Part of Microsoft's Server software that allows for the creation of dynamically generated web pages.

Next time you see a video clip on your Mac, there's a good chance that it's an AVI file. AVI is the file format used by Video. For Macintosh they are MPEG and QuickTime. In AVI, picture and sound elements are stored in alternate interleaved chunks in the file.

Any picture you see on the Web (or hot off a scanner, or on a page created with a desktop publishing application) is called a bitmap. As its name suggests, a bitmap is a map of dots--similar to what you see when you look at a newspaper photo under a strong magnifying glass--that looks like a picture when viewed from a distance. Bitmaps come in many file formats (GIF, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PICT, and PCX, to name a few) and can be read by paint programs and image editors such as Adobe Photoshop.

Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology that lets you connect computers, mobile phones, and handheld devices to each other and to the Internet. Bluetooth technology eliminates the need for the cables that connect devices together. Bluetooth-enabled devices connect wirelessly within a 10 meter (30 foot) range. Do not confuse bluetooth with Airport. Airport is wirelessly connectng to the internet and has a range of 150' (ten stories) from its base station.

If you can read this, it's highly likely that you're using a Web browser. In brief, a browser is your interface to the World Wide Web; it interprets hypertext links and lets you view sites and navigate from one Internet node to another. Among the companies that produce browsers are Mosaic, Netscape, and Microsoft, as well as commercial services like America Online.

Caches come in many types, but they all work the same way: they store information where you can get to it fast. A Web browser cache stores the pages, graphics, sounds, and URLs of online places you visit on your hard drive; that way, when you go back to the page, everything doesn't have to be loaded all over again. Since disk access is much faster than Internet access, this speeds things up.

A CD-ROM format that enables you to record data onto compact discs so that regular CD-ROM drives can read it. With a CD-R drive, you can record data onto a recordable disc on different occasions, known to experts as multiple sessions.

A cookie is a small data file that certain Web sites write to your hard drive when you visit them. A cookie file can contain information such including a user ID that the site uses to track the pages you've visited. But the only personal information a cookie can contain is information you supply yourself. A cookie can't read data off your hard disk or read cookie files created by other sites.

The CPU--a highly complex silicon chip ranging from the size of a matchbook to wallet-sized --is your computer's brain, taking requests from applications and then processing, or executing, actions, aka operations. The faster your processor, the more operations it can execute per second. The more operations you have per second, the faster things happen in your applications; thus, games play more smoothly, and spreadsheets calculate more quickly. Sometimes the term CPU is also used to describe the whole box that contains the chip (along with the motherboard, expansion cards, disk drives, power supply, and so on). Both uses are widespread, but only the first is really accurate.

An acronym for Cathode Ray Tub, CRT's are for all practical purposes, picture tubes. However, the term CRT has become the often used term for a computer station or monitor. With the coming of the new flat-panel computer, we are disguishing between as calling the older model the CRT iMac.