Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech, and we are continuing
Speaker 1: our episodes that give a sort of glossary overview of
Speaker 1: some common acronyms and initialisms within tech and include a
Speaker 1: little bit of backstory for each one. And because I'm
Speaker 1: a chatty feller, in the first episode, we started off
Speaker 1: with two f A or two factor authentication, and we
Speaker 1: ended with d l C or downloadable content. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna pick up right where we left off and continue
Speaker 1: on down the alphabet. So next up is d l L.
Speaker 1: This is Microsoft's approach to what is called a shared library,
Speaker 1: and by that I mean that it's a file that
Speaker 1: contain means non volatile resources that can be used by
Speaker 1: different computer programs. Volatile in this case refers to whether
Speaker 1: or not the information is changeable or or it gets
Speaker 1: wiped out when the device is powered off. So these
Speaker 1: libraries remain unchanged when the computer power is off, and
Speaker 1: they are right back when the computer power is back on,
Speaker 1: and that information persists even after the machine shuts down.
Speaker 1: These libraries hold assets that other programs might need to
Speaker 1: access in the process of, you know, the programs doing
Speaker 1: whatever it is they're supposed to do. So, if you've
Speaker 1: ever seen a file that has the d l L extension,
Speaker 1: that's a dynamic link library and it means you're on
Speaker 1: a PC that's running on Windows. Getting into more detail
Speaker 1: would pretty much require a dedicated episode. So just think
Speaker 1: of d l L files as being a resource cash
Speaker 1: for programs running on a Windows computer. And if you've
Speaker 1: ever had any sort of program give you an error
Speaker 1: because it couldn't find a DLL file, that's what it's
Speaker 1: looking for. Next is d n S or domain name system,
Speaker 1: so you know how you can type in addresses in
Speaker 1: a web browser to go to specific web pages, like
Speaker 1: you know, YouTube dot com takes you to YouTube, and
Speaker 1: Netflix dot com takes you to Netflix, and Facebook dot
Speaker 1: com takes you to a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Speaker 1: Might be tiny bit of editorializing that made its way
Speaker 1: in there, My apologies. Well, anyway, d n S is
Speaker 1: the underlying system that makes all that possible. It's this
Speaker 1: system that acts kind of like a massive address book
Speaker 1: for all things Internet, not just the Web, but the
Speaker 1: web stuff is probably the easiest to explain, typically because
Speaker 1: it's how a lot of us interact with the Internet. Now,
Speaker 1: every machine on the Internet has a numerical address in
Speaker 1: the form of an I P address. But as we
Speaker 1: established with binary language and machine code in the previous episode,
Speaker 1: we humans do not handle tons of numbers super well,
Speaker 1: so it would be really hard for us to remember
Speaker 1: specific I P addresses if we had to rely purely
Speaker 1: on putting in those numerical addresses. And by the way,
Speaker 1: that's just for I p v four addresses, which is
Speaker 1: outdated these days. You would really need to learn I
Speaker 1: p v six addresses. Those are even longer strings of characters,
Speaker 1: and they include not only numbers, but some letters as well.
Speaker 1: More on that in a later entry. So the DNS
Speaker 1: establishes which domain names relate to which IP addresses, and
Speaker 1: it makes it way easier to navigate the Internet for
Speaker 1: those of us incapable of committing strings of seemingly random
Speaker 1: letters and numbers to memory. There's a lot more to
Speaker 1: be said about d n s, including the various attacks
Speaker 1: that hackers sometimes launch against the d n s, but
Speaker 1: we can save that for other episodes. Next is DOSS
Speaker 1: or d O S. That stands for disc Operating System,
Speaker 1: and more often than not it refers to an operating
Speaker 1: system that was derived from IBM S personal computers. There
Speaker 1: have been many different flavors of DOSS, which share a
Speaker 1: few elements in common. They are text based operating systems,
Speaker 1: so in other words, you navigate these by typing out
Speaker 1: various commands in a in a prompt, and you do
Speaker 1: that to move through directories and folders. There's no Windows,
Speaker 1: there's no know icons to click on. You're typing these
Speaker 1: commands out, and you also type in commands to execute
Speaker 1: specific files, so to run a program that's stored on
Speaker 1: a computer. Before Windows, this was how people would interact
Speaker 1: with computers that had hard drive storage. Prior to that,
Speaker 1: your average user would typically just insert a disk into
Speaker 1: a disk drive and the computer's boot process would launch
Speaker 1: directly into that disks associated program. Although you would actually
Speaker 1: navigate to a disk drive and executed program that way.
Speaker 1: That was also possible for PCs. Windows would end up
Speaker 1: replacing DOSS, and on Apple computers, the Mac operating System
Speaker 1: replaced Apple's version of DOSSDAS was a pretty lightweight operating system,
Speaker 1: and that meant you could reserve more of your computer's
Speaker 1: resources to store and run the programs that you wanted
Speaker 1: to execute, and some old fogies like yours truly got
Speaker 1: really salty wind. Windows came along because it demanded way
Speaker 1: more computational resources than Doss did. So while Windows was
Speaker 1: inarguably easier to navigate and leagues more intuitive than Doss
Speaker 1: ever was, it also encroached on precious computational resources, and
Speaker 1: some folks like me got grouchy about it and held
Speaker 1: out for a long time until pretty much all of
Speaker 1: the software that was out there in the world required
Speaker 1: a Windows operating system as the foundation. Not that I'm
Speaker 1: still bitter nearly forty years later. Next is d p I.
Speaker 1: This stands for dots per inch and it's typically used
Speaker 1: to refer to the resolution of printed or scanned material.
Speaker 1: So with displays and screens and monitors, we talk about
Speaker 1: resolution in terms of the number of pixels that are
Speaker 1: on display within a full screen, right, So greater pixel
Speaker 1: density means that you have higher resolution. So another way
Speaker 1: to think of it is to imagine that you are
Speaker 1: tasked with making a yellow smiley face image and you're
Speaker 1: given a frame that frame is one foot square, and
Speaker 1: you're gonna make this image using wooden blocks that are
Speaker 1: painted a single color. You're giving a bunch of yellow
Speaker 1: blocks and a bunch of black blocks. Each of these
Speaker 1: blocks is one inch square, so you've got a foot
Speaker 1: by a foot, so you can fit twelve squares across
Speaker 1: and twelve squares down and you make your little smiley
Speaker 1: face image. It would be a very blocky smiley face.
