You Tube (where anyone can upload a video). There are many people who have online shows who broadcast on You Tube. I watch one regularly called “Fast Lane Daily”

Websites such as My Space and Facebook - these are community websites and make money from advertisements.

Mobile Technology such as mobile phones, smart phones and wireless devices such as the Apple iTouch and it’s eqivalents such as the iRiver etc.

Podcasts and Vodcasts.

Consumers accessing information (web, email etc) from media centres and games consoles such as the Wii. It is quite common now for people to use their Wii’s to browse and access You Tube and use it like an extra TV Channel.

Future Trends in Digital Media will include:

Wifi will play a bigger part in the accessing of Digital Media. With the iPhone coming to Australia in the next couple of months - consumers will want more and better wifi capabilities and more information and media available via wifi.

Online television is here already, but this will take a much bigger part in tiimes ahead. People find it much more convenient to watch television when they want to and watch what they want when they want. Increasingly, people are having media centres in their homes, not DVD players.

The range of wifi devices will vary. I have recently discovered this module that attachs to my camera and this will upload your photos as you take them onto your website. How nifty!

This one is almost scary!! In Korea (who are always a couple of steps ahead of us when it comes to gadgets) they have a system over there called OhMyTV and they also have mobile phones that upload straight to this TV station and therefore footage is being watching almost immedidately - see the full article here :http://malaysia.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20080613/tbs-column-pluggedin-7318940.html I would be frightened that someone would be filming my paralel parking and uploading it to world’s worst drivers!

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/index.html Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a table, topped with a 30-inch reflective surface in a clear acrylic frame. A projector underneath the surface projects an image onto its underside, while five cameras in the machine’s housing record reflections of infrared light from human fingertips. The camera can also recognize objects placed on the surface if those objects have specially-designed “tags” applied to them. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by placing and moving tagged objects. Surface has been optimized to respond to 52 touches at a time. During a demonstration with a reporter, Mark Bolger, the Surface Computing group’s marketing director, “dipped” his finger in an on-screen paint palette, then dragged it across the screen to draw a smiley face. Then he used all 10 fingers at once to give the face a full head of hair.

Using the specially-designed “tags” on objects, Microsoft Surface can automatically offer additional wine choices tailored to the dinner being eaten based on the type of wine set on the Surface.

Prices will reportedly be $5,000 to $10,000 per unit. However Microsoft said it expects prices to drop enough to make consumer versions feasible in 2010.

Partner companies plan to use the Surface in their hotels, restaurants, and retail stores. The Surface is to be used to choose meals at restaurants, plan vacations and spots to visit from the hotel room. Starwood Hotels plan to allow users to drop a credit card on the table to pay for music, books, and other amenities offered at the resort. In AT&T stores use of the Surface include interactive presentations of plans, coverage, and phone features, in addition to dropping two different phones on the table and having the customer be able to view and compare prices, features, and plans.

Info from Wikipedia and Microsoft.

News from June 2008: iTunes Australia opens up TV downloads Info from http://www.digitalmedia.com.au/

Apple has finally added TV program downloads to the iTunes store in Australia, although no word yet on movies on demand.

Programming from Australian networks along with US series from Disney Channel, MTV and ABC Studios will be available for $A2.99 inc. GST) per episode.

Some of the shows available include Summer Heights High and McLeod’s Daughters, Sea Patrol, Lost, Grey’s Anatomy and The Hills.

“We’re thrilled to bring television programming to the iTunes Store in Australia,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes. “We’re off to a great start with shows from Australia’s top networks combined with favourites from the US, which customers in Australia will love being able to watch on their computer, iPod or on a widescreen TV with Apple TV.”

The full list includes:
• Disney-owned production company ABC Studios programs airing on the Seven Network including “Desperate Housewives,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Lost” and “Scrubs;”
• Australian Broadcasting Corporation programs “Summer Heights High,” “We Can Be Heroes,” “Double the Fist,” “Foreign Correspondent Postcards,” “Sleek Geeks” and “Surfing the Menu;”
• Disney Channel’s “Hannah Montana,” “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody” and “Cory in the House;”
• Nine Network programs “Canal Road,” “McLeod’s Daughters,” “Sea Patrol” and “Urban Magic;” and
• MTV Networks’ “Blue’s Clues,” “The Hills,” “Laguna Beach,” “My Super Sweet Sixteen,” “South Park” and “Pimp My Ride.”

Just what are Digital Assets?

Digital assets are content and/or media which is digitally stored that is of value to a person or an organisation. These files could include documents, video files, audio files, photos, podcasts, vodcasts and blogs etc.

Digital Asset Management

Now that we know what digital assets are, we can understand that, obvioulsy, they are very important and there needs to be a place that you can save your digital assets and also be able to register and catalog them.

The term “Digital Asset Management” (DAM) refers to the protocol for downloading, renaming, backing up, rating, grouping, archiving, optimising, maintaining, thinning and exporting digital files.

If you are an organisation in the digital media business, a DAM would be extremely important to your business and there is software on the market that you can purchase which will mange your digital assets for you. Example: http://www.clearstorysystems.com/

The problem that can arise with digital assets is that they can be saved with all sorts of names etc, and it can be hard once you have saved your file, to find it again if you have a substantial amount of digital media. For example, I might take a photo of my car and call the file “car1.jpg” - but to someone else, that will mean nothing. With Digital Asset Management, you take your photo and add the information such as what type of car it is, what colour, when you took the photo, and maybe even of which part or vantage you have taken the photo from such as driver side view etc. When you have all your digital assets filed in a DAM you can search for topics or subjects and when the media has been filed correctly, you will get results for all media that suits your query.

An example of good Digital Asset Management is the website Stock Exchange www.sxc.hu . I have used Stock Exchange now for several years, uploading and downloading images to it. When you upload a photo you need to give it a clear name - for example, I recently uploaded some photos of Dunedin Train Station in New Zealand. When uploading you are asked to add as many categories as possible that the particular photo will come under, so in this case, the photo covered; New Zealand, Dunedin, Train Stations, buildings, architecture.

I would also class (on a home computer example) iTunes as a good digital media management tool, as it allows you to search for your music/videos via Artist, song, album, date added, year performed, music genre etc.

Implementation of Digital Assets

Recently I have had to plan the managment and organisation of my own work files for my job, and these files include photos, presentations, audio files, brochures, advertisements, videos and various other graphical files.

This is not digital asset management on a massive scale, but my files are getting too many not be organised and managed. Within my current work structure we use a managment system called SharePoint, which is a Microsoft Product. SharePoint is a browser-based collaboration and document management platform from Microsoft. It can be used to host web sites that access shared workspaces and documents, as well as specialized applications like wikis and blogs from a browser. SharePoint does not intend to replace an entire file server (e.g., an imposed 5 gigabyte file size limitation). SharePoint functionality is exposed as web parts, such as a task list or discussion pane.

All files are uploaded to SharePoint and can be placed in file libraries. In my particular case - the different types are all filed in sections (ie photos, brochures etc) - but I wanted to work it so that if I searched for “Aged Care” all files and media would appear that relate to that area. SharePoint allows this, as you can create a desciption for your file, whatever it might be. So, for example, I can have a picture of a student cutting hair, it can be descripted as: hairdressing, student at work, haircut, practical skills etc. I can also link my files to Wikis and discussion boards.

A bonus of SharePoint in our particular case is that it is backed up regulary, ensuring that data loss is at a minimum.

“The above image illustrates in 3-D the actual domains and connections of the world wide web. Colors have been added to represent .edu, .gov, .com, etc. domains. I’ve always seen the web as bubbles - some large, some small - and vectors - thick or thin. This is the best graphic device I’ve seen to show that connectivity.” George Laughead Jr. I actually think this picture is really beautiful

The world wide web is a system of Internet servers that support specially formatted documents. The documents are formatted in a markup language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language) that supports links to other documents, as well as graphics, audio, and video files. This means you can jump from one document to another simply by clicking on hot spots. Not all Internet servers are part of the World Wide Web.

There are several applications called Web browsers that make it easy to access the World Wide Web; Two of the most popular being Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

World Wide Web is not synonymous with the Internet.

Web Robots or Spiders (also known as crawlers)

A web crawler (also known as a web spider or web robot or - especially in the FOAF community - web scutter) is a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Other less frequently used names for web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms.

This process is called web crawling or spidering. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a website, such as checking links or validating HTML code. Also, crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses (usually for spam).

A web crawler is one type of bot, or software agent. In general, it starts with a list of URLs to visit, called the seeds. As the crawler visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, called the crawl frontier. URLs from the frontier are recursively visited according to a set of policies.

Wiki

Image from http://evan.prodromou.name

A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. For example, the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis. Wikis are used in businesses to provide affordable and effective intranets and for Knowledge Management. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as “the simplest online database that could possibly work”.

Web 2

Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. The term became notable after the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the Web.

WiFi

The above image is a Wifi Shirt you can buy from various “nerdy ned” shops. It actually detects WiFi networks and flashes when it has found one - that is pretty cool!

Wi-Fi, which stands for wireless fidelity, in a play on the older term Hi-Fi, is a wireless networking technology used across the globe. Wi-Fi refers to any system that uses the 802.11 standard, which was developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and released in 1997. The term Wi-Fi, which is alternatively spelled WiFi, Wi-fi, Wifi, or wifi, was pushed by the Wi-Fi Alliance, a trade group that pioneered commercialisation of the technology.

In a Wi-Fi network, computers with wifi network cards connect wirelessly to a wireless router. The router is connected to the Internet by means of a modem, typically a cable or DSL modem. Any user within 200 feet or so (about 61 meters) of the access point can then connect to the Internet, though for good transfer rates, distances of 100 feet (30.5 meters) or less are more common. Retailers also sell wireless signal boosters that extend the range of a wireless network.

