What is B2B?
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Business-to-business electronic commerce (B2B) typically takes the form of automated processes between trading partners and is performed in much higher volumes than business-to-consumer (B2C) applications.
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What is Backlink?
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Backlinks are incoming links to a website. For example, a site with a lot of backlinks implies that many other sites link to that site.
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What is Banner Ad?
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Whether you like it or not, much of the Web is run by advertising. Just like television or radio, websites can offer free content by generating revenue from advertising. While you may get tired of Web ads from time to time, most people would agree that seeing a few advertisements here and there is better than paying a usage fee for each website.
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What is Baud?
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Contrary to popular belief, baud is not a direct measurement of data transfer speed, but instead it measures how many electrical signals are sent per second. Baud is used to measure the rate of electrical signals, or "signaling elements," for modems, networks, serial cables, and other data transfer mediums.
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What is BIOS?
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Stands for "Basic Input/Output System." Most people don't need to ever mess with the BIOS on a computer, but it can be helpful to know what it is. The BIOS is a program pre-installed on Windows-based computers (not on Macs) that the computer uses to start up. The CPU accesses the BIOS even before the operating system is loaded. The BIOS then checks all your hardware connections and locates all your devices. If everything is OK, the BIOS loads the operating system into the computer's memory and finishes the boot-up process.
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What is Blog?
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A weblog, Web log or simply a blog, is a web application which contains periodic posts on a common webpage. These posts are often but not necessarily in reverse chronological order. Such a website would typically be accessible to any Internet user. The term "blog" came into common use as a way of avoiding confusion with the term server log.
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What is BMP?
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Short for "Bitmap." It can be pronounced as "bump," "B-M-P," or simply a "bitmap image." The BMP format is a commonly used raster graphic format for saving image files. It was introduced on the Windows platform, but is now recognized by many programs on both Macs and PCs.
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What is Boot?
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When you boot a football, you kick it really far. When you boot a computer, you simply turn it on. Kicking your computer really far is not recommended, though you may be tempted to do so at times. The term "boot" comes from the word "bootstraps," which people at one time used to get their boots on. Likewise, "booting" a computer gets it up and running.
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What is Bridge?
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When a road needs to extend across a river or valley, a bridge is built to connect the two land masses. Since the average car cannot swim or fly, the bridge makes it possible for automobiles to continue driving from one land mass to another.
In computer networking, a bridge serves the same purpose. It connects two or more local area networks (LANs) together. The cars, or the data in this case, use the bridge to travel to and from different areas of the network. The device is similar to a router, but it does not analyze the data being forwarded. Because of this, bridges are typically fast at transferring data, but not as versatile as a router. For example, a bridge cannot be used as a firewall like most routers can. A bridge can transfer data between different protocols (i.e. a Token Ring and Ethernet network) and operates at the "data link layer" or level 2 of the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) networking reference model.
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What is Browser?
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You are probably using a browser to read this right now. A Web browser, often just called a "browser," is the program people use to access the World Wide Web. It interprets HTML code including text, images, hypertext links, Javascript, and Java applets. After rendering the HTML code, the browser displays a nicely formatted page. Some common browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Communicator, and Apple Safari.
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What is Bus?
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While the wheels on the bus may go "round and round," data on a computer's bus goes up and down. Each bus inside a computer consists of set of wires that allow data to be passed back and forth. Most computers have several buses that transmit data to different parts of the machine. Each bus has a certain size, measured in bits (such as 32-bit or 64-bit), that determines how much data can travel across the bus at one time. Buses also have a certain speed, measured in megahertz, which determines how fast the data can travel.
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What is B2C?
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Business-to-consumer electronic commerce (B2C) is typified by the publicly addressed forms of eCommerce such as webshops and TeleShopping.
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What is Backside Bus?
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There are two types of buses that carry data to and from a computer's CPU. They are the frontside bus and backside bus. Surprisingly, there is no correlation between these and the backside and frontside airs that snowboarders talk about.
While the frontside bus carries data between the CPU and memory, the backside bus transfers data to and from the computer's secondary cache. The secondary, or L2 cache stores frequently used functions and other data close to the processor. This allows the computer's CPU to work more efficiently since it can repeat processes faster.
