What is Active Directory?

Active Directory is a new Windows term for the overall directory database in a Windows domain. The AD, or Active Directory, contains the user accounts, computer accounts, OUs, security groups, and group policy objects. The AD is markedly different from the NT4 domain database (called the SAM) because it is based on the LDAP standard. This means that everything in AD is an object with a unique path together with associated attributes. This allows a greater opportunity for interoperability with applications and other directory products. The tree or forest-wide schema determines what types of objects and attributes may be created in AD. Another implication of the new LDAP support is that information in the directory is searchable. Universities are under legal obligations to ensure the privacy of student personal information as requested, so you will find that this new functionality may be limited by privacy settings that people have requested.

What is ADSL?
Stands for "Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line." ADSL is a type of DSL, which is a method of transferring data over copper telephone lines. While symmetrical DSL (SDSL) uploads and downloads data at the same speed, ADSL has different maximum data transfer rates for uploading and downloading data. For example, an ADSL connection may allow download rates of 1.5Mbps, while upload speeds may only reach 256Kbps. Since most users download much more data than they upload, this difference usually does not make a noticeable impact on Internet access speeds. However, for Web servers or other computers that send a lot of data upstream, ADSL would be an inefficient choice.

What is ASCII?
Stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange." ASCII is the universal standard for the numerical codes computers use to represent all upper and lower-case letters, numbers, and puctuation. Without ASCII, each type of computer would use a different way of representing letters and numbers, causing major chaos for computer programmers (allowing them even less sleep than they already get). This Microsoft-based technology was built to link desktop applications to the World Wide Web. Using ActiveX development tools, software developers can create interactive Web content for their applications. For example, Word and Excel documents can be viewed directly in Web browsers that supports ActiveX. While ActiveX is a useful technology, the downside is that you need to have a up-todate version ActiveX installed on your machine in order to use ActiveX-enabled content.

What is Analog?
As humans, we perceive the world in analog. Everything we see and hear is a continuous transmission of information to our senses. This continuous stream is what defines analog data. Digital information, on the other hand, estimates analog data using only ones and zeros.

What is Application?
An application, or application program, is a software program that runs on your computer. Web browsers, e-mail programs, word processors, games, and utilities are all applications. The word "application" is used because each program has a specific application for the user. For example, a word processor can help a student create a research paper, while a video game can prevent that same student from getting the paper done.

What is AGP?
Stands for "Accelerated Graphics Port." This is a graphics card expansion port designed by Intel that resides on the motherboard of a computer. PCI graphics ports typically run at 33 MHz and have a maximum transfer rate of 132 MB/sec. AGP ports, on the other hand, run at 66 MHz and can transfer data up to 528 MB/sec. This allows games and applications to store and retrieve larger, more realistic 3D shapes and textures without slowing down the animation on the screen. Additionally, AGP cards can store graphics in system memory rather than video memory, which also helps improve performance. Becuase of these advantages, AGP cards will typically have better performance per MB of VRAM than PCI graphics cards.

What is BIOS?
Stands for "Basic Input/Output System." Most people don't need to ever mess with the BIOS on a computer, but it can be helpful to know what it is. The BIOS is a program pre-installed on Windows-based computers (not on Macs) that the computer uses to start up. The CPU accesses the BIOS even before the operating system is loaded. The BIOS then checks all your hardware connections and locates all your devices. If everything is OK, the BIOS loads the operating system into the computer's memory and finishes the bootup process.

What is BMP? Short for "Bitmap." It can be pronounced as "bump," "B-M-P," or simply a "bitmap image." The BMP
format is a commonly used raster graphic format for saving image files. It was introduced on the Windows platform, but is now recognized by many programs on both Macs and PCs.

What is Boot?
When you boot a football, you kick it really far. When you boot a computer, you simply turn it on. Kicking your computer really far is not recommended, though you may be tempted to do so at times. The term "boot" comes from the word "bootstraps," which people at one time used to get their boots on. Likewise, "booting" a computer gets it up and running.

What is Browser?
You are probably using a browser to read this right now. A Web browser, often just called a "browser," is the program people use to access the World Wide Web. It interprets HTML code including text, images, hypertext links, Javascript, and Java applets. After rendering the HTML code, the browser displays a nicely formatted page. Some common browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Communicator, and Apple Safari.

What is Bus?
While the wheels on the bus may go "round and round," data on a computer's bus goes up and down. Each bus inside a computer consists of set of wires that allow data to be passed back and forth. Most computers have several buses that transmit data to different parts of the machine. Each bus has a certain size, measured in bits (such as 32-bit or 64-bit), that determines how much data can travel across the bus at one time. Buses also have a certain speed, measured in megahertz, which determines how fast the data can travel.

What is Bit?
The computer term "bit" comes from the phrase "Binary DigIT," which is different than that thing you put around a horse's mouth. A bit is a single digit number in base-2 (a zero or a one) and is the smallest unit of computer data. A full page of text is composed of about 16,000 bits.

What is Boot Disk?

A boot disk is actually not a computer disk in the shape of a boot. If it was, most disk drives would have a difficult time reading it. Instead, a boot disk is a disk that a computer can start up or "boot" from. The most common type of boot disk is an internal hard drive, which most computers use to start up from. The operating system installed on the hard drive is loaded during the boot process.

What is Byte?
A byte is a set of 8 bits that represent a single character in the computer's memory. Do not confuse this term with "bite," as in taking a bite of a cookie, because that is totally different. While bits are often used to measure data transfer speeds, bytes are used to measure file sizes, hard disk space, and computer memory. Larger amounts of data are measured in units such as megabytes, gigabytes, and terabytes. For example, one kilobyte is equal to 1,024 bytes.

What is Bitmap?
Most images you see on your computer are composed of bitmaps. A bitmap is a map of dots, or bits (hence the name), that looks like a picture as long you are sitting a reasonable distance away from the screen. Common bitmap filetypes include BMP (the raw bitmap format), JPEG, GIF, PICT, PCX, and TIFF. Because bitmap images are made up of a bunch of dots, if you zoom in on a bitmap, it appears to be very blocky. Vector graphics (created in programs such as Freehand, Illustrator, or CorelDraw) can scale larger without getting blocky.

What is Buffer?
This is a small amount of data that is stored for a short amount of time, typically in the computer's memory (RAM). The purpose of a buffer is to hold data right before it is used. For example, when you download an audio or video file from the Internet, it may load the first 20% of it into a buffer and then begin to play. While the clip plays back, the computer continually downloads the rest of the clip and stores it in the buffer. Because the clip is being played from the buffer, not directly from the Internet, there is less of a chance that the audio or video will stall or skip when there is network congestion.

What is Bluetooth?
This wireless technology enables communication between Bluetooth-compatible devices. It is used for short-range connections between desktop and laptop computers, PDAs (like the Palm Pilot or Handspring Visor), digital cameras, scanners, cellular phones, and printers.

What is Broadband?
This refers to high-speed data transmission in which a single cable can carry a large amount of data at once. The most common types of Internet broadband connections are cable modems (which use the same connection as cable TV) and DSL modems (which use your existing phone line). Because of its multiple channel capacity, broadband has started to replace baseband, the single-channel technology originally used in most computer networks. So now when you see companies like AT&T and SBC pushing those fancy "broadband" ads in your face, you'll at least know what they are talking about.

What is C C++?
C is a high-level programming language that was developed in the mid-1970s. It was originally used for writing Unix programs, but now is used to write applications for nearly every available platform. Some nice things about the language are that it is easy to read, it is flexible (can be used for a wide variety of purposes), and C programs typically use memory very efficiently. C++, pronounced "C plus plus," is a programming language that was built off the C language. The syntax of C++ is nearly identical to C, but it has object-oriented features, which allow the programmer to create objects within the code. This makes programming easier, more efficient, and some would even say, more fun. Because of the power and flexibility of the language, most programs today are written in C++.

What is CD-R?
Stands for "Compact Disc Recordable." CD-R discs are blank CDs that can record data written by a CD burner. The word "recordable" is used because CD-Rs are often used to record audio, which can be played back by most CD players. However, many other kinds of data can also be written to a CD-R, so the discs are also referred to as "writable CDs."

What is Computer?
Technically, a computer is a programmable machine. This means it can execute a programmed list of instructions and respond to new instructions that it is given. Today, however, the term is most often used to refer to the desktop and laptop computers that most people use. When referring to a desktop model, the term "computer" technically only refers to the computer itself -- not the monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Still, it is acceptable to refer to everything together as the computer. If you want to be really technical, the box that holds the computer is called the "system unit."

What is Controller Card?

The controller card, or simply "controller," is a piece of hardware that acts as the interface between the motherboard and the other components of the computer. For example, hard drives, optical drives, printers, keyboards, and mice all require controllers to work. Most computers have all the necessary controllers built in the motherboard as chips, not full-sized cards. However, if you add additional components such as a SCSI hard drive, you may need to add a controller card as well. Controller cards are typically installed in one of the computer's PCI slots.

What is Cursor?
The cursor on your screen can indicate two things: 1) where your mouse pointer is, or 2) where the next character typed will be entered in a line of text. The mouse cursor is most often an arrow that you can use to point to different objects on your screen. When the cursor is over an object, you can click or double-click the mouse button to perform an action on that object (such as opening a program). The mouse cursor can change into other images, such as a small hand (when you roll over a link in a Web page), or an hourglass (when Windows is "thinking" so hard, it won't let you click on anything). The text cursor is typically a straight vertical line or I-shaped object that flashes in a line of text. Typically, when you are typing a paper, the cursor will be at the end of the line, because you are adding new text to the uncharted white area of the page. However, if you want to insert a word or phrase somewhere else in a line of text, you can use the mouse cursor to click the position where you would like to insert the text. In most word processing programs, once you start typing, the text cursor continues to flash, but the mouse pointer disappears until you move the mouse again. This is to avoid "cursor confusion," since most people can't type and click on things at the same time.

What is Cable Modem?

A cable modem is used for connecting to the Internet and is much faster than a typical dial-up modem. While a 56K modem can receive data at about 53 Kbps, cable modems support data transfer rates of up to 30 Mbps. That's over 500 times faster. However, most ISPs limit their subscribers' transfer rates to less than 6 Mbps to conserve bandwidth.

What is CD-ROM?
Stands for "Compact Disc Read-Only Memory." A CD-ROM is a CD that can be read by a computer with an optical drive. The "ROM" part of the term means the data on the disc is "read-only," or cannot altered or erased. Because of this feature and their large capacity, CD-ROMs are a great media format for retail software. The first CD-ROMs could hold about 600 MB of data, but now they can hold up to 700 MB. CD-ROMs share the same technology as audio CDs, but they are formatted differently, allowing them to store many types of data.

What is CSS?
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a computer language used to describe the presentation of a structured document written in HTML,

XHTML or XML. The CSS specification is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

What is Client?
In computing, a client is a system that accesses a (remote) service on another computer by some kind of network. The term was first applied to devices that were not capable of running their own stand-alone programs, but could interact with remote computers via a network. These dumb terminals were clients of the time-sharing mainframe computer.

What is CMOS?
Stands for "Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor." This technology is typically used in making transistors. The "complementary" part of the term unfortunately does not mean these semiconductors are free. Instead, it refers to how they produce either a positive or negative charge. Because CMOS-based transistors only use one charge at a time, they run efficiently, using up very little power. This is because the charges can stay in one state for a long period of time, allowing the transistor to use little or no power except when needed. Because of their wonderful efficiency, processors that use CMOS-based transistors can run at extremely high speeds without getting too hot and going up in flames. You may also find CMOS memory in your computer, which holds the date and time and other basic system settings. The low power consumption of CMOS allows the memory to be powered by a simple Lithium battery for many years.

What is Clock Speed?

Clock speed is the rate at which a processor can complete processing cycles. It is typically measured in Megahertz or Gigahertz. One megahertz is 1 million cycles per second, while one gigahertz is 1 billion cycles per second. This means a 1.8 GHz processor has twice the clock speed of a 900 MHz processor.

What is CD?
Stands for "Compact Disc." CDs are circular discs that are 4.75 in (12 cm) in diameter. The CD standard was proposed by Sony and Philips in 1980 and the technology was introduced to the U.S. market in 1983. CDs can hold up to 700 MB of data or 80 minutes of audio. The data on a CD is stored as small notches on the disc and is read by a laser from an optical drive. The drives translate the notches (which represent 1's and 0's) into usable data.

What is CD-RW?
Stands for "Compact Disc Re-Writable." A CD-RW is a blank CD that can be written to by a CD burner. Unlike a CD-R (CDRecordable), a CD-RW can be written to multiple times. The data burned on a CD-RW cannot be changed, but it can be erased. Therefore, you have to completely erase a CD-RW every time you want to change the files or add new data. While it may be somewhat inconvenient, this capability makes CD-RWs a good choice for making frequent backups. However, because CD-RWs can be erased, they don't store data reliably for as long as CD-Rs do. Therefore, you should use regular CD-Rs for long-term backups.

What is CMYK?
Stands for "Cyan Magenta Yellow Black." These are the four basic colors used for printing color images. Unlike RGB (red, green, blue), which is used for creating images on your computer screen, CMYK colors are "subtractive." This means the colors get darker as you blend them together. Since RGB colors are used for light, not pigments, the colors grow brighter as you blend them or increase their intensity.

What is Compact Flash?

Often abbreviated as simply "CF," Compact Flash is a type of flash memory. Compact flash cards are most commonly used for storing pictures in digital cameras, but are also used in devices such as PDAs and portable music players.

What is Copy?
Many software programs allow you to copy data, such as text in Microsoft Word or an image in Adobe Photoshop. To copy a piece of data, you need to first select it (or highlight it) and choose "Copy" from the Edit menu within the program. Most programs allow you to use the keyboard shortcut "Control-C" for Windows or "Command-C" for the Mac OS. When you copy a piece of data, it is moved to a buffer in the system's memory called the "Clipboard." This is a temporary storage area in your computer's RAM that holds the most recent item that has been copied. Of course, copying isn't very helpful if you can't use the data somewhere else. To insert the copied data into a document, choose "Paste" from the Edit menu and the data will be pasted into the document.

What is Configuration?
In the computing world, when people talk about their computer configuration, they are referring to the technical specifications, or the "tech specs" of their computer. These specs typically include processor speed, the amount of RAM, hard drive space, and the type of video card in the machine. While there are many other advanced specifications that you could list, if you know the four mentioned above, most computer geeks will grant you acceptance into their conversation.

What is CRT?
Stands for "Cathode Ray Tube." CRT is the technology used in traditional computer monitors and televisions. The image on a CRT display is created by firing electrons from the back of the tube to phosphors located towards the front of the display. Once the electrons hit the phosphors, they light up and are projected on the screen. The color you see on the screen is produced by a blend of red, blue, and green light, often referred to as RGB. The stream of electrons is guiding by magnetic charges, which is why you may get interference with unshielded speakers or other magnetic devices that are placed close to a CRT monitor. Flat screen or LCD displays don't have this problem, since they don't require a magnetic charge. LCD monitors also don't use a tube, which is what enables them to be much thinner than CRT monitors. While CRT displays are still used by graphics professionals because of their vibrant and accurate color, LCD displays now nearly match the quality of CRT monitors. Therefore, flat screen displays are well on their way to replacing CRT monitors in both the consumer and professional markets.

What is CTR?
Click Through Ratio (CTR); the ratio of click-throughs to impressions for a given ad run. For example, if a banner has a CTR of 40:1, it means that 1 out of 40 people have clicked on it.

What is Default?
This term is used to describe a preset value for some option in a computer program. It is the value used when a setting has not been specified by the user. For example, the default font setting in Netscape Communicator is "Times." If you don't go to the Netscape preferences and change it to something else, the "Times" font will be used -- by default. Typically, default settings are set to what most people would choose anyway, so there's often no reason to change them. However, if you're one of those people who has to customize everything that you possibly can, then you can go ahead and change all the default settings you want. "Default" can also be used as a verb. If a custom setting won't work for some reason, the program will "default" to the default setting. For example, say you're working on computer that is on a network and you print something when there is no printer specified. If you're lucky and don't get some nasty error message, the print job will default to the default printer and your work will be printed.

What is Delete?
Delete is computer terminology for remove or erase. You can delete text from a document of delete entire files or folders from your hard drive. When typing a document, you can remove characters behind the cursor by pressing the delete key. If you want to remove characters in front of the cursor, you can press the smaller delete key near the home and end buttons on the keyboard. You can also remove entire sections of text by selecting the text you wish to delete and pressing either delete button on the keyboard.

What is Digital?
Digital information is stored using a series of ones and zeros. Computers are digital machines because they can only read information as on or off -- 1 or 0. This method of computation, also known as the binary system, may seem rather simplistic, but can be used to represent incredible amounts of data. CDs and DVDs can be used to store and play back high-quality sound and video even though they consist entirely of ones and zeros.

What is Domain Name?

A domain name is the unique name of a computer on the Internet that distinguishes it from the other systems on the network.

What is DSL?
Stands for "Digital Subscriber Line." It is medium for transferring data over regular phone lines and can be used to connect to the Internet. However, like a cable modem, a DSL circuit is much faster than a regular phone connection, even though the wires it uses are copper like a typical phone line.

What is DVD?
Stands for "Digital Versatile Disc." It can also stand for "Digital Video Disc," but with the mulitple uses of DVDs, the term "Digital Versatile Disc" is more correct. Yep, the technology naming people just love to confuse us. A DVD is a high-capacity optical disc that looks like a CD, but can store much more information. While a CD can store 650 to 700 MB of data, a single-layer, single-sided DVD can store 4.7 GB of data. This enables massive computer applications and full-length movies to be stored on a single DVD.

What is DVD-R?
Stands for "Digital Versatile Disc Recordable." A DVD-R looks the same as a regular DVD, but like a CD-R, it can be used to record data. Once a DVD-R has been "burned," or written to, it cannot be written to again. A basic single-sided, single-layer DVD-R disc can store 4.7GB of data. Double-layer discs can store 8.5GB, while double-sided DVD-Rs can store 9.4GB.

What is DDR?
Stands for "Double Data Rate." It is an advanced version of SDRAM, a type of computer memory. DDR-SDRAM, sometimes called "SDRAM II," can transfer data twice as fast as regular SDRAM chips. This is because DDR memory can send and receive signals

twice per clock cycle. The efficient operation of DDR-SDRAM makes the memory great for notebook computers since it uses up less power.

What is Double Click?

Double clicking involves clicking your mouse button quickly two times. To perform a double click, and not just two clicks, the mouse button must be pressed twice within a very short time, typically about half a second. Most operating systems allow you to lengthen or shorten the maximum time allowed for a double click, using the Mouse Control Panel or System Preference. A double click is recognized by your computer as a specific command, just like pressing a key on your keyboard. Double clicking is used to to perform a variety of actions, such as opening a program, opening a folder, or selecting a word of text. In order to double click an object, just move the cursor over the item and press the left mouse button quickly two times.

What is Driver?
This term usually refers to the person behind the wheel of a moving car. In the computer world, however, a driver is a small file that helps the computer communicates with a certain hardware device. It contains information the computer needs to recognize and control the device. In Windows-based PCs, a driver is often packaged as a dynamic link library, or .dll file. In Macs, most hardware devices don't need drivers, but the ones that do usually come with a software driver in the form of a system extension, or .kext file.

What is DVD+R?
Stands for "Digital Versatile Disc Recordable." DVD+R discs look the same as regular DVDs, but can be used to record data. Singlesided, single-layer DVD+R discs can store 4.7GB of data, while double-layer discs can store 8.5GB and double-sided DVD-Rs can store 9.4GB. The DVD+R format is not quite as common as the DVD-R format, but is still supported by most current DVD players and DVD-ROM drives. Drives that can read both DVD+R and DVD-R discs are often referred to as DVDR drives.

What is DVR?
Stands for "Digital Video Recorder." A DVR is basically a VCR that uses a hard drive instead of video tapes. It can be used to record, save, and play back television programs. Unlike a VCR, however, a DVR can also pause live TV by recording the current show in real time. The user can choose to fast forward (often during commercials) to return to live television.

What is Database?
This is a data structure used to store organized information. A database is typically made up of many linked tables of rows and columns. For example, a company might use a database to store information about their products, their employees, and financial information. Databases are now also used in nearly all e-commerce sites to store product inventory and customer information. Database software, such as Microsoft Access, FileMaker Pro, and MySQL is designed to help companies and individuals organize large amounts of information in a way where the data can be easily searched, sorted, and updated. While the first databases were relatively "flat" (limited to simple rows and columns), today's relational databases allow users to access, update, and search information based on the relationship of data in one database to another. Certain databases even let users store data such as sound clips, pictures, and videos.

What is Dialog Box?

As the name implies, a dialog box serves to initiate a dialog with the user. It is a window that pops up on the screen with options that the user can select. After the selections have been made, the user can typically click "OK" to enter the changes or "Cancel" to discard the selections. It is customary for menu options that include an ellipsis at the end, such as "Preferences..." or "Save As...", to open a dialog box when selected.

What is DIMM?
Stands for "Dual In-Line Memory Module." It is a type of computer memory. A DIMM is a small circuit board that holds memory chips. It uses a 64-bit bus to the memory, whereas a single in-line memory module (SIMM) only has a 32-bit path. This allows DIMMs to transfer more data at once. Because DIMMs have faster data transfer capabilities than SIMMs, they have pretty much replaced SIMMs.

What is DirectX?
DirectX is a set of standard commands and functions that software developers can use when creating their programs. While any Windows-based software program can include DirectX commands, they are usually used in video games. For example, developers may use DirectX for controlling video playback, sound effects, and peripheral input (such as a keyboard, mouse, or joystick). By incorporating DirectX functions into a computer game, programmers can use predefined commands to manage the video and sound of their game, as well as user input. This makes it easier for programmers to develop video games and also helps the games look more uniform, since DirectX games use many of the same commands.

What is Download?
The process of retrieving information from any computer to your computer is called downloading.

What is DVD+RW?

Stands for "Digital Versatile Disk Rewritable." A DVD+RW is like a DVD+R, but can be erased and rewritten. DVD+RWs must be completely erased in order for new data to be added. DVD+RW discs can hold 4.7GB of data and do not come in double-sided or double-layer versions like DVD+Rs do. Still, 4.7GB of data is a lot of storage space. Combined with their ability to be re-recorded, DVD+RWs are a great choice for making frequent backups of your data. To record data onto a DVD+RW disc, you'll need a DVD burner that supports the DVD+RW format.

What is DVD-RW?
Stands for "Digital Versatile Disk Rewritable." A DVD-RW is like a DVD-R but can be erased and written to again. Like CD-RWs, DVD-RWs must be erased in order for new data to be added. DVD-RWs can hold 4.7GB of data and do not come in double-layered or double-sided versions like DVD-Rs do. Because of their large capacity and ability to be used mulitple times, DVD-RW discs are a great solution for frequent backups. To record data onto a DVD-RW disc, you'll need a DVD burner that supports the DVD-RW format.

What is E-commerce?
E-commerce (electronic-commerce) refers to business over the Internet. Web sites such as Amazon.com, Buy.com, and eBay are all ecommerce sites. The two major forms of e-commerce are Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B). While companies like Amazon.com cater mostly to consumers, other companies provide goods and services exclusively to other businesses. The terms "e-business" and "e-tailing" are often used synonymously with e-commerce. They refer to the same idea; they are just used to confuse people trying to learn computer terms.

What is Error 400? Error 400: Bad Request means; the request is incorrect. What is Error 404? Error 404: Not Found means; the requested resource no longer exists or has been moved, or the
address may be misspelled.

What is Error 503? Error 503: Service Unavailable means; the server took too long to answer and the connection timed
out.

What is Error 401? Error 401: Unauthorized means; the client does not have the required privileges to access the site. What is E-mail?
It's hard to remember what our lives were like without e-mail. Ranking up there with the Web as one of the most useful features of the Internet, e-mail has become one of today's standard means of communication. Billions of messages are sent each year. If you're like most people these days, you probably have more than one e-mail address. After all, the more addresses you have, the more sophisticated you look...

What is Ethernet?
Just to be clear, the first syllable is pronounced "eath" as in "Heath Bar," not like "eth" as in Bethany. Some people find this out the hard way (ridiculing laughter), but at least you don't have to. Ethernet is the most common type of connection computers use in a local area network (LAN). An Ethernet port looks much like a regular phone jack, but it is slightly wider. This port can be used to connect your computer to another computer, a local network, or an external DSL or cable modem.

What is End User?

An end user is the person that a software program or hardware device is designed for. The term is based on the idea that the "end goal" of a software or hardware product is to be useful to the consumer. The end user can be contrasted with the developers or programmers of the product. End users are also in a separate group from the installers or administrators of the product. To simplify, the end user is the person who uses the software or hardware after it has been fully developed, marketed, and installed. It is also the person who keeps calling the "IT guy" with questions about why the product isn't working correctly. Generally, the terms "user" and "end user" mean the same thing.

What is Error 403?

Error 403: Forbidden means; the request is forbidden. You don't have an access to enter the site.

What is Error 501?

Error 501: Not Implemented means; the server does not support the service type or the called protocol.

What is File Extension?

A file extension is a suffix at the end of a filename indicating what type of file it is. For example, in the filename "myreport.txt," the .txt part indicates the file is a text document. Some other examples include "Document1.doc," which is a Microsoft Word document, and "Image.psd," which is a Photoshop document. While most file extensions are three characters in length, they can be anywhere from one to five characters long. The extension tells the computer's operating system what program it should use to open the file. It also helps the user see what kind of file a certain document is by just looking at the filename. Both Windows and Mac OS X allow users to change file extensions, which can change

the program the computer uses to open the file. While this may work for some files, it can also cause the file to not open at all. For example, if you change a file with a .txt extension to a .doc extension, Microsoft Word should open it. However, if you change a .txt file to a .psd file, Photoshop will not recognize it.

What is Firewall?
While the term "firewall" creates a powerful visual picture, in reality, it doesn't involve any fire or pyrotechnics. A computer firewall is used to protect a networked server or client machine from damage by unauthorized users. The firewall can be either hardware or software-based. A router is a good example of a hardware device that often has a built-in firewall. Software programs that monitor and restrict external access to a computer can also serve as firewalls. A network firewall allows only certain messages from the Internet to flow in and out of the network. So, I guess in a way it really is like a wall of fire. Well, sort of.

What is Flash?
While "Flash" was the name of a popular superhero in the 1970's, today the term refers to something completely different. When you see the term "Flash" on the Web, it most likely refers to Macromedia's Web animation technology. Flash allows Web developers to incorporate colorful animations with text, shapes, and images into their Web pages. Because the technology is mainly vector-based, Flash animations typically don't take up a lot of disk space. This means large animations can be downloaded relatively quickly. To view Flash content in your Web browser, you need to have the Flash plug-in. Fortunately, it comes standard with most browsers today. If you don't have the Flash plug-in, you can get it directly from Macromedia.

What is Floppy Disk?

Floppy disks have an interesting name, considering they do not appear to be "floppy." However, if you take the actual disk out of the protective casing, you will discover that the disk is, in fact, rather flexible. It is coated with iron oxide and stores data magnetically, just like a hard disk.

What is Format?
In order for storage media, such as a hard drive, to be recognized by your computer, it needs to be formatted. Formatting a disk involves testing the disk and writing a new directory structure, or "address table," onto the disk. If you would like to erase or initialize a hard drive, you can use a disk utility program to reformat it. This will create an blank, empty disk for storing your files. While the disk appears to be empty, most of the files on the disk are actually untouched by the formatting process. When you format a disk, it creates a new address table, making the entire disk available for writing. However, the files are still on the disk -- they just don't show up since the are no longer part of the directory structure. So if you accidentally format a disk (which is pretty hard to do), you can still retrieve most of your files using an advanced disk utility such as Norton Disk Doctor or DiskWarrior.

What is Frames?
Frames is the HTML extension that Netscape developed to divide a page up into several sub-pages.

What is FAT32?
This strange term refers to the way Windows stores data on your hard drive. "FAT" stands for "File Allocation Table," which keeps track of all your files and helps the computer locate them on the disk. Even if a file gets fragmented (split up into various areas on the disk), the file allocation table still can keep track of it. FAT32 is an improvement to the original FAT system, since it uses more bits to identify each cluster on the the disk. This helps the computer locate files easier and allows for smaller clusters, which improves the efficiency of your hard disk. FAT32 supports up to 2 terabytes of hard disk storage. Unless you are a serious power user, that should be more than enough space for you.

What is File System?

Most people have several thousand files on their computer's hard disk, so imagine how hard it would be to find anything if the files were not organized. Fortunately, all hard drives use a file system, which organizes all the files on the disk. The file system is created when you initialize or format your hard disk. It sets up the root directory and subsequent directories beneath it. The file system allows you to add new files and folders, which are added to different parts of the "file tree" on your hard disk.

What is Firewire?
This high-speed interface has become a hot new standard for connecting peripherals (no pun intended). Created by Apple Computer in the mid-1990's, Firewire can be used to connect devices such as digital video cameras, hard drives, audio interfaces, and MP3 players, such as the Apple iPod, to your computer. A standard Firewire connection can transfer data at 400 Mbps, which is roughly 30 times faster than USB 1.1. This blazing speed allows for quick transfers of large video files, which is great for video-editing professionals. If 400 Mbps is still not fast enough, Apple Computer released new PowerMacs with Firewire 800 ports in early 2003. These ports support data transfer rates of 800 Mbps -- twice the speed of the original Firewire standard.