Wifi networks can either be “open”, such that anyone can use them, or “closed”, in which case a password is needed. An area blanketed in wireless access is often called a wireless hotspot.

Wifi technology uses radio for communication, typically operating at a frequency of 2.4GHz. Electronics that are “WiFi Certified” are guaranteed to interoperate with each other regardless of brand. Wifi is technology designed to cater to the lightweight computing systems of the future, which are mobile and designed to consume minimal power. PDAs, laptops, and various accessories are designed to be wifi-compatible. There are even phones under development that would switch seamlessly from mobile phone networks to wifi networks without dropping a call.

New wifi technologies will extend range from 300 feet (91.5 meters) to 600 feet (183 meters) and beyond, while boosting data transfer rates. Most new laptops nowadays come equipped with internal wireless networking cards.

Web programmer

I actually know a bit about Web Programmers - I am married to one!!

A Web programmer translates the requirements of end-users and internal clients into a functional product. In other words, a programmer knows how to make a computer do what people want it to do. Usually, that product is an application which allows an end-user to do something on the Web-order a pizza, make a stock trade, or buy an airline ticket, for example. The programmer assesses the technical parameters of a project, decides how to approach the work, and then carries it out. The terms for this job often vary from one Web company to the next as the Internet changes; sometimes this job will bear the title of software engineer, developer, or programmer. On a daily basis, a programmer will modify pre-existing code, design new products and applications, create and test those products, and discuss how a design is going to flow. The number of applications that a programmer can develop is virtually endless; basically, anything that can be done in real life can be translated into an application for the Web. A programmer will often simultaneously work on two very diverse projects. Programming requires highly creative, perceptual thinking-an ability to see what people want and generate a conceptual solution without seeing the actual product. If a client says, “I want it to look like this and I want it to do that,” a programmer has to be able to imagine that without actually seeing it.

Webmaster

A webmaster is the designation given to the person responsible for designing and maintaining the coding and proper functioning of a website. In the case of a personal website, the webmaster is most often the person who owns the domain. Small businesses often employ someone in-house to be the webmaster, or they might hire an independent contractor who works part-time on the project from his or her home or office. Large companies might contract a third party to handle their online presence. In these cases the webmaster is not responsible for content, only for design and function.

Web Artist

A Web Arist is a person creating art exclusively for the Web - and such art is often shown in Web Art Museums such as:

http://www.mowa.org/enter.html

The above piece of Web Art is on show in the Web Gallery listed underneath it, but it is one example of the many types of Web Art out there!

The art can take on many forms - but it is all applicable to the Web only.

WYSIWYG Editors

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors are HTML editors that attempt to display the Web page as it will show on the browser. They are visual editors, and you don’t maniulate the code directly. Some HTML WYSIWYG editors also include a text editor, while others are purely WYSIWYG. This is my list of the best HTML WYSIWYG editors for Windows.

Dreamweaver is one of the most popular professional Web development software packages available. It offers power and flexibility to create pages that meet your needs. I use it for everything from JSP, XHTML, PHP, and XML development. It is a good choice for professional Web designers and developers, but if you’re working as a solitary freelancer, you might want to look at one of the CS suites like Web or Design to get graphics editing capability as well.

(WAI) Web Accessibility Initiative

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is an effort to improve the accessibility of the World Wide Web (WWW or Web) for people using a wide range of user agent devices, not just standard web browsers. This is especially important for people with physical disabilities which require such devices to access the Web.

The W3C was founded in 1994 to advance the Web. It is responsible for the development of uniform protocols to assure the interoperability of the Web. The WAI, part of the W3C, has developed a number of guidelines that can help to make Web sites more accessible, especially from the view of physically disabled people.

Web Safe Palette

From Wikipedia

Another set of 216 color values is commonly considered to be the “web-safe” color palette, developed at a time when many computer displays were only capable of displaying 256 colors. A set of colors was needed that could be shown without dithering on 256-color displays; the number 216 was chosen partly because computer operating systems customarily reserved sixteen to twenty colors for their own use; it was also selected because it allows exactly six shades each of red, green, and blue (6 × 6 × 6 = 216).

The list of colors is often presented as if it has special properties that render them immune to dithering. In fact, on 256-color displays applications can set a palette of any selection of colors that they choose, dithering the rest. These colors were chosen specifically because they matched the palettes selected by the then leading browser applications. Fortunately, there were not radically different palettes in use in different popular browsers.

“Web-safe” colors had a flaw in that, on systems such as X11 where the palette is shared between applications, smaller color cubes (5×5x5 or 4×4x4) were often allocated by browsers — thus, the “web safe” colors would actually dither on such systems. Better results were obtained by providing an image with a larger range of colors and allowing the browser to quantize the color space if needed, rather than suffer the quality loss of a double quantization.

As of 2007, personal computers typically have at least 16-bit color and usually 24-bit (TrueColor). Even mobile devices have at least 16-bit color, driven by the inclusion of cameras on cellphones. The use of “web-safe” colors has fallen into practical disuse, but persisted in culture.

The web-safe palette system persists as being the palette with the greatest number of distinct colors, where each color can be distinguished individually by human eyes. This led to the use of web-safe colors in anti-phishing systems. [8]

The “web-safe” colors do not all have names, but each can be specified by an RGB triplet. Below are the values for the 6 shades of each color out of 256 possible color shades.

Please see below for the actual palette:

Windows Media

Windows Media Video (WMV) is a compressed video file format for several proprietary codecs developed by Microsoft. The original codec, known as WMV, was originally designed for Internet streaming applications, as a competitor to RealVideo. The other codecs, such as WMV Screen and WMV Image, cater for specialized content. Through standardization from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), WMV has gained adoption for physical-delivery formats such as HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc.

Web Banner info from Wikipedia

Example Web Banner from http://www.ology.com.au/banner_design.htm

A web banner or banner ad is a form of advertising on the World Wide Web. This form of online advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking to the website of the advertiser. The advertisement is constructed from an image (GIF, JPEG, PNG), JavaScript program or multimedia object employing technologies such as Silverlight, Java, Shockwave or Flash, often employing animation or sound to maximize presence. Images are usually in a high-aspect ratio shape (i.e. either wide and short, or tall and narrow) hence the reference to banners. These images are usually placed on web pages that have interesting content, such as a newspaper article or an opinion piece.

The web banner is displayed when a web page that references the banner is loaded into a web browser. This event is known as an “impression”. When the viewer clicks on the banner, the viewer is directed to the website advertised in the banner. This event is known as a “click through”. In many cases, banners are delivered by a central ad server.

When the advertiser scans their logfiles and detects that a web user has visited the advertiser’s site from the content site by clicking on the banner ad, the advertiser sends the content provider some small amount of money (usually around five to ten US cents). This payback system is often how the content provider is able to pay for the Internet access to supply the content in the first place.

Web banners function the same way as traditional advertisements are intended to function: notifying consumers of the product or service and presenting reasons why the consumer should choose the product in question, although web banners differ in that the results for advertisement campaigns may be monitored real-time and may be targeted to the viewer’s interests.

Many web surfers regard these advertisements as highly annoying because they distract from a web page’s actual content or waste bandwidth. (Of course, the purpose of the banner ad is to attract attention and many advertisers try to get attention to the advert by making them annoying. Without attracting attention it would provide no revenue for the advertiser or for the content provider.) Newer web browsers often include options to disable pop-ups or block images from selected websites. Another way of avoiding banners is to use a proxy server that blocks them, such as Privoxy.

XHTML

Short for Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, a hybrid between HTML and XML specifically designed for Net device displays.

XHTML is a markup language written in XML; therefore, it is an XML application.

XHTML uses three XML namespaces (used to qualify element and attributes names by associating them with namespaces identified by URI references. Namespaces prevent identically custom-named tags that may be used in different XML documents from being read the same way), which correspond to three HTML 4.0 DTDs: Strict, Transitional, and Frameset.

XHTML markup must conform to the markup standards defined in a HTML DTD.

When applied to Net devices, XHTML must go through a modularization process. This enables XHTML pages to be read by many different platforms.

A device designer, using standard building blocks, will specify which elements are supported. Content creators will then target these building blocks–or modules.

Because these modules conform to certain standards, XHTML’s extensibility ensures that layout and presentation stay true-to-form over any platform.

XML

1. XML stands for EXtensible Markup Language

1. XML is a markup language much like HTML

1. XML was designed to carry data, not to display data

1. XML tags are not predefined. You must define your own tags

1. XML is designed to be self-descriptive

1. XML is a W3C Recommendation

The Difference Between XML and HTML

XML is not a replacement for HTML - XML and HTML were designed with different goals:

XML was designed to transport and store data, with focus on what data is.
HTML was designed to display data, with focus on how data looks. HTML is about displaying information, while XML is about carrying information.

Yahoo

Short for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle, Yahoo! is a World Wide Web directory started by David Filo and Jerry Yang at Stanford University. The two began compiling and categorizing Web pages in 1994. By 1996, they had one of the most popular Web sites and a very valuable commodity.

Zip Archive

The ZIP file format is a popular lossless data compression and archival format. A ZIP file contains one or more files that have been compressed, to reduce their file size, or stored as-is. A number of compression algorithms are permitted in zip files but as of 2008 only DEFLATE is widely used and supported.

