ISP Glossary, Glossary ISP |
| W3C - Abbreviation for the World Wide Web Consortium, the organization that develops standards for the web community. |
| Wafer - A flat, round piece of silicon that is used in the manufacture of microprocessors. Fabrication plants, or fabs, typically will take a wafer and carve many... |
| WAIS - Wide Area Information Server (WAIS). An indexing system for |
| Wake-on-LAN - A technology developed by the IBM and Intel Advanced Manageability Alliance where a computer motherboard can turn itself on (and off) based on signals... |
| Wallpaper - An optional background graphic used in a graphical user interface. |
| WAN - Wide Area Network. |
| WAP - Wireless Application Protocol. A protocol used with small handheld devices with small file sizes. |
| Wares - A slang term derived from the word "software." This term generally refers to pirated or cracked software. Chop off the "soft" part and you are left with... |
| wareZ - Software pirated by dOoDz (immature scofflaws). |
| Water Cooling - This type of cooling differs from air cooling in that water is used to remove heat from a heatsink that makes contact with a hot microprocessor or other... |
| Watt - The electrical unit of power, which is energy transferred over a unit of time. Often it is used to describe the amount of heat generated by a microprocessor.... |
| Wattage - A measure of an amount of watts. |
| Wav - A sound file format introduced in Windows 3.1 with the .wav file extension. Files with the .wav extension are digital representations of sound and typically... |
| WaveTable - A bit of ROM on sound cards that stores standard sounds (as .wav files) for instruments instead of generating them from FM sounds. This gives a much more... |
| Wavetable Synthesis - A method of creating music based on a table of complex sounds. A wavetable could contain a realistic piano sound or guitar sound, which can then be manipulated... |
| WCDMA - A 3G standard that increases the throughput of data transmission of CDMA by using a wider 5MHz carrier than standard CDMA, which uses a 200KHz carrier.... |
| Web - A synonym for the term "World Wide Web," often referred to as "The Web." |
| Web Developer - Grown up Webmasters are Web Developers. Generally, if you are a Web Developer you have a range of Web skills, from managing a webserver to coding HTML,... |
| Web Portal - A term coined to describe the large search engine sites, such as Yahoo! and Lycos, that have branched off to offer a wide variety of services. The idea... |
| web site - One or more connected web pages under a common ownership or management or theme. |
| weblog - See blog |
| Webmaster - A blanket term that refers to the person responsible for running a website. It is associated more with server administration and HTML coding than other... |
| Webserver - A machine, or software on a machine, that replies to data requests from a browser using the WWW protocol called HTTP, allowing people to access HTML files.... |
| Website - This term describes a particular company's, user's, or organization's Web pages served up by a webserver. It may be split across multiple servers or URLs,... |
| webtag - A term unique to Delphi Forums which designates a particular Forum on that service. Every Forum has its own webtag, different from all others, which forms... |
| WEP - Wired Equivalent Privacy or less frequently, Wireless Encryption Protocol. A security protocol for wireless networks defined in the 802.11b standard. Being... |
| WFM - An Intel hardware specification for easier management of desktop PCs in a networked environment. The specification calls for computers to be compatible... |
| Wheel Mouse - A mouse controller that, besides the usual buttons, also has a wheel device built in that is most often used to scroll up and down windows that are longer... |
| White hat - A hacker with benign intentions. For example, if a hacker encounters a security hole and the first thing he or she does is explain the problem to the people... |
| White Noise - This is technically sound with a uniform frequency spectrum over a wide range of frequencies. Non-technically, white noise is any unobtrusive background... |
| White Paper - A complete description of a particular technology, from overview to the nitty-gritty details. It is produced by the company that created that technology,... |
| whois - An Internet utility that you can use to look up information about an Internet site in the registry database at Internic or elsewhere. You can enter a name... |
| wi-fi - Short for wireless fidelity, a standard for wireless ethernet. The term is synonymous with the IEEE 802.11b standard. |
| Wide Area Information Service - A client/server method of accessing databases stored on multiple servers. You use a WAIS client to connect to a WAIS server and search the databases that... |
| Wide Area Network - Any network that spans more than one location. Typically at least one of the locations is fairly remote. Compare this to a MAN that may encompass several... |
| Wide SCSI - An improvement to the old narrow SCSI that allows for faster throughput by increasing the number of pins used to connect the drive to the controller from... |
| Wideband CDMA - A 3G standard that increases the throughput of data transmission of CDMA by using a wider 5MHz carrier than standard CDMA, which uses a 200KHz carrier.... |
| Windows - A rectangular shaped area on the screen of any GUI that contains a program. It also refers to a family of operating systems developed by Microsoft. The... |
| Windows 2000 - At first this operating system was called Windows NT 5, until Microsoft renamed it to Windows 2000. Windows 2000 was mainly a 32-bit operating system using... |
| Windows 3.x - The first accepted commercial version of Windows. There was a version 2.x that was available at one point, but Windows didn't achieve success until 3.x... |
| Windows 95 - A 16- and 32-bit operating system that builds on DOS and Windows 3.x to support 32-bit operations, additional hardware, and a more usable interface. This... |
| Windows 98 - This operating system was designed by Microsoft and adds additional hardware support and integrated browsing onto the Windows 95 platform. This OS is still... |
| Windows CE - This was initially the name for Microsoft's mobile operating system designed for PDAs. Initial Windows CE devices offered color screens, and a fairly... |
