Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from my 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 of all things tech. And we are
Speaker 1: back on the tech glossary topic, in which we look
Speaker 1: at the various initialisms and acronyms used in the tech
Speaker 1: world and figure out what they actually mean. In the
Speaker 1: last episode, we worked up to I r C or
Speaker 1: Internet Relay Chat. I made a joke that I can
Speaker 1: get through all the eyes in that episode because I
Speaker 1: can stands for Internet Corporation for assigned names and numbers.
Speaker 1: But I actually have a few more eyes to cover
Speaker 1: before we move on, So I made a liar out
Speaker 1: of myself. Let's do it, and we're gonna start with
Speaker 1: I S d N that stands for Integrated Services Digital Network.
Speaker 1: This requires a bit of a backstory. So way back
Speaker 1: in the day, we only had what's called the plane
Speaker 1: old telephone service or pots POTS, So that's kind of
Speaker 1: a bonus acronym right there, and actually we still do
Speaker 1: have that in some regard. But let's get back to
Speaker 1: business here. Back before the nineteen sixties, all the telephone
Speaker 1: connections depended upon actual interconnected physical wires and mechanical systems
Speaker 1: and analog signals. So as more lines were joining the system,
Speaker 1: and again these were analog signals passed over twisted pair
Speaker 1: cables of wire, it became increasingly messy. Right as more
Speaker 1: people and companies and places started to add phone lines,
Speaker 1: it started to get to be a real mess and
Speaker 1: analog systems were not great at supplying reliable long distance
Speaker 1: communications service where you had to interconnect between different regional networks.
Speaker 1: Around the nineteen fifties, the telephone companies began to work
Speaker 1: on automating various systems and one potential solution, the one
Speaker 1: that turned out to be the winner, was to migrate
Speaker 1: from a purely analog telephone system to a voiceover digital
Speaker 1: line system. Now that digital system also allowed for the
Speaker 1: transmission of digital data, not just you know, voice, but
Speaker 1: other types of information, and in the late nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: a part of the United Nations called the International Telecommunications
Speaker 1: Union or i t U, another bonus initialism, began to
Speaker 1: recommend the I s d N standard for data transmission
Speaker 1: over phone lines. But there were actually two competing versions
Speaker 1: of I S d N. There was not a standardized
Speaker 1: version at first, that caused a lot of delays as
Speaker 1: far as implementation and roll out, until a unified standard
Speaker 1: emerged in the nineteen nineties, so I s d N
Speaker 1: finally kind of entered the scene and allowed for faster
Speaker 1: data transmission speeds or more accurately, greater data throughput. More
Speaker 1: on that in a little bit, But before too long,
Speaker 1: other technologies like DSL and cable modems would replace I
Speaker 1: s d N. Now you still find I s d
Speaker 1: N in some places, and I should probably do a
Speaker 1: full episode about it in the future to really talk
Speaker 1: about its development, its history, and its implementation. But these
Speaker 1: episodes are already going far beyond what I expected, so
Speaker 1: I will spare you. Let's move on. I SP This
Speaker 1: is an easy one. It stands for Internet service provider.
Speaker 1: These are the companies that provide Internet connectivity services to customers.
Speaker 1: Those customers might be people, and they might be businesses
Speaker 1: or other organizations or very organized people. I guess some
Speaker 1: I s p s also offer other services, uh, usually
Speaker 1: directly connected to Internet services, and uh, you know, some
Speaker 1: other I s p s end up offering services that
Speaker 1: are related to telecommunications. So, for example, there are I
Speaker 1: s P s that might say, all right, well, if
Speaker 1: you purchase service from us, not only will you have
Speaker 1: Internet connectivity, will also give you an email address, we
Speaker 1: will host a personal website for you. We might have
Speaker 1: other software that you have access to. And then you've
Speaker 1: got you know, things like cable companies that are also
Speaker 1: I s p s, and they'll bundle Internet service with
Speaker 1: cable TV or telephone service. You get the idea. It's
Speaker 1: pretty common thing now. Back in the nineteen nineties, there
Speaker 1: were around ten thousand I s p s in the world,
Speaker 1: with the United States laying claim to more than half
Speaker 1: of them. And if you've listened to my episodes on
Speaker 1: earth Link, you heard me talk about one of those
Speaker 1: I s p s. And these I s p s
Speaker 1: frequently focused on specific regions, and hey, you know, the
Speaker 1: Internet is a global thing. So these companies were relying
Speaker 1: on bigger telecommunications companies to actually connect various you know,
Speaker 1: computers together on the Internet. But telecommunications companies like telephone
Speaker 1: companies and cable companies already had this infrastructure in place
Speaker 1: to deliver services to customers that could easily be converted
Speaker 1: over or added onto with the Internet speeds, so you
Speaker 1: could have Internet be there in addition to the other
Speaker 1: services you provided, and these regional I sp s just
Speaker 1: couldn't match that, right, They just didn't have that that
Speaker 1: kind of infrastructure. And so there are still regional I
Speaker 1: s p s. They do exist, but they essentially sit
Speaker 1: on top of these other larger telecommunication company I s
Speaker 1: p s. And I bring this up because there may
Speaker 1: be cases in the United States and which it looks
Speaker 1: like you might have multiple I s P options in
Speaker 1: your area, but it's probably that all of the smaller
Speaker 1: ones are just piggybacking on the infrastructure of the big one.
Speaker 1: So what they're doing is they're essentially leasing space, if
Speaker 1: you want to think of it that way, on the
Speaker 1: tele communication companies technology, and then they resell that to customers. Now,
Speaker 1: the price that these regional I s p s get
Speaker 1: isn't the same price that you would pay to have
Speaker 1: Internet access. However, you might be paying more with the
Speaker 1: regional I s P and they might try and make
Speaker 1: it up make up for it with additional services like
Speaker 1: those software packages I was talking about earlier. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: move on I T. Okay. I included I T because
Speaker 1: Jen Barber didn't know what it meant. And it means
Speaker 1: information technology jen. The term originates from the late nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: which coincidentally marks the earliest days of the first personal computers,
Speaker 1: and Miriam Webster defines it as quote the technology involving
Speaker 1: the development, maintenance, and use of computer systems, software, and
Speaker 1: networks for the processing and distribution of data end quote.
