish the reserved resources once the need for them has ended.
RSVP operation will generally result in resources being reserved in each node along a path.

RTP —Real-time Transport Protocol

defines a standardized packet format for delivering audio and video over IP networks.
RTP is used extensively in communication and entertainment systems that involve streaming media, such as telephony, video teleconference applications, television services and web-based push-to-talk features.
RTP is used in conjunction with the RTP Control Protocol (RTCP).
While RTP carries the media streams (e.g., audio and video), RTCP is used to monitor transmission statistics and quality of service (QoS) and aids synchronization of multiple streams.
RTP is originated and received on even port numbers and the associated RTCP communication uses the next higher odd port number.
RTP is one of the technical foundations of Voice over IP and in this context is often used in conjunction with a signaling protocol which assists in setting up connections across the network.
RTP was developed by the Audio-Video Transport Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and first published in 1996 as RFC 1889, superseded by RFC 3550 in 2003.

RTSP —Real Time Streaming Protocol

is a network control protocol designed for use in entertainment and communications systems to control streaming media servers.
The protocol is used for establishing and controlling media sessions between end points. Clients of media servers issue VCR-like commands, such as play and pause, to facilitate real-time control of playback of media files from the server.

S

SAP —Systems Applications & Productswww.sap.com

it can literally run an entire enterprise. Companies can run SAP’s transactions to support their Order to Cash, Procure to Pay, Plan to Produce, Hire to Retire business processes, and much, much more!
uses Netweaver. See http://www.magnatraining.com.

SAS —Statistical Analysis Systemwww.sas.com

has many business solutions that enable large-scale software solutions for areas such as IT management, human resource management, financial management, business intelligence, customer relationship management and more.
It is an integrated system of software products provided by SAS Institute Inc. that enables programmers to perform:
        ∘ retrieval, management, and mining
        ∘ report writing and graphics
        ∘ statistical analysis
        ∘ business planning, forecasting, and decision support
        ∘ operations research and project management
        ∘ quality improvement
        ∘ applications development
        ∘ data warehousing (extract, transform, load)
        ∘ platform independent and remote computing

Scene —DIY Network

is an orchestration/category command of turning on and off many lighting devices to make a holistic event, eg: “Movie Watching” (all TV room lights off), “Dinner Party” (Dining room and kitchen lights on), etc.

SCP —Secure Copy Protocolwww.scp-wiki.net

In Unix, you can use the scp command to copy files and directories securely between remote hosts without starting an FTP session or logging into the remote systems explicitly.
The scp command uses SSH to transfer data, so it requires a password or passphrase for authentication. Unlike rcp or FTP, scp encrypts both the file and any passwords exchanged so that anyone snooping on the network can’t view them.
Warning: Be careful when copying between hosts files that have the same names; you may accidently overwrite them.

SCTP —Stream Control Transmission Protocol

is a Transport Layer protocol, serving in a similar role to the popular protocols Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP).
It provides some of the same service features of both-it is message-oriented like UDP and ensures reliable, in-sequence transport of messages with congestion control like TCP.

SDLC —Systems Development Life CycleWikipedia

is the process of careful planning for a successful information system, from idea to use.

Semantic Web/Publishing —from Greek σημαντικότητας having significanceThe Free Dictionary & Wikipedia

the Semantic Network Model was coined in the early sixties by the cognitive scientist Allan M. Collins, linguist M. Ross Quillian and psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus.
The term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), which oversees the development of proposed Semantic Web standards.
Lee defined the Semantic Web as "a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines."

SEO —search engine optimization

is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial,” or “natural” list.