Speaker 1: But let's say you keep that same frame, so it's
Speaker 1: one ft by one ft, But now you're given blocks
Speaker 1: that are half an inch square, so they're half the size,
Speaker 1: half the width, and half the length, and now you
Speaker 1: can fit way more squares in. While it's gonna look
Speaker 1: a little better. Maybe you go down to a quarter
Speaker 1: of an inch for a square, and as those blocks
Speaker 1: get smaller, you can fit more of them into the
Speaker 1: same physical space, and you create smoother lines as a result,
Speaker 1: giving your image a higher resolution. Well, the same is
Speaker 1: true for displays and well for printers. So dots per
Speaker 1: inch is the resolution of the number of dots of
Speaker 1: half tone that uh can appear per inch of paper.
Speaker 1: Generally speaking, a higher dp I means that you get
Speaker 1: a more clear, sharp and detailed print job. But just
Speaker 1: like photo resolution, there is a point of diminishing returns
Speaker 1: in which boosting that DPI number even higher might not
Speaker 1: lead to a noticeable improvement. It might on paper, to
Speaker 1: use a pun be an improvement, but you might not
Speaker 1: be able to actually see it. It's not unusual to
Speaker 1: have printers with a high dpi in excess of around
Speaker 1: two thousand. Next is dr M. This is the dreaded
Speaker 1: digital rights management. This refers to copyright holders attempting to
Speaker 1: control the consumption of digital media in some way. So
Speaker 1: let's take a step back for a minute. When I
Speaker 1: was a kid, if I had been anaird, well, which
Speaker 1: I wasn't. I was a good kid. But let's say
Speaker 1: that I was a rotten kid. Maybe I might go
Speaker 1: down to the local Turtles music store in Gainesville, Georgia,
Speaker 1: and I decide I'm going to try and shoplift a
Speaker 1: cassette tape of I don't know Bruce Springsteen's greatest hits.
Speaker 1: If I had done that, well, I mean, first of all,
Speaker 1: I would have been a thief, But on top of that,
Speaker 1: I would have deprived that Turtles from being able to
Speaker 1: sell that particular cassette. The store would be unable to
Speaker 1: sell it because it's gone right, I mean, the physical
Speaker 1: copy is in my hands. So stores had to come
Speaker 1: up with various methods to discourage or prevent shoplifting. But
Speaker 1: then skip ahead a few decades now you're in a
Speaker 1: world with digital files, and that world is very different.
Speaker 1: For one thing, it is way easier to make copies
Speaker 1: of digital files than it would be with physical media.
Speaker 1: Not that you couldn't make physical copies. We could, it
Speaker 1: was just very time consuming and by the way, big
Speaker 1: companies weren't huge fans of even that kind of copying
Speaker 1: back in the day. So various media companies came up
Speaker 1: with ways to limit or restrict how users could experience
Speaker 1: and more specifically, how they could copy media. So, for example,
Speaker 1: there might be copy protection on a file that only
Speaker 1: allows it to be copied a certain amount of times
Speaker 1: before it's lockdown, so you can only install this file
Speaker 1: on a certain number of machines, and then after that
Speaker 1: the code would not allow you to transfer it to
Speaker 1: a new device. Um Or there might be DRM that
Speaker 1: connects to the Internet where it phones home back to
Speaker 1: whatever the I P holders system is and keeps them
Speaker 1: informed about how that media is being used. The goal
Speaker 1: of DRM is mostly to prevent piracy and to stop
Speaker 1: the unlicensed sharing of technology, and I frequently think of
Speaker 1: it in terms of media. That's the example that I
Speaker 1: always go to. However, DRM can actually cover all sorts
Speaker 1: of technologies beyond even digital files. That includes hardware, like
Speaker 1: physical hardware, including stuff like tractors. So why tractors. Well,
Speaker 1: let's say you're a company like John Dear, because John
Speaker 1: Deer does this, and you make tractors, and you know
Speaker 1: that somewhere down the line, people are going to need
Speaker 1: to have those tractors repaired or have some sort of
Speaker 1: maintenance done on them. By including dr M, you can
Speaker 1: make sure that only licensed mechanics, which are people who
Speaker 1: have paid you for the privilege of being able to
Speaker 1: work on these types of machines. They're the only ones
Speaker 1: who can legally repair John Dear tractors. Because the Digital
Speaker 1: Millennium Copyright Act or d m c A made it
Speaker 1: illegal to try and circumvent dr M, So even if
Speaker 1: you were a mechanically savvy farmer and you wanted to
Speaker 1: do your own repairs, you would not be allowed to
Speaker 1: do that legally. You would have to break the law
Speaker 1: because you'd have to get around the DRM to do it,
Speaker 1: or I guess you could go through the trouble to
Speaker 1: apply and become a licensed mechanic with John Dear, but
Speaker 1: I think that's probably going too far. So one of
Speaker 1: the really big issues with DRM is that it can
Speaker 1: have unintended consequences and make it more difficult to legally
Speaker 1: make use of a product that you've actually purchased yourself.
Speaker 1: So in many ways, DRM can actually end up encouraging piracy.
Speaker 1: And that's because frequently pirates will actually work to strip
Speaker 1: DRM out of products. That removes all those restrictions, which
Speaker 1: again affect not just people who are trying to steal stuff,
Speaker 1: it affects people who have legitimately purchased things. The moral
Speaker 1: of the story, I think is that if you make
Speaker 1: it harder for people to use something legally, they are
Speaker 1: far more likely to turn to illegal means to do so. Anyway,
Speaker 1: dr M comes in all different forms, Some are less
Speaker 1: obnoxious than others, and I do want to make this clear.
