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Frequently asked questions. A list of frequently asked questions and answers about a given topic. FAQs are now very common on World Wide Web sites, where they serve to prevent users from flooding e-mail coffers with questions that have been asked and answered a million times. A nasty or abusive e-mail message or newsgroup posting. Often directed at newbies who don't read the FAQ. Also a verb: "I flamed that guy who keeps sending me junk e-mail." File sharing is the activity of making files available to other users for download over the Internet, but also over smaller networks. Usually file sharing follows the peer-to-peer (P2P) model, where the files are stored on and served by personal computers of the users. Most people who engage in file sharing are also downloading files that other users share. Sometimes these two activities are linked together. The part of the Mac operating system that appears when a Mac starts up. The Finder manages programs and copies files, among other functions. A firewall is a set of related programs, located at a network gateway server, that protects the resources of a private network from users from other networks. (The term also implies the security policy that is used with the programs.) An enterprise with an intranet that allows its workers access to the wider Internet installs a firewall to prevent outsiders from accessing its own private data resources and for controlling what outside resources its own users have access to. FireWire is a fast peripheral interconnect standard capable of transfer speeds up to 400 Mbs. It works well for multimedia peripherals such as DV (Digital Video) cameras and other high-speed devices like the latest hard disk drives, CD/DVD burners and printers. See EEPROM. f A math co-processor that is designed to handle complicated arithmetic. "Floating point" means any number with decimals.
A removable magnetic data storage medium featuring an encased flexible Mylar disk. Jacket-sheathed 5.25-inch floppies have largely been phased out, and the hard-plastic-encased 3.5-inch variety has taken over. High-density (1.4 megabyte) types are most common, and double-density (720 kilobyte) floppies are on their way out. Super-high-density 2.8-megabyte floppy disks are available but not widespread. See floppy disk drive. A secondary storage drive that reads and writes floppy disks. High-density drives work with both "HD" and older, double-density floppies, but double-density drives cannot read or write to high-density disks. In HTML, the ability to change font characteristics, such as type, size, style and color. The amount of space a piece of hardware takes up on your desktop -- the physical desktop, not the virtual one on your Macintosh or Windows computer's main screen. File fragmentation refers to a computer's practice of writing a single file to different sectors of a disk (be it hard or floppy). Unlike Compact Discs or LP records (remember those?), a computer disk doesn't store its information in a continuous track. A single file may be written to several non-adjacent sectors on the disc, wherever space is available. Excessive file fragmentation decreases efficiency, as the drive's read/write head jumps all over the disk to read a fragged file. Fragmentation may also waste space, because the disk drive must keep a "record" of all the sectors in which files are stored. Defragmentation software is available to combat this problem. RAM may also become fragmented, decreasing the available memory, if you open and close many applications without restarting the computer. If you find yourself running out of memory after hours of computing, restarting should alleviate the problem. In World Wide Web usage, "frames" are multiple discrete windows presented by a Web browser. Frame capability was introduced by Netscape in its Navigator 2.0 browser. Frames allow scrolling, can be assigned names and URLs and can resize when the user adjusts the size of the browser's main window. "Frame" has many meanings in the computer lexicon, including a unit of "packetized" data, if that means anything to you. It also represents a single, still full-screen image on a computer monitor -- a rapid succession of which conspire to create moving images. See refresh rate. Software that requires no fees for its use. This software is usually freely available, often times off of the World Wide Web. Although this software does not require payment, it still has licensing restrictions that must be followed during its use.
File Transfer Protocol. A transmission standard that allows a user on one computer to transfer files to and from another computer over the Internet. When you click on a link to downloadsoftware from a Web page, you are usually then connected to an FTP site. |