This is our guide to some common (and not so common) technical (and not so technical) terms that crop up from time to time in computing. The jargon file is quite small at the moment but we shall be adding terms as they crop up in features in Bitwise.

DDR		Double Data Rate. e.g. DDR RAM - achieves a higher rate of data transfer by moving data on both the ‘up’ and the ‘down’ transitions of the clock.
FAT		File Allocation Table - a file system that was used in MS DOS and early Windows operating systems but which has been superseded by NTFS in modern versions of Windows.
Latency		Time between the initialisation of an action and its effect (e.g. the time it takes to request data from a hard disk and to make it available for processing or for a data packet to move across a network connection).
MFT		Master File Table - used by the Microsoft NT File System (NTFS) to store information on disk files and directories.
MIPS		Million Instructions Per Second - a measure of a computer’s processor speed.
NTFS		NT File System - Microsoft’s NT (‘New Technology’) File System - used as standard in the Windows NT family (such as Windows 2000 and XP) of operating systems. Offers better reliability and performance than the earlier FAT file system.