Speaker 1: I get the motivation for using it. I mean, companies
Speaker 1: make revenue off their intellectual property. They don't want to
Speaker 1: see that go away, so it's in their best interests
Speaker 1: to try and find ways to protect that. It's just
Speaker 1: that a lot of the d r M approaches seem
Speaker 1: to not quite achieve that goal and instead just create frustrations.
Speaker 1: Net is DVD and I included this one because I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure everyone out there knows what a DVD is,
Speaker 1: but the actual initialism used to trip me up all
Speaker 1: the time, because I grew up in the era in
Speaker 1: which compact discs or c d s first debuted and
Speaker 1: they transformed the music industry, and then DVDs came around
Speaker 1: to do the same for the home video market and
Speaker 1: then beyond, so the humble VHS tape eventually faded away
Speaker 1: as a result, And I always used to think that
Speaker 1: DVD stood for digital video disc. But that ain't it,
Speaker 1: or at least that's not the whole story. And I'm
Speaker 1: sure a lot of you out there are way smarter
Speaker 1: than I am, way more informed than I am, and
Speaker 1: you're all shouting the real name, which is digital versatile
Speaker 1: disc now, to be fair, at least according to some sources,
Speaker 1: the original name was digital video disc. But at some
Speaker 1: point the manufacturers who were putting this together figured that
Speaker 1: this could give people the impression that DVDs are only
Speaker 1: good for storing video content because people can get very
Speaker 1: narrow focused on this sort of stuff. But of course
Speaker 1: DVDs can hold all sorts of different types of digital information,
Speaker 1: so that was why they swapped out video for versatile
Speaker 1: that would replace video. Except no one really paid much
Speaker 1: attention to that, and they just still called DVD digital
Speaker 1: video disc or just DVD. They never bothered to call
Speaker 1: it the full thing anyway. Light compact discs DVDs are
Speaker 1: a type of optical storage, which means we use light
Speaker 1: to read and write information on those discs. Companies like
Speaker 1: Sony and Phillips started working on DVD technology not long
Speaker 1: after releasing the first compact discs. So the c D
Speaker 1: allowed for the storage of large digital files like high
Speaker 1: quality audio files, but with a refinement, these companies knew
Speaker 1: that they could cram even more information onto a disk.
Speaker 1: So for about a decade uh two different big groups
Speaker 1: of companies began to work on the next generation of
Speaker 1: optical discs, and it came down to two competing formats.
Speaker 1: So in this corna you had Sony and Phillips that
Speaker 1: had developed a technology that they called the Multimedia c
Speaker 1: D or m M c D, and in this corna
Speaker 1: you had Tashiba and Time Warner a couple of other companies,
Speaker 1: and they had really led the development on a format
Speaker 1: called super Density discs or s D. Seeing how two
Speaker 1: competing formats could ultimately hurt the market. As anyone who
Speaker 1: has been a consumer during a format war can tell you,
Speaker 1: the group's ultimately decided that it would make way more
Speaker 1: sense for them to collaborate and make a common format
Speaker 1: that combined elements of both s D and m M
Speaker 1: c D. That is what became DVD. DVD players went
Speaker 1: on sale in Japan in n took another year for
Speaker 1: them to come out over in the United States. And
Speaker 1: the DVD could really hold way more information than a
Speaker 1: c D. In fact, if you had a dual layer,
Speaker 1: double sided DVD, you can store more than ten times
Speaker 1: the amount of information that could fit on a compact disc. Well,
Speaker 1: we are finally through the d s. Everyone and when
Speaker 1: we come back will jump on those ease. But I
Speaker 1: only have a couple of them, so stay tuned. We're
Speaker 1: gonna take a quick break, and our first e goes
Speaker 1: to e f F. So in technology, this stands for
Speaker 1: the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Back in a trio of guys
Speaker 1: decided to form a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending civil
Speaker 1: liberties in the digital world. And these founders included a
Speaker 1: programmer who was perhaps best known for his role in
Speaker 1: developing the spreadsheet software Lotus one, two three. That was
Speaker 1: Mitch Kapor. Then there's an activist and developer named John
Speaker 1: Gilmour who worked on many different types of software, including
Speaker 1: tons of software under the GANOW license, so more about
Speaker 1: GNU in the future. And then there was John Perry Barlow,
Speaker 1: who was, among many many other things, a lyricist for
Speaker 1: the band The Grateful Dead. Now, those three men shared
Speaker 1: a common passion for the defense of civil liberties, and
Speaker 1: they saw technology as being both a great enabler of
Speaker 1: liberty as well as a potential threat to it depending
Speaker 1: on how it's used. The inciting incident that led to
Speaker 1: the formation of the e f F revolved around a
Speaker 1: games publisher called Steve Jackson Games. And when I say
Speaker 1: games publisher, I mean hard copy stuff like board games
Speaker 1: and role playing games and card games, not video games
Speaker 1: or computer games. So some famous ones include shay Geek,
Speaker 1: which is sort of a comedy card game, or money Skin,
Speaker 1: another comedy card game, This one fantasy oriented. There's Illuminati,
Speaker 1: which is a game of various conspiracies competing against each
Speaker 1: other in a way. And then there's girp's the Generic
Speaker 1: Universal role Playing System and their tons of other ones.
Speaker 1: So what does a company that makes board games and
Speaker 1: RPGs and card games have to do with the e
Speaker 1: f FF. Well, back in nine Steve Jackson had his
Speaker 1: company headquarters in Austin, Texas, and they were raided by
Speaker 1: the Secret Service. What all, right, now, stay with me. So,
Speaker 1: in the late eighties, someone got hold of a proprietary
Speaker 1: document that belonged to Bell South. They were able to
Speaker 1: get hold of this and then they shared it. That
Speaker 1: document pertained to the nine one one emergency system, and
Speaker 1: the fear was that if hackers were able to exploit
Speaker 1: that system, they might come up the works and thus
Speaker 1: people who actually had to report emergencies would have no
Speaker 1: way of doing it. So it represented sort of a
Speaker 1: major threat. The Secret Service got involved to find out
Speaker 1: who was at fault, who had who was responsible, and
Speaker 1: to to go after them, and they found that the
Speaker 1: document had been posted on a bulletin board system or BBS. Now,
Speaker 1: I guess I could have included BBS in our tech glossary,
Speaker 1: but BBS is a pretty outdated term these days. It's
Speaker 1: essentially a predecessor to the kind of stuff you would
Speaker 1: see with the Internet, where someone would have special software
Speaker 1: that would allow other people to dial into their computer
Speaker 1: so their computer could host all sorts of stuff like
Speaker 1: message boards and games and files and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: People could dial into that computer or BBS and access
Speaker 1: those things anyway. The guy who ran this particular BBS,
Speaker 1: but again not necessarily the actual person responsible for posting
Speaker 1: the file there, was an employee of Steve Jackson Game.
