What is "ping"

backfire \backfire\, back fire \back fire\

1. A fire started ahead of a forest or prairie fire to burn only against the wind, so that when the two fires meet both must go out for lack of fuel.

2. 1. A premature explosion in the cylinder of a gas or oil engine during the exhaust or the compression stroke, tending to drive the piston in a direction reverse to that in which it should travel; also called a knock or ping.

   2. an explosion in the exhaust passages of an internal combustion engine.

1835, imitative of the sound of a bullet striking something sharply. Meaning "short, high-pitched electronic pulse" is attested from 1943. As a verb from 1855; in computer sense is from at least 1981. Related: Pinged; pinging.

n. 1 A high-pitched, short and somewhat sharp sound. 2 (qualifier: submarine navigation) A pulse of high-pitched or ultrasonic sound whose echoes provide information about nearby objects and vessels. 3 (context networking English) A packet which a remote host is expected to echo, thus indicating its presence. 4 (context text messaging Internet English) An email or other message sent requesting acknowledgement. vb. 1 To make a high-pitched, short and somewhat sharp sound. 2 (qualifier: submarine navigation) To emit a signal and then listen for its echo in order to detect objects. 3 (context networking English) To send a packet in order to determine whether a host is present, particularly by use of the ping utility. 4 (context networking English) To send a network packet to another host and receive an acknowledgement in return. 5 To send an email or other message to someone in hopes of eliciting a response. 6 (context colloquial English) To flick. 7 (context colloquial sports intransitive English) To bounce. 8 (context colloquial sports transitive English) To cause something to bounce.

1. v. hit with a pinging noise; "The bugs pinged the lamp shade"

2. sound like a car engine that is firing too early; "the car pinged when I put in low-octane gasoline"; "The car pinked when the ignition was too far retarded" [syn: pink, knock]

3. make a short high-pitched sound; "the bullet pinged when they struck the car"

4. contact, usually in order to remind of something; "I'll ping my accountant--April 15 is nearing"

5. send a message from one computer to another to check whether it is reachable and active; "ping your machine in the office"

Ping may refer to:

PING is an American manufacturer of golf equipment, based in Phoenix, Arizona. Ping was founded by Karsten Solheim, following a career as engineer at the General Electric company. In 1959, he started making putters in his garage in Redwood City, California. In 1967, he resigned his job at General Electric to develop the PING company.

"Ping" is a short story written by Samuel Beckett in French (originally "Bing") in 1966, and later translated into English by the author and published in 1967. David Lodge has described it as: "the rendering of the consciousness of a person confined in a small, bare, white room, a person who is evidently under extreme duress, and probably at the last gasp of life."

Ping is the Mandarin pinyin romanization of the Chinese surname written in Chinese character. It is romanized P'ing in Wade–Giles. Ping is listed 95th in the Song dynasty classic text Hundred Family Surnames. It is not among the 300 most common surnames in China.

Ping is a computer network administration software utility used to test the reachability of a host on an Internet Protocol (IP) network. It measures the round-trip time for messages sent from the originating host to a destination computer that are echoed back to the source. The name comes from active sonar terminology that sends a pulse of sound and listens for the echo to detect objects under water, although it is sometimes interpreted as a backronym to packet Internet groper.

Ping operates by sending Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) Echo Request packets to the target host and waiting for an ICMP Echo Reply. The program reports errors, packet loss, and a statistical summary of the results, typically including the minimum, maximum, the mean round-trip times, and standard deviation of the mean.

The command-line options of the utility and its output vary between the numerous implementations. Options may include the size of the payload, count of tests, limits for the number of network hops ( TTL) that probes traverse, and interval between the requests. Many systems provide a companion utility , for testing on Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) networks.

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In blogging, a ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. An XML-RPC signal is sent from the weblog to one or more "Ping Server(s)" (controlled by the weblog) to notify a list of their "Services" of new content on the weblog.

A Ping Server may notify multiple services when pinged;

• Search Engines
• Website Directories
• News Websites
• Aggregators
• Feed Websites
• And Many Others

The technology was first introduced by Dave Winer to Weblogs.com in October 2001. Today, most blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post or updates an old one.

Open ping servers, like Moreover Technologies' Weblogs.com, let other web services subscribe to a list of blogs that have recently pinged them. Blog search engines can provide fresh results very quickly by polling only the newly updated blogs. Similarly, aggregators use results from ping servers to tell subscribers which items on their subscription lists have fresh material.

