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A
Record
An A record is part of the zone file and is used to point
Internet traffic to an IP address. For example, you can use an "A
record" to designate abc.yourdomain.com to send traffic to your
web site at IP address 209.132.X.XX. You can also designate
xyz.yourdomain.com to go to a separate IP address.
ADSL
(Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) -- A method for moving
data over regular phone lines. An ADSL circuit is much faster than
a regular phone connection, and the wires coming into the
subscriber's premises are the same (copper) wires used for regular
phone service. An ADSL circuit must be configured to connect two
specific locations, similar to a leased line.
A commonly
discussed configuration of ADSL would allow a subscriber to
receive data (download) at speeds of up to 1.544 megabits (not
megabytes) per second, and to send (upload) data at speeds of 128
kilobits per second. Thus the 'Asymmetric' part of the acronym.
Another commonly discussed configuration would be
symmetrical: 384 kilobits per second in both directions. In theory
ADSL allows download speeds of up to 9 megabits per second and
upload speeds of up to 640 kilobits per second.
ADSL is often
discussed as an alternative to ISDN, allowing higher speeds in
cases where the connection is always to the same place. See Also:
bit , bps , ISDN
Anonymous FTP
Applet
A small Java program that can be embedded in an HTML page.
Applets differ from full-fledged Java applications in that they
are not allowed to access certain resources on the local computer,
such as files and serial devices (modems, printers, etc.), and are
prohibited from communicating with most other computers across a
network. The current rule is that an applet can only make an
Internet connection to the computer from which the applet was
sent. See Also: HTML ,
Java
Archie
A tool (software) for finding files stored on anonymous FTP
sites. You need to know the exact file name or a substring of it.
ARPANet
(Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) -- The precursor to
the Internet. Developed in the late 60's and early 70's by the US
Department of Defense as an experiment in wide-area-networking
that would survive a nuclear war.
ASCII
(American Standard Code for Information Interchange) -- This is
the de facto world-wide standard for the code numbers used by
computers to represent all the upper and lower-case Latin letters,
numbers, punctuation, etc. There are 128 standard ASCII codes each
of which can be represented by a 7 digit binary number: 0000000
through 1111111.
Backbone
A high-speed line or series of connections that forms a major
pathway within a network. The term is relative as a backbone in a
small network will likely be much smaller than many non-backbone
lines in a large network. See Also: Network
Bandwidth
How much stuff you can send through a connection. Usually
measured in bits-per-second. A full page of English text is about
16,000 bits. A fast modem can move about 15,000 bits in one
second. Full-motion full-screen video would require roughly
10,000,000 bits-per-second, depending on compression. See Also: Bps , Bit , T-1, OC-3.
Baud
In common usage the baud rate of a modem is how many bits it
can send or receive per second. Technically, baud is the number of
times per second that the carrier signal shifts value - for
example a 1200 bit-per-second modem actually runs at 300 baud, but
it moves 4 bits per baud (4 x 300 = 1200 bits per second). See
Also: Bit , Modem.
Binhex
(BINary HEXadecimal) -- A method for converting non-text files
(non-ASCII) into ASCII. This is needed because Internet e-mail can
only handle ASCII. See Also: ASCII , MIME , UUENCODE
Bit
(Binary DigIT) -- A single digit number in base-2, in other
words, either a 1 or a zero. The smallest unit of computerized
data. Bandwidth is usually measured in bits-per-second. See Also:
Bandwidth , Bps , Byte , Kilobyte , Megabyte .
Bps
(Bits-Per-Second) -- A measurement of how fast data is moved
from one place to another. A 28.8 modem can move 28,800 bits per
second. See Also: Bandwidth , Bit
Browser
BTW
(By The Way) -- A shorthand appended to a comment written in an
online forum. See Also: IMHO , TTFN
Byte
A set of Bits that represent a single character. Usually there
are 8 Bits in a Byte, sometimes more, depending on how the
measurement is being made. See Also: Bit
Certificate
Authority
CGI
(Common Gateway Interface) -- A set of rules that describe how
a Web Server communicates with another piece of software on the
same machine, and how the other piece of software (the 'CGI
program') talks to the web server. Any piece of software can be a
CGI program if it handles input and output according to the CGI
standard.
Usually a CGI program is a small program that
takes data from a web server and does something with it, like
putting the content of a form into an e-mail message, or turning
the data into a database query.
You can often see that a CGI
program is being used by seeing 'cgi-bin' in a URL, but not
always. See Also: cgi-bin , Web
cgi-bin
The most common name of a directory on a web server in which
CGI programs are stored. The 'bin' part of 'cgi-bin' is a
shorthand version of 'binary', because once upon a time, most
programs were refered to as 'binaries'. In real life, most
programs found in cgi-bin directories are text files -- scripts
that are executed by binaries located elsewhere on the same
machine. See Also: CGI
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