You’ve suddenly found yourself in a café in the Art District and have no clue how you got there—it happens to the best of us. You are bored for company and are wondering how to break into the group of digital video (DV) geeks in the corner.

“CMOS or CCD?” one of them asks after you exchange names. CCDs are Charge Coupled Devices, used for image sensing. The best digital cameras use 3-CCD arrangements to get top-quality video, and cost you half a kingdom. And CMOS (Complimentary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) is a cheaper but slightly lower-quality approach to image sensing, but it’s getting better.

Just say, “Oh CCD, no doubt. No compromises on quality”, this will have them swooning at your discerning eye and bottomless wallet (Ahem!).

Regular video is interlaced —the image is divided into two sets of lines that are displayed alternately to fool the human eye into believing it’s seeing a high-quality image. Progressive Scanned video displays all these lines in sequence, storing five times as much information in the frame. The result is High Definition Video (HDV), where faster movements appear much crisper than in interlaced video.

Video usually runs at 24 frames per second (fps). Saying “I’m shooting my next with a 24P camera” means that your video will run at 24 fps and is progressively scanned, and roughly translates to “I’m a George Lucas in the making!’”

DV25 is the standard compression format for DV; an hour of DV25 video takes up about 13 GB of space and is the best possible quality outside of raw, uncompressed video. MPEG-2 is another compression format that started out as a format for distribution, but is now used in recording as well.

“Real Men don’t compress,” you scoff, leaving them burbling something about more video on the same tape while you beckon a cab to take you home.

Every device you buy today boasts of one or more ways to network it. however, not all of us are as comfortable with networking terms. We hope this will help…
CAT: CAT5/CAT6 are fifth and sixth generation Ethernet twisted pair cable standards defined by the Electronics Industries Association and Telecommunications Industry Association (EIA/TIA). CAT has nothing to do with felines.

Usage: Someone brought a cat to the office, but unfortunately the cat had a liking for CAT cables. Now we’re planning on implementing a WLAN!

Network Address: A network address is a unique identifier for a computer on a network. Computers determine the addresses of other computers on the network and then use these to send messages to each other. An example of a network address is the Internet Protocol (IP) address, or the Media Access Control (MAC) address.

IP: An IP address uniquely identifies computers on a network. It can be private, for use on a LAN, or public, for use on the Internet. IP addresses can be assigned as static IPs (by a system administrator) or dynamic IPs (on demand, automatically, by another device on the network).

MAC: Device manufacturers permanently burn a Media Access Control (MAC) identification into networking devices, so that they can be identified easily. Using a MAC address authentication, computers can ensure that they connect to the right destination everytime, preventing fake devices from claiming to be the destination for data.

Usage: There was a hack attempt recently, some guy got hold of a networked IP address on our WLAN. He then used that address to spoof himself and identify with the WLAN and started deleting files at random. Chaos ensued, but our systems engineer used a lookup to find his MAC address, which we then traced to his internet IP address. His current address is jail!

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) undertaking. It aims to process sentences written in a language such as English so as to extract meaning from them and represent this meaning in a manner that a computer can understand. If you want to portray yourself as an AI practitioner, simply say that amongst all AI disciplines, you like NLP best and then go on to describe how you do it.

• How do you make a computer understand English?

  To this, you reply, “That’s what NLP is for. You break up the sentences into parts of speech, and then parse it just as you would any other string, of course, ellipsis is one major hurdle.” (‘Ellipsis’ means an instance where the context is not available.)

• What is ellipsis? Intimidate your audience here. “You don’t know what ellipsis is? Say you reply to a question about your name with ‘John Smith’. Here, you haven’t specified what John Smith is and that’s ellipsis.”
• Your audience will probably ask you at this point, “So that’s all there is to NLP? Parts of speech and parsing?”

  Since you don’t know too much yourself, you launch off into unfamiliar words— “No, no, there’s actually much more. You have got to consider things like failure of substitutivity, you have to learn to use the FOPC and HMMs, construct working grammars and much more.”

• What is FOPC and HMM?

  Remember to learn the full form—First Order Predicate Calculus. It sounds nice and AIish. Of course, you deliberately use the abbreviations in the first instance, so you can expand them later. HMM stands for ‘Hidden Markov Model’.

• Finish off with: “Like I said, it’s basically the manipulation of the parse tree. You construct the tree and do all sorts of things with it. I can direct you to a tutorial if you like.”

tree and do all sorts of

things with it. I can direct you

to a tutorial if you like.”