Speaker 1: So the Secret Service decided they would seize all of
Speaker 1: this guy's computers, but they would also seize all of
Speaker 1: the computers of his employer to make certain that this
Speaker 1: proprietary document wasn't getting spread around. This was a crushing
Speaker 1: blow to Steve Jackson Games and Steve Jackson himself. His
Speaker 1: company just couldn't conduct business while the computers were in
Speaker 1: Secret Service custody, and eventually Steve Jackson Games got their
Speaker 1: computers back, but it was clear that the Secret Service
Speaker 1: had really combed through the internal emails inside the company,
Speaker 1: and Steve Jackson wanted to pursue civil action against the
Speaker 1: Secret Service for damages and wanted to lean on a
Speaker 1: civil rights organization to help with that lawsuit, but there
Speaker 1: really wasn't such any organization in existence that would really
Speaker 1: fit the bill. That's what precipitated the formation of the
Speaker 1: Electronic Frontier Foundation. Today, the e f F helps in
Speaker 1: similar legal cases that revolve around civil liberties and technology.
Speaker 1: The e f F sometimes helps fund lawsuits or supplies
Speaker 1: expertise in technical and digital matters, and the organization isn't
Speaker 1: without critics. There's some people who argue that the e
Speaker 1: f F has really helped tech companies kind of entrenched
Speaker 1: themselves and protect themselves against regulation and other matters that
Speaker 1: maybe didn't lead to the right outcome. But you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of like anything with humans. There's stuff
Speaker 1: that is good and stuff that's not so good. Next,
Speaker 1: we have e O L. So in the movie Tron,
Speaker 1: e O L was the Master Control programs way of
Speaker 1: ending a line of communication. I mean it literally meant
Speaker 1: end of line. There's the end of Line club in
Speaker 1: the Tron Legacy film. But in this case, I actually
Speaker 1: mean e O L as end of life, meaning the
Speaker 1: stage of a products life cycle. In which it's just
Speaker 1: gonna get worse from here on out. So, for example,
Speaker 1: let's take Windows XP, which is a very or was
Speaker 1: a very popular operating system. There's still people out there
Speaker 1: who are using it today, despite the fact that it's
Speaker 1: sadly outdated. Microsoft released Windows XP way back in two
Speaker 1: thousand one, and that system dominated the market share for
Speaker 1: operating systems on personal computers at the time. And while
Speaker 1: Microsoft would release the successor to Windows XP in two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven, it actually continued to release service packs
Speaker 1: for Windows XP up through two thousand eight, and even
Speaker 1: provided extended support until two thousand fourteen. But by then
Speaker 1: Microsoft was really pushing people to please, for the love
Speaker 1: of technology, update to a more recent operating system. Companies
Speaker 1: can't continue to support old software indefinitely and still dedicate
Speaker 1: resources to making new stuff. Plus, fewer pieces of current
Speaker 1: software were actually compatible with this older Windows operating system,
Speaker 1: and so really, by two thousand eight, Windows XP was
Speaker 1: entering its e o L phase. Microsoft would stop updating
Speaker 1: it and the product would grow increasingly obsolete over time.
Speaker 1: Another example of e o L is easy to see
Speaker 1: with smartphones. Smartphones depend upon the interaction of hardware, that
Speaker 1: being the actual smartphone mobile device and software that being
Speaker 1: the operating system for that device, on top of which
Speaker 1: all the apps live. So with Apple, we are now
Speaker 1: on IO S Sport Team, and the oldest iPhone capable
Speaker 1: of running that version of iOS is the iPhone six S.
Speaker 1: That one is the one that originally launched in two
Speaker 1: thousand fifteen. Older iPhones before the success, even if they
Speaker 1: are still operational, are firmly in the e o L
Speaker 1: phase because they can no longer keep pace with the
Speaker 1: latest operating systems, which means fewer apps are going to
Speaker 1: run on them and they will become increasingly useless as
Speaker 1: time goes on. For companies, e OL might arrive much
Speaker 1: earlier than for customers, so a company will end sales
Speaker 1: and marketing effort around a product that it designates as
Speaker 1: being in e o L. Essentially, the company says, we're
Speaker 1: no longer going to sell this stuff. We're going to
Speaker 1: sell the next version of this or you know, some
Speaker 1: improved version of this, and they focus on that instead.
Speaker 1: So they say we're done dedicating resources to supporting this
Speaker 1: so that we can sell more stuff, more new stuff.
Speaker 1: So a company could actually start stop selling a product
Speaker 1: but continue supporting it for a while longer. In the
Speaker 1: case of Microsoft, for example, they stopped selling XP long
Speaker 1: before they stopped actually providing support for it. Next is
Speaker 1: fact f a Q. I included this one even though
Speaker 1: I think probably everyone listening to this already knows it.
