DUMMIES DAILY: Nerd Word of the Day #5
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TODAY'S eTIP(TM):


*1. Feel Over Look

Today's Term: Texture
Computer graphics experts discovered long ago that 3-D 
images didn't look real no matter how high the 
resolution or how superb the lighting and shadows. 
Images also needed texture, the appearance of surface 
irregularities and reflections that real-world 
materials would show. Today's PCs are fast enough to 
add textures to images, storing the textures as 
patterns that are then applied to the areas of polygons
within the graphic.


*2. KDE Did Desktop

Today's Term: KDE
KDE is one of the most popular graphical user 
interfaces or desktops for UNIX operating systems, such
as Linux. It provides those menus, icons, and mouse 
controls familiar to Windows and Macintosh users. But 
unlike those programs, KDE is an open-source program. 
You are free to look at its instructions to see how it 
works, change it as you like, and to copy it as many 
times as you need for free.


*3. Alpha Or Omega

Today's Term: Alpha
The Alpha family of microprocessors is famous for being
sophisticated, powerful, and fast. Based on the RISC 
architecture -- Reduced Instruction Set Computing -- 
Alpha's design rejects having a long list of 
fundamental operations in favor of having a few 
operations that it can perform very, very quickly. 
Digital Equipment -- now part of Compaq -- designed the
Alpha processor. Some potent workstations have been 
designed using the Alpha, but it has had little market 
life in competition against Intel's popular X86 line of
microprocessors, which includes the recent Pentium 
III.


*4. Role In The MUD

Today's Term: MUD
A Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) is the most common expansion
of MUD, perhaps because these online role-playing games
sprang from the offline Dungeons & Dragons games of the
'70s. But MUD can also be interpreted as Multi-User 
Domain or Multi-User Dimension, which are less dorky 
terms that mean the same thing. In any translation, a 
MUD is an online community where multiple participants 
can use as a virtual living space to interact through 
fictional roles.


*5. No Exorcism Necessary

Today's Term: Daemon
Pronounced "demon" by most, but "damon" by a few, a 
daemon is a software routine or process that runs in 
the background. That is, it operates without your 
knowledge, while other more obvious programs are 
appearing on screen, or even while your computer 
appears to be idle. The Daemon performs its specified 
chores at set times or when it detects a specified 
event. For example, it might automatically print 
something, forward an e-mail message, or clean up a 
hard drive. In essence, daemons are software robots, 
trained for specific tasks.


*6. Raiders Of The Lost Tomb

Today's Term: Lara Croft
Lara is the hero of the Tomb Raider game. She's agile, 
able, armed, and amply 3-D endowed, wearing skimpy 
outfits as she blasts her way through the opposition. 
She has managed to expand her career beyond just the 
game itself, to TV, movies, plenty of posters, a a few 
action-figure toys thrown in for good measure.


*7. Domo's Day

Today's Term: Majordomo
In the non-tech world, a Major-Domo is the head servant
in an old-fashioned household. In the tech domain, a 
Majordomo is a particular UNIX program that maintains a
mailing list, helping e-mail recipients sign up for or 
unsubscribe to a regular flow of e-mail messages. Its 
main competition is the popular LISTSERV program.


*8. Sans Gas

Today's Term: Bubble Memory.
You don't see it around anymore, but Bubble Memory was 
once a hot topic and a valued technology. Using special
magnetic materials, it stored information as mobile 
bits within a solid-state, no-moving-parts device. This
made it enticing to mobile-technology designers who 
wanted ruggedness, low-power, and non-volatility. 
Bubble memory kept its information even after system 
power was turned off. Advances in Flash Memory and 
other non-volatile RAM chips made bubble memory 
obsolete, and unable to keep up in the speed and 
density departments.


*9. Writing For Coffee

Today's Term: JavaScript
Most modern Web browser programs understand the 
JavaScript programming language invented by Netscape. 
Web pages can contain JavaScript programs that do 
anything from open additional web page windows to 
animating text within a window. Microsoft's Internet 
Explorer browser supports a limited version of 
JavaScript instructions with its JScript language. 
JavaScript is a scripting language, and not the same 
thing as Java, the more complex and powerful 
programming language invented by Sun Microsystems. The 
similar names are a needless confusion.


*10. Exercising 3-D

Today's Term: Isometric
There are many ways to try to show a 3-D image on the 
flat 2D surface of a display screen. One is the 
Isometric view that shows the height, width, and depth 
of objects but doesn't deal with the perspective of the
viewer. Instead the height, width, and depth are kept 
in relation to one another.
