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 E Ethernet: A very common method of
networking computers in a Local Area Network or LAN. Ethernet will
handle about 10,000,000 bits-per-second and can be used with
almost any kind of computer. Email: (Electronic
Mail) -- Messages, usually text, sent from one person to another
via computer. Email can also be sent automatically to a large
number of addresses (Mailing List). F FAQ: (Frequently Asked Questions) -- FAQs are documents that list and answer the most common questions on a particular subject. There are hundreds of FAQs on subjects as diverse as Pet Grooming and Cryptography. It's good netiquette (The Internet's code of conduct) to check for FAQs and read them. FAQs are usually written by people who are tired of answering the same question over and over. Finger: An Internet software tool for locating people on other Internet sites. Finger is also sometimes used to give access to non-personal information, but the most common use is to see if a person has an account at a particular Internet site. Many sites do not allow incoming Finger requests, but many do. The most famous finger site of all was a Coke machine at Carnegie-Mellon that students wired to the Internet so they could finger it and track such important information as how many bottles of which beverage remained and how long the bottom bottle in each stack had been in the machine--so they wouldn't walk all the way to the machine and find it empty or purchase a warm soda. Fire Wall: A
combination of hardware and software that separates a LAN into two
or more parts for security purposes. Commonly used to separate a
corporate network from the Internet at large. Flame: Originally, flame meant to carry forth in a passionate manner in the spirit of honorable debate. Flames most often involved the use of flowery language and flaming , well was an art form. More recently flame has come to refer to any kind of derogatory comment no matter how witless or crude.See Also: Flame War Flame War: When
an online discussion degenerates into a series of personal attacks
against the debators, rather than a discussion of their positions.
A heated exchange. FQDN: (Fully Qualified Domain Name) The "official" name assigned to a computer. Organizations register names, such as "ibm.com" or "utulsa.edu." They then assign unique names to their computers, such as "watson5.ibm.com" or "hurricane.cs.utulsa.edu." FreeWare: Software that is available for download and unlimited use without charge. Compare to shareware. FTP: (File Transfer Protocol) -- A very common method of moving files between two Internet sites. FTP is a special way to login to another Internet site for the purposes of retrieving and/or sending files. There are many Internet sites that have established publicly accessible repositories of material that can be obtained using FTP, by logging in using the account name anonymous, thus these sites are called anonymous ftp servers. G Gateway: The technical meaning is a hardware or software set-up that translates between two dissimilar protocols, for example Prodigy has a gateway that translates between its internal, proprietary email format and Internet email format. Another meaning of gateway is to describe any mechanism for providing access to another system, e.g. AOL might be called a gateway to the Internet. GIF: (Graphics Interchange Format) A graphics file format that is commonly used on the Internet to provide graphics images in Web pages. Gigabyte: 1,000
Megabytes. Gopher: A searching
tool that was the primary tool for finding Internet resources
before the World Wide Web became popular. Gopher now is buried
under mountains of WWW pages--don't bother learning how to use
this directly. You sometimes will find a Web link that takes you
to a Gopher site, but at that point, if you're using Netscape, its
usage will be obvious and actually will look a great deal like the
Web. H Helper Application: A program allowing you to view multimedia files that your web browser cannot handle internally, such as images, audio and video files. The file must be downloaded before it will be displayed/played. Plug-ins allow you to actually view the file over the Internet without downloading first. As used in reference to the World Wide Web, hit means a single request from a web browser for a single item from a web server; thus in order for a web browser to display a page that contains 3 graphics, 4 hits would occur at the server: 1 for the HTML page, and one for each of the 3 graphics.hits are often used as a very rough measure of load on a server, e.g. "Our server has been getting 300,000 hits per month. Because each hit can represent anything from a request for a tiny document (or even a request for a missing document) all the way to a request that requires some significant extra processing (such as a complex search request), the actual load on a machine from 1 hit is almost impossible to define. Home Page (or Homepage): Several
meanings. Originally, the web page that your browser is set to use
when it starts up. The more common meaning refers to the main web
page for a business, organization, person or simply the main page
out of a collection of web pages, e.g. "Check out so-and-so's
new Home Page. Host: Any computer on
a network that is a repository for services available to other
computers on the network. It is quite common to have one host
machine provide several services, such as WWW and USENET. HTML: (Hypertext Markup Language) The basic language that is used to build hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It is used in basic, plain ASCII-text documents, but when those documents are interpreted (called rendering) by a Web browser such as Internet Explorer, the document can display formatted text, color, a variety of fonts, graphic images, special effects, hypertext jumps to other Internet locations and information forms.See Also: Client , Server , WWW (HyperText Transport Protocol) -- The protocol for moving hypertext files across the Internet. Requires a HTTP client program on one end, and an HTTP server program on the other end. HTTP is the most important protocol used in the World Wide Web (WWW). Also referred to as HyperText Transfer Protocol because of "Transfer" in FTP . See Also: Client , Server , FTP , WWW Hypertext: Text in a document that contains a hidden link to other text. You can click a mouse on a hypertext word and it will take you to the text designated in the link. Hypertext is used in Windows help programs and CD encyclopedias to jump to related references elsewhere within the same document. The wonderful thing about hypertext, however, is its ability to link--using http over the World Wide Web--to any Web document in the world, yet still require only a single mouse click to jump clear around the world.
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