The format was originally evolved by Phil Katz for PKZIP from the previous ARC compression format by Thom Henderson. However, many software utilities other than PKZIP itself are now available to create, modify, or open (unzip, decompress) ZIP files, notably WinZip, BOMArchiveHelper, KGB Archiver, PicoZip, Info-ZIP, WinRAR, IZArc, 7-Zip, ALZip, TUGZip, PeaZip, Universal Extractor and Zip Genius. Microsoft has included built-in ZIP support (under the name “compressed folders”) in later versions of its Windows operating system. Apple has included built-in ZIP support in Mac OS X 10.3 and later via the BOMArchiveHelper utility.

ZIP files generally use the file extensions “.zip” or “.ZIP” and the MIME media type application/zip. Some software uses the ZIP file format as a wrapper for a large number of small items in a specific structure. Generally when this is done a different file extension is used. Examples of this usage are Java JAR files, id Software .pk3/.pk4 files, package files for StepMania and Winamp/Windows Media Player skins, XPInstall, as well as OpenDocument and Office Open XML office formats. Both OpenDocument and Office Open XML formats use the JAR file format internally, so files can be easily uncompressed and compressed using tools for ZIP files. Google Earth makes use of KMZ files, which are just KML files in ZIP format. Mozilla Firefox Add-ons are zip files with extension “xpi”.

A thumbnail is the term used to describe a miniature version of a slide or picture. A perfect example of this is when you are searching in your computer files you can view via thumbnails and this will show a tiny picture of the image or document.

Tiff File

Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) is a variable-resolution bitmapped image format developed by Aldus (now part of Adobe) in 1986. TIFF is very common for transporting color or gray-scale images into page layout applications, but is less suited to delivering web content.

Note the following about TIFF:

1. TIFF files are large and of very high quality. Baseline TIFF images are highly portable; most graphics, desktop publishing, and word processing applications understand them.

1. The TIFF specification is readily extensible, though this comes at the price of some of its portability. Many applications incorporate their own extensions, but a number of application-independent extensions are recognized by most programs.

1. Four types of baseline TIFF images are available: bilevel (black and white), gray scale, palette (i.e., indexed), and RGB (i.e., true color). RGB images may store up to 16.7 million colors. Palette and gray-scale images are limited to 256 colors or shades. A common extension of TIFF also allows for CMYK images.

1. TIFF files may or may not be compressed. A number of methods may be used to compress TIFF files, including the Huffman and LZW algorithms. Even compressed, TIFF files are usually much larger than similar GIF or JPEG files.

1. Because the files are so large and because there are so many possible variations of each TIFF file type, few web browsers can display them without plug-ins.

Tone

A tone is a pitch element or register added to a syllable to convey grammatical or lexical information.

Typography

Above is a artwork using typography..

Simply put typography is the art of print. In our daily lives we are constantly surrounded by it. Typography includes greeting cards, books, posters, newspapers, just about anything you can imagine. As simple as it may seem typography subtly combines communicative and artistic elements to create a print both pleasing and easy to read.

A small font or one that is fuzzy is obviously hard to read which makes the intended message difficult to understand. Good typography is not only clear and legible but easy and pleasant to read. Typographers achieve this by selecting the right fonts, lettering and print types.

A typographer also makes sure that the right lettering design has been chosen to convey the intended effect of the print. For example newspapers, being a source of news and facts, typically have a straightforward, black print fonts, while on the other hand wedding invitations are more ornate and elegant in accord with the happy occasion they announce.

Typography is an enormous field that has both digital and physical applications. Jobs in this field include everything from graphic designers who choose type and position them on the page to type designers that craft letter styles. Modern day typography includes more and more digital work related to the internet and other computer-related projects.

For print lettering to be successful it must complete two basic roles: it must clearly communicate the intended message and do so in a visually effective way that takes into account the design element. A print type that can do those two things is readable, artistic and attractive.

TCP/IP

(pronounced as separate letters) Short for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, the suite of communications protocols used to connect hosts on the Internet. TCP/IP uses several protocols, the two main ones being TCP and IP. TCP/IP is built into the UNIX operating system and is used by the Internet, making it the de facto standard for transmitting data over networks. Even network operating systems that have their own protocols, such as Netware, also support TCP/IP.

Text File

A file that holds text. The term text file is often used as a synonym for ASCII file, a file in which characters are represented by their ASCII codes.

USB Port

Short for Universal Serial Bus, an external bus standard that supports data transfer rates of 12 Mbps. A single USB port can be used to connect up to 127 peripheral devices, such as mice, modems, and keyboards. USB also supports Plug-and-Play installation and hot plugging.

Starting in 1996, a few computer manufacturers started including USB support in their new machines. It wasn’t until the release of the best-selling iMac in 1998 that USB became widespread. It is expected to completely replace serial and parallel ports. All computers sold today have several USB ports - some stationed at the front of the computer for easy access and some at the back for mice, printers etc. Advanced monitors also hold USB ports.

URL

Abbreviation of Uniform Resource Locator, the global address of documents and other resources on the World Wide Web.

The first part of the address is called a protocol identifier and it indicates what protocol to use, and the second part is called a resource name and it specifies the IP address or the domain name where the resource is located. The protocol identifier and the resource name are separated by a colon and two forward slashes.

Upload

To transmit data from a computer to a bulletin board service, mainframe, or network. For example, if you use a personal computer to log on to a network and you want to send files across the network, you must upload the files from your PC to the network.

Vodcast

A vodcast is a podcast that contains video content. The term vodcast comes from the combination of the words “video” and “podcast”. Video podcasts may also be referred to as vidcasts.

In order to watch a vodcast, you need a podcatcher capable of playing video (such as iTunes).

Vector Graphics

pictured above: fall leaves background vector with grunge and graffiti elements

Same as object-oriented graphics, refers to software and hardware that use geometrical formulas to represent images. The other method for representing graphical images is through bit maps, in which the image is composed of a pattern of dots. This is sometimes called raster graphics. Programs that enable you to create and manipulate vector graphics are called draw programs, whereas programs that manipulated bit-mapped images are called paint programs.

Vector-oriented images are more flexible than bit maps because they can be resized and stretched. In addition, images stored as vectors look better on devices (monitors and printers) with higher resolution, whereas bit-mapped images always appear the same regardless of a device’s resolution. Another advantage of vector graphics is that representations of images often require less memory than bit-mapped images do.

Almost all sophisticated graphics systems, including CADD systems and animation software, use vector graphics. In addition, many printers (PostScript printers, for example) use vector graphics. Fonts represented as vectors are called vector fonts, scalable fonts, object-oriented fonts, and outline fonts.

Note that most output devices, including dot-matrix printers, laser printers, and display monitors, are raster devices (plotters are the notable exception). This means that all objects, even vector objects, must be translated into bit maps before being output. The difference between vector graphics and raster graphics, therefore, is that vector graphics are not translated into bit maps until the last possible moment, after all sizes and resolutions have been specified. PostScript printers, for example, have a raster image processor (RIP) that performs the translation within the printer. In their vector form, therefore, graphics representations can potentially be output on any device, with any resolution, and at any size.

Video Card

Above: XFX GeForce 8800GT 512MB (PV-T88P-YDQ4) Video Card

The video card is an expansion card that allows the computer to send graphical information to a video display device such as a monitor or projector. The Video Card is Also Known As: graphics card, graphics adapter, video adapter

Each motherboard supports only a limited range of video card formats so always check with your motherboard manufacturer before making a purchase.

Many modern computers do not have video expansion cards but instead have GPUs integrated directly onto the motherboard. This allows for a less expensive computer but also for a less powerful graphics system. This option is wise for the average business and home user not interested in advanced graphics capabilities or the latest games.

Virtual memory

Virtual memory is a common part of most operating systems on desktop computers. It has become so common because it provides a big benefit for users at a very low cost.

Most computers today have something like 64 or 128 megabytes of RAM (random-access memory) available for use by the CPU (central processing unit). Often, that amount of RAM is not enough to run all of the programs that most users expect to run at once. For example, if you load the Windows operating system, an e-mail program, a Web browser and word processor into RAM simultaneously, 64 megabytes is not enough to hold it all. If there were no such thing as virtual memory, your computer would have to say, “Sorry, you cannot load any more applications. Please close an application to load a new one.” With virtual memory, the computer can look for areas of RAM that have not been used recently and copy them onto the hard disk. This frees up space in RAM to load the new application. Because it does this automatically, you don’t even know it is happening, and it makes your computer feel like is has unlimited RAM space even though it has only 32 megabytes installed. Because hard-disk space is so much cheaper than RAM chips, virtual memory also provides a nice economic benefit.

The area of the hard disk that stores the RAM image is called a page file. It holds pages of RAM on the hard disk, and the operating system moves data back and forth between the page file and RAM. (On a Windows machine, page files have a .SWP extension.)

Of course, the read/write speed of a hard drive is much slower than RAM, and the technology of a hard drive is not geared toward accessing small pieces of data at a time. If your system has to rely too heavily on virtual memory, you will notice a significant performance drop. The key is to have enough RAM to handle everything you tend to work on simultaneously. Then, the only time you “feel” the slowness of virtual memory is in the slight pause that occurs when you change tasks. When you have enough RAM for your needs, virtual memory works beautifully. When you don’t, the operating system has to constantly swap information back and forth between RAM and the hard disk. This is called thrashing, and it can make your computer feel incredibly slow.

QuickTime is a multimedia architecture developed by Apple Computer for Mac OS, Mac OS X, Windows, and other platforms. It allows your computer to work with real-time movies, sounds, and high-quality compressed images.

