Slang for what happens when the "best" technology loses out to a lesser technology that is more well-known in the marketplace. This term refers to the VCR wars, when VHS became the standard over the "superior" Betamax format. (A growing number of users feel this process has since been perfected by Microsoft.)...

If your IT job is outsourced to India, you’ve been "Bangalored". Note: India’s $17 billion-a-year software export industry in 2006 has spent the past 15 years establishing Bangalore as the country’s version of Silicon Valley. But for some Indians, Bangalore’s symbol as their tech boom capital doesn’t change the fact that its name was from British colonialism. Now the leaders of that state are...

An emoticon is a sequence of typed characters that creates a rough picture of something, such as a facial expression. If you don’t see the picture in the emoticon shown above, try tilting your head to the left-the colon represents the eyes, the dash represents the nose, and the right parenthesis represents the mouth. More commonly known as smileys and also referred to as "ASCII-grams," emoticons number in the hundreds and...

Slang for any paper-based printed material. Techies generally use it to refer to documentation manuals.

The paper version of a publication available in both paper and electronic forms. As in: “The dead tree edition of the San Francisco Chronicle….”

A stage of Web development at which the site is finished and launched. For example, you may hear, “When is the site going to go live?” It means the same as “up,” in the sense that someone could respond by saying, “It’ll be up by the end of the business day on Friday.” Most Web developers will wait until the middle of the night to FTP a finished site to the server (unless they’ve tested it...