Universal Plug and Play (UPnP)

 See also Plug and Play , an earlier, proprietary Microsoft approach.

Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is a standard that uses Internet and Web protocol s to enable devices such as PCs, peripherals, intelligent appliances, and wireless devices to be plugged into a network and automatically know about each other. With UPnP, when a user plugs a device into the network, the device will configure itself, acquire a TCP/IP address, and use a discovery protocol based on the Internet's Hypertext Transfer Protocol ( HTTP ) to announce its presence on the network to other devices. For instance, if you had a camera and a printer connected to the network and needed to print out a photograph, you could press a button on the camera and have the camera send a "discover" request asking if there were any printers on the network. The printer would identify itself and send its location in the form of a universal resource locator ( URL ).

VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language)

VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) is a language for describing three-dimensional ( 3-D ) image sequences and possible user interactions to go with them. Using VRML, you can build a sequence of visual images into Web settings with which a user can interact by viewing, moving, rotating, and otherwise interacting with an apparently 3-D scene. For example, you can view a room and use controls to move the room as you would experience it if you were walking through it in real space.

Core-Dump

A core dump is the printing or the copying to a more permanent medium (such as a hard disk ) the contents of random access memory ( RAM ) at one moment in time. One can think of it as a full-length "snapshot" of RAM. A core dump is taken mainly for the purpose of debugging a program. With the arrival of higher-level languages and interactive debugging, few problems require a core dump these days. It's more likely to be used by specialized programmers who maintain and occasionally have to debug problems in operating system.

IIS (Internet Information Server)

IIS (Internet Information Server) is a group of Internet servers (including a Web or Hypertext Transfer Protocol server and a File Transfer Protocol server) with additional capabilities for Microsoft's Windows NT and Windows 2000 Server operating systems. IIS is Microsoft's entry to compete in the Internet server market that is also addressed by Apache, Sun Microsystems, O'Reilly, and others. With IIS, Microsoft includes a set of programs for building and administering Web sites, a search engine, and support for writing Web-based applications that access databases.

DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol)

DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is a communications protocol that lets network administrators centrally manage and automate the assignment of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses in an organization's network. Using the Internet Protocol, each machine that can connect to the Internet needs a unique IP address, which is assigned when an Internet connection is created for a specific computer. Without DHCP, the IP address must be entered manually at each computer in an organizationand a new IP address must be entered each time a computer moves to a new location on the network. DHCP lets a network administrator supervise and distribute IP addresses from a central point and automatically sends a new IP address when a computer is plugged into a different place in the network.