Buzzwords

JAGGIES: Sometimes when a photograph or graphic file is displayed on a monitor, youll see a few jagged edges surrounding some objects. These rough edges are caused by an effect called aliasing. The aliasing features that are part of many graphics programs can cause extra pixels around an images hard edges especially those with diagonal lines. Software techniques that are used to smooth out the jaggies by setting nearby pixels to an intermediate color are called anti-aliasing.

JAVA: Its not an acronym. Sun Microsystems (www.sun.com) Java is a programming language that uses the most useful features of other languages and is designed to be easy to use. It was originally created to produce software for embedded systems in the electronics market and began as a subset of C++ and other languages. Its different from traditional C based languages (www.itpapers.com) because it is portable. Java also enables developers to write small applications called applets that can be embedded in a web site using standard HTML. It can transfer these applets from a server to a users web browser where they can be viewed on-screen. Java is everywhere; when I typed Java into Yahoo, there were 1700 pages of Java-related web sites listed.

JAZ: A removable media format created by Iomega Corporation (www.iomega.com) that offered cartridges with a capacity of 1 or 2GB. Unlike the Zip format that uses Bernoulli technology, Jaz cartridges feature a conventional Winchester hard disc design containing 31/2 magnetic disks and traditional style read/write heads. Because of this design, Jaz performance is much better than Zips. A Jaz drive, for example, has a 17.5 ms average access time, while Zips take 29 ms. Iomega discontinued manufacturing Jaz drives because of supply constraints but owners of existing drives can purchase both 1 and 2GB cartridges from their web site.

JOYSTICK: An input device that moves the cursor (or game functions in computer games) around the screen in a three-dimensional fashion that a mouse can only hope to accomplish. A joysticks lever can be moved through 360Þ and usually has buttons similar to a mouse, for additional functions.

JOLT: Java Open Language Toolkit

JPEG: is an acronym for a compressed image file format that was originally created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group, within the International Standards Organization. Unlike other compression schemesGIF (Graphic Interchange Format) comes to mindJPEG is what techies call a lossy method. JPEG was designed to discard information the eye cannot normally see and the compression process can sometimes be slow. By comparison, the LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch) compression used by GIF is lossless and no data is discarded during the compression process. JPEG compression breaks an image into discrete blocks of pixels, which are divided in half until compression ratios ranging from 10:1 to 100:1 are achieved. The greater the compression ratio thats produced, the greater loss of image quality you can expect.

JUMPER: A removable electrical connection found on motherboards and ex-pansion boards that let computer users change a circuit. Ive never had to move these little bits of plastic and metal on any of my Macintosh computers but have had to do so many timesalthough not recentlyon my Windows-based computers. The implementation of Micro-soft Windows XP plug-and-play standards has fully implemented the concept originally proposed in Windows 95, and has minimized and maybe even eliminated this kind of old-fashioned, hands-on hardware manipulation.