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I-TERMS
Spam: A deliberate barrage of unrequested and often inappropriate information in an electronic forum. It is used both as a noun and as a verb. The term is applied quite broadly and can refer to anything from e-mail solicitation to misrepresenting the contents of one’s website in order to generate traffic.
Stripping: Assembling the elements of an offset print job by hand. Strippers take individual pieces of film and construct the pages to be printed by physically laying them into position. The room in which the strippers perform this task is known as the “Strip Joint.”
MGCP: The Media Gateway Control Protocol, developed by Telcordia and Level 3 Communications, is one of a few proposed control and signal standards to compete with the older H.323 standard for the conversion of audio signals carried on telephone circuits (PSTN ) to data packets carried over the internet or other packet networks.
The reason new standards are being developed is because of the growing popularity of Voice over IP (VoIP ). Regular phones are relatively inexpensive because they don’t need to be complex; they are fixed to a specific switch at a central switching location. IP phones and devices, on the other hand, are not fixed to a specific switch, so they must contain processors that enable them to function and be intelligent on their own, independent from a central switching location. This makes the terminal (phone or device) more complex, and therefore, more expensive. The MGCP is meant to simplify standards for this new technology by eliminating the need for complex, processor-intense IP telephony devices, thus simplifying and lowering the cost of these terminals.
Mass storage: Refers to various techniques and devices for storing large amounts of data. The earliest storage devices were punched paper cards, which were used as early as 1804 to control silk-weaving looms. Modern mass storage devices include all types of disk drives and tape drives. Mass storage is distinct from memory, which refers to temporary storage areas within the computer. Unlike main memory, mass storage devices retain data even when the computer is turned off.
The main types of mass storage are:
Floppy disks: Relatively slow and have a small capacity, but they are portable, inexpensive, and universal.
Hard disks: Very fast and with more capacity than floppy disks, but also more expensive. Some hard disk systems are portable (removable cartridges), but most are not.
Optical disks: Unlike floppy and hard disks, which use electromagnetism to encode data, optical disk systems use a laser to read and write data. Optical disks have very large storage capacity, but they are not as fast as hard disks. In addition, the inexpensive optical disk drives are read-only. Read/write varieties are expensive.
Tapes: Relatively inexpensive and can have very large storage capacities, but they do not permit random access of data. Mass storage is measured in kilobytes (1,024 bytes), megabytes (1,024 kilobytes), gigabytes (1,024 megabytes) and terabytes (1,024 gigabytes). Mass storage is sometimes called auxiliary storage.
DAT: Acronym for digital audio tape, a type of magnetic tape that uses a scheme called helical scan to record data. A DAT cartridge is slightly larger than a credit card in width and height and contains a magnetic tape that can hold from 2 to 24 gigabytes of data. It can support data transfer rates of about 2 Mbps. Like other types of tapes, DATs are sequential-access media. The most common format for DAT cartridges is DDS (digital data storage).
Streaming: This technology allows a web browser to begin playing an audio or video clip while that clip is still being downloaded from the server. This minimizes the amount of time that the user spends waiting for the data to come over internet. Examples of software that facilitates this technology are Shockwave and Real Audio.
Stuffit: A Stuffit file is a common means of compressing and distributing data on the Macintosh platform.
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