| Access point | Provides wireless access to a network. Devices connected to an access point can communicate with other devices on the network. They may also connect to the Internet if the access point is linked to an Internet connection, which is commonly the case. |
| Android | Google's mobile operating system (OS) that is used by many smartphones and tablets. |
| Bing | A search engine located on the Internet. |
| Bot | Derived from the word "robot", it is an automated process that interacts with other network services. Bots often automate tasks and provide information or services that would otherwise be conducted by a human being. Bots can be used for either good or malicious intent. A malicious bot is self-propagating malware designed to infect a host and connect back to a central server or servers that act as a command and control (C&C) center for an entire network of compromised devices, or "botnet". In this manner, they are designed to purposely crash web sites. |
| Captcha | A challenge-response test that determines whether a user is human or an automated bot. A typical captcha includes an image of distorted text and a text box for the user to enter the text. Captchas are commonly found at the end of website forms and must be filled out in order for the form to be submitted. By requiring users to decipher and enter the captcha text, webmasters can prevent automated programs from sending spam or other unwanted data through their online forms. |
| Chrome OS | An operating system designed by Google that is based on the Linux kernel and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user interface. As a result, Chrome OS primarily supports web applications. |
| 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. |
| Duckduckgo | A search engine located on the Internet. |
| 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. |
| Fire Wire | A serial interface used to connect devices to computers. This type of interface is common on MAC computers but is available, usually as an option, on PCs. |
| Firewall | Generally refers to a software application which runs in the background. This software monitors and controls all data passing in and out of the computer via the network. |
| Flash Drives | Another name for "Thumb Drives". |
| Gigabyte | A Gigabyte or Gbyte is 1024 Mbytes of memory, 1,024 X 1,024 X 1,024 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes. As you can see 1.0 Gbytes is somewhat larger than 1,000,000,000 bytes. Many hard drive manufactures stretch a point and report the number of Gbytes on their hard drive as the number of billions of bytes (1,000,000,000) rather than the true number of Gbytes (1,073,741,824). |
| 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. |
| Kilobyte | kilobyte or Kbyte is 1024 bytes of memory. |
| Laptop | A fully self contained computer with display, mouse, CD/DVD drive, hard drive, and network interface built in. Also there is a built in battery for mobile operation. Earlier laptops did not have all of the listed features built in. |
| Linux | A freely-distributable open source operating system (OS) that runs on a number of hardware platforms. Several hundred distributions (or 'distros'), also known as 'flavors', of Linux exist, and many are updated on a regular schedule. Individual distros can be downloaded and run in a test mode before deciding whether to install or not. Linux can run successfully on older as well as current computer hardware. Most distros include access to a vast repository of free tested software products. |
| Mbit | This is a measure of data transfer speed generally associated with serial communication. Serial communication generally is used where one bit of information is transferred at a time. Ethernet, USB, and Fire Wire are all forms of serial data transfer. |
| Megabyte | A Megabyte or Mbyte is 1024 Kbytes of memory, 1,024 X 1,024 bytes = 1,048,576 bytes. As you can see 1.0 Mbytes is somewhat larger than 1,000,000 bytes. Many hard drive manufactures stretch a point and report the number of Mbytes on their hard drive as the number of millions of bytes (1,000,000) rather than the true number of Mbytes (1,048,576). |
| NAS | See "Network Attached Storage". |
| 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. |
| Netbook | Generally a very small laptop computer without a CD/DVD drive built in. |
| Network Attached Storage | Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a storage device attached to and accessed via the network. A NAS can be connected to by multiple computers and as such is an excellent method of sharing data. |
| Network hub | See 'Hub' |
| Network switch | See 'Switch' |
| OCR | Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a process that 'reads' the characters that are contained in a scanned image. |
| RAM | Random Access Memory (RAM) is a collection of RAM chips which provides a computer, camera, or other electronic device with data storage. Generally RAM loses any data stored in it when the RAM is powered off. There are certain types of RAM which can retain information through power off to be used the next time the RAMM is powered on. |
| 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. |
| Solid State Disk | SSD for short. A storage device built with the same memory technology as Thumb Drives but larger. However, instead of a USB interface solid state disk have an interface and shape exactly like a standard hard disk. |
| 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. |
| Terabyte | A Terabyte or Tbyte is 1024 Gbytes of memory, 1,024 X 1,024 X 1,024 X 1,024 bytes = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. As you can see 1.0 Tbyte is somewhat larger than 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Many hard drive manufactures stretch a point and report the number of Tbytes on their hard drive as the number of trillions of bytes (1,000,000,000,000) rather than the true number of Tbytes (1,099,511,627,776). |
| Thumb Drives | A physically small device that contains memory attached to a USB interface. Currently thumb drives are available in memory size up to 128 Gbytes with 4 and 8 Gbytes being very common. Most Thumb Drives currently use USB 2.0 but they use various speed memory. As serial interfaces get faster Thumb drives will use those. |
| USB 1.1 | Universal Serial Bus is a serial interface used for low to medium speed input / output (I/O) devices such a printers, scanners, and mice. The data transfer rate is 1.5 Mbits / second or 12 Mbits / second. This interface attempts to operate at the higher speed but if it can't reliably it automatically shifts to the lower speed. The 'full speed' of 12 Mbits / second is approximately 1.2 Mbytes / second. The first products appeared in 1996. |
| USB 2.0 | Universal Serial Bus is a serial interface used to connect devices to computers. The maximum data transfer rate is 480 Mbits / second which is 40 times the USB 1.1 rate. At the time USB 2.0 was introduced it was faster than thumb drives could transfer data in and out of memory. USB 2.0 uses the same cables as USB 1.1 and is backwards compatible. The first products appeared in 2001. |
| USB 3.0 | Universal Serial Bus is a serial interface used to connect devices to computers. The maximum data transfer rate is 4.8 Gbits / second which is 10 times USB 2.0 rate. USB 3.0 has a different connector and cable than earlier versions. The first products appeared in 2010. |
| USB 3.1 | An upgrade to the USB 3.0 standard (also known as SuperSpeed USB) that boosts maximum theoretical data transfer speeds from 5 Gbps (Gigabits per second) in USB 3.0 to 10 Gbps in USB 3.1. There are actually two distinct USB 3.1 specifications at this time (2016). USB 3.1 Generation 1 was an initial upgrade to USB 3.0, but it is limited to 5 Gbps data transfer speeds, while the newer USB 3.1 Generation 2 is the spec that boosts data transfer speeds to the theoretical 10 Gbps. |
| WEP | Wired Equivalent Privacy: the ... |
| WPA | Wi-Fi Protected Access (2003), an improved data encryption standard replacing the previous WEP. |
| WPA2 | Wi-Fi Protected Access II (2006) provides security and encryption for data transmissions and general computer connectivity and is a replacement for WPA. (Your router MUST include this WPA2 standard.) |
| 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. |
| Zip drives | Another name for "Thumb Drives". |
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