Aloha

A few days back, I was correcting my friend's use of "Chow" where she intended "Ciao", to say Good Bye.. From dictionary.com, I found out that "ciao" is of Italian origin and it means "I am your slave / servant". It also mentioned that a similiar term in Hawaiian is "Aloha"... As a reply to this message to my group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nsscse99), my buddy Arun replied that we have seen the word "Aloha" in the context of networking in the book "Computer Networks" by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, the "Networking Bhagavad Geetha" for me... The same was mentioned to me by my buddy ("buggy" ??) Karthik as well...

Back to Aloha, I havent paid much attention to it so far, but, when I googled for "Aloha networking", here is what I found from Webopedia.com:

"A protocol for satellite and terrestrial radio transmissions. In pure Aloha, a user can transmit at any time but risks collisions with other users' messages. "Slotted Aloha" reduces the chance of collisions by dividing the channel into time slots and requiring that the user send only at the beginning of a time slot. Aloha was the basis for Ethernet, a local area network protocol."

The other listing for this words in the site are as follows:

"Aloha Networks, Inc. -- A San Francisco-based company specializing in providing satellite-based Internet access to large Internet Service Providers. Founded by the inventor of the Aloha system, Norman Abramson.

@loha @home -- software from Media Synergy (www.mediasyn.com) that allows a user to add graphics, animation, and sound to e-mail messages. "

Now that I know what Aloha is, i think its time to say "Aloha"....