Computer & Internet Glossary Part 4

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PDF Stands for "Portable Document Format." It is a multi-platform file format developed by Adobe Systems. A PDF file captures document text, images, and most impressively, the formatting of documents from a variety of applications. You can send a PDF document over the Internet to your friend and it will look the same way on his screen as it looks on yours. PDF documents also print out the same way they look on your monitor. To view a PDF file, you need Adobe Acrobat Reader, a free application distributed by Adobe Systems. There is also an Acrobat Plug-in for Web browsers that enables PDF files to be viewed from within your browser. Port As if computer terms weren't hard enough to understand, there are three different meanings of the word "port." 1. An Internet port. This is a number that indicates what kind of protocol a server on the Internet is using. For example, Web servers typically are listed on port 80. Web browsers use this port by default when accessing Web pages, but you can also specify what port you would like to use in the URL like this: http://www.excite.com:80. FTP uses port 21, e-mail uses port 25, and game servers, like a Quake server or Blizzard.net use various other ports. It is good to know what a port is, but you seldom have to specify it manually, so don't worry if this is new to you. 2. A hardware port. This refers to any one of the ports that are on the back of a computer where devices can be hooked up (like a keyboard, mouse, printer, digital camera, etc). Some common ports found on today's computers are USB, Firewire, and Ethernet. 3. The verb, "port." This refers to the editing of a software program's code so that it can run on another platform. For example, to get Final Fantasy VII to run on a PC, programmers needed to port it to the PC from the Playstation. Popular Windows games are often ported to the Macintosh as well. QWERTY This term is used to describe a standard (Latin alphabet-based) keyboard. Why? Because the first six keys in the upper-left part of the keyboard spell out Q-W-E-R-T-Y. I suppose you could call it a QWERTYUIOP keyboard, but QWERTY is a lot easier to say. In case you are wondering why the QWERTY keyboard is arranged like it is, the original reason was to reduce the jamming of typebars in typewriters as they moved to strike the paper. In 1932, August Dvorak developed what was intended to be a more efficient keyboard, in which he placed the vowels and the five most common consonants in the middle row, based on the idea that an alternating rhythm would be established between the right and left hands. Though the keys on the Dvorak keyboard were more efficienty arranged, it was and still is too much of a pain for people to switch from the familiar QWERTY arrangement. So, it looks like we're stuck with what we have. Sorry Dvorak. 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. 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. Search Engines Google, Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, Infoseek, and Yahoo are all search engines. They index millions of sites on the Web, so that Web surfers like you and me can easily find Web sites with the information we want. By creating indexes, or large databases of Web sites (based on titles, keywords, and the text in the pages), search engines can locate relevant Web sites when users enter search terms or phrases. When you are looking for something using a search engine, it is a good idea to use words like AND, OR, and NOT to specify your search. Using these boolean operators, you can usually get a list of more relevant sites Server As the name implies, a server serves information to computers that connect to it. When users connect to a server, they can access programs, files, and other information from the server. Common servers are Web servers, mail servers, and LAN servers. A single computer can have several different server programs running on it. Shareware There's commercial software and then there's shareware. With commercial software, you have to pay for the product before you use it. With shareware, you can use the product for a trial period and then decide if you want to keep it. If you want to keep the software after the trial period is up, you're supposed to (and should) register the product and pay the shareware fee. As an extra incentive to pay for the software, many shareware programs disable certain features in the non-registered version and some will keep bugging you to register the program after the trial period has expired. Shareware programs are usually less expensive than commercial software programs, but they are usually less expensive to develop as well. This is why shareware programs are typically not as robust as commercial software programs. However, there are numerous shareware programs out there, such as system utilities, that can be very useful. The most common way to get shareware these days is off the Internet. SPAM Originating from the name of Hormel's canned meat, "spam" now also refers to junk e-mail or irrelevant postings to a newsgroup or bulletin board. The unsolicited e-mail messages you receive about refinancing your home, reversing aging, and losing those extra pounds are all considered to be spam. Spamming other people is definitely not cool and is one of the most notorious violations of Internet etiquette (or "netiquette"). So if you ever get the urge to let thousands of people know about that hot new guaranteed way to make money on the Internet, please reconsider. TFTStands for "Thin-Film Transistor." These transistors are used in high-quality flat panel liquid-crystal displays (LCDs). TFT-based displays have a transistor for each pixel on the screen. This allows the electrical current that illuminates the display to be turned on and off at a faster rate, which makes the display brighter and shows motion smoother. LCDs that use TFT technology are called "active-matrix" displays, which are higher-quality than older "passive-matrix" displays. So if you ever see a TFTAMLCD monitor at a computer store, it is a "thin-film transistor active-matrix liquid crystal display." That's just a fancy way of saying it is a good flat-screen display. UpLoad While downloading is receiving a file from another computer, uploading is the exact opposite. It is sending a file from your computer to another system. Pretty straight forward. It is possible to upload and download at the same time, but it may cause slower transfer speeds, especially if you have a low bandwidth connection. Because most files are located on Internet servers, people generally do a lot more downloading than uploading. URL Stands for "Uniform Resource Locator." It is the address of a specific Web site or file on the Internet. A URL cannot have spaces or certain other characters and uses forward slashes to denote different directories. Some examples of URLs are http://www.sharpened.net/glossary/index.html, http://www.wheaton.edu/, and ftp://info.apple.com/. As you can see, not all URLs begin with "http". The first part of a URL indicates what kind of resource it is addressing. Here is a list of the different resource prefixes: * http - a hypertext directory or document (such as a web page) * ftp - a directory of files or an actual file available to download * gopher - a gopher document or menu * telnet - a Unix-based computer system that you can log into * news - a newsgroup * WAIS - a database or document on a Wide Area Information Search database * file - a file located on your hard drive or some other local drive The second part of a URL (after the "://") contains the address of the computer being located as well as the path to the file. For example, in "http://www.cnet.com/Content/Reports/index.html," "www.cnet.com" is the address or domain name of the host computer and "/Content/Reports/index.html" is the path to the file. When a address ends with a slash and not something like ".html," the server usually defaults to a file in the current directory named "index.html". So, if you type in "http://www.sharpened.net/" and "http://www.sharpened.net/index.html," you should get the same page. Go ahead and try it if you have nothing better to do. USB Stands for "Universal Serial Bus." It is today's most commonly used type of computer port. USB can be used to connect a mouse, keyboard, 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 a lot 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 funny, considering USB was created and designed by Int