Computer Basics

The original IEEE 802 MAC address comes from the original Xerox Ethernet addressing scheme. This 48-bit address space contains potentially 248 or 281,474,976,710,656 possible MAC addresses.

Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is a technical standard for accessing information over a mobile wireless network. A WAP browser is a web browser for mobile devices such as mobile phones that uses the protocol.

The return value in the parent process is the process identifier of the newly created child process (a positive value).

Piggybacking is a bi-directional data transmission technique in the network layer (OSI model). It makes the most of the sent data frames from receiver to emitter, adding the confirmation that the data frame sent by the sender was received successfully (ACK acknowledge). This practically means, that instead of sending an acknowledgement in an individual frame it is piggy-backed on the data frame.

The fork operation creates a separate address space for the child. The child process has an exact copy of all the memory segments of the parent process. If copy-on-write semantics are implemented,  actual physical memory may not be assigned.

In local area networks with a star topology, each network host is connected to a central hub with a point-to-point connection. In Star topology every node (computer workstation or any other peripheral) is connected to central node called hub or switch.

In carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) technique this algorithm is part of the channel access method used to send data on these network.

Broadband Radio Service (BRS) formerly known as Multichannel Multipoint Distribution Service (MMDS), also known as Wireless Cable, is a wireless telecommunications technology, used for general-purpose broadband networking or, more commonly, as an alternative method of cable television programming reception.

The cyclomatic complexity of a section of source code is the count of the number of linearly independent paths through the source code.

When each node is connected to every other node then it means n nodes are connected to (n-1) nodes. But since the graph is undirected, edges in both the directions mean the same. Hence, the number of edges is divided by 2 to give the result as n(n-1)/2.

RAID 5 (block-level striping with distributed parity) distributes parity along with the data and requires that all drives but one be present to operate. The array is not destroyed by a single drive failure. On drive failure, any subsequent reads can be calculated from the distributed parity such that the drive failure is masked from the end user. RAID 5 requires at least three disks.

Instruction set architecture determines the minimum number of page frames that must be allocated to a running process.

A binary search tree (BST), sometimes also called an ordered or sorted binary tree, is a node-based binary tree data structure.The major advantage of binary search trees over other data structures is that the related sorting algorithms and search algorithms such as inorder traversal can be very efficient.

Declarative programming is a non-imperative style of programming in which programs describe their desired results without explicitly listing commands or steps that must be performed. Functional and logical programming languages are characterized by a declarative programming style.

A router is a device that forwards data packets between computer networks, creating an overlay internetwork. A router is connected to two or more data lines from different networks. When a data packet comes in one of the lines, the router reads the address information in the packet to determine its ultimate destination. Then, using information in its routing table or routing policy, it directs the packet to the next network on its journey. Routers perform the traffic directing functions on the Internet. A data packet is typically forwarded from one router to another through the networks that constitute the internetwork until it reaches its destination node.