Every device you buy today boasts of one or more ways to network it. however, not all of us are as comfortable with networking terms. We hope this will help…

CAT: CAT5/CAT6 are fifth and sixth generation Ethernet twisted pair cable standards defined by the Electronics Industries Association and Telecommunications Industry Association (EIA/TIA). CAT has nothing to do with felines.

Usage: Someone brought a cat to the office, but unfortunately the cat had a liking for CAT cables. Now we’re planning on implementing a WLAN!

Network Address: A network address is a unique identifier for a computer on a network. Computers determine the addresses of other computers on the network and then use these to send messages to each other. An example of a network address is the Internet Protocol (IP) address, or the Media Access Control (MAC) address.

IP: An IP address uniquely identifies computers on a network. It can be private, for use on a LAN, or public, for use on the Internet. IP addresses can be assigned as static IPs (by a system administrator) or dynamic IPs (on demand, automatically, by another device on the network).

MAC: Device manufacturers permanently burn a Media Access Control (MAC) identification into networking devices, so that they can be identified easily. Using a MAC address authentication, computers can ensure that they connect to the right destination everytime, preventing fake devices from claiming to be the destination for data.

Usage: There was a hack attempt recently, some guy got hold of a networked IP address on our WLAN. He then used that address to spoof himself and identify with the WLAN and started deleting files at random. Chaos ensued, but our systems engineer used a lookup to find his MAC address, which we then traced to his internet IP address. His current address is jail!

Motherboards in our computers are reminiscent of Star Trek, the TV show from the ‘70s and ‘80s. Back then, they looked complex enough for space technology and performed complex operations.

The point we are making is the motherboard is the main man (!) as far as your PC is concerned. Honestly, everything that’s involved in running the computer smoothly or enhancing its performance is either part of the motherboard or plugs into it via a slot or a port. It’s like the “mothership” that has all other vital components on it including the processor, memory slots, and many expansion slots for add-ons such as Graphics Card, Sound Card and so on.

A motherboard contains thousands of chips and capacitors that ensure each and every component is getting optimum electric supply from the main power supply for its functioning. This physical construction of chips and integrated circuits on a base is called the “chipset”.

Chipsets have various designs; and different systems prefer different designs. Motherboards have come a long way over the last twenty years. The first motherboards held very few actual components. The first IBM PC motherboard had only a processor and card slots.

Here’s some more dope to get you through a conversation as an expert: A typical motherboard today would have a PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) slot, AGP (Accelerator Graphics Port) slot, North Bridge, Processor Socket, South Bridge, BIOS (Basic Input/ Output System), USB (Universal Serial Bus), FireWire and IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics).

Knowing names of motherboards or Graphic Cards by rote is like the MCSE of Geekiness and it would be handy to know “MSI K8N NEO4 Platinum”, “ASUS A8V Deluxe” or “ASUS A8N-E”. If you can roll these off your tongue, you’re good to go!

To be honest, .NET is a lot of things. Actually, we know so little about .NET that we were ourselves tempted to bluff our way through it this month!

Well, anyway, .NET is “software that connects information, people, systems, and devices. It spans clients, servers, and developer tools”—whatever that means. Just remember to use those words when talking about .NET!

Now, Microsoft .NET consists of many things:

• The .NET Framework 1.1, used for building and running all kinds of software
• Developer tools, such as Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003
• A set of servers Client software such as Windows XP

Now you at least know what .NET is. So, what’s the .NET Framework? Basically, it is “an integral Windows component for building and running the next generation of software applications and Web services.”

In addition, it is composed of the common language runtime (CLR) and a unified set of class libraries.

Pay attention! The CLR is responsible for run-time services such as language integration, CLR security enforcement, and memory, process, and even thread management.

Here’s how to sound as though you know about .NET programming: just say, “I’m currently working on crosslanguage exception handling. That has a lot to do with strong typing: and runtime binding as well; .NET makes it easy for me to use class libraries to do the exception handling without having to go into the intricacies of Windows Forms.”

Of course, that doesn’t make any sense, but then again, who’ll ever know?

BASH: The Bourne-Again Shell is the default shell (command line interface) in most Linux distributions.

Console: When you log into Linux in text mode (command line) from the X Window System, you are said to be in the console.

Daemon: A program that runs actively in the background.

GNOME: The GNU Network Object Model Environment is a Windows-style desktop window manager.

GNU: A recursive acronym, GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix”. It is a project that was launched in 1984 to develop free Unix-like OSes.

GPL: The GNU ‘General Public License’ is a licensing that requires software coders to make the source code (for programs they create) available freely, in order to qualify for the certification. The Linux kernel and most of the bundled applications in Linux have this license.

