May 7th, 2008
Animation – Animation is the sequential display of images (either 2D of 3D), an animation could be displayed on the edges of a book, displayed in an image on a computer or rendered in a video or a 3d animation. Animation on computers could be a 2D Animated GIF (Gif 89A format), Stop Frame Animated Movie (Video) or a 3D Animation make of meshes and vertices with textures.To the right is a picture of a 3d fishtank animation in my 3DFishTank screen saver for Windows. Good 3D Animation software called Blender 3D can be found here.
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| ADSL-2 – ADSL 2 is Point to Point protocol that allows an ISP to offer internet connections to customers at varying speeds. ADSL 1 allows for dynamic speeds from 128Kk to 8,000kb and ADSL 2 offers download speeds from 128k to 240,000kb. ADSL/ADSL2 allows for either bridged of non bridged connections that can tolerate bad line noise or interference. ADSL can provide independent downstream d upstream speed ratios. The speed of yourADSL2 will generally be how good your like quality is and how far you are away from the exchange. If you want top read aboput ADSL and how it workd read this Request for Comments (RFS) article from 1999: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2662.html |
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AOL – AOL stands for America Online (and AOL Australia). AOL started in 1983 and generally offered download services for a number of games PC’s and personal computers. AOL then offered customers subscriptions to the internet via dial-up modem. AOL was the first company to switch to using proprietary software to login to and control how people displayed the internet rather than allow access via a standard a telnet session. AOL Site
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| AVI – An AVI is generally the three letter extension affixed to the end of a filename to indicate that the file is a video. Mac’s generally have only a few video formats but the PC has thousands of video formats that require proprietary video decoders to decode the video as the file is read. Common video encoders/decoders (CODECS) are MPEG, XVID, DIVX, H.264 and MOV. On the PC there is a special sequence of characters (4 characters) called the FOURCC that allow windows to lookup the appropriate decoder for the AVI file that matches the 4 characters in the AVI file. It is common on a PC to receive video files that your PC does not have the appropriate decoder (CODEC) for, a free program called G-SPOT (http://www.headbands.com/gspot/) can analyze the FOURCC code and check your system to see if you have the appropriate DECODERS. Here is a list of known video codec’s http://www.fourcc.org/.A great free AVI video player for Windows, Mac and Linux is Video Lan |
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Adobe – Adobe now is quite possibly the best software manufacturer in the world. They have software that runs on Mac’s and PC’s mobile devices and online. Adobe are the makers of the popular Adobe Acrobat PDF software, Photoshop, Flash and Illustrator. Adobe have recently indicated that they are selling software faster than they expected (bucking the trend of the rest of the U.S Stock markets. Adobe are planning to utilize graphics processing power available in just released video cards (Nvidia 260 and 280 video cards) and increasing Photoshop and video encoding speeds by up to 10x on the PC. (The Mac does not have the graphics hardware yet to allow this).Most Adobe Products can be found here.
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Apple – Apple are leading Computer hardware manufacturer that has in recent times been able to surface from many years of poor sales and now become the dream of long time IT companies. Apple’s iPod and Mac computers are now selling very well, Apple even switched over to PC hardware (Intel architecture) and leave the IBM Power PC processors from the system 9 days. Apple were able transition to the new Intel architecture and still allow most software to work via emulation (even Adobe Photoshop CS3). Apple have also recently started to scale back features in some products like iMovie and plans for the future OS upgrade Snow Leopard have been seen as just updates. Apples Australia site can be found here.
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| Analogue – Is a term given to a non digital waveform that can carry audio or video signals. Analog devices like the Radio, analog TV and CB radios have been in decline and have instead been replaced with digital devices like Digital Radio, Digital HD TV and Digital Encrypted Radios. |
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Active Server Pages – Active Server Pages (ASP) pages are essentially HTML files with a asp file extension. An ASP page can contain 100% html and no asp commands and be loaded onto a clients web browser with no issues whatsoever as the client web browser receives a html steam of text data. ASP files require an ASP service to be installed on the Web Server (Apache, IIS etc) to interpret the HTML and ASP commands. ASP commands are embedded in the HTML code in between ASP tags () When a Web server reads a requested asp file for a client the ASP service reads the commands in between the ASP tags and processes the tags accordingly. A Dample ASP Command to write the date and time in HTML is as follows “The Time is: ”, the output on the clients web browser would be “The Time Is: 7:56 PM 15/06/2008“.
Alt Tag – An ALT tag is used in a HTML Image (IMG) tag to store text to display on a web browser before the image loads or when the user hovers the mouse over an image or to replace the image on a text based screen reader for visually impaired screen readers like LYNX. It is important to place Alternative text in the ALT tag on to every image you may place in a webpage.Below is some ASP code from our External Website.You can learn ASP here.
