Glossary » T

The Swedish Confederation of Professional Employees. This confederation sets standards for electronic equipment pertaining to their environmental effects, recyclability, ergonomics, emissions, energy consumption and safety.

It is a common misconception that mobile phones use different frequencies to make sure that calls going into the same transmitter do not interfere with each other. On GSM networks this is not so. The calls are divided up by time of arrival of the data packets that contain the information rather than frequency. Therefore imagine eight calls on one transmitter on a mobile network. The signals are all timed to arrive in a certain sequence from each phone. Just like a plane is timed to arrive at a runway with other planes behind it all stacked up, this is much the same way the mobile phone works. With eight or so voice calls going into one transmitter they are all allocated a "time slot" for each packet of data or burst as it is known, to arrive. Next time you hear your mobile phone interfering with a radio or TV set, listen to the interference. The rapid "gunfire" like sound is the mobile phone sending in the data, then waiting in the quiet spot for the other mobiles using the transmitter to talk. Because the speed of data is so fast, the conversation can take place without anyone noticing a break. Mobile phone data usually uses up to 14.4k for the rate of data transfer for voice calls.

Tessellation is the subdivision of a surface into smaller shapes. This usually refers to the dividing up of a single polygon into several smaller polygons either to make them easier to work with or to increase the complexity and thus the smoothness of a 3D model.

TEXtured Element. A Texel is a Pixel to which a texture has been applied

While 3D models are generally made up of polygons, these only form the underlying framework. A texture map is a 2D image, usually a bitmap, which is essentially stretched over the polygonal framework to give a finished result. With modern graphics, textures can also be used to set a varied assortment of surface and scene-wide attributes. Light maps are also based on textures.

Thin Film Transistor. Usually made from amorphous silicon (a-Si) and used as a switch to a charge storage device located below each sub-pixel on an active matrix LCD. See active matrix.

Trivial File Transfer Protocol - Very similar to FTP, used for transferring files across an IP network.

A technique of ejecting drops of ink from the head of an ink-jet printer, by heating the ink until it momentarily vaporises and expands. When the heat is removed, the ink re-liquefies. Pioneered by Canon and HP.

Tagged Image File Format. Alternative image format offered by many digital cameras to eliminate compression artefacts of JPEG format. Note uncompressed TIFFs from 3 and 5 megapixel digital cameras measure 9 and 15MB each respectively.

The number value attributed to a video frame. Commonly represented in hours:minutes:seconds:frames, 01:25:12:24 for example.

An area within an editing package where clips, effects and other assets are arranged in chronological order against a time axis.

This filtering technique improves on bilinear filtering by averaging an additional MIP map level into its calculations. A traditionally MIP mapped scene features visible bands where the levels of MIP map detail change and the use of Trilinear filtering smoothes out these transitions. Modern graphics cards are able to perform Trilinear filtering with little or no performance penalty

This is the process of using three segments of graphics memory as frame buffers. One frame buffer, usually known as a primary surface buffer, holds a completed frame ready to be sent to your monitor while the other two usually referred to as “back buffers” contain the frames that are currently being worked on. Provided your graphics chip has enough memory available to it triple buffering can be quicker than double buffering in some circumstances.