| NEAR INSTANTANEOUS COMPANDED AUDIO
MULTIPLEX (acronym "NICAM") |
A digital form of stereo television broadcast,
where the audio signal is transmitted simultaneously with the television picture, and is
decoded by a special decoder within your TV or Video. Used in New Zealand, Singapore and
Hong Kong, as opposed to the A2 system used in other countries. |
| NEAR
LETTER QUALITY |
A term used to describe the overall clarity and
legibility of a printer's output, comparable to a typewriter. Was once a selling feature
of some of the older dot-matrix printers, but these days is expected. |
| NET |
A commonly used abbreviation for the Internet. |
| NETWORK |
The interconnection of a number of computers via
cables, modems, or other means, that share resources like disk drives, printers etc. |
| NETWORK FILE SYSTEM
(acronym "NFS") |
A protocol allowing clients to transparently
access files and filesystems on remote servers. It is independent of architecture,
operating system, network and transport protocols. It was originally released in 1985 and
has been shipped with almost every Unix system since then. |
| NETWORK
INFORMATION SERVICE
(acronym "NIS") |
An
IP resolution service above
the DNS layer which provides
a central point of administration for common configuration files and
preserves the consistency of these configuration files across all hosts on
the network. |
| NFS
(pronounced
"en-eff-ess") |
Acronym for Network
File System. |
| NICAM
(pronounced
nigh-camm) |
Acronym for Near Instantaneous Companded Audio
Multiplex. |
| NIMBUSQ |
An outline font format, similar to Compugraphic
and PostScript fonts, and reputed to be faster than both. However, they are not commonly
used, and not yet found in the Public Domain. The only program currently supplying these
fonts is Final Writer from Softwood. |
| NIS
(pronounced
"niss") |
Acronym for
Network Information Service. |
| NLQ
(pronounced
"N-L-Q") |
Acronym for Near
Letter Quality. |
| NODE |
A computer attached to and acting as part of a
network. |
| NSF
(pronounced "N-S-F") |
Acronym for National Science Foundation, a US
Government Agency, which in 1984 created five supercomputer centres whose resources were
to be made available to any educational facility that wanted access. These 5 centres
needed to be connected so the resources could be shared, and the clients had the
facilities to access them. Their original plan was to use ARPANET
but restricted by red tape, they decided to form their own network called NSFNET. |
| NSFNET |
A network formed by the NSF
to connect schools and universities in the US to each other, on a regional basis, with at
least one site in the region having access to their five supercomputer centres. This
allowed all sites to have access to the centres, and each other, by forwarding information
from site to site. Other government departments and agencies soon joined in, with NASA,
health departments, energy departments, and so on, to the ever growing Net, all
contributing to what is now known as the Internet. |
| NTSC
(pronounced "N-T-S-C") |
Acronym for National Television Standards
Committee, and generally refers to the broad television standard used in the USA, Canada,
Central America parts of South America, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and a number of other
countries. It has 525 lines running at 60 fields and 30 frames per second with a maximum
of 150,000 picture elements (pixels) per frame. It dates from 1941 when the original
monochrome standard was adopted, and has been adapted since for colour. The colour image
is converted by a device known as a colour coder, which splits the signal into a Luminance
or brightness signal and a Chrominance or colour signal. In addition, Chrominance
comprises two independent characteristic quantities: `hue' and `saturation', but is
somewhat inferior to most other systems. Often re-buffed for that reason with the
suggestion that NTSC means `Never Twice the Same Colour'. Furthermore NTSC has many
variations with different frequencies, known as NTSC 3.58 and NTSC 4.43. See also PAL and SECAM. |
| NULL |
An absence of information used as a positive
confirmation of no information, as opposed to using a `0' or a blank. A null value is
binary zeros. |
| NULL MODEM |
A special cable that allows a local device to be
connected directly to a modem communication port. It is used when two computers wish to
transfer information directly between them, without the need for modems or a LAN. |