Monday, August 13, 2001		Bits & Bytes

AAC: Short for Advanced Audio Coding, one of the audio compression formats defined by the MPEG-2 standard. AAC is sometimes referred to as MPEG-2 NBC (not backwards compatible) because it is not compatible with the MPEG-1 coding scheme. AAC boasts higher quality audio reproduction than MP3 and requires 30 per cent less data to do so.

ECML: Short for Electronic Commerce Modelling Language. ECML is a universal format for online commerce Web sites that contains customer information that is used for purchases made online, formatted through the use of XML tags. It is a standard way of transferring billing, shipping and payment information to merchant sites regardless of what site the customer is purchasing from.

Scatternet: A group of independent and non-synchronized piconets that share at least one common Bluetooth device. Bluetooth devices must have point-to-multipoint capability to engage in scatternet communication. There may be a maximum of 10 fully loaded piconets in a scatternet.