What is Flash memory

Flash memory is a type of electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM). Whew, that's a mouthful. The name comes from how the memory is designed -- a section of memory cells can be erased in a single action or in a "flash." A common use of flash memory is to store the BIOS settings in a computer's ROM. When the BIOS needs to be changed, the flash memory can be written in blocks, rather than bytes, making it easy to update. Most modems use flash memory for the same reason. Though flash memory was orginally used inside computers, it has invaded many other areas outside the box. Flash memory cards used for digital cameras, cellular phones, networking hardware, and PC cards. Though the memory's read/write speed is not lightning fast, it is nice to be able to tote around a little card rather than a cumbersome hard drive

What is Folder?
Just like real world folders, folders on your hard drive store files. These files can be documents, programs, scripts, libraries, and any other kind of computer file you can think of. Folders can also store other folders, which may store more files or other folders, and so on. Folders allow people to organize their files in a way that makes sense to them. For example, a college student might store all her photos in a folder named "Pictures," all her papers in a folder named "School Work," and all her financial information (including the tens of thousands of dollars in student loans) in a folder named "Finances." All these folders might reside within a folder called "My Documents."

What is FTP?
The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a software standard for transferring computer files between machines with widely different operating systems. It belongs to the application layer of the Internet protocol suite..

What is File?
A file is a collection of data stored in one unit, under a filename. This can be a document, a picture, an audio or video file, a library, an application, or other collection of data. Documents include text files, such as a Word documents, RTF (Rich Text Format) documents, PDFs, Web pages, and others. Pictures include JPEGs, GIFs, BMPs, and layered image files, such as Photoshop documents (PSDs). Audio files include MP3s, AACs, WAVs, AIFs, and several others. Video files can be MPEG, MOV, WMV, or DV files, just to name a few.

What is Font?
A font is a specific typeface of a certain size and style. For example, one font may be Arial 12 pt bold, while another font may be Times New Roman 14 pt italic. Most word processing programs have a Font menu that allows you to choose the typeface, size, and style of the text. In order to use a font, you must have it installed on your computer. Windows provides access to fonts using the Fonts control panel. The Mac OS stores fonts in a Fonts folder and includes a separate "Font Book" application for managing fonts.

What is Gateway?
A gateway is either hardware or software that acts as a bridge between two networks so that data can be transferred between a number of computers. For example, when you send an e-mail to a friend or when you log in to a Web site, there is a gateway that allows the connection take place. Often, your connection to a Web site will involve many smaller connections to other servers along the way. In these cases, a number of gateways are used.

What is GIF?
Graphics Interchange Format, this is a type of graphic image very common on online services and the Internet.

What is GPU?
Stands for "Graphics Processing Unit." Like the CPU (Central Processing Unit), it is a single-chip processor. However, the GPU is used primarily for computing 3D functions. This includes things such as lighting effects, object transformations, and 3D motion. Because these types of calculations are rather taxing on the CPU, the GPU can help the computer run more effienciently.

What is Gigabyte?
A gigabyte is a measure of computer memory or disk space consisting of about one billion bytes (a thousand megabytes). The actual value is 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024 megabytes).

What is GUI?
Stands for "Graphical User Interface," and is pronounced "gooey." It refers to the graphical interface of a computer that allows users to click and drag objects with a mouse instead of entering text at a command line. Two of the most popular operating systems, Windows and the Mac OS, are GUI-based. The graphical user interface was first introduced to the public by Apple with the Macintosh in 1984. However, the idea was actually taken from an earlier user interface developed by Xerox.

What is Gibibyte?
A gibibyte is a unit of data storage that equals 2 to the 30th power, or 1,073,741,824 bytes.

While a gigabyte can be estimated as 10^9 or 1,000,000,000 bytes, a gibibyte is exactly 1,073,741,824 bytes. This is to avoid the ambiguity associated with the size of gigabytes. A gigibyte is 1,024 mebibytes and precedes the tebibyte unit of measurement.

What is Hard Disk?

When you save data or install programs on your computer, the information is typically written to your hard disk. The hard disk is a spindle of magnetic disks, called platters, that record and store information. Because the data is stored magnetically, information recorded to the hard disk remains intact after you turn your computer off. This is an important distinction between the hard disk and RAM, or memory, which is reset when the computer's power is turned off.

What is Hacker?
While this term originally referred to a clever or expert programmer, it is now more commonly used to refer to someone who can gain unauthorized access to other computers. A hacker can "hack" his or her way through the security levels of a computer system or network. This can be as simple as figuring out somebody else's password or as complex as writing a custom program to break another computer's security software. Hackers are the reason software manufacturers release periodic "security updates" to their programs. While it is unlikely that the average person will get "hacked," some large businesses and organizations receive multiple hacking attempts a day.

What is HTTPS?
HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, the communication protocol of the World Wide Web. It was invented by Netscape Communications Corporation to provide authentication and encrypted communication and is used in electronic commerce.

What is Hyperlink?
A hyperlink, or simply a link, is a reference in a hypertext document to another document or other resource. As such it would be similar to a citation in literature. However, combined with a data network and suitable access protocol, it can be used to fetch the resource referenced. This can then be saved, viewed, or displayed as part of the referencing document.

What is Hard Drive?

The hard drive is what stores all you data. It houses the hard disk, where all your files and folders are physically located. A typical hard drive is only slightly larger than your hand, yet can hold over 100 GB of data. The data is stored on a stack of disks that are mounted inside a solid encasement. These disks spin extremely fast (typically at either 5400 or 7200 RPM) so that data can be accessed immediately from anywhere on the drive. The data is stored on the hard drive magnetically, so it stays on the drive even after the power supply is turned off.

What is HTML?
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages and other information viewable in a browser.

What is Hub?
This is a hardware device that is used to network multiple computers together. It is a central connection for all the computers in a network, which is usually Ethernet-based. Information sent to the hub can flow to any other computer on the network. If you need to connect more than two computers together, a hub will allow you to do so. If you only need to network two computers together, a simple crossover Ethernet cable will do the trick.

What is Hypertext?
Hypertext is a user interface paradigm for displaying documents which contain automated cross-references to other documents called hyperlinks. Selecting a hyperlink causes the computer to display the linked document within a very short period of time.

What is HTTP?
HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is the primary method used to convey information on the World Wide Web. The original purpose was to provide a way to publish and receive HTML pages.

What is Hyper-Threading?
Hyper-threading is a technology developed by Intel Corporation. It is used in certain Pentium 4 processors and all Intel Xeon processors. Hyper-threading technology, commonly referred to as "HT Technology," enables the processor to execute two threads, or sets of instructions, at the same time. Since hyper-threading allows two streams to be executed in parallel, it is almost like having two separate processors working together.

What is Install?
Most software programs require that you first install them on your computer before using them. For example, if you buy Microsoft Office, you need to install it on your computer before you can run any of the included programs such as Word or Excel. You can install software from a CD or DVD, an external hard drive, or from a networked computer. You can also install a program or software update from a file downloaded from the Internet. Installing a software program writes the necessary data for running the program on your hard drive. Often the installer program will

decompress the data included with the installer immediately before writing the information to your hard drive. Software updates, which are typically downloaded from the Internet, work the same way. When you run the update, the installer file decompresses the data and then updates the correct program or operating system.

What is Intranet?
Contrary to popular belief, this is not simply a misspelling of "Internet." "Intra" means "internal" or "within," so an Intranet is an internal or private network that can only be accessed within the confines of a company, university, or organization. "Inter" means "between or among," hence the difference between the Internet and an Intranet.

What is IP Address?
An IP address is a unique number, akin to a telephone number, used by machines (usually computers) to refer to each other when sending information through the Internet using the Internet Protocol. This allows machines passing the information onwards on behalf of the sender to know where to send it next, and for the machine receiving the information to know that it is the intended destination.

What is Icon?
Ever since the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, icons have been the way we view files on computers. An icon on your computer screen represents an object or a program on your hard drive. For example, the folders you see on your desktop or in open windows are icons. The files that you see in those folders are also icons. The trash can on the Macintosh and the recycle bin on Windows are both icons as well.

What is Image Map?

In HTML, a list of co-ordinates relating to a specific image, created in order to hyperlink areas of the image to various destinations. For example, a map of the world may have each country hyperlinked to further information about that country. The intention of an image map is to provide an easy way of linking various parts of an image without resorting to dividing the image into separate parts.

What is ISP?
An Internet Service Provider (ISP) is a business or organization that offers users access to the Internet and related services. Most telecommunications operators are ISPs. They provide services like internet transit, domain name registration and hosting, dial-up access, leased line access and colocation.

What is ISA?
Stands for "Industry Standard Architecture." ISA is a type of bus used in PCs for adding expansion cards. For example, an ISA slot may be used to add a video card, a network card, or an extra serial port. The original 8-bit version of PCI uses a 62 pin connection and supports clock speeds of 8 and 33 MHz. 16-bit PCI uses 98 pins and supports the same clock speeds.

What is ICS?
Stands for "Internet Connection Sharing." ICS allows multiple computers to connect to the Internet using the same Internet connection and IP address. For example, several computers in a household can connect to same cable or DSL modem using a router. As long as the router is connected to the modem, every computer connected to the router is also connected to the Internet. Network address translation (NAT) allows the computers to share the same IP address.

What is ICS?
Stands for "Internet Connection Sharing." ICS allows multiple computers to connect to the Internet using the same Internet connection and IP address. For example, several computers in a household can connect to same cable or DSL modem using a router. As long as the router is connected to the modem, every computer connected to the router is also connected to the Internet. Network address translation (NAT) allows the computers to share the same IP address.

What is IT?
Stands for "Information Technology," and is pronounced "I.T." It refers to anything related to computing technology, such as networking, hardware, software, the Internet, or the people that work with these technologies. Many companies now have IT departments for managing the computers, networks, and other technical areas of their businesses. IT jobs include computer programming, network administration, computer engineering, Web development, technical support, and many other related occupations. Since we live in the "information age," information technology has become a part of our everyday lives. That means the term "IT," already highly overused, is here to stay.

What is Java?
Java is an object-oriented programming language developed primarily by James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems. The language, initially called Oak (named after the oak trees outside Gosling's office), was intended to replace C++, although the feature set better resembles that of Objective C.

What is JavaScript?
JavaScript, often mistyped as "Javascript", is an object-oriented scripting language based on the concept of prototypes. The language is most well known for its use in websites. It was originally developed by Brendan Eich of Netscape Communications under the name

Mocha and then LiveScript but then renamed to "JavaScript". JavaScript has a syntax close to that of Sun Microsystems Java language. But beside name and syntax the language has more in common with Self than with Java. JavaScript was first standardized in 19971999 by ECMA under the name ECMAScript. The standard (as of December 1999) is ECMA-262 Edition 3, and corresponds to JavaScript 1.5. This is also now an ISO 16262 standard.

hat is Jumper?
This is a small metal connector that acts as an on/off switch and is used to alter hardware configurations. A jumper is typically made of two wires and a small piece of metal. When the wires are connected by the metal piece, the jumper is turned on, completing the circuit. When the wires are disconnected, the jumper is turned off. Mulitple jumpers, referred to collectively as a jumper block, are often used to tell the computer how a certain device, such as a hard drive or a modem, is configured. They can be found on motherboards, sound cards, graphics cards, I/O cards, CD-ROM interface boards, modems, and hard drive controller boards, and others.

What is JPEG?
Joint Photograhic Experts Group - a common image format. Art and photographic pictures are usually encoded as JPEG files.

What is Kbps?
Stands for "Kilobits Per Second." Don't confuse this with Kilobytes per second (which is 8 times more data per second). This term is commonly used in describing data transfer rates. For example, two common modem speeds are 33.6 Kbps and 56 Kbps.

What is Kernel?
This is a term for the computing elite, so proceed at your own risk. To understand what a kernel is, you first need to know that today's operating systems are built in "layers." Each layer has different functions such as serial port access, disk access, memory management, and the user interface itself. The base layer, or the foundation of the operating system, is called the kernel. The kernel provides the most basic "low-level" services, such as the hardware-software interaction and memory management. The more efficient the kernel is, the more efficiently the operating system will run.

What is Keyword?
A word searched for in a search command. Keywords are searched in any order. Use spaces to separate keywords in simple keyword searching.

What is Kibibyte?
A kibibyte is a unit of data storage that equals 2 to the 10th power, or 1,024 bytes. While a kilobyte can be estimated as 10^3 or 1,000 bytes, a kibibyte is exactly 1,024 bytes. This is to avoid the ambiguity associated with the size of kilobytes. A kibibyte is 1,024 bytes and precedes the mebibyte unit of measurement.

What is Keyboard?
As the name implies, a keyboard is basically a board of keys. Along with the mouse, the keyboard is one of the primary input devices used with a computer. The keyboard's design comes from the original typewriter keyboards, which arranged letters and numbers in a way that prevented the type-bars from getting jammed when typing quickly. This keyboard layout is known as the QWERTY design, which gets its name from the first six letters across in the upper-left-hand corner of the keyboard.

What is Kilobyte?
A kilobyte is 2 to the 10th power, or 1,024 bytes. "But doesn't 'kilo' means one thousand?" you ask. Well yes, but in the computer world, certain rules and guidelines don't have the same influence they do in other areas of life. Just ask any computer programmer. A kilobyte is technically 1,024 bytes because it is measured by 2^10, which equals 1,024. However, kilobytes are often estimated as 10 to the 3rd power, or 1,000 bytes. While this makes it easier to add kilobytes together, estimating can throw off larger measurements. This is because 1,024 kilobytes equal one megabyte, 1,024 megabytes equal one gigabyte, and so on. Most small files on your computer are measured in kilobytes. For example, thumbnail images might use only 5 to 10KB of space. A larger 900x600 pixel JPEG image can take up 250KB of space. Text files are often less than 1KB. Most documents you save on your computer should be between 1 and 1,024KB. Anything larger than 1,024KB is measured in megabytes.

What is LAN?
LANs are typically high speed networks that connect computers, printers and other network devices together.

What is Link?
When you are browsing the Web and you see a highlighted and underlined word or phrase on a page, there is a good chance you are looking at a link. By clicking on a link, you can "jump" to a new Web page or a completely different Web site. While text links are typically blue and underlined, they can be any color and don't have to be underlined. Images can also serve as links to other Web

pages. When you move the cursor over a link in a Web page, the arrow will turn into a little hand, letting you know that it is a link. The term "hypertext" comes from the way links can quickly send you to another Web destination.

What is LCD?
Stands for "Liquid Crystal Display." LCDs are super-thin displays that are used in laptop computer screens and flat panel monitors. Smaller LCDs are used in handheld TVs, PDAs, and portable video game devices. The image on an LCD screen is created by sandwiching an electrically reactive substance between two electrodes. This color of this substance can be changed by increasing or reducing the electrical current. Since LCD screens are based on the principle of blocking light (rather than emitting it), they use up much less power than standard CRT (Cathode-Ray Tube) monitors.

What is Macintosh?
This is the name of the computers that are made by Apple Computer. The first Macintosh was introduced in 1984 and was seen as a major innovation in computing ease-of-use. The Macintosh was the first personal computer to use a graphical user interface (GUI), which allowed the user to interact with the operating system by using a mouse to click and drag objects. Since 1984, Apple has continually revised and upgraded the Macintosh product line and now makes both laptop and desktop versions of the Macintosh. The Macintosh product line includes the following models:

Power Mac - a high-performance desktop computer for professionals PowerBook - a high-performance laptop computer for professionals. iMac - a creatively designed consumer desktop computer iBook - a laptop computer for students and home users eMac - an all-in-one desktop computer for educators and entry-level consumers Mac mini - a super-small, fully functional computer sold without a monitor, keyboard, or mouse

What is Name Server?

A name server translates domain names into IP addresses. This makes it possible for a user to access a website by typing in the domain name instead of the website's actual IP address. For example, when you type in "www.microsoft.com," the request gets sent to Microsoft's name server which returns the IP address of the Microsoft website. Each domain name must have at least two name servers listed when the domain is registered. These name servers are commonly named ns1.servername.com and ns2.servername.com, where "servername" is the name of the server. The first server listed is the primary server, while the second is used as a backup server if the first server is not responding.

What is NTFS?
Stands for "New Technology File System." NTFS is a file system introduced by Microsoft with Windows NT and is supported by subsequent versions of Windows, such as Windows 2000 and Windows XP. (The file system is how the operating system organizes and accesses files on the hard drive.) NTFS has a number of advantages over the older file system, named FAT, or file allocation table. One major advantage of NTFS is that it incorporates features to improve reliablity. For exmaple, the new technology file system includes fault tolerance, which repairs hard drive errors without displaying error messages. It keeps detailed transaction logs, which tracks hard drive errors. This can help prevent hard disk failure as well as make it possible to recover files if the hard drive does fail.

What is Nybble?
A nybble, sometimes spelled "nibble," is a set of four bits. Since there are eight bits in a byte, a nybble is half of one byte. While it may take the average person several nibbles to equal one bite of a cookie, in the computer world, two nybbles always equal one byte. The four bits in a nibble allow it to have 16 possible values, which is the same as one hexadecimal digit. Therefore, a nybble is sometimes referred to as a "hex digit." In data communications, nybbles are sometimes called "quadbits," because of the four bits that make up each nybble.

What is Network?
A set of computers linked to one another for data sharing, or the link itself.

What is Online?
In general, when a machine is "online," it is turned on and connected to other devices. For example, when a network printer is online, computers connected to that network can print from it. Other devices, such as scanners, video cameras, audio interfaces, and others are said to be online when they are running and connected to a computer system.

What is Offline?

When a computer or other device is not turned on or connected to other devices, it is said to be "offline." This is the opposite of being "online," when a device can readily communicate with other devices. For example, if you try to print to your printer and you get one of those frustrating errors saying, "The specified printer could not be found," the printer is probably offline. You should check to see if the printer is connected properly and, yes, turned on as well.

What is Operating system?

The master control program that runs the computer. It is the first program loaded when the computer is turned on, and its main part, called the kernel, resides in memory at all times.

What is Optical Drive?

In the real world, "optical" refers to vision, or the ability to see. In the computer world, however, "optical" refers to lasers, which can "see" and read data on optical discs. These discs include CDs and DVDs, which are made up of millions of small bumps and dips. Optical drives have lasers that read these bumps and dips as ones and zeros, which the computer can understand.

What is Password?
A password is a string of characters used for authenticating a user on a computer system. For example, you may have an account on your computer that requires you to log in. In order to successfully access your account, you must provide a valid username and password. This combination is often referred to as a login. While usernames are generally public information, passwords are private to each user. Most passwords are comprised of several characters, which can typically include letters, numbers, and most symbols, but not spaces. While it is good to choose a password that is easy to remember, you should not make it so simple that others can guess it. The most secure passwords use a combination of letters and numbers and don not contain actual words.

What is Parallel Port?

This interface is found on the back of older PCs and is used for connecting external devices such as printers or a scanners. It uses a 25pin connector (DB-25) and is rather large compared to most new interfaces. The parallel port is sometimes called a Centronics interface, since Centronics was the company that designed the original parallel port standard. It is sometimes also referred to as a printer port because the printer is the device most commonly attached to the parallel port. The latest parallel port standard, which supports the same connectors as the Centronics interface, is called the Enhanced Parallel Port (EPP). This standard supports bidirectional communication and can transfer data up to ten times faster than the original Centronics port. However, since the parallel port is a rather dated technology, don't be surprised to see USB or Firewire interfaces completely replace parallel ports in the future.

What is Power User?

When it comes to computers, there are regular users and there are power users. Most people fall into the regular computer user category. These types of people use their computers for basic functions like Web browsing, sending e-mails, typing papers, working with spreadsheets, doing finances, and playing games. Regular computer users can typically get by with a middle-of-the-line computer that is fast enough to do their everyday work. Power users, however, require top-of-the-line machines that are optimized for their work purposes. Power users include video-editing professionals, high-end graphic designers, audio producers, and those who use their computers for scientific research. Professional gamers (yes, there is such a thing) also fall under this category. These users seek the latest and greatest systems because no computer is really "fast enough" to suit their needs. Even the fastest computers can take substantial time to render large amounts of video and audio or to manipulate large images. Gamers want machines that will play their games in as many frames per second (FPS) as possible. So, to be a power user means to never be really satisfied with your system, but to always want something faster and better. Then again, that sounds like most of us, but power users usally have justifiable reasons.

What is Process?
A process is a program that is running on your computer. This can be anything from a small background task, such as a spell-checker or system events handler to a full-blown application like Internet Explorer or Microsoft Word. All processes are composed of one or more threads. Since most operating systems have many background tasks running, your computer is likely to have many more processes running than actual programs. For example, you may only have three programs running, but there may be twenty active processes. You can view active processes in Windows by opening the Task Manager (press Ctrl-Alt-Delete and click Task Manager). On a Mac, you can see active processes by opening Activity Monitor (in the Applications->Utilities folder). The term "process" can also be used as a verb, which means to perform a series of operations on a set of data. For example, your computer's CPU processes information sent to it by various programs.

What is PPL?

Pay per lead, or PPL, is an ad pricing structure by which the advertiser pays the publisher according to how many leads are generated by an ad, often determined by information submitted directly into the banner ad.

What is Proxy Server?

Most large businesses, organizations, and universities these days use a proxy server. This is a server that all computers on the local network have to go through before accessing information on the Internet. By using a proxy server, an organization can improve the network performance and filter what users connected to the network can access. A proxy server improves Internet access speeds from a network primarily by using a caching system. Caching saves recently viewed Web sites, images, and files on a local hard drive so that they don't have to be downloaded from the Web again. While your Web browser might save recently viewed items on your computer, a proxy server caches everything accessed from the network. That means if Bob views a news story at cnn.com at 1:00 and Jill views the same page at 1:03, she'll most likely get the page straight from the proxy server's cache. Though this means super-fast access to Web pages, it also means users might not be seeing the latest update of each Web page. The other main purpose a proxy server is to filter what is allowed into the network. While HTTP, FTP, and Secure protocols can all be filtered by a proxy server, HTTP is the most common. The proxy server can limit what Web sites users on the network can access. Many organizations choose to block access to sites with objectionable material such as hacking information and pornography, but other sites can be filtered as well. If an employer notices workers are spending too much time at sites like eBay or Quicken.com, those sites can be blocked by the proxy server as well.

What is Paste?
Just like you can paste a note on a sheet of paper, you can paste data into a document on a computer. The paste function can be used to paste copied data into text documents, images, Web browser address fields, and just about any place where you can enter data. However, to paste data, you first need to copy it to the "Clipboard," which is a temporary storage area in your system's memory, or RAM. This is done by first selecting the data you want to copy and then choosing "Copy" from the program's Edit menu. Once you have data copied to the Clipboard, you can paste it within the same document or within a different document in the same program. You can even paste copied data into a document within a different program. However, you can typically only paste data into a document with the same kind of data. For example, you cannot paste an image into your Web browser's address field or an audio file into image editing program.

What is PDF?
Stands for "Portable Document Format." PDF is a multi-platform file format developed by Adobe Systems. A PDF file captures document text, fonts, images, and even formatting of documents from a variety of applications. You can e-mail a PDF document to your friend and it will look the same way on his screen as it looks on yours, even if he has a Mac and you have a PC. Since PDFs contain color-accurate information, they should also print the same way they look on your screen. To view a PDF file, you need Adobe Reader, a free application program distributed by Adobe Systems. Adobe also makes an Acrobat Plug-in for Web browsers that enables PDF files to be viewed inside a browser window. For more information on PDFs, visit Abobe's PDF Page.

What is PCI?
Stands for "Peripheral Component Interconnect." It is a hardware bus designed by Intel and used in both PCs and Macs. Most add-on cards such as SCSI, Firewire, and USB controllers, use a PCI connection. Some graphics cards use PCI, but most new graphics cards connect to the AGP slot. PCI slots are found in the back of your computer and are about 3.5" long and about 0.5" high. So before you go buy that Firewire expansion card, make sure you have at least one PCI slot available.

What is Plain Text?

Text documents come in to flavors - "rich text" and "plain text." Plain text, as you might have guessed, is rather plain. While it supports standard ASCII characters, including numbers, symbols, and spaces, it does not support any type of text formatting. Therefore you cannot use bold, italics, underlining, or different font sizes in a plain text document. Because plain text does not contain information about text sizes or styles, it is the most efficient way to store text. Plain text documents often take up less than half the size of rich text documents containing the same number of characters. You can use a basic text editor such as Windows Notepad to create a plain text document. If you want to copy text from a formatted document without copying the style, you can also use Notepad. Just copy the text from the original document, paste it into Notepad, then copy it again. The unformatted text will be copied from Notepad to your clipboard. The next time you paste the text, it will be pasted as plain text.

What is Protocol?

When computers communicate with each other, there needs to be a common set of rules and instructions that each computer follows. A specific set of communication rules is called a protocol. Because of the many ways computers can communicate with each other, there are many different protocols -- too many for the average person to remember. Some examples of these different protocols include PPP, TCP/IP, SLIP, HTTP, and FTP. Can you guess what the last "P" in each acronym stands for? If you guessed "protocol," send yourself a congratulations e-mail.

What is QuickTime?
This is a multimedia technology developed by our friends at Apple Computer. It is a popular format for creating and storing sound, graphics, and movie (.mov) files. Though it is an Apple technology, QuickTime software is available for both the Mac and the PC.

What is Query? An object that requests information from a database and creates a dataset of the requested information What is Runtime? When a program is running, or executing, it is said to be in runtime. The term is mostly used by
software developers to specify when errors in a program occur. A "runtime error" is an error that happens while the program is executing. For example, if a program told you that 2 + 2 was 5000, that would be a runtime error. A memory leak, where the program sucks up excessive amounts of system memory is also a runtime error. The other major type of program error is a compile-time error, where the application will not even compile into an executable program. Examples of compile-time errors are syntax errors in the program code and file linking errors. Runtime is a good term to know, but you most likely won't hear it used very often unless you like to hang out with computer nerds.

What is Router? This is a hardware device that routes data (hence the name) from a local area network (LAN) to another
network connection. A router acts like a coin sorting machine, allowing only authorized machines to connect to other computer systems. Most routers also keep log files about the local network activity.

What is Right Click? Most computer mice have at least two mouse buttons. When you press the left one, it is called a
left click. When you press the one on the right, it is called a right click. By default, the left button is the main mouse button, and is used for common tasks such as selecting objects and double-clicking. The right mouse button is often used to open contextual menus, which are pop-up menus that change depending where you click. For example, if you right click on the desktop, you may see a menu pop up that includes "Change View Options" and "Change Desktop Background." If you right click on a folder, the menu might include options such as "Open" and "Properties." Certain programs, such as video games, may use the right click to perform other functions, such as firing a secondary weapon in a first-person shooter. Most programs, however, use the right click to open contextual menus.

What is Resolution? This term can describe either how many pixels a monitor can display or how fine a printer can
print. 1. Monitors. A small monitor may have a resolution or 640 x 480, which means there are 640 pixels horizontally across the screen and 480 pixels vertically. Some other common monitor resolutions are 800 x 600, 1,024 x 768, and 1,280 x 1,024. The higher the resolution, the more that can be displayed on the screen. 2. Printers. Printer resolution measures how fine a printer can print. This measurement is known as dots per inch, or "dpi." The greater the dpi, the better the image clarity. Scanner resolution is also measured in dpi.

What is Registry? This is a database used by Microsoft Windows to store configuration information about the software
installed on a computer. This information includes things like the desktop background, program settings, and file extension associations. The Windows registry consists of the following six parts: HKEY_User - contains the user information for each user of the system. HKEY_Current_User - has all the preferences for the current user. HKEY_Current_Configuration - stores settings for the display and printers. HKEY_Classes_Root - includes file associations and OLE information. HKEY_Local_Machine - has the settings for the hardware, operating system, and installed applications. HKEY_Dyn_Data - includes performance data. When you install a program, it will usually write some data to the computer's registry. If you want to manually edit the registry for some reason, you can use the "regedit.exe" program, which comes with the Windows operating system. However, you should not edit the registry if you don't know what you're doing because it could disable your computer.

What is Readme? A readme file, often named "READ ME" to get the user's attention, is a text file containing useful
information about a software program. It often accompanies the program's installer or is installed with the program. A typical readme file contains instructions on how to install the program, how to use the basic functions of the program, and what the program does. It

may also include a list of recent updates made to the program. Sometimes the readme file will include warnings and other important notices regarding the operation of the program. So when you see a readme file accompanying a new software program, it is best to do what the file says and read it!

What is RAM? Stands for "Random Access Memory," and is pronounced like the male sheep. RAM is made up of small
memory chips that are connected to the motherboard of your computer. Everytime you open a program, it gets loaded from the hard drive into the RAM. This is because reading data from the RAM is much faster than reading data from the hard drive. Running programs from the RAM of the computer allows them to function without any lag time. The more RAM your computer has, the more data can be loaded from the hard drive into the RAM, which can help speed up your computer. In fact, adding RAM can be more beneficial to your computer's performance than upgrading the CPU.

What is Raw File? A raw file is a collection of unprocessed data. This means the file has not been altered, compressed,
or manipulated in any way by the computer. Raw files are often used as data files by software programs that load and process the data. A popular type of raw file is "Camera RAW," which is generated by a digital camera. Instead of processing the image captured by the camera, the data is left unprocessed and uncompressed until it is opened with a computer program. Stands for "Red Green Blue." It refers to the three hues of light (red, green, and blue, for those of you that are a little slow), that can mix together to form any color. When the highest intensity of each color is mixed together, white light is created. When each hue is set to zero intensity, the result is black. TVs and computer monitors use RGB to create the colorful images you see on the screen. In print, however, the 4 colors -- cyan, yellow, magenta, and black (CYMK) -- are used to create color images.

What is RGB?

What is Remote Access? Remote access is just what it sounds like -- the ability to access your computer from a
remote location. Programs like PC Anywhere (Windows), Remote Access (Mac), and Timbuktu (Windows and Mac) allow users to control remote computers from their local machine. In order for a remote access connection to take place, the local machine must have the remote client software installed and the remote machine must have the remote server software installed. Also, a username and password is almost always required to authenticate the connecting user. Remote access is more than just being able to connect to a remote machine -- it is the ability to control the machine once the connection has been made. A remote access program can basically transform your local computer into the the remote computer you connect to. This is great for people who sometimes work from home and for server administrators who frequently need to update and make changes on their server machines. Most remote access programs also allow users to transfer files between the local and remote machines, which can save a lot of commuting time. While remote access can be helpful for many people, don't enable it on your machine unless you absolutely need to. It is just one more security concern you will have to deal with.

