Internet Word of the Day Archive

September 01, 2012

A fancy name for a company, organization, or person employed to work on an outsourced project.

Let's Meet In Real Life

September 02, 2012

At The Same Time

The science of using biological property, such as fingerprints, to identify individuals. Popular in sci-fi movies, it refers to voice, fingerprint, skin, or retinal identification. It is increasingly used in the real world, for example, Erin's laptop has a biometric fingerprint password protection.

U.S. law enforcement also uses biometrics to identify criminals. Since it is no longer necessary to use ink, biometrics make it easy and affordable to "fingerprint" people. In fact, fingerprint and facial recognition technology is becoming an everyday occurence especially at the Department of Motor Vehicles, arrival gates at airports, in schools, and in corporate America (especially in the banking and securities industries). Facial recognition is even in some police patrol cars because it searches databases very quickly. Future uses may include e-commerce transaction signatures identified by biometric means.

Of historical note: Remember January, 2001 when fans attending the Superbowl in Tampa were surprised to learn their faces had been captured by camera and then scanned against the database of suspected felons? That is an example of facial recognition biometrics.

September 03, 2012

To browse or look at information on the Web by pointing and clicking and navigating in a nonlinear way (meaning you can go to any site at any time you like).

A commonly heard phrase is, "I surfed the Net for a few hours last night and bookmarked some great sites." A "surfer" is a user who surfs the Net.

Three Letter Acronym

September 04, 2012

An image or graphic that has been coded to contain interactive areas. When it's clicked on, it launches another Web page or program. There's a subtle distinction between an imagemap and a clickable graphic. An imagemap usually has many different hyperlinked areas, known as links. For example, an imagemap of a country could be coded so that when a user clicks on a city or region, the browser is routed to a document or Web page about that place. A clickable graphic, on the other hand usually contains just one link.

Laughing My Black Ass Off

September 05, 2012

I Love Acronyms

A new online genre that refers to blog posts of rich kids in various states of excess, including undress, indulgence, and photos of 100,000-euro meal receipts from St. Tropez for example.

"The Rich Kids of Instagram" is a blog on Tumblr that debuted in August, 2012 and has touched off a firestorm of debate over rich kids and social media. One shot shows three teens swimming at a lake - and pouring Dom Perignon into one other's mouths. Another shows a guy sticking a giant foam finger out of his Ferrari, while in another kids slide down a giant inflatable slide attached to the side of their mega-yacht.

September 06, 2012

In business terms, this describes the fine details, after you drill down to get to the nitty gritty.

For example, "The price of opt-in lists is going up, but apparently there's good reason for it, due to the high degree of granularity available in these lists." In surfer-speak, it means awesome, as in "Totally tubular, dude."

Pig In A Pant Suit

September 07, 2012

You Never Know

Participants in online conferences and chats who seem incapable of posting anything other than "Me too!", "Ditto", "What she said", et cetera.

September 08, 2012

If You Don't Mind My Asking

UWB uses a huge swath of radio frequencies to transmit minute pulses of information allowing the signal to go through objects. The applications include radar imaging of buried objects (popular with the Pentagon).

September 09, 2012

A popular first word of many Web site names, it refers to the personalized content area of a portal or business service. For example, My Yahoo! or My Schwab.

That's What I Thought

September 10, 2012

A protocol that provides a means to allocate IP address dynamically to computers on a LAN. It eliminates the need to assign permanent IP addresses manually. DHCP software runs on servers and can be found in network devices (such as routers) that allow multiple users to access the Internet. Microsoft introduced DHCP on their Windows NT server in 1994. Newer DHCP servers will dynamically update DNS servers after assigning the addresses.

Cancelled

September 11, 2012

Best thought of as the "table of contents" of a computer disk, hard drive, or server. A directory, sometimes called a folder, often lists the following information about its contents: file name, file size, creation date and time, file type, and author name. It can also refer to a search directory.

Sticking Leeches On Myself

September 12, 2012

Refers to the administrative details that are found on a Web site. For example, the legal, copyright, liability, and licensing information. In the past, privacy issues were also categorized as "administrivia", however, with the increased awareness for security on Web sites, privacy is viewed as a more prominent topic.

Not In My Job Description

September 13, 2012

A computer that is operated or controlled from a distance.

Busting A Gut -or- Big Ass Grin

September 14, 2012

Refers to the hard work that was performed. "Our vendor did the 'heavy lifting', we just supervised the project from beginning to end."

password

September 15, 2012

Message

A 180-degree personality change. "Jim did a major bit flip and became a born-again Christian."

September 16, 2012

Text or graphics that contain a link to another location. When a user clicks on the "hotlink", they are then taken to the other location of content found either on the same, or different server.

I Know A Lot Of People Like That

September 17, 2012

A programming technique for creating interactive Web applications. Small amounts of data are exchanged as needed instead of pulling entire Web pages to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This increases the Web page's response time, interactivity, and overall usability. Ajax is a cross-platform technology that can be used on many different operating systems, computer architectures, and Web browsers as it is based on open standards such as JavaScript and XML.