QuickTime applications include the following:

1. QuickTime Player for playing, interacting with, or viewing video, audio, virtual reality (VR), or graphics files

1. QuickTime Pro for high-end media authoring

1. QuickTime Streaming Server and Darwin Streaming Server for delivering media either in real time or on demand over the Internet with no per-stream license fee

1. QuickTime Broadcaster which allows average users to produce a live broadcast event

All of these applications, except for QuickTime Pro, are free and available for download from Apple’s QuickTime web site. For more information or to obtain these applications, visit the site at: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/

Quick Mask Mode

Great tutorial here

RGB (info from TechMarket)

RGB (red, green, and blue) refers to a system for representing the colours to be used on a computer display. Red, green, and blue can be combined in various proportions to obtain any colours in the visible spectrum. Levels of R, G, and B can each range from 0 to 100 percent of full intensity. Each level is represented by the range of decimal numbers from 0 to 255 (256 levels for each colour), equivalent to the range of binary numbers from 00000000 to 11111111, or hexadecimal 00 to FF. The total number of available colors is 256 x 256 x 256, or 16,777,216 possible colours.

In the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the colour for a page background or text font is specified by an RGB value, expressed with six digits in hexadecimal format. The first and second digits represent the red level; the third and fourth digits represent the green level; the fifth and sixth digits represent the blue level. In order to actually display the colours for all possible values, the computer display system must have 24 bits to describe the colour in each pixel. In display systems or modes that have fewer bits for displaying colours, an approximation of the specified colour will be displayed.

In creating Web pages, the number of RGB values that are recommended for use is considerably reduced - first, by the fact that many displays can handle only 256 colours and, secondly, because PC and Mac Web browsers handle 40 of these 256 colours slightly differently. In order to ensure that your colours will be consistent on both browsers, a palette of the 216 colours common to both PC and Web browsers is recommended. Any colour outside of these will be dithering (approximated).

Resolution

Refers to the sharpness and clarity of an image. The term is most often used to describe monitors, printers, and bit-mapped graphic images. In the case of dot-matrix and laser printers, the resolution indicates the number of dots per inch. For example, a 300-dpi (dots per inch) printer is one that is capable of printing 300 distinct dots in a line 1 inch long. This means it can print 90,000 dots per square inch.

For graphics monitors, the screen resolution signifies the number of dots (pixels) on the entire screen. For example, a 640-by-480 pixel screen is capable of displaying 640 distinct dots on each of 480 lines, or about 300,000 pixels. This translates into different dpi measurements depending on the size of the screen. For example, a 15-inch VGA monitor (640×480) displays about 50 dots per inch.

Printers, monitors, scanners, and other I/O devices are often classified as high resolution, medium resolution, or low resolution. The actual resolution ranges for each of these grades is constantly shifting as the technology improves.

Relative and Absolute URLS

Great explanation of relative and absolute URLs here.

Raster Graphics (from Wikipedia)

In computer graphics, a raster graphics image or bitmap, is a data structure representing a generally rectangular grid of pixels, or points of color, viewable via a monitor, paper, or other display medium. Raster images are stored in image files with varying formats (see Comparison of graphics file formats).

A bitmap corresponds bit-for-bit with an image displayed on a screen, generally in the same format used for storage in the display’s video memory, or maybe as a device-independent bitmap. Bitmap is technically characterized by the width and height of the image in pixels and by the number of bits per pixel (a color depth, which determines the number of colors it can represent).

The printing and prepress industries know raster graphics as contones (from “continuous tones”) and refer to vector graphics as “line work”.

The word “raster” has its origins in the Latin rastrum (a rake), which is derived from radere (to scrape), and recalls metaphorically the systematic sampling of a grid-pattern of individual pixel-spaces with a view to representing an overall image.

Rollover Button

In Rollovers, a button or image changes (swaps) itself on rolling over it (onMouseOver event) and reverts back to the original image on rolling out of the web object (onMouseOut event). The on-rollover images are preloaded into the page when it is loading, this ensures that the rollovers are displayed quickly. Place your mouse over the Buttons in Example 1 and the Images in Example 2 to see their rollover effect (see below).

Example 1 (see picture with green background)

RAM

Random Access Memory (RAM) provides space for your computer to read and write data to be accessed by the CPU (central processing unit). When people refer to a computer’s memory, they usually mean its RAM.

If you add more RAM to your computer, you reduce the number of times your CPU must read data from your hard disk. This usually allows your computer to work considerably faster, as RAM is many times faster than a hard disk.

RAM is volatile, so data stored in RAM stays there only as long as your computer is running. As soon as you turn the computer off, the data stored in RAM disappears.

When you turn your computer on again, your computer’s boot firmware (called BIOS on a PC) uses instructions stored semi-permanently in ROM chips to read your operating system and related files from the disk and load them back into RAM.

Root folder

The root folder of any partition is the “highest” folder in the hierarchy. The root folder contains all other folders and can also contain files.

For example, the root folder of the main partition on your computer is probably C:\. The root folder of your DVD or CD drive might be D:\.

Royalty free website

When you want to use someone else’s art in a project of your own, you often have to pay a royalty. Some types of art are designated as royalty-free, and in this case, you do not have to pay the art’s creator a royalty when you use it. If you want to use someone else’s art on a limited budget, royalty-free art might be the way to go.

Creative works, including art, photography, music, movies, and software, are usually owned by their creator. If someone else wants to use someone’s song in a commercial, or put one of their photos on a website, the creator often earns a royalty. The royalty is a payment for each use of the creative work.

Sometimes artists create work that they sell as royalty-free. If a piece of work is royalty-free, you can purchase the right to use the work without paying a royalty each and every time the art is used. This can sometimes be a very cost-effective way for someone to use a piece of art, music, or software. The savings associated with using royalty-free works are especially high when the work will be used over and over.

Royalty-free images are free of royalties, but they are not free to use without purchase. The creator of a royalty-free song or photo still owns the work. The software, movie, or other royalty-free work belongs to its creator, and you are allowed to use it for specific purposes by paying a fee. This is usually much less than you would pay in royalties for a similar piece of work, but you are still required to pay.

Artists create royalty-free works for a number of different reasons. Sometimes the work is shorter or more simple than their usual work, and they do not feel that it merits royalty payments. Sometimes they design the work specifically for the royalty-free market, and intend to sell the rights to their work to people who might not wish to pay royalties on another work. It is up to the buyer to decide whether the royalty-free work fits the needs of his or her project.

There is a lot of royalty-free work available for a number of purposes. If you’re looking for stock photography to add spice to your website, a catchy melody for your movie, or a software program to add to your services, royalty-free works might offer you just what you’re looking for at a very reasonable price.

Search Engine

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information which must be consulted, akin to other techniques for managing information overload.

The most public, visible form of a search engine is a Web search engine which searches for information on the World Wide Web, examples of this are Google and AltaVista.

Scripting Languages

A scripting language, script language or extension language, is a programming language that controls a software application. “Scripts” are often treated as distinct from “programs”, which execute independently from any other application. At the same time they are distinct from the core code of the application, which is usually written in a different language, and by being accessible to the end user they enable the behavior of the application to be adapted to the user’s needs. Scripts are often, but not always, interpreted from the source code or “semi-compiled” to bytecode which is interpreted, unlike the applications they are associated with, which are traditionally compiled to native machine code for the system on which they run. Scripting languages are nearly always embedded in the application with which they are associated.

The name “script” is derived from the written script of the performing arts, in which dialogue is set down to be spoken by human actors. Early script languages were often called batch languages or job control languages. Such early scripting languages were created to shorten the traditional edit-compile-link-run process.

Spam

The term “spam” is Internet slang that refers to unsolicited commercial email (UCE) or unsolicited bulk email (UBE). Some people refer to this kind of communication as junk email to equate it with the paper junk mail that comes through the “snail” Mail. Unsolicited email most often contains advertisements for services or products, but very few reputable marketers use UCE to advertise. The most commonly seen spam includes the following:

* Phishing scams, a very popular and dangerous form of email fraud
* Foreign bank scams or advance fee fraud schemes
* Pyramid schemes, including multilevel marketing (MLM)<
* Other “Get Rich Quick” or “Make Money Fast” (MMF) schemes
* Quack health products and remedies
* Ads for pornographic web sites
* Offers of software for collecting email addresses and sending UCE
* Offers of bulk emailing services for sending UCE
* Chain letters (for more information, see About chain mail)
* Illegally pirated software (”Warez”)

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)

SSL (pronounced as separate letters) Short for Secure Sockets Layer, a protocol developed by Netscape for transmitting private documents via the Internet. SSL uses a cryptographic system that uses two keys to encrypt data − a public key known to everyone and a private or secret key known only to the recipient of the message. Both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer support SSL, and many Web sites use the protocol to obtain confidential user information, such as credit card numbers.By convention, URLs that require an SSL connection start with https: instead of http:.

Another protocol for transmitting data securely over the World Wide Web is Secure HTTP (S-HTTP). Whereas SSL creates a secure connection between a client and a server, over which any amount of data can be sent securely, S-HTTP is designed to transmit individual messages securely. SSL and S-HTTP, therefore, can be seen as complementary rather than competing technologies. Both protocols have been approved by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a standard.

Streaming Media

Streaming multimedia is multimedia that is constantly received by, and normally displayed to, the end-user while it is being delivered by the provider (the term “to display” is used in this article in a general sense that includes audio playback.) The name refers to the delivery method of the medium rather than to the medium itself. The distinction is usually applied to media that are distributed over telecommunications networks, as most other delivery systems are either inherently streaming (e.g. radio, television) or inherently non-streaming (e.g. books, video cassettes, audio CDs). The verb ‘to stream’ is also derived from this term, meaning to deliver media in this manner.

