184 Glossary
LED — Light-emitting diode. An electronic device that lights up when a current is
passed through it.
LGA—Land grid array. A type of processor socket. Unlike the PGA, the LGA
interface has no pins on the chip; instead, the chip has pads that contact pins on the
system board.
Linux — An operating system similar to the UNIX
®
operating system that runs on a
variety of hardware systems. Linux is open source software, which is freely available;
however, the full distribution of Linux along with technical support and training are
available for a fee from vendors such as Red Hat
®
Linux
®
software.
local bus — On a system with local-bus expansion capability, certain peripheral
devices (such as the video adapter circuitry) can be designed to run much faster than
they would with a traditional expansion bus. See also bus.
LVD — Low voltage differential.
m — Meter(s).
mA — Milliampere(s).
MAC address — Media Access Control address. Your system’s unique hardware
number on a network.
mAh — Milliampere-hour(s).
Mb — Megabit(s); 1,048,576 bits.
MB — Megabyte(s); 1,048,576 bytes. However, when referring to hard-drive capacity,
the term is often rounded to mean 1,000,000 bytes.
Mbps — Megabits per second.
MBps — Megabytes per second.
MBR — Master boot record.
memory address — A specific location, usually expressed as a hexadecimal number,
in the system’s RAM.
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