A virtual community, e-community or online community is a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as newsletters, telephone, email, internet social network service or instant messages rather than face to face, for social, professional, educational or other purposes. If the mechanism is a computer network, it is called an online community. Virtual and online communities have also become a supplemental form of communication between people who know each other primarily in real life. Many means are used in social software separately or in combination, including text-based chat rooms and forums that use voice, video text or avatars. Significant socio-technical change may have resulted from the proliferation of such Internet-based social networks.
Virtual communities, or online communities, are used for a variety of social and professional groups interacting via the Internet. It does not necessarily mean that there is a strong bond among the members, although Howard Rheingold, author of the book of the same name, mentions that virtual communities form "when people carry on public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships". An email distribution list may have hundreds of members and the communication which takes place may be merely informational (questions and answers are posted), but members may remain relative strangers and the membership turnover rate could be high. This is in line with the liberal use of the term community.
Virtual communities may synthesize Web 2.0 technologies with the community, and therefore have been described as Community 2.0, although strong community bonds have been forged online since the early 1970's on timeshare systems like PLATO_(computer_system) and later on USENET. Online communities depend upon social interaction and exchange between users online. This emphasizes the reciprocity element of the unwritten social contract Read more about: Community
In addition to identifying static and dynamic loading, computer scientists also often classify libraries according to how they are shared among programs. Dynamic libraries almost always offer some form of sharing, allowing the same library to be used by multiple programs at the same time. Static libraries, by definition, cannot be shared. The term "linker" comes from the process of copying procedures or subroutines which may come from "relocatable" libraries and adjusting or "linking" the machine address to the final locations of each module.
The term shared library conveys some ambiguity because it covers at least two different concepts. First, it is the sharing of code located on disk by unrelated programs. The second concept is the sharing of code in memory, when programs execute the same physical page of RAM, mapped into different address spaces. It would seem that the latter would be preferable, and indeed it has a number of advantages. For instance on the OpenStep system, applications were often only a few hundred kilobytes in size and loaded almost instantly; the vast majority of their code was located in libraries that had already been loaded for other purposes by the operating system. There is a cost, however; shared code must be specifically written to run in a multitasking environment. In some older environments such as 16 bit Windows or MPE for the HP 3000, only stack based data (local) was allowed, or other significant restrictions were placed on writing a DLL.
Programs can accomplish RAM sharing by using position independent code as in Unix, which leads to a complex but flexible architecture, or by using position dependent code as in Windows and OS/2. These systems make sure, by various tricks like pre-mapping the address space and reserving slots for each DLL, that code has a great probability of being shared. Windows DLLs are not shared libraries in the Unix sense. The rest of this section concentrates on aspects Read more about: Shared object
Online chat can refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, but is primarily meant to refer to direct one-on-one chat or text-based group chat (formally also known as synchronous conferencing), using tools such as instant messengers, Internet Relay Chat, talkers and possibly MUDs. The expression online chat comes from the word chat which means "informal conversation".
Software and protocols
The following are common chat programs and protocols:
* AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)
* Camfrog
* Campfire
* Gadu-Gadu
* Google Talk
* ICQ (OSCAR)
* InSpeak Communicator
* Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
* XMPP
* MUD
* Paltalk
* PSYC
* QQ
* SILC
* Skype
* Talk
* Talker
* TeamSpeak (TS)
* Windows Live Messenger
* Yahoo! Messenger
Chat programs supporting multiple protocols:
* Adium
* Digsby
* IMVU
* Kopete
* Lotus Sametime
* Miranda IM
* Pidgin
* Trillian
* Quiet Internet Pager
Web sites with browser-based chat services (also see web chat):
* Meebo
* Tokbox
* Fil Read more about: Chat
Flash Media Server (FMS) is a proprietary data and media server from Adobe Systems (originally a Macromedia product). This server works with the Flash Player runtime to create media driven, multiuser RIAs (Rich Internet Applications). The server uses ActionScript 1, an ECMAScript based scripting language, for server-side logic. Prior to version 2, it was known as Flash Communication Server.
Usage
* Video on Demand, streaming video stored on the server to the flash client.
* Live Video, a server-side application which allows user to broadcast their own video from a webcam on website with live stream Flash video player to other users or to the server for recording and on demand viewing later.
* Real Time Communication, an application which requires collaboration between multiple clients, such as a chat room or multiplayer game.
In books and other works, a subtitle is an explanatory or alternate title. For example, Mary Shelley used a subtitle to give her most famous novel, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, an alternate title to give a hint of the theme. There are at least eight books in English that carry the subtitle Virtue Rewarded. Subtitles for plays were fashionable in the Elizabethan era; William Shakespeare parodied this vogue by giving Twelfth Night the pointless subtitle What You Will, implying that the subtitle can be whatever the audience wants it to be. In printing, subtitles often appear below the title in a less prominent typeface or following the title after a colon.
Some modern publishers choose to forgo subtitles when republishing historical works, such as Shelley's famous story, which is often now sold simply as Frankenstein.
Subtitles are also used to distinguish different installments in a series, instead of or in addition to a number, such as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, the second in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the second in the Star Trek series. Read more about: Subtitle
