Homonyms (also called homophones) are words having the same pronunciation but different meanings, origins, or spelling.
There are actually many homonyms out there that are related to technology. One exemplary example would be Apple and Orange, which both could mean the fruit itself or the Californian-based technology juggernaut and French telecommunications company respectively. Today, we won’t be giving a description of these two world-renowned brands. Instead, we will be focusing on lesser-known projects related to technology or technological terms that some of you might not heard of before.
I recently stumbled upon a computer glossary by Whatis?com. Guess what the word of the day was? Fedora.
Fedora? Isn’t that what Indiana Jones wears? Next thing we know, his whip is made of optic fibres! But no, it is our first synonym of this post.
Fedora
In actual meaning (I refer to what ordinary people presume), a fedora is a hat worn by our dear friend, Indy Jones. However in the tech world, Fedora refers to the popular open source Linux-based operating system for general purpose computing. Touted as “always free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute”, the Fedora project is a Red Hat sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration project founded in 2003.
Today, it is widely used in various organizations, companies, and government agencies. One quintessential example would be NASA. The United States space agency embraces Fedora for its space missions — it is responsible for running the servers that distribute the footage of Space Shuttle Endeavour will be winging its way to the International Space Station on mission STS-123 to Houston’s Mission Control and NASA TV.
Zookeeper
Why on earth would someone name a tech product ‘Zookeeper‘? Maybe they worked in a zoo? Maybe they lived in a zoo? Obviously the answer is a big fat “NO!”.
With an aim to distill the essence of different services into a very simple interface to a centralized coordination service, Apache ZooKeeper is an open source file application program interface that allows distributed processes in large systems to synchronize with each other so that all clients making requests receive consistent data. It exposes common services – such as naming, configuration
management, synchronization, and group services – in a simple interface so users don’t have to write them from scratch.
It is a sub-project of Hadoop, provided by a cluster of servers to avoid a single point of failure. Zookeeper uses a distributed consensus protocol to determine which node in the ZooKeeper service is the leader at any given time.
According to the Hadoop developer’s wiki, the service is named zookeeper because “coordinating distributing services is a zoo.”
Anchor
“Ahoy there me hearties!” says the swashbuckling buccaneer, “Lower the anchor!”.
Er… no, not that anchor, which refers to the mechanical device that prevents a vessel from moving. In technology terms or Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) in this context, an anchor is a term used to define a hyperlink destination inside a document. For example, when users view the web page in a browser, they can click the text to activate the link and visit the page whose URL is in the link. It is commonly used by web designers so as to help readers navigate to site content quickly and without any much hassle.
Samba
Welcome to Spain, home of samba, a unique dance form which gives a whole new meaning to fast and colourful. In our 21st century world of technology, Samba is something totally different with no relevance to dancing.
Available since 1992, Samba is a popular freeware program that allows end users to access and use files, printers, and other commonly shared resources on a company’s intranet or on the Internet. It is often referred to as a Network File System and can be installed on a variety of operating system platforms, which include Linux, OpenVMS, and OS/2.
The software saves companies money by offering a freely available alternative to a Windows server, according to the Samba Team developers. Corporations can also eliminate the license fees Microsoft charges for each client to access a Windows server, they said.
It is known that the name Samba comes from SMB (Server Message Block), the name of the standard protocol used by the Microsoft Windows network file system.