Monday, November 19, 2001		Bits & Bytes

Wi-Fi: A short form for wireless fidelity. It is a trade term promulgated by the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA). 'Wi-Fi' is used in place of 802.11b in the same way that "Ethernet" is used in place of IEEE 802.3. Products certified as Wi-Fi by WECA are interoperable with each other even if they are from different manufacturers. A user with a Wi-Fi product can use any brand of access point with any other brand of client hardware that is built to the Wi-Fi standard.

Accounting: In information technology, accounting is the process of keeping track of a user's activity while accessing a network's resources, including the amount of time spent in the network, the services accessed while there and the amount of data transferred during the session. Accounting data is used for trend analysis, capacity planning, billing, auditing and cost allocation.

Banner: Also referred to as a banner ad, a banner is a typically rectangular advertisement placed on a Website either above, below or on the sides of the Website's main content and is linked to the advertiser's own Website. In the early days of the Internet, banners were ads with text and graphic images. Today, with technologies such as Flash, banners have gotten much more complex and can be ads with text, animated graphics and sound. Most commerce-related Websites use banner ads.