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See seek time.
Transforms ordinary phone lines (also known as "twisted copper pairs") into high-speed digital lines for ultra-fast Internet access. ADSL are capable of providing speeds up to 8 Mbps downstream (from the Internet to use the user) and up to 1 Mbps upstream.
Accelerated Graphics Port is a high speed connection only used by video cards, so there is only one of them in a computer (older computers do not have AGP). It is faster than PCI and has direct access to system memory so that the computer's memory can be used in addition to the video card's memory. Default AGP speed is 66 MHz.
Generally, any systematic method of solving a certain kind of mathematical problem. Given that a computer's operation includes a whole lot of number crunching, algorithms are often used in software to carry out complex tasks, such as determining how to alter the color content of a graphics file to achieve the most acceptable quality from the least amount of data (lossy compression).
In the computer world, analog means not digital (or binary), and it usually relates to audio. Analog audio recordings and transmissions -- in contrast to digital audio -- exist as waveforms of sound. For example, the grooves in a vinyl LP (an analog medium) correspond directly to the varying frequency and level, or loudness, of the music's waveform. While analog seems to be a closer representation of the true sound, digital audio is far more precise, as it dramatically reduces the opportunity for degradation and removes other limitations of analog media.
Modems convert a computer's digital signals to analog for transmission, and then back to digital (through a modulate/demodulate process from which the term modem is derived). An all-digital telephone system would be much more efficient, but regular telephone lines cannot support high-frequency digital signals. However, ISDN lines can.
United States v. Microsoft 87 F. Supp. 2d 30 (D.D.C. 2000) was a court case filed against Microsoft Corporation on May 18, 1998 by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and twenty U.S. states. Joel I. Klein was the lead prosecutor. The plaintiffs alleged that Microsoft abused monopoly power in its handling of operating system sales and web browser sales. The issue central to the case was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its flagship Internet Explorer (IE) web browser software with its Microsoft Windows operating system. Bundling them together is alleged to have been responsible for Microsoft's victory in the browser wars as every Windows user had a copy of Internet Explorer. It was further alleged that this unfairly restricted the market for competing web browsers (such as Netscape Navigator) that were slow to download over a modem or had to be purchased at a store. Underlying these disputes were questions over whether Microsoft altered or manipulated its application programming interfaces (APIs) to favor Internet Explorer over third party web browsers, Microsoft's conduct in forming restrictive licensing agreements with OEM computer manufacturers, and Microsoft's intent in its course of conduct.
An applet is a little application program. Prior to the World Wide Web, the built-in writing and drawing programs that came with Windows were sometimes called "applets." On the Web, using Java, the object-oriented programming language, an applet is a small program that can be sent along with a Web page to a user. Java applets can perform interactive animations, immediate calculations, or other simple tasks without having to send a user request back to the server.
A self-contained computer program that performs a specific function for the user. Word processors, spreadsheets and e-mail programs are common applications.
A specialized term for dealing with system crashes, installation hang-ups and other computer-related disasters. Particularly common among computer users who don't save their documents often.
Computerspeak for plain alphanumeric text -- ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII is a standard method of describing text characters; these "text-only" files can be read by just about any computer system or application. (However, ASCII text does not support typographic effects like italics.)
Word processing applications normally store their files in a proprietary format, but newer software is much better at reading documents created by other programs. Also, most word-processing programs include the option of saving text documents in ASCII or other word processor formats.
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