Scanner types

Different types of Scanners

Stop Frame Animation

Stop motion (or frame-by-frame) animation is a general term for an animation technique which makes a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved by extremely small amounts between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames are played as a continuous sequence. Clay figures are often used in stop motion animations, known as claymation, for their ease of repositioning. Software applications such as Stop Motion Pro, istopmotion and monkeyjam have made the technique popular among young filmmakers. A good example of stop frame animation is the very naughty show Robot Chicken

Stock Photos

Stock images are images that are posted somewhere with the express intent that it may be used by other artists in their own artwork. Use of these images in this fashion are subject to the artist’s license, which may or may not require the payment of fees.

I have used several Stock Photo sites such as www.sxc.hu and www.istockphoto.com

Software Calibration

Information page here.

Scratch Disk Memory

Scratch space is space on the hard disk drive that is dedicated for only temporary storage. It cannot be used to permanently backup files. Scratch disks can be set to erase all data at regular intervals so that the disk space is left free for future use. The management of scratch disk space is typically dynamic, occurring when needed.

Scratch space is commonly used in graphic design programs, such as Adobe Photoshop. It is used when the program needs more memory, and the amount of available system RAM is insufficient. A common error in that program is “scratch disks full”, which occurs when one has left the scratch disks configured to the default setting, being the boot drive. Many computer users gradually fill up their primary hard drive with files, slowly reducing the amount of space the scratch disk may take up.

Professional graphics designers often partition off several gigabytes of hard drive and leave that space empty to ensure reliable scratch disks. Hard drive space, on a per-gigabyte basis, is far cheaper than RAM, though performs far slower. Even if on a separate physical drive (even a fast ‘WD Raptor’ drive) to the main operating system and software, a scratch disc cannot match RAM for speed. However, since 10000rpm hard drives can be purchased with capacities of up to 130GB, whereas few motherboards can handle more than 8GB of RAM, for applications such as video editing, it is a reasonable solution.

Saturation

Saturation is a measure of a color’s pureness and brilliance. In subtractive color processing like CYMK, the more we mix colors the less pure they become; therefore, the color appears dull.

The illustration above demonstrates the change that will occur if the saturation of the color is decreased. The first parrot on the left is at 100% saturation, all colors are brilliant. The middle parrot has a saturation of 50%; the colors are very dull. The third parrot has no saturation, creating a black and white image.

SLR Camera

The single-lens reflex (SLR) camera uses an automatic moving mirror system which permits the photographer to see exactly what will be captured by the film or digital imaging system, as opposed to non-SLR cameras where the view through the viewfinder could be significantly different from what was captured on film.

Prior to the development of SLR, all cameras with viewfinders had two optical light paths: one path through the lens to the film, and another path positioned slightly off to the side seen by the photographer. Because the viewfinder and the film lens cannot share the same optical path, the viewfinder is aimed to intersect with the film lens at a fixed point somewhere in front of the camera. This is more or less helpful for pictures taken at a middle or longer distance but a close-up shot framed in the viewfinder will not look the same as the film image. Moreover, focusing the lens of a non-SLR camera when it is opened to wider apertures (such as in low light or while using low-speed film) is not easy.

SLR cameras permit direct viewing using a pentaprism situated above the optical path through the lens to the film plane. Light is reflected by a movable mirror upwards into the pentaprism where it is reflected several times until it aligns with the viewfinder. When the shutter is released, the mirror moves out of the light path and the light shines directly onto the film, or in the case of a DSLR, the CCD or CMOS imaging sensor.

The focus can be adjusted manually by the photographer or automatically by the autofocus system. The viewfinder can include a matte focusing screen located just above the mirror system to diffuse the light. This system permits accurate viewing, composing and focusing, especially useful with interchangeable lenses.

Up until the 1990s, SLR was the most advanced photographic preview system available. But the recent development and refinement of digital imaging technology with an on-camera live LCD preview screen has overshadowed SLR’s popularity. Nearly all inexpensive compact digital cameras now include an LCD preview screen allowing the photographer to see exactly what the CCD is capturing. However, SLR is still popular in high-end and professional cameras, because the pixel resolution, contrast ratio, and color gamut of an LCD preview screen cannot compete with the clarity and shadow detail of a direct-viewed optical SLR viewfinder.

Scrolling

In computer graphics and television, scrolling or text crawling is the act of sliding a horizontal or vertical presentation of content, such as text, drawings, or images, across a screen or display window. Scrolling is often used to show large amounts of data that could not fit on the viewport all at the same time, this is commonly used in window-based computer displays. The word scroll is derived from the way in which people read scrolls of paper, by rolling up the top of the page and allowing objects lower on the page to move up. Smooth scrolling refers to a scrolling display where text appears smoothly, rather than appearing as a whole line at a time.

On the Internet, OSP (online service provider) has several different meanings.

The term has had some currency in distinguishing Internet access providers that have their own online independent content, such as America Online (AOL), from Internet service providers (ISPs) that simply connect the user directly with the Internet. In general, the companies sometimes identified as OSPs (in this usage) offer an extensive online array of services of their own apart from the rest of the Internet and sometimes their own version of a Web browser. Connecting to the Internet through an OSP is an alternative to connecting through one of the national Internet service providers, such as AT&T or MCI, or a regional or local ISP.

Some Internet service providers (ISPs) describe themselves as online service providers. In this usage, ISP and OSP are synonyms.

America Online has used the term to refer to online content providers (usually Web sites) with which AOL has a business agreement.

Open Source

Most software that you buy or download only comes in the compiled ready-to-run version. Compiled means that the actual program code that the developer created, known as the source code, has run through a special program called a compiler that translates the source code into a form that the computer can understand (see How C Programming Works for details on compilers). It is extremely difficult to modify the compiled version of most applications and nearly impossible to see exactly how the developer created different parts of the program. Most commercial software manufacturers see this as an advantage that keeps other companies from copying their code and using it in a competing product. It also gives them control over the quality and features found in a particular product.

Open source software is at the opposite end of the spectrum. The source code is included with the compiled version and modification or customization is actually encouraged. The software developers who support the open source concept believe that by allowing anyone who’s interested to modify the source code, the application will be more useful and error-free over the long term.

To be considered as open source software by the software development industry, certain criteria must be met:

1. The program must be freely distributed (It can be part of a package that is sold though, such as Red Hat has done with Linux).

1. Source code must be included.

1. Anyone must be allowed to modify the source code.

1. Modified versions can be redistributed.

1. The license must not require the exclusion of other software or interfere with the operation of other software.

Out of Gamut

In colour reproduction, including computer graphics and photography, the gamut, or colour gamut (pronounced /ˈgæmət/), is a certain complete subset of colors. The most common usage refers to the subset of colours which can be accurately represented in a given circumstance, such as within a given colour space or by a certain output device. Another sense, less frequently used but not less correct, refers to the complete set of colours found within an image at a given time. In this context, digitizing a photograph, converting a digitized image to a different colour space, or outputting it to a given medium using a certain output device generally alters its gamut, in the sense that some of the colours in the original are lost in the process.

Opacity

The condition of lacking transparency or translucence. We cannot see through objects which are 100% opaque. Adjusting opacity determines to what degree information is hidden or revealed.

Photoshop

Photoshop, is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the current and primary market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation, and is the flagship product of Adobe Systems. It has been described as an industry standard for graphics professionals and was one of the early “killer applications” on Macintosh.

Photoshop CS3, the current tenth iteration of the program, was released on 16 April 2007. “CS” reflects its integration with other Creative Suite products, and the number “3″ represents it as the third version released since Adobe re-branded its products under the CS umbrella. Photoshop CS3 features additions such as the ability to apply non-destructive filters, as well as new selection tools named Quick Selection and Refine Edge that make selection more streamlined. On April 30th, Adobe released Photoshop CS3 Extended, which includes all the same features of Adobe Photoshop CS3 with the addition of capabilities for scientific imaging, 3D, and high end film and video users. The successor to Photoshop CS3, Photoshop CS4, will be the first 64-bit Photoshop.

PDA (Personal Digital Assistant)

A personal digital assistant (PDA) is a handheld device designed to facilitate organisational ability from a mobile platform. While the original PDAs were somewhat limited to keeping address, phone, calendar, and task lists, today’s PDA can function as a mobile phone, fax, provide Internet connectivity, and much more. There are many different types of PDAs, but most models work with either Palmtop software or a special version of Microsoft Windows called Windows Mobile. All models can interface with a laptop or desktop system, though optional accessories may be required. Synchronisation between computer and PDA is one of the most popular features of this digital device.

Some PDAs work only with a stylus, while others incorporate a miniature keyboard. A PDA might include handwriting recognition software, voice recognition, and a digital voice recorder. Some models come with a suite of software programs preinstalled, while others offer optional programs if desired.

A PDA might also incorporate mobile phone functionality and wireless local area network (LAN) capability. Connect to the Internet to check email, send messages, or watch the stock market. With flash card capability, a PDA can store, access, and transfer virtually any kind of data, including maps, spreadsheets, presentations, and dockets.

A PDA can even function like a mini-computer to make those last minute changes while en-route to the office or to a client. Windows Mobile runs a variety of mobile applications, including Excel and Microsoft Word. If you have a few minutes, use your PDA to kick back and listen to your favorite music, watch videos, or play games.

Portal

Portal is a term, generally synonymous with gateway, for a World Wide Web site that is or proposes to be a major starting site for users when they get connected to the Web or that users tend to visit as an anchor site. There are general portals and specialised or niche portals. Some major general portals include Yahoo, Netscape, Lycos, CNET and Microsoft Network. Examples of niche portals include Garden.com (for gardeners), Fool.com (for investors), and SearchNetworking.com (for network administrators).

A number of large access providers offer portals to the Web for their own users. Most portals have adopted the Yahoo style of content categories with a text-intensive, faster loading page that visitors will find easy to use and to return to. Companies with portal sites have attracted much stock market investor interest because portals are viewed as able to command large audiences and numbers of advertising viewers.

