half life
Also called life expectancy or shelf life, the time it takes for a data-storing medium to lose half of its strength. Floppy disks and magnetic hard drives have a half life of between five and seven years. Optical media, such as CD-Rs, have a half life of about 30 years.
The term comes from the scientific fields where it means the amount of time it takes for half of something to undergo a process or the amount of time it takes for half of the atoms of a radioactive substance to disintegrate.
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In printing, a continuous tone image, such as a photograph, that has been converted into a black-and-white image. Halftones are created through a process called dithering, in which the density and pattern of black and white dots are varied to simulate different shades of gray. In conventional printing, halftones are created by photographing an image […]
- ham
(1) A person who is licensed to operate a ham radio. (2) Automatic spam filters classify e-mail as either spam or ham (meaning not spam).
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Amateur radio communication in a range of frequencies from just above the AM broadcast band (1.6 MHz) to the microwave region, at several hundred gigahertz. These frequencies have been designated for amateur use by the FCC. Anyone with a radio receiver or a radio scanner can listen in on ham radio communications, but only an […]
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The name given to a cordless mouse which operates through an infrared connection.
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The act of trying repeatedly to connect to an unavailable FTP server with little or no time between connection attempts. It can be compared to repeatedly hitting the “redial” button on a telephone when dialing a phone number that is busy until the other phone is no longer busy. Trading servers have a limit on […]