Miscellaneous information pages

What's a FAQ?

FAQs are “frequently asked questions.”  Something that often solicits contempt from other people on mailing lists and news groups, because the information is (typically) available with the manual that came with their application, detailed in the FAQ file for the list, is easily found out by them in some other way, generates dozens of replies saying (essentially) the same thing, or even generates dozens of incorrect replies, etc.

You'll often see people get told to “RTFM,” for asking a FAQ.  So do read the (insert your own personal choice of “f” word here) manual first—that's what RTFM refers to.  And check the manual's index, or do a word search, if you don't immediately find what you want.

Why should you bother to read this or your manual?  Well, if you're going to ask questions about something you're going to have to read the replies anyway, so why not start where some answers are already available, instantly.  You're likely to get similar answers anyway (as well as some completely wrong ones too), and I see no reason to keep typing the same things instead of directing someone to read what I've written before.

This small set of documents addresses a few FAQs that I commonly encounter on the mailing lists and newsgroups that I frequent, questions I keep on answering for friends, as well as some business queries:

Internet related

Video related

Miscellaneous


Contents
Main sections:
homepage
contact details
business info
personal info
eBay & trading
“sales” ads
“wanted” ads
electronics
video production
photography
computing
reviews
misc info
website info/help
links
index
search
Misc info pages
Introduction
Internet related
acronyms
clients & servers
cookies
e-mail issues
privacy policies
sending documents
technical terminology
PGP messaging
webpage wierdies
Video related
colour video
interlaced video
telecine
persistance of vision
VHS versus Beta
S-VHS isn't VHS
video tapes
video editing
DVD formats
Macrovision
Miscellaneous
Hertz
standards