Glossary of terms used on this site
There are 88 entries in this glossary.A
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| ADSL |
Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. ADSL is a technology to transmit digital information at high bandwidths across existing copper phone lines. Download speeds are typically much faster than upload speeds (hence the term "asymmetric"). Also more commonly referred to simply as "broadband". |
| AGP |
Advanced Graphics Port. Graphics card interface for high performance graphics (faster than PCI). Specification Denoted Notes AGP 1.0 AGP AGP x1 AGP x2 Supports 1x and 2x adapter cards. Uses a signal level of 3.3 volts. AGP 1.0 adapter cards have a different slot arrangement from AGP 2.0 (and later) and therefore an AGP 1.0 adapter card will not fit into an AGP 2.0 slot. AGP 2.0 AGP x4 Supports 4x adapter cards, i.e. 4 times faster than the original AGP specification. Uses a signal level of 1.5 volts. AGP 3.0 AGP x8 Supports 8x adapter cards. Uses a signal level of 0.8 volts. The slot for AGP 3.0 is identical to that for AGP 2.0. AGP 2.0 and AGP 3.0 cards and motherboards should be compatible with each other - but an AGP 8x card fitted to a motherboard that only supports AGP 4x will be forced to work at the slower 4x rate. |
| Anti-Aliasing |
The blurring of the jagged "stair-step" appearance in graphical elements such as lines, curves, circles, and particularly in fonts. Jagged edges occur when the resolution of an image is too coarse to achieve the appearance of smoothness. Thus, smoothing can blur the roughness of a jagged line by shading or colouring neighbouring pixels. This technique makes the transition between light and dark (or between two colours) less distinct and therefore less visible, at the cost of making it look more blurry. Also known as smoothing, and sometimes abbreviated to simply AA. |
| ASCII |
American Standard Code for Information Interchange. In ASCII the letters of the alphabet, digits and various punctuation symbols are assigned a unique 7 bit number (0-127). cf Unicode. On most systems there is also an additional set of 128 "extended ASCII codes" that are used to represent a variety of other symbols. These extended codes are not part of the ASCII standard. |
| AVI |
Audio Video Interleave. AVI is a method of saving video (sound and vision) to a file, which is then often referred to as a .avi (dot-avi) file. |