Speaker 1: And that definition is a pretty broad one, and made
Speaker 1: even larger with the era of big data, which necessitates
Speaker 1: more robust networks and more sophisticated methods of data analysis.
Speaker 1: And today we typically associate i T with networks in
Speaker 1: general and the Internet in particular, but clearly the term
Speaker 1: can apply to all sorts of computer systems. Okay, we're
Speaker 1: killing it, let's keep moving. JPEG This stands for Joint
Speaker 1: Photographic Experts Group, a joint committee that forms specifically for
Speaker 1: the purposes of establishing standards for the coding of still pictures.
Speaker 1: But when we use JPEG, we usually mean the file
Speaker 1: format that this group created, not the group itself, So
Speaker 1: we mean JPEG or JPG as a file extension of
Speaker 1: file type. So the JPEG file format is an image file. Specifically,
Speaker 1: it's a lossy compression file format, which means it's a
Speaker 1: way to code still images, but you manage file size
Speaker 1: by losing some of the data associated with that file.
Speaker 1: Like a raw image file. If you were to take,
Speaker 1: you know, a really nice digital camera and take a
Speaker 1: photo of it, a raw image file is really really big,
Speaker 1: and that could be a bit of a problem. With JPEG.
Speaker 1: You compress that down, but you lose some of the
Speaker 1: information in the process, and the higher the compression you choose,
Speaker 1: the more data you have to lose in the process,
Speaker 1: and as a result, the image will not look as good.
Speaker 1: The more you compress it, the worst the image is
Speaker 1: going to look, but the smaller the file size. There
Speaker 1: was a need for this kind of file type because
Speaker 1: the Internet in general, and the Web in particular, really
Speaker 1: needed that in order to take off. Most of the
Speaker 1: world was dependent upon dial up speeds in the early
Speaker 1: days of the Web, and dial up speeds were not
Speaker 1: terribly fast. Anyone who used a dial up modem to
Speaker 1: log into say a bulletin board system back in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, before really the the dawn of the consumer Internet,
Speaker 1: they know that it could take forever to download an image,
Speaker 1: and by forever, I just mean like a crazy long
Speaker 1: amount of time. But these compression formats like JPEG meant
Speaker 1: that you could get images with smaller file sizes, which
Speaker 1: meant faster download times for those files. This was also
Speaker 1: important for stuff like email, which frequently has pretty strict
Speaker 1: limits on how large a message can be before you
Speaker 1: can send it out, like if it goes over that
Speaker 1: you get that little annoying message saying you've exceeded the
Speaker 1: the size allowed for sending out an email. The JPEG
Speaker 1: standard took off like gangbusters and was a big part
Speaker 1: of why the web itself was able to take off.
Speaker 1: It allowed for an experience that incorporated more images, and
Speaker 1: the committee introduced other JPEG standards later on, but the
Speaker 1: original JPEG format was so popular that the subsequent standards
Speaker 1: didn't really get much action, even though they had, you know,
Speaker 1: arguably superior compression algorithms. Moving on, now we have a
Speaker 1: trio here, and really it's just a an indication of
Speaker 1: a whole series of things, which is kbps, mbps, and
Speaker 1: g bps. These all referenced data throughput. Kbps is kill
Speaker 1: a bits per second or thousands of bits per second,
Speaker 1: mbps is megabits per second or millions of bits per second,
Speaker 1: and g bps is gigabits per second or billions of
Speaker 1: bits per second, and a bit is a single unit
Speaker 1: of binary information. It's either a zero or a one,
Speaker 1: so you can think of it kind of like a
Speaker 1: physical switch that has two positions off or on. Sometimes
Speaker 1: people confuse a word like mega bit with the word megabyte,
Speaker 1: but a byte is actually eight bits. To go into
Speaker 1: why this is would actually require a pretty long story race,
Speaker 1: so I'll save that for a different episode. But it
Speaker 1: is good to know that megabit and megabyte are two
Speaker 1: different things. So if you have a connection and your
Speaker 1: connection speed is one hundred megabits per second for downloads,
Speaker 1: and then you go to download a file that's one
Speaker 1: hundred megabytes, you have a hundred megabits per second. That
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that you could download a hundred megabyte file
Speaker 1: in one second. That that's different. Also, we tend to
Speaker 1: think of this as download speeds, Like a one hundred
Speaker 1: megabit per second connection is a faster connection than a
Speaker 1: one kill a bit per second connection, but it's slower
Speaker 1: than a hundred gigabit per second, which told be phenomenal.
Speaker 1: But the way we're describing this as kind of inaccurate.
Speaker 1: We use it this way, because it's how we experience
Speaker 1: this by by figuring out how long it takes us
Speaker 1: to transfer certain amounts of information over a connection. But really,
Speaker 1: by and large, all the data traveling across networks is
Speaker 1: moving at the same speed. I'm kind of oversimplifying, but
Speaker 1: largely this is true. So in other words, if I
Speaker 1: have a connection that is just fifty six kill a
Speaker 1: bits per second, like I'm using a dial up modem
Speaker 1: and I'm getting fifty six kill a bits per second download,
Speaker 1: that's fifty six thousand bits per second. But you are
Speaker 1: on a fiber connection, you're pulling down a gigabit per
Speaker 1: second it's or one billion bits per second. While your
Speaker 1: connection is better than mine, you're gonna get way more
Speaker 1: data per second than I am. The actual speed of
Speaker 1: the data traveling across these connections is pretty much the same.
