Glossary of Terms

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F

Factoring - The purchase of debts owed, or "accounts receivable," in exchange for immediate payment at a discount. In e-commerce, the term is often applied to ISOs that offer to process credit card transactions through their own merchant account, rather than through an account established by the merchant, in exchange for a percentage of the transaction or other fee. Factoring of credit card debt is illegal.

FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions. This regularly posted Usenet article answers questions that come up regularly in a newsgroup. Before you ask a question in a newsgroup, make sure that you have read its FAQ because it may well contain the answer. People get annoyed if you ask questions that are answered in the newsgroup's FAQ, because they probably have already answered the question 150 times. FAQs are posted regularly, usually once a week or once a month.

FAX Modem - Modems (fax-data modems) that enable you to send and receive faxes in addition to ordinary computer-type data. Fax is short for facsimile or exact copy, and fax technology uses ordinary phone lines to send copies of printed material from place to place. If you stick fax technology on your computer, what you send may never touch paper. It can go from your computer to theirs or to their fax machine if they don't have a computer.

FDDI - (Fiber Distributed Data Interface)- A standard for transmitting data on optical fiber cables at a rate of around 100,000,000 bits-per-second (10 times as fast as Ethernet, about twice as fast as T-3). See Also: Bandwidth, Ethernet, T-1, and T-3

Finger - An Internet software tool for locating people on other Internet sites. Finger is also sometimes used to give access to non-personal information, but the most common use is to see if a person has an account at a particular Internet site. Many sites do not allow incoming Finger requests, but many do.

Fire Wall - A combination of hardware and software that separates a LAN into two or more parts for security purposes. Also See: Network, LAN, and Security

Flame - Originally, flame meant to carry forth in a passionate manner in the spirit of honourable debate. Flames most often involved the use of flowery language and flaming well was an art form. More recently flame has come to refer to any kind of derogatory comment no matter how witless or crude. Also See: Flame War, Flame Mail

Flame Mail - Nasty E-mail or discussion mail received when someone feels you have slighted him or her.

Flame War - When an online discussion degenerates into a series of personal attacks against the debaters, rather than discussion of their positions. See Also: Flame, Flame Mail

Front-End - The user interface that appears on a web page, which allows a visitor to the site to interact with dynamic features, including databases, shopping-cart programs, and online purchase processing software. FrontPage See MS FrontPage

FTP - (File Transfer Protocol) - A very common method of moving files between two Internet sites. FTP is a special way to login to another Internet site for the purposes of retrieving and/or sending files. There are many Internet sites that have established publicly accessible repositories of material that can be obtained using FTP, by logging in using the account name anonymous, thus these sites are called anonymous ftp servers. Windows FTP and Fetch are FTP examples of FTP software.