This video format offers around twice the compression of H.264, the current standard for compressing high-definition video. It will therefore halve the bandwidth required to transmit TV channels and significantly reduce the burden on mobile networks.
Haptic feedback involved conveying information to the user through the sense of touch. This is usually designed to mimic the effect of interacting with real objects with the fingers, adding a sense of feel to tell the user when certain on-screen items have been touched or activated. Many mobile phones employ haptic feedback in this manner by making subtle use of the vibrating alert.
Refers to objects that you can actually touch, like disks, disk drives, display screens, keyboards, printers, boards, and chips. In contrast, software is untouchable. Software exists as ideas, concepts, and symbols, but it has no substance.
Books provide a useful analogy. The pages and the ink are the hardware, while the words, sentences, paragraphs, and the overall meaning are the software. A computer without software is like a book full of blank pages — you need software to make the computer useful just as you need words to make a book meaningful.
A hashtag is a word, phrase or just a collection of letters preceded by a hash (#) symbol. It’s simply a way of creating a label by which people can refer to the same thing. The # means ‘this is a tag’ and enables other users to search for content marked with the same label by searching for the same hashtag. Although they’ve been around for many years, it’s their use on Twitter which has pushed them further into mainstream use. They are also used on services such as Instagram and Facebook. There is no official directory of hashtags as they can be invented by users at any time and inserted into posts. Promotional hashtags in the media can be a good way of creating a buzz. For example, displaying a hashtag on a TV show can be a handy way of initiating group discussion and generating fan interest.
Heartbleed is the name given to a flaw in very widely-used digital cryptography software. The software was fixed in April 2014, but a large proportion of Web servers had already been vulnerable to the attack which could have revealed personal details such as email addresses and passwords available to hackers before the problem was fixed.
HTTPS is the abbreviation for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure – a secure version of the standard HTTP protocol that is used to send pages around the web. HTTPS combines standard HTTP with an encrypted protocol, called SSL/TLS, which ensures that transmissions cannot be intercepted or altered by third parties. The appearance of HTTPS in the web address of a site also signals you are connected to the website you have requested rather than an imposter who may attempt to steal your information.
A virtualisation technology created by Microsoft. It allows the creation of virtual PCs, which can concurrently run multiple operating systems on a single PC. It is available as a free download, and a version of the software is also included in Windows 8 Pro. Unlike popular applications such as VMware and VirtualBox, Hyper-V interfaces directly with the hardware rather than the operating system, giving it several performance advantages. However, it cannot be enabled at the same time as running either of those other virtualisation applications.