Guide

A guide is a person who leads travelers or tourists through unknown or unfamiliar locations. The term can also be applied to a person who leads others to more abstract goals such as knowledge or wisdom.

Travel and recreation

Explorers in the past venturing into territory unknown by their own people invariably hired guides. Lewis and Clark hired Sacagawea to help them explore the American West, and Wilfred Thesiger hired guides in the deserts that he ventured into, such as Kuri on his journey to the Tibesti Mountains in 1938.

Tour guide

Tour guides lead visitors through tourist attractions and give information about the attractions' natural and cultural significance. Often, they also act as interpreters for travellers who do not speak the local language. Automated systems like audio tours are sometimes substituted for human tour guides. Tour operators often hire guides to lead tourist groups.

Mountain guide

Mountain guides are those employed in mountaineering; these are not merely to show the way but stand in the position of professional climbers with an expert knowledge of rock and snowcraft, which they impart to the amateur, at the same time assuring the safety of the climbing party. This professional class of guides arose in the middle of the 19th century when Alpine climbing became recognized as a sport.

Tips & Tricks (magazine)

Tips & Tricks was a monthly print magazine devoted to the subjects of video-game cheat codes, strategy guides and lifestyle content. Unlike most video-game magazines, it did not include critical reviews of video games and was not a primary source of video-game industry news. Instead, it focused on gameplay instructions and hidden "Easter eggs" relating to games that its readers might have already purchased.

Editorial Content

Often referring to itself as "The #1 Video-Game Tips Magazine," Tips & Tricks was known for its strategy guides or walkthroughs for contemporary console and portable games. Each issue also included an index of button codes and passwords, alphabetized by game title and sorted by console. The magazine was also noteworthy for its "lifestyle" content, in which a particular aspect of video-game culture would be discussed at length by a regular columnist. Some of these were devoted to a specific game or game series (e.g. Armored Core, Pokémon, Halo, Animal Crossing), while others spotlighted video game-related action figures, comics, music and movies.

QuickStart

QuickStart is a loading method used by several different software applications, designed to speed up the loading time of their software. Some load the core files and libraries during computer startup and allows the applications to start more quickly when selected later. QuickStarters typically place an icon in the System Tray. When the full application needs to be loaded, the base components are already in RAM, which significantly reduces load time.

QuickStarters are controversial because they use up RAM even when the application is not open. For this reason, QuickStarters can actually decrease performance as a whole. For example, if six applications load a QuickStarter into the System Tray at 50 megabytes per piece, that is 300 megabytes of RAM that could otherwise be used for working applications. If the user only has 256 megabytes of RAM, this will cause running applications to page to virtual memory and drastically reduce performance. On the other hand, if the user has one gigabyte of RAM, running applications will probably not be paged, and load times for QuickStart applications will be reduced (resulting in higher overall performance). The point from where the user powers on the system and when the system is ready for use will be delayed, as the system must incur a performance penalty in the form of reading the QuickStart applications from the hard drive and additional CPU processing and sub-system usage as the QuickStart application is loaded into memory.