CSIS 161

Acronyms 5

Josh Ancel

2/25/2001

1. ESD wrist strap- A safety device used to channel static electricity to a proper ground while handling sensitive computer equipment. Electrostatic discharge (ESD) damage occurs when a release of stored static electricity travels from something such as a person's body into a conductor of a different potential, such as a computer being repaired. The ESD wrist strap safely channels the static electricity to a proper ground, typically the computer's chassis.

2. HIPPI - High Performance Parallel Interface, a standard technology for physically connecting devices at short distances and high speeds. The basic flavor of HIPPI transfers 32 bits in parallel for a data transfer speed of 0.8 Gbps. Wide HIPPI transfers 64 bits at a time to yield 1.6 Gbps. New HIPPI standards supporting rates of 6.4 Gbps are under development.

HIPPI became an official ANSI standard in 1990 and is used primarily to connect supercomputers and to provide high-speed backbones for local-area networks (LANs).

3. HPPC- The U.S. government's term for High Performance Computing. There are a number of U.S. agencies conducting HPCC research.

4. ACID is the acronym used to describe the four properties of an enterprise-level transaction :

· ATOMICITY: a transaction should be done or undone completely. In the event of a failure, all operations and procedures should be undone, and all data should rollback to its previous state.

· CONSISTENCY: a transaction should transform a system from one consistent state to another consistent state.

· ISOLATION: each transaction should happen independently of other transactions occurring at the same time.

· DURABILITY: Completed transactions should remain permanent, even during system failure.

5. A.L.I.C.E is an open source, natural language chat robot that relies on artificial intelligence for human interaction.

A.L.I.C.E is programmed with AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language). AIML is a XML specification for programming chat bots. Its simplicity and ease-of-use allows non-programmers, who have some HTML experience, to create their own chat bots. With AIML, developers can create customized chat bots with unique personalities and areas of expertise.

In order to create these chat bots, developers must download program B from http://alicebot.org/B.html