Speaker 1: It of course stands for frequently asked questions. Anyone who
Speaker 1: has ever served as a point of contact for any
Speaker 1: organization knows that of the time, you're answering the same
Speaker 1: basic questions repeatedly throughout the day. So one way to
Speaker 1: address that is to create a fact and that has
Speaker 1: those basic answers already in there, so people can see
Speaker 1: them right off the bat. So when people use the fact,
Speaker 1: it frees up the time of the person who otherwise
Speaker 1: would have to respond, and you know, it just makes
Speaker 1: it easier to find answers. In general, the term fact
Speaker 1: actually predates the web, possibly emerging from the electronic mailing
Speaker 1: lists and Usenet groups in the nineteen eighties. Next, we
Speaker 1: have f c C. This stands for the Federal Communications Commission,
Speaker 1: part of the United States government. It's easiest for me
Speaker 1: to just quote the f CC's website to describe what
Speaker 1: it does. So here it is quote The Federal Communications
Speaker 1: Commission regulates interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite,
Speaker 1: and cable in all fifty states, the District of Columbia,
Speaker 1: and US territories. An independent US government agency overseen by Congress,
Speaker 1: the Commission is the federal agency responsible for implementing and
Speaker 1: enforcing America's communications laws and regulations. So that organization formed
Speaker 1: after the passing of the Communications Act of nineteen thirty four,
Speaker 1: and it has helped shape the landscape of technology quite
Speaker 1: a bit in the United States, sometimes for the better
Speaker 1: and sometimes not. The FCC is supposed to promote competition
Speaker 1: between various communications companies while also encouraging innovation and investment
Speaker 1: in services so that people get access to stuff like
Speaker 1: broadband connectivity. But a quick look at the telecommunications landscape
Speaker 1: in America tells you that for a lot of folks,
Speaker 1: the whole competition thing really isn't a thing. It's not
Speaker 1: that prominent. I mean, over the years, through various mergers
Speaker 1: and acquisitions, we've seen many regions get carved out by
Speaker 1: one or maybe two telecommunications companies. And I don't know
Speaker 1: what it's like where you live, however, at my home,
Speaker 1: because I checked it this morning, just to make sure.
Speaker 1: We only have one telecommunications provider that offers connectivity at
Speaker 1: high speed needs at my place, and even that isn't fiber.
Speaker 1: I don't get fiber connectivity where I live. And I
Speaker 1: live in the city of Atlanta, y'all. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: not in like the sticks or something. I'm in the
Speaker 1: city limits. But enough about me griping about my personal
Speaker 1: lack of connectivity. The FCC has also played an inconsistent
Speaker 1: role in terms of ensuring net neutrality in the United States.
Speaker 1: The concept of net neutrality includes a lot of stuff,
Speaker 1: but one of the big ones is all content should
Speaker 1: be treated equally across all service providers. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: if there's a company that's both an I s P
Speaker 1: and a content company, that I s P should not
Speaker 1: prioritize its own traffic over that from other content providers.
Speaker 1: There's a lot more to it than that. Net neutrality
Speaker 1: is a very big topic, and during certain political administrations,
Speaker 1: the FCC has pushed to create rules and policies that
Speaker 1: strengthen net neutrality, such as under the Obama administration, while
Speaker 1: in others the FCC has largely dismantled those same systems,
Speaker 1: such as during Trump's presidency fun times. And the reason
Speaker 1: for that change, by the way, is that the leadership
Speaker 1: of the f c C comes by appointment by whomever
Speaker 1: is president at that time, and so as presidential administrations change,
Speaker 1: so too does the f c C. Anyway, you'll hear
Speaker 1: a lot about the FCC being involved in various tech
Speaker 1: related issues here in the United States. Next up flops. Now,
Speaker 1: this doesn't just describe that one stage play I was
Speaker 1: in back in two thousand two. Now, this is an
Speaker 1: acronym that stands for floating point operations per second. So
Speaker 1: if you remember when I talked about c p U
Speaker 1: s in the previous episode, I mentioned that we measure
Speaker 1: their performance in part by clock cycles, which is kind
Speaker 1: of like how many instructions the CPU can execute per second.
Speaker 1: But there's another way to measure computer perform mormants, and
Speaker 1: that's in how many floating point operations it can handle
Speaker 1: per second. So what is a floating point Well, you
Speaker 1: can think of it as being similar to scientific note notation,
Speaker 1: So you know, really big or really small numbers are
Speaker 1: difficult to handle, even for computers, especially computers that have
Speaker 1: to handle both at the same time. A computer has
Speaker 1: a limit to how many digits it can hold at
Speaker 1: any given moment. So floating points are a way to
Speaker 1: indicate very large or very small numbers and makes them
Speaker 1: much easier to handle and process. When we talk about supercomputers,
Speaker 1: we typically refer to the number of flops those computers
Speaker 1: can handle. The fastest supercomputer by this metric today is
Speaker 1: the Fugaku, which is incredible. It's set an insane record
Speaker 1: of four hundred forty two headah flops using the HPL
Speaker 1: computer benchmark. It's a way of testing how many floating
Speaker 1: operations are floating point operations I should say a computer
Speaker 1: can complete in a second. So in the tech world, uh,
Speaker 1: what does peda flop mean? Well, we use the word
Speaker 1: kilo or the prefix kilo for thousand, we use mega
Speaker 1: for a million, Giga for billion, terra for trillion, and
Speaker 1: petta is for quadrillion, which means the Fugaku supercomputer reached
Speaker 1: four hundred forty two quadrillion floating point operations per second
Speaker 1: against this particular benchmark, which is pretty astounding, right. But
Speaker 1: according to Tech Republic, Fugaku was also able to achieve
Speaker 1: two point oh exa flops against the benchmark of high
Speaker 1: performance computing Artificial intelligence workload or hpc AI another benchmark test.