Speaker 1: It's just that your connection allows for way more data
Speaker 1: to travel at that speed. The mind does. This is
Speaker 1: easier to understand with an analogy. So let's say we've
Speaker 1: got a really big room full of people, and all
Speaker 1: the people in this room can walk at the same
Speaker 1: top speed, and we'll say it's just three miles that's
Speaker 1: their top speed of walking. We've got three doorways out
Speaker 1: of this room. One doorway is wide enough just to
Speaker 1: let one person through at a time, Doroy number two
Speaker 1: is wide enough to let two people out at a time,
Speaker 1: and Doroy number three is super wide. It allows twenty
Speaker 1: people to leave at a time, shoulder to shoulder. Now
Speaker 1: that last doorway is going to allow way more people
Speaker 1: to exit the room in a given amount of time
Speaker 1: than the other two would, But all the people are
Speaker 1: still walking at that same top speed of three miles
Speaker 1: per hour. So when someone says they have a fast
Speaker 1: Internet connection, you can be that person to say, well, actually,
Speaker 1: you have an Internet connection with a high data throughput,
Speaker 1: and then you can probably escort yourself out of the
Speaker 1: area because no one will want to be around you.
Speaker 1: Trust me, I know this from experience. Here in the
Speaker 1: United States, the national benchmark for broadband speeds is twenty
Speaker 1: five megabits per second. That's twenty five megabits per second
Speaker 1: download speed coming from the Internet to your device. In
Speaker 1: other words, then it's three megabit per second up that's
Speaker 1: going from your device up to the Internet. So it's
Speaker 1: it's not the same coming down as it is going up.
Speaker 1: For most Internet connections, it's not, you know, symmetrical. In
Speaker 1: other words, it's asymmetrical. Well, we got that standard for
Speaker 1: that benchmark here in the United States back in two
Speaker 1: thousand fifteen. Before that, the US definition of broadband was
Speaker 1: embrace yourself for megabits per second down one megabit per
Speaker 1: second up. And I am not joking, and that is
Speaker 1: pretty low. So with the twenty five megabits down three
Speaker 1: megabits up benchmark for broadband, we learned in the US
Speaker 1: from census data back in twenty nineteen that twenty three
Speaker 1: of people in the US lack a wired broadband connection.
Speaker 1: This has been the center of numerous political issues, including
Speaker 1: the f c cs stance on whether or not it
Speaker 1: has the authority to classify broadband internet as a utility
Speaker 1: or something that is a basic right for all citizens.
Speaker 1: That's something that is a It's an ongoing debate, and
Speaker 1: it changes largely because the FCC itself changes every time
Speaker 1: there's a change in an administration at the top of
Speaker 1: US politics gets pretty complicated. Moving on, let's talk about
Speaker 1: land and W. LAND So land or l a N
Speaker 1: stands for local area network. This just refers to a
Speaker 1: series of interconnected computer devices within a limited area. So
Speaker 1: this could be as large as a college campus or
Speaker 1: as small as a really cramped computer dorm room. It
Speaker 1: doesn't all have to take place in colleges. But just
Speaker 1: trust me on that last one. It's that counts as
Speaker 1: a land. Now, the Internet is the network of networks,
Speaker 1: but a land does not necessarily have to connect out
Speaker 1: to the Internet. It can be self contained. So you
Speaker 1: might create a land to work on stuff that probably
Speaker 1: shouldn't be Internet accessible. That allows you to have what's
Speaker 1: called an air gap, which means there's just no direct
Speaker 1: link between that system and the Internet at large. Or
Speaker 1: you might just have a land to facilitate a specific
Speaker 1: type of computing. The example I always think about is
Speaker 1: back in the nineties with the popularity of land parties
Speaker 1: that referred to when geeks like me would go and
Speaker 1: carry our computers with us to meet up with other geeks,
Speaker 1: and then we would all link our computers together with
Speaker 1: actual physical cables, or sometimes it would be gaming consoles
Speaker 1: instead of computers, but you get what I'm saying, and
Speaker 1: we'd link things together in order to play multiplayer games.
Speaker 1: Because before internet broadband speeds made online gaming really feasible,
Speaker 1: this was how we would you know the hoops we
Speaker 1: jumped through in order to create a network to play
Speaker 1: games like Descent and Duke Nukem three D against each other. Typically,
Speaker 1: it's also how e sports tend to work. They use
Speaker 1: local area networks so that one team or player doesn't
Speaker 1: have a distinct advantage or disadvantage due to a difference
Speaker 1: in paying times. A ping, by the way, refers to
Speaker 1: a signal scent from one computer to another, typically like
Speaker 1: a server, and then the return signal comes back, and
Speaker 1: it's a way of measuring the lag between those two
Speaker 1: connection points. And you don't want one team to be
Speaker 1: a disadvantage just because they're they're ping was worse, because
Speaker 1: that doesn't indicate whether they were better players or not,
Speaker 1: or poorer players are not. So local area networks are
Speaker 1: a way to kind of eliminate that, or at least
Speaker 1: reduce it. A w land or w L a N
Speaker 1: is surprise, surprise, a wireless land. So this is a
Speaker 1: network that does the same thing as a local area network,
Speaker 1: only without the physical cables. And like a land, a
Speaker 1: w land doesn't necessarily have to connect out to the
Speaker 1: Internet as a whole. It can, but it doesn't have
Speaker 1: to these days, broadband speeds allow for on line and
Speaker 1: even cloud based gaming and computational uses without the need
Speaker 1: for land parties, though some folks will still go and
Speaker 1: do them, and to be honest, nothing really replaces the
Speaker 1: experience of, you know, going to a land party and
Speaker 1: playing with or against other people in the same physical location,
Speaker 1: where the talking of smack can become an art form.