SFM —Service Federation Managerpublib.boulder.ibm.com

⊡ The IBM Service Federation Management application is a feature pack of WebSphere Service Registry and Repository and uses a console to provide interfaces to available services.
Authorization needs to be set up to access the required service providers.
⊡ Service documents are loaded from the providers of a service. These represent connectivity providers, domains servers, registries servers and federation servers.
⊡ Domains are created on a domain server to represent each of the service domains provided by that server. Service Groups are created to contain services endpoints.
These endpoints can therefore be grouped together to ease the process of sharing.
⊡ A federation is created on a federation server to link together domains.
The domains can then be connected to map a Service Group from one domain to another, allowing a consumer to make use of a provider’s services.
At this stage the additional qualities of service are set up, such as authentication of services and the validation of messages.
The use of proxies by domains is partly determined by these selections and also partly by the user’s own selection.
⊡ Thus a Share is set up between the two domains determining which services are to be shared, and with what properties.
Proxies are created on either end of the share if they are required (and only if they are required) to support the properties that have been selected.

Shard —Secure Copy ProtocolWikipedia

is a horizontal partition in a database or search engine. Each individual partition is referred to as a shard or database shard.
Horizontal partitioning splits one or more tables by row, usually within a single instance of a schema and a database server.
It may offer an advantage by reducing index size (and thus search effort) provided that there is some clear way to identify in which table a particular row will be found.
Sharding goes further & partitions table(s) the same way, but across potentially multiple instances of one schema.
This lets the search load for a large partitioned table to split across multiple servers (logical or physical), not just multiple indexes on the same logical server.

SIP —Session Initiation Protocol

is an IETF-defined signaling protocol for controlling communication sessions eg: voice and video calls over Internet Protocol (IP).
It is a text-based protocol, incorporating many elements of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).
Can be used for creating, modifying and terminating two-party (unicast) or multiparty (multicast) sessions.
Sessions can have one or several media streams.

Sitemaps — www.sitemaps.org & Wikipedia

Google introduced Google Sitemaps so web developers can publish lists of links from across their sites.
Bing, Google, Yahoo and Ask now jointly support the Sitemaps protocol.
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.
In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL
    (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site)
    so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites.
Sitemap files list URLs to these pages so that web crawlers can find them.
Sitemaps display this data so crawlers seeking Sitemaps can pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata.
Using Sitemap protocol doesn’t guarantee better ranking on browsers, but it should help.
Sitemap 0.90 is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License and has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

SME —Subject Matter Expertswww.nwlink.com

if you are the instructional designer expert, SME provides the content while you arrange that content into material that can easily be learned.

  Subject Matter Experts
  Instructional Designer Experts
  define how tasks are performed, including the order of performance steps   design how that material will be presented (e.g. demonstrate ⇾ practice ⇾ hands-on test)
  responsible with technical-jargon   decide if that jargon needs to be explained
  responsible for acceptable performance levels   decide how that performance will be evaluated (e.g., written, hands-on, oral)
  responsible for providing the performance objectives  responsible for turning objectives into viable learning or performance objectives
  (task, conditions, & standards) and experiences

SMM —Social Media MarketingWikipedia

is increasing website traffic or visitors through social media sites.
SMM programs normally create content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it with their social networks.
An advertisement message trickles through the public person-by-person as a form of word-of-mouth marketing.
Social media is easily accessible to anyone with internet access
and is a relatively inexpensive platform for organizations to implement marketing campaigns.

SMTP —Simple Mail Transfer ProtocolWebopedia

is a protocol for sending e-mail messages between servers. Most e-mail systems that send mail over the Internet use SMTP to send messages from one server to another; the messages can then be retrieved with an e-mail client using either POP or IMAP. In addition, SMTP is generally used to send messages from a mail client to a mail server. This is why you need to specify both the POP or IMAP server and the SMTP server when you configure your e-mail application.

is an Internet standard for electronic mail (email) transmission across Internet Protocol (IP) networks.
SMTP was first defined by RFC 821 (1982, eventually declared STD 10), and last updated by RFC 5321 (2008)
    which includes the extended SMTP (ESMTP) additions, and is the protocol in widespread use today.
SMTP is specified for outgoing mail transport and uses TCP port 25.
The protocol for new submissions is effectively the same as SMTP, but it uses port 587 instead.
SMTP connections secured by SSL are known by the shorthand SMTPS, though SMTPS is not a protocol in its own right.
Electronic mail servers and other mail transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages;
    user-level client mail applications typically only use SMTP for sending messages to a mail server for relaying.
For receiving messages, client applications usually use either the Post Office Protocol (POP) or the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP)
    or a proprietary system (such as Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes/Domino) to access their mail box accounts on a mail server.

