Web Vocabulary #5

Spider – A program that automatically fetches Web pages. Spiders are used to feed pages to search engines. It's called a spider because it crawls over the Web. Another term for these programs is webcrawler. Because most Web pages contain links to other pages, a spider can start almost anywhere. As soon as it sees a link to another page, it goes off and fetches it. Large search engines, like Alta Vista, have many spiders working in parallel.  Click here for source

Bandwidth – The amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. For digital devices, the bandwidth is usually expressed in bits per second(bps) or bytes per second. For analog devices, the bandwidth is expressed in cycles per second, or Hertz (Hz).  Click here for source

Baseband – A type of data transmission in which digital or analog data is sent over a single unmultiplexed channel, such as an Ethernet LAN. Baseband transmission use TDM to send simultaneous bits of data along the full bandwidth of the transmission channel.  Click here for source

Metaverse – The Metaverse is a virtual world, described in Neal Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, where humans, as avatars, interact with each other and software agents, in athree-dimensional space that uses the metaphor of the real world. The word metaverse is a portmanteau of the words "meta" and "universe."  Click here for source

Shareware –  Software distributed on the basis of an honor system. Most shareware is delivered free of charge, but the author usually requests that you pay a small fee if you like the program and use it regularly. By sending the small fee, you become registered with the producer so that you can receive service assistance and updates. You can copy shareware and pass it along to friends and colleagues, but they too are expected to pay a fee if they use the product.  Click here for source

"Unafraid" China apparently fears YouTube"

The article is about blocking You Tube by the Chinese government.

China is definitely a country with a government which is controlling every aspect of its people’s lives. And then there is the Web that is being controlled too. I think It’s sad that some people in the world are unable to access a particular website, like YouTube, just because someone said that you can’t. Well, the Communist Party in China has everything in their hands and they determine the rules. Even though Foreign Minister spokesman Qin Gandg said that “Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the Internet. In fact it is just the opposite,” from my point of view this statement may be untrue. This is not the first time when blocking a site happened; moreover, sites were being closed due to “inappropriate” content, meaning that someone expressed his opinion (probably negative about the government). Finally I truly believe that the Web is a means of opening people’s eyes to the problems around and that is why the Chinese government is so afraid of (because he may loose absolute control over its people.)

Click here for article source

Web Vocabulary #4

ANSI – Acronym for the American National Standards Institute. Founded in 1918, ANSI is a voluntary organization composed of over 1,300 members (including all the large computer companies) that creates standards for the computer industry. For example, ANSI C is a version of the C language that has been approved by the ANSI committee. To a large degree, all ANSI C compliers, regardless of which company produces them, should behave similarly. Click here for source

Amaya – An open source Web browser editor that authors can use to create and update documents on the Web. Amaya offers integration between browsing and editing features in a single environment. Amaya started at W3C in 1996 as HTML plus CSS style sheets editor. Currently, it supports XML and a number of XML applications, such as MathML. Amaya also includes a collaborative annotation application based on Resource Description Framework (RDF), XLink, and XPointer. Amaya is hosted by W3C and is available for Windows, Unix and MacOS X platforms. Click here for source

DBA – Short for database administrator is is the title given to the person responsible for managing many aspects of a database including archiving, performance, security, testing, and other tasks. Click here for source

Cookie – A message given to a Web browser by a Web server. The browser stores the message in a text file. The message is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server. Click here for source

IRC – Short for Internet Relay Chat, a chat system developed by Jarkko Oikarinen in Finland in the late 1980s. IRC has become very popular as more people get connected to the Internet because it enables people connected anywhere on the Internet to join in live discussions. Unlike older chat systems, IRC is not limited to just two participants. Click here for source

"IBM develops 3D patient record software"

Although the article is not directly related to the Web I think it’s valuable  to mention such as technology development as 3D software for medical records. Mainly, ” Physicians at Thy-Mors hospital in Denmark and IBM have developed patient record software that uses a three-dimensional computer model of the human anatomy to visualize a patient's medical information.” It emphasizes the importance of technology in our everyday lives – the better it is, the more dependant on it we become. Immediately, it made me think of the future. Maybe we will not need any appointment in a doctor’s office to evaluate our illness. And medical examination will be conducted through the Web and you’ll be able to see, on a 3D model, what’s wrong with you. The only thing you’ll have to buy will be medication, but …you can do it online and have it delivered straight to your door. Well, the future is intriguing.