Speaker 1: It's typically also a little less um objectively terrible than
Speaker 1: what you would find with online chat that is like
Speaker 1: the worst, but in person it tends to not quite
Speaker 1: get that extreme though I guess one downside is that
Speaker 1: you can't easily mute another player that that player is
Speaker 1: saying next to you and annoying the heck out of you,
Speaker 1: unless you know, you happen to have some duct tape handy.
Speaker 1: By the way, always carry duct tape. We've got more
Speaker 1: to go, but I feel like we've picked up the
Speaker 1: pace a little bit and when we come back, will
Speaker 1: continue going down the alphabet, but first a quick break. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're back, and now let's pick up with l c D.
Speaker 1: This stands for liquid crystal display, which probably sounds a
Speaker 1: little odd. After all, the general definition for a crystal
Speaker 1: is that a crystal is a type of solid material
Speaker 1: in which the constituent components are in a highly ordered structure,
Speaker 1: like a lattice or scaffolding. So if you were to
Speaker 1: take a piece of quartz or table salt and you
Speaker 1: looked at it under a really powerful microscope, you would
Speaker 1: see these this what looks like a fairly smooth surfaces
Speaker 1: in fact made up of these repeated patterns of lattice
Speaker 1: like structures that form the overall you know, solid substance.
Speaker 1: But if crystal is a subset of solid materials, then
Speaker 1: what the heck is a liquid crystal? How can you
Speaker 1: have a liquid crystal? Well, we use the term liquid
Speaker 1: crystals to describe stuff that as a state of matter
Speaker 1: that has some elements of crystalline solid features and some
Speaker 1: elements of a liquid material. So, in other words, you
Speaker 1: might have a substance that, like a liquid, will take
Speaker 1: on the shape of whatever container it's in, you know,
Speaker 1: like a bowl of water. You wouldn't have a square
Speaker 1: of water just sitting in the middle of a bowl,
Speaker 1: though the water conforms to the shape of the bowl.
Speaker 1: But if you were to look at that liquid under
Speaker 1: a microscope, you would see that it's molecules are all
Speaker 1: in a specific orientation, more like a crystalline structure. These
Speaker 1: are really cool substances and they allow for all sorts
Speaker 1: of neat applications. So with a liquid crystal display, these
Speaker 1: crystals make images right, well, not exactly all right, So
Speaker 1: there are liquid crystals that, when exposed to an electric current,
Speaker 1: will change shape. There's a type called twisted pneumatics that
Speaker 1: do this, and as the name suggests, these crystals have
Speaker 1: a naturally twisted shape. But when you apply a current
Speaker 1: to them, they will untwist to some degree, and the
Speaker 1: degree to which they untwist depends upon the voltage of
Speaker 1: that current. So by precisely controlling a voltage of a current,
Speaker 1: you can then precisely control how much these liquid crystals
Speaker 1: are able to untwist. And in addition, liquid crystals in
Speaker 1: l c D s can transmit and change polarized light. Now,
Speaker 1: a full discussion on what polarized light is and how
Speaker 1: it works is well beyond this particular podcast episode, but
Speaker 1: basically this means that through filters you can change the
Speaker 1: orientation of light, and with l c D s you
Speaker 1: can change which light is able to pass through into,
Speaker 1: you know, a display or from a display to view,
Speaker 1: and that determines what you see on that display. L
Speaker 1: c D s require typically a backlight. There are some
Speaker 1: that rely on reflective material, so it relies on light
Speaker 1: from your environment hitting the display and then you see
Speaker 1: the reflection. But with things like l c D monitors
Speaker 1: and tell visions, we're talking about a backlit device, and
Speaker 1: because of that, l c D s traditionally have limitations
Speaker 1: when it comes to displaying a high contrast ratio. Contrast
Speaker 1: refers to the difference between the brightest colors a display
Speaker 1: can show versus the darkest colors it can show. And
Speaker 1: because l c D monitors and televisions have a backlight,
Speaker 1: that affects how dark you can get because there's always
Speaker 1: a little bit of bleed through with light. The history
Speaker 1: and tech of l c D s is truly fascinating stuff,
Speaker 1: so I'll save that for a future episode. Next, we
Speaker 1: have L E D and O l E D. Luckily,
Speaker 1: we have some tech that frequently pops up when you're
Speaker 1: talking about displays, and here we go, and L E
Speaker 1: D is a light emitting diode and an O l
Speaker 1: E D is an organic light emitting diode. So obviously
Speaker 1: we need to define some stuff here, right, So first
Speaker 1: of all, what in the blue blazes is a diode.
Speaker 1: It is a component in electronics that acts as kind
Speaker 1: of like a one way street for electrical current. So
Speaker 1: a diode will allow current to pass in one direction,
Speaker 1: but it will prevent it from going the opposite direction.
Speaker 1: Diodes are one of the basic elements in circuitry and electronics,
Speaker 1: and it's a type of semiconductor. And there's a lot
Speaker 1: more to be said, but we can't spend all podcasts
Speaker 1: talking about it. So an l e ED or light
Speaker 1: emitting diode is a subset of diodes. So it allows
Speaker 1: electricity or current rather to pass one way but not
Speaker 1: the other. And as the name suggests, it's a diode
Speaker 1: that emits light as current flows through it. Essentially, electrons
Speaker 1: get pushed to higher energy levels, and when the electrons
Speaker 1: are moving back down to their normal energy levels, they
Speaker 1: have to release that excess energy and they do that
Speaker 1: in the form of photons. You know, the particles of light.