In addition to open ping servers, there are also proprietary ping servers that gather information only for their own applications. Most of the major blog search engines operate such ping servers, and most Content Management Systems and Blogs provide an easy way to modify Ping Services

In multiplayer online video games, MMOs, MMMORPGs, MMOFPSs and FPSs ping (not to be confused with frames per second) refers to the network latency between a player's computer ( client), and either the game server or another client (i.e. peer). This could be reported quantitatively as an average time in milliseconds, or qualitatively as low ping or high ping. The latter usage is common among players of first-person shooter and real-time strategy games. Having a low ping is always desirable because lower latency provides smoother gameplay by allowing faster updates of game data.

Ping is often wrongly conflated with latency. Ping has become synonymous with its measurement - latency (usually measured in milliseconds), but it is a tool to take that measurement.

High latency can cause lag. One may "lag out" due to unacceptably high latency. Servers will often disconnect a client if the latency is too high and it poses a detriment to others' gameplay. Similarly, client software will often mandate disconnection if the latency is too high. A high ping does not cause lag; rather, a high ping value is the result of lag. It may also make servers crash because of the instability.

Rather than using the traditional ICMP echo request and reply packets to determine ping times, game programmers often instead build their own latency detection into existing game packets (usually based on the UDP protocol).

Some factors that might affect ping include: network protocol engineering, Internet connection speed, the quality of a user's Internet service provider and the configuration of firewalls. Ping is also affected by geographical location. For instance, if someone is in India, playing on a server located in the United States, the distance between the two is greater than it would be for players located within the US, and therefore it takes longer for data to be transmitted. However, the amount of packet-switching and network hardware in between the two computers is often more significant. For instance, wireless network interface cards must modulate digital signals into radio signals, which is often more costly than the time it takes an electrical signal to traverse a typical span of cable. The lower the ping the better it is.

PING (Partimage Is Not Ghost) is a free software Linux-based live CD ISO image built upon the Partimage and Linux From Scratch (LFS) projects for disk cloning or backup purposes. The software supports most hardware platforms using Parallel ATA, Serial ATA, or SCSI systems for desktop computers, workstations, and servers. It can access file systems using FAT16, FAT32, NTFS or ext3 format. Disk partition images can be stored on other partitions on the same drive, other drives on a network, or written to one or more CDs or DVDs (CD/DVD spanning). Images can be written without compression or using a choice of several compression schemes, thus reducing storage requirements.

Although the user interface is keyboard-based, it is easy to navigate with the cursor keys. Option selections are checked or unchecked with the space bar, and minimal typing is required when specifying file names for backup or restoration.

Since PING is built upon LFS, it is very small in size. Even if a user decided to expand the content and install it permanently on hard drive, it would still take only 20 megabytes. Normally, the software is burnt on a CD-ROM or installed into a USB flash drive for booting. There is also a special version that allow users to load plug-in programs, for example, Clam AntiVirus (ClamAV) for virus scanning.

Downloading PING requires registration with an email address. Older versions are still available for download.

Ping is a Chinese given name borne by (in reverse chronological order):

Ancient China:

• King Ping of Zhou (died 720 ), Chinese king
• Duke Ping of Jin (died 532 ), ruler of Jin
• Duke Ping of Cao (died 524 ), ruler of Cáo
• King Ping of Chu (died 516 ), king of Chu
• Duke Ping of Qi (died 456 ), titular ruler of Qi
• Chen Ping (Han Dynasty) (died 178 ), chancellor to Emperor Gaozu
• Prince Ping of Liang (r. 137–97 )
• Emperor Ping of Han (9 – 6), Chinese emperor
• Xin Ping (died 204), a minister under the warlord Han Fu
• Guan Ping (died 219), general serving the warlord Liu Bei
• Wen Ping, third century general under the warlord Cao Cao
• Wang Ping (Three Kingdoms) (died 248), officer under Liu Bei, made a major general after defecting to Shu Han
• Murong Ping, fourth century regent of the Chinese state of Former Yan
• Xue Ping (753?-832), general of the Tang Dynasty

Other:

• Luo Ping (1733-1799), Chinese painter
• Song Ping (born 1917), Communist Chinese politician and governor
• Hsin Ping (1938-1995), Chinese Buddhist abbot
• Ping Chong (born 1946), American contemporary theater director, choreographer, writer and artist
• Zhang Ping (politician) (born 1946), Chinese politician
• He Ping (born 1957), Chinese film director
• Ping Fu (born 1958), American computer scientist, entrepreneur and author
• Lang Ping (born 1960), former Chinese volleyball player and former head coach of the United States women's national volleyball team
• Zhang Ping (volleyball) (born 1982), Chinese volleyball player
• Wang Ping (author), Chinese-American author and academic