SNMP —Simple Network Management Protocol

manages devices on IP networks, eg: routers, switches, servers, workstations, printers, modem racks.
It is used mostly in network management systems to monitor network-attached devices for conditions that warrant administrative attention.
SNMP is a component of the Internet Protocol Suite as defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
It consists of a set of standards for network management, including an application layer protocol, a database schema, and a set of data objects.

SOA —Start of Authorityhelp.securepaynet.net

required for every zone file, the SOA record contains caching information, the zone administrator’s email address, and the master name server for the zone.
The SOA also contains a number incremented with each update.
As this number updates, it triggers the DNS to reload the zone data.

SOAP —Simple Object Access Protocolwww.w3schools.com & Wikipedia

is a simple XML-based protocol to let applications exchange information over HTTP.
It relies on XML Information Set for its message format.
SOAP usually relies on other Application Layer protocols,
most notably Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP),
for message negotiation and transmission.

SOCKS —SOCKet Secure

is an Internet protocol that routes network packets between a client and server through a proxy server.
SOCKS5 additionally provides authentication so only authorized users may access a server.
Practically, a SOCKS server will proxy TCP connections to an arbitrary IP address as well as providing a means for UDP packets to be forwarded.
SOCKS performs at Layer 5 of the OSI model—the session layer (an intermediate layer between the presentation layer and the transport layer).

SONET —Synchronous Optical NETworkcompnetworking.about.com

is a physical layer network technology designed to carry large volumes of traffic over relatively long distances on fiber optic cabling.
SONET was originally designed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) for the USA public telephone network in the mid-1980's.

SRV —SeRVice recordshelp.securepaynet.net

are resource records used to identify computers hosting specific services.

SSH —Secure Shell

is a network protocol for secure data communication, remote shell services or command execution and other secure network services between two networked computers that it connects via a secure channel over an insecure network-a server and a client (running SSH server and SSH client programs, respectively).
The best-known application is for access to shell accounts on Unix-like operating systems.
The encryption used by SSH is intended to provide confidentiality and integrity of data over an unsecured network, such as the Internet.

Strongly Typed — referring to data types

In a strongly typed programming language, you have to declare (define) the data type and name of the variable before using it.

SQL —Structured Query Languagewww.sql.org

is a database programming language for querying and editing information stored in a certain database.

Subtype polymorphism — Wikipedia

in programming language theory, subtyping or subtype polymorphism is a form of type polymorphism in which a subtype is a datatype that is related to another datatype (the supertype).
Program constructs, typically subroutines or functions, written to operate on elements of the supertype can also operate on elements of the subtype.

T

TCP —Transmission Control Protocol

is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite.
TCP is one of the two original components of the suite, complementing the Internet Protocol (IP), and therefore the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP.
TCP provides reliable, ordered delivery of a stream of bytes from a program on one computer to another program on another computer.
TCP is the protocol that major Internet applications such as the World Wide Web, email, remote administration and file transfer rely on.
Other applications, which do not require reliable data stream service, may use the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), which provides a datagram service that emphasizes reduced latency over reliability.

Telnet

was developed in 1969 standardized as Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Internet Standard STD 8, one of the first Internet standards.
Historically, Telnet provided access to a command-line interface (usually, of an operating system) on a remote host.
Most network equipment and operating systems with a TCP/IP stack support a Telnet service for remote configuration (including systems based on Windows NT).
Because of security issues with Telnet, its use for this purpose has waned in favor of SSH.
The term telnet may also refer to software for the client part of the protocol.
Telnet is also used as a verb.
To telnet means to establish a connection with the Telnet protocol, either with command line client or with a programmatic interface; eg, "To change your password, telnet to the server, login and run the passwd command."