Speaker 1: L E d s don't need as much energy to
Speaker 1: produce light as other light sources. They are far are
Speaker 1: more energy efficient than say, incandescent bulbs. They're even more
Speaker 1: energy efficient than fluorescent lights. They also last a lot
Speaker 1: longer than either of those two types of lights, so
Speaker 1: LED light bulbs are great though they tend to be
Speaker 1: pretty expensive, particularly compared to fluorescence and the old incandescence,
Speaker 1: but they last a lot longer and the amount of
Speaker 1: energy they use is much lower, so switching to them
Speaker 1: can save money over the long term. It's just that
Speaker 1: upfront cost is a high one. And LED television uses
Speaker 1: l e d s as the backlight source, and they
Speaker 1: have great optical range and as I mentioned, they have
Speaker 1: high energy efficiency which brings down the power consumption on
Speaker 1: flat panel televisions that use L e d s. They've
Speaker 1: been around since two thousand five, and they tend to
Speaker 1: have better contrast ratios than your typical, you know, normal
Speaker 1: l C D. Television's pre L e ED and organic
Speaker 1: light emitting diode is an L e ED that contains
Speaker 1: an organic compound on film, and that compound film is electroluminescent,
Speaker 1: which means that lights up when current passes through it.
Speaker 1: One of the many cool things about O l e
Speaker 1: d s is that, since we're talking about a film,
Speaker 1: you can actually create O l e D based displays
Speaker 1: that are extremely thin and are in fact flexible. You
Speaker 1: have to have the right electronics behind it that are
Speaker 1: also flexible, but you can have flexible displays. So oh
Speaker 1: lad displays have led to some really cool features, you know,
Speaker 1: like bending TVs or curving TVs, or televisions that can
Speaker 1: fold up or unfold or unrolled. Then smartphones as well,
Speaker 1: we've seen some at least concepts of that. So these
Speaker 1: malleable display technologies depend on oh lads, and most of
Speaker 1: them cost more than my house did. Well, at least
Speaker 1: that used to be the case. These days, you can
Speaker 1: find oh LED televisions capable of displaying resolutions of four
Speaker 1: K or higher starting at around dollars. That is not
Speaker 1: chump change, I know, but it's still way less expensive
Speaker 1: than the earliest oh LED TVs, which cost in the
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of dollars when they first hit the market.
Speaker 1: Moving on next, we have MAC. Mac is the name
Speaker 1: of the fictional boxer in the punch Out series, but
Speaker 1: it also stands for Media Access Control, and we typically
Speaker 1: see it paired with the word address, giving us MAC address.
Speaker 1: This refers to a unique identifier for a network interface
Speaker 1: controller or n i C, so there's another bonus initialism.
Speaker 1: This is used to identify a specific element connected to
Speaker 1: a computer network, and it just takes a little thinking
Speaker 1: to realize how this is necessary. Right, if you're connecting
Speaker 1: various machines together in a network, you need some way
Speaker 1: to identify every single device connected, or else you would
Speaker 1: never know how to send information from one specific machineing
Speaker 1: to another. It would be more like a giant party
Speaker 1: line with all machines just broadcasting to the rest of
Speaker 1: the network, and that would be chaos. You wouldn't know
Speaker 1: who was saying what, and it would all be jumbled up.
Speaker 1: It's bad enough to think about just in terms of communication,
Speaker 1: but when you get to stuff like file transfers and
Speaker 1: the like, it would just be untenable. So a MAC
Speaker 1: address usually is something that is burned into a particular
Speaker 1: network interface controller, So it's actually like a permanent thing
Speaker 1: as part of a piece of hardware that connects as
Speaker 1: part of the network um and it's determined by whatever
Speaker 1: company manufactured that controller. So you could think of it
Speaker 1: kind of like a serial number that's tattooed onto the controller,
Speaker 1: and each tattoo is unique in that network. Now, sometimes
Speaker 1: a MAC address is only mostly permanent, which means there
Speaker 1: are actually some methods in which a person like a
Speaker 1: network administrator could change a MAC address for a specific
Speaker 1: piece of hardware. Now for the fun bit, these network
Speaker 1: interface controller and their unique MAC addresses. These are necessary
Speaker 1: within a single network. So let's say we've got two
Speaker 1: n i c s connected inside Network A. They would
Speaker 1: each need a unique MAC address or else nothing would work.
Speaker 1: But let's say we've actually got two separate networks. We've
Speaker 1: got network A and we've got network B. And we
Speaker 1: find out that there's an n i C in Network
Speaker 1: A and it has the exact same MAC address as
Speaker 1: an n I C network B. Does everything fall apart?
Speaker 1: Then nope. These unique MAC addresses are only necessary within
Speaker 1: a single network. So when you have two different n
Speaker 1: i c s connecting to separate networks, they can have
Speaker 1: the same MAC address, no problem, there's no conflict there.
Speaker 1: There's a lot more to say than that, but you know,
Speaker 1: you know the old song and dance at this point.
Speaker 1: MIDI is next. This is Musical Instrument Digital Interface m
Speaker 1: I d I. This is one of my favorite technologies.
Speaker 1: It's a technical ANDERD that is sort of like an umbrella.
Speaker 1: So under this technical standard, you have specifications for digital
Speaker 1: interfaces as well as the connectors that connect these various
Speaker 1: digital interfaces to things like electric musical instruments and computers.
