THIS WEEK: Dictionary or encyclopedia?

[WhatIs]

Title: TechTarget

March 21, 2002 >> Receive this email as text  >> About this e-mail   In this Issue >> What's new at whatis.com - Dictionary or encyclopedia? - The experts list is printable - Memorizing IT - New updates >> News from the TechTarget community of sites - Site of the week: SearchSolaris? - Web radio for Windows 2000 geeks  From the Editor: Dictionary or encyclopedia? by Lowell Thing, Site Editor Is whatis.com a dictionary or an encyclopedia or something else - and should you care? Well, we really don't think you should care - after all, you (and we, too, as users) just want some information. But now that we've asked, the answer is: Both. Using ourselves as "first users," we knew that we sometimes wanted a rather strict definition of something as one might find in a Webster's. And, on other occasions, we wanted to understand something as we might as the result of reading a topic in the Encyclopedia Britannica. To address our two needs, we formulated the ideas that (1) a whatis.com "definition" should contain a rather dictionary-like sentence or two at the beginning. (Ideally, the first sentence of each definition should describe that term in such a way that the sentence could not be used to describe any other term.) And (2) after the dictionary-like sentence, the rest of the definition (which we really think ought to be called a "definition/topic") should be thought of as an encyclopedic topic. The topic, we felt, should be long enough to satisfy most readers. Dictionary or encyclopedia, we also loved the concept and power of hypertext links right from the beginning and so, as we grew, we included at least 12,000 of them between definitions and about 6,000 of them to other Web sites. Remember you don't need to know any of this to use whatis.com. But we sort of wanted you to know that we thought about it and still do.  The experts list is printable On a single Web page, we list almost 100 experts that may be able to help you with your next IT problem. Not only do these people have impressive job titles, but they also have a lot of experience in network administration, application development, and new areas like "Web services" where a little experience may be all that anyone has yet. It occurred to us that printing this page out might be a handy way for you to remember these experts and locate one in a hurry. Then, at any time, you can look on our home page and locate the "Guide to the Experts" and click to the one you need. Here it is, ready for printing... Guide to the experts  Memorizing IT In the fifth grade, we (this is editorial "we") memorized the capital cities of all of the then 48 states of the U.S. Not only that, we wrote to the Chamber of Commerce in each capital city and asked if they would mail back a postcard of the capitol (note spelling) building. Sure enough, they did and, perhaps for that reason, we still remember every one of them - reinforced by occasionally testing through the years, as in "Name a state. Go ahead. Test me." That made us wonder what kind of thing people might be memorizing today who work in information technology. All the country codes or perhaps the "well-known port numbers"? Somehow we couldn't think of anything as handy as knowing the state capitals. Or course, one of the problems in memorizing something in IT is that it may change tomorrow. However, we suspect that some of our readers may indeed have found something handy to have memorized that we don't know about. If so, we'd appreciate hearing from you so that we can tell others about whether or not it's working for you. Please write the editors and let us know. New updates Since the last newsletter, updates include: - van Eck phreaking (to fix bad links) - AAA (same reason) - infinity (it was new and we were just doing some polishing) - E-ZPass (to mention the California equivalent of that technology) - nanotechnololgy (to fix bad links) - blue laser (to mention "Blu-ray") - IDE (to indicate that it also stands for "integrated development environment") - XBRL (to fix a typo) - heuristic (to add a cross-link from "algorithmic") Here is "heuristic."  News from our TechTarget community of sites: Site of the week: SearchSolaris Our companion (sister? brother?) site that is targeted to users of Sun workstations and servers is SearchSolaris.com and it's one of if not "the" most popular sites on the Web for the kind of help that Sun server administrators sometimes need. It also brings you the latest news about Sun and related companies and products. As well as hundreds of links to other sites for more information. It is, let's face it, a portal into the Sun! If you're trying to use Solaris on a PC with an Intel microprocessor, click here to go to a discussion forum where you can ask a question. Web radio for Windows 2000 geeks Meanwhile, something new has been added to TechTarget for Windows 2000 professionals (maybe geeks, too). It's called radio. That is to say, you can keep working at your computer while at at the same time listening to expert Roger Pence interview different guest experts about various problems, tips, and new developments related to Windows networks. Listen to the latest broadcast or one of the recently archived ones at. .. http://win2000talk.techtarget.com/ Security Decisions It's fairly simple: If something goes wrong with your current security infrastructure, and you're on the hook to face the consequences, it won't be pretty. Don?t go it alone! Stop the threat of a hack attack with expert tips, tactics and techniques at the FREE Security Decisions conference June 19-21 in Chicago, hosted by searchSecurity. Learn more: A B O U T   T H I S   E M A I L This e-mail is brought to you by TechTarget where you can get relevant search results from over 20 industry-specific Web sites. If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter simply reply to this message with "REMOVE" in the subject line. Please allow 24 hours for your "REMOVE" request to be processed. Copyright 2002 TechTarget, Inc. All rights reserved.