Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Computer and Web Terminology

Internet and Web should always be capitalized. As with all fairly new terminology invented by Silicon Valley's "super" developers, some inconsistencies appear every now and then-such as with the term "intranet," which is not capitalized. (You'd think it would be because "Internet" is capitalized.) 


The other thing that everyone can be certain to count on with computer and Internet terminology is that it will also include some pretty interesting acronyms and expressions.  

Some of my favorites appear below:

WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get
Dromedary case or Camel case - a naming convention used to type a variety of programming languages where compound words or phrases are joined without a space and are capitalized within the compound. (e.g.: "camelCase") because it suggests the humps of a camel. 
GIGO - garbage in, garbage out
RTFM - Read the F...'n manual
NURBS - non-uniform rational B-spline
WORM - write-once, read-many
Bloatware - sarcastic term for software that requires considerable disk space and RAM
PnP - Plug 'n Play
POTS - plain old telephone service
Dongle - a device that attaches to a computer and  controls access to a particular application
SMURF - a network security breach in which a network connected to the Internet is swamped with replies to PING requests.
ID10-T - sarcastic codename used by IT to describe a user that doesn't know what he/she is doing on the computer. 
MUD - Multi-user dimension