What is MAC Address?
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Stands for "Media Access Control Address," and no, it is not related Apple Macintosh computers. A MAC address is a hardware identification number that uniquely identifies each device on a network. The MAC address is manufactured into every network card, such as an Ethernet card or Wi-Fi card, and therefore cannot be changed.
Because there are millions of networkable devices in existence, and each device needs to have a unique MAC address, there must be a very wide range of possible addresses. For this reason, MAC addresses are made up of six two-digit hexadecimal numbers, separated by colons. For example, an Ethernet card may have a MAC address of 00:0d:83:b1:c0:8e. Fortunately, you do not need to know this address, since it is automatically recognized by most networks.
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What is Mac OS?
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This is the operating system that runs on Macintosh computers. It is pronounced, "mack-oh-es." The Mac OS has been around since the first Macintosh was introduced in 1984. Since then, it has been continually updated and many new features have been added to it. Each major OS release is signified by a new number (i.e. Mac OS 8, Mac OS 9).
Since the core of the Mac OS was nearly decades old, Apple decided to completely revamp the operating system. In March of 2001, Apple introduced a completely new version of the Mac OS that was written from the ground up. The company dubbed it "Mac OS X," correctly pronounced "Mac OS 10." Unlike earlier versions of the Mac OS, Mac OS X is based on the same kernel as Unix and has many advanced administrative features and utilities. Though the operating system is much more advanced than earlier versions of the Mac OS, it still has the same ease-of-use that people have come to expect from Apple software.
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What is Mac OS X?
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Mac OS X, pronounced "Mac Oh-Es Ten," is the current version of the operating system used on Apple Macintosh computers. If you happen to pronounce it "Mac OS X," computer nerds and dedicated Mac users will be quick to correct you. While the name may be a bit confusing, Mac OS X is an advanced, user-friendly operating system.
Previous versions of the Mac OS, were based on the original Macintosh operating system, released in 1984. In the late 1990's, many computer users felt Windows had "caught up" to the Mac OS and Apple's operating system began to appear a bit dated. So Apple completely revamped the Mac OS and created a new operating system from the ground up.
While much of the code used to build Mac OS X was written from scratch, a lot was taken from the NEXTSTEP operating system. NEXTSTEP was a Unix-based system that ran on NeXT computers, which are no longer in production. NeXT was acquired by Apple in 1997 and Steve Jobs was hired as interim CEO. Apple developers took the Unix-based code from NEXTSTEP and combined it with the graphical user interface (GUI) of Mac OS 9. The result was a stable, high-performance operating system that had the stability of Unix and the intuitive interface of the Macintosh. Mac OS X 10.0 was released in 2001.
Since the initial release, Apple has released several major updates to Mac OS X, at a pace of roughly one update a year. The list of OS X versions include 10.0 Cheetah, 10.1 Puma, 10.2 Jaguar, 10.3 Panther, and 10.4 Tiger. Mac OS X 10.5 is expected to be called Leopard.
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What is Macintosh?
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This is the name of the computers that are made by Apple Computer. The first Macintosh was introduced in 1984 and was seen as a major innovation in computing ease-of-use. The Macintosh was the first personal computer to use a graphical user interface (GUI), which allowed the user to interact with the operating system by using a mouse to click and drag objects. Since 1984, Apple has continually revised and upgraded the Macintosh product line and now makes both laptop and desktop versions of the Macintosh. The Macintosh product line includes the following models:
Power Mac - a high-performance desktop computer for professionals
PowerBook - a high-performance laptop computer for professionals.
iMac - a creatively designed consumer desktop computer
iBook - a laptop computer for students and home users
eMac - an all-in-one desktop computer for educators and entry-level consumers
Mac mini - a super-small, fully functional computer sold without a monitor, keyboard, or mouse
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What is Macro?
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A macro is a set of individual commands for use as a group within a program, such as Excel, Word or Access. The macro executes just as a batch file or JCL file.
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What is Mainframe?
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A computer used to control large databases, perform high volume transaction processing, and generate reports from large databases.
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What is Malware?
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Short for "malicious software," malware refers to software programs designed to damage or do other unwanted actions on a computer system. In Spanish, "mal" means "bad," making the term "badware," which is a good way to remember it (even if you're not Spanish).
Common examples of malware include viruses, worms, trojan horses, and spyware. Viruses, for example, can cause havoc on a computer's hard drive by deleting files or directory information. Spyware can gather data from a user's system without the user knowing it. This can include anything from the Web pages a user visits to personal information, such as credit card numbers.
It is unfortunate that there are software programmers out there with malicious intent, but it is good to be aware of the fact. You can install anti-virus and anti-spyware utilities on your computer that will seek and destroy the malicious programs they find on your computer. So join the fight against badware and install some protective utilities on your hard drive!
