Internet glossary

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LAN (Local Area Network) - A computer network limited to the immediate area, usually the same building or floor of a building.

Leased Line - Refers to line such as a telephone line or fiber-optic cable that is rented for exclusive 24-hour, 7-days-a-week use from your location to another location. The highest speed data connections require a leased line.

Leet - Short for elite. Jargon used by hackers and crackers to refer to themselves or to the sites they frequent to share pirated software and information.

Link - The URL imbedded in another document, so that if you click on the highlighted text or button referring to the link, you retrieve the outside URL. If you search the field "link:", you retrieve on text in these imbedded URLs which you do not see in the documents.

Linux - A widely used Open Source Unix-like operating system. Linux was first released by its inventor Linus Torvalds in 1991. There are versions of Linux for almost every available type of computer hardware from desktop machines to IBM mainframes. The inner workings of Linux are open and available for anyone to examine and change as long as they make their changes available to the public. This has resulted in thousands of people working on various aspects of Linux and adaptation of Linux for a huge variety of purposes, from servers to TV-recording boxes. Internet glossary.

Listservers - A discussion group mechanism that permits you to subscribe and receive and participate in discussions via e-mail. Blogs and RSS feeds provide some of the communication functionality of listservers.

Login - 1) The account name used to gain access to a computer system. Not a secret (contrast with Password). 2) the act of connecting to a computer system by giving your credentials (usually your "username" and "password"). Internet glossary.

Lossy - A term coined by graphics programmers to refer to a technique of shrinking file sizes by giving away some precision of detail. JPEG is the most common of these. By reducing the so-called quality of a picture when you save it, you can make the file size smaller. Many pictures can take a lot of loss of fine detail before it becomes noticeable on a web page.

Luser - A user who is a loser. The result of a dispute at MIT some years ago where computer error messages referred to errors by users. Others changed users to losers, and the dispute continued until someone coined the term lusers, which everyone liked.