Speaker 1: And you have a communications protocol, and this allows various
Speaker 1: electronic audio and computer equipment to quote unquote talk to
Speaker 1: each other. So a MIDI keyboard like a musical keyboard,
Speaker 1: like a synthesizer, a synthesizer specifically with MIDI, that is,
Speaker 1: with the right connectors, you could connect that directly to
Speaker 1: a computer or to a digital audio station that in
Speaker 1: turn connects to a computer. And it could be any
Speaker 1: kind of computer as well. Like I always think of
Speaker 1: big desktops because I think of the big like production
Speaker 1: type stuff. But you can have a laptop, it could
Speaker 1: be a smartphone, it could be a tablet. As long
Speaker 1: as you have the compatible connectors that allow you to
Speaker 1: insert that into the system, it would work. And the
Speaker 1: MIDI protocol emerge in the nineteen eighties as electronic music
Speaker 1: was really evolving, digital instruments and digital editing tools were
Speaker 1: changing the industry. But that also meant there needed to
Speaker 1: be some sort of standardized way to handle all this stuff,
Speaker 1: or else we would again run into that problem where
Speaker 1: you have a billion different proprietary formats that emerge, and
Speaker 1: they make things difficult. Interestingly, MIDI does not transmit any
Speaker 1: sort of audio signal. You may have listened to music
Speaker 1: played back from a MIDI file, but that file doesn't
Speaker 1: actually contain any sound. You can think of it more
Speaker 1: as that file contains the description of sound instructions for
Speaker 1: creating sound. So it's kind of like telling a system
Speaker 1: you need to play this specific note at this specific
Speaker 1: time for this long and with this an intonation and
Speaker 1: with this amount of volume, the and through many an
Speaker 1: engineer could change really really minute tiny things about digital recording,
Speaker 1: how a note gets expressed. It's really neat stuff. This means,
Speaker 1: by the way, that if you have a MIDI keyboard,
Speaker 1: meaning a you know, like a musical keyboard that is
Speaker 1: MIDI compliant, that keyboard has to have some other component
Speaker 1: inside of it that actually generates the sound you could
Speaker 1: create if you wanted to a purely MIDI keyboard without
Speaker 1: that kind of component, but that would mean that if
Speaker 1: you were to play that keyboard, you wouldn't actually be
Speaker 1: generating any You couldn't like feed that to a speakers
Speaker 1: or anything. It wouldn't create sound. I mean the only
Speaker 1: sound you would get was that percussive sound of your
Speaker 1: fingers hitting the keys, which kind of seems like it
Speaker 1: would be a type of performance art that I would
Speaker 1: really rather not sit through. One of the best analogies
Speaker 1: I've seen, and I really wish that I had come
Speaker 1: up with this one, is that MIDI is to digital
Speaker 1: music the way old piano roles were for player pianos.
Speaker 1: So a piano role doesn't generate sound on its own,
Speaker 1: It only works when you put it through a player piano. Know.
Speaker 1: The real beauty of this is how Middy allows for
Speaker 1: the computational control of musical expression, which can come in
Speaker 1: awfully handy if you're seeking out a particular sound and
Speaker 1: vibe for a piece of music. Even if you don't
Speaker 1: use the electronic digital version as your final product, it
Speaker 1: might give you the feeling you want, so that when
Speaker 1: you record it for real z s with you know,
Speaker 1: quote unquote real musical instruments. I object to that phrase,
Speaker 1: but some people use it. It means that then you
Speaker 1: could replicate what you had created digitally. Now I've done
Speaker 1: episodes about Mindy, so if you're interested in learning more,
Speaker 1: be sure to do a search on the tech Stuff archives.
Speaker 1: When we come back, we'll finish out the MS and
Speaker 1: it's with a biggie. But first, let's take a quick break. Okay,
Speaker 1: MP three and impact All right, here we go. MP
Speaker 1: three stands for IMPEG Audio Layer three. But then that
Speaker 1: raises the question of what the heck does IMPEG stand for?
Speaker 1: And we got to get there. So IMPEG technically stands
Speaker 1: for the Moving Picture Experts Group. So you remember earlier
Speaker 1: in this episode about JPEG's and how that came out
Speaker 1: of a subcommittee that was working on the digital coding
Speaker 1: of still images. This is kind of similar, except IMPEG
Speaker 1: brings together various working groups of engineers from different organizations
Speaker 1: to create standardized ways to encode different kinds of media,
Speaker 1: which includes, but is not exclusive to video. And that
Speaker 1: gets a little confusing, right, I mean, you would think
Speaker 1: that a group called the Moving Picture Experts Group would
Speaker 1: be concerning itself only with moving pictures like a video.
Speaker 1: The group came together in the late nineteen eighties, and
Speaker 1: while the primary effort was in encoding video digitally, that
Speaker 1: includes the necessity of encoding audio as well, because a
Speaker 1: lot of video has audio associated with it, and encoding
Speaker 1: also includes compression because raw media files like video and
Speaker 1: audio are pretty darn big, like way too large to
Speaker 1: transmit easily over network connections. Way back in the nineties,
Speaker 1: those were slow connections and it just wasn't feasible. So
Speaker 1: these working groups in this alliance innovated in ways to
Speaker 1: code video and audio digitally in ways that computers can handle,
Speaker 1: and to compress file sizes down so they weren't quite
Speaker 1: so huge and you could actually transfer them from one
Speaker 1: computer to another without it taking a week. I think
Speaker 1: most folks when they use the word IMPEG, or rather
Speaker 1: I guess the acronym IMPEG, they actually mean the file
Speaker 1: extension IMPEG or MPG. This is just one of the
Speaker 1: formats that this particular working group spawned. An IMPEG file
Speaker 1: is a compressed video file format. Uh. It's one that
Speaker 1: used either IMPEG one or IMPEG two file compression. But
Speaker 1: these days most of the time we're talking about IMPEG
Speaker 1: two because that's the type of file compression designed for
Speaker 1: higher definition video. IMPEG one was like VHS level definition.
Speaker 1: Because you gotta remember this was coming out in the
Speaker 1: late eighties when VHS was still a thing, so not
Speaker 1: very practical for today's video. It's the enhanced version of
Speaker 1: IMPEG compression is IMPEG two. Some folks use IMPEG as
Speaker 1: shorthand for just video file even if the video file
Speaker 1: isn't an IMPEG format, so that can get a little confusing.
Speaker 1: But then that raises the question what about MP three. Well,
Speaker 1: that's a coding format specifically for digital audio, and it's
Speaker 1: a lossy form of compression, which means that in the
Speaker 1: process of compressing the audio file to a smaller size,
Speaker 1: the protocol ditches some of the information from that original
Speaker 1: raw audio file. So how does the MP three process
Speaker 1: quote unquote know which information it should lose? And it's
Speaker 1: all based on psychoacoustics, or how we perceive sound, and moreover,
Speaker 1: which sounds might be beyond the scope of human hearing.