What is ROM? Stands for "Read-Only Memory." Please do not confuse this term with RAM or a hard drive, as many
people already do. ROM is memory containing hardwired instructions that the computer uses when it boots up, before the system software loads. In PCs, the instructions are read from a small program in the ROM, called the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System)

What is Remote User? A "remote user" is how a woman might refer to her husband while he is watching TV. In the
computer world, however, a remote user is someone who works on a computer from a remote location. For example, if Bob leaves work and forgets to bring a file with him from his office computer, he might be able to connect to his work machine from his home computer and grab the file. When Bob accesses his office computer from home, he is considered a remote user. Of course, Bob does not want anyone to be able to access his computer remotely. So, he would most likely need to enter a username and password in order to connect to his office machine. Programs like Timbuktu and PC Anywhere allow users to not only connect to their computers remotely, but actually display the interface of the remote machine on their local computer. Unix-based systems such as Mac OS X and Linux allow users to control the computers remotely using the text-based "Terminal" interface. Remote connections can be made over a local network, a direct phone connection, or over the Internet. Of course, the slower the connection, the slower the response time will be from the remote computer.

What is Root? This computer term actually has nothing to do with trees or root beer. Instead, it is commonly used in
reference to a computer's directory structure. The root directory is the top-level directory of a file system. For example, on a Windowsbased PC, "C:\" would be the root directory of the C drive. On a Web server, the root directory is usually designated by just a forward slash ("/ "). So, on a Unix system, you would type "cd /" (change directory to root) to go to the root directory. Root is also the name of the user who has complete administrative privleges on a Unix or Linux server. While most users can only access their own directory (i.e. "/www/users/~fred/"), the root user can access any folder from the root directory down. This allows the root user to make system changes such as modifying the permissions of other users without telling them.

What is Rich Text? Rich text is more exciting than plain text. It supports text formatting, such as bold, italics, and
underlining, as well as different fonts, font sizes, and colored text. Rich text documents can also include page formatting options, such as custom page margins, line spacing, and tab widths. Most word processors, such as Microsoft Word, Lotus Word Pro, and AppleWorks, create rich text documents. However, if you save a document in a program's native format, it may only open with the program that created it. For example, Lotus Word Pro will not be

able to open an AppleWorks text document, even though both programs are text editors. This is because each program uses its own method of formatting and creating text files. The good news is, most word processors allow you to save rich text documents in the generic Rich Text Format. This file format, which uses the .RTF extension keeps most, if not all the text formatting. However, because it is a standard format, it can be opened by just about any word processing program and even most basic text editors.

What is Server? Server is a computer software application that carries out some task on behalf of users. This is usually
divided into file serving, allowing users to store and access files on a common computer; and application serving, where the software runs a computer program to carry out some task for the users. This is the original meaning of the term. Web, mail, and database servers are what most people access when using the internet.

What is Safe Mode? Safe Mode is a way for the Windows operating system to run with the minimum system files
necessary. It uses a generic VGA display driver instead of the vendor-specific driver, which means you will likely be working with only 16 colors in a resolution of 640x480. Safe Mode also turns off all third-party drivers for other peripherals such as mice, keyboards, printers, and scanners. In basic Safe Mode, networking files and settings are not loaded, meaning you won't be able to connect to the Internet or other computers on a network. So why would I ever want to boot in Safe Mode? Well, that's a good question. Sometimes, Windows may not fully load after an unexpected crash and the only way to get the computer to boot is to use Safe Mode. Once you have successfully booted the computer in Safe Mode, you can run a disk utility program to repair corrupted files or directories on the hard drive. You can also reboot into Safe Mode to see your display when you get a "Sync Out of Range" message on your screen. There may also be times when your computer is performing sluggishly and becomes annoyingly slow. Booting into Safe Mode will allow you to diagnose the problem and determine which files are slowing down the computer. When calling technical support, the support person may ask you to boot into Safe Mode to begin the troubleshooting. To boot your Windows computer into Safe Mode, hold down the F8 key while the computer is starting up. Then select Safe Mode from the list of boot options.

What is SQL? Structured Query Language (SQL) is the most popular computer language used to create, modify and query
databases.

What is Switch? A switch is used to network multiple computers together. Switches made for the consumer market are
typically small, flat boxes with 4 to 8 Ethernet ports. These ports can connect to computers, cable or DSL modems, and other switches. High-end switches can have more than 50 ports and often are rack mounted. Switches are more advanced than hubs and less capable than routers. Unlike hubs, switches can limit the traffic to and from each port so that each device connected to the switch has a sufficient amount of bandwidth. For this reason, you can think of a switch as a "smart hub." However, switches don't provide the firewall and logging capabilities that routers do. Routers can often be configured by software (typically via a Web interface), while switches only work the way the hardware was designed. The term "switch" can also be used to refer to a small lever or button on computer hardware. And while it has nothing to do with computers, "riding switch" means riding backwards in skateboarding and snowboarding.

What is System Resources? Your computer has many types of resources. They include the CPU, video card,
hard drive, and memory. In most cases, the term "system resources" is used to refer to how much memory, or RAM, your computer has available. For example, if you have 1.0 GB (1024 MB) of RAM installed on your machine, then you have a total of 1024 MB of system resources. However, as soon as your computer boots up, it loads the operating system into the RAM. This means some of your computer's resources are always being used by the operating system. Other programs and utilities that are running on your machine also use your computer's memory. If your operating system uses 300 MB of RAM and your active programs are using 200 MB, then you would have 524 MB of "available system resources." To increase your available system resources, you can close active programs or increase your total system resources by adding more RAM. System resources can also refer to what software is installed on your machine. This includes the programs, utilities, fonts, updates, and other software that is installed on your hard drive. For example, if a file installed with a certain program is accidentally removed, the program may fail to open. The error message may read, "The program could not be opened because the necessary resources were not found."

What is SATA? Stands for "Serial Advanced Technology Attachment," or "Serial ATA." It is an interface used to
connect ATA hard drives to a computer's motherboard. SATA transfer rates start at 150MBps, which is significantly faster than even the fastest 100MBps ATA/100 drives. For this and other reasons, Serial ATA is likely to replace the previous standard, Parallel ATA (PATA), which has been around since the 1980s.

Besides faster transfer rates, the SATA interface has several advantages over the PATA interface. For one, SATA drives each have their own independent bus, so there is no competition for bandwidth like there is with Parallel ATA. They also use smaller, thinner cables, which allows for better airflow inside the computer. SATA cables can be as long as one meter, while PATA cables max out at 40cm. This gives manufacturers more liberty when designing the internal layout of their computers. Finally, Serial ATA uses only 7 conductors, while Parallel ATA uses 40. This means there is less likely to be electromagnetic interference with SATA devices. In summary, Serial ATA is a better, more efficient interface than the dated PATA standard. If you are looking to buy a computer that will support fast hard drives for years to come, make sure it comes with a SATA interface.

What is Serial Port? The serial port is a type of connection on PCs that is used for peripherals such as mice, gaming
controllers, modems, and older printers. It is sometimes called a COM port or an RS-232 port, which is its technical name. If that's not enough to confuse you, there are two types of serial ports -- DB9 and DB25. DB9 is a 9-pin connection, and DB25 is, you guessed it, a 25-pin connection. A serial port can only transmit one bit of data at a time, whereas a parallel port can transmit many bits at once. The serial port is typically the slowest port you'll find on a PC, if you find one at all. Most newer computers have replaced serial ports with much faster and more compatible USB ports.

What is Socket? When a computer program needs to connect to a local or wide area network such as the Internet, it uses
a software component called a socket. The socket opens the network connection for the program, allowing data to be read and written over the network. It is important to note that these sockets are software, not hardware, like a wall socket. So, yes, you have a much greater chance of being shocked by a wall socket than by a networking socket. Sockets are a key part of Unix and Windows-based operating systems. They make it easy for software developers to create networkenabled programs. Instead of constructing network connections from scratch for each program they write, developers can just include sockets in their programs. The sockets allow the programs to use the operating system's built-in commands to handle networking functions. Because they are used for a number of different network protocols (i.e. HTTP, FTP, telnet, and e-mail), many sockets can be open at one time.

What is Sector? A sector is the smallest unit that can be accessed on a hard disk. Each platter, or circular disk of a hard
disk is divided into tracks, which run around the disk. These tracks get longer as they move from the middle towards the outside of the disk, so there are more sectors along the tracks near the outside of the disk than the ones towards the center of disk. This variance in sectors per track is referred to as "zoned-bit recording." Large files can take up thousands of sectors on a disk. Even if one of these sectors becomes corrupted, the file will most likely be unreadable. While a disk utility program may be able to fix corrupted data, it cannot fix physical damage. Physically damaged sectors are called "bad sectors." While your computer may recognize and bypass bad sectors on your hard disk, certain bad sectors may prevent your disk from operating properly. Yet another good reason to always back up your data

What is SDRAM? Stands for "Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory." Yeah, it's a mouthful, but if you
memorize it, you can really impress your friends. SDRAM is an improvement to standard DRAM in that it retrieves data alternately between two sets of memory. This eliminates the delay caused when one bank of addresses is shut down while another is prepared for reading. It's called "Synchronous" DRAM because the memory is synchronized with the clock speed that the computer's CPU bus speed is optimized for. The faster the bus speed, the faster the SDRAM can be. SDRAM speed is measured in Megahertz, which makes it easy to compare the the processor's bus speed to the speed of the memory.

What is System Requirements? Whenever you purchase software or hardware for your computer, you should
first make sure your computer supports the system requirements. These are the necessary specifications your computer must have in order to use the software or hardware. For example, a computer game may require you computer to have Windows XP or later, a 2.0 GHz processor, 512 MB or RAM, a 64 MB graphics card, and 500 MB or hard drive space. If your computer does not meet all of these requirements, the game will not run very well or might not run at all. It is just as important to check system requirements for hardware devices. For example, if you buy a printer, it may require either Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.3 or later. It may also require a USB port and 80 MB of available hard drive space. If your computer does not have any USB ports, you will not be able to physically connect the printer. If your machine does not have Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.3 or later, the printer drivers may be incompatible with your operating system. This means you computer will be unable to recognize the printer. Most hardware and software products have the system requirements printed on the side or bottom of the product packaging. When you are shopping for computer software or hardware, it is a good idea to first find out exactly what your system's specifications are and write them down on a piece of paper. The important information to record includes:

Operating System (i.e. Windows XP, SP 2 or Mac OS X 10.3.8) Processor Speed (i.e. Pentium 4, 3.2 GHz or Power PC G5, 2.0 GHz) Memory, a.k.a. RAM (i.e. 512 MB) Graphics Card (i.e. ATI Radeon 9800 w/ 256 MB video memory) Hard Disk Space (i.e. 80 GB available) I/O Ports (i.e. USB, Firewire, Serial, Parallel, SCSI, VGA, DVI ports) By recording these specifications from your computer, you will be able to make sure your computer supports the products you are buying

What is System Unit? This is the technical term that refers to the box that houses your computer. The system unit
refers to the computer itself but does not include the monitor, the keyboard, the mouse, or any other peripherals. I suppose most people will probably know what you mean when you refer to "the box," but saying "system unit" will definitely make you sound more sophisticated.

What is Subdomain? In the DNS hierarchy, a subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain name. A DNS
hierarchy consists of the root-level domain at the top, underneath which are the top-level domains, followed by second-level domains and finally subdomains.

What is Tape Drive? This is a removable storage device mainly used for backing up data. It is similar to a Zip Drive,
but instead of Zip disks, it uses small tapes. The drive acts like a tape recorder, reading data from the computer and writing it onto the tape. Since tape drives have to scan through lots of tape to read small amounts of scattered data, they are not practical for most storage purposes. That is why they are used almost exclusively for data backup. The benefit of tape drives is that they typically have large capacities for storing data, for a lower cost than hard drives similar in size. Also, multiple tapes can be used to make incremental backups (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.), which is much cheaper than using multiple hard drives.

What is Text Editor? A text editor is any word processing program that you can use to type and edit text. Hey, they
don't call it a text editor for nothing... Word Pad and NotePad for Windows and SimpleText and TextEdit for the Mac are common text editors. Larger programs such as Microsoft Word and Word Perfect are also text editors, but they have many more features. You can actually write HTML code and create HTML pages with a simple text editor, as long as you know the correct HTML syntax.

What is TIFF? Stands for "Tagged Image File Format." It is graphics file format created in the 1980's to be the standard
image format across multiple computer platforms. The TIFF format can handle color depths ranging from 1-bit to 24-bit. Since the original TIFF standard was introduced, people have been making many small improvements to the format, so there are now around 50 variations of the TIFF format. So much for a universal format. Recently, JPEG has become the most popular universal format, because of its small file size and Internet compatibility.

What is Tag? On clothes, tags usually indicate the brand, size of the garment, fabrics used, and the washing instructions. In
Web pages, tags indicate what should be displayed on the screen when the page loads. Tags are the basic formatting tool used in HTML (hypertext markup language) and other markup languages, such as XML. For example, to create a table on a Web page, the tag is used. The data that should be inside the table follows the tag, and the table is closed with a tag. If you want something to show up in bold on a Web page, you would use the bold tag. For example, the line: Sharpened.net is the best Web site ever! would show up as: Sharpened.net is the best Web site ever! Since there is often a need to format content within more general tags, the tags can be "nested," meaning one tag can enclose one or more other tags. For example: This is the Times font, and this is in italics. Pretty exciting, huh?

would should up as: This is the Times font, and this is in italics. Pretty exciting, huh? Tags are a fundemental part of HTML and they are pretty simple to understand. If you want to build a Web site of your own, you can either create it from scratch (using a text editor and typing your own tags) or you can use

a layout program such as Adobe GoLive or Macromedia Dreamweaver, which will generate the tags for you. Best of all, tags used in markup languages don't itch or chafe your neck.

What is Template? Template

A template is a file that serves as a starting point for a new document. When you open a template, it is pre-formatted in some way. For example, you might use template in Microsoft Word that is formatted as a business letter. The template would likely have a space for your name and address in the upper left corner, an area for the recipient's address a little below that on the left site, an area for the message body below that, and a spot for your signature at the bottom. When you save a file created with a template, you are usually prompted to save a copy of the file, so that you don't save over the template. Templates can either come with a program or be created by the user. Most major programs support templates, so if you find yourself creating similar documents over and over again, it might be a good idea to save one of them as a template. Then you won't have to format your documents each time you want to make a new one. Just open the template and start from there.

What is Toolbar? In a graphical interface on a computer monitor a toolbar is a row, column, or block of onscreen
buttons or icons that, when clicked, activate certain functions of the program.

What is Tutorial? A computer tutorial is an interactive software program created as a learning tool. Tutorials help people
learn new skills by using a step-by-step process that ensures the user is following along and comprehending the material. For example, a Web development tutorial may begin with instructions on how to create a basic Web page. This page might only include the words "Welcome to my website" on it and use the minimum HTML required in order for the page to load in a Web browser. Once the user is able to create a working Web page, the tutorial may explain how to add other features, such as styled text, table layouts, and images, to the page. Then the tutorial may provide instructions on how to publish the Web page to the Internet. Some software tutorials provide testing features to ensure comprehension of the material, while others may be simple walkthroughs of a software program. Tutorials can be used for both school and business purposes and are written for basic, intermediate, and advanced users. Even smart computer programmers use tutorials. Most software development programs include a tutorial for creating a "Hello World!" program, which is the most basic program that can be created with the software. Since tutorials offer a gradual approach to learning, they can be helpful to people at many different skill levels. If a computer programmer can benefit from a tutorial, just about anybody can.

What is Typeface? A typeface is a set of characters of the same design. These characters include letters, numbers,
punctuation marks, and symbols. Some popular typefaces include Arial, Helvetica, Times, and Verdana. While most computers come with a few dozen typefaces installed, there are thousands of typefaces available. Because they are vector-based (not bitmaps), typefaces can be scaled very large and still look sharp. The term "typeface" is often confused with "font," which is a specific size and style of a typeface. For example, Verdana is a typeface, while Verdana 10 pt bold is a font. It's a small difference, but is good to know.

What is USB? Stands for "Universal Serial Bus." USB is the most common type of computer port used in today's
computers. It can be used to connect keyboards, mice, game controllers, printers, scanners, digital cameras, and removable media drives, just to name a few. With the help of a few USB hubs, you can connect up to 127 peripherals to a single USB port and use them all at once (though that would require quite a bit of dexterity). USB is also faster than older ports, such as serial and parallel ports. The USB 1.1 specification supports data transfer rates of up to 12Mb/sec and USB 2.0 has a maximum transfer rate of 480 Mbps. Though USB was introduced in 1997, the technology didn't really take off until the introduction of the Apple iMac (in late 1998) which used USB ports exclusively. It is somewhat ironic, considering USB was created and designed by Intel, Compaq, Digital, and IBM. Over the past few years, USB has become a widely-used crossplatform interface for both Macs and PCs. U is the standard unit of measurement for rack-mounted equipment. Racks can be used to house servers, hard drives, switches, routers, and other computer hardware. They are also used for mounting audio and video equipment. Standard racks are 24 inches wide, but vary in height. For this reason, the U unit measures how tall a rack-mountable hardware device is. 1U is equal to 1.75 inches. Therefore, a 1U piece of equipment is 1.75 inches tall and takes up one unit of rack space. A 2U device is 3.5 inches tall and takes up 2 units of rack space. Racks themselves are also measured in U. For example, a 10U rack could store 10 1U devices or 5 2U devices. It could also store 3 3U devices, with just enough space left over for your miniature Star Wars action figure.

What is U?

What is Upload? When one computer sends information to another, it is called uploading. What is URL? A Uniform Resource Locator, URL, or Web address, is a standardized address for some resource (such as a
document or image) on the Internet (or elsewhere). First created by Tim Berners-Lee for use on the World Wide Web, the currently used forms are detailed by IETF standard.

A username is a name that uniquely identifies someone on a computer system. For example, a computer may be setup with multiple accounts, with different usernames for each account. Many websites allow users to choose a username so that they can customize their settings or set up an online account. For example, your bank may allow you to choose a username for accessing your banking information. You may need to choose a username in order to post messages to a certain message board on the Web. E-mail services, such as Hotmail require users to choose a username in order to use the service. A username is almost always paired with a password. This username/password combination is referred to as a login, and is often required for users to log in to websites. For example, to access your e-mail via the Web, you are required to enter your username and password. Once you have logged in, your username may appear on the screen, but your password is kept secret. By keeping their password private, people can create secure accounts for various websites. Most usernames can contain letters and numbers, but no spaces. When you choose a username for an e-mail account, the part before the "@" is your username.

What is VCI?
Stands for "Virtual Channel Identifier." The VCI, used in conjunction with the VPI (virtual path indicator), indicates where an ATM cell is to travel over a network. ATM, or asynchronous transfer mode, is a method that many ISPs (Internet Service Providers) use to transfer data to client computers. Because ATM sends packets over fixed channels, the data is easier to track than information sent over the standard TCP/IP protocol. The VCI within each ATM cell defines the fixed channel on which the packet of information should be sent. It is a 16-bit field, compared to the VPI, which is only 8 bits. Since this numerical tag specifies the virtual channel that each packet belongs to, it prevents interference with other data being sent across the network.

What is Vector? Mathematically, a vector is a quantity, defined by both magnitude and direction. For example, one
vector could be illustrated by an 1 inch arrow pointing at a 30 degree angle. Another vector may be 2.5 inches and point at 160 degree angle. In the computer world, vectors are used to define paths in certain types of images, such as EPS files and Adobe Illustrator documents. These images are often called vector graphics since they are comprised of vectors, or paths, instead of dots. Vector graphics can be scaled larger or smaller without losing quality. In computer science, a vector can also be used to refer to one dimensional array. For example, a vector called "fibonacci" that stores the first six values of the Fibonacci sequence would be defined as follows: fibonacci[0] = 0, fibonacci[1] = 1, fibonacci[2] = 1, fibonacci[3] = 2, fibonacci[4] = 3, fibonacci[5] = 5 Still, most people refer to a one-dimensional array simply as an "array." But using the term "vector" does sound a bit more cool.

What is Virtual Domain? Also seen as "redirecting URLs," a virtual domain is one that exists in type, but not on
an actual server. Popular redirecting services (cjb.net, for example) will allow you to sign up for a virtual domain name of your choice. This is useful if your actual URL is long and not easily remembered. By typing in the redirecting URL of your choice, you are automatically redirected by the service to your actual, longer URL.

What is VGA? Stands for "Video Graphics Array." It is the standard monitor or display interface used in most PCs.
Therefore, if a montior is VGA-compatible, it should work with most new computers. The VGA standard was originally developed by IBM in 1987 and allowed for a display resolution of 640x480 pixels. Since then, many revisions of the standard have been introduced. The most common is Super VGA (SVGA), which allows for resolutions greater than 640x480, such as 800x600 or 1024x768. A standard VGA connection has 15 pins and is shaped like a trapezoid.

What is Virus? Like a biological virus, a computer virus is something you don't want to get. Computer viruses are small
programs or scripts that can negatively affect the health of your computer. These malicious little programs can create files, move files, erase files, consume your computer's memory, and cause your computer not to function correctly. Some viruses can duplicate themselves, attach themselves to programs, and travel across networks. In fact opening an infected e-mail attachment is the most common way to get a virus. We all know it's hard enough to get a computer to work well when it is healthy, let alone when it has been attacked by a virus. Therefore, it is better to prevent an attack than to try and cure it. There are many anti-virus programs available that scan incoming files for viruses before they can cause damage to your computer. Some of these programs include Norton AntiVirus, McAfee VirusScan, and Virex. It is a good idea to have one of these programs on your computer to prevent a virus attack. It is also important to update your virus definitions file at least once a month so that your anti-virus program can check for all the latest viruses. It's a lot like having a glass of orange juice every morning -- it keeps your computer's immune system strong and healthy.

What is Virtual Hosting? Virtual hosting is a method that web servers use to host more than one domain name on
the same computer and IP address.

What is Volume? The word "volume" has several different meanings. The most common definition is the magnitude or
intensity of a certain sound. Volume may also refer to how much space a three-dimensional object takes up. However, in the always ambiguous realm of computers, the word volume can also refer to a specific data storage device. Some examples of volumes include hard disks, DVD drives, and flash memory drives, such as USB keychain drives. Your computer recognizes all these data storage devices as volumes. The only requirement is that each volume has a file system that the computer can recognize. The file system tells the computer how the folders and files are organized on the volume. On a Macintosh, all volumes connected to the computer (either directly or by a network connection) will show up on the desktop. For example, a hard drive will have a hard drive icon and a CD will have a CD icon. In Windows, you will find a list of all available volumes when you open "My Computer." If a volume is connected, but is not showing up on the screen, you can often use a disk utility program to "mount" the volume so that the computer can communicate with it.

What is Mebibyte? A mebibyte is a unit of data storage that equals 2 to the 20th power, or 1,048,576 bytes.
While a megabyte can be estimated as 10^6 or 1,000,000 bytes, a mebibyte is exactly 1,048,576 bytes. This is to avoid the ambiguity associated with the size of megabytes. A mebibyte is 1,024 kibibytes and precedes the gibibyte unit of measurement.

What is Menu Bar? A menu bar is a horizontal strip that contains lists of available menus for a certain program. In
Windows programs, the menu bar resides at the top of each open window, while on the Mac, the menu bar is always fixed on the top of the screen. Despite this major difference, the menu bar serves the same purpose on each platform.

What is MIDI? Stands for "Musical Instrument Digital Interface." It is a connectivity standard that musicians use to hook
together musical instruments (such as keyboards and synthesizers) and computer equipment. Using MIDI, a musician can easily create and edit digital music tracks. The MIDI system records the notes played, the length of the notes, the dynamics (volume alterations), the tempo, the instrument being played, and hundreds of other parameters, called control changes. Because MIDI records each note digitally, editing a track of MIDI music is much easier and more accurate than editing a track of audio. The musician can change the notes, dynamics, tempo, and even the instrument being played with the click of button. Also, MIDI files are basically text documents, so they take up very little disk space. The only catch is that you need MIDI-compatible hardware or software to record and playback MIDI files

What is Mirror?
A mirror is something that you can see your reflection in. Most mirrors consist of a sheet of glass with a sheet of metal behind it. When light hits the metal, it reflects onto the glass and produces the image you see. In the computer world, however, a mirror is a Web or FTP server that has the same files on it as another server. Its purpose is to provide an alternate way to access files when the main server is so swamped with people connecting and downloading files that other people can't get through. Unlike real-life mirrors, when you download a picture off a mirror server, the image isn't backwards.

What is Modem? The word modem is actually short for Modulator/Demodulator. (There's something you can really
impress your friends with). A modem is a communications device that can be either internal or external to your computer. It allows one computer to connect another computer and transfer data over telephone lines. The original dial-up modems are becoming obsolete because of their slow speeds and are being replaced by the much faster cable and DSL modems.

What is Mouse? A mouse is a handheld pointing device for computers, involving a small object fitted with one or more
buttons and shaped to sit naturally under the hand. The underside of the mouse houses a device that detects the mouse's motion relative to the flat surface on which it sits.

What is Multimedia? As the name implies, multimedia is the integration of multiple forms of media. This includes
text, graphics, audio, video, etc. For example, a presentation involving audio and video clips would be considered a "multimedia presentation." Educational software that involves animations, sound, and text is called "multimedia software." CDs and DVDs are often considered to be "multimedia formats" since they can store a lot of data and most forms of multimedia require a lot of disk space. Due to the advancements in computer speeds and storage space, multimedia is commonplace today. Therefore, the term doesn't produce the same excitement is once did. This also means it is not as overused as it was back in the late '90s. Thank goodness.

What is Macro? A macro is a set of individual commands for use as a group within a program, such as Excel, Word or
Access. The macro executes just as a batch file or JCL file.

What is Memory? Just like humans, computers rely a lot on memory. They need to process and store data, just like we
do. However, computers store data in digital format, which means the information can always be called up exactly the way it was stored. Also, unlike our memory, the computer's memory doesn't get worse over time.

What is MP3? Stands for "MPEG-1 Audio Layer-3." It is the most popular compressed audio file format. An MP3 file is
about one tenth the size of the original audio file, but the sound is nearly CD-quality. Because of their small size and good fidelity, MP3 files have become a popular way to store music files on both computers and portable devices. There are also many Web sites, like MP3.com and GarageBand.com, that maintain huge archives of audio files in MP3 format.

What is Megabyte? A megabyte is 2 to the 20th power, or 1,048,576 bytes.

It can be estimated as 10 to the 6th power, or one million (1,000,000) bytes. A megabyte is 1,024 kilobytes and precedes the gigabyte unit of measurement. Large computer files are typically measured in megabytes. For example, a high-quality JPEG photo from a 6.3 megapixel digital camera takes up about 3MB of space. A four minute CD-quality audio clip takes up about 40MB of space and CDs can hold up to 700MB of space.

What is Memory Stick? Memory Stick is a type of flash memory developed by Sony. It is used to store data for
digital cameras, camcorders, and other kinds of electronics. Because Memory Stick is a proprietary Sony product, it is used by nearly all of Sony's products that use flash media. Unfortunately, this also means Memory Stick cards are incompatible with most products not developed by Sony. Memory Stick cards are available in two versions: Memory Stick PRO and Memory Stick PRO Duo. Memory Stick PRO cards are 50mm long by 21.5mm wide and are 2.8mm thick. Memory Stick PRO Duo cards are 31mm long by 20mm wide and are only 1.6mm thick. High-speed versions of Memory Stick media support data transfer rates up to 80Mbps, or 10 MB/sec, which is fast enough record high-quality digital video.

What is Microprocessor? This little chip is the heart of a computer. Often referred to as just the "processor," the
microprocessor does all the computations like adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. In PCs, the most popular microprocessor used is the Intel Pentium chip, whereas Macintosh computers use the PowerPC chip (developed by Motorola, IBM, and Apple). The speed of a microprocessor is measured in megahertz, or cycles per second. But higher megahertz doesn't always mean better performance. Though a 600-MHz chip has a clock speed that is twice as fast as a 300-Mhz chip, it doesn't mean that the computer with the 600-Mhz chip will run twice as fast. This is because the speed of a computer is also influenced by other factors, such as the efficiency of the processor, the bus architecture, the amount of memory available, and the software that is running on the computer. Some processors can complete more operations per clock cycle than other processors, making them more efficient than other processors with higher clock speeds. This is why the PowerPC chip is typically faster than Pentium chips at that are clocked at higher megahertz.

What is MIPS?
Stands for "Million Instructions Per Second." It is a method of measuring the raw speed of a computer's processor. Since the MIPS measurement doesn't take into account other factors such as the computer's I/O speed or processor architecture, it isn't always a fair way to measure the performance of a computer. For example, a computer rated at 100 MIPS may be able to computer certain functions faster than another computer rated at 120 MIPS. The MIPS measurement has been used by computer manufacturers like IBM to measure the "cost of computing." The value of computers is determined in MIPS per dollar. Interestingly, the value of computers in MIPS per dollar has steadily doubled on an annual basis for the last couple of decades.

What is Motherboard? Also known as the mainboard or logic board, this is the main circuit board of your computer.
If you ever open your computer up, the biggest piece of silicon you see is the motherboard. This is where you'll find the CPU, the ROM, memory expansion slots, PCI slots, serial ports, USB ports, and all the controllers for things like the hard drive, DVD drive, keyboard, and mouse. Basically, the motherboard is what makes everything in your computer work together. Each motherboard has a collection of chips and controllers that is known as the "chipset". When new motherboards are developed, they often use new chipsets. The good news is that these boards are typically more efficient and faster than their predecessors. The bad news is that you may not be able to add certain memory and CPU upgrades to older motherboards. Of course, that's typical of the computer industry.