My True Love Always

September 18, 2012

A marketing term to describe the cost (or expense) associated with acquiring a new customer or user.

Read The Screen

September 19, 2012

A special-purpose computer that on one side has slots to plug in many modems and on the other side has a connection to a LAN or host machine. Thus, the terminal server does the work of answering the calls and passes the connections on to the appropriate node. Most terminal servers can provide PPP or SLIP services if connected to the Internet.

New Old Stock -or- Not Outside Sales

September 20, 2012

The basis for the Motion Picture Association of America's suit against 2,600 enterprises and others that posted computer code for circumventing DVD encryption and allowing PCs to play DVD movies. DMCA gives intellectual property holders the right to take away the fair use and related rights of the public to protect a commercial DRM scheme, and it interferes with the legitimate operation of peer-to-peer file sharing systems. It is considered by some to be unconstitutional.

Generally Recognized As Safe

September 21, 2012

The name given to the always-on, high-speed, broadband, ubiquitous, multiformat Web, coined by author Thomas Friedman.

Industry expert and venture capitalist John Doerr believes that six Webs will emerge to make up the evernet (of which only one is deployed now, the PC Web). Here they are:

PC Web - see: World Wide Web

Voice Web - see: voice recognition, IVR

Hand Web - see: handheld, handy

Broadband Web - see: smart home

Video Web - making use of video servers

e-Web - machine-to-machine communication.

Eating at Keyboard

September 22, 2012

Keep Your Pants On

A small, portable memory storage device about the size of a thumb, it has replaced floppy disks, ZIP Disks and CD-ROMs. Thumb drives (also known as flash drives, jump drives, and travel drives) fit into any USB port on a computer and are often seen hanging on key chains or lanyards around the necks of computer users everywhere.

A thumb drive is re-writeable and unlike RAM, it holds its memory without a power supply. They will also "hot swap," which means a user can plug the drive into a computer and will not have to restart it to access the thumb drive.

Thumb drives are considered very stable memory storage devices. IBM came out with thumb drives in 1998, as a solution for replacing the less stable floppy disks but a Singapore firm has since won the patent. Note: they are not compatible with Windows 98 and earlier operating systems and they also pose security threats since they are easily concealed. For instance, users could copy proprietary information to them, or upload hacking software from them, all undetected by the sysadmin.

The thumb drive is available in storage sizes of up to 8 gigabytes. They range in price from about US$15 to $200 or so for a large-capacity drive. Most thumb drives have millions of re-write cycles and will store data for ten years before they need replacing.

September 23, 2012

Happens on college campuses when a group of obsessive MUD (Multi-User Dimension) players takes over an entire computer cluster, or a row of terminals, to hold an all-night MUD session.

Meet In Real Life

September 24, 2012

A west coast version of Wall Street. It is the long road between Highways 101 and 280 in Silicon Valley that is home to a high percentage of VC firms, Internet startups, research centers, as well as Stanford University.

Talk At You Later

September 25, 2012

The common notation for IP addresses (for example, 66.201.69.207). In the form A.B.C.D, each letter represents, in decimal, one byte of a four-byte IP address.

Good For Nothing

September 26, 2012

Be Back In A Few

A technical term that describes the portion of the total domain name space that is represented by the data stored on a particular name server. The name server has authority over the zone (or the particular portion of the domain name space) described by that data. A "zone file" is a file that contains data that describes a portion of the domain name space. Zone files contain the information needed to resolve domain names to Internet Protocol (IP) numbers.

September 27, 2012

Unflattering information or opinions that you may have written on blogs or in chat rooms that could come back to haunt you, for example in a job interview. "Digital dirt" also refers to unflattering information that someone else has correctly or incorrectly written about you that can be found on the Internet, usually on social networking sites.

Screwing Up Face In Disgust

September 28, 2012

Hurry Back

A standard for encrypting data, developed at IBM in 1976. It is a 56-bit private key algorithm that uses the block cipher method. (A block cipher sends encrypted data to break the text into 64-bit blocks before transmitting it.)

September 29, 2012

Online jargon is the specialized language, chat acronyms, text message shorthand, and technical lingo that is used while communicating in the online world.

Be sure to check out the list of funny new online jargon in the twitterverse!

The word "jargon" refers to terminology that is associated with a specific profession, group, or activity and most often covers the language used by people who have a common interest. Like slang, it can develop as a kind of shorthand, to express ideas that are frequently discussed between members of a group, though it can also be developed deliberately using chosen terms.

Here's an example: "My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :-@ kids FTF. ILNY, it's a gr8 plc." It is translated like this: "My summer holidays were a complete waste of time. Before, we used to go to New York to see my brother, his girlfriend, and their three screaming kids face to face. I love New York. It's a great place."

NetLingo is a dictionary of online jargon ;-) For the largest list of Internet acronyms and text message jargon, click on "more info" below!

Long Distance Relationship

September 30, 2012

At The End Of The Day

Individuals who send inquiring e-mail messages and, after receiving only a slightly favorable response, begin flooding you with multiple messages of little or no interest.