Word: packet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Think of a packet as the digital equivalent of a letter. You don't drop a letter into a mailbox like itself; you stick it into an envelope first. The packet is the packaging for your data, no matter what form...
Like letters, network packets also have a form of addressing--after all, the network needs to know where and how to send these packets along their way! Each packet is marked with the IP (Internet Protocol) address of its destination computer, telling the network where the packet needs to go. Your Ethernet address comes in here as well, serving as an identification tag on every packet of data...
Measured by performance, Coss, whose pay consists overwhelmingly of Green Tree stock, may deserve a little extra in his packet: he has managed to boost the company's value at a torrid 83% compound rate over the past five years, making it one of the hottest issues on the New York Stock Exchange and winning encomiums from the likes of Fidelity mutual-fund guru Peter Lynch. Just last week Green Tree reported record earnings of $227.3 million through the third quarter and a stunning 50% increase in its loan volume, to $7.57 billion over the same period last year...
Scenario Two: You see the day's Harvard Dining Services menu in The Crimson, and you've already started feeling ill. But funds are low, and you lack the necessary hot pot to whip up a quick Store 24 packet of ramen noodles. What...
Consider, says Chalmers, the robot named Cog, being developed at M.I.T.'s artificial-intelligence lab with input from Dennett (see following story). Cog will someday have "skin"--a synthetic membrane sensitive to contact. Upon touching an object, the skin will send a data packet to the "brain." The brain may then instruct the robot to recoil from the object, depending on whether the object could damage the robot. When human beings recoil from things, they too are under the influence of data packets. If you touch something that's dangerously hot, the appropriate electrical impulses go from hand to brain...