DUMMIES DAILY: Nerd Word of the Day #4
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TODAY'S eTIP(TM):


*1. BCC It My Way

Today's Term: BCC
The Blind Carbon Copy -- or now that carbon paper has 
faded from sight, the Blind Courtesy Copy -- is a copy 
of an e-mail sent to someone other than the main To 
recipient, without revealing that any copy was sent. 
This is different from a CC that lists the 
copy-recipient's address in all versions of the e-mail 
message.


*2. Boomerang

Today's Term: Bounce
When an e-mail you've sent comes right back to you with
a message that it was "undeliverable," that e-mail has 
"bounced." Why was it undeliverable? Many are the 
possibilities, from a simple network slowdown -- some 
systems bounce messages if they can't be delivered 
within four hours -- to a disconnected e-mail address.


*3. An Applet A Day

Today's Term: Applet
If Applications are programs, then Applets should be 
little programs. And they are. Because they're little 
-- taking up only a small amount of disk space, memory,
or bandwidth -- they're typically devoted to just a 
single task. Calculators, Calendars, and the like are 
often called "applets." The Java programming language 
is frequently used to create online applets that run 
within a browser.


*4. Pantone Zone

Today's Term: Pantone
The Pantone color matching system offers hundreds of 
accurate, precise, and numbered colors. By specifying 
these colors when you send a print job to a service 
bureau, you can be sure of getting just the color you 
intend.


*5. Panic Attack

Today's Term: Panic
Panic is programmer slang for a system or computer 
crash, or for the fatal error that causes the crash.
It may also become slang for the attitude of 
day-traders working with dot-com options.


*6. It's Da Bomb

Today's Term: Mail Bomb
Mad at some company that won't respond to your e-mail 
requests, you send thousands, tens of thousands of 
e-mails to their customer service address, or to every 
address you can find of everyone in the company. You've
just "mail bombed" them. It could crash their site or 
server, or just cause their e-mail handlers a lot of 
frustrating trouble. Some advice: don't. At best, 
you'll make trouble for system administrators who 
weren't responsible for your hurts. At worst, you'll 
interrupt access for someone else that really needs 
it.


*7. You Brighten Up My Life

Today's Term: Luminance
Luminance is the part of the signal from computer to 
display screen that dictates how bright the image 
should be. It is sometimes also used for the brightness
controls on the display screen.


*8. Modus Operandi

Today's Term: MO
Magneto-Optical (MO) drives can read and write large 
amounts of information. They use both a laser and a 
magnet to write information. The laser heats the disk 
surface enough that the magnet can change the polarity 
of small areas. They read information using only the 
magnet, which can sense those polarities. MO can access
data more quickly than magnetic or CD-ROM drives can.


*9. Grep Me

Today's Term: Grep
Grep -- actually typed lowercase in most usage -- is a 
UNIX command to search for a particular text string. 
Naturally, nerds see the world as just a larger hard 
drive, and so use "grep" as a cooler synonym for 
"search" in most any circumstance.


*10. A Different Linux Vintage

Today's Term: WINE
WINE stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. That's a bit 
of a recursive joke, just like GNU, which stands for 
Gnu's Not Unix. Both WINE and GNU are parts of the 
open-source GNU/LINUX operating system, often just 
called Linux for short.

WINE is a Windows emulator. When you add it to 
GNU/Linux, or other similar X Windows systems, you can 
run some Windows programs without owning Windows.

GNU is largely the set of software tools that set the 
stage for the Linux kernel to be practical as an 
alternative to operating systems such as Windows and 
Macintosh.
