Monday, January 13, 2003		ITerminology

UTF : Short for Universal Transformation Format, a method of converting unicode characters, which are 16 bits each, into 7- or 8-bit characters. UTF-7 converts Unicode into ASCII for transmission over 7-bit mail systems, and UTF-8 converts Unicode to 8-bit bytes.

Wallpaper: On computers that use a desktop GUI, wallpaper is the monitor pattern or picture or other graphic representation that forms the background onto which all icons, menus and other elements of the operating system are displayed and moved around. An operating system will typically come with pre-installed images to set as the wallpaper and will also allow users to install their own images to be used as the wallpaper. The wallpaper always stays in the background, and all work is done on top of the wallpaper.

InfiniBand: Both an I/O architecture and a specification for the transmission of data between processors and I/O devices that has been gradually replacing the PCI bus in high-end servers and PCs. Instead of sending data in parallel, which is what PCI does, InfiniBand sends data in serial and can carry multiple channels of data at the same time in a multiplexing signal.

AFP: Short for AppleTalk Filing Protocol, the client/server file sharing protocol used in an AppleTalk network. A non-Apple network can only access data from an AppleShare file server by first translating into the AFP language.

User Datagram Protocol: Abbreviated UDP, a connectionless protocol that, like TCP, runs on top of IP networks. Unlike TCP/IP, UDP/IP provides very few error recovery services, offering instead a direct way to send and receive datagrams over an IP network. It’s used primarily for broadcasting messages over a network.