Jargon Buster

Fiber

Optical fiber is made of flexible glass and can support very high data transfer rates. An individual glass fiber, roughly the thickness of a human hair, is capable of carrying a distinct signal transmitted in the form of pulses of light. A single strand of fiber is capable of transmitting over a million simultaneous telephone calls, or nearly 80 gigabits of digital information per second (80,000,000,000 pulses of light per second), using commercially available telecommunications equipment

Filename extension

Commonly a three or four-letter extension on the end of a file name designating the file type. There are hundreds in existence, and new ones frequently being invented. Examples are: .txt (text file), .gif (image)

Firewall

is a computer security system used to restrict access to and from a network

Flash

is a vector graphics based animation program. The resulting files, sometimes called "flash files", may be included in a web page to view in a web browser, or they may be played on a standalone player

Forms

Certain Browsers support electronic fill-in forms. Users can fill in a form on a Web Page, and the information sent electronically to the relevant domain site

FTP

File Transfer Protocol is one of the main ways files are transferred across the Internet. An FTP Site is that which is provided by a company or organization as a depository for all kinds of files which users may download