What is MPEG? Stands for "Moving Picture Experts Group." The MPEG organization, which works with the
International Organization for Standardization (ISO), develops standards for digital audio and video compression. The group

constantly works to develop more efficient ways to digitally compress and store audio and video files. The term MPEG also refers to a type of multimedia file, which is denoted by the file extension ".mpg" or ".mpeg." These files are compressed movies that can contain both audio and video. Though they are compressed, MPEG files maintain most of the original quality of the uncompressed movie. This is why many videos on the Web, such as movie trailers and music videos, are available in the MPEG format.

What is MySQL? MySQL, pronounced either "My S-Q-L" or "My Sequel," is an open source relational database
management system. It is based on the structure query language (SQL), which is used for adding, removing, and modifying information in the database. Standard SQL commands, such as ADD, DROP, INSERT, and UPDATE can be used with MySQL. MySQL can be used for a variety of applications, but is most commonly found on Web servers. A website that uses MySQL may include Web pages that access information from a database. These pages are often referred to as "dynamic," meaning the content of each page is generated from a database as the page loads. Websites that use dynamic Web pages are often referred to as databasedriven websites. Many database-driven websites that use MySQL, such as Sharpened.net, use a Web scripting language like PHP to access information from the database. MySQL commands can be incorporated into the PHP code, allowing part or all of a Web page to be generated from database information. Because both MySQL and PHP are both open source (meaning they are free to download and use), the PHP/MySQL combination has become a popular choice for database-driven websites.

What is Web Host? In order to publish a website online, you need a Web host. The Web host stores all the pages of
your website and makes them available to computers connected to the Internet. The domain name, such as "sony.com," is actually linked to an IP address that points to a specific computer. When somebody enters your domain name into their browser's address field, the IP address is located and Web site is loaded from your Web host.

What is WAIS? Stands for "Wide Area Information Server." This is a program that can index enormous amounts of
information and make it searchable across large networks (including the Internet). People can search the WAIS index and it will return results by relevance. Searches can then be narrowed down by subsequent searches on the original results. Search engines are a new and improved version of WAIS, specifically for the Web.

What is Web Ring? A Web ring is a way of interlinking related Web sites so that people can visit many similar Web
sites by just following the "Web ring" link on each page. Most Web rings allow people to browse backwards or forwards through the sites in the ring, or choose to visit individual sites from a list. The rings are typically run from a main site which uses a Web scripting application to select random sites and keep the ring up to date. This includes getting rid of outdated pages and links, and adding new ones. There are tens of thousands of Web rings for topics like football, cars, celebrities, computers, TV shows, etc. You can tell if a Web page is part of Web ring if on the bottom of the page it has some huge, obtrusive, off-color, button linking to other sites in the ring.

What is Website? A website, or Web site, is not the same thing as a Web page. Though the two terms are often used
interchangeably, they should not be. So what's the difference? To put it simply, a Web site is a collection of Web pages. For example, Amazon.com is a Web site, but there are millions of Web pages that make up the site. Knowing the difference between these two terms can save you a lot of embarrassment.

What is Whois? Whois is a protocol for submitting a query to a database for determining the owner of a domain name, an
IP network, or an autonomous system number

What is Windows XP? Microsoft Windows XP was introduced in 2001 and is the most significant upgrade to the
Windows operating system since Windows 95. The previous version of Windows, called Windows Me (or Millennium Edition) still had the look and feel of Windows 95 and was known to have stability issues and incompatibilities with certain hardware. Windows XP addressed many issues of its predecessor and added a number of other improvements as well. It is a stable operating system since it is built on the Windows 2000 kernel, which is known for its reliability. XP also has a new, more modern look, and an interface that is more easy to navigate than previous versions of Windows. While not written from the ground up, like Mac OS X, Windows XP is a substantial system update. The letters "XP" stand for "eXPerience," meaning the operating system is meant to be a new type of user experience.

What is Worm? Worm has two widely different definitions. One refers to a computer virus and the other is an optical
storage technology: 1) A type of computer virus Just like regular worms tunnel through dirt and soil, computer worms tunnel through your computer's memory and hard drive. A computer worm is a type of virus that replicates itself, but does not alter any files on your machine. However, worms can still cause

havoc by multiplying so many times that they take up all your computer's available memory or hard disk space. If a worm consumes your memory, your computer will run very slowly and possibly even crash. If the worm affects your hard disk space, your computer will take a long time to access files and you will not be able to save or create new files until the worm has been eradicated. Worms are hard to detect because they are typically invisible files. They often go unnoticed until your computer begins to slow down or starts having other problems. Unlike viruses and Trojan horses, worms can replicate themselves and travel between systems without any action from the user. For these reasons, it is good to have an antivirus program installed on your system that can detect and remove worms before they have a chance to replicate or spread to other computers. Security updates such as Windows Update also patch security holes that allow worms to infect your computer. So keep your security updates and virus definitions up-to-date and you should be able to keep your computer worm-free. 2) An optical storage technology WORM can also mean "Write Once, Read Many." It is an optical storage technology that allows a disc to be written only once but read an unlimited number of times. WORM devices were introduced in the 1970's and gained popularity as a way of archiving data. The storage capacity of WORM discs began around 140MB, but increased to more than 3.0GB over the past few decades. Yet the WORM technology has no standard format, so WORM discs are only compatible with the drives that wrote them. This limitation has kept WORM equipment relatively expensive and has kept the technology from gaining widespread acceptance. Today, most optical drives are based on either CD-R or DVD-R technology. Unlike WORM discs, CD-Rs and DVD-Rs can typically be read by any CD or DVD drive, regardless of the manufacturer. Because of their improved compatibility and lower costs, writable CDs and DVDs have all but replaced WORM media. Stands for "Wide Area Network." It is similar to a Local Area Network (LAN), but it's a lot bigger. Unlike LANs, WANs are not limited to a single location. Many wide area networks span long distances via telephone lines, fiber-optic cables, or satellite links. They can also be composed of smaller LANs that are interconnected. The Internet could be described as the biggest WAN in the world. You could even call the Internet a Super WAN BAM if you wanted to. Or maybe not.

What is WAN?

What is Web Hosting? Web hosting is a service that provides Internet users with online systems for storing
information, images, video, or any content accessible via the web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own for use by their clients.

What is Web Server? A Web Server is a computer on the World Wide Web (connected to the Internet Backbone) that
stores HTML documents that can be retrieved via a Web browser.

What is WEP? Stands for "Wired Equivalent Privacy." WEP is a security protocol for Wi-Fi networks. Since wireless
networks transmit data over radio waves, it is easy to intercept data or "eavesdrop" on wireless data transmissions. The goal of WEP is to make wireless networks as secure as wired networks, such as those connected by Ethernet cables. The wired equivalent privacy protocol adds security to a wireless network by encrypting the data. If the data is intercepted, it will be unrecognizable to system that intercepted the data, since it is encrypted. However, authorized systems on the network will be able to recognize the data because they all use the same encryption algorithm. Systems on a WEP-secured network can typically be authorized by entering a network password.

What is Win32? This is the Windows application programming interface (API) for developing 32-bit applications. It has
been used for Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, and newer Windows operating systems. This means that if you use Windows 95 or later, you can run 32-bit applications on your computer. Win32 is a term that is important to programmers, but is not crucial for the average user to know. Just know that if you have Windows 95 or later, you can run Win32 applications.

What is Winsock? Winsock is actually short "Windows sockets," which are files that allow Windows programs to
connect to the Internet and other computers. Technically, Winsock is an "Application Programming Interface (API)," that developers use to make their programs network-enabled. 16-bit applications use a file called WINSOCK.DLL and 32-bit applications use a file called WSOCK32.DLL. Both of these files are libraries of networking functions (based on TCP/IP), but they can differ from computer to computer, depending on the vendor. If you use Windows, you probably use Winsock on a regular basis. Fortunately, unless you're a Windows programmer, you don't have to understand exactly how it works.

What is Web Page? Web pages are what make up the World Wide Web. These documents are written in HTML
(hypertext markup language) and are translated by your Web browser. Web pages can either be static or dynamic. Static pages show the same content each time they are viewed. Dynamic pages have content that can change each time they are accessed. These pages are typically written in scripting languages such as PHP, Perl, ASP, or JSP. The scripts in the pages run functions on the server that return things like the date and time, and database information. All the information is returned as HTML code, so when the page gets to your browser, all the browser has to do is translate the HTML.

What is Windows?
Microsoft Windows is the most popular operating system for personal computers. There are several versions of the Windows operating system, including Windows XP (for home users) and Windows 2000 (for professional users). Earlier versions of Windows include Windows 3.1, 95, 98, ME, and NT. All Windows platforms use a graphical user interface (GUI), like the Mac OS, and also offer a command-line interface for typing text commands.

What is Wireless? In the computing world, the term "wireless" can be rather ambiguous, since it may refer to several
different wireless technologies. The two most common types of wireless capabilities computers have are Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Wi-Fi is the technology used for wireless networking. If your computer has a wireless card, it is most likely Wi-Fi compatible. The wireless card transmits to a wireless router, which is also based on the Wi-Fi standard. Wireless routers are often connected to a network, cable modem, or DSL modem, which provides Internet access to anyone connected to the wireless network. Bluetooth is the technology often used for wireless keyboards and mice, wireless printing, and wireless cell phone headsets. In order to use a device such as a Bluetooth keyboard or mouse, your computer must be Bluetooth-enabled or have a Bluetooth adapter installed. Computers may also use other wireless technologies aside from Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Products such as remote controls and wireless mice may use infrared or other proprietary wireless technologies. Because of the many wireless options available, it is a good idea to check the system requirements of any wireless device you are considering buying.

What is Word Wrap? Word wrapping is when a line of text automatically "wraps" to the next line when it gets to the
end of a page or text field. This is different than a "word rap," which involves rhyming words to a rhythmic beat, though that may be more fun than typing. Most word processing programs use word wrap to keep the text within the default margins of the page. Without the word wrap feature, text would continue on one line until the user pressed "Enter" or "Return" to insert a line break. Most programs that incorporate word wrap take the first word that does not fit on a line of text and move it to the beginning of the next line. Advanced word processing programs can hyphenate long words at appropriate places. While it is uncommon, sometimes a word, or string of characters ,will take up more than one line. In this case, the word wrap feature will simply continue the string of characters onto the next line.

What is WWW? Stands for "World Wide Web." It is important to know that this is not a synonym for the Internet. The
World Wide Web, or just "the Web," as ordinary people call it, is a subset of the Internet. The Web consists of pages that can be accessed using a Web browser. The Internet is the actual network of networks where all the information resides. Things like Telnet, FTP, Internet gaming, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and e-mail are all part of the Internet, but are not part of the World Wide Web. The Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the method used to transfer Web pages to your computer. With hypertext, a word or phrase can contain a link to another Web site. All Web pages are written in the hyper-text markup language (HTML), which works in conjunction with HTTP.

What is X86? x86 is the generic name for Intel processors released after the original 8086 processor. These include the 286,
386, 486, and 586 processors. As you can see, the "x" in x86 stands for a range of possible numbers. Technically, x86 is short for 80x86 since the full names of the processors are actually 80286, 80386, 80486, and 80586. The "80" is typically truncated to avoid redundancy.

What is XML? The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C recommendation for creating special-purpose markup
languages. It is a simplified subset of SGML, capable of describing many different kinds of data. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of structured text and information across the Internet. Languages based on XML (for example, RDF, RSS, MathML, XSIL and SVG) are themselves described in a formal way, allowing programs to modify and validate documents in these languages without prior knowledge of their form.

What is XHTML?
XHTML (short for Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) is a markup language that has the same expressive possibilities as HTML, but a stricter syntax. Whereas HTML was an application of SGML, a very flexible markup language, XHTML is an application of XML, a more restrictive subset of SGML. XHTML 1.0 became a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendation on January 26, 2000.

What is XSL? The extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is a set of language technologies for defining XML document
transformation and presentation

What is XLL? Extensible Linking Language (XLL), second part of the W3C's XML specification concerning hyperlinks.
An XML extension used to insert links that can point directly to a specific object (image, title, word, etc.) into a page.

What is Zebibyte? A zebibyte is a unit of data storage that equals 2 to the 70th power, or
1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 bytes. While a zettabyte can be estimated as 10^21 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, a zebibyte is exactly 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 bytes. This is to avoid the ambiguity associated with the size of zettabytes. A zebibyte is 1,024 exbibytes and precedes the yobibyte unit of measurement.

What is Zip? Stands for Zone Information Protocol. This is an application that allows for the compression of application
files.

What is Zettabyte? A zettabyte is 2 to the 70th power, or 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 bytes.

It can be estimated as 10 to the 21st power, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. A zettabyte is 1,024 exabytes and precedes the yottabyte unit of measurement. Because of the enormous size of a zettabyte, the unit is almost never used. The prefix zetta comes from "Zeta," the last letter of the Greek alphabet.

What is Zip drive? A Zip drive is a small, portable disk drive used primarily for backing up and archiving personal
computer files.

What is ZIF? Stands for "Zero Insertion Force." ZIF is a type of CPU socket on a computer motherboard that allows for the
simple replacement or upgrade of the processor. Processors that use a ZIF socket can easily be removed by pulling a small release lever next to the processor and lifting it out. The replacement processor is then placed in the socket and secured by pushing the lever in the opposite direction -- hence the phrase, "zero insertion force." I suppose there is some force required to push the lever, but it is significantly less than non-ZIF sockets, which require special tools to force the processor out. A zone file is stored on a name server and provides information about one or more domain names. Each zone file contains a list of DNS records with mappings between domain names and IP addresses. These records define the IP address of a domain name, the reverse lookup of an IP to other domains, and contain DNS and mail server information. Because zone files are plain text files, they can be edited quickly and easily. However, this also means that if unauthorized users gain access to zone files, the files can be easily modified. This could cause websites to not respond, or worse yet, redirect to the wrong Web server. For this reason, it is important to keep the zone files on a highly secured server and always have a recent backup of zone files on another machine.

What is Zone File?

What is ATA?
Stands for "Advanced Technology Attachment." It is a type of disk drive that integrates the drive controller directly on the drive itself. Computers can use ATA hard drives without a specific controller to support the drive. The motherboard must still support an ATA connection, but a separate card (such as a SCSI card for a SCSI hard drive) is not needed. Some different types of ATA standards include ATA-1, ATA-2 (a.k.a. Fast ATA), ATA-3, Ultra ATA (33 MBps maximum transfer rate), ATA/66 (66 MBps), and ATA/100 (100 MBps).

What is Active-Matrix? Active-matrix technology is used in high-quality flat-panel displays, such as laptop screens
and thin computer monitors. The images on active matrix screens are created by laying diodes, or small semiconductors, over a grid of ultra-small wires. When a current passes through the diodes, they light up in different colors, depending on the strength of the current. Thousands of these diodes next to each other form an image on the screen. To keep the diodes in an on or off state, active-matrix displays use transistors, which are not found in the lower-quality passive-matrix displays. The transistors help make the active-matrix displays brighter and give them more contrast than passive-matrix displays

What is Affiliate? An affiliate is an entity with a relationship with a peer or a larger entity. What is Applet? This a Java program that can be embedded in a Web page. The difference between a standard Java
application and a Java applet is that an applet can't access system resources on the local computer. System files and serial devices (modems, printers, scanners, etc.) cannot be called or used by the applet. This is for security reasons -- nobody wants their system wiped out by a malicious applet on some wacko's Web site. Applets have helped make the Web more dynamic and entertaining and have given a helpful boost to the Java programming language.

What is ATM? Stands for "Asynchronous Transfer Mode." Most people know of ATMs as automated teller machines -those friendly boxes that allow you to withdraw cash from your bank or credit account while charging you a ridiculous surcharge for the service. In the computer world, however, ATM has a different meaning. Asynchronous Transfer Mode is a networking technology that transfers data in packets or cells of a fixed size.

What is API? Stands for "Application Program Interface," though it is sometimes referred to as an "Application
Programming Interface." An API is a set of commands, functions, and protocols which programmers can use when building software for a specific operating system. The API allows programmers to use predefined functions to interact with the operating system, instead of writing them from scratch.

What is Authoring Tool? An authoring tool is a software application used to create multimedia content typically
for delivery on the World Wide Web.

What is Anchor Text? Anchor text is the visible text in a hyperlink. Anchor text gets a lot of weight in search engine
algorithms because the linked text is usually relevant to the landing page. The objective of search engines is to provide highly relevant search results; this is where anchor text helps as the tendency is, more often than not, to hyperlink words relevant to the landing page.

What is Autoresponder? This is a program or script on a mail server that automatically replies to e-mails received
for a certain account. Though it is run from the mail server, an autoresponder can usually be set up by the user through a Web-based interface. For example, a company might set up an autoresponder for their support e-mail address. The reply might read something like, "We have received your support request. One of our technicians will make a half-hearted attempt to answer your question after he finishes his dart game in the lobby." Individuals can also use autoresponders to let people know when they are away from their computer and won't be able to respond to any e-mails for awhile.

What is Blog? A weblog, Web log or simply a blog, is a web application which contains periodic posts on a common
webpage. These posts are often but not necessarily in reverse chronological order. Such a website would typically be accessible to any Internet user. The term "blog" came into common use as a way of avoiding confusion with the term server log. Stands for "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code." BASIC is a computer programming language that was developed in the mid-1960s to provide a way for students to write simple computer programs. Since then, the language has evolved into a more robust and powerful language and can be used to create advanced programs for today's computer systems.

What is BASIC?

What is Burn? When you "burn a disc," you write data on it. If you were taking an SAT test, the analogy would look
something like this: Hard Disk : Write :: CD/DVD : Burn The reason the term "burn" is used is because the CD-writer, or burner, literally burns the data onto a writable CD. The laser in a CDwriter can be cranked up to a more powerful level than an ordinary CD-ROM laser. This enables it to engrave thousands of 1's and 0's onto a CD. A web crawler (also known as web spider) is a program which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. A web crawler is one type of bot. Web crawlers not only keep a copy of all the visited pages for later processing - for example by a search engine but also index these pages to make the search narrower. Stands for "Composite Theoretical Performance." CTP is used to measure the performance of computer processors. The values returned by CTP calculations are used for benchmarking purposes, which compare the performance of different processors. For example, Intel and AMD use CTP calculations to measure how many millions of theoretical operations per second (MTOPS) their processors can perform. An Intel Pentium M 770, which runs at 2.13 GHz, has a CTP of 7100 MTOPs, while an AMD Opteron 146, which runs at 2.0 GHz, has a CTP of 7168 MTOPS.

What is Crawler? What is CTP?

What is Crossplatform? Software that can run on multiple types of computer systems. For example, the graphics
program Adobe Photoshop and the word processor Microsoft Word are both available for the Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Therefore, Photoshop and Word are considered to be crossplatform applications.

What is Cyberspace? Unlike most computer terms, "cyberspace" does not have a standard, objective definition.
Instead, it is used to describe the virtual world of computers. For example, an object in cyberspace refers to a block of data floating around a computer system or network. With the advent of the Internet, cyberspace now extends to the global network of computers. So, after sending an e-mail to your friend, you could say you sent the message to her through cyberspace. However, use this term sparingly, as it is a popular newbie term and is well overused.

What is Chipset? This term is used to describe the architecture of an integrated circuit. For example, the chipset of a
modem card would be much different than the chipset of a computer's CPU. Processors themselves also have different chipsets. For example, a Pentium II and Pentium III have slightly different chipsets, and the PowerPC processors have other kinds. An SSL certificate, or secure certificate, is a file installed on a secure Web server that identifies a website. This digital certificate establishes the identity and authenticity of the company or merchant so that online shoppers can trust that the website is secure and reliable. In order to verify that these sites are legitimate (they are who they say they are), the companies and their websites are verified by a third party, such as Verisign or Thawte.

What is Certificate?

What is CPL? Cost Per Lead (CPL). A lead can be anything from an e-mail address for a newsletter to a complete survey
that needs to be completely filled out and verified in order to get credit.

What is Codec? No, this is not just a cheap rip-off of Kodak. The name "codec" is short for "coder-decoder," which is
pretty much what a codec does. Most audio and video formats use some sort of compression so that they don't take up a ridiculous amount of disk space. Audio and video files are compressed with a certain codec when they are saved and then decompressed by the codec when they are played back. Common codecs include MPEG and AVI for video files and WAV and AIFF for audio files. Codecs can also be used to compress streaming media (live audio and video) which makes it possible to broadcast a live audio or video clip over a broadband Internet connection.

What is Cluster? In the computer world, a cluster can refer to two different things:
1) A group of sectors on a disk. While a sector is the smallest unit that can be accessed on your hard disk, a cluster is a slightly larger unit that is used to organize and identify files on the disk. Most files take up several clusters of disk space. Each cluster has a unique ID, which enables the hard drive to locate all the clusters on the disk. After reading and writing many files to a disk, some clusters may remain labeled as being used even though they do not contain any data. These are called "lost clusters" and can be fixed using ScanDisk on Windows or the Disk Utility program on the Mac. This is why running a disk utility or defragmentation program may free up space on your hard disk. 2) A group of connected computers. A cluster can also refer to several machines grouped together, all performing a similar function. For example, a cluster may consist of eight PCs, all connected via high-speed Ethernet, processing scientific data. This type of setup is often referred to as "parallel computing," since all the computers in the cluster are acting as one machine. Clusters are typically used for high-end processing, such as performing scientific calculations or decrypting algorithms.

What is Clip Art? Clip art is a collection of pictures or images that can be imported into a document or another program.
The images may be either raster graphics or vector graphics. Clip art galleries many contain anywhere from a few images to hundreds of thousands of images. Clip art is typically organized into categories, such as people, objects, nature, etc., which is especially helpful when browsing through thousands of images. Most clip art images also have keywords associated with them. For example, a picture of a female teacher in a classroom may have the keywords "school," "teacher," "woman," "classroom," and "students" associated with it. Most clip art programs allow you to search for images based on these keywords.

What is Cache? This term is pronounced like "cash" -- not "catch," and definitely not "cash." There are many different
types of caches but they all serve the same purpose. A cache stores recently-used information in a place where it can be accessed extremely fast. For example, a Web browser like Internet Explorer uses a cache to store the pages, images, and URLs of recently visted Web sites on your hard drive. With this neat strategy, when you visit a page you have recently been to, the pages and images don't have to be downloaded to your computer all over again. Because accessing your computer's hard disk is much faster than accessing the Internet, caching Web sites can speed up Web browsing significantly. Most Web browsers allow you to adjust the size of the cache in in browser preferenecs.

What is DHTML? Dynamic HTML or DHTML designates a technique of creating interactive web sites by using a
combination of the static markup language HTML, a client-side scripting language (such as JavaScript) and the style definition language Cascading Style Sheets.

What is Dongle?
This funny-sounding computer term has two widely different definitions that are completely unrelated: 1. A security key. This is a little hardware device that plugs into the serial or USB port of a computer. Its purpose is to ensure that only authorized users can use certain software applications. If you have never seen a dongle, don't be surprised. They are only used with expensive, high-end software programs that most people have never heard of, much less use. When a program that comes with a dongle runs, it checks the dongle for verification as it is loading. If it doesn't find the dongle, the computer explodes. Well, not really -

- usually the program just quits. If more than one application requires a dongle, multiple dongles using the same port can be daisychained together. Basically, if you ever find yourself daisy-chaining multiple dongles together, you must be doing pretty well in life.

2. A laptop Ethernet card adapter. This is a little connector that attaches to a PC card in a laptop on one end, and to an Ethernet cable on the other end. Since most PC (or PCMCIA) network interface cards are too small to connect directly to a standard RJ-45 Ethernet cable, they need this little adapter that connects the card to the cable. (3Com cards that use an "X-Jack" connector do not need a dongle.) As far as why the name dongle is used, I have no idea.

What is Dot Pitch? This is the measurement used to determine how sharp the display of a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube)
monitor is. It is measured in millimeters and the smaller the number, the finer the picture. Most CRT monitors will have a dot pitch between .25 and .28. However, some large presentation monitors have dot pitches from .30 to .50 (which would make for really fuzzy images on a standard 17" desktop monitor). The difference between a "dot" (as in dot pitch) and a pixel is that a pixel is mapped onto the dots on the screen. When the monitor is set to lower resolutions, one pixel encompasses multiple dots. So pixels are typically larger than the "dots" on the actual screen.

What is Direct3D? Direct3D is an application program interface (API) developed by Microsoft that provides a set of
commands and functions for manipulating 3D objects. By using Direct3D commands, software developers can take advantage of many prewritten functions. This allows programmers to write significantly less code than if they had to write all the functions from scratch. Direct3D makes it relatively easy to manage three-dimensional objects, including lighting and shadows as well.

What is DBMS? Stands for "Database Management System." In short, a DBMS is a database program. Technically
speaking, it is a software system that uses a standard method of cataloging, retrieving, and running queries on data. The DBMS manages incoming data, organizes it, and provides ways for the data to be modified or extracted by users or other programs. Some DBMS examples include MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft Access, SQL Server, FileMaker, Oracle, RDBMS, dBASE, Clipper, and FoxPro. Since there are so many database management systems available, it is important for there to be a way for them to communicate with each other. For this reason, most database software comes with an Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) driver that allows the database to integrate with other databases. For example, common SQL statements such as SELECT and INSERT are translated from a program's proprietary syntax into a syntax other databases can understand.

What is DRM?
Stands for "Digital Rights Management." DRM refers to a collection of systems used to protect the copyrights of electronic media. These include digital music and movies, as well as other data that is stored and transferred digitally. For example, the Apple iTunes Music Store uses a DRM system to limit the number of computers that songs can be played on. Each audio file downloaded from the iTunes music store includes information about the owner of the file and how many times the file has been transferred. The protected files will not play on computers that have not been authorized to play the music. Digital Rights Management is important to publishers of electronic media since it helps ensure they will receive the appropriate revenue for their products. By controlling the trading, protection, monitoring, and tracking of digital media, DRM helps publishers limit the illegal propagation of copyrighted works. This can be accomplished by using digital watermarks or proprietary file encryption on the media they distribute. Whatever method publishers choose to employ, DRM helps them make sure that their digital content is only used by those who have paid for it.

What is EUP? Stands for "Enterprise Unified Process." EUP is a software development methodology that helps companies
create software in an structured and organized manner. It is an extension of the Rational Unified Process (RUP), adding two new development phases -- Production and Retirement. Since the RUP includes four phases, the EUP consists of six phases:

Inception - The idea for the project is stated. The development team determines if the project is worth pursuing and what resources will be needed. Elaboration - The project's architecture and required resources are further evaluated. Developers consider possible applications of the software and costs associated with the development. Construction - The project is developed and completed. The software is designed, written, and tested. Transition - The software is released to the public. Final adjustments or updates are made based on feedback from end users. Production - Software is kept useful and productive after being released to the public. Developers make sure the product continues to

run on all supported systems and support staff provides assistance to users. Retirement - The product is removed from production, often called "decommissioning." It can either be replaced or simply no longer supported. The release of a new version of software often coincides with the retirement phase of an older version.

What is Edutainment? Edutainment is one of those combo words, like "guesstimate," that combines two regular
words into one term that really isn't a word. As you may have guessed, "edutainment" is a blend of education and entertainment. This term is used to describe various forms of entertainment that also educate. Some examples include "Sesame Street," shows on the Discovery channel.

What is IPX? Stands for "Internetwork Packet Exchange." (I didn't know "exchange" started with an "x" either.) It is a
networking protocol used to connect networks based on Novell's NetWare. IPX is "connectionless," meaning it doesn't require connections to be maintained during an exchange of packets, like a phone call does. It can just pick up where it left off when a connection is temporarily dropped. Another nice thing about IPX is that it usually only loads when you log on to a network, so it doesn't take up unnecessary resources. As some video game players may know, IPX used to be the standard protocol for network games. However, most video games now use the more robust TCP/IP protocol, which allows for long distance network gaming. In order to install new software on your computer, you often need to run an installer program. This program unpacks compressed data included with the installer and writes new information to your hard drive. While some installers do not use compressed data, most use some level of compression since it reduces the size of the files included with the installer. This is especially helpful when downloading programs or software updates from the Internet. An installer can either install a new program on your computer or can update a program currently on your hard drive. It can also update or add files to your operating system. Most installers can be run by simply double-clicking the installer icon and then choosing the folder you want to install the software into. The nice thing about installers is that they do all the work for you, decompressing and writing the data on the hard drive. Once the installer is finished, you can often use the new or updated software right away. If any system files were installed, you will be asked to restart your computer before using the new software. This is because system files can only be loaded during the computer's boot process.

What is IEEE? Stands for the "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers." This is a non-profit organization that
develops, defines, and reviews electronics and computer science standards. Though it is a U.S. based organization, standards developed by the IEEE often become International standards. Some examples of commonly-used products standardized by the organization are the IEEE 1284 interface (a.k.a. Parallel Port), which many printers use, and the IEEE 1394 interface (a.k.a. Firewire), which is a super-fast connection for digital video cameras, hard drives, and other peripherals.

What is Impression? It is said that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Well, in the wonderful
world of the World Wide Web, publishers have thousands of chances each day. An impression is counted each time a Web page is shown to a visitor. Advertisers measure the reach of their ads by tracking ad impressions, or the number of times their ads are shown. The revenue that publishers generate based on 1,000 impressions is called CPM. Impressions are counted each time a page is visited by a user, so a single user can rack up numerous impressions for one website. However, publishers and advertisers are also interested in unique impressions, which count only the number of unique visits to a website. For example, if Greg views 3 pages on a website, while Mary views 4 and Kathy views 10, their visits would total 17 impressions, but only 3 unique impressions. Unique impressions are usually counted by sending a cookie to visitors' browsers that expire in 24 hours. This way, if Greg visits the site on Tuesday morning and Wednesday evening, it would could as two unique impressions. Stands for "Integrated Device Electronics." It is the most widely-used hard drive interface on the market. The fancy name refers to how the IDE technology "integrates" the electronics controller into the drive itself. The original IDE standard could only support hard drives containing up to 540 MB of data. The new standard, EIDE (Enhanced-IDE), supports hard drives with over 50 GB of data and allows for data transfer rates that are over twice as fast as the original IDE.

What is IDE?

