Other Uses of The Term
The term "serial number" is sometimes used for codes which do not identify a single instance of something. For example, the International Standard Serial Number or ISSN used on magazines and other periodicals, an equivalent to the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) applied to books, is serially assigned not to each individual copy but to an issue of a periodical. It takes its name from the library science use of the word "serial" to mean a periodical.
Certificates and Certificate Authorities (CA) are necessary for widespread use of cryptography. These depend on applying mathematically rigorous serial numbers and serial number arithmetic, again not identifying a single instance of the content being protected.
Read more about this topic: Serial Number
Famous quotes containing the word term:
“Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the “wrong crowd” read like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren’t planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)