FAANG

Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Alphabet (formerly known as Google). FAANG is an acronym referring to the stocks of the five most popular and best-performing American technology companies.

Fail Soft

Used to describe systems that are designed to terminate any nonessential processing when there are hardware or software failures. Systems in fail soft mode are still able to provide partial operational capability.

Failover

A backup operation that automatically switches to a standby database, server or network if the primary system fails or is temporarily shut down for servicing. Failover is an important fault tolerance function of mission-critical systems that rely on constant accessibility.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions.

FAT

File Allocation Table. A table that the operating system uses to locate files on a disk. Due to fragmentation, a file may be divided into many sections that are scattered around the disk. The FAT keeps track of all these pieces.

FAT32

A version of the FAT available in Windows 95 OSR 2 and Windows 98. FAT32 increases the number of bits used to address clusters and also reduces the size of each cluster. The result is that it can support larger disks and better storage efficiency.

FCC

Federal Communications Commission. Among other duties, the FCC is responsible for rating personal computers and other equipment as either Class A or Class B. The ratings indicate how much radiation a personal computer emits. Almost all personal computers satisfy Class A requirements, which means they are suitable for office use. Class B machines, which are suitable for use anywhere (including the home), must pass more stringent tests. Class B indicates that the machine's radio frequency (RF) emissions are so low that they do not interfere with other devices such as radios and TVs.

FCS

(1) Flash Communication Server.

(2) Frame Check Sequence.

FDDI

Fiber Distributed Data Interface, is a set of ANSI protocols for sending digital data over fiber optic cable. They support data rates of up to 100 Mbps and are typically used as backbones for WANs.

FDM

Fused Deposition Modelling, is a 3D printing process that uses a continuous filament of a thermoplastic material.

Ferret

A program that can search chosen files, databases or search engine indices for specified information.

FHIR

Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources.

FHSS

Frequency-Hopping Spread Spectrum. FHSS is one of two types of spread spectrum radio, the other being DSSS. FHSS is a transmission technology used in LAWN transmissions where the data signal is modulated with a narrowband carrier signal that "hops" in a random but predictable sequence from frequency to frequency as a function of time over a wide band of frequencies. The signal energy is spread in time domain rather than chopping each bit into small pieces in the frequency domain. This technique reduces interference because a signal from a narrowband system will only affect the spread spectrum signal if both are transmitting at the same frequency at the same time. If synchronized properly, a single logical channel is maintained. The transmission frequencies are determined by a spreading, or hopping, code. The receiver must be set to the same hopping code and must listen to the incoming signal at the right time and correct frequency in order to properly receive the signal.
Current FCC regulations require manufacturers to use 75 or more frequencies per transmission channel with a maximum dwell time (the time spent at a particular frequency during any single hop) of 400 ms. WANs.

Finger

A software program that gets information about a particular user on the local or remote system. It can find information like full name, last login time, terminal location etc.

Fios

Fiber Optic Service.

Fire Off

To send out an e-mail.

Firefox

An open source web browser based on Mozilla.

Firewall

A router or gateway specially configured to allow only certain types of data traffic to pass. Most commonly found as a security measure to isolate a company's intranet from unwanted visitors on the internet.

Firewire

Apple trademark name for IEEE-1394. A very fast external bus standard that supports data transfer rates of up to 400Mbps. A single 1394 port can be used to connect up 63 external devices. In addition to its high speed, 1394 also supports isochronous data -- delivering data at a guaranteed rate. This makes it ideal for devices that need to transfer high levels of data in real-time, such as video devices.
Although extremely fast and flexible, 1394 is also currently expensive. Like USB, 1394 supports both Plug-and-Play and hot plugging, and also provides power to peripheral devices.
IEEE 1394 is also known as trademarks i.link and Lynx.

Firmware

Software (programs or data) that has been written onto read-only memory. Firmware is a combination of software and hardware. ROMs, PROMs and EPROMs that have data or programs recorded on them are firmware.

FIX

(1) Federal Internet Exchange. A physical location that serves as the connection point between U.S. federal government agency networks, such as those used by NASA, the Department of Energy and military agencies. There are two FIXes, each named for the coast on which they reside: FIX East (FIX-E); and FIX West (FIX-W).

