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Terms for computer junkies
PUMP up your computer-related vocabulary! Load your brains with these frequenty used i-terms.
AP: Short for Access Point, it is a hardware device or a computer’s software that acts as a communication hub for users of a wireless device to connect to a wired LAN. APs are important for providing heightened wireless security and for extending the physical range of service a wireless user has access to.
Internet telephony: A category of hardware and software that enables people to use the internet as the transmission medium for telephone calls. For users who have free, or fixed-price internet access, internet telephony software essentially provides free telephone calls anywhere in the world. To date, however, internet telephony does not offer the same quality of telephone service as direct telephone connections.
There are many internet telephony applications available. Some, like CoolTalk and NetMeeting, come bundled with popular web browsers. Others are stand-alone products. Internet telephony products are sometimes called IP telephony, Voice over the internet (VOI) or Voice over IP (VOIP) products.
Streaming: A technique for transferring data such that it can be processed as a steady and continuous stream. Streaming technologies are becoming increasingly important with the growth of the internet because most users do not have fast enough access to download large multimedia files quickly. With streaming, the client browser or plug-in can start displaying the data before the entire file has been transmitted.
For streaming to work, the client side receiving the data must be able to collect the data and send it as a steady stream to the application that is processing the data and converting it to sound or pictures.
This means that if the streaming client receives the data more quickly than required, it needs to save the excess data in a buffer. If the data doesn’t come quickly enough, however, the presentation of the data will not be smooth. There are a number of competing streaming technologies emerging. For audio data on the internet, the de facto standard is Progressive Network’s RealAudio.
RealVideo: A streaming technology developed by RealNetworks for transmitting live video over the internet. RealVideo uses a variety of data compression techniques and works with both normal IP connections as well as IP Multicast connections.
RTSP: Short for Real Time Streaming Protocol, a proposed standard for controlling streaming data over the World Wide Web. RTSP grew out of work done by Columbia University, Netscape and RealNetworks and has been submitted to the IETF for standardization.
Like H.323, RTSP uses RTP (Real-Time Transport Protocol) to format packets of multimedia content. But whereas H.323 is designed for videoconferencing of moderately-sized groups, RTSP is designed to efficiently broadcast audio-visual data to large groups.
H.323: A standard approved by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) that defines how audiovisual conferencing data is transmitted across networks. In theory, H.323 should enable users to participate in the same conference even though they are using different videoconferencing applications.
Although most videoconferencing vendors have announced that their products will conform to H.323, it’s too early to say whether such adherence will actually result in interoperability.
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