Speaker 1: For example, because of our limitations in our perception, it
Speaker 1: is very hard for us to hear a soft sound
Speaker 1: that's played immediately after a very loud sound. So let's
Speaker 1: say you've got a digital audio file and that has
Speaker 1: a very soft sound played right after a really loud one.
Speaker 1: The MP three compression algorithm essentially says, heck, no one's
Speaker 1: gonna be able to hear this little soft sound anyway,
Speaker 1: So we might as well lose it if you can't
Speaker 1: hear it, it doesn't need to be there, and snip
Speaker 1: that a little bit of data doesn't make it into
Speaker 1: the compressed file. Similarly, there may be some sounds within
Speaker 1: that digital audio recording that are below or above the
Speaker 1: threshold of human hearing when it comes to pitch, so
Speaker 1: we typically define this as consisting of tones between twenty hurts,
Speaker 1: which is a very very low pitch, and twenty thousand hurts,
Speaker 1: which is a very high pitch, and most folks start
Speaker 1: to lose the ability to hear the higher pitches as
Speaker 1: they age. This has led to some interesting technologies, such
Speaker 1: as sounds designed to annoy young people that old people
Speaker 1: can't hear, so it's used to help discourage loitering in
Speaker 1: blazes like convenience stores. True Story and n P three
Speaker 1: algorithm could trim away all frequencies that are identified as
Speaker 1: being outside the scope of typical human hearing. The MP
Speaker 1: three compression algorithm is kind of a sliding scale, so
Speaker 1: you can set parameters as to how much you want
Speaker 1: to compress the file size that in turn will affect
Speaker 1: how drastically the algorithm will alter the raw audio, So
Speaker 1: this can result in a compressed file that just doesn't
Speaker 1: sound good. And there are plenty of audio files who
Speaker 1: will just turn their noses up at lossy compression formats
Speaker 1: like MP three no matter what level of compression you use,
Speaker 1: and they prefer lossless file formats that keep all the
Speaker 1: information there. And in some cases they have a point,
Speaker 1: but in others, well, your own experience might vary drastically
Speaker 1: from someone else's. My own hearing must be shot because,
Speaker 1: at least in some cases, I have trouble telling the
Speaker 1: difference between a decent MP three and a lossless audio
Speaker 1: format of the same file played on the same set
Speaker 1: of equipment. Moving on next, we have n f C.
Speaker 1: This stands for near field communications and we're back on
Speaker 1: more protocols. So in this case, we're talking about communications
Speaker 1: protocols that allow for electronic communication between two devices that
Speaker 1: are pretty darn close to each other. And by pretty
Speaker 1: darn close, I mean they have to be at at
Speaker 1: maximum four centimeters apart or one and a half inches.
Speaker 1: You get beyond that and the NFC range doesn't work.
Speaker 1: NFC allows for low throughput data exchanges, meaning you wouldn't
Speaker 1: use NFC two, say, transfer a digital movie from a
Speaker 1: computer to a smartphone or tablet. The protocols just don't
Speaker 1: allow for that, at least not on any time scale
Speaker 1: that would be convenient. Instead, NFC is meant to transfer
Speaker 1: small bits of data for specific purposes. For example, you
Speaker 1: might use an NFC enabled device to tap to pay
Speaker 1: for something with a compatible payment system. You've got a
Speaker 1: credit cards stored in your smartphone, your smartphone's got NFC chip.
Speaker 1: The vendor you go to has an NFC pay area.
Speaker 1: You just tap your phone to that and it makes
Speaker 1: the little communications transfer and boom your set. There are
Speaker 1: electronic ticket systems that use this kind of stuff where
Speaker 1: you can use your phone as like an electronic ticket
Speaker 1: to get into a venue and no one has to
Speaker 1: scan a kee our code or anything like that. You
Speaker 1: just tap your phone. NFC allows for the communication between
Speaker 1: your device and the venue device, and boom, once it's authenticated,
Speaker 1: you get to go in. That's the kind of stuff
Speaker 1: that we're talking about here. And while you wouldn't use
Speaker 1: NFC to transmit large files directly, you could use NFC
Speaker 1: to facilitate some other type of connection between devices that
Speaker 1: does allow for larger file transfers. So, for example, you
Speaker 1: might be able to tap your phone against the computer
Speaker 1: that happens to store, you know, like a particular digital
Speaker 1: movie you want to transfer, and NFC might be used
Speaker 1: to establish a wireless network link between your smartphone and
Speaker 1: the computer, and then the movie would transfer over this
Speaker 1: wireless network link. It wouldn't be using NFC itself to
Speaker 1: do that. NFC would just be used to initiate that connection.
Speaker 1: One popular example of NFC technology is the Ambo, a
Speaker 1: collection of toys from Nintendo that use NFC chips to
Speaker 1: allow the toys to connect with Nintendo game systems like
Speaker 1: the Wii U and the Nintendo Switch. If you're not
Speaker 1: familiar with these things, So there are these little toys
Speaker 1: that have, you know, a flat base, so you might
Speaker 1: have Mario or or Samus or think characters like that
Speaker 1: link Zelda, so they're typically famous Nintendo characters. You buy
Speaker 1: these toys and then on certain games with these systems,
Speaker 1: you can bring the toy in close contact with the
Speaker 1: game system, and doing so unlocks new features in the game,
Speaker 1: which might mean that you can play as a new character,
Speaker 1: or you unlock levels that you didn't have access to before,
Speaker 1: or you get a new set of moves or equipment.