Typical services offered by portal sites include a directory of Web sites, a facility to search for other sites, news, weather information, e-mail, stock quotes, phone and map information, and sometimes a community forum. Excite is among the first portals to offer users the ability to create a site that is personalised for individual interests.

The New England Institute’s portal is the DET portal and this is where we can access our personal information, terminal server connections, and lots of other information that is important to TAFE NSW staff members. portal.det.nsw.edu.au

Path (file/folder path)

A sequence of symbols and names that identifies a file. Every file has a name, called a filename, so the simplest type of pathname is just a filename. If you specify a filename as the pathname, the operating system looks for that file in your current working directory. However, if the file resides in a different directory, you must tell the operating system how to find that directory. You do this by specifying a path that the operating system must follow.

The pathname always starts from your working directory or from the root directory. Each operating system has its own rules for specifying paths. In DOS systems, for example, the root directory is named \, and each subdirectory is separated by an additional backslash. In UNIX, the root directory is named /, and each subdirectory is followed by a slash. In Macintosh environments, directories are separated by a colon.

Plug In

A hardware or software module that adds a specific feature or service to a larger system. The idea is that the new component simply plugs in to the existing system. For example, there are number of plug-ins for the Netscape Navigator browser that enable it to display different types of audio or video messages.

Podcast (great explanation gained from Podcast Alley)

Podcasting, created by former MTV VJ Adam Curry, is a term that was devised as a crisp way to describe the technology used to push audio content from websites down to consumers of that content, who typically listen to it on their iPod (hence the “pod”) or other audio player that supports mp3 at their convenience. The term podcasting is meant to rhyme with broadcasting and is a derivative of the iPod platform. While not directly associated with Apples iPod device or iTunes music service, the company did contribute both the desire and the technology for this capability. Podcasting is not unlike time-shifted video software and devices like TiVo, which let you watch what you want when you want by recording and storing video, except that podcasting is used for audio and is currently free of charge. Note, however, that this technology can be used to push any kind of file, including software updates, pictures, and videos.

Pixel

Short for Picture Element, a pixel is a single point in a graphic image. Graphics monitors display pictures by dividing the display screen into thousands (or millions) of pixels, arranged in rows and columns. The pixels are so close together that they appear connected.

The number of bits used to represent each pixel determines how many colours or shades of gray can be displayed. For example, in 8-bit colour mode, the colour monitor uses 8 bits for each pixel, making it possible to display 2 to the 8th power (256) different colours or shades of gray.

On colour monitors, each pixel is actually composed of three dots — a red, a blue, and a green one. Ideally, the three dots should all converge at the same point, but all monitors have some convergence error that can make colour pixels appear fuzzy.

The quality of a display system largely depends on its resolution, how many pixels it can display, and how many bits are used to represent each pixel. VGA systems display 640 by 480, or about 300,000 pixels. In contrast, SVGA systems display 800 by 600, or 480,000 pixels. True Colour systems use 24 bits per pixel, allowing them to display more than 16 million different colors.

PNG file

Portable Network Graphics (PNG) was developed as a replacement for the GIF standard, partly because of legal entanglements resulting from GIF’s use of the patented LZW compression scheme, and partly because of GIF’s many limitations. PNG is superior to GIF in many ways, offering the following features:

1. Images that are the same size or slightly smaller than their GIF counterparts, while keeping lossless compression

1. Support for indexed colours, gray-scale, and RGB (millions of colours)

1. Support for 2-D progressive rendering, which is based on pixels rather than lines (as in interlaced GIFs and progressive JPEGs); this means that contents of a progressively rendered PNG file become apparent earlier in the load process

1. An alpha channel that allows an image to have multiple levels of opacity; whereas GIFs only allow a given pixel to be fully transparent or fully opaque, this feature lets you create images with degrees of transparency, better blending images with their backgrounds

1. Gamma correction, which allows you to correct for differences in how an image will appear on different computer display systems

1. File integrity checks which help prevent problems while downloading or transferring PNG files

PNG does not support multiple images within the same image file, which means that you can’t make PNG animations like you can with GIFs. For transmission of some types of images (e.g., true-colour photographs and black and white images) other file formats may give better results. Although PNG is still considered a relatively young format, most graphics applications and virtually all browsers support it.

Pixellated

The above image is pixelated (quite badly) so that you can see the individual pixels.

Pixellated means that an image, has pixels that are large enough to be individually visible from a normal viewing distance.

PDF File

PDF (Portable Document Format) is a file format developed by Adobe as a means of distributing compact, platform-independent documents. It is superficially similar to HTML; a PDF document may contain images and text, as well as hyperlinks. However, as PDF is based on a variant of PostScript, each document is self-contained, packing text, graphics, and fonts into a single file. With the aid of Adobe Acrobat, many word processing and desktop publishing applications can be used to create PDF files. For this reason, and because PDF documents are web accessible, yet display exactly as intended, print publishers often favor PDF over HTML.

You can view PDF files either with the Adobe Reader or via a web browser with the PDF Viewer plug-in. To download these programs or find out more about PDF, visit Adobe’s Products web site.

Additionally, Mac OS X offers built-in support for creating PDF files and includes a free application called Preview for viewing PDF files.

Proxy Server

A proxy server, also known as a “proxy” or “application level gateway”, is a computer that acts as a gateway between a local network (e.g., all the computers at one company or in one building) and a larger-scale network such as the Internet. Proxy servers provide increased performance and security. In some cases, they monitor employees’ use of outside resources.

A proxy server works by intercepting connections between sender and receiver. All incoming data enters through one port and is forwarded to the rest of the network via another port. By blocking direct access between two networks, proxy servers make it much more difficult for hackers to get internal addresses and details of a private network.

Some proxy servers are a group of applications or servers that block common Internet services. For example, an HTTP proxy intercepts web access, and an SMTP proxy intercepts email. A proxy server uses a network addressing scheme to present one organization-wide IP address to the Internet. The server funnels all user requests to the Internet and returns responses to the appropriate users. In addition to restricting access from outside, this mechanism can prevent inside users from reaching specific Internet resources (e.g., certain web sites). A proxy server can also be one of the components of a firewall.

Proxies may also cache web pages. Each time an internal user requests a URL from outside, a temporary copy is stored locally. The next time an internal user requests the same URL, the proxy can serve the local copy instead of retrieving the original across the network, improving performance.

www.microsoft.com

Founded in 1975 by Paul Allen and Bill Gates, Microsoft Corporation is one of the largest and most influential companies in the personal computer industry. In addition to developing the de facto standard operating systems — DOS and Windows — Microsoft has a strong presence in almost every area of computer software, from programming tools to end-user applications.

Memory Stick

A Memory Stick is an IC (Integrated Circuit) which is stored in a compact and rugged plastic enclosure. Memory Sticks are designed to store data and to enable the transfer of data between devices equipped with Memory Stick slots. The Memory Stick standard was introduced by Sony in October of 1998.

The theoretical transfer speed of Memory Stick is 160Mbps.

Mouse

A device that controls the movement of the cursor or pointer on a display screen. A mouse is a small object you can roll along a hard, flat surface. Its name is derived from its shape, which looks a bit like a mouse, its connecting wire that one can imagine to be the mouse’s tail, and the fact that one must make it scurry along a surface. As you move the mouse, the pointer on the display screen moves in the same direction. Mice contain at least one button and sometimes as many as three, which have different functions depending on what program is running. Some newer mice also include a scroll wheel for scrolling through long documents.

Invented by Douglas Engelbart of Stanford Research Center in 1963, and pioneered by Xerox in the 1970s, the mouse is one of the great breakthroughs in computer ergonomics because it frees the user to a large extent from using the keyboard. In particular, the mouse is important for graphical user interfaces because you can simply point to options and objects and click a mouse button. Such applications are often called point-and-click programs. The mouse is also useful for graphics programs that allow you to draw pictures by using the mouse like a pen, pencil, or paintbrush.

There are three basic types of mice:

1. mechanical: Has a rubber or metal ball on its underside that can roll in all directions. Mechanical sensors within the mouse detect the direction the ball is rolling and move the screen pointer accordingly.

2. optomechanical: Same as a mechanical mouse, but uses optical sensors to detect motion of the ball.

3. optical: Uses a laser to detect the mouse’s movement. You must move the mouse along a special mat with a grid so that the optical mechanism has a frame of reference. Optical mice have no mechanical moving parts. They respond more quickly and precisely than mechanical and optomechanical mice, but they are also more expensive.

Mash Up

In technology, a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source.

Mashup originally referred to the practice in pop music (notably hip-hop) of producing a new song by mixing two or more existing pieces.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are HTML codes that are inserted into the header on a web page, after the title tag. In the context of search engine optimisation, when people refer to meta tags, they are usually referring to the meta description tag and the meta keywords tag.

The meta description tag and the meta keywords tag are not seen by users. Instead, these tags main purpose is providing meta document data to user agents, such as search engines. In addition to the well-known meta description and meta keywords tags, there are other useful meta tags, including the meta http-equiv tag, meta refresh tag, the meta robots tag, the meta copyright tag, and the meta author tag, etc. These tags are used to give web browsers and search engine spiders directions or data on various information.

Mirror

In computing, a mirror is an exact copy of a data set. On the Internet, a mirror site is an exact copy of another Internet site. Mirror sites are most commonly used to provide multiple sources of the same information, and are of particular value as a way of providing reliable access to large downloads. Mirroring is a type of file synchronization.

A live mirror is automatically updated as soon as the original is changed.

Media File

These are the image, audio, video and text files - “Media Files” or Media. These files (.gif, .wav, .mpg, .txt, etc.) are also known as Assets.

Monitor

The monitor displays the video and graphics information generated by the computer through the video card. Monitors are very similar to televisions but display information at a much higher quality.

The Monitor is Also Known As: screen, display, video display, video screen

A monitor, no matter the type, connects to either a VGA or DVI port on a video card. Before investing in a new monitor, make sure that both devices support the same type of connection. Monitors are not typically user serviceable. For your safety, it’s not usually wise to open and work on a monitor.

Monitors are display devices external to the computer case and connect via a cable to a port on the video card. Even though the monitor sits outside the main computer housing, it is an essential part of the complete system.

Monitors come in two major types - CRT and LCD. CRT monitors look much like traditional televisions and are very deep in size. LCD monitors are much thinner while still offering equivalent, if not better, graphics quality. LCD monitors are beginning to obsolete CRT monitors due to their smaller “footprint” on the desk and decreasing price.

Most monitors range in size from 15″ to 21″ or more. This size is a diagonal measurement from one corner of the screen to the other.

Media Player

Media player is a term typically used to describe computer software for playing back multimedia files. Most software media players support an array of media formats, including both audio and video files.

Some media players focus only on audio or video and are known as audio players and video players respectively. The producers of these players usually focus on providing a better user experience as they are specifically tailored toward the media type.

Microsoft Windows comes with pre-loaded Windows Media Player. The latest is Windows Media Player 11, which is bundled with Windows Vista, and available as a download for Windows XP SP2. Mac OS X comes pre-loaded with Quicktime Player for playing Quicktime movies and iTunes for playing a variety of media formats. Winamp only runs on Windows but supports Apple iPods and other portables like Creative’s Zen while also supporting audio and video playback. Linux distributions come pre-loaded with various media players including VLC, MPlayer, xine, and Totem.

Melbourne IT from Wikipedia

Melbourne IT is an Australian Internet company. Formed in 1996, its primary business is domain name registration in most of the major national and global top-level domains. It also offers web and email hosting services.

The company is a profit-earning medium-sized (in the Australian context) Internet business, with 2004 earnings of approximately 4.5 million AUD (EBIT) on revenues of about 60 million AUD, and continues to grow steadily. It has operations in several European countries through the acquisition of Cogent, as well as a San Francisco office.

For historical reasons (outlined below) Melbourne IT had a de facto monopoly on com.au domain name registrations for several years, providing more than half of its revenues until April 1999 when ICANN awarded it one of the first five registrar licenses to compete with Network Solutions Inc in registering domain names under .com, .net and .org. From December 1999, when Melbourne IT listed on the ASX, the registration of international domain names has dominated its revenues. Following deregulation in 2002, Melbourne IT lost its number one ranking as a com.au domain name registrar to lower-priced rivals, although it maintains a significant market share. Internationally, as an ICANN-accredited registrar, Melbourne IT is ranked around 5 in the world.

The company has attempted to diversify its revenue sources to reduce its dependence on domain names, introducing managed hosting products and consulting services. In 2006, Melbourne IT acquired WebCentral, Australia’s largest web hosting company.

Megabyte

A megabyte is a unit of information or computer storage equal to either 106 (1,000,000) bytes or 220 (1,048,576) bytes, depending on context. In rare cases, it is used to mean 1000×1024 (1,024,000) bytes. It is commonly abbreviated as Mbyte or MB (compare Mb, for the megabit). The term megabyte was coined in 1970.

Motherboard info from www.wisegeek.com

Also known as a mainboard, a motherboard is the underlying circuit board of a computer. The central processing unit (CPU), Random Access Memory (RAM), hard drive(s), disk drives and optical drives are all plugged into interfaces on the motherboard. A video interface and sound card can be optionally built-in or added.

A motherboard can come in many configurations to fit different needs and budgets. At its most basic, it comes with several interfaces for necessary components and a BIOS chip set to control setup of the motherboard. Many computer enthusiasts favor one type of BIOS over another and will choose a motherboard partially based on the BIOS manufacturer. For example, many gamers prefer the Nvidia BIOS as it is rated as one of the best for graphics applications.

An equally important feature of the motherboard is the type of CPU it will support. Some motherboards support AMD CPUs, while others support Intel processors. Within the manufacturer’s categories, there are different grades of CPUs. An AMD 64-bit processor requires a different CPU socket than an AMD 32-bit processor. Thus, if purchasing parts independently, one must decide on the CPU before choosing the motherboard to ensure compatibility.

Another important consideration is the amount and type of RAM the motherboard will support. It is always best to buy a board that supports more RAM than currently needed. If new technology for RAM chips is available, getting a board that supports the newer chips will help future-proof the investment.

The number of PCI slots varies from motherboard to motherboard, as do other interfaces like the number of SATA ports, differing RAID abilities, and USB and Firewire ports. As mentioned prior, sound and video capability might be built-in, though purists generally prefer to disable internal video and sound and add superior third party cards. A motherboard also comes in one of a few standard footprints or sizes. This figures in when purchasing the system case. Along these lines, many motherboard manufacturers recommend particular power supplies that have been tested with the board.

Though building a computer used to be somewhat challenging, today most motherboards are color-coded with controllers built-in, making it very easy to build a computer from scratch. The only time consuming aspect is investigating which hardware will best suit your needs while fitting into your budget. Once the CPU and motherboard is chosen, RAM is somewhat determined by the board itself. Hard drives, an optical disk, a video card, a sound card and a floppy round out the basics.

Nano Technology

Nanotechnology refers to a field of applied science and technology whose theme is the control of matter on the atomic and molecular scale, generally 100 nanometers or smaller, and the fabrication of devices or materials that lie within that size range. Nanotechnology is a highly multidisciplinary field, drawing from fields such as applied physics, materials science, interface and colloid science, device physics, supramolecular chemistry (which refers to the area of chemistry that focuses on the noncovalent bonding interactions of molecules), self-replicating machines and robotics, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, biological engineering, and electrical engineering. Grouping of the sciences under the umbrella of “nanotechnology” has been questioned on the basis that there is little actual boundary-crossing between the sciences that operate on the nano-scale. Instrumentation is the only area of technology common to all disciplines; on the contrary, for example pharmaceutical and semiconductor industries do not “talk with each other”. Corporations that call their products “nanotechnology” typically market them only to a certain industrial cluster.

Two main approaches are used in nanotechnology. In the “bottom-up” approach, materials and devices are built from molecular components which assemble themselves chemically by principles of molecular recognition. In the “top-down” approach, nano-objects are constructed from larger entities without atomic-level control. The impetus for nanotechnology comes from a renewed interest in Interface and Colloid Science, coupled with a new generation of analytical tools such as the atomic force microscope (AFM), and the scanning tunneling microscope (STM). Combined with refined processes such as electron beam lithography and molecular beam epitaxy, these instruments allow the deliberate manipulation of nanostructures, and lead to the observation of novel phenomena.

Examples of nanotechnology are the manufacture of polymers based on molecular structure, and the design of computer chip layouts based on surface science. Despite the promise of nanotechnologies such as quantum dots and nanotubes, real commercial applications have mainly used the advantages of colloidal nanoparticles in bulk form, such as suntan lotion, cosmetics, protective coatings, drug delivery, and stain resistant clothing.

Notebook

A laptop computer, or simply laptop (also notebook computer, notebook and notepad) is a small mobile computer, typically weighing 3-12 pounds (around 1.3 to 5.4 kilograms), although older laptops may weigh more.

Laptops usually run on a single main battery or from an external AC/DC adapter that charges the battery while also supplying power to the computer itself. Many computers also have a 3 volt cell to run the clock and other processes in the event of a power failure.

Network

Great simple explanation of a Network here.

Network Security Administrator

A Network Security Administrator can be a person’s role, and there is also software to assist you in this task. The Network Security Administrator’s role is to ensure the secure operation of the in-house computer systems, servers, and network connections. This includes checking server and firewall logs, scrutinizing network traffic, establishing and updating virus scans, and troubleshooting. This person will also analyze and resolve security breaches and vulnerability issues in a timely and accurate fashion, and conduct user activity audits where required.

Non-Graphical Display Browser

A non-graphical display browswer lets you view hypertext documents and navigate through lists of links with just your keyboard, but you can’t use a mouse, display graphical images, or play sound files. Lynx is one of the most commonly used command-line web browsers. Lynx is designed to display plain ASCII text on simple terminals, so it ignores all of the web’s multimedia content.

lynx.isc.org

Navigation

In the WWW and information systems, navigation is the process of goal-directed locating and traversing hyperlinked information, also known as browsing.

Noise

In the above picture the image on the right-hand side has had “noise” reduction using special software (in this case Noiseware).

In digital images and digital photography the term noise is used to describe the occurrence of color dots or specks where there should be none. For example, in a digital image of a pool of blue water, you may notice white, grey or other colored specks in the image where it should be blue. In scanning technology, image noise is usually referred to as grain or film grain.

Kai’s Power Tools are a set of API plugins created by Kai Krause that were designed for use with Adobe Photoshop and Corel Photopaint. Kai’s Power Tools were sold to Corel when MetaCreations was closed.

The phrase Kai’s Power Tools is often abbreviated to KPT.

There are various versions of Kai’s Power Tools. KPT 3, 5, 6, and X sets are compilations of different filters. The program interface features a reward-based function in which a bonus function is revealed as the user moves towards more complex aspects of the tool.

Kilobyte

In decimal systems, kilo stands for 1,000, but in binary systems, a kilo is 1,024 (2 to the 10th power). Technically, therefore, a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes, but it is often used loosely as a synonym for 1,000 bytes. For example, a computer that has 256K main memory can store approximately 256,000 bytes (or characters) in memory at one time.

