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Acrobat | A product of Adobe that produces stable documents of high quality in the Portable Document Format (pdf). The end user cannot write directly to a pdf document. Adobe Reader is distributed without charge for viewing these documents. It can be downloaded from many places on the web and is often found on computer magazine CDs. |
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ADSL | Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line - A high-bandwidth transmission technology that uses existing phone lines and also allows voice transmissions over the same lines as the same time. Most of the traffic is transmitted to the user generally at rates of 256 Kbps to about 6 Mbps depending on the service used (a typical home connection will be 512 Kbs which is approximately 9 times faster than 56k modem). |
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Apache | Apache is the world's favourite web server program. A web server is the program that talks to your web browser and sends it the pages that you want to see. Apache is open-source software, and is freely available from the Apache Software Foundation's website. |
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attachment | a file attached to an email message, for example a picture or a sound file. If the email is not from a trusted source it should not be opened as it may contain a virus or other malicious programs. |
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broadband | Large bandwidth communications channel capable of multiple, parallel high-speed transmissions. Broadband cables can carry data and speech at the same time. |
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browser | A piece of software to allow PCs to access the graphical WWW interface to the Internet. Examples include Internet Explorer, Kermit, and Firefox. |
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BTW | By The Way
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byte | 8 bits - A measure of storage
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cache | A temporary store of data, often used when describing data stored by a browser, for rapid access later. This store is the browsers cache, held on the hard disk and available to speed access when browsing. |
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Coffee-break test | A page passes the coffee-break test if the user can leave the screen for a few minutes and then still remember what they were doing or reading when they return. In other words, each page should provide enough contextual information so that the user doesn't have to remember what they did to get there. |
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cookie | a way for a Web site to remember that you've visited the site previously, and usually retains information about you.
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CRT | Cathode Ray Tube, the technology behind "old style" glass screened computer monitors and TVs, now being supplanted by LCD based TFT displays
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CSS | Cascading Style Sheets - a method of defining what webpage text should look like. |
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DHCP | Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol - Provides automated allocation of IP addresses. A program may view the data set simply as data, and not concern itself with access methods. |
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Firewall | A combination of hardware and software that provides a security system to prevent unauthorised access to a computer from the Internet or network. |
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FTP | File Transfer Protocol - a protocol that defines how to transfer files from one computer to another.
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FWIW | For What It's Worth |
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FYI | For Your Information
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gif | Graphical Image Format. A grahical file format
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GUI | Graphical User Interface. A graphical, icon-based display, for example: Linux, Mac-OS and MS Windows
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Hosting | The pages that make up a website are stored on a computer that can then send them to people who want to read them. The computer is known as the host of the website. The host computer is always connected to the internet, and is usually located in a dedicated building with fast connections to the internet and back-up power supplies. |
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html | HyperText Mark-up Language - authoring language used for creating and linking Web pages and contents. The various HTML standards can be found described in detail on the World Wide Web Consortium's website. |
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http | Hypertext Transport Protocol - protocol for moving hypertext files around |
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https | Hyper text transfer protocol secure
Similar to http, but the data is encrypted for security, used for online shopping and banking. |
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hypertext | Documents that contain links to other documents; selecting a link automatically displays the second document.
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