Word of The Day

Malware (a portmanteau of "malicious software") is any software program developed for the purpose of causing harm to a computer system, similar to a virus or Trojan horse. Malware can be classified based on how it is executed, how it spreads, and/or ... what it does. The classification is not perfect, however, in the sense that the groups often overlap and the difference is not always obvious, giving rise to frequent flame wars. Overuse of the term 'Virus' Because viruses were historically the first to appear, the term "virus" is often applied, especially in the popular media, to all sorts of ... (view more)

Release Candidate (RC) The term release candidate (RC) refers to a software version with the potential to be a final product, ready to be released to the public for final testing. In this stage of product stabilization, all product features have ... been designed, coded and tested through one or more Beta cycles with no known software bugs (defects). During the 1990s, Apple Inc. used the term "golden master" for its release candidates, and the final golden master was the general availability release. Gamma, Delta, Omega, Zenith Release Candidates Other terms include gamma (and occasionally also ... (view more)

A kill switch (also called an e-stop) is a security measure used to shut off a device (usually in an emergency situation) in which it cannot be shut down in the usual manner. Unlike a normal shut down which shuts down all systems naturally in a ... progressive manner, a kill switch is designed to completely abort the operation at all costs. Often, kill switches are used to protect people from sustaining an injury or being killed, in which case damaging the machine may be considered to be acceptable. Physical World Applications Treadmills often use a safety key (essentially a kill switch) that the ... (view more)

Cybercrime (or "computer crime") consists of specific crimes dealing with computers and networks (such as hacking) and the facilitation of traditional crime through the use of computers and technology infrastructure. (Source: gc.ca ) Although the ... terms computer crime and cybercrime are more properly restricted to describing criminal activity in which the computer or network is a necessary part of the crime, these terms are also sometimes used to include traditional crimes, such as fraud, theft, blackmail, forgery, and embezzlement, in which computers or networks are used. Types of ... (view more)

A Service Pack (SP) is a collection of updates, fixes and/or enhancements to a software program delivered in the form of a single installable package. Many companies (such as Microsoft) typically release a service pack when the number of individual ... patches to a given program reaches a certain (arbitrary) limit. Installing a service pack is easier and less error-prone than installing a high number of patches individually, even more so when updating multiple computers over a network. Service packs are usually numbered, and thus shortly referred to as SP1, SP2, SP3 etc. They may also bring, ... (view more)

In computer science, a virtual machine (VM) is a software implementation of a machine (computer) that executes programs like a real machine. System Virtual Machine vs Process Virtual Machine A virtual machine was originally defined by Popek and ... Goldberg as "an efficient, isolated duplicate of a real machine". Current use includes virtual machines which have no direct correspondence to any real hardware. Virtual machines are separated into two major categories, based on their use and degree of correspondence to any real machine: a System Virtual Machine and a Process Virtual Machine. A system ... (view more)

A netbook (or mini-notebook) is a small portable laptop computer designed for wireless communication and access to the Internet. The word netbook is a portmanteau of the words Internet and notebook. Primarily designed for web browsing and emailing, ... netbooks rely heavily on the Internet for remote access to web-based applications" and are targeted increasingly at cloud computing users who require a less powerful client computer. As of the start of 2009, the established definition of a netbook was a notebook computer with a low-powered x86-compatible processor (compatible with PC standard ... (view more)

Cloud computing or cloud services is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Examples of cloud computing include Google Apps which provide common business ... applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers. The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on how the Internet is depicted in computer network diagrams, and is an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or ... (view more)

The Xbox 360 is Microsoft's newest video game console, the successor to their original Xbox. It was released on November 22, 2005 in North America, December 2 in Europe, and December 10 in Japan. It will be released on February 2, 2006 in Mexico, ... February 24 in South Korea, and March 2, 2006 in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. The Xbox 360 will compete against the upcoming generation of consoles, including the Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Revolution, and was officially unveiled on MTV on May 12, 2005, a week before the E3 trade show. Except in Japan the console is ... (view more)

BitTorrent is the name of a client application for the torrent peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution protocol created by programmer Bram Cohen. BitTorrent is designed to widely distribute large amounts of data without incurring the corresponding ... consumption in server and bandwidth resources (and typically, monetary fees attracted as a result of that). The original BitTorrent application is written in Python and its source code has been released under the BitTorrent Open Source License (a modified version of the Jabber Open Source License), as of version 4.0. The name "BitTorrent" refers to the ... (view more)