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What is Mbps?
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Stands for "Megabits Per Second." One megabit is equal to one million bits or 1,000 kilobits. While "megabit" sounds similar to "megabyte," a megabit is roughly one eighth the size of a megabyte (since there are eight bits in a byte). Mbps is used to measure data transfer speeds of high bandwidth connections, such as Ethernet and cable modems.
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What is MCA?
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Stands for "Micro Channel Architecture." It is an expansion bus created by IBM that was used in the company's PS/2 desktop computers. An expansion bus allows additional cards to be connected to the computer's motherboard, expanding the number of I/O ports. These include SCSI, USB, Firewire, AGP, and DVI connections, as well as many others.
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What is Mebibyte?
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A mebibyte is a unit of data storage that equals 2 to the 20th power, or 1,048,576 bytes.
While a megabyte can be estimated as 10^6 or 1,000,000 bytes, a mebibyte is exactly 1,048,576 bytes. This is to avoid the ambiguity associated with the size of megabytes. A mebibyte is 1,024 kibibytes and precedes the gibibyte unit of measurement.
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What is Media?
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In general, "media" refers to various means of communication. For example, television, radio, and the newspaper are different types of media. The term can also be used as a collective noun for the press or news reporting agencies. In the computer world, "media" is also used as a collective noun, but refers to different types of data storage options.
Computer media can be hard drives, removable drives (such as Zip disks), CD-ROM or CD-R discs, DVDs, flash memory, USB drives, and yes, floppy disks. For example, if you want to bring your pictures from your digital camera into a photo processing store, they might ask you what kind of media your pictures are stored on. Are they on the flash memory card inside your camera or are they on a CD or USB drive? For this and many other reasons, it is helpful to have a basic understanding of what the different types of media are.
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What is Megabyte?
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A megabyte is 2 to the 20th power, or 1,048,576 bytes.
It can be estimated as 10 to the 6th power, or one million (1,000,000) bytes. A megabyte is 1,024 kilobytes and precedes the gigabyte unit of measurement. Large computer files are typically measured in megabytes. For example, a high-quality JPEG photo from a 6.3 megapixel digital camera takes up about 3MB of space. A four minute CD-quality audio clip takes up about 40MB of space and CDs can hold up to 700MB of space.
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What is Megahertz?
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One megahertz equals one million cycles per second and is used to measure transmission speeds of electronic devices. The most common area you'll see Megahertz used is in measuring processor clock speed (i.e. an 800 Mhz Pentium III). However, megahertz only measures the clock speed of the processor (how many cycles it can handle per second) -- not the overall performance. Because megahertz measures only a single aspect of a processor, it is possible that a 500 MHz PowerPC G4 is faster overall than an 800 Mhz Pentium III. Mac users love to stress this point.
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What is Memory?
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Just like humans, computers rely a lot on memory. They need to process and store data, just like we do. However, computers store data in digital format, which means the information can always be called up exactly the way it was stored. Also, unlike our memory, the computer's memory doesn't get worse over time.
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What is Memory Stick?
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Memory Stick is a type of flash memory developed by Sony. It is used to store data for digital cameras, camcorders, and other kinds of electronics. Because Memory Stick is a proprietary Sony product, it is used by nearly all of Sony's products that use flash media. Unfortunately, this also means Memory Stick cards are incompatible with most products not developed by Sony.
Memory Stick cards are available in two versions: Memory Stick PRO and Memory Stick PRO Duo. Memory Stick PRO cards are 50mm long by 21.5mm wide and are 2.8mm thick. Memory Stick PRO Duo cards are 31mm long by 20mm wide and are only 1.6mm thick. High-speed versions of Memory Stick media support data transfer rates up to 80Mbps, or 10 MB/sec, which is fast enough record high-quality digital video.
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What is Menu Bar?
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A menu bar is a horizontal strip that contains lists of available menus for a certain program. In Windows programs, the menu bar resides at the top of each open window, while on the Mac, the menu bar is always fixed on the top of the screen. Despite this major difference, the menu bar serves the same purpose on each platform.
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What is Meta Search Engine?
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Meta search engines are search engines that search other search engines. Confused? To put it simply, a meta search engine submits your query to several other search engines and returns a summary of the results. Therefore, the search results you receive are an aggregate result of multiple searches.
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What is Meta Tag?
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Meta tags are used to provide structured data about data.
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What is Metadata?
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Metadata describes other data. It provides information about a certain item's content. For example, an image may include metadata that describes how large the picture is, the color depth, the image resolution, when the image was created, and other data. A text document's metadata may contain information about how long the document is, who the author is, when the document was written, and a short summary of the document.
