| DSL | Digital Subscriber Line: DSL uses a phone line type wire to connect the DSL modem in your house to the DSL equipment at the phone central office (CO). DSL does not use a phone line that supports a telephone. DSL is not dialup. In some case the DSL equipment and the phone equipment can share the physical wires, but DSL is still not done via a phone. DSL is always on technology and can range in speed from high-speed modem speeds to almost 1 MBit (1,000,000 bits per second). Today, DSL is typically only sold by the phone company although several third party marketing efforts are selling DSL, the actual service is via the phone company. |
| Electronic mail, sent over the Internet. Originally email was intended as a messaging application. Today email is used in a crude way to move data via email attachments. | |
| Field | A location on a computer program's form or a web page where you can type in information. |
| A search engine located on the Internet. | |
| Hub | A device that interconnects multiple network devices. Today hubs have been all but eliminated in favor of network switches. Hubs can receive data on only one port at a time and this data is retransmitted on all active ports. One side effect of this is the effective throughput of a hub is the speed of the slowest device attached to it whether of not the message is directed to that device. |
| NAT | Network Address Translation: the process that many routers use to protect devices attached on the local area network (LAN) side of the router from potentially danger traffic on the wide area network (WAN) side of the router. The information sent out via a NAT is translated to alternative network connections that are non-standard. Typically NAT translations have a degree of randomness to them. If a virus or other network nasty attempts to connect to a PC on the LAN, the standard ports get mapped to some non-existent connection on the LAN side so the connection fails. NAT works well to protect networks that originate traffic like your home PC. NATS don't work at all to protect networks that are targets of traffic like web servers. |
| Network hub | See 'Hub' |
| Network switch | See 'Switch' |
| Router | A device which separates two networks from each other. Traffic which needs to be moved from one of the two networks to the other is permitted to pass but usually has some rule(s) to meet in order to do so. For instance on a home router the one rule could be pass any traffic from the LAN side network to the WAN side network. A second rule could be only pass traffic from the WAN side network to the LAN side network if that traffic is in response to previous traffic sent (answer to an inquiry). In this way unsolicited traffic would simply be ignored. |
| SHCC | Sterling Heights Computer Club |
| SIG | Special Interest Group. A group of people with a common interest related to but not as broad as that of the main club. |
| Search engine | A web site that allows you to search for web sites that reference the items you entered into the 'search for' field. |
| Snail Mail | US Post Office mail, which is much slower than e-mail. |
| Switch | A device that interconnects multiple network devices together. Each port of the switch runs independently of all other ports including speed, bi-direction, and flow. Multiple ports can receive data packets and other ports transmit other data packets simultaneously. The through speed of any one packet message set is dependant on only the receiving and transmitting ports. All other ports do not influence this transmission. |
| TCP/IP | Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol: TCP is a suite of various protocols to specify how various systems communicate. TCP/IP is one of these protocols which specifies the method systems on the internet communicate. |
| WEP | Wired Equivalent Privacy: the ... |
| WWW | World Wide Web - The Internet! |
| Wireless access point | A device that provides a connection point to the network for wireless type network interface cards (NICs). Typically wireless access points also include some security electronics which require the connecting device to provide some sort of authentication before being allowed to communicate through the wireless access point. |
| Yahoo! | A search engine located on the Internet. |
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