When the processor needs information from the L2 cache, it is sent over the backside bus. Because this process needs to be extremely fast, the clock speed of the backside bus cannot afford to lag behind. For this reason, the backside bus is often as fast as the processor. The frontside bus, on the other hand, is typically half the speed of the processor or slower
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What is Base Station?
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The term "base station" was first used to refer to the towers you see on the side of the road that relay cell phone calls. These stations handle all cellular calls made within their area, receiving information from one end of the call and transmitting it to the other.
In the computer world, however, a base station refers to the wireless access point for computers with wireless cards. It is basically a router that communicates with devices based on the Wi-Fi standard. Some common Wi-Fi configurations include 802.11b and 802.11g. Wireless base stations are made by companies such as Netgear, Linksys, D-Link, Apple Computer, and other manufacturers. Fortunately, as long as the hardware is based on the Wi-Fi standard, all wireless cards can communicate with base stations from any manufacturer.
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What is Beta Software?
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Before a commercial software program is released to the public, it usually goes through a "beta" phase. During this stage, the software is tested for bugs, crashes, errors, inconsistencies, and any other problems. Though beta versions of software used to be made available only to developers, they are now sometimes made available for the general public to test, usually through the software company's Web site. However, because beta software is free, the programs usually expire after a period of time. If you choose to test a beta software program, don't be surprised if it has multiple problems and causes your computer to repeatedly crash. After all, it is the beta version. You can tell if a program is still in beta by checking the program's properties. If there is a "b" in the version number (i.e. Version: 1.2 b3) that means it's a beta version.
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What is Bit?
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The computer term "bit" comes from the phrase "Binary DigIT," which is different than that thing you put around a horse's mouth. A bit is a single digit number in base-2 (a zero or a one) and is the smallest unit of computer data. A full page of text is composed of about 16,000 bits.
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What is Blu-ray?
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Blu-ray is an optical disc format such as CD and DVD. It was developed for recording and playing back high-definition (HD) video and for storing large amounts of data. While a CD can hold 700 MB of data and a basic DVD can hold 4.7 GB of data, a single Blu-ray disc can hold up to 25 GB of data. Even a double sided, dual layer DVD (which are not common) can only hold 17 GB of data. Dual-layer Blu-ray discs will be able to store 50 GB of data. That is equivalent to 4 hours of HDTV.
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What is Bookmark?
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Similar to a real-life bookmark, an Internet bookmark acts as a marker for a Web site. (In Internet Explorer, they're called "Favorites".) When using a Web browser, you can simply select a bookmark from the browser's Bookmarks menu to go to a certain site. This way, you don't have to go through the redundant process of typing in the Internet address each time you visit one of your favorite sites. Also, who remembers those 200-character addresses anyway?
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What is Boot Disk?
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A boot disk is actually not a computer disk in the shape of a boot. If it was, most disk drives would have a difficult time reading it. Instead, a boot disk is a disk that a computer can start up or "boot" from. The most common type of boot disk is an internal hard drive, which most computers use to start up from. The operating system installed on the hard drive is loaded during the boot process.
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What is Bridge Page?
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Bridge Page are web pages that are created to rank high in search engines for particular phrases with purpose to seduce or hoax you to watch another page. They are also known as bridge pages, portal pages, zebra pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and by other names.
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What is Buffer?
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This is a small amount of data that is stored for a short amount of time, typically in the computer's memory (RAM). The purpose of a buffer is to hold data right before it is used. For example, when you download an audio or video file from the Internet, it may load the first 20% of it into a buffer and then begin to play. While the clip plays back, the computer continually downloads the rest of the clip and stores it in the buffer. Because the clip is being played from the buffer, not directly from the Internet, there is less of a chance that the audio or video will stall or skip when there is network congestion.
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What is Byte?
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A byte is a set of 8 bits that represent a single character in the computer's memory. Do not confuse this term with "bite," as in taking a bite of a cookie, because that is totally different. While bits are often used to measure data transfer speeds, bytes are used to measure file sizes, hard disk space, and computer memory. Larger amounts of data are measured in units such as megabytes, gigabytes, and terabytes. For example, one kilobyte is equal to 1,024 bytes.
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What is Backbone?
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Just like the human backbone carries signals to many smaller nerves in the body, a network backbone carries data to smaller lines of transmission. A local backbone refers to the main network lines that connect several local area networks (LANs) together. The result is a wide area network (WAN) linked by a backbone connection.
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What is Bandwidth?
