TLAs from FAA through FZZ

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions
These are the lists on the Web, FTP and Gopher nets that remind you of your limited knowledge about anything.

Frequently Answered Questions
Those who do not have any questions have already formulated the answers. Just in case anyone would think of a question.

FET

Field Effect Transistor
A transistor (switching and/or amplifier element) that works on basis of electrical fields instead of current flow. Fets are often used in CCD elements.

FFT

Fast Fourier Transform
The smart implementation of the Fourier integral. FFT uses either a decimation in time or dicimation in frequency algorithm. The FFT is also used to speed up the calculation of convolutions. See also DFT.

FIR

Finite Impulse Response
A term used in digital filtering techniques. Finite impuls response means that there is no recursive filtering (no output is fed back into the input). See also IIR.

FPU

Floating point Processing Unit

Floating point Processor Unit
A processor specially designed for working with floating point numbers. This is a processor type that is integrated in the newer processors (like 80486 and 80586 Pentium). Floating point processors were almost unaffordable a few years ago (in the eighties and early nineties), but the gigantic demand for fast PCs has had a positive influence on the prices (the same is true for RAM chips).

FTP

File Transfer Protocol
One of the most important feature of the internet (beside of e-mail). It enables the transfer of all those games you wanted and the scientific stuff you needed. Some people will remember the program called 'ftp' (mostly on unix machines) where it was almost impossible to understand the operation of the program. Nowadays, there are more user-friendly programs that make ftp a little bit more understandable.