A megabyte is 2 to the 20th power (approximately 1 million) and a gigabyte is 2 to the 30th power (approximately 1 billion).

In computer literature, kilobyte is usually abbreviated as K or KB. To distinguish between a decimal K (1,000) and a binary K (1,024), the IEEE has suggested following the convention of using a small k for a decimal kilo and a capital K for a binary kilo, but this convention is by no means strictly followed.

Kbps – (Kilobits Per Second)

Computer data architecture is based on the binary system of using ones and zeros in a string of eight “bits” to form different characters. Each string of eight bits is called a byte. 8 bits = 1 byte = 1 character as described by the order of the 8 bits of data

For example, the capital letter “K” is expressed in binary bits as “01001011.” Approximately one thousand (actually 1024) bits of data equals a kilobit, while 1024 bytes equals a kilobyte. Kbps always refers to kilobits, while the designation of KB/sec refers to kilobytes.

1024 bits = 1 kilobit

1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte = 8 kilobits

1024 kilobytes = 1 megabyte = 8,192 kilobits

One of the most ubiquitous devices to rate data transfer speeds in terms of kbps is the standard dial-up modem. At 56 kbps it provides the least expensive, albeit the slowest, method of connectivity to the Internet. As an example, DSL modems deliver speeds starting at 144 kbps and ranging upwards of 3,000 kbps, sometimes expressed as 3.0 mbps (megabits per second).

Many high-speed ISPs (Internet Service Providers) continue to describe their services in terms of kilobits, rather than using kilobytes or megabits. This makes it easy for potential customers to compare transfer rates against their existing dial-up modems. When rates are expressed in units other than kbps, it can be confusing to the dial-up shopper.

While a dial-up modem is capable of speeds close to 56 kbps, line noise, network traffic and other interference can cut data transfer speed significantly. Under the best circumstances, a 56 kbps modem will generally operate at about 53 kbps or 6 KB/sec. Here are some conversions that might help when looking at high-speed services:

Kbps KB/sec Mbps MB/sec
56 6 Dial-Up
144 18 (3x faster)
384 48 (8x faster)
768 96 (16x faster)
1,100 137.5 1.0 (20x faster)
1,500 187.5 1.5 (27x faster)
3,000 375 2.9 0.36 (54x faster)
6,000 750 5.8 0.73 (108x faster)

High-speed services might include DSL, cable and satellite. VDSL (Very high-speed Digital Subscriber Line) can deliver speeds of up to 100 mbps. Generally, the faster the transfer speed, the higher the monthly charge. Household consumers switching from dial-up modems to high-speed access will likely call upon the services of a company providing speeds in the ranges listed above.

Kerberos thanks again to my good friends at Indiana University Knowledge Base!

Developed by MIT, Kerberos is a system that provides authenticated access for users and services on a network.

With Kerberos, by exchanging time-sensitive tickets, you can make transactions secure without sending passwords in plaintext over the network. For a program to take advantage of Kerberos, it must be Kerberized, which means that it can obtain tickets from the Kerberos server and negotiate with a Kerberos-aware service. Just about any program can be Kerberized, including web browsers, telnet applications, POP email clients, and print utilities. Similarly, services that can be made Kerberos-aware include web sites, printers, file servers, and POP mail servers. Though it’s a fairly complex protocol, following are a few basic characteristics:

1. Every user and every service has a password. Only the owner of the password and the Kerberos server know this password. Passwords must remain confidential, as Kerberos provides no inherent protection against those that are stolen.

1. When you use a program that makes an initial ticket request to the Kerberos server, it will ask you for your Kerberos username and password. The program will then send a ticket request to the Kerberos server. The server will respond by sending you a ticket-granting ticket that it encrypts by plugging your password into an encryption algorithm. Because only you and the Kerberos server know what your password is, only you will be able to decrypt and use the ticket-granting ticket. This ticket-granting ticket normally expires eight hours after it is issued.

1. Once you have a ticket-granting ticket, you may then use Kerberized programs to request services from Kerberos-aware servers. The Kerberized program sends your ticket-granting ticket to a ticket-granting server (usually the Kerberos server itself) with a request to transact with a specific service (e.g., a printer, a POP email server). The server gives you a ticket that lets you conduct a transaction with the service and also insures that both you and the service are who you say you are.

1. Kerberos gives you the option to encrypt data sent over the network. This means that the entire transaction between you and a Kerberos-aware service will be in unreadable ciphertext rather than plaintext.

Laptop

Above is the incredibly impressive MacBook Air - so thin it doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive!

A laptop is a portable computer that runs on batteries and mains power. Over the years they have gotten lighter, smaller and much more powerful. You can get laptop PCs as well as Apple Laptops. With wireless technology you can even be connected to the web while out travelling, making the laptop an excellent tool for those on the move!

LOWSRC attribute

A LOWSRC attribute is similar to a Alt Tag that we spoke about earlier in this blog. A LOWSRC attrbute is where a low resolution version of the image in your HTML is loaded first before the high res version. Although the tag remains for legacy support, LOWSRC is generally not used anymore becuase it increases the connections to the remote web server (web browers are designed to only allow two active connections to a web server). If the LOWSRC tag was used on modern broadband connections - it would put unneccesarry strain on the remote web server given the high resolution image can be downloaded in seconds.

Lab Mode

In Photoshop, Lab mode (the asterisks are dropped from the name) has a lightness component (L) that can range from 0 to 100. In the color picker, the a component (green-red axis) and the b component (blue-yellow axis) can range from +128 to -128. In the Color palette, the a component and the b component can range from +120 to -120.

You can use Lab mode to work with Photo CD images, edit the luminance and the color values in an image independently, move images between systems, and print to PostScript Level 2 and Level 3 printers. To print Lab images to other color PostScript devices, convert to CMYK first.

Lab color is the intermediate color model Photoshop uses when converting from one color mode to another.

Lasso Tool

The Lasso Took is one of the tools you can use in Adobe Photoshop. Great Lasso Tool Tutorial and explanation here.

Layer Mask

Layer mask is one of the most used elements in PhotoShop. It is mostly used in more complicated design projects and graphics. It enables us to get rid of a PART of the layer but with the possibility to edit the result. It in fact blocks part of the layer from appearing, as if erased, while still being there.

Great tutorials here - I have saved these tutorials for my future reference!!

LAN – (Local-Area Network) thanks again to www.wisegeek.com - they have taught me a lot!

A local area network (LAN) consists of two or more computers connected together in a building or home using software and hardware. A LAN is contrasted to a wide area network (WAN) such as the Internet, which covers a large geographic area. In a LAN, there is a main computer or server, and remote computers called clients. By creating a LAN in the home or office, computers on the LAN can share files, resources, and if desired, an Internet connection.

A LAN can be one of two types: wired or wireless. A wired LAN requires Ethernet cable to physically connect all computers on the network to a main device called a switch. A wireless LAN uses radio waves to communicate, eliminating the need for wires. Therefore, the hardware used in a LAN should all be of either the wireless or wired type.

A LAN is fairly easy to setup. All Microsoft operating systems since Windows 98 Special Edition (SE) have included built-in networking software. In terms of hardware, each computer requires a network interface card (NIC). A switch is also required. This is a device that resembles an external modem and directs information on the network. If the LAN will be talking to another network, like the Internet, a router is also required. Luckily, one can purchase an external DSL modem with a built-in switch and router, in wireless or wired configurations.

Desktop computers typically use internal NICs that slip into an available slot on the motherboard, while a laptop might use a portable computer (PC) NIC. This type of NIC resembles a thick credit card that can be inserted into the PC card slot on the laptop.

If the LAN is to be hard-wired, each NIC must have an Ethernet port for connecting an Ethernet cable. In a wireless LAN, each NIC might feature a small radio wave antenna. The server is hard-wired to the DSL modem, switch or router, while the clients can communicate wirelessly, if desired. If there is to be no connection to the Internet or any other LAN or WAN, a switch alone will be fine.

Once the LAN has been set up, an administrator can designate which files and programs can be shared on the LAN. Some areas of the server may be kept behind a firewall to prevent access. All traffic on the LAN, including email, Internet surfing and other activities, can be monitored by the administrator using various tools.

The advantages of a LAN in the office are manifold. By having a central printer, for example, a business can avoid buying individual printers for each workstation. Workflow is enhanced while being easier than ever to control and administer. Flexibility and creativity can also improve. A LAN is a win-win situation for management and employees alike.

A LAN at home is extremely convenient. Share programs, images, music and digital projects, and enjoy gaming. Share a high-end color printer, scanner or other equipment. If concerned about your children’s Internet use, a LAN is one way to supervise online activity.

A hard-wired LAN is more trouble to install, as it requires running a physical Ethernet cable from each client to the DSL, switch or router. However, a wired LAN is reliable and secure. A wireless LAN is easier to install and less expensive, but requires a few more steps in the software setup to ensure it is secure. It may also be slower than a wired LAN, but this depends on the wireless standard used, as newer standards effectively compete with Ethernet speeds.

LCD (Liquid Crystal Display)

An LCD or Liquid Crystal Display is a flat, thin display device consisting of any number of pixels aligned in front of a reflector or source of light. The LCD has been widely hailed as a prized invention as it is relatively cheap and it consumes less power to function than competing techologies, making it almost indispensable in battery powered electronic devices.

LED (Light-emitting Diode)

Abbreviation of light emitting diode, an electronic device that lights up when electricity is passed through it. LEDs are usually red. They are good for displaying images because they can be relatively small, and they do not burn out. However, they require more power than LCDs.

LMS – (Learning Management System)

A Learning Management System (LMS) is a set of software tools designed to manage user learning interventions. L