What is ICF? Stands for "Internet Connection Firewall." ICF is a Windows XP feature that protects computers connected to
the Internet from unauthorized access. When ICF is enabled, Windows keeps a log of incoming requests from other systems on the Internet. If the request is something the user has requested, like a Web page, the transmission will not be affected. However, if the request is unsolicited and is not recognized by the system, the transmission will be dropped. This helps prevent intrusion by hackers or malicious software such as spyware. While ICF limits incoming traffic from the Internet, it does not affect outgoing traffic. This means data sent from your computer is still vulnerable to viruses or other disruptions even when ICF is enabled. If you have multiple computers sharing the same Internet connection via ICS, you can enable ICF for all the computers. However, you should enable ICF for the router or system connected directly to the Internet connection, not for each individual system.

What is ICS? Stands for "Internet Connection Sharing." ICS allows multiple computers to connect to the Internet using the
same Internet connection and IP address. For example, several computers in a household can connect to same cable or DSL modem

using a router. As long as the router is connected to the modem, every computer connected to the router is also connected to the Internet. Network address translation (NAT) allows the computers to share the same IP address.

What is Illegal Operation? When a program on your computer has an error, you may see a message pop up on the
screen saying, "Illegal Operation." This is a rather tactless way of saying something went wrong with the program that was running. It could also be a fault with the operating system itself. The problem with the phrase "Illegal Operation" is that it seems to put the blame on you, the user. The fact is, the error was most likely caused by a bug in the program, and is certainly not your fault.

What is ISDN?
Stands for "Integrated Services Digital Network." No, it's not the same thing as the ISBN you see in books. ISDN is a data transfer technology, created in 1984, that can transfer data significantly faster than a dial-up modem. ISDN enables wide-bandwidth digital transmission over the public telephone network, which means more data can be sent at one time. A typical ISDN connection can support transfer rates of 64K or 128K of data per second. While these speeds are faster than what you can get with a dial-up modem, the newer DSL technology can support even faster transfer rates and is less costly to set up and maintain.

What is JSP?
Stands for "Java Server Page." This standard was developed by Sun Microsystems as an alternative to Microsoft's active server page (ASP) technology. JSP pages are similar to ASP pages in that they are compiled on the server, rather than in a user's Web browser. After all, they don't call them "server pages" for nothing. However, JSP is Java-based, whereas ASP is Visual Basic-based. JSP pages are useful for building dynamic Web sites and accessing database information on a Web server. Though JSP pages may have Java interspersed with HTML, all the Java code is parsed on the server. Therefore, once the page gets to the browser, it is only HTML. JavaScript, on the other hand, is usually parsed by the Web browser, not the Web server.

What is Lossy? Lossy file compression results in lost data and quality from the original version. Lossy compression is
typically associated with image files, such as JPEGs, but can also be used for audio files, like MP3s or AAC files. The "lossyness" of an image file may show up as jagged edges or pixelated areas. In audio files, the lossyness may produce a watery sound or reduce the dynamic range of the audio.

What is Logic Gate? Logic gates perform basic logical functions and are the are the fundamental building blocks of
digital integrated circuits. Most logic gates take an input of two binary values, and output a single value of a 1 or 0. Some circuits may have only a few logic gates, while others, such as microprocessors, may have millions of them. There are seven different types of logic gates.

What is Login? If you are ever asked to enter your username and password, you are being asked to enter your login
information. A login is a combination of information that authenticates your identity. This could be a name and password or an ID number and security code. Many secure Web sites use login information to authenticate visitors before allowing them access to certain areas of the site. Unlike the words "brush" and "comb," this term should not be used as both a noun and a verb. It should only be used as a noun, (you don't login to a server, you log in to it).

What is Lossless? Lossless compression reduces a file's size with no loss of quality. This seemingly magical method of
reducing file sizes can be applied to both image and audio files. While JPEGs and MP3s use lossy compression, newer compression algorithms, such as JPEG 2000 and Apple Lossless compression, can be used to create lossless compressed files. Lossless compression basically rewrites the data of the original file in a more efficient way. However, because no quality is lost, the resulting files are typically much larger than image and audio files compressed with lossy compression. For example, a file compressed using lossy compression may be one tenth the size of the original, while lossless compression is unlikely to produce a file smaller than half of the original size.

What is Leaderboard? As the average computer screen size has grown larger, the size of online advertisements as
grown as well. The leaderboard ad, which was introduced in 2003, has a standard size of 728 pixels wide by 90 pixels tall (728x90). Compare this to its predecessor, the banner ad, which is 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels tall (468x60). Leaderboards can contain text, images, or even animations. When a visitor clicks on a leaderboard, he or she is directed to the advertiser's website. While leaderboards are larger than the original banner ads, most Web developers have found ways to incorporate the ads in ways that are not too distracting to the user.

What is NAT? Stands for "Network Address Translation." NAT translates the IP addresses of computers in a local network
to a single IP address. This address is often used by the router that connects the computers to the Internet. The router can be connected to a DSL modem, cable modem, T1 line, or even a dial-up modem. When other computers on the Internet attempt to access computers

within the local network, they only see the IP address of the router. This adds an extra level of security, since the router can be configured as a firewall, only allowing authorized systems to access the computers within the network.

What is Multiplatform? If a software program is developed for mulitple operating systems, it is considered to be
"multiplatform." Since Microsoft Word runs on both the Windows and Macintosh platform, it is a mutliplatform application. In the consumer gaming market, mutliplatform games run on more than one gaming machine. For example, a sports game developed for Xbox, Playstation, GameCube, and PC would be a multiplatform game. If a game is developed exclusively for one system, i.e. "The Legend of Zelda," for Nintendo, it is not multiplatform. Gaming hardware manufacturers use exclusive software as a reason for consumers to buy their system.

What is NetBIOS? Stands for "Network Basic Input/Output System." NetBIOS was introduced in 1983 by IBM as an
improvement to the standard BIOS used by Windows-based computers. The BIOS provides an interface between the computer's operating system and the hardware. As the name implies, NetBIOS adds support for networking, including the ability to recognize other devices connected to the network.

What is Null Character?

A null character is a character with all its bits set to zero. Therefore, it has a numeric value of zero and can be used to represent the end of a string of characters, such as a word or phrase. This helps programmers determine the length of strings. In practical applications, such as database and spreadsheet programs, null characters are used as fillers for spaces.

What is NTSC? National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) is the most prevalent video standard in North
America. NTSC uses 525 lines per frame (as opposed to 625 with PAL) and frame rate is 30 frames per second (as opposed to 25 with PAL). This gives NTSC smoother motion but also lower resolution than PAL.

What is NIC? Stands for "Network Interface Card." Pronounced "nick," this is the card that physically makes the
connection between the computer and the network cable. These cards typically use an Ethernet connection and are available in 10, 100, and 1000 Base-T configurations. A 100 Base-T card can transfer data at 100 Mbps. The cards come in ISA and PCI versions and are made by companies like 3Com and LinkSys. So if you want to connect your computer to a network, you better get yourself a NIC.

What is ODBC? Stands for "Open Database Connectivity." With all the different types of databases available, such as
Microsoft Access, Filemaker, and MySQL, it is important to have a standard way of transferring data to and from each kind of database. For this reason, the SQL Access group created the ODBC standard back in 1992. Any application that supports ODBC can access information from an ODBC-compatible database, regardless of what database management system the database uses.

What is OEM? Stands for "Original Equipment Manufacturer." This refers to a company that produces hardware to be
marketed under another company's brand name. For example, if Sony makes a monitor that will marketed by Dell, a "Dell" label will get stuck on the front, but the OEM of the monitor is Sony. You can also use the term as a verb, such as, "That Dell monitor over there is OEM'd by Sony." That should impress your friends.

What is OLE? Stands for "Object Linking and Embedding." It can be pronounced as "O-L-E," or "Oh-lay!" if you are
feeling Spanish. OLE is a framework developed by Microsoft (way back in Windows 3.1) that allows you to take objects from a document in one application and place them in another. For example, OLE may allow you to move an image from a photo-editing program into a word processing document.

What is PHP? PHP is a widely-used open-source programming language primarily for server-side applications and
developing dynamic web content. A computer peripheral is any external device that provides input and output for the computer. For example, a keyboard and mouse are input peripherals, while a monitor and printer are output peripherals. Computer peripherals, or peripheral devices, are sometimes called "I/O devices" because they provide input and output for the computer. Some peripherals, such as external hard drives, provide both input and output for the computer.

What is Peripheral?

What is PPL? Pay per lead, or PPL, is an ad pricing structure by which the advertiser pays the publisher according to how
many leads are generated by an ad, often determined by information submitted directly into the banner ad.

What is PSA? A public service announcement or PSA is a non-commercial "advertisement" for web sites. What is PNG? Stands for "Portable Network Graphic." This format was designed as an alternative to the GIF format
(which has been plagued by copyright issues). Like GIFs, PNG files are lossless, meaning they don't lose any detail when they are compressed. They support up to 48-bit color or 16-bit grayscale and typically compress about 5% to 25% better than GIF files. However, they do not support animations like GIFs do. A format similar to PNG, called MNG, is currently under development, and will support animations.

PageRank is a family of algorithms for assigning numerical weightings to hyperlinked documents (or web pages) indexed by a search engine. Its properties are much discussed by search engine optimization (SEO) experts. The PageRank system is used by the popular search engine Google to help determine a page's relevance or importance. It was developed by Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin while at Stanford University in 1998. As Google puts it.

What is PageRank?

What is RSS? Stands for "RDF Site Summary," but is commonly referred to as "Really Simple Syndication." RSS is
method of providing website content such as news stories or software updates in a standard XML format. Websites such as The Wall Street Journal and CNET's News.com provide news stories to various RSS directories that distribute them over the Internet. RSS content can be accessed with an RSS-enabled Web browser or other programs designed for retrieving RSS feeds.

What is RUP? Stands for "Rational Unified Process." RUP is a software development process from Rational, a division of
IBM. It divides the development process into four distinct phases that each involve business modeling, analysis and design, implementation, testing, and deployment. The four phases are:

Inception - The idea for the project is stated. The development team determines if the project is worth pursuing and what resources will be needed. Elaboration - The project's architecture and required resources are further evaluated. Developers consider possible applications of the software and costs associated with the development. Construction - The project is developed and completed. The software is designed, written, and tested. Transition - The software is released to the public. Final adjustments or updates are made based on feedback from end users. The RUP development methodology provides a structured way for companies to envision create software programs. Since it provides a specific plan for each step of the development process, it helps prevent resources from being wasted and reduces unexpected development costs.

What is RISC?
Stands for "Reduced Instruction Set Computing,"and is pronounced "risk." It is arguably the fastest and most effiecient microprocessor technology available today. The RISC architechture is an improvement upon the CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing) architecture used in the original Intel Pentium chips. In 1974, John Cocke of IBM Research was working on making a faster version of the CISC chip and came up with a design that significantly reduced the number of instructions need for performing computations. The new design was not only faster than the CISC architecture, but the chips were also smaller and less expensive to manufacture. Motorola's PowerPC chips (such as the G4 in Power Macs) are the most widely used RISC-based chips. Intel has slowly been integrating RISC technology into its chips, but they still are mostly CISC-based.

What is RDRAM? Stands for "Rambus Dynamic Random Access Memory." It is a type of RAM made by Rambus (big
surprise) and is the fastest type of computer memory available. Typical SDRAM can transfer data at speeds up to 133 MHz, while standard RDRAM can crank it up over 1 GHz. Though some motherboards can use RDRAM as system memory, it is so fast, most boards cannot fully benefit from the speed. Because of this, RDRAM is typically used for video memory on graphics acclerator cards, for cache memory (located on the CPU), and for system memory in high-performance workstations and servers.

What is Raster Graphic? Most images you see on your computer screen are raster graphics. Pictures found on the
Web and photos you import from your digital camera are raster graphics. They are made up of grid of pixels, commonly referred to as a bitmap. The larger the image, the more disk space the image file will take up. For example, a 640 x 480 image requires information to be stored for 307,200 pixels, while a 3072 x 2048 image (from a 6.3 Megapixel digital camera) needs to store information for a whopping 6,291,456 pixels.

What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings. The term also refers to an industry of consultants that carry out optimization projects on behalf of client sites.

What is SMS? Stands for "Short Message Service." SMS is used to send text messages to mobile phones. The messages
can typically be up to 160 characters in length, though some services use 5-bit mode, which supports 224 characters. SMS was originally created for phones that use GSM (Global System for Mobile) communication, but now all the major cell phone systems

support it. While SMS is most commonly used for text messaging between friends or co-workers, it has several other uses as well. For example, subscription SMS services can transmit weather, news, sports updates, and stock quotes to users' phones. SMS can also notify employees of sales inquiries, service stops, and other information pertinent to their business. Doctors can receive SMS messages regarding patient emergencies. Fortunately, text messages sent via SMS do not require the recipient's phone to be on in order for the message to be successfully transmitted. The SMS service will hold the message until the recipient turns on his or her phone, at which point the message will be be sent to the recipient's phone. Most cell phone companies allow you to send a certain number of text messages every month for no charge. Though it would be a good idea to find out what that number is before you go text message crazy.

What is Session ID? Session ID (Session Identifier) is a value generated by a server that identifies a particular session. What is Search Engine? A search engine is a program designed to help find files stored on a computer, for example
a public server on the World Wide Web, or one's own computer. The search engine allows one to ask for media content meeting specific criteria (typically those containing a given word or phrase) and retrieving a list of files that match those criteria. A search engine often uses a previously made, and regularly updated index to look for files after the user has entered search criteria.

What is Script? A computer script is a list of commands that are executed by a certain program or scripting engine. Scripts
may be used to automate processes on a local computer or to generate Web pages on the Web. For example, DOS scripts and VB Scripts may be used to run processes on Windows machines, while AppleScript scripts can automate tasks on Macintosh computers. ASP, JSP, and PHP scripts are often run on Web servers to generate dynamic Web page content. Script files are usually just text documents that contain instructions written in a certain scripting language. This means most scripts can be opened and edited using a basic text editor. However, when opened by the appropriate scripting engine, the commands within the script are executed. VB (Visual Basic) scripts, for example, will run when double-clicked, using Windows' built-in VB scripting support. Since VB scripts can access and modify local files, you should never run a VB script that you receive as an unknown e-mail attachment.

What is Tweak?
When you modify a certain piece of hardware for better performance, it is often referred to as "tweaking" it. Overclocking the computer's CPU or changing jumper settings on the motherboard are common examples of hardware tweaking. Removing system limitations and adding plug-ins or extensions to a computer's operating system are types of software tweaking. Tweaking a computer is much like "tuning" a car (you know, the ones with the huge mufflers, big spoilers, and pimped out rims). It may increase performance, but is best left in the hands of the technically savvy. For example, overclocking your computer's processor may cause it to crash frequently, or worse yet, overheat and destroy the CPU. So, for most people, it is best to leave well enough alone.

What is TCP IP? Stands for "Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol." These two protocols were developed in
the early days of the Internet by the U.S. military. The purpose was to allow computers to communicate over long distance networks. The TCP part has to do with the verifying delivery of the packets. The IP part refers to the moving of data packets between nodes. TCP/IP has since then become the foundation of the Internet. Therefore, TCP/IP software is built into all major operating systems, such as Unix, Windows, and the Mac OS.

What is UML? Stands for "Unified Modeling Language." This is a programming language that is used for object-oriented
software development. To organize program code more efficiently, programmers often create "objects" that are sets of structured data within programs. UML, which has been standardized by the Object Management Group (OMG), was designed for this purpose. The language has gained enough support that it has become a standard language for visualizing and constructing software programs.

What is Unix? Also known as UNIX, though the letters do not stand for anything. The Unix operating system was first
created in Bell Labs way back in the 1960s. It became popular in the 1970s for high-level computing, but not on the consumer level. Since a lot of Internet services were originally hosted on Unix machines, the platform gained tremendous popularity in the 1990s. It still leads the industry as the most common operating system for Web servers. Still, Unix remains somewhat of an ambiguous operating system, as there are many different versions of it. Some examples include Ultrix, Xenix, Linux, and GNU, which, making things even more confusing, all run on a number of different hardware platforms. Most people do not ever need to use Unix, but computer geeks seem to have the need to use it as much as possible.

What is Utility?

Utility programs, commonly referred to as just "utilities," are software programs that add functionality to your computer or help your computer perform better. These include antivirus, backup, disk repair, file management, security, and networking programs. Utilities can also be applications such as screensavers, font and icon tools, and desktop enhancements. Some utility programs help keep your computer free from unwanted software such as viruses or spyware, while others add functionality that allows you to customize your desktop and user interface. In general, programs that help make your computer better are considered utilities. And unlike water and electric bills, computer utilities don't send you a bill every month!

What is VPN? Stands for "Virtual Private Network." (Not a competitor of UPN). This is a network term that most
computer users don't need to know, but at least you can impress your friends by talking about it. A VPN refers to a network that is connected to the Internet, but uses encryption to scramble all the data sent through the Internet so the entire network is "virtually" private. For example, a large company that has offices in multiple locations may need to send data to the different locations via the Internet. To keep the information secure, the company might first set up a VPN with an encrypted connection. It's basically like having a secure Intranet over the Internet.

Laptop
Laptop computers, also known as notebooks, are portable computers that you can take with you and use in different environments. They include a screen, keyboard, and a trackpad or trackball, which serves as the mouse. Because laptops are meant to be used on the go, they have a battery which allows them to operate without being plugged into a power outlet. Laptops also include a power adapter that allows them to use power from an outlet and recharges the battery. While portable computers used to be significantly slower and less capable than desktop computers, advances in manufacturing technology have enabled laptops to perform nearly as well as their desktop counterparts. In fact, high-end laptops often perform better than low or even mid-range desktop systems. Most laptops also include several I/O ports, such as USB ports, that allow standard keyboards and mice to be used with the laptop. Modern laptops often include a wireless networking adapter as well, allowing users to access the Internet without requiring any wires. While laptops can be powerful and convenient, the convenience often comes at a price. Most laptops cost several hundred dollars more than a similarly equipped desktop model with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Furthermore, working long hours on a laptop with a small screen and keyboard may be more fatiguing than working on a desktop system. Therefore, if portability is not a requirement for your computer, you may find better value in a desktop model.

Laser Printer
A laser printer is a printer that uses a focused beam or light to transfer text and images onto paper. Though contrary to popular belief, the laser does not actually burn the images onto the paper. Instead, as paper passes through the printer, the laser beam fires at the surface of a cylindrical drum called a photoreceptor. This drum has an electrical charge (typically positive), that is reversed in areas where the laser beam hits it. By reversing the charge in certain areas of the drum, the laser beam can print patterns (such as text and pictures) onto the photoreceptor. Once the pattern has been created on the drum, it is coated with toner from a toner cartridge. The toner is black in most cartridges, but may be cyan, magenta, and yellow in color laser printers. The positively charged toner clings to areas of the drum that have been negatively charged by the laser. When the paper passes through the printer, the drum is given a strong negative charge, which allows the toner to transfer and stick to the paper. The result is a clean copy of the image written on the paper.

Because laser printers do not use ink, they have less image smearing problems than inkjet printers and are able to print pages faster. While laser printers and toner cartridges typically cost more than inkjet printers and ink cartridges, most laser toner cartridges last several times longer than ink cartridges, which makes their cost per page about equal. For this reason, businesses tend to use laser printers, while consumers are more likely to use inkjet printers. Laser printers typically have a resolution of 600 dpi (dots per inch) or higher.

Page Orientation
Page orientation describes the way a document is printed or displayed on a screen. The two main types are "Portrait," in which the height is longer than the width, and "Landscape," in which the width is longer than the height. Most printers print in portrait mode by default, which means the page is printed vertically from top to bottom. Some programs allow the user to change the orientation to landscape mode within the "Page Setup" window.

Page View
Each time a user visits a Web page, it is called a page view. Page views, also written "pageviews," are tracked by website monitoring applications to record a website's traffic. The more page views a website has, the more traffic it is receiving. However, since a page view is recorded each time a Web page is loaded, a single user can rack up many page views on one website. Therefore, unique page views are commonly tracked to log the number of different visitors a website receives in a given time period. Page views are commonly confused with website hits. While people often use the term "hit" to describe a page view, technically a hit is recorded for each object that loads during a page view. For example, if a Web page contains HTML, two images, and a JavaScript reference, a single page view will record four hits. If a page contains over two hundred images, one page view will record over two hundred hits. Page views are more similar to impressions, which are commonly tracked by online advertisers. Page views and impressions may be identical if one advertisement is placed on each page. However, if multiple ads are positioned on each page, the number of ad impressions will be greater than the number of page views.

Scroll Bar
When the contents of a window are too large to be displayed entirely within the window, a scroll bar will appear. For example, if a Web page is too long to fit within a window, a scroll bar will show up on the righthand side of the window, allowing you to scroll up and down the page. If the page is too wide for the window, another scroll bar will appear at the bottom of the window, allowing you to scroll to the left and right. If the window's contents fit within the current window size, the scroll bars will not appear. The scroll bar contains a slider that the user can click and drag to scroll through the window. As you may have noticed, the size of the slider may change for different windows. This is because the slider's size represents what percentage of the window's content is currently being displayed within the window. For example, a slider that takes up 75% of the scroll bar means 75% of the content fits within the current window size. A slider that fills only 10% of the scroll bar means only 10% of the window's contents are being displayed within the current window size. Therefore, if two windows are the same size, the one with the smaller slider has more content than the one with the larger slider. Most scroll bars also contain up and down or left and right arrows that allow the user to scroll in small increments by clicking the arrows. However, clicking and dragging the slider is much faster, so the arrow keys

are typically not used as often. Also, some mice have a scroll wheel that allows the user to scroll by dragging the wheel instead of clicking and dragging within the scroll bar.

Technology Services
echnology services are services that make use of modern technology. Examples include Internet service providers (ISPs), Web hosts, and technical support companies. Since many technology services are related to information technology, they are sometimes called "information technology services," or ITS. However, other services like graphic design, audio/video production, and scientific engineering also fall under the scope of technology services. Therefore, while technology services are often related to IT, they may be associated with other forms of technology as well.

Telecommunications
elecommunications is the transmission of analog or digital signals over a long distance. This includes telephone calls, radio and television broadcasts, and data transfers over the Internet. Thanks to telecommunications, people can communicate instantly regardless of where they are located. The term "telecom" may also refer to a telecommunications company.

USB
Stands for "Universal Serial Bus." USB is the most common type of computer port used in today's computers. It can be used to connect keyboards, mice, game controllers, printers, scanners, digital cameras, and removable media drives, just to name a few. With the help of a few USB hubs, you can connect up to 127 peripherals to a single USB port and use them all at once (though that would require quite a bit of dexterity). USB is also faster than older ports, such as serial and parallel ports. The USB 1.1 specification supports data transfer rates of up to 12Mb/sec and USB 2.0 has a maximum transfer rate of 480 Mbps. Though USB was introduced in 1997, the technology didn't really take off until the introduction of the Apple iMac (in late 1998) which used USB ports exclusively. It is somewhat ironic, considering USB was created and designed by Intel, Compaq, Digital, and IBM. Over the past few years, USB has become a widely-used cross-platform interface for both Macs and PCs.

Video Card
Most of the processing done on a computer is done via the computer's central processing unit, or CPU. So in order to give the CPU a break and help it run more efficiently, a video card can be used to process the graphics portion of the processing load. Because most of today's programs are graphically oriented, the video card can help almost any program run more efficiently. However, the difference in performance is especially noticeable in image editing applications and 3D games. Video cards, also called graphics accelerators, can speed up both 2D and 3D graphics rendering. Programs such as photo editors and Web browsers may benefit from 2D acceleration, while CAD design programs and video games will most likely benefit from the card's 3D acceleration. Some programs rely so heavily on the video card, that they will not run if a supported video card is not installed. Most video cards support the OpenGL and DirectX libraries. These libraries include commands for

manipulating graphics that programmers can include in their code. Some of these commands may include moving or rotating an object, morphing polygons, or casting light and creating shadows. By using standard OpenGL or DirectX functions, it makes it easier for developers to create graphically-oriented programs. Of course, it also makes it necessary for the computer to include a supported video card in order for the program to run. Video cards are typically installed in either the PCI or AGP slots in the back of a computer. Most computers come with a video card installed in one of these slots, which means it can be upgraded at a later time.

Webcam
The term webcam is a combination of "Web" and "video camera." The purpose of a webcam is, not surprisingly, to broadcast video on the Web. Webcams are typically small cameras that either attach to a user's monitor or sit on a desk. Most webcams connect to the computer via USB, though some use a Firewire connection. Webcams typically come with software that allows the user to record video or stream the video on the Web. If the user has a website that supports streaming video, other users can watch the video stream from their Web browsers. Webcams can also be used for video chat sessions with other people. Instead of broadcasting the video on the Web, users can set up a video chat session with one or more friends and have a conversation with live audio and video. For example, Apple's iSight camera, which is built into Apple laptops and iMacs, allows users to video chat using the iChat instant messaging program. Several other chat programs also work with webcams, allowing users to set up video chat sessions with friends. Since streaming video over the Internet requires a lot of bandwidth, the video stream is typically compressed to reduce the "choppiness" of the video. The maximum resolution of a webcam is also lower than most handheld video cameras, since higher resolutions would be reduced anyway. For this reason, webcams are relatively inexpensive compared to most video cameras. And while they may not be ideal for filming a movie, webcams are great for video chat sessions with friends.

Access
Microsoft Access, often abbreviated "MS Access," is a popular database application for Windows. Access allows users to create custom databases that store information in an organized structure. The program also provides a visual interface for creating custom forms, tables, and SQL queries. Data can be entered into an Access database using either visual forms or a basic spreadsheet interface. The information stored within an Access database can be browsed, searched, and accessed from other programs, including Web services. While Access is a proprietary database management system (DBMS), it is compatible with other database programs since it supports Open Database Connectivity (ODBC). This allows data to be sent to and from other database programs, such as MS SQL, FoxPro, Filemaker Pro, and Oracle databases. This compatibility also enables Access to serve as the back end for a database-driven website. In fact, Microsoft FrontPage and Expression Web, as well as ASP.NET have built-in support for Access databases. For this reason, websites hosted on Microsoft Windows servers often use Access databases for generating dynamic content.

Access Point

An access point provides wireless access to a network. Devices connected to an access point can communicate with other devices on the network. They may also connect to the Internet if the access point is linked to an Internet connection, which is commonly the case. Access points that use Wi-Fi are also called base stations.

ActiveX
This Microsoft-based technology was built to link desktop applications to the World Wide Web. Using ActiveX development tools, software developers can create interactive Web content for their applications. For example, Word and Excel documents can be viewed directly in Web browsers that supports ActiveX. While ActiveX is a useful technology, the downside is that you need to have a up-to-date version ActiveX installed on your machine in order to use ActiveX-enabled content.

Algorithm
An algorithm is a set of instructions, sometimes called a procedure or a function, that is used to perform a certain task. This can be a simple process, such as adding two numbers together, or a complex function, such as adding effects to an image. For example, in order to sharpen a digital photo, the algorithm would need to process each pixel in the image and determine which ones to change and how much to change them in order to make the image look sharper. Most computer programmers spend a large percentage of their time creating algorithms. (The rest of their time is spent debugging the algorithms that don't work properly.) The goal is to create efficient algorithms that do not waste more computer resources (such as RAM and CPU time) than necessary. This can be difficult, because an algorithm that performs well on one set of data may perform poorly on other data. As you might guess, poorly written algorithms can cause programs to run slowly and even crash. Therefore, software updates are often introduced, touting "improved stability and performance." While this sounds impressive, it also means that the algorithms in the previous versions of the software were not written as well as the could have been.

Backup
A backup is a copy of one or more files created as an alternate in case the original data is lost or becomes unusable. For example, you may save several copies of a research paper on your hard drive as backup files incase you decide to use a previous revision. Better yet, you could save the backups to a USB flash disk, which would also protect the files if the hard drive failed. Hard drives are meant to run for many years without crashing. But just like all electronic devices, they are not immune to problems. Because they are not solid state devices, hard drives rely on moving parts to access data, which can malfunction and cause your data to become unrecoverable. If you need proof of how fragile hard drives really are, go to your local computer store and have someone show you an open hard drive. When you realize all your data is stored in such a small, delicate device, you may have a new understanding of why you need to backup your data. But it's not just hardware malfunctions you have to worry about. Software corruption can also damage your files. Directory structures can become damaged and cause entire folders to disappear. Files can be mistakenly deleted or corrupted by viruses or other software attacks. Program installation conflicts can make applications or files unusable. There are unfortunately many ways for your data to become damaged or disappear.

Binary
Binary is a two-digit (Base-2) numerical system, which computers use to store data and compute functions. The reason computers use the binary system is because digital switches inside the computer can only be set to either on or off, which are represented by a 1 or 0. Though the binary system consists of only ones and zeros, the two digits can be used to represent any number. For example: A single 0 in binary represents zero. A single 1 represents (2^0) or 1. 10 represents (2^1) or 2. 11 represents (2^1 + 2^0) or 3. 100 represents (2^2) or 4. 101 represents (2^2 + 2^0) or 5. 110 represents (2^2 + 2^1) or 6. 111 represents (2^2 + 2^1 + 2^0) or 7. 1000 represents (2^3) or 8, and so on.

Database
A database contains data stored in a structured format. It includes one or more tables, which each contain multiple fields. Each field is assigned a specific data type, such as a string or integer. These fields include data for each record that is entered into the database. By storing data in organized records, the information in a database can be easily searched, sorted, and updated.

Data Management
Data management refers to the way individuals, companies, and organizations manage computer data. It includes micro applications, such as data architecture and design, as well as macro applications, including data storage, access, and security. While computer data may be intangible, it can also be valuable. Therefore, it is important for all users to consider how they manage their data. This may involve taking steps such as backing up important files and encrypting personal information.

