San Disk says that their Image Mate and Image Mate USB,leaves a small "foot print"what is this and will it affect the high quality of my NIKON 950 in the TIFF setting?

-- RICH ZILA (maceral@mail.uplink.net), July 10, 1999

Answers

I found a couple of definitions:

Footprint (foot-print)

1. An impression or mark left on a surface by the extreme ends of the lower limbs, below the ankle. Common in households being remodeled or painted and occupied by children or men who refuse to wipe their feet. Contrary to popular belief, women do not wipe their feet, since floating angelically several mm above the surface hardly necessitates performing this task always carefully logged and noted as a failing in men. ;-)

2. An impression left in a maleable surface, into which a forensic scientist is likely pouring plaster of paris or castolite in a police drama. see also Columbo, The Hardy Boys, and Tom Swift. 3. Marketing terminology. The amount of desktop space that something takes up. As in, "It won't take up more than 400 square inches of your valuable desktop space, it has an extremely small footprint!"

Apologies to readers of this forum, Webster's, OED, et al. :-)

-- Gerald M. Payne (gmp@francorp.francomm.com), July 10, 1999.

In this context it either means the physical device is small and won't take up much space or ...
A piece of software is said to have a small footprint if it consumes few resources from a machine (little memory, few CPU cycles).
Des

-- Dan Desjardins (dan.desjardins@avstarnews.com), July 13, 1999.

The small Footprint in general relates to less demanding product (in relativele terms). The less demand could apply to many segments of system, including lower CPU instruction set execution (assembly language or machine code)which contributes to higher speed, and smaller required storage space in terms of Hard Drive ("permanent" magnetic storage media), the Cache and also the Random Access Memory (RAM). Small Footprint is a popular item specialy with the Termianate but Stay Resident (TSR) type software due to availability of the executable software any time and any place within any other application software. Small Footprint is definetly a great advantage, specialy in today's MicroController applications used for the highly precision demanding Robotics function.

-- Fred (tabarrok@frontiernet.net), July 13, 1999.