Monday, April 7, 2003		ITerminology

Skin: An element of a graphical user interface that can be changed to alter the look of the interface without affecting its functionality. Skins can give an interface an entirely different look than what it originally came with. Skins are often used to change the look and feel of a Web browser, altering the appearance and/or location of buttons, providing background images or borders that did not originally come with the browser, changing the colors and/or other graphic elements, or even changing the shape of the browser window.

Redundant: Used to describe a component of a computer or network system that is used to guard the primary system from failure by acting as a back up system. Redundant components can include both hardware elements of a system — such as disk drives, peripherals, servers, switches, routers — and software elements — such as operating systems, applications and databases.

SPOF: Short for single point of failure, a generic phrase for any component of a system that upon failure will cause a malfunction in the entire system. A SPOF can be a hardware or electrical component or a software component. Each time a system expands (e.g., adding a workstation to a network or adding a new application to a network of workstations) the number of places where an SPOF can occur also expands. Typically, systems with redundancy will still operate with an SPOF.