Defragment
Defragmenting your hard disk is a great way to boost the performance of your computer. Though the term "defragment" sounds a little abrasive, it is actually a simple and helpful process. After all, a defragmented hard disk is a happy hard disk. Adding and deleting files from your hard disk is a common task. Unfortunately, this process is not always done very efficiently. For example, when you delete a bunch of little files and add a new large file, the file may get broken up into mulitple sections on the hard disk. The computer will still read the newly added file as a single valid file, but the drive will have to scan multiple parts of the disk to read it. Because hard disk seek time is one of the most significant bottlenecks in a computer's performance, this can drag down your computer's speed quite a bit. If you have a ton of "fragmented" files on your hard disk, you might hear extra grinding, sputtering, and other weird noises coming from your computer.

You computer does not like having fragmented files any more than you do. This is why defragmenting your hard disk is such a good idea. When you start to hear extra grinding sounds, or your computer doesn't open files as quickly as it did before, it's time to defragment. With Windows, you can use the pre-installed Intel defragment program to defragment your hard disk. You can also use a commercial software program like Norton Utilities to defragment your hard disk more efficiently and with more options. For Mac users, a disk utility such as DiskWarrior or Tech Tool Pro is the only way to do it. If you use your computer daily, defragmenting your hard drive once a month should keep the fragment-fiends away.

Debugger
Even the most experienced software programmers usually don't get it right on their first try. Certain errors, often called bugs, can occur in programs, causing them to not function as the programmer expected. Sometimes these errors are easy to fix, while some bugs are very difficult to trace. This is especially true for large programs that consist of several thousand lines of code. Fortunately, there are programs called debuggers that help software developers find and eliminate bugs while they are writing programs. A debugger tells the programmer what types of errors it finds and often marks the exact lines of code where the bugs are found. Debuggers also allow programmers to run a program step by step so that they can determine exactly when and why a program crashes. Advanced debuggers provide detailed information about threads and memory being used by the program during each step of execution. You could say a powerful debugger program is like OFF! with 100% deet.

E-commerce
E-commerce (electronic-commerce) refers to business over the Internet. Web sites such as Amazon.com, Buy.com, and eBay are all e-commerce sites. The two major forms of e-commerce are Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B). While companies like Amazon.com cater mostly to consumers, other companies provide goods and services exclusively to other businesses. The terms "e-business" and "e-tailing" are often used synonymously with e-commerce. They refer to the same idea; they are just used to confuse people trying to learn computer terms.

E-mail
It's hard to remember what our lives were like without e-mail. Ranking up there with the Web as one of the most useful features of the Internet, e-mail has become one of today's standard means of communication. Billions of messages are sent each year. If you're like most people these days, you probably have more than one e-mail address. After all, the more addresses you have, the more sophisticated you look... E-mail is part of the standard TCP/IP set of protocols. Sending messages is typically done by SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) and receiving messages is handled by POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3), or IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). IMAP is the newer protocol, allowing you to view and sort messages on the mail server, without downloading them to your hard drive. Though e-mail was originally developed for sending simple text messages, it has become more robust in the last few years. Now, HTML-based e-mail can use the same code as Web pages to incorporate formatted text, colors, and images into the message. Also, documents can be attached to e-mail messages, allowing files to be

transfered via the e-mail protocol. However, since e-mail was not originally designed to handle large file transfers, transferring large documents (over 3 MB, for example) is not allowed by most mail servers. So remember to keep your attachments small!

Ethernet
ust to be clear, the first syllable is pronounced "eath" as in "Heath Bar," not like "eth" as in Bethany. Some people find this out the hard way (ridiculing laughter), but at least you don't have to. Ethernet is the most common type of connection computers use in a local area network (LAN). An Ethernet port looks much like a regular phone jack, but it is slightly wider. This port can be used to connect your computer to another computer, a local network, or an external DSL or cable modem. Two widely-used forms of Ethernet are 10BaseT and 100BaseT. In a 10BaseT Ethernet connection, data transfer speeds can reach 10 mbps (megabits per second) through a copper cable. In a 100BaseT Ethernet connection, transfer speeds can get up to 100 mbps. There is also a new technology called "Gigabit" Ethernet, where data transfer rates peak at 1000 mbps. Now that's fast.

External Hard Drive

Nearly all personal computers come with an internal hard drive. This drive stores the computer's operating system, programs, and other files. For most users, the internal hard drive provides enough disk space to store all the programs and files. However, if the internal hard drive becomes full or if the user wants to back up the data on the internal hard drive, and external hard drive may be useful. External hard drives typically have one of two interfaces ? USB or Firewire. USB hard drives commonly use the USB 2.0 interface because it supports data transfer rates of up to 480 Mbps. USB 1.1 only supports transfers of up to 12 Mbps, which would make the hard drive seem slow to even the most patient people. Firewire drives may use either Firewire 400 or Firewire 800, which support data transfer rates of up to 400 and 800 Mbps respectively. The most likely users to need external hard drives are those who do audio and video editing. This is because high-quality media files can fill up even the largest hard drives. Fortunately, external hard drives can be daisy chained, which means they can be connected one after the other and be used at the same time. This allows for virtually unlimited amounts storage. Users who do not require extra storage may still find external hard drives useful for backing up their main hard drive. External hard drives are a great backup solution because they can store an exact copy of another hard drive and can be stored in a safe location. Using the drive to restore data or perform another backup is as simple as connecting it to the computer and dragging the necessary files from one drive to another. While most external hard drives come in heavy, protective cases, some hard drives are designed primarily for portability. These drives usually don't hold as much data as their larger desktop counterparts, but they have a sleek form factor and can easily be transported with a laptop computer. Some portable drives also include security features such as fingerprint recognition that prevent other people from accessing data on the drive in case it is lost.

File Extension

A file extension is the last part of a filename, after the dot (e.g. ".pdf"). Most file extensions are three characters long, but they can be shorter or longer as well. File extensions are used to define the file type of each file. The operating system uses this information to select which application will open the file and choose the appropriate icon for the file.

File System
Most people have several thousand files on their computer's hard disk, so imagine how hard it would be to find anything if the files were not organized. Fortunately, all hard disks use a file system, which organizes all the files on the disk. The file system is created when you initialize or format your hard disk. It sets up the root directory and subsequent directories beneath it. The file system allows you to create new files and folders, which are added to different parts of the "file tree" on your hard disk. For example, your hard disk probably has separate folders for programs, documents, pictures, music, and movie files. Within these folders, there are likely other folders that futher organize your files. All these folders (or directories) are organized by your computer's file system. There are also several folders your computer's operating system uses to store system files, such as startup data and system preferences. Some of these folders are invisible to the user, but are recognized by the computer's file system. Older Windows machines used a file system called FAT32, while newer Windows computers use NTFS. Macintosh computers used the HFS file system for a long time, but now use an updated version of HFS, called HFS+. Though you typically don't need to know all the details of your computer's file system, it is nice to know that it is always working to keep your files organized.

Graphics
Computer graphics are images displayed on a computer screen. They can be either two or three-dimensional. Two-dimensional graphics come in raster or vector formats. Raster graphics are the most common type of computer graphic and are used for icons, photos, and other basic images. Vector graphics are used for drawings, logos, and other scalable objects. 3D graphics are made up of polygons and can be created with CAD and 3D modeling programs. They are most commonly seen in video games and 3D animations.

Hibernate
If you are not going to use your computer for a few hours, it is a good idea to put it to sleep (also known as standby mode) to save power. If you are not going to use the computer for more than a day, it is usually best to turn it off. However, some Windows computer offer an option that combines the benefits of sleep mode and powering down the computer, called "Hibernate." When you select Hibernate, the computer saves the current state of the system from the computer's RAM to the hard disk, then shuts down. When the computer is restarted, instead of going through the typical boot sequence, the previously saved state is automatically loaded into the RAM. The open windows and running programs from your previous session appear just as they were when the computer entered Hibernate mode. Basically, Hibernate mode acts like Standby mode, except the computer can be completely turned off. This is especially helpful for laptop computers, which will slowly lose their battery charge if they are left in sleep mode.

To make your computer hibernate, select "Turn Off Computer" from the bottom of the Windows Start Menu. Then press and hold the Shift key when the dialog box appears. The "Standby" option should change to "Hibernate." If the Standby option does not change, you may need to enable Hibernate mode in Windows. This can be done by opening the "Power Options" control panel, clicking the Hibernate tab, and checking the box that says, "Enable hibernation."

Hard Copy
A hard copy is a printed document. It may be a text file, photograph, drawing, or any other type of printable file. For example, instead of e-mailing a business memo, it may be sent out as a hard copy, or an actual physical paper containing the memo. When a document is created on a computer, it is typically saved as a file on the the computer's hard drive. This is sometimes referred to as a soft copy. While the file can be easily opened and edited on a computer, it can also be easily deleted. Therefore, sometimes printing a hard copy is done to create a physical backup of the document

Joystick
A joystick is an input device commonly used to control video games. Joysticks consist of a base and a stick that can be moved in any direction. The stick can be moved slowly or quickly and in different amounts. Some joysticks have sticks that can also be rotated to the left or right. Because of the flexible movements a joystick allows, it can provide much greater control than the keys on a keyboard. Joysticks typically include several buttons as well. Most joysticks have at least one button on the top of the stick and another button in the front of the stick for the trigger. Many joysticks also include other buttons on the base that can be pressed using the hand that is not guiding the stick. Joysticks typically connect to your computer using a basic USB or serial port connection and often come with software that allows you to assign the function of each button. Since joysticks emulate the controls of planes and other aircraft, they are best suited for flight simulators and flying action games. However, some gamers like to use joysticks for other types of video games, such as firstperson shooters and fighting games. Others prefer using the basic keyboard and mouse, with which they are already accustomed to. browser A browser is a program used to browse the web. Some common browsers include Netscape, MSIE (Microsoft Internet Explorer), Safari, Lynx, Mosaic, Amaya, Arena, Chimera, Opera, Cyberdog, HotJava, etc. bug A bug is a mistake in the design of something, especially software. A really severe bug can cause something to crash. chat Chatting is like e-mail, only it is done instantaneously and can directly involve multiple people at once. While e-mail now relies on one more or less standard protocol, chatting still has a couple competing ones. Of particular note are IRC and Instant Messenger. One step beyond chatting is called MUDding. cursor A point of attention on the computer screen, often marked with a flashing line or block. Text typed into the computer will usually appear at the cursor. database

A database is a collection of data, typically organized to make common retrievals easy and efficient. Some common database programs include Oracle, Sybase, Postgres, Informix, Filemaker, Adabas, etc. desktop A desktop system is a computer designed to sit in one position on a desk somewhere and not move around. Most general purpose computers are desktop systems. Calling a system a desktop implies nothing about its platform. The fastest desktop system at any given time is typically either an Alpha or PowerPC based system, but the SPARC and PA-RISC based systems are also often in the running. Industrial strength desktops are typically called workstations. directory Also called "folder", a directory is a collection of files typically created for organizational purposes. Note that a directory is itself a file, so a directory can generally contain other directories. It differs in this way from a partition. disk A disk is a physical object used for storing data. It will not forget its data when it loses power. It is always used in conjunction with a disk drive. Some disks can be removed from their drives, some cannot. Generally it is possible to write new information to a disk in addition to reading data from it, but this is not always the case. drive A device for storing and/or retrieving data. Some drives (such as disk drives, zip drives, and tape drives) are typically capable of having new data written to them, but some others (like CD-ROMs or DVDROMs) are not. Some drives have random access (like disk drives, zip drives, CD-ROMs, and DVDROMs), while others only have sequential access (like tape drives). e-book The concept behind an e-book is that it should provide all the functionality of an ordinary book but in a manner that is (overall) less expensive and more environmentally friendly. The actual term e-book is somewhat confusingly used to refer to a variety of things: custom software to play e-book titles, dedicated hardware to play e-book titles, and the e-book titles themselves. Individual e-book titles can be free or commercial (but will always be less expensive than their printed counterparts) and have to be loaded into a player to be read. Players vary wildly in capability level. Basic ones allow simple reading and bookmarking; better ones include various features like hypertext, illustrations, audio, and even limited video. Other optional features allow the user to mark-up sections of text, leave notes, circle or diagram things, highlight passages, program or customize settings, and even use interactive fiction. There are many types of e-book; a couple popular ones include the Newton book and Palm DOC. e-mail E-mail is short for electronic mail. It allows for the transfer of information from one computer to another, provided that they are hooked up via some sort of network (often the Internet. E-mail works similarly to FAXing, but its contents typically get printed out on the other end only on demand, not immediately and automatically as with FAX. A machine receiving e-mail will also not reject other incoming mail messages as a busy FAX machine will; rather they will instead be queued up to be received after the current batch has been completed. E-mail is only seven-bit clean, meaning that you should not expect anything other than ASCII data to go through uncorrupted without prior conversion via something like uucode or bcode. Some mailers will do some conversion automatically, but unless you know your mailer is one of them, you may want to do the encoding manually. floppy An extremely common type of removable disk. Floppies do not hold too much data, but most computers are capable of reading them. Note though that there are different competing format used for floppies, so that a floppy written by one type of computer might not directly work on another. Also sometimes called "diskette". format The manner in which data is stored; its organization. For example, VHS, SVHS, and Beta are three different formats of video tape. They are not 100% compatible with each other, but information can be transferred from one to the other with the proper equipment (but not always without loss; SVHS

contains more information than either of the other two). Computer information can be stored in literally hundreds of different formats, and can represent text, sounds, graphics, animations, etc. Computer information can be exchanged via different computer types provided both computers can interpret the format used. function keys On a computer keyboard, the keys that start with an "F" that are usually (but not always) found on the top row. They are meant to perform user-defined tasks. keyboard A keyboard on a computer is almost identical to a keyboard on a typewriter. Computer keyboards will typically have extra keys, however. Some of these keys (common examples include Control, Alt, and Meta) are meant to be used in conjunction with other keys just like shift on a regular typewriter. Other keys (common examples include Insert, Delete, Home, End, Help, function keys,etc.) are meant to be used independently and often perform editing tasks. Keyboards on different platforms will often look slightly different and have somewhat different collections of keys. Some keyboards even have independent shift lock and caps lock keys. Smaller keyboards with only math-related keys are typically called "keypads". language Computer programs can be written in a variety of different languages. Different languages are optimized for different tasks. Common languages include Java, C, C++, ForTran, Pascal, Lisp, and BASIC. Some people classify languages into two categories, higher-level and lower-level. These people would consider assembly language and machine language lower-level languages and all other languages higher-level. In general, higher-level languages can be either interpreted or compiled; many languages allow both, but some are restricted to one or the other. Many people do not consider machine language and assembly language at all when talking about programming languages. laptop A laptop is any computer designed to do pretty much anything a desktop system can do but run for a short time (usually two to five hours) on batteries. They are designed to be carried around but are not particularly convenient to carry around. They are significantly more expensive than desktop systems and have far worse battery life than PDAs. Calling a system a laptop implies nothing about its platform. By far the fastest laptops are the PowerPC based Macintoshes. memory Computer memory is used to temporarily store data. In reality, computer memory is only capable of remembering sequences of zeros and ones, but by utilizing the binary number system it is possible to produce arbitrary rational numbers and through clever formatting all manner of representations of pictures, sounds, and animations. The most common types of memory are RAM, ROM, and flash. MHz & megahertz One megahertz is equivalent to 1000 kilohertz, or 1,000,000 hertz. The clock speed of the main processor of many computers is measured in MHz, and is sometimes (quite misleadingly) used to represent the overall speed of a computer. In fact, a computer's speed is based upon many factors, and since MHz only reveals how many clock cycles the main processor has per second (saying nothing about how much is actually accomplished per cycle), it can really only accurately be used to gauge two computers with the same generation and family of processor plus similar configurations of memory, coprocessors, and other peripheral hardware. modem A modem allows two computers to communicate over ordinary phone lines. It derives its name from modulate / demodulate, the process by which it converts digital computer data back and forth for use with an analog phone line. multimedia This originally indicated a capability to work with and integrate various types of things including audio, still graphics, and especially video. Now it is more of a marketing term and has little real meaning. Historically the Amiga was the first multimedia machine. Today in addition to AmigaOS, IRIX and Solaris are popular choices for high-end multimedia work.

NC The term network computer refers to any (usually desktop) computer system that is designed to work as part of a network rather than as a stand-alone machine. This saves money on hardware, software, and maintenance by taking advantage of facilities already available on the network. The term "Internet appliance" is often used interchangeably with NC. network A network (as applied to computers) typically means a group of computers working together. It can also refer to the physical wire etc. connecting the computers. notebook A notebook is a small laptop with similar price, performance, and battery life. organizer An organizer is a tiny computer used primarily to store names, addresses, phone numbers, and date book information. They usually have some ability to exchange information with desktop systems. They boast even better battery life than PDAs but are far less capable. They are extremely inexpensive but are typically incapable of running any special purpose applications and are thus of limited use. PC The term personal computer properly refers to any desktop, laptop, or notebook computer system. Its use is inconsistent, though, and some use it to specifically refer to x86 based systems running MS-DOS, MS-Windows, GEOS, or OS/2. This latter use is similar to what is meant by a WinTel system. PDA A personal digital assistant is a small battery-powered computer intended to be carried around by the user rather than left on a desk. This means that the processor used ought to be power-efficient as well as fast, and the OS ought to be optimized for hand-held use. PDAs typically have an instant-on feature (they would be useless without it) and most are grayscale rather than color because of battery life issues. Most have a pen interface and come with a detachable stylus. None use mouses. All have some ability to exchange data with desktop systems. In terms of raw capabilities, a PDA is more capable than an organizer and less capable than a laptop (although some high-end PDAs beat out some low-end laptops). By far the most popular PDA is the Pilot, but other common types include Newtons, Psions, Zauri, Zoomers, and Windows CE hand-helds. By far the fastest current PDA is the Newton (based around a StrongARM RISC processor). Other PDAs are optimized for other tasks; few computers are as personal as PDAs and care must be taken in their purchase. Feneric's PDA / Handheld Comparison Page is perhaps the most detailed comparison of PDAs and handheld computers to be found anywhere on the web. platform Roughly speaking, a platform represents a computer's family. It is defined by both the processor type on the hardware side and the OS type on the software side. Computers belonging to different platforms cannot typically run each other's programs (unless the programs are written in a language like Java). portable If something is portable it can be easily moved from one type of computer to another. The verb "to port" indicates the moving itself. printer A printer is a piece of hardware that will print computer information onto paper. processor The processor (also called central processing unit, or CPU) is the part of the computer that actually works with the data and runs the programs. There are two main processor types in common usage today: CISC and RISC. Some computers have more than one processor and are thus called "multiprocessor". This is distinct from multitasking. Advertisers often use megahertz numbers as a means of showing a processor's speed. This is often extremely misleading; megahertz numbers are more or less meaningless when compared across different types of processors. program A program is a series of instructions for a computer, telling it what to do or how to behave. The terms "application" and "app" mean almost the same thing (albeit applications generally have GUIs). It is

however different from an applet. Program is also the verb that means to create a program, and a programmer is one who programs. run Running a program is how it is made to do something. The term "execute" means the same thing. software The non-physical portion of the computer; the part that exists only as data; the programs. Another term meaning much the same is "code". spreadsheet An program used to perform various calculations. It is especially popular for financial applications. Some common spreadsheets include Lotus 123, Excel, OpenOffice Spreadsheet, Octave, Gnumeric, AppleWorks Spreadsheet, Oleo, and GeoCalc. word processor A program designed to help with the production of textual documents, like letters and memos. Heavier duty work can be done with a desktop publisher. Some common word processors include MS-Word, OpenOffice Write, WordPerfect, AbiWord, AppleWorks Write, and GeoWrite. www The World-Wide-Web refers more or less to all the publically accessable documents on the Internet. It is used quite loosely, and sometimes indicates only HTML files and sometimes FTP and Gopher files, too. It is also sometimes just referred to as "the web". AI Artificial intelligence is the concept of making computers do tasks once considered to require thinking. AI makes computers play chess, recognize handwriting and speech, helps suggest prescriptions to doctors for patients based on imput symptoms, and many other tasks, both mundane and not. AIX The industrial strength OS designed by IBM to run on PowerPC and x86 based machines. It is a variant of UNIX and is meant to provide more power than OS/2. AJaX AJaX is a little like DHTML, but it adds asynchronous communication between the browser and Web site via either XML or JSON to achieve performance that often rivals desktop applications. Alpha An Alpha is a RISC processor invented by Digital and currently produced by Digital/Compaq and Samsung. A few different OSes run on Alpha based machines including Digital UNIX, Windows NT, Linux, NetBSD, and AmigaOS. Historically, at any given time, the fastest processor in the world has usually been either an Alpha or a PowerPC (with sometimes SPARCs and PA-RISCs making the list), but Compaq has recently announced that there will be no further development of this superb processor instead banking on the release of the somewhat suspect Merced. AltiVec AltiVec (also called the "Velocity Engine") is a special extension built into some PowerPC CPUs to provide better performance for certain operations, most notably graphics and sound. It is similar to MMX on the x86 CPUs. Like MMX, it requires special software for full performance benefits to be realized. Amiga A platform originally created and only produced by Commodore, but now owned by Gateway 2000 and produced by it and a few smaller companies. It was historically the first multimedia machine and gave the world of computing many innovations. It is now primarily used for audio / video applications; in fact, a decent Amiga system is less expensive than a less capable video editing system. Many music videos were created on Amigas, and a few television series and movies had their special effects generated on Amigas. Also, Amigas can be readily synchronized with video cameras, so typically when a computer screen appears on television or in a movie and it is not flickering wildly, it is probably an Amiga in disguise. Furthermore, many coin-operated arcade games are really Amigas packaged in stand-up boxes. Amigas have AmigaOS for their OS. New Amigas have either a PowerPC or an Alpha

for their main processor and a 68xx processor dedicated to graphics manipulation. Older (and low end) Amigas do everything with just a 68xx processor. AmigaOS The OS used by Amigas. AmigaOS combines the functionality of an OS and a window manager and is fully multitasking. AmigaOS boasts a pretty good selection of games (many arcade games are in fact written on Amigas) but has limited driver support. AmigaOS will run on 68xx, Alpha, and PowerPC based machines. Apple ][ The Apple ][ computer sold millions of units and is generally considered to have been the first home computer with a 1977 release date. It is based on the 65xx family of processors. The earlier Apple I was only available as a build-it-yourself kit. AppleScript A scripting language for Mac OS computers. ARM An ARM is a RISC processor invented by Advanced RISC Machines, currently owned by Intel, and currently produced by both the above and Digital/Compaq. ARMs are different from most other processors in that they were not designed to maximize speed but rather to maximize speed per power consumed. Thus ARMs find most of their use on hand-held machines and PDAs. A few different OSes run on ARM based machines including Newton OS, JavaOS, and (soon) Windows CE and Linux. The StrongARM is a more recent design of the original ARM, and it is both faster and more power efficient than the original. ASCII The ASCII character set is the most popular one in common use. People will often refer to a bare text file without complicated embedded format instructions as an ASCII file, and such files can usually be transferred from one computer system to another with relative ease. Unfortunately there are a few minor variations of it that pop up here and there, and if you receive a text file that seems subtly messed up with punctuation marks altered or upper and lower case reversed, you are probably encountering one of the ASCII variants. It is usually fairly straightforward to translate from one ASCII variant to another, though. The ASCII character set is seven bit while pure binary is usually eight bit, so transferring a binary file through ASCII channels will result in corruption and loss of data. Note also that the ASCII character set is a subset of the Unicode character set. ASK A protocol for an infrared communications port on a device. It predates the IrDA compliant infrared communications protocol and is not compatible with it. Many devices with infrared communications support both, but some only support one or the other. assembly language Assembly language is essentially machine language that has had some of the numbers replaced by somewhat easier to remember mnemonics in an attempt to make it more human-readable. The program that converts assembly language to machine language is called an assembler. While assembly language predates FORTRAN, it is not typically what people think of when they discuss computer languages. Atom Atom is an intended replacement for RSS and like it is used for syndicating a web site's content. It is currently not nearly as popular or well-supported by software applications, however. authoring system Any GUIs method of designing new software can be called an authoring system. Any computer language name with the word "visual" in front of it is probably a version of that language built with some authoring system capabilities. It appears that the first serious effort to produce a commercial quality authoring system took place in the mid eighties for the Amiga. AWK AWK is an interpreted language developed in 1977 by Aho, Weinberger, & Kernighan. It gets its name from its creators' initials. It is not particularly fast, but it was designed for creating small throwaway programs rather than full-blown applications -- it is designed to make the writing of the program fast,

not the program itself. It is quite portable with versions existing for numerous platforms, including a free GNU version. Plus, virtually every version of UNIX in the world comes with AWK built-in. BASIC The Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code is a computer language developed by Kemeny & Kurtz in 1964. Although it is traditionally interpreted, compilers exist for many platforms. While the interpreted form is typically fairly slow, the compiled form is often quite fast, usually faster than Pascal. The biggest problem with BASIC is portability; versions for different machines are often completely unlike each other; Amiga BASIC at first glance looks more like Pascal, for example. Portability problems actually go beyond even the cross platform level; in fact, most machines have multiple versions of incompatible BASICs available for use. The most popular version of BASIC today is called Visual BASIC. Like all BASICs it has portability issues, but it has some of the advantages of an authoring system so it is relatively easy to use. baud A measure of communications speed, used typically for modems indicating how many bits per second can be transmitted. BBS A bulletin board system is a computer that can be directly connected to via modem and provides various services like e-mail, chatting, newsgroups, and file downloading. BBSs have waned in popularity as more and more people are instead connecting to the Internet, but they are still used for product support and local area access. Most current BBSs provide some sort of gateway connection to the Internet. beta A beta version of something is not yet ready for prime time but still possibly useful to related developers and other interested parties. Expect beta software to crash more than properly released software does. Traditionally beta versions (of commercial software) are distributed only to selected testers who are often then given a discount on the proper version after its release in exchange for their testing work. Beta versions of non-commercial software are more often freely available to anyone who has an interest. binary There are two meanings for binary in common computer usage. The first is the name of the number system in which there are only zeros and ones. This is important to computers because all computer data is ultimately a series of zeros and ones, and thus can be represented by binary numbers. The second is an offshoot of the first; data that is not meant to be intepreted through a common character set (like ASCII) is typically referred to as binary data. Pure binary data is typically eight bit data, and transferring a binary file through ASCII channels without prior modification will result in corruption and loss of data. Binary data can be turned into ASCII data via uucoding or bcoding. bit A bit can either be on or off; one or zero. All computer data can ultimately be reduced to a series of bits. The term is also used as a (very rough) measure of sound quality, color quality, and even procesor capability by considering the fact that series of bits can represent binary numbers. For example (without getting too technical), an eight bit image can contain at most 256 distinct colors while a sixteen bit image can contain at most 65,536 distinct colors. bitmap A bitmap is a simplistic representation of an image on a computer, simply indicating whether or not pixels are on or off, and sometimes indicating their color. Often fonts are represented as bitmaps. The term "pixmap" is sometimes used similarly; typically when a distinction is made, pixmap refers to color images and bitmap refers to monochrome images. blog Short for web log, a blog (or weblog, or less commonly, 'blog) is a web site containing periodic (usually frequent) posts. Blogs are usually syndicated via either some type of RSS or Atom and often supports TrackBacks. It is not uncommon for blogs to function much like newspaper columns. A blogger is someone who writes for and maintains a blog. boolean

Boolean algebra is the mathematics of base two numbers. Since base two numbers have only two values, zero and one, there is a good analogy between base two numbers and the logical values "true" & "false". In common usage, booleans are therefore considered to be simple logical values like true & false and the operations that relate them, most typically "and", "or" and "not". Since everyone has a basic understanding of the concepts of true & false and basic conjunctions, everyone also has a basic understanding of boolean concepts -- they just may not realize it. byte A byte is a grouping of bits. It is typically eight bits, but there are those who use non-standard byte sizes. Bytes are usually measured in large groups, and the term "kilobyte" (often abbreviated as K) means onethousand twenty-four (1024) bytes; the term "megabyte" (often abbreviated as M) means one-thousand twenty-four (1024) K; the term gigabyte (often abbreviated as G) means one-thousand twenty-four (1024) M; and the term "terabyte" (often abbreviated as T) means one-thousand twenty-four (1024) G. Memory is typically measured in kilobytes or megabytes, and disk space is typically measured in megabytes or gigabytes. Note that the multipliers here are 1024 instead of the more common 1000 as would be used in the metric system. This is to make it easier to work with the binary number system. Note also that some hardware manufacturers will use the smaller 1000 multiplier on M & G quantities to make their disk drives seem larger than they really are; buyer beware. bytecode Sometimes computer languages that are said to be either interpreted or compiled are in fact neither and are more accurately said to be somewhere in between. Such languages are compiled into bytecode which is then interpreted on the target system. Bytecode tends to be binary but will work on any machine with the appropriate runtime environment (or virtual machine) for it. C C is one of the most popular computer languages in the world, and quite possibly the most popular. It is a compiled langauge widely supported on many platforms. It tends to be more portable than FORTRAN but less portable than Java; it has been standardized by ANSI as "ANSI C" -- older versions are called either "K&R C" or "Kernighan and Ritchie C" (in honor of C's creators), or sometimes just "classic C". Fast and simple, it can be applied to all manner of general purpose tasks. C compilers are made by several companies, but the free GNU version (gcc) is still considered one of the best. Newer C-like object-oriented languages include both Java and C++. C# C# is a compiled object-oriented language based heavily on C++ with some Java features. C++ C++ is a compiled object-oriented language. Based heavily on C, C++ is nearly as fast and can often be thought of as being just C with added features. It is currently probably the second most popular objectoriented language, but it has the drawback of being fairly complex -- the much simpler but somewhat slower Java is probably the most popular object-oriented language. Note that C++ was developed independently of the somewhat similar Objective-C; it is however related to Objective-C++. C64/128 The Commodore 64 computer to this day holds the record for being the most successful model of computer ever made with even the lowest estimates being in the tens of millions. Its big brother, the Commodore 128, was not quite as popular but still sold several million units. Both units sported ROMbased BASIC and used it as a default "OS". The C128 also came with CP/M (it was a not-oftenexercized option on the C64). In their later days they were also packaged with GEOS. Both are based on 65xx family processors. They are still in use today and boast a friendly and surprisingly active user community. There is even a current effort to port Linux to the C64 and C128 machines. CDE The common desktop environment is a popular commercial window manager (and much more -- as its name touts, it is more of a desktop environment) that runs under X-Windows. Free work-alike versions are also available. chain

