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What Does Underwriters Laboratories (UL) Mean? Techopedia Explains Underwriters Laboratories (UL) Underwriters Laboratories was founded in 1894 in the US by William Henry Merrill to address the growing need for safety and hazard testing and certification of emerging technologies. It originally only addressed electrical and fire safety concerns until it broadened its scope to cover all aspects of the supply chain regardless of industry such as: Water quality Food safety Hazardous substances Environmental sustainability Performance testing Safety and compliance education Since its first Standard for Safety publication in 1903 regarding the specifications for constructing tin-clad fire doors, UL has created more than a thousand standards from sustainability of certain technology to standards for creating batteries and life safety standards to be followed in building and factory floors....

What Does Video Cassette Recorder (VCR) Mean? A video cassette recorder (VCR) is an electromechanical device which records and plays back analog audio/video data which has been recorded natively from broadcast television or from other sources on a removable magnetic cassette tape. It revolutionized the movie and television industry by allowing people to watch TV shows and movies on their own schedules. The VCR can record a TV broadcast to be played back at another time, making it very convenient for a working person to watch shows at another time; a practice known as timeshifting....

What Does What You See Is All You Get (WYSIAYG) Mean? What You See Is All You Get (WYSIAYG) is an offshoot of What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG). WYSIAYG describes the more visually pleasing and entertaining user interfaces (UI) that lack the depth and functionality required by deeper applications. These types of program UIs often frustrate advanced users that want greater functionality beyond what is available on the screen....

The new year brings a new season of Valorant content, and there’s plenty to get excited about. That includes a brand new map called Lotus being added to the rotation, as well as the return of a fan favorite that was removed in 2021. Here’s everything you need to know about when the new Valorant map Lotus comes out and what to expect. Update: Riot Games has now revealed Lotus in full with a new trailer (below), and Twinfinite also has a separate article offering a full overview of the map that you can read here....

Even the lowest of lowborns can find power and riches in Westeros. Many characters featured in George R. R. Martin’s Westeros had rocky beginnings. For example, Varys was born a slave, only to become a member of both the Mad King and King Robert Baratheon’s small council. Another great example is Mysaria. But who is Mysaria in House of the Dragon? Who is Mysaria in House of the Dragon? In House of the Dragon, Mysaria (played by Sonoya Mizuno) is a prostitute in Westeros....

What Does Pacemaker Hacker Mean? A pacemaker hacker is an individual who can hack the access control and operational parameters of a biological pacemaker device. A pacemaker hacker can rewrite, recode or modify a pacemaker’s firmware and software so that increased - and potentially lethal - electrical shocks are sent to the human heart for malicious purposes. Techopedia Explains Pacemaker Hacker Of all malicious activists and hackers, pacemaker hackers are among the most feared and dangerous....

What Does Side Scroller Mean? A side scroller is a type of video game where a side-view camera angle is used for action viewing. Side scrollers are generally in 2-D with game characters that move from the left to the right side of a screen. Some side scrollers require users to move in one continuous direction (usually to the right). However, many side scrollers allow backtracking, as well as up, down, left and right movements....

What Does VPN Firewall Mean? A VPN firewall is a type of firewall device that is designed specifically to protect against unauthorized and malicious users intercepting or exploiting a VPN connection. It can be in the form of hardware, software or an all-in-one firewall appliance, with the core objective to allow only legitimate VPN traffic access to the VPN. Techopedia Explains VPN Firewall A VPN firewall is typically installed at the server end of a VPN, either at the front or back of the VPN server....

What Does Internal Attack Mean? An internal attack occurs when an individual or a group within an organization seeks to disrupt operations or exploit organizational assets. In many cases, the attacker employs a significant amount of resources, tools and skill to launch a sophisticated computer attack and potentially remove any evidence of that attack as well. Highly-skilled and disgruntled employees (such as system administrators and programmers) or technical users who could benefit from disrupting operations may choose to initiate an internal attack against a company through its computer systems....

What Does Bare Metal Restore Mean? Bare metal restore is a system restoration process in which an identical computer image/instance is created on a bare metal computer from the ground up. It allows a computer to be restored without preinstalled software, with the exception of the firmware or basic input/output system (BIOS). Bare metal restore is also known as tier 1 restore. Techopedia Explains Bare Metal Restore Bare metal restore is performed in enterprise computing environments where exact replicas of computer systems are required in the event of disaster....

