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Many new words have been formed in the area of computing in the past
few years... and more will soon appear in the market.
Many
new words have been formed in the area of computing in the past few
years. The Information Superhighway
and the Internet allow
computer users to connect with computers all over the world, and use
electronic mail: e-mail,
now used by many of us in preference to snail
mail, good old-fashioned letters sent in envelopes with
stamps on! Another starting point is the World
Wide Web - a system linking documents and pictures into
an information database that is stored in computers around the world and
that can be accessed with a single programme.
This is often abbreviated to www or
Web. These terms were all
virtually unknown three years ago.
The development of the World Wide Web has led to a large number of new
words. You log onto the
Internet through an access provider.
You can browse the web
using one of a number of search engines.
People and companies have Web pages
which you can click on.
If you find interesting pages, you can bookmark
them - ie save them for future use. If you do not have a
computer at home, you can go to a cybercafe
and log on from there. If you get very hooked and surf
for hours, you might describe yourself as a cybernaut
(though this is also used for someone who voyages through
cyberspace as in Star Wars), though other people are more likely to call
you a geek or a nerd,
or even a mouse potato:
someone who spends hours sitting in front of a computer just as a couch
potato is someone who spends hours sitting in front of a television. If
you have a web page, you are interested in the number of hits
you get - ie. the number of people who visit
your page. Your homepage can
have hotlinks to other
people’s homepages.
These days most of us are netizens -Internet
citizens - and we learn netiquette -
how to behave properly on the net (ie.
Internet). Today we do more and more via the net; e-mail,
of course, and e-business,
e-banking, e-ticketing
(the buying of airline or theatre tickets via the Internet);
and we can read e-zines (on-line
magazines). Not everyone likes this trend. There are those who suffer
from e-fear or e-depression,
especially if they have been victims of someone else’s net
rage.
The new millennium came over and the millennium
timebomb (luckily) did not come with it in the form of
the millennium bug.
Remember the expanded terror that most computers could not recognise the
date 2000 and crash? Well, fortunately no chaos at all...
GLOSSARY
hooked: addicted
geek: a boring person.
Source:
New English Digest - Author:
Gwyneth
Fox
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