| Gb |
Gigabit - See Gigabit. Often misused instead of GB to mean Gigabyte. |
| GB |
Gigabyte - See Gigabyte. |
| Gbs |
Gigabits per second - A measurement of communication speed, typically used to describe fast Network speeds, e.g. 1Gbs networking is used in larger buildings for the network "backbone". See also Gigabit and Gigabit Ethernet. |
| Gecko |
The name of the Rendering engine at the heart of some of the most powerful "cross-Platform" Browsers; ~Firefox~, Mozilla and Netscape 6/7, plus several other non-Windows browsers. These browsers all support more of the Web Standards, and more accurately, than any version of Internet Explorer. This means they produce a more accurate rendering of modern (i.e. standards-based) Web Pages. |
| GIF |
Graphics Interchange Format - A proprietary image file format originally created by one of the early Internet content providers, Compuserve. GIF became a de facto Internet standard, and is still the most common format, but it has now been superseded by the superior PNG format. The main limitation of the GIF format is that it only supports 256 colours per file, although they can all be shades of pink if you want. It also does not support variable transparency. Modern formats support millions of colours. The GIF format was patented and subject to royalties, but its worldwide patents ran out in summer 2004. |
| Gig |
Contraction of Gigabit (usually Network speed), Gigabyte (usually disk space) or gigahertz (usually processor speed), depending on context. |
| Gigabit |
(abbreviation Gb) Approximately 1 thousand million Bits (actually = 2 to the power of 30 bits = 1,073,741,824 bits). A gigabit is an eighth of a Gigabyte. |
| Gigabit Ethernet |
A very fast form of Ethernet, commonly used for Server-to-server and Switch-to-switch connections. It is 10 times faster than Fast Ethernet. Gigabit Ethernet is often used with Fibre cabling, but it can also use Category 5e cabling over shorter distances. |
| Gigabyte |
(abbreviation GB) Approximately 1 thousand million Bytes (actually = 2 to the power of 30 bytes, or 1K times 1MB, quite a lot). Normally used as a measurement for disk capacity or communication throughput, e.g. a Web Hosting service might specify a maximum of 2GB of Traffic per month. Current hard disks hold 20 to 500GB, a CD holds 0.7GB, a DVD holds 4.5-9GB. |
| GNU |
GNU is Not Unix - A typically recursive name for an Open Source project that basically aims to recreate Unix, but bigger, better and most importantly, copyright-free. |
| Google |
Used to be something to do with cricket, but nowadays it is more likely to be a reference to the amazingly good Search Engine of that name, found at www.google.com. Google is so famous that people sometimes refer to "Googling", in the same way that "Hoovering" means pushing a vacuum cleaner around. My Hoover is actually a fridge/freezer, so I don't push it around much. |
| Googlewhack |
Now we are into the sad realms of people with time to waste and nothing better to do - A Googlewhack is a two-word search combination that yields only one result using the Google Search Engine. So what. |
| GPG |
Gnu Privacy Guard - A GPL-licensed Open-Source version of the hugely successful PGP Encryption Software. You might come across it if someone sends you an encrypted E-mail. If you haven't got the sender's Public Key, you won't be able to read the e-mail! |
| GPL |
General Public License - A Software licence that applies to the GNU project, and is widely used in the Open Source community for other products. In a nutshell it says that the software recipient may modify, give away or sell the software but must always publish any modifications and may not restrict anyone else from doing the same. It is the exact opposite of a typical "proprietary" software licence, and is also loosely known as "copylefting". |
