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Glossary of Terms - M

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Mac

Mac is a shortened version of Macintosh. The Macintosh is favoured by Graphic Designers and people working with image files.

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Maillist

(or Mailing List) A (usually automated) system that allows people to send e-mail to one address, whereupon their message is copied and sent to all of the other subscribers to the maillist. In this way, people who have many different kinds of e-mail access can participate in discussions together.

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Media

Media refers to any fixed or removable objects that store computer data. Examples of media include hard disks, floppy disks, CD disks, DVD disks, tapes, flash drives, USB sticks and compact discs.

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Megabyte

Technically speaking, a million bytes. In many cases the term means 1024 kilobytes, which is a more than an even million.

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Meta Tag

A specific kind of HTML tag that contains information not normally displayed to the user. Meta tags contain information about the page itself, hence the name ("meta" means "about this subject")

Typical uses of Meta tags are to include information for search engines to help them better categorize a page.

You can see the Meta tags in a page if you view the pages' source code.

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Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is a multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA, its most profitable products are the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software.

The company was founded to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. Microsoft rose to dominate the home computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by the Windows line of operating systems. Its products have all achieved near-ubiquity in the desktop computer market. One commentator notes that Microsoft's original mission was "a computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software." Microsoft possesses footholds in other markets, with assets such as the MSNBC cable television network, the MSN Internet portal, and the Microsoft Encarta multimedia encyclopedia. The company also markets both computer hardware products such as the Microsoft mouse as well as home entertainment products such as the Xbox, Xbox 360, Zune and MSN TV. The company's initial public stock offering (IPO) was in 1986; the ensuing rise of the company's stock price has made four billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees.

Throughout its history the company has been the target of criticism, including monopolistic business practices and anti-competitive strategies including refusal to deal and tying. The U.S. Justice Department and the European Commission, among others, have ruled against Microsoft for various antitrust violations accordingly in today's political-cultural climate of mixed economies and "public interest of society".

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MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions)

Originally a standard for defining the types of files attached to standard Internet mail messages. The MIME standard has come to be used in many situations where one computer programs needs to communicate with another program about what kind of file is being sent.

For example, HTML files have a MIME-type of text/html, JPEG files are image/jpeg, etc.

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Mirror

Generally speaking, "to mirror" is to maintain an exact copy of something. Probably the most common use of the term on the Internet refers to "mirror sites" which are web sites, or FTP sites that maintain copies of material originated at another location, usually in order to provide more widespread access to the resource. For example, one site might create a library of software, and 5 other sites might maintain mirrors of that library.

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Modem

Modem - Is an acronym for (MODulator DEModulator). A modem converts data between the analogue form used on telephone lines and the digital form used on computers for the purpose of computer-to-computer communication.

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mod_perl

An add-on for the Apache web server software, mod_perl makes it possible to use the Perl language to add new features for the Apache server, and to increase the speed of Perl applications by as much as 30 times.

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Mosaic

The first WWW browser that was available for the Macintosh, Windows,and UNIX all with the same interface. Mosaic really started the popularity of the Web. The source-code to Mosaic was licensed by several companies and used to create many other web browsers.

Mosaic was developed at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, in Illinois, USA. The first version was released in late 1993.

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Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS)

MPLS – Multi Protocol Label Switching is a technology for speeding up network traffic flow and making it easier to manage. MPLS involves setting up a specific path across a network for a given sequence of data packets; the path being identified by a label put in each packet. Fundamentally, this saves the time needed for a router to look up the address of the next node to forward the packet to, the normal way of forwarding a packet through a routed network

MPLS is called multiprotocol because it works with the Internet Protocol (IP), Asynchronous Transport Mode (ATM) and frame relay network protocols. MPLS achieves this by allowing most packets to be forwarded at the Layer 2 (switching) level rather than at the Layer 3 (routing) level.

In addition to moving traffic faster overall, MPLS makes it easy to manage a network for quality of service (QoS). For these reasons, the technique is being readily adopted as networks begin to carry more and different mixtures of traffic types.

Many IPVPNs use MPLS to handle the data which creates an efficient network that competes well with private circuits in terms of cost and flexibility.

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