Thumb-Whore — The Urban Dictionary

the thumbs up obsessed people on youtube who say lame and stupid things just to get on the highest rated comments.

TLS —Transport Layer Securitywww.answers.com

and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), are cryptographic protocols that provide communication security over the Internet.
TLS and SSL encrypt the segments of network connections above the Transport Layer, using asymmetric cryptography for key exchange, symmetric encryption for privacy, and message authentication codes for message integrity.
Several versions of the protocols are in widespread use in applications such as web browsing, electronic mail, Internet faxing, instant messaging and voice-over-IP (VoIP).
TLS is an IETF standards track protocol, last updated in RFC 5246, and is based on the earlier SSL specifications developed by Netscape Communications.

Token/Tokenizing — faq.cprogramming.com

A token is a group of characters (like a word), separated by a delimiter.
A delimiter is a symbol which separates tokens from each other. It can be a space, a bar, a line, etc.
The process of tokenizing is extracting tokens from a string or a stream.

TOR —The Onion Routerwww.torproject.org

is a system intended to enable online anonymity.
Originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a third-generation onion routing project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, it is used every day for a wide variety of purposes by normal people, the military, journalists, law enforcement officers, activists, and many others.
Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet.
It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features.
Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.

Trade Dispute — wiki.answers.com

is the recent unsolved problem between employer-employees, employer-employer, or employee-employee
while the dispute is concerned with employment, non-employment or working conditions.

Media Temple

TTL is the value of how long
your current DNS settings are cached
with Internet Service Providers.
If your Internet Service Provider
has the current IP address for your website
cached for 24 hours,
it won't bother checking for a DNS update for your domain until 24 hours has passed
even if you made a DNS change for that domain 5 minutes ago.
Conversely, someone in another city may be using
an ISP (Internet Service Provider) that hasn't made a query for your domain's DNS settings recently.
That person will get the new DNS information (AND your new website) right away
because the ISP did not cache the information previously.
If your site is going to look exactly the same from one server to another, this is okay.
But if you're "launching" a new site,
or if you have a live email address at your domain,
then you should first lower your TTL before making any other DNS changes,
to possibly avoid a time lag when web traffic and email are going to two servers at once.

TUNNELS —tunneling protocol

when one network protocol (the delivery protocol) encapsulates a different payload protocol.
By using tunneling one can (for example) carry a payload over an incompatible delivery-network, or provide a secure path through an untrusted network.
Tunneling typically contrasts with a layered protocol model such as those of OSI or TCP/IP.
The delivery protocol usually (but not always) operates at a higher level in the model than does the payload protocol, or at the same level.
To understand a particular protocol stack, network engineers must understand both the payload and delivery protocol sets.
As an example of network layer over network layer, Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE), a protocol running over IP (IP Protocol Number 47), often serves to carry IP packets, with RFC 1918 private addresses, over the Internet using delivery packets with public IP addresses.
In this case, the delivery and payload protocols are compatible, but the payload addresses are incompatible with those of the delivery network.
In contrast, an IP payload might believe it sees a data link layer delivery when it is carried inside the Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP), which appears to the payload mechanism as a protocol of the data link layer.
L2TP, however, actually runs over the transport layer using User Datagram Protocol (UDP) over IP.
The IP in the delivery protocol could run over any data-link protocol from IEEE 802.2 over IEEE 802.3 (i.e., standards-based Ethernet) to the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) over a dialup modem link.
Tunneling protocols may use data encryption to transport insecure payload protocols over a public network (such as the Internet), thereby providing VPN functionality.
IPsec has an end-to-end Transport Mode, but can also operate in a tunneling mode through a trusted security gateway.