Speaker 1: So an exa flop is one quintillion flops. It's even
Speaker 1: more like it's just the sucker is fast, is what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. But typically when we're talking about flops, we're
Speaker 1: talking about high performance compute. We're not talking about you know,
Speaker 1: your standard laptop. Next is FPS. This one's actually tricky
Speaker 1: because there are a few different FPS initialisms, and some
Speaker 1: of them can actually apply to the same stuff but
Speaker 1: in different ways. So, for example, in the world of
Speaker 1: video games, you can have FPS, meaning a first person shooter,
Speaker 1: which is a type of game in which your perspective
Speaker 1: is from the first person point of view and you
Speaker 1: run around, you know, shooting stuff. But FPS can also
Speaker 1: stand for frames per second, as in the number of
Speaker 1: rendered frames presented to a viewer each second, and this
Speaker 1: version of FPS can apply to all sorts of games,
Speaker 1: including first person shooter games, So you can talk about
Speaker 1: the FPS for an FPS, which is a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: Right anyway, frames per second is important for creating a
Speaker 1: smooth video experience. So our vision tricks us if we
Speaker 1: see a series of similar images and they're presented to
Speaker 1: us in quick succession. We experienced this as if we're
Speaker 1: watching something that's actually in motion, that the image itself
Speaker 1: is moving. That's the whole basic foundation for film and
Speaker 1: for animation. So with a classic film like something that's
Speaker 1: actually on film itself, we watched the playback of images
Speaker 1: at a rate of twenty four frames per second. That's
Speaker 1: fast enough to make it seem as though we're watching
Speaker 1: moving images, but in fact, if you just stop the projector,
Speaker 1: you would see you're just looking at a series of photographs. Well,
Speaker 1: in the digital world, fps is important too, and a
Speaker 1: higher FPS typically means a better experience for the viewer,
Speaker 1: particularly with video games. Higher FPS can help a gamer
Speaker 1: make better choices while playing and time things out just right,
Speaker 1: picking up on details that they might miss if they
Speaker 1: had a lower FPS. But just as we saw with resolution,
Speaker 1: there's a law of diminishing returns at play here, so
Speaker 1: once you get over a certain FPS, which varies from
Speaker 1: person to person, the benefits become less obvious as they
Speaker 1: crank up. There are other fps is within the tech
Speaker 1: world to like fast packet switching that refers to how
Speaker 1: certain systems handled data transmissions across the system, but there's
Speaker 1: no need to jump into all that here, All right,
Speaker 1: I got a couple more f's to get through after
Speaker 1: this break, so stick around for f's sake. Next up,
Speaker 1: we got the f t C, and we're back to
Speaker 1: another U. S government agency similar to what we talked
Speaker 1: about with f c C, but the f t C
Speaker 1: stands for the Federal Trade Commission. So while the f
Speaker 1: c C specifically focuses on laws and regulations that relate
Speaker 1: to communications, which includes telecommunications and the Internet and radio
Speaker 1: and etcetera, the f t C is primarily focused on
Speaker 1: enforcing antitrust laws and protecting consumers in the United States.
Speaker 1: So in this case, the word trust refers to an
Speaker 1: entity or sometimes a small group of entities that dominates
Speaker 1: an industry and uses areas means to maintain that dominance
Speaker 1: by keeping other companies from being able to compete. So
Speaker 1: that can include stuff like fixing prices to undercut smaller competitors,
Speaker 1: and these smaller competitors might not have the financial ability
Speaker 1: to survive and they're effectively starved out because the dominant
Speaker 1: company could sell stuff at a loss and just endure
Speaker 1: that loss while waiting for the other businesses to die,
Speaker 1: and at that point the company can then drive prices
Speaker 1: way up because there's no competition for consumers to turn to.
Speaker 1: So the FTC gets involved in a lot of the
Speaker 1: tech world because we see some massive consolidations going on
Speaker 1: within the space, whether it's Facebook gobbling up another social platform,
Speaker 1: or Amazon buying up another marketplace, either real world or online,
Speaker 1: or Google buying up pretty much everything in sight. The
Speaker 1: FTC plays apart in making certain that companies are playing
Speaker 1: by the rules, and like the f c C, this
Speaker 1: isn't always you know, apparent, but then I guess it
Speaker 1: all depends on how you interpret what the rules actually are.
Speaker 1: On the consumer protection side, the FTC is also the
Speaker 1: agency responsible for enforcing stuff like KAPPA, the Children's Online
Speaker 1: Privacy Protection Act that we recently talked about. Because KAPPA
Speaker 1: mostly relates to how companies collect and use children's information
Speaker 1: by using the Internet, you might be tempted to think
Speaker 1: that it's the f c C that would be in charge,
Speaker 1: but that's just not the case. So it can get
Speaker 1: a bit confusing when you're talking about the f c
Speaker 1: C versus the f TC, and I sometimes mix up
Speaker 1: the two myself. I've been guilty of it. The FTC, however,
Speaker 1: is also older than the f c C. It traces
Speaker 1: its history all the way back to nineteen fourteen. Moving
Speaker 1: on f TP. You down with f TP, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: know me? All right, I'm kind of dating myself here.
Speaker 1: I'm actually very curious if producer Tari even recognized is
Speaker 1: that reference? Okay? So, f t P stands for File
Speaker 1: Transfer Protocol, and a protocol is just a set of
Speaker 1: rules or instructions. So from a high level, this is
Speaker 1: the set of rules that the guide how you transfer
Speaker 1: files across networks. And when I say you, I really
Speaker 1: mean how systems transfer files from one machine to another
Speaker 1: across a network. It's one of the underlying technologies for
Speaker 1: the Internet, with others being things like email and the
Speaker 1: World Wide Web and stuff like that. FTP is also
Speaker 1: one of the older protocols with regard to the Internet.
Speaker 1: It was first outlined back in ninete. And that's it
Speaker 1: for the f Alright, let's move on to g and
Speaker 1: first up, we've got g d p R and we
Speaker 1: start off with a biggie. This stands for General Data
Speaker 1: Protection Regulation and it refers to a regulation in in
Speaker 1: law in the European Union, and it concerns itself with
Speaker 1: the privacy and data protection of EU citizens. So in
Speaker 1: the EU member countries drafted out rules to protect privacy
Speaker 1: and personal information and gave EU citizens more of a
Speaker 1: say in how their data could be collected and used.
Speaker 1: G d PR puts the onus on companies to follow
Speaker 1: these rules or potentially face huge fines. Over in the
Speaker 1: United States, the explosive growth of the Internet far outpaced
Speaker 1: privacy laws, which in the US of been fairly lucy
Speaker 1: goosey like there's only a few privacy laws or like
Speaker 1: outright privacy laws in the United States. So as a result,
Speaker 1: these companies that were web based had established some pretty
Speaker 1: aggressive strategies when it comes to collecting, using, and sharing
Speaker 1: personal information. In fact, there's an entire industry based around
Speaker 1: establishing huge databases of personal info and then charging other
Speaker 1: companies to access those databases. Our information are. Personal info
Speaker 1: is the currency of much of modern technology. While the
Speaker 1: member states of the EU wanted to create rules to
Speaker 1: restrict how companies could do this with EU citizens, so
Speaker 1: they wouldn't be given free regin to collect and exploit data.
