Computer/Technical Jargon

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Fanboy: A derogatory term applies to any person, male or female, who blindly follows a company or ideology. If the person is know to be female, they will be called a fangirl. Sometimes, it will be spelled fanboi. Fanboys will always ignore or mock evidence that makes the side they blindly follow appear bad. Frequently, but not always, fanboys go out of their way to say nothing but good about the thing they follow on message boards, review sites, in person, wherever and to say bad things about the competition or something that is in conflict with what they believe. Fanboys cannot be reasoned with. One of the best ways to tell if someone is a fanboy is see what they write or say. Look at what they say to see wheter they are objective or blind followers. The most devoted fanboys have been known to actually linger in a store convincing people not to buy a product they are against. See also troll.

FAT: File Allocation Table. One of the first file systems. It is very old and simple, created in 1977. But it is far from dead. Although for hard drives running Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista you want to use NTFS, it is far better to use FAT for removable storage, such as USB drives and floppy disks. The first version was FAT12 and is still used on disks less than 32 MB in size. FAT16 expands on the size limitation to 2 GB. Finally, FAT32 was created and it supported disks up to 8 TB, a limit which may be possible now that 1 TB hard drives are now on the market. See the Greek prefix section for how big this is. Early versions of FAT only supported file names of 8 characters and 3 extension characters long, such as 12345678.txt. Future version now limit to 255 total characters but still maintain compatibility with versions that do not support long file names. FAT is case insensitive, that is to say a file by the name of abc.txt is the same as ABC.TXT. See also NTFS.

File System: A method of managing stored data. This includes how a drive is identified, such as a drive letter, and where, such as a hard drive. The major file systems are Unix file system (also used in Linux), HFS plus used in Mac OS X, FAT used in MS-DOS and Windows 2/3/95/98/Me, and NTFS used in Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista. The FAT file system is almost universally compatible with all computers making it ideal for floppy disks and the new USB drives.

Firewall: A system that monitors network traffic to help increase security. A firewall can block out specific traffic you don't want going through.

FireWire: The common name IEEE-1394 interface. This is a common interface most often used with digital video, but can be used for to connect anything. IEEE-1394 can transfer data at 400 megabytes per second, IEEE-1394b transfers at 800 megabytes per second. Cables come in 4, 6, and 9 pin versions. The FCC requires all HDTV cable boxes to have FireWire support. FireWire cables are hot-swappable. The advantage FireWire over USB is greater speed and FireWire does not require a computer. FireWire is one of the many extensions of SCSI. Please note that FireWire has been given many names, including but not limited to i.Link, DV, and 1394. Apple gave the IEEE-1394 standard the name FireWire.

Flash memory: This is a type of memory that is able to retain its state when it loses power. Flash memory is used for USB drives, some hard drives, and other specialized applications.

Folder: Another name for a directory.

Format: When you format a drive you prepare it to be recognized and used by the Operating System. A quick format defines the file system and tells the OS that the disk is blank. A full format does that in addition checks every spot on the surface of the disk for defects. If a defect is found, it marks the spot as bad. A hard drive has some extra space just in case some spots go bad on the hard drive. During a full format that extra space will be made available if a bad spot is found. If there is no extra space to get, formatting will decrease the size of the hard drive. Many bad spots on the hard drive probably indicate a failing drive. A low-level format disks redefines the physical layout of the disk and should never be done for ATA disks. Most drives are ATA drives, only computer servers use anything other than ATA drives.

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