The Digital Fact Book - Quantel

UnicodeUnicode allows computers to consistently represent and manipulate text in most of theworld’s writing systems – 30 are currently implemented – describing about 100,000characters. Before Unicode, there were hundreds of different encoding systems to assignnumbers to characters, and no single one could contain enough characters to cover alllanguages – in Europe alone. Unicode provides a unique number for every character,regardless of platform, program or language. The Unicode Standard is widely adoptedand supported by the computer industry.Website: www.unicode.orgUp-resThe process which increases the size, or number of pixels used to represent an image byinterpolating between existing pixels to create the same image on a larger format. There isno implied change of vertical scan rate. Despite its name, the process does not increasethe resolution of the image; it just spreads the same over a larger canvas. The quality ofthe result depends on that of the interpolation. Speed is an issue for realtime work, as goodquality requires a large amount of processing – which increases with the picture area.See also: Down-res, Format conversionUUSBUniversal Serial Bus – now available as USB 2.0 which, with 480 Mb/s maximum transferrate, offers potentially useful connectivity for media applications on PCs and Macs. It isvery cheap and widely used for connecting PC peripherals. It is a PAN, and so the serviceprovided to any one device depends on their specification and on what other connecteddevices are doing. Actual speeds achieved for bulk data transfers are about 300 Mb/s– but this is likely to rise.See also: IEEE 1394172