What Does Check Digit Mean? A check digit is a digit added to a string of numbers for error detection purposes. Normally, the check digit is computed from the other digits in the string. A check digit helps digital systems detect changes when data is transferred from transmitter to receiver. The check digit is the decimal equivalent of the binary checksum used in binary systems. Techopedia Explains Check Digit A check digit algorithm calculates a check digit based on an original character string, such as an account number....

What Does Context-Driven Testing Mean? Context-driven testing is a certain type of software testing that considers the product’s use in the field, or a performance or production environment. It is one way that developers assess software as it is built, looking for flaws and otherwise optimizing its design before its eventual final release. Techopedia Explains Context-Driven Testing Context-driven testing is something that experts would describe as a “philosophy” of testing, something that is done along with other types of conceptual testing in agile software development....

What Does Data Masking Mean? Data masking refers to the process of changing certain data elements within a data store so that the structure remains similar while the information itself is changed to protect sensitive information. Data masking ensures that sensitive customer information is unavailable beyond the permitted production environment. This is especially common when it comes to situations like user training and software testing. Techopedia Explains Data Masking Automated development and testing methods cut down direct exposure to sensitive data....

What Does High-Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) Mean? High-Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) is a mobile telephony protocol that belongs to the HSPA (high speed packet access) set of technologies. Techopedia Explains High-Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) Not all devices that support HSUPA have the same uplink speeds. For instance, Category 5 devices, like the Nokia N8, Nokia E72, BlackBerry Storm 9500, and Samsung Wave, can go up to 2 Mbps....

What Does Internet Metering Mean? Internet metering is a service model in which an Internet service provider (ISP) tracks a customer’s bandwidth usage, and the customer pays according to how much has been consumed, effectively likening Internet connectivity to utility services like electricity, water and gas. Geared toward controlling heavy bandwidth users, the idea of Internet metering is that casual users should not have to pay as much as power users....

What Does Just Enough Operating System (JeOS) Mean? Techopedia Explains Just Enough Operating System (JeOS) JeOS designers have to consider a given OS’ kernel or core, as well as tools and utilities required to create a custom OS that enables faster operations and less required installation memory. The use of JeOS designs often corresponds to a virtual appliance method, where a virtual machine (VM) image runs on a given platform....

What Does Kryder’s Law Mean? Kryder’s law is a term for an analysis of the density and capability of hard drive storage media over time. It is seen as a correlate to Moore’s law, a theory that holds that the number of transistors placed in an integrated circuit should double every two years, resulting in predictable progress in microprocessor speed. Techopedia Explains Kryder’s Law Kryder’s law is based on the work of Mark Kryder, who studied hard drive technologies over several decades, beginning in the 1970s....

What Does Lightweight User Datagram Protocol (UDP Lite) Mean? Techopedia Explains Lightweight User Datagram Protocol (UDP Lite) UDP-Lite is, as the name suggests, based on UDP. However, there is a key difference: Unlike UDP, which either protects none or all of a packet with a checksum, UDP-Lite allows implementation of partial checksums that cover only a part of the datagram, and therefore delivers partially corrupted packets. This protocol was meant for multimedia functions such as streamed video or VoIP where receiving partially corrupted or damaged packets are beneficial compared with not receiving any at all....

What Does Monolithic Kernel Mean? A monolithic kernel is an operating system software framework that holds all privileges to access input/output (I/O) devices, memory, hardware interrupts and the CPU stack. Monolithic kernels tend to be larger than other kernels because they deal with so many aspects of computer processing at the lowest level, and therefore have to incorporate code that interfaces with many devices, I/O and interrupt channels, and other hardware operators....

What Does NetBeans Mean? NetBeans is an open-source integrated development environment (IDE) for developing with Java, PHP, C++, and other programming languages. NetBeans is also referred to as a platform of modular components used for developing Java desktop applications. Techopedia Explains NetBeans NetBeans is coded in Java and runs on most operating systems with a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), including Solaris, Mac OS, and Linux. NetBeans manages the following platform features and components: