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Computing and digital systems

13,604 articles

General

Bring your own device

Bring your own device (BYOD) is a workplace policy allowing employees to use personal smartphones, tablets, and laptops for work, a term coined by Intel in 2009.

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Britannica.com

Britannica.com, also known as Encyclopædia Britannica Online, is the website of the Encyclopædia Britannica, an encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh in 1768, with Britannica Online launching in 1994.

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British and American keyboards

British and American keyboards, or US and UK keyboards, are the two main English-language layouts: the UK layout follows the ISO standard with 105 keys and £ on Shift+3, the US follows ANSI with 104.

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British National Corpus

The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100-million-word computer-readable collection of written and spoken British English from the early 1990s, compiled between 1991 and 1994 by a consortium led by Oxford University Press.

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Broad learning system

The broad learning system (BLS) is a flat neural network introduced by C. L. Philip Chen and Zhulin Liu in 2017, trained far faster than deep learning.

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Broadcast address

A broadcast address is a reserved IP address that instructs the network to deliver a datagram to every host on a target segment, including the limited form 255.255.255.255.

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Broadcast Channel API

The Broadcast Channel API is a web platform API letting same-origin tabs, iframes, and workers on one device send one-to-many messages by constructing BroadcastChannel objects with the same channel name.

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Broadcast domain

A broadcast domain is the set of devices that receive broadcast frames at the link layer; it can span switches but ends at routers and VLAN boundaries.

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Broadcast encryption

Broadcast encryption is a cryptographic method that lets a sender encrypt a message so a chosen set of recipients can decrypt it while excluded users, even colluding, learn nothing.

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Broadcast storm

A broadcast storm is a flood of broadcast frames circulating endlessly through a Layer 2 loop in switched Ethernet, consuming all bandwidth and blocking legitimate traffic.

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Broadcasting (networking)

Broadcasting is a networking method in which a single packet reaches every device on a local network segment, used by protocols like ARP and DHCP.

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Broadcom

Broadcom Inc., formerly Avago Technologies, is an American semiconductor and infrastructure-software company that supplies Ethernet switching silicon for data centers and bought VMware in 2023.

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Broadcom Corporation

Broadcom Corporation was an American fabless semiconductor company founded in California in 1991 by Henry Samueli and Henry Nicholas, acquired by Avago Technologies in 2016 for $37 billion.

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Broadcom custom AI accelerators

Broadcom custom AI accelerators, called XPUs, are customer-specific AI chips Broadcom co-designs with hyperscalers like Google and OpenAI, fabricated at TSMC with Broadcom Ethernet networking.

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Broadwell (microarchitecture)

Broadwell, also known as Intel Broadwell, is Intel's microarchitecture that shrank the Haswell design to the 14 nm process, launching in late 2014 with the Core M.

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BrookGPU

BrookGPU is the Stanford Graphics Lab implementation of the Brook stream language, letting developers run general-purpose computation on GPUs by writing an extended form of C.

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Brooks's law

Brooks's law, stated by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month, holds that adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

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Brotli

Brotli is a lossless data compression algorithm developed at Google, combining LZ77 and Huffman coding and designed to replace gzip for web content such as HTML and fonts.

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Brownfield (software development)

Brownfield development is the practice of adding new software functionality by modifying or extending an existing system, often with live users and legacy code to protect.

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BrowseComp

BrowseComp is an OpenAI benchmark from April 2025 measuring whether AI agents can persistently navigate the web to find hard-to-locate facts, with 1,266 short-answer questions.

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Browser extension

A browser extension, also called a browser add-on, is software built from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that a user installs into a web browser to add features or modify pages.

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Browser wars

The browser wars are the successive rounds of intense competition among web browsers: Netscape Navigator versus Internet Explorer in the late 1990s, Firefox's challenge in the 2000s, and Chrome's rise from 2008.

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Browserify

Browserify is a JavaScript bundling tool that compiles node-flavored CommonJS modules for the browser, walking require() calls to produce one self-contained bundle loadable in a single script tag.

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BrowserStack

BrowserStack is a privately held cloud software-testing platform founded in 2011 by Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal, serving more than 50,000 customers including Amazon and Microsoft.

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Browsersync

Browsersync is an open-source Node.js tool, released in 2014, that keeps multiple browsers and devices in sync, mirroring scrolls, clicks, and form inputs while injecting CSS changes without reloads.

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Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno algorithm

The Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno (BFGS) algorithm, or BFGS method, is a quasi-Newton optimization method that approximates the Hessian from gradients. It was derived independently by four researchers in 1970.

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Brute-force attack

A brute-force attack, also known as an exhaustive key search, is an attempt to access a system by trying every possible password or cryptographic key, defended by rate limiting, lockouts, and slow password hashing.

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Brute-force search

Brute-force search, also called exhaustive search, is an algorithmic strategy that checks every possible solution to a problem, always finding the correct answer but expected to be slow.

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BSD Daemon

The BSD Daemon (BSD Dæmon) is the mascot of the Berkeley Software Distribution operating systems, depicted as a cheerful daemon wearing sneakers and carrying a pitchfork.

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BSD licenses

BSD licenses, also called Berkeley Software Distribution licenses, are permissive, non-copyleft free software licenses named by clause count, from the two-clause to the original four-clause form.