(2) Financial Information Exchange protocol, a vendor-neutral standardised message format for describing real-time security transactions. FIX is a public-domain specification owned and maintained by FIX Protocol, Ltd.
FIX is similar to OFX in that the two protocols are used to communicate financial information. However, OFX is focused more on retail transactions and is a query-response protocol much like HTTP while FIX is focused on institutional business and is a connected session-based protocol.

Flame

An electronic mail message telling the recipient they have breached Internet etiquette (netiquette). Often delivered in capital letters.

Flash

A bandwidth friendly and brower independant vector-graphic animation technology. As long as different browsers are equipped with the necessary plug-ins, Flash animations will look the same.

Flood

When traffic on a network gets too much for the system, mainly due to a faulty piece of hardware on the network, either a port, cable or NIC.

Flops

Floating-point operations per second, a common benchmark measurement for rating the speed of microprocessor. Floating-point operations include any operations that involve fractional numbers. Such operations, which take much longer to compute than integer operations, occur often in some applications. Most modern microprocessors include a floating-point unit (FPU), which is a specialized part of the microprocessor responsible for executing floating-point operations. The FLOPS measurement, therefore, actually measures the speed of the FPU.

FOMO

Fear of Missing Out.

Fortran

The oldest computer language, developed in the 1950s.

Forum

A place to discuss certain subjects within the internet.

FPM RAM

Fast Page Mode RAM, a type of Dynamic RAM (DRAM) that allows faster access to data in the same row or page. Page-mode memory works by eliminating the need for a row address if data is located in the row previously accessed. It is sometimes called page mode memory. FPM RAM is being replaced by newer types of memory, such as SDRAM.

FPU

Floating-Point Unit, a specially designed chip that performs floating-point calculations. Computers equipped with an FPU perform certain types of application much faster than computers that lack one. In particular, graphics applications are faster with an FPU.

FQDN

Fully Qualified Domain Name consists of a host and domain name, including top-level domain (TLD). For example, www.bcs.org is a fully qualified domain name. www is the host, bcs is the second-level domain, and .org is the top level domain. A FQDN always starts with a host name and continues all the way up to the top-level domain name, so www.parc.xerox.com is also a FQDN.

Frame

(1) In telecommunications, a frame is data that is transmitted between network points as a unit complete with addressing and necessary protocol control information.

(2) In time-division multiplexing (TDM), a frame is a complete cycle of events within the time division period.

(3) In film and video recording and playback, a frame is a single image in a sequence of images that are recorded and played back.

(4) In computer video display technology, a frame is the image that is sent to the display image rendering devices. It is continuously updated or refreshed from a frame buffer, a highly accessible part of video RAM.

(5) In artificial intelligence (AI) applications, a frame is a set of data with information about a particular object, process, or image. An example is the iris-print visual recognition system used to identify users of certain bank automated teller machines. This system compares the frame of data for a potential user with the frames in its database of authorised users.

Frames

A way of dividing web-pages into separate areas that can be scrolled through.

FreeBSD

A popular and free version of UNIX that runs on Intel microprocessors. FreeBSD is distributed in executable file and source code form. The source code enables ambitious users to actually extend the operating system. Another popular and free version of UNIX is Linux.

Freeware

Copyrighted software given away for free by the author under strict terms of usage.

Fried

Something perminanently damaged or otherwise unusable.

Front End

The part of a website with which the user comes into contact directly, as opposed to the technical areas lying behind it. Also known as the 'user interface'.

FSB

FrontSide Bus - The bus within a microprocessor that connects the CPU with main memory. It's used to communicate between the motherboard and other components in a computer system.

FTP

File Transfer Protocol - a standard used for transferring files to and from servers.

FTTC

Fiber-To-The-Curb, the installation of optical fiber from a telephone switch to within 1,000 feet of a home or enterprise. Typically, coaxial cable is used to establish the connection from curb to building.

FTTH

Fiber-To-The-Home, the installation of optical fiber from a telephone switch directly into the subscriber’s home. Fiber optic cable is an alternative to coaxial cable.
FTTH is also referred to as fiber-to-the-building (FTTB), which includes optical fiber that is installed directly into a home or enterprise.

FUI

Form-based User Interface. An application program presents the user with a form to enter the information into. The resulting information is processed and displayed to the user in another form.

FWIW

For What It's Worth.