Tag Archives: Words

Decompress.

Good Monday, everybody! As the semester begins to wind down into the home stretch, you all may find yourselves feeling overwhelmed by work, projects, or just the general looming dread of the SADs as the temperature starts to drop.

Word of the Week

We’ve taken a hiatus on “Words of the Week” (which actually tend to be phrases or acronyms or concepts), but why not start it up again for summer? cloud computing Cloud computing: has resources and information that are made available on-demand relies on sharing resources by networking large groups of servers to spread the work read more »

Word of the Week

VPN: VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. It is a virtual network that makes use of an underlying network to create a secure connection between a computer and a network or a computer and another computer. The connection may be encrypted or require authorization (for example, CITES recommends you set up CITES VPN so that read more »

Word of the Week

operating system: a program that manages computer activities and is necessary in order to run other programs. The operating system manages the various hardware and software resources of a computer. Examples of operating systems include: Microsoft’s Windows 7 Apple’s Snow Leopard Linux Mint To learn more: Dictionary.com entry Wikipedia entry Webopedia entry How Stuff Works read more »

Word of the Week

Cyber Monday– the Monday immediately following Black Friday. It used to be the case that many people would do most of their online shopping for the holidays when they got back to work on Monday (during a time when more people would have faster internet connections at work than at home). The term was created read more »

Word of the Week

API (Application Programming Interface).   An API is simply defined as an interface that allows software interaction.  It achieves this through defining the vocabulary and calling conventions necessary for the communication. Web APIs provide a basis for mash-up technology, utilized in many Web 2.0 applications.  To learn more about this term, see PC Magazine’s article read more »

Word of the Week

AJAX is an acronym for “asynchronous JavaScript and XML.”  It is comprised of a number of technologies, including: XHTML and CSS The DOM (Documents Object Model) accessed with JavaScript, which according to Bruce Sterling is “the duct tape of the Web.”  (see http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2009/03/what-bruce-ster/) An asynchronous exchange of data between the server and the client, made read more »

Word of the Week

This week marks a few milestones in the Fall 2009 semester here at GSLIS.  First, it is midterm week.  Second, the LEEPers are coming!  Finally, and in a completely unrelated thread, Champaign County Public Health is happy to announce that H1N1/swine flu/whatever you feel like calling it vaccines are now available (if, of course, you read more »

Word of the Week

Ok. Today the BBC reported that Microsoft has confirmed that over 10,000 of its Hotmail e-mail accounts have been compromised, victims of a phishing attack (click here for the story).  While all of us who have not lived in a bubble for the past 10 years have heard of the term “phishing,” how many have read more »

Word of the Week

IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) The IEEE is an international professional organization that has more than 365,000 members in 160 countries. It is estimated that the IEEE provides around one-third of the world’s literature in electrical engineering and computer science, publishing 140 serials in addition to monographs.  Additionally, it contributes to technological learning read more »