Since the dawn of the digital computer age, long-term data storage and backup have been the province of a single primary medium: magnetic tape. Tape has compelling advantages. It's inexpensive to operate and buy, and even cheaper to store, whether it exists on reels, inside cartridges or as part of an automated tape library system. Tape also has the benefit of separating the portable and inexpensive storage medium from the larger, more costly recording machinery. The introduction of tape made it possible to back up everything, keep copies off-site and restore older or deleted files as needed.
In 1969, three IBM researchers created GML, a formatting language for document publishing. Understood to mean Generalized Markup Language, the letters also happened to be the initials of its creators: Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher and Raymond Lorie.
Python is an object-oriented, open-source programming language often used for rapid application development. Python's simple syntax emphasizes readability, reducing the cost of program maintenance, while its large library of functions and calls encourages reuse and extensibility.
In this computer-driven era, identity theft and the loss or disclosure of data and related intellectual property are growing problems. We each have multiple accounts and use multiple passwords on an ever-increasing number of computers and Web sites. Maintaining and managing access while protecting both the user's identity and the computer's data and systems has become increasingly difficult. Central to all security is the concept of authentication -- verifying that the user is who he claims to be.
Computers have so overloaded us with data, it's become increasingly difficult to find the information we seek. Beginning in the 1990s, powerful search engines like Yahoo, AltaVista and Google made the Web an incomparably valuable information resource, but the growth of available information has rendered even those remarkable tools far less useful. Google currently indexes more than 4 billion pages, and queries often return tens of thousands of pages, but they are arranged in no discernable order.
Component Object Model is a Microsoft-developed, language-independent architecture created in the 1990s that lets developers build applications from reusable, binary software components.
In many ways, computers make collaboration more awkward than we want. Go into any meeting carrying a piece of paper and, barring language problems, you know that other people in the room can read it, mark it up, pass it around and file it away.
RSS is an XML format for syndicating Web content. A Web site that wants to allow other sites to publish some of its content creates an RSS document and registers the document with an RSS publisher. A user with a Web browser or a special RSS client program automatically receives notice of and links to new content on designated sites and can use it on a different site.
It's hard to argue with the proposition that the World Wide Web is the largest repository of information that has ever existed. In just over a decade, the Web has moved from a university curiosity to a fundamental research, marketing and communications vehicle that impinges upon the everyday life of most people in the developed world. But there's a catch, of course. As the amount of information on the Web grows, that information becomes ever harder to keep track of and use.
Markup languages have been around since 1969, when three IBM Corp. researchers created the Generalized Markup Language. That was the grandfather of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which makes the Web work, and of Extensible Markup Language (XML), which has become the primary means of defining, storing and formatting data in a multitude of areas, including documents, forms and databases.
Phishing is a technique used to gain personal information for purposes of identity theft, using fraudulent e-mail messages that appear to come from legitimate businesses. These authentic-looking messages are designed to fool recipients into divulging personal data such as account numbers and passwords, credit card numbers and Social Security numbers.
Data stored on disk is made up of long strings (called tracks and sectors) of ones and zeroes. Disk heads read these strings one bit at a time until the drive accumulates the desired quantity of data and then sends it to the processor, memory or other storage devices. How the drive sends that data affects overall performance.
Maintaining security on their networks is critical for all companies. One primary tool that every network needs is access control -- the ability to carefully define and enforce which users have what type of access to specific applications, data and devices.
As more and more enterprises use project teams with members based in different locations and time zones -- often in different countries or hemispheres -- their need for effective electronic collaboration tools has grown dramatically. There are a number of products that aim to solve that problem, and most make at least some use of a single underlying technology.
A buffer overflow occurs when a computer program attempts to stuff more data into a buffer (a defined temporary storage area) than it can hold. The excess data bits then overwrite valid data and can even be interpreted as program code and executed.