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The word bandwidth is also used to mean the amount of data that can be transferred through a digital connection in a given time period (i.e., the connection's bit rate). In such cases, bandwidth is usually measured in bits or bytes per second.
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What is BASIC?
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Stands for "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code." BASIC is a computer programming language that was developed in the mid-1960s to provide a way for students to write simple computer programs. Since then, the language has evolved into a more robust and powerful language and can be used to create advanced programs for today's computer systems.
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What is Binary?
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Binary is a two-digit (Base-2) numerical system, which computers use to store data and compute functions. The reason computers use the binary system is because digital switches inside the computer can only be set to either on or off, which are represented by a 1 or 0. Though the binary system consists of only ones and zeros, the two digits can be used to represent any number.
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What is Bitmap?
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Most images you see on your computer are composed of bitmaps. A bitmap is a map of dots, or bits (hence the name), that looks like a picture as long you are sitting a reasonable distance away from the screen. Common bitmap filetypes include BMP (the raw bitmap format), JPEG, GIF, PICT, PCX, and TIFF. Because bitmap images are made up of a bunch of dots, if you zoom in on a bitmap, it appears to be very blocky. Vector graphics (created in programs such as Freehand, Illustrator, or CorelDraw) can scale larger without getting blocky.
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What is Bluetooth?
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This wireless technology enables communication between Bluetooth-compatible devices. It is used for short-range connections between desktop and laptop computers, PDAs (like the Palm Pilot or Handspring Visor), digital cameras, scanners, cellular phones, and printers.
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What is Boolean?
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This is the logic that computers use to determine if a statement is true or false. There are 4 main boolean operators: AND, NOT, OR, and XOR. Below are some examples of how the 4 operators work:
x AND y retuns True if both x and y are true, otherwise the expression returns False.
NOT x returns True if x is false (or null) and False if x is true.
x OR y returns True if either x or y or both are true; only if they are both false will it return False.
x XOR y returns True if either x or y are true, but not both. If x and y are both true or false, the statement will return False.
While boolean expressions are what drive the CPUs in computers, they can also be used by computer users. For example, when searching for information on the Web, many search engines accept boolean operators in the search phrases (i.e. "Yamaha AND piano NOT motorcycle"). Programmers often use boolean expressions in software development to control loops and variables as well.
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What is Bot?
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This is an automated software program that can execute certain commands when it receives a specific input (like a ro-"bot"). Bots are most often seen at work in the Internet-related areas of online chat and Web searching. The online chat bots do things like greet people when they enter a chat room, advertise Web sites, and kick people out of chat rooms when they violate the chat room rules. Web searching bots, also known as spiders and crawlers, search the Web and retrieve millions of HTML documents, then record the information and links found on the pages. From there, they generate electronic catalogs of the sites that have been "spidered." These catalogs make up the index of sites that are used for search engine results.
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What is Broadband?
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This refers to high-speed data transmission in which a single cable can carry a large amount of data at once. The most common types of Internet broadband connections are cable modems (which use the same connection as cable TV) and DSL modems (which use your existing phone line). Because of its multiple channel capacity, broadband has started to replace baseband, the single-channel technology originally used in most computer networks. So now when you see companies like AT&T and SBC pushing those fancy "broadband" ads in your face, you'll at least know what they are talking about.
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What is Burn?
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When you "burn a disc," you write data on it. If you were taking an SAT test, the analogy would look something like this:
Hard Disk : Write ::
CD/DVD : Burn
The reason the term "burn" is used is because the CD-writer, or burner, literally burns the data onto a writable CD. The laser in a CD-writer can be cranked up to a more powerful level than an ordinary CD-ROM laser. This enables it to engrave thousands of 1's and 0's onto a CD.
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What is Beta Software?
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Before a commercial software program is released to the public, it usually goes through a "beta" phase. During this stage, the software is tested for bugs, crashes, errors, inconsistencies, and any other problems. Though beta versions of software used to be made available only to developers, they are now sometimes made available for the general public to test, usually through the software company's Web site. However, because beta software is free, the programs usually expire after a period of time. If you choose to test a beta software program, don't be surprised if it has multiple problems and causes your computer to repeatedly crash. After all, it is the beta version. You can tell if a program is still in beta by checking the program's properties. If there is a "b" in the version number (i.e. Version: 1.2 b3) that means it's a beta version.
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