2020-05-30 Candy Master

Good evening guys, I am todays Candy Master Cycoe. Today my topic is when you surf the Internet. When you surf the Internet, you may meet some words confusing and maybe also interesting. So today I will intorduce some words that you may meet someday to you.

When you surf the Internet, you must use a application named `browser` like Chrome, Edge or Firefox. `browse` this word origianlly means the cows and goats wander around and eat grass. So the word browser vividly describes the gesture where you surf the Internet.

When you use the computer, you will always see these two words, cookie and cache. 点心 和 快取

Cookie in computer stands for a small piece of data sent from a website and stored on the user's computer by the user's web browser while the user is browsing. Whether you notice it or not, almost websites just need login once, and the second time it will login automatically. It is the authentication cookies taking effect.

Cache is a technology or software component that stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster. So when you use computer, 360 and 金山毒霸 always popup a window to tell you that (清除缓存来加速电脑). Here 清除 缓存 just means clean the cache. Good using of cache could boost your computer, sometimes clean the cache will even make your computer slower.

When you are register or logging-in, something will popup like these, all them are called CAPTCHA, including 验证码, 滑块, 图像识别 and etc.

CAPTCHA is a contrived acronym of `completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart`, just as its name implies, it is designed for telling the difference between humans and computers, and refuses the actions made by robots. CAPTCHAs are very important to our private security. Without CAPTCHAs, hackers will access our passwords and personal information very easily. But there are also some funny CAPTCHAs like these. I think neither humans or robots could recognize it.

When you download a file from website, maybe the postfix of it is zip, 7z or rar. we always call it an archive or a compressed package. Archive means you sort the files (文件) and put theme into the correct drawer, and extract has the opposite meaning that you take out a specific file from the archive. Compress means you decrease the size of a file by some approaches, and decompress has the opposite effect.

Nowadays we always mix using these two words, but in history, they have totally difference meaning. In history, there were no large capacity storages, so operator would backup data in the magnetic tapes like these. And then sorted the tapes on the bookshelves. This action is called `tape archive`, so in some modern system, the action that you put some files, images or videos into one file is called `archive`. And the action that you decrease the size of archive with some tools is called compress.

Imagine your firefox browser was crashed and can never open again, so you described this problem in a forum. A guy asked you that you use a vanilla version or a customized version. What was he talking about? Actually, vanilla is a kind of flavoring and flower, and can be used to extract vanillin (香兰素). But in computer softwares, and sometimes also other computing-related systems, vanilla stands for those softwares that are not customized from their original form, meaning that they are used without any customizations or updates applied to them. So if he told you to use a vanilla version means that he told you to clean your personal modifications and have a new installation. Maybe this way can solve your problem.