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Computing and digital systems

13,604 articles

General

Bandwidth (computing)

Bandwidth, also called Internet or digital bandwidth, is the capacity of a communications link in bits per second, and the point where a connection is constrained is called the bottleneck.

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Bandwidth throttling

Bandwidth throttling, also known as ISP throttling, is the intentional limitation of data transmission rates on a network, used for congestion control, tiered plans, or favoring some applications.

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Bangladeshi passport (বাংলাদেশি পাসপোর্ট)

The Bangladeshi passport (বাংলাদেশি পাসপোর্ট) is the travel document issued to citizens of Bangladesh, which became the first biometric e-passport in South Asia when launched in January 2020.

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Bank group (memory)

A bank group is a cluster of banks in a DDR4 SDRAM chip that can operate independently, allowing the memory controller to overlap column commands across groups.

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Barcelona Supercomputing Center

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) is a Spanish public research consortium founded in 2005 in Barcelona, known for the MareNostrum supercomputers and directed by Mateo Valero.

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Barco (manufacturer)

Barco NV is a Belgian technology company headquartered in Kortrijk, founded in 1934, that makes cinema laser projectors, video walls, control room systems, and medical diagnostic displays.

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Barcode

A barcode, also called bar coding, is a machine-readable symbol encoding product data that scanners capture electronically, central to supply chains since the first retail scan in 1974.

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Barcode reader

A barcode reader, or barcode scanner, is an input device that shines light on a barcode, decodes the reflected signal, and transmits the data to a host computer.

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Bard (chatbot)

Bard was a conversational AI chatbot developed by Google as an experimental service powered by LaMDA, announced in 2023 and renamed Gemini on February 8, 2024.

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Bark

Bark is an open-source generative text-to-audio model released by the AI company Suno in April 2023, built from three transformer models that generate multilingual speech, music, and sound effects.

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Barker code

A Barker code is a sequence of ±1 values whose autocorrelation sidelobes never exceed 1 in magnitude, proposed by R.H. Barker in 1953 and used in radar and Wi-Fi.

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Barrel shifter

A barrel shifter is a combinational digital circuit that shifts or rotates a data word by a variable number of bits in a single clock cycle.

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Barrier synchronization

Barrier synchronization is a parallel-programming construct in which threads wait at a designated point until all members of the group have arrived, appearing in OpenMP, MPI, and hardware.

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Bartz v. Anthropic

Bartz v. Anthropic is a copyright class action in which authors including Andrea Bartz accused Anthropic of training Claude on millions of pirated books, settled for $1.5 billion.

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Base-plus-offset addressing

Base-plus-offset addressing is a processor addressing mode that computes an operand's effective address by adding an instruction's constant offset to a base register, letting compilers access structure fields, stack variables, and array elements.

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Base32

Base32 is a binary-to-text encoding that represents arbitrary binary data with 32 printable symbols, each carrying 5 bits; RFC 4648's alphabet uses A–Z and 2–7 with equals-sign padding.

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Base64

Base64 is a group of binary-to-text encoding schemes that represent binary data as ASCII text; each character carries 6 bits, and the encoding is defined by RFC 4648.

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Basecamp

Basecamp is a web-based project management and team communication application developed by 37signals, launched in February 2004 as a deliberately simple alternative to feature-heavy suites.

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Baseten

Baseten, also known as Baseten Labs, is a San Francisco AI inference company founded in 2019 that helps companies deploy and serve AI models in production.

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Bash (Unix shell)

Bash, also called the Bourne-Again shell or GNU Bash, is the shell of the GNU operating system, written by Brian Fox in 1988 and standard on GNU/Linux.

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BASIC

BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of programming languages designed at Dartmouth College in 1963–64 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz to let non-specialists program computers.

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Basic access authentication

Basic access authentication, or Basic auth, is an HTTP authentication scheme, defined by RFC 7617, that sends a Base64-encoded user-id and password in the Authorization header.

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Basic Encoding Rules

The Basic Encoding Rules (BER), defined in ITU-T Recommendation X.690, are the original ASN.1 rules for encoding data for transmission, used by LDAP, SNMP, and X.509 certificates.

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Basis pursuit

Basis pursuit is an optimization principle for sparse signal recovery, selecting the smallest ℓ1-norm solution to Ax = b, solvable as a linear program; Chen, Donoho, and Saunders introduced it in 1998.

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Bastion host

A bastion host, also called a jump box, is a hardened computer that serves as the sole access point between an external network and a protected internal network.

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Bat algorithm

The bat algorithm is a population-based metaheuristic introduced by Xin-She Yang in 2010 that mimics the frequency tuning, loudness, and pulse rate of bats' echolocation to find global optima of continuous functions, especially in engineering design.

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Batch Bayesian optimization

Batch Bayesian optimization is a machine learning method that evaluates a batch of candidate points in parallel to optimize expensive black-box functions like hyperparameter tuning.

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Batch file

A batch file is a text file of commands that the Windows command interpreter, cmd.exe, executes one at a time, typically with the .bat or .cmd extension.

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Batch normalization

Batch normalization, or batch norm, is a technique for training deep neural networks, introduced at Google in 2015, that normalizes layer activations using mini-batch statistics.

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Batch processing

Batch processing, also called batch mode, is a way of running computer work in which jobs are collected and executed without user interaction, often on large volumes of data.