What is Cloud Computing?
Internet
Cloud Computing is computing on the Internet. Data and applications are stored and run on a server that a user’s computer accesses often via a web browser.
The “old” way of computing was to install a program on a workstation such as a home computer, then access and save any files on that same computer or a server within a closed network.
Cloud computing takes away the need for installation and storage on a workstation as all the data is processed and stored remotely in the “cloud” somewhere on the Internet. It means that workstations can be simpler devices which are still able to perform complex computing as the hard work is done by another computer and all the workstation has to do is send requests and show the results.
What is HTTP and HTTPS?
Internet
HTTP or Hypertext Transfer Protocol, is a common set of rules for how computers communicate with each other over a network. It is used for retrieving resources such as HTML files and images on The Web.
Using HTTP your browser sends a request to the web server. The web server then responds also using HTTP.
HTTPS is an acronym for Secure HTTP which is a secure way of transferring data. The data is encrypted before being sent over the network.
What is an SWF file?
Internet
.swf files are complied Flash files ready for deployment on the web.
When creating Flash files they are saved as .fla files. In order to view the file on the web in the Flash Player, they need to be compiled into a .swf file.
What is Flash?
Internet
Flash or Adobe Flash is a platform for adding multimedia to websites such as images, animation, sound and video. It is owned by Adobe and can be found on just about any web browser as an add-on. The format was born out of a need for rich media on the web at a time when web browsers where limited to static images or simple animated GIF files.
Flash started as a simple way to create vector graphic animations for the web and is still used for this purpose but today Flash is a highly sophisticated package with its own programming language (Actions Script), video formats and various versions for all popular operating systems and browsers.
Although it is strongly associated with vector graphics, the format can be used for displaying bitmaps too as well as video and playing music for that matter. Many websites use the format for rich media such as YouTube and BBC iPlayer for delivering video.
What is The Deep Web?
Internet
Search engines have crawled and indexed hundreds of billions of pages on the web, but this is just a fraction of the true size of the content available.
Search engines browse the web looking for pages. They look for links and follow these links, always on the hunt for pages to index and they are very good at this. They are not very good at finding pages with no links to them though. They can not perform searches on websites they way we would, and so have no access to content that is generated on the fly by a search or form that a human would use.
The deep web is the content that search engines do not have access too.
How do you Pronounce WWW?
Internet
In English the most common way to pronounce WWW is double-u double-u double-u.
Dub dub dub is also used but not often heard outside technical circles.
What is SEO?
Internet
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is all about making your website’s content and topic as clear as possible to a search engine such as Google. It is about showing the search engine that your content is very relevant and should be ranked highly.
It is a field full of big words, the unscrupulous, miss-direction and confusion because everyone wants to be at the top of search results and so people are willing to part with money in order to do so.
If you are unfamiliar with SEO, all you really need to know, and here is the big secret, is that Google, Bing, Yahoo and all the other search engines want to provide a good service. They are fighting tooth and claw to get people to use them. For this reason they each want to be the one that provides the best quality websites for every search a person makes.
So the secret is that they will rank highly a website that a visitor will find useful.
That is the whole trick to SEO. To rank highly with search engines, create a website that people, not computers, but humans will appreciate.
What is a PNG File?
Design, Internet
PNG or Portable Network Graphics files are bitmap images using lossless compression. They were designed to replace GIF image files but have taken a long time to become commonly used due to a lack of support by the Internet Explorer browser.
These issues have now been resolved and the format is quickly taking the place of GIF files where animation is not required.
This type of image is best used with none photographic images that use sharp lines and blocks of colour. They do not compress as well as JPEGs but neither do they lose any quality in compression.
The best use for PNG files is where an image needs to use transparency. Although an area of a GIF image can be transparent, they can only use up to 256 colours and only one level of transparency, while PNG files can use millions of colours and have varying levels of transparency. For this reason a transparent area of a GIF file will be jagged and pixelated while a PNG file can be smooth or fuzzy in order to blend in seamlessly with its background.
What Does Google It Mean?
Internet
This is a modern colloquialism for using a search engine. When you google something, you search for something using a search engine such as Google or Bing.
What is a Search Engine?
Internet
The Internet is huge with billions of files and pages in every language and on every topic. For this reason people decided to index it to make it easier to find what you are looking for. At first this was done manually but due to the explosion of content, people could not keep up and automated search engines where born which would crawl the web looking for new content and indexing it as best they could.
These crawlers also called web bots are just servers that read the content of pages like we would read them using a web browser. They try to work out what the page is about, and then index them.
When you go to a search engine such as Google or Bing, you are presented with an input box where you type what you are searching for. In the test you submit, the search engine then trawls through the billions of indexed pages to find a best match to your query.
Today Google rules the search engines but there are many to choose from and although Google is the biggest, Bing and Yahoo also do a great job of it.
Over the years they have become very sophisticated and good and guessing what you are after. They try hard to make it very simple for you, allowing you to type in a question, and then present you with a list of pages the search engine thinks you are after.
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