Fault Tolerance
The ability of a system to respond to unexpected hardware or software failure is its fault tolerance.

FCC
(Federal Communications Commission). U.S.A. telecommunications regulatory organization. It controls standards that pertain to electronic and electromagnetic transmission and also licenses the frequencies and bandwidth for the commercial use.

FDDI
Fiber Distributed Data Interface. A standard for transmitting data on optical fiber cables at a rate of around 100,000,000 bits-per-second (10 times as fast as Ethernet, about twice as fast as T-3).

Fibre Optic Cable
A cable used for transmitting data as a light wave. A fiber optic cable is composed of one or more optical fibers. It is more expensive that copper wire, but offers higher transmission speeds and allows for communication over larger distances.

Filename extension
Last three or four letters of a file name that appear after the dot. Used to designate the type of file and the format used.

Filtering
Screening network packets for certain properties, such as the source or destination address, protocol used or even a pattern in the data. It is used in firewalls in order to decide if the traffic is to be forwarded or rejected. Provides the basis for network security.

Finger
An Internet software tool for locating people on other Internet sites. Finger is also sometimes used to give access to non-personal information, but the most common use is to see if a person has an account at a particular Internet site. Many sites do not allow incoming Finger requests, but many do.

Fire Wall
A combination of hardware and software that separates a LAN into two or more parts for security purposes.

Flame
Originally, flame meant to carry forth in a passionate manner in the spirit of honorable debate. Flames most often involved the use of flowery language and flaming well was an art form. More recently flame has come to refer to any kind of derogatory comment no matter how witless or crude.

Flame War When an online discussion degenerates into a series of personal attacks against the debaters, rather than discussion of their positions. A heated exchange.

FPU
Floating Point Unit. A part of the computer responsible for high precision mathematical operations.

Frame Relay
A fast packet switching protocol. Used mainly in Wide Area Networks. It differs from ATM in that packets can have variable length.

Frontpage Extensions
Frontpage extensions can be thought of as "mini programs" that allow features of a web site created with MS Front Page to operate smoothly. It is possible to use MS Front Page to create a web site and host that site on a server that doesn't offer FP extensions, however some of the powerful features of the program cannot be used in these web sites. See Microsoft's Front Page site for more information. After you design your web site, you will know whether Frontpage extensions will be a requirement.

FrontPage Microsoft®
FrontPage® is a site creation and management software tool. One of the most popular website creation software packages the software, both FrontPage® 98 and FrontPage ®2000 is widely supported by the hosting community.

FTP
(File Transfer Protocol) -- A very common method of moving files between two Internet sites. FTP is a special way to login to another Internet site for the purposes of retrieving and/or sending files. There are many Internet sites that have established publicly accessible repositories of material that can be obtained using FTP, by logging in using the account name anonymous, thus these sites are called anonymous ftp servers.

FTPmail
Using email messages to access the FTP sites. Requires a special software installed on the server.