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| Bluray – Blue Ray is a new generation optical storage medium that is the same dimensions as a CD or DVD disc. The technology was developed by Sony and Panasonic. The format uses extremely thin wavelength lasers (Blue Lasers) to read and write data on a semi liquid medium. Blue ray has recently won a battle with it’s rival format HD-DVD that was mostly controlled by Toshiba, Toshiba and Sony coincidently created the original CD format. Blue ray has been praised for it’s ability to deliver High Definition 1920×1080 video H(.246 encoded) with up to 7 channels of 24bit PCM audio but at the same time the mandatory High Definition Content Protection (HDCP) delivery system that required all devices and cables up to the TV and speakers must support this encryption method to prevent piracy. Sony have even built into the standard a method of banning Blue Ray DVD hardware makers devices from being able to play Blue Ray DVD’s if they manufacturer has failed to adequately protect the HDCP chain from piracy. Usually a HDMI (High Definition Media Interface) cable is required to sent Audio and Data to a HDCP capable TV and speakers. Apple PC’s do not currently support HDCP, HDMI or Blue Ray unlike the PC. Even though Sony have won the supposed HD war changes to the HDCP and HDMI standards prevent consumers from upgrading to Blue ray. Second Generation Blue ray (called 1.1) requires every Blue Ray DVD player to have at least 1GB of free memory to decode Blue Ray movies, 99% of all players do not have this memory. |
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| Blackberry – Is a popular mobile phone network that was released in 1997 that allowed businesses to instantly push text messages, emails and business communications via the phone networks. Blackberry phones are knows to offer QWERTY keypads by default. There are an estimates 14 million blackberry users worldwide. These days Blackberry phones are slower and only work on the GSM network and are starting to fall out of favor and consumers are moving to the Apple iPhone. |
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| BlueTooth – Is a short range wireless network protocol that allows for pre shares/configured networks between varies devices (mobile phones, headsets, console controllers, mice digital cameras, printers etc) to communicate. Bluetooth uses the 2.4Ghz spectrum (the same as the Wi-Fi wireless network space. Bluetooth can be affected by a short lag that can be detected by wireless headsets or by computer mice. Upcoming Bluetooth 3.0 will reach speeds of upto 480mbps. |
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| Blog – A blog is a name given to the system and action of adding content to a dedicated website/page that holds similar. Traditionally a website with html files was used for adding comments or updates to but the technical skills required to create a website and then maintain the up0grades and changes to the website was tedious. Blog software allows people to easily login, write and save content to a website. I have been blogging since 2002, here is my blog: http://simon.fearby.com/blog/ |
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Broadband – Broadband is the term given to a high speed internet connection usually over 256kb speeds. A model can reach up to 56kbps, ISDN can reach 128kbps and ADSL, VDSL, HDSL etc can reach speeds up to 100mbps. Broadband can also be satellite but often Broadband for home users rarely leaps into the minimum Broadband speed of 128kbps. Pictures is my Broadband Modem.
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Bandwidth – Bandwidth is the term given to how much data can be moved though a network connection (modem, broadband, CD etc) in a given time period. A typical dial-in modem connected at 28.8kbps can download and approximate 9.8MB a hour, a 8MB ADSL2 connection can download an average 2,812.5mb (2.8GB) an hour. Bandwidth is important in determining how large a video should be encoded to or how large an image on a website should be in order to display on a website in a timely manner.
Bitmap – A bitmap is a raster graphic that uses defines a rectangle as a region (Pixel) for storing a set colour usually made up of levels of RED, GREEN of BLUE (RGB). The number of available colours can be determined to make up an image made of 256 colours or 16.7 million colours. Bitmaps retain 100% image quality as every separate pixel will retain memory of the colours in that pixel, unlike JPEG images that try and combine image colours across pixels to reduce the size of images.Here is a benchmark of my bandwidth at home.Below is a Speed Test Benchmark of my home Network from http://www.speedtest.net |
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Bracket - Or less than and Greater images symbols are used to encase HTML tags and properties in order to separate user desired content and formatting. Because HTML formatting commands and content are saved in the one text file HTML tags are enclosed in the bracket symbols. The Web browsers job is to process each character received in a html page one character at a time and classify the character as page content or a HTML tag or tags property. HTML web browsers are at the mercy of the HTML code in order to display a correct sentence of HTML element. For example a HTML tag to start making a sentence bold would be the <b> tag of the <strong> tag. All text after the start of the HTML tag will be Bold until the web designer inserts the following End Bold TAG </b> or </strong>.You can learn html here.
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| Browser - A web browser is a software application that can connect to a remote server (or servers) and download primarily HTML (hypertext transfer protocol) files as well as other W3C/IETF standard formats (CSS, CGI, DOM, SOAP, XHTML, XML etc). In the case of HTML files the file is downloaded then processes for commands (TAGS) that may instruct the web browser to download more content or images. While the content is being downloaded the web browser will format the page based on the code layout specified in the HTML file. The Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a software level protocol. Usually the client (web browser) requests pages or resources (html files, graphics etc) from the remote web server and the server schedules and returns the resources. The HTTP protocol has been in use since 1990 and web browser features have increased to include many other hypertext and scripting languages. A web browser can be installed onto personal computers, mobile phone, personal digital assistant (PDA), games console or other high level technical device. A list of web browsers can be found here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers). |
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