Click here for source

Web Vocabulary #3

Encryption – The translation of data into a secret code. Encryption is the most effective way to achieve data security. To read an encrypted file, you must have access to a secret key or password that enables you to decrypt it. Unencrypted data is called plain text; encrypted data is referred to ascipher text. Click here for source 

Firewall – A system designed to prevent unauthorized access to or from a private network. Firewalls can be implemented in both hardware and software, or a combination of both. Firewalls are frequently used to prevent unauthorized Internet users from accessing private networks connected to the Internet, especially intranets. All messages entering or leaving the intranet pass through the firewall, which examines each message and blocks those that do not meet the specified security criteria. Click here for source

Proxy Server – A server that sits between a client application, such as a Web browser, and a real server It intercepts all requests to the real server to see if it can fulfill the requests itself. If not, it forwards the request to the real server. Click here for source

Script – Another term for macro or batch file, a script is a list of commands that can be executed without user interaction. A script language is a simple programming language with which you can write scripts.  Click here for source

ActiveX – A loosely defined set of technologies developed by Microsoft for sharing information among different applications. ActiveX is an outgrowth of two other Microsoft technologies called OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) and COM (Component Object Model). As a moniker, ActiveX can be very confusing because it applies to a whole set of COM-based technologies. Most people, however, think only of ActiveX controls, which represent a specific way of implementing ActiveX technologies.  Click here for source

"Web founder warns against website snooping"

“Surfers on the Internet are at increasing risk from governments and corporations tracking the sites they visit to build up a picture of their activities.” These are the words of Tim Berners-Lee, a person who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1990. Snooping is a way to find out who people are and what habits they have behind curtains.

The fact is that most of us when surfing the Web do not realize someone is spying our actions. Well, the more developed technology is, the less privacy we have.

What Berners-Lee also emphasizes is that “the Web is not all done, it’s just the tip of the iceberg” and “the new changes are going to rock the world even more.” He has in mind “linked data, in which individual bits of data are machine-readable, not just Web pages they appear on.” According to him such development has a great potential when generating/managing data by a user and can be used in a variety of ways. 

Click here for article source

Web Vocabulary #2

Evite.com – a social planning website for creating, sending and managing online invitations. Owned by IAC/Interactive Corp. Click here for source

Delicious.com  – a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing and discovering bookmarks. Click here for source

Mappoint – is a technology and a specific software created by Microsoft that allows users to view, edit and integrate maps. Click here for source

Upcoming.com – a social event calendar website with upcoming events: music concerts, art exhibits, business conferences, etc. users can indicate their plans. Click here for source

Google AdSense - is an advertisement application run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image, and more recently, video advertisements on their websites. These advertisements are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. Click here for source

"Google Finding More Fans in the Workplace"

I think that nowadays, in the era of crisis, every single company is trying to cut the costs. They can find cheaper alternatives by using Google Search Appliance, which has “the ability to search all content through one search box. This includes content within your web servers, intranets, file shares, databases, content management systems, and business applications. The Google Search Appliance incorporates hardware, software, and enterprise-specific relevance algorithms into a single, easy-to-deploy solution” (source). Well, the fact is that if Google can provide such cheaper solutions, why not to use it? I think Google is a company that is worth to invest to, since it’s all the time improving its products and implementing new ideas/solutions. Google is growing each day…

Click here for article source