Some computer devices support chaining, the ability to string multiple devices in a sequence plugged into just one computer port. Often, but not always, such a chain will require some sort of terminator to mark the end. For an example, a SCSI scanner may be plugged into a SCSI CD-ROM drive that is plugged into a SCSI hard drive that is in turn plugged into the main computer. For all these components to work properly, the scanner would also have to have a proper terminator in use. Device chaining has been around a long time, and it is interesting to note that C64/128 serial devices supported it from the very beginning. Today the most common low-cost chainable devices in use support USB while the fastest low-cost chainable devices in use support FireWire. character set Since in reality all a computer can store are series of zeros and ones, representing common things like text takes a little work. The solution is to view the series of zeros and ones instead as a sequence of bytes, and map each one to a particular letter, number, or symbol. The full mapping is called a character set. The most popular character set is commonly referred to as ASCII. The second most popular character set these days is Unicode (and it will probably eventually surpass ASCII). Other fairly common character sets include EBCDIC and PETSCII. They are generally quite different from one another; programs exist to convert between them on most platforms, though. Usually EBCDIC is only found on really old machines. CISC Complex instruction set computing is one of the two main types of processor design in use today. It is slowly losing popularity to RISC designs; currently all the fastest processors in the world are RISC. The most popular current CISC processor is the x86, but there are also still some 68xx, 65xx, and Z80s in use. CLI A command-line interface is a text-based means of communicating with a program, especially an OS. This is the sort of interface used by MS-DOS, or a UNIX shell window. COBOL The Common Business Oriented Language is a language developed back in 1959 and still used by some businesses. While it is relatively portable, it is still disliked by many professional programmers simply because COBOL programs tend to be physically longer than equivalent programs written in almost any other language in common use. compiled If a program is compiled, its original human-readable source has been converted into a form more easily used by a computer prior to it being run. Such programs will generally run more quickly than interpreted programs, because time was pre-spent in the compilation phase. A program that compiles other programs is called a compiler. compression It is often possible to remove redundant information or capitalize on patterns in data to make a file smaller. Usually when a file has been compressed, it cannot be used until it is uncompressed. Image files are common exceptions, though, as many popular image file formats have compression built-in. cookie A cookie is a small file that a web page on another machine writes to your personal machine's disk to store various bits of information. Many people strongly detest cookies and the whole idea of them, and most browsers allow the reception of cookies to be disabled or at least selectively disabled, but it should be noted that both Netscape and MSIE have silent cookie reception enabled by default. Sites that maintain shopping carts or remember a reader's last position have legitimate uses for cookies. Sites without such functionality that still spew cookies with distant (or worse, non-existent) expiration dates should perhaps be treated with a little caution. CP/M An early DOS for desktops, CP/M runs on both Z80 and the x86 based machines. CP/M provides only a CLI and there really is not any standard way to get a window manager to run on top of it. It is fairly complex and tricky to use. In spite of all this, CP/M was once the most popular DOS and is still in use today.

crash If a bug in a program is severe enough, it can cause that program to crash, or to become inoperable without being restarted. On machines that are not multitasking, the entire machine will crash and have to be rebooted. On machines that are only partially multitasking the entire machine will sometimes crash and have to be rebooted. On machines that are fully multitasking, the machine should never crash and require a reboot. Cray A Cray is a high-end computer used for research and frequently heavy-duty graphics applications. Modern Crays typically have Solaris for their OS and sport sixty-four RISC processors; older ones had various other configurations. Current top-of-the-line Crays can have over 2000 processors. crippleware Crippleware is a variant of shareware that will either self-destruct after its trial period or has built-in limitations to its functionality that get removed after its purchase. CSS Cascading style sheets are used in conjunction with HTML and XHTML to define the layout of web pages. While CSS is how current web pages declare how they should be displayed, it tends not to be supported well (if at all) by ancient browsers. XSL performs this same function more generally. desktop publisher A program for creating newspapers, magazines, books, etc. Some common desktop publishing programs include FrameMaker, PageMaker, InDesign, and GeoPublish. DHTML Dynamic HTML is simply the combined use of both CSS and JavaScript together in the same document; a more extreme form is called AJaX. Note that DHTML is quite different from the similarly named DTML. dict A protocol used for looking up definitions across a network (in particular the Internet). digital camera A digital camera looks and behaves like a regular camera, except instead of using film, it stores the image it sees in memory as a file for later transfer to a computer. Many digital cameras offer additional storage besides their own internal memory; a few sport some sort of disk but the majority utilize some sort of flash card. Digital cameras currently lack the resolution and color palette of real cameras, but are usually much more convenient for computer applications. Another related device is called a scanner. DIMM A physical component used to add RAM to a computer. Similar to, but incompatible with, SIMMs. DNS Domain name service is the means by which a name (like www.saugus.net or ftp.saugus.net) gets converted into a real Internet address that points to a particular machine. DoS In a denial of service attack, many individual (usually compromised) computers are used to try and simultaneously access the same public resource with the intent of overburdening it so that it will not be able to adequately serve its normal users. DOS A disk operating system manages disks and other system resources. Sort of a subset of OSes, sort of an archaic term for the same. MS-DOS is the most popular program currently calling itself a DOS. CP/M was the most popular prior to MS-DOS. download To download a file is to copy it from a remote computer to your own. The opposite is upload. DR-DOS The DOS currently produced by Caldera (originally produced by Design Research as a successor to CP/M) designed to work like MS-DOS. While similar to CP/M in many ways, it utilizes simpler commands. It provides only a CLI, but either Windows 3.1 or GEOS may be run on top of it to provide a GUI. It only runs on x86 based machines.

driver A driver is a piece of software that works with the OS to control a particular piece of hardware, like a printer or a scanner or a mouse or whatever. DRM Depending upon whom you ask, DRM can stand for either Digital Rights Management or Digital Restrictions Management. In either case, DRM is used to place restrictions upon the usage of digital media ranging from software to music to video. DTML The Document Template Mark-up Language is a subset of SGML and a superset of HTML used for creating documents that dynamically adapt to external conditions using its own custom tags and a little bit of Python. Note that it is quite different from the similarly named DHTML. EDBIC The EDBIC character set is similar to (but less popular than) the ASCII character set in concept, but is significantly different in layout. It tends to be found only on old machines.. emacs Emacs is both one of the most powerful and one of the most popular text editing programs in existence. Versions can be found for most platforms, and in fact multiple companies make versions, so for a given platform there might even be a choice. There is even a free GNU version available. The drawback with emacs is that it is not in the least bit lightweight. In fact, it goes so far in the other direction that even its advocates will occasionally joke about it. It is however extremely capable. Almost anything that one would need to relating to text can be done with emacs and is probably built-in. Even if one manages to find something that emacs was not built to do, emacs has a built-in Lisp interpreter capable of not only extending its text editing capabilities, but even of being used as a scripting language in its own right. embedded An embedded system is a computer that lives inside another device and acts as a component of that device. For example, current cars have an embedded computer under the hood that helps regulate much of their day to day operation. An embedded file is a file that lives inside another and acts as a portion of that file. This is frequently seen with HTML files having embedded audio files; audio files often embedded in HTML include AU files, MIDI files, SID files, WAV files, AIFF files, and MOD files. Most browsers will ignore these files unless an appropriate plug-in is present. emulator An emulator is a program that allows one computer platform to mimic another for the purposes of running its software. Typically (but not always) running a program through an emulator will not be quite as pleasent an experience as running it on the real system. endian A processor will be either "big endian" or "little endian" based upon the manner in which it encodes multiple byte values. There is no difference in performance between the two encoding methods, but it is one of the sources of difficulty when reading binary data on different platforms. environment An environment (sometimes also called a runtime environment) is a collection of external variable items or parameters that a program can access when run. Information about the computer's hardware and the user can often be found in the environment. EPOC EPOC is a lightweight OS. It is most commonly found on the Psion PDA. extension Filename extensions originate back in the days of CP/M and basically allow a very rough grouping of different file types by putting a tag at the end of the name. To further complicate matters, the tag is sometimes separated by the name proper by a period "." and sometimes by a tab. While extensions are semi-enforced on CP/M, MS-DOS, and MS-Windows, they have no real meaning aside from convention on other platforms and are only optional. FAQ

A frequently asked questions file attempts to provide answers for all commonly asked questions related to a given topic. FireWire An incredibly fast type of serial port that offers many of the best features of SCSI at a lower price. Faster than most types of parallel port, a single FireWire port is capable of chaining many devices without the need of a terminator. FireWire is similar in many respects to USB but is significantly faster and somewhat more expensive. It is heavily used for connecting audio/video devices to computers, but is also used for connecting storage devices like drives and other assorted devices like printers and scanners. fixed width As applied to a font, fixed width means that every character takes up the same amount of space. That is, an "i" will be just as wide as an "m" with empty space being used for padding. The opposite is variable width. The most common fixed width font is Courier. flash Flash memory is similar to RAM. It has one significant advantage: it does not lose its contents when power is lost; it has two main disadvantages: it is slower, and it eventually wears out. Flash memory is frequently found in PCMCIA cards. font In a simplistic sense, a font can be thought of as the physical description of a character set. While the character set will define what sets of bits map to what letters, numbers, and other symbols, the font will define what each letter, number, and other symbol looks like. Fonts can be either fixed width or variable width and independently, either bitmapped or vectored. The size of the large characters in a font is typically measured in points. Forth A language developed in 1970 by Moore. Forth is fairly portable and has versions on many different platforms. While it is no longer an very popular language, many of its ideas and concepts have been carried into other computer programs. In particular, some programs for doing heavy-duty mathematical and engineering work use Forth-like interfaces. FORTRAN FORTRAN stands for formula translation and is the oldest computer language in the world. It is typically compiled and is quite fast. Its primary drawbacks are portability and ease-of-use -- often different FORTRAN compilers on different platforms behave quite differently in spite of standardization efforts in 1966 (FORTRAN 66 or FORTRAN IV), 1978 (FORTRAN 77), and 1991 (FORTRAN 90). Today languages like C and Java are more popular, but FORTRAN is still heavily used in military software. It is somewhat amusing to note that when FORTRAN was first released back in 1958 its advocates thought that it would mean the end of software bugs. In truth of course by making the creation of more complex software practical, computer languages have merely created new types of software bugs. FreeBSD A free variant of Berkeley UNIX available for Alpha and x86 based machines. It is not as popular as Linux. freeware Freeware is software that is available for free with no strings attached. The quality is often superb as the authors are also generally users. FTP The file transfer protocol is one of the most commonly used methods of copying files across the Internet. It has its origins on UNIX machines, but has been adapted to almost every type of computer in existence and is built into many browsers. Most FTP programs have two modes of operation, ASCII, and binary. Transmitting an ASCII file via the ASCII mode of operation is more efficient and cleaner. Transmitting a binary file via the ASCII mode of operation will result in a broken binary file. Thus the FTP programs that do not support both modes of operation will typically only do the binary mode, as binary transfers are capable of transferring both kinds of data without corruption.

gateway A gateway connects otherwise separate computer networks. GEOS The graphic environment operating system is a lightweight OS with a GUI. It runs on several different processors, including the 65xx (different versions for different machines -- there are versions for the C64, the C128, and the Apple ][, each utilizing the relevant custom chip sets), the x86 (although the x86 version is made to run on top of MS-DOS (or PC-DOS or DR-DOS) and is not strictly a full OS or a window manager, rather it is somewhat in between, like Windows 3.1) and numerous different PDAs, embedded devices, and hand-held machines. It was originally designed by Berkeley Softworks (no real relation to the Berkeley of UNIX fame) but is currently in a more interesting state: the company GeoWorks develops and promotes development of GEOS for hand-held devices, PDAs, & and embedded devices and owns (but has ceased further development on) the x86 version. The other versions are owned (and possibly still being developed) by the company CMD. GHz & gigahertz One gigahertz is equivalent to 1000 megahertz, or 1,000,000,000 hertz. Glulx A virtual machine optimized for running interactive fiction, interactive tutorials, and other interactive things of a primarily textual nature. Glulx has been ported to several platforms, and in in many ways an upgrade to the Z-machine. GNOME The GNU network object model environment is a popular free window manager (and much more -- as its name touts, it is more of a desktop environment) that runs under X-Windows. It is a part of the GNU project. GNU GNU stands for GNU's not UNIX and is thus a recursive acronym (and unlike the animal name, the "G" here is pronounced). At any rate, the GNU project is an effort by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to make all of the traditional UNIX utilities free for whoever wants them. The Free Software Foundation programmers know their stuff, and the quality of the GNU software is on par with the best produced commercially, and often better. All of the GNU software can be downloaded for free or obtained on CDROM for a small service fee. Documentation for all GNU software can be downloaded for free or obtained in book form for a small service fee. The Free Software Foundation pays its bills from the collection of service fees and the sale of T-shirts, and exists mostly through volunteer effort. It is based in Cambridge, MA. gopher Though not as popular as FTP or http, the gopher protocol is implemented by many browsers and numerous other programs and allows the transfer of files across networks. In some respects it can be thought of as a hybrid between FTP and http, although it tends not to be as good at raw file transfer as FTP and is not as flexible as http. The collection of documents available through gopher is often called "gopherspace", and it should be noted that gopherspace is older than the web. It should also be noted that gopher is not getting as much attention as it once did, and surfing through gopherspace is a little like exploring a ghost town, but there is an interesting VR interface available for it, and some things in gopherspace still have not been copied onto the web. GUI A graphical user interface is a graphics-based means of communicating with a program, especially an OS or window manager. In fact, a window manager can be thought of as a GUI for a CLI OS. HP-UX HP-UX is the version of UNIX designed by Hewlett-Packard to work with their PA-RISC and 68xx based machines. HTML The Hypertext Mark-up Language is the language currently most frequently used to express web pages (although it is rapidly being replaced by XHTML). Every browser has the built-in ability to understand

HTML. Some browsers can additionally understand Java and browse FTP areas. HTML is a proper subset of SGML. http The hypertext transfer protocol is the native protocol of browsers and is most typically used to transfer HTML formatted files. The secure version is called "https". Hurd The Hurd is the official GNU OS. It is still in development and is not yet supported on too many different processors, but promises to be the most powerful OS available. It (like all the GNU software) is free. Hz & hertz Hertz means cycles per second, and makes no assumptions about what is cycling. So, for example, if a fluorescent light flickers once per jiffy, it has a 60 Hz flicker. More typical for computers would be a program that runs once per jiffy and thus has a 60 Hz frequency, or larger units of hertz like kHz, MHz, GHz, or THz. i18n Commonly used to abbreviate the word "internationalization". There are eighteen letters between the "i" and the "n". Similar to (and often used along with) i18n. iCalendar The iCalendar standard refers to the format used to store calendar type information (including events, todo items, and journal entries) on the Internet. iCalendar data can be found on some World-Wide-Web pages or attached to e-mail messages. icon A small graphical display representing an object, action, or modifier of some sort. IDE Loosely speaking, a disk format sometimes used by MS-Windows, Mac OS, AmigaOS, and (rarely) UNIX. EIDE is enhanced IDE; it is much faster. Generally IDE is inferior (but less expensive) to SCSI, but it varies somewhat with system load and the individual IDE and SCSI components themselves. The quick rundown is that: SCSI-I and SCSI-II will almost always outperform IDE; EIDE will almost always outperform SCSI-I and SCSI-II; SCSI-III and UltraSCSI will almost always outperform EIDE; and heavy system loads give an advantage to SCSI. Note that although loosely speaking it is just a format difference, it is deep down a hardware difference. Inform A compiled, object-oriented language optimized for creating interactive fiction. infrared communications A device with an infrared port can communicate with other devices at a distance by beaming infrared light signals. Two incompatible protocols are used for infrared communications: IrDA and ASK. Many devices support both. Instant Messenger AOL's Instant Messenger is is a means of chatting over the Internet in real-time. It allows both open group discussions and private conversations. Instant Messenger uses a different, proprietary protocol from the more standard IRC, and is not supported on as many platforms. interactive fiction Interactive fiction (often abbreviated "IF" or "I-F") is a form of literature unique to the computer. While the reader cannot influence the direction of a typical story, the reader plays a more active role in an interactive fiction story and completely controls its direction. Interactive fiction works come in all the sizes and genres available to standard fiction, and in fact are not always even fiction per se (interactive tutorials exist and are slowly becoming more common). interpreted If a program is interpreted, its actual human-readable source is read as it is run by the computer. This is generally a slower process than if the program being run has already been compiled. intranet

An intranet is a private network. There are many intranets scattered all over the world. Some are connected to the Internet via gateways. IP IP is the family of protocols that makes up the Internet. The two most common flavors are TCP/IP and UDP/IP. IRC Internet relay chat is a means of chatting over the Internet in real-time. It allows both open group discussions and private conversations. IRC programs are provided by many different companies and will work on many different platforms. AOL's Instant Messenger utilizes a separate incompatible protocol but is otherwise very similar. IrDA The Infrared Data Association (IrDA) is a voluntary organization of various manufacturers working together to ensure that the infrared communications between different computers, PDAs, printers, digital cameras, remote controls, etc. are all compatible with each other regardless of brand. The term is also often used to designate an IrDA compliant infrared communications port on a device. Informally, a device able to communicate via IrDA compliant infrared is sometimes simply said to "have IrDA". There is also an earlier, incompatible, and usually slower type of infrared communications still in use called ASK. IRI An Internationalized Resource Identifier is just a URI with i18n. IRIX The variant of UNIX designed by Silicon Graphics, Inc. IRIX machines are known for their graphics capabilities and were initially optimized for multimedia applications. ISDN An integrated service digital network line can be simply looked at as a digital phone line. ISDN connections to the Internet can be four times faster than the fastest regular phone connection, and because it is a digital connection a modem is not needed. Any computer hooked up to ISDN will typically require other special equipment in lieu of the modem, however. Also, both phone companies and ISPs charge more for ISDN connections than regular modem connections. ISP An Internet service provider is a company that provides Internet support for other entities. AOL (America Online) is a well-known ISP. Java A computer language designed to be both fairly lightweight and extremely portable. It is tightly bound to the web as it is the primary language for web applets. There has also been an OS based on Java for use on small hand-held, embedded, and network computers. It is called JavaOS. Java can be either interpreted or compiled. For web applet use it is almost always interpreted. While its interpreted form tends not to be very fast, its compiled form can often rival languages like C++ for speed. It is important to note however that speed is not Java's primary purpose -- raw speed is considered secondary to portabilty and ease of use. JavaScript JavaScript (in spite of its name) has nothing whatsoever to do with Java (in fact, it's arguably more like Newton Script than Java). JavaScript is an interpreted language built into a browser to provide a relatively simple means of adding interactivity to web pages. It is only supported on a few different browsers, and tends not to work exactly the same on different versions. Thus its use on the Internet is somewhat restricted to fairly simple programs. On intranets where there are usually fewer browser versions in use, JavaScript has been used to implement much more complex and impressive programs. joystick A joystick is a physical device typically used to control objects on a computer screen. It is frequently used for games and sometimes used in place of a mouse. JSON

The JSON is used for data interchange between programs, an area in which the ubiquitous XML is not too well-suited. JSON is lightweight and works extremely cleanly with languages languages including JavaScript, Python, Java, C++, and many others. JSON-RPC JSON-RPC is like XML-RPC but is significantly more lightweight since it uses JSON in lieu of XML. KDE The K desktop environment is a popular free window manager (and much more -- as its name touts, it is more of a desktop environment) that runs under X-Windows. Kerberos Kerberos is a network authentication protocol. Basically it preserves the integrity of passwords in any untrusted network (like the Internet). Kerberized applications work hand-in-hand with sites that support Kerberos to ensure that passwords cannot be stolen. kernel The very heart of an OS is often called its kernel. It will usually (at minimum) provide some libraries that give programmers access to its various features. kHz & kilohertz One kilohertz is equivalent to 1000 hertz. Some older computers have clock speeds measured in kHz. LDAP The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol provides a means of sharing address book type of information across an intranet or even across the Internet. Note too that "address book type of information" here is pretty broad; it often includes not just human addresses, but machine addresses, printer configurations, and similar. library A selection of routines used by programmers to make computers do particular things. lightweight Something that is lightweight will not consume computer resources (such as RAM and disk space) too much and will thus run on less expensive computer systems. Linux Believe it or not, one of the fastest, most robust, and powerful multitasking OSes is available for free. Linux can be downloaded for free or be purchased on CD-ROM for a small service charge. A handful of companies distribute Linux including Red Hat, Debian, Caldera, and many others. Linux is also possibly available for more hardware combinations than any other OS (with the possible exception of NetBSD. Supported processors include: Alpha, PowerPC, SPARC, x86, and 68xx. Most processors currently not supported are currently works-in-progress or even available in beta. For example, work is currently underway to provide support for PA-RISC, 65xx, StrongARM, and Z80. People have even successfully gotten Linux working on PDAs. As you may have guessed, Linux can be made quite lightweight. Linux is a variant of UNIX and as such, most of the traditional UNIX software will run on Linux. This especially includes the GNU software, most of which comes with the majority of Linux distributions. Fast, reliable, stable, and inexpensive, Linux is popular with ISPs, software developers, and home hobbyists alike. Lisp Lisp stands for list processing and is the second oldest computer language in the world. Being developed in 1959, it lost the title to FORTRAN by only a few months. It is typically interpreted, but compilers are available for some platforms. Attempts were made to standardize the language, and the standard version is called "Common Lisp". There have also been efforts to simplify the language, and the results of these efforts is another language called Scheme. Lisp is a fairly portable language, but is not particularly fast. Today, Lisp is most widely used with AI software. load There are two popular meanings for load. The first means to fetch some data or a program from a disk and store it in memory. The second indicates the amount of work a component (especially a processor) is being made to do. Logo

Logo is an interpreted language designed by Papert in 1966 to be a tool for helping people (especially kids) learn computer programming concepts. In addition to being used for that purpose, it is often used as a language for controlling mechanical robots and other similar devices. Logo interfaces even exist for building block / toy robot sets. Logo uses a special graphics cursor called "the turtle", and Logo is itself sometimes called "Turtle Graphics". Logo is quite portable but not particularly fast. Versions can be found on almost every computer platform in the world. Additionally, some other languages (notably some Pascal versions) provide Logo-like interfaces for graphics-intensive programming. lossy If a process is lossy, it means that a little quality is lost when it is performed. If a format is lossy, it means that putting data into that format (or possibly even manipulating it in that format) will cause some slight loss. Lossy processes and formats are typically used for performance or resource utilization reasons. The opposite of lossy is lossless. Lua Lua is a simple interpreted language. It is extremely portable, and free versions exist for most platforms. Mac OS Mac OS is the OS used on Macintosh computers. There are two distinctively different versions of it; everything prior to version 10 (sometimes called Mac OS Classic) and everything version 10 or later (called Mac OS X). Mac OS Classic The OS created by Apple and originally used by Macs is frequently (albeit slightly incorrectly) referred to as Mac OS Classic (officially Mac OS Classic is this original OS running under the modern Mac OS X in emulation. Mac OS combines the functionality of both an OS and a window manager and is often considered to be the easiest OS to use. It is partially multitasking but will still sometimes crash when dealing with a buggy program. It is probably the second most popular OS, next only to Windows 'XP (although it is quickly losing ground to Mac OS X) and has excellent driver support and boasts a fair selection of games. Mac OS will run on PowerPC and 68xx based machines. Mac OS X Mac OS X (originally called Rhapsody) is the industrial strength OS produced by Apple to run on both PowerPC and x86 systems (replacing what is often referred to as Mac OS Classic. Mac OS X is at its heart a variant of UNIX and possesses its underlying power (and the ability to run many of the traditional UNIX tools, including the GNU tools). It also was designed to mimic other OSes on demand via what it originally refered to as "boxes" (actually high-performance emulators); it has the built-in capability to run programs written for older Mac OS (via its "BlueBox", officially called Mac OS Classic) and work was started on making it also run Windows '95 / '98 / ME software (via what was called its "YellowBox"). There are also a few rumors going around that future versions may even be able to run Newton software (via the "GreenBox"). It provides a selection of two window managers built-in: Aqua and X-Windows (with Aqua being the default). machine language Machine language consists of the raw numbers that can be directly understood by a particular processor. Each processor's machine language will be different from other processors' machine language. Although called "machine language", it is not usually what people think of when talking about computer languages. Machine language dressed up with mnemonics to make it a bit more human-readable is called assembly language. Macintosh A Macintosh (or a Mac for short) is a computer system that has Mac OS for its OS. There are a few different companies that have produced Macs, but by far the largest is Apple. The oldest Macs are based on the 68xx processor; somewhat more recent Macs on the PowerPC processor, and current Macs on the x86 processor. The Macintosh was really the first general purpose computer to employ a GUI. mainframe A mainframe is any computer larger than a small piece of furniture. A modern mainframe is more powerful than a modern workstation, but more expensive and more difficult to maintain. MathML

The Math Mark-up Language is a subset of XML used to represent mathematical formulae and equations. Typically it is found embedded within XHTML documents, although as of this writing not all popular browsers support it. megahertz A million cycles per second, abbreviated MHz. This is often used misleadingly to indicate processor speed, because while one might expect that a higher number would indicate a faster processor, that logic only holds true within a given type of processors as different types of processors are capable of doing different amounts of work within a cycle. For a current example, either a 200 MHz PowerPC or a 270 MHz SPARC will outperform a 300 MHz Pentium. Merced The Merced is a RISC processor developed by Intel with help from Hewlett-Packard and possibly Sun. It is just starting to be released, but is intended to eventually replace both the x86 and PA-RISC processors. Curiously, HP is recommending that everyone hold off using the first release and instead wait for the second one. It is expected some day to be roughly as fast as an Alpha or PowerPC. It is expected to be supported by future versions of Solaris, Windows-NT, HP-UX, Mac OS X, and Linux. The current semi-available Merced processor is called the Itanium. Its overall schedule is way behind, and some analysts predict that it never will really be released in significant quanitities. MFM Loosely speaking, An old disk format sometimes used by CP/M, MS-DOS, and MS-Windows. No longer too common as it cannot deliver close to the performance of either SCSI or IDE. middleware Software designed to sit in between an OS and applications. Common examples are Java and Tcl/Tk. MIME The multi-purpose Internet mail extensions specification describes a means of sending non-ASCII data (such as images, sounds, foreign symbols, etc.) through e-mail. It commonly utilizes bcode. MMX Multimedia extensions were built into some x86 CPUs to provide better performance for certain operations, most notably graphics and sound. It is similar to AltiVec on the PowerPC CPUs. Like AltiVec, it requires special software for full performance benefits to be realized. MOB A movable object is a graphical object that is manipulated separately from the background. These are seen all the time in computer games. When implemented in hardware, MOBs are sometimes called sprites. Modula-2 & Modula-3 Modula-2 is a procedural language based on Pascal by its original author in around the 1977 - 1979 time period. Modula-3 is an intended successor that adds support for object-oriented constructs (among other things). Modula-2 can be either compiled or interpreted, while Modula-3 tends to be just a compiled language. MOTD A message of the day. Many computers (particularly more capable ones) are configured to display a MOTD when accessed remotely. Motif Motif is a popular commercial window manager that runs under X-Windows. Free work-alike versions are also available. MS-DOS The DOS produced by Microsoft. Early versions of it bear striking similarities to the earlier CP/M, but it utilizes simpler commands. It provides only a CLI, but either OS/2, Windows 3.1, Windows '95, Windows '98, Windows ME, or GEOS may be run on top of it to provide a GUI. It only runs on x86 based machines. MS-Windows

MS-Windows is the name collectively given to several somewhat incompatible OSes all produced by Microsoft. They are: Windows CE, Windows NT, Windows 3.1, Windows '95, Windows '98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. MUD A multi-user dimension (also sometimes called multi-user dungeon, but in either case abbreviated to "MUD") is sort of a combination between the online chatting abilities provided by something like IRC and a role-playing game. A MUD built with object oriented principles in mind is called a "Multi-user dimension object-oriented", or MOO. Yet another variant is called a "multi-user shell", or MUSH. Still other variants are called multi-user role-playing environments (MURPE) and multi-user environments (MUSE). There are probably more. In all cases the differences will be mostly academic to the regular user, as the same software is used to connect to all of them. Software to connect to MUDs can be found for most platforms, and there are even Java based ones that can run from within a browser. multitasking Some OSes have built into them the ability to do several things at once. This is called multitasking, and has been in use since the late sixties / early seventies. Since this ability is built into the software, the overall system will be slower running two things at once than it will be running just one thing. A system may have more than one processor built into it though, and such a system will be capable of running multiple things at once with less of a performance hit. NetBSD A free variant of Berkeley UNIX available for Alpha, x86, 68xx, PA-RISC, SPARC, PowerPC, ARM, and many other types of machines. Its emphasis is on portability. netiquette The established conventions of online politeness are called netiquette. Some conventions vary from site to site or online medium to online medium; others are pretty standard everywhere. Newbies are often unfamiliar with the conventional rules of netiquette and sometimes embarrass themselves accordingly. Be sure not to send that incredibly important e-mail message before reading about netiquette. newbie A newbie is a novice to the online world or computers in general. news Usenet news can generally be thought of as public e-mail as that is generally the way it behaves. In reality, it is implemented by different software and is often accessed by different programs. Different newsgroups adhere to different topics, and some are "moderated", meaning that humans will try to manually remove off-topic posts, especially spam. Most established newsgroups have a FAQ, and people are strongly encouraged to read the FAQ prior to posting. Newton Although Newton is officially the name of the lightweight OS developed by Apple to run on its MessagePad line of PDAs, it is often used to mean the MessagePads (and compatible PDAs) themselves and thus the term "Newton OS" is often used for clarity. The Newton OS is remarkably powerful; it is fully multitasking in spite of the fact that it was designed for small machines. It is optimized for handheld use, but will readily transfer data to all manner of desktop machines. Historically it was the first PDA. Recently Apple announced that it will discontinue further development of the Newton platform, but will instead work to base future hand-held devices on either Mac OS or Mac OS X with some effort dedicated to making the new devices capable of running current Newton programs. Newton book Newton books provide all the functionality of ordinary books but add searching and hypertext capabilities. The format was invented for the Newton to provide a means of making volumes of data portable, and is particularly popular in the medical community as most medical references are available as Newton books and carrying around a one pound Newton is preferable to carrying around twenty pounds of books, especially when it comes to looking up something. In addition to medical books, numerous references, most of the classics, and many contemporary works of fiction are available as Newton books. Most fiction is available for free, most references cost money. Newton books are somewhat more capable than the similar Palm DOC; both are specific types of e-books.

