Computer/Technical Jargon

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Native Command Queuing: A technique used on hard drives to process requests in the most efficient way possible. Older hard drives process requests First-In First-Out (FIFO), just like waiting in a line or queue at the bank. However, though easy to implement, it isn't efficient for every situation. NCQ hard drives look at the queue and process requests based on the position of the read/write head. If, for instance, a piece of data is located at the end, the next request in the queue is near the center and the last is in the middle while the read/write head is at the end, the hard drive will process the end, middle, and center requests in that order even though the middle data was last. NCQ requires a SATA hard drive and a controller that supports NCQ, either on the motherboard or an add-in card.

Network Protocal: A common set of standards for communicating between computers. Just like if you were to communicate between two people you would both have to speak the same language, all computers need to speak the same language to communicate to each other. There are several protocals, none bigger than TCP/IP, the protocal used for the entire internet. There is also NetBIOS, NetBEUI, IPX/SPX, Apple Talk, and several others.

Newbie: A word describing someone who is new to something else. For example, new players who start playing on-line roleplaying games such as World of Warcraft are called newbies.

Newsgroup: A commonly used name for the usenet.

Noob: A deragotory and shortend form of the word newbie. Sometimes spelled n00b.

NTFS: New Technology File System. A file system introduced with Windows NT. NTFS has many advantages over FAT, the file system used in MS-DOS and Windows 3/3.1/95/98/Me. NTFS is less likely to experience data corruption than FAT. NTFS is faster than FAT. NTFS allows for selectable compression and selectable encryption of files, whereas in FAT any compression is to all the drive or none at all with a huge memory penalty. NTFS stores more data about files, such as last access time and last modified time. NTFS has built-in security. A user with specific permissions can limit access by other users, set quotas on disk usage, and other security features. The disadvantage of NTFS is computers not running Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista will have limited or no access to a NTFS disk. Like FAT, NTFS is case in-sensative, that is to say a file by the name of abc.txt is the same as ABC.TXT. If given a choice, you want your Windows to use NTFS.

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