Speaker 1: They would actually need to follow specific rules, which includes
Speaker 1: alerting users to any points of data collection, as well
Speaker 1: as to declare how and why that data will be used.
Speaker 1: The restrictions meant that companies had to change how they
Speaker 1: handled information, and that in itself became a kind of
Speaker 1: micro industry. We had a lot of consultants that worked
Speaker 1: with tech companies to make certain that their policies and
Speaker 1: processes were compliant with g d p R, because otherwise
Speaker 1: things could get super expensive, really fast. They also tend
Speaker 1: to involve some pretty negative press. If a company is
Speaker 1: found to have violated g DPR, it's not a good look.
Speaker 1: The passing of g d p R effectively since shock
Speaker 1: waves through the tech industry, which at that point really
Speaker 1: wasn't used to governments getting that proactive in the protection
Speaker 1: of citizen data, and g DPR has gone on to
Speaker 1: inspire some places, like the state of California, to draft
Speaker 1: privacy acts that essentially use g DPR as the basis
Speaker 1: for that law. There are some exemptions to g d
Speaker 1: p R, though, for example, law enforcement is not required
Speaker 1: to abide by g DPR, and in matters of national security,
Speaker 1: g DPR does not apply. G DPR has also changed
Speaker 1: a bit since passing. Originally, there was this concept called
Speaker 1: the right to be forgotten, which generally meant that an
Speaker 1: EU citizen would have the right to request that their
Speaker 1: personal information be deleted from any online sources, including stuff
Speaker 1: like online search engines. But critics pointed out that this
Speaker 1: policy was flawed. So let's say that we've got a
Speaker 1: case where a public figure does something truly terrible, newsworthy
Speaker 1: and terrible, like they've committed a crime of some sort. Uh,
Speaker 1: if that person were to then follow this this process,
Speaker 1: they might be able to demand that all mention of
Speaker 1: that crime get a race from the internet, which you
Speaker 1: could argue as against the public good. So these days,
Speaker 1: the right to be forgotten is now known as the
Speaker 1: right of a racer. And uh, it's not the band
Speaker 1: eraser I tried to discover a little something to make
Speaker 1: me sweeter. No, it's a it's it's a process that's
Speaker 1: a little more limited. It cannot go nearly as far
Speaker 1: as the right to be forgotten. And uh, it includes
Speaker 1: stuff like you have to put in the request of
Speaker 1: a ratier within a certain amount of time from publication
Speaker 1: or else you missed the boat. Also, there's the consideration
Speaker 1: about whether or not removing the information would represent a
Speaker 1: public harm, or if it would be more harmful to
Speaker 1: the individual if that information were to remain up. There
Speaker 1: are a lot of different parts to it. In other words,
Speaker 1: next up is Gift, and this is one of our
Speaker 1: more contentious entries on this list. So obviously I still
Speaker 1: pronounce g I F as GIF. I do not pronounce
Speaker 1: it as jeff. The initialism stands for Graphics Interchange Format
Speaker 1: and it's a subtype of bitmap image formats. The online
Speaker 1: service provider compu Serve developed the GIFT file format in
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties, led by developer Steve will Hit. Now
Speaker 1: Steve Wilhit pronounces it Jeff and that therefore he's wrong,
Speaker 1: which I'm joking. I'm not. He's not really wrong. In fact,
Speaker 1: the various dictionaries say that both pronunciations are acceptable, but
Speaker 1: I mean, come on. The G stands for graphic, not giraffic. Anyway,
Speaker 1: will Heights team was looking for a way to create
Speaker 1: image files that didn't take up an enormous amount of
Speaker 1: file space. So this was before the Worldwide Web, but
Speaker 1: people were using online service providers and bulletin boards and
Speaker 1: they wanted a way of being able to share images
Speaker 1: or to download images, and the Gift team created a
Speaker 1: format that limited color selection to two fifty six colors,
Speaker 1: which helped keep file sizes down, and they used a
Speaker 1: compression algorithm to kind of squitch these file sizes down,
Speaker 1: and the gift was born. The compression algorithm identifies repeating
Speaker 1: patterns within an image and then takes those patterns and
Speaker 1: simplifies them for the purposes of expressing them within the file.
Speaker 1: So this means that let's say you've got an image
Speaker 1: that has a lot of, you know, a particular shade
Speaker 1: of blue in one section, the file can essentially say, hey,
Speaker 1: over here, in this part defined by these parameters, all
Speaker 1: of that is just blue, rather than laying out that
Speaker 1: each blue pixel is individually in each position. Now I
Speaker 1: am oversimplifying here, but that from a high level is
Speaker 1: kind of what was going on on. By stringing together
Speaker 1: a sequence of gifts, it's possible to have them play
Speaker 1: in a loop, and thus we get the animated gift.
