Glossary L-P 

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LAN
Local Area Network: A private transmission that interconnects computers within a building or among buildings for the purpose of sharing voice, data, facsimile, and/or video.

Linux
A version of the Unix operating system designed to run on PCs. Controversial because it has been developed as part of the Open Sources movement and given away free of charge. Linux is very popular for Web servers and appliances.

Logon
To sign on to a computer system.

Mailing lists (or Listserv)
There are more than 4,000 topic-oriented, email-based message bases that can be read and posted to. Users subscribe to the lists they want to read and receive messages via email. Mailing lists are operated using listserv software. Thus, many users call mailing lists 'listservs'. There are two types of lists: moderated and unmoderated. Moderated lists are screened by a human before messages are posted to subscribers. Messages to unmoderated lists are automatically forwarded to subscribers.

Megabyte
A measure of storage space. 1 Mb roughly translates to a million characters of text, or 180,000 words.

Menu
A list of information that leads to documents or other menus.

Microsite
An individual web pate or cluster of pages that are subsidiary to a primary site with more detailed or focused content about a particular subject and probably its own wed address.

Mirror
Some FTP sites are so heavily used that in order to relieve the load, their entire contents are copied to and made available by other sites. These are then known as 'mirror sites'

Motherboard
The main printed circuit board inside a computer, containing the main processing chip, memory chips, plus all the other circuits needed to control the disk drives, the keyboard, and to communicate with plug-in extension cards.

MP3
A popular, highly compressed file format used for music.

MPEG
A family of multimedia standards developed by the Motion Picture Experts Group, commonly used to refer to audio or visual files saved with MPEG compression schemes. Files usually have an .mpg extension (pronounced 'Em-Peg').

MySQL
An Open Source development of the SQL language for talking to databases. Most commonly used amongst small business users and run on Linux operating systems.

Network
A group of computers that are connected in some fashion. Most school networks are known as LANs, or Local Area Networks, because they are networks linking computers in one small area. The Internet could be referred to as a WAN, or a Wide Area Network, because it connects computers in more than one local area.

Newsgroups
These are the bulletin boards of the Internet. There are around 20,000 groups covering every subject under the sun. Most IAPs have a newsgroup server which periodically takes all new messages from a newsgroup feed and adds the messages which have been posted by its own users. To access the newsgroups stored on your IAPs newsgroup server you need a newsreader program.

OCR
Optical Character Recognition. Software that translates a scanned image of printed or typewritten text into a plain text file that can be read by a word processor.

Online/Offline
When you are logged onto a computer through your modem, you are said to be online. When you are using your computer but are not connected to a computer through your modem, you're said to be working offline.

Operating System
The operating system or OS is a program, or a collection of programs, that manages all your computer's resources - disk drives, RAM, display screen - and controls how files are stored and retrieved.

Packet
A bundle of data transmitted across a network. It contains the source address (where the packet has come from) the destination address (where it's going to) a packet identifier (what sort of packet it is) and the data being sent.

Pay per click
A method of charging a fee for online advertisement. With PPC the cost is determined by the number of times web users choose to get more information about the advert by clicking on it, which then links to the advertisers website.

PCI
Peripheral Component Interconnect. A type of connector on computer motherboards, used for expansion or adapter cards.

PDF
Portable Document Format - a file format developed by Adobe Systems for capturing formatted page layouts for distribution. Requires the proprietary Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is now given away free of charge.

PHP
A scripting language used for developing dynamic Web pages and sites. It is typically used on Solaris and Linux platforms.

Plug-in
An extra bit of software which has to be added to a Web browser before a certain type of file can be viewed. Recent browsers come with the most popular plug-ins pre-installed.

Podcast
Audio files that can be downloaded and played on PC or MP3 device. Podcasts can be downloaded from a central repository such as company websites.

Portal
A Web site that acts as a doorway or introduction to many other Web sites that are sometimes grouped into categories [Yahoo is a famous example].

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