Someone like Larry, or one of his peculiar friends. Also refers to the strange prefixes that Perl requires as noun markers on its variables.

A variable whose value is the name of another variable or subroutine. By dereferencing the first variable, you can get at the second one. Symbolic references are illegal under use strict 'refs'.

The notion that, with a complete set of simple tools that work well together, you can build almost anything you want. Which is fine if you're assembling a tricycle, but if you're building a defranishizing comboflux regurgalator, you really want your own machine shop in which to build special tools. Perl is sort of a machine shop.

A form of scalar context in which an expression is not expected to return any value at all and is evaluated for its side effects alone.

Microsoft's implementation of LDAP used in Windows environments. Active Directory is a directory service primarily used to provide authentication services for Windows computers, but can also be used to store any information about a network or organization in a central database designed to be quickly accessible. The data in Active Directory [..]

Originally, graphics cards didn't need any more bandwidth than a PCI slot could provide, but the more they developed, the more bandwidth they took from the PCI bus—eventually requiring a dedicated connection. The AGP slot was created specifically to cater to the bandwidth requirements of high performance graphics cards. Based on the architectu [..]

High-speed networking standard that supports both voice and data communications. ATM is normally used by ISPs on their private long-distance networks. ATM does not use routing like Ethernet. Instead, ATM switches establish point-to-point connections between endpoints, and data flows directly from source to destination. ATM uses fixed-sized cells of [..]

The number of discrete signaling events that occur each second in a digitally modulated transmission. The term is named after Jean-Maurice-Emile Baudot, the inventor of the Baudot telegraph code. At slow rates, only one bit of information is encoded in each signalling event—in these cases, the baud is equivalent to the number of bits per second tha [..]

See Primary Domain Controller.

The BIOS in a PC is the code that runs when the computer is first turned on. It is stored in a form of memory on the motherboard, and when run will initialize and configure the hardware, load boot code for the operating system (usually from a hard disk), then transfer control to the operating system. Older operating systems would make use of the BI [..]