Newton Script A intepreted, object-oriented language for Newton MessagePad computers. nybble A nybble is half a byte, or four bits. It is a case of computer whimsy; it only stands to reason that a small byte should be called a nybble. Some authors spell it with an "i" instead of the "y", but the "y" is the original form. object-oriented While the specifics are well beyond the scope of this document, the term "object-oriented" applies to a philosophy of software creation. Often this philosophy is referred to as object-oriented design (sometimes abbreviated as OOD), and programs written with it in mind are referred to as object-oriented programs (often abbreviated OOP). Programming languages designed to help facilitate it are called object-oriented languages (sometimes abbreviated as OOL) and databases built with it in mind are called object-oriented databases (sometimes abbreviated as OODB or less fortunately OOD). The general notion is that an object-oriented approach to creating software starts with modeling the real-world problems trying to be solved in familiar real-world ways, and carries the analogy all the way down to structure of the program. This is of course a great over-simplification. Numerous object-oriented programming languages exist including: Java, C++, Modula-2, Newton Script, and ADA. Objective-C & ObjC Objective-C (often called "ObjC" for short) is a compiled object-oriented language. Based heavily on C, Objective-C is nearly as fast and can often be thought of as being just C with added features. Note that it was developed independently of C++; its object-oriented extensions are more in the style of Smalltalk. It is however related to Objective-C++. Objective-C++ & ObjC++ Objective-C++ (often called "ObjC++" for short) is a curious hybrid of Objective-C and C++, allowing the syntax of both to coexist in the same source files. office suite An office suite is a collection of programs including at minimum a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing program, and minimal database program. Some common office suites include MS-Office, AppleWorks, ClarisWorks, GeoWorks, Applixware, Corel Office, and StarOffice. open source Open source software goes one step beyond freeware. Not only does it provide the software for free, it provides the original source code used to create the software. Thus, curious users can poke around with it to see how it works, and advanced users can modify it to make it work better for them. By its nature, open souce software is pretty well immune to all types of computer virus. OpenBSD A free variant of Berkeley UNIX available for Alpha, x86, 68xx, PA-RISC, SPARC, and PowerPC based machines. Its emphasis is on security. OpenDocument & ODF OpenDocument (or ODF for short) is the suite of open, XML-based office suite application formats defined by the OASIS consortium. It defines a platform-neutral, non-proprietary way of storing documents. PA-RISC The PA-RISC is a RISC processor developed by Hewlett-Packard. It is currently produced only by HP. At the moment only one OS runs on PA-RISC based machines: HP-UX. There is an effort underway to port Linux to them, though. Palm DOC Palm DOC files are quite similar to (but slightly less capable than) Newton books. They were designed for Palm Pilots but can now be read on a couple other platforms, too. They are a specific type of e-book. Palm Pilot The Palm Pilot (also called both just Palm and just Pilot, officially now just Palm) is the most popular PDA currently in use. It is one of the least capable PDAs, but it is also one of the smallest and least

expensive. While not as full featured as many of the other PDAs (such as the Newton) it performs what features it does have quite well and still remains truly pocket-sized. parallel Loosely speaking, parallel implies a situation where multiple things can be done simultaneously, like having multiple check-out lines each serving people all at once. Parallel connections are by their nature more expensive than serial ones, but usually faster. Also, in a related use of the word, often multitasking computers are said to be capable of running multiple programs in parallel. partition Sometimes due to hardware limitations, disks have to be divided into smaller pieces. These pieces are called partitions. Pascal Named after the mathematician Blaise Pascal, Pascal is a language designed by Niklaus Wirth originally in 1968 (and heavily revised in 1972) mostly for purposes of education and training people how to write computer programs. It is a typically compiled language but is still usually slower than C or FORTRAN. Wirth also created a more powerful object-oriented Pascal-like language called Modula-2. PC-DOS The DOS produced by IBM designed to work like MS-DOS. Early versions of it bear striking similarities to the earlier CP/M, but it utilizes simpler commands. It provides only a CLI, but either Windows 3.1 or GEOS may be run on top of it to provide a GUI. It only runs on x86 based machines. PCMCIA The Personal Computer Memory Card International Association is a standards body that concern themselves with PC Card technology. Often the PC Cards themselves are referred to as "PCMCIA cards". Frequently flash memory can be found in PC card form. PET The Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) is an early (circa 1977-1980, around the same time as the Apple][) home computer featuring a ROM-based BASIC developed by Microsoft which it uses as a default "OS". It is based on the 65xx family of processors and is the precursor to the VIC-20. PETSCII The PETSCII character set gets its name from "PET ASCII; it is a variant of the ASCII character set originally developed for the Commodore PET that swaps the upper and lower case characters and adds over a hundred graphic characters in addition to other small changes. If you encounter some text that seems to have uppercase where lowercase is expected and vice-versa, it is probably a PETSCII file. PHP Named with a recursive acronym (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor), PHP provides a means of creating web pages that dynamically modify themselves on the fly. ping Ping is a protocol designed to check across a network to see if a particular computer is "alive" or not. Computers that recognize the ping will report back their status. Computers that are down will not report back anything at all. pixel The smallest distinct point on a computer display is called a pixel. plug-in A plug-in is a piece of software designed not to run on its own but rather work in cooperation with a separate application to increase that application's abilities. point There are two common meanings for this word. The first is in the geometric sense; a position in space without size. Of course as applied to computers it must take up some space in practise (even if not in theory) and it is thus sometimes synonomous with pixel. The other meaning is related most typically to fonts and regards size. The exact meaning of it in this sense will unfortunately vary somewhat from person to person, but will often mean 1/72 of an inch. Even when it does not exactly mean 1/72 of an inch, larger point sizes always indicate larger fonts. PowerPC

The PowerPC is a RISC processor developed in a collaborative effort between IBM, Apple, and Motorola. It is currently produced by a few different companies, of course including its original developers. A few different OSes run on PowerPC based machines, including Mac OS, AIX, Solaris, Windows NT, Linux, Mac OS X, BeOS, and AmigaOS. At any given time, the fastest processor in the world is usually either a PowerPC or an Alpha, but sometimes SPARCs and PA-RISCs make the list, too. proprietary This simply means to be supplied by only one vendor. It is commonly misused. Currently, most processors are non-proprietary, some systems are non-proprietary, and every OS (except for arguably Linux) is proprietary. protocol A protocol is a means of communication used between computers. As long as both computers recognize the same protocol, they can communicate without too much difficulty over the same network or even via a simple direct modem connection regardless whether or not they are themselves of the same type. This means that WinTel boxes, Macs, Amigas, UNIX machines, etc., can all talk with one another provided they agree on a common protocol first. Psion The Psion is a fairly popular brand of PDA. Generally, it is in between a Palm and a Newton in capability. It runs the EPOC OS. Python Python is an interpreted, object-oriented language popular for Internet applications. It is extremely portable with free versions existing for virtually every platform. queue A queue is a waiting list of things to be processed. Many computers provide printing queues, for example. If something is being printed and the user requests that another item be printed, the second item will sit in the printer queue until the first item finishes printing at which point it will be removed from the queue and get printed itself. QuickDraw A high-level 3D graphics library with an emphasis on quick development time created by Apple. RAM Random access memory is the short-term memory of a computer. Any information stored in RAM will be lost if power goes out, but the computer can read from RAM far more quickly than from a drive. random access Also called "dynamic access" this indicates that data can be selected without having to skip over earlier data first. This is the way that a CD, record, laserdisc, or DVD will behave -- it is easy to selectively play a particular track without having to fast forward through earlier tracks. The other common behavior is called sequential access. RDF The Resource Description Framework is built upon an XML base and provides a more modern means of accessing data from Internet resources. It can provide metadata (including annotations) for web pages making (among other things) searching more capable. It is also being used to refashion some existing formats like RSS and iCalendar; in the former case it is already in place (at least for newer RSS versions), but it is still experimental in the latter case. real-time Something that happens in real-time will keep up with the events around it and never give any sort of "please wait" message. Rexx The Restructured Extended Executor is an interpreted language designed primarily to be embedded in other applications in order to make them consistently programmable, but also to be easy to learn and understand. RISC

Reduced instruction set computing is one of the two main types of processor design in use today, the other being CISC. The fastest processors in the world today are all RISC designs. There are several popular RISC processors, including Alphas, ARMs, PA-RISCs, PowerPCs, and SPARCs. robot A robot (or 'bot for short) in the computer sense is a program designed to automate some task, often just sending messages or collecting information. A spider is a type of robot designed to traverse the web performing some task (usually collecting data). robust The adjective robust is used to describe programs that are better designed, have fewer bugs, and are less likely to crash. ROM Read-only memory is similar to RAM only cannot be altered and does not lose its contents when power is removed. RSS RSS stands for either Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication, or RDF Site Summary, depending upon whom you ask. The general idea is that it can provide brief summaries of articles that appear in full on a web site. It is well-formed XML, and newer versions are even more specifically wellformed RDF. Ruby Ruby is an interpreted, object-oriented language. Ruby was fairly heavily influenced by Perl, so people familiar with that language can typically transition to Ruby easily. scanner A scanner is a piece of hardware that will examine a picture and produce a computer file that represents what it sees. A digital camera is a related device. Each has its own limitations. Scheme Scheme is a typically interpreted computer language. It was created in 1975 in an attempt to make Lisp simpler and more consistent. Scheme is a fairly portable language, but is not particularly fast. script A script is a series of OS commands. The term "batch file" means much the same thing, but is a bit dated. Typically the same sort of situations in which one would say DOS instead of OS, it would also be appropriate to say batch file instead of script. Scripts can be run like programs, but tend to perform simpler tasks. When a script is run, it is always interpreted. SCSI Loosely speaking, a disk format sometimes used by MS-Windows, Mac OS, AmigaOS, and (almost always) UNIX. Generally SCSI is superior (but more expensive) to IDE, but it varies somewhat with system load and the individual SCSI and IDE components themselves. The quick rundown is that: SCSII and SCSI-II will almost always outperform IDE; EIDE will almost always outperform SCSI-I and SCSI-II; SCSI-III and UltraSCSI will almost always outperform EIDE; and heavy system loads give an advantage to SCSI. Note that although loosely speaking it is just a format difference, it is deep down a hardware difference. sequential access This indicates that data cannot be selected without having to skip over earlier data first. This is the way that a cassette or video tape will behave. The other common behavior is called random access. serial Loosely speaking, serial implies something that has to be done linearly, one at a time, like people being served in a single check-out line. Serial connections are by their nature less expensive than parallel connections (including things like SCSI) but are typically slower. server A server is a computer designed to provide various services for an entire network. It is typically either a workstation or a mainframe because it will usually be expected to handle far greater loads than ordinary desktop systems. The load placed on servers also necessitates that they utilize robust OSes, as a crash on

a system that is currently being used by many people is far worse than a crash on a system that is only being used by one person. SGML The Standard Generalized Mark-up Language provides an extremely generalized level of mark-up. More common mark-up languages like HTML and XML are actually just popular subsets of SGML. shareware Shareware is software made for profit that allows a trial period before purchase. Typically shareware can be freely downloaded, used for a period of weeks (or sometimes even months), and either purchased or discarded after it has been learned whether or not it will satisfy the user's needs. shell A CLI designed to simplify complex OS commands. Some OSes (like AmigaOS, the Hurd, and UNIX) have built-in support to make the concurrent use of multiple shells easy. Common shells include the Korn Shell (ksh), the Bourne Shell (sh or bsh), the Bourne-Again Shell, (bash or bsh), the C-Shell (csh), etc. SIMM A physical component used to add RAM to a computer. Similar to, but incompatible with, DIMMs. Smalltalk Smalltalk is an efficient language for writing computer programs. Historically it is one of the first object-oriented languages, and is not only used today in its pure form but shows its influence in other languages like Objective-C. Solaris Solaris is the commercial variant of UNIX currently produced by Sun. It is an industrial strength, nigh bulletproof, powerful multitasking OS that will run on SPARC, x86, and PowerPC based machines. spam Generally spam is unwanted, unrequested e-mail or Usenet news. It is typically sent out in bulk to huge address lists that were automatically generated by various robots endlessly searching the Internet and newsgroups for things that resemble e-mail addresses. The legality of spam is a topic of much debate; it is at best only borderline legal, and spammers have been successfully persecuted in some states. SPARC The SPARC is a RISC processor developed by Sun. The design was more or less released to the world, and it is currently produced by around a dozen different companies too numerous to even bother mentioning. It is worth noting that even computers made by Sun typically sport SPARCs made by other companies. A couple different OSes run on SPARC based machines, including Solaris, SunOS, and Linux. Some of the newer SPARC models are called UltraSPARCs. sprite The term sprite originally referred to a small MOB, usually implemented in hardware. Lately it is also being used to refer to a single image used piecemeal within a Web site in order to avoid incurring the time penalty of downloading multiple files. SQL SQL (pronounced Sequel) is an interpreted language specially designed for database access. It is supported by virtually every major modern database system. Sugar The window manager used by the OLPC XO. It is made to run on top of Linux. SunOS SunOS is the commercial variant of UNIX formerly produced (but still supported) by Sun. SVG Scalable Vector Graphics data is an XML file that is used to hold graphical data that can be resized without loss of quality. SVG data can be kept in its own file, or even embedded within a web page (although not all browsers are capable of displaying such data). Tcl/Tk The Tool Command Language is a portable interpreted computer language designed to be easy to use. Tk is a GUI toolkit for Tcl. Tcl is a fairly popular language for both integrating existing applications and

for creating Web applets (note that applets written in Tcl are often called Tcklets). Tcl/Tk is available for free for most platforms, and plug-ins are available to enable many browsers to play Tcklets. TCP/IP TCP/IP is a protocol for computer networks. The Internet is largely built on top of TCP/IP (it is the more reliable of the two primary Internet Protocols -- TCP stands for Transmission Control Protocol). terminator A terminator is a dedicated device used to mark the end of a device chain (as is most typically found with SCSI devices). If such a chain is not properly terminated, weird results can occur. TEX TEX (pronounced "tek") is a freely available, industrial strength typesetting program that can be run on many different platforms. These qualities make it exceptionally popular in schools, and frequently software developed at a university will have its documentation in TEX format. TEX is not limited to educational use, though; many professional books were typeset with TEX. TEX's primary drawback is that it can be quite difficult to set up initially. THz & terahertz One terahertz is equivalent to 1000 gigahertz. TrackBack TrackBacks essentially provide a means whereby different web sites can post messages to one another not just to inform each other about citations, but also to alert one another of related resources. Typically, a blog may display quotations from another blog through the use of TrackBacks. UDP/IP UDP/IP is a protocol for computer networks. It is the faster of the two primary Internet Protocols. UDP stands for User Datagram Protocol. Unicode The Unicode character set is a superset of the ASCII character set with provisions made for handling international symbols and characters from other languages. Unicode is sixteen bit, so takes up roughly twice the space as simple ASCII, but is correspondingly more flexible. UNIX UNIX is a family of OSes, each being made by a different company or organization but all offering a very similar look and feel. It can not quite be considered non-proprietary, however, as the differences between different vendor's versions can be significant (it is still generally possible to switch from one vendor's UNIX to another without too much effort; today the differences between different UNIXes are similar to the differences between the different MS-Windows; historically there were two different UNIX camps, Berkeley / BSD and AT&T / System V, but the assorted vendors have worked together to minimalize the differences). The free variant Linux is one of the closest things to a current, nonproprietary OS; its development is controlled by a non-profit organization and its distribution is provided by several companies. UNIX is powerful; it is fully multitasking and can do pretty much anything that any OS can do (look to the Hurd if you need a more powerful OS). With power comes complexity, however, and UNIX tends not to be overly friendly to beginners (although those who think UNIX is difficult or cryptic apparently have not used CP/M). Window managers are available for UNIX (running under X-Windows) and once properly configured common operations will be almost as simple on a UNIX machine as on a Mac. Out of all the OSes in current use, UNIX has the greatest range of hardware support. It will run on machines built around many different processors. Lightweight versions of UNIX have been made to run on PDAs, and in the other direction, full featured versions make full advantage of all the resources on large, multi-processor machines. Some different UNIX versions include Solaris, Linux, IRIX, AIX, SunOS, FreeBSD, Digital UNIX, HP-UX, NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc. upload To upload a file is to copy it from your computer to a remote computer. The opposite is download. UPS An uninterrupted power supply uses heavy duty batteries to help smooth out its input power source. URI

A Uniform Resource Identifier is basically just a unique address for almost any type of resource. It is similar to but more general than a URL; in fact, it may also be a URN. URL A Uniform Resource Locator is basically just an address for a file that can be given to a browser. It starts with a protocol type (such as http, ftp, or gopher) and is followed by a colon, machine name, and file name in UNIX style. Optionally an octothorpe character "#" and and arguments will follow the file name; this can be used to further define position within a page and perform a few other tricks. Similar to but less general than a URI. URN A Uniform Resource Name is basically just a unique address for almost any type of resource unlike a URL it will probably not resolve with a browser. USB A really fast type of serial port that offers many of the best features of SCSI without the price. Faster than many types of parallel port, a single USB port is capable of chaining many devices without the need of a terminator. USB is much slower (but somewhat less expensive) than FireWire. uucode The point of uucode is to allow 8-bit binary data to be transferred through the more common 7-bit ASCII channels (most especially e-mail). The facilities for dealing with uucoded files exist for many different machine types, and the most common programs are called "uuencode" for encoding the original binary file into a 7-bit file and "uudecode" for restoring the original binary file from the encoded one. Sometimes different uuencode and uudecode programs will work in subtly different manners causing annoying compatibility problems. Bcode was invented to provide the same service as uucode but to maintain a tighter standard. variable width As applied to a font, variable width means that different characters will have different widths as appropriate. For example, an "i" will take up much less space than an "m". The opposite of variable width is fixed width. The terms "proportional width" and "proportionally spaced" mean the same thing as variable width. Some common variable width fonts include Times, Helvetica, and Bookman. VAX The VAX is a computer platform developed by Digital. Its plural is VAXen. VAXen are large expensive machines that were once quite popular in large businesses; today modern UNIX workstations have all the capability of VAXen but take up much less space. Their OS is called VMS. vector This term has two common meanings. The first is in the geometric sense: a vector defines a direction and magnitude. The second concerns the formatting of fonts and images. If a font is a vector font or an image is a vector image, it is defined as lines of relative size and direction rather than as collections of pixels (the method used in bitmapped fonts and images). This makes it easier to change the size of the font or image, but puts a bigger load on the device that has to display the font or image. The term "outline font" means the same thing as vector font. Veronica & Veronica2 Although traditionally written as a proper name, Veronica is actually an acronym for "very easy rodentoriented netwide index to computerized archives", where the "rodent" refers to gopher. The acronym was obviously a little forced to go along with the pre-existing (and now largely unused) Archie, in order to have a little fun with a comic book reference. Regardless, Veronica (or these days more likely Veronica2) is essentially a search engine for gopher resources. VIC-20 The Commodore VIC-20 computer sold millions of units and is generally considered to have been the first affordable home computer. It features a ROM-based BASIC and uses it as a default "OS". It is based on the 65xx family of processors. VIC (in case you are wondering) can stand for either video interface c or video interface computer. The VIC-20 is the precursor to the C64/128. virtual machine

A virtual machine is a machine completely defined and implemented in software rather than hardware. It is often referred to as a "runtime environment"; code compiled for such a machine is typically called bytecode. virtual memory This is a scheme by which disk space is made to substitute for the more expensive RAM space. Using it will often enable a comptuer to do things it could not do without it, but it will also often result in an overall slowing down of the system. The concept of swap space is very similar. virtual reality Virtual reality (often called VR for short) is generally speaking an attempt to provide more natural, human interfaces to software. It can be as simple as a pseudo 3D interface or as elaborate as an isolated room in which the computer can control the user's senses of vision, hearing, and even smell and touch. virus A virus is a program that will seek to duplicate itself in memory and on disks, but in a subtle way that will not immediately be noticed. A computer on the same network as an infected computer or that uses an infected disk (even a floppy) or that downloads and runs an infected program can itself become infected. A virus can only spread to computers of the same platform. For example, on a network consisting of a WinTel box, a Mac, and a Linux box, if one machine acquires a virus the other two will probably still be safe. Note also that different platforms have different general levels of resistance; UNIX machines are almost immune, Win '95 / '98 / ME / XP is quite vulnerable, and most others lie somewhere in between. VMS The industrial strength OS that runs on VAXen. VoIP VoIP means "Voice over IP" and it is quite simply a way of utilizing the Internet (or even in some cases intranets) for telephone conversations. The primary motivations for doing so are cost and convenience as VoIP is significantly less expensive than typical telephone long distance packages, plus one high speed Internet connection can serve for multiple phone lines. VRML A Virtual Reality Modeling Language file is used to represent VR objects. It has essentially been superceded by X3D. W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (usually abbreviated W3C) is a non-profit, advisory body that makes suggestions on the future direction of the World Wide Web, HTML, CSS, and browsers. Waba An extremely lightweight subset of Java optimized for use on PDAs. WebDAV WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning, and is designed to provide a way of editing Web-based resources in place. It serves as a more modern (and often more secure) replacement for FTP in many cases. WebTV A WebTV box hooks up to an ordinary television set and displays web pages. It will not display them as well as a dedicated computer. window manager A window manager is a program that acts as a graphical go-between for a user and an OS. It provides a GUI for the OS. Some OSes incorporate the window manager into their own internal code, but many do not for reasons of efficiency. Some OSes partially make the division. Some common true window managers include CDE (Common Desktop Environment), GNOME, KDE, Aqua, OpenWindows, Motif, FVWM, Sugar, and Enlightenment. Some common hybrid window managers with OS extensions include Windows ME, Windows 98, Windows 95, Windows 3.1, OS/2 and GEOS. Windows '95 Windows '95 is currently the second most popular variant of MS-Windows. It was designed to be the replacement Windows 3.1 but has not yet done so completely partly because of suspected security

problems but even more because it is not as lightweight and will not work on all the machines that Windows 3.1 will. It is more capable than Windows 3.1 though and now has excellent driver support and more games available for it than any other platform. It is made to run on top of MS-DOS and will not do much of anything if MS-DOS is not on the system. It is thus not strictly an OS per se, but nor is it a true window manager either; rather the combination of MS-DOS and Windows '95 result in a full OS with GUI. It is partially multitasking but has a much greater chance of crashing than Windows NT does (or probably even Mac OS) if faced with a buggy program. Windows '95 runs only on x86 based machines. Currently Windows '95 has several Y2K issues, some of which have patches that can be downloaded for free, and some of which do not yet have fixes at all. Windows '98 Windows '98 is quite possibly the second most popular form of MS-Windows, in spite of the fact that its official release is currently a point of legal debate with at least nineteen states, the federal government, and a handful of foreign countries as it has a few questionable features that might restrict the novice computer user and/or unfairly compete with other computer companies. It also has some specific issues with the version of Java that comes prepackaged with it that has never been adequately fixed, and it still has several Y2K issues, most of which have patches that can be downloaded for free (in fact, Microsoft guarantees that it will work properly through 2000 with the proper patches), but some of which do not yet have fixes at all (it won't work properly through 2001 at this point). In any case, it was designed to replace Windows '95. Windows 2000 Windows 2000 was the intended replacement for Windows NT and in that capacity received relatively lukewarm support. Being based on Windows NT, it inherits some of its driver support problems. Originally it was also supposed to replace Windows '98, but Windows ME was made to do that instead, and the merger between Windows NT and Windows '98 was postponed until Windows XP. Windows 3.1 Windows 3.1 remains a surprisingly popular variant of MS-Windows. It is lighter weight than either Windows '95 or Windows NT (but not lighter weight than GEOS) but less capable than the other two. It is made to run on top of MS-DOS and will not do much of anything if MS-DOS is not on the system. It is thus not strictly an OS per se, but nor is it a true window manager, either; rather the combination of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 result in a full OS with GUI. Its driver support is good, but its game selection is limited. Windows 3.1 runs only on x86 based machines. It has some severe Y2K issues that may or may not be fixed. Windows CE Windows CE is the lightweight variant of MS-Windows. It offers the general look and feel of Windows '95 but is targetted primarily for hand-held devices, PDAs, NCs, and embedded devices. It does not have all the features of either Windows '95 or Windows NT and is very different from Windows 3.1. In particular, it will not run any software made for any of the other versions of MS-Windows. Special versions of each program must be made. Furthermore, there are actually a few slightly different variants of Windows CE, and no variant is guaranteed to be able to run software made specifically for another one. Driver support is also fairly poor for all types, and few games are made for it. Windows CE will run on a few different processor types, including the x86 and several different processors dedicated to PDAs, embedded systems, and hand-held devices. Windows ME Windows ME is yet another flavor of MS-Windows (specifically the planned replacement for Windows '98). Windows ME currently runs only on the x86 processor. Windows NT Windows NT is the industrial-strength variant of MS-Windows. Current revisions offer the look and feel of Windows '95 and older revisions offer the look and feel of Windows 3.1. It is the most robust flavor of MS-Windows and is fully multitasking. It is also by far the most expensive flavor of MS-Windows and has far less software available for it than Windows '95 or '98. In particular, do not expect to play many games on a Windows NT machine, and expect some difficulty in obtaining good drivers.

Windows NT will run on a few different processor types, including the x86, the Alpha, and the PowerPC. Plans are in place to port Windows NT to the Merced when it becomes available. Windows Vista Windows Vista is the newest flavor of MS-Windows (specifically the planned replacement for Windows XP). Windows Vista (originally known as Longhorn) currently only runs on x86 processors. Windows XP Windows XP is yet another flavor of MS-Windows (specifically the planned replacement for both Windows ME and Windows 2000). Windows XP currently only runs on the x86 processors. Windows XP is currently the most popular form of MS-Windows. WinTel An x86 based system running some flavor of MS-Windows. workstation Depending upon whom you ask, a workstation is either an industrial strength desktop computer or its own category above the desktops. Workstations typically have some flavor of UNIX for their OS, but there has been a recent trend to call high-end Windows NT and Windows 2000 machines workstations, too. WYSIWYG What you see is what you get; an adjective applied to a program that attempts to exactly represent printed output on the screen. Related to WYSIWYM but quite different. WYSIWYM What you see is what you mean; an adjective applied to a program that does not attempt to exactly represent printed output on the screen, but rather defines how things are used and so will adapt to different paper sizes, etc. Related to WYSIWYG but quite different. X-Face X-Faces are small monochrome images embedded in headers for both provides a e-mail and news messages. Better mail and news applications will display them (sometimes automatically, sometimes only per request). X-Windows X-Windows provides a GUI for most UNIX systems, but can also be found as an add-on library for other computers. Numerous window managers run on top of it. It is often just called "X". X3D Extensible 3D Graphics data is an XML file that is used to hold three-dimensional graphical data. It is the successor to VRML. x86 The x86 series of processors includes the Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Celeron, and Athlon as well as the 786, 686, 586, 486, 386, 286, 8086, 8088, etc. It is an exceptionally popular design (by far the most popular CISC series) in spite of the fact that even its fastest model is significantly slower than the assorted RISC processors. Many different OSes run on machines built around x86 processors, including MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows '95, Windows '98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows CE, Windows XP, GEOS, Linux, Solaris, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, OS/2, BeOS, CP/M, etc. A couple different companies produce x86 processors, but the bulk of them are produced by Intel. It is expected that this processor will eventually be completely replaced by the Merced, but the Merced development schedule is somewhat behind. Also, it should be noted that the Pentium III processor has stirred some controversy by including a "fingerprint" that will enable individual computer usage of web pages etc. to be accurately tracked. XHTML The Extensible Hypertext Mark-up Language is essentially a cleaner, stricter version of HTML. It is a proper subset of XML. XML The Extensible Mark-up Language is a subset of SGML and a superset of XHTML. It is used for numerous things including (among many others) RSS and RDF. XML-RPC

XML-RPC provides a fairly lightweight means by which one computer can execute a program on a cooperating machine across a network like the Internet. It is based on XML and is used for everything from fetching stock quotes to checking weather forcasts. Z-Machine A virtual machine optimized for running interactive fiction, interactive tutorials, and other interactive things of a primarily textual nature. Z-Machines have been ported to almost every platform in use today. Z-machine bytecode is usually called Z-code. The Glulx virtual machine is of the same idea but somewhat more modern in concept. zip There are three common zips in the computer world that are completely different from one another. One is a type of removable removable disk slightly larger (physically) and vastly larger (capacity) than a floppy. The second is a group of programs used for running interactive fiction. The third is a group of programs used for compression. Zoomer The Zoomer is a type of PDA. Zoomers all use GEOS for their OS and are / were produced by numerous different companies and are thus found under numerous different names. The "classic" Zoomers are known as the Z-7000, the Z-PDA, and the GRiDpad and were made by Casio, Tandy, and AST respectively. Newer Zoomers include HP's OmniGo models, Hyundai's Gulliver (which may not have actually been released to the general public), and Nokia's Communicator line of PDA / cell phone hybrids.