Joseph's Jargon (5) from the May 2000 Actrix Newsletter

by Joseph Bartlett

Sadly this will be Joseph's last Jargon contribution. Joseph left Actrix on Friday 12 May 2000 in order to pursue new and exciting challenges in Perth. In particular his Macintosh skills will be missed.

Binary: Files that contain data in 1's and 0's that is not formatted as ascii. Mostly this term is used to distinguish between ascii file and everything else (because, really, everything stored on a computer is stored as 1's and 0's)

ASCII: Acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, pronounced "ass-key". ASCII is a code that assigns a number to each key on the keyboard. ASCII text does not include special formatting features and therefore can be exchanged and read by most computer systems.

Virus:  An insidious piece of computer code written to damage systems. Viruses can be hidden in executable program files posted online.

Worm: 1. An insidious and usually illegal computer program that is designed to replicate itself over a network for the purpose of causing harm and/or destruction. While a virus is designed to invade a single computer's hard drive, a worm is designed to invade a network. The most infamous worm was created by Robert Tappan Morris in November 1988; it infiltrated over 6,000 network systems around the globe.
2. Acronym for "Write Once Read Many". Used to describe optical disk drives that can only be written once, usually for archival purposes.

Attached file: A file that is embedded into an email message.

DNS: See Domain Name System.

Domain name: The official name of a computer connected to the Internet. Domain names are derived from a hierarchical system, with a host name followed by a top-level domain category. The top-level domain categories are com (for commercial enterprises), org (for non-profit organisations), net (for network services providers), mil (for the military), ac or edu (for academic or educational) and govt (for government).

Domain Name System: (abbreviation: DNS)   A database system which looks up host IP addresses based upon domain names. For example if you ask for "www.thisismyhost.com" it will return "123.45.67.89". Copies of the Domain Name System are distributed through the Internet.