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Hosting Terms

Mailing List
A system that allows users to send e-mail to one address, whereupon their message is copied and sent to all of the other subscribers of the mail list.

Majordomo
Software used to manage a Mailing List.

Managed Hosting
Managed services are dedicated servers equipped with extended support. This support comes in the form of proprietary control panel technology that enables the inexperienced administrator to easily set up and maintain sites on a server.

MAP / Merchant Account Provider
A bank or other institution that hosts merchant accounts and processes online credit card transactions. The term is also often used broadly to include any credit card processing service, including ISOs.

Mb / Megabyte
A unit of data storage, equivalent to about 1m bytes. Generally, a megabyte is considered to be equivalent to 2 to the 20th power bytes, or 1,048,576.

MBone / Multicast Backbone
A high-speed Internet backbone designed for sending large files such as video segments to multiple users. MBone is an extension to the Internet to support IP multicasting -- two-way transmission of data between multiple sites.

MBps
Millions of bits per second or megabits per second, generally used as a measure of bandwidth.

Meatspace
The physical world, as described by participants in online conversations.

Melissa
Melissa is a fast-spreading macro virus that is distributed as an e-mail attachment. While it does not destroy files or other resources, Melissa has the potential to disable corporate and other mail servers as the ripple of e-mail distribution becomes a much larger wave.

Meme
An idea, skill or habit passed from person to person. The term was coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, and English biologist, in his book The Selfish Gene.

Merchant Account
A bank account established by a merchant to receive the proceeds of credit card purchases. By establishing a merchant account, the merchant bank agrees to pay the merchant for valid credit card purchases in exchange for the right to collect on the debt owed by the consumer.

Metadata
Data that describes other data. Metadata about an XML document is described in the DTD or in the XML document itself, enabling other applications to interact with it.

Micropayment
A small amount of money used to buy goods or services over the Internet.

MIME / Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions
MIME extends the text-only capabilities of the original Internet E-mail protocol SMTP, allowing people to exchange different kinds of information such as sound, video and still images. A standard Internet format for encoding files that are attached to electronic message (email).

Mirror Site
An exact copy of a website or FTP server, usually to reduce congestion at the original. Sites may be mirrored several times, often in different countries around the world.

MODEM / MOdulator DEModulator
A device that translates a stream of digital data created by computer into the curious squeaking and hissing sounds that can be transmitted across phone lines.

MOO
An object-oriented MUD (multi-user dungeon).

Moore's Law
A principle established in 1975 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, describing the rapid growth in the power of computer microprocessors over time. The observation that the logic density of silicon integrated circuits has closely followed the curve (bit per square inch) = 2^(t-1962) where t is time in years; that is, the amount of information storable on a given amount of silicon has roughly doubled every year since the technology was invented.

Mosaic
The first browser that displayed more that plain text, developed at the NCSA by Marc Andreessen and others in 1993.

Mozilla
Originally the codename for Netscape's first browser, Mozilla was the name given to the company's dinosaur-like mascot.

MP3
MPE is the file extension for MPEG, audio layer 3. Layer 3 is one of three coding schemes (layer1, layer2 and layer3) for the compression of audio signals. Layer 3 uses perceptual audio coding and psychoacoustic compression to remove all superfluous information (more specifically, the redundant and irrelevant parts of sound signal. The stuff the human ear doesn't hear anyway). The result in real terms is layer 3 shrink the original sound data from a CD without sacrificing sound quality.

MPEG / MPG
Moving Pictures Experts Group of ISO that generates standards for digital video (sequences of images in time) and audio compression.

MSN / Microsoft Network
An umbrella term for Microsoft's dial-up Internet access and online content business.

Multicasting
The transmission of messages from a single sender to many recipients.

Multimedia
The combination of different types of media such as text, audio, video and animations.

Multiplexing
The combining of several signals in the same communications channel, usually with the aim of increasing the amount of data that can be transmitted. Several types of multiplexing exist, each designed for a particular signal and cable type. Analog signals, for example, are combined using frequency-division multiplexing (FDM), in which the bandwidth is divided into parallel channels of different frequencies. Digital signals can be transmitted using time-division multiplexing (TDM), in which signals are carried using alternating time slots. On Fiber Optic networks, multiple signals are transmitted as light split into different wavelengths, a process known as wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM).

Multi-User
This describes an aspect of a computer system that can be accessed by more than one individual at a time.

MySQL
A popular Open Source SQL database, mySQL is a free database management system. The SQL part of MySQL stands for "Structured Query Language" .

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