B

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

bandwidth

The data transfer capacity of a digital communications system.

bandwidth control

The practice of setting the maximum network capacity that a service is allowed to use. You can deliberately limit a server's workload by not allowing it to receive requests at full capacity, saving resources for other programs, such as e-mail.

Basic authentication

An authentication method that encodes the user name and password before transmitting them over the network. Basic authentication is also called clear-text authentication because the encoding (base-64) can be decoded by anyone with a freely available decoding utility. Note that encoding is not the same as encryption. See also Digest authentication, Advanced Digest authentication, and Integrated authentication.

BIND service

See Domain Name System (DNS).

binding

A process that establishes the initial communication channel between the protocol driver and the network adapter driver.

bitmask

A numeric value intended for a bit-by-bit value comparison with other numeric values, typically to flag options in parameters or return values. Usually this comparison is done with bitwise logical operators, such as And and Or in Visual Basic, and ampersand (&) and pipe (|) in C++.

browser

An application for navigating and accessing information about either the Internet or an intranet.


Send comments about this topic to Microsoft

Build date: 11/30/2009

© 2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.