TXT —TeXThelp.securepaynet.net

is an informational record. Use it for additional information about a host or for technical information to servers.

U

UDDI —Universal Description, Discovery and Integrationhelp.securepaynet.net

is an informational record. Use it for additional information about a host or for technical information to servers.

UDP —User Datagram ProtocolWikipedia

is one of the core members of the Internet Protocol Suite, the set of network protocols used for the Internet.
With UDP, computer applications can send messages/datagrams to other hosts on an Internet Protocol (IP) network.
The protocol was designed by David P. Reed in 1980 and formally defined in RFC 768.

  • uses a simple transmission model without implicit handshaking dialogues for providing reliability, ordering, or data integrity.
  • it’s stateless nature is also useful for servers answering small queries from huge numbers of clients.
  • provides an unreliable service and datagrams may arrive out of order, appear duplicated, or go missing without notice.
  • assumes that error checking and correction is either not necessary or performed in the application, avoiding the overhead of such processing at the network interface level.
  • time-sensitive applications often use UDP because dropping packets is preferable to waiting for delayed packets, which may not be an option in a real-time system.
  • Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) or Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) are designed for error correction facilities.
  • unlike TCP, UDP supports packet broadcast (sending to all on local network) and multicasting (send to all subscribers).
  • common network applications that use UDP include-the Domain Name System (DNS), streaming media applications such as IPTV, Voice over IP (VoIP), Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP), IP tunneling protocols and many online games.

Unix —UNiplexed Information and Computing System (originally Unics)ask.yahoo.com

is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna.
The Unix operating system was first developed in assembly language, but by 1973 had been almost entirely recoded in C, greatly facilitating its further development and porting to other hardware.
Today’s Unix system evolution is split into various branches, developed over time by AT&T as well as various commercial vendors, universities (such as University of California, Berkeley’s BSD), and non-profit organizations.

URI —Uniform Resource IdentifierWebopedia

the generic term for all types of names and addresses that refer to objects on the World Wide Web. A URL is one kind of URI.

URL —Uniform Resource LocatorWebopedia

is the global address of documents and other resources on the World Wide Web.
The first part of the URL is called a protocol identifier: what protocol to use.
It ends with a colon and two forward slashes.
The second part is called a resource name: the IP address or the domain name where the resource is located.

UX —User experience

is the way a person feels about using a product, system or service.
User experience highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership,
but it also includes a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency of the system. User experience is subjective in nature, because it is about an individual’s feelings and thoughts about the system.
User experience is dynamic, because it changes over time as the circumstances change.

V

VAX —Virtual Address eXtensionwww.compaq.com

was an instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the mid-1970's.
The VAX architecture’s primary features were virtual addressing (for example demand paged virtual memory) and its orthogonal instruction set.

VMS —OpenVMS (Open Virtual Memory System)www.openvms.org

is a computer server operating system that runs on VAX, Alpha and Itanium-based families of computers.

W

WDP — Wireless Datagram Protocol

defines the movement of info from receiver to the sender and resembles the User Datagram Protocol in the Internet protocol suite.
A protocol in WAP architecture, covers the Transport Layer Protocols in the Internet model.
As a general transport service, WDP offers to the upper layers an invisible interface independent of the underlying network technology used.
In consequence of the interface common to transport protocols,
the upper layer protocols of the WAP architecture can operate independent of the underlying wireless network.
By letting only the transport layer deal with physical network-dependent issues,
global interoperability can be acquired using mediating gateways.

White Hat — a good-guy hacker Wikipedia & EC-Council

breaks security for non-malicious reasons, for QA purposes.
White Hats include Blue Hat hackers who perform penetration tests and vulnerability assessments within a contractual agreement.
The International Council of Electronic Commerce Consultants (the EC-Council) offers certifications, courseware, classes, and online training for White Hats.

WordPress —from the days of hot type printing pressesCrunchBase

is an open source content management system (CMS) and blogging platform.
It was created by Matt Mullenweg in 2003, and it is currently the most popular self-hosted blogging tool and CMS on the Internet.
WordPress is managed by the WordPress foundation, yet it is developed almost entirely by the community.
Though WordPress started and is often known as a blogging tool,
today it is a robust CMS which can be extended through thousands of themes, plugins, and widgets.
A version of WordPress offered by company Automattic is WordPress.com, which offers free WordPress-based blogs.

WTCP —Wireless Transmission Control Protocol

is a proxy based modification of TCP that preserves the end-to-end semantics of TCP.
As its name suggests, it is used in wireless networks to improve the performance of TCP.
Instead of replacing TCP completely, WTCP works with it to enhance TCP’s performance over wireless.
It accomplishes this by handling the negative effects of the wireless channel, including high bit error rates that are known to occur in bursts over the wireless medium.

WSDL —Web Services Description LanguageWikipedia

is an XML-based language to describe functionality offered by a Web service.
A WSDL file provides a machine-readable description of how a service can be called,
what parameters it expects, and what data structures it returns.
It thus serves a roughly similar purpose as a method signature in a programming language.
The current version of WSDL is WSDL 2.0.
The meaning of the acronym has changed from version 1.1 where the D stood for Definition.

WYSIWYG —What You See Is What You GetWikipedia

is a type of application that allows you to see
what the programming product will look like as you manipulate it.
One of the first examples is the drop-down menu of fonts in the Apple word processors;
it displays the name of the font (aka: type face) as it would look when you use it.
Other examples would be Microsoft Word, Dreamweaver, iWeb, Yahoo Web Hosting, Google Sites, Visual Studio, and WIX.

X

X10 —home automation standardDIY Network

is a home automation system.
It lends itself to the DIY home automator because it allows a lot of flexibility normally locked up by the bigger standards.

XMPP —Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol

is an open-standard communications protocol for message-oriented middleware
based on XML (Extensible Markup Language).
The protocol was originally named Jabber,
and was developed by the Jabber open-source community in 1999
for near-real-time, extensible instant messaging (IM), presence info, and contact list maintenance.

Y

Z

ZigBee —brand nameDIY Network & Wikipedia

is a type of communication protocol used to build mesh networks.
They are low power but don’t send a lot of data. It is used in many applications.
More information can be found at the ZigBee Alliance.
For some home automation systems, this is the network that connects everything.
It’s an innovative, self-configuring, self-healing system of redundant, low-cost, very low-power and even battery-free nodes that enable ZigBee's unique flexibility, mobility and ease of use.
ZigBee is available as two feature sets, ZigBee PRO and ZigBee and they define how ZigBee mesh networks operate. ZigBee PRO, the most widely used specification, is optimized for low power consumption and to support large networks with thousands of devices.
It now offers a new and innovative feature, Green Power, that supports energy harvesting or self-powered devices that don’t rely on batteries or AC mains power.
Through the ZigBee Certified program, the Alliance independently tests platforms implementing both feature sets, and has a list of ZigBee Compliant Platforms offering support for both ZigBee and ZigBee PRO.

Zone Files — help.securepaynet.net

organize the zone records for domain names and subdomains in a DNS server.
Every domain name and subdomain has a zone file, and each zone file contains zone records.
These files, editable in any plain text editor,
hold the DNS information linking domain names and subdomains to IP addresses.
Zone files usually contain several different zone records.
Although domain names might have subdomains, the zone files for subdomains are not considered sub-zone.
All zone files are separate entities and do not have a hierarchical structure.

Zone Records — help.securepaynet.net

the most common records contained in a zone file are
start of authority (SOA), nameserver, mail exchanger, host, and CNAME.

Z-Wave —domocile + roboticsDIY Network

Similar to ZigBee, Z-Wave is a communication protocol for building mesh networks.
It is different because it is almost entirely used for home automation only.
This has pluses and minuses.
Find more information at the Z-Wave Alliance.