KDE: A window manager similar to GNOME.

Man: Short for ‘manual’, it is the user manual that accompanies most GPL software.

Open Source: Software that distributes its source codes openly, such as all software under the GPL.

Usage: “I reinstalled the Linux kernel the other day. Something happened to GNOME and KDE though, I rebooted and all I got was the BASH prompt! I looked at all the man pages available online, but nothing! Sometimes I feel Open Source isn’t all it’s cracked up to be!”

Digit >> Your Technology Navigator >>

Here are some bouncers from the vault of Linux jargon to help you leave your friends reeling.

Framebuffer

The Linux framebuffer or fbdev is a graphics layer to show graphics on a console. It is hardwareindependent and it does not rely on system-specific binaries. It is also lightweight, unlike the X Windows system. It was originally developed for Apple Macintosh computers. These do not have a text-mode display, so it was developed so the text-mode could be emulated. It was later expanded to the IBM PC platform and became popular.

LSB

LSB is an acronym for The Linux Standard Base—a joint project by several Linux distributions. It was set under The Free Standards Groups, with the objectives of standardising the internal structure of Linux OSes. It is based on POSIX and several other open standards. It is sometimes disputed, as it promotes Red Hat’s RPM format, so Debian does not accept it. For more information, visit linuxbase.org.

Staog

Viruses on Linux OSes are rare; however, many viruses for Linux have been found, and Staog was the first of them. It was found in late 1996. Some other Linux viruses are Bliss, Devnull, Ramen, Slapper, Adore, and Kork.

LAMP

An acronym for a set of free software to run dynamic web sites, it includes Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. These programs were originally not designed to run together, but they became popular because of low cost and easy availability. This term first appeared in a German computing magazine (- c’t), in 1998. Lamp is also the name of an obsolete movie player software.

You already know that lawyers use such terms as ‘hereinunder’ ‘wheretofore’ and so on. But what kinds of terms do IT lawyers use, under the Information Technology Act of 2000? Here’s a sampler.

Computer: According to IT lawyers, this does not refer to the box you’re so familiar with. It manipulates electronic, magnetic, or optical impulses, and for good measure, includes all input, output, processing, storage, and blah blah, that are connected—or even related—to the computer.

Access: No, this is not about usernames and passwords. Access is, as it turns out, “with its grammatical variations and cognate expressions,” gaining entry into, instructing or communicating with the logical, arithmetical, or memory resources of a computer. Phew! Actually, there’s more to it than that, but we didn’t understand it.

Time and place of despatch and receipt of electronic record: We doubt that even the lawyers understand this section of the Act. It says in the Act that the despatch of an electronic record occurs when it enters a computer resource “outside the control of the originator.” This is something related to AI and robotics: computers communicating all by themselves, without human intervention…

Penalty for damages:It turns out that whatever damage you inflict upon a computer, you don’t need to pay the owner more than Rs 1 crore. If you download a virus onto someone’s computer, expect a lawyer to refer to it as “introducing, or causing to be introduced, any computer contaminant or virus into a computer.” ‘Contaminant’?

Wonder what that means… Residuary Penalty: Whoever contravenes any rules or regulations under the IT Act is liable to pay Rs 25K to someone hurt by your activities! So next time someone makes your WIndows crash, remember to ask him to shell out.

The world’s been in love with Apple’s products since the launch of the first iMac, and after the iPod, Apple’s iCult has expanded manifold—fans are falling over themselves claiming they know what the next iProduct is going to be. Here, we present a quick guide to iProducts that exist, don’t exist, and aren’t even Apple. Of course, you’ll need to figure out which ones are which first—we sure aren’t going to tell you! Like they say, the best way to learn bluffing is to be on the receiving end once in a while.

iHome: Apple’s answer to the Windows Media Center PCs, this gorgeous iMac-based media centre came on to the scene around MacWorld 2005.

iTV: This is supposedly just a code-name for the videostreaming device. The set top box will let you watch highdefinition video on your television, and is about the size of a Mac Mini.

iWalk: Really now, the Newton debacle had to be avenged eventually, didn’t it? The iWalk PDA will even run Palm applications thanks to the emulation layer on its *nix-based OS.

iDog: This Aibo-esque pet will dance to your music at your slightest whim—and if that music comes from your iPod, even better!

iTablet: Using Apple’s patented multi-touchscreen, you can now use all your fingers to “crush” a big window, a la Minority Report!

iPhone: Is it fake? Is it real? Rumours of Apple’s “inevitable” music phone have been entertaining us for ages. We predict three new rumours between our writing this and your reading it.

Now go online and find out— iReal or iFake?