Monday, November 17, 2003		ITerminology

Wake-on-LAN: Often, IT personnel prefer to maintain client systems after employees have gone home. Even if these tasks are automated, client machines must be left on. In the past, if they weren’t left on, personnel had to manually turn them on. But, with wake-on-LAN, client systems can be remotely and automatically powered up. Wake-on-LAN technology resides in a PC’s managed network adapter and motherboard. The two are attached via a wake-on-LAN cable terminated by a 3-pin connector on each side.

Dropper: Also called a dropper program or a virus dropper, a program that when run will install a virus, Trojan horse or worm onto a hard drive, floppy disk or other memory media. The dropper itself is not a virus – it does not replicate; instead, it’s more like a Trojan horse in that it carries the malicious code with it and is not detected by virus-scanning software because it is not an infected file but carries the code to "drop" a virus into a system. Droppers are uncommon.

Fibonacci numbers: A series of whole numbers in which each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers. In computer programming, Fibonacci numbers give a model for designing recursive programming algorithms where the time for any routine is the time within the routine itself, plus the time for the recursive calls. The Fibonacci numbers were originally defined by the Italian mathematician Fibonacci, also known as Leonardo da Pisa, in the 13th century to model the growth of rabbit populations.