Glossary

A glossary of terms used in this article.

Bijlee

Denotes electricity in the north Indian language of Hindi.

BSD

Berkeley Software Distribution. An operating system developed by the University of California, Berkeley, that was made open-source in the early 1990s.

Crore

Ten million (10,000,000).

See Also: Lakh.

Dalit

Untouchables

Design Axes

Important characteristics of the space of possible designs.

DTP

Desktop Publishing. Graphic creation and typesetting on a computer.

Glyph

A basic visual element in a font.

Grapheme

The smallest unit in the writing system of a language; a visual representation of a phoneme.

ISCII

Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange. An Indian standard governing character encodings.

Lakh

A hundred thousand (100,000).

See Also: Crore.

LCD

Liquid Crystal Display. A low power display technology commonly used in portable computing devices.

Linux

An open source operating system kernel, originally created by the Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds and licensed under the GNU General Public License. There are today a very large number of operating systems that are built around Linux.

Open Source

Software whose source code is available for perusal, copying, and personal modification.

PDA

Personal Digital Assistant. A small computing device that manages personal data.

Phoneme

A basic sound unit in a spoken language; the smallest unit of sound that can convey a distinction in meaning.

Unicode

A universal character encoding standard proposed by the Unicode Consortium.

Untouchables

The social underclass of Indian society. Untouchables (also known as Dalits) make up approximately one-fifth of the Indian population.

UPS

Uninterruptible Power Supply. A power supply conditioning device that provides battery-backed power for a short duration when the grid power fails.