Web pages often include metadata in the form of meta tags. Description and keywords meta tags are commonly used to describe the Web page's content. Most search engines use this data when adding pages to their search index.
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What is Metafile?
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A metafile can refer to two different types of computer files. The first is a file that describes the contents of other files. This type of metafile may contain metadata, which defines a group other files and gives a summary of what data they contain.
The second type of metafile is most often used in computer graphics. These files define objects and images using a list of coordinates. They are typically used for vector images, such as Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, and EPS files, but can include raster images as well.
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What is Microprocessor?
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This little chip is the heart of a computer. Often referred to as just the "processor," the microprocessor does all the computations like adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. In PCs, the most popular microprocessor used is the Intel Pentium chip, whereas Macintosh computers use the PowerPC chip (developed by Motorola, IBM, and Apple).
The speed of a microprocessor is measured in megahertz, or cycles per second. But higher megahertz doesn't always mean better performance. Though a 600-MHz chip has a clock speed that is twice as fast as a 300-Mhz chip, it doesn't mean that the computer with the 600-Mhz chip will run twice as fast. This is because the speed of a computer is also influenced by other factors, such as the efficiency of the processor, the bus architecture, the amount of memory available, and the software that is running on the computer. Some processors can complete more operations per clock cycle than other processors, making them more efficient than other processors with higher clock speeds. This is why the PowerPC chip is typically faster than Pentium chips at that are clocked at higher megahertz.
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What is MIDI?
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Stands for "Musical Instrument Digital Interface." It is a connectivity standard that musicians use to hook together musical instruments (such as keyboards and synthesizers) and computer equipment. Using MIDI, a musician can easily create and edit digital music tracks. The MIDI system records the notes played, the length of the notes, the dynamics (volume alterations), the tempo, the instrument being played, and hundreds of other parameters, called control changes.
Because MIDI records each note digitally, editing a track of MIDI music is much easier and more accurate than editing a track of audio. The musician can change the notes, dynamics, tempo, and even the instrument being played with the click of button. Also, MIDI files are basically text documents, so they take up very little disk space. The only catch is that you need MIDI-compatible hardware or software to record and playback MIDI files.
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What is Mini DV?
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Most digital camcorders record video and audio on a Mini DV tape. The cassettes measure 2.6 x 1.9 x 0.5 inches (L x W x H), while the tape itself is only .25 inches thick. A Mini DV tape that is 65 meters long can hold an incredible 11GB of data, or 80 minutes of digital video.
The small size of Mini DV tapes has helped camcorder manufacturers reduce the size of their video cameras significantly. Some consumer cameras that use Mini DV tapes are smaller than the size of your hand. Because Mini DV tapes store data digitally, the footage can be exported directly to a computer using a Firewire (IEEE 1394) cable. So if you want to record video and edit it on your computer, avoid the SVHS and Hi-8 options and make sure to get a camera that uses Mini DV.
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What is MIPS?
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Stands for "Million Instructions Per Second." It is a method of measuring the raw speed of a computer's processor. Since the MIPS measurement doesn't take into account other factors such as the computer's I/O speed or processor architecture, it isn't always a fair way to measure the performance of a computer. For example, a computer rated at 100 MIPS may be able to computer certain functions faster than another computer rated at 120 MIPS.
The MIPS measurement has been used by computer manufacturers like IBM to measure the "cost of computing." The value of computers is determined in MIPS per dollar. Interestingly, the value of computers in MIPS per dollar has steadily doubled on an annual basis for the last couple of decades.
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What is Mirror?
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A mirror is something that you can see your reflection in. Most mirrors consist of a sheet of glass with a sheet of metal behind it. When light hits the metal, it reflects onto the glass and produces the image you see. In the computer world, however, a mirror is a Web or FTP server that has the same files on it as another server. Its purpose is to provide an alternate way to access files when the main server is so swamped with people connecting and downloading files that other people can't get through. Unlike real-life mirrors, when you download a picture off a mirror server, the image isn't backwards.
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What is Mirror Site?
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Mirror site is an exact copy of another Internet site (often a web site). Mirror sites are most commonly used to provide multiple sources of the same information, and are of particular value as a way of providing reliable access to large downloads.
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What is Mnemonic?
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A mnemonic (pronounced "nemonic") is a pattern that can be used as an aid for memorizing information. Most often, this pattern consists of letters or words. For example, the phrase "Every Good Boy Does Fine" can be used to help music students remember the notes of the staff, E, G, B, D, and F. The name "Roy G. Biv" is often used to memorize the order of colors in a rainbow (or other light spectrum) -- Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.
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What is Modem?
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The word modem is actually short for Modulator/Demodulator. (There's something you can really impress your friends with). A modem is a communications device that can be either internal or external to your computer. It allows one computer to connect another computer and transfer data over telephone lines. The original dial-up modems are becoming obsolete because of their slow speeds and are being replaced by the much faster cable and DSL modems.
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What is Moodle?
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Stands for "Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment." Moodle is an open source course management system, orginally developed by Martin Dougiamas. It is used by thousands of educational institutions around the world to provide an organized interface for e-learning, or learning over the Internet.
Moodle allows educators to create online courses, which students can access as a virtual classroom. A typically Moodle home page will include a list of participants (including the teacher and students) and a calendar with a course schedule and list of assignments. Other Moodle features include online quizzes, forums, where students can post comments and ask questions, glossaries of terms, and links to other Web resources.
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What is Motherboard?
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Also known as the mainboard or logic board, this is the main circuit board of your computer. If you ever open your computer up, the biggest piece of silicon you see is the motherboard. This is where you'll find the CPU, the ROM, memory expansion slots, PCI slots, serial ports, USB ports, and all the controllers for things like the hard drive, DVD drive, keyboard, and mouse. Basically, the motherboard is what makes everything in your computer work together.
Each motherboard has a collection of chips and controllers that is known as the "chipset". When new motherboards are developed, they often use new chipsets. The good news is that these boards are typically more efficient and faster than their predecessors. The bad news is that you may not be able to add certain memory and CPU upgrades to older motherboards. Of course, that's typical of the computer industry.
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What is Mouse?
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A mouse is a handheld pointing device for computers, involving a small object fitted with one or more buttons and shaped to sit naturally under the hand. The underside of the mouse houses a device that detects the mouse's motion relative to the flat surface on which it sits.
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What is MP3?
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Stands for "MPEG-1 Audio Layer-3." It is the most popular compressed audio file format. An MP3 file is about one tenth the size of the original audio file, but the sound is nearly CD-quality. Because of their small size and good fidelity, MP3 files have become a popular way to store music files on both computers and portable devices. There are also many Web sites, like MP3.com and GarageBand.com, that maintain huge archives of audio files in MP3 format.
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What is MPEG?
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Stands for "Moving Picture Experts Group." The MPEG organization, which works with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), develops standards for digital audio and video compression. The group constantly works to develop more efficient ways to digitally compress and store audio and video files.
The term MPEG also refers to a type of multimedia file, which is denoted by the file extension ".mpg" or ".mpeg." These files are compressed movies that can contain both audio and video. Though they are compressed, MPEG files maintain most of the original quality of the uncompressed movie. This is why many videos on the Web, such as movie trailers and music videos, are available in the MPEG format.
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What is Multimedia?
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As the name implies, multimedia is the integration of multiple forms of media. This includes text, graphics, audio, video, etc. For example, a presentation involving audio and video clips would be considered a "multimedia presentation." Educational software that involves animations, sound, and text is called "multimedia software." CDs and DVDs are often considered to be "multimedia formats" since they can store a lot of data and most forms of multimedia require a lot of disk space.
Due to the advancements in computer speeds and storage space, multimedia is commonplace today. Therefore, the term doesn't produce the same excitement is once did. This also means it is not as overused as it was back in the late '90s. Thank goodness.
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What is Multiplatform?
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If a software program is developed for mulitple operating systems, it is considered to be "multiplatform." Since Microsoft Word runs on both the Windows and Macintosh platform, it is a mutliplatform application.
In the consumer gaming market, mutliplatform games run on more than one gaming machine. For example, a sports game developed for Xbox, Playstation, GameCube, and PC would be a multiplatform game. If a game is developed exclusively for one system, i.e. "The Legend of Zelda," for Nintendo, it is not multiplatform. Gaming hardware manufacturers use exclusive software as a reason for consumers to buy their system.
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What is MySQL?
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MySQL, pronounced either "My S-Q-L" or "My Sequel," is an open source relational database management system. It is based on the structure query language (SQL), which is used for adding, removing, and modifying information in the database. Standard SQL commands, such as ADD, DROP, INSERT, and UPDATE can be used with MySQL.
MySQL can be used for a variety of applications, but is most commonly found on Web servers. A website that uses MySQL may include Web pages that access information from a database. These pages are often referred to as "dynamic," meaning the content of each page is generated from a database as the page loads. Websites that use dynamic Web pages are often referred to as database-driven websites.
Many database-driven websites that use MySQL, such as Sharpened.net, use a Web scripting language like PHP to access information from the database. MySQL commands can be incorporated into the PHP code, allowing part or all of a Web page to be generated from database information. Because both MySQL and PHP are both open source (meaning they are free to download and use), the PHP/MySQL combination has become a popular choice for database-driven websites.
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