Speaker 1: Though many of the animated gifts we see today are
Speaker 1: actually small video files that just kind of you know,
Speaker 1: they use code to make them behave in a way
Speaker 1: that we think of as animated gifts. But it turns
Speaker 1: out that the video coding technology has actually outpaced gift code,
Speaker 1: so we tend to see small video files rather than
Speaker 1: actual gifts. However, the gift name has stuck around, even
Speaker 1: though it's not necessarily a gift file extension. Next up
Speaker 1: is GPS. This stands for Global Positioning System. Often we
Speaker 1: refer to a device, like, you know, something that we
Speaker 1: use in a car, as a GPS, by which we
Speaker 1: mean a navigational device that relies upon this Global positioning
Speaker 1: system to calculate that devices position relative to the surface
Speaker 1: of the Earth. That's a wordy way of saying that
Speaker 1: the devices using information from satellites to figure out where
Speaker 1: the heck it is. Back in the nineteen seventies, the
Speaker 1: Department of Defense in the United States began working on
Speaker 1: what would become the GPS, and it would take a
Speaker 1: couple of decades to complete it. But by the early
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, the full complement of twenty four satellites that
Speaker 1: were part of this original plan were up in orbit,
Speaker 1: and they were needed so that you could get global
Speaker 1: coverage for GPS. Otherwise, before that, you know, coverage was
Speaker 1: sporadic based upon whether or not you had the appropriate
Speaker 1: number of satellites within range of you in orbit. Now
Speaker 1: these satellites are not in geosynchronous orbit with the Earth,
Speaker 1: so in other words, they're not remaining in a fixed
Speaker 1: position relative to a point on the Earth's surface, so
Speaker 1: they are in an orbit that's at a different rate
Speaker 1: than the Earth's rotation, also a different trajectory than Earth's rotation,
Speaker 1: and that's why you need to have multiple satellites, like
Speaker 1: twenty four of them to maintain constant coverage, because satellites
Speaker 1: pass out of range at certain points and other satellites
Speaker 1: will come into range. That's why you need that many
Speaker 1: up there. The satellites send out signals that receivers on Earth,
Speaker 1: like the one in your car can pick up, or
Speaker 1: the one on your phone for that matter, And each
Speaker 1: signal sent by a satellite contains some information that it's
Speaker 1: really important. One of it those pieces of information is
Speaker 1: a precise time stamp that says exactly when the satellite
Speaker 1: broadcast that that signal, and also there's some data that
Speaker 1: indicates that particular satellites orbital location. So the receiver has
Speaker 1: to pick up signals from at least three satellites to
Speaker 1: get a physical location. Because of the time stamp, the
Speaker 1: receiver quote unquote knows how long that signal had traveled
Speaker 1: from the satellite to the receiver. The receiver has to
Speaker 1: compare this against its own time reading, typically from an
Speaker 1: atomic clock. But more on that in the second Now,
Speaker 1: this means that the receiver knows how far away it
Speaker 1: is from the satellite, because the satellite communication travels at
Speaker 1: the speed of light. So you just take the amount
Speaker 1: of time it took for the signal to go from
Speaker 1: when it was broadcast to when it was picked up
Speaker 1: by the receiver, and you use that to figure out
Speaker 1: how many miles it traveled in that span of time
Speaker 1: because it was traveling at the speed of light. So
Speaker 1: then you could draw a sphere around the satellite, like
Speaker 1: a virtual sphere, that represents all the points that are
Speaker 1: that distance away from the satellite in every single direction. Now,
Speaker 1: granted you're only interested in the points that make an
Speaker 1: intersection with the Earth, but there will be a lot
Speaker 1: of those. So then you want to compare that with
Speaker 1: other satellites. You need at least three, and then you're
Speaker 1: looking at the intersection of where these different spheres meet,
Speaker 1: and with three satellites you get two points where the
Speaker 1: spheres will all intersect. One of those two points will
Speaker 1: definitely be on the surface of Earth. The other one
Speaker 1: may or may not be. So, then by looking at
Speaker 1: the point that's actually on the surface of the Earth,
Speaker 1: the receiver says, Okay, now I know where I am
Speaker 1: because I'm able to tell by the distance I am
Speaker 1: from these three different satellites. It's really really neat um.
Speaker 1: It's it's kind of similar to um triangulation, but not
Speaker 1: exactly the same. Anyway, with four satellites, you can actually
Speaker 1: eliminate the need for the receiver to have access to
Speaker 1: its own atomic clock to make certain to correct for errors.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot more to it than that. For example,
Speaker 1: until the nineteen nineties, within the US, civilian use of
Speaker 1: GPS was really limited because GPS was meant for military use,
Speaker 1: so civilian receivers they existed, but they also purposefully introduced
Speaker 1: errors into the display, so you could not use a
Speaker 1: GPS to get a specific reading of your location. You
Speaker 1: can get kind of a general reading, so you wouldn't
Speaker 1: be able to use it to do stuff like make
Speaker 1: turn I turned directions in real time because your receiver's
Speaker 1: location readoubt could be off by several hundred feet, so
Speaker 1: it could be like turn left, you're gonna turn left
Speaker 1: either in a hundred feet or it might be three
Speaker 1: feet behind you, so not very useful. But then later
Speaker 1: on President Clinton lifted that restriction, and since then we've
Speaker 1: been able to use GPS receivers to help us get
Speaker 1: to where we're going. Or you know, if you're using
Speaker 1: Apple Maps, you can use it to drive into a river.
Speaker 1: I'm kidding. I'm just using a very outdated joke about
Speaker 1: the reliability of Apple Maps, which obviously has improved significantly
Speaker 1: since it first launched, so it's an unfair joke for
Speaker 1: me to make. These days, there are more than thirty
Speaker 1: five GPS satellites out in orbit, and the technology also
Speaker 1: is a great way to explore the concepts of general
Speaker 1: and special relativity, because you have to have an understanding
Speaker 1: of both of those things in order to correct for
Speaker 1: the issues of time dilation. But that's a complicate, aided
Speaker 1: subject for another time. In fact, I have covered that
Speaker 1: in past episodes, so check that out if you want
Speaker 1: to learn how it is that GPS proves that Einstein
Speaker 1: was right. It's pretty fascinating stuff, all right, And that's
Speaker 1: it for this episode. We're gonna leave off here. We're
Speaker 1: gonna pick back up in our next one to continue
Speaker 1: our glossary that will be next week, starting on Monday,
Speaker 1: and we'll continue to work our way through these various
Speaker 1: acronyms and initialisms to kind of demystify the world of tech,
Speaker 1: which gets very reliant on jargon and acronyms and stuff
Speaker 1: to the point where it can feel kind of like
Speaker 1: it's excluding others on purpose. And I don't dig that.
Speaker 1: I like to be inclusive, so we're gonna keep on going.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, if you have suggestions for topics I
Speaker 1: should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out
Speaker 1: to me. The best way to do that is on Twitter.
Speaker 1: The handle we use is tech Stuff hs W and
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is
Speaker 1: an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.