Technology

An editor is a person who prepares text -- typically language, but also images and sounds -- for publication by correcting, condensing, or otherwise modifying it. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, editor comes from the Latin phrase e ditus ... which means "to put forward". The editor ludorum in Ancient Rome was the person who put on the games. In French, editeur means "publisher". Also in Italian editore means "publisher". The word came into English from French. The verb to edit is a back formation from editor. In career terms, the word 'editor' has four major senses: Career Editor: ... (view more)

Seek time is one of the several delays associated with reading or writing data on a computer's disk drive. In order to read or write data in a particular place on the disk, the read/write head of the disk needs to be moved to the correct place (just ... as to play a particular song on a cassette of recorded music, the tape needs to be wound to the right place). This process is known as "seeking", and the time it takes for the head to move to the right place is the "seek time". Seek time for a given disk varies depending on how far the head's destination is from its origin at the time of each read ... (view more)

Flaming is the act of posting messages that are deliberately hostile and insulting, usually in the social context of a discussion board (usually on the Internet). Such messages are called flames, and are sometimes posted in response to flamebait. ... Flaming is one of a class of economic problems known as The Tragedy of the Commons, when a group holds a resource (in this case, communal attention), but each of the individual members has an incentive to overuse it. Although the trading of insults is as old as time itself, flaming on the Internet, like many other online 'actions', started in the ... (view more)

A crash in computing is a condition where a program (either an application or part of the operating system) stops performing its expected function and also stops responding to other parts of the system. Often the offending program may simply appear ... to freeze. If this program is a critical part of the operating system kernel the entire computer may crash (a system crash). Many crashes are the result of the execution of a single machine instruction, but the causes of this are manifold. Typical causes are when the program counter loses track of the correct execution path or a buffer overflow ... (view more)

Disk Cloning or Disk Imaging is a category of software which copies the contents of one computer hard disk to another, or onto a secondary medium such as a DVD or CD Recordable. A disk cloning program is most commonly used by large companies to ... provision new computers to install the initial package of the operating system and applications for sale, or by home computer users who wish to backup their operating systems in a healthy state. An individual user may also use disk cloning to upgrade to a new hard disk or backup an existing operating system. To provision the hard disk of a computer ... (view more)

You know, we all make fun of those "Computer Help Desk" emails that get passed around? Well -- try working at a real Computer Help Desk for a living! But, seriously. It is a real problem trying to help someone over the phone (especially having them ... type in a DOS command)! Remember the old "cup holder" email joke that got passed around where the guy on the other line thought that the CD ROM tray was a cup holder? Well -- have you ever tried to give good advice? Good advice always starts with the typical "beginning steps." Why? Because the person asking may or may not understand what is meant ... (view more)

Data recovery is the process of recovering data from primary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. This can be due to physical damage to the storage device or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the ... host operating system. Data Recovery: Physical damage A wide variety of failures can cause physical damage to storage media. CD-ROMs can have their metallic substrate or dye layer scratched off; hard disks can suffer any of several mechanical failures, such as head crashes and failed motors; and tapes can simply break. Physical damage always causes ... (view more)

Blogosphere (alternate: BlogSphere or BloggingSphere) is the collective term encompassing all weblogs or blogs as a community or social network. Many weblogs are densely interconnected; bloggers read others' blogs, link to them, reference them in ... their own writing, and post comments on each others' blogs. Because of this, the interconnected blogs have grown their own culture. The term blogosphere was coined on September 10, 1999 by Brad L. Graham, as a joke. It was re-coined in 2002 by William Quick (quite seriously) and was quickly adopted and promulgated by the warblog community. Many ... (view more)

A checksum is a form of redundancy check, a very simple measure for protecting the integrity of data by detecting errors in data that is sent through space (telecommunications) or time (storage). It works by adding up the basic components of a ... message, typically the bytes, and storing the resulting value. Later, anyone can perform the same operation on the data, compare the result to the authentic checksum, and (assuming that the sums match) conclude that the message was probably not corrupted. The simplest form of checksum, which simply adds up the bytes in the data, cannot detect a number ... (view more)

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. The mouse's 2D motion is typically translated into the motion of a pointer on the display. A mouse is called a 'mouse' primarily because the cord on early models resembled the rodent's tail, and also because the motion of the pointer on the screen can be mouse-like. In popular usage, the plural can be either mice or ' ... (view more)