Speaker 1: All sorts of stuff like that. It's a pretty neat
Speaker 1: implementation of NFC technology. Other simple uses of NFC can
Speaker 1: include anything from sharing information so it's like the equivalent
Speaker 1: of exchanging business cards but you're doing it digitally, or
Speaker 1: using an old mobile device to transfer settings to a
Speaker 1: new one. So you buy a new phone, you bring
Speaker 1: your new phone in close contact with your old phone.
Speaker 1: Your old phone says this is how this owner likes things,
Speaker 1: and your new phone immediately adopts those settings, so that
Speaker 1: way your phone's already the way you like it. I've
Speaker 1: done that multiple times with my various phones. Moving on,
Speaker 1: we have o e M. This stands for original equipment manufacturer,
Speaker 1: and typically we use o e M to describe a
Speaker 1: company that's in the business of making components that are
Speaker 1: used in the products of other companies. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: and o e M is a type of company that
Speaker 1: might make the circuit board you find in a particular
Speaker 1: electronic device marketed by I don't know, let's say Atari.
Speaker 1: So Atari makes the device, or at least markets and
Speaker 1: sells it, but some of the components in that device
Speaker 1: come from other companies O e M s. Sometimes this
Speaker 1: gets a bit muddy. So, for example, let's say you
Speaker 1: were to buy a computer off the shelf of a
Speaker 1: store like Best Buy, and let say that that computer
Speaker 1: was made by Dell, and it has the Windows operating
Speaker 1: system on it. Well, Dell doesn't make Windows. That's a
Speaker 1: Microsoft product. So in this case, the computer you buy
Speaker 1: is a Dell computer, but Microsoft is an O E.
Speaker 1: M because that's the company that made the operating system
Speaker 1: that this computer is using. Next, we've got O T T. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know me, this is over the top. That's what
Speaker 1: O T T stands for, over the top. Now I
Speaker 1: could get super silly on this and explain that over
Speaker 1: the Top is a nineteen seven action film starring Sylvester
Speaker 1: Stallone in which he plays a truck driver who competes
Speaker 1: in professional arm wrestling tournaments and ultimately competes in a
Speaker 1: tournament that will win him a new truck and the
Speaker 1: love of his son. And yes, that is a real movie,
Speaker 1: and I love it, and it is not good. It
Speaker 1: is not a good movie, but I love it anyway.
Speaker 1: And that's what O T T is in my heart.
Speaker 1: But in tech, O T T actually stands for over
Speaker 1: the top. In the case of a media service, So
Speaker 1: the media service goes over the top of some other
Speaker 1: traditional service like cable TV. So with O T T
Speaker 1: you get media delivered over Internet connectivity as opposed to
Speaker 1: something like a cable feed or satellite feed. So all
Speaker 1: those streaming services like Disney Plus, Netflix, HBO, Max, Peacock,
Speaker 1: Hulu and all the rest, all those count as O
Speaker 1: T T services. Next, we've got P to the new
Speaker 1: number two P so P the number two P that
Speaker 1: stands for peer to peer, and in this case the
Speaker 1: two is T O peer to peer. This is a
Speaker 1: distributed approach to networking. The individual machines in a peer
Speaker 1: to peer network are nodes that connect with each other,
Speaker 1: and they can distribute workloads across the various nodes. This
Speaker 1: is different from the traditional client server network because if
Speaker 1: you had just a P or client server network, you
Speaker 1: would have a centralized server that would then communicate with
Speaker 1: each individual client. The clients in the client server network
Speaker 1: would not communicate with each other. They wouldn't be like nodes.
Speaker 1: They would just communicate with the server. They might be
Speaker 1: able to communicate with each other using the server as
Speaker 1: kind of a mediator, but they wouldn't directly connect to
Speaker 1: each other. So and appeer to peer network. You can
Speaker 1: have the nodes communicate directly with each other and work
Speaker 1: directly with each other. That opens up all sorts of possibilities.
Speaker 1: For example, in certain computational problems, you can have the
Speaker 1: various computers on the p TWOP network lend a hand
Speaker 1: and speed up the time it takes to solve that problem.
Speaker 1: Or you can have p TWOP networks share files quickly
Speaker 1: through the network itself. File sharing networks gave p t
Speaker 1: P a really bad name in the late nineties and
Speaker 1: early two thousand's. There is nothing wrong with sharing files
Speaker 1: if you have the authority to do it, like if
Speaker 1: you have the perm mission to share files, but a
Speaker 1: lot of folks took the opportunity to use p t
Speaker 1: P networks to distribute files that they didn't actually have
Speaker 1: the rights to do that with, namely stuff like music
Speaker 1: files and software. P TWOP allowed for the rapid sharing
Speaker 1: of files across networks, uh exacerbated by organizations that specifically
Speaker 1: made software that that prioritize that sort of stuff, and
Speaker 1: that saw a spike in digital music privacy, which then
Speaker 1: led to big media companies bringing the hammer down on
Speaker 1: various people accused of pirating music files and it got
Speaker 1: real ugly. But there's nothing inherently wrong or bad about
Speaker 1: PTP networks. It's how you use a tool that makes
Speaker 1: it good or bad in most cases. Anyway, all right,
Speaker 1: that's enough for this episode. When we come back in
Speaker 1: our next one. In this series, we will continue through
Speaker 1: the ps and we still got probably two more episodes left.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at I'm just looking at the list of
Speaker 1: acronyms I have and feeling the weight of them on
Speaker 1: my shoulders. But we we will get through them, and
Speaker 1: then we'll move on to totally different types of topics.
Speaker 1: And on that note, if you have suggestions for things
Speaker 1: I should cover and tech stuff, reach out to me
Speaker 1: on Twitter. A few of you have been doing that recently.
Speaker 1: It's been awesome, and let me know what you would
Speaker 1: like me to talk about. The Twitter handle for the
Speaker 1: show is tech Stuff hs W, and I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows.