| Word or
Term |
Description
or Explanation |
| Gateway |
a computer which links together two or more
separate networks |
| Gb |
Gigabyte - approximately one thousand million
bytes of computer data (actually, it is 1K × 1K × 1Kb =
230 = 1024 × 1024 × 1024 = 1,073,741,824 bytes.) |
| Genlock |
this is a device which enables the output
from the computer's video system to synchronised with a normal video signal so
that computer-generated text and graphics can be superimposed on the video
signal |
| Get a life |
what to say to somebody who has, perhaps,
been spending a wee bit too much time in front of a computer |
| GIF |
Graphics Interchange Format - a standard
format for storing and transferring bit-mapped graphics in compressed
format |
| GIMP |
Graphic Image Manipulation Package - the
standard GNU bitmap paint package |
| Gnome |
one of the two main windowing environments
for Linux, KDE being the other |
| GNU |
a recursive acronym, standing for "GNU's not
Unix" - it is the name of a project begun by Richard Stallman's Free Software
Foundation to write a freeware Unix system to replace the (then) commercial
Unixes - they didn't actually succeed, per se, but did produce a wide variety
of tools and free versions of common Unix utilities which have subsequently
been ported to a variety of platforms - the best known of these tools are the
EMACS editor and the GCC, the GNU C Compiler |
| GnuPG |
a free replacement for PGP |
| Gopher |
essentially a text-only precursor of the
World Wide Web - the user explores a Gopher server using a menu-driven
interface. - pges of textual information are often available, and also search
interfaces to databases - largely died the death since the World Wide Web stole
its thunder |
| Gopherspace |
the facilities and information linked
together by Gopher servers |
Graphically rich
online
documents |
text with added pictures! |
| Grey levels |
a photograph may have some areas completely
white and some completely black - most areas, however, will be somewhere in
between - if you wish to represent that picture electronically, you have to
judge the 'greyness' of each part of the picture - if you represent this on a
scale of 0 to 15 (16 grey levels), it will not give such a faithful
representation of the picture as if 64 or 256 grey levels were used - however,
the more grey levels used to represent each point on the picture, the more data
is being used - for example, in 256 grey levels, a full A4 picture scanned at
400 d.p.i. could occupy as much as 12Mb! |
| Group id (GID) |
a number used to identify a group of users in
the Unix operating system(s) |
| GUI |
Graphical User Interface - at one time,
virtually all interaction between humans and computers was done on the basis of
the human typing words or codes into some form of keyboard, and the displays
were only able to show text characters, not graphical images - as computing
power became more accessible, it became possible to provide a form of
interaction that was based far more on pictures (icons) within windows on the
screen - the user could then indicate choice and initiate action by using a
mouse or trackerball to move a pointer around the screen |
| GZIP |
Gnu Zip - a popular compressed file
format |