DUMMIES DAILY: Nerd Word of the Day #1
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TODAY'S eTIP(TM):


*1. Pictures In Motion

Today's Term: MPEG
Pronounced "em-peg," this is short for Motion Picture 
Experts Group, a committee that works on standard 
schemes for compressing digital sound and video clips. 
It is also short for the group's standard, which has 
become the most popular way to store and play video on 
personal computers. Some computers have programs that 
understand and can play MPEG files; some computers have
special hardware that speeds up and smoothes out MPEG 
play. (By the way, the famous MP3 sound files are 
compressed using the sound portion of the MPEG standard
-- that's where the MP part of the name comes from.)


*2. Pointer To The Future

Today's Term: AIBO
Sony's Artificial Intelligence roBOt or Aibo 
[http://www.world.sony.com/Electronics/aibo] is a small
dog-shaped robot that can move, listen, and interact 
with you. Realistically it is a toy, but one that 
points toward future practical robots. After all, early
personal computers were largely toys.


*3. DAT's All Folks

Today's Term: DAT
Digital Audio Tape is a technology that records audio 
as digital bits on a thin tape that looks great deal 
like an 8mm video tape. Sony's DAT became popular with 
some budget-minded professionals and 
high-fidelity-minded amateurs, but didn't take much 
popular-music space from CD or cassette.


*4. Portable Bits

Today's Term: Memory Stick
Sony's Memory Stick is small, flat, rectangular card 
that contains memory chips. It is meant to fit into 
memory-stick slots in portable computers, digital 
cameras, digital camcorders, wireless phones and other 
electronic devices. It competes with other such 
memory-chip carrying designs, including the Compact 
Flash and SmartMedia.


*5. E-comm Pincer Attack

Today's Term: Click-and-Mortar
An e-commerce Web site that has a close link to a 
traditional physical-world store can be called a 
"click-and-mortar" strategy. A take-off on the 
"brick-and-mortar" description of traditional stores, 
click-and-mortar caught some investors' fancy as the 
best way to synergize the efficiency of Internet 
shopping with the established brand presence of 
old-fashioned stores.


*6. Portable Platform

Today's Term: Springboard
Handspring's Visor is a portable, handheld computer 
that runs the Palm operating system software. The Visor
is different from the various Palm models due to the 
special slot it has for add-on hardware. Called the 
Springboard, this is the place to plug in more memory, 
program cartridges, GPS location sensors, and other 
devices.


*7. Conjugal Confusion

Today's Term: Backup
Or is it Back Up? Or Back-up? And after you've saved 
your information to a safer place, made a copy of it to
protect against information loss, do you call yourself 
"backed up?" Some like this rule:
* back up: is the verb, the action, of making a safe 
copy.
* backup: is the noun, the safe copy itself.


*8. Of Our Teeth

Today's Term: Skins
A "skin" is a piece of software that can change the 
look of another piece of software. For example, 
MP3-playing programs -- which let you listen to sound 
stored in the MP3 format -- often have a wide variety 
of "skins" available. Each will give the player a 
different look on screen, with different colors, 
shapes, and buttons.


*9. Fly That Flag High

Today's Term: Banner
Those Web site ads that are rectangles across the top 
of the web page, or the bottom, or worst of all right 
in the middle, those ads that you can click in order to
immediately jump to the advertisers own web site, are 
called banner ads.


*10. Jack Is Not Back


Today's Term: Ripper
A ripper is a program that takes song from an audio CD 
in a computer's CD-ROM drive and turns the data into 
computer files, typically a .WAV format file. Then the 
song is ready to be recorded to a blank CD-R or CD-RW 
drive or encoded into an MP3 file.
