What are BOTS exactly?

marklar said:

The term "BOT" came from the early days of the Internet when chat was purely text based (Internet Relay Chat or IRC for short) servers were few and hosted hundreds of channels. Each channel had one or more operators with special permission (ops, kick, ban, etc.) to moderate other users' activity, the first person to create the channel was automatically the Op.

Several people programmed robots (eventually shortened to "bot") that would keep the channel open while they were logged out, automatically grant Ops privileges to authorised individuals when they joined, automatically greet new people as they joined, kick or ban people if they used offensive language, answer frequently asked questions, etc. Many of these bots had very extensive programming behind them and were actually quite intelligent. Google for "eggdrop" and "irc" for some more background.

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From trading in milliseconds, to microseconds, to nanoseconds, speeds are getting faster all the time. ''There are no technological limits preventing firms from trading in picoseconds,'' said Donal Byrne, chief executive officer of Corvil.

For those of us who get our picos mixed up with our nanos, a picosecond is one trillionth of a second. Or, put another way, a picosecond is to one second what one second is to 31,700 years. In less technical language, it's a really, really brief period of time.

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