| Windows for Workgroups - Officially this was called Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, and it added some basic networking functionality to the standard Windows 3.1 operating system.... |
| Windows Internet Naming Service - A Windows-specific method of name resolution where a WINS server translates a NetBIOS name into an IP address. |
| Windows Management Instrumentation - Microsoft's answer to DMI. Microsoft felt that DMI didn't fully exploit Windows capabilities and was incomplete. Microsoft developed WMI to be an easier... |
| Windows Me - This Microsoft Windows operating system added many UI enhancements and clutter that actually made it less stable and more hated than Windows 95 and 98.... |
| Windows Media Audio - A Microsoft-developed audio codec that offers sampling rates of 8 to 48KHz. Files of this type typically have the file extension ".wma," and Microsoft... |
| Windows NT - A full 32-bit operating system developed by Microsoft to be a very stable operating system to be used on servers and business machines. It was developed... |
| Windows RAM - A type of memory chip, or RAM, that was commonly used at one time in graphics cards on PCs. It is dual-ported so that graphics information can be displayed... |
| Windows Sockets - An API designed to help inconsistent TCP/IP stacks talk together and be accessed properly by Windows 3.x programs. |
| Windows XP - The friendly-faced, updated version of Windows 2000, with an almost cartoonish interface that will surely be looked back upon with a wince. XP started... |
| Wine - An implementation of Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs on top of X-Windows. Wine runs on Linux and UNIX, and allows Windows programs to run. Wine was created... |
| WINS - A Windows-specific method of name resolution where a WINS server translates a NetBIOS name into an IP address. |
| Wintel - The common term for computers using Intel microprocessors and running Windows. Thus Windows/Intel becomes Wintel. Often this is used as a slur towards... |
| Wire-feet - The actual length of the copper wire connecting the end user to the telephone company central office. This measure is used to determine the eligibility... |
| Wired For Management Baseline - An Intel hardware specification for easier management of desktop PCs in a networked environment. The specification calls for computers to be compatible... |
| Wireless Application Protocol - A proposed standard that allows for transfer of data securely between wireless devices, such as PDAs, cellphones, pagers, or other combinations of those... |
| Wireless Local Loop - This is simply a wireless connection of a telephone in a home or office to a fixed telephone network. Using industry technology, it is an implementation... |
| Wireless Markup Language - Part of the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) , allowing text portions of Web content to be separated from graphical content for display on wireless... |
| Wizard - An "enhancement" to programs that makes them easier to operate by guiding you through a process, step by step. Often wizards are scoffed at by experienced... |
| WLL - This is simply a wireless connection of a telephone in a home or office to a fixed telephone network. Using industry technology, it is an implementation... |
| WMA - A Microsoft-developed audio codec that offers sampling rates of 8 to 48KHz. Files of this type typically have the file extension ".wma," and Microsoft... |
| WMI - Microsoft's answer to DMI. Microsoft felt that DMI didn't fully exploit Windows capabilities and was incomplete. Microsoft developed WMI to be an easier... |
| WML - Part of the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) , allowing text portions of Web content to be separated from graphical content for display on wireless... |
| WOL - A technology developed by the IBM and Intel Advanced Manageability Alliance where a computer motherboard can turn itself on (and off) based on signals... |
| Word - A group of bits of data regarded as a whole while programming or transferring data. Often a word is 8 bits in length, also referred to as a byte. This... |
| Word Size - The number of bits of data stored in a CPU register. Typically the number is a power of 2, with 8, 16, 32, and 64 being common. You have to deal with word... |
| Workstation - A high-powered computer, one step below a minicomputer and a step above a microcomputer. The term often refers to fairly powerful dual-processor computers... |
| World Wide Web - This is basically a means of communicating text, graphics, and other multimedia objects over the Internet. Web servers on the Internet are set to respond... |
| World Wide Web (WWW) - The World Wide Web is an Internet protocol that makes use of the HTML, hypertext, and hypermedia to create pages with links to other pages. WWW pages can... |
| World Wide Web Consortium - An industry group created to design and promote standards to increase the functionality of the Web. The W3C was initially established in collaboration... |
| worm - A self-replicating program that reproduces itself over a network. The most famous worm is the one created by Robert Morris at Cornell that shut down many... |
| WPA - Wi-fi Protected Access. An interim security standard for wireless networks designed to be more secure than WEP. It is taken from the draft 802.11i standard. |
| WRAM - A type of memory chip, or RAM, that was commonly used at one time in graphics cards on PCs. It is dual-ported so that graphics information can be displayed... |
| Write Once Read Many - A type of drive/media that allows you to write to it permanently; however, you cannot erase what you've written. CD-R is a form of WORM drive. |
| Write Protect Tab - This phrase was initially coined for older floppy diskettes that needed to be write-protected by placing a tab or sticker over a notch that told a floppy... |
| WTX - A computer form factor for motherboards and cases that is designed for mid-range workstations. WTX motherboards can be a maximum of 14" by 16.75", and... |
| WWW - This is basically a means of communicating text, graphics, and other multimedia objects over the Internet. Web servers on the Internet are set to respond... |
| WYSIWYG - Acronym for "What You See Is What You Get". The term applies to word processors and web page development software where you manipulate text and images... |
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